New Orleans

First off let me say that New Orleans is one of the craziest, liveliest, most energetic places I’ve ever been to. It’s a city in the swamps, where people gather to drink and drink and drink and then eat food that is spicy as all hell yet seemingly harmless because you are so trashed that you don’t realize that your insides are spontaneously incinerating with every bite. The whole city reeks of French influences and kind of reminds me of Paris, only the romance in the air is much more uncivilized (a.k.a. “trashy”) and the people are 50 times more inebriated.

I have also never heard more live music in such a short period of time. Everywhere you walk in Orleans there is great live blues, jazz, and Zydeco pouring onto the streets from the bars and the street musicians and artists in Jackson square rival anything I’ve seen in Europe. Also the people are incredibly open and will just come up to you and start bullshitting with you which I’ve never had a problem with.

More nonsense

So after a semester abroad in Europe and reading a couple really good books with similar ideologies, I’ve become a huge fan of backpacking. It’s the whole idea of not packing anything more than you can jam into a rucksack that you can sling over your back. I personally enjoy it because it means you don’t have to check any luggage and you can just bring all of your belongings as a carry on and run off the plane and partake in what I’ve referred to is in the past as guerilla tourism. Guerilla Tourism is trying to see and experience everything that a city or culture has to offer in a very short period of time, at the expense of other less important things like breathing.

The only problem with this whole rucksack revolution though is that people like me who don’t understand the basic mechanics of folding clothes and space allocation just ball up their clothes and try to jam as much as can be fit in the bag and are welcomed by a mass of hideously wrinkled dress shirts and pants when the bag is finally opened at the final destination.

You Have Got to be Kidding Me.

So I’m rocking all these obscenely wrinkled clothes throughout the city of New Orleans for the duration of my 4 night stay for no other reason except for the fact that I just don’t care and I am still laughing about what happened as result. Thursday night after some all expenses paid dental convention dinner and consuming numerous cocktails and about ¾ of a bottle of chardonnay I decided that it would be a bright idea to stumble down Bourbon Street, drink some beer, and try find some similarly intoxicated college students to bullshit with, since they are in high supply over there. Anyways I’m just talking about a bunch of dumb things to various people and this chick from North Carolina comes up to me and says “Why in gods name are you wearing that shirt, its soooo wrinkled?”

Rather than trying to come up with any sort of intelligent answer I went with the tried and true explanation of how “I wasn’t sober and that I wasn’t really sure why.” So this girl says to me, “Well if you’ll come back to my hotel room, I’ll iron it for you.” After laughing for what seemed like 5 minutes, I thanked her for the offer but said that I wasn’t all about ironing with some random chick that I met on the street, and that she might get the creases all wrong. Only in New Orleans.

Girls Gone Wild

Now this cracks me up. On Friday Night I once again got lured onto Bourbon street to hang out on the street and drink these 45 ounce beers that this old guy was selling in one of the alleys for 3 bucks which is a steal when you figure they charge $4.75 - $5.00 for beer in the bars and what do I see?, the fucking Girls Gone Wild camera guys probably filming GGW 453 or something. I was sitting and watching this display and thinking that it was really sad that girls would flash cameras and commit other vulgarities and then sign away their rights in exchange for nothing more than a free t-shirt. And the next thing you know you’re on a nationally distributed video and a few sleazeballs make millions of dollars off of your drunken stupidity. If you’re gonna be a total slut on camera why not get some business sense and just make a good old fashioned porn flick. T-shirts shrink and get stained. Why not make actual money and buy me some beer with it. Anyways I was trashed, some of these girls were gorgeous, and overall I can’t say I had a bad time. Girls will do anything for t-shirts won’t they?

And a few last words…..

If you were feeling sharp pains in your back all weekend, it was probably because I was thinking of you while I was stabbing voodoo dolls in various area stores.

I am going to kidnap someone and force them to come to Mardi Gras with me in the next couple years cause the parades look amazing and it is my destiny to be there.

In New Orleans it is legal to walk down the street drinking beer and any other form of alcohol as long as it’s not in a glass container. It’s kind of how I imagine heaven will be like

When going through the security checkpoint at O’Hare and guards find a large pair of scissors in your rucksack, don’t laugh and say, “How did those get in there?” You will get the frisking of a lifetime, trust me.

The reason that Southwest Airlines recently enacted a policy that makes obscenely obese people purchase two airplane seats if they cannot fit into one seat is because there is no reason the person in the next seat over should only be able to use half of their seat. I was lucky enough to get to sit next to a massive authentic Cajun black woman on the way to N’awlins. I know my tickets were ridiculously cheap but this was a little too much. Thanks United. The skies were a little too friendly for comfort this time.

