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Prime Minister Pete Nice spent two strong days on the mic, and we intend to pass it back to him in the near future, but for now I'm gonna bust a few low-grade rhymes of my own. Thanks Pete. However, I don't have much right now. Especially not compared to that fine cohesive post from pb dot c. It felt good to have him back in the house. What I do have for you is several quick hitters. Bungle Bits, if you will... ***
I was like, Doooood, you're kidding, right? You don't know about the Power of the Grape? He was like, Whattaya mean? I was like, Dude, any artificial grape beverage -- Grape Gatorade, Grape Koolaid, Grape Drink from Ray's Pizza, IGA brand Grapeade from Capitol Centre Foods in Madison, Wisconsin, whatever -- will absolutely turn your shit a beautiful bright green every damn time. My friends and I used to experiment with this phenomenon back in college. Not sure if it's the artificial grape flavor that does it, or if it's the deep purple food coloring, but it's very special whatever it is. He was like, wow that's a relief. Nothing's wrong with me. I was all, not at all, amigo. Not at all. Ride it out and try to enjoy it. So for the rest of you out there, now you know. *** So we had our dinner with the neighbors and it was, well.....really fun! I am such a dick for being apprehensive about it. These neighbors are really nice, normal people. When I first have a meal with someone, I am always relieved when a few things happen:
-the people swear freely These folks nailed it in every category. Just fine people who I would be lucky to count as friends. I take back all my misanthropic misgivings. I was a tool and I need to take Madonna's advice and open my heart a li'l bit. *** I am including the rather unattractive fish photo at left because of the look of abject terror on the face of that one fish in the middle, the one with his tongue hanging out. When it comes to his attitude towards death, that fish is my kindred spirit. It looks like all his buddies went out with dignity and acceptance once they realized the game was over, but not Freddie there in the center. He was like, Holy Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck! I'm GONNA DIIIIIIIIE! I can't believe this! This is awful! Please help me! I was just trying to nourish my little fish belly with some tasty worm action, and now I'm flopping around on this dock gasping for life. I hate you, HUMAN BASTARDS. If you're going to eat me, you're going to stare at my contorted, anguished mug to remind you that I once had life. I once swam gracefully beneath the sea, not bothering you or any of your family. Now I am dead. I DO NOT WANT TO DIE. Dig in, you fuckers. *** You know what's a really good word? Pooch. I wish it had a really cool meaning -- I would use that shit all the time. From now on, I shall refer to my scrotum as my pooch. Or, more formally, my Trusty Pooch. Please join me in this campaign. Thanks. * I am not opposed to saying Grace, or to being thankful to your God for the food you get to consume, but I think it's weird to do it in front of strangers whose religious beliefs you do not know. 8/25/05: Guest Blogger Mark Leyner Checks In
Thus begins Mark Leyner's 1992 Magnum Opus Et Tu, Babe, one of four books I bought the other day at Barnes and Noble. I have purchased this book three times before, and I lost each copy. What would end up happening is that, after proselytizing about the book, I would lend it to someone. This person would inevitably not find it as brilliant as I did, and then they would compound their poor taste by failing to return it. One person even lost my autographed copy. Gas face to them. Well, I'm not lending this copy out, so you can buy your own copy if you like it, or read a bit more here if you're not sure. Me, I've come to accept that Leyner's salad days are behind him, even if I bring him up from time to time...these days he's writing lame reference books for people to read on the crapper. But it looks like it's selling (#3 on Amazon), so good for him if he makes a few quid off it. Leyner was hyper-competitive when it came to marketing his books, going so far as to kidnap and torture other writers who thought they might one day be as good as him. So I figured he'd be the right guy to go to to settle a couple raging questions from yesterday's post. I checked in with him on AOL Instant Messenger this evening, and here's the transcript:
So that's that. Let's all party down together. *** Whodat (20 points)? I. Editor's Note: The following is another example of an idea that came to me without ever hearing it anywhere else. A completely original, if not necessarily brilliant, thought. Yet I'm sure if you looked it up on the internet you'd find 1000 other jokers who had thought of it first. Is it still an original thought? Whatevs, here goes:
a) drinking and driving = bad news, makes lots of people go crunchity-crunch on
the highway My conclusion, as a 15 year-old: the decision to move to a 21 year-old drinking age was a judicious one. Sorry all you Libertarians. Of course, when I started drinking a year or so later, I rethunk my position. Now, looking back, the correct plan seems obvious:
Drinking Age = 16 Duh! My logic is this:
1. Nobody really observes the 21 year-old drinking age anyway; it's pretty much
unenforceable. Enforcing a minimum driving age is easier and the penalties would
be stiffer. Sure, we'll lose the played-out if entertaining cat and mouse game of adolescence, where the kids try to hide their drinking from the parents, who pretend they're fooled. But that's just a lot of wasted energy, isn't it? Wouldn't my suggestion be a great way to get kids and parents talking? Almost every parent drank when they were 16. The way it is now, they have to pretend like they lived a monk's life. In my system, with 16 the accepted age to pour back the delicious liquor, honesty would reign. If you got too drunk over at Mickey's house, you could call your dad to come pick you up without looking like a wuss, because none of your friends could drive, either. Then the next morning your dad could laughingly tell you all the dumb stuff you said the night before, even sharing a hangover story or two from his own youth, before passing along an honest message about moderation. And you'd have FIVE YEARS to learn this lesson before you ever sat down in one of them deathmobiles. We had the solution right in front of us all along, we just messed up our approach. Thank you. II. There is a really nice couple that moved into our building on the same day as we did, and they had a kid like a week after ours. We talk to them in the hall and stuff and they seem very friendly. But today, we took it to another level, and I'm not altogether comfortable with that. Today, gentle readers, we did the unthinkable: we made dinner plans with them. I guess I'm just at a place in life where I really am not interested in making any more friends. Enough already. I got a solid 20 or so, that should cover me for the next ten years. Then I'll worry about it. This couple seems very nice, and I think it's great that my wife might have a fellow mom to hang out and commiserate with, but I still worry. Why?
1) Because I think they might be very religious. Which in itself is totally
fine, but once they start pitching you on it, I am out the door like Edwin Moses
out of the starter's block. And in my experience, that can indeed happen. It
happened to me last week. But we'll give it a shot. III. Toilet Update: our cracked Crane Two-piece is gone and it's been replaced by a sleek little Kohler One-piece. That's big-time. Unfortunately, though, the Kohler is really low to the ground, forcing you to crouch into a weird squat when you're doing your biz. I end up not knowing whether I should take a dook or throw down two fingers for the curve. Hopefully I'll get used to it. IV. Proud to see Wisconsin atop the party school board once again. I remember freshman year, Playboy came out with its rankings, and somehow Wisconsin hadn't cracked the top 20. I was all mad for a second, but then I read the intro to the article*** where it mentioned that UW-Madison was so far ahead of all the other schools that it could no longer be included in the rankings. Like we had taken it to such a serious level that we had to give up our amateur status. That always made me happy. Pete's been saying the same thing about UVM. I'll take his word for it. Whodat? (17 points)
* which I recently found. Hoo Boy was it bad. 8/23/05: Nobody Puts Swayze in a Corner I got a couple of emails today checking to see if I was OK. I guess, through my own unclear writing style, yesterday's post made it sound like I was depressed. Nothing could be further from the truth. My life is cruising along so well I feel like I should look around every few minutes just to appreciate how good I've got it. I am truly, truly happy. I'm so happy I keep listening for the other shoe to drop. I totally didn't mean to make it seem like I was unhappy or ungrateful or anything like that.
