Cleveland, OH*

After having a great little getaway weekend in C-Bus (those words...I didn't think they could coexist in a sentence...) I thought about my train station here on the internetz, and I realized that... that this weekend would be just another event that didn't really make it to publication. Like WhiskyFest. Or Bistro Incognito. Or the Greenhouse Tavern opening. Or a weekend to Toledo (again, words I never saw together...). Or the final Roof party. Or the multitude of casualties of The Happiest Hour. I had a ginormous post to wrap everything up, a well-crafted bow to put on top of this gift to myself. But the train never made it back. In the end there's not much to say, nothing of real note, just th...

Do you have any idea how long it's been since I've posted whilst carrying the load of an eyebrow-crushing buzz? Better question! Do you have any idea how long it's been since I just posted? Okay, so it's only been 20 days. I'm only halfway through The Flood. But the best thing about being neck deep in these rising waters? All the awesome shit that I've done this past month. Saint Pat's, Langhorne, bowling, brunch, and ending every weekend with I had so much fun with you. The not so best thing? The Anything Worth Doing is Worth Overdoing Tour is really getting no press. I blame the tour manager. Nine posts for the whole year is terrible. It's like a fish gasping for breath. Spastic grabs at life. Not cutting anything even close to resembling The Mustard.

Or is it just cutting the cord.

Now, I'm not really interested in living on life support, and neither is my blog. Yeah, that's right. I'm letting this go. I've got two last, good posts left in me, but that's about it. Then I break out the petrol and set this thing off in a Viking funeral pyre. Maybe there will be something left in the ashes. Maybe.

Everything thing must pass, and this falls underneath the category of Everything. Don't be sad. We both knew this was coming. But before It gets here, I've got some business to finish up. Business that I like to call WhiskyFest in Chicago, and Bistro Incognito. Delicious business indeed.

Pottsville, PA

At some point in the near past, something unsightly has forced Itself into my world. It is ugly. It is embarrassing. It causes women and child to openly weep, their tears enough to flood a village. It makes grown men claw at theirs eyes as if a thousand mosquitoes have attacked their face. It makes Beverly Hills Chihuahua a viable form of entertainment.

I have become a dancer.

I'm not really sure how or when it happened; I'm just trying to limit the damage and suffering that it bares unto society. And failing miserably.

On Friday I blasted down after work to the Winking Lizard in Independence to participate in a Skee-Ball playoff. I was there for the company and beer much more than the competition. I mean, srsly, who the fuck really cares how well you roll a wooden ball off a ramp into some randomly numbered hole? What I'm trying to say, is that amid the machines that kept breaking, the crowd that sucked Satan's ballz, and shitty beer prices, my team got eliminated in the first round. Huzzah! All the more reason to get the fuck out of Independence and move on to someplace that didn't eat so much taint.

Which brought us to Lincoln Park Pub in Tremont. Normally. I'm not such a huge fan of LPP, but I was willing to make an exception to meet up with LN and a few of her friends that she had dinner with. Plus they had PBR Pounders to drown out the awful taste of defeat. Aaaaand then Crazy came on the jukebox, and I busted out a little bit of The Groove, because that's what happens when Gnarls starts playing. It looked a bit like Steve Martin finding his rhythm, but LN thought it was cute, and I was too drunk to care what people thought. So I shook what my Mama gave me.

Saturday was my friend's birthday, so it was time to go out. Again. We had dinner at Tay-Do in Parma, this little hole in the wall spot in Parma that resides in a strip-mall between an Eagles outpost on one end and a shithole bar on the other. The decor inside is reminiscent of all the things you'd be too embarrassed to show family members, like Christmas lights tacked to the ceiling and triangle mirrors as wall art. But the food. OMG, Food. If you're on a limited schedule, it's probably not the best place to go; it's run by a husband/wife duo who treat the dining room as their living room. Service is numbingly slow (ed note- the first page of the menu alerts you to the possibility of a long wait), but the wait for your dish to get to the end of the rainbow is rewarded with a culinary pot of gold. I have absolutely adored the meals that I've had at Tay-Do. It's like having the grandparents you have never met before cook dinner for you.

