One Year

So this week it will officially be one year since I started this website. Its amazing how fast time flies by. I've written about a ton of different things, but the general subject has been office life and how exhausting, frustrating, and generally ridiculous it can be. It definitely is a confining subject. I mean Christ, there's only 4 walls in an office, 1 employee refrigerator full of old boxes of chinese food and moldy squares of lasagna, a handful of workers seemingly striving toward the same goal, a few boxes full of pens with my companies logo emblazoned on them, a diverse collection of standardized forms which allow us to "do business" and get involved in a neverending game of "the great paper chase". But it's my life I suppose.

Off to the right you will see the Top Ten writings since Positively 18th Street started out in March of last year. They aren't in any particular order, and their wasn't a independent panel of judges who sat down with a couple cases of beer and decided what the best were. I just looked through the site the other day and picked out my favorite writings. Enjoy.

Ice Fishing

This weekend some buddies and I went Ice Fishing up in good ole' northern Wisconsin.

Ice fishing kinda works like this...

1. You buy a shitload of beer

2. You find a frozen lake

3. You drive on it with your car and/or pickup truck with gun rack

4. You find a prime location which meets all the criteria even if you, yourself aren't familiar with said criteria

5. You start drinking

6. You drill numerous holes in the ice with a big fucking corkscrew type instrument called an Auger.

7. You drink more

8. You scratch yourself

9. You stab a small bait fish onto your hook, you tie a line onto the hook.

10. You drink some more.

11. You tie your line to a contraption called a "tip up" and drop your line in the water.

12. Someone later explains to you that a "tip up" is essentially a springloaded flag which pops up in the air as soon as a fish gets hooked, freeing you to drink beer and not actually do anything until you pretty much already caught the fish.

13. You say, "wow that is pretty sweet, can you toss me another beer."

14. At some point your speech gets slurred and you walk kinda awkward and the next thing you know you've fallen head over heels and nearly crack your skull open.

15. Your friend explains to you the concept of ice.

16. A flag pops up after hours of drinking.

17. 5 idiots scramble past piles of beer cans slipping all over the place racing to the fish who has clearly been dominated.

18. You pull a 24 inch Northern Pike out the water.

19. You all agree to exagerate the size to 35 inches for future stories.

20. One of your buddies convinces everyone that every man was responsible for the "triumph" and if anyone asks that we "collectively" caught it.

21. Someone says, "let's celebrate" and 30 minutes later your in some backwoods hole in the wall bar decked out in Green Bay Packers gear drinking happy hour specials.

God Bless Wisconsin.

Heating Things Up

I have recently come to the conclusion that keeping myself fed and cooking are two completely different things.

Back in college I used to think that I was able to cook. I'm not sure why. I think it may have something to do with all those beer bongs, 3 keggers, and generally hazy weekends which led me to all sorts of irrational realizations. Cause now that I have grown older and wiser I know that all I'm really good at is heating things up. It's the bachelor pad lifestyle I suppose. The "I don't give a fuck" jam something down your throat after work, wash it down with a bottle of beer type of lifestyle. My everyday. My Life. Fuckin' A Right.

So o.k. I'm not a chef. Big deal, I have to work within my parameters to keep myself fed in the best way I know possible and that's it. The Bachelor Pad Gourmet Plan consists of 4 food groups.

• Frozen Pizza
• Breaded Chicken Strips in a "Family size" Bag
• Chips
  
• Beer

and course that's just when I actually go out of my way to
"heat things up."

I am also really good at purchasing fast food.

I can feel my arteries clogging as I type.

What would you do?

What if one week I was really busy?

What if I just didn't have time to tell you a bunch of useless stories about what was going on in my life?

What if you came to this website and you weren't welcomed by new half baked, poorly written accounts of how I sit in a fucking office 45 hours a week?

What if you didn't hear about how bad traffic was yesterday and the day before that, and the day before that?

What if I felt like reading a book or playing ice hockey or drinking beer or participating in conversations on various topics with people who aren't electronic and that you can actually see and touch instead of typing away frantically on my keyboard?

What would you do?