winded

Chicago wore me out but it was worth it. Sleep was at a premium and often got interrupted by random acts of hostility.

I like to think I left the city itself a little worn out, too, but I know I'm dreaming. Chicago's always ready for more.

It was the usual.

Drank in the bleachers.


Talked shit in the bars.

Witnessed middle-aged people swallowing each other's faces.

Greeted my two fellow members of the Unholy Trinity.

Saw the Cubs lose.


The mostly white bleacher crowd didn't care. They came to drink like they have for the last 90 years. A million Lee Elias can't put a stop to that.

Fukudome looked lonely and maybe a little bit regretful.

The view through the fence is really not all that good.

Our view from center was better.

Passed the hat, I mean cup.

Got two (ungloved) fingers on a BP homerun. My friend D (not pictured here) got the ball on the carom.

Ate five different meat products in two and a half days. And lots of that gross deep dish Chicago pizza.

But nothing tasted as good as this Western Omelet Sandwich (!) with hashbrowns, coke, and chocolate milkshake. Holy crap.

I had a bad experience on the El, and it makes a loud fucking racket, but it's so full of Chicago romance that I guess I like it.

I couldn't ask for a better group of friends. A lifetime ago, I showed up in Wisconsin raw and rude and they took me in anyway. Here we are, 20 years later, 18 kids between us, still able to insult each other with love.


Lots more pictures were taken but they're just dumb drunken bar pics and who needs that?

bye-atus

After a nice long break, I'm slipping on the ol' shitproof suit and heading off to work Monday. Don't feel sorry for me. Hiatus was good and I feel satisfied. Here's the scorecard:

I walked around and looked at stuff.

On a few occasions I drank during the day.

I read books.

I visited faraway lands.

I dipped my toes in two oceans (not pictured: me).

I bowled at a professional level.

I finally signed up for facebook. Like two days later, my boss made me a facebook friend, effectively ending the facebook experience for me.

I took the kid out for some homemade old timey ice cream.

I biked like a madman.

I found out that one of my favorite bloggers had not retired. Through him I learned what RSS is and now I use it. Sort of.

I tried a bottle of the Tiger Woods Gatorade, and I believe it took my performance to the next level. It's hard to tell, though, because the day I drank it I was just sitting around the house watching TV. I did feel stronger and more focused while doing it. I think.

I got a new gadget which allowed me to take slightly better pictures of meaningless crap.

I ate lunch right next to Mickey Rivers and Oscar Gamble and failed to recognize either of them.

I found what's left of my game on the empty courts of Orange County and brought it back East in the overhead compartment.

In NYC I lugged it out onto the court against 2 or 3 separate groups of 18-22 year-old kids who played beautifully and didn't act like babies. They gave me hope for the future of the game I love. Beating them and having them shaking their heads at what the fat man can still do gave me hope that I can keep playing into my 40's.

I made plans for my first trip to Chicago since 2004. Leaving Thursday.

I drank some gross green healthy shake things and started to watch what I eat and as a result lost maybe 20-30 ounces.

I didn't grow a moustache. I'll always have the Summer of '07.

Hope you enjoyed your summer. It's over, you know.

stuck outside of Eau Claire with the Minneapolis blues again

I'm back in NYC after two weeks in Southern California. Thought I would post some pictures. First some I took here in NYC before I left...

Ah, Stomp. What the fuck is the deal with Stomp? How is it still playing? Do they have one of those $60 a month loophole leases or something? I fucking HATE Stomp. It's been there for like 20 years. Who's going?

I would rather watch Riptide reruns with my eyelids taped open than sit through Stomp. Look at this part of the poster outside the theater. The dude has plungers stuck to his belly! Ha ha!

If your pal came out of the bathroom like that, you'd probably give it a genuine three to five second laugh. But it ain't professional-quality entertainment. Ah, who knows? Maybe Stomp is awesome.

Bowling is awesome, although the Bowlmor has really gone from a legendary NYC institution of sketchiness and fun to a representation of all that is wrong with our town: expensive, showy, and completely lacking in substance and functionality. And I sucked my first time out post-209.

