Tent Time

How the Mighty Have Fallen

2011-04-25T16:10:00.001-07:00

It's with a heavy heart that I relate this recent conversation I had with my wife about a girl I would once have happily murdered several close friends to have sex with. Times have changed. People have changed. Dress sizes have changed. Sadly, this conversation has not been altered. It took place as my wife was reading an issue of STAR magazine and I glanced over her shoulder as I walked by.

Me: Is that Christina Aguilera?
Wife: No. It's a drag queen.
Me: Oh dear.

I'm not saying I cried. But I will say that it was suddenly very dusty in our house.

Also, the fact that I just mistook a guy for a woman I used to ogle was disturbing on a level I wasn't comfortable thinking about.

Luckily, there will always be this and this to remind us of better, happier times.

'Twas the Night Before Baseball...

2011-03-31T02:09:00.001-07:00

Twas the night before baseball and all through the house
The wife was a bitch, her libido was doused.
The game gets me horny, my juices are flowing.
But I know exactly where this dance is going.
Baseball to me is akin to foreplay.
But not for the wife, she still hopes I'm gay.

Now Opening Day was coming up quick
The winter forgotten, like a Nic Cage flick.
Wife's voice would soon become background noise
Drowned out by Vin Scully, immune to her ploys.
My focus would soon find only the game,
In a matter of weeks I won't know her name.
Conversations will be so fully one sided
Attempted flirtations are dumb and misguided.
I'll know batting stats and road OPSes
But important life dates will be down to best guesses.

All fantasy rosters are drafted and set
With the best sort of players a smart man can get
Power hitters and on-base machines
And strike throwing pitchers gripping the seams.
Head to head, roto and even points leagues
all ready to play like a young Cheryl Teigs.
Soon baseball would start with pitches and steals
But tonight I'm online with Jessica Biel.

The wife went to bed, a frown on her face,
As I sit and watch midgets get way past third base.
Hours from now, sweet baseball will start
The joy can be felt down deep in my heart.
But now I recline down next to my screen
watching the dirtiest shit that I've ever seen.
Rare is the time I can't focus on porn,
but tomorrow's the day a new season is born.
Baseball is coming, the season is near,
Tomorrow's the very best day of year!

The Decline of American Civilization

2011-03-08T14:24:00.000-08:00

We're well beyond spelling "definitely" with an "a" or sincerely recommending the Sex and the City movies. Soon there will be nothing left but fat corpses and the distant hum of a Kim Kardashian "song."

This was a news story on MSN.com today:

How Will Mariah Carey's Jack Russell Terriers Handle Sharing Her With The Twins?

I cannot imagine the type of person who clicks on this story. But I can only assume that they contemplate suicide on an hourly basis. And if they asked me for my opinion, I wouldn't even try to talk them out of it.

Movies of 2010

2011-02-28T17:33:00.000-08:00

10 Best Movies of 2010

10. The Crazies: This is the kind of movie that usually ends up on Worst Of lists - A remake of a little seen and long forgotten horror movie. But Olyphant man-crushes aside, it's a suprisingly good movie. A rare horror/thriller/slasher movie that has smart characters behaving intelligently. It deserved a much better box-office fate.

9. Waiting For Superman: This documentary about the unfortunate state of America's public school system is depressing, inspiring, frustrating and then depressing again.

8. The Town: That Ben Affleck is turning out to be a very good director. He's found where he belongs. BEHIND the camera. Behind it. All the way behind it.

7. Black Swan: Mind fuck. The hangnail scene and the nail cutting scene were more squirm inducing than anything else I saw this year (intentional division). Kudos to Natalie Portman for the best masturbation scene in a mainstream movie this year.

6. The Kids Are All Right: Annette Bening and Julianne Moore gave us what might be the most realistic on-screen marriage of the year. Come for married lesbians watching all male gay porn and stay for Bening screaming "I need your opinions like I need a dick in my ass!"

5. The King's Speech: Great movie, great performances. Beautifully shot. Geoffrey Rush is one of those actors who can take any part and make it memorable. Always a pleasure to watch, despite his somewhat grotesque appearance.

4. The Fighter: We've all seen the underdog/redemption sports movie. Many of them have even been about boxers. The Fighter still stands out because of its characters and the performances. I love Amy Adams character in this movie. She swears like a sailor and crawls around in lingerie. What more could anybody ask for? Christian Bale is amazing, especially the cake scene.

3. The Social Network: David Fincher is the best director working today. How many directors could take a script where all the characters do is sit at computers and talk to each other (all sounding the same) and make it visually interesting? Probably just one.

2. Inception: Movies that require the viewer to really pay attention shouldn't be so unusual. The zero gravity hotel fight was worth the ticket price alone. I have one question though - how old is Ellen Paige and why do I feel creepy whenever I look at her? Is she 13 or 30? I can't tell. She looks like I could easily fit her in a kitchen cupboard.

1. 127 Hours: Amazing movie. Amazing story. The only movie I saw last year that really moved me and made me want to stand up and cheer. My wife literally sobbed for ten minutes. Please put this movie on your Netflix queue. You'll be glad you did.

6 Worst

These are harder because I don't see every movie. And when something looks terrible, I usually don't go. It doesn't take a genius to know Sex and The City 2 was going to be a bad movie. I couldn't sit through the trailer. So a lot of movies that fill up most people's worst of list won't be on mine. Not that I'm a movie snob. As you'll read, I still see a lot of crap.

6. CopOut: You know what happens when a comedy isn't funny? You pay attention to the story. That's not a good thing when you're seeing a Kevin Smith movie.

5. Clash of the Titans: Money grubbing bad 3-D conversion aside, the movie just didn't really offer anything new. There wasn't much to it. Then it was over.

4. Dinner for Shmucks: Painfully unfunny. A classic example of a movie putting every funny line it has in the trailer (in this case, maybe 2 lines), leaving you nothing new to laugh at for what feels like 4 hours.

3. Legion: This movie is obviously really bad, and I blame myself for seeing it, but what makes it unbearably bad is that it takes itself so incredibly seriously. There are scenes in this movie that don't seem to fit anywhere. Actors clearly don't know what kind of movie they're in and old reliable Dennis Quaid doesn't seem to know what planet he's on. Just a terrible mish-mash of the worst parts from a dozen quasi-religious-sci-fi garbage movies before it.

2. Skyline: Skyline is terrible. I get that it had no budget, but that's no excuse for such awful dialogue. The opposite of The Crazies, almost every "character" in Skyline does several ridiculous, stupid, impossible things just to keep the "story" moving along. I'm being extremely generous when I use the words "character" and "story." If my choices were between watching this movie again or staring at the blue light and having my brain harvested by aliens, I'll take the light.

The Worst Movie of the Year is....

Alice in Wonderland: There was nothing engaging for me in this movie. Nothing. I didn't care about anything that was happening. I've never had my mind wander so much during a movie. There were a lot of bright colors and 3-D things moving around, but none of it added up to anything. ANYTHING. It was so uninteresting the main character didn't even change her face during the entire movie. The most cringe inducing scene of the year (unintentional division) was Johnny Depp's dancing at the end. Clearly, it was supposed to funny, but there wasn't a sound in my theater. Not a chuckle.

Random Awards and Thoughts

Best Use of 3-D: Piranha 3D - between the naked underwater swimming and the severed penis getting vomited up, this is the movie that most delivered what it promised.

Star Who Most Needs to Fire Her People: Jennifer Aniston - I don't get it. She's beautiful and funny, but she keeps signing up for absolute crap. First she gets stuck listening to Gerard Butler trying to talk in The Bounty Hunter and then makes an ill-advised sperm movie with Jason Bateman - maybe the only movie possible that could misuse both of those talented people. Then to kick start 2011 she jumps in bed with Adam Sandler? Somebody her a good part in a good movie. Please!

Best Use of Ass In a Trailer: Rachel McAdams in Morning Glory.

Funniest Sex Scene: MacGruber

Funniest Supporting Characters: Going The Distance - Charlie Kelly, Jason Sudekis, Christina Applegate and Jim Gaffigan all get big laughs in this R rated comedy that nobody saw for some reason.

Best Looking Sniper in a Train Station: The A-Team

Most Inappropriate Movie Title: Unstoppable

Least Realistic Scene of the Year: Jessica Biel and Jennifer Garner left alone to commiserate about how awful Valentine's Day is because nobody wants to be with them. This is flat out insulting. How is that supposed to make a ugly girl with a flat ass girl feel? If Jessica Biel and her perfect body can't find love, then everybody else is fucked.

Why Aren't These Two Bigger Stars?: Timothy Olyphant and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

Most Distractingly Unrealistic Stunts: Salt. I don't understand why they had to put this crazy shit into what could have been a pretty decent movie. Angelina Jolie cannot leap onto the roof of a truck going 60 miles an hour. Can't happen. She also can't jump down an elevator shaft 2 floors at a time. And she certainly can't fly - yes, literally fly - out of a closet. She also needs to eat something.

Movie I Really Wanted to Like, But Just Couldn't: The Expendables. I'm sorry, but it's a bad movie. And it doesn't make sense. Why isn't Dolph Lundgren dead? Is that woman really supposed to be attracted to Stallone? And what the fuck is Mickey Rourke talking about?

Movie That Should Have Been Terrible, but was Actually much better than the Expendables:
Universal Soldier: Regeneration I know was technically a 2009 movie, but I only saw it last year. And it's pretty good. If you like action movies, it's worth checking out.

Trailer That Made Me Feel Bad For the Actor Until I Was Reminded That He Got Paid a Lot:
Gullivers Travels

Most Disturbing Scene of Characters Accepting Their Own Firey Death: Toy Story 3

Highest Grossing Movie I Didn't See: Twilight - Eclipse or whatever it's called. I just flat out don't get this series. At all. It looks like it's made and sold directly to unattractive, awkward teenage girls. I watched 15 minutes of the first movie and thought it was a comedy. I understand there are genres that are simply not for me and this clearly is one of them. So if it makes sad, homely adolescents happy to watch this stuff, they can have at it.

As for me, I'll be one theater down watching the latest Alien invasion/buddy cop/talking animal/lesbian/transformers/killer fish/Bruce Willis movie.

On to 2011 and it's 27 Sequels.

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol. 10

2011-01-06T20:03:00.000-08:00

"Ow! What is that? Is that the dog's foot or your penis?"

Yep.

"Ghost Community"

2010-11-23T02:38:00.000-08:00

Saturday night - playing some pretty intense Pictionary with friends of ours. Not that intense, but intense enough that the frequency with which our rolls resulted in "All-play" vs. their rolls was pointed out. More than once. And apparently we're "just good at rolling high numbers."

Anyway, it's our turn, my wife is drawing. She draws well. I should point out that I'm at least a half dozen strong Jack & Cokes into the evening at this point (so the intensity may have been higher, but I wasn't feeling it).

My wife draws your basic ghost. "Ghost" I say proudly, assuming the round was done. She keeps drawing. She draws a house. "Ghost House" I say and I know immediately that it makes no sense.

She draws another house. "Second Ghost House" I say, this time thinking I was funny. I was not.

Time is running out.

She draws a third house. Then circles all three houses. I'm looking at a group of houses. And I think we all know the common term for such a thing. "Community! Ghost community!" I shout.

Time expires.

We've all played games like this before. And you just don't have any control over what comes out of your mouth while your playing. Your eyes see a group of houses and your brain just grabs a box of synonyms and starts throwing them out of your mouth. It does not have time to try and match those synonyms with the first part of the puzzle. "Ghost Town" obviously makes more sense, as it's a term people actually use, but that's just not the first word my brain heaved out of my mouth.

Now, as married man of almost 7 years, I've seen a lot of disappointment in my wife's face. A lot. I can spot it pretty easily. Usually, it appears right after I'm done speaking. And this was no exception.

We all immediately agreed that "ghost community" is a term nobody had ever heard before. And that novelty is not lost on my wife, who seems determined to help my newly coined phrase make up for lost time by including it in almost everything she says.

I'd be mad at her, but I know I'd be doing the same thing.

(Side note: We went 2-0 at Pictionary.)

Peanuts

2010-10-08T01:17:00.001-07:00

We're at the grocery store tonight and there's a sale on peanuts. $2/jar if you buy 10 instead of $4.79/jar. That's a big discount. So obviously, I bought 10 jars.

It's a lot of peanuts.

At the checkout, there's a guy bagging for us. He slowly bags each of the 10 jars of peanuts, then he turns to us and says "You guys must be having a party!"
We casually laughed and said "no" and headed out to the car.

Then I started thinking. What was he talking about? A party? With peanuts? Is that something people buy before a party? When's the last time you were at a party and you thought to yourself: "Man, this party is great, but what it could really use is about 15 pounds of peanuts."

Here's my shopping list for the Halloween party:
Vodka
Whiskey
Cookies
10 jars of peanuts

Anyway, I can't stop thinking what kind of parties involve that many peanuts. Maybe they just torture people with allergies.

Can you imagine sticking your hand in a giant communal bowl of peanuts at party? That's disgusting.

Anyway, long story short, I eat a lot of peanuts.

Just Talkin' With My Mom

2010-09-11T01:52:00.000-07:00

So I suggested that my mom check out the new movie "GET LOW" with Robert DuVall and Bill Murray. When I mentioned the movie's title, I was led into the following conversation that I wish we never head and am still trying to forget.

MOM: Oh, I won't like that. It sounds dirty.
ME: What?
MOM: I know what that means.
ME: You know what what means?
MOM: Getting low.
ME: Okay, what does it mean?
MOM: I have to tell you? Fine, isn't it when a black guy - wait, you know what this means.
ME: I swear I have no idea.

(At this point, my curiosity was off the charts and the fact that I'd successfully gotten my 70 year old mother to stop using the word "colored" so that was also a plus.)

MOM: It's when a married black man has gay penis sex with another black man.

(That's the worst kind of gay sex. Gay penis sex. Whenever you first hear of two men having sex - and gay sex at that - you always hold out hope that at least penises weren't involved. Sadly, it's rarely the case.)

ME: Does the other guy also have to be black.
MOM: I think so.

(She's not sure on that one and to be honest, I'm relieved. The less secure my mom is about her knowledge of the closeted gay black community, the better I'll sleep at night.)

ME: Look, I don't know if there's a term for any of that specifically, but I think the term you're thinking of is "on the down-low." But as far as I know, that can be used for anything done in secret.
MOM: Oh. So what's it called when two col--I mean black guys have penis sex with other?
ME: There's no term. And stop calling it penis sex.
MOM: Why? They use their penises don't they?
ME: Yes, but you never called sex with dad penis sex do you?
MOM: Not all the time.

(Admittedly, this part is all my fault. For some reason that was the best example I could think of to prove that the term "penis sex" was ridiculous and it truly blew up in my face.)

ME: I'm hanging up the phone, turning it off, taking out the battery and setting it on fire.
MOM: Okay, well I won't keep you. We'll see the movie, but if I have to watch any gay penis sex, you're going to hear about it from me.
ME: That seems more than fair.

Did We Just....

2010-07-31T01:40:00.000-07:00

...Bribe a Mexican Airline employee?

My wife and I asked about upgrading our coach tickets back from Mexico and we were told by a gentleman at the counter that the cost to do so was $165/person and had to be done at a different counter.

We muttered and looked off at the other counter for a few moments, when the gentleman suggested another course of action.

"Or, for $100 cash, I can upgrade you right here."

Perfect, we thought. I put five 20's on the counter and the gentleman put some papers on top of the cash and dragged it down to his desk. Ten minutes later were in the First Class lounge enjoying free Wi-Fi, free booze and for some reason, packages of cookies that had pictures of chocolate chip cookies on them but did not in fact contain any chocolate chip cookies.

After angrily complaining about the cookie situation to several disinterested employees - several of whom pretended not to know what I was saying, but they knew, they had to know. Who wants to open a package of chocolate chip cookies and get some fucking ginger cookie instead. What the fuck? If I bought a bag of Milano cookies and got home to find it was full of fucking Chessmen, I'd race back to the grocery store and shove that bag of cookies up someone's ass.

But anyway, after I cooled down a bit, my wife asked me "Did we just bribe a Mexican Airline employee?"

Well, I sure as shit did not get a receipt for my $100 and I also flat out saw him put the cash into his own pocket. So, yes, I think we did.

Battle of Respected Actresses

2010-07-31T01:30:00.000-07:00

So we just saw THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT and Annette Benning answers the gauntlet dropped last fall by Meryl Streep. And no, I'm not talking about a top notch performance or character acting.

Which respected middle-aged actress has the best delivery of a completely unexpected, hilarious and vulgar line of dialogue:

Meryl Streep in IT'S COMPLICATED

"I do like a lot of semen."

vs

Annette Benning in THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

"I need your observations like I need a dick in my ass!"

I think this one is just too close to call.

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol. 9

2010-07-08T16:01:00.000-07:00

"AAAAHHHHH! I don't like it!"

That was how my wife greeted me when I left the bathroom last night after shaving off my goatee.

In her defense, I've had it for 3 years and my face does look weird without it. But that was not the vote of confidence I was hoping for/desperately needed.

People Who Should Kill Themselves #4

2010-06-24T01:59:00.000-07:00

My friend Josh, who last year was not allowed by his wife to attend a baseball game with me despite having already purchased the ticket 5 months earlier. He had to - and I'm not kidding - drive me and a friend to the game, drop us off, drive back home, watch the game on TV and then drive back to the stadium to pick us up.

That really happened. All of it.

Then to add insult to injury, last month, he was dragged by his wife to Sex and The City 2 on opening weekend.

If I were his true friend, I'd kill him myself.

People Who Should Kill Themselves #3

2010-05-30T01:51:00.000-07:00

The guy at the gym yesterday who stole my workout gloves - AFTER I worked out.
AFTER I spent 80 minutes pouring sweat into them.
AFTER I hadn't washed them in no less than 4 months.

These things must have smelled like shit. Like actual shit. But that didn't stop this asshole from taking off with them.

I guess if he needed gloves badly enough to risk all manner of infections by stealing what my wife describes as "the most disgusting things you own" then I probably shouldn't waste time wishing death on him. He'll likely die an hour after using them anyway.

Things My Dad Did On Vacation

2010-05-04T13:55:00.001-07:00

A while ago, my wife and I joined my parents and my brother on a cruise to Antarctica. The trip was amazing and I strongly recommend it to anybody who loves nature and wants to see things they've never seen before.

Now, if there's a downside to taking a trip like this, it's spending over 2 weeks on a 300ft boat with my parents. They're great and we love them to death, but certain habits, tendencies and generally odd behaviors become very hard to ignore when there's nowhere to hide from them.

With that in mind, I present to you this list:

Things My Dad Did on Vacation in Antarctica:

We all stood at the bow of the ship looking out a huge iceberg we were slowly approaching. There was nothing else but ocean as far as the eye could see. After about five minutes of staring at and taking pictures of the iceberg, my dad said "Look at that iceberg."
Just before making a key move during a close game of cards he was on the verge of losing, he claimed to be "scared stiffless."
He insisted that a different, giant iceberg in the middle of the Antarctic was in fact a US Aircraft Carrier.
Cannot seem to determine the difference between clockwise and counterclockwise.
Ate a dish called "pork neck."
Spoke proudly of the fact that his regular diet of fried foods, bacon, sausage and eggs was making his blood thicker.
When able to correctly identify icebergs, he referred to them as "bergs," presumably to save time.
He misplaced is 1100 page book detailing the life of Dwight Eisenhower. When he realized he couldn't find it, he wrongly concluded that "someone else must have wanted to read it."
Ordered and drank a Sex on the Beach.
Stared closely at a photograph of a mustached stranger and stated "there I am." When told it was not him, he peered in even closer and said "What do you mean? Of course it's me. Who else would it be?" Upon even closer inspection he then said "Wait a minute. That's not my shirt." My father does not have a mustache.
While at dinner, my Dad said to a waiter whowas trying to take our drink orders: "I gotta get Doc to take me off this damn stuff." The waiter stared with confusion. My Dad then said "I'm on medication so I can't drink alcohol." The waiter nodded and suggested a soda. My Dad thought and then said "I'll have some red wine."

People Who Should Kill Themselves Vol. 2

2010-03-16T02:12:00.000-07:00

Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, the Iranian Cleric who publicly stated: "Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes."

It's the 21st century and somebody actually said this. Actually formed the words with his mouth and said them out loud. This is a man in a position of authority who truly believes that earthquakes - EARTHQUAKES - are caused by women. It might be time for Iran so spend a little more money on scientific research. Or think about reading some books from time to time.

At first I thought it was sad for him, but then I realized it's just sad for the women there.

People Who Should Kill Themselves #1

2010-03-11T20:43:00.000-08:00

The guy behind me in line at Costco who was purchasing one item and one item only.

That item: a Blue-Ray of Old Dogs

Taking Movie Characters Home

2010-03-10T15:24:00.000-08:00

So Last Action Hero was on TV last night and other than coming up with another great idea for a porno that someone should make, I found myself asking this question:

Who are the 5 movie characters I'd most want to take out of the movies and bring home with me to hang out?

First of all, take porn out of the equation. 99% of straight guys would just take 5 different Jenna Jamesons home and die of dehydration and exhaustion six days later. So forget that. They don't count.

I thought about this for a long time. So many options. What characters do I really just want to hang out with? Would it just be 5 hot/easy girls? We love Tyler Durden and Hannibal Lecter as characters, but do we actually want to spend any time with them? Hell no. I'd love to have the Triceratops from Jurassic Park, but you get the feeling that's probably more trouble then it's worth. After much deliberation but probably not enough, this is what I decided on.

1. Dug from UP. He's cute, he's lovable and he talks. I don't know if our dog would like him, but she'd get used to it. I love this dog. And I wanted to take him home as soon as he said "I can smell you." This was hands down, easily my first choice.

2. Christina Ricci's sex addict from Black Snake Moan. Yes, I'd take her home. Yes, I'd chain her to a part of my house. But that's where the similarities to the plot would end. Her "rehabilitation" would be dramatically different - and less successful - than in the film.

3. Van Wilder from Van Wilder. Ryan Reynolds is a funny guy and Van seems like he'd be cool to hang out with. He knows how to throw a party and he always seems to know the right people. If he can make that unibrow guy in the movie get girls, he could really help my friends. Besides, I'd have to throw my wife a bone since she'd probably have some questions about why a naked Christina Ricci was chained up in our bedroom.

4. Mikaela from Transformers. No-brainer. Even my wife agreed that Fox was ridiculously hot in this movie. She's a bit of a rebel, she can fix cars (I can't) and she'll put up with a dorky guy (very important). I don't know how long she'd stick around though, but luckily I'll have some extra chain lying around...

5. The Terminator from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Of course, he'd have to agree to protect me. And not so much to hang out with - buddy style, but just to have my back. Everywhere I go. Imagine having him with you. What a boon to my confidence. And his ability and willingness to blow out people's kneecaps at a moment's notice is an added plus. He doesn't eat or sleep and requires very little upkeep or attention. He's just a permanent body guard who will literally take a bullet for you. Plus he's already mastered high fives. (also, he'll be handy to "remind" Van Wilder that those two ladies are here for me and me alone)

There are probably better people to pick. Geniuses, Navy SEALs, Jason Bourne or any of a number of other super heroes, or hot girls. But five isn't very many and these give me a nice mix of companionship, hotness, humor and protection. It's a good group.

*** EDITOR'S NOTE***

I have to add a 6th. I can't believe I didn't think of this before. I'm ashamed. This is probably my #2, right after Dug.

6. Optimus Prime from Transformers. Do I even have to explain how awesome having Optimus Prime would be? I don't even know what I'd do with him besides sit around listening to stories about Cybertron and watching him transform. Just driving him around would be awesome. Driving my new buddies around in Optimus Prime.
...Dug with his head out the window
...Van Wilder sitting there planning parties and cracking jokes
...The T-100 watching out the back for Cops
...Two hot chicks chained up in the back

Just imagine stopping in some terrible gang area and just waiting for someone to fuck with me. Then going home and seeing the following headline:
"100 people killed today by what witnesses described as some kind of cyborg working with a giant robotic truck. An unattractive white man with bad hair who appeared to be with them was unharmed."

Good times.

Ladybugs

2010-02-28T20:14:00.000-08:00

So I recently saw part of this movie called "Ladybugs" with Rodney Dangerfield. He's coaching some all girls soccer team, he's "got a lot of balls" and the team does pretty well. I don't know exactly, I didn't see the first half hour or the last. But I'll say this about the movie: that chick is hot!

Seriously. I might be in love. I mean there's something sexy about a girl who's really good at sports and she's easily the best player on the team. She just dominated the other girls, running circles around them. Physically, I know she's a little flat chested, but I kind of like that. She's got one of those 'bob' haircuts that totally does it for me. I really dig her skinny, muscular legs and wide shoulders. Don't ask me why, but show me a girl with a strong, square jawline and I'm hooked. And don't even get me started on a sexy, husky voice.

