The Physics Stupidity

Creativity. From the time our ancestral hunter-gatherer forefathers first figured out that it was a whole hell of a lot easier to try and spear a saber tooth tiger than it was to bear-hug it to death, we’ve been on a forward march powered by the stuff. But while it often makes us more productive and diminishes the chance of being seriously injured, sometimes it has the exact opposite effect.

I was fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to live in a fraternity in college just loaded with creative dynamos. We came up with all sorts of interesting games and distractions to avoid anything that resembled higher learning while at the same time maximizing the fun quotient. The house was old…with the earlier wing dating back to the 1920’s. The basement was accessible by a stairwell off the front room. It was steep, dark, and narrow. The house also was rarely left wanting in its stock of empty beer kegs. One particularly creative and masochistic guy invented perhaps the greatest drunken athletic competition in the history of man. I think it likely impossible to capture all the subtle nuances of activity in a forum such as this, but I’ll give it a try:

This activity was christened, wait for it ....................................................

Donkey Kong.

The challenge in Donkey Konging is predominantly that a keg bouncing down a narrow stairway behaves in an extremely unpredictable fashion (think Michael Vick and Tom Cruise doing Tequila Shooters). At the moment of destiny, you had two choices depending upon what you thought the keg would do.

#1 You could attempt to jump over the keg. The problem with this was that if the keg took an especially good bounce, it was going to meet you solidly in the air. A beer keg, even an empty one, is extremely adept at upending a drunken Poly-sci major. In the worst of these impacts, you got to tumble back down the steps with the keg bouncing after you. This was reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote getting crushed by the broken piece of cliff a second after he went *poof* on the canyon floor.

#2 You could duck your body down as low as you could get it and hope the keg took the kind of inspired leap described above. For some reason this never worked out for me. And taking a twenty pound husk of fermented goodness square in the skull repeatedly was not conducive a productive life of, say...not eating through a tube in your arm.

As even then I new I had little chance of getting through life on my good looks alone, I usually opted for technique #1. Today, I’ve got some arthritis in my thumb and a chip of bone floating around somewhere in the vicinity of my right hip, but I think I’m much moriest smartier this way.

Why even bring any of this up? Well, time for the metaphor. Just because you did a really stupid and dangerous thing in your past...even an extremely enjoyable stupid and dangerous thing...doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stop.

You’ve got to stop smoking. Now. And I’m talking to both people collectively and to one person individually (you know who you are).

Smoking was another habit I picked up in the House. I quit Donkey Konging when I graduated. I smoked for another eight years before I was finally able to quit for good. Guess which one has left me with more permanent injury? I’ll give you a hint...it’s the one that doesn’t conjure memories of an anti-Sicilian simian. NOBODY has a more addictive personality than I do. While trying to quit once I ate so many sunflower seeds my lips actually BLISTERED from the salt. But I did it in the end. Five years now, not a puff. If I can do it, anyone can.