Happy Fourth of July, weaklings, cowards, and little pussies all over this great country. Well folks, it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Over two hundred years ago this country threw off the yoke of its oppressors and then beat the shit out of them for trying to put the yoke on in the first place, and just like the United States did to England, I’m gonna beat the shit out of my roommate Connor. That’s right, all of human history, all of the rigorous training and strenuous torture I’ve put my body through all these years have led up to this moment right here.
You’ll have to excuse our appearance, first of all. We were supposed to do this in Connor’s overrated MMA gym but for some reason they don’t allow visitors after ten pm, even though they’re supposedly open 24 hours, so we had to make do with our living room and move some furniture around to allow us a proper arena for our upcoming struggle. By the way, this gym knows who they are, and they should be expecting a long and coordinated smear campaign across various social media platforms from myself and several other loyal followers and long-time friends of the Pood and You blog. Remember, you did this to yourselves.
I suppose now’s the best time to go over the ground rules we laid out for each other, while Connor does whatever the hell make-believe pre-workout stretches they do on whatever planet he learned them from. Punches, kicks, and holds of all kinds are allowed, excepting of course blows to the groin, since any ninety-eight pound ignoramus can win a rochambeau match. The first to tap out in a submission or lose consciousness loses a match.
So it was to be this, then, a sudden-death test of each other’s mettle. I was determined to be the one who could take the most punishment, as much as I could dish out. Sure, I might not have had as much bogus training as my opponent, but nonetheless I doubt he put his body through the same arduous conditioning as I have these past months. I offer no excuses for myself, no shortcuts. Do your worst, Connor, I said to him before we began. Rain a million blows upon my body, squeeze me with the force of a million boa constrictors. Whatever you are capable of, I will rise above, and overcome, and defeat you with my own strength.
Also, after much discussion, we agreed that Connor could hit me in the jaw but nowhere near my eyes, as losing my glasses would render me effectively blind and put him at an unfair advantage.
Well, no sense in delaying the inevitable, then. As I allowed my opponent to give the signal to begin the match, I could barely contain the excitement, the anticipation I felt over finally having the chance, after months of endless bickering and ineffectual roommate meetings, to dispense with idle chatter and wreck his feeble body with bruises and broken bones, the aftermath of my ironclad fists and feet, backed by the strength coursing through my immaculately sculpted-
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So my foe was to have first blood. No matter. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, as I’m sure someone very intelligent must have said once a long time ago. There was nothing to do but rise to my feet and bring on the charge anew, armed with the new intelligence of how my enemy will most likely attempt to strike me again.
You see, while it is true I need these eyeglasses to satisfy the state when I operate a motor vehicle within its boundaries, I have no such need for them in the art of combat! I mean, really, how hard can it be to swing at a whitish-grayish thing with black hair and a beard until it stops moving? You see, when I choose the terrain to fight my battles, as the great Sun Tzu of course suggests, I always choose the cover of darkness, so even if I didn’t have the advantage of perfect eyesight, then so neither would my opponent (when we found out the gym was not available, I suggested we have the match in a nearby public park, after hours, and deep within the trees where no municipal lamps would illuminate our fight, but Connor, like the coward he is, insisted on the apartment, as he said he had to work late that night and get up early the next morning).
I only feigned to have such a pressing need for them, knowing that they would provide my idiot roommate an irresistible target in the match, one that I could then easily defend against, and then turn against him and exploit to my advantage. And, though I pretended to be outraged that his kick to my face broke our pre-established rule, so I would. When he goes high, I go-
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So once again, this is all a gambit to get Connor to play into my strategy. For all he complains and pisses and moans about my workout regimen, he seemed to forget rather quickly that every day I swing a pood and a half worth of solid iron to make my abdomen arguably even more solid and untreatable than that iron itself. So you see, it may look to the undiscerning spectator like I’m doubled over in pain, but really I’m right in the middle of yet another of my patented feints.
And sure enough, my feint succeeded in precisely the way I wanted it to. It was all a ploy to make my roommate overconfident enough to blunder into his next step, which I correctly assumed is the same one that every overstuffed MMA lunkhead resorts to in the end: backing their opponent into a wall and pummeling them with an inelegant hailstorm of punches, like a schoolyard bully held back a few grades. Well, Connor, go to it, then. By all means, deal out as much of this punishment upon me as you like, which is surely the result of years of rigorous and precise MMA training and not at all just an excuse to dignify whatever crude barroom brawl techniques your strip-mall gym churns out at a hundred dollars a month.
