An Open Letter to Wes Welker: What to Expect In Your New Home

Dear Mr. Welker,
How's it going? Chris here. First time, long time. First time writer, long time guy who occasionally watches you on tv. First off, let me apologize for the public nature of this letter. If you played basketball, I might've been able to use a more discreet backchannel method to contact you, basketball being my sport of choice (I once met Jason Biggs at a three on three tournament in New York--humblebrag!), but alas, I am not as hooked into the world of football, and as such will have to rely on the magic of the internet to get my message across.

I believe I am in a unique position to provide you with some guidance regarding your recent decision to move to Denver. I have never played football myself; my parents wouldn't let me. However I, like you, am a short, white guy who, when it comes to feats of athletic strength, relies on his quickness and strong work ethic. If this were some alternate universe where my parents had not been concerned with my safety or well-being or the possibility of me living a long and happy concussion-free life, and I had been allowed to play football, I like to think I would be a player pretty much like you (unless of course this alternate universe is also one in which water polo is played while riding around on the backs of giant seahorses who also happen to be able to fly. If that were the case, I imagine we would all just play water polo, all the time, because I mean come on--flying seahorses!).

So yes, Mr. Welker, you and I are very much alike. Add to this, my wife is from Florida, where I'm pretty sure you once played football for the Dolphins maybe? Also, I have been a Patriots fan for the past 10-15 years as a result of living in and around Boston after college, though I am originally from New York (hey, remember when the Giants beat you guys in those two Superbowls even though you were heavily favored both times and that one time it ruined what would have been a perfect 19-0 season if you had won? Thank goodness those wounds are all healed up now and we can just laugh and laugh about it. Ha-ha!).

As if all of this isn't enough, my wife and I just moved from New England to Denver! This was like eight months ago. The move is still fresh in my mind! So much so that if I were to close my eyes right now and attempt to contemplate the sheer magnitude of all the changes our seemingly innocent decision has wrought, it would send me spiraling down into an endless sea of malaise, despondency and regret! Who better to provide you with a few pointers about what to expect from your new Mile High city?

So just to let you know, there are many reasons why this move will go poorly for you, and none of them will be football-related (unless you want to count trading Bill Belichik for John Fox, or Tom Brady for old can't-play-in-the-cold-my-neck-is-held-in-place-by-bubble-gum-and-used-up-Papa-John's-napkins Peyton Manning. The unwieldiness of his nickname alone is enough to silence fans during the games).

Everything in New England just seems...better. The one exception to this is if you have a dog. If you have a dog, you really should check out Cherry Creek State Park. They have this giant off-leash dog park that is just spectacular. It's sort of like the Grand Canyon--how people say not to miss the Grand Canyon when you go out West because it's the one thing that doesn't disappoint? That's the off-leash dog park at Cherry Creek. Also, I guess Denver is pretty close to the actual Grand Canyon. So if you're already coming out here to see the dog park, you might as well swing by and check that out too. I don't know if it's dog-friendly though. You'll probably want to check that out.

By now I'm sure you have a number of questions running through your mind. How can I find out more about this dog park? Are there other things I should know about Denver? Why can I not stop thinking about flying seahorses? Well Wes, I'm glad you asked. Here are a few more things you might be interested in knowing about before your big move:

1. The mountains, they ain't so special. Do they look majestic during sunrise...sunset? Absolutely. But as the bard once wrote, there are more things in heaven and Earth, Wes Welker, than are dreamt of in your ipod's Fiddler on the Roof showtunes, no matter how timeless or classic those showtunes might be. At the end of the day, the mountains are not your friends. Are they going to come over to your place, split a pizza and watch the game on Sunday? They are not. Will they go out in the backyard with you to toss around the old pigskin, or pick you up at the airport after a long road trip? Sorry, no. Will they help you eat everything in your fridge because the power's out and everything is about to go bad? Unlikely. They're just big piles of rock and dirt that sometimes have snow on them. And I guess that's ok if you're a skier, but my guess is if you just signed a contract for a boatload of non-guaranteed money, activities that regularly cause people to break multiple bones probably aren't very high on your to do list. Speaking of snow...

