Ode to the Meathead

by Dr. Funk

On August 3, 1492 Christopher Columbus and 87 other men looked out at the endless horizon of the Atlantic Ocean where their journey into the unknown would begin. Since that day the earth has been mapped, technology has advanced and modern travel has made this journey considerably more comfortable. To make the same trip today you just have to buy a ticket, drive yourself to the airport and you’ll be across the ocean before lunch. The contribution to society that this ease of travel has made is incalculable, but nonetheless something was lost in the process.

 
It’s hard to imagine the type of person that would have been standing next to Columbus that day, willing to get on a wooden ship and sail for months, further and further into the belly of the great deep without knowing if they would ever see land again. It’s hard to imagine because that person is all but extinct. The great unknown is known. Every discovery dilutes the adventure, reduces the nerve required to make the leap. Every step forward erodes ever so slightly the adventurers spirit. The same trip these men risked everything to make can be made today with an enthusiasm that feels more akin to indifference. A necessary progress but we’ve lost a part of the human spirit in the process.

I believe we are now in the process of losing another figure that loomed large in my early life: the Meathead. The Meathead was stereotyped as being just your average dumb jock, but if you count yourself amongst the ranks of meatheads (which I do) you know that the spirit of the Meathead is much more than that.

 
Sure we wanted to be bigger, faster and stronger, that much is true. We also had no idea what to do to make it happen. What separates the Meathead from the rest is that the Meathead never lets his ignorance stop him from the attempt. We didn’t need to know much, we went with our guts. If we wanted bigger arms, we gathered up the boys and did as many bicep curls as we could handle. If it hurt, it must be working. If it was harder, then it must be better. That was our approach.

The internet, in particular the modern internet, has allowed people access to a near infinite amount of quality information at their fingertips. The average person walking into the gym for the first time probably knows more about what they should do than I did after a few years of training. Far from dumb these young kids just starting to lift are bordering on the nerdy. You might hear a 16 year old say something like, “That felt easy, but I’m only supposed to do 20% of my volume above RPE 8 for this training block.” As a meathead it hurts my heart. Is that mentality smart? Yes. Is it going to produce better results than I ever got at that age? Yes. But the thought of being in the gym, the music is going, the air is almost buzzing with energy, you’re having an absolute day, and you’re not going to send it because it might mess up your training protocol? It’s a travesty, an assault on the very essence of man.

The progress and the results people are able to achieve now in such a short period of time is a true testament to the power of knowing and implementing correct training. Many lifters have their training mapped out for months. Optimized for success. It’s a powerful tool, and it works. But again, as the unknown becomes a little more known we lose a little bit of something in the process.

One of the great Meathead works of our time foretold us of this day, that the inevitable would come. Rocky 4, man vs. man, country vs. country, no money, no title, just glory on the line that Christmas Day. What we also see is Drago, with the entire weight of the Russian government behind him, utilizing every evidenced based high tech training protocol they could come up with. He’s surrounded by doctors, machines, trainers, drugs, all to optimize him into an unbeatable machine. The only problem is that he was going up against the Meathead messiah, Rocky Balboa. Rocky decided the best way to combat Drago’s superior training strategy was to climb mountains by himself, run through rivers in the Russian wilderness, lift stones with a pulley, all while looking absolutely gassed. We root for this. Why? They could have easily given Rocky better and smarter training to try and defeat the Russian. But that doesn’t call to us. Why do we want the primitive method to win? All true Meatheads recognize that there is something in a man that wants to believe that it doesn’t just come down to how good your training is, that there is that something inside that can rise up.

Unfortunately for the Meathead species, the training techniques, protocols supplement advancements, etc. do really seem to make the biggest difference. It seems like our story will end a little less like Rocky 4 and a little more like the tale of John Henry. The man who died of exhaustion trying to out dig a machine on the old railroad.

This is good right? People will push boundaries farther, get bigger, stronger, faster. Records will fall and we’ll move on to bigger and better things. More people will achieve and succeed on a higher level.

Maybe.

When someone is about to propose, most of the time they are understandably nervous. They have seen relationships crumble around them before. They know people who have gotten divorces that have all but ruined their lives and torn families apart. What if it’s the wrong person? What if it doesn’t work out. It would be nice to be able to see the answer before you pop the question. To know if you were about to make a giant mistake.

