Heartbreakers, Drunks, and Philosopher Kings

Ever since I was old enough to be awesome, I’ve been fascinated by outer space. Outer space is where the universe keeps pretty much all of its best stuff: rocket parts, explosions, violent death, astronaut poop, etc. I spent my entire childhood dreaming about being out there, I spent most of high school letting hormones fuel my dunderheaded dream of seeing boobs in zero gravity, and basically every day as an adult thinking of ways we can get to space and stay there. My constant foils have been, largely, technical in nature: I have no access to a spacecraft, combustion is an expensive way for a vehicle to move around, I have a cripplingly small amount of astrophysical knowledge, I bore easily, I’m afraid of heights, baseball, and space is actually pretty far away. These are not insignificant hurdles. There’s no reason for me to continue feeding this conceit because I can’t do anything about it, right?

Luckily, I don’t have to.

America is going to casually invite you to a Halloween after-party this year where you get to tell a piece of paper, or a computer screen, why you think one particular person should get to make like 10% of us happy for four years, while the other 90% gets to be a mixture of jealousy, despair, suspicion and, hopefully, hot wings. Known human Newt Gingrich wants to make my wildest dream come true. To be honest, I’m sort of flummoxed. Going to outer space would make me happy for several reasons. The first one is ants. The other one is fixing what we did wrong on “Star Trek.” Radio waves from Earth have been traveling into space for a very long time. And for every Robocop we’re sending to an alien’s face, we’re also sending them episode after episode of transparent 1960s social commentary and well-intentioned liberalism. Basically every episode featured the same problem-solving heuristic:

1.) Short speech about how we cannot ever violate the Prime Directive.

2.) Violate the Prime Directive.

3a.) Does this create a problem? If so, identify the problem, then have Captain Kirk fuck it.

3b.) If for some reason sex does not work, try love.

4.) It’s possible that your problem cannot be solved with either genitalia or oxytocin. Not often, apparently, but it does happen. If this is the case, reassess the problem by yelling at Bones,  then use a Spock on it.

5.) Nonsequitur speech about heavy-handed moral relativism to wrap things up.

Let me explain something to you. William Shatner is not our best human. Leonard Nimoy’s face is narrow, like a Shetland pony, and his main contribution to space, besides “Star Trek,” is the un-take-backable lie that humans like to write songs about tiny, invisible simpletons. We need new ambassadors, and we need a President who knows this.

Now, I’m not terribly political. I think I’ve proven that several times in the last 500 words alone. To make things worse, Newt Gingrich is likely already a space alien, and Mitt Romney is clearly a ghost robot in a people suit. But one of these men has a plan, and the other just has money and the charisma of gravel:

But we must not let Romney fight for the right to after-party. We need to be in space and we need to be there now, and here are five very good reasons why:

1.) The moon is for everybody, as long as they’re American

Gingrich’s plan is to found a permanent base on the moon by the end of eight years. A bit presumptive, yes. But part of the plan is also to make that moon base the 51st United State. Right now, the rest of Earth is catching up to us in a lot of ways, and not all of them involve salmon. There may be no salmon on the moon, but there are bragging rights. Whenever a professional sports team wins a title in America, we don’t call them “champions.” We call them “World Champions.” It’s the perfect way to constantly remind the world that they suck at doing things no one even asked them to. We’re a proud people. I can think of no greater unifying fuck-yeah for a nation that sorely needs a win right now than “You’re from the UK? That’s so interesting. I’m from America. Which part? Moon. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

2.) Cowtipping

One of the proudest American traditions that nobody tries to do is cowtipping. It’s a stupid idea. Listen: cows are terrifying animals. They’re 400 lbs. of living steak with a sack of boob hanging off the bottom. Centuries of breeding have made them stegosaurus-dumb, they bite, they’re faster than they look, and they have giant bodies and tiny feet. It’s the perfect combination of things you should not try to sneak up on and surprise. Now imagine being locked in combat with a cow not in the disadvantageous confines of an Earth pasture, but in the devil-may-care generosity of reduced gravity. I know, right?

3.) I’m serious about this alien thing

Look, they’re real, and at least one of them is already here. He’s actively trying to get us to be their friends by essentially inviting us over to his place for a barbeque. I don’t know about you, but I’m not about to tell him no, and it’s not just because I want to know what space ribs taste like. The important thing to remember here is that, while we have the vague ability to eventually come together and put a tree fort on the moon, these guys can travel through outer fucking space. Do not make them angry, or cow violence will be the least of your worries.

4.) “Moonimal Farm”

Space Camp was a prize frequently given away for free when I was a kid, on shows like “Double Dare.” Mostly, though, it was a way for rich little assholes to throw up all over themselves after having their gray matter melted into soup by that gyroscope thing. On the moon, though, even the poor would be allowed to go to space camp. They wouldn’t even have to let a cholera-filled chemical accident with green food coloring slowly chew through their skin to do it. Which, now that I’ve actually written that out, doesn’t actually sound like a very convincing counterargument. The point? We’ll all have the necessary training to abuse gravity for the forces of evil. And let’s not kid ourselves, here. A moon colony would start out as a well-governed, equality-based democratic state, but you have to remember that it’ll be people who live there. American people. It’s a proven fact that the chance for totalitarianism, oppression, elitism, mob rule and space madness increase in direct proportion to your relative population and isolation. It would be awesomely easy for one sewage backup to turn into a colony-wide bloodbath. Sure, we’d have only one recourse: to start over, make sure everyone has equal power, and use a talking horse to build us a windmill. And that, my friend, is when the real fun begins.

5.) There are no werewolves or vampires on the moon. But there ARE minotaurs

History is filled with the various and many spiritual catalogs of how humankind has tried to learn about the world around them. Gods, devils and beasts of all kinds have been the center of myth and magic for thousands of years. Their explanatory power, and the sense of shared culture by those who believe, sate the existential and deeply upsetting inability to describe those things which we can’t fully understand. Unfortunately, history is also filled with fake people who had very real sex with many, many animals. Luckily, the moon base would always face the sun at some point, evaporating every vampire with ease. Further, you can’t have a full moon when you’re on the moon. The only problem is, remember, that we’re already engaging in constant mortal combat with cows on the moon. Where there are cows, there are bulls. As we just mentioned in 4.) there’s no telling how far some people might go in a grab for power. Someone up there could be  willing to folly in God’s domain in order to create an army of talking, people-bodied meat monsters to do their bidding. And if you think “stopping a Communist madman’s legion of minotaurs on the moon” isn’t a good enough reason to leave Earth, then it’s nice to meet you, Joseph Stalin!

Let’s be honest, it’s happened to all of us at one time or another: you’re sitting at home, watching television or reading a book while enjoying a glass of wine/scotch/milk/more scotch, and suddenly, you hear a rattle. You swear a chair just moved. You hear a creak, a squeak, a groan or a flutter. You get the unshakeable and profoundly upsetting feeling that you are being watched. You check the windows nervously. It could be Timmy Simmons, the kid with rickets from three houses over that carries a riding crop, taps people with it and calls them “my little piglets.” Timmy, who only talks about binoculars and cheese. Timmy fucking Simmons, who once ate ants in front of you unsolicited until you paid him $12 and a 8-pack of Ball Park Franks to quit it.

Timmy has been at your window before.

Timmy is not there now.

There’s no other solution. It can’t be the wind, your stressful day or your cat being a dick somewhere. No. You, my friend, have contracted a rare medical condition known as “ghosts.”

We’re coming up on the Christmas season, which means we’re all going to be subjected to A Christmas Carol. A Christmas Carol  is a movie where a slow talker is assaulted by homicidal time-traveling phantoms until he gives money and poultry to a pauper with a failing marriage. The Holiday season brings even more examples of ghosts. It’s a Wonderful Life is the joyful story of a ghost making a mockery of many-worlds quantum physics by forcing a middling idiot to feel happy about his mediocrity. And let’s not forget Frosty the Snowman, the enchanting tale of a naked, haunted snowman that feeds on the thoughts of the innocent:

This is the time of year when the sad, empty nature of a life devoted to an emotionless drive for work and the sacrifice of friends and family takes its toll. Shit gets real in a hurry, and as we’ve just shown, America is obsessed with the power of spirits to somehow indicate to us the terrifying reality of our own anonymity. Christmas already does that enough, but God love us, ghosts do it even more.

