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and now I know.

As my frustrations with the Cleveland Browns have waxed and waned over the years, I’ve threatened at different points just to bag my five-plus decades of support because it wasn’t worth the effort.

I always stuck with it, though, and I had always wondered what exactly would it take for me to actually follow up on that impulse.

That’s the basic question here: How bad would it have to be?

I got that answer last week, when it was announced that the team had reached an agreement to trade for a quarterback who hadn’t played for a year while police, prosecutors and a grand jury investigated multiple complaints that he had sexually abused women while getting massages. A quarterback who still has deal with nearly two dozen civil lawsuits from individual woman who detailed those assaults.

And there’s the answer to that question.

To briefly recap: Early last week, NFL media folks began reporting that the Browns were one of an handful of teams interested in this guy, and I tweeted at that point that I’d be done with the Browns if that were to ever happen. At that point, though, the tweet felt impulsive and I deleted it a short time later.

I was glad I did a day or two later, when the name national media folks reported that the Browns were out of the running. That still left the Browns in a terrible position with Baker Mayfield, the guy who was to have been the team’s savior — but at least it wasn’t going to be that guy.

So it’s fair to say I was stunned when multiple push alerts hit my phone Friday afternoon that the Browns were not only back in the running but had reached an agreement with the Texans to trade for the guy.

I was crushed. And I knew that impulsive tweet from earlier in the week wasn’t just an impulse — that’s what I had to do if I was ever going to enjoy watching NFL games ever again.

I went to Target after work and grabbed a big storage tub, brought it home and filled it with all of the Browns stuff I could find — books, hats, hoodies, t-shirts, jerseys, all of it — so I could take it up to the attic. I cut the team out of my social media. I left the local Browns Backers group on FB. I shut off mentions in my various sports apps and deleted the Browns app from my phone.

Maybe I had a sliver of hope that the deal could unravel before it was finalized, and that might have been the reason that I didn’t take the tub of Browns stuff upstairs right away. But that was dashed when I saw this tweet Sunday morning.

Yep. It was over.

There is one large question to address here, because it’s already become the basis for justifying his presence in Cleveland, just as it was the justification for celebrating the Stillers quarterback who just retired without any meaningful discussion of his own reputation for being a sexual predator: “But Uncle Crappy — what happened to the concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty?’ “

Was he charged with any crimes? No, he was not.

So he’s innocent, right?

It’s not that simple. Police and prosecutors make hard decisions all the time about whether those suspected of crimes can be prosecuted successfully or not. In this case, prosecutors actually took evidence to a grand jury, which was empaneled not to decide innocence or guilt but to determine if there was enough evidence to proceed with charges and a trial.

That grand jury said there wasn’t.

But that ruling speaks only to those questions; it does nothing to address whether or not anything happened. And where there is smoke, boys and girls — in this instance the civil lawsuits that are still hanging out there — there is fire.

The number of allegations against him is important too. This wasn’t a one-time problem (which we refer to incorrectly as a “mistake,” as in, “Whoops, sorry, I don’t know how my penis got there.”) — it demonstrates a pattern. Something happened, over and over and over, which pretty clearly shows that this guy has no regard for women, that he’s a dangerous person in the community and that he shouldn’t be in the league — and I sure as hell don’t want him on my team.

After that tweeted announcement, there were subsequent posts from the owners, the GM and the head coach, all saying they were satisfied that the new face of the Cleveland Browns “understands and embraces the hard work to build his name both in the community and on the field” (quoted from the statement of Dee and Jimmy Haslam).

Is it possible that that’s actually true? Does he feel remorseful? Could he successfully rehabilitate himself? Sure. That’s possible. But I also think that we should believe people when they show us who they are — and he felt comfortable enough with some kind of troubling conduct that he did it not just once but again and again and again.

And that’s not a guy I can cheer for. Ever.

Fifty years. Plus a few more.

Because of TV, I was a Browns fan before I really knew what Ohio State football was. I had posters — the ones you used to be able to order from Sports Illustrated — of Leroy Kelly hanging in my bedroom. And while Buckeyes would be on TV once or twice a year back in those days, I couldn’t begin to count the hours I spent watching the Browns on TV on a black-and-white screen with a crescent-shaped chip out of one corner of the TV’s plastic frame.

