Resolutions

I don’t know why I didn’t do this, but I didn’t make any resolutions for 2006. Maybe I was just feeling lazy around resolution time or felt that I had accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish in life, but what sucks is that I can’t now tell you how spectacularly I failed at keeping those 2006 resolutions.

2006 was, on the whole, a pretty solid year. There were some sucky parts. Like how 2006 was an abominable year for me and women. Good lord. There were, of course, some exceptions, some lovely ladies and lovely times, but pretty much it was a disaster wire-to-wire. I don’t think my sex life is sophisticated enough to use the word travesty to describe it - even in the nightmare that was 2006 - so let’s instead go with the more appropriate shit show. Terrible, just fucking terrible.

(And I’m still not even close to getting that threesome, which is a resolution for every year. I’ve been hoping for this for about fifteen years now, so maybe I should replace my yearly "Have a threesome" resolution with something more attainable like, "Stop masturbating into my laundry.")

(Actually, that’s not attainable at all. I’ll think of something else.)

For 2007, I will, however, make some resolutions. But we’re going to keep them simple and reasonable.

2007 Resolution #1: Spend the year training in order to become the World’s Strongest Man in 2008
I’ve been traveling so much over the past few weeks that my concept of time is warped (this weekend will be my first real one at home in NJ since before Thanksgiving), but once recently while in Queens, sitting on the couch next to my friend, who was smoking two cigarettes at once, we were watching the World’s Strongest Man competition. Specifically, we were watching an event in which the competitors were on some tropical beach and had 90 seconds to throw ten 60 lb. kegs behind their back and over their heads over a 15 foot banner, which looked like a steel volleyball net.

The first thing to note about this event was that it was totally awesome. The second to note is that for whatever reason I really, really want to do it. I realize that it’s not exactly practical - the odds of me walking along the beach and coming upon some barrels that need to be thrown in the air are even worse than me being shirtless on a beach (what am I doing on the beach in the first place? did I get lost? shipwrecked?) - but there is something comforting to know that if something like that did happen, I could toss those kegs in no time. I feel like this would help me sleep better at night.

But sitting on that couch, the smoke from my friend’s cigarettes clouding the view of the TV and the muscle guys, I felt reinvigorated (and not at all in a gay way - I don’t think). Since just after the New Year, I’ve gotten up at 7am each morning to do my sit-ups, then run a mile, then hit the weights. And yes, of course, I’m lying. Doing this has been my intention, but my first day at the gym I pulled so many muscles in my back and arms that I couldn’t wipe my ass properly for three days. I was pooping at work when I first realized the damage I had done and was this close to jumping out of the stall and sticking my ass in a urinal, hoping that a flush would clean me up proper. Unfortunately, someone then walked into the bathroom and so I couldn’t go through with my plan. I spent the next few days staying away from people at work and going through a lot of cologne.

Yet I remain determined. I’ve gone twice this week and am getting the hang of it. I realize it’s only a matter of time before I due some serious damage to myself while doing this, but my hope is that by the time I hurt myself so badly that I can never have sex missionary-style again I will have at least put on enough muscle to qualify for the 2008 World’s Strongest Man competition. Wish me luck.

Resolution #2: Learn the dance in "Saturday Night Fever"/Meet Elisha Cuthbert/Become Engaged to Elisha Cuthbert
I went to a high school with a guy who looked like a cross between the kid in "Mask" and some throw up with hot dogs in it.

(God, that’s horrible. He was a really nice guy and not even that bad looking and now he’s going to punch me in the face when I see him next. Great.)

But the point is he was a visionary and a lady killer. Why? Because at every high school mixer (a "mixer" is a dance held by my all-boys high school attended by lots of girls from the all-girls schools), he could dance like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

And the ladies were all over it. Actually, to say they were "all over it" does not do justice to how much this guy’s dance worked - they were drawn to him, almost involuntarily. At every single dance he’d make out with an attractive girl, all because of the dance. Hell, even the guys were kinda mesmerized. And I do mean that in a gay way.

Because I don’t have an original bone in my body and because I (sadly) believe that sexual dynamics have not changed much since high school, I’m going to learn this dance. I’m a pretty good dancer for my size/paleness, but you don’t even have to have the dance down perfectly - just the fact that you’re doing it is impressive enough. And if you watch it, the first minute and a half or so seems pretty easy - it’s the whole getting down on the floor part that might give me some trouble. But I’m confident, because I’m doing this for the right reasons: to court Elisha Cuthbert.

