Save the Cheerleader...

I was going through security at the airport the other day when the TSA lady looked at my ID and asked, "Has anyone ever told you you look like the guy from Heroes?"

I responded with, "Are you shitting me?" Which in retrospect was not an appropriate choice of words for the security guard but I really was taken aback. The thing is, I have heard I look like the guy from Heroes many times, just not since I've been in Nashville so I kind of thought I was past all that. I've never seen the show but the character in question is Sylar, who is supposedly one of the main villains, and I have to admit Google Images has yielded a few pictures where I can see how there could be a bit of a resemblance. So I can accept it when people I know say something like, "Hey, you know you look like that guy from Heroes?" because I can respond with, "Bullshit, that douchebag looks like me." But when a complete stranger makes it a point to tell me I look like someone on TV it really busts my balls.

First of all, when someone says I look like him, clearly they don't think I am him, which is to say I'm not actually attractive enough to be on TV as anyone other than a rapist on an episode of Law and Order SVU, nor do I look like I have enough money to be employed as a television actor, probably because I'm flying the $79 Fun Fare on Southwest Airlines.

Secondly, if I'm going to look like any actor, why does it have to be some crap actor on a crap television show? Even if someone stopped me and said, "Has anyone ever told you you look like Peter from the show Family Guy?" I'd be like, "Well, clearly I need to start doing some sit-ups but that's awfully nice of you to say because that is a sweetass television show." I was never going to watch Heroes based solely on the original advertisement with the person whispering, "Save the cheerleader…" That's not enticing, that's just confusing. Save the cheerleader from what? Teen pregnancy? A lifetime of low self esteem? An eating disorder? What? Just give her an Algebra book. Horny high school dudes aren't into math, knowing how to do integrals is a real confidence booster and she could calculate exactly how much she'd need to eat to reach her ideal body weight instead of throwing up all the time. You don't need a hero for that. Had they been like, "Sacrifice the cheerleader save the world," then I would have been a little intrigued and at least would have watched the first episode to see what it was all about.

The only decent thing about this comparison is, I hear the guy is a pretty badass villain. Something about how he chops people's skulls off then steals their super powers to make himself stronger. That's pretty fucking cool, though rather than cut people's skulls off I'd do something like Sub-Zero's Spine Rip maneuver in Mortal Komabt where he decapitates them with a wicked uppercut, leaving the spine intact. I also wouldn't decapitate heroes to steal their power, I'd just discriminatingly Spine Rip normal people that deserve it like the lady in the super market that openly beats her child or the really creepy dude at work that stands too close to everyone and somehow always changes a casual conversation into something about a strip club. I think I'd be a pretty popular hero if I did that.

Honestly though, the only reason anyone thinks there's any comparison between me and this Sylar dude is the eyebrows. We both have monster fucking eyebrows, which is not a flattering comparison. If you saw two caterpillars crawling across anyone's forehead you'd be like, "That dude looks like John. Watch out, he might rip your spine right out of your fucking back."

See for yourself:

Sylar:

Me:

Happy Holidays

Welcome back. I hope everyone had a pleasant holiday break spent with friends and family and full of great gifts both given and received.

Speaking of gifts, we had the Dirty Santa/White Elephant gift exchange at work last week. I was really hoping for more drama and/or truly horrendous, embarrassing gifts than ultimately panned out, but that was probably for the better because it was awkward enough as it was.

As I've mentioned before, engineers in general aren't a very socially graceful group, so you throw a couple of them into a room and all you get is a bunch of blank stares, like a meeting at the UN if they forget to bring those handy headphones that translate what everyone is saying. This is true for a lot of social interactions, but particularly so in an office setting - the worst part is when everyone jumps on the same lameass joke that gets used over and over and over like beating a dead horse, resurrecting it, then beating it to death again (for those that watch The Office on television, Michael Scott's "That's what she said," is the perfect example). At the Dirty Santa party the dead horse was "the travel iron."

Every time someone picked up a gift, the peanut gallery was like, "Oh, I bet that's the travel iron," "Who's going to get the travel iron?" "Where's the travel iron?" Always followed by a chorus of ridiculously forced laughter.

After about 10 minutes of that shit I had to finally ask what the fuck the travel iron was. As the story goes, a few years back some dude that worked for the company was going on his first business trip. Before he left he went out and bought a small travel-sized clothing iron, apparently unaware that every hotel room in a non-third world country has a complementary clothing iron and ironing board. When his coworkers found out what an idiot he was, they gave him shit non-stop until someone actually stole the travel iron from him and wrapped it up as a Dirty Santa gift one year. The story is funny enough except this happened like 5 years ago and no one even knows where the hell the travel iron is now. But it didn't fail, right down to the last gift someone would say, "Oh, that looks like the travel iron!" There was no goddamn travel iron.

