The Last Song I Hear Before Death

When I die, I want to die in a car and I want to die loudly. I don't wanna take anyone with me and I don't want to be battered so badly that only a dentist will know if it's me for sure. I also don't want to die stupidly, like because I was battling ennui or something like that.

I'm hoping to die while swerving to avoid a moose.
Perhaps brake failure.
Something unfortunate, but not my fault.

And I want to die with a great song on the radio; a defining song. Something that will be highly ironic when my family and friends are told what was in the cd player when my car flipped over the guard rail.

Something like Skid Row's "Youth Gone Wild," or "No Surrender" by Bruce Springsteen or The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." I don't want the EMT guy yanking my corpse from the car with the final piano crescendo of "Tiny Dancer" lilting in the background. "Tiny Dancer "is a fine song and something that I very well might be listening to while driving, but it's not what I want my final musical statement to be.

For better or for worse Johnny Cash inadvertently defined his entire life by covering a Nine Inch Nails song and I have to admit that a large part of me feels uncomfortable with that.

Making the wrong statement at the moment of my death is one of my greatest fears.

Top Five Inexplicably Neurotic Fears:

1) Sneezing so violently while driving that, in the two seconds I am incapacitated from the sneeze, I hit someone and kill them instantly. I would get charged with manslaughter and have to explain to everyone that I am only a killer because of hay fever.

2) Plugging anything into the wall socket in my bathroom. I've never been electrocuted before. Admittedly, I don't really know how it works, but there's so much condensation in the air and three recepticles for water (tub, toilet, sink)... it just seems inevitable to dip the hairdryer chord into the sink and fry myself.*
I can't imagine what the person who invented battery-powered shaving razors were thinking.

3) Accidentally putting metal in the microwave. Look, I know that metal and nuclear heat boxes do not a good duo make, but every once in a while, I forget that the metal handles on Chinese food cartons are metal or that there is a foil lining underneath my tray of chicken nuggets...

...What I'm saying is sometimes it slips my mind and I'm constantly nervous of having to do a Mission:Impossible headroll off my balcony.

4) Flooding. I don't mean flooding as in "natural disaster," I mean flooding as in my pant legs. This isn't lethal, or in any way important, but I hate it. I'm a tall guy and no matter what size pants I buy, I always seem to flood when I sit down. I've taken to buying expensive socks just to offest my embarrassment for not allowing my cuffs to join my ankles while in a seated position. It's a sharp little pang of fear every single time I take a seat. It's kinda like an insignificantly personal little hell.

5) Failing to preemptively tie up the loose ends that my death might cause before I ever actually die. I'm not suicidal... not at all. I'm not dying anytime soon (that I know of; I've gotta at least make it until the end of The Sopranos season), but I am depraved enough to think about hypotheticals.

What if I careen off a cliff and die on impact, and at that moment, Led Zeppelin's "Rock 'n' Roll" is playing? But "Rock 'n' Roll" is only 4:30 minutes long. I bet the ambulance wouldn't get there until "Rock 'n' Roll" was over. What would the next song be?

I don't know.

You see? Once I'm dead, I've got no say in anything - including the song that the paramedics find on my stereo when they arrive. What if Lesley Gore comes on next? My God, the poor policemen would not only have to tell my parents that I'm dead, but that I died listening to Judy's Turn To Cry!

I don't have any control over that. I can't even insure that the radio will still be working properly by the time someone finds me. Which would probably cause you to wonder why, if such minutea concerns me so, would I still want to die in a wreck as opposed to, say, silently in my sleep amongst my things; a haven of my own personality?

That's a good question and I'm happy you're so engaged in my worries to be asking such thoughtful inqueries. Peaceably in my sleep is not how my 25-year-old persona dictates that I should go.
I'm James Dean dammit, rolling down a country road in a silver Spyder.
Again, I'm not suicidal. I don't wanna die. But, if I'm going to die - I wanna make it count. So barrel-rolling off a country highway going 88 mph with Patti Smith's "Rock and Roll N---er" blaring out from under the shards of crushed windowframe, is how I morbidly picture it happening.

I've also been lost in various attempts at picturing how the news of my demise might travel. I always assumed I'd die away from my family, despite that I've heard most accidents happen within 25 miles of the victim's homes. But these days, information lends itself to traveling mere moments after an incident occurs. I almost always carry i.d. with me, so they'd have a simple enough time contacting my parents first.

Now since, I don't live near my parents, they'd fly out (with my sister) to wherever my body was. While doing so, they'd call my only living grandparent (Bubby, whom you met in a previous blog entry). But my mother's mom is the last person of important people in that chain, so we've still got a lot of people to break the news to.

My dad would most likely call his sister, who would no doubtedly relay the message to my cousins and great aunts and great uncles and various friends of the family from my dad's side.

But what about my buddies and roomates and old college friends and ex-girlfriends and bosses? Oooo... that's where the tree branches split most erratically.

I've gotta believe that my sister would start the ball rolling with this. If my mom and dad are busy grieving (I hope) and telling their closest family members about me, my sister would probably think to notify my best friends from back home in The Chi. She'd call Jason, Liz and Emily (I'll let you decide if those are real names) and ask them to spread the news to all others in those circles.

But what about my Boston area friends? They're in a completely seperate group.

Do the paramedics or the police notify everyone or just the immediate family and let them take over? I don't know how this works. Would my roomates go four or five or six days just wondering what the hell happened to me? Leaving voice mail after voice mail on a phone that might very well be covered in blood and secured in a Zip-Loc bag as part of the "deceased's belongings"? And who, of the people I care about would never be formally contacted? Who might get forgotten, eventually carrying a grudge against me because I never call anymore.

Hating me for a year before someone in-the-know randomly informs them that I died a year ago? **

Anyway, If my roomates get notified, that would take care of everyone in Boston. We're all kinda swimming in the same social pool, so within a week my death would be Code Blue conversation fodder.

"Hey, what's going on?"
"Didja hear, Adam totally died on Thursday." ***
"Yeah, I heard. Crazy. When did you find out?"
"Yesterday."
"Wierd, I heard three days ago."

At this point, my friends would no longer be discussing my death, but embark in a tortuous journey on why Person A found out about my death two days before Person B. Jealousy would ensue.

Was it because I was better friends with Person A? Was it something Person B did?

But that's like, totally their hangup. I'm dead. It's not my problem.

"I've known Adam for five years, his roomates too. Why did it take six days for me to find out?"
"I was just at the house when his roomate was making calls - that's how I found out."
"Wait. Sunday? Where was I? No one called me on Sunday."
"We thought you were out of town."
"No. I was here. I was totally here. I sat at home watching reruns of '8th & Ocean.'"
"Sorry. we weren't thinking straight. We were kinda shaken up on accout of Adam being dead."
"Whatever."
"And on account that Barry Manilow was playing on his radio when he crashed."
"Barry Manilow? Adam was listening to Barry Manilow when he died?"
"Yeah. He must have been in a deep sort of depression."

I don't know what my bigger fear is: having my friends mistakenly think I'd ever listen to Barry Manilow, or having friends who would ever have a conversation like this one.

"Barry Manilow, dude? Well, at least he didn't die listening to Belle & Sabastian."

Good point, Fake-Made-Up-Dialogue-Friend: Belle & Sabastian would be my biggest fear about dying in car and listening to one last song.

*** *** *** ***

* Not that I'd ever use a hair dryer. That'd be vain and unmanly.

** If I had to guess, I'd guess Frank. Frank's kinda flighty. Frank, in all likliehood, is going to miss my funeral. Dammit Frank, with that infernal constant chip on your shoulder!

*** I've always had an inkling that I'd die on a Thursday.

The Grift

grift (grift) Slang n.
1. Money made dishonestly, as in a swindle.
2. A swindle or confidence game.

v. grifter n. intr.
1. One who engages in swindling or cheating.


For as long as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a grifter. Not a thug, or a hoodlum or a killer; I have little patience for blood. I've always thought it better to make my fortunes by fooling people. I want people to be fully aware that they've been had by me. And then they will say, "Dang. I've been had by him. I'm so stupid." And then somewhere far, far away from the scene of the grift, there I will be: laughing; dive-bombing into my enormous pile of riches like Scrooge McDuck.

And laughing. Agreeing that they were stupid for being had by me.

I'm not ready for the big-time just yet. I already know this. It takes three things to reach the highest plateau of Grifterhood. They are as follows.

1. Clothing & Accessories. To the untrained eye, there is little difference between a passable suit and an expensive suit. That's why you only need worthy accessories to make an impression. Watches and shoes are where it's at, man. You should see my collection. Matter fact, when you get a free moment you should Google "Ace's awesome watch and shoes" and see the pictures that come up.

2. Connections. I haven't any and that's a problem.

3. A Motor Mouth. You'd be surprised what you can grift if you know how to talk your way into it. Just look at Vince Vaughn. He grifted his way in both 'Jurassic Park 2' and Jennifer Aniston's pants.

