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

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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