Nobody ever got the musicvideoimitatedat, until yesterday, when BC MI wrote in with the this comment: "I'm loving the Milli Vanilli homage pics. I'm not sure what you were doing, but I was bringing in elements from Blame it on the Rain and Girl You Know it's True." That's right, the answer we were looking for was "Blame It on the Rain" by Milli Vanilli! There was a ridiculous scene in that video where Rob and Fab go to an art gallery wearing fancy clothes and they basically rub their chins and point at all the paintings as if they are absorbing deep waves of meaning from each one. So BC MI gets the ten points, EVEN THOUGH he was one of the two guys performing the musicvideoimitatetdat in the first place. Somebody needed to get the points and I never told BC MI he wasn't eligible. Even though I am happy as hell, I do have a couple of complaints, and one fear: Complaint #1: My slide during Sunday night's softball game was almost criminally stupid. Especially because a) I've made it a point over the years to make fun of all the other dipshits who slide while wearing shorts during pickup softball games, and b) I was out on the play. Now I have a huge freakin' raspberry on my shin, and the knee is also bruised up. I would say I have an abrasion, a contusion, and I am all numb and stingy. Seriously, I think it's already infected and it's giving me the fever. Like maybe I have meningitis of the shin bone or something. I do this about once a year. I do not learn. Complaint #2: I now officially think living in Stuyvesant Town sucks. It's not so much that it sucks on its own merits, but it sucks when you remind yourself that they are promoting these shitboxes as "luxury apartments." Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Here are a few things that we've encountered in Stuyvesant Town that most people in "luxury apartments" probably don't have to deal with:
1. The bathroom ceiling has basically collapsed, and we were initially told that
it would take SIX MONTHS to fix it. Now it looks like it'll be closer to two.
Two months with loose plaster and smelly walls. I guess I knew better. I spent a good year of my life in these parts when I was 16-17, getting into all sorts of trouble. I thought of it as a housing project back then. And that's really what it remains to this day. Fear #1: I know this is farfetched, but how terrifying would it be if there were packs of gypsies prowling around your office? I am aware that the term "gypsy" is considered a slur and I shouldn't be using it, but I saw some genuine gypsies when I was in Florence and they were a creepy-ass bunch of people. Doing that scam with the baby and whatnot -- you know, they toss you the baby and then when you reach out to catch it they pick you clean. Yikes. Rotten people. Today I am using the expression "gypsy" to cover all sorts of wandering bands of scammers, including some of those Irish Traveler people. All good nomadic people, I am not talking about you and sorry if I offended. But imagine if you were at the copy machine and all of a sudden you found yourself surrounded by gypsies? I would crap my pants. The reason I bring it up is that I think I saw a gypsy in our office today. I hope she's alone. Whodat (14 points)?
You might not know this, but I think about death way too much. It's a huge part of who I am. It's flickering in the background of almost everything I do. Fuckin' death. When I was 27, I was fond of saying that manhood begins at 27. I think that's basically true; most of the shit you did before that, if you really think about it, was kid stuff. I don't want to hear about your early 20's -- not the girls you seduced or the awesome band you were in that sold 10 million records or the life-saving vaccine you created. You know and I know that you were just a reckless kid who was looking out for himself when all that happened. The problem with becoming a Man* is that once you're there, that's it. You don't become a Man-plus at 32 or anything like that. It goes right from Man to Old Man to Corpse. With each passing year you see bad signs: opportunities missed, once-effortless feats of physical prowess falling beyond your reach, huge decisions looming everywhere. You basically start dying at 27. And once you start dying, you start grasping at things to prove that you're not. On my 30th birthday I went out and played basketball in Tompkins Square Park and I dunked on the low rim closest to 10th street. It wasn't pretty, but it gave me a chance to pat myself on the back and convince myself I hadn't lost a thing. My friend JP dunks on a ten foot rim on every birthday. He's still going at 36. I turned 36 this weekend, too. I had a lot on my mind, so I walked home from work on Friday night. Around Union Square I started to cry a little bit. Just a bit. And I was in a good mood, too. I just don't think it's possible for me to walk from one coast of Manhattan to the other without getting emotional. Anything can set me off, too. A couple in their 80's walking slowly down the street, arm in arm. A diner full of police cadets, all eating in their uniforms, segregated completely by race. A guy with really bad stains on his pants. A Dunkin' Donuts with no customers in it. A hopelessly overweight lady jogger shuffling along in brand new workout clothes and carrying an iPod mini. And the thing is, I love all these people. I love this city. And it breaks my heart that all of us are going to die. It really breaks my heart that some of these people will be dead before the scaffolding on their apartment buildings comes down. That's an insult. When the scaffolding outlives you. Since I hit 36 this weekend**, I decided to play some sports, in a desperate attempt to turn back the hands of time. But I failed. I looked 46 on the basketball court and 72 on the softball field. I'm dying, alright. And at a pretty brisk pace. But there were some very bright spots among all the harbingers of mortality. It was my birthday, and I got treated very well by the people around me. My lovely wife took the baby and I out to dinner on Saturday night at this joint. Pretty good place, very lively. I got the Welsh Rarebit, which was a huge mistake. I have no explanation for that order other than I was pleasantly surprised to discover it had no meat in it. The wife had the cheesesteak, which was absolutely the correct order -- breathtakingly delicious. So I betrayed my vegetarian oath and had a few bites of her meal. My Dear God it was perfect. I also had some nice fries and a cold beer. Then we walked home through the old East Village. They're still kickin' it live down there on Saturday nights, I'll tell you. Packed bars and tons of young folks milling around. Nice. Then we got home and she had bought me two really nice birthday presents that I don't deserve: This tripod (#343E), which I aim to use as often as I can for my cheesy digital snapshots, while trying not to look like a complete dork. This reasonably priced set of iPOd speakers. We actually got 'em for 100 bucks at B & H. The thing could really use a remote, but I guess I can get an iPod remote for skipping songs and whatnot. But even then, I won't be able to control the volume without touching the unit itself. Still, nice to finally have a place to play music besides my computer. Very excited about this gift. Sunday I went to brunch with mom and then the wife took me to Barnes and Noble for a little gift card shopping spree. What fun. I bought three more DVD's***:
5. White Men Can't Jump I also bought four books****. Two of them were published in 1971, one of them was published in 1992, and one of them was published in 2003. For ten points each, can you tell me the names of these books? You can enlist google, I suppose, but to paraphrase Wooderson, it'd be a lot cooler if you didn't. Then we played some good softball on Sunday night. I had a couple of fine, cold, refreshing Budweisers. They don't call it The King for nothing. Rob M., we miss ya. Joe Monkeyweb will have the recap for us sometime this week. For now, I will tell you that I slid and was out and it was a huge mistake. My pajamas are sticking to my scabby leg right now. It's definitely gonna get infected and I'll probably lose the leg. After softball, Deion and the Kissel brothers treated me to a nice dinner at Tavern on Jane. We talked about nothing but baseball. Players/topics we touched on were:
-Palmeiro: Hall of Famer before the steroids story broke? How about now? That's about half of it. You can really sit and talk about baseball forever. What a great game. After dinner, I came home and washed down some of the stress of these 36 years with my sixth 32 oz. Gatorade of the weekend. Only three loads of laundry, though. We'll call it $$$ Super Triple Cash Money. Sure I'm dying, but I'm enjoying every fleeting minute along the way. Especially because I just found out McDonald's now offers gigando cups of blue Powerade.
* We are not discussing transgender operations here today, merely the general
maturation process of those who were born XY.
