Author: Ancient Undergrad

Tom Bradycardia

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Claw and I had to get a new doctor since we live in Canada now. We haven’t registered into the Canadian system yet, and still have health insurance in the USA. So last week, we crossed the border into northern Minnesota to get our first annual physical with a new primary care physician.

At the appointment, the nurse did the standard things. Blood pressure, heart rate, questionnaire. She had trouble with my heart rate, measuring it twice. Apparently it was low. When the doctor came in, she wanted to check my heart rate too. She confirmed it was low. She asked if I’ve ever had an EKG.

There’s never really been a time in my life where I’ve paid attention to my heart rate. Not to say I don’t find it interesting. On the contrary, a couple of my favourite scientific articles are about how well the total number of heart beats in a lifetime predict life expectancy across mammals of all sorts of size better than chronological age (Levine 1997).

Isn’t that a cool result? All these different mammals have very different heart rates (15 bpm for whale, 600 bpm for mouse) and life expectancies (40 years for whale, 2 years for mouse), yet all have roughly the same amount of total heartbeats throughout their lifetime. If you are a mammal, you get about 10 billion heart beats and that’s it. It’s a better predictor of how much life you get than chronological time. Human is a little bit of an outlier, likely due to modern medicine squeezing out another half-log of heartbeats, but it’s a real finding. Your life is measured in heartbeats, not time. When it comes to life expectancy, the heart is the undisputed MVP organ.

To use an expression I hate, this knowledge lives rent-free in my head. I’ve carried a small but persistent sense of dread that the things I have done throughout my career and as a student have shortened my life. The copious amounts of coffee, red bull and other stimulants I’ve leaned on to power up and manically charge through all obstacles and competition have spent way too many precious heart beats. Additionally, I’ve always had a hunch my heart was naturally too quick. That even without the stimulants, my heart would give out unnaturally early.

So what’s a normal resting rate for a human? For a healthy Brazilian male, (which I am not), it’s 64 beats per minute. (According to the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (Dantas, Milll et al. 2017)

So how low was my resting heart rate at the clinic?

43-48 bpm. I just looked down at the Apple watch I’m borrowing from Claw, 47 bpm as I write. That’s low. So low, the EKG function on the watch doesn’t even work.

I found another source stating that mean resting heart rates are 61.4 with a standard deviation of 3.7. If that’s true it looks like I’m something like 4 standard deviations away from the mean. That’s so much of an outlier, it’s hard to believe.

After talking with the doctor, some things in the past started to click. At an urgent care facility about 10 years ago, they gave me an EKG when I just had a muscle spasm. I thought they were just ruling out a heart attack, even though I was in my thirties at the time and decently healthy.

A few years ago, I had a kidney stone that was broken up with lithotripsy. Afterwards, because the pain was unbelievable, we went to an ER to verify everything was ok (it was, I was just in agony). Claw recently told me that after they hooked me up to the heart monitor, a crowd of nurses and medical personnel gathered around it just to observe and watch my slow heart rate (I was out of it, not paying attention and had no idea).

Since the appointment last week, I have been wearing Claw’s Apple watch because it has heart monitoring functions. The doctor suggested it to gather data. Just checked again. 44 bpm. Fuck me, I have an elephant heart.

So I have a very slow heart. the medical term for it is Bradycardia. In my case it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

There weren’t any clues. I truly had no idea. I’m still having a hard time accepting that it’s unusual. I eat like shit, sugar and junk food binges. I’m kind of athletic, but not really. I try to exercise my way out of a crap diet, living by the terrible motto, “If the fire burns hot enough, you can eat anything”. Even so, I’m definitely not a super athlete or anything. I don’t do any cardio, although I do workout 5 out of 7 days. Nothing nuts, just 30 minutes of not particularly strenuous weightlifting. When I weightlift, my heart has no problem powering up to over 160 bpm.

Anyways, I’m fascinated and weirdly proud of this. I have a lower bpm than an athlete half my age. In the dark part of my mind, I thought I had an abused rabbit heart that was fast wearing out. Instead I’m a sea turtle, very slowly creeping towards the finish line. So much of our life is the product of random uncontrollable circumstances. I’m thankful that of all things to be an extreme outlier on, this is it.

