Black Nerd Problems

by William Evans

  Then they came for Robb Stark’s dog. The big homie Grey Wind, man. Grey Wind was the fucking Arn Anderson enforcer of Rob’s army. Grey Wind grew the fuck up and was fighting by Robb Stark’s side copping more bodies on the battlefield than your local morgue. Grey Wind was the definition of an animal, man. My man was taking no shit. NO SHIT. When you got a direwolf going into war with you? Going off and collecting fades all on his lonesome, then coming back to you as if clocking off of a nine-to-five? You better do everything in your power to keep that muhfucka alive. That canine Grey Wind was real as hell, but what Robb do? Had him locked up ’cause the boy would get antsy around folk. Grey Wind got that taste for blood and was lookin’ at folks like they weren’t even fit to manicure his paws. Then what the hell happened? Robb Stark got fucking GOT at the Red Wedding while his homie Grey Wind, aka the Bad Weatherman, was locked up. Them cats came out after betraying Robb and went straight for Grey Wind to kill him. Grey Wind had to be like, “Oh, this is that bullshit I was talking about. *10 stabs* Y’all wanna stab me? Y’all wanna kill the realest soldier in the platoon? *34 stabs* You ungrateful-ass bastards. *56 stabs* YOU WANNA EUTHANIZE ME? WELL, COME ON, THEN! *67 stabs… 87 stabs… 109 stabs… 118 stabs…* Shoulda ran up north with Nymeria when I had the chance…” Man, remember back to what Robb said when the Starks first found their pups and Theon was bein’ a buzzkill saying, “The pups may die anyway, despite all you do,” and Robb chimed in with, “They won’t die. We won’t let them die.” Okay, Robb. Sure. Fucking sure. Y’all two for fucking two right now and the count only increasing.

  *big sigh* What the fuck, Starks? The direwolves are like your own personal version of ’90s Death Row Suge Knight. Robb, the fuck you locking him up for? “Ooooh, he gets really bloodthirsty and antsy.”… And? Muhfuckas out here choppin’ ya daddy’s head off on the block, kid! Trust NO-damn-body. The North remembered that shit till the (Michael) Boltons came up in the spot with the fuck shit. Fuck shit has killed more people and especially direwolves in this series than… I can’t even finish the joke because I figuratively can’t think of anything else. Fuck shit is the leading cause of animal companion death in Westeros. Fuck shit almost got Jon Snow’s dog, Ghost, clipped on that dumb shit too when Jon locked him away. Jon locked his boy up and got the acupuncture treatment to the abs in a mutiny after he became head of Castle Black. Jon Snow came back to life and Ghost was lookin’ at him like, “And that’s what ya dumb ass gets for putting me away. The fuck wrong with you, man? You think an oath gon’ stop fuckboys from doing fuck shit? Hell no! You know what stops them? Me, these fangs, and that Valyrian steel piece on your hip with me on the hilt. Lockin’ me up… must be out your fucking mind, man. I should howl at Nymeria to get me ’cause y’all on that dumb shit up here.”

  Ghost made it out alive there and thank GOT, but then… then they got my boy, man. They got Shaggydog, man. Shaggydog was my fucking favorite direwolf. He had only like, what, four appearances on-screen? Shags had the best fucking entrance. Stepping from out the shadows down in the underground crypts of the Stark family, growlin’ at Summer and Bran till Rickon called for him while stepping out the pitch blackness of the underground tunnel. “Heeeeeeere, Shaggydooooooooog.” THAT WAS MY SHIT. You gon’ tell me the only all-Black everything dog, the wildest, most fuck-all-y’all wolf in this piece got fucking GOT when Rickon and Osha got caught and taken to the Boltons? THEY KILLED SHAGGYDOG OFF-FUCKING-SCREEN? THEY KILLED MY MANS OFF-SCREEN, DOE? COME ON, MAN! NOT SHAGS! NOT FUCKIN’ SHAGS. On everything, if that was me? Rickon, if I was you, I wouldn’t be around to see how that shit played out with the Boltons, because once you kill my dog, I’m killing everybody. There’s no taking me in alive or unconscious, you gonna have to merk me because I’m only here to settle the fucking score with no mercy rule in place.

