Bologna Medal Winner in the Olympic Decathlon

Almost Famous

There is a certain level of fame that comes from living in a small town. And, as with all types of fame, there comes a price. This price, unfortunately, has ruined most of John Hughes, and other coming of age movies for me.

Being raised in a small town you need to get used to everyone knowing everything about you. This aspect is never more apparent than when in the company of people from cities or towns with large populations.

When you live in a small town you bump into people you know on a regular basis and when you do you are obligated to talk to them. It makes me feel like a celebrity whenever I have friends from Manhattan around.

For example: One day during the Sag Harbor festival a few years ago Max, my friend who was visiting at the time, and I went to see my grandmother, a tiny lady working the information booth inside of the windmill, when suddenly the canon my uncle had just fired, signaling the start a whaleboat race my mother was competing in.

Nothing about that sounds strange to me but if I were to look at it from my friends perspective I can understand why it must have felt like something made up by Lewis Carroll.

But we are all used to this kind of insanity because it was what we were raised on. And as crazy as it might seem from the outside, it is always comforting to know that there are people genuinely interested in how you life is progressing. They want to know everything about your work, relationships, living situations, and every bit of information they can drag out of you.

It’s like living under the watchful eye of the paparazzi. If they don’t already know, people are extremely interested in everything that you are doing. This notoriety makes me feel a very close and personal connection with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, because like them everyone lost their minds when it came to my underwear.

Sadly however, the price of growing up in such a small town and earning this local fame is that all coming of age movies loose their impact. Sure I can watch and enjoy the Breakfast Club and I can recognize how awesome it must be to a confused high school student, but I can’t relate to it.

The same goes for Saved By the Bell, 90210, and all of these other shows that are set in high schools where stereotypes are socially influential. That is because the high schools these stories are set in have graduating classes larger than 38. Sure my high school had “a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal,” as every character from the eighties was labeled, but with such a small student body our stereotypes were forced to mingle and interact.

Growing up with these amalgamated caricatures made me realize two very important things: a) because no one is defined by their stereotype prejudices are really ignorant and b) Nerds was the only movie that I can remember that showed how stereo types were wrong.

Sure John Hughes tried to show that every character can grow to embrace the similarities they all share but in the end each student kept the parts that made them noticeably different. Nerds, on the other hand, showed that they didn’t need to grow because there was no need for such vague divides (there were a bunch of geeks in a black fraternity who showed everyone that they were cool in the end).

Do you have any idea how depressing it is to look back on your life and realize that Nerds is one of the best ways to sum it up?

But that is something that I can blame on living in a small town. It doesn’t matter if I am as bad ass as Judd Nelson because everyone knows about every embarrassing thing I did while I was growing up.

Though his column has not been posted online in a long time, Nick Bennett continues to write a weekly column that, more often than not, mentions that he doesn’t wear underwear. Focused Boredom can be found every week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the Independent.

Men’s Fashion: Time to do the Laundry

When it comes to fashion, men have a style all of their own. This is because, for the most part, women want nothing to do with it. That is because it is common for guys to go against the fashion grain by wearing colors that don’t match or not wearing underwear.

There are entirely too many rules when it comes to fashion. Guys would never have come up with rules like “never wear white after Labor Day” and “always match your belt with your shoes.” If we were to follow these fashion rules half of our wardrobe would be useless after labor day because we would have to put away all of our ribbed tank tops and men would only be aloud to wear sweat pants because there is no belt that goes with basketball sneakers.

Men take their feet very seriously because in most cases a man’s foot is an entirely new, and usually hairy, organism.

Athletic sneakers, thankfully, can be worn every day for an entire year regardless of situation, social standing and rank. This is done in the off chance that a spontaneous basketball or indoor soccer match takes place. This can happen at any moment, when suddenly all of the women in the board room, restaurant or wedding party will look around and find that all of the guys have run off for a quick game.

 Our shoes are built comfortable for just such occasions but the rest of our clothes require a vigorous ageing process. Most importantly men’s clothes need to spend at least four to six weeks on the floor in their bedroom to achieve maximum comfort.

This process is being painstakingly researched by young men in college all over the world, many of whom began researching as early as high school. This ageing process works by taking a new article of clothes, wearing it once and then leaving it on the floor in your bedroom for four to six weeks, allowing it to mingle with all of the other shirts and pants lying around the room. After the cultures growing in the clothes have matured enough to make them get up and walk to and operate the laundry themselves can they really be considered broken in.

This is why most men’s fashion revolves around looking like they are doing their laundry. This is because, for the most part, they are in a perpetual state of doing their laundry.

If it were up to us everyone would be wearing sweat pants and flip-flops all of the time, a concept that is unbelievable to all of the other genders in the world. This is because women look for fashion tips in magazines like Cosmo and ELLE that tell them to suffer for their style while men’s magazines that offer fashion tips also have pictures of Halle Berry and Jessica Alba in bikinis.

