teeth

I woke up on my bathroom floor this morning and that hadn’t happened before in this apartment so I didn’t immediately recognize the base of the toilet, but it only took a couple seconds to figure out I was home and very nearly in bed, so good enough and a nice start to the day. If I were a pessimist, I’d have thought waking up in the can was a bad sign, but I’m an optimist and I had to take a leak anyway, so it all worked out for the convenient. And I love things that are convenient, even more than I love things that are velour or bourbon.

So I’m peeing, and my penis hurts. Yipes. No big deal, though, as a sent message check revealed the following: “I’m cool, tho did just zip my cock. You?” Ah yes, I caught some dick skin on the downstroke very early last night at Finnerty’s. My darts came and I forgot that I’m boycotting Finnerty’s—I asked to borrow the bar knife to chop my sandwich a couple weeks ago and was told they don’t have one. Then I asked for a lime and stared at the guy, then murdered him—but it’s the closest bar to my house and has a nice dart set-up and no one’s ever there until midnight, so I went in to throw a few by myself. That was fun. Then I left to go a couple blocks up to Paddy Maquire’s. Which by the way, had a not-great experience there with my man Phil after WhiskeyFest.

He’s a professional bartender, I can tell he knows what’s up, and we’re pals. Did I tell you guys that Meredith came down for WhiskeyFest? It was great. We spent 18 straight hours together and did not have a single argument. Maybe we’re mellowing, and maybe we’ve just had every single conceivable argument already. At any rate, it was the most fun we’ve had together since never. There was a hint of unpleasantness when she said, “Wait, where’s the Rubber Buns and Liquor girl? I dressed for her!” and I said, “Remember the black eye and the birthday party and all that?” and shrugged, because Meredith knows me better than anyone, so that sentence should be enough for her to fill in the relevant blanks. And she said, “I remember you had a black eye last time I saw you, and OF COURSE I remember that you’re an asshole who wrecks everything. Is there more to it, or do I have the gist?” I mean, true enough, but don’t emasculate me in front of the children, you know? The fellows had also axed about Rubber and I said, “Eh, you know, they come, they go,” and that was good enough for them, why can’t it be good enough for you?

But we recovered. It was great to be at a whiskey convention with a hot chick from Kentucky. I haven’t gotten that many dirty looks since the last time I said “nigger” in a black church (Easter 2008). Men are repulsive. Let’s put this in perspective: there were 2,000 tickets sold, and the photographer lady from Malt Advocate stopped me and the Panda to pose twice. Yup, the other 1,998 had their shit together even less than me and Patrick Gallivan at an event with “whiskey” in the title. The fest actually sucked a little, and I don’t think I’ll go back. I’ll just take next year’s crop of 30s out for steak and titties or something. It was oversold, and the crowd blew. Lots of fat dudes who don’t get out of the house often enough anymore, don’t know how to work a crowded room, don’t know how to not say “Wow, look at the rack on HER!” when said rack (editor’s note: yes, impressive) is standing right next to them with five violent drunk male friends.

Now, we all know I don’t care if Meredith gets raped and killed and then raped again, so I wasn’t feeling protective, per se, just appalled at the humanity. I’m a very inappropriate person. The other night I ran into one of my Irishmen and I said “Oh shit, I was just about to head down to the Pig to visit you!” and he said, “Well, no need for that now!” and I said oh right, great to see you here, let’s get drunk and sing and rail against the barbarity of circumcision or whatever it is you people do. And he said yeah, good thing, because it would probably be OK if you never went back to the Pig. Fuck, what did I do? “You told some uptight chick that if she were good and quiet then maybe later you’d put it in her.” Shit, did I touch her? “No.” Well then who cares? I guess a whole gang of Midtown office dicks cared and it was a bit of a problem. So I said, “Are you saying I’m banned?” and he said, “Lord, no. You’ve been drinking at my bars for 9 years.” See, girls, that’s a demonstration of the secret male superpower called LOYALTY. But anyhow, what I’m saying is that I’m one of the worst behaved people in the world, and even I thought the WhiskeyFest degeneracy was too much. But whatever, there was booze there (and pasta salad).

So after the fest, me and Meredith put the cowards to bed and lit out to paint the town a very faint shade of red. We went to Paddy Maguire’s and she ordered a Jack and water (hideous) and I a beer. Phil says “Just the beer, Will?” meaning, obviously, “not the Bushmills neat with which you typically wash it down?” Meredith caught that and didn’t care in the least—we ain’t got that kind of friendship, she’s known me for a million years, it’s no shock to her to learn that I drink whiskey—but what the fuck, man? Phil doesn’t know any of this. He knows I just walked in with a girl he’s never seen before. That’s not when you start striking up double-fisting conversations. Lying to women is the cornerstone of every bar friendship.

It was a minor blip, but it gave me a flashback to Allie's first night in Cambridge. You remember Allie, right, the girl from Dallas that I really liked? We met via blog, so she already knew I was a n'often-do-well drunken shithead, but I was trying to put my less-bad foot forward for that first day or so. But the first friends she met were Bastard and Jesse, and somehow within 5 minutes she's mentioning that when she moves to Boston (she was there for job interviews) she's going to need to find a dog-walker. So Max and Jesse burst into laughter and say "Will knows a dog-walker." Eh, I fucked some girl who walks dogs a couple years ago, big deal, but the story's kinda funny and famous and told way too often. Allie's a sharp chick, so she knows what's up and says, "Did y'all make out?" and I said "No way!" and tried to change the subject. I mean, obviously I have a shady past and she was cool with that, but I knew we were on the way to two straight weeks of "And her? How about that one over there with the blue shirt?" and wanted to keep it clean for as long as possible. Anyhow, so then she says "OK, y'all didn't make out, but did you have sex?" and Max and Jesse laughed even harder and that was that, the city of Cambridge was in love with Allie and so was I and then she disappeared. The point here is that you don't tell my new lady friend the dog-walker story, you dickheads.

Hmm, how did we get here? Oh right, I was going to Paddy’s last night when Bob and Glo called, so I ran uptown to drink with them. You guys don’t know Gloria. She’s very pretty, if you’re into brown chicks, and I am. And she’s extra super pretty in the darting context: she draws a “big-titted girl from Kentucky at WhiskeyFest” level of attention from the sad old fucks at the dart bar. So Bob and I were talking amongst ourselves while the room worked her, and she came over and said “What are you girls talking about?” and I told the truth. We’re talking about how much it sucks to get your dick caught in your zipper. Then she left and we continued talking about that.

Running out of room here, but then the night progressed to Rhea—remember Rhea?—saying her bar was dead and she was getting out early. I was a bit wobbly when I got there. I fucked up the push-pull on both doors, and the giant doorthug said “Damn, G, if I had ten doors, you’d have gone 0 for 10, right?” and I admitted that was true but also that I was a peaceable fellow and just wanted to sit in the corner and drink my life away and he was like, Oh, I can tell. No problem, just saying, you’re wasted, come on it. And I did and then all of a sudden it was 5:00 and I was now-youse-can’t-leaved at some joint called Ace Bar and I snuck out when Rhea and her friend were . . . christ, who knows. I just knew it was time for bed. On the bathroom floor.

I need a hobby that takes place in a bar and isn't pool, hence

This is the quietest apartment I’ve ever lived in. I’m tucked into the back corner and only have one neighbor. A couple weeks ago I heard her being emphatically fucked and/or murdered, but other than that she is silent and mostly invisible. There are 60 or 70 other units in the building, but they are similarly ghost-occupied, so it was sort of surprising just now to run into another human in the laundry room. We had this interaction:

me: Some lady just sort of called me out for drinking a beer in the laundry room. Now I feel all self-conscious.

Sent at 3:33 PM on Thursday

Kelly: Really? What did she say?

me: Is that a BEER?

So I channeled Vinny and said "no, i drink my coffee out of a budweiser can.”

Kelly: screw her. What's wrong with drinking a beer in the laundry room? Good response. Did she smile or stare?

me: Smiled, to her credit. She's pretty hot, too, so I'm going to steal her underwear. Looks about your size. Any requests?

Sent at 3:38 PM on Thursday

Kelly: yah, sell them and buy her a 30 rack of bud cans.

me: oh, excellent idea. like a self-contained Robin Hood mission.

And maybe I'll sell them to myself.

Kelly: hahaha

I was drinking beer for two reasons: I’m a good-for-nothing piece of shit, and I had to talk on the phone twice today. We’ve been over how much the phone stresses me out, yes? The phone calls were both egregiously unnecessary, too. I woke up to the following messages today: a text from Nils saying “I’m in court and your keys are behind the bar.” Now, it makes every bit of sense that Nils would be in court, but I live a couple hundred miles from his bar and somehow managed to let myself into my apartment last night, so I don’t really know what the fuck he’s talking about and will just block it out. I’m really good at ignoring things.

The other message was terrible. It was an email saying “Hi Bill, please call about the Internet dart order you placed.” First, it’s paradoxically both over- and under-familiar to reduce the regal William to a mere syllable and the wrong one at that. My name is Will, you see. Second, the whole reason I buy things online is so I don’t have to interact with the kind of guy who sells darts for a living. I mentioned to Kelly that I was dreading calling and was half-expecting her to offer to do it for me, because she’s a very generous person and knows I hate the phone, but no luck there so I called this Rick myself. It turns out the flights I’d picked are out of stock, would I like to pick a different model or just trust him to grab the right one? I said “I don’t care, they’re just dart flights, grab whatever’s closest,” and he asked if I preferred this style or that—there are apparently a lot of options. I reiterated that I knew little about dart flights and cared even less, but then I remembered that the ones I’d picked had a real badass airbrushed tiger, so I tacked on “but something badass, if you can,” and then we had to have a 45 second discussion about how badassery is in the eye of the beholder. Fair enough, but all you know about me is that my name is Bill and that we got into this mess in the first place because I think airbrushed tigers are badass. Use that information, Rick.

Got that squared away, though, and just as I was resteadying myself with one of the Bud tallboys I seem to have acquired through the course of the night, fucking Kelly called. You know why? Because I sent her flowers, which I did because I like to send girls flowers and because I was sort of a dick to her yesterday. You know how I always say “Hey, I live 200 miles away, and I never really knew what Kelly was up to when I was right down the Red Line, so I certainly don’t get involved in her business these days.” Turns out not to be the case. Sorry, kid. So I sent her and her roommate and the roommate’s dog flowers, because they’re good to me when I turn up without warning and stick around for days. But the point here is, I send you flowers and the thanks I get is having to talk on the phone about it?! Women.

I have a fake date tonight with a great woman, though, so I need to hold it together until she gets out of work at midnight. I’ve told you about Rhea the bartender. She works at HiFi on Mondays and Thursdays and Bleecker Street a couple of other days. She’s very cool and has taken me in off the street, and a couple times it’s been suggested that if she ever gets out at a decent hour on Monday, she’ll take me to . . . some other bar over there she goes to. So we’re pals, but I also understand the bartender/patron relationship. I pay her to be my friend, and she likes me more than the other customers because I’m decent company and pay her well. That’s great, but it’s not a friendship. But apparently in this case it is, because the other night we made this specific plan. Yippee!

Remember the darts? Bobby America and his lady Gloria Mexico are big dart players, him recreationally and her semi-professionally. I decided I need to get back in the game, because it slows down my drinking and gives me something nonviolent or masturbatory to do with my free hand. So I asked Glo where to go and what to buy and she said “Go to the billiard shop on Broadway, see what you like, then buy it online for half the price.” Then I said “Could you please tell me what I like?” and she said to get the low-end 21 gram Targets. That sounded awful light, but in situations like this I do what I’m told, so I went to the store to see what was what. (Turns out 21’s are too light for this novice, but I like the model and bought the 24’s.) I forgot about the buy them online part though, and came home and bitched at Gloria for making this little hobby cost $110. She said “Well, I know you like to be an idiot and I don’t want to stand in the way of you doing your thing, but a normal person would return them and order them for $48 from the online dart place,” and in a shocking turn of events, that’s what I did. Wait, Rhea was in here somewhere.