I looked something up on the internet tonight and it freaked me out. Then it made me depressed. Then it made me not want to blog anymore. Then I got over myself and remembered that just like Freddie Mercury said, nothing really matters. So we move on. Joe Torre blew another one tonight. Hi Joe. Thursday's an off day. Therefore, Rivera and Gordon could have pitched tonight. I don't care if they each pitched 12 innings last night. The season is slipping away, Joe. You've got to go into Pete Rose mode: manage every game like you've got money riding on it. Burn out some arms. Worry about tomorrow tomorrow and next year next year. That's how the game should be played anyway. Break it down to its smallest and most important unit: the game. Not a week or a season or a career. Win every game. Thank you. I'll be watching you. We would like to announce a new page here on verbungle.com. We're calling it "Ma Bungle's Ballyard." Ma Bungle is my wife and she generally occupies the seat next to me on the couch as we watch the Yankees play. There was a time when she genuinely cared about baseball. The Durham-Sutcliffe-Moreland-Trout-Sandberg-Sanderson-Matthews-Cey-Eckersley-Bowa-Davis-Dernier Cubs were one of her first loves as a young girl in the suburbs of Chicago. And when she moved to NYC in the early 90's, she became a fan of the O'Neill-Bernie-decrepit Mattingly-Boggs-Pat Kelly-Key-Stanley Yankees. But in recent years, she's lost interest. I think she simply misses O'Neill's slender form out in RF, but whatever the case, she's reached a point where she'll kind of half-watch the games with me, and not really care about what's happening. She'll still offer opinions -- about everything except the game itself. So once every week or so, we will showcase these opinions on her own page here on the Bungle. We're already a couple quotes behind, so you'll get two observations this week. Here they are. Again we get quality content via the old email for you. Crsmal has a brand new dispatch from suburbia. We also have the first edition of Trayline. We aren't all that happy with it, but we needed to get the first column out of the way to set up a few things. The quality will increase, of that you can be sure. For ten points, what does this shirt say? For another ten, what video is being imitated by the dude in today's picture at right? Same video as last time (nobody got it), and here's a hint: it was a number one or number two single in the late 80's-early 90's. 8/17/05: Stewing In My Own Juice
Here was the situation: 11th inning, game tied, 3-3. Man on 3rd, two outs. They walk a guy accidentally, a guy who's already hit two home runs in the game. I'm thinking, fine, put a man on first, gives us a force at second and takes the bat away from a guy who's basically surging with confidence. No problem. But a lefty is due up next, and the Yanks have a righty in the game. At this point, douchemaster Kaye in the booth and Torre and his lackey Girardi in the dugout all think the same thing: you HAVE to walk the lefty to get to the next guy, who's a righty. So they do. Now you have the bases loaded, a shaky pitcher in the game who has already walked two dudes and balked the runner to third, and you are forcing him to throw a bunch of strikes in a row. You have no margin for error. You've fucked yourself. Seeing the situation and knowing the inevitable outcome, I got up and began angrily approaching my television with the remote in hand and my finger hovering over the power button, because I knew at that very second that the game was lost. Ball 1. Cut to pitcher's stupid face. Even he knows the ensuing walk and defeat is a mere formality at this point. Ball 2. Cut to A-Rod approaching the mound and basically requesting that the pitcher please not walk in the winning run. Thanks in advance. Ball 3. Cut to Torre and Girardi in dugout. Girardi is holding a chart of some sort. He's wearing an idiotic look that says, "But the chart indicated..." Ball 4. Not even close. Game over. I can't really think of a strategy in any sport that is comparable to intentionally walking the bases loaded in the bottom of the last inning of a tie game. Perhaps in football, it would be: tie game, you've got the ball, 4th and 37 on your own one yard line, 9 seconds left. You go for it and hand the ball to your fullback up the gut. I wonder if Girardi and all his BS charts are the reason the Yanks suck this year. This game tonight made me real mad. *** Dear W.B. Mason Marketing Department: You guys are doing an absolutely splendiferous job of promoting your product throughout the Yankee telecasts. You also have a snazzy sign on the right field wall at Yankee stadium. In short, you have developed a strong connection between your product and the New York Yankees, one of the most successful entities in sports. Good work. Now don't take this the wrong way, because I know you guys are busting your tails over there in the W.B. Mason compound, thinking of original and exciting ways to spread the good word about your wonderful line of products. But... Would you mind telling us what the hell it is that you make? I'm sure within the walls of your corporate headquarters, merely saying the name "W.B. Mason" is enough. It rings out through the air, signifying quality and authority -- after all, you guys have been in the business for 100 years, I'm sure of it. But what business is that, exactly? You need to tell us. I am not well versed in advertising or sales, but something tells me that there is a passage highlighted in every kid's Marketing 101 textbook that says something like, "Be sure the public knows what it is you are selling; this will make them far more likely to buy it." What I'm getting at is that the name W.B. Mason may mean something to you, it may mean something to your cousin Lonnie, it may mean something to a lot of people, but it means nothing to me. And who knows, maybe I'd buy one (some?) if I knew what we were talking about here. But instead I am left to guess what it is you make or do. Here are several guesses, in the order of how likely I perceive them to be correct:
1. Mustard It's probably one of those, right? Even if it's not, I am so put off my your presumptuousness that I ain't gonna bother looking it up on the internet. What I'm getting at is that you need to change your logo and your catchphrase (if you have one) so that your product is referenced somewhere in there. Just my opinion. Thanks for your time, Hans Bungle *** We're gearing the hell up for the debut of the new improved Trayline column. We are as excited about this as we have been about anything since the day we found out there was a real-life Wooderson. If you're not excited, you must be a real dick. Before we get started, let's clarify a couple of things regarding how it's gonna work:
1. The blog will take place in the early 90's. The locale is Madison, Wisconsin.
The premise will be that the central character (loosely based on me) is keeping
one of the very first online journals. Or, if you prefer, we have unearthed a
handwritten journal from that era and transcribed it onto the internet fifteen
years later. It'll start tomorrow. As in, tomorrow, December 19th, 1991. *** Happy birthday to my niece, sis, and mom, who were born on consecutive days in August. In separate years, though. In genius news, the monkeyman is beginning to smell the bananas and it may be too late to catch him. But you may as well try: for 9 points each, whodey?
