Down With Oxygen

Let me just put this out there. I hate the environment. Ok ok environmentalism. I prefer the correct term of conservationism or preservationism because I still hold onto my belief that oxygen was the greatest poison that this world has ever known, and if those poor little anaerobic species had any clout or opposable thumbs, they might have been able to stave off the apocalyptic disaster that photosynthesis brought about, leaving me without the privilege of typing this in my boxer shorts holding a Pall Mall in one hand and some CFL in a spray can in the other.

I believe that cities like Seoul or Manhattan or San Francisco or Los Angeles or London with their monsters and structure and noise and smell and sunlight blocking temples of steel and blinking massive crushing weight are the most beautiful objects in this entire world. They're jewels, bright shiny deadly glimmering stinky jewels. And I love them. I love the man made. I love trees and crap too, don't get me wrong, but when you take a man who in Paris loved nothing more that traveling its subways over and over and over again, c'mon what do you expect.

Graffiti are the city's wildflowers. They spring up spontaneously and in "the wrong place" they'd be called weeds, but in reality they're absolutely magnificent. Beautiful. Amazing.

Ok so I'm not into recycling. I'm not into saving water. I don't bike to work. I don't turn lights off. I don't believe in "letting yellow mellow". I don't do any of that crap.

Until recently.

I live very close, like a hemp hacky-sack throw, to Berkeley. And I live in a magical place called Northern California, which after Los Angeles is my 5th favorite place to live (Los Angeles being 1 through 4). And although I have not changed my political views (Barr '08) I have found oddly enough, some conservationism seeping in. I can't really explain it other than the fact that my buddy Su, who've up to this point I have made the point of preservationismally(TM) canceling out (I put one aluminum can into the waste stream for every can he recycles...and I use twice the amount of cans that he does so I am double-canceling him out), might one day shoot me in the face with an environmentally friendly yet still deadly slingshot if I kept going down the path I was on.

I don't believe in saving this world for my kids. I will let this planet become what this planet will, without putting any pressure on it to become a doctor or lawyer or "saved" or "human friendly". Dear Earth, you can become a total delinquent...I love you unconditionally.

But oddly enough, despite my laissez faire attitude, I am now doing all the stuff that I didn't care for before. I recycle, I let yellow mellow, I'm doing all that crap. And it's not for the Earth or my kids or the betterment of society or to fight global whateverism. I do all this because I am really really cheap.

Yeah, I am cheap and I don't like to waste things. It pains me to no end, and finally, it has caught up to counter my anti-preservationism. I just can't waste stuff anymore....it's hard to make a can. Might as well try and reuse it somehow.

It's kinda like ants. I don't kill ants. Or spiders. Well I try not to kill damn near anything. It's not because I'm Buddhist, it's not because I believe that this little ant has spiritual value. Its because this little ant is really really really hard to make. Seriously. Can YOU make an ant? Jeeze if I went through all the trouble of making a freaking ant...a tiny complex little biological machine with social structure and wacky strength, do you think I'd be pissed if you nonchalantly smooshed it simply because it committed the crime of "Being in your presence". I mean, doooooooood. Leave that little ant alone.

"Why did you kill that ant?"

"Because it was among many, inside of my house, and within my field of vision."

Damn that's harsh. Just clean your house and stop eating like cookie monster.

Ok ok I'm not trying to tell anyone how to live....be free and take the path you will. I'm ok, you're ok. What the hell was I talking about?

Ahh yes, the point of my story is this....I save all kindsa crap now and am totally getting into recycling stuff because I'm tired of wasting crap. I want to reuse....not because I like the environment. I think we should let the World go where the World wants...um in it's little hand basket. Those little anaerobic dudes took the bullet for us, we can only return the favor for anything this planet wants to replace us with....c'est la vie.

OK. Ok. I'm really here to talk about my worms. Yes worms.