There are many things about me that deserve pitying - the downright unfair amount of body hair I’ve been cursed with, how I’m 100% positive that woman are incapable of having orgasms (it’s a total myth), the whole "penis like a light switch" thing I have going on - but none more so than the fact that I genuinely believe that I have a 50/50 chance of marrying Elisha Cuthbert. Yes, I know this is how Dateline NBC documentaries start (ending of course with me giving a jailhouse interview with tears in my eyes, delirious, screaming, "I loved her! We loved with a love that was more than love! That’s from a poem! Look it up!"), but if you think about it, my life has been nothing but a series of tremendously fortuitous developments over the past few years. Let’s face it: I have no discernable or valuable talent except comparing my penis to tiny everyday objects (I was going to go with "hershey kiss" above but "light switch" felt better) and writing really long sentences, and something I used to procrastinate at work magically turned into a multi-million dollar empire (lie), garnering me thousands of "fans" (bigger lie) and a variety of exotic and capable lovers (sadly, biggest lie of all).

The point is that all of this is building toward something. Of course, the smart money is that it’s building toward something terrible (death in a hotel fire seems to be getting the best odds), but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s building toward something Greatest of All, like, for example, marrying a very attractive Hollywood starlet who probably smells like cinnamon and sunflowers. Or maybe it’s somewhere in the middle (Elisha Cuthbert and I date for awhile and it’s totally awesome but then I lose my arms in a hotel fire and she breaks up with me). Who knows.

But while I consider myself highly fatalistic, I do believe that people have some control over their destinies. This is why I’m learning the dance. Let me explain.

Every year, I get invited to one "Hollywood" party thrown by some friends at an agency in NYC at a big club around the time of the upfronts (in May). Young celebrities go there for the free booze and the networking. And while I’ve never seen Elisha Cuthbert there (I’ve seen hot young stars of similar caliber), I’m going to rely on Fate to bring her to the forthcoming one this May. Because, well, why not?

The plan then is simple: memorize the dance, go to the party, do the dance and impress everyone in the room - including one Elisha Cuthbert. Afterward, everyone will be coming up to me, congratulating on my moves, asking me where I learned to dance like that, saying "Who are you, again?" I’ll then walk up to the bar and order a stiff drink like an Appletini, and over my shoulder I’ll hear a woman’s voice say, "It takes a real man to drink a green drink." I’ll turn around and Elisha will be there, standing before me. Unflappable, I’ll say something smooth like, "It takes a real man to do a lot of things." And then she’ll say, "That doesn’t really make a lot of sense." And then I’ll say, "I know - I was just testing you." From that point forward, we will be inseparable.

At some point in 2007, we will be engaged. I will propose to Elisha at a zoo, because on one of our first dates I will be bitten by a monkey, losing a third of my calf muscle. This will happen not a zoo but on the streets of San Bernardino. But that scene would be impossible to recreate for the proposal, so we’ll have to settle for caged monkeys.

The actual wedding won’t take place until 2008. We will be married outside in a garden of sunflowers. My friend Dan will give the best man toast and later burn my groomsman Michael in the face with a cigarette in a fight over some scallops. Our wedding song will be "If I Were a Carpenter" by the Four Tops, which symbolizes how I have little to offer Elisha accept my heart and my hands, my creepy, creepy hands, which I will use to build us a home, or at least a room in a pre-built home, where she and I can drink hot chocolate and watch movies, or, if she finds the room too stuffy, where I can raise my monkeys and keep some trinkets. It’ll probably be a rather poorly built room, so maybe it’s exactly fit for monkeys, but we’ll see. Really, this is all for 2008, not 2007.

(Oh, and if you’re reading this and you work in the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, you can probably print this out now and put a "Prosecution Exhibit 1" sticker on it. Conversely, if this doesn’t qualify as "mental illness," then I really don’t know what does. I really don’t know what does.)

But really, that’s it. If my 2007 is half as good as 2006, I’ll be very happy (except in the woman department - need to step that up). In the meantime, I’m going to hit the weights and pick up the "Saturday Night Fever" DVD. I’ll update you on my progress. And if you’re in a bar in NJ and see some chubby guy dancing like it’s 1979 on the dancefloor, come up and say hi.

(Not during the dance, but after. Please don’t break my concentration. Otherwise, I might hurt myself.)