If Obama’s health care reform passes with its godless, socialist public option in tact, when the dreaded death panels that Sarah Palin has been warning me about come to my door and demand to know how I want to die, I’ve already got it all planned out.

“Nothing fancy,” I’ll say.

“I just want to die a simple, peaceful, dignified death,” I’ll say.

“I want you to tie me to a missile and fire me into the air. Then, get a gigantic robot spider with drills for feet and a laser mounted on top of it to shoot me out of the air while Dethklok plays an especially brutal track off of their heavy-as-fuck follow up to Dethalbum, appropriately titled Dethalbum II, available for purchase September 29th,” I’ll say.

“This is going to be so fucking sweet,” I’ll say. “Just do it today. Seriously. I’m getting pumped up just thinking about this,” I’ll say.

If they have any questions, I’ll show them this video:

I guess that this is actually a little bit unrealistic.

There aren’t actually any death panels, you retards.

Remember, Dethalbum II, September 29th. Brutal.

I’m sick AGAIN. Awesome. That’s three times in two weeks. Nice. Today has actually been pretty cool if you ignore the fact that I’m beginning to wonder if I have AIDS.

I went and got coffee with a friend that I met back when I was a line cook a few weeks ago when I was sick with something else. It was fun to catch up with her. As goofy as that place was, there were some cool people there.

We chatted about what we’d been up to, and at one point started talking about music. When we did, she made some sort of comment about how she likes all kinds of music, although she’s sure that I would give her all kinds of shit for saying that. I asked her what she meant, and it turned out that at some point when we used to work together, I had asked her what kind of music she listens to, and she had told me that she listened to a little bit of everything.

As you know, I’m an unreasonable dick about this subject. and we apparently had the conversation that always ensues when someone tells me this: I accuse them of being a liar and tell them that “everything” always seems to mean that 95% of the time they listen to one genre and then cherry pick a few albums they like from other genres for the remaining 5%.

So, it turns out that I had this discussion with this girl a few years ago, and she had been pissed off at me for busting her chops about it ever since. I completely believe that it happened, because that is totally something that I would do, but I have absolutely no recollection of that conversation taking place.

Which made me realize that I need to quit spending so much time fretting about the past.

I originally started listening to podcasts to help me sleep. I would put them on while I was going to bed so I could focus on them until I passed out, because if I don’t have something to distract me while I’m dozing off, I spend three hours agonizing over every embarrassing moment in my life. A missed line in a school play from 10 years ago, or a humiliating moment in front of a girl I liked, or when I said something rude to someone because I was a stupid teenager. I have plenty of them, as everyone does, and I fixate on them when I’m trying to fall asleep.

I decided recently to get off my own nuts about stupid things that I’ve done in my past. Originally, I only had one reason, which was that unless I invent a time machine, there’s nothing I can do about those events, and stressing out about things that you can’t really control is a surefire way to end up having a stroke. It’s good to remember the stupid things that I’ve done in an attempt to keep from doing them again, but not to agonize over them.

The moment at the coffee shop made me realize something else, though: It’s also a waste of time to worry about those humiliating moments from my past, because it’s entirely possible that the other people involved in those events don’t even remember them happening. Furthermore, it’s entirely possible that I don’t remember the things that I HAVE done that other people remember and are pissed off about.

This is actually not the first time that someone has told me their most vivid memory of me and it’s something that I don’t remember at all. I met up to grab a beer with one of my old high school friends a month or two ago, and he told me about the time when we were in a Physics study group as Juniors in high school. We were there during lunch, and the teacher locked the door so he could go grab something to eat. I had to go to the bathroom, and I guess that I peed in a trash can and then threw the bag out of the third story window so I wouldn’t have to leave the room. Up until my friend reminded me of that story, I had completely forgotten about it…and, uh, I still have, because it never happened and I would never do something like that. You hear me, potential and current employers? IT NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED. But if I HAD, it would be interesting that one of my friend’s strongest memories of me from high school is something that I don’t even remember doing.

It’s kind of weird to think about – I assume that people have very clear, comprehensive memories of all of the details of their experiences, and so when two people interact, their opinions of each other are formed off of their complete and identical memories of all of those interactions, and that’s obviously not really the case. If you sat me and one of my friends down in separate rooms and told us to write down everything that we could remember about the time that we’d spent hanging out, how much overlap would there be? Probably more than 0%, but probably a lot less than I would expect, too. I’ve known my three closest friends for most of my life, and that’s a lot of time spent together doing stuff to remember, especially when you consider how hard it is for me to remember anything. And even if you do look at the points where we do overlap, I wonder how differently we interpret those events? I spent all of high school convinced that everyone hated me, and most of the people that I’ve spoken to since then either didn’t really have an opinion or seem to think that I was mostly okay. If they did hate me, it was because they thought I was kind of a jerk, not because I was pathetic.

