This has nothing to do with the NFL, and it’s not very funny. But if you’re interested in the military roots of a football blogger, read on.

I did a reading last week. The person organizing the event, knowing of my experience as a Marine in the initial invasion of Iraq, asked me to read something about the Middle East. I accepted. Ohhhhh did I accept.

This particular reading series is run by and populated with graduates of the M.F.A. writing program at Sarah Lawrence College — a commendable program by all accounts, but one that inevitably produces a lot of female writers talking about their relationship with their mothers. Furthermore, it’s a nonfiction reading series, and since most of the readers are highly educated writers by trade, there’s no REAL drama. No violent crime, no fires being put out, no fistfights — only existential crises that inevitably stem from an absent father or overbearing mother, or vice versa.

Well, I was determined to turn their reading series on its head. I selected a passage that I put in the category of DARK AS HELL, one of the more emotional and gruesome passages from my always-and-forever-unfinished memoir about the war. I was gonna freak some bitches out.

However, there was one thing I didn’t count on: I don’t generally share my experience at war with anyone besides fellow veterans. I’ll tell the funny stories, or show the pictures of me with friends goofing off, but my feelings about war and my fear of death and the lives I broke as carelessly as a glass from Ikea are all things that I keep inside of me.

And you know what? That doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t help the civilians who ask me honest questions about combat, it doesn’t help other veterans who are fighting the demons of their own memories, and it doesn’t help those who try to avoid the ugly reality of war. Like, say, our Congress since the all-volunteer force was adopted.

With that in mind, what follows is the passage I read last week. It’s about my fears of going to combat just after we got the word that the invasion was about to begin. It was extremely uncomfortable for me to share it with an audience of strangers. I hope that it’s uncomfortable for you to read.

***

As the sun rises, so does my anxiety. Are we actually going to war? We are. We are actually going to war. I personally am going to war. Holy Jesus living fuck save me God in heaven fuh-huh-huh-huh-huck.

I don’t want to die. Oh God, how is it going to happen? So many ways, death at every corner and lining the streets in between. Who’s going to shoot at me? Iraqi tanks? Okay, that’s okay—we’ve got armor for that. Good armor. Great armor, the best armor. But what if it’s a close shot? Maybe that Iraqi tank round doesn’t penetrate but the shock of the blast causes the inside of the turret to splinter—spalling, it’s called—and all it takes is one little piece of metal to go into my exposed neck, to cut my jugular, and I’m gasping, choking on my own blood, trying to get out a desperate last prayer for life. Or maybe that hot piece of metal goes through my eye and I go quick. No, no—I know. I’m going to have to get off my tank—there’s a wounded Marine, or I need to help an innocent citizen, or there’s a reporter in the way—and that’s when the large-caliber rounds rip through my legs—why didn’t I see that machine gun emplacement?—shattering my femurs, cutting my femoral arteries, and oh God no not my balls. My balls are going to get shot off and even if I live I’ll be a crazy legless veteran with no balls.

Jesus, RPGs. I haven’t even thought about the RPGs. One shot from behind, or a top-down shot in a city whose name I don’t even know, and there goes the fuel tank. It’ll burn slowly at first, and I’ll be standing on the turret, making sure Sprague gets out of the gunner’s hole when the fire catches the ammunition, maybe the violently combustible main gun rounds, maybe just a box of 7.62; it won’t take much to shatter this fragile body, shred my guts to mincemeat, blow my limbs off—the flies will lay their eggs on the muscle of my detached humerus when it lands three hundred yards away; maggots will feast on my decomposing bicep. Feral dogs will fight over a piece of my foot rotting in its boot near the charred tank, and I’ll have died with the smell of my own flesh burning in my nostrils.

