#45 - eat! drink! smoke!

today's "stupidest thing ever said," courtesy of my one-a-day calendar:

WOMAN NOT INJURED BY COOKIE
- actual newspaper headline

thank you for your guidance, one-a-day calendar. thank you for providing me with an example of a brave woman who, when she found herself face-to-face with a cookie, emerged victorious...a real story of human triumph over a snack item. i take this as a logical sign that i have the o.k. to throw caution to the wind on this saturday evening, as i too, am human.

#45 - eat! drink! smoke!

snack: rold gold dipped twists fudge coated pretzels
drink: dogfish head 120 minute i.p.a.
smoke: imported dreams belgian blend

i picked up a bag of rold gold dipped twists fudge coated pretzels to snack on tonight. i love chocolate covered pretzels. back at the tail end of the 90s, i was in my mid-twenties & living in boston & working extra hours part time at a boston university "campus convenience" store. i used to eat chocolate pretzel flipz for breakfast, usually with a nantucket nectars orange mango juice. developed me a sweet extra chin for a little bit during that period of my life. anyway, i like these rold gold ones. they're nothing special, but good nonetheless.

holy crap this beer is hoppy. it's a dogfish head 120 minute i.p.a. and it's amberish & opaque & when you bring it to your mouth, your nose finds itself buried inside the glass & it's all holy friggin' hops!...it does smell nice, like when you get a whiff of a really good wine or champagne or scotch or what have you vice wise & smell-related. maybe you like dirty diapers. to each his own, i say. at least you've found something to appreciate. so this beer experience is like that.

on the side of the bottle it reads "what you have here is the holy grail for hopheads. this beer is continually hopped over a 120-minute boil and then dry-hopped every day for a month. enjoy now or age for a decade or so." a decade!...says "ages well" right on the front label. i'm telling you, aging beers is the cool thing to do. take your aged wines & cheeses & cram them. i have one beer that i'm aging. it's this beer from belgium that's "brewed with dandelions." my bottle is from 2004, so the label is all crudely hand-sketched & totally different. i have no idea what the deal is with the crazy ghost on the current label. ms whitney rodgers gave it to me along with five other beers, a gift from a short ways back from an auction she went to & thought of me at. i drank the others a while ago, but now know when i hope to enjoy this final sixth bottle & why.

& tonight with the chocolate covered pretzels & the hoppy hoppy beer, i'm having me a flavored cig. why not? i don't REALLY smoke. the best part about these, other than the slight chocolate taste left in your mouth (which is fine if you don't mind the accompanying smoke taste), is the name. apparently, they used to be named "sweet dreams chocolate." now they've changed the name to "imported dreams belgian blend." why? because flavored cigarettes, whose yumminess appeals to teens (teens love yumminess!), have been a recent target of lawmakers, even though they only represent a mere fraction of overall cigs smoked. at the same time, the menthol cig (like a cigarette AND a minty breath mint!) remains free to frolic unfettered through african american communities. obviously. so the flavored cig companies had to change their product's names to make them less appealing to teens, and if there's one thing that teens could care less about, it's belgium. so they're now a "belgian blend." obfuscation mission accomplished.

#44 - oh c'mon.

i'm generally a pretty upbeat person, but this past weekend friggin' beat me down emotionally. looking back on it, it's your classic case of one main draining event combined with & compounded by a million tiny, absolutely insignificant events & eventually ending up in a state of quite irrational utter blah sadness by the weekend's finish.

it all started quite promisingly on friday. my company was moving offices (from dumbo/north brooklyn to times sq/hell) over the weekend, so the majority of my friday work day was brainless packing of boxes, mixed in with a "closing down the office" beer or two & the ability to leave slightly early...but then i stopped by brooklyn's cadman plaza post office & the downward spiral began.

i stopped by the post office to drop off a package for a co-worker. the package was already all postaged up, but since it was all international & junk, i had to actually hand it to a postal employee, so i got in a 12-person line serviced by 1-4 windows & waited. for 40 minutes. these days, my ipod remains charged for an average of 40 minutes at a time. it has its bad days & good days & on this day, the bitchy lil nano died half way through the line experience. there weren't any luscious babes to gander at, so i alternated between leaning on the counter & huffing for the remainder of the time. when i finally got to the window, i inserted the package into the special bulletproof glass package sender & the guy behind the counter waited for me to shut my side of the sender & pulled out the package to examine it. i let him know that it already had postage right there on the front & i just wanted to hand it to him to make sure we were kosher. he smiled & pleasantly told me that we weren't. my co-worker had miscalculated & i was two bucks short on postage. at this point, i had had enough of cadman plaza & its persistent suckiness, so i refused to offer up an additional $2 for postage, had him slide the package back to me through the bulletproof glass package sender & went home.

