Brad, a tremendously energetic and unapologetic flirt, immediately engaged the staff. After we hugged, he turned to the bell desk attendant and said, in his improbably deep voice, "Excuse me, lovely lady. Could you recommend a restaurant where I could take this devastatingly handsome man?" (I am emphatically not handsome in any conventional sense. I sort of resemble a shorter Toxic Avenger with slightly better skin.) He flashed his trademark snaggly grin, and you could see her respond in kind. She pointed us to some place that I do not remember, but seemed to feature attractive ashtrays.

The flirting towards me was of course harmless and vaguely ridiculous, since he knew very well that I'm straight and married, but he also knew my weakness for wordplay and playful repartee, and so as we sparred throughout the evening, gradually endrunkening ourselves (the business meetings the next morning were murder), we found an easy groove. We shared the same vices and spent the evening reveling in both of them--nail-biting and tearing the legs off of earwigs. (Not really. I'm of course talking about drinking martinis and smoking shitty domestic cigarettes.)

It was a simply *jazz hands* fabulous evening, with Brad making his trademark groantastic punny jokes and occasionally making utterly silly salacious remarks about nearly every male or male-ish person who happened to enter his ambit.

My friend Brad was found dead on Monday, apparently from "natural causes" in his bed. He was 41 years old. I will myself turn 41 in June this year.

I am devastated. I hate the phrase "natural causes." What the holy deep-fried fuck is natural about dying from some handwavey horseshit at the age of 41? Let's leave aside the idea that "natural causes" generally elides the whole idea of providing an explanation of "causes" at all. What fucking causes? I'd like to see some fucking newspaper article describe some poor bastard's death as "natural murder." Fuck. You might as well state that he died from "Stuff."

I am also pissed off. It's difficult for me to make sense of, and I don't know how to articulate it, other than to repeat the completely worn-out trope that death is a bitch, and it's unfair, and frankly, can go fuck itself. I don't really want anyone to die (though of course I've engaged in hyperbole to the opposite, as we all do), but Brad? Really? In the words of I.I. Rabi upon discovering a subatomic particle that nobody had ever predicted, "Who ordered that?"

And it's strange to me to have these feelings--these cloudbursts of tears that have been coming on me for a couple days--over someone who I met physically only a couple times, but who I knew what I would considerably fairly intimately over eight or so years on the fucking Internet. I don't think I'm the only one. The MetaFilter thread announcing his death (technically a subsite called MetaTalk) brought dozens and dozens of old members out of the woodwork (many of whom had to obtain help from the administrators to restore long-lost login passwords) simply because they felt the need to express their utter grief.

I won't go into the details of his storied life. You can look it all up. You should. The man was an Internet legend for a lot of reasons, but those details are boring compared to the man qua man. He was one of the most generous souls I ever had the great pleasure and great fortune to meet. He's gone, and there's a void in the world that will never be filled.

I miss him very much.

I keep thinking of the closing lines of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. "O God--please give him back! I shall keep asking You." Well, unfortunately, I don't believe in God. If I did, I'd be pretty pissed off at him for this fucking horrible nonsense, this worthless, wrenching death. But I'll bet you a million dollars that Brad would forgive Him in a heartbeat. With his last heartbeat.

General notes, I guess: weather-wise, we got utterly creamed. There was exactly one day in which we were not rained on, and we're not talking Pacific Northwest polite rainfall: we got doused every fucking day. On our first night there, we sat glazed in front of the hotel TV, trying to get our bodies adjusted to the jet lag (with occasional fun bouts of me throwing up nothing), when a truly epic thunderstorm descended upon us. Naturally, I chose this very moment to wander downstairs for a cigarette.

The lightning was close and intense, so it was a smart thing that I was holding an umbrella up in the air. As a rule, I like to feel safe by holding a largely metal object up in the air when there's massive amounts of atmospheric electricity in play. I struggled to light my smoke in the ridiculous gale, and was largely unsurprised when my umbrella got inside-outed by the wind. "I've really got to stop smoking," I thought as I stood battered by the storm. I watched a middle-aged lady attempt to cross a canal bridge, and her hopeless umbrella met the same fate as mine. I stood under my crippled, useless bumbershoot, shivering and staring at the twisted tines of the poor thing and welcomed myself to Europe.

I hope it goes without saying that neither of us could give a ripe fuck about the bad weather.

We had a week of the town to ourselves before we were met by our traveling companions Will and Julea (and, for a brief couple days, Warren). We had set ourselves up in a two-story apartment with a rooftop balcony that overlooked the city's famous belfry. The three of them had a rough ride to Bruges from Amsterdam, and arrived hours later than they anticipated due to four different train changes necessitated by things like dogs wandering onto the tracks and train operators needing to stop for gum in Ghent. After such a harrowing trip, one thing was called for: a ridiculous bender.

The wife and I had laid in a solid liter of Jameson's whiskey, which we attacked like Huns. Warren in particular went after the luckless bottle as if it had done Warren some grievous wrong in the past. (I confess I wasn't far behind Warren in draining the thing.) At some point in the evening, Julea took exception to a hideous oil painting in the apartment, a depiction of some long-forgotten matriarch glaring out with a secret fury at the living world, and clambered up onto a decidedly unsturdy desk to cover it with a blanket. That's when my wife went a little pale and announced she was going to bed.

Some of us were to be discovered, the next morning, a bit on the moany side, and we laughed over our night of excess. Warren, for his part, blamed the brand of whiskey. "Fuckin' Jameson's!" he howled. "Every time I drink that shit, I wake up miserable!" We attempted to offer an alternate theory--that he had drunk a simply unreasonable quantity of high-octane moonshine--was met with scorn. "Fuckin' Jameson's!" He would occasionally yell this while looking to Zeus for answers that were not forthcoming.

It wasn't all debauchery, of course. We made sure to get our culture on, visiting some museums, taking in public sculptures, and in general freaking out over the absurdly adorable local architecture. We climbed the belfry tower, noting that, while cruel, Colin Farrell's observation from In Bruges that morbidly obese people could never make it all the way up was completely true. We were at the top when the clock struck 2:00, causing certain female members of our party to scream, which was also charming. Further evidence that heterosexual men are just assholes: nothing pleases us more than when our gals are screaming like fire alarms. This is why we subject our poor mates to things like horror movies and intolerably loud noises: the hope that they will jump up and down and grab onto us, both of which are utterly delightful to us.

There was a ton of other things that we did, of course, but then this post would be nine miles long, but I'm sure I'll get to them soon enough. But there is one last story to tell before I go hit the bed.

We spent the back end of the trip in Amsterdam, where we flew in and out of. On our first night in Amsterdam, after a fairly spectacular meal featuring oysters, the wife and I were sacked out in our hotel room. It was around 11:00 PM, and I was questing through the channels in search of something to watch. The BBC was already in full boring mode--whatever, reporting on countries I, as an American, have barely heard of, such as Scotland!--so that was out. I wearily kept punching the channel incrementer.

