Oliver Lee Bateman's Blog, page 4

The Most Important Essay You’ll Never Read (Because It Sucks LOL LMFAO ROFLMAO)

I am officially out of ideas. I thought that I had a new one a couple minutes ago, but it turned out to be a reminder to add AA batteries to my grocery list.1 The way I see it, you can only write about a couple of things or people not only won’t read your work but won’t even acknowledge that it, and by extension you, exist.2 At any given moment, there are perhaps a dozen “thinkable ideas”3 in circulation. You can recognize these because they are repeated endlessly on social media: “brainless conservatives are brainless,” “war in Africa is bad but what can ya do when you’re fighting all these food allergies?,” “headscarves are outdated relics of the misogynistic past in areas where headscarf-wearing is mandated but banning them is racist and also possibly misogynistic; it’s all relative!” and “Thomas Friedman” are some notable examples. In order to get published somewhere other than here, which is nowhere, you have to “pitch”4 a “piece”5 that has something to do with one of these preexisting ideas. Here’s a sample of a serious pitch:

Dear so and so, I have written pieces for blah blah blah and so forth and et cetera. Are you interested in a piece about Thomas Friedman? In it, I will argue that Thomas Friedman’s latest Friedmoaning isn’t sufficiently Friedmanist because it omits necessary consideration of non-moustache related Friedmasonry. My twitter is @FriedmanWriter420; please note that I have 23,000 followers, only half of whom were purchased via Fiverr, and these followers can be expected to yield a preexisting audience of several hundred losers and spambots who retweet and occasionally even skim the banal, toothless shit that I write. All of my prior hackwork is Friedman-related, so I’m an excellent single-subject Friedmaniac who will never deviate from that type of thing. Let me know. My schedule is pretty open because I reside in my mother’s basement and spend all my money on eBay auctions for Starting Lineup figurines or have it stolen from me when I’m mugged on my way out of Magic: The Gathering tournaments (happens more than you might think!). Best wishes, Oscar Levi Berkman

Or this, a pitch for a humorous publication such as The Toast or McSweeney’s6:

Dear so and so, What follows is a completely inoffensive piece that is based on the wholly uncreative premise that disgraced, closeted GOP Congressman Aaron Schock was secretly texting with disgraced, sorta-closeted late Victorian writer Oscar Wilde. I guarantee that all of the jokes in here are super easy to get even if you’ve only ever seen a single sentence of Wilde’s work and thus will allow you to feel real good about yourself (and hella cultured too!) because you’re in on our swell middlebrow gag. Plus I want to get published by you to impress this person I’m trying to have “relations” with. I doubt that he/she will read the piece, but the byline will make for some great bragging rights during the online chat when I’m lying like a rug in order to make myself sound way more impressive and relations-worthy than I actually am, which is to say not at all. Thanks for your help in this worthy effort. I hope to make a “sextape” and I will send you the fruits of my labor to let you know I’m a bad ass. Kindest regards, Ohvuh Les Bimmin

You’re probably thinking, “damn, this guy’s clearly trying to get one over on me: he says he can’t come up with any ideas and yet he just articulated two hella marketable ones right there!” And you’d be right, I guess. I can come up with infinite ideas. I’m an idea man who doesn’t make the things you use, but instead makes the things you use better.

Here’s the problem: I really and truly detest the current fallen state of writing, including all of the writing I’ve done for the past decade, which is somehow worse than the trillions of words spilled across the thousands of years that preceded it. Here in this secret clubhouse no girlz allowed forum that no one will ever see much less read, I’m denouncing my bullshit makework…and yours, too. As I frequently joke to the friends I pretend to have, it amounts to “words, not sentences.” Type type typing away with nary a worthwhile thing to say, amiright? I made a couple grand from the effort but, given my rippling abs and stunning glutes, I surely could’ve earned more than that camming for an audience of lonely old dudes who were just hoping to knuckleball some sweet relief at the end of a tiring and pointless workweek. I certainly would’ve felt less dirty and unappreciated performing labor of that sort.

So where do I go from here, hmm? More of this, I suppose. This is harmless, it’s relaxing, it’s safe. This consists of fiction you can’t understand (because it sucks) and arguments you won’t get (because they’re unsupported by logic and evidence). And I’ll grow smaller and smaller as time passes, which is what you do when you don’t, with one 24-hour stretch distinguished from another only by the joyless knuckleballing that concludes yet another long day’s journey into night.

like srsly. Shit still runs on batteries. In 2011…er, 2012. Ain’t that cray cray? And those paperweight-sized D batteries…well, there’s at least one very important household apparatus that’s still powered by them, ha ha ha.
Read it? Nobody reads it, it being used here to mean “anything at all,” so let’s scrap that. What I meant is they won’t even click “like” on it, much less comment angrily on it or (heaven forfend!) actually click on it.
This is a key point, so naturally I’m burying it in a footnote. But these footnotes are cool; you can click on them and pull them up alongside the body text and read the two in conjunction. It makes for a more fun and engaged reading experience, or would if you were reading this and I were writing it, neither of which is happening. Anyway, as to the “thinkable idea”: I’m of the belief, supported only by anecdotal observation (which, to be perfectly fucking honest/”TBPFH,” is as sound a foundation as any other), that there are only a few possible concepts that cyberspace, which has a telescoping effect despite all this empty talk about its ramifying potential, allows its bajillion users to consider at any given time. Want a demonstration? Consider the intense but completely ephemeral reactions to the deaths of relative nobodies. I first noticed this when guitar pioneer Les Paul died back in 2009, but it’s only worsened since then. Each day, some D-lister kicks the bucket, is mourned by people who only tangentially enjoyed his or her work (it’s not like there were many serious readers or listeners *before* cyberspace, after all), and then vanishes into thin air, never to be thought of again. This is a model for the political and cultural debates that constantly grip cyberspace: they outrage people, galvanize the most cutting-edge slacktivism and possibly even get a few boots on the ground, and then are forgotten almost as rapidly as they appeared. So it goes for LBTQIA issues, race issues, gender issues, and all of these other problems that, per Rorty and Benn Michaels and other old-timey leftists, should be subsumed under a more general label of “class struggle,” emphasis on the *struggle* part. Of course, these thinkable ideas, which shift like desert sands yet leave the dune untouched, are fundamentally incompatible with struggle. They’re so easy, so wonderfully and blissfully thinkable, that they needn’t be thought by you at all. Why waste time with bespoke opinioneering when a hack such as myself can provide you with all the prêt-à-porter punditry that you can handle?
i.e., email an fresh-out-of-undergrad intern who “works” for one of these omnipresent commentary blogs that have carved up public opinion into bite-sized and largely content-free fragments.
i.e., 1,000 words of pusillanimous, empty analysis, most of which is either hyperlinked to or simply plagiarized from other “pieces” on the same “thinkable idea.”
Yeah, that piece of garbage still exists. It has even retained its circa-1999 layout, during which time it likely hasn’t gained a single reader (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, whatever the fuck that means, came into existence back when a few things, maybe like .0000000000001% of the things, were still read, so “reader” is appropriate here). You’ll have to Quantcast it to be sure (I don’t have the time, bros; this is the Golden Age of Television, or so the Vulture reviews I speed-read in lieu of actually watching any of said television would tell me if I did more than scan my eyes across the words, a habit of consuming online content no more explicable than a cat batting at its own tail), but I’d imagine its demographics are all late thirtysomethings who still dress like twentysomethings dressed back in the late 1990s and cling to the illusion that their lives haven’t changed despite the fact that they’re out of shape and have children &c. Wasn’t that a long sentence? No wonder I’m a guy contemplating the Bitter End (yeah, I listened to Placebo, so sue me) instead of doing something valuable with my life, like writing about Thomas Friedman.

