I was just on a long vacation, a very loooong vacation.  But it was a good vacation.  The problem was the plane ride.  The plane trip was from Atlanta to Philadelphia on August 1st, and if by chance you are one of the poor poor souls that happened to be on the plane with my clan, then please accept my sincere apologies.

The clan included myself, my wife, my 3 year old daughter, and my almost 2 year old son.  The plane had a 3 on a side configuration, my son and I were in the middle and isle seat on one side of the plane while the wife and the girl were sitting in the middle and isle seats on the opposite side of the plane.  Please see diagram below for a graphical representation of the hell that was a plane ride.

The day started out on a dubious note, up at 3:30 AM, an hour drive to the airport and a bitchy kid at the gate.  The boy was cranky, no, cranky isn’t quite the word.  He was fucking horrible.  After we got him into his seat and some fussing and complaining into the air, the fun started.  It began with a low moan that turned into a primal scream that came from deep in his gullet.  The explosion was like Jack Jack from the Incredibles, and a visible arc of vitriol sound could be seen from it.  After the initial explosion, he took a full box of animal crackers and with animal ferocity and strength he ripped the box into shreds showering the poor schmuck sitting next to him, myself, and the rows in front and in back of us with cookie dust and tiny pieces of shredded box.  Then he got bad.  He basically rolled on the floor for 45 minutes kicking and screaming in the most ginormous tantrum in history.  In fact he now has a record in Guinness, look it up, he’s fucking in there.

He was fine once we got there.  Little fucker.  And then somehow he could still make you smile after all of that.

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In this installment of Stories from the road, our hero finds himself in Chicago.

Is the multi-day hangover a myth? Fuck no. I’ve got one. I remember the days when I could drink until 3, and then still make an 8 o’clock class the next morning (my notes would be unreadable and would smell like stale beer, but I still made the class). I just got back from Chicago where we drank like rock stars, told and re-told old stories, and realized our age all in one fell swoop. And then we re-told some old stories. The impetus for the trip was a reunion of a rugby team I used to play for, we had won a regional championship game for our division in Chicago 10 years ago and there were 3 international rugby matches scheduled for this past Saturday, so we scheduled the trip, took our pain medication, and went. I think there was a total of 18 guys on the trip.

Friday night was fairly typical reunion fare, a couple of us went to lovely Gary Indiana to play some poker while the bulk of guys went to the Cubs-Sox game. We all met up at bar/restaurant afterwards in the suburbs of Chicago. We sat around and bullshitted the night away while pounding down brew-dogs. And eventually closed the place down. I haven’t closed a bar in years.

Saturday is a rugby day. I only got about 3 hours of sleep (stupid internal clock), and after some greasy breakfast to lube up the gullet, we headed over to Toyota Park for the rugby matches. The first thing I noticed was that the parking lot was full of people drinking in groups of 10 or 15 and singing rugby songs. We entered the gate, and cracked open our first beer of the day. The time was 10:50 AM. We got into our seats on the 50 meter line and got ready for the first match (Ireland vs. Argentina, when the sun came out. I have mixed blood (mostly Irish and Scottish). This. No. Good. For. Sun. My face now glows a deep bright red and you can barbecue off of my forehead. Anyway, I moved into the shade soon after the first game, but too late. The good news was the beer kept flowing, so soon I didn’t feel my face too much.

The other matches of the day were fairly uneventful (England vs. Scotland, and US vs. Canada), my only comment is, we fucking suck. All told we were at the field for 7 hours boozing it up. We headed back to the wonderful Holiday Inn (nuthin but the best for our lot), and had a few more cold ones while we sat around and argued like little bitches about what we were going to do that night. In a moment of drunken clarity we came to the conclusion that some people are planners, some people are do-ers, and some people tell the do-ers what to do. And the do-ers get paid the least and do the most work (i.e., they’re fucked). But I digress. We eventually found a planner who planned an elaborate plan. The plan was, walk across the street to a sports bar. We’re fucking idiots. So a person that tells the do-ers what to do said “hey fuck-nuts, we’re leaving” and we left. Problem solved.

