stay clean

Four score and seven years ago, our primary culture hero put forth an indisputable notion:

sometimes it's about being ferociously stoned.

In more recent times, all heroes have fallen, myths bled of use, our tongues are rotten, no hope nor art can stand under the weight of an American moral and sensual vacuum, no voice penetrates the echo-shield, and all connected conversation withers, dies, is replaced by infinite varieties of infinitely monotonous masturbation. Stoned, numb, isolate, I find ferocious ambivalence now more my speed.

With respect to the Avs, no knowledge whatever is possible. At this moment, no known theory of hockey can predict the squad's performance:

• in goal:
  two brand-new twineminders, one over the hill, one gamble turned absolutely terrifying*.
• on the blueline:
  a wholly revamped roster, no proven offensive defenseman, and a wholesale change in style, from speed kills to the bigger they are, the harder they hit. No way to tell how long this will take to work, if indeed it can work.
• up front:
  
  A couple known quantities--Dutchy, Stats, Hejduk--supplemented by a full raft of the underwhelming (Lindstrom, McClement), the unlikely (Mauldin, McLeod), & the unreliable (Mueller).

It's a cardboard-flat roster coached by a cipher, a year-long symphony of bottles smashed in the parking lot, a season of shaky-handed morning-after head-shaving parties (to punish where all the bad thoughts live, banish their efflorescences with Oster buzz and jackhammer drums), a grind of searching for moral victories, nine months of nights of sullen drinking and dread-suffused daylight hours leading up to another dull-eyed witnessing of a savage beating received in some another shitty city***.

Everything in the back end smells to me like a competent but slow D in front of goaltending that's below the league average.

This is a step up from last year, mind you, which "boasted" an unending goaltending nightmare of frankly Turcovian proportions behind a non-mighty mite-sized defensive corps. This year's forwards look to have some difficulty with scoring, in the way that this year's first-graders look to have some difficulty with specifying a decision procedure to determine the truth of arbitrary propositions in the theory of Peano arithmetic.

It's a likeable enough bunch--Erik Johnson, Stastny, Matt Duchene, Giguere, Hejduk, David Jones** are all figures earning respect and affection through performance and demeanor--but I note all of these are, charitably, players of the second tier.

We're fucked.

--Chris Collision, who
has eyes that see
who has a brain that thinks
who has a mouth that speaks
and goddamn it will
because he's tired of hearing all this shit
about making do playing ball the way things are and dealing with it

*This offseason, Semyon Varlamov nearly went to the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team that died in a plane crash. He spent 8 years in their program. I suspect strongly the Avalanche gave up two good draft picks to acquire a man who has just had the permanent whammy put on him.

**On David Jones: I am reminded of a crack someone once made about Eddie Johnson--who scored more points in the NBA than any other player who never made an All-Star team--"he's the perfect player to be the star of this (Sacramento Kings) team (that nobody cares about and that is going nowhere)". If I remember aright, the comment actually ran "the perfect player to be the star of a team that plays in a city most Californians can't find on the map". This is what it feels like to be led in scoring by a man named "David Jones" (who didn't manage to attain 30 goals...).

***Probably Columbus.