Cookie Rookies

“Are you sitting down?!” was the phrase of choice Squall decided to open up a recent phone conversation with one day.

Now, while this common saying would more than likely cause anyone else’s heart to begin racing, my friends and I, especially the aforementioned Squall, are prone to use it before revealing topics that would be of little, if any, importance to normal humans. As I waited for him to tell me about his latest “Halo 3″ level conquest, his discovery of a nearby Sonic Drive-In, or something similar that would justify his inquiry, he followed up with “Guess what I found online?!”

“What?,” I asked, my brain unable to come up with anything more clever thanks to my constant visits to homestarrunner.com (about the adventures of a mentally challenged marshmallow and his friends), subservientchicken.com (about a guy in a chicken suit who will do anything you request), fark.com (about a listing of all the day’s news events, especially those involving links to humorous online videos about cats committing suicide), and all of the other online content Squall had found for me over the years.

“The Great American Cookie Company sugar cookie recipe!,” he exclaimed with the same amount of joy one might experience following a lottery win.

Explanation time, I presume. The Great American Cookie Company is a chain of cookie stands operated in malls all across the country, particularly in Georgia. Up until 2004, a branch of the company was in operation within the hallways of King of Prussia Mall, a local shopping edifice at which my friends and I often mallratted. While I personally neglected to consume 99.9% of the snack eatery’s menu, its pink-sprinkle-coated sugar cookies always managed to flatter my taste buds in such a way that the 50-mile round trip to the mall seemed more than justified. I have no idea what their secret is, but these sugary sweets are one of the extremely limited number of things that are actually good about America. Tragically, the mall closed down the cookie stand and eventually replaced it with a branch of the ice cream shop “Cold Stone Creamery,” which my friends and I have vowed never to patronize, and not only because it has the word “creamery” in its name. Fortunately, I was soon able to locate another “Great American Cookie Company” stand in the Voorhees Town Center, a small New Jersey shopping compound located about 25 miles and a Delaware River crossing toll away from home. Now, however, Squall was in possession of what he claimed was an actual recipe for our favorite snack food written by an employee of one of the stores. It seemed too terrific to be true…and it was.

See, neither I nor any of my friends are what you would call seasoned chefs. Most of the food that we are (somewhat) capable of making at home is either easily microwaved or poured into a bowl with milk; the only exception to this rule is our knowledge of how to prepare Ramen noodles, which I believe is a trait that everyone who attended college in the late 1990s onward naturally developed out of necessity. So when it came to using the unfamiliar appliance my mom calls an “oven” to “bake” these cookies from raw ingredients, Squall and I were rather lost. I must admit that, in all fairness, I had the upper hand in our quest, thanks to the days of my social-life-lacking younger years when I would help my mom bake Christmas cookies so as to avoid helping my dad string up the house’s exterior light display in frigid December temperatures. This is not to be confused with my apparent social-life-lacking OLDER years, wherein I and my fellow twentysomething friend spend Saturdays making cookies based on Internet recipes. Recalling how my mother and I would divide up the kitchen duties (she would do the ingredient gathering, mixing, cutting, baking, and overall preparation whilst I would eat raw cookie dough right from the bowl), I applied said duty divisions to my and Squall’s current project. To give you culinary types out there a hearty laugh, here is a mere sampling of some of the statements made by us:

“What the hell is ’shortening’?”

“I’ve never heard of an ‘electric’ mixer.”

“It says we have to ‘chill’ the dough for an hour; does that mean we stick it in the freezer?”

Despite an initial fright of the electric mixer, Squall and I managed to get through the basic mixing and raw cookie dough eating phases of the scenario with surprise ease. Cutting the dough into (shapes that vaguely resembled) circles with, honestly, the mouth of a drinking glass, we were finally able to place our soon-to-be-cookies onto a cookie sheet and place them into the oven, immediately after which we transferred our soon-to-be-cookies onto a cookie sheet that actually fit in the oven. After 7-8 minutes, we pulled the tray back out of the oven, ready to see if we had succeeded in replicating the “Great American Cookie Company” recipe, despite the fact that said company does this and nothing else day in and day out while we were relying on a recipe from the Internet written by someone named “Nicole” who honestly inserted the phrase “I think” into its text. As per my tongue, our sweets may have gone into the oven tasting like raw cookie dough loaded with sugar, but came out tasting like…

(Drum roll)

…raw cookie dough loaded with sugar, only slightly warmer.

Yes, our effort sadly ended with our sixteen full-size cookies and eight cookie fragments (made from a recipe claiming to produce 36 sweets) tasting no more like “Great American Cookie Company” cookies than spaghetti.

Maybe we should just stick with Ramen noodles.

However, I am proud to report that, to my knowledge, neither one of us contracted a raw-cookie-dough-ingesting-related stomach virus and, being the persistent optimists we are, it is a safe bet that Squall and I will be spending the next Saturday engaging in…you guessed it…a trip to the Voorhees Town Center’s sole cookie stand.

To wring Nicole’s neck.

