Instead of Work

Drumming: The Early Years, Part II

2015-02-09T20:49:00.002-08:00

Where were we? Ah yes, sucking!

Not only are those the words of a forgetful prostitute, they accurately describe my drumming skill level circa 7th grade. I totally sucked, and was totally fearful every time I sat behind the drums when playing with the jazz band. You see, I was relegated to the conga drums for performances and most of rehearsals, but would occasionally get a chance to share my suck rather than keep it all to myself near the ends of rehearsals, probably because the other drummer's arms got tired or something.

By the way if you didn't read part one, stop being dumb and click here. When you're done, come back to part two here, if you feel like you can take both parts in one sitting. And when you do come back, start over at the beginning, so you get the full effect. But then I guess you can skip over this bit the second time through if you've actually bothered to read all the way to here the first time through, without reading part one yet.

So anyway, there I am in seventh grade jazz band, clearly communicating to everybody via subtle body language that "no, I am not very good at this, and yes, that makes me uncomfortable" but visions of drum solos in the not too distant future gave me the mental fortitude to plow through all the ugliness. In reality, it's pretty likely that all the other musicians were thinking to themselves "I'm not very good" as well and had no time to focus on my not very good-ness, but mistakes on the drums were just so much more damn obvious so yes my problems were worse and that made me special.

Another issue that kept surfacing was, at the time, I played left handed. There are very few left handed drummers, and some might even argue that there's no such thing, because "right handed" is how the instrument is built, and you adapt, much in the same way some people argue there should be no left handed violinists. To that I say no fuck you, if it's easier to play the other way then play the other way because who gives a shit? So that's what I did, and it was terribly inconvenient. I could never just plop down on a set, because nearly everyone else was right handed, so whenever I had access to a set, everything was set up for a right handed drummer. If I wanted to take a crack, I had to rearrange everything. But I begrudgingly did it, and I played as much as I could as best as I could during that year or so, and then

DA DADA DAAAAAA

In March of 1998, months away from my birthday or any sort of gift giving holiday (which I guess leaves just Christmas) my parents probably thought "ah jeez he hasn't lost interest, guess we better do something" and surprised me with a set ALL OF MY OWN. "Oh there's something in the spare room closet for you!" They said, or something like that, I don't fucking know it was almost 17 years ago. I bounded up the stairs and threw the door open so hard the WHOLE HOUSE BLEW UP. Haha, no actually I probably ascended to the closet at a reasonable pace, because like I said, it wasn't Christmas or my birthday or anything so I wasn't expecting any sort of major gift...to tell you the truth I really don't remember the events leading up to the big reveal at all, I'm mostly just making shit up. I opened the closet door and blinked a few times. I didn't expect drums so hard that my first thought was probably more like "hmm, someone left their drums here" rather than "@#FUCKING!@%#$@SHIT@#@%!WTF%^" But I did eventually settle on something along those lines.

I assembled the kit in the attic (the left handed way god dammit) and immediately played one of the two beats I knew how to play for probably hours. Glory! Vindication! Disbelief! Immediate stagnation! I was young, so had no concept of effective practicing. For awhile though it didn't matter. The thought that I had a drumset all my own made me feel like a superhero, even though the drum heads looked like someones acne scarred face, and the cymbals sounded like trash can lids smashing together.

I would play my couple beats, occasionally attempt to mix it up, immediately falter and get frustrated, and then would do it all again. This repeated ad nauseam until drum lessons started a few months later. Apparently I waited a short while to begin lessons because I wanted to get my feet wet and ingrain some bad habits before my parents paid someone to get rid of them.

Here, make him not sound like shit.

Summer of '98 is when those lessons began. At this point I somewhat competently knew how to play some basic beats with some semblance of timing, which in my mind translated to "I don't need this shit I rule." However, we started with something unexpected: not beats.

Here's a quick lesson. Drums are played with two hands, and two feet, with your two hands doing most of the work. Yes there are exceptions to this statement, death metal etc..shut up. My point is the focus is mostly on your hands when you're first learning, so why not get those in shape first? Two fewer limbs to work on, and it will lay the foundation for a lot of concepts that can be applied to the rest of your limbs when they're ready.

So to start, we would do rudiments. These were exercises that would get the blood flowing, and if practiced enough, would improve your speed, dexterity, and coordination. They were also boring as fuck, especially when you aren't very good at them.

So I would practice reading music in a snare drum method book. I was already familiar with how to read music, since I had been taking band in school, so I breezed through the first book all smug and shit, even though my drum teacher was probably thinking "ok, you technically got the rhythm right, but it was still terrible for a lot of reasons." But I get why he didn't intervene further. You can't expect someone that's just learning to perfect every nuance before moving on. Lessons are a delicate balance between introducing new concepts (exciting!), repetition (boring!), putting things you've learned into context (exciting!) and discussing effective practice techniques, since most of the learning is done when you aren't with the teacher (boring!). But, my drum teacher did a good job at keeping me inspired. Each time we got together, I'm fairly sure he could tell that 80% of my practice time since I'd last seen him was spent going "RGBHGHBRHABAHBAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAH" on the drums, and only 20% was spent applying things I'd learned in his lessons, but keeping your hands moving is an important part of improvement, so I guess that 80% wasn't totally wasted.

Like I just said about 10 seconds ago (maybe 30 if you're a shitty reader), most improvement occurs when not with the teacher. There was no way I was just going to do rudiments for hours a day, so I had to make it fun somehow. I chose to play along with some of my favorite CDs on my sweet discman. My strategy seemed to be "play shit that's way out of your skill set and get depressed about it" but it did lead to some occasional,
but major improvements.

Then I gave up on playing left handed cause I was so sick of moving other people's drums around. I was terrible from either side, so I figured better make the switch before I developed skills that I would have to relearn from the other side. I regret nothing.

I would also sometimes have guitar player friends come over. They'd discover a fun riff, we'd jam on it for 30 seconds or so, and then it was just a question of who was going to get bored and stop first. So I suppose all sorts of little things worked together to keep me improving and prevent me from losing interest.

Then I got busted for shoplifting and got grounded for approximately forever, so I did basically nothing but play drums all day every day for months and months. That certainly helped too.

After those first couple of years, I was getting pretty solid in Jazz Band, and had a few fancy tricks in my arsenal to convince non-musicians that I was really good, and actual musicians that I would eventually be good maybe. Even though I'd barely been playing for any time at all, I thought I was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. That's right. Eighth grade, and I thought I was going to reach some sort of terminus already. I have obviously since realized that light is a total illusion. There is no "end" to learning an instrument. No matter how good you are, there is always room for improvement, and there will always be someone better than you. Often times these people are much much younger than you, but no worries, we can all hate those people together.

Coming soon, part 3, where I take this shit to the high school, and later COLLEGE LEVEL!!!

AAAHAHAHAHA!

Collarbone SMASH!!

2015-02-08T15:59:00.001-08:00

Most of you have seen the pictures, but I don't think I've bothered to tell you all the story in detail, so here goes.

I fell!

Before moving to Nashville, I told people of my plan to be a bike commuter depending on where I ended up living and working. I was prepared to bike up to 30 miles a day. It would be great for my health, and I would save money. People's responses ranged from: "It's too hot, you'll die!" to "you'll die!" but I'd been off the training wheels for about 20 years, and had actually been bike commuting in NYC for awhile without incident, so I wasn't too worried.

Well everyone, you were right!

My job ended up being about a 9 mile commute each way. Nashville isn't the most bike friendly city, but in my defense there were bike lanes and wide shoulders most of the way, so for a couple months there were no issues except for three stupid flat tires. Apparently the "bent staples" truck had been through town and had dropped their inventory all along my route to work. No worries though, I just biked around with a pump, tubes, and a patch kit just in case.

Anyway, there was one stretch on the ride to work, Bransford Avenue, that was a bit narrow. Here I'll show you!

"Ride on the sidewalk!" You just thought to yourself. NO THAT'S NOT FOR BIKES.

I stuck to the side of the road for this bit, and most motorists were pretty polite to keep their distance, since they only had to go under the speed limit for about 100 yards before it widened back out and they could pass me. "Not today!" thought some asshole.

I was nearing the end of the narrow stretch of road when this shithead in a pickup truck that probably not only listens to but respects Ted Nugent thought it was fine to just hover right up next to, and slightly behind me. Basically they hung out where my blind spot would be if I was driving a car.

I don't know where they were going in such a hurry. Probably on their way to pick up some drugs after abandoning their children.

So to avoid getting clipped, I had to keep an eye out over my left shoulder rather than look at the road ahead of me. This only lasted a couple of seconds, but that's all it took. I hit a manhole cover while looking over my shoulder, so I was completely taken off guard. Here I'll show you!

Hard to tell, but it sticks up from the road a couple inches.

The front tired buckled, and I slammed into the ground shoulder first, and then smacked my head (hooray for helmets!) and skidded along the road. Panic set in, since as you can see, I was in the middle of an intersection, so I leapt to my feet, picked up my bike, and carried it to the side of the road to that small patch of grass. Cars flew by, and nobody stopped to check to see if I was ok. I was incensed! They must've assumed I was fine since I had popped back up and jogged to the side of the road, but I needed to focus on hating them for a bit rather than on how injured I was.

I sat down and got my bearings, heart racing. I couldn't feel most of my left arm at this point, but could still move it. I then thought "hmm, how is my brain?" You see, when I was 11, there had been another bike accident where I'd smacked my head pretty hard (hooray for helmets!) and on that day, I had gotten some sort of temporary amnesia. It had been several weeks into my 6th grade school year and I couldn't remember who my teacher was, what the classroom looked like, who my classmates were etc..) so I tried to see if I still had my wits about me. I remembered things like my phone number, where I was going, who I worked with and all that, so relief started to set over me. I could move, I could think, I could walk. Aside from a front tire that now looked like a Salvador Dali painting

I guessed I'd be ok. Then I started checking for damage. Gash on my left hand, gash on my elbow, terrible road rash on my left shoulder. Scrapes on my knee, bruised hip, sore back. I rotated my left shoulder a bit and it felt a bit off, so I ran my fingers along my left collarbone.

Hmm, doesn't feel quite right.

And just like that, my dreams of lifting weights that afternoon were dashed. It didn't hurt yet, so although somewhat panicked about just what the hell I was gonna do next, part of me was thinking "haha people that think broken bones hurt are pussies."

So I just sat there dumbstruck for a minute. Seriously though what the hell was I gonna do next?

Let's all go to the hospital!

I dialed 911, but before I could press send I saw a police car pull up to the intersection. I quickly tossed out all the drugs in my possession, then hobbled over. Maybe he could give me a ride to the hospital! At this point the the adrenaline was wearing off, so in the dozen or so steps over to his car I was all rgbhrhbgbhrhbbhggggaauuuuhhhh and the pain started to set in. Turns out immediately lifting a bike and carrying it across the road probably wasn't the best thing I could've done. I've actually since been told that may have been what caused the bone to become so dislodged.

It became clear the only way I was getting to the hospital was in an ambulance. I told the cop what happened, so he called the ambulance for me, and actually called his police friends too because they were probably bored so hey, come check this shit out!

So picture the scene. I'm lying with my arm across my chest in a small patch of grass next to the road, in terrible pain, not sure how much worse the pain is going to get, and I'm surrounded by cops.

Best day of my life.

The ambulance arrived after what felt like literally forever, and *huphuphuphup* the EMTs tumbled out, asked me what happened, where it hurt, and asked if I could stand because that would be you know, super helpful for them. I somehow managed to stand up and thought how funny it would be to say "lol just kidding!" and just leave.

Haha but seriously they put my neck in a brace and put me on a stretcher. Off we went! In the ambulance, each bump was the worst thing in my life up to that point. The EMT asked me if I'd hit my head. I said yes, so he started asking me things like my address, date of birth, maybe who the president was? I don't remember. We both quickly realized my head was fine, and that all of the awful was concentrated into my left collarbone, or should I say left collarbones, since I now had several. At this point since nobody had taken x-rays, and "trust me it's ruined" isn't good enough, they all kept saying things like "possible fractured clavicle" on their walkie talkies. I wanted to tell them if I wasn't god damned sure it was broken I would've left the bike, shaken it off and walked the rest of the way to work like this guy:

Coulda been me.

but I was too busy saying "hngggggggh". Then realized I was probably going to get pain drugs soon, and that was awesome.

My first ambulance ride! I always wondered under what circumstances that would take place, if any. Would I be accompanying someone I knew? Accompanying a stranger? Or would I be the star of the show? It's pretty wild to think the morning had started like any other, and in seconds, I was all busted up and going to the hospital. I had this vivid memory of pulling up to the intersection before turning onto the road where I fell. I was thirty seconds away from falling, and had no idea. If I'd just taken the sidewalk, I'd have been fine. I tried not to get stuck on that thought though, because what's done is done, but that feeling of "if I'd only JUST" etc.. was the main event in my head for sure.

Off the stretcher, and into the hospital. After I was wheeled into a room, a barrage of doctors and nurses fluttered in and asked me the same questions as the cops, and EMTs. What happened? Where did it happen? Where does it hurt? Can you move? Did you hit your head? How bad is the pain? Tell us EVERYTHING.

What did you have for BREAKFAST?

They stuck me with an IV just in case they needed to run pain meds intravenously, fitted me with one of those blood oxygen saturation readers that goes over your finger, cut my shirt off with a pair of rusty scissors, all while sweating, with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths shouting LIVE DAMMIT, LIVE! No but really they did cut my shirt off with I assume sterile scissors.

Yuck.

After the flurry of doctors and nurses had assessed the situation, they noticed as long as I didn't do anything crazy like "move" I felt fine at this point, so they tragically decided not to dope me up too badly. Despite that, after cutting off my shirt and seeing my injury (and huge pecs) they all agreed my collarbone was certainly broken since they could see it was practically busting through my skin. The plan was to hang out until they got someone to do some x-rays. After those were done, they'd review them and tell me if I'd need surgery. Then it was just a matter of taking a few precautions, writing me a prescription for pain meds, and making sure I had a ride home.

So I just sat in relieving silence. No IV meds, but they did give me some pain pills, so I was pretty mellowed out. I texted everyone that needed to know what had just happened. Something along the lines of "Hi! I'm fine, but kinda in the hospital." Also told my boss I wouldn't be in that day or probably the next.

Soon various nurses came in to have me sign paperwork.

If you'll just sign where it says "yes I agree to be charged a fuckload for this shit"

SUB-NARRATIVE!
The topic of health insurance came up, to which I replied "I think I have insurance through work, but I started a couple months ago so I gotta get the details."

Let's jump ahead to the conversation I later had with HR about this.

Me: Hi there. I think we've met once, my name is Matt, and as you can see I got into an accident! I wanted to ask you about the company's health insurance.

HR: Do you have insurance?

Me: ...well, I guess that's what I came to ask. I started in July and--

HR: So you don't have insurance.

Me:...I see. Well when it kicks in is there such thing as filing a claim retroactively?

(I have since learned this was a very foolish question)

HR: *restraining laughter* no.

Me: So...I'm screwed?

HR: *shrug/minimally sympathetic look*

So no. No insurance. I was still under the 90 day probationary period where they needed to see that I wasn't a flight risk before they start throwing benefits at me. Perfect! After being insured my whole life up until that previous June 1st, I had managed to have the most expensive accident, in fact the only accident in my life requiring hospitalization (aside from that time I cut my dick open by falling off the sink when I was 8, but that was minor) in those few months before the next insurance would kick in.

BACK TO MAIN NARRATIVE!

The eventual cost of everything wasn't really a concern to me at this point though. All I needed to know to feel comfortable was "will I eventually heal?" I hadn't taken x-rays yet, but the consensus seemed to be "yes" so at least I had that.

A short time passed, and the x-ray tech came in. I think he had dealt with a lot of broken collarbones at this point in his life, and most had probably been minor, because he seemed to think this was no big deal. After wheeling me into the x-ray room he just looked at me expectantly like "Ok! Hop up in front of this wall here!" I tried to tell him getting up was going to be difficult in my current state. Also it was probably about noon and I still hadn't had a substantial meal after biking about 7 of the 9 miles to work, so I was also feeling pretty faint. Nevertheless, I struggled out of the bed, and stood in front of the wall sheepishly.

The best way to describe this feeling, is it was akin to waking up at 6 in the morning after a night of heavy drinking, and REALLY having to piss. You will finally, begrudgingly hoist yourself out of bed when this need to piss finally outweighs the overwhelming need to just lay there and recover from your transgressions. As you stumble to the bathroom, all you can think of is "man, I really need to lay back down." Then, some guys will make the terrible terrible mistake of standing up to piss before realizing just how bad of an idea standing is. This is what posing for that x-ray felt like. Holding still for even 30 seconds was so exhausting I almost vomited. After taking two or three, the ordeal mercifully ended, and I collapsed back onto the bed.

The tech went to the back room to look at the results, and after a few seconds came back out, and with a sudden air of seriousness he paused and said

"..yup, you definitely broke it."

To which I replied

"I know."

I went back to the room, and was told the docs would be along after awhile. My battery was dead at this point, so I couldn't entertain myself with my phone. Luckily there was a TV with some sort of pseudo on-demand service, so I put on "Captain Phillips." There wasn't much else to choose from.

The climax of the movie was approaching, and then finally a couple of docs came in to give me the prognosis. I tried to pause the movie but apparently this stupid TV was on some sort of fucking lockdown, and I couldn't pause the damn thing. So I turned the volume all the way down so as not to be distracted, glancing back at the TV ever so often to try to grab enough bits of the plot to keep the narrative going. I eventually gave up.

After being told earlier that collarbone fractures almost never require surgery, I was now told in no uncertain terms that I would need surgery. They scheduled a followup appointment for a week later, and surgery would follow a few days after that. They told me since the bone was so displaced, I would probably get a titanium plate and screws put in. Images of terminator-dom danced through my head. I asked if I would eventually need this plate and screws removed. They said "if it ends up bothering you down the road you can elect to have it removed, but it's usually not necessary."

So, I was going to have a titanium plate in my collarbone for the rest of my life.

Finally, some good news.

To be continued...

Chasing Chase (Haha I'm So Clever)

2014-08-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

People like to complain about banks. For awhile, I was not one of those people. Banks were a necessarily evil that I was only marginally involved with. They gave me a place to conveniently park my money, but it was never enough for them to do irresponsible things with, and I never took advantage of any of their rewards programs or credit cards or refinancing etc. They left me alone and I left them alone, so I didn't feel complicit in their shenanigans during the subprime mortgage crisis. But now, I've got something to fucking complain about, so I'm going to do it here.

The target is Chase Bank.

http://outgoingsignals.com/

For years I used Chase since their banks were literally on every other street corner in the greater New York City area. Convenience is a big part of who I choose, so if it turns out a small bank helps out the little guy and funds oversees entrepreneurs, great! But if I have to travel more than a mile or so to visit a branch/ATM, and I can't take nifty pictures of checks and have them get deposited from my couch, then fuck it I'm not choosing them, and if that makes me an asshole then so be it.

During my recent move, it came to my attention that Chase had no branches in the Nashville area. This would be a problem, so I made plans to find a new bank. This didn't bother me, because again, convenience is key, not any sort of brand loyalty. Ideally, I could've withdrawn all funds and closed the account in person before leaving, but I still had a direct deposit check coming through from my last days at work, and would need to square some bills in the coming weeks, and sending money directly via chase quickpay was the easiest way to do that. I figured it wouldn't be a problem to just close the account over the phone in the coming months. In retrospect I am the dumbest person on the earth.

Weeks passed, my funds dwindled since I was still using my debit card in Nashville, but then the time came to close the account, and for them to send me the not insignificant amount left in my checking account. I thought about having them wire it to my new account, but that would cost money, and I could stand to wait a couple of weeks for them to send the check in the mail. My security deposit from my Brooklyn apartment would keep me afloat for some time anyway. So I checked chase's website for details on how to close my account. Not easy to find as it turns out! Some deep digging led me to a "close account request form" that looked promising, but it seemed like something I'd have to deliver in person, which was impossible. So I begrudgingly called customer service and gave them the scoop.

"Hi I need to close my account and have my remaining funds sent to my new address please."

"Ok, well I can close your account, but I can't send the money to a different address afterwards."

"Ok, can youuuuu change my address, and then close my account?"

"No, address changes take 3-5 business days to reflect on the account."

"Ok, well I have this close account request form, and there's a space where I can specify where my remaining funds are sent, can I just scan that and email it to someone?"

"Sure, but you actually have to send that via regular mail."

*sigh* "Ok, where do I send it?

*agent gives me the address*

"Ok I'll put it in the mail today, thanks!"

Sure, it seemed a silly roundabout way to close my account, but whatever, I'll wait however long it takes.

A couple weeks passed and I noticed that while I could still log on to online banking, my accounts had apparently been closed, so hey, it worked! Now to just wait for the check...except it never came!

