Brian Oliu
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Final Beliefs
Where do I even begin? Does it start when I first moved to Tuscaloosa, wide-eyed and thick with anxiety over my new home—a kid without much of a plan beyond writing some things and drinking some things and maybe trying to run fives at the Rec Center courts with my roommate Rob before heading back…
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Away Game
In June of this year, after 18 long years of living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I left Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was time to go. In a lot of senses it was like graduating college once again: I had done my four years of undergrad, did a gap year at home in New Jersey, and then pointed…
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Goodbye, Tuscaloosa
Goodbye bug line.Goodbye Hackberry and Slash Pine.Goodbye do what now,Preciate it,Preciatecha and all the lexicon that found its way into this Jersey mouth—I may be a Yankee but at least I don’t act like one. Goodbye train trestles and your impossibility,goodbye soundchecks at the amphitheater on Sunday mornings. Goodbye early morning bread bakes from the…
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A College Football Hallmark Christmas Movie: A Christmas Transfer Portal
To listen to a performance of this, tune in on Spotify. “O Come All Ye Faithful,” blares from a red and green-clad marching band as a raucous crowd nervously murmurs as the tension in the game builds. California Tech and their rivals, Golden State University, have been through a vicious battle, with a shot at…
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99 Days Until Kickoff/99 Luftballons/99 Things I Am Looking Forward To This Alabama Football Season
99 First off all, it’s Alabama. 98 That first Friday before the first home game where all of the tiny tents are being set up on the quad 97 Gus Johnson getting unreasonably fired up over a Texas gain of 8 on the first drive of the game before having relatively tempered (for him) dialogue…
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Troll Tide
The 2021 Alabama Football team is trolling us. This, of course, relies upon your definition of “trolling”—I will allow those who have extensive coursework in composition and rhetoric and digital space fields, such as my cool wife, to really dive deep into social media dissent and digital counterpublics, but for this particular instance, we will…
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A Thin Line Between Heaven and Here
-1- Cecil Hurt, long time beat reporter of the Tuscaloosa News passed away on Tuesday, November 23, 2021 at the age of 62 after complications from pneumonia. This is the lede that no one wants to write, but this is the lede that is—Cecil would want journalistic integrity to shine above all things, and so…
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OLIU’S OUTLOOK: Joyless
Joy I have been thinking a lot about Ross Gay lately. Gay’s work is synonymous with discovering joy—something that can be easily dismissed as simple “happiness”; as if the concept of being happy is simple, when, in fact, we know it to be deeply complex. We spend our entire lives attempting to be slightly happier…
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OLIU’S OUTLOOK: WE ARE BACK AND I MISS YOU
And by back I mean we went through some weird loophole where our backup QB has a questionable mustache & our linebackers have turned into full on grown ass men & Dylan Moses has become the wisest entity in the history of the earth realm, to the point where me, a 37 year old man…
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OLIU’S OUTLOOK: I GUESS WE ARE DOING THE THING
Ahoy mateys! Welcome aboard the massive pirate ship that is COLLEGE FOOTBALL 2020 where it may or may not be sinking and the majority of people on it have a debilitating disease caused by a lack of foresight and or vitamin C but we OUT HERE SALIVATING like our tongues aren’t scorbutic because COLLEGE FOOTBALL…