The Rooster's Christmas Mailbag

The Rooster answers all your burning questions this holiday season.

Glorious morning. I figured instead of the usual daily grieve-and-jive in your mailbox, I’d mix it up by letting my readers do my job by asking me questions that I can turn into content.

I forgot to tell people to mention if they wanted to be anonymous or not. As such, they’re all treated anonymous. We’ll start with politics before some personal questions at the end.

Apologies for the brevity; I want to answer as many questions as possible before hitting Substack’s characer limit. If I didn’t get to your question and you still want to know, feel free to respond to this email, and I’ll try to respond personally.

God bless.

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Let’s talk politics…

Top 3 most insufferable lawmakers in the Statehouse?

1. State Senator Niraj Antani (R-Sewer)

2. State Senator Matt Huffman (R-Lima)

3. State Represenative Brian Stewart (R-Ashville)

Huffman, for alll his flaws, is at least intelligent. What makes Antani and Stewart so insufferable is they aren’t a quarter as smart as they think they are, and their ambition outstrips their mediocre talent.

What started your beef with Niraj?

To me, he represents everything wrong about Ohio politics. He won his seat by lobbying the widow of his predecessor at his funeral. He has never won a district that won’t gerrymandered for a Republican to win.

Oh, and he can commonly be seen boozing along High Street and violating state ethics laws.

But what really set it off was running into Antani at High Beck. He considers me a clown (I don’t even give him that much respect), but he wasn’t laughing the night I heckled him out of High Beck in May 2021.

I’m told he wants to run for Secretary of State. It’ll be over my dead body.

Most genuine Ohio politician?

Senator Sherrod Brown would probably be the most-polled answer. But I’m going with a true dark horse: State Senator-Elect Kent Smith (D-Euclid). The man loves rollerderby and his cats:

The man is too kind-hearted to win any true power in this state.

I'm kinda surprised the GOP didn't go hog wild in the lame duck. There is no real opposition anymore and they can do as they please but are not. Are they frightened of their own power or never fully committed to hobgoblin shit in the first place?

You and me both! As I wrote earlier this week, reading between the lines, it appears that a lot of the freaks in the House recoiled at Senator Matt Huffman trying to ram through his State School Board reform without asking any of them what that would look like.

Governor DeWine also said he would have vetoed the ban on transgender girls participating in high school sports, which was shocking to say the least.

Would Governor Dewine vetoing the trans athlete ban] be the most liberal action from an Ohio Republican since the early days of the pandemic?

Yes. It tells you what a loser this issue is for those that continue to push this nonsense. Those government officials should go get a real job.

Is Ohio doomed long-term to remain in the clutches of GOP Extremism, going Red for the foreseeable future? How can we mobilize to change the state government and hold extremists accountable?

I have bad news: Ohio is doomed to a Republican future. Our demographics problem, coupled with unambitious big-city leadership and incompetent state party leadership is an impossible mixture to overcome.

As the Republicans showed with legislative redistricting, they can’t be beat at the ballot box. We are Alabama of the North now. The only worthwhile act of resistance is to leave the state.

How did the Ohio Democrats lose so much?

The main reason is incompetant leadership. The watershed moment was 2014 when Ed FitzGerald, the golden boy of the Ohio Democratic Party and nominee against Tea Party governor John Kasich, got caught fucking an Irish national who was not his wife at 4:30 a.m. in an industrial center parking lot.

FitzGerald didn’t even have his driver’s license. And these losers ran him for government!

Rank the hobgoblinness of lawmakers?

The Ohio Republican Party is King Hobgoblin. Shortly below them are the corrupt Democratic machines that control Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dayton and Toledo.

Below hobgoblins, you have the gremlins that work for them. The gremlins deserve to be bullied, too. There are other ways to make a living under capitalism than carrying water for powerful people who don’t care about anyone who makes less than $150,000 a year.

Have any advice for somebody thinking about starting their own newsletter about local/state politics?

It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. You will likely need to write for a couple years before you’re making any money, unless you had a social media presence to leverage like I did.

Be consistent. You’re not going to build an audience writing sporadically. If you just want to write for your family and friends, then a consistent editorial schedule isn’t a problem.

Let’s get personal…

Any tricks or tips for kicking the Tito's habit? Thinkings it's that time for myself.

If you have thoughts of that nature, go ahead and make the move. You won’t regret it.

My biggest advice is to find a hobby, preferrably one that involves physical exercise. If you are a problem drinker like me, you’re not aware how much time you currently spend getting drunk. The good news is that your hobby can be literally anything other than drinking mind poison, and it will make you a better person.

Have you ever wanted to learn a foreign language? Have you ever wanted to get back in the gym? Maybe you want to become the next Iron Chef? The possibilities are truly limitless.

You also need to make it clear to your social circle that this is something you want to do. Anybody that wouldn’t fight you if you showed up to a function drunk needs to bet cut from your life, stat. They will get you drunk before you get them sober.

What has been the biggest letdown for you as a reporter? For example, a time when something you loved/enjoyed growing up turned out to be gross?

