Anyone who claims they know what will happen this football season is likely lying

Hey folks, remember me?

Nothing like football season to get me off my (currently medicated) ass and revive the ol' blog just in time.

Sure, back in December there was no real anticipation for the coming football season on my part.
2008? The most disappointing season for Georgia football in easily over a decade.

And a ton of that was because of the defense--when the likes of Kentucky are scoring 38 points on you, there's a a big problem. And when Willie Martinez wasn't fired...well, there went my crazy hopes of defensive guru (and Mark Richt pal) Tommy Tuberville coming in to be the defensive coordinator.

Stafford and Moreno were gone, and architect of the worst UGA Defense in a decade or more was coming back...oh and the 2009 schedule? Outside of Tennessee Tech, there wasn't a gimmie game on it.

So no, I wasn't looking forward to the season...and that hasn't happened...well...ever.

I did start to get over it though: Other than getting a decent sunburn, I don't remember much about the G-Day game. It felt good to be back in the stadium (and I was still in shock that I was able to get a hotel room the night before the game) and nothing jumping out either way could be an upside.

I still went out and bought a few preseason magazines, but I couldn't obsessively read and reread them over and over because, well, I'm fucking sick of hearing about Florida--especially Tim Tebow. If 50% of the US is going to get the swine flu, I really, really, really hope it gets the Gators around October.

But a funny connection happened too: as good as Florida's D was last year, we forget how porous and sucktastic they were in 2007. Can the UGA D make a similar turnaround? Stranger things have happened.

Until kickoff, we won't know. But the D is the key to a good season.

But I'm not sure even after today's game we'll know what we're going to get out of this season.
Okie State goes wild on the Dawgs? Well, that could mean they're one of the best offenses in the US, it could mean the UGA D hasn't gelled...or it could mean Willie should pack his bags.
UGA rolls? Well, we thought we were the shit after rolling Arizona St. last year: but it turned out ASU just sucked.

Let's keep the goals simple: just don't lose to Tech. That's really all I want out of the season.

But who knows what we're going to get...let's just sit back and enjoy it.
Go Dawgs.

Perhaps ESPN CFB Analysts Sleep in Hyperbolic Chambers

Yes, "hyperbolic" as in "hyperbole."

That's one of the few explanations I can find to the utter ball-washing of Tim Tebow.

Because the other explanations all have them as blathering idiots, willfully ignorant of how football actually is played (what with the defense and special teams and all.)

Sure, I'll admit it, I cracked some jokes when Tebow broke into tears after Florida lost at home to Ole Miss. Partially it was a defense mechanism (UGA having had their asses handed to them by Bama that same weekend and all) and partially it was hoping he'd pull a Reggie Ball and Florida would go into a tailspin (I hate Florida.) Also, anyone who is the star QB at their school but proudly admits having a sex life less active than the most celibate Jonas Brother should be used to jokes being cracked their way.

He's a great quarterback though, really. I'll say it. I hate it, but I'll say it.

But here's what pisses me off: this isn't news. He was carving up defenses last year. Florida scored scores of points last year. Tebow had better numbers last year.

But now he's "better?"

No idiots...Florida's defense is better.

Is Tebow playing "with more heart" than '07? Maybe, but that's not why Florida went from a 4 loss team to a 1 loss team playing for a national title.

Florida's defense sucked last season. Looked a lot like UGA's defense this season. Auburn "keeping Tebow off the field" in a close win was the exception. In the UGA, Michigan and LSU losses, Florida just couldn't get enough stops on defense to win. Tebow and co. scored a good number of points in each, but it wasn't enough when the other team can get a score or two more.

And for the life of me, I can't figure out why this isn't being brought up on ESPN (or ESPN affiliated sportstalk radio). Does someone high up in Bristol, CT have money riding on Tebow pulling an Archie Griffin?

Sam Bradford and Colt McCoy have better numbers than Tebow this year. They really should finish 1-2 in the Heisman voting.

So why ignore the defense ESPN?