That thought process is perfectly logical, and it’s understandable to want to have that information, even if it’s impossible to actually get. But in my opinion it’s better that we don’t get what we want in this circumstance. Marriage is a vow, a commitment, a promise you make to one person that you are going to be there with them no matter what happens. You have no idea what is coming next and you make that promise anyway. It’s a giant leap of faith to make that type of commitment with that much unknown. If you were to know the outcome before you proposed it wouldn’t really be much of a commitment then would it? If there is no risk then what exactly are you committed to?

In this instance you get what you want to ensure that your marriage is going to make it, but in the process you actually change the whole thing. The act is sterilized with certainty.

The fact that we know so much about training now, and how to get the results we are after kills some of the mystery, it shows us the clear path to results. We wanted results for sure, and if someone had the answers we would have taken them in a heartbeat. But the Meathead life wasn’t about the results, even though we might have thought it was. It was about meeting the boys at the gym and seeing who would say they had enough first. The regular characters in the gym and all their peculiarities. The days where you feel good and go off schedule and the whole crew rises to the occasion. A day when nothing is planned but a PR just comes down unscheduled from the heavens. The thought of it is enough to make your hair stand on end.

The sterilized monotony of the perfect training protocol where every rep, weight, macro, calorie, is all laid out on an excel spreadsheet, still takes commitment, still takes dedication and maybe even more discipline. But for me it doesn’t stir that something inside that I don’t quite have a name for.

You see, being a Meathead isn’t just about the gym, it’s a mentality. If I’m golfing I am almost certain that I’ll score better if I just put the driver away and take a more conservative approach, but I’ll quit golfing all together before I stop hitting the driver. I might put 4 or 5 balls into the trees but what’s the point of even going out if you don’t even give yourself a chance to do something big?

In the age of analytics, where football coaches are making their calls off of percentage sheets, and every baseball team is trading players based on a probability algorithm, the Meathead is going to fall by the wayside. The part that hurts the most is that those methods will prove to be more effective than our primitive ways. All is not lost, there are some trying to breath life into our kind. David Goggins is grinding his knees down to nothing as we speak, with the noble hope that more of us will rise from the pulverized ashes of his tibia, like a Phoenix.

I respect the few leading the charge, fighting against our inevitable extinction. It is our way. I hope to impart our culture onto my children, however futile the attempt may be. We all hope to be Rocky Balboa, but in the end we’re more likely to end up like John Henry.

    A man is nothing but a man,

    But before I let your steam drill beat me down,

    I'd die with a hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord,

        I'd die with a hammer in my hand.

    John Henry by Anonymous

Freshwater Memories

I-80 stretches out before the dash,
Whilst overcast Pennsylvania skies brood.
The white noise of the highway zones me out,
As I begin to revisit the past.

The land I once called home quietly soothes,
Maples, elms and spruces dot the modest
Mountains. The road gives way to rock outcrops.
The Gap nears and the mountains give way as
The Delaware rushes under the bridge.
I look down at the strong currents and try,
Instinctively, to find where we would cast.

My brother and I learned to fish from Dad.
We learned the trade with cone-shaped fishing reels,
Dexterity was quickly learned to hook
The wriggling worms dug up from our garden.
It was always a special day when we
Made the drive down Whipporwill Lane.
Past the pond where we learned to skate,
To the Waynesboro Reservoir water.

A clumsy cast into the manmade lake,
Rapt anticipation consumed our world.
Nothing mattered but bobber movement now.
A little dance, a short jerk, a silent pause,
Then it plunged! The race to land our fish began.
Lift the rod to set the hook like Dad taught.
Then quickly reel it in, almost there now.

Dad pulls up the line to show me the catch.
The luminous bluegill flaps in the air
Until Dad firmly grips it in his hands.
We smile, an involuntary reaction,
All of my troubles are forgotten now.

I want to reach out to hold this creature,
How could something so small behold such strength?
Is this really what strained the line and made
My stomach jump directly to my throat?
As Dad hands me the fish I feel it curl,
Flexing with all its might trying to leap
Back in the placid reservoir water.

