I was a really bad athlete when I was a kid. I'm still a very bad athlete. My body is bad at sports. That's the problem, and I say my body is bad at sports because my brain is good at sports. Like my brain understands how a human being could like, dribble down a basketball court, and then make a lay-up, right? But then it has to outsource the job to my weird and feminine limbs, and so when I play basketball, it looks like I just bought my body. Like I don't know how it works yet.

But I played basketball. I played basketball for five years, and I was a bench warmer all five years. I was, I was a bench warmer for all five years, and if you were never a bench warmer, I cannot express to you the humiliations of every Saturday morning, putting on a pair of break-away pants and never having a reason to break 'em away. Then they're just pants.

We would get in the game though, for like the last thirty seconds. They put you in the game for the last thirty seconds if we were winning. So, I got in the game once for the last thirty seconds. I had to go half of one minute without doing anything wrong, and I walk out on the court, and I get fouled. Right away, I get knocked to the ground. So this referee runs over to help me up, and he's like, "Hey, hey, hey. Don't you worry, son. We're gonna get you some free throws."
And I was like, "Oh, no no no no no no no no no no no. That will not be necessary. If you are looking to make this up to me, might I suggest a gift certificate of some kind?" Oh, and it was a, uh, it was a technical foul, so they cleared the court.
They were like, "Yeah, you go on out there solo, really explore the space with how much you suck at this game."

So if you were in the stands, you could watch me shoot free throws and you could watch my team watch me shoot free throws, and at that moment, my team's bench, it looked like some like, bizarre Last Supper painting? You know, where the people are just like, "Oh, he's not gonna shoot free throws is he? Oh this is a really bad idea."
And my coach in the middle just like, "What the hell have you sent me?"

I get up to the foul line, and I air-balled the first one, but, I did not air ball the second one, because, after you air-ball, the goal no longer becomes to make a basket. It's just to hit some shit.
To show the people in the bleachers that you have a general sense of the game, so I hit some shit: bottom of the back board, to be precise, and that was my last year of basketball.

And at the end of the five years, we had this big like, sports awards ceremony. Where the woman, in charge of all the teams got up to give a speech, a very important speech, that I'll never forget. She got up there and she said uh, "You know, programs like the boys' basketball program are so important, because the alternative for young men could be using drugs or alcohol," and that was the first time that I ever heard that there was an alternative to basketball, and so I became the best at that.