"Welcome to Field Gulls, Rookie"

When Danny asked me to join Field Gulls as a writer, I was flattered.  I mean, I had never been called "Spider" before and I didn't know what Wheeled Skulls was but it sounded like a bad-ass biker group.  I have seen Sons of Anarchy and though I had never had experience running guns, I was willing to learn.

Most of you will know me under my former name: Humbled Fan

Then he explained to me that I must have mis-heard him and I was sorely disappointed.  I had already spent $400 on a leather vest with the name "Spider" on it.

However, my tears of sadness quickly turned to tears of joy (after a short burst of Tears for Fears) when I realized that he wanted me to write for my favorite Seahawks blog. 

But if there's 19 things I love in this world, I would have to say that the Seahawks and writing are both in there, somewhere between the first season of Major Dad and Starburst Jelly Beans.  So it's a perfect combination of Hawks and writing that has ultimately led me to this moment. 

If I am going to treat this like a job interview where you are interviewing me for the position of Field Gulls writer (and I think that's an entirely fair way to treat this) then you'd probably ask me "Why the hell should I listen to you?  What do you have to offer me and what makes you qualified?"

My first response would be, "I don't really think you should swear in a job interview.  Have some respect." followed by several long seconds of silence.  Then I'd tell you that I can remember the first time I became a Seahawks fan:

The year was 1982.  E.T. The Extra Terrestrial had taken the U.S. by storm, and exactly three weeks after the release of Thriller I had awoken in a bright room, finally escaping the clutches of my mother's womb.  I could tell right away that I was in Edmonds, so that meant that I was destined to become a Seahawks fan.  I immediately began to bawl my eyes out. 

Green and blue runs through my blood.  The doctors tell me that this is not related to who my favorite football team is and that I should seriously start taking the pills that they prescribe me but I know they are wrong.  If there was something wrong with me physically, would I have several blackouts a day?  I don't think so.

Writing would come to me as a late teenager.  Once I had finally gotten over all my teenage angst, I just had all these thoughts in my head that I wanted to find out about.  I wanted to know things like "Who are the last ten #5 picks in the NFL draft and how and why are they successful or unsuccessful?" and "If Mario Lopez had been cast as Zack and Mark-Paul Gosselaar had been cast as AC Slater, would Saved by the Bell ever made it to The College Years?" 

I found out that having your own blog was free and didn't require knowledge of HTML.  Those were two areas I excelled at: Being broke and not knowing or willing to learn how to write HTML.  So I started some blogs and just began to write.

Pretty soon I had a really large following that included my friend Chris, my grandmother, and nobody else.  It was quite a thrill-ride of fame and fortune. 

What I wrote back then was pretty terrible in hindsight and reading it now makes me visibly upset, but the important thing was that I never quit doing it.  I'd move on from blog to blog to eventually putting up some fanposts on SBN once I felt comfortable enough in this harsh and critical environment. 

Eventually I started to feel like I had a knack for it, or at least, I loved doing it and people never told me that they hated me.  Except for some Jason Whitlock fans, but who cares about Jason Whitlock fans?  I started writing for the SBN fantasy sports affiliate FakeTeams back in March as baseball season started and the obsession with sports writing was growing.  Luckily this coincided with my obsession in pre-World War II dolls subsiding.  Frankly, you can't have two obsessions at once without losing some friends.

Then when pre-season football season started coming up I said I'd love to just start writing about fantasy football.  Honestly, I'm a Mariners fan which meant that I started hating baseball and everything it stands for sometime during our 17-game losing streak.  When the regular season ends this week, I will love it again until next July. 

Writing about football became even more obsessive than writing about baseball and I actually previewed all 32 NFL teams.  It was extremely involved and tiring and made me question my own humanity, for what kind of a God would make a man want to do that?  But it's just what I told myself I had to do.  You can see that same kind of obsession in my weekly reviews at FakeTeams. 

But fear not, I will not be writing about fantasy sports on Field Gulls.  That is obviously unnecessary with Whiskey Chainsaw holding it down, and I already have that job for the entire NFL over at FakeTeams.  My job here at Field Gulls will be to simply provide more content and a different kind of content because content is key.  Think of it like when you go see an R-Rated movie and the MPAA rating comes up: "Does it say this movie contains Sexual Content?"

Honestly I won't even watch a show on television if its not TV-MA LSV. 

If I can bring a little bit of language, sex, violence to Field Gulls then I have done my job.  If I can talk about the Seahawks in a way that is humorous but informative, then I have done my job.  Danny and Thomas and Derek and everybody else here already do an excellent job of covering the X's and O's and analyzation of the team and that's not why Danny asked me to join.  And it's not the circumstances under which I said I'd provide articles because it's not my background.

Hopefully what I'll do is provide a couple of pieces a week that entertain and inform and give a little different edge to one of my favorite blogs.  And if I fail at that and Field Gulls comes crumbling down leaving us all penniless, homeless, friendless, and completely worthless without any hope of survival or a return to normalcy?  So be it.  Then we can just start up a biker gang and run guns. 

You can follow me on twitter @casetines where I say there are two types of people in this world: People who think your value is only based on twitter followers and people who know that your value is only based on twitter followers.  I talk about the Seahawks but also general sports things and it's also where I test out my joke submissions to Paula Poundstone.  One of these days she will accept one.

DK edit: I told you all when I took the reins at Field Gulls that I'd try to bring on new writers because I think it's important to have a smorgasbord of voices, ideas, perspectives, and styles on any given blog and I think the team we've put together here at FG has been turning out pretty goddamn alright.

Now, please give a warm welcome to Kenny, as I like to call him, (or maybe K-bone, as I've taken to in our email correspondence).