Suddenly, there was . . . well, there was a thing. It seemed to be a documentary, though since the narration was in Dutch, it was difficult to tell what the fuck it was about. Interestingly--I guess--the subject seemed to be these four or five guys from America; they all seemed to be from New Jersey. I only say that because they were all sort of paunchy fucking schlubs who were phenomenally unattractive. I know that's a mean stereotype about New Jersey mooks; they could have been from Montana. But if I had to guess, well, I'm sticking with New Jersey.

So there's these mysteriously ugly dudes speaking (in English) to their interviewers about . . . what? It was strange, but yet the filmmakers seemed to think there was something interesting about them, something worth documenting. We soon found out what the hook was.

As the Dutch narration continued, one of the fellows suddenly stood up and lowered his pants, and revealed a simply absurdly huge dong. Seriously, he just stood there while the camera filmed, briefly, his thoroughly inactive flaccid dick. A few minutes later, one of the other tools did the same thing: he dropped trou and stood there, bored as anything, as the camera captured precious footage of his drooped, indolent cock. Now, like I say, we don't speak a word of Dutch, but it was around this time that a particular cross-lingual phrase started to come through in the narration. It sounded something like this:

". . . oop blarg munchkin bedonk't ENOR-MOUS PAY-NIS flimp gramm crocker schmoot . . ."

They kept saying this phrase. "ENOR-MOUS PAY-NIS." Soon, we were helplessly laughing, and now the phrase has become household shorthand for a quick laugh. (I'm surprised it hasn't come into usage sooner, given the fact that I have a ridiculously immense member, but that's another post.) We just couldn't believe it. Who would ever want to watch such a thing? Who would ever get the idea to make such a thing? These guys were, to a man, utterly hideous and complete dolts. One unforgettable scene displayed one of the big-dick dipshits shamelessly making out with his nasty skank of a wife at some cafe, which was awful enough; they appeared to be testing the structural integrity of each others' gumlines. Then the camera pulled back, and down, and then zoomed in to the under-the-table action. The guy's wife had her hand on his crotch under the table, and was, during this grotesque make-out session, enthusiastically fingering the man's penis through his jeans, rolling it between her fingers as if soothing a particularly aggrieved iguana. It felt like watching evolution go in reverse.

Okay, I guess it was all debauchery after all. (Not really. Next up, I'll talk about ice skating and frites covered with gravy and tiny little bunnies. Seriously.) I'd like to say I'm happy to be back, but apart from forced business trips and visits with your odious family members, are you ever glad to be back?

(Mom and Dad: a rhetorical goof. I do not actually find you to be odious. Merry Christmas!)

I was compelled to attend a training class on Office 2007.

I WAS THERE! As a fully grown man in a gray ponytail explained how Outlook was now "pretty neat." In fact, everything was "pretty neat," including programs that I routinely do not use, and in fact would actively resist using, such as PowerPoint and Excel.

"You see how you can import all this information from other programs like Access? It's pretty neat!"

Dear Mr. Ponytail:

Not only do I not give the slightest red rubber fuck about Excel, I give an even flabbier red rubber fuck about Access. I do not use either application, and if I did, I would surely put a bullet in my brain. I sure hope you die soon, Mr. Ponytail!

Yrs,

Skot

It was all just horrifying. We spent about fifteen minutes learning about how to put in watermarks into Word documents. My document consisted of the words "Blarg! Snuh! Guh!" Which I then overlaid with a bright orange watermark that read "SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM!" I felt I was making progress.

Later, when I was pointlessly learning about the fabulous new version of Excel, I made a column entitled "Pig Corpses." I promptly assigned myself a really impressive quantity of dead pigs, all of whom are destined for ignominy, since I then fucked everything else up and made the table completely unreadable. I hate Excel. On the other hand, I love pork.

I particularly liked the presentation on PowerPoint, another program that I find hideous and that I never intend to use again. Ponytail: "You can import older PowerPoint programs into the new PowerPoint." Hey, that's fucking amazing. It's like saying "You can pump fuel into this old Chevy simply by removing the gas cap!"

"It's pretty neat!" he concluded. I fruitlessly rubbed my temples.

This training session went on for six hours. Our company paid for this. Most likely through the fucking nose. Hey, speaking of, where did the phrase "through the nose" come from? Presumably not through interminable Microsoft training courses, which make me want to relentlessly pick mine, but I don't know. It is entirely possible in my mind that Microsoft only exists in order to make average citizens feel a deep desire to claw around in their sinus passages.

Microsoft: Pick Your E-Nose! It's Pretty Neat!

(PS: Microsoft fully endorses Veteran's Day, and in no way supports the idea of soldiers going back in time to be killed by enemy fire.)

Tom chuckled some more after Josh scampered away; he was trying to get me to ask him what was so funny. I declined his chuckly advances. Meanwhile, the hellish radio station that Josh had on blared away with songs like "I'm Too Sexy," "I Am Your Venus," "The Heat Is On" and "Your Love." The latter song, by the Outfield, by the way, has been shown, upon prolonged exposure, to drive spiders absolutely insane, causing them to spin webs that look like line drawings of Marlonn Wayans' face. Nobody knows why, but that's the God's truth. White Chicks 2 will, I'm sure, explain this bit of Wayans ephemera.

This is all, of course, meaningless, except to sort of outline how shitty my lousy afternoon was, what with the Wayans-related-arachnoid-chuckling-burnout case and all that, other than to alert me to the fact that this afternoon was in every way superior to last week.

See, last week, I had to fly to Chicago for work for our semiannual conference. It's a combo buffet of a training seminar along with dreary meetings where everyone gets together to discuss the various ways in which we have been utterly unsuccessful in finding ways to cure cancer. "So here's how you fill out these web forms. Now, in a few minutes, we'll talk about the relative uselessness of bisphosphonates."

Tuesday--all day--was a travel day for me, so no heavy lifting there. Just the usual rectal invasion by the TSA. ("You have a muppet up your asshole." "Oh, that's where Grover likes to nap.") I checked into my hotel room without incident and was improbably ensconced in a weird suite at the Hyatt on the 34th floor, where I immediately bounced on the king-sized bed for sixteen minutes and marveled that I had two different phones. Then I came to the dispiriting realization that every time I wanted a cigarette, I'd have to travel down 34 floors. I let my bed-bouncing gloomily subside, and decided to get a beer and a bite.

In a not-rare moment of terrible judgment, I opted for an in-house hotel bar of a weak--very weak--Irish theme called, ominously, "Daddy-Os." I ask you. "Daddy-Os?" That's like going to an allegedly Scottish place called "Paul Haggis" or a lesbian joint titled "Furburgers." I'm a moron.

