Customized Hell

A vital question that I like to pose on first dates is, “What do you imagine it's like in Hell?” This is by no means the first question I ask; I'm not quite that tactless. But if this question is answered thoughtfully, with little reluctance, I know I've found a chick with a limber imagination, and that's a profound turn-on. When a woman openly tells me what she imagines Hell is like on our first date, I make a mental note not to screw the whole thing up for at least three months.

If the woman provides a cursory description of a massive underground cave, rampant with raging infernos and torture devices, I ask her to think deeper. The devil has a wicked imagination. It would be creatively stilted of him to offer the same exact punishment for everyone in Hell. Satan is omniscient; he knows everything about us, our virtues, flaws, desires, vices, and fears, things we love, things we hate. That's why I think Hell has got to be a customized experience unique to the individual.

Additionally, some people, Satanists and Slayer fans, mostly, are enamored with the idea of a lake of fire and boundless suffering. They are drawn to the stereotype of Hell; it actually fills them with mirth. Hell should be a domain of eternal punishment, not a thrilling theme park for sadists. Hell cannot reward someone for leading an evil life. Chalk up another reason why Hell must be different for everybody.

At the risk of stealing my own thunder on my next first date, what follows is a description of the horrors that would await me in Hell. This essay is going to scare me so much I will refrain from whacking-off, to God's chagrin, for a week...

Okay. Maybe not a week. I'll aim for three days, instead.

****

To find out the horrors of my Customized Hell, follow this link to buy a copy of "There Will be Blog."
www.xlibris.com/NickOlig.html

The Back Cover

This is the message I have in mind for the back cover of the book, which should be available in September.

Do you keep a plastic robot in your parents' basement to teach you a lesson about fatherhood? Is it possible that the secret catalyst of Hitler's rise to power was an embittered puppet? Are grade school pizza parties the real reason my friends and I drink too much beer? Aren't the correlations between playing Mariokart: 64 and sadomasochism striking? If time travel were possible, wouldn't you use it to restrain a certain fan of the Chicago Cubs with busy hands? Isn't it obvious that David Bowie's fear of flying led to his recording of “Space Oddity”? Doesn't the dwarf planet Pluto seem like a likely stalker of Jodi Foster? Have you ever thought about what happens when one conjoined twin earns entry into heaven while the other is banished to hell? Has it ever occurred to you that the resurrection of Jesus Christ might have been part of an elaborate April Fool's Day prank?

No? On all accounts? Damn. I really thought I was on the brink of making a sale.

Soccer Hater Won't Quit His Bitching

Even when you're serenely buzzed after a raucous and joyful wedding reception, it's awkward trying to fall asleep (on the floor, no less) when two people are undressing each other with erotic stealth on a nearby bed. I am 75% my friend Max did not have a one-night stand on this night. Lord knows I didn't. I am not certain if consensual finger-banging can be placed in the one-night stand category. I don't think so, but maybe it qualifies. Hopefully someday a footnote will clear this up for me.*

The girl Max fooled around with, Cathy, lives in Milwaukee. Max lives in Fond du Lac. These two cities are separated by roughly 80 minutes of driving time, and so it is unlikely the isolated lust will blossom into a longterm relationship. This suits me just fine. I'm glad, even though I really should feel indifferent. Cathy and I would not coexist peacefully, and if things got serious between those two frisky hotel room fornicators, I would probably start to avoid Max. In all likelihood, Cathy doesn't remember my name, but I know she dislikes me. She doesn't necessarily hate me, but she hates my opinion on the topic of this essay. And I in turn hate her opinion of what I'm about to write. Before she got wink-winked that night, Cathy and I argued about soccer.

It's no coincidence that this argument occurred while the 2010 FIFA World Cup was in progress. The call for patriotism generally happens in four year cycles; this is evidenced by the presidential election, the winter and summer Olympics, and the fleeting popularity of soccer in America. Had the wedding Cathy and I attended taken place during the summer of 2011, there is little chance the topic of soccer would have been raised. The average American sports fan slumbers through soccer's existence for three years and nine months at a time, getting roused from their torpor by the fickle beckoning of patriotism—not a genuine fondness for the game of soccer. Soccer in America is reliant on patriotism as a marketing gimmick. Consequently, a great many Americans watched our boys lose to Ghana, but 1% of the population can name the team who won last year's Major League Soccer championship. A supposedly important match between two American soccer teams generates as much interest as the latest Coolio album in the state of Wyoming. The MLS championship has got to be like watching a Civil War reenactment in which one soldier gets “shot” in 90 minutes of “action” to determine the winner of the “battle.”

It may seem contradictory to assert that soccer is aided by sporadic patriotism in light of the fact that the sport is distinctly un-American. But it's the truth. The difference between soccer and football, baseball, and basketball in America is that the latter three sports are autonomous, financially viable entities that don't depend on the patriotism bailout once every four years. One of the reasons why so many Americans resent soccer is because the game subconsciously reminds us of a needy corporation like Chrysler. Soccer is incompatible with the ideals of capitalism. For decades, professional soccer players in this country have been trying to pull themselves up by the shoestrings of their Pumas with total futility.

Football is the most popular sport in this country. It is also egregiously misnamed. It can't be disputed that feet are required to play football; however, the same could be said for every other body-intensive sport (with the exception of wheelchair rugby). What's telling is that kickers and punters, the two least respected positions on every NFL roster, are the only players who routinely use their feet to kick the pigskin. Consequently, thinly veiled anti-soccer sentiments are apparent in football. David Beckham may be a suave international heartthrob, but unless the bloke can throw a shockingly spot-on deep ball, if he made the transition to football, he would rank as the 52nd coolest dude on any NFL team. His coach would refer to Beckham as US Weekly, having completely forgotten the man's real name.