The culture surrounding Ohio State football. I was indoctrinated from an early age, so I have the sickness like a lot of perverts you see around here. But it was gross watching fans protect Urban Meyer like he was their personal friend. I left Eleven Warriors at the right time in retrospect. I wouldn’t have been able to pull punches and that would have led to problems.

Were you ever charged with a crime when you and your friends robbed a drug house in Montana?  Why did you split town and come to Ohio right after your friends were charged?

I got another question about Montana, but this one was spicier, so allow me to briefly set the record straight.

When I was 19, I conspired to rob an interstate weed trafficker of roughly 75 pounds of high-grade marijuana. You can do the math on that fool’s jackpot.

The original plan called for me to be an inside man during a deal for a quarter-pound of marijuana I had already planned to buy. The target, who would die a couple months later when he drove off a mountain while trafficking weed drunk, threw a party. Once inside, I bailed on the plan, which never called for physical violence, in about an hour.

My seven other co-conspirators chose otherwise. The robbery transpired on a Tuesdya morning. By Sunday, they were all locked up. I was the only one free.

I did not “split town” after the robbery. I lived in Montana from November 2007 to March 2008. I was never questioned by police. What was I supposed to do, turn myself in? Probably would have saved me some trouble. But I transferred to Ohio State instead. If that’s running and hiding, so be it!

But I was not charged for my role until May 2018 when I got snitched on. I was just charged with four four felonies but was given a suspended sentence, which I completed.

Legally speaking, and I want my haters in the back to hear this: I’ve never been convicted of any crime other than jaywalking in the summer of 2021.

Definitely one of the dumbest moments of my life. But nothing I’ve ever hid from. The victim of the robbery drove drunk off a mountain while carrying another major shipment of a weed a couple months later. I wish I were making that up.

Is being a electrician over, forever? You ok with that?

For those that don’t know, I got fired like a dog in a casino parking lot by my former electric contractor in the immediate fallout from the Urban Meyer story in October 2021. I have nothing but good things to say about the IBEW. I have nothing good to say about The Superior Group.

There are a lot of things I miss about construction. I enjoyed the work and still have a lot of friends in the trades. It’s not like I walked away with a smile on my face, but I’ve moved on to more lucrative work that doesn’t require six hours a week of night school.

Please advise. My friend group currently contains a bunch of lonely bitches who, I believe, are much more prone to drama because they aren’t getting fucked. It’s tearing my social world apart. It feels like it’s harder to date now post Covid. So many people I know are resistant to or unsuccessful on dating apps. But I need these bored losers to start getting laid and stop fighting. Help!

The only dating app you need is Twitter. I’m sorry but it’s true. Your friends’ first problem is they’re on dating apps that aren’t Twitter.

Secondly, this is why I don’t do group chats anymore! Sure, it sounds fun. You and your friends all getting to chat like it’s the two-bedroom apartment you guys called “Kushville” in 2011. But sometimes in groups, people start concentrating on their differences rather than their similarities.

It’s like going on a two-week group trip with 15 of your friends. You love your friends, but being around them 24/7 can get grating after awhile. At least for me. And I know that’s true for my friends when they hang around me.

Maybe none of this is your problem. In which case, you might be staring at the reality that the pandemic broke your friends’ brains in unspecified ways, and they aren’t coming back no matter how much they get laid.

But look at the brightside, at least they didn’t become a pandemic-denying right-wing freak like one of my former friends did.

Sometimes in life, though, you gotta make cuts. Friends should do more than endorse and enable every shitty decision you make in your life, but they also should make you feel positive feelings when they’re around. That’s a lesson I had to learn with some of my old friends, especially those that were only in my life for their liberal views on substance abuse disorders.

Don’t be afraid to end friendships that are only negative emotions flowing in one direction. That’s what your enemies are for.

Have you ever been in a fight at a wedding?

No. But I almost slapped a wan 30-year-old wearing suspenders at a wedding in Cambridge one time. I had been drinking Tito’s Handmade Vodka beforehand, if you can believe that.

Serious travel question, what’s a spot that doesn’t get talked about much that you’d say is a must visit?

That’s a hard needle to thread. But I enjoyed Marietta, Ohio, for a weekend. There’s is a lot of history and nature stuff down there. And most Ohioans are only familiar with the metro-area they grew-up in.

When are you going to run for office again? Any one will do…

The American people, by and large, aren’t ready for my views. And I’d never disgrace myself by lying to people I don’t respect about moderating them.

Never say never, but I won’t be running for anything anytime soon. I’m as disenfranchised at the local level as I am on the state.

What do you want for Christmas?

To reverse every major decision President Ronald Reagan ever made, thus triggering a postindustrial workers utopia within America.

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If you are a member of President Xi Jinping’s Patriots Caucus, and you still want your question answered, you can submit it in the comment section below or respond to this email and I’ll answer personally.

As always, thank you for subscribing to The Rooster.

ThOSE WMDs. What chefs make when they only have a bag of rice… Tips for dressing in the cold… Hot Wheels are one of the most inflation-proof toys… The cheapest ways to soundproof a room… I spent five years in a white supremacist gang… The shocking resolution of a 23-year-old cold case.