Oh right, I went to Bobby’s dart match the other night and had a great time of watching them get destroyed and catching up with Dr. Babymaker and Fast Love. But now I can’t go back to Stillwater on East 4^th, and neither can the rest of you and this is why. The cocktail girl collected everyone’s credit card, which is a weird move when you’re dealing with the dart team—home court advantage in darts essentially boils down to not having to give the girl a card. But whatever. Until the end of the night when she admits that she lost Bob’s. Never mind how or where or why she waited until midnight to mention this, let us focus on how outrageous it is that the bar let him pay in cash. All beers are $3.50 on Tuesday nights (man, I’ll miss that place) so his tab was only about $20. It seems so obvious to me that the bar needs to eat that for any stranger off the street, never mind a celebrity dart player. But nope. So we went to Bleecker Street and told Rhea, who was appalled on behalf of her profession and comped BA’s first two drinks even though she’d never met him. That’s a solid lady right there. Man, I hope I don’t do anything too creepy.

I drank tea and read until 10; that isn't bad

I know one woman who has sold her underwear to Internet stranger-perverts, one who has threatened to do the same, and a third who has mailed her underwear to me. I like the first woman the most, for reasons almost entirely unrelated to online panty hustling, but am very friendly with the second and once upon a few times hugged the third: they're good, normal people, no more damaged or promiscuous than the next lady.

I mention this to point out that a regular woman can make a quick $50 by engaging in nothing more strenuous or intimate than an ordinary day’s dressing and secreting, if she’s willing to push the sexual-ethics envelope. The part about the woman who sent me her worn panties I mention because it makes me feel better about myself on a lonely Saturday night, and also to illustrate how easy it is for a woman to make a strong impression on a man if she is willing to push the aforementioned sexual-ethics envelope by affixing two stamps to a dirty-panties-filled envelope.

This all occurs to me because I am reading The Post-Birthday World, and a character just said “wonky.” That’s a good word that, for me, has been hijacked by the memory of a friend saying that panties that tie on the sides are tricky because you always tie one side a tiny bit tighter than the other, “which makes your vagina look all wonky.” This memory also threatens to wreck side-tie underwear for me as well, but I haven’t come across any in the half-year since. Anyhow, what this all means is that I was knocked out of my very tenuous state of peaceful solitude, and am now no longer content to spend Saturday night reading a girly book and drinking tea. These thoughts aren’t titillating or distracting—“wonky” comes up a few times a week on the BBC, and sexy underwear comes up a few times a day on my computer--but just a reminder of the larger world containing interesting people and unlikely commerce, which has jolted me out of my senses and into my pants.

I’m going to the bar soon, and I will not lose my wallet because I will not trust myself to take it. That means I have to figure out how much cash to take. Which reminds me that I don’t have any of these sleazy-like-a-fox little side gigs, and as such I’ll be broke soon enough. Which reminds me that I can’t attract women with my dirty laundry, either, which refers back to the previous point about how much cash to take: all of it. See you at the bar. (No, the other one.)

I don't think I would make a very good father

These days I find myself in unhappy possession of 7 bags of lime-flavored Corn Nuts. They taste all right, but they're not really good enough to justify the pain-in-the-ass factor of having lime dust all over your hands, so for the most part they just sit in the drawer not being eaten by me or the pretty girl I bought them for. But I just poured a dozen or so into the day's second bowl of black bean soup and god damn am I brilliant. Phew. I'm fighting through a pretty stupid stretch these days and it's encouraging to know I'm still capable of having good ideas.

I couldn't find my wallet yesterday morning, and spent 10 agonizing minutes searching my apartment for it; my apartment is tiny and empty and it's nearly impossible to misplace anything, but I took the search to the unlikeliest of places (shower, freezer, rectum) because somebody slipped some alcohol into my whiskey Saturday night and I woke up in bed with a Kit Kat Extra Crispy and a 22 of Olde English, so the day started off with an "anything's possible" sort of feel. Well, anything stupid. I was able to call off the search, though, when I checked my voicemail and learned that I'd left it at some broad's house. By the time I got the message I had slept through the deadline to go pick it up yesterday, but that's OK because I had enough cash to watch football (all draft beer is $3.50 at 12th Street Alehouse on Sunday afternoon!) and didn't really need the wallet for anything. Today I was supposed to pick it up at the lady's office, but she forgot to bring it with her. Now I'm waiting to hear when I can go get it at her house, because I got friends in town for WhiskyFest and need to get out on the street soon. Which reminds me of another really dumb decision I made this weekend.

I ended up with an extra ticket to WhiskyFest. A couple months ago I offered to take a friend for her 30th birthday, then realized I have a lot of friends who turned 30 this year and decided to make it my default 30th birthday present. But alas, I ended up with more tickets than friends and rather than violate the spirit of the thing by having the Panda and the Bastard drag someone else down from the bar, I just sold the extra to some Craigslist lady. I had to meet her at the TGIFriday's at Penn Station Saturday afternoon. She told me she's 5'4" and her husband's 5'11" and has a goatee. I told her I would be the guy selling the WhiskyFest ticket. So we had it all worked out except there are 2 Fridays in Penn Station, so there was some last-minute dicking around with text messages and so forth, and at one point it occurred to me that the only couple waiting around the front of the Fridays fit the height/hair descriptions, but the dude was black. Eh, probably not a lot of black guys going to WhiskyFest, but who knows? So now I'm furious at my Craigslist lady for not mentioning that fact because what the fuck, are we THAT terrified to talk about race? You're giving me a physical description of a stranger and decide to go with "goatee" over "oh, and black." What the fuck, America. But no, wrong people. My lady's husband was white, and he gave me $125. As I was walking home, I decided I had to do something fun with this ill-gotten dough and was kicking around the idea of going to a fancy restaurant on Thanksgiving, but realized that could get melancholy in a hurry. I could also buy 25 six-packs of Schlitz at the Food Emporium, and I surely will, but that doesn't have the festive sort of angle I was looking for.

I hadn't really settled on a plan until I got Nils' text message the next morning: "Coming down 12/4 for Phish at MSG, get yourself a ticket." And you know my reply? I said "Fuck yeah!" I hate Phish. Well, I actually don't mind the music, but I hate the whole idea of the operation. Yet I agreed to pay a lot of fucking money to go swim in that filth for several hours. I conned Kelly into coming along, so when I tell the story in the future I'll overplay the hot-girl angle as justification, but the truth is that I agreed to go before she was involved in the plan. Fucking shameful, I know, and I totally understand if you never talk to me again.

Rating the B's, part 2

Underrated: bookmarks. When we get to the P’s (note: we’re never getting to the P’s), Post-It Notes may very well find themselves overrated. There’s not much they can do that a judicious combination of refrigerator magnets, thumbtacks, and the back of your hand couldn’t accomplish just as well. And you ever try demonstrating elementary physics, lancing a blister, or emphasizing your domestic displeasure with a piece of sticky paper? However, Post-Its are good for two specific things: affixing to the inside of your wallet lists of incoming numbers to ignore, bets to make, and groceries to buy; and marking your place in books. For these tasks you need the rare and elusive credit card-sized Post-It, WHICH I CAN’T FUCKING FIND ANYWHERE IN THIS STATIONERY-FORSAKEN SHITHOLE. I’ve been to five Staples, an Office Max, and the forlorn-ass paper store around the corner called Paper (I Shit You Not) Jamz, which sells nothing but ribbon and exists primarily to maintain a de-launderized zone between the warring dry cleaners on either side.

I’ve never claimed to be a white-collar John Henry*, but I used to alight on the office environment just often enough to get my Post-Its like a normal person, i.e., by stealing them, but my only recourse in these golden years is to rely on my office-working friends, each of whom has failed me miserably. Thanks. Back at the height of my powers, I bitched about a lack of red pens, and some girl from the other side of the country sent another girl from that same side of the country to my door with a half-dozen red pens by the end of the week; now I can't even get real-life friends to jack a pad of paper to bring over the next time they drink all my beer and mock my inflatable couch. I'll have you know it was none too convenient to attach a mini dry-erase board to the inside of my wallet, and with all the smudging I keep thinking I need to buy a half-pound of “Eagles laying 6” and avoid calls from “Diced Tomatoes.” However, the book-marking problem has been solved quite nicely by a bookmark. Just one of the ones they throw in when you buy a book, which I’ve always thrown right back out because they have no adhesive properties, and somehow 3M has brainwashed us all into thinking that’s a fatal flaw in a piece of paper. As it happens and in a pinch, the bookmark is an excellent way to keep track of your place in a book.

*The steel-drivin’ man, not the creepy guy who owns the Sox.

Overrated: Brazilian women. Anyone who’s been to East Cambridge can tell you that they come in all shapes, sizes, and fuckablities, just like everyone else who isn’t Samoan or Danish**. I know there are a lot of Brazilian models, but that's not because they're an uncommonly handsome people. It's because there are just a lot of Brazilians period, and also because theirs is a shallow culture that overvalues beauty, so every Brazilian broad with an outside shot at modeling aspires to nothing but. You know how there are certain American careers that tend to attract hot women? Some of them, like bartending, are certainly based on physical appearance, but others are just things that rich dudes’ daughters like to do, such as editorial assisting and public relating. And then there's the odd gorgeous lady sprinkled throughout just about every other profession--somewhere in this great land of ours, there is a bus driver whose bills you want to pay and whose toes you want to suck. Not in Brazil--or Brasil, as they say in their mangled fake-Spanish because they're too beauty-obsessed to realize how embarrassing it is for a gigantic and relevant country to be speaking Portuguese; it's as if Indonesia's official language were Welsh--anyhow, they all want to be models, even the ones with no chance. Every year you hear about some poor-in-every-way Brazilian maid who bleeds to death in the office of a Framingham welding supply company during a botched back-alley liposuction. All Brazilian women want to do is look good; noble, but impractical and occasionally fatal. I also heard they don’t put out, but that seems unlikely.

**Just speculating on the Danes.

Underrated: Boggle. Scrabble's for show-offs.

Things that are not properly rated and begin with B, part 1

Overrated: Barack Obama. I voted for him last time and I’ll vote for him next time. And I won’t mock the Nobel Peace Prize, because even he knows that’s complete horseshit. But aren’t we roughly where we were before with all these wars? Slightly better in Iraq, slightly worse in Afghanistan, still ignoring Pakistan? Not his fault, but I find his lack of a plan unsettling. I mean, I have no idea what he should do, but that’s why I just cleaned my kitchen floor with Windex and a $7 bathing suit I had to buy last week when I ran out of tolerance for my own filth and had to wash my jeans at Captain Bubbles because I accidentally forgot to go home for four straight days; which is to say, I’m an idiot, and he’s the president, so we probably shouldn’t have identical foreign policies. I’m getting so frustrated with the indecision that in weaker moments (yes, I have moments weaker than Windexing my kitchen floor with a $7 bathing suit: maybe tomorrow we’ll discuss how I dirtied it in the first place) I almost miss Bush’s decisiveness, his tragic, delusional decisiveness. At least that clown had a plan—the stupidest fucking plan in the world, but a plan.