There are many alternatives in nomenclature to the game made famous by the likes of Tom Landry, Jim Brown, and #4 for the Green Bay Packers—Mr. Chuck Fusina. My friends and I compiled a list that includes: Yard Ball, Four Down Ball, Collision Ball, Tackle Ball, and Touchdown Ball. These names offer a more apt relation to the game itself, but they all lack in the all-important aspect of giving European football a big “fuck you.” Ultimately, it doesn't matter that football is misnamed stateside. What matters is that we stole the distinction of the rest of the world's most popular and lamest game and applied it (with bold ignorance) to a sport invented by Americans that is in all ways superior. Imagine if tomorrow our country stopped referring to inches and feet and miles as being part of the standard system of measurement and adopted the designation of metric in its place. Nothing would change in the way we measure distances or quantities, we still wouldn't know a centimeter from a centipede, but we started calling our system of measurement metric (even though it really isn't). This is pretty much what our football has done by co-opting the rest of the world's football. As far as global actions go, this one is awesome, brazen, and least importantly, utterly stupid.

And this, I suppose, is the kind of patriotism I can tolerate: that is, the kind of patriotism that keeps soccer largely unpopular in the U.S.

It's half-time. Hydrate yourself by chugging copious amounts of mineral water, replenish your vitamins with some orange slices, and review the highlight reel from the first 1,000 words of this essay.

The most repellent aspect of soccer has got to be the scoreless tie. My grudge against scoreless ties runs deeper than the fact that they are immensely boring; scoreless ties offer proof that the game of soccer is inherently flawed. The driving force behind soccer, the object of the game, is to score goals. Each team is given 90 minutes to accomplish this task as frequently as possible to ensure victory. A friend of mine who adores soccer estimated that scoreless ties happen 20% of the time, which exceeded my unsure estimate of 10%. If we split the difference between the two figures, this means that soccer matches 1.) defy the very essence of the game itself about 15% of the time and 2.) are even duller than I had originally thought.


The debate between Cathy and I was especially contentious because she despises baseball and loves soccer whereas I despise soccer and love baseball. The nasty ordeal suggested what it must be like to argue with yourself with infinite vitriol in Bizarro World. Cathy couldn't believe a baseball fan had the gall to condemn another sport for its blandness. She also stated that soccer players are more athletic than their bat-and-glove-wielding counterparts, that a fatso couldn't possibly keep up with the nonstop, frenetic pace of a soccer match. Her final point was that soccer players are unequivocally the sexiest professional athletes.


My response is that a typical baseball score is 5-3, while a typical soccer score is 2-1. Per hour of game-play, runs occur with much greater regularity than goals, and runs and goals are the true exclamation marks of the respective sports. More exclamation marks = more excitement and less tedium. Hitting a modestly-sized sphere that travels at 95 miles per hour (or suddenly curves, plummets, or slides just before it reaches the batter) is far more difficult than kicking a much larger ball past defenders and a goalie into an expansive net. It's more challenging to hit a home-run than it is to kick a ball into a net under heavy duress. And in spite of this handicap, baseball players nonetheless deliver a higher volume of entertainment than the likes of Ronaldo, David Villa, and the guy whose name I never bothered to remember. Baseball also boasts many emphatic moments that don't necessarily result in a run plated--such as doubles off the wall, triples into the gap, diving stops and snags, backhanded stabs, deftly turned double-plays, stolen bases, strikeouts, leaping grabs, home-plate collisions, the tirades of former Cubs' skipper Lou Piniella, attempted suicide squeezes, and strictly for the purists: sacrifice bunts. With soccer, here is a complete list of emphatic moments that don't translate into a goal: Saves by the goalie. Everything else is a protracted stalemate masquerading as action. In soccer, the burden of waiting overwhelms the productivity of the game itself.

As for the second part of Cathy's argument, I cannot deny that soccer players are exceptionally conditioned athletes, and that many husky sluggers who may or may not play for the Milwaukee Brewers would not fair well running back and forth across a field again and again. Make no mistake, soccer players work extremely hard to ensure that the game stays boring. The problem is that exceptionally conditioned athletes don't always deliver an entertaining product. To my mind, the remarkable endurance of soccer players would be better suited for marathon-running and decathlons, pursuits that don't enthrall me, either, but are more rational than running roughly 700 yards to-and-fro in order to get something accomplished once in a great while.

Finally, soccer players are indeed an exotic and good-looking breed. It's a shame that so many good-looking men devote their lives to meaningless professions: Modeling Abercrombie and Fitch, writing essays about dull sports, and playing soccer. Providing eye-candy for horny women and gay men is not without its merit, but that merit is superficial. It's easier for men to separate sports from sex appeal. In the bedroom, a lot of men think about sports when they want to slow down, whereas a lot of women think about handsome athletes when they want to speed up. Both instincts are valid. Both instincts explain a lot. I can't deny Cathy's final point, but I don't relate to it, either.

Dang. That last paragraph ended in a scoreless fucking tie.


###


The one redeeming quality of watching golf on TV is that it provides the perfect ambiance for taking a nap. Soccer is different, though; it's a tedious sport that doesn't even permit its watcher a nap-friendly atmosphere. This is because of the prominence of those obnoxious, relentless plastic horns: Vuvuzelas. The vuvuzela craze offers proof that soccer lovers are actively trying to make their sport more unbearable to its detractors. Blown vuvuzelas create the horrid din of a horde of nauseated and surly hornets. Vuvuzelas are going to sound to kick off the Apocalypse. The one thing I like about those plastic racket-makers is that they make it so much easier to state that listening to soccer might even be worse than watching soccer.

