Merry Drinkmas

A little poem for the holidays.

Twas guys night before Christmas and all through the bar
All the creatures were drinking, forgetting where they parked their car.

The drinks were placed on the counter, made with a steady hand
While a couple guys contemplated doing a keg stand.

The children and pets were snug in their beds
While their dads and caretakers drank their self meds.

And then, while they were tinkling, there came from the roof,
A shout of a drunk guy calling the whole group aloof.

We couldn't believe the gall of this prick,
but lo and behold, the asshole was Saint Nick!

Turns out he drinks a lot when not in his sleigh,
figuring that his reindeer will just find the way.

So Saint Nick bellied up to the bar with us for a shot,
all men trying to prove that pussies they were not.

As we all ended the night, calling for a cab,
the big man yelled "thanks" for picking up the tab.

He stumbled to his sleigh at the end of this long night,
shouting "Merry Drinkmas to all, Jesus, Rudolph's nose if f***ing bright!"

Cleanliness is Next To Godliness

Let's take a trip in the way-back machine (my memory) and talk about my college days for a bit. I want to let you all know that I was a ladies man and I had myself quite a bit of fun-ication (like fornication, but fun!). And I think I have just the story to display my magnificent skills as a closer. I've often been called the "Mariano Rivera of taking ladies to pleasure town." Well, maybe I've never been called that, but I just came up with it now, so that counts for something.

The time is winter of 2005/2006 and I'm fully engorged in my senior year of college. I've got life by the balls and I'm not afraid to flaunt that. I had it all: a crappy apartment with 3 other guys, crippling student loans building up, 3/4 of a philosophy degree, and a '91 Honda Accord with 185,000 miles on it. Yup, living the dream.

A friend from High School (let's call her Steph because that's her name) asks me if I wanted to go to a party with her because she doesn't know anyone there. As fate would have it, I had been invited to the same party because I was the most popular guy on campus and everyone wanted me at their shindigs. See, I called it a shindig, how awesome is that? After several cancellation calls I had to make for prior engagements, I was able to free my night up for Steph and we decided to head out to the party together. I have to remember where I came from and it's friends like Steph that got me to where I am today. See how amazing I am?

As we rolled up to the party, I made my entrance with much fanfare and no fewer than 3 confetti cannons. Everyone was amazed and I made sure to introduce Steph to everyone I could. Okay, maybe that was a bit of an embellishment: there were only two confetti cannons. I was on a college budget, I couldn't go totally overboard.

After a few beers and some mingling, I managed to catch the attention of a fellow partygoer. As it turns out, I had met her a few times before and it was her house we were partying at. I knew one roommate quite well from our times in the dorms together, so I was glad to meet a lovely lady that could keep up with my type of people. After several suave conversations, things were clear that this young lady was into yours truly and I was suddenly very aware that the party had started to die down and guests were leaving.

Being that I knew one of the residents, I offered to help clean up and keep drinking as I did it. At this point, Steph said she wanted to take off home and asked if I needed anything. I knew that love was in the air, so I politely asked if she could get home by herself (we lived in the same apartment building), to which she replied she could. That, or I slurred at her that I needed to stay at the house for what I liked to call "a little p in v action". Subtlety is not always my strong point.

As I cleaned up, my new infatuation started to talk to me and asked me if I could help her get to her room. I knew what that meant and I was very excited... until I realized that they had taken one of their couches out of the living room and propped it in the hallway to block unwanted guests from entering the bedrooms. She literally needed my help to move the couch to get to her room. Great, now I had misread the situation and I was going to walk home alone. But wait, as I move the couch, she grabs me by the hand and leads me into her room! I knew all along that this was the plan because I'm amazing at picking up signals from women.

As we entered her room, she closed the door behind us and wrapped her arms around me. Being that I'm about 6'3" and she was no more than 5'5", I enveloped her in my lanky embrace. She looked up at me with her big brown eyes (or maybe they were green... or blue. I have no idea), smiled, and said to me, "What are you thinking about?"

