#and incidentally it’s also why i can’t stand baseball too

[an-ivy-covered-summer]

if this one ends up being max fried’s last game in a braves uniform, i can only say that i feel incredibly blessed and grateful for having witnessed this gem of a start in person. i truly have no words. what an ace. i might just start crying right now, this is why i love baseball so much.

[aibidil]

So if you had to choose, out of Harry or Draco, which one do you think gets more turned on by the sight of the other one with their sleeves rolled up to the elbows exposing FOREARMS?

Why hello, @goldentruth813, forearms!drarry, you say? You have come to the right place.

First of all, I hope it’s clear that there’s no real answer to this question, because, like with most things with these two, they’re both completely lost over each other and that includes forearms.

And, like most lovers, they enjoy each other’s bodies in general. They don’t have perfect bodies, you know, but that doesn’t matter to people in love. Harry has a pretty good physique from trying to keep up with Greg and Dudley at the gym, but the truth is he can’t lay off the treacle tart and has a bit of a belly, and Draco is totally into it. And Draco is good-looking, but he’s also kinda too skinny and he never goes to the gym with the others because “honestly Harry, have you smelled it there?” but Harry thinks Draco is gorgeous and doesn’t mind his pointiness. In any case, I digress. They love each other’s bodies.

But the thing about bodies is they’re usually clothed in public? So you might stare at the way a set of shoulders fill out a pair of robes, or you might admire the curve of an ass in a pair of gabardine wizarding trousers or ratty but well-fitted Muggle jeans, but in general the bodies are kept under wraps. Which is a pretty good thing, indeed, because these two have a hard enough time keeping their hands off each other. Harry has confided more than once to Draco that he doesn’t understand how Ginny keeps her hands off Luna when Luna wears that set of robes with the plunging neckline.

But forearms. Forearms.

Draco blames/credits the first time they ever kissed on Harry’s forearms in a baseball tee. It had those three-quarter sleeves, you know, and that really thin, soft cotton. After the war, Muggle fashion was in vogue, and all the Quidditch teams had started selling Muggle-inspired team paraphernalia. Harry liked to wear the Montrose Magpies tee to annoy Ron (who, incidentally, had bought one of every item in the Cannons inventory). And Harry had these gorgeous tanned forearms sticking out of this blasted Muggle-inspired plebeian Quidditch tee? But Draco really had always liked the Magpies? And Harry, at the time, had been busy writing and each stroke of the quill caused the muscles in his forearms to move, and the arms were covered with this layer of dark hair and Draco was overcome with this desire to know where that hair ended? Was his back hairy?—Merlin forbid; Draco had to know; it was for science, really. And so he was just staring at Harry’s arms, and then Harry stuck his tongue between his teeth, because he’s the kind of bloke to stick his tongue in his teeth when he’s concentrating, and Draco may have kind of sort of Vanished the desk Harry was working at and grabbed Harry’s stupidly strong and tan and hairy forearms and yanked Harry toward him for a searing kiss.

These days Harry’s forearms distract Draco in a different way (though the Montrose Magpies baseball tee—which Harry still fucking has, and please can you read the Life-Changing Wizarding Magic of Tidying Up? It fucking brings me joy, Draco!—still drives Draco a bit randy, if he’s honest), because Harry is usually in his work robes and his gorgeous forearms are usually covered. So when he finally takes off his robes, which signals a sort of winding-down relaxation that always portends good things for Draco, the forearms cause a sort of anticipatory Pavlovian response. Forearms? Time to cook dinner with Harry. Forearms? Time for a do you feel like a glass of wine? Forearms? Fuck dinner, time to cast a Stasis and deal with that later.

Another less common way in which Harry’s forearms drive Draco to distraction occurs at events where Harry, for whatever reason, is wearing Muggle suits. Like Dudley and Greg’s destination beach wedding (Muggles in attendance, no robes allowed). Harry, it turns out, really hates wearing suits and immediately starts to act like he’s been hit with an Itching Jinx, grasping at his collar, fussing with his tie, whinging about how the shoulders don’t allow a free range of movement. So inevitably, Harry starts stripping off pieces of the suit, and this is when Draco generally sits back, swirling his drink, slowly feeling heat bloom in the pit of his stomach. Usually Harry loosens the tie first, exposing some of his neck, and then the suit jacket, which often reveals a waistcoat (and Circe, Draco has a real thing for waistcoats). But the next part is when the heat blossoming in Draco’s stomach starts to rise to his chest and neck: Harry unfastens his wrists and rolls up the sleeves. And it doesn’t even make any sense—there’s no logic involved here—because Harry is always good looking and he’s basically wearing the same thing regardless of the configuration of the sleeves, but let’s just say that once the sleeves are rolled up, Draco’s face is red and they’ve Apparated to a private location within a few minutes. (Harry generally returns to the function wearing something more comfortable, because “Draco, fuck it, there’s no way I’m putting that on twice in one day! You just took it off me!”)

But Harry is, believe it or not, just as obsessed with Draco’s forearms. Perhaps it’s because Draco is usually so buttoned-up. Draco is crisply pressed shirts and fussy robes and not ever rolling up his sleeves even if it’s the middle of the summer and sweat is dripping off his brow and down his neck. The first time Harry sees Draco roll up his sleeves, they’re sitting at a table together and it’s hot and they’re preoccupied and Draco does it without thinking. Harry has a coughing fit, because—in addition to staring at Draco’s forearms, which are lean and pale but also the tiniest bit freckly if you’re up close and the leanness allows you to see the muscles really well—it means that Draco trusts him. It means that Draco trusts him enough to stop with being buttoned-up, but it also means that Draco trusts him enough to see the Dark Mark and not freak out.

And the Dark Mark is horrible. It was awful when Voldemort was alive and it’s stomach-churning even after his death, when it’s faded to a pink scar. It’s ugly and it stands for ugly things, and Harry can’t stop thinking about how out of place it looks on Draco’s pale arm. Because Draco has done so much to redeem himself since the war; Draco isn’t ugly anymore (Draco was never physically ugly, of course, Harry mentally corrects, only the ideology was ugly). So the Mark seems incongruous on this Draco’s arm, and the human eye is drawn to incongruous things. Draco sees Harry looking and quirks an eyebrow, knowing Harry well enough by this point to know that he wouldn’t say anything hurtful about the Mark, but curious, nevertheless, about what Harry will say. But Harry only traces it with a finger, marveling at the way the scar tissue feels, and says, “Sometimes I wish the evil in me had a clear visual reminder like this: it’s still there, but it’s the past, you know?” And Draco stares at him for a moment—in awe, overcome with feelings he can’t quite name—before he pulls Harry into his lap and they divest themselves of their shirts entirely.

And when Draco agrees to start working with the new Muggle Studies and History of Magic professors at Hogwarts to talk to the students about the war and the toxicity of Voldemort’s ideology (“if you can even call it an ideology”), he starts to wear a uniform that consists of Muggle-style trousers, waistcoat, and shirt with rolled-up sleeves every day. Because showing off what remains of the Mark is part of his work, and overcoming his anxiety about letting people see it is for the greater good. And Harry really can’t control himself around that (“Are you sure you shouldn’t have sorted Hufflepuff, Harry?”). Draco has to ban Harry from accompanying him to Hogwarts, because the first time, after Harry spent an hour watching Draco discuss the war with a group of third-year Ravenclaws with his forearms and Mark on display, they ended up fucking in Myrtle’s bathroom, and the second time, after Draco had taught a lesson and somehow ended up with his forearms and face covered in chalk from the blackboard, Harry nearly Splinched himself trying to Apparate to avoid being caught with his trousers down by an ever-nosy Filch.

In fact, just yesterday, they were sitting at a table eating oats (“steel cut, not rolled, Harry”) in their pyjama pants and t-shirts, they were each driven to distraction by the other’s forearms, and after a brief (not-so-brief) breakfast intermission during which time the oats congealed, Harry declared, “I think we ought to wear our dressing gowns to breakfast on days we have to be somewhere.”

So it’s pretty much a tie, really.Tagging @lol-zeitgeistic @callingdrarry @carpemermaidtales @llap115 and everyone else who was involved in the Forearm Discourse of 2017.

[closetofanxiety]

Show Review: Ring of Honor/NJPW “War of the Worlds” Night One

Lowell, Massachusetts: The Flowering City! Kerouac Town! Home to the second-largest population of Cambodians in the United States, and more abandoned textile mills than you can shake a stick at! 

Let’s see how this momentous clash of companies shook out:

What: Ring of Honor/NJPW “War of the Worlds” Tour, Night One

Where: Memorial Auditorium, Lowell, Massachusetts

When: Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Who: I’ve seen crowd counts that put attendance between 1,200 and 1,500, and that sounds right to me. If it wasn’t a sellout, it was close. The place was packed to the rafters, and fully two-thirds of the people in attendance were wearing Bullet Club t-shirts. I went there after visiting multiple notable graves (one haunted), an abandoned mill turned into a kind of weirdo shopping mall, an abandoned mill turned into a national historic site, and a park named after Jack Kerouac where drunks were sleeping on the ground at 4 p.m., which is pretty appropriate when you consider that Kerouac drank himself to death.

Dark Match: Brad Hollister and Justin “Hammer” Tunis vs. The Dawgs

Hollister and Tunis are locals; I have seen them many times. Nice to see them getting a dark match. The Dawgs are new to me. I guess it’s Rhett Titus and Will Ferrara. Did you ever collect baseball cards? You know how the cards for all the bench players were grouped under the pejorative rubric “commons,” as in, “That pack of cards I bought was a bust, nothing but commons”? I kind of thing of Rhett Titus as a good example of that in wrestling. Not bad, not sensational, does the job he needs to do, but doesn’t really linger in the memory. This was a totally conventional tag team wrestling match. The crowd stirred briefly, after Hollister delivered a picture-perfect suplex. The Dawgs won. The cosmic wheel turns on.

Rating: Two Kerouacs.

The Briscoe Brothers vs. Jushin Thunder Liger and Flip Gordon

I haven’t been following ROH, but I guess the Briscoes are heels right now? They were lustily booed. Jay looked fantastic with his hair all matted and long and some kind of necklace of primitive fetishes around his neck. He looked like a chiseled, angry Dr. John who instead of learning to play the piano started a voodoo-based crime syndicate. I forget how much I like the Briscoes, but they are among my favorites. Holy cow, Flip Gordon is over with this crowd. Huge pop and “Flip! Flip! Flip!” chants. Liger, obviously, also gets a huge ovation. This match is entirely about Flip befuddling the enraged Briscoe cavemen with his arsenal of acrobatic dodges and counters. Liger comes in as a hot tag, but doesn’t really do anything spectacular. He doesn’t have to, my God, he’s Jushin Liger. He’s earned his elder statesman tag team apron-dweller spot. This match was a lot of fun. Not a sprint, but a condensed version of classic tag team wrestling, with some distinctive flourishes. The Briscoes wrestled like heels, denying the crowd anything spectacular (their post-tag tandem offense basically consisted of Mark holding Flip while Jay kicked him repeatedly) until the finish. I don’t know how to describe it, but it looked to be like a Razor’s Edge off the top into a cutter. It was nuts. Flip took the pin. I should note here that I had a terrible seat and couldn’t see three quarters of the ring, so I stood up against the back wall for most of the night. 

Rating: Three and a half Kerouacs.

Deonna Purrazzo and Skylar vs Tennille Dashwood and Sumie Sakai

I want you to notice something here, something that would prove to be the theme of the evening: tag team wrestling. Our third match, and third tag team match, was a Women of Honor showcase for four babyfaces, which is always something of a heat vacuum. The crowd likes all these women. It was Skylar’s ROH debut; about two years ago, I was there when she had her first-ever wrestling match. It’s crazy to think how much progress she’s made. She’s still a little green, though, and the other three are obviously a category above her at the moment. Not much of a story here beyond Deonna occasionally walking up to the brink of being a heel, although I don’t know if that’s deliberate or if that’s just part of our bleak, nihilistic world now. The jury’s still out on whether Tennille is another example of WWE totally missing the boat on someone; she’s good in the ring, she has undeniable charisma, but she hasn’t developed a character beyond Person Who Wrestles And Occasionally Shouts “It’s All About Me.” When you think about it, this was kind of her problem in the WWE. She pins Skylar. After the match, Kelly Klein runs out to beat on Purrazzo and the two of them have a pull-apart. I noticed that Northeast Wrestling tag team stalwarts Adrenaline Rush were among the black-shirted security guards. Lots of familiar faces tonight!

