Hammock Review:

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

It was the hammock before the storm, as they say.

The hammock was a nice hammock in the courtyard of a hostel in the colonial district of Santo Domingo.

The hostel was conveniently located just a few minutes walking distance to the rum museum. This was fortuitous because one of my goals during this trip turned out to be testing rum’s properties as a coping mechanism when consumed in various quantities. One could say the rum museum provided the requisite academic anchor necessary for my stated goals.

Here is me literally drinking from the fountain of intellectualism.

Sometimes intellectualism is about choices:

Intellectualism is evidently also about grainy, poor quality photos.

Sometimes, such substandard photography is for the better, because I’m not sure what’s going on here:

But I am sure what’s going on here. Hemingway labeled Paris A Moveable Feast. Hemingway liked rum, but did he know it was the moveable tool of intellectualism?

Don’t show my dentist this photo:

The Hybrid Hammock (AKA The Hammock Before the Prius)

Or this photo.

Just kidding. I don’t have a dentist. Mine died of a heart attack, and I have not gotten a new one. But I stopped going long before he died, as I prefer to use hammocks as my healthcare plan (including vision and dental because hammock healthcare is quite comprehensive).

Without being weighed down by the reality of medical experts, we can ponder if rum spray has a cleansing quality like mouthwash. It is hard to say because these statements–-or probably any statement in any Hammock Review–-have yet to be evaluated by the FDA or be the subject of a comprehensive study by dentists.

Having not yet been endorsed by the vast majority (four) of dentists in a group of five necessary to pass through the vetting process of your local drugstore, perhaps I should explore other health properties of the mist.

Seeing as I was visiting an island known for sunshine, perhaps dermatology should be the medical science of application here. So, rather than approaching the situation orally, should I have instead sprayed the rum mist in my face as an act of forward-thinking skincare known as facial mist?

Probably not.

I am confident I did what was best for my health by ingesting the medication orally. No reputable doctor could possibly disagree (what sober doctor would rightly prescribe spraying rum directly into your face?).

With that settled, you are probably longing for a poetic description of how the mist interacts with the taste palette.

So here we go.

The mist hits your mouth in a mystical magical way that probably does offer the cleansing powers of magic, something dentists are usually far too skeptical of, having spent too little time honing their imagination in hammocks and too much time attending to their patients in dental chairs that have never been confused with hammocks (citation: no dental chairs can be found in any respectable—or back-alley—hammock retailer and no hammocks have ever been found in “respectable” dental supply catalogs, or back-alley dental vendors).

If this bottled misty rum was not first developed by dentists, might it be the last remnants of the old Celtic magical mist féth fíada? This is unlikely as I did not attain its traditional power of invisibility or transformation into an animal typical of such mist.

But perhaps I did not drink enough?

Alas, life is full of such unanswered questions that we must hope get answered in the thereafter—perhaps when we die from drinking too much rum.*

But questions of science can often be answered in the here and now, in this life. So if we instead approach the rum mist from a meteorological standpoint, we can rightly consider it the mist before the storm.

If you are wondering if mist typically precedes storms or is an accurate indicator of generally dangerous weather on the horizon, we present to you this logical statement: weathermen and women neglect to center their expertise around hammocks and fail to consistently evoke what should be staple meteorological terms like “good hammock weather,” so we will invoke karma and completely ignore their expertise here (citation: Bible, Deuteronomy, Eye for an Eye, Tooth for a Tooth, etc.) and simply state outright that mist–-whether rummy or weatherly–-often precedes storms.

If the above logic has not convinced you, do not worry, we will proceed to present you with evidence–-soaked in the authority of anecdotal nature cooked in the circulating stove of metaphors Sir Thomas Browne baked his circle metaphor in centuries before such warming methods were invented just as he also gifted Benjamin Franklin electricity (at least in word form) centuries before Franklin owned keys or kites and gave Gates, Jobs, etc. computers (at least in word form)--of a time not too long ago (if you are reading this shortly after publication) or very long ago (if you are a scholar studying this centuries in the future trying to find the meaning of life) when mist preceded a storm so strong that the levees broke.

In doing so, we will of course accomplish many things along the way, such as also proceeding to tell you, in a manner that provides no engineering insight into what went wrong in New Orleans in 2005, how this particular levee of this particular Hammock Review broke and allowed the rum to flood into the metaphorical city known as the human body (John Donne, as we will later note, rightly claimed “No Man Is an Island,” but is a man a city—if the city is located on the mainland?).

We strive not to discredit the science of engineering, as it is needed for other levees of arguably almost equal importance as the one we have gone to great lengths to start describing here for you. Engineering is also useful in the construction of bridges (of which the great city of Pittsburgh has many great ones). But we must simply note engineers are not needed in this–-or any other-–Hammock Review. After all, you do not need an engineer to hang a hammock, but you do need a hammock to build a bridge, for where else would the engineers and laborers rest from their toil in order to regain the necessary energy and strength to complete the public works project that will help the masses: the public health nightmare of bedbug-filled beds?

We think not, unless you are some sick, poor-public-health-loving sadist, in which case you are probably spending your current time performing the devil’s work of flushing tampons down public toilets or not washing yours hands before returning to work in direct contrast to the high authority (though not the quite the highest) of restaurant restroom signs rather than doing God’s work of reading Hammock Reviews, which we know He does, partially because Hammock Reviews are often long, which would explain His own lengthy average response time (ART) to your prayers because he has to finish the Hammock Review first. We also have it in good faith that God reads Hammock Reviews because Hammock Reviews are good and it is unlikely that God spends his time reading other things like trashy romance novels (if you think God spends His time reading trashy romance novels, you are a complete idiot and not smart enough to read Hammock Reviews and thus are not reading these very words). If you still do not believe that God spends substantial time reading Hammock Reviews, if you are seeking proof, you need to reflect, study, and reevaluate how strong your faith is. One way to do that is to lay in a hammock, where you can have faith in anything and everything with lone exception being if your drunken friend hung the hammock you are laying in correctly, even though he said, “Trust me, I’m about to begin my second year of engineering school.” In that case, be a skeptic.