After some food and beer and shots and mustard and a little side of burning rage, we decided (again we needed a planner for this) to head over to a more “exotic” bar. In other words, we found a strip club. We ended up at the strip club and even the burning rage issue went away for some reason. All I could say was “god-damn we drink a lot” when I saw our bar-tab at the end of the night. We got a cab at 3:30 AM and headed back to the hotel. The last beer I finished, 3:20 AM. That’s 16+ straight hours of boozing it up if you’re keeping score at home (assuming I’m doing my math correctly course, remember the multi-day hangover thing?). I realized how old I am when I only got another 3 hours of sleep again (fucking bullshit stupid internal clock!!!).

I’m done… where’s the tylenol?

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So I’m back from Vegas, I didn’t get arrested, ripped-off, taken advantage of, molested, or even corn-holed. Vegas just isn’t what it used to be. But, I did have a stellar time, and made a decent amount of money on the tables. I will give you some of the details below broken out by day, but not all the details because…. well because I said so.

Day 1: I arrived late, it was after midnight, I went to sleep.

Day2: I played poker for 14 straight hours, on the same table, in the same chair.

Day3: I played poker for 6 hours, took a break, watched a movie, played poker for another 7 hours.

Day4: See day 3, minus the second poker session, then I got on a plane.

Well that was just about it. What was that? Oh, you want more? Ok, here are some brilliant observations.

1) During my 14 hour marathon poker session, all of the TV’s in the MGM Grand Poker room turned to the local news with footage of the casino across the street on fire (i.e., the Monte Carlo). Nobody moved, the games weren’t affected, but here is my conversation with the dealer.

Me: Is that going on right now (me pointing at the TV)

Dealer: Yep, but it’s the back-side of the casino, so you can’t even see it burning from the strip

Me: oh… ok, no need to get up then… I’ll raise

So this is proof that I didn’t start the fire, and when you are gambling and drinking, nothing will phase you, ever.

2) Vegas is just an excuse for the ladies to dress up like sluts. WHICH…. IS… FUCKING… COOL! I never saw so much cleavage in my life. Ladies, please, from the bottom of my heart. You can dress like that in other places too, seriously, like Georgia, or any place that I happen to be. I promise I won’t call you sluts.

3) I like… no, I LOVE, taking money from punk-ass kids that show up to a poker room wearing a track-suit, pulled down hat, wrap around sunglasses, and listening to their iPhones at the table. Dudes, there are no fucking cameras (other than security cameras), you are not on TV, why the fuck are you wearing that shit? I think I was noticeably aroused when I busted out this one douche-hole that looked exactly like the guy described above. If you are so bad in poker that you need sunglasses in order to not give out a “tell”, don’t fucking play. The only guys that can get away with that getup are professional poker players, but they’re probably all assholes anyway.

4) I saw a 21 year old kid drunkenly stumble and fall in the casino bathroom and bounce his melon-like head off of the marble sink counter and then the marble floor. He was bleeding, slurring, and crying. I realized at that moment that I am really getting old. I realized this because I immediately thought about how many years have passed between now and the time when I used to do shit like that, except the crying part, I’m no pussy.

5) I’m really glad Vegas is a 4 1/2 hour flight away, that place is too fucking fun to be easily accessible.

More on this trip later… or maybe not.

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The third installment of “Stories From the Road” takes us to San Juan, Puerto Rico in the spring of 2005.  I had been working off and on in Puerto Rico for 4 or 5 months performing a systems integration project (i.e., a shit-load of hasslework for those non-geeks out there).  The project team was predominately staying at the wonderful Radisson hotel in the Condado section of San Juan.  Condado was predominantly known as a touristy strip of hotels, restaurants, and bars situated along the beach just east of Old San Juan.  The hotel actually wasn’t horrible, it was just showing it’s wrinkles, but the fucker had a casino in the lobby, not good for those of us that are sleep deprived and are also known to gamble from time to time.  By the way, driving in San Juan is a full-contact sport.  I actually enjoyed it a bit too much and took to merging too fast without looking and laying on the horn like a fish to water.  Overall San Juan was a pretty cool town, a bit too touristy, but what do you expect?

