Gospel of Mark, Vol. 3: The Reckoning

January 21, 2011 By

Welcome to the third edition of The Gospel of Mark. In this section, I’ll be answering all of your questions with the wisdom I’ve garnered from over twenty-two whole years on this earth. So, sit back and prepare to fill your brain-hole with my wisdom…or with whatever else you feel needs to be inserted in there.

Dear Mark the Omniscient,

How can I better protect my anal virginity during hazing, or be less emotionally scarred afterwards?

Sincerely,
Dave “Don’t put that in there” Smith

Dear Guy With the Awesome
Nickname,

Well, you’re fucked in more ways than one. See what I did there? Because not only is the situation fucked, but so are YOU. Haha! I’m clever. Seriously though, get a chastity belt. They’re not just for women.

Dear Mark the Omniscient,

This question is not necessarily for me, as I’ve known I wanted to go to medical school since probably before I was born, but as the majority of my friends don’t really know what to do with their lives. My question for you is this: How can my friends figure out what to do with their lives? What should they do next year?
Please let me know so I can stop having to deal with their weekly nervous breakdowns.

Yours sincerely,
Senioritis

Dear Directionless Hobo,

It’s understandable to be confused about what to do with the rest of your life. We’ve all gone through it at some point. Lucky for you, I’m here to help you with your problem! Since I don’t know your friends personally, I can only give a few general guidelines about finding a purpose in life. Here’s a question for them, have they considered prostitution? It’s a job for the young at heart and the supple of body, which (most) college seniors certainly are. 24th and West End is a great corner to start working. I think so, at least, because I see ladies of the night standing there every weekend.
If selling your body isn’t for you, don’t panic! There are probably other career paths. Try starting at some service job, such as rapid cuisine artisan or sanitation engineer. You can work your way up to the top; I saw it on TV. Maybe that was just an episode of Undercover Boss… but the point is that I saw it happen, although, honestly, I was on a lot of drugs at the time so it could have been anything.

Dear Mark the
Omniscient,

How can I make more time for lifting?

Sincerely,
Some Dude

Dear Ronnie Coleman,

The first step to gain more lifting time is to break up with your girlfriend if you have one. We all know that their incessant need to ‘spend time with’ and ‘see’ us really cuts into our lifting schedule. Sure, there may be some repercussions, and your (soon to be) ex-girlfriend will be all, “boo hoo. Blah blah blah. Boo hoo some more. I’m saying something whiny and pointless.” I mean, whatever. Who wants to listen to that crap anyway? Not you, that’s for sure.
The second step is to take up residence in one of the janitor’s closets at the Rec Center. It cuts down dramatically on travel time, thereby giving you more of that sweet, sweet lifting you’ve always wanted. If they ever find out and threaten to kick you out, just flex at them with your pecs, and sure enough they ought to leave you alone forever. It’s a given that anyone who can actually flex their moobs is intimidating and should not be messed with. Either that or they’re doing a sexy dance.
The third and final step is to get a puppy. How does this relate, you ask? I have no clue. I just like puppies.

If you have a question of your own that you would like to have passed through the mental bowels of Mark the Omniscient, address an email to mto.theslant@gmail.com and see if Mark will answer your question in our next issue.

Filed Under: Advice, Articles Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

“Don’t be that guy!”

February 8, 2010 By

So I was working out at the gym the other evening when the King of the Douche Bags graced us with his presence. Now don’t get me wrong, there are generally loads of piss-ant douche bags at the gym who like to like strut around like little peacocks playing the “who has the biggest dick now?” game with their amounts of pounds lifted.

My work out buddy and I aren’t allowed to play this game, as we can’t compete with some of those douche-dudes who can lift more than quadruple my body weight with their nose-wiggle muscles. However, I am happy to finally report that we’re no longer the weakest guys in the gym either, and physically intimidating at least one other person is such a great feeling.

Anyway, the King of the Douche Bags made a stealthy entrance into the free weights section of the gym, readying his regal weights and preparing his bejeweled lifting throne without causing much commotion or demanding any “official entrance trumpet music.” Then, in a sudden fit of rage, he began doing Power Cleans.

Now for all you non-juice-monkeys and non-meatheads out there, a “Power Clean” is an exercise in which the person lifts a massive amount of weight on a bar that is sitting on the floor to the waist level and then to the shoulders/head level, and finally nicely puts it back down on the ground.

You may better recognize this as the lift that those immensely intense-looking Olympic power-lifters do with eyes bulging and neck veins popping like they had just dropped the most colossal shit of their lives. Getting a visual yet? Yeah, that one.

However, the King of the Douche Bags didn’t think he would garner enough attention by simply returning the weights to the floor quietly, so at the zenith of his lift, right around eye-level of his 6-foot-something height, he decided to just let the weights drop. BAM!

Now if this had happened once, it would have been alright. Sometimes, in an attempt to stake their penis-envy claims, the little peacocks try to lift more than they are physically able to, but then their muscles give out and they have to drop the weights. It happens from time to time. Yet, (BAM!) the King (BAM!) of the Douche Bags (BAM!) didn’t drop (BAM!) the weights just once (BAM!), but more like (BAM!) eight times (BAM!) in a row (BAM!). Do you see how annoying that is?