Like we already said, it doesn’t take an engineer to hang a hammock. Hammocks are the great democracy, the Greater Equalizer than education, more accepting than even the Statue of Liberty, for those of the huddled masses who are too claustrophobic to be crammed in a long boat ride can avoid such tight quarters in the open-air of a hammock. You don’t need an engineer, even if they have graduated with multiple degrees and have decades of experience at highly-respected firms. We don’t care about your engineering resume. We care about your hammock resume.

Because of Hammock Reviews’ well-documented (see above paragraph and then look to the paragraph above that one) close relationship to God, we are also invoking His ever-so-handy Eye-for-an Eye Clause once again and disregarding engineers (just as they have so long disregarded us) here in regards to our levee.

It is important (to prevent this revered Review from becoming confusing and tangled as in the popular saying, “Oh, what a tangled [Hammock Review] web we weave when we conspire to [not take care of our hammocks or reviews and make sure they don’t get tangled]”) for us to be ultra-clear about the perspective we discuss the levee breaking before proceeding further.

It is not from an engineering perspective or a dental perspective as noted above in the clearest manner necessary for a Hammock Review. It’s not from a Led Zeppelin perspective of weaving your hammock in an ultra-skillful way off of someone else’s pattern and calling it your own, but rather from an older artform than even rock n’ roll: hammock artists.

The rum, in this case, would then be like akin to the primer for the canvas.

Let the painting begin.

An artist’s canvas:

Art is quick and easy—and beautiful—when it comes to hammocks.

This hammock, since we were discussing levees earlier and might continue to do so, provided the sense of safety and security a levee does, the kind of preventative medicine that deflects a potential disaster before it even thinks of happening. Here, we see this dynamic at work. I am relaxing and reading a book, and there is no flood accompanied by losing everything I own, including the newly-purchased rum museum hat that can be seen on the bottom right-ish of the picture (sometimes primers do make it into the final masterpiece, I guess; I have no idea how painting works). All of this to essentially say what biblical historians have been dancing around: Noah didn’t need a large boat; he needed a hammock.

Or two.

Had Noah had a hammock or two, he would have likely had a rum hat–or two, for he did provide the world the invention of duplication (citation: Noah preceded Xerox, and probably invented twins). So if you ever feel this Hammock Review is redundant, remember it is simply an old wilderness survival technique.

We will use that idea of duplication to provide another version of our masterpiece here. We will call this our European release (slightly different than the above because we believe it has some undiscovered reasons why it may be more appealing to those across the pond):

We invite our vast European readership to explain to our North American readers, as well as those across the globe, why this photograph is more appealing than the previous, similar photograph.

But this wasn’t the only hammock I patronized in the courtyard. It is simply the only one I have a picture with. There was also what engineers (should) call “the Hammock Before the Prius.” That is, the hybrid hammock for the hammock novices out there. And there is nothing wrong with that as we all have to start somewhere. In his Book of Revelation-moment, Atul Gawande wrote about the ethics of inexperienced hammock practitioners learning the trade through the lightly-veiled metaphors of medical practitioners in order to safely circulate his work in a publishing world so hostile to explicitly hammock-centric material.

Like Gawande, we are here to educate. But unlike Gawande, we do not use extended metaphors to prove our point. We directly use the word “hammock” and “sleep” and “relaxation” instead of medical jargon. Also unlike Gawande, rather than following Frost’s first path which eventually leads to medical school, we took the “one less traveled,” which leads to the extensive study of hammocks (citation: there are less Hammock Review writers than doctors—at least the time of publication; hopefully this dynamic changes and things balance out towards global harmony).

Yet, we are not here to discredit Gawande. On the contrary, we are here to celebrate his work and build upon it. In addition, such discussion is not an unnecessary meandering like a trucker stopping off at an adult bookstore (there is nothing so salacious about Gawande’s work; if any of his content involves nudity, it is purely medical), but rather our referencing Gawande demonstrates how far society has come (largely, potentially because of him) in the last few decades, where one can now proudly loudly scream “hammock” in public (internets**).

So with the momentum of such progress at our backs, it is no surprise that hammock technology should be making great advancements as well; as 2Pac (of 2Pac Fridays) said, “you either evolve or fade away” and I assure you, if we have anything to do with it, hammocks will not fade away, and will never “go gently into that good night” (citation: Thomas, Dylan).

And so we have the hybrid hammock.

Which we will show you somewhat shortly.

While one cannot say for sure, without equivocation, that such a style of hammock is what the designers of the first Prius took their idea from, it would be reasonable(y fun) to provide such hammock models with the proper credit in staving off pollution and carbon emissions while allowing families to save money on gas and use those savings to feed, clothe, and educate their children so we can all enjoy a brighter future.

And even if it one would waste their words to go to great lengths in arguing that the hybrid hammock did not beget the hybrid car known as the Prius (just as Thomas Browne’s use of the words “electricity” and “computer” would later beget the Prius and Facebook, which would beget your workplace’s Social Media Policy), then one can surely admit that when one is in a hybrid hammock (or any type of hammock for that matter) they are at least not destroying the environment by needlessly dumping oil into the ocean.

Thus the hybrid hammock can take credit for saving the environment just like the hybrid car known as the Prius can. As rising sea levels have been attributed to pollution, it is only logical when considering the carbon-reducing properties we just discussed above, to call the hybrid hammock the 2nd levee here, one of very preventative measures.

This is what lessens your carbon footprint.