I simply allow him to make him think he’s hurting me before I retort with my own blows. Once again, he’s a fool to think a few mere punches can faze me in even the slightest when I spend a good part of my usual day lifting a hunk of iron over my head to a three-plus hour epic about two star-crossed lovers in the throes of the Russian Revolution. I tackle him to the floor and give him a Russian revolution of my own, backed by the full might of a pood and a half. So you like punches to the head, Connor? Well, let’s just see how you like-
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Well, so my roommate was to win the first match of our agreed-upon best out of three. But I was undaunted. I was still on my own two feet, and I still had two out of three matches to best him in. It’s almost preferable I let him win that first bout, to instill in him a false sense of confidence, thereby giving me the perfect opportunity to strike him at his weakest point, just when he least expects it.
It also seemed as though I gave him a fright with those punches of mine, as I noticed he abandoned the use of punches and kicks himself. It looked like if I were to beat him after all, I’d have to meet him halfway with his asinine ground grappling. While he was at an advantage in that he was well-versed in such holds and submissions, he nonetheless at a disadvantage in that I don’t take it seriously at all. Let him come to me, let him hug it out with me or whatever, and then, just when he least expects it, I stab him right in the heart. Figuratively, that is, with my fighting skill. There were no edged weapons allowed, and though it would have been something to go at it with knives in the cover of darkness, he of course as a young working professional would have none of it.
At any rate, it was a matter of time before the fight would be mine. Though I never put much stock in religion, there are nonetheless enough little snippets of truth in the Bible that ring true enough, and what better turn of phrase could I assign to my roommate here and now but pride comes before a-
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Well, so my foe was to get an early lead in our agreed-upon best three out of five match. Once again, I could have easily insisted on a sudden-death match and overpowered him with my superior strength and endurance. Instead, I allowed him so many chances to try and beat me with the ulterior purpose of getting him to reveal his true fighting style, and all the quirks and imperfections that came with it.
If I had any delusions that I was playing mental chess with my foe as much as I was engaged in physical fisticuffs, they were dashed the moment he began… whatever this is. What an enormous insult. Willingly laying on his back, presenting his exposed flanks to me, presumably to exploit them as I would. What was he getting at?
I could not let this stand, whatever it was. I abandoned all thoughts of beating my enemy with finesse right then and there, I resorted to schoolboy punches and kicks in kind. How could I hurt him, I thought then, and not just beat him in single combat? What could I do that would ruin him, what blows could I rain upon his weak physical carriage that would reverberate beyond the confines of this match, of our apartment? Imagine his stammering and dissembling, his little quivering whimpering lip as he wonders what to tell his boss when he asks him where did you get those bruises Connor? Why so many trips to the dentist Connor? Are you okay-
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Well, so he was to have a deceptively high lead on our agreed-upon best four out of seven match. Before we began, I let him know he was way out of line with that last hold. That, he claimed, was what the neanderthals who teach him “I can’t pick a martial art I like so I’ll do them all poorly” at the proto-fascist mall gym like to call a “triangle choke hold,” but I was having none of it.
It was a little gay, to be honest. I mean, what he does behind his own closed bedroom door is none of my concern, of course, but if this was all an excuse to get his kicks from having me wrapped around his supple thighs, then I warned him then and there that he’d have to forfeit the whole fight to me. At any rate, I made it clear that after being so close to his crotch as I was, win or lose (unlikely as that was, I know), he could expect me to forward any and all medical expenses I’d incur to treat any nasty cases of pinkeye I might come down with directly to him-
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Of course, to any untrained eye, to any unwitting spectator, it may have looked like my foe had me on the ropes, but that was all part of my plan that I devised in my head the moment I suggested a best twenty six out of fifty one match, which my foolhardy opponent was all but happy to agree to.
And just like a clockwork automaton, my foe predictably fell right into my trap. You see, I only agreed to have so many rounds to the fight in the hopes that I would exhaust every single one of Connor’s potential maneuvers on me. I’d tire him out by resisting submission after submission, until he had only one left, the infamous, and once again a little too homoerotically-named for comfort, rear naked choke hold. Tap or nap, those mouth-breathing chuds at the dilapidated mall gym would hoot and sputter and grunt to each other upon the first sight of their imbecile comrades choking someone from behind.
