A quick break from the stroller lady/“gender war” slop. (Fret not, the remaining ~19 posts for that discussion are queued and ready. Those will take us into approx Spring/Summer of next year. Buckle up.)
I was in Pittsburgh over the weekend, ostensibly for a wedding. A reader of the blog had reached out via my agent to inquire about my appearance fee/availability. I usually say no to this sort of thing; I don’t like to give my fans the impression that I am a regular person (and therefore potentially boring/underwhelming). It’s much better for my brand if I maintain the aloof/enigmatic persona. But I decided to break from standard procedure in this case.
1) He was quite insistent, to the point where he offered to quadruple my usual fee (which is frankly extortionate to begin with).
2) He promised that I’d get to be a groomsman (more camera time) and told me he had already paid for my suit. I reminded him that I only wear Gucci (I am a brand ambassador), and would need to be wearing an all-white ensemble (so as to show off what’s left of my summer tan). He said this would be no problem at all.
3) He paid for my private charter jet (w/ unlimited food/champagne service added).
With this, the deal was sealed. He almost certainly still got the better end of it, but it was close enough that I decided to go through with it regardless. After all, I had a far more personal, more important motive…. Suffice to say, it’s been a tough few days for me after the Charlie Kirk thing. I haven’t slept or eaten much, and I just felt so isolated over in the UK. I was desperate to go pay my respects, but also to see how things were looking on the ground. As many politicians/influencers/pundits on the right have been proclaiming, the “Left just fucked up. Big time”; “There will be hell to pay”; “Forgiveness is for the weak”, etc. So, with the Civil War looming, I wanted to be on the right side of history (my IDF application got rejected, so I figured this might be my only chance to get a taste of combat. I have been chomping at the bit). I had to get over there, stat. Sure, I was disappointed to miss out on meeting up with my buddies at the “Unite the Kingdom” meetup in London, but I knew they’d understand. I had territory to go reclaim. As Charlie “O Captain, My Captain” Kirk put it, “The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.”
I had never been to Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania is quite big, is the thing, and other than the Steelers, the city’s NFL team that I’ve supported since I was a kid, there’s not really any other reason you’d find yourself doing a 5-hour drive west, through the state gamelands. As James Carville said, “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between.” I discovered that, if this is true, it’s more descriptive of voting demographics more than anything else (the two metropoles reliably vote blue, the rest of the state goes red). Pittsburgh is way closer in size to Harrisburg (the current state capital), or Lancaster (the country’s former capital—albeit very briefly). This is not a slight—“it’s not about the size of the boat”, etc.—I really liked what I saw of the city. But it is very much still rural, small town PA. Recognizably so. If you’ve got to go to PA, though, fall is probably the best time to do it. Especially if you can catch the leaves as they turn their reds, oranges, and golds. If you miss the trees, but still want to see those nice autumnal colors, you can just take a walk anywhere around the outskirts/less-trafficked parts of town:
Anyway, some other highlights:
Finally made it to a Steelers game. It was their first home game of the season, against the Seahawks. There is something nice about being in a small town where sport is the main focus, and where there’s only one team to get behind. Every car has a Steelers bumper sticker, the dogs all have Steelers-themed collars, the businesses all have a Steelers flag or some other show of allegiance. All the grandmas have jerseys on. It’s very endearing.
Also: the uber drivers I met while I was there. I had three. In terms of English, they spoke: “seemingly none”, “very broken but eager to learn”, and “barely any”, in that order. But we made do.
The first one’s name was Bositkhon. I’m usually pretty good with this stuff, but at first I thought his name was the car license plate I was supposed to look out for. In my defense I’d just landed and was quite jet-lagged.
Not to be outdone, the second one’s name was Dzhamshed. He took me from the hotel to the game on Sunday. Once again, I initially thought his name was the license plate. No defense for this one, maybe I am just a racist. (All I’ll say is that I barely use Uber and haven’t for over a year. I don’t know where things are. And they print these names in all-caps. I mean, come on!)
He supplemented his English with the google translate app, speaking into it whenever he needed help conveying his thoughts, which would show up in text after a couple of seconds. This worked surprisingly well. He was very nice; he told me he spoke Russian and Farsi and I think another couple of languages along with English. His last customer had been someone who ran the city ballet (or something close to this?), and had promised to get him tickets for a show. So Dzhamshed was very excited to take his 9 year old daughter—whose english, he added, was better than his. It turned out he was from Tajikstan. I pretended like I knew where this was. But he pulled out google maps anyway to show me where exactly his hometown was. He said the country is 90% mountains, he told me, as he traced his finger along some of the jagged, haphazard borders in the area (you know how they get over there, with their disputed territories and so on) and said “we are here, in the head of the tiger, as you can see”. It was like when someone points in the general direction of some “constellation” in the night sky and tells you that you’re looking at, like, “Octavius the Druid King”, who is apparently locked in battle with a dragon or something. You just nod and say “Ohhhh, yeah, I see it now, that’s his battleaxe in his right hand.” Their capital is called Dushanbe, which translates to “victory”, which I won’t fact check because I trust him.