Yes, I Have a Freddy Krueger Statue

Those of you who have known me for quite a while will no doubt recall that, at one point, I used to be an exceptionally cheap bastard.

If something was over $5, I considered it way too expensive and neglected to spend my money on it, opting instead to spend it on a $12 entree at a local Japanese restaurant, which I felt was a much wiser decision. Those of you who have tasted said restaurant’s fried rice and meat will no doubt agree with me.

I guess there’s really no one to blame for my near-legendary thriftiness than, of course, my former job. Keeping me on a part-time, benefits-lacking $10 per hour pay rate for the better part of three years…all the while telling me that they were working on a promotion to full-time…I had to make do with what little I had:

–I drove one of the crappiest cars known to man, which is saying something when one considers the other excuses for automobiles that I have owned since my late 1990s drivers license acquisition. When a car frightens my DAD into saying, “I thought the entire back end was ready to fall off!” after merely backing it ten feet into our driveway, I knew that I was blessed with a shitty vehicle.

–When I was still a few DAYS away from returning home from my early 2006 trip to Hawaii, I took a look around at my luggage, whose ratio of dirty laundry to clean laundry had to be something like 80:1. Once my friend Squall informed me that the washing machine unit in his house cost a whopping 50 cents to operate, I elected to wait until I got home to my family’s free washer/dryer set to do my laundry.

–My friend Navy once offered me $1 to dance like a monkey in front of the aforementioned Squall’s parents right in their living room. I obliged, and not a single person present has looked at me the same way since.

–The same Navy once offered me another $1 to give up my seat to him at Dennys while we waited to be called to our booth by the waitress in the restaurant’s front lobby. I was no Rosa Parks, so again I obliged.

I’m sure my friends not only remember, but will be happy to share with you, countless further examples of my skinflint days that I have since blocked out from memory in a futile effort to preserve my dignity and chances at securing a girlfriend.

Anyway, once I started working for my current job, I found that my long-honed skills of being able to sit motionless in front of a computer screen for eight straight hours and appear to be hard at work were worth a hell of a lot more than a part time rate of pay equal to what Manhattan McDonald’s cashiers earn. Not only does my current position pay better, but it also includes a nifty benefits package, meaning that I no longer have to survive (should you choose to use that term) on the uber-basic health care plan that I was on before and that I had to pay for out of my own pocket. I forget what the hell the name of the company was (which should give you an indication of its widespread effectiveness), but all I recall was that I possessed extremely basic coverage. Essentially, I had to be either dead or worse to have any fraction of coverage bestowed upon my person; other than that, my monthly payments resulted in maybe $5 off a co-pay, which means that, out of the entire doctor’s visit, my insurance covered the part wherein the nurse applied the blood pressure cuff to my arm.

Armed with this new annual salary and not cursed with…er, in possession of…children, I found a lot of extra cash coming my way with each subsequent paycheck. I was actually able to SAVE money…and not “save” in the sense that I was used to in the past (which was ordering the medium-sized Burger King value meal as opposed to the king-sized meal), but rather able to deposit THREE-DIGIT sums into my bank account. Even after that and paying off my monthly bills, I still had plenty of cash left over to make purchases of virtually anything I wanted.

And purchase I did.

As I look around my place, the amount of objects I purchased in 2006…shit, just the LATTER half of 2006…far outnumbers the amount of possessions that have called my room their home anytime before then. Included among these items:

–Not one, but TWO, six-foot-tall cardbaord cutouts: one of Brandon Routh as Superman, and one of Michael Keaton as Batman. The funny thing about these is the fact that I once chastised not only my sister, but also Squall, for making their own life-size cardboard cutout purchases in the past of Johnny Depp’s “Jack Sparrow” character from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise and Sarah Michelle Gellar’s “Buffy” character from the canceled TV series of the same name, respectively.

–Not one, but TWO, talking Napoleon Dynamite figurines (though they differ in size).

–An Energizer Bunny flashlight novelty.

–Two toy robots, neither of which work all that well…and neither of which I have ever seen advertised before.

–A plush “Mr. Peanut” figure

Nothing…and I mean NOTHING…in my possession compares with the purchase I made on October 28, 2006 however. Dubbed by yours truly as “the coolest and most ridiculous purchase I ever made,” the object in the upcoming photograph is easily my most prized treasure…at least for right now until something even more ridiculous/cool/expensive catches my eye and debit card.

Ladies and gentlemen…

I present you with…

My very own 6-FOOT-TALL TALKING FREDDY KRUEGER STATUE!!!!

Miraculously fitting into the rather tiny bedroom that acted as my residence at the time, this plastic, rubber, metal, and cloth representation of Robert Englund’s beloved character from the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series watches over me and the rest of my junk at all times.

THE STORY OF FREDDY’S ACQUISITION

I really don’t know why I wanted Freddy in the first place…

Oh, wait. Yeah I do.

BECAUSE HE WAS FOR SALE!

