Beer Burgers

So I went to New Orleans this weekend, and I had a great time. I mean, I could complain about how touristy, dirty, and crowded it is, or how hard the bars try to sucker you into paying for overpriced test-tube drinks, but the fact is, when that many people get that drunk and that crazy, it’s just a lot of fun.

Perhaps the best way for me to explain what makes New Orleans so special is to share an incident from Saturday morning with you.

the scene: It is about 10:30 am on a grey Saturday, SAM is wandering around the French Quarter, drinking cranberry juice and trying to shake off a vicious hangover. As he turns a corner, an OLD BLACK DUDE accosts him. The OLD BLACK DUDE is carrying a cup, which SAM assumes means he is asking for money. SAM attempts to ignore him and keep walking.

OLD BLACK DUDE: Hey, wake up.

SAM: Oh, sorry.

OLD BLACK DUDE (walking over, holding out cup): Hey man, I don’t mean to bother you, but could I get a swallow of that juice? (holds out cup, which is full of a brown liquid) I’m drinking whiskey, and I need something to thin it out.

SAM: Hell yes. That is an awesome breakfast.

So there you have it. I met the King of the Drunks, and I gave him some cranberry juice. And it was good.

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Not to sound like a curmudgeon here, but seriously, what the hell is up with these kids today and their elaborate pants? I have seen this a couple of times now, fifteen year old goths slumping around in pants with so much crap hanging off them that they can barely walk. I mean, what the hell is going through your head when you buy these?

What kind of anti-establishment, badass cred can you have wearing something that ridiculously cumbersome? How the hell are you going to run from the cops with your LEGS CHAINED TOGETHER? HUH, FUCKNUT? Jesus, when I was a kid, we wore pants ten sizes too big with our boxers showing, and we had a single wallet chain, and maybe another one for your keys or pager, and THAT WAS IT! And it taught us discipline and responsibility. Yes it did.

Also, we only had 2600 bps modems and it took like five minutes to download a single pornographic picture. And forget cell phones. We had to use pagers. So anyway, kids these days are ungrateful little bastards, and they should be sent to the salt mines, or, failing that, the poison mines.

As some of you may remember, Evan and I spent part of our senior year in South Africa. While we were there, we had to keep journals of our impressions and thoughts on what we were studying and what we were experiencing. Since this blog is at least partly an autobiographical I thought I would share some of what I wrote with you.

Jan 5th, 2002

9:00 am

My first impressions are overwhelming. Truly, this is the cradle of mankind. The people are the biggest surprise. They are tall, with deep, dark skin and they walk with confidence. Their language is unfamiliar, like nothing I’ve ever heard before, and their clothes and jewelery shimmer with strange signs and symbols, whose meanings I can only guess at.

“My God. . .” I can’t keep from remarking out loud, “I never knew Africa would be like this.”

9:05 am

I have been informed that I am not yet in Africa, and that, in fact, I am in Newark, where I am supposed to catch the plane to Africa.

I thought that train ride was pretty short.

Jan 6th, 2002

I have arrived in Africa, Man’s ancient homeland, The Dark Continent, The Big Easy. As I attempt to locate my guide, I am struck by a deep and overwhelming sense of how bad it smells.

Almost immediately, I spot my guide. He was a tall, middle-aged Afrikaner, obviously once muscular, but now run to fat. He waves cheerfully and comes over to help me with my bags.

I should explain at this point that I have been conscientiously studying African history and culture in preparation for this trip. I spent literally three hours watching “The Ghost and the Darkness,” a week before catching the plane, and I read almost an entire article in the in-flight magazine about a new shopping mall in Johannesburg that is going to have both an Urban Outfitters and a Jamba Juice, so I feel like I know pretty much everything there is to know about Africa today. It was at this point that I expected this knowledge to pay off. In preparation for meeting my first real Africans, I had chosen to wear a FUBU Platinum Fat Albert T-shirt and jeans, and a white pith helmet, with a riding crop tucked under my arm, an ensemble that I feel displays both my sensitivity to contemporary African culture and my faith in the inherent superiority of the White Man’s civilization.

