1 Tuff Place

It's time. Time to machete through all the tags and hrefs lining the gates that bar Ben Gets Punched's entry into the realm of blogs. Time to get this thing going again.

And off we go. No destination, no reservations. Ben Gets Punched Brought to You by One Tuff Place®, back in the habit of making this little darling the one tuffest site in the whole damn world.

On the right, the look of a man in need of a good left hook. On the left, the look of a man in need of a right index finger.

No, I'm not talking about that rumor that she gave me chlamydia; I'm talking about the realization of one's own mortality, or mundanity, as it were.

It's October 1998, and I'm a high school senior. I still have dreams of being some kind of actor, or writer, or fill-in-the-blank famous person. "I've still got time," I tell myself. All the big actors, athletes, and singers are in their 20's, I've got a few years until stardom. I told myself that anomalies like Macaulay Culkin and Silver Spoons' own Ricky Schroeder were freakish blips on the radar of awesome.

But here she came, probably at her hottest (well, maybe not hottest), a peer if you will, reaching the height of stardom, and younger than me.

That's when I realized it was all gonna be downhill from there. LaLohan, Lebron... I'm twice their age. So here I am, with the 9-5, the business card, and the dreaded tie I swore I'd never wear. These are my mundane adventures. But hey, you know what they say: Once you reach the top, there's only one way to go...