Tag: tragedy

Pour one out for my dead treadmill

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My treadmill died this weekend.  I feel like I’ve lost a limb.

Ever since the start of the coronavirus pandemic really began, one of the first things to obviously go, was, the gym.  Something that I’d been consistently doing for literally ten straight years, and if I were factoring in the sporadic working out I did intermittently while I was freelance, butted up against the time before that when I was working and had a gym membership, then probably 15 straight years.

It was not an easy pill to swallow, but it was made easier by the fact that it also coincided with the birth of my daughter, so frankly I was too busy to even consider working out in the first place anyway.  But once things starting settling down (for the time being), I began to notice that my shirts were starting to feel a little loose in the arms, and tight in the stomach.  Obviously my body was beginning to revert back to a lesser state because I wasn’t exercising at all, and most definitely not aided by the sleep schedule of a new father.

Eventually, I reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore, so I dusted off the treadmill that my mother-in-law bequeathed to us, and began running on it.  I remember the first time I really did a lengthy jog on it, I did probably about 40 minutes at a light pace, and I felt absolutely incredible afterward.  I was soaking in sweat but my body felt alive again, and I most definitely felt elation at the endorphins that were popping anew in my system for the first time in a long time.

Needless to say, running, and running on the treadmill has been the only real substantial exercise I’ve been doing since like, April of last year, and it’s been the only real saving grace to my rapidly shrinking and deteriorating physical state, since I haven’t lifted weights in quite literally, almost an entire year.

My angst and rage at the legions of ignorant fucks who couldn’t be bothered to wear masks and eradicate all this bullshit in just a month and that ‘Murica is still in this fucking predicament to where I still can’t work out, knows no end.

Anyway, I eventually settled into a pretty good every-other-day running routine, and I always feel pretty good after running, because as I’ve always stated as one of my personal exercise mantras, is that time is never wasted when exercising.

But a few days ago, I noticed that my treadmill was starting to make a really loud sound.  Typically I wear my AirPods and am often times watching shit on the WWE Network, so I can’t really hear the ambient noise of the treadmill, but when I was winding down, it was noticeably loud.  I chalked it up as an anomaly, and hoped it would be gone the next time I ran.

It wasn’t.  I popped open the mechanical panel, to see if there was anything obvious about why it was making such noise.  Nothing seemed amiss, and I ran it on a low setting, with the panel open to see if there was any loose parts.  If anything at all, it sounded like body noise that was causing things, which I guess with the aging, vibrating, and the fact that I probably run with an elephant’s stride, shit had jarred around throughout its age.

I closed up the panel and decided to just run anyway, and brace occasionally on the console, to see if I could settle the noise down.  It seemed to be okay at first; but then three minutes into my run, everything just kind of clunked to a stop, and I’m surprised I didn’t hurt myself in the process being brought down from 6.5 mph to 0.

I got off the treadmill and watched it abruptly reset and made a noise, reset and make a noise.  Obviously, something was wrong with it, so I pulled the plug.

As far as I can tell, the treadmill was dead.  I haven’t ran since.

Obviously, I’m at a crossroads where I definitely want a new treadmill to replace the dead one, but I’m not sure if I want a fairly inexpensive direct replacement of what just died, which would probably run me around 300-400, but mythical wife is really suggesting that we spring for something way nicer.  But at the same time, I want to believe that maybe 2021 will be a year in which with vaccinations, I might be able to return to a gym, to which in those instances, my running at home will definitely reduce dramatically as I would be working out at gyms again, to which why would I want to have an expensive treadmill collecting dust?

I don’t know, really.  For the time being, I’m going to have to resort to running outdoors again, but I’m at the mercy of the elements, and the fact that there are still occasionally fucks without masks out there, and I definitely don’t want to catch their coronaHIV while I’m just trying to exercise.

But I’m super sad that my treadmill died. 😢

Things that have happened since the brog’s been down

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Shortly after my brog went down in April 2016, I started a document, bulleting things that want to potentially write about, in the event that the site would be back up within like a month or two.  Obviously that never happened, but it didn’t really stop me from adding to the list on a regular basis, even if it continued for nearly four years.

At first, it was a pretty nitty-gritty list, straight to the point and pretty succinct at what I wanted to remember.  But by the time 2018 rolled around, I noticed some patterns and categories in which things caught my attention and warranted notation, and so some categories started to take place.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel compelled to share all of this, but for whatever reason I’m following through with it, and basically this is going to be little more than a massive bulleted list of things that happened between mid-2016 through mid-2020, with probably not a lot of context, but likely some snark and veiled commentary peppered throughout.

