five days left working for the devil...


i've said this out loud to a few people, but during my time at coldstone, i've often felt like i've been working for the darkside. why? on a given day, if i pay attention, way more people who don't need ice cream (especially gotta have it's...almost one pound (!) of ice cream) come in the store than "healthy" folks looking for a small snack or dessert. what's worse, part of the whole franchise agreement includes trying to upsize a person's order, no matter where they start on the menu. "for only forty cents more, you can get a waffle...for only a dollar you can get this and this and this..." even if you start with the pounder, there are things that cold stone wants you to ask the customer. "have you ever tried a cold stone cake?" eat more. be happy. die younger. i know all of this is a little dramatic. the same things and complaints could be applied to any fast food restaurant or franchise where the idea is to sell something cheap at really high prices. it just makes me feel bad or wrong, and so i don't do it. the upselling that is. i'll do it when i am working with the high-school and college-age staff that i am leaving behind to set a good "example" as their boss for them, but not when i work by myself. this, in and of itself, probably makes me a poor employee and even poorer rationalizer, but it's how i've coped. only five more days 'til i don't have to worry about it anymore. what good news that is.

speaking of good news, in a beautifully ironic twist of fate, the same team in george mason that i thought ruined my bracket by taking out north carolina also ruined everyone else's favorite, uconn, and sealed my victory in my tournament pool this year. hooray for me. hooray for florida. and hooray for the sec that the "experts" proclaimed having a down year. idiots.

softball season opens tonight. this time next week, i'll be home for good. life, ladies and gentlemen, is good.

no offense, punkin', but i am glad our consecutive days streak has come to an end.


"in a one and out format, all it takes is the better team having a bad day, and the lesser team having a good one and your bracket is ruined."

see: bradley
see: george mason

is it pretentious to quote yourself? probably, but screw it. i haven't been able to write in over a week because i've been closing the store for over a week. counting today...eight days 'til i return home. the first weekend of the tournament (and last night) was ridiculous as it always is. close games. buzzer-beaters. upsets. ill-timed upsets that throw office/internet pools upside down on their heads. i'll admit it. one of the cinderella teams beat my national champion pick, north carolina. sure, they were likely underdogs if they hooked up with everyone's favorite, uconn, but what's the fun of picking chalk all the way through? what's worse is that the rest of my bracket has been stellar this year. i called wichita st. over tennessee. i called georgetown over ohio state. i called lsu over duke. as of this morning, i am winning my pool on espn.com and scoring higher than 99.7 percent of the brackets registered on espn. amazing. now all of this will change when uconn starts scoring and i don't have them, but i am resting high on my laurels through tonight. real high. and if u-dub can pull an upset? i am back in it. rock'n'roll.

here's my pet peave, though. over the last few days, i've had no less than four people tell me how great their bracket is. "what do you mean? i am kicking the crap out of you on espn." "no, my other bracket." "ohhh...you're other bracket." i don't get the whole filling out five different brackets thing. i mean, i guess if you're gambling, it makes sense. you make five different brackets to try and increase your chance of winning by playing out several different scenarios, but doesn't that take the fun out of it? be a man. or a woman. pick a bracket and go with it. if it's educated, then you have as good a chance as anyone else. if you're picking teams by how cute their mascot is, well, fill out one or fifty, if you win it's going to be pure luck anyway.

this is my call to arms. don't tell me how great you would have done with your "other" bracket, because you should only have one bracket.

go huskies. not uconn.

march madness...
nobody knows what they are talking about


the ncaa tournament is here. the men's tournament that is. god bless the women, but i just can't get fired up about them. alabama is in. uab is in. they both have good to very good chances of winning their first round games, so that will be a lot of fun. of course, until the first game tips tomorrow morning, no one really cares about the actual games. it's all about the brackets. i am the same. ever since the pairings were released, i have been a maniac. i can't get enough of the talking heads talking about the match-ups, the favorites, the underdogs, the cinderellas. i eat it up like hannah does a fudgepop. there are those that i favor their opinions, and there are those that i listen to just because i know i will disagree with them. over the last several years, there is one lesson i have learned when it comes to filling out your bracket. a lesson that anyone filling out a bracket hoping to win a pool would do well to learn from also...