We take one last look at the bluegill now,
Preparing to return it to its home.
I gently reach down and submerge my friend,
He floats for a moment, then, silently,
Darts away toward the rocks in the shade.

I feel a strong connection with nature
In those moments just after the release.
For a brief moment I am just present,
Reveling in the beauty all around.
The Mont Alto trees rustle in the breeze.
A faint trickle is heard from the spillway.
The hum of traffic does not exist here.
Standing on a boulder, the three of us
Cast in again, one sunnie happier.

Amazing how the simple things in life
Are what we carry with us to the end.
I used to think that memories were random.
Snapshots that stick with us for god-knows-why.
But now, I believe it’s not the events
That have meaning. It is who you are with
That make things worth remembering at all.















We walk back along the beaten dirt trail,
Each gripping a tackle box in our hands,
Trying to decide who caught the biggest.
Dad just listens with a contented smile,
And gently pulls us in a quick embrace.

It’s been decades since we fished those waters.
We’ve taken separate paths away from here,
But still like to talk about those serene
Pennsylvania nights at the reservoir.

So even if we did not know it then,
An arm around the shoulder means the world.

2015 KeyPAP MOTY Battle Royale: Smits

I know what you’re thinking, and I’m not going to do it.

"Smits didn't do shit last year," you're saying to yourself. "He's just going to take credit for his wife shitting out a couple of babies. What a chump."

It's not fair for me to talk about how I watched my wife nurture my seedlings to life over the course of the longest nine months of our lives. How I rubbed her swollen feet on the couch every night, because that's all I could do to ease some of the pain in her aching body.

It's not fair for me to talk about the emotional turmoil I went through in the weeks before my seedlings hatched, about how I took stock of my entire childhood and wondered whether I could give my nippers the same memories I cherished while avoiding the regrets that I still carry with me.

It's not fair for me to talk about the emotions in the car ride to the hospital with my wife, knowing that we'd never never ride in the car again as a family of two. I don't remember what we said. I don't remember if we said anything at all.

It's not fair for me to talk about how I was brought to tears when the doctor held up two healthy babies from the other side of the operating curtain. And then the horror I felt as my wife passed out on the table due to rapid blood loss. Baby A and Baby B, as they were known to everyone else in the operating room, cried for their mother after the trauma of birth, yet she could not yet hear them. I tried to comfort them, but my callused hands were no substitute for a mother's warmth.

It's not fair for me to talk about the first week after we brought the little mites home and our comfortable, bohemian lifestyle was obliterated by heaps of shitty diapers, a carpet saturated with projectile vomit, an tsunami of baby toys, and a bad case of acid reflux in Baby B.

It's not fair for me to talk about the joy of watching the babes grow, if even for a time period as short as 4 months by the close of 2015. No words can adequately describe what it feels like when you come home from a grueling 11 hour work day to see your own younglings' faces light up with joy as you walk through the door.

It's not fair, and I'm not going to do it.

As you know, I'm not a religious man. But I'll be damned if it isn't some sort of small miracle that I can stand before you today as the patriarch of the Smits clan, family of four. I entered the year 2015 as a strapping, formidable powerlifter well on his way to squatting 500 lbs, a rare feat for a 181 lb mammal. By mid-summer, I was broken both physically and emotionally. I questioned my ability to rise to the occasion in any endeavor. Am I capable of raising two tadpoles? Can I successfully navigate them through life over the next 18 years? Will they respect the weakened, damaged shell of a man I feel I've become?

My burning questions cannot be answered for years to come. But like a rose which grows from a crack in the concrete, the resurrection of my manhood has begun. I'm ejaculating onto my wife's bosom once again, a few stray droplets flinging up on her cheeks and onto the comforter. I'm stacking paper like a motherfuckin printing press. Middle class style.

The American dream is still alive. Get married, have kids, get house. One and two are in the bag. I spent 2015 putting in work, so that one day I will jizz all over number three.