Wandering around one of the plentiful “Halloween Adventure” stores that pops up every year around mid-September, I spotted this mechanical version of one of my childhood idols guarding the store’s entrance, its sensor applied so as to hopefully scare the Gap bags out of unsuspecting shoppers’ hands. Of course, I had seen the prop in years past, but something on it this year struck my eye. No, it wasn’t one of the four fake plastic razor nails on the figure’s right hand, but rather a…

PRICE TAG.

“Freddie,” it read, raping my brain with an incorrect spelling of Mr. Krueger’s moniker. What was he, a blonde cheerleader? “$249.99″ the tag finished.

Wow. Even for someone making a comfortable living wage, that is a somewhat extensive sum of moola to ask. I mean, Freddy Krueger and at least 75% of the projects he was involved with were indeed awesome…but was it all worth a price greater than that of my rather advanced digital camera? Shit, Halloween Adventure was asking for HALF of what certain laptop computers cost circa Christmas…and I’m highly doubtful that Freddy can do even a FRACTION of what your modern laptop can (though I suspect he can run Windows Vista just as well).

Then, I remembered something.

Once October 31 gives way to the first of November, every last piece of merchandise in Halloween Adventure stores automatically has its price sliced in half. The further away from Halloween we get, the more the prices drop.

Freddy may not have been worth $250 (plus tax), but he sure as fuck was worth $125 (plus tax). Hell, I pay about that amount each month for my student loans, and the “job” history provided by my wondrous bachelor’s degree in broadcast communications is proof positive that a college education is an even bigger waste of cash than a talking prop just an inch or two taller than me. Thus, I figured that I would calmly wait out the remaining week or so until Halloween had come and gone, happily stroll into Halloween Adventure at opening time on November 1, and nonchalantly lug my new 6-foot-tall toy past the array of bewildered senior citizens that fill all shopping malls at that hour of the day. He would then lounge in my car’s passenger seat while I worked, confusing/amusing/frightening the hell out of any of my company’s co-workers who had the double misfortune of working 9am-5pm and parking next to my car.

Yeah, it didn’t exactly work out that way.

On Saturday, October 28, 2006, I waltzed into the Halloween Adventure in which I had first seen Freddy. I was keeping sporadic tabs on him, making certain that there was no one out there crazy enough to plunk down a quarter grand for him before my cheap ass could plunk down half that amount in a few days’ time. On one of these checks during the week, I even had the employees behind the counter assure me that no one had looked interested in purchasing the figurine at all, essentially promising that it would be there on November 2006’s debut day, though at a fraction (specifically, the 1/2 fraction) of its asking price.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.

See, I was under the impression that November 1…and the signs dotting Halloween Adventure stores’ windows that read “50% off entire store! Sale begins November 1!”…actually occurred on, you know, November 1. Now, maybe I fell into some sort of a time continuum or something, but apparently, this year, November 1 was observed on October 28.

While the store assured shoppers that costumes were still full price, all props…including those 6 feet in height that boomed with Robert Englund’s digitized voice…were now 50% off.

So imagine my shock when I saw Freddy still standing there, only with a giant 50% off sign hanging from his neck…

…and a handwritten “Sold” sticker attached to said sign.

Whoa. Wait! What the fuck? What happened?!

My friend Hightower can confirm this: that Saturday was supposed to be spent acquiring little more than Great American Cookie Company brand cookies from a slowly dying mall in nearby suburban New Jersey we often patronize for that sole reason.

Because I was the driver on this journey, however, that day became a quest for Freddy. I was going to acquire a Freddy statue no matter how much it cost! After picking up Hightower and wildly informing him of the emergency task at hand, he warily gripped whatever he could in my car as we set out towards the aforementioned Garden State shopping compound, yours truly the lunatic behind the wheel.

Our first stop was at a Halloween Adventure in Pennsylvania, sandwiched in a shopping center between a Dollar Tree and a Wal-Mart. I took this as a good sign, for regular patrons of such a region surely wouldn’t have the money to blow on talking Freddy Krueger statues.

Well, as blank stares from three different store employees told us, said Halloween Adventure had never gotten any such figures in stock. The one cashier, who appeared to have learned English by studying the speaking habits of “Mongo” from the “Heathcliff” cartoon, actually remarked that such an item sounded “pretty neat.”

Yeah, asshole, I don’t need an obvious adjective, I need a fucking statue costing about the same as my digital camera!

Upon crossing the state line into New Jersey, we pulled in at another Halloween Adventure that had taken over the interior of an drugstore. Snickering at the prospect of finding my Freddy statue under a giant sign reading “Pharmacy” or something, we made our way inside. My face fell once the employee there informed us that they had sold their one and only statue.

Hightower’s face fell upon realizing that he had to re-enter the car with me, still in my increasingly frustrated and angry state of mind.

We made our way to the Halloween-Adventure-lacking mall, where I purchased a couple thousand cookies and grudgingly munched them as we perused the mall’s waning offerings. Normally, these cookies and their unique recipe (they taste like sugary cookie dough) cause me to experience a joy equal to that of orgasm, but that day, I wanted…nay, NEEDED…that prop. If I (and Hightower) had to visit every single Halloween Adventure store in the continental United States, we would do so, as neither of us have anything really important planned for the next, oh, 50-70 years aside from work and maybe a few more cookie runs.

