hockey is for (objectifying) everyone

It’s been a long time since I’ve done just a straight-up horny-as-hell post here. I think the last one was about like, Jesse Eisenberg? Which is, uh, still pretty true except he’s married and admitted in an interview that he married a woman just like his mother because of his Oedipal Complex and you know what, I will never judge anyone for living and speaking their truth, but there are… perhaps… some things… we should not say… aloud. No, I will absolutely not be taking my own advice at this time.

I want to preface this with the fact that I don’t really know anything about any of these dudes. Not in like, a disclaimer way where the dumb bullshit I spout shouldn’t be taken as fact (though that’s also true), but in a way where like, I have mostly no idea if they’re married, prone to criminal behavior, or complete and utter pieces of shit. I assume all men, especially in sports, are bad.

That said, I’m going to talk about banging hockey players now. Sorry if that’s weird for you. Also, if you somehow ended up here and your name is on this list… I’m only kind of sorry, but I do hope you’re having a good season/off-season/retirement/life/etc. If you’re here because your friend and/or teammate is on this list… Please, please chirp him for me.

Also, if you’re a man who has ever had or read and agreed with the thought that women only watch hockey because the men are hot… 1. I’m not a woman; 2. You’re an idiot; 3. If we wanted to watch sports for hot men, we’d watch basketball where the men are actually hot and wear way less clothing; 4. an average soccer player has more teeth in their head than any entire NHL franchise; 5. Shut the fuck up, no one cares.



Using Hockey Is For Everyone for my joke title is probably in bad taste, but because the NHL has so clearly never meant it, I don’t feel terrible about it. Hockey should be for everyone; lots of white men have gone out of their way to make sure that it isn’t. We can and should keep demanding better.


I am limiting this selection of the ten hottest hockey players to the seven teams I ~care~ about – the Winnipeg Jets (Closest Franchise to My Current Home), the Minnesota Wild (Second Closest to My Current Home), the Carolina Hurricanes (Bunch of Jerks/Storm Surge Very Appealing), the Dallas Stars (Fuckable), the Las Vegas Golden Knights (Home Away from Home), the Anaheim Ducks (Home-ish and Childhood, obviously.), and the Los Angeles Kings (HOME). Perhaps in time I will plow the field of all 31 NHL teams and objectify the entire sport properly, but for now. We are here.

Adam Henrique is thick-necked, sharp-jawed, dark-haired babe that plays for the Ducks who by nature of my having grown up in the era in which they were born and living a whopping twenty minutes from the Pond, I must love. He has a great smile that turns smarmy in a way I am deeply embarrassingly into. He looks like a dickhead Young Republican and no woman who has ever had sex with him has really enjoyed it, but it is fun to point him out to their new boyfriends and expound on just how bad it was for laughs. Has absolutely sent unsolicited dick pics.

Shea Theodore is your scruffy grad school boyfriend who’s missing an eyetooth because he got in a wrestling match with a frat brother before he left the frat life behind him entirely because he couldn’t handle the constant casual misogyny. He’s got a coffee problem and he’s happy to grab you a drink, but he always has to text and ask what you want, not because he can’t remember but because he always wants you to have the opportunity to try something new, if you’re feeling it. Were it not for being forced into them as part of his job, you would never, ever see him in a suit. Will tell you how beautiful you are when you look like shit.

Adam Lowry is, despite and perhaps in spite of, being ginger, very, very handsome. He plays for the Jets and fights like a gentleman. He’s 6’5″. He looks like the guy Disney would have cast for Charlie Conway OR Adam Banks in a Mighty Ducks the Where Are They Now? Epilogue. He looks like he smells good. Charmingly doofy, has a good sense of humor. He’d cook you dinner and then not let you help clean up afterward. Owns an apron and a nice vacuum cleaner, but probably doesn’t use either. Praises you for trying when you’re bad at video games and remembers your parents’ and siblings’ names. Probably the best kisser you’ve ever been with. He’s been out on IR for a while and at the start of every Jets game I ask Crystal, “When will my husband return from the war and punch a guy for my amusement?”

