On the Subjects of Normal People, My Hatred of Sports, and Harvesting Paris Hilton's Organs

[Currently Listening To: Wilco - Kicking Television: Live In Chicago]


Everyone has their own personal Hell. Some situation, fictional or otherwise, which is uniquely unbearable to them. I think I, as someone growing exponentially less tolerant of most of the people in the world, have a great many personal Hells, and the other night I found myself in a classic one.

It was saturday night in the faux-French city of Montreal, Canada. For those of you unaware, Montreal is part of the Quebec province, which has decided that, contrary to the rest of Canada, it is going to pretend to be French. It doesn't look like France - it still just looks like Canada, which looks like America only newer and whiter. But everyone speaks French. Everything is written in French. Except that the rest of Canada speaks English, and everyone in Quebec speaks English in addition to French, which means that almost everything is written out in both languages. It's idiotic, and completely unnecessary. It's kind of like going to Indiana and finding that everyone speaks Japanese. You're not French. Get over it.

Anyway, it was saturday night, and my friend Brett and I were attempting to find something fun to do. We seemed to be in kind of a lame touristy part of town, so our only lead was a friend of ours who was meeting some other friends at a bar near our hotel. In a completely unfamiliar city, at least it was a start. The bar was called MacDougal's, or O'Brien's, or McGillycutty's, or some other trying-too-hard Irish pub name, and I could tell the second we walked in that I hated it. It looked like any other Americanized Irish pub, but it had the atmosphere of my most dreaded of watering holes: a sports bar. I hate hate hate sports bars, largely because I hate the people who inhabit them: I affectionately refer to them as "normal people." You know the ones. You might be one. There are millions and millions of them. Bland, uncreative, worker bee types who demand little from life and receive little in return. People who sit in a cubicle all day only to come home to sit in front of their television. Who live their lives vicariously through sitcom characters. Who watch "Everybody Loves Raymond" and laugh because the laugh track tells them it's funny. People who have no use for art. Who like music that the radio tells them is good, and listen to it quietly in the background. Big Dave Matthews fans, or whatever else is safe and pleasant. Nothing too challenging. People who wear the same clothes as everyone else. Mall shoppers. The Gap. Old Navy. Chain restaurants. SUVs. People Magazine. Suits. Ties. Stock reports. The status quo. Nine to five. Monday through friday. Suburbia. Golf. People who open a newspaper and reach for the sports page first. People who are the most excited and alive when watching a complete stranger kick a ball over a line on television. Empty vessels, waiting to be told what to do. TV will tell you what's entertaining. The radio will tell you what good music is. Advertisements will tell you what you want. The mall will tell you what to wear. Society will tell you how to live your life. Go to college, get a stable job, sit at a desk, sit in traffic, sit in front of the TV, sleep, have some coffee, sit down and read the sports page, sit in traffic, have some more coffee, sit at a desk, repeat, repeat, repeat, retire, die. No variance. No risks. No creativity. No personality. Never deviate from the norm. Never dig beneath the surface. Nothing dangerous or unusual. Caffeinated faux-happiness. Comfort. Stability. Consistency. Repetition. Blandness. Just a straight line. A flat line. And then you're dead.

I know these people well because I went to high school with about two thousand of them. Silver spoon suburban kids, all with the same Ambercrombie clothes, the same rich parents, the same vacant personalities. Attack of the clones. Beautiful. Wealthy. Popular. Idiots. I see those same people from time to time when I'm back home, and it's strangely satisfying to watch them settle into their lives of quiet misery. The star quarterback who had everything in his safe little high school world, suddenly found he wasn't quite good enough to make the college football team. Without the football team, his 2.0 GPA and gradeschool reading level couldn't get him into the good university. Community college. Business degree. He gave up, and got a job with Dad's company, and married the prettiest girl in school, who's now fat and bitter that her dreams of being a veterinarian were shoved aside so she could drive their two point five kids to soccer practice while her husband bones his secretary. But none of this is to say that I was one of those bitter lonely kids in high school who got picked on by the jocks, and was about to go fucking Columbine on everyone. On the contrary, I had a great time in high school. I had a lot of fun, a lot of friends, and nothing but great memories. I did, however, regard 95 percent of my fellow students as complete fucking tools. It's not bitterness so much as self-righteousness.

Anyway. Back in Flappynuts McFannybucket's Irish Pub, or whatever the fuck it was called, we squeezed through the ocean of normality and sat down at a small table. The bar was stepping up to the rare challenge of offending all of my senses simultaneously. It smelled of old beer, with an occasional au de urine wafting in from the bathroom. Someone was blowing cigarette smoke directly in my face. It was noisy - a cacophony of loud conversations and television noise. Everyone was drinking light beer with their eyes glued to one of several large television sets on the wall. The game was on. Yes, the game. "The game" is a strange phenomena in the world of sports where no matter where you are, you can refer to a particular sporting event simply as "the game" and a sports fan will know exactly which game you are talking about. This term can be upgraded in occasions when said game is extremely important, whereupon it is then referred to as "the big game." In this case, the big game was hockey - Montreal vs. Toronto, to be specific. There were allegiances to both teams present in the bar, but mostly we seemed to be amongst Montreal natives, as was evident from a massive uproar every time something good happened to Montreal's team. When a goal was scored, nearly everyone in the bar leaped up, threw fists in the air, screamed loudly, clanked their beers together, hugged, high-fived. Brett and I, meanwhile, had no idea what was going on. Eventually we just sort of got into it, and started shouting along with them every time the burst of excitement occurred. We'd turn on the best phony machismo we could, and shout in deepened voices "FUCK YEAH!!! GO TEAM!!! THAT'S HOW YOU PLAY THE FUCKIN' GAME!!!" or "YES!! TOUCHDOWN!!!" or "HOMERUN!! FUCK MY NIPPLES ARE GETTING HARD!!" or "AAAAAAA THAT WAS FUCKIN' AWESOME!!! GODDAMNIT!!! JACK ME OFF, BRETT!! FUCKING JACK ME OFF!!!" We quickly drew ire from the mongoloids around us.

