Fred Wards of the World, i Salute You

As the howls of creatures great and small being gleefully cornholed filled Rick Santorum's handsome ears from every direction, Orin Hatch, ablaze, staggered out of the sodomy-free sanctity of his Chevy Chase estate and into a civilization in ruin.  As promised by some of the finest minds Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma have to offer, the unchecked lust for tushy unleashed by our nation's hellbound faggots had sent America from the hights of glory to the bottom of a box of ribbed, lubricated, but not spermicidal condoms.

and it was in this inferno that we lost one Lic. Harvey Birdman.

Birdy was a good man.  His skin was well cared for.  His obsessive compulsiveness was disarming.  His raport with Asians, quite admirable.  His wholesome charm harkened to brighter days when a cable channel's promise of "brief nudity" and "adult situations" was enough- before buying a ticket to Gettysburg and sneaking into Sliver dispersed so many mysteries.

i awoke in the wee hours of midday.  Drinking Birdy out of my heart the night before had been unsuccessful.  i did, please note, manage to drink a "Fuck you, man, this is Admiral Nelson!" out of my lungs and onto the face of an otherwise innocent David Bowie requester.  Marinating in my hangover with some udon soup and the paper was the call.  Perhaps it was preoccupation with Herby's departure; or could it have been the emerging memory of having my "veritablement, cette merde est incroyable" -the only phrase i know in french, incorrect and uttered to a french broad- met with "I don't speak Spanish."  Irregardless, my friends, the winds of fate that day blew me away from heeding the ornery contents of my colon before continence had been adequately achieved.

And all this is how a new age of Adrian dawned.  The failed marriage amendment, the first wobbley steps of Ewic's medical career, the clamoring of my PBR-craving demons; they all seemed to have some sort of hand in reaching the point in my Life where "Doing the Responsible Thing" mainly entails getting up from my bowl of noodles and walking briskly to the nearby house of a trusted friend.  Because, let's face it folks, dumping fire in my pants as i sat there in the 2nd Ave. Teriyaki Boy could not be worth the SoK gold.

The need to crap came so swiftly and so urgently.  i'd like to think i could have controlled it on my own terms.  But i tell you, caution and responsibility won that day.  And so, when all was concluded, i rewarded my grace under fire by watching Tremors.

In its entirety.

Twice.

Game: Guess the context!

I sent the following one line e-mail to a coworker:
If you like your night out to end in murderous rage, you drink jagermeister and appreciate the appeals of gothic S&M dungeons, methinks.

Post a comment and guess what provoked me to utter that decree.  Winner gets a SoK carryall.

"You're a real asshole, you know that?" I can do better.

I can't top it.  I've climaxed like a horse knocking back the waiting face of some poor girl in a video i was forced to watch via peer pressure as a college freshman.  Now it's a one way road to the glue factory.  Which isn't to say that glue does not have its place in society--surely it does--but my girth does not carry value at a rendering plant.  So I will go somewhere else.  And Baltimore it will be.
****
Strange city, this.  I saw Ray Lewis on a car commercial.  I hope he was offering to protect it, rather than use it as his cover as he murdered someone in a club.  But i digress.  It's a giant frontier as I'd expect would make old westerners comfortable.  I walked to a bar on saturday with full-fledged gambling at the front.  Texas hold-'em $100 buy in.  Some floozy (a word i've taken to saying far too much of late) moseys up, bats an eyelash at her man and he gives her a crumpled wad of cash.  At which point he stumbles backwards and falls against a pole.  She counts seven bucks in ones.  She asks for more.  He says, "here's four."  Some guy suggests, "just eighty-nine more."  He huffed away, insisting something about ESPN cameras making his life difficult.  The girl did not come with him.  I used this distraction to hole myself in a corner and rip a cigarrette with volocity unseen since Morton Downey, Jr. (Great reference, Kevin!).  Like the Frank family of Amsterdam, I was found by an oppressive regime, in this case my father.   If he had night vision goggles, i would have looked more mischevious than a raccoon in a trash can or Paris Hilton with a piece of trash.  He asks where i got it.  AND THEN BUMS A SMOKE.  Bonding.  It's not just for S&M any more.
******
I was at a bar on Friday.  Accidently got drunk.  For unremembered reasons, some girl comes up to me.  I'm reeking of booze and dressed to the nines in a Buddy Cianci Tee. She whispers something in my ear and kisses me on the cheek.  She walks away.  "You looked beautiful coming toward me," I say, feeling slightly smooth, "but you look better going away."  I don't remember intending to be a dickhead, at least until i overheard a slightly-outdated "Oh snap!" Of the three girls that followed her, the hottest, "The Inforcer" as it were (what is this?  GLOW?  Roller derby?) was in charge of telling me off:
Inforcer: Apologize.
Me: Huh?
Inforcer:  You're a real asshole, did you know that?
Me: Huh? What?
Inforcer: (Louder) YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE!
Me: Uhh.  Yeah.  I totally know what you're saying!

