I’m confused about this thing where people go running through banners. This might be related to the fact that my sports knowledge lacks depth. ANY depth. I’m aware of most sports on a conceptual level, but that’s about the limit.
So let’s say I play for a team. The Arizona Trolls. When I come running through the banner, does it say “Arizona Trolls”? Because that would make sense in a way, but on the other hand I’m shredding our team logo, name, and a nice banner that I assume we had to have made somewhere and printed on a plotter, which is really freakin’ expensive. Shouldn’t I come ripping through a banner with the opposing team’s name on it? Or a picture of a guy making a fumble (“making” a fumble? Is that what you’d say? Not “doing” a fumble? Probably should have gone with “fumbling a ball.” Damn)?
Anyway, the best way I could think of to attack this problem was to consider different potential banners and decide how I would feel about running through each one.
Go Team!
That one is pretty unlikely. It’s cool and everything, as long as you’re the first guy. Everybody after that just sort of runs through a ripped piece of paper. That’s really not all that exciting. How do they pick who goes first? Or do they just race? I would tell someone else he could go first and then juke right past him at the last second. Screw it. I’ll have an almost infinite number of chances to make it up to him, but very few chances to run through a banner.
Let’s Dance!
I feel like this might be an effective way to begin a dance routine. The only problem is that I feel like busting through a banner would excite me far more than dancing, so by the time I broke through the banner my excitement would be pretty much gone. The dancing would be half-hearted, and my dancing is already half-assed, so suffice to say it would be half-hearted, half-assed, all terrible.
Just Married!
It would be pretty fun. They throw that up over the door to the church or whatever, and then you come busting out. However, the likelihood of finding a spouse who is enough of a psychopath that she allows me to do this seems highly unlikely.
Funeral!
Can pallbearers run with a casket? Because sometimes I’d like to see a funeral where people were a little more enthusiastic.
Zeitgeist!
It would only say that because it sounds artsy, and I would pitch the whole thing as a performance art piece. They’d all say, He’s taking the sports paradigm and turning it on its head by co-opting it for the art world. Not to mention that I could probably do it while smoking and pretend like that was part of the art.
Marketing!
If I ever tell you I’m going to run through a banner that says anything like that, as a way to enter a stage and talk into a Backstreet Boys headset microphone about some crap about business, I’m asking anyone reading this to sabotage the banner ahead of time and soak its paper in poisons so that I perish in a sweating, shaking heap half-way through the seminar.
Drunk!
This is definitely the most plausible of the bunch. It’s a nice way to announce to the world that I am drunk and to ask them to expect me to behave accordingly. I also suspect that being drunk would make me more excited than ever to run through a banner. Plus, I tend to get craft-y when I’m loaded, so I could definitely see creating a nice banner just so long as I had bourbon, a long roll of paper, and managed to complete the thing while I was still in a state where I was capable of running through it.