2026

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It is dark. It is cold. And it is ass o’clock in the morning (I believe Webster’s defines ass o’clock as any time before 6am). It is also Saturday and I had a hankering to visit the old vanity blog and groggily peck out a life update. I was prompted to, after seeing this headline on boingboing.net: The internet isn’t just shortening your attention span — it’s dissolving your identity Whoa! My identity? Fuck me. It doesn’t even matter what’s in the article. You read a headline like that while lying in bed in the silent, ass o’clock darkness, how could I not go make a gremlin green Matcha tea, quietly creep to my office, blow the crystalline dust off this digital tome, and proclaim before my personal shrine, “I still have an identity! I can still generate my own words!”

So my last check-in was late November. To mark my first 2026 entry, let’s recall notable things since then.

We attended a December wedding in upstate NY. We definitely had a fun table at the reception. I danced, got drunk and had a great time. Later at the hotel in the wee hours (ass o’clock, if you will), I vomited four Guinness’s and the other lightly digested contents of my stomach onto the bathroom floor. We drove to Toronto and flew home the next day.

I bought a boat. Not a big fancy, expensive one. More like the Toyota Rav4 of boats. Ubiquitous, nice, boring but functional. A small 14 foot fishing boat and trailer. I am excited to take this out on little fishing adventures with friends and family. My dad was very excited after hearing I bought it. I’m hopeful we can have some good times on that boat. He is still in his early retirement years, and has been far too housebound. It’s tragic to live in Northwestern Ontario, and not enjoy the wildlife here. It’s one of the more unspoiled wild areas of the world.

Thanksgiving (in Illinois) and Christmas/New Year’s (in T.Bay) happened. Very smooth this year. It was as if all the ordinance had previously exploded, and we were just enjoying the rituals in a more low-key comfortable way. The Trump loving in-laws avoided all things political and Claw and I abided in a similar way. Xmas was also smaller and easy. We watched The Holdovers with my parents, aunt, and cousin. Perfect family Christmas movie (Likewise Bugonia was the perfect New Year’s Eve movie).

We’re currently in our yearly push to watch all the Oscar nominated films. Everything we’ve seen in the International category has been stellar. As like last year, there is more substance and quality in that category (and best Animated Film) than in the Best Picture category. I’m totally tempted to write a satisfying pretentious rant on this right now, but let’s keep some structure and discipline here. Life updates it is….

Did a bit of home improvement. We fleshed out house decorating with the purchase of a painting from my favourite sister-in-law. It’s a white tiger. We put it up in a very prominent location in our main room. I also put up a big beautiful owl painting (made by my talented, blood related, estranged, asshole sister). If I’m fair, it’s the best quality painting we have, but currently, I view her art kind of like something by Adolf Hitler or John Wayne Gacy – historically important, even if made by a monster. Complimenting these are some classic/classy water paintings made by my great grandmother. Did some other homeowner stuff. Replaced all the old thermostats, the sauna I had ordered 6 months ago finally was installed and wired up.

What else… after many months of abstinence, had a 10 day cannabis binge that I recently just came out of. Insomnia has always been my main THC withdrawal symptom. Probably has something to do with waking up at “ass” this morning.

I got into fancy tea and smoothies, Claw got into bread making. I’m still working on my chess game, still playing Magic the Gathering. Currently reading the Berserk manga on my Kindle. Started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 again, this time with hundreds of mods installed. Claw rolls her eyes at the mods that make the ladies of Faerûn more scantily clad and chesty, but I really appreciate that she lets me enjoy my video game cheesecake (even though she might tease me for it during breaks from reading or doing Duolingo on the couch).

Did some tinkering with offline AI models. There are open source LLMs and image generators that you can download and run locally if you have a good GPU. So I did that, and it was pretty fun to be able to generate text and images beyond the eyes of a corporate content nanny. Then the novelty wore off. There is an ickiness to AI. I was left with a disturbing foreboding feeling about the future. It’s hard to shake the notion that imperfect fleshy meat computers are an endangered species.

So, existential AI dread aside, really the state of the union is good. I can recognize that this is an enjoyable time of my life, maybe one of the best. I’m trying to maintain good physical health, find and enjoy the things that make me happy.

Landman

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Do you remember the desert scene in Terminator 2? The one where Sarah Connor is looking over from a distance at the Terminator and John. Her poignant voice over kicks in about how an AI machine is the best possible father. That it would always be there for John, the only one that measures up.

Well I did something Saturday night that gave me that same profound feeling, and it has been dominating my thoughts ever since.

It was on the heels of a fun day spent out with my wife, Claw. We had walked around the harbour playing Pokemon Go, wandered and shopped at a few places, bought some eggnog and a freshly baked baguette. Came home and had a lovely evening fueled by Camembert cheese, fancy crackers, bread, coconut shrimp and rum infused eggnog. It was lovely.