However, i didn't know what she was saying.  I don't hear very well at bars, and "I totally know what you're saying!" is my stock answer to any question.  It had never met its match.  When what she had screamed at me finally registered, i got defensive.  Then, i realized that my answer wasn't entirely far-fetched. 
******
We are talking about practice.  Not a game, practice.  The All Star break for the Summer of Kevin.  We've let some of the stars show their wares in an exhibition game.   I'm gearing up for the playoffs.  i don't want to throw out my arm.  Watch out, drunken Eskimos with herpes, i'm comin' atcha.  Practice is over.

Incognito Auto Repair

back in my heyday, when the weed was plentiful, the klonopin crushed up, and the strippers spiderweb-tit-tatted, i would have my car serviced by the proprieter of the abovementioned establishment.

He once charged me 75 bucks for a fake inspiction sticker.

But Dave Incognito, GNOS though he may have been, is not the subject of this story.

Faithful SoK readers may have noticed my startling absence over the past days. Some may have conjectured that I may have passed away, or been jailed, or deported. Fear not loyal readers, my silence has been due to a far more glorious and time honored purpose.

Research.

What, you may ask, was the topic with which my research was concerned? Was it a complete reading and cross-referencing of David Foster Wallace footnotes? Possible experiments with the space-time continuum? The Higgs boson? To which I respond, much like the populace of New York in Brewster’s Millions:  none of the above.

While all these projects would have been worthy uses for an intellectual talent such as mine, I was looking into far more important aspects of the natural world we live in.

Namely; prosthetic limbs, handguns, and mescaline.

Hmmmmm.
Thats probably what your thinking. Your probably wondering what these three seemingly unrelated products of the military industrial complex could possibly have in common? And how a misanthropic 24 year old TV hack could have somehow embarked upon an experiment in which all three were critical components. I can almost see the wheels turning in the collective SoK temporal lobe.

******

The story begins on a beach in Mexico. Wait, you say. Sam hasn't been to Mexico in the last two weeks. How could the story start there? To which I reply its my story and i can start it wherever i want, and fuck you if you dont like it.

Let me explain:

Chemical Ali and myself, having been denied entry to Guatemala due to lack of proper paperwork, were holed up at said beach twiddling our thumbs as our visas expired. This unfortunate event meant that our immigration status was quickly transforming from the innocuous "transmigrante" to the far more nocuous "illegal alien". And there wasn't shit we could do about it.

But as the days slipped by and our migratory condition became more and more suspect, we did manage to strike up a friendship with the perma-baked salvavidas who occupied a small red-lit shack in the middle of the beach.

Zipolite, which was the name of the beach, is famous for the treacherousness of its waves. 10 or so people a year die in the undertow. Adrian, rightly, wondered how many of those poor fuckers might have been saved if the lifeguards didn't spend the better part of each afternoon burning els that would make Bob Marley choke.

One evening they sold us some mescaline. Or so they said. What we bought looked like it came from a crematorium

We took the bag of gray dust and made little hand grenades out of toilet paper, which we then choked down in the front seat of our rhode-island plated jeep cherokee.  Then we set off down the beach, because our erstwhile Samsons had told us that the way to get the mescaline to kick in was to raise your heart rate by walking down the beach.  Then they told us we would vomit uncontrollably, afterwhich we would be off on the trip of our lives.  Oh the things we put our bodies through to escape our tortured reality.


So AT and I, mustachioed, walked off down the beach.

