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

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.

Don't Think You're a Cannibal? What One Dr. Says WILL SHOCK YOU!

When asked if he thought there was a chance that most people could probably be cannibals a real Dr. had this to say:

"I don't know, I guess it's possible" - Real Dr.

There you have it - it's possible that you are probably a cannibal according to one real Dr.

Terry Cakebread: Human, Part IV

My name is Terry Cakebread and this is the fucking story of my life.

Previously:  Part III

8:00 AM day 18 with the Aliens

I was dreaming that I was on top of the Hell in a Cell and the Undertaker was about to throw me 20-feet to the table below.  I tried to stop it but his strength was too much, I felt my center of gravity float as I plummeted to the earth.

“Damn, what are they feeding you, you stupid piece of monkey garbage, you shit bigger than a horse at a golden corral.”

I did not know where he was getting these phrases but he said them with such conviction I swear he could channel the spirit of Stone Cold himself.

He looked at me and said, “I got the matches if you wanna watch some ass whoop'ns.”

For the next two weeks Stone Cold ET and I watched WWE matches all day long.  His favorite wrestler by far was Stone cold Steve Austin and I think I offended him once when I showed some slight admiration to his least favorite wrestler, The Rock.  When I told him that the Rock would become much more popular than Stone Cold he told me, “Those other humans must be twice as stupid with half the balls as you, you bag of monkey shit.” He knew my name was Terry, but mostly I was various forms of monkey shit.  Stone Cold ET was infatuated with the hulking physiques of the wrestlers in the movies.  Most of the people on his planet were frail beyond comprehension because of the lack of physical work they had to do.  I showed him how to do some basic muscle building exercises like pull ups and pushups.  Because his body was so unaccustomed to physical work it began to respond very rapidly, much more rapidly than any human would expect.  After just two weeks he had a body that would rival the Ultimate Warrior’s!  In that time he told me that the other aliens were impressed with humans’ ability to achieve beyond their means and intended to find out what it was that helped us do so, and that to figure it out I would likely be killed.  I could tell that he was upset by this.  We were actually having a lot of fun watching the matches together, and I found Stone Cold ET and his hatred for the Rock to be hysterical.

8:00 AM day 42 with the Aliens

“Wake up you floating pile of monkey turds, I got an idea!”

ET came storming into the room muscles blaring with a makeshift pair of jean shorts and a bad replica of Steve Austin’s vest.

“I think I can save you, you no good sumbitch.  If I send you back in time I think I can get you back to Earth.”

I knew that even though Stone Cold ET was retarded on his planet that he was much smarter than I was.  I also knew that time travel into the past was impossible.

“Stone Cold ET, you can’t time travel into the past.  Even if you could how would you know where to send me?”

“Stop flappin’ your gums and listen to me you stupid sack o’ monkey goddamn sumbitch.  I said we can send you back in time, just because your dumb ass didn’t figure it out yet don’t mean it can’t happen.  And as for that other stuff, those guys already got all that figured out about when you left and where you came from.  You had a calendar, and clocks and shit in the ship, we ain’t no stupid piles of wastewater like yourself.”

Perhaps Stone Cold ET was smarter than I was giving him credit for.  The accent made it nearly impossible to assume otherwise.  I started to have some hope but it was dashed by the thought that if they did have time machines they would likely be heavily guarded.  The chances that two idiots, by their standards, could hatch a plan to get out seemed impossible.  I voiced this concern to Stone Cold ET.

“You think you got it all figured out don’t you, ya stupid S.O.B. but did ya ever stop and think for a minute?  This place is heavily guarded, on the outside.  You are what they are guarding you dumb pile of monkeys ass.  We are inside, we have a one way ticket to the time machine.”

“What do you mean we?”

“I’m the toughest S.O.B. to ever walk the light of day on this fucking planet and they treat me like some dumb pile of monkey shit like yourself.  I’m hitching my wagon and coming with you to Earth.  WHAT?  I said I’m comin’ with you to Earth.  WHAT?  I said I’m comin’ with you to Earth, and that’s the bottom line.”

I did not see Stone Cold ET for the next two days.  He was busy setting the time machine for October 2014.  I wanted to go back to that day when I watched the time travel documentary.  Hopefully I would be able to push myself in a more fruitful direction.  I sat in that room skeptical that the plan would work and hoping that Donny and Cher didn’t have me killed by then.  The last month was probably the best month I had had in the last fourteen years.  I spent it with a special needs alien who had an affinity for role play but I figure he was probably the best friend I’ve ever had.

8:00 AM day 44 with the Aliens

Stone Cold ET came bursting into the room in his usual fashion.  He was sweating profusely, I think.  I don’t really know if they sweat or not.  It seems equally probable that he was just taking his Stone Cold act to a new level.  He even tried to smash a ridiculous looking knee brace onto his little nub of a leg.  He threw me a bag.  In the bag was a black vest with CAKEBREAD 3:16 written crudely in some make shift glitter on the side.  There was a pair of cutoff jean shorts in there as well.  As I got dressed in my apparent uniform I noticed some cans in the bottom of the bag.

“What are these cans for?” I asked.

“What’s the matter?  You ain’t never seen a god damn beer before you pussy?”

“Beer?  You know how to make beer?”

“Just shut up and have at it boy, you’re gonna need your strength.”

I took a swig of the “beer” or from what I gathered a liquid he managed to get to look like beer.  Fortunately Stone Cold rarely actually drank his beer, he just dumped it all over himself so I followed suit and was thankful for his wasteful ways.  Stone Cold ET started trying to get me pumped up to take down the other aliens. This was our day and I knew that Stone Cold ET was getting fired up because he started mixing The Rock’s catchphrases with Stone Colds when he spoke.

“This is it you sack of monkey shit, we are gonna open up a can o’ Whoop Ass on them jabronis out there.  We only have about fifteen minutes before they send the guards in after us if you smell what Stone Cold ET is cooking.”

“I think I’m ready.  So you’re going to lead me out into the room and say we have a problem, then we ambush them?”

“Hell yeah, let’s get going, Earth better get ready cuz I’m gonna open up a can on its candy ass.”