The problem with ghosts, mainly, is that they haunt you. This is unnecessary and inconvenient, both astrally and practically speaking, but it happens nonetheless. Ghosts will do all sorts of violent things to you, your furniture, your foodstuffs and your loved ones. These include, but are not limited to, psychological duress, loss of sleep, loss of pet, aggressive redecorating and spastic colon. There are very few good ghosts, for some reason, and the bad ghosts range from spirits (bad dead people) to demons (bad dead Jesus people) to poltergeists (dead assholes) to Randy Quaid (Randy Quaid). And don’t count on getting any help from the good ghosts when beating back a good haunting. When there’s a bunch of creepy, moody drifters hanging out at the corner gas station of your soul, you can’t trust anything made out of spectral vapor and expired smiles to pull out a switchblade and go into a blood frenzy on your behalf.

So being haunted sucks. I’m not here to tell you how to get rid of ghosts. That sounds like a lot of work. But after some painstaking research, I’ve constructed a list of five crucial things you need to know about ghosts in order to escape a haunting. Make sure you avoid these, and you’ll be well on your way to making ghosts look like a smacked-out pug with an eye patch and a ballerina outfit. I’m not sure how, but I think it would end with the ghost losing.

1.) Never let a priest bless your house

Some of your more scientific television shows about ghosts will show you plenty of empirical evidence that many people, when sufficiently haunted, will ask a priest to bless particular rooms, or the entire house. This is the perfect way to tell the undead that you want your house to go from zero to ghost in no seconds flat. From what I gather, ghosts probably hate priests. Maybe they just hate robes. There’s no way to be sure, but when a priest starts shrieking putdowns at your lamps and walls, it agitates the situation. If I were a ghost, I would honestly be less angry in the situation if you started reading Supertramp lyrics instead. At least I know they existed. Really all you’re doing, here, is a variation on Jehovah’s Witnessing, and you can’t blame them for getting angry.

2.) Psychics are liars

Sometimes, a haunting will influence the right kind of person to call a psychic to find out what the fucking deal is with the ghosts. Psychics function, roughly, on what I call “The Nickelback Principle,” meaning that a sliver of people think psychics are awesome, and the rest of us cannot fathom their utility unless forced to by a ghost. The job of a psychic is to walk around your house and pretend the spirits of Civil War soldiers are incapable of leaving your property, so they celebrate the sacrifice of their own lives by opening your doors every once in a while. The psychic detects these chiefly by feeling whooshing sensations, oppressive feelings of hatred and self-loathing, and the room rapidly becoming cold and uninviting. I know what you’re thinking: “Are you sure the psychic isn’t just having a Lutheran orgasm?” The only evidence that psychics are telling the truth is that the same shit that was happening before happens again, only this time we’ve narrowed the cause down to a bored murderer, Indian burial ground or the untimely death of a dog nobody liked. These are all claims you could have invented on your own, and you wouldn’t have had to suffer the stifling odor of house cats and Liz Taylor perfume to do it.

3.) Your god is not a ghost’s god

Let’s be honest: if ghosts were afraid of perpetual hellfire, they wouldn’t be spitting in God’s eye by throwing your books all over the place and making your cousin talk like the Terminator. So while Christmas may make it seem like ghosts are all up in your crime scene because they hate Jesus/Santa Claus/wrapping paper, there’s no reason to believe ghosts even have a god. If I were a ghost, I would believe in Zool. He’s not real, but what if he is? I’d be covering my bases.

4.) Ghosts hate pajamas but can’t fly very high

One of the worst things you can do around a ghost is wear pajamas, nighties or underbritches of any kind. It may feel like you’re somehow protected from the mincing affections of a ghost, sure. But remember when you were a kid, and you constantly slipped and cracked your head on the side of the bathtub over and over again while those idiotic little traction butterflies your mom bought at Home Depot, and their false promise of traction, laughed silently at your ever-expanding chances at getting Alzheimer’s? What I’m saying is, ghosts don’t play by your rules, and you can expect any assumed protection you may get from your environment, especially pajamas, to be a unforgiving letdown. One thing you can do, though, is build a new house on stilts directly above the current one. The rationale here is that at no point has someone proven that it is the literal property itself that is haunted. And besides, let’s take a look at the phenomenology of ghostness here. Everyone thinks they can fly, but that’s not really true. They seem to float, but not in any way that suggests they have unlimited aerial capabilities. It’s possible that they would be so frustrated by not being able to fly up to your new house that they’d just leave, but it’s more likely that they would just haunt your old house so hard. Like you’ll care. You’ll be in your floating bordello with a jet pack having dinner with Pac-Man, Wonder Woman and the number 12! Your move, ghost.

5.) Ghost-hunting equipment is a bunch of bullshit

Everyone just assumes they can call Bill Murray and the black guy whose name no one remembers  and the pile of talking marshmallows in their kitchen will explode. Pardon me for saying so, but that’s idiotic. Ghostbusting technology from the 1980s is wildly outdated, and will do nothing to help you against succubi, kelpies, Randy Quaid and many more of today’s “superghosts.” Because you’re an American, you’ll probably want to take the destruction of the undead into your own hands. There are several things you’re going to need. First of all, you’ll need a Ghost Meter. With this you can measure how much ghost you’re dealing with–ranging from “not much of a ghost” to “all the way a ghost,” and everywhere in between. Ghosts are chatty little monsters but no one ever complains about ghosts talking in Latin or Russian or some dead language. Ghosts were invented by Jesus as a big “fuck you” to the hookers that rode golden cows all over the place. (Yes, it’s in the Bible. Somewhere towards the back, I think?) Now that Jesus is American, so are all the ghosts. To understand your English-speaking ghosts, you should probably get yourself an EVP Device. This will allow you to tap into all the hot gossip of the ghost world, including where our country’s sense of shame is floating around (Real Talk). You will probably end up spending about $289. But that’s only if you’re a massive pussy. If you really want to wiretap the afterlife, you’ll need the $500 version. So far, so good–you can tell the severity of ghost you’re up against, and listen to it talk shit to your oven. Much like Soviet Communism, though, a ghost’s movements are both wide-ranging and hard to investigate with the naked eye. What you need now are lasers. These will let you track ghosts all over your house. Much like you, you’ll probably find them sitting in one or two rooms silently obsessing over something it can’t help. And once you can know, hear and detect your ghosts, you’ll want to look at it, right? Right? Well, I present to you the RZ PRO Thermal Cam with video capabilities. This will let you take detailed heat signature thermal images of the squirrels in your walls so you can pretend those hotspots are a ghost hive or a door to the netherworld. It’s only $4000, so you should probably get two, just in case you use one to stare at the fuzzy red silhouettes of your next door neighbors fighting over what to do about Timmy Simmons and the Christmas basket of fresh pig ears he left on their porch.

The only problem with buying all of these things and using them is they will make ghosts laugh at you, and you’ll know they are. They are made by people whose conscience never berated them when they were psychics, or made them feel guilty about collecting $200/hr for telling elderly strangers that axe rapists still live in their basement. Besides, these things will never work for you.

You amateur.

That’s why you belong in the Ghost Hunters Academy, so you can learn the ways of the shyster.

Godspeed, paduan, and have a Merry Christmas!

Ever since our ancestors stopped hanging out with Mark Wahlberg for long enough to hoot at fruit and snakes, human beings have tried to reach a common understanding about what things, and people, should be called. Some of these names are totally sweet (turtle, explosion, Donkey Kong), some of them suck (shriek, leech, moist) and some of them have no business being around at all (Steely Dan). Language can be a confusing and frustrating thing, particularly once we generally agree what a particular arbitrary string of letters actually means. I can’t go to the deli counter at a grocery store, point at the roast beef, and say, “bite the wax tadpole, bladder slice. Wax it for dollars, two times. Wax it hard.” This mess of words, I think we would all agree, is way too awesome to have anything to do with roast beef, or anything else. The basic meaning of words causes enough disagreement already.