A million things flooded my head and at least 950,000 of them were sexual in nature. I glanced around her room and contemplated for a moment what to say. I wasn't going to ruin this moment and I was going to have the best response ever to this question. I'm a philosophy major and a witty motherfucker, so obviously I can slay this. I thought for a moment, looked down at her, smiled, and said:

"Your room is really clean."

Now, if that isn't the smoothest thing you've ever heard, you've probably literally heard most anything else said ever because that was terrible. To make matters worse, all the booze I had been very intelligently drinking in moderation (25 beers in about 4 hours plus countless shots) started to hit me and I got staggeringly tired in that exact moment. I released my embrace, walked out the door, and promptly passed out on a couch in their living room.

And that is how I never once talked to that fine young lady again. Lady killer right here.

Of Tractors and Field Roads...

As previously mentioned, I worked on a farm for several years.  Well, the fact of the matter is that I grew up on a farm and my dad quit farming when I was in high school.  Apparently after that, I just couldn't bear the thought of not doing farm work and had to work on a different farm in the area.  Most of my terrible stories go with that farm as I was then old enough to make the terrible decisions that are so often associated with being 16 - 23 years of age.  And as many decisions I made that proved to be less than fortuitous, this actually involves a fellow worker on that farm.  His name was Aaron, and he was the most reckless of the lot of us idiotic kids on this farm.

On this particular farm, we had many tractors and one of the training tractors was the mighty Ford Jubilee we had.  You see, not everyone knows how to drive a tractor and you need one with very little destructive power to give teenagers to learn on.  The Joob was that tractor for us.  It was small, but still had enough power to haul various forms of equipment and trailers all about the country side.  So, on this particular day, Aaron was to take the Mighty Joob out and use it with an inverter (an attachment that inverted windrows of hay to aid in the drying process).  Aaron set out to the top of a hill toward some hay that was in desperate need of turning over.

Meanwhile, I had to go to a different field area with one of the trucks and went to do whatever chore it was that needed to be done.  It doesn't really matter what it was I was doing, it could have been frog stomping for all I know (please note: it wasn't frog stomping or badger smashing or any sort of animal pulverizing at all).  What matters was that the chore involved me driving on a trail that took me directly past Aaron's inversion.

As I happened upon the field of hay that was noticeably turned over, I saw Aaron bouncing merrily along on the Jubilee.  I saw that he was going a little faster than advised on the tractor, but as I said before, he was the most reckless on the farm and therefore it fit his style.  Now, it should be noted that I said "faster than advised" because the Jubilee had a rear tire that possessed too few nuts.  You see, several of the bolts which the nuts were attached to had been stripped of threading over the years and it was down a couple (most of them).  Therefore, trundling along at top speed over uneven ground was a bad idea when the rear wheel had a habit of coming off rapidly.  I suppose you've figured out now where this is going...

I navigated the truck along the drive parallel to Aaron's path and there was quite a lot of tall grass between the two of us (along with a fence).  So what I saw unfold was the following set of events over the course of maybe 10 seconds.

Aaron and the crest of the tractor's fenders bounced along roughly in the field (that was all I could see over the grass) out of the corner of my eye.  Suddenly, nothing was there in my field of vision.  I brought the truck to a grinding halt on the gravel path, knowing that something wasn't right when Aaron popped up from behind the grass like a whack-a-mole dummy.  He made the briefest of eye contact with me, then turned and ran to his right at breakneck speed after something.  I hadn't the foggiest what was going on, but by this point I had turned off the truck and put it in park and was now halfway out the door, standing to look over the top of the truck (I wasn't going to help Aaron, but I knew whatever was happening needed to be seen from a good vantage point).  Aaron hit a patch of grass that was about waist high and I noticed something else was making a path through the grass just ahead of him, but I couldn't see what.  Aaron found the ground rapidly and involuntarily, arms and legs akimbo, tripping over god knows what in that tall grass (probably a smashed badger) and whatever was ahead of him stopped as well.