I wanted Connor to perform exactly this maneuver on me, and I barely put up any resistance as he did. The key to beating the rear choke hold, of course, was in the idiot mantra I just mentioned. If all that anyone from that limited intellectual stratum could pull from their pea brains is tap or nap, then it took someone on a higher evolutionary plane, someone like me, to realize that in order to beat it, one must simply neither tap, nor nap.
It was all so simple. I couldn’t help but let loose a hearty laugh through my rock-solid neck as his rickety chicken-bone limbs laughably kept me “restrained.” All I needed to do was get through the night in his pathetic choke hold.
My plan was working! He was expending what little energy he had left in a last-ditch attempt to make me pass out! I reveled in the irony of it all as I could feel his limbs going slack, his breathing getting slower and more belabored. I could feel him losing energy, losing power, and slowly losing consciousness. It was only a matter of time before he’d go limp beneath me, and I’d wrest myself from his unconscious body and soon after have my way with him.
Oh, what a Fourth of July treat this all turned out to be! I was proof that the underdog doesn’t always come out on top, proof that, as Darwin said, only the strongest animal will survive in the struggle against the universe’s best efforts to kill you. I was proof that the great Sun Tzu was right, that the strongest warrior is decided long before the battle begins, and its execution is a mere formality. I was the British empire against the fledgling colonial army, I was Goliath against David, and I beat them both, all thanks to the Russian ingenuity of the pood and a half!
There he was himself, the greatest American of them all, George Washington himself, grinning through his rotten wooden teeth and bending his knee in abasement and deference to my victory over my perfidious roommate. The infant American nation and the British empire alike quaked in my awful presence as I flexed my muscles to ring in the dawn of a new global superpower, the Kingdom of Max-amillion, with more destructive force than all the nuclear arsenals of all the world combined!
All nations of the world tremble with the fear of God as they salute the new flag of the nation that was to rule over them all: the flag of my defeated foe, his body beaten to a submissive pulp and hosted aloft on a flagpole, his broken bones encased inside his bruised skin blowing impotently against the winds of a new era of world history!
To ring in the dawning of this new age of strength and prosperity, I declare this day a national holiday. Today, July 4, 2019, is the Independence Day for the whole world, its independence from weakness, from making excuses for oneself, from unacceptably excessive BMIs. To ring in the grand occasion, I take my defeated foe’s battered body down from the pole and tie it to a massive rocket. It goes off and zips into the night sky, exploding into a million luminous pieces, glowing every single color on the spectrum and a few that I as the ruler of the world will coin for the first time. These colors never existed before the reign of Max-amillion, never before seen with the human naked eye, and now so established, these colors will never run.
It’s a brave new world I have established, one where everyone lives and dies by the pood and a half. Everyone in the world trains their bodies and their minds with the same hunk of iron in which I did the same. Everyone prepares to face off in mortal combat with their greatest enemy at any time in the day or night, just as I did with my own greatest enemy! Everyone strong enough to vanquish their foe in combat earns the right to live and love in Max-amillion’s new kingdom, while the battered bodies of the the fallen are kept throughout the year up to the next July 4, to be tied anew to rocket ship and shot into the black expanse of space, to illuminate the night sky in an annual grand finale as our own strong citizens of the world work tirelessly to conquer new worlds, the moon now, then perhaps Mars, then maybe Pluto, for those with the constitution to stand the cold, and then, who knows? Different galaxies, different dimensions-
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I found myself roused from what was apparently my pleasant dream and back in my apartment. I couldn’t believe what I saw next… it shook me to my utter deepest core… Could it be… did I… did I really… did I truly…
Yes! It was all true, it was no dream at all. I had won indeed! There was Connor, lounging impotently against the living room wall, defeated. His feeble rear choke hold had no effect on me, and he had no other cheap maneuver in his tawdry back of tricks to best me, me, a man of sheer iron will.
I cannot tell you how much pleasure I took in seeing him stew in the juices of his own failure. How he sulked and whinged and moaned as he sauntered off into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him, never to open again for the rest of the night. How I was to relish all the privileges and perquisites that were to be mine by right in the event of my victory, which we definitely agreed upon beforehand. I was to get the larger room, for half the rent per month I was paying now, and for the smaller room! I was to be unencumbered by the tedium of the chore chart. I was to look on and savor the sight of Connor cleaning the kitchen, taking out the garbage, making sure the dishes went into the washer, every day, every month, for the rest of the entire lease. It was all to be mine.
I have conquered Connor! I stand alone, unbowed and unbroken! I am the captain of my own soul!
Happy Fourth of July, bitches!
The Supreme Pancake 