Sure is weird that she and Dangerfield's son seem to hate each other. They're never even in the same place! Oh well, I'm sure I'll get it when I see the rest of that movie.

Suicidal Thoughts

2010-02-25T23:48:00.001-08:00

Talking with my mom on the phone today, she mentions that she now watches Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Regularly. She's also a fan of Chelsea Lately, but since that show is actually funny, it doesn't concern me.

My mom had questions about the Kardashians:
1. Who are they?
2. Are they famous? For what?
3. Why are they on TV?
4. When did Bruce Jenner become a woman?

I didn't have an answer for these questions. Who are they? Awful people. Are the famous? I suppose. For what? I have no idea. The last two are great mysteries as well.

Somehow, and I'm not sure how it happened, we started to argue. I didn't even realize it was an argument until five minutes had gone by and we still disagreed. That's when it hit me. My mom and I had just spent 5 minutes discussing the Kardashians. Specifically, which daughter was most attractive. This had happened. 5 minutes of our lives were gone. They weren't coming back. And we'd spent them in quite possibly, the worst way imaginable.

Things I would rather do for five minutes or would even feel better about having done for five minutes include but are certainly not limited to: punching myself in the face, running up a hill, drinking milk, shaving my balls and or course - killing the Kardashians.

When I thought about the fact that the Kardashians had just taken up 5 minutes of my day, I really wanted to kill myself. What was the point of going on? My mom somehow talked me down and I'm grateful for that. Because if she hadn't, then I wouldn't have been able to spend these last 10 minutes blogging about the Kardashians. And clearly, my life really needed that.

*By the way, in case you were wondering, I said Kim and my mom one of the other ones.

Gym Locker Rooms - Hell on Earth

2010-02-24T19:19:00.001-08:00

Why is that regardless of what locker I pick at the gym, when I come back to get my stuff there is always some troll, completely naked sitting right in front of it? Without fucking fail. Where does this guy come from? Because he's obviously not working out. Does he stop in after work just to use the shower and then sit around? Maybe he comes in just to sit his fat, sweaty ass in the sauna for a half hour and call it exercise.

And thanks for grumbling when I point out that my locker is behind your hairy back. Like I want it to be there. I desperately want to hold my lock now that it's covered with your sweat. Really, I'm the inconvenience here. And why does this guy always sound like every breath might be his last. Like every inhale is a great effort and every exhale sounds like relief that he was able to inhale.

And don't wrap that yellowing towel around you as you stand up. Just stand up and stretch briefly, before moving exactly one locker down so your six pound nest of pubic hair will never leave my peripheral vision. That's very nice. Thanks.

It all leads me to this - The Top 5 WORST Things I've seen in Gym Locker Rooms:

5. Fat guy with no visible penis standing naked in the middle of the locker room drying his taint "butt-floss" style.

4. Tool Academy-type Douchebag blow drying his pubes by the sink.

3. Middle-aged Asian guy wearing only a thong stretching and re-stretching his hamstrings.

2. Elderly guy emerge from shitter completely naked. (I don't know if he entered in same condition)

1. Overly tanned Mega-Tool lathering and re-lathering his ENTIRE body with lotion. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING LOCKER ROOM. How desperate for attention is this guy. And why is it illegal to kill him?

My Last Night Out

2010-02-17T01:02:00.000-08:00

You know those mornings when you're hungover because you and your friends were out all night drinking and you're at a diner with your wife having breakfast and trying not to fall asleep or look directly at any lights and to prove you didn't spend too much money you take out your wallet to pay for breakfast, but instead of cash, the only thing in it is an ATM receipt for $400 with a $15 withdrawal fee?

Yeah, it was one of those mornings.

Best Movies of 2009

2010-02-15T02:18:00.000-08:00

My Favorite movies from 2009. A little late, I admit, but I was late seeing some of these. You shouldn't be.

1. Inglourious Basterds
It took a second viewing for this movie to really sink in for me. But there will be many more viewings to come. From Brad Pitt's Aldo Raine "speaking" Italian to counting how many times Stiglitz stabs that Nazi in the head and neck - a great movie.

2. Hurt Locker
The intensity doesn't stop. It's a shame so many people have missed out on this movie. Here's to Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar.

3. Away We Go
Some reviews call this "smug." I didn't feel that way at all. I loved the two main characters and the scene in the club in Montreal will break your heart and stay with you. Funny when it needs to be and touching when it needs to be. Smug? I don't think so.

4. Up
How does Pixar just keep getting better? From the early montage to Doug the talking dog, this movie hits all the right notes and made me care more about animated characters than I do about most real people.

5. Avatar Imax 3D
I didn't see it in regular 2D and I don't think I ever would. On the IMAX screen, it's fantastic. It's an old story, but told so beautifully, you can ignore the clunky dialogue (or at least I could - except the "flux vortex"). Somehow Zoe Saldana got me to love a 12 foot tall blue alien.

6. District 9
Note to the makers of Wolverine - this is what Sci-Fi movies should be. The first ten minutes are amazingly edited and seamlessly catch you up on years of information. The last 15 minutes leave you sweating through your clothes and your mouth wide open.

7. Role Models
The Hangover had the higher concept, sold all the tickets and had some funny parts, but Role Models is fucking laugh out-loud hilarious. It reminded us that Sean William Scott and children swearing are both funny.

8. Up In The Air
The abrupt ending keeps this one a little further down my list than most. Vera Farmiga is great, Clooney is so natural, sometimes it doesn't even seem like a movie. Jason Reitman makes us think that the few good parts of Juno were a lot more him and less the forced, desperate "dialogue."

9. 500 Days of Summer
A little cute? Yeah. A little too cute? Maybe. A friend of mine spent ten minutes complaining about the art direction. Maybe it was trying too hard at times, but still a very true telling of a story 99% of people can relate to. For me, the Expectation vs. Reality scene was one of my favorites of the year.

10. Precious/Star Trek
Hard to pick just one, because these two movies are so similar... One was a popcorn re-boot that re-energized a dying franchise and the other is a small, heartfelt character journey that breaks your heart repeatedly. Both deserve a spot.

Underrated:

Law Abiding Citizen - not as bad as reviewers made it out to be. Very watchable and makes Wolverine look like a Sci-Fi movie of the week.
Fired Up! - If they'd made a hard R-rated version, we'd be talking about an all time classic. But some producer pussied out and we're still left with a very quotable, non irritating Juno-esque movie that always makes me laugh. "none of that HMO Bullshit!"
Perfect Getaway - Not sure why Timoth Olyphant isn't a bigger star. This thriller was completely overlooked early in 2009 but hopefully it will find an audience on DVD. It's like Red Eye in tone and pacing, doesn't try to be overly clever and is well worth a rental.
Knowing - I know this movie is bad. I saw it. But it's not terrible. It has some good stuff in it. The plane crash alone freaked me the hell out. Nicolas Cage has somehow morphed into one of the worst actors in Hollywood. Everything he says sounds fake. His hair is a total joke - Marv Albert went bald more gracefully. But watch this movie some night, and you'll be surprised. But don't expect it to make too much sense.

Overrated:

A Serious Man - I fully believe that people are afraid to dislike a Coen Brothers movie out of fear of seeming stupid. I didn't like this movie. I didn't get this movie. I also hated hated HATED "Burn After Reading." Maybe I'm not afraid to look stupid. Maybe I'm just stupid.
X-Men Origins:Wolverine - People know this movie is bad. They know. What bothers me is all the shit that's thrown at the Transformers sequel while this movie basically gets a pass. Why? It was definitely worse. At least Transformers looked good. And Wolverine completely wasted Ryan Reynolds and Liev Schreiber - two very charismatic actors. It appeared to be made by a college student. There was no cliche left unturned.
Funny People - Not funny. Not deep. Just annoying. The script, screener and Pressbook we were mailed touting Seth Rogen for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar is pretty wishful thinking.
Observe and Report - This was supposed to be funny, right? If nothing else, I think this movie officially put to bed the whole "penises are funny" trend because in this movie, not even that was funny.

Most Ridiculous, Unbelievable Plot/Story Cheat

Terminator:Salvation - Really? That's how this movie is going to end? How many writers worked on this thing? How long has it been gestating and sitting in development and pre-production and this is what they all can come up with? Really? REALLY? Are you kidding me? I laughed out loud in the theater. So much time and money were wasted on this movie, which likely had no real shot the moment they put it in the hands of the guy who directed Charlie's Angels. A guy whose full name is three letters.

Only Time It's Okay To Laugh at an Innocent Woman Getting Shot by a Man

Taken - Best moment of the movie. You can't believe he just did that. You can't believe it. Somehow, I ended up laughing I was so shocked and amused. The line "apologize to your wife for me" is nothing short of a classic.
Side note: How the hell is this movie rated PG-13?

Best Movies of the Decade

2009-12-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

My Favorite movies of the Decade

When I was done with my list it pained me to see that two of my favorite directors - who would appear frequently on my best of the 90's list - were completely unrepresented in the decade of the aughts. Is that my fault? Or did David Fincher and Michael Mann simply not have a great ten years? I did truly enjoy Panic Room, Zodiac and Collateral but just not enough for my top 12. (Zodiac was really close)

Are these the "best" movies of the decade? Probably not. Not exactly. But they're the ones I watch repeatedly. The ones I always enjoy and get engrossed in. These are what movies should be. Never dull or pretentious and always full of surprises, emotion, laughs and excitement.

The following other movies also just missed the cut:
Gladiator, Wall-E, Children of Men, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, The Savages, Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers, Spider Man 2, Away We Go, Just Friends, A History Of Violence, Amelie, Ocean's 11, Memento, Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Shrek 2.

12. Transformers
A little silly? Sure. Airtight plot? Hardly. But utterly enjoyable and I almost never pass it over on HBO. Why? Hard to say. I loved the toys, I love Peter Cullen's Optimus Prime, I love looking at Megan Fox, but mostly I've come to realize just how badly I want to be Shia Labeauf's character. Which is probably more sad than anything else.

11. No Country For Old Men
Every time I watch this movie, I like it more. Especially Tommy Lee Jone's scene toward the end with that handicapped older guy in his run-down old shack. The movie deflates you but then at the very end offers a flicker of hope.

10. UP
The early montage of their life together ripped out my heart, but Doug the talking dog got it beating again.

9. Mystic River
Great author, great novel, great screenwriter, great director and a great cast all deliver their best work.

8. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Endlessly rewatchable. I challenge any man not be in love with Kate Winslet's Clementine by the end of the movie. Or just Kate Winslet herself.

7. The Incredibles
Hard to pick a favorite Pixar movie, but this one just barely edged out UP and WALL-E based on pure excitement and big laughs.

6. Little Miss Sunshine
One of the best ensemble and road movies I've seen. It slowly builds to a hugely satisfying/crowd pleasing conclusion that delivers every time. I will never not laugh at Greg Kinnear's interaction with the motorcycle cop who finds the bag of porn in the back of the van.

5. The Royal Tenenbaums
I can't stop re-watching this movie. Sad, funny, uplifting. The height of Wes Anderson's quirk and still the only movie in which I've liked Gweneth Paltrow.

4. The Bourne Ultimatum/Supremacy
Paul Greengrass changed the action movie genre. And Matt Damon's career. Two of the best action movies ever.

3. The Departed
Best performance of Mark Walberg's career. Finally landed Scorcese his elusive Oscar and gave the viewers a great crime story that I can't stop watching. And face it, you still jump a little bit when DiCaprio gets shot in the head getting off that elevator.

2. The Dark Knight
What hasn't been said already. Just when you think it can't get better, you remember that Morgan Freeman is in it. (Side Note: Anybody who goes out on Halloween dressed as Ledger's Joker has a serious mental disorder)

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Director's Cut)
In my opinion, the height of cinematic entertainment for the decade. And probably longer. Jackson's trilogy is everything Lucas wanted his trilogies to be and more.

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol. 8

2009-12-13T19:20:00.000-08:00

My wife and I watch Jeopardy. We also watch the $25,000 and $100,000 Pyramids, which have taught us that Dick Clark used to a condescending douche. But that's besides the point.

So we're watching Jeopardy last night and my wife, who is very smart gave one of the worst answers in our viewing history. It was bad. Worse than during a category called "Anagram Shakespeare Characters" when she and I couldn't get "T A L H M E."

She doesn't do stupid things very often so when she does, I feel obliged to point them out.
Anyway, this was her bad answer and the question is not important.

Wife's Guess: "Mars"
Correct Answer: "The Shetland Islands"

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol. 7

2009-11-10T03:28:00.000-08:00

Occasionally, my wife decides our house is a mess and spends the day cleaning the shit out of it. Today, she went a little overboard. She vacuumed the mail. I don't mean that she sucked the mail up into the vacuum to get rid of it. I mean she used the small attachment and vacuumed the dust and dog hair off the day's mail.

Should I be concerned?

Probably Inappropriate

2009-11-05T03:17:00.000-08:00

So I'm watching Game 6 of the world series and I was in a bad mood because the Yankees were on they way to winning when our doorbell rings.

I open the door to find a cute, reasonably busty teenage girl smiling. And I'll tell you right now if that "future crime" thing in Minority Report was real, I'd be in jail right now. Anyhow, she was there with an older girl, probably to keep her from getting abducted by people like me, who answer the front door in the boxer shorts and food all over their shirt.

Anyway, as I slowly but steadily climbed to half mast, she went on and on about how these newspaper subscriptions I was going to buy would help her go to school for Nursing. I ask her to cut to the chase because the game was on. Which was a classy move.

Mind you, this whole time, as she talked she was playing with her hair and coyly smiling. Like a regular whore. As it is, I like whores so she was in good shape for a sale. (Brief backstory here: when my friend and I were in Arizona working in the AFL we were similarly bothered by two high school girls knocking on our door. I don't know exactly what happened but I ended up buying 7 years of JANE magazine and my buddy will be getting Men's Health long after he's dead.)

At any rate, the game came back on so I was antsy to end the whole thing. I asked how much, she said $20 and without thinking I said "I'll do it if you two kiss a little bit."

They didn't.

But the good news is that my wife didn't hear me say that. DID NOT. Did in no way hear me offer a high school girl $20 to make out with what was probably her older sister. Heard not a word. Not a single word.

But for some unrelated reason a lot of my stuff is now out in the backyard.

I'm a Good Dancer

2009-10-21T00:20:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, my wife Megan and I were at a friend's wedding. We had some drinks and did some dancing. I think of myself as someone who is not a good dancer. According to an email I just got, after reviewing her video footage, the bride agreed:

"I can see you dancing and it makes me think that the dj is horrible. You have this way of moving that looks like, 'Why are we dancing to Footloose? Oh well. I am going to make the best of it and swing my arms from side to side because Megan told me to act like I'm having a good time.' - The idea of you being forced to dance to Footloose makes me happy. Oh, also, my mom loves my breasts."

My dancing was so bad that she thought the DJ had to be responsible. Because no person could move themselves in such a way without help. As if better music would somehow transform me into Usher. Or even someone who isn't tone deaf.

I have "this way of moving..." It's not even really dancing. Just "moving." Almost like it's independent of the music. I'm just moving around and there happens to be dance music playing concurrently. Purely coincidence. Unrelated.

I don't know what to say about that last line. I don't know what it means or how I was supposed to respond. It does make me wonder if that's normal. Surely it would be weird if her dad loved her breasts. I wonder if my dad loves my dick. I assume not. And I have no intentions of finding out. Do parents talk to each other about how attractive/unattractive their kids are? I guess they have to. I know we would.

The 11 Worst Movies I Saw In a Theater

2009-10-17T12:45:00.000-07:00

I present to you the eleven worst movies I - at 30 years old - have seen in a theater. Some of these are probably tainted by expectations. When you think something will be good and it's bad, it always seems worse than it is. If Shakira was terrible in bed, you'd be more disappointed than if Whoopi Goldberg was. Why eleven? I couldn't leave any off.

That all being said, not all eleven of these came with the weight of great expectations. One I even saw for free. But I don't see everything, so what you see here is the very worst of what I thought wouldn't be bad.

These are the movies that made me want to grab the director and stars and shake them. I had to know what the hell they were thinking, and what in the world had convinced them that these were good ideas. And how did they convince me to leave my house and come see their trash?

#11

The Lost World: Jurrassic Park (1997)

First, let me explain. When I was little, I loved dinosaurs. Probably too much. I had a dinosaur poster and all the of dinosaur figures - the ones to scale, obviously. Jurrassic Park, the book was immediately then and still is now my favorite book reading experience.

The movie premiered on the night of my school's senior prom. Surprisingly and unexpectedly, this became a problem for me. However, as luck would have it, a SONY Theater location near me was showing sneak peaks on Thursday night. I bought tickets for me and 7 friends literally a month in advance. You see now, the problem with expectations. For the most part, the movie delivered what it promised: Plenty of rampaging dinosaurs and great special effects. But then why did we all walk out of the theater confused and feeling awful?

The answer is simple. The Lost World: Jurrassic Park contains within it the single worst idea for a scene in an action/adventure movie ever conceived. EVER. I've seen every Michael Bay movie, every Bruce Willis movie. Hell, I've seen every Dolph Lundren movie and I've never seen a single scene destroy a movie like this one. We all know what it is. Jeff Goldblum inexplicably has a 13 year old black daughter. She tags along uninvited onto the island. We learn that she was recently cut from her gymnastics team. Did anybody go to a high school with a gymnastics team? I went to a private school in NJ that had a fucking Ski Team but we didn't have gymnastics. Anyway, as she and her dad are being chased by Velociraptors, girlie here jumps onto some perfectly placed pipes and does a flawless uneven bar routine culminating with her kicking a 300lb velociraptor out a window to its death. The moment this happens, the life goes out of the theater and Goldblum's attempt at humor "They cut you from the team?" goes laughless. Why? Because they'd spent two movies telling us what great hunters Raptors are how they smart they are. Apparently, they should have been writing this movie.

I still remember being in that theater and staring blankly ahead. I don't know for how long, but I wasn't the only one. Towards the end, when a T-Rex is rampaging through a city my friend leaned over and said "Dude, did a thirteen year old girl really just kill a Raptor?" Yeah, she sure did.

I've still only seen this movie once. I can't bare to watch it again.

#10

The History Boys (2006)

This little seen (thankfully) British import is one of the most inexplicable movies I've ever seen. It's about an all boys school (as is another on my list) and centers around the students' attempts to gain admission to Oxford or Caimbridge. That would be dull enough, but large parts of the film deal with one of the teachers who likes to fondle the boys, and gives them rides home on his mo-ped while molesting them. This is taken very lightly, and in fact, played for some laughs.

The movie's horrible third act presents the viewer with the chance the molesting teacher could be fired for these offenses, or forced into early retirement. And it treats the matter as a tragedy. This teacher is portrayed as a hero to the boys, like a fatter, handsy-er Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society. In fact, the movie ends with this teacher riding off into the sunset with one character he's always wanted to fondle.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

This movie holds a special place in my heart because it almost singlehandedly ended a friendship. I wanted to see this movie and I convinced my friend Kaushal to come along despite his lengthy and sensible objections. If you've seen this movie, you know the premise: On this island, Dr. Moreau (played by a mumu wearing Marlon Brando) conducts DNA experiments turning animals and humans into hybrids or some such nonsense.

You learn quickly that there is only 1 interesting character in the movie and so naturally that character is killed off 30 minutes in. The audience constantly laughed at the movie's attempts to be serious. My buddy fell asleep and when he woke up, Val Kilmer was having drug induced sex with some kind of Cheetah-woman. Kaushal wouldn't go to the movies with me for a year. And I didn't even bother to fight him on it.

#8
Four Christmases (2008)

Okay, Vince Vaughn, we get your shtick. And the fact that you have absolutely zero intention of doing anything different. We as movie goers are very forgiving. We can forgive a single bad movie, or unfunny comedy or playing the same character in every movie (that's you too, Michael Cera), but what's hard to forgive are 3 giant turd shaped "family comedies" in row that aren't the least bit funny from a guy who used to be funny, but now rambles on maniacally begging for laughs as he plays the same self-centered asshole over and over again. Fred Claus, this monstrosity and Couples Retreat are strikes 1-2-3 for Vaughn. (he gets a pass for The Break Up because I like looking at Jennifer Aniston.) There's only one funny moment in the nearly 6 hours of screentime in these three combined and that comes from Reese Witherspoon talking about how she used to "play sunbathing" in high school with a girl she was convinced wasn't a lesbian.

These are the safest and most contrived movies you could imagine. There is not one moment on screen where you find yourself thinking "I didn't expect that to happen." Four Christmases is by the far the worst offender. Not only does it insist on dragging out slapsticky scenarios desperately searching for something funny (falling off a roof was funny for Chevy Chase 10 years ago, it's not funny now) but then, when it realizes that it has absolutely nowhere to go, it simply changes it's characters to suit the story and then has good old reliable John Voight waltz on screen and explain to explain the moral of the movie: how important family is.

Here's the pitch for a Vince Vaughn movie as it would go down in a meeting:

"We've got a guy, who's a selfish wise-ass, but he's finally going to grow up and learn how important his family or relationship really is."

They've now made that movie 4 times. And people keep seeing it.

Four Christmases takes a great premise and mines absolutely nothing from it. The nicest thing I've heard anybody say about it is "it was kind of cute." But it isn't cute at all.

Holy Man (1998)

Eddie Murphy has made his share of crap. He, along with John Travolta and many others doesn't seem to know how to say "no" to a paycheck. You have to learn to be able to tell when an actor just wanted some money (Judi Dench in The Chronicles of Riddick) and when the material might actually be good. Holy Man is the former. Murphy plays some kind of spiritual guru who becomes a home shopping sensation. Boy, what a great idea. Unfortunately, this is not the last time screenwriter Tom Schulman will be heard from on this list.

Luckily for Murphy, his part in Holy Man is essentially as a supporting actor. The most screen time is reserved for Jeff Goldblum who will drive to within an inch of killing yourself with his non-stop whining. He basically plays a 6 foot tall 8 year old girl. The only time you don't hear him whining or complaining - like a slow talking Vince Vaughn - is when Robert Loggia is screaming as if he were in a politica thriller and not a laughless comedy about home shopping. This movie is awful and my poor wife-to-be had to see it twice opening weekend. How she's still alive is beyond me.

At First Sight (1999)

A movie about a blind guy who falls in love with a woman, gets an eye transplant and then has a breakdown. The movie stars Val Kilmer - the one time "cool" actor from True Romance and Tombstone and Mira Sorvino - an oscar winner who was kind of hot - and drew from these two actors what have to be worst performances of the careers. And I say that knowing full well that Sorvino went on to star in movies like Mimic and The Replacement Killers. Val Kilmer appears to believe that all blind people are also retarded. There's an ice skating scene here that will make you want to kill yourself. As will almost every single line Kilmer says while blind, trying to sound like he's ten times smarter than everyone else.

"Close your eyes. Listen with your whole body." Oh yeah, it's like that.

The movie is essentially a Lifetime original movie that should have starred actors from old sitcoms. Think Sara Gilbert and Tim Daly or Melissa Gilbert and Tom Selleck. There are even natural pauses where commercials for laxatives, tampons and personal massagers can fit right in. When Val Kilmer first "sees" Mira Sorvino and says "So this is what beautiful looks like" I challenge anybody not to laugh or vomit.

The Mist (2007)

Directed by Frank Darabont from the work of Steven King.... That phrase once brought us The Shawshank Redemption, one of the most universally beloved movies of all time. And then The Green Mile, a solid prison movie that made Darabont 2-2 with Oscar Nominees.

The movie is about New England townspeople trapped in a grocery store as a mysterious and eventually deadly mist covers their town (and maybe the world?). What it's really about though is people turning on each other when pushed too far. Or after 2 hours of a movie, how a director turns on his own characters and then the audience.

The Mist could easily be a Sci-Fi channel movie. The creaturs that come out of the mist to kill and eat people are not scary. They look ridiculous. The special effects are just above what you would find in a movie like "Boa vs. Python" or "Island of the Kamodo Dragons." This movie is long and gory and you wonder why until the end. There, sitting a car are the 5 people in the movie you care about the most. A father and son, an elderly couple and single woman. The movie has shown these five to be among the smartest and most reasonable. They don't think the mist is the end of days and they don't clamour for a human sacrifice. They see the terror and the violence and gore and the horror all around them and when their car runs out of gas on the highway, still engulfed in mist and having passed shopping mall sized monsters, they know they're doomed.

So they agree, and without wasting any time, our hero - played by the likable Thomas Jane - takes the four remaining bullets in their gun and executes his 4 fellow passengers - including his own 5 year old son. He gets out of the car and waits for death to come. He hears a rumbling, and out of the Mist comes... the military, who have retaken the area, killing all the monsters. Still covered in blood, Jane falls to the ground wailing with despair.

(Personally, I wouldn't shoot myself or anybody else until I was mere inches away from some horrible death. Not just on the likelihood that such a death was coming. But that's why Darabont goes out of his way to show you the horrors these people were facing. But still...)