  Now we come to Summer. Everybody is like, “Oh, Summer sacrificed himself for Bran when them White Walkers were attacking him during his meeting with the three-eyed raven.” The fuck he did. Bran, Summer been there for your ass since you got knocked out the tower. Guarding your ass day in and night out. Letting you warg into his mind free of rent and shit, escaping with your ass passed up north, encountering fuckboys human and magical, and then when y’all finally got some peace in the caves with the three-eyed raven, you had to go and be THAT guy. You using your wargin’ skills like it’s the internet to go back into the past and shit. Summer lookin’ at you like:

  “Aye, man, maybe you should listen to the old raisin-lookin’ dude in the tree and not stay in the past all long… Oh, you just… you just gon’ warg back there anyway. Okay… You know I see what you see, right? Oh, you just… see an army of frozen popsicles and you going to walk through them… oooookay? Oh, you see the fucking original Mr. Freeze ice king but you not gon’ run? He sees you… he sees you! ANNNNNNNND HE GRABBED YOU! ANNNNNNNNND HE KNOWS WHERE THE FUCK WE AT! GREAT! FUCKING GREAT! Oh… oh, y’all goin’ back into the past… OH, GREAT, YOU SEE HODOR BACK WHEN HE WAS IN HIS PRIME AND YOU STARIN’ INTO HIS SOUL AND YOU JUST CREATED A FUCKING TIME PARADOX AND ALL HE IS HEARING IS HOLD THE FUCKING DOOR! GREEEEEEEAT! THIS IS ALL FUCKING PERFECT! THE FUCK, DUDE! BUTTERFLY EFFECT, MAN! I’M A WOLF AND EVEN I KNOW ABOUT THE FUCKING BUTTERFLY EFFECT, OH MY GAAAAWD!

  “You just went back in fucking time and gave Hodor a K-22 paper jam! Wait… HOW THE FUCK DID THE SNOW MEN GET HERE SO FAST? They’re killing the leafy Cabbage Patch Kids now? OH, SHIT, THEY CLAPPED THE RAISIN DUDE IN THE TREE TOO? OOOOOOH MY FUCKING GAAAWD, YOU GOT TO BE SHITTING ME. *sees Meera calling to him as Hodor drags Bran to escape* MMMMM—yeaaaaaah *looks at invading horde* uhmmmm *looks back at the squad*… You know what?… Fuck it. The afterlife gotta be better than this shit. West Side Westeros wigits! Was bumpin’? Folk gang! Gang! Gang! Gang! Gang!!”

  Please, Summer ain’t sacrifice shit. Summer just saw his boy fuck up the damn timeline… or maybe it was supposed to happen all along, or maybe because Bran did that… You know what? Nope. Summer didn’t even wanna figure that shit out or deal with the comments section in the next scroll that got sent out by raven. This shit is wyld out here, man. Y’all Starks had the red and black nWo wolf pack, man. Y’all had a literal six-pack, man. Y’all Stark kids were soul connected to the views from the six (literally) and now y’all down to fucking two.

  Sansa, you exempt from this ’cause the L found you and Lady. Y’all ain’t seek that shit out… I mean you coulda told the truth instead of pleading the “I dunno” when the king asked what happened, but whatever. Robb and Rickon… SMDH. Bran, I don’t even wanna fucking make eye contact with your ass for another five episodes, dude. Arya, good shit. You knew what was up before all of us. Jon, I wish I could say good job for not doing that dumb shit again, but as soon as you got a dragon you forgot about ya boy. You left Ghost up north after he went to war for you in the Battle of the Bastards without so much as an “All right, well, see you the fuck later, then.” Ghost straight up missing an ear, tail can’t even wag, bloodstains all in the white fur, and you really just left dude with a fucking look like, “Aiight, man.” Ain’t even pet that good boy, you fucking loser. Then what happened? That drama went down with Dany, forcing you to join the Free Folk beyond the wall. You ran back into Ghost, smiling like “hey, boy,” and Ghost looked at you with the Thanos “You could not live with your own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me” stare into the windows of your damn soul. Ghost still as disgusted with you as we all are. Sheeeeeeeeit, Ghost and Nymeria… you all we got, baby. Good job making it out alive, y’all. Y’all ain’t get the All Dogs Go to Heaven route like the rest of your family so wrongly got and we all applaud your jerseys going up in the PetSmart rafters. Job well done, y’all. Job well fucking done.

  EPILOGUE

  After a few months Travis got another pit bull, a gray one this time around. A rescue he named Raja. Raja was used as a bait dog for fighting, so he got them Jon Snow scars on him, but he is very happy with his new life now.

