I'm With Stupid

When I was 16 years old a pretty girl in my choir class named Sara Stevenson picked me up for an afternoon of snowmobiling on her family ranch. In the midst of our winter festivities/semi-flirtatious extravaganza, I saw a pair of kids who were sledding down the hill on her property. “Let’s go give them a drive-by snowballing.” I said as we packed our gloves for a winter version of violence. Staring down the ten-year olds holding toboggans, we threw our snowballs at them, and then I revved the engine of our Polaris stallion a little too much, which in turn bucked us both off the back. From that point the snowmobile made its trek down the slopes at a breakneck speed, only to hit a jump at the base of the hill and launch itself into a 15-foot pine tree. Needless to say, Sara Stevenson and I never had a second date.

Flash forward four years to when I was ripping holes down the buttseam of my pants and gorging my belly on deep-fried southern Twinkies, which in turn had me a solid 50 pounds chunkier than any of my clothes would fit. I walked into a Wal-Mart in Mechanicsville, Virginia and laid my eyes on a tummy tucker belt buddy wrap that was basically a custom cut piece of saran wrap that would package the belly blubber around your midsection and automatically make you lose/hide those pesky pounds. I saw, I ogled, and I forked over $39.99 for essentially the absolute worst purchase of my young adult life.

Lets move ahead two years in this story to when I was in college and I once caught myself trying to reenact some type of funky gyrations with my body in sync to a one-hit wonder. I tried, I danced, and I looked like Elaine Benes at a Christmas party. Part of me wonders if the fact that I was male, Caucasian, taller than six feet in height, and that I preferred heterosexual relationships had something to do with the fact that I could not get my body movement to match up with the musical beats of “Crank That” by Soulja Boy (which you can play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post if you want to have a more dramatic effect). I was a dancing fool, I imagined myself as an above average imitation of Patrick Swayze. I felt like the king of the campus as I jiggled my body around that night. And I looked like an absolute dumbass.

Cut to three years later and see me just pulling in to my girlfriend’s house from a four-and-a-half hour, 335-mile drive from St. George to Ogden to break up with someone who I had shared my life with for the previous six months. I prayed, I wept, and I debated in my head and with God if this was the right decision to make. As I sat in my car and waited for her to get home from church I responded to a text message my buddy sent me asking what I was up to that afternoon. “Just sitting here waiting to break up with Jo.” I replied. “You sent that text to the wrong person.” Jo, my soon to be ex-girlfriend, said in return. In retrospect I never thought I would have looked worse than trying to impersonate Soulja Boy on the dance floor. This social media malfunctioning moment of my life certainly proved that to be wrong.

Flash forward four years from that mishap to one summer night in Seattle where I paid $14.75 to watch Michael Bay’s fourth installment of the Transformers franchise. I don’t think I have ever sunk lower in stupidity.

The list can go on and on and I can probably dissect a dozen moronic things that I have done in the last 48 hours at least, but those five I have recounted are some of the most foolish bloopers that catch me shaking my head over through the years. Yes, I wanted to impress a pretty girl on a snowmobile, and I wanted to lose weight by being a lazy saran-wrapped, deep-fried bum, and I wanted to electrify the ladies with my uncoordinated dance moves, and I wanted to have a meaningful breakup with a girl that couldn't be confused as a plotline for a sitcom, and yes sad to say, I wanted to be entertained by Michael Bay that night in Seattle. But none of those things went according to my plan, and because of my miscalculations, some of the biggest blunders of my human existence were forged.

But those blunders, like every single other idiotic decision we all make in our histories, will go down in hysterical infamy and be heralded as some of the best stories we ever have the privilege of telling.