Written by Lars Hancock

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Last night right before bedtime, Mrs. Hancock and I got into a fight. I’m playing Words With Friends and live tweeting the NBA game from bed, as per my norm, and she’s reading her book. All is well and then she throws out there “it bothers me that you hate my home town.” Uh oh, someone wants to fight…

Now, she’s from southern California originally, near LA. This accusation is not only true, it is fundamental to my character. I hate everything about southern California. I hate the traffic, which is stupid – I’ve been in a traffic jam there at midnight on a Sunday night. I had a good friend get killed on those freeways because of stupid driving. I hate the strip mall faux culture. But mostly, I hate the people.

Southern Californians, to generalize, are artificial. There is a culture around the movie industry there, where starfucking and ego is the norm. Your fame and your wealth is your value to society, only the pretty people are relevant, and if you’re not blonde with blue eyes big tits and a Mercedes, you’re just not good enough. That culture system is an affront to every value I have and respect, and is fundamentally destructive to society and damaging to kids that buy into it.

My wife is not like that at all. She is certainly beautiful enough to “qualify” out there, and certainly had to deal a lot with that prevailing attitude as she grew up. But she, like I, does not judge people by their wealth, fitness, fame or beauty. It is who you are as a person – your kindness, the sacrifices you make for others, your selflessness… those are the qualities that matter. It is part of why I love her.

But there certainly is a deeper subtext to the fight from last night. She embraces her past – she’s a facebooker (not a serial one, but she keeps in touch with everyone she can on it). She likes to visit her home, and reminisce, and re-experience the fond memories of her youth. I, on the other hand, am not much of a backward-looking person. My upbringing wasn’t entirely fun, and I’ve retained only a few chosen friends from the past with whom I interact regularly in personal one-on-one conversations. Yes, I do enjoy reminiscing when I travel the mean streets of the east side of Cleveland, but to me that is a personal, private thing, and a past I leave behind.

So to me it’s awkward being there in a circle of friends where I’m the guy that wasn’t the guy when they were all friends back in the day. It’s like a Three Stooges flick, and I’m Shemp (except I’m much more awesome than Curly, of course). People remember Curly when they talk Stooges, and it had to be shitty for Shemp, putting aside that Shemp sucked and wasn’t hilarious, awesome, charming, good looking, and employed for booze. It’s a part of why I’m not always chipper to go there to be sure, and that gets noticed. Nothing major here, but given the choice between a trip to LA and a trip to not LA, I’ll sign up for B any day of the week. Except the week later this summer when we’re doing A, which I can maturely tolerate as a non-petty adult who loves his wife very much.

Do I put her in the same situation? Not exactly, but occasionally. One time locally we were shopping and we ran into my ex in the grocery store. We had just come from church, so we were well dressed, and the ex had just got up, so she was in sweats and unmade. Which made it awkward for her. The fact she hates me made it more awkward, especially because she told herself that I just didn’t want to commit when I dumped her, and then I introduce my three kids to her. Oops. The whole thing passed in mere seconds that felt like hours in an igloo at the North Pole.

The whole thing got me thinking of the various types of exes that one has in their life. I’ll describe them in Cleveland sports metaphors.

The Lebron: The most hated ex of them all. She’s the one you really loved, the one that you planned your future with, and then she publically dumps you. You wish her nothing but the worst – herpes, crabs, crabs that have herpes… Your dream is that her public love for her new beau winds up with him dumping her, and her being a lonely bitter old spinster.

The Delonte: This is the crazy bitch you dated and loved to hang out with, but knew it wasn’t going anywhere. You loved to party together, she was up for anything, but man, there was some bad wiring in there that scared you to death. You part ways, and still love to see her having the time of her life, and want her to get help, even though she really did screw up your life if you stop and think about it.

The Ryan Hollins: This is the girl you had a one night stand with, and you wonder why you ever hooked up with her in the morning. Later, like unfunny “comedian” Dave Coulier when he realized Alanis Morisette’s hateful song was about him, you see her make good in the world and you snicker loudly internally. Note the Ryan Hollins girl is especially awesome when she steals the boyfriend of the Lebron girl. You go girl.

The Kenny Lofton: An all-star that stole your heart who left you and came back to you multiple times, while playing for almost every team in the league in the interim. Enjoy it while it lasts, because you’ll both be moving on soon enough, and after it’s all said and done you really wonder what if you two had spent your lives together, what could you have done?

The Shelley Duncan: She’s ugly, she has no skills, and yet you’re still dating her. What are you doing? Are you that afraid of the free agent market that you’re willing to be seen in public with her? Have some self confidence man! Have some self-respect!

The Mel Turpin: You fell in love, you got married, and then she got fat, lazy, fat, and useless. You try, you put up with her as long as you can, but really, you’ve got to move on eventually. You feel empathy for her, but still disgust at how little she cared about your relationship.