3 weeks after my initial call, I called back and explained the situation again.

"Hi, I closed my account by mailing this form to some place in Texas, and my accounts appear to have been closed, but I never got anything in the mail."

"Ok, I see you called on the 7th, so yes you definitely should have received something by now!"

"YES I AGREE."

"Ok, I can put a research out on this, and they'll put a stop payment on the check, wherever it is, and I'll have them send you a new one."

"Ok, remember, send it to my NEW address. This is the address I put on your form, but someone apparently ignored it, or it got lost in the mail or something."

"Yes yes, ok what's your new address?"

*give my address*

"Ok, thank you."

"Read that back to me please."

*reads it back correctly*

"Ok thanks. Now when can I expect this?"

"The research will take 3-5 business days, and then you'll get the check within 7-10 business days."

"Uh...was hoping to get it before the first of the month. That's why I called weeks ago. I didn't do anything wrong, and pretty soon I'll have to pay bills. Any way I can get it faster than that?"

"Uh uhh *struggling to pull head out from ass* 3-5 and 7-10 is the maximum, it will most likely come sooner than that!"

*sigh* "Ok, well I'm still not happy, but as long as I eventually get it I guess that's all I can do."

So despite having basically 0 headaches for years, apparently as soon as I needed anything beyond "withdraw/deposit money" several bureaucratic hoops were presented for me to gracefully jump through. The way I see it, there should be 3 steps.

1. Call and make request to close account and have funds mailed.

2. Prove that I am me, and not an impostor.

3. Get account closed, and have funds mailed.

But I guess their internal procedure includes a million little in-between steps performed by people with minimal training/reading competency, with no repercussions in the event they fuck something up.

So, 5 business days passed, then 10 more. This is the maximum amount of time (it will most likely come sooner than that!! HA HA) and I checked the mail. Nothing. He read my address back to me. I told him exactly what I needed, and where to send it. He seemed to understand. What the FUCK was the problem? This was such a simple request! Surely I am not the first to close an account and have funds mailed somewhere else! What part of this process was confusing to the people handling it?

I've worked phone customer service before, so I try to be patient with these people, but after waiting for over a month, and having my budget stretched extremely thin through no fault of my own, my patience was gone. At this point, my first paycheck from my new job was only a few days away, so there was no more sense of urgency, although that money would've been really nice to have to hold me over!!

I had periodically been logging into online banking to see if there was anything worth noting, and hadn't seen anything, but after the 15 business day window, I logged back on to see if maybe I could attack their customer service from another angle. But what's this? An alert, that they had mailed me something, and it had been returned to them? Oh look, they mailed it to my BROOKLYN ADDRESS. Despite me putting my Tennessee address on the form. Despite giving the guy on the phone my Tennessee address, and being explicit about the fact that I had moved, and to confirm he had my address correct. Nope, they STILL tried Brooklyn. I must've been talking to this guy:

So despite my accounts being closed, I was able to change my address to my new one online (if I had done that weeks ago, would this have all been avoided?) I then sent a message detailing this whole fiasco, while heroically STILL managing to avoid swearing. Multiple times throughout the message I gave them my Tennessee address, and mentioned that I. HAD. MOVED. And to please let me know what I could possibly do to get through to somebody that all I needed was my remaining balance mailed to me.

I received a reply the next day, basically telling me exactly what the guy on the phone had told me before. Since that had gotten me nowhere, I replied immediately, saying "that action was already taken with no result. Can you confirm you have my new address, and can you confirm you will call me or email me?" I got another reply the next day, confirming they have started research on this issue and will get back to me. Their reply did not confirm my new address. Their reply did not confirm my email. Only that "they would contact me as soon as they can." It has been 4 days and still nothing.

Time to start keeping my money under the fucking mattress.

Drumming: The Early Years

2013-12-15T07:36:00.003-08:00

What goes through the head of an eight year old? That was a long time ago for me, so I can't remember a whole lot besides hot dogs, but one important thing I can tell you is that it was when I first became captivated by the drums. I also think eight years old is about the age when your dreams start the slow transition away from "some sort of laser space hero" to more attainable pursuits.

Now, I suppose I can't speak for everyone when I say that. It's possible some people entertained the idea of being a space marine well into high school or college, but for me, I was ever the skeptical one. Perhaps when I pitched my pie in the sky career aspirations to adults before this age, I saw the slight wincing. The patronizing gazes. I heard the dulcet tones hidden beneath their encouragement. "Yeah you can be an astronaut!" They'd say, failing to add "even though they will only accept perfect human specimens and you threw up from the tilt-a-whirl so maybe try something else."

So one day, I was sitting on the porch at my camp listening to some music, when someone put on "Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin. My ears perked up.

IS HOW AT WHAT MUSIC WHAT

"This fucking...somethings!!!" I thought. Later I would find out the word is "rocks". Before this time, I guess music had never really grabbed me. Maybe because it had always been something that was just on in the background. Or maybe attentively listening to music was on that long list of things that your parents did, and you were told "you'll do it too someday!" and you nodded while actually thinking "no that's something old people do, and I'll never be old, so..." Or maybe it was because I was fucking eight.

Whoever put on that Led Zeppelin album has no idea how much they changed my life. The guitars were all SQUEEEELAAAA and the vocals were all HRRMMAAADEEERRROOO but what REALLY got me was the BEAT. So POWERFUL. It hit me on a truly primal level. I'm not sure if it was a chance mix of circumstances that led to that event, or if it was bound to happen because it was just coded in my DNA or what. But that's when I made my decision. Drums for me! Nothing else for my whole life thanks!

--

So I'm dreaming of drums all the time at this point, just scheming how I could possibly get my hands on some. I knew it was more complicated than

Me: GIMME A DRUMSET.
Parents: Ok.

So I had to bide my time. What opportunities did I have to play? Let's see..I know! My second cousin had a drum set! He was several years older, and I heard he was super good. So, how to make this guy my new best friend and use him for his shit? Well luckily it never came to that, because I heard he would be bringing his equipment to our upcoming family reunion!!! The drums were so close I could TASTE THEM. They tasted like WOOD AND METAL SCREWS.

--

So there we were at the family reunion in a giant field by my Dad's cousin's house. The field was full of tents, a giant fire pit, and a small stage with the mighty drum set. I knew about five of the probably ten million people there. How many first cousins do you have reader? A few? More than ten? Well my Dad has about forty. FORTY. And they were mostly all there. And they all had kids. And they all brought friends.

So I was a shy kid, and I didn't really have the fortitude to stroll up to my older cousin amongst the hubub and say "Hi can I play your drums?" So what I'd do is walk near my parents and say something like "wow, look at those drums! Sure wish I could play 'em!" My parents were well aware of my percussive desires, and of my shyness, so they got the hint that they were gonna have to pull some strings. I distinctly remember my dad asking my cousin if he wouldn't mind letting me play the drums, while I was close by all fucking

And my cousin said something like "sure."

HOORAY

So now I just had to wait til the drums were available.

Well, I think the theme of this family reunion must've been "let's never stop playing music ever" so I had very few opportunities to actually try my hand. It was like sitting at a shitty concert with the promise of pie after the band is done, except the band never finishes and you start to convince yourself you don't like pie that much and you should just fucking leave.

When suddenly BAM! Opportunity! YES! But what's this? Who the fuck are you? This stupid little fat blonde kid hopped up onto the drums and just started smacking the shit out of them. I had never seen this kid before in my life but I knew immediately that I hated him. HOW LONG HAD YOU BEEN WAITING HUH FUCKFACE?! And he Just. Kept. Playing. He couldn't even play beats. He was just hitting random shit with the endurance of some sort of titanous beast. I stewed in my anger, along with several other kids that wanted him to shut the fuck up, when finally some other kid intervened. "Hey man, you've been playing forever, it's my turn." The stupid little fat kid said "NO! I need to JAM!"

Well so did WE. How about we START by jamming the sticks UP YOUR ASS. I wasn't sure if I was related to him, but I hoped not cause I'd be ashamed to share the same blood as this stupid pile of dog shit.

I think several other kids lost their gumption and just let this kid have at it for awhile, but I was determined to wait. Finally the kid left the seat.

Because the family was getting up to play some MORE MUSIC God DAMMIT.

So I waited and waited and waited some more, when finally my opportunity came. I found myself at the seat. Sticks in hand. Feet on pedals. Behind the instrument of my dreams. And..

Nothing.

Man, how the fuck do you play this thing?

This was hard.

I'd spent so much time lusting after this fine instrument, and hadn't really given a thought to what I'd do when I actually had the chance to play it. Sure the guitar was a mystery, the piano was a mystery, and horns and reed instruments were a mystery, but they all combined strange finger dexterity and knowledge of tones. But the drums? It looked like all you had to do was hit shit and coolness would just happen. But my every attempt to hit any of these drums resulted in a truly impotent bellow of insignificance. Also I don't think my feet touched the pedals.

My dreams were crushed. Did I cry? Probably. I had watched my cousin and various other mystery relatives play this thing with ease. What, I actually needed to PRACTICE? Pffffff. So fine. No shortcuts for me. What other choice did I have? Hmm, school percussion!

My brother had joined band the previous year, only he played a lame instrument, like the lameophone or something. I knew if I wanted to cultivate a knowledge of drums and percussion, the school music program would be a smart way to go.

Just one problem though. At this point I was 9, and I obviously wasn't the only nine year old that wanted to be a drummer, and to prevent a band comprised of one flute, three trumpets and eighty drummers, there was a stipulation. To join percussion, you need to have taken at least two years of piano lessons.

Fantastic.

Woulda been nice if they'd told us this shit when I was seven. I had of course taken zero years of piano lessons, and wondered how I was going to overcome this hurdle. Luckily my parents talked to the band director, who graciously made an exception, with the caveat that I start piano lessons now, and take them in tandem with music lessons through the school. I would later hear from the band director the conversation went something like this:

Band Director: To play percussion you need at least two years of piano under your belt.
Parents: Well, he hasn't taken any lessons, but he really wants to play drums.
Band Director: I know, a lot of kids want to play drums, but without the piano lessons, we can't do it.
Parents: You don't understand. He really wants to play drums.

I like to imagine my parents subtly sharpening a knife during that last bit.

So the band director relented, and I was in! And it was BOORRRINNNGG!! First, drums are loud and expensive and my parents sure as fuck weren't gonna drop hundreds of dollars on something I'd get sick of, so I'd have to struggle through years of piano and percussion lessons before having a drum set of my own.

Second, percussion lessons in school were very much not drums. It was all orchestra bells and practice pads. Orchestra bells look like this:

And if you're wondering how the general populace felt about this instrument, here is a 100% real transcription of a conversation I had with two guys at my bus stop:

Guy one: What are those?
Me: Bells.
Guy two: You play the bells?
Me: Yes.
Guy one: Bells are stupid!
Guy two: Bells are boring!

So there's that.

Practice pads look like this:

If you're struggling to figure out exactly what you're looking at, just imagine a drum, minus everything fun. Using these helped us get our chops up, without the noise. The noise was like 90% of the reason I chose drums in the first place, so this was a fucking travesty. The fact that I put up with this shit for years shows you just how badly I needed to play drums to be happy with my life.

I was only so patient, and I think my parents sensed that, because a couple years after I started playing percussion, I got my very own snare drum. There was still no "full drum set" yet, but I at least got part of the real thing. The only thing was, when you hear a snare drum on a recording, you're hearing an amplified, EQ adjusted snare hit. When you play one of those babies in real life you get weird ass overtones and rings and buzzes and echoes. I was disenchanted, but persevered, figuring all I had to do to achieve that idealized sound was to buy a one million dollar snare drum at some point in the future. I'd already been patient, so what's a few extra years or decades? Incidentally, I later discovered you just needed quality drumheads, proper tuning and muffling pads.

A bit after the snare drum years, I became aware that Junior high Jazz Band was a thing. Ahh Junior high Jazz..let's take some of the most stylistically complicated music there is, and hear it played by a bunch of shitty kids. Gotta start somewhere though, so I stayed after school and got to fiddle around a bit a couple times a week. By now I was coordinated enough to play simple beats, though not well. There was also the problem of the other drummer.

He was better than me, because he had already been playing for a couple years at this point. This did wonders for my confidence, as any smidgen of improvement I felt I'd made was quickly overshadowed by his superior skill set. So I was relegated to conga drums, or what everyone else liked to call the bongos. Because to most people every hand drum is a fucking bongo drum.

CONGAS. NOT BONGOS.

I think the band director saw me deflate when I got my new assignment, so he was very supportive and talked up the congas like they were some sort of backbone of the band. I think he even played a couple of tunes with congas in them for me. I feigned enthusiasm, cause I understood he was just trying to make me feel better about sucking, but really the congas were just a way to say "I've heard you play drums, and I think you'd be better suited to play far fewer of them. Also we're going to take away your sticks." But dammit I played the fuck out of those things to the point where my joints ached from slamming them incredibly hard with virtually zero proper technique. Still pretty sure nobody heard me.

But it's ok. Soon I would get a drum set all my own.

To be continued.

3 Random Memories

2013-11-12T18:43:00.002-08:00

The other day a couple of random memories popped into my head. I suppose they are the type of memories that stick because when they happened, the experiences felt profound, even if in retrospect they seem trivial. For each memory I'm guessing I was between 4 and 6 years old. Now I'm going to fucking tell you all about them.

1. "It's No, Thank You."

A lot of the circumstances were foggy, but I'll try to set the stage. I was at my Uncle's house, and I guess it was some sort of family gathering. My Uncle was moving a lot at the time, so that gave us all the excuse to go "check out the new place" a few times over the years. Incidentally, even though the place kept changing, it always smelled the same.

There we were, lots of people milling about, eating and drinking etc.. and I'm fucking off like 5ish year olds are wont to do. I was a super picky eater, and I guess everyone somehow caught wind of that and felt they had a responsibility to correct this issue. As a result, people kept coming up to me saying something like "HEY WOULD YOU LIKE AN ORANGE?" And no, I didn't want an orange. They were gross and stringy and not pizza so I said "No" because you know, the answer was no. My Uncle overheard one of these interactions and suddenly became the rudeness police and somewhat firmly informed me "Matthew, when someone offers you something you don't want, you say 'no, thank you.'" I thought to myself "ok sure whatever that's two more words than is necessary but I'll nod in acknowledgement that you conveyed this information to me." I tossed out this new information pretty much immediately because as I just illustrated, what the hell were those two extra words for? It seemed syntactically uneconomical.

See, maybe if he'd said "being terse with someone like that can be construed as rude" (phrased for a 5ish year old of course) it would have made more sense at the time, but since all I was told was "It's no, thank you" I had to make a choice between adopting this new way of life on faith, or rejecting it outright. I of course, rejected it. Even at the tender age of 5ish, I had some ingrained problem with authority and wasn't about to alter my vocabulary. Not for him.

I think he suspected this may have been the case, because not long after his lesson, he tested me. He came up to me and offered me something he knew I wouldn't like. It may have even been another orange. It still wasn't pizza, so I reflexively said "no" again, quickly realizing my error. See, I had no plans assimilate "no, thank you" but still should've had the wherewithal to at least pretend I had if I was talking to him. The funny thing though, is he wasn't even smug about my slip-up. He wasn't condescending or demeaning. He was purely interested in me learning this polite gesture to make the world a better place, so his failure hurt that much more, and he got pretty upset. Upset enough for me to think "whoa, this guy is fucking serious." He held my arm, the universal gesture for "I would hit you if I could" and made me realize in no uncertain terms that it's fucking "No, thank you."

Pretty sure I still checked with my parents after though. They said "yeah, that's the more polite way to do it." Even without the ironclad conviction of my Uncle, this was enough for me to start using the phrase, since my parents were basically king and queen of the world at this point.

All these years later I can't even imagine how snotty it must sound for even a 5ish year old to dismissively say "no" so I'm glad I learned when I did. I hope I didn't raise too many eyebrows before that valuable lesson.

2. "HOW CAN YOU TELL PEOPLE APART?!"
Same age. Which is good, because if I was much older you'd probably think "wow he was a dumb kid." I mean I was, but you'd think "no this kid was really dumb."

So I'm not exactly sure what triggered this concern, but I remember thinking "wait just a god damn minute...we all have eyes, mouths, noses, ears...how can we tell people apart?!?"

No, seriously. I thought this.

I honestly could not fathom how, despite having all the same things on our head, we were able to tell people apart. I thought it must be a combination of height, hairstyle/color weight, etc.. because obviously a nose is a nose and eyes are eyes just like a circle is a circle and a square is a square. This couldn't be enough information to distinguish people from one another right?

This is the part where you may pause and think "nope, I definitely never thought that."

A lot of times when you're perplexed as a small child, what do you do? You ask your parents. But with this one, I didn't. There was apparently some evolutionary process firing in my brain that made me think "No man, not this time. Keep this one to yourself." Something told me this should NOT be a mystery to me and if I asked my parents they'd probably think something was wrong and then "accidentally" leave me at a gas station miles away or something and that would be that.

I don't know how long this inner turmoil fermented in my brain, but I do remember when it stopped. I was sitting in the living room. My parents had an impressive vinyl collection, and one of the albums that had been pulled from the shelves at the time was a Beatles album. Looking back at the album art, it must've been "Hard Day's Night". I was looking at all of their monochromatic faces and I thought to myself, "Wow, Ringo's eyes are a way different shape than John's.....wait a minute..."

Shapes...

Different...

DIFFERENT SHAPES!!

The elimination of color and texture from their faces was enough of a reduction to give me that eureka moment. I was so disproportionately proud of myself. I almost told my parents about my discovery. I would stroll in and be like "Hey Mom and Dad, so I was thinking the other day about why we can tell each other apart. I thought we all have the same things on our faces so it should be impossible right?" Here I would pause to smugly chuckle and add "luckily I'm really smart and I figured out how our facial features, though similar, are different shapes for different people, so, you know.."

But I thought even that would be pushing my luck. Best to just celebrate this one quietly and move on.

3. The Day I Smacked my Dad in the Face
This one is really fuzzy. I must've been really young. The fact that the memory is still with me speaks to how intense the experience must've been.

We were at the library. My parents were good parents, so we would frequent this place for everything it had to offer. At this point since I couldn't read, that was basically puppet shows, magic shows, and I guess looking at picture books. This day in particular my Dad brought me and my brother. I mean, I assume my brother was there I'm not sure. Whatever happened, it must've been super fun, but I don't really remember anything before...the incident. I only remember the moment where everything changed.

My Dad gathered us up, only I didn't want to leave, cause you know, libraries are gangster as fuck. I had no concept of "time" or "jobs" or "responsibility" or "other people" really so to me what reason did we have to leave? I was having fun, so fucking wait til I'm ready to leave, and then we can go. If I'm still having fun, what sense did it make to cut it off? So I evaded my Dad, who grew increasingly frustrated. Eventually he had to just pick me up and haul my ass out of there. I didn't like that very much, but couldn't exactly fight back. Or could I?

No...

Could I?

*SMACK*

.........Uh oh..

I can't quite tell you exactly what happened after that. I'm not sure if it's cause I blacked out or what. What I do remember...is silence. I remember no backlash. No reprimanding. No shouting. Only silence. This was strange and unfamiliar. I think I had braced myself for..something, so when it didn't come, I felt the psychological equivalent of stepping down that last stair when there are no more stairs and the floor greets your foot sooner than you expected and your equilibrium is jostled for a bit.

The leaves outside rustled in the breeze.

Life had now been divided into "Time before I smacked my Dad's face" and "Time after I smacked my Dad's face"

I wandered around confused in this state of condemned nothingness. I knew something bad had happened and the fact that there were no immediate repercussions must only have meant my Dad was plotting. Plotting what though?

We got home and my dad went to another room. There was no gathering where I was sat down and scolded. I was left to stew in my own guilt a little longer. Eventually my Mom approached me.

"Did you do something bad?"

"Did you?"

I must've been clearly struggling with my guilt. I was told to walk into my parents' room and...

Apologize.

I was on fucking edge. I never went in my parents' room. Especially with nobody escorting me. Now I needed to walk in there alone like a fucking man and tell my Dad I was sorry for hitting him. I quietly entered. He sat on the bed, facing away from me. Dammit I didn't even have his attention yet. I had to earn it. I don't remember the exact exchange but it was probably something like,

"Daddy?"

"Yes?"

"......I'm sorry"

This didn't need to be creative or heartfelt. This was clearly driven almost entirely by fear and shame. But I was forgiven. I exited, shaken.

I have not hit him since.

Being the Skinny Guy

2013-08-31T14:41:00.002-07:00

I'm pretty sure the heaviest I've ever been was back in 2008. I was on vacation, staying at a friend's grandparents' house after hitchhiking with him across hundreds of miles in a few days. Needless to say, we were hungry. His Grandparents were very kind, rarely letting a few hours pass without saying "HEY! EAT! EAATTTTT!"

