The Hyper Bowl

 

It’s 10:46 AM, eastern standard time, but let’s just say it’s noon. We’re LIVE doing a pre-recorded telecast at an undisclosed location for the first annual Hyper Bowl. This never-before-seen storied tradition kept me up last night. Could have been the anticipation or the brood of howler monkeys renovating a nearby tree. 

This isn’t your father’s sporting event. Nor is it your grandfather’s. I don’t know much about great-grandfathers in general, but I’ll assume this is not for them either, wherever they may be. The Hyper Bowl is for you, hosted by an award-winning broadcaster of great esteem, within a true media sanctuary. 

Let’s go through the ground rules, shall we? The game on the field is a combination of the very best aspects of every sport. We have bats, we have balls, we ice skates and oversized foam fingers. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and that’s just when you see the price of our nacho platter. But boy are they worth it. Cortes himself brough the recipe back to Spain upon his first trip to North America. That’s according to the fine print of the can, a smidge below the nutritional facts. 

It’s almost game time. I hope you’re sitting down. Fans are known to 

keel over when the competition gets too intense. Play on the field is

without precedent, it’s truly unprecedented. I can’t promise the same

thing this time next year. This type of athletic genius is sure to bring a

tear to your eye. Although that could be a result of the preemptive 

pepper spraying of the crowd, in the hopes of tempering any on-field 

antics. Still, it might take a breath away, too. But that might be from 

the high altitude of the stadium (near Heaven) as well as the segment 

producer’s affinity for smoke machines. 

 

Some people refer to sporting events as a life and death struggle.

That’s what this is, since we deprive the participants of food and 

water for 48 hours prior to kickoff. 

 

Watching The Hyper Bowl will most certainly change your life. How

could it not? You are now an accessory to a crime and will be

subpoenaed at the conclusion of the game. Most events warn you 

about flying projectiles, not here. Everyone who attends takes a blood

oath to enter or uses a simple QR code found on our exclusive 

HyperBowl™ app. 

 

You will have a hard time reentering society once the game is over. 

Your family won’t look the same, and that’s not even counting the 

face paint, now mandated by most municipal governments. 

This is the best of your life, right here. What’s great is that to cater to

the new generation, the game is only 60 seconds long. Which, 

scientifically speaking, isplenty of time to form an addiction.

Ruptured ACLU

 

 

Here at the ACLU, we do more than safeguard civil liberties. Over the years, our mission hasn’t just crept forward, it’s leaned and lurched, too. We believe in expanding definitions. Take the word “bemuse.” We know it means to puzzle, baffle, or perplex. But since lots of people think is a synonym for, “amuse,” we use it that way, too. And since it also rhymes with “chartreuse,” when pronounced in a certain way, we say it when we to order that green liqueur made by those wild Carthusian monks at the end of a long meal. Honestly, it should already mean “to misuse.”

 

So you should understand our goals are constantly shifting beneath our feat, like tempermental tectonic plates in a quake-ridden area. Speaking of geology, one of our newfound commitments is to glacial justice. This goes beyond the untamed ice floes of the poles and affects the bobbing cubes in your glass. Glacial justice means never ordering a drink with crushed ice. It means not eating ice cream if the temperature is above 32 F. 

 

Then there’s facial justice. It could mean finding ways around the repressive facial-recognition technology. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s just as much about making sure ugly people get modeling jobs, too. That’s even if they involve artsy layouts and out-of-focus photographs surrounded by a sea of people with things over their hands. Facial justice means suing God for the existence of acne. It means never smiling at someone you don’t want to talk to for the next three hours. It means apologizing to thoroughbreds for using the term “horse face” in the past. It can me a lot of things to a lot of people, but not to us. It absolutely means the most to us.  

 

Spatial justice took enough during the pandemic. No one should ever be too close to you. Whether that’s on a plane, in line for the ATM, or waiting for a hot meat platter at a truck stop buffet. You deserve your space. It’s a human right and you don’t have to be an astronaut to earn it. 

Liberty is for libertines. We need to renovate our offices and are hoping for a certain degree of palatial justice. We'll see if there's room in our updated mission statement. There usually is. 

Carry that Weight

 

Ever since space travel returned to the news, people have once again begun asking me what I think about it. For starters, they know how many times I’ve seen Apollo 13. But they miss an important part of that journey. The astronauts on board understood they were more useful at home, so they turned back for a variety of reasons I won't bore you with now. 

Others engage with me not on the specifics regarding interstellar voyages, but how I feel about the bigger issues at play. My tune has changed all these years. I no longer support galactic joy riding. Think about it. One of the reasons I enjoy driving is because of my ability to roll down the windows and cruise along an open road. Space travel affords one an open road of sorts, but that’s it. Without fresh air, what’s the point? It can’t be the scenery either. Not that black void again. Until they make a spacecraft you want comfortably and safely crack a window, I will stand athwart each launch yelling stop. 

But that’s not all. We have plenty going on earthside that it makes leaving right now a bad idea. Besides the podcasts, TV shows, and happy hour deals, we’re not supposed to be anywhere but here. 

This is why, in large part, I’ve never troubled myself with statistics like BMI (body mass index). Mass is something that scientists deal with in labs, wearing lab coats, surrounded by bubbling beakers and boiling bunsen burners. What I care about is weight and the gravitational pull here on my home planet. 

Despite this clear fact, you still get people who swoon over the idea of what they’d weigh on the moon, Mars, or places far beyond the Milky Way. I don’t get it. Folks take me aside during pilates and whisper things like, “you’d be shocked to know what I weigh on Mercury.” Would I? That’s where they're wrong. I simply don’t care.

Weight is a beautiful thing because it takes into consideration its surroundings. I don’t care what you weigh in a vacuum; Dyson, Oreck, whatever. Now if only there was a way for really tall people to feel the same way about their height when entering different orbits.  