2016

  • Pokemon Go came, lit the world on fire for 15 minutes, and then flamed out harder than the FOX Fantastic Four films
  • I became The Burrito King of Atlanta, winning Willy’s Road Trip promotion by visiting 27 Willy’s locations in four days
  • Kobe Bryant retired from professional basketball, but not before dropping 60 in his final game
  • The Golden State Warriors won 73 games and passed the ’96 Bulls’ unbreakable record, but then lost in the NBA finals like chumps
  • The Atlanta Braves retired Turner Field for whiter pastures, by sucking hardcore and losing 93 games
  • Hulk Hogan killed Gawker
  • Went on a European cruise vacation with mythical then-gf, visiting Italy, Turkey, Croatia and Greece
  • Went to Korea for the first time in my life, with my mom
  • The Chicago Cubs won the World Series, breaking a 108-year long drought and endless memes
  • An orange baked potato reality television personality inexplicably won the presidency of the United States of America
  • A fuckton of people died from senseless gun violence

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Cancellation of Minor League Baseball kills my soul

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Primarily thanks to coronavirus, Minor League Baseball has officially cancelled the 2020 baseball season.  I say primarily, because the insinuation is that it was not the one and only factor in this decision; because prior to the world going into the shitter on account of a pandemic, MiLB was already at risk, because Major League Baseball is full of greedy cocksuckers, and they were trying to kill off associations with a large chunk of existing Minor League organizations.  Coronavirus just gives MLB a convenient scapegoat to push the whole thing under the rug for the time being, and possibly come back later to put the nails in the coffin at a later, easier time.

But commentary aside, the reality is that in 2020, there will be no Minor League Baseball, and that fact alone hurts my soul in a variety of ways.

Obviously, my love for the minor leagues throughout the years has easily made me prefer them over the MLB product, despite being but cogs in the grander machine, but there’s no denying the appeal of the more laid-back, relaxed culture of MiLB, where everything is not taken so seriously, and there’s vastly more accessibility and intimate closeness with the players and the teams, than their MLB parents.

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New Father Brogging, #010

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A thought that often crosses my mind is that I can’t believe the world that my daughter was born into.  And then I feel really sad about it, despite knowing that she very well won’t remember any of this stuff, but one day she might read about it in history books or any sort of resource that outlines the happening throughout history.

It’s bad enough she was born right at the very start of when coronavirus came into the United States and was shortly declared a global pandemic, literally changing the landscape of the world where the vast majority of educated people began to take shelter in their homes, to minimize the spread of a new disease.

But in a way that can only be described as amazing, a global pandemic still managed to get pushed into to the backseat by the more recent civil unrest that’s boiled over on account of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and very recently George Floyd in Minnesota, with the latter being pretty flagrantly executed by a white police officer, when his neck was low-key crushed under the knee of the cop.

As I’m writing this, all across the country, there have been countless protests, many of which escalated into riots complete with looting, and there are hundreds to thousands of people who have been physically harmed, gassed, tazed or impacted by some form of crowd control.  The police are widely viewed as the enemy now instead of the agency that’s meant to serve and protect, and it’s times like this in which I’m kind of glad that one, I don’t live/work as close to actual city-proper Atlanta as I used to, and two, add the staying home as yet another ironic benefit to there being a fucking pandemic.

It’s a very sad and scary thought to think of this being the world that my first child was born into, and I feel like the generations before her have already let her down in fostering a world that’s supposed to be safe and better for the future.

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Shad for father of the year

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This story breaks my heart.  Shad Gaspard, former WWE performer, has gone missing after being swept out to sea by a rip current in Venice Beach.  The last thing he did was to instruct rescuers to get his 10-year old son first, before a wave crashed down on him and submerged him.  His son was successfully rescued, but at this point Gaspard has been missing for over 24 hours.

I hate writing it out, but after this much time, the outlook does not look positive.  Open water is about as frightening as being lost in the woods, but at least in the woods, it’s entirely possible to remain stationary and hope someone can find out; out in the ocean is like trying to hit a moving target.  We can all hope for the best, until something definitive emerges.

It’s ironic, because while in the WWE, Gaspard was in a criminal tag team called Cryme Tyme, which was even for the standards back then, tasteless and racist, but being the pros that he and JTG were, made it work, and got over with the fans.  They never achieved any notable success, because the team simply wasn’t really given a chance to achieve any success, but they can at least take credit for being entertaining whenever they were on screen.

Eventually, they were bid best wishes on their future endeavors (read: WWE speak for fired), but the two remained active on the independent scene.  One of the more notable stories to emerge post-WWE was when Cryme Tyme actively prevented actual crime time, when in Orlando, Gaspard himself foiled a robbery attempt by beating the shit out of a would-be gunman at a gas station, and detaining him in a chokehold until the police arrived.

But the thing is, in spite of their tasteless WWE personas, Gaspard was anything but the degenerate thug he was portrayed to be and it turns out that he was some pretty heroic father of the year material, ultimately.  My heart breaks hearing this story, and can only wish for miracles for Gaspard’s wife and son.

