Striving for a Hype-Free Life Now more than three months removed from the music industry and living on a restricted television diet that consists of CBS (CSI-TV), Fox (sometimes) and three PBS channels and spending about 45 minutes a day listening to the soothing sounds of NPR news while developing my own milky delivery of phrases like “this is NPR” and “coming up on NPR…”, I’m finding myself increasingly appealed to this notion of “hype-free” living. And before you get pulled into thinking this is something that came about from moving up to Lawrence and that the hippies have gotten ahold of me and I’m just not the same anymore, this probably has been developing for a while now…it’s just that island living has made it more pronounced. In fact, I think it started developing when I started running. At first, I wanted all the gear, the best shoes, the best earbuds, reflectors, a Camelbak in colors that matched my own personal sense of style, the best playlist, the wicking technology in all of my clothing, socks that didn’t sweat, shoes that didn’t wear, a street that didn’t incline and a running partner that paced well and didn’t talk. For a sport that is purer and more elemental than any other sport on the planet, I sure wanted to dress it up like a little doll. But in those long drawing moments of contemplation when you’re out in the middle of nowhere in the Texas Panhandle with no safety net, no ride home, no flashlight, no phone, no fans applauding you as you near the finish line, no finish line and the battery just died on your playlist, you realize how the entire sport is, in the end, about your body, your spirit and the earth. It’s not about shoes. It’s not about pace or posture. It’s not about Nike or New Balance. All of those things don’t matter in the sport of running if you don’t break it down, firstly, to the core elements. Body, spirit and earth.  I was watching “American Idol” last night and I kept thinking how hype has become so normalized in our lives. We tolerate it. We excuse 2-hour advertisements where everyone plugs their album, their product, their soda, their new movie, themselves just to wait for a climax that everyone predicted in the first place. And they ran six minutes over. If you pulled all the hype and showmanship out of that show last night, it would’ve been less than a minute long. All the fanfare, the confetti, the “ooh, it tastes so great” and “go buy his album right now, available on iTunes” and “check out these great headphones!” took a network a shameful (or shameless) 2-hours to cram down your throat and they do it with such fluff that you either you don’t realize it’s happening or you realize and you’ve grown to not care. I find it particularly toxic, myself. That’s the hype that, with a limited budget, no cable and stacks of records, you don’t really have to avoid because it’s simply not there. It’s not that I created a hype-free space, I just walked into one. I don’t watch baseball or the Celtics in the playoffs, I just check my phone to see if they won. I don’t know how they did it, I just know if they scored more points or runs at the end of the contest. And I haven’t endured two hours of messaging and advertising to reach such conclusions. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wish I could watch the Celtics in the playoffs, but I can’t. So I don’t. It’s turned into a cleansing for me. If you’ve spent any time around me for, maybe the last decade or so, you know that I have an instinctual aversion to advertisements. When a program goes to commercial break, I mute the television or change the channel, mostly without even thinking. I haven’t listened to private radio in ages. Probably the last time I did, it was overnights with Sarah After Midnight. I don’t like to advertisers selling to me and I don’t like being sold to advertisers as a commodity.  As a vet of the Advertising business (you know, my six month stint back after I graduated from college), radio (you know, when I sold ad space for a shitty country station in East Texas) and the music industry, I spent the lion share of my life hyping something that’s less than advertised. From politicians to new cars with low financing, from cheap radio ads to just another filthy-mouthed rapper. I sold hype. And as a hype-peddler, you eventually have to buy into the hype. But now I’m moving decimals. Adding and subtracting zeros. Watching weather patterns. And when I’m not doing that, I’m spending uninterrupted, unfiltered and the purist quality time with the family without those creatures on the television screen gazing back at us, telling us to buy more