Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

All Roads Lead to Disappointment

Happy Friday Chicago!

Full disclosure, it’s been a tough start to writing tonight.

Just as I was about to hand off every passing thought in my brain to my fingers, I remembered a single awkward meet-and-greet I had on Tuesday and it sent me into such a tailspin I thought about getting ready for bed.

(I tried to ask this woman where she worked, and she said ‘The Bay Area,’ and I did not know if that was the name of her company or if she just completely misunderstood my question. We stared at each other for 10 seconds, I barely let a ‘cool’ sneak over my bottom lip, and then I just walked away. Half considered reaching out to her on LinkedIn today to explain the confusion.)

But, nevertheless, time goes on, days go by, and there’s confirmed no company named “The Bay Area” anywhere to be found. Must be the area she was referring to.

The weather was nice Thursday, and I did get in my oh-shit-it’s-nice-out-I-need-to-go-outside-for-8-minutes walk, but we’ve had way too much weather talk on these webpages over the last few weeks.

The seasons are not yet changing, but it is tax season, baby! Death, taxes, and all that jazz.

And you know what that means. It’s time for me and my brothers to shovel an entire pile of shit on my uncle’s plate during the worst months of his year and then hit him with a “Thanks, by the way,” at his granddaughter’s first birthday party somewhere down the road.

“No charitable causes this year for me Unc, but do the tips I give to those Starbucks baristas count? LOL,” I say as he asks me once again to please send him all the necessary documents by week’s end.

The good news about having an uncle do your taxes: you don’t have to worry about your taxes. The bad news? You have to report those crypto losses to a guy who’s over 60 and still carries cash in his wallet.

He swears he doesn’t pay attention to salaries submitted, but I’m just not buying it. He’s got to be aware of how insanely disparate me and my brother’s income levels are, and I’m sure he realizes that when my parents say we’re both “doing really well,” that just essentially means that they love us both for who we are.

It’s those taps on the head from a parent that feel similar to a significant other hitting you with the “perfect for a boyfriend” tag on what’s below the waistline.

That inter-sibling wage gap only became noticeable to me when I’d get a wine suggestion from the other side of the table and think, “Are you insane, buddy?”

Key word there is think, not say, because even if I think buying extremely expensive wine at dinner is agonizingly stupid, there will be a day when I need ‘ol brother for a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card after I donate $10,000 I don’t have to the University of Iowa just to get my name on a brick leading into the football facility.

And, ultimately, I can’t complain.

I’ve got a well-off sibling and an accountant for an uncle. My life a movie.

I’ve always said you need a few different types of guys in your friends and family circle. I’ve got two down right there, but the rest of the bunch need to step up.

No one owns a bar yet, for instance. I can’t tell an unsuspecting date that I “know a spot” and then be treated to an all-class experience with my buddy pulling the strings in the back.

I do have a friend, though, who “knows people who work at this bar.” But, ultimately, that just ends up being an obtuse persuasion technique to get us to the watering holes he prefers.

I’ve got a financial services guy, but every time I ask for a pulse on the market he basically gives me a report I could’ve gotten from my “Stocks” application in far less time.

I’ve got a “company idea” guy too, but not a founder or CEO. Far from that, actually. Every time I’m on the receiving end of an idea, I have to break it to him that that “idea” already exists. It’s not his fault his brain works anywhere from 5-7 years slower than the rest of the entrepreneurial public, I guess.

I’m still lacking a guy with good company tickets for professional sporting events, but I think I can hold out hope on this one. I cosplayed as this guy for a little while with season tickets to Bulls games, but it doesn’t hit the same when you have to Venmo request for $82 after the fact.

I do have a guy that can give me yet-to-be-released housing good products, which I didn’t ask for, but at least he’s producing.

Now, what do I bring to the table?

Simple.

I’ve been editing some of the worst compilations of words ever put together by humans on behalf of my friends since high school. While I don’t think every Krispy Kreme you eat takes a discernible amount of time off your lifespan (nonsense propaganda to stop you from enjoying your Saturday breakfast), I do believe that reading each of my friends’ unedited final papers has taken minutes to hours off mine.

Secondly, if one of my friends is ever talking to someone that fits the “guy they sorta know, who happens to be on cocaine” archetype at the bar, they call me in from the bullpen as their “buddy with a sports newsletter” so I can relieve them and put a fire out with 10 minutes of Bears QB talk.

Those two responsibilities alone won’t win me a medal, but they are something.

I’m hoping there’s still time for a general contractor to emerge out of the group of dunces I surround myself with, but we’re in crunch time and I don’t see much promise.

Anyway, if you’re thinking of stopping here, please don’t. When the Bulls front office is guilty of dereliction of duty, the whole city should pay attention.

After all, your taxes will be building Jerry Reinsdorf’s next baseball stadium, and you can’t get that back on a return.

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For however rich Michael Jordan is, he’s not rich enough. His greatness has enabled incompetence at 1901 West Madison for this entire century.

There’s just not much else to say here, folks.

The Dunkin’ Donuts race on the United Center jumbotron, one of the only endearing things about the Bulls over the last two decades (and it’s an advertisement), is a good reflection of Chicago’s sports teams.