Oh God don’t let it be me. Maybe it won’t be me. Carnline—he’s the curious type, always has his head out of the loader’s hatch when he should be staying down. He’ll be up joy-riding on the side of the hatch because I’ve gotten tired of telling him not to, and the sniper’s bullet is going to catch him in the cheek, and his helmet will prevent an exit wound.  I’ll be the one to lay him down on top of the turret, and I’ll pull his helmet off and his brains and shattered skull will fall into my lap, gray matter and pink stuff I can’t identify and flecks of bone like ivory, hard and sharp in the soft mess. And I’ll vomit into Carnline’s brains, and I’ll cry into his open skull, and my Marines will look at me and ask each other This is the guy they chose to lead us?

My heartbeat throbs against my wrists, beats my eardrums, thunders against my woozy temples. I chain-smoke behind my tank. I’m trying to get enough nicotine into my body to stop my hands from shaking. It hasn’t worked yet.

My platoon sergeant comes around the side of the tank and says, “Oh. There you are, sir. Been lookin’ for ya.”

“Well, I’ve been right here.” I’ve been hiding.

“The platoon’s all here, if you wanna talk to ’em.”

I don’t. Not at all. “Thanks, I’ll be there as soon as I finish my smoke.”

I’ve never been good at speeches. I always forget what it is that I want to say, so I have to write down notes, which cuts down on the rambling but makes for less effective go-get-’em speeches. Today I have so little to say that I’ve foregone notes.

I toss my cigarette into the sand and walk to the front of my tank. I look at my platoon. They’re a motley crew: gangsters, country boys, college-kid reservists, immigrants, tattooed thugs. They can drink and swear and tank like no other group of Americans I know. I have trained them, trained with them, and I love them fiercely.

I can count on Sergeant Melville for detailed, even excessive, reports. Corporal Weber—Big Joe, he’s from Washington, I’ll write him a recommendation for a college scholarship next year. Sergeant Horner’s little boy Lawson isn’t more than a couple months old. I know when Sprague has been sneaking cans of chili into the gunner’s hole because his farts smell worse than usual. Willie—when was the last time Willie brushed his teeth? Zapien’s a reservist; he works in a bank and has a pretty Asian girlfriend he’s going to marry when we get back. Lopez, just a baby when he got to the company—now he’s practically an old salt. I’ve watched him grow up. I guess he’s watched me grow up, too.

My Marines. My men, for whom I’m responsible. I’m twenty-four and older than all but two of them. I’m twenty-four and responsible for as many lives as I have years, if I count my own (and I do). I have twenty-four mothers to answer to, eight wives depending on me not to fuck this up. These men deserve the toughest, smartest leader that the Marine Corps can produce.

What they have is me, and I.

Am.

Terrified.

I clear my throat.

“I know y’all were probably lookin’ forward to a big Braveheart talk, but you know me—I’m not one to speechify.” Dead silence. Is my voice actually trembling? “We all know that we have a just cause for going to war, and we’ve already gone over the scheme of maneuver a hundred times.

“I’m just like the rest of you: I’ve never been to combat, so I don’t know what it’s like. But I want to tell you all that it’s okay to be scared.” I’ve been looking at the ground. I raise my head and force myself to look at them; I move my gaze around to meet several different sets of eyes. “What’s not okay is to let that fear overcome you. No panicking. We’re all well-trained, and as long as we go with our training and make quick decisions, we’re gonna accomplish the mission and be fine. Tank commanders, you know what I expect.”

They’re still looking at me. I’ve just given one of the least inspirational speeches in the history of warfare.

“That’s about all I wanted to say.”

This is Ted Leonsis. He is the owner of a professional hoc-key (sp?) team and a Greek, two solid giveaways that you should never pay credence to anything that slinks out of his fat tabbouleh hole. Yet here we are getting pissy about some obtuse nonsense he spouted on his blog. Such is the gaping void of suck that is the NFL offseason.

The team he owns is the Washington Capitals, a franchise that had no fans prior to having the NHL’s MVP on its roster and will have none once again after it endures another losing season. (RAWK THE RED!) Ted also helped spur AOL to financial success (when it had success and lots of discs to mail you), bankrolls movies and blog networks and other entrepreneurial shit. This makes him a Winner in the Game of Life.