We walked out into the hallway trying not to look suspicious.  This was hard to accomplish considering we were wearing matching outfits.  I drew stares from every alien we passed by but I did my best to look like Stone Cold ET's captive.  We entered a large room filled with technological advancements I can only dream about to this day.  ET motioned in the direction of the time machine and I saw it.  On the outside it looked very plain, like a polished white box with nothing on it.  The room was filled with other aliens.  There must have been fifteen or twenty of them.  I started to get nervous.  I waited for Stone Cold ET to give the signal.  He called Cher over.  He did not speak because the language of the aliens is unspoken.  He only used his crude Stone Cold speech with me.  Without warning Stone Cold ET lifted his stubby little right leg off the ground and buried it into Cher’s midsection.  Cher’s hair flew around his face as he bent forward in pain.  Without hesitation Stone Cold ET had Cher’s head on his shoulder and delivered his first and most devastating stunner.  Cher was knocked out cold and flew to the floor.  Stone Cold ET stood up with his head flying side to side in a frenzy spraying spittle everywhere as he gave two glowing middle fingers to anyone he could see.  This was our subtle signal.  I sprinted toward Donny and heard alarms going off all around me.

Shit our time is running out.

I got to Donny and leveled him with a rock bottom.  It was euphoric as I felt the power of my legs driving him into the ground.  I was alive!  I narrowly avoided disaster because Stone Cold ET saw that I used the move of his arch enemy and was not amused.

“You do that to one more of these here jabronis  and I’m gonna open up a can on your ass.”

Noted, I moved around the room leveling aliens with DDT’s and piledrivers.  I could see down the hallway armed aliens rushing toward us.  Our time was running out.  I looked across the room and saw Stone Cold ET delivering another devastating stunner to our rivals.  He got up, pulled his alien beer out of his pocket, and began dousing himself with it, waving his free middle finger in the direction of the armed gaurds.  Stone Cold ET was living his dream.  I ran to the time machine and yelled for Stone Cold ET.

He threw me a beer and shouted, “Take that to remember me you hard headed sumbitch, I’m gonna open up a can on these guards to give you some time.  I got it set for Earth already, just do what I told you and don’t flap your gums at me no more.”

Stone Cold ET was right, we didn’t have time.  He ran to the first guard into the room and gave him the stunner.  He lowered his face to within an inch of the unconscious alien’s head wielding dual middle fingers and said as spit flew everywhere,  “This here is for my friend Terry, who believed in me unlike you ungreatful sack of monkey candy ass jabroni sumb–”

The second guard leveled a blast from his weapon that blew Stone Cold ET’s head clean off of his body.  As his body fell to the floor his middle fingers still burned bright white at the tips, his spirit refusing to surrender.  I closed the door to the time machine and heard a loud bang hit the wall.  I had tears in my eyes and could barely compose myself.  I followed the instructions given to me by Stone Cold ET and the machine began to move as I traveled back through time to a place I thought I would never see again.

8:00 AM October 15, 1980 Cincinnati, Ohio

Stone Cold ET was close.  His calculations were a little off but in the grand scheme of things it was a pretty incredible feat.  He managed to set the machine for a distance countless light years away in a time that had long since passed and only missed by 27 years and some miles.  Nonetheless I was back on Earth but in a time that I knew nothing about.  I thought that I was probably going to be done with the whole time travel idea and decided I would leave my mark on the world through my other passion, entertainment.  No one would ever have known I lived most of my life as Terry Cakebread in the near future.  They would only know me as Steve, the name I took to honor my best friend.  Two years later the Movie ET would come out where Spielberg made that impossibly lucky guess as to what the aliens in that distant planet would look like.  Then again maybe that guess had a little bit less to do with luck than I thought.

Terry Cakebread: Human, Part III

My name is Terry Cakebread and this is the fucking story of my life.

Previously:  Part II

8:00AM Day 2 with the Aliens

I sat in that room staring at the door waiting for it to open.  This was exciting for me, when you have been sitting in the same room where nothing happens for fourteen years straight, staring at a door waiting for an alien to bust through wasn’t so bad.  I sat watching the door for eight hours until it finally opened.  ET looked like he was wearing a long black wig, I think it was just his hair.

Do they have hair?

The long haired ET was carrying some of the food that was left on my ship and a bottle of the whisky.  They must have assumed I needed these things to survive.  He dropped it off next to me and walked out. This daily routine would go on for the next 2 weeks.  At least I was drunk.

Sometimes two or three would come in at a time and stand around me.  They looked like they were communicating with each other but they never made a sound.  I was always uncomfortable when they walked into the room – who knew what they were planning to do with me.  They mostly just brought me my food watched me eat it and left.  There were three different aliens that tended to me and the only thing that I could distinguish them by was their hair.  The one with the long black hair I nicknamed Cher, then there was one with a Donald trump sweeping comb over (Donny), and the standard bald ET.  The bald ET was the one who got the daily honor of removing my shit from the corner of the room every day.  I wondered if their hair was a sort of status symbol.  I wondered a lot of things while I was in there, but mostly I was just drunk.

8:00AM Day 15 with the Aliens

“We would like to speak with you.”

I opened my eyes.  My head was pounding, I think I drank a little more than usual the night before.

Did Cher just talk to me?

“What did you say?”

“We would like to speak with you.”

How could they know English?  There were many people on earth who couldn’t speak English and these people were certainly not from Earth.

“How do you know my language?” I asked Cher.

“It was quite difficult really, there are a lot of concepts that are foreign to us, like names and mathematical concepts.  We were able to learn your language by watching your videos and reading your books and notes.”

“You learned my language by watching WWE and reading my notes?”

“Yes we did.”

“You definitely don’t talk the way they do on WWE.”

Cher gave a meaningful expression, I think, and said, “We were able to use the words and their context in the videos to cross reference your dictionary.  This way we were able to learn the whole of your language and not just the dialect employed by your WWE.”

I was done; they could do what they wanted to me.  What was I going to do to stop them?  They figured out the English language in two weeks by watching wrestling with a dictionary that they presumably didn’t know how to read.  They probably learned how to read from those goddamn signs.  I couldn’t outsmart them.  ET was definitely not the most physically intimidating specimen that I had ever seen but I still had no hope of overpowering them.  In the last fourteen years I had achieved never before seen levels of skinny fat that would be appalling to most humans.  I would have to just sit there and let them run their experiments on me.

“You have come an incredible distance with such crude technology.”

“My ship is crude?  I spent years and years developing the most advanced spaceship ever seen on earth!”

“Yes, I understand but your people have very limited intelligence.  Our kind don’t actually have to do calculations as you call them, we just understand math, or the convention of math that you on earth have created to understand certain things.  It really is remarkable how humans were able to develop such a convention to allow them to understand what their limited minds cannot grasp.  It would almost seem to require a higher intelligence to work with so little.  What a paradox that is, isn’t it?  Anyway your ship is very rudimentary but we are very pleased that it worked as well as it did.  I’m sure deep space travel must have seemed nearly impossible to your kind.”

