The whole of one's adult life is spent suppressing and/or coping with the damage done during childhood. Never think otherwise.

To tell the truth, it isn’t the easiest job coming up up with good ideas for this site. Episodes of my radio show fill some of the gaps, and the NFL (which I’ll be losing after the Super Bowl) eats a few pages, but, by and large, I’m pulling these topics out of my ass five minutes before I write about them. Which is why I was so happy when, a few nights ago, I woke up with a jolt, my mind filled with the words “share your childhood shame” as clearly as if I were reading them on the side of a blimp. So, for the next few days, enjoy a collection of the memories that scarred me for life and turned me into the “man” I am today.

Thank God my dad never watched the ending of Boogie Nights, because it might have inspired him to do a riff on the knife scene from 'Crocodile' Dundee. (Click the picture if you aren't acquainted with that cinema treasure.)

I shouldn’t list this as a singular memory, because my dad was a fresh-off-the-boat European, meaning seeing him strutting around in the nude after a shower was par for the course until I was 10. Also, the word “cock” has something of an erect connotation, and, believe me, if I’d ever beheld my dad’s penis erect, I would be in some asylum clawing out my eyes and speaking in tongues, not typing this.

So why, other than the obvious, was seeing my dad’s hog traumatic for me? Because it was massive. I have no issues with my dong. It is a run-of-the-mill, porridge-that-Goldilocks-choose average cock. But compared to the my dad’s flaccid penis, my erection is a pimple. The majesty, the goddamn splendor of that construct defied words. That he routinely gutted my mother with that harpoon is something I still refuse to process.

To top it all off, until I was 14 and got AOL, the only penises I’d seen were that of my father and a shot of John Holmes on a Swedish Erotica reel-to-reel that I found in the garage. I spent my adolescence convinced that everyone was hung down to their knee and that I had an 8″ penile growth spurt lurking around the corner. My innocence died the day I realized it wasn’t going to happen. In time, I may go on in life to become as great a man as my father (no I won’t). But there’s one department I will never equal or surpass him in. And it’s a big one.

It was like this, except I wasn't as cute and the pants were far more full.

Like bearing witness to Papa Papageorgiou’s anteater, I’ve weathered this storm more than once. Thankfully, the second time took place when I was 19 and I found it hilarious, not haunting. That first time, however…that was a horse of a different color.

I remember it like it was yesterday. May, 1989. Second grade. Dressed in a dayglo Gotcha shirt, OP shorts and red Converse All Stars. Lunch had just wrapped up and, as we began solving mathematical word problems, it dawned on me that I had to take a monster dump. This wasn’t turtle head scenario, either: I immediately recognized that some very loose, incredibly runny barbarians were at the gate. It felt like the T-1000 was trying to melt out of my asshole.

The devil is in the details, however. You see…I’d never shat at school. Not once, and I didn’t plan on starting then. The thought of my pristine ass touching the same seat that my classmates had rested their scummy cheeks upon disgusted me. Besides, it was only two hours until I could go home and shit in peace. No matter how uncomfortable it was going to get, I decided I was going to hold it. And hold it I did. For 47 seconds.

Every public bathroom looks like this to me.

Come the 48 second mark, my pants began to fill with hot brown lava. The ass and crotch of my whitey-tighties bulged with the volume of a shit that Andre the Giant would have been proud to take. I sat there, mortified, unable to move for fear that my payload would splatter onto the carpet the instant I stood up. My mind froze. I grasped for an exit strategy. What’s worse, one by one, the kids in the class all began chirping “What’s that smell?” to our teacher, Mrs. Levy.

It was that day that I learned a valuable lesson: When in trouble, lie. Lie and deny. If I got up and excused myself, I was a dead man. So I stayed put, joking about the mysterious, awful smell with my classmates and sitting in my filth for hours. When people began to realize I was the source of stench, I claimed it was due to dog shit I had stepped in and left it at that.

The instant my school day was over, I sprinted for the door, waves of relief crashing over me as I realized that, somehow, my Fruit of the Loom were either holding in my smelly shame or had, by this time, absorbed it like one of those massive sponges the lunch lady cleaned the cafeteria tables with. My mom, angel that she is, treated me like a war hero as I tearfully told my story to her upon entering the car. We went home and I soaked my in the tub for hours, sobbing like a rape victim. If there’s a Freudian reason for why I find poop and farts so funny, you just read it.

More to come later this week.

