Ziggin' and Zaggin' with the Heart of a Lion: Local MMA Fighter Prepared to Win Match July 12

Ziggin' and Zaggin' with the Heart of a Lion: 

Local MMA Fighter Prepared to Win Match July 12

by Rebecca L. Ferraro

Zach "Zig Zag" Forrester

On Steubenville Pike, bordering the line between Oakdale and Imperial, is a little MMA apparel store attached to the Fort Pitt Bar called Out of the Cage. The store, which doubles as an MMA gym, is where Zach “Zig Zag” Forrester has been training for his upcoming fight on July 12, 2014.

           On June 29, a mere two weeks before his eleventh combat competition, Zach, 26, an Imperial native, practices sparring with John Miller, Bobby “The Bug” Mader, and Out of the Cage owner and coach Drew Lyscik. Zach leaps and dances around the red gym mats, bobbing and weaving with his brother and sparring partner John Miller, 25, before giving him a taunting smile. Zach is constantly in motion, moving his feet in maze-like patterns that make it evident where the nickname “Zig Zag” comes from.

“It’s about speed, the way I move,” he grins. “I bounce around like a rabbit, I don’t know if you noticed.”

            Zach, Bobby, John, and Drew trade off between sparring and grappling with each other on the mat or sitting on the sidelines coaching. While actual fights have 3 three-minute rounds, these practice rounds run at five minutes to build endurance.

            Zach is playful in spite of the 89 degree gym and the four thermal shirts he’s wearing to shed any excess water weight. He’s turning cartwheels and somersaults in between sparring, and manages to stay humble and good-natured to the compliments and teasing that his fellow fighters pepper him with alternately.

“Hey, make sure you write down that his nose is easy to hit!” Bobby yells, turning his face away from Zach for a moment—just long enough for Zach to leap on Bobby as lithe as a spider monkey. Drew reminds Zach that nobody fights quite like Bobby, and that coupled with the extreme size advantage Bobby has will culminate in Zach being a better, more prepared fighter.

From left to right: Bobby Mader, Zach Forrester, Drew Lyscik, and John Miller. 

Drew, with his signature seriousness and crossed arms, shares his confidence in Zach’s ability to win the upcoming fight.

         “I have never trained nor trained with anyone who puts in more effort than Zach. He is definitely one of the toughest up and coming fighters in the city,” he said.

Zach’s been into fighting since the first UFC fight he saw piqued his interest and continued to watch them into adulthood.

“Aw man, it was way back in the day, Don Frye versus the Shamrock. Don Frye used to just go out and swing like crazy and knock people out. He wasn’t afraid and just went brawling,” he said.

After that, he spent a good portion of his childhood watching the fights and was really influenced by Jens Pulver, primarily because of the obstacles he overcame to be a fighter. Pulver had a childhood that he referred to as a living hell, primarily because of his abusive alcoholic father. The underdog story hit home with Zach, who admitted that his home life growing up wasn’t always the greatest, but adds that he and his family counted on their grandmother to brighten things up. “Being there [at her house] just made things better,” he says, his brown eyes completely sincere.

 In spite of growing up watching MMA fights, it wasn’t something Zach considered doing until Bobby encouraged him to join. Bobby, John, and Zach have been close since childhood and that’s how, in 2011, Zach found himself training as a fighter, initially just to lose weight. However, at the beginning of this year, Zach saw Drew setting up Out of the Cage and learned that it was going to be a store and a gym. “I’ll be back when you open,” he had said to Drew, and he was. Now he’s down 30 pounds to 145, and will be fighting in the Bantamweight category at 5’7”, 135 pounds.

Zach grappling with Bobby at Out of the Cage

Since he’s been at Out of the Cage, he admits that while the hardest part is making sure that he comes in every Sunday through Thursday for two hours, he’s having a positive experience training there.

