Wheels-Off Reverse Bucket List

Anyone can make New Years' Resolutions. Rather than jump on that bandwagon (I'll just keep mine to myself), I did some thinking on things I have NEVER done and WILL NEVER do. I'll call it my Anti-Resolution List. I'm sure you will be duly offended.

1. I’ve never played Halo. Grown men don’t play video games. Sorry, Millennials, but it’s true—and a big reason why no one takes you seriously.
2. I’ve never played fantasy football. I’m enough of a dork in other areas of my life to invest myself in the ultimate symbol of dorkdom itself. Also, I love football too much to bastardize it in that way.
3. I’ve never voted for a Democrat. I haven’t always voted for Republicans, either, but I can guarantee you I have never voted for a Democrat. I’m too much of an American exceptionalist for that.
4. I’ve never been “part of the crowd.” Everyone wants to lay claim to this one, but of course it’s not true in most cases. For me, it was significantly easier than it seems. I had a horrific social existence in high school, so the ability to think for myself and take unpopular, principled stands wasn’t a big stretch for me when I grew up. I was, simply put, used to being rejected by the crowd…so it didn’t bother me to be distinct from them.
5. I’ve never enjoyed pop music. When I was a freshman in high school, Michael Jackson’s Thriller came out. I hardly noticed, because that was also the year that Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Texas Flood also came out. From a young age, I saw the music of the followers as inferior. To me, there is no tangible difference between Michael Jackson, Tiffany, the Spice Girls, Justin Beiber, Katy Perry, or Lady Gaga. It’s all the same schlock, sold to the same people, who will one day be embarrassed to have to admit that they listened to it.
6. I’ve never abandoned the Cowboys. Yeah, they’ve abandoned me, alright, but I’ve stayed true to the Blue. Frustrating, to be sure. Bumping around town in an Aaron Rodgers jersey just because he wins the Super Bowl isn’t my style. A Staubach one, maybe.
7. I’ve never borrowed money against the equity in my home. I’m still mildly shocked that I even have equity. I can’t imagine jeopardizing it for a jet ski.
8. I have never purchased special rims for any of my cars. When I spend money on one of my vehicles, it’s to maintain it properly or to make it run faster, better, or meaner. I could care less about owning $400 blades.
9. I have never played golf. I know it’s a requirement for business people, men in ministry, and professionals of all kinds. I fit into all three categories, and have never played a hole in my life. I already have an expensive hobby—hunting—and I’m barely any good at that.
10. I’ve never NOT received a traffic ticket. In fact, I’ve never even made it through a single two-year period without getting one or twelve.  I’ve been driving since around 1987. It’s doubtful that one should be proud of this one, but since there doesn’t seem to be much hope of my ever breaking this dubious streak, I might as well wear it like a uniform. The Ticket Kid salutes all you “good drivers.” Now please get out of the left lane and do your ten-and-two routine in the far right one, thanks.

Dear Sports Media Grinches:

All I want for Christmas is to have my football game back. You stole football from me and the rest of America these last two decades, and I’m really ready to have it back. Yes, I blame you Media Types. The coaches may vote for the rule changes, and the Commissioner may be more powerful than the President—but these people all read your columns and watch you on television, and it’s your favor they try to curry. How have you ruined America’s Game? Let me count the ways:

