Why Not

When I was 10 years old, I somehow became convinced that I needed a pet. I was ready. My age had finally reached double-digits, putting me on equal footing with my parents in that regard. Naturally, then, it was my turn to be responsible for the life of another creature. After extensive research, I settled on a chinchilla. Why a chinchilla? This is why:


Now you understand. Chinchillas are fucking awesome, and I wanted one. But my parents, likely sensing that my demands were movable provided their counteroffer had fur, were able to bargain me down to a hamster - a species so stupid it forgot to finish growing a tail. Obviously I didn't force the chinchilla issue enough. I was like an amateurish bank-robber who threatens to kill all the hostages if he doesn't get a chopper, and my parents were like veteran negotiators who in twenty minutes bargain the guy down to a roast beef sandwich and the guarantee that his prison cell toilet will have a seat on it.

So I got a Twinkie-colored hamster and creatively named it Twinks. Years later I took a class called "Social Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity" and learned that "twink" is a slang term for a young gay man. Urban Dictionary informs me that "(t)he stereotypical twink is 18-22, slender with little or no body hair, often blonde, dresses in club wear even at 10:00 AM, and is not particularly intelligent." Twinks the hamster was also young and blonde, but was female, hairy in the manner of a hamster, and not fond of club wear any time before 5 PM. I can't really speak to her intelligence relative to other hamsters, but she was smart enough to escape one time for like 5 days. Assuming that she was halfway to Honduras or halfway through our cat's digestive system, I was crestfallen, and my parents after a few days caved and got me a new hamster. This one was a poop-colored male that I, being very smart, decided to call Whiskers. Whiskers was notable for having the biggest balls-to-torso size ratio I have ever seen in nature to this day. You might say that this is just a case of childhood imagination-run-wild a la The Beast in The Sandlot, but I don't think so. I swear, man. It was like if you put monster truck tires on a motorcycle.

But at any rate, Whiskers' reign as the only hamster in town was short-lived, as I found Twinks a few days later wandering around in the basement. I excitedly picked her up, and she in turn excitedly bit right through my thumbnail. Not to be outdone, I responded by throwing her across the room and running away crying. But we were both fine. My parents were less-than-thrilled, though, as the amount of hamster cages, hamster food, and hamster litter to be changed out had just doubled.

Things settled down in the aftermath. After a week or two of hamster overload, I fell back into my regular routine of forgetting that I had any pets and relying on my parents to keep them alive. But on one particularly boring night, my brother and I decided to see what would happen if we put Twinks and Whiskers together. The answer, in hindsight, was predictable: if you put hamsters together, they have passionate hamster sex. That's it. Whiskers didn't have to ask Twinks if she saved some turkey for him, and he didn't have to roll up in a luxury hybrid hamster ball. They went from meeting to penetration faster than a mosquito on your arm. We separated them after like 30 seconds of laughing like nerds, but for Whiskers that was more than enough time to piss my parents off again a month later when a bunch of horrifically ugly, hairless hamster babies turned up in the corner of Twinks' cage. I was pumped. Conservative groups lauded Twinks' decision to choose life. Whiskers claimed he was not the father. But Twinks was like "Look at those babies! They look just like you! They look just like you!" and everyone in the crowd agreed.

So anyway, that's the riveting story of how 13 years ago some kids in my neighborhood got some free hamsters. I don't know how to sum this up except to say that this would never have happened if I'd gotten a chinchilla. First of all, Chinchillas don't escape. And they definitely don't have sex. Look at that picture again. No way they have genitals. Chinchillas just pop into existence whenever a unicorn sneezes.

First Three Rules Of Apartment-Searching: Location, Location, Reliable Plumbing

There are many reasons that it's important to me to live in Boulder proper this year. I could easily cite the skyrocketing gas prices, or the importance of making the most of my last year in college, or the simple convenience of living close to campus. But really, all of those points are minor compared to what else is at stake here: no less than my ability to empathize with my fellow man, which is slowly-but-sure-as-shit eroding every single time I make the commute.

There is this one particular stretch of highway on my drive home that is just a meatgrinder for my sense of human fellowship. Basically, it's the point where one highway merges into another. So the left lane of the first highway merges into the new highway, and the right lane ends. Knowing this, most drivers kindly position themselves in the left lane as they approach the merge, leaving the right lane mostly open. This is obviously the perfect situation to see some grade-A dickbaggery. Like, if you were setting a trap for a vampire, you'd definitely get a nubile, nightgown-wearing virgin, and you'd put her in an old Victorian house, in a bed that's way too big for her, with lots of pillows, and with one of those curtains around it. Maybe you'd make sure the moon is full, because you don't really know anything about vampires but they probably dig that shit. And just as surely, if you were interested in seeing a straight-up parade of asshole cars, you would crowd up the left lane that they've been comfortably speeding in, and leave the right lane open, and put up a sign saying it's going to end in 1000 feet, then just sit back and watch the goddamn show. Because inevitably they'll get tired of crawling along in the left lane, and out of some dickheaded sense of entitlement they'll jump into the right lane and zoom by everyone in front of them, eventually picking out the pussiest person in the pack and cutting them off just as the lane ends. It is infuriating. I would sooner die than let my car be the one that one of these person-shaped shitstains cuts in front of. I have literally come inches from crashing just to keep this from happening. And in the event that such a wreck ever occurs, I make no promises about my subsequent behavior.

It's not like I see this every once in a while. Every single time I drive there, it happens. So when I went to that stretch of highway on Google Maps, I was not surprised to see that it happened to the gMaps Beetle, too. Now, I'm willing to grant that the gMaps Beetle is probably slow and it might be tempting to pass it. But the picture still speaks to me.


I know that everyone sees this type of thing every day, and we all have a few "It was so awesome! This guy was weaving through traffic, and I was all 'I hope he gets pulled over', then later on I saw him PULLED OVER ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD! I was so happy!" stories. And while I do enjoy such mild schadenfreude, my thoughts in these instances tend to transcend a simple hope for a slap on the wrist and dive straight into crazyland. I sit there and actually, really, not-just-saying-this wish for these people to have awful, awful things happen in their lives. I don't just want them to get pulled over up ahead; I want some Biblical, contrapasso-style shit to happen to them. Like maybe all the time they shave off their commutes by being inconsiderate shitheads allows them to get home just in time to find their spouses in bed with their best friends, or, if they're really egregious offenders, just as the robbers are leaving, and they get stabbed for their bad timing. That would be poetic. Or they could just get colon cancer - I'm not that picky. But harboring these thoughts can't be healthy.

Obviously I need to stop commuting so much, so I went into this apartment showing on Tuesday with an open mind. The location was close to campus, which would limit my driving and allow me to rehabilitate my tattered soul, so I was willing to overlook many potential flaws.

I showed up at the apartment and met the guy who was doing the showing, a kind-of-awkward, bohemian-looking guy about my age named Garrett. I would have been surprised that a shy hipster would be walking me through the apartment, if not for the fact that he had called a little earlier to confirm the appointment, and the conversation started like this:

Me: Hello?

Garrett: ... Um, hello...

Me: Hi. What's going on?

Garrett: Um... Not much. This is Garrett (blah blah blah)

I think the phone call was Garrett's way of giving me fair warning that this was going to be an awkward showing, and I appreciated the heads-up.

My apartment-searching experience is pretty limited, but I'm guessing that any time you're looking through an apartment that someone else is currently living in, it's bound to be a little weird, and this was no exception. The guy who answered the door cut a depressing figure: mid-40s, wearing a wifebeater, with hunched shoulders and a mopey, hangdog face. It might have been presumptuous to deem his life depressing this quickly, but when you are over the age of 40 and you let strangers see you in a food-stained wifebeater, you're kind of asking for it. I know I'm not an important guy, but come on - throw on a bowling shirt or a KISS '95 Reunion Tour T-shirt or something. Anyway, I'm going to call him Gus because I was too busy judging him by his cover to remember his name.
 

