Guest post by Thank Charleston
<-- This is not Thank Charleston; it is Angus Lennie.Thank has had a tough time and he wants you to hear about it. Seems he was a tall child, but not nearly Andre the Giant level in anything. There was no famous author in his early life.
I have never wanted to be an athlete. I never wanted to grow up to be a baseball player, and I never wanted to play in Little League. But what comforted me all those years when I had to learn to read because all the other boys were busy breaking each other's shins was that in my mind, I could be a competitor if I wanted to. If I really worked hard and put my nose to the dugout, I could pick up a bat and send a ball sailing, or drop "the rock" through "the hoop," or sink a putter or nab a goal or what have you. With that logic, it was clearly my own sane choice to spend my time with the Animorphs, and later Billy Pilgrim.
What was frustrating, however, was knowing that there was one thing I could never be: a jockey.
Sure, I could wear them, but I was far too tall to ever be one. In fact, I was always absurdly tall, which led many people to mistakenly think I was a basketball player (I wasn't). What killed me was that I could have been the size of a jockey and still been a basketball player, but at my height I could never, ever, get on a horse and make it go fast.
Further distressing is my more recent revelation that this too-tall problem extends beyond the world of being a jockey. I am too tall to be an old-school physical comedian. Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and all three Marx Brothers (I know what you're thinking; shut up) were all very short men who would cast very tall villains to make themselves look put upon and sympathetic. If I want to appear in an auteur comedy from the 20's or 30's, I could only play the awfully serious guy who gets his what for.
It is times like these, when I am realizing the limitations of my height, that I think back to the Tom Hanks movie "Big," and remember how much that little kid wished he were bigger.
Fuck him.
posted by (Dan) at 7:48 PM
3 Comments:
I fear I must be the world's only Zeppo apologist...
But in happier news, I am overjoyed that you thought to include Mr. Lennie in your post. I think of him whenever I think of dirt.
Haha, your friend is the Oggmonster
Being a professional athlete would be more work than it's worth. You have to stay in shape, listen to some fat fucking coach, travel to miserable cities and play miserable games for a 23-49 team. Fuck that. Better to be an actor or a rock star, those people can do whatever they want all the time, always get fawned over, have shitloads of money and girls stretching to the horizon. Plus, you might get to sleep with someone famous.
Well, according to countless movies and the show "Lost," being a rock star is not all it's made up to be. Being an actor, however, means you get to deal with the most self-absorbed human beings on earth. I think the ideal career is a movie producer, which means you can get laid just so much and talk shit about actors, which is ideal.
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