It would also explain my last two serious relationships. I walked away from both of them feeling like I had been trying fairly hard to make things work but getting the obligatory “Dear Johnny, fuck you. Sincerely, your ex-girlfriend” from both of them after it was over anyway. It probably has less to do with them being assholes and just boils down to us selectively remembering different parts of the relationship. I remember cooking for her, fixing her flat tire in the rain, patiently (at first) letting her exclude me from plans so she could hang out with her ex without hurting his feelings and missing the Broncos 2008 season opener against their bitter division-rival Oakland Raiders to go on a walk with her because her roommate wanted to watch something else. She remembers that I always came over late, wouldn’t go camping, didn’t like her friends and refused to take a four day road trip with her and went to a party at my ex-girlfriend’s house instead.

The idea I find most interesting, though, is that there are probably people out there who’s entire perception of me is based on interactions that I don’t have any memory of, and vice-versa. I wonder how many people I’ve met that made a huge impact on me with some little thing that they said or did that they don’t even remember anymore?

It boggles the mind. The sick, NyQuil-addled mind.

One thing I seem to remember is that Clipse’s 2003 single “When Was The Last Time” kicks a lot of ass.

It appears that in this case, I have remembered the past with crystal clarity.

1. People are saying that this is a golden age of television. Broadcast television is starting to struggle more and more,

The most coherent, lucid, articulate celebrity on VH1. No, really. This is VH1's A-Game.

and networks are willing to try crazy shit that they normally wouldn’t in a desperate struggle to get their hands on what little viewership is left. Sometimes that means that you have reality shows  starring competitors from other reality shows starring competitors from other reality shows until you have ten degrees of separation from even a D list celebrity (I’ll fucking kill you, VH1. Then again, can I really blame them? They’ve managed to spin Brett Michaels, Flava Flav and their groupies into 14 different reality shows. What do you think 24 hours of programming costs VH1? Sixty dollars? One fifty if you throw in the cost of liability waivers and condoms? Doesn’t matter. Go fuck yourself, VH1.)

Anyway, as I was saying, when television networks are willing to try anything, sometimes you end up with a reality show that they have to cancel because one of the contestants is wanted for murdering his wife and stuffing her in a suitcase, but other times you end up with The Wire, or Lost, or Rob & Big. I fucking love Rob & Big.

2. I gave up video games for a year and pout about it regularly on this blog.

A few years ago, I started smoking. Not heavily, but my daily nicotine intake kept gradually creeping higher and higher until one day it dawned on me that, shockingly, I had developed a fondness for cigarettes that one might go as far as to describe as an “addiction”. I laid off the cigarettes at that point, which proved embarrassingly difficult. I only spent about six months as a very light smoker, but it was still a pretty big uphill battle. Sometimes I could distract myself with an alternative activity, but there were moments during my day when I was driving in the car or taking a break from flipping pancakes and my brain would say “You can’t distract me, asshole. Quit what you’re doing and find a cigarette. I need some flavor in my fucking T-Zone, stat.” All I could really do in those situations was gnash my teeth and try to decide if I would be willing to toss the salad of the guy in the car next to me if he would give me a pack of cigarettes in return.

Convincing me that I have a serious problem with games is the fact that I sometimes have these moments with this habit, too. I try to find other ways to fill my time, but every once and a while, my mind just stops me in my tracks and tells me “I don’t give a shit what you’re doing right now, you need to put a controller in your hand and blow some shit up”. Sometimes I find productive things to do during the time when I would normally play games – I’m trying to learn Spanish, finish school (again) in another of my futile attempts to achieve my dream of becoming financially solvent, and my laundry gets done on a far more regular basis, but I have those moments where I have to clench my fists and grit my teeth to stop myself from buying a gamecube and then having sex with it. There’s no hope of being productive in situations like that, so I have to find entertaining alternatives.

3. Everyone is gay for Mad Men.

It’s a show that takes place in the early 1960′s about an advertising firm and the people that work at it. Everyone has been ranting and raving about how great that show is. About two weeks before season three started, everyone started making little Mad Men themed avatars for their twitter and facebook profiles. With everyone’s status updates leading up to the Season 3 premier getting giddier and giddier, I couldn’t even log on to facebook without someone’s boner for that show smacking me in the face.

I’ll bet that you see where this is heading.

Normally, I wouldn’t give a television show a second thought, no matter how many twitter updates I saw in a day about excitement for Mad Men that resulted in loss of bladder control. Between video games and Internet pornography, I normally have more than enough entertainment to occupy my free time. Lucky for Mad Men (assuming Mad Men gives a shit about me watching their show), this year is different, so I decided to watch the first two seasons so I could jump on the bandwagon for season three.

