Drinking Stories

Newt Gingrich Has Lost His Shit: An Open Letter to Newt Gingrich

2012-01-27T21:03:00.001-05:00

Newt,

Do you mind if I call you Newt? I've never known a Newt. As I kid I had a tree frog, turtles, dogs, and even a tarantula, but never a newt, much less a Newt. It's quite the diminutive. I have to say though, maybe you should have stuck with Newton or even rocked Leroy once you kind of figured out you may want to go into politics. Plenty of people go by their middle names (I do!) and Newt just strikes me as a little unpresidential. Like Cooter or Hambone or Catfish. Enough about the name; you're played the cards you're dealt, right?

What I want to know is this: WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MOON COLONY BULLSHIT?!?! A moon colony? Really, Newt? Really? What is going on with the GOP? You guys are in a race for the Republican nomination, not a race to see who can be the most unelectable. Rick Perry is a crazy, Christian fundamentalist with an affinity for Carhartt jackets, incredibly well coiffed hair, and epic verbal bumbles. Michele Bachmann is a sharp-faced homophobe (in spite of the fact that she seems to be married to a confirmed bachelor) who simultaneously manages to misspell both her first and last names. Herman Cain is a pizza baron (a pizza baron?) who apparently likes to give his female customers a little extra pepperoni even when they say "Please, no pepperoni, Mr. Cain." Mitt Romney is a Mormon cyborg who is incredibly successful in the business of ruining lives. And Ron Paul, well, he sometimes makes sense, which precludes him from ever doing anything meaningful in Washington.

Newt, you were back in the game! Granted, that game is a game of Who Wants To Lose To Obama Next November, but at least you were in the conversation after an epically slow start off the blocks. And now this? A moon colony? Were all your staffers just sitting around before the Florida primary out of ideas and frustrated and someone said, "Fuck it, let's watch Total Recall"?

Ground control to Newt Gingrich. Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.

Listen, I'm all for setting a lofty goal to galvanize the nation in the face of stark challenges, but Kennedy's "Land a man on the moon" this is not. We were in the throes of The Cold War and an epic pissing contest with the Soviets. There was a race to be won. The Taliban doesn't even believe in toothpaste, much less space travel and I'm pretty sure John Q. Public would rather find a way to keep his house here on earth than have you fund a program to build him one on THE FUCKING MOON! The moon?!?

This has been like watching a bunch of special needs high school kids run for class office. You guys might as well promise to put Dr. Pepper in all of the nation's drinking fountains or cut the workday by two hours every Friday for a nationwide pep rally.

Seriously, Newt. Stop playing. You guys are all joking around, right? This is like a massive hidden camera show and the entire US populace is the mark, right? That has to be it. You guys are going to put Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Saturday Night Live out of business because the Republican debates are more hilarious than anything Comedy Central or SNL writers could come up with. Is that the angle? Shoot me straight. You guys are just ceding this election to Obama in a bid to run the lampooners out of business and pave the way for a Republican win in 2016, right?

No?

WHAT THE FUCK, NEWT GINGRICH?!

I feel like Will Ferrell's Alex Trebek in the Celebrity Jeopardy sketches from Saturday Night Live. Say something that makes sense, anything at all, and you can win this nomination. What's that you say? Fund a moon colony? Jesus.

Hoping you're the first and last colonist we send to the moon,

Doug

The Prestige: My Home-Schooled Dog

2012-01-23T19:07:00.001-05:00

I am an accidental dog owner. Although I didn't happen upon Mazzy Sarah Maclachlan pitiful, covered in mud, whimpering in an alley somewhere and take her in or win her in a white elephant auction or foolishly enter into some foggy business transaction with a non-English speaking Gypsy and have her foisted upon me, I did become inextricably her Alpha Dog in nearly as significant a what-the-fuck-just-happened kind of way...although much less altruistically than in the Sarah Maclachlan scenario.

In retrospect, I was sort of cattleman Shanghai-ed; rancher magic tricked. I had a buddy who had an uncle who had two working Australian Cattle Dogs and those two ACDs did the deed and wound up with a whole litter of adorable little part Dingos. My buddy expressed an interest in owning one of the puppies and asked me if I'd like to drive out to his uncle's property with him to pick up his new dog.

"Sure," I said, "But I'm not going home with a dog."

"No problem," says he, "We'll only be there for a bit and I'm pretty sure all of the dogs are spoken for already."

I now know this to be the first part of a magic trick. The Pledge.

We rolled into his uncle's dirt driveway and immediately laid eyes upon a whole gaggle of rambunctious ACD hellions wrestling in the mud, nipping one another's recently docked tails, and moving in all ways like atoms being shot around a super-collider.

When I first saw Mazzy, I won't say it was love at first sight, but it definitely wasn't disinterest. She was the only she. She was the only one whose tail had not been docked, and she was staring up at a plane flying overhead. This is sort of the single guy's equivalent of walking into a coffee shop where a bunch of girls are comparing Coach purses, talking about Jersey Shore, preening, and then looking over to see a naturally beautiful woman reading A Death in The Family quietly by herself.

This is the second part of a magic trick. The Turn.

My buddy was trying to corral his new puppy and talk to his uncle while Mazzy and I shared a moment. She was energetic but not manic. She was playful but not dopey. She was inquisitive but not clingy. She was...

"She's yours if you want her," my buddy's uncle said.

"Ha! I'm just along for the ride," I replied. "I can barely take care of myself, much less a dog." Seriously. This wasn't just Texas banter. I liked to stay up late, sleep late, drink beer, come and go as I pleased, and lead a decidedly dogless life.

I might as well have said, "I love her! I have to have her!"

"My daughter wanted her, but she's being wishy-washy. Hang on, I'll call her," was the rancher's reply.

After a brief phone conversation (it easily could have been a dial tone on the other end of the line) in which the rancher's daughter decided that she could not take the dog, I found myself driving home with a puppy riding shotgun. How'd he do that?

This is the third part of a magic trick. The Prestige.

I'd be inclined to applaud, but my furry little prestige has continued to appear at the foot of my bed every morning for the last six years. Energetic has become borderline manic. Playful has become occasionally dopey. And inquisitive has most certainly touched on clingy.

For those unfamiliar with ACDs, they have energy for days. These are dogs who herd cattle, not bitchass sheep. They're rugged, athletic, tough as nails, and loyal/protective to a fault. Every time Mazzy and I see another dog on one of our runs (these runs are a necessity to bleed some of that energy), Mazzy goes all Regulator from that Warren G song and starts repping her hood. She's handy with the steel and she's damn good too. Mostly, this is an annoyance as it serves to nearly send me ass over tea kettle more often than not and, if she's ever able to get to the other dog, her Regulator attitude quickly devolves into licking and butt sniffing.

Additionally, she's way too smart for her own good. If I make a move to the drawer in the dresser with the running shorts in it, even if it's just to fold said shorts and put them away, her ears perk up and her tail wags and she goes to her leash. Once we're outside, she drumrolls the ground with her paws until she hears the beep on my watch and then barks and bounds joyfully for the first fifty yards or so of our run. And these aren't token runs to get her blood flowing a little bit. These are five to ten mile seven and a half or eight minute mile pace runs in all weather.

Her head is about to explode here. And yes, I'm wearing tights.

For a long time I thought the more we went on regular runs, the more she would mellow out a touch. Such is not the case. I've recently become aware that I've been training a world class athlete and she's only getting stronger and therefore more capable of the bounding, barking, chasing mania I was trying to defeat in her.

Now, before you go all Cesar Millan on me, understand that the kid has structure, discipline, and affection. In the house, she's an angel. She sits and waits and doesn't get on the furniture or tear up anything. It's only outside that she goes ape shit and really only when we see another dog. Essentially, Mazzy's home-schooled. She's a social retard. I've sometimes handled this patiently and philosophically, and I've sometimes thought about tying her in a pillowcase and throwing her in a river...or mailing her in a box to Sarah Maclachlan. Not really.

But really.

My question to the dog owners out there is this: Any advice on how to rewire a wired, home-schooled, socially retarded, genius athlete? Clearly, my six years of effort have failed to hit the mark.

Also, be careful with how generously you proffer your advice. I've been studying magic tricks and I'm pretty sure this was The Pledge.

Words With Friends People I've Grown to Hate

2012-01-16T22:18:00.001-05:00

One of the many pieces of evidence that has supported my great fear that I am in fact getting older is my intolerance for all manner of social networking games, apps, and postable quizzes. I'm immediately tempted to defriend anyone on Facebook who invites me to play Farmville or Mafia Wars or who posts anything telling me how in love they are today. I Facestalk as much as the next guy, but have the decency to give me something to reward me for my efforts. I don't care which John Hughes film you are or that you're listening to Lana Del Rey RIGHT NOW. In the future, everyone will have their fifteen minutes of fame. There's an app for that.

The one exception to my curmudgeonly aversion to these sorts of things is Words With Friends. I'm addicted to it. I'm the guy who will start three games with one person and play them all at the same time. This is the 2012 version of that home schooled kid with two inhalers and the perpetually runny nose entering a speed scrabble tournament. I worry about defense and vowel to consonant ratios and setting up big scores. I mentally high five myself when I use a Q, Z, or X on a triple letter space in a word that also covers a triple word score. I talk trash to myself to my opponents when I break the one hundred point barrier with a single word. I play on my phone at stoplights. I get honked at.

The thing is, for a guy who loves words and reading and prides himself on having a well developed vocabulary, I have three friends who absolutely beat the shit out of me every time we play. When I first became addicted to the game, I had fantasies of playing words like loquacious, pusillanimous, quixotic, and acquiesce. Instead, I'm regularly losing to a Canadian dairy farmer, a bartender, and a should-have-been Abercrombie model. And by "losing" (10 points), I mean being epically defeated by over one hundred points and struggling to play words like nut (5 points), it (2 points), poo (5 points), and hi (4 points). This exasperates (20 points) me.

Norm's not really a dairy farmer...anymore. He grew up in bucolic (15 points) New Brunswick on a dairy farm but is now a chemist for a major pharmaceutical company. In all honesty, he may be the smartest guy I know and he approaches Words With Friends in the same meticulous manner that he services his bike, cleans his home, and grills his steaks. This means he's memorized every Q without U word, every two letter word, and probably has a reference guide akin to a football coach's "Go For 2" chart that is codified, highlighted, and indexed (17 points) that tells him which playable word is most likely to send me into a blind, murderous rage. Every time I think I'm hanging in there he goes and plays a word like "qoph."

Me: Qoph?! What the fuck does qoph mean?! Use it in a sentence.

Norm: Doug, qoph is the nineteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

Dammit!

The thing is, unlike some of my other more Machiavellian (28 points) friends, I know Norm isn't googling "words that start with q" and then pulling a fast one on me. He's smart and principled. I hate him for it.

Much like Norm, Daniel isn't really a bartender, although he does tend bar...at the pub he also part owns. The thing about the restaurant business is that to be successful you have to have good food, a great atmosphere, and incredible business acumen (14 points). The restaurant industry cemetery is littered with well meaning creative types who could cook their socks off but couldn't do inventory or manage a staff to save their lives. Daniel seems quite capable in all of these areas, which apparently makes him unbeatable at Words With Friends. Restaurateurs are often up at all hours of the night and I can't tell you how infuriating it is to wake up to your turn and find that some pugnacious (21 points) pub proprietor has found time, between mixing Jaeger Bombs and pulling Guinness pints, to drop a "quizzical" on you for over one hundred points. Recently, Daniel has stopped asking me for games. Do you know what it feels like to not be challenging enough for someone? It's like getting dumped. I can use circuitous (18 points) in a sentence, dammit! To make matters worse, if he ever does ask me for a game again, I'll know it's because he met his Daniel and he needs a slump buster.

John is a soccer buddy of mine from college. He's easily one of the best players I've ever had the pleasure of sharing the field with and I'll always remember both of us arguably having the match of our college careers in the same game. He scored four goals and I stood on my head to save four times as many and we beat the number two team in the region in an away match in which their fans' trash talk became sincerely complimentary towards me in the second half. Add to that the fact that John doesn't have a disingenuous bone in his body and that that body is chiseled like a freaking Greek god - not to sound homosexual (24 points) - and you can see why it's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING to get absolutely worked over every time we play Words With Friends. In our last game, he won 417 to 216. He played "glozed." Glozed?

I make myself feel better by telling myself things like I was the cerebral (14 points) kid on the team and John was the strong jaw line and surely he meant to play "glazed," but accidentally used an O and it just happened to work out for him, but this happens every time we play. No one's that lucky. Right? And if they are, why is it against me? Maybe he has a cheat code I don't know about. The thinking man's version of up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Select, Start. Glozed. Fuck glozed.

If I keep playing I'll get better. I've learned to use ka and adz and za to great effect, but Norm, Daniel, and John continue to be my white whales. Swerve, me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!

Fuck. Norm just played "hove" for forty eight points.

Shout Out

2012-01-14T13:48:00.001-05:00

My college buddy Kelsey is intelligent, insightful, talented, gorgeous, and snarky as hell. Also, she shares my birthday so she has to be badass. Read her blog at Kelseynicollescott.com and like it. That is all...unless you're a talent scout and need an actor, writer, singer, and/or outstanding waitress. In that case, hire her. That is truly all.

@&#!

2012-01-13T13:00:00.000-05:00

Winter has officially gotten the memo. For the last week and a half or so, Indianapolis residents have been largely muted on discussions of the weather, perhaps afraid that the mere mention of the unseasonably gorgeous days would jinx it for everyone and we'd wake up one morning to find that outdoor January runs in shorts and golden sunshine really were too good to be true.

No one has to worry about jinxing it for anyone else now.

It is cold. Like Yeti cold. Like Moscow cold. I am not man enough for this cold. Few are. It's so cold, I just wrote and deleted four sentences trying to describe the utter coldness of things at the present moment because nothing seemed to make sense. It's that cold. It's so cold I can't even describe it cleverly. My mind is cold. That's freakin' cold.

It's -2 degrees right now. Fuck! And then there's the wind chill. It's ridiculous to have wind on a day like this. -2 degrees becomes -20 degrees. Blown snow shoots up your pants legs. It's like a menthol enema. It's like you're own personal snow globe, but NOT FUCKING CUTE. Only places like North Korea should be this cold. This is evil cold. Human Rights Watch should document cold when it gets to this level. Kim Jong Il should be blamed for this cold. I keep expecting to look up and see a flock of those flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. It's so cold, that would make perfect sense. It's so cold I wish Han Solo would slice open a Tauntaun and stuff me inside. I would not mind the smell.

Did I mention it's -2 degrees right now? Christ on a bike that's freakin' cold! I bet if I took a piss outside right now, my urine would freeze in a gentle, yellow arc before it even hit the ground. I wouldn't even have to shake, I would just snap off the frozen pee arc from my business and be about my merry way. Actually, strike that. It's too cold for that. I could not expose myself to this kind of cold. That would be like getting a handjob from a polar bear. Cold. Painful. Did I mention cold?

Not this kind of cold...

This kind of cold.

The freezer in your house is warmer inside than it is here right now. I want to sit in your freezer. I would wear swimming shorts and flip flops and make furniture from bags of frozen vegetables and packages of frozen chicken breasts. Do not question me on matters of scale. It's so cold my mind is not working right. We've discussed this. I would play your ice cream containers like bongos. I would have friends over to your freezer and talk about how wonderful the weather inside your freezer is. Oh, the fun we would have!

It's so cold Superman's Fortress of Solitude looks like the Maui Westin. It's so cold Vikings would put off pillaging, plundering, and raping...maybe not raping. I mean, they were Vikings. But they would take no joy in it. They would just do it for warmth. It's so cold that scene in Titanic when Leo has frozen to death and Kate has little bits of ice in her hair? That scene? It's so cold THAT scene looks like a warm scene. Positively tropical!

-2 degrees. Fuck.

Rocky Mountain National Park

2012-01-10T22:53:00.000-05:00

I was on a business trip to Denver in 2008 with a buddy of mine from work. We had a few hours one afternoon with nothing to do so I suggested we put our four cylinder rental car through its paces and make the drive to the visitor's center at Rocky Mountain National Park.

The park is one of my favorite places in the world. In national park circles this is a little like saying PF Chang's or Maggiano's is your favorite restaurant. Rocky Mountain National Park lacks the isolated beauty of Acadia or Zion and its proximity to Denver makes it a certainty that, especially in the summer, one will have to travel well off the beaten path to find that delicious moment of solace so many national park goers seek when they plan a trip. And to travel off said beaten path, a back country pass must be applied for years in advance.

It's atypical for me to say this, but that's part of why I love the park so much. I've never been there, whether in a car for a brief visit or on foot with just a few awed friends for company two days from the trailhead, and not seen something profoundly beautiful. The park's magic is in its accessibility. On a hazy, claustrophobic day in Denver, one can look west and know that just an hour away, hiding impossibly behind the particulate in the air, is a panorama of natural beauty on a scale that puts daily life in its proper perspective.

My work buddy had never been west of the Mississippi River and was anxious as soon as the road tilted slightly upwards as we weaved toward Estes Park. I made the most of this by repeatedly taking my hands off the steering wheel to fiddle with the radio and point out elk or cyclists or breaks in the tree line. He countered by repeatedly imploring me to keep both hands on the wheel and ease off the accelerator a bit as he snapped pictures out the car window.

I learned long ago that any photos I took would insult my memory of what the views actually looked like. There's just no way to capture the totality of such an impressive landscape and the depth and colors and crispness of the mountains always seems too compressed and demagnified through the lens of a camera. Maybe I'm just a bad photographer. In spite of this, I had packed my camera just in case, but I had no plans to use it. I just wanted to get to the visitor's center and sit and watch and be still.

It was late afternoon and the sun was starting to set. The Alpine Visitor's Center at Rocky Mountain National Park is right at 12,000 feet and even in August it gets really cold in the evening. We were not dressed for this at all, but a lenticular cloud was hovering right above the peak at the visitor's center and as the sun dipped, it did this:

Sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time. The photos still don't do it justice.

Ancient Economics: The Great Wife of Lot Debate

2012-01-04T18:35:00.000-05:00

This is a repost from a few years ago. It's a transcript of an email conversation between some of my friends and I and, dammit, I'm posting it again because it's still one of the funniest things I've ever read. This is what happens when young professionals educated at a Christian university who have a penchant for bullshit try to look busy in their entry level jobs.

Scotty: Do you think Lot's wife was worth more as a human or as a condiment? Keep in mind the huge popularity of the slave trade and the spice trade during the BCE. Also, assume that the pillar she became was equal in grams to her weight as a human.

Doug: Is salt rendered from a human being considered kosher? Is this a moot point as Lot's wife was transformed by God Himself? Surely her value as salt would go up significantly if both Jews and Gentiles could consume her. Also, and I just thought of this, was she a pillar in grain form? Or, was she just a giant pillar of rock salt? I think the rock salt would be much more valuable but also more difficult to sell. You're really looking at a single buyer in that scenario because not many people would have the shekels to shell out for a wife-sized rock of salt. Either way, surely the novelty of a wife-sized (and shaped) pillar of salt would add a few bits to the price. It's not everyday you see something like that!

Barrett: You guys are morons...hello, this is famous salt. Even at the time everyone had to have been talking about it. You don't sell it for consumption, you sell it as a collector's item. It's not that the shape would add value, it is the fame of the incident. I mean, you don't eat God's salt. Otherwise, he just might eat you.

Chris: Right now a 9 oz. bottle of all natural sea salt will run you about $3. Let's call it $.33/oz. Worst case scenario: You sell this as all natural Dead Sea salt (let's call that a 25% premium) at $.41/oz. You're looking at a 105lbs lady, which is 1680 oz., or almost $700. I think that's about what Barrett pays for a lady these days. Better case scenario: You sell this as God's chosen salt, market it to the Thomas Kincaid crowd, and you get $25/oz., or $42,000. Best case scenario: You lick it until it's gone. That's just my take.

Doug: Today the average yearly inflation of the US dollar is around 3%. In 1864 it was close to 27%. I have no idea what that would translate to in BCE, but let's ballpark it at an average of 10% for, oh, say the last 4,000 years...that's quite a bit more than Chris' $700.00. I'm no math major, but I think that's somewhere around $2,658,673,870,446.40...not including Barrett's fame factor.

Barrett: Ahhh, Doug, clearly you are retarded. You account for inflation (good) whilst (yes, I dropped a 'whilst' on you) forgetting about the degradation of salt. 105 pounds of salt several thousand years ago would not leave you with 105 pounds of salt today, especially not if we're talking about sea salt, which evaporates 12.4% faster than regular salt on average in the area around the Dead Sea, with that percentage rising as high as 15.9% in some areas of the Middle East. So, to an extent, it would depend on the storage facility of the salt and where that facility was located. Also, you have to hire a trustworthy supervisor to secure the premises. Otherwise, you may end up with some crazy bastard like Chris licking up all of your salt and destroying your investment. At least, that's my not-so-humble opinion on it. But for the preceding crazy licker watching the salt, I think you would be best off immediately selling the salt and becoming a shylock.

Scotty: You are all idiots. The real lesson of the situation is that money, being the root of all evil, is not to be worshipped or even sought after in the Face of The Lord. Thus, you spread the salt to the winds without making a cent and start telling people your new philosophy about money, setting the groundwork for an empire of pamphlet sales, public speaking engagements, an internationally televised religious hour, and a lucrative stone-selling business that nets you several hundred million a year by your fifth year of operation. No matter how much you could make off the salt - odd commodity or just plain spice - it would be a one time event at a fixed amount. Swearing it off and convincing others that you're enlightened keeps the green rollin' in year after year. Suckers.

Barrett: Ahhh, Scott...cute. But seriously, men are talking here. Your pamphlets and the stones are going to cost money. Where will you get that money? Simple: From my shylock business where I would charge you 20% interest plus 56% of the profits. It's good to be on top. You have just given away your most valuable possession and, other than my shylockery, you have no way of attaining capital to invest in your grand scheme. So you have a choice to make...make both of us rich or you can actually be poor the rest of your life with no way to get your venture off the ground. And in that case, I will still be rich because I would find some other sap to suck the life (and money) out of. In the fictional world of ancient economics my grandkids and their grandkids would all be taken care of. If present me could go back in time and help out my ancient ancestors, I bet present me would still be living high on the hog from all the wealth I would have accumulated (assuming my time machine could bring me back to the future).

Scotty: And that's when Barrett showed everyone why no one should hire him as a lawyer. I'd be able to pass by your shylockery -as well as the haberdashery - while on one of my Inspirational Walks With the Master (C) (149.99 shekels). Overhead? Zero. That's called pure profit. And from there I'll order some pamphlets. Oh, and I'll order rocks too since they definitely don't just grow on trees.

Money maker?

David: While you idiots are debating the best way to spend your ill-gotten saline wealth, you have all neglected to properly value the Wife of Lot as a sturdy member of the early Judeo slave trade, let alone as a skilled prostitute, especially when one considers that taking into account the well documented custom of taking a child bride, Lot would have likely chosen for his mate a nubile 105 pound teen skank of Sodom. All it would take is a simple online keyword search for "nubile 105 pound teen skank of Sodom" to see that such a skilled girl today would fetch an hourly rate of well over $400.00. See: austin.craigslist.org/personals/teensodomskank for documentation. Taking into account the average life expectancy of the era, and the going shekel exchange rate, she'd be able to earn her weight in salt in a single night. Fools.

Brando: Since I'm the first one to reply, I'll take this one guys... *AHEM* Your mom is a nubile 105 pound teen skank of Sodom. Burn.

Rob: Once again, you have all missed the point. One interpretation of the Biblical account of Lot's wife being smote to salt is that it is a metaphor for her inability to reproduce (i.e. salting the fields of your enemies in ancient times). You have no salt to sell, but you may save some money on birth control if you go the prostitution route.

Doug: Ok, I'm back and I have brought myself up to speed on the Great Wife of Lot Debate. I have to say, you're all a bunch of douchebag intellectuals. Firstly, salt doesn't evaporate. Salt water evaporates, but you (and by 'you' I am referring to Barrett) are suggesting that salt somehow sublimates at an amazing rate only in the area around the Dead Sea. Now, while your professional caliber BS may have convinced your fiancee to sleep with you, it cannot convince me that a solid can suddenly turn into a gas under normal climatic conditions. By storing Lot's wife in a relatively dry place (and Christ knows there are a ton of them in that neck of the woods) she should be fairly degradation free and ready for sale years into the future...like 4,000 years into the future. I am willing to concede, however, that having a licker like Chris anywhere around your prized salt is simply bad business. As for the argument that Lot's 105 pound Skank of Sodom would be more valuable plying her trade at $400.00/night, you need a bag on your head. Let us assume that she starts flashing ass for money at the age of 14 at $400.00/night. The average life expectancy of a woman in that era was 30 years old. This gives her 16 working years. For argument's sake, let's assume that she could work every night. That's still only a lifetime earning of $2,336,000.00. That doesn't hold a candle to my $2,658,673,870,446.40 rock of salt, and we're not even considering the days she would lose from getting knocked up (metaphors aside) and not working on the Sabbath, not to mention the fact that her $400.00 price tag would diminish as she crept toward the big 3-0. So much for your nubile ancient world fantasies. Sicko.

Monday is a Honey Badger and Other Days of The Week

2012-01-03T23:57:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, when you have too much time to do nothing, you come up with all sorts of ridiculous thoughts and ideas. For instance, who was the first guy to eat an egg? I'll tell you who he was. He was bored and hungry. Bored enough and hungry enough to eat something that came from a chicken's ass. Fact.

I was similarly afflicted the other day, minus the hunger part. Unfortunately, my idea was not quite so earth-shattering as the eggs-as-food thing (omelettes...mmmmmmmm). That's a once in a millennium discovery. No, instead I set about determining which animals best represented each day of the week. What can I say? I wrestle with complex issues on a daily basis and live life on a razor's edge.

Monday is a Honey Badger

"What the fuck are you looking at?"

By now, most people have heard of the Honey Badger. YouTube did its part as did Tyrann Mathieu. But my first awareness of the Honey Badger came from Ben Thompson's blog, Badass of The Week. Read it here! There are certain life lessons to be learned from the Honey Badger. One of them is this: If something is named in an incongruous way, a sweet name and a mean name stuck together in one name for instance, that thing is not to be fucked with. At the very least it's unpredictable. Puff Adder. Eyelash Viper. Honey Badger. Marshmallow Shark...ok, I made that one up, but you get the point. Anyhow, Thompson makes the point that the Honey Badger has been known to run beneath male lions and bite off their balls! Now, what's Monday if not a chomp to the balls?

Tuesday is a Tiger Shark

Nom, Nom, Nom!

Everyone knows about Monday and what a bastard it can be. Just like everyone knows about the Great White and gets that super panicky get-me-out-of-the-water-right-now feeling when they go to the beach and/or dive into the deep end of a swimming pool and the word "shark" creeps into his/her mind. Thanks, Spielberg. You literally ruined any and all bodies of water for me. What most people don't know is that the Tiger Shark is responsible for a huge percentage of shark attacks worldwide, can swim into rivers and estuaries, can grow to 20 feet, and eats almost anything. There you are taking a nice swim in the river having survived Monday and OOPS! there goes your leg. Didn't see that coming at all. Huzzah, it's Tuesday!

Wednesday is a Hippopotamus

Totally deserving of Jawsesque cello music

No one likes Wednesday. Wednesday is that day you just kind of trudge through to get to Thursday and eventually the weekend. You're never going to have a long weekend that includes a Wednesday and once Tuesday is over with you're not really stoked to be into Wednesday. Imagine we're part of an expedition in deepest, darkest Africa. We've avoided the the lions and hyenas and painted dogs and black mambas and cobras and crocodiles and brain burrowing beetles and we really just want to get to the end of the expedition. We just have to paddle our ridiculously flimsy canoes over this river and we'll be more than halfway there. Cake, right? There are just a few beefy, amphibious cow looking things over there. What kind of noise can they bring? Plenty. Hippo tusks can grow to over a foot. Hippos are intensely territorial. Hippos have been known to flip ridiculously flimsy canoes. Hippos can hold their breath for over six minutes. Hippos shit underwater. Hippos have no sweat glands so they secrete a red viscous fluid that looks a lot like blood. Blood. That's just the kind of insane BS you don't expect that always seems to characterize Wednesdays.

Thursday is a Panda Bear

"Get a little closer and you'll see how cute I am, bitches."

Pandas are cute. There's no way around this. They're like Oreos and cotton balls got together in a test tube somewhere and made a baby. They laze around bamboo forests and eat shoots and star in Disney movies and are generally loved by everyone, even poachers. Seriously, Panda meat is unpalatable so poachers rarely intentionally kill them. Isn't that adorable? At the end of the day though, a Panda is still a fucking bear...and Thursday is still a weekday.

Friday is a Penguin

"It's the freakin' weekend, I'm about to have me some fun!"

Penguins are baller. Friday is baller. No one has anything bad to say about a penguin. They swim like torpedoes, are literally ice cold, and have a freaking permanent tux. They're like the Frank Sinatra of the animal kingdom and perfectly embody everything Friday is about. Put on your tux, have fun, and be cool. In the words of Lyle Lovett and his quirky genius, "I don't go for fancy cars, diamond rings, or movie stars. I go for penguins. Oh Lord, I go for penguins." I don't know what the hell that means, but I know it's cool.

Saturday is a Dolphin

"Haaaaaaaay!"

Dolphins: Flips. Jumps. Frolicking. Social animals who hang out in pods. Talk a lot. Have sex for fun.

Saturdays: Active. Fun and frolic. Hang out with friends and catch up on the week. Good day for sex for fun.

I got a perfect score on the analogies section of the SAT. This is proof.

Sunday is a Koala Bear

"My sleep number is Eucalyptus."

Sunday is the laziest day of the week. Even God rested on Sunday and if God's taking the day off, then so am I. My friends in college consistently had No Shower Sundays. This is exactly what it sounds like. Wake up at noonish, mosey on out to the couch, eat, watch some TV, take a nap, eat some more, watch some more TV. Look, you've got a Honey Badger to deal with in just a few hours so you're going to need all the rest you can get. And when it comes to rest in the animal kingdom, there's only one animal in the conversation, the somnolent Koala Bear. Koalas on average sleep 22 hours out of every day. It's completely within the realm of possibility that a Koala could go to sleep Saturday night and not wake up until Monday morning. I don't advocate skipping from a dolphin to a Honey Badger, but if you want to take Koala Sunday to All Pro levels, that's your business.

So there's your week. I'm giving you pearls here. Have a careful Hippo Wednesday!

A Note On The Pillow To 2011

2011-12-31T17:57:00.001-05:00

2011,

By the time you read this, I'll be gone. I know it must be a shock to wake up alone with just this letter lying beside you, but it had to be like this. I've seen out other years with one last hurrah. Dancing, champagne toasts, sparkly hats, and whatnot. But to be honest, our relationship was so dysfunctional I'm afraid of what you might have done once you realized I was taking 2012 home with me.

That's right, I'm with 2012 now. I get that this may make you feel abandoned and that you're probably wondering how I could make such a big commitment so quickly, but to be honest, you made it pretty easy. Sure, there were high points. You were with me when my best friends married one another in a beautiful wedding by the lake. You celebrated on my couch right beside me during Baylor's first superlative football season in years. And for a few delirious weeks in August I thought I might want to be with you forever in spite of the other things that came between us before. But there were other things...

If you're honest with yourself, you know what I'm talking about, but here are a few of the low points in case you're feeling wrongly done by.

I never should have leapt into your arms so aggressively. You wound up being a lot like 2010 and I should have recognized that immediately. By March we were already fighting and I essentially wasted three months on you because I forgot the lessons I had learned from 2010.
You killed my grandfather. He's the best man I've ever known and I realize it was his time, but that's not something you just get over.
You were terrible with finances. Seriously, I almost had to forgo my friends' wedding because of that. Money literally fell out of your pockets and it took a healthy dose of pride swallowing and some DEFCON 5 type action on my part to try to make it better.
The icing on the cake was that one awful, irresponsible decision you made in September that helped sink our Indian Summer together and has made this fall a living hell. I can't even begin to quantify the costs of that quagmire. I'm not sure I'll ever forgive you for that. Heartbreaking.

You may never see things my way, but I'm OK with that. I'll turn 32 with 2012 and I can't handle the sort of roller coaster relationship you were addicted to. I have to do this for me and there's no going back. Don't call. Don't write. Don't ask our friends about me. The best thing I can say about you is that you taught me some excruciating, stone-cold, starkly unforgettable lessons.

You were a stop sign...a massive, blinking, fire-engine red stop sign. I'll be by to get my things at some point, but I'm bringing 2012 with me. Don't make a scene.

