Pain For Breakfast, Traffic, Credit

Well, that was a nice two weeks of not worrying aboot pissing everyone off if I don’t write something one day.

Old ESPN friend Henry Abbot hooked up a link via his True Hoop blog, who any of you arrived from my old website surely read already.

That was the result as of like 5:00 Pacific lasterday…obviously it won’t hold 100%, but you all know how infectious my virtual voice is. So, welcome to my blog about airplanes.

Anyway, Henry and I exchanged some emails, which was basic “what-up/how you been/I like things/etc”, until this one came back:

Tuesday 8:45-8:47 How to be a beast in the shower stall. (Meet at lockers.)

Here’s what happened for me: I turned the shower on and got in, totally forgetting I was on a mission to eat pain for breakfast.

It was warm. I turned it even warmer. Then I was like “holy crap, it’s beast time, I forgot!”

And I instantly turned it 100% cold, sticking my head straight in it.

The cold water straight froze my head, which quickly adjusted, but as it tinkered with the rest of me it felt pretty cold. It took some spine for me to turn around and get “all in.”

But I did it for a minute or two, and felt pretty freaking relaxed. When I turned the shower off, and stepped out, I was beaming. I went straight to the mirror to check out my pores.

I’m playing hoops tonight, so I have another cold shower on my dance card in a few hours

Two important things – first, Henry’s head is covered with a lack of hair. His experience had to be totally different from mine – I’m about eight beers from shaving my head, just to experience it.

The far more important thing here is that Henry is heading for ESPN colleague David Thorpe’s IMG Basketball Academy for a “we gonna make the media throw up” weekend of training like the pros.

If you’re not familiar with Thorpe, he trains a lot of NBA guys in the off-season as a coach-ish game doctor, and one of his philosophies is that guys need to learn to “beast”, ie play all out, all the time.

(I believe Charles Barkley, in talking about “rebounding techniques”, said he has one: GO GET THE DAMN BALL. Putting that in context, he was good at beasting.)

Alas, I suggested Henry introduce this whole cold shower thing to Thorpe, so if sometime this season you start reading stories about a wave of eccentric NBA players taking cold showers as a way to increase their intensity and beasting abilities, please remember to remember where it all started.

That’s right – the Armenian sublet, where Brian Who Thinks About Airplanes lived for one month in 2008. Throw a plaque up already.

NOTE: That link from ESPN was gold, because there are two things I truly love: attention, and pretending I don’t like attention.

I can’t remember what my first big link was on my old site – I think that was just built through hard work, because it started at the same time as Deadspin, which wasn’t Deadspin-Deadspin yet.