Rating: Two and a half Kerouacs.

At this point, Dalton Castle comes out. He’s billed for a title defense against Matt Taven. There’s a brief “Rusev Day” chant for some reason, which, smdh. A segment of this crowd also chanted “You can’t wrestle” at Brandi Rhodes when she walked out before the show. I’m not sure how to characterize the ROH audience. There are too many of them to just be the indie wrestling diehards, but there are no casual fans among them either. It’s a weird group. 

Anyway, Castle cuts a meandering promo saying that he’s injured and can’t wrestle, although he’s not vacating the title. Matt Taven’s mom stands up and boos the shit out of him at this point, and good for her. Castle says he’s going to treat us to brunch instead. It’s past 8 p.m., but that’s probably still brunchtime in parts of Brooklyn. The Boys come out and throw croissants to the crowd. You call this brunch? Not even a damn mimosa?

The Kingdom vs. Coast to Coast

Matt Taven comes out with fellow Kingdomites TK O’Ryan and Vinny Marseglia and cuts a promo calling Dalton Castle “a babyback bitch.” Taven’s grandfather, a dignified elder gentleman with a walker and an oxygen tank, is at ringside. I wonder what he thinks of hearing his grandson use that language. Maybe he taught it to Taven. Maybe he thought, “I’ve never been more proud. Especially because Dalton Castle is truly a babyback bitch.” 

Has any wrestling faction had a stranger evolution than The Kingdom? Remember when it was Matt Hardy, Adam Cole, Michael Bennett, and Maria Kanellis? And then Hardy left, and Taven joined, and they would do the Four Horsemen hand gesture? And now it’s Taven and Taven’s Friends? Don’t get me wrong, I like TK O’Ryan and Vinny Marseglia fine, it’s just they’re not exactly Matt Hardy and Adam Cole. 

But they are here tonight, and they are wrestling, and so far we are 4 for 4 on tag team matches. I don’t know who Coast to Coast are. They are, like Rhett Titus, the wrestling equivalent of commons, at least to me. This match is fine. There are some shenanigans when Horror Man Marseglia pulls Coast to Coast and the referee under the ring and some red balloons come out, a la “It.” But then the guys just get out and run back into the ring. Commit to this gimmick, ROH: have them be bloody, mangled corpses (I mean, kayfabe-wise). 

The Kingdom lose this match due to interference from SoCal Uncensored, and so we have a six-man tag match later tonight, because of course we do.

Rating: Two Kerouacs.

Bully Ray vs. Cheeseburger

BULLY RAY IS BACK IN ACTION IN LOWELL! That’s WWE Hall of Famer Bully Ray to you, pal. His entrance video keeps flashing the words “Hell’s Kitchen,” but he grew up in Queens. Why not claim Queens, Bully Ray? Hell’s Kitchen these days is not exactly a terrifying place; it’s full of Wall Street finance industry dickheads. It’s not even Hell’s Kitchen anymore, they call it “Clinton” now. O for the days when the Irish mob would shoot out your kneecaps on West 44th Street! 

This is a squash, with Bully Ray delivering an uncontested succession of power bombs to Cheeseburger, much to the displeasure of the crowd. Bully Ray leaves the ring to glare menacingly at some fans - THAT’S HOW THEY DO IT IN HELL’S KITCHEN, ER, CLINTON - and is counted out. Cheeseburger wins! Unfortunately, this means more power bombs.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, this would be the only singles match of the night.

Rating: N/A

Roppongi 3K vs. Marty Scurll, Hangman Page, and Cody Rhodes

Ring of Honor is really hot right now, maybe the hottest it’s ever been. They just had their largest show ever in New Orleans, and they’re comfortably drawing 1,000+ houses every night. It feels weird, though, like it’s borrowed glamour. It’s all from the Bullet Club/New Japan stuff, and although I realize there’s overlap, it doesn’t feel like a lot of the excitement is Ring of Honor excitement. The ROH stalwarts, guys like the Briscoes and Jay Lethal, feel like afterthoughts right now, as angles are booked around plot twists in “Being the Elite” and buildings are full of fans in New Japan shirts. 

Still, the fervor is undeniable, and the roof practically lifts off the place for the Bullet Club Threesome, although there is definitely a smattering of “You suck!” judgments hurled at Cody. 

This is basically like an NBA All-Star Game; no one is playing defense, no one is really taking it seriously, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. It doesn’t mean anything and no one is going to be talking about this match in 10 years or 5 years or even two weeks, but at the moment, for the day that’s in it, it’s fine. Everyone does his thing, Roppongi 3K get a lot of offense in, “Being the Elite” plotlines are advanced when Marty accidentally kicks that guy in the bear costume and gets berated by Cody. 

Bullet Club win, because that’s what the crowd came to see. Too sweet! Woop woop! Too sweet! Woop woop!

Incidentally, I’m reading the book “The People Who Eat Darkness,” which centers on the disappearance of a woman who was a nightclub host in Roppongi, so suddenly Rocky Romero’s team name seems sinister to me.

Rating: Three Kerouacs.

INTERMISSION

Before the show, there was a meet and greet session. We waited in a big long line inside the venue and people got really excited when first Naito, and then the Bullet Club, walked by to get to their tables. Lots of too-sweeting. Less excitement for Daniels and Kazarian, who weren’t part of the official meet and greet but who brought their own table to sell things. That’s how you do business, folks. Always bring your own table to shows, so you don’t have to put up with ROH’s red tape.

In order to get your picture taken, you had to buy a ticket, like when you go to a carnival or fair or something, and then present that ticket to the wrestler, who I guess would hand them all in at the end of the night in exchange for money. I was near the front of the line, so I bought a ticket for Naito. It worked out really well. I assumed the line for his table would be way too long, but because of Sinclair Broadcasting’s ruthless bureaucratic efficiency, I got to meet Mr. Tranquilo. 

Also, I want to doff my cap to whoever programs the music to play at ROH events. Cock Sparrer’s “Because You’re Young” sounds phenomenal over a real PA system, and how often do you hear Cock Sparrer songs in public?

EVIL, SANADA, and Naito vs. Silas Young, the Beer City Bruiser, and Brian Milonas

Crowd goes nuts for Los Ingobernables de Japon, of course. Naito gets a crazy ovation and sustained chant of “NAITO! NAITO! NAITO!” That’s how you can tell an ROH crowd isn’t just indie diehards; unlike indie crowds, ROH crowds can keep a chant going. I always want to call Silas Young either Paul Silas or Silas Marner. The Beer City Bruiser is like a real-life version of parody Wrestling Twitter account Jumpin Jim Grabowski, and Milonas is a New England guy. Lots of heat on Milonas, both from people who have seen him at shows before (the indie diehards) and people who scream at him for being fat (the ROH fans proper). 

This has the same NBA All Star vibe as the previous match, except Silas, Bruiser, and Milonas are not exactly all stars. Perfectly fine, perfectly good mid carders, but there’s a lot of star power on the other side of the ring. Milonas stops Naito from doing the Tranquilo pose and gets maybe the loudest heel reaction of the night. This match is what it is. It’s fun to see the NJPW guys, even doing like 20 percent of their normal repertoire. LIJ win, naturally.

Rating: Two and a half Kerouacs.

Jay Lethal vs. Jay White vs. Chuck Taylor

Taylor was a last-minute addition to the card and gets a crazily enthusiastic welcome. They avoid the usual trap of triple threat matches - one guy takes a powder outside the ring while a standard one-on-one happens - by essentially making this a handicap match, with Taylor and Knife Pervert Jay White teaming up against Lethal. This was my favorite match of the night. It told a reasonable story, the wrestlers are all compelling and played to their strengths (Lethal as heroic babyface, Taylor as chaotic neutral comedian, White as creepy weirdo), and there was decent action all around. Instead of kicking out of each other’s finishers, they would simply tease the finish, have the crowd react, and then have the intended victim escape at the last second. Very effective. Jay Lethal hits Lethal Injection on Knife Pervert and is about to win when Taylor swoops in with an inside cradle to pick up the win. Genuine surprise and a huge pop from the crowd.

Rating: Three and a half Kerouacs.

ROH Six Man Tag Team Championship Match: SoCal Uncensored (c) vs. The Kingdom

Having already seen TK O’Ryan and Vinny Marseglia wrestle a full match, I was not jazzed for this bout. Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian are freaks of nature, though, and always find a way to deliver. Daniels in particular still manages to wrestle the way he did 10 or even 15 years ago, which is absolutely insane when you think about it. A lot of decent stuff here, although I admit I was not in the right mood for it. The Kingdom win in a mild upset and we have new six-man tag team champions. Taven celebrates at ringside with his grandfather, with nary a babyback bitch in sight. 

Rating: Three Kerouacs

The Young Bucks vs. Hiromu Takahashi and BUSHI

The first time I saw the Young Bucks in person was a little over three years ago. They seemed absurdly popular then, and it’s amazing to think how much bigger they’ve gotten since. At this point, it sort of doesn’t matter what they do, the spectacle is the whole point of the event, so credit to them for still working hard to put together a wrestling match. This is very much NBA All Star territory, but more like one of those games where one absurdly competitive weirdo like Kobe Bryant decides he’s going to play really hard, and is countered by a similarly competitive weirdo on the opposite. This seesawed between “hey we’re havin’ a blast here” and “can you top this, you babyback bitch.” Lots of crazy stuff happening here, some near falls that actually felt like near falls, and the Bucks winning with the Meltzer Driver, sending the Bullet Club shirted masses home happy.

Rating: Three and a half Kerouacs 

[junker-town]

These are the best and worst sports in fiction, according to us

What is your favorite fictional sport and why is it Calvinball?

Inventing a sport is hard. The best fictional sports from movies/books/shows/etc. seem to fall into two categories: Either exceedingly clever games you have always wished you could play (and sometimes can!), or senseless, broken dreck that no one could possibly find fun, no matter what a story’s canon would lead you to believe.

Here are the best and worst fictional sports, as selected by SB Nation staff. There are a lot of other options out there, however, and plenty of discussion to be had about what sports even count as “fictional.” Does a sport you can “play” in a video game count? What about, uh, murder-based sports?

Let us know in the comments. Or just yell at us about our decisions. That’s fine, too.

Best: Jumanji

I wanted to consider the board game oeuvre of fictional sports, and considered Cones of Dunshire for the top spot. But Jumanji is it to me for the way it captured my imagination as a kid. Will it inflict untold damage, and potential death, upon you and everyone around for miles? Sure. It may also turn you into a cool monkey boy with a prehensile tail. Just roll the dice, dingus, it’s your turn.

Worst: Star Wars holochess (I guess it’s called Dejarik)

It’s kinda like Magic: The Gathering crossed with chess. The board looks too cramped for much strategy to take place, though. Plus you have to let the Wookiee win.

— Louis Bien

Best: Blernsball

Blernsball is the 30th-century version of baseball, which took place in Futurama (Season 3, episode 16, “A Leela of Her Own”).

The reasoning behind this being the best fictional sport, is that baseball in the future undoubtedly has to be better than baseball in its current form. It’s that simple. Baseball is good now, and assuming they were to actually evolve over nine more centuries, it could be great.

But that’s also a big if.

Worst: Poohsticks

The objective of Poohsticks (from Winnie-the-Pooh, obv) is to stand over some running water, drop a stick, and see whose stick gets down to the end first.

Go play Fortnite or Call of Duty instead.

— Harry Lyles Jr.

Best: BASEketball

A sport that combines all the fun of basketball with none of the running, jumping, or otherwise-needed athletic traits one needs to typically be good at basketball. Any game you can play with a beer in hand is a good one. Especially if all you have to do to play defense is remind opponents how their sister’s GOING OUT WITH SQUEAK.

Worst (but not really): Bouillabaseball

It’s just baseball with fish parts. I expected better from the ALF writer’s room, but I still stan the Equinox Weenies.

