Month: July 2008

Things I Have Lurnded In A Weekend

Foof! I rocked David Bowie Day a little too much on Friday, the 18th day of 2008. (hee) I convinced an entire bar that it was officially David Bowie Day and the manager obliged my request and played all my Bowie cds. It was great fun and I wish you were all there. It’s nice to leave and get “Happy David Bowie Day” from 30 people you don’t even know. I wonder if they will be pissed when they find out that it’s not completely official. And by ‘completely official’ I mean outside of my own head and the select few who read VeggieM. Meh, who cares?

So this weekend I took note of a few things. Everyday is an epiphany for me.

  • I’m never going to use the term, “Doggie Bag” at a restaurant again. I’m not sure what I would be taking home.
  • If you hit someone’s house with a golf ball, they get pissed. Even though the stupid assholes bought a house right on a course where people hit hard white balls with clubs and have the accuracy of Stevy Wonder with a dart.
  • Patron tastes better with an orange slice. I can’t explain it but it does.
  • I gave blood on Saturday and the nurse(?) told me that the stick would feel like a little bee sting. If that is supposed to calm me down, why do people go bat-shit crazy when bees are around?
  • On the same topic of giving blood, when the ears start popping, you have about twenty seconds before you take an involuntary nap.
  • Smelling salts hurt the nostrils.
  • An older black woman said I was “Fly”. I don’t know what that means, but I like it.
  • David Bowie’s character in the movie Labyrinth isn’t Jarrod. His name is Jareth. Dude still has funny pants.

That’s pretty much it. My weekend was uneventful by many people’s standards. How was yours?

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Happy David Bowie Day!

I’m starting something and I need your help. This time of the year is really short on holidays and I end up falling into the “too excited for Halloween too early” dilemma that happens every August. So I am going to combat that by revising the calendar and adding my own holidays to get excited for. Today is David Bowie Day. Is it his birthday? I don’t think so. I just declare that today, the eighteenth day of 2008 to be international David Bowie Day.

(the worst drawn party hat ever)

So this is where you come in. I want you to pick a day on the calendar and create your own holiday other than your own birthday. I will put it into my Outlook calendar and it will remind me a week before the day arrives. Then I will write a whole post dedicated to your holiday and we can all celebrate together.

So for now, you can listen to my favorite David bowie song, “Ashes to Ashes”. And tonight I am going to rock the Labyrinth and poke fun of Jarrad’s hilarious horse riding outfit, minus the horse. Happy David Bowie Day!

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Friends From A Distance

So, I stopped over at a friend’s house after work to grab a few beers with him. I am not great friends with him and his wife but I have had a few delightful conversations over the course of the past few months and I finally took them up on a long standing invitation. And that is when I learned that some friendships should stay at the place they were formed. At the bar.

Don’t get me wrong, these people are really sweet but I guess there are just people in life that are meant to be friends from a distance. You think I’m a dick, don’t you? Well, just hear me out and then you can be the judge. I am sure there are a number of people in the world that wouldn’t want to come over to my house too. I’m not perfect. Okay, let us begin.

Right when I got there I knew this night was shaping up to be interesting. I wasn’t in the driveway yet and my gut was telling me to just go home. I guess it was from their yard with grass 4 feet high. But like usual I ignore my instinct and went with my retardo-sense. That always proves to be deadly. So I pulled in, barely missing 6 bigwheels, a bike, a pork roasting barbecue barrel thing and what looked to be a chewed up Lazy-Boy recliner. I got out of the car, walked up to their door, rang the doorbell and out jumped my buddy’s wife who gave me a really long and uncomfortable hug. It was clear that they had a six hour drinking head start on me.

I walked into their house and was met by a half a dozen other people, all very drunk. Now that doesn’t bother me but when you are dead sober and the people at the house are the type that will arm wrestle you for your girlfriend, it is strange. On top of that all the guys there played high school football together and now in their 40’s, they still act like they just walked off the homecoming field. I treated that night as a twisted sociology project, trying to use really big words out of context, just to see if someone will correct me.