2015 KeyPAP MOTY Battle Royale: Dr. Funk

I got rice cooking in the microwave

I got a three day beard I don't plan to shave

It's a goofy thing but I just gotta say, hey,

I'm doing alright

– Average Country Song

A Year in the Life of the Funky One

This is my case for the KeyPAP Man of the Year 2015, or at least it is supposed to be. An undeserved crown is but a fancy hat, which is why I will not partake in the hyperbole that will no doubt spread throughout the other essays like a malignant tumor. As I muse about my year, two thousand and fifteen years after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, I keep returning to one day that I feel is an adequate representation of my last trip around the sun.

It was a quiet day in October, a day as ordinary as a common acorn. I woke up before the rising sun at a hunting camp that housed the memories of my father’s youth. I trekked out deep into the woods of central Pennsylvania. I walked behind my father as he gave me directions to my spot, referencing landmarks that were nowhere to be found in the recesses of my memory. I found the spot luckily, as I always do, quite unsure as to how this happened. I sat up in my tree stand and waited for the sun to come up.

The woods I have hunted in for the last 17 years are not immune to temporal changes. Our surrounding landscapes give us the illusion of permanence, perhaps a false glimpse into a span of time that is beyond our grasp. The truth is that this wooded expanse, a mostly untouched representation of a time long since passed, has changed as much as the people who hunt it. Gone are the days of constant action. It is not uncommon to go days without a single deer sighting, an event that would once seem impossible.

Entire species of plants that were once plentiful in my youth are nowhere to be found, changing the entire feel of the landscape. But why shouldn’t it change? As for the people I walked with out into the woods that morning, the change was more obvious. I was no longer a 12 year old boy who failed to grasp that you could get tired walking up a mountain. I don’t have to spend my time walking holding up my hand-me-down hunting gear made for a man twice my size. As I looked around that morning most of the people in the cabin had grayer hair and longer belts than they did when I spent my first days there over 20 years ago. Like the lost vegetation that changed the landscape of the mountain so greatly, the most striking difference in the people who walked the mountain that morning is the absence of some of them.

For all the changes that have taken place over the years, you still can’t escape that feeling of permanence that you get when you look at the rolling hills of the Unions 2nd state. Visually the surface may change, but the land is still as much the same as it is different. In the same way I feel connected to who I have always been when I am out there. I still stare at stretches of bark on the trees in front of me blurring their deep groves until they look like faces, I still believe that being ready to shoot a deer and actually seeing one are inversely proportional, and when I put the gun to my shoulder that day I looked into the same lens as I did when I shot my first deer all those years ago.

Objectively speaking this day was as uneventful as it gets. I woke up before the sun, sat in a tree by myself for 5 hours and shot an averaged sized doe. I don’t even think I bothered to take a picture with it. It was a day many hunters would trade for a long morning in bed. Maybe it was just the right combination of factors but I was able to take it all in that day. I felt that connection, to the past, to the woods. I was grateful to be able to bring home food that I killed myself. It all felt right. There is no trophy to hang on the wall, no crazy story to tell. Just a hum drum day in the woods that for some reason, I find myself remembering more fondly than almost any other. This is much like my 2015, I certainly have done nothing to win any awards, especially one as illustrious as the KeyPAP MOTY award, but I can’t help feeling like it was one of the good ones. 2015 was one of those bland uneventful years that you never forget. Every common acorn has in it, an entire oak forest. 2015 contained as little and as much in it as any year I can ever recall.

2015 KeyPAP MOTY Battle Royale: Beebles

<content redacted>

2015 KeyPAP MOTY Battle Royale: Fez

2015 was the most average of years. Nothing of major consequence happened to me.

I had many ups and downs. I turned the most average of ages: 27. I had what I believed to be, at the time, a great relationship. It ended in the most average of fashions, via text message. I didn’t gain or lose weight. Sure, I was promoted to be the chief resident of my residency program. However, I did not assume that role until April 2016. I didn’t travel anywhere, didn’t save money well, and didn’t make new friends. Athletically, I was very neutral, despite completing my first Spartan Race.

As I lay here on my bed in my boxers, furiously combing through my memories of 2015, I come to a singular, simple, and significant realization: 2015 sucked.

Thus far, 2016 has been one of my best years to date. Therefore, I have decided to respectfully withdraw from the race for KeyPAP Man of the Year 2015.