Ok me and my wife drink enough coffee to choke a racehorse and make it say "hmmm I'm peeing more than usual". I mean ridiculous amounts of coffee. Juan Valdez has a picture of me taped up on his bathroom mirror and every morning he says "One day bitch".

Sorry Mr. Valdez, you will NEVER get to retire, I don't care how old your donkey is.

So we produce ridiculous amounts of coffee grounds which go directly into the waste stream and one morning I woke up with an epiphany.

"Crap, I can use those coffee grounds"

Yup, I'm cheap. I'm gonna turn those coffee grounds into worm castings and feed it to my lawn and make it grow big and strong and green. I know I know...lawns waste water. Whatever.

I'm building a worm farm. My kids will love it and I will convert a 1 pound of garbage per week into worm food.

So here's the money shot (Continued...)




How to build a worm farm that eats garbage, smells not too bad, and can be used as a behavioral stick (eat your dinner nicely then we can look at the worms son)

You need a bin. 1 cubic feet per 1lb of weekly garbage. And you need 2000 redworms (2 lbs) for every lb of Daily garbage. Hmmm units do not match. OK here we go....

1 cubic foot = 280 redworms eating 0.14 lbs of garbage per day or 1 lb of garbage per week. Expand as needed.

The bin I got at Target....little file bin with a flippy lid. Cool. Drill some drainage holes in the bottom, maybe some tiny little breathing holes in the top. Set it in a pan to catch liquid gold (worm version).

Now bedding....shred an ass-load of paper and soak it in water for about an hour. Wring it out to the consistency of a damp rag. Fluff it up and put it in the bin. I use junk mail and old newspapers.

You're gonna need a bunch of redworms. Stick with redworms because that's what the internet says. No nightcrawlers. The redworms are well suited for composting due to their appetite for organic matter and temperature tolerances. I got mine at a bait shop....costs about twice the amount that you would pay on the internet. But I got to save 250 worms from death row.

Dump the worms in.

Feeding: Pick a corner of the bin and bury your organic waste. Think of the worms as vegans and feed them accordingly, not a lot of meat or dairy or eggs. Make sure they have some gritty stuff for their little worm gizzards such as coffee grounds, crushed eggshells, etc.

They will slowly turn everything into worm casting rich composted lawn gold. When the bedding has been converted you'll need to transfer the finished product out. Smoosh everything over to one side and put fresh bedding in the other side. Add food to the fresh side and wait a few days. The worms should eventually migrate over to the new side and you can remove the compost from the other. Pick out any worms and worm egg things from the compost. Use it in your garden or add it to some water and make worm tea fertilizer. Worms will double in about a months in ideal conditions.



Now a word of warning....I really have no idea what I'm talking about. This system has been cobbled together from various internet postings and I have just started, so I have no idea how any of this will turn out. There is however a book that every worm site seems to mention, so I am going to simply assume that it is good.

Worms Eat My Garbage

It probably has the real way you're supposed to do this....but hell I can usually just figure stuff out so my way is probably still the best.

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No More Heroes

So here I am. Driving in my old beat up Jeep, down a hill, with the evening peaking and bathed in the last little bit of Northern California light which seems to last forever during the summer. The dirty bits of Oakland and strip mall heaven of Hayward down below. Like the day I drove to my wedding, crossing the Bay Bridge to a weird and wacky life before me, I was now heading into new territory only this time in the opposite direction. Yeah, I'm saying goodbye to a big piece of my life. Yeah that's right, I'm done with studying. Really. Seriously I am. That's it. Kaput.

I had always thought that if I won the lottery I would become a perpetual student, jumping from field to field for the rest of my life in studious bliss. Like some small Texas high school football hero driving past his Alma mater on the way to his night shift at The Wafflehouse, I too have trouble letting go. Yeah I peaked in college so what. But flash back 24 hours and you would have found me sitting at a desk trying for the life of me to motivate myself to just study for this damn final. And I couldn't do it. I was done. Out of gas. It wasn't hard....just didn't want to. I blame it on the kids.

