#47 -- 10 Ways The NFL Laughs In Your Face (But Football Is Still Great)

"The American man is neither chiseled from stone nor from crispy-chicken batter. The American man isn't helpless. . . He doesn't shirk on his responsibilities. He does work hard and he does not pick on his friends. He loves rock and roll and he hates Nickelback. He loves football, but he's smart enough to hate the NFL's greed."

You are an idiot. You are an obsessed idiot. You are a zealous, obsessed idiot. You are part of a nation of zealous, obsessed idiots. You shall find camaraderie amongst others in that nation of zealous, obsessed idiots. You, and your comrades in arms, know of a deeper love than those who are not part of your nation of zealous, obsessed idiots -- noses turned up at you as if their farts smell like Cinnabon and Carebears. You know that even amongst the other citizens in your nation of zealous, obsessed idiots, in your heart of hearts, there is no doubt that you are unique in your understanding. You know how far, and how strong, this empire, your empire, of zealous, obsessed idiots truly reaches. You, idiot, are part of something so grand that you understand your place in the world, despite that those unlike you will see your idiocy as idiocy, and not as a badge of honor.

That is what the NFL considers you to be. You're an idiot, a charity-case without an identity, and you're a football fan -- specifically, an NFL fan. The league is making bank on that. You adore watching football games -- rightfully so -- but in all probability, the NFL actually laughs in your face, rubbing its crooked fingers through hair greased with Axe Bodyspray. You are the lowest common denominator, and yet according to many a marketing department, that's a good thing. Cuz, c'mon, don't you see, man? We're all football fans and don't let anybody tell you that's not a good thing! In America, we can agree on so few things, yet it's clear that we love football. We're lunatic, all-consuming, stat-grubbing, TV-hugging, truck-driving, cellphone-using, food-devouring, family-loving, beer-chugging, house-painting, work-neglecting, unfocused, inattentive, indifferent, clueless, hopeless, gutless, star-struck, passionate football fans.

We usually watch football on Sundays on the a 72-inch OLED TV that's set up in the What's That From? Recording Studios screening-theater. It's nice, don't get us wrong, the double-wide fridge in there dispenses micro brews, which we can select from on the iPad installed into the front of it. You don't actually open the fridge itself, it just sorta works on its own. We also like to eat those Trader Joe's Organic Blue Corn Chips with spicy-jalapeno salsa dip and our guy Geno comes by around halftime to hand-roll sweet bratwursts back in the kitchenette and we got a PS1 emulator to run on the Android tablet so we can play Final Fantasy IX during the football game's slower possessions. We've gotten pretty far into disc 2!

As far as we can tell though, we're doing it wrong. We aren't tailgating the game under azure skies with sober folks over in the clean world. The ads during the games paint this unfamiliar picture for us because we aren't surrounded by a dozen friends wearing Seattle Seahawks shirts. Children aren't toddling around the floor in our two story, 4-bedroom colonial, large box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes: Reduced Sugar® clutched underarm, and a disproportionately-attractive woman isn't dangling off the end of the eight-person leather sofa, wholly accepting her options of: "Become a fan myself," or "Mentally warp his fanaticism and neglect into comfortable adoration, at least my mother has stopped haranguing me."

This is the advertised image of what it means to be an NFL fan. Again, are we doing it wrong -- or are we being lied to? Re-watching Mad Men has taught us that dramatized advertising is a message that alleviates fears and reminds you that "You're doing fine; you can do better with this though," and we must say, Don Draper makes a fairly persuasive argument. He probably smells good too and let us state now that there is a stink on the NFL broadcasts that gives us such a headache that getting through the peripheral quagmire to the actual game part of the fucking game becomes a chore. We don't care about what the NFL considers us to be. We want to consume their sport, the rest, well, we could take or leave.

We at What's That From? love football. We do. We love most everything about it. It's strategic and psychological and physical and it can go from zero to ludicrous-speed like *that* and we don't want the game to change. It's changing. It is. It's being repainted and branded. Too many eyeballs are laid upon the product to let the sport part get in the way of the league part. That's why the lock-out ended with such flawless timing before the season's start. Too many parties had billions of dollars about to be lost. Watching an afternoon of NFL games though raises a few questions and concerns with us about what the league thinks of us, the ads on display -- which have undoubtedly been vetted by the league, there's no way they'd let their identity be undermined -- make us think:

1) How many people in America drive pickup trucks into shale quarries on a daily basis? How about haul horse trailers? Judging by the ads during NFL games, dozens of thousands of men do. We initially marked this down as a "con," but upon further examination, shit to that. We need trucks. Many of them. They're so damn awesome. Getting behind a stick-shift truck's wheel adds a friction to driving that has sort of been lost in automobiles. Thanks, Germany! Way to ruin things with your flawless suspensions and perfect transition-timing! No, trucks, man, that's where it's at. Only in a truck can you pull up to work with the paneling splattered with mud and cornstalks sticking out of the grill and have it be socially-acceptable. It's odd seeing them all buffed-up in the Chevy ads. Or was it a Ford ad that we just saw? Damn, we can't even remember.

Doesn't matter! Trucks!

2) Are electronics really that complicated? This is such a terrible stereotype that it's basically a hate-crime. You can't figure out how to use your cellphone, middle-aged cubicle drone? No, not possible. You've played more games of Minesweeper on your BlackBerry than you've had hot meals. There's no way an iPhone or an Android fascinates you that much ("I'm listening to downloaded music!" Are ya sure? It could be a tumor). It isn't magic and it isn't Jesus -- it's just rote handheld device usage. You need some gelled-up spike-head at Best Buy to explain what 1080p is and why you need an HDMI cables encrusted with a million fucking diamonds? You'll be victimized if you let buying consumer electronics be complicated. Go to the Google machine and take 5 minutes before assuming you can't learn the difference between an Xbox 360 and a PS3. Or, ya know, ask your son. He's smarter than you. Already. At basically everything.

3) Most twenty-somethings aren't this good looking and they don't have season tickets to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. There's a recession on right now. Who are these trust-fund babies spending a year's pay on NFL tickets and dye-jobs for their girlfriends? Yes, we all go nuts for the bottle-blonds, don't we? Nobody in Florida is that well-groomed and speaks without an accent. Have you been to Tampa? It's like Manchester, New Hampshire, except in Florida, which means it's a concrete-encrusted misery-mire. Also, bros the world over, please, stop wearing open, unbuttoned plaid shirts. That's classless, even for trust-fund baby. You aren't sixteen. Or have you already accepted that you'll always be a disappointment to your grandfather? And shave your neck beard. Don't you watch football? Don't you know that there have been huge advances in shaving technology, thanks to Gillette? They can give you a razor so fine that all the ladies will swear you have alopecia.

4) Twenty-somethings also don't ridicule each other for drinking one light beer versus another. They just don't. They've been to college. They know it all tastes like charcoal and compressed CO₂, and there's little difference between Bud Light and Miller Lite, except maybe more bubbles or increased misspellings. Some of these guys in the ads are damn cruel to their friends -- they're kind of borderline-sociopaths. This is how suicides happen. See, football fans. . . love. . . drinking. Football fans that love drinking have been drinking recreationally for a long time. They have a favorite way to get drunk. That guy that's drinking a random piss-water beer that you're making fun of is starting a trend. He's not a lemming. He's the individual in this situation. Somebody's going to see him drinking Buck Range Premium Light Lager, and think, "I bet that beer's terrible. I want to see how terrible it really is." So you have one and it tastes terrible and familiar and, whatever, at least the can's design is sorta different. And then you realize half the beer in the western world is brewed by InBev anyway.

