So this bartender was like, "How old are you?" And I'm all, "Twenty nine. No, wait, shit, I'm thirty. I've been thirty for 10 months. I should remember that."

It's been a while since anyone has asked me how old I was. Or am. I'm old.

So I realized last Sunday night that the most depressing place on earth at 11:00 p.m. on a Sunday is Newark Penn Station. Sure, you might say something like, "I bet Lebanon right now is a little more depressing. Or maybe the Harrison PATH station." Maybe, but I doubt it.

Newark Penn Station is the worst. No matter what time. I've never been somewhere that no matter what is going on, no matter what time it is, I always feel like I am about to be stabbed. It just has that Imminent Stabbing feeling about it.

I was getting off of the Amtrak train from DC and it's just one of those places. I was waiting for the Amtrak guy to say, "Next stop, Newark! And just so you know, I will be stabbing you when you exit the train." And then I bought a water and some Doritos, and I anticipated the guy there to be like, "OK, your change is $1.35, and if you don't mind, I am going to stab you in the spleen." Then I'd be like, "Ow, that's my neck, motherfucker!" And he'd be all, "Neck, spleen, whatever. Have a good trip."

We get a shitload of spam email at work. Most of it makes no sense, but every once in a while a subject line comes across and makes me giggle like a lady. Today at 4:51 A.M., this gave me quite that giggle.



It then made me imagine that somewhere, someone got that email, and it happened to be the truth. Then I got a little sad. Poor guy. Probably sitting at his computer at 4:51 A.M. in his underwear while his wife was in the bedroom spooning the vibrator. Then I imagined that birthday. He was probably wearing a party hat, his wife had just blown out the candles on her Entenmann's cake, then she opened up her gift. "Oh honey, this is awkward. Why would you get me this?"

Then he would sigh, slump his shoulders and say, "It's because of my hopeless Erectile Dysfunction. Please note that the E and D should be capitalized. I love you."

Stupid spam email. Making me think about sad things.

You know that American Express commercial with Kate Winslet where she says things that reference her films like, "At 17 I went to prison for murder... I almost drowned at 20... I had my memory erased at 28." You can see it here. Kind of a clever little ad, that somehow is supposed to make you want to use American Express.

I would like to see them do one for Jodie Foster.

"At 13 I was a teenage prostitute. At 26 I was gang raped on a pool table. Then when I was 29 I went to visit this cannibal in a jail, but on my way to see him, some dude threw his jiz on my face. And when I was 32, I was in Nell. My life. My card. American Express."

At my cousin's wedding a couple of months ago, after someone would take a photo, my cousin Bob would say, "Oh, that's one for the board." The board he was referencing was the board of photos they put next to the coffin at wakes. I found that pretty funny.

I would like complete control over my board. So I have set up my own board over at Flickr. It isn't complete. This is just the start. It's going to be a huge board. Tania told me this is pretty morbid, which I guess it is, but I am just helping out my loved ones. No one likes planning funerals. I am just making it a little easier.

Here are some favorites.

This one has already been blogged about. Sort of. It's of Rich and I receiving tickets for open containers. How awesome is it that Rich is wearing a lei? I'd say pretty awesome.



This is me clicking my heels at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missoura. My sister and I were waiting for friends of hers, so we took a lot of pictures of each other doing things in front of the Silver Dollar City sign.



This is of my friend Rick and I in Telluride, Colorado. A bunch of us rented a house there for the week, and Rick and I had to share a bed. We are very close. Anyway, they had all these books in the room, and these two gigantic Adolf Hitler books. We thought it would be funny if we got a picture of us reading them in bed. I think it was kinda funny. Nice beard, right?



So I am a little bored tonight and I've been playing around with my blog and with Flickr. You can see the little Flickr thing to the left there. So now you can click on it and see all of my photos. Like this past Friday where I decided to go on a hike in really hot weather. I was sweating like my dad. Seriously. My dad can sweat.



That's Jill, raising the fucking roof. We thought because we saw a flag that we had reached the summit. That's why we are so happy. Little did we know that we would be doing lots more climbing. It was seriously the most difficult hike I have ever done. Lots of climbing up rocks. I thought I was going to die. Luckily, I didn't. Otherwise I would have had no creative control over my funeral board.

I read some other blogs that I haven't read in a while. And as usual, BlabberMouse had me laughing quite a bit. Especially with her description of giving birth:

And while some women have described natural childbirth as “a miraculous and overwhelming wave sensation,” I’d liken it more to “Satan in a mesh trucker hat, driving an 18-wheeler out of your asshole. Sideways. In an electrical storm.” Only much more painful.

Oh, one more thing. I also realized that I had those Greatest Hits over there on the left, which haven't been updated in about two years. If anyone has any favorites they'd like to see added, I might update that shit. So email me if you have a favorite or two.

Apparently I am in a potty humor mood.

So when I went to Colorado with Tania last year, our relationship was still kind of new. Certain boundaries hadn't yet been crossed. But spend a week driving around together, and well, boundaries go out the window and into the mountain air.

On our second day in Colorado, we are about to go on a pretty long drive. My stomach, however, is in no condition to go on a long drive. I don't know what was wrong with me. It hurt like hell. I had never felt this kind of pain in my stomach before. I went to a supermarket and stood in front of the stomach remedies for about five minutes where nothing really seemed to describe my symptoms. I needed a drug that said, "For when you feel like you are about to give birth to an alien baby with spikes."

