Coach Roberts, PhD; V-Rod owner

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(Like riding a Harley and having a PhD were not diametrically opposed achievements in life...)

 From:              "Michael Roberts" coachroberts@nc.rr.com
 To:                     blackecho
 Subject:           Who is the joke, here?
 Sent:                 Wed, 7 Jan 2004

I own a Suzuki SV 650-lightweight, nimble.  I bought a used RC 51 from a friend-power, great all-around bike.  I have recently purchased a V-Rod, and it is my favorite.  While looking for some information, I stumbled across your site, and must admit that I have no way to justify or account for the absolute disregard for the value of my time.  While most of the affluent professionals with whom I associate across the country own a Harley Davidson, most of the "punks" who attend my university classes covet sportbikes.  After reading such thoughtful, articulate, gramatically correct, and insightful comments from the "punks" who cannot spell "Harley," much less afford one, I am embarrassed to own a sportbike and will contemplate selling mine soon.  And since I have some knowledge, thanks to your web-site, of to whom I am marketing these bike, I will be sure to sell them cheap.

Mike Roberts, PhD; V-Rod owner 

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To which I have replied...
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Mike,

Mike actually meant to write: “While most of the “punks” with whom I associate across the country own a Harley Davidson, most of the aspiring affluent professionals who attend my university classes covet sport bikes.  After reading such thoughtful, articulate, gramatically (sic) correct, and insightful comments from the "punks" who cannot spell "Harley," much less obviously afford one, I am embarrassed to own a Harley and will thus contemplate selling mine very soon.  I now have invaluable knowledge, thanks to your web-site, of the type of uneducated buffoon I will soon be marketing my Harley Davidson to.  I feel more than confident that I will soon be able to sell my V-Rod for an above reasonable profit to some ignorant, NASCAR worshipping hillbilly who fervently desires this antediluvian, lackluster piece of sub-utilitarian dog shit thinly disguised as a contemporary motorcycle.  I am truly indebted to you for all eternity, Black Echo, and wish to thank you so very much from the bottom of my heart for opening my eyes wide and snatching me so abruptly from the world of inbred fantasy and redneck make believe which I had unknowingly become trapped in.  You, sir, have given me both the guidance and the courage that I require to leave the unwashed flock and to become once again a respected and valued member of our great society.”

Chance for extra credit:  I think it would be interesting if some of the “punks” in your class happen to visit this web-site and not only download this reply, but also choose to post it in a public place on campus or in the hallway outside your class room, all in order that others may know what you think of the student body, particularly of sport bike riders in your classes.  Now that in and of itself would be something worth staying after school for, I do believe.

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"Coach" Mike Roberts - (Part II)
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Well.  Well.  Well.  Looking for my latest scoggin to spit-roast on the flames of mirth, I decided that so much time had passed since the last update that I really needed to look for some kind of pattern, like some psycho Harley stalker who would send me ten to fifteen emails in a row over a period of about two hours.  While I wasn't lucky enough to have one of those classic retards, I did find a small trend, that of four emails in a row, one per day, from the same person.  Lo and behold, it was a returning favorite, coach Michael Roberts.  I flipped through his first email (which was his second ever to me) and then proceeded to the next three emails.  Oh, it just got better and better the more I read.  Apparently, Mike is in the advanced stages of a breakdown here, and I'm the cause.   The next three emails will show that Mike has clearly reached bottom and started to dig.  Yes, there's a flag on this play for sure.

From:         "Michael Roberts" coachroberts@nc.rr.com
To:              blackecho
Subject:     Sheep
Sent:           Mon, 22 Mar 2004 09:58:24


Mr. Black, or is it Mr. Echo,

I am certain that your many references to "sheep" are no doubt an insight to your preferred sexual practices. After viewing pictures of your daughter on your site, perhaps you should have stayed that course.

It is ironic that you refer to "sheep" quite often and demean people with like preferences, yet the millions that own sportbikes are independent? Free-thinking? Non-conformists? By the way, "Let's all buy my t-shirts to be different." Your assertions are superficial and counter-intuitive.

Since ad-hominem attacks seem to be your specialty, try this one. Looking at the pictures of you and your family sitting in your trailer and in that supposed vehicle with the torn seats that is undoubtedly up on blocks, I started to lament that people like you continue to follow the cycle of incest and incestuous reproduction that your parents and grandparents practiced. I do hope you sell many more t-shirts so that not only can you afford a piece of plastic on two wheels, but maybe a car with a CD player, XM radio, or at least a working tape player. I also lament that my tax-dollars pay enough to you through welfare that you are able to buy a used computer and a thesaurus to churn out your inane spew. Being a heavy drinker has played in your favor, though, because it appears certain that you live in or very near an aluminum recycling center. I am a little dismayed that Jerry Springer did not make you return those clothes when you left the show.

It was only through the attention of one of your class-envious clones that your posted response to my e-mail was facilitated. I believe that, like him, your mother was also gang-banged behind a Harley dealership and treated like the HOG that you so despise. Like him, I believe that your "father" abandoned you and your siblings behind by selling the family mobile home, your 8-track players, and Casio watches to buy a Harley, then left you all in the stink that you call home to this day.

I will, at times, commit typing errors. It is the least of my concern. That is why we employ proofreaders. It is a straw man for you. Unlike you, I can type with many digits and do not take six or seven months to produce a one-page text. It must be a struggle for you to type with that one finger while the other hand is involved in penile manipulation. So, I will overlook your typos.

Your inferiority complex manifests itself in class envy relating to your financial inability to own an American made motorcycle. Like the way you use the fools who devour your hate speech, I need people like you and the punks at my university to pay my salary because,unlike you, I will not live in a trailer with no plumbing or a/c. Do not be dismayed if you find yourself at a stoplight, in your torn t-shirt, on your GS 500 E and you look over at someone on an RC 51, who also own a Harley, who gives you the finger because you are part of society's tax liability. Do your daughter a favor, and please do not make her quit her education in the fourth grade, as you did, and doom her to repeat the cycle of stupidity that has perpetuated itself in the "Echo" lineage. Take heart, the first of the month is near and your check is in the mail. Meanwhile, my lawn does need mowing.

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To which I have replied...
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“Mr. Black, or is it Mr. Echo,”

Actually, it’s Mr. Shields, but I’m not going to stand on formalities since we both know that any implied respect presented here would simply be for appearances sake and insincere at best, Mike. The only way you could really insult me was if you were to put the title of “coach” in front of my name, thus suggesting that society as a whole had branded me as a failure. Given that, let’s move on, shall we, to the business at hand.

“I am certain that your many references to "sheep" are no doubt an insight to your preferred sexual practices. After viewing pictures of your daughter on your site, perhaps you should have stayed that course.”

Oh my! Since you can’t stand toe to toe with me, you’ve had to resort to insulting a 15 month old little girl. Normally I might be a little upset by this if I didn’t realize the fact that you’ve managed to make a career out of screaming at and insulting other people’s children, let alone that you actually get paid for it. This new angle of attack, of course, comes from a man who gets most of his dates during the breaks between classes or on the playground during recess. Truly, Mike, you are a cretin among cretins, even by Harley owner standards.

“It is ironic that you refer to "sheep" quite often and demean people with like preferences, yet the millions that own sportbikes are independent? Free-thinking? Non-conformists?”

Why don’t you tell me, coach Roberts, since you claim to own both a Harley V-Rod and a Honda RC 51; are sport bike owners idiots? If they are co-dependent, herd-minded, conformist sheep that subscribe to a make-believe lifestyle and pretend to be something that they are not, then what does that make you since you also own a sport bike? If you knew this information beforehand, then why did you ever purchase your sport bike in the first place?

The danger of owning both a Harley and a Honda is that when you fervently defend your Harley by insulting import motorcycle owners then by default you are summarily lumping yourself in with your low opinion of others. Your Moebius-like logic is your own worst enemy or as I like to say, it’s impossible to ride down the middle of the fence when you have to straddle two bikes in order to do so.

“By the way, "Let's all buy my t-shirts to be different." Your assertions are superficial and counter-intuitive.”

Superficial and counter-intuitive are two adjectives that would far more accurately describe the collective (and rather short) history of your sex life (be that as it may) than they could be used to apply to any of my views, coach Roberts. I sell T-shirts merely as an addendum to my site, as a way of speaking out against the mass ignorance that prevails in this great land and as a way to spread some much needed mirth in a very dark and often humorless world. What separates Harley Davidson from me is that the majority of my income is not actually derived from selling T-shirts. Another big difference is that you will only find my T-shirts for sale on my website and not at every truck stop or redneck gas station / video rental / bait shop on the highway. The T-shirts that are offered for sale on my site are merely a souvenir of the experience; they are not and have never been the price of admission.

