"and then people need to get killed by it to know its there"

Some bunz ass CDs for you.


Rooney Real just woke up in someone's front yard. "Rooney!! Look more REAL! The camera loves you baby!"


Michael Cole has a guitar boner and wants to tell everyone about it.


No. I don't want to.


This guy did his cover art in a booth, in a mall, in Pennsylvania, and then paid for it.


Poetical is a word now. I called it.


Seriously, FUCK the papyrus font and fuck your serene picture. Papyrus does not make everything look "mystical" and "earthy" it makes you look like a fuckbag.


No. YOU Spend some time.


"I've seen gay-er things, but not today"
-Ogre


This is just great. I cant make fun of this. "Vehicular Bump-a-side" might be the coolest phrase I have ever heard. Ever.


I might buy this one, because I reeeeally want to know what happens to Little Suck-a-Thumb and Flying Robert.


Yeah....


It is extremely challenging.


Jesus.


Wanna look like a complete tool? Everything you need is right here.


FUCKING FUCK THE PAPYRUS FONT. Seriously, if you have ever used this to try and make your shit look cool, leave, don't ever come here again.


Ok so yeah it was unrelated to anything, but I just found this website (http://kunaki.com/) where aspiring musicians can design their own CD packaging and get it printed. I could look at the gallery on that site for hours for the staggering amount of assholes with chauncey ass packaging. Its a worn out blogger bit, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 style ragging on some poor sucker who takes himself seriously, but I dont give a fuck. This shit is too funny.

I really hope some of these artists find this and get mad at me. They won't.

I will be back to the booze thing a little later, no worries.

Free Spirits (Pour me another) Part 2.

I'm considering all of this as I am cruising off of a massive bender. Let me explain. I had 10 days off from work to celebrate the holidays with my family and friends back home. Those 10 days were almost wholly occupied by passing out in loveseats, playing with my dog, wearing a mustache, mixing absurdly strong brandy and coke IV's for my auntie Tammy, dancing drink-in-hand to James Brown with my entire family, playing guitar hero, and taking BAC tours of lower Minneapolis. Fantastic.

And, this deserves its own paragraph, tangling myself night after night inside Awesome. A girl that should have monuments erected in her honor... Besides mine.

That being said, I crash landed, refreshed, back in NYC to celebrate a speedy new years in a shady warehouse in Brooklyn. Depleted of vitamins, moisture, semen, brain cells, and sentences, I returned to work for a four day work week. Four because any opportunity to subtract will be taken enthusiastically by the entirety of this business. I don't remember most of those four days, but they were the most productive of my entire 6 month career.

So naturally, it was again cause to celebrate, continue the bender, Robbie Williams high-fiving Rod Stewart, shattering highballs for three whole city blocks while kicking Angelina Jolie square in the tit. It was that good. So I went to Vermont. To "ski". For a whole week. How I pulled off the logistics of such a vacation in such close proximity to another is far beyond me.

It was to be me, my friend Jay From Queens (Bro), his girlfriend Jess, a hardcore Irish girl from Broad Channel, 160 Queens College kids, and Shady Milos, a Serbian National with a Beethoven haircut and his own language.


A brief glossary, the official dialect of Milosistan:
Beasting: Verb, to beast. To attack something head on, be it a buffalo wing or a vagina. "I beasted that shit, son". One can also be in "Beast Mode", which is the state of Beasting. This is similar to "Berzerk" mode in Doom 2, where you Beast everything in sight without the aid of a weapon.
NOTE: "Son" should be uttered after 95 percent of all statements made, regardless of familial relation to the subject.

Bunz (or buns): Variation: "Bunz-ass": Adjective. The state of being bunz, inconvenient, ugly, shady, pointless, or lame. "That girl is bunz, son."

Done Dotted: Who the fuck knows. To be finished, over with, or, "a wrap". I think.

Some Acceptable Phrases:
"You're getting mad grimy with that cheese, son.", but only in reference to sandwiches. And:
"Ya' done Son!" In reference to basically anything.


It should be noted that Shady Milos is the biggest hater in history. So bad to the point that he literally "hates" in his sleep.

This trip happened, among the girls with wigs and the guys with non-ironic unibrows. The mutants of Queens College. By the second day, the four of us were simultaneously hated, adored, and feared by each unfortunate mongoloid we ended up drinking with. For my part, I was unknowingly thrown out of a house for informing a room full of girls they were "stuck up cunts". Which they were.

For Jay's part, a red-head, he somehow managed not to kill a small, shook-looking child named Terrence (who insisted that all call him "T-Hef") for grabbing his girlfriends ass repeatedly. This restraint brought Jay local fame.

Shady Milos shouldn't have been allowed near anyone, but he did end up finding security for us. Through his Balkan pride, some-the-fuck-how he befriended Vlado, the Judo champion of Croatia and trainer of military special forces for the Croatian military. Vlado was our de fatco bodyguard, all he required was a warm beer every 20 minutes from my backpack. We were happy to oblige.