Anyway, I got this pulled pork sandwich (oh, shut up). It was fire-engine red and tasted like a fire engine. I got about four bites in before my dead-tired brain finally realized, "Hey! This tastes like death." I pushed the thing away from me to the perplexed bartender, who asked if everything was all right. "I'm in the most inexplicably named Irish bar ever," I explained. The Daddy-Os bartender shrugged and dumped my sandwich into the garbage, and I raised a tired mental cheer over its demise.

My duties the next morning were easy: I was to preside over the "drop-in" desk, where I registered people to our conference who where too distracted or simple to register online via a rather simple set of checkboxes. It's a lot like, I would imagine, screening contestants for "The Price is Right." There were four of them who registered; I resisted the urge to ask them how much a can of Del Monte green beans retailed for, but only barely. I also grabbed a cheap latte.

By 11:00, my stomach was in turmoil, and not just because of crippling ennui. I went out with a co-worker for a smoke, and began shaking uncontrollably (though not so uncontrollably that I couldn't raise my cigarette to my mouth).

"You're getting that from one cup of coffee?" exclaimed my friend. "Wow"

"Fucking hell," I replied. Then I dropped my cigarette.

"Whoa!" cried a bum passing by. Then he apologetically cadged a cigarette, which I gave him after a complicated bit of negotiation with my coat pocket.. "I just got out of prison," he explained.

"He looks better than you do," said my co-worker. "You're fucking swell," I chattered.

I was sent to bed for the afternoon.

And the next.

In other words, I went to Chicago for three days, and I spent one of them in a horrible hotel bar eating chromium pork sandwich and the next two shivering and puking in my hotel room. The kicker is, the last time I had to travel for work, I got food poisoning. The lesson is clear: I should never leave home.

I went through a few thoughts about this ordeal. At first I thought it was (yet again) food poisoning. Then I got to fretting about H1N1 and moved swiftly on to dark ideas about a pneumonia reoccurence. But when I got home to my wife--who has the immune system of a Borg drone--she offhandedly mentioned that a 24-hour stomach flu bug had been roaring through her preschool popluation, and I moaned out load.

Tomorrow night, we celebrate her birthday. I love her, so I will resist the urge to fart into her eggs or whatever. I'm not sure I'll be able to resist playing the Outfield, though.

Well, I do. And listen, my tens of readers, you should too, particularly those of you fellow Washington Staters. Because of Referendum 71. (Jesus fucking Christ, give me strength to tolerate the referendum process.)

Here's the (very abbreviated) deal. Last spring, the legislature voted to expand domestic partnership protections. In response to this, a bunch of lying fucking assholes whipped up a frenzy of "OMG the fags want to get hitched!!!!!" nonsense and managed to get any number of mouth-breathers to sign up for a referendum that's tantamount to asking us, "Are you suuuuuure? Because if this becomes law, you might be, you know, a faggot." Voting "no" on R-71 would repeal rights for same-sex domestic partnerships. Never mind that it says nothing about gay marriage. Never mind that the liars are spreading all kinds of toxic horseshit about teaching about gay sex in schools. Never mind that the issue is (once again) being flogged by a bunch of motherfucking ignorant goblins.

Okay, that may be a little over the top. Let me clarify: those who are against same-sex domestic partnership rights are motherfucking ignorant goblins who should be thrown under a glacier. There! Didn't mean to sound cruel.

Look, I'm appealing to you as a friend. Maybe that's overreaching. How about just as someone who would have my back, even if you don't know me? I like to think that, say, if I were hanging out in a bar and some fucking douchebag punched me in the face for no reason, and you were also hanging out, maybe you'd come give me a hand and pull that fucker off of me. I like to think that I'd do that for some poor guy minding his own business in the same situation. I'm not even gay, and this goddamn bullshit feels like getting sucker-punched for sure. After eight stinking motherfucking years of feeling punched in the face every goddamn day during the Bush years, it's getting old. So can a dude ask you--my imaginary friends--to please stand up and give me a hand? Give my friends a hand? Can you help pull these wretched ass-goats out of the fucking bar and help me kick them to the curb?

I mean, for Christ's fucking holy choad, it costs you a stamp if you've signed up for voting by mail. You don't have to go anywhere! You don't have to smell kindly old ladies in vests! You don't have to endure faceless municipal buildings or desiccated church lobbies! And even if you still want to physically travel to your local polling place at the Denny's conference room . . . WELL, COULD YOU, PLEASE? I'm begging you.

I guess I lost my "be nice and ask nicely" tone somewhere. I'm fucking tired of being nice (not something I suppose I'm regularly accused of). But I'll try again. Please, guys, get out the vote. Approve R-71. Stand the fuck up for that nice guy over in cubicle 2043 and his live-in boyfriend. Leslie in HR can use your fucking help. You know these people, right?

Are you tired of getting fucking punched in the face? Are you tired of your friends getting knuckled out? I swear to God I've got your back. Just step up, and there's a whole lot of us who've got your back. Step up.

Alas.

No, for the first time, I had received a summons for jury duty, and was scheduled to appear on, of all things, on a Friday morning at 8:00 AM sharp at the King County Superior Court in downtown Seattle. On September 11, no less. NEVAR FORGET! (Your jury duty.)

I dreaded this for weeks leading up to the event. I'm not even sure why. I envisioned myself being empaneled for some tax evasion drear party that would lead to eight weeks of existential despair. (Work covers me for two weeks of jury duty, even on top of King County's generous per diem of ten bucks a day.) For the rest of it, I had no idea what to expect. In my mind, I was thinking me and thirty or so of my fellow citizens hanging out in some shitty conference room all day.

The wife drove me to the courthouse on the fateful day. Traffic was horrific, so I actually got out a couple blocks early and wandered over to the site.

There were literally hundreds of people in line, stretched around the block. It was 8 sharp, but I obviously wasn't getting into the building (and through security) any time soon. Fuck this, I thought, and went to get some coffee.

Getting in line, I immediately began smoking like a fiend, drawing grouchy looks from others, but really, fuck them. It was pretty clear that I wasn't going to be skipping out of the courthouse on every whim to satisfy my nicotine monkey. I had brought nicotine gum in anticipation of this fact, but that was a last resort--in the meantime, all these other people could go fuck themselves.

A young gal with a cellphone screwed into her ear was standing in line behind me; she was one of the few people who didn't seem to give a shit that I was hotboxing my brains out. Presently, she turned off her phone, and then looked at the jury summons in my hand with some confusion.

"Wait, are you here for jury duty?" she asked.

"Yeah, aren't you?"

"No. I'm here for, like, court. Like, I have to appear in court."

"Oh," I said. It's this sort of thing that just goes to show why chicks think I'm fucking rad.

"DUI," she clarified without prompting.

