Alright @YouTheReader, the Yanks are playing so-so. I love being able to write about them. That said, I’ve found that when they are playing poorly, it’s easy to rip on them, but the next day I feel bad doing it afterward. It’s weird. When they are playing well, I’m inherently nervous that if I say anything nice about them I will be jinxing them and therefore my writing positive things about the Yankees on Week to Week Notes is to blame for their struggles. I know I’m nuts. I need to get over myself about that and just stay professional as a fair, balanced, honest, & objective sports writer. Anyway, here is a bit about life…
Life
Young Forever came out in early September ‘09. I was a freshman in high school at the time.
Not to come across too dramatic but this is a song that hopefully ten years from now I can do another Week to Week Notes write-up to on May 27, ‘33.
The original lyrics from Alphaville came out in September 1984. That’s kind of cool, my mom was 14 so right around the same age. It’s also pretty cool that a song her generation listened to was brought back in a modernized way by one of the best rappers to ever do it for my generation.
The bombs in reference to Alphaville were about the Cold War in the 1980s. USA vs Soviet Union, you probably know the deal, you learn about it a ton in US History class. In ‘09, the US was of course in a conflict in the Middle East that stemmed from 9/11. I was in the 1st grade that day and my family was living in Westwood, NJ. For most people I grew up with and are from around the Tri-State, there is a good chance that day is one of your first specific memories. I’m not saying I had any real conceptual ability to know what was really going on, hell even the adults back then did, but for me, it’s the farthest my memory goes back so despite being lucky that all my family worked in The City got home okay, of course, it was impactful of my childhood. There will be a day when us 90s kids will be the last to really understand what happened that day or what it was like to live in a world without smartphones & social media.
Not to get all morbid, but I’ve mentioned toward the end of last football season that as soon as NYC sent out a nuclear warning that basically just told us to “stay inside and wait for a signal”, I decided to give up on watching the news and focus on what I’m passionate about. Well, I’ll add to it. Right around when I first started posting Week to Week Notes links, all the “serious” people in the news and media were bickering at each other about masks, shots, bathrooms, guns, race, etc. I don’t want to come across as insensitive but those are serious topics that frankly I have no control over while sitting on my couch after work. I haven’t really stayed up to date on that, but I’m sure they still are bickering at one another.
From my perspective, I got to the point where I just said Fuck All of the News. Fuck All of the Media. I’m not a serious person, I’ll let the serious adults in the room handle that shit. Both sides of the aisle had just locked us indoors for 2 years and fed us bullshit about what the other side of the aisle was going to do. As far as I know, we all only live one life, so I’m going to focus on what I enjoy. Let’s see, I love sports and I enjoy writing stupid jokes for my friends during the fantasy football season on this thing I named Week to Week Notes. Screw it, why not go public with it, let the serious people worry about the serious shit, I’ll try my best to have fun writing about the unserious elements of life that people might enjoy. If it bleeds it leads is a real thing, so I’ll sometimes look a bit out there, but as long as I’m not hurting anybody, I’ll take my chances trying to build something that hopefully Unites people rather than divides.
Worry about today and what is in front of you that you can control. Stay in the moment and be present is what Jay-Z is saying. I’ll add an updated modern-day twist, if you’re on a date, put your phone on silent. If you’re with your significant other, throw your phone out the window. If you see me out in a group, don’t show me the latest shit you saw on TikTok or what funny shit you saw on the internet, I’d rather talk in person and communicate as humans have done for all of civilization. For the love of God, don’t be pulling out your phone to read out loud some shit I wrote on Week to Week Notes. @YouTheReader I need all the views from those friends of yours so send them the link and tell them to read it in bed hungover the next day. I’m kidding, I know nobody reads these out & about, most of you probably read it on the shitter.
This song specifically takes me back to a night 10 years today when I took a picture just to capture a moment of the end of high school. For people who didn’t know me in high school, I’m sure the people who I went to high school with are stunned I’m doing this now. Maybe not the Guinness part or sports, but the rest of this. It’s impossible for me to think about Week to Week Notes without thinking about my friends. The name for this came about while I was in college typing and posting about my friends' TRASH fantasy football teams. That isn’t that uncommon, but maybe how I got to this point is…
My family moved a ton around the Tri-State when I was a kid but I ultimately ended up growing up in a small town called Pearl River, New York. Prior to moving to Pearl River, I lived across the street from my grandparents in Westwood, New Jersey. I was pretty upset by the move, I made some friends in Westwood and I didn’t want to be the new kid again. Plus of course, it was the best having my grandparents right across the street. I hated the 3rd-grade idea of Pearl River at first, but I was promised we’d get a family dog and sure enough we did - Holly.