So as I was saying before I blamed Obama for the wars, I don’t blame Obama for the wars. What I DO blame him for is lying about Guantanamo. He said he’d close it by the end of the year, and he’s not going to. And it wasn’t a mistake or a miscalculation, it was a lie. A lot of times when politicians have to reneg on campaign promises, they can blame unforeseen circumstances: the economy shit the bed all of a sudden, so they had to raise this tax or cut this program, etc. They’re probably always lying, but at least there’s usually some plausible deniability. But the biggest hurdle to closing Guantanamo was in plain sight all along—what are we going to do with these assholes when we let them out of our illegal jail? I’m opposed to the death penalty even for people convicted fair and square, never mind for these poor pricks, but at this point, the most honorable thing to do is say, “Right, I meant I’m going to kill them all, then close it.” At least that would show some evidence of legitimate forethought rather than just bullshit political pandering. I don’t like to get all patriotic with what it means to be an American, but if it means anything, it’s that you don’t illegally detain people and deny them representation and trial. It’s what separates us and the 20 other good countries from the couple hundred shitty ones. Due process is the opposable thumb of justice, man. Don’t fuck with it.

All right, now we need something equally important yet underrated. Leaning toward Black Beans and Bears, Polar. Back later. Make sure you Google something today; the logo is delightful!

Do the Less Wrong Thing

In the middle of October I told a friend in New York that, having been out of Boston for a couple weeks, I was just starting to get text messages saying, “Wait, did you move to New York?” I’d been threatening this for so long that people had stopped listening, which is understandable, plus the timing was sort of abrupt (and really, really stupid). The New York friend asked, “Don’t they read your blog?” And I said, “Good god no, why would they?” The New York friend started to read before we met, so to her, it’s my defining trait. I’m her buddy Will who writes one of the blogs that help her kill time at work. But a lot of my friends don’t read blogs, or don’t like mine in particular, or don’t have office gigs, or I never told them about it, or for whatever other perfectly valid reason just don’t give a shit.

Kelly was vaguely aware that I wrote a blog, but the one time she asked about it, I dissuaded her from reading it, because she didn’t know I was predominantly an asshole and I was in no hurry for her to find out. She’s a very good person. I’m not kissing her ass when I type that, because she announced last night that she was giving up my blog after a couple harrowing days of reading about vanilla-scented genitals and jerking off on the bus. I asked why, just to make sure she wasn’t mortally offended, and she gave one of her Northern California hippie answers about secondary consciousness or some damn thing—she seemed a little drunk and was doing shots of Jager with Truck at the time “because otherwise he’s doing shots alone on a Sunday, which would make it melancholic rather than celebratory.” I asked what he could possibly have to celebrate and she said “that there is Jager here.” See, she’s a kind soul. But anyhow, we got her off the blog, thank god. She’s known me long enough now to realize that I’ve got a prick side, which I’m told comes across quite clearly in these pages, but I’ve also got an often-dormant nice side, which is what she sees most often, because I like her.

One way I try to be a decent person is by being fair and borderline generous in my dealings with the world. I don’t have much, by any material or spiritual measure, but I have enough, plus ample opportunity to acquire more. If I never end up making anything of myself—which is entirely possible—it will be my own fault. I was dealt a good hand. So I try to be compassionate with bums and fuckups, and just generally pull my weight in the world and not screw anyone over. The only bum I won’t give money to is the lady in Union Square with the “Tired of prostitution, please help” sign, because to me that says “I had a decent job in a bad economy, but I decided I didn’t like it, so now I want strangers to give me money even if I don’t blow them.” Seems a bit presumptuous. I know prostitution’s not a great job, but neither’s working at Wendy’s, and if you replace “prostitution” with “fryolation” in the above sign, do you get pity nickels or a kick in the face, you know?

Killing time softly

Another Saturday evening, another attempt to manage my at-home prep drinking so that 11 o’clock finds me conversationally—but not feloniously*--loaded. This party’s not nearly as stressful as the last, though. It’s a close friend’s thirtieth birthday, and I’ll know the right number of people: a handful to cling to when necessary, but with enough leftover bodies to provide interesting-stranger potential. Plus it is at an apartment and therefore the music ought not be quite so deafening as at the last one. Part of the reason I don’t like the phone is that I think something might be a little off with my hearing. There’s deafness in my family, but I don’t think I have a problem with hearing volume, more with hearing accuracy, if that makes any sense. I have a hard time making out accents, and I think I rely more on lip-reading and hand gestures than most people. I mean, who knows? Again, I’m not clinically damaged, I just have a hunch that making out words comes a little less naturally to me. At Bad Art the other night, I told the chick next to me, “Oh, you gotta hear the recorded version of this song, the lyrics are a riot,” and she said, “I know they are. Max is signing them 10 feet away from me.” I thought the acoustics were terrible, but no, it was just my inability to hear straight.

Anyhow, what this means is that at loud parties full of strangers, I have a hard time doing my song and dance. I spent most of the last one talking to the best-looking chick there, which I suppose I’d have done anyway, because I’m an optimist, so when I have no idea who the cool people in the room are, I figure I might as well start the search with the pretty girls and work my way on from there. And this broad was really cool, but her most important attribute that night is that she’s 6 feet tall, so our lip/ear levels were reasonably matched and that made talking to her easier than bending over to understand what the short chicks were saying.

So that’s my phone excuse and I’m sticking to it. But my friend Kelly, who now reads this, likes talking on the phone and took excellent care of me last week, so I vowed that I would stop letting her calls go to voicemail. Except, she called while I was on the bus home the other day, and no way I can talk on the phone with that kind of noise/pressure. So I smiled at the number and rejected the call. And the next one 30 seconds later. And then answered the 3^rd, figuring it was something urgent. No, it was not. So I got all stressed out for a few minutes after the garbled conversation—no big deal, but I was knocked out the peaceful easiness I’d felt all week, and it reminded me of a conversation I’d had the day before. One friend suggested that another—the world’s angriest hippie—needed to beat off more. I said, “Well yeah, but he lives with his really hot fiancé, so I don’t think sex is the problem,” and the guy I was talking to explained that no, real sex is better, but also more complicated, less peaceful. Yeah, I can see that. You fuck yourself and then all of a sudden whatever was nagging at you immediately prior to the self-abuse fades away. So as I was lying in the back of the mostly empty bus, I thought, “I wonder if I could just jack it quick right here?” I didn’t, and it never even really evolved to the point of “potential plan,” but it was more than just a completely hypothetical thought experiment, too.

All that by way of answering the question: “Will, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you ever, like, make yourself nervous?”

All right, gang, I got strangers’ Solo cups to teabag on the UWS. Stay cool.

*note to dickhead’s ambulance chaser: simple assault, which you could never prove anyway, is a misdemeanor. My wearing a wristwatch does not upgrade it to assault and battery with a shod hand. Furthermore, you must work real cheap or have gotten some real bad info on my finances. Furtherermore: You see my fuckin' eye? Getting your ass kicked in the street is many bad things, but prosecutable ain't one of them.

So far, so far

Notes from a conquered hero's homecoming:

I had really ambitious plans for last weekend, plans which per usual fell apart at the last minute in a hail of violence and airline bullshit, but it had been too long since I'd seen anyone who likes me so I had to get out of NYC. This city is largely indifferent to me, which is fair and fine, but sometimes you need to be around friendly faces who can be counted on to mock your busted face (got punched 13 days ago, just finally starting to look human again) but then let you cash a check at the bar. I had a lucky trip in that I saw almost all of my friends in Cambridge. The only regulars I missed were Fahy and Masi and Cheese. I saw enough of Fahy's cousin to fill my needs in their category; I wish I saw Masi, but it's probably for the best that she and Kelly weren't in the bar at the same time, lest the old perverts all die on their stools of a collective grand mal boner. And as much as I like Cheese, it was a relief to spare my kinda-fucked hand the agony of yet another 16-step palm-mating ritual.

I'm lefthanded, and I didn't really do anything in the few days between the fighting and the fleeing, so I hadn't even realized that my right hand was a little banged up, too. I doubt it came from a punch, since I'm not much of a fighter so I don't like jab and throw combinations and shit: I get punched, then the terror and rage propel me forward into the one punch I got in me--big dumb slow straight left--and then we both stare at each other with the hurt "Wait, I can't believe that guy hit me!" expression and then it's over. But somewhere in there I did something to the right, as well, which I didn't realize until several days later when I was back in a town full of people willing to shake my hand.

I also saw the Dead Trees and Bad Art in the same night. How about that?

All right, so all that bullshit, drinking and eating and messing around, and then yesterday I finally made it back to NYC. I was on the green dot with Kelly in the early afternoon and we were commiserating about how beat up we were, all-drink and no-sleep -wise, and I said "Yeah, after a nap I'm going to force myself to go to the bar, even though I won't have the energy to work up a sweat, just because it will be good for the soul" and she was confused but ain't one to judge so she didn't say anything, until I noticed that I'd typed "bar" where "gym" was supposed to go, and we had a nice laugh over how obvious a sign that was that it was time for a night off.

So then, after the nap, I went to a gym one of you'd recommended, place called Paddy Maguire's. I dunno, I found myself feeling pretty sound of both body and mind and wanted to watch Pedro and fuck it, this is who I am. So off to Paddy's, which I enjoyed very much. I got there in the dead zone post-happy hour and pre-Thursday night, so it was only about half-full, which is the ideal bar fullness. There were two pretty young things right by the door, which wasn't a great sign, odd as that feels to type, because I wasn't looking for that kind of company. I just wanted to have a couple drinks and watch baseball with other tired old men. But those two girls were the only young ones there for the first couple hours, and the crowd and the bartender were both great. Then it filled up as the night and the game wore on, but even those people seemed cool. So I'll be back. Good recommendation, thank you.

Trees

Kelly, who is mercifully unaware of this blog, called at around 6 yesterday. Our conversation was approximately as follows.

Her: Hi, what are you doing?

Me: Drinking a million beers.

Her: Oh, fun! (She is PERFECT IN EVERY WAY AND I'M NOT USUALLY INTO MUSCLEY CHICKS BUT I INSIST THAT EACH ONE OF YOU RUB HER STOMACH AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE, IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE VIS A VIS MASTURBATION AND PLEASANT MEMORIES OF STOMACHS THAT YOU HAVE TOUCHED.)

Me: Yeah. Alcoholism's a riot. Glad you are amused by my fatal disease.

Her: So are you back in New York?

Me: Good god, no. I am several days away from having the wherewithal to go home.

Her: Oh, fun! What are you doing tonight.

Me: I have a very romantic proposal. How about if me, you, and Max Green go to Waltham to watch Nils and Tim play basketball.

Her: Oh, fun!

Me: Are you fucking insane? How could that possibly be what a gorgeous intelligent woman wants to do on a Monday night? And my face smells. I haven't shave in 10 days and while I was drinking one of my million beers, I thought the beer smelled like shit until i realized that it was like refracted face essence. Hard to explain. What I mean is that I could, like, smell myself in my beer. And it wasn't pleasant.

Her: Hmm. Maybe Irene left some soap there once? Or does Patrick have any, for like when his mom visits? You could try that. Or don't. Meet you at the bar at 8?

Hi, guys

You know how sometimes you wake up on the couch with someone you shouldn't necessarily be on the couch with and there's an exposed body part that seems to want licking and you're not totally into the idea but on the other hand it would be rude to ignore it, and come on we're not in college anymore, it's not called date rape, it's called getting by? Weird when it's a dog's asshole, though.

Coming at you live from the Panda cage. He's passed out, obviously, since it's only 3pm. The dog is, for now, satiated. The beer ain't gonna drink itself, but I'm otherwise unencumbered so I thought I'd take a minute to remind you that the Will Gordon Drinking and Fighting World Tour is in the middle of a 5-day stand in Boston. I would like to see you.