For the most part the gifts really sucked. There was a box of chocolates, a blanket, a set of three umbrellas, a singing Santa Claus, a pile of turds, a satchel of bullshit, and countless other crap gifts.

Everything was so stupid and tame, I really started sweating how well my gift would be received. Last year my brother gave me a desk organizer in my stocking. It held a roll of tape, paper clips, pencils and post-it notes. The thing was, the organizer was in the shape of a man taking a shit on a toilet. I thought it would be the perfect gift given that I work in the plumbing department now, but compared to a stupid Frosty the Snowman picture frame, a little dude sitting on a toilet is positively scandalous.

Lucky for me it was a huge hit, after several nervous moments before people actually realized what it was, and got traded several times.

There was one good gift other than mine, a 14-in-one utility tool, but the dude that brought it ended up stealing it for himself. That's a pretty big douchebag move but I applaud him for doing it because the awesomeness of the gift I brought was only offset by the sheer bullshit gift I received.

When it was my turn I picked up a rectangular box that was not too big and not too small. It wasn't too heavy but had some weight to it suggesting there was something substantial within. As soon as I grabbed it some dipshit said, "I bet it's the travel iron!" (Uncomfortable chuckles). It wasn't the fucking travel iron but I wish it had been. All I got was a stupid fucking Santa Claus coffee mug full of candy and a vanilla scented candle.

Clearly someone had gone to Walgreens 15 minutes earlier and grabbed the first things that added up to $10. I know when I opened it I had a retarded smile on my face as I tried to sound happy/grateful/surprised when I said, "Oh look, it's a Santa mug... oh, and a candle... how... nice..." but really I was feeling pissed/vengeful/blind rage. Are you shitting me? I brought a desk organizer in the shape of a man taking a shit and I'm leaving with a fucking coffee mug and a goddamn scented candle probably made from endangered whale blubber???

Goddamn, I wish I would have gotten the travel iron so I could have stashed it above a ceiling tile over that asshole dirty-santa-mug-and-candle-gift-giver's desk. You know why? I'd put a bottle of water up there right next to it with a tiny little pin hole in the bottom so over time it would just drip... drip... drip, real slow like until eventually the water would compromise the integrity of the ceiling tile and the travel iron would come crashing down onto his goddamn head. Then at least next year I could go to the stupid gift exchange again and instead of everyone laughing about the travel iron I would bring it up and see the fear in their eyes.

Anyway, the whole thing was over in about 30 minutes then the awkward silence set in again and you could see everyone thinking the same thing: "This really blows but it was scheduled for an hour so I don't want to go back to my desk but this is so painful but I don't want to be the first to get up so I guess I'll just sit here with this stupid smile on my face and wait for someone to mention the travel iron again so I can chuckle awkwardly."

A Century Ends

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Travels - Part III: Walk The Line

Wednesday morning we had to attend a meeting with the hospital’s engineering and maintenance departments to discuss the specifics of the project we were working on. Just to be clear, I had absolutely nothing to contribute to this meeting. I haven’t even worked on the project yet and didn’t know anything about it until 5 days ago. I literally said nothing the entire meeting. Not a single word. I just fought the overwhelming urge to pass out from pure boredom/exhaustion. At one point I blinked then at some unknown length of time later I thought to myself, “Huh, that’s funny; my eyes are still closed. I should open them.”

Earlier I mentioned my two critical components of a successful business trip: eating at proper intervals and managing your bathroom breaks. The stupid meeting I was sitting through seemed designed specifically to prevent me from accomplishing either. Things got started at 8 am and didn’t end until 2 pm… with no breaks. I’m not kidding. We sat in the same goddamn room for 6 straight hours with no food or water or bathrooms. Not even doughnuts, coffee, or a trash can. So not only was I fighting to stay awake, after the first hour I desperately needed a snack and had to pee with no opportunity to satisfy either. The worst part was, the conference room was in the middle of the goddamn cafeteria. I could see and smell and hear food all around me but I couldn’t get to any of it.

