Watch @FWBluesFan slow dance...for charity!

Many people who are reading this know Twitter user @FWBluesFan, either through Twitter or in real life. Those who know him know that he is generally a quite mannered person. But yesterday, May 28, with my own two eyes, I saw him do something wildly antithetical to this persona.

While at the wedding of our friend, Twitter user @dspPickuptruck, the Fort Worth Blues Man participated in dancing, as people often do at wedding receptions, but the true highlight was during a slow dance song, Ed Sheeran's omnipresent 2014 hit ballad "Thinking Out Loud", in which he and the groom engaged in a slow dance.

I have mentioned this to a few people already, and consensus is that this did not happen. But not only did it happen, but I have video to prove it. Two details about the video.

1. It is 35 seconds long and they dance for about 34 seconds of it. The video ends with a pair of bridesmaids, who were also dancing to the song, crashing into me.
2. At one point, listeners can hear a voice other than Sheeran's belting the lyric "that baby now". The voice is mine, attempting feebly to sing.

I would love nothing more than to share this video with you. I've watched it several times and hope others will get the privilege. Now, I could just post the video on Twitter, but we have made the decision to try to parlay our silliness into helping a worthy cause.

I will post the video of @FWBluesFan and @dspPickuptruck slow-dancing to "Thinking Out Loud" to Twitter and to this post if we are able to raise $69 for the American Cancer Society.

Yes, it's silly. Yes, it's juvenile. But who says that supporting a good cause must be ultra-serious? I made the decision to turn this video into a charity effort, and @FWBluesFan picked a very worthwhile cause. In fact, I donated to the cause myself.

So really, you guys only need to raise $59. If every one of our followers donates five cents to ACS, the video will go beyond my cell phone.

If you would like to contribute, go to donate.cancer.org and make a one-time donation. E-mail me at johnjf125 at gmail dot com to confirm that you made the donation: a screenshot of the donation screen, forwarding a confirmation e-mail, a screenshot of the confirmation e-mail, etc. are all acceptable as long as it is clear that it is authentic. 

If you want to blur or block out information (such as I did above, where I blurred my phone number), feel free to block out as much as you'd like as long as you maintain the dollar amount donated. If you want to keep it completely anonymous, you may blur out single bit of information on the e-mail aside from the dollar amount while using a dummy e-mail account. All information regarding individual donations will remain 100% anonymous.

As an extra bonus, if we can raise $420 (yes, I am 12 years old), I will record an audio commentary of the video (it will actually be much longer than 35 seconds). Hopefully I can convince one of its co-stars to also appear to break down the video, but I can promise that I will be there. So we are only $410 from that. Less than 34 cents per follower gets us to this level.

All donations are welcome and encouraged. No amount is too small. Thank you in advance.

I wrote a spec script for Crying Birds's TV show

@johnjf125 Everything is terrible. I'm currently writing a pilot about you, Grobot, @lil_scooter93 and Adron Chambers sharing an apartment.

— those crying birds (@crying_birds) May 22, 2016

Having partially inspired Crying Birds to creative heights with his pilot about a television show in which Grobot (henceforth referred to as "Nick"), @lil_scooter93 (henceforth referred to as "Heather"), and former St. Louis Cardinals quad-A outfielder Adron Chambers share an apartment with me, I have decided to begin a spec script for this show. While I personally would have titled the show "Apartment 2F", I #re2pect CB's decision to name it "Four Stories." And here is the story I have chosen to tell. I have only a vague idea of how scripts are written, format-wise, so please just enjoy the CONTENT on its own terms.

As the scene begins, John is sitting alone on a couch in the living room, typing on his laptop. That commercial where Jon Bon Jovi strums an acoustic guitar, singing and obliterating a small child as part of selling DirecTV is on in the background.

*Nick walks in the apartment*

NICK: Do you know if Addie bought milk at the store this morning?

JOHN: Wh...Addie? Who's Addie?

NICK: You know, Adron.

JOHN: Wait, you're calling him Addie? I think we need a vote on this.

NICK: What the hell's wrong with Addie?

JOHN: Well, first of all, it doesn't even save on syllables. And if one of us is going to be nicknamed Addie, it should be Heather, since she's an accountant.

