In other musical news, I have recently gotten in on the Spotify game. And, well, I am in love. Not the kind of love I have for my right hand, but a legit, deep feeling of love. Like one has for an amazing steak. Or a cooler of cold beer. Or your favorite stripper. Spotify is a "cloud service" for music. It syncs up with your iTunes/playlists and your Facebook friend's iTunes/playlists (provided that they are on Spotify). I think. I'm not exactly sure how it all works, but it is pretty amazing so far. And much better than Pandora since there's no limit to the amount of hours you can listen. (Fucking 40 hours a month Pandora? I use that up in about a week and a half). A simple search for an artist will result in every song/CD they've ever made. A Micheal Jackson search yields 206 songs and 16 hours of music. A search for Smash Mouth comes up with their 6(!) full CDs plus compilation and soundtrack CDs that their songs have also been included on. Apparently their music has appeared in "The Cat in the Hat", "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", and "Can't Hardly Wait." I would also like to point out that their greatest hits CD "All Star Smash Hits" from 2005 has 20 songs on it, which is pretty amazing in it of itself. Moral of the story: get in the Spotify game if you enjoy listening to music.
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Back on May 18th, a friend from college sent out this Facebook message to me and three other friends (names will probably be withheld unless I remember something stupid one of them did, at which time I will totally name names):
We are all getting old. We never get to see each other at once. And John... Is a lonely motherfucker. So the weekend of July 15th has been marked. I want to know what you guys think. Travel plans. Cost. All that good bullshitAs usual, pretty much everyone ignored him. But eventually we got our shit together and made plans, they would fly down on Thursday the14th, go home on that Sunday, and my apartment and Austin would never be the same. The plan was 3 college friends (Farmer, the Government, and Jeff) would come down and see what Austin had to offer. Sadly, a fourth friend was a giant pussy (GP) and decided he wasn't going to be able to make it down. His reasoning: he was moving to New York for grad school in August and didn't have the money. I'm not sure it dawned on him that he was about to have student loans for close to, if not more than $100,000 in a few years so what was a few extra hundred bucks. He stood by his reasoning and was out. Again, giant pussy.
The week before the visit, the same GP friend called asking for my address, saying he was going to send us a package for the weekend. I oblige him with my address thinking he'd send down a box full of singles or beers or some other bullshit. Fast forward to the day the other 3 were flying in and I still hadn't gotten the package so I asked him about it. He called me and told me he was tracking it online and said it had just arrived. As he said that, there was a knock on my door so I told him to hold on, that it may have just arrived. I opened the door and lo and behold, GP was standing there. He had bought a ticket and not told anyone. In hindsight, I should've caught on to his "sending us a package" scheme but I figured he was such a GP that it would never happen.
I wasn't expecting visitors until 10:30pm so I was going to get a good nap in. Really be fresh for the drinking scene. Well as soon as GP showed up, about 6pm, all bets were off as we drank the few beers I had and went to pick up some Tullemore Dew Irish Whiskey and some Guinness. The Rapture had began 4 hours ahead of schedule, unlike the old ass man, who's rapture has yet to happen.
10:30pm rolls around and we make our journey to the airport. To have the grandest of surprise reveals, GP decides he will duck down behind the driver's seat and will pop out once the passenger doors are opened. Well I get out to meet the three and one of them immediately says, "what the fuck is GP here?" The grand reveal at the airport wasn't as highly executed as it was at my apartment. (I would like to give a shout out to Liz for driving us to the airport as GP and I were already several beers deep and would not have been the best drivers.)
The party moves back to my zero bedroom studio apartment. Instead of being cramped with 4 stinky assholes, there was now even less room with the sudden addition. I don't remember many details from this night, except that we finished a case of Natty and a case of Miller Lite, became best friends with my next door and downstairs neighbors, cooked a frozen 'za, and somehow had the wherewithal to get beds ready for everyone.
For some strange reason, we all pretty much were awake by 9am on Friday morning. No idea why. Farmer works on a dairy farm back in Ohio and is usually awake by 5am or whatever so I blame the early mornings on him. The game plan for Friday was as follows: get a ride downtown and see what happens.
Luckily there's a bus stop 2 blocks away that takes us directly into the heart of downtown. Unluckily, we missed the bus and had to sit in triple digit heat for upwards of 25 minutes. It is here that I'd also like to point out a huge flaw in the Austin bus system. The route we took, the 10, makes roughly 25 stops on a 4-5 mile trip. There are certain blocks that have more than one stop. You could literally be at the bus stop and see another one less than a block away. This makes for a hell of a trip. A tip for the city: consolidate.