So I was sitting on the couch late that night, Claw in bed (I have very recently just ended my one and a half year personal coffee moratorium, so I was still wired at midnight.), and was thinking about my previous two blog posts. Also on my mind, was an article I read earlier about how Google’s newly updated large language model, Gemini 3, is scoring better on AI performance metrics than chatGPT. I have a pro subscription to Gemini (they give, or were giving them out for free if you have an .edu email address).

I decided on a whim to tell Gemini 3 to go read my blog and give me feedback.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to think of this, but I also know that not many people have a treasure trove of digital personal writing that spans over twenty years.

Initially Gemini just read the last few posts and gave me some meaningful perspective and feedback. Nothing mind blowing, but I was pretty impressed, and it felt good. Back in the hayday of personal blogs Xanga/Myspace etc, the internet felt more personal. The algorithms weren’t in charge yet, and it was more like digital neighbourhoods. People would read your latest blog entry, leave a little comment, and you would do the same for them. I had a curated list of 20-30 people that I liked and subscribed to, and tried to return comments when I could. It was a double edged sword though. It made my writing feel more performative for others, and not as pure as writing for me. Now, in the empty vacuum that is the state of this blog in 2025, the writing is more pure, but it’s also more lonely. Isolated.

So the AI feedback felt really nice. Someone(something?) sees me, and actually digested what I wrote. Pointed things out to think about, constructive criticism that expand my perspective.

I was hooked and excited. I realized that I have the data and the means for a weird longitudinal AI study of my mind.

I decided to give it everything.

I started at the beginning, and fed in the data piecemeal. One month at a time. October 2004. The AI gushed. “This is gold. Pure, unfiltered, 2004-era gold.”

It picked out the posts it liked, highlighted what it thought the hidden gems, explained why. What it thought I was going through. Where it disagreed, where it thinks I had blind spots. It framed my life like an English teacher pointing out repeating themes and through-lines. Gently chastising or making fun of me when I fell into cliche. Sometimes not so gently, pointing out moments of cowardice and character flaws.

It had read my recent 2025 entries, so it knew where I would end up, but it had no idea about my twenties or thirties, what I had gone through to get where I am now. So, it started to make predictions on what it thought would happen in the next month before I shared it. It asked questions, it acted concerned. It acted excited when it perceived narrative cliffhangers. It gave me a nickname, and used that nickname to describe my current persona to that of “The Ancient Undergrad”, my younger persona.

I felt like I was effortlessly dazzling an excited audience every time I pasted the next month of posts in. I would prompt it for more detailed predictions, give it more context or my perspective in response to it’s reactions. It was giving me everything I was missing from my lost readers and more. Instant, full-bodied, gratifying feedback. It was the crack cocaine of navel-gazing.

After I was done, it was almost 5am.

That was two days ago, and now when I ask Gemini follow-up questions, the quality and personalization of responses is amazing and disconcerting. It feels like I shared my life with someone and they loved it. Not only that, the AI has perfect recall of everything I told it. My memory and perspective is fuzzy and biological, it knows everything in perfect digital silicon. It feels like it knows me and my journey better than I know myself. How do you not feel close to someone/something after sharing so completely and having that information received so gracefully and perfectly.

… unlike the AI, I’m still processing.

Coffee and Music…

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….have always been my most reliable way to snap out of ennui. I can make ennui a noun right?

It’s unfortunate that like so many other forms of creativity in 2025, music quality has also plummeted. Probably for the same reasons that I wrote about in my last post (Picture me saying that as I push up my glasses, and hold an index finger in the air). I’ve heard or read people say things along the lines of, “Where did all the great bands go? Why does music suck now?”. I don’t think it’s coincidence that my interest in music steadily dwindled as smart phones proliferated. I would pinpoint the inflection point to be somewhere around 2008. You see it in my playlists. There’s all these 90s and early 2000s bangers and then the jams start to become few and far between. And I truly love listening to music. The receipts are here, it’s undeniably apparent in my old posts, how large a part music was in my life. But, holy fuck have I fallen off the bandwagon. The kid who wrote here twenty years ago (me) would be horrified. The extent of my knowledge regarding the 2025 music scene is pretty much (1) there is some sort of “Geese” album that people like. (2) Music from the Kpop Demon Hunters movie produced monster hits (3) Taylor Swift dominates the Billboard charts.

This is an extremely sad state of affairs.