Look, at the time I started writing this, Jason Zucker was still on the Minnesota Wild, so I’m fucking keeping him, even if he abandoned us for the Pens. If he didn’t want to be objectified by a random horndog in North Dakota, he should’ve gotten traded sooner. Jason Zucker is from California, so is both a rarity and a gift to the hockey world. He has an unbelievable smile and great taste in suits and I mean, he’s pretty good at hockey, I guess. He will absolutely do some sort of pretty solid seductive move in public to get your interest, put his hand at the small of your back once you’ve given him the signal that it’s cool to do it, and then lean in and say something absurdly funny instead of smooth. It’s up to you to decide whether it was intentional and being confused about whether a hot person is dumb is actually very horny.

Jordan Greenway is 6’6″. That should be the end of the list, but it’s not. He’s got a Gordie Howe hat trick. He’s hot as hell. He says it takes a lot to make him angry enough to fight, so instead he just compulsively grins at dudes on the ice, even after he loses a fight. It is a spectacular smile. He was the first Black US Olympic hockey player (which, Hockey Is So Deeply Racist, jesus) but also the first player in the Olympic Games, an NCAA tournament, and the Stanley Cup playoffs in the same season. Did I mention he’s extremely hot? And 6’6″? He was an adorable kid. Picks up after himself even when he’s exhausted– You know how you like, walk away from the dirty plate and empty seltzer can and beer bottle on your coffee table, but then you like, stop and sigh deeply and turn back around to grab them? Like that. Definitely smells good, will have exceptionally good taste once he’s not 23 anymore. No one has good taste when they’re 23.

Look this is my list and I will get horned up about WHOMEVER I CHOOSE in whatever order I deem appropriate and accurate, thank you very much. Anze Kopitar is a big boy who has been playing with the Kings since I was in college. The fact that he looks perpetually exhausted is deeply arousing to me. He plays golf with Wayne Gretzky, which is probably very complimentary if you ignore Gretzky’s politics and most of the words that come out of his mouth. He probably tells great stories about his childhood that don’t involve hockey and leans in close to your ear in a crowd to make weird little wry jokes that you never see coming.

I need to note, now, that I did extensive research to write this. I put down the guys I knew I wanted to bone-down on first, then looked through all seven official NHL rosters with their accompanying headshots and added the most promising names to the list. Then I Google image searched the shit out of all 27 of them and narrowed down the list accordingly. The issue here, which I did not anticipate, is that the longer you stare at the kind of men who play hockey, the more of an upheaval you experience in the things you’re attracted to. My two braincells want to be extremely horny about hyper-masculine men right now and frankly I’m going to let them do their thing lest they revolt. Hockey has even deeply changed my very gay wife.

Mathieu Perreault is another Jet (Who knew Winnipeg could collect?) and a standout because he is one of the few hockey players who I wouldn’t describe as even approximating clean-cut. His hair alone is killer, but then there are the tattoos and the beard plus the big dark eyes and the great smile that turns smarmy in a hot way. It’s a very, very nice-looking package. Matthieu Perreault knows how you’re supposed to light someone else’s cigarette when you’re lighting your own. He’s the kind of guy you bring home and make use your mouthwash before you’ll have sex with him. Also, you maybe ask him to give his dick a cursory clean-up first. He makes sure it’s worth it.

Laurent Brossoit is another Jet ginger and the only goalie on this list. He’s got a killer jaw and beautiful eyes, often the facial hair of the bard-y dude in a puffy shirt in ‘period’ movies and a sweet-as-hell laugh. Laurent Brossoit color-codes his closet and donates the stuff he’s bored of to a place that isn’t the Salvation Army. He’s fastidiously clean, always smells good, and is middling-to-decent in bed. He has an online shopping problem, but in a like, charming way. He sends his mom a big expensive arrangement of flowers on her birthday and holidays. He has neither a ‘personal life’ or ‘legal troubles’ section on his Wiki, which is a sign of someone who knows better than to cause trouble and that is very sexy of him. I saw Laurent Brossoit shirtless earlier this month and I dropped my phone because I wasn’t prepared. He is not willing to try out your adventurous ideas in bed.