- Doug

Reality Bowls: Real Names to Make Sense of All Those Bowl Games

2011-12-19T19:11:00.003-05:00

Well, it's Bowl Season again. For college football fans this is sort of like an extended and tedious Christmas. More than half of the teams in big time college football play in the "post season," and yet a playoff is deemed too cumbersome. I'm missing something.

And what of all those bowl games and their ridiculous names? The Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl? The San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl? Call me old fashioned, but the rampant commercialism of every single bowl makes for a frustrating mouthful and tells me nothing about the game or where it ranks in the hierarchy of the college football post season. The bowl season has gotten so out of hand, ECU is selling tickets to their fans to a bowl that doesn't even exist.

I offer the following alternative names to demystify the 2011-2012 Bowl schedule.

Gildan New Mexico Bowl - Wyoming vs. Temple: The Watch Temple Rush the Ball 51 Times Bowl...or put up Christmas lights. Either way

Famous Idaho Potato Bowl - Ohio vs. Utah State: The Brian Griese Wonders How the Hell He Wound Up Broadcasting a Bowl Game Named After a Tuber Bowl

R & L Carriers New Orleans Bowl - San Diego State vs. Louisiana - Lafayette: The I Wonder How Many Ragin' Cajun Fans Spent the Night in New Orleans Jails/Gutters After the Game Bowl

Beef O' Brady's St. Petersburg Bowl - Florida International vs. Marshall: The Beef O' Brady's is Big Enough to Host a Bowl?! Bowl

San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl - TCU vs. Louisiana Tech: The Fun Drinking Game: How Many Times Will Gary Patterson Lose His Shit Bowl

MAACO Bowl Las Vegas - Boise State vs. Arizona State: The Thank God We Don't Have to Listen to Boise State Plead Their National Championship Game Case Again Bowl

Sheraton Hawaii Bowl - Southern Mississippi vs. Nevada: The The Bowl System is So Screwed Up, Southern Miss Cost Themselves Millions of Dollars by Beating Houston But at Least They Get to Go to Hawaii Bowl

AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl - North Carolina vs. Missouri: The Tar Heels and Tigers Players Will Be Pissing Bright Orange For Two Weeks After This Game From All of the V100 That is Foisted Upon Them Bowl

Little Caesars Pizza Bowl - Purdue vs. Western Michigan: The Is Anyone Really Going to Watch This And Also, Does Anyone Still Eat Little Caesars Pizza Bowl

Belk Bowl - North Carolina State vs. Louisville: The Can You Believe the Big East Gets an Automatic BCS Invitation Bowl

Military Bowl - Toledo vs. Air Force: The Military? Toledo Rockets? Close Enough. Bowl

Bridgepoint Education Holiday Bowl - California vs. Texas: The This is Actually Worth Watching Bowl

Champs Sports Bowl - Florida State vs. Notre Dame: The Remember When This Might Have Been For the National Championship Bowl

Valero Alamo Bowl - Baylor vs. Washington: The 1,000 Yards of Offense...Maybe Just From RG3 Bowl

Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl - BYU vs. Tulsa: The Name "Military Bowl" Was Already Taken Bowl

New Era Pinstripe Bowl - Iowa State vs. Rutgers: The Meh Bowl

Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl - Wake Forest vs. Mississippi State: The do We Have to Say the Sponsor's Full Name Every Time Bowl

Insight Bowl - Iowa vs. Oklahoma: The How the Hell Did Oklahoma Wind Up in the Insight Bowl Bowl

Meineke Car Care of Texas Bowl - Northwestern vs. Texas A&M: The Remember When People Were Saying A&M Might Win the Big XII This Year Bowl

Hyundai Sun Bowl - Georgia Tech vs. Utah: The Congratulations You Were Decent Enough to Make it to a Bowl Game, Here Are Your Tickets to El Paso, TX, Don't Look Too Excited Bowl

AutoZone Liberty Bowl - Cincinnati vs. Vanderbilt: The I Bet Jay Cutler is Such an Asshole He Doesn't Even Watch This Bowl

Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl - Illinois vs. UCLA: The UCLA has Two Different Coaching Staffs Right Now, Everyone Watch This Train Wreck Bowl

Chick-fil-A Bowl - Virginia vs. Auburn: The Antebellum Bowl

TicketCity Bowl - Penn State vs. Houston: The Penn State is Going to Take Advantage...er...abuse...er...give it to...er...Penn State Should Win This Bowl Bowl

Outback Bowl - Michigan State vs. Georgia: The This Should Really Be a BCS Bowl Bowl

Capital One Bowl - Nebraska vs. South Carolina: The Those Damned 'What's In Your Wallet' Commercials Are Going to Get Stuck in Your Head Bowl

Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl - Ohio State vs. Florida: The Tebow and Pryor Eras Seem Like a Long Time Ago Bowl

Rose Bowl - Wisconsin vs. Oregon: The Admit it, You're Just Really Pumped to See What Ridiculous Uniforms Oregon Wears Bowl

Tostitos Fiesta Bowl - Oklahoma State vs. Stanford: The Best Reason For At Least a Plus One Format Bowl

Allstate Sugar Bowl - Michigan vs. Virginia Tech: The It's a Tuesday. Decent Matchup. Guess I'll Watch it Bowl

Discover Orange Bowl - Clemson vs. West Virginia: The Reason Number 5,436 Why the BCS is Fucked Bowl

AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic - Kansas State vs. Arkansas: The Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Pump the Brakes, AT&T. Let's Not Call it a 'Classic' Just Yet Bowl

BBVA Compass Bowl - Pittsburgh vs. SMU: The There's a Bowl Game On?! My Christmas Decorations Are Already Put Away Bowl

GoDaddy.com Bowl - Northern Illinois vs. Arkansas State: The The Only People Watching This Are Pervs Who DVR'ed it to Get to the Commercials Bowl

Allstate BCS National Championship Game - LSU vs. Alabama: The For The Love of Christ, Please Score a Touchdown This Time and How Can You Play in the National Championship Game When You've Already Lost to the Team You're Playing and Why is the BCS Such a Perennial Cluster and We Get it, the SEC is a Really Good Football Conference, But This is Getting Ridiculous and ESPN Has Done All it Can to Fool You into Thinking This is Going to be a Great Game, I Hope They're Not Wrong and Can Someone Just Please Blow up the BCS Death Star so We Can Stop the Madness Bowl

How I Met Your Mother

2011-12-18T16:42:00.000-05:00

This is my favorite photograph ever. Compositionally, the photo follows the rule of thirds both in depth and width, foreground to background and right to left. All three thirds are occupied by compelling subject matter; the faceless and intimidating authority of the policeman in riot gear (one), the tender but hyper-passionate embrace of the main subjects (two), and the riot police in the background charging into the madness of the gaggle in the distance (many). Obviously, the incongruity of the image is what made it famous. Like a red flower in a monochromatic sea of concrete, the last thing one expects to see in the midst of a full blown riot is a still, peaceful space occupied by a focused expression of human sexuality.

I love this image for all of those reasons, but even more so because it touches on an ideal I believe is indispensable to a relationship and one I have yet to find. If someone asked me, "What are you looking for in a partner?" I would show them this photo. The world is literally burning down around this couple. Faced with the choice between brutal, joyless order and bacchanal, destructive chaos, they chose neither and instead found a still space in which the only thing that mattered to them was one another.

I realize that sounds like the idealization of an event, but I mean it as a critique of a composition. I don't know what they were doing previously. They very well could have been throwing bottles of Labatt through Vancouver shop windows or dropping MDMA and imploring anyone of the opposite sex to bang them, in which case my critique of the composition would be tainted by the back story. But what if I told you they're still together? True story. He was an Australian stand up comedian and she was a young Canadian college girl. They live in Melbourne, Australia now and are apparently still happy and very much in love (granted, it's only been six months). I'm guessing the move to Melbourne was precipitated by potential Canadian legal ramifications resulting from being party to the riots (read: deportation). Maple Leaf Law doesn't mess around when it comes to foreign nationals. Trust me.

Where they wound up geographically doesn't really matter. That they're there together enhances my appreciation and enjoyment of the photograph that much more and makes for an epic, "How I Met Your Mother" story. Seriously, can you imagine being asked by another couple, "How'd you two meet?" and answering with, "Well, remember the Vancouver riots?" Win.

My parents knew a husband and wife named Stanley and Theresa. They were raised in the same small town in west Texas as my mother and father, but were never much more than acquaintances until they crossed paths with my parents as adults when they were all living in Aberdeen, Scotland. One evening over dinner, my father asked how they met...

Stanley was sort of the James Dean bad boy of Snyder, Texas; cool, cultured (at least compared to the rest of Snyder), good looking and aloof. Theresa was the quintessential small town All-American high school girl; cute, smart, well-behaved, and dying inside for some kind of adventure.

This was back in the late 60s and Snyder was still a segregated town, in practice if not in law. There was a specific neighborhood called The Flats or colloquially, [insert something much worse], where the majority of the town's black citizens lived. The inhabitants of The Flats were largely left to their own devices and, provided no serious trouble got stirred up and/or the right amount of money found itself into the right person's pocket, even illegal enterprises were mostly overlooked. Until very recently, Snyder was the county seat of a dry county. In order to purchase any alcohol, Snyderites had to drive to either Lubbock or Abilene to buy their booze...or, they could risk scandalizing their good neighbors and potential legal entanglements to venture down to The Flats to have a drink at Freddy Ray's.

Freddy Ray and his wife Mozelle ran a speak-easy that was attached to the back of their house. I don't think they actually brewed/distilled anything, but instead drove to Lubbock or Abilene (like the 'good' white folks), bought booze, drove it back to Snyder, and then sold it at a mark up to the inhabitants of The Flats and any of the white citizens brave enough to shirk convention and belly up to the bar.

Stanley was home from college in the Big City - every city is "big" compared to Snyder, so it could have just been Lubbock, but I like to imagine it as New York or Chicago - so, Stanley's home from college in New York and, unconcerned with the provincial hang-ups of Scurry County, spends the better part of more than a few evenings having beers at Freddy Ray's and counting the days until he can get back to the city.

On one such evening, Theresa and a couple of her friends decided to finally indulge their sense of adventure and have a crack at good old fashioned rebellion. I imagine this idea coming to fruition in much the same way the three nerds decide to go to the party at the moon tower in Dazed and Confused. Freddy Ray's was their moon tower.

Innocent, white, Cute-as-a-button Theresa and her similarly attributed friends must have caused quite the stir when they walked into Freddy Ray's speak easy. I imagine all heads turning to stare and all noise, save for the blues music playing in the background, stopping as Theresa and her friends paused briefly just inside the door and tried to pretend that they weren't deeply, painfully out of their element.

Like any good businessman, Freddy Ray eventually offered the three awkward paying customers a drink and things settled into some sense of routine. Conversations resumed, beers were poured. If there was a pool table, and I like to think there was, the game started back up. However, and in stories like this there's always a "however," the Scurry County sheriff had decided that that night was a good night to raid Freddy Ray's speak easy. I don't know if this was because the sheriff had to keep up appearances and did so by periodically raiding Freddy Ray's, making some arrests, and doling out some fines, or if the sheriff was on the take and Freddy Ray hadn't paid his dues.

When I'm in a good mood, I like to imagine the sheriff raiding Freddy Ray's as Buford T. Justice

When I'm in a bad mood, it's Boss Godfrey from Cool Hand Luke

At any rate, the law was coming through the door and there were four white kids sitting at the bar who were about to be in a world of hurt and embarrassment...mostly embarrassment...and mostly for their families. Mozelle, realizing the stakes for Stanley and Theresa and her friends, herded them quickly into her and Freddy Ray's house and hid them, two by two, in coat closets.

Stanley and Theresa spent the evening getting to know one another in the coat closet of a bootlegger's house while it was being raided.

As if that wasn't epic enough, my parents tell me Stanley and Theresa were later divorced but then got remarried. At their second wedding, the pastor didn't show, they called around and found a backup pastor to preform the ceremony on short notice, and then spent the evening at a bar together regaling a drag queen with their story. Well played, Stanley and Theresa. Well played.

I think of their story as sort of the Saturday Night Live version of the Vancouver Riot Couple. Instead of riot cops, it's Buford T. Justice. Instead of a city street in the midst of chaos, it's a bootlegger's closet in the midst of a raid. Regardless, the story is essentially the same. Two unlikely people find one another in the eye of an equally unlikely storm and decide that being together is better than being alone and back in the storm...in Stanley and Theresa's case, twice.

I love that story.

Inconsequential Reader Debate #1

2011-12-15T21:56:00.002-05:00

Ages ago I had the idea of a recurring weekly feature in which I would share one of the seemingly hundreds of nicknames my friends and I have doled out over the years and the stories behind their creation. This "weekly" feature, cleverly titled "Nickname Friday," survived for exactly one Friday, dying in its infancy when I realized I had committed myself to weekly updates on a day that, quite frankly, I looked forward to for reasons other than sitting in front of my computer and forcing myself to try to be clever. Dance, monkey! Dance!

Maybe I'll bring it back one of these days (not a Friday), but for now I have an idea for another potentially recurring bit. Welcome to the first Inconsequential Reader Debate! For clarity's sake, the debate is the inconsequential part, not you the reader. As I noted yesterday, this blog needs (wants?) all the readership it can get so each and every one of you is decidedly consequential as far as I'm concerned. Feel good about yourselves. Go ahead, I'll wait.

On to the debate!

Of the following seminal 80s bands, which band is the King of the Seminal 80s Band Hill?

The Contenders:

Erasure

Scoff all you want, but Erasure was the balls. Depeche Mode castoff, Vince Clarke and flamboyantly gay lead singer, Andy Bell had 24 consecutive Top 20 hits in the UK. I remember listening to the radio as a kid and Erasure being sort of an also ran amidst songs by The Cure, Duran Duran, U2, Depeche Mode, and all that ridiculous hair metal, which, strictly speaking, was very much hair and very little metal. But every time I hear an 80s hits compilation, Erasure seems to have at least two or three songs in the mix. As a testament to how awesome Erasure must have been, can you imagine a lead male vocalist in the present day being as comfortably out as Andy Bell is/was and enjoying anything close to the popularity Erasure did? Maybe our country has become more intolerant (God, I hope not), but I have a hard time envisioning it. "Well, maybe he wasn't clearly gay at the time," you say.

"Have a look at this," I counter.

The Cure

Does the dude on the far right not look vaguely like Jared Leto?

If the hairspray industry had a say in this debate, The Cure would win hands down. I mean, Michael Jackson's activator once caught fire on stage because he stood just a touch too close to a tiny open flame. The Cure must have had a staunch "No pyrotechnics" policy at their shows. These guys would go up like flash paper.

Hairspray aside, of the four bands I've chosen for this Inconsequential Debate, The Cure is arguably still the most relevant. I challenge any of the 80s babies out there to produce a Cure free iPod or to not sing along to "Friday I'm in Love" when it comes on the radio during one of those throwback lunch hour shows. I fell in love with The Cure when my mother, in a bold child rearing move, allowed my sister and I to watch MTV (when it was just music videos) reasoning that we were being exposed to the arts and not gratuitous violence or mindless sitcoms. I haven't been the same since I saw Madonna's "Justify My Love" video. Hang on. I need a moment.

[Two minutes later]

Back to The Cure! Anyhow, "Lovesong" was the first video by The Cure I ever saw. Creepy, forlorn, and awesome. I was hooked. And apparently so were a lot of other future musicians my age. You can't read an interview about influences without someone, from Deftones to AFI to 311 to The Killers, mentioning The Cure.

Depeche Mode

Of the bands in the debate, Depeche Mode is easily the most overtly sexual. Andy Bell was heartbroken most of the time but in a Gloria Gaynor "I Will survive" kind of way and wanted you to know all about it. Robert Smith was heartbroken then in love then heartbroken then in love then just really missed someone then was in love again then was back to being heartbroken. Dave Gahan just wanted to fuck you.

Even today, 25-30 years on, Depeche Mode's songs sound like sex.

Let me take you on a trip
Around the world and back
And you won't have to move
You just sit still

Now let your mind do the walking
And let my body do the talking
Let me show you the world in my eyes

Gahan's baritone, the mischievous and hyper-sexual synth melodies, and driving bass lines were a formula for some massive hits in the 80s and early 90s and, like The Cure, a huge number of present day artists from diverse backgrounds reference Depeche Mode when naming their most prominent influences. Check out this list of acts from "For The Masses," a Depeche Mode tribute album:

Smashing Pumpkins
God Lives Underwater
The Cure
Hooverphonic (I had ever heard of them either, but their cover of "Shake the Disease" is awesome)
Deftones
Monster Magnet
Veruca Salt
Meat Beat Manifesto
Rammstein (Can we get a mulligan on Rammstein?)

Tears For Fears

For me, Tears For Fears is the dark horse in this debate. They were big a little before the other three bands and their decided lack of hairspray and black clothing in favor of Cosby sweaters and mullets can't be ignored, can it? Maybe I should have thrown INXS in here instead, but I'm really curious to see who can make a case for Tears For Fears. "Shout" and "Everybody Wants to Rule The World" were huge songs and deservedly so, but they were both from the "Songs From the Big Chair" album and "The Seeds of Love" may be just a touch too saccharine for my taste. But what do I know? Earlier in this post Andy Bell was dancing around in heels and a he-corset and it rocked.

Essentially, Tears For Fears was two dudes who wrote pretty good songs. They're certainly the least processed of the four bands in the debate and are arguably the most cerebral. Admittedly, I know little about them compared to Erasure, The Cure, and Depeche Mode, but I had to have four choices for the reader. Why? I don't know. Three just seemed a little totalitarian.

So there are the contenders. Have at it, small but hopefully growing readership. Leave your comments below. It's OK to be anonymous, just have a reason for choosing whichever band you choose. No one ever won a debate without supporting his/her position. Well, Lloyd Bentsen did own Dan Quayle with that, "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy," but you, Reader, are no Lloyd Bentsen.

Milestone?

2011-12-14T21:32:00.003-05:00

This week Drinking Stories welcomed its 20,000th visitor. 20,000. That's like the population of Hammond, Louisiana. I didn't mean that to sound impressive. Much like the population of Hammond, Louisiana, I'm pretty sure many of my visitors are related. My parents, my sister, and ex girlfriends wondering if I'm venting their dirty laundry into cyberspace almost certainly account for a hefty percentage of my readership. Still though, 20,000 feels like a milestone.

Wilt's 20,000 was a bigger deal...both times. Hey-O!

It's been a big week for the blog. Delusions of grandeur danced in my head as "Heisman Eve or Why Baylor Fans Can Wait For Tomorrow," fueled by a number of much appreciated links on Facebook and Twitter, found a niche readership (let's be honest, anything associated with Baylor is likely prefaced with the word 'niche') and attracted close to 200 visitors the first day it was posted.

I was on the cusp of something. My article just needed to find its way to the right email account or Twitter account or Facebook account and someone with the authority to do so would offer to publish it. I'd reach a mass audience! Drinking Stories would blow up! Muahahahahahaha!

None of this happened.

After RG3 hoisted the Heisman (Do work, Son!), time sensitive articles written in the perishable space between him being named a finalist and him winning the award lost much of their relevance. Who knew? Over 200 visits became under 20 visits in 24 hours.

It was during this time that Drinking Stories welcomed its 20,000th visitor. Rather than the cosmos and some strange synergy conspiring to make said 20,000th visitor the literary benefactor I had previously imagined, reality and karma conspired to make said 20,000th visitor some unsuspecting high school kid in Medford, Oregon. This is sort of like a Victoria's Secret store all geared up and ready to roll out the red carpet for its millionth customer and Hugh from the bowling league sheepishly saunters in looking for edible panties.

"Y'all got cherry flavored?"

And for what, you ask, was my milestone searching?

"storys on drinking"

Jesus.

Well, it is what it is.

*Ahem* Here's to you, Oregon High School Kid! Congratulations on being the 20,000th visitor to Drinkingstories.blogspot.com. Although I'm fairly sure you didn't find what you were looking for, I hope you at least learned the proper way to spell "stories." If I ever do make any money as a writer, no matter how much, I will be sure to send a portion of the proceeds, in the form of a ceremonial, oversized check, to your school's English department in recognition of your boredom driven, unintentional accomplishment. Thanks for keeping me firmly grounded in reality.

Heisman Eve or Why Baylor Fans Can Wait For Tomorrow

2011-12-10T00:43:00.006-05:00

Robert Griffin III may win the Heisman Memorial Trophy tomorrow evening. As a proud Baylor University Alum, I'm over the moon about this and I almost can't decide whether I want the award ceremony to happen tomorrow at all. Everything is perfectly poised, ready to tip in the most unlikely, unexpected, and spectacular way imaginable for a Baylor football fan. It's our own little Christmas Eve and the excitement of the "what if" is too great a dream to even contemplate what it would be like if grandmother actually got us socks.

Baylor fans don't want this to just hurry up and happen. We can wait. Right now is just too delicious, too difficult to wrap our minds around, too much milk and honey after too much time in the wilderness. We kind of just want to sit here for a minute and take it all in. For the last few weeks, sports writers have been taking notice of Baylor football and RG3 and referencing this season as a shocking bolt from the blue engineered at the hands (and feet) of a once-in-a-program quarterback who quietly exploded onto the national stage. While that makes for a compelling lede, it ignores so much of what came before and on which this season was built.

I spent six years at Baylor as an undergraduate and graduate student beginning in 1998. During that time, Baylor went a combined 14 - 54 and were outscored 1,069 to 2,442. I was raised in the Austin, TX area and, although my father also went to Baylor, we were both University of Texas fans. I freely admit that the highlight of my 1998 college football season, as a Baylor freshman, was watching Ricky Williams break the NCAA rushing record en route to winning a Heisman Trophy for The University of Texas. I wasn't alone in this kind of traitorous allegiance. One of my friends on the soccer team was a huge Oklahoma fan. I had cheered for the Longhorns since I was a little kid. Why immediately switch allegiance when my new suitor gave me so little to be excited about? Plus, being a freshman on any university campus in your first semester is a little overwhelming. Not to mention one that was seemingly so antithetically suited to what I was all about at the time. I spent most of my days playing soccer, wondering why I couldn't get a girl to even throw a rock at me, and being generally antagonistic to all things Christian. And at Baylor, there are a lot of all things Christian. In short, I didn't feel plugged in. Baylor is just where I went to school.

But by the second semester I'd found an outlet. Maybe not the most traditional outlet, but a dyed in the wool, uniquely Baylor outlet, and an outlet nonetheless. There's an organization at Baylor called The NoZe Brotherhood. One of the central tenets of being a member in this group is that you remain anonymous and under no circumstance do you reveal your membership therein to anyone. This "central tenet" is adhered to on a sliding scale inversely proportional to the relative attractiveness of any/all members of the opposite sex who might be impressed by your membership in said group. Since I'm well outside Baylor's sphere of influence in both age and distance these days and I have no plans to run for public office, I'm not terribly concerned about revealing this bit of information.

I'm the naked one in the middle of the photo.

The thing about The NoZe is, they love Baylor. They don't always show it in a way the administration finds palatable, but the pranks, and the articles, and the criticisms (and there are plenty, see: Marc Ellis) are all done because The NoZe Brotherhood genuinely cares about the university, couldn't exist without it, and, as students committed to getting an education there, want the university to be as good as it can be, both academically and on the playing field. These people are not the fringes of the Baylor student body. In fact, as much as the university would cringe to hear it, some of the students Baylor markets as its best and brightest - actors, lawyers, politicians, doctors, judges, musicians, scholars - were all NoZe Brothers. How I got in is still a mystery. No one voted for me.

To be a good NoZe Brother, you have to be plugged in to the university. You have to care enough about what's going on with the university athletically, socially, academically, and politically to write articles that are relevant and plan and execute pranks that are memorable. With so much time invested in caring about what was going on on campus, representing the university on the soccer field, and just settling in, it didn't take long before I felt a sense of ownership toward Baylor. This was my university. I stopped cheering for the Longhorns.

In my time at Baylor, The NoZe definitely lampooned the football team. We couldn't not do it. If you don't laugh, you'll cry...and there was plenty to laugh/cry about. In 1999, we went 1-10 and endured Kevin Steele's signature college football coaching moment when we tried to rush for a touchdown from UNLV's eight yard line up 24-21 with five seconds left on the clock. We fumbled in the end zone and a UNLV defensive back returned the ball 101 yards for a touchdown. We lost 27-24.

In 2000, we went 2-9 and endured three straight shutouts losing to Texas Tech 28-0, Texas A&M 24-0, and Nebraska 59-0.

In 2001, we lost to Southern Illinois 56-12 to cap off a 3-8 season...that's Southern Illinois!

In 2002, we were shut out four times. New Mexico 23-0, Texas A&M 41-0, Colorado 34-0, and Texas 41-0.

In 2003, Guy Morriss took over as head coach, finally putting Baylor out of Kevin Steele's misery. Morriss seemed destined to be a perfect fit as Baylor's coach after the Kentucky/LSU premature Gatorade bath of 2002. It was Kevin Steelesque and the kind of thing that couldn't help but be associated with Baylor football. Morriss is a genuine football guy with all the bonafides to make a good coach, but recruiting in Texas against the likes of Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Texas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, and any other college program licking its chops to mine the most talented football state in the country was just a bridge too far. Texas A&M beat us 73-10. And if that wasn't bad enough, The University of North Texas beat us 52-14. Find UNT on a map. I'll wait.

Still, there were just enough "if only" moments to keep a Baylor fan's sad, flickering flame of hope alight. In 2001, myself and the rest of the soccer team listened intently to the radio in one of our team vans as Greg Cicero put in a gutsy performance on a windy day against the Aggies at Kyle Field. We lost 16-10, but it was respectable. Hell, even before that game, Greg Cicero, a one time University of Texas recruit, filled Baylor fans' hearts with expectation when he transferred from UT to be our quarterback. He was a solid guy and his roommate Guy Tomchek, another Baylor quarterback, was a solid guy too (See what I did there?), but being a solid guy and being a solid quarterback are not necessarily mutually inclusive.

Gary Baxter was a standout defensive back who shut down Roy Williams in Austin one Saturday and was a second round draft pick by the Baltimore Ravens. Unfortunately, there are ten other defensive positions on the field and Gary Baxter couldn't play all of them, although The NoZe Brotherhood suggested it. Reggie Newhouse, in spite of having God-knows-who at quarterback for his entire Baylor career had over 1,000 yards receiving in 2002 and had six 100 yard receiving games that season.

In 2002, we beat Kansas to open Big XII play...but then lost all of our remaining games. In 2003, we beat Colorado to open Big XII play...but then lost all of our remaining games. Rashad Armstrong rushed for 1,074 yards and six touchdowns that season though. That's something, right?

I left Baylor just before the fall semester of 2004 to move on to the adult phase of my life (i.e. not running around a university campus drinking beer and wearing Groucho Marx glasses and a wig), but I still followed Baylor football, returned for Homecoming, and found myself more than willing to defend Baylor and Baylor football when confronted by the Red Raiders, Aggies, Longhorns, Sooners, and Cowboys who run feral across Texas outside of the Baylor Bubble. And for a brief flash, I was armed with a few more weapons to defend myself.

Players like Shawn Bell, Dominique Zeigler, Trent Shelton, Joe Pawelek, Daniel Sepulveda, C.J. Wilson and Colin Allred were the kinds of hardworking, under-recruited players Grant Teaff had coached up to make Baylor a solid and respected football program (Side note: if this new stadium gets built and it doesn't somehow bear Grant Teaff's name, someone is going to have a lot of explaining to do). There was the double overtime win against the #16 Aggies in 2004 and a five win 2005 season in which we lost to Oklahoma in double overtime in Norman. Dominique Zeigler went off in that game and made a catch on a deep ball that I'm still trying to wrap my mind around. We were making strides. Bears were getting drafted and signing NFL contracts. Daniel Sepulveda won the Ray Guy award...twice! I didn't care that our punter was our most hyped player and neither did any other Baylor fan. He was a Bear, dammit! And he could do this.

Then in 2007 the wheels fell off, we went 3-9, and didn't win a Big XII game. Let's be honest, we were already driving on rims.

Exit Guy Morriss.

Enter Art Briles.

I can't not like Art Briles. He coached some relative of mine (I'm not sure of the cousin rules...twice removed...second...distant...whatever) at Stephenville, coached at my high school (waaaaaay before my time), and sounds just about as Texan as you can get without sounding unauthentic. Those appear to be inconsequential qualities when you're tasked with rebuilding a program that has violently resisted being rebuilt, Baylor in 2008 was sort of the Afghanistan of college football, but those are precisely the qualities that have allowed him to attract, improve, and retain players like RG3, Kendall Wright, Terrance Ganaway, Terrance Williams, Danny Watkins, Phil Taylor, Ahmad Dixon, Lache Seastrunk, David Gettis, Jason Smith, Elliot Coffey, Philip Blake, and J.D. Walton.

There's just something about Briles that makes you want to play for him, and not because you're scared of him *cough* Gary Patterson *cough*, but because you believe in what he says and you don't want to let him down. I remember listening to Grant Teaff speak at a luncheon I was invited to as a grad student. One of my buddies from the soccer team was there with me and when Teaff finished his speech, we both stood to applaud but did so hopping from foot to foot because we were ready to go run through a brick wall for the guy. Briles has that quality and instills belief where others see only reasons to doubt. I remember Briles, in his first season at Baylor, saying something along the lines of, "Baylor fans will get behind Baylor football when we give them a reason to." It was an honest assessment of Baylor football in recent years, but it also pointed a way forward for a program that had been adrift and searching for excuses. Everything will take care of itself when we start winning. Let's start winning. Vintage Briles. He brought in guys like RG3 who are supremely confident, march to a slightly different beat, exude positivity, and wanted to be the start of something.

That start was not without its bumps as Baylor won only four games in each of Art Briles' first two seasons at the helm and RG3 missed an entire season with an ACL tear. But then there was a 7-6 season and Baylor's first bowl bid since I was in junior high. I sat in a bar in Washington, DC the night before my first marathon and sacrificed my finishing time goal to watch the Bears beat the University of Texas in Austin. I yelled and high-fived strangers. The week before, I was at Homecoming in Waco with my dad watching a Baylor football game together live for the first time since I was in elementary school. We beat Kansas State to become bowl eligible and my dad rediscovered his affinity for Baylor football for the first time since Grant Teaff was fired. For the New Year I drove from Indianapolis to Houston to share a suite in Reliant Stadium with a bunch of other NoZe Brothers and watch Baylor play Illinois in the Texas Bowl. Remember, just a few years earlier we had lost to Southern Illinois in the last game of the season to go 3-8. This was quite a change, the start of hope growing into anticipation and excitement.

The college football public is just sitting up and taking notice of that start, but for my money, it's four years late. RG3 has looked like a thoroughbred class act since he stepped on campus, won the Big XII 400m hurdles, and did that little stutter step juke move on the sideline of the Wake Forest game in 2008. Add to that humility, humor, academic excellence, and the quiet confidence that comes from knowing there's a world out there beyond football. Watching Robert Griffin III win the Davey O'Brien award last night was telling. It's not that he was nonplussed or expected to win it, but that he didn't seem awed by the moment or affected in the way one might expect of superstar 21 year old athletes. It's a prestigious award and he was clearly appreciative, but there's a quality of aloof confidence about him that showed in his acceptance of the trophy and that he's shown throughout his Baylor career. For the last few seasons, gliding into the huddle with the game on the line, Griffin might as well have been wearing a sign that says, "I got this."

Briles and RG3 have been the college football version of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker ("Return of the Jedi" Luke Skywalker, not "A New Hope" Luke Skywalker) and if Griffin wins the Heisman tomorrow night it'll be sort of like that last scene in "Return of the Jedi" when The Death Star blows up and all the Ewoks absolutely lose their shit. They're a type of bear, right? For now though, the anticipation is just too perfect. For Baylor fans who love and are proud of their university, this has been a long time coming. This isn't the Griffin to Williams touchdown pass to beat Oklahoma on national television. It's the 21 point, untelevised comeback against Kansas as described by the ~~insufferable~~, ~~obnoxious,~~ ~~glad-handing~~, ~~clueless~~, ~~water-boy-all-grown-up~~, Voice of the Bears, John Morris. It's the culmination of everything that came before it. It's the work of the players who did what they could in the lean years between Teaff and Briles. It's the Baylor fans who sat in Floyd Casey Stadium at games against Texas, Oklahoma, and Texas A&M when it seemed like there was more maroon, burnt orange, and crimson in the stands than there was green and gold. Rather than a bolt from the blue, Baylor's recent success, RG3's ascendency, and Briles' stewardship of the program are the opening pages in a chapter of what has, until this point, been a very cumbersome book to read, but one that had to be read to get where we are now.