Thus far we have sufficiently, recklessly, or brilliantly discussed what the “hammock” refers to in the famous saying, as popularized in this magnificent Hammock Review, “the hammock before the storm.” It refers to hammocks (as sometimes things are apt to refer to themselves) and other things that are saving the world from itself.

So then what does “the storm” refer to in this wise saying?

It is another societal game-changer. But unfortunately, it is not Storm the American Gladiator. Also unfortunately it is not a bright sunshiny day: storms, not having the scheduling savvy of the very profitable NFL, seldom are held on such sunny days. Storms have sadly settled on other proclivities.

Of course this societal game-changer is part clouds–-the same clouds that “got in [the] way” of many things Joni Mitchell wanted to do in life, such as lay in more hammocks and do a better job of being a hammock advocate. These clouds do “rain and snow on everyone.”

But this “storm” is much more than clouds. It is heavy winds, it is heavy rains, it is flooding, it is thunder, it is lightning, it is a storm, the not-so-heavenly prosecutor presenting himself as the sun.

Oh, yes John, I will be the one, in this Hammock Review, to finally answer your epochal question: I have seen the rain! A rain so strong, so ugly, so fierce that it tries to make you forget there was ever a sunny day to begin with at all! Oh I can pick that rain out of a lineup of other rains—such as the lovely studio rain Gene Kelly danced and sang in—or any other less cheerful rains you want to try to confuse me with. But I won’t be confused. And John, I can identify that nasty rain, the worst rain of all, for you right here and right now!

It is Tom Brady.

Before Tom Brady one could sit and watch football from a relaxed vantage point: an easy chair, a couch, or a hammock that had yet to be ripped from two beautiful ancestral oak trees that were knocked down in the heavy winds of the Tom Brady storm. Life was good and simple. People said hi to each other and young men helped old ladies across the street. There was peace. Ice cream cones were reasonably priced. Inflation was in check. New Orleans’ levees usually held.

After Tom Brady came around, one had to sit up with tenseness and determination to try their best in preventing Tom Brady from doing his evil deeds. 9/11 happened. Ice cream prices rose. Inflation became emboldened. The cost of diabetes treatments soared. New Orleans levees broke. And the pre-Brady world without war or hunger now seems so far away and unbelievable that it feels like a figment of a drunken man’s imagination filled with exaggerated nostalgia that embraces the positive and conveniently forgets the negative.

The once-idyllic pastime of football watching is now marred in the Tom Brady Era (T.B.E.) by the needle poking of passes to short slot receivers on five-yard option routes no one can stop, which may have been the inspiration for Chinese water torture–-if one is a student of quantum physic headlines and questions time’s linear nature.

“Oh Tom Brady is much more than that,” his sea of admirers that perhaps only Moses could part (if he were dressed in a Tom Brady game-worn jersey) will doth protest, saying “he throws such a handsome ball with attractive, modelesque accuracy to Wes Welker and Julian Edelman (or Danny Amendola, when healthy) that less attractive, non-supermodel-marrying quarterbacks could never execute with such beauty, grace, and chiseled facial features,” as such idol worshippers cannot accept a simple compliment (like we gave Brady in the above paragraph) , probably due to some inner dissatisfaction.

“People have trouble accepting compliments for a number of reasons,” explains Social Worker Lisa Schuman, who is probably not a Patriots fan because she is based in New York and helps people. “Sometimes, it’s tied to social anxiety. It can also be caused by feelings of low self-esteem, or by going through life without experiencing positive feelings of gratitude.”

Robyn E. Brickel, M.A., LMFT puts the emotionally deficiencies of Patriots fans a little differently: “To be able to accept a compliment begins with being able to see the good in oneself.”

At least Pats fans are accurate here in not seeing good in themselves. So instead of saying “thank you,” to your Tom Brady compliment, the sad, unholy, blasphemous, frigid New England masses continue on: “He is a gamer, that wonderful and handsome Tom Brady is; he can make every throw; he is clutch; he is terrific; he is a good-looking guy; he is a competitor; blah; blah; blah.”

Normally those blah blah blahs are storms. Terrible, awful things. Hailstorms and tornadoes spitting incoherence dribbling down from the mouths of our neighbors, teachers, doctors, etc.--people we might normally respect if they had not taken the unfortunate path of desiring to be Tom Brady connoisseurs, hero worship warned against by God and Moses as well as Drew Bledsoe followers and Drew Bledsoe himself.

One might hope, in life, to escape such societal craziness, to abscond from such utter madness with at least a few morsels of sanity still intact, to flee the drunkenness of the masses for a moment of clear-thinking sobriety. Yes, one could only hope to avoid, like an unathletic Pats QB using good pocket presence and a quick release to outpace the pass rush, such a stormy distortion of reality.

But how?

Perhaps by going to a Caribbean island during hurricane season and getting swept away by the high winds. Seems dangerous though. Your life insurance premiums may sharply rise.

A more logical strategy would be going to a Caribbean island during the non-hurricane season and relaxing in a hammock, getting swept away to the good places by the good things in life.

Such escapism was possible pre-Tom Brady. If it were 1920, let’s say, and you needed to get away from your problems orbiting an annoying pop culture figure, you might be able to go to a faraway location and avoid that person. In 1920, no one in the Dominican Republic gave a rat’s ass about Tom Brady and there were not any hostels with cable TV playing the Super Bowl at their bar on your last day away from sad, cold, and dark New England.

But shuffle those numbers in 1920 around a little and suddenly you have a problem, for I tried that 1920-style escapism in 2019 #DyslexiaWasNeverAProblemUntilTomBradyMadeItOne.

In the beginning, I had success. Rather than indulge false idols that flaunt themselves on the Other Internet and cologne commercials, I went and visited the spirit of a real hero of old, a real legend: Roberto Clemente, of the baseball diamond and of the world of humanity. And of Puerto Rico, just about 60 miles (at the the nearest points) from the Dominican Republic. Clemente became the greatest defensive rightfielder of all-time, spending all of his 18 Major League seasons in Pittsburgh. It would have been even more, but his career was cut short by his tragic plane crash during his humanitarian mission taking relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua Near Year’s Eve of 1972.