After stuffing our faces with too much deliciousness, we headed up to McNamera's to have a pint or seven. None of our group had been there, but we ended up having a great time there. Dark wood, good drink, and a supportive jukebox kept us cozy company as we drank and threw darts. Between Flogging Molly and Smashing Pumpkins, Crazy came back over the speakers. I shook my hips. Pints got drank. Laughs got laughed. I might have a new favorite spot to kill time.

Sunday's shitty weather was the perfect excuse to not go anywhere. LN and I spent the day hunkered down inside, hungry and thirsty. The Hunger was cured with a vat of white chicken chili, the perfect weapon for the cold, drizzly zombie of a day flapping at the door. The Thirst was quenched with Winter Warmer, Version Two. Sequestered in the fridge were samples liberated from the Christmas/Winter brews that we had savored the past few months. The herd had been thinned over the past few weeks, but Sunday was the wholesale slaughter of all that remained. We stretched the necks of

• Pyramid SnoCap
• Thirty Dog Twelve Dogs of Christmas
• Goose Island Christmas Ale
• Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale
• Indigo Imp Winter Solstice

Such a medley of delicious suds had me doing a happy dance. Hopping around like Snoopy. Doing the Carlton. Kicking it like Turk. Permission to Cabbage Patch was mos def granted.

Cary, NC*

The Two Thousand Nine Anything Worth Doing is Worth Overdoing Tour is finally overdoing a little bit of a break now. The past week has seen me over filling my allotment of wine, family, and face-melting guitar solos that make Thor himself cry tears of lightning.

Starting with...

Last week I had a few blogger-friends (who have crossed into the real world, A-HA style) over to share some noshes, some good conversation, and a large amount of wine. I'm not sure how much of the internetz needs to be set aside for one night at my house, and seeing as how the hazy details have been already been covered here, here, and here, I don't think I have anything to add. I mean, I actually don't remember much from the night. Did I already mention the wine? We had a lot of wine.

Pictured: All the wine drank at my place last week.
Not Pictured: All of the beer.

Saturday morning had me getting all Mr. Sunshine on my Goddamn Shoulders John Denver and leaving Cleveland on a jet plane as LN (ed. note- Yes, those are her initials. I had a whole post about finding her a suitable pseudonym, but I'm lazy. So you get the unimaginative cop-out. Deal.) and I flew down to Carolina for the weekend to visit my family. Yes, the big Girlfriend, Family; Family, Girlfriend meet and greet. Everything but the weather went perfectly. We landed and walked out into... Cleveland. Cold, windy, a bunch of freezing rain and more than a couple of inches of snow. Blarg. Not what I was hoping for. But the weather was not the main attraction; family was the real deal. And family we got. An overdose of family time coursed it's way through my veins. My brother has three children, and they are perhaps some of the most adorable, well behaved children in existence (I have third-party opinions to support that claim. It is not just hyperbole.), but they are still visual birth control. I love all three of them, and I still cannot to be around them for longer than a few hours; the sugar and spice in their voices turning to rock salt on my nerves. I am just not built to have children- I have neither the birthing hips nor the patience/ability to break their will. So I will have none.

How do I follow up a weekend of wholesome family time? With booze and rock 'n' roll. We got dropped off early at the airport, hunkered down in a bar for a pre-game beer, and when we hit the ground in Cleveland, we rolled up to the Beachland to have Jason Isbell sear the juices in with guitar riffs that contribute more to global warming than anything out on the road today. The turn out at the Beachland was pitiful, but that didn't keep me from drowning my gullet in cheap beer and RTFO. It just gave me more room to drunkenly sway back and forth as I was assaulted with riffage of a decidedly higher caliber. The show ended with Mr. Isbell and the Four Hundred Unit Tearing Ass through a rendition of DBT's Never Gonna Change with such ferocity that there was nothing left to do at the end of the night but pick up what was left of my jaw from the floor and go home. The last solo even made Narm make Beaker Face.

