In a recent radio address, President Bush promoted a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriages. Even though current Federal law defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, the President said we must “counteract a few activist judges insisting on imposing their arbitrary will on the people– because we all know that’s MY job!”
Two thousand and six– what a year. Some professional football team won the Super bowl, the Democrats won a majority in both houses of Congress, and almost all of humanity was destroyed in an unexpected large-scale thermonuclear attack from a previously unknown Cylon attack force. Hold on—I might be confusing things that happened on television with stuff outside television. Now that I think about it, it was the Cylons who won the Superbowl, and the Dallas Cowboys who destroyed the twelve colonies of mankind.
In an unrelated note, I finished Netflix-ing the first two seasons of the SciFi Channel series Battlestar Galactica. On a whim I added the first DVD to my queue, and after the first twenty minutes I was hooked. I would say it is like crack to me, but I’ve never smoked crack, so something like “high fructose corn syrup” or “partially hydrogenated oils” would be more appropriate to my situation. What’s so great about Battlestar Galactica? (or, as we in the business like to say, BSG) Sure, I’ve always been a Science Fiction geek, but this series is so much more than I expected. I like to think of it as Star Trek with a healthy dose of nuclear annihilation, drug abuse, and (best of all) hot human/Cylon threesome sexual encounters. That, and they aren’t afraid to kill off main characters on a regular basis. Who is going to get thrown out of an airlock this week? Stay tuned!
In more reality based news, I’m still working as a driver at UPS. One of the highlights of the year was delivering a package near the Colorado State University campus and receiving, at no charge, a song sung to me by the entire tri-delta sorority. I don’t remember all the words, but it sounded like a cross between the theme song to “Friends” and that creepy song they force the wait staff sing when you tell them it is your birthday at Bennigans. When the song ended they asked, no, begged me to stay and referee their impromptu sorority wide pajama-clad pillow fight. Before I could answer, however, Sir Gallant and King Arthur broke down the door and dragged me rather unwillingly back to my UPS truck—thus saving me from certain temptation.
With the exception of the entire tri-delta sorority, I seem to have a new woman in my life. Katherine started out as my Kinetics craft assistant, but her ability to deal with my lunatic ravings quickly led to a promotion. This, by any measure, is not an easy task. Our relationship is quite similar to that of Doctor Who and his latest sidekick Rose Tyler. The only difference is that Katherine isn’t blond and doesn’t speak with much of an English accent, and my time-traveling tardus currently lacks any time traveling abilities and is constructed chiefly from a port-o-let acquired from a nearby construction site.
Since Katherine and I both seem to have an unexplained attraction towards shiny objects, we decided to go visit Las Vegas for a week in November. Outside most casinos are elaborate setups specifically designed to capture the attention of nearby pedestrians. If you are able to get past this small army of scruffy looking middle-age men trying to sell time share vacation plans and discounts to various strip clubs, the actual casinos themselves often times have their own form of visual stimulation designed to lure people inside their establishments. Treasure Island has one of the most well known setups on the strip.
Based on a true story (as told by someone on an acid/Viagra trip), things start out with a raggedy, sassy band of exotic dancers who eek out a living on a large sailing ship by plundering passing ships of their Victoria’s Secrets cargo. In their spare time, just like any other pirates of the sea, of course, they dance and sing highly choreographed musical numbers. Neighboring pirate groups know them as simply armed, arrogant, and argumentative, or in pirate talk, “the three Arrrs.” Trouble erupts, however, when they come across a ship of raggedy, sassy exotic male dancers who don’t want any trouble as they are merely on their way to a friend’s nearby houseboat to attend their annual gay pirate party costume party. One thing leads to another, and eventually the matter is settled with a traditional “pirate dance off.” Loud music plays, hips are thrusts in perfect sync, and cannons are discharged until only one boat is left floating.
That about sums things up for this year. So, to anyone planning on visiting remember the saying, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas—especially the dead hooker in the trunk of the rental car.”
My name is Omar Lutfey, and I recently lost my Kinetics virginity. Don’t bother looking for it under the sofa cushions or behind the mint Oreo ice cream in the freezer. I don’t know exactly what happened, but after May 5, 2006, it disappeared forever. Countless readers have been asking, no, demanding, that I document, in excessive and possibly accurate detail, what exactly happened at my virgin Kinetics experience. I spent months preparing for the event. I wanted every little detail to be perfect. Sure, I didn’t really know what I was doing—watching other people do it from a distance just isn’t the same. When the moment of truth came I took a deep breath, lunged in, and just did whatever felt natural. Ten seconds later I was finished—exhilarated, soaking wet, and surrounded by broken PVC pipe and camouflage painted Styrofoam blocks. Welcome to Kinetics.
On the rare moments when I’m not repressing my virgin experience, I ponder what kind of advice I would give to future Kinetics virgins. First of all, remember that old phrase about planning and failing. As a kid I never had time to remember it all the way through, but the point is this: if you enter the Kinetics race and your craft falls apart after 10 feet in the water, you immediately win the respect of the possibly psychologically irregular man on the beach dressed up in a wizard outfit and twenty other people you’ve never met before wearing matching lederhosen and pointy ears. That’s just one of those things money can’t buy. However, it did get my team the “What Were They Thinking” award AND one hundred dollars of food at Illegal Pete’s. Handing out football sized burritos to my teammates was a small, yet symbolic, gesture of thanks for their time, hard work, and loss of all personal dignity. (More on the parade sketch later)
OK, so maybe building a Kinetics craft isn’t so easy after all. Maybe I just didn’t know what I was doing. Maybe three-quarter inch PVC pipe is not designed to function as a structural element of the craft. All I know is that I’m not some kind of wizard. And just because the real wizard told me all of this a week before the race doesn’t mean anything. He doesn’t, however, know my secret plan to come back next year with my REAL craft, finish the race in record time, win every possible award, and take advantage of the situation to enslave humanity– unless, of course, he is reading this.
So what am I doing here? Living out my glory days? Taking cheap shots at the wizard because my craft fell apart? Well, yes and yes, but I also live in a world full of Kinetics virgins. I relate my situation to one of the characters of a relatively unknown low budget science fiction movie:
Trinity: I know why you’re here, INSERT YOUR NAME HERE. I know what you’ve been doing… why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night, you sit by your computer. You’re looking for him. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn’t really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It’s the question that drives us, Neo. It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did.
Neo: What is the KBCO Boulder Kinetics Race?
Trinity: The answer is out there, and it’s looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to.
So, for all the virgins out there who don’t know what they are missing, I have completed Version 1.0 of “The Virgin Kinetics Handbook: Are you too normal?” So read through it, and decide if you are ready for the experience that will change your life. As one large, bald, black man wearing broken sunglasses told me while I was sitting on my couch the other night, “I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.”