(And, in a semi-related note, wouldn't it be nice if UGA's D made the same transition from porous sieve to ball-hawking brick wall by '09?)

Five-by-Five

Confession:

I once was a huge comic book junkie.

I still have, somewhere, a large portion of those comics I once collected (and hell, maybe some were good investments. Anyone know if Wizard is still the go-to source for a comic's value?) likely stored away in bags, with the cardboard backers, in boxes in a storage place.

It was somewhere around 4th or 5th grade that this started. I'd loved the funny pages since I was a wee lad, and vividly remember that I learned the word doubt (and how it doesn't sound a damn think like it's pronounced) from a Garfield collection in 1st grade.

Like most boys with basic TV access growing up when I did, I was a huge junkie for GI Joe and Transformers. Then one afternoon I saw that they had comics too (this was likely at a gas station, and a few years before my attention would be drawn to that rack of magazines wrapped in plastic). I'm not sure if I was able to convince my folks to get one for me on the first try, but it eventually happened.

Throw the kid an allowance, and I was soon blowing the whole thing on comics.
I even drew some of my own (I had better artistic/drawing talent then--it has since atrophied). I had no clue what the actual creative process was for most comics, so I went the difficult direct route of making it up as I went a long mostly, and drawing random layouts on a page before filling them in. There's a reason I didn't grow up to be Frank Miller or Jim Lee or Todd McFarland.

It lasted pretty much until puberty. I'd like to say women replaced comic books, but I was skinny (like "hey, I can see ribs" skinny) about a decade and a half before skinny dudes were "cool". Plus there was the whole braces thing, and the acne. Let's not talk about that.

Guitar (and guitar-related magazines, with interviews I'm damn glad my parents never read--I don't think they'd see Dimebag from Pantera as a good influence) quickly replaced comic books by 7th grade. The comics got boxed up, rarely looked at, and that was that.

Until a few months back.

I saw that there was a "Season 8" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show I was such an unabashed fan of that I once attempted to write a script, and actually got far enough in the process that I was looking for a way to submit it (and of course, found out that Whedon and Co. don't take unsolicited scripts--damn. I though a special "Spring Break Buffy where the Scoobies get to take on a Chthulu cult was good times.) But the catch to Season 8 was it was in comic form. I passed at first.

Then one day I saw the first few issues collected in graphic novel form at Borders, said "what the hell" and I've been hooked ever since.

It's a great season so far (and I have my own theory about the identity of the masked Big Bad, Twilight, but I'm keeping it largely to myself) and the first 10 or so issues are now in two graphic novels. But this might make me a comic geek again...

Time To Pretend

After the past couple weeks, I don't think I'm that out there in saying maybe we could all use a little less realism in our lives.

What's realism done for us lately? Well, realistically, I saw that I likely didn't have the fuel to make it UGA-Bama. And the Dawgs lost. Realistically, I know those two things aren't related...and yet. Superstitions aside, I know, realistically, I missed many good tailgates that day.

Realistically, my meager 401k lost almost everything that was in it. Realistically, people lost what they'd been saving for decades in the past month. Realistically, economically, things are going to get worse before they get better.

Realistically, it was folly to to think a UGA team that had lost its NFL-caliber Defensive Tackle (and then NFL-caliber middle linebacker on the first defensive play), it's preseason All-SEC Left Tackle, and was without its starting fullback; it was folly to think that a depleted top #5 was still a top 5 team. Realistically, while Willie Martinez has had moments of defensive greatness, he's yet to have a season at UGA where the defense didn't get absolutely torched at least once (Auburn and West Virginia in 2005, UT in 2006, UT again in 2007, 'Bama this year.)

Realistically, even if I finally finish a novel, get an agent, and get a publisher, I won't make that much money from it. Even if I have a cool idea where I'm writing songs to go with the novel, and slowly but surely practicing playing guitar and singing at the same time, so my book tours can be a cross between a normal signing/reading and an acoustic Butch Walker show. Because realistically, I'm not even half the songwriter Mr. Bradley Glenn Walker III is.

