As more and more people return to the office they are having to deal with the unhinged coworker that thought it was a good idea to bring their guitar to work and play during their lunch break. You might think this is anarchy, but there are rules. Follow them and you will make it out alive.
1. Admit Powerlessness
Surrender to the fact that at some point in your tenure here, you’re going to have to listen to him play guitar. This, for many, is the hardest step.
2. Enter His Lair
He’s called you in, after all, and if he’s bringing a guitar to the office every day, he probably has some serious rank in this company.
3. Don’t Stare at the Pearl Jam Poster
This will only lead to the following: “Wait, you like Pearl Jam?” and (picking up the guitar): “Okay, check this out.” (It won’t even be “good” Pearl Jam. He’s into, like, “Binaural.”)
4. Try Changing the Subject
When he asks who your musical influences are, it’s a clear “baiting” tactic to get you to ask him about his. Don’t go for it. Before you know it, you’ll be looking at an empty guitar holder—like the scene in “Jurassic Park” where the goat is missing and its chain is swinging back and forth. CUT TO: Your colleague is holding the guitar.
5. Don’t Say You Want to Talk About “the Project”
He’ll just pick up the guitar and say, “This IS the project.”
6. Fake an Emergency
Tip back in the chair and give yourself a concussion. When you throw up, try to do it on the guitar. This might not sit well with your coworker at first, but he’ll understand eventually, and it will buy you—and your colleagues—some much-needed time.
7. Deny the Existence of “Music”
When he gets the guitar back from the shop, he’ll want to show it to you. Appear confused. Say you don’t know what “that” is. Imply that the concussion has maybe erased part of your memory. When he says the guitar plays “music,” shake your head. This will lead him to “teaching” you, which in turn will lead to . . . Fuck. Too late.
8. Listen to Him Play Guitar
Realize it’s not about you anymore: You’re taking one for the team. Your other colleagues have kids, mortgages, real problems. You can tough this out for the next thirty to forty-five minutes. Could be an hour and a half. You might want to think about other things. Don’t. There will be a quiz at the end.
9. Be Sure to Bring Up the “Guitar” Incident in Your Next Performance Review
This could indeed be your biggest contribution to the company.
10. Ask for a Raise
You earned it.
Born in Reno, Nevada, Stern Hanson was amongst the most dedicated members of the Reno scene, much to the scene’s detriment. Kevin Seconds once referred to him as “that weird dude who always uses way too much eye contact.”
Born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Wallace Klenzendorf was born with his arms already crossed judgmentally. He allegedly learned to scowl before he learned to crawl.
Grimhilde Futz was born in Hamburg, Germany, and was near immediately abandoned by her parents out of sheer terror. She was raised by a coalition of anarchist chimney sweeps who had originally mistaken her for a creepy Victorian doll.
For someone whose rejection of capitalist ideology has been his whole thing (some might say annoyingly so) this seems like it should be an obvious dead last. No way would Scoutmaster Henry even have an interest in attempting this one, let alone ever being able to shake that punk ethos long enough to make it through just one requirement.
Can the Scout build a double A-frame suspension bridge using only split timbers and natural fiber rope? No. No, of course not. But it would be very very entertaining to watch those dusty kielbasa fingers of his try.
When you’re in one of the earliest punk bands who are notorious for having their shows broken up by bible-thumping protestors and militarized cops then it’s fair to say that crime prevention isn’t high on your agenda. His stick-and-poke ACAB tattoo would probably be good for a crafting merit badge though.
Can you even imagine Henry Rollins sitting up on horseback? Like full-on with the bandana and the hat and the boots and the “giddy-up, giddy up!” If you haven’t already, it’s well worth trying. But regardless, no matter which way we think of it, attempting this badge always ends badly for the Scout. However, Rick Ta Life would be great at this one.
This badge is not really the best for the Scout. Really, we can’t even see him enjoying sniffing the permanent markers for sketching storyboards while earning this badge, so it’s likely he would never even try it in the first place.
We’re gonna go out on a limb here and assume that the “American heritage” that makes up the Boy Scouts’ curriculum has some pretty stark contradictions to what we learned going to Bad Religion shows. Scoutmaster Henry would make a valiant effort at this one, but ultimately there’s no way he’ll be able “to define what American freedom means” to him without going into some long weird rant about the Bay of Pigs.
It’s hard to say what would be more of an impediment to the scout in earning this merit badge. Is it his pseudo-pacifist lifestyle and disdain of modern gun culture, or simply the logistics of somehow wrapping his medicine ball-sized head around a rifle sight? Either way, there’s no chance he’s getting this one in the ten ring.
Seriously, how the fuck is this a merit badge? Are the Boy Scouts grooming recruits for the next Manhattan Project? Scoutmaster Henry is a smart guy but it’s doubtful he’d be able to design the plans for a functioning fission reactor on his own. Plus, ‘80s punks weren’t always the fondest of nuclear energy, so it’s unlikely he would thrive with this badge.
