OCtober 18th, 2024

I know last time I said I’d post more often, but I spent all last week losing a bout with COVID (my first time to dance with the Rona and, lemme tell ya, that motherfucker doesn’t play), and Monday of this week saw me busy with TOTALLY FORGETTING TO CALL MY MOTHER ON HER BIRTHDAY!!! Yeah, that really happened, and I’m quite displeased with myself. Sorry, Mom. I’m the worst, I have no good excuse, and I can only hope the grace, benevolence, and compassion you’ve steadfastly displayed in your 34 years of life on this planet will extend to your oldest son’s (latest) egregious mistake. I love you.  And to make it up to you, Ma, I'll post my favorite birthday-related picture ever. 

Enough about how I'm a shitty son, though...

Let's kick today off with some Cheers and Jeers. I did this a few months ago, intending for it to be a regular thing, then forgot about it. Not ‘cause it’s not a good feature or anything, but more because I have the attention span (and spastic urethra) of a three-week-old puppy. I’m fully locked in today, though, so let’s get to work. 

Cheers to Donald Trump for saying “Fuck it” and jamming to music for 40 minutes at a recent Town Hall event. Let me spell this out for everyone, in case the many, many, many hints I’ve dropped here have been too subtle: Donald Trump is a giant, swollen, bleeding asshole, and I wouldn’t entrust that dude to competently oversee a game of Peek-a-boo without fucking it up, let alone one of the world’s foremost Superpowers. He's a piece of shit, and if there’s any karmic justice in the universe, he’ll spend the rest of his life in a max security prison rockin’ a Sinead O’Connor buzzcut, eating dick sandwiches, and waiting for someone to give him a Hot Epstein. But I must begrudgingly admit…the guy is funny. Not like, “Oh man, that Paula Poundstone standup special was hilarious” funny, but more like, “Holy shit, that gas station just exploded and torched a four-block radius, but on Google Earth the charred wreckage is kinda shaped like a set of fat titties” funny. Y’know, gallows humor funny. Apocalyptic funny. “Jan. 6th Shaman Guy shitting in AOC’s office” funny. “Time to learn Russian ‘cause Vladimir Putin has the hard copy of one of this year’s Presidential candidates giving an Uzbek whore a Tallahassee Night Train” funny. An example? He held a Town Hall in Pennsylvania Monday night, and right after the event started a couple people in the audience fainted. His pivot? Instead of answering questions from the blue-collar folks that make up most of his base that he clearly hates, or riffing on how hot his daughter is, he decided to just bop to songs by James Brown, Leonard Cohen, the Village People, and more. What was supposed to be Serious Swing State Discourse turned into fucking karaoke, and I kinda dig it. 4-5, this is your lane, bubba. Just be the old dude that vibes out to kickass songs, rubber stamps horrifically transphobic campaign ads, and enjoys the occasional Steam de Cleve.  

Jeers to SARS-CoV-2 for existing. Ho-lee-shit, COVID sucked. “It’s just like the flu, bro, it’s not that bad.” Kindly suck my ass if you’ve ever found yourself saying the previous sentence, as it most assuredly is not like the flu. I’ve had the flu a couple times, and it never horsefucked me for five days like COVID did. The body aches, fatigue, and loss of senses were one thing, but it’s what happened north of my neck that really got my attention. I was so congested that my head felt like it weighed 100 pounds, and I happen to remember a widely seen documentary from 1996 indicating that the human head weighs eight pounds; that’s a sizeable difference, kids. But it wasn’t just that, it was like my brain stopped working. I tried to write a bit on the second full day after I tested positive, and I just couldn’t. I’m not talking about the ideas not flowing like normal, or not being able to come up with awesome Halloween costume ideas like Super Sexy Stalin, or a flamboyant lucha libre wrestler named Gay Mysterio. No, I mean I literally couldn’t make my brain activate the correct fingers needed to strike the keyboard. It was a full-on “Forrest Gump just got an anvil dropped on his head, and Jenny probably gave him AIDS again” level of brain activity in my noggin, and it was fucking scary. I’m used to being a dipshit that can’t tell his ass from a hole in the ground, but I couldn’t even fake my way through basic motor functions. Not cool. I can promise you one thing that comes from this: I ain’t missing another COVID booster, no matter what my dad’s second wife has read on Truth Social. She’ll just have to accept that her husband’s son is a living, breathing, 5G signal booster that wants her grandkids to be sterile socialists.

Cheers to the Texas Longhorns football team for strumming OU. Folks on the 40 Acres must be feeling phenomenally good about the Steve Sarkisian hire, as his crew just creampied OU for the second time in three years. Texas is also a four-point favorite this week against Georgia, a program that’s won two Natties since 2021. Keep grinding, Sark, and let me know if you’re ever in the D-F-DUB and want to hit an AA meeting. OU, meanwhile, is fucking baaaaaaaaaaaad on offense, and I’m sure the crimson and cream faithful are readying the necessary enticements to lure former Sooner QB and current Tennessee head coach Josh Heupel back to Norman. Things like a shit ton of money, his own private booth at Arby’s, a virtually unlimited supply of Sooner sports bras, and a weekly delivery to Josh’s house of a U-Haul van filled with Fudge Rounds. I even heard the Sooner powers-that-be are in deep negotiations with Big Diabetes for Coach Heupel to replace Wilford Brimley as the face of awareness of the disease. That’s a huge, sweaty girdle to fill, but I think Josh is up for it.