Look, it's me! You can tell that it's 1960 because I'm drinking a martini and smoking indoors! I cropped it out of the picture, but I'm also cheating on my wife and discriminating against a homosexual!

At first, I didn’t really like it, mostly because the first half of Season 1 isn’t so much “Telling a story” as “Beating you over the head with the fact that it’s 1960″. I barely knew any of the character’s names or anything about them 6 episodes in, because they seemed to need the full hour every episode to show people smoking, drinking, being disrespectful to women, blacks and gays and wearing stupid clothing. The first four hours of it were kind of novel, but after that, I found myself thinking “I get it. Don Draper loves smoking and cheating on his wife, usually at the same time. All the better if he can slip in an anti-Semitic slur right before he climaxes. ”

I’m not saying that it’s a completely useless trick; I think that part of what people like about the show is that even though it takes place in what seems like it should be relatively familiar territory, 1960′s America is almost completely alien in a lot of ways. It’s also kind of fun to watch historical events play out on the show, like the Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy beating Nixon. Nonetheless, you can’t watch a scene with a man driving up to a gas station in an old car with his wife and then yelling “5 cents a gallon!? That’s highway robbery! Why, I’m so worked up I have half a mind to smack you right in the kisser, Gladys! Toss me a cigarette and freshen up my drink before my nerves get the best of me and I throw this goofy looking plaid blazer that I’m wearing right in the dirt! Negro boy – NEGRO BOY! Come fill up my tank!” without feeling like they’re leaning a little bit too heavily on a gimmick. (Spoiler alert: That scene never happened. I made it up. Are you listening, Mad Men? I can bring heat like that all day long! You can’t afford NOT to have me on your writing staff!)

I have to say, though, that about 3/4ths of the way through season 1, I started to really enjoy the show. They started telling a story that went beyond “No, really! It’s 1960!” with characters that I found interesting, and I’m pretty excited to start watching season 3 now. I even made a sweet little avatar of myself to show my enthusiasm for the show that you can see on the right. I am now caught up and looking forward to keeping myself from cheating on my video game resolution with the rest of the season at Sterling Cooper.

Up next: Battlestar Galactica.

Three and a half more months left.

I can do this.

-CBFBTASCILTCHVF-

(For those of you who don’t know, the above acronym stands for “Certified Butthole Free, But There’s A Slight Chance Is Less Than Completely Horse Vagina Free. Do what you will with that information.)

After some careful consideration, I have decided to eliminate the post with a horse penis in it. I’m a busy man. I can’t waste bandwidth making sure that people that speak Farsi get their dong fix for the day. Don’t worry, I didn’t delete the entry. It’s just private now. That way, when the homeland security raids my house, I can be sure that it’s incredibly easy for them to find evidence of my fine collection of horse wang pictures.

Sure, I’ll be sorry to see all of the traffic from it disappear, but it was time.

Besides. Horse penises are SO last year. The kids these days are all about one thing and one thing only:

Horse Vaginas.

Welcome to the FUTURE!

Now we’re talking.

And, actually, now that I look at it, I guess that there is a picture of a butthole in this post. What are you gonna do?

So, as you know, I got sick about a week ago. It started with some remarkably loose bowels and ended with…I’m not sure what. I want to say a head cold, but I was pretty fogged out and hazy too. My brain wasn’t really working for a about a week. Or, maybe I’m just saying that because I didn’t post anything for a week and I don’t want you to think that I’m a pussy and I refused to write because I had a runny nose. Those of you that are familiar with my work ethic probably have a pretty good guess at the truth.

I sniffled and coughed up all kinds of interesting things for a week. I drank Nyquil as hard as I could. I could handle about four hours of consciousness before needing to lie down and breathe through my mouth and cough for a few more hours.

Today, I woke up and seemed to have a little more get up and go. I could sleep without any cold medicine, I could think, I was energetic and even though my body still had a lot of mucus in it, it didn’t seem to be making any more of it. I wasn’t 100%, but I felt good.

Obviously, things were looking bleak: I was dangerously close to being healthy.

Thankfully, my body picked up the slack. Maybe it was something I ate, maybe I have the flu, maybe I should’ve just sprung for a new enema bag instead of trying to save some money by reusing the one that I accidentally dropped into a carnival porta potty – I don’t know, I’m not a doctor – but whatever the reason, I’ve got a new and exciting sickness to deal with now. I’ve spent a delightful evening lying on the floor of the bathroom listening to podcasts with a break thrown in here and there to throw up. I’m feeling a little bit better right now, but it’s hard to say if I’m actually better or if it’s just a temporary reprieve from that queasy feeling that lets me know that I should go hang out in the bathroom for a few more hours.