5) Would you actually be impressed if Reggie Bush watched football and ate Pizza Hut with you, or would you be kinda pissed at him for being an overrated fuck-stick? Think about it. You start watching the game, get a few beers in, and then you realize that you took him in your fantasy league with your first pick after he went super-high in the draft right out of college, and that he underperformed. People don't grovel in front of celebrities, even minor ones -- they get obnoxious and envious and violent, especially if there's alcohol involved. In-person, people hate famous people if they're in their company for an extended period. And honestly, in terms of career success in a professional environment, you, reader, have probably had a more successful and proportionately productive career at your job than Reggie Bush has. He's a middle-low tier running back on a shit AFC East team -- that's the equivalent of being an account manager at a Motorola or an intern at Paramount.

6) How desperate are these women that they accept these negligent, cowardly men and their unerring, childish devotion to an moronic product? Fine, pairing a disproportionately unattractive man with a woman of extreme beauty, that's recognizable commonplace, because it's that same lulling-reassurance to the schlub inside men that there is a woman out there that will love you for no good reason, even if they don't do a fucking thing to deserve or earn it -- that's an accepted fact, and it has been since The Flintstones and The Jetsons (and The Honeymooners). But when ads during NFL games frame every household as a miniature kingdom where the queen is one quizzically-raised eyebrow from a shaky, tearful belt-beating from a Kansas City Chief's fan, we're gonna have a problem. No, it's not that she doesn't get football, mister, it's that if you got near an open flame, it's possible a spark might travel up your gaping asshole and ignite the compounded methane that circulates your formless black guts -- if you have any at all.

He knows he's pathetic. He might not know his haircut is half-Lloyd Christmas and half-mullet, but he knows his obsession with the McRib is sickening. He will do whatever it takes (even kill a man!) to hold onto this shaky lie. There is football though -- glorious, simple football. But if she interferes with football, he'll have to talk to her, and if he talks to her, she'll begin to see the cracks, and if she sees the cracks, his always-was-there lameness will crystallize, and if that comes out, she'll take the kids during a bolt in the night, and he'll be alone, so very, very alone. Then he'll have to hang himself on a doorknob with a belt.

7) Will lucrative prescription drugs save you from death? As was foretold by Arthur Miller, American men don't know how to die happily. Maybe it's the crushing misrepresentation and glory that was promised and never delivered. Advertising frames the Baby Boomers on retirement's fringe as short-changed pity-cases. Aging? Nobody told you? Yeah, you're gonna get old, you LSD-soaked pinko-hippie. This is payback for not listening to your 'ole pal Nixon! The Reds are gonna get The Bomb and all your inside-parts are going to stop working correctly. You can swallow chemicals that can hold off those effects for a limited time. You will never age gracefully. 

Hey you, don't you know there's no hope at all? The worms will eat into your brains.

Know what sucks? If the gullible and desperate hadn't bought bad mortgages for houses that that they couldn't afford, Wall Street would have never seen value in bundling those toxic debt packages and imploded the arbitrarily-valued housing market, they wouldn't have needed a government bailout -- draining billions of dollars from other industries -- the country's public and private sectors would have had that money to spend on some form of extended healthcare and livable pensions, and that entire generation would've been able to retire safely years ago before their organs went bust. Then the Millenials would have an actual fighting chance to enter the workforce and stop sponging off of their parents. 

God, if only they would move out of the house! 

Then the Boomers could have all that free time to drive trucks, learn how cellphones work, and watch more football!

8) The American man is neither chiseled from stone nor from crispy-chicken batter. In TV ads, American men are visualized too often as indecisive, mentally-stunted bio-masses. The American man isn't helpless. He isn't frothing in anticipation for his next trip to Taco Bell. He doesn't wear a hoodie everywhere he goes. He can swing a hammer and he can change a tire. He doesn't shirk on his responsibilities. He does work hard and he does not pick on his friends. He loves rock and roll and he hates Nickelback. He loves football, but he's smart enough to hate the NFL's greed. He doesn't shriek for a solid fifteen seconds around live fish. He doesn't shit his pants at the prospect of Christmas shopping. His role model should be Clint Eastwood, not Adam Sandler. He should respectfully disagree with football commentators, not because he needs validation, but because the commentators are pompous and overly-entitled that might know a lot about a narrow profession like football, but don't know a thing about reserved confidence.

9) Now that you mention it, the commentators during the games, especially during the ones broadcasted on Fox, need to go to the hospital and sign up for some surgery to remove the spiraled rebar that's up their collective asses. It's foul. If you ever find yourself reiterating Joe Buck and Troy Aikman's commentary to those around you, do not panic -- simply realize your error and request that somebody club you over the head with a bit of firewood. An honest man, knowing his infraction's severity, will know how large the bit of wood ought to be and whether the wood should be lit aflame prior to striking upside the head.

10) If anything, football players are like obsessed stalkers, so stop referring to them as "warriors." (Come out to plaaaayayyy!) They are well-padded millionaires playing a game that has dominated their lives since age 5. They've been coddled their entire lives to become money-making man-children. They are not warriors. They are not soldiers. They are game-players. George Carlin has a great bit on this subject but it bears reiterating. The players are smart ("A strong Football IQ!") in that they understand how to play a game that most people stopped playing decades ago. StarCraft II is more mentally-taxing than football. The machismo within playing professional games is weird as hell. So adrenalized and so focused on a singular thing, they tackle their day-job with stalker-like obsession, learning everything they can about their prey and exacting swift dominance over them!

It's the players that don't strut with the delirious glee usually reserved for concussion-victims that we can root for. The ones that are, you know, human. Not the cartoon characters that work eighteen weeks a year. But ya can't sell silence, which is why everybody outside of New England hates Bill Belichick. That, and his stalker-like obsession and devotion to exacting swift dom-- oh. Yeah, that's not a very fashionable allegory.

**GET BONUS!!** 11) Want a fun drinking game? While watching a game, drink every time the commentator says the word "football." You will end up poisoned. If you really want to get crazy, drink double whenever they say a made up word like "audible-ize" or "downhill running."

The disturbing thing is that professional football, one of our most expansive societal-touchstones and most universal pop-culture generator, is owned by a calculating, wealthy entity. So much has been done to protect the NFL product as an honorable and spirited competition that brings generations, and our entire nation, together. In doing so, they've limited the descriptive vocabulary that's allowed to be used in respect to this shared popular culture memory is, and will be. Those feelings, real as they are, we know because we've felt it, are bent to the point of exploitation -- they're the property of a thing so incomprehensibly large that it feels better to not worry ourselves than to feel violated.

But you know what? Tune it out. That's what America does best. As a country, to an extent, we can make something die simply by not looking at it -- yes, advertising pointed at the NFL audience will appeal to the lowest-common denominator, and that will never go away, only change (with the times), but this country was founded on the concept that if enough people find something harmful, we can stop its black-magic curse by looking away, just like we did with that shitty Green Lantern movie. We'll talk about the lowest-common denominator as entertainment's double-edged sword another time, but if you want to really fight back, do some research. Circumvent the ways the NFL makes money. Become incalculable and invisible. That's what they fear the most. It's the football games that are our national love-affair, not the ads for Sprint's Unlimited Data Plan.