—Orson Lon Bakersman

Doms and Subs

Jesus fucking Christ, thought Emily Twiggs, though she wasn’t thinking about someone named Jesus fucking someone named Christ so much as she was thinking about how life sucked. Let’s be crystal clear on that point, shall we?

Jesus fucking Christ, thought Emily Twiggs, is every guy here on Fetishfinder.com a “dom?”1 They were, of course: “doms” of all shapes and sizes, mostly oblong shapes and distended or deflated sizes, who were raisin-overripe for the picking. Each promised that he would put Emily Twiggs in her place, which was likely at his corn-encrusted flat feet or waxing his 1989 Geo Tracker or going to Wal-Mart to acquire a digital receiver so that he could finally watch antenna television again.

Emily Twiggs, who like 750 million other red-blooded Americans had just seen Fifty Shades of Grey, was hot for a real Christian Grey-type asskicker, a once-in-a-lifetime ubermensch who deserved to be worshipped and obeyed because he was nigh-on perfect. But instead she found aged shut-ins highlighting their “massive man meat” (4.5 inches semi-hard, but semi-hard was as hard as it got these days) or an ability to tie elaborate restraint knots developed over the course of many grueling years in the Boy Scouts.

The last guy she met had seemed promising. He was a handsome, well-built college professor who taught courses on the history of sex and sexuality. He claimed to have vast experience with threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes, as well as a “firm hand” when it came to spankings and chokings. On top of that, he hadn’t wasted any time, inviting her right back to his studio apartment.

"Just me, the flip & fuck2, and a coffee maker,” he’d texted her. “Gonna be a loooooooooooong night.”

And it was, with just that many o’s. Only the o’s didn’t correspond to orgasms experienced by the parties, but rather to the train of “oooooooooh gods” delivered by the professor, whose last name was Berkman, as he cried himself to sleep.

"Are you okay?" Emily eventually asked him. She didn’t give a shit, of course, but one had to say these things. She wasn’t a psychopath, after all.

Upon hearing this question, he brightened. “Oh, I’m such a pathetic fraud,” he said, launching into the woe-is-me sob story he’d prepared for such an occasion. “I claim to be dominant, because everybody thinks I’m so powerful and great and sexy, but what I want more than anything is to be…” He trailed off.

Emily, noticing he’d fallen silent in an extremely contrived and dramatic manner, again did the polite thing. “Is to be what?”

"I just…I don’t know what you’d say to it. I haven’t ever told anyone about it. I guess what I’d like more than anything else is to experience—"

"You want me to fuck you with a strap-on," she said, heaving a sigh after he nodded his assent. "Damn it, what is with you guys? All of you powerful Christian Grey types, you’re all just pussies and losers. You want me to do the work? Don’t I deserve to be dragged through the mud in the service of something greater? Aren’t you the perfect man who will save me from my mundane life of being dragged through fifty miles of shit by, uh, dragging me through 50 miles of shit?"

"Don’t you go quoting Smiths lyrics3 at me, young lady,” Berkman replied. “I was pretending I liked them back when you were still learning basic anatomy by playing nurse with your guinea pigs. Now we can just stop here and let bygones be bygones or you can go ahead and get the hell gone.”4

Emily, who was half-naked and seated right next to Berkman on his flip & fuck, began hastily assembling the pieces of her wardrobe she’d strewn about the 200 square feet of the apartment during the sultry sixty seconds5 when she had assumed some real hardcore sex was imminent.

"Just like that, huh?" Berkman continued. "Don’t you feel the pain that I feel? Does it always have to be about you, you bitch? I bared my soul to you, and you—you disport with me as cruelly as a schoolboy who pulls the wings off flies!"6

Emily shrugged. “Whatever, man. We just met. All you had to be was not an asshole.”

Berkman, sensing another opening, launched into his second monologue. “All I had to be was not an asshole, huh? It’s just that easy, is it? Maybe it’s easy for you. Emma—”

"Emily," corrected Emily.

"Maybe it’s easy for you, Emme, but it’s not so fashul, fashool…uh, facile for me. I’m all alone here in this rat hole of an apartment with no one to talk to. Can you imagine how much I’ve suffered?"

"No, of course not," said Emily. "We exchanged one e-mail and a couple of texts. Look, I have to go. It’s nearly 7 p.m. and I have a lot to do tomorrow."

"Oh, go ahead and leave me. They all leave. Everyone leaves. Life is about endings, because life itself ends. What else could it be about? There is no success. There is no happiness. There is no…"

She didn’t hear the rest because she was already down the steps and in the lobby. Even the vaunted Doppler shift failed to deliver the remaining words.

"He was a nice enough guy," she had told her friend Camden when the pair met for coffee the next day. "And it wasn’t that he was pretending to be sad; I’m sure he was sad. I just couldn’t bring myself to give a shit."

Camden Camden, whose Botox-enhanced countenance seemed to register a look of permament surprise, looked surprised because, well, Botox. “Oh Em, I never give a shit. Like ever.”

Emily sipped her $7.99 caramel apple nutelliato frappécinita, two-thirds of which was cane sugar and the remainder little more than heartbreak and thin air. “Then what’s the point of online dating, Cammy?”

"I don’t know. You can’t just stay in forever. Sometimes you have to go out. And it’s nice to know you can, even if it’s awful, because then you can come back in and it’s not quite as awful, though it still is. When I was married it was worse: it was like living alone except someone besides you is always angry at or deeply disappointed by what you’ve done wrong, and what you’ve done wrong is everything." Camden’s explanation, much like the rest of her, came as something of a surprise. She was full of surprises, or at least full of a substance that caused her to appear surprised.

"So should I give up trying to find a dom?" Emily asked.

"Dom as in Dominic? I know a Dominic, but he goes by Nicky.7 Total douchebag roidhead guido,” replied an ever-startled Camden.

