Fourth of July '04: Wildwood

Just for the hell of it, me and Josh, one of my coworkers at the time decide that it would be a good idea to get a hotel room in Wildwood for the Fourth of July. Of course, deciding this on July 3rd kind of limits our options, but whatever. We both had the 4th off from work, so after he got off at 7 in the morning, we drove down, and started hotel hunting.

We found a room that was $100, which, for the Jersey shore, on a last minute lark, during the holiday, wasn't terrible. Especially considering the first few places we checked out wanted close to $200. Also, neither of us planned to be in the room long, other than to take a nap before going out, and obviously for a place to crash after the bars.

The afternoon was rather uneventful, just a quick trip out to the boardwalk for lunch, before passing out for a nap. We wake up at around 6, and head to McDonald's for dinner. I will be regretting that one tomorrow.

Me and Josh go bar-hunting. We find a place that is advertising "beat the clock" night. Intrigued, we go inside. The special is that beer starts at $.25 a bottle at 8. It goes up a quarter every hour. This is right up our alley. The bar, however, is totally dead. Undaunted, we go back to the hotel room, and do a power hour. We make it back to the bar at about 9:30, and proceed to get positively shitfaced. We're just walking around, pounding back a beer every 10 minutes or so. With the added effect of the power hour, I am barely functional, and Josh is even worse. For some reason, the ladies weren't feeling us that night. I have a sneaky suspicion that us barely being able to communicate with other people played a major role in that. Josh left before me. Josh doesn't remember leaving the bar, or going back to the hotel room. I don't remember the walk back from the bar.

I get back to the hotel room, and Josh is passed out. I decide to go for a walk down to the beach. I just like to get out and do stuff like that when I'm at the shore, regardless of time or state of consciousness. Obviously, there are very few people (read: no one) out on the section of beach I am at at 3:30 in the morning. I just kind of zone out for a while, before remembering that I have to get some sleep before we drive back, because I have to work the next day at 2. On my way back to the hotel, some random guy on the boardwalk asks me to go out on the beach to smoke weed with him. I don't smoke weed, so I'm not interested. And if I did smoke weed, I wouldn't trust some person I don't know to supply me with weed. I had enough pot head friends to know the "always know your dealer" credo.

Anyway, fast forward to next morning. I wake up, take a shower, and start to pack. All of a sudden, Ronald's Revenge hits me. Those double cheeseburgers I ate don't mix with Coors Light, apparently. A full 45 minutes after waking up, I am puking in the hotel room toilet. This sucks. We check out, and start driving back. We get maybe five miles inland before I make Josh pull over. It is 10am, and I am puking into the bushes on the side of the highway in broad daylight. I am very unhappy with McDonald's right now.

The moral of this story is: Jeff shouldn't eat McDonald's before a night of drinking. Jeff forgets these sorts of things, though.

Terri Schiavo and my hatred of politicians

This is an issue over something that shouldn't be an issue: a person's basic rights.

All these self-important, pompous asshole conservatives who want the government out of their business have decided to put the government in someone else's business. The irony would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.

As soon as these jerkoffs get the chance, they will go back to being smaller-government budget hawks. But right now, there's morals to uphold!

I hate politics.

Drinking Story: My First Legal New Year's Eve

Dateline: Philadelphia, PA, December 31, 2001. I am now finally able to celebrate New Year's Eve the way it was meant to be spent: drunk in public singing "Auld Lang Syne" with a bunch of other drunks at a bar. I ran into a little problem, however: I didn't have any other friends around me who are also 21. One of my friends from college lived in Philly, and he said he knew some places that he could get into. He also lived about a block and a half off South Street, which is one of the more famous drinking areas of the city. I decided to take him up on the offer, since he was also giving me a place to crash. This is the recap of the night (as best I can recall):

I get to Aidan's house at about 8pm. We shoot some pool, and drink a couple beers, just kinda killing time. We venture out onto South Street at about 9. Most of the bars are carding already. I try to talk my friend in, but we're getting nowhere. We finally find a restaurant that isn't carding, and we start drinking. After two beers and a Jack and Coke each, we venture back out into the Philadelphia night.

We kind of wander around aimlessly for a while, down to Columbus Avenue. I'm not entirely sure when we turned back towards the city, but I'm pretty certain we walked past the Ben Franklin Bridge. As we're coming back towards South Street, we find a sketchy looking bar. Perfect. We go in for drinks. And are the only white males in the establishment. We have a couple drinks, get a couple funny looks, and then continue on our way.