"Oh," I said again, causing her to immediately fall in love with me and give me a rapturous blow job right there on the sidewalk. Oh, wait, I'm misremembering! She actually then said, "Oh, it's cool." Then she called another friend, causing me to seethe about all of the anonymous blow jobs I seem to be missing every fucking day, somehow.

I continued smoking, and the line trudged along as only a line containing people fulfilling a public service can: sullenly. Then my friend Val walked by. I've known Val for probably ten years; she's a fellow actor, and I used to be in a sketch comedy troupe with her.

"Val!" I cried. "Have they finally gotten you on those multiple child abuse charges?" (Not really.) She of course had also been summoned along with several hundred of our closest friends. She hugged me and then loped forlornly to the end of the line. I continued chain smoking.

FINALLY, after clearing the metal detector, I was inside. "Ninth floor! Prospective jurors, ninth floor!" cried out some guy. Yeah, definitely not just bouncing out for a cigarette any old time I felt like it. I patted the nicotine gum in my pocket for solace. Then, since I was in the neighborhood, I also patted my penis, also for solace.

To the ninth floor! Where I found . . . amazingly . . . more interminable lines of the same people I'd been spending my morning with, all waiting to be herded into courtrooms. All wearing the same look of grim inevitability that they'd been displaying outside, only now I couldn't smoke. I gripped the magazine I had brought for boredom-fighting a little tighter.

Glancing around at the lines, I happened to notice a bench against the wall. Val was sitting on it, so I wandered happily up to her.

"Fuck standing in line," she said. "I'll just wait for someone to tell me where to go." Sounded good to me. I sat next to her, and we shot the shit for a while. Not much longer later, some clerk rambled by, yelling, "We need about fifty people down in this room!" We decided to get it over with and head down there, reasoning that we'd have to pick something sometime.

We went. We sat. A couple of weatherbeaten lawyers were up at the bench, quietly chewing on each others' necks sotto voce. Clerks (or whoever the fuck they were) bustled in and out, carrying papers, or garbage, or whatever. Val and I continued bullshitting, along with--improbably--another friend of hers who also had been called that day. I didn't know him, and I forget his name, so let's say it was "Congo Godzilla, the Ultimate Fighting Force."

At 8:55--five minutes before things were supposed to get rolling--a beady-eyed clerk dashed in and shushed us. "Folks!" he said. "We have way too many jurors here today. And nobody usually objects when I say this: you're all dismissed."

My mouth fell open, and I looked at Val and Congo Godzilla, the Ultimate Fighting Force and wel exchanged goggle-eyed looks. "Are you serious?" Val said to the ceiling. "I'm going back to bed!" pealed Congo Godzilla, the Ultimate Fighting Force as he bounced to his feet. He left immediately after giving Val a brief goodbye hug.

As we left the building (where nobody ever verified that we had actually showed up, so okay), Val asked what we should do. "Should I go back to work?" she fretted. I gave her a look like you would give someone who claimed to talk to her ancestors. "When I told my boss I got jury duty, she told me, 'Seize the opportunity!' " she admitted, seeing my stare. That made even less sense than the previous sentence, but carry on.

"Then what the fuck is wrong with you?" I hollered. "Are you kidding? Sazerac is right there! Sazerac is a hotel bar about two blocks away. "We need Bloody Marys!"

And so we got them. That was my jury duty day. I can't wait for another one.

VO: He will eat your foxes.

Pursuing Polish peasants: Come back! We are starving!

[The Most Interesting Man in the World is shown having sex with Mindy Cohn.]

VO: He will fuck former television stars. Here he can be seen banging the shit out of Natalie from The Facts of Life.

Mindy Cohn: He's got such a bumpy dick! It's like he has cleats for that thing.

VO: He can disarm you with his words. Or his hands. Or his alarming penis.

Mindy Cohn: Seriously, it's pretty terrifying at first, but I really needed the money.

VO: He can speak French . . . in Canada.

Quebec Resident: Yes, it is not remarkable.

[The Most Interesting Man in the World is shown playing a game of contract bridge.]

The Most Interesting Man in the World: I meld these hearts for nine hundred points.

Opponent: Have you ever played this game?

VO: He is clinically insane.

[The Most Interesting Man in the World is shown sticking circus peanuts into his ears.]

Mindy Cohn: He wasn't that rough with me. I've had worse.

VO: He routinely receives barium enemas. Not for diagnostic purposes. He just loves those enemas.

The Most Interesting Man in the World: My asshole, it is a Chernobyl.

Mindy Cohn: I got so tired of those enemas. Talk about no fun.

VO: He is the most interesting man in the world, if you find complete douchebags interesting.

The Most Interesting Man in the World: I don't always drink beer, which seems like the last thing you'd want me to say for a beer commercial, but when I do, I vaguely prefer Dos Equis. They almost never make it out of donkeys any more.

[Final tableau shows Mindy Cohn's mutilated body staring blindly into the camera.]

I really hate Dos Equis' latest ad campaign.

You remember a post a while ago bragging about my winning at poker? Yeah, you can go ahead and ignore that. We had another poker night, and not only was I knocked out first (my pocket queens ran up against pocket aces), I didn't win one single hand. Joining me at the table was a guy named (allegedly) Elvis, who sported a good old fashioned handlebar moustache and who has no social skills at all, and a guy named Bert, who eventually won, and I assume ran home to roll around ecstatically on his tiny pile of money, upon which he later fucked his muppet gay lover.

Oh, and then a couple weeks later I lost at a fundraiser poker tournament, though not so spectacularly. This time I lost to a perfectly nice matronly gal who called my pocket sevens with absolutely nothing but suited cards--I think one of them might have been the joker of diamonds--and rivered a flush. I think it's safe to say that my terrifying reign of terrifying terror is over and that Phil Ivey should stop nervously throwing rocks at my wife.

You know, I have been meaning to write some stuff. Last week, I came up with an idea, too! I had it all planned out. It was to have been called "Hollywood Celebrities Who Are Also Elements." Here are some of the things I actually wrote down. Seriously, I'm transcribing this off of my scribblings on a Premera Blue Cross bill.

Weird Aluminum Yankovich
Molybdenum Shannon
Bradium Pitt
Cesiummer Glau
Max Vanadium Sydow (Jesus Christ)
Beryllium Streep
Timothydrogen Olyphant
Radon Chong

So I guess I'm losing my mind, probably because of my poker-related poverty conditions that have caused me to shoot rats for food. I got as far as typing out this:

RADON CHONG

"This faintly famous actress, known for her work in such movies as The Color Purple and Soul Man, later became known for becoming the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States. Radon Chong poisoning occurs when areas without adequate ventilation build up high amounts of radon gas. This can occur in underground mines, basements and in the homes of viewers of Commando."

Hilarious! Don't you wish I had filled out the rest of the list?