Recommended related reading:

[Ultimate Frisbee Is Just World Of Warcraft For Extroverts] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[Behold, The 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®: A Break-Up Story] by Ghost Little

[The 2011 Halloween Survival Guide] by Doberman

[FULL STORY ARCHIVE]

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#34 -- Ultimate Frisbee Is Just World Of Warcraft For Extroverts

"When the sports-club that you're enamored with -- which is meant to be the healthy evolution from competition-driven traditional sports -- quickly turns into a clusterfuck of LSD and wardrobes of repressed sexual abuse, you've got a contradiction on your hands."

In the grand scheme of personal vices and obsessions, we'd rate Ultimate Frisbee just below World of Warcraft and just above Bible Club.

(Nota Bene, Ultimate Frisbee will henceforth referred to in this writing as simply 'ultimate,' as those in the industry refer to it.)

Any freshman activities fair rep will tell you about the inclusiveness of ultimate.

(Right now is when we go on record as people that weren't booed off a try-outs field and feel spurned. Ultimate players didn't break into our car or undercook and eat our dog (Floki, no!!))

People that play ultimate, and are a part of the surrounding community, really like it. Similarly, people in fraternities, yacht clubs, and Methodists, really like their communities, but they don't promise grassroots equality and inclusiveness. Clubs are clubs are clubs, and up to the most extreme extent (local church potluck supper organizers: cool. The Tea Party: really fuckin' not cool, man), they're within their rights to set rules on who they allow in.

When the sports-club that you're enamored with -- which is meant to be the healthy evolution from competition-driven traditional sports -- quickly turns into a clusterfuck of LSD and wardrobes of repressed sexual abuse, you've got a contradiction on your hands. Ultimate players are devoted to their sport and its lifestyle more passionately than Cleveland Browns season ticket-holders. It's high school football in Texas to them. It is the only thing in life. It's the clique. It's Augusta National, and all your friends are members. It's that montage in a crime movie where everybody's getting along and making money and getting laid and moving into huge mansions with bathrooms the size of Luxembourg and shower-curtains made of albino tiger pubes. It's the mob. It's a mob that preaches inclusion and non-competitive learning but boils over into a kind of hate that pumps spin-class leaders' obsidian hearts. It's self-regulated and self-refereed by supposedly-honorable players while simultaneously being populated by overly-inventive trash-talking that borders on consensual, verbal hate-yiffing (don't Google "yiffing") towards one another. They are the athletes, the owners, and the fans, all serving their self-propelled morbid hunger for. . . cherry pie? We dunno.

But there are smiles on the surface and there is slander and threats of skullfucking behind each others backs.

It's difficult, isn't it? Knowing that you care as much as you do and that only the diluted will agree that it isn't time wasted in a fantasy? The players want it so much to be real. To make it real though, they must first let it go. If you want to be a sport, be a sport. Be competitive, get some refs, dislike your opponents, and knock each other down. You'll be a sport then, but you won't be a Natural Foods Co-op Membership Club Sub-culture. If you want to continue to be a 'culture,' then stop wearing those shit-eating grins, and secretly hating people that don't take you at all seriously.

Handball is an Olympic event. Ping pong is an Olympic event. Ultimate frisbee is not.

Ping pong is a more real 'sport' than your pseudo-competition / box-wine / kegger / circle-jerk. It's there. You feel it. It's a niggling doubt in the back of your mind that you really and truly aren't legitimate and you're having less fun than you think you are and you're just killing time until your next match, or, eventually, you'll have to be excommunicated from the only thing you know anything about, otherwise you'll become a 38 year-old burnout riding a fixed-gear bike, incapable of jumping more than two inches because somebody slashed your Achilles tendons at a tournament in Savannah, GA while you were sleeping. The fact that they have to insist, that, "yeah, it's a total sport, we have an acronym for our governing body and everything!" is a sign that they are not mentally-developed enough to be a sport.

A One-Note Song is not a song, even Tenacious D knows that. The best ultimate players are one-note humans. They play their sport, they practice their sport, they organize their sport, they live with people that play their sport, they vacation to play in events they've practiced for and organized, they brood over the lack of their sport when the weather is cold and the squash team won't let them practice their sport in their courts. They're the sporting equivalent of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, wandering grassy areas, highly recognizable, even at a distance, getting ready to ruin your day with banter about this thing that they love and want to 'legitimize.'

"There's more to it than you know!"

Who are you trying to convince? Go, play your game, have fun, enjoy it, we encourage you to spend your time getting some physical exercise. It's the contradictions and self-delusion that's hurting your ability to love it to its fullest. Really good ultimate players get sponsored to play their sport, they talk about their sport at the water-cooler at the job they work to pay for their sport. Notice how generous we're being with the word "sport," and how much of its power the word loses when placed in close proximity to the word "Frisbee" (Copyright: Whammo Toys). You're welcome!

It becomes a tiresome load of bullshit. There's deeper meaning in sports, and how, on a base, pure level, they can teach us about success and failure and competition, and then we carry that over into real life. Ultimate is none of those things because it's all one in the same to the people involved with it. It's not a means to an end in the way that high school baseball is, it's Shangri-La. Except it isn't! It's the Opiate Of The Jackasses. Most of them aren't even red-blooded hippies -- they stopped smoking chronic when their shit got 'real.' A Frisbee player will steal his friends' Birkenstocks and throw them off the Chesapeake Bay bridge as a prank, but he won't abuse substances that might hurt his game.

Ultimate is a thrilling study in how a utopia collapses. Founded on principles concerning equality and non-violence, things were beautiful, sublime, in fact, amongst the young, Fae-Frisbeeians. The people in the Ultimate Utopia looked outward from their small, walled garden, shaking their heads at those outside who could not understand their Zen wisdom. They didn't concern themselves with outsiders, and for a while, it was good. They played their sport, lived, laughed, and loved, cultivating healthy respect and competition. Then, one day, one player decided to work on his cardio and outran everybody during a game, winning with ease. The others asked why he did this, the competition and been simple and pure until then. The player that had worked on his cardio explained that he had been envious, and annoyed that he hadn't ever won. In the next game, another player elbowed him in the ear for transgressing against the friendly competition. Slowly, the ultimate players started living closer and closer to their sport, devoting more time to deciphering how to win. Eventually, they believed they had developed enough of a competitive identity to earn the respect of those outside their garden, and they opened the gates. What they didn't know was that inside their micro-society, the sense of reality had become so warped that they could barely speak. Nobody could understand them, and certainly nobody could understand why they wanted to be a "real" sport. It's a society, it's a way of life, not a sport.

The best thing about ultimate is its honesty, and the players genuine love for the sport -- for the mantra built around it, which is unique. The worst part is that the highest levels of play are still populated by pretentious, arrogant, true-athletes, whose existence betrays the sports' best justification point. Their desire to bend unwritten rules and exploit a system that isn't built to defend itself against these exploits ruins the game.