2. Denver does not deal well with snow. I know this seems counter-intuitive, because Denver gets more than its fair share. But there's a catch: it's usually so damn sunny out here that everyone just assumes the snow is going to melt within a couple of days. And while they're usually right, this philosophy tends to discourage anyone from doing anything to deal with the snow in the meantime. Like say, plowing and salting the roads. This can be an issue if it has just snowed and you have to be somewhere sometime in the next 36 hours (a football stadium, perhaps) and can't necessarily wait around for Mother Nature to make everything all better. It also leads to an interesting dichotomy on the highways. Local drivers overreact to a light snow and go much too slow, which infuriates transplants from other cold-weather cities who can't understand why a little snow would make everyone freak out. But then when it snows a lot, those same transplants go way too fast thinking that Denver is like Chicago or Boston or some other snowy city where they actually give a crap about their citizens. The transplants aren't prepared for the horrendous road conditions and end up playing bumper cars or spinning out while the locals putter along, content in the knowledge that their city has forsaken them. And while we're talking about driving...

3. Every time you get onto the highway, prepare for a drag race. There's a stoplight at every highway entrance ramp, with two lanes side by side that quickly merge into one. When the stoplight turns green, one car from each lane is allowed to go through and immediately engage in an all out Thunderdome-like scramble to the death to reach that one lane merge before the other guy. There are no signs to instruct you on appropriate motorist behavior, nor do there appear to be any social norms with regard to which car has the right of way. It's a bizarre and sadistic ritual that repeats itself over and over again throughout the day. If you lose, it will gradually chip away at your fragile sense of manhood throughout the day. And if you win, you are left feeling like a jerk for secretly enjoying the small piece of pride that you gain from your ultimately useless victory.

Then there are those people who just blow through the stoplights altogether while you're sitting there waiting for the light to change and you want nothing more than to catch up to them on the highway so you can run their car up into the cement divider. On second thought, you might be able to use that anger out on the field. I guess we can put this one in the plus column after all. Unlike say...

4. Denver has pretty much any food chain you could ever want, but they don't have any Dunkin Donuts. You know how New England runs on Dunkin? Well Denver don't. I have a plastic DD mug that fits perfectly a Dunkin Donuts medium coffee with milk and sugar. But out here, my mug is completely useless! I try to use it with my Keurig, but that only fills the mug up a little more than halfway. If someone at a Starbucks were to leave that much room for milk they would be fired on the spot! It is way too much room left for milk! And so I am left to drive to work in the morning with 40% less coffee at my disposal. Is that fair? Is that right? It is not. Also, I don't get to eat donuts anymore. When I was living in New England, if I happened to grab a boston creme or jelly every once in a while to go along with my Dunkin Donuts coffee, that was fine, because I was there mainly for the coffee. But to just go into a donut shop for the sole purpose of buying some donuts? That doesn't seem right. What am I, a glutton? I am not a glutton, Wes Welker. And neither are you. Neither are you.

5. Sure, the time difference is great for watching sports because everything starts and ends earlier, but the benefit is pretty much moot if you don't have cable. I know, I know, you're a rich football player who just signed a lucrative football contract, you're probably going to spring for cable. But you also might be on the fence about it. Maybe you like to spend your money on other things, like backyard bird fountains or inspirational Knute Rockne bronze placards that are bolted to the walls in strategic locations around your house to keep you motivated in the offseason. Maybe you've got most of your money tied up in seahorse levitation technology (the water polo revolution has to start somewhere). The point is, maybe you're taking stock of all the things you want in your life, and maybe you think you can get by without cable tv. You'll get Hulu and Netflix, you think. You'll watch shows illegally on the internet. That's fine, Wes. I get it. But live sporting events are a tougher needle to thread. You say you'll go out to the bar if you really want to watch something, but you never do. And then you think you'll be covered for most stuff because ESPN has this online mobile app that shows games and you can just plug your laptop into the back of your tv and voila! Instant sports! But Wes, you can't watch the mobile app unless you have a tv subscription that includes ESPN.

Suddenly it doesn't matter so much that all these games are starting two hours earlier because you have no way to watch them anyway. You end up scrolling through the ESPN podcenter at three in the morning--up way later than you ever were to watch a game back East--feverishly downloading audio files of Around the Horn and PTI just so you can feel something like the sweet, feverish joy that used to come from following sports in a normal way like you used to back in your old life.

