Juiced

As you might have heard, Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees has admitted to using banned substances earlier in his career. It was a stunning revelation for some, and to many a career-tarnishing admission.

Personally, I commend Alex for owning up to his misgivings and offering a public apology to the Yankees and his fans.

I will take this opportunity to make an announcement of my own.

It is with tremendous sadness and regret that I announce several of my past columns have been written under the influence of performance enhancers.

I can honestly say, it was something I never even considered until late October. At that time, I was dealing with a painful ear infection and coming off a column about boobs, which I knew would be hard to top.

I fought through the pain, though, and produced a poorly received column, titled “Midgatitis”. After the painful chirping of crickets, I became desperate to prove my worth to the fans.

Like Alex Rodriguez, I’m guilty of many things. I was naïve and negligent.

Part of the problem is that it was a very loosey-goosey time in the writing world. It seemed like all the writers were doing something to gain an edge. One writer encouraged me to inject Diet Coke directly into my aorta. Somebody else recommended that I lick amphibian anal-nectar.
It was clear to me that I needed to press onward for other solutions.

I needed something that would help me generate material, and also help me keep up with the physical rigors of typing. As I researched different performance enhancers, I became a believer in their benefits.

I started off by injecting Human Growth Hormone directly into my hands. I was hoping to add muscle mass and range of motion to my fingers, which I hoped would add explosiveness to my “shift key” reaches.

It seemed to work at first, as the 1200-word “Carnage” column would not have been possible without the additional finger strength.
I was on an emotional high from the results and I got so carried away that my hands became grotesque in size. They were Stay-Puftonian large. I had to use voice recognition software on my last few columns because my sausage fingers were too massive for the keyboard.

I decided to back off the hand treatments, but was still anxious to find a way for more material. I remember hearing in health class about some of the side effects of steroids. I figured “’roid rage” would be the perfect answer to my problems.

I immediately began consuming anabolic steroids. I have to admit, that without the resulting anger, I would not have been able to produce the “Bowling” and “Bananas” columns. Even as a man of marginal character, I wouldn’t dream to kill my child’s Webkinz character in sound mind. Nor would I degrade an entire community of athletes for a cheap couple laughs. The steroids made me do it.

Soon enough, I had another problem on my hands. I was having no trouble generating column ideas, but according to my wife, all of the subject matter was likely to be frowned upon by the reading public. At her urging, I deleted such column titles as, “Beat 'Dat Ass”, “What’chu Looking At”, and “I’ll Cut You”. My wife had bigger bones to pick though, or maybe I should say smaller balls. I regret to say that the age-old warning of steroid use is very true. After just a 4-week cycle on the juice, my man-pride had become infantile.

I didn’t need any more convincing to stop my doping routine. I quickly realized my mistake and my last few columns have been great proof that I can continue to write these columns without the aid of performance enhancers.

I feel terrible for the poor message I have sent to the kids…you know, all those kids who want to grow up to write a content-poor, low-readership column someday…to all those children…or child…I am sorry.

I would like to get this behind me, and to formally apologize to all of my readers. I’m sure half of my readers will never look at me the same, but I hope that the other three can learn to forgive me, and to judge my legacy by my work moving forward.