I've seen a LOT of you, though. It's been a lucky couple days. The luckiest part is related to a text message I got from Brian yesterday. "Was I really drunk, or was the girl with you uncommonly gorgeous and sane?" Yes and yes, sir. Kelly!!! has taken a curious interest in me lately. Do you now that she tucked me into bed and told me a story the other night? I bet you didn't know that. I'm bragging. As for her being fucking drop dead gorgeous, well, you got eyes, you knew that part. Bet you didn't guess that she made me an egg sandwich with sundried tomatoes the next morning, though. I think you probably want to kiss me, just to taste whatever's left of that sandwich, the one that tasted good and that Kelly touched.

Other personnel notes:

This morning I texted, "Wow. Where did I go wrong that I find myself jealous of Vinny Mannering?" And that's all I'll say, I can't tell tales or jinx shit. But the blond girl the other night? Are you fucking kidding me?

I saw the Reverend. Good thing. The last time I saw him was a couple months ago at 8am. I was walking down Mass Ave and saw him 100 yards ahead. I crossed the road, because I was drunk and he was the Reverend on his way to work. As you may be aware, the Reverend is not unfamiliar with the charms of the bottle and is also not one to judge, but still, I was stumbling drunk and had shit in my hair, like leaves and Matt and what not. So I crossed the road. And he crossed as well, and obviously what I should have done is crossed back, thrown both middle fingers in the air, and yelled "Fuck you, black man!" but who has that kind of energy, so I stood there like an asshole and he confronted me on the sidewalk. He said, "Good morning, Will. You don't ever cross the road to avoid a friend." Now, that's a very direct statement for the Reverend. He doesn't speak in absolutes, because smart people don't (I do). But yeah, have you ever heard a better point? So I said "Oh, I know, I'm sorry, you know you're my man, it's just that [blah blah, telling him a story he invented 20 years before my parents met]." And he said, "You don't ever cross the road to avoid a friend."

Things that are not properly rated, and begin with A

All right, we’re going to do this alphabetically this time.

Overrated: apples from the farmer’s market. Hey, I like farmer’s markets. I’m not going to get gay over everything needing to be local and organic, but I get all that shit; it matters, some. And more important, the food tends to taste better. So I don’t mind paying a bit of a premium, and I don’t mind if the produce has sort of a funkier look to it. I will sacrifice shininess and stackability for flavor. But Jesus, the apples at the Union Square farmer’s market are a bit too much. I’m cool with a little dirt and maybe the odd bruise, but I draw the line at festering open wounds. Get your shit together, hippies. You’re stepping all over the line between “shit I’ll accept” and “shit I’ll pay extra for.”

Underrated: A cups. I dunno, for whatever reason I’m on a small-boob kick lately. I think it’s because I’m getting older and therefore meeting older women, and lesser-blessed old broads hold up better? Again, I’m not sure the science behind it, and I am certainly not telling you B’s and above to stay away, just saying it’s something I’ve noticed that seems worth mentioning. I’m not a great titologist and might be mislabeling some B’s as A’s, but it’s safe to say that my two favorite racks of 2009 have been A cups. Huh.

Overrated: Angles. I don’t have cable, so I have to watch the playoffs online. MLB.com has a decent deal where for $10 you get to see all the games. This turned out to be a shaky investment on my part because I watched the Sox at bars and don’t really care about the rest of the games, but anyhow, I’m impressed with the presentation and shit. It looks good. But one thing I was really excited about turned out to be useless. You can choose between 8 different camera angles: tight and far down the baselines, behind the plate, from the dugouts, centerfield, all the logical places. Thing is, and I guess this would be obvious to savvier watchers, this just means you get to choose which angle to lock in on. You can switch, but it takes a couple seconds, plus you don’t want to ride the keyboard the whole game, so for any given play, you’re stuck with the traditional pre-pitch centerfield view. On normal TV, they cut to other cameras when the ball goes in play; you can’t, so you’re stuck with fucking Buck and McCarver telling you where the ball went. Plus, no replays, which is especially tough in a post-season where the umpires are blowing every other call. All right, not that interesting, just trying to flesh out the alphabet a bit here. You could help, you know, rather than just bitch.

Underrated: anecdotal evidence. Good news, fucko: we don’t live in a court of law. Sometimes you can just sit back and examine some patterns, establish some hunches, interview some not-totally-credible-but-well-placed sources, and put together a good enough theory to make your move.

Overrated: avocados. Last night I was talking deviled eggs with a friend and mentioned that I might be overstating the importance of the avocado I keep putting in mine. She was pretty blunt in telling me that they were useless, presented a solid case, and I agreed.

Underrated: Adam Carolla. I know I just talked about him yesterday, and I know he’s pretty highly rated. But I’ve been burning though his podcast archives lately, and goddamn, does he know his shit. If I got one knock on him, it’s that his politics are somewhat skewed by what seems to be a discounting of his own talent. He came from a sort of shitty family and it took him a while to find his groove, because he lacked strong support. But he keeps bringing up his self-made manhood in a way that reminds me of the Michael Jordan Hall of Fame speech: yeah yeah, no one believed in you while you were a kid, and you worked real hard. Great, thank god you did, otherwise you’d have been deprived of your Bentley and we’d have been deprived of your entertainment value. But please recognize that you were also born with an innate ability to be funny/play ball. That helped too. So maybe stop sucking your own dick for a second, just long enough to praise Allah that, for all your hard work, you had a pretty sweet lump of clay to work with. But my point is that Carolla’s podcast is the balls, and I’m surprised he’s just a fringe celebrity (Dancing with the Stars and shit) rather than big-time.

Overrated: Acquiring new friends. It’s well documented that I love new people. I think that’s because I’m an optimist, but I’ll also concede it’s because I’m a bridge-burner. So while I really like my couple of new friends in NYC, and look forward to meeting my anonymous bar recommender (look sugar, we talk about the Trader Joe’s line in the comments section now, that’s intimate), the thing that’s got me so fired up to post the last couple days is that I got a couple new-old readers. When I started this blog, I only told a couple of people, but one of them told the Thrillist kid, who told Jen, who is famous, and so on. So now I’m sort of writing for a bunch of strangers. Which is undoubtedly cool. I love it. But on the other hand, to round this back to the point, what’s got me feeling good this week is that it turns out that now O’Malley and Kullman read this. God damn, gentleman. You know all the A-cup beauties I’ve met from doing this? Yeah, well, they rank ahead of you. One of their vaginas smelled like vanilla, I’m not kidding. At first I thought it was like perfume or special-smelling drawers or whatever, but no, over time I realized that was just her thing. I don’t like talking intimate about ladies who still might read this, but the thing here is that A) I’m a little bit Schlitzed and B) I don’t think I ever told her. Like, how do you say “Hey baby, that’s nice, you taste like ice cream”? So I imagine I just voiced a general appreciation for her downstairs parts. Which were a fucking delight, so I ain’t going to lie. Getting beers with you guys at Mickey’s on Thanksgiving’s not going to top that. But it’s still going to be real, real nice. Welcome, thanks for your time, and tell me what you’re up to.

Rest of you: so what’s good and bad, as far as things that begin with A? And we could jumpstart B if we had to.

Fucking myself the bad way.

I just made 3 phone calls in a row, phone calls that I should have made several dozens of hours ago but that I’m sort of proud of myself for having made at all. I HATE talking on the phone, for the most part. But I left my debit card in the back of a cab a few days ago, according to my witness (never mind why he didn’t say at the time, Hey dickhead, get your debit card). This didn’t present an immediate problem because after my first bender in New York I realized “Fuck, I gotta keep some cash in the house, because I’m definitely going to lose my wallet soon,” and hey, only lost part of the wallet's guts, so that’s progress. Bad news is that I’m going far out of town in a couple days. So this is all a hassle that necessitated some phone calls.

The bank can’t send me a new card, because I don’t live at the right address anymore. I have to go into a branch and fill out forms and shit. Well, I live 200 miles from the nearest branch. OK, the nice lady says, she can meet me halfway and mail me the new-card application at my current address and I can mail it back. So I said, “Oh, right, and that will count as like proof of address change and you can then send the card to me in New York?” She said, “Oh Christ no, it will just facilitate the process of getting the card itself sent to the inconvenient-as-hell Massachusetts address.” What the fuck good is that? But it’s not her fault. What she meant was, “Look man, I type up the new-card application envelope myself, I’ll mail it wherever. But the card comes from HQ and they’re not going to let some manic asshole just call from a different state and say, ‘Hey, I, uh, moved. Wanna send me a new card?’” I get her angle, I was just a little crestfallen after she’d perked up with her sneaky plan to send me a fairly useless application under the table, because for a second there I thought it meant I was all set.

But this is all my fault, and one of the things I try to be reasonable about is understanding the difference between My Problem and Your Problem. I LOVE it when people take an interest in helping me out, but I generally don’t expect it. This is handy, because it means I get unduly excited over small favors. It is also handy because I find that most people aren’t interested in helping me out. Like the guy at 311, who pretended he was but didn’t really give a shit.

That was my first call. You know 311? It’s the New York hotline for mundane quality-of-life shit that isn’t worth 911, like reporting potholes and making noise complaints and wondering who you gotta blow to get Angostura bitters in this half-horse town. Google says that’s who you call when you lose shit in a cab. I’ve never bothered to before, but this time the lost card was such a daunting pain in the cunt that I figured, what the hell. The 311 guy answered right away and transferred me to the “Department of Dealing with Delusional Suckers Who Think That a Credit Card Lost in a Drunken Stupor Three Days Ago Might Be Unraped and Readily Available for Pickup or Hey, Delivery, and Should We Send Some Pad Thai with That, You’ve Probably Worked Up Quite the Appetite with All This Fantasizing.”

So I told that guy my story and he started asking for all sorts of info about the cabbie’s name and medallion number and approximate ethnicity as determined by percentage of body odor directly attributable to onion, etc. Now, I completely understand why that shit matters. Otherwise how do you track it down? I’m pretty sure this cabbie, or whoever found my card next, didn’t rob me (although the previously lauded waiter at 11 Madison Park may have: I know I’ve recently extolled the virtues of overtipping, and I also know I was in a fantastic mood when the check came, but I can’t imagine why I would have gone 35 percent on $300). All my shit seems pretty much in order, balance-wise. My general theory on the integrity of my fellow man is that most people are decent and not looking to fuck you gratuitously, but also that if you give someone an open lane to the hoop, they might be inclined to lay one in. So I was prepared to see one $70 trip to a gas station in Queens, or one extra cab fare or some such. But no, I got off easy there. Anyhow, back to the guy who wanted all this info. Look, the kinda guy who keeps taxi receipts and records medallion numbers is not the kind of guy who leaves his card in the back of a cab and then takes the balance of the week to muster up the courage to call and check on things.

So, realizing this, I said, "All right man, I know it was a longshot, just checking” and he said, “No, no. Tell me the card number and we’ll see if someone turns it in” (using future tense, because he’s already lied and said “Sorry sir, no credit cards have been left in cabs this month”). I said nah, that’s cool, I know I’m fucked, plus I don’t know the number, as it is imprinted on the card that I lost. But want my name? No, he wants the number. What? Look, how about if you find a card with my exact name, issued by my exact same tiny out-of-state credit union, you give me a ring? But no, he can’t call me back, I have to call him back. At this point I was pissed because it was all so obviously a charade. I was fucked, and it was all my fault. Fair enough, I get that. But then why are you pretending that you’ll take my info and investigate further? I get that a lot of people don’t take no for an answer, get irrational and think that every city clerk owes them a solution to their problem, but I’ve made it very clear that I’m not one of them.