This situation raises two interesting questions.

"H-1-N-WHAAAAAAAT!?"

First of all, do I even have a fucking immune system? As a substitute teacher, I’ve worked three different jobs in the past month for teachers who are sick, at least one with swine flu. I know I won’t make any friends by saying this, but I am a very outspoken opponent of swine flu – this is America, and swine flu needs to get the fuck back to Mexico, or really anywhere else that I’m not. Because of my xenoswinophobia, I’ve been trying to get plenty of sleep, wash my hands regularly and eat well – the kind of shit that’s supposed to keep you healthy. CLEARLY, it is not working. After a week of being sick, I get to spend all of eight hours feeling better today. Not healthy mind you, just like I’m on the road to recovery before I have a new and exciting disease to deal with. Hey immune system – you know, the one that flips shit and gives me allergies to protect me from all of the deadly flower pollen in the air during spring – where the fuck are you? Your only job is to fight off sickness, so how about you fight off some fucking sickness? I’ve either contracted AIDS without having sex with anyone, or I just have the Don Knotts of immune systems. Maybe both.

Second of all, and this one is a little more fun, I can’t help but wonder which ailment I’ll be struck with next. God knows I can’t be healthy, and I’m dying to know what health problems I’m going to have after this assuredly brief window of recovery. Sure, I’m feeling a little bit better now, but I’m sure my body will make sure that I’ve got typhoid, or scurvy, or autism, or feline leukemia before the sun comes up. Which will it be? I won’t know until I’m sitting in class tomorrow and my hair starts falling off or I start crying blood, but not because something really awesome happened as per usual.

Well, I’m starting to feel a little queasy again. I think it’s time to go see what’s going on in the bathroom. If I don’t post anything on Wednesday, I think it’s safe to assume that I’ve contracted a lethal case of some bizarre disease that normally only babies and the elderly are weak enough to contract.

There’s only one thing that can bring me joy in this state: Making fun of the elderly.

I’m dying.

Football starts soon. Like, yesterday.

Fucking awesome.

I have a framed copy of this sitting on top of my hope chest.

1. Most years, I get to spend most of the football season talking myself into the Broncos taking a run at the championship. They’re a good enough team that they can usually find their way into at least the first round of the playoffs, and even on the years that they don’t, they’re rarely mathematically eliminated until the very end of the season. Even last year, when they were 8-8, they weren’t knocked out of the playoffs until the very last game of the regular season, so I can usually spend a lot of time during football season talking myself into being optimistic about Denver’s chances. It’s not uncommon to find me on week five saying things like “Sure, we’re struggling right now, but if the Broncos can win their last ten games, most of the Charger’s starters die of swine flu, Kyle Orton has an epiphany like Neo at the end of the Matrix and Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees and Philip Rivers enter a suicide pact and kill themselves the week before the playoffs, we’re right back in this thing!”

This season, I’m guessing that I have about three weeks during football season where I can talk myself into the Broncos winning more than three or four games. After that, I’ve got 13 straight Sundays penciled in on my calendar that are filled with alcohol and bitter, bitter tears. I have a very brief window to be optimistic this year, starting now, and ending, by my estimation, in about the third quarter of the Bengals game, when Cincinnati figures out Denver’s Defense and starts to make some plays and the offense continues to dink and dunk a few yards here and there, yielding a couple of field goals and a fluke touchdown in garbage time when the game is out of reach.

You sicken me, Jay Cutler.

Because of this, I’ve got to treasure what little time I have to be delusional about the Bronco’s chances this year, and Bill Simmons has earned himself a lifelong reader with this article: he picks the Denver Broncos as his 2009 sleeper team, predicting that they will go 10-6 and even make the playoffs. He then goes on to say that Jay Cutler “looks like a pissed-off trust-fund kid who can’t believe the valet scratched his Escalade hybrid” and compares him to the Iron Sheik.

Are you fucking kidding me? An ESPN columnist comparing the quarterback who turned on my team to a professional wrestling villain AND predicting that my imploding team will make the playoffs!?

Bill Simmons, I don’t have very much time to be excited about the Broncos, and you have done everything that you can to let me enjoy that time as much as possible before they lose in every way imaginable! This is like a last meal before an execution! I know you don’t read this blog, but if there’s ever anything I can do to thank you for all of this sweet, sweet false hope, you let me know.