It couldn’t have happened anywhere else

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In short: 28-year old man stabbed to death over Popeyes’ chicken sandwich in Oxon Hill, Maryland

Honestly, I’m more surprised it’s taken this long for there to be any killings over Popeyes’ chicken sandwich (that I haven’t been able to try but am highly skeptical that it has any possibility of living up to the hype much less being superior to Chick Fil-A or Bojangles).  Maybe there have been, but considering that nothing’s made the news like this one, I’m led to believe that this is the first.

But there we have it: a person was killed over the artificial mania created over a fucking chicken sandwich.

If this really was the first incident of someone dying over the craze over the Popeyes chicken sandwich, I have to say that it really couldn’t have first happened anywhere else than Oxon Hill, Maryland.  I’m actually quite familiar with Oxon Hill, and it’s not just me flinging shit and generalizing because I have an innate disdain for the state of Maryland; seeing as how my parents’ old barbecue restaurant was in Oxon Hill for seven years, and how I worked there for the last two, is specifically why I’m familiar with Oxon Hill and had developed such a disdain for the state of Maryland.

In fact, my parents’ old restaurant was literally two doors down the strip plaza from this specific Popeyes’ where a guy was stabbed to death over a chicken sandwich.  One my biggest pet peeves I had when I worked there was when people would get their meals at Popeyes and bring them into my parents’ restaurant and bought a small drink from us so they could justify sitting in our tiny dining area to eat because our business was so poor the last few years.

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The brutal absolute of the rule of three

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As those people who read my writing might be aware, I don’t really write that much about my personal family life.  There’s not really any particular reason for that, except for the thought that I guess there are veils that I prefer to keep on certain things depending on the audience.  Plus, the internet is already full of heavy and glum things to read about, and I’ve always preferred to try and write about less serious and more whimsical things, or at least dunk on all of the stupid shit that the City of Atlanta or State of Georgia does.

But after the third death in the last six weeks, the prevalent thought in my head is just how brutally absolute that the whole rule of three really seems sometimes.  I forewent my bachelor party due to a death in the family of someone very close to me, and as much as it probably would’ve been great to get smashed in Vegas and piss away a few hundred dollars, it was more important to be with my brother in a tragic time.  A week later, there was a death in the family of mythical fiancée, and although this one was kind of anticipated due to obvious circumstances, a passing is a passing, and it’s no less sad because we could see it coming.

This morning, I found out that an uncle of mine passed away.  Which, to me was kind of a surprise, but at the same time kind of wasn’t.  I knew his health was deteriorating, but it’s been quite a few years since he had a quintuple (read: five) bypass, so it always just seemed like he survived a tough ordeal and was on his way to simply living out the rest of his life in relative normalcy.  He watched both his sons grow up, get married and father their own kids, becoming a grandfather four times over.

My family has this group chat that I regularly keep my eye on, to see general chatter amongst my cousins and aunts.  I had seen that he had been admitted to the hospital due to a complication in regards to an artery, but according to the chat, it seemed like he made it through, and I’d see pictures of him sitting back and reading the paper, or when he was out on a walker doing physical therapy.  I felt some relief that it looked like he was on the mend.

But then I get some messages from one of my cousins, telling me that they’re not going to be able to make it to the wedding, on account of my uncle’s hospitalization.  And although I’m disappointed losing headcount this close to the wedding, if there was any reason that could be justified and understood, this was it.  I called my mom, because I wanted more details, and it turns out that he’s doing way worse than the family chat made it seem like.  He was mostly immobile, relying on an oxygen machine in order to breathe, and the kicker was that the only times he wasn’t actively in pain was whenever the morphine kicked in.

And then this morning, I get a call at a very unusual 6 a.m., and I knew the news was not going to be good.  Just like that, right after talking about him the night prior, he was gone.

Since it’s so fresh, I have no idea what the next few days are going to be like in terms of a service or funeral.  All I know is that the likelihood of me going to another funeral is pretty good, provided flight availability isn’t catastrophic.

I couldn’t help but think about how the rule of three came into play again here, but this wasn’t like professional wrestlers, athletes or nostalgic celebrities.  These were people that were entwined with people in my everyday life that were passing, which means it was hitting home just that much harder, because I’m seeing the sadness and grief affecting people right in front of me, and enduring the helpless feeling that there’s nothing at all that can be done to snap them out of it.

It’s scary just how seemingly absolute and inevitable the rule of three tends to be.  After the first two funerals, I can’t say that the thought didn’t cross my mind, but I couldn’t help but feel this sinking feeling when I found out that my uncle was going to the hospital.  I’m not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, I’ve long since walked away from my Catholic upbringing.  But much of my extended family are, and watching and reading them talk about the prayers they were having for the family, and then the initial news that my uncle’s surgery was successful gave promise that maybe things were headed in the right direction, and there just might be reward for those with faith, as long as they’re good people.

But as stated, there was way more to the story than what was made available in an online group chat, and now the inevitable third is gone.  The rule of three strikes again, but it’s unfortunately a little too close to home this time.

Let’s just hope that it’s done now, and that the people in my world can not have to go to any more funerals this year.