All right, I made another phone call, but this is too many words and not enough points or jokes. Sorry. I’ll try again later.

Joy

I’ve been doing a lot of bitching lately. Let us now discuss some of the many things that make me happy.

I usually listen to NPR all day, but it’s tough this week because they’re begging for money. Lucky for me, then, that I’ve figured out how to listen to podcasts. May I recommend Adam Carolla? And I guess Bill Simmons, if you’re into his act. I go back and forth on him. One thing I do like, though, is that when you click on his podcast link, up pops an ad for some other ESPN guy’s new show. I ran around with this guy’s cousin a little while ago. She said he’s very nice. He seems it, but the unsettling thing is that they look pretty similar, even though he’s a somewhat goofy-looking man (for a TV guy, I mean) and she is a very attractive woman.

My point here is that I once kissed a very attractive woman.

I also love Stuff You Missed in History Class. This is doubly good, because I missed a lot of stuff in a lot of history classes through the years, and now I think I’m getting a little smarter. Which is handy, because my other new hobby is doing the New York Times crossword online. You have to pay for it, I think like $7 a month, so I never got around to it, plus I used to get the regular paper like a regular (old) person, but $800/year for something you can read for free online seems rather extravagant for a man with no job and an inflatable couch. At first it was unsettling and it took me a couple days to really get into it, but now it’s the most satisfying 20 minutes of my morning. The puzzles get progressively harder through the week and on Wednesdays, when I’m not usually hungover or outraged, my relationship with the Times crossword puzzle peaks—it’s hard enough to make it feel a worthwhile accomplishment, but easy enough to be surmounted by an unemployed man with an inflatable couch—and I feel much more connected to the world, like I belong. Via an online crossword puzzle.

But I have made a human friend! Well, she’s a bartender, which means she’s only my friend because I pay her to be, but whatever, I’m more an ends man than a means man. I don’t care why she talks to me, I care that she does. She is dating a man she met while he was exterminating vermin at the bar. When I showed up with a 4-star black eye Monday, she gave me free whiskey.

Oh, there’s another service industry guy who has made me happy. Last week I went to 11 Madison Park, because that’s the kind of deluxe shit I do (plus: friend’s birthday). At first the service was a bit aggressive, as it tends to be at nice restaurants, but once Daniel and his army of assistants realized that my partner and I were perfectly capable of talking among ourselves (mostly about eating shit we find on the sidewalk), they left us alone to enjoy a delightful 4-hour chat-and-gorge that was capped by an exasperated Daniel plopping 2 bottles of bourbon on the table with our 3^rd round of dessert because he “noticed [you] were whiskey-drinkers.” Now, we had not drank any whiskey that day. Well, not together, and not in front of Daniel; but I was reading the friend’s back issues of Bourbon Review while she was in the can. Because that’s what she gave me for my birthday, along with a heart-breaking painting of a very distinguished-looking polar bear wearing a jacket and tie. I can see there’s like a one percent chance that reads as retarded, but I swear it’s one of my 5 most cherished possessions (top-4, pending Trader Joe’s bean-and-rice burrito stash; been tearing through ‘em pretty quick this week).

Recipe #8: Monkey Tie

I’m going to a birthday party tonight. This is mostly exciting: my closest friend in New York, both geographically and lifestylistically, turned 30 the other day, and she’s being kind enough to ring in her ovaries’ fourth decade at a bar two blocks from my apartment, so at least the bushes I wake up in tomorrow morning will be local. Thoughtful of her, which is why she deserves better than to have me [fill in the socially unacceptable blank]. We’ve been through this a million times, no need to pre-hash the repetitive and inevitable. Yet allow me.

I’m not always a complete dickhead at parties, but all the elements are in place for this one to go poorly. I don’t know a single soul save the hostess. This is theoretically good, because it means I’ll meet new people, and pretty people at that, because if babydoll picked “befriending the unattractive” to be the one fucking time to abandon her chronic elitism, I’ll punch her, leave, and go find pretty people elsewhere. Because I deserve pretty company tonight on account of I’ve shaved three times in the past four days. Of course, my unemployed face is so unused to the abuse that I cut the corner of my mouth this morning, so I get to look forward to a whole night of people demanding to know my affiliation to the birthday broad, by which they will mean “Hey you, with the bad haircut and the mannerisms 2 percent deviant from our norm, what’s your story?” and who can blame them. So I will be forced to admit that Jen is my longtime Internet girlfriend, and 95 percent of them will say “Huh” and walk mercifully away, but the other 5 percent will say, “Wait, the guy from Boston? With the blog about corpse-fucking and whatnot? I grew up without a dad and am therefore pleased to meet you! You’re much taller than she’d let on.”

Which would be great, but then I’ll have to say, “Yeah, about all the hooker stories and everything . . . look, I cut myself shaving the corner of my mouth and then kinda aggravated it with Blistex, I swear it’s not herpes.” And they’ll laugh and back away, but not like away from the conversation, just away from the spittle zone. So I’m still in small business until I say, “Well, I can’t SWEAR it’s not herpes.” Which isn’t even true—I’m positive I don’t have herpes. Even though it’s reasonable to assume that I stockpile STDs like an unambitious Scrabble player, I have been beating the tests for so long that at this point I am fully confident in declaring myself immune. But still, I’ll leave the door open, because I am addicted to putting my worst foot forward (and I got two bad feet).

What I mean to say is that I’ll be nervous, so I’ll overdrink early, which will speed me into my No Longer Awkward And Not Yet Terrifying zone, generally found in the glorious 10 minutes between drinks 6 and 10, which will way-too-quickly transition into the Why Is That Angry Man’s Penis in My Gin and Tonic? zone. But I really don’t want to wreck Jen’s birthday or alienate her friends (if you are a friend of Jen’s, you are my fifth-best friend in this state before we’ve even met, and that’s if I count Kats twice, which I do), so I’ve been trying to distract myself by running non-alcoholic errands all day and oohh look, the sun’s already down! So I take back what I said, I’ll be fine. The party starts in a mere handful of hours, seems perfectly safe—responsible, even—to make myself a little hand-steadier. Like so.

The Monkey Tie

Pour all this into a shaker full of ice.

2 glugs dark rum. I use Babancourt 8 Year. I’ve tried the 15 Year and didn’t notice a difference, which doesn’t mean there ain’t one but does mean I save $12 a bottle. Which I can use to begrudgingly buy:

1 glug light rum. Eh, light rum. Not my thing, but good enough for you clowns, especially once you realize you can do more than dump it in Coke or beat mint into it. For instance, you can pour it into your Monkey Tie to make it a little boozier and a little less brown.

1 glug brandy. No need for the French shit, plain old E&J will do you fine. But if you do opt for Cognac, don’t make the mistake of getting Hine lest you end up double-disappointing the sexy Bronx mamis who are uncommonly interested in meeting genarizz whiteboys on Craigslist the end of every month. “But it’s better than Hennessy(s)!” is no more convincing than “But it’s better than someone who can achieve and maintain a serviceable erection within the first half-hour!”

Quarter-glug orgeat syrup. In the past I’ve gotten by with a tear’s worth of almond extract, but I came across the real shit during my week-long quest to find regular old Angostura bitters in New York. I find that I’ve become a little bit of a cocktail snob. I try not to be a pain in the ass about it in public, but in the discomfort of my own home (my couch is inflatable), I feel entitled to a properly constructed drink. Alas, it’s impossible to get bitters around here. The Internet suggests it’s sold in grocery stores rather than liquor stores. Don’t know why, since it’s 90 proof and good only for drinking, no matter what they try to push on the website, i.e., “Please put it in your pancakes because the $10 bottle will last a lifetime if you only use it for the intended purpose.” It seems a cruel joke that in Manhattan you can get absinthe from the sidewalk banana guys but can’t get the backbone of a decent Manhattan anywhere—it’s rumored to be found in the bullshit bar mixers section, near the flavored salt and the mojito nectar, but it ain’t there—but at least my quest was rewarded with real orgeat.

4 glugs pineapple juice. Look, we’re up to 1,000 words on a Saturday. Tell yourself a goddamn pineapple juice story.

1 glug pomegranate-cherry juice. See above, and use the stuff in the hourglass jug.

All right, shake the hell out of it and dump it in a pint glass. Go ahead, get yourself a straw, ain’t no one looking.

I would eat that working man

Against my better instincts, which are not that good, I went to the 12th Street Alehouse last night, a bar that I'd arbitrarily written off as a place where boring men play air golf with Heieneken bottles but which turned out to be a very warm place where pretty women drink out of proper glassware. So that's good. I have two more bars to try out but they're going to have to wait because man, where does the time go? Five straight afternoons in bars is too many. Or rather, just the perfect amount, but today's Day Six so I'm doing laundry and hope to summon the strength to get a haircut.

This is the first time in 10 years I've lived in a building with an elevator. Alas, I live on the first floor. But I can't figure out how to get to the basement via the stairs--which one assumes exist but of which I've found no evidence--so I had to take the elevator, which means I got to be re-delighted to notice that I was riding in an elevator that has been recently inspected by a man or woman named "Pork."

HiFi

One of you recommended a bar called HiFi. I ran it by my chief recommender and she was negative, but she’s been a tiny touch of the cunt lately (maybe my fault, if you’re into fault) and sometimes tends toward the negative anyway, so fuck her, it’s off to HiFi.

Eh. Lot of skinny white boys with beards. I had a little run-in with a beard fetishist a million years ago in June, so I grew me one and I gotta admit it sort of made me sad to shave it. But still, beards are tough. If you’re one of my dad’s friends, they are entirely appropriate. If you are some skinny kid at a bar on Avenue A, you should probably shave. And you should definitely not give me shit about the jukebox.

Look, I’m not a music guy. I mostly just listen to my friends’ bands and the Talking Heads. I’ve been a little more musical lately because I am lonely and bought an iPod. The iPod’s kinda cool, I admit, even though the headphones blow and make everything sound like Dinosaur Jr., except Dinosaur Jr., which sounds like the devil calling in a favor. Anyhow, this HiFi operation has a big bad jukebox, on which I played a little Willie. There aren’t too many absolutes in my life. I’m a pretty reasonable and open-minded fellow. But if you don’t like the Muppets, you’re probably a shitty person. Same with Willie Nelson. I’m not saying he has to be your favorite, but who hates Willie Nelson? Who, when “Angel Flying Too Close to the Sun” comes on, starts making angry hipster faces? Someone cruising for a bruising, is who.

The bartender was really cool, though, and that’s 90 percent of the battle, and the other 10 percent is, when I ask for whiskey, please don’t give it to me in a shot glass. What do I look like, you know? A guy who does shots? Come on. Pour it in a rocks glass like a decent person. This girl—Rhea, I think?—got it right a couple times and wrong a couple times. But I like her. I’ll go back. The crowd sucked, but I’m sort of operating on one-man gang rules these days anyway, so that don’t matter.

Man walks into a bar

I’ve been in New York for a dozen days now and still haven’t found a bar to call my own. I keep ending up at this Professor Thom’s joint on 2^nd Avenue because it shows Boston sports, but I don’t really like it that much. The food blows, even for bullshit bar food, and the place is too big, so taking a leak feels like a chore and there are too many employees to keep track of: it’s too hard to remember which bartender’s the competent one and which ones are just there for show, although the standard rules seem to apply (the guy in the Trot Nixon shirt can be trusted, the girl in the pigtails can be smiled at). It’s not a bad bar by any means, but there’s no reason to keep going back alone now that the Sox are done.