2. Tila Tequila’s lawsuit against Shawne Merriman just got dumped by the DA. I was going to write more about it, but it boils down to this: As I said before, I’ll never know what happened for sure. It’s entirely possible that Shawne Merriman did beat her, she was sober and justice isn’t being served. What I do know for certain is that she should stop using twitter to defend herself. Her vague comments about how steroid abusers are violent, that she couldn’t have been drunk that night because she can’t drink alcohol because she’s allergic to it (although people have claimed that she was visibly drunk and it’s been verified that there was alcohol involved in the incident) or her angry tirades about what a shit head Merriman is aren’t really giving off a “This woman is a victim of an aggressive athlete!” vibe so much as a “This catty nutjob is throwing a temper tantrum because she’s not getting her way” vibe. Like I said, it’s entirely possible that she’s telling the truth, but her twittering is making her look like a bitchy 14 year old hot girl that isn’t used to being told no.

LIGHTS OUT!!!

3. Fall is in the air, and that means that I have to start putting “Round Up” by Sam Spence in HEAVY rotation. The song cracks me up, and it gives a sense of purpose to whatever I’m doing. Imagine an average day for me: I stumble out of bed sometime between ten and eleven. I check my email, facebook and google reader. I read on the can and then browse over some Internet porn. If it’s a school day, maybe I put some pants on and go try to fit in with a bunch of students who are ten years younger than me. At some point, I eat something, go back to the Internet for a few more hours, and then stumble into bed sometime after midnight.

Sounds kind of goofy.

Now, imagine me doing all of those things with this song playing:

EXACTLY.

Everything is cooler if you do it to that song. Bonus points if some announcer with a gruff, deep voice narrates the entire thing: “A lesser man would’ve given up on that chilly fall September day, but Johnny Castle was no lesser man. Come hell or high water, Castle was prepared for that majestic battlefield where heroes are made and legends are created, dig deep and do whatever it took… to make sure that he read a couple of chapters of a book while he took a dump. Only one question remained: After his heroic effort, would Castle have the tenacity to walk into the kitchen and eat a leftover chalupa from last night’s dinner? ”

Anyway, I have to put that song on repeat and go print out three hundred copies of Simmons’ article, throw them in the tub and rub them all over my naked body.

10-6, BABY! HERE WE COME!!!

I love football season.

(I’ve got a cold, which I am responding to like a baby. As a result, I’m drinking NyQuil like Kate from “Jon and Kate Plus 8″ drinks human blood (I can’t prove that she actually does this, but to date no one has ever argued with me when I’ve made this claim.)

The gooey, doped-up haze that I’m floating around in is the only excuse I have for this post. Let me spoil it for you: It’s 1000 words worth of made-up chess rules. I’m going cross-eyed and even I know that this is a bad idea.

Whatever, help me out and spread the word on these exciting new rules. If there’s one thing that hard-core right wing conservatives have taught me, it’s that if enough people say something on the Internet, it becomes true.

Enjoy.)

About a year ago, my friend Brian wanted to start playing chess.

I hadn’t played a significant amount of chess since I was 11 or 12, against my Dad, who was a gentlemen, but didn’t pull any punches either. He had been on the chess team in high school, and maybe he wasn’t good enough to beat Bobby Fischer, but he was certainly good enough to beat my ass on a consistent basis.

"I can't believe my eyes! A Minotaur!"

Then, in high school, in order to kill time at forensics meets (another of the hip activities I participated in as a teenager), I played a few games against a guy I knew who wouldn’t play games unless he was positive that he could beat you at them. A few rounds of getting beaten up on by a less than gracious peer was my last experience with chess up to that point.

Those experiences led me to believe that

A) I wasn’t good enough at chess to compete against anyone but a 9 year old who had never played before, and as a result

B) I didn’t like playing chess very much.

Brian’s a pretty nice guy, though, and I figured he wouldn’t steam it in when I lost the way my other friend did, so I told him I would give it a shot.

It was pretty rough at first, and I’m still not very good, but I really enjoy chess now. He and I play about three times a week.

Like I said, it wasn’t always easy; I spend the first two months that we played spending ten or twenty minutes per turn and still getting torn apart. Even now, when we play timed games, I consistently run out of time. Brian and I are about 50/50 when we play now, though, making it more fun for both of us, I think. We’ve also both gotten better in the process – I know a few openings now, I’m familiar with forks, skewers and gambits, and I don’t find myself in checkmate three moves into the game nearly as much as I used to.

There’s only one conclusion to draw from this: Brian and I have completely mastered the game of chess.

So what do you do to keep a game fresh when you’ve accomplished everything that you can possibly accomplish in it?

Simple, really. You start making up your own rules.

The next step, of course, is to mix up those rules with real ones and then put those rules on your blog in an attempt to use the Internet to convince everyone that they’re real.

Let’s begin.

Pieces:

The Minotaur: As even the greenest chess player knows, if a pawn is advanced to the opponent’s back rank, the piece can be promoted to a Queen, Rook, Bishop or Knight. Only the true chess aficionado, however is aware of the piece promotion required to achieve a Minotaur. The Minotaur is a difficult piece to obtain, to be sure, but well worth the effort.