EAAATTTTT!!!!!

I weighed myself after a week of eating prodigious amounts of food, during which I exercised an unremarkable amount (none). I tipped the scales at just above 160 pounds, but I think I was wearing boots.

THE EARLY YEARS
When I was young, not only was I very skinny, I was very short. I remember being in first or second grade, and we were measuring everybody's height for some reason. I was the shortest in the class! I remember thinking, "What does this mean, is this good?" I guess at that age nobody really cared, and hey I was the most something-est! Then a few years later, in fifth grade or so, I started noticing that I was still shorter than basically everyone. But no matter, we started learning about puberty and all the wonderful height and weight gain it entailed, so naturally I assumed I'd get tall and fill out just like everybody else. Except I didn't!

Pretty soon, everyone my age started to think "ok, let's develop into actual humans now" and I was left in the dust. I actually remember the moment I started thinking my shortness was really becoming a problem. There was an assembly at school one day, so the whole class crowded into the auditorium. At one point I was walking right in front of the girl I had a crush on, and she STEPPED ON ME BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T SEE ME BECAUSE I WAS SO SHORT.

Haha, no but actually I had tiny legs and I guess I was moving too slow, because she yelled "move it short kid!" to the delight of her friends. A crushing moment for me to be sure. But, I wasn't doomed to be a modest pillar of ineffectiveness forever. I'd have to get taller at some point right?

End of 9th grade. Hooray! By then I had shot up to about my current height, "tall-ish". So what if it was years later than everyone else? But a problem remained. I was still about the same weight. I had merely stretched.

I was in denial for awhile. "I'm not that skinny" I thought to myself, somehow ignoring the fact that basically everybody my height seemed to weigh about 30 pounds more than me. I would look at someone that looked "skinny" to me, and then covertly compare something like forearm width and notice I always came up short. Eventually I thought, "Okay, enough of this shit, it's time to start working out." So in high school, I started going to the gym. The only thing was, I wasn't aware that to actually bulk up, you needed to lift more weight fewer times, and eat a fuckload. I didn't exactly eat a balanced diet, and my strategy involved lifting not very heavy shit the wrong amount of times, so despite a steady increase in the amount I could lift, I looked basically the same, whilst going from "able to beat 1% of the world in armwrestling" to "able to beat 2% of the world in armwrestling." I even remember senior year, thinking that although I was still pretty skinny, I'd put on a small amount of weight and was more normal sized, until one day after cross country practice, it was really hot, so I took my shirt off, and one of the guys on the team remarked "wow, I think you're about the skinniest person I know." Annnd defeat.

So you might be wondering. What are the advantages and disadvantages to being the skinny kid?

Advantages:

Because I carry less weight, it's easier to lift myself, so I can appear tougher than I am if someone asks me to do chinups or pushups or something, which is basically never.

If I ever forget how many ribs I have I can just look down and count cause they're fucking right there.

I can fit into small spaces. Crowded train? No problem. I can usually wedge in there. Only a tiny bit of space to sit on the bench on the subway? Also no problem. I can usually squeeze in, although I've noticed some plus sized people are entirely undeterred by the fact that they have no business trying to squeeze into a space previously occupied, snugly, by someone 1/5th of their size.

The ability to turn sideways and become completely undetectable.

Dressing up like a skeleton for halloween is way more realistic.

I only need a modest sized umbrella.

MUCH more stamina while masturbating.

I'm much more aerodynamic when flying through the air horizontally. This hasn't really been helpful to me yet but I'm thinking it will at some point.

Riding a large dog isn't totally out of the question.

If they ever run out of medium sized shirts, I can usually fit into a small shirt too, and hey maybe I'll even opt for that anyway cause it's less fabric and I can help save the earth.

Getting drunk is way cheaper.

If you ever need someone with skinny arms to reach into a gopher hole to pull out your wedding ring, I'm your man.

I metabolize caffeine awfully quickly, so though I might not have a caffeine buzz for as long, the amount of time I do have it is fucking legendary.

The ability to spring up a flight of stairs with the grace of a forest nymph.

Disadvantages:

Having to constantly field the question "How do you stay so thin?!" when someone observes me eating the one unhealthy snack or large meal I've eaten that week.

If I ever break the law and a cop tries to grab my wrist and says "come with me!" he'll be unprepared for just how thin my wrist is, and it will startle him, giving me a chance to get away. Hmm, I should be a felon.

A stiff breeze will frequently blow me into oncoming traffic.

If anyone asks me to lift a car off their baby, I'll probably only be able to lift if halfway and then I'll drop it again and oh god I've just made everything worse.

If I ever stumble into a protruding object, my bony frame offers absolutely no padding, and instead of a slight *thud* the impact will create a resounding *THWACK* which will draw all sorts of unwanted attention.

Every time I carry something remotely heavy looking, people panic and shout "OH GOD DO YOU NEED HELP?" No it's fine I just tripped over the ruffle in the carpet a bit, my body isn't collapsing beneath me.

If I ever have a bad day, I'd love to take out my aggression by "axe tossing" or "boulder rearranging" but it's just not realistic.

I get nervous if someone hands me too many helium balloons.

The only time I'm ever not the smallest person at the gym is if someone couldn't find a babysitter.

If I ever go skydiving above a forest and my chute fails to open, instead of the branches violently but slowly breaking my fall, my narrow frame will probably slip right through the branches and I'll slam into the ground.

If I turn on a powerful hose I fucking go flying all over the place.

SERIOUS TIME.

I'd say being skinny when I was younger may have caused a bit of insecurity to bleed into my later adolescent life for awhile, but overall I feel fine about it now. And why shouldn't I? Basically, nobody cares. I don't think I've got any deep psychological scarring from it, and besides, literally everyone has their hangups about how they look, and coming to terms with how you look becomes easier once you realize that.

Oh god I sound like the end of an episode of Family Matters.

Have a good day everyone.

What an Asshole.

2013-07-29T18:36:00.000-07:00

Here is another chapter in the "things I've told some of you but will now flesh out for all the internet to see." This is a tale of a huge asshole.

It began last weekend, when after a couple days of rehearsing with the band, I needed to hop back on a Metro North train from New Haven, CT to take me home to Brooklyn. I had taken this trip several times before, and it's usually pretty uneventful. This time would be different! DUMDUMDUM...

I arrived at the train station at about 6pm. I checked the schedule and saw the next train to Grand Central was at 6:27 on track 14. A slight wait, but no big deal. I headed through the tunnel, and up to track 14, whereupon I saw a train pulling into the station. "Awesome!" I thought, because although sometimes you get lucky like this, a lot of times the train doesn't arrive until a couple minutes before departure, so you're stuck standing on the platform for awhile in cold, or dark, or in this case heat. So yay! Now I could sit in an air conditioned car while I waited to leave.

The train pulled in, paused for a beat, and then let all the passengers off. I like to sit near the front, so as I was moving up the platform, I did the awkward "try to walk past someone and pick the same side as them multiple times" dance at least 3 times before just standing the fuck still and waiting for the hordes to pass me by. Once the train was empty and the platform clear, I headed the rest of the way up towards the front, and hopped into the second car. As I strolled through the empty car to find my seat, the doors closed. "Hmm, weird" I thought. Then the doors opened back up. Was this to invite me back onto the platform? I paused, and listened for someone on the intercom to say "please step off the train", but didn't hear anything so I assumed the doors were staying open. It wasn't that long before departure I guess, so it made sense that they'd just let people board as they arrived. I walked up to the very front car, and had a seat. The doors closed again. Hmm. I remembered how sometimes the crew does this thing where they'll only open the cars in the middle, so I assumed because I'd gotten on the train fairly early that's what they were doing. The middle doors were probably still open. Secretly though, I was nervous that maybe all the doors were closed, and this train was going to leave. Maybe it had to pull onto a maintenance track, after having barely arrived in one piece. Maybe it was actually a different train that was slated to arrive a bit later that would actually be taking on passengers. But no! Nonsense! I thought. Nobody told me to get off. Every time I've ever stayed on a train when I wasn't supposed to, someone has made it very clear very quickly to get the hell off. That didn't didn't happen, and the train remained on the tracks for several more minutes, so I figured I was good to go. It was about 20 minutes to departure at this point, so I just pulled out my book and started reading, basking in the temporary capaciousness.

I was a bit startled when the door opened up and a gentleman appeared. He locked the door behind him with a special key, so apparently he was the conductor or some other crew member. He walked to the front into the little conductor room, pulled a few switches or whatever it is these guys do, and walked back into the aisle, carrying himself with a bit of a surly disposition. I'm sitting maybe fifteen feet away from him, and despite him turning vaguely in my direction at some points, he didn't acknowledge me. I assumed he would and figured "good, if I shouldn't be here, he'll let me know." Sure enough, he spotted me with a very slight, but noticeable lurch to his step. His face was a mix of surprise, and angst, like he was about to drop trow and start jerking off or something, and he was imagining what would've happened if he'd gone through with his plan before he saw me. After staring at me like I was an alien for a bit, here is how our conversation went as closely as I can recall:

Him: They let you stay on the train?
Me: No, I'm actually on the next train out.
Him: And they let you stay on?
Me: ...No..I just got on.
Him: Oh..well you aren't supposed to be on the train if the conductor isn't on the train.
Me: Oh sorry, I just got on when everyone else got off, and nobody said anything.

I looked at him expectantly. He said nothing. I think he had planned for his time in this car to be alone time. So since he was probably reluctant to even start a conversation, he certainly felt no obligation to end it with any sort of closure. A few seconds passed, and I shrugged.

And he went about his business. I watched him rhythmically move about the cabin with the poise of a man that had done this before and had only recently become aware that he was awfully tired of doing it. He made his adjustments to whatever, taking these big pieces of metal off the wall, fastening them back into place, and I wondered why he'd bothered to remove them in the first place. It was fairly silent, aside from his jingling keys, and his audible breathing. I took a moment to replay the conversation in my head, feeling vaguely unsettled by the way it ended. I scanned for incendiary undertones. Eh, he was a paltry fellow that seemed incapable of subterfuge.

Anyway, the fact that he called what I was doing "staying on" suggested that this was indeed the next train out, and it wouldn't be pulling out of the station to be switched with the actual train or anything like that. If they had had plans to do that, surely he would've told me. I figured he must've realized me getting on the train early was an accident, and since this was the train that was going to be leaving anyway, no sense kicking me off. Besides, he was apparently one of the train crew, and now that he was on the train, I wasn't technically "on the train without the conductor" anymore was I? So I went back to reading my book. It was approaching 10 minutes before departure, and many passengers were accumulating out on the platform. I was surprised they hadn't let them on yet, and decided to crouch down in my seat a bit, lest they spot me and make a fuss.

And then, the guy left the train. Hmm, guess he wasn't the conductor? Oh well, surely the real one would be arriving soon.

Suddenly with just over 5 minutes to departure, my worst fear came true. I watched all of the passengers on the platform do an abrupt about face and walk to the other side. FUCK! They switched tracks on me! But WHY? There was a perfectly good train sitting on track 14! Just like the sign had said! "Oh well, guess I'll get off the train. There must be some button you can push to override the doors or something!"

Nope!

I was puzzled. I looked around for that mysterious train crew guy, but he was nowhere in sight. I walked to the other train doors. All equally closed. I walked to the next car. Although they were also just as closed, they felt extra closed, like the rubber was being squeezed to it's limit. Feeling perplexed and a bit agitated since the real train was LEAVING IN 5 MINUTES, I hit the "emergency intercom" button to get someone to open the doors.

The instructions read: Push button, and wait for solid red light, then speak. Good, those instructions are easy to follow even while panicking! So I pushed the button and it blinked red. I guess when it turns solid, someone has acknowledged the call. Here's my impression of that stupid button:

BLINKBLINKBLINKBLINKBLINKBLINKBLINKBLINK INFINITY.

I hung around long enough to be fairly confident that nobody was there to answer my distress call and that I would probably die alone on this train car. So I'm thinking "FUCK I'M TRAPPED FOREVER!" And I started darting between cars as fast as I could, because the faster you panic, the better your chances of escape. All the doors were still closed. Also, in these particular trains, every 3 cars or so, the doors between the cars go from small sliding doors, to big ass locked doors, which is what I was now met with. So I ran back and hit a different emergency intercom button because I dunno maybe they were wired to different speakers or some shit. I was kind of running out of options. BLINKBLINKBLINK with no answer AGAIN. My head started spinning. They were probably slowly sucking oxygen out of this train car too.

I thought about dialing 411 and getting the phone number for union station, but the clock was ticking and I didn't have time to navigate a stupid automated phone system, especially in my current adrenalized state, so I walked up to the glass on the doors, and started banging on them. Passengers walking up the platform would hopefully spot me, and get someone to let me out. Pretty quickly someone did spot me. I mouthed the words "HELP?!" as if I needed to say anything. Obviously I was on the wrong train, and needed to get off. The girl looked at me kind of puzzled, and sheepishly pointed ahead of her, probably wondering if she had just aided the possible escape of a serial killer. So I ran up to the next car, thinking maybe someone had opened a door up there. Well they were all still closed, but there was the train crew guy! PHEW. I got behind the door closest to him and banged on the glass. He looked up at me while on his phone, and although I couldn't hear him, he distinctly mouthed these words:

"That's your problem now."

Now I've been angry in my life before, very much so in fact in this story, but usually the anger is at a combination of things, or circumstances. Never have I felt such rage directed at such a singular thing: This Fucking Asshole.

After I shook off the shock of his douchiness, I snapped back into action. He strolled away from me on the platform, but I would not be ignored. I followed him. I went to the next car, and pounded on the glass there. He kept walking. I followed again, and pounded again. He turned back in the other direction. I doubled back, and pounded the glass even HARDER. I wanted him to remember these pounds for the rest of his life. My hand still hurts from it. I was ready to break the fucking glass and deflect the inevitable punishment onto this guy since if he'd let me out like a decent person, I never would've had to break the glass. Despite my pounding and pounding, he continued to ignore me. Maybe he couldn't hear me through the several layers of dumb that surrounded his brain.

So I reflected. Dozens of thoughts clustered into my head in a matter of seconds and I'm gonna do my best to string that cluster out into a coherent thread.

First, this had to end one way or another, and when it did, how would I ruin this man?

Second, did I deserve this somehow? Should I really have known better? When those doors first closed, and then opened back up, should I have known that meant "get out?" Maybe. But the combined lack of announcement to exit, the fact that I was on the train on track 14 that was said to be leaving soon, and the train crew guy not telling me to get off, I think despite maybe thinking I had bent the rules a bit, staying on the train wasn't unreasonable.

And third, what was this guy's problem?! For him to trap me on this train, knowing full well he had the capability to let me out, means I must've done something to really piss him off. But during our brief conversation, he may have seemed a bit miffed, but I'd assumed that was because he hated his life or something. He didn't snap at me, didn't seem all that angry, and I stress once again, he did not tell me to get off the train. So why the total 180? Did I do something that didn't sit right with him, and after ruminating for a bit, only then did he realize how angry he was with me? What did I say? Just a few basic sentences that fairly clearly laid out how I ended up on the train, and then I sat there reading my book. Nothing objectively assholish about that I don't think. Did I make a face without realizing it? Did he not like my tone? My posture? No. I hadn't done anything wrong. Maybe this went deeper.

Maybe when I got on the train early, and got my pick of whatever seat I wanted before anyone else, he realized I'd cheated the system. Perhaps watching me do so brought on a flood of painful memories for him. He simultaneously remembered all of the times in his life he'd ever waited in line while other people got better seats than him. Dozens and dozens of bus stations. Train stations. Airports. Always getting the shitty seat. Maybe that's why he ended up working as a train crew member. Now he would always have a seat to himself on the train. But then I showed up, and despite having not payed my dues, having not gone to train school(?), and not working my way up the corporate ladder, I'd found a way to get a seat all to myself. The fact that I had found this shortcut made him furious. This workaround that had always been so elusive to him, and I had found it so easily. He thought of all his failures in life. I became the personal embodiment of anyone that had ever wronged him. He needed justice, so he trapped me on the train, with only minutes before departure. I would watch all the passengers climb in, the doors would close a mere fifteen feet from me, and I would watch it pull away, trapped behind the glass of the train that was not to be.

So I yelled. I knew nobody was listening, and it was clear that these doors were quite soundproof. So I yelled and yelled and pounded the glass more and more. He continued to ignore me and ignore me and ignore me. I became a caged beast, reduced to only my primal urges. I took one final stroll to the front car of the train and threw my arms up in defeat. It was 6:25. The doors of the other train would be closing very soon. I put my hands on my hips, eyes wide, breaths heavy and deliberate. I was starting to fantasize about the terrible ways I would make this man's life terribly inconvenient for awhile. I turned..

And the guy was inside the train, one car up. He was going to let me out!? I guess he had the tiniest shred of decency in him, and realized "holy shit if I actually let the train leave without this guy I'm a much much much bigger asshole than I imagined him to be." After all, what if I had something extremely important to go to? For all he knew I was meeting someone in the hospital!

I made eye contact with him, and he made a douchey face while yelling something. I was behind 2 soundproof doors, so obviously I couldn't hear him. I made a probably equally douchey face while making a flailing hand gesture that tried to communicate "I can't hear you idiot". I walked through the doors to the next car as he was in the middle of his shouty lesson:

MAYBE NOW YOU'LL DO WHAT YOU'RE TOLD!! MAYBE NOW WHEN SOMEONE SAYS NOT TO GET ON THE TRAIN YOU'LL--

But I was in no fucking mood. I stopped him right there. Foul language ahead:

NOBODY TOLD ME ANYTHING YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE. YOU DIDN'T TELL ME TO GET OFF THE FUCKING TRAIN. FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT.

I'm amazed I didn't try to break his face. I felt pretty self-righteous for a bit, thinking "what gives him the right to trap someone on the train like that? Who is HE to teach someone a lesson about proper rules of the train this way, when I didn't even realize I was breaking them? Nobody told me not to get on the train, and when he had a chance to inform me of the error politely, and ask me to leave the train,he did not." Instead he assumed I got on the train early to piss him off and took it personally. He made me think, up until the very last minute, that I would miss my train. How long had he planned this? Was he alerted via some secret earpiece (that he probably felt all smug about having) that the train was switching, and that's why he got off the train? Did he have a chance to warn me at that point and instead took it upon himself to enforce the rules in the very worst possible way?

He continued his rant with NO! YOU WAS TOLD NOT TO GET ON THE TRAIN BLAH BLAH BLAH I'M A GIANT DUMBASS, and saying some more of the wrongest of things that are wronger than wrong. Why was he saying I was told that? Didn't he remember not telling me that? Didn't I tell him nobody said anything? Didn't he remember talking with me, letting me sit there for several minutes as he went about his business? Would I just sit there like that if he'd told me to get off the train? I briskly walked across the platform into the thankfully still open doors of the correct train. The doors closed fairly soon afterwards, and I gave the guy the finger all the way out of the station.

People I ended up sitting near probably overheard a bit of the conversation, and I got a few perplexed looks, but I didn't share the story with anyone. I was too busy fuming. I was literally shaking with rage. It took me half the train ride to calm back down.

And then occurred a brilliant display of the universe balancing itself back out.

Nobody came to collect my ticket. The tickets are good in either direction for two months, and I will certainly use the ticket soon.

I rode the train for free that day.

Man, fuck that guy.

Rocked on a Mountain in Maine

2013-06-25T19:49:00.000-07:00

Our band wanted to do something big.

What's something people will notice? What's something we can do that takes planning, but not a ton of money? One day Nick thought "I know, let's shoot a music video on top of a really fucking tall mountain!"

Perfect.

We were going to need some help.

Friends of the band lept at the opportunity to help us out with this monumental endeavor. Our friend Kate actually had a camp nearby that we could stay at the night before too. WHAT AMAZING LUCK. I don't think any of us realized just how out of the way this camp was, but more on that later..

So the expedition started with me joining Nick and Mesa in Connecticut on Thursday night June 14th, where we planned to discuss the final logistics involved in organizing the trip (read: drink). We would get up the next morning and drive the approximately one million miles to Kate's camp, stopping a few places along the way to gather food, supplies, people, and to distract ourselves from how much this was probably going to suck.

Pit stop #1: Topsham
Nick's Mom's house, about 4 hours into the drive. We needed a break, and were going to meet up with some more of the crew, Tyler, Dan and Ryan. This is when we realized two things. One, "Wait just a god damned minute, how are we going to sync the audio from the track with the video we planned to shoot?" And two, "What if there's no parking at the mountain?"

For the first solution, we needed to acquire a battery powered stereo or iPod dock. We all owned those things, but nobody had them at their disposal. Lucky for us though, my parents had a sweet boom box, and we could swing by to grab it.

I know most people don't call them boom boxes anymore, but this was a fucking boom box.

