“I couldn’t be prouder of our guys the way we competed in some tough situations, down 3‑1. One shot away from going to try to do it again.”

Chicago Blackhawks head coach Joel Quenneville looked a bit shell shocked as he said those words in his postgame press conference last night after Game 7. Minutes before, Alec Martinez had taken a pass from Justin Williams and shot it from the left point. A bounce here, a bounce there, and the Kings ended what has perhaps been the best Stanley Cup Playoffs series in recent memory.

I didn’t think the Kings had it in them. Sure they overcame the 0-3 deficit against the San Jose Sharks. Sure they got past Anaheim. But this was the Chicago Blackhawks. This was a team that had the speed, the precision passing, the goaltending, the big bodies and, most importantly, the Cup. Although the Kings were healthier coming into this year’s rematch, I still didn’t like them getting past the champs.

But Game 2 happened when they overcame a 2-0 deficit to win 6-2 in Chicago. Everything changed from that moment. The Kings had a chance.

Their first chance to close out the series in Game 5 in Chicago was unsuccessful, but it brought us the Perfect Period: the first overtime period that saw hockey at its best, a 20-minute period played in 26 minutes including seven minutes, 56 seconds of uninterrupted play.

Of course this series was going to have a Game 7. Even when the Kings trailed 2-0 in the opening period, they were going to come back. I knew better than to count these guys out especially when they had Mr. Game 7 on their side. Of course Justin Williams tied the game in the first period 2-2 and got the assist on the overtime game winner.

Today the Hawks are starting their summer vacations, but they were one shot away from winning the damn thing. That’s what made this series so compelling. Like the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals between the Sacramento Kings and Lakers, this was tightly fought and had its moments of heroics and answered prayers. It’s a shame this couldn’t have been a best-of-nine series or the Stanley Cup Final itself. So it’s no surprise that it set a ratings record for NBC Sports Net according to Puck Daddy. With a 3.17 overnight national rating, it was the most-watched game in the network’s history including the Stanley Cup Final.

The talk of the Final is now the King versus the Kings. Apart from Kings fans and Rangers fans, the Cup Final is going to pale in comparison to the Western Conference Final. Hopefully it’s not like the 2002 NBA Finals where the Lakers swept the New Jersey Nets in an anticlimactic fashion.

But does anyone see the Rangers winning? Does anyone see the Kings winning in less than five games? But a note of warning: I’ve been wrong at every point of these playoffs. I said San Jose in 7, Kings in 6, Blackhawks in 6. Sure the Kings could win in 5, but then again…

“You’re such a good housewife,” my mom told me last night as I showed her where I cleared some kitchen clutter away. My mom and grandmother do not believe in putting dishes, cups, whatever away in cabinets. Just leave it to dry on the dish rack, we’ll probably need to access it easier. But our cups and mugs situation were way out of control, I had to do something about it.

I haven’t said anything this week since there hasn’t been much to say, really. Being laid up with my sprained ankle has been a bitch. A boring bitch, that is. It’s still swollen, but it has gone down considerably. I can walk around with some discomfort but not a whole lot of pain.

On Thursday I helped my cousin put her things in storage as she has finished her first year of pharmacy school in Pomona. She hadn’t heard the extent of my injury since she shuns Facebook and never reads my site. So when she saw me limping, she told me to suck it up. Then she saw the extent of my injury and she shut up.

In the course of loading her things into the moving truck, I tweaked my back. Again, my cousin and my aunt thought it was an effort for me to get out of helping her. It wasn’t. I felt an impingement that could develop into another sciatica outbreak. My last period of sciatica caused me to be completely immobile X-mas 2012 and left parts of my left leg and foot numb to this day.

And here’s the part that I get resentful towards my family. <angsty bullshit>I’m told to suck it up because I’m supposed to be a man. Fine. But when I get injured to such an extent that I can’t move, I’m told to know my limits and be very careful.

So the two choices: be a faggy pussy, or be an immobile man.

Of course, when my family sees how injured I end up being they realize that I was usually right. That I’m not complaining for the sake of complaining. That I usually try and suck it up until I have to say something. </angsty bullshit>

Regardless I finished loading her shit into the truck. When we got to the storage unit, the moving truck driver took a look at me with my fucked up ankle and hunched over a bit from my back and determined there was no way I could move the stuff from the truck to the unit. So that was that.

Fortunately my back hasn’t flared up to a full-blown sciatica episode, so I am mobile thankfully albeit a bit hunched over. Thank the heavens for acupuncture.

