Moms I'd Like to Watch Baylor Football With

Started Wednesday night at The Windsor, where me and two TX friends were the lone table more interested in watching the Baylor-Illinois “Texas Bowl” than the Georgetown-Notre Dame basketball game – after fending off a few prep-tastic would-be channel-changers, I said “Those guys can Choate on my cock”. I wish I'd thought of that before they switched tables, though with my luck, they probably went to Exeter.

Except my luck last night was fantastic: I laid down a $200 bet on Oklahoma State -4.5 vs Arizona and ended up winning the shit out of it.



Then on the way to the oddly imposing urinal, two also-preppy Devils fans at the bar asked if I was friends with “Jordan”, who I found out later was the manager. I said no, I was just a man out to watch some exciting Baylor University football, a program built entirely on recruiters telling Baptist moms their sons would go to hell if they attended the University of Texas. For some reason they thought I was cool, or at least “remember that dude we met last night? holy shit!” cool.

Probably because they were high. On the ecstasy. “I share everything, except my pills!” said the louder one (the other one was so quiet I had to ask if he was rolling too, or just babysitting – his tiny terrorist fist bump affirmed that, yes, he was rolling too). Pretty quickly he was offering me his girlfriend. Her not being around, he quickly threw his steak into the deal. “Have my steak, cool guy!” he screamed. “If you don't eat your steak, how can you have any pudding? How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your steak!”

He had a point, and a bad English accent. I cut off a big bite of his steak. Then came the pudding: when they decided I needed to take four shots of Jack, one after the other. The bartender asked what I wanted to do, in a tone that said that while there was shame in turning down a shot, there was none in turning down four. But really, there's more shame in it – you're not just turning down momentary fraternity, you're turning down a story that'll last a lifetime. Or at least a week.

“Fuck it, I want these guys to remember me tomorrow”. I took the four. When I left them, the loud one was on his knees, enraptured by the shoe size of a guy who'd played football at SUNY Buffalo. "Look at how big! These feet were all-conference at CUNY Buffalo!" The big fellow was not happy with the mispronunciation.

Within 30 minutes I was at the new Hog Pit, drinking Wild Turkey and belting out a song I'd just made up to Ibar (short for Ibarguengoitia), a guy who once drunkenly punched me in the gut for flirting with a married woman I'd already half-truthfully told him I had no intention of actually trying to sleep with. “Flirting's where it starts!” he'd yelled as I'd tried really hard not to throw up.

Fittingly, the new song was about a guy telling his friend not to cockblock his own mom.

“I know
You want to drive her home
Like any good son would
But she's feeling the love, so don't get in the way...
Your mom wants to stay!”

Yesterday I smuggled a flask of vodka into Tron. Needless to say, I didn't even have the heart to drink it.

Big Sky Country

Just got back from visiting the family in Montana, where I learned:

Peacocks will not necessarily die if you take them out of their natural environment and dump them in the snow. These here can often be seen hanging out on the front porch of a house five minutes away from my parents':

Kids don't care how idyllically placed a concrete embankment is. They will graffiti it.

Five years and 20lbs after the last time you skied, it is still possible to descend the mountain without dying like a peacock in the snow should but doesn't, provided you stick to blues, and spend $60 on the latest boot-insert technology for your now-flatter feet.

Farms tend to amass huge collections of vintage automobiles, though the farmers probably don't call them “vintage”. Spent an hour roaming a lot full of these cars, which the proprietor hauls away after one farm purchases another and want to be rid of the rusting treasures they've inherited. Saw everything from a custom mini '57 Chevy, to a (Dali-esque?) battered metal tricycle resting atop a 50-year-old pickup, to an old sedan artists frequently stop by to render because its patina evokes an oil painting. The lot's affably conspiratorial owner was as open to showing me around as he was to expounding on the general goodness/rightness of expansive interpretations of the 2nd Amendment. When discussing impending state laws allowing for unlicensed concealing & carrying, the filing off of serial numbers, etc, he periodically snicker-laughed like Mumbly the Dog from the Laff-A-Lympics.

My dad recorded an album of classic country parodies – most dealing with the theme of being a big-city transplant in cowboy country – in the tradition of Tom Lehrer, the original Weird Al Yankovic, except not overtly weird, other than also being a math savant (except not savant, because he did other things well, like song parodies). Over the past few years my dad's been performing these songs a capella at Cowboy Poetry gatherings. At the urging of people including actual cowboys, he went into the studio with one half of the local folk duo Storyhill, and came out with a 16-song disc, complete with cover art featuring two hulking dudes from his gym. If you purchase this album at digstation.com, it will help my dad pay for my boot-insert technology.

The Needle and the Healing Done. Titicaca!