soda and lotion. And between work and home, is an 80mph soothing turnpike commute which requires less than two arm movements for getting on and getting off and I’ve even gotten good enough that I can successfully exit the turnpike and have my tolltag scanned without even using my brakes. I just cancel cruise control and coast. I’ve perfectly calculated precisely where to cancel my cruise so that I can cruise for half a mile and then coast through the K-tag lane at approximately 20mph. I listen to news. Commercial-free and delivered with a side of deadpan feature transitions. It’s like drinking straight from the glacier. Fitting that I’d be talking about hype during, first, an election year which typifies the hype experience full flavor. And, two, on the heels of the most anticipated and hyped IPO offering ever in Facebook. It hit the market like Greg Oden and then, WHOOPSIE, the market was flooded with shares and the value was nearly halved in just two days of being on the market. As Warren Buffet once said, and I’m paraphrasing, when the high tide goes back, you get to see who’s swimming naked. I want news, but only when it’s truly news. If you ain’t got none, you can’t talk none. I don’t want my news delivered with, “Now you gotta check out this story.” You don’t know me. I want albums that sell themselves on their quality and their own accomplishment. I want rappers who col’ put…it…down. Like Rakim. LIke Chuck D. Like pre-1995 Cube. I don’t dance and I don’t put my hands up. I bob my head like real gangstas so spare me the hype man. I want to try it for myself. Give me a small spoon so I can tell myself what it tastes like. I don’t want someone standing over it saying, “Oooh, so yummy!”  It’s likely that one of the biggest reasons I don’t like the NFL is they spend four days talking about next Sunday and then three days talking about what happened the prior Sunday. It’s all hype. Precise and calculated hype. What if our world operated on a hype-free, but healthy profit margin of 25%? Everyone down the line. What would a car cost? Gas would probably be $.50 a gallon. Because every hand that touches it, adds cost to it. Public policy wouldn’t have to be sold to us, but rather we could get to the real heart of the matter. Politicians could be real for once. Imagine the real estate market. The stock market would implode. Twitter would cease existing and expressions OMG and LMFAO would become extinct overnight. My daily life is like trying to catch a wave in an ocean of hype. Learn to surf it and stay on top of it instead of letting it swallow you and drown you. Because there’s such hyperbole, sarcasm and competition. To decipher truth from perception is to change perspective. Learn to intake differently. When I was a kid, I specifically remembered Chuck’s notion of “Channel Zero.” I’ve now found “Channel Zero.” It’s FOX. It’s 80% advertisement, 18% entertainment content and 2% news. It’s the media equivalent of pork grinds smothered in high-sodium hot sauce. It hardens the arteries and disintegrates brain matter. But hype is not just on television. It’s in the way we talk to each other. The way we converse. Hype has even polluted or clouded the way we relate. We use lies, exaggerations and simple deception like credit cards to just get us through till next month. Something’s no longer just funny, it’s “hilarious.” It’s not good or satisfactory, it’s “great” (sarcastically, of course). Imagine how many fewer words we’d use and how more succinctly we could communicate if we stripped the hype away and told it like it is. If we cut the 80% advertisement out of our speech, what would it sound like? We don’t have to sell ourselves reality. And maybe this is a bi-product of being fed reality on television for the last 10 years. Where it couldn’t get any “realer,” but then you realize the entire thing was just one big cola ad. The game was rigged. The votes were never tallied. There’s fine print even to reality. We finally have come full circle and even reality is rigged. It’s hyped. Reality’s not even real. So friends, I don’t proclaim to know how to fix it, but I know how to fight it. I know the sources. I’ve identified the suppliers. I don’t expect it to be easy. And I don’t expect it to be popular. Hell, last night I missed Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals (where the Celtics lost to the Heat, but still…). It’d be easy to cave. It’s like most stupid stuff that I take on. No meat. No sugars. Marathoning. There’s an exit every mile and you can always just give up, pull off and turn around.  But as Chuck said…don’t believe the hype. 