Then again, they've probably got tv's at the stadium. You can probably just watch stuff there. Hey speaking of which, if they happen to give you an extra key to the facility, or maybe there's a window you could leave unlocked so that someone could, say, sneak in at night when there's no one there and watch one of those tv's that no one's using... Or maybe we make things simpler. Maybe you could just splurge and get cable for your house after all. (Come on, we both know you can afford it.) Then you can give me a key and I can swing by and let myself in to watch stuff in your living room. I mean I don't think it's too much for a person to ask. Especially when that person is already providing a bunch of insightful tips about the city to which you will be moving. It would actually be sorta rude if you didn't offer to let me come into your house to watch tv whenever I want. And I don't think you want to start off your grand Denver experiment by being rude to the first person you meet. Nor do I think the Broncos would appreciate the possibility of your rudeness getting picked up by the papers, potentially casting their new free agent in a negative light. Besides, it'll be fun. We could watch tv together. Look, March Madness is coming up. We can give it a trial run. I'll bring over a nice casserole; we can make a day of it! Just let me know what kind of casserole you'd like and I'll start looking for a good recipe.

So in summation, I guess moving to Denver won't be that bad for you after all. I think you're really going to like it here. Godspeed for now. Good luck with the move, and feel free to drop that key off in my mailbox whenever you get a chance.

Yours in future television-watching and casserole-eating goodness,
Chris

The Descendants (2011), Film 2/50

(Man, am I sick of looking at this review. Besides containing spoilers and a reference to the actor Daryl "Chill" Mitchell, the following also contains a bunch of nonsense that, try as I might, I couldn't quite work into a cohesive review. But I need to move on. I'm stalling on other posts and frankly, I'm already woefully far behind. So, without further adieu....)

I think I can safely speak for all of us, in the world, when I say that in his short time on this Earth, Lil Bow Wow has taught us many a life lesson about truth, justice, honesty, and what would happen one day if we suddenly woke up with the talents of a professional basketball player. But never has the Once Diminutive One's instruction proved more illuminating than in his 2010 cautionary tale, Lottery Ticket, in which an intrepid youth must guard a winning "lottery ticket" from the evil and mischievous forces of his neighborhood. Succinctly put, for this youth, mo money leads to mo problems (which, as everyone knows, is a lyric Biggie Smalls stole from a then barely two week old Very Lil Bow Wow during a Snoop Dog recording session back in 1987; a betrayal that would later come to be known as the Franz Ferdinand assassination tipping point in the ongoing East-West rapper feud). From the outside, Lil Lottery Winning Bow Wow had it all. But in actuality, the pup still had a great deal of struggles to overcome. (Or at least I assume he did. I really only saw the trailer.)

Enter George Clooney. Wealthy. Successful. Family Man. Literal descendant of royalty. Wearer of comfortable shoes. Landowner. Oh, landowner, you say? That's interesting. Where is this land he owns? North Dakota? Maybe a nice little cottage up in Maine? Hawaii. He owns land in Hawaii. And not some rinky dink condo either. Basically the most gorgeous stretch of sandy beach line and lush rainforest you can imagine. Sounds pretty good, no? Sounds like this boat shoes wearing bastard has really got it made! Problem is, if Clooney's life is a winning lottery ticket, his no-good speedboat-riding, adultery-having, coma-acquiring wife is the felonious drug dealer standing on the corner anxiously polishing his brass knuckles, waiting for Clooney to venture outside. Such is the paradox that surrounds The Descendants. Clooney's got paradise in the palm of his hand, but it can't save him from the hard times that he's been set up to endure.

The reason I bring all this up is, watching the first 15 minutes of the movie I couldn't help but think that George Clooney, the actor, was trying to tell us something. You can almost hear the underlying frustration in his voice during the following bit of narration:

My friends think that just because we live in Hawaii, we live in paradise. We're all just out here sipping Mai Tai's, shaking our hips and catching waves. Are they insane? Do they think we're immune to life? How can they possibly think our families are less screwed up? Our heartaches, less painful?

Sure, Clooney is saying, I'm rich and famous. Yes, I alternate between shooting movies in Las Vegas and Hawaii. Am I not still human? If I stand out on the beach in the sun all morning waiting for the crew to set up a complicated shot, do I not still burn?

