Nothing Is Scarier Than Being a Child Afraid of Getting in Trouble

The wet heat on the back of your neck …

One of my sons got in trouble at school this week. It was minor trouble, nothing-to-be-concerned-about trouble, an offense that, if we would have heard about later rather than having his teacher call us about, we wouldn’t have thought twice about. But the fact remains that the teacher did call. She handled it well, we were glad she called, we weren’t mad at him, it was really no big deal. Still: She did call.

So: Trouble. The biggest misconception about me early in my career — by “early,” I mean “shortly after Deadspin launched,” which was the first time nearly anyone had ever seen my name in the first place — was that I was some sort of troublemaker, that I came barreling into the media world wanting to burn it all down. Part of this was because Deadspin was associated with the Gawker Media network, whose mothership site had most of the New York City media scene pulling its hair out (though I’d modeled my site much more after Mark Lisanti’s Defamer), and part of it was because the newspaper model started to unravel most dramatically right as Deadspin’s ascendance began. This led people to think that I was a far more adversarial personality than I am. (When I showed up for the infamous “Costas Now” appearance, Bob Costas seemed legitimately…