Adventures in Awful: The Introduction

Post written by Pete Strub.

On Sunday night, Kanye West stole the microphone from Taylor Swift’s hands at the Video Music Awards to tell the world that he thought her to be an unworthy winner. That is awful.

On Monday night, the Buffalo Bills outplayed the New England Patriots for 58 minutes before fumbling the ball on their own thirty yard line, effectively tying a big bow around the game and handing it to the Patriots. That is awful.

On Monday night, I fooled myself into believing that it would be different for the Bills this time; I fooled myself into thinking they had changed, and they wouldn’t let me down this time, like an abusive relationship. That is awful.

This summer in the Adirondacks I was walking back to my cabin and somehow dropped my keys, and my wedding ring which, for safety’s sake, was attached to my key chain – brilliant, I know. The Adirondacks aren’t a very easy place to locate a set of lost keys, so, needless to say, I never found them. That is awful.

Every Thursday, this is what I want to offer you – a whole big bunch of awful. Why? Because awful is fascinating, awful is funny, and when it’s somebody else, awful is even hysterical, but most of all, awful shows us the truth. Maybe I’m a bit of a sadist, but I am absolutely fascinated by the terrible things in our world, by the foolish and cruel things people do and by the stupid things I do. I think most of us share some of this fascination, and part of the reason is that seeing these snapshots of what life shouldn’t be allows us to see a little more truth about the way life should be. To whet your appetite, let’s take a little look at the four examples of awful listed above. By the time I’m done revealing my brilliant insights, you’ll be drooling in anticipation for next Thursday; I know it.

Example 1 – Kanye West steals the microphone from Taylor Swift. And what lesson can we learn here? Don’t trust short people. Yeah, you heard me. Kanye is supposedly 5’8”, but I don’t think he’s even that tall and I’m pretty sure he has a serious Napoleon complex. Seriously, why else would a guy who made forty-two million in 2008 (Billboard’s Moneymakers List) need to steal a microphone from a teenage girl and insult her in front of the world? So, next time you find yourself around a short person, guard your microphones carefully; they are not to be trusted. As for all of you short people reading this, your secret is out: we’re watching.

Example 2 – The Buffalo Bills blow their lead against the New England Patriots. Lesson? It takes something extra to be a winner in this world. Yes, that sounds like cheesy, inspirational blather, but it’s true and I can’t get over it after watching that game Monday night (if you’re not a football fan, sorry – you should work on that). When there were five minutes left in the game, the Bills were up by eleven points. In other words, the game was theirs. There is no way a team should lose a football game when they are up eleven points with only five minutes left, yet there was this little whisper in my head. Don’t trust them. It’s not over. And it wasn’t. One of the worst parts about the loss is that there was a part of me that knew it would happen because the Bills don’t have that something extra that winners have. They are like that nice kid in high school who gets cut from the team, can’t quite make the honor roll, doesn’t get accepted into his first choice college, and watches the girl he has a crush on go out with the school jock. The Patriots? They are that school jock. They get the girl, the college, and earn honors the whole way through. Can a team or a person develop this something extra? I think they can. I hope they can. In the case of the Bills, they better be able to or else every fall of my life will be a case study in the effects of slow torture.

Example 3 – I keep coming back to the Bills even though they always let me down. Lesson? I bet you think I should say something about ditching the losers, but I won’t. Like I said, I keep coming back. Loyalty is seriously underrated in our hyper-ADD, get-it-your-way world, and maybe if we had a little more loyalty we wouldn’t have a 50% divorce rate. When the Bills lose an awful game like this, it reminds me that loyalty is tough, but there is something strong and good and beautiful about loyalty, whether it is a husband who sticks by his wife through thick and thin or an obese man at a football stadium with body paint on his chest in 15 degree weather.

Example 4 – I lose my keys and wedding ring in the Adirondacks. From this incident my friends, there are two very simple lessons. The safest place for your wedding ring is on your finger, and I should never be trusted with holding onto or remembering anything. I have lost two wallets, two cell phones, my social security card, and have forgotten everything from returning phone calls (happens very regularly) to forgetting to complete my graduate school application (and thereby not being accepted into grad. school).

See how great this is? We can all learn from awful and in the weeks to come I’ll have plenty more for you.

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