You write and talk for a living. I don’t begrudge writers a living; I am one myself, and wish I were making what you are to string those illiterate sentences together on dallascowboys.com and nfl.com. But your incessant chatter becomes gospel to millions of people who don’t know any better. And you frequently miss the real point of football. This is the ultimate team sport; the only sporting event truly 100% analogous to human existence (who among us hasn’t found himself facing 4^th  and long in life..with a decision  to punt or go for it?). And yet you persist in trying to draw moral equivalence between football and other sports. You get paid to talk all year long about all sports, and for that reason we are subjected to “expert” analysis on basketball (still barely a sport in Texas), baseball (with its 150-game season), hockey (!), golf (yawn)…and now you even speak, with a straight face, about Super Gay Emasculated Wine-Sipping Pantywaist non-sports activities as though they ARE sports (soccer and cycling). You know a little about all of these, but not enough about the one that counts: football. You think you do, but you don’t. Let me help you out, transplants: football is the national sport of Texas, and that’s why the other sporting events can only dream of packing in audiences like pro football. You’ve probably noticed that 95,000 people don’t show up at Cowboys Stadium to watch synchronized swimming (20,000 sports writers on expense accounts, maybe). Here is Cardinal Rule #1: ALL SPORTS ARE NOT EQUAL. There is football season, and then there is that interminable wasteland of the year called Football Off-Season, where we sometimes pay passing attention to other humans competing in other stuff to make the off-season go faster. You are a sportswriter, but we are fans. And we appear to know a lot more about football than you do.

You have stolen our game through the way it’s presented. It was bad enough when you decided that football needed to be deliberately marketed to morons who couldn’t read a down marker (that’s when you came up with the imaginary on-field graphics). You patted yourself in the collective back about that one, but the other ways you changed the presentation of the game were disastrous. How many more times, for example, must we sit through that idiotic Fox Robot? And what makes you think we want to hear Shannon Sharpe say ANYTHING at all? Those of us who worked hard to get through school and make something of ourselves are generally stunned that someone is actually paying Michael Irvin to talk. It’s nice that you have interpreters on site, like Rich Eisen, but just because some guy made a nice living running pass routes doesn’t necessarily mean that he has a coherent thought floating around in his cranium. And you have profoundly misunderstood the nature of this game when it comes to “talent.” The twin tales of Vince Young and Andy Dalton are all you need to know. Remember when the dumber-than-a-bag-of-hammers Vince Young failed the Wonderlic test, and you all told us that it didn’t matter because of his superior physical abilities? And then he got onto a field and didn’t know how to lead? Or do you recall—just last year, mind you—how you dismissively sniffed to us that Andy Dalton just wouldn’t be able to cut it as a pro quarterback because he was too short and too slow? Those of us who know football watched him lead that TCU team like a field general, and saw that Staubach-esque quality in him that spells “quarterback.” You’ve repeatedly lectured us on how normal and right it is for a classless thug with no character to cheat his way through college and then leave after two years just to pursue millions (Reggie Bush, Cam Newton). To those of us who worked many jobs and sacrificed time to graduate college,  seeing a Reggie Bush get handed a $250,000 education and then barter it away so he could drive a tricked-out Escalade is borderline criminal (or, in his case, actually criminal)—but in your world, it’s normal. And then you all sit around and ponder, with serious expressions on your faces, how it’s possible that Dez Bryant might be lacking in character and maturity. The worst way you’ve ruined our game is in your celebration of such jackanapeses—which, in turn, passes into the culture as “normative.” Every one of us who’ve watched football faithfully for four decades or longer would come out of the stands and yank our kids off the football field in shame if we ever saw them behave in some embarrassingly prideful display of Me First behavior in the end zone. And yet, rather than label Deion Sanders the Supreme Idiot that he was, you celebrated his showboating, his big mouth, his inattention to basic football details like being able to make a tackle. And now, a generation later, you have inflicted us with Terrell Owens, DeJackAss Jackson, and Ocho Stinko. Thanks, Media Morons. We taught our children that football was a sport to be played with character and class, and you proceeded to tell our kids that it’s just entertainment. It’s NOT. It’s a sport. There’s a difference.