Also possibly from the future.

All we needed were batteries and we would blast forth our tunage from the highest point in Maine. Fortunately, this device didn't run on car batteries like you might expect. However, it did need eight D batteries. Perfect. It wasn't heavy enough.

We would all slowly learn to hate this boom box. And by slowly, I mean quickly.

The second solution was to call ahead and reserve parking spaces. The route we had intended to take is highlighted in green below. Up the Chimney Pond trail, up Saddle to Baxter Peak, across the Knife Edge, and down Helon Taylor.

So we called to reserve parking by the Chimney Pond entrance. Here's the lady on the other line:

It turns out the only available spots left were at the Katahdin Stream campground, by the Hunt trail.

WELP.

Ok no worries, we are a flexible bunch! We agreed we would persevere despite any bumps in the road. Hunt trail it was. This was happening.

Seriously though, fuck.

Pit Stop #2: Waterville

My parents house to pick up the aforementioned boom box. We also got some girl scout cookies that my Mom had lying around.

Pit Stop #3: Milford

Shaun's place, where him and the rest of the crew, Bill, Smey, and Francis would join. I think the original plan was to get there at a reasonable hour, and head up to Millinocket fairly quickly where we'd all go to Hannaford and grab food for the next day's hike. Well, that didn't happen. People were held up variously, and we decided to hit the Hannaford in Orono instead. I don't know about anybody else's shopping trip, but my thought process in the grocery store basically amounted to this:

What foods can I eat that will make up for my almost total lack of physical preparation?

I ride my bike a decent amount and did a few sets of squats in the weeks before, but I wasn't really in hiking shape because you know...I didn't want to overtrain... So I, and everyone else, were all trying to load up on carb-heavy and energy-dense foods to stave off any hospital visits. Fruit smoothies, granola bars, cliff bars, bananas, etc..

We got our groceries, and it was about 7PM at that point. Kate's camp was 2 more hours away but didn't have an address that was really on the map, or easy to navigate to, so we were going to meet at a little store close to her camp instead of the Millinocket Hannaford, then make the final leg of the trip before eating and then packing it in for the night.

The highway north of Orono Maine is about as desolate as a highway can get. There is just nothing but trees and fields for miles and miles. Not even close to as isolated as we'd get though.

Pit Stop#4: Kate's Cabin

The closest store to the camp was the Abol Campground and General Store. Getting there was an expedition in itself. We couldn't just use GPS. We had to look up the directions ahead of time, save that shit, and hope to hell it's wasn't confusing once we got there, because GPS satellites are a fairly tale in those forsaken fucking boondocks.

Here's how the trip to the general store went as far as I can remember:

Arrive in Millinocket
Drive to the outskirts of town.
Take a quick turn onto a fire road, and then onto the Golden Road.
"Hey we must be close! The store and camp are on the Golden Road!"
Drive a few miles on pavement.
Keep going onto a dirt road.
"Oh the road has turned to dirt! Not long now!"
Road turns back into pavement.
Back into dirt.
Back into pavement.
"What the fuck?"
Drive over the most pothole-laden road on the whole earth.
Night falls.
Pull into the store parking lot where we'd all probably get murdered by wild forest people.

As middle of nowhere as this place was, the scenery (when it was still light out) was absolutely beautiful. The sun was setting, shining its last light onto the mountain, and it was so secluded and quiet and just amazing.

So, this store was the agreed meeting spot, only Kate and two more of her friends, Matt and Alan weren't there. Hmm. Well nobody had cell service, so we had to just assume they'd be there shortly. We waited. Forty long minutes passed, and we started to worry a bit. We tried to think of backup plans that weren't horrible, (pitch a tent in the woods somewhere? Try to find the cabin ourselves?) but we couldn't. Then we thought through the possible scenarios that would explain our friends' absence. Either we had somehow gotten the meeting spot wrong, they had gotten into some sort of accident, or they were making us wait, because we were assholes and this was payback for us taking our sweet ass time getting there.

Several cars drove by us over these forty minutes. Each time we figured this HAD to be Kate, cause who the fuck else would be driving by this secluded-ass closed store at this time of night? Apparently a lot of people, and they all had trucks. Luckily none of them tried to murder us.

At this point Nick and me decided to break the number one rule of horror movies, and split off from the rest of the group. Maybe there was another entrance to this campground a mile or so down the road? Or if they had gotten in an accident, maybe we'd come across them? About a mile down the road another car passed us coming from the other direction. It wasn't a truck, so we figured it must be Kate. We kept driving just in case though, and just as we were about to turn around, we saw a moose.

FINALLY!

It ran across the road, into the woods, and then cause it's a moose, and is dumb as hell, it ran back into the road, and then along the road. GOOD WAY TO NOT GET HIT MOOSE. REAL SMART.

So anyway, we turned around, and sure enough, the car that had passed us was Kate. They had gotten a flat tire, but were back in business, and now it was time to head to the camp. Phew, they weren't dead.

As secluded as we were, the camp was still several miles away. We drove and drove, knowing that if any of us got hurt, this is how much farther the ambulance would have to drive. The scenery had changed from breathtaking to just dark and scary. This road had already claimed one tire, how long before it claimed another? We didn't even have a spare tire. HEY LET'S NOT THINK ABOUT THAT THOUGH RIGHT? HAHA GOOD TIMES OK WOOHOO!!

Eventually, we arrived at the turn to the camp! Hooray! And you know, why would the driveway be any longer than a hundred feet or so? There's already absolutely nothing out here. We assumed that Kate's family wouldn't want to bushwhack through hundreds of yards of forest any more than we would want to drive through it.

Wrong. Again.

This road looked more like an ATV trail. And it stretched for quite a ways into the woods. Much farther than any of us thought was necessary. But we finally pulled up and realized it wasn't this far in so nobody would hear our screams, it was to be close to a lake.

Oooh, pretty.

This place was the definition of serene. I kind of wish we had gotten there before it was dark.

So we made a fire, grilled, packed on the calories for the next day's hike, and all acted in a way that suggested we didn't fully understand the scope of what was to come. I, and several others, had hiked Katahdin before, so I thought I knew what I was in for. Nope.

We went to bed at around midnight. Hell, we only would've gotten a full night's sleep if we'd gone to bed at about the time we'd left Milford, so FUCK IT.

The Big Day
Up at 4:15. Yes, AM. We needed an early start because we still had to pack all of our stuff, and then backtrack through pothole land and several more miles to get to the gate before 7:00, as our parking spots would be forfeited at 7:05.

Seriously look at these potholes.

After some more grand prix racing, thirteen of us rolled up in four cars to the gas station right outside the road that leads to the park entrance. We had stopped because one of the cars was almost out of gas. But the gas station was closed. The park entrance was several miles away still, so we had to split up again. We couldn't risk forfeiting the parking spots, so we had to just hope they'd find gas somewhere, and make it back in time. This was the second instance of waiting nervously.

Then, just before 7:00, they rolled in. Phew again.

Time to gear up!

It's Mountain Time Motherfucker.
We made sure our bags were all properly packed, and divvied up the instruments.

Maybe I hadn't yet made that clear. On top of all of our normal hiking equipment, we also had to carry the following:

Guitar
Keyboard
Snare drum and stand.
Hi Hat and stand.
Floor tom.
Kick pedal.
American flag (because 'Merica)
Stupid fucking Boom Box.

Here we all are, fairly early in the hike. You can see by the looks on our faces it was starting to sink in how much carrying this shit was going to totally blow.

After a little while, we got to the first signpost that told us the summit was only 4.1 miles away, which really doesn't seem that far until you realize it totally is.

We were still in high spirits though. Carrying that shit was tiring, but not totally exhausting yet. We would all soon get our second wind. We were all munching away on energy food, staying hydrated and keeping positive. Here are some of us a bit higher up.

OH HI MR. SUN!

See? We were still feeling good. Good thing too, because we were probably less than a quarter of the way through the whole hike.

Below the tree line, there were a few points of intense steepness, and a few more lookout spots. It was a pretty intense to climb extremely high, hop up onto a lookout point, look at all the surrounding peaks that stretched waaay above us on all sides, and realize that the summit we were headed to was much much taller than all of them. One of these lookout spots included a dazzling rendition of "A Whole New World" complete with backing vocals, harmonies, and key changes. If anyone has video of this, please let me know. I think the world needs to see it.

Above the tree line, it started getting STEEP and WINDY. We could no longer just haul the extra equipment up on our shoulders. We had to strategically hand pieces up to each other assembly line style while scrambling up and over huge boulders. Hauling equipment up a mountain takes quite a bit more energy than not hauling equipment up a mountain.

Good thing we were tough as hell.

We got to a popular rest spot with no incline, and took a break. Time for some ab-rolling sandwich eating.

Definitely the only person that's ever done this.

After we were somewhat recharged, we hauled our asses up another steep incline to the great plateau.

This:

To this:

Plateau-y as fuck.

This seemed like a good spot to film, so we recorded a run through of our song, "Our Way" WHICH I CAN'T SHOW YOU CAUSE I DON'T WANT TO RUIN THE SURPRISE.

After that, we had only one final ascent to the summit. At this point, hikers that weren't fucking around had already made it to the summit, and were on their way back down.

Earlier on in the hike, these people that saw our equipment thought we were totally insane, (and they had a point) but now that we were close to the summit, they didn't want to be discouraging, so they all had very positive things to say to us. I think we heard the exact phrase, "Looks like we're missing the party!" probably about 100 times. But you know what? They were RIGHT. We told everyone our band name, and told them to look for the video in the coming weeks. I'd say probably about 1% of those people have actually remembered our band name.

During this final ascent, we were starting to feel some pretty ill effects. My hip started to hurt with just about every step, and other people were starting to get cases of rubber-legs. Remember that boom box?

If E.T. was a boom box.

This isn't that heavy, until you carry it up a mountain. It's also the world's most awkward shape, so anyone cursed with the burden of carrying it at any point during the hike felt like doing this:

Not long now though. This would all be worth it.

BAM. Summit.
We celebrated. We ate. We drank (water). We rejoiced. Now it was time to do what we came to do. Make a fucking music video:

Just a preview...

And eat bacon.

Spectators were in awe. Who were these crazy bastards that hauled these instruments up a mountain? Here's an actual conversation I had.

"Holy shit! You brought instruments up here?! How did you get them up here?!"

"We carried them."

You see? They knew "we carried them" was the only logical answer, but they asked anyway because some part of them refused to believe that anybody would be that crazy and/or stupid.

And this is exactly the reaction we wanted. We can only hope some of these people remember who we are, and are intrigued enough to look for us later.

After this was our attempt at making a five hour energy commercial. See, Nick had purchased over a dozen of these to be handed out at the summit, the idea being that we could all chug them together on camera and get an endorsement from them or something. Well, it was so fucking windy there was no possible way to hear anything, but we kind of got some shaky footage of us all drinking these more or less at the same time from a distance. Somehow I don't think five hour energy is gonna go for it though. But hey, five hours of energy. That's about how long it will take to climb back down! Perfect!

But in all seriousness, this was the culmination of a colossal effort that I never thought we'd actually achieve. I knew this was our goal, and I knew it's what all the effort was for, but I still can't believe we pulled it off, and I still can't believe the support of all the people that helped us along the way. It was truly a once in a lifetime experience. Thank you to everyone involved.

YEAAAHHHHH!!!

Also thank you to Kate, Matt, and Alan for hosting us the night before. They didn't feel like hiking the mountain at our slow ass pace, and had slowly broken off from our group. They probably didn't want to be associated with our hijinks since it wasn't totally guaranteed that we wouldn't end up arrested. I don't blame them. We caught them on their way back down as we were making our way up that final ascent, and said our thank yous and goodbyes. But hey, they too were missing the party.

So after getting all the footage, eating some bacon, and some more rejoicing, we'd noticed that by then, basically everyone else had cleared off the summit, so it was time to pack up and go. We had originally planned to go across the Knife Edge, but that was out of the question now, unless we went down a different way, and hitchhiked the several miles to the other parking lot. Plus it was windy, and the Knife Edge is pretty dangerous in the wind. Oh, and what's this?

Hmm, that's getting fairly close.

Fuck.

We were in for some weather. Eh, a little rain never hurt anyone though huh?! We went back the way we came, stopped at the plateau, and took one more break, all while hoping we'd get lucky, and just maybe the storm would circumvent us. That would be super helpful, because the exhaustion really started to set in at this point, and keeping spirits up became more difficult.

Then it started hailing into our faces.

The storm did not circumvent us. At all. It came at us full force. Although we didn't want to get rained on, we had mentally prepared for that possibility as we watched the storm ominously approaching. Well, it didn't rain! Instead, it started hailing sideways at us, and a humble cheerlessness settled on us all.

We now had to hike down this:

While it hailed on us. While still carrying our equipment.

Feeling exhausted, wet, and miserable.

I know Nick...I know...

But we trudged on ahead. Everyone was now fighting their own battle against the mountain. Going at our own pace was key, so at this point, the groups started to separate. The focus and determination needed to keep going took all the energy we had, so interacting with each other became less and less frequent, so as to not expend energy needlessly.

I hiked on ahead, wanting to get this over with as quickly as I could. Boy were those cascading rocks endless. Every time I felt I had made major progress, the next turn came, and I looked down onto the still remaining miles of nearly vertical wilderness.

Like I said, I had hiked Katahdin before, but not this trail, and I wasn't carrying a fucking drum before. IT MADE A BIG DIFFERENCE. I had to maneuver back over the boulders, set the drum down, cautiously slide down a rock, get my footing, turn back around, hoist the drum back onto my shoulder, go about one step, and do it all again.

Over..

and over..

and OVER.

While it continued to hail into my face.

And none of us had any choice. We had all reached our breaking point, but had to move onward. I kept looking at the vast expanse of wet slippery stupid boulders in front of me, and felt exhaustion and defeat like never before. The last thing I wanted to do was anything, but we all had to do what amounted to hundreds of squats on slippery rocks with dead legs, and I cannot stress this enough, WHILE IT WAS HAILING ON OUR FACES.

--

Other times in my life when I've felt exhausted, I've always had a choice. Any sort of workout I had done that involved extreme exertion always had an out. If I really needed to, I could have opted out. I could have stopped running, biking, swimming, lifting, whatever. But not today. I had to bring this drum down this mountain. There was no way around it, and it was a very jarring realization. My legs trembled violently with every step, and I still had miles to go.

After what felt like forever, I found one of the lookout spots we had stopped at on the way up, so I shimmied up it and sat for a bit. The hail finally stopped, and the sun even peeked out a few times. I just sat there, reflecting, feeling the faintest sense of completion on the horizon. I thought about Tyler and Dan carrying the boom box, and how much it must have totally sucked to be them.

The end was almost in sight. Just two more miles. I waited for everyone else to catch up to this lookout point. I discovered that Nick had broken his guitar, and that although they had tried to keep the boom box sheltered, it had gotten wet, and probably didn't work anymore. We later confirmed after it totally dried out that no, it did not work. Our worst fear came true.

We carried it back down the mountain for nothing.

There were a few twisted ankles. Everyone was wet and exhausted. Behind every laugh was a glimmer of hopelessness, as if to say "It's hard to enjoy laughter, knowing this may be the last time I ever do it."

We recharged as much as we possibly could, and then set off again, quickly splitting up into our respective groups once more. Here I am closing in on the last mile carrying a big wet drum:

I dare you to find any happiness in this picture.

Every step was the most exhausted I'd ever felt. I had to talk to myself to get through it, knowing that each step I took brought me closer to victory. I felt like I had walked three miles since the two mile point, and I hadn't even gotten to the one mile marker. My brain was starting to turn to mush. No room for rational thought or spatial awareness. My body was eating itself. My entire being had boiled down to "one foot in front of the other, and don't drop this fucking drum."

With about a mile left, I was alone again. There were more frequent spots with little elevation change, and although I couldn't walk normally, I managed to awkwardly bound through these spots fairly quickly without collapsing.

The feeling I got when the trees opened up to the campground by the parking lot is one I will not soon forget. I felt like a fucking hero even though I had completed what countless people do on a daily basis. But they weren't carrying drums were they?!

It was about 7:30 when I rolled in, several minutes behind the first group. Yup, that's a solid twelve hours of being on that mountain. The bugs were pretty fucking terrible at the bottom, so Shaun and I figured we hop into Nick's car while we waited, only it was locked. Oh look, no worries, the sun roof is open! I climbed into the car through the sun roof to unlock the door for Shaun.

CAR ALARM.

Oops.

My thought process:

Hmm, this alarm isn't going to stop is it?... I wonder how far behind Nick is?...Wow, people at this campground probably don't like this at all...

The honking went on for several minutes until we decided to pop the hood and just rustle around and pull some fuses until it stopped. Most of the fuses didn't come out, and the ones that did come out didn't make it stop. But then, suddenly, it stopped on its own. WHEW. I was at the end of my rope and didn't want to deal with that shit.

So we squashed into Dan's car, and waited for the rest of the gang to show up. They came in about fifteen minutes apart each. We were all delirious, communicating through mostly mumbles and grunts. About an hour passed, and we had one final member of our crew that was still on the trail. He was accompanying an older fellow too, making sure he didn't get lost. It got a bit nerve racking at the end, but at about 8:45, Francis rolled in and we all cheered quietly to ourselves, since we had no energy for anything else. We unceremoniously said our goodbyes, again, too exhausted for anything else, and drove out of the park. And now began the journey home.

Driving Home
As soon as we got in the car, our main priority was to not be in the car anymore. We were eager to get to Mesa's parents' house, where we'd recuperate, and then head home the next day. Well, things don't always work out.

I fell asleep almost instantly. Even when I wasn't asleep, I wasn't fully awake, until we got to an intersection, with a sign that none of us recognized. The only landmark on the sign that was remotely close was the ranger station to the left. Everything else was something ridiculous like fifty miles away. The ranger station must be where we came in! So we turned left, and were met with a dead end. There was another truck parked on this road, (who the fuck knows why, but thank god) and we asked him for directions. In the world's best Maine accent he replied

"Ayuh, yah go upta that stawp sign, take a right, and yah gonna go seventeen miles."

Seventeen miles. On dirt roads. Speed limit 20mph. So almost another hour. Just to get out of the park.

All three of us did well to not communicate to the other two how utterly fucking destroyed this news made us feel, but a silence hung briefly after we heard the number "seventeen". I wanted to meekly reply, "..are you sure?" But this dude was Mainah as hell. He looked like one of those guys that can tell you exactly what time it is by looking at the sun, or tell you where the closest moose is by sniffing the air. He knew exactly where he fucking was.

On a normal day, having to go an extra thirty four miles would make you snap your fingers and say "shucks!" but on this day, we had nothing left. It felt like he said "Ayuh, upta the stawp sign, take a right, and drive LITERALLY FOREVER."

Again, we had no choice but to go back. I drifted in and out again, but I remember coming to once we drove past the entrance to the parking lot we'd left from. Ahh, not long now. I fell back asleep.

Suddenly I awoke to screaming, violent jostling and then SMASH.

I snapped into a confused primal alertness. My senses came back. Nick is yelling, "is everyone ok??!" Thankfully, everyone is. What the fuck happened? Did we hit a pothole? A deer? A moose? A tree?

Apparently we had skidded off the road on one of the sharp turns and crashed into a rock, crunching the front end, smashing the windshield, and causing the airbags to explode out. I only became fully awake after it was all over, and I was in the back seat, so I didn't experience the full brunt of the terror, only the aftermath of the car being sideways at about a forty five degree angle as it filled with the strange smell of deployed airbags. Still awfully scary. We gathered our wits, and thought maybe despite the damage we could at least drive the car off the rock and to a garage, and then go from there, but it was stuck. We managed to crawl out of the car and tried to push, but it was totally pinned. There was such a huge rush of adrenaline, that we couldn't even feel exhaustion or creeping soreness anymore.

So what now?

We were stranded in the middle of a dirt road in Baxter State Park, in the dark, miles from anyone, and even more miles from a phone. Good thing our friends were behind us.

Bill, Smey, Shaun, and Francis were in the car behind us, and had also taken the wrong turn out of the parking lot. We had passed them after turning around, so we knew they couldn't have been far behind. A short time passed, and sure enough, they arrived. They saw the destruction and I can only imagine how they felt, since they didn't get the surge of adrenaline. They suddenly had to deal with this in a more exhausted state than we were in. Luckily, everyone remained level headed. Miraculously Mesa's phone got one bar of service just in time for her Mom to call. What are the odds? She had time to discuss what had happened, and that everyone was ok, but that we'd be a bit late to say the least. Then the service dropped out again.

So the plan became this: Mesa would hop in the other car with those four and go get help, while Nick and I would stay at the scene of the accident and wait for the help to arrive. They were going to presumably find the closest phone and try to call a tow truck or the police or whoever would be able to help. Off they went, and Nick and I had no idea how long they would be. The closest store was that gas station I mentioned before, but that was definitely closed now.