Pictured: Narm
Not Pictured: My melting face

And then I woke up on Tuesday, hungover, tired, and not feeling very cooperative. So I've taken these past few days to regroup, to get my wandering ducks back into something resembling a row. But then it's back to the Tour this weekend, with a white knuckle Skee-Ball playoff on Friday and a birthday celebration on Saturday that will start with me over-eating at Tay-Do and hopefully end with me passing out somewhere indoors.

Let's Roll.

Mentor, OH

Have you ever had ants in your pants? Like, swarming your underroos? I have- And it sucked! Hard! I was working at a paintball field back in Ninety Seven as a referee. Most of the people playing that day sucked, and the field we were playing on was mind-numbingly huge, so points of action and interest were few and far between. As my thoughts wondered off to candy-coated dreams about getting fucked up (ed note- what else is there to dream about when you're eighteen?), I sat my sweaty ass down and waited to hear the Game Over call across the radio. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minu--what the fuck is THAT!

And by THAT, I would be referring to the very odd, pissed off and uncomfortable sensation emanating from my legs, crotch, and ass. A few seizure-worthy leg shakes did little to ease or cure the worsening electric-like shocks coming from my loins. Jumping around like James Brown on fire didn't help either. Unzipping my pantaloons revealed the source: a host of ants making a jailbreak for it in my pants. The next few moments in my life were not the calmest I've ever had, although I'm sure they would have been entertaining for anyone watching. Actually, I'm glad that no one was watching, as they would have been brandishing a paintball gun. I was a referee. With my pants down. When the Lord provides you with the that kind of opportunity, you take it.

Now I always make sure I know where I'm parking my ass when I'm out in the woods. Eventually, I would rid my pants of the invading hordes, but the memory remains. The burning, angry feeling...

...which is kinda like...

...the feeling I get...

...Big Segway....

....waaaaaait for it...

...when I think about all the stupid shit that goes on in the world. The kind of shit that needs shaken outta my pants and clubbed with a dead, broken tree limb. Which is why I've started...

(ba daba ba daba ba bah!)

Ants in My Jockstrap.

It's a new home on the internetz for all of the rage and hate that I have for things, dumb and non-dumb. I have a little place over at h8ter, but that's for my impulse hate, my hate on the go my downtown hate. This feels suburban...so much more...palatial. So stop by. Say hi. Feel the burn.

Bridgeton, NJ

Damn. Thursday already? Before you know it I'll have to be rocking out and drinking my balls off again in no time. Shucks. But last weekend was too fucking sweet to just gloss over with a few flippant words. It's worthy of a three-part trilogy.

New Hope- Saw one helluva show on Friday at a packed Brothers Lounge. Beers. Introductions. Some guy who looked like a version of Mark Wahlberg with slight Down’s Syndrome. Keyboard Drunk dancing spectacles. No food at the Parkview, much to the disappointment of some people or peoples. Last Call.

Strikes Back- More introductions. Nap. Afternoon samples at OgreFest at The Brew Kettle. Subsequent heavy afternoon buzz at OgreFest at The Brew Kettle. Booze nap. Gallons of Modelo and getting up with the Get Down at Garage Bar. Becoming the drunk dancing spectacle. Blowing past Last Call for another closing round at home and the accompanying great conversation that chased it.

The Return- Late Start. Pancakes with bacon. Awesome meal at Tay-Do. Outlet shopping. Proper fitting shoes. Chad, the overly-excited manager at the Adidas store. Flushing a meal out with a trip to Heinen’s. Said meal of bread, cheeses, apples, compound butter, scallops. House sitting. Red wine. Darjeeling Limited. Having sweet dreams well before Last Call would ever show up.

But before all that Awesomeness could roll down the tracks, and foundation had to be set. A base. A base of meat and potatoes. Of burgers and fries.

Now, there are many fine (or even merely passable) establishments to get said burger and fries, and perhaps a beer, in our hard-working city, but on last Friday we chose to nosh at 56 West, a new place in Lakewood. In a word, it was fucking terrible. In a few more words, which I shared with the owner of the establishment, it was (as put forth in an email to him)....

