when it's time to party...

over the weekend, i saw this dude use his library card to crush up a xanax and a ritalin. he then mixed them together and started doing lines.

badass!

a case of the mondays

i was half-assedly watching the SAG awards last night... what a snoozefest. anyway, i happened to see david duchovny and thought about how it's kind of weird that he admitted being a sex addict while he was playing character who's a sex addict on "californication."

then i suddenly remembered this crappy song i heard in high school:



see, the irony is david duchovny probably would have loved bree sharp (physically at least) because he compulsively seeks sex! get it?!

sleazy bar stories, #1

i just want to say before i begin that this story honestly makes me feel extremely... i guess "unclean" is the word. i hate it and wish i could forget it but it grossed me out so much i felt like i had to share it.

last weekend, i went to meet some friends at the bar at which they always hang out. we were having some drinks and it was a pretty good time.

then people started noticing the stench.

i personally didn't notice anything at first, but everyone else had that weird, screwed-up "what's that god-awful smell?" face.

then sam rolled his eyes and pointed to someone who was sitting at the bar behind me and was like "oh, it's grandpa joe." or something, i don't remember his fucking name. the person did indeed look old and grandfatherly, so i was like "whatever, it's some old guy who doesn't care about smelling bad in front of people anymore." i had no idea how right i really was.

so i stopped caring about it and the night progressed. then maybe like 45 minutes later, i finally caught this overpoweringly filthy, wet, heavy odor... like the smell of a nursing home on a hot day.

this was seriously hardcore... like it was so bad i had to walk away for a bit. you probably see where this is going by now but i still didn't really think much of it, aside from "man, those guys weren't kidding."

a little bit after that i was talking to my friends karl and annie. i went to sit down next to them and they were just like "no... no, no no! that's grandpa joe's chair." i assumed they meant because he was coming back and had just gotten up for a second.

i left soon after that and the realization suddenly struck me while i was driving home -- karl and annie were trying to warn me not to sit there because that fucking old man had shit himself!

BLAAARGH!!! the pieces all fit! how fucking revolting! i seriously think i was subconsciously trying to block myself from understanding what was going on because of how grossed out i would have been (and still am almost a week later).

aghast, i told a couple people from the area that i suspected some guy shit himself at the bar after i got home. and they were like "right, grandpa joe. big deal, it happens all the time."

WHAT THE FUCK?! i couldn't believe everyone was so blase about this. i was blown away.

so... employing my goren-esque deductive skills, here's what i make of the situation:

1. no one was surprised the old guy soiled himself (other than myself... and not only was i surprised, i was also horrified and incredibly grossed out). in fact, people knew who i was talking about without needing any specifics beyond "some guy at the bar shit himself."
2. so the old guy spends enough time there that the other patrons know his nickname and behavior.
3. a grown man soiling himself at a bar is a significant deviation from normative behavior. since other regular patrons knew his behavior and were not surprised by it, this is likely a routine occurrence.
4. so this man is shitting himself in a public place, and most likely does not sit in the same chair each time he's there. even if he does attempt to sit in the same general area, people in bars move stuff around all the time so it is unlikely he sits in the same seat.
5. given the general condition of the bar, most notably the men's bathroom, the employees likely do not disinfect the barstools.
6. because the old guy routinely shits himself and sits in different stools, every barstool is potentially contaminated with fecal matter.
7. ipso facto, i'm never sitting down at a stool there again... otherwise, i might inadvertently be sitting in stool! ah-ha ha ha!

blargh, i'm still too grossed out and unhappy to think that was funny. i'm sorry my first sleazy bar story is so unpleasant.

is he still talking about that stupid mall cop movie? jesus.

my only hope is the runaway success of "paul blart: mall cop" will reflect some richly deserved limelight on its obvious source material, "drabble."

last weekend, the american people proved they can hear about a widely panned comedy starring a morbidly obese man in a mall cop costume perched atop a segway, and still think "this is the best thing out there right now."

and this day would never have come without drabble tirelessly and thanklessly toiling in near-anonymity to pave the way for such widescale bemusement/apathy toward fat mall cops on segways.

i'm calling you out, blart. pay your dues and honor your roots!

dumb public transportation moments, #7

i was on the brown line and i was trying to read my book when i saw this guy in a cowboy hat making rounds on the train. i assumed he was asking for money because that's what's involved in probably 95 percent of "interactions with strangers on the train."

sometimes it's other things, like when a couple of uppity, spoiled bitches go around calling people they don't even know "scary" without ever stopping to think that maybe they just happened to catch the person on an off day when he wasn't looking very nice and was really hung over.

