Bring My Lover Back

She left me in February.  After years and years of dating on and off, I always go back to her, sure as the seasons change, the wind blows, and the hands of time march onward, I will always return to her.

Who is she you ask?  The one that marks the end of my summer romances, the one who I can spend hours with on weekends and occasional weeknights, depending on her schedule.

The relationship can be a roller coaster though, some weeks are ups, others downs.  Sometimes she hurts me for weeks, other times she puts a smile on my face for a month, but like a drug addict, I will always need that rush.

Who is she you ask?  Some blonde bombshell?  Beautiful brunette?  Ravishing (And of course, soul less) red?  Wrong, wrong, and wrong again, friend.

Her full, legal name is "The National Football League", and she is the one for me.  I love baseball, I spend my summers with her, but as soon as the leaves begin to turn, the air gets a chill, and men put on pads and beat the shit out of each other, baseball just seems, well, too plain, too boring for my likes.

All ridiculous writing and romanticizing aside, football season is right around the corner, and I couldn't be happier.  I've been talking about it with friends, reading the latest news, and counting down the days until the season kicks off.

Now, if you walked my bedroom, you might notice a few things.  One, I try to keep a clean room.  Two, why do I still have a twin bed if I'm too big for it?  And three, there's a few Redskins things on the wall.  Like a giant FatHead of the Skins helmet, poster of the 1932 World Champion Redskins team, poster of Sonny Jurgensen, Redskins basketball hoop and basketball, giant Redskins blanket, team plaques for the three Redskins Super Bowl Champion teams ('83, '87, & '91) and the matching beer steins, and then there's the wall color, which may or may not be burgundy and gold walls.

You could say there is a theme to the room.  Now, for those of you who really know me, you know that I live and die with the Redskins on Sunday, it's that emotional rush that makes the football season so magical to me, but it also means after losses, I have to sleep in hell.  I have to go to bed staring at all this Redskins stuff, getting more upset and disturbed that the Redskins always seem to choke in the red zone, or Ladell Betts tripped over the four yard line (I know, I know, yes that was years ago but it clearly still bothers me to no end.  IT'S JUST A LINE!  HOW DID YOU FALL OVER?  I'm ranting. I do that a lot.)

But sleeping in that room after a tough loss can be a nightmare.  Sleeping in it after a big win is the best sleep of my life.  It's a terribly awesome hell I live in.  And I love every minute.

Football is just amazing, I feel like that's all I'm really saying here.  It's the roar of the crowds, the deep bombs, the amazing tackles, the back breaking runs, the acrobatic interceptions, the slow motion instant replays, agony of defeat, and the sweet, sweet ecstasy of victory.

I know some people, well, a lot of people, think it's insane how on game can affect my mood for a few days, or how it can affect who I socialize with on certain days (Both "Dallas Weeks" are my favorite weeks of the year), or how it can bring a group of people t who have never met, together for three hours over a game.

Okay, I'm getting myself too worked up right now.  The point is, football is right around the corner, and it's basically what America is all about haha.

Until next time, follow my random thoughts on Twitter @therealSamWow.

Plastic Battleship

Now that I've put that little public service announcement out there for everyone, I'm going to talk about something totally different.

We're one week past Memorial Day and summer is here, even though outside my window it's kind of overcast and freakin' 69 degrees.  I coulda typed "70", but "69" makes me giggle, my blog, my immature rules.

But real summer will be here soon, girls in bikinis, grills being fired up, humidity to the point where you wanna kill yourself, girls in bikinis, and getting drunk on the beach/at the pool with your friends and or family.

The pool I used to go to, or maybe not.  This was the only place
the looked close on Google so deal with it.

Now, my family used to belong to the neighborhood pool in Glenn Dale at the golf course (They call it a "Country Club" but let's be real, it's just a golf course).  Then Glenn Dale pool got closed down, maybe cuz it was a crap hole, maybe cuz no one went, or maybe because that one life guard was too hot to keep the pool open.

Let's side track and talk about her.  I didn't know her name, the only time she talked to me was probably when she would say "NO RUNNING!" and I'd speed walk instead, but I was in love.