In school, no big deal but I was a low 90s GPA student. I sucked at science, it always weighed my GPA down. I liked simple math like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division because it was useful to know for sports statistics. No offense to all @YouTheReaders who like trigonometry but I found SohCahToa useless. I’d like to think I was above average, some may say Presidential, at high school Phys-Ed. I loved history, it was by far my favorite subject in school. Sometimes I wouldn't even have to study a lick and I could get an A, for some reason that was always the case even in college. Then there was the English or ELA. I could always write a solid essay, but at the time I never really thought anything of it. I just figured it was the English teachers doing a great job teaching sentence and paragraph structure combined with my mom always being a helpful proofreader. I was also never a big book reader. I got in my reading of words through articles and stats in the Daily News or in Sports Illustrated. This is why I never would have considered myself a sports writer/blogger/notetaker before all this because I never thought to really put the two together until I was in college writing Week to Week Notes for my high school friends, but that was just for fun.
I never really got into trouble in high school while IN school, but I hung out with the crowd that did. I only had lunch detention one time and that was because we got caught driving off campus during lunch. Other than that I was squeaky clean IN school. Outside of school, I was grounded every other month usually for drinking with friends and being the moron who almost always got caught. You probably already could have guessed that with the whole #GuinnessChallengeSeason thing going on.
Funny story, going into my junior year, I got a nickname and it wasn’t TD. It was Dave. My friends and I were having some sports debate centered around the Darrelle Revis/ Rex Ryan Jets and one of my friends told me to “shut the fuck up, David Hasselhoff.” I was shocked at how random that was and reacted a bit flustered by how ridiculous that sounded. That name has stuck to me like glue ever since. Eventually, I just embraced it, it’s best to just go with it, but yeah for my friends who still call me Dave today that was the origins. It’s not like I just woke up one day and decided I hate the name my parents gave me, it happened in the heat of a sports debate. Glad we cleared that up, but I’m still going to play with the Double-Entendre aspect in Everybody’s Favorite Dave for the laugh. What’s funny is most of my friends used to roast me for being into history, calling me an “old man” so I like using the Old Man Dave moniker now too. If I ever come across like I’m trying a bit too hard to be Davey Pageviews, trust me, I’m just trying to be Tom Davis but hey that can be difficult when almost everybody you know has been calling you Dave for half your life. By the way, I’ll be handing out Week to Week Notes cards outside Yankee Stadium for tomorrow’s game, wish me well, or don’t, I don’t care. 🫡
Lastly, I do a ton of “I’s and Me’s” in Week to Week Notes, but hopefully for people I grew up with you realize that I’m trying my best to represent us all, both the fellas and ladies. While I might be the village idiot writing this, I’m fully aware that we all came from a town full of village idiots and some of you were much smarter, funnier, non-gingery, whatever the case may be. If you don’t believe me, well, my senior yearbook quote was, “I’m not no angel but always remain true.” I guess some things are just meant to happen for a reason, like how after being an 8-year-old who didn’t want to move to Pearl River, life flew by, and 10 years ago today for some reason I felt the need to take a picture alone in the high school parking lot.
Now I look back at high school/college and I for sure glamorize parts of them in my own head with the passage of time, but they were fun and they shaped me into who I am today. I have a ton on my plate today, there is always a never-ending cycle of sports, music, and life so I have to be as sharp as a tack. I just stick to Guinness nowadays but to each their own!
I write Week to Week Notes for @YouTheReader for the past, present, and future. Quite literally, I write about history during Stumblin’ Along on Sundays. The first @YouTheReaders from the onset of Week to Week Notes know me from my past. The present, well that is quite obvious too. That’s everybody that has stuck around to read this now (past & present), that I’ve met along the way from drinking pints of Guinness, or have come across Week to Week Notes from scrolling on social media. Lastly the future, this part will probably sound a bit out there, but I’m writing something that hopefully will stick around for as long as the internet is a thing. That’s pretty cool if you ask me. Trends change. Popular apps change. Shit, people change but words don’t. Words will always have meaning as long as there are people around to read. 80 years from now is somebody really going to be interested in what we found funny on TikTok this weekend? They might, but they also might find my Week to Week Notes a bit different, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Maybe that’s a bit egotistical of me to think, but I’ve been thinking this way for a while. It’s why on every post at the start of this I have a date with ‘22 or ‘23 instead of 2022 or 2023 and why I type out every year in the 1900s.
Life is too short. No point in living in fear, do what makes you happy and you’ll find joy.
Let me mention this again. While I was in high school and getting out of college a part of me always wanted to work in sports in some way. Out of school, I applied to ESPN, sports marketing pyramid schemes, the Jets, the Yankees, BleacherReport, and even Barstool Sports. I never got a response from any of them. Remember last fall when I tagged every sports media company on one post on my 28th birthday? Well after getting ignored again that weekend I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to sell out to try and work for any of them anymore. I’d rather not have an editor above me, at least this way I have only myself to blame if people don’t like what is written. This ambition didn’t happen overnight, it happened a little bit more Week to Week.
Jay-Z’s nickname is “Young”. As generations continue to play his music, Jay-Z’s stories will continue to live on and stay young. This song in particular is timeless.