Emily stirred her drink, which was supposed to be lukewarm. Was it lukewarm? It seemed slightly on the chilly side. Ah whatever. “Dom as in…I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. Maybe Oscar Berkman was the guy for me.”

Camden seemed surprised to hear this. “Maybe he was, Em. But I can assure you that there’s someone out there for everyone. You’ll know it when you see it. Just keep your eyes open. I know I always do, but then again, my lids don’t shut the way they used to before all the treatments.”

"So I’ll find somebody?"

"If true love didn’t exist, why would we always be reading about it in magazines and seeing it in movies and dreaming about it at night? You tell me that, Em. If somebody believes in something, or a lot of somebodies, that something has to be real."

So what I’m trying to say is that I’m super duper double-dog sorry for everything, Emily. You were a hot tomato and here I went and dropped you like a hot potato. If life8 were a life-size game of Simon Says™, I’d have been eliminated after the third or fourth color pattern. Maybe we’ll hang out again one day. I’ll hold your hand and we can sit on an old-timey swing eating homemade fudge and thinking about how good it once was or could have been if I hadn’t been such an asshole and you hadn’t had such a low tolerance for assholes. Perhaps with the passage of time you’ll remember me more kindly than I deserve, and we’ll put everything past us—not that there was anything there in the first place, of course. You’ll wear that dress I like, which is the dress you wore on our first and only date, and I’ll wear my t-shirt that says “GRANDPA: THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND” because I’m ironical and silly like that.

love always,

Oscar Levi Berkman

n. Short for “Dominant.” The dominant person in a BDSM relationship or encounter.
n. One of those chairs that is made of a long rectangular body pillow with some fold points stitched into it. Usually the chair is uncomfortably short to sit on, a bit too narrow for easy sleeping, and has a very wimpy “backrest” that doubles as a neck roll.
She’s actually referencing a Morrissey song. The lyrics in question are: “I’ve had my face dragged in fifteen miles of shit/And I do not, and I do not, and I do not like it/So how can anybody say they know how I feel/When they are they and only I am I.” Hella profound, huh?
There’s absolutely no way for you to know this, but Oscar Berkman, who is really just a stand-in for the actual author of the piece (Oliver Bimmin), was obsessed with the rap group OutKast. The lyrics he’s referencing (and botching) are: “So who you placing the blame on, you keep on singing the same song/Let bygones be bygones, you can go on and get the hell on.”
Awkward adjective but…alliteration!
"As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport." King Lear, Act 4, Scene 1
Not that you’d care, but this is a reference to a story written years earlier by the l8, gr8 Ryan Powell. In it, two Dominics start fighting to the death over the proper diminutive of that Christian name, only to be stopped by a third man also named Dominic who goes by “Minnie.”
Actual life, as in life itself (referenced earlier by Berkman; were you paying attention?), and not the board game Life™. But can you imagine crossing Life™ with Simon Says™? I bet that would be akin to crossing the same stream twice, pace Heraclitus, or just crossing the streams period, pace Ghostbusters.

—Oliver Lee

How to Love Backwards and Forwards

I’m not one for facts. They just make a mess of simple things. You start with a look or a touch and you’re golden. But add facts, and, in short order, you’re strung up on the cross of proper etiquette. Nevertheless, the facts, the first foundations of the story, were clear. When I walked into the coffee shop that first morning, she was dressed in sweatpants and her hair was unkempt. She turned to me, or turned to the opening door, fixed her hair and smiled.

The next day, she had on cigarette jeans and a sheer blouse, one of those sea foam get-ups that you wear a black bra under. Her hair was combed or brushed — however girls manage to get their bob looking sufficiently shaped without sacrificing the suggestion that they’ve come from yoga or sex or a jog in the park. Her aspect had changed. Again, she turned, responding to my tremendous slamming of the door, and smiled.

The third day she was working hard, hunched over a MacBook, hunting and pecking out a PR letter. My first entrance provoked no response. Such a busy bee. So, I stepped out, kicked a hole in the glass, and started screaming in pain.

Now this got her attention. She ran over and began shouting for someone — I assume one of those coffee bartenders in the skinny jeans and Meowtallica shirt — to get help. So I looked up at her and just laid it on the line. “I know we have something special. You’re not as pretty as the normal girls I pull (mostly 10’s and up) but there’s this energy about you.” She looked shocked but then she started to blush like one of those blushing emoji and her eyes shrank into these tiny points. “Is it crazy for me to think that I might feel the L-WORD for you?”

I was overjoyed and bleeding out. Franken — or whatever the fat baristo should have been named — strutted over with his hand towel. “Do you need help. Is that your female-er-al artery that’s cut? I’m not a doctor but Criminal Intent tells me that’s the bad one.”

But I didn’t really hear his question because I’m making out with the girl of my dreams. (She actually was a 10 but I figured she’d heard that her whole life. I only had one chance to make her swoon with self-doubt, then stagger lovestruck and self-conscious into my safety).

So she was kissing me and I was dying and I thought, “Isn’t this just great? I find the woman I’m meant to be with and I’m about to die. Guess that’s life.”

—EH

How to Write Sentences

No author wants to write a good sentence. Why should they? You don’t fill one of those fashionable, mammoth volumes with sentences. You fill them with words. A 2000-page tome about white guilt will earn you tenure at any one of the historically-white universities. A trilogy has even more words, and an unfinished, ever-growing novel is close to godliness. Modern writers need words. They need them fast. Good sentences will only get in the way.

So here are my eleven theses—eleven solutions to traditional, awful sentences.

A word of caution. When I say, “don’t write X, write Y”, I don’t mean, “write a sentence similar to Y,” I mean “write Y exactly.” You might fret that your astute readers will pick up on the idiosyncratic sentence repetition among today’s top writers — they won’t, no one reads, we have the evidence to support this — but you can’t forestall ignorance indefinitely. Also, you have an easy response:

“Yes, this is the exact same sentence that appears in Judith Trunsey’s ‘Light Falling on Hard Tack’. We both drink from the same well, that of eucharistic literature, stories that exist only in their constant repetition and performance. Past generations had theatre, but no one likes black boxes anymore. Our theatre is the cyclic play of these sentences, the bold premiere in his book, the matinee in hers, the reunion tour in mine. Are there connections between our stories? No. Yes.”

Without further ado, “How to Write Sentences”.

—

Never write, “He was sad”. Instead, write “He laughed to himself, grimacing in pain and tearing up their picture.”

Never write, “They had sex”. Instead, write “She looked at him with the kind of doe eyes that he’d grow to resent after the unplanned pregnancy.”

Never write, “He missed her”. Instead, write “They hadn’t really met, but he felt a great kinship with the picture of her at brunch, cached from a time when her profile wasn’t private.”