“Since ad-hominem attacks seem to be your specialty, try this one. Looking at the pictures of you and your family sitting in your trailer and in that supposed vehicle with the torn seats that is undoubtedly up on blocks, I started to lament that people like you continue to follow the cycle of incest and incestuous reproduction that your parents and grandparents practiced. I do hope you sell many more t-shirts so that not only can you afford a piece of plastic on two wheels, but maybe a car with a CD player, XM radio, or at least a working tape player. I also lament that my tax-dollars pay enough to you through welfare that you are able to buy a used computer and a thesaurus to churn out your inane spew. Being a heavy drinker has played in your favor, though, because it appears certain that you live in or very near an aluminum recycling center. I am a little dismayed that Jerry Springer did not make you return those clothes when you left the show.”

Oh! I snickered at your tiny bit of spirited yet retarded repartee. Just a little, mind you, but I did snicker. I consider the words posted above to be the best intellectual shot yet from a brand aware idiot-savant who couldn’t tell the difference between a P4 based laptop computer built by Hewlett Packard and an Etch-A-Sketch™ produced by The Ohio Art Company.

I’m also amazed that you would so quickly turn your nose up at a vintage 1989 Pontiac Firebird Formula, seeing as how you are, after all, a coach. Personally, I would think that an old Firebird such as mine would be pretty much towards the top of the list of dream cars for anyone involved in athletics. Even in its current condition, my Firebird certainly has far more class than the primer gray ’77 El Camino you drive to work every day, you know, the one with the Astroturf in the rear cargo area, the SKOAL bumper sticker and the stylized number 3 decal in the far right side of the split slide opening rear window.

Honestly, Mike, I just don’t see you as being either educated or cultured enough to have a taste for the more stylish, more elegant, and better built European or Japanese automobiles. Given your oft displayed, highly limited intellectual capacity you probably think that the Volvo is part of the vagina and that an Audi is a reference to someone whose navel protrudes.

If you want to find out more about my Firebird, then you may go to my SPO site and follow along the work in progress as I restore the car back to its original showroom condition. The Formula will also be the future home to a full roller, D-port aluminum headed, tuned-port fuel injected 406cid small block engine built by none other than the legendary John Lingenfelter, may God rest his soul. I assure you that John Lingenfelter knew far more about building high performance engines and fast cars than Willie G. and his ilk will ever know about building motorcycles.

I won’t waste space here repeating information that is already displayed in great detail on the SPO site but I will say that my Firebird is a hobby, nothing more. The Firebird is not a spiritual binding, it is not my center of being, it does not determine who I am, where I exist in society and it certainly is not part of some hooky redneck religion. My work on the Pontiac allows me to pass on my knowledge of these cars and their mechanical attributes to others who are just starting out in the hobby of swinging wrenches on hot rods, to others who may not know an air filter from an air conditioning condenser and who may be totally lost when they pop the hood and stare at all of those tubes, wires, and intake runners. I’m afraid that unlike the unwashed villagers who fervently worship your chosen brand of motorcycle, you won’t find me naming any of my children after the company that made my car, or of me getting the Pontiac logo tattooed in red and black ink on some highly visible part of my body as a sign of my unquestioning filial-like devotion to General Motors.

In at least one way you and I are both alike, coach Roberts, and that gives us about a foot of common ground to begrudgingly share. We have both made the conscious decision to take a big step backwards from something dependable and nice to something far less so. My choice was to sell my black ’99 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP (purchased new) and go with the ’89 Pontiac Firebird Formula 350 (which I had to literally pull out of the woods with a chain). With you, it was your choice to forego the modern Honda RC 51 and take up the reigns of a Harley Davidson V-Rod, itself an almost perfect copy of a twenty year old Yamaha design (V-Max). The only one who was fooling their self into thinking that they were actually getting something better in the process was, of course, you. So far, true to my better financial education and experience, my step backwards has not cost me near as much as yours has.

Now, all of that aside, I believe that one humorous description so richly deserves another so please allow me to characterize you in turn. I assure you it won’t be that hard.

Strictly judging you from your email, coach Roberts, I would say that you are a very sad and very bitter individual. I’m not sure how old you are as your age really isn’t relevant given your overall immaturity, but you do seem to have consciously made a decision long, long ago to be an abject failure in life. The good news is that not only have you embraced this decision and accepted it, but apparently you’ve also done so with a great amount of enthusiasm and zeal.

Now, at some early stage of your life, for one reason or another, you simply stopped developing normally mentally, having reached the pinnacle of your full potential (or be that as it may, all that was allotted to you by God our Father). Whether this was done in a conscious manner as a choice on your part or simply because you had achieved your highest development potential at that early point can certainly be debated, but the end result is the same, regardless. Some would label this limited development as stunted mental growth, perhaps even going so far as to refer to it as a specific type of severe mental retardation. Society has a different name for your government assistance-worthy mental affliction. We pity those who suffer from this special type of evolutionary arrest and call them “coach.”

The zenith of your development as a human being had come and gone long before you ever graduated high school, coach Roberts, and you are now simply coasting into the long twilight of your life, slowly sliding towards the nadir of your existence. Your whole life is based around organized sports, which is a polite way of saying that you’re in charge of people who aren’t smart enough to do anything else but play a silly childhood game. While these extra-circular activities may be entertaining and very important to the lowest common denominator in society, in a hundred years, who is really going to remember you or the games you play? Who is going to care what victories you achieved on a field of prepared turf, precisely measured out lines and carefully scripted rules? In a hundred years, if we still have coaches (and how I do so hope that society quickly moves beyond the lackluster phase of mind-numbing degenerative, so-called “professional” sports entertainment that it is currently undergoing), do you honestly think that there will be some well recognized play or prestigious sports award named in your honor? Will future generations build a bronze statue to you in the middle of the city, or perhaps erect a small shrine to you in the center of the academic campus? Do you think you might get a stadium named after you, if you are lucky, if you work hard enough and if your career is pleasing to those far smarter than you?

Really, in all honesty, what do you, or the athletes under your charge, really contribute to the betterment of society or the advancement of civilization? Do their repetitively practiced skills at running up and down a predetermined space on a well manicured, surgically flat field or on a hard wood court somehow help to find a cure for cancer? Does each touchdown that your team scores build a house for some homeless family? Does the ability to shoot a hoop with nothing but net from center court help explore distant planets or find new resources for the ones we are rapidly exhausting? Does the ability to hit a line drive down the middle and bring home two runners equate into stopping the threat of international terrorism?

No.

What exactly are you teaching those under your charge, coach Roberts? Nothing. You are teaching them nothing that betters the world or their own lives. Your main reason for existence in life is to motivate people who are dumber than oxen and nearly as brutish in demeanor. You are the appointed leader of a group of individuals from the lower spectrum of the SPED programs, individuals who can each be considered as a shining example of the Faulknerian idiot man-child concept. The most important thing that they can do is jump high, throw a ball, or run really fast while trying to avoid being knocked to the ground by an even bigger, heavier mongotard.

Society is keen on numbers. We have numbers for everything, including IQ. We usually assign numbers, big, easy to read numbers, to the various imbeciles who fall under your charge. Most people would think that there was some order to this numbering system, but the more erudite members of the species understand that these aren’t numbers as much as they are brands, much like cattle are marked with when the become the property of someone else. These numbers, or brands, ironically, are usually very indicative of the IQ of the person to which the number is assigned. There seems to be an even distribution between single digit numbers and double digit numbers. Those under your charge would be lost if it were not for the guidance of a slightly less mentally impaired moron who was born to lead them. That’s where you come in, coach Roberts.

I’m sure that you also have some limited academic responsibility, such as teaching PE or Driver’s Ed. Art would be open to the coaching sub-caste in society, that is, if the world of art consisted mainly of little X’s and O’s with lots of arrows pairing off from them and drawn in such a way that an epileptic monkey undergoing a Grand Mal seizure could reproduce the same quality of artwork in a quarter of the time that it takes you to do so. However, as art is a far more complex subject than that, society relegates those who are destined to be coaches to the simpler, more entry level aspects of our exalted academia. You are one step above the elderly door greeter at Wal-Mart in overall functional capacity at the vo-tech center where you are employed. Yes, society has a wonderful way of filling its many empty lower niches with those who will serve it best in that regard.

Now, exactly why you chose to be a coach is not such a great mystery. You chose to be a coach simply because you weren’t smart enough to be much of anything else in life and God just didn’t give you very much to work with thus leaving you with few options in the long run. After all, what self respecting person with a fully functioning brainstem wakes up one morning and says:

“Holy tap dancing Bocephus on a languishing pregnant donkey! I finally know what I want to do with my life! Why, I want to be a coach!”

Sadly, this personal revelation is probably either followed by a cranium splitting headache (mixed with a bumbling quest on all fours to discover exactly what type of illicit pharmaceutical substance you feverishly experimented with last night and if it will have any long term genetic damage on any offspring you might one day sire by happenstance) or a rapid search to find some suitable method with which you can end your new found tepid existence in the most expedient manner possible.