On our way back, we run into a bunch of people who went to my high school. I am fairly drunk, and am rather chatty. The girls do not seem thrilled to see me. I am perplexed by this, and continue to talk, until it hits me: these girls are friends of my psycho ex from high school. I cut myself off mid-sentence, and go searching for another bar.

We get back to Aidan's house before we can find another bar that will let Aidan in. We decide that our best bet is to hit up the restaurants. Aidan and I both have not had anything to drink in a good while, and he suggests shots of Jim Beam before we head back out. I can only handle one, as all he had for a chaser was red wine, which I detest. Aidan knocks back a second shot, and we head back to South Street.

We find another restaurant that will serve us. Two beers and a tequila sunrise later, it is approaching midnight. We head down to the Penn's Landing footbridge, and watch the fireworks. Aidan, being the stoner that he is, manages to find the group of people smoking weed in that mass of humanity, and takes a toke. I sense bad things coming. We walk back, and run into some girls who tell us to meet them at Fat Tuesday's. Maybe my sense was off.

Fat Tuesday's is carding. Time to find another bar. We try going back to the restaurant we started the night out at. Aidan tells a bunch of junior high kids to come with us, because he'll buy them drinks. I realize that my first instinct was right. And, of course, the place we started at is now carding and charging a cover. Bloody hell.

The next stop is rather amusing. Me and Aidan find ourselves in a fairly classy establishment. And we are both rather smashed. We start talking to some guys in their mid-30s. Aidan is in full-on drunk bullshit mode. He tells these guys that he's a 29-year 0ld stockbroker. I am too drunk to care, and just go along with it, as long as the bartender keeps the beer coming.

We make one final stop for the night. The really funny thing is, I'm about 99% sure there was a bouncer there, but me and Aidan just walked right by him while he was checking other people's IDs. We sit down at the bar, and continue to pound back beers. After two beers, Aidan says, "Watch my beer, I'll be right back." Aidan does not, in fact, come right back. I decide that I shouldn't let his beer go to waste, and start to polish it off. Last call comes, and Aidan still hasn't come back. I wander through the bar, checking out the upstairs and the bathrooms, looking for a passed-out Aussie. No such luck. So, I am at a bar in Philadelphia. I am far too drunk to drive down the block, let alone all the way back to New Jersey. And now, the guy who knows the door code to his house is no longer with me.

I go home, and Aidan's brother is still up. I ask him if Aidan came home. He tells me no. I should have just said "Fuck it" and passed out at this point, but instead, I intrepidly venture back out into the night to find Aidan. I cover about 10 blocks on South Street, but do not find the Aussie.

When I knock on the door of Aidan's house this time, no one answers, and the lights are off. Seeing as how it is about 3am, and I am in no mood to piss off my friend's parents by ringing the doorbell, I sit down on the porch to mull my options over, and also hope that Aidan stumbles by. Philadelphia's finest show up first, though. Apparently, one of the neighbors called the cops, and told them I was trying to break into the house. Yeah, like any thief knocks first, and then sits down on the porch, facing the street. Whatever. I try to explain my situation to them, hoping to mask how obviously drunk I am. My one thought is that I am spending the night in the drunk tank.

Luckily for me, the cops are women, and in a fairly good mood. They merely inform me that I either can go inside, or go somewhere else. I decide to walk to my car. The cops decide to follow me. I unlock the door, and make a big show of tossing the keys onto the passenger seat. I am not about to get tossed in the slammer for an attempted DWI. The cops go on their merry way. I go back to the house to make one last knock, and if no one answers, I am sleeping in my car. Aidan's brother answers the door this time. I tell him I couldn't find Aidan, and promptly go upstairs and pass out.

I wake up somewhere in the neighborhood of 7:30 in the morning. The bedroom I slept in had big windows that faced east, and I didn't think to pull the shades before I passed out. The sun is beating on my eyes. I open them. Big mistake. Instant headache. I feel like total shit. I sit up, and see Aidan walk past my room. I get up, and try to figure out what the hell happened to him at the bar and afterwards.