“It builds confidence and it’s a good get-away. Say you’re having a bad day. You leave here smiling,” Zach says. “There are good people to help you out and believe in you. It’s always nice to have someone like that on your side. Ain’t nothing like sparring with your brothers, and I got three brothers—Bobby, Allen [Bennett], and John,” he added, referring to his brother and two fighters from OTC.

In addition to a rigorous training regime including wrestling, boxing, jiu-jitsu, muay Thai, and cardio, he has been focused on eating healthy-- primarily berries, chicken breast, and lots of vegetables.

          “I’m eating healthy but when I’m not training, it’s milk and cookies all night every night. Put this down—oh my God, Oreos, chocolate chips, Nutter Butters…the peanut butter ones are my favorite!” He looks off just enough to make it apparent he’s dreaming of peanut butter cookies, then shifts his weight and gets serious.

 “I feel better than I have in a long time,” he shares. “I feel confident, not cocky, and I’ve been training harder than I ever have.” 

Bobby, Zach, Drew, and John at Out of the Cage

Zach acknowledges his opponent Cortland Woodard as a “tough kid” from the Pittsburgh Fight Club. He’s looking forward to walking out to greet his adversary to the bass-heavy Queen classic “Another One Bites the Dust” decked out in red, white, and black DuoMachy Fight Gear emblazoned with Out of the Cage and Kick ‘n’ Butts Vape Pals, his sponsors. Most likely, he’ll be sporting a red Mohawk to match his gear, similar to that of his favorite fighter Dan Hardy.

“I feel like it makes me a little tougher,” he laughs unpretentiously. “You look good, you feel good, you do good.” He adds that he is a man with the heart of a lion, completely fearless in the ring.

When asked what his best move is, Zach contemplates for a moment and then smiles sheepishly, unable to determine just one.

“I’d say my best move is my jab, left hook, or spinning heel kick."

His what?

 “Spinning heel kick. I can kick a dime in mid-air. Probably need about three tries.”

            He proceeded to demonstrate this, successfully, in three tries.

Zach and Bobby grappling at OTC

His ultimate goal as a fighter is to fight at Bellator (an MMA competition founded in 2008), something he feels “would be awesome.” Although he is a promising young fighter now, Zach already has plans for the future, when his fighting days are over. He plans to open up his own gym and wants to coach, especially kids.

His advice to any aspiring fighters? For this, he doesn’t miss a beat.

“Listen to your coach, train hard, and show up to the gym,” Zach says, smiling widely.

Tickets for Zach’s fight are available at Out of the Cage (7780 Steubenville Pike) for $40 each. The fight takes place on July 12, 2014, at 7:00pm at the South Pointe Iceoplex in Canonsburg. 

 

Taking Off

(Editor's note: I wrote this about 9 days ago on my flight out to Ireland. I'm posting it now because it's my blog and not yours and I make the rules and you should just shut up. There'll be something else coming later this week)

The first thought I had taking off was, “Wow, I haven’t been on a plane in a while.”

The second, somewhat more morbid thought, was, “Wow, we could all crash into the ocean and die. Oh shit.”

The third was, “How am I gonna sleep now?”

Welcome to my brain for the first twenty minutes of our flight to Ireland.

My brother is studying abroad in Norwich, England, and my mother used this as a good excuse to finally take a family vacation to Europe. It was me, my mother and grandmother, all crammed into coach on my first ever cross-continental flight.

I’ve never been to Europe. Never been outside North America, either. Hell, aside from a two-day portion of a family road trip that took us to Canada’s side of Niagra Falls when I was 12, I have yet to set foot outside the land of the free and the home of the 70-ounce slurpee. My exposure to foreign culture essentially boils down to the “Foods of the World” part of Epcot and the part of the South Park movie where Cartman sings about Kyle’s mom in different languages.