Never write, “He hit the home run”. Instead, write “He didn’t swing to win, he swung because his hypertrophied arms had swollen into grapefruits custom-made for bearhugging Make-a-Wish kids.”

Never write, “He popped a sick ollie”. Instead, write “Down. Down. Down. You have to go down to go up. It’s called investment. It’s called getting air.”

Never write, “He wondered”. Instead, write “His blue eyes flicked from her face to the dog’s. ‘What has my wife become? I mean, what has my LIFE become?’ [Cue laugh track]”

Never write, “They married”. Instead write “Her wedding dress, salvaged from the wreck, didn’t fit any of his best friends, so he gave up on love entirely.”

Never write, “He was loved and admired”. Instead, write “His sexual potency was monomaniacally inspired by the galley proofs of his upcoming novel.”

Never write, “They danced”. Instead, write “He struggled to remember what the dressform had taught him about anatomy and physics.”

Never write, “He died”. Instead write, “Autoasphyxiation again? When will one of these emaciated ponyboys start listening to Usher?”

Never write, “No author wants to write a good sentence.” Instead write, “He was halfway through his Grantland blog about how Stephen Curry was like Stephen Malkmus when the WYSIWYG editor refreshed and he lost everything he had written.”

—EH w/ OLB

The Only Online Dating Profile You Will Ever Need

I’ve never murdered anyone, much less anyone that deserved it. I believe it’s important to get the real deal-breakers out of the way first. I’m pragmatic like that. A real pragmatic, non-murderous kind of gentleman.

I get my pragmatics from my leather-and-roebuck father and my non-murdering from my mother who was an inveterate, unhomocidal domestic. My parents met and divorced and had me — in one order or another — but they never treated me like a burden or a bowl-cut tchotchke, an heirloom of an impetuous union, orchestrated to win one of those “How Long Can You Kiss Your Legal Partner” competitions at the car dealership.

Needless to say, I had a broken childhood but was ferried from go-kart practice to origami club in a brand new Chevrolet Citation. That backseat was the vinyl lyceum in which I learned many skills, all of which I’d like to lavish on you. I can lip-sync to tapes and close my eyes every time a telephone pole passes. I’m a blast on road trips, for those weeks when you just need to get out, to drive in a direction you’ve never even heard of before, to let your hair down, to let it just fall to the floor and punt it away — I’m one of those two-high-kicks-a-minute kinda guys. I’m not interested in girls that can’t can-can if you get my drift.

At one tender age or another, I was shipped off to an all-boys school. It wasn’t one of those every-tree-is-pregnant-with-meaning, separate peace schools. It was just your average men’s penitentiary, replete with hard knocks, life lessons and remarkable displays of character.

I made great male friends there. They still regularly perform “designated wingman duties” for me, thoughtfully leaving their young wives and younger children at home, putting on their State U hats, slumming me from hyper lounge to dive bar, and whispering lies to pretty young things about my bona fides. That’s just the kind of loyalty I inspire. I’d like to get that kinda rise out of you. Not that I’d want you to wingman for me. I’m monogamous to a fault.

Hell, I’m monogamous to a double fault. Good thing love’s not a tennis match, eh? Hah. One of my close friends told me to make that joke. Said that a gossip blogger used it on fifty women, got to sleep with one, and wrote a whole book about the single-pun experience. “Around the City in 50 Women: Riding a Line Until the End of the Line.” I don’t agree that his novel — really a bildungsroman — was “rampantly misogynistic.” But, I don’t judge. I mean, I’m not judgmental. It’s cool if you have a child or one of those real fetishes that don’t show up in popular cinema.

(If you do have a fetish, you should know that I’m only dominant when it comes to Trivial Pursuit. Or maybe, I’m only trivially dominant. Wink-face?)

It should be pretty obvious that I’m an open book. My other favorite books are that book you read in high school but never really appreciated like I do and that book that all your friends pretended to read but immediately discarded, on account of all the footnotes. I’m well read but not a snob like a librarian or a bookstore clerk. My deepest apologies if you, anonymous online dating match, are a librarian or a bookstore clerk, but you’ll find my life is too messy to fit either into any classification system or user-reviewed online catalogue.

This is probably for the best. I can only imagine what my user reviews would be. “He was impossibly handsome. In reality, he was ugly.” “I assumed he’d be older. He told me he was older.” “Our first date went well, but by the second date, he kept trying to lay his hand in my lap. It wasn’t even like he was fondling my thigh. He just placed his hand, palm up on my lap, like it was dead bird. From time to time he’d wiggle his fingers. I wasn’t sure how to respond.”

As you can tell, I have a real appreciation for self-deflation. Hah! Another joke, this one courtesy of my younger brother who’s studying mezzo-economics at U State. I don’t know much about him.

But, enough about me. What’s your story? Feel free to contact me with any of the following cold-openers:

Are your parents still alive and have they remarried?
Are any of your great male friends single? I wanna hear more about those hunks. Just kidding. How are you?
My confidence is pretty low at the moment. If you could call me ‘a vision, my Venus, probably perfect’, I’d be more than happy to take the compliment and never respond.
What’s your name?

—EH

A Love Letter to Aaron Schock

Dear Aaron Schock,

We, meaning me, hardly knew ye, meaning thee. To be brought down in a such a petty scam, such a grasping and penny-ante grift…what a shame! You, the darling face of your party, could’ve had such a finer fall from grace. Busted on Grindr? Sending dick pics on Craigslist? (but never in those Favre-ian Crocs™, you have too much taste for something like that) Something Mark Foley-ian with a few handsome ponyboy interns? Anything but falsifying mileage on your government automobile. For cryin’ out loud, as sung by a prime-period Meat Loaf Aday, aren’t you capable of more? And why, if you were going to fall from grace once—and Weiner & Sanford have shown you only get one free fall and no more—not package all of your misdeeds together? Why not force the Republican Party, a party that might be right (no pun intended, I guess) on many foreign policy issues, to confront the wingnuts and proto-Jennings Bryans it picked up over the past forty years of divided, do-nothing government?1

Ooh, stop. Insert some kitty emoticons. >^==^< & OGC (look closely at that one!), maybe. But chill with this screed already, wouldja, Oscar Berkman? You have nothing fresh or novel to add to the conversation. There is no sequence of words about this tragicomedy of the linen closet that could possibly win the admiration of those 5-7 readers who will scroll through your story with the greatest of ease. Let me quote some Pixies lyrics “at ya” (as the bros and brahs and brahskis say) and we’ll move on with our lives: Aaron, your head’ll collapse if there’s nothing in it, and then you’ll ask yourself, “where is my mind?”