The main problem, though, is irony. Only 0% of Americans, give or take, know the actual definition and use of irony, particular when trying to be funny or poignant. A lot of us are Po-Mo enough to realize when some people are saying something offensive, it is specifically because they are being ironic: expressing a thought or hyperbole that deliberately offends, intending to convey the exact opposite sentiment. The problem with irony is two-fold:

1.) There are plenty of people who don’t have the good sense to be jaded by their shitty lives and/or experiences. They inflict this pedestrian, sheltered hopefulness on others around them, chiefly through the acts of smiling too much and showing you pictures of their children. Irony doesn’t work on them because, to paraphrase Freud, humor is anger turned sideways, and irony isn’t funny if your idea of tragedy is somebody peeling one into the skull of a four-legged dinner wearing horns in Bambi. If this is tragic to you, then congratulations, Somebody’s Milquetoast Grandmother! I’ll let you get back to that editorial letter you’re sending to the paper explaining why “prime-time television is no place for sarcasm!”

2.) Some people are just stupid. And I’m not talking listening to Nickelback, loving Applebee’s or having every season of “Two and a Half Men” on a functionally infinite cycle in your Netflix queue. All of those things suck, and if you do them then you suck too. But sucking is different than being a moron. Let me explain the 3 sub-groups of 2.). It’s important to note that stupidity is not paralleled with being unintelligent here:

2a.) The Twitt-iots: Unfortunately, there is a fairly substantial audience out there that needs to know when it’s time for something to be funny. We’ve manufactured an entire network of triggers and cues for the criminally stupid, from commercial radio, Twitter and Tim Allen to laugh tracks, catch phrases and tabloids. These things give permission, to those who need it, that it’s okay to laugh, or love, or know, or chide. If you take away television, Dilbert, Internet memes and magazines making fun of rich peoples’ bad fashion choices… well, I’m not saying civilization would crumble. But seriously, civilization would totally crumble.

2b.) The Deliber-idiots: It’s not as though being slightly more intelligent in a situation makes you superior. Not at all. But sometimes, those in that position do have to deliberately limit their vocabulary and delivery in order to land jokes and points. If you’re offended by the idea that smart people sometimes slow themselves down to participate socially sometimes, bullshit. It’s happened to you, and you’ve done it to other people in turn–just like everyone else.

 2.c) The Social Activ-idiots: Are you hypersensitive to the plights of minorities, immigrants, disabilities, mental illness, old people, sex in general, or any combination of the above? Do you stop laughing because it’s “too soon”?  White people, in particular, love Actividiocy, because there is such an overwhelming Puritan guilt about all the fucked up things we were responsible for that the best we can do is feel good about having non-white friends. Irony only makes them feel worse because they know the only reason they won’t laugh is because they want to laugh, which means that at some level, they agree that terrible things are funny. Thanks, Old Testament Jesus! If someone talks about offending a Native American waiter because we didn’t know which “Indian” this food was supposed to be, and finishes with the punchline, “calm down, kemosabe, it’s not like I stole your bag of foreheads,” you may think it’s funny, or not. I think it is. But if I didn’t think it was funny–and there’s plenty of things that miss the mark for me–I’m at least open-minded enough to try understanding why someone else might laugh.

I admit my sense of humor is a pastiche of cynicism and coping mechanisms. But even I wasn’t prepared for how funny I thought this was. A couple from New Jersey just had their fourth child, and it was immediately taken away by the state. Their other three children were taken by child protective services in January of 2009 because the parents were suspected of abuse and neglect. I’m still an asshole for laughing if we stop here. But let’s keep going. These are the names of their first three children:

*Honzlynn Himler Jeannie Campbell

*Joycelynn Aryan Nation Campbell

*Adolf Hitler Campbell

If you can’t see the humor in this, you’re an idiot. If you believe this sort of thing just doesn’t happen, if it makes you uncomfortable because it can’t be wrapped around nerd verbs on “The Big Bang Theory,” if you feel like you couldn’t attack the humor in this without dumbing it down to vague analogies and platitudes about how racism is wrong, if you feel like it’s just too offensive to carry any humor value, you’re so wrong. This is awesome. It’s so bizarre that I can’t think of anything to do but laugh. To be fair to these parents and their mathematically unquantifiable racism, you can name your children whatever you want. For example, devout Christians name their children things like Peter, Paul, Joseph and Malachi. (We have your woman, Outlander.) People name their children after gods, book and movie characters they like, and sometimes they name them after fruit. Hell, these guys named their kid after a video game character, just so they could get free video games for life from the company that makes it.

I mean, I have so many questions. The names above are in the order they were born. That means that, when naming their children after Nazi Germany and the White Power movement, it took them three children before they realized maybe Hitler somehow fit in there. Aryan Nation came to them before Hitler. I mean, isn’t Hitler the logical #1 here? Why can’t ignorance this brutal at least have some sense of internally consistent logic? But practicality in one’s hatred aside, there are far more pressing problems with people hearing about you naming your children after the bellwethers of a nation full of facile, racist, genocidal fascists.

It’s hard to explain the difference, sometimes, between dealing with ignorance, and passively justifying it. To treat it with levity is to understand it without investing oneself too deeply; to pull too far away, though, risks a dangerous, comic dissociation from the sickness this sort of thing that turns, long term, into a simple incapacity to empathize with the suffering of others–the creation of an us/them dynamic that makes victims into types, into things. To overreact to something like this, to treat it exclusively as the sickening reminder of one of the darkest manifestations of the human psychology, is certainly doing it justice, but it’s also the easiest and most effective way to keep the darkness alive. The hyper-focus on the deadliness of such mindsets separates the victims out into the constant targets, the things fired upon, a perpetual, distinct group of apart-froms and other-thans. No matter what, it’s impossible for the reaction to avoid imitating the mindset that created it–if not tacitly on the victims, then actively on those who started the whole damn mess. Hatred breeding reaction, reaction breeding dichotomy, dichotomy breeding hatred.

To laugh is to search, sometimes blindly and desperately, for a middle ground. There are times when the search becomes so blind that any foothold is foothold enough. It’s the only way to manage, sometimes, without being swallowed whole. Where the line is–where the threshold between dissociation and coping, and then coping and hatred, actually exists, seems fluid and difficult to me.  What to say, how to say it, what’s too much, what’s not enough, what helps to heal, what help to destroy. When it’s just blind and dark enough, the problem isn’t finding ground to stand on, but how close you are to the lines.

And that’s the most frightening thing about being in the dark: others can still see where you are, even when you can’t see yourself.

I love Thanksgiving. Unlike Christmas, Valentine’s Day, your birthday and National Hobo Week (9-12 August), Thanksgiving wasn’t invented by soulless fatcat corporate monsters to trick you into believing an indolent commodity exchange is a satisfactory replacement for human affection. No, Thanksgiving is a celebration. It’s the apogee of sensory overload and vicious irony, which is quite a position to hold in a country that has been historically dedicated to the exclusive production of both of these things. But the Puritans weren’t just good at culture rape, farm theft and musket backfires. They were also experts at sharing with other people what was theirs to begin with. So while you can argue that there were some “marginal” abuses of the goodwill of the indigenous peoples, what you can’t say is that there was no such thing as turkey or corn, and that they didn’t eat the hot hell out of both.

What we give thanks for has definitely changed over time. For example, the Puritans were happy that they didn’t have to spend the winter eating their shoes or dead people faces anymore. The Founding Fathers were thankful that France was willing to bankrupt itself into democratic revolution in order to help us shoot British people. The Titans of Industry were really thankful for our comically absent sense of regulation, and razor companies were thankful once hippies stopped happening. Even today, we continue to be thankful for casinos, jobs, liquor, croutons, even more liquor, family (lame) and whatever a Snookie and Pikachu are. That’s why I have trouble believing we haven’t changed what we eat on Thanksgiving for so long. You’d think a country so dedicated to the twin principles of self-entitlement and gratuitous gluttony could do a little better this; hell, half of our treasured vittles look like things our bodies refuse to keep. So whether it’s cranberry sauce (blood clots), mashed sweet potatoes (meconium), pumpkin pies (anger frisbees), stuffing (don’t make me say it) or peas (I don’t know,  tumors?), Thanksgiving is about as predictable as a first grade play making Squanto look like an Uncle Tom.

This holiday represents everything we, as a nation, know about cramming dead plants and animal pieces down our gullet. It’s time we started acting like it. It’s time. The time is now. Let’s slick this bitch up with some culinary shake-ups guaranteed to make children cry gravy and make your grandmother question her sexuality.

(The menu below serves 4 people. Adjust portion size and quality control according to your drunken passive-aggression towards specific relatives.)

