Roger Clemens - Why Didn't You Curse Them Out?

My first and probably only rant...

Congressmen Henry Waxman and Tom Davis, get the fuck out of Roger Clemens face!

You guys can take your House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on steroids in Baseball and shove it up every stinking ass in Congress. You guys say it's illegal to use steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs in Baseball? Well, then, call the fucking cops! Arrest the owners and trainers. But Congressional hearings? Please. Give us all a fucking break!

I watched yesterday's FISA debates and votes and once again witnessed the United States Congress shame us all. I went to bed with anger in my heart, a very unusual thing for me. I was restless all night and by the time I woke up I was still in a bad mood. This is not like me.

This morning, I turned on the TV and what do I see? Roger Clemens walking into a House hearing on steroids in Baseball. OMG. No fucking way. Clemens? No, don't drag him through this, I ached. I looked at Clemens and absorbed the drama - was it tragic or absurd, I couldn't tell - the disappointment and injustice of having to enter this hearing room and the seething anger in him.  

I love(ed) Baseball. I started watching the Brooklyn Dodgers from our family's Bay Ridge brownstone as a small child and learned from my Italian grandmother that during a Dodger/Yankee game it is OK to curse. When the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1957, after 68 seasons in Brooklyn, it broke my grandmother's heart. I remember watching her sob. She plead through her tears to the dusty RCA black & white to say it ain't so...I rubbed salt into her wounded heart by innocently waving them on and saying that from now on the Yankees would be my favorite team. I was just trying to make her feel better.

Many years later, I moved to Los Angeles and got to see my favorite team beat the Dodgers once again for the 1981 World Series. I was able to buy someone's set of season tickets to the whole series and it was heaven. I have been to baseball games in most parks and stadiums around the country. It's romance and memories, comfort noise, and I love the game and all of its esoteric rules and characters. If I had it all to do over again I always say, I would be either a judge or a baseball ref...  

Then The Strike and baseball has never been the same to me...But I still love it.  

By the time the steroid issue surfaced I was already in a pathological attachment disorder with Baseball so I waved it off...more tarnish...more bad management...more psychic pain...what time does the game start...?

Now Congress. My team, the Democrats, are in charge. My local West Hollywood Congressman, Henry Waxman, the Chairman of this cockamamie  investigation into steroid use in Baseball. He's been in Congress for over 30 years, failed to get Karl Rove or even Harriet fucking Miers but now he's about to get his mustachioed teeth into Roger Clemens. My (former) Congressman Waxman has spare time evidently and some secret unconstitutional agenda that allows him to run with his prerogative to investigate Baseball. For the children. It's all to save the children. Tell me, is Football next? Oh, I hope so.

The fucking asshole Rep. Tom Davis and Rep. Henry Waxman called today's hearing so Roger Clemens can explain why his trainer says he injected Clemons ass with human growth hormones when Clemens denied ever taking HGH. The trainer saved the cotton swabs and the syringes since 2001 and provided them to Congress! What kind of person saves bloody syringes for seven years! This is Roger Clemens' accuser. A former cop turned trainer who injected baseball players with arguably legal steroids and saved the bloody fucking syringes and we get to hear him pull Roger Clemens down into the dirt. No way Clemens will take this.

I don't want to expound on steroid use or the technicalities of HGH on baseball stats. I don't care anymore. Today's Baseball is comepletely different from the original real Baseball already. I believe in freedom. I recall a manager who once worked for me discussed using HGH with a bunch of us middle-aged folks at a lunch table once. He shared with us his analysis over the weeks of looking in to it and the pros and cons and then finally said he and his new younger girlfriend decided to take them. They're not illegal - or at least not then, not when Clemens may have taken them. In fact there were no rules against the use of performance enhancing drugs in Baseball that I know of. Or, in the local gyms where their use was/is common. Or, then in my office. I don't care. I watched Mr. Middle Aged Manager beef up and start turning younger heads. I was riveted at the TV watching Mark McGuire and then Bobby Bondsand the crazy new extreme androgenic android baseball...I adapted. Nothing about Baseball could make me cry anymore like my Grandmother did.

But today the great Roger Clemens let me down. Not because he lied in front of his wife and kids, in front of the world, in Davis and Waxman's bogus grandstanding hearing. And not because he took (il)legal drugs to enhance his body's performance. To me it's like a woman's breast enhancement or a middle-aged male Senator's Botox, I don't give a rat's ass what other people do to their bodies. Baseball is already not the old Baseball of love, peanuts, the home team with faces that grow on you and don't change every season.  

No, Roger Clemens let me down becasue he didn't fight back and tell Davis and Waxman to Fuck Off like I expected he would. I really had faith in Roger to let hem have it. I guess I was just projecting...

At the edge of my seat, I stared as Clemens moved to the mic assuming he would call these guys out, tell them to mind their own fucking dismal ineffective  business, tell them to go protect the country from mad ex-baseball team owners or NSA letters and get the fuck out of Baseball. I wanted him to curse at them in front of all the live TV cameras, because in baseball it's OK to curse. I wanted him to shame them and bully them on live TV like I wanted to do on CSPAN last night. The great Roger Clemens looking down his massive body, should have spit a wad of mucus at Waxman right then and there for defiling the Congress and wasting taxpayer dollars. It's OK to spit in Baseball too.

But instead, I watched Roger Clemens take it, squirm, and then he lied. He dissembled as if questioning the definition of "is" and claimed the problem was that some "misremembered" and said his wife did it. Facing front he let them have at him. And I cried. Why did you have to lie, Roger? What's the point of lying now? They already fucking know and who the fuck cares? Why didn't you just tell them it was none of their business what you do with your body as an adult? Why couldn't you throw them an inside screwball right into their temples (metaphorically) and shame them on CNN, ESPN, CSPAN and the whole media whoring empire that has been showcasing your body for so many years? Do something!

Fuck you Congress. You guys are useless. Go ahead and entertain yourselves taking down athletes and letting go tyrants. I'm sick of taking it. I'm sick of just adapting to these men who talk, talk, talk all about the kids and how they're protecting the kids and get nothing good done. They do nothing but waste time. Fuck you, Davis and Waxman, you'll get yours.