With each passing minute I just got angrier and angrier. Who were these people that didn’t need to eat or drink anything and never went to the bathroom? It was like a meeting with a bunch of goddamn cyborgs. I started to get delirious and began daydreaming crazy fucked up situations in which the cyborgs were plotting to take over the world and extinguish the human race and I was the only one to stop them. I was looking all around for an escape route and then weapons to fight them off. I figured I could fashion some sort of flame-thrower out of high pressure oxygen tanks and a lighter but that would only serve to burn the flesh off their otherwise titanium steel robotic bodies.  What I really needed was an M-16 with a grenade launcher. Everyone knows that the bullets are useless other than to hopefully slow them down. The grenade launcher would be the only chance but I’d need to figure out where their weakness was. The sternum perhaps; maybe the back of the neck; the arm put; I don’t know. But if it were up to me to stop them I’d have to figure it and fast.

Anyways, just when I thought the meeting was finally over, some new guy showed up to the party. He was with the Board of Directors and oversaw the budget for the project, which is a nice way of saying he was a complete prick. The meeting up until that point, while entirely worthless and long-winded, was at least cordial. Then this dude showed up like a goddamn cyclone intent on ripping a path of destructions right through the middle of the meeting. For everything that had already been discussed and agreed upon he was like, “Why should I pay for this? Tell me. Tell me why I should pay for this.” Then someone would start to speak and he’d interrupt with, “This is ridiculous. We don’t have the money in the budget for this. I’m not going to pay for it.” And everyone in the meeting just bent over and grabbed their ankles. We were prepared to design a state of the art healthcare facility until he came in and shit on all of that and instead decided that he would only pay for the Little Tikes version. It was insane.

“I’m sorry Mrs Smith; you have stage 4 renal failure, which has an 80% morbidity rate. Don’t worry though, we have a team of the best doctors to take care of you along with this Baby Tap-a-Tune Piano. It won’t contribute anything towards saving your life but we’ve found when times are tough, playing a little plastic piano with four keys can really help with the coping.”

Just as the guy was at the peak of one of his tantrums he got a phone call, which is always embarrassing but even more so for this guy because his ringtone was “Ring of Fire,” except it wasn’t the Johnny Cash version, it was some Mexican mariachi band version. So he was railing on like, “I won’t pay for that shit, blah, blah, blah, I’m a big fat asshole, blah, blah, blah…” Then his phone kicks in with, “I fell in to a burning ring of fire, Fiesta! A burning ring fire, ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! A burning ring of fire…”

I derived a good deal of enjoyment from that.

Finally, just when I was about to get desperate and aggressive, the meeting ended, I ran off to the bathroom and found a vending machine. The world was back to normal for a short while.

Later in the day we were hanging around the maintenance department, which might as well be located in the dungeon of a castle it was so far down in the bowels of the hospital, shooting the shit with a couple of the good ol’ boys who keep the place running. One of them, who had been in part of the meeting with us said, “Man, I don’t know how you guys sit through those meetings without falling asleep.”

My boss responded, “Well, if you had seen my face you would have known that I was fighting it off pretty hard. I don’t know about you, John…”

They all looked at me, which was my queue to say something witty. Generally when I’m on the spot to say something witty my brain just takes a big shit instead and I usually get caught in the middle of trying to say two different things, so whatever comes out is an unrecognizable conglomeration of both. Like, “I was really couldn’t stay awake my eyes sleepy also…” In this case my brain did in fact take a shit but fortunately it was just a small one so while I didn’t say anything witty, I at least said only one thing, which was, “Half of my job is just trying to stay awake.” Everyone got a big kick out of that, especially my boss, and I realized it actually was kind of witty except for the fact that it was true and I wasn’t trying to be the least bit funny. I’d be twice as productive if half of my day wasn’t spent working just to actually be awake.

Thursday was a long day though pretty uneventful. I just had to draw out all the existing piping above the ceiling in one of the abandoned wings of the hospital that was going to be renovated. That required me to get a ladder and look up above the ceiling tiles in a whole bunch of patient rooms that hadn’t been used in what looked like decades. That’s actually not true; each of the rooms had been used, probably by some resident, as a remote location to take a shit only to find out after they were done that the water had been shut off to the entire wing and they couldn’t flush any of their business. Each room I went into smelled like the devil’s ass to the point where I felt like I was on an episode of Dirty Jobs.

In the afternoon we had to go to an old children’s hospital dating back to the 1940’s  that had been converted into doctor’s offices. We had to explore the attic level because they were considering renovating it to add a bunch of offices. Most of the attic was just used for storing patient files, all except one room. One room was a repository for a bunch of broken down old medical equipment and shit. I’m telling you, there is nothing freakier than a bunch of old, broken medical equipment. There was a whole pile of broken walkers and wheel chairs, a gurney, and oh man, it’s creeping me out just thinking about it. Plus there were all these old ass children’s toys just discarded and strewn about the whole place. There was even a broken tricycle. A fucking tricycle I tell you. You could practically hear the haunting laughs of ghostly kids running around. Suddenly cyborgs were the least of my worries, especially when compared to the Children of the Corn. 

