Every March, I roll up my sleeves, get to work, and really put a fucking hurting on my family. I mean, I fucking whomp on ’em. Take no prisoners, give no quarter, and mercy is for the weak, that’s what I say. When I get through destroying my family, they will wish that they had never been born. I’m speaking, of course, about our family NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament pool. This is serious fucking business. Continue reading

Chances are that you’ve got a killer in your household, something directly responsible for over 1.2 million deaths worldwide every year. It is so dangerous, in fact, that you have to obtain a special license to use it. It is expensive to purchase, expensive to operate, and expensive to maintain. In addition to all of that, it is poisonous, contributing to pollution so severe that it claims an additional 1.3 million lives every year. If you even turn it on in a closed room, it will kill you within minutes. I’m referring to, of course, automobiles, specifically the one I had to take in with a blown master cylinder this morning. Fucking cars. Continue reading

I attended public schools growing up, which wasn’t as bad as some people would have you believe. At least it wasn’t out in the far suburbs of Chicago where the streets were more likely to be teeming with cows than gang members. I had my share of good teachers, a couple of them I’d go so far as to call excellent. Most of the teachers were competent, but average. They got the job done, kept control of the class, and managed to make sure that you left with a little more knowledge in your head than you came in with. But you take the good along with the bad: I also had a fifth grade teacher who was horribly inept and lazy, and an eighth grade teacher who was a living nightmare. That nightmare was called Lester the Molester. Continue reading

You know what I highly recommend? Being in a rock band. I was in a rock band when I was in college, and it was tremendous fun. We did band-like things such as rehearse, play gigs, do drugs, and get really drunk, but being in a rock band is so much more than that. It’s having the police bust up an outdoor jam session while you’ve got a bottle of whiskey and a bag of drugs in plain sight on a picnic table; it’s dumping a full garbage can out on another band’s gear in a recording studio because they had just been signed to a label and made the mistake of thinking that meant they could order another band to go buy beer for them; it’s the sheer exhilaration you feel when you realize you have a real fan, even if looks-wise she’s closer to a grouper than a groupie. Being in a rock band fucking rules. Continue reading

I read the other day that new evidence has surfaced that supports the claim of a man who had claimed that he was Hitler’s love-child with a young French woman. The first thing I thought was that I’m not so sure you want to be running around announcing that you’re Hitler’s son. I mean, it’s got to be hard to get second dates when you drop that little nugget of information into play during dinner. “Well, I’m an avid reader, I like to travel, and I’m the son of the mastermind behind the slaughter of six million innocent people. What about you?” At that point you may as well drop in that you’ve got herpes and that your name is Mel Gibson, because it won’t make things worse: You’re just not getting any action tonight, Adolf Jr. Continue reading

My daughter has been a terrible tattle-tale almost as long as she’s been able to talk. She’ll run up to me breathlessly and inform me that her brother, six years younger than her, just spit at the cat, or threw his piggy bank down the stairs, or some other relatively harmless thing that he did, often because his sister told him to. My reaction is always the same: “Thanks for the heads up on that, narc!” Continue reading

My birthday is on Thursday, and to celebrate the 14th anniversary of my 29th birthday, we are going to head out of town and spend a long weekend up in the mountains north of Phoenix. This will give us an opportunity to get away from our normal day-to-day lives, spend some time with each other (and some good friends who are coming with us), and do something about the fact that in a recent study, the United States came in 56th in a poll of the drunkest countries in the world. Fifty-sixth! This, quite frankly, is pathetic. I don’t know who commissioned this poll (because I was too hammered to read it), but obviously the people compiling the data completely missed my house on New Year’s Eve, Arizona State University, and Boston. Continue reading

Every once in a while you’ll read some study that claims that guys think about sex every six minutes or so. Whenever these studies come out, women always have the same reaction. First, they say, “No kidding!” Then, invariably, they ask, “How do guys get anything done?” First of all, if anything, those studies are too conservative. Thinking about sex is something guys are constantly doing with almost no breaks. Maybe you can go six whole minutes without thinking of sex when you’re ninety, but I still kind of doubt it even if sex at 90 is like shooting pool with a rope.* Continue reading

For whatever reason, I do some of my best thinking while I’m walking. I take several walks a day, and almost always I’ll be just walking along, spacing out and not thinking of anything in particular when a thought will just hit me. “I bet Rosanne Barr’s vag looks like someone beat a raccoon to death with a rolling pin! That’s comedy gold!” And then I’ll do nothing with that idea because it’s not really that funny, just goofy. To be fair, though, that’s exactly how several successful sitcoms came to be. Case in point: someone in a writer’s room once made a joke about Loretta Swit’s poon, and before you know it, that joke morphed into Charles in Charge. Scott Baio’s original role was listed as “Dildo”. True story! (Note: Not a true story.) Continue reading

A quick postscript to yesterday’s post, which detailed some of the more outrageous moments I experienced in college. I heard from some of my friends who have heard me retell these stories ad nauseam (which is Latin for “Shut the fuck up, already, Greg!”) They generally wanted to know why I left out my psychotic lesbian roommate who thought cigarette smoke was radioactive and could travel through walls, or why I didn’t talk about the asshole who wouldn’t stop hitting on my girlfriend, whom I later found passed out in the bushes and for whom I managed to arrange an unconscious lingerie photo-shoot, or any one of a hundred other fucked up things that happened while I was supposed to be getting an education. Continue reading