*Heather walks in the apartment*

HEATHER: Who's an accountant? (Laugh track, which otherwise does not appear on the show, for some reason loses its absolute shit over this joke)

JOHN: Oh, um, nobody's an accountant here, absolutely nobody. Nick just thinks we should call Adron "Addie".

NICK: Look, if you want to call him Adron, you go right ahead, but I think Addie sounds good.

*Adron walks in the apartment*

ADRON: Heyyyyyyyy gang. (This is his catchphrase, and because sitcoms are almost uniformly garbage, this is one of the better catchphrases in the history of television)

EVERYBODY ELSE IN UNISON: Heyyyyyyyy Adron! (Yeah, I know Nick's supposed to be calling him Addie, but this was really just a set piece at the beginning to pad the word count)

ADRON: Hey, I was just, I was thinking about something.

JOHN: What's that?

ADRON: Well, like, you know, it's kind of weird that I'm living with you guys.

JOHN: Nah, man, it's awesome. We're an interracial, mixed-gender group. We're like The Revolution here (oh, also I'm wearing a Prince t-shirt in the scene, RIP).

ADRON: No, it's not...it's not that. But, like, you're a bunch of single people in your 20s. I turn 30 later this year, and also I'm married. Doesn't logic suggest I should be living with my wife?

HEATHER: You're married?

ADRON: I...I think so. Wikipedia didn't say. Look, anyway, this just seems weird to be.

NICK: Don't be an asshat, Addie. This is a great setup we have. Yeah, you kind of stand out in the group because you're the old guy and also because you are a former professional baseball player and we're just a bunch of weird people on the internet...

ADRON: I'm still a baseball player, Nick. I'm in the Cubs minor league system.

HEATHER: The Cubs? So, um, do you hang out with Jason Heyward or Kris Bryant ever?

JOHN: *Looks straight at camera* Here we go again! *Looks around room* Oh, really? Nobody else is gonna say it with me? *Walks to the fridge and opens a beer that looks exactly like a Budweiser can except it says "Beer" on it* You guys are assholes.

ADRON: No, they're in the big leagues and I'm in the minors. It's like you guys don't even know me.

NICK: Well, we don't really know you. I know you scored that run against the Cubs in 2011 but that's it, really.

HEATHER: It's okay, Adron. I feel like an outsider here sometimes too. (The audience has an audible gasp like she just said she had a freaking brain tumor or something)

JOHN: Well, why's that?

HEATHER: Well, like, I'm the youngest one here. I'm the only woman. I don't even know why you guys invited me to be your roommate. I feel like a token woman here. I'm like Elaine on Seinfeld or that one girl, I don't know, I think her name was Kate or something, on The Drew Carey Show. Like, okay, there's three guy characters so we have to throw a female character into the mix.

JOHN: Look, Heather, I get what you're saying, but this isn't a TV show. (The audience LOSES IT on this joke, which I know I said there isn't a laugh track here but this was too damn much). And yes, we all have our differences. Nick's the tall one. Adron is the one that won a World Series ring with the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals. You're the woman. And I'm the extremely hot one. But while we all have our differences, we're all trying the best we can with these...four stories. (Audience erupts with applause and I win all of the Emmys that Jim Parsons won for The Big Bang Theory for some reason)

A tale of two Blues fans

Eight days ago, Tony X was just some guy with a Twitter account. Tony, whose Twitter handle is @soIoucity, had a little over a thousand followers last Monday night and as of the moment I started typing this sentence, he had 85,692.

The genesis of Tony's spike in Twitter followers, for the uninitiated, is that he turned on Fox Sports Midwest hoping to watch a Cardinals game, but instead found Game 7 of the first round of the NHL playoffs between his hometown St. Louis Blues and the Chicago Blackhawks. According to Tony, he had never before watched a hockey game, but he nevertheless kept his TV on the channel and, as he live-tweeted, fell in love with the game. He was mesmerized by the sport's intensity and the drama of the event.

Granted, most hockey games aren't tightly-contested playoff game sevens between bitter rivals, one of which is your hometown team, and Tony probably got a bit lucky that this was his first exposure to the sport, but Hockey Twitter fell in love with his enthusiasm. He was naive to the specifics of hockey, but he had an enthusiasm which was infectious.