Beyond that, Leonsis is a Pronouncer of Epochs. Only he, as an elite flier, can bookmark the partitions between the great shifts in cultural thinking. I hope you have enjoyed The Era of Snarky Feelings because Ted, in a premise he was daring enough to steal from David Denby, has pronounced snark to be dead. Kaput. Subject to necrobestiality fetishists.

Snark is dead. The era of snideness and rudeness is over. I am calling the bottom.

Ovechkin only likes being a top anyway.

Incidentally, if, like me, you happen to be a glutton for punishment and listened to Simmons podcast with Rick Reilly, you heard Simmons invoke 9/11 as a time when he thought we would forever become a kinder and more sincere people. If I wasn’t so snark-ravin’ mad (feel free to use, Reilly) I’d transcribe the whole thing to 9-11 Happened to Me!, a wonderful site “devoted to compiling the most inane, alarmist, reactionary and Irony Is Dead comments everyone said — and I mean everyone — in the days after September 11.”

Here is how I see it. Can you name me one business based on snarkiness that has been successful? Can you name me one person that you know that is snarky and rude that is happy? Has great relationships? Has life success? Can you name me one blogger that is relentless in his snideness that is successful with readers and advertisers? How about one anonymous negative message board poster that is self actualized; takes initiative; and is a winner? I know why. It is because snark is so 2004, so pre the new reality.

Let’s see – there’s damn near everyone in the entertainment world interested in being funny. They’ve garnered some financial and personal success from this whole snark thing. The Gawker business model seems to have netted Nick Denton a few shiny dimes from his sweat-snark shop, while many of the individual bloggers are living comfortably doing what they do. Granted, it’s not Nanking financier money, but it’s livable nonetheless.

The era of Snark is over. It was all tangled up in an era of empty financial success calories where you were either in or out with the mainstream media and it was easy to be snarky sort of like a comedian that drops F bombs and curse words in a stand-up act to be considered hip and funny. Snark is for the intellectually lazy.

So it was snark that sunk Wall Street? At least that’s what you seem to be implying. And here I thought it was self-serious asshole millionaires who did it. Why search out CEO homes when we could be lynching Louis C.K.?

As for the statement that sarcasm is for the intellectually lazy, sure, there’s some truth to that. But it’s certainly no less lazy and naive than some Greg Kinnear in Little Miss Sunshine-esque rant about behaviors that aren’t indicative of “winners”.

It is hard to find the upside in downside thinking and activity, isn’t it?

Quite the linguistic flourish.

Snark, the animal species in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark are not positive role models. Snark is dead. Bury it and move on. We are all in this together. Onward.

Similarly, a douche, a device used in vaginal irrigation, is not a positive role model either.

And, sure, we will all hold an earnest funereal ceremony (pyre or Viking funeral – TBD) for snark and irony and dick jokes, where we will forever put away childish things and set out into the world, renewed with purpose and enterprise and with jagged sticks jammed 18 inches into our rectums. Then we will be Winners. And having won, we’ll look for some other benign slice of humanity to decry.

*Offer not valid in any way

Vitali Klitschko successfully defended his share of the heavyweight title over the weekend in his adopted homeland of Germany with a win over Juan Gomez. So excited was the Ukrainian born fighter to have knocked out his former sparring partner that he felt compelled to offer up this classic German salute. Either that or he was attempting to salvage the merger between Morgan Springs and Poland Creek. We may never know.

One of the secret benefits of the current economic death spiral is that, with cable ad rates plummeting, a sudden wellspring of retarded novelty product ads has sprung up virtually overnight. You, of course, know now about the ShamWow and the Snuggie. I’m not a big believer in the Snuggie. After all, the whole point of a blanket is for your girlfriend to give you a handjob underneath it without anyone noticing. But the Snuggie destroys that opportunity. If you don’t have your hands through the sleeves of your Snuggie, everyone is going to exactly where they are: on a cock somewhere.