  Haikyuu!! Roughly Tra
nslated Means “Ball Is Life”

  OMAR HOLMON, aka You Got Swerved

  LEMME TELL YOU something you should already know. There’s an anime for just about everything. You want pirates and ninjas? Anime has you covered. Cooking competition? There’s an anime for that. Magical girls saving the day? Anime put that shit on the map, pay homage. See, *pours ginger ale into a highball glass as if it’s scotch* the beautiful thing about a good or well-written anime is that it’ll make you care about something that’s not in your area of expertise or realm of experience *sips ginger ale slow because it burns like scotch*. Now, there’s anime you watch and then there’s anime you get immersed in. When Will and a few other friends were talking about this anime on Netflix called Haikyuu!!, I decided to check out a few episodes at 8:00 p.m. one random night not knowing what it was about. I stayed up till 4:00 a.m., watching that show entirely enthralled. What’s it about, you ask? It’s an anime show about high school boys’ volleyball teams going hard in the muthafucking paint.

  Soon as Haikyuu!! had its protagonist, Shōyō Hinata (aka “Jumpman, Jumpman Jumpman, that boy spiking something”), stepping on the court saying, “Y’all smell all that IcyHot in the air? Woooo, we gon’ be hoopin nettin’ on the courts here today, boi,” I was hooked. If you haven’t seen this series, I guess you don’t know ball is life. Here’s the quick rundown: Hinata is Kevin Hart in height but got these tall dreams of spiking volleyballs in faces after seeing Karasuno High School’s #10 volleyball player, dubbed the Tiny Giant, in action at nationals on television as a kid. The Tiny Giant is Katt Williams in height but Vince Carter in hops. This is what gets Hinata into volleyball. However, his middle school has no boys’ volleyball club, so he practices with the girls’ team trying to get a setter for spikes. His friends who are all involved in other sports join his janky-ass pickup volleyball club so he can at least play in one actual volleyball game. They play and get murdered by Kageyama Tobio’s team. Kageyama is the setter for his squad and can play every position, and they bust Hinata’s shit in. I mean ESPN-highlight-reel type embarrassing ass-busting. We see that Hinata has no technique or experience, but his talent, reflexes, and hops are disgusting. I’m talking dunk-from-the-foul-line disgusting. Hinata’s raw athleticism is so nasty it puts Kageyama on notice. Hinata swears that he’ll bust Kageyama’s ass one day. A year later they end up at the same high school as freshmen on the Karasuno Crows high school boys’ volleyball team. A team now known as fallen champions, or the “flightless crows,” since the Tiny Giant’s departure.

  The great thing about this anime is that it doesn’t solely focus on just Hinata and Kageyama. This is a sports anime that focuses on the entirety of the team. The starting lineup for the Karasuno Crows is as follows: team captain Daichi Sawamura, ace Asahi Azumane, left-wing spiker Ryūnosuke Tanaka, libero Yū Nishinoya, middle blocker Shōyō Hinata, setter Tobio Kageyama, and blocker Kei Tsukishima, with vice-captain and substitute setter Kōshi Sugawara and pinch server Tadashi Yamaguchi. There are more folks on the bench too that come to shine as well, so it’s important to know all the names of the players as well as the team managers Kiyoko Shimizu and her apprentice, Hitoka Yachi, ’cause these muthafuckas out here doing work! Everybody plays a part in making this team wild card challengers. As far as I’m concerned this squad is the ’92 Olympics Dream Team. The series creator, Furudate Haruichi, captures the essence of teamwork and that’s what won me over. Mind you, I’m no expert in volleyball.

  Back in my teen years at Hackensack High School (go Comets!) I ran track, but volleyball was my favorite spring activity in gym class. Every day before track practice, my best friends, Phil and Elvis, along with our other teammates and I, would go to the main gym and play volleyball. We played so often that the girls’ volleyball team would play against us before their practice. It always started out fun and cordial until the girls got warmed up and started spiking on us. Looking back, I now realize that this was where we all learned about intersectional feminism, ’cause those girls came together to Stone Cold Steve Austin mudhole stomp the shit out of us once the score got a little too close for their liking. Mind you, there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it either. One time, I saw my boy take a jump serve to the chest, North Face still on, and he got laid out. I stood there lookin’ at his chalk outline, then at the server, and she had her blowout blowing in the wind (there wasn’t even a draft in there) while pointing at us to pick out who was gon’ get that pain next.