but everything would be fine. i grabbed two dogfish head ales on the way home & settled down round the apartment for a few hours whilst preparing to go see a band i'm attempting to manage to deserved superstardom and/or infamy, the amazing missing teens. eventually, i finished off both of the dogfishes, so...

#44 - oh c'mon.

snack: archer farms jalapeno savory pretzels
drink: berkshire brewing company berkshire ale

...i cracked open the 22 oz of berkshire brewing company berkshire ale i'd purchased for bloggin' purposes whilst visiting a friend's new condo in ipswich, ma over the holiday. i suppose i should have bought an ipswich ale & blogged about that given the proximity of the condo to the actual brewery, but who's watching? the blog police? i don't think so. it has a pretty tasty, caramely sort of flavor & the company's initials are b.b.c. & that's cool, so i finished it off, grabbed my vacuum (my management contribution to that evening's live performance) & jumped on the subway.

the evening went well overall. a few of my friends represented at the show & we hung out & that ruled. i met some new peeps & adorable ladies. that ruled. i drank lots more beer. that ruled...until the end of the night, when i was wasted & as a result became internally deeply unhappy when i discovered that the tube to the vacuum had been lost during the evening...so i carried my crippled vacuum home on the subway at 3am filled with the sadness, got home, drank some water & crashed. when i awoke around 10am, i was TOTALLY ILLIN. it was like that scene in spaceballs, but with more hot flashes. my body expelled everything that was in it & everything i subsequently tried to put in it (it was all "f you water! f you fruit punch gatorade!") until about 6pm that evening, when i finally slept it off. the weird thing was that it didn't feel like puking from a hangover though. it felt like puking feels when you're twelve years old, puking from actually being sick & i wanted my mommy...& then hours later it was gone.

in the course of that pukefest, i expelled the bounty of archer farms jalapeno savory pretzels i'd consumed during the previous eve. if you're like me & the dryness of pretzels starts to get to you, even when accompanied by a tasty beer, these pretzels are for you. they have what critics like to refer to as "zingy powder flavoring" & that goes a long way toward upping the amount of these i can consume in one sitting. in summary, they tasted really great going down.

once the pukefest was done, i was in no shape to leave the house & was unquestionably chillin' for the eve & eventually, the rest of the weekend. hasbro had finally forced scrabulous to change their game board a few days earlier, so it's no longer a copy of scrabble & i no longer care to play it. without it, i went through withdrawal this weekend, as i was bedridden & unable to kill hours playing scrabulous.

...& on sunday i woke up & checked out my "the 365 stupidest things ever said" calendar. the day's entry, a quote from football player cadillac williams, read "he might have won the war, but the battle's not over." even with its illogical logic, it felt like quite the defeatist way to start the day.

...so on sunday, i stayed home & killed lots of time watching episode after episode of the shield. it's damn good tv, but the setting & circumstances & overall despair of the show definitely wears on you, especially after 7-8 straight episodes. when this marathon of despair was mixed in with all the emotionally downwardly spiraling events of the past two days (including other stupid things like the cat annoying me or the shower water taking too long to heat up), i was not in a happy place, so i drowned my sorrows in the rest of that bag of pretzels...& things turned out ok. this time i didn't puke them up.