— Christian D’Andrea

Best/Worst: Vampire Baseball

Though I’m loathe to admit I’ve read “Twilight,” I would like to make fun of “Twilight,” so here we are. Basically, in the book, a real treat for our heroine was getting to watch Edward and his vampire family play vampire baseball. Wow, sounds fun, they have superhuman abilities I wonder what their sports will be like?!

Get your hopes down, it’s just regular baseball that’s louder. Because they hit the ball so hard. Great date idea Edward, Bella gets to watch your family game of regular baseball. She doesn’t even get to play. I can’t believe she likes Edward more than Jaco— I mean I don’t care, Twilight’s for children.

— Clara Morris

Best: The Running Man

I’m sure there are some prudes out there saying “but Jaaaames, murder isn’t a sport!” To which I would reply “it is the REALEST sport, even when fictionalized.”

The Running Man is unquestionably one of the greatest action movies of all time, which game us the best fictional sport of all time. It’s professional wrestling, with all its pomp and circumstance mixed American Gladiators with a healthy sprinkling of pure, unadulterated murder.

In case you’re not familiar with the plot, the basic concept is simple: Dangerous convicted felons are given a chance to fight for their freedom in gladiatorial battles against armed, themed enforcers on a dystopian game show. It probably says something about me that I like this so much, but here we are.

Worst: Taking the Stone

This is from the show Farscape and is the dumbest thing of all time. Rather than try to explain in my own words let me just share the entry from Wikipedia, which does a great job detailing how dumb this is.

“The game consists of jumping into a deep well, and chanting while falling. A sonic net at the bottom of the well, sustained by the participants’ voices, cushions their fall. When the youth reach the age of 22 cycles, rather than grow old and be deformed by the planet’s radiation, they stop chanting part way into the leap and die against the rocks. This death is called Taking the Stone.”

Jumping into a well. Maybe killing yourself. Bad sport.

— James Dator

Best: Cricket

Or, more specifically, the good Dr. Stephen Maturin’s take on cricket. At the beginning of Patrick O’Brian’s The Fortune of War, what can only be described as the hulk of the HMS Leopard drifts into the Indonesian bay of Pulo Batang. The crew, exhausted by their recent ordeal in the Southern Ocean, relaxes with a game of cricket against that of the HMS Cumberland. Or they try to, before Maturin, equipped with a bizarre, home-made bat, makes his appearance on the behalf of the Leopards.

A rapacious grin ran round the Cumberlands: they moved much closer in, crouching, their huge crab-like hands spread wide. The Admiral held the ball to his nose for a long moment, fixing his adversary, and then delivered a lob that hummed as it flew. Stephen watched its course, danced out to take it as it touched the ground, checked its bounce, dribbled the ball towards the astonished cover-point and running still he scooped it into the hollow of his hurley, raced on with twinkling steps to mid-off, there checked his run amidst the silent stark amazement, flicked the ball into his hand, tossed it high, and with a screech drove it straight at Jack’s wicket, shattering the near stump and sending its upper half into a long, graceful trajectory that reached the ground just as the first of La Flèche’s guns, saluting the flag, echoed across the field.

As far as rebukes towards English pretensions go, deliberate or not, it’s pretty hard to beat Dr. Maturin’s efforts. This is cricket as it really ought to be played: nonsensically and with maximum force.

NB: My favourite part of the above passage, incidentally, is the confusion it created amongst O’Brian’s significant American audience over whether Dr. Maturin was any good at cricket or not.

Worst: Quidditch

Take a perfectly good magical sport, with three goals, multiple balls, rogue and malevolent magical items designed to hurt you, and flying. The bones of quidditch are close to perfect, giving scope for brilliant tactical and individual play in three dimensions.

And then the Golden Snitch ruins it. There’s absolutely no need for the damn thing. The chasers, beaters and keepers are playing an interesting, well-constructed sport. The seekers, meanwhile, are playing a ridiculous version of hide-and-seek which almost inevitably overrides what everyone else on both teams are trying to achieve.

Not only does the hunt for the Snitch render the actually good part of the sport irrelevant, it also destroys quidditch as a spectator sport. Since the Snitch is so small as to be untrackable, the audience in the stands has no idea what’s going on at any given time, making this a sport that’s both nonsensical and impossible to follow.

Kill the Snitch, and then we’ll talk.

— Graham MacAree

Best: Crunchball 3000

Now I know what you’re all thinking. What the hell is CrunchBall 3000. Well it’s a computer game that has LORE.

The game has elements of rugby, soccer and football and is an excellent time waster at wo— I mean it’s a really underrated way to pass the time.

Worst: Quidditch ... but in real life.

*It’s not really the worst, I just wanted to talk about it.*

Don’t get me wrong, IRL quidditch is fun. I’m just mad that the one time I played, I was the seeker and the snitch could go anywhere. We were in a park and there were no boundaries. I stopped chasing them after three minutes. I have asthma, man. I was off it.

— Kofie Yeboah

Best: Calvinball

When I was a kid in my hometown, there were a few boys on my street who were around the same age as me. In the summer, we would all spend our hard earned pop-bottle deposit returns on buying used baseballs at rummage sales and then use them to play in an open field down the road from our houses. Baseball is actually a very loose term for what we played, especially once the ball was lost or the cover tore off. Then it was a free for all. Little did I know until later in my development that such games as those we played were already mastered by the titular characters in Calvin and Hobbes. Calvinball, you see, is a game with no rules, other than the rules you make up as you go along. No two games are allowed to be the same, and no rules made up on the fly are allowed to be duplicated. Throw on some masks, hit a baseball with a mop and go score some points by running seven times around the sprinkler. Wait! The sprinkler is now the loser zone, so you have to use a croquet mallet to hit a tennis ball over the driveway without it touching any dirt or concrete. If it does, you lose 10 points.

“Other kids’ games are all such a bore!

They’ve gotta have rules and they gotta keep score!

Calvinball is better by far!

It’s never the same! It’s always bizarre!

You don’t need a team or a referee!

You know that it’s great, ‘cause it’s named after me!”

As Calvin opined in the final Calvinball strip when a football game turned into one of the crazy contests, “Sooner or later, all our games turn into Calvinball.”

There really isn’t a better sport out there, real or fictional.

Worst: Star Trek’s parrises squares

Let’s keep this portion short and sweet: They never gave any rules to parrises squares on the show, but it clearly is dumb because there is no way the folks who made Star Trek: The Next Generation were able to come up with a cool sport. That’s probably why they didn’t bother showing viewers much of the game, which is played with an “ion mallet” on a padded playing field.

I know no other details. But it’s is clearly dumber than real-life quidditch, which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever watched in my entire life.

— Sam Eggleston

Best: Rocket League

Video games are murky territory, and I’m not sure if most of them can be classified as fictional sports. Is Counter-Strike a fictional sport, or a simulation of a military operation? I’m not really sure. But Rocket League is unquestionably a game about a fake sport, and it is by far the best fake sport anyone’s ever invented.

Soccer is the most popular sport ever invented by humans. The coolest iteration of soccer ever invented is from Nike’s 3v3 Secret Tournament ad, which was played in a metal cage. Rocket League iterates on this concept further by replacing the human competitors with freaking rocket powered cars. If it was possible to create Rocket League in real life, it would be the world’s most popular spectator sport.

Worst: Professional wrestling

Oh no, I’ve exposed the business! It’s difficult to classify wrestling as a type of sports or entertainment, hence the term “sports entertainment,” but essentially it’s a TV show about a fake sports league. There’s no non-fixed sport that bears a strong resemblance to pro wrestling, so I think it’s fair to classify pro wrestling as a fictional sport.

Wrestling Twitter, don’t scream at me. I am not here to talk shit about the entertainment you love. I’ve watched thousands of hours of pro wrestling and I love it. But as an actual sport, it’s kind of a mess. There are no published rules, and the referees seem utterly incapable of enforcing the ones that broadcasters tell us about. Competitors are not punished for repeatedly assaulting referees. Any sensible sport would have introduced additional referees or an instant replay system after 100 years of consistent shenanigans, but the major pro wrestling organizations simply refuse. No fictional sport has less competitive integrity.

— Kim McCauley

[aion-rsa]

Watchmen Episode 5 Easter Eggs Explained

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Detective Looking Glass' origin story is revealed, and Adrian Veidt's plan becomes more clear in Watchmen episode 5.

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This episode contains Watchmen episode 5 spoilers.

About halfway through Watchmen episode 5 "Little Fear of Lightning," you should know that we've officially hit and surpassed the midpoint of the series. HBO's Watchmen only consists of nine episodes (not twelve), so it's time for the pieces to start falling into place and for some mysteries to be revealed. In this case, the mystery is why Wade Tillman/Det. Looking Glass is such an odd guy and why he behaves the way he does, while we also take giant steps towards untangling the mystery of Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias and whatever the Rorschach-influenced 7th Kavalry have been getting up to. If you spotted something I missed, let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter, and if it checks out, we'll get this updated.

Now, let's get to work. The clock is ticking...

HOBOKEN

- The episode opens in Hoboken, N.J. minutes before midnight on Nov. 1, 1985. You can hear a radio broadcast announce that the Doomsday Clock has been set to 1 minute to midnight, just as it was by this point in the book.

- Hoboken is located across the Hudson River from Manhattan and lines up almost exactly where the giant squid materialized, died, and detonated a psychic shockwave that killed millions. Hoboken’s proximity to Manhattan means it would be right in the path of that blastwave, just as residents of that city can often see and smell fires on the big island.

read more: Why Does it Rain Squid on HBO's Watchmen?

- Overall, this looks like a reasonable forgery of Hoboken in the 1980s, the buildings are all roughly the same height, and it feels like they’re roughly halfway up Washington St. As the camera pulls back from the carnage at the fair, you can spot Frank Sinatra Drive. Hoboken was the birthplace of Frank Sinatra, and his music features prominently throughout this episode.

- Hoboken was a haven for record shops back in the day, but I’m not sure if ZigZag Records ever existed there. However, the sign for that record shop here bears a strong resemblance to the defunct, departed, but beloved ZigZag Records that used to be located at Brooklyn...two rivers away.

- The pseudo-punks we see in Hoboken (and who terrorize poor young Wade) are the Knot-Tops subculture who featured in the book. One of them is wearing a shirt that says “katies” a reference to the street name for a drug called KT-28 which was used by many members of the gang. I guess they couldn’t get tickets to see Pale Horse at Madison Square Garden that night...not that it did them any good.

- You can spot a poster for the Pink Triangle benefit concert that was also hung on the side of the newsstand in the book.

- The bus that drops off the crew of young Jehovah’s Witnesses, including young Wade Tillman (the future Det. Looking Glass), is #486, but I’m having trouble finding any significance to that number or the numerals it consists of. Similarly there’s a license plate that reads BHS463, but I don’t see any greater significance there.

LOOKING GLASS

- As quickly becomes apparent, this episode is the origin story for Detective Looking Glass. That’s young Wade Tillman (played by Philip Labes) who gets humiliated in the funhouse hall of mirrors right before experiencing an excruciatingly traumatic psychic tragedy. It’s no wonder he’s a little bit off back in the present. His mask is more than just a convenient affectation, it’s made of something apparently called “reflectatine,” a material believed (probably just by crackpots) to protect from psychic blasts. It explains why we’ve seen him eating with his mask on at home. It’s also revealed that he lines his baseball cap with the stuff. It’s basically a “tinfoil hat.”

- Wade’s trauma has informed every aspect of his life, and keeps an alert system from a company called “Extra Dimensional Security.” Incidentally, the fact that they still deliver comprehensive print catalogs is another fun little reminder that the internet isn’t a thing in this world.

- Looking Glass is fond of eating cold baked beans right out of the can with his mask half rolled up, a habit he shares with Rorschach.

- Wade’s ex is named Cynthia Bennett, but she is an original creation for the show. Their relationship lasted seven years, and Wade makes the obvious mirror joke.

- Wade runs a support group for survivors dealing with trauma after the squid attack (there’s a pamphlet called EDA and You, presumably that stands for ExtraDimensional Anxiety). He greets new members by asking if they’re a “friend of Nemo.” Captain Nemo was a creation of seminal science fiction author Jules Verne and appeared in the novels 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. He was notorious for doing battle with giant squid. 

