After spending Saturday evening at a family function, Fishman, Papaya, HoBiscuit and I were driving home when my tongue detected the intruder. I don’t know where it came from or how I missed it during the evening, but it suddenly became all too obvious as I sat there in the backseat of the car that I had a major problem. My mouth was under attack by an alien force and I had been caught unawares.

There was something stuck in my teeth.

This wasn’t your average piece of dinner tooth-spackle, either. In fact, I think it was such a spectacular piece of dental destruction that it deserves a name and henceforth, I shall call it ‘Fred’. Fred was an evil invader declaring war on my molars and waging psychological warfare on my mind. He was taunting me from a safe position between my teeth like videotape of Osama bin Laden laughing at Dubya from his cave in Afghanistan.

I don’t have any strong proof, but Fred might be connected to Al Quada.

Fred was one of those stringy, dangling things that are just long enough to rub against your tongue, but too short for you to easily grasp and remove. I sat there in consternation, trying in vain to remove Fred from the death grip he had on my molars, but to no avail. I tried using my fingernail to scrape him out, but my nail wasn’t long enough. I tried swishing spit through my teeth in an effort to wash him out, but the Fred was like a red wine stain on a white T-shirt and refused to come out. I tried to grasp his slippery body in my fingers and pull him loose and I even tried sucking on my own teeth as if I were the high-school whore after a long summer break, but the little bastard wouldn’t let go.

At this point, I would have sold my mother into slavery for a toothpick.

It wasn’t too long before HoBiscuit became aware of my discomfort and asked me what was wrong. When I told her, she laughed at me and said I should leave it alone for now and floss when we got home. I don’t think she grasped the severity of the situation. She didn’t understand that this unwanted molar intruder and I were locked in a battle to the death. A battle that would only end when I had forcibly pried Fred loose from my mouth, thrown his slimy, bloated, spit-covered body to the ground and stomped on him like a frightened three-year-old on a cockroach.

I would even point and scream hysterically.

HoBiscuit took pity on me and offered up the only thing she had handy that might have been some help to me, an old business card. I took this meager offering from my loving woman as if it were my last hope. I figured that a card has edges and I’d be able to win the war raging in my mouth if I could just pry Fred loose from his enamel bunker cavity of safety. Choosing the sharpest edge of the card, I located Fred with my tongue and launched my personal Cruise Missile of Dental Salvation. I was dead-on accurate and shoved that card deep into the recesses of my teeth. I was so close that I saw golden lights and heard harps and a choir.

And then the corner of the card tore off and got stuck in there with Fred.

For the rest of the trip home I had food and paper stuck between my teeth and there was nothing I could do. Fred and his new friend mocked my discomfort and HoBiscuit laughed at my stupidity. She never said it, but I just know she was thinking, “I told you so.” the whole way home.

Damn you Fred. Damn you to hell.

Sometimes, the worst day of your life turns out to be one of the best stories for you to tell your friends & family later on in life. One of my personal favorite stories to tell revolves around my very first day as a college senior. The day was so bad in fact, that I bought myself a journal and began writing down my thoughts just so that I would remember how miserable I was at the time.

And boy, was I miserable.

Looking back, everything that happened to me that day was probably very funny to those around me. At the time however, I was so distraught I probably wouldn’t have minded if I had accidentally chewed off my own arm and fallen into a huge vat of lemon juice, salt and battery acid. Today, for the sake of learning to look back and laugh at myself, I thought I’d tell the world all about the day I like to call The Day Of Ultimate Suckiness. The following is the complete text from my journal.

I’m living in hell. My life is in ruins and everything I touch is turning around the bite me. Don’t believe me? Well, let me just tell you about my day and maybe you’ll do me the favor of putting me out of my misery.

My girlfriend, who I’ve been going out with for eight months, has just broken my heart. She says she needs ‘space’, but I found out the truth and broke up with her. You see, I found out that during the summer break she was sleeping with my roommate. Isn’t that special?

I am poor. So poor that I can’t afford to buy food and have been boiling basil leaves in water in the hopes that it will make a good soup. So far it’s not working and no, I’m not kidding.

I’m also so poor that I can’t afford to pay for my college classes. If I don’t get a job, and soon, I’m going to get thrown out of college.

I received a letter from college today telling me that I need a measles shot or I am not allowed to attend classes. I hope the shots free or I’m, well… shot.

