Inhuman Swill

Okay, I have to come clean somewhere, so you just got voted my confessor. Lucky you.

So Laura and I started playing Wednesday nights in a pub trivia league late last spring. It's a uniform game that takes place in different bars not just all over Chicago but in several cities around the country. Our first few outings were dismal, but gradually we improved to the point where we took several firsts at our home bar, and we regularly place near the top of the pack. During this past season, our team—then known as The Reigning Cats and Dogs—did well enough to get invited to the city league championship match on February 13th. We placed 15th out of about 25 teams.

Using cell phones to look up answers is strictly forbidden, and we never cheat on that score. Sometimes, though, if we're nervous about a question, we'll look up the answer after we've already turned in our response. We're there to have fun, but we also love winning, and we can get pretty competitive with the other regular teams. It's a friendly competition, though.

Besides Laura and me, we have a few regulars on the team, most consistently Diane and Chuck. On a normal night, we have three or four players. There is no real limit on team size, though. We've had as many as six and as few as two. Everyone has categories they're strong and weak in. Laura does great at business and advertising and celebrity questions. Diane has TV and politics. I'm good at music and science and geography. Chuck has history, and he's pretty good at sports too. We generally dread sports questions, though, and there are usually a lot of them, so we recently recruited a new player, Randy, to help shore up that weak area.

Also, we have a regular waitress at the bar who's taken a liking to our team. I'll call her Devin. She likes to get in on the act too, so sometimes when we're stuck on a question she'll drop by, under cover of taking our beer order, and brainstorm with us on the answer. She has saved our bacon on more than one occasion.

Last Wednesday night, for the first time, I was the only team member able to attend. I considered blowing it off, but I wanted to get out of the house and have a few beers, and playing alone sounded like an epic challenge. For the new season we've changed our team name to Question Authority, but as long as our assigned league number is on our answer slips, we can call ourselves whatever we like on any given evening, so that night I called my team of one the Lone Punman. Nervously, and not without a great deal of self-consciousness, I settled in at our regular table to wait for the game to start.

I usually send a few Twitter updates from the matches, and much has been made there and on Facebook about my performance that evening. But I'm here to semi-publicly confess something that my teammates already know—I'm not as amazing as I've led people to think I am. Here is a detailed recap of the evening's match, from my perspective, that I wrote up the next day for my fellow Question Authorities.

( The play-by-play, in excruciating detail )