And it wasn’t just the presentation of the game that changed: you altered the way the game itself is played. I’ll not elaborate on your shameful lobbying for overtime rule changes and the eventual success you had. Your disregard for the tradition of football betrays a shocking lack of trust in the men who invented it and made it great. Remember in the 1970’s and 1980’s when you got bored watching America’s Game and lobbied for rule changes to give the offense more of a chance? Now we might as well put a skirt on the quarterbacks; we wouldn’t want them to get hurt playing football or anything. Chad Johnson’s big mouth would be doing less talking and more bleeding if he ever had to run those routes against Mel Blount,  Dick “Night Train” Lane, or Cliff Harris. Despite what you’ve done to our game, offense may sell tickets, but defense still wins championships….and you still don’t know that. And you get paid well to speak ignorantly of it, day after day. And don’t get us started on “resting starters” at the end of a season. Let me get this straight: we lived, with gritted teeth, through an entire off-season of draft news, basketball games, baseball hype, and preseason football to finally enjoy one tiny little 16-game season….and you want to shorten it to 12 games? This is football, and these guys make millions of dollars to play it. Stop worrying about their little pumpkin heads with the concussions. Stop trying to talk the rest of us into thinking that it’s ok to shirk the last two games of the season for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER. Teams that do that lose, plain and simple. Ask Coach Wade “Yuk-Yuk” Phillips and the 2007 Dallas “Cabo” Cowboys. I’ll type slowly so that even a sports journalist can understand me: there are 16 games in a season. We would like to watch all 16 of them. Guys get hurt playing football; it ain’t soccer. That’s why they get paid a lot more money than we do—to risk their health in this brutal sport. Now shut up and let us have our season back.

So give me my game back, Sportswriters. You stole it, we both know it, and I want it back. You still have the NBA, where the referees determine the outcome of the game and drug offenses are the norm. You still have cycling, and judging by all the sheep riding their ten-speeds on public highways decked out in objectively retarded-looking gear, you have something of an audience to write for. You still have the children’s spelling bee on ESPN. You can continue your quest to talk all of us into believing that just because soccer stops camel traffic in Saudi Arabia, we should give it a chance here. But for the love of all that’s American….give me back my beloved game of football. It’s all I really want this Christmas.

Well, that and a healthy Felix Jones for the playoffs.

Cowboy Churches....P-shaw, Hoss.

“Cowboy Church.”

Really?

Is this necessary? Have we really sliced the last remaining fragments of white middle class whiners down to its last onion-thin representative? Is there really some gaggle of down-home rural folk who just don’t cotton to gettin’ gussied up and goin’ to real church? Assuming this is the case, why do these people persist in seeing themselves as somehow unique?

I mean, we’ve got it all now, don’t we? For the snake handlers, we’ve got the shotgun-architecture single-cell church buried in the sticks. For the urbane college kids who are really just looking for a slightly less profane meat market than the Village, there is the spiffy megachurch. For the Mac-using, black-glasses-frame-wearing, beta males who swing lefty because they think that’s more sensitive, we have the Seeker Friendly Emergent Church. The whole church landscape in the western hemisphere appears to have developed in the last four decades as the natural consequence of catering to people’s dumb excuses for not going in the first place.

There’s really only one truly great excuse for not going to church: you’re not a believer and you can think of better things to do with your time. And setting aside the obvious missional purpose of a ministerial calling to change your mindset about this, let’s grant validity to that excuse. Now think of all the dumb reasons that Christians have given for the last forty years for not coming to church.

“I don’t have nice clothes to wear.”

“People weren’t nice to me.”

“The preacher stepped on my toes a bit.”

“The music sucks.” Ok, actually, this one can be really tempting for me, too. That doesn’t make it a great reason for deliberately disobeying the scriptural teaching to not forsake the assembling together of ourselves.

It’s almost as if every 25-year-old who came along and heard a new excuse for the same old sloth and fear that keep people out of God’s house decided to start a new church designed to remove that excuse.

“Oh, you don’t like liturgy? We do it different over here.”

“Oh, you don’t like being ‘preached to,’ and you’d rather have a guy in a turtleneck sit and rap with you over coffee? That’s how we roll over at our church.”

“Oh, you don’t like people wearing their best to church? Well, come on out to the cow barn with us. We stand in cow manure in our blue jeans just to show how relevant to this tiny sliver of subculture we are.”