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Note: You can click any of the song titles to download the .mp3 directly via Amazon. Because me shilling like a Jew when writing about Christmas songs is deliciously ironic.

I’m a huge fan of Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” because I can’t remember a Christmas without hearing the song. I don’t care one bit about Bing, though he allegedly smoked weed by the pound and beat the ever-loving shit out of his fat son Gary whenever the kid gained an ounce, both of which are admirable qualities. The song remains a favorite because, the older you get, the more pleasure you derive from your earliest memories, no matter how awful they might be. With enough time, even a repressed memory of a mall Santa fingering your ass would go down like a cold beer on a hot day.

I love this song because it reminds me of getting head. From a woman. I felt I should clarify that. Back in college, I had a girlfriend who opted to spend a week of her Christmas break with me. The girl was awesome in a lot of ways, but most important was that she lived to go down. I’m talking zero cajoling on my part. Not even a raised eyebrow. Just, “Hey, I’m bored, let me blow you.”

“Last Christmas” enters the picture because the girl in question was obsessed with the song and would sing it non-stop every time her mouth wasn’t full of my dick. It wasn’t literally “Last *gulp* Christmas *gulp* I gave you my heart *gulp gulp*” bad, but pretty close. And, as Pavlov proved, you can condition a physical response via an unrelated stimulus, which is why, every time I hear the first lines of “Last Christmas,” I pop a rager. True story.

“Christmas in Hollis” is another song I heard at a very young age that stuck with me. Everyone enjoys this song, even my mother, and she hates rap of any sort. A note to black people: Ever since this song came out, all white people believe that your Christmas dinners consist of nothing but chicken, collard greens, rice, stuffing and macaroni and cheese. I suppose that’d be a problem if it weren’t the truth.

I really don’t need to explain why The Ramones wound up on this list because they were amazing, but here goes: This song captures what actually goes down during one of my family Christmases. We’re a bunch of temperamental Greeks who scream at each other whenever we interact. Toss in the stress of cooking, buying presents and several mandatory hours together and you can see why the success of each of Christmas is measured in how long it took for the inevitable meltdown to arrive.

Elvis was the best. He was the first rock star, and a Southern rock star at that, meaning it’d take a mind like Bobby Fischer to truly comprehend the quality of the ass he slew. Guys like Robert Plant and Jimi Hendrix were skunking the same ungroomed hippie pussy that was being tossed around like a Frisbee while Elvis was wiping off his shaft in Ann-Margret’s hair. What does all this have to do with “Blue Christmas”? Absolutely nothing. I just want you to remember this Christmas that there’s only one true King, and he wasn’t born in a manger.

There is so much about this song that I loathe that it’s difficult even picking a place to begin. The cunty whispers at the beginning. The obnoxious use of a children’s chorus. The fact that John Lennon had the balls to tell anyone how to live their life when he abandoned his first wife and his non- ^_^ -eyed son, Julian like lumps of shit in a dog park.

It’s the condescension present in the refrain of “War is over/If you want it” that gets to me the most, though. You know what, asshole? No one likes war. You aren’t some heady genius for standing against it. Sometimes, though, as much as everyone hates something, it becomes a reality. Just look at the WNBA. The next time you want to make a statement by sliding the stem of a flower down the barrel of a gun, how about you jam it up your cockhole instead? At least that’s amusing. I only regret that Mark David Chapman didn’t get into you sooner.

How I dress for all of my fast food reviews.

So, just how much did my Triple Steak Stack look like this in real life? Read on and find out! (Unless I forget to address that question, in which case, I apologize for that and so very much else.)

The photo might be fake, but the truth of what your average Steak-umms eater looks like couldn't be more real.

I’m giving the Triple Steak Stack two-out-of-four clogged arteries. At $4.99, it was a pretty crappy deal, barely 50% of the size of a footlong Subway sub with which it shares a price tag. Taco Bell’s entire allure is being able to walk away with four lbs. of food for under a dollar. If I’m going to cough up the big bucks (yet, ladies, I really just referred to $5 as “big bucks”. Rawr), I’m going to want a little more on my return than an oily dough-pocket of beef that’s so low-grade you can almost taste the awful living conditions of the cow that produced it. Plus the farts it causes are every bit as bad as you’d expect. You may never read these words ever again, so savor them well: Taco Bell, I expected more from you.