This was amazing, these people looked at me like a chimpanzee who found a way to pass high school with nothing but sign language and a diet of bananas, and everyone knows you can’t open a beer bottle with a banana.

“What do you call this planet?” I asked.  Cher looked frustrated that he had to explain these things that he had already made clear, but he was talking to a fucking monkey after all.

“We do not have names.  We just recognize things as they are.  This is why we do not have spoken communication.  We can look at each other and know exactly what the other desires us to know.”

I felt so stupid at this moment.  I thought that this must have been what it felt like to know me back on earth. I discounted everything anyone else said to me in favor of my own theories.  I talked down to everyone else and ejaculated my superiority all over the face of anyone who came to near my greatness.

Cher spoke again, “We do have one question for you.  What is the purpose of this WWE?”

“It’s just entertainment for humans.”

“Yes, we were able to gather as much, but what is the function of entertainment?”

“It doesn’t really have a function, it’s more so that the audience can take a break from your functions.”

Cher looked confused for the first time.

“What about your fucking hair?” I blurted out, after all I had some questions of my own.

“Our hair is just that, hair.  It distinguishes us, physically, from one another.”

Cher glanced at the others and they all turned to exit.  I was left alone in the room once again.

8:00 AM day 17 with the Aliens

I was sleeping, dreaming about a life back on earth when I heard a loud voice calling toward me.

“Wake your goofy ass up you stupid sumbitch.”

I must be dreaming

“I thought I made myself clear, I said wake your dumb ass up you stupid sumbitch for I hafta open up a can of Whoop Ass on your ass. They got me in hear cleaning up your goddam monkey shit again, and I got a few words to say to ya.”

It was ET and he was talking in a completely accurate impression of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s voice.  He sounded angry, but I don’t know if he intended to.

“Why are you talking like that?” I asked.

Stone Cold ET was acting like a maniac.  He was strutting around me swinging his arms back and forth with power in his stride.

“Let me tell you sumthin, and don’t you go flappin’ your gums while I’m talkin’ to ya.  You see I’ve been watching that WWE that they have been talking soooo much about.  You know it’s been causing quite a ruckus on our planet.”

“It has?”

“Shut up and listen when I’m talking to ya, I thought I warned ya ‘bout flappin’ those gums when I’m talkin’.”

ET was in a frenzy at this point, he had his hands on his knees and his face about an inch away from mine as he spoke to me.

“They keep yammerin’ about this entertainment thing you were talking about because they can’t understand the concept.  I tried to talk to them about it but they just think I’m some stupid sumbitch who don’t know his ass from a hole in the wall.”

“Who can’t understand it?  Cher?”

“Who the fuck is Cher?” ET bellowed as spittle covered my face.

“That’s a name I made up for the guy with the long black hair, the other one is Don, and I imagine I’ll be calling you Stone cold ET from now on.”

“Stone cold ET?  Hell, you know what you sack of monkey shit, I think I like that.  You’re god damn right that’s my name and that’s the bottom line.  Like I said those ass wipes have been yammerin’ about this entertainment thing and they reckon I ain’t smart enough to help them.  That’s why they got me in here wiping your shit outta the corner cuz they say I’m not much smarter than the god damn human.  I think they might be right because I get it, I get entertainment.  I got to watchin’ those big ol’ musclemen in that ring and couldn’t get enough.  That Stone Cold is one tough S.O.B. and I decided I was goin’ to be just like him.  If anyone wants to stand in my way of that then I have two cans of Whoop Ass I’ve been dyin’ to open up on ‘em.”

I didn’t know what to say.  Here was an alien.  A real goddamn alien that looked like fucking ET from the movie!  And he was acting like Stone Cold Steve Austin.  This was actually happening to me.

“What are they going to do to me?”

“I reckon you got about a month in your time before they split your ass to timber to figure out what makes you tick.  Until then they will probably just run some tests on your ship and try to figure out which side of the Mississippi you came from.”

Stone Cold ET was clearly mixing phrases and confusing me in the process.  What I did gather was that I had about a month to live on this planet before I was a dead man.

“Stone Cold ET, do you think you can bring in some of those matches to watch the next time you come in?”

“You're god damn right I can and that’s the bottom line.” His head was bobbing wildly side to side as he spoke.  He started to walk toward the door.

“Stone cold, I have a question.”

“Then spit it out, or are ya too dumb to talk?”

“Did your people ever hear of Jesus?” I asked.

I don’t know what in the Christ you’re talkin’ about boy.  What’d ya say ET?  What? What’d ya say ET?  What?  Boy, you better not be getting smart with me or I’ll knock that stupid little smile clean off your face before you can count to two, and that’s the bottom line.”

“Yeah, I figured you didn’t.”

Stone Cold ET strutted feverishly toward the door and slammed it shut as he left.  I liked him.

To be concluded . . .

Terry Cakebread: Human, Part II

My name is Terry Cakebread and this is the fucking story of my life.

Previously:  Part I

8:00 AM October 31, 2052 Ship Time (ST)

It had been eight years since I left Earth.  I was not getting nearly the amount of work done that I anticipated up to this point in my travels.  Being this deep in space, and the fact that I am was smarter than nearly all other humans, gave me an incredible advantage over any other scientist of my caliber, of which there are few.  I assumed I would be disproving modern theories of the universe handily by now, the way string theories and M theories of the past were dismantled.  The truth was that I was flying at near light speed, warping the very fabric of time, and as I did years were flying by on Earth.  My friends and family were all dead by now and unless humans started to colonize other planets or sent more people out like me, then I was likely the last one of my kind:  a lone human, hurtling through an infinite void, alone.

The whole mission started to seem pointless to me, I thought about how it would feel before I left on this mission and assumed I could deal with it better.  The thoughts were abstract then – this was real.  No one would ever feel as alone as I felt.  There was no hope that I would ever see another human for the rest of my life.  I tried to distract myself by doing the work that I intended to finish.  I became overwhelmingly distraught by the fact that no one but myself would ever benefit from the advances I made, and that during the thousands upon thousands of years that passed on earth since I left many people probably discovered far more than I could realistically do in a lifetime.  I thought I could deal with these feelings since I had always been a loner.