The Dallas Stars are, by force of Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin alone, the most fuckable team in the NHL. Stephen Johns, Roman Polak, and Jamie Oleksiak (He’s 6’7″!! His nickname is BIG RIG!! He doesn’t have a boring black & grey tattoos!!) don’t hurt and five good-looking guys on an NHL team is, truly, A Lot. (Only the Golden Knights do better, but none of them are as hot as either Tyler Seguin or Jamie Benn.) As noted above, I have chosen to support the Dallas Stars solely for their fuckability and if they don’t like it, well. Go back and change thousands of years of misogyny and then come talk to me. You’ll survive a little good-natured objectification. Cry into your money about it.

Tyler Seguin is very hot. He has a nauseatingly good body and he seems allergic to shirts. He was in the ESPN body issue and there are so many (SO MANY) great gifs of him sitting on a Zamboni naked and eating a rocket pop. He seems extremely charming in a way that makes me want to punch him. He has the best looking laugh in the NHL and is also Brutally Cute. All evidence points to him either being an absolute dumbass, too dumb to adequately formulate a homophobic joke or trying desperately to come out via metaphor since the Bruins shunted him to Dallas. I want to destroy him sexually and emotionally. I’d like to see him cry. Tyler Seguin seems like he’d pick up at a bar and then be bad in bed, but he’s actually very considerate and takes direction well and isn’t exactly hopeless without it. His hair is very soft and he smells good in a non-cologne way. Can’t cook, doesn’t really pick up after himself, but knows your coffee order AND how you like it at home. He will not remember your birthday, but his sheets are almost always clean. He likes to play the dirtbag, but he’d definitely take care of your dogs for you while you were on a trip if he could.

There is nothing particularly special about Jamie Benn looks-wise. With a good haircut, decent facial hair grooming, and off the ice, he looks like the smarmy, work-obsessed big city boyfriend in a Hallmark Christmas movie. Jamie Benn has big time Fat In High School energy and people are mean about his body because he looks like an athlete instead of a model, which is still nothing like a regular human man. His nickname is Chubbs. He has never spoken a single clear, coherent, un-mumbled sentence in his entire life. Tyler Seguin is, probably, better looking objectively depending on how swayed you are by willingness to be publicly naked. Nevertheless, Jamie Benn makes my fucking dumb-ass brain stop working entirely from Horny Disease. Jamie Benn looks like a big, low-rent Gabriel Macht and yet when I see him I go into that idiotic daze that nerds in 80s movies get when they see a boob. On-ice, without a helmet, I absolutely lose my shit. If I saw him in real life, I’d probably embarrass myself by going absolutely fucking feral. This fight makes me feel fucking faint. (Shoutout to my big boy Joe Thornton as well. Credit where credit is due.) Jamie Benn’s neck makes me feel, I imagine, the way those grotesque 90s morning DJ men felt when they were knee-deep in some deranged fantasy about a Playboy Playmate. If you give him a blowjob, you have to look over at this fucking thing. He has classically bad hockey hair in this picture and 1. I find it endearing and 2. I gasp-screamed and had to look away from my laptop when it came up in a Google image search. Jamie Benn has never successfully made a woman come. I have never, ever wanted to have sex with a man more.



MITCH MARNER – My enemy, a Maple Leaf, but also the reason for this dumb fucking post. His jaw makes me furious and nothing motivates me like anger. He looks like he would have bullied me in middle school for being fat.

LEON DRAISAITL – Sometimes looks like a smarmy bully in an 80s movie who would happily give you an STD, sometimes looks a little bit like a Disney prince and apparently that’s a mix that I find very fuckable.

ANTHONY DUCLAIR – So, so, soooo handsome. Way too handsome for hockey. An unbelievable smile and great facial hair.

MATHEW BARZAL – Looks like Nico Tortorella got bodied face first. Every time I see him I call him a little rat-faced bitch. No, I don’t know why that does it for me.

KRIS LETANG – Looks like Milo Ventimiglia in a mug shot. He’s a Pen, so he’s a dweeb, but I’ve been attracted to worse things.

BRADEN HOLTBY – Absolutely looks like he’d murder you in a parking lot until he smiles. Very big, very good boy just trying his best.

