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Why is garbage so fun when you're drunk? -Halloween weekend part 2- yeah it's backwards I know

Some people are going to think this is weird...guaranteed.

Friday night we all went out to the city (NYC for you out-of-towners,) and appropriately partied like we were never going to see someone again (Sal's moving to Georgia.) The night started off with Clay rushing me to get ready like he was a Drill Sergeant.

"We have an hour to get to the train from here!!! Me and Matt made it in 15 minutes one time!" I shouted from the bathroom as Clay was pacing back and forth.

"Yeah, but it's rush hour and we have to pick up beer on the way," he responded...alright, he was right there.

We then left, picked up beer, drove to the train station and bought tickets from a stubborn ticket machine all with about 15 minutes to spare. We sat down, cracked open some beers and started watching for the entertaining situation about to unfold right before us on the platform. Dennis (who's chronically late,) his girlfriend Jackie and Chris (who chronically doesn't show up,) had all banded together and promised to meet us at the train station to catch the train we were now sitting on.

After sitting there for 15 or so minutes without any word from them, we started thinking that they might not make the train. Clay, Kim and I breathed a collective sigh of relief though when we saw the other three running up the stairs to the platform just in time for the train...or rather, just in time to miss the train. Chris threw his hands up like he didn't know what to do, and when I pointed toward the door he started running toward the back of the train. Just when he did so, the train started pulling away, and Clay, Kim, myself and some random dude who saw me banging on the glass and waving my hand at them, all started laughing hysterically when we realized that they missed the train by about 30 seconds.

"Oh well, time to get started on these beers!" I thought as me and Clay proceeded to down six each before arriving in the City an hour and a half later.

We were the first one's out to the bar as well. 100 or so beers on tap and I have a headstart on everyone else to see how many I can imbibe before iminent intoxication ensues. We quickly claimed dibs on a decent sized table, sitting next to two Asian guys and a British guy. They were just finishing up and told us that we could have the table when they were done...even told us to sit down and have a drink with them. After settling down, I exchanged my knowledge of British cursewords with the British guy, we all had a laugh at Bollux, and they were off. The other 10 or so of us showed up shortly after me and Clay had each thrown 3 more beers to their acidy death.

I'm not sure how much the tab came to, but I assume it to be somewhere in upwards of 300 dollars or so. I'm pretty sure that that included both trays of shots that we knocked over. First one: Dennis felt a hand on his shoulder and quickly turned around to see what it was about and sent all 15 shots to the floor...the waitress was signalling that she was right behind him. The second tray actually made it to the table, but quickly toppled like dominos when Sal tried picking a few of them up.

We left the bar around one, giving ourselves plenty of time to get back to Penn. On the way back we noticed that it was garbage night in the city and proceeded to trip, push, throw and kick each other into the bags stacked up on the side of the road waiting to be driven to New Jersey (New York's landfill.) I don't know what happened to my hand, but it was really hurting the whole next day. I heard tales of Dennis punching a parking meter, but I don't know if he "Soul-Crushed" it like I did little more than two years ago (I really thought my hand was broken for the next two weeks after that incident.)

I don't know why it happens, but it seems to be a common trend that whenever we go to the City for Sal's Birthday, we start throwing each other in garbage, and it's always hilarious at the time.

We made it back to Penn with plenty of time to get a few slices of pizza before the last train. Clay, keeping the tradition of the night, dropped one of the two slices that he bought [cheese side down] on the floor of Penn Station, and promptly tossed it in the garbage.

I'd blog about the train ride back, but I don't remember it because I was so engulfed in sleep that I had to be shaken awake when we'd reached our stop (thank Flying Spaghetti Monster it was the last stop because we would have overslept it by a longshot.)

My Life as a Giant Beer -Halloween weekend part 1-

"What's cooler than a Gigantic Beer?" I thought as I pointed to the costume I'd finally decided to wear to the party.

Picking out a costume this year proved to be more problematic than previous years. In years past, I'd always figured out what I wanted to be ahead of time; ie. wrapping myself in tin foil, wrapping myself in ceran wrap, the cowboy w/ the ridiculously large foam hat, the bum w/ the "Will Dance for Beer" sign, or just the ever creative, "Yeah I'm not doing the costume thing this year." I was originally planning on the latter of the choices for this year until Saturday night at about 7:30 when Kenny and Kristen called me up asking if I wanted to go to the costume shop with them.