I'm fine with running my mouth. I've been able to talk my way into or out of just about any situation handed to me. In school, when I was a kid, bullies often targeted me as a good choice to take their self-hatred out on. I believe this was because of my height and the self-confident little smile I adopted. Every teacher I ever had up until college loved that self-confident little smile. Bullies, to the contrary, hated tall, beloved students and so I often carried a bullseye on my back. If memory serves I've been invited to no less than eight major kafuffles in my time spent in lower education and was never forced to carry out the fight in any of those occasions.

For the record, a major kafuffle (as defined by me) is any school incident in which the agressor challenges the agressee to meet him or her after school. It has to be announced and prepared for.

Steam and fear must build.
Rumors started and exaggerated.
Sides taken.

Impromptu fights are kinda like streaking across the highschool football field: sure it'd get talked about, but without a prepared escape route once you fled the field, you'd always find yourself standing in the visitor's endzone all cold and trapped and cupping your nuts...

...okay so that's not really an accurate analogy. Just trust me okay? Impromptu fights never worked; you just had to meet him (or her) after school.

Lucky for me, I never got challenged to fight a "her". In general, any physical interplay between a man and a woman yields absolutely no positive result for the man, as you are either a dirtbag for competing against (and beating) a woman or an utter sissy-wimper for competing against (and losing) to a woman.

I learned this the hard way in third grade when I was taunted into arm wrestling my classmate Amanda Daniels. She was the tallest person in our grade (I was the second tallest) and whereas my height embarrassed me, her height created a chip on her shoulder. For three days she said she could beat me in arm wrestling; she even got everyone in our class to choose sides.* Eventually, I was shamed into combating her.

She beat me in less than four seconds and for reasons that are no longer clear (and very well may never have been), I had to give her half of my tater tots for like, three weeks.

I'm not sure what the moral of this story is. I originallystarted this tale of yore with the intent to illustrate why it is a fool's bargain to ever compete against a girl if you don't happen to be one yourself. But as I sit here waxing-nostalgic on my elementary embarrassments I am reminded of the final outcome to this whole situation: I was forced to give Amanda Daniels half my tater tots for like, three weeks, which served as the impetus to start eating lunch with her (cooties and all) which served as the impetus for me to befriend her and invite her to normal grabassing during recess, which begat my (truly) accidental groping of her not-yet-formed-but-nevertheless-groundbreaking-bosoms, which eventually sparked Amanda Daniels as the first girlfriend in the personal history of yours-truly.**

So what is the moral? Hell, I dunno. If you're gonna fight a girl, fight a cute girl, I guess.

Wait... wasn't I talking about grifting? How did we get to my elementary school trysts? Let's backtrack:

1st girlfriend ==> tater tot comeuppance ==> emmasculating arm wrestling ==> runnin' my mouth ==> not ready for the big grift.

Ah-ha. Okay. So I'm not ready to enter the "Ocean's Eleven" world of swindling. I've already got a day job. I'm a teacher, I haven't got the means or connections to hoodwink coorporations and fat cats (that being said, I am brilliant when it comes to sneaking into movie theaters). I'm on a constant search to discover, how better to swindle the general populace?

I was sitting in a coffeehouse earlier this morning when it hit me; something my Bubby told me several years ago.^ We were in a department store and she was talking to a shopgirl looking at earrings or perfume or something, I can't recall. The shopgirl left whatever it was she was showing Bubby atop the counter after being called away for several minutes. Bubby then turns to me and says, "You know, I could put that in my pocket and convince the sales girl that she took it with her."

Taken aback slightly I said, "You think so?"

"Absolutely. I'm old. The elderly can get away with stealing anything as long as they aren't caught red-handed. They would blame you ten times before they ever blamed me."

You'd think Bubby was Calamity Jane the way she was rollin' me at this moment. Calamity Jane she is not, and in the end, she never touched whatever it was the shopgirl had left behind.

That moment nevertheless, opened my eyes. The best grifters use the people they are stealing from as a weapon against themselves. This is the thought that consumed me thid past Friday while taking Neddy around town.

Important Information About Neddy

1) His name is not really Neddy. I changed it in hopes of keeping my job. Amanda Daniels, however, is my third grade girlfriend's real name. And if you find her, tell her I want a rematch.

2) Neddy is my student. And yes, that does mean that I am someone's teacher. And yes, you are right to fear for Neddy's well-being.

3) Neddy has Downsyndrome.

This last fact about Neddy is the most important because if there's one thing I've learned as a teacher of teenagers with various disabilities, it is that they herald in a high amount of discomfort while maintaining an equally high amount of sympathy.***

Neddy would be a perfect partner-in-crime. He's a bastard, first-of-all, which is not a nice thing to say about anyone, much less someone with Downsyndrome, but it's true nevertheless. Neddy is a bastard because he is intelligent, far more intelligent than the average person gives him credit for. He's been underestimated his entire life and it's made him angry.

Resentful.

He's developed a keen sense of how to utilize his disability (which most people wrongly assume renders him both useless and harmless) to completely take advantage of everyone around him.

And I plan to take advantage of him. Let the circle remain unbroken.

Yesterday, Neddy and I went around town fundraising for our school, which was more than reminiscent of Tom Cruise lugging Dustin Hoffman to Vegas in Rain Man: frustrating and style-cramping - but highly profitable. We went to banks and bakerys and restaurants and grocery stores and Neddy stuttered through spiel after spiel and manager after manager about his school's fundraiser. And "oh-wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-we-could-get-this-donation-or-that-donation and the whole time Neddy's eyes are drooping and puffy and his hair is messy and all the managers in all the places of business felt uncomfortable. Neddy stuttered and stuttered and the managers felt uncomfortable. And guilty because of their discomfort. All the managers in all the stores want to get back to work, but felt guilty for wanting to get back to work. Guilty because the managers assumed that their life was better than Neddy's. They didn't know Neddy is loaded. He can buy and sell us all. All the managers in all the places of business assumed that not giving Neddy one more minute was shameful. They felt shame. Guilt and shame and they were going to hell. So the managers would give Neddy one more minute of their time. One more minute and a gift certificate. Hey, it's for a good cause. two good causes because of Neddy's affliction.

Here kid, here. Take two dozen bagels - on me. Here's a free set of tires. A hundred dollar gift certificate. Whatever. The managers are guilty and they just don't wanna go to hell.

Meanwhile, I didn't lift a finger to help Neddy. I didn't need to. He loves this stuff. I bought a car freshner while Neddy's droopy eyes got us a fistful of gift certificates. I bought and ate a donut in the bakery, read the newspaper in the bank, the restaurants.

I didn't even leave the car when Neddy tried the gas station.

Neither of us ever showed anyone any proof that such a fundraiser even existed. The people of Massachusettes are tortured with guilt and highly gullible - not MidWesterner-type gullible - but easily duped nevertheless.

Visions of Raymond and Charlie Babbit.
Visions of Bonnie & Clyde (dibs on Clyde).
Visions of The James Gang.
Visions of The Long Riders.
Visions of Scrooge McDuck leaping into his enormous pile of riches.

And Neddy doesn't need the profit, he doesn't want it; he wants the game. He wants to make every manager in every store feel bad, to give him stuff because of their guilt. But Neddy doesn't want this stuff. He wants power. He is a bastard, and bastards want power. He wants the game like I do.

I want the game but my eyes are not droopy and I haven't got a lisp. But I can talk. I can talk my ass off. Talk a whirlwind.

I can talk my way out of ever having to arm-wrestle a girl ever again. I can talk, but my words cultivate no guilt.

Visions of Mickey & Mallory Knox.
Visions of 'Pretty Boy' Floyd.

I would come up with the grift, implement it; coach Neddy. Mentor him. Shape him. We'd travel state-to-state. He'd get to mindfuck an entire nation. Wrongheaded revenge against a God that retarded this boy's body and mind but spared his spirit. He would get the mindfuck, I would get free oil changes and lattees and Fender guitars, and iPods and whatever. Like the Catholic church before us, guilt will enblazen us with riches.. Dolly Parton's tits are worth a million dollars, Neddy's puffy eyes will be worth twice that. Quadruple that.

Visions of Baby Face Nelson.
Visions of Richard Nixon.

I am Neddy's brain. Neddy is my forcible will. We are pistons pumping the well-oiled machine that is your guilt. You haven't stopped us.
[I am a bad teacher.]
You aren't even aware we need to be stopped.
[Should I quit or wait to be fired?]
Who's next?
[Neddy deserve better. Bubby is not to be blamed.]
Guilt. O great destructor! Ruiner of men!
Visions of Ned Kelly. Visions of Ma Barker.
Visions of Cole Younger. Visions of Perot Rocaguinarda.
Refrigerators, Nike shoes, free buffets, 2 liter sodas, gift certificates. Who's next?
[I'm getting carried away?]
Who will fail to stop us next?

=========================

* The boys cheered for me, of course, and the girls... well, I guess the girls cheered for Amanda, but they mostly just stood behind her braiding each other's hair while Amanda talked shit about what a little sissy I was.