8:00 PM September1, 2027 ET

I stood at an intersection in Washington D.C.  I looked around me and couldn’t help but think that the nation’s capital was not all that I thought it would be.  Everyone around me looked so dirty and poor.  The fact that I was standing at the intersection attempting to hitchhike in my only suit, a blue suit I bought in 10th grade which was fashionably small at the time, and a bright red computer backpack did nothing to quell my nerves.  I did my best to comb my otherwise messy brown hair into a respectable order because I had the biggest interview of my life that day.  When I say interview I mean I was just going to show up at the NASA headquarters and start asking people questions.  I may have been a genius when it came to math and physics but when it came to people, I had no idea what I was doing.

I tried for two days straight without sleep or luck to find someone who would listen to me.  Late on that second day I saw a vivacious blond woman in a pantsuit walking by me as I tried to plea my case with an official who was having none of it.  She must have pitied me because she came over and asked what I was trying to do.  If my social skills left something to be desired for the average person, then they were virtually nonexistent when talking to a beautiful lady like her.  I couldn’t look her in the eye and attempted, without success, not to look her in the chest either.  The best I could do was go full blown nerd on her and show her what I had been working on at school.  She was very impressed by my work and agreed to let me intern at the research and development department at NASA, even with my limited schooling.  Ms. Bosomchest changed my life and it would be a long time before I watched WWE again.

These nobodies in all honesty were lucky that I took my talents down to NASA in the first place.  During the first two weeks I was there the scientists tried to give me the most tedious jobs that no one else wanted to do.  But my genius could not be contained; I had an appetite for answers that could not be satisfied.  I would stay at the headquarters day and night working on my own theories by myself, inspired by all that was going on around me.  By the time I started showing the others what I was working on, people started to take notice.  The fact that I did not have any letters after my name or a degree to fall back on stopped holding me back when people started to listen to what I had to stay.  I began to work closely with Ms. Bosomchest on a daily basis.  She was one of the smartest women in the whole world but the stuff I was working on was much too difficult for her to grasp.  She did the small stuff for me and allowed my mind to concentrate on making real progress.

She became infatuated by me, by my dismissal of her flirtatious attempts, and my sheer intellectual dominance of any room I was in.  When I was stumped I used her, she became my WWE.  She fancied that we were in a relationship at the time but she was the only one connected.  Thinking back about her would be one of the worst things about flying out here in space.  I had someone who wanted to be part of my life, who wanted to share what I had to offer and I just used her for my own advancement.  I thought no one could ever be enough for me, that my only chance to be happy would come from within my own mind.  That is why I was the only one to volunteer for this mission.  That is why I knew I could handle it.

I was wrong.

8:00 AM December 25, 2058 ST

Four years ago my “internet” went down.  The whole thing was wiped out. The only thing that I had left was 24 hours worth of my most recent activity.  This amounted to 24 hours of WWE wrestling videos.  I also had a few books on the universe, a dictionary, and my notebooks full of unfinished theories and calculations.  I used none of these things anymore.  I had been on this ship for fourteen years.  I was in another galaxy so far from earth it is impossible to comprehend the distance in your mind and I couldn’t even summon the enthusiasm to walk over to the windshield and look out.  I tried to watch WWE sometimes but just seeing other people on TV, people I knew were dead, and a species that died long ago was just too depressing.  Mostly I drank and drew pictures.  I brought along 70 bottles of whisky, one to celebrate each potential year on the ship on New Year ’s Day.  I only had five bottles left.

I also brought on this trip a huge stack of notebooks.  I preferred to write out my calculations by hand, my mind just worked better that way.  I filled those notebooks, mostly, with pictures of penises or peni as I like to pluralize it.  If I thought that another human would read my life story I might have left that part out, but since I doubt highly the possibility that anyone will ever know about Terry Cakebread I see no reason not to be honest about the whole thing.  At some point during the trip the subject of the penis, particularly my penis, the last, final penis, or the lone penis, as I referred to it, became infuriating to me.  It became very symbolic of my life.  It, like my life, really had become useless since this whole trip began.  It would never get to do what it was designed to do or accomplish its purpose.  It was an endless reminder that I was lonely and it fucking mocked me.  I would awake each day with acute onset of Bonair’s disease, and find it staring me in the face.  Other times it would just hang there depressed, making me depressed.  But mostly it was just there, being useless, the way I was just there being useless.

I tried to draw other things.  I tried to draw Bob Marley but it just looked like a penis with dreadlocks.  Motorcycle perhaps?  Penis with wheels.  Watergun?  I think you see where this is going.  This day was just like any other, I was drunk like many of the days before lying in my living room amidst a floor strewn with pencil drawings of peni.  The fact that it was December 25, on the ship was just an abstract measurement.  It wasn’t Jesus-mas back on earth and it didn’t feel much like Jesus-mas here either.

Just then the ship started to shake.

The artificial gravity of the ship was disabled and I was floating in my ship.  I was incredibly drunk at the time and I thought I might be hallucinating.  Suddenly I flew up to the front of the ship and was knocked unconscious.  When I woke up I was no longer in the only place I knew for the last 14 years.  I was in a dark square room that smelled like thai food, by myself.  I often had dreams of being outside of that goddamn ship but I could tell that this was no dream, something had me.  The only way I could have been taken out of that ship and still be alive would be if aliens abducted me.  I wondered what they would look like, what they would do to me.  Then the door at the far end of the room opened.

ET

He looked like fucking ET.  I thought that I might be killed but at least I would get to see what aliens really looked like.  But no, I get abducted by aliens that look like fucking ET.  Spielberg , nice fucking guess, thanks for ruining my day.

“Wheres Alf?”

It didn’t answer me.  It just walked around me staring silently.  I felt my butthole tighten up, everything I’ve ever read about aliens tells me that they are going to stick something up my ass, and Spielberg already guessed right once today.  He pulled out a long wand.

He's going to stick that up my ass.

He waved the glowing light over my body like a metal detector.  I didn’t move, I’m not sure If I could have moved or not, but I didn’t.  Then when he was done ET walked out of the room without making a sound.  I sat there dumbfounded.  I didn’t know what to think.  At least they were probably going to kill me, that would be ok.  But what if they just kept me as a test subject?  That’s what humans would have done.

Fuck.

To be continued . . .

Terry Cakebread: Human, Part I

My name is Terry Cakebread and this is the fucking story of my life.

