Okay, so now that the blog’s been relaunched, I don’t know where to start. I know y’all are probably wondering about Joyce, but you’re probably wondering about Keaton and Lucas and Travis and Maya and Robert and the boys and the Parrots and Mrs. LaSalle and Dad and Meemaw and Melanie Kate and Adam and Allan and all the other people I used to write about.
I promise I’ll get to all of them, but maybe I should just start slow and tell y’all what I did last night. I went to dinner at Sloppy Joe and Danielle’s house. I still can’t believe that they’re only a couple months from celebrating their second anniversary. If any of y’all thought that they were going to get married when I last wrote about them, time has proved you right.
Y’all just might not recognize Sloppy Joe, that’s how much Danielle and married life have changed him. The first surprise is that he lost 75 pounds. He did it in under six months, which is kinda crazy, and, before you ask, no, Danielle didn’t get an Ozempic prescription for him. He did it all by himself, by changing his diet and totally cutting out fast food (me and Keaton thought he was going to have withdrawal symptoms from no more Wingstop lol.) It wasn’t just diet: he started working out like a motherfucker. He was in the gym six days a week and doing more than even I’m doing – and I’m the one whose livelihood depends on how I look in a pair of boardshorts. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t exercise for themselves, but I did think Sloppy Joe was driving himself too hard.
What was really driving him was Danielle. Not like she came to the gym every day to make sure he was putting in his full cardio session, but she did give him an ultimatum. She wanted him down to 225 pounds maximum by the wedding because she didn’t want him looking “fat and sloppy” (her exact words) in the wedding pictures. She didn’t say that she wouldn’t marry him if he didn’t lose the weight, but I can tell y’all that part of him was afraid that that’s what she would do. In the event, he nearly made it to his present weight of 200 by the day of the wedding. I was in the wedding, so I also know that he was afraid his pants were going to fall down since he’d lost another bunch of weight since we went for our fittings.
(I don’t know that it’s a true story, but Danielle’s brother, who was also in the wedding, told me that she wasn’t too pleased that I was going to be in the wedding. Not that she doesn’t like me, but, from what her brother told me, she didn’t want anyone better-looking than the groom in the wedding pictures. Nobody told me I couldn’t be in the wedding, but the story may give y’all some insight into Danielle. That is if it’s true. Keaton, who was convinced that Danielle’s brother was gay, told me that he probably made up the story as a come-on.)
I don’t think Sloppy Joe had anything to worry about from me stealing the limelight in the pictures. He looked awesome the day of his wedding. Danielle had all the men in the wedding in white tie and tails, and he looked so elegant you’d wonder how he got his nickname in the first place. He told me she spent $350 on his haircut – and sent him to Beverly Hills to get it. Maya offered to send her stylist (he cuts my hair now too), but that apparently wasn’t good enough. Danielle said she wanted “someone who does movie stars” – which got a big laugh out of Maya. So Sloppy Joe showed up on his wedding day with movie star hair and a beard that was almost as perfect as Keaton’s. Danielle actually made him shave his whole messy beard off while they were dating, and us Parrots showed him absolutely no mercy when he showed up for a game looking like a sheep whose wool had just been shorn off. She quickly decided she liked him better with facial hair, although she couldn’t decide what kind. So poor Sloppy Joe kept changing his beard style until he came up with one his fiancée approved of. The winner is close to the face but a lot lower than his natural beard line. He’s complained to the whole team (after we were done making fun of him) that the upkeep is a pain in the ass, but I’ve always had the feeling that he genuinely enjoys making Danielle happy and that he didn’t make all these changes because he’s scared of her.
(In case all this talk of facial hair has made y’all wonder whether I’ve grown a beard like practically every other man in America the answer is…well, I’m not sure how to answer my own question lol. I still think of myself as clean-shaven, but Maya (with the marketing research team behind her) want me to shave only twice a week so I have some visible stubble. To judge from what Destiny told me about audience response when I started appearing on camera that way, the show’s social media accounts blew up with comments about how hot I looked. So now I shave twice a week, which makes the amazing but very expensive English shaving cream Robert got me addicted to last longer lol.)
No matter how much Sloppy Joe has changed physically, inside he’s still the same first baseman the Parrots have had since before I joined the team. We definitely haven’t changed his nickname: we all still call him Sloppy Joe, although everyone knows Danielle doesn’t like it. She went on an all-out campaign to get his friends to start calling him what she calls him – Joey – but it didn’t catch on. I try to remember to call him Joey when I’m with both of them, but I forget as often as I remember.
Maybe it’s Keaton’s influence, but I’m kinda afraid that I’ve made it sound like Danielle is the Wife from Hell who’s bullied my teammate and friend into something he isn’t. I don’t think that’s true. Really. There are men who like their wives to take a firm hand with them, and I reckon Sloppy Joe, who was super chill as a bachelor and let everything slide when he could, is one of those men. Sure, at his new weight he can’t throw a softball harder than anyone I’ve known anymore, and now he has to stop off at Keaton’s place to shower and change clothes if we’ve had cigars, but Mr. and Mrs. Sloppy Joe seem truly happy when they’re together. And she gives him time to play softball and hang out with his buddies. I’m no expert, but I have noticed that time apart can be as healthy for a marriage as time together.