We love Clemente so much, the Roberto Clemente Foundation is one of the charities we support here on the Sweeter of Internets. But it is not just us; we are far from alone in honoring Clemente. Clemente’s humanity has spread to corners throughout the world, including Santo Domingo where not one—but two—streets bear his name.

And so I indulged in my Kevin Costner moment, imagining Clemente appearing around the corner onto this street—his street—and inviting me to a game of stickball, a metaphysical possibility that is for some good reason more probable in baseball than any other sport, including football.

Yes, football has the ratings. Football has the popularity. Football has Tom Brady. But go to a sports section in almost any American bookstore and the biggest subsection will be baseball. Baseball has the history—of dead players walking out of cornfields to play ball.

I love Field of Dreams. I always imagined a certain scene in Field of Dreams where when the Black Sox needed a team to play against, the old Negro League greats would walk out of the cornfield, including perhaps the greatest of all time, Pittsburgh’s Josh Gibson. Kevin Costner’s character would be explaining all of this to his daughter (as he does in a similar scene in the actual film, but with white ballplayers); all of the sudden Costner’s explanations would be interrupted by the sharp sound of the ball smacking the third baseman’s glove as a baserunner was gunned down from right field. The daughter, referring to right fielder, would ask, “Who is that?” Costner would reply: “That’s the great—” before having his sentence completed by someone speaking in a rich Puerto Rican accent: “Roberto Clemente.” Panning over to the speaker, we would see fans starting to pile in from all corners of the globe, as Clemente’s story is explained, transitioning into baseball’s history around the world.

But back in the late 80s, Kevin Costner did not refer to Hammock Reviews for film advice: Hammock Reviews did not exist back then. Now that they do, it is unknown to what degree Costner currently relies on Hammock Reviews to improve his craft.

While of course Clemente did not physically appear on the Santo Domingo street bearing his name, I did try to feel some essence of his spirit while I was there.

Real or imaginary, I felt something. Hammocks adventures are about not being skeptical in such moments. Why ruin a good thing?

So I tried to immerse myself in what was good, what was right—Clemente, baseball, hammocks, etc.—while avoiding the sinful temptations of this era: football and the Other Internet. I embodied the island mentality and had been successful.

For the trip’s first several days.

But oh, how John Donne was right: I could not stay the whole trip in island form, for I am not actually an island! I had no choice but to watch the Super Bowl, for football has a magnetic pull on us Americans that is difficult to explain, but can probably be best seen in the fact that our pre-Brady pastime of baseball’s featured game of the week on ESPN only doubles the ratings of midweek Mid-American Conference pigskin showdowns. Yes, baseball’s biggest game each week, the one that is promoted the most, does not at all crush (as it should if it were still America’s pastime) one of football’s least important games of the week. This was certainly not the case in the 1970s, before Tom Brady was around, and television viewers would much rather love the rare chance of seeing greats like Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell on TV than the Akron Zips host the Bowling Green State University Falcons.

Baseball’s fall from sporting supremacy was one of the early levees to fail in protecting us from the impending Tom Brady storm, leaving us more vulnerable to the inevitable incoming floodwaters.

Yes, we now live in an era—T.B.E. (Tom Brady Era)—of society where football is royalty and Tom Brady is king and parents do not reward or punish their kids based on their report cards from school, but rather their kids’ fantasy football draft report cards (citation: The Decline of Parenting). Football is so big that the biggest artists will do the Super Bowl Halftime Show for free, because it is such an honor to be even indirectly linked to “the great” Tom Brady through the game of football. And we must remember to capitalize Super Bowl Halftime Show as a proper noun, less Tom Brady-loving grammarians come out of the woodworks and lobby our English Department Chairs to remove us from teaching any classes before blacklisting us from dating supermodels so as to not reduce Tom Brady’s options.

If I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, somehow the United States Government would know. They would search my bags at Customs when I tried to return, not for what they may contain, but for what would be missing: they would hound me with great suspicion for the “incredulous” lack of a Tom Brady worship dildo in my luggage, and I would have to explain in great length why I do not own such a blasphemous item-–in fact this very Hammock Review is essentially a revised version of the affidavit they would have made me write in this very truly hypothetical situation. I have never read the Patriot Act myself as it is certainly not appropriate Hammock Literature, but I know it was passed around the time of Tom Brady’s rise to fame and may be what provides the legal framework for such feverish invasion of privacy.

This is only after making me stand in a long line at Immigration because I didn’t have the “the cut line” card of Global Entry at the time or the accompanying Tom Brady face tattoo*** or the religious exemption thereof: samples of his semen somewhere on my person large enough for them to verify through DNA testing.

When I finally got to an Immigration Officer they would ask me questions–-not about the purpose of my trip, but about the Super Bowl Halftime Show and obscure Tom Brady Super Bowl trivia–-and I would be detained if I answered incorrectly. I had to watch the Super Bowl.

Of course, Tom Brady was in the Super Bowl.

So noting the cable above the bar and the rum at the bar and the earliness of my flight the next morning and the fact that I was staying in a dormitory style room where I would have to wake everyone up at an ungodly hour with my phone alarm and pack my stuff, I developed a plan. It may not be called a great game plan, but it was certainly better than what Sean McVay would develop offensively versus Bill Belichick’s defense.

Unlike McVay’s plan of doing nothing and setting up punts to give the ball back to Tom Brady, my plan was that of action and not setting up punts. In fact, I would not set up one punt. Instead, I would pack all of my stuff before kickoff, bring it to the bar, watch the Super Bowl, drink rum and cokes until the bar closed, and then wait for my taxi to the airport to bring me back to cold, frigid, and Patriots-crazed New England.