October 31, 2044 Earth

The clock read 7:55 AM, as I double-checked the wall of endless switches and monitors that covered the inside of my spaceship.  I could not concentrate on what I was doing despite the potentially morbid consequences of my lack of focus.  This was essentially my funeral – it was a day that I knew, and hoped, would come since I was seven years old.  I was an incredibly gifted child if I do say so myself.  I could always breeze through math problems that gave others difficulty and my ever expanding interest in all things science put its splendors easily within the reach of my mind.  When I was in second grade my teachers implored my parents to move me up to a more difficult grade or at least sign me up for advanced classes.  Let’s just say that my parents were not endowed with the same intellectual gifts that I was.  My parents were two bleeding heart burnouts, who would not allow me to be brainwashed into placing importance on the things dictated by society.  This is why I remained in the second grade.  I remember, at times, attempting to hide my intellect from them so they would not think that I was being too absorbed into “the system” that they fought so hard against.

There was only so much I could do – my mind was racing in a thousand different directions and on October 15, 2014 at the age of 7, I found my purpose.  I was browsing my parents Netflix account as they slept.  I typed science into the search bar.  My mind was so absorbed with science at the time that I had already read my entire science book cover to cover by the second month of the school year.  I was now moving on to documentaries.  I moved the curser slowly past a number of movies.  Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I didn’t make the random selection that I did.  Maybe I would have developed an interest in the subject afterward, as I like to think, but maybe my life would have been a lot god damn better if I would have skipped this movie.  The curser landed on Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.  In the next month I watched and re-watched the entire series a total of four times, but one episode piqued my interest more than any other.  I watched the episode on time travel every night that month and during the course of my lifetime I must have watched it a couple hundred more times.  I used to have dreams of traveling to far off galaxies and planets in a single lifetime, living out sci-fi fiction in real life.  When you are 7 years old anything seems possible and I was from a long line of dreamers.  I would chase that dream for the rest of my life.

My parents were sobbing, proud but distraught.  I knew that this was the last time I was ever going to see them and they knew it too.  The image was tough to get out of my mind.  I thought of my girlfriend too, a voluptuous blond by the name of Veronica Bosomchest.  I could still envision the tears streaking down her face and neck to be swallowed up by the deep ravine of her ample bust.  She was inconsolable.  I had to bite my lip hard to keep myself together and if there was any time that I ever needed to keep myself together it was now.  If time travel was like the movies these goodbyes wouldn’t have been so hard. There would be an old man running around like a lunatic screaming, “Plutonium!” and warning me not to bang my mom.  But there was no old man and no one was telling me not to bang my mom.  The reality of time travel bordered on melancholy, to say the least.  I would be accelerating my space ship for seven and a half continuous years, and at the end of that time the ship would be travelling very near the speed of light.  When a person travels near the speed of light, time slows down in the spaceship for reasons that only I and a handful of other human beings can understand.  Everything still feels the same on the ship but for each hour that passes on the space ship many more will pass on earth, so many more, in fact, that my family, friends, and even the entire human race, would all perish long before my journey would be complete.  Once that space ship took off I would have nowhere and no one to return to.  I would be alone, in space, the last of my kind.

“You ready, Terry?” I heard coming from the inside of my helmet.

“I think so.”

“Good luck Terry, we all hope this works.”

“Thanks for the fucking confidence.”

I hastily turned off the speaker in my headphones and initiated the launch sequence.  Within moments the ship was moving and I began my travel through time.

8:00 AM October 15, 2047 Earth Time (ET)

I had been traveling on my long tube of a spaceship for three years.  The spaceship was similar in size to a fairly large ranch style house but the design was heavily influenced by the principles of aerodynamics for obvious reasons.  The ship was equipped with a very advanced gravitational simulator so that I would not float from one end to the other for the rest of my life.  The only thing that separated this from a regular house was an enormous pantry at the rear, built to hold 70 years worth of food riddled unrecognizable with preservatives, and the front of the ship that contained an elaborate control panel and a window betraying the fact that I was actually hurtling through space.  There was also an exercise room to help me stay in shape but I figured that if I was going to be eating food that was supposed to last for the next 70 years, that the exercise room was not really going to help me all that much. I would spend most of my days back then trying to figure out difficult equations that might help me determine more about the universe, reading, or having video meetings with my mission directors in my living room. I also had the pleasure of having regular video contact with Ms. Bosomchest two times per week, where she would provocatively pretend that she hadn’t forgotten about me yet.  I played along with her rouse, and I was well aware of it being a rouse, after all I am the super genius flying through fucking outer space.  This day was the day, however, I calculated that my speed would not allow my communications to function properly.  I attempted to tune in to my standing appointment with Ms. Bosomchest and my pants were already shortening by about a ½-inch at this point if you know what I mean.  I was not surprised when I did not get the pleasure of seeing the bountiful Ms. Bosomchest on the screen as I assumed that I wouldn’t.  What did hit me was unexpected.

I had prepared for this moment for many years.  Even before I ventured onto the spaceship, I knew that this moment of “singularity” as I liked to call it, would come.  My chest started to tighten up, it felt like I had a cinderblock on my chest.  I could not breath, I sucked desperately at the air and even wondered if the spaceship had been breached.  I never had such extreme feelings of anxiety before.  I was able to slow my breathing after about ten minutes or so before the panic attack finally subsided.  I felt totally drained. I sat there in a living room that looked no different than any other living room on earth, condemned to a life of solitude.  I was too distraught to finish my calculations for the day or do any reading, so I did what I always did when depression set in.  I watched professional wrestling.  Due to amazing advances in computer storage capacity I was able to have the entirety of the internet at my fingertips even though my communications with the earth were terminated. I would not, unfortunately, be able to receive any new information placed on the internet since my communication with earth ceased.  The touch screen wall of the room changed as I heard my voice shout out reflexively “Play the Undertaker match from Hell in a Cell 1998.” I found myself suddenly immersed in a  screaming crowd, where a seven-foot giant of a man was about to toss his seemingly lifeless opponent twenty feet to his demise. The wretched opponent fell to the earth demoralized as the crowd erupted.  I felt normal again.

I started using WWE to self-medicate my depression in college.  I started college at Penn State University for aerospace engineering.  I was going to change the world.  Depression started to set in for me over my coursework.  My classes seemed so easy and trivial at the time.  I was not making the advancements I wanted to make and was going nowhere near the goals that I set for myself.  To combat this I started to spend most of my time in the library by myself, learning on my own.  I spent most of my nights that first semester trying to figure out a way to create a power source that would sustain the acceleration of a spaceship for years on end, because I felt that this would be the limiting factor for deep space travel.  I thought I was on to something when I imagined a wireless power source at a distance from the ship, very similar to the way the wireless charger worked for my cell phone at the time.  But I still had to find a way to create the astounding amount of energy necessary.

