What I Learned This Summer (2013)

You know the drill.

This is the fourth one of these posts that I’ve done in the past five years. If two is a coincidence and three is a trend, then four is definitely a standard. Which is ironic, since I’ve often been accused of not having standards. *cough* Moving on…

I love summer, and since my childhood I’ve worshipped it with a reverence typically reserved for favorite grandmothers. Ice cream truck jingles, pickup baseball games, and firecrackers started the romance in my days of innocence. Pool bars, bikinis, and outdoor happy hours have kept the flame alive after all of these years. For me, summer air carries a certain magic with it, be it real or imagined.

My list of memories from the Summer of 2013 feels a little less extensive than in years past (maybe that’s a blessing in disguise, though, given how long some of those posts have been). That may be due to shoddy note-taking (as always); or, maybe, it’s due to fewer shenanigans being had. Working 50 hours a week has worn me down over the past year, and as a result most Friday nights I’m too drained to get turnt up at the bars. I hate it—it’s like I’m being force-fed adulthood—but, unless I hit the lotto or marry a beautiful heiress, that’s life.

So, with no further delay (since it’s, you know, November December January February March [fight me]), and in no particular order, here are my lessons from the physically painful, mentally exhausting, emotionally dulling summer days of 2013 that I would gladly relive if given the chance.

• If a drunk friend runs away from you, let him go; if he comes back, it was meant to be. If he doesn’t…at least you won’t need staples in your leg. Yup. June 22, 2013 will go down in history as the dumbest day of my life. Well…top-5. Who would’ve thought going to a country concert tailgate wouldn’t be the stupidest thing I did that day?
  
  
• Parents always know when you’re being stupid. I limped into my mom’s house the day after the accident, expecting hysterics and motherly lectures. Instead, she reacted with a measured, cool demeanor, and calmly told me she’d dreamt the night before that I was in the hospital. That’s some ESP for your ass. At the same exact moment I was laid up in a hospital bed—in the same ER room, coincidentally, that she’d been in a little over a year before that—getting 16 staples put in my leg, she was having a dream about me being in the hospital. Our bond is tight.
  
  
• Stupidity is expensive. The bills for the ER visit and multiple follow-up doctor appointments were not cool. Perhaps worse, though, was buying more medical tape and gauze bandages every week. Somewhere out there is a mid-level manager at Johnson & Johnson who should shake my hand for sending his or her kid to college.
  
  
• There’s something scarier than 16 staples in your leg: Sobriety. My leg became infected during the recovery period. That meant antibiotics. That meant two weeks of July spent sober, praying PowerBall and modern science would rescue me with an infection-fighting rum that could only be found on a tropical beach populated by beautiful, sexually-adventurous women.
  
  
• Finding the right party means making tough decisions. Armo hosted a pool party in mid-August, but unfortunately it didn’t command the same attendance demographics (see: lots of morally bankrupt people, many of them in bikinis) that similar parties have in the past. Alex suggested, as the night set in, that we all head for life rafts and paddle back to Shadyside, where the season’s third and final “Jam on Walnut” was roaring to life. Armo refused to leave his place, vowing to go down with the ship. He’s a valiant captain. At least, that’s the thought I had as I fastened my life preserver seatbelt.
  
  
• When you’re friends with someone, there’s usually a pretty good reason for it. Alex, Tony, and I were the three mutineers that night. As we walked from her place to Shadyside Saloon, Alex tripped over the uneven sidewalk ahead of me. I began chuckling—fully intending to grow it into a self-righteous LOL—when I felt myself stumbling over the very same sidewalk bump. Just that quickly, my feelings of superiority had turned into dejected realism. As I stopped and collected my shattered self-worth, I heard Tony trip over the bump.
  
  We’re idiots.
  