You can tell by overly serious score that Darabont thought he was making a serious movie. A classic. But he wasn't. And nobody told him. To put it into perspective, a friend of mine claimed it was "worse than Bicentennial Man."

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Don't bother trying to tell me that you love it. I hate this movie. And I hate that people think they love it. I know a lot of people who say they do, but none who've seen it in the last 10 years. I hate this movie so much. Sometimes, in the theater, you can feel yourself being manipulated by a movie. A more recent example would something like "Pay It Forward" or even "Marley and Me." But really, no movie makes me angrier than Dead Poets Society. An equal combination of unbelievable pretentiousness and unrealistic absurdity. No movie has more characters acting impossibly with the gears of storyteling more obvious. Each scene may as well come with instructions that tell the viewer how they are supposed to feel. It couldn't be more obvious and insulting.

Find me one person who spent his high school nights in a cave with his guy friends reading poetry to each other. And don't tell me it's the 1950's and things were different. They weren't that different. The parents of the students aren't even characters, just caricatures of caricatures. Overly melodramatic, and full of pompous scenes that want the audience to say outloud "That's right, you break those rules!"

This movie won writer Tom Schulman an Academy Award. Good for him. But Tom's remaining career highlights include "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," "What About Bob?" "Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag" and "Welcome to Mooseport." Granted, that's four more movies than I've gotten made, but still not the best company to keep.

Batman and Robin (1997)

I'll admit it: I like George Clooney. I don't blame him at all for this. If someone offered me $5mil to play Batman, I'd take in a heartbeat. I might not even notice that my costume had silver nipples, that large portions of the script featured Chris O'Donnell and Alicia Silverstone, that every set would be more brightly colored than Japanese Anime, that a scene required Batman to attend an event and dance in public, that Arnold Schwartzenegger was playing a doctor or that the script included lines like:

"It's the hockey team from hell."
"Everybody Chill!"
"Ice to meet you."
"You're just jealous because Poison Ivy loves me."
"Kill the heroes."

This movie was a complete mess. I don't know how a director could put his name on it. I don't know what Shumaker was paid, but it couldn't have been worth it. The whole movie was like one big toy commercial and an insult to anybody who ever read a single Batman comic. Actually, to anybody smart enough to read any book. It made the old TV show with Adam West look moody and intense. Try to watch the trailer without laughing.

It didn't make sense to me until a week or so later when I was running a tennis clinic for kids. A 7 year old was on my court wearing Batman and Robin sneakers. Suddenly, it all made sense.

#2
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999)

"There's always a bigger fish."

I'll say up front that I was never a big Star Wars guy. Episode IV is fine and V is a great movie. But VI was boring and basically IV again but with little bears. That's just my opinion. I know other people love it and that's fine with me. I'm just not one of them. What nobody loves, though, is this movie, which is not only terrible, but might feature the single least likable, most ridiculous, dumbest, most annoying and to many even most offensive character imaginable.

(I was in high school when this came out. A friend of mine tried to convince me it was great. That she loved it. "Amazing" she said. When I ask her about it now, she completely denies this ever happened.)

For every fan of Star Wars this movie was the ultimate meeting of expectation vs reality. The equivalent of Bar Rafaeli agreeing to have sex with you and then finding out she has a penis. Maybe even 2 penises. A good friend of mine is a huge Star Wars fan and he likened his experience watching Episode 1 to someone just punching him the balls for 2 straight hours without stopping. I went in without those expectations and was shocked at how bad it was. So I can't imagine how he felt. But I do know that because George Lucas refused to hire any other writers or a good director, my friend had that same feeling 2 more times.

#1
Spiderman 3 (2007)

It's not really even that close. This movie was just flat out awful. It had the misfortune of following a good sequel, which makes it look even worse. If that were possible. This is the only movie I've ever had to turn away from because what was on screen was so terrible and embarrassing that it hurt to look. And that happened more than once.

The first was while Kirsten Dunst and James Franco cooked and decided to dance to the twist. Watch that scene. Watch it. I dare you. You'll feel sick. It's awful. And it keeps going.

Next came Peter Parker's dark side. His cool side. His angry side. Or in Sam Raimi's mind, the side that wears eye liner, winks at girls and swing dances. I was staring at the floor. I looked over to my wife and she was doing the same thing. "I can't watch this," she said. This stuff was in a $200mil hollywood movie. People had to sign off on this. Give it the okay. Somebody watched Dailies with Sam Raimi and told him it looked good. Executives watch the cut of the movie and agreed to release it. I'd ask how, but why bother.

Let's also not forget the villainous Sandman, having just been proven more or less unbeatable, suddenly deciding that he doesn't want to fight anymore and will leave peacefully without having accomplished his goal of getting money for his daughter's medical bills. My wife and actually laughed our way out of the theater after this. I've read a lot of other opinions from "it's not that bad" to "There were just too many villains." Shit like that is letting Mr. Raimi off the hook. He laid an egg. But he's a good filmmaker and we'll forgive him for it. Not that he'd ask or even cares if we do.

THE END

So there it is. It was hard to make this list without using Juno, but somehow it came in at #12. Just after Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I also have a hard time not using National Treasure: Book of Secrets. I cant recommend strongly enough that nobody watch these movies. But if you must, you must. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a movie on the Sci-Fi channel about fish that come out of the water and kill people. I plan on checking that out.

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol. 6

2009-10-14T16:34:00.000-07:00

Wife said to me: "If you die because you didn't see Shakira, I'm not coming to your funeral."

Doing Vegas Right!

2009-09-15T02:20:00.000-07:00

In Vegas for a bachelor party. 10 guys. MGM Grand Hotel. This was my Saturday:

11am: Wake up after 4 hours of "sleep." Re-orient self. Notice male friend in bed with me, no recollection of how that happened. Hope like hell I didn't drunkenly fuck him or try to suck his dick.

Noon - 4pm: Relax in the MGM pool. Oggle Vegas ass, and hope that chlorine kills the STD's that are probably floating around. In lieu of breakfast or lunch, Drink fruity drink from a two foot high souvenir glass. Very disturbed by how few people seem to be leaving the pool to go the bathroom.

4-5pm: Attempt 4 man nap in room with 2 beds. Get distracted watching Marlins-Cubs game on TV. When someone turns the game off, conversation drifts toward masturbating and then awkward silence. The game is turned back on.

5-7pm: 4 man nap in the room. Wake up at 7 feeling about as horrible as possible. I can't move. The only thought in my head is that if I killed the other three guys, I could go back to sleep.

7-8:15pm: 4 guys take turns showering. We're late for dinner reservation because one of us has to iron his "going out shirt" and put more gel in his hair. We all confirm our heterosexuality by not ever asking each other how we look. Grab an ice cold Smirnoff Ice for the walk to dinner.

8:30-11:30pm: Eat $100/person dinner at pricey seafood restaurant. Watch buddies drink white wine and discuss Sea Bass. Guy next to me gets completely hammered, and says out loud, unsolicited and to nobody "Man, I should have fucked that Asian chick five years ago."

11:35pm: Dinner over, at ATM with friend, get mistaken for gay couple in our 40's on our way to Rod Stewart Concert. More details on that in previous blog.

Midnight: Standing outside Studio 54 Night Club, I ask the Bachelor if he really wants to go inside. He says: "Yeah, man. I feel like dancing."

Midnight-3am: Inside Studio 54 with 9 other guys. We dance, we laugh, we get bottle service and drink Vodka-Cranberries. Realize that hot female dancer on podium has been replaced with a shirtless guy. Begin to wonder if the Bachelor is marrying a man or woman or if I've drunkenly wandered into a different all gay club. Again.

3:15am: Realize that my eyes are having a hard time focusing. Drink an entire Red Bull to try and sober up/stay awake. This fails. Of the 9 of us that came in, only about 4 others remain. Have an actual fantasy about just laying down in my bed and going to sleep. Slip out the door and drunkenly stumble back to room.

9am: Wake up with same male friend in bed with me again. I'm ony wearing boxers, but have no recollection of taking my clothes off. Wonder aloud if last night was the gayest heterosexual bachelor party ever. Bed-mate responds with disturbing overconfidence: "Oh yeah."

Tickets - The End of My Self Esteem

2009-09-15T02:05:00.001-07:00

I was in Vegas recently for a bachelor party. There are two stories to tell, but I'm going to stick with one for now.

It was about 10:30 Saturday and my friend Jon and were, where else, waiting in line at an ATM. We'd just finished dinner and were gearing up for a night of "activities." We got our cash and turned to walk away when we were approached by two women in their mid to late 40's. Not young. And frankly, while they were dressed kind of slutty, they weren't the kind of 40 somethings who are desperately trying to look younger. These ladies were on the prowl for guys their age. So they stopped us. We are both 30 years old.

Lady #1: What's up guys? You have tickets?

We have no idea what she's talking about. We didn't have tickets to anything. We shrugged our shoulders, gave her a confused a look and said "No."

She and her friend then rolled their eyes at each other and looked at us like they were teenagers, and we were their parents. Then, with more attitude than I'd have thought possible, we got this thrown in our face:

Lady #1: Uh, Rod Stewart tickets.
Lady #2: They have no idea.

Then they walked off. We laughed briefly, making jokes like "we have no idea? They're heading off to see Rod Stewart!" (It's worth noting here, that I was under the impression Rod Stewart was dead). We went back to the restaurant to meet our friends and forgot about it.

Until about 10 minutes later, when a devastating thought occurred to me: Jon and I are not ugly - at least he's not, and there we were in our jeans and button down shirts inside the MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada preparing for a night of unimaginable debauchery, and these two women took one look at us and immediately, without any hesitation assumed that we were there to attend a Rod Stewart concert.

What the fuck? What do we look like? What vibe are we giving off? How could this be?

You know what kind of people go to Rod Stewart concerts. They're old. They wear Tommy Bahama shirts. They don't like any music they can't understand the words to and when they have sex it's only for recreation and not reproduction (if you catch my drift). They're also all white, but that's besides the point.

I don't need to tell you that this completely ruined our night. Any sense of confidence we may have had was long gone.

Thankfully, in Vegas, you never have to walk to far before you run into a little Asian dude who wants to give you and your buddies a ride to a fountain of self confidence: A strip club.

Now, if I can only avoid getting slapped...

Carousel of Progress

2009-09-13T20:19:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine and I recently took our fathers to Disney World in Orlando. We told them that we would do whatever they wanted all day. We arrived as the park opened and both our dads immediately walked with purpose. Their destination (after the bathroom): The Carousel of Progress.

For those of you not familiar with the Carousel of Progress, it's not a carousel with horses that you ride up and down. You sit sill. In seats. And watch an animatronic family "progress" through the 20th century in 4 parts. A full rotation takes about 20 minutes. And let me tell you that after the Hall of Presidents and the Country Bear Jamboree (which gives me an erection for some odd reason), the Carousel is easily the least interesting attraction in the Magic Kingdom. And that includes just sitting on a bench all day watching Latino kids get physically abused by their parents.

We settle into the Carousel. When I say "we" I mean the four of us and the two other people who were probably looking for a restroom. We go around, our dads enjoy it on a level usually reserved for sex and revenge.

When the rotation was complete, my friend and I stood up. Our dads did not. "Let's go again," they said. I tried pointing out that we hadn't gone anywhere, but gave up. We sat back down for round 2.

A quick note on the Carousel of Progress. It's not like THE SIXTH SENSE, or THE USUAL SUSPECTS. When it's over, you don't feel like it got you. You aren't filled with a need to see it again and point out all the hints you missed. It just goes back around again. The dog barks and cousin Orville won't get out of the damn bathroom. By the time the Grandmother gets the high score on the video game, you find yourself pulling out your eyebrows. And showing them to your friend.

2nd rotation is done, we head out. Both Dads grab a Mouseketeer bar, sit down and begin to - I kid you not - discuss the Carousel. Appliances they grew up with, similar relatives, etc.
"What's next," we ask.
"Maybe one more time around," they say.

I think that our Dads' favorite thing - next to actually experiencing the Carousel of Progress - is waiting outside to be let in. Because this provides them both a chance to further discuss the Carousel with whoever is unlucky enough to be working there. Now, I'm married, so I've seen some eyes rolled before. But I swear when my dad asked this girl how many times a day she "experiences" the Carousel, I actually saw her brain.

We go inside. 1 turn becomes 2. 2 becomes 3. 3 becomes 6. We finally stumble outside and it's like leaving a strip club in Vegas. You have no idea what time it is and you feel kind of dirty and full of shame and the sunlight burns like you're a vampire.

We head for lunch and end up eating for 2 hours, listening to our Dads continue to discuss the Carousel in detail that Walt Disney himself would not believe. Suddenly, and without warning, an argument breaks out and gets heated. The trouble? The dog's name in the Carousel of Progress. The debate reaches friendship ending levels.

Thankfully, there was an easy way to solve this problem. And that's a full afternoon spent seated on the Carousel of Progress. In case you're curious, they were both wrong. The dog's name is Rover. Very imaginative. I suppose technically my Dad was closer. He said Max, which is actually a dog's name. My buddy's Dad said Martin, which is a name I've never known any pet to have.

During what was probably the 7th consecutive time around, my Dad begins to wonder if the Carousel is rotating faster this year. I suggest that maybe the breaks are out and we might be slowly rotating to our deaths. This prompts my Dad to get up in the middle of what was easily our 14th showing of the day and go ask an employee. When he comes back after a minute (the answer was no), he completely blows my mind by having the audacity to ask: "What did I miss?"
I can't respond. My hesitation results in a much needed 8th consecutive spin around the carousel.

We leave to stretch our legs. The sunlight burns my eyes. Our Dads being looking around for someone, anyone with whom they can discuss the Carousel. It doesn't have to be an employee, an elderly person, or even someone who wants to talk about it. What they're basically looking for, is someone who can't get away.

What I've noticed that men aged 60+ love to do, is share information. Or rather, tell people things. Random facts, or instructions mostly. They actually started to tell my friend and I about the Carousel, as if we hadn't just spent the last 8 hours sitting on it with them. So our Dads sit down next to this guy waiting outside a souvenir store, buried in bags, and start telling him all about the Carousel of Progress. They guy looks confused, and who wouldn't be. After about five minutes of what was basically a lecture, the guy stands up, turns to our dads and says something in Spanish.

For dinner, there was apparently no time to sit down. The park was closing in a little over an hour and that was only time for 4 or 5 more Carousel turns. So we grab an oversized turkey leg and get right back into our regular seats.

"Hurry," my buddy's dad says. "I don't want to miss anything." I don't need to remind you that it's not a live show. It basically waits for you. There's nothing to miss. Well, nothing to miss inside. Outside there's a whole world of things going on to miss. And miss them all we did.

Something strange happened as I passed my 20th carousel of the day. I would have expected the kind of disorientation that people suffer at high altitudes or at beauty pagents. But no. I found myself starting to look forward to different parts of the show. I was reacting more. I realized that day's lack of sunlight, nutrition and circulated air had somehow caused my brain to think these animatronics were alive. And part of my family. It certainly didn't help matters that my dad insisted on frequently addressing the characters. And interrupting them. But suddenly, cousin Orville was my cousin Orville. I was concerned with how long it took to do the laundry. And the daughter was starting to look a little too good to me.

Thankfully, we got the call that there was only one more show that day. Disappointment hung in the air like it was opening night of Phantom Menace, or like it must everyday at the Kardashian's house. So the four of us sat there and sadly bid farewell to our animatronic friends for the 23rd and final time.

They weren't completely gone, though, because I still can't stop humming or whistling that damn theme song.

So in conclusion, if you ever take your parents to Disney World and let them plan the day, bring a book. Or some booze.

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol 5

2009-05-18T21:59:00.001-07:00

My wife is watching The Bachelorette. Why she is doing this, I do not know. She's way too smart to watch that kind of garbage.

Me: I should go on this show. It would be funny.
Wife: Oh, no. No, no. You wouldn't stand a chance.
Me: Why?
Wife: People don't like you.
Me: That's not true.
Wife: Trust me, it is. Nobody likes you.

Pause.

Me: Want to have sex?
Wife: No.

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol. 4

2009-05-08T01:33:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting on the couch eating peas. Apparently, too loud.

Wife: "I want to shove peas up your nose until you suffocate and die."

$2

2009-04-29T02:51:00.000-07:00

So, my friend Jon and I are in New Orleans for a bachelor party. We found ourselves with a small group sitting at the stage of your basic Bourbon Street strip club with a wad of sweaty singles in our pockets. Lap dances cost $60. Now, I don't care what they will do, because I know what they won't do and that, as far as I'm concerned, makes it not worth $60.

After another lackluster stage show, our group decides to leave. As Jon and I walk away from the stage we glance back and notice two things:

First, there's absolutely nobody else sitting down. Anywhere. The place is basically deserted.
Second, the new stripper hitting the stage is very cute and is giving us a pouty, pleading look.

Like the men of stone we are, we told our group we'd catch up with them and quickly sat back down, placing a dollar in front of ourselves on the stage.

After taking our dollars and doing some pole tricks, she kneels down in front of Jon and asks the following question:

"You want me to slap you?"

Jon looked puzzled and - possibly desperate for any female contact - he sheepishly said "Yes."
He looked at me with a giddy grin on his face like he was getting away with something.

Before I knew what happened, the stripper slapped him clean across the face. Based on the sound, the force with which Jon's head snapped back and the look of shock and terror on his face, she'd hit him pretty hard. It was a solid slap. More like an open hand punch. She didn't just nick him with her fingers. She'd literally wiped the grin off his face. She then turned and pulled out the side of her thong, basically, instructing Jon to place a dollar there. As though she had done something to deserve it. With the look of a punished child, Jon placed the dollar in the thong.

She crawled over to me. "Your turn," she said.

I looked over at Jon. He had a very puzzled look on his face and was rubbing his cheek. 'What a moron,' I thought to myself. It was then that I heard the strangest thing. I heard the word "okay" said in my voice. I actually looked around us to see where it had come from. Nobody was there.

I looked back to Jon and he was holding his head in his hands and shaking it back and forth. Clearly, he wasn't going to be of any help. And to be completely honest, he rarely is.

I suddenly felt her left hand gently cupping my chin, slowly turning my head a bit to the right. I thought to myself that if this was going to happen - and by all accounts it was, as I was clearly in no position to stop it and Jon was at this point more dead than alive - then I was determined to take it better than he did. After all, this was a stripper. At 5'3" and maybe 118 pounds, this girl couldn't possibly hurt me. Besides, as someone who's been married for over 5 years, I'm certainly more familiar with taking punches from women than my fallen bachelor comrade.

It was then that I saw her right arm go back. It didn't look like she was preparing to slap. Her arm receeded like she was about hurl a discuss or skip a stone all the way across the Mississippi.

I heard the impact before I felt it. But not long before. Suddenly my chin was on my right shoulder. My ears starting ringing. Actually ringing. My face felt like it was on fire. I was sure I'd lost a filling and that my jaw might be broken. For a moment, I couldn't see.

I shook my head, blinked back what I feared would be first of many tears and turned back to face my assailant. Her hands were covering her mouth, as though she thought she may have done something wrong. Her eyes a little wide. She lowered her hands to reveal a huge smile. She was laughing. Then she turned and pulled out the side of her thong. Inviting me to place a dollar, where so many other dollars had gone to die.

'Not a fucking chance,' I thought. If anything, I should be allowed to punch her in the face for $1. There is no way in hell I'm giving this girl $1 for hitting me. Jon might be a sucker, but I for one am not. I then noticed my right arm extending toward her, dollar in hand. 'How could this be?' I thought. Was my right hand acting autonomously? Certainly, I wasn't in control of it. I wasn't the one telling it what to do. If I was it would either be in a fist and heading towards her face, or in a slightly looser fist and heading towards my cock.

Next thing I knew, my dollar disappeared - as so many other dollars before it - into the thong of this stripper. Nestled right next to Jon's dollar, the two singles hung there, as a symbol of perhaps the dumbest way to spend $2 in history.

I turned back to Jon. His face had emerged from his hands, but still sported a look of deep confusion. He clearly saw the same look on my face and just shook his head. "Were we just robbed?" he asked, massaging his jaw. We stood up to leave and as we did, we noticed a new stripper hitting the stage. Also cute, and also sporting that pouty pleading look. We turned and ran out the fuck out of there.

If there's a moral to this story, I don't know what it is. But if anybody asks if they can slap you - say no. And if you let them hit you, don't give them money for it. And if you do give them money, you should go right home and cut up all your credit and debit cards, put an "R" or an "L" on each of your shoes, and write the word "ME" on the top of your bathroom mirror with an arrow pointing down. Because you're just as dumb as we are, and we are not smart.

6 Pounds

2009-04-05T03:53:00.000-07:00

If somebody tells you that you have a gift for exaggeration, they're calling you a liar.

How does that guy know how much snow I can eat?

Because I can totally eat 6 pounds of snow.

Fuck that guy.

Pranks Part 2: Not Retarded. Not

2009-03-20T22:31:00.000-07:00

Senior year of college, my friend Jon (my co-conspirator in the other prank) and I had, well, few friends. Probably because we did stuff like this to them.

Our friend Julie had two girls come and visit her. They hung out with us and we got to know them a little bit. Shortly after they left, Julie sent out an email to all four of us. When I saw this email with her friends' addresses, it got part of me thinking. The part of me that should never be thinking. The part that just comes up with awful things to do to people, but only sees the possible positive outcomes. Like how great it would be to be trapped in an elevator with Megan Fox. Such a scenario sounds great, but the problem is, it'll end with me in prison for life.

I devised a plan. (I should mention that this was the year 2000. Email had not yet taken over the world. I was new at completely understanding the internet and its power of pornography.)

Anyhow, the plan was simple:

1. Create an email address at hotmail with Julie's full name.
2. Send an email to Julie's friends claiming to be Julie and explaining that the school's email system was having problems receiving emails and that they should only write to this address for now.

Brilliant.

But you see, I didn't really think this through. And neither did Jon. Because thinking things through is not our strong suit. In fact, we're both 30 now we still don't know exactly what our strong suits are. We know what they aren't, but that list would take up a whole other blog and would include things like talking, eating, getting dressed, checking the weather and logic.

We sent out the first email. I included a detail which I thought genius at the time. It was an expression that Julie used to describe herself whenever she did something stupid. Needless to say, we'd all heard this expression quite a bit. She used to say she was "not retarded. Not." Amazingly, it was this detail specifically that led to my first hearing the phrase "malice aforethought."

We signed the note with what we considered to be an obvious indication that the email was a forgery. Under the name Julie, we added a photo of hardcore lesbian sex. It was a small picture, from one girl's POV, of another girl licking her pussy.

I'll tell you right now that had I then, or if I do now, ever get an email from a friend of mine that includes email re-routing instructions and is signed off with a photo of a dude sucking cock, I'm not responding to it. I'd probably pick up the phone and call that person. Maybe that's just me. Or maybe it's because 9 years have gone by and we've all gotten a little smarter. Well, most of us.

In two days, we got our first response. It was nothing. Just small talk.

It was then, that I got another idea. We sent a second email that detailed - very graphically - a hook up with a guy named Steve. Very graphic. My initial thought was that spring break was a few weeks away and Julie was going to see her friends. Wouldn't it be funny if they both started asking her about this guy Steve? She'd have no idea what they were talking about. Ha ha ha ha! We also signed the email with the same photo of lesbian sex. Ha ha ha ha!

Morons.

I like to think of myself as someone who is able to see all sides of issues. I may disagree with people, but I like to try and understand other points of view and figure out where things are coming from and could be going. But that one part of my mind that I mentioned before does none of that. And I can still remember to this day, that it did not occur to me for even a single second that this entire thing could be anything less than hilarious.

We got another email.

It was from the same friend. The first thing we noticed was the size of the email. It was a long one. It was taking up a lot of space in our inbox. Julie's inbox. Our version of Julie's inbox.

Now, I don't know what crying looks like in word form, but I assume it looks a lot like this email. We sat in silence reading the first paragraph. It was about her boyfriend, things were bad, something sexual had --

I closed the window. We just stared blankly ahead. At least two minutes went by before Jon said "we're fucked." As is very rarely the case, Jon was correct.

That email was very personal, very long and very much not something we should be reading. Instead of sending out graphic details about Julie's fake relationship, our little email scheme was pulling in the details. Details we didn't want to know. And knew we shouldn't know. And then that feeling. The one most people would describe as guilt, but is really more like nausea.

I had only one thought in my head: "How did this happen?" How did this girl get 2 emails signed with lesbian sex, one of which included sexual acts that would make Jenna Jameson blush and respond with details of her personal problems. Amusingly, Jon - as he so often does - also had only one thought in his head. But his thought was: "How are we this stupid?" So at least he had enough sense to recognize that this was completely our fault and wasn't still trying to blame the poor girl for being too trusting - like me.

We pondered our next move.