Furthermore, the Snuggie seems awfully practical as far as novelty products go. It’s missing that one-of-a-kind uselessness inherent in products like the Showtime Rotisserie Grill (you can get a roto chicken for $5 at the store, with no risk of MASSIVE GREASE CONFLAGRATIONS), or that one asshole who sells DVDs about how to surf the internet, or Alonzo Spellman’s Clown Burgers. Those are products worthy of a $7 production budget.

And now, I have found another. Good Christians, I give you THE PRAYER CROSS.

Finally, the classy type of accessory you need to wear to your Michael W. Smith concert. Best of all, hidden inside the Prayer Cross’ fabulous pseudo-crystalish center is THE FUCKING LORD’S PRAYER. The whole thing. Unexpurgated. No bullshit.

Now that’s one bitchin’ piece of jewelry. Think Jane Seymour’s double scrotum Zales design has the Lord’s Prayer hidden inside it? FUCK AND NO. The only thing you’ll see if you stare up close at a DeBeers diamond is the blood of a Sierra Leone refugee. And Jared the Galleria of Jewelry is run by filthy Jews with back hair. This is like a DVD Easter Egg, sent from resurrected Jesus himself.

Now, if you need the Lord’s Prayer in an emergency, all you have to do is press a cheap light prism against YOUR FUCKING EYEBALL. Did you just get t-boned by a tractor trailer and are pinned to the road by the flipped chassis of your vehicle? Well, shit on a shingle, you got salvation hanging right around your neck. No need to wait for your preacher to show up and pray for you. Fucking preachers, always with the slow response time.

Why crack open a bible to see the Lord’s Prayer? That’s boring. Look how much fun kids have with this shit.

Awesome.

My hope is that this is only the beginning of novelty jewelry products that contain hidden biblical messages. Who wouldn’t like to own a cock ring that WAS SECRETLY TRYING TO UNGAY YOU? I know that would help me personally. What about earrings that tell the story of Sodom and Gomorrah? Or a chastity belt that features the entire section of Leviticus? A jeweled wonderbra that contains the entire Left Behind series? The possibilities are endless… FOR WORSHIP!

With the Prayer Cross, you can get more praying done on the go. Need Ruth Ginsburg’s cancer to metastasize? BOOM! The Lord hears you. Hoping to God that the Golden Corral is still open? Oh, you know it will be now, my friend.

So ditch that Snuggie, you heathen fuckfaces. The Prayer Cross is all you need to keep you warm at night.

Above is the image Punté used yesterday for Beaker’s Super Bowl prediction.  Of course, blog commenters being what they are — that is, people who tend to ignore the forest to look at the trees (and leaves, and individual pieces of bark, and chloroplasts) — they instantly ignored the obvious bandwagon imagery and instead asked why Beaker was riding a D.C. Metro bus.

Anyway, from Maj’s annoying homerism for our nation’s capital (and Punte’s annoyance with it) was born a new meme: Beaker in D.C.

Yesterday, the good people at Sloshspot created a guide for bacon-infused alcohol and bacon-flavored mixed drinks.  It’s a handy thing to have if, like me, your two favorite things not attached to women are bacon and alcohol.  The only problem is, Sloshspot completely fucked it up.  The article reeks of Google search and inexperience.  As the preeminent Internet writer who spends most of his free time finding new ways to combine bacon and alcohol, let me set things straight point-by-point.

1. Bacon-infused vodka

To its credit, Sloshspot accurately copied the dozens of recipes out there: fry three pieces of bacon, put it in a mason jar with vodka, wait three weeks, freeze, strain.

2. The Bacon Martini

AKA colossal fuck-up #1.  SS takes a recipe meant to give a regular vodka martini a hint of bacon (lining the edge of the glass with bacon grease; garnishing with a piece of bacon), and mistakenly says that you should use three ounces of bacon-infused vodka with the recipe.

I’ve dabbled with making bacon-infused martinis, and anything that is 90% or more bacon vodka will taste like ass.  I promise you.  The bacon flavor is just too salty and overpowering.  It’s like drinking pork-flavored seawater.