Not only is 2016 the year of the Monkey, but also, it shall be the year of the Fez. And hark! The Fezian shalt strike back with the force of one-thousand suns to burn into the sweet memory (and mammory) of 2016. For as a great man once said, “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for much thereafter.”

See you at the 2016 KeyPAP End of the Year Rendezvous. You better bring your A-game.

People are Better than Animals. Stop Pretending We Aren’t.

by Randolph J. Pittsburgh

“Man is the cruelest animal.” 

― Friedrich Nietzsche (Dummy)

Animals are better than people in a lot of ways. Ever since that Harambe bullshit I have been seeing a lot of these statements popping up. So true. Absolutely. Then the conversation really takes off when someone suggests that people are actually the WORST species on the planet and that it would be better if we didn’t exist at all. Profound. I am asking these people to take a step back from these views for a second in hopes that they will stop being such dummies. But animals don’t shoot each other!

“People speak sometimes about the 'bestial cruelty of man,' but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Bigger Dummy)

Saying a slow, visually amusing creature like the sloth is better than a human because no animal ever dropped an atomic bomb is like saying a poorly assembled side table from Target is better than a space shuttle because side tables never explode. No shit. A side table can’t explode because it sucks, it needs a goddamn coaster to support a damp glass or else it falls apart in a heap of shitty fasteners and flake board. You know what else a side table can’t do? Break the shackles of gravity and fly through outer space, blurring the line between possible and impossible, quenching the great call of the unknown as man dares to create a future as limitless as the universe he plunges himself into!

“Animals don't hate, and we're supposed to be better than them.” 

― Elvis Presley (Dummy)

That’s really all this comes down to. All the great qualities we love about animals are just a side effect of something they can’t do. You really think no other animal would have dropped an atomic bomb if they could have figured that shit out? Before you answer that I will have you know that I owned a dog once. I loved this dog and this dog loved me. When I left on vacation I made sure this dog was taken care of, fed, walked, the whole nine yards. Do you know what this dog did every time I went on vacation? It took a hot steamy dump right in the middle of my fucking floor. No not in the corner, hidden away from view. Right in the middle of a high traffic area, the dog wanted that butt baby to be seen. Think about that. A dog who LOVED me, shit right on my floor ON PURPOSE because he was just mildly upset. Can you imagine what kind of person it would take to shit the floor of someone they loved and then look them  in the eye like they deserved it. We would lock up such a person, and for good reason. Is this the type of person that we would trust with an atomic bomb?

“All his life he tried to be a good person. Many times, however, he failed. For after all, he was only human. He wasn't a dog.”

― Charles M. Schulz (How could a dog be a good person? Dummy)

People kill in the name of religion, war, hate, animals kill to survive! Tell that to the squirrel corpse the stray cat left on my neighbors doorstep as a present. Do you know why animals don’t kill in the name of religion? Because they don’t have the capacity to question their existence, it’s also the reason why they don’t write books, drive cars, or ready shitty articles on the internet. There is a give and take here. Everything that makes humans better as a species also has a negative side. Thems the breaks. When you argue that animals are better than humans you are just arguing in favor of reduced ability. I mean people don’t have wings and we figured out how to fly better than the birds! But birds don’t explode. Touché.

“Look, PETA! If God hadn't wanted us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them so darn tasty!” 

― Stephen Colbert (American)

My least favorite version of the “people are worse than animals” crowd are the people who are against hunting. If you are a vegetarian, cool enjoy your soy stuff and vegetable medley, I respect your consistency. If you are against hunting for food and you still eat meat you are the worst, for a human I mean, you are still better than the animals you eat. I’d like to see how tough these hunters would be if the deer had guns. Well I would be exactly as fucking tough if they had guns because they are too dumb to use them. You could leave a truckload of loaded guns in the woods with a CGI video of how a deer could maneuver the guns in order to use them, and I would still be eating venison cheese steaks all year long. Next time you badmouth someone who hunts for their food while you sit there eating an omelet, keep in mind that the male chicks that don’t lay eggs get tossed down a metal chute that ends in them being ground up alive. It’s like Rob Zombie directed an Easter movie. Keep eating your eggs just don’t be such a hypocrite.

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.” 

― Groucho Marx