We're finally to the good part. Let us enjoy it for a few moments.

Top 25 Redux

2011-12-08T22:27:00.004-05:00

When you've not written in a while or are in a slump, sometimes it's a good idea to just ride the coattails of something you've written before and ease on back into the groove. Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and, most obviously, Dan Brown have all made a career out of this. I mean really, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons are EXACTLY the same book. Yes, this means I read both of them...Damn you, Dan Brown! Damn youuuuuuuu!

Clearly, I'm not in the same boat as these guys. For one, I'm terrible at writing fiction. For two (Can you say 'for two'?), half of my posts are about people crapping their pants and my most popular writing to date is a reading of The Dukes of Hazzard as the Gospel of Christ. I guess that's a sort of hillbilly Da Vinci Code, right?

Anyhow, I'm going to pull a Dan Brown here and revisit a post from about a year ago. A lot has happened in the last year. Heartbreak, a best friend's wedding, two moves, personal crises, heartbreak again...let's see how this has been reflected in my iPod's Top 25 Most Played songs! I know, you're on the edge of your seat in anticipation. Cut me some slack.

1. This Modern Love by Bloc Party - Admittedly, this live version is not as good as the album version, but who cares? If you're going to schlep a song title from David Bowie, you'd better bring the business. Lyrically, I love this song, especially the last lyrics. "Do you wanna come over and kill some time? Throw your arms around me." Is there such a thing as a love song that isn't in some way part of everyone's autobiography? Methinks not.

2. No Love by Eminem - Only Eminem could sample a song by a guy who looks like this and still sound hard as fuck. This may be the greatest breakup song of all time. Thank God Eminem cleaned up and got his shit in one sock. Offended by his lyrics or not, the guy is absolutely the most clever, intense, and skilled rapper out there.

3. Kill Everybody by Skrillex - I probably never would have gotten turned on to Skrillex were it not for a certain young lady with an eclectic and discerning taste in really, really cool music, but I'm glad I did. A lot of dubstep producers cringe that he's brought their genre to the masses, but I have to chalk that up to sour grapes. In another universe, where I'm a mixed martial arts fighter (laughable as I've never been in a fight and have no intention of starting that habit now), this is my entry music. Pretty sure I win the fight before I even get to the ring.

4. Almost Easy by Avenged Sevenfold - I don't know what it is about these guys that I like because they're essentially a meat head band, but I have to admit to a weak spot for really aggressive music. And if there is a redeeming value to Avenged Sevenfold it's, as I've mentioned before, the musicianship is pretty unbelievable. Additionally, as I've also said before, there's something delicious about unabashed heavy metal. This song reminds me of an ex girlfriend from ages ago. We played the back and forth game for way too long; sort of a fucked up, emotionally disturbing version of the Mango skits from Saturday Night Live. If she were self aware enough to have any sort of introspective thought, I think the lyrics to this song would have been a pretty accurate inner monologue.

5. Too Shy To Scream by AFI - Full disclosure: I LOVE AFI. If I have a critique, it's that lyrically Davey Havoc (great stage name) can be a touch too earnest. Having said that, what's wrong with being a little over the top from time to time? Androgynous? Effeminate even? The fact is, I'm not sure there's a lead singer out there who has more fun being a lead singer than Mr. Havoc. Also, if you get the chance, brave the Hot Topix kids and go to an AFI show. Awesome live. Fact.

6. Veronica Sawyer Smokes by AFI - Clearly, I don't skip over these two songs as they're ordered back to back on the Crash Love Album. Ditto my thoughts above. "Oh, I saw you every time I closed my eyes in the Hughes film I had scored, produced, and starred in in my mind. I could recite you, well, I'd written every line but you strayed far from my flawless script on which I'd spent a lifetime."

7. Tell Me What it Is by Rodney Parker and the 50 Peso Reward - Again, the album version is better, but a songwriter and his guitar are tough to beat. What do we have so far? Rap, dubstep, heavy metal, Indy, Emo, and now country? Sounds like a day in my life. I have a weakness for good Texas country and this is right up my alley. I'm pretty sure Rodney Parker is going to appear somewhere else on this list...maybe a couple of times. Lyrically, Parker doesn't pander to the conventions of modern country music and I could kiss him for it. He also does a great cover of Atlantic City by Bruce Springsteen. Who wouldn't love that? Communists, that's who.

8. Just Like Heaven by The Cure - My best friend and I were both raised in separate football nuts regions of the area south of the Mason-Dixon line and constantly argue about Big XII offenses and SEC defenses. He also occasionally sends me comedic picture messages of himself in his underwear, I've told him I love him on more than one occasion (his wife too), and we both adore The Cure. If his parents are reading this, they're probably praying and mainlining Fox News shows just to stay alive. The Cure are easily the best band of the 80s and in my top five all time.

9. Smile Like You Mean It by The Killers - Can you be wildly successful and still be underrated? Great, great song writing. Wonderful lyrics. Morrisseyesque vocals. More often than not, a perfect soundtrack to my life.

10. We've Had Enough by Alkaline Trio - The aesthetic of this band is addictive and tailor made for some really great tattoos...if getting album jacket art as a tattoo wasn't itself tailor made for instant regret. I remember when Good Mourning came out. It was pretty much all I listened to and I still love the album. I'd say most of their lyrics are haunting and disturbing, but also tongue-in-cheek and playful. That's a tough combination to nail, but they do it.

11. Fast Lane by Bad Meets Evil - Highly inappropriate lyrics, expertly delivered. Best rap song of the last two years.

12. Wish by Paper Route - This band just lost the singer and songwriter that I loved them for, but hopefully it's not a death sentence. "All my decisions were just second guesses, looking for love like a bride looks for dresses." I spent the majority of a 16 hour drive back to Texas listening to this album and sang along most of the time. People in Arkansas stared.

13. Jenny Don't Be Hasty by Paolo Nutini - Where is Paolo Nutini from, you ask? Paisley, Scotland. When I was a little, little kid, I used to think it was odd to hear a black man speak with a UK accent, but now it seems completely normal. A guy named Paolo speaking with a Scottish accent still doesn't seem right. Great song. Fuck age differences. Like R. Kelly said, "Age ain't nothin' but a number." And that officially marks the first time R. Kelly and Paolo Nutini will ever be referenced in the same literary space. You're welcome.

14. Why Are You Here by MeTalkPretty - I'm beginning to wonder why I have a weak spot for overwrought female break up songs. Yeah, I'm not going down that rabbit hole. This chick has PIPES.

15. American Slang by The Gaslight Anthem - Working class band from New Jersey. Fender Telecasters. Heartfelt. I've seen this formula before.

16. Cautioners by Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American is a killer album from beginning to end and the ultimate "F you!" to the record label that dropped them. Yes, they can be a little too pop prone for my taste, but what a lovely song...and yes, it's breakup apropos.

17. 11 Hours by Rodney Parker and the 50 Peso Reward - God, this is a beautiful song. Do yourself a favor and listen to the album version (iTunes). If I cried, I never do...and I never lie either...seriously, this song would get me like a baby every time I hear it.

18. Silver Wings by Thrice -

From tender years you took me for granted
But Still I deign to wander through your lungs
While you were sleeping soundly in your bed,
Your drapes were silver wings, your shutters flung

I drew the poison from the summer's sting,
And eased the fire out of your fevered skin.
I moved in you and stirred your soul to sing;
And if you'd let me I would move again.

I've danced 'tween sunlit strands of lover's hair;
Helped form the final words before your death.
I've pitied you and plied your sails with air;
Gave blessing when you rose upon my breath.

And after all of this I am amazed,
That I am cursed far more than I am praised.

If you're going to sing about God, by God, do it like this.

19. International Players Anthem by UGK - You have to love southern rap. Seriously, you have to. UGK and Outkast may be the best ever. Pour one out for Pimp C. Also, does Andre 3000 remind anyone else of RG3? Makes RG3 even more Heisman worthy as far as I'm concerned. Andrew Luck's got no drip in his hip.

20. Just Say Yes by Snow Patrol - Apparently, this was played at my request at my best friend's rehearsal dinner. I say "apparently" because, even though I was the best man, I was in a plane somewhere over the Deep South when said rehearsal dinner was taking place. Halfway to the airport early that morning, I realized I had forgotten my suit. Faced with the decision between upsetting the groom by missing our tee time and upsetting the bride because I forgot my suit, I immediately told the cab driver to turn around and head back to my house to retrieve the suit. Not exactly Sophie's Choice.

21. Motivation by Kelly Rowland - Not exactly my go to genre, but I'm pretty sure people get pregnant just by listening to this song. Hot.

22. First of the Year by Skrillex - The drop in this song melts my face. Creepy video though. Seems sort of like a, "Well, we have to make a video, any ideas?" kind of video. Whatever. I have a friend who works for a concert promotions company who I'm pretty sure thinks I only contact her when I'm looking to score free tickets to good shows. I texted her to say hey right about the time Skrillex came to town. She responded with something along the lines of, "You just want Skrillex tickets, don't you." I really was just saying hey...but once it was mentioned...

23 and 24 Wax and Wire by Loch Lomond and A Little Piece by The Jezabels (respectively) - I heard both of these songs for the first time on this video of Danny MacAskill doing absolutely insane things on a mountain bike. I watch this video at least once a week. Part of it is the music, part of it is the ludicrous shit this guy is doing on a bike, and the other part of it is a little bit of Scottish pride. I claim Texas, but I was born in Scotland. That's a pretty badass combination if I do say so myself. Barbecue and haggis. Kilts and cowboy boots. Six shooters and headbutts. William Wallace and Sam Houston. Battle of Stirling and The Alamo. #winning.

25. Rosa Parks by Outkast - The mock phone conversation at the beginning of this video is what Outkast is all about, and God bless them for it. I can't hear this song and not dance. I sent a text to a girl I was dating referencing lyrics to this song. She responded with question marks. I educated her. Don't say I never did anything of value. Hush that fuss.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

2011-11-30T16:44:00.003-05:00

A week or so ago a study was released that suggested Fox News viewers were actually less informed than people who watch no news at all. Fox News viewers were probably shocked and offended by this - well might have been, but I'm guessing Fox News didn't even put this on its ticker and it's doubtful Halloween Mask Nancy Grace reads anything but her own teleprompter so she probably never got offended by the report in the first place - but it did stir up quite the tit for tat on various Facebook walls on which it was posted.

One such Facebook debate, a debate I regrettably got involved in, led off with a tired saying by a self-proclaimed Fox News fan that there were, "Lies, damn lies, and statistics," suggesting that any survey can be tweaked and spun so that it supports a certain bias. While I somewhat agree with this, I often find that this argument is used by people who don't want to even contemplate that the survey in question has any validity to it. It did however get me to thinking about statistics and emboldened me to click on the "stats" tab at the top of my Blogger home page for the first time to see, statistically anyway, who it is that reads this blog. Here are the results from the last month:

699 page views - Apparently I'm not the people's first choice in blogging entertainment. I've not written much recently...that must be the issue.

Blogger's Choice Awards, Google, Twitter, and Facebook lead the referring URLs, but there are some notable referrals from other bloggers that are greatly appreciated! Specifically, Nomad With Glassware, Life As We Make It, and Petite Pasteque (sorry, I can't do the accent on this keyboard).

There's also a significant number of referrals from a particularly odious and parasitic crap bag of a website called Nasty Banners that takes other people's work and tries to pass it off as its own. More on them later. I don't have the energy right now.

Breakdown by country:

USA - 492
UK - 38
Canada - 34 (Thanks, Canada!)
Australia - 21
Germany - 17
South Korea - 8
India - 6
Poland - 5
Russia - 5
Latvia - 4 (WTF?)

So far, everything makes sense. Statistics seem pretty solid. Fox News viewers must really be morons. But for what, you ask, are these readers searching?

Well, in the last month, Boss Hogg beat out Uncle Jesse with 54 searches to 35. Also, given that The Gospel According to Duke is far and away my most popular post, statistics say there are a lot more "Dukes of Hazzard" fans out there than I thought possible.

"Genie" led 25 online searches to my blog.

"Drinking Stories" appropriately accounted for 21 hits.

"Frogdog" comes in at 12.

"Mordecai" Children of the Corn gets a respectable 9.

Still, I get it. All of these are things I've posted about and form a logical pathway through the intertubes to my humble cyber affectation...but then there's this:

"Dad son masturbation stories." 1 search.

Fuck statistics. I'm watching Fox News.

Happiness

2011-11-27T17:47:00.000-05:00

There's a kid who plays for Texas Tech's football team named Happiness Osunde. Unfortunately, he suffered a horrific injury against Baylor last night so his name is more than a little ironic at the moment. I was watching last night's game (Sic 'em Bears!) and I started to think about Happiness, the player initially and then the idea, while the television announcers were showing images of Happiness' knee folding gruesomely in the wrong direction.

How can you not be struck by a name like Happiness? I know nothing of his background, but my initial reaction, although I'm not sure I'd name one of my own children Happiness, is that it's a wonderful name. How many times do you say your child's name from the time he is born to the time you never say anything again? Even calling him to dinner is, although I'm sure at some point it becomes routine, a subliminal reminder of the joy his birth has brought into your life. Happiness the person, just like happiness the idea, is something that requires(d) nurturing and patience and practice. Maybe you didn't get it right on Monday, but there's always Tuesday. Maybe you didn't get it right in January, but there's always February. Maybe you didn't get it right in 2011, but there's always 2012.

I'm coming to grips with this after some recent and spectacular personal failures. Without getting into details, I've spent the better part of the last 10 years waiting for happiness. When this debt gets paid off....When I meet the right woman...When I find the right job...When I find the right city...When I lead a healthier lifestyle...When...

The tricky thing is, none of those things happen unless you commit to making them happen. The trickier thing is that none of those things happen unless you create a context in which they can happen. You can't commit to meeting your soulmate. What is that? You may as well commit to walking to the moon. A commitment to something as massive and intangible as that fails almost as soon as you've articulated it and then where are you left? You're left in the same spot you were right before you committed to it. Stuck. Waiting. Finally, after some alarming and painful wake up calls, "when" has become right now. Failures have become starting points from which I can commit to the thousand little things that eventually, after time and practice, add up to the idea of happiness. That's the hope anyway.

On a long run this morning in a cold rain I found myself smiling at nothing in particular. The run, in and of itself, wasn't that gratifying. I had stepped in a few too many puddles and the rain was picking up as the temperature was dropping. If I hadn't been running regularly for the last month or so, I would have been cold, wet, tired, and miserable. As it was, the work I'd put in on sunny days in the early fall had accumulated in the form a ludicrous, beaming smile on my face. I must have looked ridiculous to anyone who drove past me. It occurred to me that gratification and happiness are not the same thing and things I've been doing for the last 10 years that I have found gratifying have not gotten me one step closer to being happy. In fact, in many ways they've kept me waiting. Gratification is what you feel while you're doing something, but it stops as soon as that something stops.

I started to form a list in my mind of things that over time and with practice create a context in which I can nurture happiness. I'll spare you the details because I'm sure the list makes for boring reading. Promiscuous, booze fueled sex didn't make the cut. I'm not upset about that. This is going to take time and it's going to be hard, but finally, finally, finally.

David Crowder Band - All I Can Say

2011-10-28T22:52:00.000-04:00

When You Find Yourself the Villain in the Story You Have Written

2011-08-04T19:56:00.000-04:00

I have this pan I love. I use it for almost everything. It's Calphalon, non-stick, very sturdily built. A while ago, I pan fried something and burned an acrid layer of gunk into it that seemed impossible to scrub out. I washed it on every conceivable setting in the dishwasher. I scrubbed the bejesus out of it with the coarsest scrubber I could find that wouldn't ruin its surface. I even put it on the stove, heated it until it was almost glowing, set off every smoke detector in my house, and tried to burn off the offending black residue. No dice.

Eventually, I just decided to continue to cook with it until it worked itself out. Great plan, right? This just made the residue worse and every meal I cooked, meals I used to love, began to taste charred, caustic, and poisonous.

As this is one big metaphor (yes, it is), I can't just toss it and get a new one, that would ruin the metaphor. There's only one thing for it. Stop ignoring it. Scrub the hell out of it. Keep scrubbing the hell out of it. Scrub it until every last bit of burnt shit is gone. Scrub it and don't use it until I'm confident I can enjoy a meal again without feeling like I licked the inside of a chimney.

Consider this a hiatus.

Until I'm the Good Guy again,

Doug

Warning: Genies Are Bastards

2011-07-11T16:58:00.001-04:00

Genies, leprechauns, and the like are sneaky, devious little bastards. I learned this from a Twilight Zone episode I saw when I was a little kid. Who says TV isn't edifying?

These three teenaged friends caught a leprechaun (what he was doing out of Ireland is anyone's guess) and made him grant them each a wish. The first kid wished for what I would probably have wished for when I was 13, x-ray vision. Why did he want x-ray vision? To check out girls' underwear, of course. What were you thinking? Well, at first the x-ray vision works swimmingly, but then as he focuses, panties give way to skin and then skin gives way to internal organs. The little perv gets sick and faints (also what probably would have happened to me at 13).

The second kid wishes that his parents will do only what he commands them to do. Not a bad wish, I suppose. His wish quickly goes awry when he has to tell them how to do everything. To make a pizza, he has to tell them in excruciating detail to first open the freezer then remove the pizza then unwrap the pizza then turn on the oven then put the pizza in the oven...you get the point.

The last kid wishes for a hot car and a kick ass limo pulls up complete with a driver. They go tear assing around town and soon get pulled over. The driver disappears and the three kids are arrested for driving a stolen car. Get it? "Hot car?" And that's the problem with genies and/or leprechauns. They're always trying to teach you some moral lesson about greed or self-centeredness.

My buddy Barrett reminded me of this on a six hour drive back from a casino in Shreveport, LA (that's another story altogether) after we had listened to R. Kelly's Ignition remix twelve too many times and needed something else to occupy our time.

"If you got one wish from a genie, what would it be?" He asked.

"Hmmm...not sure. You?" I replied.

"I'd wish for the ability to throw a 100mph fastball. That would take care of the money, fame, and women thing. I mean, if you're throwing that kind of smoke, you're gonna play in The Bigs."

He'd clearly wrestled with this important question many times before.

"Good wish," I responded.

There was a long pause while I was thinking of my wish and then Barrett broke the silence.

"Fucking genies. I take that back. I'd wish for the ability to throw a controlled, left-handed, 100mph fastball in a healthy, pain free way for at least ten years. Genies are always trying to teach you some ridiculous lesson and if I just wish for the fastball I'm not gonna be able to hit the broad side of a barn and I'll need Tommy Johns surgery after one pitch."

So true. Damned genies.

A couple of days ago another buddy of mine said he'd wish for a ludicrously wealthy wife so he could be a kept man and coach high school football for fun. I may have saved him a good deal of future misery when I cautioned him about genies and their mischievous lesson teaching.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," I said. "Seriously, you've gotta be careful jumping the gun like that. It's a good wish, but no genie is going to pass up the opportunity to make your wealthy wife hideously ugly and/or annoying, dumb as a stump, self-centered, unfaithful, abusive, prone to divorce you immediately, or all about a pre-nup. You've gotta think these things through."

"You're right," he said. "Fucking genies."

So let this be a lesson. Genies and leprechauns are wily and dastardly moral pedants. Take caution and really think through any wishes you might be tempted to make right out of the shoot. You've got time. Don't waste that wish.

You're welcome.

My Kind of Thuggish

2011-06-17T14:25:00.002-04:00

I have a deep and abiding love for rap music. I've written about this before, but I'm still no closer to being able to explain this affinity. UGK, Do or Die, Maino, Outkast, Three Six Mafia, Eminem, NWA, Tupac, Jay-Z, Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def Lil Wayne...the list goes on and on.

This seems to be pretty much par for the course for white guys my age and all I can say is that maybe we listen to and enjoy it in the same way and for the same reason that our parents listened to the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Namely, our/their parents hated it. I've never been arrested or destructively rebellious and I definitely pull the Office Space roll-up-the-window-and-turn-down-the-hardcore-rap maneuver when I pull up to an intersection in a predominantly black neighborhood. Essentially, I have no street cred.

The next video is a case study in my kind of thuggish.

General Tso's Revenge

2011-06-14T00:24:00.002-04:00

I always wanted to be good at a particular type of writing. When I was in college I had this fantasy of being the next young, edgy, insightful, sensitive, and humorous author who could break hearts with a few soul cleaving paragraphs and touch human truths with an artistically wry wit that seemed to playfully ambush my fantasized about troves of loyal readers (mostly swooning females).

Turns out I'm good at telling stories in which people shit their pants.

I know this because every time I post something that lays my soul bare my dad calls and says something like, "Hey, I read your blog the other day. I thought it was well written." When I post a poo story, I hear similar comments, but said comments need to be deciphered among periodic peals of laughter and child-like giggling. Typically, these stories also receive the most Facebook comments, often from people I've not heard from in years, and also get the most hits on the blog. I guess as a writer it's good to have a wheelhouse, I just never thought mine would involve human excrement.

Oh well. Know thyself, right?

In college my sister dated a miserable asshole we'll call Zack, mostly because Zack is his real name and I have absolutely no love loss for the guy. Zack was an odious hipster at a time when Austin was just becoming overwhelmed with odious hipsters. He had that heroin chic look, multiple awful tattoos, and and an artist's affect that was less genuinely artistic and more exhaustingly practiced. He was sort of like Bug from Uncle Buck but minus some weight and plus some disapproval from my family. The disapproval I speak of came not from Zack's appearance, my parents have always been very accepting, sometimes to a fault, of the people my sister and I have chosen to date, but from his complete disregard for my sister's needs and the sense of entitlement he felt he had to date her. Aside: I love my sister dearly and although I am anti death penalty, I know that were anyone to ever do anything terrible to her I would want to murder the bejesus out of him. Clear enough?

Anyhow, Zack and my sister were on the rocks and Zack, thinking he would show some vulnerability and the ability to communicate intimately, decided to share a particularly awful story involving his unfortunately exploding bowels in an effort to win her back. It didn't work, but he unknowingly created a magnificent parable for their relationship.

Being college students and particularly strained in the pocketbook (Sound familiar?), Zack and his buddy decided to do work at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet before attending a cookout at another friend's house. Apparently, the General Tso's Chicken was of particularly tasty quality that day and Zack consumed literally all he could eat. He and his friend were politely asked to leave by the restaurant's proprietors who afterwards undoubtedly rethought their business model so close to a university campus.

Stuffed to the gills on General Tso's delicious chicken, Zack and company made their way to the aforementioned cookout and immediately began to chase their affordable and delicious feast with multiple bottles of Shiner Bock. I was shocked later to learn that a rousing game of volleyball was also played at the party (who knew hipsters played volleyball?!), and about an hour or so in, General Tso, Shiner Bock, bumping, setting, and spiking collectively served as the impetus for some low grade intestinal cramping.

As I've said before, as with any good I Shit My Pants story, or Greek tragedy for that matter, impending doom could always have been avoided were it not for the hero's hubris. Zack could have left the party at the onset of his intestinal distress and violently evacuated his bowels in the privacy of his own home and Odysseus could have elected not to tell Polyphemus his real name and avoided being cursed by Poseidon, but arrogance is a powerful intoxicant and shit happens. Literally.

Zack instead elected to down another few beers thinking, foolishly so, that his discomfort would pass and a party marked by his early exit wasn't a party at all. Another hour or so passed and Zack finally felt the steel fisted squeezing of his lower abdomen that marks the beginning of an uncontrollable and immediate expulsion of the contents of one's bowels. It was go time.

Zack sprinted to the only bathroom in the house and found it occupied by another partygoer. Affecting his coolest I'm-just-waiting-calmly-for-my-turn-in-the-restroom-nothing-to-see-here stance, he tried to flex just the right muscles to avoid unleashing hell in the middle of the living room and managed to do just that long enough for the bathroom to become vacant.

Once inside, he hurriedly locked the door, sprang to the toilet, and began to struggle with his belt. At that time in Austin, proper hipster aesthetic necessitated the wearing of a scout belt with a completely unnecessary amount of slack in it. This required the wearer to cinch the belt tightly and prevented the smooth release of the sliding bar in the buckle. In normal situations involving waste elimination this is a minor inconvenience. In waste elimination situations involving General Tso, Shiner Bock, and volleyball, this is what we refer to as a "perfect storm".

Zack managed to get his pants (he was wearing no underwear, another hipster habit) to half mast or, for the more graphically inclined, half moon, before General Tso exacted his revenge. Without getting into too much detail, Zack's pants, legs, shoes, the toilet, and a generous percentage of the floor were covered in a fetid fecal eruption.

After a good few minutes collecting himself, surveying the damage, and trying, as calmly as possible, to convince the multiple partygoers impatiently waiting at the restroom door that he would be out momentarily, Zack hopped in the shower pantsless and washed himself from the waist down. He also had to wash his shoes. Seriously.

Aside: My Brother-in-law, the man lucky enough to eventually marry my sister and one of the best guys I've ever known (he's been a great buddy since 6th grade), is a naval fighter pilot. Pilots have a phrase for people who manage to stay cool and collected in awful situations that made perfect sense to me the first time I heard it because of this story. *Ahem* He's really got his shit in one sock. Zack had it in both shoes, his pants, and all over the floor.

After toweling off, he used the same towel to clean the toilet and the bathroom floor. He then disposed of the irretrievably soiled towel and his socks in the waste basket under the sink. At this point, those waiting for the bathroom had given up and returned to the party. Zack cracked the door and waited for his buddy to pass by and then, in a panicked voice, demanded that his buddy find him pants and quickly. Not knowing why Zack needed pants, his buddy leaned closer to the door and started to ask for clarification but was then assaulted by the caustic stench escaping from the cracked bathroom door. Without further question, he wheeled around and went searching the host's bedroom for some trousers.

Unfortunately for Zack, who stood well over six feet tall and weighed all of 140 pounds soaking wet, the party's host was a short, portly fellow. Any normal person would have cut his losses at this point, cinched the ridiculously fitting pants, and beat a path home. Zack decided to return to the party. Questions like Why did you change pants? Where have you been? Why are you barefoot? and Why are you carrying your shoes? were not enough for Zack to deprive the party of his company. What finally shamed him enough to leave was a question that was asked only after the central air kicked on in the house. I remember when I was a kid hanging out in my room and my mother was cooking chocolate chip cookies in the kitchen. I would have no knowledge of her cookie baking until the air conditioning would turn on and the vents in my room would gently emit the aroma of freshly baked deliciousness. This was the opposite of that. The question in question? What the fuck is that God awful stench?

Zack grabbed his buddy and told him it was time to leave. Now.

Like I said, a perfect parable. Take advantage of a good thing. Create a stinking mess. White wash your fuck up. Pretend nothing happened. Leave. Zack never got his shit in one sock.

Airport Bars: A Case Study in Story Value

2011-06-08T16:25:00.007-04:00

I was flying home the other day - Arms sure are tired! (forgive me, I had to) - and had a couple of hours to kill before my flight departed so I sidled up to a bar (the only bar) in the Lubbock airport and ordered a beer.

Frequent travelers who enjoy people watching as much as I do LOVE airport bars. The transience of the other personalities is so palatable and that I'm-never-going-to-see-you-again voice in the back of many of their heads is so strong that they will air the dirtiest of secrets, release the most reprehensible inner beliefs, and sometimes completely fabricate a life to an absolute stranger just because they can. And the great thing is that one (assuming one is more of the listening ilk than of the confessing ilk) has to do almost nothing to coax this out of them. They WANT to do it. Sitting at a bar, ordering a beer, and looking approachable is often enough to attract a talker. They're like moths to flames. Granted, you can never quite be sure what is going to be said and you run the risk of hearing something that upsets you and/or causes you to lose your faith in marriage, government, the arts, religion, schools, men, women, family, the military, big business, the entertainment industry, dogs, sports, Halloween, or the decency of all humankind, but regular readers of this blog will realize that this is a small price to pay for story value. Put in simple terms:

Personal Discomfort (what is said + what is done) - Disbelief < Story Value

or

PD (ws + wd) - D < SV

It's science.

Anyhow, I'm sitting in this bar in the airport in Lubbock watching these three soggy, middle-aged salesmen chug boxed wine and literally dry hump a young, svelte blonde thing who is headed to New Orleans for a bachelorette party and chuckling to myself when Rick sits down right next to me.

Rick looked normal enough. Rick turned out not to be normal. If Rick were a character in a screenplay, he would be introduced thusly:

[Rick enters from the left side of the bar. He briefly surveys the patrons, then walks confidently, but with a slight chip on his shoulder and seats himself next to the young(ish) man at the bar who is drinking alone. Rick wears cowboy cut jeans with work boots and a denim shirt tucked in to reveal a healthy paunch. Rick's collar is open to the third button and a gold chain dangles there ensnared by his graying chest hair. The sleeves of the shirt are rolled to 3/4 length to reveal a faded, indecipherable tattoo on the back of his right forearm. Rick's salt and pepper hair is styled in a tight crew cut. He wears aviator shaped yellow lensed glasses. Rick orders a double Jack and Coke in a pint glass. Rick taps his drink with his large, gold pinky ring before speaking.]

And speak, Rick did. In thirty minutes, I learned the following:

Rick's son's best buddy was slated to be the high school valedictorian but one day got stoned to the Bejesus Belt and decided to rob the small town Sonic...at 3pm...maskless. His son's buddy made it two blocks with the $63.00 haul before he was apprehended. Oh, and Rick's son was with him. Rick made his son spend the night in jail to teach him a lesson.

Said lesson didn't work. Rick's son, years later, is currently in the clink.

Rick's daughter is a softball player and can throw smoke in fast pitch soft ball. Rick cannot comprehend how anyone can throw a ball that fast underhanded.

Rick is a construction supervisor and his current project is "seven ways of fucked up." It's not his fault though.

Rick met his wife while living as a foster child in her parents' house.

Rick's parents and parents-in-law are the same people.

Rick's current neighborhood has a large number of Vietnamese families moving in.

Rick believes this is why the family cat has gone missing. "You know they eat cats," Rick questions me and the bar in general after double Jack and Coke #2.

Rick wishes "The Whites" would stop getting forced out of their neighborhoods by people like "The Cat Eaters."

Rick is trying to get his card for the Senior PGA Tour. Qualifying rules have thus far prevented him from qualifying, but he's got sponsors lined up to foot the bill now and will be on tour in no time.

Rick has to ride in a golf cart when he plays on account of his disability.

Rick has chronic back pain.

Rick's chronic back pain stems from the second time he was struck by lightning.

Rick's gonna have one more Jack and Coke and then go catch his plane.

Rick was "Damned glad to meet [me]!"

PD(ws + wd) - D < SV

Like I said, it's science.

Damn you, poison ivy! Damn Youuuuuuuuuuu!

2011-06-06T18:17:00.002-04:00

I'm getting over my second epic struggle with poison ivy this week. Although I wish I could write that as "Poison Ivy" and therefore, through the blogosphere, confess to you all that I am actually Batman and have recently vanquished for the second time the sexy and salacious villain of same name, I cannot. Alas, my poison ivy is a virulent little bitch of a vine/shrub/weed that has been the bane of my existence since I first encountered it as a child tromping around in the undergrowth of the creek that ran by my home pretending I was GI Joe.

My first youthful encounters with this spawn of Satan were more inconveniences than actual death matches, but since moving to Indianapolis four years ago, I have, on two occasions, been exposed to the urushiol that spews from its every surface and thereafter been subjected to the seeping misery that accompanies it.

How, you ask, has this happened? Well, my dog has A.D.D. and is too curious for her own good. Any overgrown area that smells faintly of chipmunk, squirrel, rabbit, or other woodland creature is immediately a target for her reckless tromping, sniffing, and digging. The urushiol gets on her fur, her fur gets on me, and voila! Horrible seeping rash.

The first time this happened, the rash that eventually appeared on my leg was bothersome, but no worries. A seeping leg rash can be easily covered with a bandage, jeans, and a little modesty. Plus, the scar that eventually formed there blended nicely with the multitude of other scars on my shins and knees that have been the consequence of what my fellow soccer playing friends call a "sometimes overzealous style of play." When they don't use that euphemism they just say "dirty." I'll argue that until I'm blue in the face, but I digress.

