This weekend, I have the privilege of visiting some of Molly’s friends in Rochester. Among other forms of entertainment, I’m looking forward to a rousing game of Marbles.

What is Marbles, you ask? Well, at least I know that’s what I asked. It’s not the same game where you use a shooter to collect other people’s marbles by knocking them out of the circle. No, it’s some other game that involves cards and strategy and things like that.

Learning how to play the game is a secondary concern for me at this point. What I really need to work on now is my smack talk.

If you clicked on this blog title in hopes of learning to talk smack (otherwise known as taunting, trash talk, et cetera) with the best of them, you’re out of luck. Instead, you can learn a bit from one of the worst trash talkers around – myself.

What I like to do when I’m going to taunt someone is run through a three-point check list:

1. Skill level – You would think that I might want to use the first point to make sure I’m skilled enough to back up any smack talk I may dish out, but you would be wrong. In fact, I check my skill level for the opposite reason. I hate it when people are overly proud of things they do well, and I refuse to talk smack about anything that I might actually be good at. So my first step is to make sure that I am smack talking about something in which I have absolutely no skill, or in which luck plays a major roll. In the case of Marbles, I’m led to believe that both of these apply.
2. Opponent – To me, smack talk is only fun if the person I’m taunting is in on the joke. In other words, they have to know that I am woefully under-prepared to back up my words. In this situation, that’s a definite check.
3. Ridiculousness – Smack talk is best served when the situation has reached levels of ridiculousness previously unheard of. Usually, the first two points on this list help me reach that level, but I also like to make sure I’m there by making sure my smack talk is so incredibly stupid or ridiculous that no one could ever take me seriously.

Now, I’m not going to give you an example of the smack talk I intend to dish out when I take on Marbles this weekend. But I invite you to try, in the comments section below, your own hand at talking smack about my ability to talk smack.