My car has just died and I don’t have the money to get her fixed, so I might have to junk her. As if that isn’t bad enough, due to that little ‘accident’ last week my license has been suspended.

My one and only credit card is overdrawn. A lot.

I know it didn’t happen today, but yesterday my mother made me go to a family outing where I was put in charge of the nine small children and three dogs. I still have the migraine.

My other roommate, not to cheating bastard, brought a couch to the house today that stinks like mildew. He refuses to get rid of until we find a replacement couch, which we can’t do because we’re all very poor. So, because of this stinking, stupid couch, none of my friends will visit me at all. Stupid bastard.

The answering machine that my brother bought me as a house warming gift doesn’t work.

My plant is dying and nothing I do seems to be helping.

I’m a theater major.

And lastly, as I was walking down the street this evening a little girl pointed out to me that the pants I’ve been wearing all day have a hole in the crotch.

I want to cry. Somebody please kill me. I won’t even struggle.

Coincidentally, the date this all took place was 9/11. Funny, huh?

It’s strange, but even while all of this was going on I still managed to keep my sense of humor. My ability to laugh at myself, and to get other people to laugh at themselves, has served me well throughout the years. It’s gotten me out of fights, into jobs, through hard times and yes, even laid.

I’m especially proud of that last one.

When I tell the story about this day in my life it becomes a comedy, not an odyssey. Looking back, it all seems so trivial that I can’t help but laugh. Nothing that happened on that day changed my life forever or gave me new insight into my inner self. I took no journey, I learned no lesson.

I just took notes and moved on.

I really enjoy telling this story and most of the time my audience enjoys hearing it. It makes me feel good that I can look back on what at the time felt like the worst day of my life and laugh along with my audience as I relive it.

I’m positive that everyone out there has at least one of these stories to tell. Tell me, what’s your story?

I’ve been sitting here for most of the day trying to figure out how to write my Christmas story. Now, I’ve been working on it all day, but I’ve run into a little problem. I just don’t know how to start writing it.

Yeah, yeah. I’m an idiot.

So instead of beating my head against the wall trying to come up with the “right way” to write my story, I decided to simply write it when I can. Since I’ve already written three pages of the story, I think I deserve a little break.

Especially since I was losing my voice.

I also wanted to tell everybody about a little thing that happened to me last night. It’s a little thing I like to call ‘dinner’. You see, last night for some strange reason I decided that I would cook. That might not seem so important or awe inspiring to you, but to me it’s a very big deal. I don’t like to cook. In fact, you could say I actively avoid doing anything that even resembles cooking if it doesn’t also involve an open flame.

Every man knows that a barbecue is the only way to really cook.

There’s just something so right about an open flame slowly roasting the outside of dead animal flesh. Everything tastes better when it’s cooked over an open flame. Steak, potatoes, chicken, small children, or anything else that you could ever want to eat. They’re even better when drowned in barbecue sauce, pink on the inside and slightly charred on the outside.

Especially the small children.

Anywaste, last night I was going through my pantry what I discovered that I had pasta. I don’t know how old the pasta was, 1988, 1989, or maybe 1991, but it didn’t make a difference to me in the least. All that mattered was that I had something to cook that I might actually be able to eat.

And lord knows I was hungry.

I scrounged up some pasta sauce from the bottom of a ketchup bottle and noticed that in the back of my freezer there was some mold that looked like it could have been some sort of meat at one time in the past. I scraped this mold off the back of the freezer, put it into a pan and started cooking. The pasta was boiling, the sauce was simmering, and the meat was browning nicely. It was at this point that I had another one of my revelations, an epiphany if you will. I realized that I was only cooking for myself and therefore didn’t have to tone down the spices.

My god, I could finally make the perfect sauce.

I literally flew to my spice cabinet and took out all the spices I would need to create the perfect sauce. I had them all, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper, ground red pepper, and crushed red pepper. I also had my secret ingredient, the one thing that’s guaranteed to rip apart the stomach lining from any human being on the planet. I won’t tell you what it is, but you need to be licensed by the government in order to have it in your home.

Yeah, I got the hook up.

So I added all of the spices, including my secret ingredient, to the sauce and let the whole thing simmer. Then I added the meat-like product (which I am now convinced was sentient) and let the whole thing simmer for about fifteen minutes.

