🙌🏽 Raise the roof...

because nobody is gonna raise it for you.

When’s the last time you raised the roof? I ain’t talkin’ about no cute little half way Bankhead Bounce hybrid sort of deal, either. I mean really raised the MF roof?

🤷🏽‍♂️🙌🏽 🤷🏽‍♂️🙌🏽 🤷🏽‍♂️🙌🏽 🤷🏽‍♂️🙌🏽

I ask because it’s important. I truly believe that lifting your hands in the air is the purest form of emotion, and I don’t see it as much anymore. Do you?

You ever seen old footage of wide receivers scoring a touchdown (Jerry Rice, 1990, above, always did this)? Or a mid-90s Comic View crowd? What about somebody’s mama catching the Holy Ghost at church, or a crowd full of fans doing the wave at a ball game? That one T-Pain song?

Look, it ain’t real until people throw their hands up (and not a moment before that). So I ask again, when is the last time you raised the MF roof?

Now, I don’t have footage of cavemen, but I’m pretty sure the first time something like fire, water, sex, oxtails and gravy, or whatever, was discovered, whoever that dude was put them hands UP. I can guarantee that. Raising the roof is metaphysical; something you can’t deny.

Imagine this. You’re in line for a roller coaster. Not just any coaster, the one that has an hour-and-a-half long line. The one everybody wants to ride. Everybody. Including the one kid in front of who just won that bouncy ass Kansas Jayhawks basketball that he can’t keep a handle on. The line with that weird couple right behind you wearing jean shorts that won’t stop kissing. The line with the family reunion way in front of you that keeps sneaking their cousins underneath the rope up there. And you’re standing there, in the middle of the summer, sipping on a watered down Icee you just spilled on your shirt. That line.

Now, imagine you finally make it to the front, get all strapped in, and get all the way to the tippy top of the hill of the roller coaster (so high you can see your car in the packed ass parking lot over yonder), and as y’all are about to drop, you decide NOT throw your hands up on the way down.

When you imagine yourself in that predicament, are you THAT person? The one without their hands up? Hell no you aren’t.

You came too far for that. Throw them hands up; be happy to be happy, right?

Ok, I know I just took y’all on a ride. Let me bring this home…

I had a professor once, freshman year of college, who would make us do this little chant before class (ask Sam about this dude, LOL). It was an 8AM class, mind you. And the chant went something like this:

“ACT enthusiastic and you’ll BE enthusiastic!!! 🗣️ ACT ENTHUSIASTIC AND YOU’LL BE ENTHUSIASTIC!!!”…

… and we’d repeat it like 30 times before we even took our seats. It was.. a lot.

Now, as you can imagine, as a gang of oft hungover, too-cool-for-school, 18-year-olds, this was the last thing on our bingo card, three times a week at 8AM. But we did it, I suppose.

But we weren’t enthusiastic. Simple as that. Can you blame us? Even still, as you probably can guess, by the end of the year, it became sort of fun in its own little way. And eventually, if nothing else, he got us to yell the chant itself enthusiastically at least.

Yep. And, even at this big age of mine today, it’s stuck with me since, for whatever reason.

That’s what I’m getting at here. It turns out that the only reason I wasn’t enthusiastic, because (wait for it), I wasn’t trying to be enthusiastic. I wasn’t allowing the good in. I didn’t raise my roof.

But, as the aforementioned Sam always says, “the key word in the phrase ‘have fun’ is ‘have’, not ‘fun’.”

Form follows function, you dig?

So, when you see somebody raising the roof like it’s 1994, don’t laugh at them, you better try and figure out how you can raise yours!

When you’re at a ball game, and you see the wave coming around that corner, put that overpriced Bud Light down and get your ass up!

When you’re in the club and T-Pain’s “WIN” comes on, they don’t have to “stay there”, but them hands need to go UP (at least for a little bit)…

And, and I cannot stress this enough, the next time you’re on a roller coaster, you know what to do.

For Lack of a Wetter Bird, find something that makes you want to raise the roof today.

(A retired Jerry Rice, not long ago, still lifting his hands up.)