#43 - hispanic attack.

mon dieu. as a teenager in high school, why in le monde did i choose to learn french over spanish? here's what i've learned as an adult: pretty much nobody speaks french. it's a useless language unless you want to go to france or quebec & pretty much nobody ever goes to either of those places. these days, all the cool kids are speaking spanish. i mean, according to the ethnologue, it's the 2nd most spoken language in the world, just ahead of english. french? 17th. last i checked, they don't give out medals for 17th.

i really should learn spanish. i've given it a few half-assed attempts over the years, but in reality, i've put more hours toward learning bengali. i guess it's because its alphabet is ten times more beautiful/fun to write with. still, i have a lot more call for spanish on a daily basis than i do for bengali. currently, two of my favorite tv shows contain high-ranking hispanic officials & sometimes they speak in spanish and fx & showtime apparently can't afford subtitles or is forgoing subtitles in an attempt to be realistic or something. oh...there are probably tons of spoilers in the next two paragraphs:

david acevada (benito martinez), the shield
i'm just starting to watch the 4th season (out of 7) of the shield, which is the season in which hispanic police captain david acevada makes the transfer to city councilman. he's had one of the show's more interesting character arcs thus far, as in the previous season, he was in a limbo period between the primaries & the election. it's a time where he's still the police captain but he's a few months away from running unopposed for city councilman in the election...& in the 3rd episode of the season, two thugs hold him at gunpoint & force him to give one of the thugs head. it's rare to see a major male character on tv who is raped during his adult life. benito martinez's acting is damn good, especially when he is still the only one who knows about what's happened to him & he is cycling through hundreds of emotions throughout the season...anyway, that dude speaks spanish sometimes...los angeleso spanish.

miguel prado (jimmy smits), dexter
jimmy smits also speaks spanish & this season, he's joined the cast of dexter playing hispanic assistant d.a. miguel prado. in the opening episode, dexter accidentally kills miguel's brother, who happens to be at the house of a drug dealer/murderer dexter is hunting named freebo. freebo flees the scene, leaving miguel with the impression that freebo is the one who killed his brother, as miguel has no clue that dexter was even involved. as the season has progressed, miguel has become dexter's first real friend & they've bonded & even worked together to kill someone who has escaped justice (as is dexter's m.o.). i've never watched l.a. law or nypd blue or the west wing so i can't comment on jimmy smits' acting style, but in dexter, he's a commanding presence. he's smooth & persuasive & apologetic, but he can kick your ass & he just might...anyway, the show is set in miami, so he totally speaks spanish sometimes...cubano spanish.

#43 - hispanic attack.

snack: planters roasted salted pepitas
drink: negra modelo

so i got a bag of these planters roasted salted pepitas at a gas station back in new hampshire over the holiday because i read the front real quick & thought they sounded exotic enough, but it turns out that pepitas are basically squash or pumpkin seeds. in this case, it's a mix of pumpkin seeds & sunflower seeds. roasted pumpkin & sunflower seeds. with salt. if there was a single word that allowed me to combine a sarcastic "mmm" with a long, drawn out yawn, i would use it here.

the seeds aren't all bad, i suppose. i didn't have to actually do any carving or roasting. a machine who took the job of a hispanic worker who took the job of a black worker who took the job of a white worker at some ubiquitous planters/kraft/philip morris/altria plant took care of that for me. plus, a few sources on the internet tell me that pumpkin seeds are good for urinary flow & as mentioned in my previous post, i love things that are good for the ol' tract.

...like beer. beer really gets the tract flowing. take negra modelo, for instance. if you were to believe all the off-based generalizations about the effects of mexican beers, you would think that if you wanted to drink a negra modelo, you'd need a lime wedge & the patience to be running to the bathroom for the remainder of the evening. not so. i drank a negra modelo & passed the hell out still wearing my jeans. take that evil stereotypes.

UPDATE: bill richardson has been named secretary of commerce. go hispanics.

#42 - trapped in the closet.

so i'm staying in nh at the parents' house for a few days for the thanksgiving holiday. when i visit them, i usually stay upstairs in the bedroom that i shared with my younger brother for 13 years or so. these days, the room is now painted greenish-blue, is much cleaner than i ever remember it & is now referred to by my parents as "the guest room"...& i am now a guest.

since i left home at the end of high school, my parents have been nice enough to store a ton of pack-ratted junk from my childhood. through the years, my mother has got me to whittle down my horde of childhood possessions, but there are still a good amount here & there around the house--some boxes stored in the attic, a few boxes down in the basement & a number of random things in the closet of my childhood bedroom. a quick glimpse into the closet reveals:

bank pseudo-collection - there's a shiny silver piggy bank & a ceramic, hand-painted owl bank, complete with sad owl eyes (that i am amazed never got broke) & a square silver one that pretty much never got used. these banks are where i stashed my occasional scratch & the varied coins from around the world that my dad gave to me throughout the years. this tradition has apparently continued, as this thanksgiving, i watched my 16-year old brother sort through my grandfather's stash of quarters to find alaska quarters for both he & my grandfather's state coin collections.

polaroid camera - during my freshman year at b.u., they had a housing fair, where students would go & visit people at various fold-up tables, checking out the housing options & other campus services. one of my floormates, who was likely tipsy at the time, swiped this polaroid camera (& a porkpie hat that you were supposed to put on & then take polaroids of yourself wearing) off some table...& somehow i ended up with it. the whereabouts of the porkpie hat are unknown at present time.