But wait, there's more! Delving further into the fictional Clooney psychosis fun bag, if Up in the Air finds everybody's favorite hunky ER alum portraying the consummate bachelor as he realizes the pitfalls of not being connected to anything or anyone, then The Descendants is good ol' Georgie telling everyone to just settle down because the opposite scenario is no picnic either. Here's a guy who's steeped in family heritage and tradition. He's got kids, a wife, step-parents, fifty Hawaiian cousins and a family palm tree that stretches back to the days of explorers in funny hats. And yet, he's still miserable. See, Clooney is saying, life's a bummer either way. You might as well just let me bachelor it up already and get off my back.

Speaking of Clooney's character's family heritage, one thing I thought the movie did a nice job exploring was the idea of legacies--how we treat that which has been given to us, and what we leave for others when we go. After all, when you get right down to it we're all just sequels in our own family's ongoing movie franchise (Personally I like to imagine myself as White Men Can't Jump XVII: King and the Duck, The Early Years). In Clooney's case, we get to see him both in terms of past and future generations--future in the example he sets for his daughters (especially the older one, who knows what's going on with all the stalking and skulking around and the hey hey) and the past in the way he decides to honor the land of his forefathers.

What's interesting and refreshing about the character is that he's not always portrayed as perfect. He's a decent guy--the amount of abuse he endures from his father-in-law goes beyond admirable--but at the same time he's no saint. His decision not to sell his family's land was at best a conflict of interest and at worst a cowardly decision to hide behind the most altruistic option because it satisfied his own selfish end. Namely, to not let that spineless degenerate who had an affair with his wife make one dime off his family's land.

(By the way, I got a little jolt of excitement when I saw Matthew Lillard's name in the opening credits. He's one of those actors who never quite broke through but I always find myself rooting for (other actors in this category include Peter Facinelli, Daryl "Chill" Mitchell, Colin Hanks, Donal Logue and Alex Desert. Joseph Gordon-Levitt used to be here circa Brick, but then he hit it big with Christopher Nolan; atta boy, Joey!). But Lillard always seems miscast to me. If he just got some roles as a normal, good guy with a little bit of sarcasm thrown in I think he'd do fine. But instead he's always a slimeball or evil or just plain annoying. It's sorta like back when Vince Vaughn seemed dead set on only playing serious parts (the infamous Clay Pigeons and Psycho phase) and you wondered what the hell he was thinking. Where's the guy from Swingers? I liked that guy. I'd like to see more of him.)

One last note: In general I tend to steer clear of movies where a main character cheats on their significant other. It feels lazy and cliched and in most cases ends up with me disliking the cheater so much that it takes me out of the rest of the film. They're just not my cup of tea. The Descendants, however, proved to be an exception. Maybe it was the fact that all Clooney's wife did the whole time was lay in a coma then die, but I gotta say, I didn't mind her so much. (Too harsh? Probably too harsh. Apologies to the fictional philanderer.)

Honestly though it was more fascinating to see all the other characters projecting their feelings onto said coma wife. Clooney, her dad, the kids, even Judy Greer: they all make her into what they need her to be in order to find some semblance of closure. Heck, even the audience can get in on the fun. Sitting there in the theater, we can imagine Coma Sue in any way we want--infinitely apologetic, remorseful, bitter and resentful, a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger--without any interference from the character herself. There's almost a generosity in her inaction. Her ability to just lie there and act as a sounding board for everyone else (albeit involuntarily) ultimately even makes her sort of endearing in the end. Which is a lot like the rest of the film actually. A great deal of the movie is defined by what characters don't do--Clooney doesn't expose Lillard to his wife, he doesn't sell the land, he doesn't tell his father-in-law about his wife's affair. And while the movie too, ends up being sort of endearing in the end, it's hard to shake the fact that it also feels like there's something missing. Things are never fully resolved, or even brought out into the open. But I suppose that's part of family legacies too. And besides, Clooney's just so damn charming that in the end none of that other crap really matters anyway.

Rating: 7/10 Monocles

 

Pretzel Product Most Likely To Be Enjoyed By Clooney and the Fam: Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby. It's the perfect snack to enjoy after a long day in the Hawaiian sun. Just plop right down on the couch, flip on some March of the Penguins and serve up a delicious pretzel-filled ice cream treat.