Upon reaching the far end, I turned to my companion and inquired as to his degree of gastrointestinal unrest.
Me: you feel sick yet?
AT: not at all.  you?
Me: nothing

So we walked to the other end of the beach, and, upon feeling no pangs of nausea, decided we’d have to take the situation into our own hands.  At which point the finger-down-the-throat game began.  Afterwhich ensued the finger-down-the-throat-combined-with-stomach-punch game.  Afterwhich the thought that we, with a combined 300 grand or so worth of education, were sitting on a Mexican beach trying to make each other vomit, set in.  Which is not, by any means, a bad thing. Unless you’re a functional human being.

****

Flash forward 1 year.  Our hero lives in the rotten apple.  His mustache is gone, his job is semi-legit, and he’s buttoning his shirts nearly to the top.  He goes to to the Hamptons, where he is treated to dinner by a duo of jewish septuagenarians.  As he’s finishing up his clams and ordering his fifth G & T, he manages to strike up a conversation with the waitress.  She’s got a fat ass for a white girl and hoop earrings, which he happens to have an innocuous fetish for.  As conversation continues after dinner, he’s making real progress.  And when the topic of Mexico come up, he’s on familiar ground and confident of his ability to charm this service professional with his intricate knowledge of the red, the white and the green.

Me: yeah I spent some time in Mexico
She: really?  me too.
Me: Oh yeah?  Where?
She: Zipolite.
Me:  no shit.  me too—I was stranded there for like 3 weeks with visa problems.
She:  I lived there for 6 years.

At which point I probably should have suspected something.  But, for better or for worse, I persisted with the same line of questioning.

Me:  wow.  what were you doing down there.
She:  Oh I had a baby by one of the lifeguards.

Blam!  Her baby’s father sold me bad mescaline!  That slore!  This turn in the conversation was one that I was utterly unprepoared for.  So I said the only thing I could think of, which was oh, I know your baby daddy that piece of shit sold me bad mescaline.  Which, predictably, ruined our rapport a little bit.  Like completely.  She stalked off and that was that. 

Later in the week I found myself at an after hours spot on Essex.  It was 6 in the morning, and I was listening to bad techno and drinking a 10 dollar gin and tonic.  And I was talking to a chick with a back full of intricate tattoos, fuck-me glasses and a wooden leg.  Actually wooden is a misnomer—it was some manner of aluminum PVC alloy.  But there I was anyway.  I asked her if she’d ever been to Mexico.  She said no.  So I went home.

The next day I got a gun pulled on me outside a Zox concert.  Ask Mike.  It happened. But that’s a story for another time. 

"Reliable Sources"

I am pleased to report tha two members of this forum, one Michael Grimes and Kevin Cunningham, are, thanks to their intrepid investigative skills, recieving full citation on New York television. To protect their identity, we have not used their real names, referring to them only as "less than reputable sources".

As in "sources say mary kate olsen was suffering from an eating disorder. However other, less reputable sources reported that she was being treated for a cocaine addiction."

Congratulations gentleman, your 15 minutes starts......NOW.

Are You There God? It's Me, Kevin

They say that Honore de Balzac used to write with a bowl of rotting oranges on his desk to hold writer's block at bay.   I've got empty beer bottles on the floor, three pairs of headphones, some Andy Dick TV show, a bottle of vitamins and toenail clippers.  I cannot be stopped.  And my name doesn't bring to mind a sex maneuver involving Gold Bond Powder, a felt pillow and Jesus-strength myrrh. 
 
Some have feared that SoK had died.  As the Yogi of this Ashram, let me just tell you maggots:  Like the South, the Brood X Cicada and the prophetic phoenix, I have risen.  As foretold in the scripture, bitches.
 
Still, I haven't had a coherent thought for a week or two and this will not be an exception.  But it does occur to me that there is a marked occurrence of my thoughts not corresponding with reality.  For example, I laughed hysterically at the inspirational quote in my work elevator:
"Pleasure in the Job Puts Perfection in the Work."
--Aristotle
Turns out, I read it as "Hard work will set you free."  I later again misread the appropriateness of my sense of humor, whilst attending a friend's wedding.  Religiousness has a curious effect on people.
 