Last Thursday, I punched out the first half of my list of the ten greatest guy movies, promising the top five the next day. Since I operate on CPT, that was code for a week later. Here, at last, are numbers five through one.

Lorraine Bracco, moments before gnawing off Ray Liotta's face in a cocaine-fuelled frenzy. It was in the director's cut.

Some people might say it’s hard to make a case for Goodfellas as a guy movie because you could call it a love story…if you wanted to miss the point entirely and sound like a jackass. I mean The Shining featured Jack Nicholson going on a vacation with his wife and kid; I still wouldn’t call it a family-friendly romp.

Goodfellas was the first film I watched with my mom where it became abundantly clear that her limitations as a female prevented her from enjoying certain awesome movies. Before the barrel cooled on Joe Pesci’s gun, the video was being shoved back in the rental box as my mother bemoaned the movie as a overrated and far too violent, which shocked me because, up until then, my mom and I always agreed on films and I thought Goodfellas kinda rocked. It wasn’t until years later I figured out that the ovaries taking up 50% of her cranial capacity were interfering with her brain’s ability to process the film’s awesomeness. While I may have failed Anatomy that year, I aced Guy Movies 101.

Moment girls leave-When Morrie gets that icepick through his brain stem. Women see that scene and wretch. Guys laugh because Joe Pesci insulting Frankie Carbone is hilarious, even more so with a corpse evacuating itself right next to them.

James Caan's hairy back and shoulder and Abe Vigoda's face. Sorry this photo didn't come with a warning that you'd have to fan your crotches off after gazing upon it, ladies.

The Godfather is a slightly questionable choice as a guy movie because almost everyone, male or female, has watched it. It isn’t until you ask around and learn that four out of five women (especially your mother) watched the film to get out of going down on their significant other that its selection starts to make sense. The joke’s on the guy who forsook head, though: Watching The Godfather with a girl is three hours of hearing about how Kay’s a great wife, Michael’s an uncommunicative prick and that Apollonia (that’s a NSFW link to her non-nippled Barbie boobs) deserved to get blown up for being his slutty side-piece.

Moment girls leave-When Moe Greene gets popped through the glasses.

Does everyone else find it easier to picture Sigourney Weaver with a penis, or is that just my weird thing?

Aliens is a love letter to everything I was obsessed with as a kid. A plucky team of space marines? Check. Futuristic weaponry? Check. Monsters that combine “cool-looking” and “frightening” so well that they induce pants-shitting awe? Check. Sometimes I think that James Cameron’s focus group for the film was a class of fourth grade boys. “Yeah, I guess the plot is okay, but can you make Hudson say more cool things? Sweet. Oh, and I want a robot. And I want the robot to die. And, when he dies, I want him to puke milk like I did in the lunchroom. No boobs, though. Those are gross.”

Moment girls leave-The initial space marine massacre that kills half the characters they’d just spent an hour growing to love.

Conservative estimates place the number of times I've recited this scene's dialog at 4,236.

*The real number two guy movie of all time is Predator. But I’m sick of writing about it. I’ve written about it here. And here. And here. (Okay, that last one was a link to hilarious moments from To Catch a Predator, but items always sound best listed in threes.) So, instead, you’re getting Full Metal Jacket. And that’s fine, because FMJ deserves to be on the damn list. The movie made such an impression on a teenaged John Papageorgiou that I held a cassette recorder to my TV to capture R. Lee Ermy’s opening monologue so I could then listen to it on my Walkman as I paced the halls of my high school. Two weeks later, every guy in every one of my classes was reciting the film scene by scene with me whenever we got a chance. Were we viewed as hot commodities as prom dates that year? You betcha!

Moment girls leave-The blanket party.

One look at this photo and I know I made the right choice.

Here it is. Heat. The greatest guy movie ever made. I’ve never met a man that didn’t speak of the film in reverent, hushed tones. Asking a guy what he thinks about Heat is akin to asking him “Do you like breasts?”: He’s going to look at you cockeyed for a moment, then bury a pickaxe through your forehead, because you were either an alien or a Russian spy and, in order to be safe, you had to go.

Conversely, it’s easier to grow bacterial colonies in a Petri dish full of rubbing alcohol than it is to get a girl through a viewing of Heat. If The Godfather is a movie that portrays women as dopey and superfluous, then Heat presents them as actively ruinous, existing only to complicate a man’s life as he seeks to give it real meaning by battling his arch-nemesis, a person who understands him more than any lady could. Heat is the ultimate guy movie, and it taught me more about being a man than school, the Cub Scouts and all of my years of youth sports combined. Thank you, Heat. Thank you.

