They are dropping like flies.

So this is a sad state of affairs.

Joe’s Mom’s Place and Inoteca Vin are both closed. One I saw coming and one is a little out of left field. Both are landmark Downtown establishments, and are going to leave a big void both food wise and location. Some thoughts on both. Or maybe just one. Let’s see how this blue ball of frozen water is flying this evening.

Joe’s had the best roast beef sandwich I have had in Raleigh. Fo realz. With a z so you know it’s got street cred. I was walking home, literally the first week I got here, and saw the neon and the locale right off Nash and thought,

“This joint must be good. Look at the size of that neon.”

And if I have learned anything in my short quarter century on this planet it is that size does matter. Why don’t I have more dates then? Oh self deprecation, is there anything you can’t solve?

Nothing like that neon. It’s like electrified crack. With a twinge of fluorescent after taste when you climb halfway up the fence out back, scoot along the brick detail edge, scale the downspout, hold on to the incoming cable wire while swinging your right leg to get a foothold on the mounts, lean in and lick it. I just tend to walk that way. My shoes have the left side worn down more from trying to stay on course when walking through the afore mentioned square. Sometimes I have to hold on to a tree just to keep to the east. Usually I like to take a breather around the firefighters who always talk about spraying me when I walk by. I don’t think that they are being capricious, I think they might do it one of these days. And boy, will I be wet that day. I hope it’s warm. Or there is a dryer handy. At least once the neon is gone I can walk to the west away from the nozzle without fear of holding a sandwich in my hand within a block and wondering,

“Wham, bam, what the fuck just happened? Where in hell’s half acre did this delicious sandwich come from? You, dirty old man by the fire station, did you get me this sandwich? Yes? Ok. What else? Did Jimmy fall down the well? Pop Rocks have been discontinued? Poppa Smurf got me the sandwich?”

Wow, you are all over the road, dusty. How about you get your ADD under control and look me in the eye when you are talking to me?

“Pop up books are fun? Of course, I agree.”

What’s with the pop theme?

“Pop tart’s have mercury in them? Get out of town, really? You read it on the FDA’s website? Well I’ll be. Crazy. What a second….you sly fox with no teeth….you have neither a computer for research nor money for a white paper rolled deli creation, nor a doctorate in all things pop related. Ok, PHD in Tab, my bad, I forgot.”

They don’t soak me though, just talk about it. I think it’s more of a time kill for them. They can’t move, you know. Bronze. Heavy.

But this night was different. Pluto was still a planet then, until that Rubik’s cube solving mouth breather demoted it to some sort of nebulous swirling empty shell of man it was once was that doesn’t even exist on the same plane as everything else in the milky way and now gets picked on by the other planets.

“Really Saturn? Big words from a planet with a tutu. Yeah that’s right, orbit away. Oh, sure, blame it on the fabric like force of gravity and centrifugal motion physics laws. Like I haven’t heard that before, bitch.”

I got your back, ‘Plutes.

What’s his name? Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yep, that’s the guy. Seriously, it is all loopy in its orbit pattern. So maybe he’s more right than I give him credit for. More like some sort of red dwarf or even a nebula of inert gases. Which I guess is what it is now. But I digress.

So I walk in, and the place is empty. I mean crickets and polar bears hanging around empty. I pet the mid size one, he seems nice, let’s call him….Hamsterbox. He tells me to get the roast beef. I say

“Sure giant fuzzy mammal, but who do I order from?”

He shrugs then says

“Hey for all it matters you can order through me, but I can’t make the sandwich. You know, the fur? Sanitation would deport my ass. Plus, dude, no opposable thumbs.”

Wiggle wiggle.

“Hey the pads are black!”

“Don’t interrupt, I have a small brain and it is hard to string sentences. I just learned english mid way through this soap box rant. What was I saying? See? Oh, yeah. Big knives, meat slicer, bad news polar bears.”

Word, Hamsterbox. Good point. Just as I am about to give up on the sandwich and ride him to the far side of the train tracks, a big dude comes sauntering out of the back.

“Roast beef on sourdough! And put some stank on it.”

Hamsterbox nods approval before ramming his big white head into the wall chasing a cricket into a crack. Damn near knocks himself into the special olympics. Faster than chinchillas they are.

