Karma

Before you read on, I am going to ask you to please reference this or you will not understand the following...

I was at Tricia's apartment last week enjoying the little time we had left on our winter break. Because my shitty truck was in the shop I had to hitch a ride with Matt and his buddies from Fitchburg on their way up to Dover. And seeing how I was dependant on them for a ride, I was doing something that was really out of the norm for me, and that was drinking a lot and spending the night.

After losing a few games of beirut really fast and then some more general drinking, we were settling down to do what I've done every time I've been to Tricia's this year, and thats play Taboo. But thats not the funny part. Well, actually, when Tricia was trying to describe the word "cling" she said "its something that Ashley (her roommate) does with all her boyfriends." Then Matt shouted BUTT SEX. That was really funny. And then when I was trying to describe "poison" (the general thing you use to kill rats with) to someone, and I described it as a crappy heavy metal band from the 80s, the kid got it right immediately. That amused me as well. But thats not what this story is about. Recall this picture.
Now doesn't this look familiar? Oh yeah, that the futon at Tricia's place, with all the wine bottles perched precariously above it. Seems rather unassuming, rather harmless, a nice comfy little spot for an intoxicated fellow to lie down for a spot and gather his thoughts or stop the room from spinning....




Now recall this picture. But now substitute the "girls head" with my head. Yep, you guessed it. Tricia was whilin' out, and she knocked a whine bottle off of the ledge...And what happened to Brian? HE GOT HIT IN THE FACE WITH A WINE BOTTLE!! Luckily it wasn't that massive Grey Goose bottle or I would have been in some serious trouble...

Its still soooo big!!

For your information, the Grey Goose bottle is still there. So I ended the night with a bruised lip. Before I slinked away to bed (ps- thanks Kristin, if you read this, for letting me use your bed while you were away) Tricia gave me a consolitory hug. It was nice, but I kinda like the Larry David School of Consolation a little better. (In this episode, larry keeps trying to turn consolation into sex, first with a friends secretary, then with his wife) I wasn't really angry though, because I think I deserved it. The odd thing is that like 2 hours before the incident re-happened, we were talking about both the original incident and my subsequent story, and how funny they were. But the Universe has a funny way of coming back to get you....

Blow'Hare

As promised, the second update about the vacation that ended over a week ago is here!!

When we left off, our hero (me) was chucking grapefruits at his little sister, and being unecessarily destructive. But it was at this point the twilight of the trip, as departure was scheduled for later that night.

We pull into SkyHarbor airport a little before 5:00 PM MST. (7:00 PM EST) Our flight leaves at about 6:11 PM, departing for the city that starts with a 'C', ends with an 'O' and has 'HICAG' in the middle. We arrive at the second busiest airport in the country, Chicago O'Hare (the airport had recently lost its crown of busiest airport to Atlanta) at about 11:10 CST. None of us had any dinner so we are understandably hungry. We walk by all these little restaraunts and shops, but they are all closed. I can understand when the Duty Free shop (which has the largest carton of cigarettes I've ever seen) doesn't want to be open 24 hours, but you'd expect something to be open right? They do have at least one 24 hours Dunkin Donuts in Logan, so I just assumed there would be one in every airport (or even a Starbucks). But get this....


Not even the well respected airport establishment Hudson News was open. I couldn't buy a pack of gum if I wanted. I walked around the area (terminal 3) for a while looking for something, but everything was closed.


Even Montblanc was closed, and I don't even know what they sold. It looked like it was just overpriced pens and watches, but I may be wrong.


We did however find a soda fountain that someone had neglected to turn off before they closed up so my father and I helped ourselves to some of their finer Coca-Cola....

This was the scene at all 5 Starbucks that were in terminal 3. All the sandwiches and things were behind these little cage things. But as you can clearly see at the top, anybody with girly little hands and slender wrists could just reach in and take one. (Actually, even I, with my bear paws for hands and wrists like tree trunks, because I'm so manly, could have reached in there and taken one. And if you are thinking, "If you are so manly, why not do it, or even just rip off the cage with your 28" pythons?" Well the answer is quite obvious. I didn't want to sit in an airport jail for attempted theft while my family flew back to Boston.)