To Whom It May Concern,

A friend and I had dinner at your restaurant for the first time on Friday, February 13th, and there are several things about our experience that I would like to relay to you.

-When we arrived at 7:07, the waiting area was crowded and the hostess informed us that the wait for a table was about 30 minutes. This seemed perfectly acceptable. What seemed unacceptable was the fact that we were not seated until 8:21.

-The open view into the kitchen from the waiting area was nice, as we were able to watch what came out and get an idea of what we wanted. However, it also allowed us to watch a member of the kitchen staff exchange a few short words with the gentleman expediting food, and then slam a basket of sweet potato fries onto the counter and floor, splattering the house-made ketchup all over the counter. Short of the order of fries, nothing was ruined, but it was an ugly incident that left us questioning our dinner plans. Although, we did stand around and wait some more.

- After finally being seated, we immediately ordered from the delicious sounding menu. The service and execution were however very lacking. We ordered a bucket of sweet potato fries as an appetizer, but they were not served until much later when our burgers came out. Our waters were never refilled. My burger, although severely overcooked, came out as ordered, but my friend's had to be returned to the kitchen twice before it was correct. It seemed to be a theme for the evening as we also noticed food being sent back from the tables on either side of us.

-When our food finally did arrive as ordered, it was underwhelming at best. It is easier and shorter for me to say what we enjoyed about the our meal than to explain what we disliked about it. The buns, which from what I understand are from Breadsmith, are very good.

-The candles on almost half of the tables were not lit. It may seem like a small, nit-picky complaint about a small detail, but you have gone through the trouble of putting that detail on your tables, and it was done poorly.

I understand that your restaurant has recently opened, and I can understand people have bad days, but that doesn't mean your customers should have bad days as well. I hope that you encounter smoother seas in the future and the that your restaurant prospers, but unfortunately it will be without my support.

Regards

And while the meal was piss-poor at best, his response, while grammatically poor, was exactly what it should have been.

Jason,
First let me sincerely apologize for your dining experience on Friday night and let me thank you for bringing it to my attention. Being that it was Valentine's Day weekend it was extremely busy and on that night we had unusually large parties that really that contribute to the long wait. Since we have been open we have been very busy but never experience the wait we did on Friday so it was new to us to calculate the actually wait time. But the fact of the matter is that should of not happen. As for your other valid points there is no excuse and I will not try to make excuses. We truly value every customer and we have our lives invested in this project. We take every effort to make our customers(we call friends) happy. We have made many friends since opening but we are not perfect. I will do anything to turn your opinion around about us. Please, please, please give us another chance and I will personally make sure you have an enjoyable experience. Please let me send you a gift card or simply call me at the restaurant 216-226-0056 or on my cell 216-536-XXXX and let me know what day you would like to come in and I will take care of you and a guest. Jason, please take me up on my offer and give me the opportunity to change your opinion.
Sincerely,

After saying I'd never go back, that was the kind of response that can make a man/child change his mind. I will take him up on his offer. Although, it won't be this weekend. Too much rock and booze in the next few days. If you happen to be Rock Bottom on Sunday and see a Sharp Dressed Man looking a little frayed around the edges, stop and say hi.

Bethesda, MD

(ed. note- Thanks to Kelly and José's comments, I thought I'd share a story from my sordid past...)

Back at the height of my degenerate lifestyle, when I called the dingy streets across from OSU Home, I didn't have a whole lot going on for me that I would call positive. I subsisted on a diet of grilled cheese, Beast Ice, and Vitamin R. I went to classes, okay class, for exactly two times. I sucked money outta my parents like a tapeworm. My only form of employment consisted of me slinging boxes at RPS for about five hours, before I decided not to get outta bed the next day. And I also failed at being a test subject for a medical study.

