So anyway, here I am, up at 3:17 am because of combination of fajitas, beer and golfing.
That's right, golfing.
At one point, a golfing partner said, "oh my gosh you really have never done this before." I replied that having known me for three years, was there anything about me to suggest that I would have ever set foot on a course.
Turns out, golf is kind of hard. Even with the assistance of beer. Which led to the comment made by another golf partner, "you'll do better once you've had a few beers. Which is true about everything in life, really."
Golf
Bass
Work
Parenthood
Yeah, I can see it.
--The Robopirate
Showing posts with label beered. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beered. Show all posts
Friday, October 26, 2007
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Bet you really wanted to know this.
You know why I liked living by myself? Because a closed door and drawn blinds ensured that alone time meant that I would actually be alone. Now, I have to apparently lock my bedroom door.
On a different note, how do you get someone to stop smoking? At this point, I'll tolerate Junior's weed if it means he ditches the Marlboros. In addition to his failure to recognize that no lights and a closed door is the universal roommate sign for don't-come-in-here-or-else-we're-going- to-have-an-awkward-rest-of-the-evening, he's raised my ire tonight by constantly hacking and coughing. Here's the conversation I had just now:
"Are you sick?"
"No, I just had a cigarette."
"Junior, why do you smoke."
"Because there's nothing like having a cigarette when you come home from work."
I should point out that he is highly susceptible to the sort of phrases and ideas that are bandied about as part of a lifestyle conceived by a marketer in order to sell something. Throughout his life, this has ranged from breakfast cereal to toys to Marlboro Lights.
"Do you even want to quit?"
"Eventually..."
"What have cigarettes ever done for you?"
"KOFF KOFF HACK KOFF KOFF"
And that was the end of the conversation. So it goes. The problem I have is that from time to time when I get hammered, I think that a smoke will go with those 7 or 8 beers just fine. In its temporarily pickled state, my brain gleefully follows the dubious logic that if my exterior smells like a bar, my interior might as well match. And then the next morning, I always think jeez that's the last time I do that, because I totally feel nasty. So in other words, I'm that guy. The guy who rails against smoking but who is ironically a social smoker. So I have a problem effectively yelling at him. The difference is that my tobacco missteps are so occasional that they're hardly worth mentioning beyond barely founding a case for my own hypocrisy. Same with the dope.
But all the same, I wish he'd knock off that goddamn coughing.
One night, I think this was the first or second night after we moved into the new place, I came home from bartending to find him camped out on the balcony getting high. And camped out is barely an exaggeration. He had a chair. And a black light. And a reading light. And his iPod and its speakers. And a towel. And his bong (on a side note, he refers to all of his paraphenia as his "pieces." We used to just call them pipes). And I went through the roof. Why couldn't he just smoke a joint in a chair on the balcony without making it such a big production? Why did I have to come home to find an array of blown glass drying on a towel on the kitchen counter? Why did I have to find a copy of High fucking Times in the bathroom?
In other words, I wanted to know why he couldn't just smoke pot instead of being a stoner.
I explained to him, with the rage of a 1,000 sitcom dads, that it is stupid to see this chunky kid who used to be a D-1 athlete take the time to set all this shit up on a balcony just so he could get baked. He, of course, didn't see what the big deal was, and as I realized immediately, I didn't actually realize what real big deal was either. I didn't catch it until afterI had explained to him, this time with saltwater running down my cheeks, that it was weird and sad for me to see this chunky kid all chinese-eyed and addled, talking about "pieces," and "baba kush," when what I remember when I look at him is the 7 year-old who fell asleep in his Sonic the Hedgehog costume after trickertreating. Or the 3 year-old who thought that the pregnant cat my dad brought home from work would eventually lay eggs. Or the four year-old who fell asleep on my dad's shoulders during the Electrical Parade at Disneyland.
In other words, what I really wanted was for him to be a kid again. And I say this with complete sincerity, unsmirking, without a gram of smarm: my heart broke.