First used in the now infamous Sarkifsky-Lumbaugh match of 1906, obtaining a Minotaur requires that the player advance three pawns to the opponent’s back rank. The pawns must sit on the back rank until all three are advanced, and if even one is captured, the Minotaur cannot be summoned. If the player is able to obtain the Minotaur, however, his opponent’s fate is all but sealed. The powerful Minotaur (which is represented by a Knight sitting on top of a Rook) can move in the same fashion as a Knight OR a Queen, meaning that, if placed correctly, it can attack more than half the squares on the board. The most famous use of the Minotaur was in an unforgettable battle between Johhny “Two Pawns” Jackson and Alfred Mackleby. Mackleby had an almost eighteen point advantage late in the match, but ignored Jackson’s advancing pawns until it was too late. It is said that once Jackson advanced his third and final pawn, the only sounds that could be heard were the shocked gasps from the crowd and the dulcet tones of Mackleby forcefully soiling his pants in a deliberate display of rage.

You kind of have to use your imagination for the electric guitar.

The Wizard: Another piece that only the savviest chess players utilize. Acquired by the same means as the Minotaur, the Wizard, which is represented by a Bishop sitting on top of a Rook, is unable to move. This lack of mobility is countered by his extremely powerful attack – Capable of summoning a mighty lightning bolt by wailing on an electric guitar atop a mountain, the Wizard is able to destroy any piece on the board but the King for every move that it is left untouched. Although when used correctly the Wizard can wreak havoc on an opponent’s pieces, one must be cautious when using the Wizard; since it cannot attack the King, the chances of a stalemate increase exponentially as more and more pieces are removed from the board. This piece was used frequently during the 1700′s, but didn’t find it’s way into the modern game until it was popularized by Franklin Blumenkurtz during his run at the 1942 International Chess Championship. Blumenkurtz cruised into the semi-finals with ease, but his run was cut short in his match against Hanz Schliken. Blumenkurtz appeared to have won the game when he aquired the Wizard, but Schliken responded with the Dirty Sanchez (A technique described below). Blumenkurtz immediately resigned.

Techniques:

The Queen’s Gambit: An opening where the player sacrifices a pawn in order to speed up development.

The Clown’s Gambit: An opening that involves losing a major piece in exchange for a minor piece, or, in extreme cases, nothing. If the gambit results in losing to the opponent in a humiliating fashion, all the better. Used as a tactic to imbue the opponent with a false sense of confidence when playing multiple games against them for money. All of the famous Chess Sharks of the 1800′s used the Clown’s Gambit to fleece their opponents and use their ill-gotten gains for the finer things that professional chess players needed hard currency for, namely polio medicine, asthma inhalers and female companionship.

The South Beach: Any number of moves. The only requirement for a combination to be called the South Beach is that when you perform it, you are “Bringing The Heat”.

The Gary Cooper: An opening that Brian and I haven’t figured out yet. We like the name, but the only reason it came up was because we started singing “Puttin’ On The Ritz” one night while we were playing. I don’t really even know who Gary Cooper is. Help me out on this one. I’m never going to get it into Wikipedia if I can’t make something up.

The Dirty Sanchez: A nuanced maneuver where the player inserts their index finger into the opponent’s rectum and subsequently runs it across their upper lip, giving them what appears to be a thin mustache. Primarily used as an intimidation tactic, and an effective one at that: There are no recorded instances of a competitor performing the Dirty Sanchez on an opponent and losing the game. I swear that this is true. Google it.

There. That should do it. It’s only a matter of time before these techniques find their way into the modern game of chess, AND YOU CAN TAKE THAT TO THE BANK, MOTHERFUCKER.

Just a little bit more proof that chess is super cool:

Yup. That’s pretty much what it’s like.

I get MY kicks ABOVE the waistline, sunshine.

As much as it’s going to hurt my pride when I check my blog traffic and there are no horse penis searches to boost my hits, I’m taking down the post with the picture of the horse wang in it. I think.

On one hand, it’s an old post that nobody reads anymore that still gets yields the majority of my daily traffic because it has a picture of a horse penis in it.

On the other hand, it’s a part of my blog. If I wrote a book that I decided needed a naked picture of Don Knotts and people kept buying the book for that one page, is it really my responsibility to rewrite the book and take it out because it’s making people buy it for the wrong reasons?

Who knows? It’s not really a good metaphor, because it implies that I get paid everytime someone visits my blog. If that were the case, you’d better believe that I’d be frontloading every single post with as many animal cocks as I possibly could.

I don’t know. I’ll sleep on it. The thought of removing the post, I mean. Not a horse cock.

