How I Found Tom Brady Where The Streets Have No Name

My wife is pissed and my three young children are upset. No, not because the Cardinal’s season is in a tailspin and Kyler looks like garbage, but because I have been out on the road for too long, travelling the globe to meet my long lost sister I recently discovered was alive and working as a nanny for a wealthy family in Bavaria. The sister is a story for another blog, another website. Long story short, she wasn’t my sister (shocker) but a tricky biddy who fled Ukraine and made a fake account on www.FindYourLostSiblings.com, a shameful website filled with refugees looking to get to America by catfishing good people like myself looking for their lost siblings. Apparently The Mexican Doctor’s Alliance database was hacked and my personal information was leaked across the globe for purchase (don’t tell my wife about that). Hence how this busty blonde from Kiev got a hold of my info and duped me into believing she was my sister. But really I just used this as an excuse to go to Munich to see the NFL play their first game in Germany so my wife wouldn’t think I was on another football related trip. So here I am, sitting in a tiny hotel room outside Munich with my fake sister. The last thing I’ll say on the matter for those still interested is that Denny Greens has offered to take my fake sister in and marry her seeing she is actually quite attractive but I am very hesitant knowing his close ties with Matthew Perry and the events around his recent suspension. Denny Greens loves wild women and I am not sure if that is good or bad in this situation.

Anyways, that is why I set off to Europe. I left a few weeks ago and decided to pitch a stop in London first. I went to London for two reasons. First to report on the Broncos-Jaguars game at Wembley Stadium but also to meet up with fellow colleague and journalist Herman Dootmore.

Dootmore heads our Spotlight team and is currently investigating Jets owner Woody Johnson’s murky British connections from his time as former US Ambassador to the United Kingdom under the Trump Administration. After sharing a few too many hefty pints with Dootmore over some fish and chips and listening to his stories of the wild Boris Johnson parties he’s been attending since Boris got the axe from Parliament we got to thinking and pulled some strings to get us an interview with Bronco’s quarterback Russell Wilson.

We basically made another shitty website, this one a front for a fake Norwegian Water Company, VallhallaVann. We claimed to bottle water straight from fjords deep within ancient Scandinavian tribal grounds where Vikings once trekked as part of their vision quest in becoming warriors and sons of Odin. We said the water contained special nano bubbles that improved muscle regeneration and stamina and that we then take this same water to Iceland to filter it through volcanic rock but only during the deepest of winter months when the northern latitudes are farthest from the sun and thus out of reach from the sun’s harmful radiation that secretly poisons all water by .034 nanograms. We said we were able to reduce this contamination over a hundred fold to just .000041 nanograms. We relayed all this to Russell’s agent since Russell is impossible to reach and sure enough we were in a room alone with Russell the afternoon before the big game against the Jaguars. Russell was very kind and very excited to say the least for an opportunity to try out ValhallaVann (we dumped some Fijis in a fancy crystal decanter for him). The following is a portion of our interview with him, most of it needing to be cut since we had no clue what he was talking about as you will soon see.

JC: Well, Russell, I’m glad you like the water and are interested in partnering with us. We believe your Dangeruss and Mr. Unlimited branding is an excellent match with the story behind VallhallaVann.

RW: I love the water fellas. You can really taste those bubbles. I mean, I’m already feeling dangerous. You guys have any more you could give me before the game? I would love to share some with the o-line. Got to get some of for coach too (chuckles).

JC: Sure, we can get you some more. Anyways, we are curious on the reports about your long flight to London, that you were exercising and watching film while the rest of the team was sleeping. You see, we are trying to market to elite athletes like yourself, and we’re curious if there was some secret or clue that a quarterback like yourself has for his success. Is it as simple as working harder, longer, while others sleep? You see, we disagree, we think there’s something more. Something up here, in the mind, something that the nano bubbles can unlock. I’m interested what you think about that.

RW: (laughs) You want to know if I’m feeling jet-lagged before the game tomorrow.

JC: Well, yes, sort of, but really how do you beat the jet-lag while pushing your body harder than all your teammates. Well, you know what, I’ll be honest. What’s the deal with the jumping jacks and high knees on the plane? Is there something more behind that? Because I think there is. I think you’re hiding some secrets you don’t want to share with the rest of the media.

RW: Do you want the dangerous answer or the unlimited answer? HD: Both.

JC: Yes, both, please.

