September 17, 2000: Into the Vault: How Honkeyball Almost Broke My Leg - A True Story

Originally published in Paranoize #11, sometime around May 1999

This really happened.  I kid you not.  It was around the beginning of March, and I had just gotten two new Honkeyball CDs in the mail.  (3 days after I ordered ‘em... Wonderdrug rules)  They couldn’t have come at a better time.  My roommate had moved out, I had no computer, and my VCR had quit again, leaving me with nothing to do but stare at the wall and play Tecmo Super Bowl all day.  It was during a heated Tecmo Bowl session that I popped in the first CD and began to listen.  The first track was “Kemosabi,” a big, heavy tune that served as the perfect background for my Bears to begin opening a can of whoopass on the unfortunate Jaguars.  Of course, things weren’t going so well after that. I was up by about forty points, and Rashaan Salaam had just scored his fifth touchdown.  I lost interest in the game, and near the end of the third quarter I was totally bored.  Meanwhile, the CD kept on playing.  Random play landed on “Buffoon,” and things just went downhill from there.  As the TV screen displayed Mazio Royster being carted off the field on a stretcher, the music began to build... “Criminal world... Animal world...”  I started to have this nervous feeling, like I needed to do something, but what?  A tiny, cluttered room is no place to jump around and go crazy;  I would accidentally smash everything I own if I did.  But that damn disk just triggered something odd.  “Criminal WORLD!... Animal WORLD!...”  By this time, my foot was tapping nervously, and after the game ended (68 - 0... Mwa, ha, ha.), I had nothing else to do.  Then came track six, “Dedicated.”  This was one of those hard, fast songs that when you listened to it, you couldn’t help but jump around and go crazy.  I was screwed.  I just had to do something.  Then I looked over at the bunk-bed...  Some defective section of my brain then produced the thought, “Hey, I bet if I got enough of a running start and twisted my body just right, I could jump all the way up there.”  So I backed up to the door, took a deep breath, got a running start and leapt...

And I almost made it.

In the aftermath, my bed frame is bent, and I swear to god my left leg has a dent in it.  There is a valuable lesson to be learned in all this:  a 250 pound body, mixed with about a five foot jump, a metal bed frame, and 9.81 meters per second squared of gravity just don’t mix.  And I’m not making up the part about the dent.  Just ask my mom; she’s seen it.  I’ll probably have to pay a fine for the damage to the bed, and I’m disfigured for life.  I’d like to see Marylin Manson do that.