For this to be a good plan, I just needed a little help from the Rams (citation: Lennon & McCartney, 1967; Cocker, 1968).

Because with the Rams winning–-or more specifically the Patriots losing–-the hangover from the rum would be overcome by the age-old cure to hangovers, which is ideally hammocks or, when hammocks are unavailable, more drinking (which really only staves off the hangover), or when more drinking is unavailable, the soothing nature of a Patriots loss, which is really a metaphorical hammock (so really only hammocks actually cure hangovers).

With the hangover taken care of by the metaphorical hammock, adrenaline would tackle the sleep deprivation, and the overall joy of the situation would allow me to forgive myself for using “tackle” as a cheesy sort of pun earlier in this sentence.

Joy, after all, is a powerful thing.

Adrenaline, as we all also know, is also a powerful thing. I’ll provide a historical example: don’t worry, it is not another one of those dumb cliché stories where a dad lifts a jeep off of his only child to save their life and then that child goes on to be a great person and feed masses of future starving children, making us believe in a more positive future, because “children are the future” (Houston, Whitney, et al.), whilst forgetting one of those children could be Tom Brady who will grow up and become Tom Brady and thus the future those children go on to create could actually be worse than the current moment #LiveInThePresent.

No, this is about how to logistically get to an important football game when you have limited time available. Imagine you have to work Saturday and Monday where you live in Northern Maine and the Steelers are hosting an AFC Championship game on a Sunday in Pittsburgh and the only logistically-possible way to get there is drive through the night after work Saturday, watch the Steelers defeat the Patriots on Sunday, and use that adrenaline to fuel the sleep-deprived journey through the night back to New England for work on Monday. That adrenaline would help you avoid almost nodding off at the wheel and going 45 miles per hour (the speed limit they impose when road conditions are bad during storms, which there wasn’t, but could metaphorically said to be so when we considering the road led to the dangerous Tom Brady Era of two decades of stormy disaster) on Connecticut highways entering back into New England when you should be going over 65 under normal, non-Tom Brady-induced weather and subsequent road conditions—or 90, if the Steelers had won.

But sadly, poor Tom Bradyish road conditions became the “new normal” as Tom Brady storms swept across the United States with 434 more deaths happening from car accidents in the United States the year Tom Brady entered the NFL, 2001, than the previous year 2000 (citation: injury facts), when the NFL and American roads allowed people to focus on driving without being distracted by that terrible road hazard, wearing number 12. While some may say 434 people is not a lot, tell that to those families who lost loved ones. And while not all of those deaths can be attributed directly to Tom Brady, even 1 is too many.

Such deaths increased another 1,592 the following year, which makes sense because the Patriots won the Super Bowl in January and so Tom Brady was in the public eye (rather than the other car in front of them they are about to hit) for the entire year, rather than was the case in 2001 where it was just a prorated situation. That’s enough evidence right there to understand Brady road conditions if we stop looking at the statistics at that point in time and just project onwards what the numbers would be if that trend were to have continued.

But I was not so wise and did not know such things when I began the journey with my uncle, a longtime Pats fan who rooted for the Steelers on that occasion due to his compassion for my exuberant youth and his safety.

And so you can see, my game plan at the Santo Domingo hostel was not the first of its kind: I had used this similar one decades earlier (before I was of the legal drinking age; no alcohol was involved) to solve sleep deprivation through football justice of the correct team winning.

My old plan from decades earlier had not worked, of course. The Steelers lost and that’s how I ended up driving, half asleep from the lack of needed victory adrenaline, 45 mph on Connecticut highways rather than the 75 which would have been natural and safe with a Steelers victory fueling a more rapid pace. Instead it was the Patriots who punched me in the gut and punched their ticket to play the Rams’ Greatest Show on Turf in the Super Bowl.

Oh and how the Super Bowl had been like a holiday growing up, with my stepdad getting special foods, like platters with cheese balls, that we never got on any other day; yes, the Super Bowl was the one out of the year we were allowed to eat cheese in ball shape, and it was special.

Every year that the Steelers exited the playoffs before the Super Bowl, I made a promise to not watch the Super Bowl out of protest. It was a promise I could never keep, because I loved football and the Super Bowl so much. But after that road trip, and so much that had happened earlier in the year, I finally made sure to keep that promise to myself and not watch the Super Bowl. In order to make sure my Super Bowl boycott would hold, I made sure to be working during it.

But I couldn’t help myself, of course, while at work to peek in on a TV and watch a play: it happened to be Ty Law’s pick-six,**** the pivotal play that helped the Patriots to their first Super Bowl victory.

Of course, as it turned out, a pivotal part of that Super Bowl victory for the Patriots was also Spygate. Would it have ended up differently had Belichick not been spying on the Rams. Would the Rams have won? Would they have gone on to be a dynasty? Would they still be in St. Louis instead of eventually relocating to LA? And would the Patriots have been just as successful? Would the destinies of the two franchises, in essence, have been switched?

Now so many years and automobile fatalities later, the Patriots and Rams were matching up once again in the Super Bowl. Yes, it was the Los Angeles Rams this time instead of St. Louis and so Nelly was no longer wearing their jerseys backwards in his videos, but it was still the Patriots vs. the Rams.

Oh it would only seem fitting if the Rams were the start and finish of the Patriots dynasty, the alpha and the omega. That is, not that Patriots victories against the Rams would be bookends for their decades of dominance, but rather the Rams would finally put an end to the tyranny. If the Rams finally got revenge, it would be like the good protagonist waiting in the wings all these years to finally slay the beast at the appropriate time and return the world to its pre-Brady arcadia. Yes, Rams: it is time to get out of Bette Milder’s freaking shadow, stop waiting in the wings, and fly!