Be that as it may, the amount of drinking achieved was basically heroic. It would only take three trips down the slushy mountain to kick up the thirst again, and three strong drinks to bat down the shakes. One more to shuttle us in for good. Nighttime, it hit well, 2 glasses of Jameson were fine the way 2 glasses of Canadian Club were in the morning. I was getting paid for this. 6 more to make a bet with Jess on who would fuck the first girl (yes), and 14 more to win the bet (yes). 0 to fall corpse asleep with the condom on. 0 to stay passed out, spread eagle on the hide-a-bed while the cops raided the house looking for T-Hef (yes). 2 more to make sense of it all. One more warm one on the way home.

None of this seemed problematic to me. The same way I feel comfortable writing about it. Of course, I think it was funny, but none of it seemed like a bad idea. A good time was had by all. Andy's Tap was open early for a reason. So people could start having fun sooner. This makes sense. The first time I had an inkling that such a lifestyle could be foolish was as a 7 year old, ducking a drunk as he screamed condemnations to the ref at at a Gopher basketball game.

"What's wrong with that guy Dad?"
--"Nevermind him, he's just drunk."
"Probably just can't handle his shit huh?"


Oh yeah, I am going to stop drinking for the entire month of February (Super Bowl excepted).

To be continued...

"Free spirits ain't settin no one's spirits free"

I suppose I've just lived in bars...I might have even been raised in them. The drinking wasn't anything to me, Wednesday nights at Frenchmann's. Every Wednesday. From age 5 until about....14. Without fail. My Dad and all of his softball buddies downing pitchers, smoking cigars, throwing darts. I would play pinball and swallow cokes, hamburgers. I was always happy there. Shit, everyone was. Every now and again one of my Dad's slurred pals would throw quarters in the machine, lean over me and tell me the about the finer points of multiball management.

My aunt also worked there, Patty, the baby of the family. She ran the bar, she didn't own it, but when she was in there, she ran the motherfucker. She outsized most of the people in there, both in heart and physical space occupied. Stout, she found herself ducking whipped pool balls on more than one occasion, as they sailed to connect with the already dotted booze and wood behind her. Never when I was there though, not on the weeknights, the good vibes ran shit then. All those nights, she would duck out of the windowless bar after closing time into her broken muffler plymouth duster and haul ass out of there sounding like a thousand punctured lungs screaming at the road. That was her war call, my brother often found himself in fights with the dirty fucks in his trailer park. 4 to 1, 8 to 1, my brother never cared. He'd kill 'em all or catch an ass whooping. Either way, when those thousand lungs came screaming rusty around the corner, kicking the back end out, everyone fucking scattered. Patty was coming. And that meant headlocks. Fight was over.

She raised me too, I was raised by committee. She was second only to my auntie Jer. Jer was a traveler, a road person who would slang trunkfulls of dope all around the country, she knew hitmen, pulled scams on car dealerships by moving cars across state lines, saw the pyramids of Giza, smuggled pounds of weed over the fence to my 2x vietnam vet uncle at "camp" (read:jail). All of this, but just like Frenchmann's, none of this seediness while I was around. She took care of my cousin (my cousin is my age) and me at the age of two and beyond. She would take care of us while our more straight laced mothers were at work, showing us the way light bounced through prisms, telling us stories, and, I believe this to be one of the most important parts of my life to date, playing us every Bob Marley record she had. And she had a lot.

We didn't just like it, we fucking LOVED it. We would crawl into her room and viciously scatter all of her records on the floor, grab the Bob ones, hold them up, eclipsing our tiny bodies, and say "Bob". How the fuck did we know which were which? Doesn't matter. My cousin's first word was "rastaman" (a fact that his mother denies vehemently to this day). Said.

Back at the bar, watching these people, these friends of my Dad put down pitcher after picther and laugh after laugh, I never once thought "these men are bad people", or, "these guys are intoxicated". Nothing about their behavior suggested they were dangerous. Zero. Less than zero. It seemed to me to be a normal part of adulthood.

The same went for Andy's Tap. Andy's was right next to the hobby shop where I would snag comics out of dusty boxes and weights to throw my pinewood derby cars down the track. Every Tuesday, my genius Dad found a way to parlay my weekly swimming lesson into a wet haired trip to the bar with his son. At Andy's it was video bowling instead of pinball, and instead of an Aunt it was a waitress who knew my name and my family. She is still there to this day. Again, this seemed to be everything OK. Low light, happy people who knew each other, swilling beer (at 3.2% alcohol. the bars in Bloomington couldn't serve the real stuff until a few years ago, unless they were on the freeway) laughing, playing games, and handing me an odd colored lollipop on my way out.

Fuck it, I thought, as a 5 year old. I'm away from the wife, they got pull tabs and MGD on tap, what the fuck else do I need?

Not much apparently. Like the Cat Power track, I've lived in bars ever since then. And I still don't see what's wrong with that.

To be continued...seriously this time.