After careful observation, I’ve noticed that this is largely a white people thing. And many white people, for whatever reason, are just not comfortable saying, “I’d rather be watching football” or “I’d rather be sleeping” or “go to hell, preacher.” So they make up other reasons, and then earnest, well-meaning young pastors spend inordinate amounts of energy to remove that excuse. They heard where people hate sitting in pews, so they throw the pews out and get chairs. They heard where people don’t like hymnals anymore, so they throw those out and get Power Point (and an illiterate 20-year-old to program it). They write books that become best-sellers on how they’re re-inventing church. They give seminars on how to make Jesus relevant to the culture. Which culture? Well, it depends on which narrowly-defined segment of the white population you go to.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for walking around Mars Hill, sizing up the cultural context, and delivering your message within that context in appropriate fashion. What I’m a bit weary of is the novelty churches that spring up  like little wildfires in response to some new bit of asininity. When your kid gives you an excuse for why he doesn’t want to brush his teeth, you don’t buy it. Brushing your teeth is good, even if you don’t always enjoy every waking minute of it. Why would a pastor change the basic definition of church for the people he’s supposed to be leading? Is he their shepherd or their babysitter?

Do we really only want to hang out with other people if they’re exactly like us? Must I look around church on Sunday morning and see people who always share my politics, worldview, racial makeup, and general bad attitude toward traffic hooliganism? Are we really going to insist on this as a definition for church? I mean, if that’s really how it’s going to have to be from now on, what’s to stop me from starting my own I Hate Christian Music church? (Save the hate comments on that one; I’m going to write on that topic next).

My father-in-law is a real cowboy. And if he were to decide to go to church—which might be a small miracle—he would just go to church. He would be ashamed to demand that a 2,000-year-old institution bend over backward to accommodate his personal comfort. And his church experience would be richer for it.

Which brings me to the Cowboy Church people. Do they really see themselves as a unique culture? You can literally find a Cowboy Church in every community any more. They pass out little bumper stickers to advertise their “no-church” church, and the stickers have the pious vaquero standing alongside his horse near a cross, perhaps wondering how in the tarnation a danged old cross got here in the middle of the danged old cow pasture. I’m not questioning their sincerity here; I’m questioning their necessity.

Thanksgiving.

I’ve always believed that people who start Christmas early are just those who don’t take Thanksgiving seriously enough. I’m a big fan of Thanksgiving, and there are many reasons. I mean…it’s a holiday built around food, right? How can that go wrong? Add football to the mix, and brisk weather, and catching up with family and loved ones—it’s an important holiday to itself. Of course, I have other reasons to love Thanksgiving.

It was during the last week of October 2005 that I was given around two weeks to live. In the first week of November, I underwent apheresis for an adult stem cell transplant, which I received on 07 Nov. Over the course of the next two weeks, I made daily trips to the 10^th floor of Methodist Hospital in San Antonio during the dangerous neutropenic stage, and by the Monday of Thanksgiving week I was released from the hospital—cancer-free. The following Thursday, I ate solid food for the first time in months. I was home, I was alive, and the sun was still coming up every day. Believe me….I was thankful. And that’s a big reason that Thanksgiving is an important holiday for the Mitchells. But it’s not the only reason I’m thankful.

I am thankful for Christ in my life. This side of eternity, I am not perfect, and still daily battle my propensity to be my own man and do my own thing—but because I trust Christ for my salvation, I don’t have to worry about how good or bad I am at following rules (turns out I’m pretty terrible at it). He accomplished my salvation, not me. And when I think of how many times I should have been dead or in prison by now, I am truly thankful that my life has been transformed. Of course, it feels like it could stand some more transformation, but that’s just life this side of eternity. On the other side, He’s already done the heavy lifting.