Aidan is worse off than I am. He doesn't know what happened, only that he came to walking around Philadelphia a good 40 blocks from his house at about 6am. And he only remembers walking into a diner or a police station, he wasn't sure which, and then walking back out and getting a cab back to his house. He is exhausted, and passes out. His room doesn't have the sun. I can't fall back asleep in the room I'm in. I wind up giving up on falling back asleep, and just drink water in hopes of sobering up.

I leave at around 11am, and I feel like I'm trying to beat the clock, before I pass out from lack of sleep. I make the horrible mistake of deciding to catch 676 back to 95, because that takes me right across the route of the Mummers parade, which I had completely forgotten about. Sitting in traffic watching string bands strut by absolutely sucks. Doing it with a pounding headache and an impending sense of doom is even worse. I am beginning to get worried that I will just pass out asleep in my car before I can get back to Jersey. I finally cross the parade route, and drive as fast as I can home. I make it to my bed, and instantly fall asleep.

The lesson learned here: never party with an Aussie on New Year's Eve.

Drinking Story: Half a Handle night

One of the great things about college is the fact that binge drinking rarely leads to interventions. It's almost expected that, as a residential student, you will get ridiculously drunk about five times a semester. This is about one of those five times, and I went above and beyond ridiculously drunk into the realm of completely shitfaced.

It's the end of my first semester, sophomore year. Most of my friends are living in suites in Bryan Hall. I am still living in a regular room over in Milner. The weekend before finals started, I had left about six beers in one suite, figuring that my friends wouldn't drink them because I always hang out over there. I finish my finals, and go to their suite, and find out that they drank my beer. I am less than thrilled, as I needed what little money I had left for the trip back to NJ.

Since those guys were on my shit list for the night, I decide to amble over to another suite. My friends there were much more hospitable that night. In fact, someone had left about half a handle of Aristocrat rum (I only drink the good stuff) in their suite, and everyone there had more than enough booze. I jump around giddily, and run downstairs to the vending machines to stock up on Coke.

We had just been given 44oz water bottles at a finals study break, and I felt it was the perfect receptacle. I just start dumping in rum and Coke. The night seems to be going fairly quietly, as some people still had finals to take and such. I just keep pouring myself drinks, and hitting up the occasional shot.

I finish off another drink, and go to pour myself another. Problem: the bottle is empty. Big problem: It had close to a liter in it when I started. I begin to ask around frantically, to see if anyone else has been drinking the rum, like I hope. No such luck. One guy admits to doing two shots with me, but two shots isn't going to save me at this point. I stumble out into the common room of my friends' suite. My last conscious memory is sitting on the couch in their suite, telling my friend Don that "I am fucking wrecked."

Fast forward to the next morning. I say that, because that's pretty much the way I recall things happening. One moment, I'm sitting on a couch in Bryan, the next moment I'm lying in my bed in Milner. I have no clue how I made it home. My head is absolutely pounding, and my stomach is still doing cartwheels. My roommate is gone, taking a final, so I have no clue what happened to me from about midnight until 11am. Time for my own damage assessment.

The trash can is next to my bed. There is a big pile of paper towels next to the sink. Not a comforting sign. There was a box of Oreos on my desk that was definitely not there when I went out. I am beginning to worry that I went grocery shopping last night. There is a delivery container filled with chicken wing bones at the trash can by the desks. I get pissed at my roommate for ordering wings when I left.

After looking around the room for about 15 minutes, I muster the strength to sit up. That doesn't make my head happy, so I lie back down for another 20 minutes. I sit back up, and check my messages. I have a voice mail from my (then) girlfriend, wanting to know what had happened to me last night. I do not miss the irony of the situation. I make it to my desk, and try to see if she's online. She's taking a final, too. I still have no clue what happened to me last night.

I go to the bathroom to take a shower. As I walk in to the bathroom, I notice that the stall directly opposite the door to the bathroom, which is right across the hallway from my room, is covered in TP. To this day, I am not sure if I am responsible for that or not. When I get out of the shower, my girl is back online. She informs me that I spent a good thirty minutes attempting to hold a conversation with her on instant messenger, and then abruptly signed off. Hence the phone call. One small piece of the puzzle solved. She can't explain the Oreos, though.

My roommate Dan comes back, and proceeds to bust out laughing. He is happy that I cleaned up my puke, and tells me exactly what happened. Well, the part after I made it back to Milner. We spent a good deal of the night running up and down the hallway acting like retards. I got hungry (when I get drunk I get the munch like a stoner), and Dan told me that there was leftovers from the "welcome the new RA" party that our floor had. We stole the chicken wings and Oreos from there. So that allayed my worry that I had wound up off-campus somehow.