Your time outside the classroom is probably spent walking up and down some sideline or side court, clapping your hands authoritatively while shouting out encouragement to your ambling gaggle of hulking Boo Radley mongoloids. You fervently hope that you exercised them hard enough, ran them long enough, screamed at them loud enough, and gave them enough refreshing Gatorade that they will instinctually remember all the X’s and O’s and curvy arrow tipped lines that you drew on your white board, let alone that they will recall all the colorful names you gave to each group of scribbles, names like “Left 41” and “Right 42.”

Your domicile, whatever languid form it may take, is probably rented on a monthly basis since most coaches, like cattle, are migratory in nature. Your life is pastoral, instinctually requiring you to keep moving, always looking for the green in your life. I am sure that where ever you lay your head at the end of every day is filled with lots of sports memorabilia which has meaning only to you. There are probably many pictures of friends that have come and gone, pictures of you on various teams, possibly even a few pictures of you shaking hands with some great name in sports who promptly forgot your name two minutes after you left their immediate vicinity. There are probably far more pictures of you with men than there are of you with women. In fact, the only picture frame in your house that has a woman in it is the one you just bought at Fred’s Dollar Store, and that’s only because the woman in the picture is the placeholder artwork that originally came with the frame.

The many long, lonely nights of your life are spent watching professional sports and pay-per-view athletic events on TV, taping these shows on your VCR for later review and taking careful notes on the plays being used by coaches who are far more successful than you will ever be. Your impressive collection of sports trophies wouldn’t fetch a ten spot at a yard sale for the whole lot yet to you they are priceless because they each represent a tiny but significant step in your path towards becoming the man (or lack thereof) that you are today.

Your assortment of periodic reading material is limited to Sports Illustrated, Sporting News and the well flipped through copy of American Cheerleader Magazine stolen from the waiting room of your doctor’s office and now found occupying a cherished spot in your bathroom just beside the toilet. I’m also sure that you’re quite proud of your sports card collection and eagerly await your next issue of Sports Cards Magazine and Pricing Guide so that you can see how your personal retirement plan is holding up from month to month.

You couldn’t name one of the astronauts who were killed when the space shuttle Columbia exploded on reentry over Texas or one American soldier who was killed in Iraq, but I bet you can name every single team that has won the Super Bowl for the last twenty years, the final score of each game and who was the MVP. A six pack of Old Milwaukee is your best friend along with some form of chewing tobacco, a carton of generic brand cigarettes and, of course, chronic, spastic ham fisted masturbation. After all, no sane member of the opposite sex would ever want to spend the rest of her life with a man who, with a smile upon his face every single time, can tell a bunch of younger men to get undressed and hit the showers on the double.

The closest thing you probably get to a true sexual release is victory for your team, the few times when that happens and your idea of a wet dream is when the team takes the giant cooler of melted ice and dumps it on your head after the big game. You stare longingly at the young, nubile cheerleaders like the lecherous old, pork chop sideburns sporting, hairy necked butter troll that you are, wrongly thinking that your baseball cap, your team jacket, your tight athletic shorts (all two sizes too small by choice) and your shiny game whistle (secured around your neck by a pristine white shoe lace) somehow endow you with the chiseled physique and the accompanying sexual stamina of Adonis.

The most intelligent thing you will say in a week’s time is “Let’s hustle! Way to hustle out there! Come on, defense! Don’t let him through!” which is probably exactly what your mother’s defective IUD was screaming all those long years ago when your father crawled on top of her there in the back of his ratty old ’63 Impala, almost smothering her under his ponderous, hairy beer gut. I can imagine the tremendous victory he must have felt when he finally managed to somehow partially penetrate her in his otherwise drunken stupor, right before he commenced to rutting like a starving armadillo desperately looking for its next meal.

Perhaps your father was a coach as well, which would explain much from a genetic aspect, and perhaps your mother was some young cheerleader who was as nubile as she was naïve, enjoying her first year on the squad at some backwater junior college. Perhaps she was a doe-eyed, farm trollop who was mesmerized by your father’s ball cap, his team jacket, his tight athletic shorts, his tobacco stained teeth and the shiny game whistle hung around his neck by a brand new white shoe string. Sadly, not knowing near enough about the game as your father did, she called the wrong defensive play and left herself wide open. Your father, seeing his chance to score a much needed touchdown, drove his best offensive play forward to make a ten second hard drive right up the middle. At the end of the play, he spiked the game ball in the End Zone of your mother’s fertile belly. The final score was probably a tie and I truly doubt the game went into any overtime. I can imagine that Hank Williams was playing softly in the background on the AM dash radio. His characteristic whiskey drenched yodeling somehow perfectly accompanying the creaking of the worn out coil springs on the old Impala parked on that secluded dirt road beside the train tracks on that hot Spring night oh so long ago.

There is a saying in my chosen career field of computers and technology, and that is “garbage in, garbage out.” It mainly applies to programming and the gist is that you get out of your software exactly what you put into it. I’m sure it wouldn’t take much of a leap of faith to see how that philosophy would apply to you as well, genetically speaking of course. After all, people like you think that Wi-Fi is a type of home stereo setup.

Now we fast forward to nine months later and look in upon your mundane birth. What did the world receive for that glorious five minute ballgame in the back of a beat up old ’63 Impala? Why, the world received another coach in the form of a fat, screaming fuck trophy. Miracle of miracles! From the first instant that you took air into your tiny lungs, you, coach Roberts, were destined to do many unimportant things with your life. I bet your father offered around a generous pinch from his wad of chewing tobacco to all who visited your family at the hospital while in bitter hindsight, he would have been far smarter to do a paternity test among the members of his team in order to find out who your real father was.

I find it sad to know that people like you exist, coach Roberts. You, and your “professional” ilk, are perhaps the greatest telling of all in the failure of our great society. We, as a society, put entirely too much value on such a worthless profession as yours and it shows, academically speaking.

“It was only through the attention of one of your class-envious clones that your posted response to my e-mail was facilitated. I believe that, like him, your mother was also gang-banged behind a Harley dealership and treated like the HOG that you so despise. Like him, I believe that your "father" abandoned you and your siblings behind by selling the family mobile home, your 8-track players, and Casio watches to buy a Harley, then left you all in the stink that you call home to this day.”

Oh, now I really doubt that you found out about my reply to you via email from someone else. You probably sat night after night with baited breath waiting on my update to be posted and it has taken this long for you to piece together your languid reply to me. You hoped that somehow you could stand up to me, and that I had finally met my match at your hands, like a coach could ever stand up to someone with a real college degree. My, my. You’ve really got your hackles up now, haven’t you, Mike? It just goes to show that you can take the coach out of the athletics program, but you can never take the athletics programming out of the coach.

Oh, well. I guess we’ll play by your rules this time, which is fine with me.  I find it humorous that first you insult my fifteen month old daughter, and you now resort to insulting my parents.  You insult my family because like your father before you, you can’t seem to hit the target you are aiming for, but then like your father before you, you’re using a small gun and you have absolutely no skill in handling it correctly whatsoever. I think the only person you’ve left out of the argument is my wife, but only because you realize that she is a teacher, a real teacher (as opposed to a coach) with both a college degree and a Master’s degree in education. Now we all know that real teachers simply don’t take coaches very seriously at all since your time in the classroom is more honorary than actually having been earned through any form of advanced education on your part.

Simply put, a coach is a teacher who can’t teach.

You’re like an inexperienced substitute, only you have a whistle and a playbook and probably a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels hidden in the bottom drawer of your desk, under a stack of plays that never really worked on the field but which you were too proud of to ever throw away. Any academic responsibility you may have, meager as that will be, is only to assure that you stay on in the minimum capacity required in order to allow you to fulfill your solemn duty and responsibility to your academic institution. That solemn duty, of course, is simply to train (through a series of repetitive forced exercises, loud screaming and the threat of physical abuse) a group of semi-domesticated, limited intelligence life forms on how to run fast and catch a ball that is thrown towards them. Simple physical tricks, I might add, that the average family dog can learn well before the age of two.

Me? I have a little old BS degree in business administration, with a heavy emphasis on finance, which, I believe, puts me above you, academically speaking. Unless, of course, you were to have a PhD in coaching or sports medicine, which would be tantamount to you having a PhD in esoteric medieval finger painting for all the good either it or you would do you for world.

“I will, at times, commit typing errors. It is the least of my concern. That is why we employ proofreaders. It is a straw man for you. Unlike you, I can type with many digits and do not take six or seven months to produce a one-page text. It must be a struggle for you to type with that one finger while the other hand is involved in penile manipulation. So, I will overlook your typos.”

What typos are you speaking of, Mike? 

You seem to have a wonderful way of transposing reality to suit your own personal needs and I find it a curious aspect of your deep rooted dementia.  You claim that the idiots who send in email on my site are all sport bike owners when in reality they are Harley owners.  You claim that you will overlook my typos when it is you who are submitting the grammar and spelling challenged emails to me.  It sounds like you are in denial.

Interesting.