As far as you know.

What could possibly go wrong?

I was catching up on the AFC West today, eager to find out what the Broncos had done in the last 24 hours to make it even more difficult for me to talk myself into three wins this season.

In past years, I’ve found reasons to be pessimistic – a struggling defense, a suspect quarterback, or maybe an injured player – the kind of things that made me worry that they might not make the playoffs, but nothing like this year.

This year has been special.

If they’re not firing their coach, they’re dumping off their franchise quarterback, or suspending a pissed off number one receiver, or turning into a watered-down, boring, impotent version of the Patriots. It seems like something bad happens every week. They’ve reached the point where they’re hard pressed to find a way to surprise me. Will Josh McDaniels trade all of the running backs the Broncos have to the Patriots for some Hustler magazines and a 12 pack of Miller Light? Will Brandon Stokely show up to a press conference in black face? Will Pat Bowlen try to eat Ryan Clady’s brains because he thinks it will give him the cagey offensive lineman’s strength? I don’t know! That’s the beauty of my 2009 Denver Broncos: Anything is possible!

Like I was saying, I was interested to see what sort of depressing news would be headed my way when I checked the news. Imagine my surprise when I found out that not only had the Broncos not done anything crazy in a full day, but Shawne Merriman, star linebacker of the AFC West rival San Diego Chargers, was in jail for allegedly preventing his girlfriend, Tila Tequila from leaving his house and then choking her.

My initial reactions were relief that the Broncos has managed to make it a full 24 hours without doing anything that made me want to cry and that sweet feeling of my misery getting a little bit of company.

The more I thought about it, though, the more complicated it got.

First of all, for those of you that don’t know, Tila Tequila is an MTV reality “star”. Take a few seconds to watch these videos of her.

Now, think about it, and be honest: after watching those videos, you kind of wanted to choke her a little bit, right?

Then, I read a little bit more about the incident, and according to Merriman’s lawyer, Tequila was at a party at Merriman’s house, she was wasted, she was trying to drive, and Merriman tried to keep her from doing that. According to Tequila, she was wasted and he restrained and choked her. The one thing these two stories have in common is that she was wasted.

Let's just say that it's taking an incredible amount of self restraint to keep from spouting off quotes from Full Metal Jacket right now.

I want you to take a look at those videos of Tequila again, and then imagine her really drunk at a party. What do you think the odds are that you would end up choking Tequila at some point? 90% 100%? Some percentage higher than 100%? I’ve done the math in my head a hundred times, and save for a few scenarios where I’m paralyzed or dead, there’s no equation involving me and a drunk Tila Tequila that doesn’t end with me choking her.

Here’s where my brain really starts to hurt, though: Merriman and his lawyer claim that he was trying to keep Tequila from driving because she was wasted. If that’s true, and she threw a tantrum and called the cops and lied about the fact that he had been choking her…well, she deserves to get choked for that. But only if she lied, which would mean that he DIDN’T choke her…. what I’m saying is that she only deserves to get choked if she didn’t get choked. It’s the ultimate paradox!

My final thoughts on the issue are this:

We’ll never know for certain what happened that night, but assuming the allegations are true, Shawne Merriman did something that I’ve dreamed of doing since the first time I saw her on TV: He choked the shit out of Tila Tequila. If he did actually choke her, I can only hope that he did the “Lights Out” dance once he was done. For those of you that don’t know, Merriman is known as “Lights Out” because he has a reputation for knocking out quarterbacks. Most of the time when he gets a sack, he does a stupid little dance.

In all honesty, I hope that Merriman is telling the truth, and that he didn’t do anything inappropriate or abusive to Tequila… but if he did, I hope it went as follows:

Tequila: I’m going home. I need my car!

Merriman: Tila, I think you’ve had a little bit too much to drink. Let me call you a cab.

Tequila: I told you, I’m fine! You don’t…y-you don’t know what the FUCK…you’re talking…about.

Merriman: You’re slurring your speech and stumbling. I don’t want you to get hurt or get a DUI tonight. Come on. I’ll get you a glass of water while you wait for the cab.

Tequila: Are you – are you gonna listen to me? I’m FINE! Gimme my fucking keys!

Merriman: No, you’re drunk.

Tequila: I need my fucking keys you fucking…you fucking fuck!!!

Merriman: Calm down, Tila! Let’s just get you a cab!

Tequila: Don’t tell me what to do! I’m fuckin’…I’m fuckin’…Tila Tequila…and shit. All my haters…need to get a…get a life and shit.

Merriman: I know, Tila, but you’ve had to much to drink (He puts his arm around her and tries to corral her back into the house)

Tequila: DON’T TOUCH ME! DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME! I’M CALLING THE COPS, YOU…YOU FUCKING DICK!!