Representing all that is right in our city is San Loco. Cheap, tasty, no-frills, and pretty much unchanged as far as my drunken old taste buds can tell.

I ordered way too much food. Sometimes that's what you do, rather than choose.

Did you know there is an amazing public track right off the FDR downtown? You can just go run there whenever you want. If I were the type of man who ran, I might do it there.

The Belgian place in our neighborhood is far from perfect, but it's a nice place to chill on a HIATUS afternoon.

Threatening skies to the West. And man is Houston street a mess.

Beach day, Stuyvesant Town-style:

Then there's a genuine California beach day. Sigh.

My freshman year roommate was a fascinating guy. A sensitive soul trapped in the body of a mountain man. Or maybe he was just a mountain man. He had no fears. He used to tell me that if he was in an airplane that crashed, he'd be fine. "I would do whatever it took to get out alive. I would just be determined to survive and I'd make it." I almost believed him, because he was the toughest bastard I ever met. Beating him in a fight would mean killing him and would probably take three men.

Let's call him Oly.

He was always getting into trouble, sometimes his fault, sometimes just terrible luck. He had a girlfriend in Minneapolis for awhile and he used to hitchhike there from Madison to go see her. One time, just a few miles into the journey, he found a ride with a middle-aged dude who said he was going all the way to Minneapolis. Great luck! It was cold as hell and the less rides it took to get there, the better.

Not a word was said between them for the first 30 or 40 miles. Finally, the middle aged guy cleared his throat and spoke.

"Do me a favor, reach underneath your seat," he said.

Oly reached down and found an unmarked, nearly full bottle of who knows what.

"Have some," said the driver.

"No, that's OK," Oly said. "I'm good."

"Ah, a teetotaler," said the driver. "Well pass it over here then."

Oly passed him the bottle, and the guy took a healthy tug.

"You don't look like a teetotaler," said the driver. "Come on, have a sip."

Not knowing what else to do, and seeing as how the driver had already taken a sip and was still alive, Oly grabbed the bottle and took a nice deep gulp. It burned, but in a familiar way.

"Good, isn't it?" the driver said, taking the bottle back and helping himself to another huge snort. "I knew you wasn't a teetotaler."

This went on for another hour or so, the two of them passing the bottle back and forth, and finally there was some conversation. Just small talk, where you from, are you a Packers fan, etc. Just bullshitting. Oly noticed that the guy was beginning to gently swerve out of his lane every few minutes, and the car had dipped down to about 50 mph on the left lane of the interstate. Oly was getting drunk, but his survival instinct had kicked in and he began to watch the driver carefully to make sure he didn't lose control of the car. Several times it almost happened. Oly considered grabbing the wheel, or asking him to pull over, but each time he was about to, the guy would straighten up in his seat, shake out the cobwebs and right the ship. There didn't seem to be any immediate danger.

As the bottle became nearly empty, the small talk trailed off to silence again. After a few awkward miles, the driver suddenly asked, "Have you ever sucked a man's dick?"

"Uh...no," Oly said.

"Well, I'll tell you what," said the driver. "There's an exit about two miles up the road. I'm gonna take that exit, then I'm gonna pull over, and then you're gonna find out what it's like to suck a man's dick."

Without hesitation, Oly pulled a knife out of his sock and held it up to the guy's face.

"No...you're gonna pull over right here and let me out," Oly said. "Right now."

"Easy, easy! I was just talking," said the driver, pulling over immediately. Oly held the knife up to the guy's face the entire time, then grabbed his backpack and climbed out of the car. The guy sped off.

It was getting dark. Oly was still about ten miles Southwest of Eau Claire. He put his knife back in his sock and began to walk down I-94. He was still too freaked out to put his thumb back up, so he just kept walking in the cold. He walked for nearly four miles before he heard a siren behind him. It was a state trooper, a woman, and she told him not to move. She had her gun drawn already.

"Do you have any concealed weapons?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "I have a knife."

He pulled it out and offered it to her, handle first.