Striving for a Hype-Free Life

Now more than three months removed from the music industry and living on a restricted television diet that consists of CBS (CSI-TV), Fox (sometimes) and three PBS channels and spending about 45 minutes a day listening to the soothing sounds of NPR news while developing my own milky delivery of phrases like “this is NPR” and “coming up on NPR…”, I’m finding myself increasingly appealed to this notion of “hype-free” living. And before you get pulled into thinking this is something that came about from moving up to Lawrence and that the hippies have gotten ahold of me and I’m just not the same anymore, this probably has been developing for a while now…it’s just that island living has made it more pronounced.

In fact, I think it started developing when I started running. At first, I wanted all the gear, the best shoes, the best earbuds, reflectors, a Camelbak in colors that matched my own personal sense of style, the best playlist, the wicking technology in all of my clothing, socks that didn’t sweat, shoes that didn’t wear, a street that didn’t incline and a running partner that paced well and didn’t talk. For a sport that is purer and more elemental than any other sport on the planet, I sure wanted to dress it up like a little doll. But in those long drawing moments of contemplation when you’re out in the middle of nowhere in the Texas Panhandle with no safety net, no ride home, no flashlight, no phone, no fans applauding you as you near the finish line, no finish line and the battery just died on your playlist, you realize how the entire sport is, in the end, about your body, your spirit and the earth. It’s not about shoes. It’s not about pace or posture. It’s not about Nike or New Balance. All of those things don’t matter in the sport of running if you don’t break it down, firstly, to the core elements. Body, spirit and earth. 

I was watching “American Idol” last night and I kept thinking how hype has become so normalized in our lives. We tolerate it. We excuse 2-hour advertisements where everyone plugs their album, their product, their soda, their new movie, themselves just to wait for a climax that everyone predicted in the first place. And they ran six minutes over. If you pulled all the hype and showmanship out of that show last night, it would’ve been less than a minute long. All the fanfare, the confetti, the “ooh, it tastes so great” and “go buy his album right now, available on iTunes” and “check out these great headphones!” took a network a shameful (or shameless) 2-hours to cram down your throat and they do it with such fluff that you either you don’t realize it’s happening or you realize and you’ve grown to not care. I find it particularly toxic, myself.

That’s the hype that, with a limited budget, no cable and stacks of records, you don’t really have to avoid because it’s simply not there. It’s not that I created a hype-free space, I just walked into one. I don’t watch baseball or the Celtics in the playoffs, I just check my phone to see if they won. I don’t know how they did it, I just know if they scored more points or runs at the end of the contest. And I haven’t endured two hours of messaging and advertising to reach such conclusions. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wish I could watch the Celtics in the playoffs, but I can’t. So I don’t. It’s turned into a cleansing for me.

If you’ve spent any time around me for, maybe the last decade or so, you know that I have an instinctual aversion to advertisements. When a program goes to commercial break, I mute the television or change the channel, mostly without even thinking. I haven’t listened to private radio in ages. Probably the last time I did, it was overnights with Sarah After Midnight. I don’t like to advertisers selling to me and I don’t like being sold to advertisers as a commodity. 

As a vet of the Advertising business (you know, my six month stint back after I graduated from college), radio (you know, when I sold ad space for a shitty country station in East Texas) and the music industry, I spent the lion share of my life hyping something that’s less than advertised. From politicians to new cars with low financing, from cheap radio ads to just another filthy-mouthed rapper. I sold hype.

And as a hype-peddler, you eventually have to buy into the hype. But now I’m moving decimals. Adding and subtracting zeros. Watching weather patterns. And when I’m not doing that, I’m spending uninterrupted, unfiltered and the purist quality time with the family without those creatures on the television screen gazing back at us, telling us to buy more soda and lotion. And between work and home, is an 80mph soothing turnpike commute which requires less than two arm movements for getting on and getting off and I’ve even gotten good enough that I can successfully exit the turnpike and have my tolltag scanned without even using my brakes. I just cancel cruise control and coast. I’ve perfectly calculated precisely where to cancel my cruise so that I can cruise for half a mile and then coast through the K-tag lane at approximately 20mph. I listen to news. Commercial-free and delivered with a side of deadpan feature transitions. It’s like drinking straight from the glacier.