What else? Oh, right, I got a fresh lesson in WHAT NOT TO DO: Do not go out on the town with bartenders. I went out with my friend Will, who tends bar at The Place That Shall Not Be Named, and here's the thing. Bartenders all tend to know each other. We went up to Liberty, a perfectly lovely little jewel box of a lounge, and immediately the bartender there zoomed over armed with four bottles of whiskey, three of which I had never heard of. (Alternate strategy: always go out on the town with bartenders.) He proceeded to pour us shot after shot of gratis (dynamite) booze; I hadn't even gotten around to eating anything.

Here's another thing: bartenders are willfully perverse animals, given to doing insane things for no good reason at all. Which doesn't go far explaining why Will ordered us some daquiri shots, or, later, when ordering two shots of vodka, sorrowfully told our waitress, "Man, I hate vodka." But she was a pro, and didn't blink at this illogic. The next day, Will asked me, "Did I even eat anything?" Will is fifteen years younger and me and is famous for eating anything that comes into his ambit. "You ate the galaxy," I said. "You are Galactus. Then you drank God's shining blood."

"Who's Galactus?" he said, so I punched him in the face. Then he ordered a couple of killer bee shots, even though we were in a library. Don't go out on the town with bartenders, I'm telling you. Don't even go to the library.

Fuck, I went out and bought a whole bunch of screaming two-stroke engines and have them running 24/7 out on the sun-blasted patio. My neighbors scream at me about them--I assume they are applauding my efforts to continue to ruin the environment and preserve this glorious ongoing atmospheric clusterfuck--but I cannot hear them over the din, so I can't be sure. I blandly wave at them while they make complicated arm gestures at me, and I grin happily.

And with improbably fuck-nuts summers come predictably babble-mad summer movies! Let's see what's on the docket. As usual, I have seen none of these movies, nor do I intend to, but I probably will, because of Comcast's siren song.

G-Force

Sometimes I feel sorry for parents, where "sometimes" = "constantly." This is a movie that actually advertises the fact that Jerry Bruckheimer is behind it, which is a lot like trying to promote your new line of Ed Gein lampshades. This is directed by the legendary Hoyt Yeatman--a visual effects guy with no prior directing experience--and his talents are being employed here to lend 3-D effects to what everyone thinks of when the topic of 3-D comes up: guinea pigs.

Sorry, moms and dads. The rest of us will simply consider this Hollywood's continuing efforts to provide us with visual birth control.

"I hate condoms."

"Listen, do you want to find yourself one day watching a 3-D guinea pig spy movie?"

"I, uh, I'll go to the store; back in five."

The Ugly Truth

IMDB plot synopsis synopsis (abbreviated on the home page thusly):

"A romantically challenged morning show producer (Heigl) is reluctantly embroiled in a series of outrageous..."

I defy anyone to give me any good reason to keep reading or thinking about or acknowledging this movie. Anyone?

[Silence.]

Well, there you go. Incidentally, those of you who watch movies like this? And therefore encourage their creation? Could you please fucking stop? Seriously, I'll blow a lonely zoo tiger for everyone who swears off this shit.

Orphan

Hey, looks like another entry in the "little girls with dark hair are terrifying" genre! Hollywood really is just delusional. Every sane adult knows that little blond girls named Dakota Fanning are the most terrifying filmic entities ever thrust into an unsuspecting public's collective face.

I mean, you all saw--to pick only one out of untold millions of films where Fanning spreads her reign of terror--Spielberg's War of the Worlds remake, right? Where we all desperately rooted for the Martians to blast Dakota Fanning into oblivion if only to stop her incessant screaming, but then Tim Robbins showed up and ate the entire set? And Spielberg kind of went, "Hey, where's all our stuff? That cost $100 million!" And the audience went, "Why, why didn't he eat Dakota Fanning? Won't somebody? Cruise has the teeth for it, even if she is kind of gristly."

But he didn't. So thanks for fucking nothing, Robbins. Now we'll have to wait until 2010, where Dakota Fanning stars in The Fanning, a taut thriller about a young, needle-voiced blonde girl who collects antique fans and sits and fans herself for two hours while receiving blood transfusions in a desperate directorial attempt to make her actually appear in color on film, but to no avail,andt she keeps on fanning her numinous Dakotian self, ceaselessly, while countless exsanguinated children die in a growing pile at her side, and then Tim Robbins eats everything in the universe, and Dakota Fanning screams into the gaping void. I think it's a Werner Herzog film.

Funny People

Hey, it's Judd Apatow! I wondered what he'd been up to. It's been almost half an hour.

Look, I love The 40 Year Old Virgin. I own it. Superbad and Pineapple Express are much, much less beloved to me, as they begin to exhibit a certain disease that afflicts directors who become popular and celebrities in their own right: a refusal to edit. Both of those latter movies wear out their welcome well before the endings, and begin to display an unwelcome attitude towards young asshole males: that they are inherently funny. (Jonah Hill's character in Superbad is emblematic of this; Pineapple Express is excruciatingly long.) (Oh, and Knocked Up is a chickenshit drag that's even more cowardly than Juno.)

It's hard to say what Apatow's up to here. It looks like a comedy with "heart," which is a nearly chilling idea in most hands, but 40 Year Old Virgin, at its core, pulls it off, mainly thanks to Steve Carell and Catherine Keener, particularly the latter, who is unfailingly great.

But there is cause for worry. There is always the troubling presence of Adam Sandler, but then again, he's shown that he is not always completely useless with an actual directorial presence, a la Punch-Drunk Love. There's also the troubling inclusion of--and I find this truly mystifying--Eric Bana, a mostly faceless actor who has, as far as I can recall, never displayed anything resembling a sense of humor ever. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but the man just strikes me as dry wheat bread.

And there's one other thing that should give everyone pause. It is this, again from IMDB's cast list:

Andy Dick ... Himself

Now I question the entire marketing campaign. This might be a horror movie after all. Do you think they got Dakota Fanning to do an uncredited scene with Andy Dick? The screaming will never stop! Until Tim Robbins shows up and eats the multiverse.

"We've got so much fucking potato salad," said Will, throwing a longing glance at the already-groaning table. Will eats as if someone was going to chop off his feet if he didn't clean his plate. Naturally, he also has the metabolism of a starved moth, and his girlfriend--who also loves her food--is something like five-two and should be wearing a decal that says "Actual Size Shown."

Presently, more guests arrived, all of them hauling ridiculous quantities of food; it was, by the climax of the evening, something like a UN humanitarian project, assuming the UN is in the habit of airlifting pallets laden with Doritos and barbecue sauce to Somalia, which, of course, I assume they are. One-hitters were passed around, giving the evening a vaguely key party-ish feeling. Well, not really. Our friends are not skeevy. However, once that thought had taken root, I was unable to prevent myself from thinking about the effects of barbecue sauce on vaginal pH levels, and so I kept a sharp eye on the wife.

