PAX: Goose, Safety Valve, Honeysuckle, America’s Best, Uncle Kracker, Pope

AO: The Stage

By: Goose

The PAX were given a tip that there’d be a substitute this morning. Their regular Q is friendly, energetic, creative, and funny, but the list of potential subs varies greatly. The one who greeted them at the door ended up being a bald, unfeeling, poorly dressed curmudgeon with a number of axes to grind. And, once they settled into their places, they noticed he had a stack of papers in his hand, and he said something like, “Put everything away but a pencil.” It was worst case scenario.

The warmups were all business as the PAX processed their fate and the leftover pain from Saturday. The sub then began on his first of many agendas, something about needing to learn from history and not letting your nostalgia ruin other people’s mornings. Then, he pulled out a bluetooth and started everyone on an exercise of living in the present.

It was a song that sounded at first like something you hear on every feel good Spotify playlist, but ended up just being a spoof making fun of modern music–more of the sub’s curmudgeonly platform. The assignment was to hold plank for the duration with merkins on every “we” and “die”. The song was “We Will Never Die” (https://youtu.be/PKVOeQICi1A?si=7FyGqOu6x8uZ2-Y8).

Next, he purported to just play a song from the 90’s, a decade of music he’s been targeting recently, but it was again revealed to be just another scathing spoof. The assignment was curls during the male parts, overhead presses during the female parts–the song was “Planet of the Bass” (https://open.spotify.com/track/5WtHlOkaOXwuW6yMW2buRq?si=0f84755bff9e48e5)

After enduring these two attempts at cynical cleverness, the PAX watched as he distributed the stack of papers.  There was one page for each decade (60’s through 2020’s) placed suspiciously under cones that were spread out at the edge of the concrete.  The sub then asked the PAX to choose what they think the best decade of music is and go stand by the corresponding cone.  They sullenly complied, waiting for the ax to fall on one or all of them, while the sub made snide comments about their choices.  Uncle Kracker headed for the 90’s cone, clearly oblivious to the layers of tension and conflict that lay heavily upon it.  In so doing, he inadvertently wandered into the main locus of the sub’s angst and had to start his “test” with 90 shoulder taps.  

This “test” went as follows: the PAX would have to complete the number of reps corresponding to each decade of the exercise written on the paper under the cone while Bose’ oozed out some of the most mind-numbing, morale-sucking tunes of each decade.  These were the exercises, rinsed and repeated until 6:00am:

60 squats
70 cherry pickers
80 flutter kicks
90 shoulder taps (1:1)
100 calf raises
10 8-count manmakers
20 merkins alternating between wide, regular, and diamond.

The playlist avoided the usual “worst song of the decade” suspects, the ones that have already been overplayed in previous beatdowns (“Achy-breaky Heart”, anything by Bieber, etc.), but they were all on the Billboard top 100 at some point.  So, it was basically 35 minutes of isolated grind with extremely low quality music, which didn’t even provide the joy of united scorn since most weren’t familiar tunes.  The list was sourced from a variety of online polls.  (Here it is if you’re morbidly curious: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6d6aHFifKBjhLybhRphpks?si=210t_XLORfK6h3UVD7eTNQ)

Toward the end, AB expressed feeling like Superman that one time his powers were sucked away in some sort of Kryptonite booth, which probably had something to do with our proximity to Saturday’s IPC.  The PAX showed courage and grit despite the deep disappointment and the mental and physical grind assigned by that one sub who can’t loosen his grip on his “standards” even for a post IPC Monday.  And they’re stronger (and more informed) as a result.  

SYITG,
Goose