Travels - Part II: The Legend of Zelda

Tuesday morning we got up early to do the final site visit on a doctor’s office that was getting ready to open. We met the contractor, a good ol’ southern Georgia boy who didn’t speak a lick of English. I mean, he spoke English and nothing but, we just couldn’t understand a thing he was saying because he talked like Hank’s buddy, Boomhauer, on King of the Hill. “Wut wees got hisah sitasian witta cold w’er pipe anuh pipe fitens werdehuh comes’geter anuh recon dersuh dri-dri-drip…”

We’d nod our heads and smile but we didn’t know what the hell was going on.

The site visit was very uneventful for the most part until the end when we had to climb into the attic to see if they’d installed the fire sprinkler piping correctly. I wasn’t anticipating that part of the operation so I had left my headlamp in the car (that’s right, I travel with some of my tools). My boss was like, “Oh, it won’t matter, I have a flashlight,” but all he had was a dinky little mag light capable of producing a beam of light the size of a quarter. So next thing I knew I was climbing around the rafters of the attic in the pitch black like a blind monkey or some shit.

I would just see this little light flicker every now and again and he’d be like, “Can you see the sprinkler piping over there?”

“No.”

“How about now?”

“No.”

“Now?”

“No.”

“Now?”

“Dude, I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing but I can’t see my hand in front of my face. For all I know I’m hanging upside down right now. Next time just let me know we’ll be doing this shit and I’ll bring my night vision goggles.”

After that we took a lunch break at my favorite neighborhood bar and grille, Applebees. When the waitress took our orders she said matter of factly, "This is just stress."

We both looked at her like, "What???"

"This," she said, indicating to her left eye, which was blood red with a broken vessel. "This is just stress. I just wanted to let you know so you didn't think it was something else."

Well, truthfully I hadn't even noticed but now that you draw my attention to it I don't care if it's stress or eyeball herpes, it fucking grosses me out and now I want to throw up.

That afternoon we had to do a plumbing survey on the energy plant for an entire hospital, so I spent 5 hours crawling around massive 4000 gallon boilers, 1000 ton chillers and 1250 kw generators trying to trace water and fuel oil piping that had been installed in 1978 and modified a hundred times since then. The place had dozens of different rooms, each with 6 entrances and 8 exits and no real discernible way of knowing which went where. I felt like I was wandering around some secret level in Zelda¹.

After spending the day crawling around all that crap in rooms with huge signs that said stuff like, "CAUTION: Hearing Protection Required," or "DANGER: Hazardous Chemicals," or "Do NOT Enter This Fucking Space Without Safety Glasses," all without hearing, eye, or acid waste protection, I kept thinking, "Dammit! I'm a grown man! Why am I crawling around on my hands and knees in this godforsaken place just following a bunch of pipes around? Can't we give some 6 year-old a bunch of transformers to do this shit for us? In fact, I just met a kid at the airport who would do all this for a couple nudie magazines."

At one point my boss was literally army crawling through a bunch of weeds outside the energy plant trying to determine the location of the underground piping. When he emerged he had a huge beetle crawling across his ass. I was a micro-second away from instinctively swatting the thing off him before I realized what the hell I was doing. There was no way I was going to risk a sexual harassment suit for smacking my boss’ ass. No way. Had it been any one of the girls in accounting I wouldn’t have hesitated; but not my boss.

So I was just like, “Uhh… dude, you have a beetle.”

“A what?”

“A beetle. You have a beetle there.”

“Where?”

“Right there.”

“Where?”

“Uhh… there. In that general region. Crawling all over… Listen, I’m just going to go into the next room and let you handle this on your own.”

The day ended with us crawling through the tunnel that connected the energy plant to the hospital and held all of the water, gas, and electrical piping. This thing was never really intended for normal sized humans to traverse yet there we were, pitch black, among the rats and spiders and roaches. It felt like we were in World War II Nazi Germany holed up in a bunker 50 feet below the earth’s surface with the Allied Forces relentlessly bombing us above.  I was prepared to turn the corner and stumble upon Hitler all curled up in the fetal position clutching his teddy bear and I’d be all like, “What’s up motherfucker,” then I’d kick him in the throat and rip that stupid mustache off his face^2,3.