So for the game this weekend, I'm saying "nuts to realism". Realism is like a fancy massage parlor: there are no happy endings.

So, with MGMT in your head, let's pretend, get the bad news over quick, and get on with it:

The Cumberland Report:

Well, this one's easy. Look at the last few times the teams played. Moving on...

The Rose-Colored View:

For all the talk about how bad Auburn's "Spread Eagle" offense is (and how many bad jokes can be made at their expense) they still rank higher than UT's not-vaunted "Clawfense". How does a shredded Dawg D get to feelin' good? Matchup against a new QB making his first start on the road, pressure the shit out of him (literally--I want him so scared he loses all bowel control) shut down the running game and shut out the Vols.

And the Vol D has been considered the one bright spot. But we've been there before. They were stout in 2005 too, and we broke them. Line former offensive lineman Kiante Tripp up at TE, let Brannan Southerland knock the hell out of some people, and let Moreno and King go nuts.

This goes beyond revenge for the past two years.

This is about all of us "Dawg People" having something to feel good about. Hope for the future.

Bold prediction: if the Dawgs win big, or shut out the Vols, the stock market goes up next week.

Nuts to realism...

Go Dawgs

And Now, A Whole New Set Of Problems To Deal With...

First up, a personal Cumberland Report: Atlanta has no gas.

Sonny Perdue, apparently channeling Kevin Bacon from the end of Animal House, tells us "there's plenty of gas," and then boards a plane to Europe, ostensibly for some government business, but I think in reality, to avoid the pitchfork'd masses who will eventually (after walking, or horse and buggy) show up at the Governor's Mansion.

But it's very up in the air whether or not I'll make it to Athens or not. So Sonny, you may be a Dawg, but today: you suck.

The Cumberland Report
Football usually comes down to the play of the linemen, and thus far it looks like Bama's got a sizeable advantage--and not just Terrance Cody, who is so large he has his own gravity (little-known fact: Bama's DEs don't actually do any stunting at the line, that's just a result of their usually rotation around Planet Cody.) Cooler weather could mean more snaps for Bama's Mangino-sized DT: who is going up against a freshman center for the Dawgs. The Dawg OLine in general is really making only its second start in its current iteration (last week vs. ASU was the first). Mismatches like this get your running backs stuffed, and your QBs horizontal (and not the way many female Georgia fans would like).

On the flip side, Bama brings a very experienced Oline up against a UGA front seven that, while they've been strong against the run, hasn't exactly gotten to the QB that much.

If Bama can get a running game going, and dominate on both sides of the line, we could get embarrased almost as bad as Clemson (at least none of our coaches keep the play chart stuffed in the front of their shorts, Al Bundy style.)

The Rose-Colored View
Georgia's had success with poor Oline play before (the 2003 Oline led the SEC in sacks allowed, yet the team won the SEC East) and the current group played much better last week than the SoCar game.

Terrance Cody: huge yes, but is the front seven for the Tide really that much better than Carolina's? If it's not, then we can run the ball on them: which will spell doom for the Tide.

The passing game's gotten better each week, dovetailing with the emergance of AJ Green. If Bama loads up to stop the run, Green (and MoMass) could have big days. Reggie Brown-and-Fred-Gibson-vs.-Saban's-LSU-team kind of days.

And if the Dawgs stop the run, that means it's up to the poster child for Bama Bangs, John Parker Wilson, to beat the Dawgs. And that just won't happen. The DLine has already figured out his secret: as a child, Wilson was very slow to lose his baby fat, and is still sensitive about his childhood nickname "John Porker Wilson." Plus, Bear Bryant is still dead. And Nick Saban is no Bear Bryant. Also, Georgia ain't Clemson.

Who wins? Ask Wesley Snipes about the blackout...

(And our good-luck charms have dressed the part.)

Go West, Young Dawgs (and win!)

It may be the worst week in Wall St. and finance since John McCain was in his early teens (sorry, last crack at McCain's age for...well, at least the next few weeks let's say) but I still didn't forget there was a big game this week.