Every two months or so I go through what Joe Monkeyweb is calling a "blogocrisis," and every time I do you awesome bastards* respond. Yesterday was no exception. To my pleas for young blogging blood, I received these suggestions and offers: PB (formerly) dot C suggests: "Maybe you should have Bungle Open Mic where people send you occasional bids for the main column." We reply: Yes, a damn fine idea. Yes. Yes. From here on out, consider the daily blogspace on verbungle.com to be open ground for any ideas that run through your head. I don't care who you are, send 'em on in. Full posts, sentence fragments, Christmas lists, I simply do not give a fuck. Send 'em in. Unless I find them personally objectionable, I will post 'em. Some days they will be prefaced by a few comments from yours truly, other times they might stand alone. Love this idea Pete. Crsmal adds: "For what its worth, I've always kind of viewed your site as a virtual open mic-- you're the host and the rest of us are guests. Remember back when you used to have us answer those questions? That might be fun now, especially with haloscan. You could probably go a few days in a row just by posting a question of the day. I'm sure you'd get a fair amount of submitted questions as well." We reply: I'm glad you feel welcome here, Crsmal. Your contributions are always a hoot. As to your suggestion about the question of the day, we like it and we may go that route on slow days if we can think of a funny question. Joe Monkeyweb has been using that device successfully for awhile, and we don't want to bite his rhymes, so for now we'll just keep that idea in our back pocket. Thanks though. EJ generously offers: "I'd volunteer to do a late-twenties female perspective if need be." We reply: Um, is there a catch? OF COURSE we'd like to see this. As often as you like, and you can send it in anonymously if it helps. Love this idea. Send that shit in as part of the Verbungle.com Open Mic Internet Trial (VOMIT). Buck Young also has a proposal: "I am a young dude who hooks up at will, you should let me write a column for you. I've made videos of some of my conquests, which I would be willing to share. (No worries, you don't see her face, sort of like Quentin Tarantino not showing you the nasty action in Reservoir Dogs, but there is some screen time of my ass while 'my ax chops some wood.') Let me know Hans, I could be the missing link." We reply: Buck, we are excited about this kind offer, and we would be delighted to read some tales of your youthful shagging. However, the videos (and even any graphic sex descriptions) may prove too explicit for our audience. We (might) have some impressionable young people who read the site, and frankly we want those young people to turn to more established sources for their daily porn fix. The offer is still appreciated and we welcome any R rated dispatches you might be able to send our way. We also got some immediate goddamn content, such as this fine and frightening review from Disco Dan Kois. And we also got a full friggin' post courtesy of The Artist** which will follow in a minute. But before that, I just want to say thank you very much for always picking my shit up when my bag is sinkin' low. As for the proposed changes, this is how we're looking at things as of 2:37 am HST:
1. Guest bloggers as often as possible. Three, four, ten times a week. Sometimes
with a short preamble from me, either related to the guest blogger's content or
not. Our deal with the twenty-something blogger that we mentioned yesterday has
fallen apart over money. He wanted some, we laughed in his face. Which is fine,
I like the idea of a multitude of voices singing a multitude of tunes anyway. So
now when you come here each day you have no idea what to expect. It's pretty
much what I envisioned when I started this site two and a half years ago, and
I'm delighted that I have talented and willing people ready to step in and make
it happen. Speaking of which, cW, we're ready for another
music column (and people, those empeetreys may be
coming down soon, so get 'em while they last). *** Tough day at work today, that's all I'm saying. Some bad things happened. Nobody got my deodorant yesterday, it was Tom's of Maine unscented. Today, for 8 points, tell me whodey?*** *** Thanks again for your help, I love you all, and now on to today's guest post:
A Summer Excursion to Shores by Timberlands Untrodden
There
are two kinds of people in this world: People who eat simply nuts and people who
eat no nuts. A lot of shit has been happening lately. So much so that I am beginning to rethink my assessment of the year 2005 from a couple weeks back. It seems like everybody I know has dealt with a life-changing event of one kind or another this year. Here's a partial list:
-I had a baby I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff. Like that thing you were just telling me you did, or were gonna do. What was that again? That was HUGE. I think a lot more stuff is on the way, too. I am going to talk more about Dipak over the next few days, in fact he is our next scheduled Profile in Dignity. But first, I want to address Valsmal's imminent departure from our workplace.
Whatever the case, Val will be missed. She joins a long list of friends I've made at work who eventually left while I stayed behind. cW, Dipak, Joe Monkeyweb and his missus, Big Jimmy Lang, TJ, MDGBC, Sita, my own wife, and a bunch more. A big bunch more. My greatest fear in life has always been the fear of being left behind. I learned how to do a lot of things late in life, and because of that I always worried about not being able to keep up with the other kids as they moved on and did new things and discovered what life was all about. You'd think that someone who had a fear like that might be super-aggressive, making sure he took care of his business so he didn't get left in the dust, but instead the fear just paralyzes me. I guess that's how we deal with our worst problems, we hide under the couch and hope they'll go away. In the end, I wind up feeling like the last guy to get up the balls to jump off the cliff into the water. Or like the guy in "Escape from Alcatraz" who doesn't make it out at the end (from the abandoned "Touching" Page):
"Can a scene from a movie make the “Touching” page? For me, the most
heartbreaking scene in any movie I’ve seen is the one in “Escape from Alcatraz”
when they’re making their actual escape. They get to one part of the prison
where they have to jump up to a bar and pull themselves up, so that they can
crawl through some ceiling area on their way to freedom. They’ve planned this
whole thing for months in advance, and they’ve been incredibly meticulous and
patient, waiting for this moment. In addition to the uneasiness you feel for the
inmates (who you are definitely pulling for), there is a palpable sense of
excitement. It’s like, holy shit, this is working. Let’s go! Anyway, there is
one guy, sort of the most gentle and nerdy of the bunch, who’s been instrumental
in setting up the plan, and when he gets to the part where he has to jump up, he
can’t do it. The other guys are already up there, and they’re like, “Come on!
Let’s go, dude!” And he just can’t do it. They have to leave without him, and he
has to return to his cell. Oh God, it’s almost too much to think about. It
reminds me of my worst fears in life: falling behind. Being left out. Not being
able to measure up. Being the one loser who can’t color within the lines. All
the childhood tests that shape us and make us generals or make us timid, lonely
middle managers are encapsulated in that scene. Only in this case, it’s not just
the psychological damage inflicted on the poor guy (who clearly wasn’t able to
do the rope climb in junior high and has already been mentally destroyed by a
lifetime filled with such shortcomings), but also the sense that this particular
failure means he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison. He’ll also be
unable to conceal his chopped up prison cell wall, and the warden is gonna make
him suffer big time. It’s like he was sneaking out of the house in his dad’s car
to go meet his girlfriend for his first sexual experience, and he ends up
running over his dad’s dog and totaling the car. There is no mercy in sight." *** Speaking of "Shawshank," which we were (if you missed that), I think "The Shawshank Redemption" holds a certain key to understanding the true spirit of the American people. If a politician could somehow harness the soul of that movie and attach it to his own campaign, he could not lose. Yes, I realize that the movie only made $28 million at the box office, so maybe in that sense it is not a sufficient barometer of what we like as a country. But have you ever met anyone who didn't like this movie? Who hasn't seen it multiple times? I rank myself on the low end of "Shawshank" devotees, and I still like it plenty. Just among my friends, I'm pretty sure that cW loves it dearly, Brady ranks it among his favorite movies, and the wife will watch it every time it's on. There's something very basic about it, something that resonates with just about everybody. I can't quite put my finger on it, but if I could, I would definitely run for city council. I think I may buy it. It would become the fourth DVD I own, and fifth I've bought, after (in order of when I purchased them):
1. Fast Times (have watched maybe three times since purchase) I also kinda want to buy "White Men Can't Jump." I don't know why, exactly. *** Tony Womack may be the worst hitter I've ever seen. He's batting .240 and that includes more infield hits than anyone else on the team. His approach at the plate reminds me a little bit of my approach in a batting cage. I swing at everything, I miss more than half the balls I swing at, and the ones I do hit I usually foul tip or chop straight onto the ground. He's a real problem. The only good thing about the Womack Acquisition (Band Name!) is that we are in no way obligated to use him. As stinky as Bernie's been, as unproven and shaky as Cano is, either one of them is a far better option than Womack. Best case scenario is that we use Womack as a pinch runner and he steals a big base at some point a la Dave Roberts. Funny, as stinkified as this Yankee season has been, I find myself watching the games much more intently than I have in recent years. The fact that the postseason is not a given has magnified the importance of every crappy midweek game against Texas and Minnesota. It's almost like a pennant race. What fun! *** I think we've all heard the theories of that the inaugural NBA Draft Lottery in 1985 was rigged so that the Knicks would get Patrick Ewing. Well, have you ever heard the Theory of the Cold Envelope? (No, I'm not talking about the Womack Acquisition's first album.) I hadn't heard it until my basketball-loving co-worker explained it to me last week, and I have to say it amused the hell out of me, doubly so if it's true. If you remember that lottery, it was pre-ping pong balls. The sealed envelopes with each team's name inside them were all kept in a bin, and David Stern would reach into the bin and read the name of the team he had picked, starting with the 7th pick and working towards number 1. The Theory of the Cold Envelope posits that the NBA had stuck the Knicks' envelope in the freezer prior to the lottery, so Stern would feel it each time he reached in and pick a different envelope instead. If that's how they pulled it off, I tip my cap to them for their simple ingenuity. If you add to that conspiracy theory the other one about Jordan's first "retirement" in 1993 actually being a secret league suspension to punish him for his gambling problem (I personally find this theory pretty dimwitted), then you'd have to say the NBA did their part to bring a championship back to NYC. Unfortunately, I think Ewing stuck his hands in the freezer prior to every game of the '94 Finals. *** Kudos to big Jimmy Lang, who works in the news biz and actually got this copy read on air: THE SECRET TO AVOIDING A HANGOVER MAY BE IN YOUR GENES. NO, NOT YOUR DRINKING PANTS: RESEARCHERS SAY THEY'VE ISOLATED THE GENE IN FRUIT FLIES THAT HELPS THEM HANDLE THE EFFECTS OF ALCOHOL. THEY THINK PEOPLE WHO HAVE A SIMILAR GENE MAY DEVELOP AN ALCOHOL TOLERANCE. BUT THE RESEARCHERS ALSO WARN... THIS GENETIC MAKEUP COULD ALSO MAKE MORE LIKELY TO DEVELOP ALCOHOLISM. Yes! The best part: apparently after the story the male anchor responded with: "Ahhh - I miss my drinking pants - my wife threw them out after we got married." Yes again! That made me so happy I have forgiven Big Jim for dropping the ball on last week's softball recap. ***
The rest of the weekend was so-so. In the wintertime, you can pretty much decide
for yourself how much fun a weekend is gonna be. In the summer, it's Mother
Nature's party. And this weekend she was having her special lady time, I think.
