#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.