Of course, if I had a 401K worth a damn, it'd be a different story, but I've had almost no spare money for years now, so I'm used to it. If I could make it through my last few years of college on a little more than $100/week without eating Ramen then, I should be fine now (oh, wait. I also had a Platinum card then...hmmm...well this may be a problem.)

So off we go...

The Cumberland Report
What could go wrong here? It's not like UGA has already displayed issues in pass defense and they're going up against the future Pac-10 record holder in passing yards. Oh. Wait. So there's that risk.

Also, it's been great, semi-, almost-not-quite Fall weather in GA this week. Game time temp in Arizona? Expected to be between 98 and 101. Dry heat or not, that's a big jump in climate. Plus, the multiple time zone shift. And risk someone getting arrested for stealing diapers.
Throw an already suspect (at times) pass D in with a team that's out of sorts because of heat and time zone issues and you've got a disaster brewing. Throw in some offensive miscues, and then you've got a recipe for the pollsters to really, really drop the Dawgs.

The Rose-Colored View
On the other hand, the only team worse at protecting their QB than ASU last season was that Yakkity-Sax-bad Notre Dame team. While Rudy Carptenter differs from Jimmy Clausen in that he has both a functioning brain, isn't part cro-magnon man, and isn't going bald in his early 20s (the Clausen Gene: for those who thought The Simpson Gene wasn't that bad!) most of that seive-like OLine is back to protect (sic) him. The Dawg's D should make him hear the dulcet tones of Queen and David Bowie in his head.
And, while much gets written about the offensive firepower of the Pac-10, defense still doesn't seem to exist there outside of USC. If a woeful Maryland team could rough up Cal, and BYU could do things to UCLA that might be forbidden in the Book of Mormon, and UNLV could hang 20+ on the ASU D, this ain't the "Desert Swarm" out there. Stafford, Moreno and company could get well in a big hurry.

Honestly, there isn't too much precedent here. It's warmer, the time zone's different, and the Dawgs haven't done this type of thing before. Flying to Arkansas is one thing, Arizona's another. The first quarter/half is key. There should be a ton of Dawg fans there, and if ASU's offensive gets stymied early, and the Dawg's O returns to pre-SoCar form, it could be a very, very good day for the Dawgs.

Signifying Something

I'm attempting a near hat trick of selfish right now.

Writing?

That's not a selfish act.

Writing with intent to blog?

That's a misdemeanor of selfishness at least, and that's what this is.

Drinking Johnny Walker Black with a Jones Soda chaser?

Self-destruction. Of the liver at least.

The Valerian root/melatonin cocktail that I hope will knock me out for a good 12 hours?

Selfish denial of wanting to deal with all this. The all this that can only best be encompassed by italics.

I'll never meet the author of my favorite novel--my favorite writer. I will never meet my favorite author. 48 hours ago it was technically possible that I could. Now? David Foster Wallace is dead. And as much as I'd like to empathize with his wife, friends and family, students--my first reaction was the selfish one. And that's why I'm drinking. Because even at the best of times it seems so much of humanity is a parody of Ayn Rand: "how does it affect me?" If I was a little less self-aware of my selfishness, maybe I'd be drinking less...

There's a word, I think, for how I'm feeling right now: I don't really want to be writing this, with sad bastard music on, drinking, and the Fresno-Wisconsin game on mute because I think maybe any old college football game will get me feeling better maybe?--but really I just want to crawl into the far corner of my bed, curl into a ball and cry until I pass out. I'm thinking maybe it's not an English word, but maybe something made-up, like when an animal tharns. The word. And for the condition in general, not the specific near-tears I'm dealing with now.

Over someone I've never met.

I never met David Foster Wallace, will never meet David Foster Wallace.
This is not normal behavior. I know this. But also.

This is the kind of intimacy writing has. Few other mediums can have a connection like this.
Sports I think is one, which kind of explains the muted CFB on in the background. Music is another.

Again, this is seeing through my own, somewhat selfish lens. And yes, the connection is a kind of selfish one.