So you have to dilute it a little.  Here’s a tomato-bacon martini recipe that will knock you on your ass:

- 1 oz. bacon-infused vodka
- 2 oz. plain vodka
- 3 oz. tomato water (It’s another time-consuming pain to make, but well worth it)

Add ice.  Shake.  Garnish with fresh cherry tomato.  Optional ingredient: dash of black pepper.

You know how good a BLT tastes, right?  Imagine getting rid of all that horseshit lettuce and bread and mayonnaise and adding booze.  Make that at a party and you’ll be a goddamned hero.  Just remember where you got the recipe: an obscene football blog.

3. The Bacon Bloody Mary

This is another one that’s pretty impossible to mess up.  Just a regular Bloody Mary made with bacon vodka instead of plain.  And rimming the glass with bacon salt is definitely a good call.

4. Bacon-Infused Bourbon

There’s a bar in New York called PDT that insists you can make bacon-infused bourbon in just a couple hours.  New York Magazine bought into that idea, and so did Sloshspot.  Guess what?  It’s a fucking LIE.  I tried it, and it sucks.  The best way to make bacon bourbon is the same way you make bacon vodka: by waiting impatiently for three weeks.

5. Bacon Old-Fashioned

This is a brilliant drink, but only if you do the annoying time-consuming process to make your bacon bourbon.  Start with just a little maple syrup (a little goes a LONG way), add just enough water to liquefy the syrup, then add a shot of bacon bourbon.  The PDT recipe calls for bitters and an orange twist, but bitters suck, and twists aren’t worth the effort.  Instead, add a few drops of lemon to cut the smoky sweetness.  Serve over ice.  If you need a garnish, I recommend a dark cherry.

So go forth, Internet readers, and drink bacony booze down the path of delicious drunkenness.  Have faith that these recommendations have come only after extensive trial and error, and though it pains me to share my secrets, I’d rather do that than see others lead you astray.  Because bacon-flavored booze is a terrible thing to waste.

Image via XKCD

I think a better one would have been “Born fat, raised preppy, jerked it.” Yours in the comments.

Yesterday, resident KSKentuckian flubby directed our attention to this story, and without dipping into too much hyperbole, I can say that it is at once the saddest and funniest thing I’ve read all week.  It’s a terrible family tragedy in which every tired hillbilly stereotype gets paraded around without the slightest hint of irony.

Come, let’s read it together.  Something that involves tractors, highway blockage, trailer smashing, 35-year-old grandmothers, and pie-stealing shouldn’t be experienced alone.

There’s little undisputed in this story, the tale of the tipped trailer.

Frances Barton’s single-wide, the one she had fully paid $5,000 for and was hoping to move to a little piece of land she was buying on a $250-a-month land contract, is now literally in pieces on Jim Gaunce’s front lawn.

Rule of thumb: any news article that includes the term “single-wide” ain’t gonna have much good news.

And, everyone agrees, that leaves some 12 people — four adults and eight children ranging from 3 months to 12 years — facing Thanksgiving with no place to live.

How, exactly, the mobile home came to this odd resting place is where the story gets complicated. On Friday, Barton hired a guy to put her house on a trailer and move it up U.S. 68 in Nicholas County. When the trailer broke down and the house blocked the highway for hours on end, the sheriff got involved…

Barton’s boyfriend, Alan Gaunce, no relation to Jim [Somehow, I doubt that - Ed.], said somebody — he’s not sure who — told him he’d be shot if he didn’t get out of the trailer before it was toppled. Barton, a grandma at 35 with gold streaks in red hair [RAWR!], tearfully contends that Nicholas County Sheriff Dick Garrett “showed no respect for my home” when he ultimately ordered two tractors to ram the thing and set it on its side.

