Taken from a conversation between [info]diesel__powered (aka Mike) and myself…

We were outside working on the cars. I live in a mixed ethnic neighborhood, so we have those guys who push carts around with jingling bells that sell burritos. Mike is from Chicago, so he looks out and goes-

“Holy shit, you have those here too?”

“Huh, what, Mexicans? Hell yeah, I thought everyplace had those.”

This is why sometimes I don’t say what I’m thinking.

Speaking of tales from the ghetto, which I don’t live in, but nearby, don’t go driving looking for fine wine for your girlfriend in said ghetto. I went around asking for a decent, chilled Riesling. You’d think I asked them to tell me the name of the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and all related repercussions of said event.

Me- “Do you have any Riesling, preferably chilled?”

Counterperson- (who will probably be shot in an armed robbery sometime after I leave tonight) – silence…

Me- “Hello?”

Counterperson – “Uhm…what?”

Me- “Riesling, it’s a white wine”

CP- “Wine?”

So I have to explain the concept of wine to the person. Now if I had wanted malt liquor, I would have had my pick of roughly 47.5 fine brands, but not on wine. I half expected the person to go “Whoa, hold up…you’re telling ME, that you can take GRAPES, sqwoosh them up, distil them, and somehow…magically, you get an alcoholic substance!? Suuuuuuure Mr. Whacky Hairdo guy, I think you’re clearly mistaking the blockbuster trilogy, Lord of the Rings, with real life. Elves, ogres, magical warlocks, wine, these things are what we call FANTASY. You call me when the space shuttle lands. Now get outta my store, I have some MGD to sell”

I did finally find a non-malted beverage in wine form that did not come in a giant jug with three big X's on it...

Some day, when I have a kid, and they are in need of some encouragement, they are going to ask me what the greatest thing I ever did was.

Most parents would say something like “Son, and/or daughter, I have done many things in my life, but the thing I am proudest of is YOU.” And then everybody hugs.

Not me. I’m going to tell it like it is.

“Kid, you’re ok and all, but this one time I poured a big ass bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and instead of milk, I used Cream Soda, then I poured exactly one metric assload of sugar on that and ate it like a vagina connoisseur at an open legs convention. THAT was the best thing I ever did. Now spend the rest of your life trying to live up to that.”

This would be the second most awesome thing I have done with my culinary skills, the first being a creation I like to call “Piece of bread with an egg in the middle of it.” Basically what you do is put a fuck ton of butter in a pan, then you take a big piece of bread (read as not a normal slice, not one of those pansy ass Rainbow bread slices, but a good deli sammich sized piece) and you cut a hole in the middle of it. Crack an egg and pour it in the hole and fry that bad boy up. It is delicious and manly.

Incidentally, I wanted to open this week with a big thank you to both Hotmail and Yahoo mail. It took you years of close competition but you have finally succeeded in sucking goat’s ass of equal proportions. It’s nice to know that after 3 years of having an account with both of you that I am now going to be asked at TOTALLY RANDOM moments to verify that I am indeed a human and not engaged in spam.

This is a reference to the fact that I have to type in a fucking password for about half the emails I send out, you know, the one where they have a display and you are supposed to type the words you see in the box even thought they don’t specify whether or not it is case sensitive and it looks like someone dragged the password through a pile of homeless dysentery.

Yes, you jackasses. You got me. Although the account has been active for 5 years it was all a clever ruse to dupe you into a state of false security, at which point I was planning on using your free internet mail to send out emails ONE AT A TIME in an effort to inundate the innocent users of the internet with spam. I planned on calling this endeavor “Operation Slowest Motherfucking Spam Campaign Ever” you fucks. I wrote them an email on the subject and ironically received…an automated response.

I also came home to find that my porch had become the insect equivalent of the Normandy landing and roughly two billion ants and some other crazy ass bugs were crawling all over it. For those of you who don’t know, I hate nature. Most people will go outside and see some sprawling forest and running stream and go:

“Gawly! This sure is beautiful! I never get to see things like this in the city, big open spaces of trees and greenery are breathtaking, it’s a shame how civilization has reduced this sort of thing”

I on the other hand tend to look at those things and go “Man it would be awesome if a I could find a cement truck big enough to cover all of this and then bring in a truckload of half clothed goth chicks to pose for photographs with industrial refinery equipment”

Id be perfectly content if the entire nation was covered with 2 feet of concrete. The mountains are OK as it, but imagine how awesome it would be to have DEATH MOUNTAINS covered in black asphalt and tire damage spikes.

So the point is, nature is not welcome on my porch. It’s lucky enough that I am gracious enough to allow it to exist in the form of grass in my yard. So I headed to the basement to find anything in chemical form that could be possibly toxic in any way, industrial solvent, air filter oil, Taco Bell hot sauce, cream soda and some expired ranch dressing I found in the back of the fridge. It was basically ‘Operation Turn Front Porch Into a Zesty Toxic Wasteland By Any Means Necessary’.

This tactic met with nominal success. While the addition of ranch and hot sauce probably made the ants undeniably tastier than before, it was not making them any more dead, so it was time to head to the store. One thing that disappointed me when I got there was that not many of the products came across as deadly enough. I fucking hate ants, and when they are assuming an aggressive stance on my front porch, I don’t want some pussy ass product with a name like “Ant B Gone” or anything like that, I want a product with a name like “Ants Become Super Dead Mega Quick”, “Ants Die Horrific and Painful Death Almost Immediately” or maybe “The Hiroshima Equivalent of Ant Town”. I want a product that has pictures on the can of vacationing ant families coming home to discover grizzly scenes of all their 2 million ant neighbors and coworkers in contorted throes of agony and death. I want product descriptions illustrating ants melting away as though they were the Nazi’s that opened the Ark of the Covenant in the Indiana Jones movies. A cartoon ant with X’s on it’s eyes and it’s little ant tongue sticking out fails to satisfy me.

At any rate, I finally settled on a product with a pansy name that promised it killed ants, but did not specify if it might actually kill anything else it happened to come in contact with, such as other bug life, plants, trees, pandas or those fucking obnoxious ass kids who sell magazine subscriptions door to door. I figured it probably wouldn’t kill them, but since it did not indicate otherwise, I can at least hope.

As it turns out, not only was it sufficiently deadly, it also utilized a pressurized stream of liquid that you normally see in industrial fire hoses. It was freaking awesome, not only were ants dying in record numbers, but they were being blasted well into the stratosphere while doing it.

 

Back to the main page!