HDaPK proudly offers the 1st Annual:

T-Give Xtreme! 1.0

Presented by KY spermicidal lubricant and Hardee’s

Appetizer

Snackagawea: Forget sexy Indian wilderness guides. Let this modern take on Pemmican blaze a trail straight from your mouth hole to your lower thorax!

Microwave four Snicker’s bars until they just begin to melt. Form into clumsy patties, and jam some asparagus tips into them. Like, deep into them. Cover in flour tortillas. Submerge patties completely in bourbon for 15 minutes. Remove from bourbon and place them in the freezer for however many minutes it takes to freeze. (I don’t know how long that is. I’ve never really done this before.) Remove from freezer. Eat, somehow.

Side Dishes

Potato Surprise: So many people like surprises! Don’t ask me why.

Skin 3 lbs. of Russet potatoes, and cut them into small pieces. Place them in boiling water until they are soft, but not falling apart. Mix in 1/4 C. whole milk, 2 C. heavy whipping cream, 1 stick of unsalted butter, and stir until fully incorporated. Add salt and pepper to taste. Garnish with “danger balls.”**

**Recipe for “danger balls”: wad up live wasps with three layers of fila dough. Place dough in toaster until wasps are angry. Glaze danger balls with danger sauce (4 parts maple syrup to 1 part Hawaiian Punch). Serve.

Whiskey: Open a 1/5 gallon bottle of Jack Daniel’s No. 7 sour mash Tennessee whiskey. Find old Nintendo and cartridge for “Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!”. Insert cartridge and controller, and turn on system. Serve. (Don’t forget to save those passwords!)

Capered Goose Fist with Jaegermeister Glaze: The goose fists (sometimes called “Carl Hanson’s wing-knee”) are considered a delicacy nowhere, and should be prepared with absolute hostility. Make sure the goose is dead first. They hate this otherwise.

Pluck one adult-sized goose. Save feathers. Cut off the goose wings, and trim wings down to two inches on both sides of the final wing joint. Cover wings in A-1 steak sauce. Place on a cookie sheet in the oven at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. While it is cooking, combine 8 shots of Jaegermeister with one jar of marshmallow fluff, and whip into a frenzy. Pull out wings just long enough to dump the glaze potion over them liberally, then sprinkle capers over everything (yourself included). Put back in oven, cook until brown. Remove from oven, and let sit. Cover with feathers. Serve. Try to make it look like an accident.

M&M’s 8 Mile Wrap Battle: You better lose yourself in the moment.

Inside of a standard crepe, lay down a thin bed of lentil puree. Sprinkle cilantro, cloves, garlic and the leftover beak muscles and knuckle meat from the goose. Scream. Sprinkle with powdered sugar. Add three tears, 1/3 C. M&M’s. Roll up tightly into a nice little wrap. Garnish with shredded hot dog. Make sure you make enough to get all the way through the championship. These are meant to be eaten quickly, in contest against another. Construct a tournament bracket. Give first-round byes to pets and the elderly. The winner gets first cut of the main course.

Main Course

Montessori Turducken: this is sure to please everyone, and definitely isn’t a tacit contract with the unholy beyond!**

Have a duck get a chicken pregnant. Make sure the birth takes place no more than two weeks before T-Give Xtreme! It’ll look stillborn, but trust me, it’s not. (The timing is pure logistics–the lifespan of the hybrids are… somewhat compromised). You must kill both the father and the mother of the chicken-duck (chuck?). That part’s important. Pluck them. Burn the feathers. Kill the chuck, and shave its hair off. Hell, kill a turkey while you’re at it. You’re in too deep now. Hollow out all three. Shove the duck corpse into the turkey. Put the chuck corpse inside the chicken, and manage its way inside the duck shell. Insert 1 beer. Next, take a thin chisel and construct a complex network of tunnels inside the raw birds. This is the “chuck dungeon,” and the ghost will naturally learn which areas of the bird it likes the best, and just go there. Don’t worry; its ethereal wanderings will leave a thin layer of ghost juice throughout the birds that will taste amazing, though its favorite area (the juice hive) will have a higher concentration of flavor. Make sure you eat plenty of thyme; its aroma confuses communication across the nexus, and will help stop the chuck’s ghost from summoning the Black Wind out of vengeance.

**Don’t serve to old people. It… renews them.

Dessert

Haha, what? Are you kidding me? Really? Fine. Here.

Dancing Mungo with Portabella-Skittle-Snapple Syrup: The Dancing Mungo is a British (?) tradition that goes back to the days of yore, and probably further.

To start, soak 1 pack of regular Skittles in a bottle of Mango Madness Cocktail-flavored Snapple. While this mockery of nature is dissolving, melt 2 packs of Starburst in a 2-inch saucepan. Once melted, add 1/4 C. powdered flax seed, milk, and 1 C. of anything with a rooster on the front. Bring to a boil. Mix in 1 quart of yore (if there’s no yore, mix equal parts dark chocolate and regret). Add fire, and don’t forget to check for ticks! Reduce to a simmer. Mash up one back of Funyuns, mix with melted butter, and line a pie tin with it; this will serve as your “pie” crust. Pour in Starbursts. Puree 1 portabella mushroom cap; place in a microwave safe dish, and incorporate Skittle-Snapple base. Microwave until ready. Pour syrup over “pie,” then cook it. Look at it while it’s cooking. Think about what you’ve done today… really think about it. When you can live with yourself, remove from oven. Serve.

Ever since Ronald Reagan and Jesus invented America in 1981, it’s been apparent that we don’t have many mutually shared traditions. When you have a country this big, with this many people, there are going to be things that cause profound disagreement–things like poor people, what the deal with soccer is, and sounding awkward when trying to describe a friend without referring to him as “the black guy.” In a world so rife with struggle and conflict, it seems impossible to ever find common ground. We are a society of island universes.

Even in the face of such adversity, there are certain things almost all Americans hold dear: putting on clothes, regretting stuff, getting diabetes and producing dickbag knockoffs of television shows and movies from twenty years ago, to name a few. Luckily for us, there is one great American holiday that allows us to do all of these things at once:

Halloween.

And, as I pointed out last year, there’s a far more likely chance that instead of planning for a month, you’ll instead be spending 10 minutes at Goodwill looking for a hat shaped like shapes. That means people you don’t even know are already making you feel like a box full of buttholes. It’s not your fault, though. This lack of planning goes all the way back to childhood for so many of us. Dressing up for Halloween, when I was a kid, was both joyless and pragmatic. First, you dig through a cricket-infested box from the crawlspace, and fish out that $2.00 plastic Batman mask from last year. Then you, dump out all of the cricket shit, and use a warm washcloth to wipe off the dried blood around the mouth slit because you couldn’t keep your tongue out of it last year. Next, you put on the plastic Spider-Man smock from two years ago, because your sister tore the Batman one fighting you hockey-style after you stole her Sour Patch Kids and then shoved all the Snickers down your underwear. Then, cover it all with your winter jacket and hood, because it’s going to be cold out. Alright, let’s light this candle!

My point is, all of that stuff actually gets you jacked when you’re six, because that is exactly the age where you don’t understand the crippling pathology of vigilante psychosis. Whether it’s building your own Iron Man suit or shoving ankle socks down the front of your Superman tights, the sense of childlike wonder you remember is going to transform into intense insecurity once you realize that The Hulk didn’t jiggle when he ran. This may seem like a purely male problem, but it isn’t–women occasionally chance into it as well. For example, take the “sexy wench.”  Look, Drama Club, quit looking for an excuse to get more wear and tear out of your Renaissance Faire clothes. I know you think the pinnacle of American cinema is Pirates of the Caribbean, but here’s something you might have overlooked about women living in and around pirate cultures in the Caribbean Islands: more than you’d care to know, many were STD-riddled, occasionally raped alcoholics living in insular societies revolving around the whims of homicidal anarchists. So unless you want to knock out your own teeth, drink rum out of a stranger’s armpit and give yourself dysentery, save it for Lute-stock.

And so on. Since it’s obvious that you’re an irresponsible mess who can’t be trusted to wipe front to back, let alone create Halloween brilliance, the only real option here is to let me help you.

You’re welcome.

