Dispatches from the Deadwood Forest
My buddy Rick and I both departed StubHub in October 2014. He’d worked in tickets for more than a decade and needed to get out whereas I decamped to join a small brokerage and dutifully served until July 2018, often carping to my empathetic, barcode-bruised pal about a frustrating world he’d since nicknamed the Deadwood Forest. We swapped jokes for the next three years and change about how much we’d never go back while ignoring how it spawned an absurd friendship that led to him serving as my host-slash-tour guide in San Francisco for eight days in 2017, hiring me to work for him at a short-lived start-up last year, and our imagining a fake compound named DubbTurtle surrounded by a moat in Nampa, Idaho, where we’d circle the wagons once the inevitable Second Civil War commenced. Can’t accuse us of lacking ambition.
Of course, Life being the snarky jokester that he is (no misogyny!), we returned to tickets a month apart this summer. After years spent baked out of our minds joking on iMessages until dawn, we suddenly began trading infrequent, pithy barbs about our exhausting work lives, seemingly incapable of riding the wave of lunacy that had long defined our camaraderie. As the two of us settled into our new roles by the end of summer, we began incorporating our trademark silliness on occasional evenings, including new Nampa-related content generated by purchasing tickets for a Reba McEntire concert at the Ford Idaho Center. The DubbTurtle had come full circle, whatever that meant.
Last week I secured tickets for my mother and I to attend game one of the World Series—I knew deep down that the Yankees would get crushed by the Astros, but there’s always a chance—only to see Rick’s Phillies make a surprise run to the season’s final series. Insisting that I wouldn’t watch a second of it due to my Houston hatred, I cracked open my laptop in the fifth inning last night to spot a couple messages from Rick. Figuring I’d send a frivolous reply then move on—I assumed he’d be too busy watching the game and group chatting with his fellow Phanatics—it instead led to a thrillingly nonsensical sequence that almost offset not cheering on my Bronx Bombers from the 400 level of Yankee Stadium.
[Rick sends a CNN article titled “‘Scrabble variants’ now cause the majority of new Covid-19 infections in the U.S.” followed by a TMZ screengrab of a topless (censored knockers) Madonna sporting a virtually unrecognizable plastic surgery sheen of a face.]
“THAT is Madonna? Wtf. Yes this was gross enough that it prompted me to send it in the middle of a World Series game.”
“Scrabble variants is too good. Madonna ready to get pissed on, babycakes! Red Rick.” [He dyed his beard red to honor the Phillies World Series berth.]
“Man, this is a solid day. Just rolling along.”
“All 4 tha ca$h homey.”
“I have a daily company-wide standup on Zoom. It was a scene today. A few folks thought it was a filter.”
“Shagerty [his co-worker/former StubHub employee] should’ve rocked the orange. Coward. You gotta put some diamond dust in that bitch for Home Game One (fka Game Three)! That’s cocaine, powdered glass, lemon zest, & imitation diamonds for the dust. How’s the American lastime treatin’ ya?”
“That entire sequence was amazing.”
“R.I.P. Jerry Lee. Cousinfuckers will mourn but they will mingle on. For some weird reason the way our brains work, I have a vivid memory of my father watching Great Balls of Fire w/ D.Q. in the early ‘90s. Gonna play the famous Hamburg concert on the 33 1/3 machine here in two shakes.”
“Love it!”
“Two Tucker homers?! Man, I fucking hate that dude so much.”
“Yeah. He deuced.”
“Top 3 Deuces? McAllister, Bigelow: Male Gigolo, & ‘What the?’”
“Incorrect! It’s McAllister, Staley, ‘What the?’.”
“That’s the homerism & recency bias talking. Go take a shower, cool off, & we’ll regroup on this later. Oh geez, there goes [noted anti-vaccine FOX commentator] John Smoltz again about ivermectin.”
“I miss Joe Buck calling baseball.”
“Funniest shit… Borrowed my mother’s car to go to the credit union. Had to take out cash cuz my dude lowered the price $300 if I paid cash. ALWAYS park facing the street when I go, but it was busy, so I parked facing the building. Walk in, do my thing, the lead teller counts the hundreds in a room & I’m itching to get outta there. Walk to a silver sedan that looks just like my mother’s car that’s facing the street, rip open the door, & a sixty-something-year-old black man using a laptop immediately yells, ‘WHO DAT?!’ I realize what I’ve done & instantly say back, ‘OH GOD! SORRY, WRONG CAR!,’ slam the door, & pace back to the correct car. Died laughing at myself as I drove home.”
“Slayed! That is priceless!”
“No clue why an old black man was on a laptop in the credit union’s tiny-ass parking lot, but there it was.”
“Almost crying at the vision of this in my head.”
“Verlander climbing the ole pitch ladder.”
“He’s approaching the next level aka Jamie Moyer level. Let’s gooooo. Fucking let’s go. No surrender.”
“That’s right! We’re not listening to Cheap Trick tonight!”
[I send a meme of former Yankees and Phillies manager, Joe Girardi, wearing a medical mask with the fake headline NL MANAGER OF THE YEAR.]
“Joey Shitbags. What a change.”