Fitting that I’d be talking about hype during, first, an election year which typifies the hype experience full flavor. And, two, on the heels of the most anticipated and hyped IPO offering ever in Facebook. It hit the market like Greg Oden and then, WHOOPSIE, the market was flooded with shares and the value was nearly halved in just two days of being on the market.

As Warren Buffet once said, and I’m paraphrasing, when the high tide goes back, you get to see who’s swimming naked.

I want news, but only when it’s truly news. If you ain’t got none, you can’t talk none. I don’t want my news delivered with, “Now you gotta check out this story.” You don’t know me.

I want albums that sell themselves on their quality and their own accomplishment. I want rappers who col’ put…it…down. Like Rakim. LIke Chuck D. Like pre-1995 Cube. I don’t dance and I don’t put my hands up. I bob my head like real gangstas so spare me the hype man.

I want to try it for myself. Give me a small spoon so I can tell myself what it tastes like. I don’t want someone standing over it saying, “Oooh, so yummy!” 

It’s likely that one of the biggest reasons I don’t like the NFL is they spend four days talking about next Sunday and then three days talking about what happened the prior Sunday.

It’s all hype. Precise and calculated hype.

What if our world operated on a hype-free, but healthy profit margin of 25%? Everyone down the line. What would a car cost? Gas would probably be $.50 a gallon. Because every hand that touches it, adds cost to it. Public policy wouldn’t have to be sold to us, but rather we could get to the real heart of the matter. Politicians could be real for once. Imagine the real estate market. The stock market would implode. Twitter would cease existing and expressions OMG and LMFAO would become extinct overnight.

My daily life is like trying to catch a wave in an ocean of hype. Learn to surf it and stay on top of it instead of letting it swallow you and drown you. Because there’s such hyperbole, sarcasm and competition. To decipher truth from perception is to change perspective. Learn to intake differently.

When I was a kid, I specifically remembered Chuck’s notion of “Channel Zero.” I’ve now found “Channel Zero.” It’s FOX. It’s 80% advertisement, 18% entertainment content and 2% news. It’s the media equivalent of pork grinds smothered in high-sodium hot sauce. It hardens the arteries and disintegrates brain matter.

But hype is not just on television. It’s in the way we talk to each other. The way we converse. Hype has even polluted or clouded the way we relate. We use lies, exaggerations and simple deception like credit cards to just get us through till next month. Something’s no longer just funny, it’s “hilarious.” It’s not good or satisfactory, it’s “great” (sarcastically, of course). Imagine how many fewer words we’d use and how more succinctly we could communicate if we stripped the hype away and told it like it is. If we cut the 80% advertisement out of our speech, what would it sound like?

We don’t have to sell ourselves reality. And maybe this is a bi-product of being fed reality on television for the last 10 years. Where it couldn’t get any “realer,” but then you realize the entire thing was just one big cola ad. The game was rigged. The votes were never tallied. There’s fine print even to reality. We finally have come full circle and even reality is rigged. It’s hyped. Reality’s not even real.

So friends, I don’t proclaim to know how to fix it, but I know how to fight it.

I know the sources. I’ve identified the suppliers. I don’t expect it to be easy. And I don’t expect it to be popular. Hell, last night I missed Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals (where the Celtics lost to the Heat, but still…). It’d be easy to cave. It’s like most stupid stuff that I take on. No meat. No sugars. Marathoning. There’s an exit every mile and you can always just give up, pull off and turn around. 

But as Chuck said…don’t believe the hype. 

