Sports and Wine

Prelude:

A lot of times when I’m out with my closest guy friends, I will say something unflattering about myself to get a laugh—this sometimes comes to the expense of other people, but mostly my jokes are purposeful insults at myself. I accidentally cross the line and I often get caught on the other side. The same can be said about this blog. I say a lot of different things for the sake of story or out of context humor. Please take it with a grain of salt.

The beard experiment:

For the run of the Flyers postseason—the 2010 season in which the team came one goal and three periods away from winning the Stanley Cup—I grew a near equally impressive, yet totally awkward beard. Hockey playoffs are almost the only time you are permitted to have beard. You can have a beard in the regulatory year (non-hockey time) only if you accompany the beard with a scarf, sweatband, flannel shirt, fixed gear bike, ripped jeans with the leg folded up, and a remarkably scornful hatred towards corporate America…but then again if you had all that, you’d probably be a dick anyway. You would be hip, no doubt, but undoubtedly a dick…nonetheless.

On a side note: do hipsters know they are hipsters? I will look at a person who totally resembles a hipster, but yet they themselves will make fun of hipsters. Every hipster that I thought was a hipster claimed to hate hipsters. So hipsters for me have become like a ghost; everyone claims they have seen one, but nobody can point one right out to me… Do ghost know they are ghost? Is there a ghost alliance? When they are not haunting and gooling are they playing X-Box or watching a DVD? Will they go from DVD to Blueray? Can they get On-Demand? Will there On-Demand suddenly not work and give me an ER-55? (Stupid Comcast)… The same can be said about hipsters. I don’t think hipsters know they are hipsters; they are the ghost of society. Just the other day, I thought I saw a hipster. I was certain. But it just turned out to be this guy John who really likes the Arcade Fire. Nice guy, that John.

*

Anyway, when rocking an intense beard from April to June, there are some things that you just have to be cognitive of. By week two of the beard, one has to know that picking up women at this is point is wholly out of the question—which is good if you have friends who pressure you into talking to women at the bar, “Sorry man, can’t do it. I got the beard.” It makes your evenings less pressured and (in my case) less disappointing. You get to enjoy your Lager and you can fart all you want in bed that night.

On another side note: sleeping with someone who you just met—and I’m not talking about just having sex, but to actually sleep with someone for the entire night can be painful if you’ve been drinking Yuengling and eating late night dollar slices of pizza. It’s worse holding it in at night, then say at a during the day at your office, because at night you’re trying to sleep. You can’t travel to dreamland when you’re packing some intense luggage in your stomach. It’s not just the uncomfortable nature of holding your bowels as tight as a Chinese finger trap, but it’s the mental game. You spend all night tossing and turning, hoping one calamitous bubble of noxious air doesn’t slip during the sleeping hours of spooning.

And what if you do get to the activity of intercourse? If something is brewing in your stomach as you try the 9 minute push and pray with your newly acquired mate, you can get distracted by your internal suffering and not be at the top of your game… One way to get out of this jam is to do some recon immediately upon arriving in the apartment or room of your knew friend. If there is only one bathroom and it’s located inside of her bedroom and it has no fan, sorry Charlie, you’re going to have to pex (Pex; verb; to have sex when you really have to poop). But if there is a fan, in a bathroom in another part of the apartment, you have some room for a victorious release. Just make sure no roommates are around.

The best way to evade all of this internal conflict is to avoid sex until marriage…or at least to the point where you can fart in front of the person.

Tricks of the trade;

Whether you are married, engaged, dating, or just picked up a woman from Silk City, performing with adequacy is a must. Seeming in command of yourself is an attractive quality to find in a mate, which makes it seem unfair that men can’t fully control their own, well, “manhood.” I can control what my arm does. I can control what legs do and I am able to tell my body that I want even my smallest toe to wiggle. And I do these things and many more with great ease. So why can’t I tell my penis exactly what I want? The problem is, since Junior High, my penis has developed a most unfortunate independence—it acts on its own at mass, the supermarket, and even sometimes during visits to Grandmas. I could be there, having a nice conversation with Aunt Dotty about Olive Oil and Bocce Ball, when all of a sudden… Woops. Look who decides to stand up?**

Then what do you do?

Well, if you are not at the beach with your shirt off, you can isolate yourself and do what we in the business call, “The flip up.” The problem with that is, when you are at half mass, a few moments later, you have to stand awkwardly hunched in order to create an illusion that your pants are just crunched at the crotch area. “Stupid pants, got them at Target,” is the innocent look you give everybody. Looks like Uncle Jim has the same pants. See what I mean?

Back to the issue at hand; adequacy. As I claimed before, sometimes your downstairs soldier can go AWOL and shoot without orders. As the commanding officer, it is the man’s duty to seize fire until ready—which respectfully must come after the enemy (in this case the Vagina) shoots first. Sex is basically the Geneva Convention.