Anyway, you are judged by how you present yourself, coach Roberts. If you claim that you are far above me educationally, intellectually, socially, and economically then I would expect you to at least show it, instead of just bragging about it. Everyone makes mistakes, Mike, the question is, between us, who has made fewer mistakes in their life? I think I’ll put the safe money on myself in this little bet as, after all, I’m not the one who owns a Harley Davidson, or has the title of “coach” in front of my name.

I am so very glad to see that you had someone more educated than you to proofread your reply to me. Please pass along my congratulations to the head of the cheerleading squad. She did an exemplary job of cleaning up most of your mistakes this time.

“Your inferiority complex manifests itself in class envy relating to your financial inability to own an American made motorcycle. Like the way you use the fools who devour your hate speech, I need people like you and the punks at my university to pay my salary because,unlike you, I will not live in a trailer with no plumbing or a/c.”

You keep speaking of this mysterious “university” where you supposedly work, yet you have not mentioned its formal name once in your many emails. This leads me to believe that not only are you ashamed to be employed there, but also that you are not employed at a real “university” at all but rather you have somehow managed to find work at a small, rural vo-tech center. I especially liked the double negative that you included at the end of your last sentence as it was spoken like a true redneck, Mike.

Now, before you go and open a fresh can of worms about mental complexes, coach Roberts, you should look at your own situation first. I think you’ll find it as interesting, though probably not as funny, as I have.

When you refer to an inferiority complex, do you mean some middle aged abject failure of a man who has achieved, at this late stage in his life, the paltry title of coach at some vo-tech center and who vehemently despises those students which he has to pander to every day in order to put food on his table and keep the water flowing through his ramshackle domicile?

When you refer to an inferiority complex, do you mean someone who is so poor in character and utterly lacking in personal charisma that they laughingly judge their net worth to society, their overall placement in the civilized order of things by the brand of motorcycle that they have (barely) managed to acquire at this late stage of their life?

Is your pathetic life really based solely upon a material possession of yours? Are you that shallow of a person that you somehow believe that simply owning a Harley Davidson somehow magically elevates you above all others around you?

I would have to say that answer would be “yes.”

“Do not be dismayed if you find yourself at a stoplight, in your torn t-shirt, on your GS 500 E and you look over at someone on an RC 51, who also own a Harley, who gives you the finger because you are part of society's tax liability.”

Mike, I would be dismayed if I found you anywhere other than on the boy’s locker room floor, on your hands and knees with a box of Kleenex and a bottle of Jergens lotion, mumbling and whistling happily to yourself while you were trying to fumblingly use a cordless power drill you “borrowed” from the janitor’s closet in order to make a peep hole through the wall into the girl’s shower area.

Now, didn’t your last email state rather emphatically that you were going to sell your RC 51 to some of the idiot punks in your class? Yes, I think it did.  Let's review your words now, shall we?

"After reading such thoughtful, articulate, gramatically (sic) correct, and insightful comments from the "punks" who cannot spell "Harley," much less afford one, I am embarrassed to own a sportbike and will contemplate selling mine soon.  And since I have some knowledge, thanks to your web-site, of to whom I am marketing these bike, I will be sure to sell them cheap." -Mike Roberts

I believe you were exuberant to discover that you would so quickly be able to off load your sport bike to what you thought of as some speed worshipping serf who would base their whole existence around the ownership of that sport bike (much like you do with your V-Rod). My question to you then is why are you still riding the RC 51 if you despise the types of people who own bikes like the Honda that you now own?

The truth is, I truly doubt I would ever find you on a RC 51 or anything more technologically complex than the rusted out, primer colored ’77 El Camino that you drive to work each day, appearing on campus after you sleep off your hangover, your Tandy stereo blaring the Steve Miller Band’s greatest hits through two home stereo speakers crudely wired and duct taped to the floorboard behind your bench seat. No, when it comes to brains and figuring out technology, I think it is best that you just stick with something simple like Harley Davidson.

After all, it must have been a real bitch finding a set of training wheels that would fit a Honda RC 51.

“Do your daughter a favor, and please do not make her quit her education in the fourth grade, as you did, and doom her to repeat the cycle of stupidity that has perpetuated itself in the "Echo" lineage.”

Oh, I’m sure that my daughter could do a lot worse than turning out to be like me. After all, one day she may suffer a fit of spontaneous mental retardation, shit her entire frontal lobe and bring home (in order to introduce to her mother and I) some pathetic loser whose highest ambition is to be a coach and teach driver’s ed for the rest of his pitiful life. That, of course, will be the day that we disown our daughter and begin to wonder where exactly it was that we went wrong as parents, where we failed to instill in our daughter some of the basic qualities of how to be a good and responsible human being and at least a somewhat valuable member of society.

Her mother and I will probably take to putting on sackcloth and heaping ashes upon our heads, wailing and lamenting in Old Testament proportions on the day that our daughter begins to give birth to a long lineage of coach-spawned genetic failures. I’m sure that these fetid, no-neck, buzz cut and mono-brow sporting proto-troglodytes will be weaned on Old Milwaukee and Skoal and even though they may not be real smart, they’ll certainly be able to hoot and holler in monosyllabic grunts as they run around and tackle stuff.

“Take heart, the first of the month is near and your check is in the mail. Meanwhile, my lawn does need mowing.”

I’m sorry, Mike, but I simply make way too much money to ever qualify for welfare. Perhaps if I had the title of “coach” before my name, and told the workers at the welfare office that I owned a Harley and drove a '77 primer gray El Camino, they might in turn take pity on me and I might qualify for some sort of special consideration with regard to my request for financial aid. That is, if I were ever to apply for such government support in the first place.

I am truly surprised that a person of your great social importance isn’t paid for their hard work promptly in cash, say, from the proceeds after each game. I can imagine that what meager earnings are awarded to you for your important services could be taken directly from the change box at the concession stand at closing time, and would probably never be missed. Mike, if you actually earn more than three figures and two decimal places of income a month, as a full time coach, then I will weep openly for our great and failing society and the obviously tragically misplaced values that we as a stagnant civilization put on such worthless wastes of human effort and lost potential that you so perfectly embody.

I also understand how hard it must be to make ends meet with nothing but a coaching degree to your name so I would like to try to help you out if I can. Perchance, you are looking for some extra income and are getting tired of having to continually title pawn the Elky just to make ends meet.  Why, Mike, with your educational background and your vast experience with the subject matter, I feel confident that you could apply for a position as a sales associate at your local Footlocker athletic shoe store. At least that way, you could also get to dress up like a referee and perhaps fulfill another of your as yet incomplete though well thought out sexual fantasies. Who knows, from time to time, you might even get to look up the skirts of unsuspecting little girls as you help them try on their new athletic shoes. I bet you would consider that a real employee benefit, now wouldn’t you?

With regard to your lawn care needs, I’d say that it does indeed sound like you’ve gotten your “honey-do” list all set up for this weekend (minus, of course, the “honey” since we know that most coaches lead lonely, solitary, migratory lives). Since your Harley probably isn’t in running condition at this moment in time (but it sure is pretty to look at bungee strapped down in the back of your Elky), I would suggest that you invite your school’s cheerleading squad over so that they can graze contentedly in your yard, thus doing your hard work for you while you sit on the front steps, killing a twelve pack of PBR and staring longingly at their short skirted backsides and twitching tails.

Enjoy your time spent in your yard and good luck on that job application should you decide to pursue my suggestion. You may, of course, use me as a reference if you think it might better the odds in your favor on gaining meaningful employment. My contact information is located on my site (address and phone number). Who knows, the position at Footlocker might really work out for you and in a few years, you might have worked your way high enough up in the company that you could finally get to wear a pair of those spiffy manager pants.

Why, just think about it!

One day soon you might even be well enough off that perhaps you could completely quit your coaching position at the vo-tech center. Yes, I think that would truly be the day that you actually begin to give something meaningful back to society and really start to repay civilization for all the years that you have freeloaded off of the rest of us.

________________________________________

"Coach" Mike Roberts - (Part III)
________________________________________

From:            "Michael Roberts" coachroberts@nc.rr.com
To:                  blackecho
Subject:         specimen
Sent:               Wed, 24 Mar 2004 10:57:46 -0500


Big Echo,

Congratulations. Although you may feel like it in your tiny everyday life, you have become a celebrity of sorts. My colleagues and I feel as though we have discovered the Missing Link and we are energized by its study. Much like a train wreck, we find you horrifying, yet we cannot turn away. We have worked on composites of you and your life, and much like that Ninja of yours, we have gotten great mileage out of the endeavor.

We understand that you do control the coveted DELETE button, but we ask that you not negotiate that maneuver until someone has read you what we have conjectured to this point.

We have bookmarked your site and examine various facets pertaining to our own area of expertise or interest. (I must admit that my analysis is not very objective. I handed out a picture of you at that fine eating establishment (Applebee's?) with my mid-term exam and warned my students that this was their future if they did not pass my class.