Returning to Pennsylvania, we made our way to King of Prussia Mall, located in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, which, for those of you unaware, is a small suburb roughly 15 miles outside of Philadelphia that consists of pretty much the King of Prussia Mall. Containing numerous buildings, it is one of the largest malls in the country and easily the largest one on the East Coast. To give you an idea of its mass appeal, not only does its PARKING LOT have a TRAFFIC LIGHT in it, but several fucking HOTELS surround the property. That’s right: HOTELS. And there is NOTHING else in the immediate vicinity other than the mall and the shopping centers that sprung up around it in the years following the complex’s completion, hoping to cash in on its appeal.

And it was here…a mall that people apparently make the cornerstone of their VACATION…that I hoped to acquire my Freddy statue. A mall wherein $250 is what a majority of the patrons spend on haircuts is where I hoped to acquire an apparently rare Halloween artifact…because apparently, decaying malls and refurbished drug stores in lower middle class new Jersey and Pennsylvania towns are fresh out of such amenities!

Parking at the first spot I saw (parking at ANY suburban mall on a Saturday is about as easily done as striking a match on a bar of soap), Hightower and I made our way through the rather uneven parking lot architecture and into the mall.

We entered Halloween Adventure.

Beyond the plethora of dickheads and their failed abortions who decided that waiting until three days before Halloween was a good time to purchase costumes, there stood another Freddy statue, its plastic eyeballs staring at me from the back of the store.

Only this one wasn’t wearing a “sold” sticker.

Nor was it wearing a “50% off sign.”

Instead, it had one sticker fastened to the inside of its hat brim:

“Freddie statue not for sale.”

Uh, what the fuck? Yes it is.

I commandeered a cashier and, rather animated, explained my desire to relieve the premises of this statue for whatever price he deemed necessary. I explained that sister stores all across the region sold these to just-as-psychotic customers and now it was this psychotic consumer’s turn.

He went to his supervisor and explained my situation to him. The supervisor made his way to me. He didn’t make his way to Hightower, as I believe he was trying to distance himself from me by this point.

“You want to buy this statue? We have them right over there.”

The motherfucker pointed to a motherfucking small PYRAMID of boxes…each one of which was stuffed with a brand new Freddy statue! Moreover, lying atop the boxes was a bright yellow “50% off all Props” sign!

I won my 8th grade spelling bee.

I won a Halloween contest at work just that year.

I have graduated from high school AND college, achieving honors both times.

But never in my life was I prouder than when I was pushing the rather heavy representation of Bobby Englund to the front register for (half-price) purchase. And that damned thing was HEAVY.

But worth every penny. And every subsequent backache.

To this day, a life-sized, non-cardboard representation of one of the greatest horror characters of all time stands in my dwelling. I have lived at three different addresses thus far, and Freddy has followed me to each and every one. Despite the fact that one of his pre-programmed sayings includes the phrase “Trick or Treat,” this thing is with me year-round.

Freddy is decorated for each and every holiday, birthday, you name it, between now and my death/day my parents and/or spouse force me to sell it.

UPDATE

Slightly over one year later, on November 1, 2007, I acquired Freddy’s brother: a 6-foot-tall, sound-spewing Jason Voorhees of “Friday the 13th” fame. Both characters continue to stand next to each other to this very day.

Secret Military Base Makes Notebooks

Norwood, Pennsylvania is not really a town that the general U.S. populace reacts to upon hearing its name. However, I bet that I may face certain corporal punishment at the hands of camouflaged government workers just for mentioning this suburban Philadelphia town’s name. I say this (in 24 words, apparently) because one of Norwood’s suburban legends brought to my attention by my friends Squall and Navy.

According to them and several unnamed town residents they claim to have talked to, the heavily wooded Norwood Park at the end of their street has far more to it than just trees and local teens having sex. There is allegedly a secret military base deep in the woods whose occupants actually shoot at curious parties brave enough to take a look. Since I would like to see many of my future birthdays, I opted not to check Squall and Navy’s facts for accuracy, instead deciding to take their word for it…just like I did with Squall’s additional claim to have seen several full-size TANKS rumble down his street one day en route to the base. I bring up this base’s supposed existence, even though it does not appear on any area maps (of course, neither does the Norwood Arbys, which DOES actually exist), to support a claim later on in the column. So just keep it in mind as I fly off on another tangent in the upcoming paragraphs.

