this is harder than it looks. try to not fuck it up.

games you can play in the car

the signing of the anal accord, 1775.


long holiday drive planned this year? a friend of mine suggests passing the time by putting the word "anal" in front of every model of car that you see on the road. this idea became very funny to me yesterday as i was driving to work, and realized that the three cars surrounding me on the highway were an avalanche, a sidekick and an accord.

too much of a good thing

if i lived in brazil, i would still eat this


i love pizza. love it. a disappointingly facile addiction, i know. but the heart wants what it wants.

i was visiting a friend of mine the other night, who had a small get together to celebrate her first brithday in recent memory as a single woman.

two of the women at the party had put together a "single girl survival kit" for my friend, complete with the first issue of her new subscription to playgirl. very "cathy for the new millennium". probably the most compelling item in the kit, if "let me see it" is a measure of anything. plus, you know, it's porn. eventually, the "guy with the biggest dick" picture was located, and then held up and shown to the rest of the class.

i was sitting some 10 feet away on the couch, so i didn't get a real good look. but it wasn't shockingly large. i mean, it was probably the size of a small baby arm i'd say. but it wasn't on the scale of, like, early erotic cave painting big or anything like that. this guy wasn't going to be driving oxen or plowing a field with this thing any time soon. unimpressed with what seemed to be an imaginable set of circumstances, i was just about to start half-listening to the goings on when the girl sitting next to me said the following:

"look at that thing. it's practically out there on it's own, living it's own life, you know, hanging out, callin' friends, ordering pizza..."

and all i could think was, "that would really be something...being able to order pizza while you were ALREADY ordering pizza. that would be sweet. don't say this out loud."

the hustler

puck me


on monday nights, i play a style of hockey known as "puck wap-o". the rules of puck wap-o are simple. you skate around as hard as you can, try and keep the other team from making good passes, and hit, or "wap-o", the puck toward the other team's goal if your opponent and your composure will afford you the opportunity. this requires what is known as "good hustle", and for lack of any tangible skill, i possess this in spades.

yesterday i was hit by the puck on three different occassions. the one that looks like it hurt the most was the slap shot to the chest that i "took" while trying to block the view of our opponent's goalie, leaving a perfectly puck-shaped bruise right where my dignity used to be, and robbing my teammate of a scoring opportunity. this is what is known as "bad hustle". no one will actually say "bad hustle" to you, as hustle in general is appreciated. but it's quietly understood that this is not the "good" variety.

208 cases of the mondays

there is a dilbert comic strip that was cut out of the local paper and given to me by my boss, almost 4 years ago. as a matter of professional courtesy, it's still hanging in my cube, yellowed and frayed, stained with taco bell "border sauce" that my cube mate shot at me, ostensibly because he hadn't taken his medication that day (seriously). here's how the last two frames of the comic strip go:


(two managers sitting at desk eating donuts and drinking coffee)
"back to reality. i'll fire ted. he creeps me out. who else do we hate?"
(next frame)
"hey, my donut is being eaten by the world's ugliest fly!"
(the fly is shouting the word "bonanza")


that's it. that's how it ends.

next to the comic strip is the bomb threat procedure guide which we are required to post in the "cube area". the bottom of the page discusses identifying a bomb:


"Ask yourself this question:
'does this belong here'
if your answer is:
'no. this object is out of place and i can't explain why it is here.'
you should consider it suspect"


i see these two things everyday. they make my mouth dry.

watching movies by yourself

the drag of being alone


if you watch "alien" and "hedwig and the angry inch" back to back on the same night by yourself, you'll be amazed at their similarities. aside from the obvious nod to the drag queen idiom that both movies make (it's really more of a sub-text in "alien"), the two films also surprisingly share some important themes:

it's hard to know what's inside of another person.

we're frequently compelled to seek out things that used to be a part of us, as disappointing as this can sometimes end up being.

doing what you have to do often means ending up alone.

something disgusting this way comes

"c'mon baby (don't fear the leaper)"

there are six words that, when paired just so, will make me feel instantly nauseous. they are:

brown + recluse
out + sourcing
and
camel + cricket

brown sourcing is not so hot either.

not unlike one of my ex-girlfriends, the brown recluse spider is a nasty, tiny, light brown colored hermit that, when feeling threatened, will inject a flesh-necratizing poison into it's otherwise oblivious victim. the lesson i've learned: don't seek it out and you can continue living relatively unscarred without large chunks of you missing.

out-sourcing is a meaningless campaign issue whereby livelihoods are taken away from a higher paying job market and given to a lower paying job market, usually in another country. the segment of the population most affected by these practices would be the unlucky. coming in at a close second would be the over-paid and under-smart. (gulp.)

while not possessing the means to hurt you in any direct physical or financial manner, the camel cricket has other ways of "getting" you. this little time burglar from the ninth circle of cricket hell will creep you out with it's freakish leaping abilities, which it uses to either (1) keep you foolishly swatting at the spot on the floor where it just was less than a second ago, (2) force you to spastically writhe and brush your arms and chest, or, (3) when alone with you in tight quarters, ensure that you know the face of the insect whose life you are trying to take.

camel crickets live almost exclusively in the southeastern part of the united states, under my house. they generally stay in the crawl space, which i imagine sufficiently suits their dark and dank little lifestyle. but with the advent of daylight savings time, you can usually find at least one or two "soldier crickets" that have crawled through the cracks of my 1935 house and found their way into the seasonal darkness of the surface world by 5:30pm or so. which means the first thing i do when i come home from work is spend about 15 minutes trying to end a life.

great. that's just great. thank you, daylight savings time.

how to make a joke

1. invite parent over to apartment for christmas

2. buy christmas tree

3. take small piece of 2x4 and bore 2-3" hole through center

4. attempt unsuccessfully to use as tree stand

5. repeat steps 3 and 4 until parent is able to stabalize tree with old fashioned ingenuity (bobby pins, string, tape, etc)

6. have parent endlessly mock your failed attempts

7. do not throw away wood pieces

8. years later, have siblings visit

9. if you look carefully, and are high, you can now enjoy the perverse awkwardness of having made what appear to be several portable glory holes. suggest sending parent one as a christmas gift*. good stuff.

*do not actually send. do not tell parent about blog. if confronted, insist that a glory hole is a german pastry similar to a bunt cake, tradtionally made during the christmas season.



joke hole