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Guess what:
I'm done with finals! I'm one third of the way through my senior year of college.
(Thank you. Thank you. Okay, that's enough wild applause. This isn't The Tony Danza Show. You can sit down now.)
But guess what number two:
I'm not sure, but I may have, well, I think, the thing is, I may have accidentally taken some performance-enhancing drugs to help me through finals period. Not on purpose though! See, I was up really late cramming for a test and one of my friends (who is also a drug dealer but whatever) came by my room. I complained that as a senior I was "getting too old for this."
"Really?" my friend who is also a drug dealer asked.
"Yes."
"Why do you think you're getting too old for this?"
I told him that I was tired, that I couldn't concentrate and I had a headache and a sore throat. So then my friend who is also a drug dealer reached into his jacket and pulled out an orange prescription bottle of pills and a clear plastic baggy that contained a white powder. He put a few pills on my desk and crushed them into "lines." Then he made several "lines" out of the white powder to the right of the first lines.
He pointed to the lines on the left. "These will help your headache."
He pointed to the lines on the right. "These will help your sore throat."
I nodded and then snorted all the lines. To be honest, they really didn't help my headache or my sore throat. But I wasn't tired anymore and I felt like I could study forever except when I was distracted and talking to myself or eating pages out of my notebook. Anyway, I liked it and I kept blowing lines for the next few days even though my friend charged me $4,000.
Is it possible that my friend who is also a drug dealer had slipped me coke and Adderall? Hardly. I know I've already mentioned this but listen, he's my friend.
Well, okay, maybe they were performance-enhancing drugs. But I thought they were Tylenol and, you know, sore throat powder stuff.
Question: That's ridiculous!
Answer: You really think so?
Question: Yes!
Answer: I agree. It never happened.
Question: Then why'd you print it?
Answer: Because I wanted to satirize Barry Bonds BALCO testimony.
Question: Oh.
So here's the deal in case you haven't been watching or reading the news recently: the San Francisco Chronicle has published two articles in the past week, both revealing supposedly confidential testimony from Major League Baseball players regarding their own personal steroid use. Jason Giambi said he used them and got them from Barry Bonds' trainer. And Barry Bonds apparently used the same steroids - the clear (you inject it in your stomach) and the cream (you rub it into your muscles) - but according to him, he thought they were flaxseed oil and arthritis balm respectively. This raises a couple questions, Barry:
1. Did you always just rub the cream into your joints or did you ever "accidentally" get some on a muscle and then think, "oh, what the hell," and spread it over the entire muscle? I only ask because a friend of mine once got into some trouble because he was eating a sandwich naked and some mayonnaise dripped onto his private parts and he thought, "oh, what the hell," and a couple minutes later his mom walked in on him. So a "what the hell" mindset can be a dangerous one.
2. Can we now use the ignorance plea whenever we want? Remember Richard Reid? The shoe bomber? What if he got his shoes from a friend? What if he was just holding a match to the soles to see if he could burn some gum out of the treads? What about that underage stripper in Montreal who told me that "laws in Quebec are different?"
3. How stupid are you?
The most frequently used phrase by baseball analysts over the past few days has been "egg in its face." As in, Major League Baseball has "egg in its face." I swear you can't flip through three television channels without hearing this phrase at least once. But it's not nearly strong enough unless I missed the conversation in which we all decided that "egg" would be used as a code word for "elephant feces." Then it's maybe approaching strong enough.
Let's face it. The steroids issue is not a new one. For the past few years, there have been grumbles that refer to this age of the monster home run as "the asterisk era." It began with Mark McGwire acknowledging his use of Androstenedione and continued with Sammy Sosa's refusal to get tested and won't end until Barry Bonds' incredibly expanding head can be properly explained in a medical journal. I'll tell you one thing - his hat didn't get three sizes bigger because of flaxseed oil and arthritis balm.
Was anyone really shocked by the leaked grand jury testimony? Raise your hand if you believed Jason Giambi when he said he had only lost four pounds before this season. There was wide speculation before the 2004 season that Giambi's weight loss (and it was clearly more than four pounds) was the result of not taking steroids anymore. But he lied to us. He said he never took steroids. He hadn't really lost weight. Just four pounds. Come on, Jason. Think about your fans. They're mostly men. Men get lied to about weight all the time. We weren't fooled.
It's a tough time to be a sports fan. College football is in desperate need of a playoff system. The NBA has its own problems with player attitudes and brawls and rape trials. NASCAR is, um, probably fine actually. But the NHL is non-existent and when it does exist, it's extremely flawed (and yes, I know I'm one of eighteen people who care, but still).
Somehow baseball has managed to blow all those sports out of the water. I hope it fixes itself. I hope it institutes mandatory, real drug testing. And I hope it puts a big old billboard-sized asterisk next to every 450-foot home run Barry Bonds has hit since 2000.
Until then, Major League Baseball is going to be wearing a whole lot of elephant feces on its face.
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