I had a couple chances. In high school, I was slated to travel to Germany for American Music Abroad with the school symphonic band (TUBAS ON TOUR, BITCH). But the fund my mom and I had to get me there instead went towards the repair of my mother’s friend’s new car, which I smacked into while whipping out of my parking spot on the way to a basketball game. I also had a chance to study aboard in Ireland my final semester of college, but passed so I could be the sports editor of my college newspaper instead. I figured this would be a better choice in my pursuit of a journalism career and would aid me in my job search after college. As you may know, that’s going pretty well so far.

 So when my mom suggested we visit my brother, I decided I couldn’t push it off any more. Everyone who has more maturity and life experience keeps telling me to travel while I’m young, because it only gets more difficult and more expensive. Therefore, before I decide to settle down, start a family, and breed a dozen children like a good Catholic, I had to go.

I’m not afraid of flying. I’ve been on short flights between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and longer flights from Atlanta to Vegas. The mere act of going through security, boarding the giant, metal bird and watching us rise off the ground from a window seat usually doesn’t bother me.

But for some reason, I got spooked this time. Maybe it was because it’s been a few years since I’ve had to fly. I travel by car most of the time now. Renting a car and driving where I need to go is usually the same price or cheaper than taking the skies, and it gives me more freedom when I get to my destination. My friends don’t have to taxi me around, and I’m not a slave to public transportation, which I find to be unreliable, uncomfortable, and usually far more expensive than something unreliable and uncomfortable should be. (Otherwise, I have no thoughts on public transportation)

Maybe it was the delay. One of the runways was closed for construction, so our takeoff time was pushed back about an hour and a half, enough time for me to watch nearly three-quarters of the movie “In a World…” from my seat. Enough time to realize how fucking spoiled rotten I am to be watching a move in an airplane while I also have a laptop, iPod and books with me to keep me entertained. This is why the terrorists hate us.

But I’m going with the third option – we’re flying over an ocean holy crap oh my God.

Subliminally, the missing Malaysian Airlines flight and the images of Captain Sullenberger’s downed aircraft could have been tugging at my psyche, but even still, there’s something downright eerie about flying over the ocean at night. Where do we land in case of an emergency? Are we gonna have time to whip around and hit the Caribbean or Greenland or Iceland or an aircraft carrier the back of a whale or something? What if Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is our captain? Has he learned since last time?

At moments like this, my mind doesn’t consider that transatlantic flights happen every day without a hitch, the same way my mind didn’t consider that thousands of people stand on the reinforced glass ledge out over the edge of the Willis Tower in Chicago the day I staggered out onto it, swearing like a sailor in fear around a couple dozen kids and their parents.

And I have to sleep now? With the time change, our flight’s going to land at 7 AM, at which point I need to be awake and relatively alert to help navigate to our inn. I have about three hours until then. At most, I’ll probably sleep for 45 minutes. I can’t sleep on planes or moving vehicles. I’ve tried several times. It doesn’t work. My back tightens and clenches like an angry man’s fist while sitting upright, and I can’t get comfortable enough, so my best bet is to at least get something productive done.

Of course, now I’m complaining about not being able to sleep on our state-of-the-art aircraft where I’m about to be offered dinner and a drink while watching “American Hustle” out of the corner of my eye and tapping away at my laptop. So it goes.

I saw a video recently of two elderly Dutch women flying for the first time in their lives. For one reason or another, they’d never had any reason to board a plane until a pair of online filmmakers taped them on a first-class flight to Madrid. The women marveled at the takeoff, the turbulence, and the amazing view. When they landed, one called her husband and began sobbing in joy as she recounted the experience.

That kind of amazement still exists. And it’s moments like that I try to remember when I get perturbed by minor inconveniences. Yeah, maybe I can’t sleep well, but I can’t sleep well on this enormous steel contraption that’s going to get me from the east coast of the United States to the west coast of Ireland in a hundredth of the time it took a few hundred years ago. And if I’m tired, it will be a minor hiccup on the trip of a lifetime.

I Don't Want to Change the World, I Don't Want the World to Change Me

“So, why are we here? What do you guys think?”