The second time this happened, just last week, I had finished doing a little yard work and was playing with the aforementioned A.D.D. canine and wound up with a disgusting, oozing swath of broken skin that extended from my shoulder to the top of my right ear. There's no hiding this. I was literally under house arrest for three days save for my mandatory trips to work (although I did take one sick day). Shaving was not and still is not an option. This is bad for someone who has to appear respectable on a daily basis. To boot, I am challenged in the facial hair department. Were I able to grow a Paul Bunyanesque man mask, things might not have appeared so bad. Unfortunately, my beard is what can best be described as "weedy" and is starting to get a little too much salt mixed in with the pepper. I also may wind up with a neck/facial scar from the whole ordeal. Scarface is a seriously cool nickname, but you want to get that nickname as a result of a knife fight in a Cuban prison, not a canoodling session with your beloved dog.

Which leaves me where? Well, I have a pretty serious poison ivy infestation in the backyard. I need to get rid of this poison ivy. Poison ivy is notoriously difficult to eradicate and I'm allergic as hell to the stuff. If you've got any suggestions, please throw a guy a bone. How far am I willing to go? Well, here's a list of things I would rather do than EVER be exposed to poison ivy again:

Go on an 8 hour road trip with Sarah Palin.

Masturbate with Tiger Balm.

Let a tiger masturbate me with no balm.

Cheer for the Mexican Men's National Soccer Team over the US Men's Team.

Paper cut my ass hundreds of times and then sit in a lemon juice bath.

Have a blistering sunburn on my business.

Wax my head.

Roll in stinging nettles.

Be stung on the tongue by bees.

Give a two hour PowerPoint presentation naked.

Watch my parents have sex (maybe not).

Get tipped over in a full Port-O-Potty...door down.

Go to a Justin Bieber concert.

Let David Beckham kick me in the crotch. Maybe just left footed, but the crotch nonetheless.

Eat a light bulb.

Kiss a hot stove.

Drink water wrung from camel shit in the Sahara with Bear Grylls.

The list goes on and on. Please leave your poison ivy eradication suggestions in the comments and any other things you would rather do than be subjected to rashes from this particularly onerous and evil flora. Help!

What Would Jesus Do? He'd Wait Three Days.

2011-04-29T15:34:00.005-04:00

A guy has a formula he uses to determine the number of days he should wait before calling a newfound target of his affection. I've never been too big on these formulas and usually call if and when I feel like it. Having said that, I'll concede that even if I feel like it moments after being given a phone number, and this has happened on a few rare occasions, I believe you have to at least wait until the following evening. That's just common courtesy, right? I mean, she could have been drunk...you could have been drunk. All sorts of things could have conspired to cloud the judgement of the parties involved and you're only going to make it worse if your zeal gets the best of you and you pick up the phone too soon.

I've heard the standard Three Day Rule explained ad nauseum, but a buddy of mine recently laid it out before me with pretty impeccable - strike that - Biblical logic. I'm pretty sure he didn't come up with this on his own, but that doesn't undermine the analogy's genius.

Jesus would wait three days, and here's why:

For a little context, the Bible never actually says on which day of the week Jesus was crucified. Most people go with Friday, but there's a whole lot of stuff that happened between the crucifixion, death, and resurrection to make Friday the least logical. Not to get too into it, but the Passover Sabbath and then the actual Sabbath of Saturday would have severely limited anyone's ability to get anything done and there was a lot of spice buying and feast preparation going on between Jesus being taken off the cross and Mary running into the Big JC on Sunday. No way all of that happened Friday afternoon before sundown and then super early Sunday morning. This is BCE we're talking here. It's not like there was a supermarket around the corner for all of your Sabbath needs.

I kind of feel like Wednesday makes the most since. Agree to disagree if you're breaking out your Bible right now to argue with me. I mean, come on! This blog is called Drinking Stories, for Christ's sake!

So, let's say Jesus died for all our sins Wednesday afternoon. If he'd been resurrected Thursday anyone who ran into him would be like, "Oh, hey Jesus! What's up?" No one would have known he'd been gone and more importantly, no one would have missed him. Sort of takes the miracle bit out of The Resurrection.

If Jesus had been resurrected Friday, people would be like, "Oh, hey Jesus. I didn't see you yesterday. How was Passover? What did you and The Twelve do?" No big deal. Same thing goes for Saturday.

Now, after three days and three nights, Jesus shows up on Sunday and it's like, "Holy fuck! Jesus! He is risen! I'm SOOOOOOO glad to see you!" That's a big deal. It's been long enough that people miss him, but not so long that they've forgotten about him.

Three days: Score!

Imagine what would have happened if Jesus had waited until Monday?

"Hey, who are you?"

"It's Jesus. I was crucified the other day?"

"Jesus who?"

"Jesus Christ of Nazareth?"

"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus....hmmmmm. Oh, I think I remember you. Tall guy? Beard?"

No one wants that conversation. Wait three days. Not one. Not two. Three and no more. Do not wait four. It is written.

Nickname Friday!

2011-04-22T16:20:00.000-04:00

Nicknames are tricky business. They come and go on their own time; they do not respect the rules of logic; they can be demeaning and meant to show affection at the same time; and they are often so powerful as to consign a person's actual name to irrelevance. In short, I freaking love nicknames.

So without further ado, I am officially beginning Drinking Stories' first recurring segment, Nickname Friday. Don't all get too excited at once.

The Texas Wagon - I met The Texas Wagon in college. She was the best friend of a girl that was sometimes sleeping with and sometimes not sleeping with one of my best friends. She made the trip up to our university one weekend and the four of us wound up hanging out for most of her visit. The Texas Wagon was certifiably gorgeous. Blonde hair, blue/green eyes, tanned, intelligent, quick-witted...the list went on and on. Why The Texas Wagon, you ask? Well, she had the most disproportionately massive ass I have ever seen in my life. Seriously. It's as if all of her other body parts belonged to her and at some point she experienced an ass transplant. She looked like a one of those Japanese Hentai characters with ludicrously sized breasts and asses, but minus the breast part and double the ass part.

Also minus the Japanese hang up on pigtails and schoolgirls who also know Karate...and may/may not be robots...or cyborgs...or under the influence of some mind control device. Also, she wasn't Japanese (in case the blonde and blue eyed part didn't clue you in). So I guess now the analogy is completely disproved and gasping for life on the floor of this blog somewhere. I tried?

Note: This nickname can be used in any geographical circumstance. Hoosier Wagon, Cajun Wagon, Jayhawk Wagon, Chi Town Wagon, etc. You get the point.

Another note: Rereading this, I know it sounds hugely chauvinistic, but that is not at all my intent.

Another note: The Hentai thing is common knowledge, right? Right? Someone please agree with me so I sound a little less pervy.

Thank God We Found and Tamed Those Frogdogs

2011-04-21T16:19:00.002-04:00

I had this buddy in college named Aron (Yes, with one 'A'). Aron was maybe the best story teller I have ever been around. He was so good in fact, that I unknowingly began to mimic his mannerisms and pattern of speech in my own stories because they seemed to illicit peals of laughter independent of what he was actually saying. I also appropriated a good number of his stories and made them my own, or at least retold them as I-have-this-buddy-who stories.

No one had better stories. Everyone in every story had a great name, and if they didn't, they had a great nickname. There was Steve Ignash who everyone called Jaws. Johnny Yelverton (whose nickname escapes me). Stu who clearly didn't need a nickname and was actually in college with us at the same time so any story involving him could be immediately corroborated to make sure it wasn't total BS, and many of Aron's stories seemed like they had to be total BS.

There was a story about his summer camp counselor, Mr. Moon, who had a tendency to absolutely flip his shit and scream at the slightest provocation or violation of camp rules. Shortly after directing his wrath at a young and terrified Aron, he was arrested for murdering his mother with a hammer. There was the story about the Korean gang fight at his high school where everyone was LITERALLY Kung Fu fighting. There was the story about two mall hoods who tried to steal a shirt from Aron while he was wearing it. There was the story, light on details, about his father and something involving a bank robbery (Aron liked to say 'heist'). There was a famous story, often retold, about a conversation Aron overheard at a truck stop coffee bar at three in the morning between a trucker and two women Aron described as "Rode hard Biker bitches." Actually, it wasn't so much a conversation as a monologue by the trucker told for the benefit of the "biker bitches." The monologue went thusly:

"So there I was, right? And me and the bitch are getting it on. The bitch has whipped cream all over her. Things are gettin' hot and right as I'm about to blow my load, I grab one of the empty whipped cream bottles and I start to get high. Then the bitch gets mad at me. What's up with that?"

Ridiculous and absurd things like this seemed to only ever happen to Aron. Or maybe they happened to us all, but he was the only one tuned to hear, synthesize, embellish, and retell them to hilarious effect. He was/is a screenwriter so that must say something.

When he didn't have any material based in reality, Aron had no problem turning to his dreams for our entertainment. One dream in particular stands out in my mind.

"So we're on this island, right? All of us. And it's like fucking Water World and the water is continuing to rise. We're all running up to the top of this island and scrambling to stay ahead of the rising water. There are old women and babies and dogs and just a fuck ton of people, right? Everyone scrambling. I'm ahead a bit and I turn around to see this old lady with the water lapping right at her heels and I'm thinking, 'Man, that old lady better put it in gear,' and right as I think this, the BIGGEST FUCKING CROCODILE I have ever seen springs from the water and chomps her right in half. I'm like, 'Holy fuck!' --"

At this point in the story, Aron executed one of his patented mannerisms which was sort of a wide eyed look of shock combined with a partly agape mouth and a casual point for about a two beat pause. Clearly, I can't recreate this via the written word, but you get the point.

"-- So I turn around and start sprinting to the top of the island and there's very little room left up there and the water's still rising and now I know there are these massive, prehistoric killer crocodiles rising with the water. So, we all get to the top of the island and there's nowhere else to go. We're totally screwed. The water's almost to us and one of those massive crocodiles jumps out of the water at us. Right at that moment, this fucking mix between a dog and a frog, but like a vicious frog with fangs and a dog body, leaps out of nowhere and starts attacking the crocodile. Then there are like twelve more and they just shred the fucking crocodile. All I remember thinking is, 'Thank God we found and tamed those frogdogs and they're on our side.' Wildest thing I ever saw."

I'm thinking more the above and less the below.

In Which I Suddenly and Inexplicably Become Irresistible to Women 15 Years Older Than Me

2011-04-18T22:49:00.000-04:00

I'm not old. Contrary to what some of my younger friends tell me, I'm still in the spring of my life (late spring, but spring nonetheless). Let's call it May? Which is why I'm still trying to wrap my mind around last Friday night and failing to do so.

Perhaps it was the venue. Perhaps it was the lighting. Perhaps it was the copious amounts of booze (some fruity wine, no doubt) clearly imbibed by my potential suitors, but I inexplicably found myself the main course of a cougars only buffet. Maybe not cougars. What's older than a cougar?Sabre-tooth Tiger?

The evening started promising enough. A buddy of mine and I went to a bar we frequent with some regularity. A band was playing. People were dancing. More importantly, there were plenty of men and women in attendance that I would easily, and with no creative mathematics on my part, call peers. Now, I'm not a pick up artist, never have been. There's just something sleazy to me about approaching a woman I don't know in a bar and trying to get in her pants. I see it as a sexual telemarketing call. Phone rings, you think it might be someone you know, you pick up, and then your heart sinks as you realize some douchebag with too much hair gel and after shave (and it's always after shave and not cologne) has interrupted your good time. It's just not for me.

Because of this reluctance on my part to ever play that roll, my buddy and I posted up at the bar for a few beers, some decent music, and some decidedly solid people watching. Then I got a tap on the shoulder. More accurately, I got a boob on the shoulder. As I turned around to see who said offending mammary gland belonged to, I was shocked to see a woman who resembled my portly, jovial, and matronly third grade teacher. Thinking it must have been an accident, I scooted my stool over so that the school mistress could have unfettered access to the bar and order her drink more easily. It was crowded and everyone was having trouble getting service. The boob followed...with a sly smile.

Nothing more followed at that point, boobs ordered her drink, and that was that. A few more songs were played and then she came back. Same routine with a little awkward banter this time. Nothing more followed, boobs ordered her drink, and that was that. A few more songs were played and then she came back again. SAME ROUTINE. Seriously? The male equivalent of this is an old guy approaching the bar, dry humping a young woman's leg, smiling creepily, and then disappearing only to repeat the cycle over again 10 minutes later...except it would probably only happen twice because guys like that tend to make an early exit at the insistence of a manager or a bouncer.

I was shocked the fourth time I felt a tap on my shoulder because I was pretty sure I hadn't given off the "I have a thing for larger, significantly older women vibe." However, this time when I turned around it was a different woman. 26 year old, smoking hot, blonde athlete? Negative. It was another massively overweight 40 something.

"Excuse me, are you single," she asked.

I was flummoxed and thinking I was on a hidden camera show so I didn't answer quickly enough. My buddy, ever the mischief maker, sprang into action.

"Yeah, he's single!"

"Single and content? Or single and looking," she pressed.

Again, I don't know if it was the beer I'd had or the still total inability to comprehend what sort of signals I was clearly sending out, but I hesitated to answer.

"He's totally single," my buddy laughingly answered.

"Well, I have a friend who's been staring at you all night. Would you like to meet her?"

I started to answer, "Well, I'm not really -," but before I could get out the rest of my objection, my buddy leapt off his bar stool and offered it up for the mystery woman waiting in the wings.

"Great," the middle woman exclaimed, "She'll be right over!"

I stared dumbfounded at my friend as he smiled back at me.

"Maybe it's a niece or younger coworker," he offered, still with a shit eating grin on his face.

I took a sip of my beer thinking that although that was a nice idea, I was pretty sure he was wrong. I was right. Moments later, a woman I can best describe as Skeletor dressed in drag, sauntered up to the bar and sat down next to me.

Mercifully, the music, crowd noise, and my total lack of desire to engage in any conversation whatsoever prevented us from having anything to talk about beyond me finding out that she had children my age (as in plural), and a gentleman equally as long in the tooth as her sidled up moments later to drop his best soccer mom game on her. Far from feeling like my territory was being intruded upon, I was thankful that at least one person in the bar (albeit a 50 year old dude) seemed to recognize that I was as old as I actually am and that there was no way in his mind that anything remotely amorous was unfolding between myself and his quarry.

Disaster avoided, I excused myself and sought out my buddy to tell him he'd better never, ever, ever, in a million years pull that type of shit again. He apologized, said that he owed me, but did all of this with a ridiculous smile and twinkle in his eye.

The "I owe you" part of his apology should have sent alarm bells ringing in my ears, but I let it go. Mistake. As the evening was winding down, he excused himself to go to the restroom. But he didn't go to the restroom. Instead, before I could object, he walked to the other side of the bar to tell the most Helen-of-Troy-like female in the entire establishment that his buddy (me) across the bar would like to meet her. I know I've said that I'm not one for approaching women I don't know, but I'm REALLY not for outsourcing said approach to someone else. The approach is douchey. The outsourcing is spineless.

Knowing I was stuck -I mean, you can't jump up and leave while your buddy is trying to point you out and you can't flail your arms and yell "No!" from across the bar (which is what I wanted to do) - I just sat and tried to act as unsuspecting as possible until he returned, and he did return.

"Your presence is requested across the bar," my buddy said as he walked up to me, shit eating grin still firmly plastered across his face.

Fuck.

I took a breath, not wanting to go, but forced myself to walk over to the other side of the bar and introduce myself to Helen. She was actually a friendly and talkative young lady (yes, young), but about 20 minutes into our conversation, she asked me who the woman on the other side of the bar was and why she was burning holes in her with her eyes.

Confused, I looked up, and there was Boobs, sitting alone, and absolutely shooting icicles at us both.

"Do you know her," Helen asked.

"No, I don't. She was ordering drinks between my buddy and I earlier, but I've never met her before."

As if on cue, the bartender set a beer in front of me.

"I didn't order this," I said.

"You're Doug, right," the bartender asked.

"Yeah."

"It's from the lady across the bar," the bartender replied.

Shortly thereafter, Helen left with her friends.

Shortly after that, my buddy and I left, but not after trying to decide what to do with the beer that the school mistress had ordered me. In case you're wondering, I drank it. Etiquette is one thing, but wasting a beer is another altogether. I'm not proud of it, but I did this while making as little eye contact as possible with the school mistress. I did, however, mouth "Thank you" across the bar before I took my first sip.

After we'd paid our tabs and left the bar I asked my buddy what the hell had just happened.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "Once is an oddity. If it happens again, it's a pattern."

A few moments of silence passed as we continued walking and then he offered, "I mean, there is a little gray over your temples."

Thanks, Ass.

When Abstinence Goes Horribly Awry

2011-04-11T23:35:00.004-04:00

I'm not a big believer in abstinence. And by "not a big believer," I mean I think it's pretty silly in the grand scheme of things. I'm not saying I advocate copious amounts of promiscuous sex, but not having sex until marriage is a little like allowing someone to teach you skydiving because they stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Bad business.

I could go on and on, but I'd probably just end up coming off as a typical guy who wants to sleep with women (I am, but that's beside the point), so I'll just retell a story that encapsulates my distrust of all things abstinence.

*Ahem*

Bob and Julie were like a lot of the people I went to college with. If you've ever read this blog, you know that I went to a conservative Baptist university in The Great State of Texas. The student body ran the gamut from heartless, pagan wild children to first century throwbacks intent on ruining the fun for everyone else. Bob and Julie were neither of these things, but fell more to the first century side than the pagan wood nymph side.

Bob and Julie were, in most ways, a delightful couple really, truly in love with one another. They were on the path to marriage weeks into their relationship and had that glow of young romance and the security that they had found The One in one another. As a newly minted couple wanting a Christ centered relationship, they decided to wait until they were married to have sex. Although Bob had done the deed in a previous relationship (Julie had not), he gladly accepted the no sex stipulation as he was confident Julie was the end all be all of his romantic life.

Fast forward one year.

Bob and Julie had just made it back to their hotel on the night of their wedding and were both anxiously anticipating consummating the marriage. This was the main event. Julie nervously went into the restroom to slip into something more comfortable and prepare herself for what she had built up in her mind as the most earth shattering, consequential moment of her entire adult life. Bob, as the cagey veteran in this equation, knew that his new wife was nervous and he anxiously fumbled around the wedding suite thinking of what he could do to take the anxiety out of the situation for them both. I can't say that I would have formulated the same plan of action that he did, but I give him high marks for thinking outside the box.

What was his plan of action? Bob stripped down to just his socks and laid stark naked on the bed with all the lights on. His big plan to break the tension was, as Julie exited the bathroom, to grab his ankles, roll onto his back, and fart. Like I said, not what I would have done, but who am I to judge? I imagine at this point in the story you're calling bullshit on any of this ever happening. All I can do is assure you that this is entirely true and that although you may think there are some embellishments, I heard this from Bob himself and when you read how this romantic mastermind's plan of action actually plays out you'll ask yourself, "Jesus Christ, why would he make that up?"

Back to the scene. Julie is finally ready. She's purchased classy lingerie for the evening (Think more La Perla and less Frederick's of Hollywood), redone her makeup, brushed her teeth, redone her hair, and whatever else women who have never ever had sex before do to get ready on their wedding night. She affects her most alluring and graceful posture as she sweeps into the wedding suite, rounds the corner, and sees her betrothed rolled onto his back, holding his ankles, and giving her the most unadulterated view of his asshole she's never wanted to see. There's a two beat pause and then a giggling Bob lets rip with a fart he's been holding in since they got to the wedding suite.

Except it wasn't just a fart.

As Bob was explaining later, the rich wedding food, wine, stress of the event, and anxiety surrounding having sex for the first must have all conspired to create what we call in Texas "a rumbly basement."

Bob shit all over the bed.

Julie screamed, burst into tears, ran directly back into the restroom, and locked the door.

Bob lay shocked on the bed wondering what exactly just happened. As he said to me years later when recounting that awful evening, "I saw things going differently in my head." Indeed.

After a hurried attempt at some sort of clean up, Bob donned a hotel bathrobe and spent the rest of the night talking to Julie through the restroom door. Part mortified, part concerned husband, part crisis negotiator, Bob was finally able to convince Julie that his actions had a sincere and caring intent and that he was not in fact a sexual deviant bent on doing God-knows-what to get himself off. Just before dawn, Julie finally left her restroom sanctum, hair down, make up off, lingerie put away for another time. They both went directly to bed and apparently didn't even try having sex with one another until nearly a month later.

Abstinence: Nice idea. Crisis of expectations. Can be messy.

This Week's Band No One Has Heard of But Everyone Needs to Listen To: The Weeks (See what I did there?)

2011-03-15T04:31:00.000-04:00

Ever heard a song and thought, "Why, on God's Green Earth, is this not a hit?" Yeah, me too. This is that song. The Weeks are a band from Jackson, Mississippi (is that not the most ridiculously spelled state?), and they're solid. I'll spare you the experience of reading me wax philosophic about a band I really don't know that much about, but I'll also urge you to give this song a listen. Because they're from a southern state and sound a certain way, they have garnered their fair share of Kings of Leon references, but that's just because people need context in which to describe them, "People" meaning music fans and idle bloggers like myself. This is sort of the curse of being a new band or new writer or new painter or new poet or any other new artist. I once described The Kooks as the musical progeny of an orgy between The Cure and The Rolling Stones, lack of female sex organs aside. As inadequate as a comparison often is, it's all a new(ish) group has. So without further ado, The Weeks!

The Gospel According to Duke

2011-03-11T00:57:00.002-05:00

One of the consequences of going to a Christian university is that the young, curious mind is inundated with all manner of Jesus talk. This is especially true if said young, curious mind is, like mine was, a bit of a tabula rasa when it comes to talk of the Big JC. It's not that I was raised a pagan, as some of my more earnest classmates would have had me believe, but that I did not grow up attending vacation Bible camps and was not already firmly satisfied that I had a firm grip on Absolute Truth at the tender age of 18 (By the way, 18 year olds who feel this way are scary as hell. Just saying. They're sort of like an older version of Mordecai from Children of the Corn).

Whereas I initially found talk of finding Jesus in all that I encountered on a daily basis cumbersome and a bit naive, I eventually thought of it as a sort of tongue-in-cheek intellectual game. It was sort of like spiritual hide-and-go-seek. Jesus H. was out there hiding in my morning bagel, political science classes, and Wednesday margaritas, I just had to get in the right frame of mind and he would jump out at me with an "Aww, shucks, you found me" grin and embrace me with the grace and tenderness of The Lord. Kind of like a Jack-in-the-Box...but a Jesus-in-the-box!

This was especially true one evening when some of my more irreverent friends and I were sitting around a table at the local coffee shop snarkily commentating on an article that had appeared in the university paper about a student who had a deep and aiding love for all things Dukes of Hazzard. I can't believe the article can still be found online, but there you go.

Anyhow, our snarky commentary eventually led to a serious and well-reasoned Christological interpretation of The Dukes of Hazzard. I know, I know...$30,000 a year to discuss Jesus as he pertains to one of the worst TV shows of the late 70s and early 80s. Sorry, Mom and Dad! But I still think we were really on to something. Allow me to elucidate:

First let's talk about the theme of the show. Bo, Luke, and the Duke family and friends were, at best living on the fringes of Hazzard County life, yes? I mean, they were just some good ole boys, never meaning no harm, but they'd been in trouble with the law since the day they were born. It's even in the theme song. Fact. What were JC and his early followers if not on the fringes of early Judaic law? Lepers, hookers, outlaws, heretics? And they certainly didn't mean any harm. They were just trying to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven. The whole show is all about the Duke boys trying to do the right thing even though they're desperately misunderstood as petty criminals and hell raisers.

Once that understanding of the shows driving thematic element is pinpointed, it becomes pretty easy assigning roles to the characters. Let's start with the bad guys:

Boss Hogg

As I recall, there was some debate about whether Boss Hogg was more of a Pontius Pilate or a Caesar. I went with Caesar. Look at the guy! All white (just like a Roman toga), cigar smoking luxury, and that fat, tanned and greasy look of a man living in the lap of ill begotten wealth. It's not too much of a stretch for me to imagine Boss Hogg being fed grapes and drinking wine...ok, maybe pork rinds and Boone's Farm, but you get the point.

Roscoe P. Coltrane

In my Gospel According to Duke, Roscoe is the Pontius Pilate figure. If it were up to him, he'd just wash his hands of the whole Duke boy situation and get about the business of patrolling Hazzard County. He really never thought of the Dukes as being all that bad, but he had Boss Hogg...er Caesar up his ass all the time demanding that something be done about those wily rabble rousers so he really had no choice.

Enos Strate

Enos was sort of a minor character and was Roscoe's deputy so that automatically qualifies him as a Roman Army henchman. Having said that, he had a thing for Daisy Duke and really kind of liked the Duke boys. Chalk it up to a disinterested Roman Legionnaire who got stuck out in the boonies because he signed up for the army. He just wanted to put in his time and get back home alive...and also bang Daisy. Isn't this sort of a typical enlisted man's plight?

On to the good guys!

Uncle Jesse

Uncle Jesse was the patriarch of the Duke clan and the font of wisdom that kept the Duke boys on The Path. He's the tangible legacy through which the Duke line could be traced back to the early days. Therefore, Uncle Jesse has to be The Stump of Jesse. I mean, it's in his freakin' name! Isaiah 11:1 reads: There shall come forth a root from the Stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. This is a horticultural parable for the growth of the Davidic Line that eventually spawns a one Jesus Christ. Jesse was David's father - Does anyone else think 'Jesse' is the least Biblical sounding of all the Biblical names?! - and is the guy who sort of started it all. Nothing says, "I'm the God damned pater familias," like a massive white beard and transcendent Southern wisdom.

Daisy Duke

That feathered hair! Those sultry eyes! Those incredibly short, short, short shorts! Daisy Duke = Mary Magdalene or I'm a monkey's uncle. Mary was a woman of ill repute who was taken in and forgiven by Christ. Despite her appearance or past actions, she was a good woman who eventually became the Apostle of Apostles. Daisy was Bo and Luke's right hand woman. Dressed like a ho, but had a heart of gold. Yeah, she was flashing ass all over Hazzard county, but she also helped the Dukes spread the good news. Bonus points for having a badass white Jeep.

Bo and Luke Duke

As the main characters of The Dukes of Hazzard, Bo and Luke have to be Apostles. I know, I know, why isn't one of them Jesus? Well, firstly, there are two of them. You can't have two Jesuses, that would be Jesi. Secondly, the main characters of the story of the spread of Christianity are actually the Apostles. They did all of the writing and all of the promotion of this kickass guy named Jesus who was crucified for all of our sins. By the time the Good News was being spread like wild fire, JC had long since lived, died, and been resurrected. It was left to remaining 12 to go out into the world and preach the Gospel. Bo and Luke drove all over Hazzard County doing good deeds, foiling Boss Hogg's nefarious plans, and looking out for the downtrodden and disadvantaged. If you're like me, you never thought of Bo and Luke as early purveyors of Christianity, but there you have it.

The General Lee

So who's the General Lee? You guessed it, Jesus. I do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Amen. How many times were the Duke boys in a tight spot, an impossible spot, and The General Lee got them out of it? How many leaps of faith did they take in that Dodge Charger to escape the clutches of evil men? I mean really, it's like the whole of Hazzard County was comprised of a road system predicated on dirt ramps set on either side of a creek. And that "01" emblazoned on the doors? Who's Christ if not number 1? Also, did you ever notice how the Duke boys seemed to be the only ones capable of driving The Lee? Remember that one episode where Boss Hogg tries to get in The Lee and he gets stuck in the window because the doors are fused shut? Mark 10:25 - It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter The Kingdom of God. You can see my logic is unassailable here.

Cooter

I'm probably going to hell for saying it (let's face it, I'm probably going for all sorts of things other than this), but Cooter is The Holy Spirit. Cooter is the guy who kept The General Lee running. He was a mechanic who helped the Dukes with all things technical and repaired The General Lee when the Dukes had taken it for a few too many creek jumps on the roads of Hazzard County. You could say - and I'm going to here - that Cooter breathed life into The General Lee and gave the Dukes the pick me up they sometimes needed to continue to spread the good word.

Waylon Jennings

Most people forget that Waylon Jennings was on The Dukes of Hazzard as the omniscient voice who narrated the Duke's adventures. He sang the theme song at the beginning of the show, knew everything that was happening with all characters at all times, and could FREEZE LIVE ACTION before the show went to a commercial break. Waylon Jennings was God. Think about it. All seeing. All knowing. Knew the Dukes and all of the other characters better than they knew themselves. Plus, I like to think God would talk to me in a deep Southern drawl. Waylon Jennings, who art in heaven...

Related posting: Ancient Economics

Crushing Reminder of Failed Romance Available to Best Offer

2011-03-02T23:10:00.003-05:00

So, I've been meaning to post this tale of romance, woe, and Craigslist sales for quite a while now but have just not mustered the energy to do so until now. Years ago (yes, years) I was engaged to a delightful young woman but things just didn't pan out. This can be attributed to a variety of things, but youth, naivety, and fundamental differences would front any list entitled "Why It Didn't Work Out."

The thing about ending an engagement is that after all of the heartache and upset there's still the matter of an artificially valued ring that neither party involved in the breakup has any use for. Fortunately for me, the Ex in question was classy enough to return said artificially valued ring and I didn't have to swallow the entire cost of the diamond and band. Unfortunately for me, the diamond industry is comprised of some nefarious bastards who convince women and men that shelling out three months' salary for a not-that-uncommon stone is de rigueur and essential to asking someone to spend the rest of her life with you. This is all well and good until things don't work out and the jilted lover (me in this case) is left with something that is really only worth a tenth of whatever three months' salary fetched at the original purchase. I was in grad school at the time so three months' salary wasn't a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, but that's not really the point. The point is that I spent way more than I could afford, got my heart broken, and then was left with a considerably depreciated rock I had no use for. So I turned to Craigslist. My ad:

Here's what I have:

One white gold, lady's, solitaire ring; set with one, transparent, white, princess cut, natural diamond. Substantiated weight: .72 ct. Proportions and Finish: Good. Color: H-I Clarity I1. Comes with Carte Blue Evaluation and appraisal.

Here's what I really have:

This diamond has been tucked away in desks and closets throughout the numerous crappy apartments I have lived in for the past four years. I have resisted the urge to heave the ring, a representation of my painful past, into a lake or ocean or river of liquid hot magma or some other tired cliche of endless reclamation. I have also resisted acting upon the much less dramatic advice of my friend Barrett to take the ring to a jeweler, extract the diamond, and "Get [me] a sweet ass man ring."

Every time I look at it, I feel like someone has punched me in the nuts...in public...and like maybe they'll do it again for a good laugh. My ex-fiancee gave it back to me after I returned from a trip to Argentina as a grad student in 2004. Did I flounce around with some Argentine Tango goddess when I was there? Nope. On the contrary, I spent most of my time wondering why The Ex had broken a lease in my name THE DAY AFTER I LEFT despite telling me the day I left that everything was cool and she was looking forward to moving into the apartment with me. I don't know if you've ever tried, but it's pretty tough sub-letting a loft from 8,000 miles away even if it does have wood floors, high ceilings, and is located in a delightful area just off the prime entertainment strip of a college town. I'm just saying.

Anyhow, we did the "just dating" thing again for a while after I got back (mostly this was just sleeping together and pretending things would work out), I spent an interminable year living with my parents - remember, I'm apartmentless at this point - I took a job working at a Starbucks that was managed by a neurotic and over-protective single mother who also tried to get in my pants (true story), there was much more floundering and gnashing of teeth with The Ex as I tried to extract myself from the sticky mess we had made (seriously, get your mind out of the gutter), and I finally wound up single and happy in the beautiful, Midwestern megalopolis of Indianapolis, Indiana. It's OK so far, but I still don't know what the fuck a Hoosier is.

So what do I want for the ring? Great question. If you have a charming, intelligent, blonde haired, blue eyed, tan, atheltic, angel of the morning laying around the house I'll take her. Check that. I think that's human trafficking and I'm pretty sure it's illegal. How about this? Make me an offer that you feel takes into account the following:

Worth of the ring. Emotional toll. The negative balance of my checking account. 1 year's membership to Match.com. Seriously. Following the advice of another friend, one much less wise than Barrett, I got on Match because it seemed like time to move on. Good grief. Date #1 proudly proclaimed she had been in a Girl's Gone Wild video (the one with Snoop Dogg) and was also a Reds fan (much less forgivable). Date #2 showed up on my porch one night with a psychological study explaining passive/aggressive disorder. Date #3 was a raging bulimic...and alcoholic. And date #4...well, you think I would have learned, no?

So, to the victor go the spoils. Send me an offer and if you wind up the lucky bastard with this ring, then I hope you have better luck with it than I did. I'm just tired of happening on it during the occasional cleaning fit. It's like coming into your living room after hosting a party and finding your drunk friend still on your couch. Go home already. And stop throwing up!