And that was my lone adventure of the week.

Brendan IS NOT DEAD! So rather that wait two weeks for a podcast, here is another one just one week later.

This podcast features the music of Kim and Kelley Deal: The Amps’ “Bragging Party”, The Breeders’ “Doe”, Kelley Deal’s cover of Pantera’s “Fucking Hostile” and Kim Deal’s new single “The Root”.

In this one we talk about where Brendan was last week, how I fucked up my ankle, that kid who went on a killing spree in IV, Barbra Streisand, how I’ve never watched a Star Wars movie, Pat Sajak’s denying science, Miguel Olivo biting off Alex Guerrero’s ear, Willow Smith taking a picture with a 20-year old and other nonsense.

This podcast even features guests: incestual lesbian dogs!

You can subscribe to the podcast with the RSS feed or on iTunes.

I suppose I should know better than to doubt the Kings. I wrote them off after the lost their first three games to the San Jose Sharks in the first round. Of course, we all saw them storm back to win the final four games of the series to advance.

The question is how many times does a team get to come back from the brink of death? I thought the Kings used up their one get-out-of-jail-free card. And then seeing how they were thoroughly outplayed by the Blackhawks in Game 2 last night for the first two periods, I responded by turning to the Spurs-Thunder game.

So I didn’t see this spectacular save by Jonathan Quick that many are pointing to as the genesis of the Kings turnaround:

I didn’t see Justin Williams greasy goal at the end of the second period to cut the deficit to 2-1.

But as the basketball game went to halftime, I switched over to the hockey game as the third period got underway. And holy shit. For the first time since the Wayne Gretzky era, the Kings scored five goals in a period. Jeff Carter scored a hat trick and got an assist. For 38 minutes the Blackhawks were making the Western Conference Finals a mere formality. Then the Kings seemingly woke up and had a few things to say about that.

Here’s all of this in slo-mo:

For the first time since the Kings hoisted the Cup in 2012, I believe the Kings can actually win it again. I know the Kings probably won’t score five goals in a period again this postseason. Hell, the Blackhawks can still win this series.

But last night’s game left me with the first hope that the Kings can get back to the top, that it’s not merely a far-fetched prayer muttered by zombie-eyed fans. They can actually do it.

I went to the Portuguese Bend Preserve for a hike. I’ve been down here many times and didn’t think anything out of the ordinary would happen. Of course as I was heading down Burma Road, I decided to go down the Water Tank Trail, connect with the Garden Trail, up the Landside Scarp Trail to the Ishibashi Trail back up to Burma Road.

One problem: it is really steep going down the Water Tank Trail for about several hundred meters. Normally I would take one step, make sure I had traction, take another step and so on and so forth. For some reason I started jogging. I knew I was fucked. The jogging thanks to gravity turned into a full run. “Fuck me,” I said out loud resigned to my fate of falling. And I fell, slid for a couple of meters and stopped.

My first fear was that my glasses were broken. Fortunately they were only dirty from all the crap I kicked up. So at least I could drive.

As I was sliding, I felt my gimp foot in pain. As I stood up, what is normally a slightly numb leg was in pain right at the ankle. Fortunately I didn’t hear any popping and I could actually walk, so I figured I sprained the damn thing.

Walking more than a mile back up to my car with my sprained ankle was a bit funny. I was laughing most of the way back up. Not funny was twisting my ankle twice more, but I kept on going.

After washing off, I noticed my ankle the size of a tennis ball. I ate lunch then went to my acupuncturist where along with the normal needles:

I got the bleeding and cupping you see above. And just for kicks you can see the trail rash on my left leg that happened when I slid to a stop:

I have a couple of scrapes on my arm, but other than that and the sprained ankle I’m okay. But at least it was a pretty day.

We did it relatively quickly, cutting at the joints. There was really no blood left because it had dried. Freez sprayed Calvin Klein’s Eternity all over the bathroom to disguise the smell, which was ironic.

To be honest, though, I was less terrified about being caught than going to hell.

–Michael Alig, “Club Kid killer relives bloody crime”, NY Post, 5/12/14

We’re deep in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and of course that means playoff beards. Of course Brendan’s beard apparently killed him. They went camping over the weekend, and Faith apparently killed him with her womanly wiles. So you are stuck with me mourning for this asshole.