1984 windham soccer association trophy - i played soccer, baseball & basketball every possible year of my childhood, up until high school, when i became too old for the town recreational leagues. i liked soccer & feel like i was fairly good at it & going into high school, i was planning on trying out for the team...until i discovered that i had to get a physical & for some reason that freaked me out & i didn't go out for the team...end of career...but in 1984, i was still riding high & i (& every other kid in the entire league) got a trophy for my skillz.

hardy boys books - the hardy boys books were the first series of books that i can remember getting excited about. they had intrigue, mystery & titles like the secret panel, the witchmaster's key, the secret of pirate's hill & the tower treasure. reading them eventually led to me writing a short mystery titled "mystery at skeleton's groove," starring all my friends & featuring both a fight scene with our nemeses--the shlack gang--and a concert in the final chapter by our mystery-solving band, the rock-its.

strat-o-matic games - strat-o-matic creates board games based on actual statistics from actual sports pro & college sports teams, with cards for all the actual players, based on how good or bad that player was in the previous sports season, so you could, if you took the time, recreate the 1986 baseball season, for instance. i tried to do this, keeping score of every game & compiling the players' statistics. because of this, i became really comfortable with numbers & learned how to do a good amount of math in my head, as i figured out players' batting averages & stuff like that.

random box containing - roddy roddy piper & the junkyard dog action figures, a new england patriots ticket stub, europe's wings of tomorrow on tape, topps cereal series baseball cards including the much-bearded trio of bruce sutter, greg luzinski & bill madlock, a calculator watch, a view finder reel from jim henson's muppet movie, a valentine from "jenna" (jenna moeckel?) telling me that i'm a great friend & urging me to keep being myself, a third place ribbon from the windham recreation department's family festival, a transformers booklet for evil insecticon shrapnel, a laminated photocopy of jake the snake roberts' autograph, a sketch of a croissant that was supposed to be colored in but wasn't with "33%" written on the sheet in turquoise blue marker...probably the grade i got for not coloring it in.

#42 - trapped in the closet.
snack: mrs smith's boston cream pie
drink: ocean spray cranberry & blueberry juice

a holiday at my parents' house always features a few pies. as far as pies go, i've never ever liked dry-ass pie crusts. eating them reminds my mouth of the feeling i get when i cut my fingernails too short & then pull on a fresh pair of socks, scraping my newly-exposed fingertips against clean cotton. pie crusts are akin to licking a paper towel in my book. you can put all the warm cinnamony apples you please on that pie crust, but it's still fingernails cross a chalkboard, people.

boston cream pie plays by a whole different set of rules though. for starters, it's more cakelike than 95% of pies, which means no dry-ass pie crust getting in the way of dessert time fun & there's just something about the texture of the creamy junk that drives me wild...& how can i not love that chocolate. my mom knows this, so she's always made sure to get a boston cream pie every holiday. tonight, all three present family members asked me if i wanted a piece of mrs smith's boston cream pie. i was all "chill, people. i'll get to my pie." eventually i had one. mmm, obviously.

& there's always some form of cranberry juice in my parents' fridge. i finished off the bottle of ocean spray cranberry & blueberry juice with my boston cream pie. tastewise, i'd have to say it's one of my favorite cranberry blends--not too sweet, not too tart...& it probably helped partially clean out my urinary tract, which is always a beverage bonus.