but anyway, the cowboy hat guy walked up to me. i glanced up real fast and was like "hey man, i'm sorry but i'm not really interested" before he could say anything.

i've heard tons of bullshit stories about why random guys in the city need money and i never, ever give them any. i figure my method of preemptive striking saves both of us time; i don't have to listen to his stumbling attempt to warm my icy, black heart with his insincere sob story and he can keep his A-game for some sap who might actually fall for it.

but cowboy hat guy totally ignored me and kept smiling and waving his hands and gesturing at some piece of paper on a clipboard. i still didn't really look up but i said again "no, i don't want it."

he kept standing there but now he started looking kind of hurt and continued pointing to the piece of paper. i finally looked up for real and realized the guy he hadn't been just making random hand movements at me, he had been signing.

he had been signing because he was fucking deaf and trying to collect for a charity for deaf children and the piece of paper was a pledge drive sheet.

shameful bar tabs, #1

schuba's + some bar i forgot + alice's = ...

$76.50!

dumb public transportation moments, #6

i saw a guy with the word "dijon" faded into his hair on the brown line. either that's his name or i've finally found someone who likes mustard as much as i do.

dumb public transportation moments, #5

last night at the brown line stop, the CTA employee in the booth was eating a lemon freeze when it was like -12 degrees out. what a world.

have at thee, satan!

i rarely pay any attention to internet advertising. i don't want to buy t-shirts with cute little quips, i don't give a shit about my credit score, i have no interest in going to some weird online college, etc.

but i happened to see an ad on gmail today that really caught my eye:


i mean, that's pretty badass, right? a giant beast with lion, jaguar and (i think) goat heads. incidentally, that's exactly how the ad looked; i didn't crop off the side like that.

after i managed to wrap my mind around the sweet, sweet awesomeness of that picture, i actually read what the ad said and grew increasingly curious. does my future contain this savage chimera? what the fuck does it want? does it have other cryptic messages utterly bereft of basic punctuation for me?

i got my answer when i scrolled down a bit more and saw the lower half of the ad:


of course. in retrospect, it's really obvious it was about religious fundamentalism. the gobbeldygook about monsters and prophecy blended with sloppy grammar is a dead giveaway... although "hyborian age" high school student fan fiction would have been my second guess.

even so, i was kind of intrigued. i always thought the old testament was kind of cool, what with all the smiting and turning people to pillars of salt and raining down fire and plagues of locusts and rivers of blood. for the first time since i can remember, i voluntarily clicked on an ad and i was not disappointed.

i think that picture pretty much speaks for itself, but i'm going to say it anyway: HOLY SHIT!!! there's a fucking barbarian warrior princess riding a five-headed dragon! and she's apparently giving away free booklets full of secrets! i'm so blown away that i don't even care what the rest of the web site says.

here's an even bigger picture so you can really see the barbarian-warrior-princess-riding-a-dragon-osity of it all:


all i need to know is the end of times is going to look a lot like a 1980s-era dungeons and dragons book, which fills me with a burning desire become a christian. i've got a +3 broadsword and a wand of melf's acid arrow with your name on it, satan!

measurable progress, #1

the other day, i realized the driver's side door on my car seemed to be broken. at first it wouldn't open at all and i had to go through the undignified process of crawling out the passenger's side (more on that later).

after i applied my considerable mechanical prowess to the problem (i.e. swore at it and kicked it a few times and kept turning my key in the lock over and over), it finally made this horrible clicking noise and swung open... except now it won't stay shut. sweet irony!

i've found the best (?) way to drive in my present situation is to use my left hand to steer and cross my right hand over my body with a death grip on the interior handle to keep it from flying open in oncoming traffic. classy.

the important part of this anecdote is i never realized how much weight i've lost. it took me a solid five minutes to maneuver my bulk out of my tiny ass car when this first happened last spring.

i had to begin by reclining the driver side seat all the way and then reaching over and doing the same thing to the passenger side to make sure i had enough room for the vehicular acrobatics i was about to perform. then i had to kind of scoot up in my seat and bring my left leg up to chest level and then twist it around over the center console to the passenger's side seat, which was about as comfortable as it sounds.

i then had to flop my body over, in a manner not unlike a walrus, so i was facing the ground and propping myself up with one arm on each headrest with the gear shift cruelly jamming into my groin. finally, i brought my right leg over to the other side and slid out the car feet-first while i was still facing the floor.

trust me, this was the only way it worked. i tried several methods with varying degrees of discomfort before i found the one that worked, ungainly though it was. i was fucking sweating by the time i was finished.

but this time i just hopped over the console and was out in like five seconds. it was disappointingly simple and took no strategy.