In any case, I’m still pretty much in the dark about this whole “Afrikaner” thing. As far as I can tell, they’re kind of like a cross between Australians and the Dutch. I decide that my best chance at blending in was to fake a Cockney accent and hope for the best.

“‘Allo gun’vah!” I shout, jauntily. “Long trip in the owld sky-boat, what?”

“What?” he says, apparently confused.

“Hands up the Cobblers billy-jack.” I am beginning to become concerned.

“You are from the University of Chicago, right?”

“Toppers, me crozzly-wozzlies.”

“I thought you all spoke English. Well, I’ll do what I can.” He grabs my suitcases, and began to walk briskly towards the door of the airport and out to his car. Apparently my efforts to blend in are going well. I say this, because as we walk through the airport, I notice a lot of people pointing at me, and a small crowd of children following me. I can only assume they were amazed by the dignity and grace I bring to their uncivilized homeland.

But I see we are arriving at the hotel we are going to be staying at. I’ll continue this journal as soon as possible.

I’ve been waiting for my brain to make something funny that I could write down in internet form to entertain people, but apparently, my brain is defective, because all it keeps coming up with is remarkably persuasive reasons for me to watch television for an ungodly number of hours and various scenarios in which I could be in the same room as Alysson Hannigan and she somehow loses all her clothes.

Since I will never have an original idea again, I have decided to resort to the classic blog cop-out, the entry that consists only of a link. However, this link does actually require an explanation. And by an explanation, I mean an excuse. And by an excuse, I mean. . . well really there is no excuse.

I read internet forums. There, I’ve said it. I no longer post on forums because oh god the dorkiness it burns, but I still read them because it’s a great way to procrastinate, and because, every now and then, you find something hilarious that you would never find anywhere else.

With that in mind, you can click on this link here and scroll down to about four fifths of the way down the page. The post is titled “Happykitty for president 2004,” and if I know you, it will make you laugh.

I’m taking the last entry down. It’s saved, if you care, but I really didn’t want to start this kind of political discussion. Honestly, the more I see, the more I realize that nobody ever gets convinced in this kind of argument anyway. Everybody has their own opinions, formed by their own exeriences, and we’re all convinced that the world reflects our view of it. We think our beliefs come from objective facts, but none of us has all the facts, and even if we did, we couldn’t begin to understand the incredibly complex web of relationships that make up these issues we casually define as “the economy,” and “society.” Yet, like a bunch of self-important freshmen at the University of Chicago, we rant and rave at each other, convinced that we’re right, and that if everyone else would just listen, they would see how right we really are.

I remember when I studied Communism, how disgusted I was with the relentless zealots who sacrificed countless lives to make society conform to their “objective” view of the facts. Now that’s a horrifying extreme, but we all think the same way, to some extent. We ignore facts that make us question our assumptions, and we steer away from media that challenge our way of thinking. The problem isn’t any one ideology. It’s the fact that we’re all so damn sure of ourselves.

So does this mean that I’m giving up any kind of political belief? That I am surrendering any stake in how the human race is going to get through the next hundred years? Absolutely not. You see, the difference between my ideology and all of yours is that I’m right.

So apparently, I have received the dubious internet honor of becoming a “googlewhack.” I didn’t know what that meant, but one quick trip to google later, I came away somewhat wiser. It means that this website is the only result that will come up if you type the words “Incapacitation” and “unicycles” into Google.

Besides raising the disturbing question of why there is no more reputable source of information on deadly unicycle accidents than my blog, this situation presents something of a problem to me. On the one hand, it is nice to know that I am, in some way, making a unique addition to the internet. On the other hand, it takes absolutely no skill, ability, or creativity to place the words “incapacitation” and “unicycles” on the same page, and that, really, is what this is all about.