I'm not sure what I expected from posting this ad. I thought I needed to write something clever enough to differentiate my decidedly underwhelming ring from the literally hundreds of other rings being hawked by guys apparently in the same position as myself. I never sold the ring via Craigslist, but I did get a flood of emails from all sorts of people. Here are the high (low?) points:

"Dude, you've missed your calling. Professional storyteller all the way. Something a la Garrison Keillor. I think you should sex it up a bit though with a picture of your ex. Just saying. It would drive traffic to your post, assuming of course, that she was/is hot."

He was probably right. A little pervy, but probably right.

"Is that a bottle of Bell's Oberon Ale? Good beer. Drink more of it."

I'm not sure if this was intended as advice to get over the heartache or if possibly this was sent by a Bell's representative. Potato, potahtoe (that's a tough one to make translate through text), I took the advice. It was delicious.

"Well, I cannot afford to pay anything for your reminder...my last major relationship stole my engagement ring from my exhusband that I was saving to give my daughter!! Sounds like a soap, I know...Sooo...I mean it, I came across this as while trying to find the number of the guy who sold me a 'non working' dryer for 150...'it works great,' he says. I really cannot afford to pay you for your ring, but please don't ever do anything foolish and throw it in the ocean...I am here for you!!! You will feel just as 'free' and a single mom like me could feel special!!! Win, win."

This was not an uncommon theme in the replies I received. Apparently, there are a lot of women out there who just want someone to give them a ring...for free. I had no idea how to respond.

"My daughter and her goofy friends live in Indy (although they are not hot blondes) and are always interested in adding intelligent people to their group."

I got like 6 of these from parents trying to introduce me to their daughters. What parent surfs Craigslist and decides that a guy trying to sell an engagement ring is relationship material for their daughter?!

"I've been composing this email for about 20 minutes trying to think of something witty enough that you'll say. 'Man, that chick should get the ring even though she's happily married and has a kid and probably would just sell it for a bed anyway.' But, unfortunately, I haven't really come up with anything spectacular. I'd offer you my sister, she's a hottie who lives in Los Angeles...but like you said, there are probably some ethical and legal ramifications involved with that sort of transaction, so we better not go that route."

...and a bunch of these trying to introduce me to their sister. The preceding paragraph in this email was all about the Disney Princess bed the woman was trying to buy for her daughter. Apparently, she searched "princess" and my ad is what she got.

"Take your substantial, romantic and loving energies, and give bits of it to the women around you who aren't crazy...but no more than you're comfortable with. Give this energy also to your mom, sisters, grandma, whoever you love and aren't romantically connected with too. Most of us are starved for it, and be aware that some may lunge at you. Begin, slowly, to sort out the women who really appreciate what you give, and who don't take advantage of your generosity, and listen to the women who return your affection. Date them. Listen to them as best you can...just because a woman is beautiful, hot, fuckable, doesn't mean she's good."

This is the most lucid, thoughtful advice about relationships I think I've ever gotten...via the internet...on Craigslist. I'm still wondering what possessed the woman to write it, but wow.

"I have very little interest in the ring, but I might be able to make you an offer on a date with a brown haired, brown eyed, tan girl from the East Coast?"

This was actually written by the tan girl from the East Coast. She wrote like 5 more times. We never went out, in case you were wondering. I'm all about serendipity, but this was just a little too romantic comedyesque for me.

"Your friend who suggested a sweet ass man's ring is a bit of a douche. Men who wear jewelry like that are creepy."

Barrett's no douche, but the general rule here is noted and usually holds true.

"Stay away from Mach.com. My brother used it because he said it's a way to find girls to hook up with. You could do that was a lot less than $35/month by going to Broad Ripple on a Friday night."

This email made me re-up my Match membership!

"My name is Jon aka Wolf I know random bu id liek to tell you something and if you take the time to read this i appreciate it as well but id liek to tell you about a story of a marine adn his ex. I got out of high school and started to work hard for a life better then the one served to me by my folks and make something better of myself. so as it seems i went day in and day out working my butt off for a new car a new place and all and all a new life. one day i meet a young woman she was here for school from cali well we got to know each other for over 2 years i decide she was the one i left everything her sold my truck left my job moved to cali with her when she was done with school. we ended up moving in to geather and thinkgs got really tight so i decided to join the marines to take care of us and know that id be able to supply for me and her. well i made it thru basic adn came back home and asked her to marry me well she was all happy and glade btu i was wrong i got my first station in specnav san diago and hell i got lucky to be able to stay in the same state for my first station and be abel to see her on the weekends well after yr of this i got hurt and discharged from the u.s.m.c.

came back home to find she wanted to be with me for the money nd beafits i wake up one morning to her gone and the ring left on my desk to find out she moved back in with her mom and was with another guy for the past yr and 1/2 while i was in the core i knwo life can behard my friend but beleive me take it one day at a time adn learn something from it i knwo you can nvr really forget the ones we love or loved its not in us to forget because we alwas want what we cant hae but i have been alone not even dating because i dont want to urt againbut im learning to trust woman and im dating this amazong woman that see me for me and nothing more. but i just wanted to let you know it will get better and to take time in life because you nvr kwno when youll lose it all at once adn start all over ppl are the best thing in ones live but the worst as well adn im sry to hear that you went thru almost the same thing but i wish you the best of luck in life and best of luck with selling the ring i wish i could let mine go it still sits in my locker box with my uniform to remind me i guess..."

Jon...er...Wolf? Stay tru.

"My knight of almost 20 years decided while I was out of town working that he felt abandoned...poor baby...alcoholic, mama's boy. Had to go find comfort and picked up some skank...last one left after 'last call' and took her home! First night, bam! What a catch! Of course he didn't have the balls to tell me he was doing us both! Had to find out the hard way!"

I can only hope the "hard way" wasn't a scorching case of herpes. I kind of think it may have been.

"Hey, I'm not interested in buying the ring, but I find your writing incredibly hot. I want to meet you."

Again, we never met. If the other email was a little too romantic comedyesque, this one was a little pornesque.

"Hoosier is a term that originated from basketball. Have you seen the movie Hoosiers?"

False. Clearly the term existed before the movie came out! You can't use the word in question in the definition. I'm still flummoxed.

"Dude, thanks for the laugh. That sucks! Haha! Not sure how I came across your ad as I was searching Craigslist for 'Ass play.' Whatever, it was worth it. Good luck, Bro!"

I wonder how many other anal lotharios I gave a good laugh? But does anyone want to buy the fucking ring?!

Today's Band Everyone Has Heard of But More People Need to Listen to: Alkaline Trio

2011-02-23T20:08:00.002-05:00

Full disclosure: I hate February.

It's still winter but all of the cool stuff is over. Christmas? Check. New Years? Check. Bowl games? Check. Super Bowl? Check. Also, 28 days, February? Just 28? Get your shit together. All of the other months are laughing at you. February sucks so bad the greeting card industry had to come up with a holiday to remind us that we love other people. What would we do in lieu of this fictitious holiday? Apparently moan and groan and commit acts of domestic violence at an alarming rate.

One quick order of business before we get down to business. I need to extend a shout out to Drinking Stories' newest fan. Belle writes an exceptionally witty blog entitled Life As We Make It. How do I know this? Well, I've read a good portion of it and the first post made me snort a little laugh and I'd only read the title. It's solid. Trust me.

Now, on to Alkaline Trio...

This is, you guessed it, a trio from Chicago, Illinois. I don't know what it is about that city, but it produces exceptional musical acts from all genres. Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, Smashing Pumpkins, Rise Against, Chevelle, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Twista, Common...the list goes on and on.

Sure, you may not be a fan of the punk/pop genre, but lyrically Alkaline Trio takes the cake. Matt Skiba, the most lead of the two singers, has an awesome voice and his lyrics are ironic, dark, macabre, but also touching and often tongue-in-cheek. Plus, I can muster enough range in my decidedly rangeless voice to belt out my own renditions of their songs when I'm in the car...alone...and at night...and not stopped at a light where other motorists can see me.

A Smattering of Old Favorites or No Time to Write Anything New

2011-02-09T16:39:00.001-05:00

You know how Saturday Night Live used to always be live every week? And then they started taking a couple of weeks off here and there? And then they took a week off after seemingly every live show? Remember that? Yeah, this is sort of like that. Enjoy the reruns!

Also, in case you were wondering, I AM NOT comparing myself in terms of "the funny" to SNL...well, maybe the Chris Kattan and Jim Breuer years.

Texas Is The Reason

On Fire For The Lord

Ancient Economics

@&#!

J.U.I.C.E.!

The Fainter

Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned at Scruffy Murphy's

Murder Most Foul

Believe Me Now?

2011-02-08T01:36:00.000-05:00

Have you ever been caught in a situation that appeared to the outside observer to be 100%, beyond a shadow of a doubt, absolutely, OJ in the white Bronco, Clinton's semen on Lewinsky's dress, Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the candlestick your fault? But it wasn't?

When my sister and I were in high school my parents recognized the need for a third car to accommodate our respective extracurricular activities. Early on in our pre driver's license days, there were a few too many left-at-the-soccer-field-until-8pm nights because one parent assumed the other was taking care of pick up duties. Additionally, my sister and I were into very, very different things and there was little to zero chance a band concert and a soccer tournament were going to be held a convenient distance from one another at the same time. A third car was necessary.

The problem was that said third car was not a high mileage Civic or Accord - either would have been an affordable and reliable buy - but a near brand spanking new Chevrolet Corsica. For those of you unfamiliar with the Chevy Corsica (it no longer exists), it has to be one of the most appalling, shambolic shit shows of a vehicle ever produced by an American automotive manufacturer. Seriously. Google it.

My sister and I had no knowledge of this at the time as my father was still viewed by both of us as the End All Be All of Universal Wisdom. That's some serious shit. Even though I was into my teenage angst years, I still thought of the Old Man as some sort of indestructible amalgam of Chuck Norris, Thomas Jefferson, and that guy from the Dos Equis commercials. The thought that he would be duped into buying an authentic lemon was beyond my ability to comprehend.

And then I started driving the car.

Everything about the Chevy Corsica was cheap, even the knobs on the radio felt like they were going to break as soon as you touched them (They didn't, but they only held out for a month or two). The brakes felt soft and dangerously incapable of performing their duty in an emergency situation (I think my parents invested in at least two costly brake jobs in the three years we owned the car). "Ergonomics" was clearly not a word that entered into the engineers' vocabulary when they were sitting around discussing the features they wanted to include in the car. Quite the contrary. After a few months driving the car, I began to wonder if, perhaps, the opposite had happened. Maybe the Corsica was one big joke on the American auto buying public perpetrated by Chevrolet engineers fed up with being told to constantly cut costs. It's as if they sat around and brainstormed how they could turn every good idea they had into a massive, stinking pile of suck.

Still, I was pumped to have a car to drive around in. I don't want to sound ungrateful. I have some fond memories of that car (And it's back seat...sorry Mom and Dad!). It's nice not having to ask for a ride everywhere and the freedom it afforded me as a high school kid in a part of Texas where NOTHING was within walking distance was delicious.

The downside of this situation was that my dad was still not convinced that the car was a POS. Every little creak or shimmy or grind was CLEARLY evidence to him that my sister and I were driving the car too hard and not doing our part to make sure that it was well maintained inside and out. At one point, the upholstery lining the interior of the roof of the car started to sag. Shoddy craftsmanship and cheap adhesive? No way. My sister or I had obviously done something, reckless, irresponsible, and damaging that caused the upholstery to sag. What this could have been, I still have no idea. When the brakes went out for the second time, it was because we were driving and stopping WAY too fast. I'll admit, I drove like most teenaged boys do, but not nearly aggressive enough to account for two brake jobs.

The cake taker here, and the one thing that broke on the car that my dad was absolutely unwilling to believe was not entirely my fault, happened when I was turning in to our subdivision on my way home from soccer practice. It was a completely normal, mostly forgettable day. Nothing at all out of the ordinary happened and I was in no way abnormally tense, angry, or otherwise in need of physical release. I slowed as I approached the entry to our subdivision and reached up with my left hand to click the signal arm down to make a left hand turn. I was in no way angry, tense, or overly aggressive in this motion. However, the ENTIRE FUCKING TURN SIGNAL SNAPPED and then dangled ridiculously from the side of the steering wheel. I was in shock. After I made the turn, I pulled into our driveway and inspected the clean break in what appeared to be really sturdy plastic. Operative word here being "appeared."

How was I going to explain this? Thinking I'd done no wrong and believing that honesty was the best policy, I walked into the house and confidently explained to my dad what had happened. As I spoke I realized I should have come up with a really good lie. My dad scoffed and pursed his lips in a way that said, "You're my son, and I love you, but you're also totally full of shit right now." He walked out to the driveway and inspected the impotent turn signal for himself and, I believe, became further convinced that I'd done something in keeping with the rambunctiousness of my age rather than merely gone to turn left.

The turn signal was eventually repaired, but after that day I always thought about signaling with my arm out of the window when I wanted to turn left. Once we got rid of the car I tried to explain again to my dad that what had really happened that day was exactly what I told him. I still don't think he believed me. So Dad, if you're reading this, here's a list of things I have done:

I did hide grapes in my underwear as a child because I didn't want to eat them. I then snuck said grapes away from the dinner table to be disposed of in your golf bag. I'm sorry.

I did use all of you and Mom's expensive bath gel in the tub because it was green and I thought it would be cool as toxic waste when I was playing with my GI Joe men. It didn't just start coming out of the faucet as I claimed (My most ridiculous lie ever). I'm sorry.

As a three year old, I did drop a deuce on the back porch and claim a dog had jumped the six foot fence, shit on the porch, and then re-jumped the fence to vanish into thin air (My second most ridiculous lie ever). I'm sorry.

When Mom walked in to the living room on prom night my senior year at 2AM, my date and I were not actually just watching Mr. Wizard (My third most ridiculous lie ever). Thank you, Mom for taking your time walking down the hall and being extra loud. Still, I'm sorry.

When I came home the morning after Rachel's wedding...at 11AM...still in my tux, it's not because I spent the night at the hotel with the other groomsmen. Read in to that what you will. I'm sorry.

That Easter when I stayed up at school and you asked me what I did over the long weekend and I said, "Not much, just hung around campus." What I really meant to say was, "Barrett and I drove to Shreveport at 2AM and played blackjack for two days." I'm sorry.

I could go on and on, but I think I've proved my point, which is this:

When I told you the turn signal snapped off simply because I went to signal left, I mean THE TURN SIGNAL SNAPPED OFF SIMPLY BECAUSE I WENT TO SIGNAL LEFT. I'm not sorry.

When Almost Just Isn't Good Enough

2011-02-03T20:40:00.004-05:00

Since my last poo post I have become even more secure in my assertion that a good poo story transcends all generational, social, and economic differences to bring a smile and belly laugh (sometimes guiltily had) to all who hear it. Everyone can relate because everyone's been there, whether they admit it freely or not.

This particular story involves three of my college buddies, Mike, Big Mike, and Jon. Big Mike was so dubbed to differentiate him from the other Mike and also because he was really, really big. If I had to guess, and resisting the urge to fall prey to Paul Bunyan legend effect, Big Mike was a conservative 6'7 and had to weigh at least 300 lbs. His moniker was well deserved.

One day, being college kids and perpetually underfunded, Mike, Big Mike, and Jon decided to take full advantage of a local Pizza Hut's all you can eat buffet. I initially found it surprising how many of these stories start with "So I was at this all you can eat buffet," but given the combination of over eating and food-exposed-to-the-elements-for-God-knows-how-long-under-a-heat-lamp I guess I shouldn't be surprised that so much intestinal distress can trace its origins back to a hearty buffet. It's like a perfect storm. Moist air from the Gulf meets arctic air from Canada and BOOM, you shit your pants.

So the three protagonists in this story have probably eaten five or six pizzas worth of soggy, lukewarm buffet offerings and are coming to the end of their gorgefest. Side note: why is it that we don't use "luke" as a term to describe other middle of the road states of being? No one says Jay Cutler is a lukegood quarterback or that IKEA offers lots of stylish, lukelycrafted furniture. Think about it. Anyhow, at about the time everyone is feeling really, really full, Big Mike feels the lower intestinal rumblings of something about to go terribly wrong.

In all great poo stories there is a point at which the unfortunately afflicted main character can make a choice to endure a lesser embarrassment in order to avoid what eventually becomes the tragic ending. In my experience, this point usually occurs when said main character elects to do something silly like try to make it home in an effort to avoid having the general public take notice of his own private hell instead of using a more conveniently placed restroom and potentially stinking up the joint. I guess when the shit is going to hit the fan people would much rather be in a familiar, controlled environment. Risk aversion. Such is the case with Big Mike's tale of woe.

The thing you need to know about Big Mike is that he was a generally low key, easy going kind of guy. He typically went with the flow and never really struck me as a type A, fast working, strategic thinker. This is probably why Mike and Jon were so shocked when he sprang into action and started barking orders and laying out the plan of attack.

Big Mike drove a notoriously finicky and difficult to handle jalopy of a car that it often seemed he was the only person capable of divining a way to make run. No doubt knowing another driver would only stall his escape, he gave the following orders. Jon and Mike were to pay for the meal. He was going to get the car and pull it around to the front door. Move fast.

Jon and Mike had just paid and were approaching the front door when Big Mike came tearing around the corner in his jalopy, Sabotage style. Heeding his blaring horn, they ran out of the Pizza Hut and jumped into the car. He didn't even come to a full stop. Not entirely sure what was going on, Mike asked Big Mike what was up. Big Mike replied quickly, and without ceremony, "I'm going to shit my pants. We have to get to my apartment."

The short drive back to Big Mike's place was made in silence as Jon and Mike watched sweat bead on Big Mike's forehead. Big Mike clenched his jaw and gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. I know Big Mike was on the verge of panic and trying to keep it together, but at this point in the story I actually feel much, much, much more for Jon and Mike. I mean, seriously? They must have been terrified that Big Mike wouldn't make it and they'd be trapped in a hot, old car with bench seats when the seal finally broke.

As they approached Big Mike's apartment, the barked orders began again. Jon, being in the passenger's seat, was responsible for getting the car to a complete stop and putting it in park. Mike was handed Big Mike's apartment key, told to bail out of the back seat, and run like hell up the stairs to get the apartment unlocked. As if the situation couldn't be more clearly dire, Big Mike added at the end, "Move fast, Mike. I'll be right behind you."

They screeched into Big Mike's apartment complex and it was go time. With the car still moving, Big Mike opened the driver's door and hit the ground running. Jon dove across the front seats and slammed the car's brake with his left hand and then threw it in park with his right hand. Simultaneously, Mike jumped out of the back seat and sprinted up the stairs to Big Mike's apartment for all he was worth. Now, in case I haven't made it clear enough already, Big Mike did nothing quickly. His demeanor and size had conspired to create what I can best describe as a gentle giant of a man. However, I like to think that were Mike able to turn around on his manic sprint up the stairs, he would have described Big Mike as John described Death of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the The Book of Revelation. "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him." Indeed.

Somehow, under all of the pressure of knowing Big Mike was moments away from turning himself inside out, Mike was able to unlock the door and step out of the way just as Big Mike threw it open and disappeared into the interior of the apartment. Jon made it up the stairs moments later and the two of them listened awkwardly as Big Mike went through the throes of explosive diarrhea from within the apartment. What they didn't know is that Big Mike had just about made it. Just about. Apparently, the pressure was just too much to contain any longer and as Big Mike dropped his shorts and began to sit down, he exploded. It was described to me as being 50/50 on target v. off target. It was also described to me as "epic," "heinous," "unholy," "incredibly foul," "having happened at a clearly ridiculous velocity," and "liquid black gunga." I have no idea what gunga is, but even though it's an obviously made up word, it may be the best example of onomatopoeia I have ever had the displeasure of hearing.

Here's to you Big Mike! You almost made it.

Flirting FAIL

2011-01-28T16:29:00.002-05:00

I have a buddy who fancies himself quite the ladies' man. Well, let's be frank, I have lots of buddies who fancy themselves quite the ladies' men. I think it's a predisposition of the male species to err on the side of confidence, or at least the appearance of confidence, when dealing with the fairer sex. Obviously, this is not always the case and even the best looking, most intelligent, genuinely hilarious guy deals with bouts of insecurity, but when was the last time you saw a homely, overweight, snaggle-toothed girl approach a super hot guy in a bar and lay down her best game? That's what I thought. To all of the gorgeous women reading this blog, and I like to imagine there are thousands sitting on pins and needles waiting to see what I'll write next (I'm a guy, that's what we do), how many times have you been approached by a guy with a beer gut, stained shirt, bad hair, and a braided belt and had to reject his advances while he fumbled on oblivious to your rejections? Long story short: if one sex is more prone to out-punting its coverage, it's the one with the external plumbing, just saying.

Anyhow, back to my buddy; we'll call him Kevin. Kevin is not a guy who consistently out-punts his coverage. It's not that he's an Adonis or anything, but the kid has a lot going for him. He's funny, intelligent, and confident. In most cases, that will carry a guy pretty far. Interpret "pretty far" as you will. So, Kevin was in the gym at his apartment complex the other day working out when an attractive young lady we'll call Jennifer walked in to take a spin on the treadmill. Kevin was actually about to finish up his workout, but being ever on the prowl, decided to extend his run for a while in the hopes that there would be an opening to initiate a conversation. He's cagey for his age.

A good twenty minutes later and feeling closer to his aerobic limit than he would like, Kevin decided to call it quits. Women love a fit guy, but a guy who passes out on the treadmill screams manorexic. As he was toweling off and collecting his things, Jennifer decided to introduce herself by way of saying she was glad he had finished his workout because she was going to be embarrassed if she started after him but finished before him. They exchanged casual banter and then as they were leaving she gave him her apartment number and said if he ever wanted to hang out he should stop by. Success!

Back in his apartment and basking in the glory of attention received, Kevin's sense of victory was soon tempered with the realization that there were two apartments with the same number in the complex, albeit in separate buildings. One was four doors down from his apartment and the other was across the street. Thinking there was no chance he would not have noticed a sultry vixen living mere feet from his front door, he confidently concluded that Jennifer must live in the same numbered apartment across the street. When he ran this logic by me a few days later I had to agree that it made sense. All good so far.

As he was working late hours that week, he decided he couldn't just stop by after he got off work. Again, this makes sense. A knock on the door at 11:00PM screams, "I really just want to do you." Every guy knows that even if that is precisely all he wants, actually admitting to it isn't going to get him anywhere. However, he didn't feel he could wait the 10 days until his schedule settled down as she might think he wasn't interested or, even worse, forget she'd invited him over in the first place or even who he was. There could be nothing more awkward than knocking on a girl's door and then reintroducing yourself and reminding her how you met as she stared at you blankly...except maybe the spelling of the word "awkward." Seriously, it's pretty awkward. Look at it. I'm right.

Kevin decided that the best course of action was to leave a note on her door with his name and number on it that said, "Hey, I'm working odd hours this week, but if you want to grab a beer sometime soon, give me a shout," then he skipped off to work. At about 9:00PM that night his phone rang. Thinking it might be Jennifer, he answered hoping she would suggest a beer that night. A guy on the other end of the line asked menacingly, "Is this Kevin?"

Now, up until this point Kevin hadn't done anything wrong. He could have easily said yes and then explained himself innocently if it turned out, and it was looking like it was going to turn out, that Jennifer actually had a boyfriend who may have come by and seen the note before she had. Sometimes though, you're put on the spot and you freeze. It happens to the best of us. Once, during my freshman year in college, my girlfriend, who went to another university, came in to town to visit for Valentine's Day weekend. I was going to a conservative Baptist university with dorm visiting hours and couldn't have her stay with me. Additionally, a dorm room with a roommate, microwave, and no private bathroom says a lot of things, but "romantic soiree" isn't one of them. We decided to stay in a hotel close to campus. I thought everything had gone off without a hitch, but then my dad called midweek and sounded really, really put out. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Hey dad!

Dad: Hey.

Me: What's up?

Dad: Nothing.

Me: Ok?

Dad: [silence]

Me: Everything ok?

Dad: Yup.

Me: Ok?

Dad: [silence]

Me: You sure?

Dad: Yeah. Just getting ready to leave town for work.

Me: Ok.

Dad: [silence]

Me: You're sure everything is cool?

Dad: Yeah. Oh hey, I got something in the mail today asking me how I enjoyed my stay at the Courtyard Inn across from your campus on February the 13th. Care to explain that to me?

At this point, a laundry list of innocent excuses went streaming through my head at warp speed but none of them seemed even remotely plausible and I'd already paused for about 10 seconds so I answered with about the only honest thing my mind could muster at the moment.

Me: Nope.

Kevin similarly froze and came up with the considerably less honest but equally idiotic answer, "Wrong number," and then hung up.

Clearly, the guy was going to know it was not a wrong number. Seriously. Kevin had written it down on a piece of paper and even if the guy thought he'd misdialed, he could look at his phone and check what he had dialed against Kevin's personally handwritten and signed number.

About an hour later, wondering why on earth a chick with a boyfriend had asked him to stop by, his phone rang again. The caller ID displayed the same number from the menacing guy who he'd told had the wrong number. Not having come up with a better game plan in the interim hour, Kevin let the call go to voicemail.

The guy left a message. It went something like this:

Menacing Guy: Hello, Kevin Pearson, and this is in fact Kevin Pearson's number. Kevin Pearson from Wabash, Indiana who went to Indiana University and studied political science and lives at 3301 146th Street, Apartment 3B. You need to call me and make things right on your end because, to be honest, you're getting into creeper territory and you need to explain yourself. If you don't sack up and call me, things will escalate because I will escalate them.

Holy. Shit.

At this point, Kevin is FREAKING OUT. Who does that?! And what does "escalate things" mean?! The guy already did some serious internet digging to get ALL of his personal information and then called him back and told him about it. Isn't that already an escalation?

So, seeing no other way out of things and not wanting Ike Turner to break down his door, Kevin called the guy back.

Menacing Guy: Hello, Kevin.

[So creepy!]

Kevin: What the fuck, dude?

Menacing Guy: This is Cornelius. You've got some explaining to do.

Kevin: Dude, I left a note on a door because I met the girl who lives there in the gym and she said to stop by some time to hang out. There isn't anything to it. We're both new in the area. I'm not trying to be shady. How did you get all of my personal information?!

Cornelius: You let me worry about that.

Kevin: What is your deal?

Cornelius: That's all there was to it?

Kevin: Yes! I had no intent. We didn't even talk about relationship stuff or anything. She just said you guys were new in the area and didn't know many people.

At this point, Kevin is assuming Cornelius is her boyfriend (a safe assumption) and, although he's not lying, he's definitely spinning things for damage control.

Cornelius: Ok, man. If you say so. I just gotta watch out for my girl.

Kevin: Seriously.

Cornelius: Why'd you say I had the wrong number earlier?

Kevin: What? I haven't gotten any calls this evening.

Cornelius: Whatever, man. Say what you want to.

Clearly, this is an awful lie and Kevin really has no way out of it, which makes the next part SO MUCH WORSE.

Cornelius: Sharon's a hot girl and guys are always trying to creep on her.

Kevin: Wait, did you say Sharon? The girl I met was named Jennifer.

Cornelius: Whatever.

[click]

The girl he met was Jennifer. And she lives four doors down from Kevin. No way Cornelius believes any of this.

I love...

2011-01-19T23:40:00.000-05:00

My sister and I used to play this game on long road trips out to my grandparent's house for Christmas where we would wish one another a happy holiday by very earnestly and sincerely ornamenting the beginning of the greeting with all sorts of florid language and then putting a horribly obscene capstone on the sentiment. An example: On this Christmas Eve, the commemoration of our Lord Jesus Christ's birth, I would like to bestow upon you my most sincere and heartfelt hope that you succumb to a particularly aggressive strain of syphilis and die insane and alone. Merry Christmas.

Before you assume that we come from a dysfunctional family or that we genuinely despise one another, let me further explain that we usually both fell out in belly aching laughs at the conclusion of each greeting and that we genuinely love one another more than probably anything else in this world. Well, that may not be true. She has a husband and a son at this point so I'm cool with being number three on the list. Sorry mom and dad!

A buddy at work and I have recently started playing a derivation of this game in which we text one another all of the things we love and then put a bow on our texts by concluding them with something like, "But above all, I love my job." This is funny because we do not in fact love our job and insist on playing this game in the hopes that all the things we love will somehow rub off on our real feelings for the job and thereby make the job more bearable. Or maybe it's sort of a Big Brother double speak thing and we think that if we say we love our job enough, above all other things, that we will eventually really love our job. This hasn't worked yet, but it won't stop me from trying. In the meantime, at least, it keeps me entertained.

A sampling of our exchange:

Me: I love puppies. I love BBQ. I love Tex-Mex. I love beer. I love books. I love soccer. I love girls. Mostly though, I love my job.

Him: I love the Stacked Pickle, movies, yoga pants, but most importantly, my job.

Me: I love Deadspin, fantasy football, adult internet sites, Thanksgiving, Bjs, ribeye steaks, Banana Republic, road trips, and again, above all else, my job.

Him: I love Facebook, Texts From Last Night, dill chip, Hooters, girls with daddy issues, your mother, and still, more than anything else, my job.

Me: I love Buffalo pretzels, Timmy O'Tooles, my mother (appropriately), your mother (inappropriately), Jesus Christ, tigers, Japanese vehicles, hip hop music, thongs, but more than anything, my job.

Him: I love text updates, dating, boneless wings, chicken nachos, Benny Hill, Great Big Sea, Steve Yzerman, spandex, and once again...my job.

Me: I love lingerie, Tosh.O, Lil' Wayne, flannel sheets, hot showers, running, iPods, but first and foremost...my job.

Asinine? Probably. Hours of mindless fun to pass the time? Yup.

Paper Route - Carousel

2011-01-13T01:09:00.003-05:00

I'll eventually get back to Marathon Man, I promise. I just sort of burned out writing the damned thing at about midway. If you look closely, I think it's pretty obvious where I reached the how-can-I-put-a-bow-on-this-thing point. It sounds cliche, but the whole lead up to the event and then the actual event itself were accented by so many other confusing, frustrating, energizing, emotional, humorous, and all around cathartic events, that, to be honest, writing about it is a little exhausting. Oh, poor tortured me, right? Bullocks.

Anyhow, I thought I'd follow a thread that's snaked its way through a number of the previous posts, and is not altogether unrelated to Marathon Man, and throw another music post your way. This band is outstanding. They are originally from Illinois but call Nashville home now. Much of the lyrical content of their songs touches on faith and Christianity, but they vehemently reject the idea that they are a "Christian band" out of a philosophical distaste for that industry. Very interesting. If you're interested, you can read a great article about them here.

I'll post a video of one of my favorite songs of theirs along with the lyrics. Definitely a punch to the gut and I think anyone can relate.

You and I are gonna get it right
Don't let me go
It takes two to make a leader but
One has to follow
Help me, help me understand
What we've become
We fell apart and then proceeded to
Both play the victim
On and on and on we go
Just like a carousel that's lost control
We don't know why, we don't know why
We go, we go, we go in circles
I want you more than anything
Just as you're leaving
For every wound there's an apology
That's lost its meaning
You and I, I think we're better off
Without each other
The last ride, the unavoidable
Keeps getting farther
On and on and on we go
Just like a carousel that's lost control
We don't know why, we don't know why
We go, we go, we go in circles
On and on and on we spin
To find an end where we begin
We don't know why, we don't know why
We go, we go, we go in circles

Quote of The Year...So Far

2011-01-11T15:35:00.002-05:00

My roommate and I were discussing relationships and music with a bartender when he dropped this pearl on us:

"I met my wife singing karaoke. I dug her Journey and she dug my Danzig."

Glorious.

Marathon Man

2011-01-07T17:26:00.003-05:00

This post will be seriously revised in the next few days and I'm not happy with it at the moment, but I've been sitting on it since November and wanted to somewhat wash my hands of it!

I recently ran my first marathon, and as it turns out, running 26.2 miles is not easy. Who knew? I'm not going to say it's the hardest thing I've ever done physically, but it's pretty damn close. I enjoy running and can wax philosophic about the Zen like trance one falls in to on a long run when one settles into an easy stride and breathes just so and it feels like the wind is blowing one effortlessly along one's route. I can do that. This was not that...at least not after mile 15 or so. I was pretty vigilant about my training schedule, but toward the end of the 16 week cycle, I started to take a few liberties. It's not that I lost motivation or commitment, but that life happened. Life always happens. Work and travel and any number of other things conspired to cut a few miles off this run and delay that run by a day or so. By the end of the training, my initial goal of breaking 4 hours had been somewhat tempered by the realization that this was probably a bridge too far and that finishing with some semblance of self respect was a more realistic carrot for which to strive. All foreshadowing pointed to a disastrous outcome.