Me: "I got a great rock band name.  So what do you think of 'Siegfried and Jesus?'"
Groom: "That is horrendous. I want to throw up on myself, clean up, then throw up on myself again."
I insist that, well, yes, it may be months until Roy can get back into the act.  The show must go on.  It's the spirit of Vegas.  Some things are bigger than any one man.  Who's best suited to deal wild, man-eating, genetically modified tigers?  The Son of God.  Damn skippy. 
 
Sorry about all of this.  I think this might be the least interesting religion writing since any Modest Mouse song.  
 
I'm spending money like a drunken sailor and do not have a mustache.  One will change. 
 
Fire 'n Brimstone,
--Ed 
 

Baron Von Nibbles: the Playboy Emperor

Living above an Indian restaurant in college had its advantages and disadvantages.

advantage: the interminable aroma of curry masking all competing smells in our 4th floor bathroom.

disadvantage: the interminable aroma of curry

advantage: free Indian food

advantage: lessons in making naan bread

advantage: the companionship and comaraderie of a congenial waitstaff

disadvantage: BARON VON NIBBLES

Not since Bao Dai, the "Playbor Emperor" of the Nguyen Dynasty, has an authoritarian figure so brazenly wielded and misused his power than Baron Von Nibbles during his reign of terror at 230 Wickenden Street.

Bao Dai's authority fueled a reckless hedonism visually manifested in ostentatious gold toilets, elegant ivory-tipped cigarettes and a seemingly endless bevy of sycophantic prostitutes.

Baron Von Nibbles displayed an authority of excess in a similar fashion, leaving carcasses of half-gnawed whole wheat bread loaves, pockmarked packages of crackers and telling trails of excrement in his wake.

Bao Dai and Baron Von were kindred spirits, inextricably linked. With this association evident, is it not a stretch to liken 230 Wickenden to being "in the shit"? I don't think so. I can recall several nights spent lying awake in semi-comatose terror, convinced I could hear Baron's sewer-rat physique slithering towards my bedroom as if I were camoflauged in palm fronds in anticipation of Charlie's inevitable advances.

(editor's note - for those offended by my usage of the slang word "Charlie", I can only say that I have been emboldened by the epithet's puzzlling resurfacing in the upcoming issue of Damon Dash's America Magazine, in which R Kelly justifies transforming his studio into a jungle by stating:

"I have never been to Africa, but I got books and studied up on the music, the culture and, most importantly, the people....That's why you see all of the shrubs and plants and trees in here. I just wanted to feel it. I put tents in the studio and slept in the tents for like a few months, eating off the floors, dressed in army fatigues...I know people out there might laugh, but we are in the jungle....We're on a serious mission, and just know that Charlie is out there to stop us, and you have to load up your guns. I know this all sounds crazy...."

Come to think of it, I guess its never a good thing to follow the lead of a man who urinates on tweenage girls whilst wearing a Kato mask....)

I was in the shit. Like Kevin and his Boredom Offensive, it was a war of attrition. Time passed, seasons changed, we soon graduated and moved on. Yet just as Vietnam Vets have carried the shackles of post traumatic stress syndrome throughout their civilian lives, I have likewise been cursed with daily reminders of my unsavory tour of duty, for I now have mice in my apartment.

I am now back in the shit. Whether their unwelcome appearance in my apartment is a result of our scabies-ridden friend's weekend residence on my floor I cannot tell. Evidence cannot be corroborated. Speculation is pointless.

If I have learned anything from my previous journey into the heart of darkness, however, it is that swift action must be taken. Land mines in the form of mousetraps, agent orange in the guise of rat pellets, this is guerilla warfare and this time I will not be Bao Dai'd.

When the napalm clears, I will have bayonetted so many rodents with spring-action peanut butter-baited traps that even Lieutenant Calley would lose his lunch.

I will come to work wearing a necklace made of little mouse ears.

And then I will come home and dance joyously to the Chocolate Factory, a free man once again.

BITTERNESS

Apparently I suck doggie teats. That's what my coworker and sometimes friend Matt Tyson (the Mattador) just informed me via Instant Messenger. He also composed the following post in another blog that deserves burn in the SoK. This one goes out to all you worker drones courtesy of Matt....