I’m thankful for the country where I live. Yes, we’ve been told for a generation by our political class that America is a terrible place that has done nothing but terrible things to people. Today’s kids learn the first story of Thanksgiving, and think it’s all about smallpox blankets and evil Republican types raping the pristine native countryside and building great hulking, smoking factories powered by grime-faced children’s labor. It would be nice if they learned the true story: that the first colonists to the New World were faced with horrific hardship, and originally tried to set up a collectivist economic system in which everyone owned the property and chipped in to produce what was necessary for survival. This led to even more extreme hardship (you may easily read all of this in Colonel William Bradford’s diary), after which they decided that private ownership of property might lead to more production—and they were right. Long before Barack Obama told a plumbing contractor on the street that it was time for government to “spread a little of the wealth around,” the 17^th-century colonists had already experimented with such a system, and had dismissed the idea. With a great deal of help from Squanto and his friends, those colonists learned how to plant and cultivate in the New World, and when they extended an invitation to them to share a great meal of Thanksgiving, it was heartfelt. The colonists wanted to give thanks to God for their friends, whom they saw as a blessing. I’m thankful for this moment, and this tradition.

I’m thankful that I got a scholarship to seminary; otherwise I couldn’t have afforded to go. And since I moved my whole family up here for this, that’s kind of a good thing. I’m thankful that I’m involved in church. Church has gotten a bad rap for the last couple of decades, but the Church was Christ’s idea, not Man’s. And in the Church we find fellowship with fellow-laborers. My own church isn’t a big fancy-pants mega-church with a trendy black-framed glasses-wearing, Starbucks-sipping, blogging techno-pastor—but a normal-sized congregation consumed with finding new ways of reaching its community with the gospel. I’m thankful for that.

I’m thankful for my home and job. I didn’t move up here because I felt called to be a contractor, but this job has enabled me to support my family while we pursue God’s call on our lives. That’s a huge blessing, and in this economy—stagnated by the Keynesian inflationary recession perpetuated by this administration—it’s a big one. I don’t get paid a lot, but we can meet all our obligations. I’ve seen the day when we couldn’t do that—and so I’m thankful. God has blessed me in a variety of ways, and I don’t deserve any of them. I’m not particularly good, or skilled, or awesome in any way. He just does what He does, as He sees fit.

I’m thankful for my idiot dog, General Sam Houston. He’s no good at hunting birds, guarding property, or even showing many signs of vigorous life. But he’s a loyal friend who is completely enamored with children and love—the perfect addition to our family.

And I suppose I’m thankful for Thanksgiving. It’s not just a one-day affair for the Mitchells; we have had our giant turkey for days now, sitting in a carefully prepared, secret family brine recipe. Tomorrow morning, I will get up at 4 AM and fire up my wood smoker (that’s right, suburban weenie dads…WOOD smoker) and will use a careful combination of hickory, mesquite, pecan and some apple chips to smoke the perfect Thanksgiving turkey. My wife will start making pies tomorrow—not the store-bought kind, but the old-school kind, rolled out on the counter, like your grandmother used to make. She’ll make five of those—blackberry, cherry, chocolate, pumpkin, and a new homemade mincemeat she’s been perfecting through the year. She will make homemade dressing, cranberry sauce, and also a ham. There will be nothing canned or microwaved or made from a mix on that table tomorrow. That may not be important to you, but to a fat guy who likes food like me—well, it’s a big deal. It’s how Thanksgiving started, and it’s how it continues over here. There will be family hanging around, playing in the big backyard, jumping on the trampoline, wandering around down by the creek. All of it will take place against the warm backdrop of live football on the big-screen. We’ll keep half an eye on the Detroit game because tradition dictates it, but we will become planted for the Cowboys at 3. By 6, we will have reconciled our emotions to their annual epic choke job, and will console ourselves with rummaging through the still-steaming Thanksgiving dinner. The best antidote to Jerry Jones is pie, after all.

Yes, the next day begins the inexorable march to Christmas, and we enjoy that too. But right now….it’s Thanksgiving.

And what could be better than that?

So....I'm extreme?

“Extreme.”

This is a great word. It’s a tabula rasa term…a blank slate upon which the losing debater—desperately flailing about, treading the dangerous waters of his own weak philosophical position—may write a snappy rebuttal of his rhetorical better. When we are losing on substance, we may resort to the argumentative fallacy of name calling. 

