We all face problems in life, from agonizing over your crippling fear of commitment and proposing to your longtime partner to developing a crippling fear of rejection after they laugh in your face and break up with you. But there’s one thing you should know: despite what iconic art-rock provocateurs tell you, the answer to a problem is almost never “whip it.”
I should know. I have faced innumerable problems in my life that I thought could remedied by whipping them good, real good. I was almost always wrong. Here’s a non-inclusive list of six of those instances.
1. The year was 1987, and my parents saw nothing wrong in letting me listen to 104.7, the Station with Great Gustation. That’s how six-year-old me first heard the smash hit song “Whip It” and why I thought it was appropriate to deal with a report card filled with Ds by seizing a nearby pack of Red Vines at Kroger’s and whipping it. That only left yet more red marks on the page and I was grounded for two months, plus I can no longer enjoy the great taste of Red Vines without academic shame. That report card prevented me from ever studying archaeology beyond the grade school level.
2. Fast forward ten years, and I’m in high school. I plan to ask Mary-Jo Maryjosen to the prom, but I can’t afford a corsage. What to do? The answer, I promise you, is not to bust into a neighbor’s flower garden with a whip you borrowed from your uncle, the archaeologist, and attempt to whip the flowers into a passable corsage. My uncle died in Nepal two years later, which feels related.
3. Burdened by my increasing failures to resolve problems with a whip, I vowed to give the past a slip and take a course in conflict resolution. Long story short, I went to jail for two months for using a cat o’ nine tails in what I can now admit was clearly a hypothetical role-play scenario about job interviews.
4. This one is not my fucking fault. The cream sat out too long, and that louse Mark Mothersbaugh gave clear instructions about what to do in that circumstance. Motherfucker.
5. Picture this: you book a trip to Nepal in an effort to assuage the everpresent guilt of your archaeologist uncle’s death-by-rolling-boulder. American Airlines refuses to honor your frequent flyer miles, even though the fine print clearly states they are transferable. Nowhere does it say that the death-by-rolling-boulder of the original owner of the miles voids them. However, American Airlines has since added verbiage to its flight restrictions, saying that no one who has ever threatened to get straight, go forward, move ahead, or try to detect it will be allowed on a flight.
I also may have attempted to whip a Boeing 747 in desperation.
6. My most recent and, in many ways, most ill-judged attempt to whip it was simple. I was reading a scientific book about archaeologists at my local Denny’s. when who should enter but Mark Mothersbaugh, the author of all my pain. As if in a trance, I removed my fedora and seized a tablecloth, wringing it into an improvised whip with expertise that shocked even me.
As I pelted the Devo singer with lash after justified lash of tablecloth, he tried to explain that he was, in fact, Bob Mothersbaugh and did not write their iconic hit song.
Sorry, Bob.