The Gerard Warren: Like the Mel Turpin except she also smoked a lot of weed. And when you divorce her, she cleans up her act and makes someone else a nice wife. Which kind of makes you angry.

The Ernie Camacho: Last one, this is the girl you called late at night when you ran out of other options. She wasn’t pretty or that good at anything, but she was the best you had at the time. As your lot in life changes, you moved onto the Doug Jones (never sure what you’re getting when you call her), the Jose Mesa (not as good as she seems), the Joe Borowski (this was a bad time in your life, we’ve all been there), the Kerry Wood (emotionally fragile), and finally the Chris Perez.

Anyway, off to the questions.

Lars, werewolf or vampire? -CDT            

Werewolves have the ability develop superhuman animal strength outside of their control. While this would be useful if you wanted to become a pro sports star, the lack of reliability in transitioning to the beast, and the lack of control when you are the beast, would certainly limit your marketability. At some point, you know you’re going to wind up eating some dude’s face in Miami, which has two possible outcomes: 1) you get shot, and 2) you turn back into a human as your eating his face. Neither is good, although, if the person in Miami is a certain ex of ours who took his talents there… well, not ALL bad.

No, faced with this conundrum, you want to be a vampire. Vampires live forever, have female devotees that live forever too, all at the price for not seeing the sun ever. So you don’t have to go to LA, spend the daytime in a partially fluorescent environment surfing the web, and then party all night. Where’s the downside? Plus, you can turn into a bat, which means no more airport security. Just poof, fly wherever you want to go whenever you want to go there. Vampire in a landslide.

Note that movies about vampires suck, and movies about werewolves are much more awesome. Movies about vampires are by in large melodramatic crap, and I haven’t even seen any of the Twilight shit. Werewolf movies explore the animal/human dichotomy in a metaphorical sense that makes you think, plus, Teen Wolf! I know, Teen Wolf II, counterargument. And you have a point there. But later Jason Bateman became a much more hilarious TV presence than Michael J Fox, so we can excuse that.

Lars, why does sex always feel better the day after a night of heavy drinking? Has to be some science to that. -JCoz

After a night of drinking, your entire body hurts. Physical muscular soreness, and I’m not talking about the random UDIs (Unidentified Drinking Injuries), which are always there. No, there’s a soul-deflating muscular stiffness that starts in your stomach, beelines to your brain, and then spreads to the rest of your body like the Hiroshima bomb blast. Total destruction.

The only cure for this is to get your body to produce endorphins. There are two ways to deliver a massive whole-body endorphin rush: 1) massive pain, and 2) sex. Sure, you could go eat a few habaneros, which would cause you to puke violently and painfully while creating head-exploding agony. Or you could slam your hand in a door (which you just may well have the night before, at least you hope that’s why it is all bruised. Please, don’t let there be a police report anywhere…). But the much better alternative is to have sexual relations. While in the act, your body becomes singularly focused to the task, shutting down the headache and puke mechanisms, and at the moment of climax, endorphin rush. Which should provide you then enough clarity to get in the shower to get to McDonalds for three Egg McMuffins and hash browns to start the healing.

Now, if you really want to clear your head, you could combine the two methods of endorphin release, and hire a dominatrix for the morning. If you need one, I think I know a guy that can hook you up…

Now that Maria Sharapova got into the French Open Finals, can she finally stop choking finals and win one? –Hikohadon

Choking isn’t something to be taken lightly. It is a very real phenomenon that manifests itself like a chicken bone in your throat at exactly the wrong time. It causes you to freeze up, become mechanical. You worry about losing, and that fear manifests your every action. What if I miss what if I miss what if I miss invariably turns into miss miss miss. Trying not to lose makes you not win, that is as true for Romeo Crennel kicking field goals down by a touchdown as it is for Lebron in the 4^th quarter when he passes instead of shooting.

I know this because I’m a choker. Every team I’ve ever been a part of, from fantasy to reality, has followed one of these paths: 1) also-ran that underperformed all year, gets hot in the playoffs and reaches the finals only to implode on the big stage, or 2) dominant team throughout the season that gets a little heat in the playoffs and can’t handle it, bowing out early. You want to make me screw something up? Bet me I can’t do it. Something about the big stage screws the wiring in my brain to the point where I can’t produce. I’m a machine when I get in the zone, but the zone goes away in the crunch every time. That’s what chokers do: biologically, they’re inclined to choke.

Which brings us to Sharapova. She’s bowed out way too early in a number of tournaments in ways unbefitting her ranking. But she has three majors to her credit, and is 3-3 in major finals. She has won against the likes of Serena Williams in a Grand Slam finale, which you just cannot do as a choker. Her career has been riddled with injuries, which certainly have hampered her but by no means excuse every early tournament exit, and she certainly should have more titles to her name. But it isn’t because she is a choker, per se. Chokers always choke, and you can’t win the third set tiebreaker – ever – if you’re a choker.