** "Having a girlfriend" at Hawthorne Scholastic Academy in 1988 consisted of nothing more than passing notes with hearts scribbled on them. I suppose it also meant that the two tallest kids in Mrs. Gelderman's third grade class had formed an unbeatable empire of harmony and strength.

^ I am not Jewish, nor is "Bubby". But when I was about to be born, my grandma wasn't ready to be called "grandma"; she said it made her sound old. Desperate to find a more suitable label, "Bubby" is what she settled on.

*** Children and dogs still attract the most love and sympathy, but most people feel comfortable around both entities and that is a liability to any grifter worth his or her sand.

Chubby Bunnies, Triple-Doubles & The Mighty 5-3-5

Do not read this if you get queasy easy.
Do not read this if grown men behaving like juveniles angers you.
Do not read this if your taste in food runs on the sophisticated side.
Do not read this if your opinion of me already runs toward the negative (as this entry will do nothing to improve this outlook).
Do not read this if you find something inherently wrong with using dogs as cleaning utensils.

The rest of you: let's rock.

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It is not at all important that you know the following information about me.

There are three (3) things on this Earth I love more than rock'n'roll, and I will list them for you in decending order of importance:

3) Sports. I'm fairly certain I coulda played in the Major Leagues if I applied myself. I was an awsome fielder and I could bunt cleaner than a scotch-guarded patio. Alas... I fell in with the theater clique in high school and that was the end of "Sporty me".

2) Bear. Bear is my old English sheepdog. He is dumb as a bag of biscuits (the bulk of why I love him). He is so passive, in fact, that I once held onto his hindlegs and Swiffered my entire kitchen floor by dragging him around while his fur collected all the dust.
Bear did nothing but lay there licking his jowls.*

1) Food. I'm gonna be a great big fat man when my matabolism decides it's time to pay the piper. But until that time comes, I love food more than I love my own mother.**

I suppose it is poor taste not to have included God or my sister or my parents or any of my inspirational teachers throughout the years or Abraham Lincoln or some damn thing, but let's face it.. .you woulda seen that coming. You were expecting it, but you weren't expecting me to list food, now were you? HaHA.

Eat it suckers.

Quick Recap: There is nothing I love in this world more than rock'n'roll. Except for food. And I love eatng contest more than food. And I hafta assume I love my mother more than all of it.

I am a putrid prioritizer.

Now where was I? God what was I talking about? I really need to work on my editing. Oh yeah... I remember now.

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I recently attended a gathering in Brighton, Massachusetts this past Saturday commemorating National Corn Dog Day. I wasn't aware that Corn Dogs had their own day, but they do and I commemorated it. I won't go into much detail as to the history and origin of NCDD, but I will refer y'all to the National Corndog Day website: http://www.corndogday.com/

When I arrived with friends to a non-descript house in a borough outside of Boston, I was a little put-off. I expected blocked-off streets, flashing lights, perhaps a giraffe. Nothing. It was in some dude's house. A dude, older than me; married. It was in that moment that I saw a vision of myself in 5 years. This vision met me first with horror, and soon dissippated in amusement.

These guys weren't so damn bad. They were into the NCAA tournament and liked eatin' junk just like I do. I was happy to meet a few blokes not confined to dancin' for the man. I dug it. It reminded me of, well... me.

Anyway everything was normal and fine until I struck up a conversation with a man wearing a tool belt filled with mustard and barbeque sauce instead of hammer and nails. My inquisitive side taking over, I asked the guy what the belt was for.

He told me it was because he was going for the triple double. I prodded further...
"Good sir. What is this Triple-Double you bespeak?"

"I am touched you would pr'offer such a query, my fine lad." (alright, we didn't speak like this, but wouldn't it be kinda quirky if we had?)

He went on to tell me that a "Triple-Double" - in honor of the athletic feat found in basketball - is an accomplishment of drinking ten (10) beers (Pabsts specifically), eating ten (10) corndogs, and ten (10) handfuls of tater tots, which must equal 100 total tots. The timeframe: from tipoff of the first game of the 2nd round in the NCAA basketball tournament to the final buzzer of the last game of that day; roughly ten hours.

From a long, deep, unfulfilled slumber, I awoke. My stomach leapt. My mouth salivated. My eyes widened. My enjoyment of corndoggery hastened and heightened; grew afresh. I was no longer drinking a beer, muching a handful of tots and ingesting a cornbread-wrapped hotdog on a teeny pike. I was competing. I was standing upon the threshold of legend.

I was 1/10 of the way to obliterating my body with poisoned deliciousness.

I hadn't made it far before I gave up. I hadn't trained; mentally or gastrually. I carried no condiment belt, set up no one to drive my enebriated ass home. I finished after only 4 corndogs and 30 tots. It took me 1.5 hours to accomplish this feat. Like the ancient Roman gladiators before me, I will build myself, strengthen my weaknesses and survive the next coliseum bout.

And while we're speaking of Pantheons, I'd like to offer up my very own, as mused by last weekend's incendiary corn dog festivities.

TOP 8 (because I cannot think of any more than 8) EATING CONTESTS

8) The Triple-Double Like any good song to arrive on the charts, only time will tell where it belongs in the history books. It took Maroon 5 three years for their album to become overplayed, overblown, overrated and exposed as the piece of junk it turned out to be. So, I am enamoured with the Trip'Doub, but I cannot usurp the rightful spot of it's predecessors just yet.

7) The Ruins Of Ancient Ramen. If you are in college or were once in college, you've no doubt had Ramen noodles. You've probably had a lot of Ramen noodles. But have you had five dry, unseasoned packets in 10 minutes? No. This one is painful. It hurts my jaw more than eating a whole package of Skittles in one sitting. Don't try this contest unless money is involved.

6) The Belly Bundle (a.k.a. The Stomach Squisher, The Tummy Tumbler). This hellish battle is the most scientific of all the contests. It is said that an hour must pass in order for the small and large intestines to process whatever is ingested. Following with this fun little factoid is another one suggesting that even the most stretched of stomachs cannot hold a gallon of anything all at once.***
It is rumored that the Belly Bundle has been accomplished several times before. Many people have claimed to have seen "their friend" drink a gallon of milk in under an hour. I will not pass judgement upon those people, but I will add that I have never seen it done first hand and when I attepted the feat myself (with a harmless gallon of water) not only did I fail to finish the water, but I felt loagy for several days afterward.

5) The Chubby Bunny. This is the only contest in my Top 8 that is technically a competition against others. It's simple: stuff as many full-sized marshmallows into your mouth as possible - do not swallow - and after each marshmallow, you must annunciate the words "Chubby Bunny". The first one to choke or spit gooey 'mallow all over their friend or loved one loses and either a) dies from asphyxiation or b) no longer has a friend or a loved one.

I have never engaged in this one personally, as it has long been my belief that the marshmallow is a sugary treat meant to be savored and enjoyed - not stuffed en masse as part of some slimy amalgm. That being said, it's funnier than hell to be in a room with a bunch of idiots screaming "Chubby Bunny" in repeated muffled voices.

4) The Perfect Game. Nine (9) hotdogs in nine (9) innings of baseball.

Interesting strategy involved on this one. Do you eat three hotdogs quickly while your original hunger rages and then take a break? Do you keep a steady one-dog-per-inning pace? Mustard? No mustard? And what is the drink-to-dog-ratio?

I always thought my group of friends invented this contest in college. But everytime I talk about it, someone else in the room claims to have done it as well. It kinda frustrates me. Like a cute girl at summer camp who always flirted with you. She'd puff you up, make you feel like the cock of the walk. You'd head back to your boys' bunk and brag about how awesome she thought you were, only to find out she'd already kissed your two best friends.

3) The Cycle. It is my long standing belief that the old mantra: "Beer Before Liquor, Never Sicker" is a myth. The order in which the liquids enter your body has nothing to do with the style of hangover infesting you the following morning. It's got more to do with judgement. If you house a half-dozen beers only to move onto tequila shots, not only will you be unable to taste it, but you will also be unable to gauge what the fuck you're doing. However, if you slam five shots and move onto beer, you far from being "in the clear", my friend.
I already hate myself for discussing "drinking" as much as I already have and it'll be a long time before you hear me discuss the ribaldry that is gettin' hammered. Nevertheless, The Cycle was invented as a thumb in the eye of the "Beer Before Liquor" myth.

You are to split The Cycle into three (3) seperate rounds. Each round consists of a shot, a beer and a mixed drink of your choice (Rum'n'Coke, L.I. Ice Tea, SeaBreeze, whatever) . You choose the order in which you drink these three drinks. The next round, you order the same three drinks but change the order and then change the order again for the third and final round.

Surefire barf every time. You "win" if you hold your barf until after your ninth and final drink. My preferred Cycle order is: shot-mixed-beer; beer-shot-mixed; mixed-beer-shot.