###

A few days before my debate with Cathy, I had a casual conversation about soccer with a die-hard fan of the sport. I subdued my ranker while talking to him. He informed me that the United States has never won the World Cup, a fact that I did not realize. He is also a baseball fan, and so I asked him what he thought was more likely to happen first: The U.S. winning the World Cup, or the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.

His answer was immediate and disgruntled. He predicted with confidence that the Cubs would become World Series champions long before America brings home the Cup.

A more trenchant question, which I would have asked if I had a six-pack of Budweiser languishing in my belly, is: Will the Cubs win the World Series before Americans truly care about soccer? The answer, again, would be yes.

And ever since that night, I try to put sports in perspective and I became slightly more upbeat about the plight of the Chicago Cubs.

How about that? Maybe soccer is good for something, after all.





*Getting to third base with a woman does not constitute a one-night stand. **
**Thanks for confirming my hunch, footnote.***
***Anytime, Nick. I'm here to help.

There Will Be Blog?

The reason this book is titled There Will Be Blog is because all the essays you're about to read made their first appearance on my blog. The lark of parodying the title of a terrific P.T. Anderson flick played a part in the naming of this book as well. It seems counter-productive to this capitalistic venture to inform you of the web-site where you can read all of this shit for free, so I will refrain from doing that. But here's a vague clue: Uninformed people tend to assume the blog is somehow associated with one of MTV's many strongholds of decadent idiocy, Jersey Shore.

You should know that this book is being distributed through a publication that is known, derisively to some, as a vanity press. I'm a bit confused by this designation. Stephen King is the one selling a conservative estimate of nine zillion books worldwide through Simon and Schuster, guest-starring as himself in the crowd at nationally televised Red Sox home games, blasting AC/DC tunes at ear-splitting volume from the stereo of his Bentley while cruising the streets of Bangor, Maine, and yet I'm the who is vain for providing some laughs and insight for fewer than a thousand people while they sit on the toilet. The implication is that the wealthy are humble and the poor are vain. Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I haven't been able to afford a new pair of Chuck Taylors in two years and now I'm supposed to chide myself for being conceited? That's weak.

Early on in the search for a publisher, I went for a long stroll around the neighborhood and chatted with the representative of a (pricey) rival company of Xlibris on my cell phone. The man's sales pitch was convincing enough and he seemed like a knowledgeable fellow, but he lost me when I asked him if his company printed many humor books. He laughed and informed me that their two most successful books in the freakish literary genre that I have chosen were actually quite similar. One was titled Everything Men Know about Women and the other was called Everything Men Love More Than Breasts. Both books, when opened, revealed nothing but 200 or so blank pages.

So, from what I gathered, my contemporaries in the field of self-published comedy books tend to include one joke per project, and they generally believe words just get in the way of the yuks. There Will Be Blog includes ____ words. Clearly, I am putting far too much needless effort into the creative process. Scoff. To my mind, it is beyond obvious and hardly worth the mention that while I do love tits I really don't know much about women. I was chagrined by the realization that I've been trying too hard all this time and decided to pursue options more (affordable and) appropriate for comedy.

Hey, what do you know? Maybe I am a vain self-publisher after all! Wow. Unproven writers really do suck in every way imaginable. I retract the trash I typed about Stephen King.


This book is intended to be a tad more meaningful and emotionally resonant than an average episode of Seinfeld. If all goes well for you, reader, you will be greatly entertained and slightly enlightened by the proceedings. The subjects I cover are quite diverse. I write about pizza, the Apocalypse, ass-kicking, ventriloquism, Greyhound bus rides, Facebook, facial hair, leg hair, pubes, Pluto, plastic robots, partying, fainting, The Beatles, Radiohead, jam bands not worth naming here, Herman's Hermits, mental illness, masked crusaders, an aging gunslinger, the Chicago Cubs, The Simpsons, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Adolf Hitler, Burt Reynolds, and scientists. The unifying focus, if this even qualifies, is that I'll write about anything that somehow intrigues me.

If you've ever complained to your friends that characters and plots are so overrated, There Will Be Blog is poised to knock your socks silly.

***

To read the rest of this introductory essay, you'll have to order a copy of the book of the same name (sans the question mark). I'm typing about "There Will be Blog," people.

www.xlibris.com/NickOlig.html

The Party Started with Pizza

This essay, like its predecessor, “What Pizza Taught Me about Women,” made its first appearance on a Milwaukee-based website known as Doctors of Za. My friend from college, Tyler, has since adopted the persona of T. Mario for Doctors of Za, whereas my alias is Jimbo Slice. Pseudonyms are pretentious gimmicks employed by writers, feeble ruses we construct to convince ourselves that we're not really doing this to bring fame to our real names.

###

“Sink the Ship” is a decadent college drinking game in which two teams gather in a circle. They're matched with every other person in the group so that each player has a rival on both sides. Everyone takes turns pouring droplets of beer into a cup floating in the middle of the pitcher. The unfortunate soul who pours the
droplet(s) responsible for capsizing the cup, i.e. sinking the ship, must chug the contents of the pitcher along with his or her teammates. The pitcher must be passed to a teammate once the drinker's lips leave the spout of the glass pitcher. What this means is that the anchor of the team, depending on your teammates' penchant for consuming hops, may be forced to swallow up to half a pitcher of beer in a chug-obsessed frenzy.