As if that weren't bad enough, I found myself able to empathize with my parents over a whole catalog of hurt feelings. I could now appreciate the anger and disappointment they felt when I came home from my first semester of college, reeking of Keystone light and a 2.4 GPA. I understood the resignation in my dad's voice when I told him, no I'm not going to quit the band. And finally, the defeated sadness in my mom's eyes when I told her I had foregone with saving myself for marriage no longer looked like martyrdom. In these instances, I bristled at all the various manifestations of parental disappointment, because every fuck up seemed to be a matter of how I was reflecting on them, not how I was reflecting on me. At the time, I always thought, fuck, it's my life and my mistakes, and you guys weren't perfect either. I'm pretty sure this is exactly what goes through Junior's head the instant I begin to pontificate.
Once again, I wish I could be a big brother. I feel like I don't know how. More than that, I feel a little lost.
And by a little, I mean a lot.
--The Robo-Pirate
On a different note, how do you get someone to stop smoking? At this point, I'll tolerate Junior's weed if it means he ditches the Marlboros. In addition to his failure to recognize that no lights and a closed door is the universal roommate sign for don't-come-in-here-or-else-we're-going- to-have-an-awkward-rest-of-the-evening, he's raised my ire tonight by constantly hacking and coughing. Here's the conversation I had just now:
"Are you sick?"
"No, I just had a cigarette."
"Junior, why do you smoke."
"Because there's nothing like having a cigarette when you come home from work."
I should point out that he is highly susceptible to the sort of phrases and ideas that are bandied about as part of a lifestyle conceived by a marketer in order to sell something. Throughout his life, this has ranged from breakfast cereal to toys to Marlboro Lights.
"Do you even want to quit?"
"Eventually..."
"What have cigarettes ever done for you?"
"KOFF KOFF HACK KOFF KOFF"
And that was the end of the conversation. So it goes. The problem I have is that from time to time when I get hammered, I think that a smoke will go with those 7 or 8 beers just fine. In its temporarily pickled state, my brain gleefully follows the dubious logic that if my exterior smells like a bar, my interior might as well match. And then the next morning, I always think jeez that's the last time I do that, because I totally feel nasty. So in other words, I'm that guy. The guy who rails against smoking but who is ironically a social smoker. So I have a problem effectively yelling at him. The difference is that my tobacco missteps are so occasional that they're hardly worth mentioning beyond barely founding a case for my own hypocrisy. Same with the dope.
But all the same, I wish he'd knock off that goddamn coughing.
One night, I think this was the first or second night after we moved into the new place, I came home from bartending to find him camped out on the balcony getting high. And camped out is barely an exaggeration. He had a chair. And a black light. And a reading light. And his iPod and its speakers. And a towel. And his bong (on a side note, he refers to all of his paraphenia as his "pieces." We used to just call them pipes). And I went through the roof. Why couldn't he just smoke a joint in a chair on the balcony without making it such a big production? Why did I have to come home to find an array of blown glass drying on a towel on the kitchen counter? Why did I have to find a copy of High fucking Times in the bathroom?
In other words, I wanted to know why he couldn't just smoke pot instead of being a stoner.
I explained to him, with the rage of a 1,000 sitcom dads, that it is stupid to see this chunky kid who used to be a D-1 athlete take the time to set all this shit up on a balcony just so he could get baked. He, of course, didn't see what the big deal was, and as I realized immediately, I didn't actually realize what real big deal was either. I didn't catch it until afterI had explained to him, this time with saltwater running down my cheeks, that it was weird and sad for me to see this chunky kid all chinese-eyed and addled, talking about "pieces," and "baba kush," when what I remember when I look at him is the 7 year-old who fell asleep in his Sonic the Hedgehog costume after trickertreating. Or the 3 year-old who thought that the pregnant cat my dad brought home from work would eventually lay eggs. Or the four year-old who fell asleep on my dad's shoulders during the Electrical Parade at Disneyland.
In other words, what I really wanted was for him to be a kid again. And I say this with complete sincerity, unsmirking, without a gram of smarm: my heart broke.
As if that weren't bad enough, I found myself able to empathize with my parents over a whole catalog of hurt feelings. I could now appreciate the anger and disappointment they felt when I came home from my first semester of college, reeking of Keystone light and a 2.4 GPA. I understood the resignation in my dad's voice when I told him, no I'm not going to quit the band. And finally, the defeated sadness in my mom's eyes when I told her I had foregone with saving myself for marriage no longer looked like martyrdom. In these instances, I bristled at all the various manifestations of parental disappointment, because every fuck up seemed to be a matter of how I was reflecting on them, not how I was reflecting on me. At the time, I always thought, fuck, it's my life and my mistakes, and you guys weren't perfect either. I'm pretty sure this is exactly what goes through Junior's head the instant I begin to pontificate.