To be continued…

 

1. Does anyone remember what the hell the point of that game was? I’m sure it was to save a princess or someone that had been captured but really, did anyone ever finish that game? Ever? I have a ton of memories of playing that game. So many in fact I feel like I must have spent a solid year, year and a half doing nothing but Zelda and I don’t think I finished 10% of that stupid game. The problem was, there were more secrets embedded in that game than the actual game itself. Like, if you weren’t so obsessed with finding the magical fairy in the swamp by playing the flute while standing on the fifth lily pad from the left, you could have finished the game in like 45 minutes. I know I’m going on about this like I hate the game, but honestly right now I’m really jonesing to play some fucking Zelda.

2. Truly Hitler would have deserved a whole lot worse than that and I’d like to think that had I run into him I would have had the energy to work him over with a lead pipe for a good two to three hours but at the time I was pretty tired so that’s all I could think to do.

3. Speaking of mustaches, anyone seen the cover of the new Rolling Stone? My boy, Brad Pitt, rocking the badass mustache? Don’t be surprised next time you see me…

Travels

I have to apologize for not posting anything recently; I’ve pretty much been off the grid for the past few days. I'm currently sitting in a shitty hotel room in southern Georgia on my very first business trip for my new job. I'm traveling with just my boss, spending our first amount of significant alone time together, which feels like a really awkward first date. A whole bunch of personal get-to-know-you questions and blah, blah, blah. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like the guy a lot, I just haven’t talked this much about myself in like… ever. I ran out of things to say after the first half hour, so I’ve just been making shit up and telling stories about movies I’ve seen like they actually happened to me. “Yeah, it was the craziest thing. I’m driving this little tricked out two-seater around the parking lot at the mall and I get it up to like 87, 88 miles per hour and next thing I know it’s like the car got struck by a bolt of lightning. I mean, I should have been killed but I wasn’t. In fact, I woke up and I felt like it was 1958 or something. It was just the strangest thing… So, tell me more about your kids…”

We flew out of Nashville into Jacksonville, FL then drove 3 hours into Georgia. Now, I know what you’re thinking – unless you’re traveling to like MeeTeetse, Wyoming you shouldn’t have to fly somewhere then drive another 3 hours. That’s ridiculous. And in fact it was ridiculous. We practically drove through the passenger pickup lane of the Tallahassee airport in order to get to where we were going. Why we didn’t fly into Tallahassee I don’t know. If we were playing a real life game of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego we would have lost right away. You know damn well you don’t have time to fly to the wrong airport if you’re going to catch up to a wily bitch like Carmen.

I traveled a ton at my old job so I'm pretty seasoned at it, and if I've learned anything in my business travels it's this: 

In order to have an enjoyable experience you have to manage two things:

1. Your food intake

2. Your waste output

That is to say, when you travel you never know when the next meal is coming or where the next toilet is going to be. If you pass a restaurant or a shitter, you need to stop, even if you’re not hungry or don’t need to go, because you don’t want to be racing to the airport to catch a flight having not eaten in 6 hours and being all hypoglycemic, nor do you want to be up on a ladder in the middle of a warehouse without a toilet in sight then lean over to bust ass and shit your pants instead. If you can name anything worse than that while on a business trip, I’m all ears. 

While I’ve never soiled my pants that I’m willing to admit, I have taken a leak on the roof of a Home Depot before because the plumbing wasn’t hooked up in the bathroom yet. I’m not proud of that but you tend to get really resourceful when you’re faced with a tough decision in which one of the options is pissing your pants.

Anyway, on this particular trip we were flying Southwest out of Nashville. I hate flying Southwest for business because there is always that awkward moment when you’re getting on the plane with your coworker and you want to sit in the seat next to the hot chick but he wants to sit next to you. Oh man, that sucks. Fortunately on this trip, my boss didn’t check into his flight until an hour before so he was relegated to Group C.

While I was in line with the other Group A people waiting to board, I was standing next to a young 30-something couple and their three sons, ages 6, 4, and baby-ish. The 6 year-old, John, was the brains of the brotherly operation while the middle one, Tucker, was equal parts ADHD and unfiltered parrot. Tucker was dancing around and kept running into me until his mom was like, "Tucker, would you quit bumping into that gentleman!" Tucker turned around, looked up at me, and in a 4 year-old's voice said, "Gentleman. Gentle-man. Gentle-baby. Gentle-baby!" Like, the little motherfucker was antagonizing me right to my face and all I could do was laugh at him. I looked at his mom who was embarrassed as hell, but I could also tell she had been through this before so all she could do was apologize and hope her son shut up.