I’ve had some good recent experiences at Finnerty’s, which is right next door and a very cheap place to drink. The Truck and I were in last Sunday, standing in the corner like a couple of dicks, and the bartender said, “Hey, couple of dicks, those two dudes are leaving, you take their table” and bang, we were set for the day. It was such a kind gesture that I tipped her $3 a drink from there on out. Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. You have to tip $2 a drink now. It’s been a buck per for too long. You think your bartender’s rent is the same as it was in 1998? Smarten up. So anyhow, Finnerty’s is a contender, but I’ve been going there for years so even though I never know a soul in the place, it doesn’t feel like the fresh start I’m after.

I had high hopes for Shades of Green on 15^th, despite the awful name, because it looks the part and draws a fairly diverse crowd in terms of age and apparent station in life. It weirds me out a little to spend too much time in a bar where everyone looks the same. I know I’ve told you this before, but it bears repeating that one big drawback to the population density in New York is that it makes it too easy for groups to self-segregate. Boring. But the half-in-the-bag Irish guy pouring beer at Shades of Green Friday evening left me about 2 ounces short of a pint. It ain’t the money of the thing, although I paid full price and therefore ought get full beer, it’s just the lack of effort. It’s not that tough to pour a beer, and if you fuck it up the first time around, you need to fix it. The fact that this guy couldn’t be bothered cost his boss several thousand dollars.

Ooh, lookie, almost noon on a holiday Monday in a town where I have no friends. The quest continues. Any recommendations?

Recipe #7: Angeled Eggs

Some broad came over for eggs the other day. This is how that went down.

6 boiled eggs. I used to work at a lampoonably pedantic cooking magazine that is popular within the larger-than-you’d-think niche market of humorless people who like roast chicken and being yelled at. Not my scene, but a nice place to work in two significant ways, the first being that they fed me well and often and the second being that they also produce a cooking show that allowed me to discover the satisfying meta-perversity of laying on the couch on a hungover Saturday afternoon and dicking absentmindedly through the channels until I found myself jacking off to the girl from two desks to my left making cheesecake on PBS. Another little perk is that they taught me how to boil eggs. Start them in cold water and when they begin to boil, turn off the heat and cover the pot for 10 minutes. I know, I know, fuck off with telling a grown man how to boil an egg. But I swear, it’s better this way.

Avocado. I like grocery stores with self-checkout lanes. I dunno, it’s just sort of fun to scan your own shit, plus it enables you to avoid the awkward scenario where you finally get to the front of the line and the cashier just stares at you, and then at your shit, and then back at you, and then dramatically sucks on her teeth and mutters “Daaaaammmmnnnn,” by which she means, “I just got my nails done, and if you think I’m going to risk them on your almond butter and black beans . . . “ and then trails off because she hadn’t thought through her if/then scenario, but you get her point. She’s going to glare at your groceries until they scan and bag themselves, or her shift ends, or you fucking die dead right there. So you suggest to Oztentaysha that maybe she could ring in the prices manually by holding a pencil between her teeth and pecking at the register. You meant like Stephen Hawking or an inspirational land mine victim might, but she read it as “Who you calling chickenhead, mufucka!?”

So maybe best to deemphasize the human element. In discussing this with a friend, it came to light that the self-checkout is also a handy accomplice for those willing to, in this slut’s reckoning, “totally type in one avocado when I really have four.” Now first of all, who the christ needs four avocados at a time, and second of all, wait, that’s stealing. Which is fine if you call it by its name, but she launched into some bullshit logic by which she, as an AmericaCorps (or whatever) volunteer, was entitled to extract certain unspecified benefits from society by way of compensation for her service. Oh come on. She taught retarded kids how to ride horses, which is sweet and probably beneficial, but those sorts of white-girl “service” outfits aren’t about self-sacrifice, they’re about padding your resume and avoiding work; they’re grad school for people who aren’t good at standardized tests. They also surely provide some tangible benefit to those they incidentally happen to serve, but spare me the nobility hustle, honey. And pay for your fucking avocados.

Dijon mustard.

Chives. Chives are my favorite herb to chop and pronounce, and I wish they tasted better.

Sour cream.

Salt, pepper, lemon, all that shit.

1. Slice the eggs in half, hollow them out, toss half the yolks.

2. Mix the other half of the yolks with all the other shit. Use whatever proportions you’re supposed to use, man. These things ain’t going on my tongue. You figure it out.

3. Spoon it all into the hollowed-out half eggs.

4. If the chick coming over for eggs has mentioned having a cold, make her a hot toddy. Yeah yeah, that ain’t real science, whiskey and honey don’t cure shit, I know. But I always drink hot toddies when I’m sick and only drink hot toddies when I’m sick, not for any medicinal reason but because it’s the one nice thing to look forward to should you find yourself with a cold. I did not join my partner in a hot toddy for this very reason, and wouldn’t you know I was rewarded the very next morning with a burgeoning cold of my own. I was thrilled to sneeze, because it got me that much closer to justifying the $9 Food Emporium beat out of me for the fucking cloves. But back to the drink in question. The liquor store by my mom’s house had a fishbowl full of Bushmills nips by the cash register all summer; I bought a ton but never used them, and when I moved was intending to simply change the listing to “3bed/1bath/17 nips,” but one of my very few friends in New York likes Bushmills and she came over for eggs with a cold the day after I got here, so good thing I brought them. So let’s make her a drink, right? I dumped a nip into the mug and had the stunning realization that THAT’S WHAT A SHOT OF WHISKEY IS SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE?! The bottom of the mug wasn’t even wet all the way around! That explains a lot. Sincerest apologies to my liver, and to the owner of the People’s Republik. Robert, you know how when you asked if we were stealing your liquor, I said, “No way!” I would like to change my answer to “kinda.”

200 days to go 200 miles

Well, that settles that. I'd like to see my problems try to catch up with me now! As for the rest of you, deviled eggs and champagne at my place at 7:00.

Recipe #6: Genius Sandwich

3 slices of rye bread: Rye reminds me of my mother; I know I go on too much about my orphancy, but I’m telling you, man, when your mom dies it kind of becomes the central fact of your life for a while. Still, I hate to be a gash, so let’s move away from the rye part and toward the 3 slices part, which is really the innovation here, and reminds me of another pretty-haired lady who drinks whiskey and never breastfed me but who, to her great credit, has never filled my home with dogs and Hummels, or died.

Other sandwich ingredients of your choosing: See, this is the best part. It don’t matter what you throw in this fucker, it’s still going to be the best sandwich you’ve ever made. And some of you have made some pretty nice sandwiches, I bet.

1. Last Friday I woke up in a hotel room in Connecticut, like a true dick, and was therefore feeling a little insecure and did what guys like me do when we feel insecure: beat off, overtip housekeeping, and make outlandish declarations intended to prove that we are men of great means, discretion, and ambition. So I casually mentioned to the aforementioned not-dead woman that I have arrived at a station in life where I can no longer be satisfied with a 2-slice sandwich. It’s 3 or nothing for me from here on out. Our conversation, like the vast majority of them, was chaperoned by the infernal fucking green gchat dot, and I have yet to stumble upon the widget that tells me "Girl is squirming in her seat and fidgeting with her hair and silently renouncing all other suitors and sandwiches, and typing," so all I can say for certain is that she replied: "Only toast the one in the middle." Holy fuck, is that a great idea.

2. Tuna and avocado’s good with this technique: all mushy and slimy but then woah piece of toast in the middle smartens everything right back up.

Hey guess what

Remember how I was supposed to live in Cambridge and work in a bank? Change of plans, moving to New York October 1. I don't have a job, but I also don't need one, because Finnerty's has wifi, and a PBR tall and a shot of well whiskey is $6, and Kenji lives in Brooklyn now and he likes to feed me.

I'm a little short on friends down south, though, so please come visit. I still intend to get bunkbeds for guests. And I need someone to help me damage the apartment, because guess what kind of shape I was in at last night's 8pm lease-signing? Drunk shape. I made Meghan go with me, and this morning she reminded me that for some reason I felt the need to force a security deposit on the landlady. Since I paid cash money upfront, drug-dealer style, she didn't feel the need to secure anything, but she also doesn't speak a ton of English, and I think her cracker boyfriend'd mentioned something about a security deposit on the phone, so I was like "No, Akiko, I insist you take this extra bit of money"--I don't remember how much, I guess I'll see when the check clears. Anyhow, so now I feel obligated to wreck the joint. See you there. 

A line and a ditch

Damn nigger, didn’t you used to be a blogger?
Don’t you DARE use that word around me. I’m a guy who writes a blog; a blogger is four orders of magnitude more successful and pathetic. It’s like how you are a girl who expects me to buy all her drinks, but you aren't a common fucking streetwalker. Subtle distinction, I realize, but I thought you slopes were supposed to be smart.

Sorry. But what’s with the gimmicky Q & A? Isn’t that flavor of horseshit more appropriate for guys who write blogs that are either much better than yours, or much worse? Can’t put my finger on it, but it just doesn’t seem right for a middle-class cat like you.
Good point, needledick. But seriously, good point. And needledick.

Why do you still live in Boston? Weren’t you supposed to be out of there in June and then again in September? Name one good thing about Boston.
Absolut Boston vodka. In this strange case, flavored vodka and provincial marketing bullshit are two wrongs that make a right-enough-to-drink-when-everyone-else-is. It’s tea and elderberry or some damn thing, and tastes OK with lemonade and iced tea.

You’re still in Boston because of flavored vodka?
No, jerk. I’m still here because I couldn’t get one of them fancy new subprime leases that start on the 17th. But the vodka IS good.

Could you be any gayer?
Sure, I could fuck dudes.

Oh right. Dudes, plural, would indeed be twice as gay as the one dude you’re blowing right this second.
A joke that’s simultaneously meatheaded and eggheaded. How very Bostonian of you.

Fairy. Now name one thing about Boston that pisses you off so much you’re moving back to New York?
Ted Kennedy’s dead. I have to admit that hit me harder than I’d expected it would. He was my all-time favorite politician, but I knew he was going to die and be replaced by someone who will vote the exact same way. So him being dead’s OK, big picture, just sorta sad. The infuriating part is that the first line of the Globe’s lead story about it was “Edward Kennedy was not a great man.” I appreciate the need to counterbalance all the hagiographic necro-hummers, but can’t we mention “the most influential and effective politician of the past 100 years” before we start kicking a man when he’s dead? They make it sound like he was Jeffrey Dahmer. He killed one person! Forty years ago! And it was mostly an accident! Oooh, the big meanie made no effort to save her. Yeah, how was your swim that night, hero? Oh, you didn’t try to save her either?

But granted, she was cute. So maybe he wasn’t a great man after all. Well, you know who else weren’t great men? My fucking father! And Mother fucking Theresa! You ever hear of a couple little things called “adequate, given the circumstances” and “sainthood”?

Oh, I see, Mr. Timely and Topical; you’ve been gone the last 3 weeks because you’ve been busy writing for Leno. I can’t wait until you unveil your fall lineup of Farrah Fawcett jokes. Any defense?
Yeah, I was thinking about this today because I can’t decide if I want Deval to appoint an interim senator before the election in January. See, a few years ago the state legislature passed a completely bullshit law preventing such an appointment, to keep Romney from giving President Kerry's seat to a fellow bible-humping baby-saver. It would have kept the evil Mormon cocksucker from subverting the will of the electorate by choosing someone with drastically different values than the haircut we keep electing; but it was still a bullshit law and should therefore be overturned . . . except I can’t stomach watching this flock of assholes reverse themselves on such blatantly partisan grounds.

So sit on it.

Later

I'm going on vacation. Catch you dinks next week.

Stay busy.

Recipe # 5: Scallop Rich Boy

It would have been nice if you’d at least called to say you weren’t coming to breakfast. Hey, your loss. Hope you enjoyed your bagel, the one that had 400 calories before you even added the cream cheese. Oh, light cream cheese? That’s cute.