Call it a another Thomas Browne moment, in the shittier Super Bowl-losing Rams being invented in word form/name only before the better Super Bowl-winning version comes to fruition years later; call it evolution, in society getting better; call it Shakespearian, in that it could be said by some (those who call everything Shakespearian, whatever that really means) to be Shakespearian, but any time the Patriots lose it is the height of poetry (citation: Patriots games get higher ratings than all of the Shakespeare renditions, which are largely poetry, put on by your local community theatre and broadcast on a public access channel–-combined). Call it the realization of a young man’s dreams, in the justification and validation of his football justice, safety-through-adrenaline plan finally coming to fruition decades later. “It is never too late,” as they say.

Call it Sweet Livin’. For it would be.

Call it an emotional high, in that it would be decades of tormented emotions finally coming to a place where they could rest in a hammock.

Call it intellectualism, seeped in rum.

Which is not boring. At least not as boring as the Patriots.

The Patriots are boring. The “Patriot Way” is the corporate way, a “shield’ of legalese and B.S. that bores the consumer into submission. The Patriots are in fact that long waiver you don’t read, and thus sign your life away. That is the secret to their “success”--if you consider sucking fun out of life success. The Patriots do not promote those wonderful characters worthy of NFL Films, like Madden’s Raiders, a worthy antagonist to the great Pittsburgh Steelers that helped vault the NFL into national popularity. Give me the Fred Biletnikoff method of chain-smoking on the sideline any day over the TB12 Method. For the monotonous and mundane, stale, stodgy, stuffy, and stupid Patriots amazingly made so many Super Bowl runs so uninteresting, stifling creativity at every turn.

To previously unforeseen levels. The Patriot Way makes the mid-90s New Jersey Devils Neutral Zone Trap look like exciting hockey. The Patriot Way makes the Tim Duncan/Gregg Popovich Spurs seem like the Showtime Lakers. The Patriot Way makes Troy Percival seem like Rob Dibble.

The Patriot Way is actually headquartered at 1 Patriot Place, a place—Gillette Stadium—I never need to visit and is much less interesting than any street named after Roberto Clemente. This is one reason I don’t use Gillette Razors: because it is not the best a man can get if he wants to write Hammock Reviews. I don’t want to shave my imagination. I want to shave my beard, not my creativity. The true name of Gillette Razors, when one does their research, is Delilah Razors.

I don’t want to deflate my originality.

But none of this cold New England behavior should come as a surprise to anyone who has studied history.

You need not even go as far back as the Salem Witch Trials.

When New England had an opportunity at creativity in the previous century, in the wonderful poet Wallace Stevens, he had to hide the beauty he created from his legal pals—who would later breed generations of Patriots fans—at the Hartford insurance agencies, which would later be in cahoots with Connecticut’s pharmaceutical industry in spurring an terrible opioid epidemic so people could mask the societal pain that the Patriots created.

Opium is a depressant, a downer–-and so it is no surprise that like the modern opium dens New England spread across the country and world, their fans are downers and pessimists, always criticizing every little flaw of when things go wrong. For instance, when they simply lose a Super Bowl, they ask, “What’s wrong with Patriots?” and complain about a Wes Welker “drop” that was in fact not an easy catch, certainly not like the famous (if you’re a good person from Pittsburgh) or infamous (if you are a bad person from Dallas) Jackie Smith Super Bowl drop.

But, being from Pittsburgh, I am not a downer or a pessimist (citation: Rogers, Fred). This was not just about some people failing.

I also wanted some people to succeed, like Aaron Donald. Aaron Donald was born in Pittsburgh and went to Pitt. He had just come off an iconic regular season with 20.5 sacks—after signing a massive contract, which is an indication of an all-time great: one that produces after such massive contracts. He also had just won back-to-back Defensive Player of the Year awards. I would love for him to cap it off with a Super Bowl MVP, or at least an iconic play in the Super Bowl like when James Harrison, 2008 Defensive Player of the Year, had the memorable interception return for a touchdown in the Super Bowl that same season. I wanted that for Aaron Donald. I wanted that for Pitt. Hail to Pitt #H2P.

I wanted the Rams to win for Wade Phillips. He really has no relationship to Pittsburgh, other than the 70s Steelers usually besting his dad, Bum Phillips, in competitive matches with the very formidable and physical Houston Oilers, who may not have outdone the modern Patriots in Super Bowls, but certainly outdid them in interestingness. But as a Pittsburgher, I love defense, and Wade Phillips is one of the best defensive minds in NFL history, especially as relates to the 3-4 defense (though he is of course not as great as Pittsburgh’s legendary Dick LeBeau, the best 3-4 defensive coordinator of all time). Entering the Super Bowl, a lot of articles were written about the history of Tom Brady vs. Wade Phillips, who had done pretty good against Tom Brady.

Yeah, who am I kidding? Does anyone really emotionally pull for anything in life because of Wade Phillips, other than the fact that he does look like a guy who knows his way around a hammock?

I just freaking wanted the Patriots to lose and now am stretching for intellectual reasons to support that necessity. When you are making dumb shit up, like “Win one for Wade Phillips,” that means you are out the hammock.

But that’s what the Patriots do: they take you out of your hammock.

Yes, some boring New England insurance company is likely the reason you can’t be in the hammock at any given time. You haven’t signed the proper waiver or something. Which is probably the reason why so many of the world’s hammocks are outside of the United States: they are outside of New England’s anti-hammock insurance industry’s jurisdiction.

But would they—those bastard New England legalese-loving, fine print-exploiting Patriots—take Wade Phillips out of his perpetual hammock state?

It was a question for the ages.

Or at least for this particular time in human history.

Which is ever-interwoven—or at least should be—in hammock history.