The mid-sized peacocks began to grumble amongst themselves about how the King of the Douche Bags was not obeying the “golden rule” of the gym. Even if he were to have selective common courtesy amnesia, there’s a fucking sign on the wall that literally reads “Don’t be that guy!,” reminding him to put his shit back where he got it from and to not let his weights crash onto the floor.

Being perhaps the fourth smallest guy in the weight room at the time – though only slightly weaker than my work out buddy who kept whispering “hardcore” under his breath with every crash – I had major peacock points to make up, and I saw this as a rare opportunity to quickly climb the gym’s hierarchal ladder. I grabbed the smallest weight I could find – a 2.5lb one – and marched straight to the King of the Douche Bags’ crashing zone. The mid-sized peacocks thought I was a crazy mo’fo’.

Right after he let another one of his lifts drop to the floor (BAM!), I stood squarely in front of him, looked him dead in the eye, raised the 2.5lb weight above my head with both of my hands (like Rafiki did to Simba in The Lion King), and then slammed it to the floor with all my might (baby BAM!). We angrily stared into each others’ eyes for about a full 30 seconds after the crash, which I thought was long enough for him to fully get the point of how I just shamed him by making him realize how much of a d-bag he was being.

The King of the Douche Bags, despite the stupid-looking faces he made while lifting, was, at the least, not as dense at the iron he was pumping, because he got the idea and finally dethroned himself.

The mid-sized peacocks were impressed, and they promised to stop stepping on my feet whenever I would lie down on the bench press seat. I considered this a small victory and was glad to accept it.

Since that evening, I have never seen the King of the Douche Bags ever again, and one may even go so far as to proclaim that his doucheiness has been fully vanquished, but I know that it won’t be long before another hardcore mid-sized peacock tries to claim the throne once more. Until the time when my title is put to the test once again, I shall remain self-knighted as “Justin, Slayer of Doucheiness.”
Granted, it’s not as badass of a title as “Dragonslayer” or “Womanizer,” but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

Filed Under: Articles, Culture Tagged With: ,

The Slant VS The Rec

November 15, 2009 By

The Rec center at Vanderbilt is what is wrong with America. There I said it. And yes, I mean the whole thing. Every Wal-Mart filled with obese children. Every Starbucks rife with teenage girls. Every street corner in Middle America littered with Tea-Baggers. All of them can trace their problems back to Vanderbilt’s Rec center. How? Here’s how:

First thing you notice when you walk into the Rec center are the two distinct groups of people coagulated at separate ends of the weight-room. If you don’t notice this, then you are probably part of one of the groups; may God have mercy on your soul.

First off there are the sorority girls. I’m not talking about your average girl that’s pressured to join sorority because if the don’t they’ll be “totally lame”, I’m talking about the hardcore foot-soldiers; the ones who come up with stuff like “D ClDssy Tribute to VeterDns!” and “Theta Loves to Hate Malaria!” You’ll see these ones on the Ellipticals. What is the reasoning behind this? Some of them will tell you it’s because running is too “high impact for my malnourished bones” and the exercise bikes are “all sweaty and junk”. In actuality the only thing the Ellipticals help you do is run through oscillating pits of sand, a challenge few of us will ever face. But hey, 99 problems right?

The second group isn’t connected by any higher organization like a sorority; instead the group itself acts as the binding force. These people love doing curls. Never mind that your body has many other more important muscles that you could be developing, everyone with half-a-brain knows curls are all that matters. This perception is bolstered by the fact that the girls who use the Ellipticals sometimes look to mate with guys who can lift heavy things from their waist to their shoulders, only using their arms. This is also how the choosing of a mate works in many isolated villages in Central Africa, the Amazon, and rural Kentucky.

Meanwhile, the people who actually know what they are doing have to wade through all these people. However, this is not the fault of either of the two aforementioned groups; the onus for that mistake lies on the shoulders of the university. In the construction of the facilities they seemed to forget that around 6000 undergraduates are enrolled at any given moment. This makes their choice to make the weight-room of comparable size to that of its high school counterpart, interesting.

Now, after all that, you would think that the Rec would finally get its act together when it came to the Intra-Mural leagues. Unfortunately for all of us, thinking this would be a colossal mistake. The scheduling and re-scheduling of games seems to be completely incongruous. “Oh you can’t play 1:30 pm on Mondays? Class? Ok, we’ll move your game to 5 am Tuesday then. Sleep? No problem, we’ll just move it to 8 am Sunday. Church? Well, you’ll have to forfeit then. By the way, you owe us forty dollars for joining the league, thanks”.

In closing, the Rec Center could use a little attitude change. I don’t know how it has contributed to the ills of American society. Sure, I could go for some metaphor that The Rec represents our moral and cultural deficiencies, and that such a tenuous metaphor the best evidence any of us will ever muster in our chaotic and materialistic lives, but that would take too much time. So here’s to you Rec center, thanks for giving the Slant a new enemy; I’d watch your back…

Filed Under: Articles, Opinion Tagged With: ,