So we hopped back into the severely tilted car, knowing that there was nothing we could do but wait.

The surge of adrenaline had mostly worn off at this point. The exhaustion crept back in, and we tried to just sleep in the car until help arrived.

I don't know how many of you have ever tried to sleep in a car in the woods at a forty five degree angle after a car accident after hiking ten miles, but it wasn't exactly easy. I sat in silence for a bit, my head spinning a million different directions at once. The anxiety of thinking about how totally isolated we were, and how difficult it was going to be to just wait for at least an hour, (almost certainly more), while we sat in a busted car on the side of a dirt road, along with the exhaustion of the day, along with the sudden recollection of all the terrible horror movies I've ever seen, was totally overwhelming for a brief period. I said to Nick at one point. "This is making me anxious as fuck. I'm never going to be able to sleep." And Nick said "Well, it's the only thing we can do right now." And I knew that, but after hearing him say it, I guess I was able to fully resign myself to that fact, chill the fuck out, and drift off. But then the cars started coming.

I didn't think there would've been so much traffic on such an secluded area at this time of night, but over the course of our wait, four separate cars drove past us. You gotta love the good nature in people though, because every one of them stopped. I would've loved to get some sleep instead of having to repeatedly hop out of the car (which took some effort I might add) and explain to everyone that yes, we had an accident, but we were all ok, and help was on the way. After about an hour and a half, the fourth car drove up, and I started my little speech. But then, about halfway through explaining the situation, another car pulled up behind them. It was Bill, Smey, and Shaun. Hooray! I told the fourth good samaritan that we were taken care of, and thanked them for stopping.

Apparently a few miles outside the road leading to the park entrance, the gang had found a little inn with a phone. The owner was very accommodating, and let Mesa use the phone all she needed. She called in a park ranger, who would come fill out an accident report, and explain how to move forward with the situation. Once this was settled, Bill, Smey, and Shaun came back for us.

We all headed back to the inn, talked with the park ranger, figured out what to do about the insurance and tow truck, and we arranged to have Mesa's Dad pick us up at whatever garage we got dropped at the next day. Bill, Smey, Shaun and Francis made sure we were all ok, and departed for Milford. (Thanks again guys!) The owner of the inn set us up with a couple of rooms for the night at a discount, reheated some soup and bread for us, which at that point was the most delicious fucking thing in all of the universe, and we were able to finally get some sleep.

What a day.

The Next Morning/Aftermath
We started with all that boring crap like calling triple A, and the insurance company. I hung back at the inn while Nick and Mesa visited the scene of the accident to get the car onto the tow truck. The driver allegedly looked at the car in its wrecked state and had this to say.

"Yah done good kid."

Then, apparently while pulling the car off the rock, the car rolled too far and smashed into the truck, busting the taillight. GOOD. PILE IT ON.

The tow truck arrived back in the inn to pick me up. According to Nick The conversation between him and the driver went like this:

Driver: Yuh ruhm widdya gon get ayuh wid gon upta yur?
Nick: *mumble mumble*
Driver: What?
Nick: What?
Together: Hahaha!
Driver: ...
Nick: ...

Etc..

When they pulled in, I noticed the driver was about as magnificently bearded as I expected, and we headed to the garage to wait for Mesa's Dad, who showed up fairly soon after, and hauled our destroyed selves back to Blue Hill.

This concluded one of those few times in one's life where you really have no idea what will happen next. Sure you never really know exactly what's going to happen, but usually you have at least a vague idea of what the immediate future holds. But to be wrestled away from that path was a valuable experience. Am I happy we got into a car accident and stranded? Fuck no. But we all worked it out and steadied ourselves within the next day or so, and to be reminded every once awhile that you're capable of that is important. It also helps to have friendly, helpful, loving people around. Thank you Schubecks for your hospitality.

The next day involved much much much stiffer legs/backs/everythings. The slight change in elevation between the kitchen and the living room was enough to make us pause and evaluate how best to go about it. The soreness lasted about a week, or what Shaun likes to call "Thigh Awareness Week." It's very unpleasant, but each step reminded me of our grand journey, so it wasn't all bad.

So we rented a car, and drove the one million miles back south. We unloaded the gear, and then I hopped on a train back home to Brooklyn to get not enough sleep for the next several days.

Memories achieved. Thanks again everyone.

--

Our Album is coming out within the next couple of weeks. Don't worry, you will all definitely know when it happens because we will be very irritating in our perseverance. The epic video to accompany the equally epic song "Our Way" will follow shortly after.

In the meantime, here is our first single:

http://bigcharliesrubberband.bandcamp.com/track/found-love

Stay tuned.

RIP Honda.
RIP Nick's Guitar.
RIP Boom Box.

Actually no, fuck you boom box.

Farewell Apartment

2013-06-08T14:58:00.002-07:00

Well, I have moved to a new place, and I wanted to say goodbye to the place I just moved out of. I'd like to say the apartment was good to me, but that would be a terrible awful lie.

You see, it all started last May, when due to a number of unforeseen circumstances, Spence and I had about 2 weeks to find a new place. We both thought "2 weeks? Sure! PLENTY of time!" And then after some deliberating, we realized that we were really stupid and worked opposite schedules and had basically more like 2 days to find a place.

How could we possibly find a decent place in such a short amount of time? Simple. We didn't.

We looked at a couple places in the couple days we had, with each of us going at separate times to check the places out. It was approaching the zero hour, and we had viewed a place that had been newly renovated and wasn't totally awful. It was close to a park and across from a school, so good enough!

When it comes to where you're going to live, "good enough" is not good enough, but we had no choice.

On most maps, our place was on the very southeast corner of crown heights, which as a whole isn't terrible. But you see, it basically bordered Brownsville. When everyone heard that we were a couple of blocks from Brownsville, they all immediately said something like "LOL YOU LIVE IN BROWNSVILLE!" Actually more like "..Oh god you live in Brownsville?" Well, not geographically, but socio-economically, basically yes, so I get it.

Oh! Have you not heard of Brownsville? Check out the wikipedia page. About halfway down, the page shows a couple of attractions, one of which being "a large vacant lot". Seriously.

Breathtaking.

Also, here is a direct quote from the wikipedia page:

Brownsville's 73rd police district reported the highest murder rate in the city in 2011, according to crime reports complied by DNAinfo.com. Brownsville has significantly higher dropout rates and incidents of violence in its schools.

Good thing we weren't going to school there!

We didn't live in the thick of this area, only just outside it. But before we moved in, we weren't really aware that we were living so close to an area with these..statistics.

But hey at least the apartment was nice! I did just say newly renovated right? Well yes and no..

This apartment boasted the following:

New cabinets, and countertops.

New...hmm actually I guess that was it. But still, the place looked good at a glance. A GLANCE. As with any apartment, there are always calamitous shortcomings lurking just below the surface. Here are a few:

The Bathroom
The first time I saw the shower I basically only noticed the shelf at one end which provided ample space for shampoo/soap etc.. and there was a window! BEST SHOWER EVER. Except god damn this awful awful shower. To start, the shower head came out of the SIDE of the fucking thing. What showerhead on earth comes out of the side instead of at the end? And there was no type of fancy plumbing fixture fastened to this pipe. It was just a stupid bare copper pipe of the variety you generally see on the ceilings of unfurnished basements. At the end of this pipe was the world's most boring shower head.

Stupid.

"But all of that is cosmetic!" You say. And too true, function over fashion. I just like to make fun of how stupid it looks. But wait! From this shower head cascaded the weakest water pressure I've ever experienced. It was horrible. It doubled the amount of time I needed to shower. There were no quick showers, unless you wanted to leave the bathroom still covered in fucking soap. Also, I'm a lazy son of a bitch in the morning, and I was not a fan of this extra few minutes I suddenly needed to get ready. Why didn't we just get a new shower head?

BECAUSE WE'RE STUPID I ALREADY SAID THAT.

On top of the terrible shower, one day someone from our building management company knocked on our door, asking to be let in to check our bathroom.

"Um no, our bathroom's fine thanks, buhbye!"

But it turns out, there was some convoluted situation going on. Something like a lady on the first floor had a leak, and to check out the source of it they needed to run water through pipes of the apartments above it. Now apparently there was also some crazy lady on the second floor that refused to let anyone inspect anything, and they had to go to court about it, and were eventually able to remove her from the premises for two days or something, so they had a very small window to check out her pipes, and needed our apartment to be available during that same small window.

STELLAR PLANNING YOU GUYS!!

I don't even know where to start when it comes to how poorly the management decided to execute this plan. But whatever, fill up our bathtub, let it drain and figure out what you need to figure out. And they did, but they weren't done!

They came back ANOTHER day and had to do this again! Tough shit, we had to leave. They were all "no but you don't understand!" I DON'T CARE, I HAD PLANS. Eventually we worked out a day they could come do what they needed to do. What about the crazy lady on the second floor? Wasn't it a huge ordeal to get her out of the place before? And now no mention of her? Pff, who knows. Probably a bullshit story to begin with. So, THIS time, they needed to bust some tiles in the bathroom to get to the pipes they needed to inspect. It wouldn't affect the water flow at all, it would just be a cosmetic issue that they promised they come back to fix in a few days. FINE JUST DO YOUR SHIT AND LEAVE. So smashy smash. They didn't come back to fix it in a few days though. We called them, and had to leave a message. More time passed. We called again, they said they'd come by to fix it that next week. They didn't. We called again, and again.

9 months. They never fixed it.

The Heat
Heat and hot water was included. I know that's a good thing, but there's a downside. We couldn't control the heat at all. "But that's not that bad!" You say. Well, it is if whatever or whoever does control the heat is totally FUCKED. I don't know what sort of mechanism/mystical heat goblin was in place, but in the dead of winter we would regularly have to have all of the windows open to counteract the blistering inferno that was our few meager heat pipes.

That's right, we didn't even have to hook up our radiators. The sheer power of these nondescript pipes in the corners of our rooms was enough to keep the entire apartment sweltering. This was actually kind of great after walking in from the cold, but only for about 8 minutes. It quickly became unbearable. We have an air conditioner, but it was WINTER. We refused to turn it on out of principle.

"But what's so bad about it being hot?" You say. Haha, stop saying things. But you're right hypothetical reader, to keep things in perspective, a lot of people can't control their heat, and usually this means they are freezing cold, and I recognize that our heating situation wasn't terrible. But what if say, the pipes screamed at you constantly?

YUP! The pressure release valves on these pipes apparently couldn't be closed all the way, and when the heated blasted on occasionally, several of the pipes emitted a nice high pitched whistling noise that came and went, interspersed with gurgling and sputtering. Why didn't we ask to get this fixed? Oh, you mean ask the same people that refused to get back to us regarding the giant hole in the side of our shower? Perfect!

The Total Lack of Anything to Do
Remember that we lived basically in Brownsville? Well that meant "no going out late at night". But what about the daytime? Maybe there were restaurants or bars (for early evening drinks!) or something?

Nope.

The Smell
We're dudes, and comparatively, dudes smell, I know. But this was something different. Our kitchen had a smell that I still can't identify. It was one of those smells that we could never locate the source of. It smelled a bit like gas, but not quite. Better get the gas checked! No, the guy that came by said there was no leak, plus our gas bill was normal, and the stove had a failsafe that would spark every once in awhile, so if there was a leak it would've flamed up. Maybe it was something else inside the stove? No, we tore that thing apart and cleaned the hell out of it, and nothing. The sink? Nope, cleaned the hell out of that too. Fridge? No, also clean. Any time we stuck our faces close to something to see if it got stronger, the smell would disappear. We would regularly take out the trash, and the smell would never get better or worse. It just lingered, and lingered and lingered. Not enough to make you totally grossed out, but enough to make you grimace slightly and furrow your brow every time you entered the kitchen. For months. What the fuck was it?!?!

Well who gives a shit now we don't live there anymore!

That's right. We don't live there anymore. We have moved to prospect park south, gotten a HUGE upgrade in square footage, and we are closer to better trains, and more food. We're close to the park, and have 10 times as many food options, be it grocery stores or restaurants.

We're slow as hell as far as unpacking goes, but we should be totally settled in soon. Expect a housewarming party to be announced shortly.

A Terrible Night I Recently Had

2013-04-05T19:25:00.003-07:00

Gather round folks, cause I need to vent a little bit.

It all started a few weeks or so ago, when I noticed the bottom buttons on my phone stopped working. This prevented my phone from being able to do things like "make calls" or "do anything". I know with android devices you can root them and customize them, and if I really wanted to, I could've worked around not having the functionality of those four buttons, but fuck that I was under warranty and also lazy so GIMME A NEW ONE.

I braced myself for awfulness, because despite how simple you expect it should be, it never seems to be as easy as:

Me: Hey my phone's broken.

Rep: Terribly sorry about that, we'll send you a new one!

*new one arrives a day later*

Me: Hey thanks, it works great!

Rep: You're welcome, can I interest you in some potpourri?

etc..

So in an effort to get a replacement phone, I sent a message to the cell phone company's customer service, telling them about my problem. I waited somberly.

A day later, I got a message saying "Hey did you try all this obvious shit that has never fixed anything ever?" I politely responded with something like "Yes, I turned it off, and back on, and it's still broken," expecting to go back and forth for days with someone that had no common sense, and who was probably reading from a script. But impressively, fairly shortly after my initial response, I guess whoever was in customer service was like "fuck it let's just skip steps 2 through 8 and just give this guy a new phone." And for that, I was very appreciative. They told me they would overnight me a new phone, with the stipulation that I return the broken one within 14 days. Wow! This was actually going great! Ha ha HAAAA!!

My first mistake was telling them to deliver it where I lived. Silly me right?! Their first attempt to deliver it was at around 12:30pm on a Tuesday. Because I was not one of the probably 8 people on earth that are normally home at that time, I did not receive it that day. I figured "hey, they'll probably try at a different time tomorrow and my roommate will probably be home if I'm not. The next day they tried to deliver at about 3:30pm, but my roommate's job was like "HEY EVERYONE LET'S HAVE A MEETING TODAY OF OUT FUCKING NOWHERE FOR SOME REASON!" So once again, despite him normally being home at 3:30, the fates would not allow delivery on this day either. Whatever, I'm sure the 3rd time's the charm right? Well, you are far too optimistic, anonymous reader.

So on the 3rd day, I returned home to see a delivery slip that shows they tried at about 1pm, and this was their final delivery attempt! RAAGE! But! The slip said they would hang onto it for 2 days at a holding center, and I could pick it up after 5pm if I brought the slip and a photo ID. I was ready for a bike ride, so I checked the website to make sure it was actually at the holding center before setting off. It said something vague like "it's on a truck" which is basically like saying "it exists." I refreshed the page endlessly until about 6:45 (so I guess not endlessly), and it finally said it had arrived at the holding center. Good thing I didn't just go "after 5 pm!" Unfortunately, this holding center was in the midst of East New York. Where is that? Let me show you a little map. I did not create this map, and although it's a little outdated, I think it basically tells you what you need to know:

See that "don't even think" portion? YUP! The holding center is located even farther south than that arrow is pointing. I don't mean to cast aspersions on East New York, but suffice it to say, I wasn't very excited about biking a couple miles into this area. Hey, but at least in waiting for the fedex website to update, it had gotten nice and dark!

So I ventured forth on my serendipitous journey. Surely vast and untold treasures awaited.

I hopped onto my bike and plunged into the darkness. Keep in mind, because my phone didn't really work, I could not rely on GPS to guide me. I had to resort to the antiquated employment of pen and paper.

"Instruct carriage driver to turn right at first cow path."

The ride itself was fairly uneventful, aside from riding past a fresh car accident, and the annoying discovery that this neighborhood didn't really see street signs as a necessity. See, I had written down which streets I needed to turn onto, but failed to include extra landmarks. You know like "turn onto main st, and if you reach smith st, you missed your turn." So I would ride for awhile, and then come upon what may have been my turn, only to notice that there was no sign indicating what street this was fucking ANYWHERE. I had to improv it a bit, taking a couple wrong turns, eventually figuring out which street I was on at the next intersection, and doubling back. Eventually I arrived at the fedex holding center. This is what it looked like:

Ok, maybe just what it felt like..

Once I got up to the counter, I showed the guy my slip, and a photo ID, you know, like it said, right on the slip. He asked "do you have a proof of address?" I said "well, no..the slip said I needed to bring just this, and a photo ID." He gave me a shitty look, like a shitty asshole, and with a shitty tone said "It's our policy to get proof of address for certain items as well." I tried to remain polite and said "Oh sorry, I didn't notice that, where does it say that I needed that? I would've brought some if I'd noticed." To be fair, he could probably tell I was being passive aggressive as fuck, and that my tone was only very minimally sheathing what I was thinking, namely "OH YEAH? SHOW ME WHERE IT SAYS THAT DIPSHIT." He paused, still with a shitty look and shittily said "I'm just telling you for future reference, so just remember to bring it next time. I'll release it to you this one time though." I wanted to launch into a tirade something along the lines of "Good! You fucking better! I brought exactly what your note told me to bring so don't fuck with me!" but figured that wouldn't help me get my package. He returned with my phone, still being all shitty, and I signed for it and left. In keeping with the night's events, more misfortune followed. The phone came in a box much bigger than was necessary, and I realized "hmm, I didn't bring a backpack, how am I going to carry this?" God I'm an idiot sometimes.

First I tried riding the bike with one hand, while balancing the box in the other. I rode about 4 feet before realizing this would most likely end in my death. So then I managed to awkwardly stuff the box into my coat, only it wouldn't really stay put unless I rode my bike like I imagine Quasimodo would. This was not ideal, but it would have to do.

And now began the journey back home.

I have a pretty bad sense of direction. If it's more than 3 turns, I'll probably get lost. Again, my phone didn't really work, so I had to read my written directions in reverse, but adjust a bit because I didn't want to bike the wrong way down narrow one way streets. Why didn't I write a second set of instructions for the way back, since I would need to find a slightly different return route? BECAUSE MY QUILL PEN RAN OUT OF INK. No, actually because...fuck you.

Anyway, I figured this wouldn't be too big of a deal, so I set forth, mostly relieved that my sojourn was almost over.

My inner monologue at this point was something like "LALA I DON'T CARE WHAT HAPPENS EVER I'M LEAVING THIS TERRIBLE PLACE LALALALA" and to make things even BETTER, at one of the intersections I happened to glance down, probably to avoid a legendary pothole, and found $5! No way right?! I crammed the $5 into my back pocket, pretty satisfied with my life up to this point, and even decided to bike the wrong way down a one way street! Who cares if I wasn't supposed to, I had a new phone and $5, so I was basically indestructible! I wondered what I would buy with my $5. Ice cream? Beer? Beer? I rode a few more blocks, but couldn't remember what street I was looking for next, so I grabbed my directions, confirmed my route, and then stuffed the directions back into the same back pocket with the $5. Only what's this? This pocket feels a bit empty..oh god no.

NO!

My keys! My keys were gone! I felt probably about as close to getting covered with diarrhea as you can get without actually being covered with diarrhea. I thought about what was on my keychain. Could I go without these keys? Maybe.. I had my 2 apartment keys, a mailbox key, a bike lock key, a drum key, and a practice room key. Most of those were replaceable. But oh, I also had a little tag on my keys with my address on them that I got when I first moved in, that I never bothered to remove. So great! If I didn't find my keys, some random asshole in one of the worst neighborhoods in brooklyn could stumble upon them, and know exactly which building they would unlock! Awesome!!!!

Sleep tight!

I figured I had dropped my keys when I found that $5. The lord giveth, and the lord taketh away indeed. So after a few minutes of going over my options, I resigned myself to the fact that basically I had 2. Go back and look for my keys, or don't. The good thing was, if anyone felt like giving me shit, I was on a bike, and they would have to be a really determined crazy person to catch up with me. I liked my chances, and biked back into the depths of human dissatisfaction.

Of course now, I was all turned around. One state of mind that is very much not conducive to good memory is "violent rage" which is basically what I was feeling. I started to play out the possible end to the night's events in my head, willing to subject myself to the possibility of utter despair as long as there was an equal chance of jubilation. I biked back to where I thought I had found the $5, only to think "wait, is this actually where I found the $5?" Apparently my lust for riches had blinded me to my surroundings, and I could no longer remember at which intersection I had discovered my fortune. So now I had to bike around the whole neighborhood, GPS-less, angry, and growing more and more upset by the minute that chancing upon this $5 had sparked this most unfortunate chain of events. After looking at a couple spots I thought might've been where I'd lost the keys, and failing to find them, I threw up my arms in exasperation. I decided to bike almost all the way back to the fedex holding center, and retrace my route entirely.

This was perfect, because I wanted to bike around this neighborhood as long as possible.