My Dad used to tell me that when you're young, your brain is nice and soft and as you grow older it hardens. My brain was ok until the day my brain was on kids. This is your brain....this is your brain on kids. Having kids had knocked the taste of higher learning right out of my mouth. You see the thing is, even after you get used to the schedule and logistics, even when you can cruise through a pattern of child rearing day after day, even when you become efficient....parenting still is a massive drain on the...well the everything. Drains your body, your brain, your spirituality, your bank account. Even when you think it's easy it's really not....you've just gotten used to the pain. And when you do get some free time, you spend it furiously relaxing. Strangling that free time and relaxing the hell out of it. And like some washed up old part-time fighter, I'm left shadow boxing in the ring of higher education about to get knocked the F out. Ok I got knocked the B+ out...but still shameful nonetheless. I hate the B+. Its the best of the not-an-A you can get. That's so half-assed. My GPA consisted of a series of A's and D's. And back in my Bruin years before the netertubes, you'd have to call a freaking phone number to obtain your grade. And this crappy machine would want to make sure that the D that you got didn't sound like a B so it would say....."In Biochemistry 153A your grade is.......DUH-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!" I mean not that I got a D in Biochem, c'mon I freaking love biochem. Wait what was I talking about? Yes...washed up fighters.

I'm all washed up. Old and beat up. Waaaaay past my prime. And the sad thing is, looking back, I never got to really fulfill the promise of the gifts I was given. I had a brain back then, but paired with a pathological laziness and horribly impressionistic youth, I was never gonna amount to nuthin. The only thing I could do well was a standardized test. And I banked on these damn things to get me through everything. Crap I've taken everything.... CAT, PSAT, SAT, AP, GRE (two flavors), MCAT, OAT, GMAT, and I almost took the LSAT for fun because I heard it had logic games in it. And I always did well. Every interview was the same...

"Can you explain why you have such a low GPA? Any unique challenges that you had to endure?"
"Yeah, I don't like to study."
"That's your answer?"
"Yeah. But I'm Effing brilliant"

I mean hell you could spin it so many different ways...

"I don't like to study, I only like to learn."
"The days I skipped class were the days I became a more complete human being."
"It's not about the grade I got in that class, it's about the class in which I got the grade. I'm classy bro."

I took courses out of sequence. I've shown up to 3 hour finals 2 hours late because I was furiously memorizing the stupid textbook outside of the exam before I walked in. I've rarely slept before an exam in undergrad. Ok the truth is I played A LOT of Streetfighter 2. I mean A LOT. And I was on BBS's a lot...that was a precursor to teh internuttzzoars.

I guess what I really need to say is just this....

(continued)


My dear and beautiful Studying,

I wanted to make you a mixtape to encapsulate how I feel as I prepare to take the first of many steps away and alone without you. I was gonna put a lot of Bright Eyes on it and some Postal Service and then of course some really obscure shit so you'd think I was cool but then mix it up with some Chi-Lites and stuff so you'd know I could be playful and stuff you know. But my double cassette recorder is broken and I'm all out of tapes, so I'm writing you this letter to say you-know-what you-know-when and if you want you can play your own favorite songs when you read this although keep in mind that the songs you pick would be nowhere as awesome and deep and touching as the ones I would have picked if my Sanyo wasn't broken. Anyhoooo.

Ahh yes, Studying. Studying, do you remember when we first met? I was 1 minute old and the nurse was counting my toes quietly to herself and I thought hmm interesting and then you showed up and whispered into my ear that if I watched closely I might learn something, and so i did and I learned that I like nurses uniforms. Hmm wait a sec, I'm getting you mixed up with Learning, yeah yeah I know, you hate her guts and you think she's a dirty hippy, don't get all crazy Studying. Don't be like that. Ahh yes, now I remember. We first met when I had to count to 100, and it was really quick because as soon as I got past 15 then it really is just logical isn't it? Oh no of course, of course not, it was all you. It was your help that got me through that one.