And the tour of the apartment vindicated my snap judgment (It was a studio, so by "the tour" I mean "my first three steps inside"). My task, then, was to try to separate the merits of the apartment from the depressing way that Gus was inhabiting it. This was easier said than done, because this guy was really a bummer. For instance, there was this mildewy smell, and I couldn't decide whether it was the apartment or if profound sadness just smells like mildew (read on for the answer). And he had a gift for answering my apartment-related questions with anecdotes that made me even sadder for him. In response to a question about how much electric ends up costing, I learned the following things:
 

- Electric can be 25-40 dollars a month, depending on the time of year. (Useful)

- He tries to be frugal, and he doesn't run heat during the winter. He just wears hoodies. He also likes to turn the lights off whenever he can because sunlight does the same thing for free. (Semi-useful, or at least relevant, albeit long-winded and obvious)

- Expenses add up, man, and this place is out of his price range these days. (Less-useful, very rueful)

- That's why he's moving out, and he wants to stay in Boulder but he doesn't know where he's going to live. Everything is expensive. He's hoping he can stay with a few people, but he's not sure. (Irrelevant, very sad)

Even in my empathy-damaged state, I really felt for the guy. As he was talking I got this really vivid picture in my head of him sitting on his floor (there was absolutely no furniture) in his underwear watching Olympic speed-walking on his 13-inch TV (also on the floor), eating Spaghetti-Os out of the can. I am 56 percent sure it was a psychic vision, and it was chilling. But his penchant for volunteering depressing information - stuff that other people would keep buried deep down in the recesses of their souls - actually soon came in handy. When Garrett pointed out the bed that was folded up into the wall, Gus told us he never used it, because it was uncomfortable and rickety. I asked him where he slept, then. He said "Just..." and then pointed to a specific part of the floor, and I wept inside for him. Then he told us that he used to have an air mattress, but it was ruined by the flooding. He not only said this like I already knew about the flooding, but also as if apartment flooding is just a fact of life - like the apartment was next to a South American river during monsoon season - of course it's going to flood sometimes. When I pressed him further, he told me that the apartment had been sporadically flooding with toilet water from the unit above him. This was game over for me. I was mentally checked out the second he said "toilet", but the guy had a good head of steam now and just kept complaining. We got to hear all about how the property owner declined to buy him a new mattress, and how next time they wanted to set up a showing they should call him a little later in the day because he's on sleeping pills and he can't get back to sleep if they call too early, and something about his caller ID not working. I'd imagine that Garrett wanted to strangle him; I just wanted to give the poor bastard a hug and get the fuck out of there.

While I waited for Gus to take a breath, I thought better of the hug and inched toward the door, fully prepared to leave Garrett to fend for himself. He tried to rent me a lemon apartment; I had no sympathy for him. But Garrett was having none of it, and he rode my coattails out the door. When we got outside I told him No Thanks, and as I walked past the staircase that led to the unit above, I smelled cigarettes and heard a girl talking way too loudly on her phone. And I couldn't help but smile, content in the knowledge that I would never, ever have to clean up that girl's poopy floodwater. And for just one day, the goddamn drive back didn't bother me at all.

Completely Self-Absorbed, Kind-Of-Serious Post. You Probably Shouldn't Read This.

Do you know what my dad does when he gets bored? He reads the encyclopedia. Just grabs a letter from the bookshelf, pours himself an Arnold Palmer, sits down, crosses his legs, and sets about expanding his intellectual horizons. I, on the other hand, am a sporadic reader. My bookshelf is full of partially-read books, any one of which I will nevertheless claim to have read and loved if it comes up in a conversation. And if I get stuck comparing favorite parts, I'll just list a few things from the 20 pages I actually read, then I'll enthusiastically agree with anything the other person throws out there. I've never been caught doing this, but I cringe just thinking about the day that someone gets wise to my game and starts talking about the riveting chariot race in Catcher in the Rye. I have nightmares about this stuff.

Anyway, I tell you this for several reasons: to inform you that my father is better than I am or can ever hope to be; to alert you that I am sometimes a liar; but most importantly to establish that I have absolutely no follow-through. I don't stick with anything - books, commitments, relationships, jobs - anything. I'm not a finisher. One might say that "not a finisher" is a pussy-ass way of saying "quitter". And I say fair enough, hypothetical bullshit detector person. Fair enough. Whatever you want to call it, it's something I need to work on.

I guess the first step is to pin down some underlying causes. Sometimes, like when I can't finish a book, it just comes down to laziness. But I've realized that most of my problem is that I have absolutely no regard for my future self. I am really a fucking asshole to that guy. According to the old bromide, a stitch in time saves nine. Roughly translated, this means that a little consideration now can keep you from getting knifed in the balls later (figuratively speaking). I regularly fail to do simple little things that would save me testicular trauma (speaking in figures here) down the line. And I don't care who you are: when your nuts have puncture wounds (in the figurative sense), you want to do what it takes to stop the bleeding.

Take college, for instance. Miraculously, I am very close to graduating (with a degree that will limit my options to grad school or learning to give a killer handjob), but it has not been easy. The work itself isn't hard; even though I tend to do things at the last possible moment, it's only rarely made me contemplate quitting, and even then only for a few miserable sleep-deprived minutes. No, the worst part of college for me is this time of year, before school has even started.

It takes like 20 minutes to register for classes online. It is very easy to do. And considering the profound impact that your schedule can have on your quality of life for 4 months, it stands to reason that any semi-competent college student would free up a little time to register as soon as the system opens up. My school's registration opened at the beginning of April, with the earliest slots going to the students with the most credits completed. As a Senior, the system was obviously working in my favor. It's clear where this story is going: until this week, I hadn't registered for any classes, because I am an idiot. It's not like I forgot to do it; registering for classes is like all anyone talks about in late March/early April. For weeks, conversations like this were a regular occurrence around campus:

Guy: Did you register for classes yet?
Girl: No! I can't till the 6th!
Guy: That sucks.
Girl: Yeah, but I've been using the planner thing, so I kind of know what I want to take. I definitely want to take Western Civ. with Donahue because I heard he's super-chill and his class is at 2 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I'm trying to get all late classes so I can party the night before but if that's full then I'll take blah blah blah blah (10 minutes of rambling about potential schedules and contingencies).
Guy: (bored, regretting that he asked)

I would regularly hear people having these conversations when I was already eligible to register. Sometimes I would hear these conversations in class, with my computer in front of me - registration literally at my fingertips - and I would instead choose to play online Family Feud or to type my full name into Word and attempt to come up with anagrams for it ("Shawn Christopher Davis" = "Christ, a dawn shivers. Hop!") for the entire class period. I didn't even think about what I wanted to take. Little did I consider that I was (figuratively) shanking my future self right in the (figurative) junk. Because here I am five months later looking through a bunch of booby prize classes that are going to make my life miserable starting in about two weeks, wondering what the fuck is wrong with me that I lack even the smallest shred of foresight when that little sliver would have been enough to prevent me from being in such a dumb situation.

The same applies for my living situation. I really have no idea where I'm going to live this semester, and school starts in two weeks.

And I do this every goddamn year, so early August is generally a pretty stressful time for me as I struggle to get my shit together before school starts. So I really, really feel like quitting. I feel the magnetic pull of the vagrant life: I'd roam from town to town, just me and my rucksack, working for food and impregnating the women with the fewest teeth. It would be great. But I guess I've come too far to quit now. There's plenty of time for vagrancy. For now, I need to finish what I started - if not for me then for my parents, not to mention my many, many future children. It's not that I want to be there for my progeny - I just want them to live. And vaccinations to protect against raccoon scratches don't come cheap. A college degree can be my first-ever stitch in time, because with a little work now I can not only save my future kids' lives, but I can more importantly keep one of their toothless, obese mothers from castrating me for being such a lousy bum, thereby saving my balls (LITERALLY!!!).

China's Underage Gymnasts

I recently started watching Planet Earth, having heard reviews ranging from "It's great" to "After you watch it you'll sprint outside frothing at the mouth and have rabid sex with the dirt". So far, my opinion probably falls somewhere between the two, so I guess you could say that I want to feel up nature. It's definitely an impressive undertaking, man. The creators spared no expense, using state-of-the-art technologies to show us rarely-seen creatures and locales that other state-of-the-art technologies are pushing toward extinction. And David Attenborough's narration could make a backalley stabbing instigated by a "Yo mama" joke seem dignified and poetic.

I always feel weird about watching nature documentaries, though, because it turns out that animals often kill each other, and I never know who to root for. And the documentarians don't make it any easier with this popular formula:

1. Introduce animals as they frolic/eat/chill.
2. Segue to that animal's predator by cuing dramatic music and saying something about how life isn't all just fun and games for the animal.
3. Show the inevitable clash between the animal and its predator.

In cases like these, the primacy effect dictates that I'm going to root for the prey. Plus, I don't particularly like seeing things die. But then it's like, what do I expect the predator to do? They've gotta eat, man. They've gotta feed their families and mistresses, just like the rest of us. And what they do is necessary, even if I don't like it, not unlike bar bouncers or Rush Limbaugh's lawyers. So what the fuck do I do? I'm an American, and I wasn't brought up to watch things without a rooting interest. And fucking David Attenborough never helps me out by playing favorites. If he would just tell me that macaques are homophobic, or that golden eagles beat their wives, I wouldn't have a headache at the end of each confrontation.