She was tall, well, tall compared to my puny grade school body, brunette (The only non-blonde I'll ever love), and had a pierced belly button (Hot).  Below is an artist's rendition of her, apparently dressed for a Christmas party orgy?  Or she's a hooker.  Either way, I wish her the best of luck.

She left life guarding for a
more "lucrative" career.

So back on task, my pool.  To set the mood, it was your basic pool.  Varying depths, diving boards, giant toilet also known as the kiddie pool, and the classic snack stand.  The snack stand was great, it was run by the life guards, had a hard cement floor, picnic tables, and it's were we'd eat cold peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

It also held the greatest candy bar in all of North Bowie.  We're talking twenty five cent AirHeads, wax bottles, KitKats, Hershey's, Bottle Caps, and Reese's.  It was amazing.  They also had a water fountain that tasted like pure copper.

Now, as far as the actual pool goes it was great.  Coach PeeWee taught us to swim and I refused to learn how to dive.  Still haven't to this day.  The best part about the pool though was that you could bring in any toy you wanted, unlike some other pools in the area.

I mentioned the toys for a reason.  My best friend when I was a wee little pup was this kid Joel.  He was the man, only child, German, hell, his parent's even drove a Volvo, the kid was living the life.  The first baller I ever met (Anthony Nelson, @MDsOwn, is the greatest one though).

Joel also had a Dad whose job was to do something and that something translated into Joel having a bunch of bad ass army toys.  He had a toy AC-130 gunship that had working guns, missile launchers, and a cargo bay that was a show-and-tell staple in kindergarten.

He also had a fleet of plastic battleships, patrol boats, aircraft carriers, and other things that we would spend hours playing with in the pool, attacking them with splash bombs and those awesome toypedos, until that damn adult swim kicked us out for fifteen minutes.  Bastards.

So anyways, I was just feeling nostalgic so I figured I'd right about it.  There you go, my next post will be about my trip to Bremuda so until then, check out my friend Gina's blog here for some cool stuff.

Billy-Bob the Caterpillar.

So as many of you know I love to write. On legal pads, notebooks, napkins, hands, or walls. In trains, cars, planes, bathrooms, beds, kitchens, and restaurants.

I like to write about beating the odds, I like writing about sports, a lot of sports. Hell, I even wrote a few songs, speeches, and the occasional random eulogy (They're not all about people I know, most of them are just random characters I come up with in my brain piece). I just love writing. Always have and hopefully I always will.

I dunno how this fascination started for me, I guess I know pretty quick that math and science weren't really my thing at all. I didn't like them but I did love history, english, and sports. And I've always bean a talker, so I guess writing was my way of talking when everyone around me wanted me to just shut the, uh, well, let's say they wanted me to shut the "front door".

Hopefully one day I'll get paid to do this, how awesome would that be? I've always wanted to write a column like what Rick Reilly writes for ESPN.com and the one he used to write for "Sports Illustrated". He would go behind the stories of the really big name athletes and instead write about the quarterback at some random D-III college in "YourTown, YourState". It would be more about the human element behind sport, not so much the star athlete, the giant contract, the asshole head coach, or the off field problems for a primadonna wide receiver. It was about the college football and basketball team driving off campus to pick up a school booster who had been in a wheelchair since he was seven. The human condition. Stories that made you laugh, cry, smile, and gave you chills.

So I wanted to share with you all something that I think only three people have seen in my lifetime. It's the first ever short story I wrote, or at least it's the first one that's recorded and will go down in history one day. It was literally written on the day that I turned ten, March 14th, 2000.

I didn't edit it at all, this is the straight uncut dope. Best of the best, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I still do. I almost died I laughed so hard when I re-discovered it.

And now, without further delay, "The Caterpillar Story" by SamWow Carroll...

"One day there was a caterpillar named Billy-Bob who lived in a dump. He thought he was very ugly. Finally, more caterpillars moved in. One day someone came and dumped it out.

So he went out into the world. He had to cross the ocean. So he made a boat of sticks an went off. But he got sucked up in a waterspout. He landed in Europe. There he made a cocoon.

He emerged a butterfly. He flew to the United States but he got took under by a tidal wave. He flew over a battlefield. He got his wings blown off."