We were about an hour away from Delaware when my esteemed co-blogger, from her perch in the backseat, whipped out the unanswerable question that has flummoxed philosophers and potheads alike since the beginning of time. It was Monday night, and the three of us (me, Rebecca and my girlfriend Jenna) were over the 1500-mile mark near the conclusion of our five-day trek through New England.

In five days, we’d spent at least 25 hours in the car, sweeping through the Northeast in search of some deep story or coming-of-age tale, something that would fulfill every liberal arts major’s insatiable desire to write a Big Important Story that Has An Affecting Message, all while Seeing the World and Meeting People. It was frankly surprising it took until the final leg of our journey for our conversations to take a turn for the metaphysical.

Jenna and I were silent for a few seconds. I repeated the question, then the two of us made some cracks about how “lighthearted” and “frivolous” the question was, then we all chuckled, and then we set to work solving the world’s problems.

Our trip was hatched when Rebecca texted me a few months ago suggesting we go on a Bill Bryson-esque trip through New England. We talked about it a little more, discussing how we drive around the woods and the harbors, sleep in our car, interview complete strangers about their life stories and write a book or an essay or a blog post or a This American Life segment. It was the quintessential “Stuff White People Like” entry.

I filed it away under “One of Those Plans You Talk About All the Time, But Never See to Fruition for Practicality’s Sake.” (My filing system sucks) After all, there was the time, and the money, and the method of transportation, and the company we’d keep, and the lodging (or lack thereof), and the fact that, let’s be honest, talking to random strangers sucks.

Hey, you! Sorry to bother you and keep you from doing your job or getting to where you’re trying to go. You’ve never met me and have no possible reason to trust me. Can you please speak into this iPhone for three minutes while I ask you intensely personal questions and write down your every word? Did I mention we don’t know what we’re going to use this for and it has just as much a chance of winding up in an actual publication as I do of owning a Rolls-Royce ever? Hello? Hey, where’re you going?...

A long, brutal winter will set your imagination running, though, and in the midst of a half-dozen snowstorms that kept me bottled up inside for even more of the season than usual, I needed something to look forward to. I started plotting out some cities and sites on the map, one thing led to another, and long story short, I’m now the premier of Newfoundland as we prepare for unsanctioned naval combat with Greenland.

Ah wait…hold on, I’m mixing up my “memoir” notes and my “science fiction” notes. Give me a second. Okay, we’re good now.

I sent a planned route to Rebecca, who approved. I asked Jenna if she was interested in taking off of work to join two idealistic liberal arts students looking to play roving novelist for a few days (and see a few sights). She agreed. Finding a fourth person, preferably a dude, to come along for the trip, balance out the testosterone-to-estrogen ratio and keep Rebecca from a half-week-long stay in the Third Wheel Suite, proved fruitless, but we were already too deep in the process to turn back.

We planned copious amounts of sightseeing on our trip, from the 9/11 memorial to Yale’s campus, from the Athenaeum Library to the House of Seven Gables, from Boston Common to a storm-deluged wharf in Maine, from the Rockwell Museum to ESPN and the Basketball Hall of Fame. All the way, we read magazines, traded stories, listened to hours of music (my personal favorite was the streak of classic metal we hit as we drove through the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire), and consumed enough sodium to keep our bodies from producing it for months on end.

We employed a multitude of time-killing devices on our way, from games straight out of the family vacation playbook (pointing out every single Prius we saw on the road – had to have been at least a hundred) to the stuff of more stir-crazy individuals (saying the word “snacks” in a rising and falling voice mostly reserved for “ooohing” at a kindergartener’s macaroni diorama, and laughing like goddamn idiots every time we did). We chatted up tour guides and hotel employees and gas station attendants, including one particularly bubbly convenience store fellow in Maine who originally thought I said I was from New York ("I've got a cousin that lives out in Buffalo!"), then realized I'd said "Newark" instead ("Hey, my brother lives down there! Works in construction!").