Politically, you are not ambiguous. You operate much like a fascist, in that you take an extreme view of an issue and pander to the downtrodden, mentally challenged, individuals with inferiority complexes (much like Hitler after WW1 and contemporary Skin Heads). You then use the accolades from those who consume your propaganda to amass a small amount of perceived power. Like fascists, you do not entertain nor encourage diverse opinion. Blocking opposition, like Jim Jones and Jonestown, is the foundation of your influence. You use these lemmings to engage yourself in a capitalistic enterprise which is facilitated by your preying upon the various personality disorders they are afflicted with. You are able to use their inability to engage in critical thinking to convince them that a group of people (like Hitler with the Jews) are somehow responsible for their misery and angst. They will do much of your bidding, and best of all BUY YOUR SHIRTS. GENIUS, B.E.! You put an "identifying armband" on people who have a similar taste in motorcycles, yet you can convince your "brown shirts" that having a similar taste in t-shirts, dressing alike, and thinking alike, is not the same as those "Jews" who congregate over their chosen bonding experience. You are the "charismatic" leader of a Klan, Mr. Echo. Congratulations to you. Have yourself a beer on our behalf at Applebee's.

More to come later from other departments. Thanks again.
 

_____________________

To which I have replied...
_____________________

Saint Unicef preserve us!

What you are seeing here, ladies and gentlemen, is the sad example of a pathetic man who is not only hopelessly on the losing end of an argument he chose to start, but also a man who has had the fragile fantasy of his make believe life burst asunder like the soap bubble fancy that it was and boy is he sputtering mad.

The latest sign of Mike’s rather obvious failing was when he started to change my name around to suit his own juvenile delight. It is a childish tactic, learned in the single digit formative years, and one which most people outgrow by the time they reach puberty. Puberty, however, was a subject that Mike failed three times straight in a row and had he not fortuitously chanced upon an obscure correspondence course in the back of a well leafed through Playboy magazine, then he might never have graduated to manhood at all.

If Mike wants to look up to me as “Big Echo,” then I shall, in turn, choose to refer to him as “Mikey.” It’s a chummy little repartee that we have established and I feel that our terms for each other are quite quaint.

Mikey’s knee jerk spasm of an email was, of course, riddled with obvious errors. This means that once again Mikey did his own typing and failed to send the preliminary copy to his proofreader for some much needed correction before he fired it off to me. Perhaps the head of the cheerleading squad has run off with someone more virile or perhaps she was just being wormed and groomed at the veterinarian and was unavailable to help Mikey in his uphill intellectual labor this time around. I’ve taken it upon myself to correct him once more, hoping beyond all hope that he will eventually learn from his mistakes and become a more articulate person when communicating with other human beings. You will find my corrections done in red for easy reference. I chose this color since it is the same color that Mikey sees all the real teachers use when they grade papers.

Now, with the introduction to our next session behind, let’s see what indolent manifestation of uber-retardation Mikey has signed his name to this time. Oh, I just bet that it’s going to be good!


Big Echo,

“Congratulations. Although you may (not) feel like it in your tiny everyday life, you have become a celebrity of sorts. My colleagues and I feel as though we have discovered the Missing Link and we are energized by its study.”

Well three cheers and a hurrah for you, Mikey!

Everyone needs a hobby, especially over paid vo-tech staff with an abundant surplus of idle time on their hands. I see that you intend to prove to me that you are a rugged, free thinking individual by running away from me as fast as you can, crying because your feelings got hurt, and hiding behind the letterman jackets of your so-called academic colleagues. You understand now that you can’t stand against me on your own so you put out a clarion call for the flock to come save you.

Oh, I am laughing at you now, coach; rich, hearty, booming guffaws fill my study and reverberate down the halls of my otherwise peaceful home.

“Much like a train wreck, we find you horrifying, yet we cannot turn away. We have worked on composites of you and your life, and much like that Ninja of yours, we have gotten great mileage out of the endeavor.”

Yes, when it’s quitting time at the university, I’m sure that you all pile into Mikey’s ’77 primer gray El Camino and head to town as fast as you can for the local happy hour. You whoop and holler, swerving down the road from lane to lane all the while blaring Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys are back in Town” from the Tandy stereo in the dash. Three sit across the front bench seat (including the lucky one who called “shotgun”), and the rest simply hang on to the bed rails for dear life there in the back of the Elky.

I find it simply dumbfounding that a small group of junior college educated coaches could be sitting around getting drunk in some sports bar while scratching their crotches and rubbing their noggins in a vain attempt to psycho-analyze me. I imagine that while you are wading through the comparably light drizzle of your collective brain storming session that you are all otherwise glued to the game on the big screen, eating free chips and salsa hand over fist, pulling each other’s fingers and playfully slapping the passing waitresses on their wiggling hineys as they walk by. Your comments behind their backs take the form of crude appraisals of their aging physiques and what you would do to them if they ever paid you any attention.

It almost brings a tear to my eye when I think of the close knit togetherness that you and your colleagues must share, what with this new common cause to draw you even closer in your collective male bonding. Why, like some classic B movie from the Cold War era, I imagine that you all must truly look like a bunch of worried, frantic Allied scientists suddenly faced with some terrible threat from beyond your normal realm of expertise. Page after page of my website will have been printed out and spread on the table before you as you so desperately try to grasp the difficult concepts and look up the big words which you are totally unfamiliar with. Yes, your group is quite the spectacle to behold for after all, who would have thought that a lowly TGI-Fridays could be the site of such an awesome brain trust in the making?

“We understand that you do control the coveted DELETE button, but we ask that you not negotiate that maneuver until someone has read you what we have conjectured to this point.”

Why would I ever want to delete any part of your delightfully ignorant prose, coach Roberts? I see no reason not to use you for what humor I have, can and will eventually siphon off from you. After all, someone really needs to find some use for you in this life as you obviously have a long and proven track record of being incapable of doing that for yourself.

And as for having someone read me what you have conjectured, please remember that I'm not the one making all the mistakes here, nor am I the one who is having to call in reinforcements left and right to back me up.

“We have bookmarked your site and examine(d the) various facets pertaining to our own area of expertise or interest.”

Outstanding.

I doubt, though, that you will find anything on my site that is even remotely related to any area of expertise and interest that you or any your colleagues may have. I do try to cater to a more intellectual visitor to my site than what you represent so I must apologize in advance if I don’t have any Flash games or sports themed animated coloring pages that you can fill in by number pad key or mouse click. This is all very interesting and wholly unexpected as I admit that I am totally unprepared to entertain visitors at your level of intellect on my site. I will try to be a better content provider in the future and shall therefore ask to borrow some items from my daughter’s day care. With those simple activities installed on my site, you and your colleagues should be mesmerized and entertained for the next several months to come. Perhaps I could even scan in the complete issue of Marvel Comic’s SUPERPRO for your reading enjoyment as I feel that it is more along your level of mental development.

I will go ahead and say this on behalf of your so-called academic colleagues: you really have to admire the kind of men who would give up NASCAR and reruns of Baywatch in order to sacrifice their time and their energy just to come to the defense of what could so easily be described as the downer cow of their herd.

“(I must admit that my analysis is not very objective.) I handed out a picture of you at that fine eating establishment (Applebee's?) with my mid-term exam and warned my students that this was their future if they did not pass my class.”

Boy, times sure have changed since I was in school!  I was unaware that PE or Driver’s Ed had mid-term exams, coach Roberts, but perhaps things are done differently at the vo-tech center where you are employed.

Oh, hell.  Let’s not fool ourselves here, Mikey. We all know that the only part you had in any mid-term exam was when you were asked to step in from your position as hall monitor so that you could watch the class while the real teacher excused herself to step away to the bathroom for a few minutes. That and possibly you might have been entrusted with the very important duty of handing out the number two pencils and the Scantron sheets just prior to the test.

I’m curious, coach Roberts. Did you charge all of those copies of my picture that you made to the university or did it come out of the loose change and dryer lint in your pocket, perchance when you found yourself at Kinko’s after one of those late night brain trust meetings with your colleagues at TGI-Fridays? At any rate, I am a little concerned that you would take the time to print out a picture of me from my website, make copies of it without permission and disseminate it to your students for your own spiteful purposes.

I do, however, find this admission of your behavior to be truly humorous in hindsight and that goes a long way towards forgiving you, Mikey. I can just see it now... There you are, foaming and fuming, handing out pictures of me sitting with my infant daughter in my arms at a local restaurant, all the while you are vehemently warning your students that if they fail your class, they will somehow wind up like me and how that will be a very bad thing.

The humorous part is that all of this rancid vitriol is coming from a man whose highest ambition in life was to be a coach and to own a Harley Davidson. I find the irony of what you have admitted and what you have done to be truly savory!

After all, who knew so much was actually riding on passing Driver’s Ed?

“Politically, you are not ambiguous. You operate much like a fascist, in that you take an extreme view of an issue and pander to the downtrodden, mentally challenged, individuals with inferiority complexes (much like Hitler after WW1 and contemporary Skin Heads). You then use the accolades from those who consume your propaganda to amass a small amount of perceived power. Like fascists, you do not entertain nor encourage diverse opinion.”

