WBA title holder

Hello, seekers:

Here I am recovering from a long run on a beautiful day. I have just enough time to choke down enough alcohol to make working on this beautiful day tolerable, but while I am doing so I wanted to tell you a WBA story.

WBA is not what you think it is. I think at one time WBA largely meant World Boxing Association, which I think was one of the main organizations in professional boxing before Don King and his Eraserhead 'do got involved and fucked it all up. Now I think there about about 600 boxing federations, each of which has a champion. It is not like the good old days, back when my dad and I used to sit in front of the black-and-white Motorola on Friday nights and watch the Fullmer brothers, Gene or Don, or one of those tough-as-shit guys from the late '50s and early '60s really pound the pissbuckets out of each other.

No, the new "WBA" is something that started at my office several years ago, and it stands for World's Biggest Asshole. Actually, it started out as Asshole of the Night, which I guess means that while having lots of variations of a governing authority (like boxing does) can be confusing, it doesn't hurt to allow for just a little bit of natural evolution when it comes to these things.

The original Asshole of the Night started when a friend and I used to occasionally (try nightly) go out drinking after work. While doing this we would discuss particular incidents of aggression or, worse, passive aggression in the office that night, and both of these traits are seen on a regular basis in my line of work. After we would hash over the most appalling of the night's incidents, we would come to a decision as to who the Asshole of the Night was.

Mind you, we were not high-hatting everyone on this. Either my friend or I were Asshole of the Night on occasion; of course, there were a few people who were the Cal Ripkens of being Asshole of the Night.

But my friend moved on, and eventually a small cadre of the newer crew came up with an even better contest: the now-coveted WBA title, or World's Biggest Asshole. But the criteria have changed, just like the big league strike zone is no longer from the shoulders to the knees like it was back when baseball was worth paying attention to.

Being aggressive or passive aggressive will get you nowhere on the road to the WBA title. What you need to get in on this one is to be the biggest fucking chump on the job that night, the person who gets the biggest load dumped on them, the person who winds up getting a cowshit pie in the face from one of the "bosses" for no real good reason. Stuff like that.

We thoroughly enjoy awarding the WBA title at the end of the night. This event is either not known to the "bosses," or they try to ignore it. I suspect the latter. We have not come up with an official belt yet, like one of those idiotic jewel-encrusted
things boxers get when they pound the bejeezus out of some tomato can to retain one of the 600 or so titles that are available. But we are working on it, and I am always up for ideas in that regard. I guess the crown of thorns is already taken, so we will have to do better.

However, there also is a subdivision in the WBA that occasionally calls for the awarding of a title, and this is probably more in keeping with the World's Biggest Asshole concept that Denis Leary sang about in his unforgettable song "The World's Biggest Asshole," which would be sung on a regular basis in the office if we weren't too tired or stupid to remember all the words.

I need to tell you that on Saturday one such person crossed my path. Seeing this person made me wish that there was a real WBA organization, and that WBA title winners were real professionals who made ridiculous salaries, because if that were so I could have been this guy's agent and signed him to a WBA contract for seven figures and pocketed a nice little bit of change out of it my own self.

I took my daughter, my daughter-in-law and my grandkids out to a small restaurant for brunch in a small city near where I live. This place was unbelievably crowded, and it took forever to get served, but that's what you come to expect when you put the preparation of your food into someone else's hands, and whenever you do that and survive without a near-fatal case of dysentery or food poisoning you should thank your lucky fucking stars for your good fortune in life.

About 25 of the people in there, or so it seemed, were from one family or group, and they were making about the equivalent amount of din that you might hear from the left-field bleachers during the seventh game of a World Series. Amid this buzzing, teeming nest of assholes (I call such gatherings NOAs for short) was one guy who was an asshole for the ages.

He was about 35 or so, and was decked out in full asshole regalia: snap-brim golfer's cap endorsed by Payne Stewart or some other dead asshole with a little kangaroo logo on it; wraparound "shades" that were alternately up on his forehead, covering his little rat eyes, or hung down the tip of his skinny-assed, long pointy nose so that he could "peer" at you while telling "jokes"; a T-shirt that inexplicably said ALCOHOL TOBACCO FIREARMS on it (two out of three isn't bad, but he can shove his tobacco up his ass), and some kind of nylon sweat pants with a stripe down the side, even though by looking at this guy I daresay he hasn't broken a sweat since Reagan was in office.

You could just tell that this guy once got a fortune cookie that said he is the life of the party and took it fucking seriously, because he kept braying and guffawing and shouting and cracking stupid one-liners, after which he would look around at the poor suffering hordes to see if anyone else was laughing at them, and if you have to check to see if people think you are funny chances are you are not very funny.

There is a terrible tendency that lies within me for some stupid reason. That tendency is to think that things can't possibly get worse, and of course this is a painfully wrong canon on which to base your faith. Just as I am starving and looking at my fork and thinking that on their prior visits to this place people like that have had that very one I am about to eat with in their mouths, he stands up again and, guffawing at his own incredible cleverness, shouts out "Git 'er done!!"
This line, along with the standing and some weird arm motion that looked something like what Jackie Gleason used to do when he would say "And away we go," was repeated several times. If I weren't sick of this fucking jackass before, believe me that did it because it stirred up a painful memory.

I have a brother-in-law whom I love dearly. He is an educated man and a high school teacher. One night when I was visiting him and my sister, he suggested we watch a DVD featuring L---y the Cable Guy (note that I continue to carefully avoid revealing identities in here. You can't be too careful in this world).

For about 55 minutes or 55 hours, and I really am not sure which it was, I watched open-mouthed as this jackass L---y delivered his "routine," which basically consisted of being an asshole in not too different a manner from the guy in the restaurant. This is fucking funny? And L---y's catchphrase is the selfsame "Git 'r done," whatever that means, and God only knows that I have no interest in finding out.

So hearing "Git 'r done" from the guy at the diner really sealed the WBA deal for me as far as he was concerned. Former pitcher Jim Bouton wrote a very funny book in the late '60s or so called "Ball Four" in which he revealed the shocking fact that young big-league players are often drunks, whoremongers and womanizers, which really sets them apart from regular young males, doesn't it? Anyway, in "Ball Four" there was a coach or manager or something who would yell out "Have an idea out there!" whenever a player would do something stupid. (If anyone recalls the identity of who said that in the book, please let me know. The suspense is brutal.)

But that was exactly what I thought when this guy kept saying "Git 'r done" and thinking it was the funniest thing since Cheney shot the lawyer. Have a fucking idea out there. If something isn't funny when a comic making seven figures a year says it, it sure as shit isn't funny when you say it, pal.

So if you decide to get into the business of crowning WBA titleholders on your own, just learn from this experience and remember that no matter how good you are, there's always another contender right around the corner.

ADDENDUM: And now for an opposing point of view. I want to preface this by saying I take neither side in this little tiff, but I must say the music on the Web page is an inspiration to all. Looks like a job for People's Court or Judge Judy or Oprah or something: http://www.disinfotainmenttoday.com/hakim/andrehakim.htm

And if you are Andre or his tormentor, don't bother seeking my opinion, OK?