Appellation Trail

 

For a two month stretch two years ago I signed my official agency email “The Salmon King of Astoria.” Few could object to this designation considering my household’s prodigious consumption of the pink (when cooked) fish. But nameless critics implied it was unprofessional, ushering in an unregulated time for the proliferation of less empirically grounded digital signatures. I worked with a guy who, for 55 minutes was, “The Beef Jerky Baron of Bayonne, NJ,” before transitioning to “Young John Lettuce,” and then settling on the rather basic, “Meat Man.” I can’t be held responsible for this sort of thing catching on. Who doesn’t want a memorable, food-inspired nickname? 

Over the years, I’ve had other honorifics, which existed in places besides my company inbox. Inspired by Hector, breaker of horses, I was known as breaker of ices, for both my ability to converse with strangers as well as my strange aversion to air conditioning. More than one person has referred to me as the “Young Rascal Prince,” which, as I approach forty, may require a certain peculiar update for the accuracy obsessed. Duke, perhaps. 

Borne out of an appreciation for ocean sizzle, the resounding noise sea foam makes after a wave settles into place, I adopted the sobriquet of “Poseidon’s Apprentice,” after legions of sunburnt surfers and other boardwalk vagrants insisted on using it in lieu of my given name. They said it was easier, despite the extra syllable. I relented, only after threats of physical violence.

As a child, I earned the moniker, “Plunger Boy” after successfully warding off an intruder a plunger. The intruder turned out to be our plumber, there to repair a major clog in the master bathroom. In days of greater flexibility, I became known as “The Creature” for my ability to climb trees without fear or foresight. The latter being driven home when a branch cracked under my weight. 

I guess I understand why people go to grad school. Long titles. My are just as much fun, only without the debt. 

The Grass is always Grass

 

 

When you’re standing on your deck, sweeping up leaves and other expected detritus of the suburban homeowner, it’s all about perspective. In this case, that means standing several feet above the sea level, safe from both a future flood swell and passing Jehovah’s witnesses flooding your mailbox with admittedly intriguing religious literature. While you’re peering onto your neighbor’s manicured yard, it’s easy to get caught up in the rivalries that sprout up on every block like poisonous mushrooms after a torrential downpour. 

You admire their birdhouses, wishing yours had the same structural integrity. You gaze across at their deck, dreaming of yours, rid of termites once and for all.

But the grass is always grass. Even artificial grass is a type of grass. It’s just one you don’t have to water or mow. Although you may still have to clean up after your pooch since they can’t really tell the difference. 

And despite what you may have heard, it’s not always greener since these days that has very little to do with a verdant hue extending from your patio to the driveway. Want a green yard? Then you better make room for a Tesla, at least one wind turbine, and a full-time influencer giving a TED talk from your barbecue pit 24-hours a day.

Hiring a General Secretary

If they say titles don’t matter, they probably never hired at General Secretary. A General Secretary is not there to answer phones, send emails, and order lunch. What they do can’t be quantified for reasons less to do with their unique talents and more to do with rampant criminal activities.

You don’t want an employee who gives it to you straight. It’s much better to have someone seamlessly and effortlessly massage the facts. Facts, like people, get sore from time to time and benefit from the actions of a tender masseuse and a basic insurance plan. Facts aren’t things that exist in one place and are the same somewhere else. They are different in different situations. Kind of like you. The way you are around grandma is not the same as you are on the bocce court. Why would facts be any different?

While traditional secretaries may organize office pools and parties, a General Secretary focuses on one type of party. Happy Hour implies that some hours of the day are not happy, which is an impossibility. There aren’t shows for you to attend, only show trials. Interviews are exchanged for interrogations and collaborators, no matter how productive, are punished.  

A General Secretary is not meant to be your friend. You have enough friends. If anything, they’re a comrade. Possibly a fellow traveler, but definitely not a friend. 

Drawing The Line Somewhere

When you work in advertising, people tend to ask you where you draw the line. As in, what’s the brand or brands you would refuse to work on. Most industry people stick to the same script. Tobacco, pharmaceuticals, and the military industrial complex. When it comes to moral objections, I’m not like everyone else. Over the years, I’ve kept a long-running, ever-growing list of brands that give me pause or some semblance of concern. 

For instance, I’d work for a junta, but not a cabal. A junta does their business out in the open, while cabals meet in secret, sometimes literally in the shadows. While I enjoy getting out of the sun as much as most pale writers, it can be hard on the eyes to squint that much. All that smoke and glow from a row of computer screens is incredibly uncomfortable. With a junta, you know where you stand, which is usually in a poorly dug foxhole. Plus, it can be pretty steady work, as long as the guerrillas are committed to a policy of mutally assured destruction. Reelection campaigns in totalitarian states are far less taxing (for marketers) than those in democracies. You don’t have to waste your time on attack ads or going negative. 

I don’t think I could bring myself to write a commercial about a gun. But I could easily write them about knives, missles, maces, spears, swords, battle axes, and really long sticks used to swat at people. If I’m feeling exceptionally confident, I might even ask the junta if they have any recommendations for firearm alternatives. Honestly, there is a scenario in which I could write an ad about bullets. Divorce them from their notorious delivery system, and instead picture them in necklace form. Much cheaper and sturdier than pearls

I can’t imagine ever working directly for a religious sect. Too stuffy and old-fashioned. As a rule, they are rarely open to to rebranding. But a cult? That’s a different story. Cults are very conscious of the moment. But not just that. They’re also concerned with how they’ll be perceived a hundred, maybe a thousand years from now. 

You have to draw the line somewhere. And when you do, it should be done in grease pencil, hunched over a drafting table in a fortified safe house. But hey, that's just me.