  That ain’t stop us though. We’d still be fighting on that underdog shit. I’ll never forget seeing Phil, a 220-pound shot-putter in track, dive to dig up the ball and slap it to me with his left hand as his chest hit the floor. I bumped it up on instinct just as Elvis Allen Iverson’d himself into the air and knocked it over the net. We’re all cheering as the ball looks like a prayer to God floating in the air. Yeah, well, that prayer got stamped “return to sender” as Tamika jumped up to hit the ball full force for a spike. She Onyx slammed (the rap group, not the Pokémon) the rock right in front of us while shouting, “Get that weak shit outta here.” I’d hear her saying that in my head for the rest of the year, because she sat behind me in social studies and whispered it to me repeatedly.

  I relive that shit every time I watch Haikyuu!! I love it. I then realized exactly how deep in the Haikyuu!! fandom I was when I found myself buying a Karasuno Crows cosplay uniform. It is the only cosplay uniform I own and will ever need. These kids built different, man. These other school volleyball teams kept talking about how the Karasuno Crows use to be great but been trash for dumb long now. The way they talk about the “flightless crows” would make you think it’s been like ten or twenty years since this volleyball team has seen greatness. The team only been bad for like four years, yo! Like damn, the old coach had to retire, and things fell apart, it happens. The third-years Daichi, Sugawara, and Asahi had to hold it down for three years till they got this all-star roster, matched with an enthusiastic faculty advisor, Ittetsu Takeda, who got the old coach Ukai’s grandson, Keishin Ukai, to be the new coach. They were tired of being called flightless crows, yo. Teams calling these dudes’ skills butt to their face. Maaaaaaan, they don’t say that shit no mo when the Karasuno Crows step on the court! The powerhouse schools kept thinking they’d dog walk them Crows and wound up eating crow. These boys busted they asses for three anime seasons to make it to nationals in season four.

  Look at the résumé! They took on Date Tech and its Iron Wall. Date Tech specialized in blocking spikes. They blocked Asahi so much prior to the start of the series that that grown-ass-lookin’ man had PTSD from not being able to get a spike off. Had that man looking at his hands thinkin’, “Am I even an ace?” Karasuno took their Iron Wall down piece by piece—piece by fucking piece—for Asahi to get his confidence back as the goddamn ace of the team. Asahi sent them a spike that had the same stank on it as Mercury during retrograde. Then they beat Aoba Johsai and its powerhouse setter and server Tōru Oikawa. Oikawa’s serves packed the same strength as a fucking howitzer and was blowing the team apart. Them serves never saw a Burger King commercial in their life because they weren’t letting anybody have it their way. That boy’s serves were a thing of beauty, man. Karasuno had no choice but to just brace for impact. But still, Karasuno pushed the Aoba Johsai team so hard that they had that boy Oikawa crashing into the announcer table just to make a set from out of bounds to keep the ball in play. That pretty boy crashed into a table and stumbled back up into the game hustlin’ hard. Still got bodied. Who next?! Who else wanted it with the Brandon Lee–blessed Crows of Karasuno High?! Even Shiratorizawa Academy, one of the top eight teams in all of Japan, had to kiss the fucking ring. Its captain and super-ace Wakatoshi Ushijima was talking all that shit about Karasuno being nothing. All that shit about crushing the young jumpman Hinata, and what happened? Dem Crows mobb deeped Shiratorizawa Academy on the court with their teamwork. Ain’t nobody fucking with Karasuno High of the concrete parking lot. Well… actually a lot of teams fuckin
g with them now that they in nationals.

  Listen, as it stands, Karasuno is facing Inarizaki High. Its boys’ volleyball slogan is “We don’t need the memories.” It became my second-favorite team on the strength of that slogan alone. That slogan sounds hard in any context. You know a team strong as fuck when its slogan is better than a presidential campaign slogan. Yo, watching Karasuno in tournaments and now nationals is stressful as fuck for me, man. This is my NBA Finals. Y’all talking ’bout ball is life in terms of basketball?! Nah, man, please know when you hear me screaming “ball is life” I’m talking about these anime high-stakes high school volleyball matches. My wife had never seen the show, so I rewatched it with her and saw her crying when Tsukishima, the most lax and analytical member of Karasuno, screamed in excitement after getting a winning block against Ushijima from Shiratorizawa. She wiped her tears away saying, “What the fuck?! It’s high school volleyball, why am I crying?! Why is the show so good?!” I looked at her and said, “It’s okay. Ball is life, yo.” She looked back at me and yelled, “BALL IS LIFE.”