Whenever I drive past a high school in August, I always laugh at the tired, miserable kids running sprints in the hottest month of the year. Sometimes I even roll down the window and shout helpful advice like, “Quitting isn’t as selfish as you think” and “If you weren’t doing this, you could drink or get high every day before your parents get home from work”.

These suggestions are based not on careless assumptions, but on years of experience with mediocrity in sports. I hold many Minnesota state records for athletic failure, including the honor of being the slowest wide receiver in state high school history. The average running speed of an 18-year-old man is 15 mph, yet I was regularly clocked at 4 mph. I once reached 5 mph, but was only able to maintain the speed for a few seconds before collapsing into a diabetic coma.

But I never gave up. I did what Nike and Gatorade and those posters with the cats hanging from a branch said to do. I spent 10 years of my youth assuming that if I tried my best, I would eventually become skilled enough to not be mocked by my coaches, my teammates, and the parents of my teammates. But I was wrong. Nike and Gatorade were wrong. That stupid cat – who’s probably already dead, judging by the age of that motivational poster – was also wrong.

I was one of the worst high school athletes to never quit, which is why I’m now preaching the virtues of quitting to others. My decade of torturing myself only culminated in one down of actual varsity football experience, in which the quarterback threw the ball to me over the middle and a linebacker three times my size struck me so hard that I landed on a football field in another town.

Then my coach drove his car to the field in that other town and politely informed me that if I was going to get hit anyway, I might as well catch the ball. I tried to give him the finger, but all of my fingers were broken.

In my senior year of school, God and Jesus and The Holy Ghost and possibly the rotting corpse of Jerry Burns got together and decided they’d use fate to force me to stop playing. In the last practice before our first game, I dislocated my shoulder and was out for the season. As I watched from the sidelines all year, I realized how much better sports were when opponents were unable to beat the living crap out of you or repeatedly kick you in the groin while you were struggling to hold onto a fumble at the bottom of a pileup.

Some people say sports help kids build confidence and self-esteem. These people fail to mention that those sorts of benefits only occur if you’re actually good at playing sports. Students who are terrible and keep playing end up having no self-esteem, leading to lifelong prescriptions of Lexapro, bizarre facial tics, and the unfortunate habit of marrying people much fatter than them. People who suck at multiple sports develop even worse habits like serial killing, cannibalism, or writing crude humor columns for alt-weekly newspapers that still haven’t replaced the editor who resigned eight months ago.

Our society needs to start rewarding quitters instead of shaming them into wasting countless hours being talked down to by grown men who teach gym class. We need a strong ad campaign championing legendary people and all the things they quit.

For instance, Simon Cowell quit high school and now gets paid millions of dollars to sit behind a glorified card table. Enrique Iglesias quit college to do whatever stupid, boring thing he’s doing now. Carson Daly quit his dream of becoming a professional golfer and now gets paid what I assume couldn’t be more than $20 per night to host a late-night NBC talk show.

Quitting isn’t just for losers. It’s also for whiners, crybabies, sissies, people who refuse to wear padded spandex pants in 90 degree heat, and most importantly, for people who obviously shouldn’t be playing football in the first place. I may not have been a quitter back then, but I’m proud to say I am now.

If you use the white pages, you’ll find three different Paul Ryans in Duluth, 35 in the state of Minnesota, and over 100 of them in the state of California. None of them are me, because I don’t own a landline telephone. There are also a number of deviant Paul Ryans. If you search Minnesota’s court records, you’ll find a Paul Ryan who was caught driving 93 mph in a 55 mph zone. That Paul Ryan is actually me, but when you ask I’ll still deny it and launch into a long, boring story about how many Paul Ryans there are in any given city, and how perfect I am compared to them.

Potential employers can’t search for racy photos, controversial opinions, political contributions, or comments from others about what a horrible drunk I am because I’m pretty much invisible. My army of fellow Paul Ryans are helping to disguise me, and in return I am helping to disguise them. We’re a team dedicated to the advancement of people named Paul Ryan, and there’s really no stopping us.

