Lessons With A Blind Kid

Kids, today I’m going to teach you two things, both of which are of upmost importance and could steer you down pathways of success no matter what direction you decide to take in your life.

First and foremost, don’t be fat.

That sounds rather terse, I know, but just hold on a minute and let me relate to you the events that transpired over the course of 90 minutes last night in a city league basketball game that I was involved in. A contest that will go down in my history as the greatest tie I have ever won.

I arrived on scene at a stinky gym only to find out that the majority of my team hadn’t shown up to play. In fact, the entire team forgot that 9:00 was when we tipped off. The only ones there were my equal in height buddy from high school, and a blind kid. That’s right kids, a blind kid. No lie. He was our starting point guard last night, and he can’t legally sit behind a steering wheel.

At first I was a bit nervous that the evening would end in a blow out, until I began to watch our opponents warm up, for I noticed in the midst of their pre-game shooting drills how abundantly large they were. Very large, in fact. So large, one of them was guzzling down a chilidog while shooting free-throws. Needless to say, their un-coordinated chubbyness was not something that alarmed me in the least degree.

And oh, how it was evident once the ball was tossed.

The three of us ran circles around them, ran laps in between them, ran all over them. We had a 20-point lead even before the referee saw that the clock was moving. Being the Swamp Thing that I am, I had barely broken a sweat in the first half it was that bad. There was a point in the middle of the second quarter where they just stopped moving past half court because their lethargic bodies were too tired to get back on defense. One of them even sat down by the out of bounds line and answered his cell phone, just to get a breather while we played.

Taking a 58-21 lead into halftime we were feeling pretty good. And oh, how generous we were with those 21 points we gave them. Turning to my buddy I said, ‘why don’t we just switch scores with them, and see if we can catch up? It’s worth the workout isn’t it?’ The officials at the scorer’s table agreed, since this league doesn’t have that serious of a title at stake, and so we switched sides. We were now the ones down 37 points. We were now trailing guys whose combined cholesterol was twice the size of Texas.

And that’s where it got interesting. One of our referees was also the starting point guard for our team’s biggest rival. When he heard we would be playing from a hole, he took off his zebra skin, laced up his Nikes, and said he would be taking control of the obese offense himself, and would lead them to victory. Which brings me to the second point that I would like to leave with you today.

Don’t be a jerk.

In our lives we all will have highlights, glory moments, 15-minute physical feats that we will accomplish and can relate to our posterity. Usually those have all ended by the time that we’re handed our high school diploma, and the majority of us can hang up our hats, and accept the fact that it’s time to move on and accept what the real world has in store.

But there are some who live in the distorted bio-dome also known as their titanic egos, who think they are still at that level. You know who I’m talking about. The Super Seniors, the wannabe homecoming hero athletes, Napolean Dynamite’s Uncle Rico! Those guys. The idiots who think that they are still the greatest ever. This point guard was one of those guys. He still thought that he was the neighborhood Top Dog, when in reality, he really wasn’t.

And so, with a comfortable 37-point lead, all he had to do was hold the ball at half court for 20 minutes, not move his feet, and play an extended session of Angry Birds while his mutton-munching teammates ran around wildly and the “victory” would be his. But he couldn’t do that, he had to destroy us single-handedly. He had to beat us himself. He had to prove to the handful of stay-at-home mothers watching that he, the great goggle-faced near midget, could stave off a comeback from two post players and a blind kid. That’s right, A BLIND KID!!!

And you know what, he didn’t. We jumped right back on our horses and more than doubled their point total in the second half, outscoring them 61-24, with a late last second lay-up by the kid who couldn’t see, thus resulting in an 82-82 draw. We got our workout in, the cocky point guard’s attempts were foiled, and all of the moms finally got to go home to their crying children.

If you were to keep track of the official tally, the three of us beat down that team very handily. 119-45, if it matters anything. That's right, we out powered a group of obese Vikings and an arrogant nitwit by 77 points, and we did it all with a blind kid. Seriously, how many times can I stress that?! HE WAS BLIND!!!

The two points that I learned from last night, and I hope you take from this entire post are this: 1. Don't be fat, and 2. Don't be a jerk.

And if you are going to be a fat jerk, just hope and pray you can see.

Saved By The Bell

It’s alarming how many of you clicked on the link because you saw the words “Saved By The Bell” in the title, when in all reality you probably don’t know a single thing about that overused, overhyped, wannabe sitcom that has its logo branded all over early 90’s television.

There, I said it.