Fat Jeff, full throttle. Happy Friday.
The Wounds of a 2011 Sox Fan The Sox are at .500 for only the second time this season. And there was a resounding yea from the dwindling Red Sox Nation. If there was any doubt that the bandwagon fans had jumped ship, that was put to rest by the Red Sox’s epic collapse in September, the firing of TIto, the departure of Theo, the hiring of Bobby V. and the, once again, atrocious start to the season by which the Sox started 4-10. Gone is the hype machine that once was. Here is the harsh reality factory where every night we’re reminded of athletes’ brokenness, the human’s statistically-sound probability for failure and the ever-true notion that money can’t buy glory. The offseason was as miserable as any that I can remember. No one wanted to manage the Sox, no one wanted to play for the Sox. The strongest leaders in the clubhouses were now the blackening cancers in the clubhouse. Backtalk and ricocheting rumors were abound. Lester hates Beckett. Pedroia says no one respects Bobby V. Beckett’s lazy. Everyone hates Youk. Youk hates everyone. Ellsbury’s a primadonna. Fried chicken. Rally beers. For the first time in a long while, I was dreading opening day. The dirty secrets were now becoming public and I knew that once it hit the field in real-time action, it was gonna be the ugliest damn thing you’ve ever seen. And the first week was exactly what I was expecting. Swept by the Tigers and nearly swept by the Blue Jays. 1-5. Pedroia looked like even he wanted out. This is gonna be ugly. This team is completely free of any hype or pretense. Papelbon’s gone. Varitek and Wakefield retired. Beckett and Lester are both .500 pitchers with their worst ERA in ages. Buchholz is 4-2, but with an ERA near 8.00! Josh Bard was moved up from the bullpen to disastrous results. Their best statistical hitters include Ryan Sweeney and Mike Aviles. Youkilis was batting .219 and then got injured. And now he’s on the trading block as soon as we can get him healthy to put him on the market. Ryan Sweeney, our best hitter, is nursing a concussion. John Lackey, who divorced his wife while she was battling cancer, is out for the season with Tommy John’s recovery. Dice K is a fading memory and looks like some stoned college student. He’s on the endless 15-day DL. Cody Ross, who was a bright spot in the lineup coming over from San Fran, is expected to go on the DL with a small left foot fracture. Darnell McDonald who was filling in nicely for Ellsbury in center is out on the 15-day DL. Bobby Jenks had back surgery and is out until after the All-Star break. Ellsbury banged up his shoulder again. The dude’s made of twigs, man. He’s out until probably early July. Carl Crawford ain’t even swinging a bat yet and he’s out indefinitely with ligament sprain. But watching the in-game action last night, the Sox somehow managed to field a team and beat the first place Orioles on the road to pull into a last-place AL East tie with the Yankees. Read that last sentence again. Yep, this season’s gonna be ugly. But at least Papi’s hitting well. If there’s anything that’s going right for the Sox right now, it’s David Ortiz. He’s batting .335 and is slugging over .600 with nine homers. It’s not MVP numbers, but the guy can still draw walks and wreak havoc. But yeah, the sweethearts of the league are now the Texas Rangers. Somehow. The Sox went from lovable losers to darling idiots to beloved champions to evil empire to laughing stock. The parade came and went. Now, in the cellar, it’s time this team mount an unlikely comeback to mediocrity. I have no expectations of performance which is probably the first time I’ve thought that since they signed Manny and Pedro. I’m not sure if anyone knows this either, but I don’t have cable right now. Which means that I’m relegated to checking scores on my phone or computer and watching box scores, you know, the way we used to do it before the internet and Sportscenter. I remember reading box scores growing up to see what Kirby upped his average to. Watching the standings to see who was surging or waning. It’s probably also helped me heal a little from last season. I haven’t watched this Sox squad once this year. I wouldn’t even be able to recognize most of this roster if they walked up my front door in their home jersey. They’re just names and stats. And I missed my opportunity to see them in KC this year too against the Royals. Probably for the better as the were taken by the Royals, two games to one. So how about a yea for .500. We can at least enjoy it for the next 15 hours or so.
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