I'm sorry. I love football.

First and foremost, I'm going to blog more this year. Not only do i often find myself with shit to say that does not fit into Twitter's character crunch, but i also have a TON of old notes, writings, diaries, photos, etc that i need to document/archive somehow. This seems as good a way as any. That way, folks can enjoy or hate the trip down memory lane with me... Either way, getting memories down on "paper" is the goal here. This is stuff I do not want to forget.

Secondly, I'm sorry. I love football. I feel like I need to keep this obsession under wraps because there are just so many gosh darn haters out there. When folks post about how they wish football was over, I take it personally. I can't help it. The one thing we ALL have going for us, haters or not, is that football has a very short season. 16 weeks plus playoffs and Super Bowl. From September to early February. And games are played on the weekends, primarily Sunday. Can't you all just handle it for one day a week? Hahaha. I don't go apeshit when people tweet incessantly about hockey, american idol, basketball, foursquare, etc... so why am i so wary about posting about football? Ah well.

My dad played football for Michigan State. I cannot find any online evidence of this, nor have I tried too hard. You see, he's Bob Nanna as well and I can't seem to wade far enough past the junk that our name has accumulated. I don't think he was very good but the fact is - every single Sunday, we ordered pizza from Salerno's (a hike from our house), drank root beer, and watched football. There is even a "famous" picture of me as a bald <1 year old holding a football that my mom likes to parade around the house when company is over. (I couldn't find this online - but i did find this gem.)

Anyway, the season ends tonight, so we can all get on with our happy lives and frolic carefree until September. I hear there is a probable football lockout for 2011 - aka NO football. I don't even want to think about it...

I'm at Threadless right now. I set up the chili cook off stations and now i'm just wasting time till the game starts. I'm wearing black and gold.

David Foster Wallace and "Too Much"

Man, I'm bummed. I'm bummed about the news of David Foster Wallace's suicide. I'd be hard pressed to make a case for myself as an actual "writer." Throwing together blogs or doing quick profiles/reviews for a local magazine hardly qualifies me to even be classified as such (maybe typer is better?) but if you happened to plow through my rambling, long-winded (but hopefully entertaining) entry in the Revolution On Canvas Vol 1 book about the day to day concerns of a neurotic vocalist on tour - you will find heaping bushelfulls of nods, inspirations, and maybe even straight up rips of David Foster Wallace. If I remember correctly, I may have even put in a bunch of footnotes and eventually scrap them... thinking it was too much.

But that's what made DFW so great. "Too much" just didn't exist for him as a writer. Jesus, I dragged around Infinite Jest for several tours - eventually ditching it for something slimmer and lighter... a cinder block, perhaps. It's not that it wasn't fascinating. As my friend Zach noted - you need to read it with 3 bookmarks - one to mark your place, one to mark your place in the footnotes, and one to mark the hilarious parts you want to show others. But they'd never get it just from a paragraph, or a line, or even one of the oddly sequenced chapters. I once pointed out character James Incandenza's extensive filmography (one footnote) to a friend, saying it was just about the funniest thing I'd read in awhile. I don't remember it garnering much of a reaction. Maybe I'm just a fan of fun, nonsensical lists. (Side note! The Rye Coalition had a song named after one of Incandenza's films: "Blood Sister: One Tough Nun")

While Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews, Consider The Lobster, the amazing 9/11 essay in Rolling Stone were just fascinating, it was his writing style that I was just so ready, willing, and able to champion! It wasn't Kerouac-ian stream of consciousness or some randomly written journal entry. It took a LOT of thought, a LOT of research, and a LOT of experience. "Too much" even. It was so much information that - hell, if it took a page-long run-on sentence, or a novella worth of footnotes, or insanely esoteric language (the radio show passage is killer) - it didn't matter - as long as it got out of the head and onto the page. Conventional writing structure (and probably several editors) be damned!

After a few unsuccessful stabs at reading Infinite Jest on tour, I just said fuck it, I'm going to do this. So, during a month at home, I dug in. I took notes on all of the characters, I chronologically figured out what takes place when, I kept track of all of the plots and subplots... and I did it. You know, it's almost like a dare. I'm glad I took it on, though. It was so eye-opening and so envelope-pushing... I have many favorite parts but there's no way I'd be able to find them in that haystack. I'm just going to have to read the thing again.

DFW didn't publish much the last few years, but I bet he was writing... a lot. I wonder what, if anything, will come of it. Whether it's amazing or disappointing, it will most certainly be tragic because something became "too much."

And leave it to a tragedy to get one writing again.

Bob Blogs

It's a new beginning. A new chapter. Let's hope it doesn't suck.