What I’d like to write about instead of Aaron Schock, who is admittedly a gorgeous man2, is what’s happening to me, Oscar Berkman, at this very moment. What’s happening to me, Oscar Berkman, at this very moment is that I’m playing Whatifsports.com historical simulation baseball and my stupid fucking lineup of stupid fucking ballplayers is collapsing in the face of other stupid fucking lineups of stupid fucking ballplayers. We all know the best “cookies”—1989 Howard Johnson, who inexplicably has an “A” range grade at shortstop, and the unhittable 1908 Addie Joss (RIP: too soon, too soon!) are two of the best—and so it just comes down to random number generation, which I guess is all that life comes down to.

Life, and this is a theme I’ve developed elsewhere and will develop again after I get around to cleaning up all the Sweetos™ and other delicious sugary/salty late capitalist waste littering my darkroom, is as fair as a lottery. The lottery, in other and better words that I’m too busy to use here because I’m writing this in a mad rush at 1:02 a.m. CST3, is fair because it’s random. What could be fairer than random? Cogitate hard on that one, kid. Since it (life or the lottery or the life-lottery) is random, you never know what you’re going to get. Maybe you’ll be the baronet of an impregnable redoubt in Upper Swabia. Maybe you’ll get assigned to a shit-shoveling position in one of the several societies that still employs slaves4. And I’m not saying that we should set the terms of the pre-lottery veil of ignorance here, either: that would ruin the surprise. If you knew that things could be only thisbad and no worse, would you buy a ticket? I saw the movie Scream and hated it; I certainly can’t imagine I’d enjoy a movie called Mumbled Cry for Help (though such a film could also make good use of marble-mouthed leading man/former WCW World Champion David Arquette, perhaps resurrecting his flagging career in the process)5.

My point—I had one, I assure you—is that we should abolish the three-point shot. Who cares about upsets? Who cares when a bunch of math majors from Dickinson State School of Minecraft inexplicably “make it rain” from “three-pointland” and vanquish a powerhouse program with five telegenic 6’10” world-beaters in its lineup? And why even have two-point shots that aren’t dunk shots or layups if you’re going to have a three-point shot (40% from 3 > 44% from 2 duhhhhhhh)? Or if you don’t abolish the three-point shot, create four-point shots and five-point shots and ten-point shots. Make every square inch of the parquet worth a different amount based on the statistical likelihood of hitting the shot from that particular spot. Vary those amounts depending on whether or not the shooter is left-handed (a “southpaw,” to use parlance familiar to late New York Giants manager John J. “Mugsy” McGraw)6 or right-handed or, g=d forbid, ambidexterous. Or perhaps just make the value of each shot random, because, as noted supra, what could be fairer than random? At any rate, please for the love of chr=st could you make it so that I can watch ten behemoths sumo-wrestling in the low post, trading tip-ins and rebounds for two full and hearty minutes before the ball improbably drops through the net.

Well, it’s been a great summer. Camden and I drove our eco-friendly 2008 Subaru Outback to Bangor, ME (“bang her? I hardly knew her!” ahahaha guffawed and chuckled the crowd at the dinner party) to meet her parents. Bev and Reg sure didn’t disappoint, nosireebobandjudy. We went sailing in the bay (totally not what I expected given that my expectations of bay sailing were based solely on a lifetime of using Old Bay seasoning LOL!) and I rode a quarterhorse for the first time (equally shocking because it was actually a whole horse, as far as a layperson/rube like me could determine). In short, it was a once in a lifetime experience that I plan to keep repeating even after our divorce is finalized. Whoops, did I just type that in this “ugly Christmas in July sweater family life update” e-mail? Ha ha ha, silly me. I’m such a repressed sadsack LMAO. Do you think any of you would notice if I shuffled off this mortal coil? Please respond ASAP because I can’t keep going on like this forever :D.

Besties, Orson Bainman

Isn’t “do-nothing” government what everyone wants, in the bitter end? Isn’t endless compromise and slow change preferable to anything else? Why do we complain incessantly about the system forced upon us? Because we secretly desire to be bossed about like sheep and made to build pyramids and Olympic stadia to celebrate the accomplishments of our betters? Ah well. Wutevs.

"Yum yum!" yelled the clueless small-town girl who didn’t yet understand the ways of the world. She loved Anderson Cooper, too. He had such kind eyes. She probably sides with the Jewish philosopher Maimonides on the whole cut/uncut debate, too. In fact, for many years she wasn’t even aware that uncut was a model of that product. (Almost) needless to say, when she finally made that discovery, she was pretty grossed out and left my futon bed in one heck of a hurry. I had to change the sheets because she’d vomited all over them. "Quite a parting gift," said my imaginary best friend. "Ah life!" I replied with the mock exasperation of a veteran Britcom supporting player.

Perhaps the end is nigh. “No man is happy until the end is known,” etc. It’s all good in the neighborhood, though. I’ve accomplished everything I’ve ever wanted to accomplish and am now more than ready for an emotionally death riveting sequence that will be accompanied 99 times out of 100 by a Hans Zimmer score.

Or so all the “end human trafficking” booths seen on college campuses would have us believe. Who among us would admit to wanting that to continue? I’m against strangling kittens and jerks who pull chairs out from underneath the elderly, too!

Why hasn’t one of those shitty blogs (Slate, Grantland, Salon, any site that has ever broken down and paid me to write a single stupid sentence about the same bullshit topics I never tire of discussing even though nobody gives a crap except when I talked about once upon a time I managed a clothing store that we all hate and I sucked at that and…and can you believe I made enough money writing that drivel, basically the same story over and over and over and over and over, that I was able to put a down payment on a modest little ranch house ha ha ha oh what a world this is! as Rufus Wainwright sings in the song of that same or at least a similar title) published a shitty listicle about how much David Arquette looks like Ryan Gosling (given how long that parenthetical digression was, did you even remember what the subject of this sentence was? bonus points if you did!). Is that a taboo thing to say? Because I don’t believe it is, certainly not in these liberated, alternative music and hemp sweater-saturated 1990s. I believe it’s something we can’t be afraid to discuss, not if we’re going to claim our society is as free and open about such matters as noted libel defendant JP Zenger’s attorney Andrew Hamilton said we colonials were.

Not to beat a dead horse here about the Whatifsports stuff, but the 1899 third base-playing version of JJ McGraw, who is hitting a robust .250/.320/.300 despite season averages of .340/.450/.400 (and no, before you ask, the sim doesn’t era-correct; I know the 1890s were an extremely high-offense period, brainiac), is fucking (figuratively) killing (figuratively) me (???). He’s hanging me out to dry, boyfriends and ghoulfriends.

—OLB & “Eddy”

Pandas, Bro

"Well, Ming Ming, did everything work out the way you wanted?" I asked the panda, who just kept on doing what pandas everywhere do: ate pounds of bamboo and had a really hard (ha ha ha) time popping a boner. "In the end, I mean," I persisted, hoping against hope for an answer. "Was it good for you here? Was it bad for you?"