If you’re starved for ideas, try one or all of these, and see how long it takes for you to run out of fucks to give:

Doctor Scientist, Ph.D.: Ever since that kid from “The Breakfast Club” invented a smoking-ass hot robot woman, everything we used to know about technology has made us ashamed. It’s time to take science back! Get yourself a lab coat, and get one of those metal circle headband things that physicians still wear in every piece of ClipArt. Maybe carry a rat with you. Depending on your scene, a couple of bottles of prescription pills couldn’t hurt. You should come up with an idea of something you’re inventing: cat powder, sneeze condoms and ghost insurance are all good conversation starters.  And don’t shout “It’s ALIVE!” whenever you get an erection. Doctor Scientist only does two things in life: get shit done.

You heard me.

Kris Kross: You’re going to start out feeling like a total shithead with this one, I’m warning you. But you’re not just here to make people jump jump. You’re also here to dress like an autistic chimp and bust rhymes that a sufficiently programmed Speak ‘n’ Spell could make more entertaining. Try to make sure you’re the one who wore the suspender jeans, not the regular jeans. Seriously, what was supposed to be the symbolism with this? At any rate, initial feelings and reactions aside, it’s only going to be a few drinks before people won’t even need an explanation for why your clothes are on backwards to nod with silent approval. And if you can avoid the collar of that rasta-colored baseball jersey cutting into your neck while you’re throwing up tequila on a sexy wench, then you better watch out! For the Mack Daddy! The Miggidy Miggidy… sigh.

Hipster: You may be asking yourself, “how do I make fun of a twenty-year old that doesn’t shower, rides a skateboard, discusses how broken education is from the back of a college classroom and owns six Thundercats t-shirts?” It’s surprisingly easy. Embrace the gestalt. There’s fair amount of irony that comes with being meta-hipster, and you should be prepared for the fact that most people won’t give a shit whether or not you’re actually an asshole, or just faking it. Here’s a hint: if can’t think of any way to make fun of hipsters, then congratulations! You are one. Just go as yourself. (Asshole.)

Twitter: Put down your Edgar Winter LPs, America’s youth, and check out this high-concept/high-reward costume that all the cool cats are wearing this year! First thing’s first: you’re going to need a beak. It’s a tricky peripheral on a day like Halloween,  because you’re going to have to pick a shape that is both conducing to pecking and drinking. And trust me, once you start drinking in a bird costume on any day, you’ll be doing a lot of pecking. Try to make sure the costume is blue, and that you don’t use real feathers. Real-life birds can smell treachery, and they don’t take it lightly. Beyond that, just walk around and speak distantly and objectively about every person you talk to, especially if they’re boring. Nothing stops a conversation quicker than “@Applebee’s: almost midnight, and it’s really hard to shit in a bird costume. Oops! Guess it’s not! Haha! Just kidding! I think!”

Dependent Claus: If there’s anything about the North Pole that I can’t stand, it’s icebergs. A close second is Santa Claus. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” Bullshit, Claus. Every year, the true miracle is delivered by Grammar Santa, who leaves thesauruses (thesauri?) and number 2 pencils inside the backpacks of all the world’s children that got at least a B+ in Phonics. It should be pretty easy to find a Santa outfit, and do it without the beard: Dependent Claus doesn’t need to hide his face like the Jesus Santa does. Then, fill a tube sock full of shaving cream. Drunk people are full of blurted half-sentences and uncivil conversation, so every time you hear someone talking like a rube, slap them across the face with your shaving cream sock. A bar full of faces with splotchy white messes will be a walking reminder of their common shame. This move is known as “The Kris Kringel.” There’s only one kind of person who hates Kringling: Communists. Which, now that I think about it, I realize how counter-intuitive that sounds from a sock-wielding pain monster in a red jacket, but Dependent Claus has another sentence fragment for you: an ugly little word called “bigotry.”

Subordinate Claus: Same as Dependent Claus, but in S & M gear instead of the classic Santa outfit.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent a good deal of your adult life hating disaster movies, yet silently hoping to punch nature in the face. In the upper Midwest, there are no natural disasters, unless you count bears and Ohio. More than once, I’ve seen a movie commercial about how gravity and tornadoes somehow make every plant hate being alive, or a news report that nature is happening to people everywhere except here. It can make a guy jealous.

That is, of course, until I survived an earthquake. Kind of.

So now, as a certified quaking-earth-no-shit-from-taking bad-ass, I can’t help but look at the floods and forest fires and hurricanes that have been happening over the last few months, and wonder: isn’t it time we did something a little more… American about fixing these problems?

Now is the right time to shift to a weather-pummeling, no-nonsense strategy for managing natural disasters. The Federal Emergency Management Association (or NAFTA) is about to go bankrupt. FEMA has even sunk to the level of posing its own employees as reporters at its press conferences to avoid answering difficult questions about their disaster relief operations. Clearly, we’re in no position to mount a counterstrike against a mass Dracula attack, or even that briefcase disease guy from 12 Monkeys. So while your average American may not be concerned about hailstones the size of a unmedicated diabetic house cat, I am. To replace a red-tapey, foot-draggy, underfunded government boondoggle, here are 5 new plans I propose for giving Mother Gaia a pile-driver in the future:

1.) Mosquito-powered Zombie Death Squads

Even though the article proved to be a hoax, one can’t help wondering if actually having insects that reactivate the hearts of the recently deceased isn’t so worth diving into. For one, it wouldn’t matter if anyone died. We could just jump start dead people like a stalled school bus full of zebra poachers. It’d be a huge money-saver, unless the mosquitoes decide to unionize. There will, of course, always be the potential for abusing the power to bring back the dead (Evil Lincoln, Hitler in a Hamster, eternally shrieking nether-army of poached zebras), but all of those things might happen anyway.

Your move, science.

2.) Stegosaurus Thunderdome

I know you already think this is a stupid idea, but hear me out. Dinosaurs are renowned for their ability to eat Newman, but they can do more than just spit smoker’s cough at fat people. Stegosauruses are tall, enjoy warm weather, and can swim probably. In spite of having a brain literally the size of a walnut, they tend to be accomplished cognitive behavioral therapists and sign linguists, which helps to calm humans during times of duress via a flurry of threateningly soothing visual ovations. They have tiny heads and inappropriate jaws. This means no language, and no complaining. Above all, Stegosauruses are basically four-legged sailboats, so wind isn’t an issue. All of this leads to an animal that can carry any human anywhere that human wants to go, including away from Dracula attacks. (Draculas hate cold blood.) The result is probably the closest recreation to Master Blaster we’ll ever see, and that’s plenty of reason to folly in God’s domain long enough to unleash an ancient reptile panoply of lifeguards and police lizards.

3.) “Press Your Luck” weather control system (with lasers)

If there’s anything enduring about the 1980s, it’s the game show “Press Your Luck.” The premise of this show was simple: offer people nominal prizes and a few hundred bucks in exchange for being belittled by incredulous hobgoblins, sometimes dressed like Elvis, circus things or a Civil War general, all on television. It was the perfect way to tell an entire country full of trailer park housewives that it wasn’t so bad after all. The show was a like the fever dream of an unloved house pet: a sad, conceptually confusing mix of terrible haircuts and the distinct scent of misplaced attention. Add some lasers, and you have a perfect plan for fighting natural disasters.

Allow me to explain. I’m operating on the assumption that lasers can do something like murder a hurricane, which so far hasn’t been disproved, or even tried. And if you were a storm (they give these things first names for a reason, you know), can you imagine anything more humiliating than an opium-fueled cartoon dressed like Marilyn Monroe scratching its way through the opening to “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” and then stealing all of your raindrops? You wouldn’t even wait for the shame to sink in before you sat down on a rock somewhere and cried, silently wishing Sheila hadn’t left you, coaxing you into your genocidal rampage across Northeast Colorado. And when you’re alone, wallowing in your self-doubt and broken dreams?

Laser to the face. Checkmate.

4.) Ask politely to stop it already

What? You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. I know that this is the country that invented $5 steak and lobster dinners, the Vietnam War and the quarterback blitz. We’re not used to rolling over, showing our bellies and waiting for gentle chin rascals to soothe us into a purr-induced coma. But maybe the cat is schizophrenic (from the Ancient Greek roots “phrengo,” or “punched throat,” and “schizon,” meaning “often and repeatedly”). Maybe, the piercing sentience behind those complex little eyes belies the tacit premise: “… or else.”

That’s more like it.