- It sure seems like Wade is probably gonna be taking ye olde dirt nap after this episode, but we’ll have to wait to find out. But we do hear the ominous ticking of a clock during the part of the episode when he’s exploring the warehouse, and we last heard that in the leadup to Judd Crawford’s death. So it might be a tell that if you hear the clock ticking, someone’s gonna die.

- Is anyone able to make out the newspaper headline on the wall of Wade’s bunker? It seems like it has to do with 11/2 and Manhattan, but I can't quite nail the specifics of it.

ADRIAN VEIDT

- On the streets of Hoboken at the start of the episode you can spot someone reading a copy of Tales of the Black Freighter (presumably the same one the kid is reading all through the book), and on the back of it you can see an advertisement for “The Veidt Method.” The Veidt Method was a self-help program “for physical fitness and self-improvement” launched in the ‘80s by Adrian Veidt that was dedicated to “creating a new you” by combining mail away exercise, nutrition, and bodybuilding techniques with philosophy and new age thinking. The letter that greeted applicants contained Veidt’s “all best wishes and encouragement” sign off we heard him use in the letter to the Game Warden in episode three.

- As we see several times throughout the episode, Veidt’s philosophy about getting the world to believe there was a greater threat absolutely worked. It’s brought up in casual conversation, and you can see it in the philosophy espoused at the EDA support group, where they take the squid attack as proof that there are other dimensions.

- Veidt’s “confession” video was recorded on Nov. 1, 1985, minutes or hours before he unleashed the squid attack on New York City (and Hoboken). Redford was shown this video on Jan. 21, 1983, the day after his inauguration (which lines up with the day Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993 as well). HBO’s Peteypedia supplemental materials revealed that Veidt was also a major public player in the election of President Robert Redford, although the knowledge of his role in the squid attack never caught on publicly, despite the publication of Rorschach’s Journal.

- Within that video, Veidt refers to using “fear” as a weapon and says “and I am its architect.” This is more than a mere turn of phrase. “The Architects of Fear” was an episode of sci-fi anthology series The Outer Limits. It’s basic story? Scientists decide that the only way to prevent nuclear apocalypse is to convince humanity that we have a common enemy from another world and thus need to put aside our differences. Sound familiar? This story was the source of great friction between Watchmen series editor Len Wein and writer/co-creator Alan Moore, as Wein felt it was too similar to what Moore delivered in the book. The book, however, does reference the intro to The Outer Limits at one point, perhaps as Moore’s way of paying homage to the source.

read more - Watchmen: Jeremy Irons on the Mystery of Adrian Veidt and Ozymandias

Veidt also confesses that he has engineered “additional small scale extradimensional events” to keep up the illusion. In other words, the squid rain we first saw in episode one and that has been referenced throughout the series now has an official explanation.

- Veidt appears to be wearing the hieroglyph for the Eye of Horus on his makeshift spacesuit, a symbol of both protection and power.

- Is Veidt (and his prison) on a moon of Mars or Jupiter? While Mars is the obvious choice, there appears to be ice on the surface of that moon, and neither of Mars' moons (Phobos and Deimos) have them. On the other hand, two of Jupiter's moons, Io and Europa contain both oxygen and water in sufficient quantities that you could imagine Dr. Manhattan successfully synthesizing the environment necessary to create life. The music playing during his little lunar adventure is Claude De Bussy's "Clair de Lune."

- Veidt appears to write “Save Me” or “Save Me D” using the bodies of his servants. “Save Me Dr.” perhaps?

- The “memory pills” are called Nostalgia, which was also the name of a perfume line by Veidt in the 1980s. Are these a later creation by Trieu Industries rather than Veidt?

DR. MANHATTAN

If there’s any doubt lingering in your mind, it almost certainly appears that the bizarre environment Veidt has been imprisoned in is something of Dr. Manhattan’s creation. His outburst (and the Game Warden’s agreement) that “your god has abandoned you” would seem to be a reference to that. Specifically, right before he left Ozymandias (and our plane of existence, seemingly) in the book, Dr. Manhattan speculated on the possibility of creating life of his own.

RORSCHACH AND THE 7TH KAVALRY

- That giant red eye symbol we see painted on the wall of the warehouse that Wade explores will probably be significant later on, but it does also kind of resemble the squid eye in the book, doesn’t it?

- When Senator Joe Keene talks about being taken aside and shown a tape that reveals the truth about the world (in this case Adrian Veidt’s “confession” to President Redford), it feels like a bit that legendary comedian Bill Hicks used to do about the Kennedy assassination. OK, to be fair, Hicks did LOTS of bits about the Kennedy Assassination but this one from his Rant in E-Minor album is the most relevant…

“I have this feeling that whoever is elected president...when you win, you go into this smoke filled room with the 12 industrialist capitalist scumfucks who got you there. And you're in this smokey room, and this little film screen comes down ... and a big guy with a cigar goes, "Roll the film." And it's a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you've never seen before ... that looks suspiciously like it's from the grassy knoll. And then the screen goes up and the lights come up, and they go to the new president, 'Any questions?' 'Uhhh...just what my agenda is.'"

- It would appear that Judd Crawford was legitimately involved with whatever nonsense was going on with 7th Kavalary based on his relationship with Joe Keene. But neither he nor Keene seem to actually be part of the 7th Kavalry nor their generally racist mission statement. But also note that we learned from HBO’s supplemental materials that the painting in the Crawford home was actually gifted to Judd’s grandfather as a token of esteem within the order (from an ancestor of Senator Keene's it would appear), so it’s still possible that the hood and robe discovered at the conclusion of episode two belonged to his grandfather.

read more: HBO's Watchmen, Rorschach, and the 7th Kavalary Connection

- The Kavalry are experimenting with teleportation, which uses some of the same energy that Dr. Manhattan gives off, hence the blue glow you see when basketballs materialize. They’re using a CX924 Teleportation Window from The Institute for Transdimensional Studies, also referenced in the book.

- Anyone else think our actual real world President thinks it’s called “squid pro quo?”

- Can anyone name the country song in the bar? This isn't trivia, I'm seriously asking.

HOODED JUSTICE

This week’s episode of American Hero Story: Minutemen offers a graphic depiction of the romantic relationship between Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis. The pair were indeed lovers in the "real" world of Watchmen.

MISCELLANEOUS STUFF

- That’s HBO’s The Sopranos star Michael Imperioli in the New York City tourism company’s “Why We Came Back” commercial. We haven’t heard much about what happened to NYC after a disaster with a body count the size of ten 9/11s (and it’s worth noting that throughout the episode the squid event is referred to as “11/2”). Needless to say, it seems to have not yet recovered, even 30 years later. It does make me wonder how different a show like the New Jersey-set The Sopranos would be in this world.

Within that commercial you can see folks waxing about Broadway shows while holding a Playbill for something called “Oppenheimer.” J. Robert Oppenheimer was a key figure in the development and design of the atomic bomb. I wonder if Oppenheimer is the Watchmen universe’s Hamilton.

- Another product being focus grouped at the company Wade works as cover is a breakfast cereal called “Happy Harry’s Smiley-O’s.” Happy Harry was the proprietor of Happy Harry’s Bar and Grill, a dive by any standards and one frequented by members of the underworld. It was a favorite place for Rorschach to beat information out of suspects and their associates.

- What is the name of the genetics company? Their slogan is something about offering “the splice of life” which is hilarious. And of course, the field of genetic experimentation was greatly advanced by Adrian Veidt in the book, as evidenced by his super-pet, a genetically engineered lynx named Bubastis.

- In this world, Steven Spielberg won Oscars for a movie called Pale Horse, about the tragedy in New York City on 11/2 and its aftermath. The scene described, with the little girl in the bright red coat in a movie that was otherwise filmed in black and white, means that this may have replaced Schindler’s List in Spielberg’s filmography in the Watchmen universe.

- Each episode gives us another little glimpse at what happens when every liberal hobbyhorse policy is enacted. To that end, tobacco is now contraband in this world.

- This isn’t a reference to anything in particular, but it’s worth pointing out that Red Scare eats Cheetos with a fork. On the surface, this may seem ridiculous, but if you don’t want to get orange powder all over your fingers and everything else, it makes perfect sense. I once saw someone eating Doritos out of the bag with a pair of chopsticks on a New York City subway, and that all makes so much more sense now. 

- Panda is overheard saying that churches are “basically all the same.” This could be another sign about the low regard religion is held in the Watchmen universe, similar to the casual atheism Cal displayed in episode four.

Mike Cecchini is the Editor in Chief of Den of Geek. You can read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @wayoutstuff.

Read and download the Den of Geek NYCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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Books

Mike Cecchini

Nov 17, 2019

Watchmen

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Something Like a Modern Fantasy

Notes: So, six years ago, I wrote a thing.

Specifically, I wrote this thing, and I know it was six years ago because I posted it to Facebook and it showed up in the “On This Day” app. And here’s the thing about this thing: This original fic resulted in one of the worst drags I’ve ever experienced, one that honest-to-god almost broke me as a writer.

Let me explain.

Six years ago, I took an advanced fiction workshop for the first time. See, I was a creative writing major in undergrad, and so we were required to take at least one advanced creative writing course (I took two over the course of my time---fiction and playwriting---but that’s not the point right now.) The first time I tried to take the advanced fiction workshop, however, I didn’t finish it. The reason why I didn’t finish it---the reason why I ended up dropping out---was because I submitted this story when it was my turn to submit something for our class of 25 to read . . .

. . . and the professor . . . raked me over the coals for it.

Now, again, our class had twenty-five students in it. But my professor hated this story so much that he went off about how much he hated it, in front of all twenty-four of the other students. He also said, and I’ll never forget this, “There’s so much wrong with this I don’t have time to tell you how to fix it.” Apparently it was the least funny, most horribly written thing he had ever read. I’m all about constructive criticism, but literally nothing he said was constructive. All insults, and no instruction on how to fix it. As a result, I was so completely ashamed and humiliated that I just stopped showing up to the class and took my failing grade, feeling that I deserved it.

Anyway, I ended up taking an advanced fiction workshop with the other professor who taught it a year or two later (because while I could have just given up on writing forever, that’s . . . not really my style), and I worked my ass off and passed that one with flying colors, so it all worked out in the end. The first workshop was a disaster, and the second one was a success. But the point of this post is that I’m going to share with you that fateful story that was so bad that I couldn’t show my face in that first advanced fiction workshop again, because, hey . . . even if (though?) it’s garbage, if nothing else, it just shows how far I’ve come.

So, here’s this.

- - -

Most people go through their lives without anything exciting happening to them. Oh, sure, they go to school, go to work, maybe win a contest or two, participate in some sports tournaments, attend a few concerts . . . but nothing truly exciting happens to them. They live ordinary, boring lives, even if their lives don't seem boring all the time. Most people, through the course of living these ordinary, boring lives, indulge in fiction as a way to break up the monotony. They read books. They watch movies. They watch television, listen to music, and play video games. They let themselves escape to a more exciting, interesting place for short intervals of time, as a way of pretending that living their ordinary, boring lives doesn't bother them. This gets them through until they die, at which point it no longer matters how boring and ordinary their lives are, because they're dead and there's nothing they can do about it.

But still, some of these people wonder, what if life wasn't so boring and uninteresting? What if they woke up one day, and life was suddenly exciting, interesting, and all-around like every fictional book and every fictional movie they'd ever dreamed of living in?

For some people, such a thing sounds like a dream come true. For others, it sounds terrifying.

And for others, well, they really don't have much of a choice in the matter.

- -

The adventure always kicks off differently in each story. For some, they get a letter summoning them to a magical school. For others, they get told that they must take a magical MacGuffin off to some faraway place, all the while avoiding others that try and take it away from them. Still others simply happen upon the wrong place at the wrong time and then spend the rest of their adventure constantly running from those that want to kill them. Actually, all of the people in the above scenarios, at one point or another, run away from people who want to kill them. It seems to a staple of the interesting, exciting life. Well, that, and conveniently being an orphan. You'd be amazed at how many main characters in various fictional scenarios just don't have parents for some reason or another, because parents — above all else — seem to not approve of their children going off on magical, life-threatening adventures.