Our first thoughts were about Julie's other friend. Why had she not responded? Was she too smart and or did she know that we were this stupid? Probably a little of both.

We knew that we had to get this email to Julie, because her friend would be expecting some kind of response. We also knew that we didn't want to read any more of that email. And we began to wonder if we'd broken the law. It started to seem like something that should be illegal. The part of my brain that concocted the scheme was now the equivalent of the kid who shot a spit ball and then looked out the window and whistled, thinking it made him look innocent.

We did what we had to do. We wrote Julie an email telling her what we had done. We explained our hilarious intentions - though only briefly - as we knew she wouldn't care anyway. We included her "new" email address and password. I scrolled the mouse over the word "send."

When you click on something, your index finger or thumb lightly depresses part of the mouse. Less than a second later, that part of the mouse is back up. I know it happens that quickly, I've done it thousands, probably millions of times. But I swear to this day, that before that part of the mouse had come back up, my phone rang.

It was Julie. She was pissed. She was yelling. She was coming over. We were dead.

Our only defense was to focus on the lesbian porn that we'd sent and how obviously, we weren't expecting anybody to take it seriously. "Why would anybody respond to that?" I asked. "Who would think that was really you?" Julie looked at me the way a teacher looks at a bad student or a man looks his red-headed stepson or the way the whole world should look at Jessica Simpson's family: with contempt. When she spoke, she over emphasized the words, pronouncing them as though she were performing a play at a retirement home. But angrier. And louder. And with spitting. She looked me in the eyes with burning rage and said "Not retarded. Not."

I lowered my head and accepted the 90 minute scolding that followed.

We promised to make it up to her. And we meant it. Then, a month later, I jokingly tripped her in a parking lot, but her hands were stuck in her jacket pockets and when she fell, she bruised her shoulder, cut her chin and hurt her knee.

Sometimes I think I'm just not a good person.

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol 3

2009-02-24T02:00:00.001-08:00

Our apartment - approximately 6:15 PM.

Me: Honey, can you cook that pork loin for dinner tonight?
Wife: Why don't you go fuck yourself!

The Life and Times of My Left Testicle

2009-02-13T17:00:00.000-08:00

While I doubt Daniel Day-Lewis will be starring in a movie about me, the last two weeks have been mighty interesting for old low-hangin' lefty. During that time my balls have been touched, handled and basically groped by two strange older men. Exhilirating? Hardly.

It all started during the simplest and most common of male activities: I was laying in bed playing with my balls. Why do we do this? I don't know, but it definitely leads into the fact that we don't understand why women aren't always touching their breasts. But I digress. I noticed something on my left ball. Something like a lump.

Obviously, I was a little freaked out by this. I knew I would have to go see a doctor, which was in itselft a strange thing, as I hadn't been to a doctor since the fall of 1997 (over 11 years ago). Ironically, the last thing done to me that time was a hernia check.

So I went and I told him what I'd felt and he said it didn't sound too bad but he would give it a "thorough examination." Just a tip, that's not something to laugh at. Like I did, as I found his use of the word "thorough" unneccesary - but as I quickly found out, accurate. The "thorough examination" consisted of his right hand, my left testicle and 4 long minutes of erection supression, after which he decided it needed more tests. So I had to get an ultrasound. This I found amusing as I think most people equate an ultrasound to pregnancy. At least I do. And the idea that the same machine that's used to determine a baby's sex was about to be rubbed all over my scrotum was fairly amusing to me.

So the following week, I get my ultra sound. First, I meet Sergei, a pleasant older gentleman with a thick Russian accent who put all the emphasis on the second syllable: tes-TI-cle. So there I am, laying on my back in a gown with a surprising amount of rear coverage, I must say, while Sergei rubs my nuts with this machine.

When most men find themselves in a position like this, they're only thinking about one thing: Please don't get a boner. I know I was. Unfortunately, when you start thinking to yourself about not getting aroused, the first thoughts that come running, sprinting into your mind are of course deviantly sexual.

Thankfully, in mid-February, baseball season is fast approaching, so I was able to sufficiently distract myself - from the obvious sexual nature of my surroundings, especially when I was asked to stand up so he could get the back of my balls - with thoughts of an upcoming fantasy baseball draft. Once again, baseball to the rescue.

So the test mercifully comes to an end, leaving me with an uncomfortable goo-like substance all over my sack. I ask ol' Sergei if he saw anything. "Yes, I did" he said. "What did it look like? I asked. "I just take picture," he responded and then added "It no look too much like tumor."

Sweet. Not too much. Well, that's good. I tried to ask how much "too much" was, because in my opinion, it could look "just enough" like a tumor and that would be a problem. Charles Manson doesn't look "too much" like a serial killer, but he sure does "just enough." Thanks for the tip Sergei.

A couple days later I finally get a phone call from my doctor telling me good news. What I was feeling down there is called a Varicoscele.

So that was a relief. Problem is, now my balls feel lonely all the time and when I look at sonograms, I get aroused. Moreso.

Was He Hitting On Me?

2009-02-10T02:31:00.000-08:00

So I'm at the gym. I don't want to get into it, because I hate it when guys talk about working out. It's irritating. And very douchebaggy. It's something I try to avoid, like Sarah Jessica Parker movies or guys who put gel in their hair.

The gym always plays awful music. And almost everytime I'm there, I hear a song I've never heard before or since. It's always some kind of 80's techno-opera-country. It never makes any sense I don't know where it all comes from. I've heard a woman singing about her sandals and a man crooning about roller skates. I always wanted to ask what station they had on, but I never did. That's probably because I was usually complaining about the water fountain not working or the A/C going out. Or both.

Okay, so I'm sitting on a bench, listing to a particularly odd sounding song that seemed to be combining a synthesizer, a harp and a triangle to a woman's voice that could best be described as "sounding German." I'm sitting there, furrowing in my brow with confusino and looking up to the speakers when it happens.

There's an older guy on the bench a few feet to my left. He has a mustache. His clothes aren't memorable, just a t-shirt and shorts. I hear his voice.

"Hey," he says.
I turn to look at him.
"What is this crap?" He motions up toward the music.
"I have no idea," I offer.
"Well, I think you and I could make better music together than this."

I nodded and thought nothing of it. When I mentioned this to a friend later, he said "dude, that guy wanted to fuck you." Now, I have no idea. For all I know, he could be a great drummer. Or play a mean guitar. Maybe he was looking to fill out a band. Or maybe he actually meant better music and not slow, passionate, candlelit sex. I'll never know. And you'll never care.

Was She Hitting on Me?

2009-01-27T00:47:00.000-08:00

So, I'm getting my haircut by this woman. Not a fancy place. A $20 haircut. We were chatting as people in this situation often do and she tells me that she has a daughter and that she's divorced.

"It's hard" she says, "to meet people these days."

She finishes the cut and is just trimming the back with a razor, and adding final touches.

"I see you have some hair on your ears," she says. Sadly, this is true. I don't know why, but my ears grow hair like crazy. And not from the inside, I mean all around the outside of my ears.

"I know," I say. "It's weird. My wife won't shave it for me so I usually do it myself. And I tend to end up bleeding."

"I'll take care of it for you," she offers and proceeds to gently shave my ears for me. "That's better," she says.

"Thanks."

"Well, if I was your wife, I'd shave your ears for you anytime," she says.

There was a significant silence. And not one of those comfortable silences between two people who know each other well. It was that other kind, that puts people in cold sweats and makes their genitals shrink. The kind of silence that usually follows someone saying "I like you as a friend," or "I'm late."

I thanked her for the cut, paid and headed out, left to wonder this: Was she hitting on me?

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol. 2

2009-01-26T13:52:00.001-08:00

"Oh, weird," my wife said.
"What?"
"You have a long hair growing out of the back of your shoulder."
"Is that weird?" I ask.
"No. I guess it's more disgusting."

Good times.

Pranks Part 1: A Taste of Success

2009-01-25T02:25:00.001-08:00

While in college, my friends and I pulled two pranks. One that resulted in police action and another that ended with us hanging our heads and being scolded. One of these was a success and the other, a short lived failure. I know they won't seem like much to some of you, but while I have put my share of Port-a-Pots on cafeteria roofs, we've always been fairly harmless and gentle pranksters.

Tonight, I'll describe the success. Why? Because it was a success. Who wants to talk about failures?

I have a friend from high school who was a really good looking guy. The kind of guy who could throw up on a random waitress' shoes and still get her number as he was put into a cab. (true story) Girls were easy for him. As I write this, I still wonder how we became to be friends. We weren't at first. He entered my school in 4th grade immediately did 2 things that became famous in our grade. First, he farted loudly during class. Secondly, he did an oral report about his brand new indoor pool. I disliked him immediately.

Years later, we'd become friends, then went to different colleges but stayed in touch regularly. But none of that matters. The prank unfolded thusly:

Phase 1: My then girlfriend (and now wife) calls him and - using a slutty voice - pretends to be a girl that he'd met the night before and had sex with. Despite his denials, she tells him she got really drunk and doesn't remember much, but is sure she left her panties in his room. She has to get them back because they were a gift from her boyfriend and he'll kill her if she loses them. Needless to say, my friend is confused. He insists they never met, but nevertheless tells her that he's looking around his bed for the panties. She reiterates how drunk she was but she knows his name and that freaks him out a little bit. He asks her if his friend PJ (not me - and a name I had never before. I stored this nugget of information away to be used later) had put her up to this. She tells him no and starts to fake cry before finally hanging up the phone.

My friend (and one-time co-blogger) Jon has 3 talents: He can play piano, he can make a realistic looking vagina with the extra skin on his knees and he can drop his voice about 3 octaves and sound menacing on the phone. One of these skills was put to use on this night. Another was put to use every other night that week.

Phase 2: After about 15 minutes, Jon picks up the phone and calls my friend. Jon pretends to be the slutty girl's boyfriend and he's pissed that not only was his drunk girlfriend taken advantage of, but her birthday panties are gone. He keeps using my friend's name which makes him a little afraid. Jon used some perfectly scripted lines:
"I know guys like you and I hate them."
"She drinks too much sometimes and assholes like you take advantage."
"Somebody needs to teach you a fucking lesson."
"How about I come down there and we talk this out man to man?"
It's worth noting here that I knew my friend's address and Jon made sure to mention it. This seriously freaked him out.
"Listen man, fuck this. I'll be down there in twenty minutes."
He slams the phone down.

I have something of a habit of calling people at exactly the wrong time. It's not on purpose, it's just the kind of timing I've always had. You know that friend at the bar who's always turning and knocking people's drinks over, or pointing to something and hitting a waitress in the face? That's me. I've called 2 friends within minutes of a devastating break up and another just moments after learning of a parent's death. Basically, if you see my name on your cell phone, I'd check around and make sure the people you care about are okay.

Phase 3: I casually call my friend. I hadn't talked him in a few weeks, so nothing seems out of the ordinary. My friend picks and immediately tells me the following:
"I can't talk now. The cops are here. I'll call you back later."
He hangs up and I shit my pants.

I didn't know what kind of call tracing equipment the police have. I didn't know if living in a dorm would protect my phone from being located. But I did know that if the calls could be traced to my dorm room that I was up shit's creek without a paddle, a boat, a map or even a lifejacket.

So, for about twenty minutes the three of us sat in silence, exchanging nervous wordless looks like a couple of teenagers staring at a home pregnancy test.

The phone rings. It's my friend. "What a night," he says.
"Why were the cops there?" I tried to sound innocent.
"It's a long story." And in what I think might be the cruelest part of the whole ordeal, I allow my friend to relate the entire saga to me in painstaking detail. He tells me about the cops standing watch at his place for an hour while back at the station, they were trying to trace the calls. And after he gets past the part about how the police were unable to successfully trace the calls, I offered a possible solution.

"You know what I think," I say. "I think your buddy PJ might be behind all this."

There are different kinds of silence. This one was long, and difficult only in the sense that it was hard not to laugh during it. The silence was eventually broken by what sounded like his lower lip being torn apart by his front teeth as he shouted one of the strongest, and quite possibly the angriest and most emotional "FUCK" I've ever heard. It was a vicious "fuck." One with wide eyes, lots of spit and possibly a few burst blood vessels.

Now, I'm not the kind of person who holds a grudge. I wish I could say the same for my former friend.

My Mortal Enemy

2009-01-20T15:21:00.000-08:00

So the wife and I took our dog to Huntington Beach. Best known to us for having a mile long stretch where dogs are allowed to play in the surf, or in the case of our dog, allowed to run away and cower in fear of the water.

Now, I'll keep this short, but just let me give you a little window into an average day in my life. While at the dog beach, we walked that mile stretch a few times to mingle with other people and their dogs. Something happened to me twice on this beach that has never happened to me before on a beach. And no, it wasn't stepping in dog shit.

I was stung by a bee. Twice. About 45 minutes apart. And where you might ask? On the bottom of my foot. Apparently, and for reasons known only to them, bees like to hang out at the water's edge, sitting in the wet sand, waiting for unsuspecting beach goers to step on them and be stung.

Let me tell you one thing about bee stings. I'm 30 years old and they still fucking hurt like a bitch.

Why the fuck are there bees by the ocean? What the fuck are they doing there? There are no flowers in sight. No pollen anywhere. Do they go to the beach to die? Or were they having a relaxing day at the beach only to be disturbed and martyred by a giant? I don't know, but insects and I have had a strained relationship from the start, particularly bees.

When I was about 7, I was taking food out to our pet rabbit's hutch in the backyard (Our rabbit's name was Stefan. Named by my sister, who at 13 wanted to marry a swedish tennis star named Stefan Edberg. She's now 33 and married to a swedish man named Stefan - some people just know what they want). I accidentally stepped on a bees nest in the ground. I was stung upwards of 20 times. There were bees in my socks.

A few years later, I found bees in my window, between the glass and the screen and we later discovered a huge hive in the attic. And by discovered, I mean I picked up a box and got the fuck stung out of me again.

Finally, when I was about 12, I was diving into my grandparents' swimming pool when I was stung on the bottom of my foot. That part of my body couldn't have been exposed for more than a second. That bee had been planning the attack all day. Timing my jumps and setting his course. He probably left a note behind, something like "I regret that have but one life to give for my hive." Asshole.

You don't think they're smart enough for that? Just ask my wife. When she was a little girl, she would spend hours in her backyard singing. Until one day, when a bee flew into her open mouth and stung her on the tongue. You think that was coincidence? I'll tell you right now, every creature in that yard - birds, insects, snails, squirrels, her dad - had a meeting and drew straws. One of them was going to put a stop to that singing. And one of them did.

And let's not even get into that time I was attacked by fire ants, because that just sucked.

I know I've heard people say that if bees disappeared off the earth, humans would die out in a few years, but fuck it. I'd rather be dead than continue to live with bees. I can certainly live without honey. And if there were no flowers, we'd all save about $50 every February. All bees do is scare us and they're more than happy to give their lives just to cause us pain. They don't serve any fucking purpose. Like Sarah Jessica Parker or softcore pornography, they're useless to the world.

The next time you see a bee, run it down and kill it. It ends now.

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol. 1

2008-10-04T15:17:00.000-07:00

As my wife and I near our 5th year anniversary, several people have told me that we will soon find a lot of the magic and excitement disappear from our relationship. I've also heard the 5th anniversary described as something like a mile marker on a highway or for some unfortunates, an exit. For me though, I see it as more of a vast, bottomless crevice into which my car is slowly slipping and there's nothing to grab onto as I fall.

Moving on, I've asked when we'll notice this loss of magic and I've been told two different things. Either there will be a clearly defined moment that will signify and illustrate a total lack of excitement or it will happen so gradually that we won't even notice until one night when we'll find ourselves watching reruns of Frasier on TVLand and chuckling gently to ourselves as we slowly forget how our genitals work.

With us, it was definitely the first thing - a signifying moment. And it just happened. My wife said to me the following:

"Wow! This is the crunchiest fucking lettuce I've ever tasted. I can't believe it. Amazing."

It wasn't just that she said this (which in itself illustrates a complete and total end of excitement in her own life), it's the fact that she thought I would have even the slightest interest in hearing it. To me, that's a signal as clear as a mushroom cloud that the magic is over and now we need only wait out the many remaining years of our pulse-less, thrill-free existence until the cold embrace of death finally relieves us.

Of course, I could just be tired from that orgy we went to last night...

Only the Opposite

2008-09-22T01:18:00.000-07:00

Recently, my wife and I have been doing a lot of hiking in Runyon Canyon. Though the size of my quad muscles would indicate otherwise, we've been hiking quite a bit.

One of our favorite things about hiking there, is that with people constantly walking past us, we get to hear snippets of conversations. All kinds of conversations. We only hear about 5 seconds, and then the person speaking has gone by.

Yesterday, we heard the best conversation snippet by far. A group consisting of 3 guys and 1 girl passed us going up as we were making our way down the mountain. We overheard one of the guys say the following:

"That's like me with bananas. Only the opposite."

Now, I found this funny for 2 reasons. First, it's obviously nothing like him and bananas. In fact, it coudn't be less like him and bananas. So why did he say it? This guy's a complete idiot. Who talks like that?

Imagine if talking like this was common:
"I just pooped in the outhouse."
"That's like me and the sink. Only the opposite."

WHAT does that mean? Where did he just shit? Or did he even shit at all?

The most logical scenario we could come up with was this:
"I'm allergic to apples."
"Oh, that's like me and bananas. Only the opposite."

But what does that mean? That's saying he isn't allergic to bananas. And if that's the case, why would he say that. Imagine a conversation like this:
"I'm allergic to apples."
"I'm not allergic to bananas."
If you were having a conversation like this, you'd walk the fuck out of there and pray that asshole got hit by a car.

Second, what the fuck is he talking about? Fucking bananas?

Now my wife and I just spent about ten minutes trying to use this 'formula,' if you will, to humorous effect. It's like the quadratic formula in math. Except instead of numbers, we plug in offensive words and phrases.
"I love hanging out with Asian people."
"That's like me and Jews. Only the opposite."

See what you can come up with. Assuming you're reading this blog, which you most likely aren't.

Conversations For Crowded Parties

2008-06-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went with some friends to a house party in Brooklyn. At the party, my friend and I struck up a conversation with a girl, who started telling us about her gay friend's sexual exploits. Just a quick head's up, if youre bothered by reading stuff about this, you should probably just close this window now and go pray for your soul. Okay, you've been warned.

My friend and I have been saying for awhile that we'd like to have a gay friend, who would openly discuss his sex life in the kind of detail normally reserved for drunken fraternity boasting or autopsy findings. For some reason, we think this would be fantastic.

I asked the girl at the party if her gay buddy could be that guy for us. She said that he's usually shy and that you have to "get 'em going." I mention this, because it's not the first time that I've heard the expression "get 'em going" refer to chatty gay men. My dad is in his seventies and a few months ago he saw his first episode of Will & Grace. He told me how funny he thought it was, especially "once you get that little queer fella going, he's a riot. You gotta get 'em going, though."

Questionable terminology aside (he didn't mean anything by it) why do gay guys have to "get going" in order to be found amusing by us straight people. What does that mean? How do we "get 'em going" in the first place? According to this girl at the party, the answer is simple: Alcohol.

She began relate to us a story that her buddy had told her. This will be detailed. Apparently Fred (made up name) was banging some guy in the ass. He comes. He then sucked the semen out of this guy's ass and proceeded to spit it into his mouth. Now this moment was awkward for two reasons. The first being the fact that her voice for no apparent reason increased in volume as she told the story, and the second being the particularly untimely arrival of my wife into our little circle. Any married guy knows that if your wife joins a conversation you're having with another woman and hears something like the phrase "spit the load back into his mouth," you're going to have to answer a lot of questions. And trust me on this: When you explain that both participants in the story were guys, you'll only have more questions to answer.

Now, I've heard of this particular behavior before, and various terms to describe it from felching to shrimping. It doesn't gross me out. I don't gag, scream or run away. Frankly, the strange things people do - strange though they may seem to me - tend to interest me. Mind you, after hearing the story, I'm not begging for a tall glass of egg whites, but I'm fine. The other people who were listening in to story were not. In fact a loud cry went up and people scattered from us like we'd just pulled out a gun or started talking about Jesus.

My first reaction to this story was 2 thoughts:

First, I want to know if this activity is planned in advance, or a spur of the moment thing. Did something just come over Fred (pun intended) and he felt he had to get back in there and bring his load back? Or was the other guy eagerly awaiting phase 2 of their evening from the beginning?

Secondly, why? Why do this? In my experience and in the experiences of most guys I've talked to, when we climax, sex is over. I'll tell you right now that after I'm done I don't have the energy for something like this. I have about 6-8 seconds to get my immediate affairs in order before I'm out like a fucking light. And once out, I can't be revived. It's over. But for Fred and his friend, climax seems to be only the beginning for them. Cleary they're wired differently than I am - in more ways than one - but I can't help but wonder if both guys truly enjoy this act.

I'm personally of the opinion that when something leaves my body (be it piss, shit, sweat, semen, hair, wax, snot, nail clippings, etc) I'm done with it. I don't want it back. I flush it away, throw it in the trash or stick it to the underside of my wife's pillow like a normal person. This is especially true of anything that leaves from below my waiste. I find nothing sexual in piss or shit. NOTHING. I'd like to think I'm in the majority here, but popular internet searches indicate I might not be so lucky. When something leaves my body, it's gone and I'm done with it. And it's not just because it was in a guy, either. If Megan Fox or Jessica Biel asked me to do this I would still say no.

I feel like this relates back to an earlier debate my friend and I have been having for years. I maintain that even if I was flexible enough to orally satisfy myself, I would NOT do it. I wouldn't even consider it. No way. Not happening. My friend disagrees and insists that not only would he do it, but of course I would as well. My answer is simple: I don't want a penis in my mouth. I have no problem with people who do. God bless them. But I don't. Any more than I want to eat shellfish or look at Sarah Jessica Parker. My friend's response is logical and generally ends the debate whenever we have it. He says "well, you don't want a dick in your hand either. But you sure as hell do that all the time." Of course he's right, but there's a fundamental difference between your hand and your mouth. If you don't believe that then I really can't do much for you.

For various reasons, not a lot of people talked to me for the rest of night. A few hours of solitary drinking later, I found myself again talking to this girl. She had another story about Fred, who apparently will on occasion sleep with girls. Where he finds them is beyond me. This story will have to wait for another time, but suffice to say, if you ever find yourself in bed with a woman and you realize the sheets on her bed are made of rubber - get the fuck out of there.

Brick Ass Cold

2008-04-09T12:01:00.001-07:00

A few years ago, back when I worked on Coney Island, I suffered through some of the coldest days of my life. Coney Island in the January looks like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie. There is absolutely nothing there. Every storefront is boarded up. All the amusement parks are chained closed. My office was surrounded by vacant lots and run down apartment buildings. And the most depressing thing about it was the total lack of other people. There was nobody around. No people. None.

We were right on the water, so the wind would just grab you as you got out of your car and harass you all the way to the door. It was so brutal my eyes and teeth would hurt. I started wearing a pear of snow pants on top of my regular pants just to make sure my genitals would survive the 40 yard dash to warmth.

At any rate, one day we had a delivery and I happened to be heading out when the delivery guy was coming in. I held the door for him as he passed. He looked at me and said something that has puzzled me to this day.

"Thanks, man. It's brick-ass cold out there today."

I nodded on my way out, took a few steps and stopped dead. What? Did he just say "Brick-ass cold?" What the fuck did that mean? Obviously, it means cold. I figured that out. But why 'brick-ass?' Why 'brick?' What did the brick mean? What was the significance of the brick? Mind you, during my winters in Coney Island, I'd heard some strange ways of describing the cold.

"Fuck me, it's cold out."

"That wind is a dick in my ass this morning."

"I wonder how much sperm that just cost me."

"It's cold enough to turn gay out there."

"I think my vagina iced over this morning."

But this brick thing had gotten to me. I was determined to discover it's origin. I got out of my car and went back inside. To my dismay, the delivery guy was gone. Dejected, I headed back outside. I noticed on my way out, that a co-worker of mine was sitting at his desk, shaking his head. I asked him what was wrong and he told me that he'd just heard the strangest thing.

"I can't get it out of my mind," he said. "What does brick-ass cold mean?"

We immediately agreed that it was intended to indicate a particularly cold temperature, but the origin of the phrase continued to haunt us.

I was reminded of college in the late 90's when I was equally stumped by a turn of phrase. It was my sophomore year and I was walking through a campus parking lot when I passed my freshman year roommate, who was waxing his car. (For the purposes of detail, his car was a gray mid-80's Buick) I politely said hello, and commented on his waxing. He said the following:

"That's right. I want this baby to be shinier than my asshole."

I chuckled and kept walking as I didn't like talking to him. But as I did, I couldn't get the phrase out of my head. 'Shinier than my asshole.'