A couple of asshole kids walking by the place set off some firecrackers. Minutes later, a couple of cops ambled up to the gate.

"You know, there are a lot of cops down here," one of them said amiably. Will and Julea live down by the water, real close to where the official pyro show is shown; the cops were a real presence by design. "So if you guys have any illegal fireworks, I'd think twice about setting them off."

"It wasn't us!" cried somebody. "It was a couple kids walking by!" While this was true, it was also cutting zero ice with the cops. They just gave us their best Scooby-Doo police chief hairy eyes. This, while uncomfortable, turned out to actually be really fortunate, since party guest Tony chose this exact moment to emerge from the house utterly laden with illegal fireworks. The cops didn't see him pale and beat a hasty retreat into the back yard, where he likely frantially crammed all his illicit booty directly up his ass.

Later, after we had all stuffed ourselves stupid and the remaining food had succumbed to gravitational strain and sunk to the center of the Earth and disrupted tectonic activity everywhere, we went across the street to watch the fireworks. We lifted our faces to the night sky and beheld magnesium hellfire painted across the face of the world!

Fireworks are fucking boring as hell. Every year I stand there, po-faced and arms crossed, staring at the same old god damn fucking smiley faces and Tina Turner hair displays.

This year, we got narration in the form of the two shaved apes behind us, who happened to be semi-crashers to Will and Julea's party. They were friends of some friends. They treated us to a running commentary.

Some bored, alcoholic pyrotechnician managed to figure out how to explode heavy metals so that they displayed a cube shape.

"Square pegs!" cried one of the apes. "Dick in a box!" cried the other. They laughed raucously, and I felt myself tensing.

More enervating displays followed. Some of them looked like other things, which seemed to excite people. "Hey, that's a heart!" screamed our pals. "It's giving me a heart-on!"

The wife turned to me and actually said, "Want to go back and find the bottle of Rebel Yell?" This sentence has never actually been posed to me before, but I immediately assented. Unfortunately, some other lunatic had already drained the bottle of Rebel Yell, and so we contented ourselves with the dregs of a rum bottle, but at least we had made our escape from the Gehenna of fireworks-watching and its attendant narration. Then Will walked out of the house.

"You guys left too, huh?" he said.

"Yeah. I fucking hate fireworks. Plus, we were trapped with a couple of douchebags who couldn't shut the fuck up."

"I just didn't like the tension," said Will, which I didn't quite understand, but I mentally categorized the statement as "I hate fireworks too," just for my own ease.

Naturally, minutes later, when the show was over, everyone returned. Including the two assholes. We were standing in the back yard, gathered around a lovely chimenea fire, just kind of everyone all relaxing, sensing the evening was drawing to a close. It was nice; just friends basking in the warmth of fire and friendship.

"This one time, I glued a chick's hair to her pillow with my come," said one of the assholes, virtually apropos of nothing, as if "apropos" even belongs in the same sentence with, well, anything his neurons were capable of generating. There was a glacial silence as we stared at the mammal making these honking, vaguely human-like noises. It was like watching some early chordate try out his vocal anatomy. He continued to make noises with his mouth, but Will, the wife and myself chose this moment to simply turn around and walk in any direction that might take us away from the sound of his voice. Others soon joined us, gathering joylessly in the front yard, flicking our eyes at each other, silently communicating: "I didn't imagine that, did I? That really happened?" We hung our heads as we heard more goatish laughter floating to us from the back yard, and we shuddered as we imagined what could possibly be said this time to the people who were too uncomfortable to just leave.

We eventually left, spent and emotionally damaged, and really totally fucking full of food. Those guys were still there when we left. Will has sworn to the Elder Gods that they will never darken his door again. Then he ate a gallon of potato salad and farted himself to sleep.

AMERICA!

A dead pig. Gutted from stem to stern, its legs splayed and pointing upward as if in some sort of porcine supplication. It grimaced hopelessly at the ceiling like a distressed, eviscerated prostitute. It was like a scene out of Se7en, except I wasn't repulsed. I was suddenly hungry.

Will and Eric had earlier that day picked up the freshly dressed pig and painstakingly rubbed it down with a mixture of cumin, brown sugar, cider vinegar, garlic and cinnamon, all of which were crawling eagerly into my nostrils. Despite its ghoulish appearance, it smelled divine.

"Eric tried to hold it up while we rinsed it off before rubbing it," Will explained. "But it weighs over 70 pounds. He couldn't hold it. You should have seen us trying to jam the garden hose into its asshole." I was suddenly less whetted.

"It's disturbingly like human flesh to the touch," Will continued. "It was really weird putting the rub on its tongue." Okay, not hungry!

But it wouldn't last. I would succumb. You see, this Sunday I celebrated my 40th birthday. (My actual birthday isn't until, well, right now, but I wanted people to actually attend the party.) And now that we've cleared out the vegetarians--I'm sorry, you guys--I think it's clear that in said celebration, we roasted an entire fucking pig.

It was Eric's idea. He started with the idea of a barbecue--"Maybe some ribs"--and soon escalated the idea into SPD (Singular Pig Destruction), which is a well-known variant on Mutual Assured Destruction. Will signed on shortly afterward, as Will is also a tremendous fan of putting various animals to the sword and to the torch. An unholy alliance was formed, and in the weeks of planning that intervened between the germ of the idea and its (literal) execution, I was to be treated with the sight of Will and Eric absently, evilly stroking their beards and talking about various rendition techniques with a certain unnerving gleam in their eyes.

A roasting box was procured for the big day, and invariably, as my friends arrived, their pupils would dilate as they beheld the giant box. "There's a pig in there?" they'd ask with wonder. If I were wearing suspenders, I would have snapped them insolently against my chest and rocked back on my heels and said "A-yup." Will and Eric, in the meantime, fussed endlessly over the entire operation, nattering to each other like barbarians discussing the finer points of skull-crushing implements. Inside the roasting box, the pig abided in peace, rendered fat pooling placidly inside its chest cavity.

The guests continued to arrive, most of them pretending to genuinely like me so they could sample their taste of giant pig. Some even brought gifts, despite my invitational directive that gifts were wholly unnecessary. "Unnecessary for you," some of them seemed to say, as the many bottles of whiskey I received were quickly dispatched, some of them by me. Dusty and Kirk, responding to an old, stupid running joke of mine, brought me an alarmingly enormous, veiny dildo and an autographed photo of Stockard Channing. It's best not to ask.

Towards the end of the cooking process, it came time to flip the pig over to crackle up the skin. As Eric and Will attempted this procedure, the pig's feet came off, and the nicely caramelizing carcass thunked back into the box. Eric and Will stared at the feet (in their hands--this was rapidly becoming an Abbott and Costello routine as imagined by Artaud) for a moment before declaring, "Well, nobody was gonna eat any fucking hooves anyway." The unfooted hog continued to stare without comment into the slate-gray skies, figuring, probably, Well, it's not the worst thing that's happened to me today. As if sensing emotional collapse on the part of the dead pig, Will took this opportunity to jam an apple into its mouth.