RW: (smiles) Good. You see, we’re talking about time here essentially, and our sense of time involves not only some awareness of duration and of temporal ordering, but also of the distinctions that we habitually make between past, present, and future. There is some evidence that our awareness of these distinctions, and hence of the transient, or transitional nature of time, is one of the most important faculties distinguishing man from all other living creatures. Indeed, it would seem to be closely connected with our faculty of self-consciousness. But are these distinctions between past, present and future merely a peculiarity of the way in which our minds happen to work, or is there some external factor corresponding to them?

JC: What?

RW: Exactly. On this very question expert opinion is divided. Many philosophers and scientists believe that, although there exists an external time, it consists solely in the before-and-after-sequence of events and is not concerned with the distinctions that we make between past, present, and future. In other words, to use McTaggart's terminology, external events can be associated with the B series but not with the A series. Time is the mode of activity, and without activity there can be no time. Consequently, time does not exist independently of events, but is an aspect of the nature of the universe and all that comprises it.

HD: I see.

RW: Our actual perception of time is a complex process. Beneath the level of consciousness beat the innumerable clocks of cellular and physiological activity. Although in the course of evolution man has become less dependent than other forms of life on biological rhythms, he is not entirely emancipated from them, as is evident for example in the modern complaint of jet-lag fatigue. Our cognitive time-sense, however much it may be controlled by other factors, is superimposed on the rhythms of the biological clocks that beat silently within us, and these have been selected in the course of our evolution because of their close chronometric relation to external influences of an astronomical nature associate with 'universal time'.

JC: So you beat jet-lag by controlling your consciousness to alter you biological clock?

RW: No, I didn’t beat jet-lag. I just said we can’t be entirely emancipated from time. But you can control it. Look here, our conscious awareness of temporal phenomena involves psychological and sociological factors that overshadow the physiological, right? It depends on processes of mental organization uniting thought and action. Thought. Action. Our consciousness runs like this, dominated by the tempo of our attention, acquired by the process of learning. As far as we know, all animals live, like very young children, entirely in the here and now, but man, man has gradually learned to transcend the limitations of the 'eternal present'. Man has become unlimited.

HD: And you have become unlimited?

RW: Well, yes, we all can too, but let me put it this way. There is no reason yet to doubt that the fundamental physical constants are truly invariant in time as well as in space. There’s no reason doubt that there is a unique basic rhythm of the universe. You see what I’m get at? JC: I think so. You’re changing the rhythm of the universe, therefore becoming unlimited?

RW: No, no, no. I am locking my mind in with the universe and playing my chords, my cells, into the sound that is present around me. I am seeing the clocks, the beats, the music of the cosmos, flowing through my biological body as my mind observes from above. But this is all not solely mind dependent. My mind can’t control, but it can blend, it’s not one or the other, you see. To quote Lotze, ‘we must either admit Becoming or else explain the becoming of an unreal appearance of Becoming'. And to those who believe in what William James called the 'block universe' and what Milic Capek calls 'the myth of frozen passage', we can put the question as this: if events are eternally there and we merely come across them in the course of our experience, how do we get the illusion of time's transience without presupposing transient time in its origin?

JC: I have no clue.

RW: Exactly.

HD: You share any of this with your teammates?

RW: Oh yeah. I share as much as I can with all my teammates. It’s all in books too you know.

JC: And what does your coach Nathaniel Hackett think about all this? RW: (laughs) Maybe I shouldn’t have shared so much so fast with coach. I think I busted his mind a bit on the concept of time, hence the late clock management issues so far this season. But we’re getting there. We’re in London, baby. And you know what’s in London?

JC: What? RW: The biggest clock in the world. Big Ben.

HD: You are an incredible man, Russell. You know that? RW: Oh, I know.

If you understood all that then god bless you. Russell Wilson blew my mind. For a moment I wish VallhallaVann was real and that I could go into business with him. But alas after the interview me and Dootmore proceeded to ignore the water requests Russell’s agent ardently demanded from us and instead headed to the London Library to investigate where Russell was getting all this information on time and space. Scouring through the catalog while consulting the interview tapes we found some old dusty books. Whitrow, G.J (1961) Natural Philosophy of Time, Second Edition. McTaggart, J.M.E. (1927). The Nature of Existence, Vol. 2. And of course, Lotze, H. (1884). Metaphysics (translation B. Bosanquet). Unfortunately we couldn’t sit there and read too much of them since the pubs were closing soon but sure enough they were the books Russell was referencing. The Librarian wouldn’t let me check out any of the books since I was American but she did give us some good pub recommendations from which we proceeded into a spiraling rabbit hole of drinking where all I can remember before waking up on a bench in Hyde Park the next morning was a dancer in a pink dress at the Blue Rabbit in Soho and devouring a plate of crappy meat pies besides a fat man in a Kangol hat. Luckily I had all my stuff with me when I awoke and soon reconnected with Dootmore who I found at a diner. His eyes were razed and he looked terrible, his tweed jacket crumbled and haggard. He said his head hurt. He'd been awake since the day before. He said the pink dress from Soho had given him some bennies and he spent all night and morning back in the Library reading up on Lotze and teleological idealism.