Please forgive me if I choose not to subscribe to your personal hallucination, but I do find it entertaining to try to navigate my way around the edges of your dementia. I think I said long ago that one of the classic lines of retort that will be used by the typical flock-minded Harley owner would be if they were to compare me and / or my views to bad people and / or bad situations in history. The typical Harley rider has, at best, a functional tenth grade education (and those are the smart ones), so I understand not only how these poor scoggins are so easily brainwashed by the powerful marketing wizards in Milwaukee (who conveniently spin their tragic corporate history for their own financial benefit), but also how the typical Harley rider wouldn’t know a communist training camp from a community college, not that they are likely to ever step foot within the boundaries of either during their pathetic life.

Over the last ten years, I’ve been (wrongly) compared to racists, fascists, socialists, Nazis, communists, and since September 11, 2001 I’ve even been compared to militant Islamic extremists and Middle Eastern terrorists. Your argument, as presented above, is neither original nor is it new. I'm not surprised to see that for all your claimed uber-intellect, when you run out of your rather limited venues for creating original criticism, even you have to quickly resort back to the clichéd redneck mumblings found in the decades old Harley Owners manual.

Mikey, you of all people should know the dangers of basing your best offense off of a tired old one page play book that everyone already knows by heart, a playbook, I might add, that has been passed around just slightly less often than your mother.

“Blocking opposition, like Jim Jones and Jonestown, is the foundation of your influence. You use these lemmings to engage yourself in a capitalistic enterprise which is facilitated by your preying upon the various personality disorders they are afflicted with. You are able to use their inability to engage in critical thinking to convince them that a group of people (like Hitler with the Jews) are somehow responsible for their misery and angst. They will do much of your bidding, and best of all BUY YOUR SHIRTS. GENIUS, B.E.!”

I honestly smiled at this part of your email because you have just reiterated Harley Davidson’s corporate mission statement perfectly. Let me change a few words in your ranting and you’ll see what I mean. I’ll even go one step further and outline the words that I change in yellow so you’ll have an easier time of following along in the error of your ways.

“Blocking opposition, like Jim Jones and Jonestown, is the foundation of your influence. You use these lemmings to engage yourself in a capitalistic enterprise which is facilitated by your preying upon the various personality disorders they are afflicted with. You are able to use their inability to engage in critical thinking to convince them that a group of people (like the Japanese) are somehow responsible for their misery and angst. They will do much of your bidding, and best of all BUY YOUR SHIRTS. GENIUS, WILLIE G.!”

Kudos, sir, for trying that rather obvious transposition of values but I’m afraid it doesn’t work on someone who knows the history and marketing practices of the world’s largest manufacturer of overpriced and underpowered junk. Do you hear that funny sound way off in the distance, coach? It’s me, laughing at you. Again.

“You put an "identifying armband" on people who have a similar taste in motorcycle s, yet you can convince your "brown shirts" that having a similar taste in t-shirts, dressing alike, and thinking alike, is not the same as those "Jews" who congregate over their chosen bonding experience. You are the "charismatic" leader of a Klan, Mr. Echo. Congratulations to you. Have yourself a beer on our behalf at Applebee's.”

Ah, coach Roberts. Your feverish delirium gets more entertaining the further it unfolds. I love how you put quotes around common words, like you somehow invented these words or that the rest of us wouldn’t know the definition of these words when we read them.

The word you are trying to both spell and use correctly in your sentence is “clan,” Mikey. The word “clan,” when specifically spelled with a “k” and when that “k” is capitalized within the sentence itself, refers to none other than the KKK or the Ku Klux Klan, a particularly notorious white hate group that originated in the deep South but has since spread out across the country, especially to the Midwest, in the many decades that followed its creation.  Just for your future information, Webster's defines the word "Klan" as follows:

Klan -(klan)- The Ku Klux Klan. n. : a secret society of white Southerners to resist Black emancipation [syn: Ku Klux Klan, KKK]

If this isn’t a Freudian slip on your part, then it is simply another glaring and rather humorous failure of both your argument and your squalid intellect.

Since you have already compared me to both Adolf Hitler and the (laughable) reverend Jim Jones, I can very well see how someone in your state of dire pharmaceutical emergency might also wish to imply that since I am from Mississippi I therefore, by default, must also be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. You have already claimed that my behavior is similar to Hitler’s desire to commit mass genocide while you also liken my arguments to Jim Jones’ belief that you really can take it all with you when you go.  Given your flawed reasoning, it doesn't take much of a leap of thought for me to believe that by capitalizing the “k” in “Klan” that you fully intended to also compare my arguments to the actions of the KKK and the impact of their espoused racial hatred.

• Carry yourself well in life, don't drag your knuckles.

• Speak eloquently when engaged in conversation, even if the other person cannot or does not do the same.

• Use the English language correctly when communicating in any kind of written or transmitted format. Just because you’re using email or you’re posting on the Internet is no excuse for being lazy in your language skills.

• Be all that you can be.

• Share what you know, learn what you don’t.

• Never stop learning. The day you stop learning should be the day that they close the lid on your box and put you in the ground.

• Don’t take crap off of anyone, especially crap from people dumber than you are.

• Stick to your beliefs and never back down.

• Question what everyone else is doing, especially if they can’t give you a good reason for why they are doing it.

• Don’t subscribe to hooky redneck religions, buy your life out of a catalog or try to be something / someone that you’re not.

• People are sheep. Get used to it. The average person can tell you all the names of the members of their favorite NASCAR team or recite the game statistics for their favorite athlete but couldn’t tell you the three branches of the US government or name five presidents in a row and what years they served.

• Always give something back to the community in which you live.

• Take your time, marry well, and marry for life.

• Be faithful, respecting and loving to your spouse.

• Be a loving parent to your children.

• Provide for your family at all costs.

• Embrace technology. It makes your life easier and better.

• Do something meaningful with your life. Don’t expect others to thank you for it or respect you for doing it.

• God gave you a brain, use it! Don’t trust other people to think for you. You’re smarter than that.

• Don’t be afraid to be alone or to be an individual. Stand on your own two feet, don’t wait to be carried along by someone else.

• Being an individual means that you don't dress like everyone else claiming to be an individual and you all don't get your clothes from the very same company.

• Have fun while you are here and be crazy whenever you can because the world is far too serious and in a hundred years, who’s going to give a damn about what happened today?

• The good times will come and go. So will the bad times. Deal with it and don’t dwell on it.

• It isn’t important what happens to you in life. How you deal with what happens to you in life is what is important.

• If you don’t believe in yourself, chances are, nobody else will either.
  
  
  And last but not least, by all means, the most important piece of advice I think I can give to anyone who may visit my site:
  
   

• Don’t ever, ever, ever let your child grow up to be a coach (or marry one).
  
   

As such, I can safely say that I truly lead by example in the many intricate aspects of my life.

Unlike the historical figures which you (wrongly and laughably) cite above, I do not advocate any kind of physical violence on any other human being simply because they may have a different opinion than I do. That is the realm of the typical Harley owner who more often than not responds to any intelligent argument presented to them with a flurry of death threats and laughable but completely physically impossible sexual suggestions. These responses are usually chock full of poor grammar and miserable spelling denoting either a low level of education, a severe case of mental retardation, or a liberal combination of the two afflictions.

I’ve seen too many idiots on Harleys in the last ten years to ever think that these simpleton dickbobs don’t form a vast majority of your inwrought, ecumenical sect. I’m always humored when I think that so many of your most outspoken zealots can’t even spell the word “Harley” correctly and more so when I’m told stories of how “Harley” has even been misspelled when applied as a tattoo somewhere on their seldom washed bodies. There is, I believe, a direct correlation in why there are six letters in the word “stupid” and exactly six letters in the word “Harley” just like there is a direct correlation in why there are five letters in the word “idiot” and five letters in the word “coach.”

Honestly, how dumb do you really have to be in order to not know how to correctly spell the name of the one thing you so feverishly worship in this life? Pretty damn stump fuck dumb, IMHO.

Most people use their God-given brain to solve problems in life. Harley owners are different. All a typical Harley owner really needs in life is a tire iron, a piece of pipe, or perhaps some length of chain to help them work through their frequent periods of confusion. Monosyllabic grunts mixed with smashing things they don’t understand generally form the core aspect of the typical Harley owner’s problem solving process. After all, if a Harley rider could think on their own or actually make something original out of their own life, then they really wouldn’t need to ride a Harley Davidson, now would they, coach Roberts?

I find great fault in your argument in that it is not currently nor has it ever been my opinion that Harley riders should all be rounded up and marched off in an orderly manner to the gas chambers (though people like you do cause me to sometimes temporarily reconsider my otherwise adamant position on this matter). We shouldn’t kill all the Harley riders, we should have pity on them. Harley riders are poor, misled, hoodwinked sheep. They desperately need something in their otherwise empty lives and they are willing to pay a premium for an end to that deep longing. They are willing to pay someone else to fill their lives with that which they cannot or will not do on their own. These poor, pitiful souls shouldn’t be tortured or punished, no, they should instead all be rounded up and educated, forced, in essence, to complete at least a high school education or get a GED.