Sharapova wins 6-3 6-2 tomorrow with ease. She’s the better player, and she will turn on the punishment and never look back.

Brian Windhorst is LeBron's personal scribe and bitch. He says LeBron may have had stayed in Cleveland had Mike Brown been fired before the 2009 season or so.

You think that's the truth or is it just May/June in LeBronville, where truth and accountability are skewed by his pilot fish like Mav Carter and Windhorst in order to put him in a better light? –peeker

It’s bullshit.

Lebron had been planning with his bun boy Dwayne Wade to form a “superteam” for years, well before the free agency period that led to his exit from Cleveland. That was always the goal of the 2010 offseason, and they were looking for a chump of a franchise in which they could play GM. Cleveland was never in the cards – not glamorous enough for the likes of Wade, who may actually be a bigger douchebag than Lebron. “May”.

Let’s not pretend that Lebron was anything short of acting GM when he was in Cleveland. He approved every trade, including the horrible trade that landed Antawn Jamison here. That was all his doing, and the emasculated shell of a franchise left behind was a result of his puppeteering. He ran the show, and could have whatever he wanted, even if that was just a touch short of firing the coach (a task he successfully accomplished in 2010 before he departed). So giving him that one last little bit of power (which, ironically, would probably have been the best thing he did as acting GM as Brown was, and still is, a wretched coach) would have convinced him to stay a year later? Hardly.

The timing of the quote was not coincidental. Lebron was making another excuse for losing, and sure enough, he choked away game 5 soon thereafter. He was sending a message to Pat Riley: Fire Erik Spoelstra. “He’s mean to me. He holds me accountable. HE’S the reason we’re going to lose this series.” Typical Lebron mental weakness and mental games. “If you don’t give me my way, I’m taking my toys and going home.”

And if his message helps him play victim in the whole “Decision” fiasco (which nobody is buying), hey, that’s good too. Lebron is a pathetic excuse-making whining bitch who is as trustworthy as an rattlesnake. Every word that comes out of his mouth is self-serving for his enormous ego, and attempting to manipulate people in a passive-aggressive bitch-like manner. And he wears stupid fake glasses.

Total bullshit.

Your take on Bloomberg becoming the Soda Hitler? –Schmuli

Ugh.

I’d have loved to be in the war room when this brain dead campaign was launched.

“Guys, New York is in a crisis, a crisis we’ve never seen before in history. We must act now!”

“I agree Mr. Mayor. Which crisis should we tackle first? Murders? Unemployment? Rape? The drug war? Deteriorating education quality? Degenerating morals in society? So much to choose from…”

“Yes, indeed there is. Let’s start with the most dangerous one and work our way down.”

“Murder rate then?”

“Yes, sodas it is.”

“Excuse me?”

“Soda makes you fat. If you get too much, you get fatter. We can stop obesity by limiting soda sizes”

“Um, where are the hidden cameras?”

“Stay focused, we’re at war. And high fructose corn syrup must be stopped at all costs!”

“Have you lost your fu…”

…and on it went.

There are only three ways to describe this campaign: stupid, dangerous, and illegal. It is patently stupid to think that by limiting the size of an individual soda you can fundamentally change the health of the population in order to provide a societal benefit in any remotely measurable manner. If you’re unaware that a 90 oz Mountain Dew is choked with thousands of empty calories, there is no way you are going to lead a healthy enough lifestyle to avoid being a burden on the healthcare system. And if you’re going to chug down one 128 ounce cola, you’re going to have no compulsions about chugging four 32 ounce colas instead – you’ll get your sugary crack one way or another. Pouring it in smaller cups will have exactly zero effect on consumption.

Worse, allowing the government to regulate the size of our Big Gulp opens the slippery slope for them to mandate other things as being “good for us”. What’s next, bacon? Let me tell you, if any of you douchebag empty headed stuffed suit nanny politicians tries to fuck with my bacon, I’m going after you like a crazed chimpanzee on bath salts. I will. Which brings us to illegal. The government by no means has any sort of authority to legislate health. The devastating and costly mistake of the drug trade is evidence enough that whenever the government meddles to protect us from ourselves, evil forces rise up to fill the void. There is no constitutional mandate to keep caloric consumption down, nor is there a societal mandate to do such. If you want to be fat, be fat. I don’t care, and it doesn’t make you a bad person. The government shouldn’t either.

So to answer your question, Bloomberg has lost his mind with this crap. If the checks and balances on him do not stop the legislation from becoming real, be afraid. Because we’ve just greased up the slipperiest slope of them all.

 

Please email questions to lars.hancock@yahoo.com, tweet them to @ReasonsImADrunk, or DM them to me in the forae to LarsHancock.