Saw two coffeeshop friends at Mud on 9th. Chad's a longtime EV personal trainer (from martial arts to making clients do high-school-style bear crawls across the Tompkins Square Park hoops court) and actor (he sold Nate's dad the fake passport in the Gossip Girl Season 1 finale). He's also the only guy I know who'll put a foot through your throat, then go home and feed his two cats. Since last I saw him, he moved uptown and enrolled in acupuncture school -- after twenty years teaching people to tear other people apart, he says wants to learn to put people back together. It also doesn't hurt that all but three students in his acu class are women.

Also discovered that Jeff, a screenwriter & USC grad, wrote for Beavis and Butthead in the glory days. He's lucky he didn't know me back then. I actually yelled at the TV when "Home Sweet Home" lost the top Countdown spot after, like, 16 weeks. I would have ruined his life with dialog suggestions.

These cookies were just brought in by a girl who really is hitting on a guy here with baked goods. I don't know if it's going to work on the dude she's after, but if my heart were a bunghole, cookies would be the TP.

Wang Dang Sweet Matt Barnes

Went to the Iron Bowl with my brother in law over Thanksgiving. Alabama fans have a lot of cre-hate-ivity.

Upon my return, attended an event at the Maserati dealership for Matt Barnes' charitable foundation. Barnes, who's around 400x better spoken than most NBA defensive stoppers, lost his mom to cancer, and's now funding prescreening for people who can't afford insurance. Met a lovely white lady named “Dove” who works as a hip-hop writer/talent agent/content producer, and who started out as a rapper in Seattle in the early 90s, when she also went by “Dove”.

Later hit an apartment party on 48th and 10th, where these designer housecleaning tools made a majestic appearance. Met a guy whose stepmom used to run a hotel in Tampa/St. Pete. During the mid-90s, she booked a then-desperate Hall & Oates, and actually met her now-husband (this guy's dad) at the show – and the guy's sister also met her husband at the same show.

In “Wango Tango”, Ted Nugent advised men to pretend their face was a Maserati in need of a garage/vagina. It's uncertain how many loving relationships were sparked during performances of this song, but probably fewer than there were white female Pacific Northwest rappers in the early 90s.

Method of Modern Loving the Lord

Saw Hall & Oates last night at the Beacon, a really nice place for musicians to die. The show was actually great, and the backup band was tight -- the groove they laid down made me feel like I was floating over a field of happily flaccid dicks. But H&O also gave the backups room to shine: the sax guy, "Mr. Casual" -- big like Clarence Clemons, white like that guy who played the Area 51 scientist in Independence Day, old-school-purple-suited like a 1960s version of Prince -- spent as much time near the edge of the stage as the guitarist, a relaxed shredder who took every solo, leaving Oates with around 14 seconds of legit tearing-it-up time. The percussionist, who never stopped gyrating the whole show, was allowed to belt out Hall-shaming harmonies on "I Can't Go for That"; if a song was ever written about him, it would contain the line "He played his bongos with his tambourine". Also, at one point Hall tried to convince the audience to watch his New Year's show on TBS by saying "instead of watching the ball drop, you can watch my balls drop." Oates said "I'd like to be there for that." Really, he did.


The set list was all-hit, with only one post-'82 song ("Say it Isn't So", from Big Bam Boom, a smash album I distinctly remember a Dallas Times Herald critic arguing would end up being totally forgotten -- he was right, though the Times Herald suffered the same fate). Except: for their second encore, they played three Christmas songs: a version of "A Midnight Clear" that apparently contained some "obscure" verses, a number written by Robbie Robertson with the refrain "son of a carpenter..." (not nearly as catchy as "Private Eyes", the song everyone assumed they'd end on, since they hadn't played it, and they couldn't possibly finish up with another Xmas tune?), and the finale, "Jingle Bell Rock", which they've actually been doing at least since they recorded that goofy-ass video for it in the early 80s.

The random psychopath sitting next to us had literally said nothing but  "This is great, this is great, this is great" all night. He said it again, in triplicate, then left during the first Xmas number. My friend Brian, who was good enough to have gotten the tickets, said "I was expecting around 20% less Jesus".


And here's why I wasn't (explanation after the impressive picture gallery):

That was from two days before. I was walking through the East Village listening to the new LCD Soundsystem and successfully convincing myself I was post-ironic when I ran into a friend-of-a-friend. Then someone who turned out to be a close relative of an actress you've heard of walked up to us on the sidewalk and said "Hey, can I show you something?" The friend-of-a-friend quickly introduced me to the new guy, then said "I gotta run" and literally bolted, like he knew what was coming. The new guy proceeded to tell me the entire story of Jesus via this holy-rolling Rubix Cube.


So yeah, lately, I've been expecting 20% more Jesus.