My classes were only getting in the way. It was bullshit.  I was doing all the work, learning on my own and I had to pay them to get in my way.  Just so I could get a piece of paper that said I didn’t fuck up a lot.  I was smart, smarter than any of those has-been’s who were my teachers.  The thoughts of the injustice of it all often clouded my mind and I began to see what my parents thought of this whole “society” thing.  I started to watch some WWE in my apartment to clear my mind.  There was/is something about those spandex tights, poor story lines, and terrible acting that captivated me.  The melodrama of it all called to me like the pied piper called to his rats.  I found that after a small WWE binge I could solve problems that had been plaguing me easily, and my creativity was through the roof.  With the help of professional wrestling I began to progress my theories in leaps and bounds, and had almost no time for my school work.  I had to drop out, and I did drop out after just a year and a half.  There I sat many years later twelve hours deep into a WWE binge with no intentions of stopping, traveling into the future.

To be continued . . .

KeyPAP Perspectives: Milk Is Weird

by Dr. David Funk

In this edition of the KeyPAP perspective series we will be taking a closer look at Milk, and I will show you why milk is in fact, Weird.  Unfortunately for our regular readers across the globe I will be restraining myself, with no small effort, from using the salty language that you all are accustomed to.  For this I apologize, but I feel that this message must be suitable for the masses.  As for why salty language is not suitable for the masses, well that is a topic for future perspective series articles, but I digress.

Many young children have been encouraged to drink their milk regularly so that they will grow big and strong.  Regular Milk consumption has been encouraged to help form strong bones.  In practice, however, it has been observed that not only is milk bad for your bones, and a poor source of calcium for the body, but that it may actually increase your risk of fracture.  That, of course, is not what this article is about.  If you would like to learn more about why milk may be detrimental to your health then click here.  This article will be focused on the less important yet more entertaining issue of how weird milk is and why everyone ignores it.

The first point I would like to make against cow’s milk is that this is what a cow looks like:

It is truly a filthy disgusting animal.  When most people think about cows they think of the black and white cartoon drawing of a cow on their milk carton.  It is some abstract thought that they associate with milk, like a logo.  A cow is not a logo, it is a real, huge, smelly, gross animal with machines sucking liquid out of a smelly swollen veiny pouch between its legs.  That should be enough to help you understand that milk is weird but I shall continue.

Milk itself is not weird when used for its real purpose.  When babies drink their mother’s milk it’s awesome.  The mother produces the perfect food to help her baby grow, a food completely designed for babies with the perfect amount of nutrients, immune boosting bacteria, and the like.  It’s really incredible.  What blows my mind is that people, at some point, decided that we should start drinking cow milk, designed for baby cows.  This must have seemed preposterous the first time someone drank it.  I have to believe it was in some sort of survival scenario.  Over the years it seems that humans have not even made a valid attempt to make milk any less weird.  It’s stored in a waxy cardboard box for god’s  sake.  Even crazier is the fact that human milk is now considered more disgusting than cow’s milk.  Think about it, if you let your child go over to his friend’s house and his father said, “well for breakfast we gave them some cheerios with some organic breast milk” I think that father would probably have charges pressed against him.  He would be considered a sociopath if not a borderline criminal because he offered your child milk from a human instead of a fat corn fed anonymous cow from god knows where.

Do you know where human milk comes from?  It comes from the most publicized, shown off, and obsessed-over part of the female body.  But it is somehow considered disgusting to the general public (to be clear, I am not in favor of drinking breast milk as an adult; I’m just highlighting the fact that it should definitely seem less weird than drinking cow’s milk).  I dare you to go to a farm, find a cow, take a big whiff of its essence, and look it straight in the udders.  Then say, "I’d like to drink whatever liquid leaks out of that!" Now human milk is for babies and jokes in movies.  I saw a movie where a man drinks breast milk by accident and in the TV version of the movie that part was cut out! He drank it from a glass and all they did was say it was breast milk and they cut it from the movie.  Hypocritical? Maybe if you have ever seen a commercial with The Rock's upper lip smeared with the remnants of whole milk or watched an Indianapolis 500.

In conclusion I hope that you have come to understand that cow’s milk is weird and that no human should ever drink it.  I would be lying if I told you that I am never going to drink cow’s milk again, but I will at least feel ashamed of myself when I do.  And that, I think, is better.

Positively Progressing from the Perils of Paunch

A Memoir by Louis DiFez

As 2013 A.D. ended as devastatingly as it began, I reviewed the year in my life thus far.  I am in the process of accomplishing my goals:  I will be graduating with my Doctorate in Podiatric Medicine in May 2014, the KeyPAP flourishes brightly as ever, and overall I am happy with my life and the direction that it is in.  However, as I perused the annals of my individual 2013 history, I came to a part in my life that I was extremely dissatisfied, and, frankly, thoroughly disgusted with.

The paunch.

In its noun form, it means “a large and protruding belly; a potbelly.” Or also, in nautical terms, “a thick mat that prevents chafing.” I believe the first is more appropriate.

"This turtleneck is so good at being thick and the prevention of chafing.  I get Bonair's every time I put it on!"

I let myself go.  I became lazy, unenthused, and bored with exercising.  In 2013, I viewed working out not as a goal to continually better myself, but as an obstacle that lay between my studying, eating, and facebooking.  Luckily, two things changed my thoughts:

#1 – Consistent harassment from the Founding Fathers of the KeyPAP.

Harassment not in the sense of, “I’m going to file charges against you for harassing me and saying mean things and I am not MAN enough to handle it.” But the good kind.  The kind that stirs in your loins, lights a fire from deep within, and looks to expel all of the terrible things inside of you in order to make yourself the best possible human.  Dr. Funk, Smits, the First Ladies, and lastly, The One Known as Beebles (TOKaB, for short) all constantly harassed me, and rightly so.  I was still muscular, but shapeless.  I had a midsection of Play-Doh®.  I felt as doughy as an uncooked stromboli.  I needed the abuse, I thrived off the abuse, and I turned it from a negative to a positive.

#2 – Smits MANLY performance as the first ever KeyPAP 2013 Strongman Performance of the Year.

We all saw the videos, heard the grunts of pain and agony, but reveled in his strength and mastering of the perilous weights.  He achieved victory as only a man of the KeyPAP can:  through a skin-tight, nearly bulge-showing, wrestling singlet.  Smits was a man of action, and I wanted it back.

