Well well, it appears Eric Walkingshaw is no mere anonymous graduate student with an unhealthy association with numbers. In fact, Eric has a little bit of that wonderful currency, so rare and special in these modern times: close ties to a person of small fame.
Consider me awed, Mr. Walkingshaw! Here I was thinking you, like me, were a nobody, a person of unremarkable breeding and background cursed with a relatively advanced intelligence but no better for it. To toil in obscurity, your gifts going unrecognized--that was the lot for you and I. But no more! At least, in your case, anyway, what with your fancy baseball connections and all.
So it turns out Eric was childhood friends with a current minor-league baseball player. So it turns out Eric and his friends once beat this professional athlete and his friends at a game of pickup football. So it turns out that Eric, despite his current profession, closet full of board games, love for robots, and blog-happy ways, can count himself as one with the alpha males.
Well, well done, sir. I congratulate you on your promotion to the top of the pack. As I, with my brittle bones and lack of physical stamina, with my fingertips dancing delicately over the keys on my laptop, sit in this quiet room and dream not the pipe dream of athletic accomplishment, you can sit back in your Barca-lounger or La-Z-Boy or whatever comfy relaxation apparatus you might have handy and wistfully remember those bygone days, when you ran with the big boys and could beat them at their own game.
Don't think I don't know what this is all about, Walkingshaw: it's more gloating for you, a look-who-I-know-that-scummy-little-douchebag-Patrick doesn't. I see where this is all going. First it's this Minaker fellow (who, admittedly, seems like a genuinely good dude, what with his academic accomplishments and 10-point smile), next it's some Oregon native who goes on to play pro football, and then years down the line when you're rolling in your mountain of robot-love-doll-business cash, you'll casually drop me a line to remind me you're having a dinner that evening with several heads of state and the starting left back for the Parramatta Power. Fair enough. You win. That's right, you win. You are an athlete in a computer scientist's body; but with your social skills and your sheer physical determination, you will cast off the chains of intellect and mingle with only the coolest and most robust of our sex; meanwhile I will remain the faceless bag of bones that I am, whiling away the late-night hours giving serious contemplation to those phone sex ads on cable TV.
And as if that were not enough, you add salt to the wound by revealing your close kinship with Mr. Andy Stallings, a fellow man of letters whose poetic prowess is much admired by yours truly; surely he and I could be great friends indeed, uniting our pens in rebuttal to your gauche muscledom. But no! He sends baseball tidbits your way, keeping you up-to-date on all the latest in obscure record-assaulting, while ignoring me and my obscenity-laced treatises against all things Walkingshawian. He forsakes the art of the online hate blog and instead caves to your charisma and charm, no doubt aided by some kind of high-frequency signal radiating from your satellite-dish-nostrils to dull his senses and make him easier to manipulate.
Very well, Eric. Have it your way. Enjoy your status as an honorary "jock," and join in when your cohorts laugh down their noses at I and my fellow social outcasts. But don't be alarmed if you see me smiling, ever so slightly, from the corner of my little, seldom-kissed mouth; for I, too, have tricks up my sleeve. I, too, have connections--not minor-league doubles-hitting connections, but connections nonetheless, connections that may very well some day end up producing a piece of mass media that fictionalizes the rise and oh-so-glorious fall of a large-nosed, computer-literate robot fetishist, whose own hubris and predilection for all things chromatic leads him to end his life amidst the rabble of civilization, in dark alley outside let's say a baseball stadium, where his former buddies have forgotten all about him as they raise their trophies and trophy wives in celebration of some kind of ball-game victory.
Perhaps that character sounds familiar, hmm? And perhaps when this let's say Hollywood blockbuster multi-Oscar-winning film is released, you'll see a name at the bottom of the poster that rings a distant bell, that brings to mind a suburban high school and a red goatee and watching Adult Swim in someone's basement. And then you'll know whose bony hand has been working behind the scenes, whose soft, uncalloused fingers have been pulling the strings, and whose nasal voice will be breaking into a laugh as the plaudits roll in.
And if all of this isn't clear enough, let me put it another way:
My good friend Brad once worked with Justin Motherfucking Timberlake! Who's the alpha male now, bitch!?
It's me, by the way.
No comments:
Post a Comment