"I can relate to this."

"I was there."

And that's the scary part.

Yes, I admired the hell out of the sheer, more-blinding-than-staring-at-the-sun-from-the-surface-of-Mercury brilliance of the man. So much that many times, my own writing (this likely included) reads, to me at least, like a bad parody of his own writing style(1).

But unlike say, any professional athlete, or even musician, I idealized Wallace.

By about 22 it had dawned upon me that being a "rock star" was very, very, very unlikely to ever happen (if "rock star" was defined as: making lots of money playing music, getting interviews and covershoots, music videos etc.) But that same year I was flipping through a book of MFA programs because that was the dream: get MFA, publish first novel, get rave reviews, then land great job teaching creative writing to college students (though the first draft of this plan was a bit less realistic, as it involved getting the MFA and giving a A to the freshman I was dating at the time, then landing the teaching job at UGA, thus never leaving Athens for anything beyond vacations or family gatherings, and exposed a serious naivete about college hiring practices). But so the point was: I didn't think I could be Steve Vai, and I was damn sure there was no chance I was going to walk-on to the football team and then make it big in the NFL. But I thought, sort of, and however wildly hubristically, that I could be like David Foster Wallace. And when a man you've idealized and (so far, wildly unsuccessfully) who's life you've tried to emulate kills himelf, is it so far out of left-field to ask the question: so is that me in 10, 15 years?

And one of the more frightening things isn't the selfish "I'll never meet him" sentiment, but the part of me that thinks "I can kind of understand." I'm not going to speculate on any issues with mental illness Wallace himself may have had. But based on his micro-essay for the 150th Atlantic, I can make the educated guess that he does keep up with current events.

If ignorance is bliss, in today's world, where even some of the most banal slights can spawn 2,000 words on someone's blog, being informed is almost asking for, if not outright depression, at least some sort of flirtation with it. I've been reading a lot more financial blogs in the past year--they accurately called the housing crisis, and now I'm informed. But the catch is: I also know that I'm pushing 30 and any chance at "comfortable retirement" for me in the US is sitting at just a few shades from about nil at this point. The whole country's in debt beyond its eyeballs, the demographics are such that we'll be a country of old men (and women) very soon, with a decent number of kids, and not much in between. Anger and Fear still seem the two dominant moods in our foreign policy. If we're not all-out fucked, something more than foreplay is at least going down already.

One way I'm reading David Foster Wallace's death is this: life is sending me (and many, many others) an increasing number of reminders that it is not fair this year.

And if you were already having doubts about this thing called life, reading about it in the US lately...I can't see it helping.

Wallace wrote the single most frightening story I've ever read (it's one of the Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in the short-story collection of same name) and the frightening element was all about dehumanization. I don't think it's possible to accurately write something that dark and feel all that chipper and happy.

(And I'm reading back over some of this and questioning a bit the deal I made with myself to publish it as is, with no revisions, because let's face it, it's a bit of a drunken mess, even if there are no typos.)

I was a junior in college when I read Infinite Jest for the first time (and to show how very little I understood women, as well as the real influence of non-assigned books at most colleges, thought that simply reading it at Tate Center would get me dates. That enough people--single, ravingly attractive, female people--on campus gave a damn about contemporary fiction to know about a 1,000 page novel published back when they were all in high school or middle school. That they would be impressed that I, a skinny undergraduate so lacking in confidence around women that I needed them to all but hit me upside the head and scream "hey idiot! I'm interested in you! I wish to date and possible sleep with you! And by 'sleep with' I mean fuck your brains out! Do I have to spell it out further!" that they'd be so impressed they'd all but scream out all those things I listed in quotation some 10 words back.) The first 100 pages took me forever. I had no clue what was going on, and there was no Wikipedia to help me out. I was fortunate enough to have access to the online OED at least. And for a kid who'd gained a lot of false confidence in the breadth and width of his vocabulary in high school while reading nothing more challenging than Stephen King or Clive Barker, and scoring a lofty SAT Verbal, well IJ was a wake-up call. The blurbs talking about the "brilliance and wit on every page" were right, and there was much rereading.