Whenever you think one team is as dumb as it gets in professional sports, another team in the second-largest market in the country races ahead of them. The Bears raced off to a lead at the turn of the year, but we should have known that was only baiting us, as the Bulls beat the lag and raced ahead of them just 40 days or so into 2024.

Last year, after the deadline, on the matter of Arturas Karnisovas, I wrote that I was “teetering between cutting him some slack for being a Lithuanian-born man that doesn’t always find the right words and thinking he’s just a fucking moron. I’m leaning towards the latter.”

I’m fully on the latter now, and I cannot wrap my head around the fact that the Bulls have hired two consecutive general managers completely incapable of doing what their jobs require. Nobody is booing Jerry Krause’s wife now.

The only thing John Paxson and Karnisovas have driven over the last decade is sheer apathy within the fanbase. If I was capable of being apathetic toward the Bulls (God, I wish I was), I’d be past there.

It’s already something that, in a group of friends filled with sports fans in Chicago, I have like three friends who care about the Bulls.

But the Bulls don’t notice these things, because they are completely disconnected from their fans. They mistake full-ish arenas — which is due to Michael Jordan and a city that loves basketball — with fan satisfaction. It could not be further from the truth.

The last time Karnisovas was active on the trade market, he made one of the worst trades of the last 10 years for Nikola Vucevic. Since the deadline after that, in 2022, the Bulls are 77-84.

They’ve never, during that stretch, flirted with contention.

We all joked about the Heat making the finals last year, and how it would convince the doofuses in the front office that the Bulls were right there, too. The saddest thing about that joke is that it was actually true.

During a press conference Thursday, Karnisovas again displayed what appears to be stupidity intertwined with delusion, which is a hell of a combo.

He got multiple things wrong, like, for instance, how far back the Bulls were in the standings from the 6th seed (they were 4.5 games back, he said 3). Does this mean I check the standings more often than the Bulls GM?!

He also said the last front office missed the playoffs five years in a row, which was untrue. The fact that he is even looking at the past front office as a point of comparison tells the whole story. The Bulls are past doomed.

I wrote about the Bulls needing to trade LaVine last year. I wrote about it this offseason. Then he asked for a trade this year, with his value already plummeted. I wrote about them needing to sit and trade him so many times over the last few months that I thought I would start annoying readers.

And yet they did not trade him, they did not sit him, and now they are stuck with a bad, injured player who they owe $200 million to over the next few years.

It’s the worst malpractice I’ve seen in the NBA in a long time. And that was five days before the trade deadline.

The Bulls have zero aspirations of winning a championship. They are resting on their laurels without realizing they have zero laurels to rest on.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that there was one person in the entire city of Chicago who would have supported absolute inaction at yesterday’s trade deadline. It just so happens that that one person is in charge of the Bulls’ basketball decisions.

So long as the United Center is not empty and the Bulls are under the dreaded luxury tax threshold, ownership doesn’t care, either. It’s depressing.

It’s not even worth explaining the details around why it was so dumb to behave in the manner the Bulls have over the last few weeks. Because you all already know! The fans, for maybe the first time ever, actually know better than the front office.

And, if you don’t know why, you’re carrying water for the Bulls organization, like certain “reporters” that cover them, who I imagine were walking around singing their own version of “America, Fuck Yeah” today.

Slightly under .500 ball! *FUCK YEAH* Continuity! *FUCK YEAH* Play-in tournament! *FUCK YEAH* Underneath the luxury tax threshold! *FUCK YEAH*

The only plausible way that I can get through the rest of this season (and I wouldn’t ask anyone else to do this), is to completely separate the actual Bulls basketball team from the rest of the organization.

I want to root for this team, I like this team (for the most part), and, god dammit, I want something to care about on a Tuesday night in the winter!

Sigh.

Let’s go Bulls.

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One more video of someone asking a random person at Super Bowl Week what they think the Bears should do with the no. 1 pick may finally force me into the digital detox I so desperately need.

April cannot come soon enough.

All signs appear to be pointing toward Caleb Williams at no. 1.

And a quick digression: If you think that Williams would actually say ‘No’ to the Bears at no. 1, you’re either misguided or dumb. And it’s hard to distinguish between the two.

I know we all hate the Bears, but why would Williams ever not want to come to the Bears? He’s going to step into the best situation a no. 1 pick has faced in a very long time. The Bears will be good next year, and he also gets to play for a rabid fanbase in one of the best cities in the country.

Oh, he’s from Washington, D.C.? Who cares. That’s not how this works.

Anyway, I’ve come to grips with the Williams pick at no. 1, and I am OK with it. Maybe even a little excited, so long as he doesn’t turn out to be the insufferable prick I’m expecting.

And when the Bears draft him, I expect we will not see a mutiny from players who all make millions of dollars to play football for a living.

Now, if the Bears trade Justin Fields and draft anyone other than Caleb Williams, that may actually be it for me. I may fold the newsletter and say sayonara.

I’m very happy Steve McMichael and Devin Hester will be admitted into the Hall of Fame.

I have a dream, though, that one day we can reminisce on highlights other than the opening kickoff of a Super Bowl we lost nearly 20 years ago and a Super Bowl we won nearly 40 years ago.

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