For full effect, download “Under the Bridge”, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

Any shallow Hal born in the 1980’s: “Oh my gosh, I just LOVE Saved By the Bell! It’s such a GREAT show. I mean, sometimes I turn on the CW, and they’ll be playing a marathon, and I just HAVE to stay and watch it all night!”

LIAR! First of all, who the curse word even watches the CW network anyway? When their hit show is about a superhero named ‘Arrow’, they aren’t worth anyone’s time. Second, you have probably never watched more than 90 seconds of any single “Saved By The Bell” episode anyway, mainly because it’s a boring show, and you more than likely tuned out after the theme song got done playing. Why else would it have been cancelled after 70 episodes?

Aside from Screech, Zack, Kelly, or Slater, can any of you name one other character from Saved By The Bell? No, you can’t! Don’t lie to yourself, and don’t you dare lie to this blog. The only way you could was if you searched the character list on IMDB.com. “Saved By The Bell” is the TV show that pops its collar and only tucks the front of its shirt into a giant belt buckle.

Look where all those so-called teen idols ended up. One of them still thinks he’s Hollywood hot stuff by hosting “America’s Best Dance Crew”. One of them uses his video blog to complain about the fact that his acting career forced him into bankruptcy. One of them shows off her bi-polar tics in TV interviews, and one of them had her last big acting gig in an X-rated film about showgirls. And these are the kids that we were supposed to model our lives after in the 90’s?

Every pretentious liar in Generation X: “Saved By The Bell was like the show I would always watch when I got home from school. I would have my Capri Sun, and Ritz crackers and laugh all afternoon.”

We all know that isn’t true. First of all, Capri Sun wasn’t popular until “The Secret World of Alex Mack” got big on Nickelodeon, and we all thought we could morph into a giant pile of liquid metal. And besides that, “Saved By The Bell” was cancelled by 1993, probably long before any Gen-X-er understood the proper function of toilet paper.

Saved By The Bell doesn’t have a cult following. Don’t kid yourself. It’s no “Arrested Development” or “Community” or even “The Adventures of Pete and Pete”! It’s a shallow show. Go ahead, I dare you, try and remember a single episode from Bayside High School. You can’t! You remember that show as much as you remember BK Knight high tops. Remember those? Absolutely not! And if you do, you’re as honest as Lance Armstrong.

The point of all this is don’t lie to yourself and go along with the crowd trying to fit into what pop culture calls “hip” and “cool”. Just because your friend supposedly liked “Saved By The Bell” (which they didn’t), doesn’t mean that you need to sell yourself short, put on an act, and fib to the rest of society that you adored it too.

Because you and I both know, that’s not true.

What Might Have Been...

Today I sat in a ski lodge up Logan Canyon that I haven’t been in for almost two years. The last time I was there, a pretty girl was sitting across from me.

This time, she wasn’t.

For full effect, download “Someone Like You” by Adele, and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

I would like to add that this is not, I repeat, NOT a “woe is me” swan song for attention due to a harsh lack of the L-word in my personal life. This is simply a remembrance of something that didn’t happen. I would also like to suggest that if you have any masculine traits, or a strong inclination to cry during motivational Nike commercials, it would be best if you closed your Safari browser now.

If you and I have talked about relationships, you are more than likely well aware of my blunder of a break-up known by the simple coined phrase, “Text-Gate”. Yes, I know. I am a fool. Please, don’t rub it in. The girl who was the victim of Text-Gate was the same girl who used to sit across from me at that ski lodge in Logan Canyon. A girl who was the closest I ever came to L-wording someone. A girl who has now moved on in her life.

Again, please don’t label me a softy, a sissy, or any other girly name that fifth-grade bullies abuse during recess. I’m as manly as they come. I can change the oil in my car, kill a spider with my bare hands, and bench press my body weight while a Stallone movie plays in the background, yes, I am a man. However, I write this post only because today I was caught off-guard in a hypothetical puzzle wondering about the outcome of my life; wondering about what might have been.

Things change. We make choices, we deal with the consequences, we move on. That’s the way it’s been since day one. But sometimes, I think that every single one of us has gotten caught up in the heat of reminiscing moments, second-guessing the decisions that we made, and having subconscious debates about how things would have been had we taken a different direction when we came to one of the many monumental forks in the roads of our life.

Now, I’m not questioning my choice in committing the act of Text-Gate, not at all. I still stand by my social media foul-up through and through, 100%. It was the right thing to happen for both of us.

But then again, what if it wasn’t? What if for some crazy, hair-brained, off-the wall, outlandish, lunatic reason I didn’t send that text to her? What if I did change my mind at the last split-second, and ignored what I felt was the voice of reason talking sense to me? What if I didn’t terminally end things with that girl, where would the two of us be right now?

