24 hours

There was a terrible moment on Monday night when I didn’t want to be here anymore. This wasn’t necessarily that I wanted to die, though some told me to go do that very thing, but that I just didn’t want to be here anymore. With myself. In my apartment. At RCR. A crisis of thought and creativity that nearly crippled me and caused me to sleep in late on Tuesday and teach a horrible class that I should have been more prepared for.

But what brought me back up from the ground was the realization that this whole situation — that I was so starkly upset about — was entirely of my own doing. I wrote a zinger of a screaming mad post about Laremy Tunsil kneeling during the national anthem — which I won’t link out to here, you can go find it yourselves — and then dealt with 24 hours of your worst vitriol. I apologized back in the volleyball post, but let me formally issue this: I’m sorry for lashing out against you. I’m a passionate person who feels things, as are all of you, and I offended your sensibilities by telling you to go elsewhere. You shouldn’t do that, because I like you.

For 24 hours I wavered on whether or not it was all worth it. Being here. Being the editor. Being a writer. I like to write. I enjoy just the action of writing, which is one of the reasons why I started up this Friday column in the first place. This space is something like my weekly devotional and emotional idea dump. This is what’s going on in my head as I head into my weekend of college and professional football, and you can read about it if you so choose. I deeply appreciate those of you who do.

Monday was awful. Tuesday only slightly better. Wednesday more or less got me back on to even keel. At the time of writing — it’s Wednesday evening, around 7 p.m. ET — I feel fine enough to write this column. I hope you do too. I’ve spoken personally with a few of you — Jason, Bob, Evan, CLT — and those have been helpful, encouraging discussions. Jeff reprimanded me then told me what to do. What he wants on the site this week and in the future. Thank you, Jeff.

Things have calmed down to the point that we’re back to putting out standard RCR content. We’ll still get a whiff eccentric whenever I get a wild hare, and those ideas will be successful or they’ll fall dead on arrival. That’s fine. I’m new at this. I’m not trained as a newsman. I’m trained as a classical philologist who wrote a dissertation on violence in Roman epic poetry. Letters, words are my thing, and I’m learning how to find and see newsworthy content that you all will be interested in, and how I can deliver that to you in the perky, funny way that we do.

I edited Whiskey on his time working at Uptown Coffee earlier this afternoon, and I’m so glad that he wrote that. That story about the cat is crushing and wonderful. He’s a great writer whom I’d never edited before, and I look forward to doing more of that. If you haven’t already, go read Gray’s thing on his time at the Cal game in Berkeley. I earnestly pestered him about that thing because, well, he’s probably the best writer on the site — outside of Bob and Will and Zach and OneMan and Alex and Jeff and Juco and Whiskey and Christoph and Matthew — and because he was freaking there. It’s a wonderful little vignette of an Ole Miss alum and current Texas resident’s foray into BIG LIBERALISM, and it was a joy to edit.

So here we are. Alabama on Saturday. Gray just dropped this into Slack, saying “they’re going to suffocate us.”

Probably. Maybe. We’ll just have to wait and see. Alabama has struggled with spread attacks in the past, and perhaps that’s something that Saban has tried to shore up this year. Maybe he hasn’t. It’s still early enough in the season, though, that anything could feasibly happen here, and that lends a high degree of watchability factor to Saturday’s game. We’ll certainly be there.

Are you ready?