I used to play “Sink the Ship” on a biweekly basis when I was a junior in college. It is astounding, scary, and whimsical—the damage we have the liberty to inflict on our livers without consequence of severe hangover, when we are 20 years old.

Before Doctors of Za's T. Mario ever adopted his alias, we went to college together. Shortly after he came of drinking age, he arranged a tag-team case race at his house. Members of the college newspaper staff (Jimbo Slice included) paired up and competed against each other. My partner and I got off to a strong start but wavered after an hour or so. We didn't end up winning the contest. But afterward, I was drunk enough to (accidentally) gulp a shot of 409 cleaning spray. I have long debated which is more puzzling: 1.) Why someone would fill a shot glass at a party with a liquid that, to the inebriated eye, could pass for a cherry bomb, or 2.) Why I decided it was prudent to send the mystery shot down the hatch in the first place. Thankfully, I didn't need to have my stomach pumped at the hospital. 20 minutes later my gag reflex, in tandem with a rejective stomach and a recoiling esophagus, evacuated all the foul chemicals in my system in a raging torrent of vomit.

All this is to say that I have partied, for good or ill. But long before the accounts of booze-induced debauchery that I have just described, my first memories of parties showcase pizza. In first grade, for example, the only type of party that could make my pink crayon tingle was one of the pizza variety. I could not say the two words, “Pizza Party,” without exclaiming them as I pumped my fist expectantly.

This brings us to yet another reason why pizza is the greatest food on the planet, and the topic of this essay, as well. Because pizza parties mark the genesis of our remembered party experiences, it is the catalyst for all the rowdy half-barrel bashes I was a part of in college. If you trace the dominoes of party antics from gulping a shot of 409 spray all the way back to the origin, the instigating domino was inhaling a triple-decker of Shakey's pepperoni pizza because my friend Al dared me to do it.

Now, before I progress any further, it's important to dismiss cake as the real catalyst of our partying instincts. Granted, it's true that, mostly because it's easier to chew, we are fed cake by our parents for our birthday parties before we mature to the pizza party stage, but the reasons why I'm not writing about cake are as follows.

First off, we can rarely remember the birthdays before our teeth became firm and sharp enough to eat pizza. The cake-boasting birthdays of toddler-hood are not a part of our conscious memory. Sure, we recall eating cake at parties in grade school, but not until after we scarfed down pizza for our main course. The relationship of pizza to cake has long been as out of whack as, say, a concert in 1975 that featured Led Zeppelin opening up for the Guess Who. In spite of the order in which they are experienced, no one with the possible exception of Lenny Kravitz is dumb enough to debate who the real headliner is.

Secondly, cake parties were about bonding with our parents and offering them jovial moments for the family photo album. The drive behind a pizza party in grade school, however, was to distance yourself from your parents, a trend that was followed ardently in high school, and with reduced intensity, in our twenties and thereafter. Pizza parties prompted our desire to carouse with friends rather than our parents in social gatherings. At pizza parties, our parents were embarrassing yet essential appendages responsible for providing us presents and quarters to plug into ticket-dispensing games like ski ball and Whack-a-mole, not to mention four-player arcade masterpieces such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Finally, at age 27, as a Wisconsinite with a penchant for brewed ale, beer has become for me an essential component of a party. The tastes of beer and cake are incompatible. When the two are combined, masochistically, the beer seems too bitter, while the cake tastes too sweet. But beer mingles exquisitely with greasy and salty foods like pizza. The absence of beer at a “party” has an enervating effect on the event. More likely than a party, if they're not serving beer at the gathering, you're at a PTA meeting. Or worse, a Christian Rock concert. Cake is not the instigating domino in the evolution of our party experiences.

Fuck cake. You're reading this because we love pizza.

The problem with the third dismissal of cake that I cited, that no beer = lame party, is that one could argue it makes me seem like a drunkard elitist, that I've been corrupted by intoxicants. Maybe it's just that I have a chemical predilection for pizza and beer and the parties that accompany them both.

Pizza is not by definition an intoxicant, but in a way, it's the first gateway drug we experience. Despite its wholesome reputation, the first little stumble on the slippery slope of partying is the pizza party. We're encouraged to consume not in moderation but in excess. If you scarf down five slices while your friend is still gnawing tentatively on his second slice, you become cooler than your friend. We learn that gluttony gives us reason to boast. Just as we brag about crushing six New Castles and three Irish car-bombs before sundown, when we are young we puff out our chests and garner high-fives from our buddies for devouring four pieces in less than ten minutes.

When I think back to the pizza party thrown at Shakey's restaurant to celebrate my 12th birthday party, it comes as no surprise that three-quarters of my pals who gathered began indulging in booze and marijuana the next year, when we entered junior high school. I was not among the 13-year-old drug-dabblers. Back then I lacked audacity and recklessness; I was sheepish and feared upsetting my parents. I did not advance on the path of party decadence until my senior year of high school. Consequently, I was mocked and then dismissed from that core group of friends.

From age five until twelve, I derided any kid my age who wanted nothing to do with pizza parties. These kids were fun-hating freaks to me, dour bores whose overbearing parents forbade video games, soft drinks, and greasy foods. But at age 13, when puberty hit, when popularity became a cutthroat proving ground, from the perspectives of my former friends, I had become like those excessively protected geeks who shunned pizza parties. I had been left behind because I didn't advance on the path of decadence.