Blistering damn heat followed by fierce thundershowers that threatened to blow
down the tall trees of Stuytown. So the missus and I laid low with the baby all
weekend long. When you've got two crappy days like that in a row, it gives you a
good chance to I will get to the results of that reflection in a moment, but first let me report to you some of the mundane events of my weekend.
1. Had another Stella Artois bottle. Either I got a bad six
pack or this is one beer that should only be consumed on tap. Just not good at
all. Not quite skunky, but it tasted like Old Style that had been left in
somebody's 4th of July cooler a couple days too long. Avoid that crap. I mentioned that I also did a little reflectin'. One thing I came to understand is that the actual details of my everyday existence, such as the ones listed above, are no longer blog-worthy. I am not saying that my life is meaningless or lame or boring or anything like that; I am enjoying it just fine. But I was cruising some other blogs that I saw listed on Oak Park Mastermind's site, and instead of turning out to be a bunch of crapstains as I expected they would, they were very much entertaining. Like this one. And this one. And this one. It made me realize (sorry if this is obvious): the life of a young single person who goes out and gets hammered and hooks up with other people is fundamentally more interesting than the life of a married dude who actually recounts how many loads of laundry he does. Doncha think? In addition, many of these blogs were stylishly written and full of fascinating photos. So once again we are left at a crossroads. We can't go on like this. We need some new blood up in here. I will still post the daily challenges and the occasional brilliant observation about humanity, but I am turning the day to day life-reporting over to somebody else. We have narrowed our candidates down to two:
1. We are in negotiations with an actual 20-something person
who actually goes out and does actual 20-something person things on a regular basis,
and is a pretty good writer as well. We'll have official word in the next couple
of days. If you have a preference of one option over the other, chime on in. Finally, this was described on Metafilter as the "greatest video in the history of the internet." It was mildly amusing, but I can think of a million better videos, including this one from the next day. The (presumably facetious) billing made me wonder: of all the lame-ass videos that you've seen online or in emails, which is the best? My wife votes for the classic "Monkey picks butt, smells finger and falls from tree." Hard to argue that.
For 6 genius points, tell me what brand of deodorant I use
(one guess per person). 8/11/05: The Best Beverage Ever
In addition, this story takes several leaps back and forth in time and place. Not in an interesting, cool, Pulp Fiction kinda way, but in an annoying, disorganized-brain kinda way. My Vitton. In addition, I am so unhappy with the way it turned out that I am going to publish the whole thing in strikethrough text. For a non-strikethrough version, you can click here. In what I think must have been the summer of 1993, a bunch of the old college buds went to visit Brady P., who was living deep in the suburbs of Chicago at the time. Like Libertyville/Mundelein deep. It was probably just a long weekend, but looking back it seems like a full week. I got a real sense for what it means to be living in the deep-ass suburbs of Chicago. I'd never spent more than two straight days in the suburbs before that, I don't think. I mean any suburbs, not just Chicago's. The country, sure. The city, sure. But not the deep-ass suburbs like that. When I say deep, I mean it was like an hour and a half to Chicago. If we wanted to go to Chicago to drink, we had to rent a hotel room. Which we did. And we went out in Chicago and we had a big night. I think it was that night that turned me around on Chicago. Before that, I was all, blah Chicago, what's the big deal? But that night the city opened its arms to me and showed me its huge heart and it bought me a few drinks and said, "You're among friends. Have another." And by 4am, as Brady and I traversed half the city on foot, sharing a bag of SmartFood while we searched for our hotel, I had a new home away from home. Earlier that evening, at maybe 8:30 pm, we were all in some generic downtown bar, half-watching the White Sox and A's on the tube and bragging about all the stupid stuff that seems worth bragging about when you're 23. "Remember that night when we each drank 26 beers?" "How about the time that I caught the tennis ball out the car window*..." "Who'd win in a fight, Oly or Dillahunt?" Change the names and I'm sure you've had the conversation before. Anyway, one of my friends, let's call him Jimmy, decided to tell us about his secret gift. "You know, there were nights in college when we'd go out drinking and I wouldn't piss the whole night." "That's horseshit," came the reply from several of us. I mean, that's horseshit, right? "No, for real, I can drink beer all night long and not take one piss," Jimmy said. "If you want, I'll do it tonight." We had been drinking for about an hour at this point, and Jimmy had not pissed yet. So we decided to call his bluff. But just to make sure he didn't nurse one beer the whole night, we split into teams of two, with each team being responsible for keeping up with the other teams' beer intake. The idea was that if one member of a team had a "no mas" moment, his teammate would have to pick up the slack and finish his beer for him. Terrific fratboy stuff. So we paired Jimmy with Little Scotty F., who was a little more refined than the rest of us, which is to say he wasn't as likely to drink 26 beers in a night as we were. We knew that if we paired Jimmy and Scott, Jimmy would have to drink at least his share, because Little Scotty wasn't gonna pick up his crumbs if he came up short. So we carried on like this for maybe three hours, and in that time each team consumed maybe 8 or 10 beers per person. It was a strong pace. And Jimmy, true to his word, never excused himself to hit the head. It was fucking impressive. I probably peed 9 times in that span. We were in perhaps our third generic bar and I was pretty much blotto when the waitress came up and tapped me on the shoulder. "You better get your friend out of here," she said to me, motioning to her left. I took a look and there was Jimmy, face down on the table. He had given it a huge effort but in the end the toxicity of the beer did him in. We helped him to his feet and walked him outside the bar. He vomited in the street. We pointed and laughed as he did it again. Then we sent him home in a cab with his teammate so we could keep the night alive. In the next 24 hours, he would produce more vomit than I have in my entire lifetime. He filled half of one of those medium-sized hotel garbage cans. The next day, on the drive back to the suburbs, he forced us to pull the car over in the middle of the highway so he could vomit again. Then, when we finally got back to Brady's apartment complex, he demanded that we pull over again so he could do his business once more. We were only like ten feet from the parking space, but that was ten feet too far for Jimmy. He climbed out of the car before we even stopped, ran onto the grass, dropped to his knees and vomited again. But there was no vomit left in him, so all that came out was a long, thin strand of bile, which stuck to his chin and fluttered elegantly in the wind like a little kite. I'll never forget that sight; a human being in complete disrepair. To this day he is occasionally referred to as Jimmy Bile. Back to the night before. After we sent Jimmy packing, we headed out to another bar. It felt like we had been out for