“Bigger change than menopause. Some are calling it the biggest change of all-time. Not me, but some are.”
“Scrabble variants! The ole ‘7 letter word with a Q for 50 point bonus’ variant. The apex of variants.”
“The ‘get the dictionary’ variant. The ‘are we missing two tiles?’ variant. The ‘dude, quit peeking at my letters when you get up to piss’ variant. The ‘you’re too competitive’ variant. The ‘oh, look who went to college but still is assistant manager at The Gap’ variant. The ‘if you do what I think you’re gonna do, I’m gonna drop a seven-letter word on you & FUCKING END YOU’ variant. The ‘who wants to play Boggle’ variant. Oh braj, I just got our visas so we can go do that hospitality thing w/ Ticket King (Minnesota) in Qatar for the World Cup!”
“Wow. We haven’t had an evening like this in too long. Both had to run the Ticket Oak gauntlet in the ole DWF [Deadwood Forest]! But here we are. Just sword touching.”
“Citizens for Sanity keeping it real! Big Ukraine. Luckily, I’ll just daydream about buying automobiles lacking electronic chips & blasting Christine McVie’s odes to existential enlightenment.”
“Right! Ukraine. What’s happening over there? They have a massive Covid outbreak? Is that what all those mass graves are about?”
“Decimated by the Chinese Checkers variant. I don’t care if Trey Mancini had cancer, it must be said: this dude fucking sucks.”
“Man, where’s Joe Buck? This is awful. I hope Disney buys the MLB rights when they are up so Buck can call it again. This crew is like that awful Monday Night crew with Joe, Booger and the other guy. Griese? I don’t even know.”
“I listen to Michael Kay & Paul O’Neill 100 times per year. This is fine by me.”
“I didn’t ask your opinion!!!”
“True, true. First, they didn’t ask for my opinion & I said nothing…. This cranberry juice jiggler commercial is poppin’ off!”
“Yes!”
“Jiggling her way free of a UTI. Brings a tear to your eye. Like the Indian man crying about pollution but in reverse.”
“Stfu!!”
“The East Carolina/BYU game’s tied w/ four to go in the 4th. Time for some quality commentary, huh? *up top*”
“Well this is a plot twist. Phillies bringing in the projected game 3 starter in relief. Rob Thompson is letting it all fly here. Anti-Girardi. Love it.”
“Rob Thompson is a fierce gum chewer.”
“Yes! It was just a big topic in my group chat.”
“Stares temporomandibular issues down & doesn’t flinch. ‘Member when Mein Kampf got reissued on the Donda app w/ Kanye reading the ‘master text’ in the original tongue? What a knucklehead.”
“THAT one just got a rare audible laugh. Woke up the dog. That’s the winner.”
“We’re done here. Go Astros!”
“Now I just have this vision of South Park Kanye reading it.”
“I detest the font used by Nitto Tire. PLAYING A SONG SAMPLED BY KANYE AS WE GO TO BREAK! I’m calling the Mayor of Television this instant!”
“I mean…. Come onnnnn. We are having a Friday….. WITH FRIDAY!”
“‘Back home.’ This is nativist hate speech.”
“Remember when the game Scrabble had to rebrand after Anthony Fauci decided ‘scrabble’ was a good term for what ‘gun violence’ is covertly referred to??? Between that and whatever the fuck Madonna became, it’s just a solid news day.”
“‘Terrible shooting in Bakersfield.’ ‘Oh no, an AK-47 again?’ ‘Worse. Two blank letter tiles, a Q, I, & a Z.’ ‘Lord, I’ll batten down the hatches.’”
“Sir Anthony! Guy’s real name for the Phillies. This guy’s mixing up pitchers. BRING BACK JOE BUCK! Fuck.”
“Sure but look at the fun bags on that hose hound! [send a photo I took of a brunette with ample cleavage that FOX’s camera director chose to linger on in the crowd]”
“Fair enough.”
“These astronaut cunts [fans dressed in astronaut suits]. Drinking Tang & eating MREs here at Enron Field.”
“Houston is strange.”
“Classic Soros putting the lazerz on stun for Paul Pelosi right before a mid-term. What a card, huh bud?”
“Oh man! Encore by AHF! Fantastic. There’s supposed to be private security on that street. Was like 4:30 in the morning. Where were they? It’s all part of MTG’s rise!”
“[Photo of Pat Sajak with MTG.] A, E, I, O, U, & Sometimes Why Not Try Trolling the Libzzz. Oh boy, Robertson in!”
“Oh god.”
“Could’ve watched Lawrence of Arabia & still caught the end of this saga.”
“You could have.”
“Great win, but more important, I had no clue that Heather Thomas & Markie Post of The Fall Guy fame were such absolute early ‘80s sex kittens.”
“Old school titties.”
“My father loved that show. Smart man. Alright, I’m out. Go Philz!”
“Night night. Hey! You tell Sioux I say hello! Have a good Saturday, Friday!”
“Hey braj, I’ll do just that! You do the same. Going to the vegan bakery that’s been closed on Saturdays for months. Love that place. Can’t wait. ‘Oh, I can’t have honey, ma’am, I’m too ethically pure.’”
“Lol! Toodlez.”