Every morning it's the same thing - bitterness. Bitterness such that I can't even stomach it.
The kind of hatred that comes from carelessness.
The evidence of clueless attempts to do good by the whole office wasted in a black sea of disgust.
You can smell it in the air and strangely, everyone handles the situation the exact same way.
Acceptance that becomes apathy.

I generally never partake, usually opting for the cool and refreshing way out of the morning malady.
But some days - sometimes - I just have to join in.
Today is one of those days.

So I got myself collected, woke up as best I could, prayed for the best and expected the worst, and I headed straight for the temple of bitter. I had hoped to find emptiness upon reaching my destination, that perhaps some God of the Workplace had seen my situation from up above and was looking out for me, helping me to avoid diving headfirst into the overly putrid land of percolating sludge. Instead I saw immediately that others had already left their mark. The seeds of bitterness were bubbling and boiling - black hate already filling the temple - steam rising. I stood and watched the hell unfold before my eyes.

I needed this cup of coffee though, and I would fight through the pain.

Normally I take my coffee black, that is to say when it is not prepared by demons without taste buds.
Today would be an exception.
I can not stomach Half and Half, thus I opted for Skim Milk...knowing full well this meant I'd need to venture into previously un-charted milk/coffee mixing territory.
Filling my cup to about the 3/4 mark with the Black Death, I then proceeded to add the lightening agent.
A taste...gag!
I poured some of the foulness out and re-poured more milk.
Sunshine.
I had finally found the right mixture. Bliss...caffeine bliss and gorgeousness.

Wide awake I set out to share my harrowing tale with the rest of the office so that others may learn from it.

---

Epilogue - I do not care to have coffee every morning, I'm fine with my bottle of water. Some rare days I do need it, and those times are dark and bitter indeed. However, I do have the same coffee maker at home and a good rule of thumb to pass around is "however many cups you are making, use one less tablespoon of ground coffee". For example, 10 cups of water - 9 tablespoons ground coffee. This generally makes a very nice pot.

Mine and Someone's Rashes

What a fabulous treat it is to have Jake and his celebrated ethos of "mine and someone elses" on the SoK. Fantastic story.

However, one issue alluded to with the expectation of further explanation is Jake's rash. Why do all of our friends have rashes now? Is it normal to get a half-joking/half-cautionary email from a friend in Asia who shall remain nameless (aw c'mon everyone knows who it is) letting everyone know he has scabies, detailing the precautionary measures we should take to avoid this malady because he slept on our floors in the rash's nascent phase some weeks back? This is like "Outbreak" and we're those nasty little monkeys, Jake spreading one strain of rash to Russia, Dingles spreading another to Asia, and Sam spreading his asscheeks on a barstool at the Cherry Tree....
Thats right, the Cherry Tavern will henceforth be referred to as the Cherry Tree as per Martha Slaughter's suggestion....
Or maybe its more like "Twelve Monkeys" because the bad guy spreading shit in that was redheaded just like our favorite hairless harbinger of eight-legged itchybugs. And wasn't that bad guy also the guy from the tv show Hack too? Sam loves Hack.

Oh okay, I just went to imdb.com. His name is David Morse. And it appears he was in a movie called "The Slaughter Rule". Everything is finally beginning to make sense.

A Tragedy in Three Halves: Recent Thoughts on the Fairer Gender

Paging Dr. Freud: Here are my most recent thoughts on women.
1. I woke up this morning dreaming of Ashley Olsen. I learned some stuff about her: she's self-conscious about the peach fuzz on her upper lip, she said kissing me was like "licking an ashtray", and she would like me to get a new bathing suit. I threw her over my shoulder.

2. I found myself very attracted to an older lady on the metro yesterday. And I mean old. But very put together. She was like a high-society Courtney Love with orange paisley pants and without the OC. Are collagen lips attractive? Her skin was pulled as tight as the top of a drum. I would have talked to her, too, save my public drunkenness and her myopia. The reading glasses kind of distracted from the whole, methinks.