I swear I could hear the meat crying in agony the whole time.

This was going to be the best sauce I ever made. If any of you out there like spicy things the way I do, then you would have loved this sauce. I was crying as I ate this perfect concoction of spicy bliss, this wonderful, acidic nectar of the gods. It didn’t even bother me that I knew I was slowly destroying myself from the inside out.

Oh yeah, I knew I was a dead man come morning.

Throughout the meal I could feel this delicious, spicy, almost-sentient sludge burning a hole in my stomach as it sat there like a piece of white-hot lead in my stomach. I just knew that my anus would be a blistering, festering, open sore for the next four to seven days and that should I venture forth from my apartment people would die on the streets as I walked by. I knew all of this, but it just tasted so good I couldn’t stop eating it. Consequences be damned, I was going to enjoy my spicy meal because it was everything that I ever wanted in a sauce.

This sauce was so good it should go down in the history books as the greatest sauce ever conceived by man.

As I sat on my porcelain throne this morning, bent over double, breathing through my mouth, holding my knees and praying to god that the pain would stop, I knew that I only had myself to blame. I smiled as my sphincter convulsed in agony and the sweat formed on my brow and back. I knew that if it weren’t for my years of training in the back alleys of Chinatown, Korea-row and Indian-alley, eating anything with the little symbol for hot on the menu, I would have died during the night.

And you know what? It would have been worth it.

Well, since no one has any complaints about my writing so far, I guess I’ll just keep doing what I like to do and be as funny and entertaining as possible. If that just happens to include writing about silly new products, then so be it.

And if that’s not a perfect segue, I don’t know what is.

How many people out there like peanut butter? OK, now how many of you think that it’s just too difficult and time consuming to have to open up that jar of Jiffy and use a knife to spread that peanut-buttery goodness onto the bread? Wouldn’t it be great if peanut butter came in individually wrapped slices just like cheese? The people who invented PB Slices thought so too, and now they’ve turned that fabulous idea into a marketable product! Oh, yummy!

Morons.

Anywaste, I’ve uploaded the CAN-Struction pictures I promised, you can find them here. I’ll be back to writing more substantial entries tomorrow or Thursday, but be prepared for something special in December. I’m going to be writing an ongoing series about my favorite holiday memory from my youth. It’ll be long and involved so it might take a few weeks of entries to tell, but it’ll be worth it. Trust me.

And if anyone from my family is reading this then yes, that Christmas.

[Evil Laugh Here]

Snippets of a conversation I had this morning with my mother. Please keep in mind that she’s a sweet and loveable person with a huge heart and everyone who’s ever met her loves her. But sometimes she just says things that sound wrong unless you really know her.

“Well, you tell Papaya (Fishman’s girlfriend) that I want my soup! She should be in the kitchen, barefoot and slaving over a hot stove so my soup is ready by tomorrow.”

“Would you like her pregnant, too?”

“No. She should get married first.”

“HoBiscuit is how old? Oh my! She had better marry you and squeeze out some kids before her time is up.”

“She better what?”

“Well, you know what I mean. I want to see some grandchildren.”

“If she hears you saying things like that, I’ll be sure to bring them to your gravesite.”

There was more, much more, but she might die of embarrassment if I post them all so I’ll stop now.

Since it’s Thanksgiving tomorrow, the next few days will be a little hectic so I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything new until this weekend, but you never know. I’ll be posting the pictures of the CAN-struction exhibit this weekend and I’ll hopefully have a new skin up sometime next week. Be afraid.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I’m terribly sorry for my silence these last few days, but I’ve been a very busy little Geek. Also, there was some sort of server problem with my host that I didn’t become aware of until Sunday afternoon so I couldn’t post my thoughts on Harry Pothead until I got it sorted out. Everything’s back to normal now, so without further delay, here’s everything you didn’t ask to know and don’t care to hear about my weekend.

On Friday my friends and I went to see Harry Pothead and the Sorcerer’s Stoned. Being the Official Movie Psychopath that I am, I arrived at the theater eight hours before our scheduled showtime just so I could make sue we would have the best seats in the house.

Hey, It’s not as if I have a job or anything.

So I’m standing outside the theater, waiting for my friends to arrive when I think to myself, “Self, since we’re here so early, why don’t we charm one of these ticket-taker girls so that when all our friends do arrive we can get inside before anyone else and thereby get the best seats in the house?”