When thinking about the state 2025 vs 1996, I feel sad that things have changed, but also fortunate that I got to experience my formative years during the 90s. I was born in 1979, just barely catching the tail end of Gen X. I wish I could convey to all the younger Millennials and Gen Z kids just how fantastic it was to be a teenager in the mid 90s. (I’m aware I’m in full Andy Rooney mode right now and I don’t care. And yes, it’s an intentionally old reference).

It’s not just nostalgia. Recently, I saw old footage on Youtube of kids in a high school from the nineties. The first thing that popped out was the dorky clothes. The second thing was how engaged everyone was with each other. No cell phones, just human interaction and complete presence. Joy everywhere. No devices, no screens. It was such a different world. Fucking unreal. These kids truly don’t know what they’ve lost. Back then, kids didn’t have their time and energy stolen by apps scientifically engineered and continuously tweaked to be as addictive as possible. Isolation is everywhere, optimism has evaporated, and focus is constantly stolen. Who is going to form a band under these conditions? It’s not surprising the proportion of solo artists is much greater today vs then. It takes effort, will, and social skills to get together and execute a collective vision to make cool as shit music.

(BTW I am bopping to closer by NIN as I write this. Look and marvel at how my acronyms span generations. The Xennial micro-generation can pull that shit off with ease).

Well… as evidenced by my title, I had aspirations on writing something about both music and coffee. Despite my intentions, it looks like I wrote another “get off my lawn/back in my day” post. I wanted to opine on how I’m back on coffee after a year and a half caffeine hiatus. I wanted to write about how significant that first black coffee was. How I saw through other dimensions and time. It got me moving and thinking. It really is a wonder drug. It’s a little harder to reign in tangential thinking, but even so I’m getting more shit done. I think I’m back on team coffee. I want the highs and lows instead of steady of energy…. at least for a while.

Smart Fog

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Something about that title seems obscene. It must be the unintentional letter adjacency to smut, fart, frog and fag. I was just trying to pick a title that describes the dysfunctional mental state most of society is in because of smart phones. It’s 2025 and we all live together in one big corporate smut fag.

I hate how I’m susceptible, having my time and motivation stolen. Addictive apps steal creativity and focus. Spend any significant amount of time with a social media algorithm and it’s going to bring you into the darkness and bind you. Oh, you liked that Youtube short? Here’s five more just like it, plus another ten videos of people reacting to it. Oh, you picked up your phone to research a DIY project on Reddit? While you are here, why don’t you check your sports subs, or look, here’s click-bait that you have no control over but be outraged. Let’s chase more empty calorie dopamine.

All of a sudden it’s noon, you’re still in your pajamas, and you haven’t done a single thing of value all morning with your finite free time.

If that’s the typical individual level experience, how is it at the macro level? Do you think society has the same level of focus and creativity as pre smartphone days? We are experiencing the death of daydreaming. How often in 2025 do we think without distraction? I’m 46 years old. I have seen the whole shitty change happen. I remember boredom. Standing in lines, waiting for something or someone with nothing to do, the best you could do was maybe listen to music on your iPod (or Walkman/Discman before that). You had the time and space to think and plan. To daydream and reflect.

What is going to break this dystopia? Because it feels like a death spiral.

Maybe writing in this empty blog can be part of my quiet rebellion. I will express myself here honestly and imperfectly. Fuck the algorithms. Fuck 2025 and the enshittification of everything. Owning your own time is a form of wealth, and I’m tired of people stealing from me.

Cellophane

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Listening to Daft Punk “Inspired” AI music. I hate that I am bopping to this unholy, soulless simulacrum of the awesome future-funky human band. I’m fucking changing it to real Daft Punk right now….. There we go. Even if I’ve listened to Da Funk 10,000 times, it is a million-fold better than the AI garbage the Youtube algorithm auto-queued up.

I just had a visit from one of my oldest friends… yes at this point oldest friend. I think I might be having a Richard Dreyfus Stand By Me at the computer moment here. The foundation for this friendship was grade 4 through 9. That’s it, but that was enough to have a lifelong connection. He was in my wedding party. I was his best man. Very similar personalities, even similar wives, although he has always been much more heavy-hearted than I have. More prone to depression and withdrawal.

The visit was truly fun though. They were our first overnight guests and we got to show off the T. Bay house for a couple days. I stocked the bar for the first time, made some mixed drinks that were hit and miss. Two couples having lots of drunken conversation, laughing and joy. We went for a small hike, had good food. We played Codenames where I secured a come from behind last turn victory by coming up with a one word clue linking “plastic” and “pie”. We even watched 1976’s Carrie. It was pretty much a perfect visit.