As for me, well, I'm not an orphan, but I'm not a child, either. I don't even live with my parents anymore. Not that I'm exactly an adult; I don't want to be an adult, and so long as I'm still in college I can pretend that I'm not while still reaping all the benefits of one, such as getting to do whatever I want in my on-campus apartment while not having to pay rent or mortgage bills. Anyway, so I'm not an orphan, and my adventure doesn't kick off with a letter of summons, a "but thou must" quest, or stumbling into the wrong place at the wrong time and triggering a series of unfortunate events.

Instead, it starts with me opening my front door and hitting a zombie in the face with a baseball bat. And let me clarify: this is an actual zombie, not someone pretending to be a zombie, or my drunk neighbor stumbling home at three in the morning, so piss drunk out of her mind that she looks and acts like a zombie. No, this is an actual zombie, of the eat-your-flesh-and-brains for breakfast variety. It'd actually be kind of cool, if it didn't reek of dead flesh, and ooze all over my welcome mat.

At least I wasn't too attached to that mat.

But anyway, that's how the whole thing started. In case you're wondering, I was holding the bat because I was getting ready to go to batting practice. Not that I'm on the baseball team or anything, but sometimes I like to just go down the batting cages and hit a few rounds. It's good for getting out anger, you know, without actually hitting someone in the face. Besides the zombie, I mean. But if a zombie was standing outside your front door, moaning and probably about to gnaw your face off, and you just so happened to be holding a baseball bat, you'd hit it in the face, too.

But there we have it — the "just so happened," the convenient coincidence that goes along with every sort of story like this. Well, I guess we had to have it somewhere.

Anyway, so that's how it all began. I was on my way to batting practice, I opened my front door, saw a zombie, and hit the zombie in the face with the bat. I didn't even really think — I just swung. And I guess all those years of batting practice have paid off, because the zombie went down pretty hard, fluids oozing out of its face where proper blood should be. It didn't die — blunt force trauma won't kill anything that quick, and anyway, aren't zombies undead anyway? Can't kill what's undead. At least, I don't think you can. I didn't stay long enough to check. It was stupid of me, but I just hopped over the zombie, didn't even bother to close my door, and took off running to see if the rest of the campus was overrun. What? I was excited! It's not every day that you open your door, see a zombie, hit the zombie, and then get a chance to jump over it and check out the rest of campus. And with a campus this small and this mundane, completely boring and not exciting in the slightest, the chance of a zombie apocalypse is a pretty big deal. It's something to get excited over.

But there was no zombie apocalypse. When I went down the stairs and got to ground level, everything and everyone looked normal. There were no more zombies, no lumbering corpses, no moans or odors of dead flesh — nothing. Just me, holding my goo-covered baseball bat, a zombie twitching in front of my open front door upstairs. Good way to start the morning, I guess, but for some reason I didn't even really panic. I just stood there, looking at the rest of the ordinary, still-alive people around me, holding the bat and probably looking like an idiot.

Well, at that point, I had two options. I could either, A) go back up and check on the zombie (who, incidentally, turned out to be my roommate; I felt kind of bad for hitting him in the face when I found that out, but since he was already a zombie, there wasn't much I could do for him; a band-aid wouldn't fix it, and anyway, since I left the door open he could get into the apartment just fine, so I don't think what I did was that terrible) , or B) leave. So of course, I did what any reasonable human being would do in that situation.

I left.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where I lost all choice in the matter. Because if you're faced with a zombie upon opening your front door, and you happen to be holding a bat, chances are you're going to swing the bat to hit the zombie. And at that point — or maybe the point after you check to see if the rest of your campus is infested with flesh-and-brain-eating corpses — you have two options. You can either go back to your life as normal, and have the adventure end there, or you can leave, and thereby get contracted into going on an adventure.

I left, and so I was contracted into going on an adventure. It's really as simple as that. Once I turned away from the stairs and went off in search of finding out why there was a zombie in front of my door (or really just doing something about it, because the why wasn't as important as the can you please take this away it really smells rank and it's getting ooze all over the place as far as I was concerned), I was roped into whatever would happen next, whether I liked it or not. It would have been that way no matter what I did, so long as what I did didn't involve going back up to my apartment, going inside, shutting the door, locking it, and then going back to bed.

But since that's the case, I really wish I would have done something other than go to public safety for help.

- -

In my defense, I didn't know what else to do. I guess I could have called the Help Desk, but what could they have done, filed an incident report to public safety to get them to take care of the zombie? Yeah, as if. I figured I'd cut out the middle man and just go to public safety myself.

I should have known better, all things considered.

"Uh, excuse me?" No response. The woman behind the little window just kept typing on her computer, completely oblivious to my presence. You'd think the fact that I was holding a baseball bat might've got her attention. I mean, I had no intention of bashing her skull in, but I could have, and usually that makes all the difference in any and all situations pertaining to weapons. "Excuse me?" Still no response. Maybe I should have brought a box of Krispy Kremes with me. "Excuse me!"

"What?" Finally. Even if the response was less than friendly, it was still a response. I tried to make my voice polite again, but I wasn't too sure I succeeded.

"There's a zombie in front of my apartment. Can you send someone over to do something about it?"

"What?" The woman's voice still wasn't friendly, but now it wa a little less angry, and a little more confused. I tried again.

"There's a zombie in front of my apartment. I opened my door, and it was standing there, so I hit it with my bat." I held up the bat and she looked at it, frowning because of the goo that was still on it, I guess. "I think that knocked it out, or at least stunned it or something, because it went down pretty hard and didn't move aside from twitching after that. But anyway, I guess it's probably still there, and I want someone to go take care of it. Or at least make sure that it's not still there, I don't want to get mauled the next time I go back."

The woman stared at me, and I stared back. For a few minutes, there was no sound except for that which the other public safety "officers" made behind her, filing reports or whatever it is they do. Mostly all they ever do is issue parking tickets, so I guess maybe they were filing those into the system. Finally, the woman asked, "Do you think this is a joke?"

"What?" It was my turn to be confused. "Uh, no, a zombie in front of my apartment is pretty serious business." I didn't want to think about what ResLife would fine me for zombie stains on the carpet inside.

"Here at public safety, we work tirelessly to ensure the safety of the students, staff, and faculty on this campus," she continued, and I guess I should have seen where it was going then, but part of my mind got distracted wondering how they factored frequent trips to McD's as "working tirelessly to ensure the safety of the students, staff, and faculty" on the campus. "We do our best to respond in a timely manner to every report, to make sure that every safety regulation is followed, to investigate each matter as seriously and swiftly as possible."

"Great. Then you're going to send someone to deal with the zombie, right?"

"That means," the woman continued, and her voice was rising at this point, so I really should have gotten the message that this wasn't going to end well, "that when we get fake reports — when we get little practical jokes by students, we take those seriously as well. They are not appreciated. They are not amusing. If we had the same power as the police department, I can assure you that you would be arrested for this insubordination!"

"Uh."

"Please leave. Do not come back here again unless you have a serious problem."

"I do have a serious problem. There's a zombie in front of my—"

"Leave!"

Well, in all honesty, I wasn't that surprised. Put-out, I guess, because this was the one time in which public safety could actually be useful, and they'd failed me. But surprised? Nah, not really. Like I said, they were never really useful despite that woman's speech about how they worked tirelessly to blah, blah, blah, and so I hadn't really expected much from them, especially since I'm pretty sure they were not prepared for a zombie apocalypse. For a mass onslaught of parking violations? Definitely. For zombies? No.

Of course, that gave me the idea that maybe I should say someone was parked illegally in front of my apartment building, and then just drag the public safety officers up to my apartment once they got there. But then, if there was someone parked illegally by some chance, the officers would be too distracted in writing their tickets, so that was a lost cause, anyway.

At that point, I was at a loss for what to do. I figured that I could go back to my apartment, but by this point the zombie would probably be awake, and I didn't want to get mauled. There was still the option of calling the Help Desk, but again, what could an incident report do for me now? And then I could always go to the university center, but I didn't see what they could do, either, except maybe make me a new ID card for the zombie. Out of all the resources on campus, that only left ResLife, Health Services, and the Academic Advising/Resource Center. ResLife would just fine me for zombie stains, Health Services was only ever useful for hounding people for vaccination records, and the Academic Advising/Resource Center was just useful for administering tests and telling you to take classes that you didn't need while never offering you any real help when it came to registering for the classes that you did need.

So all in all, my options were pretty slim. Given that I didn't want to go back to my apartment (at least not alone), and given that I also couldn't make use of any of the available "resources" on campus, I did the only thing that made sense at that point.

I went to go see my best friend Kyle.

- -

"A zombie?"

"A zombie."

"In front of your apartment?"

"Yep."

"And you hit it with your bat?"

"Uh-huh."

". . . No fucking way." I knew he'd react like that. But see, the thing about Kyle is, while he says "no fucking way" right off instead of giving some long-winded speech about how I should only talk about serious things and not joke around, he doesn't mean that he doesn't believe me. He just means that he thinks there's no fucking way there could have been a zombie in front of my apartment. And despite how it sounds, that's not the same thing. "You've gotta show me this shit."

"I will, if you'll move your ass and come with me." I walked away from his apartment, only pausing at the top of the stairs to let him shut his door and lock it. Not that he has anything worth stealing in there except his laptop, but you know. "It might not still be there, though. I didn't kill it."

"Of course you didn't kill it, it's a zombie. It's already dead. Undead. Whatever. But you're just saying that now because there wasn't an actual zombie, so nothing's going to be there when we get there."

"Like hell, dude. There's zombie ooze all over my welcome mat."

"Sure there is."

"You'll see."

Kyle's on-campus apartment was across campus from mine, but the campus was so small that it only took about five minutes to get from his place to mine, even taking into account the fact that we had to dodge kids on scooters and weave our way through the parking lots. When we got back to my apartment, the zombie had moved as I predicted, but it didn't go far. Not only was the ooze still all over the place, but it made a trail through my open door, leading right to the zombie, who was rolling around on the carpet.

ResLife will have a field day with those zombie ooze fines, I swear to Christ.

"Holy shit dude," Kyle said, and I glanced over to see that his jaw was dropped. Well, that's a decent reaction, at least.

"Told you so."

"No, seriously, holy fuck." Kyle walked into my apartment, which I thought was pretty batshit stupid considering it was a fucking zombie that was rolling around (moaning, too — seriously, was it getting some strange, freaky, orgasmic reaction to the cheap carpeting or something?), and leaned forward a bit to get a closer look at the zombie. "I think that's your roommate."

"My what?"

"Your roommate. Ryan. Isn't that Ryan?"

I walked up to join Kyle in the doorway, standing a bit behind him even though I was the one with the weapon, and leaned forward to get a closer look. In case you were wondering, yeah, this was when I found out that my roommate was the one I bashed in the face upon opening my door to find that there was a zombie there. Again, he was already a zombie. There wasn't much I could do. And from the way he was taking pleasure in rolling around on my carpet, I really don't think he cared too much. "Yeah, I guess that's him. Kind of hard to tell, since there's a gaping mouth where his face should be."

"I'm positive that's him. Dude, your roommate's a zombie. That's pretty fucked up. Think they'll give you a roommate transfer if you ask for one?"

"Well, considering public safety thought I was bullshitting them when I told them about the zombie in the first place, probably not."

"You went to public safety? Man, that's so weak."

"Shut up, I didn't know what else to do."

"Point taken."

The zombie — or Ryan, I guess — kept rolling around on the floor, pausing every few moments, yet then going right back to it. He kind of reminded me of my dog. She'd do that sometimes, too. After a minute, I asked, "So, what do you think I should do?"

"Ask for a roommate transfer."

"I mean besides that."

"Dude, I don't know." Kyle shrugged. "I've never had a zombie roommate before."

Well, there went all my options. I had no resources on campus, my best friend didn't know what to do, and my roommate was a zombie that was currently rolling around on my carpet and showing no signs of stopping. There was really only one thing I could think of to do at that moment, and if my fate to go on some quest hadn't been sealed before that moment, it was definitely sealed right then.

"Well, I guess I can just go home for the weekend."