Now that this was all finished, I had a second to take stock in the situation.  I glanced back a few feet and saw what appeared to be a Ford Jubilee sans one rear tire.  And it all started to make sense.

You see, Aaron had been driving the tractor too fast when the wheel decided it had enough of this hard labor and opted for break time.  It broke free from the shackles of "The Man" and went on its own path.  A path that led directly to a fence that was holding cows into a pasture.  Aaron, meanwhile, had followed gravity's path and taken a digger off the tractor.  He did have the wherewithal to realize the wheel was now not only doing a piss-poor job of being on a tractor, but was also heading toward a fence.  A fence that Aaron would have to fix if anything should happen to it.  So, Aaron took off in a dead sprint after the wheel through the weeds trying to stop this from happening.  A bit of flattened woodland creature later and he was on the ground.  Luckily for him, wheels are notoriously quick to give up, and the wheel decided to take a nap in what it presumed was Narnia instead of breaking through barriers (literally and metaphorically).

I traversed the small space between the truck and the accident scene to turn the still running tractor off.  Aaron was still down, more out of shame than injury (I assumed, anyway).  I could see two very clear entry points into the thick growth, so I followed one and came upon the Che Guevara of wheels.  Aaron sprang up once again, but this time less purposefully.  I helped him drag the wheel back up, gave him a ride to the barn, and let him explain what had happened to our boss as I set out to demolish more animals smaller than me (or whatever it was I had been trying to do before).

And that, my friends, is how we inspired the movie Rubber.

I guess I am lucky...

During one of my summers home, I was working on the farm again and most of my time was spent there. But every so often, I would get a night off early and be able to go out with friends to see a movie. One particular night I was driving a few friends up to Madison to see a movie and we were about 30 minutes early for the movie. We decided to get some ice cream from a Dairy Queen, but that required me to drive a couple minutes from the movie theater. This would be the wonderful drama for the night.

As I crossed a highway with a median dividing four lanes of traffic, there happened to be a pedestrian crossing. I didn't really notice the woman, but my friends did and I easily avoided the woman and was never really in any danger of hitting. We all laughed and then went right on into the DQ to get our ice cream.

As we came walking out to enjoy our frozen treats (it was a beautiful summer day so we sat outside), there was a woman leaning against a car a few feet behind my car. I thought nothing of it, though it was a bit odd to see her just sitting there. As we all finished up our food items, the four of us started to get back in my car. The woman then spoke up:

"I wouldn't go anywhere if I were you, those police cars are coming for you."

At this point, I noticed two squad cars coming through the parking lot towards us and a female officer exited each car. One officer approached me, while the other went to the woman there. I asked the officer what this was about and the office responded, "This woman says you nearly hit her on the road." I nearly hit her.

Take that in for a moment. She was saying that I almost did something illegal, but actually didn't do anything illegal. I understand maybe that woman was mad and I may have been a bit close to her, but to call the police?

In any event, I explained to the officer what happened. At one point I said I may have gotten a bit close, to which the woman replied, "HE ALMOST RAN OVER MY FOOT!" I said to the officer I didn't know what to do, and she rolled her eyes, telling me I should probably apologize.

At this point I got the distinct impression the officers didn't want to be there either. So, I approached the woman, ready to apologize. I said I was sorry if I had scared her, I didn't mean to almost hit her, I will try to be more careful, and all that type of stuff. She then said the words I will never forget:

"You're just lucky I'm a reasonable person."

I very nearly responded to this with some smart ass comment, but the officer made eye contact with me and shook her head. I simply replied, "I am" and turned and walked away.

We made it to the movie on time as this whole exchange only took about 10 minutes. I was livid, but I got to see whatever the hell I was seeing that night. But I will forever remember those words. I guess I am very lucky.

