Ok, day two of feeling like a fucking cementhead is coming to an end, and the cumulative effect of so many cold meds is starting to get to me. I use DayQuil to cure my cold and wake me up, and NyQuil to cure my cold and knock me out. It’s getting to be that the only reliable way for me to tell what time of day it is is to look at the color of what I’m drinking. Maybe I’ll just start mixing them together and let them fucking duke it out. If I fall asleep, NyQuil wins. If I sprint laps around the house trailing used Kleenex behind me, DayQuil is the winner. And if my liver fails because I’m the kind of idiot that fucks around with over the counter medicine for giggles, well then the funeral industry wins, I guess. Continue reading

I’ve got a very bad cold. It’s 100 degrees outside, and I’ve got a cold. This is what is known in the medical community as fucking bullshit. Having a cold in summer weather gargles donkey-balls. Everyone else is running around, diving in pools, golfing, and generally acting like they’re in a fucking Mountain Dew commercial, and I’m stuffed up to the gills feeling like shit. Every once in a while I’ll look at someone enjoying themselves in a particularly summer-like way and just tell them, “Fug you butherfugger!” Continue reading

My kids are really big fans of Minecraft. If you don’t know what that is, go have a boy and you’re certain to find out. It’s a computer world-building game, intentionally low-res, and you wouldn’t think it’d be of interest to anyone until you sit down and start playing with it. 90 minutes later, you’ll look up from the mountain hideaway you just finished building and realize with a start that you’ve spent the better part of your evening acting like a four year old. Then you’ll go back and put a battlement on your mountain hideaway because, and let’s be serious now, you simply can’t have a mountain hideaway without a battlement. Continue reading

They say you never forget how to ride a bicycle, and it’s true. I know because I put it to the test. When I was a child, I lived in a rural area of Illinois, and I practically lived on my bike. We had rolling hills to fly down, homemade jumps to launch from, and a series of winding one-way streets that we knew like the backs of our hands. Of course, now I live in blazing-hot Phoenix where for five months out of the year riding a bike is like soaking yourself in gasoline and lying down under a large magnifying glass: It’s going to end with you carrying your roasted nuts home in a thimble. And so, between work, and kids, and the weather, and living in a city where everything is very, very spread out, I soon found myself not having ridden a bicycle in 20 years. Continue reading

I found myself struck by a powerful case of wanderlust the other day. All of a sudden I just felt like hopping in the Jeep and driving through the desert with the top down, my destination… Who knows? And probably irrelevant besides. Sometimes the road is the destination, with the sun painting the sky purple, the wind blowing through your hair, and road-weariness settling in just as lights begin to twinkle on the horizon…

Hey, what the fuck was that? I dunno. Life has been exceedingly weird for me the last few weeks, and sometimes I catch myself actually expressing my thoughts instead of making dick jokes. Sorry. I won’t let that happen again. Anyway, between everything I have going on and getting ready for a big wedding this weekend (as a groomsman, I hasten to add), I have no time for a real post tonight. So instead, here’s Chris Robinson and New Earth Mud performing a song that I always associate with long drives in the middle of nowhere, Eagles on the Highway. (Jesus, I’m starting to sound like Casey Kasem.)

I have two brothers, which people find fascinating for some reason. “You mean there’s more than one of you? Good God!” Actually, while I’m the garrulous, outgoing type of person, my younger brother is quiet and more reserved. And then my older brother is from Planet Zoot, and no one knows what the fuck he is thinking. To say that he’s socially maladapted is to assume a borderline level of social awareness, which I can assure you that my older brother does not have. He does or says what he feels like, and if that happens to violate every social more in place since the invention of the plow, well then that’s society’s fucking problem, isn’t it? This is how he came to ruin a Christmas Eve dinner for a bunch of old ladies. Continue reading

We live in a world of technological wonder, or at least we think we do. Five years from now, of course, we’ll wonder what we did back in the stone ages when we didn’t have high-def porn streamed directly into our brains (answer: get shit done), but for right now we feel like we are on the cutting edge of a brave, new world, one in which our phones are advanced enough to tell us that we’re all a bunch of lard-asses. Continue reading

I was black the first time I stepped into a bar. You see, I attended a University with some rather relaxed rules about public alcohol consumption: Pretty much anyone could do it. The rule was that campus bars were allowed to admit people who were at least 19 years old, but they weren’t supposed to serve anyone unless they were 21 or older. This worked about as well as you would expect it to, which is to say not at all. You showed your id at the door, went inside, and proceeded to drink until you were too drunk to lie down on the ground without holding on. Then you had a few more and went home. Still, by limiting their clientele to those who were legally and almost-legally allowed to drink, they were missing out on a key demographic: People absolutely not old enough to drink. So bouncers at these bars tended to be rather casual when it came to checking ID. They’d put a thumb over the photo and wave you right on in. Continue reading

It’s getting close to summer here in Phoenix, when you can fry an egg in your pants just by walking outside (this is why I no longer trust IHOP). Because of this, I’m forced to take my post-lunchtime walk across the street in the air-conditioned confines of our local mall. It’s a pleasant, comfortable walk as long as you can avoid the assholes selling helicopters and are able to mentally block out the sight of unfortunate ass-crack. Seriously, what is with all the ass-crack? If you’re so big that you can’t find pants large enough to cover your ass-crack, you need to run over to a sporting goods store and buy a god damn tent because no one who isn’t being paid in some capacity should ever have to see that shit. Continue reading

I work across the street from a massive electronics store, the type where you can buy a 100″ HDTV, a washing machine, or an iPad all under one roof. It’s a very dangerous place for a person like me to go because at any given moment I’m liable to convince myself that life isn’t really worth living unless I can buy myself a giant, remote-controlled blimp shaped like a cheeseburger. I’m not much for rampant consumerism, but this store has my fucking number. One time I went over there to buy a new hard drive on the company’s expense account. I came back with 6 inch Gumby and Pokey dolls. I’d forgotten all about the hard drive. Continue reading