Collision at Home: It's Not Easy to be the Villain

By Mink

Ok what is worse? Being sent to the hospital as a result of a collision in a softball game or being the guy that sent someone to the hospital (with a bleeding lung) after a collision?

Many of you certainly will choose the former (for the record I hate it when people use the former/latter crap in their writing...maybe I'm just very slow but those phrases confuse me nearly as much as my enjoyment of madonna's music). Anyway, in the immediate moments following the accident, I decided that assuming the man didn't pass away or enter into a schiavo-like condition, that it was far better to be him (the needy victim) than it was to be me, (the asshole villain).

Here is a brief rundown (no pun intended for you baseball fan nerds like me) of this past sunday's events:

In the first inning of our second game of a double header on sunday, I was on third base trying to score (again no pun intended for you perverts like me) on a groundball hit toward first. To make a long story short, I slid awkwardly into him as the ball arrived and my right knee hit him square in the rib. The force caused him to drop the ball and I was safe! But immediately something didn't look right. I think his rollover and subsquent schoolgirl-like moans interspersed with 20-30 F-bombs were a giveaway.

At this point the game came to a complete halt and his entire team began tending to the wounded soldier. Five or six of them lifted the husky dude off the field and onto a nearby table shoving ice in his face and anywhere else on his body. I love how people with no first aid knowledge (myself included) really believe that some ice will fix everything. I think 90 percent of the people there assumed he would rub his injury with the cold pack until the coolness was unbearable at which point he would get off the ground, spring to his feet as if nothing happened. Well, not on this day.

After watching him continue to groan and clutch his ribs, and then being informed that 911 was on its way, I determined that this situation was potentially ugly. I was only able to make this "potentially ugly" assessment as a result of my extensive experience of being a doctor's son as well as a former First Aid counselor on a west coast teen tour for spoiled Jewish kids from New York. (I know I said I didn't have first aid experience before but I'm not sure that being entrusted with carrying around a bagpack full of bandaids, cough drops, and tampons for a whole summer really counts).

So the game was stopped for about 40 minutes as we waited for the ambulance with everyone tending to the fallen victim. But for me, the real victim here, I could only stand on the side and feel helpless (as well as proud for scoring the run), realizing that I singlehandedly caused the circus. That I may have in fact killed a man. That an entire team wants me to die as well. That it is late in the morning and I am famished. That I am also dehydrated and sunburned. BUT NO ONE CARES, cuz they are too busy worrying about the other guy.

The bottom line is being the victim may suck but being the victimizer is far worse. As it turns out, the catcher only suffered some internal bleeding in his lung (no joke) and was released from the hospital the next day. He probably is getting tons of ice cream and ladies because of it. I, on the other hand, continue to get death threats from his team and my sunburn has begun to peel.

Summer in the City

by singerz

Summer is here. The birds are out. They’re shitting all over town. Ahhh, the sun is shining. The humidity rises to unprecedented levels - not only am I sweating through my shirt, but I’m sweating through the shirt of the guy sitting next to me on the subway. He gets annoyed. Yum, the urine smell in the subways returns and becomes more pungent. Wait, maybe that smell is just mold or something…Nope, no, that’s urine all right. Yup, urine. Delish.

I stroll through the streets. A car honks and almost hits me. So I then move to the sidewalk. I try not to step on the cracks because my mother would NOT like osteoporosis. (JOKE NOTE: That was a “Step on the crack, break your mother’s back” reference). And then something strikes me. No, not bird poop, but a thought: Where do all the hot women go in the winter?

All winter long, there seems to be a lack of hot women on the streets. When summer returns, I feel like a suicide bomber after a successful jihad. No, not dead and in pieces you fool, but in heaven with 70 virgins. But then winter- bam, the women disappear. Where do they go? Do they hibernate? I think they do.

This winter, I am determined to find the lair of the hibernating hot women. And when I do, here’s what I will find: A cavern filled to capacity with hot women sleeping, like bears. But hotter than bears. And with less fur. Hopefully. Except this one furry girl I once knew named Wendy who looked like a bear from Wyoming. Not unattractive, just different. Don't be mean, Wendy has a good sense of humor.

I have finally realized what the answer to this existential question is. Turns out, the hot women do NOT hibernate in the winter. They’re here among us humans. But in the summer, women simply wear less clothing and so it’s an iluuuuusion that there are hotter women in the summer. Same women, less clothing. Chew on that. Actually don’t, you’ll choke. This just goes to show you the only thing on guys minds- hibernation.

Mustaches and My Quarter Life Crisis

By Mink

I recently have been spending more time with middle aged men. Is that a weird thing to say? Well it is true. As I've mentioned, I travel quite a bit for work and many of the participants on these conferences are male emergency planners in their 40's and 50's. I also play in 2 softball leagues which are flooded with the senior circuit. In fact my team got shut out last week by a dude who was playing softball during the Korean war. And finally I have been spending more time just chilling at the barber shop in the Jewish part of town. (It's really a pretty similar barbershop experience to the one in the Baltimore inner city that I wrote about a few months ago. The only mild difference is that you have to replace conversations about boxing matches with kvetching about back spasms and replace Allen Iverson styled hair requests with "please make sure to part it like David Goldberg the accountant and leave some sideburns.")

Anyway all this male bonding has been life altering. I am now a regular groaner during both take offs and landings from my chair, I wear a V-neck (not tighties), and make the same unfunny puns as my father. But the most significant change in my life is that I am pretty sure that at 26 years old I have mustache envy. The stache is something that has always fascinated me but it is also something that I have mocked for years. I have never known my Dad without his under-nose fur and growing up it often provided an easy retort to his rebukes. Example:

Dad: Jon your room is disgusting, clean it
Me: You have a growth under your nose, shave it

But as time went on and I watched Tom Selleck achieve fame and sex appeal solely on the basis of his thick whiskers, I began to become more intrigued. There were, however, some things that troubled me about the whole phenomenon. First of all what prompted someone to begin the stache movement? I mean common sense says that you are either going to shave or not shave but the mustache is something that involves careful grooming, triming, and even brushing. I also found it to be extremely troubling that Hitler, the regimented German genocide artist, seemingly forgot to shave a little patch everyday. But most troubling of all is the question of why has the mustache become the lost art of our generation?

I mean you see twenty-somethings grow them once in a while but usually they are on the faces of murderers from Alaska, and are certainly not considered cool. Kip in Napolean Dynamite has a solid one (see picture above) but he doesn't exactly convey sex appeal unless middle- america- white- trash gets you going. Adam Morrison, the best college basketball player this past year, also sports one but his looks like one a 13 year old unintentionally would grow before he can shave. Bottom line is for whatever reason we don't choose to grow them and if we do they look abysmal.

With that in mind, I decided I wanted to try it out. But unfortunately my dad didn't pass along the good stache gene and mine looked even worse than Morrison's. The whiskers are light colored, very thin and each one grows in a different direction. Basically I look like some of the older Russian ladies that I have run into at the JCC who decided probably 20 years ago to stop grooming their faces. (no offense intended to Russian people.... my great grandparents were all Russian and I love the babooshkas).

Anyway I had to shave that upper lip debacle off but don't think that it made me happy. I am now fully entering a quarter life crisis where I am bitter about the onset of greying hair, receding hair lines and an inability to compensate for such things because I am incapable of growing even a semi-presentable looking mustache.