Every few days I'd get a little bit ambitious and leaf through a classified section, kinda looking for a job, kinda just watching the pages go back and forth (ed. note- I almost guarantee that I was stoned. I have a tendency to become overly productive when I am baked outta my mind. It's one of the few ways I get housework done...). An ad caught my eye:

Participants Needed for Study
Age Twenty One to Thirty Five males
Food plus compensation provided

I like food. I like compensation. So hells to the yeah. Let's do this shit! It ended up being a study on diet and sedentary males, and I thought I had stumbled into a honey-pot (in my stoner opinion) of a study: an eight-week study where I'd get Fifty Bucks a week, and three meals a day, every day (kinda like a Weight Watchers-type deal). For a lazy fucker who was eating whatever he found at the UDF down on the corner, this was gold.

Well, it was until I fucked it up.

Okay, to be fair, the way the study was set up was fucked up and I lacked the ability or interest to un-fuck it. I'm just here for the food, folks. Oh, and the money. Don't forget the money. Seeing as how the study was on sedentary men, they had to make sure you were slothful enough to qualify. I figured with my daily routine of video games and drugs, I'd be a shoe-in. Being all scientific and shit, they had to establish a baseline for how out of shape you were. Enter a stationary bicycle, a breathing apparatus, and two catheters. Where do the catheters go? One in each arm. Lovely. Now I have a fairly comfortable relationship with needles in a medical setting, but these things were, uh, hefty. The first one went in fine, but DoucheBag McAssistant wasn't very good at his job, and while he tried to stab my other arm, for the first and only time in my life, I started to black out...



...And we're back. It's a weird feeling to be sitting in a chair, you feel everything get hazy, and then your head snaps back, you're drowning in a cold sweat and you have no sense of time and everybody's kinda just staring at you. But whatever. It passed. So now that I have two pencils jammed in my arms, Let's Ride.! Oh, but first, strap on this fucking mask that makes me feel like I'm in one of those recovery tanks from Starship Troopers (what, too nerdy?). Okay, now that I'm hooked up sci-fi style, Let's Ride!

Now, I haven't ridden a bike in some time. Fuck, I can't remember the last time I did something that could be considered athletic, unless you consider playing Nine-Ball athletic, but I'm guessing you don't. So I'm pedaling away on this thing, face sweating under a plastic mask, when somebody informs me that I've gotta keep pedaling....for two hours. Wha...What? (ed. note- While I'm sure this information was on something I signed, I...can't...read.) Are you fucking serious? You want to have lazy, out-of-shape guys ride a bike for two hours? I could go into a long, impassioned diatribe as to how retarded of an idea this was, but the short version of the story....is that I did not ride a bike for two hours. I rode a bike for about an hour and forty-five minutes, aka, The Time When My Legs Stopped Working. Shortly following my feet coming off the pedals was a cock-munching assistant, who was closer to death than he realized, telling me that Sorry, we need a full two hours to use the data. Can you do it again?.

Aaaaaaaaaaand that was the end of my career as a lab rat. No data= no food, no money. I basically spent a few hours getting sweaty and having holes punched in my arms with nothing to show for it. Well, except the holes. Cock munchers. In light of my recent ramblings about trying to get paid, I'd be open to possibly submitting my body to science once again in exchange for monetary glory,

Buuuuuuuut...

King of Prussia, PA

THE DAY LATER UPDATE!

Okay, so about twenty seconds after I hit that little Publish button yesterday, I felt kinda shitty about the post. Bitch, Bitch, Bitch. Lots of sandy-vagina whining about Hmpf, I wanna stuff but it costs money and I don't like that so I'm gonna kick and stomp my feet like the mature eight-year old that I am. Very little pro-active solutions to My current way of life is insufficient to achieve the products that I wish to own, so perhaps these are the alternatives that are available to me.

Well, that attitude is not very can-do, now is it? I needs to do something to generate some cash, post haste! So what the fuck is we gonna do? I suppose I could sell some of my stuff, but that would require me owning stuff that other people would want to buy, and nobody really wants to buy my rice cooker or a three-legged table. New job? Nix-check the paper as to the reasons why. Well, how about a part-timey job to supplement my piss-poor paycheck? I like working two jobs about as much as you do. Oh, you hate work? I hate work too. Besides, it severely cuts into my booze-drinking time. Oh, you love wine? I love wine too. So what the fuck is there left for somebody who doesn't have stuff, hates work, and loves wine?