Sometimes, though, one animal is so much cooler than the other one that I can wholeheartedly root for an outcome. Who wouldn't want to see a badass endangered snow leopard make an acrobatic kill on seemingly impossible-to-navigate mountain terrain? Unless you are a markhor enthusiast, this one is easy.

But if the snow leopard fails, it doesn't die on the spot - unless something goes super-wrong, it lives to hunt another day. So while I rooted for it, there was no real sense of urgency. It's only when the animal being hunted is undeniably cooler than its predator that shit gets intense. Cue the otters.

Otters are fucking awesome. I've always thought so. When I saw otters come up on the screen, I smiled a stupid smile, because otters are like little furry hits of Ecstasy without the spinal fluid issues and potential for rape. Basically if you don't like otters, I hope you get eaten by a snow leopard. So imagine my distress when Attenborough introduced the crocodile*. My memory isn't the best, but here is a paraphrased version of events:

Me: (smiling about otters)
Attenborough: (Britishly, accompanied by suddenly ominous music) Check out this crocodile. It is big and scary.
Me: Oh no.
Attenborough: Crocodiles eat otters.
Me: No!
Attenborough: A single otter is no match for a crocodile.
Me: (hoarsely, crazily) NO! Goddamn it, no! Run, you fucking otters! Attenborough, do something! Why won't you do something!

In retrospect, I should have seen the foreshadowing when he said "a single otter". But then my mind wouldn't have been so otterly (fucking yeah, I did.) blown when the otters got together and GANGED UP ON A GODDAMN CROCODILE. A bunch of cute little otters teamed up and antagonized a murderous dinosaur thing until it got confused and ran away. Usually when you root for the prospective prey the best you can hope for is that they live. But these otters basically got together and pantsed the school bully. Just when I thought otters couldn't get any cooler, by Darwin's balls they did it. If the otters were fat kids and the crocodile were Ben Stiller, this would be the movie Heavyweights.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, except to say that nature is cool.

___________________________________________________________________


*Some might contend that crocodiles are also cool, but they don't do much for me - certainly not as much as otters. Dictionary.com has my back on this one, as the third definition of "crocodilian" is "hypocritical; insincere". Otters are nothing if not sincere. I think "otterian" should eventually come to mean: 1. sincere; 2. gregarious; 3. lovable 4. better than a crocodile.

UPDATE: Just after writing this post, I realized that the otter video is probably on YouTube. Sure enough, it is. This renders moot my (inaccurate) paraphrasing of Attenborough, but oh well. Here ya go:

Non-Sequitur Title

I've recently been in the market for a new sport to play. It's not that I'm tired of the sports I grew up playing; it's just that in this new age of jobs, girlfriends, and increasingly rampant pansyism, getting a game of football, baseball, or even basketball going is a logistical nightmare that pisses me off to even think about. I've always been an instant-gratification type of guy. If you told me I could have three thousand dollars today or fifty thousand dollars in one year, then I'd laugh at you because I know you can barely pay your car insurance, much less play assholish games with your money. But then if you were like, "I won the lottery, and I'm giving you a choice, man", then I'd ask to see the ticket. And after you showed it to me, I'd be all "Holy shit, dude! Holy shit! You lucky bastard!". Then after shit settled down I'd think for like five seconds, and a week later I'd be zipping around on a Dervish-blue Vespa with a little decal of that cartoon guy who loves to pee on things like Chevy and Jeff Gordon, peeing on the words "Your Mom". Because a year is too long to wait to drive an awesome scooter whilst simultaneously informing my fellow drivers of their mothers' disgusting sexual habits.

Unfortunately, I happen to suck badly at all of the sports that are easy to play with a few people on a whim. So my lack of patience (for setting things up) has driven me to seek out sports which my lack of patience (for sucking at things) has historically caused me to hate. Such are the vicissitudes of being an impatient asshole, I guess.

Anyway, the way I see it there were two sports that fit my criteria (outdoors, easy to set up games, potentially fun after initial infuriating sucking period): golf and tennis. Seven years ago I would have openly disparaged both as "lame" and "stupid" (I've since learned bigger words), because by 16 I had tried and profoundly blown at both sports, and I subsequently shied away and mocked them from afar as a defense mechanism, like the high school jock who gets shot down by the smart, shy girl and overcompensates for his failure by telling his friends that she has a fivehead and she's borderline autistic and he wouldn't touch her vagina even if he cornered a goddamn leprechaun inside it. But he would. Everyone knows he would.

I like to think that I'm a little more mature now, and that as an adult I've learned to better cope with humiliation and pain. But even if that were true, we all know that a man can only take so much before he cries and sulks underneath a tree. So golf was never really an option. And it's nothing against the sport - I would honestly love to get good at golf. It seems like it'd be a lot of fun, and you never get too old to do it. You can play golf until the day your heart explodes at the 10th tee box just seconds after creepily flirting with the Drink Cart Girl even though she went to school with your granddaughter. I like that. But golf also has the steepest learning curve, and I just don't think I could handle climbing it. The last time I went golfing, I got so frustrated with my inconsistent ball-striking that I stopped using clubs halfway through the round, opting instead to pick up the ball and heave it as far as I could at every hole, laughing the deranged laugh of a broken man with no more respect for society's arbitrary rules and mores. It was probably embarrassing for my friends (I also may have verbally abused a goose), but it definitely made my round better and neutralized my slice. More recently, my friend Tim and I spent like two hours in his backyard attempting to chip a golf ball into a planter. Though we were both tired of trying after ten minutes, neither of us would admit it because we are idiots. We hit hundreds of unsuccessful shots until eventually it got dark outside and we gave up, having sent the planter on an epic, rollercoaster journey from "planter" to "prospective golf hole" to "very broken planter", which just goes to show you that even planters can never truly go home again.

So it's probably safe to say that I lack the temperament/natural ability to ever excel at golf. My memories of tennis are much more tame. When I was a kid every attempt to play tennis started with poor play and arguments over the rules, and quickly devolved into a competition to see who could hit the ball the farthest out of the court. Good times. And since tennis courts are almost always adjacent to basketball courts, I remember many times feeling superior as I walked past all the 40-year-old knee-braced tennis players on my way to play a real sport. But I've come to realize recently that tennis really is a beautiful, fluid sport, alternately requiring power and agility, offense and defense, a gameplan and the ability to improvise. I'm speaking generally, of course. Like when I watched Wimbledon last week. That was cool. The tennis I play requires only tennis equipment, the ability to hop a fence, and a lack of shame.

But I've definitely gotten better. I play whenever I have free time, and though I've thrown the occasional temper tantrum - complete with strings of expletives and violent swings resulting in the loss of tennis balls - I feel like I've on the whole been very patient. And now I can hit angles sometimes; and I occasionally play some long, crazy rallies; and I've even messed around with slices and drop shots and other cutesy things. It's been encouraging.

But it's a tenuous happiness that's easily shattered. A few weeks ago I was playing with some friends when someone in a car driving by yelled out "You suck!". There is no way he could have seen us playing long enough to make that determination, but it still stung. I'd imagine if someone who was clearly blind walked into a mall and just yelled out, "You're fat!", it would still shake the confidence of every person in the mall who considered himself fat, even though everyone knows the blind guy clearly couldn't have known what the hell he was talking about. It's just the kind of incident that only matters because it exposes our own deep-rooted insecurities. So even though I outwardly yelled back "Come get your ass kicked, pussy!", deep down inside I felt the withering glare of 16-year-old me, and he totally agreed with the assessment.

Unread Nonsense: Educational?

I started this blog in August of 2006 in an effort to prove to myself that my summer job hadn't rendered me illiterate. It sounds like a stupid concern, I know. But you should have walked with me one of those nights as I ranted to myself about the fact that Fancy Feast not only saw fit to make like 100 flavors of cat food; and not only deemed it necessary to create separate "Grilled Beef Feast" and "Sliced Beef Feast" flavors, as if cats could differentiate between the two so soon after licking their own assholes; but then had the nerve to make such similar-flavored tins the exact same fucking color, rendering cat food almost impossible to stock without causing an aneurysm. And you should have been there as King Soopers' late-night classic rock soundtrack (which is the same to this day) played songs like Jackson Browne's "The Pretender" and The Who's version of "Summertime Blues", and I became convinced that the playlist had been designed with the sole intent of mocking my station in life. And when the night crew took its breaks outside and spent the entire time discussing bowhunting excursions, you should have read my mind as I wondered how hard it would be to commit suicide with a bow and arrow (all I could think of was to shoot the arrow way up in the air and catch it with your brain). Because if you had done all these things, you would understand that I had gone a little bit insane, and it was therefore not at all inconsistent for me to wonder whether I could still read and write above a third-grade level.