We got so caught up in our geography lesson that he accidentally drove right by the stadium and we ended up merging onto a highway and going over a bridge across the river (in his defense there are about 15 bridges in/around the city, it’d be harder to not cross one on even a short drive). He grabbed the phone and pulled up google translate, speaking some hurried Russian into it. I think he was worried I might complain to uber and have him deported. Wearing an apologetic smile, he turned the phone toward me to show me the results: “I’m gonna get you to that stadium, buddy, I promise you. Do not worry.” Talk about a heartstring-puller. I told him not to worry at all, and asked him another question about Tajikstan to show him that I really wasn’t bothered if we were a few minutes late.
Obviously, as soon as I got back home I filed a report with ICE (they put me straight through since I’m such a regular and trusted client). I’d had a chance to think clearly by this point, and to recall what Charlie had taught me about Dzhamshed and his ilk; about the unstoppable tide of Islam, which Charlie somewhat ominously described as being “the sword the Left is using to slit the throat of America.” Nice try, Dzhamshed.
Lowlights: I learned as I walked up to the stadium that it was no longer called Heinz Field, but Acrisure Stadium, meaning it has lost its iconic name to join the growing list of generic, AI-generated-sounding stadiums across the US/UK. A travesty. Ideally, your stadium is named after a road/geographic landmark unique to the city. (Pittsburgh’s old stadium was even better: “Three Rivers Stadium”; as the city sits at the juncture of the Allegheny, the Ohio, and the Monongohela—don’t forget those, there will be a pop quiz later!)
I don’t mind it being named after a person. But they have to be dead (or freakishly old), and done extraordinary things on the field, or for their fellow man.
If it has to be named after a brand, it should be one that was founded in or is unique to the city in some way. Heinz, for example, is a ketchup company that was founded in Pittsburgh in 1869, and so this, conveniently, would qualify. It also has to be a brand that sells a physical product, and has brick and mortar stores. I do not like the growing trend of venues that are named for intangible (read: completely made up, socially corrosive, parasitic) industries: equity firms, crypto, AI, and other junk software/pyramid schemes. It has all become too soulless, too impersonal. We have lost our way.
So I was already on edge from all this as I got into the stadium and found my seat. Alas, things then got worse, when I looked down onto the field and saw that we have a wide receiver who wears the number 4 and a linebacker who wears the number 6. Utter woke nonsense. An affront to our flagship sport and therefore our country. I do not care why they chose these numbers—I would at least hope they have some sort of deep emotional connection. Whatever the case, they should be suspended from the team immediately and banned from all team facilities/activities until their squad numbers have been swapped out for more suitable alternatives. Linebackers should be somewhere in the 50s. Wide receivers should be in the 80s. (The english football equivalent to this is like when Morgan Schneiderlin wore #2 as a central midfielder for Everton.) These players have gotten too big for their boots, they “need straightened out”, as we’d say in PA.1
Again, we’ve lost our way. By my reckoning, it all started with Colin Kaepernick. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. And I know a lot of my readers will feel the same way. No player is bigger than the sport. These cocky young guys come in and think they can piss all over our time-honored traditions, our hallowed halls. When I tune in on Sundays, I don’t want to have the fourth wall broken by this sort of nonsense. I tune in to forget about the outside world. No politics, no “activism” being shoved down my throat, just good old pigskin-tossing and CTE propagation.
It all got to be a bit too much. It was a hot, humid day; I was still slightly drunk from the wedding the night before; I’d never really stopped crying from the national anthem before the game, and I’d been up until five or six in the morning watching Charlie Kirk highlights and sobbing my eyes out. I was not doin’ too hot. I was a powder keg ready to blow, and the #4/#6 thing put me over the top; the red mist began to descend. I excused myself to the bathroom to blow off some steam. I have no idea what happened next. All I know is I started swinging.
A couple of nice guys apparently found me curled up in the corner midway through the first half. I’d lost quite a lot of blood, having cut my wrist while shattering the mirror. I can’t quite be sure when it happened, exactly; I was pretty much blacked-out from the adrenaline. I know I pummeled that wall like a boxer’s speed bag. They sat with me for a while, wrapped some napkins around my bleeding knuckles/wrists, and applied some pressure. Once I’d stopped hyperventilating and could stand up, they walked me over to a First Aid station where I could get myself patched up. The nice nurse gave me a blue raspberry ice pop for me to suckle on (I requested tropical punch, but they did not have one in their little cooler bag).
My blood sugar was low, and I get terribly grumpy when I’m hungry. I can’t help but think this played into it. Luckily there was an Auntie Anne’s vendor in the concourse. You can’t get soft pretzels in the UK, and the country is worse for it. So this was another highlight.
By the second half, I felt much better, and had finally calmed down enough to be discharged. I’d been venting to one of the nurses walking me out, who gave a sympathetic smile and said that I ought to give the game one more chance; there was a surprise coming that would cheer me right up. I obliged. Back at my seat, refreshed, I now noticed that all the American flags around the stadium had been lowered to half-mast to commemorate our fallen brother. This cheered me up a bit. Maybe our country hadn’t gone completely to shit just yet. But things were about to get even better….
Part 2 shortly! Thanks for tuning in ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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“His shirt needs ironed”, “the car needs washed”, etc.