There was also even more time when I was in junior high and high school, pretty much every Sunday. My dad and I even convinced my mom to let us keep a small radio plugged in behind the couch so we could listen to the radio broadcast as we watched the game TV. And if we weren’t parked on that couch for kickoff, it was probably because we went to the game, as we did once a year for a few years.

That wasn’t easy, either. Everyone knows the list of Patented Cleveland Sports Disasters that happened to the Browns, and trust me — I felt each of those, deeply and personally. The ultimate heartbreak happened in 1995, when the team was stolen from Cleveland and from me. Mrs. Crappy talked me out of bailing then, and I was newly committed to the team when it returned.

I stuck with them through everything, even the previously mentioned moments when I doubted whether I should. But that wavering was all based on football stuff — the team’s luck, its poor decisions by terrible coaches and personnel folks and, yes, its inability to beat the team that plays just down the road from my house. But that was my team. And I stayed.

The Browns would say that this also is a football decision; I think it’s more than that, though. Regardless of the tweeted platitudes, it shows a disregard for the women of the team’s fan base and a disregard for your community. It says that the front office folks think those things can be sacrificed in the name of playoff wins, all while keeping their fingers crossed that he doesn’t start doing the same things once he lands in Cleveland.

Look, I’m not being naive. I know that the NFL is about winning. Period. And I suspect this guy will help. But my own values are more important — and they say that I can neither support this guy nor the team that signed him

So what happens now? That’s hard to say. If I’m still going to watch the NFL, it would make sense to fall back on my previous free agency deal with the 49ers. It would be easy and pretty comfortable.

And I have to admit that at the moment, the idea of cheering for the other Ohio team — the one led by Joey Burrow — is interesting.

And it could also be that I simply choose to take some time off from pro football. After all, I discovered in the years that the Browns were gone that Sunday afternoons spent doing things other than football were kind of nice.

Maybe I’ll give that a try for a while.

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it’s very real.

You don’t have to look far these days to find plenty of examples of Karens and Kens throwing their weight around in public. I’ve even seen them out in the wild, usually after someone confronts them about the lack of a mask in a store where it’s required. There is generally some shouting, maybe some throwing of things and then a dramatic-but-hasty departure. Witnesses shake their heads and wonder how it came to this.

I’ve found myself thinking about how to handle a confrontation over our new normal, especially since a maskless jerk who seemed to think he was funny crowded my mom in the grocery store.

And now I know.

Just a little while ago, I was checking out at the little Giant Eagle store in our neighborhood. The woman running the register is one of my favorite people there, always chatty and friendly while customers unload their carts. I held out my phone so she could scan my loyalty card barcode and then stepped back to the end of the belt to pay with my card.

And there’s a guy standing there. Already unloading his stuff. Standing right in front of the card reader. I said, “Sir, could you please back up? I’ll pay real quick and be out of your way.”

He stepped to the back of the belt, but went no further.

“Sir, could you please back up to the sign on the floor so I can pay?”

He says he doesn’t need to back up any further.

I now notice he’s not wearing his mask; he’s just holding it up over his mouth. And, because my brain works like it does, I also notice that he looks an awful lot like the late pro wrestling manager Bobby Heenan, but with a cut-off t-shirt instead of the satin jacket.

With the exception of the clothes, this is REALLY close.

I am no longer being polite. Or quiet. “Back up. And put on your mask.”

The woman checking me out is now no longer behind the register; she’s standing next to the guy, asking him to move back. At this point she’s the reasonable one, saying if he could just back up for a minute, she’d get him checked out right away.

He says, to her and to me, that he doesn’t have to back up. There is now a lot of shouting. He pretends to swing at me once, after I asked him what was so fucking hard about this whole thing. He is red in the face (I probably was too) and telling me he’s going to break my jaw.

I made one mistake. I tossed his gallon jug of iced tea back in his cart. It came open, and poured out on the floor. He sensed that this was an opening, because he immediately started to shout about me assaulting him. “He ripped off my mask! He shoved me! Did you see it? Someone call the cops!”

A couple employees show up with mops, and they move his cart back — way back — and begin to clean up the iced tea. Another employee said the police were on their way. He stepped up to me one last time. “You’re going to jail, asshole. I guarantee it.”

I laughed. “You know the cops are going to ask other people what happened, right? Lying to a cop is a really bad idea.”

We’re now separated. I paid and moved my cart over to the service desk. The woman who checked me out — she is also the front of house manager — says to me, quietly, “Don’t worry, sweetie — I’ll tell the police exactly what happened.” And I apologized to her, repeatedly, for the scene and for spilling the dude’s iced tea on the floor.