The plan was as follows: look at costumes, and if we see something we like, we'll go to Kristen's friend's party. Forty-Five minutes later, the most solid costume that any of us had was Kenny's idea to buy a gigantic, blue, foam cowboy hat and this pillowy pony to go around his waist. We momentarily retreated to the car to organize our thoughts and decide if we in fact wanted to go to the party or sit back and watch movies. After 15 or so minutes of deciding (a new record for the three of us,) we decided to go back in and obtain some costumes then go to the party.

Kenny's was easy; I saw a gigantic milk costume hanging on the wall...a no brainer for Kenny. I think he's the only person that drinks milk after running around on a hot day, and I've heard rumors that he drinks something like 10 gallons of milk a day. "Well if he's gonna be his favorite drink, then I'm going to be mine...Gimme that gigantic Beer costume." So Kristen was pretty headstrong on being a hippie at that point, and we purchased our costumes and left that madhouse to go to another type of madhouse.

Kenny's costume came w/ a milk mustache applicator crayon and mine came with the promise of intoxication. He applied his milk mustache before leaving his house and it was off to Wendy's for a quick meal. They messed up two of our foods that we ordered so Kenny decided to go in and fix it.

"You have something on your lip," the girl behind the counter says to him.
"Oh I know, I'm going to a party dressed as milk," he replied.

"Oh...You have something on your lip," the other girl says to him.
"I'm going to a party dressed as milk," he repeated.


We finally get to the party and met all the characters there. There was Beetlejuice, the receptionist from Beetlejuice, a few criminals, a cop, a bee, Jack White, a Werewolf, Cochise from the Beastie Boys video, and a handful of other costumed characters. I was surprised to learn that cochise was actually Robert Gulet, and overheard Jack White telling someone that he was actually Willy Wonka. Having not seen the new movie, I did not know this and just kept referring to him as Jack White all night.

So Kenny won the award for "Funniest Costume" (I guess no one found it funny when I slapped their beer to the ground and yelled, "RUN BROTHER!!!!") Quite ironically, the prize for "Funniest Costume" that night was a box of Frankenberry and a box of Boo-berry cereal.

My Magazine is Spying on Me

"I'll be courteous and let this guy in the minivan over, so I'll move into the middle lane. Hmm...doesn't seem to be any traffic coming up behind me so I'll just make my move. There. What is this asshole doing speeding up in a huge truck? Now he's tailgating? Fuck him. Fine I'll move back into that other lane. Are you happy now Mr...wait, what's that say on the side of the truck? Positron Emitty-who Tomota-dealy? (PET.) What the fuck is PET?"

So I wondered for the duration of my trip home tonight about where the hell some gigantic truck speeding up behind me is going at this time of night with a positron-doohicky. I also further wondered what the hell PET is and stood for because he sped by me so fast I couldn't read it; all I got was Positron and PET.

I arrive at home and take my ritualistic evening dump and carry my favorite magazine (Men's Health) in for some reading. Much to my shagrin, there it was. PET: Positron-Emission Tomography. It maps out vital organs apparently.

The point of this story is not the PET...that's actually a really boring end to a pretty boring story anyway. But the important part is that no more than 15 minutes after wondering what this truck was and what it was doing, I had my answer. Coincidence? I thought so too...at first.

I thought back to Sunday night (2 nights ago) and remembered how I kept waking up and couldn't have slept for more than 2 hours at a time without lying awake for an hour. I hoped that this was going to be just an isolated incident because I normally sleep pretty well. When I woke up exhausted the next morning, I thought that I might need some answers, just in case.
During my ritualistic morning dump, I discovered a little article that was in the very same issue of Men's Health about sleep patterns. It had a few bits of advice for getting a great 8 hours of sleep.

After recalling this annecdote, I realized that my magazine is spying on me, because it's not the first time that this has happened. I knew that there was a reason that I read this magazine so religiously and abide by it's diet and excercise programs as strictly as I do. It's probably trying to tell me something so that I don't die in a year and a half.

Fucked up T-Shirt Ideas

So Sal, Little Matt & I have this ongoing "contest" for who can think of the most fucked up t-shirt idea. After putting some time into our thinking on these shirts, we've come up with a pretty decent list of possibilities for most fucked up t-shirt of all time. However, after I found the website: t-shirt hell, I rethought our ideas.

With such awesome shirts as, "I'm not getting Jiggy, I just have Parkinsons,"

and this little dealy, I thought that they were a shoe-in for most fucked up t-shirt ideas.

Which is why I decided to write this blog. You see, Sal started it all off with, "Hurricaine Shmiricaine; I just want my damn orange juice," relating to last year's hurricaine whiched caused a shortage of orange juice. Matt retorted with
.
To which I came up with, "Tsunami 2004: Ride the Wave." Then I later found out that t-shirt hell had, "I surfed Tsunami 2004," pretty much the same thing. So I came up with something so bad that I really care not to divulge as it will result in numerous people discontinuing friendships with me.