Our first bar in Austin, Texas? An Irish pub. That was the beginning of the end. It may have only been noon on Friday, but that's when the beers started flowing. They didn't stop for another 13 hours or so. In the mean time, we had discovered many amazing things that downtown had to offer, such as the many food trailers that are conveniently located. We stopped at a biker bar cleverly named the Dirty Dog. The place was pretty empty, considering it was about 3pm. There was a photo booth and along the wall the folks had a collage of pictures girls had taken in various scenes of undress. Farmer, being a 25 year old male who works with bovine more often than people, felt it necessary to take a picture of the pictures.
We eventually continued the worst-planned bar crawl in Austin and found ourselves at the local watering hole of Coyote Ugly. It was here that Government took the first and only pre-gargled shot I've ever seen. Quite literally, the bartender poured the shot, took the shot herself, put his head down on the bar with mouth open, and then spit the shot into his mouth. How the man does not have any number of contagious diseases is beyond me. Shockingly, it's at this point that the rest of the night becomes rather blurred for me.
This was also the point that we had the grand idea to split up. BP and Jeff were at one bar, Farmer was by himself someplace and Government and I made our way to another bar, Maggie Mae's, where we proceeded to get thrown out within 5 minutes. Literally. We were STANDING at the bar and ordered two beers. After paying for the beers, the bartender looks at me and says "You've had your eyes closed for a few seconds. I can't serve you anymore." I would like to again emphasize that we were standing at the bar and had just exchanged money for two beers. They took my beer back but would not return the money. It's at this point that Government offered possibly the best one liner of the weekend: "Do we need permission to blink?" We were then escorted out of the bar.
(This is the second time I have ever been asked/told to leave a bar. The other time was at O'Hare Airport while waiting on a flight. It was a Sunday so I had wandered into a bar area and was watching the Bears. The worker asked if I needed anything and I said no. He then asked for my ID and since I wasn't 21 yet, I was told to leave. It wasn't even crowded and I hadn't even asked for a beer. Fucking pricks.)
The five of us eventually regroup and (shockingly) head off to the local gentleman's club. I wish I could tell you that everything really is bigger in Texas, but I don't remember much past getting thrown out of the bar. BP and I eventually left the g-club and cabbed it home while the other three stayed behind, quite possibly making it drizzle. As soon as BP and I get back to my place, we pass out. Well an hour later, the other 3 show up and attempt to kick my door down SWAT-style. I would like to point out that they have weak legs and were unsuccessful in even making a dent. A few dusty shoe prints are the only reason I believed that they attempted to kick my door down to wake us up.
After the marathon drinking session of Friday, Saturday was quite tame-ish. Again, we all seemed to wake up by 9am. Age had clearly caught up to us a bit as the first beers eventually began flowing, but quite slowly. Flying all the way to Texas, they had wanted to experience some quality BBQ. I've heard many people recommend a place called the Salt Lick, where they had all-you-can-eat options for $20. Farmer used to weigh in around 270 pounds in college so he was up to the challenge of the all you can eat. I say used to because he now weighs a good 80 pounds less. (And yes, it is always funny to ask which arm someone cut off when they mention they've lost X amount of weight.)
We head to the BBQ place with our cooler in tow, as this was a BYOB. I can't decide if BYOBs are a good idea or not. On one hand, you can bring all the beer you want. On the other hand though, can I really walk into a restaurant carrying a 30 pack of Natty? The answer is yes, yes I can. Anyways, Farmer is the only one who goes the all-you-can-eat route, as the rest of us order meals for regular people. Farmer had been talking all day about how much meat he was going to put down, how he was going to put the place in the red that night, he was going to get his picture on the wall, etc. As we're eating, we all keep an eye on Farmer's progress. He goes through the first plate no problem. A plate consisted of beef brisket, sausage, pork ribs, and turkey. The other 4 of us had some sort of combo of these meats and couldn't even finish one plate. Farmer gets his second plate and starts slowing down. Let the insults commence. "The cooks are laughing at you." "The cows are laughing at you." "You suck." "We are laughing at you." Etc. I wish I could say that he found his second and third winds and would up putting down 4 and a half plates. But in reality, he did one and a half. That's like one forearm of a cow. No one gets their picture on a wall for one and a half plates. We waddled out of the Salt Lick full of food and disappoint in one of our own.