  
• Only a drunk idiot puts a drunk idiot in charge of pizza. After the bars closed that night, we grabbed a couple of pies at S. Aiken Bar and Grille. For reasons unbeknownst to any of us once the sober hours arrived, I was given the responsibility of carrying the pizzas from there to my apartment. Alex instructed me not to eat any until we got to our destination; that rule might’ve held some weight with someone who hadn’t been drinking for most of the day, but…#drunchies. We weren’t even a quarter of the way to my place when she and Tony turned around to find me with sauce and cheese all over my face.
  
  
• What some call binge drinking, I call efficient packing. Each of the summer’s big three holidays—Memorial Day Weekend (MDW), Fourth of July, and Labor Day Weekend (LDW)—saw my friends and I squeeze three or more days full of crazy into one small calendar entry. As natural as such mini-binges have been over the past 15 or so years of my life, it took until just now for me to realize that those were the only three-day calendar entries of the summer. Far from being a symptom of alcoholic dependencies, those multiday adventures were actually a symptom of adulthood. We’ve found ourselves clinging ever-so-tightly to the windows of liberty shared by our calendars as we’ve grown older (especially as, in turn, those windows have grown increasingly-rare). It’s the life of busy adults trying to get the most out of the infrequent times when they were free from responsibilities.
  
  

• Responsibilities are Father Time’s rapey minions. Like many people, I often daydream of winning a huge PowerBall lotto payout. But I’ve come to realize that it’s not necessarily the financial freedom that fuels those fantasies, it’s the freedom itself. No alarm clocks, no project deadlines. No bosses. Just living life as it comes to you each day.
  
  
• Not working can be hard work. Of those three holiday weekends, LDW was arguably the least hedonistic. But it might still have been the shortest on sleep.
  
  We kicked it off with the Oddball Comedy Festival that Friday. TD, Boy Toy, Armo, Weatherman, and several others joined me in some parking lot imbibing (read: pounding beers like they were cheap sluts earning rent money) in the summer sunshine, followed by throwing back tallboys of Heineken inside the First Niagra Pavilion grounds in the summer moonlight. Dave Chappelle, Hannibal Burress, Kristen Schaal, and everyone else killed it, while I killed every beer and shot that came within 10 feet of me.
  
  
• Following your dreams is scary as shit. And I haven’t even done it. But I’ve stood at the edge of the cliff, looking down at the ground below, and wondered how I could ever fly above it. I have endless respect for those who’ve taken that step forward. I pray I man up and follow you soon, before it’s too late.
  
  
• When you do make a bold decision, don’t half-ass it. In July TD and I, out of the clear blue sky, decided to go on a bar crawl—after a whiskey distillery tour. And when we come at you, we come hard. (Wait…)
  
  
• Life is what you make it. Seriously, we wrecked shop that day. Nine bars. Nine bars AND A WHISKEY DISTILLERY. And we never really broke a sweat. In fact, all of us handled ourselves like all-stars the entire Fourth of July weekend, going strong four days straight. That was one of those moments where you find yourself smiling at all that just took place, as you lay on your couch in agony on Sunday afternoon.
  
  
• LDW is officially fantasy football Christmas. Saturday of LDW—as is tradition—featured the annual W&J draft at Armo’s house. It was one of two that I attended that weekend. Finn, Chief, Esq, BBB, Tony, our friend Keith, and others met to bust each other’s balls and select fantasy teams over lots of pizza and lots of beer. I don’t know if it’s due to football having dominated that weekend for numerous years now, but hearing “LDW” just triggers images of the game in my head, like saying “Fox News” makes you picture a monkey throwing its own shit at a wall.
  
  
• The better you are at something, the more you suffer for your art. This year saw me manage six fantasy football teams of my own, and consult two of my friends’ teams. Every godforsaken day from mid-August through the end of December saw me dividing up the free time I don’t have between fantasy research, eight leagues, and the CS pages. Who needs a love life?
  
  
• Love lives are second-class citizens in a world that’s home to fantasy football. One of those friends who employed me as a consultant was Dupa. He flew into Pittsburgh late on the Saturday night of LDW for his league’s draft, which would be held Sunday afternoon. By early Sunday evening, he was on a plane headed back to Houston.
  