I'm not really sure if there's a point to this story, or if it's even that funny. Whatever.

Drinking Story: Cover Band Night

We'll crank the Way Back Machine to September, 2003. I am about four months removed from my college degree, and have been living life wildly irresponsibly. At this stage in life, I'm crashing with five friends while looking for a place of my own.

My alma mater's radio station was sponsoring a cover band show. I had friends playing in about four different bands at this concert, so I'm naturally excited. I'm not sure at what point I decided I was out to get royally shitfaced, but these sorts of things tend to sneak up on me.

So I get off work at about 8pm, and head to the closest bar to wait for my friends to pick me up. They're going to be about half an hour, so I slam back a couple pints of Rolling Rock during the wait. We get back to the house, I throw on some clothes, and we head out to the show. Matt grabs two bottles of beer for the five minute ride. Phil, Matt, and I pass these bottles back and forth pretty quickly. I turn up the rest of the second bottle as we pull into the parking lot.

I had just gotten paid the night before. Me at a bar with money in my bank account is always a bad sign for my account balance and my liver. Me and Phil "warm up" with a Screaming Nazi shot and a beer. And I decide, rather than visiting the ATM, I would prefer to start a tab. To wit, I've just gotten to my destination, the night has barely begun, and I've already knocked back four beers and a shot. I think you can see where this one's headed.

I walk around, talking to my friends there, listening to the bands. The opening act is an acoustic Janet Jackson band, which is amusing because Tim and Eric are funny guys. I continue to drink Rolling Rock like I'm getting paid to do it. Which, folks at Latrobe, would work out great for both of us. Between sets, I find Phil, and we find another round of Screaming Nazis. The next act is a Tom Petty cover band, featuring some of my best friends. I am having an absolute blast, dancing and drinking. The guys were good. Someone threw a pair of panties at Eben. I merely point this out because things are beginning to get hazy, and I start having problems keeping memories from this point on in sequence.

I'm not sure what I did during the next break. A guy I was kind of friends with swears I bought him a beer at this point. Yup, it's one of those nights. The next band is a Bruce Springsteen cover band. And they're really good. And I'm really drunk. I sang myself hoarse, and soothed my throat with more beer. I don't remember if another band came on after that or not. Actually, I don't remember anything else that happened that night. The rest has all been pieced together from various sources.

I wake up the next morning, and my stomach isn't agreeing with me. I bolt downstairs and yuke, marking the first time in my life I have puked the morning after drinking. I make it back to my bed, and realize that I have no recollection of settling my tab. Fortunately, I find my check card in my wallet. Not that there's anything wrong with blacking out at a bar, I'd just hate to be that guy that has to come back to settle up the next day because I was too drunk to remember to do it before I left. I go back to sleep, and wake up close to noon, not knowing what happened to me. Phil is more than willing to bring me up to speed.

Phil says he came up to me, and said that the guy we came with was leaving. I said something to the effect of, "Fuck it, I'm going to Wendy's." Phil naturally assumed that I had found someone to drive me to Wendy's. When they left about 10 minutes later, they find me stumbling through a parking lot, walking to Wendy's. At about 1am. Oh yeah. Aidan stopped to help me in the car, and he says I fell down twice walking to the car. I still think he's bullshitting on that one. I never fall walking on concrete. Whatever. We get home, and Phil says he makes some kind of sausage that I eat ravenously. I'm not sure how to take that. Phil then said he passed out, and I was still watching a movie. I had passed out by the time the rest of my friends got home. So they all said I was rather funny at the bar, but didn't say anything else about what I'd done after I left.

For some reason, I had the nagging urge to call my ex-girlfriend that afternoon. I was rather surprised when she called me. We make small talk, I ask her about her night last night, and am rather surprised to find out that part of her night's activities included talking to me on the phone. I am kind of embarrassed about it at first, and apologize profusely to her. She said it wasn't a big deal. I asked her what we talked about, and she told me she couldn't remember. I tell her that she's got a major step on me, because I don't even remember talking to her in the first place. She tells me I need to stop by her place that afternoon.

My one regret about that night is that I wasn't sober enough to remember what kind of game I ran at my ex, because I need to find that game now.