Good palmful of scallops. I went to a wedding on Nantucket the other day. I love Nantucket, even though one trip in five it depresses the fuck out of me. This is actually pretty helpful, because the less balanced among us need certain touchstone nouns that serve as constants against which we can gauge our moods. Nantucket is like Cops and my buddy Charlie: fundamentally enjoyable things that never change, so when they start pissing me off, I know it’s time to shift into not-noticing-things mode. As I meant to be saying, the wedding was fun and the island was fine. Some interesting shit happened, but I can’t bring myself to tell you about it in detail, because the world needs another wedding recap like it needs more small dogs and football blogs. However, I will tell you that there were shrimp where the scallops were supposed to be. Shrimp are good too, though, and I overcame my disappointment with such aplomb that my piss smelled like gin and cocktail sauce till Wednesday, so it would be ungracious to complain (more). Yesterday I decided to reward my equanimity and perseverence by picking up some scallops with the intention of staying home alone to eat them whilst polishing off the collection of Johnnie Walker half-pints I got at a booze event last month. The Blue was long gone, but I still had Red, Black, Green, Raw Umber, and Gold, and I figured that and scallops would fix me fine whilst I listened to the Sox sweep Chicago and reflected on my good fortune. Instead the Sox got drawn and quartered and I got loaded and pizza. But hey, nice to wake up to a half pound of scallops, right?

Half a scallion.

Third of a red bell pepper. I was bitching about green peppers the other day when it was brought to my attention that the greens beget the reds. I wonder why I never knew this. I don’t know half a dick about the natural world, but I’m old and I read, so a lot of basic shit like this has seeped in through the years. Now I’m sort of anxious to see which shoe’s going to drop next in regard to my appalling ignorance. Wait . . . you never had any intention of coming over for breakfast, did you? When I proposed it in all sincerity, you were like, “Oh, there goes clowny Will again, joking about how our relationship could possibly entail anything more than me sucking up free whiskey and affection when no one’s looking.”

Corn.

Bread. I like all starches, but bread is my favorite. I eat at least one sandwich every day. You know what I did last week? I had 3 slices left in the loaf, so I fucking made me a club sandwich, right here at home. I was having a shitty day, but that sandwich turned it directly around. People like to say, “It’s the little things,” but people are idiots. It’s the big things, and if you stuff an extra slice of bread in the middle of your sandwich, it makes your sandwich bigger. I could have done a better job arranging the layers—there’s a lot more to think about, design-wise, when you add a second floor, and I foolishly rushed in without a blueprint, or enough chicken, so I ended up with a pretty lackluster pickle and bacon situation up top. But still.

1. Chop the scallops up into reasonable sandwich-sized chunks. Or I guess you could buy the right-sized and half-priced scallops in the first place.

2. Same with the pepper.

3. Get the corn off the cob.

4. Throw it all in a pan with some oil. Don’t burn it.

5. Hmm, smells good but looks kinda dry in there. Got any suitable liquid? Maraschino cherry juice would be nice, but you keep meaning to quit drinking at home, and so far the only progress you’ve made on that front is to stop stocking mixers and garnishes. Maybe the juice from the open can of black olives? Oh fuck it, gotta do something with the 30-pack of Busch the weird dude across the street gave you in June. Man, Busch sucks. You know how when people say they don’t like a certain kind of fish because it’s “too fishy,” and you say, “Well then you don’t like fish, fucko. Which is fine. I don't claim to be open-minded or accepting of other cultures, because I’m comfortable with my character and I don’t need to cloak my apathy in nobility [note to Libertarians: “I don’t give a shit” is not a political philosophy, it’s an admission of militant prickishness], but the fact remains that I don’t care how you choose to turn your own worm on the white-flesh tip. But really, you should just stick to chicken”? Well, Busch is too beery. Dump an ounce in the pan anyway, see what happens.

6. Woah. Christ.

7. Try to at least salvage the situation with a decent Burning Busch pun. Should you go biblical or vaginal? Ah, fuck it.

8. Scoop it all onto the bread; add the scallions and some salt and pepper. Pretty sloppy, lot of moving parts there. I guess you could melt some cheese on top to hold it all together. But I’d really rather you didn’t.

Book Review: Clockers

I had a lot of time off in August and what I should have done is taken the ferry to Newfoundland to be enchanted by the fog and the fiddlers (and perhaps eat seal), but what I did instead was buy a $200 shirt and read a couple of books. These events qualify me to report that beef grease stains on a $200 shirt look a lot like beef grease stains on a $20 shirt and that Clockers by Richard Price is a lot better than I thought it would be. This is what you need to know about the book.

1) I don’t tend to care for genre fiction because I’m not a plot man. As much as I respect the ability to maintain a complicated storyline full of dragons and/or detectives, when it’s all read and done I don’t really give a shit who got shot or laid, so if it’s obvious that the paragraphs are scattered around for the sole purpose of stringing me along to the dramatic conclusion, I’m going to split the first time someone recounts a dream or has a melancholic exchange with an ex-wife. Events aren’t my thing. I like words, and to a far lesser extent, ideas. I would rather read an artfully composed shampoo bottle disclaimer than a sloppily rendered document entitled “Sex Acts I Will Perform Free of Charge While You Lie on Your Back and Think About Less Pleasant but More Interesting Things.” Clockers is good with words. For instance: “They were a couple of tables away, two hours into a shitface.” Shitface as a noun!!! Just when I began to suspect there might be more to life than drinking and cursing comes a great new curse about drinking. Close one.

2) In the fictional city of Dempsey, New Jersey, low-level cocaine dealers are called clockers, which reminds me to tell you that I don’t own an alarm clock. I have no use for one, because I get up at 5 every morning when the NPR voice I semi-consciously listen to all night switches from British to American; the couple of times a year I have occasion to be awake before 5, I just don’t bother going to bed. This would make me an excellent boyfriend, because it means I would already have a couple hours of blessed aloneness under my belt before you get out of bed, which would inch me that much closer to missing you. Let's play! And if you don’t want to interact first thing in your morning, that’s cool too, because I can just keep playing online poker with people in different time zones. But let’s say you want to chat or even have sex: fine by me. I’ve already had coffee and, if it’s the weekend or snowing, perhaps a beer or two as well, so I’m more than ready for yakkin’ or fuckin’ or at least one thing in-between. Or maybe you want breakfast: even better, for I like to cook morning meats, and you will feel more comfortable dropping this good deed into casual office conversation, which will make your coworkers like me more than they already do, which is plenty because I’m good in small doses plus not shy with the flowers.

The only thing that could wreck this arrangement is if you are one of those snooze-alarm zombies. As a non-clocker in both the narcotic and chronographic senses, I am disinclined to judge snoozers--it's simply not my world--so it’s fine with me if you’re into the snooze game on your own time. But if we are temporarily cohabitant, then with each smack of the snooze button you are announcing, “I would rather be yelled awake by this infernal fucking beeping in perpetual nine minute increments if the other option is joining you for a sitcomical sausage double-entendre, or even a bagel.” I have feelings, you know.

3) Speaking of women destined to someday break my heart, the main drug-dealer has a stomach condition that he treats with vanilla Yoo-Hoo. Seems reasonable so far, until I tell you that I know a lady who knows a lady who professes to hate all things vanilla. Isn’t that absurd? At first I assumed it was some sort of pathetic self-inflicted quirk to differentiate her from all the other boring broads with the same shoes and tattoos, but our go-between assures me that the girl in question has all sorts of interesting characteristics including cuteness and cleverness. It seems she simply can’t stand vanilla. This is ridiculous, and I must meet her and get to the bottom of it. In my frequent imaginings, our meeting always goes one of two ways. She is probably going to dazzle me with a fantastic tale of being kidnapped by a bloodthirsty cabal of Madagascan vanilla bean smugglers who held her in degrading--yet almost . . . titillating?--servitude until she was rescued by a humble and dashing lemur-herder, of whom I remind her. But she may also just say, “I dunno, vanilla sucks. And why do you talk so much?”

Sincerely,

Read Clockers.

Trying to split one trick into two ponies

Remember when I told you I started a football blog* with Vinny and you didn't give a shit because you don't want to read about football? Well, turns out I don't really want to write about it, being as there is no "Will" in "football" and I only like writing about my fears, meals, and injuries. If you like football and Vinny, you should read that blog regularly, as it will feature Vinny writing about football. It will also feature the same old bullshit I do, allegedly football-themed but who's kidding who. Anyhow, I'm not going to double-post in the future, but the first taste's free:

Hard tacos are the only tacos worth eating. Soft tacos are just under-filled open-faced burritos, which is not a bad thing to be but also not a thing you should order when you could instead get hard tacos or a burrito or, obviously, hard tacos AND a burrito. Last night I burned my mouth on a hard taco; at the time I considered it more a nuisance than an injury, but I still took the postcaution of immediately applying rum and sour cream, so imagine my displeasure upon waking up this morning with a blister on the roof of my motherfucking mouth. This is why I wish I had a girlfriend.

I’m ashamed to admit that I don't thrive in solitude (tigers do; more on them in a few). I consider this a sign of weakness. I should be able to make decent decisions on my own, but I am what I am, and this morning that am a guy with a mouthful of blood because I just used a thumbtack to lance the aforementioned taco blister. I think if there had been a woman in the bedroom with me, she would have said, “Darling, why are you putting a thumbtack in your mouth?” and that would have been enough to jolt me back to my senses. She wouldn’t need to say, “Hey dipshit, don’t put a thumbtack in your mouth!” which is good because who needs that kinda ballbusting at 6am? I mean, my fuckin’ mouth, toots. But it would be nice to have someone around to ask the questions that need to be asked.

I’m new at sports blogging. Is this where I’m supposed to say, “Hey, I know it’s only preseason, but football’s football and football is awesome so yay!!!”? Well, I tend to get a little wordy, so let’s say we ignore that second part. Preseason football fucking blows, and everyone knows it, and everyone acknowledges it, and then everyone says, “But I’m still going to watch it, because football!!!”

You know another reason I wish I had a girlfriend? Because tomorrow night when we’re sitting around whining about how hot and tired we are, I could faux-accidentally stumble upon whatever godforsaken channel is televising the Patriots/Bengals game, pretend to perk up for a second, and then snap the TV off and announce, “You know what, sugar? Get your best dress on, because we’re going dancing,” and she would know me well enough to know that means we are going to a medium-nice restaurant to eat shellfish and drink more than we should but, credit where due, less than we could. This would make her like me, and make her more tolerant of my thumbtack-eating impulses.

Regular football is great because it facilitates gambling and Sunday afternoon drinking; preseason football does neither of those things and is therefore dead to me. But I will leave you with one thought about the Patriots’ opponent.

I don’t like their name. Bengals doesn’t make any fucking sense. Bengal is an adjective here. It is a kind of tiger, but they are always referred to as “Bengal tigers” or just “tigers,” as they are the most common subspecies. (Bengal is also a state in India, but the helmets feature tiger stripes rather than corpses floating in a river, so I believe the reference is zoological rather than geographical.) Furthermore, tigers are among the very classiest of the megafauna—neck and neck with the rhinoceros, off the top of my internally bleeding head—and the football team in question sucks. So in protest and desperation, I will henceforth refer to them as a more appropriate unconsummated animal adjective. Tomorrow night, the Patriots will play the Cincinnati Three-Toeds, and none of us right-thinkers will care.

*I can't get the link to work. It's cultofthehoodie.blogspot.com.

Oh! You should have!