I yearned for the sound of iron.  I missed the feel of the cold, never wiped-down, probably loaded with tetanus and MRSA, steel on my hands.  I pined as I would get ready to shower, seeing the abomination that I had become. “If I don’t think I look good, surely the opposite sex thinks I’m revolting,” thoughts ran through my head.  I needed to change.

I began to eat healthier and less.  I also began running to the gym from my Philadelphia house.  And when at the gym, I worked out like the old days of college - like a MAN.  No more of this, “I think I’m going to do 3x20 bench press of 135 lbs.” crap.  I began to bulk back up, like only a meatball can.

I am still in the process of changing my lifestyle and body, but I am fully committed.  2014 will be the year that the paunch is defeated.  Even as I sit here now, my muscles call out from within to be burned.  As the great Arnold once eloquently stated:

I will leave you all with 2 inspirational quotes that I use daily, while in the process of Purging the Paunch™.

“Be strong and of a good courage.  Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes . . . If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.” – James Fitzjames Stephen

“Time for dem gymtitties!” – Me

The Great Awakening

by Dr. David Funk

9:00 am EST

"What should I do at the gym today?" I shamefully asked myself since I had no plan of attack for the day.  It’s true, I have a workout routine over the last few months that is as shameful as it has been in at least 10 years.  This unplanned schedule is a breeding ground for future paunch, self-loathing and unachieved goals.  I realized this as I sat in my living room, fatly watching ESPN2 cover the three stories of the week.  In that moment I felt a surge in my belly, not in my ample adipose tissue hanging over the taut elastic of my pajamas, but deep inside where a man’s spirit lies.  I was compelled; I walked outside into the unusually warm December weather and looked out from my second story balcony to the highest point of my surroundings.  The surge said to me, "Today you will climb." It was not up for debate, it was a command issued from the depths of my soul.

The Trail

I set out toward my mountain along a trail that I was very familiar with, the sights and sounds of soccer moms and their puffball dogs were commonplace on this path.  I had never ventured off of this trail before.  It was well marked, it was level, it was safe.

When I arrived at the base of the mountain where I planned to begin my assault on the summit I discovered, much to my chagrin, that its base was completely surrounded by houses.  To continue on my journey I would have to trespass, in broad daylight, in a community that lands on the extreme right of political issues.  The risk was not a small one but it was one I was willing to take.  I daringly broke trail and stepped into a yard boasting a truck whose lift kit surely cost more than the machine.  I strode through the residential back yard dodging dog dumplings like landmines the whole way.  I gazed at the house all the while picturing a man, with more first names than teeth, bursting from it waving his second amendment rights in my general direction.  At the end of the yard I clambered over the stone wall that marked its end and began my accent.

The Ascent

I looked out into the terrain that I would soon be traveling on.  The ground was still wet with droplets from the morning dew.  A thin refreshing layer of fog hung low on the dead trees and rocks that formed the mountains floor.  The lay of the land was not intimidating, in fact the mountain itself seemed at first glance no more than a large hill.  As I began to walk up the gradual incline I could feel my heart starting to beat a little more quickly, I could feel the cool December air satisfyingly stroking my face as I pushed through the woods.  Something primal was stirred inside of me, a thought that this would be what the world looked like if humans had never left their grotesque mark on the planet.  I remained enamored with this thought, hardly able to comprehend it in my own mind, or why it weighed so heavily on it in the first place.  I thought about the fact that I could have easily passed this time by sitting on my couch barely moving except to gorge my face with salty foods, a practice I am no stranger to.  But I had made the right choice.  This, I decided, was where I belonged.  My pace quickened, even breaking into a childlike run at times, the kind of run where you just move your body through space and time out of pure excitement.  It was a kind of run, I thought, that is not commonplace in the morose land of adult decorum.  I wove my way in and out of the heavily wooded mountainside, walking on logs, climbing on top of large rocks. I could start to see the mountain rising at a greater slope and all at once the trees cleared and I saw what remained of my climb.

Summit

I peered through the remainder of the trees trying to get a good look at the climb ahead.  I had anticipated a gentle grade that would lead me to a relatively easy summit.  Gentle grade this was not; this was a sharply inclining grade that culminated in a 90 degree wall of intimidating rock as craggy as a cancerous prostate.  I began to climb the steepening mountainside, each step harder than the last.  My lungs burned white hot and pleaded for a rest, I could feel my legs filling with lactic acid as they begged for reprieve.  I had gone into a trance; I could feel the summit beckoning me.  I finally paused, out of breath, when I arrived at the rock face that guarded the summit.

The stone rose beastly from the ground without warning like some sort of sinister push pop.  The wall was 12 feet high if it was a foot, and I had to form a plan of attack.  There were several somewhat easy routs over the wall but I was maddened by the climb.  If I may borrow from the great alpinist and author Jon “5 star” Krakauer,

“Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.”

With those words in mind I took the most difficult rout I could handle.  I started up the face of the rock wall, the rocks were cold and much more slippery than I anticipated.  They were moss covered and it occurred to me that I may be the only person in a very long time to have been here.  I neared the top clumsily and my foot slipped from its hold.  I could feel my heart drop as I lost my balance.  Luckily I regained my footing, but not before I sent a dead stump hurtling down the mountain falling meters to a rocky demise that reduced it to unsanitized toothpicks.  My mind did not hesitate to make the connection that this could very well have been my fate.  I climbed to the top and expected to be standing triumphant over citizens of Shavertown.  To my surprise there was another climb that culminated in yet another wall of earth that was taller and more intimidating than the first.
 
I began to climb the second rock wall, the craggy moss laden demon that stood in my way toward the summit.  Midway up the wall I grabbed a small branch to hoist myself when - SNAP - the tree gave way.  My feet slid down the mossy slope of rock they were perched on toward the nothingness that marked the rocks end.  I was going down.  I reached blindly in the area of the broken branch and caught a root with my left hand saving me from tumbling down the mountain.  I stood there badly shaken.  My mind felt clouded, perhaps the beginning of hypoxia.  I had, after all, climbed hundreds of feet above sea level to perch myself on this precarious ledge. I was woefully underprepared for this moment. I was wearing a long t-shirt, jeans and boots. I had no carabiners, no ropes, and I was smack dab in the middle of a 12 hour fast.  The brashness of my preparation, or lack thereof was staggering to me in that moment.  I had never climbed anything before, and I was attempting to solo climb this rocky whore of a mountain without safety gear, without food, or water, and not enough clothing to make a bivouac until I regained my strength.  The climb back down the mountain was too treacherous, the rock wall I was on was too slippery and I would have to descend a second rock wall after it.  The thought of slipping on the wet leaves, as I approached the ledge of the lower rock wall, and hurtling over it was sickening to me.  I would have to climb up the mountain and find an easier way down. In that moment I thought of my wife, the beautiful first First Lady of the KeyPAP.  What would she think if I lost my footing?  The only people who knew I was out here at all were hundreds if not thousands of miles away from here and would not know where to look in the first place.  I could not place that burden upon her shoulders.  No, it is in her that I found the strength and determination to move on.  I struggled mightily to the top of the second wall battling my own limbs which trembled with fear.
 