We had some challenges “going live” with the new system and I had ended up working somewhere around 30 or 35 hours in a row just prior to my flight home.  The way the timing worked out I checked out of my hotel a day early and headed straight to the airport after my marathon work session for an 8 am flight.  I had been a road warrior at this point in my career and had racked up considerable frequent flier miles and a gold medallion status on Delta, because of this I often was able to upgrade my seats to first class, which rules when you are totally spent from burning the candle at both ends and blow-torching the middle.

So I get to the airport a total wreck, I’d been up for a couple of days, shaking from the lack of sleep and all of the caffeine (Mt. Dew, the only way to roll), and smelled like horse-shit.  The good news, I got the upgrade to first-class, at least I was going to be able to pass out as soon as I boarded the plane.  At this point, there was some buzz in the terminal about Cheryl Crow as she had just finished up a concert in San Juan the previous night, and rumor was she was going to be on this plane.  I could care less, all I thought about was sweet sweet sleep in my comfy seat, please god just starting boarding.

The call finally comes and we’re boarding, I’m in the first row middle section, the configuration on this plane (I think it was an MD-88) was 2 seats - aisle - 2 seats in the middle - aisle - 2 seats at the opposite window.  I get settled in and prepared to crash when all of a sudden Cheryl Crow plops down in the seat next to me.  My first thought:  “Shit, I totally stink”.  One thing you should know about me, I really don’t get star struck at all.  This was no different, I don’t think I even looked at her let alone talk to her, I just buckled my seat belt leaned back and crashed hard.  In fact I’m pretty sure I snored like a drunken sailor the whole flight back to Atlanta.  My only thought was that Lance Armstrong was going to make a comment on sports-center about some stinking, loud, snoring, asshole that sat next to his old-lady on her nightmare flight back to the states from Puerto Rico.  Good times…

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The second chapter of “Stories from the road” brings us to Cape May, New Jersey on Friday November 14th, 2003.  This is the day before my wedding.  My fiance and I were living in Indianapolis, Indiana at the time, but decided to have a “road” wedding as most of our family members were from the New York/New Jersey/Philly area.  We love Cape May and couldn’t have chosen a better place to hold our nuptials.  Our wedding was held in a Catholic church, and to this day I can’t believe that God didn’t strike me down right there and then due to my fairly open view on how corrupt and sick the fucking church (and most organized religion) has become.  In fact one of my new, but now all-time, favorite movie quotes regarding the Catholic church is from The Departed in the scene where Costello (Nicholson) is talking to a couple of priests in a diner.  This quote sums it up for me:

You recall our chat? Little boys. Sucking on their peckers, etc… and so forth. I am as God made me. Is that your rationale? May I remind you - in this archdiocese, God don’t run the bingo. 

Enjoy your clams, cocksuckers. 

I have a chubby right now from that line.  But I digress.  Our reception was held at Congress Hall, which was quite frankly fucking awesome, and most of the wedding party, guests, and my (now) wife and I had rooms there the night before and night of the wedding.  Coincidentally, there was a film festival occurring the same weekend in Cape May and in Congress Hall.  The guest of honor (so to speak) was Billy Baldwin who was the star of films such as, er, what the fuck was he in?  Oh yeah, Backdraft and Flatliners.  Can somebody say “I peaked in the early ’90’s people!”.  At any rate, Cape May and Congress Hall were pretty crowded due to the film festival and let’s face it, everybody was there to see me.