And after a while, Will and Eric declared the beast to be well and fully cooked; they pulled it from the box and took it into the kitchen to rest for a while. It looked like a giant, pig-shaped Rollo candy; the onlookers--everybody--gasped and oohed and ahhed. Upon setting it on the counter, Eric promptly tore off an ear and gave it to me; his first offering to the (near-) birthday boy; I wondered idly if they had irrigated the ear with the same assiduousness that they had spent on the thing's asshole. I wandered outside into the throng and held it up triumphantly.

"I got an ear!" I yelled witlessly. People cheered, because I know only slavering, brutal maniacs. My social life is like a Rob Zombie movie. I bit into the ear.

It was delicious. The skin had formed a lacquerlike finish, concealing inside a ridiculously luscious admixture of cartilage and fat. Never had hitting bottom felt so much like rocketing to the top. I passed the ear around to the assembled heathens, and they fell on it like starving hyenas. Orgasmic moans began to fill the air, and I briefly thought about Stockard Channing before returning to my senses.

Thanks to Will and Eric, of course. Thanks to my wife. Thanks to all my friends. Thanks to the luckless hog. Thanks, I guess, to time itself, that merciless fucking shit. Thanks for reading for all this time.

Thanks, Stockard Channing.

But I'm only human. A human heterosexual male. And normal, human heterosexual males tend to notice things like when random girls happen to be wearing their pants hanging halfway down their asses. Which is what was happening here. There was a good five inches of ass crack staring at me, and, once I gave up the idea of trying not to stare--which happened almost instantly--I also clinically noted a distinct lack of any evidence of underwear. I honestly found myself cocking my head to the side (why do we do this?) to verify that there wasn't even a hint of a thong strap concealed somewhere. Nothing. I continued to stare helplessly at the pistoning half-globes and stepped up my pace so I could pass her and make it all end. I felt terrible. I'm not voyeuristic at all, really, but Jesus Christ, how can you not notice?

As I passed her, I spied another detail. She had one of those front-loading baby slings on. With, of all things, an actual baby sitting placidly inside it, bouncing against her chest. Those dealies always make me think of baby vampires, where the child is poised at any moment to lash out at mommy's neck to feed on her lifeblood. This wasn't helping AT ALL. I caught part of the mom's phone conversation, which seemed to involve some complaining about a guy named "Davey." The child coldly contemplated the mother's unprotected neck. The mother's exposed ass presumably kept bobbing behind her exuberantly. I hastened my pace yet again, trying to put this unwholesome thing behind me, literally and figuratively. The third party continued to receive cellular castigations of the unknown, unloved enigma named Davey, and I scuttled forward, feeling like I had committed some mental form of frottage.

She gave me an inexplicably dirty look as I sailed past her, which made me feel even worse, for some reason. I wondered if I was, at that moment, a proxy-Davey, or if her half-ass had strange ocular talents that I'd never experienced before. The child on her chest stared at me liquidly, probably wondering how adroitly he (or she) could go after my jugular.

I'm turning 40 next week, as it turns out. I'm aging, yes, but I'm not decrepit or creepy or horrid. I mean, I'm working on it, but I've got a ways to go. I'm looking forward to hanging out with around 40 of my good friends while roasting a fucking pig for dinner.

What I'm trying to say is, lady, if you want to wander around Capitol Hill with your undead baby jouncing off your damn chest and your asshole winking at me in the sun, I'm going to look at it. Sorry, honey. But you'd look at it too.

Yes, this was an entire blog post about some insane woman's exposed ass. The internet is improving your life.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Leaving aside the perpetual embarrassment that John Travolta has become; leaving aside the goodwill that Denzel Washington seems insistent upon squandering; leaving aside the residual greatness that Luis Guzman continues to exude despite appearing in one out of every three movies ever filmed including Hey, Don't Fuck My Butler!; the inescapable fact exists that this is a Tony Scott movie, and so it will be intolerably awful.

Scott has made approximately one and a half entertaining movies during his zombie reign--True Romance, which my friend Rory probably wisely suggests that benefits from a Tarantino boost, and Crimson Tide, which is a risible submarine movie that is more or less rescued by the nearly unbelievable straight-faced performances that are loaned to Scott interest-free in service to a patently ridiculous movie.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, I am almost positive, will continue to drain my sympathy for Denzel Washington, and will also probably fail to feature a scene where John Turturro is doused with robot urine. And really, what other use is there for John Turturro?

Moon

I like Sam Rockwell, but it's a little precious to shoot a feature film where he just presses his ass against the camera for 87 minutes. Also, it's sort of irritating to give your movie a title that obligates asshole humor bloggers to say things like "M-O-O-N, that spells box office failure!"

What's that? Yes, I do hate myself.

Imagine That

FUCK YOU, HOLLYWOOD! That's YOUR job! I work too hard and too long to imagine things! That's all well and good for the French, who work like 8 hours a week, but we Americans demand you imagine shit for us!

Except that you imagined something with Eddie Murphy and Thomas Hayden Church. Say, would it be okay if I worked sixty hours a week until this film isn't in the theaters any more?

Year One

This might be the most awesomely bizarre collection of comedic talents ever assembled. Will blank-faced Michael Cera be able to withstand the incredible onslaught of muggery that will be brought by Jack Black, Oliver Platt and David Cross? Or will he succumb to the pressures of a John Turturro-like tsunami of robot-urine comedy-face? (Forgive me if I'm stretching this metaphor. I can't seem to let it go.)

You know, I actually like all of these actors, for all of their various foibles. I even have serious affection for Harold Ramis, who, for all his crimes, has made the world a better place with some of his earlier films. But this just looks like a catastrophe.

Tetro

Hey, a chance for Francis Ford Coppola to redeem himself!

Vincent Gallo--Tetro

Or a different thing.

"Look at your hair!" he cried. He seemed to study Warren's skull for a moment. "Look at your ears!" This might be my favorite male-to-male comment ever documented. "Look at your ears!" Hey, you can't! Anyway, then Will challenged me to shots of Stroh, an undrinkable rum brine that the Austrians have perpetrated upon society. I of course accepted. It made for a lousy following workday, and my mouth tasted like ants had set up shop there.

I love bar talk. This was not, technically, bar talk per se, but I'll take it, because it 1. happened in a bar, and 2. made me laugh pretty hard.

But let's define our nebulous terms. Bar talk does not necessarily have to make you laugh. It is enough that it makes you uncomfortable or embarrassed. Let me explain.