Well, I began to drink very fast. So fast that I was drawing the attention of the said football team and before I new it we were shotgunning PBR’s. I really thought those days were behind me but it seems that they are not. So, about four beers later I had to pee like no other. I walked into there bathroom and right above the toilet was this.

What the fuck is that? Who buys art like this? I was completely transfixed and could not pee for the life of me. I am in no way a snob art connoisseur because, let’s face it, I collect horror movie posters as art pieces, but come on. Upon closer inspection I also found this.

Why is that frog blowing chunks? There is no theory to explain this. I have never seen a picture that caused me to have a bladder block before. There were four 16oz PBR’s begging to be set free and the pissing boy/frog yarf painting sucked out my will to relieve myself. Then my friend’s wife knocked on the door to make sure I was ok.

What the hell is with that anyway? Are there people who disappear in bathrooms around the country and I am the last to know? Why do people feel the need to knock on the bathroom door to check the status of whoever is in there? Next time I will ask them to come in and give me a back rub. That should keep them from asking anymore questions.

Well, I finally gained composure and finished what I started. I walked out and found my buddy, drunkenly gazing at his neighbor’s boobs and telling her about the new schooling zones that Alpharetta is starting. I walked up to him and inquired where they got that painting. It went like this.

Me- Fred, I have to know…where did you get that painting in the bathroom?

Fred- You like it? (hick-up)

Me- Ho..uh…where would one find something like that?

Fred- HEY NANCY! WILL LIKES YOUR PICTURE IN THE CAN!

Nancy- Oh you do! Our niece painted that for us! Isn’t it cute?

Me- Well, it kept me from peein’.

Nancy- That’s so nice! I’ll tell her that when she comes over again.

I so wanted to tell them fire wouldn’t even touch that but I didn’t have the heart. No, I am caddy but I am not a dick.

So, I drank my limit and went home. It wasn’t a bad night by any means but I prefer them in a neutral setting, without seeing them set up plans to swap partners, being obvious about having coke upstairs or being being asked who I am voting for when I am sure it is the opposite of everyone there and could ignite a fight. No, I like those two at the bar where I can enjoy the company free of vomit frogs. They are good people.

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El What?

It sucks to get behind a truck moving 45 mph on a crowded highway with no hope of merging. It’s even worse when you are already late for work. To compound it, when you finally do get there, you swing into the meeting and apologize by saying you were stuck behind El Juereno. Really shoots your credibility to shit.

Ooo! Ooo! Make sure to swing by Macabre Fitness to read Romi’s hilarious story. Muy worth it.

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Emeril’s Tie

Over the course of my life I have had a few interactions with certain celebrities and for the most part they have been fairly good experiences. I always walk away feeling a little surprised that these said celebrities were normal people like me. I can’t understand why I would think that every celebrity burns stacks of money in their furnace or hire poor immigrants to be human footstools but unless they prove me wrong, that’s the assumption I make. Anyway, today’s story is about an odd encounter I had with Emeril Lagasse.

A few years ago I worked at the Alliance Center (pictured above) as a corporate project manager and I must say, I hated it. I am not what you call “corporate material” by any stretch of the imagination. Everyday consisted of going to the same meetings with the same people raising the same concerns and answering the same questions with the same answers. You know you have a bad job when you take breaks through out the day just to ride the elevator. The one good part about the job was I had some perks at the restaurant on the lobby floor because their account was under my project portfolio. The restaurant was ‘Emerils’ inspired by none other than the famous Emeril Lagasse himself.

Since I had a few perks at the restaurant, one including a big discount on a bar tab, I became pretty good friends with most of the staff there. I am a firm believer that people in the food service industry are the greatest American we have. No where else can you find harder workers who have to take shit on a daily basis from the cock suckers of the world. If you are ever at a restaurant and you are snotty to a server for no reason I swear I will stab you in the leg with a soup spoon. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, well over the course of discussion one night the bartender told me they were working double time in preparation for the emperor himself to arrive, Emeril Lagasse. They hated him. Apparently he was a real ass to all the chefs and servers but he is the man so they sucked it up. And since hurricane Katrina shut down his main place in New Orleans he would be staying in the ATL for quite some time.