And it's not that my rebellious ex-friends outgrew the appeal offered by pizza parties; they just preferred—no, demanded--to rip a joint of dirt weed and/ or pound a couple shots from an absent parent's liquor cabinet before riding their bikes to Shakey's to gorge on pizza and get their stoned minds blown playing Mortal Kombat II. Pizza still delivered satisfaction...but it was no longer enough to quell their partying impulses. They needed more. More risk, more excitement, a more substantial buzz. It was no longer cool to merely boast about one's pizza intake; the stakes were raised the day the snide hellions discovered sprouts of hair on their balls.

I can no longer get by on pizza parties as I could when I was 13. Nowadays I prefer to wash down slices of pizza with hearty sips of beer as opposed to cola, and 25% of the time I consume 'za, it's while I'm stoned on the reefer. It's inevitable for so many adults to seek intoxication from time-to-time, and I wonder if those years I spent shunning drugs represented not a noble battle for sobriety amidst temptation but rather a protracted case of arrested development. I was already hooked on partying; those exuberant birthday bashes at Shakey's provided proof of that. It just took me longer to ascend to the next level of fun-loving decadence.

Sometimes I think my insights tend to tarnish everything. If that's the case, then I'm grateful to be wrong now and then. Regardless, the next time I'm invited to a pizza party for children--and this is a rare occasion because I generally dislike spending time with kids—I will know of the dark undertones lurking beneath the surface of an ostensibly innocent gathering. I will envision all the youngsters as burnout adolescents, sneering impishly by the band-saw as they carve a rudimentary bong out of oak in shop class. I will envision beer in place of the cola in their cups as they chug with reckless thirst to alleviate their tongue burns. In place of their arcade tokens will be quarters, which will one day inevitably get bounced off the hard surface of the table into a foamy glass of Milwaukee's Best. My imagination will distort and subvert the seemingly wholesome event; everything will be different, transformed.

Except for the pizza. It will remain constant. Pizza is not by definition a mind-altering substance, but it alters our mind's perception of how to party: with parent-leery friends, in a calamitous setting, with insatiable greed that obliges us to boast. The party started with pizza; we just didn't fully realize it.

Tournament of Ass-Kickers

Violence is a polarizing impulse for me. In actuality, I find violence repellent and detestable. The violent urge, except when it is employed in self-defense, is laden with twisted sadism. Enforcers of violence do ignoble and deplorable damage to their fellow man. With every strike against flesh, such crooked lowlifes tacitly contend, “There must be more suffering!” And that sort of brutal adage refutes the possibilities of virtue a human being can choose to pursue—to minimize suffering.

If you'd rather chase after suffering than peace in this frenzied rat race known as life, then you're fucked in the head. If that's the case with you, reader, then let's never hang out together.

In my imaginative life, which of course differs from actuality, violence appeals to me. It is quite a challenge to suppress the human urge for gaudy entertainment. We get bored so easily without fireworks, thunderstorms, Super Bowls, Royal Rumbles, episodes of “Cops,” and the like. The days become unbearably slow and stagnant in the absence of lurid spectacles. In cycles of neurosis, we trade boredom for pain when the boredom begins to ache. Later we trade the pain back for boredom when the pain becomes dull.

The pangs I feel to partake in one hell of a bloody show are transferred to imaginative outlets. My precious jollies are had when I press the X-button to decapitate a zombie with a loaded shotgun as I guide my character through the gory adventure of a survival horror video game. I watch on with savage glee as Lieutenant Aldo Raine carves a swastika into the forehead of the hysterically squealing Jew Hunter. Once a year I watch a WWF cassette tape highlighted by a steel cage match between The Undertaker and The Heartbreak Kid Shawn Michaels—as dumb tribute to gaudy and fictitious violence at its best.

I suppose I'm a hypocrite because I disdain real violence but embrace fictitious violence. I assure myself that imaginative violence is harmless as long as one has a thoughtful philosophy to condemn real violence. But perhaps I'm fooling myself.

The ensuing column glorifies fictitious violence with (hopefully) funny results. After I graduated college, I still published guest contributions on a sporadic basis in the Advance-Titan. I was able to do this because fellow humor columnist Tyler Maas, two years my junior, had become the editor of the newspaper, and Tyler is a fan of my work. For the Halloween issue, we collaborated on “The Tournament of Ass-Kickers” with two other columnists whose names I cannot recall. We devised brackets of 16 combatants for each writer and then determined the outcome of each fight, working our way to the Final Four.

Included here is the first round of my bracket, the Fist Pumps for Brutality region. Much of what follows differs from how it was printed in October of 2007, which hardly matters. Changes have been made to allow for more contemporary references as well as an expanded list of dead pro-wrestlers.


First Round Match-ups

Wolverine (1) defeats Captain Planet (16).
Shortly after the opening whistle blows, Captain Planet sets his mind to digging a compost heap. He offers Wolverine a hoe in a gesture of what he refers to as, “Solidarity with Mother Nature.” For the novelty of an easy kill, Wolverine doesn't even bother to extend his deadly Adamantium claws, opting instead to club Captain Planet to death with the garden tool. Wolverine then litters an empty bag of pretzels onto the mangled corpse of Captain Planet. Sorry, hemp-worshiping vegans, but if you want America to become more environmentally conscious, you need to lend your support to a superhero who's got more balls than Captain Planet.

Goro (2) defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt (15).

With a functioning limbs advantage of six-to-two, Mortal Kombat's most insidious villain finishes off what polio started. Goro hijacks the wheelchair of our greatest (handicapped) president and bashes FDR with it using his top two arms while the others play Wii Boxing and write haikus in honor of fallen heavy metal God Ronnie James Dio.