Good question.

Honestly, I would probably have a wife. Maybe a kid? Maybe a house? Maybe getting ready to move across the country to further my education with a PhD, with her at my side? Maybe she would have been with me last year when my Grandfather died, and I would have been with her when she became an Aunt to an adopted child. Maybe the two of us would have been happy. And maybe today in that ski lodge, I would have been looking back into her eyes, probably dropping the L-bomb to her for the thousandth time in our relationship, and not regretting a single moment of our lives together.

But you see, dear reader, that’s not what happened. We went our separate ways. She found a great man to tie the knot with that she adored more than life itself, and today I sat in a ski lodge looking at a guy who just had his second child with my cousin.

Life sure is screwy, wouldn’t you say? That’s the best description I can come up with for this thing that we all wake up to every single morning. Screwy. Don’t doubt me a bit, I L-word my entire life to pieces. And every single thing I have ever done I stand proudly behind, with those choices molding me to becoming the person I am. Call it destiny, call it fate, call it whatever you want, I am exactly where I want to be in my life at this very moment.

But as the night creeps on well after midnight, and the reminiscing silence only grows louder, I can’t help but have an inkling of a second-guess play mind games with me, and ask the never-ending unanswered rhetorical question:

What might have been?

You're As Cold As Ice!

How in the curse word do you people survive the winter up here in Logan?!

For full effect, download, "She's So Cold" by The Rolling Stones and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

Honestly, I do think that the first nine years of my life have been blocked from my conscious memory. Those nine years of course being spent in a valley famous for cheese curds, stinky cows, and negative Kelvin temperatures. Seriously, you people must have some form of mutated skin coating that makes you immune to frostbite. Either that or you all have on more layers of coats than Adrian Peterson has rushing yards. I'm telling you, the underground Russian Parka business could make a killing in these parts.

It's so cold up here you can see your breath while sitting in the sauna at Gold's Gym. A place where your tongue gets stuck to the roof of your mouth like Flick's did to the flag pole in "A Christmas Story". A place where my running nose makes booger icicles when I walk outside. I'm not kidding, I had a medium-sized layer of frost on my sweater last night after only half a mile of jogging. You people are frost-bitten lunatics up here, I swear!

And what's worse is that you Cache Valley-ites don't even think it's that bad at all. You've become accustomed to this frozen madness. Your bodies are acclimated to the fact that your spit freezes before it hits the ground. When I think of "too cold to budge from the stockpile of blankets I'm laying in", you're thinking "Hey, who wants to go boating at Beaver Dam today?" What is wrong with you people?!

Logan Lady-"Oh yeah, it's not bad at all. In fact, this week has actually warmed up quite a bit."

Warmed up quite a bit? Lady, when the tear ducts in your eye sockets ice over to the point that makes it impossible to blink, that's a problem. That's not warmed up, that's Utah's version of Siberia.

Does the fact that your main highway still has a three-inch coating of frozen tundra give you any indication that it's too cold to survive up here? Or the concept that you have now lost half of all of your parking lots due to the fact that there are 25-foot piles of used snow being stocked up into black heaps by every major grocery store? One would think that Wal-Mart and Costco would be wiped clean of all bread, milk, and eggs, in preparation for the Snowpocalypse, but instead y'all are out here prepping for the sidewalk CaseLot sale of BBQ chicken!

For years I've been getting the same old questions from my family and friends, wondering why I've stuck with living in St. George, and how come I haven't moved back "home" to northern Utah. You want to know why, because in St. George I don't burn a gallon of gas every morning waiting for my car to heat up, plus I like the fact that I can comfortably wear a pair of shorts longer than 30 days out of the year!

Maybe the grinch in me is just getting a little too angry at this cold weather, I can in fact see this weather shrinking my heart two more sizes too small. But seriously, for the love of moving atoms can we please get a breath of warm air? Or at least a jump in temperature to the double digits? Otherwise, they're going to have to start filming the live version of Ice Age.

Plus I think Finch's face is still stuck to that flagpole.

The Bucket List

Today I caught up with a lady who statistically speaking is going to be dead in 90 days.

You can go ahead and thank pancreatic cancer for that one.

An angel of a Grandmother, this woman was diagnosed a few months back, basically handed a death sentence of a contract from a man in a lab coat and cordially asked to sign her life away at the bottom. Yeah, I know, that's a lousy way to kick off the holiday season.

But rather than wallow away in hopeless agony, she has decided to take the higher road, the road very much less traveled, and enjoy the last few days that she has on this earth in absolute delight; meeting up with long lost family members, renewing vows with her spouse, even a road trip here and there to knock out her bucket list with a bang.