The ominous feel to the event started long ago (although I didn't realize it upon registration), when the marathon was scheduled for Halloween. Let's be honest, a celebration of the macabre seems an inauspicious date on which to do anything except celebrate the macabre, but at the time I registered for the marathon, things in my life were going swimmingly and an extended weekend with loved ones all endeavoring to the same goal seemed like a great idea. That was before two of the original participants succumed to catastrophic injuries and had to withdraw their participation. Then one of the aforementioned catastrophically injured and I broke up. Without going into detail, morale dipped. My roommate and I pushed on with our training and achieved a level of confidence that started to taper off long before our actual tapering should have started, but plane tickets, a planned proposal (to the other catastrophically injured original participant), entry fees, and hotel reservations committed us for the long haul. Our last long run with one another, a 15 miler that kicked off at 6:00AM, was completed as a cold front blew in and sleeted all over our final seven miles. Our conversation for the last hour of the run consisted of my roommate saying, "This fucking sucks." And me replying, "Yup."

On the morning we were supposed to leave to catch our flight to DC for the marathon, my roommate, his girlfriend (now fiancee!), and I were rerouted at 4:00AM from our planned route to the airport due to a horrific looking car accident. And by "horrific," I mean I'm pretty sure someone punched out for the final time. At least two cars no longer resembled cars and the entire road was closed down. This was Omen #1.

We boarded separate flights with plans to meet up at the airport in Baltimore for the short trek to DC. Their flight came off without a hitch, but a guy died on my flight. Seriously. I don't mean to make light of the gentleman's death, but as far as bad omens go, an unexpected death on your flight tends to get one thinking. This was omen #2. By the time I finally got to DC, I was tired and a little on edge.

I was staying at a friend's apartment in Cleveland Park and needed to catch the Metro to Georgetown to deliver my roommate's engagement ring to him (he asked me to travel with it to avoid his girlfriend potentially finding it and ruining the surprise). After an epic plane ride and ensuing cluster fuck at BWI waiting for a shuttle bus that never came then finally renting a car to drive to DC, I decided a long walk from Cleveland Park to Georgetown was just what the doctor ordered, so I decided to forgo the Metro. I immediately reconsidered my decision as I settled into my jaunt south on Connecticut Avenue. In front of the zoo, a bird flew inches from my face, into the backside of a bus stop shelter, and then fell dead at my feet with a crushed head. This was omen #3. At this point, I was feeling a little like The Become Death, but I pressed on.

Things started to look a little better that afternoon when my delivery of the engagement ring met no snags and my roommate and I were able to get some passable BBQ into our stomachs (side note: BBQ isn't exactly what I would call optimal pre-race fueling). The uptick in omens continued that evening when my Baylor Bears managed a famous win against The University of Texas (this looks much less famous now that the Longhorns weren't even in a bowl, but whatever), but after leaving the sports bar at around 11:30PM, I realized all that had really happened was that I had managed to stay up way too late, had 2 too many beers, was stuffed full of grilled meats, and was about to spend a short night's sleep on an air mattress. Non of these things were recommended in my training plan as Ways to Succeed in Your First Marathon.

4AM came fast and furious just as it had come the previous morning when I woke up to catch my flight to Baltimore. Mercifully, things started to look up at the metro that morning. I met and wound up running much of the race with a wonderful woman who lived in the area. This is one of the things I love about runners, especially runners in what guarantees to be a difficult event. I used to race bicycles and there's an alpha male element to cycling that just really pisses me off. I can remember rolling neutral onto a course for a 60 mile road race in one of my first events and being told by the guy next to me in the pace line that he wasn't at the race to make friends. He told me this after I asked the horribly offensive question, "How are you doing?" Cocksucker. Runners would never do this. They're more likely to offer you a banana and make you believe that you're about to qualify for Boston than they are to look you up and down and describe how thoroughly they're about to destroy you.

I met Juliette on the platform of the Cleveland Park Metro stop. She was obviously a runner which made my, "Are you running the marathon," question that much more ridiculous. What else would someone be doing in the Metro well before sunrise in running gear on race day with a what-the-hell-have-I-gotten-myself-into expression on her face? As it turns out, she was also running her first marathon and had the same target time in mind...and she didn't drop dead in front of me which was good considering the previous day's events.

We boarded the Metro and as we snaked our way underneath the DC streets more and more runners started to filter onto the train. By the time we had gotten to the Pentagon City stop, the train was packed to capacity and the buzz of excited anticipation was palpable. My roommate had met us on the Metro after spending the evening proposing to his girlfriend and celebrating when she mercifully said "yes." I say "mercifully" not because there was any doubt she would say no, but because I couldn't stomach the prospect of running the whole event with a heartbroken buddy...or doing the "good friend" thing and bowing out of the race to go help him drink his sorrows away. I mean, I may or may not have been responsible for multiple deaths and a bird suicide the day before. I had to participate.

The three of us made our way off the Metro and followed the crowd through a security checkpoint and into the staging area where we reluctantly stripped into our race clothing (it was cold!) and started to limber up. This will be entirely too much detail, but I'd not been able to take care of business AT ALL the previous day as I was never in the company of an unoccupied and/or quiet restroom with more than two minutes to spend using it and now I was eyeing the phalanx of Port-O-Potties with increasing anxiety. Everyone's seen the photos of marathoners who suddenly lost bowl control during their run and I was convinced that I'd better not push my luck (those damned omens again).

After waiting in line for over 30 minutes, my time to take care of business finally came. I rushed into the Port-O-Potty, dropped my shorts, and...nothing. The fact that the race was scheduled to kickoff in mere moments and there was still a line of hundreds of people ALL WAITING ON ME mere feet from where I was then anxiously seated conspired to induce the most distressing and crippling stage fright I've ever experienced. I left the Port-O-Potty empty handed (full boweled?) and made my way to the start line with Juliette and my roommate to begin what I was now sure would be an epic disaster to entail possible death or, at the very least, violent and embarrassing bowel distress.

My thoughts and feeling per mile:

Start: It took us 10 minutes to get to the start line from the 4 hour corral so by the time we crossed the start line much of the pomp and circumstance of the official start was over. Also, I imagined the Kenyans being halfway through the course and I suddenly felt pale, pasty, slow, and lumbering. Sort of like an Imperial Walker from Star Wars.

Mile 1: Smooth, effortless gliding. We ran a mile already?!

Mile 2: I'm still feeling pretty good. Good conversation. Good friends. Good people watching.

Mile 3: Cake.

Mile 4: Seconds on the cake.

Mile 5: Maybe BBQ and constipation are secret recipes for success.

Mile 6: I could shit right now.

Mile 7: That was a big hill. I could REALLY shit right now.

Mile 8: I have to stop to shit RIGHT NOW.

Luckily, mile 8 is apparently where a lot of people feel this urge and a nice sprawling bank of Port-O-Potties was set up on the side of the road for just that purpose. Unfortunately, a lot of people feel this urge at mile 8 and I had a good 10 minute pit stop when the wait and actual performance of the deed are taken into account.

Right before I ducked off the course, Juliette said something like, "I'm going to keep going! Catch up!" I didn't realize it at the time, but this is terrible advice to give anyone in an endurance event.

Mile 9: Unencumbered by extra weight, I'm feeling great. Breathing through my nose.

Mile 10: Let's gear it up a bit. I'm flying.

Mile 11: Did I just run a 7:15 minute mile in the middle of my first marathon? Yup.

Mile 12: Maybe I should dial it back a bit.

Mile 13: Halfway there!

Mile 14: That 7:15 minute mile may not have been a good idea.

Mile 15: This is kinda staring to suck.

Mile 16: This sucks.

Mile 17: Hey, it's the Washington Monument. Whatever.

Mile 18: Sweet Baby Jesus, my calves are tight.

Mile 19: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Mile 20: Second wind! Awoooooooo!

Mile 20 1/2: That didn't last long.

Mile 21: Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming....

Mile 22: [white noise]

Mile 23: Where are my legs? Oh, there they are. Why can't I feel them?

Mile 24: Pain. Hurt. Legs.

Mile 25: Dooooon't stop...BELIEVIN'!

Mile 26: I'm seriously going to finish this thing!

Finish: Those people who say they get choked up are so full of it....wait, why am I crying?

The end, and I knew this from my previous marathon experience as a spectator, is the most chaotic, frustrating, and endless process of the whole event. Unless you're super badass or super not badass, you're going to finish with a whole gaggle of runners and it will take an eternity to go anywhere. During this eternity your legs will feel like someone has tapped into them with a funnel and poured molten lead into them. If you're like me, you eventually find a place to lay down, stretch, and JUST STOP MOVING. This place will be maybe a mile from where you're actually supposed to meet everyone but you just won't give a shit. You just ran a freaking marathon.

Eventually, I made my way over to the reunion area and met up with Juliette and my roommate's fiancee and relived the marathon mile by mile as we waited for him to show up. I'd known during the race that he wasn't feeling it (silence, a grimace here and there), but I figured a night of engagement celebration would have that effect. I lost track of him at mile 8 when I ducked off the course to relieve myself. Apparently he'd had a similar need at mile 13 and it was then that I'd overtaken him. When he finally did show up, he revealed that he'd started cramping up at mile 8 and had seriously considered running straight to the hotel at mile 16, but he'd stuck it out and now here we all stood, Juliette, her parents and a friend, my roommate, his newly minted fiancee, and myself among a bustling but exhausted crowd of runners. It had been a tough few months of training, least of all because of the training, but we'd done it and that odd, twisting course replete with bird suicides, actual deaths, catastrophic injuries, brutal training runs, bowel distress, new friends, cramping at mile 8, and an engagement all somehow seemed to fit...or maybe I was just too exhausted to make sense of it all.

Either way, I'm definitely doing it again.

Top 25

2010-12-17T02:00:00.005-05:00

Note: If you follow the links in this entry, forgive the commercials.

So I'm on a bit of a music kick these days. I used to do this when I was younger, particularly in high school and college. I would buy an album (Jeez, remember CDs?!?) and listen to it beginning to end with the liner notes in hand. Lots of times I had to have music playing to fall asleep. I'm not listening to more music or enjoying the music I do listen to any more than I normally would, but I'm thinking about it more. Some of this undoubtedly has to do with long commutes with nothing but my iPod for company. I'm a big fan of putting the two thousand something songs in that little miracle box on shuffle and just letting it rip. I do my fair share of skipping around, but it's nice to get reacquainted with a song or unexpectedly hear something that takes you back to a specific moment in time. That's not always good, but it's always interesting.

The other catalysts for this renaissance of musical primacy are friends of mine who are either in the business or just have really, really ridiculously good taste (at least similar to mine) in artists. My buddy Mike, who is a member of a prominent band which shall remain unnamed, has recently introduced me to Paper Route. Mike has a habit of giving me solid referrals to the point that when I'm feeling things are getting a little stale, I'll call him up and ask him what he's listening to these days. I have yet to be let down.

My self-admitted music snob friend Maria has similarly introduced me to Sleigh Bells. Maria's introduction was kind of a wake up call. You can't turn on the TV or get online right now without seeing something about Sleigh Bells. I guess it was a sign of how far gone I had gotten (and how much Top 40 radio I was listening to) that I had no idea who they were until Maria threw me a bone.

I love having people like this in my life. Music always changes and new bands are constantly popping up all over the world. Your favorite song is probably still floating around out there in someone else's head. It's just an idea he/she needs to write on paper or tentatively pick out on the strings of a guitar. It's exciting to compare musical tastes and new bands with friends like these because the conversations are always reinventing themselves and discovery is always just catching up away. Which is why I'm presently at such a loss, a loss dripping with guilty pleasure.

You can tell a lot about a person by what's in their iPod. And you can tell even more about them if you go to their Top 25 Most Played list. I did this earlier today. I was shocked. Apparently, my sensibilities are a lot more mainstream than I'd like to admit. I attribute some of this to pre soccer or training run playlists. At least, that's what I tell myself. It would be really tough to glide through a 10 mile run listening to Elliot Smith. Seriously. But the fact remains that the majority of my Top 25 Most Played is rap music. I can't quite explain this. I grew up upper middle class and white. So did my sister, but she has a deep and abiding love for Tupac.

It occurred to me to doctor the list. I could squeeze in some Gaslight Anthem, Mumford and Sons, Death Cab For Cutie, et al and post a list sufficiently cool/esoteric enough to rescue my ego from total disclosure...but where's the fun in that? So,here goes:

1. I'm So Hood (remix) by DJ Khaled - This one cracks me up. Mostly because DJ Khaled is such a freakin' joke. I am patently against producers in their own songs and especially when they talk over huge portions of the song bragging about how they make hit records. Having said that, the first few verses in this song are awesome, particularly Ludacris and Busta Rhymes. I also gain a little bit satisfaction watching the artists in this song awkwardly interact with DJ Khaled in the video. He clearly has no idea what to do on screen and winds up looking like a bad high school improv student. Plus, they all look low grade annoyed by him, sort of like having to hang out with the water boy at the football party. Or like they're all thinking, "God, I wish he'd quit doing that with his hands." Perfect pre soccer song. PS: There is nothing about me that is even remotely hood.

2. All of The Above by Maino - Firstly, Maino is awesome. It's complicated, but he's one of those artists who is a total trainwreck/thug, but is also completely authentic. I don't think I'll ever wrap my mind around how someone can have booze and strippers i their videos, but also be a positive role model for kids. This only seems to be a debate in rap music. I don't think I've not gotten a yellow card in a soccer match when I've listened to this song before kick off.

3. Everybody's Changing by Keane - Clearly, we're changing gears here. I'm pretty sure Maino and Keane have nothing in common. To be honest, I wasn't a big Keane fan until I saw them at Austin City Limits Festival. It was during that huge "we all want to sound British and somewhat vintage" phase and I sort of dismissed them out of hand. Granted, they are British and don't try to sound vintage, but whatever. I just wasn't in to bands like this at the time. I was at the festival with my girlfriend, it was early evening, the festival hadn't quite yet turned into the choking dust bowl it would the next day, and we sat on a hill and watched their set. I was in love and this was one of those perfect moments that you later realize occur so rarely in life.

4. Buried Myself Alive by The Used - Changing gears again. I used to think of The Used solely as "that band with the lead singer who was dating Ozzy Osbourne's daughter" (a clear publicity stunt). Having said that, they have some pretty damned good songs. What can I say? It appeals to the skate punk in me.

5. Ride by Ace Hood - I plead the Fifth here. No idea what to say. I can remember being between relationships and getting a ride to the airport from a female friend with whom there was always a mutual attraction. This song was on the radio and I thought, "Maybe?" PS "Maybe?" is never a good thing to think when contemplating whether or not to start a relationship. Also, Ace Hood songs should never serve as an emotional impetus for anything.

6. Get Like Me by David Banner - Total disclosure? I love David Banner. I remember after Hurricane Katrina there was a huge controversy because Banner gave a huge amount of money and time to the relief effort in Mississippi (his home state) and was later given some civic honor for his efforts. A Republican politician had the temerity to suggest that Banner wasn't a role model and should not be honored for his work and support because some of his songs are less than totally appropriate (some are, but seriously, what a dick). Also, I went through a phase when this song came out that when people asked me what I was up to later I would just say, "Stuntin'." When they stared at me blankly, I would clarify, "It's a habit."

7. What You Know by T.I. - Great song. Awesome beat. TI is easily one of the best lyricists in hip hop music today. Maybe not in this song, but that's beside the point. What makes this song is the beat. It's epic. Yes, epic.

8. Banquet by Bloc Party - I was actually introduced to Bloc Party by a video game. It was one of the incarnations of EA Sports' FIFA franchise (I can't remember which). Who says video games can't have positive effects on young minds? I'm not quite sure why it's this song that's in the Top 25, especially considering there are other songs by the band that I like much more, but I'll take it.

9. Out Here Grindin' by DJ Khaled - Here's that freakin' DJ Khaled again. Honestly, he's a total ass clown, but maybe all he does is make hit records? Does anyone remember when you could buy "Homies" from candy dispensers? DJ Khaled looks like a Homie.

10. Lights, Camera, Action by Mr. Cheeks - What's great about this song? The guy's name is Mr. Cheeks. That is the least badass rap name of all time, which makes it badass. Plus, when this song came out I think Mr. Cheeks was something like 40. Whatever. It was my go to song when I was playing soccer in college. Coincidentally, my girlfriend at the time was also a soccer player and it was her go to song as well. I'm guessing this had less to do with lyrical content and more to do with the chorus and the beat. I'm hoping so anyway.

11. Give it All by Rise Against - If Maria isn't rolling her eyes already, she will when she reads that Rise Against weighed in at number 11. Firstly, they're from Chicago (her hometown). Secondly, they're a politically active, vegan, environmentalist, animal rights band. I mean, really?!? Can a band be more earnest? I can't help myself though, this is a great punk anthem. Love it. Trivia: the lead singer has two different colored eyes.

12. Stuntin' Like My Daddy by Birdman and Lil Wayne - Can you not like Lil Wayne? What a freak show. Say what you will, but the guy is a legitimate rap star. Prolific, artistic (or at least a trend setter), and he just doesn't give a damn.

13. Unholy Confessions by Avenged Sevenfold - This is definitely a guilty pleasure band. When I was teaching high school and overhearing teenagers bitch about their angst filled lives, I had to accept the fact that I was listening to the same music they were. This is definitely a band in the "my parents just don't understand me" genre, but the two guitarists are legitimate virtuosos and there's something reassuring about the fact that even the 2000s couldn't kill The Metal. PS Watching this video makes me want to be a ROCK STAR.

14. Shawty Say by David Banner - David Banner again. This song is essentially about treating women correctly. Granted, David Banner says it in his own special way - which is probably the way the previously mentioned Republican politician was referring to when he railed against him being honored for charity work - but that's beside the point. The other great thing about David Banner? The chick who says his name over the beat at the beginning of every song.

15. Kimdracula by the Deftones - This one totally flummoxes me. The best I can guess is that I made a playlist once and put this song on it twice. I love the Deftones, but this is not the song I would have picked. *High School flashback* My best buddy Gary took me to a Deftones show in 1996 at Liberty Lunch in Austin, TX. There were all of 300 people in the crowd and the show cost $3. $1 for each band playing. Deftones, Man Will Surrender, and Human Waste Project. It was, and still is, the best concert experience of my life. Chino Moreno has an incredible voice and they are one of the few bands I listened to at that age that has actually grown with me. Also, "I wish these snakes were your arms...." great lyric. Note: The video on this link is not the actual music video because they never made one for this song.

16. Dope Boys by The Game - Ok, I legitimately have no business listening to this song. Like I said before, there is zero hood about me. The Game is from South Central Los Angeles and had a scholarship to play basketball at Oregon State but just could not shake the hood in him. Honestly, and I mean this with no judgement or humor, but if another rapper is going to get shot sometime soon, a la Tupac, it's going to be this guy. Having said that, the beat is ridiculous.

17. You Are the One by Shiny Toy Guns - This song is addictive. I'm not sure a keyboard riff has been more balls out awesome since "The Final Countdown". I mean that ironically and seriously. I used to listen to this song before indoor soccer matches to get my Euro fix (the band is actually from California). I also have to confess that I had a faux hawk at the time and was referred to at work as "The creepy European guy". Shiny Toy Guns no longer has the same female vocalist. They replaced the chick in this song, Carah Faye Charnow, who is also exhibit A in how sexy tattoos can be on a woman, with another girl named Sisely Treasure. Does that not sound like a porn name to anyone else? Anyhow, treasure does a decent enough job, but Charnow had a voice like a bell.

18. Just Dance by Lady Gaga - Ok, ok. What the hell? Well, I'm a product of my times and my times are currently defined by Lady Gaga (at least my popular culture times). Honestly, though, I challenge you to not want to dance, or at least hum along, to her songs. Plus, she's an actual artist who actually writes her own songs. She's also proof that you can exude sexuality and be sexy without actually being terribly good looking.

19. Hi Hater by Maino - Another great song I challenge you to not sing along to.

20. Savior by Rise Against - Maria, roll your eyes once more. Honestly, I can't explain the video. People in stuffed animal suits. Who knows? It's a pity too because the song stands on its own merits and would be fine if the video were even just a performance montage. Whatever. I'm not sure why I love this song so much, but I think it reminds me of an Ex in that waaaaaaaay too serious and emotional kind of way.

21. Jackie Will Save Me by Shiny Toy Guns - Again, no official video for this song, but I wasn't listing the Top 25 Most Played Videos, was I? I've got nothing new to say here about Shiny Toy Guns. Guilty pleasure...Euro feel...Carah Faye Charnow is sexy as hell. That about covers it. Oh, one more thing. If I were a professional soccer player and had to have a Youtube clip video set to music, this might be the song I'd use. I'd be badass...and maybe a little gay.

22. The Taste of Ink by The Used - Another The Used song. I think it's hilarious that an emo band hails from Salt Lake City. Great song to belt out late at night in the car.

23. Split Me Wide Open by the Bravery - This is another band I got in to because of the Austin City Limits Festival, and this is just a great song. Synth, guitars, great vocals. Sort of reminds me of all the reasons I love The Cure. There's this highly sexual and somewhat androgynous quality to the lead singer's voice that fits just perfectly with the music. Can't believe I just wrote that. See the last five words on #21.

24. Smile Like You Mean It by The Killers - I feel like I may have a thing for keyboards.

25. Wake Up by Metalkpretty - I have a thing for bands with female lead singers who have PIPES. this girl can sing her ass off. Also, and this really creeps me out, she looks exactly like a girl I dated a couple of years ago. The resemblance is uncanny enough that I wikipediaed (I totally made that a verb) the band to make sure it wasn't her. Also, some friends of mine saw the girl I dated in a Lowe's the other day. Pretty good sign she's not a rock star. Damn.

American Girls, They Want the Whole World/They want Every Last Little Light in New York City

2010-12-09T18:33:00.001-05:00

I get addicted to bands. I'll hear a song that strums one of my admittedly many emotional chords and I'm hooked. Sometimes this results in a terrible crime. I love a song so much and put so much stock in how well written all of said band's other songs must be, and then...nothing. It's the worst kind of sleight of hand. You get all prepared to love a body of work but instead you're asked to tolerate a life's work of mediocrity for two minutes and thirty seconds of accidental genius.

[Aside: I had this great analogy working here about wonderful first dates and shitty second dates and wanting to be rescued from shitty second dates and I even worked "deus ex machina' in there, but it seemed too self satisfying.]

[Aside to my aside: See how I went ahead and used the self satisfying analogy in a self deprecating way? I am such an asshole.]

Such is not the case with The Gaslight Anthem. There is nothing profound about me saying this as they're already a critically acclaimed band and have been around for a few years, but I'm just now getting into them and want to enjoy this honeymoon period for all it's worth. If you don't know the band, please consider this an earnest introduction. In particular, check out The Queen of Lower Chelsea (title of this entry from the song), Miles Davis & The Cool, and She Loves You.

Lyrically, all of these songs are outstanding. Touching, intelligent, mature. Plus, they can bring the rock. That's always important. Enjoy!

Another Letter to My Nephew

2010-12-06T19:36:00.000-05:00

Dearest Otto,

Here's the deal: It looks like your folks have settled on Otto as The Name You Will Forever be Called. I put that in all caps to remind you later on how final something like this is. Seriously. My folks decided, for no other reason than to be confusing I'm thinking, to also call me by my middle name. Every roll that is called, every job interview you attend, every face-to-face meeting with someone in an official capacity will start with you saying, "Actually, I go by 'Otto'."

Whatever. Your dad is in the same boat so maybe he thought he'd be a smartass and pay it forward. To be honest though, it's not that you'll have to explain, ad nauseum, For The Rest of Your Life (See what I did there?) that you actually go by your middle name that bugs me, but that for whatever reason, the much, much cooler "OJ" was voted down. I know, I know, initials for names can be obnoxious. Trust me, I once had a friend named "BJ", I know the weight a set of initials can put on the shoulders of an unsuspecting adolescent. It's not pretty. "OJ" though? Solid...save for the whole "named after a probable double murderer" thing. Details, details.

Anyhow, how have you been? I still haven't gotten to meet you in the flesh. I'm feeling a little like I'm shirking my duties as an uncle, but multiple time zones and a paucity of expendable income in my bank account have conspired to keep us on opposite sides of the country. Soon, dear Juice, soon. I have, however, seen many a picture of your earliest days and have heard you wailing like a banshee over the telephone as I try to talk to your mother about shit that probably doesn't really matter to her at all these days. Tough to tell her about what I'm listening to or reading these days when she's worrying every second about the helpless infant crying in her arms for whom she is SOLELY RESPONSIBLE. Puts things in perspective, I suppose. If anything, it makes me realize how desperately unready I am to impregnate anyone. I say "impregnate" not to make it impersonal, but to point out the fact that I have a few hurdles to jump over before I can say "have a baby." You know, details like fall in love, get married, plan. Actually, you don't, but one of these days you will...and I'll be able to offer you a whole slew of advice, not all of it willingly gained. But that's a conversation for another day. Just remember, you'll have tough times, but eventually it will all be worth it. If you ever get lost, look at your parents as a model. Hell, even I do sometimes.

Enjoy discovering the world on a daily basis and doing whatever it is 3 month olds do to occupy their time. I'm guessing this is a lot of feeding and sleeping. Sounds like heaven!

Cheers,

Your Uncle

Love, Tex-Mex, and IBS or When a First Date Goes to Shit

2010-11-18T17:04:00.002-05:00

There are a few simple truths I've been taught in my time on this earth. No one is in charge of your life but you. Curiosity is one of the greatest blessings in life. Love and generosity are incredible gifts to both the recipient and their source. Those are of the high brow ilk.

A few others for your consideration: Beer is better with friends. Sex is best when you actually like the other person involved. Everyone knows at least one good "Oops, I shit my pants" story.

It is the last of these truths of which I would like to write today. In particular, I am thinking of a story that was relayed to me in college (What is it about those years that a good story outweighs potential embarrassment every time?) and that has stuck with me ever since. Were this story not told to me by a person one degree of separation from its unfortunate protagonists, I might doubt it as a horrifying and ingenious work of fiction composed by someone seeking to entertain, sort of like the Lard Ass story from Stand By Me. However, I have never doubted this story's veracity.

This is a tale of woe, misfortune, and love lost at the hands of a particularly irritable bowel. The protagonist, who we'll call Billy, was a newly appointed youth minister in a prominent church in a small town in Texas. Coincidentally, Billy's name was/is really Billy. I figure "Youth minister who shit himself" is a largely unGoogleable phrase and would likely render no results for the actual Billy of whom I'm writing. Fingers crossed.

Anyhow, Billy was young and single and launching what promised to be a long and successful career in the ministry. If you know anything about Texas, you'll know that this is the type of thing mothers of young, single women who are members of prominent churches in small towns in Texas lick their chops over. Such was the case with Billy. Every mother with a single daughter of marriageable age in this particular town was slyly and not-so-slyly trying to hook Billy up with her daughter. It was only a matter of time before Billy accepted one of these dates (I mean, if he didn't the rumors might start regarding his sexuality, and then where would he be? This also happens in prominent churches in small towns in Texas, sad to say).

The date was to be a traditional dinner and a movie affair with the dinner part taking place at a Casa Ole. Apparently, this was the small town girl's favorite restaurant, which probably should have been a red flag to Billy. Casa Ole is the bane of legitimate Tex-Mex all over the Lone Star state. It's sort of like the Chili's of Tex-Mex, but of lesser quality and with a more obnoxious decor. Jose Lima used to sing the jingle. Some say that, aside from his Cy Young caliber year with Houston, this was his best work.

Enough about Jose, God rest his soul, Billy knew two things about himself that were unconditionally true in all situations. 1: He had to have home field advantage for any bowel movement. It was a hang up born from something that must have occurred early on in life. I can only guess what this was, but I think a lot of people have this hang up, although probably not to the degree Billy did. 2: He was afflicted with irritable bowel syndrome and never quite knew what would set it off. Sometimes it was spicy food. Sometimes it was greasy food. Sometimes it was something he couldn't put his finger on. At any rate, he occasionally experienced regrettable and violent bouts of explosive diarrhea. With those two truths having governed a substantial portion of Billy's behaviors for God-knows-how-long, Billy and his date arrived at Casa Ole to begin their evening together.

According to the version of events that was told to me, the date was going swimmingly. Conversation had flowed easily and familiarly in the car on the way to the restaurant and the two had continued their enjoyable evening over a bowl of salsa and some tortilla chips. Billy was genuinely interested in this small town girl and the small town girl appeared to be genuinely interested in Billy. She was attractive, intelligent, and witty despite her affinity for Casa Ole.

The two had ordered their food but it had not yet arrived when Billy felt a horrifyingly familiar sensation in his lower abdomen. You know what I'm talking about. It's as if someone has reached inside your body midway between your navel and naughty bits and clenched your intestines with an iron fist. You break out in a low grade sweat and wring your hands at the discomfort and begin to asses, with razor sharp accuracy, the most efficient route to the nearest bathroom. Billy, unfortunately, was a prisoner to truth #1 and the most efficient route to the nearest bathroom was not left at the hostess stand and all the way to the back of the restaurant, but straight at the hostess stand, into the car, east on Interstate 20, off at Main Street, through two lights, left, right, another left, into his garage, out of the car, through the utility room and kitchen and living room, down the hall, and left into the bathroom.

Billy looked at his date and interrupted her mid sentence.

"We have to go. Now."

"What?" She replied. "The food isn't even here yet and the movie doesn't start for another hour."

"Now," Billy said as he plopped a fifty dollar bill onto the table.

[Aside: Casa Ole's entire menu probably doesn't add up to fifty dollars]

Billy jumped up from the table and his date, confused, followed after him to the car.

Speeding out of the parking lot, the small town girl tried to ask Billy what was the matter, but he couldn't say anything, such was his level of concentration at keeping what was inside of him inside of him. Even if he could explain, that's really not first date conversation.

They made it to his exit, but Billy knew he wasn't going to make it. He was face to face with a horrifying choice. He could violently shit his pants in the car with his date, a date he genuinely liked, or he could pull over on the Interstate and unleash hell. Billy chose the latter but was immediately confronted with another horrifying choice. Once out of the car, he had to decide, given that there were no bushes or trees to conceal himself behind, whether to face the car and thereby give his date a front row viewing of his expression during the most agonizingly embarrassing moment of his life, or he could face away from the car and give his date a front row viewing of the reason he was having the most agonizingly embarrassing moment of his life. Billy again chose the latter, slightly more modest option. He ran 10 yards away from the car, turned to face his confused and worried date, dropped his pants, and absolutely turned himself inside out while he grunted, cramped, and gasped his way through the ordeal.

Cars honked.

When it was finally over, Billy pulled his pants back up and tried to act as professional and appropriate as one possibly can in a situation such as the one he was now in. There was no toilet paper, and despite his date graciously averting her eyes, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what had just happened. Billy got back in the car and began to head for her house. There's really no salvaging things when a first date goes this route. They drove in silence for a few minutes as they both must have searched for what to say. Finally, the small town girl broke the silence.

"Are you OK?" She timidly asked.

"Did you not see what just happened? Of course I'm not OK," Billy replied.

I would love to say that Billy and the small town girl were able to recover from this epic catastrophe and that they're laughing about it now after years of marriage, but I can't. I mean, I suppose it's a possibility, but this is where the story ended when it was told to me. I like to aim a little lower and think that this is finally what cured Billy of his need for home field advantage. Left at the hostess stand is always the best option.

De Ja Vu or Crazy "Matrix" Shit

2010-11-02T15:33:00.000-04:00

This is just WEIRD. Go back and read my post from September 17, 2006 (or don't; it's probably not that weird to you). Good? Finished it? Now read the post from September 17, 2010.....

What the fuck?!?!

FML.

2010-10-29T14:23:00.000-04:00

Of all of the galactically stupid things I've done in my life, the most recent doesn't really rank in the top 10, but it's pissing me off something fierce. Last weekend, I flew back to Texas to watch my Baylor Bears become bowl eligible for the first time since my voice changed...at Homecoming...with the majority of my college buddies present...and my father...and as an added bonus, we earned a top 25 ranking. This also has not been done since about the time my voice changed. Tex Mex was consumed, stories were bandied about shotgun style, karaoke was preformed, an alumni soccer game was played, and I generally got to recharge my happiness batteries although I was exhausted by the end of the trip.

As per my previous post, I'm a new uncle and my sister lives on the other side of the country. Flights are not cheap to the other side of the country and I had my fingers crossed that American Airlines would overbook at least one leg of my trip and need volunteers to take a later flight in exchange for a voucher. This happened on the second leg of my trip and I volunteered, but alas, they did not need me and I arrived in Texas empty handed.