Then little John turned around to get Tucker's attention (in 6 year-old's voice), "Tucker. Tucker. Lookey. Tucker, lookey.” He was pointing to a 20-something year-old girl standing not more than 10 feet in front of him. “Tucker, lookey. Look at the girl. Look at the girl there… She's hot!"

Immediately I looked to the mother's face again, and again she was embarrassed as hell but still in familiar territory. The thing was, he said it loud enough that the girl could have heard him and it was brilliant because among all the people standing in line there she was definitely the most attractive so the mother was less embarrassed that her horn-ball kid was into some older chick than she was that he basically told everyone else around him that they were ugly and not worthy of any notice. 

Better than that, after John got Tucker's attention, or more appropriately, turned his attention to the hot chick, Tucker said (in 4 year-old’s voice) "Huba-huba!" 

I'm not making this up. 

I thought the mom was going to shit her pants. She snapped at the kid, "Tucker, you are not old enough for ‘huba-huba’!" 

Meanwhile, I was just rolling on the ground, just like everyone else around us, thinking how awesome the two horny bastards were. Since I was flying Southwest I was going to offer to let the little dudes sit with me in my row. How great would that flight have been? "Ok, boys... sit back and relax. I'm going to introduce you two to a little something us big dudes call Playboy..."

That didn’t happen so instead I just sat next to the hot chick.

To be continued…

Wild Horse Saloon

The wife and I attended my company holiday party at the Wild Horse Saloon on Friday night. That's right, I said the Wild Horse Saloon. The name alone conjures up images of denim-clad cowboys and cowgirls drinking Bud, sipping whiskey, and shooting pool. Incidentally, that's pretty much exactly what it was like.

For those not familiar, the Wild Horse is a huge bar/restaurant/line-dancing club/concert venue where they filmed the tv show, Nashville Star. I've never seen the show but I think it's like America's Next Top Model for country hicks or something.

It ended up being a great venue for the Holiday Party because it was completely unpretentious, very laid back, and lots of things to do and see. We had the entire third floor balcony to ourselves, which overlooked the massive stage and dance floor on the first. I spent most of my night (since I knew a total of 4 people at the entire event, one of whom I married a few years ago) standing at the edge of the balcony watching the hundreds of people line dancing below. It was quite an amazing spectacle. Literally, a massive dance floor full of people all doing the same choreographed line dance steps to every single song that played. Didn't matter if it was fast or slow, country or hip-hop¹, they had a different dance to everything and everyone knew it. After watching that in amazement for 2 hours I kept coming back to the same thought: this is what's wrong with America.

All of those people knew all of those dance steps and could do all of them perfectly. I mean, what a fucking waste. Instead of learning a hundred different line dances learn some math, or maybe a little Spanish, or some computer programming or something. Anything productive that the country could hang its hat on. Not line dancing. We can't export line dancing and even if we could the Chinese would learn how to do it better.

At one point in the night a band of douchebag poser country boys got up on stage to rip through everyone's favorite country music hits like Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy and... shit, I don't know the name of any other country song but rest assured they played them all. This band was a real piece of work though. It was like they all got together for a brainstorming session to answer one question: How can we be the most blatantly country cover band ever?

Lead Singer: "Ok, what have we got here? Start spitting out some ideas guys. Start with you there Brad."

Brad: "Uhh... hmmm... how about a fiddle?"

Singer: "Yes! Great! That's exactly what we're looking for. Country people love fiddles. Ok Brad, you're going to need to learn the fiddle. Who's next? Come on guys, we need something. Rob, what do you have?"

Rob: "Oh... uhhh... two rhythm guitarists?"

Singer: "Yes! Perfect! Every country band has two rhythm guitarists playing the exact same thing. That's a good one. Ok, what else? What else? Jeremy, you're up."

Jeremy: "Man... hmm... I would say no undershirts."

Singer: "Wow, I like that. I wouldn't have thought of that personally, but you hit the nail right on the head there. Country stars don't wear undershirts. That means we need to start waxing our chests but we need to do it discreetly because waxing is really gay and country stars are definitely not gay. In fact, I would say we need to put heterosexuality on this list, but that really goes without saying so I'll leave it off. Ok, what else guys? Come on we can't be done. Randy?"

Randy: "Well... what about cowboy hats?"

Singer: "Shit! I don't know why I didn't think of that right away. That should be at the top of the list. Dammit, I'm just going to write it in here at the top; I'd hate for someone to find this list some day and think that we didn't put cowboy hats at the top. Alright, what else?"

Brad: "What about denim?"

Singer: "Ahh, fuck me! That should have been first, even before cowboy hats. Shit, this list is all fucked up now. Ok, how 'bout this - we'll finish the list and I'll go back and re-write it so it looks like denim is 1 and cowboy hats are 2. Ok, we're on a roll here, let's keep this going..."