Shortly after I came up with the unmentionable of t-shirts, another of my friend (nameless) came up with, "I didn't like the Twin Towers anyway." Really bad nameless.

Then, another of my friends asked if I had any good ideas for shirts in poor taste about the hurricaine. I started thinking and came up with something to the order of, "Flash me for..." and then formed a writer's block on the rest. Thankfully, my favorite t-shirt site filled in the rest for me with "Flash me for Food & Water" with "beads" crossed out.

I've just come up with two more hurricaine related shirts and I'll divulge them now before the opportune 2 years for comedic discourse has passed. They both play off of the same idea, which was also kind of covered already in t-shirt hell.

Number 1: "I survived Katrina and all I got was this fucked up house."
and
Number 2: "I survived Katrina and all I got were these kick-ass seats in the superdome."

Ok, so maybe everyone's crossing the line too soon on these t-shirt ideas because there are a lot of people dead and suffering because of this. However and first of all, those people were told to leave because a Class 5 (big mother-fucker) hurricaine was coming their way. They chose to not vacate. Second of all, I wouldn't get pissed if someone made a t-shirt that said, "Blatt bought this awesome Mazda and now all he has is a gigantic lawn jockey." Or, "You know you're a hick when you smashed a tooth out after 25 shots in an hour, and then your new car resides in your lawn because it blew up...thus forcing you to buy a new engine before a new tooth. Oh yeah, and you also don't use words like "thus.""

There they are for now. I'll amend this post when I think of more.

Where's your cock? Oh right...it got rocked the Fuck off.

So my band and I just got back from playing a show at the Sheraton in Philadelphia, PA. Dennis and I got to the hotel that Sean had booked at about 2:30 on Saturday morning. At that point I had consumed about 9 Warsteiners and was freely running around the hotel throwing ice I'd collected into our bathtub to keep the remaining beers cold.

The next day it was off to the Independent Music Conference (IMC) for us. We showed up there at around 12...far earlier than half of the people that showed up, and we set up our table. The following is a discourse on the events that occurred that day.

Dennis found this awesome Belgiun bar called Eulogy. I can only imagine that it got it's name from the sheer brute number of different beers that had been consumed within it's doors. 400 is the number that it's 4 page, small type menu sported. The best of them, and the award for my new favorite beer is Gulden Draak (Golden Dragon.) At a menacing 10.5% alcohol coupled with a delicious half-full-bodied-wine half-really-awesome-beer flavor, this beer quickly won my liver.

Shortly after my latest epiphany, I discovered the deliciousness of their "Napolean Burger." A half pound of delicious ground beef with sauteed onions, cheddar, lettuce, tomato, on a sourdough roll; served with awesome twice fried french fries and a mustardy-mayonaise dipping sauce (for the fries...yeah I know, heart attack city, but don't knock it 'til you've tried it.)

So me and Dennis met Sean back at the conference slightly iniebriated and completely satisfied with our find. We met this cool girl from a pretty cool sounding band who actually asked me, "Where's the beach?" to which I responded with a, "I think it's that-a-way (pointing with my bicep flexed.)" She then signed our mailing list adding a few choice words - "You guys are hot!" and was off on her way telling us that she would try to catch our performance later that night (she didn't.)

We then went to a workshop for CD critiquing and got some pointers for our next demo album. We promptly rushed to no fewer than 5 bars after that. Surprisingly each bar had it's own awesome selection of beers (up to 10 new ones per bar.) Back to Eulogy with Sean to talk to an awesome bartender and some more wine-beer, then off to the conference again.

We hung out there for a while. We learned that we'd been bumped back to 12am...instead of 10:45pm because of a booking mix-up with a local bar. So I proceeed to drink the bottle of Powers that I'd brought along for the trip. Some crackhead lady decided to try to steal 2 of our t-shirts, me and Sean got on some radio station talking to Dr. Lou while Dennis was in the shitter, and we saw some crazy 1 piece band guy in the rest of the time we spent there. Oh yeah, incidentally, there's some kind of magic bench around that area that we went looking for also. Apparently, it's much like the singing bush from the "3 Amigos" movie, only twice as elusive and no one shot the invisible swordsman.