Yes, I do talk that way inside my own head. Shut up.

After a quick internal dream sequence, where this innocent seeming plan of action somehow became part of a brilliant scheme to take over the world using a movie ticket stub powered super ray gun, I went inside and spoke with one of the ticket-taking young ladies. She was kind enough to tell me all sorts of important, theater-insider-type information. Things like the bathrooms were on the third floor only, and today’s special at the concession stand was a house-sized bag of popcorn and a swimming pool of soda, and that they allow ticket-holders inside about an hour or so before the movie begins so they can wait on another line inside the theater.

Columbo’s got nothing on me.

A few hours later, after some more of my group had arrived, my brother Fishman had to use the bathroom so he went inside. When he came out he told me that he had charmed the ticket girl on the second floor and that we could go inside whenever we wanted. About two hours before the show Fishman, his girlfriend, HoBiscuit and I went inside to make sure we would have seats and were simply waved through by the ticket girl who didn’t even bother to check our tickets.

Did you catch that? We still had our un-ripped tickets!

I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but here in NY a movie ticket is $10 so it’s a fairly large investment. When you go to see a movie, if you buy tickets for friends who don’t show up for some reason, you can usually bring the unused tickets back to the window for a refund. That’s why the theater’s make sure to rip your ticket in half when you go inside to watch a movie. Since we were now inside the theater we didn’t really need the tickets anymore, but we could certainly use the money. Since the movie was sold out and no one had ripped our tickets it would have been very selfish of us to keep the tickets when there were so many less fortunate people outside without any tickets whatsoever. If you look at it that way, then bringing back our unused tickets for a refund was kind of like charity.

We’re a very charitable group.

If anyone wants to know about the movie, let me tell you it was a solid five on my BE scale. My BE scale goes from 0 to 10, with a ten being akin to looking into god’s left eye and a zero being the ultimate crapfest known as Battlefield Earth. Harry Potter was technically very good and extremely true to the book’s story but it lacked any feeling. There was no sense of awe or discovery when Harry’s world was turned upside down. When he discovers that he’s a wizard he merely accepts it as if someone had told him it looked like it would rain. The movie didn’t draw me into a new world. I saw Potter’s word, but I didn’t feel it. In essence, the movie lacked any ‘magic’, which is a shame because it looked really good and had so much potential. Since they’ve already begun filming the second movie, I hope they do better next time.

If you’re all real good, I’ll tell you about my Saturday outing at the CAN-struction exhibit tomorrow. I know you can hardly wait.

Dear Friends,

Tragedy has been averted.

Due to the unbelievably shortsighted decision of waiting until only three freakin’ days before the release of a major blockbuster, we might have been unable to purchase any tickets for the Friday night showing of Harry Potter at our local theater of choice. If not for some quick thinking and alternate plan making we would now be ticket-less and thereby forced to see the movie with the rest of life’s social flotsam during a Saturday afternoon show. Or, even more revolting on Sunday morning when all the family groups and lonely single outcasts go.

Oh, the unmitigated horror.

However, we did manage to find another theater with Friday evening tickets still for sale and I did not have to resort to plan B. I know some of you will be disappointed, but ever since Guiliani cracked down on prostitution in NY we’ve been unable to resort to our usual means of ticket procurement by selling our significant others to high-school nerds as they wait in the ticket holders line. Be advised that most high school kids are now on the Internet, and many remember us from the Star Wars Episode I ‘All This and a Salad, Too!’ fiasco.

SleepyZ, there’s no need to wear your thong.

As it now stands, I’m going to go to the theater early and wait in the ticket-holders line because otherwise all 12 of us won’t all be sitting together. Donations of food, water and sympathy will be appreciated, although some company would be best. I expect to be there a few hours early because I want to be first in line so that we get really good seats. That and I also want to watch all the young, sexy girls as they bounce up and down with excitement in their too-tight sweaters and low-rider jeans before HoBiscuit arrives.

HoBiscuit, please don’t hit me. It was a joke. Really. You know you’re the only one for me, right? Right?

Oh boy. I’m in trouble now.

Anywaste, breathe easy my friends, the worst is over and our record of seeing all blockbuster movies on opening night remains safe and unbroken. We’ve never missed the opening of a blockbuster movie and we’re not about to start now. Not on my watch we won’t. All we need to do now is figure out what to do before and after the movie so we don’t all wind up standing on a street corner doing one of life’s most depressing song and dances. You know the one. Where we all stand around on a street corner, looking at each other and saying things like,

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t care.”