Because this are half the hosts, here is half a podcast. We mourn Brendan with Haujobb’s remix of :wumpscut:’s “Die In Winter”. Then we celebrate with Kevorkian Death Cycle’s cover of Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin”. Then we honor Brendan and his meat is murder ethos with Skinny Puppy’s “Testure”.

You can subscribe to the podcast with the RSS feed or on iTunes.

It’s no secret that I’ve been on an industrial music kick recently. One look at my Last.Fm profile is the most damning evidence of this.

One of the relics from my industrial past was There Is No Time, a four-disc compilation from RAS DVA records when I was first starting to get into the music. Pre-internet this was perhaps the only way to sample music from unheard bands since the radio wasn’t playing it and if you were too young to get into clubs. So when I saw this at Vinyl Fetish on Melrose, I snatched it.

A lot of bands on this comp have long come and gone, but there were mainstays like Leaetherstrip, :wumpscut:, X Marks the Pedwalk, Suicide Commando and Haujobb. So I polished this sucker off and listened to the whole thing yesterday, and amazingly enough it holds up pretty well nearly 20 years later.

In a show of coincidence, Metropolis Records posted on Facebook about this comp this morning. They noted that RAS DVA’s founder Ric Laciak is not doing well. Since I have been way out of the loop for quite some time, I was shocked to find out he has been suffering from four inoperable brain tumors that caused him to lose an eye and leaves him in incredible pain.

I hope Ric gets better. For someone who has given a lot of joy to be dealt with this hand, it really saddens me. It’s further proof that the concept of fairness does not exist outside our imaginations.

Existence, as we know it, is full of sorrow. To mention only one minor point: every man is a condemned criminal, only he does not know the date of his execution. This is unpleasant for every man. Consequently every man does everything possible to postpone the date, and would sacrifice anything that he has if he could reverse the sentence.

— Magick, Liber ABA, Book 4 by Aleister Crowley

I spend the weekend minding my own business, listening to industrial music almost non-stop while reading filth. Of course I had Twitter on in the background, and the uprising I saw yesterday was quite something when Michael Sam was drafted by the St. Louis Rams in the seventh round.

Most people I follow and have on lists celebrated the pick as they should. It is huge for an openly gay athlete to finally break through. ESPN had a camera at his house, and Sam’s reaction to being selected even brought me to tears:

Of course there was negative reaction from some of those in Straight America who doesn’t want to see two men kissing. Now they get to experience what I experience when I see the heterosexual abomination of the football player kissing the pretty girl. It really is stomach churning when I see a boy and a girl kiss. Just the thought of it sends shivers down my spine that seem to settle in the pit of my stomach that tried to force the regurgitation of my lunch.

There are also those who think Sam is getting way too much attention. After all he’s a seventh-round pick, they contend. Just because he’s gay it shouldn’t matter, they add.

If only the real world was as pleasant as the utopia in their heads. Yes he’s getting all the attention because he’s gay. He broke through the glass ceiling.

Sam should be celebrated as should the Rams. And I’m happy. But there is still one thing that is bugging me about this.

Here is every SEC defensive player of the year and where they were drafted by the NFL:

2003 – Chad Lavalais, 5th round 142nd overall
2004 – David Pollack, 1st round 17th overall
2005 – Demeko Ryans, 2nd round 33rd overall
2006 – Patrick Willis, 1st round 11th overall
2007 – Glenn Dorsey, 1st round 5th overall
2008 – Eric Berry, 1st round 5th overall
2009 – Rolando McClain, 1st round 8th overall
2010 – Patrick Peterson, 1st round 5th overall
2011 – Morris Claiborne, 1st round 6th overall
2012 – Jarvis Jones, 1st round 17th overall
2013 – Michael Sam, 7th round 249th overall

When Sam came out, we heard how he was overrated and all of that nonsense that executives and general managers used to veil their homophobia.

I guess I should be happy that Jeff Fisher and the Rams did this, happy that we were thrown the bone. But I wonder if Sam is really a worse defensive end than Zach Moore from Division II Concordia of St. Paul who was draft at the end of the sixth round (198 overall) by the Patriots? Or Larry Webster III of the Division II Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, drafted in the fourth round (138 overall) by the Detroit Lions? Or his fellow linemate Kony Ealy at Mizzou who was drafted by the Carolina Panthers in the second round with the 60th overall pick?

I get that the draft is a crapshoot, that most of the players selected will be busts. Hell, Sam could wind up being a bust. But there is something telling about all 32 teams leaving the reigning SEC defensive player of the year dangling until being a compensatory pick of the seventh round.