- - 

Okay, so maybe going home for the weekend wasn't the best solution to my problem, either. I still couldn't go into my apartment, because even if he was just rolling around like my dog after eating kibble, there was still a chance that zombie-Ryan could jump up and maul my face at any given moment. That, and going home wouldn't exactly solve the zombie-Ryan problem. All it would do was postpone the fact that I had to deal with it until I got back, unless my drunk-ass neighbor happened to look in my open door at one point and see zombie-Ryan rolling around on the floor. Granted, I doubted anyone would believe my drunk-ass neighbor any more than they ever believed me, especially since she was drunk all the time, but hey. I could try.

Anyway, so going home wouldn't really solve the zombie problem, but it was all I could think of to do in that moment. I guess in a way I was panicking, but not in the screaming fit way of panicking. More of the I just did whatever came to mind first brand of panicking, and since that panicking allowed me to drive home without crashing the car, I figured that was a good thing.

Home was about three hours away, so even though I left at eleven AM, I got there at about two-thirty, which was fine. It was a Saturday, which meant my parents would either be at home or playing golf or something, and they'd be happy to see me home for the weekend. Probably, anyway. It was hard to tell with them sometimes. Anyway, I fully expected them to be home, because as mentioned before, I am not conveniently an orphan. That's not how this story is going to work. No way, no how.

But I guess stories can't function if the main character can just run home whenever they want, either. And I guess that having parents there sort of induces that "run home" feeling. And I guess since I lost all choice in the matter the second I decided to leave my zombie roommate rolling around on the floor, some divine forces from above were going to step in and make sure that I couldn't get all comfy-cozy at home, ignoring my destiny or whatever the hell it was that caused my roommate to turn into a zombie and then roll around in the living room.

That was the best reason I could come up with, anyway, for why — when I used my key to get in the front door and walked into my living room — a middle-aged couple that was not made up of either my mother or my father was sitting there, watching television, the house filled with furniture that I didn't recognize.

"Uh." It was my default response for when my brain was too broken to think of anything else, okay? And for the record, the middle-aged couple that wasn't made up of either my father or my mother seemed to have brains as equally as broken as mine.

"Who are you, and what are you doing in here?" the man asked, standing up from his reclining chair. I held up my key by way of explanation.

"I live here. Or I kind of live here, anyway. This is my parents' house. Speaking of which, where are they, and who are you?"

"This is our house," the man said, indicating himself and who I assumed to be his wife. "We've lived here for thirty years, and we don't have any children."

"Then explain to me why my key works," I said, holding out the key. He didn't take it. "I'm positive that this is my parents' house. I grew up here. We never lived anywhere else. I was just here two weeks ago to do laundry." Hey, don't judge me, you never really need to do laundry until you run out of underwear. "Seriously, what the hell is going on?"

The woman looked somewhat scandalized, either by my presence or my language. Hey, it wasn't nearly as bad as what I could have said, but then, I guessed they might be one of those couples that's traumatized by everything "our nation's young people" do. There are some older couples like that out there.

"Look," the man said, apparently doing all the talking for him and his wife. "I don't know where you got that key or what you're playing at, but if you don't leave right now, I'm calling the police."

"Leave and go where?" I asked, and I don't even know why I bothered. "I can't go back to school, there's a zombie in my apartment. And I would go to my parents' house, except this is my parents' house, even though it's apparently not now." The man seemed to have no sympathy for me, and his wife still looked scandalized, so I sighed. "Fine, fine. I'm going."

And go I did. I walked out, but I made sure to check the number on the mailbox and the outside of the house. There was no mistaking it. It was my parents' house, the house I was raised in, the house I'd just done my laundry at two weeks ago.

Only, apparently it was no longer my parents house, but instead the house of some middle-aged couple that I didn't even recognize. And when I tried calling my parents on my cell phone, all I got was a "this number has been disconnected" message.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still pretty sure that I'm not conveniently an orphan, but again, if nothing before had sealed my "you're set to go on an adventure now" fate, this did it.

And to be honest, it kind of sucked.

[jeffatk1ns]

The Wooden Bead - Jeff Atkins x Reader

Request - “Hello can I request a very tomboy and boyish reader x Jeff?”

(I’m English so i don’t know if this will be any kind of inaccurate, I’ve struggled with using ‘soccer’ here instead of ‘football’, sorry if there are any mishaps. Also I hope this is kind of what you envisioned!)

“PARSONS, OVER HERE! PARSONS I’M OPEN GODDAMMIT!” You screamed at your teammate, who was refusing to pass you the ball. “DON’T FUCKING PASS IT TO KING! Oh, you fucking did it. Idiot.” You spoke more to yourself.

—–

“What the hell, Parsons? You saw I was free but you blatantly ignored me?” You confronted the stocky girl in front of you. Although much smaller than her, you packed a mean punch and would be happy to show anyone what happens when they cross you. You weren’t really into stereotypically ‘girly’ things, you were more boyish in your mannerisms, look, and activities, but stereotypes in general pissed you off, despite the fact you probably fit quite well into the tomboy category.

“Sorry, I just didn’t feel like passing to you, L/N.” she brushed you off. You scoffed. She was unbelievable.

“You knew I was your best bet. I can’t believe you lost that for us.” You shook your head.

“It’s not my fault you can’t play soccer, L/N. there’s no hiding Coach’s charity case this year.” Romelda Parsons spat. There was no such thing as Coach letting on a charity case each year, she was just trying to intimidate you. The snooty brunette girl had been jealous ever since you’d joined the team, purely because you were so much better than her - maybe the best on the team, and coach paid far more attention to you than to her.

You were ready to show her. “You little-” an arm eased you back, and another was put up to Parsons face.

“Easy, easy.” A smooth, calm voice interrupted your angry thoughts and soothed your boiling blood.

“Fuck off, Atkins.” Parsons gritted her teeth at the well-built honey-skinned boy holding you back.

“PARSONS! Over here now please!” Coach beckoned Romelda, and she almost snarled her teeth before walking off to talk to him.

The boy in front of you turned to face you. His blue eyes smiled at you while his lips did the same. He was wearing baseball gear, which fitted his muscles snugly. There was no denying the fact that he was insanely attractive.

You’d seen this boy around lots.

Jeff Atkins.

Loved by everyone, baseball player, popular, and you thought; way out of your league.

“You okay?” He asked with concern laced in his eyes.

“I can fight my own battles, thanks.” You muttered slightly, but stared him down nonetheless, you couldn’t let him know he phased you.

“That’s what I was worried about,” he chuckled. “1. You absolutely wreck Romelda, 2. Coach sees, 3. You get in trouble, 4. Maybe get a suspension, 5. I don’t see you playing soccer.” He smirked before continuing, “I can tell you pack a mean punch in there, Romelda wouldn’t stand a chance.”

You pretend to ignore everything he was saying, but really you were drinking in every detail.

“I know she wouldn’t.” You said defiantly.

You paused while you watched the way he grinned at your words and scratched his chin.

“I didn’t think Baseball practice was now?” You mused.

“It’s not.”

So, what was he doing nosing in your business anyhow?

“Why are you here?” You crossed your arms, your team had dissipated back to the changing rooms by now, and it was just you and Jeff on the field.

“I like to watch the girls soccer.”

“You perv!”

“Not like that! It’s just, you’re an awesome player and I hold great admiration for you, watching you play fuels me to play my own game.” He explained.

“Don’t be silly.” You scoffed.

“No, it sounds silly, but it isn’t. There’s something so clear about your passion that just makes me want to live my life.” He smirked, noticing your expression. “Don’t laugh at me, L/N.”

He knew your name??? He was just a boy from school, a boy way out of your league, who you’d never imagined knew of your existence. But instead, he was a boy who watched every soccer practice, complimented your play, and knew your name. You had to play it cool.

“I’ll keep a straight face, Atkins.”

“I should be off, we’ll be practicing soon and I wanna get a few hits in myself before the team comes, but thanks for entertaining me.” He started off, and you felt a pang of disappointment as he turned his back to you.

“Oh, and Y/N? That goal was incredible. Best thing I’ve seen in days.”

—-

It had been a few days since Jeff Atkins had saved your arch nemesis’ life, and incidentally pervaded into your life. He smiled at you in the corridors now, and you could’ve sworn he even winked once. On Tuesday, after a few judgemental comments about your clothing, you found a note in your locker;

You always look awesome Y/N. In fact, i might have to steal some clothes sometime. -J

Which you could only assume was from the man himself. On Thursday, Atkins slipped you the last chocolate muffin in the cafeteria. And on Friday, you had practice again.

Your play was slacking, your usual fire was off and you were distracted.

“L/N- pay attention! Ball coming your way!” Jess warned. You kicked your foot out just in time, but the hit was poor. You continually looked up at the bleachers, hoping to see Jeff watching you, but to no luck. His no show disappointed you.

—-

“What is wrong with you today, Y/N?” Jess caught you up after practice. She was clearly concerned.

“I don’t know, Jess, I guess today isn’t my day.” You sighed.

“You drop your lucky charm or something?”

“Something like that.”

The team left for the changing rooms and you slumped on the bottom row of the bleachers.

“So a lucky charm, huh?” You immediately knew the voice coming from above you. You turned and saw Jeff coming down the steps.

“I don’t have one.” You were blunt, you needed to remind yourself not to get feelings for a boy so out of your league.

“Maybe you should get one, you looked in need of one.” He slumped down next to you.

“Thanks, I appreciate the compliment.” The sarcasm dripped from your tongue.

“Not because you played badly by any means, but because you looked a little lost out there today.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, my brain doesn’t appear to be working recently.”

Jeff dropped a wooden bead in your hand. It was nothing special, simple, wooden, spherical, with a hole in the middle. A plain wooden bead.

“Uh, thanks?” There was question in your voice. He chuckled.

“It’s your new lucky charm. Don’t lose it, I promise it’ll help you win the match next week.” Sincerity coated his words and his eyes bore into yours, with a jokey overtone.

“I will keep it close. But I might wash it first, if you found it on the floor.” Of course, you didn’t really care where it had been, and you wouldn’t really wash it, but you were curious as to where it had appeared from.

“Don’t worry, it wasn’t on the floor.” He chuckled again, and started to stand. “I’ll see you around, L/N. Keep an eye out for me at the match.” He winked before walking off.

—–

You squeezed the bead tightly before placing it back in your gym bag. The game was starting, and you were not ready.

Obviously, all your nerves went out the window after your third goal of the match, at only 20 minutes in.

You won, which was no surprise to everyone, except you. You spotted Jeff making his way down the stairs and ran up to meet him.

“You were right! I can’t believe it worked!” You shone like the sun from happiness.

“I hate to say I told you so.” His eyes sparkled at you.

“It’s insane, you’re magic!” You mocked, feigning shock.

“What can I say?”

You smiled at each other for a moment, basking in your happiness.

“Actually, can I admit something embarrassing?” His tone turned awkward.

“You’re not magic?” You joked. He laughed.

“No, um, actually I was really nervous to talk to you. Seeing Romelda and you at each other’s throats the other weeks sent me into immediate rescue mode, (not that you need rescuing), and I didn’t realise until the adrenaline had worn off that I’d actually ended up speaking to you, but by that point I was too far in my rescue.”

You laughed at the idea of Jeff Atkins being scared to talk to you.

“You’re just so cool. You don’t care what anyone thinks, you’re passionate, you’re an amazing player, I love your style, not to mention how smart and gorgeous you are.” “What I admire most is honestly, how badass you are.”

You blushed, taking compliments was a struggle.

“Jeff stop messing, it’s not funny.” You rolled your eyes playfully.

“I’d never- this is the most embarrassing part-” he took a deep breath, “I sorta like you.”

You couldn’t believe what you were hearing. Jeff Atkins? Likes you?

“You do?” Was all you could think to respond with.

“Yes.” He breathed, and moved closer to you.

“Is this-” he asked as he leaned in toward your face and cupped his hand on your cheek. You nodded forcibly in consent, before he pushed his lips onto yours.

After a while, and with regret, you broke off.

“But- you’re so out of my league.” You breathed, doubting yourself.

“I play baseball, Y/N, leagues are my thing.”

—— ——

“Jeff! Please tell me you sent out the invites on your way home!” You screamed downstairs at your boyfriend.

“Of course I did!” He shouted back up.

You threw various wedding catalogues off the bed to reach the top you’d been looking for, before throwing it on.