EVANDER KANE – Killer smile, great hair, great facial hair, beautiful eyes.

JUUSE SAROS – Lost his helmet in a game Crystal and I had turned on for five minutes the other night and we both yelled, “Oh NOOOOOOO” in harmonic unison. It’s an Erik Von Detten in Brink! situation, so you either get it or you’re wrong.

JUJHAR KHAIRA – Quite easily the handsomest man in hockey, hands-down. Phenomenal facial hair, amazing bone structure, 6’4″ and seems very willing to throw a punch when it needs to be thrown.

SIDNEY CROSBY – Look, I do NOT want to talk about it; no, I will NOT be taking questions at this time, and if you can look at Sidney Crosby’s mouth and feel even a tiny inkling of self-restraint or one single pure thought, you are surely a better man than me.

totally top three: january 2020

2020 is a futuristic-ass looking year, isn’t it? Will I ever get used to it? Will I ever stop accidentally typing 2002 instead? Who knows!


Harry Styles’ Fine Line is so lovely and so artful and delicate and poppy and fun and emotive and I was so looking forward to it and so glad to not only not be disappointed, but to be deeply impressed and MOVED. I’m particularly fond of “Adore You” and “Cherry” and “To Be So Lonely” and “She,” and “Canyon Moon,” and okay, really, not going to list the entire album, but I am really into the whole thing. This is just a lovely cohesive experience that’s very repeatable.


Though I don’t consider myself a sports person, as surely I have mentioned before like the obnoxious pain in the ass I am, I’m not not-interested in sports and have often gone through phases of getting really into watching hockey and/or baseball depending on my ~mood and the season. This winter, Crystal and I have gotten pretty into hockey compilations on YouTube (I love injuries and fights. I know what this says about me. Hush.) and because of that, the algorithm served us a Bardown Quiz and we kind of fell in love. Everyone who shows up for the quizzes is a delight and we like the dumb inter-office competition and the yelling. The other Bardown videos are great too, but nothing tops the quizzes.


Orville Peck’s Pony is absolutely going to be on my top five of 2020 because I listened to it at least once every day in January. AT! LEAST! ONCE! A! DAY! FOR! A! WHOLE! MONTH! And I am not even a little tired of it yet. ORVILLE PECK SOUNDS LIKE QUEER “I LOVE YOU BECAUSE”/”I WILL BE HOME AGAIN” ELVIS MADE AN ALBUM IN TWIN PEAKS. If that doesn’t sell you… Well. This probably isn’t the album for you, I guess!

a tweet from ash which reads orville peck's kansas (remembers me now) makes me feel like i'm slowly bleeding out from a knife wound in a seedy small town honky tonk bathroom, but in a way where i've made peace with both my fate and my misdeeds and welcome the relief of the coming darkness


And three to look forward to…

nada surf, never not together   birds of prey   green day, father of all motherfuckers

totally top five 2019: listening

I listened to so, so much good music this year and I have been SO EXCITED to talk about it that some of these blurbs have been in draft for literal MONTHS. Also, I urge you to remember that I have spectacular, diverse taste in music and you should listen to me!!


King Woman, Created in the Image of Suffering – This is 38 minutes of heavy, haunting, artful doom metal and it rules. Kristina Esfandiari is so unbelievably talented and you can hear pain and growth and struggle and escape and reconciliation and it’s beautiful and heavy and cool as hell. This was the first thing I listened to and loved in 2019 that made me feel like I was experiencing something I never had before, like it was the ground floor of something brand new to me that will only get better from here. “Utopia,” “Deny,” and “Shame” are my favorites, but I cannot stress enough how good it is as a complete album and how it’s incredibly satisfying to listen to that way. My only complaint is that I didn’t hear it sooner.


Billie Eilish, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? – This was probably my most surprising album of 2019 because I am old and crotchety and sometimes do that thing where I refuse to try something because there’s Too Much Hype and I Am An Asshole, so I am grateful to whatever Spotify user put “Bad Guy” on a playlist dedicated to tempo changes because otherwise I might never have heard the album at all. It’s another one that works as a whole, but I usually end up just queuing my favorites because I am fussy that way — “bad guy,” “you should see me in a crown,” “all the good girls go to hell,” “when the party’s over,” “my strange addiction,” “bury a friend,” and “listen before i go” — and also because they still form a kind of neat, cohesive sound without the songs between. I’m both wildly jealous that a teenager is so talented and also wildly excited to see what she does as she makes more music.


