Why I Needed LeBron to Win

I didn't want this to consume my life.  I thought I was a bigger man.  It's only sports. These are the things that were going through my mind last night as my wife and I were pulling out of the grocery store at 9pm.  In fact, I didn't even know that game 5 of the NBA Finals was just getting ready to tip off.  I was almost there.  If I did not check Twitter as we were waiting in line to check out - I would of went home, cracked open a Cherry Coke, and played a fake game of basketball on Playstation til 1am.  You know, because that's what regular 28 year-old married guys do....as well as 12 year-olds.  Oh the joy that playing a game with a virtual Michael Jordan brings me.  However, I did check Twitter, saw the game was on, and had to make a major decision at that time.  

I tried to fight it so hard.  I tried to not care.  I got home, carried in the groceries, and immediately turned on the TV to see what the score was.  Heat up by ten.  Shit.  The last two years of my life have led me to this night.  It was inevitable.  LeBron James is one of the ten greatest players to ever step on a basketball court.  To think that he would never win a NBA Championship is ridiculous.  However, I rooted as hard against LeBron as I have ever rooted for him, hoping that this would never happen.  It is hard enough to deal with all that comes with being a diehard Cleveland sports fan.  I've been kicked in the balls so many times that they are pretty much non-existent.  And I'm only 28.  My Dad, 53, has no balls left to be kicked.  To be honest, rooting this hard against somebody else while trying to maintain some sort of sanity with Cleveland sports as well was just growing to be too much.  Which is why I followed up my first Tweet with this:

In some sort of bizarro world, I was rooting for LeBron James to win this game.  Not to be joyous in seeing him succeed.  Trust me, if LeBron would of pulled a Joe Theisman at center court, I would of been the first person cheering in delight at the sight of the stretcher.  I needed LeBron to win so I could regain my sanity.  In a world of so much negativity, I don't need any more.  I need to focus on the positives that are going on in my life and in the Cleveland/Akron area.  Say what you want about the historical statistics of casinos and poverty, but The Horseshoe has seemed to bring a new life to Cleveland.  The city needs to ride this thing as far as it will take it.  You know what I saw the other night while walking to the Indians game?  A new retail store!  Yes, these do exist in Cleveland outside the dollar stores that have taken over Tower City.  

So there is so much positive out there. That doesn't mean that I forget or forgive what LeBron did on Thursday, July 8th, 2010.  Yes, I know that date by heart.  There are only a handful of times that I can remember crying as an adult.  Watching Eileen walk down the aisle on our wedding day, my grandfather's death, Eileen's family's funerals, the closing credits of the Nicholas Cage 9/11 movie, the last chapter of Scott Raab's book The Whore of Akron, and on July 8th, 2010.  Two of the six involve LeBron James directly.  It's stupid.  It's just sports. It doesn't matter...until it does.   

Which is why I need to move toward total apathy for the LeBron situation.  I know that people are tired of hearing his name, reading about his every move, reading Facebook posts and Tweets.  I may never get to apathy, but last night was a step in the right direction.  I can now stop focusing on rooting against one player to lose at every turn and start rooting with complete passion for our Cleveland teams.  I know one day, I'll be dancing around and look as happy as LeBron did on the bench with his teammates as the clock was winding down.  The sun came up this morning.  As it does every morning. But it shined a little less over downtown today.  Because God hates Cleveland.  Eff you LeBron.  Welp....so much for the positivity.

The Sandler Effect

Well this is harder than I thought.  When I started this blog on April 22nd, I had all of these grandiose ideas running through my head.  Since I love writing, I would enter in at least one post every week. Piece of cake. If that wasn’t enough and I still had more to write about, then definitely two posts a week.  Well here I am 9 weeks later and this is only my 6^th post, which puts me at 67% to expectations, which ironically is the same grade I received in Business Law at Kent State after slacking in a similar fashion.  It was my only D in 20 years of schooling – and I’m kind of proud of it actually.  I mean, at least I can say I accomplished that.  Well...maybe not the only D – I got my name taken off of the Big Yellow Sun in preschool for not sharing, which is probably the equivalent to a preschool D.  In case you’re not well versed in pre-school discipline – if you got your name taken off the Big Yellow Sun, then you did not get a snack, which was fine by me because I routinely ate snacks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so I didn’t need anymore.  I have never met a sugary-boxed treat that I didn’t like.

Anyways, I have been struggling with finding things to blog about.  I mean there are plenty of things to write about.  In fact, I have started and stopped 4 different blog posts before ultimately deleting them due to reading them and thinking how overwhelmingly boring they were to read.  If I can’t find what I write interesting, then how is somebody from my old high-school who wasn’t in my class, who I have spoken three words to my entire life, who I am friends with on social media, who is going to read this on Facebook going to find this interesting?  So clearly, I owe it to everybody to be on my game.  I don’t like to associate myself with crap, so I try to only post things that are a decent read.  Well that’s not entirely true, I associate myself with the Cleveland Browns, and so I sometimes associate myself with crap.

The message that I have found is that it is better to take the time and deliver something you can be proud of instead of throwing the Cleveland Browns against the wall and hoping something sticks.  Guns N Roses essentially had 2 albums and the rest was garbage.  Think of how awesome Use Your Illusion would have been if it were not released separately.  Take the best songs off of I and II and that is a monster album.  Appetite for Destruction and one killer Use Your Illusion?  That’s all you need.  Same goes for Springsteen.  Bruce is by far my favorite artist of all time, but he has had some duds that would of served him better to not release.  As an uber Springsteen fan, I appreciate the effort, but sometimes you need to force yourself not to settle for just being average.  In 2009, Springsteen released a song named "Queen of the Supermarket", in which he falls in love with an employee at his local supermarket with a "dream that awaits in aisle number two". Well I guess thats what happens when you release four studio albums in four years.  Most of the time quantity over quality never pans out - unless you're a sophomore at Kent State with $10 and a yearning to get wasted on a Thursday night.

We see it all of the time in social media marketing.  It is not the sheer number of Facebook posts or Tweets that makes a business successful online, but the quality and value of the message that is being delivered to the customer.  I’d rather get one or two awesome sales messages a year, than a weekly email, post, or tweet reminding me how I can save 10% off my regular purchase.  Businesses do this all of the time and it just doesn’t make sense to me if you want to create meaningful, lasting customer relationships.  The focus should be on building the extraordinary - not throwing darts with your eyes closed.

Which is why I am curtailing my own expectations of this blog.  In reality, it's really a dumb little outlet for me to write.  I know that maybe 35 people will end up reading this if I'm lucky.  But for those 35 people, I'd rather give them Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore every other month, than weeks worth of Jack and Jill, Don't Mess With The Zohan, and That's My Boy.  Hopefully somebody reading this will be motivated to focus on truly being remarkable in whatever they do in their life.  Once you find what inspires you, don't settle on simply being average.  Which is what I'm trying to avoid with Losing Touch.