My heart bleeded, girl

The Columbus Blue Jackets offered to buy my first beer if I went to a bar to "support the Arena District" today to watch the "Battle of Ohio," ie, the Bengals v the Browns, aka the most boring football game of the day. How about we support the Arena District by playing some hockey at said Arena, hmmm?

This made me pretty angry when I read it the other day.

We passed the first anniversary of Rick Rypien’s death just two months ago, on August 15. In that year, the former Canucks winger has been anything but forgotten. Despite playing only 119 games in a Canucks uniform, Rypien left an indelible impression on the city of Vancouver, one that his death has only deepened. Kevin Bieksa and the Canucks launched Mindcheck.ca, a website where visitors struggling with mental health issues like Rypien’s can get connected to support early and quickly, and that site quietly became a provincial resource back in January. Ryp’s death was hardly in vain.

But Mindcheck isn’t the only lasting tribute to Rypien. There’s also the column outside of Rogers Arena that still bears messages from the impromptu memorial Ellen Ransford and other fans put together after Rypien took his life. While many of the construction paper cards, posterboard signs, flowers and whatnot are gone, the writing on the pillar has remained untouched.

That is, until Justin Bieber came to town last night. Brace yourselves.

So, yes, some girl wrote "Justin Beiber, Oct. 10, 2012 and foolishly added her name. Very sad and thoughtless. She's been relentlessly cyberbullied and harassed since then, with the usual jackass death threats and "why don't you go kill yourself" tweets - ironic coming from fans of a man who committed suicide, don't you think? The point of this article is to decry said harassment and to point out that if she was neither a hockey fan nor from Vancouver, she probably had no idea what the pillar was about, saw writing on it, and decided to add her own commemoration of an important event in her life. Whatevs, here's the part that pissed me off.

Now, before we freak out too much, it’s important to remember that Justin Bieber fans, as a group, are not known for their intellect or social awareness. Consider the girl who carved — yes, literally carved — “JB I love” into her forearm. Or Greg Leuch, whose program that censors Bieber from your web browsing had fans calling him Hitler, because basic blocking software is akin to death chambers to these people? Several tweeted death threats to Selena Gomez when her relationship with Biebs hit the press. And how about this group of girls screaming at a guy that isn’t Justin Bieber outside his hotel room window? I could go on
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It’s a level of unintelligence I can hardly fathom, but it would be a surprise, to me, to learn that the person had a full understanding of the column’s significance when she broke out the sharpie. I’d guess this particular young lady, in the delirium of post-concert Bieber Fever, saw a graffiti’d pillar and thought she’d add to it with almost no synapses working to determine what the rest of the graffiti was about.

I didn't comment because there were already a gazillion comments and most of them were the kind that make you want to punch someone, but really? Over and over and over again, young female fans are derided simply because they are young and female. What young girls like, whether it's Justin Bieber, Twilight, Nsync, or the Beatles early in their career, is thought to be beneath contempt solely due to their target audience. The older I get, the more frustrated I am by that.

Okay, on a happier note. I read a story the other day that was both lovely and really hit home for me.

Distance and Time by bestliar. Hockey RPF. Sam Gagne/John Tavares

It's about a long-distance relationship, and it feels as if the author knows something about that. This part:

It is easy to say next time, eventually, and in the future. It is easy to make plans for the days that aren’t here yet, still invisible over the horizon. They can talk on the phone. They can compare what they want out of life sometime when they aren’t so busy living it.

And it's been 16 months for Larry and I, five-ish years to go, and sometimes I think this would be fine if we were younger, but we're saying next time, eventually, when time seems more finite, and I wonder if we're wasting it apart. I mean, you all know things were kind of crappy for awhile, and now they're better, and one reason they're better is the distance and time apart, but still. It makes me think, those thoughts you have when you're older. And this story just kind of...resonated.

Also, it's beautifully written.

And now I'm off to help Erin spend some of the giftcards they got as wedding presents, while Larry and Neville nap.