Christine & the Queens, Chris – Crystal does this thing at the beginning of the year where she looks at a whole bunch of year-end lists of music and then listens to a little bit of each album and sends me the ones she thinks I’ll like. (This is the most tender, romantic thing anyone has ever done for me. And the JOY and GLOATING PRIDE she radiates when she gets a selection right? Good lord, how it feeds my egomania.) This was one of the first she sent me at the start of 2019 and I was immediately so into it. It’s so dance-y and throwback-y without feeling like a derivative retread of the music it’s echoing. It’s great in English and French. (It might actually be even better in French. Don’t tell anyone I said that.) And it feels sparkling, enliveningly queer, which just completely fucking rules. The obvious standout here is “Girlfriend” which feels like… Gay New Wave Debbie Gibson? And “Feel So Good” — OH MAN, SO GOOD — but I also love “Doesn’t Matter” and “The Walker” and “Make Some Sense”. This got me through the rough early months of 2019 and it really continued to shine even after the snow melted.


The Damned Things, High Crimes – This album is so god damn good and, like their last, has a kind of old school hard rock-metal feel with that kind of… slinky thing that fell out of favor and I missed immensely. (Seriously, listen to “Storm Charmer” or “Keep Crawling” – they make me feel like an extremely horny teenager again. It’s great.) “Something Good” is super catchy and fun and repeat-worthy. “Young Hearts” has a great middle-of-the-song breakdown AND great sort of falsetto call-and-response echo in the chorus. The guitar work is spectacular top to bottom and nobody else is slacking either. “Let Me Be (Your Girl)” is fucking great – “I don’t need to mean the world / I just wanna be your girl / I don’t need to have your heart / I just wanna leave a scar” – and also has a boss guitar solo. This is an album I listen to from beginning to end most of the time and I am never disappointed by a single song, but they also work as singles, popped out individually, and make a great addition to a playlist, which you know is one of my most beloved pasttimes and thus a very serious compliment.


Frank Iero & the Future Violents, Barriers – This was hands down my most listened to album of 2019 and Frank was my most listened to artist of the year in general (He changes his band name every time he makes an album! Because he’s an artist!) and I just really loved it in a way that is hard to articulate because explaining why you just really, really love something is hard.

That said, the run of “Moto Pop” into “Medicine Square Garden” into “No Love” is one of the most fucking,,, masterful pieces of music I’ve experienced in a long time. It honestly causes me PHYSICAL PAIN that it is so good and that I will never create anything remotely comparable!! It is best listened to EXTREMELY LOUD while you are INTENSELY FOCUSED and the fact that it’s all on side 3 together so I can sit too close to my turntable and go far away inside of it all at once… Magic. (“Police Police” is a solid finisher there too, so don’t let me undersell it.) And GOD, the jangly guitar at the beginning of “No Love” has made me roll around on the floor more than once out of sheer joy.

I cannot stress enough that the album as a whole is so fucking solid that I almost always listen to it in its entirety. I’ll be like, “Oh, I want to hear “Fever Dream” (the phrase “ventricle taste test”… it haunts me) and I’ll go to the album on Spotify and I’ll listen to that track and then I’ll be like, “Well… while… I’m… here…” and then start it from the beginning. And then I usually go back and listen to “Fever Dream” again and then the “Moto Pop”-“Medicine Square Garden”-“No Love” trimuvirate and then, honestly, I frequently go back and start the album again. (This sounds like a lot, but I listen to music all day at work and most of my evenings. I have time to obsess. It’s great.) “24K Lush” is a great gut punch of a finisher too.

When we saw them in July in Denver, I did not expect to cry at all. I didn’t even bother to take a guess at a song that might make me cry, that’s how unlikely it seemed! But then I just started HEAVILY WEEPING as soon as “24k Lush” started and then continued all the way through “Great Party,” so hideously that guitarist and extremely nice dude Evan Nestor handed me a bottle of water. I am… an all-time champion of behaving ExTREmelY NORmallY in public and also sometimes slow to absorb just how deeply something has gotten embedded in me. This album got its claws in and hasn’t let go yet.