Amy, Sarah, and Hilary: Good morning, gorgeouses! What is it that you desire? Would you like me to procure for you a bouquet of roses the color of your eyes? You may be thinking, “But my eyes, being brown--or in one case possibly blue or green but almost certainly brown--are of an unlikely color for a flower,” to which I say, “Oh? Merely brown? Is that how your husband describes the color of your eyes? Funny that he should be so dull, what with you being so desirable and him being so tall. Huh, almost enough to make one think that height’s not the single most important factor when selecting a life partner.” I mean, I’m five-fucking-ten. Five-ten-and-a-half, in fact, but I refuse to debase myself by trafficking in fractions: that shit’s for midgets and carpenters. So let’s say I’m five-ten. When did that become short? I can’t remember the last time I thought, “If only I were taller, I could bring more light to this world and/or satisfaction to this woman.” I get by just fine: Ask the smug giant in charge of Peoples’ liquor inventory if five-ten’s tall enough to reach the top shelf. Yet you people treat me like I’m a pygmy, or some kind of five-eight freak.

But let us get back to your eyes, into which I can gaze directly and lovingly without having to look down on you (aside to short chicks: don’t get picky). I had not thought of this hypothetical rose color as "brown," but rather as “sparkly integrity.” But perhaps color is not the matter. Would you prefer roses that smell like something even better than roses, such as your favorite kind of muffin, which, as you are a decent person who would never dream of disappointing me, is surely blueberry? The possibilities, like my devotion and digressions, are endless. I cannot engineer these marvels by myself, for the deceptive green of my thumb is due to envy of your husband’s thumb, but my cousin is a botanist of sorts, and he owes me favors. Would you like a special breed of sedative tomatoes, or cucumbers that make you feel as if your heart is about to fucking explode?

As I was saying: Amy, Sarah, and Hilary, I would do anything for you.

All the rest of you interchangeable Seans, rogues, scoundrels, and Jens: Fuck you twice in the head. My birthday was Friday. I wasn’t looking for a goddamn parade, or even the dinner you promised to make me. Acknowledgment would have been nice, though. As would a meatloaf cake with mashed potato frosting and “Here’s hoping 35 is slightly less brutal than 34, dickhead” finger-painted across the top in canned gravy. But alas and fuck off.

Though I now and forever know better than to expect anything from anyone I’ve met this century, I have one final request. Today is my sister’s birthday. Could you do me a favor and not punch her in the face after you rape her? Thanks.

here we go

Looks like me and Vinny have a new football blog. I don't really know that much about football from a tactical perspective, and there's not exactly a dearth of Patriots coverage out there anyway, so I'm going to have to try to find some weird way to make this interesting. I have a hunch this will piss Vinny off, we'll see.

I like taxes and booze and taxes on booze

A moon or two ago I made the exquisite decision to buy a grapefruit press to warm a house I’ve since been frozen out of. And because I forgot the cardinal rule governing poorly conceived gift-giving—people who have two-day relationships need to pony up for one-day shipping—my intended juicee had split before the package arrived, so I’ve still got the fucking thing sitting in a box on my counter.

Even though she was fun to have around and as cute as two buttons, I like to simplify things when I can, and hatred is the tidiest emotion, which is why I regret that I just can’t hold a grudge against anyone with the good sense to like grapefruit juice. But despite my fond feelings and best wishes, I’m through giving expensive shit to women with whom I share neither a common grandparent nor a common interest in my penis, so I need a backup plan for this contraption.

I’d keep it, but I already have a couple of other juicers: a cheap plastic reamer-thing from which you can wring a glass of orange juice if you’re willing to invest in 10 pounds of oranges and 6 months of physical therapy; and one of the big ugly electric jobs that chews up carrots and spits out denial (“As long as I take my vodka with carrot juice”—the Bloody Bunny, I call it, recipe to follow—“my liver will be fine”). So even though I like the new one, a kitchen that features one chair and two spoons ought not have three juicers. But

I fucking love liquids. My biggest problem with drinking is my problem with drinking, but my second biggest is that I ingest so damn much nonalcoholic fluid throughout the course of a day that my bladder’s given up by the time I have my first beer. This is fine when I’m inside, but in the warmer months I like to take my action to the streets, which gets tricky because I got warrants and nothing screams “There is a half-pint of brandy in this Lemonade Big Gulp” louder than whizzing on a dumpster at 3 in the afternoon. There are two obvious solutions to this problem and the first one causes a rash, so from now on I’m going with Plan B and just staying inside.

Another advantage to drinking inside is that you have control over the glassware. I’m surprisingly picky about that kind of shit. As much as I love Suffolk Downs, I only go a couple times a year these days, because I hate drinking out of the waxed-paper cups. I don’t need a fancy glass, just one that is simple and clean and thoughtfully designed for the matter at hand. But that said, I don’t mind the odd bell on my whistle-whetters, which is why I should have bought the Notorious B.I.G. mug I saw at Urban Outfitters. I’m not sure why I didn’t, but I suspect it’s because I find Urban Outfitters to be cheesy.

I got no beef with people who shop there, but I don’t want to be one of them. I’m not sure why, but it’s probably because I don’t like the sloppy use of the word “urban.” I’m not going to hack-up a “Webster’s defines urban as” on you, because then the next thing you know I'd be telling you about the dream I had last night or making a sneering reference to people who order hyperbolically complicated coffee drinks as a way of asserting my own quiet dignity. I’m not that kind of rhymer, see. But still, we all know what “urban” means, like “of a densely populated region” or thatabouts. Given that is also the name of popes and football coaches, I will concede that it likely used to mean something else, but for our purposes here, we can agree that urban is supposed to mean “citified” in a very general sense. And I’m okay with it also meaning “that which pertains to the fashions and jamz of the blacks,” because at least that’s extrapolated from the mother definition. But what the fuck does any of this have to do with Family Guy action figures?

Still, dumb move on my part, because now I’m out a cool Biggie mug. When I confessed all this to a friend the other day, mocking myself for taking a stand on a stupid lexico-retail principle that I made up on the spot, she accused me of being a man of generally weak moral fiber. I don’t recall the specifics, but she said something to the effect that I don’t really have any principles and need to stop pretending otherwise.

She is mistaken, for reasons related to Massachusetts’ week-old sales tax on alcohol. It got late early this morning, so I can’t explain just how right now, but we’ll get back to that.

Such a quitter that I even quit quitting.

Hi guys.

You know how sometimes when you take a leak in the morning the safest thing to do is stare straight down at your dick because chicks think mirrors are decorations and put them everywhere, and even though you’re not entirely certain where you are, you know it’s a girl’s bathroom because there are candles on the back of the tank where the fantasy football preview magazines are supposed to be? And the last fucking thing you need to see right now is your hideous reflection, because you haven’t had a haircut since May and even though your net worth is about the Major League Baseball second-year minimum--due exclusively to timely deaths, not your own intellect or industry, but fuck it, dead people’s money’s just as green--your debit card was declined the last time you tried to buy razors because the only thing you’re worse at than remembering where you are is remembering to shuffle your financial shit around efficiently?

So you’re staring at your dick and telling yourself it must be cold in here, even though it’s are-you-shitting-me August and you’re in a 25-square-foot windowless room in a 4th-floor Manhattan walkup, and you see god knows what down there by the basetip and you think, “Please let that be salsa,” and after a couple terrified seconds you give it a wipe and it’s gone and then you’re like, “Glad that lipstick came right off,” because it’s gotten so bad that you even lie to yourself?

It’s tempting to call that good luck, right? But luck doesn’t exist, is what we’re going to talk about today, now that my genitals have been addressed. I’ve spent many years claiming to be lucky, but my rudimentary understanding of probability and my bookie’s very precise understanding of my address and glass throat have taught me that blind chance always evens out. When I say I’m lucky, I mean that I was born into certain advantages. I’m a straight white male with high-IQ parents who valued education. I’m smart, too, but no smarter than the rest of you slunts; but I’ve seemed smarter than a couple of you a couple of times, because my thing is words, which is easier to show off than the other sorts of intelligence. You ever read Someone Gardner’s book The Theory of Multiple Intelligences? I think there were seven different ways you could be smart. I don’t know what-all they were, because I don’t have to; I can fake it, because my thing is the thing that lets you bluff. But anyhow, I whole-heartedly believe it. There’s a whole lot of different ways to be clever. Let us now discuss the ways in which I am not.

I love baseball and was pretty good at it as a young buck, but I have made two horrifically stupid decisions so far this softball season. Month ago in the top of the 7th-and-last, we were down one and I led off. I got on base somehow; I haven’t hit worth a damn all year, so I’ve swallowed my Wild Turkey and pride and accepted that I’m a hole-slapper at this point in my career, so I must have either dribbled one through a gap or lined it at a weak link. Anyhow, I’m on first, and the man behind me, I’m gonna say the Cobra, freezes a nice little legit single to left-center. Now, my philosophy on beer-league slow-pitch is that you always draw a throw. Run hard to the bag, turn, see what happens. I mean, not when you’re blowing out Central Kitchen, that ain’t sportsmanlike, but if you need to score a run, the way to do it is Little League-style, where you almost intentionally get yourself in a rundown and wait for them to throw the ball into the thicket of broken tricycles, promises, and 40s behind third base. So I round second like I mean business, and got just what I wanted: the kid panicked and threw behind me. You know how twice a month Ellsbury gets picked off first and just says “Fuck it” and heads straight to second anyway, and it works more often than not? That’s the move in that situation. Obviously I don’t have any speed, but I just mean that if you’re fucked, and they’re throwing behind you, nothing left to do now but head for the goal line. But I didn’t, I tried to beat the throw back to second, i.e., was begging to be allowed to go backward. Fuck me. Rundown, fall down, out. Awful, the low point in my athletic career.

Then just last week we had a special guest star on the mound, my man Vinny/ie. Pitching slow-pitch is a bitch. I’ve never done it, actually, but I don’t think I’d want to. First of all, you’re 14 feet away from getting your fucking teeth knocked out, and there’s also a weird kind of mixed pressure. Your primary job is to throw it over the plate, let them swing, get the game moving. We don’t paint corners in slow-pitch; the show is the batters and the fielders, the pitcher’s just the guy who facilitates that. But then, you can get a little cute: slow-pitch is so easy to make contact with that you can take advantage of people’s wide eyes. The first year I played, after a childhood of hardball, I was like “Fuck, I can get a hold of this!” so I’d take two steps across the plate to hack at a meatball that I popped up to third. What I’m saying is that in real baseball, just making contact is hard, so you get too excited and forget that in softball you make contact with everything, unless you’re the orange-mohawked faggot on PWS whose ass I will absolutely kick before the year’s up, but that’s a different rhyme for a different time.

So Vinny’s on the hill and I’m playing first. There was a lefthander up, and everyone’s a pull-hitter in slow pitch, so I told Vinny to cover the bag because I was going to make a play. I dunno why. But that was the idea, so when the guy dribbled one to Jimmy at 2nd, I ranged 50 fucking feet off the bag and Vinny had to cover 1st, which understandably fucked up Jimmy, who is A) Canadian, B) wondering why I’m in his lap, C) trying to hit a moving target to the bag.

Anyhow, so what I was saying is that luck doesn’t exist. The shit that happens to you is an accumulation of your talents and circumstances. I have a lot more to say about this, but remember that girl with the bathroom? I split at 10 to go get a boozy brunch at the Kinsale, and to allow her to “run errands,” which almost certainly involve the boyfriend that we both pretend doesn’t exist. So we’ll see where this ends up, and I’ll get back to you guys. I missed you. Writing a blog is fun. Fuck anyone who pretends it’s a chore. Oh yeah, the collaboration one’s not likely to happen anytime soon, nor is the $30 one. Back where we started, same as we ever was.