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description=Essays in relation to the L.A. Rams, usually done with a six pack and a dash of psychotic disorder.;

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r suddenly silently with the preternatural instinct of someone who has watched a thousand strangers rifle through the accumulated weight of someone else s life maybe i said cards are a dollar each or six for five sure i said and she dissolved back into the furniture the way she d come here is what i knew about jack snow he came out of notre dame in 1965 a first round pick which is the kind of beginning that carries inside it the implicit promise of an eternal ending which did not come instead there were eleven seasons eleven years of serious professional underappreciated work performed in front of crowds who were mostly watching for something else his best year was 1967 fifty two catches 1 097 yards imagine roman gabriel roman gabriel the name itself like something a screenwriter invented back there dropping back and flinging bombs to the fleet footed golden domer the thing sits on my desk now which is where things go in my apartment to be permanently indefinitely almost dealt with i tell myself i ll sleeve it i tell myself a lot of things jack s still looking at whatever he s looking at has been since 76 which is to say he s been staring at that fixed point for nearly as long as i ve been alive longer than most of what i currently believe in has existed somebody stood there with a camera and made a decision not the second before not the second after this one this exact fraction of a man s face plucked out of the whole endless unspooling reel of his life and pinned down forever that s the tension of the whole enterprise isn t it the card collector s dirty secret we tell ourselves we re honoring these men really we re doing something closer to embalming we re taking a person who ran and sweated and got tackled and disappointed and went home to dinner and we re reducing him to one still flat foldable rectangle and then we re charging each other a dollar for the privilege of owning that rectangle jack snow doesn t know i have him jack snow is dead i looked it up 2006 complications too young and i am sitting here in 2026 with his folded unfolded face six inches from my laptop feeling something for him i have no right to feel and can t entirely name wide receiver s a good position for a ghost when you think about it always running toward something just out of frame this entry was posted in uncategorized and tagged american football football cards humor jack snow los angeles rams memoir nfl retro football sports vintage football writing on march 4 2026 by gary trujillo insomnia a vince ferragamo chronicle 14 replies the algorithm finds you at 2 am the way trouble always finds you without apology without warning and with the specific cruelty of knowing exactly what you need insomnia has its own political agenda and tonight it has decided that what i required is vince ferragamo highlights from super bowl xiv when the los angeles rams nearly beat the steelers in that last cocaine bright moment before the 1970s finally got around to dying properly and the world still operated on the premise that beautiful things might actually win ferragamo had that look dark hair feathered just right jawline sharp enough to cut through the smog hanging over the coliseum the kind of face that belonged in a convertible heading north on pch with the radio playing something by the eagles or fleetwood mac not your typical quarterback this guy looked like he moonlighted in deodorant commercials or maybe starred in forgettable b movies about vietnam vets who become badass surfers and kick the shit out of oiled up sand bullies ferragamo emerged from the university of nebraska and landed in southern california like some beautifully wrapped package addressed to the wrong coast except it turned out to be precisely the right coast the thing is he could kind of play took the rams to the super bowl nearly pulled it off against terry bradshaw and the steelers dynasty threw piss missiles that looked effortless like he was tossing a frisbee at the beach and moved in the pocket with this casual grace unhurried as if he had all day and maybe a dinner reservation in beverly hills afterward defensive backs would watch the spiral floating overhead and think two things simultaneously i m screwed and how does his hair stay like that then he went to montreal because that is what happens careers end the way administrations end badly with loose ends with the uncomfortable suspicion that the promise never quite matched the performance though in this case the performance was genuinely pretty good which makes the ending worse somehow the beautiful ones leave first because beauty is portable and they know it and you knew it too standing in the coliseum parking lot in 1980 with a warm beer and a ticket stub watching the sky go that specific los angeles purple that exists nowhere else on earth he arrived in california the way everyone arrives in california which is to say with nothing except the idea of himself and for three years maybe less maybe exactly as long as the story required ferragamo threw spirals into a sky that seemed designed by someone who understood what skies were supposed to look like this is the thing about california it doesn t hide what it is the lie and the truth are the same sentence what he represented if representation is even the right word was the argument that surfaces are not shallow that beauty sustained long enough earns its own kind of depth that a man moving with sufficient grace through sufficient light might eventually become indistinguishable from the grace itself you can dismiss this many people do but dismissing it requires ignoring what it feels like to watch those old clips at two in the morning when sleep won t come and your mind is doing what minds do in the dark which is return to things that are gone and ask why they had to go this entry was posted in uncategorized and tagged american football humor los angeles rams nfl personal sports super bowl vince ferragamo vintage football writing on february 16 2026 by gary trujillo the invention of matthew stafford 19 replies after a balls out year in which he led the nfl in passing yards and passing touchdowns rams quarterback matthew stafford has been named the most valuable player for the 2025 nfl season and honestly it s about damn time this wasn t some cake walk to glory stafford who turns 38 in a couple days and whose back has more miles on it than a 1987 buick conspicuously missed training camp missed most of the preseason there were whispers the kind that follow aging quarterbacks like flies on roadkill that maybe he was done cooked finished and then then this absolute madman goes out and plays all 20 games every single one stafford for 4 707 yards and get this 46 touchdowns against just eight interceptions eight brett favre used to throw eight picks before halloween the back thing the kind of chronic pain that transforms quotidian activities rising from bed bending to tie one s shoes the acts we perform without thought until our bodies begin their long campaign of rebellion into deliberate calculated movements stafford who spent a decade in detroit getting pummeled behind offensive lines constructed from duct tape and prayer wasn t about to let some vertebrae issues stop him from throwing piss missiles on sunday now he joins kurt warner and marshall faulk in that exclusive rams club guys who won both mvp and a super