Remember the summer we spent together reading the entire dictionary? When other kids were forced to play outside, you and me got to hang out, just the two of us, and memorize 6 pages a day for 90 days? Yeah that was the summer before 4th grade I think. If only "collegiate", as in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, was a word that sounded the same in Korean so my mother could have picked something a bit more age-appropriate. Doesn't matter because after that summer my whatchamacallit was seriously improved.

We had some really good times together. There was that whole multiplication thing that I figured out phonetically before you came along and helped me with the rest of it. Remember 8 x 3? I figured it out on my own because hell just listen to it....eight times three. Ok three and three and three and three and three and three and three and three. Tadah...24. Yeah that was a bitch. And then no one believed me.

Remember that time in Kindergarten when I spoke no English and I had to take a test and the teacher was asking us to circle the tiger and I had no idea what the hell was going on because when you hear Charlie Brown wonkawonka sounds followed by intense circling activity by your peers all around you and all you know how to do is eat lunch and take naps, you can't help but to look at your neighbor and circle what they circle. Busted. What the hell is an isolation table anyways and why are the walls so high and why the hell do I have to sit here? Cheating? WTF? I'm ESL, I know what a damn Tiger is, just say in in Korean and I'll get an A. Oh well I'll just cry. Damn I digress, you weren't really with me there that day were you.

OK, so lets just remember the good times. Proper nouns....remember us and proper nouns. What a disaster. Everything was a proper noun. What do you mean grape is not a proper noun, its the proper noun for a type of fruit. I name thee, grape! I name thee, chair! I name thee, Kevin! Big fat D on that one.

Remember the spelling B? We lost on wen, I mean "when". The hell the word "when" makes a blowing whispery W. I could spell flower why the hell did I lose on "when". Spell this.

OK damn have we really been together that long? Remember high school?

Yeah me neither.

Ok remember college? What a torrid raging affair. On again, off again. The fights and splits we had. The crazy passionate all-nighters. The women that came between us. In the end though it was always you that stayed with me when times were rough. The caffiene binges, the long desperate nights. Watching the sunrise from the top floor window of Kerckhoff Hall, what a miserable sight. That physics midterm we walked in with 15 minutes left and finished 5 minutes early. Remember the MCAT? The first standardized test that could not save my GPA? The king Hell of all tests. The test that while studying for I actually thought I broke my brain.

"What do you mean there's no such thing as broken brain? I swear it's broked bro."

That's the last time I trust those quacks at student health services.

And then there was gradschool and eyeball time. We're were like an old married couple at that point. No more torrid raging passionate nights, just a comfortable, if not predictable, relationship. You wouldn't throw a fit when I went out without you. You stood by my side and supported me through clinics and rotations. Externships in funny places. Strange demands from varying attendings. That tour through Oklahoma. Yeah we were comfortable and familiar with each other then but we were still happy.

I guess Business School was our swan song. I should have seen it coming. We'd had a good long run and no matter how compatible or in love two people are, things can still be monkey-wrenched. It wasn't you, it was all me. The first half of business school I thought we could keep going the way we always had, but by the last bit I knew that something was different. It's not fair to you for me to pretend that we still have that magic. I'd spend most of my days away from you...to be honest some days I wouldn't think of you at all. Our nights apart, I didn't miss you and that's when I knew that it was wrong.

Who's to blame when love dies? Does it matter? Is it any less heartbreaking? I know we had dreams for the future. We were supposed to go to Law school next, it was supposed to be beautiful. The fun we were going to have with the LSAT, finally completing the triple crown of standardized tests. How we were looking so forward to the California BAR exam and how wonderfully brutal it was going to be. I know now that that day will never come. Out of respect to you I know that I will never share that moment without you. It simply won't be a part of my life anymore and it is a dream we will never share apart.

The PHD in Immunology that was supposed to come last...I won't even breath it's memory.