Here was a guy who was hoping his car could be compared to the single shiniest object that he could think of. And in that moment, the shiniest thing in his universe was his own anus. I began to wonder if his asshole did indeed have a shine to it. Needless to say, I spent way too much time thinking about another guy's asshole. Eventually, I turned to my own. I realized I'd never even seen my own asshole. For all I knew, it was pretty shiny. Impossible, I thought. With all the shit that comes out of there, a shine seemed impossible. But then why the analogy?

Then it occured to me. Mabye, there was something I was not doing to my asshole that other men were. Perhaps we were supposed to take better care of our asses. Should I be waxing and polishing my asshole, I wondered. For who? Was this why no girls wanted to touch me? Could they tell my asshole wasn't very shiny? The pieces seemed to fit.

I went to find him a few days later, and found out that the previous night, he'd gotten into a drunken fight with a dog over a pumpkin. He'd lost the fight, his hand was seriously wounded and he'd left school. With him, he'd taken any chance I had of solving the mystery.

I decided that he was simply an idiot. Unfortunately, this decision came after I was found bent over in front of the mirror in a men's room shining a flashlight at my asshole.

Regardless, I was determined to figure out what "brick-ass" meant. My co-worker and I ignored business for the day and set our minds to figuring this out. The best we could do was to assume that the delivery guy came from a family so poor, that they couldn't afford ice. So to keep food cold in their icebox during the winter, his parents would take a brick from outside and put it in with the food. As he grew up, our delivery guy would then begin to assume that bricks were in fact, the coldest things in the world.

To my delight, the delivery guy returned the following week. My co-worker and I shared our theory with him and asked him to please explain his expression.

"It's just a fucking expression," he said, shaking his head. "I had plenty of ice growing up. Morons."

So we beat him to death with a brick.

The Best/Worst Movies of 2007

2007-12-17T23:24:00.000-08:00

10 Favorite Moves of 2007

Choosing my top 10 movies of the year is a tough job. It shouldn't be, because nobody cares what I think, but it still was. Anyway, enjoy my top ten, and I strongly encourage everybody to see these movies.

10. Gone Baby Gone

9. The Savages

8. The Kingdom
7. I Am Legend
6. No Country For Old Men
5. Zodiac
4. 3:10 To Yuma
3. Eastern Promises
2. Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
1. The Bourne Ultimatum

Hardest Elimination From My Top Ten
There Will Be Blood - Was it just a showcase for Day-Lewis? Only repeated viewings will tell us for sure. Sure it's beautifully shot, but what about the ending?

Best Fight
Viggo Mortensen, naked, takes on hitmen in a London spa in EASTERN PROMISES

Runner Up: The Kingdom's 2 on 1 hand to hand fight to the death

Best Nude Scene - Female
Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan

Runner Up: Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (opening scene)

Best Nude Scene - Male
Viggo Mortensen again

Best Musical Number
The "by the Sea" number in Sweeney Todd is fantastic. And hilarious.

Worst Decision By a Military Man
Josh Duhamel in Transformers for deciding that the best place to stage a battle between giant robot armies is in a hugely populated city and not the desert. Good call there, buddy.

Best Use of a Dick on Screen
That Extra in Walk Hard

Worst Use of a Dick on Screen
Frankie Muniz simply existing in Walk Hard

Sexiest Woman On Screen
Megan Fox in Transformers

Sexiest Man on Screen
Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz (courtesy of Megan)

Most Confusing Plot
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Saddest Moment
I Am Legend - I will not elaborate

Funniest Moment
Spider Pig's impression of Marge in The Simpson's Movie

Best On-Screen Meltdown
Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead

Movie That Most Seems Like a Good Idea in Real Life
The chaining of a half naked, sex crazed Christina Ricci to your radiator in Black Snake Moan

Runner up: The kidnapping and imprisonment of Elisha Cuthbert in Captivity

Movie That Most Seems Like a Bad Idea in Real Life
Not immediately aborting Seth Rogen's baby in Knocked Up

Most Throats Slit
Sweeney Todd

Most Graphic Throat Slicing
Eastern Promises

Movie Title That Most Makes Me Think of 7th Grade
Sweeney Todd

Slowest Moving Movie That Should Have Been Obvious by the Title
The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford - The official run time is 160 minutes, but I walked out of that theater with a full beard and a 2 year old daughter.

Worst Moment on Screen
James Franco and Kirsten Dunst doing "the twist" in Spiderman 3

Movie Title That Most Made Me Want To Kill Somebody
The Jane Austen Book Club

Line From a Preview That Most Made Me Want To Kill Somebody
"Well, I'm already pregant, so what other kind of shennanigans can I get into?" - Juno
"Reading Jane is a freakin' mine field." - The Jane Austen Book Club

Most Shocking Ending
The Mist

Smallest Percentage of Budget Spent on Special Effects
The Mist

Movie So Bad a Friend of Mine Compared It to "Bicentiennial Man"
The Mist

Most Crowd Pleasing Moment
Dane Cook getting killed in Mr. Brooks

Least Crowd Pleasing Moment
Every other moment Dane Cook was on screen in 2007

Most Wince Inducing Scene of Graphic Violence
The eye stabbing in Eastern Promises

Least Believable Casting
Nicolas Cage as a man with real hair in Ghost Rider

Movie That Least Understands What It Means To Be A Badass
SpiderMan 3, which defines it has wearing black eyeliner and swing dancing.

Movie Most Clearly Made For Stupid People
Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Actors Least Likely To Have a Movie Go Straight to DVD, but did in 2007
Morgan Freeman (The Contract, Edison Force)
Kevin Spacey (Edison Force)

Creepiest Moment
That basement in Zodiac

Actor Whom It's Hard To Remember Was Ever Funny
Robin Williams in License to Wed (or any other movie since The Birdcage)

Most Blatant Attempt to Push Religion Onto Moviegoers
Evan Almighty

Best Use of a Miniature Town and Full Size Swan
Hot Fuzz

Best Car Chase
Death Proof (2nd half of Grindhouse)

Best Body Accessory
Rose McGowan's machine gun leg in Planet Terror (1st half of Grindhouse)

Most Inappropriate Use of the Word "Requiem" in a Movie Title
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

5 Worst Movies of 2007

Making a worst of 2007 list is hard because in most cases, when a terrible movie comes out, I simply don't see it. I knew not to waste time and money on crap like I Know Who Killed Me, Hostel: Part 2, Evan Almighty, License to Wed, The Comebacks, The Nanny Diaries, Good Luck Chuck, Martian Child or Fred Claus. I thought about seeing Bratz and "pretending" to masturbate in the theater, but didn't. I did see Hitman, though, so I'm not sure what that says about me.

5. The Mist
4. Lions for Lambs
3. Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
2. Ghost Rider

1. SpiderMan 3

When the utter debacle that was SpiderMan 3 was over, I found myself asking just what Sam and Ivan Raimi had been doing during the 3 years since the top notch Spider-Man 2. I mean seriously. This mindless threequel contains two - count 'em two - unwatchable dance sequences. First, a dark haired (eye shadow sporting) Tobey Maguire swing dances with the beautifully blonde Bryce Dallas Howard (how could Sam Raimi so misunderstand what it means to be a bad ass? This is Peter Parker's dark side? My theater was laughing and I could barely even look at the screen) and an even more asinine 'twist' sequence with James Franco and Kirsten Dunst who both must have just been thinking about their paychecks.

Now those two scenes alone would put any movie on a worst of list, but Spider-Man 3 wasn't done. In a true display of terrible writing, the movie provides the two worst, most inexplicable plot cheats in recent memory.
#1 - Harry has to learn that his father's death was in fact self-inflicted, so he can forgive Spiderman. How to do this? Should he re-examine evidence? Talk to the police? No, no. Instead, the house servant, who in the almost SEVEN previous hours of Spider-Man movies had not once appeared on screen comes out of nowhere to calmly explain to Harry (without a shred of physical evidence in his hands, mind you) that the wounds on his father's body were in deed self inflicted. Brilliant.
#2 - How will Spider Man stop Sandman, a man hell bent on getting enough money to cure his daughter? Water didn't work. How about burning him? Can he be trapped? The Raimis must have thought long and hard on this, because eventually, the best they could come up with was - NOTHING. Instead of being defeated, of course Sandman would just decide he doesn't want to fight anymore. Of course, that doesn't help his daughter at all, but what the heck, the movie was pushing three hours. Just terrible.

Frozen in Ambiguity

2007-10-31T14:08:00.000-07:00

I'm not one to openly mock my close friends. That's just not my style. Unless of course, they bring it upon themselves, which two of my friends most certainly did at a Halloween Party last Saturday. If it wasn't bad enough that they dressed the way they did, they also managed to pose for a photo

To be clear, I don't regularly bash people's choices in costumes or photos. After all, I just threw on a dress at halloween all four years of college, and there are - somewhere - two rather incriminating photos of me. One in which I am again clad in a dress and being spanked by a cowboy in a pink shirt and bicycle shorts and another in which my tongue is so close to the tongue of another man that I shudder at the mere mention of it. Also, that same guy (my roommate) and I adopted the song "I think we're alone now" as our personal anthem for junior year of college.

However, these two morons have posed for what might just be the single most unintentionally gay photo I have ever seen two notoriously straight guys take. It's worth mentioning that this is not first foray into sexual ambiguity. While in high school, these two Casanova's hit Lilith Fair and walked around shirtless together trying to pick up chicks. Yes, that Lilith Fair. Not exactly your classic singles mixer. I therefore would like to suggest a JOKE OFF! Let me hear every one liner that you can spit out. First, the photo (and note the hand placement):

Now, the jokes:

High-Ho Silver! I'm gay!
Happy Holidays from Adam and Steve.
The last remaining village people.
Gay if by land, gay if by sea.
http://www.interracialgaysex.com/
Does this jacket make me look gay? No, everything else does.
Uh...Our "girlfriends" took this picture.
The Overtly Gay Duo
Now your anus isn't safe on land or at sea.
Brokeback Caribbean
Time for another round of "Hide Your Penis in My Mouth and Anus."
The further adventures of Cowpoke and Butt Pirate
Yo-Ho, yo-ho another penis for me!
We can guess what they buried on Treasure Island. And where.

Add whatever you can come up with, however tasteless.

A Halloween Haunting

2007-10-31T13:37:00.000-07:00

What follows is a terrifying Halloween Nightmare. You'll sweat with terror down to your very sole. Or just click away. I call it:

"His Eyes Are Watching Me"

As most of you know, or have figured out, I'm married. Now, in spite of this, or in fact because of this, I masturbate a lot. A hell of a lot. Recently, however, there's been a rather disturbing trend in my climaxes, which has led me to start masturbating much much less. As you can imagine, this is not good.

It all started a few weeks ago when my wife and I were watching X-Men 2. Why 2? Well, for starters, Brett Ratner ruined X-Men 3, but mostly just because it was on. At any rate, if you know anything about the X-Men movies or the X-Men in general, you know there is a shape shifting character named Mystique. If you are not familiar with the movies, there are 3 things about her you need to know:
1. Her costume is blue body paint
2. She is always naked
3. She's played by Rebecca Romijn

Thinking about this, admittedly too much, I said that she would make the perfect wife (putting aside the fact that she is something of a serial killer). Imagine it, every night, her husband could have sex with a different woman. She could be anybody. Michelle Branch, Meredith Viera, the mom from ALF, a pregnant Demi Moore or Michelle Branch with a different hair cut. The possibilities and hair colors are endless.

It's possible that telling your wife that the idea of having sex with a different woman every night of your life is your ultimate fantasy is a bad idea. I'm not saying that it's definitely a bad idea, but it is possible.

My wife then brought up a good point. She said that Mystique might get a little self conscious that all these nights I want her to look like someone else. In fact, she might get very angry about it. My wife said that if she was Mystique, she would get back at me. After the third time I demanded to have anal sex with Melissa Ethridge, she would wait until she thought I was about to climax and change her body to exactly match my father. In that instant she would turn her head around and lock eyes with mine and more or less cause me to lose my sanity in 3 seconds.

First I laughed at this. It was pretty clever. And utterly devastating. I stopped laughing a few nights later when at my moment of porn and exficiation induced orgasm my mind temporarily produced a snapshot of my father's smiling face.

Why my brain did that, I do not know. Why it continues to haunt me to this day, I wish I knew. I wish I could stop it, I really do, but I just can't. And what's worse, what's somehow more disturbing, troubling and nauseating, is the fact that during these last few weeks that his eyes have been on me, my orgasms have never been better. They drain me so thoroughly that I can't go again for several days.

It's probably not a big deal though. I mean, all that sex I had with my dad when I was in my early twenties was bound to pop up again in my brain sooner or later, right? Right?

Happy Halloween.

Things My Wife Said To Me During Tetris

2007-10-09T19:43:00.000-07:00

In continuing with confessions of geekdom that began with my last post's discussion of Yahtzee and Taboo, my wife and I are avid Tetris players on Nintendo 64. My wife is incredibly competitive and tends to let her emotions get the better of her, especially if/when I happen to win a game.

She has something of a history of violence and cruelty during competitions as even the most friendly game of beach volleyball with friends, included her throwing sand into an opponent's eyes. Don't get me wrong. We're both competitive, though I tend to threaten her life significantly less frequently than she threatens mine.

I therefore present to you the following list:

Things My Wife Said To Me During Tetris:

I hate you
If you take another breath, I'll kill you
Keep scratching your nose, faggot
There's nothing good about you as a person
You're such a dickface
I'm glad you've got this in your life, because you have nothing else
Why aren't you pushing that fucking button?
Are you done gloating, you piece of shit?
We're not having sex for a week
We're not having sex for a month
We're never having sex again
I don't know what I ever saw in you
Sweet haircut
You smell like dog shit
How does someone so ugly get so lucky?
I really want to hurt you right now
I still want to hurt you
You're lucky we don't own a gun
When you do that, I imagine you dying

When we were done playing, I asked for a kiss to which she responded:

"Oh, shit."

Olden Times

2007-09-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

Ahhhhh, summertime...

If your idea of summer is anything like mine than it means you've got an ice cold Smirnoff Ice silently sweating in one hand and the rhythmic rattling of 5 Yahtzee di in the other. It also means you should seriously consider putting that 6 foot rope in your closet to some good use.

But dear readers, that is how I spent my Labor Day weekend. Was I upset about this? Goodness no. The only upsetting part was that my wife kept bludgeoning me at Yahtzee. I don't see how someone who prides herself on being thought of as unlucky (which speaks volumes about my perception) can be so consistently good at Yahtzee.

This was, however, something of a change from how we spent Labor Day, 2006: Drunkenly fumbling about in an adult novelty shop comparing bottles of anal lube to bottles of jack-off lube, deciding if $199.99 was indeed too much to spend for a plastic replica of Tera Patrick's face (with eyes that move, and a tube in her mouth for your cock - best line on the box is a tie between "tube removes for easy clean-up" and "dishwasher safe"), and looking at t-shirts with clever phrases like "my kid raped your honor student."

Sadly, Labor Day does signal sort of an end to summer. Ten years ago I'd be heading back to school. Now all I can think of is how exactly a game like Yahtzee has suddenly taken our lives by storm. As I write, we just completed another full game on this lovely Friday evening. Yes, Friday. And yes, we live in New York City. You'd think at the very, very least, we could have taken Yahtee to a bar and played there. Alas, we did not.

Board games seem to be popping up all over the place now. Last night we attended a Game Night at the home of and mostly attended by Doctors. The game of choice: Cranium. You'd think then that the person in the group who didn't know how to spell "snorkel" would be one of us non-doctors. And you would be wrong. It was perhaps the most aggregious board game error since my wife and our friend convinced themselves that dolphins could speak by aggreeing that "dophins are like the smartest animal." I'm pretty sure that if a dolphin ever uttered a phrase such as "go to gym" (as the trivial pursuit card suggested) that it would national news. And that the dolphin would immediately be killed. I don't need to be thinking that dolphins can talk while I'm trying to climax, that you very much. It's hard enough to do with Sarah Jessica Parker's ugly ass all over the place.

But I'm getting away from the point. If I had one, which I now don't think I did. It seems that board games are intended for two age groups. First there are young children, who play games like candyland and Chutes and Ladders. Then there are the creepy adults who use those same games to lure the children into the back of their unmarked van. Anyway, then you turn 15 and board games just aren't fun anymore. And how can they compete with driving, underage drinking, pornography and girls? They just can't. Trust me, the only seventeen year old who wants to play a game of Parcheesi has no fake I.D, failed his driving test and couldn't pick out the vagina in a child birth video. (also, he looks a lot like I did at that age).

Then you turn 25 and you might grow a little tired of those things, except sex, which when attainable, is still slightly better than a game of Simpsons Jeopardy. In my opionon the best board game is hands down Taboo. No board game results in dumber or more entertaining things coming out of people's mouths. Watching my wife trying to get our friend to say "drip" and listening to him continue to say "leak" is just priceless.

Wife: A sound you hear in the sink at night
Friend: Oh, from a leak? A water leak? Is it leak? It's leak, right? Leak? Oh, it's a leaky faucet. Leak? Like water falling out? Leaking? Leak? Is it leak? Leaky?
Wife: I'll fucking kill you.

And of course there's the occasional mind-meld that takes place between two idiots. One of the best ones I've ever witnessed came when one person was trying to get the other to say "Chariot."

Person A: "Olden Times"
Person B: "Chariot"

Just like that. Of course, there's only one thing worse than 3 twenty-eight year olds playing board games on a Friday night. And that's blogging about it afterwards.

And possibly reading the blog.

German Shepherd Puppies

2007-07-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

My parents are getting old. My dad just turned 71 and my mom is 65. Very recently, and with mixed success they have begun to understand the internet and its many uses. They can use hotmail, and shop at their favorite stores and even play a few online games. Teaching my parents to use the computer, I feel like I imagine Anne Sullivan must have felt while trying to control and teach Helen Keller in her early years. My parents blindly typing away - well not really "typing," more like mashing the keys hysterically, as if the keys were coming at their faces menacingly, and needed to be knocked aside- lifting the mouse up from the desk and waving it toward the computer, and of course shouting at the computer to work better.

This "training" of course leads to come humorous questions:

"Can I check hotmail on someone else's computer?"
"Do we need to use a different hotmail name since we aren't at home?"
"What does 'in caps' mean?"
"Can you get your brother on this machine?"
"How old is Hillary Duff?"

I'm not intending to be mean here. I myself am not particularly technological. I had no real understanding of the internet until the very late 1990's. When I first discovered email, I was amazed. It was fascinating. And then the immediate discovery of internet pornography changed my life and the skin on my penis forever.

A few months ago, they got the idea into their heads that it was time for them to get a dog. Momentarily forgetting the stresses and frustrations of housebreaking a puppy, they searched for German Shepherd breeders in New Jersey. My wife and I were called in to consult and one night we were using my brother's laptop and looking at dogs. My dad brought in his laptop and asked what we were looking at. We told him to use Google and search for "german shepherd puppies."

I saw him typing away and then look confused at his computer. This in itself is not unusual. He grimaced and I saw him hit Enter again, and shake his head. "I'm not getting anything," he said.
"Nothing at all?" I asked.
"Nothing."
"What did you search for?"
"German shepherd puppies, like you said."
It should be noted that my dad has what Bart Simpson would describe as "kind of a short fuse." He is not a patient man. He was growing frustrated.

I got up to see what the problem was, wondering how he could possibly be getting zero results from Google if he was in fact typing in the correct words. I sat next to him and looked at his screen. I froze. I wouldn't describe it as horror, but what I felt was very close. It was like what I felt during 'The Crying Game' when you see that guy's cock (and no, I don't mean arousal). I was in shock.

"So what's wrong with this damn thing?" My father asked. It was a question that had to be answered with caution.
"Can you see okay?" I asked. "I mean, are your glasses alright?"
"Of course they are." He responded quickly.

Looking at his screen I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. I had told him to search for "German Shepherd Puppies." What he had typed in was very much not "German Shepherd Puppies." Into the Google search box, my father had typed and then attempted to search for: "germanshephardhardpubbies"

No spaces. Just twenty-five consecutive letters. Letters, which when put together, spell absolutely nothing.

I've used Google hundreds of times if not more. Whenever I've seached for anything, anything at all, even if I mispell it, Google gives me something. Even if it's just a "did you mean -----." It always offers something to it's searching clientel. If you blindly mash the keypad, Google still gives you something back. This time - this one time - my father had stumped the mighty Google. It had nothing. Not a clue. No idea what this person was searching for. There wasn't even a link to an eBay auction for some related item. Apparently, nobody on eBay was selling any germanshephardhardpubbies that week. Not even in eBay stores.

I like to think that at the moment my dad clicked "search" that a siren went off at Google headquarters, and some supervisor had to rush to his desk to find out why a search on his website was unsuccessful. And I like to think that when he saw that someone had searched for germanshephardhardpubbies that he panicked. There's just no way they could prepare for such a search inquiry. Nothing they could do. At that moment, he would have realized that Google would never be able to handle every query imaginable. It would never be perfect, infallible. In the still of that moment, I like to think he put a small revlolver in his mouth and took his own life.

I asked my father if what he had typed looked right to him. If that was really what he had intended to write. He peered at his work. Leaned in for a closer look. Suddenly, he rolled his head back.
"Oh, of course," he said. "Those shouldn't be d's, they should be b's." He then deleted the b's he already incorrectly used to spell 'pubbies,' (and had just mistaken for d's), and typed the b's again.
"There," he said, and clicked 'search.'

When no results came back, he said what has become a common phrase for my parents regarding their computer - "I give up."

"Dad?" I was willing to let the spelling mistakes go. Many people have thought (and probably do think) that shepherd is spelled 'shephard' (we even have a friend who is blindly convinced that the word 'definitely' has an 'a' in it). Certainly, the presence of a second 'hard' in the spelling is troubling, as is the insistence on two b's in a word that contains no b's at all. Those are all issues that could easily be explained away by someone just being a bad speller. Or so I was willing to believe.

What cannot be explained away, especially for a man who is as avid a reader as I have seen my father be, is the fact that he didn't seperate the words with spaces. This is something you learn at the very beginning of school. From the very moment you start writing anything, you learn that words are seperated with spaces. Even my borderline illiterate friend (and fellow blogger) from high school, who cheated off of me in 3rd Grade because he couldn't spell 'elephant,' failed an AP Chemistry test because he forgot the 'L' in 'nickel' and even recieved a below average grade on a creative writing assignment for mispelling 'the' (no e) understands to space words apart from each other (even if most of the words being spaced are horribly mispelled).

"Why didn't you put spaces between the words?"
My dad responded the way I should have expected him to. Really, the only way he could. His response was perfect. It could not be refuted or argued. It was perfect in its simplicity.
"Because you didn't tell me to. You just said German Shepherd Puppies."

And like that, I was defeated.

Assholes vs. Douchebags

2007-07-13T14:17:00.001-07:00

I was recently involved in a debate about the meaning of the terms "douchebag" and "asshole." A friend of mine said they were the same thing, which they clearly are not. An "asshole" is a person who intentionally harms, annoys, irritates and generally treats others like shit. A douchebag, by contrast is one who doesn't give a shit about others, and does not pursue their mistreatment, but still aids in it. Somebody who starts a fight is an asshole. Somebody who hails a cab away from a pregnant woman is a douchebag.

I find myself more in the company of douchebags lately than assholes, and therefore I've noticed some of the more common behaviors or symptoms, if you will, of douchebaggery. So here they are, some signs that you might be a douchebag:

The collar on your polo shirt is up
You wear sunglasses when you eat dinner
You have a barbed wire tatoo on your arm

You wear loafers with no socks

You frequent bars with $12 mixed drinks

You've made an appointment with a Book Appraiser

You never notice other people

You snap your fingers at waitstaff

You've ever said "I never take the subway."

Every pair of shorts you own is plaid

You like Paris Hilton

Your opinions of people are largely influenced by how they dress

You constantly complain that other people are "dorky"

You've ever worn a visor anywhere other than a golf course

You can't go five minutes without saying the phrase "Hedge Fund."

You refer to your parents as "mother" and "father"
You call other people "big guy," "tough guy" or "guy"

You think every woman should lose weight

In public places you always talk louder than is necessary, then subtley look around and see if people heard you.

You go tanning. Regularly.

In a crowded Sheep's Meadow in NYC's Central Park, you play an overly aggressive game of touch football, constantly running into people's blankets and hitting them with your ball. To them, you casually and without looking say "sorry" in a way that makes it all too obvious that you don't care at all

There is always a ton of product in your hair

You carry aroud lip balm and constantly apply it

You smoke and don't think it bothers anyone around you

You didn't attend your cousin's wedding because the guy she married was Jewish

You've watched yourself masturbate in a mirror

You've given a close relative an expensive pen as a gift

You constantly start statements with the phrase "I'm not racist, but..."