I say that what I’ve written about Danielle might have been influenced by Keaton, because he and Danielle are allergic to each other. Keaton doesn’t like it that she’s (as he puts it) the kind of woman who likes to keep men’s balls in a jar on a shelf in the garage, and Danielle doesn’t like it that he represents (as she puts it) toxic masculinity at its most misogynistic and homophobic. I’ll grant him that she has taken over a lot of aspects of Sloppy Joe’s life, and I’ll grand her that Keaton’s got a misogynist streak. So neither of them is completely wrong. But, like I said, Sloppy Joe isn’t complaining about his wife, and Danielle doesn’t know that Keaton rescued his upstairs neighbor from her abusive boyfriend back when he was living in that apartment by Cal Tech he hated. And, as for the homophobic charge, Danielle should have seen what Keaton did to the jerkoffs who started giving Ryan and his boyfriend a hard time one night at the Volcano. Although Sloppy Joe made sure Keaton was in the wedding, that’s when Danielle started to dislike him, and she made no secret of it. Keaton started disliking her even before that, because of all the changes she was making to her fiancé.
It’s taken me into my 30s to realize something that now seems pretty obvious: not all your friends are gonna like each other. They don’t have to. You really do need to think twice before you start introducing people to each other.
So Sloppy Joe and Danielle bought a small but real nice house (Joyce said it was “cute” when she saw it) in Monrovia, which is the next city over from Pasadena. It’s got three bedrooms, some grass out front, a backyard…and a lot of gym equipment in the garage because Danielle decided that would be more cost effective than gym memberships for the two of them. Although she’s not a decorator, Danielle works for an interior decorating firm (no, not Adam and Allan’s), and she’s learned a lot about how to make a house a home. I reckon most of the designs are kinda girly, but she did allow the third bedroom to be turned into a man cave with a big flatscreen and some awesome leather recliners. I’ve always suspected that the reason she gave the man cave the ok was because she didn’t want all Sloppy Joe’s sports and video game shit ruining the look of the rest of the house lol. (And, yes, she does impose strict limits on his video game time. She probably did him a favor there: me and Keaton were afraid that he was developing a serious gaming addiction, and she’s put the kibosh on it. Not that Keaton gave her any credit for it, of course.
Sloppy Joe and Danielle have me over for dinner at least once a month. I like to go on my cheat day; that way, I can get a home-cooked meal without having to worry about what’s in it.
I know I used to say that cheat days were lameass and that you didn’t need to watch your diet that carefully if you stayed active. Only now I’m 34 instead of 26, and staying in dang good shape is part of a job for which I have my shirt off almost as much as I have it on lol. At least Maya and Robert got rid of that stupidass Beverly Hills place that made up that crazy diet they forced Matteo to be on. Y’all may be surprised, but the new official nutrition and fitness advisor (that’s his credit on the crawl) to At Home with Maya is none other than Lucas. He graduated from Denison with a degree in nutrition and sports kinesiology, and it takes only one look at him to realize he knows what he’s talking about. He’s been working with all of us, and I reckon we’d win a lot of medals at the reality show olympics if they existed lol. He’s even working with Jacob, although not with Matteo, who slimmed down on his own as he hit adolescence and doesn’t want anything to do with anything athletic. At least he gives me a lot less attitude than his PE teachers get at school when we work out together twice a week. He’s not going to win us any medals at the reality show olympics, but I’m taking the fact that he doesn’t get picked last anymore as a win.
Lucas was in on Sloppy Joe’s transformation too, although he still thinks the weight came off too fast. That got Sloppy Joe interested in nutrition, which turned out to mean that he taught himself to be an awesome chef. He does most of the cooking in the house, which is fine with Danielle, since she hates to cook (and, according to him, she sucks at it, too.) He works it so that me and him have the same cheat day so he can really go to town in the kitchen when I come over for dinner.
Last night’s dinner was amazing, with a shrimp appetizer, a pasta with truffle cheese, and then a fillet mignon and loadedass baked potato course that included some vegetables that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Adam and Allan’s Thanksgiving table. Believe it or not, he even baked the dinner rolls, since he wasn’t about to ignore carbs on a cheat day. Dessert was an exact copy of the Dairy Queen Blizzard, and, between the two of us, we finished every last bite of it. Since they need me to look more like Michelangelo’s David (as Lucas has joked) than a huge bodybuilder, I don’t go batshit crazy on my cheat days and eat a bunch of cheeseburgers sandwiched between two meat lover’s pizzas with a milkshake poured all over it all. But cheat days are still the only time I get to have ice cream now, and I probably do get carried away when I get to have it.
It was just me, Sloppy Joe and Danielle, and the evening was real nice and chill. Sloppy Joe did warn me about bringing up Lindsay Clancy, but I know better than to discuss that with anyone, male or female. And I ain’t gonna tell y’all what I think about it, either. All us Blocks are huge Dolly Parton fans. I even got teary-eyed when she passed. She said a lot of smart stuff during her life, but maybe the smartest of all was when she said that you need to keep your [dang] mouth shut about politics if you’re gonna have a career in show business. I don’t know that being on a reality show is exactly the same being in show business, but I’m keeping my dang mouth shut just the same.
I was totally stuffed after my huge dinner, so I decided to sit up and get some writing done when I got home. I gotta admit that Sloppy Joe wasn’t at the top of my list of people I wanted to update y’all about, but I reckon I had to start somewhere. Now that I’ve got a couple posts up, I need to figure out a routine for keeping up with the blog. Dr. Oliver suggested that maybe I could pick two days a week to publish new content since. If I can stick to a workout routine, he said, I can certainly have a writing one.
I don’t know why exactly, but Monday and Thursday strike me as good days for posting new content. Today’s Thursday, so y’all should tune in again on Monday to see whether I’m keeping up with my brand new routine. Who knows? Maybe knowing people are gonna be looking for a new post will inspire me to write one.