Orginally written: October 20, 2002

(The Following is a selection from my new book "Two Years in Electronic Form")

And Then There Was Scotland

A. On Thursday afternoon I found myself on a 6 and a ½ hour train ride from Oxford, England to Edinburgh, Scotland. Since that is a rather long time, we came on the train armed with: 1 bottle of Jameson’s , 1 bottle of red wine, 1 bottle of white wine, 1 copy of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and 1 Backgammon board. We exited the train having consumed every last drop of alcohol we came with as well as numerous oversized beers in the train bar. I was not sober and I still have no clue how to play backgammon.

B. The hostel we stayed in called the Cowgate Tourist Hostel, made the Flying Pig Hostel in Amsterdam look like the fucking Ritz Carlton. I’ve seen housing projects in Chicago that were more luxurious and they didn’t even have a bar there. We wanted to drink 40 ounces with brown paper bags over them to give it more of an authentic ghetto type feel, but these bastards only have 1 liter bottles. The Metric System is weak as fuck.

C. Any country where a guy can get chicks by walking down the street in a skirt and rocking out on a bagpipe has got to be a pretty sweet place.

D. I was going to buy a bagpipe since they looked to be a damn good time, but for 800 dollars I thought I should at least learn how to play the thing first. I ended up buying what is called a "chanter," which is a woodwind instrument that is essentially a bagpipe without the bag. The guy in the bagpipe store played it and it sounded exactly like a bagpipe but without the drone. When I play it sounds like a cow being slaughtered.

E. The first two nights we went out to the pubs in search of traditional Scottish music. Thursday and Friday nights we caught two amazing bands with amazing fiddle players and I was all about it. The Scottish come from a Celtic background, so their music is very similar to Irish music, so much so that I really can’t tell the difference. But we drank large amounts of Guinness and joined some cute Scottish girls on the dance floor to do some Irish Jigging. Me doing a jig was definitely an interesting sight. It basically consisted of spinning around in circles, hopping up and down, and accidentally kicking pretty much everyone around me in the shins. No one in the pub was all about it, but I was and that’s all that really matters, right?

F. Scottish people have really sweet accents.

G. People in Scotland for some peculiar reason are all about Miller beer. Its almost impossible to find it in cans in England let alone on tap, but every bar in Scotland has Miller on tap and those goofy Scottish bastards suck that stuff down like its their job. It’s not Miller light or MGD, or even Beast Ice for that matter. It’s just called Miller and apparently is only available in Europe. I’m not exactly sure how to explain the taste cause though cause I wasn’t sober when I decided to purchase a pint of it.

H. As I write this e-mail there is a girl out in the hall screaming at the top of her lungs at her mom on her cell phone, and if she doesn’t shut up soon I’m going to go out there and strangle her.

I. I was talking to Nikita this goofy Russian kid, who I’ve written about before and he was trying to convince me that Russian chicks are the best. He said that they are always making you food and stuff and they are real givers; "Christmas Chicks", he says. I think that every guy hopes that someday they’ll end up with one of these so called "Christmas Chicks."

J. One of the days we hit up, the Edinburgh Whiskey Tour. This place was a riot. It was kind of like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, only it was about booze and you get to drink whisky before and after it.

K. I finished this great Hemingway book last week called "To Have and to Have not." It’s about one armed sea captain who hangs out and drinks beer and whisky all day while he’s smuggling illegal booze and Cuban immigrants on his boat and getting shot at. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother getting a college degree, when I could be rum running in the Florida keys and drinking the fuck out of the place while wearing sandals and button down shirts with flowers on them.

L. We were at this one pub called Biddy Mulligans checking out a band, and we got up to go over by where the band is playing and left all of our jackets over at the booth that we were sitting at. 3 minutes later, 4 rather large Scottish women sat down and took over our booth. It was about 1am and I had already had one too many Guinnesses, and for some reason I was convinced that these women were going to eat our jackets. So I kept yelling across the bar to some friends, "Those chicks are going to eat our jackets," over and over again. They kept trying to get me to be quiet and convince me that they weren’t going to, but I didn’t believe them and just kept yelling it louder and louder. Now that I am a little more sober, I do kind of feel bad, but I was really drunk and they really did look rather hungry. Like I’m not plenty goofy looking myself though.