You break up with girls by simply not calling them anymore

You drink Smirnoff Ice and you aren't gay or a woman
You've ever paid over $30 for a t-shirt

You wear a wife-beater under your t-shirts
Sometimes, you just wear the wife-beater
You constantly talk about how much weight you can lift, and usually lie when you do
Before you go out to a beach or a pool, you do push ups in the bathroom

I've long considered myself more of a douchebag than asshole - despite my wife's beliefs and the fact that I never have and never will put any type of gel into my hair - and this is mostly because I've never been in a fight, I love Smirnoff Ice and let's just say the bathroom mirror and I are more than just friends...

Armageddon Was A Good Movie

2007-06-27T11:38:00.001-07:00

One of my few readers recently asked me a very important question. He had just finished wiping the sweat from his brow with the very same napkin he had just been using to wipe the fried zucchini grease from his hands when he inquired (across a table of 8, no less) the following:

"Why do you blog so much about masturbating?"

It's worth noting that not two hours before our dinner, this person had sent me a link to a free porn web-site with the email title "Greatest Site Ever." This person also used to hold Men-Only porn nights at college during which a dozen or so guys would crowd into his dorm room to watch high quality (and assumably heterosexual) pornography. There were theme nights:

No Shirts

Vest Night

Dildo Night (his was named Daldy)

Scented Lube Night

To be completely honest, I actually thought this was a decent idea and tried to get one started up at the University of Rochester. It didn't go over well. There's something about being in a small, poorly ventilated room with about a dozen other guys who are all fully engorged and sweating that's just flat out unappealing. Guys would always sheepishly leave early, faces flushed and hurry back to their rooms for a round of mini golf.

Besides, porn in dorm rooms had already caused my friends and I a little trouble. One of my high school friends had sent a video to me titled "Good Friends." At the time, I had a shitty little Mac and couldn't possibly process anything in color, more or less a video file, so I went down the hall to my buddy with a better computer. Unfortunately for my buddy, he had great speakers. Suddenly and rather unexpectedly, the air was saturated with the sounds of a young woman choking on the cock of a full grown adult horse. If you live in a dorm and you've ever wanted to have a dozen people come running into your room at once, find a video of a woman blowing a horse and turn the volume all the way up. Trust me. Needless to say, those dozen people all had friends who also wanted to see the video and it wasn't long before my buddy's name was changed from "Adam" to "Horse Blowjob Boy." Thankfully, it didn't stick. Past sophomore year. Of law school.

Back to the matter at hand (pun intended), my apparent infatuation with masturbation. My astonishment at my friend's accusation was two fold. First of all, this guy actually read my blog. Secondly, he of all people was shocked at my rather consistent mentioning of masturbation. It's definitely worth noting here that this same friend also judged a "Best Male Vagina Contest" at college. Sadly, the only participant was an all-too-willing mutual friend of ours, who while winning the contest, in fact, if you think about it, really lost. But who am I to judge, I once thought Armageddon was a good movie.

The reason for my frequent forays in the Art of Self Gratification is something of a mystery. My creative writing teacher at college always stressed that we should "write what you know," so that certainly explains part of it. For that reason alone my blog will probably never contain any tips on hygiene, professional advancement, friendship forging, technology, plumbing, art or catamaran sailing.

I went back and read some of my previous posts and now I feel that my friend's assessment was a bit exagerrated. But at the same time, while my posts don't start off about masturbating, some of them sure as hell end up there. And who knows why. Frankly, I think it's because I find jerking off to be an exeedingly funny topic of conversation. I mean, who doesn't enjoy new euphemisms for self satisfaction?

I have one friend who likes to refer to it as an act of violence. He always says he's going home to "whale on himself." He probably needs help. I don't have a go-to phrase in conversation. I always try to keep it fresh or change it up from time to time. If you want to a have a good laugh, just google the word "euphemism" and see what comes up. There's a lot of hard working individuals out there with nothing better to do. It pains me that I'm not one of them.

Of course it could also be that most of my blogs are written in the wee hours of the night when I'm the only awake and I'm sitting in front of the computer. Usually, in situations like that, I've just done something....

Douchebags A-plenty

2007-06-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

So my readers have been clamoring for a report on my 10 year reunion. Okay, that's a lie. I meant "reader." And by "clamoring" I mean I got one email.

I did in fact attend the reunion. Though to be honest, it really wasn't much of a reunion. It was in the basement of a bar in the city. It was dark, crowded and if an attendee didn't want to mingle (as one of my friends did not) there was ample hiding space provided.

I think in my two hours or so down there, I spoke to maybe 10 people. I say maybe 10, because I don't necessarily remember all the details as clearly as I would have hoped, and in fact just a few days remembered that I'd spoken to one person that I had previously forgotten about entirely.

Was it a waste of time? Not really. I actually enjoyed talking to some people.
Was it what I expected? No, it was a little better, but mostly because it was loud.
Was I immediately recognized? By most people yes, but two people looked me right in the eye with a blank look. Of course they could have immediately recognized me and remembered that they didn't like me at all. Very possible, actually.
Am I glad I went? I guess, I mean drinks were free.

I was very disappointed in myself because there was one person there to whom I actually had soemething interesting to say. Her locker was next to mine for six years and yet we never really spoke. She then spent a year in London living with a girl that I knew from summer camp and even took to prom. However, for some reason, and I believe mostly my drunkeness, I said nothing to her. This bothers me.

Half the fucking guys there had button-down shirts on underneath sweaters. The quintessential winter douchebag look. (For informational purposes, the summer douchebag look is the polo shirt with upturned collar, plaid shorts and some type of sockless loafer. Not required: Sunglasses indoors.) I see people like this all the time and I just truly wonder what guys are thinking when they pop up the collar on their polo shirts. I mean seriously. Are they worried the back of their neck will burn? Does the wind chafe their skin? Do they realize that this simple fashion choice makes everybody who sees the immediately hate them? It's the social equivalent of wearing a swastika on the front of your shirt. The only difference is that some sick fucks will actually like the swastika. I really should ask one of these guys next time I see one. But I probably won't.

10 Years...

2007-05-18T00:10:00.000-07:00

So my 10 year high school reunion is fast approaching.

A reunion basically takes all of those people that you've chosen not to see for the last 10 years and jams them all into one room. Why then, would you enter that room? That is the question I find myself trying to answer.

The most common reason to go to a reunion (at least according to the movies) is to show off what a success you've become. As an unemployed aspiring screenwriter who's blogging at 3:15 in the a.m. I don't think I fall into that category. Nor do I have a lost love that I haven't seen in a decade and with whom I'm desperate to reconnect/drug and rape.

Though not particularly popular, I wouldn't consider myself a nerd in high school (I wasn't smart enough), and so I don't feel like I have to go back and exact revenge on any abusers. Nor would I expect any revenge to be visited onto me. The meanest thing I think I did in high school was stuff scallopped potatoes down the back of classmate's shirt. Admittedly, that was a douchebag move. But I don't think my victim will be waiting for me with a rifle. And if he is, well, I guess I owe him a drink.

I certainly was not attractive in high school, so maybe I should go back to show all the ladies what a stud I've become. After all, I did, finally, at the age of 25, and at the behest of my wife, start plucking my unibrow...

So why attend? One of my best friends from high school tells me that the best part of the reunion will be talking about it afterwards. I immediately agreed to meet him afterwards and discuss it. No deal, he said. Apparently, I'd have nothing to discuss if I wasn't there to see it. What the "it" is that he's talking about escapes me.

Certainly my social skills are at an all time high, as I can whip out conversation starters like:

"Who's on your fantasy team?"
"Ever spent a night in prison?"
"Does your ear wax smell like your feet?"
"Would you like some candy?"
"Why are you walking away from me?"

All trademark Parsons classics.

My idea to go back with a fake male lover was immediately squashed by both my proposed cohort and my loving wife, who may have felt slightly offended.

Are there any people I want to see? Not really. I already see the ones I want to remain in contact with. Do any of my fellow Pingry School Class of 1997 graduates want to see me? Undoubtedly, no. I get the feeling I was not well liked by most of my classmates. I got this feeling from a friend of mine who recently told me "you were not well liked by our classmates."

I didn't really accomplish very much in high school. I was a member of the soccer and tennis teams, won the inaugural school-wide team handball tournament and was a prominent member of The Simpsons Fan Club. Reading that over and looking back, it's a real miracle that I didn't hang myself. Probably still is. Girls didn't talk to me and I didn't talk to them. This fact was even noted by my mother, who at a PTA event, took to introducing herself as "Meredith Parsons. You probably don't know my son. He's not very popular with the girls."

Am I embarassed or ashamed about who I am? Not now, but certainly who I was. The introverted weird kid with bad skin who was always playing ping pong and yelling at his small Indian friend. For awhile I truly feared that would be my tombstone. Now at least we can add "might be gay," "permanently sterile," "has herpes," and "probably gay."

So maybe that's my hesitation. I don't like who I was and I'll be walking into a room full of people who only know me as that person. That's kind of scary actually. But I'd like to think that after 10 years, people forget, or stop caring. I certainly wouldn't look at a former classmate and assume that he is still the same person he was in 1997. Although that guy in our class who fucked the hole in a couch and was always whipping out his cock in public is definitely still the same person.

So why go? Is the $50 open bar enough to lure me? I guess I'll find out.

An Awkward Good Morning

2007-04-11T22:48:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently used a strange word in conversation with me.

Me: How did it go with the prostitute last night?
Him: It went swimmingly.

Swimmingly? Is that even a word? I had no idea. I'd never heard it before.

Me: Did you go swimming?
Him: No, I fucked her and then knocked her around a little bit.
Me: Obviously. But I thought you might have gone swimming beforehand.
Him: I didn't. I wouldn't pay some whore to swim with me.
Me: Then why did you say swimmingly?

Seemed like a logical question.

Him: It's a common term. It means that things went well.
Me: Why does it mean that?
Him: I guess because people like swimming.
Me: So you get just as much enjoyment out of swimming as you do ejaculating into a nameless, bloody streetwalker?
Him: Sometimes.
Me: You're not allowed in my pool anymore.

I don't have a pool but if I did, I would certainly ban my friend from it.

This got me wondering exactly how a word like "swimmingly" came to be. It seems like someone took an activity that most people seem to enjoy - swimming - and decided to turn it into an adverb to describe other things people enjoyed. This led me to wonder about a few more things.

First, if someone doesn't enjoy swimming (i.e. black people) would that person use the term? And if they did, would it mean the same thing, or would they intend it to mean the opposite.

"Hey man, how did it go being raped by that guy?"
"Swimmingly."

To the listener, it could sound like the person had a great time being sodomized, but the truth of it is, you don't know unless you have a full understanding of the other person's feelings toward swimming. Anyone who assumes that swimming is universally enjoyed has never seen my wife's friend Larissa sitting on the top step of a pool, clutching the railing and reaching wide-eyed for her inhaler because she's trying to survive her third panic attack of the last ten minutes.

Secondly, why is swimming the only activity that's granted this honor. There are lots of activities that most people enjoy, but only swimming gets the decorative -ly and cushy adverb status.

"Hey man, how did the job interview go?"
"Blowjobly."

Admittedly, there is one simple and key flaw to this example. That is of course, the lack of clarity on whether the second speaker enjoys receiving or giving the blowjobs. (It's assumed that the response indicates a positive performance at the interview) Speaking from experience, nothing can ruin a male friendship faster than if one of the men thinks the other likes giving blowjobs. The whole relationship becomes one night of heavy drinking away from one guy saying to the other "If you want, you can blow me." This will undoubtedly lead to confusion for the second man, who would then assume that the first man was gay and had been harboring long supressed love and lustful thoughts about him. And of course, what is a simple misunderstanding between two rational, educated adults while sober becomes a screaming, fighting, crying, inadvertent kissing, secret revealing night of bond strengthening sexual experimentation that leaves its participants emotionally and physically drained .

This immediately leads to two things. First, the most awkward semen scented "good morning" of both their lives and second, the immediate swearing of a sacred oath never to speak of that night again. (Further down the road there will be refusals to move with his wife out of the city and away from the other guy, countless "2-Man Guys Nights Out," and a seemingly endless laundry list of excuses not to be dating any girls)

Back to the point, I think we need to introduce some new adverbs into our lexicon, because let's face it, as a society, there are things we enjoy more than swimming. Aren't there?

A short list:

- baseballly
- sleepingly
- analingusly
- eatingly
- masturbatingly
- rapingly
- sodokuly
- convincing my wife that a certain night in college with my roommate never happened-ly

"A Hair Cutting Place"

2007-03-14T23:57:00.000-07:00

Somehow during dog walks we end up talking about, or simply saying things that really have no bearing on anything or interest to anyone other than the person saying it. Even that, I suspect, isn't a given. For example, tonight my wife spent a good five minutes discussing with nobody in particular (while I know I was her intended conversational target, I am pleased to report that she missed) her difficulties distinguishing between the Norwich Terrier and the Norfolk Terrier. Now I could quite pleasantly spend the next few paragraphs laying out the differences in the breeds, citing historical facts about the origin of each, etc. However, I'd much rather head on into the bathroom and masturbate with a handful of rusty nails and an unsanded broom handle.

A few nights ago we were walking along, making unsuccessful attempts at keeping our dog out of the trash when we happened upon a building with a hair cutting place in the basement. Looking at this I proclaimed:

"Wouldn't it be cool to live above a hair cutting place? Whenever you needed a haircut you could just go downstairs."

Now, to be honest, I have no idea what I was saying or for that matter why it was I was saying it. I don't know what the point was at all. Looking back, I assume it was just very quiet and I couldn't think of anything else to say. In my head, I believe I was imagining being able to get my haircut without having to go outside. As though a Batman-esque tube with a pole in it would run directly from my apartment down the to hair cutting place. Obviously, I hadn't though this through to the point where I'd have realized the pole would go through other apartments and that I would be zipping through other people's bedrooms, and of course that the pole would also access those apartments above me and therefore other people would be zipping through my bedroom. Of course maybe we'd become friends and I'd offer a simple "Hey, Fred" as I went on past Fred having sex with what was probably a dead hooker in his bed. And then of course, how to get back up to my apartment. Surely, shimmying up the pole is out, both due to difficulty and the chance collision between myself on the way up and a freshly muderous Fred on the way down looking to have the dried blood shaved out of his mutton chops. So we'd either have to install a second tube with perhaps a rope ladder (and specific instructions that it was only to be used to go up), or just go outside, which would defeat the entire purpose of living in a buiding specifically to use the hair cutting place downstairs.

What bothers me the most now is my continued use of the term "hair cutting place" as though we as a society had not come up with a better name for such a facility. But really, is there a name? It wasn't a pretentious salon where a man's haircut is $120 (and if it had been, then the whole idea goes out the window because anybody who knows me, or has simply met me or even passed by me on a day when I'm not wearing a hat, knows full well that I don't spend a fucking dime over $20 on my haircuts), and it was definitely a step up from the more reasonable $20 barbershops visited by guys like me, who are either really smart or really ugly.

Somehow my brain chose the term "hair cutting place," which reminded me instantly of a rather absent minded co-worker of mine a few summers ago, who would almost daily throw out a statement so ludicrous and poorly thought out that we came to look forward to them. The time I am thinking of specifically is when he, panicked and unable to think of the word "restaurant," instead asked us which "eating place" we were going to. He had many other gems, the All-Stars of which I've included below:

"Is a bird an animal?"
"Is vocalize a word?"
"There are no smells I don't like."
"Do non-baseball players have vaginal surgeries?"

If you think about that last one, you might start to bleed out your ears.

Knock First

2007-02-25T15:17:00.000-08:00

When I was in college, I lived in a six person suite with a guy who used to masturbate fairly regularly (2/day). He was even kind enough to alert the rest of us to his schedule by playing the same song on his computer before taking a trip to palmdale. "Adam's Song" by Blink182 has been forever ruined. Any song that causes me to immediately think of my buddy jerking off is a song I am not going to play very often.

While his choice to have a masturbatory anthem is a curious one, the benefits to his suitemates became clear with a recent news story regarding masturbation. Whenever we heard the Adam's Song we all knew what he was doing and so nobody ever knocked on his door or barged into his room. This saved countless embarassing moments and awkwards encounters.

How awkward could such an encounter have been? This awkward. Granted, none of us owned swords but still. The best part about the story, in my humble opinion is the exclusion of any details about how the "victim" was discovered by his "attacker." We can safely assume he was found with his pants around his ankles, all lubed up and probably asphyxiating himself with an old leather belt. Both men, however, decided to exclude those details. Probably for the best.

Perspective

2007-02-18T21:24:00.000-08:00

Every now and then I stumble across something that puts my life and my accomplishments into proper perspective. For example, a few nights ago, my wife called me into our bedroom to kill a spider. You can bet your ass I showed that arachnid who was boss. I crushed it like the insignificant little spec that it was, then headed back out to the living room secure in my manhood and looking for a celebratory Smirnoff Ice.

Ice in hand, I hopped online and was greeted, rather harshly by the following story which put not only my bug squashing in perspective, but my drinking ability as well. This guy is a fucking man's man. I am something else. Perhaps a gay man's man. Or preferrably a young girl's man. I may have killed the spider, but I didn't even eat it.

Either way, the sting began to dissipate as I curled up next to our dog with my fantasy baseball magazine, looked over at the three empty Smirnoff Ice bottles and marveled at the gentle buzz I was feeling.

Hunter - gatherer, I apparently am not.

v-day Tribute

2007-02-06T20:11:00.000-08:00

So valentine's day quickly approaches. For men in relationships, the approaching "holiday" can make us feel like we're tied to train tracks with a steaming locomotive just around the bend. After all, valentine's day is in fact, not a holiday. It doesn't commemorate anything. Nothing happened on February 14th. Ever.

So what's the point? Pretty clearly, it's money. There's an easy way to make men pay $20 for a box of chocolates, or $100 for a dozen roses: Tell their women they have to. Or even worse: Tell their women that they should. We're inundated with advertising that tells us men that if we don't get our ladies something special, then we don't think they're special. Do we buy into this? Of course not. Problem is though, women do. And I'm not blaming them. If I started seeing commercials talking about how June 8th was "Head Day" and the only way for women to show men that they really cared was giving them head on that special day, we'd be all for it. (Until about June 9th, when we all realized we weren't getting head again for a full year, and that women had successfully lobbied to turn blowjobs into a - gulp - annual event. And think about it, do our ladies get heart shaped boxes of chocolates any other days of the year? No, they don't. The moral is, say no to Head Day)

I usually head into valentine's day a little bullish and refusing to even acknowledge it. However, I know full well that if my wife indicates that this behavoir will not be well received, then I'm off to the florist to have my money and testicles removed. Thankfully, we were watching TV the other night and saw an add for some bullshit candy company that was "interviewing" women about what it's like to get chocolates on valentine's day. One "Interviewee" said the following about getting the same heart shaped box every year: "It shows they care. It means love."

Does it? Does it really? Does the fact that your husband walked into a fucking Hallmark store on his way home from work (or his girlfriend's place) and bought the first package of chocolates he saw really mean love? Seems to me that she has pretty low expectations for her husband and in her relationship in general. A heartshaped box of chocolates does not say "love," it says "I realized today was a bullshit holiday, but that I might get sex tonight if I got you something. And since I don't know what kind of candy you actually like, or what clothes you might wear and I have no interest in taking you to dinner or a movie, here are some chocolates I got from 7/11 that I hope I can parlay into crotch locking." Very sweet. Thankfully, my wife agreed, and we (re: she) decided we should do nothing for valentine's day.

With that in mind, I am offering up a tribute to my lovely wife of just over 3 years by listing -

The 10 Coolest Things About My Wife

10. She Hates Being Late

I am so glad I don't have one of those girls who takes hours to do anything. You know you have those friends who you're supposed to meet at 9 and show up at 10:30 saying that "my hair was crazy" or saying nothing about it at all but you can see that guy rolling his eyes? Those people suck. My wife hates those people. And Jews. You have to be somewhere at a certain time? Fucking get there. Being late is irritating. And those of us who aren't late, hate you people that are (Erin, Larissa). And Jews.

9. She's Very Competitive
Anybody who knows her will be shocked at this understatement. Whether playing nerf baseball, indoor soccer, volleyball, Scrabble or even MarioKart, there's no halfway. Once she's in, she's in all the way. She hates to lose at anything. I've even heard her grunt with delight over an unexpected second Yahtzee. But perhaps the best example of her hyper competitiveness was during a game of beach volleyball in college. She and a friend of ours started to wrestle. He pushed her to the ground and while falling she reached out, grabbed a handful of sand, and threw it into his eyes. Remember, I didn't say she plays fair, I just said she plays hard.

One of our mutual friends said something really funny once about our competitiveness. He now knows that when we ask a seemingly innocuous question, his answer to the question will undoubtedly support one of us and the other will definitely hold a grudge. He has taken to more or less ignoring us.

8. She Can Fix the Computer
This has come in very handy, as I myself cannot. We took a video of our dog playing with the neighbor's dog (I know, I know) and I gave her the camera, asked her to put it on YouTube (I know) and went to bed. When I woke up, she was done. She's hooked up a wireless internet adapter and taught me how to burn CD's. Most embarassingly, when a friend of mine was trying to show me how to use bit torrents to download free porn, she had to step in do it for me saying "Not only do I have to have sex with you, now I have to help you masturbate, too?"

I was on the phone with my internet savvy and pigment deprived friend who was trying to talk me through the process, and I was relaying his instructions to my wife. My friend likened this situation to having 2 physics professors trying to discuss a problem, but the only way they can communicate is by having a monkey translate.

7. She Likes Strip Clubs
I don't think you truly know love until you've seen your drunk wife groping the breasts of a stripper, and then afterwards attempt to drunkenly cross her legs, only to clear off a knee-high table of drinks in one smooth motion, and still have to presence of mind to blame someone else.

6. She Loves Dogs
For me, this one's a requirement. She can watch Field of Dreams, Steel Magnolias, Forrest Gump and Terms of Endearment back to back dry-eyed, but if our dog so much as picks up a tick on her fur, she's virtually inconsolable. She also avoids like the plague, the following movies which she believes to be too sad:
Charlotte's Webb
Eight Below
My Dog Skip
Down Periscope (Not for dogs, but because of Kelsey Grammer as a fucking Naval Submarine Commander? Seriously.)

5. She's Funny
Mostly when mocking my increasingly homo-erotic relationships, receeding hair, ineffective genitals, poor personality and general defectiveness. And those same qualities in our friends. She's also managed to convince our neighbors that I'm gay.

4. She Hates the Yankees
God help me, I don't think I could truly love a woman who didn't think that Derek Jeter is the most over-hyped, overrated and frankly luckiest athlete of the last 50 years. She also likes to openly root for the Red Sox in crowded bars and talk shit to people she doesn't know (while drunk) assuming that if they get pissed enough at her, they'll kick my ass.

(Somebody once asked me if I had to choose between three girls who looked the same, and one of them was a chain smoker, one was bulemic and the other was a die-hard jersey wearing Yankee fan, which would I date. The answer was easy. Very easy. The bulemic. You can always get chewing gum and some porcelain veneers. But if had to listen to a girl say "I don't care what all the statistics say, I think Jeter is a good fielder because I see his highlights on ESPN," our relationship would end poorly.)

3. She Actually Trusts Me
To further explain, if I want to go out to a bar with some friends on a night when she doesn't feel like it, and I then stumble home at 4am, she doesn't care. Probably because she prefers reading a book to talking to me. And that time I left her home sick and went to a party on New Year's Eve, she wasn't even mad. From what I was told at the party, that takes a special person.

2. She Plays Fantasy Baseball
She doesn't just play. As I said, she's competitive, so all through February and March when my loser friends and I are discussing keepers and draft strategies she openly mocks us, only to then hunker down a week before draft day and fine tune a strategy. In the 5 year existence of our College League, she's never finished lower than 4th (and she only did that her first year) and she won the league once. Her success in the league at one time even led one of our fellow players to threaten to "kick her in the teeth." She can also define and calculate the following acronyms: WHIP, K/BB, K/9, OBP, SLUG, OPS, VORP. This has lead to at one time or another yell the following phrases:

"Fucking Bartolo Colon!"
"I wish Chris Berman would die."
"My pitching staff can suck my dick."
"They'd better rule that an error."
"My WHIP blows this week."
"Remember when I beat you in the playoffs? How did that feel?"
"Matt Holliday is a faggot."

She also jumped up and down and fist pumped like fucking crazy when she got the first pick the year we decided to start using keepers. She laughed for hours when one fantasy magazine said of Dodgers bench player Dave Hansen: "He's not worth a cent." And yes, all of this turns me on like you wouldn't believe.

1. She Married Me
No faster way to improve oneself socially. No faster way to achieve "coolness." Some would call it a "mistake" or a "death sentence." She looked passed all those naysayers and signed on for a lifetime of baseball statistics, David Fincher movies, dog hair on everything and a refusal to spend $50 on flowers.

You put all of those together you get one of two things. A guy. Or a girl that can make even the craziest asshole happy. Luckily, I got the girl...