don't listen to anyone.

not jay bilas. not dick vitale. definitely not digger phelps, or jim nantz or billy packer. not me. not your mom. not my mom. no one knows anything. jay bilas ripped uab all sunday afternoon calling them a "half-way decent team". never once did he complain about the alabama selection. now i watch more than my share of college basketball. way more than my share of alabama basketball. and all the uab that tv offers. in my heart of hearts, i know that uab would beat the crap out of alabama. in one game. in a best of seven. however you wanted to do it. i didn't necessarily disagree with jay bilas. uab is half-way decent. but so are between 45 and 55 teams in the tournament. the other 10-20 are either really crappy or all-the-way-decent. the nba and the temptation of the nba has lured away all of the quality star power from the college game. so, you may have teams with talent, but it'll be incredibly young talent. and you might have mid-major or major teams with experience, but it'll be all white guys with teammates not good enough to play in the nba. so, which way wins out? neither. both. who knows. no one knows anything.

in a one and out format, all it takes is the better team having a bad day, and the lesser team having a good one and your bracket is ruined. the "experts" should know this. but everyone and their mother is still picking a team in UConn that lost to the 9th(!!!) best team in their own conference just a week ago. go ahead. pick UConn. pick 3 out of 4 number one seeds to make it to your final four. it may in fact happen. but know this, if it does you will have only been lucky, not good.

here's to my wife beating me again this year.

not that i am bitter.

ribs: the cure for what ails you
(that and good friends)


in the huffman-centric part of my world, the last three days have been trying. a combination of emotions ranging from complete and utter shock, to confusion, to sadness, to anger, to frustration and back to sadness has enveloped my world. mine and countless others. how does one react? what should one do? why did all this happen?

it's frustrating to know, too, that had these three young men not included one that i held dear to me, my interest in the entire story would fade as soon as my intrigue and wonder about their motives had been satisfied. a lesson in perspective? not one that i asked for. but yes.

then comes the ribs. i have had several people tell me the last couple days that they cannot even fathom small talking or worrying about what now seems trivial in their lives compared to having a friend's future hanging in the balance. i understand that feeling. i have had it myself. what i have been able to convince myself of, though, is that the trivial is relative and abso-freakin'-lutely necessary in times of trial. if it weren't for my ribs, my softball, my baseball, my friends with boys that make me want one of my own talking about little league, my pardon the interruption, my march madness, my hope that alabama beats kentucky today, my hope that team usa beats the mess out of south africa...if it weren't for these things and others my head would explode.

three young men's lives have changed in a dramatic way this week. people's lives change everyday, though, oftentimes for worse. this time, i just happen to know one of them and hold him very close to my heart. it is the trivial that keeps me unaware and sane. it is my friends and family that remind me that that is ok. i am thankful for both.

ben, i am praying for you, your family, your friends. i love you.

"a human walgreens, a grotesque and insulting example of better baseball through chemistry."


this was one of the many descriptors for barry bonds used in an espn.com story this morning. yesterday, the story and excerpts from a book hitting shelves on march 27th called game of shadows found the internet and with it, the shit hit the fan. barry bonds, possibly the greatest baseball player of the the last fifty years and arguably ever has been one of my favorites for a while now. his superhuman efforts at the plate are well documented. passing mark mcgwire for the single season home run mark. approaching babe ruth and hank aaron on the all-time list. only member of the 500 home run and 500 steals club. multiple mvp trophies. the man. equal to all of these accomplishments, though, is the cloud that has followed him for over five years now that rains questions of steroid and performance enhancer use down upon him each and every day.