Without these pictures most guys would have stopped reading after high school. Because I am offering fashion tips here without pictures many of our male readers have already stopped reading. I know I did.

Thankfully, however, fashion is not left up to guys. There have been moments in history when men took charge of the fashion world all been historically recorded as bad ideas. Things like powdered wigs, bow ties and all of the eighties are just a few examples. It is entirely inconceivable that a woman would intentionally giver herself gray hair or wear Members Only jackets.

With the summer approaching we will begin to see beach fashions re-emerging. Never has the difference been more defined than on the beach. Women wear bathing suits that require them to constantly check to see if it still on, have teams of technicians tie it in the back, and dissolves in water.

Men’s bathing suits are essentially boxers that dry faster and cover the knees, which is very important in men’s fashion. Showing off the knees is a sign of weakness and gives your opponent an open target in the likely chance that a spontaneous game of tackle football takes place.

For the record, Nick’s entire fashion sense revolves around not wearing underwear. His column, Focused Boredom, appears every week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the East Hampton Independent.

Life Questions: If a Blind Man Falls on the Train is it Funny?

I often wonder how I would react in certain life situation. For instance, if I were taken in a hostage situation would I panic and do as the assailant says or would I remain calm and watch for any moment of weakness when their guard is down and strike back. Or, more realistically, if someone offered me a free Ferrari would I take it or assume that the car is stolen or filled with drugs.

Each one of these “Life Questions” also bares with them hundreds of variables which change from day to day, thus making me really think about my reactions and forcing me to come up with original responses. Do I have the sun in my eyes or is it night outside; am I driving my car or riding a speeding bus; are there tools I can use to defend myself or do I have a super power?

That last one usually only comes into play on Wednesdays when all the new comics come out and I have spent my afternoon at Forbidden Planet.

Yesterday I was privileged enough to finally get my answer to a question that has been plaguing me since I moved to New York City and started using the public transportation system.

“If, while I am on the subway, a blind, homeless man steps on to the train and, as the train begins to leave the station, this person begins to fall would I be able to catch them?” Initially I hadn’t envisioned the blind person as homeless, that’s just how it worked out.

Frankly it puts me in an even more uncomfortable situation him being poor because the answer to that question is an indisputable No. And not in the simple “I just couldn’t react fast enough” way that I would have said incase the police got involved (of course he didn’t have health insurance). I didn’t even make an attempt.

I must sound like a horrible person and I know that I am going to Hell in a hotrod but there are variables here. Allow me to explain:

I had just walked on to the up town N train at Canal when the man in question walked on one door over. That is a good fifteen feet away from catching distance. I noticed that he was blind and homeless so I began to go over various scenarios in my head (If I was blind which of my other senses would I want to be heightened the most?) when he began to sing “Amazing Grace.” This caused everyone nearby to prepare their polite responses as to why they don’t have any spare change. He began working his way up the isle, making the occasional apology to people as he slapped them in the shin with his walking stick, and had gone half way before the doors closed and the train began to move.

This is when the unthinkable happened. Despite all of my mental training for just such as occasion I was unprepared for the one variable that left me dead in my tracks. He had just made it to the end of the fourth line in Amazing Grace (“Was blind, but now, I see.”) when he fell causing him to yell the word “see” and throw all of his loose change into the air.

In my defense I was still too far away to have made a difference (he was at least five feet away from my grasp) but I have no excuse for what happened next.

I just started laughing.

This was comedic gold. I blind, homeless, black man (I forgot to mention he was black) falling on a train while singing a hymn about regaining his sight and throwing all of his change… Look, maybe you had to be there but this is the kind of scene that only Buster Keeton could have come up with.

And I had just watched it live.

I was just able to maintain minimal composure and I am pretty sure that most of the other passengers didn’t notice my struggled attempt at forcing back a smile because everybody else got up to help this poor man.

Seeing as he was blind (heh, word puns), I know that he was able to hear me laughing because of his heightened hearing abilities, despite how hard I was fighting back the urge to keel over laughing. I did the only thing that I could think of. I got off at the next stop, waited until the train rolled out of the station and collapsed on the ground laughing like a crazy person.

While I sat there on the platform, laughing and waiting for the next train, I chalked this up as one of the greatest days of my life.

And if karma is any indication it will be my last. 

The Way Things Work, It’s Magic!

There are so many things in this world that I will never understand, like the mechanical workings of a car, the intricacies of most modern technology, or why Kevin Costner keeps making movies.

He starred in Field of Dreams and Dances With Wolves but that is no excuse for the Postman. So instead of focusing on something that none of us will ever understand I will focus more on the things someone does understand.

If someone were to pull up along side me at a stoplight they would see, on the surface, a technologically savvy master of machine picking his nose. Underneath this crunchy shell, however, is the creamy nugget center of a person who knows nothing about what makes his toys work.