I went to the bathroom a few times, with no results. My friend Rich calls that balking. I balked.

I decided I would just suck it up and start driving. I think I bought some Tums or something. The problem with just driving is that we were about to head out on a drive through a place called Grand Mesa. I'd never been, but my guess was going to be that there wouldn't be many bathrooms along the way, just in case.

So we start driving, heading into the middle of nowhere, my contractions about 5 minutes apart.

I don't know if it was moving into the higher altitude, but the urge hit me to pass some gas. Now, at this point, I had not farted in front of Tania (at least none that she knew about). But I had no choice. It was silent, so I thought maybe I'd get away with it. But then I realized about .000000000001 seconds after I did it, that she would most definitely know about it, and she would know too much.

I've never smelled a fart so fast and so bad. It was horrendous. So right after it happened, I said to Tania, "Well, the good news is I feel better..."

And before I could even tell her the bad news, she got the bad news. She pretty much had her head out the window trying to suck in as much Colorado air as she could. She was laughing and gasping and not believing I was capable of such a thing. As we drove by, I think I saw trees dying and a couple of cows were like, "Oh dude, was that you?"

That's all.

My company offers lots of training programs, like management training and things like that. Or how to be better at talking on the phone to clients. I think they should offer a new class to the fellas in my office called, "How to Flush Your Shit All the Way Down the Toilet."

I will even volunteer to teach the class, because when it comes to flushing my shit down the toilet, I am second to none. There are people in my office, though, who don't seem to have my shit flushing skills. It would be a really quick class.

"OK, so let's say you've just finished your shit and you've wiped and you are ready to head back to work. Instead of just pulling up your pants and leaving the stall, what you should be doing is pushing down on this little silver lever. What's going to happen is your shit will spin around a couple of times, begin to sink, and then it goes down that hole into the plumbing system. Where it goes from there, I don't really know, nor do I care to know. But what's most important here is that's where it belongs. Don't leave it sitting there. Any questions?"

It's seriously a problem lately. I can't understand why people wouldn't want to flush their shit. Maybe they just leave it there to taunt those who might be constipated and are trying to shit.

Anyway, it's been bothering me. And I'm sure the cleaning lady isn't crazy about it either. So if you read this and you work with me and you don't like flushing your poo, please flush your poo.

So I did really try to get World Cup fever. I asked Europeans to cough on me in hopes of getting said fever, but I merely got a chill. Maybe a little headache. Some matches were very exciting and fun to watch, but it's hard for me to get behind a sport where the ULTIMATE CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE FUCKING WORLD is decided by something as ridiculous as penalty kicks. I can make a penalty kick against a world class goalie, I am sure of that. It's a guessing game. Guy goes to kick ball, goalie guesses which way to dive, guy kicks ball almost always into the net, goalie shakes head. They might as well decide the championship by playing Guess Which Hand The Marble Is In.

Or arm wrestling. I'd watch that. Or the referee should just say, "OK, I'm thinking of a number..."

Anything other than penalty kicks. Maybe a head butting contest. France would win. I can't imagine a situation where I would want to head butt someone. Other than my girlfriend while we sleep. But that is the only situation.

If you live in the New York area and you watch TV, you know this guy. I believe when I bring it up in conversation, I refer to him as the dude with the tracheotomy.



He is always on, either in his house cleaning out his hole with a Q-Tip (which I took a picture of as well, but it was really gross to post up here), or being a buzz kill at the community pool talking about how he can never swim again.

I don't smoke, so I can't say whether or not it is effective advertising. I know it freaked me out at first, but the more I watch these ads, the more entertaining they become. For example, you can still hear his accent. I didn't ever know that accents would transfer through a trach box. Like when he says "again," he still has a Hispanic accent. He says it "a-gain."

I would also like to know if they planned the ad at the pool, or they just crashed there one day to freak out kids. "OK, kids. For the next hour or so, there will be a man walking around with a hole in his neck. But don't be scared. Just keep splashing each other and play in the pool. But don't get any water in his neck hole, because he will die. Aaannnd, action!"

After reading more of that article, I guess he has appeared in other markets, so he has been around.

Oh, when we were talking about this at work fairly recently, a smoking co-worker said that her mom called her to tell her about the ads. She agreed that it was gross, but wasn't ready to quit smoking. She said, "It's only one guy."

So that gave me a brilliant idea. Get a ton of tracheotomy patients, like 100, and put them all in one ad. Don't just show them cleaning their holes or walking around pools, but make a choir out of them. Have them in a concert hall, Carnegie if it's available, then have them sing. How creepy would that be? No musical accompaniment. Just them singing a very cheery song, like "Wouldn't it be Nice?"

So imagine 100 patients with those boxes singing that song. Now imagine you are 7 years old when you see it. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Wouldn't it be nice if we were older
Then we wouldn't have to wait so long
And wouldn't it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong

You know it's gonna make it that much better
When we can say goodnight and stay together

Wouldn't it be nice if we could wake up
In the morning when the day is new
And after having spent the day together
Hold each other close the whole night through

Happy times together we've been spending
I wish that every kiss was neverending
Wouldn't it be nice

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true
Baby then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do
We could be married
And then we'd be happy

Wouldn't it be nice

You know it seems the more we talk about it
It only makes it worse to live without it
But lets talk about it
Wouldn't it be nice