"Oh, but where's the harm? Surely they're doing good." No, madam. No. What occurs is an artificial ego that is incapable of functioning outside of the ultimate snowglobe. In that world, they're warriors, and athletes, and politicians, and have lead armies across battlefields with tactics comparable to Sun Tzu and Machiavelli. They live, truly, as gods do, drinking in halls akin to Olympus or Valhalla or Azeroth. Everything is right, the world is full of color and merriment, and the sparring and competitions endure even after you have retired.

Wrong, fucker! You are a human being in the real world. You don't ride a fucking battlecat o'er snowcapped peaks never-summited. That wench you snapped up from a recent festival is as ugly as sin and the only reason she is blowing you is because you can throw a decent hammer, or whatever. Stop it. Your conquests are as real as those in World of Warcraft. People that love, love, love World of Warcraft have ground the game's purpose and identity into dust, exploiting it until it has become a freebase-drug called 'Distraction,' entirely pure and wicked. The numbers, the calculations, winning, that's all that matters. The escapism, the spirit, the world, the art, all of is invisible to them. Ultimate players experience the same thing, they're just tall extroverts instead of people with Internet connections and a WoW account.

Here's an idea, ultimate 'competitor.' Move to a dirt road in Tennessee. See how long you last. You'll be wandering and in withdrawal like a lip-less crack-whore in less than a fortnight, grumbling with dementia that nobody will throw round plastic at you, before your kneecaps are forcibly removed by a pheasant hunter with a Bowie Knife and a bladder fulla Jack because of a confusion over the phrase 'poach.'

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter | @GhostLittle_WTF

More [posts], [reviews], and [stories]. . .

#30.5 -- Should You Cross The Street?

Are you considering spending some time in the fabulous state of Massachusetts this summer? If so, please be aware of the inherent perils in cross the street [see fig. 1].

fig. 1

(click to embiggen)

Enjoy your time in the Bay State!

-- Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#29 -- Behold, The 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®: A Break-Up Story

"Being in vengeance is like being in love -- you can't be told you're getting revenge, you just KNOW you are."

I broke up with a girl. She didn't reckon I had the backbone, or the wherewithal, to emotionally cripple her in the way she did me. This isn't karma. It's something more callous. It's vengeance.

The next sentence involves the word "ass." Coming out of a relationship, you can either kick it, or suck it. I will not suck it.

She said she was going to make something of herself and I was just treading water with my life. First of all, know that at this point, I have stopped caring about all things when I'm in her presence. You know it -- you know the feeling when that switch that gets flipped. Now I'm quite literally bound by the laws of physics to find everything about her repugnant, lest I sink into depression like her failed-future career as a patent attorney! BOOM! That is verbatim what I said to her. She didn't even realize that not only did I already know she was going to try again to pass the bar and become a patent attorney, but I ALSO already knew she was cheating on me with Dan, her carpool buddy, with whom she also shares a subway pass with.

Dan is the worst name in any language. Try saying, "And the hero's name was: Dan." Seriously, try it right now. Just you try it. See? You try to say it and you just end up barfing your mouth full of vomitus.

She thought she was breaking up with me, but I'd come to the breakup prepared to counter her ending our relationship with a 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®! You should've SEEN the look on her face. It was repugnant. She thought she was just going to reveal her secret plan about breaking up with ME and moving in with DAN and her new career as a patent attorney. I'd been with her for a while and I KNEW I could easily take the wind of her sails, and I ALSO knew that she sucks ass at sailing -- a vain shortcoming that's always bothered her -- so tacking against the wind was COMPLETELY out of the question with her. Her entire  nautical vocabulary is limited at best, so when I said that, "Baby I'm going to take the wind out of your sails and you'll be fucked because you don't know how to tack," she was BLOWN. . . nowhere. Her brain was in the doldrums. I'm awesome at crossword puzzles and I'd come to that brunch prepared.

I drank like 3 cups of iced coffee at the Dunkin' Donuts across the street prior to meeting up with her and I wrote down some notes on a notepad that I'd bought earlier with the change from my coffee. I decided on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance® right then and there. She was going to come and tell me that she was going to become a patent attorney, that I knew. Know what? Fuck her. I'll become a stand-up comedian. I wrote that down and underlined it. What's she going to say to that? She knows I'm funny and she knows that I know that she hated studying for bar the first time, and she knows I LOVE being funny. I'll be pursuing a kick-ass dream -- she'll be backsliding into lifelong career of professional, regretful nitpickery. And she's pissed that her roommate Charlotte always said I was funny and even said I should become a stand-up comedian when I wasn't in the room one time. I know she said that, because I trained their pet parakeet, Toucan Fran, to tell me secrets. Toucan Fran and I are in very good terms.

"Well done, Toucan Fran," I whispered to him, handing him a Salteen. "Yes, yours are the words that shall topple the first domino in my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®."

That was number 1 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®. Turn the people in this coffee shop against my ex!

Turning a crowd against somebody else is easy if you're me or if you're like me. You don't even need to be mean about it, they usually do most the damage to themselves. All you need is some money, not even a lot! It's super fucking easy. For example, with money, you can get cheap plane tickets and go places, but before you do, tell people you're going to go somewhere and do something. Public knowledge is the truest knowledge, and rumor is her sexy half-Japanese cousin. Make sure that the person you're telling your plan to will think that it's really fucking stupid-sounding, but make sure uninvolved others are there to hear it too, because it'll sound cool to them. For example, I'll say: "I'm gonna go to Iceland. Bathe in some hot springs. If the mood strikes me after I visit Haukadalur, of course."

Number 2 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance® had already been set in motion. Vacation in Iceland. My ex didn't believe me, but when I pushed my bought-and-paid-for Iceland Air ticket across the table to her, she started denying it. Like I couldn't do it? Please, the seeds are already planted. Dudes eating brunch with their girlfriends were already pulling out their iPhones to see how cheap tickets to Iceland were. My ex looked fucking dumb saying going to Iceland wasn't a good idea. She wanted so much for me to be unhappy. I will have none of it. Fucking with people is easy if you take something impractical and make it awesome, which is what I did with my time in Iceland!

It's a beautiful country, by the way. I took pictures and I sent them to her new address when I got back to the U.S. I borrowed my grandmother's old camera that I gave to her for Christmas in 2002, and I included that fact in the note I sent to my ex along with the pictures. It wasn't a digital camera either, it was an oldish, but still really good-quality film camera, so the actual for-real photographs that I mailed to her of me tacking against the wind while sailing off of the coast of Reykjavík with Jóhanna and Flóki made her concede how awesome my time in Iceland was, thanks to the pictures I took with my grandmother's camera.

That's number 3 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®. Help HER family members get jobs. It's the most thoughtfully hateful thing you can do to somebody. Her younger brother and I play Mario Kart Wii online all the time and he just graduated from RISD. Well, guess who works in HR at a design firm downtown? Charlotte! She's already refused to talk to my ex when she called to ask for help on getting her brother an interview. But Charlotte and me are super-close now ever since we got drunk on kick-ass maitais at the Cheesecake Factory a little while back. BOOM! My ex's little brother got the job offer this morning, he sent me a video message from his smartphone of him celebrating in the elevator after the interview. Now, even after the breakup, my ex's family knows how kind I am. Her mom is already refusing to buy her a plane ticket home for Thanksgiving! Her brother's already been put on a project at the job doing logo design for a Chinese flower company that specializes in genetically-engineered lilies.