One of the most often used and simple method to prevent an early explosion is to think about things unsexy. Your mind becomes the main character in “The Hurt Locker,” as you frantically scramble to think about baseball players, bumble bees, the Republic of Haiti, or anything really that to get your mind off of sex. All of this is in order to communicate to your penis to delay action.

The dilemma:

So you’re there in the groove, giving it your all, thinking about Ryan Howard’s 2008 batting average, when suddenly you are struck with the notion that you are moments away from fulfilling nature’s obligation. You try to fight as best you can. You pray. You plead to the angel of love that you’ll volunteer at the homeless shelter, you’ll call you’re mom more often, you’ll even take to lunch that weird cousin in New Jersey who nobody likes only for a few more moments of pure bliss. Now you are intense. You’re not even looking at the girl anymore—she’s not even there. She becomes Rue McClanahan and all you are thinking about now is Ryan Howard. Ryan Howard; .301 average. Ryan Howard; 43 RBI’s. Ryan Howard; 199 strike outs. But no. It’s all over… You precipitately opened fire. You are left sweaty, disappointed, inadequate, and on your way to the bathroom to pick up a towel for clean up.

And it is there at the bathroom where you are hit with the terrifying realization that while you were at your peak climax, when you were at your ultimate glory and the only few seconds of the day where you feel complete elation, at that exact moment, you were in fact thinking about a 240 pound, St. Louis bred, Ryan Howard. You just defiled a Phillies legend.

Now you can’t even look at him the same. He goes up to bat and you have to go get a beer. When people talk about Ryan Howard you quickly change the subject to the weather or the Flyers. If Ryan Howard is on the front page of the sports section of the paper, you flip to something less depressing, like Economy page or news from the Middle East… The point is, if you are thinking about ball players in order to calm things down in the sack, make sure it’s a Greg Dobbs type player.

Back to the beard part two:

Before you can even think about the Ryan Howard dilemma or interrelations of any kind, you probably have to be clean shaven or at least in a developmental beard commonly known as the scruff. Think Chase Utley, not Jason Werth. Girls like the scruff…well this is what I thought at first…

It was a few weeks into the playoffs. The Flyers, who tired the series 3-3, were in the mist of fulfilling the best Philadelphia comeback in recent history by beating the Bruins—this was when I had a nice Rocky IV, log cabin type beard. At this point the bristles were all up in my neck and as thick as an alcoholic Jack Sheppard, when women, yes women, were actually speaking with me. Not out of kindness or in short form, but actually speaking candidly, flirting even... I figured the first woman I spoke with was some sort of mistake. Maybe she didn’t have her glasses on or her jealous ex-boyfriend was near by—but it happened again. Another conversation. A nice one at that. A conversation ending with a received phone number. This happened on several different nights at separate venues. But I have a beard? A beard! What are these women thinking?

This made me uneasy. It maybe out of self doubt or complete correctness, but whenever I get involved with a woman I think there is a catch. There must be a catch. There is always a catch. When I really like a girl and she, out of ignorance or disillusionment, really likes me back, there is something in the back of my head that says, “Jeez, this girl really has low standards. Do I really want to be with a girl such low standards? I mean if she is willing to be with me who knows what kind of hobgoblin she has been with before?” It seems odd, but if a girl actually wants to be with me, I tend to raise my eyebrow in curiosity and trepidation. I guess it’s like parking on a street in the city. The better the spot, the more you look around for that DO NOT PARK sign. And if you can’t find the do not park sign, you read every sign around it and read and re-read every detail. I have found that women are as confusing and most similar to those signs that say, “Do not park on school days,” when it’s the middle of the summer. It’s a Tuesday, but it’s July. Does that count? You’ll spend the whole day thinking about if you are going to get a ticket. Sometimes I think about getting a ticket the entire time I am parked there. The whole night. The whole weekend.

Earth is nothing but one big parking authority. And I already have a shit load of tickets.

So what can we conclude with the great beard experiment of ’10? Nothing. Who knows what the fuck girls are thinking? Just look at the 90s Sci Fi drama, The X-Files. Mulder can literally go back in time through the Bermuda triangle to the 40s and become a passenger aboard a Nazi ship, over take the ship, and solve the mystery of the dead girl, but it takes him 15 years figure out Scully has a crush on him.

Ah, whatever.

On another side note: Can ghost get summoned anytime? What if they are having coffee?

Chuck 0ut.

*You know what? I ride a bike. I like flannel shirts and The Decemberist. I think Bush was a lousy president….Oh. My. Gosh.

**My penis.

PS I’m sincerely sorry, Ryan Howard.