We make our way back to my place and sit for a while. The food needs times to adjust and digest. We eventually slowly make the two block walk down to the bus stop. It is on this bus ride, that the weekend takes a crazy turn. While on the ride, an older gentleman in a wheelchair gets on the bus and we begin a conversation with him. In the process of the talk, tattoos gets brought up. Suddenly Jeff cannot get tattoos out of his head.
"I'll get tatted up if someone else will" is all he kept saying. After about 10 blocks and 17 stops, Jeff had wore down BP and both agreed to get "tatted up." (Bear in mind, BP already had 6 or so tattoos. He also still lives at home. The crazy part, his dad apparently doesn't know about any of the tattoos he has. Unless he reads this and cracks my amazing code names.) Jeff and BP find a tattoo shop while Government, Farmer and I head off to find beers. About ten minutes later, Farmer has once again wandered off on his own and it was just the two of us again. We kept clear of Maggie Mae's as we didn't want to get tossed again for extended blinking.
Now I've never seen someone get a tattoo so I had no idea how long the process took. Well, two hours later, Government and I were still on our own and crawling the bars around Austin. The ink, bleeding and the crying finally and we meet up sans Farmer who had apparently returned to the Dirty Dog (probably to take more pics of the nudie pics.) The rest of us made our way down to the Dog where Farmer had made friends with a few old, biker-looking guys named Ragweed and Bob (might not have been Bob but it was definitely Ragweed). Honestly, Ragweed is not one of my amazing code names. That is the name he went by. You don't question Ragweed.
After drinking through last call, it was time to find a ride home, which was easier said than done. Apparently downtown Austin can hold tens of thousands of people and about 12 cabs. After an hour or more of attempting to hail a cab, we had broken into two factions to better our odds: Farmer and Jeff and then BP, Government, and I. As soon as this happens, Farmer and Jeff get a cab while the three of us end up in the back of a pedicab. Due to the fact that my apartment was roughly 5 miles south of where we were and that Lance Armstrong was not driving us, we needed a better plan.
"I'll ride you guys back to the pedicab headquarters and drive you home in my car," said the pedicab driver from heaven. And just like that, we were off on a ride through downtown, under the interstate and into the east side of town. What seems like 45 minutes later, we actually do end up at the headquarters of the pedicab business and we were not mugged in an alley. Also, the driver went inside and brought out beers for us. He then drove us back to my apartment. So to recap: pedaled 3 of us (including a former 280 pounder) through the streets of Austin for a good 40 minutes, gave us each a beer, AND then drove us 20 minutes south to my apartment. I think we gave the dude a twenty then went inside and passed out.
Sunday was supposed to be a day of recovery for me. My plan was to drop Jeff, Farmer, and Government off at the airport then sit and let my body rest. That was my plan before BP decided to show up unannounced and before he told me his flight wasn't until Monday afternoon. So the day of recovery was not to be. The five of us got in my car and I dropped three of them off at the airport. All that was left was BP and a big fucking mess formerly known as my apartment. This particular Sunday also happened to be the Woman's World Cup final. We had dropped them off at the airport around 10am, came home and napped until about 1pm when the game started. Well we couldn't let the girls get all hot and sweaty while we just sat there sober. So he opened up the Irish whiskey. Well a full bottle and a heart breaking loss later, we were, as the college kids say, fucked up. Both of us ended up passing out around 5pm, only to wake up from a seven hour nap right around midnight. It was the strangest feeling, being wide awake and hungover at midnight. Not shockingly, I was in a world of hurt on Monday as I went into the office. It took every fiber in my body to not throw up (it almost happened twice before work and almost once at work).
BP made his flight on time and I managed to have a semi-productive day at work. Semi-productive for me meaning way less than productive for anyone else.
I think the five of us learned some life lessons that week: we are no longer the same people we were in college. Let me clarify: we act the same, talk about the same shit, use the same jokes, flex, don't talk to girls, etc., but can no longer party for three days in a row without repercussions of some sort. To some, those repercussions came in the form of ink and for others, those repercussions came in the form of dry heaves and a terrible headache.
Another thing realized: some of us have better fashion taste than others.
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| Government wore these shoes and socks every fucking day |
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On a totally different note, I got this in the mail two days ago. I have never stepped inside one of their stores, never been on the website, and never have I ever had to put together one of their EXPEDIT book cases that retail for $129 on page 80. The thing comes in at 374 fucking pages. I'm sure some poor tree could have kept standing had I not received this.
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| Fuckin Swedes. |
Y'all come back now.
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