This wasn't the band we saw, but they might as well have been. You can get an idea of just exactly what I'm talking about:

1. Just for the record, they definitely didn't play any hip-hop; I was just trying to make a point that had they played hip-hop, people would have line danced to it. I mean, actually everyone would have walked out the front door, but had they not been mono-ethnical and had there been hip-hop, there would have been hip-hop line dancing.

The Weather Outside is Frightful

It's snowing in Nashville right now. I moved here to get away from this shit.

To be clear, it's not even really snowing. Ohio gets snow like this in August yet the entire city is losing its mind here. All the schools are closed even though it would take you damn near an hour to scrape together enough snow to make just one snow ball. It's like instead of snow falling from the sky it's Russian Paratroopers just like in that movie, Red Dawn. "Today's forecast: Temperatures in the low 30's with winds at 5-10 miles per hour out of the northeast; there's a 60% chance of communist paratroopers with a potential accumulation of 3-4,000 foot soldiers."

Man, I loved that movie, Red Dawn, growing up. After seeing that movie as a kid I could not wait for Russian troops to try to take over my town. I'd stare absent mindedly out the window at school and just hope it would happen because I knew I was going to be one of the kids that escaped to the hills with just a hunting rifle to ultimately drive the communists out of our great land but not before they ruthlessly slaughtered half the town. 

I also realized at a very young age the Patrick Swayze was a major douche bag. I mean, yeah I took like 8 different girls to see Ghost in the theater and tried to get them to make out with me but that's the only usefulness that turd has ever provided and even then he wasn't good enough to seal the deal for me. 

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Last night we went to help package food to send to starving children around the world. Now, I know most good natured people who volunteer their time don't go around announcing it to people, unless the volunteer is Oprah who broadcasts all of her good naturedness on her television program which is seen in every country in the world; even the ones that don't have any food. In an interview once, Oprah was asked if she was so good natured to all the people in the world, why didn't she have any kids of her own? She replied that the world's children are her children. Bullshit. Oprah doesn't have any kids because she's the most asexual creature on the planet. Like an amoebae with billions of dollars. You could show a picture of Oprah to every person in the world, all of whom would recognize her, and literally no one would even register a 1 on an attractiveness scale of 1 to 10.

 

Anyhoo. Back to my great charitableness. Actually, we really did have a fantastic time doing it and it is truly a great cause. The organization packaged over 400,000 meals that will get shipped around the world. That's amazing and I don't mind talking about it for that reason alone. 

 

Still, that's not going to stop me from reserving my place in hell for finding humor in even the most altruistic of events.

 

First off, while you're reading this, just picture me in a hair net the whole time.

 

The whole thing was set up in a gymnasium where there were dozens of packaging stations. Each station had like 8 or 10 people. A small plastic bag would get filled with a tablespoon of powdered chicken, tablespoon of dried vegetables, cup of soy, and cup of rice. The bag would get weighed on a scale, sealed, then boxed up. It was remarkably efficient. I really wanted to ask how you turn a chicken into powder but that wasn't really appropriate and I don't think I really did want to know ("Well, it's actually quite simple. You just take a chicken - it can still be alive if you want - and you just throw it into a big woodchipper. That's really it. You just add some food dye at the end to mask the naturally blood red color, but that's it.")

 

I ended up at a table with an entire family - Grandma and Grandpa, mom and dad, uncle, and three kids. My first task was bagging and weighing the food. I know these people took one look at me and realized I knew how to bag and weigh some shit and the funny thing was, I wasn't even high, nor did I have any dried blood on my face. They just knew.

 

So we got started packaging food and it was just absolute insanity. You see, the organizers had this brilliant ploy to treat it like a competition - see which group could package the most food. You take a bunch of normally good natured, mild-mannered people and introduce a little competition into their lives and it turns into fucking Wal-mart the day after Thanksgiving. I mean rice was flying everywhere, there was a thick dust cloud of powdered chicken in the air, and I saw one old lady get trampled in a stampede. And the thing was, I felt it too. I wanted to set the record for most bags of food packed and no one was going to stop me.

 

Unfortunately, the family I was working with operated with the efficiency of major US automaker. I wanted to be like, "Come on Grandma! Get your shit together! There are starving children in the world and you're measuring out that soy like you're baking a fucking rum cake! Shovel it out! Shovel that shit out!"