We agreed to shake it all off, get some coffee, and went to Wembley for the game where we found our seats among a group of Jags fans from Shaftesbury who had snuck in some flasks of Scotch which they gladly shared with us throughout the game. The Broncos ended up slaying the Jags 21-17 despite Russell playing mediocre like he has the whole year. I wondered how he would have played if he did indeed have ValhallaVann on the sideline. Surely Jags quarterback Trevor Lawrence could use some Viking water, looking like a bust yet again after throwing two interceptions and passing for a meagre 133 yards in a fifth straight loss for the London home team from Florida. I asked Harold, the accountant from Shaftesbury, what he thought of his second year quarterback and former phenom. “Fookin’ wanker he is. No better than Bortles!” “Would you rather have Kyler Murray?” I asked. He didn’t answer but rather winced, took another swig of Scotch, and stumbled off to the loo claiming he had to “piss his dick out”.

That was London. Next was finding my long lost sister who wasn’t my sister and who I wasted way too many euros on stupid trains to find. Again, I’d rather not go through all that here, but at the end of it all I found myself stuck with a refugee in the basement room of an inn outside Munich trying to get a ticket to the Bucs-Seahawks game to make my trip to Germany worth something. I had no luck getting a ticket. Apparently there had been over three million requests for tickets to the game and football is way more popular than you’d think in Germany, even more so than England. I wandered the streets of Munich to find a decent internet café and by chance walked by a huge tower with Geno Smith painted across it. That’s when it happened. That sudden deep inconsolable moment of sadness that comes occasionally in your life and you wander what it’s all for. Seeing Geno Smith’s face on a building in Munich was such a moment. Where am I? Who am I? Such questions abounded as I walked as a foreigner among leagues of pale Germans.

I picked up an English newspaper instead of going to an internet café and headed to a beer garden. My fake sister was blowing up my phone asking where I was but I ignored her and took an aggressive gulp from my dunkel-filled-stein as I flipped through the paper. Just as I couldn’t feel even more down, I discovered in a painful revelation that my small crypto holding with FTX that I hadn’t checked in on in months had likely gone caput as the company was collapsing towards bankruptcy and that their CEO Sam Bankman-Fired was going full Denny Greens with a curse-ladened apology thread on Twitter. “What the fuck Matt Damon?” I yelled aloud to myself, nearly knocking over my stein. I read on hoping for a statement from Matt Damon who had personally challenged me during a Sun’s halftime broadcast on TNT last winter to invest in crypto. But I was wrong, Matt Damon was shilling for a different crypto company, crypto.com. FTX had Tom Brady for their spokesperson. My god, I thought, Brady is having a rough year. Sitting with the Bucs at 3-5, recently divorced from Gisele, 45 years old, and now all his investments in FTX have gone to shit because some whiz-kid named Sam made a labelling error to make him think he had 0% leverage instead of 170% with billions on the line. Has Tom Brady hit rock bottom?

Has Tom Brady hit rock bottom? Is the golden child finally defeated? The question gnawed me. The man has been in my life so long and I have gone through every emotion with him that I wasn’t even sure how to feel. Whatever I felt, I had to see him play in Munich. I needed to stand by my fellow American in this foreign country. I finished my stein and went roaming the streets to find a ticket. I found a German named Michael in the Marienplatz who said he could help. He helped book me a deal with another German on Schmidtslist, the German equivalent of Craigslist. He said it was fifty-fifty chance the seller was real and I had to go out to Paunzhausen to pick up the ticket in person and that it was 670 euros for nosebleeds. “Paunzhausen? Jesus Christ, where the hell is Paunzhausen?” It wasn’t close, but nonetheless, I accepted the deal and went to the train station to get to Paunzhausen.

I had written down all the instructions of how to get to the seller’s house in Paunzhausen but to no surprise after switching off from my third train I was lost and found myself walking in a dark little German hamlet with no cell service. I felt like my fake sister. I tried to find an open business to speak with someone for help but everything was closed and the one bar I walked in was filled with old Germans who each gave me a terrible glare when I proclaimed, “Ich bin ein Amerikaner.”

“Ist das Paunzhausen?” “Nein.” “Fuck,” I muttered as they laughed at me walking out.