However, on the return leg of the trip, I accepted a 4 hour lay over in exchange for a $300.00 flight voucher. Success. This morning I was thinking of dates that might work for a trip out to meet the Little Fella and catch up with my sister when I remembered, with a sickening feeling, that I HAD FREAKIN' SHREDDED MY BOARDING PASSES AND FLIGHT COUPON AT WORK THE DAY AFTER I GOT BACK. The voucher is non refundable and American Airlines will not replace it. I spent 4 extra hours in the DFW airport just for the hell of it. There isn't a suitable profane phrase to sum up how I'm feeling right now.

A Letter to My Nephew

2010-10-20T23:34:00.000-04:00

Dear Samuel Otto,

Where to begin? Well, first off, welcome to the world. It must seem like a big place all of a sudden. I mean, one minute you're floating around in blissful darkness and the next it's all lights and doctors and hustle and bustle. Right now you're preoccupied with sleeping and feeding and pooping yourself, but all of that will change, probably quicker than your parents will want (more on them later). It's a funny thing this world. It can be scary and overwhelming. Trust me. But with some time you'll come to see that it's really pretty small and we're all pretty similar despite our trying desperately to prove otherwise. Right now there's a kid on the other side of this floating blue sphere experiencing many of the same things you are. Maybe you'll meet that kid some day and find something in common. Seem strange? Well, let me tell you, I've run in to people I went to high school with on other continents. No planning or forethought to it. One minute you're walking down a street in Scotland, far away from anything that seems like home, and then you bump into (literally, in my case) you're buddy from English II. It's only scary if you allow yourself to settle for a smaller scale. Be curious! I know you will, it's in your genes. I think between your mom, dad, grandparents, and myself we have all the continents covered...well, maybe not Antarctica. Put it on your list. We've only got a limited time here and your clock started ticking on October 7th, 2010. That's when you were born.

Your parents will be able to tell the story of your arrival much better than me, I wasn't there. They'll talk about how the electricity on the military base was out and how the dog needed x-rays and how the car was broken down. They'll talk about how happy they were that you were born easily and that you were healthy and they'll argue about who you most resemble. They'll talk about how they picked your name. Let me tell you, it wasn't an easy process. They intend to call you Otto, which is cool by me, but since your last name starts with a "J" I may exercise obnoxious uncle rights and refer to you as OJ or Juice. Not a fan? Well, you were almost a Miles. Seriously. Your mom was partial to the name, but your dad and I had to talk her off that ledge. You may know a Miles in your time on this big, tiny planet and I can all but bet that Miles has two inhalers, allergies, and glasses well before the other kids. I like to think of Miles as that kid in the back of the class who wipes his nose on his sweatshirt and is always a step behind. Your third grade teacher may say something like, "If all of you get your science books out in five seconds we can play Heads Up Seven Up at the end of the day." Don't worry if you don't know what that is, it's a badass third grade game and you'll love it down the road. Well, Miles will be the kid that gets out his history book and ruins it for everyone. You'll hate yourself for it later, but with all the other kids you'll turn around and say, "MILES! Not your history book!" Count yourself lucky. You're OJ.

Life's going to move pretty fast, OJ. It seems like just yesterday that your mother and I were smuggling vegetables from the dinner table into our underwear, excusing ourselves, and flushing the offending greens down the toilet. She'll never tell you this, but she got caught once because said offending greens were too much for our childhood home's plumbing to take. No way can you convince your parents that you ate, digested, and crapped whole trees of broccoli. Remember when I told you I had a lot to teach you? Consider the dinner plate to underwear to restroom heist and early freebee.

Before you know it you'll have left childhood and games of catch and Saturday morning cartoons behind and you won't even realize you miss them. There's a brief moment of hell called middle school that you'll get through fine. Remember, whether you're a jock or a band geek, nothing is permanent. Middle school kids suck and, I hate to break it to you, you will too. There's no way around this. It's a cruel time and kids that age are cruel kids. On the whole, you'll probably be one of the less cruel kids because you've got two gems as parents. Trust me on this one. I've known your mom literally since the day I was born and your Old Man has been a buddy of mine since the middle school days I was just referencing. In fact, your mom has known him since about this time as well, and she thought we were both way too full of ourselves then. Truth be told, we were...and probably for the ensuing ten plus years afterwards. You'll get out of that stage. Things change and so do people.

Back to your parents. Your folks are the kind of people who would stop in a rainstorm in the middle of nowhere to help someone with a flat tire. They're the kind of people who, around Thanksgiving, will buy an extra turkey and donate it to a homeless shelter. They're the kind of people who will teach you to always stick up for the underdog and always take your victories and losses with humility and grace. I'm saying this with years and years of evidence and the privilege of witnessing them both at extraordinary highs and debilitating lows. They're salt of the earth type people, and although I'm sure sometimes you'll be embarrassed by them, in the end you'll see the same qualities I'm telling you about now. You're a lucky kid, Samuel Otto.

You don't know it now, because you're really just a pudgy ball of baby rolling around in blankets and flapping your arms, but someday the shit is going to hit the fan and your parents will be the first people there for you. Some bully is going to insult you or some girl is going to break your heart and your mom will say something like, "This too shall pass." I know she'll say this because that's what my mom (your grandmother if you're not big on the whole geneology thing) said to us. You'll roll your eyes and sarcastically think, "Thanks for the comfort," but she'll be right. Time is a funny thing. When things are going well, you'll never have enough of it, but when things are bad, when your heart feels like it's been wrenched from your chest and you just want to be better NOW, minutes will pass like days. I hate to be a spoiler, but this will happen and it's what makes the good times that much more delicious and meaningful.

Your dad is going to teach you a lot of cool stuff. When you're old enough to understand, he'll be your hero. It's kind of unavoidable in your case because he's a fighter pilot. Without getting into all the weighty moral intricacies of what being a finally honed weapon of war entails, being a fighter pilot is pretty freaking cool, and you'll most certainly be all about it. I know this because I felt the same way about my dad. Your mom is a sensitive, thoughtful, emotionally intelligent woman. Your father is similarly thoughtful and emotionally intelligent, but he provides a needed foil to your mom's way of thinking. Ditto my parents. Sensing a pattern? Your dad will be gone a lot. It's unavoidable considering his job, but those moments when he's home? Cherish those. There's nothing like basking in the glow of a father's affection and feeling the love of something that is a part of you and will leave again. Take a nap next to the guy. Go on a hike with him. Let him teach you how to start the grill or work on the car. When you get to that crappy middle school phase, he'll become less your hero and more your task master, but that phase will pass. By the time you're your own man and can look back on your childhood and reflect on your teenage years, your dad will be your hero again, but he'll also be human. That's an important combination because it allows you to love him even more. It allows you to see that he chose to be that person for you. OJ, you're already a lucky boy.

I hope I get to be a big part of your life. I hope you come to see and love me as I've come to see and love my uncles. I hope our geographic differences are not too much to overcome. I hope you always feel loved and cared for. I hope you are able to embrace every opportunity you choose to take advantage of. I hope your life is an adventure of your making. I know you're off to the best possible start with the best possible parents. I can't wait to meet you.

Sincerely,
Your Uncle

Holy Awkward

2010-09-29T19:40:00.004-04:00

So, I would normally never post on back-to-back days. It's sort of a principle thing. Blogs are a dime a dozen, and who's really interesting enough to write about their life every single day?

[Aside:] The answer there is no one.

But I feel compelled to let this one rip (future pun totally intended). I'm in the process of training for a marathon. This process is sometimes rewarding and sometimes utter torture. Occasionally I feel like Mercury flying wing footed just above the ground and the pure exhilaration of running fast(ish), over distance, and comfortably is enough to make me smile suddenly and laugh to myself. This was the case yesterday when I found myself slowly but surely clicking through the gears on a seven mile run and finishing strongly with a maniacal grin plastered across my face. But, as the Greeks were so fond of pointing out, when a mortal likens himself to a god, there's sure to be some sort of divine punishment. Ah, hubris.

I set out on my run today feeling full of myself, but I quickly realized the legs weren't there. Whereas yesterday I felt springy and light, today I felt like an elephant with concrete shoes. First my ass tightened up, then my calves, and finally my stomach started to rumble in protest. Two thirds of the way though my planned run, I was out of gas and walking dejectedly back home.

On the trail in front of me an Asian couple was shuffling along enjoying an evening stroll. When I first saw them they were a good hundred yards in front of me and I was confident that there would be no awkward walker-passing-walker exchange. You know what I'm talking about. It's sort of like when you see someone you know in public and have a brief exchange, say your goodbyes, and then both realize you're headed in exactly the same direction. No one likes that. It's awkward. Before I knew it though they were only fifty yards in front of me. Then twenty. Now ten.

They had been passing a mobile phone back and forth and speaking a staccato rhythm of what I believed to be Mandarin Chinese and I was confident that they had not yet noticed I was just behind them. Right as I was about to break into a jog and play the I-just-caught-up-to-you-because-I've-been-running card and coast the final quarter mile back to the house, the woman in the couple hung up the phone, paused for about two beats, and then uncorked the longest, most intensely strained fart I have ever heard in my life.

Oh. My. God.

I was like a burglar in a Loony Toons cartoon. I froze in a tip toe and tried not to breathe...both out of fear of being noticed and of the possible malodorous consequences, my face strained as if I were in the process of dipping myself into a frozen lake

At that very moment, the woman SHOOK HER FREAKIN' LEG to wrest out the final crescendo of gas. All told, we're talking a good five seconds of fart time.

Biting my cheeks and holding my breath, I faked my best I've-been-running-for-a-while-and-just-now-caught-up-to-you-and-no-I-definitely-did-not-hear-you-tear-the-sky-in-half-with-your-ass jog. When I was at the woman's eight o'clock, she noticed me, stepped to the side, and grabbed her husband's arm. As I passed, she said something in Chinese which, although I don't speak, I was able to roughly translate as, "Holy fuck, I just crop dusted the bejesus out of that guy!"

I ran the final quarter mile to sell the farce that I had been running the whole time and finished with another huge smile on my face, but for an altogether different reason. As my sister once told me, with a look of convicted sincerity on her face, "I don't want to live in a world where farts aren't funny."

Amen to that. And also, I'll think twice before cutting a run short again.

Cracker Barrel Casanova

2010-09-28T22:50:00.004-04:00

I have never used a pick up line. To be honest, I didn't realize "game" and "raps" were as prevalent and well-rehearsed as they are until recently. I kind of always figured that if you were yourself and yourself was an attractive, confident, intelligent, and witty dude, that yourself would bat at least .300...which I guess sort of sounds like a pick up line. I also just realized I used a sports analogy to quantify matters of the heart...well, maybe not the heart...maybe just hormones...does that make it ok? Crap. Now I'm confused and off topic.

Regardless, I have never used a pick up line (trying to find my initial thread of thought again). I'm not saying I'm charming and witty and awesome enough to just be myself in front of an attractive stranger and legitimately expect a reciprocated interest. Quite the contrary. What I'm saying is that I have NEVER walked up to an attractive stranger and PURPOSEFULLY started a conversation in the hopes that one thing would lead to another and we'd wind up in the sack together. This is not to say I'm a shrinking violet, but that to me a planned approach to someone just seems really sleazy. Well, depending on your motivations, I suppose. I mean, if you're generally love struck by someone I guess a well-intentioned approach is ok, charming even, but walking up to a stranger to get in their pants is sort of heartless. Actually, it's the definition of heartless. But isn't "love struck" just a politically correct way to say you think said attractive stranger is really, really hot and want to get in their pants? Damn! Now I'm confused and off topic again.

This whole post started as a vehicle to relay the most ridiculous pick up line I've ever heard. I promise I'll get back on track. So, the other night (see, I'm back on track), a guy I know, and he's a really good guy - honestly, he just plays to the audience sometimes and I think spouts locker room banter to be one of the boys but is actually a big softy - said that he leads with, and I'm not making this up, "So, let's say after you and I wake up tomorrow morning, we go have breakfast at the Cracker Barrel." Cracker Barrel? Seriously? I feel like breakfast in bed would be a better route to take, or even a nice cafe with farm fresh omelets and mimosas. Crepes? Belgian waffles? Lattes? But Cracker Barrel? Off the highway? Exit 103? Maybe it's just ridiculous enough to work. Regardless, I can't say I'd jump at the opportunity to hook up with the girl who swoons at the prospect of a $6.99 eggs and bacon breakfast at the Cracker Barrel.

To each his own. I guess it's better than a McDonald's egg McMuffin.

Phantom Pains

2010-09-17T15:47:00.002-04:00

I've read before that when a patient needs a limb removed either because of irreparable injury or cancer or infection that they can sometimes "feel" the limb even after it's gone because the nerve endings transmit sensations as if the limb were still there. I can't imagine how disconcerting this must be to the amputee, especially in the months immediately following the amputation. Can you imagine waking up one morning and feeling your arm only to come fully awake and realize that this appendage you can't imagine being without is gone? Forever? If the arm or leg was lost in a clinical setting, clearly it had to go. A conscious decision was made to sacrifice a limb to save a body, but that can't make it any easier to be without. Maybe it helps to rationalize and be philosophical about the loss, but in the end it's still a loss - a vital loss - and it must be heartbreaking.

Without indulging in hyperbole or stooping to teenage poetry, I'm feeling a bit like that these days. Before I go on, I have to admit that I'm a writer. It helps me make sense of things and order my thoughts. It's sort of like organizing a disheveled work space. Bills go in one folder, incoming and outgoing memos are separated, trash is disposed of, and before you know it, you can see a clear path forward and prioritize your actions. It's like that, but with emotions and thoughts and hopes. In realizing I need to do this to make sense of myself, I have to ignore the audience. It isn't for the audience (well maybe this explanation is), and I can't help that I know some of the people who will read this and that they may see themselves in it. It's not a message in a bottle or a flare from a sinking ship. It's where I am and hopefully a starting point to where I want to go.

To pick back up my analogy, my amputated limb is the loss of a relationship. I mean that strictly in the sense of loss and the now, more than three months later, realization of the gravity of that loss. It's the strangest thing that the easiest part of a break up, at least to me, are the few weeks immediately following the decision to end it. All of the bad things are perched aggressively in the forefront of your mind and the frustrations and hurtful things and reasons why it's not right come at you like a rapid fire diagnosis. I had to end things to save us from an unhappy relationship. We have to take your arm to save your body. I can accept that. I imagine most amputees can as well. When you're presented with all of the reasons why a thing has to be done, you can rationalize doing that thing, even if it's highly unpleasant and emotionally wrenching. But then the recovery starts...

You don't miss having your arm because it had cancer. You miss your arm because it was a part of you; because you could climb and throw and reach and hold hands or stroke your lover's face. You come to this point months after you've experienced the loss when the clinical decision has been taken and the necessity of having to make that decision has faded into the past. I don't miss my girlfriend because we fought and didn't trust one another and became gradually resentful of our differences. I don't miss her because I never felt she was comfortable being totally vulnerable to me or because I craved a measure of warmth, intimacy, and understanding that I'm sure looked an awful lot to her like losing herself. I miss her because she gave me exhausted hugs at the end of her workday and she sometimes unknowingly used the wrong word to hilarious effect. I miss that she has to sleep in pitch blackness, is the world's worst cook, won't save herself from embarrassment if the story is good, smiles like a spotlight, and when she genuinely laughs, sounds like a symphony. I miss her striking beauty and her graceful power. The diagnosis has faded and now I'm living without something I thought I would live with for the rest of my life.

Which places me at a starting point. Pick yourself up, kid.

Dirty 30

2010-09-09T13:06:00.004-04:00

Full disclosure: I hate being 30.

I know it's just 30 and you hear all sorts of cliches about the joys of turning 30, but I think most of them are BS.

"30 is the new 20." No it's not. 30 is 30. 30 is 10 more than 20. 30 and 20 have very little in common except they are both divisible by 10...and 5...and 2. Ok, that's three things, but none of them make me feel younger.

"Life begins at 30." No it doesn't. Life begins at birth. Or if you're a Super Pro Lifer, it begins at conception. At any rate, it doesn't begin at 30. You can't abort your child as long as they aren't 30. That's murder. And murder is illegal.

"30 is when you get to start really enjoying being an adult." What does that even mean? All the fun adult stuff starts at 18 or 21. I feel like the 30 adult stuff is a mortgage, car payment, receding hairline (more there later), and an expanding waistline. Why did I have to wait 9 years to enjoy adulthood? And now that I did, I have the sneaking suspicion that the only reason someone is now telling me I get to start enjoying it is because this is precisely the moment that I realize I would like to be 21 again.

I could go on, but suffice it to say, turning 30 is a little like that moment when you wake up and realize you've slept through your alarm clock. One minute you're cozy and half asleep, like the bear on the Sleepy Time Celestial Seasonings tea box, the next minute you're in a complete state of wide awake panic because you're never going to make it to work on time. It's like that, but with more expletives.

Why, you ask? Well, at a time when all of my friends are married, about to get married, having kids, buying houses, taking fabulous vacations with their fabulous significant others, and generally loving being loved, stable, and secure, I'm single (again), childless (as far as I know), renting a room from my buddy, and still planning for my financial future. I can hear your objections now:

"You have plenty of time."

"Don't be in a hurry."

"All of those things will eventually happen for you."

"You're still young! 30 is the new 20!" We've covered this one. See above.

Here's the deal, I'm not in a hurry. Clearly. If a relationship is not right, it's not right. No way am I going to wind up 60, brow beaten, and miserable because I married the wrong person. Nor do I want any hypothetical kids of mine to get some fucked up sense of what a marriage is supposed to be like by watching mommy drag daddy around by the balls or vice versa...except without the balls part...although that would certainly confuse my hypothetical kids. Not doing that. The real issue here is that the people I still have a lot in common with are in their mid 20s. I'm not afraid of winding up childless and alone, but as my same age friends check out of the single, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants club, I'm afraid of winding up the creepy older guy who doesn't quite fit in with the 20s crowd.

It wouldn't be so bad, but it seems like my beard and hair decided to turn gray at exactly the same moment. That moment? 30. Oh, and for added giggles, my hair decided to abandon my scalp in a way that leaves a tiny island on the crown of my forehead. My hairline is like the last stand of the 300 Spartans of Thermopylae. A few brave follicles are holding the pass while my forehead advances in a classic Rommel style pincer movement. I'd punch a baby for a full head of hair. Kidding. Well, maybe not. I guess it depends on the baby. I mean, if life doesn't start until 30...

Also, my left knee is becoming progressively wonkier. It used to be that running and riding the bike and playing soccer could be counted on to make me feel young and free and happy. Now I'm losing a step and having a little bit of difficulty keeping up with the younger players. Just standing in the kitchen making dinner, one of the decidedly adult things I actually do, causes my knee to swell up. Who gets hurt making dinner? 30 year olds. Oh, and when I do suck it up and play soccer I feel like I got the shit beaten out of me the morning after...and the morning after that.

A buddy of mine at work (he's 25...fucker) gave me crap about wearing a v-neck t-shirt the other day. Apparently, I'm too old. Too old for a v-neck?!? These kids today!

I accept that age cannot be reversed and I'd never go so far as to dye my hair or call Hair Club For Men (side note: are those not the creepiest commercials on TV?) or roid it up to try and reverse muscle and joint deterioration. I would stoop to Cialis though. Why lie? I just don't want to be the awkward older guy hanging out with the kids. No one likes that guy. Not even that guy likes that guy.

Here's to hoping 30 sits easier with me as the year goes on. It'd better. Next year I'll be 31.

Just a Random Great Song....

2010-08-25T22:49:00.002-04:00

Sometime Around Midnight- Airborne Toxic Event

And it starts...
Sometime around midnight
Or at least that's when
You lose yourself
For a minute or two

As you stand...
Under the barlights
And the band plays some song
About forgetting yourself for a while
And the piano's this melancholy soundcheck
To her smile
And that white dress she's wearing
You haven't seen her
For a while

But you know...
That she's watching
She's laughing, she's turning
She's holding her tonic like a cross
The room suddenly spinning
She walks up and asks how you are
So you can smell her perfume
You can see her lying naked in your arms

And so there's a change...
In your emotions
And all of these memories come rushing
Like feral waves to your mind
Of the curl of your bodies
Like two perfect circles entwined
And you feel hopeless, and homeless
And lost in the haze
Of the wine

And she leaves...
With someone you don't know
But she makes sure you saw her
She looks right at you and bolts
As she walks out the door
Your blood boiling
Your stomach in ropes
And when your friends say what is it
You look like you've seen a ghost

And you walk...
Under the streetlights
And you're too drunk to notice
That everyone is staring at you
And you so care what you look like
The world is falling
Around you

You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her
You just have to see her

And you know that she'll break you
In two

I Do Not Think That Means What You Think That Means

2010-08-20T14:00:00.000-04:00

I'm a huge fan of people using the wrong word to express the wrong thought. Part of it is the deliciousness of being a grammar/vocabulary Nazi and secretly judging the person guilty of the misuse, but mostly it's the unintentional humor it creates. It's sort of a guerrilla chuckle. First you're in a business meeting expecting all sorts of boring nonsense bandied about by people acting important and then your boss throws out something like, "In the coming physical year we can expect to get more bodies." It's not that funny, granted, but hearing the boss confuse fiscal and physical is a petty little reminder that maybe, just MAYBE, you're more qualified to do his job...and therefore better...and therefore justified in playing Brickbreaker on your Blackberry when you probably should be nodding attentively. Whatever. As a side note: In case the boss in question is somehow reading this, I really don't believe I was more qualified to do your job. The preceding was for humor value...which I suppose was just ruined by way of my explanation.

A buddy of mine who's wife teaches at a well respected Southern university called me today and read the opening sentence of a paragraph from one of her student's papers regarding Title IX legislation. The student in question, dissecting the complexity of his point, decided to put it in "lame man's terms." Awesome.

My personal favorite incident of word misusage occurred recently in a moment of intimacy between two friends who will remain unnamed. The couple in question is limited somewhat in the realm of sexual positions because the female has a suspected retroverted uterus. I personally had never heard of this condition, but apparently it occurs in something like 1 in 5 women. Check Wikipedia if you're curious...or writing a term paper. Anyhow, the condition means that the uterus is tilted slightly to the back as opposed to the front and can cause pain in certain sexual positions. The couple in question was in flagrante delicto when the female, intending to make a joke about her suspected retroverted uterus, instead referenced her introverted uterus.

My vagina likes to spend time alone and is uncomfortable in social situations. Classic.

One Upper

2010-07-31T14:52:00.004-04:00

We used to play this game in theater class in high school (yeah, I was in theater) in which the participants were to ad lib one upping one another. The trick was to start modestly and then increase the one ups in very small increments. You couldn't, for example, start with, "I signed my first professional football contract today, married a supermodel, and got a personal message from the President in my voicemail box congratulating me on how badass I am and how much he wishes he were me." I mean, where do yo go from there?

There was a flip side to this game in which the participants one downed each other. Same principle, but with progressively more depressing events. I recall one game being won by my buddy Will after he had been quiet for about five minutes. We all assumed he had given up as the other two players made up slightly more awful things that had befallen them throughout the day. Finally Will softly spoke up and, staring into the middle distance, whispered, "Do you ever just go outside, dig a hole, and lay in it?"

I loved these games mostly because I knew how obnoxious it was to be one upped and also because, as someone who has been accused more than once of being cocky, it sort of kept me in check. I was reminded of this last week on a business trip with some coworkers I had never before met. Turns out, one of the guys in the group was an ex New York City cop. One night over beers, he gradually started to open up about some of the things he had seen and done on the job. Mostly, these were your run of the mill cop stories. People caught in compromising positions in compromising places, bodies found, bizarre acts witnessed, etc. The guy was a cop in NYC for 10 years. Things happen.

Every step of the way this other guy, whom I had never met, would butt in with, "That reminds me..." or "Yeah, something like that happened to me once..." If I had been listening to two veteran police officers talk shop over beers, I would have thought nothing of it and just enjoyed the ridiculousness of the stories, but this other guy had never been a cop...or a soldier...or anything more than a mediocre desk type. Still, he comported himself like Billy Badass and at one point even wanted to compare calf muscles with the ex cop (he would have lost badly).

All of this was amusing and mildly annoying until yet another coworker asked the ex officer if he had been at Ground Zero on September 11th. He had, as it turns out, and he answered questions about it in the way that I have seen combat veterans answer questions about their experiences. That attitude is sort of tough to nail down, but when you see it, you know it's not bullshit. It's not braggadocio, but it's also not out for sympathy. It is what they saw. Period.

Everyone got very quiet as he said that one of the two things in his life he will never forget was the sight and sound of bodies hitting the streets as people jumped from the towers before they collapsed.

I put my beer down as I absurdly struggled to wrap my mind around what that must have been like, but was interrupted by the one upper. "Yeah, that reminds me of..."

Everyone else at the table turned and stared at him. We must have all been thinking the same thing. That reminds you of absolutely nothing! There is nothing you have experienced that can even remotely compare to witnessing the sky rain live bodies! You ass! I can't recall wanting to punch someone so badly, and when I scanned the rest of the table, they all seemed to be thinking the same thing. Everyone, that is, except for the ex cop. He listened politely and sympathized with whatever BS story it was that the one upper related to the table. I was shocked and a little shamed as well. The ex cop had every right to interrupt the one upper and tell him where to go with his likely fictional story, and the one upper, upon completion of his story, took a drink from his beer with a self-satisfied smirk.

Maybe that's the gift of tragedy. It gives us the ability to empathize and respond with grace even though there's no reasonable expectation that we do so. I still haven't picked my jaw up off the floor.

Unclear on the Concept

2010-07-01T17:53:00.003-04:00

I was driving home from work today and I saw an obese (not fat....OBESE) woman brazenly throw her McDonald's hamburger wrapper out the window of her car.

She was driving a FUCKING PRIUS!

Essentials.

2010-06-17T11:23:00.004-04:00

I once crouched next to a woman and her husband as he was dying. He had collapsed in a soccer match and half of his body was numb from a massive stroke, but he was still conscious. He was terrified. His wife knelt gracefully beside him, sobbing gently, and stroking the side of his face that could still feel her hand. She was terrified.

I happened to be there when he collapsed and offered the small medical training I have more as comfort than treatment until a doctor emerged from the crowd of gathered people to take control of the situation. She checked his vital signs and asked him questions and ordered people about until an ambulance arrived and the buzz of movement was amplified by paramedics as they prepared to move him to an ambulance and eventually the hospital where he would die.

The man and his wife never broke eye contact. Amidst all of the moving bodies, amidst all of the questions and medical devices and the oxygen mask they were still. Terrified but present; not just afraid, but alive. As she stroked his cheek all she said was, "I love you." Over and over again. I love you.

Bless you both. You have no idea what a gift you gave in that moment.

My Mom Used to Sing This to Me

2010-05-19T11:53:00.000-04:00

As I went home on Monday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a horse outside the door where my old horse should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that horse outside the door where my old horse should be?

Ah, you're drunk, you're drunk you silly old fool,
So drunk you can not see
That's a lovely sow that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But a saddle on a sow sure I never saw before

And as I went home on Tuesday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a coat behind the door where my old coat should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that coat behind the door where my old coat should be

Ah, you're drunk, you're drunk you silly old fool,
So drunk you can not see
That's a wool blanket that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But buttons in a blanket sure I never saw before

And as I went home on Wednesday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a pipe up on the chair where my old pipe should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that pipe up on the chair where my old pipe should be

Ah, you're drunk, you're drunk you silly old fool,
So drunk you can not see
That's a lovely tin whistle that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But tobacco in a tin whistle sure I never saw before

And as I went home on Thursday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw two boots beneath the bed where my old boots should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns them boots beneath the bed where my old boots should be

Ah, you're drunk, you're drunk you silly old fool,
So drunk you can not see
They're two lovely Geranium pots me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But laces in Geranium pots I never saw before

And as I went home on Friday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a head upon the bed where my old head should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns that head upon the bed where my old head should be

Ah, you're drunk, you're drunk you silly old fool,
So drunk you can not see
That's a baby boy that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But a baby boy with his whiskers on sure I never saw before

And as I went home on Saturday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw two hands upon her breasts where my old hands should be
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who owns them hands upon your breasts where my old hands should be

Ah, you're drunk, you're drunk you silly old fool,
So drunk you can not see
That's a lovely night gown that me mother sent to me
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But fingers in a night gown sure I never saw before

As I went home on Sunday night as drunk as drunk could be
I saw a lad sneaking out the back, a quarter after three.
Well, I called me wife and I said to her: Will you kindly tell to me
Who was that lad sneaking out the back a quarter after three?

Ah, you're drunk, you're drunk you silly old fool,
So drunk you can not see
That was just the tax man that the Queen she sent to me.
Well, it's many a day I've travelled a hundred miles or more
But an Englishman who can last till three I've never seen before

Misnomer

2010-05-13T15:06:00.000-04:00

So, I was thinking today (because I have plenty of time in my current state to think of all manner of ridiculous stuff) who was the marketing whiz who decided to name America's Number One Condom Trojan? I mean, it's a fine product and all, but Trojan? Is that really the best name for a product designed to prevent pregnancy and protect against sexually transmitted infections?

There are two ways to look at this, I suppose.

1:The Female Prespective- America's Number One Condom is named after the massive wooden horse that was accepted as a gift by the City of Troy thinking it a sign that the ludicrously long Trojan War was over. In reality, said horse housed Odysseus and his buddies who snuck out in the middle of the night while the Trojans were drunk and sexed up, unlocked the gates of the city, and let in the entire Greek army to murder the bejesus out of them and burn the city to the ground.

I don't know about you, but if I'm a member of the fairer sex I don't want my man's condom acting all safe and secure and then unleashing sperm, bacteria, or viruses into my "secure city" when I think all is right with the world, never mind the massive wooden horse part. Ouch.

2: The Male Perspective...or maybe it's the Less Female Perspective (I haven't thought that far ahead yet).
America's Number One Condom is named after the Trojans themselves. First of all, Paris was a bitch and I'm pretty sure no self respecting guy with a condom wants to be thought of that way. Second, Hector was pretty badass, but he still got killed by Achilles. Third, Helen was almost certainly the hottest young lady in the Ancient World, but was she really worth it? I mean, she caused an epic war with massive casualties that culminated in the utter destruction of the entire city.

For a condom that's supposed to facilitate safe, relatively consequence free sex (at least physically) the aforementioned marketing whiz seems not to have picked the most desireable name. What about Ft. Knox Condoms? Or Citadel Condoms? Or even Spartan Condoms if they were dead set on the Ancient World theme?

Lost. In Translation.

2010-04-23T00:09:00.004-04:00

I once found myself at 2:00AM spread eagle with my hands on the trunk of a taxi in Mendoza, Argentina while two police officers in tactical gear took turns frisking me and asking me who I was and where my passport had gotten off to. I tried to calmly explain that I was an exchange student, was leaving the next day to return to the United States, and that my passport was on a nightstand next to a bed in my host family's house a few blocks away.

This didn't seem to satisfy the curiosity of my interrogators. Maybe it was the multiple glasses of wonderful Argentine wine I had consumed in the preceding hours or the way the taxi driver nervously tugged at his jacket and kept repeating, "There's no problem here," but I didn't seem to be getting anywhere with the two militaristic looking policemen holding my Texas driver's license (the only ID I had on me) and my thoughts turned more and more to the horrendous human rights record Argentina had earned a few decades earlier and the thousands of disappeared that have never been accounted for.

Eventually they explained to me that there had been a spate of taxi robberies. They did this as they waved their hands mocking exhaustion and blamed it on The Crisis. Everywhere in Argentina in 2002 all manner of problems were blamed on the crisis. The buses aren't running: The Crisis. The prisoners are rioting: The Crisis. It's unseasonably hot: The Crisis. As they followed my cab they noticed that I had been leaning forward from the back seat and appeared to be having an animated conversation with the driver and assumed it was a hold up.

The officer speaking to me half smiled in apology and I took this as an opening to explain to him what we'd actually been discussing. The taxi driver, finding out that I was an exchange student, had asked me how I had enjoyed my time in Argentina. Feeling emboldened by the wine, I decided to try to be clever (side note: this is never a good idea in a second language). I told him my time in Argentina had convinced me that the world was coming to an end.

"Really, how so?"

"Well, The United States made it to the quarterfinals of the World Cup," I said.

"Yeah."

"I went to Patagonia to see the whales and there was no wind," I continued.

"Yes."

"And there was the biggest earthquake in years," I finished.

"I see...that's interesting. I have to disagree with you, however," said the driver. "You see, The Bible is very specific about the coming of the End of the World."

"Oh, I know," I laughed, "I was just making a joke."