But that son of a bitch wouldn’t stop gnawing on his bamboo stalk to answer my question. He wasn’t going to give me the time of day. His schedule, which consisted of moving as little as possible to conserve the nutrient-poor calories provided by the bamboo, was exceptionally tight and would admit no distractions.

Ming Ming, so the story goes, came to our city’s zoo from a private reserve in the Republic of Suriname. He and a dozen other pandas were part of a top-secret breeding project undertaken by some Dr. Moreau manqué. The good doctor was attempting to splice panda DNA with gorilla DNA because, as he screamed to the INTERPOL agents who arrested him, “the time had come.”

Ming Ming was the sole survivor of this utopian panda-gorilla fusion farm, and he seemed none the worse for wear. Sure, he had a bunch of nasty scars all over him and nightmare-inducing PTSD, but is that any worse than what you or I go through on a daily basis? I think not, mon frère. I was in a fender bender about six years ago on I-95 while driving through Richmond during rush hour and, man, my neck still hurts. Whiplash. Wish I’d gone to the doctor and had it checked out, but I was so darn busy what with everything I was and wasn’t doing. I was busier than this good-for-nothing abused panda, anyway. Yet here he’s front page news and I’m yesterday’s papers.

It wasn’t always like this. You may not remember me, but I was the backup point guard for the 1994-1995 Virginia Commonwealth Rams. We went 19-11 (8-8 in the Colonial Athletic Association), qualified for the NIT, and lost in the first round to the University of Rhode Island Rams (the irony, huh?). I say backup, but it wasn’t like I was a benchwarmer who sat around all game in a sweatless, non-bloodstained shooting jacket. No, I was more like an eighth man who averaged ten minutes, one point, and two assists per game. I wasn’t exactly Isaiah “J.R.” Rider—I’m 5’11” and I’ve never dunked a basketball, for one thing—but my contributions were more than de minimis and I think I was in a good position to make even greater contributions as a seventh man during my senior season.

Then there was that accident, the one I oh-so-casually referenced earlier when I was talking about Ming Ming’s PTSD. I can be calm and collected now, but the whiplash it caused would forever alter the trajectory not just of my three-point shot (23% from “downtown” before the injury, 0% afterwards) but of my entire life (2.5 GPA with a communications major before, college dropout one year later). Before you could say “Isaiah ‘J.R.’ Rider,” I found myself living in an abandoned schoolbus parked somewhere along the Henrico County line, miles from the opulent studio apartment I once occupied in downtown Richmond.

But I guess I can’t blame it all on the accident, no more than Ming Ming can blame his inability to impregnate Song Song on his former owner’s decision to circumcise him. The way the papers reported it, the guy was a devotee of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and believed that circumcising the panda would cause him to finish faster, derive less joy from the sex act, and focus exclusively on procreation instead of the pleasure that accompanies busting a nut. So what I’m saying, then, is that Ming Ming’s owner had his reasons and I had mine.

Reasons for what, you ask? That’s so kind of you to ask. Nobody just asks nowadays; instead, they launch right into the interrogation under the klieg lights and you’re too nervous to ask to stop so that you can call your attorney. The reasons I’m talking about are my reasons for getting entrapped on To Nab a Pervert. There are several of them, actually. All of them begin with true love and end there, too. Can you chat with somebody, even a fake somebody or a team of somebodies, for five hours in an AOL chatroom and not feel something? Something besides a desire to drink a couple 40s and “push rope” for as long as your weakened constitution allows it, I mean. Because, yeah, I felt that, but I also felt something greater, something deeper.

Is this the same something that Ming Ming feels when he gazes up into the gloomy gray heavens, bamboo stalking dangling from his mouth the way a circa-1989 Ring Pop™ used to dangle from mine? The challenge in talking about the past—my past, Ming Ming’s past, your past—is that the words are always coming from the present. The crazy things that happen to us, and there are so many of those, can’t be quantified or qualified like my performance on the 1994-1995 VCU Rams basketball team.

"Where did it all go wrong?" is a question Ming Ming would probably ask me if he could talk and if the mouth he used for talking wasn’t stuffed full of bamboo. "Where did it all go wrong?" is a question I’d ask Ming Ming if I, like the rest of the panda-loving public, didn’t already know the answer to that.

But let’s pretend for a minute that Ming Ming’s life didn’t go south after he was drugged and smuggled into South America. Let’s suppose that it started much earlier, that Ming’s Ming father, a panda like himself and most assuredly not a gorilla (because as we now know, that’s just not possible given our current level of DNA-splicing technology), just didn’t love him enough and that was what did him in. We’d be wrong, wouldn’t we, for making asses of ourselves and assuming that life was so bad with those other gorillas and pandas, that the torture was indeed torture. Maybe Ming Ming developed Stockholm syndrome; maybe he met the love of his life and it was a gorilla.

Ming Ming and his hypothetical gorilla princess together in the gloaming of a Surinamese fall day: is that so hard to believe? Is it so hard to believe that the one that we love, the one who completes us, isn’t someone we could ever have? Or isn’t even someone who is real, someone who is possible? No, it’s not hard to believe, though it’s certainly hard to talk about. I can’t reckon with the words, and Ming Ming, for his part, will remain forever silent but for the perpetual crunching of his bamboo.

Out of all which we may define (that is to say determine) what that is which is meant by this word reason when we reckon it amongst the faculties of the mind. For reason, in this sense, is nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts; I say marking them, when we reckon by ourselves; and signifying, when we demonstrate or approve our reckonings to other men.

—OLB

Pearls Before Swine

I was feeling snarky and unappreciated one day, so I created a literary magazine called “Pearls Before Swine.” Like, you know, my words were the pearls and the readers were the swine.

I didn’t have an audience anyway, so it didn’t matter if I insulted them. There was no one there to insult. “You’re just a stupid pig,” I said to no one, and no one cared. No one’s feelings were hurt.

Or so I thought!

Imagine my surprise when one day, as I sat at my desk, toiling in apparent obscurity, wearing my special cap with a feather in it that I jokingly refer to as my “thinking cap”… an army of pigs marched through the door! Actual, literal, honest-to-god pigs!

They spoke to me in a sort of pidgin-hybrid of American English and oinks.

They had a leader whom they referred to as the Mayor. He wore a medal on a ribbon around his neck. I don’t know the backstory there, but I bet it’s a doozy.

“Excuse me, oink, fine human sir,” said the Mayor. “Are you, oink, the individual who’s responsible for this publication?” He sort of pivoted to the side, and somehow – don’t ask me how – there was a copy of my magazine, strapped to his back kind of like a saddle. It was the latest issue and everything.