After finally talking to somebody who really reminded me of this guy....

We asked them where to get some food. He proceeded to hike up his toolbelt and said "Oh you're askin the right gise" He told us all the open foodcourts were in Terminal 5. It was just a short train ride over. But heres the problem....


As I have clearly marked in red Arial 10pt font, I was there, and food was there. And then in yellow 10pt arial font, security was in between us. And they wouldn't let us go back through if we went to terminal 5. So if we left Terminal 3, we couldn't get back in. But we needed to stay in terminal 3 because thats where our flight was leaving from later that morning (6:41 AM CST). So I did some more walking around.....


I found this fun little playplace that I played in for about 10 minutes. It really was a blast pretending I was a captain of that Jumbo Jet!!


This magical little toilet here solves all your problems you may have with shitting in public. You just press a button and it magically puts down a fresh plastic lining on the seat for going number two. Its not very comfortable though, because the seat kinda feels like trying to take a dump while sitting on the toilet with the toilet seat up. And if your irrational fear of using public restrooms stems not from the unsanitary toilets but of crazy patrons jumping over the stall and looking at you....well then you have a whole other set of problems....


This was the leftover holiday display in the airport, as it was still only January 4th. And it was quite pretty to walk down that concourse and look up and see that, but it wasn't food, and it didn't help me pass time any quicker by looking at it. Maybe if I had taken some mushrooms....


This was my "final resting place" so to speak. I chose it because it was dark and hidden, and didn't invlove me having to contort my body in seven different ways to try and lay down on those uncomfortable airport benches. I fashioned a makeshift pillow out of my shoes and my jacket and was able to grab about 45 minutes of sleep...that is...once the insanity started to wear down.

Eventually everything opened back up at like 5:30, and I finally got some food. And then I sat there and people watched for about an hour. My plane had an invasion of girls in Red Sweaters, as some sort of ice dancing team from Chicago was heading to Boston. They were like all 16, and most of them were kinda hot, but then they opened there mouths......but I digress

All in all my short experience with Chicago left me confused and enraged. Maybe I will one day again return to the Windy City and actually leave the airport....


nawwwwwwwwwwww


If you were so glad I was there, why didn't you try to be a gracious host and SERVE ME SOME FUCKING FOOD WHEN I WAS FUCKING HUNGRY!! FUCK YOU SHITCAGO, I'M NEVER COMING BACK AGAIN!!!

Cover Your Shame

It has been a while...

Seeing how I haven't updated in so long I'm going to treat you kiddies to two consecutive days of updates!! Look at it as a way of trying to atone for my laziness, seeing how I have been home from Arizona since January 4th, and it is now January 10th. You wanna fight about it?

Most of the vacation was actually quite relaxing, and I got to go on a little hike up a small mountain. But on the way down i fell on a cactus and I'm still picking the needles out of my hand. It would be cool if I liked having cactus needles in my hand, but I don't so its not.

The only real "highlight" is New Years. And not because it was super fun or I got beligerently drunk or anything, but because some funny things happened. I was with my family, because Smitty and his buddy RP decided that they'd go away from the area for NYE, while I went to the Phoenix area.

We went to the New Years Eve Fiesta Bowl Block Party in Tempe, held every year prior to the Fiesta Bowl.

--I'm gonna digress here for a minute... As you probably know, Ohio State played Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl. The resort that I stayed at was filled with Buckeye Faithful. I was inundated with red shirts and old people dressed in Ohio St. track suits. I mean seriously, these people only wore OSU gear. All the time. Golf shirts, track suits, plain t-shirts, hats, you name it, they wore it. It made me hate OSU supporters even more than I already do. They are so fucking pretentious, calling it THE Ohio State University, like its the only fucking school in the entire state. Yes, I go to THE University of New Hampshire, but i'm not a prick like them. Yes, you have a football team that is competitive every year, and occasionally your other sports teams are competitive too, but all your constituents are stupid punks (See Maurice Clarett). And until the NCAA fixes its flawed football post season, college basketball will always trump college football in my mind, because March Madness is where its at. Yeah thats right, all you dumbass OSU fans flew a few thousand miles to support your team in what basically amounts to an overhyped, money generated exhibition game, because the only game that really counts is the National Championship game. But, I digress....