bowl that s it that s the list three guys and stafford the dude who spent a decade in relative obscurity who we all assumed had missed his window is now in that pantheon what strikes you thinking about it is how close it came to never happening at all how many different versions of this story end with stafford retiring quietly remembered as talented but unlucky good but not quite good enough how the distance between those endings and this one comes down to what exactly a choice a series of choices the decision to show up when your back is screaming at you not to sometimes rarely enough that it felt noteworthy common enough that we kept believing in it the universe distributed its rewards with something approaching fairness and we watching from our living rooms and sports bars from our second screens and social media feeds allowed ourselves to feel that this meant something that justice was not merely a comforting fiction we told ourselves between commercial breaks this entry was posted in uncategorized and tagged american football jim everett table toss los angeles rams matt stafford nfl sports vintage football on february 6 2026 by gary trujillo the ghosts of 86 23 replies january 12 1986 i remember it of course i remember it how could i not it s tattooed on my brain seared into my consciousness like a cattle brand rams bears nfc championship soldier field the final score was 24 0 which doesn t begin to capture the brutality the absolute savagery of what transpired that frozen sunday afternoon the bears didn t just beat the rams they dismembered them humiliated them left them for dead on the frozen tundra while the monsters of the midway roared back to life and quarterback jim mcmahon strutted the sideline like caligula surveying the colosseum but real football fans never forget which is the pledge we lunatics retail to ourselves isn t it the little fascism of fandom this insistence that our capacity for grudge holding constitutes depth as if marinating in resentment for forty years makes you authentic as if the psychic real estate you ve ceded to strangers in helmets somehow ennobles the transaction so naturally i m treating this as revenge never mind that every sentient organism from that afternoon is either retired decrepit or fertilizing the earth never mind the rams themselves have been shuffled like a shell game los angeles to st louis to los angeles a franchise as geographically stable as a grifter s forwarding address the coaches are different the plays are different the cit ies are different but revenge revenge doesn t need logic revenge doesn t care about rosters or geography or the passage of time revenge is pure primal it s the thing that makes grown men scream at television sets and paint their faces in team colors and convince themselves that this time damn near 40 years later somehow matters because some scars don t heal not even the pope himself a noted chicago sports fan dragged from the vatican and forced to intercede could save the chicago bears fourth and 4 from the rams 14 twenty seven seconds caleb williams anointed savior heisman winner the latest quarterback drafted to absolve chicago of its original sins heaves a prayer off his back foot that somehow inexplicably improbably finds cole kmet in the end zone 17 17 eighteen seconds remaining the throw travels 51 2 air yards per next gen stats because of course we measure such things now and bears fans that masochistic congregation allow themselves the dangerous luxury of hope of thinking perhaps the cosmos has finally exhausted its cruelty budget it hadn t overtime arrived the rams went three and out punted and handed chicago the ball at midfield this was it the moment destiny had been preparing for except williams who d just conjured magic now conjured disaster an overthrown pass over the middle a diving interception by rams safety kam curl with 6 47 left the kind of throw that makes you wonder if the football gods aren t just indifferent but actively cruel los angeles took over at their own 22 and matt stafford led a march downfield like whispered secrets cutting through silence methodical ruthless inevitable they reached the chicago 24 before kicker harrison mevis with a physique like ernest hemingway and nicknamed the thicker kicker trotted onto the field and drilled the game winner sending the rams to the nfc championship and the bears back to their familiar corner of despair still cold as shit but a different ending different city different decade same exquisite agony this entry was posted in uncategorized and tagged 1985 nfc championship american football chicago bears humor jim everett table toss los angeles rams memoir nfl personal playoffs retro football sports vintage football on january 19 2026 by gary trujillo the rams the 49ers and the beautiful stupidity of conviction 14 replies i ve always hated the 49ers and they meaning the 49ers their fans the entire bay area apparatus of smugness and fog and sourdough based self satisfaction have always hated the rams right back which creates this beautiful terrible equilibrium this mutually assured animosity that s been humming along for three quarters of a century now like some vast engine that we all keep stoking because what else are we going to do find meaning in our work connect authentically with our inner child please i once asked my grandfather a niners fan to the marrow of his bone to take me to a rams game and he told me i ain t going to see no goddamn rams and it s been this way for 75 years he was not interested in dialogue in finding common ground in the undemanding reconciliation that contemporary culture insists upon he had chosen his side and that was that the thing about my grandfather s refusal and it was a kind of absolute refusal that suggested he would sooner have taken me to witness a public flogging or to tour a horse shit plant was that it arrived like some ancient decree handed down from mount sinai chiseled not in stone but in that particular california bedrock of sports fanaticism that stratum of collective identity running deeper than family loyalty political affiliation or religious devotion he simply thought with the certainty that others reserve for religious conviction that the rams were an abomination consider the theology of sports fandom it demands faith without evidence loyalty without reciprocation hope in the face of repeated disappointment it asks you to invest emotional capital in the performance of millionaires who have no idea you exist who may leave your city tomorrow if offered a better contract and yet we comply we transmit our allegiances generationally my grandfather could have spared me he could have said you re right let s go see the rams they re just another team but that would have been a kind of spiritual fraud the beauty and i mean this sincerely without irony though i recognize the absurdity even as i defend it the beauty of my grandfather s refusal was its purity in an age of promiscuous enthusiasm and non committal dabbling when people speak casually of rooting for five different teams across three different sports when allegiance has become as fluid and temporary as a hollywood marriage my grandfather s stubbornness stood as a kind of monument to an older fiercer way of being he would no sooner have attended a rams game than he would have voted republican eaten sushi or worn a pair of designer jeans these were not options available to him within the circumscribed universe of his convictions he had built a self and unfortunately the load bearing walls of that self included an undying...