5.) Write your congressman or congresswoman and complain about storms

“Town hall” political forums are a novel concept: they combine the down-home folksiness of humanizing abstract politics with the adorably racist and uninformed elderly. You know what the problem with America is? “Taxes.” You know what else it is? “Socialism.” Because those things make sense together. And so on. The point is, it doesn’t matter how batshit bonkers you are. If you go to a town hall-style meeting, you’ll be in a room full of people who think Jesus Christ is a verb and that vodka is a Communist plot to eugenically breed the democracy out of our blood by lowering our inhibitions until we have sex with whatever formless blur is gastropodding through our field of vision. Once the children are aware that they are the only surviving spawn from the clutch that lumbered out of that unholy union, they’ll give up on God, hate the freedom that allowed their parents to hold hands (hooves?) and walk out of the bar together, and paint themselves Red.

The point is, complaining about the weather will make you, decidedly, the most rational person in the room– and that includes the idiot politician who believes your opinions matter. They are no more able to stop the storms than they are able to teach the backwards Macarena to fire-breathing earthworms, but at least it’ll be the government’s fault now, and not nature’s.

Accepting that we live in a world where things merely happen sounds like a lot of work. Those kinds of cognitive gymnastics don’t jibe with the hegemony. We operate on a principle that can be called something like “sufficient similarity.” It goes beyond who we help; it extends into the realm of the empathetic, a fundamental disconnect to understand the suffering of those whose lives are destroyed through the accidents inevitable to existence. To help is to enable– isn’t that the reason we want to stop funding all social programs? The Red Queen effect of rooting out the cheaters is an unending battle, and it’s definitely easier just to say that we should stop throwing money at the problem. The solution may not find itself, but its a damn sight better than believing that poverty perpetuates itself, and the cognitive dissonance that blocks out the advantage takers at the top of the ladder is another great American tradition. The American Dream may be a bankrupt concept but it’s comfortable, and there’s a certain emptiness in our understanding–a short-circuit– that occurs when even the illusion of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps can’t be applied. Helping the helpless is a moral itch that we are scratching raw.

Victims of circumstance, suck it up. Physician, heal thyself.

And if you aren’t a doctor, that’s just your own bad luck.

I’m not a political man. I listen to NPR, I know the actual definition of socialism, and I know Count Chocula can’t run for office in the United States. That’s about as far as I go– but it’s not your fault, America. This country’s body politic is folksy, uninteresting and dangerously prescriptive, but those are not reasons in themselves to maintain philosophical distance from politics. No, politics just came along too late in my life to consistently hold a place of real value. I’m an adult male. I own lamps and a knife set, which is already a lot of responsibility. On top of that, there’s a lot of concerns on my daily agenda, such as:

*things to dip chicken in

*ants

*running and jumping

*reading about eels

*the ballistics of various cold cuts

*what feathers are made out of

And so on. There’s just not enough hours in the day. Politics offers me very little, personally speaking. FoxNews gives me aneurisms, sure, but so do all the people who only get their news from Jon Stewart. I don’t care about any cause nearly enough to vote for it, and the only people I hate are geese. You can’t make geese illegal. Obama could pass social health care by winning a steel cage match against a berserker panda and it would still have to be more attention-grabbing than memorizing all the different Lego sizes in order to keep me interested. The reason this is so important is, obviously, because the world was supposed to end, but then it didn’t. 21 May, 2011, at 5:59 PM EST, was when this was supposed to go down. It didn’t. Maybe God doesn’t live on the East Coast, I don’t know. And I’m kicking myself for not going to Goodwill, buying tons of old shoes, pants and shirts, and just leaving them in piles all over the place. There’s nothing I can do about that now. What I do know is that we still have a country to run here, and to be honest, the Rapture is exactly the kind of flash a good candidate should be able to bring to the table.

Think about it. For the first time since the Macarena, everyone in the US was interested in the same thing. We’re unified. We’re laughing with one voice here. This energy must be carried over. We need a candidate who will listen to the heartbeat of the American people, hear what they’re saying, see what they love, know what keeps them smiling and happy. I know just the group of Americans to do it too. You know who I mean. This candidate should appeal to the somewhat conservative moral and social sensibilities of Americans, and know how to pinch a penny. Someone not afraid to poke their nose into the wrong place, if they think they can learn something useful. Someone who knows what it is like to be pushed to the margins of society, someone whose people has a long history, especially in Europe, of being ostracized, stereotyped, scapegoated, even hunted. Someone who understands what it means to have one’s family, one’s faith, one’s very way of life constantly threatened, and to come out victorious and strong. Someone from an ancient and learned tradition.

I’m talking, of course, about a werewolf.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Nick, you handsome idiot, neither party will nominate a werewolf.” That’s true. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are ready for real change, let alone man-beast metamorphosis. Which is why I’m founding a new political party: the RepubLycans.

Here’s why a werewolf would make a perfect US presidential candidate:

1.) A hit with young voters

Thanks to nearly a decade of indolent literature, most Americans younger than thirty are perfectly aware of werewolves. A lot of this same demographic thinks cheeseburgers are vegetables and that the Batman symbol should be on a calculator. A note to any politician who wants to get elected: their vote counts exactly the same as those assholes who always make you talk about your policies. If you were a teenager, would you vote for a politician because you had a photo op or if they answered your question in a town hall meeting? Okay, now what if the answer to that question was ripping a lamb in half, and what if that photo was of you high-fiving a werewolf in a business suit? Thought so.

2.) Werewolf-specific political banter

Oftentimes, politicians who are light on their feet can dodge questions or give quips that divert actual blame or interrogation of a key point. One of the most valuable things a politician can do is talk about hot-button issues without ever taking a stance on them. Check out some of these sample questions and answers, and see how a good conservative werewolf would score huge points in any debate:

Q: “Can a werewolf and a human have sexual intercourse?”

A: “Not before marriage.”

————————

Q: “Do you support the Second Amendment?”

A: “It’s only silver bullets that I have a problem with.”

————————

Q: “How would you stimulate the economy and recover American jobs?”

A: “Some presidents may like having their ear scratched by China, but not me.”

————————

Q: “How do you respond to those who say your campaign is making many lofty, rhetorical promises that will be difficult to follow through on in reality?”

A: “Where I come from, we have a saying: either you can sit around and howl at the moon, or you can run at a dead sprint through the black of night, hop the fence at Farmer Dodson’s cattle ranch, slake your blood lust on the quivering, sanguine bovine mass writhing in your jaw, and rip out its still-beating heart for your immortality ritual.”

3.) The wolf card

You know what I’m talking about.

4.) A werewolf will scare the elderly shitless

Once an American turns fifty or so, they go through their own bizarre transformation. Everything become a paranoid threat to whatever opaque ideals of theirs haven’t been crushed by a lifetime of ignorance and cognitive dissonance. This is a very large part of the voting public: the fear vote. They will vote for whatever irrational excuse for policy passes muster in that waning mental Candyland they call a brain. they will vote to preserve their way of life. They will vote this way because after a lifetime of benefiting from change and progress, those things that once were exciting and new are now deeply confusing, alienating and threatening to them. This is why you give them a conservative candidate. A RepubLycan candidate can ease all of their moral, fiscal and social worries, but with one important addition: there will no longer be any reason to find another evil to fear.

Because the steely glint in the RepubLycan’s eye in the camera lens is more visceral than any idiotic fear they can concoct in their own heads. The message in those eyes is clear: “I am the candidate who will fulfill all of your pointless and far-fetched expectations– and if you don’t vote for me, I will eat your labradoodle.”

Before I get going here, I don’t want you to be lost in case you were trying cigarettes in junior high instead of playing sorcery card games. So in case you don’t know, this is essentially what Magic: The Gathering is about:

You have “land” cards, that come in five types– red, blue, white, green and black. Each color has corresponding monsters, spells and corrective footwear that gives them advantages over cards from other colors, and you use the land cards to “pay” for them. Some people use two colors, or three, in a deck; most use one. So, your goal is to beat the opposing cartomancer by “damaging” him or her with your spells and critters. The concept is simple and straightforward, right? Good.

When I first arrived, there was a sign for the Magic tournament that said “Battle of the Bad.” Apparently, this was because we were all going to “draft” cards from different stacks of terrible cards, so we would all be playing with the worst of what Magic had to offer. I remember more than enough from my athletic playing days that you have to put yourself in the mood to succeed in whatever way works best for you; that’s why, on the drive in, I listened to a two-song playlist consisting of Cake’s “The Distance” and “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine. By the time I arrived, then, I was in no mood to be fucked with.