Before you, the reader, sees my complete column in its entirety, it must first go through several stages of development. As long as I have been writing, I first pen a rough draft of the column in a small notebook or journal before transferring it to the SpellCheck-enhanced computer. I own several books full of my columns’ drafts as well as many more unfinished pieces (try as I might, I can NOT complete a full-length column on April Fool’s Day for some reason). Anyhow, Book #Eleventy is what I am currently working on and is also the location of this very column’s original draft, complete with my authentic horrid penmanship brought to life by the black ink of a $2 CVS pen that is slowly drying out thanks to my penchant for wordiness. This book is a standard size wireless ruled notebook bound by a tough cover colored a really ugly shade of green/yellow, not unlike the color you expect to find in your sink after hocking up a large wad of mucus. The words “Record” and “Federal Supply Service,” in addition to a hyphenated series of numbers, appear on the front cover. I found the book in a file cabinet in my basement and never knew where it came from until I bumped into “Modell.”

“Modell” is a guy I worked with back in 1998-1999 at a regional sporting goods chain store in a nearby mall. He and I have of course long since moved on since the last year of the 20th century; I am now in the communications field and Modell has joined the Marines. He was on leave (or possibly AWOL) when I bumped into him in the mall; we got to chatting when he noticed my book. Asking where I got it, he didn’t seem too impressed with my file cabinet response; he explained to me that my type of book was manufactured by the government and is not sold in stores. I explained to him that my mom used to work for the Philadelphia Navy Yard and thus probably decided to hoard this puke-green product of her tax money. Modell seemed to buy that and went on to tell me that he and his fellow servicemen have several of these books and are often asked by their non-military-serving friends where they got them. The way he made it sound, this type of book was Tickle-Me-Elmo to people employed outside government offices. The Holy Grail of notebooks, if you will.

That’s when it struck me.

Maybe this secret military base in Norwood manufactures these putridly-shaded notebooks! You might ask why our government would go to all the trouble to construct a secret base in suburban Pennsylvania just to manufacture notebooks. And my answer is: because it’s the GOVERNMENT. It is a large, complex entity that no one understands (kind of like hockey playoffs)! It is the entity responsible for “classifying” every last document and piece of intelligence it comes across so that the moronic public won’t see it…then forces this same moronic public to fully fund its existence. It is the entity whose decentralization into a mess of different parts managed to come up with both “guilty” AND “not guilty” verdicts for O.J. Simpson. It is the entity that elected GEORGE W. BUSH; I sure as hell didn’t do it!

Thus concludes my latest collection of wordy rants. Just remember that if you ever happen to be in the Norwood, Pennsylvania area, never wander too far back into the woods of Norwood Park (at least not without a flak jacket). Our government employees have notebooks to make and can’t be bothered with shooting at you all the time. So just shut up and give them your money.

Wright Night

Those of you who are familiar with the cameo roles in the movies “Loser,” “So I Married An Axe Murderer,” and “Half-Baked” will no doubt recognize Steven Wright, provided I point him out to you and say “That’s him.” However, unbeknownst to you and many others outside of Wright himself and his close friends, there is much more to this man than simply bit parts in truly forgettable movies. Wright is an Academy-Award-winning, Grammy-nominated, Larry-Fine-of-”3 Stooges”-fame-resembling stand-up comedian who has been honing his craft ever since the 1970s, meaning that today he gets paid more per one-liner than I do in an entire month. But don’t get me wrong; I am not (entirely) bitter towards Wright’s success. Thanks to my dad and his taping of one of the comic’s HBO specials, I became a big fan of Steven Wright and his trademark deadpan delivery style mixed with truly unique life observations that many everyday humans would not notice without the aid of strong PCP. Thus, I was thrilled when I got the opportunity to see one of his comedy performances live back in 2005, especially upon learning that my dad was going to be paying for both of our tickets.

The last (and only) time I attended a comedy performance was in New York City, when Squall and I paid a Saturday evening visit to one of midtown Manhattan’s comedy clubs that featured some “comically clever” misspelling of the word “Laugh” as well as a homosexual emcee who managed to make his sexual preference only a mere 98% of his joke fodder. It was one of those places that featured a bill of (they hope) up-and-coming comedians that the club management trusts so much to entertain their audiences that they impose a mandatory 2-drink minimum. By the time the last few comics reached the microphone, taking care to wipe it clean of the emcee’s “faggot”-laden jokes, the crowd was, in addition to $27 poorer, extremely wasted and thus willing to laugh hysterically at just about anything. The emcee could have closed out the show by reading the white pages aloud and still would have warranted cries of “encore!” upon completion.

Steven Wright’s performance, however, was much different, and not only because it was actually funny and original and not chock full of homosexuality jokes. It was held at the (drink-minimum-free) Grand Opera House in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, whose liveliness scene on the Sunday night the show was held was rivaled only by that of Toledo, Ohio. I can’t even put into words what it feels like, as someone who is eager to undertake as many exciting life experiences as possible before age sets in, to live so close to a city like Wilmington, Delaware. I may equate it to the feeling you get after realizing that the Hershey bar you just ingested was, in actuality, hardened pit bull feces. Nevertheless, my dad and I donned our best K-Mart fashions upon hearing the words “Opera House” and ultimately joined the other members of the t-shirt-and-jeans-clad audience. I felt stupid. My dad, who had just come from watching the Philadelphia Eagles’ first loss of the season after an impressive undefeated head start, felt drunk.