I could get arrested for heroin dealing, streaking naked through a women’s soccer game, assaulting an entire van full of clowns, or french kissing a siamese cat, and as long as my antics aren’t picked up by the local news, I’m golden. If my name were something unusual like Humanne Itcheverre or Gentle Fudge, I would have to be more careful when choosing hobbies. But I’m not, so I’ll drink and steal and seduce Mrs. Whiskers through your house’s cat door.

Actually, if my parents had named me Gentle Fudge, I probably would have committed suicide before the end of grade school. But I digress.

Of course, I’m not entirely invisible online. You can still find me by searching for “Paul Ryan ramblings” or “Paul Ryan panda intercourse”, but very few employers have the foresight for such search terms. Mostly, human resources people just search Facebook for pictures of female interviewees drinking alcohol and wearing slutty Halloween outfits. If the photos are perverted enough, they hire her for the job.

But what about my parents? Shouldn’t I be worried about what things they may learn about their son online? Uh, no. They are well aware of these columns, and call me once every two weeks with a list of therapists and AA meetings in my area. My relatives are also aware of these columns, which my father appreciates because it makes them afraid of us and keeps them from visiting.

If any human resources or authority figures in my life are reading these columns, then kudos to them for making it this far. That’s a lot of search results to wade through. And if those same employers actually hire me after reading this stuff, then I know they’ll be fun people to work for who have a good sense of humor. I consider all my online horrors a litmus test for future bosses, friends, and girlfriends. You pass if you don’t barf.

It’s time to face facts. Your daughter has been pissed at you ever since you told her you don’t have $10,000 for her to go backpacking through Europe with her friends, so why not trick her by offering a trip to my apartment in sunny California? It’s a worry-free solution for you. She won’t be spending time at the beach, because beaches in Los Angeles are filled with dirty syringes and homeless people. She won’t be partying in Hollywood, because I won’t pay her a dime for her work. She won’t be calling you whining and complaining, because I don’t allow my interns to speak to their friends or family.

My goal is to have roughly 40 or 50 interns by the end of the summer. Your children will wash my car, buy me coffee, fix my meals, beg for change so I can pay rent, get vengeance for various wrongdoings done to me, and if they’re attractive females over the age of 18, they’ll occasionally bathe me. But the real point of this internship is to beat down your children mentally, and make them realize they’re not as cool as they think they are. And unlike internships at the Duluth News-Tribune, I promise to only beat your children mentally, not physically.

I prefer college interns because they’re legally allowed to work 20-hour days, but my program doesn’t discriminate based upon age. If your child can walk, then I see nothing wrong with you sending them to a stranger to be exploited. Scientists have actually conducted studies and confirmed that babies intelligent enough to talk are also smart enough to ride the bus by themselves and get me a 12-pack of Pabst from the supermarket.

The knowledge your child will attain from their “Hollywood internship” is vast. Aspiring network executives will learn about TV scheduling and how pissed I get when Seinfeld and Simpsons reruns are on at the same time. Aspiring doctors will learn firsthand how quickly the smog here can cause asthma in visiting teenagers. Aspiring psychologists will learn how many beers it takes to make me enjoy watching the Minnesota Twins lose by six runs every game.

There are only a few simple rules to this internship. First, if I’m watching “Robocop” and it’s the scene where the guy covered in acid gets splattered by the car, wait until it’s over before speaking to me. Secondly, don’t walk in front of the TV while I’m playing video games. It’s rude. Thirdly, if the homeless people outside try to touch you while you’re sleeping on the sidewalk at night, you can usually scare them away with loud noises. Finally, keep in mind that one of my interns will be acting as a food taster, so don’t even think about trying to poison me.

Making your spoiled child my intern is very easy. All you have to do is send them here and pretend to be surprised when they return a month later telling you all the horrible things they had to do. You’ll still be a hero for sending them to California, and like Batman, I’ll be the bad guy because I’m whatever your family needs me to be at the given time.

You really don’t have a choice. Nannies cost too much and Sam Cook’s internships will make you look bad because he’ll be a better father to your children than you ever could. You don’t run that risk with me. Send them by train, plane, or automobile. Send them on a Greyhound. Ship them in a crate if you must, because this asbestos in my ceiling isn’t going to remove itself.