The whole time, though, there was always the nagging voice in my head reminding me, “Hey, dumbass, get to work on this book or pamphlet or sonnet or whatever the hell it is.”

Some person in Salem loves her knick knacks...er, chotchkies...er...whatever they are

I’ve tried to illustrate many times before on this blog my desire to go back into writing or broadcasting, though a combination of my own life choices and job scarcity have held such desires at bay. This was my big chance. Maybe we’d meet some extraordinary street musician, or an old shop owner with stories as long as his beard, or a woman who treated her menial work like a daily challenge to improve the world. Maybe, in the process, we’d find some single, unifying theme tethering them all together, and maybe we’d learn a little bit about ourselves…and the world. (Pause here to look up at the sky wistfully and observe a shooting star)

In fact, we met each one of those people on our trip. We talked to each one. And we gleaned next to nothing from them.

Rebecca talked to a hotel breakfast server in Coventry named Rose about the happiest moment in her life; Rose responded with stories about nearly everything that ever happened to her ever. We tried to pry a story out of the aging owner of a going-out-of-business bookstore in Salem, who made it clear from the outset that the happiest moment of his life would be whenever the three of us would shut up, buy something (“75 percent off,” he’d advise each patron on their way through the door) and get the hell out of his store. We asked a rainbow-clad Boston Common street musician about his five-drum, dozen-whistle…thing on wheels that he played, but he seemed preoccupied by a few aspiring documentarians who apparently had the same idea we did, only they had cameras and a boom mic and we had an iPhone and a bag of souvenirs from Quincy Market.

Three strikes, you’re out. Thanks for playing. That doesn't event count the sole visible employee of a Salem "witch/wizard" souvenir shop who insisted that Salem was not, in fact, a "town," as I'd so erroneously considered it before - which I guess means that the handful of potted plants we have sitting on our kitchen windowsill constitutes a "garden," too.

This all could be viewed as a slight against the people we “interviewed,” but it truly isn’t. As my old journalism professor Dr. Dillon reminded us regularly, “Write the story you found, not the story you set out to write.” We simply set out with round holes and only found square pegs to put in them. 

Or, more likely, it may be interpreted as a slight against us. We set out with the intention to write another tome in the long line of travel memoirs and testimonials and instead put more effort into seeking out the world’s largest chocolate moose (no, that’s the right spelling, jerk), or places to use the bathroom.  Great enterprising journalism there, losers.

So, at least in my mind, we were returning to base camp with plenty of stories, but no story. Nothing I’d turn in to a publisher or editor with any intention of even an inch of their publication being devoted to it, at least.

Still, I felt fully accomplished, like I’d achieved some sort of secret goal.  I couldn’t quite articulate why, though, until the drive home. It started with some comment Jenna made about Chris Christie, and continued into a discussion ranging from student loans to Obamacare to the housing market.

Then, Rebecca’s voice abruptly replaced our political discussion with a more philosophical one.

“So, why are we here?”

Cue the pause. Cue the mood-lightening jokes and the chuckles. Cue the “deep” discussion.

We bounced ideas off each other for an hour trying to solve the question we, like most other humans, are woefully unqualified to answer (particularly given the amount of aspartame we…okay, I, had ingested in the past five days). I thought that people often see their purpose in life as some sort of massive undertaking, a macro objective that will somehow outlive their relatively small amount of time on earth, which isn’t right for everyone – at least not right away. I proposed we were all little specks, bouncing off all the other specks in life, and, depending on when or at what trajectory we hit each other, we sent each other spinning in some other direction, pinging our way to some cosmic finish line. Then I pantomimed smoking a joint, because I can't make any remotely serious point without making a dumb joke.

“Maybe everyone should be looking at things in more of a micro way,” Rebecca suggested. “Make the lives of their friends and family and loved ones better, make a difference that way.”

Then, I got it. I think we all got it.

