#34 Daniel Augenbraun

In cooperation with a “Macarthur, Jr. ‘Young Genius’ Grant” (sponsored by PepBoys), Danny is in a specialized 8-year university track that is fast-lining him from B.A. to M.A. to PhD in a course of study that waives his general education requirements, demands that he take on a course load of 4 Master’s histrioethnosociological courses concurrent with necessary research and independent study for his final 2018 PhD in Contemporary American Sociology thesis entitled “Roots to Ritualized Reclusion: From the 18th Century Anglo-American Fetishism of the Bold to the Desertified Contemporary American Cultural Landscape Necessary for the Popularization and Ritualization of Private Toiletry Routines; With a Focus on the Act of the Poop²,” and also somewhat unprecipitatedly requires that he participate in (at least) one nationally competitive collegiate club sport.³

Luckily, Danny has extensive training with Frisbee, which at the University of Pittsburgh fulfills his grant’s requirements. Danny as a child was “Far too socially inept⁴ to participate in most traditional sports, and as such began training to eventually be passable at Frisbee by the time he had finally outpaced the spectre of sexual maturity.⁵ His upbringing was one in the hardlined quadrivium of the old colonial upper-adolescent boarding school academic structure that saw him attain competencies in Mathematics, Latin & Languages, Grammar & Writing, and Sociological Texts. His curriculum also stressed the importance, physical, mental, and spiritual, of applying one’s self to an athletic discipline, even for the most socially regressed boys.⁶ Being that he was neither quick to learn nor physically impressive, his counselors deemed him an ideal candidate for the school’s joke-of-a-sports-team Ultimate Frisbee Club. After a prodigious leap in ability of all kinds caused by a catalytic Frisbee to the head, Danny was soon surpassing his peers in the academic and athletic fields like the ugly duckling surpassing its duckling brothers as it metamorphosed into a beautiful kick-ass swan.⁷ Danny was entertaining many collegiate offers upon graduation, and U.P. seemed to offer if nothing else at least an abbreviational promise to accelerate his unnatural gifts.

Danny has a, thankfully, unfathomable mind that exhibits a dissatisfaction with reality to the point where he prefers making new realities to fit a situation rather than just attempting to co-exist with others on the same mortal plain. He is a pathological liar, and actually not all that unattractive.⁸ Though he might have been a big fish in a little pond, Danny has met trout and even tuna more massive than he in the physical ocean that is the University of Pittsburgh Men’s Ultimate Frisbee Team, and his progress is sure to be a point of interest for bored niche athletic academics everywhere.

-by Ari Weitzman

Notes
¹ Calls for his birth certificate have been met with what can most aptly be characterized as “undue” resistance From The Desk Of Daniel Augenbraun, which played no small part into sustaining what the same impeding source has somewhat hypocritically called “[a] fallacious and unsubstantiated rumour” that Danny is not an American citizen but is in fact Kenyan, and other smaller but no less sensational rumors that Danny is Austrian, Vietnamese, Mooninite, Futurian, Historiana, and a cactus. Vocationally speaking this is somewhat true.

² Working title.

³ Many theorize that the insertion of this clause came at the demands of Board of Directors for PepBoys, who are hoping to associate their brand with, in addition to the “Macarthur, Jr. ‘Young genius’ Grant,” the healthy and the masculine.

⁴ Quote, Daniel’s father.

⁵ Will update at such time.

⁶ Danny’s Boarding School, “The Mid-Atlantic Stayaway Transitionary from Upper-adolescent Remedial Boys to Adult Teachers & Educators,” is an institution famous for taking on awkward and likely perverted youths and turning them into high school teachers, adjunct university faculty, and even tenured professors in their adulthood that are almost indistinguishable from normal Homo Sapiens, but is also infamous for never quite figuring out how to instill a comfort level in their heterosexual students around the female sex that would not elicit a synclinal brow at cocktail parties of even the lowest of brow.

⁷ Danny still cannot talk to girls.