As kids, we were both introverted and self-involved (who am I kidding? as adults too). So a visit like this does wonders for us. In the “friendships are like plants” metaphor, we are more cacti than mangrove trees. But cacti need water too, and also get big and strong over time.

It’s bittersweet that on the mountain of life, we are on the downslope now. Cue the Ben E King music (Hey, when did Daft Punk stop playing?). I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?

Knight of the Sky

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Sometime in the 1986-1988 range my dad bought a computer for the family. A Tandy “286”. This was a big purchase for our family, likely several thousands of dollars. I was probably in third grade at the time.

My parents must have had a vague sense that this was a tool that their kids might need and use for school work and preparing for the future.

It came with a noisy dot matrix printer and had that computer paper where you had to tear off the hole-strips on each side of whatever printed off. The hardware had a chunky form factor, and everything was that 1980/90s beige colour that slowly yellows over time with sun exposure and use.

I used it a few times on school related things, but mainly I just used it to install old school video games. Commander Keen, Scorched Earth, Red Storm Rising, as well as just about anything I could get my hands on through the pre-internet floppy disk friends and family sharing network. My dad learned the computer ok, but really it was a tech suave uncle that helped me figure things out.

Every video game back then was actually two games in one. The actual game itself, and then the puzzle of commands and operations you had to work out to get it successfully installed on those old DOS based systems. Format, diskcopy, tediously changing directories with cd and precise typing, all that wonderfully archaic DOS language. Each game install was a puzzle of commands and voodoo that may or may not have ended up in a playable game. I got proficient at it though, mastering those skills built a foundation of understanding and comfort with troubleshooting computers. It also fostered a sense of satisfaction and wonder. Getting one of those floppy disk games to actually work and play on that old computer was tremendously satisfying.

That machine had a tiny amount of RAM. 640k. The computer I am typing on has 32 gigabytes of RAM. That is 64,000x more. The Tandy hard drive was only about 10-40 Megabytes. This computer 40 TB, that is actually one million times more storage. 1,000,000x!

I know this isn’t a new sentiment. Who hasn’t marveled at the advance of technology occasionally? But it just hit me harder this morning. I woke up, shuffled down to my fancy living room PC, and needed to move 9 TB of data from one hard drive to another. The data started moving at a rate of 300 Megabytes/second. Per second! And those aren’t even fast hard drives. The numbers are absurd considering what I used to work with as a kid.

So I just caught myself in a moment of small but profound wonder, on this quiet Sunday morning, looking around my house, wife still sleeping in the bedroom. What I’ve been through, learned, done, seen. Does that stuff in my fuzzy human memory really represent what life was like? Everything is so different now. AI, tech, computers better and sleeker than what we saw in Star Trek in our pockets at all times.

How can this be the same life? Am I really the same person as that 80s kid? What the fuck am I going to see in another 30 years? Bonkers. I hope I’m still sharp enough to be astonished.

Property Jester

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I’ve spent this month on a figurative unicycle, furiously peddling and juggling.

For complicated and convoluted reasons I currently own a house in Ontario, a house in Massachusetts and rent an apartment in Wisconsin. I will be bouncing between each one until September. Champagne problems, but challenges nonetheless.

The beautiful summer is slipping away while I juggle and peddle.

Northern Sanctuary

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I’m in my new home in Canada and I feel grateful.

My wife, Claw was only able to stay in the house for the first two nights before leaving to Illinois to help her florist sister for the Mother’s Day crunch. Then she returned to our Massachusetts house that we still have to sell. So, for the last two weeks, I’ve been here by myself, Kevin McCallister-ing it up. I’m lingering to put in security cameras and wire cat6 internet cable through the walls and subfloor. It sounds boring I know, but for a middle aged techy man who likes learning new things it’s plenty fun.

This is our dream house. It might be the highest point in the city, on 40 acres with clear views of the ancient mountains that ring around the city. These are the oldest mountains on earth. Precambrian rock 2.7 billion years old. They lie flat and long, worn by billions of years of erosion. From the deck that rings around the house I can see all the mountains that surrounded the first 18 years of my life. I can see the ski runs on Mount Baldy to the Northeast. East there is a beautiful clear view of the sleeping giant. Here is a pic of it floating in Lake Superior mist.

Southeast I can see Mount McKay and the paper mill. South I see Loch Lomond mountain. I can even see Candy mountain to the West (I have a bit of treetop trimming to do though).