In reality, when I look at the engine in my car all I can see is a large ball of metal that appears to have been put together to look specifically so it wouldn’t work. There are tubes that vanish behind wires, milk cartons filled with pink and blue liquids, and parts that I am sure are magic.

Automobiles are a combination of mechanical ingenuity and imagination in motion because they run on miniature explosions caused by sparks and rotating parts. But most importantly they have parts with names like dip stick and Wankel rotary engine, which are perfect for my column because they almost sound dirty.

Occasionally, I will try to sound like I know what I am talking about but the most information I have ever been able to retain about cars I learned by watching Back to the Future.

You see, what you should be worried about is how much gas your car needs to get to 88 mph when the nuclear reactor, that black tube right there, will create the 1.21 gigawatts needed to activate the flux capacitor.

The flip side is if I did manage to make it back to 1955 I would finally be ahead of the technology curve, a curve that I have never been able to catch up to.

Technologically I take after my dad who really only need to be in the same room as a computer to make it crash. The only real reason I can search the web, download music and use email is a direct result of being part of my generation. I was born knowing how to use Google and iTunes.

That is where is ends for me though. I am still amazed that my computer can check my spelling and deal the cards for the many games of solitaire I play when I should be working.

There is also the lingo that comes with being web savvy. Once someone begins talking about bloggers and tweeting, writing on friend’s walls, or ‘html’ and ‘bit torrent’ it begins to sound like the teacher from Peanuts.

The worst part about it all is that I am drawn to these technological advancements. Maybe it is because I am a product of a consumer society where a shopper can have the instant gratification of purchasing a high-ticket item that will help improve their social status or just because I like shiny objects but whenever a new iThing comes out I want it.

Not long ago I got my first Blackberry, which was a monumental moment in my life. Not only can I check my email and search the web from my phone but I can apparently do tons of other things that I will never figure out how to do.

Not only is there a feature that would allow me to watch television on my phone but I could also shoot short movies and cook bacon on the screen.

I am all right with not knowing how everything around me works, as long I can appear to know. I just wish I could figure out how to shoot video on my phone because no matter what I shoot it would have to be better than Swing Vote.

This column was released late because Nick Bennett hand wrote this entire column on his computer screen. Focused Boredom appears every week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the East Hampton Independent.

Sports Fans: The Good Kind of Crazy

If I’ve learned anything from working in a sports bar it is how to make it sound like I know what I’m talking about.

If customers would ask me about video games, new movies and early Warner Brothers cartoon I would be able to talk their ear off. But since, as is usually the case, my customers are of legal drinking age they want to talk about more mature topics.

They ask me things like “Did you see the news today,” “Do you know who won the game,” or “Two trains leave the station at the same time traveling at two different speeds. Which train would reach Montana first,” although customers really don’t get into the math problems until after the tequila.

But once the question is out there I have to respond even though I usually don’t know the answer. It’s not that I actively tried to avoid watching the game or the news, it’s just that there is a much better chance that I spent the last four hours watching SpongeBob or CSI: Miami.

Usually I can just make it up as I go along. “That thing that happened in that place, it was awful. Unless it was a amazing.”

Just winging it is really hard to do in a sports bar. Sports fan, for those who have never met one, are insane. They yell at the television screen in a desperate attempt to make the coaches and players, who are in the television, hear them; in many cases, fans will dress up like the players; they create imaginary teams and play in imaginary leagues; they will follow a team for thousands of miles to watch them for a few hours.

In any other situation these traits would get a restraining order slapped on you and possibly fitted for a straight jacket, depending on how involved your imaginary league was in your day-to-day life. But in this sports culture you’re just considered a big fan if you shave your teams logo onto your chest.

Even with all of this eccentric behavior fans manage to store and access unprecedented amounts of information, which they never hesitate to rattle off. This information can range from the really general (how many wins and losses a time has so far this season) to the very specific (Derek Jeter’s dog Slugger has a .349 fetching average).

There is only one other fan base that can be remotely compared to sports fans when it comes to the shear dedication to their team, loathing of the opposing team and knowledge all the topics and controversy that come with them: Political Parties.

Politicians, like athletes, are adored by the people that follow them and then scrutinized by the people who follow the other team. The rivalry between Democrats and the Republicans is almost the same as the one between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Each team demonizes the other all the while there is someone like Ralph Nader who, like the Cubs, will never win in 100 years.

They are especially similar when it comes to controversies and scandals. No matter what goes wrong the fans will stick to their team through thick and thin. And when you are in the lime light as much as politicians and athletes there is a lot that can go wrong, from drug use, to bribes, to gambling, to everything that could possibly go wrong in an airport bathroom.

The only real difference that I can see is in how acceptable it is to scratch yourself on national television.

Yet through all of the muck there are the loyal followers who will defend tooth and nail everything from a homeland security plan to a homerun record despite any mounting evidence that rules were broken and securities were compromised.

But don’t take my word for it because if there is one thing that I know for sure, it is that I don’t know what I am talking about.