“You ready babe?” Jeff yelled at you.

“Just coming!” You yelled back, before pulling out from under your top, a string, with a plain wooden bead on it.

[jeremietheguy]

MEPS 2 (Part 1)

And so it was back to Clarion Hotel and MEPS again. A month ago I took the AFOQT and apparently my “very competitive scores” earned me a second trip this time. The purpose for this trip was getting my physical done. I wasn’t worried; I was in great health, had no congenital or incurable disease, and nearly a year had passed since I last smoked weed.

Knowing the procedure from last time, I simply said, “MEPS” to the front desk guy and went to the second floor office room. I stopped abruptly near the door, realizing there must be about 25 people stuffed in that small office.

“Hey, you that just came in-” everyone turned and looked at me and turned back “-read that list of instructions on the wall and line up here to sign in,” ordered the office lady, who was not Joanne from last time.

I looked at the poster, which contained basically the same information that Joanne from last time had so kindly and amicably explained to me. I waited in line until it was my turn.

“Name and branch?”

“Lai. L-A-I. Air Force.”

She flipped through the heavy binder.

“I can’t find you here. Is your name spelled correctly?”

“Yes.”

She flipped one more page.

“Oh, you’re an officer!”

I heard 25 silent gasps and felt 25 pairs of eyes on me.

“Yes.”

I was already seated at the diner in the lobby five minutes before dinner was supposed to start. I wasn’t taking any chances. Judging by how many people were in that office, I wasn’t going to wait for my food. It had worked too; I was the only one there. A few moments later a guy in blue approached the diner.

“Hey can I sit here?” he asked, gesturing the seat opposite to mine.

“Sure.”

As he ordered his food, we were joined to two more, filling our table. We introduced ourselves.

“So what are you, Army?” I asked the guy in blue.

“Marine,” he replied.

“Nice.”

I took an immediate liking to the Marine. He had an easy-going and relaxed vibe and seemed like someone I could just hang out and talk about nothing with.

“Yeah right now I work in an electronic store and I’ll probably be a radio technician or something. By the way, how old are you guys?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen.”

“Twenty two,” I answered, then raised my eyebrows inquiringly at him after the moment when he should have responded right away.

“Twenty seven,” the Marine said after a slight pause, as though embarrassed. He continued, “See, I have to go to boot camp before I turn 28 or else I’m too old. I worked it out and I’ll turn 28 in boot camp, which is allowed. What’s your branch?”

“Air Force, pilot,” I said, “I’m going to be flying. And you guys? Army?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Just then, a question that had always been bothering me came to mind, so I asked, “have you guys seen the movie Zootopia?”

I was met with yes’s.

“OK so you know how the bunny and the elephant are both police officers? Here’s my question: do they get paid the same amount?”

All three guys laughed.

“No seriously think about it, the elephant needs, like, a thousand times more food than the bunny, so she should get paid a lot more. But if they’re doing the same job, they should get paid the same.”

They laughed again.

“You know what, I’m going to be thinking about this,” I said, “in my cockpit.”

Then, our food arrived.

The perks of being an “Officer” were unbelievable. My double-bed bedroom offered me the peace and quiet for me to finish my final paper for my German Expressionism class on female sexuality and autonomy in the films Metropolis and Nosferatu when all the other recruits were watching a football game. I would later find out that I only earned a B+/A- for that paper.

The next morning I went down to the lobby for breakfast at 5 A.M. and was greeted by a familiar face.

“Back again?” Joanne from last time asked, “How was the test?”

“Good enough for me to be back here”

I picked a random seat and quickly finished my food. Quite a few recruits had finished theirs too and were standing around in clumps near the entrance, waiting to be bussed. I spotted the Marine from dinner the previous night wearing a full suit and tie standing with another guy and joined them in waiting.

“Did you watch the game last night?” the Marine asked.

“Nah, had to finish my final paper. What’s up with the suit?”

“Gotta be formal, man. I may be swearing in today.”

Usually you get your picture taken when you swear in, hence the formality.

A voice called out, “Single file, everybody!”

Us clumps started declumping towards the middle of the lobby. I remarked to the Marine, “How long do you think it’ll take to get all these guys in a line?”

“Seeing how these are a bunch of Army and Marines, probably forever,” replied someone from behind me.

I turned around and faced a short guy with a rather large head.

“And why is that? I asked.

I didn’t have to ask; I knew why he said that. There are stereotypes for the four branches of the military (there are actually five, but no one cares about the Coast Guard enough for them to have stereotypes that I am aware of), and essentially the stereotypes boil down to this: there is a strong negative correlation between intelligence and manliness/fighting ability for each branch. The Air Force and the Marine Corps exist on the opposite ends of the spectrum with the Air Force being regarded as the smartest branch and the Marine Corps as the best fighters. The Army is somewhere in the middle, and the Navy, weirdly, doesn’t really fit in anywhere regarding the intelligence/manliness debate. It’s probably because the Navy guys already get roasted enough with the stereotype that they are all homosexual. Supposedly, being on a giant ship for months has that effect, although incidentally, the Navy also as the highest percentage of female personnel.

Yeah, I don’t get it either. I’ve actually seen full blown fights between members of different branches over which branch is more <insert adjective here>.

“Well, you know,” Bighead said, “these guys are pretty dumb. But I’m Air Force, so…”

What an ass.

Remarks like these extremely juvenile and pointless. After all, we all work for the same organization that is the U.S. government for the same purpose of exercising political and economic might over other countries when diplomatic missions and bribery don’t work. So what the hell do you gain from vilifying each other?

Trying to defuse the tension a bit, I turned back to the Marine and said, “Hey Jarhead, you hear that? Air Force over here says y’all are dumb.”

Jarhead. Noun. Semi-derogatory term for a Marine. It originated from the short and flat haircut given to Marines which makes their heads look like jars. It also implies that like a jar, their heads are hard on the outside and empty on the inside.

The Marine turned back to us and said, “Beats being you, Chair Force.”

Chair Force. Noun. Semi-derogatory term for an Airman. It refers to the belief that all Airmen simply sit in chairs and do boring paperwork as Air Force personnel see the least amount of combat.

“Man, fuck you” Bighead wasn’t about to back down and was determined to prove his intellectual superiority. “What’s your ASVAB score?”

“96”

That’s a really good score, like damn near perfect. But then again, the man’s 27, graduated from college, and worked for five years. He would simply be more knowledgeable.

“How about you?” Bighead turned to me.

“I didn’t take the ASVAB. I took the AFOQT. It’s for Air Force Officers.”

Usually I’m not one to flaunt my status as an Officer candidate, but seeing as how this fool wouldn’t shut up, I thought I’d mention it.

“Butter Bar.” He replied.

I just looked at him.

“Clearly you don’t know very many Officer jokes.” He said.

“No. No I don’t. Why would I?”

Butter Bar. Noun. Semi-derogatory term for a Second Lieutenant, the lowest ranking commissioned officer in the U.S. Armed Forces. It originated from the gold insignia worn by 2nd Lieutenants. Because 2nd Lieutenants are the lowest ranked officers, they usually have the least amount of leadership experience. The term is used to belittle the 2nd Lieutenants who think they are hot shit and know more than enlisted personnel who may actually have way more years of experience.

The guy standing with the Marine the whole time finally joined in.

“Dude, you know he outranks you, right? And that he’s not going to be a Butter Bar forever?” he said to Bighead. “And like in five years, he’s going to be making ten times the money you will. What’s your job going to be anyway?”

“Service.” Bighead said.

The Marine, the guy with the Marine, and I exchanged looks.

“Ah yes. Service, of course,” I said. “Only the noblest of all jobs.”

They smirked.

When we arrived at MEPS, we went through the same procedure as last time of checking in. Immediately afterwards, we were ushered into a classroom-like room for procedure debriefings. An even older and more cynical looking version of George Carlin was in civilian clothing and started debriefing us.

“How many people are under the age of 18?” he asked.

Everyone except the Marine and I raised their hands.

“And how many of you 17 year olds are going to be 18 in six or fewer months?”

All the hands stayed raised.

“Good. Now, how old are you two?”

“Twenty two.” I answered.

“Twenty seven.” The Marine answered, looking slightly embarrassed again.

“Trying something new, huh?” Jeorge Karlin continued, “On the forms in front of you are detailed questions relating to your physical and mental health. Think clearly and remember every possible disease, injury, or surgery that you had. Say you end up in Syria and lose an arm. You come back home and expect ol’ Uncle Sam to take care of you since you bravely sacrificed one arm for our freedom that was in Syria for some reason. They’ll look through these forms and examine your entire body, and if you forget to mention that in 8th grade you broke your arm playing baseball and they find signs of surgery on your bones, they’ll say that you lied to them and won’t give you a dime because your missing arm had something to do with that 8th grade surgery before you joined the military instead of that F1 grenade, freeing them from all responsibility. You know those Wounded Warriors commercials playing at half-time of a football game? Yeah, that’s a charity organization, not a government organization. They’re the military equivalent of those adopt-a-stray-dog-today commercials. These guys come back from warzones with missing limbs and have to beg their government to keep them off the streets.”

I raised my hand. “Sir, do braces count?”

“Dental braces? Yeah, I’d put that down just in case.” He turned to address everyone again, “Some guys come back with all their limbs attached, but something’s different. In their heads. They’re just not the same men anymore. Now that’s harder to prove, but they’ll find out that you were homeschooled for a year in middle school because of behavioral problems, proving that you were already crazy, and that seeing the guy next to you get shot had absolutely nothing to do with your PTSD.”

I was the last one to finish filling out the forms. I walked to the front of the room where he was waiting and handed them to him.

The area next to the classroom was where we were actually examined. We were separated into groups and went to different stations for different checkups. I had the honor of getting my eyes checked by none another than Jeorge Karlin.

“Took your time, huh? That’s good. Bring your pencils back to this box. We’ve only got a 600 billion dollar military budget so we can’t afford to lose any pencils.”

[locochronic-blog]

1.

Cue the helicopters.

Federal agents soar high above California’s northern coast like eagles with a bird’s eye view of this multi-billion dollar black market marijuana industry. They see a symmetrically beautiful Yin Yang of rough blue sea and rolling green hills. Rhythmic waves crash like percussions on the shore ‘n rugged, mountainous terrains mimic the ups and downs of hill life for weed growers and trimmers, locals and transplants alike.

The task force chopper in the air slightly descends, losing sight of its moving target as a line of cars disappears under a Redwood forest canopy that is too dense.

Launch the drones.

Agents rely on monitoring live stream footage from their remote controlled drones as the little fed cameras swoop closer to the ground, able to finagle through trees with ease. Able to stalk this criminal brigade mobbin through the woods.

Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity Counties are collectively known as the Emerald Triangle for ranking highest in Cannabis production throughout the United States for all of time… Don’t quote nothin tho. These counties have been putting in work since before getting high was this cool… and with all the recent advancements of this underground industry, getting high has never felt so sensational. 

This that LoCo Chronic, sucka.

Majestic rays of love and light filter through giant, ancient trees as the dusty mountain road begins to narrow on a summer’s eve. From the sun, rays of light travel a hundred million miles in under ten minutes and still must reposition around these mystical Redwood beings. 

Beings wider than the SUVs that maneuver amongst them through roads ’n coves. 

Fallen beings crafted into big castles.

It’s the green Wild West, baby.

Primitive ferns carpet the forest floor and rattle as the ground rumbles out of nowhere. Ballerinas of Godly mist percolate above vines and mossy rocks, dancing with mountain lions, bobcats, bald eagles and bears. One might imagine Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World” playing merrily in the background.

Shit ain’t sweet out here tho, so Tupac’s “High Til I Die” gets progressively louder with its deep bass and quick pace. People are really out here mobbin in the middle of nowhere.

“Smokin chronic muthafuckas, causing ruckus”, Tupac’s distinctly sexy voice stabs at the tranquility of surrounding nature. “It’s the last of the drank pull over, can’t hear a damn thing sober. High til I die, loced til they smoke me, the shit don’t stop til my casket drop… I’m high til I die…”

Oversized wheels race by, one set of beefy black rims after the other as five or six off-road capable trucks and SUVs cruise swiftly through the woods. The racket approaches Wyatt and Chaska's ranch rapidly, reverberating sounds of music throughout the hills, causing critters to scatter at once, with chills.