The whole search was basically uneventful, which was good and bad. Good, because it meant I didn't get mugged or anything, and bad, because it also meant that I never found my keys. I had been over every intersection multiple times, and figured that either someone had already picked up my keys, they had fallen into a sewer drain, or I just hadn't spotted them. If I just hadn't spotted them, then I never would, because I couldn't spend the entire night searching. I frustratedly biked all the way back home, buzzed back into the apartment, vented, and drank copious amounts of alcohol. But at least now I could activate my new phone!

Here's how the activation process went.

Me: Ok it says here to just turn the phone on and follow the steps. Ok, *turns on*. Ok, looks like it's connecting to the network.

Phone: No!

Me: Ok, hmm, it's not connecting to the network. Guess I'll try again.

Phone: No!

Me: Dammit, something's wrong. OF COURSE. *cancel*. Guess I'll just call customer service with this phone to see what I need to do. Usually they'll allow you to at least call that number.

Phone: No!

Me: ...it won't even call customer service?! Ok, I guess I'll take this apart, put the battery back in my old phone, and try on that one.

Other Phone: No!

Me: WHAT? THIS PHONE ISN'T WORKING EITHER?!?! Spence, can I borrow your phone?

Spence: Sure.

Me: *Dials customer service*

Rep: Hi thank you for calling your customer service center, my name is whatever, and I'm just so happy to be taking your call right now, I would love to assist you with whatever problem you are having, but first, I would like to..

Me: SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO MY PROBLEM.

Rep: ...

Me: My old phone broke, so you folks mailed me a new one, and it's not activating properly.

Rep: LOL DID YOU TRY TURNING IT ON.

Me: ...DON'T FUCK WITH ME.

Rep: Ok, let me look at your records here *beep boop boop* OH! It looks like we forgot to do the thingy that we needed to do to make the new phone work! Let me just press a few buttons here, *beep boop boop*....There! Ok, try again, it should work normally!

Me: *sigh*...ok thank you!

Rep: LOL YOU'RE SO WELCOME THANK YOU FOR CALLING THE CUSTOMER SERVICE CENTER WITH YOUR ISSUES, I'M GLAD WE WERE ABLE TO ASSIST, PLEASE CALL US BACK WITH ANY OF YOUR ISSUES! IF YOU--

Me: *click*..ok, let's try this again.

Phone: No!

Me: !#%(*#^$@

Phone: ....wait....ok.

Me: AAAHAHAHAHAHA HALLELUJAH!!!

So to celebrate, I drank some more alcohol, and rejoiced. By then I was ready to go to bed, so I triumphantly walked back into my room, and collapsed onto my chair.

And there,

On my desk,

Were my keys.

Still More Public Transit Gripes

2013-01-21T17:13:00.005-08:00

HEY WHO DOESN'T LOVE COMPLAINING AMIRITE?! Seriously though, when you ride the trains for hours every week, you can't help but pick up on more and more irritating things about it. I've bitched before, and now I'm going to bitch some more. That's probably the last time I will rhyme in this post.

Toast!

Ok, actually done now.

Passenger Indecisiveness
Often times on the train there is no place to sit. Duh. So when you wrestle your way onto a crowded train, and navigate the jungle of not paying attention passengers until you find a comfortable place to stand, you feel like a hero. A hero that has earned the right to ignore everyone, and pretend they are not in a cramped smelly shit wagon. Hahah, what a foolish hero. Next stop, the doors open, passengers flood in, and everyone simultaneously realizes their favorite spot on the train is on the other side of you. For the next five minutes you're all

because no matter how much time passes, if you don't stay vigilant, you'll hear "excuse me" from someone that has to peruse the entire subway car for the perfect fucking spot. Occasionally you'll have to lean into an uncomfortable position to let this person pass, and despite hoping you were only briefly going to become a contortionist, this person will annoyingly linger in what was only supposed to be a temporary void.

Connecting Train Bullshit
Let's start this one with the most obvious statement in the history of the universe: Sometimes trains don't run on time. Now let's add the fact that there are lots of popular travel hubs throughout cities, where people will transfer to different trains. Put these two together and you get the inconvenient fact that to keep passengers happy, if a train pulls into a station 30 seconds ahead of a popular connecting train, it should probably wait for the other one to arrive so that people can quickly make their transfer and go about their days, lest the people on the arriving train miss the connection, and have to wait on the stupid platform for another god damned 8 minutes.

I have frequently been on the shit end of this situation. The train is cruising along, and I'm miraculously only a couple minutes late probably. We pull into a station, and just when the doors should close, suddenly "hold on folks, we're waiting for a connecting train!"

But I bear it, because I know if the train were to leave, my on time-ness would be at the expense of hundreds of other peoples' lateness.

But wait!

Then we pull into the next station, where I need to make my transfer.

And my connecting train is pulling out of the station.

Whaaattttt?!

YOU COULDN'T WAIT 5 FUCKING SECONDS?! I don't get it.

The Turnstyles are at Crotch Level.
This is more of a personal gripe. I'm at the perfect height and proportion that if I want to race through the turnstyle in a hurry, I'm going to collide with it exactly at ball sack level.

For the French speakers.

No dammit. I've got places to be. My haste shouldn't be interrupted because of this unfortunate testicular happenstance.

Screaming Babies

"Yes! I made the train, phew! Now to hopefully ride in silence!" -You. Haha, you fucking idiot.

Nobody hates babies, but everybody hates screaming babies, which is too bad, because when a baby is on a train, they struggle to make sense of this strange room full of strangers rocketing through the earth to points unknown. All they can think is "Hmm, guess I should probably scream about this."

"SCREAM SCREAM SCREAM. I LOVE TO SCREAM"

And sometimes they sound truly horrifying. It's like the world's worst sound passed through the world's loudest amplifier, except it only amplifies the worst part of the sound.

Plus, they occupy that unfortunate space where a rational person has nothing to be mad at. You can't be angry at the baby, cause that's what they do. They eat, shit, and cry. You can't be mad at the parent, because look at them trying to comfort the baby. They don't want their baby to cry any more than you. Who else is there to be mad at? Society, for fostering an environment where babies aren't placated 100% of the time and therefore would have no reason to cry ever? That's dumb. You're dumb.

So again, you bear it. Except in the case of the neglectful parent that's basically making no effort to calm their child. What's the matter with you? Can we all get permission to smack these people? Well, the baby was already screaming, and now someone's attacking their parent, I guess that won't make them stop crying.

Wait, I know! Train clowns.

Haha.

Old Shitty Science Projects of Mine

2012-06-03T19:33:00.001-07:00

I think most of you know me as a man of science. I tend to be (sometimes annoyingly) analytical, logical, emotionless, etc.. So it may come as a surprise that although I thoroughly respect the scientific method and and its contributions to technology and society as a whole, I'm pretty fucking awful at it myself. I remember three science projects from my junior high and high school days, and I don't know which one to feel more ashamed of. I will now describe them to you in as much detail as I can remember.

Grade 6 Science Fair

To be fair I was still pretty new to the whole "science" thing at this point, and although I considered myself relatively bright for my age, the concepts of "hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion" were kind of lost on me.

"So wait, you want me to ask a question, make up an answer, and then see if I'm right? Why don't I just look that shit up in a book?" I thought.

"Well this could be something you maybe haven't found or can't find in a book. Something you've been curious about that you can play around with. Science is fun!" A teacher would answer.

I then thought to myself "If I can't find something in a book it's probably because nobody gives a shit about it. But whatever, I'll do your fucking science."

I probably had a month or so to do this project, which for a sixth grader roughly translates to "you will never have to do this." But suddenly, the science fair was a few days away and I hadn't done shit, so I furiously racked my brain to come up with some bullshit I could test. I settled on, "What happens when you put different shit in cat litter?" Because fuck it, I had two cats, and therefore cat litter, and it seemed like something nobody else would ever think of because it's probably the least important thing there is.

The Experiment

Step 1: Grab 3 different fruit peels and put them in 3 different buckets of cat litter.

Step 2: Leave one of each peel in regular dirt as the "control"

Step 3: Hate yourself.

The Hypothesis
The fruit peels in the cat litter won't decompose as fast.

So I threw some fruit in some cat litter and forgot about it. A couple days later, with no excitement whatsoever, I checked the results. The fruit peels in the cat litter were all dried out. The fruit peels in the dirt were all wet and gross and smelled terrible.

Conclusion
This was a waste of time.

I presented my findings to a jury of my peers, detailing how "cat litter absorbs shit, and dries it out, effectively reducing the smell of rotting fruit the same way it does for cat piss." Nobody, including the teacher, gave a shit, and I got an A+.

Grade 8 Science Fair
Sorry to skip grade 7, I have no idea what I did that year. But hey grade 8, I was a whole 2 years smarter so probably came up with something really great right? Nope. I think I procrastinated even more this year. I found myself with probably less than 36 hours before I had to present shit and realized I couldn't sit around and wait for science to happen, I had to make the science quickly. I had no idea what to do. Well, I was really cool and had a rock collection, so I figured I could include that somehow and maybe get bonus points for geology or whatever. Also, that night we happened to be cooking some food on a little gas grill on the porch. So I settled on the scientific query, "What happens when you cook rocks?"

Seriously.

The Experiment
Pretty straightforward really. I would find a bunch of different rocks from my awesome collection, throw them on the grill for an hour or so, and see what happened. I don't even know what I used for a control. Uncooked rocks probably.

The Hypothesis
I don't know, they would get hot?

So I started the experiment, while my parents probably thought to themselves "wow let's go inside." I waited. I thought maybe something cool would happen to some of the softer looking rocks, but after an hour they looked pretty much the same so I just left them there and did something else because maybe they were shy or something.

Well I came back much later, and one of the rocks was kind of black underneath, but another one had broken in half!

Phew, something to write about.

Conclusion
I basically wrote in the fanciest scientific language I could muster, that nothing much happened. I made up some shit about chemical reactions causing color changes and probably mentioned kinetic energy because I had just learned that word, and called it a day. The teacher wasn't very impressed, but I got a B.

Sophomore Year Biology
This year was more textbook based, and didn't include a whole lot of free experimenting, but there was one project that involved living like a zoologist. This was exciting in theory. We got to pick two animals, one vertebrate, and one invertebrate, and we would observe each one for three separate sessions of ten minutes each. The idea was to watch them in their habitats, and to not interfere with their behavior, and record everything they do for some reason. Here was an opportunity to go out into the world, and do some real field work! Haha fuck that!

I, along with probably half the class, chose to watch a cat, and an ant. The teacher's face as we all announced our choices got visibly more upset. In my defense, the cat was a given for the vertebrate, because I wasn't about to drive to a zoo. And for the invertebrate, what else was I gonna do? Buy a lobster and watch that? Find some other bug that is functionally identical to an ant? Find a flying bug and inevitably lose track of it? Watch a...clam? Oh well, let the observation commence.

Cat Observations
Sure, cats can be funny sometimes, but that's usually only if you fuck with them. For the purposes of this project, we weren't to interfere. As it turns out, when you just let your cat do its thing, its number one priority is to be not exciting. Over the course of those three ten minute sessions my cat did a whole fat load of fuck all. One session in particular I remember quite well. My cat was outside and walked over and sat on a stump. I watched it from a window in my garage, so as to not affect the science, and started the timer. The only thing he did in the whole ten minutes was turn his head I think once. After these sessions, I stared at my mostly blank notepad and thought the only logical thing: "I'm gonna make some shit up."

So I calculatingly wrote down some cat like activities, being careful not to make it too flashy or too boring. Fairly satisfied, but a little uncomfortable that I just faked an entire log of cat endeavors, I took a break, not at all excited to soon observe an ant, which could not possibly be any less boring.

Ant Observations
I (surprise!) ended up procrastinating a bit for this one. Then with probably a day left or so I remembered "Oh yeah I have to find an ant and watch what it does." So, I walked around my house not looking very hard for an ant. I predictably wasn't having much luck. At this point it was time for some self reflection. I wasn't sure which would be sadder, watching an ant for thirty minutes, or lying about watching an ant for thirty minutes. I decided that the world was a cold and unforgiving place to make me choose between the two, and ultimately decided to do the only logical thing: "I'm gonna make some shit up."

I was able to come up with several ant-like activities such as "walking" and "just standing there" totally on my own from memory. However, it became tiring to make up thirty minutes of unique yet not totally fake ant activities. I slogged through two "observations" and wondered how I could escape from writing pretty much the same old shit in the third one. I decided to boldly end this ant's tale with murder. I thought "how funny would it be if while watching the ant the cat came by and killed it?" So that's exactly what happened to this make believe ant in this project. RIP my imaginary insect friend.

Conclusion
I don't think we had to present our findings, because if the entire class had to sit through shit like "My cat ate some food" over and over, we probably would have shit into our own hands and smeared it all over the chalkboard. I don't remember what grade I got on this project but after bullshitting an hour's worth of observations I guess any grade that's not an F was a win for me.

So, what have I learned from science classes over the years? I realized "you can easily get away with procrastinating", "bullshitting is surprisingly easy" and "two days is basically enough time to turn anything into science" but most importantly "I will never be a scientist ever."

Skateboarding. That is All.

2012-04-01T06:16:00.000-07:00

You probably aren't wondering why I started skateboarding. Well, my bike had been stolen a couple years before, and I wasn't ready to go through that shit again, so I decided to find a new mode of transportation. One that might give me tons of chicks (nope). Enter skateboarding.

Oh hi.

After getting used to using words like "gnarly" and "stoked" unironically, I was ready to undertake what was to become a constant uphill battle.

At first I practiced on friends' boards. A decent board is kind of expensive so I figured I'd mooch off of others for awhile while I decided if this whole endeavor was worth it or not. Admirable, I know. I eventually got to the point where I could skate several feet without getting injured, so I was hooked. As far as some fancy ass tricks, I figured I'd start at the beginning with, the ollie.

Speaking of ollie, what a god damn weird show this was.

Well, while trying to figure out the most fundamental trick, I discovered something kind of bothersome about skateboarding: falling.

Yes sir, for those first several months I spent as much time skateboarding as I spent sitting near a skateboard shortly after falling off of it. But like any endeavor, if it doesn't make you severely handicapped or kill you, chances are you'll start to get better, and I did. After those first few months, I might've even looked like a competent skateboarder, providing you were watching from a distance, and need glasses, but forgot to wear your glasses that day.

At this point, brother Mike had noticed that I was getting somewhat serious about skateboarding and just fucking went to the store and bought me one. It wasn't a professional board by any means, but you know what? I wasn't a professional. THANKS MIKE!!

Tangent! This brings to mind an incident I remember about playing drums. My first drumset was secondhand, and of course after just a few months I wanted a one million dollar drumset so I tried to make excuses about how the quality of the set was interfering with my destiny. My dad said something along the lines of "well, I'm sure a professional could sit down at the drums you have now and blow you away, so don't worry about getting a new one just yet." Thinking back, I'm amazed he managed to say anything other than "shut up son".

Alright, tangent achieved.

So at this point I had taken up skating with a few friends that were equally not very good, and it was a great time. We could all do some simple tricks, so I had fantasies of soon becoming capable of this:

Even though all I was currently capable of was this:

Little by little we all steadily progressed. We were finally able to fall in such a way that it only took several hours to recover rather than several days. We even got to the point where we could go to local skate parks and less frequently think "wow, everyone here is so much better than me."

Years later we all got fairly decent. Each of us had our occasional moment in the sun, those days where out of nowhere one of us was suddenly capable of greatness. But for some reason, it never lasted. After throwing ourselves down a giant set of stairs one day, we consistently failed at a set half the size the next. After doing a kickflip off a giant ledge one day, we could barely manage to do it on flat ground the next. This constant up and down struggle was frustrating, but we just kept at it, and at the start of each day we would wonder "is this gonna be a good day or a bad one?" because you just never knew. And oh boy some of those bad days were very bad. Let's talk about a couple of the worst injuries shall we?

Fairly early on in the game, I was having one of those confident days. I was still on the skateboard brother Mike had gotten me. I probably hadn't fallen for fifteen minutes or something so I got cocky and thought "I'm gonna ride down one of the steepest hills in town!" I don't know why I felt so stupidly confident, it probably had something to do with my friends watching, but I even gathered speed before going down the hill. About halfway through I thought "ahhhh fuck" and just waited to fall horribly.

I knew it was going to happen. I was going way too fast to jump off and hit the ground running, so I just had to wait and cling to the .0000001% chance that I would make it to the bottom unscathed. Nope. Sure enough, I got speed wobble and slammed into the ground. If you've never experienced speed wobble, don't. It felt like falling out of a car.

..not a parked car. Like, a moving car. One moving the same speed that I had been going on my skateboard. Why did I include this hypothetical car?

So, I severely gashed both elbows, knees, and my back, but apparently after tumbling several times, I'm told I popped right back up onto my feet. I don't remember doing that, but I guess it's good that I did, so my friends didn't have to spend more than a second thinking "well, our friend is now dead." After this injury I should've just taken a break from skating for awhile, but about a week later I was walking somewhat normally again and figured I was good to go so I tried to ollie a cinder block and my knee hit the cinder block and oh god it was horrible.

Next! One day I was skating at colby college with a few folks, and we hit a favorite spot of ours, a long set of 5 stairs. I had gotten pretty good at launching myself down these stairs without bailing, so now the only thing to do was to try to do it while going faster.

Once again, my confidence made me complacent and I didn't pay attention to what I was doing. A good rule of thumb when it comes to weight distribution is to err towards the back foot. Why is this? Imagine riding a bike. What happens when you slam on the rear tire breaks? You skid along safely. What happens when you slam on the front tire breaks? You flip over the handlebars and slam your dumbass face on the ground. Well, I forgot that rule, and tried to stick a landing when leaning a bit too far forward. I landed on a rock and my board stopped dead in its tracks. Face smash!

Haha, no not really, but to prevent from smashing my face, I had to smash basically the rest of my body. It was a little chilly out, so it didn't really hurt at the time, but once I got back inside and my circulation returned it felt like I was being stabbed everywhere for hours.

All things considered, I've done pretty well to not mangle myself. I still ride these days, but I use it mostly as a mode of horribly inefficient transportation, rather than a ramp conquering sex chariot. I'll probably continue to ride it until my legs give out, and I look forward to the injuries to come.

I'm Sorry, Enormous Stranger

2012-03-25T21:38:00.001-07:00

Here's another story from back in the day that I may have shared with some of you. It's another one of those situations where I had no idea what the fuck to do, and to this day, I'm not sure if I could've handled it any better.

It all started back in college after a percussion lesson. I was playing a piece that required a certain sound that I just couldn't seem to get with the mallets I had at my disposal. I spent some time with my teacher going over some different choices, but we were both ultimately unsatisfied. Near the end of the lesson my teacher suggested that some mallets I had might sound ok if they had some thin rubber sheathing over them. I politely responded with "What? Where the fuck am I going to get that shit?"

Well apparently a good place to check was the chemistry department, where they would hopefully have some rubber or plastic surgical tubing that was the right size to slip over the end of the mallet. If you haven't thought "well this sounds fairly sexual" by now, then clearly I'm not doing a very good job.

Anyway, off I went to Aubert hall, which incidentally I had been pronouncing incorrectly all throughout college. I assumed it was pronounced "aw-bert", until my teacher was all

and told me it's pronounced 'au-bear'.

Since it was the home of the chemistry department, and I was a music major, I had obviously never gone anywhere near the place. It was big as fuck, and the moment I stepped inside I had no idea where to go. There was no "surgical tubing this way" sign, so I had no choice but to ask strangers "hey do you know where I can find some uh...surgical tubing?" This was met with mostly "no." Or just a confused face. Something like..

I assumed most people in there would at least be able to point me in the right direction and help me narrow my search, but apparently the whereabouts of surgical tubing was some giant fucking secret. I eventually got some vague answer like "uh 3rd floor maybe?" and was somewhat relieved, but also a little irritated because who knows what further tribulations I would have to endure for two measly pieces of plastic if step one already took about forty times longer than expected.

GOD DAMMIT

Then, to even get to the 3rd floor meant even more bullshit because it was one of those buildings where certain elevators only went to the 2nd floor, and if you get off there expecting to maybe find stairs to the 3rd floor then fuck you because the only stairs on the 2nd floor go down, but then you can't get off at the 1st floor to start over using those stairs, because those stairs led only to "basement level C" or some other endless crypt. So back to the elevator.

After finding the mythical 3rd floor, I had to hop around into various rooms and once again ask strangers, "does anybody know where I can get some fucking surgical tubing for christ's sake?" A few people responded with "what do you need it for?" See usually this means "yes I know where it is, but you have to give me a valid reason for using it before I'll give it to you" but instead they would listen to my story about mallets and end up telling me "ok, well that might be down the hall? I'm not sure!" Good. Well then I'm glad I regaled you with my tale for nothing.