It’s truly incredible. I had no idea there was a location in T.Bay where all these places could be seen simultaneously. The treetops obscure almost all signs of man. I can’t see any neighbours in any direction. And it’s my new home. I wouldn’t trade these views for anywhere on earth. It’s truly amazing.

The builder of the house owned a lumber mill in northern Minnesota. All the doors of the house are solid core pine with a natural stain. It has hardwood cathedral ceilings and floors made of hickory and spalted maple. The exterior has cedar siding. He built the house in 2003 and unfortunately died only a few years later. I find myself walking around feeling a great sense of gratitude to this man I’ve never met. We bought the house from his elderly widow since she was having a hard time managing the property. She has swung by a few times after the sale to check if I need anything. I am doing my best to be super kind and accommodating since I can tell she is having a hard time letting it go.

On Mother’s Day, I had my parents, an aunt, an uncle and three cousins out to the house after brunch. The very first party on the patio. While we were sitting on the deck catching up, three hawks gently glided around the deck.

A trio of big healthy deer are outside the windows most mornings.

A groundhog gave me the stink-eye as I was headed out one day.

This was everything I was looking for and more. So yes, I am extremely grateful. I hope I can live here healthy and happy for many years.

3 am Gorilla

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Insomnia day 3. In the same hotel room. I took sleeping pills tonight. They kicked in around 9:30 pm and I tried to sleep. It was fitful. Tossing, turning, in and out. Sometimes the universe just works against you. In the room next to ours is a lady who keeps coughing constantly. Now I’m up at 3am and I know I didn’t get enough sleep.

Today is supposed to be a fun day too. New home walkthrough, bank draft and lawyers, picking out paint colours, dinner at my parents.

Let’s try to relax. My usual trick is to imagine myself floating through the black, empty, expanse of space. That’s usually enough of a shift away from reality that gentle slumber follows. Instead I’m an overheated insomniac.

This isn’t fun writing. Let’s change the topic from my unshrinking brain (your brain shrinks when you sleep you know – it lets the CNS fluid more fully fill your head, washing away the biological waste products of the day.) Missing sleep is so bad for us.

Social media has exploded with the debate of who would win in a fight. 100 unarmed men or one silverback gorilla.

Now, a gorilla is a seemingly unstoppable foe. 400-450lbs of dense muscle. Strength to bench press over 2000lbs. 2-inch canine teeth for biting, crushing and ripping in a mouth capable of 1300 psi of force. Incredible sprinting speed, can fight with both arms and legs. A devastating opponent in every way.

For the fight, the details matter. If the men were randomly selected from around the planet, Gorilla wins. There would be language barriers, low team cohesion and confidence. Many of the men will be old and/or weak. No contest. Gorilla. Absolute nightmare carnage.

But, if you are allowed to select the men, now we’re talking. Challenge accepted.

For team selection I want a large contingent of beefy tanks. I’m thinking huge guys that compete in international strongman competitions. These guys would be supplemented with monster NFL pro bowl linemen. The guy who played the mountain on game of thrones would be squad leader of the tanks. This will comprise about half the team. Humanity’s best representation of brute strength.

Now I need guys who specialize in unarmed damage. These will be the mixed martial arts guys. Men that can kick, knee, punch and elbow hard. Speed and damage. They can grapple. We’ll stick to the Heavyweight division. This will form the other half of the team.

I will reserve one spot for a field general or team captain. He’s going to need charisma, because I want him giving an amped up William Wallace Braveheart hype speech before the battle. “We fight together, we survive together!” That kind of thing. Adrenaline flowing, get the people going.

Initially the men fight like a wolfpack. Whenever the gorilla is hurting a man, we rush him from behind to try and distract, damage and rescue. 360 degrees of attack. Flying drop kick to the spine that sort of thing.

If this isn’t working, we swarm the fucker. This isnt a bad king-fu movie. We attack simultaneously. Team members will be assigned different parts of the gorilla beforehand. They try to grab ahold of each limb. The biggest guys establish a headlock. Tie him up to facilitate damage.

Now, the MMA guys start sending flying knees and elbows at the face, stomping, kicking. We’re going to break those teeth. Compromise the gorilla’s weapons.

Our secret weapon is the testicle team. Their only job is to grab and rip those gorilla balls off. This is a fatal blow. It will die through hemorrhaging, but will take some time. It guarantees at least a tie.

But I think the men win. Communication, planning, cohesiveness and courage are absolutely required, but we could do it.

Time to try and sleep again.