"I know you were joking, but God's word is very specific. There are seven signs. The rivers will turn to blood, the ..."

It was about this time that we were pulled over and the previous scene was played out to the point where I decided to explain to the policemen what the taxi driver and I had been discussing. As I started in on my "End of The World" line of humor I could see the taxi driver cringe. I pushed on anyway thinking he was just your run-of-the-mill religious fanatic (they exist in every country). When I finished, expecting at least a polite laugh, the policeman I had been directing my stand up routine to was staring at me blankly.

"I see what you're saying," he said. "But The Bible is very specific about the Signs of the Apocalypse."

"That's what I said," exclaimed the taxi driver.

I finally made it home that night a bit cowed by my inability to be funny in Spanish and wondered how, in the span of a few hours, I had gone from wine-fueled joviality to a frisking that led to a theological lesson. I couldn't wrap my mind around it then and I still can't now. Maybe it was The Crisis. I'm feeling a bit like that night these days except The Crisis is much more personal to me and much more complex than an ill constructed sentence in a foreign language or a mis-conjugated verb.

I have a girlfriend I love dearly. To be fair, we're so different I think sometimes we are speaking different languages, but when things are still and the world has slowed down just a little, there's no one else I would rather have wrapped in my arms. The problem is, things have not been still recently and instead of slowing down, the world has sped up for us both. Her sister has just had a baby and mine has one on the way. She just got promoted and either has to sink or swim but hasn't been in her new position long enough to even know how deep the pool is yet. I've been promoted due to a prolonged absence by my boss and am experiencing many of the same frustrations and running up against the same terribly steep learning curve. We've been working opposite hours. There are a whole slew of other complications, fears, and frustrations that really have no business being posted on a blog, but all of them are at least equally as weighty as the ones I've just described. In the midst of all of this I have tried to be a good boyfriend, but my attempts have sometimes come off looking just as cumbersome and addled as my End of the World routine. To make it worse, I feel like maybe my apologies have as well.

In my mind and in my heart I want this period to end the way I had envisioned my interaction with the cops would. I wanted them to throw there arms up in laughter, hand my driver's license back to me, pat me on the back, and wish me safe travels. I want my girlfriend to sigh in relief, hug me, and rest knowing that we made it through all of this together. That in spite of our differences, we are stronger for having them. I'm afraid though that in that moment after it's all still again I'll be face to face with a cop in Argentina wondering how in the world I got there and searching in vain for an answer.

I guess what's really important is that I told the joke not knowing if it would be funny or not. I told it in an effort to connect, with the thought that somehow, in such a strange situation, the taxi driver, the cops, and myself could all willingly wind up in the same punchline. In the end we all did, just not as I had envisioned it.

I think the joke is funnier for it.

A High Straight in Plainview, A Side Bet in Idalou, And a Fresh Deck in New Deal

2010-03-03T18:12:00.003-05:00

So, it was Texas Independence Day yesterday. I thought I should point this out to any and all readership of my decidedly underwhelming blog. For one, I'm duty bound as a Texan to embrace any opportunity placed before me to preach the face- melting awesomeness of my home state. And dos, I'm duty bound as a Texan to embrace any opportunity placed before me to preach the face-melting awesomeness of my home sate. That is what we call impervious logic.

So here's to you, Texas! Yellow Roses, Lone Stars, Bluebonnets, Shiner Bocks, Rattle Snakes, BBQ, Two Steps, Cowboys and all. Don't let the bastards grind you down. We'll talk soon! Miss you.

Murder Most Foul

2010-02-04T15:30:00.003-05:00

I lived in several ramshackle apartments while I was in college. I think of it as a measure of how far I've come that I can look back on these places, places I once viewed as "quaint" or "hip" or "nice," and describe them now as "dank" and "shitty" and "Hooverville-like." It's the same sort of thing with furniture. I think everyone I know at one time or another saved a "perfectly good" piece of furniture from the dumpster. Only a college kid can look proudly upon a living room furnished with a plaid La-Z-Boy, glass coffee table, faux leather couch, wicker love seat, and Wal-Mart TV stand and think, "I am master of all I survey." It's a matter of place I suppose. When you've got no money, "nice" and "perfectly good" are negotiable terms.

The first "nice" place I lived in was a hideous box of an apartment in a sprawling complex well away from campus that was originally built as Section 8 housing. The carpets were forest green and every room was perfectly square. If a German Leggo designer had been asked to create a floor plan, this would have been it. The whole place had a prison feel. The apartment was access controlled, but with the buildings shaped and organized the way they were, 8 foot wrought iron fences surrounding the entire complex, and large grass fields separating the buildings from the fences, one got the feeling it was more about keeping the residents in as opposed to keeping any would be ne'er-do-wells out.

Of the countless ridiculous acts I witnessed or partook in at this apartment complex, the cake taker has to be the time an acquaintance of mine was propositioned by a prostitute in the parking lot of the complex. He was walking home from a bar, no doubt more than a little pickled, and did not have the mental capacity at that moment to realize what was going on. He just thought he was irresistible. After a good five minutes in flagrante de licto, my acquaintance had a moment of clarity, realized he was dealing with a pro, and, moreover, that the pro she was actually a pro he.

My next apartment was actually not bad, save for the complete lack of windows, the halfway house next door, and the attempted murder I witnessed in the parking lot when I was moving out. I knew this place was going to be great the first night I spent there. Pulling into the complex well after midnight, I was a little shocked to see two roaring blazes shooting flames out of the two community dumpsters in the parking lot. Pacing back and forth between these two gateways to hell was a well muscled, shirtless black man with a menacing look on his face clutching a pipe wrench. I guess I should have said, "I knew this place was going to be great the first night I was to spend there," but I just coasted straight through the parking lot and drove to a friend's apartment where I crashed on his couch. John Henry and the Bonfires were just a little too post apocalyptic for me.

After waaaaaaaay too many good times, a record low GPA, and countless other Animal House acts of tomfoolery, I thought I finally got it right when I found an old apartment well on the other side of town. My unit was one of four (just four!) in what looked to have been one large house built sometime around the turn of the century. I knew all of the other tenants well, the neighborhood was quiet, the unit had high ceilings and wood floors, a working Murphy bed, and most deliciously, I would be living there ALL BY MYSELF. I cannot stress how delirious with joy this made me. I loved all of my previous roommates, but the idea of having complete rule of my domain was beyond appealing.

For the first year, I was in love with the place. The commute was a hassle, but it served as an unassailable excuse when my buddies wanted to go out and I wanted to stay in. My GPA recovered its health, I witnessed no more acts of violence or prostitution, and I was generally very, very happy. Then one night I heard a noise in the kitchen. I had immersed myself in my studies in the living room (I was playing Xbox) and from the kitchen I could hear what sounded like a plastic package being opened. I pressed pause on...my studies...and listened closer. The noise continued in spurts, but was most definitely coming from the kitchen. I slowly made my way from the living room, through the dining room, and to the entrance to the kitchen where I stopped to listen again. After a brief moment of silence, the noise started again and I turned on the kitchen light. An explosion of scuffling erupted from the top of one of the kitchen cabinets over the sink and then all noise abruptly ceased.

This was not at all what I wanted to be dealing with at 2AM. My quaint apartment on the other side of town was now a quaint varmint infested apartment on the other side of town. I immediately recalled the story my buddy Mike had told me about the family of raccoons that had lived in his attic and how one of them had pawed a hole in the bathroom ceiling as his roommate was occupied on the toilet. This lead to their landlord "solving the problem" by entombing the raccoon family in the attic Cask of Amontillado style. In the following days, my buddies were serenaded by the raccoon family's starvation shrieks. After they all finally succumbed to what must have been an excruciating death, the stench of a rotting raccoon family tainted the air for many weeks to come. In Disney movies, families of critters are cute. In the real world, they get murdered by a dimly lit college slum lord and their decomposing carcasses assault your inner sanctum.

I climbed on top of the kitchen counter and peered toward the back of the top of the cabinet. Sure enough, there was a small hole in the wall and littering the top of the cabinet were old roach traps gnawed around the edges. I went immediately into panic mode. The hole was clearly only large enough to accommodate a squirrel, mouse, or rat. In my thinking, at that hour any self respecting squirrel would be sleeping amongst his collected nuts in a tree somewhere and a mouse could not possibly have the chompers to make the sort of racket I had been hearing all the way from the living room. That left one possible culprit: A rat. And said rat had been gnawing on roach traps. Roach traps?!? This meant a further few things: 1) The rat was not eating plastic for sustenance which meant he/she could only be nesting. 2) If he/she were nesting that meant he/she was expecting a family to be moving in some time soon. 3) Roach traps?!? I must have really let myself go if my potential roommate list was now comprised of rats and roaches.

I sprang into action, my mind awhirl with possible IMMEDIATE solutions to my new rodent problem. My eyes darting around the kitchen, a large, gleaming knife caught my attention. This was it! I could position myself on the kitchen counter, knife pointed motionlessly at the rat's hole, and when he/she showed its little rodent face, I would stab it in one incredibly gruesome thrust. The idiocy of this plan occurred to me only after I had been standing on the kitchen counter for a good five minutes. How could I be sure I killed the rat with one fell swoop? What if I only mortally wounded it and it escaped back into my walls to die and rot thus filling my living space with the stench of decomposing rat? What if I merely succeeded in pissing off the rat and instead of flight, he/she decided on fight? I could think of few worse things than having my face gnawed off by a recently stabbed rat. Clearly, the knife solution was not going to work.

I started to scan the kitchen again for a more effective murder implement. At one point, I noticed a book of matches and an aerosol cleaning can. I could strike a match and flame throw the rat to death. Brilliant! Again, I started to climb the kitchen counter when I realized that a flaming rat scampering through the walls of my wooden apartment would not be the best thing in the world. I could imagine trying to explain to the Fire Marshall as we surveyed the smoldering ruins of my apartment building, "Well, there was this rat, right?" In addition, there was the very real possibility that I could experience a repeat of scenario number one and be attacked by a flaming rat instead of a recently stabbed one. Clearly, the impromptu flame thrower option was not going to work either.

By this point, it was approaching 3AM and I was out of ideas on how to kill the rat. I would have to wait until morning to solve my rodent problem. But what to do for the rest of the night? I would have to leave the rat to his/her own devices. What was to prevent the rat from crawling out of my walls and getting in to my food? Or bedroom? And chewing my face off? I found a beer bottle and shoved it in the rat hole. Then I placed a heavy book behind the beer bottle to make sure the rat couldn't get out for the evening. I didn't sleep a wink.

The next morning I had to leave the apartment early to go to my work study job. After work, I had a seminar class that lasted three hours and got out at 5PM. With each passing minute of class, I imagined the rat waking up somewhere in my walls in his/her half made nest and stretching his/her little rat arms and yawning a devious rat yawn. I had to get home before the sun set, lest the rat complete his/her project before I could get to the business of killing him/her.

As soon as class let out, I sped to the grocery store and found the pest killing aisle. So many choices! At first I went for the sticky trap but then remembered my sister's own collegiate rat issue. She too had opted for the sticky trap and woke up one night to hear the rat becoming successfully ensnared in said trap. The following morning, expecting to walk into her kitchen to find an exhausted rodent with a "You got me" look on his face, she instead found a right rat arm and a left rat arm but no rat. I put the sticky trap back. The next option was the poison rat pellets. This seemed a good idea at first as it would excuse me from the actual business of killing the rat. Plus, it seemed a little more cerebral and civilized. But then I realized that I would probably wind up with a dead rat in my walls again and I didn't want to endure the whole rotting rodent thing. Eventually, I opted for the tried and true rat trap...three tried and true rat traps to be exact. Marching proudly toward the check out counter, I passed through the shampoo aisle and, remembering that I was about to run out, grabbed a bottle. While I was at it I thought I would grab some toothpaste and deodorant as well because I was pretty sure I was running low on those two things. Approaching the check out counter with my shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste, and rat traps I realized why the exceptionally attractive check out girl was giving me an exceptionally revolting look. Clearly, I was a guy with a rat problem. And clearly, I had decided the source of my rat problem was a total lack of personal hygiene.

It was almost dark now and I had just made it home. In the final moments of sunlight, as the rat was no doubt waking from his/her filthy slumber in MY WALLS, I prepped the killing field atop my kitchen counter. After initially setting only one rat trap immediately opposite the rat hole, I figured overkill was better than underkill so I set all three rat traps in a semi circle of death facing the rat hole. I coated each rat trap spring with irresistible peanut butter, then, deviously, I moved the gnawed on roach traps to the opposite corner of the cabinet top. Admiring the precision of my work, I shut off the kitchen lights and took up residence in the living room waiting to hear the delicious SNAP of the rat traps doing their business.

An hour later I heard the roach traps being gnawed upon.

Impossible! I snuck into the kitchen and turned the light on. Silence. I carefully climbed atop the kitchen counter and peered over the edge of the cabinet. The roach traps had indeed been further gnawed. The tasty peanut butter and rat traps? Untouched. I was dealing with a pro. I repositioned the rat traps to IMMEDIATELY in front of the rat hole, coated them with more irresistible peanut butter, shut off the lights, and went back to the living room.

10 minutes later I heard the roach traps being gnawed upon again.

This was getting old. I marched back into the kitchen, flipped the light switch on and listened. Again, silence. Again, I climbed atop the kitchen counter and observed exactly what I had previously observed. Rat traps and delicious peanut butter? Untouched. Out of frustration, I moved one of the roach traps to one of the rat traps. This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. I thought I would either finally get the rat, or I would kill the hell out of a giant roach. Again, I climbed back off the counter and shut off the lights.

5 minutes later I heard the roach traps yet again being gnawed upon. Rigoddammeddiculous!

I ran to the kitchen yelling and flipped the light on. The metallic SNAP of a sprung rat trap echoed through the kitchen and a hideous flopping and scurrying sound emanated from atop the cabinet. I froze in the kitchen listening to the gradually slowing death throes of my rat nemesis. After things were good and quiet for a few minutes I carefully climbed back on to the kitchen counter and leaned over the top of the cabinet. There, with a roach trap still clenched in his/her jaws, was the biggest rat I had ever see. Seriously, you know that rat from The Nutcracker? It was a least as big.

I decided to leave the rat king on top of the cabinet that night. Why did I do such a disgusting thing, you ask? As a warning to other rodents who might have become emboldened when this rat started nesting in my walls. I was no longer the college kid in apartment B. I was a stone cold killer and I wanted the world to know it.

Benjamin Busch Essay

2010-01-25T23:22:00.006-05:00

I heard the author read this essay on NPR today and I was struck by how eloquently he articulated such a delicate point. It is written by a Marine responding to the recent revelation that a company that makes rifle sights for the military has, for a long while now, been stamping the rifle sights with Bible verses along with their serial number. Any point involving religion in the public discourse is rife with the opportunity for misinterpretation, reaction, and offense. I am always struck by how easily we make religion support our conquests and fight our battles without thought to how anathema the idea of killing one another is to most world religions. As a Christian I have grown to believe that the simplicity of Christ's message is its beauty, but probably also why it is so easily perverted and clouded by our own experiences, prejudices, and particular political/social bent.

At any rate, this was an interesting and touching essay and one that touches on a fundamental difference between our world and the one that is envisioned by Sunni terrorists.

Benjamin Busch was an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps. His memoir, 'Bearing Arms', recently appeared in 'Harper's' and his photographs from Iraq have been featured in 'Five Points', and 'War, Literature, & the Arts'. His newest essay, 'Growth Rings', is in the current issue of the 'Michigan Quarterly Review'. He lives in Michigan with his wife and their two daughters.

As a Marine invading Iraq in 2003, I thought we actively separated church and state from our motives.

I know that Scripture embedded in the obscure numbers on rifle scopes may seem like a small detail, and that manufacturer Trijicon likely intended no particular malice by placing biblical references on its equipment. Like, 2COR4:6, "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." There seems to have been neither marketing nor secrecy associated with the presence of these inscriptions.

But these are not innocent times, and the codes are still messages printed and sent out. These notes have now been read and exposed, and we have the baggage of explaining ourselves to people convinced that many of our actions are motivated by religion instead of self-defense, justice or altruism.

As a Marine, I aimed at Iraq through rifle scopes, my vision amplified. When viewing other cultures, even enemies, I think we should be wary of seeing them through a lens marked by religion.

The United States is fighting Islamic extremists. But we are not Christian extremists. When I returned for my second tour in 2005, we were in the embattled city of Ramadi, and we fought jihadists, tribal factions and criminals alongside almost entirely Muslim Iraqi soldiers. It was impossible to segregate the ambitions of singular religions then.

Although the rifle equipment was stamped as a private act by a private company, it was sold to governments, and therefore unavoidably and knowingly coupled with politics. Biblical quotes were thoughtfully chosen — thoughtful enough not to be allowed as innocent of larger context.

By branding weapons with Christian messages, there is a deep and ugly blending of religion, politics and bloodshed, and it has unwittingly painted our government and military with the embarrassing language of "crusade."

America is largely composed of people who consider themselves Christian, separated by various interpretations of the same book. But I did not go onward as a Christian soldier. I went forth as an American, a Marine. I was sent by my country to fight a threat, and thereafter with the best intentions of democracy, not theocracy.

Our efforts in the Middle East were complicated enough, and small symbols are examined carefully by our opponents. Based on my understanding of the teachings of Christ, he would be very disappointed to see his Gospel assigned to war of any kind in the first place.

I leave you with a verse that has not been stamped on our weapons: "But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you" — Matthew 5:44.

I (Want to) Like For You to Move!

2009-08-28T00:51:00.005-04:00

I Like For You to be Still

I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth.

As all things are filled with my soul
you emerge from the things, filled with my soul.
You are like my soul, a butterfly of dream,
and you are like the word Melancholy.

I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.
It sounds as though you were lamenting, a butterfly cooing like a dove.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:
Let me come to be still in your silence.

And let me talk to you with your silence
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations.
Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid.

I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died.
One word then, one smile, is enough.
And I am happy, happy that it's not true.

That Pablo...

Is it cheesy and more than a little emo to have a favorite poet? Especially a tragic Latin American poet of the unrequited loving self-destructive variety? Every time I read one of Neruda's poems and get that twinge of empathy I feel a little like someone who weeps at opera and fight the urge to slap some of the sensitivity out of myself, but in the end, it still gets me.

At one point in life, I read this and thought it was the most beautiful thing; the thought that a simple gesture from a romantic love could, in the midst of a void, swell into this crescendo of sheer joy that rescues you in glowing affection, and in some ways I still view the poem that way. In the context of everyday life with all of its cold, hard edges a smile or an unexpected expression of tenderness can be more meaningful than the most elaborate romantic plans.

But with some experience, I now view a darker side to what Neruda wrote. And I guess in the context of his life it makes a little sense. I mean, let's face it, Neruda is saying he likes to imagine his lover dead. Not much of a Valentine's Day card, is it? He's saying he likes to think of his relationship at the absolute apogee of despair. He makes himself imagine his love in the bleakest terms so that the tiniest sign otherwise becomes as huge as salvation. This all makes for very romantic expression, but it sounds like quite the roller coaster to me. Essentially, what he's saying is that he's willing to imagine his love being completely unreflected in his lover so that he can taste the delicious feeling of being rescued from his morbid imagination.

As much as I find this reading of the poem to be far from what I would want in a relationship, I have to admit, I know a great number of people who have been guilty of this in relationships, myself, unfortunately, included. How often do we create problems where none really exists and test our partners for that gesture, that smile, that word so that we feel affirmed? The thing about it, and in the way Neruda has written this poem I get the sense that he would know exactly what I'm talking about, is that simple gesture becomes addictive; once we've experienced it, we have to have that intoxicating feeling of reassurance. Neruda even says it at the end of the poem. He's happy, but not because the woman he is writing about loves him, but because she's not dead. Whatever he's built up in his head as the worst possible outcome is not true. But that feeling is just a fix, selfish even. The poem even echoes the fleeting salvation he feels. He spends the whole of the poem articulating how awful he's imagined things to be and then only gives one line to the joy of discovering they're not true. If the poem went on, he'd immediately have to start imagining things to be horrible again just to get back to that one brief moment of hollow satisfaction and, as I said before, it's not even happiness that he is loved by his partner. It's a hollow look alike for mutual love. Nothing about this is sustainable and what seemed romantic to me when I first read it seems dysfunctional now. And that's not even scraping the surface of what it must be like to be the one who is made to play dead all the time. Unfortunately, it also rings much truer to me than it did when I first read it.

Goodbye to all that. Thank you, Pablo, you're still my favorite poet, but I'd much rather commit to building something sustainable and real than wallow in imagining disaster in the hopes that the one I love will tolerate me imagining her dead so she can suddenly rescue me from despair. Maybe it doesn't make for world class poetry, but I bet it lasts longer.

Referral

2009-08-22T00:44:00.003-04:00

I used to have this student, we'll call him Damien, who, if not number one, was certainly high on the list of all time worst students. His file from the counselor's office was dictionary thick and contained every derivative of the ADHD acronym known to medical science. Some doctor somewhere probably started making up disorders to describe Damien and, I can testify, still fell well short of diagnosing him. You name it, he did it: Tardiness, outbursts, non-existent organizational abilities, sleeping in class, total disregard for the rules, anger. Having written that, I'm sure some of my former teachers are rolling their eyes at the irony, but this kid took it to a new level.

To be fair, Damien was also an entertainer. He was a gifted athlete, reluctantly bright (bright enough to know exactly how to get under his teachers' skin), and genuinely hilarious. I can recall a number of times having to stifle a laugh before disciplining him upon overhearing Damien rag on a classmate or let loose with some completely inappropriate remark during the lesson. Still though, his antics wore on me and, as a coach, I was flummoxed when the nuclear punishment of bypassing a parental phone call and going straight to his coach failed to effect the proper improvement in his behavior.

Eventually, Damien transfered to another school in another district and the other students in his Spanish I class, suddenly free from disruption, actually showed signs of learning Spanish. But as with any problem, foisting Damien onto some other poor educator did not solve the issue. After the Christmas break, I was informed that Damien had worn out his welcome in the other school and, after a brief stint in the "Alternative Center" (this is the Orwellian name given to the lock down boot camp school in the school district I used to teach), would be rejoining my class.

I met Damien at the door on his first day back and read him the Riot Act. One slip up and he was gone. At least, that's what I told him. I had only been teaching for a few months and I had already learned that in a public school short of actually beheading another student during class and running around the room wearing their decapitated head as a hat...naked there was nothing a student could really do to get expelled. Damien nodded his understanding of the new strictures, dropped a few "yes sirs" and took his old seat. As he walked passed me into the classroom, I could see the mischievous grin spread across his lips and I knew nothing that had happened to him in the last few months -check that - years had made any change in his behavior.

Still, I was cautiously optimistic after I had finished the lesson and divided the students into work groups and Damien had not yet done anything untoward. As the students began working orally on their assignment, I settled into my desk to grade a few papers before making rounds among the groups to offer help and instruction. And then I heard it, I'm not sure if you've ever been around a large number of people taking their first clumsy steps into learning a new language, but it isn't pretty. In fact, it sounds like a room of mildly retarded children mimicking animal sounds. I can remember my mother coming to a middle school band concert I was in and, after listening to our efforts to play carols, said as politely as she could that she had never heard Jingle Bells preformed as a funeral dirge. It's like that. So you can imagine, just as an actual rooster might sound in the retard example or how a member of the Boston Philharmonic might sound in the Jingle Bells example, a native speaker speaking his native language would ring out with crystal clarity. It took me a second to process what I had heard and who had said it, but as I looked up and saw the sparkling, devilish grin on Damien's face I cursed myself for not knowing better. Damien had indeed been practicing proper usage of the preterite and imperfect tenses, but what he had said was not Spanish and was most certainly not in the book.

I immediately stood up from my desk, pointed at Damien, and firmly booted him from the class. The other students reflexively hushed and listened as I instructed him to leave the classroom and go to the Behavior Improvement Center (another Orwellian name for what was called detention in my day), a referral would be waiting for him in the principal's office. He reluctantly stood up, threw his bag over his shoulder, and muttered something as he slammed the classroom door behind him. After he had left, I called the BAC and informed them that Damien should be there in a few minutes and sat down to write the referral. The rest of the class slowly eased back in to their animal sounds and the period ended a few minutes later.

Now, as a teacher, they tell you in instances where a student has said something inappropriate that you have to write down exactly what the student said so that a proper assessment of the crime can occur. This scared me a little as I imagined the principal's secretary, a woman eerily reminiscent of my conservative, Methodist grandmother, reading the referral and immediately going into cardiac arrest. I decided it would be better to deliver the referral first to the counselor as I was going to demand Damien be removed from my class.

The next period was my lunch period. I took the time to march down to the counselor's office and deliver the referral, reading it along the way to make sure I had actually written what I knew I had.

"I want Damien Ragsdale removed from my class immediately," I said as I handed the surprised counselor the referral.

"Well, I can't just do that," replied the counselor, "What did he do," she asked without reading the referral.

"Well, he said something inappropriate."

"Well, Mr. Smith, it takes a lot more than words to remove a student from a class. The student has to have done something exceptionally inappropriate like, for instance...". The counselor trailed off as she unintentionally began to confirm my suspicions that a naked decapitation really was what it would take. "What did he say?"

I took a deep breath and, with a straight face said, "So, I was in the shower this morning, right? And I was beatin' my meat with the two handed technique. You know, 'cause my dick's so big."

The counselor stared back at me with her chin on the desk. The office that had previously been a whirring hive of activity, crowded with teachers' aides, copiers, and administrators, fell totally silent.

I continued, "And he didn't say it in Spanish."

Damien was removed from my class.

Indecent Proposal

2009-08-21T02:52:00.002-04:00

I was driving down the interstate today and, as I passed under a railroad bridge, I looked up to see "Will you marry me Lauren?" scrawled sloppily in dirty pink paint on the iron side of the bridge. I couldn't quite wrap my mind around this marriage proposal. Who drives down the interstate in a major city, surrounded by traffic and urban sprawl, and thinks, "This is the perfect setting in which to propose to my girlfriend!"

All sorts of things seem wrong with this. Firstly, what if Lauren doesn't look up to see what you've written on the railroad bridge? This was a tollway. How do you explain exiting the tollway at the wrong exit, paying the toll, turning around, paying the toll again, exiting, paying the toll AGAIN, and driving the same stretch of highway to give Lauren a second chance at eternity? If Lauren is anything like my girlfriend, I think she'd be pretty pissed at this point to have wasted a good twenty minutes on her travels for reasons that you, for obvious reasons, cannot divulge. God help you if she misses it again.

So what if Lauren does catch your proposal the first go around? It's not like you can stop and put a ring on her finger. I mean, you are in heavy, highway traffic. Do you settle for a peck on the cheek and then pull over at the next truck stop to get on bended knee? Do you high five and keep driving? Do you pull over to the shoulder and get a picture with the bridge in the background? I can't see any good answer to the logistical quandary proposing to someone on an interstate presents.

And that's just if you decide to go through with the interstate proposal in the first place. I know a lot of women and I'm pretty sure none of them would, given their druthers, want to be proposed to via highway graffiti. It's unromantic, illegal, unsightly, and the sort of half-baked idea a high school Casanova would dream up. Which, I suppose, could have been exactly who came up with Lauren's proposal in the first place. Still, I can't imagine dangling upside down from a railroad bridge over a torrent of speeding traffic with a can of pink paint thinking, "This is gonna be GREAT!"

And what if it didn't work out with Lauren (and I have a sneaking suspicion it may not have)? Both of you, unless you're seriously committed to avoiding an entire thoroughfare, have to pass under "The Bridge" until someone puts the final nail in the busted relationship coffin, scales the bridge, and dangles back over the tollway to blot out all those bad memories. Somehow, erasing railroad bridge graffiti to mend a broken heart seems even more ridiculous than creating railroad bridge graffiti to win one.

I say that...I can think of one thing more ridiculous: The guy who thinks, "Damn, that was a great idea! All I have to do is climb up there, cross out 'Lauren,' write 'Amy,' and I'm set!"

But The Ground Pulls At My Feet

2009-08-14T14:43:00.003-04:00

My father is fond of telling me that as you age opportunities to make "easy decisions" fast begin to fade. Clear choices get muddied by commitments and intricacies and complexities and fear. I guess you sort of wade into life, taking steps confidently, and then suddenly the shelf starts to drop off and you can't see the bottom as easily as you used to be able to and those confident steps turn into hesitant, searching probes that move farther along into deeper water. At 29, a set of floaties would be nice. Ridiculous, but nice.

I'm starting to feel stuck again. The more experienced I become (I enjoy the adjective "experienced" much more than "old") the more I realize this is a pattern with me. I'm sort of like a rock that tumbles down a hill for a while and then finds a place to rest. It's refreshing for a time, but then the lichen starts to grow and I feel uneasy. Potential energy builds up and I just want to tumble again. Sometimes the tumbling is just a slide a few feet in another direction, like moving across town. Sometimes it's crashing, bounding, underbrush shattering ricochets that last for months. Maybe it's a job change or a relationship change or a complete shift of outlook. Regardless, it's a change. The irony of it is that if you asked me where I would be most comfortable, I would tell you some place where I feel settled and content. But in saying that, I have to accept the fact that constant movement isn't the answer, especially if I indulge the rock metaphor once more and speak of movement of the tumbling variety. Who the hell can control that? Plus, there are a lot of people in my life who would suddenly need a "watch for falling rocks" warning.

Not to get too Zen (and with the naturalist wading and tumbling metaphors I'm probably already there), but I know I'm not going to get that warm, fuzzy feeling until I'm happy with where I am -and I mean that in the non geographical sense. It's just that sometimes I confuse being at peace with settling. There's a great scene in the movie High Fidelity where John Cusack's character is trying to explain an epiphany he's had about his relationship. He starts to tell his girlfriend that he fantasizes about other women and the underwear they're wearing and how he now realizes that the reason he can fantasize about them is that he never gets to see their granny panties. He doesn't really know them and in not really knowing them he's keeping himself from being happy with either another woman or his girlfriend. I suppose I'm guilty of that as well. Not necessarily with women's underwear, but with my career and my finances and my city.

So there's the challenge. That's where I am. Do I not really know where I am and just want to tumble off somewhere else because of the fantasy of it all? Or am I consciously realizing that I am not where I want to be and just need to overcome all of those complexities and intricacies and commitments and fears that age - er, experience - has encumbered me with.

Lawnmower Man

2009-06-26T11:01:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, I saw a guy driving a golf cart around is house. He was wearing camouflage shorts, high tops, a ratty American flag bandana, and sported the tan of someone destined to die of skin cancer but completely nonplussed by that eventuality. Attached to the golf cart via the straps intended for use in securing a golf bag to the back of the cart was a push lawnmower. I suppose at this point it would not shock you to read that the lawnmower was on and that the driver of the cart was proudly operating this rig as a riding mower. This struck me as hugely awesome and reminded me of the time, when living in the Middle East, I saw a tiny Dodge Ram 50 pickup truck towing a Brahma bull down the highway via a rope tied to the bull's head and attached to the trailer hitch of the truck. The whole scene was ridiculous. The bull was clearly struggling to match the Dodge 50's speed (maybe the first time in history anything has struggled to match a Dodge 50's speed) and the driver was completely oblivious to the Bull's increasing discomfort.

Lawnmower man showed similar disregard for his attachment and bounced and skidded his way around his lawn leaving little grass mohawks and long patches in his wake. This too struck me as hugely awesome. Clearly, the advent of the golf cart-cum- riding mower had nothing to do with efficiency and quality but was instead imagined solely to facilitate laziness. This reminded me of being junior high aged and allergic to work. I remember one Sunday - chore day - hearing my dad laugh to himself in a resigned way as he was cleaning the bathroom my sister and I used. This was not a good laugh. It was more of an "I give up" kind of laugh. I poked my head in the bathroom door to see what the offending object of his ridicule was and saw him holding a toothpaste tube and shaking his head. The end of the tube nearest the opening was crimped and crushed into a twisted knot while the rest of the tube, bulging with a fresh reservoir of toothpaste, was untouched.

As I thought of this, I began to realize I had maybe once been a little too much like lawnmower man and I stopped laughing as hard as I had been previously. Then I thought of the dishes in the sink, the expired chicken wings in the refrigerator, and pile of laundry in my bedroom and I stopped laughing altogether. Then I thought maybe I could kill two birds with one stone and wash my laundry in the dishwasher with the dishes. Genius.

Just Thought Ya'll Should Know

2009-03-02T13:06:00.002-05:00

Today is Texas Independence Day.

On this day in 1836 the Texas Declaration of Independence was created at the Convention of 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos.

This marks the most badass moment in the history of the world.