“Racist.”

“Sexist. 

“Extreme.” 

It’s telling that the ones who so quickly throw out this term in shameless attempts to silence dissension are typically the same ones who shriek the loudest about “freedom of speech.” The same crowd doesn’t seem to find “extreme” the films of, for example, Michael Moore. They don’t consider it extreme for an Illinois State Senator to kill a bill that would have made actual infanticide illegal (http://www.nrlc.org/ObamaBAIPA/ObamaKills2003amendedBAIPA.htm). What’s “extreme,” it seems, is any opinion from anyone who disagrees with them. 

A good deal of this negative emotion is tied up in people’s annoyance at those pesky sorts of Christians who take their faith AND their civic duties seriously enough to speak out. Secular society would much prefer the staid, quiet, Christian who leaves public policy to others. The metaphorical toothless hillbilly Christian who has withdrawn entirely from the cultural discourse on this and other topics is the picture that reigns supreme in the minds of many—and it’s the picture that comes to mind when carelessly tossing out terms such as “extreme.” Woe be unto those Christians who dare to speak up for the weak, the innocent, and the despised in culture (you know, the kind of thing Christ did—to the irritants of the cultural gatekeepers of His day, too). When someone does so, he’s called “extreme.”

But why? If the facts are on your side, of what serious threat is dissension? Why would you stoop to name-calling if you have the more defensible position? That’s the essential question that rhetorical giants like Quintilian and Socrates would have asked.

Unlike the bomb throwers, the man who made this video presented facts to a hostile audience and engaged in discourse that had, as its chief end, persuasion. This is classic rhetoric, plain and simple. It’s not extreme in any way. He admittedly had better production value than most Christians use in their arguments, but how is that extreme? Again, it’s not extreme when the heroes of the Left do it. Apparently, artistic production may only be attempted by the Left.

We think that there is plenty of “extreme” to go around in this debate. It’s pretty extreme, for example, for nine people in robes to write law for the people of the United States. Since the Constitution explicitly dictates that this should not be the case, it follows that favoring such judicial activism is BY DEFINITION an extreme position. If the pro-abortion folks are so confident in their persuasive abilities, why not put it to a vote? Let the people have their say, once and for all.

Ah….but there’s the rub. Such a vote would spell the end of blanket federally-sponsored abortion once and for all. For we are no longer dealing with a college bull session philosophical conversation any more….we now have incontrovertible evidence that that fetus is ALIVE in there. There is such substantial scientific evidence that it’s LIFE in there that a majority of American voters would reject abortion for their state if given the choice (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30771408/ns/us_news-life/t/majority-americans-now-pro-life-poll-says/).

And back to the favorite Pal of the Left, Science—now that good old Science has proven that that’s a live baby in there….we are faced with troubling questions. Questions that the pastor in 180 Movie asked.

If that’s really alive in there, at what point does it become ok to kill it?

Now that this is the only unanswered question pertinent to the topic, the onus of moral responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of those who refuse to see it. For those of us who have seen the evidence with our eyes, there remains only the civic duty of speaking up for the saving of that life. To fail to do so makes our society every bit as culpable as the residents of Auschwitz who deliberately closed their eyes to the unspeakable horrors just outside their city limits.

If it weren’t for “extreme” Christians speaking out, there would have been no movement for the abolition of slavery. If there weren’t “extreme” Christians, there would have been no civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century.

And if “extreme” Christians don’t speak out now, we are cowards, plain and simple.

Michelle Bachmann's Voice Weaponized And Dropped On Enemy Camps

(AP)—Minnesota—

The United States Department of Defense announced today that it had completed its first series of tests on the new Bachmann Bomb, an innovative weapon developed in recent months in top secret bunkers in the Beltway area.

The Bachmann Bomb is a weaponized recording of Michelle Bachmann’s voice that has been produced in mp3 form and dropped on enemy Al-Qaeda camps. Initial Al Jazeera press reports estimated the casualty total at one camp at upwards of 53 terrorists. According to one source, the Bomb detonated at 15 feet above ground, and seconds later terrorists began shooting themselves to escape the resulting sound.