I want you to take a break right now.  Think the sexy young grandma was good?  Just wait.  Try to steel yourself for two paragraphs of pure, unfiltered awesome:

On the other hand, Garrett, a wiry chain-smoker who ran for re-election with the slogan of “More ‘Dick’ in 2006,” maintains that anybody who thinks it’s a fine plan to pay somebody $200 to move their 25-year-old home, all their belongings, and a passel of pets with a farm tractor can’t exactly complain when things go wrong.

“I know I wouldn’t pay somebody $200 to move my house and everything in it,” said Garrett, noting that the group didn’t have a required permit or escort. Basically, he said, he could have arrested the lot of them: Barton, her brood and the hauler. The charge, he said: “being ignorant.”

/kisses fingers

I just checked to see who wrote this article.  Mary Meehan.  I would make love to her right now if I could.

To be fair, the partial closing of U.S. 68 for some nine hours on a Friday night is pretty major in Nicholas County, where Garrett Tuesday was reviewing a Mayberry-like constituent call concerning a thwarted attempt to snatch a fresh cherry pie from a kitchen.

…while someone provided a backdrop of up-tempo banjo music, no doubt.

He said he did all he could think of to salvage the mobile home, but had to get the road clear. “It’s a federal highway,” said Garrett, who stood in the rain from roughly 4:30 p.m. Friday until 2 a.m. directing traffic with the rest of his force, a single deputy.

“I’m sorry it happened,” he said, “I really am.”

But, asked what he would have done differently, Garrett said, “I’d have knocked it over sooner.”

That’s it.  I want to head up his next reelection committee.  “More Dick All the Time.”

Barton spent more than an hour Tuesday standing and crying next to a 10-foot-high pile of wooden walls and pink insulation, sometimes cradling her daughter’s doll, one starting to show signs of black mildew after sitting in the damp remnants of the house. Over and over, she said, “Everything is gone. I’ve lost everything. It’s all I had.”

Whoa.  Who invited Debbie Downer?  Lady, you mind?  We’re trying to laugh about your misfortune.

Barton, who helps manage the mobile park where she lived, paid for her home with a settlement from an automobile accident. It’s the first home she’s owned by herself.

She said she thought the man she hired to move her home knew what he was doing. Chris “Pancake” Meyers told her, she said, that he had more than 13 years’ experience in hauling things and that he had the proper permits and insurance for the move. (She didn’t ask to see proof of insurance or a permit, she said. Meyers could not be reached for comment Tuesday by the Herald-Leader.)

Besides, she trusted Pancake.  Anyone with such a delicious name HAS to be good!

About 1½ miles into the move, the tires popped off. Sheriff Garrett said he’s heard that somebody warned the group the tires would be loose and they should stop the move. He said Barton insisted on going ahead.

And soon found herself in front of Jim Gaunce’s house on U.S. 68. Garrett said over the course of the evening, he did everything he could think of to get the house unstuck so it could be salvaged. But, he said, several of the well-intentioned efforts did significant damage to the house. For example, trying to push with one truck from behind while pulling from the front resulted in the hitch coming off and Barton’s blue-walled bedroom being crushed.

“My bad.”

Lee Roberts, owner of Roberts Heavy-Duty Towing in Lexington, said his company was called in to help. “We tried to pull the trailer back on the road but couldn’t without tearing it to pieces.”

When asked to push it off the road to clear the traffic flow, Roberts said he declined to do so.

That’s when, Garrett said, he called on Meyers and another farmer with a tractor to tip the trailer.

He said he gave Barton and her friends and family at least two hours to get out what they needed and asked more than once if they had everything they wanted before he issued the order to push. Garrett said he didn’t know how badly damaged the trailer might be, but thought he had no other choice.

Barton said she collapsed before the final destruction and was taken away by a friend, but Alan Gaunce said Garrett told him the cleanup was “all up to you, baby.”

/fires double gunfingaz

Garret said he has given Barton 10 days to clean up the mess. He’s already talked to the county attorney about charges if the debris hasn’t been removed. Even as looky-loos slowed while driving by the wrecked house and an increasing number of clumps of insulation littered Jim Gaunce’s yard, Garrett said it’s not the responsibility of the county to do the demolition or removal.