  His girlfriend lives here in Pittsburgh. He didn’t visit her during the approximately 20 hours he was here. …She was not happy.
  
  
• Getting drunk with your homies is like riding a bike. On his one night in town, Dupa dialed the knob to “full turnt.” He drank himself silly on the plane, and then led Tony and me to Shady Grove straight from the airport. In the 20 minutes after we walked through the doors, we consumed a round of Long Islands, a round of Jager Bombs, and a round of Heinekens. By the end of the night I was taking pictures of Dupa sitting alone on a city bench with his arm around a pizza, as he made sex faces at it.
  
  
• Fuck fire hose fittings. Seriously. To this day I feel myself get nervous and twitchy each and every time I walk near a fitting sticking out of a wall or a hydrant on the sidewalk.
  
  
• I don’t know how Pak’s wife does it. For reasons only known to divinities of the universe, I spent three consecutive weekends hanging out with Pak in Shadyside. Week 1 was two homies wanting to drunk; Week 2 was the summer’s second Jam on Walnut; and Week 3 was the annual kickball tournament that turns my friends into booze zombies. Safe to say, Mrs. Pak hated me as much as I hated Pak by the end of that stretch.
  
  
• It’s possible to be a bigger drunken spectacle than Pak. The second of those weeks, the Jam, found Tony in his drunkest form. Pregaming at my place, drinking beers on Walnut St., and downing shots and drinks at Shady Grove did in the homie, who was an irrationally-angry mess—a.k.a. “full-on Irish”—by midnight.
  
  Realizing that his night had reached its peak, I walked him home. Along the way, we passed various random bands of revelers strolling through the neighborhood. And each time someone in one of those clusters would raise their voice in excitement over whatever it was that they were discussing, Tony’s reaction was to accuse them of talking shit on him, and to attempt to dart in their direction.
  
  
• With age comes experience…and shame. The following week—that of the kickball tourney after party—Tony balked at Pak’s and my suggestions that he come catch up with us. He was worried that most of Shadyside would remember him as the blotto fool he had been the previous week. He finally relented when I reminded him that all of the people that had seen him be a drunken asshole that night were, themselves, drunken assholes that night.
  
  
• Fate is a woman. Related: Women are cruel. The postgame partying after the kickball tourney saw some wild sights, including our girl Liz expressin’ herself on the wall at Mario’s East Side. The star of the night, though, was Armo.
  
  It’s rare that we get the Italian Stallion to venture outside the five-mile radius encircling his house (as evidenced by the fifth bullet point of this post); his average is about once a year. On this uncommon night, he met a cute blonde girl at Grove, who talked him up for most of the night. Keith and I watched from nearby barstools, sipping our beers like proud parents. At close, her friends pulled her in the opposite direction from the one our collection was headed in, so Armo and blondie did the whole huddle-on-the-sidewalk-away-from-your-friends-while-exchanging-phone-numbers ceremony. She then made him a tongue-wrestling practice dummy in front of their friends and the world.
  
  
  That Monday he texted her to see if there were flames to fan. She mentioned that she has a boyfriend. A boyfriend with whom she lives. Armo considered that maybe once-a-year was too often to venture out into the world.

The Summer of 2013 may have turned into November December January February March [fight me] as quickly as it appeared, but we’ll always have the memories.

…And the scars.

The New Normal

Sometimes, I feel as though I’m misleading you.

The nature of this biz—I say “biz”, of course, to blindly reassure my ego that this site is somehow a relevant part of the entertainment industry, despite what our paltry page hits suggest—is that the mundane gets filtered out. If I’m writing about a story, well…there has to be a story involved. Something spectacular and interesting has to have taken place for it to even be worth the time it takes to type it up.