That's number 4 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®. I learned about flower arrangement. Why? Because girls love flowers but don't know SHIT about arrangement methods.

A girl might know how to speak a second language or be really good at running or yoga or be a really good cook, which are all NORMAL things a guy coming off a break-up might pick up to get back at his old girlfriend.

See, girls don't know ANYTHING about flower arrangement, so when my professionally-arranged piece shows up in a local magazine that I know she reads because I re-forwarded it to her new address, it drives her crazy. She doesn't know if it's good or not because she only speaks French, cooks chicken cordon'bleu, sits in a full-lotus position, and runs half-marathons. Talk about BORING!

I found these reactions to be kinda trite. They exude a deliberate, inorganic sadness-aura. Why be so predictable? Being in vengeance is like being in love -- you can't be told you're getting revenge, you just KNOW you are. Remember your Palpatine and let the hate flow.

My security and self-confidence annoys her so much it makes her menstruate early. It's satisfying, but really fucking gross. Here's the real great part: flower arrangement is FUCKING EASY.

I also told all the girls in the seminar class that I got into, wherein I learned what little there actually is to know about flower arrangement, that I'm color-blind, so when they realize how amazingly put-together my display was, it drives them fucking WILD. All I did was Google color-blind and figured out all I needed to know about what colors look like what to somebody with the affliction.

"What? Green? No, I see something darker, something closer to what you might call 'blue.' " Then I tell them that my ex was a cocktease and always left me with green-balls.

"Wow. Sounds like she sucked ass."

"Yeah. She did. I'm getting over her though."

That's number 5 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®. I convinced Dan that HE was color-blind. They don't have their cable modem hooked up yet at their new place, so when he went to Starbucks to get a wireless signal, I got a bunch of my buds together, and at random intervals, had casual background conversations about how the way Dan was dressing suggested that he might be color-blind. Then my friend Spike, who graduated magna cum laude in computer science, fixed up some kick-ass fake websites with some unproven research on color-blindness. We Google-bombed the search terms for his site and associated them with color-blind searches. Dan found them no problem when he Googled it, and BOOM! Dan now thinks he's color-blind.

So now Dan thinks he's color-blind, his Internet isn't hooked up, I enjoyed my time in Iceland, and my ex's family is neglecting her during the holiday season. Not good enough. Too many of her friends still like her.

Logically, step 6 on my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance® is simple: deprive her of sleep on the week of Saint Patrick's Day. There's nothing worse than a malnourished grouch on Saint Patrick's Day. This is a little tricky, but I basically remove all substances from her life. Aspirin, ibuprofen, Ambien, caffeine, alcohol, vitamin-C supplements, sugar, all of it. It just involves replacing all the pills with placebos, the coffee grounds with decaf, the sugar with salt, and the alcohol I'll just steal from her.

I was debating hiding metronomes in her apartment to wake her up at random intervals during the night and I liked the idea that I had, so I did it. I already installed auto-run features on her laptop and work computer so they randomly turn on and off be it day or night. How pissed does that make you when you computer shuts down for no reason? Very. I can actually activate these background-routines on her computer from my phone with the supporting app I wrote, so I'll know when she's sad and I'll know when to laugh.

Come Saint Patrick's Day, she's a wreck. She'll be utterly repugnant, and yet, it DOES. . . NOT. . . STOP. She'll want to do hair-of-the-dog, or drink an Irish coffee or some shit. No. I don't let it happen. Keep it up, swapping everything out. She'll hate the sight of smiling faces, scowling constantly at drunks, and she’ll be so upset that eventually, dehydrated and exhausted, she'll collapse. Sober, she'll be taken to the hospital on Saint Patrick's Day, and nobody will be able to come and get her because a) we hate her for being whiny and annoying and pouty all day, and b) we'll all be too drunk to drive over there. Hope you enjoy getting felt up by puke-soaked forty-somethings, Honey.

Finally, step 7 in my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance® is to convince her that she's been indirectly responsible for the death of a homeless guy. This is easy. On Halloween, I'm going to have one of my friends that she doesn't know dress as a homeless guy. It's a common costume, it'll work perfectly because she's looking for a pity-fuck by now. When she asks who he is, he'll be from out of town, and nobody will know, so I'll start spreading the rumor that he is, in fact, an actual homeless guy. He'll deny this when she asks, and despite the fact that he smells like spoiled fruit, they’ll hook up. Then he'll go back on his word, adamantly confirming that he is entirely homeless. His story will be something like: he dropped out of school after his parents died and he blew his trust fund right after it came out of escrow, and now he's homeless at a very young age.

This will gross her our, and she'll kick him out of the building where the party is, thinking that he's lying, that he's playing a joke on her. He'll crawl into a doorway and make sure that she watches him go to sleep, and she’ll go home. Now, the next day, the host of the party will release a statement on Facebook saying that it was a great party and all, but demand to know who let the homeless guy in? First, she'll be grossed out that she hooked up with a real-live homeless person, who is still just one of my friends from out of town that owes me a favor. I gave him a ride to the courthouse so he could fight a speeding ticket and then bought him an iced coffee outside the DMV while he got his license renewed, and now that he’s helped me with this, we're even.

Pay it forward, people.

The real coup de grâce though is that the host of the party, another one of my friends, will begin to complain about a smell outside his window, occasionally updating his status or Tweeting, or wherever. Finally, it will be revealed that the smell is coming from a corpse. We take a few pictures out of his apartment window with a gurney and ambulance that we borrow with the help of some buddies at med school, my "homeless" friend, still in costume, sorta bloated and very dead. Autopsy reports suggest that he's actually been dead for about a week, passing away on the night of Halloween.

So not only did she hook up with a homeless guy, but her cruelty and disbelief that he was in fact homeless, resulted in him getting dead.

And that’s my 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®. I would say that you should have heard this coming, especially since I was actually planning it while we were still "together," but you're a repugnant stump, and you're as deaf as a haddock, so you get what you deserve. One last bit of constructive criticism: it isn't the light, you look bad no matter how and where you stand.

Die alone.

[FULL STORY ARCHIVE]

 

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#18 -- The Airport Is Your God Now

"The airport is a really slow time machine that forces you to pass through an alternate Mirror, Mirror version of Nazi-occupied Britain before letting you reach your destination."

Flaming fucking hellshit in a deflating life-raft, I hate the airport. Every moment is an internal dialog. It's all questions. It's all criticisms, complaints, seething judgments, and escapist fantasy. How can this be so slow? How can this person be on their phone while disassembling their bag for security? Why is a soda cheaper than a water? Why does this guy smell like fruit that my girlfriend's cat puked up onto the radiator? Where the fuck is my plane? Why are all the people working at the airport so apathetic? Always? Why hasn't the air-travel "'business" imploded into itself with all these inefficiencies and infinite requests to tolerate their dickish practices? Seriously, 9/11 was almost 10 years ago, that's not an excuse. Get your shit back together. It's getting worse, they're just finding ways to gouge and tithe us until holograms put them out of business.

I'm not going to rail this wrecked locomotive down your throat. Everybody can recite awful travel stories or 5-hour delays in Newark where you realized just how durable the baby changing tables are thanks to an experimental move devised by a Rutgers waterpolo girl. Bruised tail-bone stories are commonplace. No, in short, your rage against the airport can be summed up quite plainly: The airport is your church now. 