about twelve hours. Stuff just kept happening. At around 3am, I looked across the bar and saw Mark McGwire standing there, hitting on a waitress so hard I actually felt embarrassed for him. Seeing him in the bar after seeing him at the game on TV earlier that night** was difficult to compute. It was, again, like one of those episodes of Seinfeld with so many subplots you can't believe they're all part of the same episode. It was like the night had split into two distinct nights and somehow we had managed to exist in both. We had achieved a small measure of time travel through booze. Another time travel incident that comes to mind was the night that same year when I went out to watch a Knicks playoff game in NYC, partied with cW and company deep into the night, and didn't arrive back at my Brooklyn apartment until around 6 am. When I got there, our New York Times had already been delivered, and it contained the box score of the game I had been watching that same night! It seemed impossible. I thought of all the people who had to do stuff in order to get that paper to me. The stat guy, the typesetters, the guy who runs the printing press, the delivery guys. There's just no way all that work could get done while I was out filling my gut with booze. Anyway, back to Chicago: McGwire was there sweating this rather attractive bar maiden, practically demanding her phone number. I decided to approach him. I was lit up like a Christmas tree at this point, and I hadn't even really been following baseball for a couple of years, but I felt some bizarre need to tell Bic Mac how swell I thought he was. He was pretty nice to us for awhile until his handler dude told us to get lost. I specifically remember this exchange:
Me: You know, you have a chance to hit 600 homers. He ended up with 583. Back to the suburbs. After his virtuoso performance, Jimmy had to rest for a full day while the rest of us kept on living. We all stayed in that night and had a few beers in front of the tube, except Jimmy of course, who just chilled. Finally, the day after that, we all went out to shoot hoops. Brady drove us to an outdoor court that was adjacent to the community swimming pool. It was a beautiful court, it had that tennis hardcourt kind of surface, and the pool was about 200 feet long. It was unbelievably hot that day, but I don't remember if we swam or not. Probably not. I do remember being blown away by what beautiful facilities they had in the suburbs. I mean, a mint basketball court like that and nobody playing on it? What the hell? The heat was so bad that we could only play a game or two of two on two before we had to sit down. But I was feeling strong that day, despite a lingering hangover, and I was playing one on one with whoever would take me on between two on two's. It was that day that I developed my spin move. I remember because I was playing one on one against somebody, I think it was Jimmy, and I just tried some crazy spin and it worked. That's what one on one is for, working on crazy moves that you'd never try in a game out of respect for your teammates. The move was pretty impressive. Jimmy is a big tall stud and a great defender, but the move worked on him several times in a row. Feeling good, I looked over at Little Scotty, who indicated that the move was a travel. I dunno. To this day, nobody's ever called me for it. Little Scotty and Big Dave and Jimmy and company were pooped, so they sat on the edge of the court while Brady and I went on a beverage run. We drove over to Cub Foods or some other mega-market, and we stocked up on Powerade 20-ounce bottles. We probably bought like ten. I immediately took a liking to the bulk purchasing mentality of suburban life. Just buy a whole bunch of stuff. It's cheaper out there anyway. This was the early 90's when All Sport and Powerade had recently emerged as competitors to industry standard Gatorade. All Sport got more press out of the gate. Shaq endorsed it, I remember that. I tried it once and found it to be disgusting and sweet, the Pepsi to Gatorade's Coke. But this was the first time I had ever tasted Powerade, and it blew me away. I had the Blue flavor and it was cold, real cold, probably 33 degrees. The mouth of the bottle was made of thick white plastic, which I assume was there to lend a thermos-like effect, preventing your lips from warming the Powerade as it flowed through the opening. It worked, yo. It was easily the best beverage of all time. To this day, I rank Powerade right up there with Gatorade. Especially their blue flavor. That shit's tight. Life's been busy as hell but the project that we've been working on has finally ended. I feel a little sad about it being over, and I'm sad I missed the wrap party. I had to come home and deal with some household shit. Our bathroom flooded, for one thing. The ceiling is destroyed. Stuytown is a lot of good things, but it is by no means a luxury apartment complex. As one of the workmen who came over pointed out, the only thing they spend money on is the flowers. I did see the lovely EJ jogging through the complex today on my way home from work. God bless people with the willpower to jog. That is hardcore. Whodat (8 points)?
* OK, this is still worth bragging about.
Yesterday, my friends, in the search for a laugh that never came, we besmirched the name of our dear friend Kissel, and in doing so we violated at least 4 of our core values. It is a dark day here at the office. Here's what exactly took place: We exaggerated a story from 3rd grade in order to dress it up and make it shorter and funnier, and in the process we made Kissel look like a bad guy. We even used his real name, which was an honest mistake but not a forgivable one. We have retracted the story, and now we can give it to you accurately to help make amends. The true story goes like this: in 3rd grade, a huge, poorly adjusted immigrant kid named Ali Hakim threw a Stratego piece that hit Kissel in the head. Kissel went over and calmly punched Ali in the nose. There was blood. And Ali never threw a Stratego piece at Kissel again. The End. Kissel, I hope you accept our apology; the joke was mainly meant to be shared by you and me, but of course there are at least 6 other people who probably came across it, and it was wrong. It was unnecessarily and inaccurately critical of who you were in 3rd grade. You were basically just another kid like me and Polly and Ali Hakim. We all had our moments. Your actions were justified. You are my best friend and I hope you weren't wounded. Although if you slipped Polly the creeper at one of D. Lee's sick 5th grade fleshfests, I am not speaking to you. Other than insulting my homey, it was a damn fine weekend. By the universally accepted PbdotC standard I would give it a $$$: Super Triple Cash Money. Here's how it broke down:
-basketball games played/won: 3/3 So as you can see it was a solid weekend. Great to see the fellas at softball. Big Jim Lang promises a recap. And basketball was also intensely satisfying. If I can only play one sport for the next ten years, that's the one. I am going to buy a scale because they make you lose weight. Right? For 20 points, tell me what 1989 or '90 music video these two schmucks are imitating. For 8 more, tell me whodat? Big Jim Lang, who unfortunately turned out to be pretty accurate in his interpretation of the Peter Jennings diagnosis, had more sobering information today. He works in the news biz, and he told us that they had already prepared all their graphics for a potential shuttle explosion tomorrow. Not that they necessarily think it's going to happen, but they have to be prepared. I hope it goes OK for those poor spacemen. And after they land safely, I hope we pull the plug on the space program and divert that money someplace useful. Enough with the friggin' space.