"You know that's against the law," she said, taking the knife and then kicking it aside. "And you shouldn't be out here."

He told her the story. She told him to go pick up the knife and put it back in his sock. He scrambled over to get it.

"Get in," she said. He climbed into the passenger seat of her cruiser. She drove him all the way to Minneapolis, neither of them saying a word.

This is a palm tree:
Palm trees are pretty awesome.

While we were in Cali, we went to this interesting offshoot of the SD Zoo.

I have mixed feelings about zoos, although this one was pretty cool because it was spread out and there seemed to be more attention paid to recreating the natural habitats of the animals, etc. It was vast.

Given the choice between living in a mock habitat sans predators or going home to the real deal, I gotta think these guys would stay in San Diego. I know I would.


I'm sure they've all lost their natural hunting instinct and gone soft but they're probably cool with that. This guy looks like he'd still fuck me up in an instant.

We went by the beach. People were surfing.

I'll never be as cool as the uncoolest surfer.


Even the Lego surfers are cooler than me.


There is a scene in Knocked Up where the Paul Rudd character grits his teeth and says with a forced smile, "We're going to Legoland." When you go to Legoland, you are officially renouncing your selfish youth and acknowledging that you now exist mostly to make your kids happy. It's a strange feeling, but it's also sort of comforting. And I gotta say, the Lego people are really good at making shit out of Legos.



Outside the bathroom there was this odd Lego cartoon:

I understand the first panel: "Dad, get me some water."

And I understand the second panel: Dad steps on kid's Lego and shrieks in pain, spilling the water in the process.


But the payoff? Hmm. 25 GP's to the person who comes up with the best caption for this:

something awesome i once did

Out in California staring out the window (pics to come), and I just remembered this.

One time during my senior year in high school, I went to a party at my friend's house. Everybody was getting all drunk and goofy and whatnot, the usual crap. But there was one kid who had really gone around the bend. This person stumbled into the bathroom, closed the door and locked it. Nobody could get in, and the person wasn't responding to knocks, shouts, etc. Everybody, especially the chicks, started getting really worried.

Unfortunately, I can't remember if the locked-in person was a guy or a girl, and if the problem was merely drunkenfuckedupedness, or she-or-he-doesn't-love-me-based depression, or just the need to throw up in private. Who really cares? The facts are: somebody was in locked in that bathroom and nobody could get 'em out.

Meanwhile in a dark corner of the party, I was doing my thing. My thing: carrying on about some stupid horseshit and feeling like Superman. Some girl tapped me on the shoulder and was all, "X is all locked up in the bathroom and we don't know what to do. Should we call 911?"

"Hmmm," I said. "Do you have a hairpin? Like, a bobby pin?"

Mind you, I had no idea what a bobby pin was until a moment later, when the girl produced one from her purse.

"Will this work?" she asked.

"It should," I said, having no idea what I was talking about.

I marched over to the bathroom door, bent the bobby pin open and shoved one end inside a hole that was conveniently located on the end of the doorknob. Then I started jimmying it gently. Within seconds, like maybe 4 seconds, the lock popped open. A group of worried kids streamed into the bathroom, where the locked-in thing lay on the floor in some acute form of misery I no longer can identify. They helped it to its pathetic feet and the crisis was over.

"Shit, Hans, you're like MacGyver," some genius shouted. Let the record show that this was the first time in the history of amateur comedy that someone performing an act of everyday handiness was compared to the always-resourceful hero of the hit show that bore his name. I guess I share the blame for the 8 billion times this joke has been made since.

So there you have it. Pretty awesome, yeah? Have you ever done something awesome like that? Eight GP's for every awesome thing you can name, max 40 total.

Don't like that? How about this:



Yeah. Awesome.

P.S. Thanks for all the additions to the People Who I Suspect Didn't Realize Their Awesomeness Had A Shelf Life Until It Was Too Late List. They were very strong as a whole. A couple I didn't completely agree with but overall very good work. I am gonna dole out 5 GP's per answer but I'm gonna cap it at 25 GP's per person. Don't like it? Too bad. Your awesomeness may be coming to an end, kid.