Lost in Translation

So this picture was recently brought to my attention (thank you reddit.com) and I just have to give a few pointers to people thinking this might be helpful. First things first, the picture in question.

It is a "translation" for parents to understand what their kids are saying when they say certain key words. Now, I am not necessarily the most up-to-date on most phrases, but I have grown up in the generation mentioned in this article and I need to tell you that most of the shit in this article is horribly fucking wrong. Let's go through some of the words together, shall we?

"Cheddar: Money" - If your children are rich, monocle-wearing British aristocrats, they may say this. Otherwise, pretty sure no one uses this word unless they are talking about the cheese.

"Cheezing: Smiling" - I refer you to this Urban Dictionary article. Has no one seen South Park? The author of this article hasn't.

"Chillax: to relax and chill out" - Ding! Got this one right! Of course no one has said this since The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was airing new episodes, but whatever. A victory is a victory, even if it is at the Special Olympics.

"Chomper: loser" - I've never heard anyone say this. As far as I know, Chomper is this thing.

"Coolth: a state of being cool" - Is this actually slang? Maybe I am out of touch? Maybe I need this article to help me when I thought I didn't.

"Crunk: somewhere between drunk and crazy" - I don't think that's what rappers had in mind when they came up with that word, but if you need to think that in your sheltered, suburbanite world, then fine. To quote Urban Dictionary again: "Everybody here is wrong, it is not getting crazy and drunk. It's smoking chronic (marijuana) and getting drunk."

"Dang: disappointed or surprised" - This is helpful for a person who has never heard words before or grew up raised by wolves. Otherwise, you can probably glean from the context what this word means.

"Defriend: to end a friendship" - You're officially riding the short bus if you didn't know what this meant.

"Dis: to disrespect" - Are the 90s that long ago people don't remember what this word means?

"Durri: a cigarette" - No one says this. Ever.

"E-Class: a really expensive car" - This isn't slang. IT'S AN ACTUAL TYPE OF MERCEDES CARS NUMBNUTS!

"Fap: Drunk, confused, intoxicated" - "Here's the pulse. And here are your fingers, far away from the pulse, lodged firmly up your ass." Fap isn't an adjective, is a verb/sound. A dirty, dirty verb/sound.

"Fetch: cool or stylish" - Someone watched Mean Girls, but quit paying attention when they explained this was just some wannabe cool girls not cool word.

"Foo: a fool and/or friend" - Mr. T called, he wants his obvious shortening of a word back. And his popularity as something other than a punchline.

"Grommet: a child who surfs, skates, or snowboards" - No, this is Grommet:


"Gronk out: go to bed" - That phrase has never been uttered by a sober human being before someone read this article out loud. Maybe they meant "zonk out", but even then, that's pretty old.

"Holah: Make some noise" - I believe they meant hollah, which is usually used to say something terrible like "Hollah atcha boy!", used by frat boys and other would-be date rapists to mean "call me".

"Jacked: Messed up and destroyed" - I guess if someone said to me that Sylvester Stallone was totally jacked in the new Rambo movie, I could misinterpret it like that. But really, jacked is all roided up. Sorry, probably need a definition for that too: he's taking steroids and looking very cut. Sorry, cut means very muscly and strong. And strong means...

"Loose: a positive word meaning without morals or self-restraint" - Yes, positive. As in, "Look at that loose chick. I love the way she has no inhibitions. This is positive." Sorry, wrong, it means she's a whore, which is almost never positive.

"Moo: bored" - That's the sound a fucking cow makes. Is the person writing this article suddenly playing with a Speak and Say?

"Piece: mobile phone" - Piece means gun or dick. Jesus Christ, are you living on a goddamn religious commune or something? Who wrote this?

"Puff: something very good" - Okay, I hate to tell you this, but if you ask your kid what a "puff" is and they say "something very good", it's most likely going to be followed up with a lot of laughter, bloodshot eyeballs, and a discussion about your kid's room smells like incense. Because it means to smoke pot, you see. If you're reading this article and actually thinking it's correct, then I need to spell this out for you.