Promptly at the show’s 7PM start time, I, my father, and the sellout crowd filling the three massive tiers of the posh venue’s interior found ourselves basked in the presence of…our program booklets. Steven Wright, who must have overseen operations for a major metropolitan mass transit system before getting into show business, must have taken a cue from that calling and thus wound up onstage at around 7:06PM…also clad in jeans. For the next two hours, however, we audience members forgot about everything in our lives outside of bladder control as our favorite “So I Married an Axe Murderer” cameo role player filled the air with such monotonously-spoken thoughts as:

“Rate my insanity level on a scale from 1 to 10, 6 being the highest.”

“I took a lie detector test. No I didn’t.”

“Do you suppose if they asked George Washington for his ID, he just pulled out a quarter?”

“What’s another word for ‘thesaurus’?”

“Have you ever seen an Indian midget? Don’t look at me like I’m an asshole. Oh, I forgot. You’re not allowed to say ‘midget’ anymore. You’re also not allowed to say ‘Indian’ anymore. You know what you can still say, though? ‘Eat me.’”

“My friend has a trophy wife, but it wasn’t first place.”

And so on, entertaining the mostly-middle-aged, mostly-drunk-from-watching-the-earlier-football-game, entirely-white crowd. When it was all over, my dad and I left with a much deeper understanding of, well, requests for George Washington’s ID. With the exception of the parking garage pulling its own brand of comedy by having only one of its four tollgates open for the huge exiting-at-the-same-time crowd, I and my dad had a superb time. Even though we realized, deep down, that as we both trudged off to mediocre-paying jobs the next day, our combined $62 that we spent to see Mr. Wright would probably just about cover what he may have spent on a post-performance bar tab.

Or fresh PCP supply.

Freaks-Giving Eve

Before Thanksgiving Eve 2004, the last time I had been to central Philadelphia’s “Shampoo” nightclub was for a Halloween costume party. I had gone as Jim Carrey’s “Ace Ventura” character while Squall added a folded index card to the collar of his black wardrobe and went as a priest. It was enjoyable, except for the 30something-year-old fairy who mistook Squall and I as fairies.

Recently, I and Squall, along with our friends Navy and SuperFan, decided to return to the popular downtown venue on its weekly “Goth/80s night” which, we later figured out, failed to differ from the Halloween costume party, attire-wise. Specifically, our outing occurred on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which is of course one of the biggest “party nights” of the calendar year, a day when people all across the country imbibe enough alcohol to float an oil tanker on, possibly to prepare for having to deal with extended family members during the following day’s turkey feast. Naturally (meaning stupidly), my then-24-year-old ass continued its staunch sobriety streak, which of course meant that I got to witness, for the umpteenth time, Squall, Navy, and SuperFan each exchanging the better part of $50 for slurred speech and eventual hangovers.

We arrived at the club shortly after 10PM, which also happened to be the numerical figure of our cover charge. As nighttime hours progressed whilst friends’ livers (further) deteriorated, we became aware that the dress shirts, nice sweaters, and khaki pants of our collective wardrobe slowly but surely pigeonholed us in a minority that consisted of, well, us. Apparently, the dress code that night called for clothes…or anything somewhat resembling clothes…of any kind whatsoever. One fellow I saw there had chosen to don himself in a black outfit complete with a puffy white shirt, not unlike what you would normally see Declaration of Independence signers dressed in. Another looked like he had shopped for the evening’s attire at the same location Tim Burton had purchased Johnny Depp’s leather, zipper-encrusted “Edward Scissorhands” costume from. However, it was the people donning themselves in so-called “Goth” fashions who made up the majority. I saw no trace whatsoever of 1980s attire. Not a single sideways ponytail, leg warmer, “Smurfs” T-shirt, etc. Nothing.

Remember those kids in high school who wore lacy black outfits all the time, even in the pool, and had faces that were so pale that they regularly blended in with poster board? I sure as hell do, and I avoided them like George W. Bush would an IQ test because I was scared to death that one of them would put some kind of spell on me upon learning that I was unable to name at least three Marilyn Manson songs. Well, these (excuses for) people, whom we ignorant, jeans-clad, suburban high schoolers affectionately called “freaks,” filled every available and unavailable corner of Shampoo that night in a giant “Fuck You” to the building’s fire safety capacity rules. In between tequila sunrises, Squall sadly looked around at the 18-and-over crowd and remarked, “You would think that people would have given up dressing and acting like that the older they got.” I would have blinked in surprise if I wasn’t deeply engrossed in a game on my cell phone, for the above statement was one of the most insightful and truthful thoughts to have ever been uttered by Squall, drunk or sober!

