The Origin of The Rooster

On how this humble operation got its name.

Strangers on the street routinely approach me and say, “Sir, where did the name The Rooster come from?” It happened three times yesterday.

My usual response is that a rooster is a dumb barnyard animal that crows at all hours of the day—but will also defend its turf to the death.

However, new customers have recently swollen the ranks of The Patriots Caucus. And to mix it up, I thought I’d finally explain how this humble operation got its name.

It’s a story that starts when I was 16.

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The world was a different place in 2002. I was a high school sophomore and considered Jack Black one of the funniest people alive. He had some skit I’ve since long forgotten the parameters about, but it had a part with him hiding in the bushes where he exclaimed, “You’ll never catch The Rooster!”

For whatever reason, my two best friends and I thought that was the height of comedy. We rewound it countless times and died laughing like the puerile juveniles we were.

A couple weeks later at school, I started a running bit where I would write ransom notes for pets and drop them in random lockers. The idea of people reading them utterly confounded was the type of thing that I found funny at 16. But I always signed the letters as The Rooster.

That winter, as my birthday approached, my parents were incessant about buying me a gift. Even then, I was one of the most humble people alive, and I rebuffed numerous attempts. But I finally broke down and said you know what? I want a domain name. I had been writing short stories about Marion Harding High School in my AOL Instant Messenger profile, and they were a hit with my classmates.

The name of that domain? The-rooster.com, a URL that you can use today.

The blog was a 16-year-old’s attempt at reproducing Maddox’s “Best Site in the World,” which, again, was the kind of internet content I found funny as a 16-year-old virgin. It was basically the common gripes you’d hear from any teenager about their high school, only with more typos, butchered grammar and misspellings than a normal dispatch I’d write today.

My life changed over Christmas break. While attending a basketball game, I was walking to the concession stand (probably to buy something healthy like Twizzlers and a Pepsi) when my high school principal stopped me.

“Hey, D.J.,” he said.

“Hello, Coach Mac, sir,” I said to the man who hadn’t coached in 20 years, but everyone still called him coach because we Marionaires love our monikers.

“When school is back in session, we’re going to have to talk about your website. What is it? The Rooster.”

I can still feel the frosty chill that went down my spine because I was your standard-issue middle-class nerd. My biggest crime in school had been stealing pencils from the elementary school office until the guilt got the better of me, and I returned them all while crying. I hadn’t been in trouble in my life.

But weeks later, I would learn that my dumb little blog—I don’t even know if “blog” was a word in 2002—that I wrote every night after school for my dumb little friends had traveled beyond my circle of comfort.

One article I wrote was entitled “Spanish with Miss Pannett,” and it was about how much I hated Spanish class with Miss Pannett. The principal told me she came to him in tears over the post. She would later fail me by one point on my final exam. My name, “Fidel,” was hereby banned from his classroom.

An article called “Fat Black Girls” also complained about fat Black girls in the hallways. In retrospect, the post was wildly racist and something I would kick the shit out of 16-year-old me if given the chance.

I also wrote short stories about my experiences at Harding High School. One, entitled “The Fall of a Warrior,” was about my friend blasting a special needs student in the face during a game of dodgeball. Looking back, I’m still unsure how my two gym teachers never got sued or lost their jobs.

One day, I quoted my friend about jizzing in a girl’s hair. Again, this is the type of thing 16-year-olds talk about at the lunch table like it’s something they’re actually doing.

The football coach incorrectly thought my friend “JHarry” was talking about his daughter. He tried to get the star middle linebacker, one of my good friends, to punch me in the nose. He later fired me from the gig of cutting football film every Saturday morning in exchange for cold, leftover pizza.

I spent more time in the principal’s office that year than I had in my entire career. It reached the point where teachers offended by my writing would call me to the office to air their grievances.

And again, the only thing shocking about the original Rooster is that a student was writing his deranged thoughts down for public consumption. I’m sure teachers have become enured to that in the age of social media.

The other problem was that my mom was on the school board, and the teachers were heading for contract negotiations. How could my mom negotiate in good faith when she lets her son personally insult them on the internet?

In retrospect, my antics were merely a cry for help. My parents were going through a divorce that I would only realize, years later, thanks to hours of therapy, how much it affected me at the time. But I had burned too many bridges by that point.

My career at Harding High School culminated in Biology class under a teacher we called “The Colonel.” He had never served in the military, and we used the name mockingly.

The Colonel always had a saying for kids who scrambled to complete their homework before the bell rang class into session. “Homework is for home.”

Well, The Colonel also had a nasty habit of not teaching through the end of class. On those days, he would expect us to work on our homework.

One day, he caught me doodling on my homework assignment and told me in no uncertain terms to get my ass in line.

“Homework is for home,” I said.

“D.J.,” he said, “If I come back around and you’re not doing your work, I’m sending you to the principal’s office.”

And that he did minutes later on a charge of “insubordination.” Years later, he would admit that he thought serving three days of in-school suspension (sitting in a concrete cellar and doing busywork throughout the day in silence) would “be good for me.” I carry a vendetta against him to this day.

I knew the game had changed when my mom picked me up after the vice principal called her and explained the situation.