In a way, this game could be seen as a referendum on hammocks. Would the probably pro-hammock Wade Phillips representing one of the most hammock-friendly climates of the country in Southern California (though there are not as many hammocks there as there should be, probably because of the reach of the aforementioned Connecticut insurance companies) be able to slow down the anti-hammock Tom Brady/Belichick cold, frigid New England regime? Could the levees of the California hammocks (great potential nickname for a team by the way, for all you owners out there) hold up against the storm of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick?

By halftime they had. The Patriots only had three points.

Hammocks were looking pretty good (as they always do). Wade Phillips and the defense had done their job. Sure, they had not completely shut down Brady. But you don’t shut down storms: you protect yourself from them with levees. The levees were holding, but behind them, the storm was astir (sans coffee, because Tom Brady doesn’t drink coffee).

The Patriots only punted twice. New England failed two fourth down conversions while their other drives ended with an interception, missed field goal, and the end of the half. Most of those drives had promise. The Rams were fortunate to hold the Patriots to three points.

You did not need a meteorology degree to see that this was not a sunshiny day, but rather the Pats offense was an ever-possible storm brewing and starting to actuate; and you did not need an engineering degree to see that Wade Phillips’s defense was a levee holding on with every ounce of strength for dear life. And only three points had seeped through: a freaking amazing accomplishment against Brady in any half of any game (imagine a group of your brightest engineering students accomplishing that!).

Then why would I be especially nervous and especially annoyed with Adam Levine in the Halftime Show?

It had nothing to do with Maroon 5’s catalog, really. I have never been for or against them; for me they are simply something that exists, evidently from Southern California, like the Chargers. Super Bowl Halftime Shows inherently make me nervous and annoyed, even if it is an artist I really like, because what I really want to do is watch more football. But they especially make me nervous and annoyed when the Super Bowl itself is making me nervous and annoyed.

And so I tried to quell those nerves by drinking more rum. And then it did start to annoy me when Adam Levine took his shirt off—something that I would have thought was funny and humorous had the Rams offense maybe scored more than 3 points!!!!!!

That was the refrain I sang in my head, probably not in any Maroon 5 lyric: “How, in God’s name and everything decent in this good world–which was better before Tom Brady–do the Rams have zero points in the first half?” My newfound hardcore metal band lyric-generating angst was nourished by the fact that I knew Adam Levine’s striptease was just delaying the inevitable (maybe that’s how people get into hardcore metal in the first place, to heal such mental and emotional scars unsoothed by aloe?).

It was not as though I had any special insight. I was not predicting something anyone else who had watched too many Patriots games could not have envisioned: if you somehow, miraculously pull a hammock out of a hat and hold the Patriots to three points in the first half, you need to have built a huge freaking lead (or any lead at all). It is only a matter of time before the Patriot floodwaters creep over the levee crests, for Brady and Belichick do not believe in hammocks—whether they are up by a shit ton or down by a shit ton—and in this metaphor the hammocks are the levees (yes, we’re layering shit here like an Eminem diss track).

And how much tension are you going to put on the hammock; how much weight are you going to make it hold? Are you, the Rams, going to do nothing for yourself in life (the offense) and rely completely on the healing properties of the hammock (the defense)? Even the most pro-hammock (and we know this because we are the most-pro hammock) advocates never said to stay in a hammock all day, every day, and never do anything else. Life, of course, is about balance. Spend some time in the hammock (defense); spend some time in the world outside of the hammock (offense)--at least that’s how the metaphorical world works for the moment.

But enter special teams: the Rams just seemed to like punting and punting, like they were on the Thames or River Cam or maybe both. They had six punts on six first-half possessions, which all looked like some form of garbage. It is true that the Rams Johnny Hekker may be the best player at his position (Belichick, 2016), but he is a punter and no one likes to see their punter come onto the field—you cannot punt your team to life or the other team to death. Punting is about deferring or giving up. That is why every parent should have a talk with their kid during the formative years: “Darling, my sweetie, your body is changing and it must be confusing, but there is one thing that will always be clear. Listen to me carefully. Do not grow up to become obsessed about hang times and directional kicking; do not punt your life away.”

And hammocks, as articulated so soulfully two paragraphs ago, are the defense of the soul. Hammocks are not your special teams, the Human Resources department of any NFL franchise as well as your soul; no one likes the coworker that has HR on speed dial (citation: Scott, Michael).

And so what unfolded was naturally a disaster deferred, which was not deserving of Langston Hughes’s eloquence (there is a reason Hughes never wrote about the Patriots). The Rams defense continued to hold in the third quarter while their offense continued to struggle, finally putting something together that could be called some semblance of a legitimate football drive, laboring for 42 yards on 10 plays to the edge of field goal range, where Greg Zuerlein was able to hit a 53-yarder in all of the Rams fundamentally-sound special teams glory. They had been in solid field goal range the play before, it should be noted, before Jared Goff took a sack on third down in his game-long effort to ruin things in this world.

After the Rams defense held the Pats to another punt, it was time for the Rams to pounce. This is when a champion senses an opportunity, smells blood in the water.

But Jared Goff is not a champion and must have an odd sense of smell, because the Rams offense responded by dinking and dunking their way to 23 yards a weirdly lengthy 9-play, 5-minute drive which resulted in nothing more than better punting position for their hero, their greatest human resource, Johnny Hekker.

Anybody that’s ever watched Tom Brady play, has ever been rained on, or has ever been disappointed at some moment in life knew what would happen next.

With 7 minutes left in the game, Tom Brady promptly marched his offense right down the field under 3 minutes on just 5 plays as the Patriots finally scored the first touchdown of the night.

The Rams answered with what looked like perhaps their most promising drive of the evening, but Jared Goff punctuated it with an interception instead of points.

The Patriots, actual able to sense blood in the water rather than good punting conditions (what Rams—both the football team and the animal, we conjecture—sense when in water), promptly drove 72 yards for a game-sealing field goal.