Orginally written February 25, 2002

(The Following is a selection from my new book "Two Years in Electronic Form")

Elevated Trains and Drinking with Co-Workers

My apartment is sandwiched in between two Chicago "EL" train stops on the green and the blue line. Come about 10pm at night on the far westside of Chi-town they usually aren't the safest options, but it's one of those situations where you hide your credit cards, put a minimal amount of cash in your wallet, and hop on the train with the understanding that it would still be cheaper to get mugged on the "EL" then take a cab into the city. When its later at night and you're taking the train, it is all about safety in numbers. I don't care if there's a guy with one leg asking me for a dollar "fiddy" so he can buy a plastic flask of "Uncle Johnny's extra strong whiskey" at the corner liquor store, or a rather large women with crossed eyes and buck teeth who appears to be talking to herself. If someone is going to stab you and take your wallet, they are much more likely to do it when no one else is there watching it go down.(at least I like to think that)

Anyways after a long, grueling, backbreaking, headache inducing, fucking brutal week of work, myself and some colleagues went out for some post-work drinks. You know the drill. You go to the bar with the intention of having a couple drinks and keeping your guard up the entire time but before you know it you are telling all your co-workers your life story as well as really lame inside jokes about paperwork and conference calls. And after 2 drinks you have you tie loosened up, and after about 8 drinks it's possibly tied around your forehead. And after 10 you're waving your paycheck around in the air, saying "a round of shots on me."

And as you hop on the "El" and sober up about half the way home you kind of wish some one would stab you, right there on the spot, or at least that the old guy sitting in the back corner of the train would give you a huge swig from that flask of whiskey of his.

Cause Lord knows, you're gonna be the hottest gossip in front of the water cooler Monday morning.

Right About Now

I think I just realized where my life is going after I got home from work, laid out on the couch, and drank a Gin and Diet Tonic.

These are the types of things that typically scare me.

Kind of like when you're invited to two different parties on a Friday Night but instead fall asleep at 10 o' clock from utter exhaustion cause they worked you like a dog all week.

Or when you're in the office lunch room eating the boring sandwich that you made at 6am while reading a copy of Newsweek from two months ago and you hear bunch of old hens talking about the latest innovations in tupperware and for a split second you actually consider putting in your own two cents regarding your favorite plastic microwaveable food containers.

Or when you cook a frozen pizza one night and you take it out of the oven to let it cool before eating it. And you remember that it wasn't that long ago that the second a pizza was removed from the oven you were there with five guys fighting to jam as many pieces of pizza down your throat as possible, not caring how badly the roof of your mouth was burned, or even if you had in fact tasted the pizza, just as long as you got more pieces than the guy next to you.

Or when you go to Jiffy Lube and the fucking grease monkey changing your oil tries to convince you that you need a new air filter, and a gas cap, and your car needs to be "winterized", and new transmission fluid, and your differential fluids need to be adjusted, and you're like "how bout you just fucking change my oil like I asked in the first place," and you wonder what ever happened to the good old days with the baseball cards inbetween your spokes and the bell on your right handle bar.

Book Released Today

My first book "Two Years in Electronic Form" is out today.

Check it out here

The Election and a Book Update

So thank the fucking lord that the election is finally over. I'm so sick of hearing about politics. I'm sick of the bland guarded conversations we seem to have at my office. I'm sick of a bunch of actors and rockstars constantly telling me that I need to "Vote or Die," I'm sick of Michael Moore and his big fat mouth, I'm sick of Bill O'Reilly and his as well. The Fox News Channel makes me want to gag and Dan Rather and his liberal bullshit will not be missed. We had the choice between two really shitty candidates and one of them won by a small margin. Let's move on. Let's get back to the things that matter.

Who is Paris Hilton screwing at the moment and when will the tape of it be released on special edition DVD? Who is Donald Trump gonna say "You are no longer employed" to. When is the liquor store down the street gonna have a really good sale? When is Rolling Stone Magazine going to actually start writing about music again? Why did the woman at the "Hair Cuttery" tell me she was going to "pimp out" my hairstyle, but instead gave me the worst haircut of all time? When will a 40 hour work week actually mean 40 hours? When will I save enough money to put those 20 inch rims on my SUV and get those platinum grills that I spend all day dreaming about? Will there ever be a time when I'll be able to my laundry without having to pump a fist fulla quarters into the damn machines? Wheres Waldo? Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? When is that fucking book you wrote going to finally come out? These are the things that matter.

Without Further Ado I once again bring to you Monday, November 8th the day my first book "Two Years in Electronic Form" finally comes out.

Now I will answer some questions you guys are asking:

How will I obtain this so called book? will it be at my local book store? Unfortunately it won't be available in Barnes and Noble or Borders or any respected book store because they know better. I'm not gonna lie, this book is trashed, and by trashed I mean the opposite of sober.

Okay so it's not in a bookstore, then where is it?
It is going to be available through through a link posted on this website next monday November 8th.

Are you going to be having any book signings happening in the next couple of weeks? preferably in the Northwoods of Wisconsin?
No I am not planning on signing any books. Especially not in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. I have found that signing autographs detracts from more important things I could be doing like not getting chicks, drinking cheap beer, and working ridiculous hours in a drab, lifeless office.

Did you really write a book or is this just going to be book of really crappy stick people drawings that you did at 3am some night with words like "beer", "chicks", and "not sober" scribbled randomly throughout the pages?
Yes I actually wrote a book. I personally can't believe it either. Its 166 pages of pure idiotic writing, I promise you.