Dead Horses Should Stay Dead

Update: MySpace still hasn't deleted my account. Tom must really want to keep his 535,987th friend around forever, in spite of my profile space resembling an abandoned storefront.

In an effort to break a mental sweat and fill the void of the missing Tuesday night Guitar Hero tournaments, I have taken up going to trivia nights at a bar downtown in order to nerd out and keep myself from becoming a sheep and taking Domino's up on their Two Times Tuesday offer. If I ever order pizza alone, I will eat all of it so that my heart will stop, and I will die. That is how it will go down.

Trivia is a strange beast indeed. Is it trivial to know trivia? Or is it trivial to be trivial about trivia? Who am I to judge? Trivia might be more important than a casual observation of it might suggest. Consider Jeopardy! Ken Jennings didn't exactly stack paper as an offensive lineman Seahawks; he was on the show seventy-five times. At sporting events, there is always some sort of trivia challenge and handsome reward that accompanies the nerd who knows the answer. Since alien technology brought us the television, there has been a bevy of game shows that involve knowledge that most of us wouldn't exactly consider "common." Yet, retaining such information can, on occasion, make you look like the world's best person. That's right, the best person in the entire world.

What happens, however, when you corral a sizable number of individuals into an establishment who have a history of self-aggrandizement and massive egos with faulty foundations? Which is to say, what happens when you have a trivia competition?

Each Tuesday night downtown, Blackfinn Restaurant and Quasi-Overrated Nightlife Hotspot holds a trivia event where smug Richmonders fake the funk and act like the cock of the walk when it comes to identifying celebrity mugshots and recognizing 50s pop hits. Now, I run hot and cold when it comes to competition. If I know I can emerge victorious, I transform into a mean-spirited, venomous creature who does not acknowledge failure as an option. However, if I know I haven't shit for a chance, I acquiesce to those competing who will surely smite me down with righteous indignation. Trivia night is one of those potentially victorious occasions.

I'm not the smartest person I know by any means, and have no way of quantifying intellectual capacity in any sort of scientifically sound manner. But if I'm in a trivia contest, I trust myself first and foremost, and pretty much no one else. Is this conceited? Yes. Am I being a dick about it? Yes. Will I change? Never. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that there are tons of people exactly like me, in the same room as me, on these trivia nights.

Easily the best and worst part of the evening involves me criticizing the competition to my teammates to the most petty of details. It is as if a fog washes over me and I morph into a beast who considered those on other teams to be the bane of my existence. But seriously, why not? It's a competition, and these people, one and all, are giant assholes. Giant, gaping, assholes. They name themselves such clever things as "No Pictures Please" and "The Artist Formerly Known As..." and "Soviet Masturbation" and "We Are Dominatrices" and on and on and on and kill me. Some groups are less smug and pretentious than others, but let's face it, folks: if I'm calling them smug and pretentious, they've got to be exactly those things.

We all sit crouched around answer sheets with ice in our veins and an unquenchable hatred in our eyes, as pens furiously scribble across paper to determine the proper Soviet premier for this or that multiple choice question. We ponder quizzically as the DJ plays song snippets in the identification portion, as if our thoughts might levitate towards the ceiling and form invisible air forces, battling it out above the din of the crowd and the haze of cigarette smoke. Through it all, I remain transfixed on the opposition, waiting for them to err and allowing my team to gallop forward.

Much to my chagrin, we never really do such things. Certain teams pack considerable heat and leave us in the dust week in and week out. Perhaps this only fuels my relentless desire to eviscerate the competition and claim myself to be the top nerd. Is this trivia or American Gladiators (thank you, networks, for allowing the writers' strike to result in the defibrillator working on this dead horse of a physical game show and bringing it back to air in place of legitimate television)? Maybe my dislike of the competition is actually the way I manifest self-loathing, and this has become too psychoanalytical for my tastes, so let's recede a bit and use words like poop to lighten the mood.

Hope, as they say, springs eternal, and pending the rapture, there's always next week. At least I know what Nick Nolte looks like in his mug shot.