 

On the top, the mountain smiled mockingly at me with a third rock wall.  There were trees twisting from the side of the wall, reaching towards the heavens, as if they were daring me to continue.  I realized that it was not up to me - in the end, the mountain would decide my fate.  I thought then that it might not be so bad to be seated on my couch vegitizing in front of the TV.  I shook the thought off and stormed toward the third rock wall, my blood boiling at the mockery of the mountain.  If the mountain wanted me, it was going to have to fucking take me.  I tore at the third wall tossing loose rocks by the wayside, climbing with great fervor and strength.  I was moving but it was as if my body was moving for me, I was just along for the ride.  In minutes I stood atop the nameless mountain.  The mountain, fittingly, did not reward me with a spectacular view, those heaven bound trees did all that they could to obscure it.

Descent

I was able to find an easy way down the mountain.  Once my descent began I noticed that I was absolutely drenched in sweat.  At several hundred feet above sea level this could have proven treacherous if the weather turned.  Luckily I was graced with clear skies the whole way down.  I stepped out of the woods on a road labeled Carverton.  I knew where I was, back to safety, and decided that I would stay there for a long while.  As I began the walk back to my apartment I looked ahead of me, away from the mountain that had spared me.  I walked around the bend of the road and saw through the clearing another mountain appear, dominating the horizon, looming over me something sinister, and I felt my spirit stir once again.

Worldwide Pandemic: Do You Have Bonair's?

Recently every single member of the Keystone Professional Association of Pennsylvania came down with recurring bouts of Acute Onset Bonair's Disease, or Bonair's for short.  What are the signs of this devastating illness and what can you do to prevent it?  You've come to the right place to learn, ye olde loyal readers.

Background

Bonair's is defined as the involuntary engorging of the penile tissue.  It is sometimes unrelated to sexual stimulation.  For example, one may find upon waking up that he has a raging boner.

 

Pathophysiology

Erection is the result of smooth-muscle relaxation and increased arterial flow causing engorgement and rigidity.  See image below:

"Awww SHIT, I got Bonair's again!"

 

Epidemiology

Frequency of Bonair's is three to five times a night during REM sleep, upon wakening, and throughout the day whenever a man is exposed to titillating visual or psychological stimuli.  It typically persists from puberty until death.

On average 99.9% of males on Earth are victims of Bonair's.  Eunuchs and diabetics comprise the 0.1% of the unafflicted male population.

Bonair's is painful at onset, but has an almost nonexistent mortality/morbidity rate.  One notable exception is that one sex scene in Golden Eye where Xenia Onatopp squeezes the life out of that guy with a beard while trying to administer the antidote.  More on that later . . .

Bonair's afflicts unsuspecting males all over Earth, regardless of race and age (provided the male has already reached puberty).

There are two common causes of Bonair's.  The first is a reflex erection caused by a full bladder because of nerve stimulation in the spinal cord, which is most common upon wakening.  The second is also a reflex erection, but it is caused by physical or psychological stimulation increasing blow flow to spongy tissues in the penis.  Consequently the blood engorged penis becomes grossly erect.
 

History

Patients with Bonair's report recurring unwelcome erections.  Bonair's usually manifests itself in an episodic manner.  The physical stimuli may change over time, but the symptoms remain the same throughout one's life.  For example, a man may have had bouts of Bonair's while looking at his father's hidden Playboy magazines in his teenage years, while courting a co-ed during a college party in his early twenties, and while watching Brazilian fart porn during his 30s and 40s.

 

Physical

Inspection:  obvious raging erection is a key physical finding in the examination process.  Flesh need not be fully exposed to the medical professional for accurate detection.

Palpation:  a rigid erection will be felt upon stroking the organ.

Differential Diagnoses

Phone in pocket with protruding antenna.

Lab Tests

Blood work.

Porphobilinogen (PBG) measurement.

Nocturnal Penile Tumescence (NPT) Test - a device around the penis during sleep that detects changes in girth and relays the information to a computer for later analysis.

Erection Self Test (EST) - 1 cent stamps are bought in a roll.  A string of several of these stamps are wrapped around the mid shaft of the penis.  They are moistened and allowed to form a continuous ring around this portion of the penis.  Intermittently, the man checks to see if the strip of stamps is broken.  If so, this indicates that the shaft of the penis has swelled and hardened at some point.  If the stamps remain unbroken, no erection has occurred.

 

Imaging

Dopplar Ultra Sonography to view blood flow through the penile shaft.

Penile Radiograph.  See X-ray below:

Treatment

"Do you have Bonair's? Let me help you with that."

 

Alternative Care

Take a piss

Hire a prostitute

Use a fleshlight

Choke the chicken

Insert your member between two soft couch cushions

Insert your member into a warm apple pie

Insert your member into an attractive willing female companion's orifice

Insert your member into the orifice of an unattractive willing female with at least one redeeming quality

Medication

High quantities of alcohol

Trojan Extended Pleasure condoms

Cold weather

Swimming pool

Other dudes

Ugly bitches

Complications

When an erection lasts for longer than four hours the blood trapped in the penis is deprived of oxygen which can begin to damage or destroy penile tissue leading to disfigurement.

Public shaming and embarassment.  To prevent detection in public, a man riddled with Bonair's would be wise to secure his shaft in the "headlock" position.

Blue balls.

 

Prognosis

The prognosis depends on the duration of symptoms, the patients age, and the underlying pathology.  The time to treatment is the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR affecting the outcome of Bonair's.  Education is the best way to avoid undesirable outcomes.  Females especially should become familiar with the symptoms so that they may immediately apply the antidote upon detection of Bonair's.

 

Prevention

Current technologies have not evolved fast enough to prevent this pandemic.  Men must learn to recognize Bonair's when they have it and women must have the know-how to administer the antidote at any given time.