Selling plasma.

Holy shit, I'm kinda serious. I mean, has anyone other than transients and winos ever done this? I've heard it kinda hurts when they pump the unused fluid back into you (ed. note- unfamiliar with the process? Start reading here.). Can anybody back that up? Am I gonna end up looking like a junkie with track marks? Am I talking to the wrong audience? Are you too upstanding for these questions. Should I try talking to folks over at Linda's Superette?

I mean, what else is there?

Germantown, PA

So, if I haven't been blogging, what the fuck exactly have I been doing? Having non-stop fun. Like, it's been that point during a party when everyone is playing FlipCup, and yelling at each other and laughing and spilling beer and it's chaotic and then a team wins and everybody's like Heeeyy, that was a great round. It's been just like that. Except that the round never ended.

And I don't see that round ending anytime soon. That is, unless my wallet finally declares martial law and shuts things down. Seems like all this fun actually requires something other than the money outta my Monopoly set, which kinda sucks big floppy donkey dick because I don't have a whole lot of the genuine article. Already on the official docket for the next couple of months is:

The Magpies ($)
Flogging Molly ($$)
Winter WarmerFest ($$)
Jason Isbell ($)
Langhorne Slim ($)
WhiskyFest (in Chicago) (ZOMG!)($$$$)

And while I'm thoroughly looking forward to rawking out/not remembering all of these events, the price of admission is putting a serious fucking damper on a desire that has recently been rekindled in my greedy little heart: I want a goddamn tattoo.

Strike that, I don't want a tattoo- I want a goddamn half sleeve. Black, red, and twisting up my arm and shoulder. Fuck yeah. I have the basic premise of my skin art design, but because they too require what grown-ups call real money, and what I like to call the bane of my existence, it's nothing more that thoughts and ideas and snippets of pictures. Plus I'd like to confer with a professionally trained tat monkey before I put needle and ink to skin, so until the fronts of consultation and money converge into the perfect storm of Everlasting Art, I keep scratching at my skin while ideas flash through my mind like heat lightning. I've even asked people to take a Sharpie to me, to scribble anything, just so I can see something there on my blank canvas.

But permanent marker is only temporary. I want something that stays. I want a goddamn tat.

Auburn Hills, MI

I’m back.

Remember when I wrote those words last month? I love how I followed that post up. With this one.

I’m back.

I’m sorry, baby; I really mean it this time. I’m gonna change -- I know I can change. Just gimme one more chance. I swear I won’t do it again. For seriousness.

We’ve all heard those werdz before, right? I mean, we’ve at least heard Ike Turner say them a few times (I remember when he died, and we cheers'd him because Nobody Can Beat Death). Okay, maybe not the For seriousness part. I might have snuck that in. But we’ve all seen that living-in-the-moment pledge to change bob to the surface, only to see the tentacles of life creep in from the corners and drag it back down to the depths of reality. So I’m gonna go ahead and say it.

This blog is never going to be what it was before.

There. Deal. I’m pretty sure I’ll never post with the regularity that I once did (ed. note-although, I‘d like to drop in more than once a month…). I don’t think The Darkness is going to drag me back down to the bottom of the barrel like it used to. I’ve lost that edge that made me want to grind my teeth down to porcelain nubs. Sure, I’ve still those things in my life that make me want to drop an angry badger into my pants to make all my cares in the word go away. My job sucks the dirt outta dead donkey’s dick. My car is just dying to leave my on the side of the fucking road. And I’m still hemorrhaging money like I own Chrysler. But for fuck’s sake! I’m too fucking busy to worry about that shit! And if I’m too busy to worry, how am I ever even gonna find time to vent/bitch about it online?

Exactly.

So I’m gonna change my pitch up, smack my bitch up. Things are gonna start to look a little different, maybe have a different key they get played in. Same music, but different song. Same words, but a different story. Same ingredients, ahhhhh fuck you get the idea.

Brb. Srsly