Organizer: “Hi, are you here for the tournament?”

Me: “No. I’m here for the Battle.”

Organizer: (awkward silence)

Me: “Am I saying that right? ‘Battle’?”

The first thing I noticed was that, whether coincidental or merely unfortunate, the room consisted in the panoply of stereotypes that likely do not represent the majority of Magic players. Thesaurus.com offers these (evidently) accepted levels of increasing severity for the nerd:

“a geek is any smart person with an obsessive interest, a nerd is the same but also lacks social grace, and a dweeb is a mega-nerd.”

Armed with this objective, scientific analysis, I was able to see quickly that the tournament offered at least one example of every major nerd sub-category:

Weird Facial Hair Guy: usually, nerds with substantial girth and height mask their insecurity by having ‘crazy’ facial hair; the rationale, I believe, is that by showing others they are good-natured about the hydraulic grip of the cold hand of evolutionary injustice, they will dissipate sarcasm, criticism or even their own insecurity. In a word, they strive to make everyone, including themselves, comfortable with them. At the tournament, this manifested in a 6’5″, 240 lb. guy with a Charles Manson beard teased out to a handlebar mustache. It was epic.

“Oh no I dih-n’t!” Guy: In his collection of essays “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace’s review of a new dictionary includes a brilliant digression on the contexts of different vernaculars in language. When we are kids, e.g., we talk differently with teachers, with parents, with friends, with religious figures, with sports coaches, etc. His point is, part of complex language acquisition isn’t the acquisition at all; it’s the understanding of euphemism and social context that determines language use. His explanation concludes that kids that are ostracized as nerds under-develop, or never develop, the ability to change social contexts as kids. If they did, they would learn to pipe down in class to not look “uncool,” they would learn to swear when no adults are around, they would learn to make fun of others in order to be a member of a “better” social group. Nerds, though, are always hopelessly trapped in one vernacular, unable to adjust to the quickly sophisticating social relationships that occur in childhood and adolescence.

A young outsider turns into an old outsider, and something really interesting happens for some nerds: in an attempt to breach this vernacular gap, they will intentionally use language in a way that is flagrantly “for” the crowd they’re with. This is always for one of two reasons: to assure others that they are funny/witty/edgy, or simply to assure others that any first impression of them as a nerd is wrong. Either way, it takes the power of categorization away from the observer, and awards linguistic leverage to the nerd– a valuable coping mechanism, particularly for those who have always been in sociolinguistic bankruptcy. The problem, of course, is no one in a given social sphere announces what they’re doing to others. Cooks don’t tell each other “the temperature of this grill will really do the trick for cooking this meat!” People getting high in the dunes at the beach don’t tell each other, “wow, we sure are smoking marijuana cigarettes!” This tournament happened to have the “funny/witty/edgy” guy, who would laugh loudly at his own jokes and frequently say things like “Why did I do that? I shouldn’t have smoked so much crack before I got here! Haha!” or “oh man, I’m going to hell for saying that! Maybe this time around I’ll get a better room!” or “jeez, I might as well bend over the table right now and save you the time!” There was one of these there, and he said all of these things and more at some point.

Un-nerd Guy: because people are not categorical stereotypes from “Revenge of the Nerds”, the reality is that the interests of “nerds” are not relegated to sociotarded Rain Men. These traditional things, like Magic, Dungeons & Dragons, Risk, and (massive multiplayer online) role-playing video games, are associated with nerds because they create a sense of togetherness and communal interest in a social group negatively defined– they are not nerds because they are nerds; nerds are nerds because of what they do not have: mainly, membership in the social groups we designate as ours, and refuse to them. Naturally, tons of people who move fluidly through multiple vernacular spheres breach on the nerd sphere easily. It feeds particular interests they have that other social groups do not satisfy, but they operate with a level of confidence that they can still move between spheres as much as they’d like without being “condemned” to being a nerd, for example, because they like video games. I am this kind of nerd, and 4 others there were as well.

The Cruelty of Interests Guy: this kind of nerd is generally the nicest and most secure of any of them. When you have a set of interests that includes deep investment in vampires, dwarves, spells and knowing insults in Latin, it can be a cruel reality that you happen to look exactly like the things you like. For example, I’m 6’3″ and broad-shouldered; I’m not really type-representative of anything you’d see on a Magic card (unless they have one for “Breakdancing Pope of Tacos”). There was one kid, though, who was about 5’5″, and on the portly side. Liking dwarves and looking like one is one of these somewhat cruel intersections. Generally though, these nerds are far more socially aware of how they are perceived because they are aware of the phenomenology of their being. This is opposed to…

Projection Complex Guy: I’m not talking about people who dress up for Star Trek or Star Wars conventions; that’s a social exercise among like-minded individuals, and whether you into it or not, that’s one thing. Some proselytize, though; they say things like “man, that was a stupid move!” or “I thought you said you played this before” or even “if you want, you can just leave now and I’ll give you your entry fee back. What a waste of time.” The goal is, obviously, to punish you for not being like them. If you weren’t so you, you’d see how awesome this guy is. He’s just turning bullying on its head: if you aren’t like him, he’ll tear you down simply on account.  We had one of these guys, and he got booted from the tourney after 10 minutes.

The Big Fat Liar: some nerds can’t give up the dream that they can sate their nerdery and still distance themselves from the nerd sphere in the eyes of others. Having, for example, gone off to college, and realizing that unlike high school, no one here knows you once made a sex doll of an anime cat-woman out of Q-tips, acrylic paint and Neosporin, then poof! Now you’re a new man! Kurt Vonnegut wrote, in “Mother Night”, that “we are what we pretend to be… so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.” This is the mantra of the liar– he will feed you the stimuli that prove he is how he wants to be seen. So he might show up to the tournament and say something like, “yeah, I mean, so I don’t really play Magic, but I know like the rules or whatever, and if I win I can sell the cards they give you on eBay. It’s like, it’s free money, know what I mean?” There was one of these.

If you did the math on all that, you’d reach ten participants. This took place on campus at Eastern Michigan University. EMU has 22,974 students. 12 of them signed up for the tournament, and only 10 showed. Many of them probably misinterpreted the title, and fearing that their radness wasn’t awesome enough, they couldn’t be good enough to beat the truly bad. But generally speaking, we can all agree I was in very selective company.

My first game did not go well. I was playing The Big Fat Liar, and his laissez-faire attitude only made getting my ass handed to me more demeaning. Clearly, I was not nearly so prescient as I had anticipated being. I rationalized beforehand that the game is essentially about using the abilities of all your cards to help each other, and hurt your opponent. It quickly became obvious that my original game plan was somewhere between “lobotomized earthworm” and “sentient pig semen” on the broad scale of intelligence. I revised my dissociative strategy, and took game 2. I lost game 3, and so was defeated in the first match.

At this point, I started questioning whether or not I possessed any supernatural ability. I mean, I know that my grandfather on my mom’s side was a Daywalker and I had two uncles that were ghosts, so I figured I must have inherited something. I resolved to focus my wizarding energies, lose all strategy, and just let the magic speak through my death-bringing fingertips.

It totally worked. I played dwarf guy next, and he was a genuinely enjoyable person. I fucked him up really hard for all three games, and by the end of it I felt absolutely terrible about myself. He even invited me to hang out with them later that night– grabbing a couple beers then going to a group thing they do every week. If the group thing hadn’t been dressing like vampires and role-playing life in the 14th century (which, in fact, it was) I may have considered it. He apologized to me for not playing better. Devastating.

I can only imagine he was an agent for my next opponent, who was a fellow Un-Nerd. He wasn’t substantially better than me, but he did have strategy. And there I was, an emotional tempest in a teapot and a strategic nightmare, sitting across from him. He evenly and methodically tore me to pieces– three games in about twenty-five minutes. (The average was three games in about forty-five minutes.) Just like that, my day was done. The whole process– from draft to draw to playing all three opponents–lasted about four hours.