When we returned we played one of the best shows we've ever done, and rocked everyone in the audience so much that there were "love-stains" left on their chairs after our set. I continued to drink my Powers until the bottle was 75% gone, and ended up really drunk. Drunk enought that I decided that everyone on the way home was "airhorn-worthy." A quick trip to Denny's and the mastication of my favorite breakfast ever - moon's over my hammy - sobered me up enough so I didn't smash my face walking around, but left me drunk enough that I don't remember leaving Denny's and going back to the hotel.

Overall...awesome time in Philly even though I didn't get one cheesesteak. I just wish more people could have seen us play and hung out with us when we were barhopping.

Yeah...Still Not Who You're Looking For.

"RRRRRRRRIIIIIINGGGGGGGG"

--I don't know this phone number. I guess I'll answer it anyway just in case some hot girl spontaneously decides to call me randomly and ask for wild sex--

"Hello?..."
"Yo wassup...where's marv at?"
"I don't know who you're talking about, you must have the wrong number."
"pfft...CLICK"

--Damn what a dick, he could've at least said he's so...--

"RRRRRRRRRIIIIIINNNNNGGGGG"

--Same number again...I'll let voicemail sort this one out rather than waste more minutes on this asshole--

So at this point I was on my way home from work. Half an hour later, I arrive at my house and take my habitual after work dump. So what happens when I'm at my most timid?

"RRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNGGGGGGGGG" -- Same asshole...still not answering it.

A few hours pass by and I now have free minutes and I'm not really doing anything so I decide to answer the phone this time:

"RRRRRRINNNNNGGG"
"Yeah...listen I'm STILL not your friend, and your friend is not going to have this number anytime soon because I've had this number for the past 4 YEARS now."
"CLICK"

I've said this before, and perhaps even blogged about it in the somewhat recent past, but I really think that we need to eliminate some of the population Darwin style. I beleive that we need to eliminate some warning signs that would normally cause people to die if they don't pay attention to them. Really...what does a sign say that you can't notice on your own?

I recently saw a sticker on the lid of a tupperware container; one of the big ones that you store books and stuff in. Guess what it says to not put in the airtight container? If you guessed small babies, you're correct. I don't necessarily think that it's just to suffocate innocent babies because of my theory, but how smart are they really going to grow up to be if their parents store them in plastic airtight containers? Furthermore, any sign that says "Elevator Out" should be just plain burned. Anyone that walks straight into an open elevator shaft deserves to be removed from our gene pool. There are many other cases of signs that should just cease to exist in our world to help smarten our offspring up, you know what they are when you see them; I don't think I have to list them.

I will however offer further proof for my cause. It happened over the course of today.

"RRRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINGGGGGGGGGGG"

--I don't recognize this number, but my phone says "Maryland" and I may know someone in Maryland--

"Hello?"
"Hi...where's Laverne?"
"Who's Laverne? There's no Laverne here."
"CLICK"
Yeah, thanks for wasting 1 of my last 4 remaining minutes on my phone until my minutes renew next week.

Two minutes later...
"RRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGG"
--Motherfucker...it's the same fucking idiot crackwhore from before...this looks like a job for voicemail--

A few hours later...
"RRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG"
--What the fuck?! Are there really people this stupid in this world...goddammit I'm blogging about this--
"Yeah, Laverne is still not here nor will she ever be."
"CLICK"

Get some manners and get rid of the OCD. It's crazy to think that doing the same thing over and over again will have results contrary to what they were before. In this day of technology, there's a such thing as an outgoing calls list on most phones. All you need to do is check the number that you're about to dial, comparing it with the number in your phone that you dialed before and didn't get your friend. Real hard.

Now I have to go because the cripple fight episode of South Park is on and I've devoted far too much of my time to crazy people from Maryland that don't know how to dial phones.

You think you have problems cake boy?!

Walking out of the grocery store today, I heard a plethora of expletives being sewn by a tall gentleman on the phone. As I snuck past him, I noticed he was dressed in a Green-shirt with a Stop and Shop logo on the sleeve. Even though it was none of my business I figured I'd post an exerpt of his conversation on this blog anyway to satisfy the rubberneck in all of us.
"SO BECAUSE THAT FUCKING IDIOT IS OUT, SO I HAVE TO FUCKING BAKE ALL OF THE CAKES TODAY?! I TOLD MY BOSS THAT I'M NOT FUCKING DOING IT. I CAN'T TAKE THIS FUCKING PLACE ANYMORE...HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BAKE ALL THOSE CAKES TODAY GODDAMMIT!"
Never thought I'd hear someone so vehemently protesting the baking of delicious party desserts. Maybe I should get this guy to argue with Mazda about replacing my engine for me. I'd gladly bake his required cakes for him if he could cause a ruckus and get me my engine block.