Now that's a lady on death row with her head on straight, I'll tell you what.

Perhaps it's this time of year that conjures up memories with the grim reaper, combined with the fact that everyone annually feels a false sense of personal renewal once the ball drops in NYC, but either way, I wondered what is on my bucket list, what are my terminal priorities, what do I want to have accomplished whenever it's my turn to be knockin' on heaven's door?

I think we all have those benchmark items, "write a book", "run a marathon", "visit the Grand Canyon", commonplace triumphs that would give us an inner sense of validation. And sadly, I still haven't seen that giant trench of a canyon that Paul Bunyan supposedly made as he dragged his axe across the West, despite the fact that it’s only 145 miles away from my house. I'll get to it sooner or later, I'm sure.

Honestly though, I'm not quite sure what Bucket List items I have in stock that I would like to have checked off before the end of my days. But then again, what about yourself, dear reader? Do you have some theoretical list of last minute accomplishments put together of what you would like to have done before you die? A list that you could gaze upon and say with a content smile slapped on your face, "I. I am a great person. See what I have done."

For the record, hindsight is sadly the one direction in life that the majority of us look.

At the moment I couldn’t tell you what is on my true bucket list. I do think that I have done quite a lot in my life. More than your average grumpy bear completes in 27 years. But I certainly do wish for more, and I think that we all should. I would like to learn another language, complete my doctorate, and see the final seasons of Community, Dexter, and How I Met Your Mother. And who knows, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have finally found that girl with the yellow umbrella that can share all of this stuff with me, but hey, that’s all in good time.

The point of this post is that every single day 7,000 Americans wake up for the last time in their life. 7,000 American people open their eyes in the morning, only to have them ultimately closed by the time the sun goes down. Every single day, 7,000 people that are basically you, and me, and everyone else around this fine country, don’t get the chance to cross any more items off of their bucket lists, whether they had one or not.

As for me, whether or not I’m alive in three months or 30 years, I’m going to do my best to cross off as much as I can.

For Your Protection

It’s been almost 48 hours, and I wonder how many of you have actually stuck to your unoccupied New Years resolutions

It’s o.k., you don’t have to lie. Everyone else already gave up too.

For full effect, download “The Bicycle Song” by Queen and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

This afternoon I had the privilege of purchasing yet another helmet. That makes two dome-toppers for me in the last three weeks: one for the slopes, and one for the streets. You would think that I would be one to take a little bit more tender care of what my Dad called, “that lump of fat that sits on your neck like an under-popped pimple”, but alas, I still engage in some of the most collision-riddled activities known to man.

Ironic as it sounds while I was on my way to the bike shop to purchase this new helmet, I was two feet away from a crushing T-bone collision on the corner of Tabernacle and 1000 East, when a four-eyed Grandma trying to escape from her old folks home forgot what the term “right of way” meant and jutted out into the intersection like a runt puppy on Red Bull. For a brief moment as I caught my breath and dried my pants, I reflected if I should put on my current Specialized bike helmet lying in the back seat for precautionary measures to protect against senile nincompoops such as the one I had nearly collided with.

Helmets are the most failsafe, yet most idiotic inventions ever to have popped out of mankind’s head. We need them for all of the stupid things that we do, and yet we still do those stupid things once we feel the protection of a plastic molding clutching on to our noggins. I think Jerry Seinfeld put it best when he summed up mankind’s moronic tendencies in his own personal rant:

“There are many things that we can point to that prove that the human being is not smart. The helmet is my personal favorite. Now why did we invent the helmet? Well, because we were participating in many activities that were cracking our heads. We looked at the situation. We chose not to avoid these activities, but to just make little plastic hats so that we can continue our head-cracking lifestyles.”

If only I had heard his stand-up when I was nine years old, then perhaps I would have avoided those “head-cracking” activities, steered clear of a concussion-riddled career in youth football which would later cause hundreds of unconscious drooling sessions, and then bypassed completely a batch of doctors slicing open my scalp to remove a damaged portion of brain tissue. But hey, with a helmet I thought I could do anything. And at nine years old, who listens to reality anyway?

Thumbs pointed directly at my chest: “Not this guy!”

And so, rather than pay respect to rational, logical, and downright obvious solutions such as completely disallowing any head-to-hard surface contact at medium to large impact speeds, I again purchased a helmet this afternoon, simply for the most negligible protection that three-inches of plastic can provide as I shred the slopes or dodge oncoming traffic while locked into my bike’s pedals.

And for when the next time a blind Grandma nearly T-bones me in the middle of an intersection, I have something to beat her upside the head with.