Bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill “wine” leading to drunken tryst: $2.99
Off season clearance Old Navy turtleneck sweater: $3.99
Concealing giant conspicuous hickeys and no longer having to lie about getting attacked by a pack of wild rabid vacuum cleaners: priceless
I awoke this morning with a gin hangover, the taste of cigs in my mouth, and the sound of a very excited Indian cab driver named Gupta yammering into my ear babbling incoherently about my friend Jake’s cellphone, which he apparently lost in the back of Gupta’s cab. I’m guessing that my number was the first in Jake’s addressbook, and so Gupta decided to call me, two timezones to the west, at the ungodly hour of 7 AM so that I could inform Jake that his phone was safely in the hands of an NYC cabbie. At least I hadn’t turned into a cockroach.
The stale taste of cancer in my mouth was a minor concern. The giant hickeys on my neck large enough to declare their own sovereignty were a slightly more urgent problem. I haven’t owned (or needed) a turtleneck since high school, but if ever there were a time and place, today would have been it.
Favorite line at work today: “It’s not what you think. [long uncomfortable pause] Ok, it’s exactly what you think.”
As I learned from my high school wrestling coach, an archetypal warrior-poet, there is quite a distinction between injured and being hurt. Back then we were all hurt, all the time, but that was par for the course. You expected to train, train hard, get hurt while training, and then keep training even harder. And you took pride in knowing that you were the toughest SOB on the face of the planet because you could continue to push yourself past the breaking point of most men even while you were hurt.
Injury was a different story. If you were injured, you were expected to take time off and heal and get better so you could return to the pantheon of men and charge back into battle. Injury was not taken lightly, it was a serious thing, and rest was important. All the same, you felt a secret shame and deep frustration at not being able to suffer along with your brethern, and you chomped at the bit to get back into the fray, even while grimacing in agony.
I’m older and wiser and mellowed out now, but old habits die hard. Injury sucks. I hate the feeling of lethargy, the dullness of inactivity that rest entails. Rehabbing my shoulder is boring and tedious and completely necessary so I do it, but I hate the fact that I’m injured in the first place.
I just want to climb. Or play ultimate. Or anything. Ugh.
2nd grossest shot ever — prairie fire. csmith and dannf had to drink one each of this vile shot, which consists of tequila and tabasco sauce.
Grossest. Shot. EvAR — t-bone. Myself and some kid we met at the bar had to drink this nasty disgusting abomination in God’s eyes since we lost at foosball. Bacardi 151 and A-1 steak sauce do NOT go well together. My throat is raw and I feel like a bag of hell.
I have white headphones now and that makes me cool. How else are you to measure a man other than by his possessions?
So in my South American travels a couple years ago, I was astounded whenever I passed by one of the numerous video game arcades. Without fail, there would be a huge crowd gathered around a giant epilepsy-inducing blinky monstrosity pumping out megadecibels of cheesy dance-pop tracks while young Peruvian boys feverishly desperately contorted their bodies to the beat, stomping their feet in accordance with the arrows on the video monitors, whilst the crowd shouted words of encouragement. Or maybe they were trash talking (my understanding of Spanish insults was weak at best).
Thus, I was exposed to Dance Dance Revolution.
For those not familiar with this game, you stand in the center of a giant pad. There are 4 arrows, one per side. So one arrow points forward, one points left, another to the right, and the last one points backwards. As the music plays, arrows pointing in one of the four directions scroll up a screen, and it is your job to step on the corresponding arrow on the pad at the appropriate time.
When I first saw these crowds, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. It also saddened me to realize that America was exporting the underbelly of its musical culture via a video game. Also, since I tend to think I’m the best at everything I do, I thought it looked fantastically easy.
Fast forward to tonight. Someone had DDR for Playstation2. My new conclusions about this game are: 1) it’s a lot fucking harder than it looks and 2) it has serious drinking game potential.
Also, I want to video tape people playing it and edit out the sound and the view of the TV so that it just looks like two severely retarded adults jumping and twitching about in close proximity to each other, intensely focused straight ahead and never making eye contact. I would then collect large sums of money to never release the tapes to the public at large.
In other news, I drank something called “Sparks”. Actually, I drank two of these somethings, and that’s why I’m up at 4:45 AM writing an inane post about Dance Dance Revolution. Basically, a company noticed that Red Bull and vodka is a popular drink, so they decided to take the middleman (ie, bartender) out of the equation and sell a malt beverage drink chock full of Alc/Energy.
In a nutshell, this drink is basically like someone took a shitload of orange Gatorade, added a half-packet of Tang, a bunch of new-agey energy crap like “taurine, guarana siberian ginseng blend, and citric acid blend” along with some good old fashioned caffeine, AND made it 6% alcohol by content. It’s basically liquid candy that makes you drunk AND peppy, and I think I’ll have one for breakfast every morning from now on, it’s that good.
Read other comments about Spark (which are incidentally much funnier than anything I could write).
Also, my favorite thing in the whole world is that the Sparks website is “powered by Alc/Energy”. Alcohol? MAX! Caffeine? MAX! Taurine? MAX!
So I totally jacked up my left shoulder last Thursday playing ultimate, while laying out for a disc (which I didn’t even catch). It’s been hurting like the dickens for the past few days, so today I went and saw the chiropractor/accupuncturist.
No serious damage, which was good, and I got some accupuncture for the first time. It was an odd experience, getting those little pins stuck into my shoulder. Next, the good doctor hooked me up to some sort of electrical device, and put some juice into those little pins, so various little muscles were twitching. I guess it was supposed to stimulate blood flow to help the connective tissue rebuild faster.
In any case, I sat there and twitched for about 25 minutes. I guess I feel a bit better, but the experience was more interesting than it was therapeutic, methinks.
Do I dare admit to the entire internet that I read Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood? A question that answers itself, I guess.
But yeah, wildly hilarious at times and only slightly sappy at others, overall it was a good book. The story revolves around flashback vignettes of the picaresque Ya-Yas , and the rich gumbo tapestry Wells weaves is a savory marinade for you to sit back and soak up.
My favorite passage from the story comes when Sidda finally resolves her conflicted inner feelings about both her mother and Connor:
The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?
Yeah, it’s cheesy, and perhaps I’m revealing the uncomfortable fact that I actually do have emotions, but hey — I’m cool with it, and if you’re bothered, you can go fuck yourself.