I finally ended up finding a TA that told me where I could find some tubing, but after hearing what I needed it for, he told me they probably didn't have the right size. AWESOME. Well, I checked it out anyway, and sauntered down the hall for hopefully the last time.

Eureka! This room was definitely what I needed. It was a giant lab/warehouse looking room with boxes of shit fucking EVERYWHERE. Still didn't know exactly where to find the tubing I needed so I asked the only guy in the room.

This guy, by the way, was huge. HUGE. He had to have been pushing 400 pounds.

I told him what I was looking for and he expressed the same nonoptimistic sentiment as the TA in the previous room, and showed me one of the sizes of tubing they had. I told him it was probably too small. He said "well we have one size bigger, but I still don't think it's what you're looking for." I asked him if he wouldn't mind showing me anyway because hell I'd pretty much gone on safari to find this stupid room. He pointed to where it was and said "well, we might need a ladder."

Sure enough it was stacked several feet off the ground on top of all kinds of boxes. We glanced around for a ladder, but couldn't find one. Then he saw a little metal stool and said "oh, well this should work." I said "...are you sure?"

I think you see where this is going.

This stool's structural integrity was dubious at best. But the guy approached it with a confidence that suggested he had no scruples about its ability to support his utter massiveness.

I will now demonstrate my reactions to the situation as it developed, using owls:

He climbed on and stretched his arms up to grab the coil of tubing at the top of the pile.

His balance wavered.

He regained his composure and stretched again.

The stool creaked.

He had the surgical tubing in his hand!

His balanced wavered again...

And the stool gave out.

He crashed thunderously to the ground with a force felt by probably most of his ancestors. This. Guy. Fell. HARD.

He groaned slightly and I was immediately psyched that he was still alive. I rushed over to him and asked "Oh jesus, are you ok!?"

He seemed calm, but his answer was "No."

He looked down. I followed suit, and glanced at his feet, which had maybe just taken more brute trauma than any feet in the history of humans. The sight was unpleasant.

Picture a foot. Now picture that foot upside down. Now picture the person attached to the foot not being upside down. I imagine this guy was in shock, as there was no reason he had to not being screaming like a completely psychotic individual.

Despite the horror of the situation, the thought occurred to me, how to test the pile of tubing that had collapsed by his side without it being weird? But before I had time to give that much thought, the TA from down the hall had apparently heard the crash, along with probably the rest of the University of Maine, and had come to investigate. He immediately took action and called an ambulance. Hmm, guess I should've done that.

So there we were. I was standing by being not all that helpful while the TA attempted to calm the fallen man, even though the TA seemed much more hysterical (seriously this guy's ankle was ruined). I had no idea what to do. I had resigned myself to not really testing the surgical tubing, as it seemed like the less important of two issues at the moment. But then, what the fuck was I going to do? The ambulance had been called. This guy was clearly suffering, and I felt horrible, but he was in stable condition, and being looked over. I thought about sticking it out until the ambulance got there, but then didn't really know what purpose I'd serve other than to confirm to the paramedic "yup, he fell." This guy didn't even seem comfortable with this TA all up in his face, so I didn't want to add to that. Plus, because this whole ordeal had taken a lot longer than I expected, I was almost late for class.

So, I was stuck. I realized that leaving was probably the wrong thing to do. I was obviously partly responsible for this accident, so I guess I felt like I should see this thing through to the end. But then several minutes passed, the ambulance hadn't arrived, I felt awkward as fuck, and nobody was talking to each other. I finally asked the guy something generic like "hey man, are you gonna be alright?" and he responded with something equally generic like "yeah, I'll be fine". I apologized profusely, and he brushed it off, saying "it's ok, it's ok." Feeling like I couldn't possibly get any more closure than that, I left the room, apologizing once more, and feeling fucking terrible.

That surgical tubing might've been perfect.

Giving Blood

2012-02-28T13:38:00.000-08:00

It's not like giving blood is terribly uncommon, but I'm going to relate to you all my personal experience with it anyway. To those of you that haven't done it, take my story possibly as a warning.

Let's start with a little anatomy lesson. When you give blood, be prepared to sacrifice about half a liter. Is this a lot? If you're an averaged sized person, then no not really. More importantly though, will it fuck you up? Ha ha ha. Foreshadowing.

So I had made my appointment to donate blood one afternoon at the University of Maine. Incidentally, I was the typical lazy college kid, and my daily diet usually went as follows.

8am - Glass of orange juice, maybe.

10am - Nothing.

12am - Snack from the vending machine outside of class, maybe.

2pm - Nothing.

4pm - Small to medium lunch.

6pm - Nothing.

8pm - PUT EVERY CALORIE IN FACE.

This is basically the opposite of what every dietician/nutritionist/doctor will tell you is healthy, but whatever, it was college and I was a young high metabolism garbage disposal of a son of a bitch.

So on this day I had as usual woken up approximately 4 minutes before my first class and left no time for breakfast. Whatever, I felt GREAT. After class I skipped over to the place to give blood, like this:

Any excuse to use this picture.

While waiting to donate, I sat around forever. Then I got pulled into a little cubicle where they asked health related questions, like:

Do you have AIDS?
...Are you sure?
Have you had sex with anyone that has AIDS?
Do you have hepatitis, or anything else? *coughAIDS*
Have you participated in gangbangs/needle sharing/reckless drug use?
Have you traveled to any countries lately? Specifically ones filled with AIDS?

So after convincing them I was fairly disease free, they tested my blood for proper iron levels by putting it in some liquid suspension and seeing if it floated or not.

It sank like a fucking rock and I was cleared to go.

My blood.

Now the fun part! I hopped up onto the hospital bed, feeling a little anxious because I was about to watch a giant needle get stuck in my arm. I had never had a giant needle stuck in my arm before. Don't people sometimes faint from this? Is this going to hurt...forever? Well it stung for about a half of a second, and that was that. Phew.

So at this point my blood was pumping away. After a short period of time, I felt a combination of lightheadedness, which I assume is normal, and extreme glee. I tried not to laugh, because I would have appeared crazy, but it was difficult to maintain my composure while thinking "Haha I am bleeding into a bag. On purpose." I thought if I didn't finish up pretty soon, I was going to look like this:

The whole ordeal lasted several minutes, but then I was done. Crisis averted. Then came some excitement, because you know, snacks.

That's right! To minimize negative effects caused by a sudden drop in blood sugar, they give you a bunch of sugary shit. Makes sense. So there I sat, munch munch, but it wasn't long before I started feeling peculiar. It was a mix of growing lightheadedness and nausea. I thought "eh, this is normal, be cool" but it was getting worse. I started getting nervous, so I pounded some apple juice and slammed down a bunch of cookies. Great plan! Maybe I thought my digestive system was going to distribute this food throughout my entire body immediately instead of digesting over the course of several hours like it usually does. Nope, still getting worse. I was pretty sure I was gonna pass out pretty soon, so I looked for a nearby nurse, hoping I could discreetly mention "hey I'm not feeling too well over here, what should I do?" but they were all busy with other people. Seeing no other option I said to some random dude next to me

"Hey man, I'm feeling dizzy as HELL."

I'm not sure what I expected him to do about it, but luckily since I had told him at about the same volume as a jet engine, a nurse quickly rushed over to me, put me on a bed with my feet elevated, and put cold packs on my face. I felt fine almost immediately, so I told the nurse "Whoops, false alarm!....K....Bye!" But they wouldn't let me leave until I they were damn sure I was actually fine. Can't have blood donors passing out in the road on the way home I guess.

Fifteen minutes or so went by, which coincided with the first fifteen minutes of my next class. Welp, guess I wasn't going to that! I eventually flagged down a nurse and said "seriously, I'm ok, can I go?" She then looked at me silently for several seconds. I'm still not really sure what she was doing, maybe checking to see if my pupils were dilated or something? Do pupils dilate before fainting?

So I sat there, waiting for her to you know, speak. Eventually she asked "are you ok?" And I said "...yes, kind of like I just mentioned."

The nurse finally let me go, so I hopped off the bed and wandered off. I was fairly disoriented and still not feeling great, but I felt good enough to walk home without fear of passing out. Then, I slept. For the rest of my life.

So my story isn't all that unique I suppose, but remember kids, if you're going to donate blood, eat some god damn breakfast, don't be a god damn idiot. Like me.

The Day I was Trapped in the Bathroom

2012-02-01T11:56:00.000-08:00

I told a story recently about a legendary dump. Well, here's another one.

It was early on Thanksgiving day several years ago. My grandparents and maybe a couple other folks had showed up and were having cocktails. I decided it was the perfect time to get a shower in, because things hadn't really gotten going yet. I didn't announce my shower plans to anybody, because you know, who gives a shit?

So I went upstairs, did my thing, finished up, and in those few seconds between turning the water off and pulling the curtain back to grab a towel, I heard the door open. You see, our bathroom door was fairly unreliable during the colder months. The wood compressed just enough so that even if the doorknob wouldn't turn, the door could still sometimes pop open. "Fuck that lock!" I thought, and started sheepishly clearing my throat a few times, and shuffling around somewhat noisily.

No response.

No worries though, even if the intruder somehow hadn't heard me, I expected them to either 1) See the mirror fogged up, or 2) See my pile of clothes on the floor. Surely one of those facts would clue them in that someone was currently behind the shower curtain, silently hating them. Still, nothing registered. After hearing the unmistakable slightly labored breathing of my grandfather, it became clear why. He was hard of hearing, so of course he never heard me moving around or clearing my throat. As for not noticing the mirror fogging up or seeing clothes on the floor, I can only chalk that up to some as of yet undiscovered malevolent force in the universe.

So at this point I'm still standing there in the shower desperately hoping he'd figure out I was in there. I suppose at this point I could've avoided disaster by just sticking my head out from behind the curtain and saying "HEY I realize the door popped open there, but the KNOB DID NOT TURN BECAUSE IT WAS LOCKED PLEASE LEAVE." But I froze. I guess I had assumed too much time had passed by then and he would've thought I was a weirdo for not saying something immediately. My only hope was to wait it out. It's not like he was going to take a shower right? Hopefully he was just taking a piss, and it would all be over in 30 seconds or so. As long as I stayed hidden and silent, I just might make it out of this unscathed.

Well of course he wasn't taking a piss. Of fucking course he wasn't. I heard him sit down for a shit, so I quietly closed my eyes in a sort of resigned cheerlessness, and waited.

It was loud. It was putrid. It was legendary.

It went on for quite some time, and all the while I'm standing there revolted, and yet somehow fascinated. Fascinated not only that a man was capable of defiling a room so swiftly and unapologetically, but also that I had ever gotten myself into this mess.

We all do our best thinking in the shower, and surely now was a time for reflection. I started pondering my life up to that point, and then wondered where it would go from there. How would this scenario play out? The idea of me escaping undetected at this point became more and more of a distant fantasy, and a few thoughts bounced around my head.

"If he finds me here now, what do I do? How in ever living fuck am I going to explain myself?"

"I wonder if there are support groups for people that have also hidden in the bathroom while their grandfather took a shit."

"Hmm, what objects are close by that I can kill myself with?"

"I've ruined Thanksgiving."

After something like 15 hours, he finished up. I snapped back into lucidity, and felt a confusing mix of joy and fear. Joy that the end was near, and fear that this end might also be tragic. He walked over to the sink to wash his hands, the sound of each footstep thunderously echoing against my soul. He dried his hands, and then what's this?

He wasn't leaving.

No, the faucet turned off, but then he started traipsing around the bathroom. What was he looking for? A towel? No! They were right next to the sink? From the sound of it, he was just taking a whimsical tour of the bathroom. My heart sank when I figured surely this tour would include whatever was behind the shower curtain. Fear had overcome me. I was sure that he was seconds away from pulling back the curtain and seeing me standing there. I found a small amount of comfort at the thought that I had become such a hollow shell of a person at that point, that maybe he wouldn't recognize me.

I braced myself, hoping the shock of the sight of me wouldn't give him a heart attack. "Please do not let him find me." I thought. "Please let his curiosity become fulfilled before inspecting the shower. Please."

And just like that, he walked out.

And I wept..

One Year in the Books

2011-10-30T18:35:00.000-07:00

So I've been at this for a year now. As there are probably more blogs than people, this makes me not special whatsoever. Still, after all my stupid articles, some of you are still reading (I assume), and I appreciate that. I'm normally not one to blow myself, but upon reflection, here are some of my favorites:

The Heart Attack Grill

I took a look at this infamous restaurant's policies and practices, and offered some unsolicited new slogans.

The Microdyne Days

I reminisced about a shitty job I had back in college. I talked about how it began, the crazy people I dealt with, and some things I learned along the way.

Grocery Shopping: I Hate It

Despite the fact that I should be thankful for having such an abundance of food a few blocks away, I was an asshole and chose to complain about it for trivial reasons instead, so hopefully it's at least a little funny.

Oatmeal: Pointless

I enjoy oatmeal at least a couple times a week, but for some reason decided to shit all over it because of its boringness.

The Formative Years

Because of how handsome/successful/stylish I am these days, you may have a hard time believing how fucking stupid I looked back in my younger years. Either that, or you look at how fucking stupid I look now, and upon reading this think "well that makes sense."

The Platypus, Why?

What a stupid piece of shit waste of a fucking animal. This article goes a bit more in depth than that, but that's the basic idea.

The Horror of Bengay

Apparently putting bengay on your balls is kind of a thing on the internet, but before any of my friends or I knew about that, we all tried it with hilarious/horrifying consequences.

More Public Transit Gripes

Here's one article from my series of complaints about dealing with public transit. Obviously I'm grateful that it exists and life would be a huge pain in the ass without it, but that doesn't mean I can't still talk shit.

Some Things I've Figured Out

Here's a list I wrote that will convince some of you out there that don't know me very well that I am slowly but surely becoming an adult. Don't be fooled though, watch: LOL FART!

Let's Talk About BREAKFAST CEREAL!

Here's a completely random article that illustrates how sometimes I can take a silly idea and run with it, often turning what was once a mere pointless observation into a big long pointless article. But again, hopefully at least a little funny.

Journey to England Part I

Here's what kicked off my so far 10 part series about my trip to England and parts of Europe. I should probably getting around to finishing that..

So, there you have it. It might be fairly clear that writing is not my main thing, but I hope you're all enjoying the articles. If you haven't read some of these, enjoy and read some more!

LOL FART AGAIN.

Continuing Internet Vigilantism

2011-10-18T11:36:00.000-07:00

Remember how before, I wrote about "facts" on the internet, and researched them to see if they were true? Well I'm gonna do that again.

Vigilante Dog

Nobody Knows who Invented Eyeglasses
Hmm, that doesn't seem right. We know who invented the cotton gin, and nobody gives a fuck about that anymore, so how can we not know who invented glasses? I know If I invented something that awesome I'd tell everyone immediately.

Well actually, I bet that was the plan for the guy who invented them all along. He tried them out for the first time and thought "holy shit these work" and was so excited about finally doing something not useless that he had a heart attack and died. And by the time he was found he was just a skeleton holding a mysterious new invention. I picture two people stumbling upon his corpse:

"Whoa, what's this scary skeleton holding? Whoa coole, do you suppose this guy invented these things?"

"Yeah probably, who is he?"

"I dunno man it's just a skeleton. Skeletons all look alike."

"Ok, maybe he's holding a note with his name on it?"

"Well even if he was how would we knowe it's not someone else's name?"

"Shit. Wait, how do we know it's not a lady skeleton?"

"Good pointe. How can you telle?"

"I dunno check the relative width of their shoulders and hips or something."

And then they continued with their anatomy discussion and fuck if they every figured out who the person actually was.

So is this "fact" just bullshit or do we really not know?

Well, according to wikipedia, I think we've got it narrowed down far enough so that's good enough for me, let's move on.

Oh and I couldn't find a suitable picture for any of this crap, so here's a bunny in midair.

Humans Swallow 7/8/75 Spiders in a Year/Lifetime
Ohhh boy, we've all heard this one before. Apparently the only reason we aren't covered in spiders all the time is because we move around? Like as soon as we fall asleep they come out of their hiding spots and say "let's go in that dude's mouth, and after it's pretty clear that we shouldn't be there let's get swallowed somehow instead of just crawling back out." Hmm, I dunno about that, and here's why:

First, like I've just illustrated, it seems like it's against a creature's best interest to crawl into the mouth of a sleeping giant that will kill them.

Second, who's gathering this data? Did some dude wake up with a spider in his mouth one morning and think "well fuck me that probably happens 7 or 8 times a year!" If you think about it, the nature of this fact implies we're swallowing the evidence, which means the only way to verify it would be to videotape someone's mouth while they sleep every night for however long it takes for a spider to crawl in there.

And finally, if it's based in fact, why does the amount vary so much 7? 20? 75? Every year? A lifetime? But hey I'll play devil's advocate and admit that I guess you can't rule out the possibility, because bugs can do some weird shit.

Well, with astoundingly little effort, you'll find the myth debunked here, here, and here and probably a million other places. Seriously, all you have to do is type "do we swallow spiders in our sleep" into google and you'll be flooded with sites screaming "no shithead"

So there you go. If I hear anyone else repeat this fact, go ahead and climb aboard the train to punch-town, next stop your face.

Some Beaver Dams are over 1000 Years Old.
Whoa. That's older than your mom. Who the hell figured this out? And how the fuck did they figure it out? And who the fuck cares? Did a guy watch a beaver damn get built, then when he was about to die he was all "wait, I gotta get someone to find out how long this thing hangs around" and so he told his son "hey man keep track of this" and so forth for generations? On top of that: even if you knew the age of the wood, how do you know how long the wood has been arranged into a beaver dam? Except for almost your mom, nobody is old enough to know this for sure right?

Well when doing my research, I stumbled across the following and kind of got distracted because it's god damn hilarious:

Apparently we've all been looking in the wrong place.

So instead of researching further I'll just assume they figured stuff out using some sciency combination of technology and and databases. They probably carried the one at some point too.

The Creature with the Biggest Brain in Proportion to its Size is the Ant
Yeah? Well they still seem pretty fucking dumb to me.

The Man that Took a Poo, and Almost Killed us All

2011-10-09T12:38:00.000-07:00

I was listening to a podcast recently, where guys were talking about eating hot food and subsequently almost shitting themselves, and I got to thinking about poo stories, because I'm mature. One experience in particular sprang to mind after years of dormancy. I shared this experience with several of you out there, so let's take a trip down memory lane.

And to those of you who haven't heard this story, enjoy.

It was the high school senior trip, late spring of 2003 (Yup, I'm old). We took a few buses to York Beach, Maine. These weren't regular school buses, they were fancy "coaches" if you will. You know, the kind with toilets in the back. That will become important later.

So, we all mucked around the beach and pier that day, doing some swimming, frisbee, checking out random stores and arcades, just hanging out having a good time. After exploring, the plan was for everybody to meet for lunch at the Goldenrod restaurant at a designated time. Yum! And instead of forcing us to pay for our lunches, the school graciously gave every last one of us a $20 meal voucher.

Now, you might expect $20 to not get us very far. Perhaps it would pay for a sandwich and a drink, but if we wanted to get anything fancy, we might have to dip into our own pockets. Not so. Not even fucking close.

Whoever was in charge of securing lunch funds must have not bothered to check the Goldenrod's menu ahead of time, foolishly having the same suspicions about the cost of a meal that I just highlighted above. Well, they certainly fucked that one up, because the staples of this menu included basic things like hot dogs, hamburgers, and grilled cheese at the un-fucking-believable prices of $2 $3 and $4. Some people were fine with ordering one or two things, content to just forfeit the rest of their voucher in an attempt to not get utterly fucking stuffed and feel like shit for the rest of the day. Not my friends and I! We were ready to take advantage, and stretch that $20 to the fullest extent of the law.

Spectators likely watched in horror as everyone at our table started wolfing down three or four hot dogs each. Some of us also added a burger or two, or scavenged other's plates for fries or half of a grilled cheese. After eating far more than any humans ever should, we realized we all still had a few dollars left on our vouchers, and we'd be damned if we were to let that go to waste. So we got ice cream.

Must eat.....FOREVER...

Little did we know, somewhere in probably a dark corner, a teacher with a digestive problem was also taking full advantage.

So finally, the gluttony ended. I've never needed to be escorted from a restaurant in a wheelchair quite as badly as I did that day. We were all miserably full, and instead of going back to having fun, we all collapsed on a pile of rocks near the beach in agony, calmed by the thought that soon our burden would be slightly lessened after what was sure to be a series of truly unforgettable dumps. After a period of time, one of us finally broke the silence and said "alright, that's it, who wants to come shit with me?"

And unforgettable it was. But the story does not end there.

We all piled back onto the bus, straight to the back near the toilet just in case any of us felt an encore performance coming on. Well, thankfully it didn't come to that...

For us...

