Things More Painful than Exercise

I’m doing the New York Road Runners Brooklyn Half-Marathon this Saturday. Running 13.1 miles can be pretty painful, but one way to keep motivated is to think of things that would be even MORE painful, so I came up with this list:

• Watching Terminator Salvation
• Buying a ticket to a good movie, like Star Trek, sitting down to watch the title sequence, then seeing the film stop and be replaced with the worst movie of all time, aka Terminator Salvation
• Finding out that at every mile marker of the half-marathon, instead of the theme from Rocky, they play the theme from Dawson’s Creek, where Paula Poundstone sings “I don’t want to wait/ for our lives to be over,” but they replace those lyrics with “I can’t wait to see/ Termi-na-tor Salvation”
• Discovering I’m dating the actress Moon Bloodgood, which sounds amazing, until I find out she sometimes talks
• During the race, getting hit by a car, seeing a bright light, then realizing the bright light is a projector that projects Terminator Salvation directly onto my retinas in a continuous loop for all eternity
• Being diagnosed with synesthesia, a real disorder where certain sensations trigger seemingly unrelated senses — e.g., certain numbers “taste salty” or certain words “sound spiky” — except that in this version, whenever you taste any food whatsoever, you see a clip from Terminator Salvation
• Realizing my life is inconsistent, riddled with plot holes, full of grade-school acting, and crammed with pointless SFX to distract me from the lack of a story
• Getting married, having a beautiful wife, expecting my first child, going to the hospital, then the beautiful baby comes out and it’s a baby who doesn’t think Terminator Salvation was an absolute abomination that even Cheney would agree is torture and should be used in lieu of waterboarding
• Having a critic describe my work as “Terminator Salvation-esque”
• Finding out that I’m the director, McG, and that each second of film I shot for Terminator Salvation cost $30,000 — seriously — and that I just accidentally shot 6,420 seconds too many, aka 107 minutes, the entire running time of Terminator Salvation
• Running the race faster than anyone else, then going on forever because I have a nuclear power cell — that’s right, realizing I am a Terminator in Terminator Salvation
• Discovering, after spending $200 million to make a movie, that the last 3/4 of it made no sense because if Skynet simply wanted to kill John Connor the whole time, it could have done so in a heartbeat while the Terminator was chatting with John, by just crushing his skull or something, thus voiding the whole reason for the movie’s existence
• Being a deckhand in the Discovery Channel reality series Deadliest Catch, and in the middle of a good king crab haul, a sudden squall comes up and you’re thrown overboard from the CorneliaMarie, and now you’re the middle of the Bering Sea in 3.6-degree-Celsius water, shocked and numb, but then wait, it’s a miracle, because the Coast Guard cutter Mellon is approaching and they’re throwing you a life preserver, only it’s not a life preserver, it’s the hemorrhoid pillow used by McG on the set of Terminator Salvation
• You know how sometimes you’re flipping through a stack of papers at work and one slices the webbing between your forefinger and middle finger, and it really stings? That.
• Finishing all 13.1 miles, getting a time I’m proud of, having a nice brunch, heading back into Manhattan, resting, having a great improv show, going out to a couple of parties, calling it a night, going home, showering, brushing my teeth, getting in bed, then waking up the next morning…only to realize it was all a dream and I had simply nodded off during the opening credits of Terminator Salvation
• One of the Terminators wore a kerchief around its head, like some sort of hipster pirate. I’m dead serious. A hipster pirate.
• Stubbing your toe on a chair, except stubbing is more like watching, the toes are your eyes, and the chair is Terminator Salvation

I don’t recommend this movie.

An Open Letter to Asher Roth

On Monday night I had the honor of being invited to a release party for the debut album of the most talented young rapper of our age, Asher Roth.

While he was very nice to us, and while he probably has more money than I do, I believe his hit song, “I Love College”, is somewhat too erudite, lyrically speaking, to be accessible to the average listener. I imagine he got some notes from executives about toning down the lyrics, but ultimately ignored them. The notes probably went as follows:

That party last night was awfully crazy
I wish we taped it
Great, Asher, just great. One issue: Your home state, Pennsylvania, requires all parties’ consent for videotaping; undercover recordings will be tried according to current wiretapping laws, and could prompt civil lawsuits for invasion of privacy. Please see 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5703(1), 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5704, and 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 7507.1 for details.

I danced my ass off and had this one girl
Completely naked
Highly evocative! Only problem is, if someone’s dancing so hard that her clothes fall off…yeah, that’s not normal. She may be having an epileptic seizure. Assuming we’re discussing a generalized tonic-clonic seizure, the best procedure is to move the patient away from sharp edges and place something soft beneath her head, making sure she’s on her side with her chin up to avoid asphyxiation through epiglottal closure or other blockage. If the woman enters a state of persistent (unremitting or recurrent) seizure, you’re encountering status epilepticus and must contact professional emergency services immediately.

Pass out at 3, wake up at 10
Go out to eat then do it again
Wait. You’re advocating only sleeping from 3 a.m. to 10 a.m.? Obviously you’re joking, but these kids are impressionable and may take your advice at face value. And as we know from the Guinness World Records book, one can last only so long on just 7 hours of sleep per day before going clinically insane. And if you mean 3 p.m. to 10 p.m., man, that’s some party. It’s so crazy, it turned into brunch.

I wanna go to college for the rest of my life
Sip Banker’s Club and drink Miller Lite
Nice. Only, we recently got you a sponsorship deal with urine? Yeah, urine. As in…okay, you get it, urine. They’re paying us more than Banker’s Club, and the taste is similar. So, just to be clear, you should replace the words “Banker’s Club” with “urine.” Please do the same for “Miller Light.” That’s right, with “urine.”

On Thirsty Thursday and Tuesday Night Ice
I can get pizza a dollar a slice
NO WAY. One dollar? ONE dollar? One DOLLAR? ONE [gunshot].

I am champion at beer pong
Allen Iverson, Hakeem Olajuwon
Great references. One potential hitch: We checked with Allen Iverson and Hakeem Olajuwon, and both said they’d literally rather die than have their name be associated with yours.

Do somethin’ crazy! Do somethin’ crazy!
Do somethin’ crazy! Do somethin’ crazy!
Keg stand!
Simply too crazy. We want this to be sold in Wal-Marts! Let me suggest a few activities that aren’t quite so “out there”:
1) An extended jam session with Jimi Hendrix’s corpse, that guy who found a fur tree growing in his lung, and Bill Murray.
2) BASE jumping using a squid for a parachute.
3) Eating the concept of freedom on a bun.

Man, I love college, ay!
And I love drinking, ay!
I love women, ay!
Man, I love college
Too subtextual. Assuming people get the thinly veiled references — “college,” “drinking,” and “women” are clearly clever nicknames for the three founders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), Carlos Fonseca Amador, Silvio Mayorga, and Tomás Borge — they may be upset at your casually evoking the Junta of National Reconstruction (1979) that later gave way to unchecked FSLN rule of Nicaragua, the Contra resistance, and all the political associations that go with it. And your sly references (“ay!” — three times, no less) to current president José Daniel Ortega Saavedra’s defeat by Violeta Barrios Torres de Chamorro in 1990 won’t be taken kindly to either.

In short, I’m not sure the world is ready for your genius.

Your Producer,

Timothy “Mad Ph7s!cal” Cooper