It's where you go to have all control over your modern fate surgically removed.

It's abundantly obvious. You hate going to the airport. You have to go around the holidays because of your familial obligations. You don't really understand the things being shouted at you but you loaf your way through it because it's tradition, and you have to, and don't want to be hassled. You go through the ingrained motions whenever you can, which is when you get a reprieve from the internal fury backlog that I've mentioned above. But it goes beyond that. There's. . . the fear. You can't be a dick at the airport, just like you can't be a dick at church. And not 2011 church, I mean old-school pre-Martin Luther church. I mean Spanish Inquisition upside-down flesh-flaying shit. I mean excommunication, can't fight The Man, airport jail for saying "Paul Greengrass," God is always watching fear. It's one of the only places that white Americans are still afraid of other white Americans. They know they have to watch what they say or they might have their windpipe collapsed as a result of an air marshal's knee hose-kinking their trachea. 

The airport is a really slow time machine that forces you to pass through an alternate Mirror, Mirror-dimension version of Nazi-occupied Britain before letting you reach your destination. Papers, lads. Keep calm and carry on, for Queen and Country.

Watch for un-manned pieces of baggage! Also, watch for heathens, please! Constant vigilance -- of yourself and of that guy with that red hat! Verily, that guy. . . I do not trust. Ladies and gentlemen, sit and wait, you will be delivered to your desired destination, thank you. We cannot explain directly why things are the way they are, why you must suffer, the Lord speaks in riddles so that our souls might grow to accept waiting in the goddamn JFK E-terminal. The music is unusual, and you only hear it at church, played on a type of piano that you only hear in this place. You kind of hum along as you sit there, waiting for whatever, sort of recognizing it for a few bars, but you don't know why. The people around you have camped out in their pews, drawing their families close, their kids already wearing unfitting clothes that now are way too small since last year, so they continually fidget in their flip flops and hand-me-down parkas with colors from the incorrect decade. At the airport, like at church, you stare at people. I imagine going to Puritan church was like going to the mall back in the day, where you would walk in and try to figure who's daughter had been knocked up by an Indian brave or a Catholic, which I assume was like their version of a black guy. Except instead of judging silently, they'd throw big stones at her and then crush her to death under bigger stones like in The Crucible.

(A quick side note -- frequent fliers are the real Catholics of the airport. They're in, they're out, they mumble with begrudging respect in Latin and in acronyms (SFO, LAX, JFK, BUR), pop a Xanax at the exec-communion bar, then coast straight through the remaining hours, ready to do it again next week when they have to go out to Round Rock to meet with the guys at Dell. You WASPs wish you were that accustomed to the noxious mixture of obliged, guilt-soaked indifference.)

There's a ton of people-watching at airports. You keep to yourself, but you're very self-aware at church, so your mind is always going, assuring yourself that it's almost over, or that at least you look better than that guy with the $400 stroller who probably couldn't find a bathroom at his parents' house without his iPhone. Fuck the iPhone. It's a slap in the face to anybody that got made fun of for using a Game Boy on the school bus growing up. You just know that lady teased her younger brother for getting really good at Tetris back in 1989. Did you three-star every level in Angry Birds yet? Oh, on both iPhone and iPad, you say? Swallow a knife! 

People grip their smartphones like holy relics at the airport -- their only conduit to what they call reality, but what a Man of the Cloth would call "hedonistic pleasures of the butt." Which is why the airport bans these kinds of electronic devices on planes themselves. You're in God's house now, motherfucker -- your St. Francis of Assisi Skull is not allowed! If the airport is the church, the plane itself is your motherfucking confessional booth. You're stripped of everything, laid bare, and asked to be alone with your thoughts, and maybe your dad's old copy of The Winter of Our Discontent (for some reason?) that he bought in 1962 when he got delayed at Idlewild on his way to DC. The airport has the power to do that, take all that you have, and you can't fight it or you'll be labeled a heretic and put on the no-fly list or something. Who really knows? You don't. You don't want to know what happens to people that Skype'd during a flight from Boston-Logan to Detroit-Ft. Wayne. I'll tell you what happens to them. They end up in Detroit, a.k.a. The Capitol Wastes from Fallout 3. Except instead of roving gangs of Super Mutants, it's just the Detroit Tigers back from Kansas City for a home game.

The boredom at airports is crippling and baffling. You have entire weekends at home where people ask you, "so you seriously did nothing all weekend?" And you answer, "yeah," quite honestly. You loafed around from 9:32am, read part of The New York Times online, but mostly just stared at mail you didn't want to open because it's either junk or bills you already paid on their website. Then you watched SportsCenter, decided not to weed the back patio, and played Nintendo Wii until 4:30pm when the Jets' game came on. How is sitting for 20 minutes at an airport actually not 20 minutes, but instead 2 metric-fucktons of murderous dead space that has descended upon your soul like a inter-dimensional bogart with extra crustacean claws wriggling from its maw, swallowing all light, all hope, and all time? How, I ask? Because you aren't alone with your boredom in church/airport. You're at a party with no ride home. You're suffering together, and somehow, unlike normally, when co-misery makes everything better -- which is why you never crash a wake without a wingman -- you have to sit, and wait, until you finally get too awkward, and at last acknowledge the dude staring at you with such unabashed indifference. His eyes speak to you and they say, "hey, man, this sucks, doesn't it? But hey, what're you gonna do? We're in God's house."

Do we live in a society where idleness is synonymous with failure? If you aren't miserable, you're doing it wrong. If you're doing it right, you're actually forgetting something really important you'd better check every inbox, mailbox, bill-pay, account, and fact-sheet to make sure you haven't forgotten NAOW! I feel that constantly. I think it's been ingrained into me since before I could walk. At the airport, we're given time. But we are stripped of the means to be productive. What a paradox.

At the airport, there's no room for punk-rock. No room for irony. No room for humor. No room for the sly. No room for will, or even for humanity. We all serve the desire to get the flying fuck out of these skin-wrinkling circumstances and on to somewhere that isn't church. Anybody that thinks outside of the Order of Airport Logic is possessed by the devil, an interloper that fights the tenuous system that has promised to bind us together.

-- Doberman (. . .has had enough of this)
on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#15 -- Guys Don't Particularly Like Strip Clubs

"We could've kept everybody happily blackout drunk for this entire weekend with the money you're wasting on having somebody's mom hit you with brittle pillow!"

NB: This is entry #15. We skipped #14. Why? Because #14 is Paradise Lost, the greatest thing ever written. Not only do we need to do it justice, we got to writing about it, and left the computer for a bit, and then came back, and had an epiphany. Needless to say, in order to prove a point, the review of Paradise Lost might not go live until July 19, 2011. You'll understand why when it drops. So, instead, we have a treatise on strip clubs.

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Fact: 9 out of 10 guys in any group of friends dislike, if not outright loathe, strip clubs. 

We approach them the way we might approach an wobbling badger, so unmistakably infected with rabies, that we can't help but stare, wait, and see if this animal isn't simply friendly and wants to pal around. We make excuses later, jaws locking up, hand swelling with animal saliva and puss-choked blood. We feign ignorance even in defeat. By design, guys might get fired up along with everybody else at the prospect of the idea of maybe going to the strip club and run for the 15-passenger van like a 14-year old after his second shot of Wild Turkey, like, ever. But they're still just lying to themselves and everybody around them. They might even try to explain to their girlfriend -- metaphorical rabid-badger bite be damned -- how sick their trip to the strip club with their buddies was and how girls just don't "get it."