"Secks: something desirable" - Say it out loud once. Sound like anything to you? Hmm, maybe it's "something desirable" because SEX IS FUCKING DESIRABLE. I bet the author of the article asked their kids for help translating it. If they did, I also bet they don't know that their kids hate them and are currently laughing at them. Also, SURPRISE BUTT SECKS!

"Uber: Very" - Ehh, close enough. Try super or over (what it actually means in German), but you got close.

Moral of this story: Newspaper writers are as out-of-date and archaic as the form of media they write for.

Make Your Moove

I grew up on a farm and when my dad quit farming, I decided that getting covered in shit and working really long hours was really appealing to me. I opted to get another job at a farm in town and I truly enjoyed working there. It was very hard work, but it was rewarding: waking up at 4:30 AM to be at work by 5:00, working from then until about 6:30 PM, milking cows, driving tractors, and just generally doing what they show on a Wranglers Jeans commercial. That doesn't mean we didn't have fun working there though. I remember one particular morning, a strange thing occurred...

It was morning milking time and we were just getting started, so I would guess it was probably about 5:30 AM. One of the other guys that worked on the farm by the name of Troy was wandering around before going to feed the cows. I was starting the task of milking and he came walking past me. He and I had a fun little game we liked to play in the morning that went a little something like this:

Me: Hey Troy!

Troy: WHAT?!? (Faking anger)

Me: Fuck you.

Troy: Shut. Up.

Me: Shut the fuck up.

Troy: SHUT. UP!

Me: SHUT THE FUCK UP!

This would go on until we were shouting obscenities at the top of our lungs at each other for no good reason other than it kind of woke us up at that point in the morning. It ended with one of the two of us waving our hand above our heads with a big goofy grin on our faces, saying, "Mornin'!". The other would be forced to do the same and then we went about our days. It always managed to keep us entertained and happy. I don't know what that says about us, but it can't say good things.

In any event, I was in between a couple of cows, putting on a milking machine when Troy went traipsing past my field of vision. I then proceeded to yell at him:

Me: HEY!

Troy: WHAT?!?!

Me: SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Troy: SHUT THE FUCK UP!

*Large thump from an indeterminate source*

Troy and I stared at each other for a second, trying to figure out what exactly had made that noise, when all of a sudden Troy got terribly pale and looked to his left at a cow that was laying down. He bolted towards the animal and I did as well. I had no idea what was going on, but judging from the look on Troy's face, something was not going well. I ran over to see the cow on the ground, pulling its collar to an extreme and choking itself. Troy and I leapt into action, Troy going to the front of the animal, grabbing the collar, and tryin to unhook it while I pushed the animal up from the back, allowing the collar to loosen some slack. If you've never tried to move a cow that's dead weight, it's very difficult. A cow can average anywhere from 1200 to 1500 lbs and this was a Brown Swiss cow (one of the larger breeds), so she was probably about 17-1800 lbs. We managed to get enough slack to remove the collar, but the cow just put her head down and laid very still suddenly. Immediately we called for the owner of the farm to come down to help, and he ran to us.

He put his head down and just said she was dead. Now this may seem pretty sad, but it wasn't all that out of the ordinary; farm animals died all the time, it is just a way of life. This cow in particular was old (about 13 yrs old, which is a pretty old cow) and we were pretty sure she had a heart attack. The odd thing was the timing: she literally dropped as Troy finished yelling at me and he just happened to be about 10 feet from her when it happened. We will never know if Troy startled her that much and she died or if he has some super power that allows him to kill bovines by yelling at them to "shut the fuck up", but one thing is for certain...

I am not letting Troy anywhere near my fucking cows. Ever.

Liar, Liar, Feet on Fire?