As we squeezed our way through the club’s multiple dance floors, all of which resembled the top deck of the Titanic when the last lifeboat was leaving, Squall and I conveniently forgot the fact that we willingly made the 20-mile round trip here and that no one held a gun to our heads upon paying admission when we decided that this wasted outing was all Navy’s fault. Apparently (which means “according to drunken claims made by Squall”), Navy took great pleasure in attending Goth-themed parties such as these. How did he reach this logical deduction? Maybe it was due to the fact that, back when we were deciding what to do on this famed Wednesday, Navy subtly hinted, “Dude, we should go to Shampoo because it’s Goth night and there’s all these hot Goth girls there.” Looking back, I can’t say as I recall seeing many “hot” girls, Goth or not, primarily because Shampoo, which doubles as a gay hotspot some nights, was chock full of, for lack of a better term, humans whose genders weren’t easily identifiable. This did not seem to faze our chum Navy, as the non-Navy three of us regularly saw him downing drink after drink while watching groups of Goth people sitting around and doing the same. He got a tad irritated when I pointed out that he could have done the exact same thing at any local shopping mall for free and thus felt compelled to relieve his drunken irritability towards my insight later on at South Philadelphia’s Penrose Diner, when he helped break up a fistfight between two other drunken patrons. He chastised Navy, SuperFan, and I for our negative outlook on the evening, claiming to have made out/danced/slept with hordes of Goth girls, conveniently when none of us were around.

All in all, the night at Shampoo was definitely an interesting one and, despite my rants, I definitely plan to return there once I become hooked on marijuana and thus fit in more.

Odd-Vertising

Today (Wednesday), I will be focusing my thoughts on the ever-growing popular concept of advertising (as evidenced in the latter two “Austin Powers” movies). Specifically, I would like to call attention to some of our nation’s most bizarre forms of ads or, as I like to call it because it sounds clever and witty, “odd-vertising.” This piece will discuss three places I recently saw advertisements that I deemed odd. Keep in mind, however, that there is a fine line between what constitutes an oddly-placed ad and what is simply a desperately-placed ad, just like there is a fine line between quiet sanity and homicidal rage, which I myself am about to cross if the crazy bastard sitting across from me on the train as I write these words doesn’t stop talking to the damn window every ten seconds. For example, people may view an ad placed during the world network premiere of “Alexander” as odd or bizarre, when in all reality it is really nothing more than a desperate and pathetic move. Also, the fact that wireless phone service companies agree to sponsor movie theater messages telling you to silence your cell phones is not odd, but rather just plain stupid.

The first form of odd-vertising I saw was at a local diner, which was a part of my home township until a fire in its kitchen gave the nearby Dennys the upper hand in immediate area restaurants. As you are probably aware, buildings gutted by fire normally have their windows boarded up with large wooden slabs in the days, months, eras, etc. following the inferno. I never understood the point behind this, seeing as how wood is rather flammable and could easily be re-ignited by forgotten smoldering embers that the firefighters overlooked in their rush to quell the blaze so they could get back to drinking at the station. At least, I never understood the point of boarded-up windows until recently: to advertise the wood’s contractor. Seriously. The wooden slabs boarding up the windows of the township’s (former) local diner is prominently stamped with the name and number of a contractor. I’m not exactly sure what audience this contractor is hoping to seize, but, by the same token, it is a pretty ingenious way to show off exactly what he can do. I mean, he won’t get a a lot of calls for, say, building a house thanks to this form of “odd-vertising.”

I came across Example #2 while urinating…meaning not only did I earn another form of odd-vertising to enhance my point, but also earned the “Most Disgusting Sentence Beginning” Award, which was formerly held by the writer of the screenplay for “American Beauty,” which, if you have seen the Oscar-winning flick, has as its first sentence of dialogue “There I was, masturbating in the shower.” Nevertheless, the odd form of advertising in this instance was located on, seriously, a urinal pad. It wasn’t for a product but rather was the bland 1980s-era public service message “Say No To Drugs” followed by a 1-800 number in case, I don’t know, someone who the pisser knows says “yes” to drugs. No (further) offense, but if you take suggestions and phone numbers from a urinal pad, you have definitely got to be on SOMETHING not made from legal substances. Besides, doesn’t the mere fact that you’re literally pissing on the slogan pretty much kill the intent of the message?

The final form of odd-vertising that I can currently think of caught my eye at South Philadelphia’s Wachovia Spectrum several years back. I was there finishing up my self-guided walk-through tour of Lynton Harris’ “Nightmares on Broad Street” Halloween attraction which had used the sporting arena as its home base for most of October 2004. Striding quickly past the “Nightmares on Broad Street” souvenir vendors lining the Spectrum’s concourse (where the tour coincidentally ended), I spotted a rather oddly-colored turnstile, which is of course that revolving three-pronged object seen at the gates of most high-crowd places. Closer inspection revealed that the turnstile’s three prongs were actually covered with “Philadelphia Inquirer” and “Philadelphia Daily News” logos; these are obviously two large newspapers here in the City of Brotherly Love that apparently feel the need to corner the turnstile-passing-through market. I cannot recall any instance wherein I or anything human made their choice of newspaper based upon what they observed on the oversized counter granting them access to their overpriced sporting event.

In conclusion, I invite everyone, living and dead, to share with me any and all forms of oddly-placed ads you have come across while strolling around town or urinating. Sell-out nation that we are, I honestly doubt that advertisers did not stop at simply turnstiles, urinal pads, and boarded-up windows.

