Category Archives: Uncategorized

For the last few hours…

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…I have been plagued by a burning curiosity, lost in contemplation over one of the greatest pop culture mysteries of our time. Yet, as it goes with most of life’s great philosophical journeys, the answer becomes more elusive with every step. The subject of my intense meditation is the possible motivations behind the humble career choice of one of America’s greatest fictional adventurers:

What inspired Mario to be a plumber?

Were Mario’s extraordinary abilities merely a product of circumstance? Did Princess Peach’s initial kidnapping activate some secret reserve of untapped potential previously unbeknownst to the pudgy Italian protagonist, or was the blue-collar career choice made in full awareness of his uncommon capabilities?

It’s difficult to imagine that a man with such universal talents would subject himself  to a path of such limited ambition. Granted, Mario has never shown any signs of engaging in any form of abstract thought, a fact made evident by his ten word vocabulary and preference to express his emotions with inarticulate hoots and grunts. However, this uncaped crusader’s athleticism is off the charts, being an accomplished stock car racer while excelling in tennis, golf, baseball, and soccer. Not only has he competed in the summer and winter Olympics, but was an eligible participant in every single event. The sheer stamina required for that level of physical duress could earn him millions in endorsements. As a consequence, I think it’s safe to rule out a financial motive for Mario’s everyman occupation.

Next, there’s the possibility that the plumber gig was intended as a cover to protect those closest to him: every superhero needs a secret identity right?   Wrong. Mario is one of the video game world’s biggest narcissists, never passing up an opportunity to plaster his name (in bold letters) all over any organization or event with which he gets involved. Accordingly, it would be understandable if he lacked concern for his own safety, but nor does he have consideration for the safety of his family, exemplified by the frequent abductions of his girlfriend and idiot brother. Though to be fair to Mario, you’d think a princess would have more capable security than a bunch of talking mushrooms.

Consequently, if we must rule out the application of a secret identity, then we find ourselves in the realms of speculation, and would not be remiss for postulating that Mario’s employment in the plumbing industry was pursued as a means of honoring his lineage. My very limited research uncovered little to no reference in regard to the familial origins of the Mario brothers. You can find out a great deal about a man’s motives by studying the deeds of his forefathers, but the only history we have on Mario is the fact of a very general Italian heritage. For all we know, the Mario family tree could be ripe with plumbers, which would also explain why Luigi took up a similar mantle despite being remarkably less competent.

Beyond that, I can only see one other logical option:  he enjoys it. It could be that within the hurricane of celebrity and adventure that is Mario’s existence, plumbing is the method by which he unwinds, finding the monotony of manual labor to be therapeutic. Although, if the answer is that simple, it would mean the last three hours of my life and the resulting blog post were a complete waste of time. Debatable, but I choose to keep dreaming.

Nobody Cares

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My love of sports has waned considerably since childhood, most likely because I never really cared to begin with, but was born into an athletically minded family and was too insecure to fight the grain. Despite my general indifference to televised athletics, the NFL has kept me securely tethered to the world of professional sports, mainly due to my obsession with fantasy football. My love of fantasy football reaches to such an extent that I wouldn’t be surprised if it became a major point of contention in all of my future relationships. I start studying during training camp, immersing myself in player news and stat lines, and memorizing depth charts even before the season begins. However, even considering the unhealthy extremes of my football nerdery, there are few things I find more irritating than having a discussion with someone about their fantasy football team.

Actually, “discussion” may be a mild term, because although these conceited individuals usually frame the subject within a conversational structure, they obviously have little to no interest in anything you have to say. These are the same kinds of self-glorifying jock straps that can’t wait to tell you about the new spinning rims on their car, or how they totally hooked up with that hot cougar at the bar last night. I get it guys. You’re excited and you want to share that excitement with the world, but you need to deflate that cancerous lump of pride swelling in your chest, because you will not find a single person who cares. Ever. If you corner a polite stranger, they may toss you a halfhearted nod of approval, but no one could willingly match your level of enthusiasm over something so fucking stupid.

“Yeah, bro. I’ve got Peyton Manning and Adrian Peterson this year. I’ve got a good chance to win my league.”

