Friday night we celebrated the first night of the poorest attended Cubs Convention in 20 years with our annual Desipio – Hire Jim Essian drunkfest at Shitty O’Keas at the Hilton and Towers.

The usual gang of miscreants showed up and, as in years past, some prominent media members stopped by to chat with us, the unwashed masses.

Our good friends Paul Sullivan and Bruce Miles were both there.  And Sullivan was in his glory because he was going to get to introduce the most insufferable of the Chicago baseball media (consider what it would take to wrestle that title away from some of the other candidates) Gordon Wittenmyer to me.

I went over and shook hands with Paul and with Bruce and extended my hand to Gordon and he stared at it like I had just pulled it out of my ass.

He immediately started in by demanding to know what “my deal is.”  I wasn’t sure what he meant (so many deals to choose from) and he wanted to know why I’m so personal with my criticism of him.

Other than the superficial (he’s a ginger so I make the requisite albino jokes, and he looks like Timothy Busfield so I point that out) I haven’t gotten too personal with Gordon.  Other than calling him a douche.  And that’s what he was so fired up about.  But I call lots of people douches, or sometimes I just point out douchey behavior.

He indicated that the one that really bothered him was the now famous “101 Reasons That Gordon is a Douche” column from 2008.  It was in reaction to his hack-tastic column that gave “101 reasons not to get too giggly about the Cubs.”

Gordon was pretty agitated.  He was turning pink and pumping his little hands in the air and saying “fuck” an awful lot.

We had this exchange:

Wittenmyer: My kid read that.
Me: I’m sorry that’s how he had to find out.
Wittenmyer: I’ve never had anybody who’s never met me say those kind of things about me.
Me: So most people say those kinds of things about you after they’ve met you?

Don’t I get any kind of credit for being so perceptive?

After about ten minutes of him staring at me like his eyes were about to pop out of his head, during which I wanted him to explain why I would have a problem with him and not with the other beat writers, and him calling me an asshole, we went our separate ways in the bar.  I thanked him for his effort in 2009 of painting every Cubs fan as a racist.

Then he started up with Kermit, which is not a good idea because Kerm’s a lawyer by trade and he’s used to extending arguments as long as possible for billing purposes.  They must have gone on for at least 20 minutes.  Gordon paused a few times to try to get my attention and give me the finger, and eventually even Kerm tired of talking to him.

The rest of the night was fun, too.  Right next to us Cubby Julie was hosting a tweet up and she had name tags for everybody and she let me have one.  I wrote Todd Ricketts on mine…Morpheus had already named himself Toby Ricketts.  And that came in handy at about midnight when who should come in but Crane Kenney and Todd Ricketts!  I got a chance to tell Todd that the bathrooms could use a good hosing down and I got to tell Crane something very personal.

If they want to sell out next year’s Convention they need to add a session where you can tell Crane to go fuck himself.  Because even though I got to do it for free, it felt so good I’d have gladly paid for the privilege.