“Neither do I.”

Silence

“So, what do you want to do?”

No one wants that to happen, now do we? I didn’t think so.

To recap, we have tickets for Harry Pothead and the Sorcerer’s Stoned. I will be waiting in line for seats (with blinders on and a picture of my beautiful, lovely and forgiving girlfriend stapled to my forehead) and we will not stand around on a street corner either before or after the movie. Should anyone have any questions about or criticism of my plan, please write them down on a sheet of college-ruled notepaper, carefully roll the paper into a thin tube, shove it up your into a bottle and hurl it into the ocean because I just don’t care. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to paint a lightning bolt on my forehead and find an old-fashioned broom to bring with me to the theater.

What? Because I’m a Geek, that’s why.

And now, simply because I thought it would be fun, I present a Web Log parody of U2’s song Elevation. Before anyone tells me, yes I know that there’s no such word as ‘inspirate’, but it went so well that I just couldn’t pass it up. If it makes you feel any better you can substitute ‘inspirit’ in its place, ok? Do you feel better now, you grammar nazi?

Emulation

Woo-Hoo

You, your site is like the sun

I’ll show you linky-love

I need mine to emulate yours now

Your site design it kicks

All the words, colors and pics

Just fits, you inspirate me so

I’m laying bare my soul

I’ll post this bad boy, go

Now write it down, inspiration

Why oh why, do I try

You make me feel like I could write

So right, emulation

Your Blog, or some would say Web Log

So good it’s like a god

Maybe I should emulate your mind

I’m using all your code

I can’t steal but I can clone

The goal is emulation

Uh-oh! Laying bare my soul

Post that bad boy, go

Now write it down, inspiration

Why oh why, do I try

You make me feel like I could write

So right, emulation

Woo-hoo

Love. Lift me up out from these fools.

Won’t you tell me that I’m cool?

I’ve been linking you.

Oh no! Laying bare my soul

Post that bad boy, go

Now write it down, inspiration

Why oh why, do I try

You make me feel like I could write

So right, emulation

Emulation

Emulation

Emulation

Emulation

Woo-hoo

(Fade Out)

So, anyone want to take a shot at making a recording?

Woah, have I been busy.

Yesterday I clipped my toenails, took a shower, went food shopping, de-waxed my ears, made one phone call and watched a small bug crawl across the windowsill. Unfortunately, I was startled out of my daily grind of inactivity by a cleverly camouflaged, rabid and feral dust bunny.

Yeah, a dust bunny.

There I was sitting in my Aeron Chair of Back Pain Relief trying to create HoBiscuit’s requested Hello Geeky skin (now available), when I decided to reach for one of my gel-filled, carpal-tunnel-relief squishy-balls. Normally, I just reach across the desk and pick one of several up from right above my drawing tablet, so I wasn’t even looking at what I was reaching for when I reached for it. Imagine my surprise when my hand closed on not the firm, yet yielding squishiness of my favorite item of hand-based stress relief, but on something hollow, scratchy, hairy, dirty and altogether disgusting.

The Evil Dust Bunny of Horror.

Usually I’m a very clean person. I vacuum, I put things away, I wash between my toes, but for some reason dusting is anathema to me. It’s like my kryptonite. No matter how bad it gets, I just can’t seem to get myself up off my lazy behind and take the three minutes time necessary to dust my apartment. I even bought Swiffer rags because I thought taking the spray-cans of polish out of the equation would somehow make dusting more ‘hip’ and ‘cool’. Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed. Not by the Swiffer’s effectiveness, because they did work as advertised, but by the fun factor of using them, which was almost nil.

Where’s the fun in dusting if you can’t pretend you’re Godzilla raining nuclear, fire-breath-death on the dust-mote denizens of mini-Tokyo?

So today I have two missions. First, to use my omnipotent powers to smite the dust bunny infidels from the face of my world. I will do this by a combination of nuclear-fire-breath and Mothra-like rags of doom. Second, I will try to find some work so that I will be able to eat something more nourishing than Cup-O-Noodles (now with more real beef!) or Mac N Cheese.

Web/Print/Graphic Designer. Will work for food.