That does nothing for me. At all. I’m one step closer to death, with nothing to show for it but the useless information that just came spilling out of your face hole. I would rather have hit myself in the head with a tack hammer, and killed those brain cells straight away, than waste them on your self-indulgent filth.

Now, as the perpetrators of these types of lopsided discourses are, in my experience, predominantly male, I want to stress that there is no topic in the English language that will make a girl lose interest in you faster than the details of your fantasy football team. You could discuss the dimensions of your ex-girlfriend’s ass and get a more passionate response, albeit an unfavorably passionate response, but even then there’s a chance to inspire jealous aggression.  If you start talking about fantasy football with a girl you’re trying to sleep with, you may as well break out the moisturizer and pick an image to jerk off to, because you just buried yourself. Be that as it may, I’m not so narrow-minded as to assume that there are no girls who will find the subject interesting, as I’m sure there are guys out there dying to talk about the Kardashians; but those individuals are few and far between.

 

Best F@#%in’ Friends Forever

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Have you ever blacked out at a party and woken up next to your best friend to find them wearing your clothes and you donning only a pair of boxers?  Did you also realize shortly thereafter that there was a small pile of puke on the floor and a significant amount of urine in your book bag?  If you haven’t already guessed by the sheer specificity of these circumstances, this has happened to me.  For most people, this would raise a very revealing line of questioning, and would probably constitute a serious reevaluation of the friendship in question.  For me, this was merely the first of a laundry list of compromising situations which cemented my undying love and loyalty to Melinda Ann Tucker, who is, without rival, my best friend in the world.

I met Lindy during our freshman year at Ohio State.  We didn’t take to each other immediately, but that was because I still lacked the self-confidence for social outreach, and she was fighting to overcome a slight personal fear of….well, me.  Apparently, I had a tendency to be a bit intimidating when I still had yet to get over “all of my wrestling bullshit,” as a friend of ours so eloquently put it.  Nevertheless, we overcame our subtle differences and bonded over a mutual lack of ambition, spending countless days playing Mario Kart and Wii Bowling, and countless nights drinking to our physical limitations.  We used to have a motto during that first year of college that went “It’s not a good night unless Lindy pukes.”   We had many good nights.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a best friend of the opposite sex, but I highly recommend it.  If for nothing more than to have someone to bounce ideas off of, especially when it comes to relationships. Navigating the female psyche is exponentially easier when you have consistent access to first hand source material. It’s like living in a foreign country with a personal translator who has not only mastered the language, but is an expert on culture and customs as well.  Not to mention, that despite our considerable amount of common interests, I never have to worry about her sleeping with my girlfriend….and even if she did, I doubt that anger would even register within the mushroom cloud of thoughts and emotions I would be likely to feel.

It wasn’t just our love of partying and daily flights from responsibility that served as the mortar for our friendship, but an unspoken bond developed between us; and I don’t mean ‘unspoken bond’ in the cliched sense of the phrase.  I mean that we established such a deep understanding of one another’s thought processes that we could literally communicate without speaking.  Hell, there have been plenty of times where she figures out what I’m thinking before I do.

Now, and for the rest of my life (or at least until she gets married) I have someone who will have my back regardless of whether I’m right or wrong. Although, if I do happen to be wrong,  she’ll pull me aside and privately inform me how out of line I am.  In Lindy Tucker, I have a friend who I can always count on, and although she may express (justified) concern for my mental health, will never (openly) judge me for whatever perversions my mind may conjure.

When the inevitable day comes, and Lindy does walk down the aisle, if I’m not directly across the altar, you can be damn sure that I’ll be right behind her. I don’t even care if I have to wear a dress. If that’s what it takes, I’ll be there.

Dance Class, pt. 1

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I sat in my car watching the minutes tick by, singing along to my radio, and pretending that I wasn’t nervous.  It’s difficult to say exactly where my nerves were coming from:  either the natural anxiety that comes from stepping out of your comfort zone or the personal disquiet in knowing that I was about to walk in to a dance studio full of preteen ballerinas.  “Just smile and act confident,” I coached myself as I stepped from the sanctuary of my Grand Prix.  “You confirmed the time of the class four times in the last hour.  You have just as much right to be here as anyone else.”