 

The worst was the mom. She was on rice detail and let me tell you, she was the worst ricer I could have ever imagine. She was constantly staring off into space when it was her turn to dump the rice into the bag. I didn't know her name, so I just had to be like, "Rice... Rice.... Rice! Rice! RICE!!!" Then when she was actually putting the rice in the bag, she was so goddamn inconsistent. Each bag had to weigh around 400 grams. She'd dump some rice in and it'd weigh in at 420 grams. Then 360. Then 440. Then 350. I mean, it was a cup of rice; the cup itself was capable of regulating the amount of rice that went into the bag. After 5 minutes I could smell 400 grams and I would just hold the bag in front of her until she got it right. Our efficiency was miserable. 

 

My favorite though was the one son - Oliver. This kid was great. At like six years-old he couldn't have been more excited about packaging food for starving children. One look at him made me feel guilty for hating his mom for being so terrible at her job. Oliver was on soy duty and was so amped up for this shit that every time it was his turn to dump the soy in the bag, he'd wind up and launch that shit as hard as he could into the bag and try to blow the bottom right out of it. I mean, bless the kid's heart, there's more soy on the gymnasium floor of Belmont University at packaging station 18  than will ever see the light of day in a developing country, but you couldn't fault his enthusiasm.  

After a short while we got our collective act together and really started to churn out the bags of food. The organization exceeded their goal and we had a great time doing it. The highlight for me was seeing little Oliver's face light up when I accidentally dropped a tablespoon of chicken on the table and exclaimed, "Shit!" I could see in his eyes he was thinking, "That's the coolest word I've ever heard! I can't wait to use that word all the time now. Hey mommy, get your shit together!"

Deck the Halls

I woke up this morning to the sound of the cat taking a deuce. Not the sound of him pawing at the litter; not the sound of him prancing around in the box; but the sound of the actual shit exiting his arse. It was like the sound a balloon makes when it's full of air then you stretch the little air-inlet-opening real narrow and slowly let the air out.

At first I didn't know what the hell it was, then it just dawned on me. Have you ever known a cat's shit to make a noise as it is being shat? I certainly haven't. Cats are like the ninjas of the animal kingdom - all stealth. I've never met a ninja, nor have I ever been in a stall next to a ninja in the bathroom, but I would imagine that ninjas can just vaporize their shit so as not to 1) be caught in any one place for any amount of time or 2) leave any evidence of their presence, even at the sewage treatment plant.

I don't mean that Ninjas just fart instead of shit. Farting is air that sits next to shit. I think that ninjas can actually take the solid waste in their colon and vaporize it and they can probably do it without even taking their pajama bottoms off. I'm going to Wikipedia this.

Needless to say, the non-ninja-esque deuce was an absolute mess, prompting us to scrub down the entire interior of the litter box like that scene in Pulp Fiction when John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson accidentally kill that kid in the back of the car then have to go to Harvey Keitel's house for help cleaning it up.

This all reminds me of two stories:

1. A friend once fowarded me a story in which some college kid was taken down by campus security for sneaking around campus dressed as a ninja. Why would some idiot kid be sneaking around campus like a fucking ninja? Naturally he had just come from a Pirates and Ninjas party. Oh, you didn't attend one of those while in school? Loser. The only rule at the Pirates and Ninjas party was, Pirates had to greet you by saying, "How arrrgh ya doin'?" while ninjas said, "Hi-Yah!"

The story is kind of stupid until you imagine campus security taking down a ninja with like mace or a taser gun. Then it's hilarious.

2. One time back in Columbus, I was at work and I don't know what the hell the wife was doing but certainly not saving lives because she called me from home in an absolute panic:

Wife: "Oh my god!"

Me: "What?!?"

Wife: "The cat!"

Me: "What??? What about the cat???"

Wife: "The cat... has a string... hanging out of his butt!"

The cat, left to his own devices for the day, had somehow consumed a considerable length of string. He managed to pass a portion of it, which the wife found in the litter box holding together 4 or 5 little turds like popcorn strung across a Christmas tree. The remainder was stuck somewhere between his stomach and dangling three inches out of his cornhole.

Wife: "What do I do???"

Me: "Uh, you pull it out..."

Wife: "No, I can't. You're going to have to do it."

Me: "Uhh... let me explain something to you. You're a goddamn butt doctor. In this case, of the two of us, you are the one qualified to deal with this. Call me when it's done."

Ultimately she had to lure him over to his food bowl so he would stand still while he was eating. Then she grabbed the string (let's just assume with her bare hand) and gave it a tug. The cat didn't mind much but the sphincter did, so it clamped down and the wife was only able to extract 3-1/2" inches. The rest came out later in another popcorn string of turds.