You know where this is gonna go, so let’s just get there. Together. Now.

Red-eyes are fucking terrible

Of all of the variations of hell that have been conjured up by the greatest minds, from Dante to Sartre, Virgil to Matthew, Milton to Plato, I think I’ve figured out a version that tops them all: Hell is a never-ending loop of nightly red-eye flights.

I took a red eye from Los Angeles to New York City, and while I could not possibly have been happier about being out of LA and in NYC, my happiness was tempered by the fact that I was so tired after landing that I couldn’t say for certain if I was actually in NYC, on earth, or just dreaming (or maybe none or all of the above). The only thing kept me awake at my desk on that first day in NYC (I worked out of the NYC office my first Thursday and Friday on the east coast) was my unnaturally rapid heartbeat, courtesy of the half-dozen diet cokes I’d consumed during the day to keep everything moving along as smoothly as possible.

Women can alter their menstruation cycles with a pill, thus preventing them from getting pregnant. We’ve been putting men, animals and, accordingly to conspiracy theorists, criminals on the moon for decades. A question that twenty years ago would take hours and volumes of encyclopedias to answer can now be figured out in under thirty seconds through Google. Ten years ago, I had to spend $15 to buy a CD for one song; now, I buy a CD happens with less regularity than I buy condoms. (Which is rare. Trust me.) One year ago, I thought I had downloaded every last bit of free porn on the internet. Then Redtube came along and made me a man. All this, and yet humanity can still not figure out how to make plane that comfortably sleeps passengers during an overnight flight while being cost-friendly at the same time.

Look, I’m not being delusional here – I’m not asking for a geisha girl stewardess to come in my private suite (with bathroom) on my flight from London to Hong Kong and stick various things into her body for my enjoyment. I mean, I know such arrangements exist, but I have neither the finances to afford them nor the desire to pursue them. Mostly because I like boobies and Asian girls don’t have boobies – and the ones that do have boobies are not so much interested in a chubby bearded Irish guy and tend to lean more toward the LA Clippers/My penis is so advanced it can vote-types.

But for $600, you’d think they’d make things a little more comfortable (and I sat in a reclining exit row!). I didn’t sleep at all on the flight, save for at one point when I looked at my iPod and say that it was 2:28am, then looked back in what I thought was a few minutes to see it was 3:13am, so I grabbed about a 40 minute block of unconsciousness. Otherwise, nada.

So I’m done with red-eyes. I always talk myself into taking them, thinking they’re the most convenient, and this time, I say to myself, I’ll fall asleep on the plane. And it never, ever happens – I may arrive conveniently in the morning, but then my whole day is shot because I’m so tired.

So no more red-eyes. They are truly, truly hell. And the best hell ever, really.

DUYS

Speaking of hell, North Wildwood, New Jersey, the shore town my family and my entire neighborhood has spent summers in for decades, is starting to change. It seems that the guidos that have for years inhabited the shore towns of North Jersey are being priced out and making their way down to South Jersey, particularly North Wildwood. This is a shame, really; for generations upon generations, North Wildwood has been the summer home for 90% of the families from my neighborhood in South Philly (Second Street). But those guidos, they’re like cockroaches. Dumb, drunk, tweezed, teased cockroaches. And once they take over, they don’t leave.

Despites the presence of an alarming about of guidos and douchebags in the bars, the 10^th Annual “Drink Until You Shit” tour was another great success. Once again, no one shit (running it to three years in a row no one has pooped themselves on the tour, which is a shame), but we had around 100 people involved, wearing t-shirts and celebrating the drinking and shitting lifestyle. We had planned to name our friend Dan captain for the tour, not so much for his performance last year but as a lifetime achievement award for best embodying the spirit of the tour, but, true to form, Dan couldn’t be located. Like, for the whole weekend. I honestly don’t know if he’s been located since. So we had no captain this year.

For me, it was an up and down night. For the most part, I held it together, being in co-charge of the pub crawl and all and having to answer questions and be a good host. But once we hit the last bar, I really don’t remember much aside from sweating a whole bunch and, ultimately, making a turkey sandwich after coming home to find my little sister passed out on the floor of my aunt’s house. So she had a good night.

Every year, David (the DUYS co-founder) and I say it’s going to be our last year. The tenth would be a good one to go out on; it’s a nice number, and this year we lost a record amount of money on the t-shirts (since they were tye-dye and cost a fortune to make and we never make a profit anyway and we usually wind up getting too drunk to carry them any longer and so leave them in a bar). But with each passing year, I wonder if how we could ever put an end to DUYS. We’ve been around long enough that people know that the first Saturday after Fourth of July weekend is DUYS time, and seeing the happiness (and drunkenness) on so many people’s faces gives me great joy. So my prediction: there will be an 11^th DUYS. Be sure to keep your July 11, 2009 open.

Bar domination, part one

One of the things I’ve often wanted to do is go into a bar in the afternoon, possibly even when it opens, and sit there getting smashed until it closes. I knew I would do this eventually, but I never thought it’d be because I couldn’t see my friends’ new baby.

My friends Joe and Dani had a baby. It’s a boy, but I won’t give any more details, since I really don’t want this child mentioned on here so early in his life; if that’s not the very definition of “damning,” I don’t know what is. The kid was born the Sunday, the day after DUYS. I got to Boston on Monday night and asked if they wanted me to come to the hospital to see the baby. However, Dani and Joe were (understandably) tired and suggested I try the next day, as they’d be out of the hospital and home. No problem.