It went like this: it's the year 1996 or something. I'm the starting shortstop for the New York Yankees. We've reached the World Series and we're squaring off against our fiercest rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers. 7th game, 9th inning, two outs, we're holding onto a one run lead, but the Dodgers have loaded the bases against our ace reliever, Goose Gossage.* Steve Garvey steps to the plate, a 5 foot ten inch block of Pure Southern California Evil. Tan, square jawed, huge hairy forearms. The fans are suitably terrified. He works the count in his favor, then sends a foul pop off of third base, drifting towards the seats. At this point in the fantasy I would toss a rubber hardball into the air over my parents bed, which represented the first few rows of seats along the third base side. I'd leap over the bed/into the seats and snag the ball, rolling onto my back, then I'd freeze as if I'd been knocked cold. Slowly I would pretend to gain consciousness. There was the umpire, peeling back fans to see if I'd held on. Next to him, right in the first row, was my 3rd grade crush Polly S., attending the game with her Billy Zane-like husband who she obviously couldn't love. Polly was a cute little redhead, probably the only kid in the class who was smarter than me.** Sure she had little snot balls that sometimes poked out of her nostrils, but in 3rd grade you overlook such minor eccentricities. We used to walk home from school together, me dropping her off at her apartment at 30 Fifth Avenue every day, wanting so much to kiss her but never even coming close to doing so. It was part lack of nerve and part not wanting to spoil the fantasy of what it would be like. What girls would be like.*** Somehow, even in the fantasy, it had never quite worked out between Polly and me. After 3rd grade, we'd gone our separate ways, I guess, the way two people who both know they're absolutely right for each other sometimes do. In real life, you never end up getting a second chance. No reason, no point in thinking about it, you'll just wind up fifty years old, sitting at the kitchen table drinking Budweiser and cursing out loud. But not in this fantasy. Here there was a second chance. Here she was in the first row, watching me, wanting me. Surely she hadn't told Zane that her newfound interest in baseball had more to do with following the daily heroics of the Boy Who Used To Walk Her Home than it did with the game itself. He was probably just happy that he and his wife had something to do together. They'd grown increasingly detached in recent months, the sex had dried up, and Polly seemed so distant when they sat down at dinner and talked about the day's events. Watching baseball was the one time when she came alive, especially when Hans Bungle made a great play in the hole and nailed the runner at first by a half step. As I begin to gain consciousness and I see Polly there, my heart starts to beat a little bit faster. Our eyes lock, and she mouths the words "I love you" just before I reach into my glove and produce the ball. I'm still laying on my back, splayed across about five seats. Finally, when the moment is exactly fucking right, I pull the ball out, squeeze it tight and raise it high above my chest. The umpire gives a dramatic "out" signal, and the World Series is over. Yankee Stadium erupts. Bedlam. Everyone's on their feet. Dads are hugging kids, people are jumping up and down, you can almost hear the concrete that supports the upper deck begin to crack apart. My teammates are wading through the fans trying to pull me out. The fans are pawing me and congratulating me and basically molesting me as if I'm Courtney Love surfing atop the crowd. I lose sight of Polly. I pull myself to my feet and begin forcing my way forward, towards the field and, hopefully, towards Polly. As I get to the first row I catch a glimpse of her again. But she seems further away than ever. Zane is holding her tight and he's jumping up and down and sort of pulling her with him. She's still staring at me, over his shoulder. She doesn't even blink as my teammates mob me and pull me onto the field. As they carry me towards the locker room all I can think about is Polly. I twist my neck and pick her out of the crowd again, and she's still locked on me, fulfilling her end of the bargain. "I love you, too," I mouth. And she gets smaller and smaller in the distance and I realize that's all it will ever be, two third graders hopelessly in love and doomed to live the wrong lives. And to keep it all their little secret forever. I cry a little bit as she disappears, but somehow the knowing is enough. My actual athletic career fell a little short of that. Perhaps its peak came in that same year I'd fantasized about, 1996. I was playing a pickup basketball game at Houston Street, and my new girlfriend/future wife had stopped by to watch me. My team was me, D. Lee, Leroy, Harold and some other dude, and we usually played well together. But this wasn't my day. I was clanging up jumpers and throwing the ball away and we were quickly down like 10-2 in a game to 16. The future Mrs. Bungle told me she had to leave, and so I waved goodbye and went back to the game. I was embarrassed for how badly I'd played. It was frustrating, as pickup basketball sometimes is. There were a bunch of dudes waiting and I sort of knew that if we lost this game the day would be over before it began.
Then I turned around and noticed that she WAS there. She had stayed and seen the whole thing, and she even took pictures. That was a good feeling. As more and more of your fantasies go by the boards, you find it easier to take delight in the small triumphs that sometimes come your way in reality. Even today, I had one of those triumphs. There is a supernice guy I'm working with now. He's 27 and he loves basketball, and we spent part of the day Friday sharing hoops stories. It reminded me how much I love the game, and I decided I had to play this weekend. I gave him a call today to see if he wanted to join me, but he wasn't around, so I headed out by myself to the 20th street courts. The thing that makes playing sports interesting to me is the unpredictabililty of it all. You go play and you have no idea what to expect. When you show up, how many guys will be waiting? Will you get in a game at all? Will the guys who pick you up be nice, or will they be dicks? If you lose, will the wait be too long for you to play again? Will you have a good day shooting, or will you go home all grouchy because you stunk up the joint? Today I arrived and it all seemed new to me. I haven't played in a couple of months and when I started watching the games all the players looked so big and quick and strong and skilled, as if the game itself had evolved in my absence. I felt a few butterflies, as stupid as that may seem. Then I saw Bruce and Vern and a bunch of other faces that looked familiar, many of them faces without names who I know only through playing basketball on various downtown courts. That made me feel a little more comfortable, so I went up to some dudes and asked them who had last game. "We're next, and then he's after us," one guy said, nodding towards another guy. The games were three on three, and I only counted three guys waiting, so I figured that I could maybe get in on the second guy's team. This is one of the most awkward parts of pickup games. Going up to complete strangers and trying to sell yourself to them. "Can I run with you?" I asked the dude who had second game. He didn't really make eye contact with me. I could tell he was trying to think of a way to say that he already had his team, that there was no room. I hadn't impressed him, I guess, with my doughy physique and my Hub's Carryouts T-shirt with "You Like It The Juice" written on the back.**** But he wasn't quite enough of a scumbag to lie to my face and tell me he had his three. "Sure," he said without any enthusiasm at all. Then we played, and it was beautiful. I was doing it all. We beat a team that was much better than us, and I was the main reason why. We won three straight games, and after the third one my new buddy told me that I had "carried us." I was tired as hell but it felt great to be out there again, moving, shooting, passing, scoring. Everything but defending. I decided not to push my luck and left after the third game. Another small achievement to feel good about. The other day, I was on the Upper East Side and I was thirsty, so I stopped into some gourmet deli place and grabbed a 20 oz. Gatorade. They rang it up as $3.59. "3.59?!?!?" I asked. "For real?" "Yes, $3.59," the lady said. "Um, can I not buy that then?" I said. She voided the sale, and I walked out onto Madison Avenue shaken. $3.59 for a Gatorade, and not even the big boy, just the 20 ouncer? Yikes. It made me realize how fragile our relationship with Gatorade is. I mean, what if Gatorade started acting like the pharmaceutical companies do, gouging prices because they know we can't live without their wonderful product. Imagine if a 20 oz. Gatorade was always $3.59? It's too scary to think about. Maybe out of protest, maybe out of plain thirst, today during and after basketball I consumed FIVE 32 oz. Gatorades of varying flavors. I paid only $1.50 for each. What a country. Props to the rescuers of the Russian sub crew. Nice job. Wheredat (6 points)? By the way, in yesterday's picture I was simply all rocked out, not injured.
* Note that all other players in the fantasy besides me are of mid-70's vintage.
That didn't seem weird to me at all at the time, nor does it really seem weird
now.
