Writer's Block: Physical Education

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Despite being the least athletic person in my entire school, I actually enjoyed P.E. for the most part in grade school. This was before Middle School where they started making you take humiliating group showers for no other reason than because they could. Anyway, favorite thing in grade school P.E. was parachute day where we'd play games that mostly involved throwing the parachute up in the air, then running underneath it as it floated down.

Least favorite thing was the monkey bars of death. I seriously didn't like heights as a kid and our gym had this set of monkey bars that was like, eight feet off the ground. Seriously, a grown man could hang off this thing without his feet touching the ground. So to a little kid it may as well have been twenty feet in the air. Plus by the time I would get to it the bars would already be slippery from the sweat of a dozens of grubby little hands. Traversing that thing was always an exercise in unrelenting, paralyzing terror. Balance beams were similarly frightening.

Sometimes you have to slow down to see a car wreck... and then share it with other people.

Pop quiz: What does "The Unforgiven," Metallica's classic dirge of bitterness and isolation, have to do with pink confetti, guys in Mario Puzo gangster suits, and bouncing, hoodie-wearing European bubblegum pop starlets?

If your answer was anything other than a barrel-chested roar of NOTHING! then you must have seen this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m9wd2dMXA4

What makes it all the more tragic is that the girl actually has a really decent voice.

I feel sorry for the backup band. They're flailing away back there like they're actually *in* Metallica, only to be replaced by an anemic drum machine beat and an occasional guitar jangle that likely originated out of a piece of software.