The vast majority of the average human life, however, is filled with the boring shit that no one wants to read about. What I love about my friends and me, though, is that we don’t live average human lives. If 5% of a regular person’s life is reportable, my friends I are somewhere up in the high teens. …As is our maturity. But that’s a topic for another conversation.

Last Saturday I awoke looking to turn booze into happiness. I eagerly texted several friends, sure that they would be feeling the same way. One after the other, they shot down my hopes with little thought towards how my feelings would be affected. Selfish bastards. I hit up my one constant, my road dawg, Alex; surely SHE would be down to help me drink.

Me: “You putting on pants and drinking tonight?”
Alex: “Lol no I think I’m laying low…I have something going on almost every day in March.”
Alex: “So I’m taking advantage of the fact I have nothing to do today and being a huge bum.”
Alex: “Pantsless.”
Me: “All of my friends are disappointing me today.”
Alex: “Lol no one is on the drinking boat today?”
Me: “TD isn’t. Mitch & Swag are out of town.”
Alex: “I wish I was…the week was so stressful I’m ready to just veg out.”
Me: “I did that last night. Got it out of my system. Now I wanna put my dick in some Long Island Iced Teas.”
Alex: “I won’t judge you for drinking alone.”
Me: “Why would you? That’s like me saying I won’t judge you for not wearing pants. It’s just what we do.”
Alex: “#sotrue”

Eventually, Tony hit me up wanting to indulge in some Shadyside imbibing. Thank you, Baby Jesus. He came over in time to catch the second half of the Pens game, and to supplement his beer intake with a shot of Beam. We hit our first bar…I normally would give you the name of it, but I’m going to plead the fifth while giving you his and my exchange as we left for bar #2:

Me: “So I was looking at the bartender, and I kept thinking, ‘She reminds me of someone.’”
Tony: “Okay…”
Me: “I tried doing, like, word association, to think of who she reminded me of. ‘When I look at her face, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?’ And all I could think was, ‘Ham!’”

We hit Shady Grove, and Tony was well on his way to being me-drunk. “Hey,” he proposed, “Let’s do a shot!” To hang out with Tony Drunk Tony is to have shots thrown at you once or twice repeatedly throughout the night. It doesn't matter if you’re out to calmly forget about the workweek, or to get Bonnaroo-drunk; if Tony sees bottles of alcohol nearby, he’ll want to do shots.

I declined, knowing the kind of hell at the end of that path. “I’m not trying to go there tonight. I’m staying chill; no shots.” After listening to my words of wisdom, Tony agreed whole-heartedly. “Ahh, you’re right. Shots are a bad idea. Forget it.” Approximately 18 seconds later, the bartender walked past.

Tony: “Hey—can I get a shot of Crown?”

*sigh*

Drunk Tony is basically a two-legged version of “Dug” from Up. The rest of the night went as you might predict: me gently nurturing my buzz with Heineken and the like, and Tony dry-humping the night while wearing a big sloppy grin. My friends being above average, though, one last tale presented itself before night’s end.

For several months now, the running joke among some of us—particularly Swag and Mitch Canada—is one of Tony being a meathead. Now, to know him is to know that’s not true, though in recent years he has become seemingly more self-assured in feats of strength due to his continued dedication to weight training. He’s not a fitness nut preaching about flaxseed and posting workout quotes in his Facebook statuses; but the homie’s been ridiculously disciplined about his workout schedule over the last eight or nine years, after about 28 years of hardly ever glancing in a gym’s direction. And the resulting boost to his confidence is noticeable. …Especially when he’s been drinking…and when he jokes about flipping cars.

Back to Saturday. He and I were at Mario’s East Side, having beers at the bar and reminiscing about ten years ago, when we were the age of most of the people in there with us. I saw Tony engage in conversation with a guy who had walked up to the bar, but didn’t hear what was said. He was an average kid in his mid-20s, clean-cut with a regular build. Whatever words of charm Tony laid on him seemed to strike a chord, because the guy added two shots to his drink order, and then handed them to Tony and me. We tossed back the shots and thanked the stranger for his generosity, though my friend felt the need to offer more than that. “…And hey,” he said, momentarily halting the kid from returning to his buddies at a nearby table, “If you need any help tonight, if anyone gives you a hard time, you let us know!”