Harley riders should simply be informed of their mass delusion and have it shown to them for what it really is, on their level. I think that Jim Hensen studios or Disney (now one in the same) would be very helpful in using Muppets and cartoons to get the message across. The decades old blinders on their eyes should be carefully removed and these people should then be rehabilitated, possibly treated for pharmaceutical abuse and quickly brought back into the folds of society. Perhaps after all of this is done, they can once again be a valuable and productive part of civilization (instead of an intellectual burden and a chronic eye sore to our great culture). IMHO, Harley Davidson should also be required to give each and every one of these poor cattle a full refund for having lied to them from the very start and taken advantage of their inability to tell fiction from reality.

Oh, I know this is a daunting if not outright impossible task, but someone’s got to take the first steps towards bringing the wayward flock back into the fold and I was happy to step forward and make the effort. We’ve all got to do what we can.

“More to come later from other departments. Thanks again.”

When you refer to “other departments,” would that also include your local department of corrections where most of those you coach are destined to eventually wind up at shortly after they leave the vo-tech center where you claim to teach?

Sadly, it is I who should be thanking you, Mikey. This email proved to me that it is the coach who is now depending on the real teachers at his institution to save his over-extended ass and to soothe his bruised ego.  I’m laughing at you, coach Roberts, mainly because in the Big Game of Life, you’re about as useless as lug nuts on a birthday cake.
 

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"Coach" Mike Roberts - (Part IV)
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From:         "Michael Roberts" coachroberts@nc.rr.com
To:              blackecho
Subject:     update
Sent:          Thu, 25 Mar 2004 10:46:06


Big Echo,
Congratulations again on your newly found cult status. A colleague from our Computer Science Department suggested that we create a web page that provides insight into our "academic" study of BE. We have a few concerns:
1. Because we are using university resources, we have to justify some sort of academic endeavor.
2. We would like to link to your page.
3. We would like to buy a dozen of your shirts. We will wear these while posing on HD's. This will be posted on our site and we would like you to post it on yours. (This could provide a tremendous windfall for you, as we understand this is after all, a entrepreneurial enterprise for BE)
4. We would like permission to use one of your photos.
5. We would like you to post some of our feedback on your site.
6. We are mostly concerned about the slow updates on your web page. We are looking forward to the promised "philosophy and logic" analysis.

If you would address these concerns, we can move forward. We do need frequent updates because they are the nexus of this exercise. This activity has grown its own legs. The CS faculty member was not even in on the original planning. Having your Applebees photo on my office door has generated much conversation. Thanks again. Our newest analysis is forthcoming. Please respond to the affore-mentioned concerns, as we would like to conclude before the summer session arrives.
 

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To which I have replied...
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Mikey,

Thank you for the fourth email in as many days. Looking at the time stamps for each of your emails, I see that you must really have a lot of free personal time between the normal school hours of 7AM in the morning and 1PM in the afternoon. This gives great support to my view that you are vastly over-paid for what little work you provide to your employer but then no one has ever actually accused you of having a real job, now have they, coach?

“Congratulations again on your newly found cult status. A colleague from our Computer Science Department suggested that we create a web page that provides insight into our "academic" study of BE.”

I find it hilarious that not only have you given me this new found cult status (something that I believe you chastised me for having in your last email) but also that you readily admit you are going to have to farm out the HTML part of this project to someone who understands a computer language that is itself barely one step above drawing X’s, O’s and arrows on a dry erase board. I see that in your effort to stand against me, you are finding yourself totally lacking in many key areas, the first of which is apparently computer science.

My chosen career in the field of advanced networks and computer systems allows me to share somewhat of a kindred spirit with this CS colleague of yours. I truly feel sorry for this technology savvy person and what you must have done to them in order to browbeat them into submission. The only way I could ever see that someone with enough brains to work on a modern computer system let alone an integrated network would ever throw their lot in with a bunch of brand worshipping dickoids would be if you threatened to do things to them that even a hillbilly would consider rude.

“We have a few concerns:

“ 1. Because we are using university resources, we have to justify some sort of academic endeavor.”

Well, I think it would be hard to justify your academic behavior at this point in time let alone approve of your academic endeavor. However, if overpaid, idle minded vo-tech center employees want to spend their many free hours a day building a website, then all power to you. It’s not like you’re doing any real work as it is, right, coach? What is even better is that this website won’t be based on refuting my claims about Harley Davidson or their owners (because you can’t refute those claims), but rather it will be about ridiculing me as a person using whatever angle you can find or contrive by assumption based on information you find on my personal website.

I'm sure that you (and your colleagues) will put a lot of effort into this endeavor but I’m afraid that what you are intending to do is the same thing that many other ignorant Harley owners have been doing for over ten years now; ridiculing me while avoiding the argument and ignoring the basic facts all together. I really see no difference in what you will be producing and what has already been done but then no one ever claimed that Harley owners were original.

“ 2. We would like to link to your page.”

I have no problem with this as I give anyone permission to link to my page as they see fit. I would suggest that you utilize the skills of this CS colleague of yours to do this task for you, since you obviously don’t understand the first thing about HTML (or computers).

3. We would like to buy a dozen of your shirts. We will wear these while posing on HD's. This will be posted on our site and we would like you to post it on yours. (This could provide a tremendous windfall for you, as we understand this is after all, a entrepreneurial enterprise for BE)

Mikey, you keep forgetting that you’re a coach, a rather ineffective one at that and as such, you therefore have no learning, experience, or training in the field of finance and business. Hell, you wouldn’t recognize an entrepreneurial enterprise if it walked up to you and gave you a wedgee by jerking your athletic supporter up around your shoulder blades.

If my site were truly an entrepreneurial enterprise, as you wrongly claim, then don't you think that I would require you to become a member of my site before you could enter and read the really good stuff. If I was trying to make a profit off of my website, then I would charge you a monthly membership fee to be a part of the experience instead of just giving it all away for free. Since I do not charge an admission fee to enter my site, my site simply cannot be considered an entrepreneurial enterprise, much to your chagrin. My site is open to the public, free of charge, and is not advertised with any media source. The only way to learn about my site is either by accidentally stumbling across it, by word of mouth, or in the same vein by following a link to it that some visitor has posted to some other area of the Internet. I view my site as more of a personal hobby than as an entrepreneurial enterprise or any kind of business venture.

As I have said previously, my T-shirts are merely souvenirs of your visit to my site, buying one of the shirts is the Internet equivalent of tipping me for my good service to you.  My site does not operate off the proceeds of selling T-shirts and I do not have to sell T-shirts to keep my site open nor do you have to purchase a T-shirt in order to access my site. I pay for everything on the site out of my own pocket because I enjoy keeping the site up. It’s a hobby, not a life.

As for ordering shirts from me, I look forward to doing business with you, Mikey.

Before you ever put concern #3 into your proposition, you probably should have actually looked at the shirts that are for sale on my site and read the sayings very carefully. If we both agree to concern #3, then an added stipulation will be that you must pose, wearing one of the shirts of my choice, on your beloved V-Rod. The shirt will, of course, have the F1 logo on the front, and the B15 logo on the rear.

You’ll recognize B15 from my reply to some other colleagues of yours, the notorious "Iron-Hour-Seman" and it has been a favorite ever since. The other eleven shirts you may mix and choose to your heart’s desire, but the F1 / B15 is yours to wear and pose in for my entertainment. Some might perceive this future picture of you to be a stark visual example of the Jungian duality of man concept but I will know it for what it really is: simple truth in advertising.

If you order twelve shirts at one time, I’ll give you a bulk shipping rate on the large order, so take the cost of the shirts, multiply by twelve, add $20.00 shipping to the total and I think we can do business. Oh, you might want to get a colleague from the math department to help you with your “figgering” when you run out of fingers and toes, Mikey.

4. We would like permission to use one of your photos.

Well, since you have already taken a photo of me from my website (without permission), made multiple copies (without permission), and distributed it freely (without permission) for your own spiteful purposes, I’m really wondering why you are even bothering to ask me for my permission now. If I were to say no, which I wouldn’t, then you would just do it anyway because you have already proven that is the kind of fine, upstanding individual that you are.

If you want to use any of my photos, be my guest. You may reproduce any photo on my site, but they are copyrighted so you may not add to, subtract from, change, modify, or animate them in any way which, sadly, is probably just what you intended to do all along. Other than that, I’m not going to lose any sleep over what you do to any of my pictures. Print them all out and wipe your ponderous, tangle haired ass with them for all I care. It’s your paper and ink, or I should be saying that it will be the vo-tech center’s paper and ink.

I do, however, demand the courtesy of a photo of you in return, subject to the above rules and guidelines. Nothing fancy, just your mug from the shoulders up. If you will, please draw a line where a normal human would possess a chin.

5. We would like you to post some of our feedback on your site.

I’m posting some of your feedback right now, Mikey, or didn’t you realize that?