i didn't want to believe it. i still don't. never mind the visual evidence. si.com has a great picture gallery up right now that details the way his body has changed since college. i knew he looked different. different now compared to when his pirates tormented my braves. bigger. badder. stronger. forehead version 2.0. i saw it all, but i didn't want to hear any of the haters. i don't know why. i guess part of it was because he was so great before any of the steroids. he could do everything. run, hit for average, hit for power, play d. he was going to be a hall of famer anyway. he knew he was the man. everyone did. until everyone else started juicing up. the new book alleges that when all of mark mcgwire's and sammy sosa's and brady anderson's (??? red flag ???) homers started pushing him to the back page, barry got jealous. now, whether or not this is true we will never know. unless barry comes out and says it. and he won't. so instead of just being the best player, barry picked up needles, creams, clears, whatever he could get his hands on to pump up. get bigger. hit more home runs. and he did. a lot more. he was back on the front pages. he was the best ever. until today.

today he is called a cheater. a fraud. tainted. all of which are probably true. above all else, though, i think barry is just human. it's hard to see heroes broken down. i admit it. i liked my barry super-sized. i liked all the home runs. i liked pitchers being afraid of him. there's part of me that doesn't want to see him play if he can't still do all those things. and that's horrible of me. maybe i just picked the wrong hero. i know i do that a lot. i know we all do. i like my heroes capabable of doing things i can't. but i do want them to accomplish those things using the gifts God afforded them. not some drug cocktail that includes, among other things, stuff that makes women more fertile and gives cows stronger bones.

dang it, barry.

paging verbal kint
the best trick the devil ever pulled;
convinced the world he didn't exist - link 80


it's been too long since i've been able to write. too many things are going through my head at the moment. some sports. some serious. some not. too much. maybe i can get it out now. more likely is that this will come out a jumbled mess.

my life is about to change. again. what i thought was going to be a year-long experiment/venture/challenge/leap of faith has transformed into eight months. eight short months of unrealized expectations, disappointments, struggles and closure versus the excitement of meeting difficult expectations, finding the lessons is disappointments, working through the struggles and new beginnings. at this point, today, it feels like the former four have won the battle, although i am confident time will allow me to see otherwise.

silvers linings abound, though. in one very short month, i will see my wife and daughter every day again. i have learned in my eight months how i took them for granted, and i wonder how that knowledge will translate to the next chapter of our lives. i will get to see my friends again, much more than i did for eight months. i will start a new job. another job in retail (who knew?). i do love people. maybe retail will be the way to go for me. time will tell. a new softball season is on the horizon. it will take me 10 minutes to get to the field. not 105. that's good. i will get to have ribs with andy and kiker again. soon. i want ribs. lots of ribs. and we have to get 'nana pudding. even if we are full.

i have decisions to make as it relates to my god. for the first time in over six years, i will not be on a church staff. what does that mean? how do i plug in? where do i plug in? back to huffman? do they want me? do i want them? it's my church, right? but i don't want to rock the boat. if i go back, it can't be like it was. time will tell.

my cake decorator at cold stone is the wife of a freewill baptist church pastor. incredibly nice lady. we were talking about teenagers the other day and she was waxing theological. she was telling me, in so many words, that their church would not allow their youth to fellowship with groups that were not like-minded in the way their church viewed the bible, the faith, the like. she started talking about how there were so many "bad kids" in this world, in huntsville. how their youth group, her children included, would benefit from being around the "bad ones" as little as possible. i felt sorry for her. i didn't have the heart or the time to disagree with her. she believed with every ounce of her what she was saying. she wasn't being malicious. she was just wrong. the devil resides in all of us. in huntville freewill baptist churches. in huffman united methodist churches. in every denomination's churches. we are all verbal kint's. limping around. hiding from the world. disguising who we really are.

not until we come to Church broken. open. real. honest. not until then can we make a difference again. not until then will we do anything other than tread water, occasionally picking up two, four, ten, four hundred other verbal kint's along the way that are treading water as well.

i am coming home broken. frustrated. excited. anxious. broken, but in the best way. what will it mean? will it make a difference? time will tell.

it will be scary. then again, most things are.

turning the page. on to chapter whatever.