When I was 20, I was sure I knew everything about life based on a few economics classes and the fact I could book a flight by myself without borrowing my mom’s credit card. At 24, I’ve never been more aware of how little I know. We may all have the potential to change the world, but we only elect one president every eight years, which doesn’t leave a whole lot of chances for everyone to get a turn. More than likely, most folks’ innate desire to make a lasting impact in the world is going to be somewhere in the realm of “home and school board member” or “guy responsible for bringing the doughnuts into the office on Fridays.” This isn’t demeaning, it’s simply realistic, and it’s not a bad thing.

There’s still some small chance I’ll solve world hunger or cure cancer or become Pope. I’m not ruling it out – I look good in white. For the time being, I’m happy to start with my little microsphere, by spending five days traveling the east coast with my girlfriend and one of my best friends, seeing some of the most notable landmarks and natural beauties with two people I love and growing closer together as a group each day – for reasons that range from deep to dumb (snaaAAAAAAcks). We chatted with a few strangers who weren't pleased to see us, but a few people, like Rose or the gas station store clerk, were. We may not have changed the world or inspired a generation, but we made our own little world, the little balls we bounced off of, a little bit happier.

I’ve got the rest of my life to figure out the “change the world” thing. At the very least, I can always just get a Prius.

A Leisurely Stroll Into the Past

*canned laugh track, "womp womp" horn go here*

In April, I’m taking a trip to Ireland and England to visit my brother, finally presenting me with an opportunity to use my passport. I got my passport about five years ago when my friend Logan and I were planning a trip to Canada that never came to be, and since then it’s gotten less foreign exposure then [FIND NAME OF BAND/MOVIE/BOOK THAT ISN’T POPULAR OUTSIDE OF UNITED STATES FOR JOKE – DON’T FORGET]

There are usually two categories that items you rarely use fall into. There are the things you never need but come across every single day to the point of annoyance, until the day you actually need said item, at which point it retreats to the deepest recesses of the space underneath your bed. Then, there are the items you never see, never use, and never give a single thought to. These items either find their way into a Goodwill bag without your knowledge or are consumed whole by termites. After five years, which included two more years of college and a handful of moves after that, my passport was dangerously close to falling into that second category.

Following weeks of searching my house and my grandmother’s house, I finally decided to give our basement another good once-over before I paid $60 for another copy of my passport. As it happened, there was a tied-up grocery bag in our basement holding several important documents (my social security card, my birth certificate, my Klub Kool-Aid membership card), including my passport. SUCCESS.

My attention turned to the mess that begat my predicament. In the year and a half since my roommates and I had moved in together, our basement had become a labyrinth of months-old junk mail, dust-coated furniture, tangled AC adapters, seldom-used sporting equipment and assorted personal memorabilia.

In searching my grandmother's basement for my passport, I'd come across a pseudo-collage (there's another word for it but I don't care) an old friend of mine had made me for my high school graduation, compiling photos of us on a piece of construction paper with the lyrics to the Friends theme song written in the middle. Basically, exactly the kind of gift high school kids make for each other, given how out of whack our time-to-money ratio is. Surely there were gems I’d neglected in our own pit of paraphernalia.

You can probably guess where this is going: Matt looks through some old stuff in his basement, unearths a few trinkets from his childhood, gets nostalgic, finds a gram of coke hidden in some couch cushions and spends the rest of the day doing lines and trying to have sex with the water heater.

Um...I mean, just those first three. Those three things only. Yeah. Them.

What follows is a list of some of the most notable things I found and some stories about them. For those of you concerned that a blog post centered on a bunch of old mementos that bear no emotional significance to anyone other than the blogger himself is trite and without much potential for entertainment, your concerns are 100 percent warranted. So let’s do this.

Forget Madden - THIS is the pinnacle of football simulation. "Foto Electric Football" is basically a large box with a light inside that illuminates a transparent screen at the top of the box. Each player reviews a selection of plays, illustrated with lines and dots on a piece of paper, and, when both players have picked their plays, lay them on top of each other on top of the lit screen to see what happened on the play. If the line showing the ballcarrier runs into a defender, that's where he's tackled.

