Extra Curricular Activities: The Make Out Web

Hey boys! Wanna make out with Laura Hadar? Or maybe the classic good looks and charm of some one like Gretchen Bleiler is more your thing? Well I’ve got good news for you! Chances are you already have.

Perhaps you are confused because Gretchen is a lovely and respectable girl who is happily married, or because Laura is out of your league (and you live nowhere near her.) Let me explain. When I say you’ve “made out with them,” I don’t mean you’ve literally made out with them. In fact, the way I mean it, I’ve probably “made out” with them to. This amazing phenomenon is all thanks to a little thing I like to call the make out web, where everyone in the world is indirectly connected through their indiscretions.  Sort of like the six degrees of separation for ass.

At one point in time, the snowboard make out web was an actual, tangible thing. At its peak it was 15 sheets of notebook paper taped together and scribbled on with every sort of writing device you could imagine. It started with a few people in snowboarding I knew well, and then continued to grow, adding everyone from Olympic gold medalists, to shop kids, to magazine editors and then some. If I wanted to link myself to Terje Haakonsen, it was doable in a few steps.

Though I initially kept it relatively private (except of course from the sources I used to track down everything from drunken make outs to serious LTRs) word quickly spread. It was sort of an industry legend (and it actually got me threatened with an unfounded lawsuit.) One of the major magazines even wanted to publish it once, but they didn’t, for the same reason it’s not getting published now.

While the make up web was a lot of fun, people get sensitive about that sort of thing, and as a female I can understand. No matter how much or how little ass you get, someone is always going to judge you for it, and it’s not my place (or goal) to out the major hubs on the web. And besides, the original web is gone. It spent a winter taped to my bathroom wall with a sharpie attached, but the marker had to be taken away when all of a sudden most people on it had made out with Michael Jackson. Eventually, four moves later, I lost track of it.

But as I let the torch burn out, this is a call to you to keep the dream alive. With a pen and a few sheets of paper, you and your friends can definitely start your own web. Maybe it won’t include tons of sweet pro snowboarders, but it’ll still be funny.