Here’s another one of those badges where Scoutmaster Henry would spend the whole time he was supposed to be working on it just complaining about how only an elite few have the inherent privilege of being able to afford such a resource-consuming hobby in the first place. Of course it would all be a show to cover up for him not being able to get the boots to fit on right.
This one is less of a merit badge and more just a vague concept. Nevertheless, Scoutmaster Henry is not necessarily a play-it-safe type scout. So the campsite is gonna be real fast and loose safety-wise until he figures this one out.
As it says in Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War,’ “Don’t play chess against a computer, once those are invented, because they are all cheating, electric bastards.” But the scout wouldn’t take that advice as he has never met an opponent he would not gladly try to conquer. As such, he has already failed the first prerequisite for the chess merit badge.
Man, fuck this country! Scoutmaster Henry would absolutely fucking hate this badge. But having toured extensively, he at least wouldn’t be wholly incompetent at it.
Much like the horsemanship merit badge, the image of Henry Rollins sitting up on a tractor in a pair of denim overalls with a cheek full of Skoal is just a delight to us. But also like horsemanship, we have absolutely no confidence that once he gets up there that he will have even the slightest clue how to operate a combine harvester.
We’re pretty sure this is that thing where you leave a bunch of shit in one of those plastic tubes that you use in the drive-thru at the bank and then bury it and then later other people have to use GPS to go find it and usually it’s like a note or a little trinket or something in the tube. God, what a stupid fucking activity. Scoutmaster Henry wouldn’t waste his time on that crap.
Despite having spent a substantial amount of his career in the music business, or “the biz” if you’re on cocaine currently, the Scout has very little prior experience with the bugle as an instrument. We’re sure he could probably learn, but if we’re guessing he’d probably do better with any instrument that has buttons.
Let it never be said that Scoutmaster Henry doesn’t care about the environment. He’d certainly make his best effort to understand the science of flora while working on this badge. Unfortunately, yelling at a hibiscus that it needs to “push it to the limit” and “work the lats” is not the kind of growth that plants crave.
Scoutmaster Henry doesn’t seem like much of a water guy. He could probably paddle pretty hard (albeit always to the beat of the Misfits “Hybrid Moments”), but the first bit of choppy surf that hits him and that top-heavy moose of a man is definitely going overboard. Maybe rowboating would be more his speed, but for finesse watercraft he probably doesn’t have the prerequisites.
Here’s another one that its mere existence is pretty baffling? How does the Scout feel about industrial mining? Probably not too enthusiastic. But if this badge is about how anthracite extraction has impacted the modern labor movement then he may be able to figure out at least a few requirements before he absolutely loses his shit about clean coal legislation.
It’s hard to locate a missing person when the entire time you’re supposed to be stomping around the forest, screaming their name, you’re instead telling the lead paramedics about all the times you’ve seen ambulances called to unruly Black Flag shows in the ‘80s. To Scoutmaster Henry’s credit he does have some impressive stamina, which we think would aid him in a long-haul search for the Nordic metal band that got lost during a photo shoot.
Same argument here as for the rifle shooting badge (see above), but we gotta admit he probably has a much better chance of success with a firearm that requires, how should we put this, “less precision.” Honestly, if you just taped a picture of Ronald Reagan’s face onto a target or tell him a few of those clay pigeons they fling up into the air voted in favor of invading Iraq then the Scout would have no issue picking up a shotgun and blasting a fistful of buckshot down range. 
Grey aliens, or Zeta Reticulans for those in the know, are the iconic, old-school big-headed humanoids often depicted in science fiction. They represent the first rift Linda and I had in our approach to Ufology. I firmly believe that these beings are actually us from the future visiting and influencing the past, which accounts for their humanoid appearance. Linda firmly believed “This is all a lot of silly nonsense.” They rank low because they harken back to a time when she found my preoccupation with extraterrestrial theory “quirky.”
This region of the Atlantic Ocean has long been the site of so many mysterious disappearances and incidents of possible extraterrestrial origin it just begs for its own evidence board with tons of newspaper clippings and bits of red yarn. But no matter how meticulously I connected the dots, it was never aesthetically pleasing enough for Linda to let me keep it in the living room. I guess she thought it was more interesting to ponder the mystery of “Live, Laugh, Love.”
After a 2-day Adderall fueled deep dive into this Australian sighting, my wife asked me why I was putting so much effort into a case where it was likely a weather balloon and the only witnesses were children. “And their teacher” I corrected her. There was a strange look in her eye after that, and I now believe it to be the moment she first considered that she may have married the wrong person.
There’s nothing that bolsters a close encounter claim like multiple witnesses. What are the odds that 6 total strangers would report being abducted by greys at the same hotel on the same night? According to Linda “Considering they were at the hotel for a UFO convention, pretty damned likely you idiot.”
