Rock the Rock, Rock

If you're going to rock, you might as well rock as hard as you possibly can. So, if you rock, you might as well rock the rock because the rock is the rockin'est thing around. If you happened to be The Rock and someone said, "Hey, rock the rock, Rock," then complying with such a request would involve a truckload of rocking out!

Plus, you'd be strong; you know, because you're The Rock. So... you could move stuff easier.

Nobody is The Paper. Nobody "papers" anything like a verb. Even if you were to "paper" something, you certainly wouldn't "paper the paper" because paper sucks! Paper, furthermore, has no personality. In fact, you have to invent the personality of a piece of paper by drawing or writing on it. Paper can't determine any part of its own destiny.

Still, the truth is undeniable: paper beats rock.

Here's the tough one, though: would scissors still beat paper if you drew a rock on the paper? Think about it, if someone showed you a piece of paper with a drawing of a rock on it and said, "What's this?" you'd undoubtedly respond, "That's a rock, dickshell."

Well, maybe you wouldn't call the guy a "dickshell," but you would certainly call the drawing a "rock" rather than a "paper." This is why I love ro sham bo, or rock paper scissors or whatever you call it: the complex strategy; the intangible elements; the potential for inventive meddling; the three elements battling perfectly against one another in splendid harmony. Just like Battle Beasts.

Battle Beasts, if you're too young to remember or sucked as a kid in the 1980s, were these little animal dudes with guns and knives and weapons and stuff that you could use to beat the hell out your friends and your friends' Battle Beasts. The second best part, though, was that they each came with a heat-em-up decal on their chest that had an icon of either water, fire or wood. Water drowns fire; fire burns wood; wood... um... floats all the fuck over water. So you could have a Battle Beast Penguin against a Battle Beast Lion and, if the Penguin had a better icon than the Lion, it didn't even matter that he was a worthless penguin; he would still win! That kicked ass!

"So, Mike," you are probably wondering to yourself, possibly with a finger jammed way, way up your nose or butthole, "what was the best thing?" The best thing about Battle Beasts, my probing friend, is that after about a week, the decal would totally fall off and you could revert to the rules of the jungle or total chaos. I preferred the latter. In fact, I liked to throw the Battle Beasts at one another and see which one knocked the other furhter back after the mid-air collision. There's your fuckin' winner right there!

Nobody, though, was ever as big of a winner as Steve Perry, lead singer of Journey. God dammit... what a winner. That guy was so cool. He had the coolest voice, the coolest hair and the coolest fucking face of any dude around. "Don't Stop Believing," "Any Way You Want It," "Wheel in the Sky"... those songs rocked! They rocked so hard that they rocked the rock. Back in the day, I'll bet The Rock rocked the rock to the rock that Steve Perry rocked out.

So, if you think about it, rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper, paper beats rock, water beats fire, fire beats wood and wood beats water (somehow). If I remember correclty from his films, The Rock beats scissors, water and wood but not fire and, of course, not paper. Steve Perry, however, beats everything.

If you're going to rock, you might as well rock as hard as you possibly can. But, if you're not going to throw rock, you should throw Steve Perry because you'll never lose and you'll totally piss off the chump who throws stupid paper.

Rock on!