Finally, people who search for “googlewhacks” are the kind of thoroughly pathetic “look how internet-hip we are” Wired-reading, goatee-wearing, catchphrase-spouting “internet pioneers” who wasted everyone’s time and money talking about just how super this whole inter-web thing was in the first place.

Look, kids. The internet is over. You want to find something “unique” and “funky” out there? You want to enter an unlikely combination of words into a search engine and giggle at what you find? Well how about I show you the real internet? This is the internet. This is the internet. But most especially This is the internet.

The internet is a dumping ground for the ramblings of illiterate self-important perverts. The fact that I have combined two unlikely words doesn’t make me any better than any of them. If you want to recognize this site because of its good grammar, or regular updates, or the incredible sexiness of its author, that’s one thing, but some little search-engine anomaly just doesn’t cut it. And if you think there’s still any intrinsic value to finding stuff on the internet that no one has found before, I can show you many, many more reasons why you are oh so wrong.

However, if you want to see something genuinely fresh and interesting, try this. I don’t understand it, but I like it. Or you could try this. The fact is, though, you’ll never find stuff like that on a damn search engine. You have to start with a worthwhile site, and click on a lot of links.

Sometimes, it seems to me that our lives follow a fractal pattern. In every incident, no matter how trivial, you can see reflections of a life’s fundamental shape. If you had the wisdom, I could almost believe that you could extrapolate everything you need to know about a man from the way he holds a cup of coffee, or the way his children greet him when he comes home from work. It’s not just our behavior, either, that defines us in this way. The things that happen to us could never have happened to anyone else, because if they had, they would have happened in a different way. These patterns sometimes seem to me to run through our most banal activities and into the grand tragedies of our lives.

Why do I look at life this way? Because it seemed so strangely appropriate, even familiar, that as I watched the opening credits of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, someone vomited in my lap.

This is how I see my life sometimes, grand drama juxtaposed with slapstick, the good contrasted, not with the bad, but with the humiliating and ridiculous. Having come to this understanding, I have decided to review both aspects of the experience, to bring my truly unique perspective to the world.

First of all, The Return of the King is a big movie. Oh man is it a big movie. And it has balls. At least three of them. It starts slow and quiet, and builds up to the point where I honestly cannot tell you how cool it is, because there are not enough words for kickass in English to describe giant elephant-ghost-pirate-ninja-elf-cavalry-charge-wraiths-on-dragons-and-holy-shit-Aowyn -just-cut-the-monster’s-head-off-and-stabbed-him-in-his-FACE-battles!

The getting-vomited-on part had a similar depth. There were many elements to it; smell, texture, the staining of the trousers, and the ever-popular getting-all-over-the-place. It started off with a persistent and awful smell of rotting milk, that caused me to look around with a sort of outraged disgust that anyone could reek like that in a crowded movie theater. When I realized that it was I, myself who was doing the reeking. I attempted to remove a maximum amount of vomit from my body, while getting a minimum amount of it all over the goddamn place, and failed miserably. Of course, I had wisely chosen to sit exactly in the middle of a crowded row of seats, because everyone knows that if you drink beer for five hours. and then go to see a three-hour movie and bring a half-gallon coke in with you, you won’t ever need to get up for any reason. Anyway, one deeply apologetic and stinky trip to the bathroom later, I was ready to enjoy a vomit-smelling adventure story and man did I ever.

The Return of the King lingered with me, and I found myself replaying its spectacular scenes in my head, as I wandered around New York the next day. As a matter of fact, the vomit lingered with me as well, and although I was hardly the only individual in Union Square that morning who reeked of partly-digested alchohol, I felt particularly unable to escape its cloying aroma.

In any case, I heartily recommend The Return of the King, about three weeks too late for anyone to care, but I can add, for the record, that if you are going to see the movie, don’t see it with puke all over your damn lap.