I think it’s safe to say that most people want to have their name remembered long after they die a noble death, and in my case, sell their remains to the glue factory. I think the best way to have your name remembered with the immortals is to have a cool nickname. A lot of people have cool nicknames like “The Dominator,” “The Crushinator,” or “The Italian Stalionator,” but alas, not I – At least, not yet. Forty years from now when I’m old and semi-retired, operating a small chain of laundromats in Northern New Jersey, people will come by and whisper, “Look! Isn’t that Gabe ‘The Spanish Armada’ Worgaftik?” or, “Hey! Do you think that might be Gabe ‘The Tree King’ Worgaftik?” And I’ll look them right in the face with my dusty glass eye sparkling in the sunlight and tell them to wash some clothes or get the hell out of my laundromat. People from far and wide will come to see me as I sit in my trusty recliner, tell stories of my youth and sell hotdogs at outrageous prices. I can see it all now as they ask to hear about the time I simultaneously outbid P. Diddy for the New York Knicks and Jay-Z for the New Jersey Nets and then converted one into a hockey team and the other into the first ever US-based Canadian Football League Team, with myself taking the snaps from under center as the league’s first ever QB/Head Coach/GM/Owner combo. You might doubt me now, but years from now, people will be dying to know how Gabe ‘The Iron Stereo System’ Worgaftik single-handedly beat the unbeatable Olympic Chess team of the newly reformed Soviet Union. Nay sayers might call it hogwash, but far in the future, people will clamor to hear just once more about how Gabe ‘The Ice Queen’ Worgaftik destroyed a 20 foot tall homicidal robotic Al Gore, thus saving the Earth. In 20 years when the polar ice caps melt and the world is certainly doomed, people will tell their children of how Gabe ‘Mr. Universe Runner-up’ Worgaftik refroze those ice caps with his super-frost breath. On a related note, people will probably want to hear about how I obtained super-frost breath, but that’s a story for another day. Children’s books will be written about how Gabe ‘The Amoral Crackpot’ Worgaftik drove across the country in a ’74 Yugo without a single bathroom break, thereby breaking the previous record set by an enraged Howard Dean after losing to Burt Reynolds by one vote in the 2006 California Recall Election. All things considered, my future is looking pretty bright. Sure I might not have included my plans for college, and that might be because I don’t have any plans for college, but I’m not worried. And yeah, maybe I don’t have any plans that involve getting a real job, but I’m not worried. And sure, none of the things I envision myself doing in the future are physically possible, or even make sense, but the way I see it as long as I get that cool nickname, it’ll all be gravy.