By now you may have gathered that I cannot stand sports. For my entire life, it has been something that's always felt like a battle I had to fight against the rest of the world. As a child, you were just sort of expected to play sports. Little league. Girls' soccer. Basketball at the YMCA. In white upper-middle-class suburbia, every kid played a sport or three. Except me. I was the loner only-child with not even a shred of interest in organized athletics. I wanted to draw comic books, and have adventures in my backyard, and play Nintendo. I wonder sometimes if there was an exact moment in my youth when my father realized that his only son was going to be an art fag rather than a jock. I wonder how much that crushed some piece of his soul. He was, after all, a sports fanatic who wanted nothing more than to have a son he could coach - and it was in this interest that he once and only once talked me into joining a team - the basketball team, when I was in kindergarten. Just because he wanted to be the coach, and you had to have a child on the team in order to do so. I was his only hope. And so it was that my father's dream was exchanged for his son's misery. I was easily the worst player on the team - a bumbling little pudgeball who spent most of the time sitting on the bench - although I was far more content there. From the bench, at least, I could watch the game and imagine tentacles coming out of the floor and squeezing the guts out of the kids on the team I particularly disliked. Or a meteor crashing through the ceiling and incinerating them all. I would hold onto the bench and imagine gravity suddenly reversing, causing everyone on the court to fall to their death, gored violently by the rusty ceiling beams. I was a strange child. Imagination was my sport. I went through gradeschool as the kid who couldn't climb the rope in gym class, but was widely known as the best artist in school. That saved me from being a loser, but I always wondered why creativity was valued so much less than sporting ability. By the time I got to high school, and the art and music programs were heavily underfunded while they built the football team a new field, I began to realize that it's simply the way of the normal people, and it's never going to change. They value entertainment designed for simpletons, and they outnumber us creative types a hundred to one. Sports are, after all, the common language of normal people. It unites them. It gives them a purpose. It provides them with accomplishments to live vicariously through. A true sports fan will feel like he has personally succeeded on some level when "his" team - a group of complete strangers with athletic skill he will never possess - wins a game. Sports fans shout "we did it!" when their team wins. No. No, no, no. YOU did not do anything. YOU sat on your fat ass, drank beer and ate pretzels, while the game was won by athletes who do not know you and are in no way connected to you.

I have nothing against people who play sports - rather, I have all the respect in the world for them, since I've never had any athletic abilities of my own. Instead, I despise sports fanatics, and moreover society in general for placing sports on such a tremendous social pedestal. Why are sports figures so much more highly regarded than brilliant scientists, doctors, authors, artists, or philosophers? Why do we worship these mongoloids who run around knocking each other over for a living? Why do retard rapists like Kobe Bryant make tens of millions of dollars a year, while public school teachers struggle to pay for books for their students? No one should make that much money. No one. Particularly not idiot basketball players who read at a fourth grade level and can't think of anything better to do with their riches than buy a seventh Hummer or a third pool for their fifth mansion. Our world needs a system of checks and balances for wealth. A panel of highly-educated officials to determine who deserves the money they've been given. Not just sports figures - the entertainment industry is rife with guilty parties: Julia Roberts, you don't deserve that much money. We're sorry the idiot masses deemed you someone of value, but they were wrong. We're giving half of your net worth to hard-working families who are struggling to get by. 50 Cent, we're taking every penny you have ever earned. Bragging about being a former crack dealer who's been shot nine times and then grunting into a microphone does not make you deserving of your wealth. Sorry MTV tricked everyone into thinking you were talented. Paris Hilton, we're very sorry. Really, we apologize, but we're going to have to take all of your money, and also we're going to have to kill you and harvest any of your vital organs not too damaged from substance abuse. Again, we apologize on behalf of the people of America. They're not the smartest bunch. They let you believe that you're significant or deserving of attention on any level whatsoever. There are millions of people far more deserving of your money, your organs, and the air that you breathe.

We got the hell out of that bar as fast as we could - and just in the nick of time: As we were stepping out, the entire room exploded with cheers and shouting - apparently signifying Montreal's victory. A number of fratboy types lurking outside the pub perked up with interest, and asked us "who won the game?" Montreal, we told them, without being entirely certain that it was true. "FUCK YEAH!!!" they shouted, and gave each other high fives. "WE'RE THE FUCKIN' WINNERS!!! FUCKIN' RIGHT!!!" You sure are, guys. You sure are.

Why are people so fucking stupid? I could start a whole new tangent on that subject alone, but I've rambled enough for today. Time to get on an airplane.