I walked down the back hall leading to the studio, holding tight to the straps of my book bag just to give my hands something to do.  To my great unease, the office to the studio was overcrowded and the mothers had spilled over into the hallway, so they were able to eye me the whole way.  I just nodded and gave a closed eyed smile, communicating that I was well aware of how out of place I seemed and felt the according sense of discomfort.

I walked into the office, already flushed with the embarrassment of having two dozen eyes fixed on me, most scanning my features with mild curiosity, while the more paranoid among them betrayed the obvious judgment flitting around behind their eyes.

“Oh, you must be Andrew!”  I looked up to see a younger woman with shoulder length black hair extending her hand toward me. I took her hand with a sheepish smile, taken aback by the fact that she knew my name at first glance.  I had only exchanged a handful of emails with someone named Nicole to narrow down the details of class registration.  How could she possibly be able to spot me without talking to me?

“This is the hip-hop instructor, Alicia,” the woman went on, presenting a girl no older than me, who was seized by a look of genuine excitement.  It was as this girl was shaking my already extended hand that the pieces fell together.

“Oh shit,” I thought.  “I’m the only–

“I was so excited when I saw that I would finally have a boy in class this year!” Alicia piped, finishing my thought.  “A lot of our styles are geared towards girls, but I’ll work with you to make them more–”  And instead of finishing the sentence, she puffed out her chest, furrowed her brow, and flexed; which I assumed was a charade for the word ‘masculine.’

“Can’t wait,” I said forcing a smile.

Sure enough, as the class got under way, out of twenty students, I proved to be the only with a y-chromosome.  A little more than a dozen of them were girls ranging from 12 to 18, who took turns staring at me like I was a unicorn.  Three were women somewhere between 30 and 45, eyeing me like I was a guy with mustache at a playground.  Then there was the redhead: petite with tattoos and fierce green eyes that settled on me like a cheetah scouting its prey.

This should be fun.

 

 

Death is a Draw

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I’m sure the actual ordeal of dying is more often than not a horrific experience on both a physical and psychological level, but I’m talking in terms of objective pros and cons: cost/benefit.  I feel like people too often focus solely on the negatives when faced with the concept of life coming to an end: not getting to see your family again, not experiencing joy or love, being incapable of orgasms, or never getting to see the Browns win a Super Bowl.  I realize that some of those examples are more universally identifiable than others, but you get the point.  No one ever remembers that their are always two sides to that coin.  You may never feel loved again, but going along with that logic, neither will you feel lonely. You might never feel the touch of a loved one, but neither will you feel a broken bone or the torture of sitting down when there’s a zit right at the top of your tailbone:  not high enough on your back to avoid contact but not low enough to be safe within padding of your butt cheeks.

I should probably point out something that you may have already noticed:  my argument assumes that when we die, we’re absorbed into nothingness and everything we held dear is lost in the vast expanse of space and time.  I recognize that most of the major religions recognize some form of afterlife in which all the pain, sadness, and butt zits are swept into non-existence, leaving only peace, love, and unblemished complexions to reign through eternity.  I’m not trying to discount those ideas in anyway, and my previous assumption of death being equal to oblivion is not a reflection of my own system of beliefs, because honestly I don’t know what I believe; and I don’t know what I believe because there’s no way for anyone to answer the question of afterlife with absolute certainty.  Accordingly, I think that the inability to know for sure is exactly what scares people about dying.  They’re not afraid because they think their soul will be eternally raped by giant cheese graters, tormented in a lake of fire, or water-boarded by terrorist demons.  People are afraid because they just don’t know.

When you really sit down, accept the inevitability of your own death, and think about it’s immediate effects, you may realize that fear of one’s own death is actually a rather conceited instinct.  No matter what the outcome is for the individual, the people you leave behind are the ones who are most affected by the emotional aftermath.  They’re the ones that have to deal with the fact that someone in whom they have invested immeasurable amounts of their time and love has just been torn from them, leaving a scar that will never fully heal.  Nevertheless, personal anxieties about death occupy a large portion of our inner thoughts.  What will happen to me?  Where will I go? Will I even be me anymore?  Will I remember my life on Earth?

Who cares?  You’ll be dead, you selfish fuck.