No. No, no, and no. 

You are fucking embarrassed and ashamed. You would bathe your brain in lye if you thought it might wash the stink out of you but you know it won't do the job. You can't un-smell this shit. You didn't know what the hell you were doing while you were there. You weren't really sure what you were paying for. You will always and forever remember that strangling burn whenever you hear Wicked Garden by Stone Temple Pilots, and you really don't ever want to have to go back to a place like that.

But as sure as the sun shines, birds fly, and grass grows, there naturally is that 1 guy out of the 10 that does, quite honestly, really and honestly love strip clubs. He is infatuated with the notion. He's medium-sized and usually wins your fantasy football league too. He's the one that is being done a favor by all of his saner, emotionally-grounded buds when they agree to venture into that yawning chasm of clingy carpet and blackened cum stains. So, this one friend, is a burden! Yes, you, Trevor! 

(We don't know anybody named Trevor, but we'd bet 4 of the finest otter pelts and a bottle of firewater that some fuckstick named Trevor is causing his friends trouble somewhere right now.) So, Trevor, asshole, you should realize that you are an awkward bundle of blue-ball-loving baggage. Want the fast answer as to why you think strip clubs are awesome, Trevor? Because you got puked on during a BJ once. Since then, all of this right here seems, well, kinda okay, man.

Trevor is the guy that will actively save single dollar bills for months if he knows he's going to Vegas, or Atlantic City, or the suburbs of Tampa, or something with his bros. He'll save up for it like most people would save up to buy a new set of headphones or or a sofa or a lift ticket at Vail. It is at the forefront of his brain. He'll read up on these things and study and go back and watch those parts of The Wrestler that take place in the strip club to try to understand how things might work. He'll tell you about all the shit he's seen at the clubs before. He'll tell you about those times in Montreal and Prague the way middle-aged guys show you pictures of their kids on a swingset.

Well, those girls are somebody's kids on a... swing. Of some sort. These stories are terrible. Worse than the dentist. Worse than choking. Worse than hearing a guy's story about watching poker on TV. It's a second-hand description of something that doesn't qualify as a vague turn-on. How can you, Trevors of the world, giggle at this kind of sexuality when you know that the Internet is a thing that exists?

"Yeaaaaahhhhh! Strippers! Whoooo!" Untrue. Guys don't care. Groups of guys don't care. They know that if they go to a strip club, and they show up wearing decent clothing because... well, who really knows what's appropriate to wear in front of women that have chosen inverted nudity as their profession... they know they, as a group, are there to be drained of their cash. That's why you go there. When you walk in the door, you are literally obligated to shell out cash. It's not fucking Lowe's Home Building Supply! You can't peruse and think, "hmmm... I suppose I could let a vagina rub on me if I wanted, but I don't think I have time this weekend. And we're going to the lake next weekend. And then Thanksgiving is the week after that. Never mind. No, thanks Cheyenne, I'm quite alright. Thanks for your help in my decision. Nice vulva though." It's not like that! What you see is what you're getting, scars and cellulite included. LeRoy is going to be there by the door with his earpiece and shaved head and your fear vectors are going to activate, and you're going to sit down in that creaky, damp chair, and drink two $12 Scotch and sodas out of a dixie cup, while Trevor blows his water bill money on a lapdance from a chick eating a cheeseburger.

"Guys! Look! I'm making it rain!" Fuck you, dude! We could've kept everybody happily blackout drunk for this entire weekend with the money you're wasting on having somebody's mom hit you with brittle pillow!

You'll probably pop half a chub and walk uncomfortably out of the club later that night with no money and blue balls.

Thank god the cover was... oh, wait, yeah, it was like $30 to get in. But we all had fun, didn't we? No. Strip club regulars have fun. The dudes waaaay past the point of caring that watch reckless young groups of idiots come in -- and they pray every day that one of these little punks tries to get too rough with one of their regular girls (Yazmeene, the first 'Y' is silent, the third 'e' isn't) so they can come flying in with a bottle of Jaeger upside his head, and the punk just lies there bleeding and crying, and the local and his girl (Fanta) run back to his truck where he can plow her over and over before showing her his softer side -- and that's their entertainment on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

 -- Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#9 -- Non-Sequitur Of The Estate (Etcetera)

"The audience just took their massive erections home and did stuff that would still be sung about in the halls of Valhalla come Ragnarok. Stuff that would make you and your partner experience the full repercussions of the Coriolis Effect."

We need to talk about stylistic consistency. As a framing device, we'll begin by describing why The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a piece of shit. 

In 1998, the Greatest Video Game of All Time was released, and it was better than good. This was, and is, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (* * * * out of 4), the game that made all the other games ache with envy. It was a new flavor of ice cream, and while you ate it, somebody played a fun snare drum beat to keep you in rhythm. It stunned with its setting, its latitude, and its focused minimalism. Seeing it today is like watching a 1964 Aston Martin DB5 drive by, windows down, radio playing a familiar tune, and you suddenly get thirsty. From beginning to end, it knew what it was doing, quietly going about its business, tightening screws, adding spice, and cracking its knuckles at all the right moments. It even stopped for smoking breaks once in a while, because you suddenly realized you wanted to smoke cigarette, if only one time. The best smoke of your life -- why ruin it? It was restrained and had a keen edge, making its precise blade strokes when it needed to, and then returning without a drop of blood back into its sheath. The game was a 5-movement orchestra, and every piece of that orchestra complimented the man (or woman) in the chair next to them while the concert was in progress. And then they complimented each other again later, with words, at the after party. 

In short, it didn't dance like one person's choreography. Instead, it crushed the whole goddamn scene like dance troupe, team name: "The Democratic People's Republic Of Infinite Christmas Banana Pancakes." It did its thing and it stunned people so hard that they could barely applaud. The audience just took their massive erections home and did stuff that would still be sung about in the halls of Valhalla come Ragnarok. Stuff that would make you and your partner experience the full repercussions of the Coriolis Effect.

In Zelda: Ocarina, and to an even greater extent in its sexy-cousin/sequel, Majora's Mask, everything had a place and every character had a Dickensian purpose. The center of the world had a vast Persian rug that smelt good and well-traveled, and every corner contained an etched statue with a story, or a piece of family memorabilia, or music box that played a familiar snare drum beat. If you looked closely at these things, it dawns on you that this world was actually made of other worlds, and when viewed from afar, you realized it had been made by a thousand tiny gods. All thinking the same thing. All hoping for the same thing. And all for you. You'll never want to smoke another cigarette again. 

Like so much pink insulation, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was made by a million tiny bits of lint and wooden splinters coalescing behind your dryer. It sort of collected back there, got stuck to your sock, and then somehow ended up in your coffee cup on, like, what was up until that point, a pretty good day. Well, it dissolved pretty quickly in your coffee, and it looks the same, and (wait, what's that, does somebody have their headphones turned up way loud? We can hear a song that. . . never mind, probably nothing), how bad can it be? You sip it and it barely tastes different. Then you get home and you have woodchips stuck in your gums and your lips are all sliced-up. Fuck.

