Because sometimes things are pretty funny. The video below, though funny, does not represent the views or opinions of any writers, thinkers or editors of the blog.
I wrote and performed the listed song in around 1998 but as it turns out I'm not talented, so I sold the the rights to some English lady. When you get right down to it, the preceding sentence pretty much sums up my life.
You awake after five hours of inglorious sleep to the smell of bacon.
M: "It's like God put a little piece of heaven right inside a pig, and he's given us the ability to cut it right out and eat it."
S: Theology isn't always your strong suit.
Because you have brought flags and a strangely child-sized football, you spend the morning complaining about the fact that you won't be playing football that day. Sometime before noon, breaking a rule I might add, you start drinking rum. By two o'clock you've won several games of pool and downed a solid portion of the Captain's drink. Your friends are playing a game of Scrabble. Secretly you've always known them to be nerds. For a while you toss the football back and forth in the house over lamps and through rafters, in just the sort of way that gives every mom nightmares. In fact, that's one of the first memories you have of your spouse, her telling you and your friends to stop tossing the football in the quad. Clearly, she didn't know how accurate you were with a football. Eventually you convince a couple of your friends to go outside and toss around the football. On one of your first throws you want to prove that you've still got it so you zing a tight spiral twenty yards to your friend. It is at this point that you begin to suspect that you might have torn your right labrum as well. You gun a few more across the cement to prove your worth before retiring inside with an aching shoulder and elbow. Someone else is going to have to play football with your kids.
By two o'clock most everyone is playing poker, so you take a nap. It is a point of pride that with you that you don't play poker. You don't even know the rules. Playing poker is like learning about drill bits or how to cook a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, something you'd rather not know. You sleep for a couple of hours then call various people in your family and talk to them about work.
Outside, a few evergreens cast long shadows across the street. Without even walking outside you can tell that the air is crisp. If you had to live life over again, you're fairly certain that you'd sleep more. By four o'clock everyone is done playing poker and you have the run of the house to yourself. For a while, people climb on rafters like monkeys for no explicable reason. You start to climb up but then climb back down because you're going to be a father soon and safety is no accident.
In the early evening you drink some more rum and coke. By this time the booze has no palpable effect on your body, but it appears to be in the process of burning a whole in your esophagus. Some time passes in which really nothing much happens. Eventually everyone heads down to the casino and you watch a couple of your friends play craps and blackjack and secretly wish you had way more money, so you could partake as well. However, you're going to be a father soon and financial safety is no accident. It is at this point that you burp and discover that the hole burnt into your esophagus from the rum and coke has created something akin to the sulfur smell when Old Glory erupts. Your friend, who is well on his way to becoming a doctor, cowers away in fear.
At the blackjack table some people win money and some people lose money. We debate the merits of telling wives about substantial financial loss via text or phone. It is decided that the best method is just to exaggerate the cost of the lodging to make the gambling losses seem smaller. Really, it's why you've always liked being friends with smart people, great ideas like that. At the craps table a couple of your friends win money while occasionally heckling poor rollers. The whole process looks like a hell of a lot of fun if you're winning money.
At the end of the day, you don't have some scathing critique of the casino, you only slightly think something like "no wonder they hate freedom; it gives you slot machines." Later on someone receives a return text from a wife saying something along the lines of, "It doesn't matter how much you lose, I'll still love you." You're pretty certain that no such text would be headed your way if you had done more than pay the 4.50 withdrawal fee to take out forty bucks that you didn't gamble. Casinos are strange but so are human beings.
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