When I first heard about this, I was told that there was just a huge block party that night near Arizona State University. I was hoping that this would be on par with the legendary Fox Hills/Ashby block parties that kick off the school year at JMU. I haven't been to a good block party in a while, mostly because the off campus housing in and around Durham is not really conducive to block parties. But my hopes were high....then summarily crushed when I learned that the party was sponsored by the town of Tempe. No public alcohol consumption except at overly crowded bars and in "Beer Gardens." It was kinda lame at first, but then I wandered into one of the beer gardens and found a little live music....and this....

Who does this? I mean seriously?

This is a picture of a man with a video camera, filming the live music. Ok, that occasionally happens, and often small bands encourage it to help get their name out there. But this small band, The Zoo Station, isn't just any ordinary small band, they are a U2 cover band. Now, it would be one thing if this was an original band, or he was actually filming U2, but its not. I wonder if he got up that morning and said to himself "don't forget your camera to the block party tonight to film the U2 cover band." I'd like to know what he was thinking. On a side note, they were pretty good at exactly replicating the U2 sound, and I only got upset when they played "Vertigo" because new U2 sucks and old U2 is kinda good.

I later found this man.


That is supposed to be "Ozzy Osbourne" wearing a giant foam novelty cowboy hat. (Its actually CrazyTrain, [ultimate tribute to Ozzy Osbourne]) Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked, giant foam cowboy hats were NOT metal. So this guy is kinda disrespecting Ozzy. They also had a guy in a blond wig (you can kinda see him on the left) who had on a black leather vest with NO SHIRT on underneath it. Now thats metal. And that guy was actually a pretty talented guitarist, as their rendition of War Pigs was pretty good. But since he doesn't do anything original that I know of he loses a little credibility with me.

After the ultimate tribute to Ozzy Osbourne got off the stage on came TNT (as AC/DC). These guys were the "headliners" of this particular stage. (The overall headliner of the event was Blues Traveller, but I had no interest in them). At first, the guy in the leather vest came out, only this time he was dressed as Angus Young from AC/DC, and again, did a pretty damned good job of emulating him. Then out came the singer, and instead of a man trying to be Bon Scott, there was a man trying to be Brian Johnson trying to be Bon Scott, and he got many boos. But the area in front of the stage was so crowded I still couldn't get close enough for a picture, thats how loved these guys were. Unfortunately earlier while I was watching the U2 coverband, I missed Metal Gods (super tribute to Judas Priest). Oh well

I came to the conclusion that night Tempe, AZ is only known for 2 things, the first being Arizona State. The second is being the location of the greatest cover bands in the world. Because as I looked over the schedule of events, there were maybe 3 original acts there, one of them was Blues Traveller, one of them was Kinch (who oddly enough covered "I'll tell my ma" an old irish folk song covered by both The Cheiftans and The Pogues), and another called Blue Fur, which I neglected to see. And my night actually ended pretty early because I was on east coast time, so when midnight hit out west, it was like 2 AM back home and I was kinda wiped.

The rest of the vacation was pretty uneventful with the exception of the trip home (covered tomorrow) and the fact that we changed hotel rooms like 3 times. On the third time, we got a suite with a grapefruit tree in the yard. And my brother and I proceeded to throw grapefruits at anything and everything....but mostly our little sister, which was hilarious. We wasted so many unripe grapefruit in a span of 2 days that it was almost sickening.

That is just a small fraction of the wasted fruits, as many went over the surrounding fences on to the tennis courts, into the maintenence area, into the road, any direction i felt like, and many towards my sister. But some we just grabbed and whipped at that stucco wall right there, and thats what those are.

Ok, so I got bored on my last couple days there....


tomorrow will be the conclusion of the vacation

ps-i know this post isn't as good as it should be, but i was actually working on it yesterday, and it was damned funny, but the were two power outages localized entirely within my room and i lost my update twice. i have since forgotten the best parts of it, and i tried my best to resurrect it, but i don't think i did the old one any justice. i'm sorry