While the shock of what he’d heard caused the guy to pause and stare at Tony, my shock caused me to fill the silence. “Wait, what the—did you just offer to be his bodyguard?!”

Spirit'd Discussion

My girl BIO with the assist.

Viva Las Vegas: The Hungover

“Ouch.”

I vaguely remember this being my first thought that morning, as I opened my eyes to a dim room. It was about 11 a.m., and sunlight was fighting its way past the edges of drawn blinds. Looking around the room, I felt a bit surprised that all three of us had made it back safely the night before. After Dupa’s Wednesday night/Thursday morning adventure, I had just kind of expected at least one person to be missing when I woke up each day. Maybe even me.

Waking up was difficult, in much the same way that lifting a skyscraper with your pinkie finger is “difficult”. And I say this despite being the first one to get out of bed. Feeling the need to aid the common good, I threw on some shorts and a shirt and shuffled my way to the ABC Store in the mall. I grabbed another gallon of water and another four-pack of Red Bull; I’m not sure if the words I spoke to the cashier were English. …Or words, for that matter. I came back to the room hoping to find T.C. and Dupa exhibiting some level of consciousness. No such luck. I threw the water and Red Bull into our fridge, and went back to bed. If you can’t beat ‘em…

By 2 p.m., there were signs of life. And by 3 we were all back out in the fresh—well, freshish—Sin City air, as we strolled the Strip. More than just my hangover, I was fighting malnourishment; I hadn’t had anything to eat besides water, beer, and Cable Car-tini since dinner at Ellis Island 17 hours earlier. With every step amid the buzzing crowds of Vegas, I felt…fuzzier. While Dupa was buying beers for himself at sidewalk stands, I was teetering and sweating in 67 degree weather like a dusthead, thanks to low blood sugar.

Some fries from a vendor outside of Carnaval Court helped bring me back from the brink, and a burger at Strip Burger steadied my legs beneath me. But I could only eat about half my burger, delicious though it was, and I was only slightly more adept at finishing my “Strip & Go Naked (Grey Goose Citron, lemonade, and pilsner). I felt like I was letting down Nancy, our cute waitress; there was a hint of disappointment in those beautiful eyes each time she stopped by our table and saw my plate and glass. [Nancy, if you’re reading this: I love you, and I never want to hurt you like that again. Come to Pittsburgh, and I swear I’ll be soused with hamburger crumbs all over me every night, just for you, baby.]

As I struggled to put food (and more alcohol) into my body, it occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one moving slowly. True, Dupa and T.C. weren’t nearly as roughed up as I was, but two days of Vegas had clearly put a hitch in their get-along. Since Strip Burger sits across Las Vegas Boulevard from the Wynn and Encore casinos, we decided to tour the sparkling Babylon-that-Steve-Wynn-built; it was only about ten minutes into doing so that I noticed none of us—not a single-fucking-one of us—had so much as a light beer in his hand. We were dry-humping the Encore. The shame was too much; I couldn’t even look at our reflections in the mirrored ceiling.


After a brief stop at the Ferrari wing (where a lovely c**t of a hostess reprimanded me for attempting to take a picture of the showroom—to which I replied, “They’re cars; the camera’s not going to steal their souls.”), we began the return trek up the Strip. We stopped at Carnaval Court, which by now was in full swing: a band played onstage, cougars and young cougars-in-training bopped around, guys standing at the outdoor blackjack tables drooled over the beautiful dealers in their slore-casual attire (tight jeans, cropped t-shirts, etc), and—for no earthly reason—a bartender stood on top of the bar while blowing the loudest coach’s whistle I’d ever heard. T.C. ordered us a bucket of beers as we talked to two middle-aged guys from Pittsburgh who just happened to be standing next to us. There was a problem, though: My hangover wasn’t going away. I nursed my beer, hoping each sip was going to ease me back into my Danny Ocean state. Negative. Instead I was dull and irritable. And I was anxious to go over to the bartender with the whistle, yank him down by his children’s medium tee, and pummel his face with an ashtray.