I attempted retracing my steps to the train station but I found myself walking on a country road I did not recognize and as the moon came out and the temperature began to drop into whatever Celsius is cold here in this terrible country I started to hear howling. Awful nightmares of werewolves and other monsters assaulted my mind for was this not the land where all the terrible fairy tales came from? I swear I saw breadcrumbs and that the Germans were fucking me. I ran as fast as I could but I only got myself more lost until finally I stumbled upon a castle, a dark gothic fort of stone, full of towers and shadows. There was light though. I ran to the front doors and knocked, rubbing my hands for warmth as I waited.

“Wilkommen bei Schlossblut!” The doorman exclaimed as he opened the door. He was tall and strong and wearing slacks and a tight collared shirt. I could see the veins bugling in his neck. He spoke English but warned me against travelling to the train station 20 kilometers away at this time of night, explaining it would be quite dangerous to do so. I asked if they had a room I could have for the night but he said this would not be possible. I replied I heard wolves outside and didn’t want to go back there but the large man just laughed. We stood there for a while looking at one another till an old woman in a luxurious red coat and fox pelt around her neck walked by. She was holding a cigarette longer than a hot dog and gave me look. “Amerikaner?” She asked. I said, “yes, mam,” and she smiled and goddamit and I know its bad but I put on the charm. She invited me in for a drink at the bar.

Her name was Alma. She wore merlot lipstick and all kinds of makeup to cover her age. She was in decent shape for her age but she was surely pushing seventy. She had huge fake breasts, thick fake lips, long black-dyed hair and she said she was from Berlin and in Bavaria with her husband Karl who was a businessman for Audi. Karl was a Buccaneers fan and they were going to the game on Sunday. I asked if they had an extra ticket and that’s when she gave me the most terrible grin. My knuckles tightened and I began to feel the sweat on the back of my neck. I thought back to that giant mural of Geno Smith in Munich. What am I doing? Oh Lord, forgive me for I have sinned but goddamit there’s werewolves outside I swear and I really want to go see this football game. I smiled back.

A few brandys later Alma was leading me through the castle. Schlossblut, it was called. She said it was here that a prince once hid Martin Luther five centuries ago during the reformation as he was being persecuted by the Catholic church. That it was here that he encountered Jesus and the Devil in the same room. She said all this as she led me past rooms and halls where I glanced and saw the most horrific of things. I saw a long room with a mirror at the end and the walls all frescos of fairy tales and in the room ten men standing around watching two women engage in acts I wont repeat. I saw into a bedroom where an old man sat in a chair beside a younger man, the two of them hooked up with cords and tubes as the young boy’s face went pale and gaunt as the old man groaned with pleasure as the boy’s blood dripped into his veins. I kept my head down the rest of the way to Alma’s room.

Karl was out, Alma said, and we had an hour. As you could imagine it took some time for the old whistle to moisten and some time for me to get going and after that good heavens if only I could have lasted that long at nineteen, my body refusing to seal the wretched act. But I did it and when the nightmare was over Alma said she would have two tickets to the game for me waiting at the will-call. And that's how I cucked Karl and got two tickets to the Munich game. Was that hour with Alma worth it? I’ll be asking that question for a long time I imagine.

I walked out of Alma’s room and wandered the castle looking for the exit. I had no clue where I was going to sleep but I had to get out that castle. The place was a maze and as I walked down a hall of rooms I began to hear music. “And I wait…without you…with or without you.” It was Bono. Someone was blasting U2 in their room. I went to the door and listened in and heard a man singing to himself. He was awful. “And you give yourself away…and you give yourself away…and you give...and you give…and you give yourself away!” I leaned my ear back from the door and to my shock nearly knocked over a flower pot sitting by the door. I quickly moved to grab it and in doing so bumped against the door to the room. As I set the flower pot back into place, I heard the music stop and the door open behind me. “Hello?” a familiar voice called.

And there he was. The golden one. The comeback kid. Tommy Terrific. TB12. The Goat, standing before me in his Brandy brand underwear with his amazing hair. The jawline of Apollo speckled with that incredible salt and pepper scruff.

I stood slack jawed. He asked if I worked for the castle and if I was here with the steamed towels he requested. I didn’t know what else to say so I told him to truth. “I just banged some rich German baroness to get tickets to see you Sunday. I had no idea you were here.” He gave me a strange look then looked out in the hallway to check if anyone else was around. No one was. He told me to come in.

His room was posh and huge. In the background I could hear the Joshua Tree album still being played softly. “I have scaled these city walls only to be with you.” He told me to take a seat, turned the music back up a bit, and as I sat down the beautiful voice of Bono slipped through my ears and put into place everything I was feeling. “I have held the hand of the devil. It was warm in the night. I was cold as stone.”