“You can transfer to Pleasant if you want.” My mom and I hated Pleasant High School. I would rather die than attend there, but I somehow knew at the time that I would never see the inside of Harding again as a student.

I transferred to River Valley High School in rural Marion County. Naturally, the administrators had some questions about my website. I agreed to tone it down, and I did, to the detriment of the site. It was never the same at River Valley, which was probably good as I did my best not to graduate anyway.

The Rooster died somewhere in the back half of my sophomore year. When Harding High School built a new school, my mom bought a commemorative brick that said, “The-Rooster.com.” She placed it in the center of the display in front of the new school.

Coach Mac would eventually have the school groundskeeper chisel it out. It was only returned under threat of a lawsuit by my mom.

The incident only solidified in my mind how much psychic damage you can do to those in power by typing blunt, poorly edited sentences into the internet.

In retrospect, I should have weathered the storm and gone back to school until the administration eventually expelled me for my internet posts. That’s what a kid at Delaware Hayes did with a similar site, and he got a $250,000 check because the court ruled he was entitled to his free speech while only posting from his home computer like I did.

But it’s probably for the best. I would have only done something stupid with the money, though paying off my mom’s house for all the troubles I caused her in a thankless profession that she loved would have been nice.

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In December 2018, I was still personally reeling from Jena Powell dumping my ass in our Statehouse race.

Though I had deluded myself into thinking I had a chance, my ultimate plan was to work for more impressive Democratic candidates I had met on the campaign trail.

Unfortunately, they all lost by similar margins as I did. In a rookie move, I had put a picture of me and Democratic gubernatorial Richard Cordray on my campaign literature to present an aura of legitimacy for a blogger running for Statehouse.

I didn’t anticipate Mike DeWine loaning himself $4 million to bury Cordray in commercials that painted him as personally responsible for Ohio’s backlog of rape kits. It probably would have been wiser to stand next to Bozo the Clown.

The Republicans swept the statewide executive offices in the last competitive General Election that Ohio will have in 20 years. Worse, I had quit my job blogging for Eleven Warriors to pursue this suicide mission because, for better or worse, it’s impossible for me to do anything in moderation.

I licked my wounds in Piqua by running to my favorite crutch of alcohol. Though I wasn’t yet depraved enough to drink Tito’s Handmade Vodka by the pint, I thought drinking six IPAs after dinner was “taking it easy.”

One day, however, I read about Substack, a new platform for independent writers. Typing insane sentences for strangers was and is my most marketable skill. I had a bit of a social media following from my Eleven Warriors days and my campaign.

All I needed was a name.

“What about The Rooster?” my ex-girlfriend said. The suggestion hit me like a thunderbolt. I created this blog that night with a post, “Adios, Urban” that enraged Ohio State fans and led to my old boss declaring it “The Worst Take of 2018.”

I think it aged well.

I originally planned The Rooster to be like the Skull Session I used to write for Eleven Warriors. But instead of remixing ways to propagandize the local football team, it would feature news from around Ohio.

I think initially, it had like 50 paid subscribers. But through personal successes and total failures, the business line has continued to rise, even as my drinking became problematic in 2020 and reached a point in the summer of 2022 where I had to decide if I wanted to keep drinking Tito’s or alienate my friends and family and die alone in a gutter.

Retiring from alcohol was the best decision I made. I used to think that catching a buzz made me a better writer. I have since realized that I was producing content that other deranged people wanted to read in spite of my drinking. Anybody who has followed me from then to now will agree, even if the typos persist.

On January 3rd, after publishing a picture that I knew Speaker-Elect Derek Merrin and his Holy Rolly backers didn’t want on the internet, I asked myself, “What is the last thing these guys would expect me to do?”

Minutes later, I pedaled my bike to One Capital Square to witness Merrin learn the lesson of a lifetime. Seeing his followers, who had traveled from across the state, looking aghast at the voting board on the TV screen was what I’d imagine heroin is like. My only regret is that I didn’t regret them feeling 1/10th of the pain their policies have inflicted on Ohio’s most vulnerable citizens.

But that day, I realized that state government is just like high school. Worse, it’s as if the worst, most insufferable nerds stuck around high school for 20 years and deluded themselves into thinking they’re important people worthy of respect because they “work at the Statehouse.”

And standing amongst them, clad in my Hawaiian shirt and reeking of weed that I was still smoking like a numbskull, I realized that, despite my flaws, nobody was up there who played ball like I did. I could run the same playbook as I did in high school and garner the same results.

And that’s precisely what happened. A prominent Republican recently relayed that Lt. Governor Jon Husted has a deep loathing for me. All because I busted him up outside the Statehouse for drawing a $21,600 salary from a bank he regulates.

I welcome his hatred as much as I welcome the support of The Patriots Caucus. Because it goes back to that age-old lesson I learned as a youth. Most people would be surprised to learn how much psychic damage you can inflict on ostensibly powerful hobgoblins by routinely posting poorly edited sentences on the internet.

THOSE WMDs. How The Onion decided to release its first post-9/11 issue… The troubled life and death of Cindy James… What we really know about the CIA and crack… Why I sleep in a different bed than my husband… That’s what I call Ponzinomics.