Weeks past and my job really took a turn towards the busy side so my beer days took a hit and the chance to meet Emeril left my brain. That is until I past him in the parking garage. He really is a lot shorter than I thought. I mean he’s not short like qualifying for a handicap sticker but short enough to play keep away with his hat indefinitely. Regardless of his height, he was the most famous chef in the world and the dude did drive a really nice Mercedes. I couldn’t help but notice that this was one of those cars that had to be the same price as a nice house. I also noticed there was a tie was sticking out of the passenger side door. That’s when my stupidity took over, as usual.

“How cool would it be to have a tie that belonged to Emeril Lagasse?” Actually in hindsight, that’s pretty dumb. Who would believe or care whether I had a tie that belonged to Emeril? It’s not like I could invite dinner guests over and bring them into my closet to look at Emeril’s tie in a glass case. I’m not even a big fan. But that wasn’t going through my head at the time. The only thing that was, was this, “tie..tie…tie..tie..”

So I watched Emeril and the lady in the business suit walk across the drive towards the building and then I started to work on the tie. I pulled with all my might but it wasn’t happening. I guess that is why you pay $100,000 for a car because that door was vacuum sealed and wasn’t giving an inch on that tie. I should have remembered that when I slammed my own tie in the door a few weeks ago. My memory isn’t what it used to be.

Well, the tug of war was turning out to be a stalemate so I did the dumbest thing one could do in that position. I tried the door handle of the Benz. Wouldn’t you know it? The fucking alarm went off. I went out of body the second that “BLEE BLEE BLEE” alarm sound rang out in the echoing garage because I have a vivid memory of me standing there, hand on tie and other hand on door handle. Emeril and the lady he was with stopped in their tracks and looked back to see me there, evidence in hand, wide-eyed, looking directly back at them. They slowly started to walk back towards the said vehicle with me, trapped like a raccoon in a garbage can, obviously guilty of something.

I tried shouting over the alarm at them, “BLEE BLEE BLEE …YOU SHUT…BLEE BLEE..YOUR TIE IN…BLEE BLEE… THE..BLEE BLEE …CAR”

Emeril, with a look of both confusion and annoyance, tilted his head to hear what I was saying as he fiddled in his pockets to find the keys and stop the alarm. Finally he hit the alarm button on the key chain and asked, “what’s going on now?”.

God I wanted to run but I assumed that would have just led to a possible termination, police chase and a spot on “World’s dumbest Criminals IV”. So I collected myself and in a shaky voice and a red face I said, “You shut your tie in the door and I tried to get it out for you but I set off the alarm. Sorry about that.”

Emeril looked at the tie sticking out of his door like the tongue of a dead dog and said, “Oh…”. Then came the long awkward silence. I picked up my briefcase and went to gracefully exit. But before i could take a step he looked at me, smiled and said, “thanks”.

I didn’t know how to take that. Was he being funny? Was his agent calling the cops as we exchanged awkward glances? Will I be a story on his show as he kills dead time between sauteing the sauce and adding the “BAM” to whatever he is cooking? Am I about to receive a punch in the nose from his disproportionately sized grabbers? Nope. He extended his hand and introduced himself as Emeril Lagasse and asked my name.

After our introduction he invited me to dinner that night on the house. Wow, and here I was trying to steal his tie. What a shitbag I am. I gracefully declined, saying I was honored but I had to drive to Augusta to see the girl I was dating at the time and that was at least 4 hours with Friday night traffic. He said the invitation was open anytime and we went our separate ways.

I got in my car, hands a shakin’. That could have been bad on so many levels but it taught me a valuable lesson; If you are going to steal a celebrity’s tie from their car, wait until they have left the area.

Be sure to check out Pammy’s story over at MacabreFitness!

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