It's always good to stay in touch with your friends from High School when you go off to college. Especially if your friends go to the same college! But what happens when you have to come home for the summer to live with your parents? Well, you hope that some of your friends will have to come back home as well, thus allowing you to party with them. The only problem is that you are living with your parents. But then you just wait for a set of parents to leave and you can party at their house. While my parents never went anywhere, luckily for me some of my friends' parents would leave their house in the capable hands of their responsible, college-aged children. This is a story of one of those times...

My friend Kat had a few of us over to her house when her parents weren't there for a weekend and we decided to have a couple of drinks. Now, when I say a few people, I actually mean that this time: there were only about 5 of us total at the house. The problem was that three of us were dumb, 20-something males who grew up in the middle of nowhere. So, when the words "fire pit" and "bonfire" were thrown around, we immediately decided to investigate this further. At this point, our bloodstreams were probably flammable due to consumption, so the last thing we needed to do was play with fire. Thank god we were all rational adults, so we all decided to sober up before we played with fire.

After that fantasy never happened, the three of us (myself, Jake, and Corbin) headed outside to get some serious flames going. Now, unfortunately, Kat was being a major buzzkill (read: more sober than us) and said we couldn't do that and she wasn't going to tell us the location of any fire-starting supplies. Luckily for us, Jake was dating Kat at the time, so he went outside and said, "I know where they keep the gas! And I've got matches!"

The three of us went to a shed near the house and went to find the gas Jake said he knew of. Not only did we find a gas container there, but we found 3 gas containers! We had stumbled straight out of reality and into a Darwin Award! Too bad for the human race, we weren't removed from the gene pool that night, but something pretty damn funny did happen...

All three of us decided to go out and put some wood on the fire pit and some gasoline on that wood. All was going just fine until we light it all on fire. Nothing exploded, but we did notice there was a bit of grass outside of the fire pit that had lit itself on fire. And by a bit, I mean something roughly the size of a football. I am not over-exaggerating anything this time, we were in no imminent danger. We were a good distance from the house, woods, cars, and other people. And that's why what followed is so stupid.

We all agreed in a well thought out, calm conversation ("Dude, the grass is on fire!" "Should put it out?" "Probably should" "I'm drunk as hell right now, stop harshing my buzz with talk about fire") that the grass should be extinguished. So, Jake and I (being slightly more sober than Corbin) looked around for something to put the fire out with. Corbin, being a man of action (drunk), decided to stomp the fire out. This is just fine most of the time, but I think I left out one important detail:

Corbin was barefoot.

Actually, I left out two important details:

Corbin was barefoot and his feet were soaked in gasoline.

It took Jake and I a minute to realize that our friends feet had CAUGHT ON FIRE and we should probably do something about that. You see, we managed to spill everywhere with our gas (probably because we were flinging gas at each other, but that's neither here nor there) so Jake manage to get Corbin to the ground and I patted his feet out. Luckily, Corbin was one of those genetic freaks that didn't really feel pain like normal people (seriously, they made Jackass-style videos of him getting tazed and things like that), so he was no worse for the wear. That and all the booze made him just fine. It was at that point we all realized the grass was still on fire and we still had to do something about it.

You ever have one of those moments where everything happens in slow motion, you know it's all going to end badly, but you still can't react fast enough? This was one of those moments. I am sure it had something to do with all the alcohol, but for whatever reason, I just sat back and watch what happened next. It was like seeing the unveiling of the PT Cruiser: you knew it was a bad idea and it could do a lot of damage, but you kinda wanted to see it go up in flames.

Corbin proceeded to notice the grass was still on fire and sprang into action again. That's right: after we had just stopped his feet from being on fire, he tried to stomp out more flames. This, unsurprisingly, lit his feet the fuck back up and we had to put him out once again. I then got up and stomped the fire out with my shoe-covered feet and everything was fine. Jake and I asked Corbin if he was okay and he seemed to be. After a strange conversation about bacon (probably brought on by the smell of burning flesh), we all decided to let the fire burn out and go back inside to drink more.

I wonder if they ever covered that scenario in D.A.R.E.?