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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That would be me… the fucking slacker (or slackee).  I’ve been AWOL from the interwebz for a while attending to bidness and family.  It’s funny how life can get in the way of digital life.

Anyway, I’m off to Chicago this weekend to watch some rugby, play some poker, and drink some fucking beers (not necessarily in that order).  I haven’t watched a live rugby game since my trip to Ireland in 2002, I’m looking forward to this one, but again, I will feel like a slacker because I haven’t played in 8 or 9 years.  It was always better to play the game than watch it anyway, so I’ll have to get over my discomfort by pounding extra beers and acting like an even bigger asshole than I already am… somehow I don’t think this will be a problem.  Ciao bitches…

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Hi… I’m in Delaware…  err I mean Connecticut.  I’m in the middle of a week-long business trip in the grand state of Connecticut, where they aren’t quite New Yorkers and not quite New Englanders.  They don’t even have a decent accent here, WTF?  Anyway, I’m in a suburb of Hartford which is nice enough, and I haven’t been snowed on, so I’ve got that going for me… which is nice.  One thing I’ve noticed about traveling lately is why the fuck are all of the classic rock stations in the country called “The River”?  I swear that just about every city I’ve lived in or spent any time in had a station called “The River” that was “playing the best classic rock to chill you out”…. bite me burn-boy DJ.  Anyway, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program of bullshit when I return to hot-lanta on Friday.

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Knock-Knock-Knock… hello?  McFly?  If you place chum in the water and then swim in it, you just might get eaten by a shark.  A tourist died yesterday on a “shark dive” after he was bitten in the leg.  Click here for full story.  The excerpt from the article below is a masterpiece:

The company’s Web site says it offers the opportunity to get “face to face” with sharks. The site explains that its hammerhead and tiger shark expeditions in the Bahamas are “unique shark trips … run exclusively for shark enthusiasts and photographers.”

To ensure “the best results we will be ‘chumming’ the water with fish and fish parts,” the Web site explains. “Consequently, there will be food in the water at the same time as the divers. Please be aware that these are not ‘cage’ dives, they are open water experiences.”

Brilliant marketing.  I wonder if these guys run any “in your face” safari outings?  They could dump you out of a Range Rover in the Serengeti wearing nothing buy a bloody steak vest, a head-lamp, and some Lion pheromones.  But be warned, this is an open plains experience without any shark cages or guns and shit.

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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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I’m outta here, I’m heading to fabulous Las Vegas for a three-day weekend. Suffice it to say, I will not be blogging while I am in the land of neon lights and hooker trading cards (just walk down the strip if you don’t believe me) and will return with a censored trip report early next week. I will have to honor the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) that Vegas enforces at the airport and won’t be providing details. This trip is brought to you by my wonderfully spectacular wife who in her infinite wisdom granted me the trip as my Christmas gift this year. The real trip is a weekend away from work and the kids so I can unwind. For that matter, it could have taken place in the plains of Kansas or the surface of moon for all I cared, the point was peace and quiet. Alas, instead it was Vegas, now that is some great icing on a big-ass cake.

Here’s me in Kansas wondering why the fuck I was there:

And here is my hairy-beast Vegas dance, which is a fusion of the truffle shuffle, the chicken dance, and the electric slide performed while on acid. Take care bitches.

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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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Not to be confused with Snakes on a Plane(”I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!”), but in general, there is a very weird “something’s off” thing going on while viewing movies on a plane.  While I was returning from a business trip in California yesterday, the movie Arctic Tale was playing and it made me think of a story my sister told me.  When she was travelling quite a bit for work she viewed a hilarious movie on a plane, it was so funny that she told everybody she knew how good it was, including her family members.   Guess what the movie was?

That’s right, Big Mamma’s House.  After much feedback from her friends and family, my sister realized that this movie was not the genius piece of work she originally took it for.  This was the first tangible observation of what I refer to as the Plane Movie Space-Time Continuum.  This theory posits that any piece of drivel that is shown on a plane, to its very captive audience, will automatically be perceived more positively by an order of magnitude.  In other words, really shitty movies are tolerable or even good when you watch it on a plane.  In my own experience Miss Congeniality, Arctic Tale, The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Wedding Date, Dance With Me, and many other pieces of shit were actually enjoyed by myself on planes (full disclosure, I may have been wasted for some trans-Atlantic flights but whatever).

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