2) The Saltine Towers. I consider this one the granpappy of all the eating contests. The gist is ten (10) regular Saltine crackers eaten and swallowed in one minute. Each cracker is 2.5 inches x 2.5 inches and when stacked atop one another (The Saltine Tower, if you will) it stands a mere 2 inches.

It seems startlingly easy. Everyone thinks they can do this. But you will fall to the Tower just as thousands before you have fallen to it. You won't even make it to eight crackers.

1) The Mighty 5-3-5. By all accounts I should be dead. I don't know how I survived The Mighty 5-3-5 several Mardi Gras ago.

In New Orleans there is a specialty beverage called the Hand Grenade. It looks like a Slurpee, tastes like Hawaiian Punch and leaves you breathless and barfing like nine shots of Jack Daniels. An equally foolish friend of mine suggested we, over the course of one night, drink five (5!) of these bad bastards, follow them with three (3) beers and chase all of that with five more (+5) Hand Grenades.

I should be dead. I don't know why I'm not.

But as Dave Chappelle noted: white people just love talking about what alcohol they were able to consume the night before and I promise you, no bragging rights supercede the bragging rights of he who completes The Mighty 5-3-5.

I'm not sure what the rules of MySpace.com are, but legally I may be obligated to warn minors that binge drinking is both dangerous and illegal. So don't do it...
...unless you're sure you won't get caught. If that be the case, have at it and wear clean underwear.

I love food. I love games. I love making food into games. Don't judge too harshly. I'll write an "intellectual" blog next, okay? Will that appease you?

We'll wax artistic on Literary pop bands like Camera Obscura and Belle & Sabastian. Hopefully that will make up for typing the word "barf" three times?

Next time, I'll share my thoughts on Plato and Heidiegger and Kant. We can roll over the abhorrent mistreatment of American's after the first World War during Hoover's presidency. We'll cry like Oprah, okay?

For now, I just wanna giggle at the term "Chubby Bunny".

Now leave me alone to feed marshmallows into my mouth until I go walleyed.

========================

* For all you animal cruelty activists out there, fear not - I immediately told him he was a good boy and fed him a doggie treat after I pulled the dust from his belly.

** This statement is probably false. If my little league baseball glove, my mom, a handful of peanuts, and a copy of Springsteen's Born To Run were all hanging off the edge of a cliff and I could only save one of them... I suppose the nuts would plummet to their eternal cracking and my little league glove doesn't really fit anymore so...

...Mom versus Bruce. I dare not inquire further.

*** What you will soon learn from these tasks is that everything listed works under the assumption that those who attempt them are expected to fail. It is understood that if you complete any of these contests, you may have won the battle, but you have also lost an inherently larger war. Those of you cringing at the thought of these "games" will inevitably ask "why". Those amongst us who engage in such activites can only reply, "to see if we can."

There are extreme sports and then there are extremely gluttonous sports.

Stalking From the Rooftops

READER'S NOTE: This blog was orignally posted on my MySpace blog, thus the references to that site.

I'm feeling more popular than usual this week. There's been an influx of people I've never met before asking to be my "friend" upon this novelty called MySpace. For the most part, I blindly accept their friendship and read all about them shortly thereafter.

I have no idea what interest these people have in who I am or what I say. Nevertheless, I am absolutely convinced that MySpace is, one way or the other, going to change the ways of the world. This world I speak of is for the lonely, the desperate, the overly-curious.

I'm speaking of course, of the world of stalkers.

I hafta admit to missing the good ol' days of stalking though. You had to really want it back then; you had to earn your information. Late-night drive-bys to see if someone else's car was in the driveway. Hiding in bushes to see who came in and out of the house. Hiding in the bathroom across the hall from your ex's highschool locker.... y'know; stuff we all used to do, right? RIGHT?

My tallest glass of "stalkahol" came during my senior year of highschool and involved a girl I never dated and barely interacted with throughout my years of academia.

READERS NOTE: The names in this blog have been changed to stop you nosey fuckers from typing them into the SEARCH function of MySpace in hopes of finding out who I once rolled with. So if you search any of the names written here, I don't actually know them.. it's just a coincidence that they are on here. Like the poor schmucks in 1983 whose phone numbers happened to be 867-5309.

"Jenny?... Jenny who? ...I don't know any Jenny, pal. My name is Ralph. ...How'd you get this number?...Yeah, well screw you too, buddy! Turn off the radio!"

Anyway, for what it's worth, I kept my real name. My real name is Ace. So go ahead and call me Ace. The name of the girl in this blog is Jenna. Jenna was not her real name, but the real life girl that Jenna is based on is a total cutie and I have firmly believed for quite some time that there are no ugly "Jennas" in this world. I cannot explain this phenomenon, but it nevertheless seems absolutely true. Therefore, nicknaming the girl in my blog Jenna, seemed more than appropriate.

So, just to recap:
1) My real name is Ace.
2) Only name your daughter Jenna if you want her to be attractive.
3) If you end up naming your attractive daughter Jenna, prepare for a swarm of dudes named Ace coming around your house looking for nookie.

* * * * *

There are two facts you need to know before I begin my story.
FACT 1: When I was in high school, the house I lived in had a stucco-topped roof that extended a solid ten feet from my upstairs bedroom window. It was essentially a back deck with no walls.
FACT 2: I was a very normal teenager growing up. I cannot prove this, you are just going to have to trust me. I was you. Or your friends. Or, if you were one of the freaks in high school, then I was the normal guy that was a little uncomfortable being your lab partner in chemistry class. That was me. Joe Normal.

But feel free to call me Ace.

And from my understanding normal people had two types of love interests growing up. There were the "Real People" and the "Unattainables". Real People talked to you, dated you, kissed you, considered you friends... and they never ever looked as good as the Unattainables. Unattainables were not famous, they were not models or pop stars. They lived in your town and shopped at your mall and hated the same gym teacher that you idolized. BUT they were in a different social hierarchy; understood the society around them better than you did. And although it is not nice to say, in highschool, they were better than you were.*

I had an Unattainable. She was in my French class when I was a freshman and I loved her everyday for four straight years. Her name was Jenna Oliver. She was clean and well-groomed and always smelled like exotic fruit. I, on the other hand, went a stretch of eight days wearing the same ratty red Tom Petty t-shirt**; so already, the differences between the two of us should be evident.

Her walk - one of the first things I noticed about her - was solid and peacock- proud with a matching vanity. Her arms, gently bent outward at the elbow, breezed past her thighs, wafting front to back, front to back.
Front to back.
Front to back.
Her butt had an imperceptible wiggle that reminded me of a sultry dame from some old James Cagney movie. I often imagined Jenna, dressed to kill, shooting some "john" in the heart with a .22 pistol. # She never carried books in her arms and I don't remember her ever wearing a backpack either. In comparison, I always walked as if I were trying to keep from crapping my pants. My back was hunched; shoulders rolled forward as if I were shielding my nipples from the rain. We were from the same town, but we were also from two wholly seperate worlds.

The largest difference between the people of my ilk and the people of hers was that I spent my time watching - Jenna spent her time being watched.

Consider this the segue back to my bedroom roof.

As it happens, Jenna lived across the alleyway from me. Well, technically across the alleway and over two houses from me, which I believe constitutes the term "kittycorner", but these blogs tend to run lengthy and I'm trying to remain conservative with my details. I hadn't realized her approximation to my house for the first three years of highschool (our groups ran in such seperate circles that she could have lived in Transylvania and I wouldn't have known it).

Then one dark, soundless spring night while looking for shooting stars on the roof (a habit I learned from my dad years ago), I noticed a pink streak wth fine golden hair speeding from one lit-up room of an adjacent house to another. When you are 17-years-old, anything with exposed skin and blonde hair draws immediate priority over everything else.

It was Jenna Oliver. And seeing Jenna Oliver in a bathtowel was like striking gold or videotaping a Sasquatch.
It was like shaking hands with Tupac.

Jenna Oliver. It might as well have been Bridgette Bardot.
Catherine Deneuve.
Audrey Hepburn.

"Holy shit," is the first sentiment that popped into my numbed-up brain. Followed closely by, "I'm seeing Jenna Oliver in a towel. She's in a towel and her hair is wet . She's in a towel, her hair is wet and her skin is all tanned." ***

What I'd like to tell you is that I remained cool. I'd really like to tell you this, but that would be lying and I wanna save all my lies in this blog for later. So although I'd like to tell you that I calmly enjoyed a glimpse of natural beauty and went merrily on with the rest of my life, I am instead forced to admit that I had a total freak-out and set up camp on my Goddamn roof for the remainder of the spring and into the summer. Noticing the amount of stargazing I had recently been engaging in, my mother bought me a telescope to better cultivate my newfound love of the stars.

I'm not kidding - it got that bad.

I also formed an odd habit of eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while I waited for a glimpse of the Unattainable****.

Mozart enjoyed eating cheese while he composed, I enjoyed peanut butter and jelly while I stalked...