It’s weird on a number of levels when your friends have a baby, but in this case, I was in town only for a short while – all the way from Los Angeles, without a Boston visit scheduled again until March 2009 – and I wanted see the lil’ SOB, but I also wanted to be respectful of their privacy – Christ, they just had their first kid two days prior, after all. So on Tuesday, after showering and beating off and having run out of things to do, I texted Joe, inquiring about the baby, and he gave me the hold sign – they were home but not feeling it at the moment. I decided the best course of action would be to head to near where he lives – Boylston Street by the Pru – and kill time until I got the green light to see the lil’ guy. Joe said he’d hit me back in two hours (it was about 2:30pm when he said this).

It was very hot on Boylston, so I had walked less than a half block before I sought refuge in a bar, a sports pub unfortunately named McGreevey’s on the far western end of Boylston. It was just after three and the place was empty. I had had Anna’s for breakfast (a breakfast of champions, if I ever heard of one) and wasn’t hungry, but figured a nice pint of Guinness and the paper would help me kill some time until Joe got back to me. It was about 3pm.

Three and a half hours and several pints later, I heard from Joe, who said they were still not feeling any visitors. By this time I was pretty well in the bag and perfectly ok to sit there, nice and cozy, at the bar. So I texted my buddies Bill and Nevin and Site Guy Brendan, and by 8pm, the four of us were watching the All Star Game, pounding pints with grace and aplomb and definitely more than a little fear and anger about our real lives, which prevent us from doing this all day, every day, all the time.

We drank and ate and drank some more and I sat on the same bar stool, getting up only go to the bathroom, from 3pm until 1:30am, when the lights came on and we were asked to leave. My bar tab was a shocking $277 (including tip). Even more shocking was that all during the drink-a-thon, the first three-plus hours of which I spent alone, I did not get a single buy-back, not one free beer. I don’t want to say any more about this, because I’ll get so angry that I won’t be able to type for the next several hours.

So despite the travesty of the non-buy-back, Tuesday was an exceptional day, the easily the longest I’ve ever spent in a single bar (I think). While not a true open-to-close day, I think I did pretty well.

(And because I drank Guinness the whole day, I was not hungover the next day. However, my butt…well, let’s just say it didn’t make it. Not a good scene.)

29

Back in NYC, my birthday on Thursday night was spent much like I imagine most of my birthdays will be spent for the rest of my life: steak dinner with some friends, followed by a few whiskey drinks, followed by an aborted masturbation session in the shower because it’s too damn hot and I’m full of red meat and rye whiskey. This is the truest, most sincere paragraph I’ve ever written in this blog.

There was nothing exemplary to report about the birthday, aside from the good company of my friends Jeremy, Meredith, Nicole and Brendan and another stellar steak (with foie gras butter!) from Dylan Prime. But here it is: another year has gone by and I remain threesome-less. I know, I know – I’ve been complaining about this since the dawn of time (or at least, the beginning of this website). And true, I haven’t really been trying to make this happen; I’ve adopted an insouciant approach recently, thinking that if I act too cool for school for a threesome, I’ll start having several a week.

But honest to goodness, a legit goal is to pull off a threesome before my 30^th birthday. No idea how I’m going to go about this (aside from craiglist – “Chubby 29 year old sad and wants to fuck you and your friend or whatever. So sad inside.”), but I want to have a memory of three-way love to wank to after my Dylan Prime steak next July 17. Mark it down.

Bar domination, part two

On Friday afternoon, my buddy Mike had a half-day and suggested I meet him and our buddy Fran for drinks at 3pm at Pete’s Tavern. Never one to turn down such an offer, I agreed. In the cab, I was talking to my buddy Brian on the phone and told him I’d call him back in a little bit – I was going to have a few drinks and didn’t think it would last very long.

Whoops.

Mike and Fran and I hit it hard at Pete’s Tavern. Then our buddy Pat showed up. Then some of their buddies from work and my friend Meg joined the group. Then we moved over to 7B (real name: Horseshoe Bar) . I usually hate 7B because I feel like I’m in a bodega when I’m there: the booths are so close to the bar that they’re almost on top of each other, and things – the bar, the booths, the chairs – are packed so tightly together that if the bar’s even a little bit crowded, you’re better off peeing outside or under the table, because there’s no way you can get through everyone. But it wasn’t crowded on that Friday night and anyway we were rolling large, as my buddy Terrence and my brother, who was in town, met us out, as well as our friend Bryan.

You can probably guess how this one ended: my buddy Brian, who I told I’m call back shortly at 3pm, didn’t hear from me again until 5am, after a trip to Rosario’s after the bar closed. Brian didn’t answer since it was around 2am in LA and I’m told the message I left him consisted mostly of me chewing, sprinkled with a little bit of snorting, but hey – I’m a man of my word and I did call him back.

It was a glorious wonderful night. The only downside was that I was so crippled that the next day, Saturday night in NYC, I couldn’t even make it out. I guess this is what happens when you turn 29.

******

I’m leaving a number of things out, but I think you get the drift – I had a blast back on the east coast. And I look forward to doing all (or most of it) again in the fall.

(God, I miss NYC…)