5 minutes flat, Johnny Bravo’s on point with the sandwich. Warm, soft, a bit top crusty on the bread with the roast beef mooing at me while trying to jockey for position in the white run of paper hugging my sandwich. I’m thinking about eating it there, but I suddenly remembered the words my dad said to me on graduation day,

“Son, your mother and I want to invite you to never move back home. Really, we have some things planned, and you kind of stay up late and well, just don’t come back. Oh, and if you value our meal, or your life for that matter, you don’t eat loud roast beef in front of a polar bear. No opposable thumbs.”

Um, thanks Pop? Just a crackerjack job there.

I even scratched his head, no respect. I bid the god given sandwich artisan a fucking adieus and scaddadle.

Never ran into the polar bear there again. What was his name? Hamsterbox. Yep.

That’s how it went down at Joe’s place. Fo realz.

News of the weird…lazy sunday.

So I found these tooling around the cyber tubes this morning laying in bed. Interested ladies? Oh yeah. Some of them are just stupid, some about stupid people, some funny, some cool, but all odd. Give your bloodshot eyes a feast.

Ebay madness. I don’t get it, I even clicked all the links.

More. This guy is a douchebag, no wonder no one wants his soul. You also know that you can’t sell that right?

Michael Phelps. Cut the guy some slack. It’s just a bong rip. The guy wins gold medals on his uptime.

Hackers are awesome. I really wish they lived on my street.

I want this. Someone make one for me. Actually I want many of them so I can have a little army of them tapping around. Then they attack in the night. They should put a warning about this on a street sign somewhere.

Who the fuck are these people?

I really need to tap into this market of hapless chumps who seem determined to give other people their money. They might as well walk down the street just throwing it on the ground.

Hey there mister! Yeah, you in the Simpson’s shirt with the three day old ice cream stain on your sweatpants. Who’d you like to be taken for, oh, I don’t know, a couple hundie?

Boy Howdie Would I! How do I sign up?

Just lean over and hold your breath!. Oh, it’s up front payment.

I realize that Hollywood has been recycling shit for over 150 years now, hell there has been probably 20 remakes over the last two years and only two were good. Since when did people think they should be buying shit that has been invented before and has been on sale for decades now. A snuggie is a fucking robe! You hear me? A goddamn robe. And you know what? A robe is nothing more than a towel that happens to fit you! Where the fuck do you get off trying to tell me that a blanket with holes in it is a new product?  They make a slanket too. I guess the demand is so high that one manufacturer of preposterous crap can’t possible be expected to fulfill the need. They named it after a slacker and blanket. How much more proof do you need that this is not a worthwhile product? Most people throw the equivalent of your product away.

Hey Billy, you got a blanket I can borrow?

Yeah, man, but it’s kinda old. Really old. I mean look at this thing, it’s got two holes in it.

Not a big deal, I’m taking it camping. Most likely we will burn it to stay warm when we get lost. Maybe save some for kindling to get the fire back going in the morning when we are forced to eat the weakest of the group by the third day. Wait, I might be thinking of a movie. Yep, that’s definitely a movie. Either way, I can just leave it out in the woods right? You won’t miss it.

Fo shizzle, bud. Why would I want a blanket that has two holes back? Those things are damn near big enough for my arms to fit through. It’s the winderness’s now.

The shamwow? Suck my balls. There is nothing wow about a chamois. Yeah, that’s how you properly spell it. They even bastardized the name for the sake of marketing. You know when they invented a chamois? When the ORIGINAL goat was made. Yeah. Around the beginning of the earth, give or take a few days. And you know what makes a good chamois? The fact that it comes from a mountainous region goat, not from some fly by night 3M knockoff waiting to get sued when some bobbleheaded pug faced kid chokes on their do it all (included asphyxiation) yellow towel. If you need to kill time go up and read the previous paragraph and you can get in a perpetual loop picking up speed till you eventually bleed from your ears.

I really hope someone out there has bought one of these ridiculous things so they might figure out how to budget their time and money better. Maybe they can start with an IQ test, fail it, get a helper dog who might eat these two things and but them out of their misery.