...Alright, lemme stop here for a second, because I'm worrying that I'm making myself out to be a dangerous creep. I wasn't dangerous. I petted dogs without them barking at me, still made babies laugh instead of cried. I was a loser - absolutely - but I wasn't a sicko. I still maintained my friendships. Still went out on weekends, completed all my homework and so-on. And while I did all that, I swore myself to secrecy. This was my mania to deal with alone. For better or for worse.

And that's how it went for the remainder of the schoolyear. Being a senior was both amazing and ominous. I was scared for my college-bound future and scared to leave my highschool years behind me. There was something comforting about my roof. Jenna Oliver became inhuman after a while. It wasn't about seeing her so much as it was about achieving a goal, which many months ago had been set at catching a glimpse. And occasionally I would see her, but only briefly and only in the evening (and never more scantily clad than that first night). I imagined her to be too cool to ever be home on the weekends. I imagined Jenna never having experienced heartbreak or sadness. I imagined her to be forever happy, always partying, always excited to be alive.

I wondered what someone like her would think of someone like me if she ever realized I climbed onto the roof 3 evenings out of every 7 with a baggie full of sandwiches. Or what she might think if she ever caught a glimpse into my window?

Life can be cruelly humorous sometimes. The summer before college, I needed a car. Anything would do, it just needed to run properly. I searched classifieds for people selling their cars and saw an ad for a nice '94 Mazda 626. Not too old. I called the number to inquire about it, the lady on the other end was middle-aged sounding, maybe older. She gave me the address and lo and behold it happened to be just one block over from me. Crazy coincidence, right?

It was Jenna Oliver's house.

And what I did not know at the time, but soon realized, was that Jenna was selling her car before she headed off to college. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that until I compared the address I had written on a Post-It note to the numbers on the house I was standing in front of. They were expecting me, I couldn't turn back now.

Could I? God what if Jenna was home? I should turn around... too late, I had already rung the doorbell. If there was a God, he would have sent Jenna to the mall an hour ago. And while we're dictating what God would do if he existed, he would not only have sent Jenna to the mall an hour ago, he would also have her try on the new underwear she bought at the mall, later tonight while I am eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches...

God apparently retired.

Jenna opens the door and sees me standing outside her home. Amazing is the only word arriving at the forefront of my thoughts. What were the fucking odds that this social butterfly would actually be home on a Saturday afternoon?! In all the days I'd sat out on the roof, I couldn't recall a single-Goddamned- time Jenna Oliver had ever been home at this time of the day.

The first thing out of Jenna's mouth was, "finally decided to get off your roof, huh?"
Alright. She didn't say that. But I imagined her saying that and I wanted you all to share in the same brief moment of horror that I had to. In actuality, she said, "Hey!" in an oddly excited fashion, like we were old buddies.

Because I am suave like George Clooney, I respond in kind with something akin to, "Jenna. you live here? Wow. Small um, world. I live just across the alley. I never knew you lived here."

I remember her smiling for an extended moment and, to this day, I wonder if it was because she knew I was lying.

At this point, all of those creepy stalker movies from the early nineties were edging their way into my consciousness. These movies always had an interaction between the slasher/stalker and the damsel-in-distress. About 50 minutes into the movie, the damsel would have some sort of run-in with the slasher (always appearing to be a kind, joyful sort) and to her, the run-in would seem harmless. But for the audience, the meeting would be wraught with tension and fear. Suddenly I felt like the audience (watching via hidden video cameras planted throughout my town, of course) was finding this particular meeting uber-creepy; wrought with tension and fear.
I was Hannibal Lector.
I was Son of Sam.
I was Lady MacBeth. I already had blood on my hands. I had never before fashioned myself Hannibal Lector, but the audience now had and I hated them for that.

The tortured outcome of this meeting is that the car turned out to be a great deal. It was in good condition, even has a tape player. I told her I'd take it and immediately regretted the decison.

I could almost hear the unsettling Howard Shore music in the background as I wrote the check. And in the brief moment our hands made contact as I passed her the check, I imagined a slow-motion close-up of this encounter, the audience recoiling, counting down the inevitable seconds until I was wearing her face as a mask!

I was a sick cannibal. Driving around in Jenna's old flesh.

As I climbed into the driver's seat, waving to Jenna I couldn't help but wonder what fava beans tasted like.

Only now - years later - does any of this strike me as humorous. The things we remember of our past; those things that will forever remain as fact. Faces and places sometimes fizzle and blur. What was said is more often than not paraphrased or fabricated altogether. Times of day, motivations; these are the things that escape us with each passing year. They are often replaced in order to protect us.

I don't remember why I sat out on the roof that last summer night, but looking back, I tell myself it was to see if Jenna had left for college yet, as I was fairly certain it would be the last time I ever saw her.† I can no longer recall the weather that final night sitting, stuck in a forward gaze into a veritable strangers bedroom window, but I'll go ahead and paint that night as a brisk August evening, because sitting here typing, that's the way I remember it.

It wasn't stalking, it was agressive fondness.

Those were the good ol' days of stalking. Back then, I put in my time. Worked my hours. Ate my sandwiches. There's no more challenge anymore. I'll finish blogging and then see what my girlfriend from four years ago did yesterday without leaving my seat... and it wouldn't be creepy. It will be assumed. Everyone is stalking these days.

Maybe even Jenna. Maybe not though, she doesn't have a MySpace account. Trust me, I've checked. Y'know... for posterity.
For the record.
For the books.
For old times sake.
_____________________________________________________________

* It should be noted that, if you happened to be the coolest person in high school, there were still "Unattainables" around. No one could escape this. If you were at the top of the heap in your own school, than YOUR Unattainable was probably enrolled at the private Catholic school on the other side of town, or the senior from last year's class, now in college.
Proof that, regardless of who you are, shit always rolls downhill.

** There was no specific reason I did this, I had other shirts. But in a running theme through this blog: teenagers can't explain anything they do. That's why everyone who is not a teenager, hates teenagers.

# I never imagined this in some gross horny manner, I just really enjoyed film noir.

*** When my faculties began functioning again, I deduced that she had just gotten out of the shower. Smart, huh?
I got B's in high school.

**** I guess it's not so odd that I ate sandwich snacks out on the roof, but I put them in plastic baggies... that's the part that's kinda wierd. I'm not sure why exactly. I never really thought about it. My mom packed my lunch sandwiches in those baggies and it just came with the territory. See? I'm telling you, teenagers can't explain anything they do. Whatever actions highschoolers take, they don't question the reasoning behind it. Just do-do-do. Why? Who the fuck knows.

† I've remained correct in that hunch, so far. I occasionally hear about her, but I have yet to see her since that summer. I hear she is still very attractive and hasn't gained any weight at all.

Top 10 Ingredients For A Kickass Song

At the risk of exposing myself as an irredeemable goober, I have decided to make public, my long-standing belief that every good song can be divided into one of 10 categories that I have honed and crafted over the years.

Firstly, I should mention that drum and guitar solos do not count, as they are obvious necessities in creating a great song. That's like claiming lyrics and melodies are required as well. Duh, right?

Instead, what I have here are the ingredients to creating a masterwork of kickassitude. Any given song can include many or just one of these ingredients, but if they include none, the song was probably written by Tori Amos. (ouch. Burn.) If you know of any song that includes all ten of the rules listed here, please e-mail me immediately so I may find it and commence gettin' my face melted!

NOTE TO READER: If you find yourself struggling to identify with this list when comparing it to your own musical tastes... please, do nont hesitate to come on over to the house so I can fix whatever aisl you. Bring your iPod, I'll reload it, you'll be set in like, ten minutes.

Wish luck.

TOP 10 INGREDIENTS THAT MAKE A KICKASS SONG, A KICKASS SONG

10. When Instruments That Are Not Actually Instruments Are Nevertheless Used As Instruments. When Brian Wilson holed himself up in his California recording studio to create Pet Sounds, the engineers on that record thought he had gone criminally insane. In a time where The Beatles were cookie-cutting out number one hits with bass, guitar, and drums, Wilson used barnyard animals, bicycle bells, and an oddity called the Theremin, which is such a cool indstrument, people still don't know what thre fuck it is. On a completely unrelated note: Pet Sounds is one of the five best albums ever made.
EXAMPLES: 'Filipino Box Spring Hog' by Tom Waits, 'Extraordinary Machine' by Fiona Apple. .

9. Songs In List-Form. I've gotten into dozens of arguments about this one. Many people feel listing shit for four minutes isn't much of a feat, but any song that manages to rhyme Budapest and Khruschev and homicide with thalidomide is damn near Socratic in it's brilliance. (SIDEBAR: it wasn't until Billy Joel's incendiary song list-of-stuff-that-happened-before-I-was-born hit the charts that I noticed that Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio rhyme. Not only that, Disneyland and Peter Pan rhyme as well. There's some sort of comforting symmetry in all that. )
EXAMPLES: 'Wanted Man' by Johnny Cash, 'Man At the Top' by Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band, 'I've Been Everywhere' by Hank Snow.