Massive Naked Black Guy from “Cops” who Punched a Hole through a Wooden Fence while Jacked-Up on PCP (3) defeats Aquaman (14).

Aquaman's reputation as the most useless above-sea level superhero is validated in this one-sided fracas. Pfft. Aquaman. His “powers” would only prove fruitful if we lived in a world in which SCUBA divers robbed mermaids at harpoon gunpoint. His opponent, whom we will refer to from now on as PCPNBG, with the last three letters in the acronym standing for “Naked Black Guy,” is built like a naked linebacker. He is impervious to pain until the PCP wears off and he is covered in blood. Aquaman's fear of possibly contracting Hepatitis from the bloody vagrant is fleeting. Before the panic really takes hold, PCPNBG bashes Aquaman's head in with a trash can lid.

The Bride (4) defeats Chewbacca (13).

In spite of Chewbacca's height and weight advantage over Beatrice Kideaux, the Bride, the bedazzling Samurai assassin from the Tarantino flick “Kill Bill,” it is important to keep in mind that Chewbacca, endearing as he is when his plaintive moans aren't irritating the shit out of you—Chewbacca is essentially a noisy, gawky, Muppet creature. He's built more like Yao Ming than Shaq O'Neal; he's lacking in bulk for not only a dominant low post game, but also superior ass-kicking prowess. The Bride slays as many Yokuza henchmen in two gory minutes of “Kill Bill” than Chewbacca kills Strom Troopers in the entirety of the “Star Wars” trilogy. The Bride dominates the fight but spares Chewbacca's life. Rather than slicing the Wookie in half with her Hattori Hanzo blade, the Bride opts for a more humane victory and mercifully plucks Chewbacca's right eye from its socket. She then sells it to the highest bidding nerd on e-Bay. (Congratulations to Tyler Christensen from Sherman Oaks, California!)

Hacksaw Jim Duggan (12) defeats Magneto (5).

X-men arch nemesis Magneto's ability to manipulate metallic objects with telekinetic force is rendered useless because Hacksaw's foreign object of choice is a wooden 2 x 4. Magneto's lone offensive attack is telepathically ripping a gold stud out of Hacksaw's earlobe, which Hacksaw only wore in the first place because his old lady Deedra, a bartender at a bowling alley in Queens, insists it makes him look more dashing. Luckily for Hacksaw, the plate inserted into his head after the notorious “Sledgehammer Trampoline Incident” is not made out of metal, but rather Legos. (It turns out that pro wrestler Dr. Death, who performed the procedure, is not in fact an accredited surgeon.) Hacksaw squeezes the pine into finely ground sawdust with his mammoth, clumsy hands and then bludgeons Magneto into a mangled monstrosity. As Dick Vital would exclaim, it's upset city, baby, and they are rejoicing in the streets of Hacksaw Jim's hometown of Glen Falls, New York.

General George Washington (11) defeats Robocop (6).

Unknowingly corrupted by overconfidence, Robocop pistol-whips General Washington for the first two minutes of the bout, echoing the initial power and haughtiness of the British Empire during the Revolutionary War. Bloodied and exhausted, Washington matches the fortitude he displayed during his troop's six-month winter Battle of Attrition holed up at Valley Forge. General Washington, always a savvy strategist, aims the barrel of his musket at Robocop's vulnerable mouth area, specifically the hollow target of his open mouth as Robocop drones bland cop rhetoric about Persecuting to the Fullest Extent of the Law. Crimson-tainted gunpowder sprays through the back of Robocop's neck.

Macho Man Randy Savage (7) defeats Super Macho Man (10).

Supercilious Nintendo boxer Super Macho Man scrambles the brains of the Macho Man Randy Savage early in the bout, landing solid thumps on his skull with the force of a hammer. He should have worked the body instead. Considering that much of Savage's thought process consists of catchphrases such as “Oooh, yeah, Dig it” and “Snap into a Slim-Jim,” Savage's head trauma has little if any effect on the fight. The former WWF Champion eventually turns the tide of the fight, nailing a flurry of clotheslines before finishing Super Macho Man with a flying elbow drop off the top rope. In a post-match interview, a teary-eyed Savage dedicates his victory to the memories of his tragically fallen pro-wrestling comrades, including: the Lovely Miss Elizabeth, Mr. Perfect, The Big Boss Man, The British Bulldog, Owen Hart, The Texas Tornado, Earthquake, Yokazuna, Eddie Guerrero, Flyin' Brian Pillman, Chris Benoit, Ric Flair, who is expected to die in a Sledgehammer Trampoline accident of his own later next week, and 14 others whom I'm omitting due to lack of space. For God's sake, please stay the hell away from cocaine and steroids, kids!

Chucky (9) defeats The Leprechaun (8).

The Leprechaun at once tackles Chucky, pins him down and kneels on his wee doll arms, and wields a broken bottle of Guinness inches above Chucky's bulging eyes. With certain death looming, the redheaded Hellraiser pleads in an Irish accent: “For the love of Riverdance, you can't kill a fellow Irishman!” The Leprechaun skeptically remarks, “What? You're too big of a wanker to be hailing from Mother Ireland.” Chucky persists. “I swear on me last drop of whiskey, me family's from Ireland. Every time I think about the Great Potato Famine I feel like stabbing the first babysitter I come across.” The Leprechaun lowers his guard. “Ay! I've stabbed more than a few babysitters me-self. And the Great Potato Famine? T'was devastating! You know, me grandparents in the Old Country didn't even realize there were edible foods other than potatoes. Just imagine what a cursed time they had—“
At this point the treacherous Chucky takes advantage of the Leprechaun's naïvety and thrusts a switchblade into his opponent's jugular. In his regular voice, Chucky muses, “Stupid Mick.”