He practically sprinted out of the store, still making cartoonish gestures at me, when the police arrived. I thanked the manager one more time for her support and understanding and stepped outside, away from Mr. Heenan. I told one officer what happened while the other officer spoke to the guy. When the second officer came over to me, I learned that the story had apparently changed back to something close to reality — no mentions of assault or vicious mask removal. The second cop made sure I wasn’t parked near my friend. Then smiled, shook his head and said to have a nice night.

But I haven’t had a nice night. It’s nearly two hours later, and the adrenaline is still pumping. I still feel guilty about causing a problem for the people who work in the store — they shouldn’t have to be the ones to deal with shit like this. I’ve gone over — and over and over — the confrontation in my head, and I don’t think I’d do anything differently — except for the iced tea thing — if this happens again.

Or, maybe, when it happens again.

That’s the thing I don’t get. Why did this happen? Did the guy come in the store thinking he was going to pick a fight with someone? Was he just having a bad day? And even if the latter is the case, what is so hard about being respectful? Or even just tolerant? I mean, I was literally 60 seconds away from walking my cart out to the car. I wouldn’t think twice about taking a step back to let someone finish up their purchase. I go back to the question in the first paragraph: How did we get here?

And more importantly: Can we please go back?

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6. not yet.

reunited

I look a little bit demented in this picture, but the happiness on my face is genuine.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last.

I took that selfie outside of one of the two shops that worked for more than two weeks to restore my Element to its former glory. It had been pronounced fixed earlier on Friday; I left work a bit early, drove out to the ‘burbs to drop off the Charger and pick up my car.

And, man, I was happy to see it.

But there wasn’t much time to stand around and admire my 10-year-old, 245,000-miles-on-it Element; I was on the way to Columbus to help out with tomorrow’s Minnesota tailgate party. I needed to get some gas and get myself on the Parkway West.

Once on the highway, it still took a while before I noticed anything; as any good yinzer knows, rush-hour traffic in Robinson tends to not rush anywhere. But once I got on I-79, it was easy to tell: the Element wasn’t fixed. The moment I accelerated, the check engine light came on and the engine hesitated sharply. It struggled to get up hills. And by the time I got to the Washington County line, I knew I couldn’t stick it out all the way to Columbus; I had to turn around and head back home.

And. I. Was. Furious.

There were issues all week with something to do with emissions; the check engine light apparently was persistent all week long. But: It eventually passed its annual emissions inspection and the folks at the body shop said they fixed one final problem emissions problem this morning.

I wonder if anyone at either professional automobile service business bothered to take the car out on the highway. I’m guessing they didn’t.

Mrs. Crappy has work stuff to catch up with and I can’t leave her without a car for the weekend. So, instead of being in Columbus, helping my folks with the tailgate party and seeing the season’s penultimate home game, we’re stuck in Pittsburgh. And I am frustrated beyond words.

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johnny (part two).

All I really wanted to do on Sunday was cut the grass and haul the summer furniture out of the garage, clean it up and spend the rest of the afternoon lounging on the front porch.

As we discussed yesterday, those plans were changed. I took a day off today to get all those things done; I was hoping to finish the toilet installation today and get some outside work finished in time to grill a pork loin and spend the evening outside.

Instead, the bathroom is in pretty much the same state it was when I started working on it this morning. I still have no idea about my toilet installation skills, because I’m still nowhere near being able to install the toilet, thanks to something in the subfloor that has left me unable to anchor a new flange.

And I am out patience and, because I have to work tomorrow, out of time as well.

I don’t have a problem with paying professionals to do these kinds of things. I just wish I hadn’t wasted two full days before figuring out that I’d need to do that now.

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13. disappointing.

People who aren’t who you thought.

Those who don’t do the simple things they should.

Not living up to my own expectations.

Feeling isolated.

These aren’t new lessons. But they seem to have come up all at once this week.

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unforgivable.

Although we have three televisions in the newsroom, I wasn’t watching any of them at 10 a.m. on June 28.

We knew the Supreme Court was set to announce its ruling on President Obama’s health care law around 10, and I was reading through the rapid posts at the SCOTUSBlog and refreshing the Associated Press feeds so I could be ready to post the first write-through AP moved.