8. Grunts, Yelps, and Screeches That Occur Without Warning. We'll call this the "James Brown Award For Excellence In Song-Craftmanship". I'm gonna go ahead and assume this one needs no clarification.

7. The Band Drops Out. You know you've got a good song when, about three minutes through the song, the band just stops. The song's hook is so sustaining and so brilliant, the band can completely break off and the tune remains be in your head - liquified into your neurological system - wherein all that is required is a simple vocal repeat of the words.
EXAMPLES: 'Float On' Modest Mouse, 'I Love Rock' N' Roll' by Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, 'Smalltown' by John (Cougar?) Mellencamp

6. Claps, Snaps and/or Foot Stomping. Look, I like drums as much as the next guy, but there's a part of me that will always appreciate Ace Frehley's foot percussioning in New York Groove more than anything his guitar ever did.
EXAMPLES: 'Clap Your Hands' by The Meters, 'We Will Rock You' by Queen, 'Photograph' by Weezer.

5. False Endings. I was a fan of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces despite knowing it was 80-percent false. I'm also a fan of songs that pretend to end only to scare the piss outta me when they suddenly return. What does this mean? It clearly means that I enjoy being duped and wetting my pants. False endings serve a dual purpose.
EXAMPLES: 'Do You Love Me' by The Contours, 'Centerfold' by J. Geils Band, 'Good Vibrations' by The Beach Boys.

4. Replacing Finely Crafted Lyrics With Rythmical Hollering. Although there is a wonderful aethestic pleasure in listening to artists impress audiences with their enlarged lexicon by rhyming eutopia with corneucopia (we'll call this "The Rule of The Decemberists"), there is also something totally, obviously wicked about rolling down the window and whoa-whoa-whoaing at the top of your lungs. Bonus: hard to forget the words when there are none.
EXAMPLES: 'Sweetness' by Jimmy Eat World, 'Of All the Gin Joints' by Fall Out Boy, 'Werewolves Of London' by Warren Zevon, 'Dope Nose' by Weezer

3. Fake Words. I dunno if I should credit Ella Fitzgerald, the Doo-Wop groups of the 1950's or Snoop Dog, but either way, making up words to fill a chorus or to rhyme with "drizzle", is a-okay by me.
EXAMPLES: 'Cement Mixer (Putt-i, Putt-i)' by Slim Gaillard, 'Rubber Biscuit' by The Chips, 'Da Doo Ron Ron' by The Crystals, 'Gossip Folks' by Missy Elliot

2. Horns. This is geared more toward rock songs, but I challenge anyone to give me an example of a song that was made worse by adding horns into it. This rule also applies to strings, specifically the violin. Oo... also, if I might be gluttonous for a moment, I'd also like to add bass guitar solos to this rule. Those are as rare and sweet as Cadbury Eggs in November.
EXAMPLES: 'Respect' by Otis Redding (horns), 'Hurricane' by Bob Dylan (actually, you can probably just include all the songs from the album Desire 'cause they all kick equal amounts of ass). (strings), 'Brown Eyed Girl' by Van Morrison (sweet, sweet bass solo)

1. Call and Response. I'm a sucker for interplay between two singers or musicians in one band. I like the idea that they are relying on one another to make the song pop. Sharing a microphone; intermingling their strumming and so-on... Is that gay? I didn't mean for that to come off as gay. Anyway, when I say "Kick", you say "Ass"! "Kick"! "Ass!" "Kick!" "Ass!"
EXAMPLES: 'You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling' by The Righteous Brothers, 'The Fallen' by Franz Ferdinand, 'Let Me Clear My Throat' by Biz Markie

So that's the list. Do with it what you will. Now go out there and be somebody!

Les Zygomates

In honor of Restaurant Week, some friends and I went to a French restaurant in the south end of Boston last night. Restaurant Week is a tri-yearly occurrence where an assortment of chic Boston-area eateries create a discounted menu in hopes of jazzing up business. Unfortunately, some of that extra business comes from kickass ragamuffins like myself hoping to taste - if but for a moment - the robust nectar of affluency. Affluency must be an acquired taste.

I cannot explain what I was doing at this place outside of that I seem to flock toward free or discounted dinners like Brad Pitt flocks to a-list starletts. I don't care for French food, to be honest, I don't particularly care for France. The last time I was in Paris a brasserie tried to pass watered tomato paste off as ketchup, a fact not made clear to me until after my dejeuner was smothered all up in this Parisian lie. As if that weren't bad enough, France was also the site of my first petting zoo experience, my first flamingo experience and my first bloody knuckle experience caused by said flamingo biting my hand for no good reason.* This is France to me, so we're already starting off on the wrong foot at Les Zygomates, the restaurant we attended last night.

The problem is that I just don't have any class. I can occasionally muster up enough fakery to fool people, but by and large I'm a goober and a mess. I am to buffoonery what James Frey is to lying. My frou-frou night at Frenchie's is an example of said buffoonery.

The badness started roughly nine seconds after entering the restaurant. Walking in after the rest of my friends, the first person I noticed relaxing in the lounge area was an ex-girlfriend of mine from way back. Well, she wasn't exactly an ex-girlfriend and she wasn't exactly from way back. She was a girl I went on a few dates with in October and lost interest in because she was too regal for me.° I tried to maintain the friendship but I went about it all wrong and ended up probably confusing, frustrating and eventually angering her into ignoring me. I can't claim to miss her much, but - as I never seem to run into anyone by sheer accident - I immediately entertained the idea that I had been duped. That I would, in any moment, by flanked on all sides by all the previous women in my life.

I wasn't ready for this. I was wearing scuffed shoes and hadn't combed my hair. I was unsettled. I did my best to hide behind my friends. It was at this moment that I realize that I hang around with a bunch of Goddamned midgets. I hunched down enough to take off a solid five inches and still towered over my accompaniment!

Our reservations were at 8 o'clock. It was 8:06 and we were still standing there like a flock of lost sheep. In my head I'm screaming. In my head I can't believe, of all the classy French restaurants in all the world, I had to walk into hers. In my head the seconds thunder away like gunshots. In my head I think my ex-whatever looks pretty. In my head, I shame myself for noticing that she looks pretty. In my head I am ridiculous; I am redonkulous**. In my head I'm wondering what the fuck reservations are for if I'm still forced to wait around like some regular walk-in. Six hours later, the out-of-place hipster host beckons us to the back of the restaurant (the "Music Room") and it is the last I see of any of my ex-female-persons-I-have-ever-batted-an-eyelash-at.

Les Zygomates was exactly what you'd expect of a posh French wine and jazz bar in the artsy loft apartment-area of the Chinatown district of Boston. Unless you have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about (in which case... the place was nice). Lots of redwood fixtures, framed portraits of famous wine advertisements, a bar that ran the length of the Music Room and a ladder-accessed alcove for the musicians. Consisting of a drummer, a trumpeter/conductor, an upright bassist and a piano player, the area for the band was no bigger than a jail cell and overlooked the rest of the bar like a band pit in a cabaret. The band was tight. Not KISS tight, but passable and pleasant.+

The four of us get seated in front of the windows at the table closest to the band which made me feel as if we were being displayed like the cowboys of the western age used to do with hanged prisoners as a warning to other outlaws. Apparently Les Zygomates hadn't been forewarned about my mohawked-clad roommate's pension for amusing himself by amicably waving to strangers as if they were longtime friends. He does this on the street from time to time and the result is always the same:

1. He smiles and waves.
2.The stranger in question - prone to the same human nature as the rest of us - immediately waves back with a confused smile while they try to connect where they know a blue-haired Phillipino. "Is he from school? Do my kids know him? Oh God! Was it from three Friday's ago when I blacked out?!"
3. By the time they settle on the idea that my roommate is crazy and they do not, in fact, know him - he is gone.

Add a pane of glass to this formula and you now know what my roommate entertained himself with for the duration of dinner.

Shortly after we are seated and have fully soaked in the atmosphere of jazz and wine and hoity-toity 29-year-old accountants and salesmen with waxed chests and eating disorders (pure assumption, I haven't any proof) we are greeted by a sour-faced waitress with a modicum of natural beauty but no kindness to speak of. She is unkind to us throughout the entire meal, which means one of two things: she 1) is French and has found a wonderful job placement for herself here in the states. Or 2) she took one look at us and deduced (correctly) that we are uncouth morons and that nothing good could come out of serving us.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Oh come now, Adam. Surely you couldn't have been that bad." No, no. I appreciate your apprehension, I do. But our waitress was right to wish she had the gelled-up car salesman and his satin scarf-clad lady friend at the table next to us. For your amusement I have included some of the classier occurences to take place during the course of the meal:

- - As previously mentioned, one of my roommates was decked out in a tweed jacket, dress pants and high-flung blue mohawk. Throughout the night he ate the garnish off his escargot plate and then convinced me I should do the same. It tasted like plastic. My roomate in question, in between the second and third course, almost made me spit my free water all over the table when - as the busboy (busman? busdude? busperson?) was taking away our emptied plates - quickly and desperately grabbed the small finger bowl of whipped butter from the guy. When the busboy looked at him accusingly, he calmly replied, "oh, I'm still working on the butter." At that point, there was nothing else on the table, not even a knife with which to spread the leftover butter... just the Goddamned butter. That's it. He's still working on the finger bowl of butter... this comment still kills me. You people thought I was exaggerating when I said we have no class.