See, the issue with Twilight Princess was that it was created by a dozen-hundred people that exclusively read romance novels. They have, however, never themselves been in love before. They might have convinced themselves, and anybody else that will listen, that they have. The fatal flaw keeps coming back though. Crabby, frustrated, but focused, these people moved their pieces around the checkerboard in a perverse, wrong simulation of what they've come to understand is the emotion people most want to feel -- slamming pieces down after each turn, assuring themselves they'd done right. After a few rounds of checkers, and realizing they can't figure out any ways between the six of them how to improve the game, they decide that's enough, they've sufficiently simulated the feeling of being in love, and package the thing. Each package comes with 15 boards, 15 red pieces and 15 black pieces.

Thing is, they all had different opinions on what the game was actually about. Was it supposed to resemble something old? Was it meant to be familiar? What are all these empty squares about? What were they thinking exactly when they made the game? No instructions were included, so the dearth of components resembling a familiar game just became puzzling to people that bought it. This begat harsh feelings. Twinges of dishonesty and betrayal. It made your gums bleed again just thinking about it.

Knowing what it should feel like -- that buzz of affection, effects not to be mistaken or faked -- it was all the more apparent that Twilight Princess was a cardboard cut-out in the background of a 3D movie. 

Its style wanted to be everything, which is not a style (just like how jamming on the START button to make your Mario Kart opponent lose rhythm is not a style and not a move). It was dreamed up as a flat world for all of your (and all of your friends) favorite old memories and fantasies to live in, but like Narnia, it had to die. Memories aren't flat, they can't exist like that. They're made of thicker stuff. They can't be dipped in fudge and thrown in a corner. You can try to do that, and point to what you've done, but that still doesn't help the fact that you dunked your friend's old classic rock mix-tape in Hershey's Genuine Chocolate-Flavored Syrup and flung it in their fucking face!

That's not what they want, and it's not like you to do that. Baby, you took something that might not have ever really existed in the first place and gilded it. Then you sold it, after slapping a badly-drawn plastic dust jacket and called it something unmistakably retromingent like Twilight Princess. In an effort to make something that can appeal to everybody, so was an inferior product created. One that nobody can relate to.

(click to embiggen)

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#7 -- Do They, You Know... Of Electric Sheep?

"People talk about the distribution of wealth in modern times. Imagine that, except a double-kujillion times worse, plus religious control, times XFINITY! The bosses of religion were the equivalent of Isaac Hayes in Escape From New York."

I recently read a report that a nail -- roughly 3.5 inches long and pretty intimidating as far as nails go (overcompensating, Trent Reznor? (I kid, you fucking rock (I fucking hate Kid Rock))) -- was discovered during a dig on a tiny island off the coast of Madeira. Madeira is a decent-sized island that's technically part of Portugal, and is actually located in the Atlantic off the coast of Morocco. Now, the tiny island had a fort on it, and inside that fort was a box, and in that box was where they found the 3.5 inch nail. What's interesting about the nail is that it's not all that rust, and is in fact quite smooth and well-preserved. And do you know who once held that fort? The Knights Templar! Really? The same Knights that occupied Jerusalem during the first Crusade in the 12th century? Of course. Does that mean... oh, holy (!) shit!! This nail is significant! It may, or may not, but it just might, have been used to crucify somebody. Know anybody important in history not named Brian that was crucified? 

The immediate conclusion to jump to is that this ancient nail is in such fine condition centuries later is because Christ bled on it, and his blood has the qualities of silver polish, natch. Now, that's a pretty keen superpower, but it's also really highly fucking unlikely! And anybody that that theory can stand on that evidence is asking a whole lot. 

Chances are, this nail was used to attach Jesus to The Cross. A Cross? A cross. I mean, that cross wasn't significant. It was? Oh, well, I'm not capitalizing it, just like I don't have to clarify who Jesus was. 

During their occupation of Jerusalem from 1099 to 1147, the Knights Templar, who we all know as the iron right hand of the might Pope Urban II (the ghetto Pope), seized many divine artifacts from the Holy Land. One of which was most definitely a certain nail. And they hid it, because shit that Jesus touched couldn't just be on display for people to see. It had to be hidden. In a box in a fort on an island off the coast of Morocco under Portuguese control. Nobody expects The Man From Lisbon! Bwahahahaaa! 

It's pretty plain to see that Pop Urban II had a great deal of foresight. He knew, using his God-future-vision-infallibility, that Jesus would be pissed if he didn't hide the very nail that the Romans had used to hang him on the cross (a cross? (across from what? (hah! Thanks, Mitch Hurwitz!))), an act through which he absolved all the sins of humanity up until that point. And seriously, it's a special 'effing nail. It's super-smooth and mad-tasty, like drinking a blended cashmere sweater. Hello, son-of-God blood! That's why all these artifacts keep popping up in great condition. Because it's stuff Jesus bled on. 

If it's so well-preserved, how come they even bother digging it up? They're just going to throw it in a closet somewhere. Tangentially, you cannot be fucking serious! Do you know how stupid people were during the Crusades / Middle Ages / Medieval / Dark Ages. There is not a single person on earth that looks back on an era of fiefdoms and feudal lords, and says, "gosh, things were at their best back then. What progressive, humane, honest, caring people that lived in those centuries that have literally be labeled the Dark Ages. I mean, they must've been both wise and smart." Pope Urban II probably had leprosy and slapped  a beard of leeches on his face if he caught a cold. He was some old Italian motherfucker that most likely ordered thousands of knights to go die for God and... well, God, again, countries hadn't really been invented yet, and that all their sins would be re-missed. Like he's some kind of claims collector. In his wisdom and divine, loving soul, he told people to go and die for his lecherous ass. 

Is it at all possible that he planned this? That he could engineer a conspiracy of this level? Think of people like Copernicus or Newton, some of the smartest men in history, and they were still probably dumber than the dumbest stoner at Brown University. 

But, BUT! That was all a FRONT set up by the Pope! No, honestly, look at all the evidence! The Pope had to do that because he was informed by the doctrine of Un'skenth Grah (made up just now to prove a point, not real), which was what Jesus secretly passed on to the 13th Unknown Apostle, that all physical evidence of Jesus has to be hidden from humanity's sight. It was all a power-grab! That's where the Knights Templare came in. They were Urban II's personal guard, his SS, if you will, and they followed his orders blindly. They were like the terminators from Terminator Salvation, and they were sworn to protect all Jesus merch for a thousand years to conceal the fact that they were really... well, clueless, mostly. 

I know, right? Intense. It was basically to conceal the fact that the Knights Templar, the Pope, the Catholic Church, fuck, anybody in power at that time, were a clueless band of lazy, incestuous, boy-rapist, shit-wreathed lords that liked getting blumpkins from anybody (anybody!). People talk about the distribution of wealth in modern times. Imagine that, except a double-kujillion times worse, plus religious control, times XFINITY! The bosses of religion were the equivalent of Isaac Hayes in Escape From New York. They were leaders of the world's biggest street gang. Think of all the awful stories you've heard about the shit that nasty gangs, whether in movies, or in real life, or in Baltimore, have done over the years. Now think of all the worst stories you've read about in your fucking history books about genocide and holy wars and burning cities to the ground rather than letting your enemy hold it for a moment. 

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-- Ghost Little

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