The Barnstormer has secured the cooperation of a locked-out NHL player who has agreed to document each day he is kept out of action on the condition that we do not reveal his identity. Ever. Read all the daily diary entries of “Cheap Throat” here.

11:05AM — I am hanging from a cliff. At this moment I am hanging by a cliff. Cliff hanger. I might be dead. Obvs I don’t die because I’m writing this and it’s really all backstory but I’m just trying to be as dramatic as hanging from a cliff was so bear with me. Oddly enough, I was writing this in my head when I was hanging from a cliff.

11:05AM — So…I am hanging from a cliff. Down below are rocks that would slice my body into ground beef and some heavy waves are smashing them like a vet smashing a lippy rookie in training camp.

7:35PM — This place is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Heard some people in a restaurant talking about Chink Watere and how they had to go see Chink Watere and I thought this was some local mafioso with a weird nickname but actually it’s a place called Cinque Terre – like five lands except they’re five villages that are so gorgeous. If I ever get married. This is where I honeymoon. Except I won’t take my wife running up a cliff like I did because if we did and she fell from a cliff, I would feel awful.

7:45PM — You know when you go to Niagara falls there’s this monster wall which is basically a big stone message saying if you cross here you’ll die? They don’t have one of those in Cinque Terre. What they do have are cliffs and was respecting the cliffs – I went for a run that turned into a me walking slow as shit with my back to the cliffs. But then this lady who’s about a hundred in a black dress and church shoes starts complaining that I’m moving to slow and she’s pushing me and then she gets around me and she was off – so I figured I was reading the slopes wrong and so I started running.

7:46PM — Then I fell over a cliff.

7:47PM — Swear to god. It was just like the movies. Hanging from a cliff. If I ever write a spy novel based on the Bourne Trilogy, it was be called Hanging from a Cliff but I’ll change my name to a cool writer name like Beverly Cliffs. No wait, Cliff Meryl. No wait. BJ Streepcliff. There. That’d be it.

7:48PM — When I scrambled to the top it was almost sunset and I was catching my breath I felt this gust of warm air on my back and when I turned around it was the sun coming through a break in the clouds. I shit you not. I shit myself again later but I’ll get to that.

7:48PM — Hang on. Gnocchi incoming.

8:20PM — Anyways, as I sat there, watching this majestic sky coloured by the dust on the horizon and watched steel blue waves crash dramatically against jutting rocks, i could help but think how powerfully I hate John Tortorella. I feel like if he were here he’d be complaining that the sun wasn’t setting the right way, and that the waves weren’t crashing into the corners hard enough and then I thought that if he were here, I would feel like that scene in Return of the Jedi where Darth Vader throws Emperor lazer fingers into the Death Star generator and I would throw John Tortorella over this Italian cliff and think of nothing but washing down tonight’s gnocchi with something red and expensive.

9:55PM — So yeah. Still not hun percent recovered. Felt the horse coming down bowel canyon after I was sitting there for a bit thinking of Torts and scurried up a path by a vineyard, dropped trow and shat what looked like the fetus of a manitee.

10:10PM — Speaking of mafias, and maybe I’m a bit drunk right now, but The Habs were run by em for a while. Not the Italians though. Russians. Remember the Tits brothers? And Kovi? Ever see em get benched? No? There’s a reason for that. They ran shit there for a while.

10:25PM — Speaking of John Tortorella, I hear there’s a big storm heading towards New York. I hope everyone is okay and that the storm just goes to Torts’ house.

11:00PM — Niagara Falls is the armpit of Canada. If someone ever says the Canadian side is better you should punch their lips and tell them to stop the trick questions and propaganda. There is no good side to Niagara Falls, except maybe the side Gary Bettman goes over.

• “Cheap Throat: The Diary of a Locked-Out NHLer“. Read all the other entries here.
• “A Fan’s Note: How to Fix the NHL” by Mike Spry 
• “Complicit in the NHL’s Demise: How the NHL & its players hate hockey, and how the fan is at fault” by Mike Spry
• The Barnstormer’s Take Hockey Back fan protest event