For as jaded as adults can get online about sports, Tony revealed a different perspective: somebody who discovers something new and just wants to tell everybody about how great it is. It doesn't have to be a sport--I discovered Oasis after they'd been selling out soccer stadiums in Europe for over a decade, but that didn't mean I didn't want to scream to everybody I know about how OH MY GAWWWWD YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO SUPERSONIC RIGHT THIS INSTANT.

I was seven when I watched my first hockey game. Tony was an adult. There is a cavalcade of people best described as "haters" who clearly resent Tony's rise to pseudo-fame, which I do not understand whatsoever--I understand not being interested in seeing some random guy learn hockey on the fly, but the sense of "What did this guy do to earn this attention?" is odd to me. He entertained people and in many cases, reminded people of themselves.

In a strange way, he reminds me of my dad.

My dad is a generation older than Tony, and unlike Tony, has watched hockey before. He used to be a somewhat big fan: the first sport I ever watched was hockey, and it was because I watched the first home game of the Wayne Gretzky in St. Louis "era" (it's a footnote in Gretzky's career, but it was a formative experience of my sports fandom) with him that I eventually started following other sports.

But not long after I took to hockey, my dad stopped caring about it. He has always cited the Blues trading his favorite player, Brendan Shanahan, as the inciting incident which dulled his hockey fandom (this predates the Gretzky trade, but I'm willing to accept that the 1995-96 season was a transition year in a vacuum). But this always seemed strange to me, especially after Shanahan netted a 20 year-old Chris Pronger, an eventual Hall of Famer whose number will rightfully be retired by the Blues.

A month and a half after the Brendan Shanahan trade, the St. Louis Rams played their first game.

My dad was always a bigger fan of the Rams than the other St. Louis sports teams, including the Cardinals. Remember a few years ago when the Cardinals played in Game 5 of the World Series while, at the same time, the 3-4 Rams played the Seattle Seahawks on Monday Night Football? Most people I know ignored the Rams game. I didn't, but the World Series took priority, with the Rams getting my attention during commercial breaks. Dad watched the Rams exclusively. He wasn't at the game or anything--he just cared about the Rams that much more.

Tony X, it appears, was similarly passionate about the Rams. I don't know Tony's age, though it seems that, like me, he doesn't remember a world in which the Rams were not in St. Louis. For all of the national talk about the Rams' brief time in St. Louis, if you're under the age of 30, you remember the Rams in St. Louis as ubiquitously as you remember the Packers in Green Bay or the Steelers in Pittsburgh.

Rams left me ........ @StLouisBlues saved me 🙌 https://t.co/SIlJ5heFjb

— Tony X. (@soIoucity) April 26, 2016

The Cardinals are great and wonderful. Hell, I write for a Cardinals blog. I'm not exactly ambivalent to their existence. But fans have a different relationship with the Cardinals, a ubiquitous local brand, than they do with less successful teams.

A little over a month ago, I wrote about how the Cardinals should specifically court alienated ex-Rams fans, though in fairness to the Cardinals, this was always going to be a less intuitive courtship than one spearheaded by the Blues. Fandom of the Blues, or any hockey team for that matter, is less casual. Say what you will about attendance for the Rams or Blues during lean years (of course, owners dangling the franchises to other cities didn't help the matters, either), but the fans who did show up and who did loudly rep their teams were hardly passive fans.

It had been well over a decade since my dad watched a Blues game. The only hockey I can recall him watching beyond my elementary school years was the last two minutes of the 2009 Stanley Cup Finals, and even after Marc-Andre Fleury's absurd performance stopping a flurry (pun unintended but nevertheless kept) of Detroit Red Wings shots, I could barely get him to muster more than a casual noting of impressiveness.

He usually goes to bed around 8 on weeknights, but he stayed up and watched every minute of Game 7 against the Blackhawks. He made sure before Game 1 against Dallas to know what channel NBC Sports was. During overtime of Game 2, he texted me about how nervous he was. It was the first time he had texted me about an in-progress sporting event since the final game of the St. Louis Rams.

Something is happening here. I had assumed when the Rams moved, St. Louis would collectively find another NFL team, but as it increasingly appears the entire league left us out to dry, this ceased to be an option. So in the end, our new Rams will not be the Chiefs nor the Bears nor the Colts. It's the Blues.

I was a Blues fan anyway, but it was only in 2016 that the Blues saved me.