So at this point we were all deep in the midst of our food comas, and probably about 90 minutes or so had elapsed since we left the restaurant. Well apparently, for the entirety of that 90 minutes, the teacher with digestive problems was becoming a vehicle for a foul hellish beast, soon to be furiously unleashed upon our poor unsuspecting bus.

This guy, who shall remain anonymous, was normally a fairly slow mover. Not today. We all saw him arise from the front of the bus and lumber through the aisle with a haste that clearly communicated to everyone that this was a fucking EMERGENCY.

Now, at this point all of us in the back knew that we were in for some unpleasantness, but I don't think any of us were able to fathom just how truly awful it was to become.

A ghastly silence came over us. For several seconds, it seemed as if maybe the door to the bathroom was in fact enough of a barrier to mitigate the stench to tolerable levels. Fucking, nope. SO WRONG. JESUS CHRIST I CAN TASTE IT.

I cannot put into words how awful the stench was, but I'll try: Imagine if you were to compress all the shits anyone has ever taken in the history of earth into a box, then added garlic.

Some of the jokes thrown around I remember to this day:

"Oh god I can smell it when I exhale."
"He must've eaten rotting corpses for lunch."
"This my friends, is the intestinal holocaust."

And the worst part was just how long we had to endure the awfulness. What we assumed was an initial burst of utter digestive failure that would slowly depreciate in repugnancy, was actually an ungodly force that seemed to gather strength from the objects around it. None of us could breathe. We would take turns testing the air one at a time, and for what must've been 15 minutes, there was no relief. People halfway up the bus were turning their heads in horror, only to see the dozen or so of us at ground zero with tears in our eyes. It was utterly fucking mind-blowing to us all that one person was capable of such a tragedy.

He finally exited the stall and did the walk of shame back to the front of the bus, no doubt knowing that he had just achieved the dump that would soon leave the air, but never leave our minds.

Weird or Crazy Work Shit

2011-09-18T13:40:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted anything in awhile, mostly because I was in Maine for the summer. Well, no I guess that's not it. It's not like they don't have computers in Maine. I guess I didn't post for awhile because, I dunno, shut up. Anyway, I figured I'd bust back onto the scene with a few stories about weird shit I've seen at various jobs over the years.

Guy Tries to Use a Fake ID, gets Piledrived.
...Piledriven?

Well here's what happened. This suave looking motherfucker strutted into Tekserve one day while I was working up front. He told me he wanted to buy a computer. I signed him up for an appointment and then doot do do, off he went with a salesman. Several minutes later, he was pacing around the front of the store and asked me if I've seen the salesman he was talking to, because he was "taking awhile getting his computer". I checked it out, and it turned out the customer was using a fake ID. At Tekserve, we're wicked fucking awesome at spotting that shit so little did he know, when he thought he was waiting for his computer, he was really waiting for the police to arrive.

A bit more time passed, and the brilliant rocket scientist of a thief put the puzzle together in his head and realized "they still have my ID. Hmm, don't people usually not need to keep that?" So he casually tried to exit. The security guard was all

So he tried to play it cool.

And by play it cool I mean "leap over a wall past the guard but fall and then get smashed into the door when trying to stand back up and escape."

So broken glass everywhere, customers panicking, police arriving, and an attempted thief getting his ass thrown to the ground and cuffed.

So remember kids, make sure the dude making your fake ID knows what he's doing!

Woman Almost has Heart Attack
The day started like any other day. I was wandering around trying to look helpful while not necessarily being helpful, and I got approached by a slightly older woman. She had complicated questions about how to properly sync her ipad and blah blah blah. It was early, so I wasn't quite in the "I want to get the fuck out of here" mode yet, so I actually try to explain how the process worked even though I could've easily sent her off to the department that more directly deals with that.

I quickly realized it was going to be an uphill battle because I foolishly assumed she knew what things like "files" and "computers" were. At one point, it seemed like we were making some headway, when she stopped and said "Ok, just give me a second, I just need to..." and she trailed off, closed her eyes and stood there silently.

Interesting..

I Assumed she just had a weird way of learning things and needed to silently contemplate everything I'd just said to fully absorb it, so I waited patiently. Shortly thereafter she rejoined planet earth and said

"I have a heart condition, my heart was doing some weird things just then so I needed to make sure everything was ok."

Unexpected.

I had never really thought about what I'd say in the event someone randomly divulged a serious medical problem, so I just said "um...are you alright?" to which she replied "I think so."

See, I was really hoping for a "yes" there, so then I had to start wondering if I was going to need to call 911 pretty soon. She told me she had medication, and since I wasn't really prepared to see anyone die, I almost blurted out "ok well then take some of that shit".

That makes sense right? Why wait until your heart actually stops to take the medication? Well, thankfully she carried on fairly heart-attack free from that point on. The only other oddity was that at one point, her eyes started to tear up. Now, I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure eyes water for reasons mostly unrelated to heart failure, so I relaxed a bit.

She lived. And eventually, I passed her ipad problems on to someone else because fuck that shit I was mostly making stuff up anyway.

Find Out Boss Also Films Porn in Office

So I had been working at this...music place we'll call it, for a little while. It was mostly with people my own age so it was a decent environment. The boss however was a german dude at least fifteen years older than all of us. He seemed nice enough, but I suspected there were some stories about him, and I had wondered for a little while how all the coworkers felt about him. Well after talking with a few of them, it came to my attention that the boss also occasionally filmed porn in this room behind his office.

Not his office.

Whaaaaattttt?

I thought maybe it was a joke, but no it most certainly wasn't. Not only did that perpetuate some stereotypes, it was fucking gross and weirded me out. But it didn't seem to bother anybody else, and it was pretty fun to joke about so fuck it. I guess it wasn't really any of my business what he did on his own time anyway.

Then one day he sent me and another guy to take his car and go pick up a mattress for his office. It was very uncomfortable helping transport that mattress, knowing full well what it was going to be used for. It occurred to me that the boss was now in a way making it everyone else's business what he used that alcove behind his office for. I quit shortly thereafter.

Guy Walks Around with Shit on Pants
This was from years ago while working at a scrap metal yard in Maine. A guy with shit on his pants you say? In a scrap yard you also say? Yes, I say.

So yeah, it immediately makes more sense when you know the context. It wasn't like I was in an office building and someone walked by with shit on their suit.

"Whoops. Had a bit of an accident.."

So this scrap yard job mostly involved local folks coming to drop off pickup trucks or trailers full of old scrap metal for us to weigh and sort so they could get a bunch of extra cash. I saw my fair share of unintelligible trailer trash, but I'd say most of the folks were just everyday people.

But, like I just said, some of these people were all kinds of fucked up. They communicated in vague gestures and grunts, were missing teeth and were usually shirtless. One thing they basically all were however, was shitless. It makes sense, because you tend to learn pretty early on in life that walking around with shit on yourself is pretty unacceptable. Well this one diamond in the rough either never learned that lesson, or just didn't give a fuck about anything. He was a heavy set man probably in his 30s, with a gut hanging down over his elastic waistband cutoff gray sweatpants. I noticed a couple of my friends stifling some laughter in front of this guy, and I had just assumed it was because he was a big funny looking fucking gross dude. Then the man turned, and my friends pointed out his problem.

Lovely.

HOW DO YOU NOT NOTICE A BIG BROWN STAIN ON YOUR SHORTS?

Or maybe he knew it was there and thought "well, I'm not exactly trying to keep up appearances with anyone so instead of changing my shorts I'll just walk around WITH SHIT ON THEM ALL DAY. YES THAT SOUNDS RIGHT. I COME UP WITH BRILLIANT SOLUTIONS."

More "FACTS"

2011-05-31T16:20:00.000-07:00

Once again, in the interest of internet vigilantism, and avoiding productivity, I have found more supposed "facts" and looked beyond. What treasures of knowledge did I find? ARE THESE REALLY TRUE? YOU GUYS WON'T BELIEVE THIS SHIT! FUUCK!

People in China Don't Eat Cheese
Whaaaat? I found this especially hard to believe because of how much cheese I eat. Seriously, this is what my food pyramid looks like:

As you can see, I couldn't imagine living without such a large staple of my diet.

So as I've done previously, before I research whether or not this profound statement is true, let's look at the implications of a cheese-less society.

First off, no pizza.

I can't imagine living somewhere where there aren't countless pizza franchises, all claiming to be the best. Let's see what else...no macaroni and cheese! So what's the backup plan for dinner when kids refuse to eat shit like brussels sprouts? Also, Chinese people must be a lot less constipated. So is it true?

Well it turns out there's some truth to this. Chinese culture went without any cow by-products for quite awhile, so the gene for lactose intolerance wasn't necessarily bred out of them. So nowadays, even though cheese is much more readily available in a globalized economy, I guess some Chinese people are like old grandparents sitting on their rocking chairs on their porches talking about how "back in my day, we didn't need cheese, and GOD DAMMIT WE STILL DON'T!"

But come on, all of China? Not possible. This fact needs a lot of footnotes. As you might imagine, while Chinese culture has a lot less cheese, plenty of them still fucking eat it because it god damn rules.

The Waiting List for an Apartment in Poland is 20 Years
Once again, whaaattt? When I first read this I thought it was referring to just renting an apartment. A funny scenario sprung to mind wherein as soon as a child was born the parents immediately thought "Oh FUCK, if he wants someplace to live at college in 20 years we've gotta get him on the list fucking quick!!" Then they irresponsibly dash out of the hospital and drive to the building with the apartment list so they can write down their names and secure their baby's future. Haha, why didn't just one of them go so the other could stay at the hospital? Crazy Polish people.

But then I realized it would only make sense with regard to buying an apartment. Still though, 20 years? Why don't they just build more apartments?

Holy shit you guys we can fucking make more of these!

(I think that dude is about to get hit by that cement truck.)

Anyways, doesn't that statistic seem a bit outrageous? So I looked into it and this site talks about the late eighties being a time where the waiting list was about 15 years. I don't feel like researching too deeply into Polish history to find out why the waiting list supposedly hasn't gotten shorter, cause I've had a few beers and fuck that.

I did find plenty of real estate listings for apartments in Poland though, and failed to notice any fine print about possibly dying of old age before you own one.

The First Hearing Aids were Too Large to be Worn

Well what fucking good were they then? Suppose someone's walking through town, not hearing shit, when suddenly someone appears to say something interesting. Maybe something like "you look like a man that can hear pretty well." So the fellow with the hearing problem says, "follow me back to my office, then wait a bit while I hook up this contraption, then tell me again." Man, that dude should've just brought a pad of paper around with him.

Seriously though, were the first hearing aids only for home use? Or does "too large to be worn" mean they were portable, just not hands free? I need some fucking answers.

Apparently the first electronic hearing aids were the size of a desk radio and "large and unwieldy". I suppose you could still carry it around with you though. Maybe you could push it around on a little cart, and then when someone speaks you shout at them, "NO! Say it into this little box!"

I'm assuming that's how they worked anyway. I dunno, I kinda stopped reading.

Bats Always Turn Left when Exiting a Cave
I've been hearing this for years and always smelled bullshit. Allow me to demonstrate why. Here is a bat cave:

Whoops, sorry. Here is a bat cave:

Now suppose I took on a little construction project and...

Now I bet those bats learn to stop turning left pretty quickly.

I researched further and found out it certainly was bullshit. Plenty of sites talked about the moon or some other dumb thing affecting the bat's inner navigational systems, but then plenty more sites said the people on those first sites were fucking idiots. Say you always turn towards the moon, left will still be different depending on if the cave faces north or south. Or what if there's just a wall on the left side of entrance, what are they gonna do, fly into it and die? Pff.

I was shocked to learn that the internet had told yet another lie, but after a cold shower I've come to grips with it.

Wait, bats turning left out of a cave...

I'll be damned.

Papers Are Worse Than Dog Shit

2011-05-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

We all get excited when we finish something difficult. We think to ourselves, "finally, the last time I'll ever have to do that!" For me, this feeling has accompanied big papers...about eight million times.

It started in my senior year of high school when English culminated in a giant paper and presentation. Knowing I was going off to college for a major that was very much not English, I thought "Ahh, my last big paper!"

Well if you've been reading my blog for awhile you'll have noticed a recurring theme which I have once again illustrated for you: I'm a fucking idiot.

Here's Some More!
I immediately realized the graveness of my error when I became familiar with gen. ed. credits. Noticing a lot of science and history courses thrown in there I thought to myself, "Oh god.." Sure enough, the very first class I went to in college included two small papers and one large one.

After that semester was over I thought. "Well, I don't have to take any more history classes, so this time I think I really am done with papers!" I was a stupid, stupid son of a bitch.

I looked over the gen. ed. requirements some more and realized I needed to take English credits. Not only was I not done with papers, I wasn't even done with English. I was fairly certain I already knew how to speak the language pretty well, but begrudgingly signed up for the ol' English 101 anyway.

Not to be confused.

We were quickly told by probably the oldest teacher on the planet that there were to be five papers completed over the course of the semester. GOOD. FUCKING PILE THEM ON. After checking through some old mythology books, curious as to what ancient deities I had pissed off to deserve such treatment, I got to work on the readings and papers. What were we reading? Books about jury duty. Because if you take the most boring task in the world, writing papers, and combine it with the most boring subject in the world, you get something exciting right?! YES. LET'S WRITE ABOUT JURY DUTY. AWESOME. PARDON ME WHILE I SHIT INTO MY OWN MOUTH. Here are some topics I would've preferred to write about:

The Story of the Dude that Sat in a Room for a Few Days

Reading Books Backwards. More or Less Fun?

Taste Testing Piles of Shit in Various States of Decomposition.

The History of Assessing the Reliability of 9/16" Bolts Vs 1/2" Bolts with Regard to their Use in Car Batteries that are Used For Display Purposes Only in Museums that Nobody Goes To

So I read the books and did the utterly boring papers, one of which I actually typed in the hour I had between classes. You can imagine how that one turned out. I affectionately titled these five papers the following way:

So after I finished my favorite class in the whole entire world ever, I wised up and only briefly and half-heartedly entertained the idea that I had just completed my final paper. I knew I was in for one more English class in the category of "Writing Intensive."

A Bit of Hope
The class I ended up taking, Foundations of Literary Analysis actually, get ready...

made English kind of fun!

How could this be? Well, it turns out if you combine a brilliant and engaging teacher with straightforward expectations, with someone like me who was actually learning to grow the fuck up a little bit, some college classes can actually be rewarding. If any of you out there are attending the University of Maine and Steve Evans is still teaching, I highly recommend taking one of his classes.

Still though, we had to write a bunch of papers.

Although the papers were on more interesting topics, and encouraged and rewarded critical thinking, they were still big stupid dumb papers and I hated them. But hey, once those were over, surely I was finished with papers this time! I was a music major. We didn't need to write about shit!

Fucking, Yes We Did
Music history classes involved papers. Advanced theory classes involved papers. I ended up taking a philosophy class for an elective, and had to write more papers. It just never ended. And now that I was somewhat of a responsible adult, I couldn't help but try to do well on these papers, and that just ended up causing frustration when I neared the end. Rather than close the paper on some half-assed conclusion that didn't flow well with the rest of the paper, I actually tried to think things through and make sure the papers existed as some sort of cohesive unit. They usually needed lots more revising. This took time and energy, and made me angry.

Now I'm a graduate student, where basically every class is taught seminar style, so grades are based on discussion, and you guessed it, papers. Usually one giant one at the end of the semester. No more 5-10 page assignments. No, now it has become

1. Choose a topic that kind of relates to the class.

2. Write every single fucking thing about it you can possibly think of.

So now I'm going to break down my paper writing process for you.

Step 1: Outline.
To write any good paper, it is generally a good idea to make an outline from which to draw. That way, you'll see how the points relate to one another, and recognize any redundancies in your thought process. This should help you avoid writing yourself into a hole later.

Step 2: Fuck Step 1.
I usually skip the outline bit. What a god damned waste of time.

Step 3: I Shouldn't Have Skipped Step 1.
I'll usually realize what a mistake it was to skip the outline fairly quickly. So alongside my paper I'll end up doing a half outline. Every time I think of some way to relate certain points to others, I'll quickly right them down in notepad or something before I forget. In the interest of time, I'll write an abbreviated note to myself with the intention of going back to it later.

Step 4: What The Fuck Do All These Notes Mean?
It turns out my little notes were a little too abbreviated. I'll have no idea what to make of phrases like "Remember connectivity" or "Differences in experience", so I just keep plugging away.

Step 5: Cruise For A Bit.
Usually after a page or two I've got a pretty good idea about where I'm going with this paper and I can bang out a couple of more pages pretty quickly.

Step 6: What Have I Done?
After the cruising portion, I'm maybe six pages into a ten page paper and hit a wall so thick it's probably responsible for the loss of most cell phone reception in the Northern Hemisphere. I have no idea how to stretch my points any further and end up taking a break for awhile.

Step 7: Get Drunk.
Fuckin' might as well.

Step 8: Back To The Grind.
I was so proud of myself for getting so far when I started typing, that I probably got cocky and let several days pass, and now the paper is due in less than twelve hours. Desperation tends to breed creativity in my mind, so I start making wild ass points and cover up their utter lack of relevance using sound rhetoric I've developed over the years.

Step 9: The Thesaurus Is Your Friend.
My sound rhetoric I've just mentioned can only get me so far, so now I need to start using big words to throw the professors off. By now I'm pretty burnt out so I'll often stop mid sentence, recognize the opportunity for the perfect word, and fuck me if I can ever remember what that word is. Even with the thesaurus it will probably take several minutes and a bit of luck to find the word that "sounds right, but I don't think it was the one I was looking for, oh well. FUCK IT."

Step 10: Home Stretch.
After a couple more hours of slogging through the mud it's time for the concluding paragraph. This part is easy. Just remember your main points and try to combine them all into one sentence. Repeat yourself unnecessarily a few more times and hope that by then you've got a sizable block of text that is valued more for how much space it takes up than for its actual content.

Step 11: Proofread.
Haha, just kidding.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY MOM!

2011-05-08T10:47:00.000-07:00

I'm sure all of you out there are thinking "my Mom is the better than yours". And hey, so am I! The only difference is that with my Mom, it's true.

Here she is back in the day being way more awesome than your mom ever was.

And here she is continuing that trend, despite having to put up with these two assholes:

for the last couple of decades. How does she do it while continuing to be the most warm, friendly and loving person on the earth? The mystery may never be solved.

She has truly been there for me through it all, and deserves a second separate mother's day six months from now. I trust you will all observe it.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

Flow Chart

2011-05-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

This and That

2011-04-27T08:42:00.000-07:00

Here's some random shit I bothered to write down.

What's with the saying "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy's dog"?
Well of fucking course you wouldn't. What does the dog have to do with anything? Just because the dog is in close proximity to your enemy doesn't mean shitty traits are rubbing off on the dog. Anyone that hates a person so much that even their dog's misfortune is enough to make them think "Close enough!" is a fucking shitty person.

You'll have to do.

Mystery Hair
Occasionally we'll all notice a stray hair on our clothes or something. Sometimes this hair is much longer than any of our own, so we'll wonder, where did it come from?

"I'm around chicks so much it's only natural for some of their hair to end up on my clothes" - Douchebag.

"This could actually be from a dude with long hair...no it's probably from a hot chick" - Slightly more rational douchebag.

"Did someone put this here on purpose?" - Paranoid asshole.

"This smells really good." - Creep.

"I'm going to include this in a blog post." - Loser.

I wonder when I'll drive a car again.

I don't own a car anymore, and I don't need one where I live, so here's how I imagine the next time I get behind the wheel:

Dear people behind the announcers at sporting events that suddenly realize they're on TV:
Fuck you. Can't you just sit still? If you have to be an attention craving asshole, at least do something creative, don't just wave incessantly for five minutes. I'm sure one or two people watching are saying "oh look it's Dave!" but most are probably thinking "Fuck that guy and his goofy grin."

Why are there two locked doors in the entrances of some buildings?
Nobody's going to bust through one door, see a second door and think "Shucks! Guess I'll go home!" If they possess the tools or strength to get past the first door without a key, the second door will only slow them down, and this will probably just make them more angry by the time they get to your apartment and start stealing your things.

You know what? I guess if someone forgets to lock one door, they'll hopefully remember to lock the second, which cuts a burglar's chance in half. God dammit. It makes perfect sense. Fuck it, I'm leaving my rant on here.

Sometimes in life, you just won't know how to act.
Like how not to feel a little awkward when you:

Try to do something suave and injure yourself really badly.

Buy toilet paper.

These folks have to do it far less often.

Say "what?" more than twice.

Send more than two un-reciprocated texts.

Make eye contact with a mother whose child just backed into your crotch.

Over the years, this is how I've felt while in church:

0-8: Enthralled

8-12: Bored

12-16: Bored

14-20: Bored

20-25: ...Enthralled...aaaaaannDDD HAHA TOTALLY FUCKING KIDDING. STILL BORED.