It took AP just a couple minutes to move its first few paragraphs after Chief Justice Roberts announced the 5-4 ruling; I grabbed the story and a couple pictures, posted them on the paper’s site, and then took a look at Twitter to see what the reaction was.

I found some discussion about the opinion, sure, but most of the talk was about how CNN had butchered the announcement. The network had jumped on Roberts’ first few words — which said the individual mandate didn’t meet the tests necessary to be constitutional under the commerce clause — and reported that the individual mandate had been ruled unconstitutional.

A few paragraphs later, though, Roberts’ opinion states that the mandate is, in fact constitutional, but CNN was in enough of a hurry that its on-air folks apparently couldn’t wait to get it right.

Hooboy. I checked CNN’s site and found the above (the green highlights are mine). CNN continued to bury themselves for minutes, even going as far as letting Wolf Blitzer start consulting with the network’s mind-numbing array of talking heads about the impact of the devastating political loss for Obama.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, I found out later that CNN’s chief rival, Fox News, hadn’t fared any better. I didn’t see the broadcast, but the screen cap above pretty clearly illustrates that the Fair and Balanced team screwed it up as well.

By themselves, the errors were bad enough. But one of those networks made their mistake infinitely worse later in the day. CNN — which apparently hung with the erroneous report longer than Fox did — issued a correction and an unattributed apology:

CNN regrets that it didn’t wait to report out the full and complete opinion regarding the mandate. We made a correction within a few minutes and apologize for the error.

Fox, as it does, took a different tack in addressing its error. Michael Clemente, the network’s executive vice president of news, issued this statement:

We gave our viewers the news as it happened. When Justice Roberts said, and we read, that the mandate was not valid under the commerce clause, we reported it. Then when we heard and read that the mandate could be upheld under the government’s power to tax, we reported that as well.

That noise you just heard was my head exploding. But we’ll get to that in a second.

First, let’s talk about the mistakes themselves. I’ve never worked at an organization anywhere near the size of CNN or Fox News, but the basic principles of journalism are the same whether we’re talking about a television news network or a medium-sized newspaper: Be right. And if you can, be first.

Note the order there. If you’re in such a hurry that you screw up the facts, it doesn’t matter how quickly you got it on the air or on the site. You’re wrong. Period.

Working with the paper’s website has made me more aware of the importance of timing, but it’s also made more aware of the caution necessary when we’re rushing. If I can confirm that there’s been an accident and that the coroner has been called to the scene, it’s safe for me to report THOSE TWO THINGS ONLY. It’s a pretty good assumption that someone is dead, but it’s still an assumption; I’m not writing that someone is dead until somebody — a cop, the coroner, one of our photographers — tells me there’s a body or until I see it myself.

After hearing Roberts say the mandate wasn’t valid under the commerce clause, CNN and Fox both made assumptions as well and those assumptions bit them both. If the reporters in Washington had continued listening rather than making those assumptions, I wouldn’t be writing this post.

The next thing has to do with a pretty basic tenet of journalism ethics. When you make a factual error, you correct it, and when you make a correction, you do it in a way that is transparent. CNN, to its credit, not only corrected its error but recognized that it was significant enough that it also issued an apology. It’s still irritating to me that the network made such an egregious — and avoidable — error in the first place, but once it happened, fixing it and moving on is really the only public course to take (I assume there are things going on behind the scenes to ensure something that stupid will never happen again). CNN swallowed hard and did what it had to do. Good.

Mr. Clemente, on the other hand, comes off looking like a kid whose hand was caught in the cookie jar and then denied it was ever there. Let’s repeat that basic tenet of journalism ethics: When you make a factual error, you correct it.

Fox didn’t do that. In his statement Clemente said his network reported the facts as they happened. Take one more look at the headline in the above screencap. At no point did anyone connected with the court say the legislation had been ruled unconstitutional, and that makes the headline wrong. Period. If the headline had read that the individual mandate was invalid under the commerce clause, it would have been accurate, maybe — MAYBE — Clemente’s stunningly arrogant statement would have been appropriate.

It didn’t. And when the executive vice president of Fox News had an opportunity to simply, quietly correct the error his network made and move on, he failed. Badly.

You guys are more than capable of drawing your own conclusions about the ideologies and motivations that drive our cable news networks; that’s not the point of this post. But on a day when the two biggest cable networks each made what had to be one of the biggest errors in their histories, only one of them handled the mistake as a serious news organization would.

The other? If I needed a reason to write it off, what it did on June 28 would be it.