- - The rest of us were no better. A buddy of ours who does not actually live with us, but might as well, was so enamored with the immediate service swanky restaurants give toward refilling waters, that he began drinking just to see how long it took for the waitstaff to refill his glass. After a while, he was drinking just so his glass would get refilled, not because he was at all thirsty.

We have no manners.

- - Look, I'm not soured, okay. I understand that we need young go-getters in this world; I shouldn't hate on those who do the things that young professional America should be doing. I could certainly stand to comb my hair, bathe seven days a week and drop the word "kickass" from my daily vocabulary. I should also draft a letter of apology to Les Zygomates for having plagued them for nearly two hours with our unabashed Robert Heinlein-ish unawareness. No one gave us a hard time, no one made fun of my poor clothing attempt to match a wine red collared shirt with a navy blue sweater and for that, I am appreciative.

Even the mean waitress with the angry pucker - she utilized the path of least resistence with us - by ignoring us completely. Our tip reflected our anger, but upon further ponderance, I wondered if we should have really blamed her? I didn't even know what the devil a "frite" was and why it went with steak. You should've seen my face when I discovered a frite was a frenchfry.++ And sweet Lord don't get me started on dessert. I learned a few things about the French this night; the most important lesson being that the French are liars. They call two scoops of icecream Mousse Ou Chocolat. Fuck that. You can call it what you want, it was two scoops of icecream. And Creme Brouille...? The loose translation of this had better be "burnt yogurt" or else I'm gonna be real pissed.

Anyway, can I really hold a waitress' poor service against her when, upon our greeting, the four of us collectively waved off wine (at a wine bar) in favor of water (which was free) and ordered, not off the menu, but from the paper flyer inserted into the menu for Restaurant Week? I mean, if you're a waitress and this all happens within the first twenty seconds of greeting your new diners, what did she really have to lose?

Did we enjoy ourselves at Les Zygomates? Heck yeah. Would we go back? Yes, but they probably would request that we not. Do I foresee a change from my normal hot-dog-and-frites-in-a-red-plastic-basket-with-a-refillable-rootbeer? Mmm. No. Each of us, are who they are. And I am a ragamuffin and I am kickass.

*** *** *** ***

* Okay, the flamingo might have had a good reason. I poked it's beak with my finger. I didn't poke it hard, but I guess hard enough that the pink destroyer saw fit to punish me by ripping chunks of skin from my hand - a punishment I still do not feel fit the crime.

° How regal, you ask? Regal enough to fit quite well in a place like this.

** What is "redonkulous"? I've heard this term for several years, but it seems to have really picked up steam recently. Did Kanye use this word on MTV? Is Ashlee Simpson entitling her new album "Redonkule"? Why is this fake word so popular? Was ridiculous just not strong enough, that people feel compelled to bend the middle of the word, like a guitarist bending a string to fit the note?

+Halfway through our meal, the band would take a break and Les Zygomates began piping in Stevie Wonder. This not only caused me to battle urges to shimmy throughout the second course (this place was too fancy to shimmy, they surely would have thrown me out) but it also seemed to undercut the jazz quartet, like personally giving the fat kid in gym class the confidence he needs to do participate in dodgeball only to immediately slam him in his head your damn self.

++I housed my steak like a junky hoarding crack and stared at my plate-full of frites when panic struck. Does Les Zygomates serve finger food? Do I eat these french frites with my fingers or do I hafta fork these motherfuckers? The four of us at the table were indecisive. I eventually chose to go with what I knew and use my fingers. With each bite however, my eyes darted around the room like a fiend scannin' for cops.

Poop Dudes (a.k.a. Blog-Of-Awesomeness)

I recently discovered the number of blogs Myspace hosts. The number is so vast, that I learned it less than five minutes ago and I already cannot recall it's vastness. The number had at least two commas. Did this many people have something to say fifteen years ago? Thirty? Fifty?

I feel like I have wanted people to know what I am thinking at every moment since I was four-years-old. My father - a jokester who apparently enjoyed molding his son's brain into silly putty - told me that our U.S. President installed cameras into everyone's houses, an idea my father probably thought would scare me, but I thought was totally good thinkin'. There were cameras all over; in the kitchen, the bedroom and even the bathroom; there was no place to hide. Ironically, he told this to me sometime around 1984 (probably in honor of George Orwell) and many years before The Truman Show.* Anyway, until I was in junior high and my friends constantly questioned why I kept winking at the light fixtures in their parents' house, I was under the impression that men-in-suits were wondering what I was doing and were assuaging such wonder by staring at video monitors hooked up to hidden cameras peppered around my house. This sounded like a real bad deal for those men-in-suits because most of the time I wasn't doing much of anything. Out of guilt, I always tried to make my routine minutae as entertaining as possible. I hoped that it would make the men-in-suits feel better about their jobs and maybe then they'd go home at the end of the day happier and less likely to fill their 4-year-old's head with lies about cameras and men-in-suits!

So anyway, I feel like I'm better equipped to blog than anyone uninterested in such an activity before 1984.

I guess blogging isn't about importance so much as it is about ease (the crux of why blogging has become so damn popular I suppose. Hell, I have three blogs and Lord knows I haven't put forth one worthwile sentiment on any of them), and ego. It takes a certain amount of ego to assume friends or strangers have any interest in your random collection of musings. I know I don't care about most people's random collection of musings, but somewhere along the line there is a disconnect between my feelings toward others and my projected feelings of others towards me.

That is ego.

I hope that soon, I will say something interesting or entertaining or worthy of a stranger's time. I'm not aiming for a Nobel here (I'd blog on Friendster if I was aiming for a Nobel), but if you look at the top blogs on Myspace... well, look I don't wanna knock a fellow blogger, so I'll just say that the word "poop" and "dude" appear frequently in such blogs.

Again though, my ego makes me a hypocrite: my profile uses the word "gism" so it's not like I can really play the highbrow card here. I guess I wish I had more to say than those Poop Dudes, but I do not. I only have some homeless man I saw on the street "the other day" to write about, or what I was like as a kid, or what song is currently melting faces. And through all this uncreative ramblings about nothing oringinal, I will nevertheless assume that I am awesome and anyone who isn't reading my blog-of-awesomeness is simply missing out. Like the guy who resisted buying the Killers album until, like last summer after the band was stretching to find a fourth single or the guy in my freshman biology class who failed because he was overly mezmorized with looking at his own sperm under a microscope**.

These are examples of people who missed the boat.

For the rest of you, this is Adam's Ego speaking. Congatulations on finding his blog-of-awesomeness. You shant be dissappointed. See? I just typed "shant" which is inarguably the best word you've heard all day. Go ahead, start using it around other people who haven't read this blog. Make it "the thing that you say". You'll be original and cool and you'll make everyone else want to start using shant instead of the word won't. Won't will soon be a word for suckers and baffoons.

No need to thank me, it's what I do. Awesomeness begets more awesomeness. But while you are using shant (and you will begin using shant) just remember that you heard it from Adam's Ego and Adam's Ego is way better than you could ever hope to be. So shut your blog down and give up.

*** *** *** *** ***

*My father also gave me the impression that there was a tall tower in our town that controlled every traffic light. He would tell me that if I was ever at a red light and rolled the window down and said, "please sir, change the light so I may go." that the workers i nthe tower would hear me and the light would turn green.

The timing must have been perfect when my dad first tried this trick on me, because for a good year or so, I totally fell for it. My dad wouldbe driving and my mom would be in the passenger seat - unaware of the magical traffic light tower - and she'd suddenly hear her little boy roll down the window in the middle of a Midwestern winter saying, "please sir, change the light so I may go."

She would ask my dad why I was saying that, and he would look at her and shrug as if he had nothing to do with her first-born son's psychotic behavior.

Looking back on this, I'm surprised I'm not more screwy. Unless I am screwy and people just aren't telling me. Which, considering I believed the Government hired all these men-in-suits and traffic light tower workers just to make my life a little more trying, is entirely possible.

** I have no idea how that kid got his sperm on a microscope slide.

Haley's Comet

Your father could always hold his own in a fight against all your other friends' fathers. This is an important fact when you are eight-years-old. When you are eight-years-old, you are the sum of your parent's parts. The father half of your parents is Atticus Finch. He is John Wayne in 'The Searchers'. He is Elvis Presley when Elvis Presley wore more leather than sequins. He is James Dean is Lou Gehrig is Johnny Unitis.

He is what you hope to one day become.

You watch him work up a sweat while fixing a broken stair behind the house when you are eight-years-old.