Rabbits and deer steer clear.

For growers and trapstars, summer in Humboldt is when all goes well, or, well, you’re fucked. And the drought ain’t over. Won’t be anytime soon. All this heat and wildfire smoke is a bitch, it’s making some hill workers go crazy.

“I know the feds watchin!” Chaska shouts above the music playing in the car, “Why else they circlin round here on a Sunday? Can't be no dang electric company!”

Chaska is co-owner of the grow-op and acts as both the armed guard and the DJ in the passenger seat. His buzz cut glistens with sweat on this hot August day and he wears a couple gold chains that contradict his country boy demeanor yet reinstate his unpredictable priorities. He also wears his machine gun like a seatbelt.

A gorgeous, soft spoken Alicia Keys look-a-like named Aura drives with one hand, adjusting the rearview mirror with the other to be sure of what she sees.

“We’ve got visitors!” Aura warns.

She feels alert and refreshed, refusing to put the A/C on anything other than high while she is behind the wheel. Curls poppin, dancing with the air that blows in their direction. Her beaded charm bracelets jingle over bumps and potholes as she transports a load of workers to the farm. Her favorite and most unique charm on her wrist was decorated by her son Carmelo after his last day of Kindergarten a couple months ago. He painted a beautiful rendition of her head and hair’s silhouette onto a plain wooden coin and she looks even more like a Goddess through the eyes of her child.

Aura is a mother, a college student and a bartender who hosts karaoke every Thursday night. With a demeanor so sweet, nobody would believe the lifestyle she truly lives… Not that she talks much about herself to strangers anyways.

Aura and Chaska teamed up to drive and guard the last car in the criminal convoy today. The goal of this backup squad is to deter cops and crooks, by any means necessary, from following the rest of the gangsta fleet of guards and workers up to Chaska and his brother Wyatt’s weed farm. 

Rose turns around from the middle row of the overly lifted SUV and peaks through the tinted back window. She finds herself at eye level with a couple steadily approaching drones and instantly snaps around to face front, paranoid about having her face on camera. She pulls her long, wavy hair into a sloppy bun and throws on a black hoodie to cover the distinct tattoos painted preciously on her arms.

The drones stream footage up to agents in the helicopter, revealing a line of pimped out trucks and SUVs all painted forest matte green so deep they look black at night. Each whip is equipped with massive all-terrain tires, heavily tinted windows, spotlights ’n grille guards.

Incidentally, all the doors and windows of this brigade are also bulletproof. Some markings decorate the exterior of a couple cars like souvenirs from upset shooters whose bullets never made it to the person riding shotgun.

Ironic.

Drivers, armed guards and over a dozen blindfolded passengers bump up the mountain on the hottest day in years. A sunny Humboldt summer that’s hot with the cops, too.

“Yeeee”, Chaska haws as he pops a magazine into his modified gun and loads the chamber, “I’m sher glad I done chose to git in your vehicle today, Miss Aura. Now open that sunroof for me, if you be so kind”.

Aura is Chaska’s sister-in-law, though she and his brother Wyatt split up a year ago. Wyatt waits at the ranch for the convoy of cars to pull up, caring for Carmelo along with other little kids and making lunch for the guards who stayed with them for the day.

Chaska and Wyatt look similar but act totally different. They are muscular and healthy, half Portuguese half Native American with a natural tan to their skin year round. They could pass as twins despite their different personalities and hairstyles. Wyatt is younger yet wiser and he flaunts his Native roots with long, silky black hair he keeps tied back while working. Chaska is a couple years older and keeps his hair short as if he’s about to deploy with the militia. 

Chaska acts so savage and redneck it’s comical, considering his familial upbringing surrounded by countless tribal elders guiding him in the right direction. Soon as him and Wyatt’s folks died Chaska quit attending ceremonies, quit showing respect to food he hunts and quit following advice from his tribe. As much as Wyatt becomes enlightened, Chaska becomes equally as dark and twisted. Instead of going to group gatherings, dances and prayers, a young Chaska would disappear for days at a time to camp in the woods. He can drive every single back road that stretches north, south, east and west in the Emerald Triangle blindfolded. He can survive for months alone in the wilderness. 

And he can kill anything that moves without feeling a drop of remorse.

Aura presses a button on the dash and the sunroof slides back like a door to an action packed movie. Chaska takes off his shirt, ties it around his face and throws on a baseball cap leaving only a slither of his eyes as evidence in a potential case. In one fluid, almost rehearsed movement he places a hand on the roof of the car and thrusts himself upwards til he is standing on the passenger seat with his gun toting in the breeze. He switches the safety off and steadies his aim amidst such dusty, rugged curves in the road. 

Agents in the air monitor the cameras that lag only a second or two behind real time. They see a masked figure pop up out of nowhere and call through their radios that there is what appears to be an M4 aimed directly at their pricey cop toys. Orders from base are given to hold the drones back a few yards and begin swerving them from left to right on this winding mountain cut through.

Turn those fuckers off.

Distance and swerves are no match for Chaska’s tactical moves as he holds down the trigger and sprays in one sweeping motion. With a shot to the brain of each robot, footage is immediately ceased, leaving nothing but fuzzy gray connections up on the helicopters split screen.

[ismael37olson]

Something Dirty on the Whole Who's-Who

We've all fallen in love with Sweet Smell of Success as we've worked on it the last several weeks. It's such a privilege to work on material this strong. I notice that when we talk about it to other people, the first thing we talk about is the sizzling hot jazz music by the great Marvin Hamlisch, and we also talk about playwright John Guare's script, which our music director Jeffrey calls "the wittiest and wickedest" script he's ever worked on. After all, the source material, both the short story and the film, are so rich and so well-crafted, and then the stage musical builds on that with more superb writing -- and not incidentally, twice as much story, since the film and original story are Act II in the musical. The story of Act I is entirely new backstory, again, masterfully constructed. But we often forget to mention Craig Carnelia's amazing, acrobatic, smartass lyrics, which are every bit as impressive as the show's other elements. As just one example out of many, let's look at the lyric for the song "Dirt," which is in the middle of Act II, as the story takes a short breather before a roller-coaster final twenty minutes. During this breather, the leads all vacate the stage and the ensemble talks directly to us. Strike that. The ensemble talks for us. They explain why it is that sixty million Americans read J.J.'s nasty gossip column every morning. But aside from the rich, insightful content here, and the awesomely smug perspective, the actual construction of this lyric is worth a look. It's worth noting that the script often refers to the ensemble as press agents, as "whisperers" (i.e., Greek chorus), and other things. But here, there's no label; they're just "ensemble." They're outside the story for a moment. They are our stand-ins. Brecht would've loved it. But it's even more than that. The actors in the ensemble play multiple characters throughout the show. This time they're playing us. They're playing the people who read the gossip columns in 1952 and who consume the equivalent forms today. The song starts with a chant... Notice anything odd about it...?

Feel the heat On the street; Can you feel it? Gonna gonna be, Gonna gonna be good... Feel it comin'... Yes, yeah, Good, uh-huh, Hot, hot, hot…

Yes, gossip is as good as sex for these folks. For us. Notice how short the phrases are. As the gossip-orgasm builds, the ideas get simpler, devolving from "Feel the heat on the street" to the more vague "Gonna be good," all the way down to single syllables. At the end of this section the lyric and the rhythm unmistakably mimic the rhythm of sex. Then the music explode... in a gossip-orgasm...?

Gimme what I'm hungry for: The one thing that's never a bore…! Dirt! It's the reason I read. Dirt! It's an animal need. I don't pick up the paper For the sports or the news; Those ain't The sport That I choose.

You gotta love the assumption that gossip is just a healthy past-time like football or baseball. They go on.

Dirt! With my bacon and eggs. They go together like a skirt, And a nice pair of legs.

Notice the assumed sexism which was (along with homophobia) a big driver of gossip. We know they're not talking about men's legs. Also notice that in the third line of this verse there's a full phrase where there was only the repeated single word "Dirt" in that place in the previous verse. It's a wonderful way to use traditional song form -- audiences need clear signposts, like verses and choruses, in their songs -- but also play around within those forms. It's a cool surprise, and it underlines the casually sexist rhyme. But it's not just the abstract dirt -- celebrity gossip -- that we love; it's the physical dirt, the tactile experience of holding newsprint, the turning of a page to find something unexpected, something many people are mourning today as we move into a digital world. It's the whole experience.

Got the ink on my fingers, Got the smudge of a smear. Oh my! What dirt We got here!

Again, notice that the more emotional they get, the shorter and simpler their sentences get. Now having explained their appetites, they give us an example. Here's the dirt they love so much. It's like a soap opera, but it's real.

Dallas is a doper, Dallas is a red; Susie's gonna leave him flat. Dallas used to grope 'er, They were gonna wed; Look out, look out! Splat!

Notice how many assumptions these strangers make about Susan and Dallas, knowing nothing more than what they read in the gossip columns. And the music tells us how much these folks love that Dallas is a drug addict and a commie. Schadenfreude in the first degree. Of course, Dallas is neither. These folks know how nasty their impulses are, they know objectively that people deserve privacy, they know that the gossip columnists can destroy people's careers, but...

Oh, Kinda makes you feel bad. But don't the public have a right to know, Like our forefathers had? It's in the constitution! Call a commie a commie, Give his reefer a light; Dallas is dirt In black and white.

If it weren't true, they wouldn't print it in the paper, would they? Notice the third line rhymes with the first, but again it's extended. Also, up till now, dirt meant gossip in this song, but now "Dallas is dirt..." People are dirt too. They're ink. They are whatever J.J. Hunsecker says they are. For sixty million readers, there's no larger reality here beyond the items in the columns. Then the ensemble watches as some poor schmuck (Dallas in the script, but it could be anyone, no one is safe), picks up a paper and finds themselves in it... Our stand-ins can barely contain their salacious delight:

There he is! This is it! Go on over and see what the paper says! You could sit For a bit; Later on you can read it to Susie in bed. Man, you're already dead, Don't you know? Watchin' them rise is a ball, But nothin's as sweet as the fall…

And that's the crux of it. Schadenfreude. Misery loves company. And then the music bursts forth:

Dirt! Got a hunger to feed, Got a hunger and a thirst, Gimme, gimme some dirt, Take me down in the dirt! It's an animal need! Give it to me in the First Amendment!

It's so primal, so animal. It's not a choice; it's an addiction. But as aggressive and fierce as this lyric is, also notice the beautiful construction. Break the verse above into two four-line stanzas and you can see the rhyme scheme. The first lines both end with "Dirt," though the second time the line is extend, like it was earlier. The second lines rhyme (feed and need), and the third lines rhyme (thirst and First), The fourth lines don't rhyme, for a reason -- the surprise of no rhyme mirrors the surprise of starting the phrase with more sexual imagery ("Give it to me in the..."), and ending it with the Constitution. Carnelia brings it all home with a trick Sondheim often uses. They create the feeling of building momentum by increasing the rhyming, especially by making a whole stanza rhymes (think of the end of "On the Steps of the Palace"). "Dirt" ends with a Big Finish musically and a string of rhymes, but also the most disturbing content of the entire song:

Give me something that can get me through, Something dirty on the whole who's-who And keep this in mind as you do: It don't have to be true... Don't have to be true... Don't have to be true... Yeah!

Remember, the ensemble is standing in for us. That's us telling the columnists that we don't really care if what we read is true or not, as long as it's juicy. These are your friends on Facebook sharing a nasty article about a politician they hate, without bothering to check if it's true or not. And that, my friends, is how Russia tampered with our 2016 Presidential election. And this show opened way back in 2002. When I chose this show for New Line a year and a half ago, I had no idea it would be so freakishly relevant right now. What I love about this song is how it places this whole ugly story right in our laps. We give J.J. power. At the same time, this song is a five-course meal for your ears, such brittle, jittery jazz matched to such fun rhyme and alteration, and all in the service of really insightful social commentary. It's gonna be a blast living inside this show for the next month. We open next week. I can't wait to share this wild, awesome musical thriller with our audiences! Long Live the Musical! Scott from The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2017/05/something-dirty-on-whole-whos-who.html