So the day I quit that job, I started this blog. I decided to call it "Unread Nonsense" as a sort of lameass play on words, since "unread" can either mean "uneducated" or "nobody reads this". I'm confident that this site has lived up to its name in each respect. Until this week. Because on the heels of Nate's learned Constitutional discussion, I'm here to one-up him and present an educational post concerning something even more important to Americans' collective psyche than the Bill of Rights. Pin this to your lapels, fuckers: it's state flags time!

My favorites, in alphabetical order:

Alabama

Educational Fact: Alabama's state flag has won the Flaggy for "Flag That Most Perfectly Sums Up The Rest Of America's Feelings About The Statehood Of The Place It Represents" every year since the awards were created to drum up Cold War jingoism in 1957.

Delaware

Delaware's flag is a love story in one frame. Listen, it's the 21st century. It's sad that our society is so hung up on what consenting adults like to do with each other's genitals. That said, these guys are totally gay. And not because one of them is wearing pink; we all know that wearing pink doesn't make a man gay any more than liking The Notebook or being secretly psyched to hear a Corinne Bailey Rae song does (so shut up!). No, these guys are gay because of the besotted glance we catch them sharing, the kind of glance that in a single second betrays feelings that years were spent hiding. These guys are gay because the farmer on the left is trying way too hard to seem insouciant, with his aw-shucks posture and his hand in his pocket. He's not fooling anyone. Also, these guys are gay because they're masturbating a hoe and a gun, respectively. I don't know what ever happened to Vernon and William (I named them Vernon and William), but I hope their story turned out happier than Ennis and Jack's, or Romeo and Juliet's. Let's hope it was more like Allie and Duke's, though I'm sure we can all agree that theirs too is bittersweet at best... right?

Oh, and Educational Fact: "December 7th, 1787" commemorates the day Delaware became the first state to ratify the US Constitution. Of course, December 7th eventually became much more well-known for two "days which shall live in infamy": the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the RIAA attack on Napster in 1999. The former forced the United States to enter into World War II; the latter forced me to pay for an Everclear CD instead of just downloading that one song I like for free (I know there were other file-sharing sites, but I was stupid, OK?).

Hawaii











Educational Fact: Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959, but its flag predates its statehood by over 100 years. It is the only state flag to feature the Union Jack, which honors Hawaii's friendship with the British during its years as an independent kingdom. After Hawaii became a state, President Dwight D. Eisenhower attempted to replace the Union Jack with America's flag, famously stating "It's OK for your new wife to be friends with her ex-boyfriend, but this is like finding out she has his name tattooed on her vagina."

New York

Educational Fact: The woman on the left represents Liberty, and the woman on the right represents Justice. Liberty and Justice are in a sorority at SUNY Oswego. Many people erroneously believe that Liberty is holding a Phrygian cap; actually, it is just some cap that she stole off of an old couple's garden gnome as part of her initiation. And while it is popularly held that Justice wears a blindfold because "Justice is blind", she is in fact very drunk, and is playing a game of strip "Pin the scale on the donkey" with some frat guys. Such shenanigans often have a price and this is no exception, as in the process of playing she inadvertently punctures a bald eagle's left wing with her sword.

Bonus Fact: Derek Jeter sucks!

North Dakota















Educational Fact: In a 2004 poll of worker birds, Buzz, the eagle on North Dakota's state flag, was named "The Hardest-Working Bird In The World". "It's crazy," said Milo, a carrier pigeon from Chicago. "Every bird I know would take one trip for the holly, one trip for the banner, one trip for the arrows. Hell, I can't even carry arrows. This guy, he does it all at once. He's a freak of nature." More recently, due to his skyrocketing blood pressure, Buzz has been advised by his doctor to take it easy. Predictably, he is said to have responded "Shove it up your ass, pussy."

Rhode Island
















Educational Fact: The following is a heretofore-unseen transcript of the 1897 meeting during which Rhode Island's flag was created.

John: I propose that the flag have 13 stars, arranged in a circle, to denote our status as one of the original 13 colonies, and as the 13th state.

Robert: A splendid idea.

John: And I further suggest that we include our state's motto, "Hope". Perhaps we could place it within the circle of stars.

Robert: Fantastic! This is shaping up wonderfully. And maybe if we just add an image within the circle... one that signifies hope... I'm reminded of Shakespeare here: "True hope is swift, and flies with swallow's wings". Perhaps, then, we could include some sort of bi--

Steven: (interrupting) Anchor!

Robert & John: ... ... ...

Robert: ... Yes, an anchor. Brilliant idea, Steven.

(Steven smiles and leaves)

Robert: I fucking hate that Steven is the governor's son.

Virginia

Educational Fact: Virginia's is the only state flag celebrating murder. Beneath the king's corpse is the motto "Sic semper tyrannis", which is Latin for "What now, bitch?".

West Virginia

(close-up)















Educational Fact: West Virginia's flag commemorates the date that zombies (pictured above) rose from the dead and seceded from Virginia. The slab of rock is meant to resemble a tombstone, and the flowers framing the picture represent zombies' love of pretty flowers. The state motto "Montani semper liberi" (translation: "Mountaineers are always white") was a last-second inclusion, replacing the original motto, "Uuunnnnnnng" (translation: "Flowers are pretty").

There you have it. To the states whose flags didn't make the cut: better luck next time. And to you, my twelve readers: just remember to thank me when you go on Jeopardy and "State Flags" is the final category. And Nate: Sic Semper Tyrannis.

I Love Summer!

So the plan for this post was to talk about how much I love summer. I was going to do this facetious thing where I have an epiphany that I love summer, and I was going to say that it's funny how love can sneak up on you that way. I was going to say that summer is the season of my dreams. Then I was going to go tell my best friend (Google) that I love summer, and Google was going to tell me that everyone (427,000 results for "I love summer") loves summer. And I was going to cry and cry because summer is such a cocktease and I was going to lament my youthful hubris in thinking that summer would ever settle down with me. It was going to suck.

Luckily for all of us, my attention span is as short as that of a guy whose attention span is so short that he can't be bothered to concoct a decent simile. So what ended up happening is that after I googled "I love summer," I forgot about writing the post and I started googling "I love" followed by random things and drawing definitive conclusions about their popularity based on the results - conclusions which I will maintain are correct for the remainder of my life. Because what better way to determine the relative popularity of something than to see how many people have explicitly stated on the internet than they love it? (That was a rhetorical question: there is no better way.)

So here for your learning pleasure are 25 of the things I googled (e.g. "I love [blank]"), ranked in (now-indisputable) order of popularity:

1. Lucy - 3,640,000
2. Jesus - 1,080,000
3. Summer - 427,000
4. Harry Potter - 241,000
5. Baseball - 240,000
6. Cancer (!) - 39,200
7. Apples - 33,300
8. Elephants - 25,100
9. Shakespeare - 23,400
10. Ping Pong - 14,300 (with "table tennis" 20,140)
11. Oranges - 13,700
12. Uranus - 4,340
13. Peeing - 4,090
14. Heroin - 3,160
15. Porcupines - 2,570
16. Pooping - 1,940 (with "shitting" 2690)
17. Tony Danza - 161 (with "shitting" 911)
18. Cutting Myself - 146
19. Canoodling - 25
20. Shawn Davis - 7
21. Renaissance Poetry - 1
22 (tie). Beating The Elderly - 0
22 (tie). That Video Of The Monkey Peeing In His Own Mouth - 0
22 (tie). Harpooning Whales - 0
22 (tie). Immature Blogs - 0

Before we discuss, I'd like to singlehandedly render this list inaccurate:

I Love Beating The Elderly!
I Love That Video Of The Monkey Peeing In His Own Mouth!
I Love Harpooning Whales!
I Love Immature Blogs!

Congrats, you four! Each of you is now as popular as Renaissance Poetry. Suck on that, Roger Ascham!

Roger Ascham is bummed about it.

Also:

I Love Shawn Davis!
because none of you assholes has ever said this on the web. Fuck you guys.

Anyway, let's talk about the list. I'm sure you'll notice that I tried to compare things that have historically been linked and bitterly debated: Apples vs. Oranges, Pooping vs. Peeing, Tony Danza vs. Cutting Yourself, Shakespeare vs. Elephants, etc. The matchups were sometimes close (elephants win by a nose! woo!), but I think we can safely say that each of these classic battles has finally been settled forever. You're welcome. But beyond the obvious oppositions, there are some interesting results:

- This Lucy girl is more than three times more popular (which my pappy raised me to read as "better") than Jesus. Waaaah is right, Jesus.