I enjoyed that my overly snarky Multicultural Lit teacher was impressed I was reading it (and relieved that he put up with my ham-handed aping of Wallace's style in my essays for that class--and yes those essays were probably worse than the mixed metaphor about ham and apes in this sentence). I got no dates out of it. But over three months later I'd finished, and almost wanted to start over again right there. This was what great literature could still do. This was a Ulysses for my generation (well, depending on how you define "my generation.)

I've reread it several times since then and it has not grown remotely close to getting old.
Parts can make the hairs at the back of my neck stand at attention, and parts can give me that strange kind of ache in my stomach that usually precedes an issue with my lachrymal ducts(2).

His essays and short fiction have much the same effect on me.

There may or may not be more.

But if I'm going to be selfish about all this, I need to do it in a good way, if such a thing is possible. I haven't written this much, or this long, on one topic in a long time. I've got notes and notes and notes and poorly-written fragments that I've thought for a while could be a very good novel. I need to stop being such a self-pitying pussy and make them that novel. As Wallace himself put it about writing:

TRY TO REMEMBER

The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to work your way somehow back to your original motivation -- fun. And, if you can find your way back to fun, you will find that the hideously unfortunate double-bind of the late vain period turns out really to have been good luck for you. Because the fun you work back to has been transfigured by the extreme unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you're now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery that disciplined fun is more than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not all paradoxes have to be paralyzing. Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.

It's the man's life and work that will be remembered, not his death. And the single largest, most life-changing thing I took (and am still working on) from Infinite Jest is the fact that simple, seemingly banal things can have real depth and truth to them. "Be honest" is two words and an overused phrase in print. In practice, in life, in relationships? A whole 'nother story.

Telling myself "have fun, write more"? Just words on a blog. In practice? Wallace again:

But it's still a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong. As to the nature of that fun, I keep remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school when I was about the size of a fire hydrant. It takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that. It seems there was this old farmer outside a village in the hill country who worked his farm with only his son and his beloved horse. One day the horse, who was not only beloved but vital to the labor-intensive work on the farm, picked the lock on his corral or whatever and ran off into the hills. All the old farmer's friends came around to exclaim what bad luck this was. The farmer only shrugged and said, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A couple days later the beloved horse returned from the hills in the company of a whole priceless herd of wild horses, and the farmer's friends all come around to congratulate him on what good luck the horse's escape turned out to be. "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" is all the farmer says in reply, shrugging. The farmer now strikes me as a bit Yiddish-sounding for an old Chinese farmer, but this is how I remember it. But so the farmer and his son set about breaking the wild horses, and one of the horses bucks the son off his back with such wild force that the son breaks his leg. And here come the friends to commiserate with the farmer and curse the bad luck that had ever brought these accursed horses onto the farm. The old farmer just shrugs and says, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A few days later the Imperial Sino-Korean Army or something like that comes marching through the village, conscripting every able-bodied male between like 10 and 60 for cannon-fodder for some hideously bloody conflict that's apparently brewing, but when they see the son's broken leg, they let him off on some sort of feudal 4F, and instead of getting shanghaied the son stays on the farm with the old farmer. Good luck? Bad luck?

Life sucks, but dwelling on the suckiness of life(3) sucks more. Or, to quote Orson Welles (a hero of mine I never had a chance of meeting):

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace, your songs are not yet silenced, and we will go on singing.


(1). For fuck's sake I snuck in at least one footnote in a column for the Red and Black. And more than one sentence that started with "so but then."
(2). And yes, at 1am "lachrymal" is about the best I can do in terms of "hey look at my brobdingnagian vocab use!" Johnny Walker is good stuff.
(3). Ok, I'm going to have to come back and edit "suckiness" though right? That's veering dangerously close to old-school LiveJournal/Geocites emo pages right? Or am I just using footnote snark to hide my diminished perspicacity? Instead let's end with one more quote:

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.