As I mentioned, this story actually occurred the night before my wedding.  As most traditional weddings go, we had a rehearsal and rehearsal dinner the evening before.  After the distaste of a church rehearsal, we had a lovely rehearsal dinner with a nice walk down memory lane in the form of a slide show put together by my father that chronicled my wife’s and my lives up to that point (which was mostly cute pictures of my wife when she was a kid and me acting like an asshole when I was a kid).  After the dinner, much of the wedding party and out-of-town guests “retired” to a bar in Congress Hall, which was a basement bar called The Boiler Room because it was in fact the old boiler room for the hotel.

I had several college friends in town for the wedding and a couple of them were in the wedding party itself.  It was a blast hanging out in the Boiler Room re-hashing old stories of how stupid we were in college and all of the retarded shit we used to get into.  One thing led to another and we started pounding a few beers which led to shots.  One of my good friends from college “Chops”  suggested that we all do a new variation of the standard tequila shot (you know with the salt and lime and shit) called the tequila stuntman.  If you look it up on wikipedia, this is how it is described:

A stuntman is performed by:

1. Snorting the salt from the back of the hand or by using a straw.
2. Slamming the shot of tequila.
3. Squirting the juice from the lime into your eye.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking, well actually I don’t, but yes, we are idiots.  So I tried to weasel my way out of it with excuses like “I’m getting fucking married tomorrow you assholes!” or “I don’t wanna”.  The problem is, I just couldn’t crack their argument of:  “Don’t be a pussy”.  So there I was, lime in one hand, salt on the other, and holding a shot of tequila, which I hate.  And I did the deed.  I would love to tell you it was cool or it was a great experience, but that would be lying.  It sucked.  I snorted the salt, which burned the shit outta the back of my nose/throat, drank the shot, which tasted like Mexican ass, and then leaned back and squirted the shit out of my eye with lime which burned like holy water.  So there I was burning throat, burning eye, and holding back some puke…. good times.  So we did a couple of em.

At this point, the film festival had wrapped up its program and the bar was filling up.  Guess who shows up to the bar shit-faced?  That’s right, Billy Baldwin.  Some celebrities are down to earth and chill, but Billy Baldwin was definitely NOT one of those guys.  He was an unadulterated douche-hole, that’s right I just made that word up.  He was hitting on anything that moved including a couple of girlfriends/dates of my friends, and had a small contingent of old lady wanna-fucka-celeb-hangers-on following him around.  The highlight of our “Baldwin Experience” had to be when we convinced him to do a tequila stuntman with us.  Full disclosure, he didn’t snort the salt, but he did the shot and squirted a little lime in his eye, so I’ll give him that.  The following pic is evidence of the Baldwin siting, in this pic, Chops (in red) is explaining the finer aspects of how you perform a tequila stuntman to a vaccuous Billy Baldwin (he’s the retarded looking guy in blue ).  BTW, in case you’re interested, the old lady wanna-fucka-celeb-hanger-on is in the background of this pic over BB’s shoulder.

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I have started a new feature on my site, “Stories from the road”.  There have been several stupid, funny, sad, ridiculous, or just plain fucktarded things that have happened to, by, or near me while travelling around the US or internationally.  I just have to share, mostly because I want to, so shut and read.  First up:  Basel Switzerland, and the night I almost met my wife.

It was the year 2000, Halloween, I had just flown into Zurich Switzerland and taken the train over to Basel for a business trip.  At this point in my life I was an Oracle DBA and was working on a new system implementation contract in Basel for my company.  This was my first trip across the pond in quite some time and I had forgotten how terrible the jet-lag was (i.e., I was a gaping pussy and was tired).  I had two friends and colleagues working on the project and were already on-site, let’s call them R and T.  R and T met me at the train station and escorted me to the corporate apartments we were staying in.  Now these apartments were, what’s the word?  Oh yeah, fucking shitty.  In fact, we referred to them lovingly as the crack-house.  It was a five floor tenement with paper thin walls and the tiniest elevator in existence.  If you farted on the fifth floor, they could hear it on the first.  The elevator could fit 2 maybe 3 people tops, and most guys had to cram themselves in the corner so they wouldn’t touch anybody else who happened to be in the elevator.  At any rate, I arrived and my hole in the crack-house wasn’t going to be ready until the next day so I would have to stay in one of the currently occupied apartments for the night as one of the guys on the team was back in the states for a couple of weeks.