- Cancer is much more popular than the mainstream media would have you believe. Maybe Iraq does smell like ginger bread.

- Porcupines are underappreciated.

- So is Uranus...but not by me.

- People who harpoon whales don't love to do it. Their high school guidance counselors are probably very disappointed.

- Summer is fucking awesome! I love you, summer! XOXOXO.

Weekly Dervish Update: Musical Edition

I'm going to make this one relatively quick, because I don't have too much to say. The Dervishes played The Rocks two consecutive times. We really wanted both of these games, not only because we didn't want to suffer the ignominy of an 0-12 season, but because apparently the Rocks were talking shit in the stands during our first-week drubbing at the hands of the similarly lamenamed A-Town Nugs. A tale of two weeks (with accompanying music!):

Week 1

(Hit play, then read. Except you should check out the guy at 1:18. He would definitely be a Dervish groupie.)

Victory! If I had to come up with one sentence to best describe how we felt as this game unfolded, it'd have to be "Where the fuck did this come from?". Playing the undefeated Rocks (who Nate oh-so-cleverly dubbed "The Walks" due to their baffling refusal to swing the fucking bat), we couldn't have hoped for much. To this point, we had generally hit and fielded like a blind softball team might hit and field if you took away their BeepBalls. But our bats inexplicably came alive, and our fielding was good enough, as we swapped our clown shoes for cleats and triumphed, 23-8.

Highlight: Some might point to our 14-run outburst in the first inning during which we batted around twice and yelled "Yeah!" a lot. But my personal favorite moment came when our first baseman Tim "En" Garde attempted to slide into second base but instead performed a maneuver that looked like a cross between a fencing thrust and that scene in Bambi where he's trying futilely to walk on the ice.

Safe

Lowlight: Our umpire was a dickhead. There are not a lot of things sadder than when Bambi's mom dies, but an old, double-knee-braced umpire who compulsively injects himself into the game with unsolicited commentary and crotchety stipulations just might bum me out more. Seriously, fuck that guy.

Is the music still playing? Hit stop. John Philip Sousa's boisterous songs of American triumph have no place in week 2.

Week 2

(Once again, click and read.)

Oh yes, friends, we were riding high. But we knew that if we didn't do it again the next week, the first win would feel hollow. That didn't stop us from losing, though. We fell 19-9, though the game was actually closer than the score might indicate. The Rocks had a couple of players who weren't there last week, though I'm not necessarily claiming that shenanigans were afoot. I am, however, claiming that the new players were fucking assholes. Their new shortstop dropped a double play ball and proceeded to scream at the umpire, claiming that he dropped it during the glove-to-hand transfer (he didn't). Their new left-centerfielder slid into every base cleats high, even if there were no outs to be had, claiming he was "just tryin' to scare ya". We weren't scared or impressed. So in a span of two weeks, they went from Rocks to Walks to Cocks. And from losing to winning. Funny how that works, I guess.

Highlight: I'm tempted to just go with what makes me laugh again (walking into the complex, Nate was looking at a scoreboard and walked directly into a trash can, knocking it over. It was both awesome and a bad omen.), but the highlight has to be Cody Ray hitting two long home runs in the losing effort. It was so impressive that after the game I told him he could date my sister. Yeah, he was already dating her. But still. Also noteworthy here is a spectacular diving catch by left-centerfielder Matt Hockett. Also also noteworthy is that our team has two players named Matt Hockett, and they are in no way related. That is insane. How many people do you know named Matt Hockett? It's not that common a name. My name is way more common than that, and it would still blow my goddamn mind to meet someone named Shawn Davis. I'm not sure how I'd react: I'd either join arms with him and jump around gleefully for 10 minutes, or I'd push him out of a tree in a fit of insecurity like Gene in A Separate Peace (terrible book).

Lowlight: Plenty. But like Rowlf, I'm prone to crying jags, so let's not talk about it anymore. In conclusion,

Thank-Yous

I know that people love to crib the thoughts of well-spoken others and insert them into conversations. It's hard not to, really. And it makes you sound smart and classy. Take me, for example. Just the other day my friend Tim and I had this conversation:

Me: (reacting to Tim's dog barking outside) Are you going to let your dog in?
Tim: The back door is open.
Me: That's what she said.

And then we laughed for like 20 minutes. Even though she's the one who said it originally, my decision to call it back at that moment was impressive, and obviously reflected well upon my intelligence and character.

But there are thousands upon thousands of quotes out there, competing with the always-unnamed she to be casually dropped into conversations. I think I hear this one the most often:

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

I'm going to go out on a limb here and designate this phrase "stupid" and people's use of it "annoying". My reasons are several and boring, and I'm not going to talk about them because I hate to sound serious. Besides, everyone knows that the definition of insanity (unverified by the dictionary) is "any act that can be described by a googly-eyed emoticon or by the sound made when you simultaneously hum and flick your finger over your lips" (that's what she etc.)
 
But as I finally sat down this weekend to write thank-you notes for my birthday, I couldn't keep that goddamn quote from coming to mind. Not only because I wait way too long every year to write these things and still expect family members not to think I'm an asshole, but also because somehow every year I sit down expecting to write the rip-roarinest, most awesome letters ever written in response to 25-dollar checks. Then immediately my brain gets all constipated and I struggle to remember which way the letters S and N are supposed to go, much less how to write effectively. Inevitably, two hours and 5 sentences later, I've come up with a lame-ass form letter to duplicate on every other card, and I slink away thinking much less of myself as a writer and as a human being. It's crazy, man. In almost every other area of my life, I can say that I've learned something since early childhood. But somehow my thank-yous are stuck in a Never-Land of Stupidity. As a point of reference to show you how far I haven't come, I've tracked down a thank-you note I wrote to my parents at age 7:


Your first instinct might be to say something pithy and cutting like "BLAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Oh my God I can't breathe. HAHAHAHA What a moron!" Me? I'll go with a knowing sigh. Oh, 7-year-old me, you probably thought you'd get considerably better with time. Fool. A few things you might notice:

- I had written a first line, but decided to erase it and start again a line lower. You might wonder how bad that line must have been to be deemed unsuitable for this letter. I just wonder whether I did such a bad erasing job because I couldn't see very well through the anxious tears.

- You would probably figure that by age 7 I'd know which direction question marks are supposed to go. Actually, I would figure that, too. This might be one of the few areas of this letter that I can identify as no longer an issue in my thank-you note writing. And that's only because it is such a breathtakingly stupid mistake. To say I've gotten better would be kind of like commending a murderer for at least sparing the family's goldfish this time.

- My lowercase Ks look like uppercase Rs. I should actually point out that my handwriting here is probably a thousand times better than it is today. I've regressed in this area. Now my lowercase Ks look like uppercase What The Fucks.

- "I got everything I wanted" is awkwardly slipped into a list of things I got. It seems like the kind of thing on a standardized test where they'd number the sentences and ask which one seems out of order or shouldn't be there at all. Right now, for instance. I still do this.

- I got a book and a microscope (which I call "neat") and claim to like my gifts "very much". Both the gifts and the adjectives I apply to them would be classified by a child psychologist as "things that are lame".

(Super-long aside: I feel like I need to explain myself here. I was the oldest child, and in case you weren't aware, the oldest child is a fucking hero. By the second kid, parents have usually realized that children are not as sensitive as the egg babies they took care of in high school home-ec classes. But the first kid is shielded to the point of absurdity - never exposed to things that might be dangerous or cool. By the age of 7, kids who are second and third have not only led less-coddled lives in general, but they've also been privy to the cool things that the older siblings picked up at school between having their lunch money stolen and being called words that they don't understand because they're not allowed to watch anything awesome. While younger siblings are at home torturing the cat, the oldest kid is at school every day chipping away at his lameness with a little pickax, then he comes home and readily makes gifts of the cool he mined. I very clearly remember my friend Woody Potter (awesome name? yes) telling me in kindergarten that Santa Claus isn't real, and me arguing vehemently and confidently that he was mistaken. Imagine my embarrassment the next day. Or in first grade, my friend Bryce told me that the F-word was "fuck", and I was positive that he was just fucking with me. It blew my mind that the F-word wasn't a word I already knew. I had always just assumed the F-word did other work when it wasn't being the F-word, like Clark Kent did lame stuff when he wasn't Superman. So I argued vehemently again, going so far as to keep saying "fuck" in the middle of class, so sure was I that it was nonsense. These are the kinds of public defeats that first-born kids have to suffer on the road to knowledge of cool things. I will definitely be sitting my first kid down on the first day of kindergarten and just schooling him(/her) in every vile, depressing thing known to man. He will be bummed for a few days, but will soon be psyched when he earns cool points by telling his friends about Santa* and Fuck and what "teabagging" means.)