This was even more embarrassing, because we were allowed to put our own names on the dry erase board for the standings before we got going. Other people put their names on it. I put “The Alabaster Porkchop” where my name was supposed to go. My rationale was, when I won the final game and the big prize, I would karate-punch my opponent’s throat until it stippled then shout “you just got CHOPPED, son!” But there I was, in a room full of people representing .0005% of EMU’s student population, at a tournament where 2 people paid money to show up then thought about it later and were like, “mmmmnaaaah, I don’t think I’ll do that,” on a Saturday at 1 PM when the number of other things any of us could have been doing besides this tournament was so inconceivable that your aneurisms would catch leprosy just from trying to think about it…

in that room on EMU’s campus, at that tournament, at that time, you could’ve walked in and seen all the legerdemain and cunning of the world’s foremost warlock and eye into the future walking slump-shouldered back to his car, and the unmistakable signature of hubris burning like neon sex into the dry erase board:

The Alabaster Porkchop.

Dead fucking last place.

On the whole, the experience was a good one. As a country, we’re so horny for nostalgia that a tragic percentage of entertainment is sampled, stolen, remade, reissued or reworked. The main problem with this, besides pandering to intellectual sloth and creating a culture of vapidity, is it never really works either way: the old who experienced it around the first time won’t appreciate the added sensationalism needed to sell it to a younger audience, and the young don’t have the cultural background or history to understand why this, why now? In the end, the product never truly hits either audience, but each audience will patronize it before being let down, justifying this process of creative abortion by agreeing to its terms. I think that’s why it’s so easy to go to something like this tournament; it’s not like they’ve added hookers or jetpacks or solid gold credenzas just to bring in a newer audience. The game has evolved a bit, but it hasn’t changed. Lots of “nerd” culture is like this. The fans and participants are militant about rules, accuracy and constancy, because it is their thing, and they won’t let what is important to them be changed without a fight. For some, the childhood dream to see their favorite things become a movie, show or toy isn’t eclipsed by the fanhood that gave birth to that dream. There are some pockets, some social spheres, where a sense of integrity still adheres to the things which brought them together in the first place. And when you can look at something you did half a lifetime ago and return to find it essentially unchanged, I think it begs an interesting question:

who, exactly, is keeping who out?

I’m probably not the only one who spent a large portion of my childhood dreaming of being a soothsayer. There was something alluring about the black arts, and not in that angsty teenager “sitting in the basement cutting ourselves and listening to The Cure while the Asian kid from homeroom tells us about Tarot cards” way. Everything I knew about wizards came from science fiction movies made before 1950; this was not a very progressive time for the thaumaturgically-inclined. Most Wizard-Americans enjoyed a variety of activities back then, such as baby finding, baby theft, baby burning, baby eating, beating babies at chess, tricking babies into signing over their powers of attorney, and backgammon. We see more than half of these, nowadays, as culturally backwards.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

Like most kids, I wanted practical magic powers. I didn’t want to travel through time or control other peoples’ minds or trick John Lithgow into making me Gatorade. I just wanted to see about thirty minutes into the future. That was it. As an overfed and underachieving middle class white kid, I was subject to a lot of peer pressure. So when you’re in 7th grade and trying to prove to a bunch of freshmen you’re cool, it’s not uncommon to do something like put “I brake for Monster Booty!” bumper stickers on the back of all the cop cars in town. Wouldn’t it be nice to know when they’re going to show up soon? It would definitely solve a lot of awkward questions with your parents after being caught: how you sneaked out, why you smell like peppermint schnapps and burning hair, when you became such a huge fan of booty, etc. Future-sight just seemed like the only worthwhile power to have. Unfortunately, the movie examples I had all arrived at the same dilemma: which is it? Are magicians always horny, aquiline sociopaths, or are they more like great white sharks– ambitious and misunderstood?

Later in junior high, I found the answer to my question– and it didn’t require any babies, stealing women for sport or shark magic. The answer was:

Surgeon General's Warning: may contain social stigmas and inappropriate self esteem.

I began to play Magic: The Gathering. This was the perfect solution, because it gave me all the benefits of predicting what others would do and then thwarting them, all without having to go to a Black Mass or becoming ensorcelled by a spell-casting donkey with a devil-may-care attitude. It wasn’t until I was almost 17 or so that I realized that, enjoy it or not, being good at Magic doesn’t really prove anything to anyone else; it does, however, tell everyone two very specific things about you. Let me explain.

1.) You might be a space alien.

Let me tell you a story. In the Old Testament, God was powerful but insecure; He made Israel slaughter the Midionites because their women were lookers, and he got jealous; He burned down Sodom and Gomorrah for doing the same things that most half-sane kids are bored with by the time they’re college sophomores, and then he turned people into spices this way and that. It’s a pretty hard sell to a potential convert; so what you do is talk up the New Testament God. Most people like the New Testament hippy God because he let his kid be in a gang, get hammered, and hang out with prostitutes. That’s some fairly progressive parenting.

So imagine you’re Paul of Tarsus, wandering around the Mediterranean in the days of yore, trying to make everyone believe that a powerful floating white guy wants their undivided attention with no proof it will get them anywhere. It’s no surprise he was laughed out of Athens; when the Greek logicians heard the idea that a god would send himself/his son to be sacrificed to redeem the people the god created as sinful to begin with as well as act like a neurotic manic-depressive, it made them spew whatever it was pretentious Greeks drank right out of their noses.

If you haven’t picked up on the parallel by now, Magic players are like St. Paul. There’s this reciprocal and insulating value to the environment of many hobbies, and 14 year-olds using a card game to establish self-worth likely qualifies as just such an environment. But to everyone on the outside, you aren’t nobly sticking by what makes you happy; you look like you’ve lost the good sense to be publicly ashamed, and whenever you try to talk an outsider about why Magic is great, they’ll just tell you why drinking beer and smoking weed at your classmate’s house with his hot older sister is just a better use of their time. Above and beyond that, high school relationships are tenuous enough anyway without introducing constant, heated competition into groups of kids who have had no outlet for competitive energy their whole lives. If you lose your Magic friends, consider how fucked you would be for friends in general. (EN: it’s very. Very fucked.) So if you can’t understand why any of this is somehow socially crippling, the chance is good you’re an intergalactic hive mind that put on a people suit to experience life as a human.

Above: a roadmap to shattered dreams and forgettable friendships.

2.) Misplaced Priorities

Parenting a Magic child can’t be easy, particularly if you have many such children. Any first-born with a younger sibling will tell you that there’s the feeling that the second kid has it better. It’s no surprise that first time parents have no clue what they’re doing. Go ahead, read parenting books. You think that’s going to prepare you for when your eight-year old beats your neighbor’s dog with a summer sausage, or when your twelve-year old daughter bangs a college sophomore for some Boone’s Farm and half a pack of smokes? Doubt it. And if you already have experience with those situations before having children, there’s a good chance your kid’s already on the fast track to the exciting career of “public masturbator/arsonist.” If you come down too heavily, you’ll make them rebel, like all teenagers desperately want to do– only because they’re Magic kids, the rebellion will be the sad ghost of anarchy, like drawing mustaches on family photos are taping popsicle sticks to your cat’s legs so he walks like Frankenstein. But if you’re too lenient, your priority– protecting your genes for future generations– may be compromised, particularly since modern teens know even something as simple as stealing rare Magic cards and rubbing them on dangling unmentionables during recess is enough to put your kid into a fear coma that won’t begin to subside until they discover alcohol, strip clubs and passive-aggression.

More than that, Magicians are usually either poor, young teenagers, or poor, old loners. Neither one has a lot of money. This means that whatever cash either of them can weasel out of their parents, scrape together from stealing bottle return slips or by selling your neighbor the “A Tale of Two Titties” and “A Cockwork Orange” porno movies he found under your bed, they will use this money to buy more Magic cards. And, because they are likely aliens, they won’t understand that they are buying packets of Virginity Insurance, 15 cards at a time.

Yet, like most people, I occasionally pine for that which is gone. I don’t particularly think about Magic anymore than, say, abusing myself to Victoria’s Secret ads, but its all part of the gestalt of adolescence. That’s why I’ve enrolled in a Magic: The Gathering tournament. Except for brief lapses very few and far between, it’s been more or less 15 years since I laid down my orcs and scepters and whatever the hell, and I’m morbidly curious to see what the modern Magician looks like– and, of course, whether I start giving a shit a little too much once the games get going.

In just a few short hours, I’ll either be heralded a champion of supernatural combat, or whatever the opposite of that is (Arby’s shift manager?).

Only time will tell where this old wizard lands.

Ironically, this is probably the best advice Magic players won't have the good sense to listen to.