Yeah, we had big dreams you and I. Sometimes dreaming ain't enough. And as I slowly let go of your hand, I tip my head to the times we had. I light a last cigarette to remember those long lost days when we were young and so passionate. Damn this cigarette tastes like shit. Here let me throw it out my window. Ok sorry. Yeah I guess we never can really go back. If I was melodramatic I'd leave you hanging with an "Until we meet again" but that's for someone far younger than me to say. So instead I say this...I loved you with all my heart. And with all my heart I let you go. Thank you for the time we had together, in our youth we were truly unstoppable. I loved you Studying. I will never forget you.

Farewell dear heart,
Henri

P.S. Stay cool forever.

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Sweet and Tender Hooligan

Ok in my defense you do have a bit of a reputation for crying wolf. Someone even looks at your train funny and you scream bloody murder....

"What happened little buddy?"
"My Train"
"What? Someone took your train?"
"No. Someone wants it."
"Err...what?"
"He wanted my train."
"But he didn't touch it?"
"NO."

Hmmmm. So this morning I heard you crying in your room and I thought maybe you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed or maybe you were just announcing the fact that you have awoken and need to play some GTA4 because it's totally awesome....er wait a sec, that would be me...yes GTA4 is totally awesome.

Anyway, I thought you were just trying to tell me you wanted the door opened. So I pop into your room and see you crying on the floor and I ask whats wrong and you mention something about some train's coal tender, which I find and give to you and you stop crying and you start smiling and then I notice to my mild dismay that YOUR HEAD IS COVERED IN BLOOD.

My boy is covered in blood. High holy hell almighty I'm gonna punch the universe because somehow my kid is covered in blood. OK don't panic. You're smiling at me and holding a little train coal tender in your tiny bloody hands and you're super excited that I found it and you're now looking for the train it goes with and I think you're about to start singing a little Thomas song to go along with your little happiness and it's really freaking me out because your doing all of this COVERED IN BLOOD.

"Hey little buddy"
"Hey Big Buddy"
"Um...can you come over here please?"
"You find my coal tender????"
"Um yeah I found it for you...but come here and sit down ok?"
"OK!"

So I start wiping blood off of my boy with a diaper wipe...and wiping and wiping and wiping. 1 diaper wipe. 2 diaper wipes. 3 diaper wipes. 4 diaper wipes. I wipe blood off his hands and face and chin and cheeks and forehead and then I get to the hair and its everywhere. Finally I find the source, a 4 mm laceration on his scalp. He sees the blood and amazingly seems to notice it for the first time.

"I have ouchy?"
"Yes"
"OH! A leeeshun?!?!"
"Yes boy you have a lesion."
"I Have leeeshun and my blooood?!?!"
"Yes"
"Oh OK!"

And back to train time.

It always sucks when your thinking stitch or no stitch. I'm poking and prodding his scalp and seeing how deep the laceration is and wondering if I should just superglue it but after a bit of pressure it stops bleeding and I grab some antibacterial ointment and slab a bean of it into his scalp.

"I have hair lotion?!!!?!"
"Yes Son"
"Oh OK!"

And back to train again.

"Um little buddy...what happened? To your head."
"OH OK! I was here (points to door) and then I hit my head here (makes a long arcing motion and smacks the corner of the train table)"

So from what I gather from your elaborate demonstration is that somehow you made some type of flying arcing journey through the air from the door to the corner of the train table. Wow....I would seriously think you'd be a bit more pissed. You nail the corner of the train table with your head and bleed all over the place but what seemed to really make you cry was the fact that in this process you misplaced the little coal tender that goes with one of your trains.

Tough on the outside, tender in the middle. I want to grow up to be just like you son.

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I'm Not JayZ

These are apples and pears, cockney for stairs, hand picked and shipped to me from a small family organic farm. They sit on some sort of fabulous silver thingermabob. Now as parents you toss aside many things. I got no nights out. I got no fast car. I got no city view. I got no entourage. I'm losing my mojo/steelo/and street cred along with my hairline to some far off land called thetwenties. I blame it all on the parenting lifestyle. It consumes you. Takes all your time, ruins your relationships with your city friends and allows issues such as preschool and optimized nap schedules to take up residence in a brain that used to house nothing but Sonic Youth lyrics and zippo tricks. So screw you JayZ. I don't need your penthouse. Check out my organic fruit in a metal whatchamacallit. Flossy flossy. I'm living hella large people.