"Sack of Shit"

2007-01-19T23:37:00.000-08:00

I'd like to take a few minutes to talk to you about a friend of mine. I don't want to use his real name, so I'll refer to him by a nickname which was given to him by my "good friend" Steve: Sack of Shit.

Now for the better part of the last 5 years, Sack of Shit has been calling me at least 5 times a week during the offseason and up to about 20 times a week when baseball season is in full swing. Yes, this is a lot of time for two heterosexual grown men to spend on the phone with each other, but what can you do?

The timing of these phone calls almost creates a timeline of cell phone billing procedures. At first, his calls could be expected right about 9:02pm. The reason of course was that his free nights and weekends plan would kick in at 9:00, and the extra couple of minutes was just to account for a margin of error. About a year later, those calls moved up to 8:02pm and then less than a year later, 7:02pm. At that point two calls nightly during the season were expected. There was the 7PM pre-game discussion and then the 10:00PM east coast wrap up chat that preceded Sack of Shit's self imposed 10:30PM bedtime. In between which I could expect a call anytime a player on his fantasy team did something good, or anytime a player on my team did anything bad. About a year later, Sack of Shit briefly switched over to T-Mobile and got a plan which, much to my chagrin made all of his calls to me free. This was not a good time to be me. Shortly thereafter, he switched back over to something else, and restarted the old 7pm schedule. Now, however, with the offseason slowly moving along, that 7pm call is temporarily extinct. It has, unfortunately been replaced by the 3:50pm call. The reason for which, is that as a teacher (please help the youth of America) this is when he is in the car heading home. Should I not be able to answer, or simply choose not to, this call is immediately followed by the 3:51pm recall. I would venture to say, though I'm no mathematician, that roughly 5% of my time awake is spent either on the phone with Sack of Shit, or ignoring his calls.

What is most amazing about all of this, is that during this 5 year evolution in annoyance and due to easily the single greatest miracle that the internet will ever perform, Sack of Shit got married. How this happened is one of the greatest mysteries of my life. Greater than the pyramids of egypt, women's reluctance toward anal sex and people's boundless interest in religion (I mean come on people, if Priests - people who are supposedly closest to "god"- are not afraid of any eternal ramifications of their earthbound actions, then why on earth would anybody else?) Sack of shit's engagement and subsequent nuptuals are simply astounding.

When I found out he was engaged, and I did so via an email, as did his parents, I knew two things for damn sure:
1. She was Asian
2. She was going to hate me
The reasons for my second conclusion were threefold. First, with the exception of one lovely Asian girl from my high school, with whom I have remained friends (though she continually ditches me week in week out as my movie-buddy) every asian girl I've met has taken an immediate disliking to me. Secondly, I knew if Sack of Shit kept up his dialing schedule with me, she would inevitably grow jealous and angry (which surpisingly hasn't happened with my wife, most likely do the fact that she doesn't like talking to me). And lastly, the majority of people when I first meet them strongly dislike me. (One prime example would be the friend of Jon's who was staying the night in my apartment. He thanked me for letting him stay and I joked that I had not invited him in the first place. He didn't get that it was a joke for almost 2 years.)

After news of a wedding date broke, I waited idly by to be told of my inclusion in his wedding party and to prepare a speech of some kind. Days went by, and then weeks. Eventually I got a call from my "good friend" steve, saying that he was a groomsman, and why wasn't I?

I didn't know what to say. I was shocked both at my exclusion and the fact that Sack of Shit had other friends. Surely if he called them as much as he calls me, there couldn't be any time left over for his wife, or even going outside. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't help but feel rejected. It's embarassing to say, but I was actually looking forward to being in the wedding. Alas, it was not to be. My wife, equally as shocked and appalled as I was called Sack of Shit on the phone to discuss my exclusion. She was told that his bride, who is from Taiwan - where most of her family still lives - was not having enough people on her side to allow for my involvement (We can question the intention of this later). My wife asked how he could not choose me when we spend so much time on the phone. What Sack of Shit said to that still haunts me to this day. I hear these words in my head on an almost daily basis, as they seem to sum up my life. Remember, roughly 5% of my time awake is spent talking to this person. Sack of Shit said: "That time doesn't count, because we never talk about anything important." A dagger into my heart. Not just any dagger either, a jagged dagger dipped in lemon juice, buried in salt then twisted into my chest.

I hadn't been this insulted since my mom told she "probably shouldn't have had kids," to which I said "I hope you like your Christmas present." Shockingly, the next day, at exactly 7:02pm, Sack of Shit called me. Did he think my wife wouldn't relay the message? Did he expect me to pick up the call? Why would I? It wasn't anything important. I kept this up for a few weeks, but just like constantly having sex without a condom, you're going to catch a disease. My disease was a Sack of Shit.

To add insult to injury, we were also not invited to the rehearsal dinner. Sack of Shit said that, as is customary, it was only for close family and out of town guests. We were coming from New York City and the wedding was in northwest Pennsylvania. Apparently, not far enough away.
The wedding day finally arrived and the cermony came and went. At the reception, the best man stood to make his toast and (despite Sack of Shit telling him that he was the best man - no kidding - on the car ride to the church) said the following: "I've known Sack of Shit a long time. We grew up together. Let's all wish them both the best of luck. To the Bride and Groom."

My speech would have been 43 minutes long if I rushed it. I would have detailed some if not all of the strange and downright unexplainable behavoirs that Sack of Shit has demonstrated during our time as "friends." Some of the most notable:

While in college, Sack of Shit would drive his gray 1987 Astro Van (which I'm convinced was used in Silence of the Lambs) off campus to pick up high school girls that his obese roommate had met online and made arrangements to fuck. He would then wait outside the room for said fucking to subside, and of course drive the girl back home. Alone. What I would not give to now what they talked about during those rides back to suburbs of Rochester, or for that matter if the girls would even stop crying. (said roommate also agreed to a deal in which he would receive $50 for performing cunninlingus on an extraordinarily unattractive and unfortunately hairy woman he met at a bar, IF AND ONLY IF Sack of Shit would stay in the room to verify that it was taking place.)
Sack of Shit once received a padded envelope in the mail from someone he described to me as "a guy in Cleveland I met online and trade stuff with," which was filled with CD's. One of said CD's, and for the record the only one I ever looked at, contained a film titled "Snow White and the Seven Black Cocks," which concluded with a scene that still makes me nauseus today. Upon completion of what appeared to be a highly uncomfortable group activity, the seven men took turns ejaculating into a single champagne glass, which Snow White then took into her hands and did who knows what, because I was long the fuck gone by that point.
With the second overall selection of our 2002 Fantasy Baseball Draft, Sack of Shit selected Mike Piazza. Citing position scarcity as the most vital early round drafting technique, Sack of Shit finished some 64 points off the lead.
Sack of Shit has a rather unique ability to take something you've said or asked and begin responding to it as though his response will be related to your statement or question, despite the fact that what he is about to say will have almost no relevance at all to what was first said. Example: "Hey, Sack of Shit, did you find and download Tommyboy yet?" His reply: "No, but I did find Stroke Your Cock, Watch Me Fuck." Another example: "Hey Sack of Shit, what kind of cereal is that?" His reply: "You want to watch Stroke Your Cock, Watch Me Fuck?"
He and his younger sister look exactly alike and despite or because of this, I am intensely attracted to his younger sister.
If you take your thumb and middle finger from the same hand and touch their tips together, the circle created is roughly the size of his wrists and ankles.
At 2:45am the night of halloween, and dressed as a woman, Sack of Shit ordered the batter dipped deep fried haddock which was on special at the crappiest all night diner you have ever seen in your life.
His alcoholic drink of choice is a vodka with cranberry juice.
Before going to my "good friend" Steve's wedding, Sack of Shit tried to get me to drive over 3 hours out of my way to pick him up so he could save $11 on air-fare.
Tried to convince me that Baltimore was in between New York City and northwestern Pennsylvania so that I would pick up a girl flying in there for his wedding in hopes that she would then have relations with our friend Jon.
He takes his wife to Long John Silver's every Thursday night for all-you-can-eat fish sticks.
He recently began a sentence to me with: "I got into the biggest fight with an idiot today" only to then conclude the sentence with: "on the cbssportsline baseball message board."
He took swing dance as an elective class in college and practiced by tying a short white string to his door knob and "shim shamming" with it. Later that year, at a dance, when swing music came on, he refused to dance with a lovely female friend of ours, saying "she wouldn't know the moves."
He lives in Miami, Florida and does not go to the beach.
He once got an $8 haircut, paid with a $10 bill and asked for change.
While he was in the car with his wife, I told him over the phone that we were looking for a new printer. After they mocked us for a few seconds, he then told me the make and model number of one that was on sale (on-line only) for the next 2 days.
While on vacation in Arizona, he called me from a rental car and asked to go online and find the nearest bar to him that offered an on-screen trivia game that he likes to play at home.
To my rehearsal dinner (as an out of town guest, he was invited) he wore khaki pants, a long sleeve t-shirt and an adidas Rochester Tennis Team warm up jacket.
He exercises religiously, at least 5 times a week and right now uses the exact same weights for a dumb-bell bench press as he did as a senior in college 6 years ago.
While in college, we would always know when he was masturbating because he always played the same song. (Adam's Song - Blink 182)

I think it would have been the greatest wedding speech of all time, however, having reviewed this, he probably made the right choice by not giving me a chance to speak.

And in case you're wondering, his wife doesn't like me.

Insomnia

2007-01-15T02:31:00.000-08:00

So here it is, 5:30am and I'm still awake. For the record, this is only notable because this time, it's against my will. I want to be asleep. I've tried to be asleep. But a little nasal congestion has joined forces with insomnia and sent me out to our living room to look up Grady Sizemore baseball cards on eBay. I like to wonder sometimes if other people somewhere else in the city are ever doing what I'm doing. I feel like this is one of those times when they are not. If it was two hours earlier when I was masturbating to farm porn while exfixiating myself with a new belt I purchased (for this particular purpose only) then I would and did assume that there were several dozen people, if not more, all around the city doing that very same thing.

Speaking of which, we've lived in the city for almost 5 years now, and have always been in a building that looked across the street into another building. Fascinating, I know. Aren't you o the edge of your seat, dickhead? I've watched enough soft core porn in my life to know that voyeurism in big cities is much easier than in small towns. Despite this, the only nudity I've ever seen out of our windows is a rather large woman getting dressed and after having seen it, I immediately wished I hadn't. But I kept looking anyway. When will our time come to see the perky lesbians experimenting with hot wax, or some other such erotic encounter? Also, contrary to what Cinemax will try and teach you from 1:00 - 3:00 am, the laundry room in apartment buildings is not, I repeat not a hotbed of sexual activity. It's still fun to jerk off into full washing machines, though (old college trick).

Why I am having trouble sleeping? That's a good question, so lets look at some possibilities:
- Fantasy baseball drafts are only two and half months away. And yes, I'm starting to think about them. Too much. And certainly when laying in bed naked, spooning my wife last night it was not the best time to start discussing the right round to draft Derrek Lee this year. Live and learn.
- Our dog recently stopped sleeping in bed with us and maybe I miss the warm, gentle gusts of wind that she would occasionally waft towards me from her anus every few hours.
- I watched football today, and anybody who read my last post (You three know who you are) knows that I don't usually do that, so maybe my brain is messed up trying to figure out why baseball started using a different ball. And totally different rules.

When I'm lying in bed my mind really starts to wonder. Tonight alone it went from fantasy drafts to my need for new sneakers to the movie "Sneakers", to "Field of Dreams" (which is a movie that almost always makes me cry, which almost always causes my wife to mock me mercilously, despite the fact that she cries during every makeover show on TV and recently will only watch programs that begin with the phrase "America's Funniest"), to little league baseball, to catching crabs in Cape Cod (from the ocean, not dirty Cod sluts), to things I could do instead of sleeping. The only three things I came up with were fantasy baseball reading, Text Twist or blogging. After doing the first two, I was left to blog.

Much like reading my blog, writing it this morning is making me a little sleepy. Maybe this is my perfect cure. I hope so, because my neck is a little too sore for another go with my new belt. Though if my overweight neighbor across the street is up...

My Machismo

2007-01-10T21:57:00.000-08:00

Recently, my masculinity has come under a bit of long overdue scrutiny. The catalyst, if you will, of this McCarthy style witch hunt was a simple misunderstanding about a local piano bar. To make a long story slightly shorter but nonetheless uninteresting, a friend of mine (and theoretical co-blogger) Jon plays the piano and has for many years. To my amazement, he is actually very good. This is alarming to me because as far as I know, his hands spend so much time on and around his own cock and balls that I didn't think there was any time left over for piano practice. Apparently there was. Jon has been looking for a bar at which to participate in an open mic night, and get some experience playing before a crowd. He currently enjoys a weekly gig in front of about 250 people. Unfortunately, since it's at a soup kitchen, most of his audience is homeless, or at the very least, more hungry than they are interested in his piano playing. So he's been looking for the chance to entertain a slighly more upscale crowd, and so far has not had much luck.

While returning some of the Christmas gifts I got my wife (an annual custom) I happened by Brandy's Piano Bar, which is around our neighborhood (UES). It was about four in the afternoon, so the only people in there were the bartender and a delivery man. I asked about open mic nights and was pleasantly told that they have about 6 hours of entertainment a night, and are always looking for open mic piano players. I happily took his business card, and was told to email him and schedule a block of time for my friend to come in. (At this point, it should be clear that my earlier declaration of my intent to keep this story short has been abandoned, much like the integrity of the few Baseball Hall of Fame voters who left Cal Ripken off their ballots) I gave Jon the card and told him to contact the email address. He was excited about the prospect and a few days later sent me an email titled "Piano Bar," which I was expecting to detail when he would be playing there. Turns out, Brandy's Piano Bar is in fact, a gay bar. A gay piano bar to be specific. Most, if not all of their piano players specialize in show tunes, and the bar is "famous" for its sing-a-longs. Oops. I say he still should play there. He's single, Italian and the highly suggestable type.

Normally, such a mix up would not cause an investigation into my manfulness (it's a word, trust me), but the investigators dug up some other evidence which paints me in something of a less than heterosexual light.*

The case against me is as follows:

1. I have little to no interest in football - The problem is all my sports energy is focused on baseball. I'm so invested, that by the end of October, I'm just worn out. You want to know how many home runs David Ortiz hit last September (7), I'm your man. You want to know where Eli Manning went to college, try the internet.

2. I don't like beer - This by itself wouldn't be a huge issue. I know a lot of guys who don't like beer, and they have "their drink" when they go out and nobody makes a big deal about it. However, "my drink" is a frosty beverage known around town as a Smirnoff Ice. And whenever I drink them, unless I'm groping my wife (who often has a beer in her hand) assumptions are being made.

3. I love my dog - Again, on the surface, hardly a big issue. But she's small (about 35 pounds) and my wife insists on a purple collar and matching purple leash. When I walk her, I might be putting out a certain vibe. And that vibe is not that I like vaginas. Also, I probably should sleep spooning her a lot less.

4. I spent a week deep in the Canadian woods with four other guys, and no power - Believe me, this one's hard to get around. When I start describing this trip to people, I always get the same response about half way into it: "You're married, aren't you?" Why can't a bunch of friends just bond in the wilderness together? I admit, the idea of a reunion with people who live in the same city is strange, and the fact that my buddies ate their weight in Keilbasa isn't helping, but dammit, there's nothing gay about sitting around a frightening large (and dangerously uncontrolled) campfire, making smores with your old high school friends.
I just read that sentence again, and I now I'm not sure.

5. My favorite dessert in NYC is a Chocolate Salami - please see www.thepickygourmand.blogspot.com for more information about the restaurant UVA. The Salami is a 6 inch long chocolate cock filled with cookie dough. If you don't like it you can kiss my ass.

6. I have a favorite dessert in NYC.

7. I go to the gym a lot - This may be true, but I am not one of those tank top wearing closet jobs, who wear as little as possible while they work out and claim it's to watch their form. Little tip, there aren't a lot of girls around the free weights, so you aren't wearing those teeny tiny tanks for the ladies...

8. I don't like buffalo wings - I don't know what this means to people, or why they care, but I was asked last weekend while at a bar trying to watch football, why I wasn't taking advantage of the $2 wing special. When I responded with the fact that I don't like wings, I was told in not so polite terms that I was slightly less than heterosexual. To prove my assailant wrong, I chugged what remained of my Smirnoff Ice.

9. My taste in music - This is where it all falls apart for me. I cannot tell you how many times my taste in music has been compared to, or has directly matched that of a teenage girl. It's scary. Some of my favorites include: Christina Aguilera (though strictly because she is fucking hot), Kelly Clarkson, Avril Levigne, Nickelback, Staind, Green Day, Blink 182, Backstreet Boys (admit it, 'I Want It That Way' is a fucking good song and you still know exactly how it goes). For some reason the fact that I don't like Bob Dylan upsets a lot of people, too:
Guy: What music do you like?
Me: Christina Aguilera.
Guy: I guess she's hot. You like Bob Dylan?
Me: Not at all.
Guy: Are you gay?
That is an exact conversation I had recently had one night at Brandy's Piano Bar.

10. There are some women whom the media tells us are hot, but for various reasons, I am not the least bit attracted to them:

Pamela Anderson - She's got an STD, people. And there is absolutely nothing real about her. Now look, I don't care if a woman has fake breasts, if I can see them, they're real enough for me. But when they're bigger than her head, and you can see the skin puckering constantly, it does nothing for me. Also, SHE HAS A FUCKING STD. Not that I ever could, but I'm pretty sure that I don't want my penis going anywhere that Tommy Lee and Kid Rock have been.
Jennifer Lopez - Has a woman ever become famous for doing so little? Can't act, can't sing, but wears a fucking robe to an award show and suddenly she's huge. I don't get it. But quite obviously she's confident that she's better than everybody else. Thankfully, she married some ugly dude who's way more talented than her, and she's been reduced to a reality TV judge on MTV.
Jessica Simpson - There is nothing attractive about this idiot. Nothing. Don't get me wrong, if you told me you knew some stupid chick with huge tits that I should meet, I'd be excited, but all you have to do is watch one frame of Dukes of Hazzard, or one second of that fucking reality show and you'll want to murder her. (and after she's dead, probably have sex with her, but that's because you're disgusting)
Kate Bosworth - Never have a I wanted to force feed a girl a sandwich more in my life. She literally has the body of my 13 year old nephew. As a guy who likes asses (which could be another item on this list in itself) this flat assed boy/girl and all of her anorexic-bulemic friends are of absolutely no interest to me. (See also: Nicole Richie, Calista Flockhart, Keira Knightley, Lara Flynn Boyle, Mary-Kate Olsen, the girl on HOUSE, the new Lindsay Lohan, Mischa Barton) If I were to have sex with one of these girls, I can guarantee you two things. First, I would be arrested, because the sex would not be consentual, and secondly, all I'd be able to think about the whole time was little league baseball. If I wanted to have sex with a boy, I'd kidnap and rape one. Again.
Britney Spears - Admittedly, she has a great body and yes I went online to look at pics of her vagina, but people, take a look at her face. Seriously. A long look. Really look at it. Guys, look at it for about two minutes and if you're still hard, then turn the fan down, or push your dog away.
Paris Hilton - Simply put, this chick is a twat.

I'm sure there are others, why just off the top of my head: I wear silk underwear, I like popsicles, I've started to use color in my blog postings, I have a blog, I like having parties, there are several photos of me wearing a dress - including one in which I am being spanked by a cowboy, I refuse to watch porn with uncircumcized guys, when I have sex with my wife I think about my male friends and I have a red pair of athletic pants.

*I feel I should say that I do not consider myself a homophobic person, and I'm all for gay rights and am a big supporter of gay marriage. This blog was meant to be amusing and was not intended to offend anbody. If you were offended, you probably shouldn't be reading this blog. And you probably also shouldn't join my friends and I next fall up in Canada.

Maybe...

2007-01-07T20:08:00.000-08:00

You know that feeling when all the blood drains from your face and you feel your heart stop beating. You can sense time stopping right in front of you. You can feel the world stop turning. For a lot of people this feeling is brought on by something fantastic like losing your virginity, getting married, falling in love, watching your team win the world series or winning the lottery. In those cases, the feeling is joy; uncontrollable jubilation. In my case it was not.

In my case, this feeling was absolute terror. Horror. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I couldn't breathe. It was a horrible feeling. I was paralyzed. I didn't even blink for almost a minute. As far as I was concerned, the earth's rotation stopped on a fucking dime. It didn't start again until my eyeballs started to hurt from a lack of fluid and I was forced to blink and come back to the world. When I did, I didn't know how much time had passed or where I was.

What happened? What caused my temporary lapse? Why was I momentarily incompacitated? Simply enough, it was because of my wife. Harldly a plot twist, I agree. But nevertheless, it's the truth. So here we go. I'm sitting at our computer at roughly 11am. I was gleefully reading the latest Keith Law blog on espn.com or some fantasy baseball related article, when my wife emerged from our bathroom and uttered the single most terrifying phrase that a young man can hear. More terrifying than your parents telling you they "need to talk about the magazines they found in your closet." More terrifying than your college roommate telling you that he "saw you watching him change after his shower." More terrifying than a religious official asking you "do you take this woman..." Terrifying.

She walks out of the bathroom with her hand on her stomach. She doesn't look well. She looks at me and says, with all innocence: "Wow. I've been nauseous like the last three mornings." Time stopped. My heart stopped. For all intents and purposes, there was no more oxygen in the earth's athmosphere. None.

Unfortunately, as a guy, I am preprogammed to fill this deadening silence with something. My brain, suffocating though it was, insisted on saying something. In my oxygen deprived condition, my thoughts were admittedly less than genius, and thusly the first thing out of my mouth was, though devastatingly logical, instantly regrettable. "Maybe it's just Lukemia," I offered. Perhaps this was and still is the very first and hopefully last time the phrase "just Lukemia" has ever, ever, ever been uttered.

It definitely says something about me that the idea of my wife, the love of my life, being stricken with a likely terminal illness was, for that brief moment in time, a better solution than the possibility that she was carrying our child inside of her. Obviously, I'm insane. That's clear to anybody who was with me tonight, in the sports bar, watching the NFL playoffs (about which I absolutley could not care less) who observed me sweating with the effort of preventing myself from getting up and straightening the painting below the TV, which was slightly askew. Seeing myself as a father, as somebody in charge of someone, of something that isn't walking on all fours, covered in hair and shits in the street was absolutely terrifying.

Thankfully, my wife, wonderfully understanding of my insanity as she is, knew just what to say. "Maybe," she responded quizzically and rolled her eyes.

After a few minutes of perusing fantasy rankings, the air had crept back into the room. I could breathe and move and think again. After perusing the fantasy ranking of Travis Hafner, the perenially undervalued DH of the Cleveland Indians, I prepared to make the long walk across our living room to my wife on the couch. This walk, though only about 15 feet, truly felt like a mile. Why? Simple. Anybody who hooked up with an ugly or otherwise regrettable person at college and had to trudge back home across campus in the early morning knows the feeling. It's shame, and the feeling of every set of eyes around on you, knowing your shame and judging you for it. Was my crime worse than blowing the back up second baseman of your division 3 baseball team at some gay fraternity party? I didn't think so, but it sure felt as bad (for the record, I have no idea what blowing the backup second baseman on my college baseball team would feel like, but I imagine that it feels pretty shitty, because let's face it, that dude sucks at baseball - which is of course, not to say that if he was better at baseball that blowing him would feel better. Although, what do I know, maybe it would.)

So I walked over to apologize and for what I wasn't exactly sure. Was it my immaturity? My hope for her illness? Or my off color remark about the incestuous nature of her family's distant and obese "relations?" Either way, it was clear that a long bout of cunnilingus was in my immediate future.

I wouldn't say I'm a bad husband, but the word "good" seems a bit strong these days...

Context

2006-12-27T13:22:00.000-08:00

For anybody who has ever said or heard the phrase "That's taken out of context," I'd like to present to you, perhaps the greatest out of context line I have ever heard. It was said by my wife in an airport gift shop, and if anybody around us had overheard it, there might have been a riot.

In case any reader isn't familiar with the concept of a quote taken out of context, I'll happily provide two other recent examples that I've encountered. The first comes from my sister, who, during an argument with her husband exclaimed the following:

"You can't just beat off every boy in school."

What my sister was trying to say is almost irrelevant, but for the sake of posterity, she was discussing how to handle bullying in school.

My other top example comes from my place of former employment where a fellow coworker of mine, who will remain nameless, had a terrible habit of saying things in just the wrong way, and of course, having no idea. Her crowning achievement came in front of the entire office during a conference room staff-lunch, although sadly, most of the people at the table missed this little gem:

"I can't do these big groups anymore. My throat is killing me."

What could she possibly have been talking about? Good question, because I know it's hard to imagine anything other than some fantastical bukake or gang bang scenario, but sadly it's not to be. She ran tours of our ballpark (I used to work in minor league baseball) and often had to talk to groups of 50 or more kids, which of course required her to shout and thusly, made her throat sore. But it's much more fun without the context, right? Of course it is.