I stared at the Mayor and his pig friends. I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if they were insulted – was “swine” considered derogatory? If I had insulted them – what would they do to me? They looked like domesticated pigs, the kind you would see on a farm – like Wilbur from “Charlotte’s Web.” I hoped they were more civilized than, say, wild boars. I hoped, if need be, they would listen to the voice of reason.

I gulped hard and decided to tell the truth. “Y-yes, sir. That would be me.” It might sound weird that I referred to a pig as “sir,” but the Mayor had a gravitas about him that commanded your respect.

The Mayor and his pig brethren stared at me. It was a tense moment. I thought of that saying “in a pig’s eye” and wondered what the heck it meant. If I had ever known, I couldn’t remember.

He said: “And these words, oink – these are your ‘pearls’?”

Gulp. “Y-yes, your grace. Those would be them.” Admittedly, saying “your grace” amounted to laying it on a little thick, but at this point I was both awed and getting pretty freaked out.

The Mayor turned to his left, then to his right, for dramatic effect, making sure he had the rapt attention of all who were assembled.

He said to his pig pals: “This is him – the one who has been giving us pearls! The others all scoffed. ‘Oh ho ho, what a joke – bestowing our precious pearls upon a bunch of lowly swine.’ Even the freaking Bible made fun of us – the Bible, man! That’s what started it, in fact!” He shook his piggy head from side to side in sad acceptance of the truth.

He continued, brightly: “But this man – this paragon of open-mindedness and compassion, oink! He gave us pearls of wisdom, proffered expressly to us – it says so right in the title!”

I wondered if the pigs had ever heard of irony, or even just of sarcasm, but I wanted to be their hero so I didn’t bring any of this up. I decided to just go with the flow.

He said to his followers: “Well, folks – what are you waiting for? Let’s give him an, oink, group hug! Circle of mud!” I gathered that “circle of mud” was their special oink-language word for a group hug.

And then the pigs shuffled up to me in a most endearing and stub-legged manner, surrounding me with their love and oinking out their glee. They even sort of nudged me with their soft snouts until I was riding on their backs, like when someone is tossed into the air while everyone sings “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”

“Hero! Oink! Hero!” they snortled lovingly.

They carried me off to their pig town, which was a self-sufficient democracy away from any humans, with some rather commendable social-welfare programs for the poorer pigs. They made me their Writer Laureate.

I was so happy and self-fulfilled that I stayed there. I married a beautiful girl pig, and we have half-pig, half-human babies. And I was never condescending again. The end.

—CCH

Surf Planet

I live on Surf Planet. We based it on Beach Boys songs. For example, you know the one that goes: “Two girls for every boy!” Well, we have that here. A demographics expert helped us make sure of it. Yes, it takes some occasional rejiggering of the population — a tiny bit of infanticide sometimes. But it’s worth it, because the bros can walk around on the beach with a babe in each arm.

As a people we managed to adjust the tilt and spin of the planet to make it ever in sunshine. A day on our planet looks like what 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. looks like on Earth in summertime — and then at the end, our day starts all over again looking like 2 p.m. We had to push really hard to do that! We used a big stick.

Our populace is made up of Surfer Dudes and Little Surfer Girls. All we do is surf all day, and make out and produce more surfers. There are no businesspeople on Surf Planet, or trash people. Truth be told, our streets are littered with crap, and our public health’s a disgrace. Away from the beach — and OK, even on it — Suft Planet is basically a Hawaiian-print nightmare version of Ayn Rand-ian Libertarian World. But nobody does anything about it, because all we wanna do is surf.

We surf until our muscles ache. We surf until our skin prunes.

"If everybody had an ocean! Across the U.S.A.! Then everybody’d be surfin’! Like Californ-I-A!" Well, on Surf Planet everybody does have an ocean, so guess what? We surf.

"We’re on [surfin’] safari to stay!"

I met my wife the same way all the guys here met theirs: She was having fun fun fun till her daddy took her T-Bird away. Man, I love to tell that story. One time I started telling it at my class reunion, and all the other bros chimed in and finished the story with me in unison, because it was their story, too.

This sort of thing naturally eradicates jealousy. Nobody here is any better or any worse than anybody else.

Our planet is what would happen if a genie appeared and said, “You get one wish,” but instead of anybody saying anything — a Beach Boys album was playing, and the genie took it literally.

"I wish they all could be California girls!" On Surf Planet, they all are.

You see us wearing our baggies. Huarache sandals, too. A bushy bushy blonde hairdo.

When the sun threatens to set on Surf Planet — at what would look to you like 7:45 p.m. on Earth in the summertime — all the bros go up to their designated Little Surfer Girl and say: “I… I love the colorful clothes you wear… and the way the sunlight plays upon your hair.” Because we’re all picking up good vibrations, every last one of us.

—CCH

A Second Chance at My First Time

"And I will kiss you on the forehead, and everything with you will be as it should be."

He had won a prestigious writing fellowship, this friend of a friend of a friend, because people read his work. No one, not even my harshest critic or my secret sharer, had ever bothered to read mine. It was pure gene yuss, though…of this you can rest assured. But if you can’t get past the first paragraph—and research shows 99.6% of readers don’t, even when the book is as good as Kate Upton’s Game of War and Peace—you’ll never discover what you’re missing.

I turned to Camden, whom I might have been dating at the time, and tried to muster as determined a look as a beaten-down, can’t-win-for-losing sadsack such as myself could manage. “So here’s what I’m going to do, baby: I’m going to write an entire book of amazing opening paragraphs,” I said.

She looked up from her Sega Game Gear, on which she had led Sonic and his fox friend Tails past the dreaded Green Hill Zone #1. “What did you just call me?” she asked.

"I called you ‘lady,’ because you’re such a pretty lady,” I lied, hoping that my killer Jerry Lewis impression would compensate for my pathetic attempt to assert my masculine bona fides.

"Okay, whatever," she said, returning to her game. "I need to get these last couple of rings or I’m screwed."

The hardest part about the past, at least for me, is that you’re in so much of it.

"Do you like that one? That one’s about you, Camden," I explained as she continued to furiously push buttons in a futile effort to put that egg-sucking dog Dr. Robotnik in his place.

"Sure, Oscar. You do what you think is right," she said. I marveled at how she was able to drive a car while keeping neither a hand on the steering wheel nor a single eye on the road. She was gifted, my Camden, my baby.

My birthday present for turning sixteen was a wild night of sex with my half-sister. After seven minutes in heaven, I wondered why it had taken me this long.

"This one’s a bit on the racy side," I continued, "but I think that fans of my work on literotica.com might like it."

"Keep going in that direction," mumbled Camden. "It’s ambitious and it’s definitely a story I know is from you."