Nope. The truth is, I've been one busy Mature Ugly Man for the last week or so, more than I've ever been before in my life. And not busy with some huge new career path or lifestyle choice. I haven't become a marine sniper or a DJ or a pipe fitter. And I haven't taken up motocross or deep sea fishing. The plain and sad truth is that my busy-ness stems from the two areas that many Mature Ugly Men come to grips with around this time in life. The Job and The Kid. First, The Job. I will try to follow the basic Blogger's tenet not to discuss work in the blog*, but let me just say that it has been crazy at the office over the last few days. Crazy-ass crazy, like a cross between Vernon Maxwell and Tom Cruise. Long hours, lots of mental stress, and I go home every day feeling like I've left 152 questions unanswered. The flip side is that I'm working on a project that I care about and that stimulates me creatively, and I feel like I'm making an impact on it, for better or worse. I daresay that my job has become, temporarily at least, rewarding. But I've been putting in twelve good hours a day and that shit'll wear you out. Especially if... ...you have a Kid. I am not going to pretend to be wise to the ways of parenthood after a month in the saddle, especially as my wife has done roughly 92.6 % of the work. There is nothing I hate more than know-it-all parents. As I was awaiting the birth of our li'l girl, at least 20 parents I spoke to** chimed in with their opinions about what I could expect. These opinions ranged from the crushingly obvious ("you can forget about getting the sleep you're used to") to the condescending ("you don't even know what tired is yet") to the offensive ("you haven't made a down payment on a house yet and you're having a kid? what the hell are you doing? you have to move to the suburbs immediately!") to the mind-blowingly unoriginal ("your life as you know it is over") to the just plain wrong ("you're gonna have a boy, because your wife is carrying low/high, etc."). Thanks so much all you douchebags. You added nothing to my experience. That said, Dan K. totally gets it right in his stunning softball recap this week when he says: "While babies are totally rewarding from an emotional standpoint, while they broaden your horizons immeasurably, giving you a new understanding of what love and being loved can be, while they give a rare sense of purpose and direction to one's life and make you want to be -- need to be -- a better person, they also really drain your fuck-around time." Ouch and amen. Especially in these early weeks, The Kid just takes up all your goddamn time. And again, my wife is carrying the vast majority of the burden. But even with the awesome job she's doing, The Kid needs some love, attention, and time from Daddy as well. So blogging, while still important and fun and something I don't want to give up, is gonna get squeezed out here and there. New parents out there, if you're having one of those beaten-down moments when you can't believe you actually went ahead and made a baby, and you're feeling hopeless about ever again experiencing that selfish joy that used to fill your evenings, here is a cool thing to think about: someday in the next few years, you're going to be able to take your kid to a water park. And the two of you are gonna slide down those water slides all day long, running back up the hill each time so you can do it again. I can't wait for that shit; I strongly feel that water parks are the answer. In fact, when somebody I know tells me they're expecting a child, that will be my stock reply: "Water parks are the answer, kid. You'll see." Another by-product of The Kid is that I have stopped playing sports altogether. That's a bad sign. I need to get back in there again soon, and I will, but in the meantime all I can do is think about sports. And in that thinking it occurred to me: the end of the line is nearing in terms of my participation in sports. I'm almost 36, I'm carrying around somewhere between 20 and 275 extra pounds, and I'm not getting a chance to exercise. It's not that I'm going to up and announce my retirement, pretending that my career has warranted such a dramatic conclusion. No, I am your typical weekend warrior knockaround plugger, and so I imagine that my career will end in the way most weekend warrior knockaround pluggers' careers end, with a painful and embarrassing injury. Maybe even in the next few weeks or months. We don't want to let that milestone event go by without pumping a little fun out of it. So we hereby announce The Official Verbungle.com Career-ending Injury Challenge. Here are the rules. Somewhere on the right side of this page, there will be a Trusty HaloScan comments box. In that box, you can leave your prediction of how the playing days of Hans Bungle will effectively end.***
1. Date and Time So a legitimate guess could be: 9/3/05, 7:52 pm, P.S. 41 gym, basketball, ruptured left groin. The closest guess in each category will receive a free verbungle.com button, courtesy of verbungle.com. And yes, Brian C., we're still working on that T-shirt from the lyric challenge. Maximum ten guesses per person.. *** Just a couple of notes on the comments from the previous couple of posts:
1. I didn't buy that Hard Rock T-shirt, I borrowed it that day to play ball. OK,
maybe I kept it after that, but I didn't buy it. Does anyone want to step up and
admit that they did? *** Whodat (22 points)?
* Yes, I am freely using the word "blog" in all its various forms and tenses. It
doesn't mean that I accept it, just that I am too lazy to present an
alternative. |
When
I was a sophomore in high school, I wrote a term paper on The Drinking Age.* The
nationwide age of 21 had just gone into effect, with the government threatening
to withhold highway funding from any states that did not comply by a certain
date. I did the bare minimum research, saw some statistics that seemed to
clearly indicate that:
Went
out tonight for the sendoff of a woman I've worked with for 12 years. It was at
Frying Pan, which is a rather underappreciated little bar/cafe on a floating
barge right next to Basketball City. I got a little seasick for a spell. A
fine cold Bud brought me back. The wife even showed up with the baby, who
behaved impeccably. Well, she did crap all over herself but nobody saw
that. 
This is officially the angriest I have been about a baseball game since Game 7
of the 2001 World Series when Luis Gonzalez won the game off Rivera with that
little dink shot after Torre brought the infield in. Bringing the infield in
occasionally makes sense, but there are some moves that
managers continue to make despite decades of overwhelming evidence that these
moves will cost you the fucking game every time. Bringing the outfield in is
such a move. You bring the outfield in, you lose. Have you ever seen a team win
after bringing the outfield in? No you have not. Torre pulled another beauty out
of his handbook tonight: intentionally walking the bases loaded in a tied,
extra-inning game on the road. 
by PB dot C
As she points out in her review, "after ten years of anything it's time to move
on." Having worked at the same place for almost 12 years now, I am inclined to
agree. And as much as I throw a big semi-ironic verbal high five in her
direction for getting out and moving on, I am saddened as well. Val has been a
valued office ally and a true delight to be around for this last decade of both
our lives. We were just kids when she started back in '95, but she already had a
real presence as an employee, thanks both to her obvious intelligence and her
tireless Pittsburgh work ethic. Not to mention that she's always just been an excellent all-around lady with a great sense of humor. Over the years, we sat
together, we laughed together, we bitched together, we even shared a tape
dispenser. In PMOP brand white-out, we wrote "Val" on one side of it and "Hans"
on the other. She still has the dispenser, even though she's a big shot now with
her own office, and I am still stuck deep in Cubicleville. I think the tape
reminds her of how innocent and ridiculous things used to be in our workplace.
If nothing else, she owes a big Thank You to our company for introducing her to
Crsmal, her husband. She hit the jackpot on that one; you'd be hard-pressed to
find a more charming and mellow dude than him. They are one of those rare
couples that seems absolutely made for one another. Although who knows, maybe
it's all a front and he smacks her around behind closed doors. I doubt it. 
My
weekends seem to be falling into a pattern of one "$$$ - Super Triple Cash
Money" followed by a meager "$ - Money." This weekend was merely $. Friday night
was nice, went to my friend's bachelor party, which consisted of playing full
court hoops at Chelsea Piers (not basketball city, Chelsea Piers) and then a
meal of reasonably priced Chinese food. I guess after that they all went out and
did some of the bad things that we normally associate with bachelor parties, but
I was home in bed with my footie pajamas on by that point. Hoops was most
excellent. One of the nicer courts I've played on, and it felt good to actually
sprint up and down the court a few times. I bet it didn't look so good, though.
Whatever. Saw a bunch of old ballplaying buds and none of them looked too bad.
I'd tell you that I played very well but some people who were there might read
this and they know I'm a scrub, so it kind of defeats the purpose of false
bragging.
When
I was eight years old, I had exactly one fantasy in life, and I played it out
almost every single day. It covered pretty much everything: sports and girls and
personal validation and professional triumph. 