Honorable Mentions

microwave, much love   cavetown, lemon boy   let’s eat grandma, i'm all ears
littlest man band, better book ends   jon walker, impending bloom   ghost, seven inches of satanic panic


Previously

2K12 | 2K13 | 2K14 | 2K15 | 2K16 | 2K17 | 2018

untweeted

Here’s some more stuff I refrained from posting on the internet until now!

i, for one, believe that it’s deeply important to have an unhealthy relationship with everything you love – why just like something when you can be COMPLETELY UNHINGED about it

just saw a teenage girl in the year of our lord 2019 walking out of the gas station in a crew neck sweatshirt that said VIRGINITY ROCKS – was it ironic? was it legit? i will never know and i hate it!!

i have an mfa in writing and i will go to my grave having never used lay/lie correctly

u ever disassociate from yr own face, but in a good way? like, shit is that me cuz she cute!!

there’s a hole in the gore of my bra and the wire works itself out of it as i go about my day and today i touched it through my shirt and mumbled, “tiddy dick”

“speak of the devil” is my favorite thing to absolutely SHOUT whenever someone enters a conversation, regardless of whether we were actually speaking about them, the devil

so much of writing is just trying to figure out how not to use the same word twice in one sentence

today i have gotten ads on instagram for shibari rope and leather fox bdsm face masks and furry manga… i don’t know what the algorithm sees in me, but if that’s there,,,, it is buried too deep for me and i don’t want to meet it

u can be hot or u can be talented, but it should be illegal to be both

how do u know which horses need coats

I do still use Twitter, @ashrocketship, so you know… Don’t miss out on those either. Because I’m a real gift to the world and you should be getting as much of me as humanly possible.

totally top three: november 2019

November has been so, so good. Not just compared to the painful shitshow of October, but just like, genuinely! Even though it was also super stressful! What a wonderful and hideous mixed bag life can be!


I didn’t know how I would feel about Lords of Chaos going in — I probably know about… 300 times more about Norwegian Black Metal than the average moviegoer — and I wasn’t totally sure what I thought after, but I sure have thought about it a lot. This was both a story I already knew and a subject I am vaguely interested in and I was worried I might be too concerned with The Truth to just watch it as a movie, but that ended up not being an issue because everyone is so good in it that I just sort of disappeared into it. I ended up having a lot of feelings I didn’t expect and though I think I wish it had focused more on the relationship between Euronymous and his band before Dead’s death, I obviously get why we got the timeline we did. I was surprised at how beautifully this was shot and also how absurdly funny it was in places and also how much the ending got to me emotionally even knowing what was coming. It’s not going to be for everyone and I think selling it as a “horror-thriller” is not only incorrect, but gross. This is a music biopic tragedy set in a subculture that looks absolutely nonsensical, even to people familiar with it, and it does that well.


Cavetown, Lemon Boy – I have accepted that I exist only at the whims of the algorithm so I should know by now that when it serves me a song that I really like, I shouldn’t wait six months to listen to the album that the song is on, but that’s exactly what happened with Cavetown. “Lemon Boy” showed up at some point early this year and I loved it and have listened to it and put it on my giant master list of songs I like but I didn’t listen to the album until earlier this month after “Pigeon” popped up for me and I loved it too. The album is solid and pretty and kind of achy in places I wasn’t expecting which I always loooooove. In addition to the aforementioned tunes, I am also obsessed with “Green” and “It’s U” and “Taking Care of Things” and “10 Feet Tall” and “888,” but the whole album is genuinely great.


Like so many other people on the internet, I have been playing Cat Condo because it is a soothing and simple distraction in a chaotic world. There’s not much to say about it other than the cats are extremely cute and I really like being able to come and go without any commitment to sit and tap unless I want to because the game keeps generating cats in my absence. What a time to be alive.


And three to look forward to…

little women   my chemical romance at the shrine   star wars: rise of skywalker