Moment girls leave-THE OPENING CREDITS.

Now that I’m done, what would your top ten list be? Leave a comment, Tweet it to me or leave a message on Facebook. Just make sure to do it somewhere I can publicly scold you for being incorrect.

Danny Rouhier of 106.7 The Fan fame, seen wearing a 'Natinals' shirt and eating two pieces of pizza smashed together cheese-to-cheese. Both of these behaviors = very manly.

The other day, while dorking around the studio with the gifted Danny Rouhier (pictured above showing you that we at the sports station take our fitness very seriously), a segment topic came up that captivated me: “The top five guy films of all time.” Several callers phoned in with titles like Rudy and American History X which, while fine films, I felt weren’t guy movies, at least not in the classical sense. To me, a guy movie is a flick that, for its duration, any woman who is watching it is bored to tears and totally unable to grasp how your brain even functions in order to derive pleasure from such fare. Picture being taken to Sex and the City but in reverse. So, using that criteria, I present to you the top ten guy movies (as well as the moment in each that they cause any woman pretending to enjoy them to walk out of the room shaking her head).

Seeing this makes me want to decapitate someone. And we all know decapitation is manly.

Conan (the awesome original, not that unforgivable abortion of a 3-D remake), is a movie so manly that my friends and I still play its theme song in the gym for performance enhancement. It’s also how I learned of the awesome female-repelling power of a true guy movie. As a kid, I watched Conan the Barbarian on TBS or USA with my dad roughly 5,000 times. And in the beginning, I was curious why we were watching it over and over. And over. And over. Then it dawned on me that, each time we did, my mom left us alone for the entire damn movie. If humans had more sensitive noses, I suppose he and I could have urinated all over the hallway leading to the living room to mark our territory and achieved similar results, but we don’t, so we didn’t. And, to be honest, I still think Conan would do the job better.

Moment girls leave-When Conan properly answers the question “What is best in life?”

Robert DeNiro's about to put an equal amount of blueberries inside Sharon Stone's muffin.

I’m not sure if women hate Casino more because it’s a violent story about men kicking ass or because Sharon Stone plays the most treacherous slut to ever slut, but make no mistake, hate it they do. It’s their loss, too, because Casino, while unfairly viewed by some as Goodfellas‘ less-accomplished little brother, is a monster of a film, rife with three hours’ worth of amazing quotes. To this day, whenever one of my Jewish friends asks me to repeat or clarify something, I reply by telling them to “Get this through your head you Jew motherfucker, you.” I don’t have many Jewish friends anymore.

Moment girls leave-When Joe Pesci gets head in a car while explaining to the dancer fellating him that his restaurant’s veal is the best in Vegas.

I guess this photo is a bit of a spoiler. Yep, everyone dies in the end. Surprise!

300 is a flick that a lot of girls claim to like because, “Tee hee, it has eye candy!,” but I think they’re basing that opinion upon promotional posters and that commercial where Leonidas shouts, “This. Is. SPARTA!,” because I sure as Hell can’t imagine any of them actually sitting through it. 300 is a timeless orgy of ultraviolence, with a surprising number of bared tits thrown in for good measure. Plus I personally enjoy it because it gave people something to reference other than the Windex quote from My Big Fat Greek Wedding or Nick Papageorgio of Vegas Vacation every time they hear my last name and its 18 vowels.

Moment girls leave-When the Ephors molest the Oracle 30 seconds after the movie starts. That didn’t take long, did it?

Kinda giving away my selection for 'moment girls leave' here, but yeah.

The Fly is a grim, brilliant film, which utilizes Jeff Goldblum’s disgusting metamorphosis into a human fly as a metaphor for disease, aging, and pretty much every other shitty thing that happens to us in the course of our wretched lives. Men love it because of the gripping story, Jeff Goldblum’s amazing performance and how nice it is to remind ourselves that, once upon a time, you would have loved to stick your cock inside Geena Davis. Women hate it because finding a wrinkle is enough to drive them to the brink of suicide, so 90 minutes dedicated to progressive human disfigurement is probably not gonna stir their pot.

Moment girls leave-One hyphenated word: Vomit-drop

If women had their druthers, Scarface would be two and a half hours of Elvira Hancock spending Tony's money.