(Merriman grabs her, chokes her, and then, as she falls to the ground, he does the dance at the 8 second point in this video:
)

Merriman: LIGHTS OUT!!!

Awesome. Awesome.

So here’s to you, Shawne Merriman: Either you didn’t commit a crime, or you committed a crime that I’m jealous that I didn’t get to commit. Either way, you brought some bad news to an AFC West team that isn’t the Denver Broncos, which is a rarity so far this season.

LIGHTS OUT!!!

Edit: Well, it was nice while it lasted. Looks like Broncos rookie tight end Richard Quinn was arrested on harassment charges related to domestic violence/obstruction of phone services Monday afternoon. Way to go, boys. Way to go.

It’s been an interesting two days.

Actually, it really hasn’t. I’m going to talk about it anyway.

Yesterday, I worked middle school language arts for a teacher who’s a family friend. She hadn’t written lesson plans for the day, so we came up with some together before class started, and the day went really well. The kids only tried to sass me a little bit, when they did, I shut them down for the most part, and the lesson plan went really well. Sometimes I think I have good ideas for classes – I’ll give them a logic puzzle to chew on for the first five minutes of class to get their brains running, or I’ll have them journal for fifteen or twenty minutes, or we’ll listen to War of the Worlds or something like that. 9 times out of 10 when I do something like that, it get’s met with one of three things: 1) Blank stares, 2) Whining about how they don’t know what to write/say/draw, depending on the assignment, or 3) Complaints that the assignment is both boring and “gay”.

The lesson plan that we came up with for her advanced language arts class was this: I’d divide the class into three different groups and show each one a picture. Then, everyone had to start writing a story about the picture in question. After five minutes, they would pass their paper to the person next to them, who would continue the story. The rules were that they had to stick with the theme of the previous writer, they couldn’t kill any characters, it had to be school appropriate and the story couldn’t just be two pages of characters fighting and insulting each other.

It sounded like a pretty fun idea that I would’ve enjoyed if I were a student, so, naturally, I knew that they would give me a lot of shit for it and then spend the rest of class bitching about how hard/boring/gay it was.

Granted, it was an advanced class, but advanced classes can be some of the whiniest bitches on the planet. They start moaning and complaining when you have them do serious work, but they get sand in their vaginas when you try to do something fun with them too, because it’s beneath them. After all, they’re the ADVANCED class of 13 year olds! They don’t have time for this kid’s shit!

Because of this, I went into the class with low expectations, prepared to immediately get bombarded with 30 high pitched, whiny voices saying “Why do we have to do this!?” all at once.

“Because fuck you, that’s why!” I was prepared to yell.

But the whining never came.

Actually, things went the way they would if it were a movie. Everyone was into it, they worked hard, they followed the rules, and they were pumped up out of their minds about their stories. It was hilarious watching them scribbling away as fast as they could with huge grins on their faces, snickering at their own clever plot twists. Once we were done and started sharing the best stories with the class, they were all tripping over themselves to read their stories aloud.

The point is, the day went about as well as I could possibly hope for it to. I put a lot of energy into getting down on every aspect of my life, but yesterday was a “I actually think this might be the right line of work” kind of day. I have days where bad things happen that I find funny, days where I’m glad that the room doesn’t burn down, and days where, to avoid crying in front of the students, I have to repeat “six more hours and I will never have to see these little pieces of shit ever again” through clenched teeth until the bell rings. As a man who has to rely on thirty teenagers who don’t really want to be there for things to go according to plan, things RARELY go according to plan, so it was a real treat.

I went to be with those good vibes vibrating around in my head.

Then, I woke up the next day and realized that I will turn 30 in exactly a month, which was kind of wild to realize.

I don’t know what I expected out of thirty, but I didn’t expect to be going to school and living with my parents when it happened.

I couldn’t tell you why, but it doesn’t really seem to be bothering me. I’ve spent enough time pulling my hair out over the fact that I’m not living in some mansion jacked up on cocaine that it doesn’t bug me as much anymore. My life is what it is, and all I can do is try to move towards the things I want.

Besides, my life is more interesting when I don’t know what to expect. I mean, mediocrity, of course, but what kind it will be is a total mystery. What will I be doing in ten more years? Teaching? Working as a line cook? In the middle of another blog-related lawsuit? Living in my parent’s basement and going to school? It seems unlikely, but I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be doing it at 30 either.

Whatever I’m doing, it probably won’t be what I think I’ll be doing now. And I think I’m okay with that.

We’ll see how tough I am when I actually turn 30. Expect a frantic, suicidal post, followed by me growing a ponytail and buying  sports car.

Why?

Because fuck you, that’s why.