The handheld tomato slicer? It’s called a knife. They have been around for a while and seem to be working out just fine. A stealth secret sound amplifier? Called a hearing aid, slick. Been around long enough for my grandpa to believe in it. You just managed to make it bigger. Portable outdoor blender? That runs on electricity? Genius. Oh, I see you have invented……a blender. What a breakthrough. A pillow with built in speakers. Ah, useful. That would come in handy all the times I wanted to fall asleep to loud noises! You sir, have managed to take two perfectly good products and combine them to make something worse than the sum of it’s parts. Congratulations.

 

I wish this was a snuggie

Let’s not shit ourselves.

Not only is this the famous (alright it’s not famous) tagline of one of the best songs in the Bright Eyes catalog, but it also sums up the dreadfully piss poor job I have done trying to cover the snowshoe trip. I blame it one two things. Both of them not me. Really, were you expecting anything else from me? I can barely take responsibility for the things I do at the exact moment I do them. You really expect me to fess up and take the fall for something that I might kinda sorta have done when I can readily bring to mind other better scapegoats?

Now that the disclaimer of my cowardice is out of the way, I blame it on booze and shitty service. Not the kind when the 15 year old pours your thick tomato based spaghetti sauce down the front of you. The kind that you can only expect on the little strip of frozen tundra called Snowshoe……. Snowshoe……. Snowshoe…..

It was hard enough just getting the phone to make calls when other people weren’t putting fake numbers into it (call me Rene) let alone get enough data service to get the wordpress app cranking along and upload photos on the fly. I got a few up there as you can see down the left side, but not nearly as many as I would like. I’ll be putting more to the flickr and they get wrangled by the slickness that is widgets to this page.

So, as god as my witness (he turned just now) I will do better now that I only have one scapegoat. Yeah the booze will probably be the downfall of all of us. Sweet boozy booze.

Highlights of the trip - 

Meghan playing tonsil hockey (yeah I called it tonsil hockey I’m a first grader)

Cheese palying tonsil hockey with Zack Galifinokis?

The wii and more specifically wii bowling and the newfound ability to pick little people up and throw them away (sorry about the mods junior)

The emptyness of the mountain the first day and the fluffy whitness of first tracks

Meghan’s seizure set to motion the first night at the connection

Cheese’s irish yoga the first nite at the connection which put her down for the count when Fred got there.

Cheese’s miraculous awakening the last nite as we were walking out the door to booze with the group

Snake’s newly acquired taliban affiliation

Fred coming all the way from the W to ski for one day

Ryan having the forsight to bring the Wii and the leftover booze and the beer bong and driving and organizing the trip and……

15% off bitches

The free pizza from the argintinian.

Ask the respective owners about these and more stories next time you see them.

Oh and Snuggs.

Fuck your remote!

So I have a fuckin bone to pick with gmc. Why would you have a tv built into a car if you can’t control it? We have spent about the last hour trying to figure out what inside a packed car uses two double a batteries that we can steal. Glove box, negative. Center console, negative. One of four mp3 players, all rechargable. Damn you lithium ion technology! Wii guitar, negative. Wiimote, again rechargable. Fuck, I’ll be damned if I can’t play lucy daughter of the devil through this stupid tv. It’s a mission now, your going down gmc, bringing the thunder. Thought about trying another adapter, the connections won’t work. Make sure the aux is turned on. Yes it is Meghan and cheese passed second grade. Hold up! There is a little black wii reciever in a little blue bag in the back of the car. Go go gadget arm! The batteries might be dead Ryan says. Awesome, way to give us the littliest glimpse of hope then yanking the rug out. Got the batteries chief, you are playing what we want you to. The fuck do you mean the remote won’t work? Alright tell justin to pull to the side of us and throw the batteries through the window. Yeah of course it will work, just check the wind. Oh right, the paint job. Fine.

Fast forward an hour……

Ok you’re there? Good.

New batteries. Moment of truth. God dammit. I swear gmc. I swear. Dj Jesus will be sending you a letter.

The Snowshoe Project

So this is the beginning of the snowshoe experience. Couple photos loaded along the lower left side, pretty much just the start of the drive, but there will be more o’coming. Hopefully some of these lazy skiers will write some entries if I can convince them. Stay tuned for the duration of the weekend.