Emusic used to be so much cooler

I'm going to make a departure from the last two posts, which were pretty much about things that I hate. This time, I'm going to extoll the virtues of the music service to which I subscribe, emusic.com.

How I found out about emusic is fairly amusing (to me, at any rate). I was taking a jazz class the summer betweeen my junior and senior year of college, and I was supposed to listen to two Dizzy Gillespie CDs and write a reflection on them. I am a legendary procrastinator, and the fact that I got to actually searching for these CDs on Sunday evening (the work was due Monday night) was almost a record for me getting something done in advance. So yeah, with less than 24 hours until this fairly significant project is due, I have absolutely nothing done.

Me being the resourceful college student that I am, I immediately start hitting up web searches for track listings of Dizzy Gillespie CDs so that I can download them off Kazaa. One of the hits directed me to a page that not only had a bunch of Dizzy Gillespie CDs, but I could download them directly from the website! It was a paying service, but my first 40 downloads from the site were free, or so they claimed. Anyway, at this stage in the game, I was willing to try anything, so I used my bank card and got the free trial. Two Dizzy Gillespie CDs later, I was coasting my way to an A in jazz class.

So, I had about 25-30 downloads left on my free trial. Time to poke my nose around the site. I find all kinds of stuff that I'd sort of heard of before, but hadn't listened to much. The Get Up Kids, Alkaline Trio, Saves the Day, Yo La Tengo, Hot Water Music, and so on. I am very intrigued. Entire CDs, and unlimited downloads, for $9.99 a month. Chump change, when you think about it. My collection quicky grew. By the end of my senior year, I had probably 80 CDs downloaded.

After a while of no internet access, I went back to emusic. I was saddened to find that they have since changed their subscription plans, with $9.99 getting you 40 downloads a month, $14.99 netting 65 downloads, and 90 downloads coming in at $19.99. One thing I am extremely happy about is that my collection remained intact from my unlimited downloads time, because the computer I had in college had crapped out.

It's pretty funny though, I look forward to the refreshing of my downloads at the beginning of the month with close to the anticipation that I look forward to payday. Anyone with an appreciation of hard-to-find music, who doesn't want to run the risk of getting the Feds chasing you, I recommend emusic.com. It's got some great bands that often slip under the radar of popular radio, and has definitely expanded my musical tastes.

I still yearn for the days when I could download upwards of 20 CDs in a month, if I had the time and inclination, but I enjoy the music that I do download. I could get more adventuresome in the old days, because if the CD sucked, so what? Now, I have to choose the CDs I download slightly more judiciously, as I would be upset to find out that I wasted 10-15 downloads on a CD that sucks. It's still a good system, however, and is probably the only paying download site that I see myself subscribing to.

Why mock drafts suck

It's still over a month and a half until the NFL Draft starts. Some NFL fans will spend the upcoming weeks reading over the biggest waste of time this side of feeding a pet rock: Mock drafts.

I suppose I could put a whole laundry list of complaints here, and cite various sources around the sportswriting world, but that's much more effort than I feel like going into for the people who are (or, based on the feedback this blog is getting, aren't) reading what gets posted. So, I leave the research up to you, my lazy reader, to do. Suffice it to say, if you came here expecting to read about mock drafts, you will see much of the former, and little of the latter.

Let me first begin by saying that mock drafts are almost always done with the order of the draft remaining intact, which is completely crazy, since teams trade up and down in the draft all the time. Mock drafts simply cannot know which teams will do what, so they forge ahead with the idea that no team will do anything. Allow that logic to sink in: since we don't know what will change, we'll assume that nothing changes.

From there, it seems like any asshole who happens to follow the NFL even a little bit will decide to post his or her mock draft. Never mind that most people don't even know what an NFL draft board looks like, and have never been inside one of the "war rooms" that coaches, personnel directors, and scouts fill during the draft. So these people have no clue as to: a) what players teams value, and b) what positions teams need to address. These people merely make "educated" (this is going to be used in a rather loose sense here) guesses (much more accurate) as to who they think a team will select, if the team even keeps their draft position.

That's right, folks. These people don't know what a team is looking for, and who a team is really looking at, or even if the team will even be picking then, but they are intent on determining who all 32 teams are going to draft.

I could go on, and I probably will. I mean, I still have a good six and a half weeks worth of mock drafts to pore over.