Where was I? Oh yeah. I called things neat and liked microscopes. Fucking sue me. This is another area in which I've improved, though when I'm writing letters to my grandmother, using words like "neat" actually isn't a bad idea. Better than "epic" or "sickmendous".

- Probably the most ridiculous part of this whole letter is the fact that I ended a note to my parents - people who conceived me and gave birth to me and changed all my shitty diapers and taught me to walk and taught me to talk and took me to the hospital when I ate a whole bottle of Flintstones vitamins and protected me and bought me a microscope that I wanted for Christmas - with "Sincerely, Shawn Davis". Like it's a fucking business letter. Like when they walked me to my first day of school I turned and said goodbye with a handshake and told them we should have lunch sometime. I can just imagine them getting this note:

Mom: Oh, we got a thank-you card from Shawn Davis.
Dad: Who?
Mom: You know, Shawn Davis? Our real estate agent? He was just thanking us for the radio and the microscope and the books. He said they were really neat.
Dad: (coming over to take a look) Huh. Isn't it weird that we didn't just pay him in money?
Mom: I don't know. He said he wanted those things a lot worse. Remember, when we were closing the sale he gave us that JC Penney catalog, and he'd circled the things he wanted?
Dad: Oh, right. Odd guy.
Mom: He was nice!
Dad: His lowercase Ks look like uppercase Rs.

So yeah, "Sincerely, Shawn Davis" is embarrassing. But I'm pretty sure that within the last three years, I've signed a few of my thank-yous "Shawn Davis" in cursive without even thinking about it.

If I'm being completely honest, I know my notes have gotten better since this one. But not much better. They start with "Thanks" and end with "Thanks again" and in between they very briefly mention how I used the gift (since it's always long-gone by the time I'm writing the letters). So pretty much the same sentiment as when I was 7, but with slightly better execution. It's pathetic. I'm a grown man - I should at the very least be able to come up with something small-talky and inane. I do, after all, write this blog.
____________________________________________________________________

*I would like to mention that I don't blame my parents for not telling me about Santa Claus. Because without a belief in Santa, I doubt I would have been inspired to create masterpieces like "Santa Mouse". It's like, who knows what Caravaggio would have painted if he wasn't a Christian. It's just like that.

Santa Mouse sees all with his big squiggly left eye. He must have also seen that coming to my house would have been a mistake, because if my mom had seen him she would have freaked out and smashed him with a book.

Post About Not Always Writing Dervish Posts Which Is Nonetheless Still All About The Dervishes

It was too much, I know. I think that Nate decided to post as a sort of passive-aggressive intervention, before my descent into Dervish-inspired madness was irreversible. I was young and foolish, and I kept telling myself that I was just a hobbyist - that I could stop any time I wanted to and go back to how things were. Besides, I don't have to tell you that Dervish posts always feel so damn good. And that's the thing about addiction, friends: what feels so much like transcendence is really about as base and earthbound as it gets. But you don't usually figure that out until your tongue has already been in somebody's butt; I was one of the lucky ones who had a support system that cut me off before it came to that. Really, taping "Dervish" over the "Cheeri" on my cereal box isn't that bad. And neither is editing the nutrition facts, because Dervishos do have one billion percent of your daily Pimp Juice. And Boardwalk is a stupid street name in Monopoly, anyway. But I shudder to think of what I've no-doubt driven my readers to do under the influence of my powerful Dervish posts. So I had to do something, for you.

But I can't quit Dervish posts altogether; you (I) love them too much. It's just about moderation. To that end, I recently got some great blogging advice from the Foundation for Alcohol Responsibility. It was pretty poorly-written, but I know exactly what they were going for:

Pair your (blog posts). The single best habit you can adopt is to always (blog) one non(Dervish post) for every (blog about) (Dervishes), (softball), or (pussies who take walks).

(...)

Pairing your (blogs) in this way offers several benefits (for your readers):

You are slowing and diluting (their)(Dervish) intake. This gives (their) (minds) more time to adjust to and metabolize the (Dervish posts) (they) consume, and gives (them) more control over (their) (reading) experience, since (they) can "slow down" by switching to (non-Dervish posts), making (them) more likely to be enjoyably relaxed as opposed to (frothing at the mouth) and (having dangerously powerful orgasms).

(Dervish posts) (are) a (roller-coaster ride of emotion), (titillating) you and making you (randy), so (reading) a non(Dervish post) keeps you (clothed). [This also helps to prevent (becoming a Dervish groupie), which (is) partially caused by (Dervish posts).]

(They) can also better enjoy the (metaphorical) flavor of (their) chosen (softball team), because (non-Dervish posts) can help clear your (metaphorical) palate.

It's good advice. My next post will not be even vaguely Derv-ish, which will calm everyone down before I launch into the Weekly Dervish Update (which should be a doozy). But as I take my first tentative steps back into the world of non-Dervish-related blogging, I simply ask for your continued patience and understanding. If I occasionally interrupt a post about words that sound funny with "Hit your fuck-damn cutoff man!", please forgive me and continue your regular yawning routine. Funny word: milquetoast.

Fortnightly Dervish Update: Brave Face Edition

We're back. After taking a Sunday off to barbecue and remember something, the Dervishes today enter Phase 2 of our super-secret master plan for interstellar softball supremacy. Phase 1, you might have guessed, was "Suck balls." Mission accomplished. Phase 1 reached its successful conclusion two Sundays ago, when a 7-5 loss to "Dem Cats" left us 0-3, thereby granting us "Clown Shoes" certification, and the attendant league-wide disrepute that is so important to our cause.

And our cause is a movie. Because while there's something to be said for the purity of amateur pseudo-sports, there is also something to be said for the purity of really pure cocaine. And that something is "LET'S GET NAKED!!! WOOOOO!!!" But movies don't get made about juggernauts. Hollywood wants the unlikely champions, man. The first half-hour of any sports movie worth its salt has to include enough comic bunglery to justify intermittent reaction shots where the coach throws his hat on the ground and contemplates suicide. And the Dervishes have delivered. Now we can "miraculously" turn it around and set ourselves up for a showdown with the seemingly-unstoppable team that beat our asses early on (the 4-0 A-Town Nugs). If all goes according to plan, Hollywood won't be able to resist, and the Dervishes will soon come to a multiplex near you, to be played by the cast of 300 (which would be about akin to casting Dennis Quaid to play Jim Morris -who really looks like this, yet apparently does not molest children or run a saloon).

Anyway, today we play "The Rocks", one of two undefeated teams in the league. Next week's opponent: "The Rocks". Good fucking job, schedule makers. And all false bravado aside, we will probably lose. If so, I'll see you here next week, armed with some equally mealy-mouthed attempt to laugh off our soul-crushing shittiness. If we win, I'll probably post something ejaculatory later on tonight, then go get drunk. So again, see you next week.

Weekly Dervish Update: Narrow Loss Edition

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

- Helen Keller - Author, Activist, Noted Softball Player

Damn straight, Helen "Wheels" Keller. My first thought as I sat down to write this was that posting weekly updates is much less fun when they follow weekly losses. We lost, 13-12 in the bottom of the seventh inning. I've been trying not to think about it too much, because even though intellectually I know softball doesn't matter, I also learned in second grade that intellectuals are gaywads and winning is always awesome. Ask anyone: I hate losing. I'm completely insufferable for about 30 minutes after I lose at something. I fume and rant and bitch and throw things and generally comport myself poorly. Beyond 30 minutes I'm usually fine and I revert to my baseline level of insufferability. But talking about losses is still no fun. So I'm not going to go into too many details; I'll save those for when (if) we win a game. In the meantime I'm taking shelter in the soothing words of great thinkers/softball players of the past.

There is a strength in the union even of very sorry men.

- Homer - Poet, Power-Hitting Shortstop

Weekly Dervish Update: Blowout Loss Edition

Hey out there, all you Whirling Derverts™! If you thought I was kidding when I said there would be weekly updates - if you thought "He won't ever do that. He has to know that no one cares about the travails of his stupid softball team. Even he can't be that out of touch, can he?" - then you were super fucking wrong and kind of mean. I'm committed, man, and the fact that I'm posting an update after this game just proves that this is happening weekly, come shine or rain, victory or humiliating defeat, avid readership or scorn/indifference.