If you ever thought I’d get tired of writing about Scarface, well, here’s your answer. Not only is it a flat-out all-time-great, but it’s way up there in the pantheon of guy movies, too. Explaining why Scarface is amazing is as futile as trying to tell someone why pizza is delicious: It just is. As for why women hate it, I’m not sure. Maybe because Tony Montana was out there getting it done every day instead of spending his time out on fancy vacations with his wife, Elvira? Sorry that the film focused a little more upon Tony’s Colt AR-15 with a mounted M203 grenade launcher and a little less upon Elvira’s countless walk-in closets and all the latest fashions that they must have been stuffed with, ladies. Maybe they’ll work that in as a Blu-ray extra.

Moment girls leave- When Tony tells Elvira off right after cheering on his favorite bird.

Stay tuned for Part Two, coming tomorrow.

Considering I want to get into the entertainment industry, he should probably be at the top of the list, but...Hitler, while dorky looking, wasn't ugly.

Yesterday, in honor of Muammar Gaddafi, I composed a list of history’s ugliest dictators. Not ugly in some sort of Namby Pamby, they have evil, disgusting souls sense: I’m talking they overthrew governments because they couldn’t get a prom date. The article ran out of space, so today I present more men who can’t even manage to look attractive in a propaganda poster. Feel free to use their visages in place of thoughts of baseball to last longer in bed.

Really, has no one looked into this? Because, from where I’m sitting, one of the West’s biggest opponents has infiltrated us for years using a disguise so shitty it makes Clark Kent’s glasses look brilliant by comparison. If he tries to advise a young imam by telling him that “Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen,” the jig is up.

Now here is one ugly sonofabitch. His skull looks like a UFO made of hair crashed into the back of it at an angle. And that mole…my God, that mole. It is so massive it casts a shadow. Literally. I don’t say it lightly, but Lemmy might lose that pissing contest.

Let’s just call this money-grubbing tyrant what he is: A damn dictator. For years, George Lucas has seen fit to unnecessarily tinker with and revise precious chapters in dork history, and has just confirmed that he will be doing so again with the Blu-ray release of the original Star Wars trilogy. The more time goes by, the more I realize that Lucas is bereft of new ideas (or storing them all in his neck waddle) and has no clue what made his original films so great to begin with. The least he could do is stop screwing with them.

Look for more articles in the future on this subject. There’s no way I can remain silent regarding the face of Mwai Kibake for long.

Duch Schaefer is so potent that he makes my clucking, "Ugh, I'd just KILL for hair like that" both understandable and masculine.

And so it ends. 46 years after I began my series “The Five Movie Characters Men Wish They Were” (quality writing takes time. And, apparently, predates the Internet), our journey’s conclusion is upon us. We’ve had Ferris Bueller, Tony Montana, David Wooderson and Travis Bickle. All represent facets of the man we’d ideally like to be. In the history of moviedom, though, there has only been one king who embodied the most primal ambition that men aspire to. His name? Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer.

Compared to Dutch Schaefer, Carl Weather and Bill Duke look like...

this.

Why does every guy want to be Dutch? Because, as cool as running a drug cartel or pounding so much vag that cats follow you tuna-drenched scrotum down the street like the Pied Piper, there’s nothing that bolsters confidence like knowing you are the greatest physical specimen to ever walked the Earth. That, if angered, you could pull a man’s arms out of their sockets with your bare hands, then club him to death with them like a Mortal Kombat Fatality. Still not convinced that being Dutch Schaefer is the coolest gig in history? Let me submit a few facts regarding the making of Predator that might make you think otherwise:

FACT 1: Scores of extras were needed to carry Dutch’s flaccid penis behind him like a bridal train because its combined length and weight were gouging massive trenches in the pristine Mexican jungle, disturbing the local ecology.

Like this. But infinitely bigger.

FACT 2: Here’s a picture of the cast of Predator.

What utter badassery. The amount of testosterone in that picture could trigger puberty in a eunuch. There hasn’t been a collection of such vicious, lethal musculature on the silver screen before or since. And yet…every pack has its alpha. Who was it in this group? Maybe listing the cast’s on-set nicknames will offer some insight. Going from left to right, they were as follows: Liberace, Elton John, Zeus McRadStrong, Black Liberace, Black Elton John, Harvey Fierstein and John Travolta (I’ve always had my suspicions). Ponder that.