#41 - F.L.O.R.I.D.A...flo-ree-dah.

back in 97, shortly after college graduation, i moved to pembroke pines, fl, a city in broward county just minutes north of miami. it was the year of the expansion florida marlins' first world series win, a dark year for baseball indeed.

my girlfriend at the time had moved down there to get a masters in o.t. & i really liked her & for the most part, had never left the northeast, so i went with. she was moving down earlier than i & so we flew down there a few months before her school year started to find an apartment, see the school & area, etc. i was 22 & it was the first time that i had flown in a plane & was old enough to actually remember doing so.

prior to that, the only other time i had been to florida was in between junior & senior year of high school, when i rode all the way down from hudson, nh to jupiter, fl in the back of a mostly-empty van that belonged to the father of my (first real) girlfriend at the time. we drove down there with her divorced parents & little sister. one day, the girlfriend & i took her dad's van to the mall & when i was finished purchasing a pair of midnight blue jean shorts at the guess store, we left the mall through an entirely different entrance & got lost. while trying to figure out where i was going i almost ran a red light & slammed on the brakes. the sand on the road caused the van to slide sideways & as we skidded to a halt, i remember a tool box & a jar of change unloosing themselves all over the van. we emerged unscathed other than the tool & change collection duties necessary to do to avoid detection from her parents. a couple days later, hurricane andrew hit. that should have been a clear sign as to the future of that relationship.

...so in august of 97 i moved to florida & lived in a one-bedroom apartment with my girlfriend. from the outset, it was obvious that she was stressed. school was pretty hard, neither of us had long-standing friends in the area & for the most part, things did not go well between us. i know i wasn't happy...hell, i only went to the beach once my entire time there.

my best friend at the time was a girl named michelle, who i worked with at my data entry job. as far as i know, we were the only two college-educated folks in our office, so we naturally gravitated toward each other. as far as i can remember, she was my first ever gay friend (nh & b.u. kept me a bit sheltered up until then). often, when my monthly new issue of playboy arrived (via a gift subscription from my girlfriend), michelle & i would flip on through together. we'd go out to lesbian bars & shoot pool & ramble about our respective relationship issues. she brought a lot of happiness to me at a time when many aspects of life sucked...& it helped that she was totally cute...& then i moved away after only eight months in florida & came down to visit a few months later for new years' eve & then through circumstances, we completely lost touch, even with the recent advent of social networking...friendwise, this is the loss i most regret. she was a really good friend to me & i really hope she's doing well now that we're ten years into the future.

#41 - F-L-O-R-I-D-A...flo-ree-dah.
snack: hershey's all natural extra dark assortment
drink: sobe orange carrot elixir

as i've mentioned previously, i currently have a thing for dark chocolate. recently, it's gotten worse & regular dark chocolate just won't cut it any more. when i go to a store & they only have one or two types of lindt bars & both of them are nothing more than your average dark chocolate, sans any fruits or nuts or geographical cacao branding, i scoff heartily...but i am occasionally a rational man & when my best choice at a local rite aid the other night was a bag of hershey's all natural extra dark assortment, which contains single serving pieces of both the average "pure dark chocolate" & "pure dark chocolate with cranberries, blueberries & almonds," i "went for it." i absolutely love the cranberry, blueberry & almond ones. the fruits & nuts are tiny & worked into the chocolate really well. basically, biting into one is like biting into any other candy bar, until you notice that there's a chunk of cranberry stuck in your teeth & you get to lick at cranberry for 2-5 minutes trying to get it out of there...& when you do, the reward is all yours. this bag is definitely no match for me tonight.

with them, i'm downing a sobe orange carrot elixir. it is SO ORANGE!...but i wouldn't ever turn one down based on its shocking color, because it's a pretty tasty beverage & carrots are totally good for your health. some might say "this beverage is too friggin' sweet." to them i say, "your teeth only live once, jacko." i was addicted to sobe beverages (& more specifically the black tea) in the years round the end of college, when they started appearing on the shelves of boston convenient stores. when i moved to florida in 97, i was forced to starve my addiction. as far as i could tell, there was nary a sobe drink to be found in the greater ft lauderdale/miami area, which absolutely baffled me, considering that the drink gets its name from south beach, an area of miami beach, located just 30-45 minutes south of my pembroke pines apartment. it turns out that sobe is based out of norwalk, ct, known primarily for its oysters & from what i can tell, "sobe" is pretty much just a pre-geico lizard marketing gimmick...& i hate their website. it tries to be cool while sacrificing functionality for bird chirps.

in closing, originally this post was going to be more lesbiancentric, but in the end, i decided to go in a different direction...instead i'm just going to throw out this one random thought from that thought train: are there any females in my neighborhood who aren't lesbians? even one? i remain skeptical.