It was a beautiful day for softball, slightly overcast but warm, with a pleasant breeze that only fanned the white-hot flame that burns in the heart of every Dervish. As we arrived at the complex, the weird "thwack" of juiced bats against balls made real what for the last 9 months had been only the subject of beautiful dreams (when we weren't dreaming about cops on all-fours chasing after dogs on two legs who are wearing ski masks and carrying bags of money while our grandparents look on - a favorite Dervish dream): softball season was here.

The game started off pretty well, with both teams playing solid defense (often in short supply in softball leagues) and limiting scoring chances. One thing I'd like to note is that the A-Town Nugs loved to take walks, man. Growing up playing baseball, I must've heard the saying "A walk's as good as a hit" about 90 times per game. Every time a batter got to three balls, "A walk's as good as a hit" would be hurled at him ritualistically from every conceivable direction: his coach, his teammates, his parents, his teammates' parents, the teammate whose parents abandoned him's uncle. Planes would fly overhead, towing a banner that said "A walk's as good as a hit!!!" behind them. And all that was fine, because it's true. But this is rec-league softball, man. The ball is going 5.3 miles per hour, and you're 39 years old, and your glory days are already gone if they ever came at all. Who the fuck wants to walk in softball? The saying in softball should be "If you walk, you are a gigantic pussy". Everyone should chant it every time someone gets to three balls. If the ball is in your general vicinity, you have enough time to position your body so that it's perfect to hit. But in this case, these balls were like an inch off the plate. Swing the goddamn bat.

Oh, right, the game. So thanks to a nice surge in the bottom of the fifth inning, the score was 7-4 Dervishes. Life was good; it was time to bring it on home. Right here I am going to posit the existence of a Dervishmobile just so that I can tell you that the wheels fell off of it in the top of the sixth. Then, in the top of the seventh, someone smashed the windows and stole our awesome Dervish sound system. And by the end of the inning, people were looting it of all its semi-valuables and having sex with each other inside its hollow shell while a crazy homeless guy defecated on its hood. All of a sudden in the last two innings we couldn't play defense. We dropped popups, overthrew cutoff men, bobbled balls, let balls past us, and generally bungled every opportunity we had to get outs. We lost *expletive deleted*-8. Fine, 26-8. After being up 7-4 two innings earlier.

I was stunned. I was crushed. I needed answers. So after the game, the Dervishes struggled through the throngs of upset groupies and compared notes. And we figured it out. It was so simple. You see, though the Dervishes are cut from the manliest cloth in God's sweatshop, we are sensitive, too, like a swan or a clitoris. And it hit us collectively, in the top of the sixth, how meaningless softball really is amidst the world's suffering. When our first baseman dropped a popup, it turns out that he was tormented by thoughts of how skyrocketing oil prices are driving hardworking people into poverty. So he dropped a softball; big fucking deal. Our left-centerfielder overran a line drive, allowing the hitter to come all the way around and score. But it turns out that he was busy writing a poem about the effects of deforestation on third-world countries. No one can catch a ball while simultaneously rhyming "deforestation" with "the poorest nations", or "the tree" with "hug me", or "mudslide" with "sun-dried". Those multisyllabic rhymes need one's full attention. So: catch a ball, or talk about a serious issue facing our world? Which one would you choose? I know I personally was troubled by the deadly stalemate between the Israelis and Palestinians when I flew out to left with runners on base. Sue me.

But after a long philosophical discussion about the nature of suffering and our obligation to help relieve it, we came to the nuanced conclusion that it is up to each of us to do what we can to help, but we cannot, in these efforts, sacrifice fully our obligation to actualize our own happiness. We must help with one hand, and with the other reach for our own greatness. And what in life is greater than to be a Whirling Dervish? So the Dervishmobile is rolling once more. Next opponent: "The Unknowns". We can sympathize with them, because before last Sunday we too were unknowns, even to ourselves.

Fin.

Wherein I Lose My Mind

Hi there. Weren't expecting me back so soon? Expected me to be gone for a few weeks, as usual? Well, I thought you'd be happier to see me. Why are you so flustered?... What's going on? Whose shoes are those!? You fucking whore! It's a busy weekend, and I really didn't expect to post anything for a while, but I also didn't expect to read a Forbes article entitled "What Your Car Says To The Opposite Sex". It's already changed my life. I'll admit that just yesterday I was a novice in the field of car semiotics. And no wonder. I drive a simple '98 Saturn, and the only language it can muster is an onomatopoeic, idiotic "VROOM!", which women rarely respond to. I just figured that every other car was the same. How wrong I was, friends. Forbes has opened my ears to the limitless lexicon that cars have developed in the past decade, unbeknownst to silly old me. The progress is staggering. The newest luxury cars are capable of witty repartee in several languages, always culminating in an accepted invitation for drinks on the veranda, and, ultimately, oral sex. There is really so much of this article to talk about, that I'm going to go through it step-by-step, Fire Joe Morgan-style. Let no critic ever say that I ignored perfectly stealable formats. Here we go (bold is excerpted from the article; regular type is me):

Can't seem to catch the attention of that certain someone? You may be driving him or her away before you open your car door.

You might wonder how often it is that "that certain someone" is in a position to see you pulling up in your lame-o, turnoff car. You also might wonder why you would be smitten with a person who apparently comes to dumb conclusions about you based on your current mode of transportation. Hold on, though. Maybe your ride says more about you than you might imagine.

That's because your ride says more about you than you might imagine.

Bingo. At this point I was intrigued, and I instantly suspected that my past romantic failures were not due to my own ineptness, but rather because my car had been telling girls behind my back about all the helpless animals and schoolchildren I've willfully mowed down over the years. It all made sense, finally. I knew my Knock-Knock jokes weren't "horrifyingly terrible"! Take that, therapist!

A man pulling up to a ritzy restaurant in a two-seater Porsche 911 sends a signal that he is a determined, highly successful, middle-aged professional. 

Ohhhh, we're talking about signals here. So check it out: If you're like an 80-year-old dude trying to score some 30-something tail, the 911 is for you. You just pull up to Le Food, and the girls will pick up on your determinedness, and successitude, and, most importantly for your purposes, middle-agedness, and they'll be intrigued. Now comes the tricky part, because you need to find a way to seduce them without letting them see your wrinkly old-guy face. Because I'm pretty sure that your car won't help you project middle-agedness when you hobble out and take your walker out of the backseat. You are disgustingly old. But what do I know? I drive a Silver Saturn SL2 with 93,000 miles on it. Maybe an 11-year-old can step out of a 911, and the girls will be so captivated by his car's luxurious signals that they'll peg him as a 44-year-old stockbroker. 

The guy behind the wheel of an Audi RS4 sedan is confident shopping on Rodeo Drive and making deals on Park Avenue. 

Self-explanatory. Are you a little squeamish shopping in Beverly Hills or brokering megadeals in the Big Apple? Here's a step-by-step guide to help you alleviate your anxiety: 1. Buy the RS4 You're welcome. Even if you've never made it out of Idaho, you're now well-prepared for a confident coastal foray. Let's skip forward a little bit. Now we're learning what a car can say about a woman: 

 "The (Jaguar) XF is extremely modern," says Anne Clinard, a Jaguar North America spokeswoman. "It says that I am an individual who has a strong sense of self and appreciates the finer things in life. People know you have discerning tastes and that you are not afraid to stand out and drive something different than what your neighbors may drive." 

You've gotta hand it to Forbes. To figure out what specific cars say to the world-at-large, they go to impartial sources: spokespeople for the car manufacturers in question. Anne Clinard may awkwardly segue from the first- to the second-person, but she really seems to know what the XF has to say. She knows that it takes a brave "individual" to drive around the neighborhood in a new Jaguar. I can just imagine how unique and discerning Jaguar XF drivers must appear to their upper-crust neighbors. They might as well ride in on a jewel-encrusted, three-legged ostrich. A Jaguar in a rich neighborhood? Get outta towne! But XF drivers are well-equipped to handle the whispers. Their sense of self will carry them through.   

Automakers like Jaguar know that a car is more than transportation for some; it is an extension of the driver's image. 

That's just how it is. It's not like Jaguar spends untold millions of dollars to make sure people know that people of a certain standing drive Jaguars.

That's why we turned to them to see what the market's most popular cars for men and women, according to J.D. Power and Associates, say about their drivers. Our findings come from automaker-supplied buyer demographics.