Fear of Flying

B.A. Baracus and John Madden have something in common. Granted, B.A. Baracus is a character and John Madden is a real person, but don't stop reading on account of that. The former is the Mohawk-rocking enforcer played by Mr. T on the insipidly macho '80s show The A-Team. The latter is the blustery and retired football coach and analyst. Their similarities are not striking on the surface. The two differ starkly in matters of hairstyle*, wardrobe, skin pigment, and tolerance of crazy fools. But they share a severe phobia, the topic of this essay: Aerophobia, the fear of flying.

David Bowie, the eclectic and eccentric explorer of psychedelic glam, is also afraid of flying, which in part explains why he adopted the surrogate persona of Major Tom for “Space Oddity,” his epic song about a doomed and intrepid astronaut who loses his way somewhere in the cosmos. The hero of Bowie's invention meets the tragic fate that the songwriter portends for those foolish enough to defy the Earth's gravitational pull in a floating tin can.

But I'm digressing far too early on. I've been warned about that.

Hey, did you know that Marge Simpson also suffers from Aerophobia? I love The Simpsons, from season 2 through 8, especially. Did you know that Homer Simpson's flummoxed profile was etched into my right bicep when I was eighteen? It's true, and before I turn 40, that tattoo is totally going to get me laid.

Oops.

Returning to Mr. Bad Attitude Baracus** and bloated gasbag John Madden, their mutual phobia is vexing when you consider how their manly personas are in contrast with suffering from an abject fear. Male chauvinists tend to think phobias are exclusive to women, that they're always the ones afraid of spiders, mice, guns, chainsaws, and unprotected sex. Baracus and Madden, both broad beacons of manliness--one known for launching terrorists and evil drug lords through plate glass windows, the other for squiggling X's and O's on a telestrator to enlighten fans and players alike about the nuances of America's greatest and manliest sport--are afflicted with a dire phobia. Baracus squeals in a hysterical tantrum every time he catches wind that his partners want him to board an airplane. It is rumored that Madden curls up into the fetal position and wails in a terrified falsetto the words to “Rocky Mountain High” every time he overhears a John Denver song on the radio. *** Such weaknesses hardly reflect the behavior of two macho guys.


At a recent backyard bonfire, as I spoke with my friend Tony, both of us sipping on Keystone Lights on a tranquil summer night, Tony revealed that he fears flying, too. My hope is that someday B.A. Baracus, John Madden, David Bowie, Marge Simpson, and my friend Tony will all be in the same support group for Aerophobics, empathizing amongst themselves, lending each other shoulders to cry on and so forth.

In terms of manliness, Tony ranks much closer to the likes of Baracus and Madden than an effeminate neurotic such as David Bowie. Tony hangs dry wall for a living, he swings a sledgehammer for a good chunk of his workday, he manages fire-pits and grills with nonchalant aplomb, and he plays on a rugby team dubbed the Wolf Pack.

Personally, anytime I think to myself, “Hey, I'm playing RUGBY!” I know that I'm having a nightmare. A YouTube clip of me locked into a combative scrum would elicit a million hits. The clip would be titled, “Skinny Geek Pummeled into Coma on Rugby Field.”

It surprised me that Tony had such a palpable fear of flying, that something he found terrifying didn't scare me much at all.

Like all obsessive-compulsives, I am not without my phobias, but nonetheless, Aerophobia puzzles me. The odds of dying in a car accident are exceedingly greater than dying in a plane crash. The average motorist is so much less reliable than the average pilot. A pilot would sooner smash his own crotch with a wooden mallet than send a text message from the cockpit. Pilots are a competent, respectable breed. Have you ever shaken hands with a male pilot? The handshake of a pilot is firm and vigorous. His intention is to make your hand throb afterwards, but the gesture is done with gallantry meant to inspire confidence.

Pilots can be trusted not to guide the plane into the side of a jagged mountain with malice both homicidal and suicidal because pilots are usually content men who lead satisfying lives. This is mainly because it's easy for pilots to get laid. Women are insatiably attracted to them because pilots are adventurous, capable, courageous, and responsible (for the lives of 200 people at a time). Pilots also wear uniforms.

By the way, the fact that women are so profoundly attracted to men in uniforms bothers me because writers can't feasibly wear uniforms. I protest petulantly that being an individual who thinks uniforms are highly over-rated can be sexy, too, but no one ever seems to listen. Fair enough, I suppose. It takes a repugnant fool to argue with the truth.

Pilots exude authority and command respect. When a pilot is distracted by the intense glare of the Sun, he squints ever so slightly, gnashes his teeth and growls, “Fuck off, Sun!” Seconds later, it gets cloudy. The Sun retreats behind hastily formed clouds, thick as Texas-sized marshmallows.

Bus Drivers, on the other hand, tend not to be great conquerers of women. Their calling in life inspires feelings of tedium rather than adventure. There are ballsy dudes on bicycles in major cities who don't fear a brush with a bus. Flying in an airplane evokes enterprise while riding a bus evoke the realization that you're probably poor. Pilots have got to be more satisfactorily laid than their bus-driving counterparts.

I'm not entirely trying to worsen the wounds of the bus driver—it's an essential, respectable profession. It's just that, in a roundabout, peculiar way, the fact that pilots have richer sex lives than bus drivers makes me fear flying less and riding on a bus more. Screwing on an airplane is a cheeky achievement. Screwing on a bus is a desperate plea for a Hepatitis intervention. To boot, homeless people don't jerk off on airplanes. They can so rarely afford plane tickets. Buses are often seedy and filthy vessels of transport, and that rankles me as an obsessive-compulsive. The more I think about it, the easier it is to assert that riding in a bus scares me more than flying in an airplane.