Jeers to the rollercoaster ride that is raising children. My son is almost 10, routinely guts his ass whipped by single-digit division, “forgets” to wear deodorant yet gets pissy when you tell him he smells like a buzzard’s taint, LOVES to take 12-pound shits in my toilet and not flush, and recently got in trouble at school for writing a story about a student stabbing a teacher with a knife. My daughter is six, and she wildly and unpredictably vacillates between being the sweetest, smartest, kindest person I’ve ever known and behaving as if she’s the love child of Satan and O.J. Simpson. Has your daughter ever screamed at you, “You’re the worst parent ever, I wish Travis Kelce was my dad?” It’s, um, affecting…especially when it’s because you told her she couldn’t play with friends on account of it being 7:00 AM on a Sunday. But my kids will also do stuff like take two hours to write and illustrate a 30-page comic book for me to read, ask to go on rides in my truck just so we can sing along to boy band songs, make me a grilled cheese sandwich while I’m laid up with COVID, and get genuinely excited about the other one’s success in school and sports. Kids, dude. (There are no jokes here, I just needed to expound on the ups-and-downs of fatherhood. It’s quite the journey.)

Cheers to kickass and supportive friends. Here’s the thing: If some random asshole hates my site, or thinks my writing sucks, it couldn’t matter less to me. But if one of my good friends thinks it’s no good? That would wreck my fragile little ego. Hence, I haven’t told many of my friends about ArmSideFun.com. A couple of my buddies were recently made aware of it, though, and their response was so gratifying. One of them even read through most of the archives and said, “Good stuff, bud, but your playlist of ‘Best Walk-Up Songs’ is utter horseshit.” That’s the type of criticism I can handle, especially when it comes from a long-time friend, and I’m glad I went against my instincts and let him know about my stuff. I’ve long said that this site is the best and cheapest therapy I’ve found, and that will likely be true as long as I maintain it; I do this shit for me. But to be able to make my buddies smile along the way is incredibly rewarding. 

Jeers to whatever Faustian bargain Jerry Jones made in the ‘90s. It wasn’t worth it. That sounds fucking ridiculous, but the three Super Bowl wins in four seasons that I jubilantly experienced as a youngster were absolutely not worth the shit show of an abortion I’ve had to endure for the last 30 years. Your franchise is a goddamn traveling circus, Jerry, complete with the loudest, drunkest, horniest, most buffoonish clown of all: You, you giant asshole. Yeah, you’ve figured out how to make a fuck ton of money, but so what? What do you do with your cash? Do you do shit with it that matters, like helping to solve the homelessness crisis, or funding addiction intervention? Are you financing cutting edge research of cancer treatment? Or do you let your wife buy a bunch of sculptures and paintings and other stupid bullshit and then pay TV guys to talk about it because it makes you feel better about the scores of hookers you’ve plowed through over the years? 

You remember Tony Romo, right? Sure you do, Jerry, even your drunk ass can’t forget a guy that quarterbacked your team for almost a decade. A few years ago, when it was obvious his time as QB1 had ended, he said, “Football is a meritocracy.” Yeah, maybe on the field it is. Off the field, though? Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. You’d have been relieved of your GM duties decades ago had merit, ability, or competence had anything to do with it. But you get to keep fucking up again, and again, and again, and again, and you keep getting chances to fuck up because you happen to be really, really good at one thing: getting big name sponsors to throw piles of money at you in order to be associated with the Cowboys’ brand. A brand that, while worth billions, has been permanently tarnished by your ego, hubris, stubbornness, greed, and insatiable desire to never once pull out. YOU’RE GODDAMN TERRIBLE AT YOUR GM JOB, SIR, AND YOU’RE QUITE CLEARLY A GIANT SHIT HEEL!!! Are you successful? Sure, in a lot of ways, some of which are very impressive. Funny? Often, and occasionally even on purpose. Impactful? No question, as you’re a big reason why the NFL is such a money-printing monolith. But here’s your ultimate legacy, at least from my point of view: I, and many others just like me, now loathe watching the team we’ve unabashedly loved since childhood and you, Jerral Wayne Jones, Sr., are the sole reason why. Fuck you, Jerry. 

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We’ll end today with another edition of Story Time, this one about a baseball lifer that I played for a long time ago. Do enjoy, as it features a classic joke comparing the mob and cunnilingus.

Story Time: Stan 

Thanks for listening/reading. Enjoy your weekend, let’s hope the ‘Boys can get beat by less than 30 on their bye week, and don’t be an asshole.