If this sounds simplistic and hopelessly outdated, then GO TO HELL. This game is AWESOME. This used to belong to my uncle; eventually, my grandparents let me take it home one time when I was a kid and I never returned it. I am the Bill Walsh of Foto Electric Football and I will accept all challengers.

Guitar tabs - because reading music can go right to hell! This is a binder of tabs I had printed out for years ago, when the only songs I was interested in learning to play were either horrifically difficult ("Second Heartbeat" by Avenged Sevenfold) or simple to the point that I really could've learned to play it if I'd just listened to the song more than once (every single Bowling for Soup and Good Charlotte Song in here).

One of my late grandfather's many hobbies was woodworking. He had a small workshop in his basement where he would retreat many evenings to fashion pieces of novelty furniture and meticulously craft models. This often led to my irate grandfather kicking me out of the basement for trying to crush my own hand in a set of clamps, but sometimes, his passion for carpentry manifested itself in the form of gifts like these.

My brother and I received these boxes with our names on them as a Christmas gift when we were young, and they became storage units for knick knacks and trading cards. For a while, I was convinced my passport was in here until I remembered that I used my "Matt Box" exclusively for fun, random stuff, like...

...a souvenir baseball from a Reading Phillies game. The AA affiliate for the Phillies is now known as the "Reading Fightin Phils," which pulls me in two directions. On one hand, the cool train logo has been abandoned. On the other hand, OSTRICHES.

Another souvenir baseball. I believe I had this signed at an Orioles game years and years ago, but I could not for the life of me make out who the signature belonged to, so I'm just going to assume it's Frank Robinson. (It's definitely not Frank Robinson)

My grandfather also helped my brother and I make our Pinewood Derby cars for Cub Scouts. We used this same simple, aerodynamic design every year - by that, I mean my grandfather told me we should do it this way and I agreed so long as I got to paint it and put on all the decals. Ridiculed by one snot-nosed brat in our pack as "a wedge of sticky cheese," my cars nonetheless did well pretty much every year but never finished higher than third place. In short, my grandfather and I were the Andy Reid and Donovan McNabb, respectively, of Pinewood Derby racing.

There were also plenty of pictures, like me showing off some SICK KARATE MOVES in my Blue Ranger costume behind my neighbor's house...

...me in New York when the Mathcounts team visited the New York Stock Exchange, and me playing guitar in one of the music practice rooms at school. My friends and I referred to our weekly get-togethers as "Poker Nights," even though we never played poker, and thus one year, our friend Andrea took a bunch of our photos and framed them in those little poker hand frames as Christmas gifts. *turns on "Aww" sign for audience*

This was a gift from my friend Dave, currently a seminarian. You never know when you'll need a spritz of the holy stuff in the morning. Dave drew this from a spring someplace with some spiritual significance (maybe in Spain?), but since I can't recall the place exactly, I'm going to take a guess and say it came from Scottsdale, AZ.

Speaking of Dave...

In high school, Dave and our friend Ellyn formed the "Best Friends 4 Eva," a confederacy of unprecedented exclusivity (membership was limited to "Dave and Ellyn") that ruthlessly pursued their small set of objectives (come up with inside jokes, bag on our friend Jeremy, find new was to cut class, bag on Jeremy some more, etc.) At some point, the two decided it was time to expand and rushed me like a fraternity brother.

In many of the Hold Steady's songs, lyricist Craig Finn sings about n'er-do-wells doing nefarious deeds in the back half of the theater during matinees. Little did he know he was actually singing about the lives of the "Best Friends 4 Eva," who completed and signed the above contract (complete with Latin, which got smudged but appears to start with "Bring thee into the order by virtue of this") in the back row of a Regal Cinema theater on a Sunday afternoon.