The picture is backwards, I'm sure you all can deal with it. It's just proof that this epicness exists. Ignore the stupid "Dove Prayer".

Nostalgia Sunday

I've been feeling extremely nostalgic ever since my first "Offical Unoffical Grade School Reunion" was planned and I wanted to share a few memories from my grade school years. I'm hoping to string a few of these together but we'll see how that goes. It's 1995ish. I'm in Miss Andrea's kindergarten class at Ascension Catholic Church. I used to sit near the door next to Joe, Joel, and maybe Emily. Can't exactly remember. What I do remember is every morning when we came into class, we'd have to get out our journals and crayons and draw something. When we were done, we had to take it up to Miss Andrea and show and tell her what we drew so she could give us a check mark on the page. Since I was a boy (and awesome) I drew tanks, bears, and other deadly stuff.

I wish I could find that book and scan in a few of the pages but I wouldn't know where to look, probably an art muesum but that's not the memory I wanted to share. I already told you guys about the girl trying to kiss us and us running away (we were so naive) and that's my only memory (along with the drawings) that's clear enough to tell, so I guess I just wanted to show you all how good looking I was in kindergarten.

So now I'm in first grade at St. Pius X Regional School. It's November of 1996, Mrs. Cavanaugh's 1st Grade class. This memory I can promise you is 100% solid. I wish I knew how I could hold all of these random memories in my head, it scares me sometimes but it's also a really cool thing to have.

Okay, so back to the memory. I was sitting next to Anne on the window side of Mrs. Cavanaugh's (1A?) classroom all the way at the end of the hall in the "Old Wing". My Grandfather had just died and I was telling Anne about that (I don't know why) and while I was telling her, I had a pencil in my hands with a pair of scissors onnit. What I was doing was holding both ends of the pencil and spinning my hands, making the scissors spin around the pencil. Apparently that wasn't "safe" to do in a classroom full of kids so I was told to stop and I was pretty embarassed.

I also remember that Mrs. Cavanaugh always took off her shoes during class and just walked around barefoot and apparently I was the only kid that could read the word "creation" off the board (well duh, I was in Sister Cecilia's reading class so I was kind of a big deal).

I debated sharing this next memory for a while for two reasons, (A) the finer details are kind of foggy and (B) it's embarassing to me. I think it was sometime around second or third grade and we were playing a game that put basketball and kickball together in some weird sports orgy but it was a fun game (everything was then). I was up, kicked the ball, and made it to first. It was a close call, but an arguement arose.

My team said I was safe, the other team didn't so they yelled at me. I started to cry like a little bitch. Mrs. Sikorsky came over and said I was out so I walked back to the bench and hung my head in shame. We lost the game by one point (I made that up for dramatic effect, I have no idea if we even kept score).

Now let's skip ahead to third grade. Mrs Curran's 3B classroom. It was close to the end of the day and we were all writing down our homework in our "Homework Books" and I was sitting next to a classmate that will remain un-named (if you really wanna know, send me a message on Facebook). My classmate asked me what the homework was that Mrs. Curran had just mentioned. I told her to shut up and thought it was over and done and I returned to jotting down the day's homework.

She raised her hand, presumably to ask Mrs. Curran to repeat the homework that she had missed. Wrong. She ratted me out. I looked up at the front of the class like a deer in the headlights. I got in trouble but I don't think anything happened to me except the fact that I had to apologize, which is dumb, cuz if I told her I would have just been slowing myself down then I would have had to ask Mrs. Curran and it would make it look like I wasn't paying attention.

What takes longer to say, "Shut up." or "Finish the color by numbers, read another chapter in our 'Children's Bible', and learn why two plus two isn't five." Women.

Okay, so that's really it for this "Nostaigia" post. Let me know what you guys think and I'll post more pictures and stories later in the week that will cover the fourth through eigth grade years.

Playing In the Street

It seemed like every day when I got home from grade school I would get in, take off my blue pants and white shirt and put on "play clothes" and run back outside where all gaming hell would break loose.

I'm talking about playing in the street man, the proving grounds, the football field, baseball diamond, basketball court, kickball place, and hockey rink. The border line in capture the flag, guns, and sometimes, the war zone for dodgeball and smear the queer. Okay, so maybe smear the queer isn't the best game to play in the street, but I like saying "smear the queer".