Once again, I wish I could be a big brother. I feel like I don't know how. More than that, I feel a little lost.
And by a little, I mean a lot.
--The Robo-Pirate
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Faith in God renewed by the drunken generosity of SAE's, AKA "Everything's coming up Milhouse!"
I never thought I'd say this, but I was glad to see the frat kids back in the bar last night.
See, on Tuesdays, I check I.D.s, bar-back and mop at my friend's bar. If the joint gets busy enough, I get to jump behind the bar as a third and get the other two bartenders caught up. Then I get tipped out from the other two bartenders, usually doubling my normal take. Of course, it's been about a month since I've had to bartend; school's been out, and the bar has been pretty dead. Luckily, all the kids have to drag their khaki-covered butts to class on the 17th, and they were easing back into form last night.
I like bartending. I've been doing it part time (always as a supplement to whatever 9-5 I've been doing) over the past five years. It's way more fun when you only have to do it for an hour a week. This is because all the things that college kids do to rankle a full-time bartender (not knowing about tipping, getting legendarily plowed, snapping their fingers for drinks, walking tabs, etc.) are not nearly as aggravating when not encountered on a nightly basis. After all, the money I make at the bar is pretty much spending cash anyway.
Except, of course, for this week, when I had three checks floating around in the banking netherworld and the electric bill set to be debted out of my account on Thursday. I was sort of praying to either get a FW Weekly check in the mail or make some extra cash last night, as one of my three New Year's resolutions is to go the entire year without any overdrafts, and I had set myself up to break it two weeks in. Some time after Christmas, I posted an angry, resigned gripe about God, Bush and the war, because my faith at the time was pretty much at a low point. Every so often, however, God does come through in the clutch. Or at least it looks like He does. Granted, college students usually come back to school a week early, and it's easy to call an answer to prayer a coincidence rather than divine benevolence. Ultimately, though, I think life is a little sunnier without a haze of cynicism coloring one's perception. So thanks, God, for sending the college kids (like manna from heaven, if manna were clad in Northface vests and Ducks Unlimited hats) to get drunk and give us their parent's money.
Oh and also, I booked a Sabbath tribute band for my birthday. It's in June, but you know, whatever. You've got to take care of the important stuff in advance.
--The Robo-Pirate
See, on Tuesdays, I check I.D.s, bar-back and mop at my friend's bar. If the joint gets busy enough, I get to jump behind the bar as a third and get the other two bartenders caught up. Then I get tipped out from the other two bartenders, usually doubling my normal take. Of course, it's been about a month since I've had to bartend; school's been out, and the bar has been pretty dead. Luckily, all the kids have to drag their khaki-covered butts to class on the 17th, and they were easing back into form last night.
I like bartending. I've been doing it part time (always as a supplement to whatever 9-5 I've been doing) over the past five years. It's way more fun when you only have to do it for an hour a week. This is because all the things that college kids do to rankle a full-time bartender (not knowing about tipping, getting legendarily plowed, snapping their fingers for drinks, walking tabs, etc.) are not nearly as aggravating when not encountered on a nightly basis. After all, the money I make at the bar is pretty much spending cash anyway.
Except, of course, for this week, when I had three checks floating around in the banking netherworld and the electric bill set to be debted out of my account on Thursday. I was sort of praying to either get a FW Weekly check in the mail or make some extra cash last night, as one of my three New Year's resolutions is to go the entire year without any overdrafts, and I had set myself up to break it two weeks in. Some time after Christmas, I posted an angry, resigned gripe about God, Bush and the war, because my faith at the time was pretty much at a low point. Every so often, however, God does come through in the clutch. Or at least it looks like He does. Granted, college students usually come back to school a week early, and it's easy to call an answer to prayer a coincidence rather than divine benevolence. Ultimately, though, I think life is a little sunnier without a haze of cynicism coloring one's perception. So thanks, God, for sending the college kids (like manna from heaven, if manna were clad in Northface vests and Ducks Unlimited hats) to get drunk and give us their parent's money.
Oh and also, I booked a Sabbath tribute band for my birthday. It's in June, but you know, whatever. You've got to take care of the important stuff in advance.
--The Robo-Pirate
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