I said so to Tony and he dismissed my argument. He considered it bizarre nonsense. Tony has never lived in Chicago as I did, without a car, and so the last time he stepped foot on a bus was probably for a high school field trip, nearly a decade ago. I didn't spend much more time debating the perils of bus travel because I was more at ease questioning Tony about his fear; it was and remains an interesting novelty to me.

It's dubious to seek validation for your argument based on a scene from the film Dumb & Dumber. The film is a sophomoric comedic spree and not typically known for imparting wisdom. It reflects poorly on your intellect when you're in total agreement with the words of a hapless buffoon—especially when the buffoon in question essentially fulfills the role of a character coined “Dumber.” But that is where my rhetoric ventured to next.

I asked Tony to recall the scene in which Lloyd, behind the wheel of a limousine, drives vivacious redhead Mary Swanson to the airport. Her demeanor is frazzled because she is about to drop off a briefcase loaded with ransom money as payment to the mob—who have kidnapped her husband. Lloyd wrongly assumes that her anxiety is due to a pre-flight bout with Aerophobia. Wanting to console her in his flirtatious stupor, Lloyd cranes his neck over his right shoulder, ignoring oncoming traffic, and says to Mary...

“There's really nothing to worry about, Mary. Statistically, they say you're more likely to get killed on the way to the airport. You know, like a head-on crash, or flying off a cliff, or getting trapped under a gas truck—that's the worst. I have this cousin—well, I had this cousin...”

At this point Mary urges Lloyd to keep his eyes on the road, to which he replies...

“Ooh. Yeah. Good thinking. Can't be too careful. There's a lot of bad drivers out there.”

What I said to Tony was paraphrased, and rather shabbily, at that. I smoke too much to remember that many words verbatim. As readers, you get the benefit of verbatim thanks to the wonder of DVD technology.

I felt like a recollection of this scene from Dumb & Dumber did wonders for my argument. Even a hapless buffoon like Lloyd Christmas can cite evidence to support his stance that driving is more dangerous than flying, and additionally, Lloyd's negligence behind the wheel speaks volumes about the intellect of the average motorist. (Not to implicate you, of course. No. Never you.)

Tony is pretty practical--a quality that can really hinder one's imagination, and so he said I was nuts for citing Dumb & Dumber as persuasive evidence for the case against Aerophobia. My thoughts were again dismissed with cordial authority, treated like little more than wisps of smoke cleared away by a hand-swipe.

Deferring and recharging, I listened further to Tony's explanation of why he's afraid to fly. At last it occurred to me why he feared airplane travel and I didn't. It was all a matter of Control and Faith.

My capacity for control is exceeded by that of Tony's. He provides a justification of control at his job, swinging sledgehammers, or while he's calmly tending the grill or thrusting a shoulder block as he struggles to advance past carnage on the rugby field. Me? I'm less in control of my life, what with the unemployment, the fact that my dad doesn't trust me to operate his grill—perhaps with good reason—and my fear of contact sports.

My capacity for faith, contrarily, exceeds that in Tony. I have faith in pilots because there is something cosmically profound about their handshakes, because pilots get laid frequently and therefore have stronger wills to survive. I trust pilots for being everything I'm not. Unlike pilots, I'm not too adventurous, capable, courageous, or responsible—and I don't wear a uniform. But I have enormous faith in all of the aforementioned qualities (wearing a uniform NOT INCLUDED, because I still think the perceived sex appeal of men in uniform provides a grim hint that women really prefer conformists to individuals).

With maximum faith but minimal control, death wish inclinations abound. This is why terrorists declare Jehads and fly planes into buildings with malice both homicidal and suicidal--because they have faith that a grateful and benevolent invisible man is going to greet them after the catastrophe, his arms stretching around the distance of 36 ravishing virgins on either side who can't wait to be banged by insidious lowlifes. Their lives are likely to be out of control, too. It's hard to get a job in a country that is war-ravaged and economically bleak. It's also hard to get a job when you check “Yes” to the box on the application that asks, “Are you a terrorist?” And consequently, without steady jobs, terrorists must strive to oppress women no matter what, because an independent woman is one who needs a damn good excuse to date a dude who doesn't have a real job.

Let's see Tony dismiss that as bizarre nonsense.

And incidentally, I'd like to declare that I am not in fact an Islamic extremist. My death wish is expressed with sadistic patience, by means of sweet, toxic nicotine. Not coincidentally, Tony rarely smokes cigarettes.


I'm not afraid of flying. For people, control is always subject to limitations, but Faith can be boundless, immeasurable. Forgive the sour grapes, please, but I think control is mostly an illusion, a tangibility that can morph into an apparition at any moment, regardless of our objections. When I lose control, I still feel human. When I lose faith, I turn into a monster. Maybe you can relate.



*Okay. Admittedly, Mr.T's hairstyle lookalikes are a very breed, limited to pro-wrestlers from the Cock Rock era who have all but become extinct due to overdoses of cocaine, steroids, and anti-depressants, which when abused at the same time, comprise a concoction that pro-wrestlers ominously refer to as the “Ultimate Piledriver.”

**As his name appears on wedding invites.

***Obviously, I hope you already know this, otherwise I hate to bear this bad news, but folk singer John Denver died in a plane crash. For God's sake, didn't you see the movie Final Destination?!