EAST COAST SCHOOL YARD BULLY:

I was reading an article about The Sopranos and a quote from Sopranos creator David Chase struck me as right on the money. He was talking about the writers he had assembled for the first season and how he fired almost every writer on the show when his or her first draft came in: "We had writers from Iowa, California, you name it, and they just didn't seem to get this East Coast, schoolyard-bully thing, this level of verbal abuse. And savagery. It's called 'breaking balls' and it's what guys in Jersey and New York do." (from Vanity Fair, April 2007)

Now as most of you know (unless you live in a cave), I am from Ohio, not exactly East Coast, but east, and more east than Midwest. Plus my best friends who I grew up racing with are English, and I think they wrote the book on ball breaking with no mercy. Our crew in Columbus was especially merciless, if you did not have a thick skin you would be left sniffling in the corner, crying for your mommy (and filling out this report). And I bet we paled in comparison to those from further east than we.

Even a hardened pro who hailed from Portland and who found himself staying in Columbus for a few weeks commented on how ruthless we were when it came to busting balls.

What's my point? My point is that I think they raise them up soft out here on the left coast, the place where they are thinking about banning booing at high school sporting events and have banned playing tag at school, and the further east you go, the thicker your epidermal layer needs to be. Ask anyone who lives here and who hails from anywhere from Chicago east and I bet they will agree. Hell you should have heard the shit storm that kicked up on my own team when I busted some balls of my own team mates for not showing up for my cross race last November. You would have thought I said something against their mothers, their daughters and kicked their dogs all at the same time. My advice: get a little more aggressive, call your best friend an "a--hole", bust a ball or two and enjoy it. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, it just means that you are can dish it out and, more importantly, you can take it.