…Did I mention I was irritable?

Dupa and T.C. polished off the fourth and fifth beers from our bucket (I forced myself to choke down my one beer) as we returned to the Strip. We stopped to snap pictures of T.C. posing with a street performer dressed as Catwoman [she was wearing the costume almost as well as Halle did] in front of the Flamingo, strolled through the Bellagio (this time with a bit more coherence at our disposal), and then concluded our family-friendly tourism with the fountain show, before heading back to our PH basecamp.

By this point, the reason for our sluggishness had been diagnosed: digestive unrest. Two and a half days of plentiful booze and heavy food—two and a half days of Vegas, more or less—needed to be flushed (no pun intended) from each of our systems. After that, a shower (one that I was actually aware of this time!), and some Red Bull mixed with Belvey, I was back up on my game. T.C. and Dupa were still a bit subdued, but we collected ourselves and headed to the curbside pick-up outside of the main lobby, where we would be meeting up with B Rush.

It had been nearly a year since I had last seen B, who’s been busy in Vegas trying to do his thing in the rap game. We caught up on some of the recent doings on our respective sides of the country, his speakers rumbling with one of his latest recordings as we cruised down the Strip. We stopped at Slots’A’Fun to experience a Sin City novelty that B had been telling me about since we had first gotten to town: A 48 oz. plastic cup shaped like a football. A bartender filled one with Tecate, threw in a straw, and handed it to me as I smiled gleefully like a small child being handed a triple-scoop ice cream cone.

B made a similar purchase, and then we climbed back into his car. The plan was simple: We would be touring Fremont Street that night, where casinos have $2 specials on bottles of Corona and Heineken. In other words, $8 refills of Corona and Heineken.

Vivaaaaa…

Dupa and T.C., still in the grips of the slowdown that had been ruining my fun earlier that day, decided to skip the footballs. As we waded through Fremont’s frenetic atmosphere of celebrity lookalikes (Snoop and Tupac!), flashing neon signs, people racing by on zip lines overhead, thick crowds, and a Kiss cover band that tested decibel safety levels from an outdoor stage, they somehow remained dry. I, on the other hand, was clutching my football tighter than Darnell Jefferson. We stopped for some slices of pizza, which did both of them a world of good; afterwards they quickly found a cocktail stand and bought themselves sustenance.

While they were doing that, B and I stood off in the thoroughfare talking. Out of nowhere, a small, older white woman appeared in front of us. Without warning, and to our bewilderment, she began barking at the heavy Jesus piece dangling from B’s neck. “Arf! Arf! Arf!” I don’t know what she’d been drinking, but I can assure you I was jealous that I hadn’t had some, too.

Whatever was coursing through her veins, it most certainly affected her eyesight. When B asked her why she was barking at his Jesus piece, the woman said she thought it was an image of a dog. Then, as if to atone for barking at the prophet, she broke out in prayer while bowing her head in reverence to the golden idol. She then walked off into the crowd and vanished just as quickly as she had appeared. Dupa and T.C. returned from the drink stand to find B and me laughing hysterically, wiping tears.

We headed into the Fremont Casino to use the restrooms and replenish the footballs. Maybe, in another town, a man methodically pouring four bottles of Corona into a cheap, plastic, football-shaped cup while standing at a crowded bar would look…oh, I don’t know…peculiar. Perhaps, one might say, a bit abnormal. Not in Vegas, though. No one so much as blinked. God I love that town.

[To be continued...]

Dream Kitchen

This On the Rocks intermission is brought to you by the folks at Heineken, who remind you to always dream big.