3. I found myself going out with this girl and determining that I'd preferably not date her. But I'm appalled at the idea of someone not liking me. I reconciled these two bits by enacting my "Boring Strategy", whereas I would go the whole night just by not being interesting. Open doors, smile, laugh as normal. It's a war of attrition. I get home and complain to my roommates that my brilliant strategy didn't work. But how? It was flawless: a gut reaction that says something akin to, "kevin, i liked you better when i was drunk." The next evening, I get a phone call. "Dude, i liked it better when we were just friends." This was pleasing. I'm like Donald Rumsfeld: not bad as a tactition, but certainly arrogant, jerky and a bit of a loser.

Conclusion: I'm a little fucked up.

Weekend Stats

Taking a page from our namesake's notebook, here's my attempt to statistically quantify my existence.
or, at least 48 hours thereof:

hours worked: 17
drinks consumed: roughly 26
liveshots: 9
times i ran into a fat drunk chick from one of the liveshots in a elevator the same night: 1
times i checked the SoK website: around 30
damage: $120
fireworks seen: 0
adrian sightings: 0
sunrises: 2
amputees: 1
asians: 2

status report:
mustache: gone
nikes: new
de-rigeur work accessory: flip flops
last weeks accessory: cigarrettes
chest, arms, face, legs: sunburned

Like/Dislikes:
i currently prefer jim o'rourke to jeff tweedy.
however, i prefer jeff tweedy to mary kate (or is it ashley) olsen.
i also prefer pills over coke.
the new york times put seth macfarlane on the cover of the arts section: this i like.
however, the post but a picture of dick gephart on the cover, with the headline "Kerry's Choice".
This i like even more.
I would rather my (hypothetical) girlfriend had a prosthetic leg than a prosthetic arm.
Prosthetic tits would be even better than that.
I would rather be manny than a-rod.
i view mark blounts impending signing with the sixers with apathy.
i view jake's contributions to this forum with disgust.

Babe in the Woods: Eric's European Vacation Diary, Part the First: WILCO

As custodian of this fine trove, here is Eric's e-mail from Europe. See the bottom for my notes and edits.

Dearest Fellow Wilco Supporters-

As a friendly "fuck you" to all of my good friends back home in NYC who were unwilling or unable to obtain Wilco tickets to the June 8th show at Irving Plaza(1), I attended a certified kick-ass Wilco show last night at Club Vega right here in Copenhagen(2). Melissa, myself, and my 250 closest Danish hipster friends (indeed I believe the hipster first appeared in Denmark before invading the rest of the planet (3)) rocked out to the far out sounds of my favorite Yankee Hotel Foxtrot songs interspersed with my first listen to the new album (which somebody owes me a burn of because I no longer can afford to buy it(4)). Anyway, show was great and to top it off Missy decided to stalk the only member brave enough to hang out in the bar afterwards, Pat Sansone (apparently he joined the band to tour after the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot(5)(6)) and proceeded to introduce herself and make me look foolish as I stood sheepishly behind her as she made the introduction and continued to tell him all about our travels. Unfortunately, I was unable to hang out with Jeff Tweedy because I had a fat stash of valium (7) on me which I am sure would've made him think twice about that whole rehab regimen. So my magical mystical European musical tour continues. Who knows, maybe I'll see Wilson-Phillips in Oslo if I am lucky.

Keep your fingers crossed for me brothers. Tussen tak.

E (8)