One local Afghan recorded the incident on his cell phone. The resolution is grainy, but the sound quality is captured. The nasal, flat “a’s” and “o’s” are clearly heard penetrating flesh in the camps. The slow, rhythmic lilt of Bachmann’s upper-Midwestern dialect can be seen knocking one bearded man to the ground, his turban askew and his rifle harmlessly fallen by his side.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International has called for an investigation into the use of the Bachmann Bomb, claiming that the unusual cruelty of such a weapon constitutes war crimes that could be prosecuted in the Hague. Says Wendy Gaslenship, Amnesty International’s Committee Chairperson of Drum Circles and Bong Hits: “it’s wrong and un-American to inflict this kind of mass casualty on any other human being. This is no different than Hiroshima, and the makers of this weapon should be held accountable for the lasting damage this voice is doing to civilization.”

Anonymous sources have reported that four scientists committed suicide while in the process of developing the bomb. One is reported to have stabbed himself repeatedly in the side of the head with a butter knife during initial testing, exclaiming, “Make it stop! Make it stop! I can’t take it any more!”

When asked for comment regarding the weaponization of her voice, Bachmann opened her mouth to respond, but was silenced by the press corps, who asked her to simply write a response.

Come, Sweet Death....And Other Musings I Came Up With While Having To Attend A Conference

One of the most ironic misnomers in the English language is the phrase “breakout session.” The breakout session is a reference to a specific type of meeting-within-a-meeting, and it carries the typical semantic vagueness of the darkly impersonal. A breakout session typically happens at a conference—generally, an all-day one, in which you are sitting perfectly motionless and listening to multiple speakers. The ones who announce breakout sessions expect that you will love the idea, even though anyone who’s ever attended one understands it to be Dante’s First Circle of Hell.

The most annoying people at any conference are, of course, the ones who announce to everyone that they’re having a great time and really like the speakers. The normal people are the ones trying desperately to stay awake and maintain some hold on sanity. They are working overtime, mentally, to keep from running, cackling, from the conference room in zig-zag patterns. The way these conferences are designed, the breakout session is carefully timed to coincide with that very last minute that the attendee can tolerate sitting in the First Meeting before they snap. Just at the point in which the attendee has finally decided to set themselves on fire because they cannot tolerate even 60 more seconds of listening to the speaker, someone will announce, in a gay airy voice, “it’s time for the breakout session!” The reason that people seem generally excited about this is because lives have, quite literally, been saved.

Of course, it’s all a horrifyingly brutal joke—because the breakout session is simply another meeting. Yep. More speakers. Only in this one, you don’t have a large crowd to provide you with cover, like you did in the First Meeting. In the breakout session, you can’t get away with drawing funny pictures, texting, or making funny faces; it’s just you and 10 other people and the speaker, and now you have to act like the annoying people who are just tickled to be there.

The breakout session is poorly named, mostly because of the other thoughts that come to the forefront of your consciousness when the term is employed. Was it titled a Breakout Session because the attendee feels like breaking out the window on the top floor and leaping to his death? Or because he entertained the fleeting thought of breaking out the speaker’s teeth in front of the horrified (but secretly grateful) audience? Or because the attendee feels like breaking out of the conference entirely and headed to wherever 90 proof alcohol is being served?

There are no correct answers here. Only the disturbing truth that there will continue to be conferences, mostly because there are people who require other people to attend conferences. And also because many of those people attending the conferences are putting on a smile and pretending to enjoy the conference. I cannot abide the thought that they are genuinely enjoying this; to come to this awful realization would be cause for the total annihilation of civilization. No, we cannot do away with the conference—because there are Those Who Love To Hear Their Teeth Chatter. But at least we can break out the smiling jackanapes who acts like this is the perfect day for him, and we can lock him in his own session to smile winsomely at his reflection in the mirror.

Now THAT would a breakout session I could be in favor of.