FACT 3: Remember the half-hand shake half-arm wrestle that Dutch Schaefer and George Dillon greet each other with at the start of the film? Here’s a photo in case you forgot:

Were you aware that digital cameras were invented to capture that scene? It’s true. Standard film stock buckled and became tattered like a ghost ship’s sail when the power of Dutch’s bicep was placed upon it. We owe all of our current digital projection technology to Predator. Isn’t that amazing?

The gun contained blanks. Dutch killed using fear.

Dutch Schaefer was so manly that John McTiernan, Predator‘s director, had to cast Kevin Peter Hall, a 7’2″ titan who had just finished playing Harry the Sasquatch in Harry and the Hendersons, as the Predator to make it remotely believable that the alien could stand a chance against him in the ring. Did Dutch still manage to get the job done? Of course. His fists were poet laureates in the intergalactic language of pain. But at least the Predator, a hulking alien armed with weaponry so high-tech that it shits on the lightsaber, was at least able to make things interesting.

There’s nothing more that needs to be said about why all men wish they were Dutch Schaefer. He’s the most physically dominant presence that’s existed in a movie and a role model to all who want to succeed at being a man. If I ever have a son, I’m going to show him Predator once a day from the time he comes home from the hospital. And when he’s old enough to talk, points to Dutch on the screen and says the words “real daddy,” I’ll know my work as a father is done.

Travis Bickle is so awesome that he masculates an image that couldn't be more homoerotic if he were mock-fellating the .44 while pinching his nipples.

After writing about men wishing they were an ass-crushing turbine of sexual attraction, a successful (if unlawful) businessman and the coolest guy to ever walk the Earth, I realized that there is a dark side to the average male I had overlooked. A sinister aspect that bore mention. You see, sometimes, men don’t want to be part of the world. They want to say “fuck it” to everything, including sanity and reason. Look no further than Nazi Germany, Columbine or the fan base of the Cleveland Browns for examples.

According to British folklore, the brownie is characterized by its mystical ability to give away seemingly won games.

In the realm of movie nutjobs that every dude wishes he were, there’s only one option to go with: Travis “You Talkin’ to Me?” Bickle. Who are your other possibilities? Jame Gumb aka Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs? While I enjoy the “Great big fat person” line more than anyone, for the purposes of my list, I’m limiting myself to characters created for a movie, not adapted from a book. Not to mention that, despite what your mothers told you in an effort to scare you away from having premarital sex, ladies, most men don’t have a sublimated desire to butcher and fabricate a skin suit out of their dates. To top it off, remember that scene where Bill dances around to “Goodbye Horses“? Not to brag, but I’m far too well-endowed to pull off that maneuver. If I tucked my penis, I’d be a few stripes and a pair of fox ears away from looking like Mario in his Tanooki Suit.

Destroying cherished childhood memories one analogy at a time.

God help me, but I was almost tempted to go with a woman here. Almost. Does the name Alex Forrest ring a bell? She’s the character Glenn Close played in Fatal Attraction. Sure, she peed sitting down and had that ridiculous Louis the XIV hair, but…as far as delivering batshit crazy vengeance, she’s up there. A dude screwed her over and she murdered his kid’s pet, then attempted to kill both him and his spouse. I’ve never even had the guts to drop a deuce on an ex’s doorstep much less boil their bunny.

Luckily, I came to my senses in time and realized, “Hey, you know who’s more intimidating than a knife-wielding woman coming right at me? Any man doing anything.” Charles Xavier lowering himself to the toilet seat using those cripple bars in the middle of the night to explosively shit out some of Jubilee‘s putrid Asian fusion cooking, would scare me more. That’s just science.

He could take over women's MMA in a second.

The belt goes to Travis Bickle because he was a man’s psycho. We identify with him. The guy wasn’t “Use my feces to replicate Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting on the roof of my den” crazy, just frustrated and violent. He watched too much porn. He ate crappy food. He took women on disastrous dates. He was the kind of lunatic that the guys want to shoot with and the ladies want to get shot by. If I lived in a world without the Internet and cable television to keep my dopamine levels a sliver above zero, I can guarantee you I’d have lashed out at society in ways that make Travis Bickle look like Mohandas Gandhi by comparison.

Plus…Travis had game. He had the balls to approach Cybill Shepherd in her prime and successfully pick her up. Those who read my work regularly know I hate blondes because they age in dog years and their heads are filled with uppity beliefs like “I’m Daddy’s princess and demand to be treated as such” and “No, I won’t let you choke me in bed as you cry hysterically and scream the word ‘whore’ in my face.” But Cybill Shepherd in her heyday was something else.