Without money, Barton said, she’s relying on friends to dismantle and move the trash. At least two of the men working Tuesday said they took off time from their jobs on horse farms to help and are working with hammers, a sledge hammer and a chain saw. The Red Cross paid for a hotel room for a few days, but now Barton is on her own. The family, a mishmash of real kin and unofficially adopted kids, teens and young adults, are crammed into a smaller trailer while Barton tries to sort through it all.

…Tiffany, Heather, Cody, Dylan, Dermot, Jordan, Taylor, Britney, Wesley, Rumer, Skyler, Cassidy, Zoe, Chloe, Max, Hunter, Kendall, Kaitlyn, Noah, Sasha, Morgan, Kyra, Ian, Lauren, Q-Bert, Phil…

Jim Gaunce, an amiable great-grandfather, watched most of it unfold from his rocker in a sunny living room with windows so spotless birds frequently thud into the glass while trying to fly through.

No shotgun in his lap?

He’s sympathetic to both sides and willing, he said, to be patient as the mess is cleaned up. He worries that the insulation might blow into nearby farms, get eaten by cattle and do some major internal organ damage, putting a dent in someone’s livelihood.

But he knows one thing for sure. “Somebody,” he said, sitting calmly as a chain saw roared, “is going to have to clean that thing up.” ]]> http://kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com/2008/11/ksk-off-topic-the-song-of-frances-barton.html/feed 78 http://kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com/2008/10/sexy-friday-and-a-vote-for-lingerie-shopping.html http://kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com/2008/10/sexy-friday-and-a-vote-for-lingerie-shopping.html#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:15:27 +0000 Captain Caveman http://kissingsuzykolber.uproxx.com/?p=6318

As you get older, you make trade-offs with your lifestyle.  Downsides: your body starts deteriorating with the half-life of Polonium-214, hangovers get more and more brutal, and you end up spending less and less time with people you really like — especially if you’re married. But there are upsides, too.  For example, with every year that goes by, I become slightly less stupid.  But much more importantly, I’m now comfortable buying lingerie — and not just for myself.  It makes a great gift for women, a gift that they will wear almost immediately after you buy it, and then as many as 0.5 times per year thereafter.

There was a time when going into Victoria’s Secret was so daunting.  I’d go in, eye something frilly, then some woman would ask me if I needed help.  Need help? Is she implying I don’t know anything about lingerie?  Man, I KNOW lingerie.  Why, I took off a woman’s bra off with one hand!  Once!

“NO!” I’d shout, then adjust my voice. “No, just looking.”  Bitch.  Then I’d buy my woman some lame-ass babydoll that wasn’t all sexy, because the saleswoman unnerved me and I didn’t want to offend my girlfriend by getting something too risque in case that made her uncomfortable, and anyway wouldn’t it mean more to her if she got something comfortable?

But not any more.  Now I go in there, and before the sales girl can finish her question, I’m like, “Yeah, do you have this in 34C?  Does it only come in black?  Do you think needlenose pliers would rip this?  Does this conduct electricity?”  And when I check out, the missus gets something bona fide sexy… that she wears once.  Then it’s back to unsexy nightclothes.

Because, let’s face it, as long as you’re the kind of person who insists on dating women with things like an “education” or “intellectual curiosity,” you’re going to be hard-pressed to find a gal with a penchant for knit bikinis:

Or tight sheer button-downs sans bra:

Don’t even expect her to wear one of your dress shirts, unbuttoned in unpossibly sexy fashion:

The only shirt of yours she’s going to wear frequently is your favorite t-shirt that you’ve had for ten years and is perfectly worn down to the thinnest cotton possible. And you know what?  That’s plenty sexy in its own right.

Still, a knit bikini would be awfully nice.

(Photos of Holly Weber via Uncoached. Disclaimer: discussion of relationships is from general experience and depicts no particular woman. Love you honey!)