“God I fucking love U2,” I exclaimed.

Brady smiled and nodded. I could tell he had been crying recently. “Yep,” he said with a choked voice. “Fucking great, aren’t they?”

And soon enough just like that we were off sharing our love of U2, blasting One and Where The Street Have No Name as we sang along together. I then told him my whole story of how I got there. How Russell Wilson was either genius or insane. How a refugee tricked me into believing she was my long lost sister. How a giant portrait of Geno Smith in Munich sent me spiraling into darkness to this accursed castle and into the belly of Alma. Brady laughed and laughed. I didn’t understand what was happening though. Why was he letting me talk to him? Why was he here?

“This German friend of Gisele recommended the place to me while I was here. Said it could help me to recuperate and relax and that they had a good treatment for jet-lag. Giselle’s got a lot of freaky friends. Something I won’t miss. I don’t know. Well, you’ve seen the place. Good god, they tried to give me a fucking blood boy. And then these sluts kept coming to my door. I switched rooms with Alex so I could just be left alone.”

“Alex?”

“Yeah, Alex Guerrero, my personal trainer. He’s here with me. What he’s doing now I got no clue.”

“Probably banging sluts.”

Brady turned sad after I said this, his eyes drifting off from me to nowhere in particular. I felt terrible for the remark. I said I was sorry and asked how he was doing.

“How do you think? I got a lot of shit going on. I’m forty-five, recently divorced, just lost an insane amount of money in FTX, and instead of watching film I’ve been listening to U2 crying my eyes out. Not good.”

“Yeah, FTX really screwed me too.”

“Should have listened to Peyton and put my money into Exxon and Chevron. That piece of shit was right.”

He then asked me if I was a fan of the Bucs but I said no I was a Cardinals fan. He chuckled and said he’d been watching a lot of their tape seeing the Seahawks had just crushed the Cards twice in the last month. “I aint losing to Geno fuckin’ Smith. I’ll tell you that.”

“His face is all over Munich,” I responded. “And you just lost to Mitch Trubisky and PJ Walker.”

“I also lost to Eli Manning in the super bowl. Twice.”

“You also won seven super bowls.”

“Yeah, I fuckin did, didn’t I?”

“And three million are flocking to see you on Sunday.”

“I saw that. It’s going to be epic.”

“It is,” I smiled. “Fuck the Seahawks!’

Brady then got this look in his eye. The look you see in your crazy friend from your high school team that you never keep up with and who you know to avoid when he’s had a few too many drinks in him. The look of fire and anger that says he is going to do something totally batshit crazy. “I’m going to give them something they’ve never seen before,” Brady muttered to himself.

I didn’t know how to respond. He stopped looking at me and just stared at the ground like a maniac. Something had overtaken him. He was possessed. He suddenly stood up from his seat and wiped his jaw in consternation. God damn he’s a handsome man when he does stuff like that.

“Look, I appreciate our time here together,” he said. “In a way, I needed this. I needed a buddy. But you go to go now. I got to watch some film and get some sleep.”

I nodded my head, stood, and shook his hand. “Best of luck, good sir.”

I left the castle and slept in the woods off the road. Well, I didn’t really sleep, rather laid there in the dark thinking about Brady and all that had happened. My head was aflame and body cold as ice, my thoughts flashing between Alma, Geno Smith, Martin Luther, Russell Wilson, FTX, Jesus, Brady, and Blood Boys. And then the words of Bono came back to me, sweet, beautiful Bono. “I believe in the kingdom come. Then all the colors will bleed into one. Bleed into one. But yes I’m still running.”

At the first light of dawn I crawled out of the woods and made my way back to my fake sister at the inn. She was super pissed, deliriously mad believing that I had abandoned her. I reminded her yet again that she wasn’t my sister and that she wasn’t coming back with me but she wasn’t having it and as I stood there with her screaming at me in Ukrainian the grace of god found me and I transcended the limitations of the eternal present and into the beat of the universe wherein I heard Bono’s voice and the words of Hermann Lotze and suddenly all bled into one and I discovered myself Becoming.

“It’s all one song,” said the great Bill Walton. It truly is. And as I sit here writing these words, I find a little peace in this strange and scary foreign city plastered with the face of Geno Smith. I’m going to the game with my fake sister tomorrow. I bought us both Brady jerseys and we will be cheering hard despite whatever pain awaits us all afterwards. The beauty of football is truly unlimited.

PICK OF THE WEEK:

Buccaneers vs Seahawks Buccaneers (-2.5) When a man hits rock bottom, you ride with him to the top. All the money in the world on Brady.