Wait. Didn't this article start by saying that your car could be the reason that you're seen as such a terrible prospective mate? But all of the article's conclusions about drivers are drawn from automakers' demographic info? So the girl of my dreams would only know what my car says about me if she pores over the market research of various car companies? Maybe it is the Knock-Knock jokes. Damn you, Dr. Fitz! See you next week!

"This new generation of consumers looks at a vehicle as a piece of clothing," says Wesley Brown, partner in Iceology, a Los Angeles-based consumer research and trend consulting firm. "We have clients who say 'My BMW or Jeep is the last thing I put on before I go out.' They are concerned with the color of their iPod and spend $200 to $300 for cool-looking sunglasses."

Wow. Wesley's clients are fucking douchebags. I'd like to hear the audio of Wesley's interview, because it seems impossible to give that quote without a disdainful inflection. I would also like to see video, because I have a hunch that he would enclose "cool-looking sunglasses" in sarcastic air-quotes. How come no one at Jaguar included "fucker" along with "discerning", "appreciates the finer things" and "strong sense of self"? 

High on the luxury list for women are safety, reliability and value. Men prefer the exact opposite; performance, power and style are among their top choices. 

You heard it here first: The exact opposite of safety is performance. Kids, remember that come SAT season, and you can go to a state school like Uncle Shawn.

Take the Porsche 911. Its buyers are 86.8% male with the average age of 51 and median income of $390,000. They are driven to succeed and like to reward themselves for achieving their goals.

Recurring theme: Buyers of expensive cars are "driven to succeed", which as far as I can tell means "Can afford to buy an expensive car," thereby telling us nothing new about the buyer of an expensive car. Similarly, "like to reward themselves for achieving their goals" can be understood as "Would buy an expensive car". In related news, men who have cancer are cancerous, and are more likely to die of cancer than men who do not have cancer. 

If you are looking for love, you may want to steer clear of women driving sport-utility vehicles.

So an article that began by saying that your book is being judged by its cover is now encouraging you to judge other books by their covers. Also, I was really, really hoping that the next sentence would reveal that market research has shown SUV-driving women to be both fatter and smellier than their car-driving counterparts. But alas: 

Mike Michels, a Lexus/Toyota spokesman, says 66% of the RX 350 SUV buyers are female, and 78% are married. Their median age is 55 and they have a median income of $141,000. About 25% of female buyers have children under age 18, suggesting that many are empty-nesters. 

Oh well. Also, it seems a little crazy to recommend that men "steer clear" of women driving SUVs based on the sales figures of a luxury model that doesn't even rank in the top-ten selling SUV models for 2007. I'm not saying that the RX 350 figures are any different from other, better-selling models; I'm not doing that research. It just seems like a hasty claim. All those poor SUV-driving single women, destined to be alone because Forbes says talking to them ain't worth it. It's a shame. Then the article inexplicably craps out and talks briefly about niche marketing, ending with a strange discussion of Volvo's attempts to market their cars to a wider range of audiences. No tidy conclusion. No "So next time your love life can't get any traction, consider a change of wheels." Nothing. Just this: 

The Volvo S40, with a base price of $24,365, has helped Volvo reach single women who want safety in a more stylish package at an affordable price. 

The End. It started with a promise to outline unconsidered ways your car might affect how you're perceived, and ended with the boring machinations of a car company's marketing success. It's like they realized that the article was incredibly stupid about halfway through; that everyone already knows that nice cars suggest that you're rich, and less-nice cars suggest nothing (but don't preclude you from being rich). They realized the article was a useless nothing-husk, and they bailed. But not before an awesome slideshow. Some of the contestants: 

Volvo S40 Base Price: $24,365 The woman who drives this car is often in her 30s, college-educated and likely isn't status-conscious. She is more concerned about the welfare of her family and friends than about image. 

You are a saint, hypothetical Volvo woman. You care more about keeping your family and friends safe than you do about looking cool. If only hypothetical Mazda woman had been so selfless, instead of choosing Botox injections over a life-saving surgical procedure for her daughter. 

Jaguar XF Base Price: $49,975 The woman behind the wheel of the Jaguar XF is an educated and highly successful woman. She surrounds herself with the finer things in life and is equally as likely to be single or married.

Did they mention whether this woman was a woman? Also, "finer things in life" = "bought a Jaguar XF. Duh." Adds nothing except redundant redundancy.

Lexus RX 350 Base Price: $37,500 Behind the wheel of this car is a married mother who is a college-educated professional and takes great pride in herself and her accomplishments. She surrounds herself with luxurious things because she has the money to pamper herself. But she doesn't make frivolous purchases; she wants luxury that fulfills a purpose and performs a function. 

"Takes great pride in herself and her accomplishments" = ...I don't even fucking know where they're getting this. Did they do demographic research on pride levels, or does it just mean "Proud to have bought a Lexus RX 350"? Also, I don't want to be this guy, but don't words like "pamper" and "luxury" sort of imply frivolity? I refuse to link the dictionary, but words like "excessive" and "unnecessary" are likely to come up a few times. When your car has a "backup camera" and DVD voice-activated navigation, shit is getting to be a little frivolous. Also a little frivolous: parsing definitions like this. Moving on. 

Acura TSX Base Price: $27,785 The driver behind the wheel of the Acura TSX is a successful woman who is likely married with a median income of $87,000. She likes tasteful things but isn't into flash and status. 

In this article this amounts to a colossal dis of the Acura TSX. A car under 30,000 dollars? Clearly this woman has no interest in flashiness or status. I'll bet she doesn't even special-order her maple syrup. Is it not weird for them to write all these captions as if they're talking about a specific person, while continuing to describe stats like median income? She's fucking fake; just keep your weird illusion going and say she makes around $87,000. 

Mercedes Benz CL Class Base Price: $103,875 This affluent man is a captain of industry or a very successful professional who wants it known that he has arrived. He surrounds himself in tasteful luxury and attacks life. He doesn't waste time on the mundane or frivolous. 

I know this gets repetitive, but doesn't "surrounds himself in tasteful luxury" just mean that the car he bought is tasteful and luxurious? So aren't we really just inferring things about the car he bought based on the car he bought? Or did they go to his house and approve of his subjective taste in grandfather clocks? Also, this man considers the mundane and frivolous a waste of time. Case-in-point: he does not "get" the mail. He doesn't "make" breakfast. He doesn't "go on" dates. He attacks his mailbox. He destroys breakfast. He assaults women. And he never laughs, unless he hears a joke that is relevant to his stock portfolio. Envy him.

Mercedes-Benz C-Class Base Price: $31,975 This woman demands respect. She is a successful, independent thinker with discerning tastes. She is not shy about what she wants, likes to make bold statements and is driven to succeed. 

You do not fuck with this woman. She is both "successful" and "driven to succeed" (as evinced by, you guessed it, her goddamn car). She is also an independent thinker, unless she only decided to buy the car after reading about how cool it is on forbes.com... Then she would be quite dependent, if you think about it. And she likes to make bold statements, like "You, sir, murdered my grandfather," and "Reagan was assassinated by his own brain". I assume. Or maybe "likes to make bold statements" is just another euphemism for "drives a nice car". But that would be readily apparent anyway, so I'm sure that's not it.

Lincoln Mark LT Base Price: $38,340 This well-to-do guy wants it all and is in a position to get it. He likes the best things in life and doesn't mind being noticed. He is driven to succeed and likes to make a statement wherever he goes. 

Hey, Forbes caption writer: we fucking get it. Nice cars. Successful. Likes the best things. Successed. Finer things. Success-oriented. Statement-making success story. Success-loving. Why not try saying things that the cars in question, like, do? If my only criterion for a car is one that says "This guy's successful", I'll just go buy a speaker I can mount on top that says "This guy's successful" over and over and over. And I will use the money I saved to hire a discreet hitman to murder the editor of Forbes magazine. Or, better yet, they could hire me to write these captions, so that I can be successful, too. Here's my audition: 

12-Speed Mountain Bike 

Base Price: 75 dollars 

No hill is too steep for this guy. Typically in his mid-tweens, with a median annual income of his-allowance-times-52, this kid commands respect on the playground. Driven to succeed, this jack-of-all-trades can adjust his speed to any situation. He appreciates the finer things, like Biggie-sized fries and expensive packs of baseball cards. What a successful succeeder. 

Lamborghini Murcielago 

Base Price: $300,000 

What a success story this guy is. A Powerball jackpot winner, he has no idea what 35 divided by 5 equals, much less how to manage money. But he just bought a Murcielago, so he is a successful, finer-things-loving, tasteful, individualistic, go-getting captain of industry who takes pride in his achievements and is addicted to meth. *Whew* Did you actually read all of that? Sorry. Goodnight.