You don't watch him to learn how to repair a broken stairstep, as no ten-year-old, to your knowledge, has ever been called upon to utilize this knowledge. You watch him because this is what he is currently doing and everything he does seems abnormally important. He is fixing a stairstep. It was broken and in a minute, it will no longer be broken. He is ingenius, he is perfect. He is an unstoppable force. Davinci would pout, and Thomas Edison would weep in awe, your father is that amazing with this damn step. He is listening to Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis and he is grinding down a broken stairstep with number 6 sandpaper and he is amazing. He is incendiary. He is tired and frustrated and curses loudly and asks you not to tell your mother. He takes a break and pours you and he a glass of lemonade.

This is the brilliance of your father, he abutts two empty glasses against one another and pours both glasses of lemonade without ever halting the pouring process. You do not believe what you just saw, through the use of close approximation of two empty glasses and quick and precise shift of the pitcher from one glass to the next, your father has saved himself two to three seconds and immeasurable wrist strain. He is King Kong. He is Thomas Edison.

You think about how it costs you the use of both hands to simply tip the pitcher of lemonade yourself, and you normally spill.

When you think of your father, these are the images that immediately spring to mind:

1. Sunny. Saturday afternoon. 12-5:30. Every window in your apartment is open and the sounds of the city are brilliant and busy and loud and hypnotic.
2. Summer. Heat waves make everything wavy, dream-like, funhouse mirrored.
3. Chicago Cubs. You are a cliche. Baseball is a cliche. America is a cliche. You are unoriginal. You are uncool. America is uncool. Baseball is uncool. America is baseball is you.
4. Bruce Springsteen traveling to Darlington County. For some inexplicable reason, the thought of your dad's cut-off jean shorts always accompany this Springsteen song. Springsteen was cool in '88 and you suppose jean shorts were cool as well, or if not cool, at least common.
They are no longer common and unfortunately photographs still exist.
5. Sweat. You think of his need for that lemonade and the manner in which your dad wipes the sweat from his rounded sturdy face. He doesn't use his arm or his palm; in one motion he removes the turtleshell sunglasses from his head and uses the inside pocket of his elbow and bicep to sop up the massive amounts of sweat your father generates.

Your father is an artist. Your mother married a photographer. But your father is Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent and Peter Parker and lives a double life. People who take pictures are silly and sissy and gay. They are gay even though you do not yet know what gay is. Peter Parker was not a photographer. Clark Kent was not a journalist. Bruce Wayne was not a millionaire. Your father is not a photographer. He can beat up your friend's dads and he can fix broken stairsteps in your home and he listens to Jerry Lee Lewis. He is Spiderman is Superman is Batman.

If dad is damn near perfect, you could never be anything but a complete and utter failure by comparison.

Dad treats you like a glass crescent star and handles you with kid gloves. As big as he is, he is the most gentle man will ever know. When you think of him, you will not think of his roadster in the garage or the sounds of the Beach Boys blasting out of the roadster's speakers. Or The Who or The Doors. You don't think about the time you and he were playing catch and he threw a baseball into your face at a probable speed of 570 mph. The ball caught flame, lost it's seams, began to bleed. You could not have possibly caught a ball thrown with such force. Your nose was a swollen apple. It was no longer a nose but bloody pounded hamburger. What you remember about your father has nothing to do with ther magnitude of your father's pitch, but with the guilt that he felt after hitting you in the face with it.

The amount of ice cream he bought after you stopped crying like a ridiculous baby.

You remember the look your mother gave him for being so awesome at pitching and you hope your mother never gave you a look for being so inable to catch his awesome pitches.
You remember how your father still hasn't forgiven himself for hitting you with that baseball.
You remember how quiet your father is and you will always wonder what he is thinking.
Sometimes your father wears white shirts with tiny red stripes that make him look as if he is wearing a solid pink shirt. This is sad for you and somewhat confusing as he has been heard saying that he does not care for the color pink. What also confuses you on this particular night of this particular year is your father's request to join him on the back deck of the porch. The problem is, that on this night 'Perfect Strangers' is on television and to be left out of the goings-on of 'Perfect Strangers' would mean social ridicule from your friends on the monkey bars the next morning.

The monkey bars, for an eight-year-old, is to social normalcy what the water cooler is for a thirty-something office worker. And if you're going to miss the goings-on of tonight's episode of 'Perfect Strangers', you cannot imagine what your father feels warrants such a disturbance.

Your back porch is creepy at night. Neighbors living upstairs trudge upward in unseen commotion. You hear voices, you hear noise, you hear unidentifiable sounds. What would people think of the two of you sitting on your porch when it's dark out? It's creepy. Would they assume you were spying? This is what goes through your mind seconds before your dad lifts your chin and points it directly into the open starless city sky. "In about fifteen minutes we're gonna see Haley's Comet."

This is essentially where you and your father part ways. There was an argument you had last month about whether Little Richard's version of Long Tall Sally was better than Elvis', he says it is. And although you don't readily agree with this, you cannot argue with Zeus or wrestle Poseidon, so Little Richard wins and Haley's Comet stands as your only current impass. Sure you've heard of Haley's Comet, but you have no idea where. You're mildly aware that it's a rare sight to behold, but you'd much rather be doing... well, anything almost. When you're 8-years-old, rare is a relative term, as everything is new and everything will happen again and again and again as far as you know.

Your Dad has the a passion of Shakespeare and Joni Mitchell and the color red and he wants you to see something that many people might never see. He wants this for you and all you can think of is Balki's dance of joy. You envy his romanticism (your father's, not Balki's). You envy it because it is not inside you. In eight years you have ceased to develop passion and romance. Instead, you're stuck with an eight year version of realism. He sees a once-in-a-blue-moon occurence you see five seconds of light and twenty minutes of wasted television viewing. You know you should be more awe-struck by the comet and more dumbstruck by your father's romanticism. He is Godzilla, he is the President, he is King Midas. But none of this means anything when you're sitting atop the monekybars tomorrow afternoon at school and everyone is talking about what was on television the night before. You will turn to your friends and mention that you saw Haley's Comet and they will all stare at you as if you were bareass naked.

You ask, "How much longer?"
Your father, without taking his eyes of the night sky says, "Ehh... who knows? Why? You got someplace to be?"

It would not be good for you to answer this question honestly. What comes out of your mouth instead of honesty is silence. Your father looks down at you for a moment and then back to the sky.

"Your mother doesn't care for this type of thing. You know what she always asks me?"

You do care what she always asks and you tell him so.

"Why bother?" is what your father rests with. And at first you aren't sure if he is referring to Haley's Comet or your attitude. "She asks me, 'why bother'. She asks me all the time, whether I'm waxing my car or vying for a raise. 'Why Bother?' You know what I say?"

You shake your head and the thought occurs to you that maybe your father's answer and Haley's Comet will somehow be poetically linked and arrive in your astral plane of existence at the exact same moment in time. Your father looks down at you once again. This will be magic. This is will be epochal. His eyes are soulful and beating a hole right through you.

"I usually just shrug and smile and tell her 'what the hell'. That's what I tell her. What the hell."

Your father looks back into the sky and you both sit on the back porch for another half-minute or so. No magic. No epiphany. You are thr same as you were sixty seconds ago. You can't imagine a better philosophy in life and you let your father's words sink deep inside you for as long as it takes for Haley's Comet to appear.

And then it does; fast and bright and straight and true. He is Galilleo and the comet is the fireballing Northstar. He is Plato and Des Plaines and the smell of burning leaves and the comet is a white hot fastball down the middle of the plate.

As soon as it disappears, he looks at you with a wink and says, "you can probably catch the end of your show if you hurry." My father is Houdini or maybe The Amazing Kreskin.

The next day arrives quicker than you would like and sure enough, there you sit atop the monekybars. You have a friend named Charles and Charles has two gifts in life: the first is his amazing collection of Star Wars action figures. The second is his uncanny ability to dangle from the monkey bars with multiple parts of his lower appendages. You wish you had the simple bravery to use something other than your hands and arms for dangling. The only thing you can do to strike out the bitterness you feel toward your dangling incompetence is to mention on a whim that you caught 'Perfect Strangers' on televison (leaving out that you only saw the final ten minutes). Nevermind that you saw Haley's Comet. Nevermind that it was your dad who showed it to you. Nevermind that you don't really know what happened on television last night. Appearing to know is more important that what you were actually doing and who you were actually doing it with. Charles will ridicule you for hanging out with your father, he'll make fun and embarrass you. You will be out of the loop, so for now, to Hell with King Kong and Lou Gehrig and Fonzie and John Wayne. To Hell with your dad and the time spent with him.

To Hell with the time he spent with you.

You mention how funny the show was last night and Charles confesses to having been outside watching Haley's Comet.

You see your father at the edge of the playground... at least for a split second you think you see him and he looks as if he's failed in some way. As the image of your father disappears into the morning air, you realize that between the two of you, it is not your father who has failed.