You may send me any feedback you wish and I will reply to it here if I feel the need to, in the same way that I have always done, or if it will generate some mirth. Again, I won’t modify it other than to point out, correct and make fun of your atrocious spelling and / or grammar and in turn intellectually spank you if you try to use tired old dealership clichés as some strong point of your argument.

Please do try to keep your arguments to the point, that is, your defense of Harley Davidson and why you subscribe at great financial cost to your pathetic make-believe lifestyle. You may also post on my forums if you like, though I don’t hang out there much and you may invite others to respond to you in turn, others who are also smarter than you and will rapidly put you in your place, just as I have done.

6. We are mostly concerned about the slow updates on your web page. We are looking forward to the promised "philosophy and logic" analysis.

The slow rate of the updates is rather easy to explain, coach. My website is a hobby, not my life and as such, I update when the fancy strikes me, when I’m bored or when I feel the need to pass along some relevant information to those who might be interested in it. I don’t live on the Internet, I have other hobbies as well that strike my fancy from time to time and as such, you're just going to have to fit your life into my schedule if you want to be a part of it.  Otherwise, I suggest that you get happy, and the quicker you do, the better you will feel.

“If you would address these concerns, we can move forward.”

So done!

“We do need frequent updates because they are the nexus of this exercise.”

Ah, here’s the crux of the deal, coach. You are not only proposing a lot, you’re also asking for a lot as well. Since this is going to be a vo-tech center sponsored experiment, and you will require frequent updates on my part, I’m sure that you will realize that my time is at a premium and I will have to charge you labor. Any time that I might spend being involved with your project will, of course, take me away from time I could be spending doing other important things in my life (like being with my wife and child, earning an income, taking dangerous thugs off of the streets of my community, etc.). All institutions of higher learning are more than accustomed to paying well for guest speakers and other renowned visitors to their campus. The status which you have recently elevated me to should make me no different in this respect. As such, I feel that I should be adequately paid for my contribution to your project, especially if I am going to actually be the subject of your study.  After all, anything that is going to involve the direct intervention of so many different departments on your campus surely is going to be costly for you.

I will agree to a flat fee of $10,000.00 USD for my part in this endeavor, which I believe is a fair estimate of what I would make (after taxes) during the month or month and a half worth of time I would be required to be involved in your pet project. This fee is non-negotiable and is payable in advance by cashier's check or money order drawn in US funds on a recognized bank. My fee is to be mailed to my address (posted on my site) by no later than May 1st, 2004 in order for me to accept your forthwith proposition. I do understand that this amount is almost the sum total budget for the next five years of your athletic program at the vo-tech center, but in the quest for higher education, I’m afraid that we’re just going to have to make some sacrifices and cut back on the lesser effective programs if this project is to go ahead on its own merits.

The amount quoted above should guarantee you speedy updates and replies to your email at least through the end of May or the end of this semester, which ever comes first. The next six to eight months are going to be very busy for me personally so we will have to renegotiate our contract for any further time you may require me to expend on this endeavor past the end of May. I will go ahead and say that my fee may very well include a personal visit to your campus in order that you and I may engage in direct debate against each other in front of your Driver’s Ed class. I will expect you to provide the fold up card table as well as the pork rinds, pickled pigs feet and Old Milwaukee that will serve as your personal refreshments. I will instead opt to have some ice water or perhaps some sweet tea (home made, not that stuff out of a pressure line) in a clean glass. I will give you a scathing look of contempt if you attempt to serve me liquid refreshment using a Dixie cup or an old mayonnaise jar. I would look forward to that meeting, facing you on your own turf, in person, and handing you some more of what you have been receiving here. It’s so much more rewarding when I can actually see your expression.

When you have sent my payment, please give me the courtesy of an email so that I may look for it and thus start to rearrange my busy schedule to meet the schedule of you and your colleagues. I look forward to this potential business arrangement and anxiously await your payment for my services for it will be, after all, the first and only check I have ever received in the mail from a state or government run institution. This should be a real intellectual treat for all involved.

I must also state that the shirts will be at extra cost.  Like so many institutions of higher learning, you must first pay the tuition (my fee) then extra for the class room materials (my shirts).  I'm sure that you are more than familiar with how this procedure operates.

However, if you do not agree to my fee, or the vo-tech center where you are currently employed cannot come up with my appearance fee, then unfortunately you may not use any of the copyrighted material from my website for your study, your proposed website, or your personal use, including but certainly not limited to pictures of me or my family. I’m afraid that without any up front financial backing, this little endeavor of yours is going to be over before it has even begun, which would really be a shame.

“This activity has grown its own legs.”

Most bacterial cultures do when left unchecked.

“The CS faculty member was not even in on the original planning.”

That is strictly because the CS faculty member could run faster than you to start with. I’m sure that the only way that someone from the CS department is now working for you is due to an unfortunate momentary lapse of reason on their part and a hastily prepared ambush set up on your part. Your clever use of a piece of string tied to a big stick supporting a heavy wooden box wasn’t nearly as smart as the decision to use a pack of deliciously inviting Blue Bunny cream filled sponge cakes (being a coach, you probably couldn’t afford the more expensive Hostess Twinkies). The Blue Bunny sponge cakes were set out on a paper plate as bait for the poor CS faculty member. All you had to do was to wait patiently and yank the string at the right moment. That’s how you really got a CS faculty member to work with you.

Let’s face facts, coach. If you, personally, could do a website on your own (most ten year olds can in this day and age) then you wouldn’t ever need to farm out that expertise to someone who was smarter than you were. I imagine that you will get several more faculty members from other departments to join your personal crusade before too long as you quickly find out where and how you don’t stack up, as a person, as a man, or as an individual to my skills and my education.

“Having your Applebees photo on my office door has generated much conversation.”

I imagine it has generated much conversation indeed, Mikey, and not a tiny bit of snickering carried out behind your back among the student body and the faculty.  Let’s review the rather humorous (and not just a little bit suspect) situation which you have now put yourself into:

You’ve downloaded my picture from the Internet, printed it out multiple times for your own personal use and then you have taped at least one copy of a picture of me to your office door. You stare at the picture of me on your door during your many idle hours each day and comment on it in-depth whenever anyone will give you the time of day (or more likely, any time they simply aren’t fast enough to avoid you in the first place). You have even gone so far as to make multiple copies of my picture and pass it out to the students in your class, thus showing that I have become a rather deep and personal obsession for you.  I would honestly be surprised if you haven’t also printed out a picture of me and taped it to the wall beside your bed, put another copy on your refrigerator door, and possibly even keep a copy in the bathroom to wank off to when you get half the chance. I would suggest that you spend the extra buck fifty at Kinko's in order to laminate the picture of me which you keep in the bathroom.  That way, it will last far longer, especially under the kind of workout you are giving it every night.

Mikey, in all honesty, I’m now more than a little concerned about you.  You have to really begin to suspect a man who likes to download pictures of other men off the Internet while bragging about it constantly. You have not only emailed me an average of once per day for an entire week, but now you apparently want to create an entire website about me and my life for your own personal pleasure and review. You have expressed to me your desire to fulfill this homo-erotic dream of yours by subsequently surrounding yourself with as many other men (which you lovingly refer to as “colleagues”) as you can find to join you in your special playtime.

I strongly feel, at this time, that your abnormal behavior thus far is highly indicative of your deep, innate desire to finally come prancing merrily out of the rainbow colored closet.  If you do succumb to these new feelings that you have been having lately and fully embrace who you really are as a person deep down inside, then you will at long last be able to let your often denied latent homosexuality blossom into a beautiful, fruity candor not seen since the likes of Liberace.

Oh, well.  I'm glad that my picture has brought you so much joy and that it fills such a large part of your otherwise empty and meaningless life, Mikey.

“Thanks again. Our newest analysis is forthcoming. Please respond to the affore (sic)-mentioned concerns, as we would like to conclude before the summer session arrives.”

The word you are so desperately trying to use correctly in this sentence, coach, is “afore.” I’m afraid that you’ve put an extra “F” in there, just like your English teacher must have done on your report card all those years ago.

I appreciate the tremendous boost that you are personally trying to give to me and my views, the entrepreneurial enterprise that is going to be my stake in this academic mis-endeavor of yours and the financial windfall that will result from my forthcoming fee for participating in your highly anticipated vo-tech study. Since you have made it more than obvious that you, as an individual, cannot stand alone against me, you have also readily admitted to me that it is going to take no less than twelve of you to face one of me. The truth of the situation is that it might take far more of you than that if you, coach Roberts, are any indication of the type of intellectual juggernaut that your vo-tech center employs on its faculty staff.

Oh, you may think that you’ve ridden back to the shiny white towers and waxed halls of Academia and begun to assemble a mighty group of stalwart individuals to ride hard against me, Mikey, but as we shall soon see, all you’ve really managed to round up so far is something that more closely resembles the Apple Dumpling Gang than it does a bona fide posse comitatus.

 

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