This is a term used by ufologists to describe various encounters with extraterrestrials in which the witness’s own behavior or sense of reality is warped, possibly the result of some interdimensional abnormalities related to the alien’s presence. Any time Linda heard me say this she would reply “I’ve got your high strangeness right here” and mime smoking a joint. It was hurtful and dismissive, but I almost miss it? Divorce is weird.
Another mass-witnessing, and a close encounter of the third kind to boot! In 1994, 62 students at a school in Zimbabwe saw a silver craft land on a nearby field. Then several creatures dressed in black (men in black? Note to self, update conspiracy board) emerged from the vessel and telepathically preached environmentalism to the children. When I would tell Linda about this case she would just get on my back about not sorting the recycling, which is not the point Linda! Besides, I think they sort it at the plant.
This series of UFO sightings in Florida between 1987 and 1988 gave us some of the most compelling photographic proof of extraterrestrial life to date. Then, in 1990 a styrofoam UFO model matching the craft seen in the photos was found in the home of a photographer and was used by skeptics to easily reproduce the photos. If you ask me, the discovery of the model is suspicious and reeks of a government plant. If you ask my wife, “Get a job.”
Could alien beings have taught early humans to build the pyramids? Were they the architects of Aztec society? Could they have used their technology to alter our DNA? These are the questions that eroded my wife’s love for me over time.
While unidentified flying objects are fascinating, I believe not enough attention is paid to sightings of underwater alien crafts. Linda disagrees with me. She thinks that not enough attention is paid to “anything besides this alien crap,” by me specifically.
When I surprised Linda with a trip to Chicago she was thrilled, but when I didn’t want to leave the airport in hopes of seeing the same saucer-shaped aircraft witnessed by a dozen airport employees in 2006, she was pretty crestfallen. Honestly, I don’t know what else she was looking forward to. Have you had deep-dish pizza? It’s disgusting.
In 1978 Travis Walton wrote a book detailing his alleged alien abduction, which was adapted into the 1993 film “Fire in the Sky.” Years later, I would date and eventually marry a woman named Linda, who habitually had zero input when I would ask “What should we watch tonight?” Apparently, I was supposed to psychically intuit that “I’m okay with whatever” meant “For the love of God, not “Fire in the Sky” again. Coincidence?!
One of Linda’s go-to dismissals of my “hobby” is the fact that sightings and abductions “always happen in small towns to bored drunk hicks.” My retort — Hudson Valley, a densely populated area of New England with over 7,000 reports of sightings since 1982. But she didn’t want to hear any of that. She was all “Wait, that’s why you moved us here?!” In my defense, they do have good schools.
With a slew of eyewitnesses and government documentation, this incident is so much more than its nickname, “Britain’s Roswell,” and much more interesting than my ex-wife’s stories about how passive-aggressive her manager was. So sue me if I’m preoccupied! Actually, technically she is suing me.
This incident is considered “The Roswell of Mexico,” and indeed it should have been, but apparently the boys at Majestic 12 don’t like international competition. They crossed the border, strapped the crashed flying saucer to a helicopter, and executed the Mexican recovery team. Now I ask you, who in the hell can be expected to help keep up with the dishes with that information sitting in their head?
Whether you believe these tall, Nordic-like beings to be visitors from another world or an ancient advanced hominid living underground, my ex-wife thinks she can do better than you.
In 1977, Terry Lovelace and a friend went on a weekend camping trip to Devil’s Den where they did not take mushrooms. At night, they noticed 3 bright lights in the sky forming a triangle and they were not on mushrooms. The lights approached them, and the center of the triangle became larger as if a chunk of the night sky itself were lowering down upon them and Linda they were not on mushrooms, stop it. Both men became oddly disinterested in the approaching vessel as if under the influence of extraterrestrial telepathy, NOT MUSHROOMS LINDA! GOD, JUST FORGET IT!
Skeptics chalk this British UFO crash sighting up to a combination of an earthquake and meteor shower, and after weeks of personal research I have to conclude that they were probably right. Unfortunately for me, those were weeks I was supposed to be looking for a “real job.”
To call this the incident that started it all is to confess ignorance of a mountain of evidence indicating that extraterrestrials have been visiting Earth since before the dawn of history. It is, however, the inciting incident that shaped ufology as we know it today. If this were a list of significant extraterrestrial events it would definitely be in the top 5, but Linda actually kind of dug this one in a detached “X-Files” fan sort of way.
Who are you going to believe, my killjoy ex-wife, or Barbara Lamb, a legitimate psychotherapist who treats personality disorders with past-life regression who saw a Lizard man for 2 seconds and coincidentally is terrified of reptiles?
One of the most detailed accounts of a close encounter of the fourth kind in existence. Raymond E. Fowler gives us the story of Betty Andreason, a woman who through hypnosis recalled being abducted by small grey aliens as a child and introduced to a being she considered to be God. It’s a compelling story, and certainly did not “ruin” our couple’s book club, as my now ex-wife would have you believe. The group merely disbanded because Tom’s wife kept getting headaches at the last minute.