Now in the hay-day of my street baller status (wow, scary to type) we played alotta football, some baseball, and alotta guns. "Hey SamWow, what's guns?" I'm glad you asked loyal reader. Guns is a game where you get guns (NERF, water guns, toy guns) and run around yards and the street shooting each other. Guns was the perfect boys game and not a game for girls, a girls simple mind couldn't possibly comprehend all the running, diving, sliding, screaming, aiming, and trigger pulling. That's an art that cannot be learned quickly. The only problem with guns is what I'm gonna write below this.

Shooter - "You're dead! I shot you!"

Dude Who Got Capped - "No I'm not, you missed!"

Shooter - "No you're dead, lie down/go back to base!"

Dude Who Got Capped - "No, you missed!"

These arguments could go on for hours, sometimes ending in fights, usually ending in either the Shooter or Dude Who Got Capped running home crying like a little bitch. It's kinda like when you play dodgeball and you throw, hit someone, but they say they weren't hit. Arguements explode, laywers are called, and then the gym teacher takes dodgeball away from the whole class. Thanks alot Un-named Freshman in my high school class...thanks alot.

Kids in Cambodia play Guns for keeps.

But out here on North Cliff Road, we were uh, innovative? We thought we had the best idea ever. Why not combine playing guns with capture the flag. Oh my god! Totally original! But probably not. I guess before we could all handle our pieces(glocks, straps, guns), we played by tagging people but come on, it was like, 2001, technology and shit led us to guns. And it led to a awesome game that pretty much turned into Guns with a insignificant objective that looked alot like a tennis ball hidden in a tree.

Now, if your Dad was born in the '50s or '60s, ask him if he remembers/owned and Johnny Seven OMA (One-Man-Army). My Pop did, and I think a few of his brothers did too and they played Guns like champions. I don't really know what words to use to describe the pure awesome firepower that the Johnny Seven OMA contained so I'll put up the picture and tell you this - I want one. Bad. Heres the commercial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPhZsauluXM

So now I wanna talk about my true street sport passion. Street football. What was the only place I could pretend I threw like Tom Brady, ran like Marshall Faulk, caught passes like Jerry Rice, pass rush like Lawrence Taylor, and ball hawk like Ed Reed? The street. The home of the three, five, and seven Mississippi blitz (I only put seven in there cuz I'm told in MoCo they rush after seven. Lame.), the place where saying "Shotgun" meant you take a few steps backwards before you hike it and the defense can come at you free, without using their one blitz. Street football was the home of two hand touch rules, two completions for a first down(some went by car lengths), never punting, no extra points, where running the ball was done by the quarterback, and where a recievers route was a thirty step fade route that would cut back twenty steps towards the quarterback.

You learned to talk smack, you could "Moss" people (for those of you who didn't grow up in Gorgeous Prince Georges, to "Moss" someone was to make an epic catch and burn the coverage for a touchdown), you played until dinner or until it was too dark to see the ball, the curbs were out of bounds and mailboxes, cars, and cracks in the street were the endzones. It was the sport at it's purest form, drop back and sling it. And if you were like me, you always tried to do touchdown dances like Ladanian Tomlinson, Terrell Davis, T.O., or some other superstar.

It was an amazing thing to play and still is today. On Christmas we played on my Grandmommy's street (a fine place to play) and it just gets competieve. It starts off all fun and games then you start fudging holding rules and pass intereference (looked that one up in the dictionary). This years game was a rout but it's still fun, I still picture myself as Jason Campbell, Donald Driver, Jerrod Mayo, or Champ Bailey even though I'm unathletic and white.

So that's what playing outside was to me for the most part, if you have anything awesome you used to do playing on the street when you were a kid type something up and send it to my e-mail (samcarroll9@gmail.com) or find me on facebook (SamWow Carroll) or twitter @therealSamWow.

Also, in my last post I said this was gonna be about Jim Vanve, rocks, and my future wife(maybe that'll be the next post). I got off work and stepped outside and decided this post would be more suiting to the weather seeing how it was about seventy degrees in the District.