My dad compiled this DVD of performances by my high school rock band Visibly Blind to remind me and my brother that even though we were terrible and woefully unfocused, at least every minute of it was recorded so we could never escape it. Even if you have no discernible musical ability, you and your friends should start a band. It's so much fun. We only learned a few songs and rarely practiced, and when we did practice, we mostly just ordered Chinese food and played video games. Nevertheless, we have at least a dozen stories of gigs and practices that we still recount to this day. And you never know when you could pull a "reunion tour" together. (It totally won't be weird if we try to play the local YMCA as a bunch of twenty-somethings, right?)

Our marching band went to Disney World during our senior year for a few parades , and we were scrambling for ways to keep ourselves occupied for the 24-hour bus ride. My friend Charlie suggested we all log 50 hours in a new game of Pokemon and then have a tournament on the trip. I bought a copy and Charlie supplied me with an extra Game Boy Color (yes, an extra Game Boy Color. As in, he had one just lying around and was like "Here! All yours!"), and it was on. While more responsible high schoolers in my position honed their college essays, I honed my team until the wee hours of the morning (and look where it got me today, kids!) and stomped everyone in the tournament.

When I found this, I had no choice but to replace the batteries and boot it up. The sound doesn't work unless you plug in headphones and the game freezes when you move the actual Game Boy too much in your hands, but otherwise, all works as it should. Naturally, I went and beat the Elite Four again once more for old time's sake. Suck it, ASSHAT!

GADGETS! I won the flip cam in a raffle a Society of Professional Journalists convention. One day prior, they had shown a video about how to use flip cameras and how useful they could be in the field. The elder statesmen of SPJ took notes diligently and expressed genuine fascination with the device, while the younger members...um...didn't. I spent the night mocking the video and the excruciating detail with which they explained concepts like "Don't jiggle the camera!" and "Turn it on before you use it!" The next day, I was "awarded" the camera. Karma is a bitch.

The second item is a slide clicker for Powerpoint presentations. I so thoroughly enjoyed using the economics department's clicker for my thesis defense that I asked for one for Christmas. It probably says something about the quality of my thesis that every other student assertively defended their research while I was going, "Look at this clicky thing! Guys...GUYS, are you watching this? Whoa!"

The two items on the right are voice recorders I used for recording lectures, interviews, and rounds of the Antiques Roadshow drinking game. (I actually found the copper one a few weeks ago, but just unearthed the black one today) For every five interviews and press conferences on the recorders, there's one two-hour sound clip of my two roommates and I drunkenly howling over elderly men and women having their furniture looked over by pretentious, middle-aged appraisers on public television. I regret nothing.

Press pass from the Atlantic 10 men's basketball tournament, proving that I was once a legitimate journalist, or at least someone who was capable of e-mailing a request to get my name on a laminated press pass. There are few things better than sitting courtside at a college basketball game, talking to players and writing about it...for your job.

Lastly...

BOOKS. Man, were there a lot of books. Among them were notables like:
-An Alice Cooper autobiography that also includes golf tips
-Two copies of the Bible
-A John Grisham novel NOT about corrupt Wall Street bankers or attorneys called "Playing for Pizza," about a former NFL quarterback who gets a job playing in Italy
-Several Nick Hornby books, because he's the man
-A big book of Rolling Stone interviews
-A John Lennon book with interviews from "his final days" (judging from the back cover, it looks like he spends the whole booking bashing everyone in the band except Ringo, so I'm pumped)
-The Daily Show "America" book

These came in an awesome box set designed like Zim's house, but it got wrecked at some point in transit during one of my moves. If you don't like this show, I am no longer interested in associating with you. "GIR! RIDE THE PIG!"

This is our last stop. Thank you for riding the Nostalgia Train. Please exit through the doors on your right and remember to take any belongings with you as you depart. We know you have many choices to travel down Memory Lane, and we're grateful you've chosen us today. Have a nice day.