So here it is, the grandaddy of them all. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the single greatest out of context statement in the history of women speaking to men - which is decidedly shorter than the history of men speaking to women - go figure. Maybe it's because we find things like this funny, and they don't. Anyway here it is:

"I don't care. I just need to suck on something. It feels good."

I almost think it's cheating to explain what it was that made my wife say such a thing, but rest assured, dear reader, that a penis joke was coming out of my mouth faster than the speed of sound itself. So rather than just tell you, we'll play a little game of multiple choice. It was one of the following two reasons:
A. She loves to give me head.
B. She had a really bad sore throat, and it was her justification for purchasing two pounds of Jolly Ranchers.
Little hint - it wasn't A.

Adult On-Set Adulthood

2006-12-26T23:22:00.000-08:00

What does it mean to be an adult? As my previous blog indicated, I recently turned 28. Chronologically (not to sound like Scott Boras), that makes me an adult. However, until recently I have not been feeling like one. I still do a lot of childish things including play nerf games, play video games, watch animated movies and masturbate with a finger in my ass to intense sexual fantasies about my mother.

However, with Christmas having and come and gone, I think I've discovered a sure-fire definition of adulthood, and that is when you start to look forward to giving gifts more than you do receiving them. I can remember as a young boy opening gifts on Christmas morning with such great excitement, enthusiasm and anticipation that I could barely contain myself. Now, when my parents hand me a brightly wrapped gift, I am sadly filled with a forboding sense of dread. The exception being when my parents ask me for ideas and I give them a specific suggestion as to what I would like for Christmas - say for example a blue North Face sweater. In these instances I am not filled with dread but rather fear, because I know that what waits for me inside the box on my lap could be almost anything, but the one thing it is most definitely not is that blue North Face sweater. It is something else, but that something will be close enough that I'll know they tried and am thus prevented from being angry. Instead I'm forced to look at whatever lays in wait under the ribbon and paper and somehow pretend that the blue sweatshirt with Oliver North's face on it is exactly what I wanted and couldn't live without. I'm sure this seems like an exagerration, but my mom's obsessive need to give people lots of gifts combined with not knowing exactly what to get has recently resulted in some puzzling gifts such as dog poop bags (for both me and the wife), soccer toy for ages 3+ (again, I'm 28), 2 boxes of socks (this year alone) and of course miniature bathroom products (tiny shampoo, tiny shaving cream, etc.)

This year at Christmas the thing I was most looking forward to was giving my 3 year old nephew some old He-Man figures (yes, somehow the shirtless, furry-speedo clad superhero seems to be making a comeback with the young boys of non-homophobic parents. If you used to play with He-Man when you were a boy, as almost any man my age did, then I strongly suggest finding an episode of the old cartoon and watching it again. Afterwards, you can sit back as I did and wonder just what the fuck it was about that show that you enjoyed so much. Every fucking episode is the same thing. Skeletor attacks the Kingdom of Eternia in some way, and Prince Adam - sytlishly clad in purple tights, long sleeved white spandex shirt and pink vest - runs off afraid, then magically turns into He-Man, who basically looks the same, but sports an impressively more homo-erotic outfit consisting of the aforementioned fur speedo and knee high boots. All of Skeletors best laid plans can always be undone by one punch from the mighty He-Man - a punch that can topple buildings, but of course never actually kills anybody). Anyhow, upon giving said He-Man figures to my nephew, he loudly states that he has several of them already. All told, he already had 5 of the 11 figures I got him, despite assurances from his mother - my sister - that he had none. This of course, rather metaphorically, removed all of the wind from perverbial sail. Only moments later, my older brother rode in on his white horse, and presented my same nephew with a slew of new Power Ranger action figures (all heterosexual in nature) which were met with screams of delight and literal jumps of joy. Sadly, those same jumps mostly landed on my nephew's new He-Man figures.

I truly enjoy shopping for gifts for my wife to return. As I like to say to people who ask me, every year I give her store credit. I just wrap it up and make her go get it. We're rarely able to surprise each other - positively that is. Any year I wanted I could wrap up a Coral Snake and surprise the fucking hell out of her, but that really wouldn't count. Last year, despite spending several hundred dollars on her Christmas gifts, my wife's favorite was a $5 book made up entirely of photos of sleeping puppies. This year, my wife was actually able to surprise me with a day trip of white water rafting, the biggest surprise of which is that she's willing to go with me. Now I'm sure, a week before the trip, she'll backout faster than my "good friend" Steve three hours before a holiday party, but for now, I'm looking forward to her screams of terror on the rapids. I'd like to think that if everybody in the world got to hear terror screams from the person they love, the world would be a much better place.

The point of all this is that Christmas has changed, or to put it better Christmas has changed for me. I'm now more interested in giving gifts than I am in receiving them. I'm no longer the little kid waking up early and rushing to see what's under the tree. You couldn't get me up early if Christina Aguilera was under the tree (this is possibly an over-exagerration. I'd probably get up early and leave an awful mess for the rest of my family to find). So as I sat there on Christmas early afternoon I started to realize that I'm an adult now.
But, then my parents handed me a check and I was an excited little kid again.

Life Wasted: A Retrospective

2006-12-17T21:31:00.000-08:00

In two days, I'll turn 28 years old. I still consider myself very young and since I'm not a figure skater, gymnast or Malaysian seamstress I feel like my life is still ahead of me. However, sometimes it's good to be a little retrospective and look back on all that I've accomplished in the my first 28 years of life.

graduated college
got married
have a dog

What this blog will not be able to reflect is the 20 minutes of crying and suicide contemplation that took place as soon as I completed my "list" of accomplishments. Sure it could have been longer if I'd been willing to lower the bar a bit to include some of the following:

made friends
earned some money
able to order food at a restaurant (I know it doesn't seem like a big deal, but anyone who has witnessed my wife's stuttering, gesticulating madness while trying to order a soda would swear that she has some kind of palsy - and yes, this gives me some kind of strange confidence because I can say "medium rare"without crinkling up my face, cocking my head, raising my voice 3 octaves and wildly gesturing with both of my hands)
haven't died
keep clean(ish)
masturbated thousands (upon thousands) of times
mastered breathing, food chewing, shoe tying, accurately urinating, Smirnoff Ice drinking, friend mocking, wife slapping, porn downloading, gift wrapping, eyebrow cocking, strange white hair out of my stomach growing and nail clipping (after some early issues, as discussed in a previous blog)
still working on tie tying, shit taking, beer drinking, friend keeping, wife loving, porn hiding, gift buying, eyebrow plucking and of course career finding.

As you can see, I clearly have a lot more to work on and get done.

It's always interesting and incredibly depressing to look back on what I was like as a young boy and to remember the dreams and goals that I once had. My current goals of increasing my bench press weight and conning my wife into sex are, admittedly, something of a drop off. When I was 12, I made a list of things I thought I'd be able to do by the time I was 30. Let's take a look and see how close I've come, shall we? (that's not really a question, it's mandatory)

1. Play professional baseball - one serious back injury and a lifelong battle with pussytus (puss-eye-tus), which leaves me generally useless and borderline catatonic in high stress (non-nerf) athletic situations, have left this goal, sadly, unattainable. And it hurts.
2. Win a World Series - no need to hammer this one home.
3. Earn a million dollars - no doubt this feat was tied to the first. Sadly, it seems every bit as likely.
4. Get a dog - DING! DING! DING! Now if I can just keep her alive for 2 more years...
5. Have sex - troubling that the dog came before this on my list of things I thought I could do. Obviously, at the age of 12, puberty had taken a rather ghastly toll on my once adorable visage. Recovery would not be swift, and sadly, I was fully aware of this at 12. Thankfully, we live in a world where even the ugliest guy in the room can get laid, as long as he's willing to pay for it and won't get rough (or somehow convinces Christina Aguilera to marry him).
6. Write a screenplay - This, too I have completed. Though only recently, as I don't count my early teen work "King Cock takes on Mount Vaginias," (classic though it may be). However, I don't get full credit because I'm pretty sure that when I was 12 I was referring to a screenplay that actually makes it to the big screen.
7. Get Married - another success. Statistically. Though the laundry list of things I've done today that have annoyed my wife (woke up late, watched TV too loud, typed on the keyboard too loud, left a fork in the sink, chewed with my mouth open, didn't spray air freshener after using the bathroom, threw my dirty clothes on the floor, drank milk in a "disgusting" way, didn't want to eat dinner where she wanted to eat dinner, drugged and anally raped her, and forgot to put detergent in the dishwasher) might indicate that by 30, this accomplishment will be history.
8. Go into Space - Not sure how realistic this a goal this was. I was struggling with electricity in science class and had a small fear of heights. The fear of heights I've overcome, but electricity (like plumbing) still befuddles me. I mean seriously, where does the power and water come from?
9. Own a dozen turtles - My early lack of specificity almost gets me off the hook on this one. Though I'm sure I meant all at once and in a pond, I've owned roughly 10 different turtles in my sad little lifetime (and yes, reptile ownership is probably both a cause and a symptom of my glaring unpopularity with girls growing up).
10. Be Happy - While some would look summarily at my wasted existence to this point, and wonder how I could possibly be anything less than miserable, I do indeed consider myself a generally content person. I know it flies in the face of what is more or less 28 years of doubt, fear and failure but it's true. Do I have some regrets? Of course, we all do. But if I can successfully slip a roofie into my wife's regular 1:30am cup of hot cocoa tomorrow night, I'd say that my 29th year will be getting off to a pretty darn good start.

It looks like I'm hitting a solid .400 (with partial credit on two others). With a possibility of .700 out there (I don't think I need to remind you which 3 are least likely, but if Lance Bass can't get into space, how the hell will I? I can't sing and I'm a terrible dancer. Oh wait...) I have a lot of work to do in the next 2 years. A lot of hard work and turtle buying, and of course turtle hiding, because coming home with a dozen turtles might hurt my average as much as help it (i.e. the continuation of numbers 5 and 7).

My OCD

2006-12-04T11:28:00.000-08:00

Recently I have discovered or just confirmed that I may be developing a little something called obsessive compulsive disorder. Certainly anybody who has seen me during the final days leading up to a fantasy baseball draft can vouch for this.

I don't mean to insinuate that I am otherwise mentally sound. I'm quite sure I have many other playful psychological disorders, but right now OCD really seems to be charging to the forefront. Do I need help? Probably.

Recent evidence of my OCD:

1. I took 2 hours to put christmas lights on our tree - it's 3 feet tall. I used 3 strings of lights. I said the phrase "not on that fucking branch" at least 15 times. I was also alone.

2. It takes me 30 minutes to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich and almost 45 to make a chicken sandwich. Everything has to be perfect, including the depth of the peanut butter (slightly deeper than the jelly, which must be grape) and the layers of chicken must be even throughout.

3. Every picture frame in our apartment must be straight. I've even been known to go around my friends' houses and correct improperly hung frames. In particular a friend of mine from high school, who I am quite sure tips all of the paintings in her parents' house before I get there just to watch me frantically run from room to room adjusting them.

4. I've caught myself counting the number of times I clap, the number of steps in a staircase, number of times I chew a bite of food, number of strokes when I pet the dog and how many tugs it takes me to successfully masturbate (127, which I know is a lot, but I'm a tough orgasm - just ask my wife, who will most likely spend her later years with some type of brace on her neck and back, and thoroughly regretting her choice of spouse).

5. I kept my finger and toe nail clippings in a minature metal replica of the United States Senate until I was 14 years old.

6. I've stopped shitting.

7. I insist on eating any facial hair that I shave off.

8. Only one person is allowed to cut my hair. And this has become something of a problem since my Aunt Milly was diagnosed with Parkinsons.

9. I've started a ball made of the white/black stuff that collects on your feet when you take off your socks. When it reaches 2lbs, I'm going to boil it. Then eat it.

10. Now, when I watch people sleep, I can't stop laughing about how weird their skin tastes.

11. Every list I make must be exactly 11 items long.

Hidden Insults

2006-10-23T23:25:00.000-07:00

I recently attended the wedding of a good friend of mine from college. I refer to him here as a "good friend" on the off chance he reads this. Unlike my "good friend" and his lovely new wife, I don't want to offend anybody.

Our story begins with their registry. The happy couple registered for real pricey items that most married couples ask for and surely never use, like fancy china, crystal sugar bowls, golden creamers, lace duvet covers and vacuum cleaners. This came as a mild shock since the last friend of mine from college (note the absence of the word "good" before the word "friend." Not a mistake) registered for shit you buy on a regular basis like energy bars, cat litter and mouthwash (not a joke). I was taken aback by the sudden increase in my "good friend's" class and style as it was not uncommon that while coaching tennis he would sleep on the floor of his office, purchase condoms online in bulk and catch middle-aged cleaning men masturbating at his computer in the middle of the night. I guess marriage changes some people, and in my "good friend's" case it appears to be for the better. But I'm getting off the subject.

My wife (hold the laughter, she's real) did the wedding gift purchasing for the two of us. Anybody who has ever unwrapped a gift from me can assure you, dear reader, that this was for the best. Sure enough, about a week or so after the wedding we received a lovely, well-written thank you note. It was clear by the handwriting, spelling and vocabulary that the note was written by my "good friend's" wife. This I can tell you came as no shock, for if you were to call my "good friend" on his cell phone and get his voicemail you will be greeted not by his subtle baritone but by the voice of his wife instructing you to leave a message for her husband (she uses the longer, and more formal version of his name) and if you were to glance at the license plate of his car, you would see his wife's name. My "good friend" suffers from Pussytus (Puss-eye-tus), which is a regrettable medical condition causing the sufferer to be a pussy. I am well acquainted with the ailment as I've struggled with a fairly strong case of it for the better part of the last decade. Trust me, it can be brutal. Though not fatal, patients tend to wish it was.

Back to the thank you note, in which this crafty castigation is so carefully concealed. First of all, to my dismay, we were thanked for the exact kind of crappy gift that I was hoping we wouldn't give. Apparently we donated a vase, a few "serving pieces" and of course, a sugar creamer to their china cabinet, most likely never to be seen again. That, however, is beside the point. As I played no part in the purchasing of the gifts, it's hardly my place to complain about what was purchased. Moving on. The following is an excerpt from the conclusion of said thank you note:

"(We) love to entertain, so I can assure it will all be put to good use."

When read over casually, one can find no fault at all with the sentence. They like to entertain, we bought them some of the means to entertain. As Homer Simpson would say "It's all wrapped up in a neat little package." But I just don't see it that way. The way I see it, this sentence is a thinly-veiled slap in the face. It should quite naturally have come to a more logical and friendly conclusion:

"We love to entertain, and we look forward to having you for a visit in the near future."

But in this case, it most certainly does not. In fact, the note seems to imply that not only are we
not invited over, but we are to be assured that our gifts are being used by other, more important friends and we should be so assured that we should, under no circumstances, take it upon ourselves to investigate the usage of these items, but rather merely trust that those close enough to the newlyweds are enjoying them. It would seem that my "good friend" has stripped the word "good" from his description of our relationship, and soon I will be nothing more than an "old friend," and then "acquaintence," and then merely "that guy I watched masturbate in college." I am left to assume that my "good friend" is enjoying a better life now that he is married, and that his new and better life will apparently not ever include me.

But then again, how would it be better if it did?

P.S. I find myself wondering if there are any relationships I wish I'd severed after my own wedding....

Dear Josh,
Thank you so much for the Simpsons Calendar and magazine subscription. You can be sure that we will be filling our calendar in with many trips to visit our close friends and family. None of these visits will be to see you, but rest assured, we will take many wonderful trips and have great times with good friends.

Partners

2006-10-05T00:04:00.000-07:00

There are many bloggers out there today, probably millions. To those millions, who, like myself believe rather foolishly that other people really care what they think, let me offer you some advice. Do not attempt blogging with a partner.

Now, surely blogging is not the first exercise to be avoided with a partner. Andybody who has tried canoeing, jogging, juggling, masturbating, reading, picking up a hooker at 3 a.m. on Sunset BLVD, cooking a chicken, digging a shallow grave in the Central Park Ramble or raising a child with a partner can tell you that is just plain isn't worth it. Those are all tasks that clearly should be handled solo.

When blogging with a partner, you will have one main problem and it can be summed up in a short series of conversations I had with my blogging partner:

Me: Okay, buddy so it's your turn to blog now.
Him: Good, because I have a really funny idea. I'll do it this week.

ONE WEEK LATER

Me: Still waiting on that blog.
Him: I know, I got busy organizing my porn collection. This week it will get done.
Me: Sounds good. (This was referring to both the forthcoming post, and the organizing of the porn. Nothing is more annoying that trying to borrow good porn from someone and getting stuck with some midget crap, or some softcore shit with no penetration because the idiot your borrowing it from doesn't have a good filing system, so you have to go bang on his door at 4am pissed off and horny - but that's for another blog at another time.)

ONE WEEK LATER

Me: Hey, buddy. Gonna get to that blog sometime soon?
Him: Oh my god, I totally forgot.
Me: That's okay. I know it's just a blog and it isn't that important, but I have a lot of funny and clever ideas about how to get my wife and her hot friend in bed together and I want to blog about them.
Him: I promise, I'll do it over the weekend. I have a good idea.
Me: Super. (This time, however, I was not referring to two things, but instead just one. And that one thing was not my dear friend's forthcoming blog, but in fact the surprisingly large defecation that I had just left floating quite lifelessly in my porcelain toilet. Shocked by it's grandiosity, I immediately searched for something with which to capture its sheer bulk. Hoping to find a one dollar bill in my wallet to use, I unfortunately found only a twenty. I then carefully placed said twenty on the very edge of the seat of the toilet so that my photo would capture the true scale of the excrement. Tragically, at the moment of the flash, my rather hastily and carelessly placed twenty slid gently from the warm plastic rim of the toilet seat and into the putridity below. I debated my next move for several minutes, which proved a poor decision as by then my twenty had sunk even further into the foul loathsome abyss. At this point, I begrudingly decided to cut my losses and flushed my twenty away, thus completing the single most expensive shit of my life. Much to my dismay, the photo catpures, quite vividly, not only my truly heroic fecal lumber but also the rather tragic fall of my twenty dollar bill. Thusly, if I am to show my treasure to anybody, the first remark made is never to the length or width of my creation but instead a query as to the whereabouts of my twenty. I have attempted both to tell the truth about my lost money and to lie and speak of a phantom recovery, but both responses have resulted in mockery so cruel that I dare not ever show the photo again.)

ONE WEEK LATER

Me: Douchebag, are you ever going to post?
Him: Of course, I really sorry. (He's an idiot and actually talks like that sometimes)
Me: What the hell have you been doing?
Him: I've been trying to find a place that will do a manicure and pedicure for less than $20. (it's worth noting here that I would have been more than happy to simply give him the $20, however, after certain recent events, $20 has come to carry slightly more value to me than before and I am less likely to frivolously toss them away. It also prevented me from giving my soon to be former friend the proper derision that he deserved for caring so much about his toes.)
Me: I hate you. Just write something. Anything.
Him: Okay, I'll do it before I go to bed tonight.

The date of that last conversation, in case anybody has read this far, which I sincerely doubt, was in fact March 21, 2006. It is now October 5, 2006. No post was ever written. Much frustration has built. This is exactly the kind of thing that can happen with child rearing when done in pairs. One of you is supposed to feed the child, he doesn't, and then 6 months later you finally just have to do it yourself.

I can assure you that the majority of what I have written here is true, and should be taken as a warning to all bloggers that blogging is a solitarty act, (as is almost everything one can do at a computer) and should always remain so.

As a secondary warning, try to keep a one dollar bill in the bathroom at all times...

Trapped

2006-02-12T13:05:00.000-08:00

So it's snowing...

I'm stuck inside the apartment with my wife and her friend. I could go outside, but its cold, windy and generally uncomfortable. Inside, though is a ticking time bomb. Its just a matter of time until a romantic comedy is ordered On Demand. As I write this, they are paging through a catalogue full of foot creams, body butter, hair products and other vaginal accessories that I need not understand.

Clearly, my situation is dire. As they discuss the pros and cons of having your makeup permanently done, and what color nail polish best compliments their hair, I can feel my penis inverting and heading up into my body. This apartment needs another vagina like I need to stop taking my Valtrex.

"Have you seen Mad Hot Ballroom?"

While that could easily be the title of a porn, it clearly isn't. I'm starting to get desperate now.
I try come up with a good excuse to go into the bedroom so I can at least masturbate to porn, but as our blog putout should indicate, creativity is at an all time low. The awkwardness of walking from the bedroom to the kitchen with a big handful of sloppy wet paper towels doesn't really excite me.

"My sister was saying that Oprah wears Spanks.'"

For those of you not in the know, 'spanks' is something that covers over panty lines, and gives a smooth look - just learned that myself. That's not something I needed to know. That fact will probably push a more important fact out of my brain, like Pujols' road OPS against lefties last year. Or my mom's birthday. Or why I shouldn't eat arsenic.

"Oh, that Santino is so arrogant."

I'd like to take time out to thank Bravo for having the foresight to run a Project Runway marathon today. That's just what I needed.

"I really want to get a saddle for Buster."

Buster is a boxer (dog, not person) that my wife's friend owns. Unless there is another boxer being sodomized right now, I would venture to say that Buster might be the least lucky boxer in the world. As they exchange photos of their dogs (ours does not get dressed up), high pitched giggling and a sense of dread fill the room.

At this point, our neutered female dog is my only friend in the apartment. And she's throat deep in her own vagina right now and clearly not interested in me.

"He's a real man's man with his fake tan."

Thankfully, they aren't talking about me. In fact they haven't really noticed anything that I've been doing for the last hour or so. Maybe that masturbatory jaunt into the bedroom could become a reality after all. My heart skips a beat just thinking about it.

"Sometimes I bleed when I pluck my eyebrows."

It might be temporary insanity. A case of cabin fever. Lack of food. Lack of testosterone. But I realize that my plight of being trapped inside an apartment with two hot twenty something girls might not be the nightmare that I've imagined. If I could only get us playing a game of twister....
A nice game of strip pictionary is just what the doctor ordered. Of course, I can't draw, but that's a whole other blog in itself. I've seen enough porn to know that these things do happen, and I know just how to start them. If I can just get the girls loosened up, get some alchohol passed around I could make something happen. Start a game of I've Never. A game of Truth or Dare. A game of Who's In My Mouth?

"I've got the worst cramps today."

Of course, in the quite likely event that my plan falls flat on its face, I've got some chloroform in the closet.

For me.

Killing Time

2006-01-22T13:57:00.000-08:00

For a lot of us, there is no longer or more boring time of year than those icy months that fall between the calendar turning over and that first pitch on opening day. It's a long 3 months, and it doesn't pass quickly. Some of us spend this time reading, writing or having a meaningful relationship and those of us who have know that this is time wasted.

Eventually fantasy baseball guidebooks are printed and baseball preview issues hit the shelves, but its a long time between now and when writers start picking an overpriced and flawed Yankees team to win it all with quotes like "Jeter just knows how to win." Like hell he does. He knows how to win about as much as I know how to make a woman orgasm.

So we would like to offer up some suggestions of ways to pass the time until we all hear those magic words: "Pedro Martinez arrives late to Spring Training," or "Garciaparra Goes on DL," or "Sheffield Upset About Contract," or "Woman Claims Jose Lima Gave Her Herpes."

1. Watch Director's Cuts of all 3 Lord of The Rings films with and without commentary.
This should take you up until Valentine's Day. Though, lets be honest, if you do this
Valentine's Day has very little meaning to you anyway.

2. Play many rounds of Masturbation Clue.

3. Sort and Resort Your DVD collection.
There are countless ways to do this, but here are some suggestions:
Production Cost, amount of nudity, chronologically, genre, quality, or
if you're like us, cumshots.

4. Take someone in your group of friends, and devote the next six weeks to convincing
everybody else you know that they're gay. No actual evidence is required if you've
got enough heresay, conjecture and adobe photoshop.And don't forget to prey on other people's fear that you might think they're gay themselves.

5. Pretend College Basketball is Exciting.

Masturbation Clue

2005-12-30T21:15:00.000-08:00

Next time you're playing the same old board games, treat yourself to a game of "Masturbation Clue"...

A wad of sticky paper towels was found in the trash...

Who was jerking off??? Only one game dares to ask...Who got caught wet-handed?

Locations -
Computer
Shower
Parents' room
Astro van
Morgue
Confessional
Chuck E Cheese Ball Pit
Sister's Vagina
"Crocodile Dundee" Matinee

Weapons-
Teddy Ruxpin
KY Warming Jelly
Ball Spreader
Gay Porn
Warm Feces
Parents' Wedding Photo

Suspects-
Admiral Blueballs
Mickey Cockface
Professor Plumpkin
Mrs. Peacock
Mr. Period
Rev. Loveboy