Even after converting to Islam, Muhammad Ali would have given up the belt to smell this chick's farts.

Look at that. Travis had the guts to ask that out, whereas I’d stutter saying “hi” to a coworker with a .2 BAC sitting atop a Xerox machine photocopying her cooze at the office Christmas party. The guy simply didn’t take shit. He drove his cab into the worst of neighborhoods, shot thugs that got in his face and even rescued a teenage prostitute from a life of addiction and sexual slavery. Yes, he also plotted the assassination of a presidential candidate to get back at a woman who broke his heart after a single date, but haven’t we all done some embarrassing things in the name of love? If I were a walking down a dark alley and a few hoods were coming toward me, there’s no one I’d rather be than Travis Bickle.

R. Lee Ermey ain't got shit on this.

Bill Lumbergh: Not on the list.

Over the next few days, I’ll be writing a series about the five movie characters men most wish they were. Because, let’s be honest, unless you’re one of those rare people whose days consist of doing what you love and making a good living at it, you probably spend the majority of your life stuck at a desk, your head filled with fantasies of murdering your boss, winning the lotto or simply being someone else. And, while I might someday pen a tale about cutting the brakes of my corporate oppressor or winning $500 million and living my life as a khan in international waters, today I want to focus upon that last item I mentioned: The people (specifically, movie characters) that men most dream about being. I’ll start with number five on my list: Ferris Bueller.

Seriously, what's wrong with Cameron in this still? It looks like Clint Eastwood with the orangutan from Every Which Way But Loose.

I could have gone with a lot of people in the “cool guy” slot here. Jeff Spicoli was a thought, because the scene of him walking into Mr. Hand’s class with a bagel down his pants is one of cinema’s iconic images. But Spicoli’s never scored with girls, and his future seemed abysmal. Jeffrey Lebowski was also considered, but (and I say this with all the love in the world) he was a loser, albeit a loveable one. And Luke Jackson, aka Cool Hand Luke, might have earned the nod if it weren’t for me being convinced that every inmate was fucking the everloving shit out of each other in that prison camp (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

George Kennedy doing his best to ease something between Paul Newman's pouty, cherubic lips.

To me, Ferris’ coolness is unparallelled because he was cool when it mattered the most: High school. How many of us felt we were cool enough in high school? Lord knows I didn’t (mostly because I wasn’t). With time, the need in life for coolness tends to fade. You think an elderly Han Solo is going to be sustained by the memory of his former coolness? He probably spends most of his days getting carried on Chewbacca’s back from one medical appointment to the next, thinking to himself, “How did it end up this way? I made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, goddammit. I really should have put a few more space bucks into my 401k.”

Ferris possessed the wisdom of an older man (one of the perks of being scripted by an older man, I suppose) crammed into the shell of a teen. He was able to live in the moment in a way few of us, at any age, are able to do. Would you have had the balls to see a lovely day and skip school to enjoy it, much less live it out in such grand fashion? Drive a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California with not a worry in your head of crashing it? Catch a ball at a Cubs game while eluding your pedophile principal? Sing “Twist and Shout” from the top of a Von Steuben Day float? And do it all in time to get home before your parents, the two whitest people on Earth, caught you?

The things these two must have done for property values in their neighborhood.

The answer is no. And that goes for anyone. Because no one is cooler than Ferris Bueller. Even Kimbo Slice wishes he were Ferris Bueller, though it’d probably cost him a few inches. All we can do is hope that someday, when asked by a snooty maitre d’ who we are, we remember to cooly look him in the eye and reply, “Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago“.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So I’d like to think that today’s article counts as having written for several hours and not just slapping up a tragic picture I snapped last week because I spent the day compulsively viewing episodes of Roseanne via Netflix. Here it is, in all its glory:

Let’s just zoom in on that for a closer inspection, shall we?

It’s always depressing when you can infer the tale of a broken home from a guy’s bumper. At a distance, I figured that maybe some of the fish had fallen off with time, but nah, that’s definitely Mama Jesus Fish having received custody of the kids in the divorce. I’m sure Hunter Irrigation Systems is happy that one of their technicians is using their van to boast about his love of the America, the Pittsburgh Steelers and fantasies of his ex-wife dying violently.