Warren again. He recently wrote a piece for the web in which he defended the movie Predator 2--against whom I am unsure--and argued that the movie qua movie was actually the best movie ever filmed. Now, this flies in the face of all sense and wisdom, of course. Predator 2 is actually an embarrassing pile of shit that is not worth the thousands of maggots that feasted upon its utterly unwelcome presence in Hollywood. But Warren would not be deterred, and thus regaled us at a bar recently about the unheralded merits of this terrible film. Even Eric, the bartender, was having none of it. I should point out that one of Eric's very favorite films is Cliffhanger, the noisome Sly Stallone mountaineering pic.

"Warren, you are full of fucking shit. Predator 2 is horrible," said Eric. "FUCK YOU!" screamed Warren. Warren likes to point his finger a lot; he was pointing at Eric, just in case Eric was unsure as to whom it was being suggested be fucked. Eric laughed.

Warren then treated us to his latest treatise on film, listing for us his top ten movies which were "ruined by women." Number two on the list was any iteration of Romeo and Juliet. ("Without fucking Juliet, you've just got guys kicking each others asses!") "You are fucking insane, Warren," Eric moaned. The wife by this time had her forehead in her palms. "Warren, you can never talk about this list to any woman you want to sleep with," I said. "The misogyny is horrible. Are you crazy?" Then I informed him, "Anyway, you really fucked up by leaving out Gangs of New York."

"OH FUCK! How could I miss that?"

Bar talk is important. It shows you your friends' true faces.

The other day, my friend Jonah was preparing to leave the bar. For some reason, the word "nutrageous" was uttered in the course of conversation.

"I haven't had a Nutrageous in a long time!" he exclaimed. "I'm totally going to buy one." I farted moodily into my barstool.

Twenty minutes later, I received a text from Jonah. "Operation Nutrageous was an unparalleled success." I read this and whooped. I immediately texted him back to explain that "nutrage" was going to be my new euphemism for a male orgasm. I also explained this latest strategic plan to Eric and the wife. I provided hypothetical examples.

" 'Feel the fury of my nutrage!' is what I'm going to say." Eric chuckled and gripped the bar a little more tightly. The wife was back to cradling her head in her hands.

This says something about me, I suppose. I just prefer to not think about what that is.

We had a couple options as the date approached, both of which we'd done before: Oregon Coast or Whidbey Island. We opted for the latter, mainly for this reason: it was a lot closer. It's clear we're getting old. "You want a refill on your glass of wine, or would you prefer to stay motionless?" "I prefer to remain sedentary." "I concur." (They do not move.)

We did splurge a bit on accomodations and made reservations at the Inn at Langley, a magnificent establishment that welcomed us and our credit cards with a room with a fireplace, a windowed whirlpool tub, and a hardwood patio that with its three-story beachside view practically invited us to dump a body over the side, which we promptly did the first time housekeeping bothered us at 10:30 AM, wondering if we were ever going to leave so they could give us more toilet paper.

Apart from the gorgeous inn, our stay did not really get off to an auspicious beginning. The two-doors down tavern was shuttered with a mysterious "CLOSED UNTIL SUMMER" sign. Langley is nothing if not capricious about business hours, but that was a bit much. We pounded on the doors energetically, but were rewarded with nothing but a muffled silence and possibly slight creaks as angles were bent out of true by the coastal winds. The building dates to something like 1908 and looks like your grandfather's teeth; a spirit level is nearly required just to get your beer to the table. I hope someone's going to fix the old place up before it just slides into the ocean.

We instead made our way to the Edgecliff Bar & Grill just up the road a ways. A couple of local duffers were watching the Mariners play their peculiarly dumpy brand of ball (the AL West: May Require Goggles) and commenting acidly: "Who the fuck is this guy?" (Guy grounds into a double play.) "Never mind." I can't tell you how much better it is hearing stuff like this rather than hearing Mike Blowers' run-over oboe intonations.

But this was only a momentary respite. We then went off in search of food. The tavern being closed, we were denied salty fried things, and also giant squid attacks, and so we went across the street to the innocuously-named "Mike's Place." You know, I can't say we weren't warned right from the start. For one thing, Mike's Place has its own generally deserted ice cream counter. There is almost nothing more depressing than a completely barren ice cream counter. I imagined Archie Andrews sitting there, desolate and alone, raising a pistol to his head.

Our waitress greeted us at our table. "Can I get you something to drink?" The wife asked about their wine selection. "Oh, we don't serve alcohol here."

Don't even "family" restaurants--which Mike's assured us it was right on the menu--offer a fucking beer for poor Dad to drink so he doesn't run out and fuck his secretary on his new motorcycle? We sagged a little. (Our bartender friend Eric contends convincingly that they must have been busted at some point and lost their liquor license; the fact that they run a "trivia night" in the back--on the night we were there, actually--sort of backs him up. Who does a bar trivia night without alcohol?)

Wife sensibly ordered the fish and chips, but did also ask for a garden salad; I ordered the french dip (or, in Mike's grandiose parlance, the "Prime Dip"). And a couple of soft drinks.

The waitress reappeared seconds later to explain that they were sold out of the Prime Dip. This made complete sense to me, as we were two of the six people who actually were in town at the time. Whatever. Mike's menu mentions that you can get breakfast "all the time," so I had a "fuck it" moment and just asked for bacon and eggs and toast and hashbrowns and purple melted crayon jelly and also my original salad, which no longer made much sense, but, oh, fuck it, as I said. The howling emptiness of the ice cream counter was starting to weigh on my psyche.

The salads came out first. Fine. Dressing came on the side in the little plastic cups that always make me think of prostate medicine (for some reason; I'd like to emphasize that my prostate is, as far as I know, stupendous). We gnawed the begreased leaves agreeably.

Then the entrees came. I sighed at the sight of my bacon, which resembled tiny deck planks; the eggs, however, looked just fine. Then I looked over at the wife's alleged "fish and chips," and felt myself falling down the rabbit hole.

Here's all I can figure: the waitress must have interpreted the wife's garden salad order as "instead of the chips," because there were no fries at all. What she received was a tiny little saucer with about six little fried fishlet chunks dumped unceremoniously atop it along with a little cup of tartar sauce. She stared at this meager spectacle while the waitress asked, "Can I get you anything else? Salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard--" because, mmmm, fish and mustard; "--vinegar . . . "

"Yes, vinegar, please!" cried my girl. I rapped my bacon against my plate rim and contemplated its implacable juicelessness. "We are not seasoned at all," my hashbrowns trilled to me, and they were unfortunately correct. The wife continued to wait for her vinegar. "Maybe if I eat this really slowly," she said, chewing delicately.

We never saw our waitress again.

I don't want to sound like we had a bad time; we didn't. I mean, Mike's Place wasn't great, but it got better. We ended up having a nightcap at a really splendid place called Prima. And the Inn at Langley, while pricey, is really fantastic. We also fucked a lot, and that always seems to improve one's mood. It beat the hell out of Volunteer Park.