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This Modern Life

I kissed my son goodnight and he was two years old. And I awoke the next morning, and he was gone. And in his place stood a three year old and I smiled and wished him happy birthday. And the son I knew, the one who was two, I realized that I had kissed him for the last time the night before, and I would never get to see him again.

"Im Treeees?!"

Yes son, you're three.

I am a broken record, with a limited repertoire. I'm like rainman. My brain is a Tyco slot car. I come back and back and back again to this crazy life and how beautiful it is in all its madness and glory and like a damn firefly its ephemeral nature gives us so little time to try and understand it before it's too late.

I miss my two year old. I love my new three year old. And I have a crazy insane gigantic beast of a girl who is now one. Beautiful fierce and mighty J.

And it's happening too fast. I have to love faster.

As a younger man I often wished for faith. I thought it would be nice to have some sort of religion. It was something even worth praying for...which made no sense. Dear almighty higher being...um give me some faith cuz I don't believe in you, but I'd like to....It would make my life a bit more organized. Kinda like smoking. In college I really really wished for the desire to quit smoking. I thought if only I had the faintest desire to quit smoking maybe I would quit. But the fact of the matter was...I really had no desire whatsoever to ever ever ever ever ever stop smoking. Forget it. But I did want to want to quit. I just didn't want to quit.

So I made my way through this life with this absent minded prayer somewhere in the back of my head for some faith to arrive one day. I once thought something was waiting for me in Big Sur. I was absolutely sure of it....so I hopped in the car and drove up from the Westside. I sat there in Big Sur. And sat. And sat. And sat. And sat some more. Nuthin. I did have a nice sandwich up there...there was that.

And another time I thought there was something waiting for me in New Mexico. It took me 8 years to finally have a reason to drive there and away I went. I discovered to my dismay that it was a waitress with soft eyes that was waiting for me there...but she seemed to not quite comprehend her importance in my karmic life. I had pie.

So all of this has somehow led to the fact that I love empty Sunday mornings. I have this magical device that I feed electricity to and it feeds me John Coltrane. And it's Sunday morning and there is absolutely nothing on the agenda for the day. And it's ass early, like 7:00am and it's spring and the sun is out already and my coffee is strong, hot, and blacker than the devil's pupils. And my hair is an absolute mess and I'm wearing my lucky shorts, and the kids are still asleep (t-minus 5 minutes) and I'm just reaching for a 20 lb cast iron pan to cook a breakfast that could kill NinjaDad.

And I realize that this moment holds all that I need from this world. And my wife is asking why I'm smiling and I'm asking her why she's asking and Coltrane is none the wiser.

Coltrane+Sunday_Morning+Springtime+Breakfast+Kids+Wife+Bacon+Bacon+Bacon = Grace.

So somewhere along this haphazard journey, seeking the fear of god to finally awaken in me, I did find a knack for appreciating this wacky world we walk. That thing in your brain that lets things wear off, that lets you get used to stuff; I don't think it fires on all cylinders for me. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see the end of my life and I make a dying wish to be given a bit more time...a day more, an hour more, a minute more even, to just say I love you to this crazy stupid world...and I open my eyes to realize that I have been granted that moment, and if I'm lucky maybe even a moment more. And I say rad.

So on that night, when I kissed my son goodnight, I took the time to close my eyes and make my dying wish to go back again to that moment when I was young and my son was only two, and I could hold him in my arms and lift him high and kiss him again. And I opened my eyes and saw his two year old smile and I knew with my entire heart what I was saying goodbye to. And I realized then that grace might have indeed found me, and perhaps in some karmic way, my prayers had been answered long ago.

rad.