So all I wanted to do was sleep, again, the pussy thing.  And all my friends wanted to do was go out and rip it up.  My arm was appropriately bent, peer pressure is a bitch, and we went out.  I was nursing a couple of beers and feeling sorry for my tired-self when I had a moment of clarity around the fourth or fifth beer.  The more beer I drank, the better I felt.  Looking back, it was surprisingly (and scarily) close to the moment in Old School where Frank the Tank (Will Farrell) did his first beer bong at the party :

Once it hits your lips, its so good!!

Now it was on.  Five beers turned into 15 or 16 and then it was time for the shots.  Remember this was Halloween, and the weirdest thing was that it was more popular in Switzerland than in the states for adults.  All of the bars were decorated to the nines and a lot of people were dressed up in costumes.  I was dressed-up as a drunken American asshole, I almost won some costume contests.  The most memorable shot was the “devils blood”, I haven’t the foggiest fucking idea what it was except it was red, strong, on fire, burning hot, and you had to suck it through a straw that was poked through the flames.

So after destroying my liver and most of my brain-cells, we began to stumble back to the crack-house around 2 or 3 AM.  The crack-house was located in the Muslim slums of Basel known as the Gundeli (pronounced Goon-doo-lee) and the road to it was a cavernous cut through buildings that echoed for blocks.  I come to find out later, from other accounts, that we were heard for blocks carrying on and yelling walking down the middle of the road in our wonderful drunken bliss.  On the way into the building, T started to hit all of the apartment call buttons and yelling into the intercoms.  A super nice woman we’ll call S was working on the project as well and trying to sleep at this point in the crack-house. 

We finally stumble up to the fourth floor where I am trying to figure out how the weirdest key in existence worked when T asked me: “Hey, have you met S yet?  “Nope”, I replied.  R replied, “OK!” and turned to S’s room, which was directly across the hall from the room I was trying to get into, slammed on the door loudly, and yelled “HEY S, WAKE UP AND MEET BILLYMAC!”  And then R and T sprinted to the tiny elevator.  I was stunned, I didn’t know what the fuck to do, I still couldn’t figure out how to get into the room and I could hear what I could only imagine a very pissed off S coming toward the door.  So I ran.  I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, so fast in fact, that I beat the elevator down.  At this point, it is worth noting that in the year 2000, I was only around 1 or 2 years away from retiring from playing rugby, and I’m a pretty big guy.  When the elevator opened, I pounced like a coiled lion.  I dove into the elevator with my arms spread in front of me and gripped the outside shoulders of both T and R, and then slammed the both of them into the back of the little elevator.  I was trying to put them through the back of it, let’s face it I was pretty pissed, and very drunk (and the look of pure terror on their faces was priceless).  Well it turns out that this was too much for our tiny little elevator to take, and it made the most incredible screeching metal on metal sound and lurched completely off it’s track, waking up the entire building.  Thinking fast, we got the fuck out of there muttering “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” and booked out the front door.  My annoyance not completely sated, I slapped T on the back and said “thanks a fucking lot”.  This was too much for good ‘ole T to take as well, he went flying off of the front stoop of the crack-house and into the bushes severely twisting his ankle.

The aftermath.  The elevator was destroyed, it didn’t work for weeks, which pretty much fried everyone’s ass that lived in the crack-house.  We never got pinned with the crime, but karmic retribution was the saviour of the day as T and his sprained ankle had to hobble up 5 floors to his room every day.  I finally met the infamous S the next day at work while nursing a 5 alarm hang-over.  Her first words to me “So you’re the asshole who was pounding on my door last night”  (ok, so she may have not said asshole, please allow a bit of poetic license).  All’s well that end’s well though, 4 or 5 months later we were dating, moved in together in late 2001, got engaged in 2002, and then married in 2003.  Who’d have thunk it the night I almost met her.

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