In the end, Wade Phillips, the Rams defense, and Team Hammock did its job, limiting the Patriots offense to 13 points. And it probably would have been less had the Rams offense done anything and thus reduced the number of possessions (i.e. pressure on the Rams levees) the Patriots offense had, 13. One point per drive. That should be a win against any team—and that is certainly more than anyone could ask against the Patriots, the sharks in this world’s water who circle beautiful islands waiting to take a debilitating and life-altering bite out of a good time.

Yes, life can change so quickly. Can you remember the gool old days in the hammock and the rum museum? Can you remember the magical spiritual experience of visiting Roberto Clemente’s street? Can you remember the good in the world?

It wasn’t so long ago.

Yet there I was: the Patriots with another Super Bowl, the bar still open, and my taxi still hours away. But I could already feel the chill of the New England winter. In this space of liminality, I was both the narrator and lost lover of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” I was indeed there at the bar in the Dominican Republic, yet the cab had already taken parts of me to the airport where a plane had already scattered my splintered remains across New England.

Oh I like New England, especially Northern New England. It is gorgeous. Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine: the lakes, the ocean, the mountains, the rocky coast, the idyllic towns, the quirky towns, the real maple syrup—the life has a simple sweetness up there. And I live near the top of it all in Northern Maine. The summers are for everyone, as the tourists flock in the millions. The winters are not. Hence the low population.

But I like the winter there. There is a romance to it through the holiday season, and football season. Those are times when winter can add to the poetry. But after the Super Bowl, the love sonnet ends.

Just cold, followed by mud. When spring is coming around the corner for the rest of the country, we still have winter storms only teased by sporadic spring-ish days that create a lot of sludge and mud, a mess. The message of Punxsutawney Phil, another Western PA great, does not reverberate in Maine, where winter is always at least six weeks longer and they forgo groundhog worship for idolatry of Tom Brady.

I’ll take the groundhog every time.

So I was going to New England at the worst time. Without even the happily-ending love sonnet necessary to warm my heart in a cold world, to lighten my heart in a dark world. Oh for it is not just the frigidity of New England winters that can freeze the un-happy-love-sonnet-blanketed soul; it is also the lack of daylight that can have undesirous effects—unless you are a masochist who likes Vitamin D3-deficiency as you go to work in the dark morning and return home in the afternoon with the sun having already set so early, like the poor Buffalo Bills season in the ever-so-ugly Tom Brady Era, the Dark Ages of the AFC East where actual science like medicine was pushed aside for the unscientific TB12 Method, the modern-day bloodletting.

Yes, going back to New England right after the Super Bowl was like going back into the Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad was talking about if he were even just half the predictor Thomas Browne was, if he just half-baked those wondrous Browne circular metaphors in wood stoves (or stoves of any material-heating device).

Oh Thomas Browne, can you give me just one more word before its fruition that will help rid society of this Patriots tyranny?

There is a reason Thomas Browne never mentioned Tom Brady centuries before Tom Brady existed: Thomas Browne wrote after the publication of the Bible, and so the Book of Revelation with all of its terrible monsters was already in circulation. But Thomas Browne did come up with the initials TB centuries before Tom Brady did, and for that—Thomas Browne’s greatest flaw—he will live in infamy for all eternity right here in the scrolls of this Hammock Review (once some good soul prints this off the internet, puts it into scroll form, and buries it in a mostly discrete location, but convenient enough for archaeologists to uncover thousands of years in the future when they will replace the word “uncover” with “unearth” to match the importance of the moment).

Yes, society’s levee broke in 2001 when Tom Brady came along. With almost two decades to repair it, I had hoped it would have been repaired. But what we learned during the course of this Hammock Review is that humans rarely truly ever learn from history, that the levee has yet to be repaired, that all we can do is enjoy that moment before the storm when we can enjoy our rum, our sunshine, and our hammocks before Tom Brady appears again to ruin everything.

Oh Satan you can take many things from us; oh hurricanes, you can take many things away from us; oh Tom Brady, you can take many things away from us. But you can never take away our hammock moments.

“Live in the moment,” as they often say, especially in the 1990s during the New Age spiritual movement that disappeared with Tom Brady’s arrival. But the full quote is, “Live in the moment if you are in a hammock at the moment.”

Don’t live in the moment if that moment is watching Tom Brady raise a Lombardi Trophy. In such moments, live in the past or in the future, when you were, or once again will be, enjoying another moment in another hammock. Live in the moments when you are happy.

For terrible things in life, storms and Tom Brady, can take us out of our hammocks. But the beauty of life is, we can always eventually find our way back into the hammock.

And so, this was about the hammock before the storm.

But there are also hammocks after storms.

For every storm, there is a hammock waiting for you afterwards.

Unless you’re Jared Goff.

In which case, there’s Detroit.

UPDATE

Many real storms in many places did occur after this Super Bowl. They may have not happened the very next day, or even the next week or month or year. But they happened To attribute the death and destruction from those storms directly to Tom Brady winning this Super Bowl may be a stretch. But indirectly….

Roberto Clemente Street, Santo Domingo, D.R.

Wade Phillips, longtime NFL coach and guy who likely knows a good hammock when he sees one.

*This is not a light way of talking about alcoholism; the death in this case, less anyone take offense, would occur from the rum causing drunkenness as can occur to any innocent bystander drinking tons of rum, followed by the deceased falling out the hammock, hitting their head, and later dying from concussion-related symptoms, which cannot be blamed on the hammock because of the age-old saying ”hammocks don’t kill people”--the saying ends there and the answers to life’s questions begin there, in the afterlife.

**Like this one.

***For those not familiar with the Global Entry process, they usually simply take a picture of you using facial recognition software that recognizes your Tom Brady face tattoo, so that you can pass through the Immigration Officer with little questioning or difficulty.

****Ty Law, it should be noted, is from Western, PA and the nephew of Tony Dorsett. As such, New England owes its dynasty to Pittsburgh.