Of all the people I ever knew, John Wilkes Booth wasn’t one of them. But I felt like I should know him; I felt the world owed me this much. This was just one of many things I felt in my heart.

"Historical fiction is always a popular genre, Cammy. Don’t you agree?"

"Did you call me Cammy, Oscar? You didn’t just do that, did you?"

"No, no," I stammered, racking my brain for an acceptable excuse. "No, we just passed a Denny’s and I wanted to see if you’d like to stop and get a Moons Over My Hammy. It’s a heck of a sandwich, one of America’s best. That’s why they call it the ‘Taste of America.’"

"People call it that? All the food there tastes like sawdust and angel tears, Oscar. Aw fuck, I completely messed up that jump. Is my Ecco the Dolphin cartridge in the glove department?"

I reached in and retrieved the game. I’d never liked Ecco—I thought most of its missions were long and tedious, and I’ve always hated the sea—but I respected its staying power. Like Sonic and Tails in Dr. Robotnik’s Revenge 2, here was a game that had withstood the ravages of time…and then some.

Eddy “Flap” Jacks eased his droopy, shit-stained wrestling trunks over his enormous grandpa ass, in the process obscuring a field of carbuncles and abscesses that had left me and a few of the other boys in the locker room feeling sick to our stomachs.

"Jesus christ, Eddy, what are you going out there for fifty bucks for? You need it that badly?" asked Steve "The Fury" Kowalski, another battered old fart of a wrestler who continued to take bookings in spite of fused vertebra and worsening dementia that most of us assumed was due to untreated late-stage syphillis.

Jacks, who had been rubbing bacon fat all over his sloppy gut and man-boobs, hoisted a trunk-like thigh onto the bench near where I was changing, thus affording me an unforgettable glimpse of the distended testicles that accompany an inguinal hernia. “Fuck you, Kowalski, I’m gonna go out my way,” he replied.

"C’mon, dad, you’re wrestling the opening match and you’re booked to lose to ‘Gentleman’ Timothy N. Turner," I interrupted. "You need to finish up these bookings and maybe get that eye looked, maybe spend some time on the farm relaxing and enjoying retirement."

Jacks rested his elbow on his upraised knee and his chin on his fist, a thoughtful pose that highlighted the old man’s many bone spurs and other deformities. “Shaddup, Junior, I never was too big a guy to say no to a job. I’m putting TNT over, that’s all. I put everybody over. ‘Cowboy’ Ken Curtis, ‘Outlaw’ J.W. Hardin, ‘Grizzly’ Gaines. I main-evented the Garden against Gaines, and we drew $40k.”

"Yeah, forty years ago," laughed Kowalski. "The only thing people today know you for is how when you were wrestling on that IWF pay-per-view and Dan Kauffman went to body-slam you, you shit your pants."

Jacks shrugged. “Christ, I’d been leaking for weeks, Steve, and I know should’ve used an enema before that match, but I figured what the haystacks. The promoters got a lot of mileage out of that, anyway.”

"The ‘brown streak,’" I said. "Mom and I thought you should’ve quit then. You did okay business up there for a little while."

"They’ll have to carry your old man out, junior," Kowalski said. "He’s gonna die with his boots on, and not just because he can’t pull them off over those corns he’s got."

"I just want to go out on my terms," insisted Jacks. "I’m 71 years old…"

"You’re 75," I corrected him.

"I’m 71 and I just want to have that spotlight come down on me one final time, and then I hit a move, maybe my big splash, and that’s my second to last move, I’m almost out of moves…then my last move is to the grave."

Eddy Jacks, my father, was blind in one eye because he had contracted trachoma from a filthy wrestling mat in Poughkeepsie in early 1940 and refused antibiotics. He underwent a couple of bluestone treatments, and they succeeded in burning the eye pretty badly, but his condition only worsened over the years.

Eddy Jacks, my father, had been the champion of the world for six weeks in 1964 and five days in 1971. He was always too late or too soon or too much or too little for the promoters who booked him. For a brief while, he seemed destined to be a top guy; he had the college football background and was pretty sharp on the mic. Now he was just too old, too far gone.

Eddy Jacks, my father, wasn’t much of my father for the thirty years he ostensibly served in that role. Toward the end of his life, as my own career in the sport was trending to the upper midcard and eventually a substantial backstage role, he took to playing that role on local-access, UHF-band television. “I taught him everything he knows, but not everything I know,” he would say, and then we’d wrestle a tag team match where I did all of the work and also took the pinfall.

Eddy Jacks, my father, stood in front of me and the rest of the boys whose guts he had always hated: gross, fat, and nearly dead. This would be his last night on earth. Someone up there must’ve liked him, because he didn’t have to do the job to the dreadful TNT, a feeble and overrated enhancement talent who drifted from territory to territory.

Eddy Jacks, my father, died a few minutes after trading banter with me and Kowalski. He died sitting down on the toilet, which for a variety of reasons he always had to do, and he died with half a smile on his face. I never told him I loved him, not really anyway, but in that moment I realized everything I had achieved was either due to or in spite of him. “I’m dying here,” he shouted from the toilet as he expired, and so he was.

Eddy Jacks, my father, would’ve been proud of me, because I went on with the show. While an ambulance came to pick up his body, I wrestled a washed-up Serge Annis to a time-limit draw in a match for the Great Lakes Television Title. The crowd was pretty dead, but I like to think a few of the chain wrestling sequences I called in the rring were reminiscent of what the original Eddy Jacks would’ve done: rest-holds and such, not much action, working the headlock to lazy perfection. And surely the indeterminate screwjob finish was right up his alley, because if there was one thing my father didn’t believe in, it was closure.

"Life is eternally new, which gets old," I mused aloud as Camden pulled into the parking lot of the Applebee’s Neigbhorhood Bar & Grill where we we doing happy hour with some of her "besties."

"That sounds nice. You should write greeting cards or something," Camden said. "That could be a good job for you. You’re always talking about doing something different, about how what you’re doing is a bad fit or doesn’t challenge you or whatever."

I’d never said anything like that to her, but hey, she could think what she wanted to think. At least she was talking to me instead of at me or over me. “Yeah, I mean, how do you find a job like that?”

"I don’t know," she said. "I’ve never wanted a writing job. But it sounds neat, doesn’t it? It could be a second chance at a first start for you."

She didn’t know what the hell she was talking about—Camden indiscriminately spewed words, never caring what any single one of them meant—but what she had just said was nice. As I tried to push the thought of unlimited boneless wings as far from my mind’s eye as possible, I had to admit that I longed to start over and do everything differently, yet still wrong. It’d always be wrong, because you can’t please any of the people any of the time, but it’d be something else, something I hadn’t experienced, and there’s a lot to be said for that.

So it ended with that?” “Of course, with that. Everything has ended, and everything ends.”

—OLB