A Five Tool Rat

I’ve done a lot of stuff of which I am not proud. For example, I used to sell illegal narcotics when I was in high school (hey, strippers don’t pay for themselves). Selling drugs, much like selling anything, can be a decent way to make a living, provided you are intelligent enough to learn the ins and outs of your craft, the laws which limit your work and the ever-important relationship that risk shares with reward. I’m not condoning drug use or drug dealing, here, I’m just saying that the business teaches you some things that every kid should know before they set feet into the wide world of adulthood, like, for example, the all important adage: never rat.

Never rat.

I taught my little brother this in grade school. Only then we called it tattling. My brother learned not to tattle (after I dispensed a few beatings) and now he doesn’t rat. I think this is part of what it means to be a man.

My senior year of high school, a kid named Jim got arrested for possessing a lot of cocaine while being inherently dumber than an eight-day-old slug. To avoid a few years in jail, Jim ratted out my entire senior class and then some. Two days after his arrest, my school was raided and thirteen people were taken into custody (I got lucky that day because I cut class until well after the raid started—hey, I’d rather be lucky than good). Jim had been smart about the whole "being a rat" thing, though. After he ratted, he moved to California.

Too bad that won’t work for Barry Bonds. He’s already in California.

As some of you may or may not know (doesn’t matter), Barry Bonds, alleged baseball steroid freak, tested positive for amphetamines over the summer. I don’t have a problem with this. I have written (at least a few times) that I don’t care if ballplayers use drugs to improve their games. In fact, I expect it. We’re talking about millions of dollars, here. It’s risk and it’s reward and all that. And if Bonds wants to take his risks, then fine by me.

I also have no problem with Barry Bonds being an alleged gaping asshole of a human being. That, much like the whole drug thing, is his risk. If he wants to treat his fellow human beings like I treat the high school girls who sneak into my local pub with fake IDs that look like they were made in Technical Drawing Class, then so be it. It’s his life.

But I hate it when people rat. And Barry Bonds is a fucking dirty, sniveling, evil, little, disgusting, vermin-filled rat.

You see, Barry said that the amphetamines which tainted his urine came from Mark Sweeney’s locker. Mark Sweeney is Barry’s teammate. You don’t rat out your teammates. Only a disgusting, shit-shined, grunge-coated, hairy-assed, worthless, fucking pretend human would ever rat out a teammate for a good reason, let alone just to save his own skin. Or, to put it more politely, no real man could ever behave like that and still look at himself in the mirror without wanting to slit his own throat.

I find it interesting that, had Barry attended my high school, my friends and I would have beat the ever-loving shit out of him with wet socks filled with jagged rocks. And we were scumbags. Bonds, a professional athlete, would have been beneath us. That's fucked up right there.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I have no problem with drug users and cheaters. They reap what they sow and all that. I have no problem with professional criminals. A job is a job and I have a hard time differentiating between killing for the President of the United States or for a mafia don (both positions seem inherently corrupt to me). I’m a simple and accepting person by nature. And I’m not here to judge or take sides.

And I think that Barry Bonds is a snitch-bitch bastard who should rot in hell.