[Editor's note: We here at the SoK feel that artistic expression should rely with the author. Except in the case of Eric.)
1. I got to see them in DC. I raged with some other concert-goers to form a "no tall people in front of us" club, and had the best seat (stand?) I've ever really had. Tweedy looked like Skelator, sang like a sparrow with a tracheotomy and made fun of Ronald Reagan's crispy corpse, which was also in town that week.
2. I went to Copenhagen with Drew, Jesse and Mike. We landed there on the way from London to Stockholm because somebody died on the plane. I said, "I'm glad I didn't order the fish". b-dum ching.
3. It was a velvet revolution, really. Next time call them Vikings. Or make a Lars Ulrich reference. Rookie.
4. You're copping my excessive parenthetical stees! And you're not poor. We in the insurance industry would call you "emerging mass affluent" and we would court your favor with candy and spices from the orient. And Wilco is at the top of their musical powers: "When the devil came, he was not red. He was chrome, and he said, 'come with me'." So true. Though, when I met the devil, he looked more like X-ibit and he pimped my ride for my soul.
5. What? More of this ()()()() nonsense? Gimme a (! Gimme a )! (!!)
6. He says, pushing his glasses to his brow, "Pat Sansone is Wilco bassist John Stirrat's partner in the Autumn defense and joined Wilco's touring group after the recording of A Ghost Is Born. Also joining was avant jazz guitarist Nels Cline, he of spider fingers fame [insert your own Marfan Syndrome joke. My last one had me feeling bad for weeks]. Sansone wears scarves around his neck and generally seems more foppish than the rest of the boys. He was especially great as a maraca player. He really sold it."
7. If history serves me, you had roofies.
8. I know I've given this tirade before: Write your damn name out. Three more letters. It's not like you're writing Chukwuemeka or something. People who have been typing for years can write their name in less than a second. Stopwatch ready: Kevin. Ok. 1.1 seconds. So why would people do this whole shortcut thing? Elegant indifference? Too cool for school? Trying to create an air of mystery about who wrote the e-mail? Maybe it was Eric estrada? erica eleniak? edward james olmos? No, these classy individuals would have called themselves ponch, chick from original baywatch and pockmarked teacher of Lou Diamond Phillips, respectively. Imagine if ee cummings signed his name, "holla back, e". no gravitas. Don't be sloppy. Stand up straight. Sign your name.

Hirsute Homage: Why We Brand Ourselves

Sworn Enemies: Very French Revolution
Blood brothers: Too Huck Finn
Mutual Scars: Post-yoga, post-Hell's Angels, pre-Swan perfection

Or it could just be drunken, self-inflicted beligerence masking a childhood of squirrel nuts and beebee pellets.

It either rate, during my visit to New York, Sam and I decided it would be a good idea to align arms and drop lit cigarettes between the arms. Within seconds my skin was singed. Usually not one to believe in second chances, i played another round.

Why, would I purposely choose to burn my friend's arm with the business end of a Camel Light?

Because, as Sir Edmund Hillary said upon being asked why he climbed Mount Everest:
It was there.

Marry a share of pole fuzz

I like Maria Sharapova. I may have to become a tennis fan.

For the past few months I've been shaken by the enduring urge to buy a van and drive around for the summer, a roving field reporter for the SoK. Alternately willing my facial hair to liberation with each passing mile and pausing to camp in the forest or run around the beach, I would undoubtedly "achieve the inspirational levels of performance" trumpeted by Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina in a partiuclarly rousing speech.

On this trip, I would listen only to the new Sonic Youth and Wilco albums while driving, continually mouthing "riding alone, town after town, toll after toll a fixed bayonet through the great southwest". When in the forest, I would listen to side B of the Animal Collective lp. When on the beach, I would listen to nothing.

Perhaps on the occasional Monday night I would coordinate my dinner with Fox's "The North Shore."
Perhaps I would just skip the meal, my appetite destroyed by Star Magazine's recent revelation that Mary Kate Olsen is in rehab for cocaine and not anorexia.

I would watch Maria Sharapova play in the Finals of Wimbledon in a Masonic Lodge somewhere outside of Pittsburgh. Maybe I would go to Jester's house instead because it would be close by and I know he enjoys watching tennis and drinking beer.

How I Leraned to Stop Worrying and Love Saddam

the man himself was on tv today, testifying in front of some minor iraqi functionary. he's been locked up since february, undoubtedly been subjected to all manner of anal probes, sodium pentathol drips and hot branding irons.
and yet, against all odds, he's kept his fashion game on point.

Today he was rocking a stylishly cut navy suit with a starched open-necked white shirt. He didn't look anything like an imprisoned former tyrant. In fact, he looked like he was about to go sip mojitos in a Hampton's beach house with tom, duke and a bunch of of yale girls. plus, the mans beard game may be without par in the free world. his facial hair reaches his eyes.

Will i be sent to guantanamo for admitting on this forum that i'm jealous of saddam's beard? could it be possible that the recent debacle in Iraq stems from no more than Bush's inability to grow competing whiskers? is there a connection between facial hair and geopolitical factor leadership? And by the way, you know who our last whiskered president was? Teddy muthafuckin' Roosevelt, thats who.

did i mention that i have a mustache?