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Like a Stent Lubed With Awesome

So yeah I have a little problem. I play Team Fortress 2 like nonstop. Can't stop. It's too awesome. I'm seriously thinking of scrapping this blog and switching it over to a TF2 fansite. Yes I am retardeded. Anyway, I've always prided myself in being able to add things to my life without too much disruption. Work. Family. School. That kind of stuff. Each new thing just kind of streamlines everything else and stuff gets shuffled around and new efficiencies are found and soon Henri is running trouble-free with a new added feature.

Well I just hit the wall.

It's funny to hit the point of max capacity where if you want to add something to your life you have to delete something else.

So when I added TF2 to my repertoire stuff kinda fell out. Like blogging. It just fell out and hit the floor. And I stared at it while a Monty Python sounding voice in my head said "Oh fancy that" and I continued to happily play my video game.

Recently though, I realized much to my amazement that my life was actually starting to shift around this TF2 obsession and like some crazy game of existential tetris, things just started to fit a bit better. It's being absorbed and the rest of my life is slowly growing back around it. It's a mass. I'm like Akira.

So what my wife calls a childish video game addiction, I refer to as a quiet period of integration. I think my way sounds better. The time I spend playing this retarded video game is actually like a stent that's pushing stuff aside and making some room in my life where no previous room existed. One day I'll tire of this game and have instead an extra 2 hours of my day to fill with something else.

Awesome.

This somehow segue ways into the fact that my wife has taken up knitting. She goes out and knits one night a week. She's been doing this for weeks now but I only recently noticed because of... umm you know... my video game playing making me oblivious to my surroundings.

So since she knits with the other gals of the compound (no Mr. Comedian, she doesn't knit with Sancho), me and the dads of the compound have been trying to come up with a weekly event that we could partake in because, lets face it, when you are married and have kids you keep a really tight-ass tally of all the free time the other spouse gets to take. It's like pizza math. And we're tight as hell...running an errand without the kids is like the parenting world's version of making a Vegas run to hang with Cypress hill in 1992.

The dudes have ruled out playing video games because of something about being "enablers" whatever the hell that is.

I've been burnt out on bowling since the late 80's when everyone and their mother thought it was "cool" to do that stupid midnight rock-and-bowl crap that every bowling alley in the nation started to do.

Poker is out because that's hella 2005ish

The wives ruled out Project Dancer Cab much to our dismay (the business plan was airtight).

So far the only thing left is the brilliant idea to all take on part time jobs together.

Yeah, me and my dad bros all working at Starbucks Tuesday nights.

"This place smells like whisky"

Or maybe busboys so we could rock some hairnets. We'd fill out applications instead of submitting CVs and we'd get to yell "I quit" and really quit when we wanted to. I'd wear a fat Sandinista 'stache to at least confuse my patients when they bumped into me.

"That Sandinistan busboy looks oddly familiar"

Sweet. You know you work to much when your escapist plans involve taking on fun part time jobs.

Crap I miss my videogame. Bye.

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Dishes Are Done

Yeah I got a backlog of material. I got stories of old time Mexico. I got airport hacks. I got wisdom about celebrity babies. Yeah I got a lot of stuff to spew...

But right now, at this second, all I have is this...
I just delivered the deliverables to my marketing client. Consulting project is done. Client happy. A crapload of work completed. Kids are asleep, well almost...Conman is loudly plotting his takeover of the block. Today the block, tomorrow Uzbekistan. The boy has too much Genghis in his blood.

The wife is out plotting a Chut-dol for the little girl. The sweet center to our speed demoned family. And I am on my ass at last. I have a beautiful glass with two fingers of Redbreast. And on my old TV...I see Anthony Bourdain. Perfectomundo. Redbreast is a fine whisky that smells of caramels and will remind you of kissing your first girlfriend with bubblegum.

Finally, finally, finally...I have a moment to sit and blog something. This.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.........happy grace. It's this nugget I always bust my ass for. And it's so damn sweet. 'Night.

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