Protected Parking Meters

Drunken binges.

These alcohol-induced bouts of rather hilarious activity are what many suburbanites count on for amusement in their extremely dull existence. It’s interesting how this concept is as memorable to the actual drunk as any given thing he or she learned in 7th grade…whereas sober people who were there to witness the episode are able to recall each individual detail for CENTURIES. This is one of the reasons I never touched a drink throughout college; I love a good laugh (and video keepsake) at the misfortunes and legal hassles of others whose drinking could single-handedly keep Betty Ford in business. Also, one of my friend Squall’s more serious drinking binges…one which forced him to curl into the fetal position on the floor and whimper…resulted in my successfully talking him out of $10. And while a 2004 binge performed by my proudly Irish friend Navy, who has been shitfaced from May 2002 all the way through, say, tomorrow, did not result in any personal financial gain, I did manage to squeeze the following column out of it. So here goes.

He opened with the sentence “Dude, I got so trashed the other night…”, which, again, has been the phrase he had pretty much begun ALL of his sentences with since the theatrical release of the first “Spider-Man” film. While the tale ended with Navy getting the crap kicked out of him by a local friend and waking up to find himself passionately hugging a grill, it was his walk to the aforementioned friend’s house that intrigued my pen and I. Apparently, he had gotten into ANOTHER fight earlier that evening while walking down the street to his suburban Philadelphia house. Who did he fight, you may ask, unless of course you read the title of this column or the following three-letter sentence struck the corner of your eye?

A parking meter.

Yes, Navy, an individual who hadn’t owned a car in years at that point, picked a fight with a parking meter…and won, a fact he boasts about with an amount of pride you would expect to be emitted from a Super-Bowl-winning field goal kicker as opposed to a drunken suburbanite who just annihilated a parking meter. I’m not certain as to WHY he did it; perhaps it was because of the time when, during his residency in downtown Philadelphia, he had parked his car (when he had one) at a meter, only to have it towed to an impound yard when police officials placed a “No Parking” sign on the meter AFTER HIS CAR HAD BEEN PARKED THERE. Whatever the reason, he was rather full of pride about the incident…pride which I chose not to destroy by bringing up the fact that, more often than not, fights picked with inanimate objects usually result in said inanimate object horribly losing, the only exception involving a mentally challenged student who took on (and apparently lost to) a table in Riti Sped’s politically incorrect yet rather hilarious “Tard Blog” website. Anyway, as Navy walked away from his coin-collecting victim, the quasi-thinkable happened.

“About 400 cops showed up!”

After sobering, he concluded that the meter must have had some sensor that alerts remote police units that blitzed early-20-somethings are currently beating the shit out of it. This really irritated Navy, for he recalled that, when his car was stolen, it took FOUR PHONE CALLS to the local authorities, who STILL entered the crime into their records wrong. “But beat up a parking meter and every cop in town shows up in 30 seconds,” he sulked. Although a shocking and somewhat implausible tale altogether, the fact that every squad officer in the vicinity showed up instantaneously to rescue what may or may not be the means in which their Christmas bonuses are collected doesn’t surprise me. We lived in suburbia at the time, where police officers have their patrol shifts filled with extreme boredom and anger at the fact that they have had to get their asses kicked in the Police Academy, only to wind up in a collection of southeastern Pennsylvania cul-de-sacs performing such heroic, crime-fighting maneuvers as chasing away mallrats and, well, saving the lives of parking meters. I guess it goes without saying that the swift police response to the Navy vs. Meter match took place less than a half-mile from the town’s 24-hour Dunkin’ Donuts.

In case you’re wondering, Navy was never caught for the attack, meaning that, each time he gets drunk (i.e. each time that the day’s temperature is recorded using numbers), no parking meter around is safe. As for the victim, another was installed the very next day by town officials. Hey, bonuses are at stake!

I Can’t Handle the Tooth!

I flew on a plane a little over a month after September 11.

I’ve ridden several roller coasters boasting themselves to be the tallest/fastest/only in the country/world/general vicinity.

I took a girl that I and many others claimed to be the hottest in the world out to dinner twice.

I’ve been two blocks from Harlem at 1:30 in the morning.

I’ve been to New Jersey.

Despite all of these things, nothing petrified me more than when the oral surgeon who hovered over my mouth for the better part of an hour said “Okay, open up.”

Back in early 2006, a toothache kept me awake all night, despite multiple doses of Tylenol taken by me in a desperate and possibly illegal attempt to remedy the discomfort. The episode prompted me to visit my dentist for the first time in nearly three years. Sure, the part-time jobs that filled my post-collegiate, post-being-kicked-off-my-dad’s-insurance-while-I-was-a-student life and their lack of a dental plan had gotten me used to a DDS-free existence, but my toothache, which is the only ailment that can hurt so much that it actually pisses you off, prompted me to take advantage of my current (full-time) job’s dental coverage and schedule an appointment.

Despite the usual poking and prodding of every sensitive area of my mouth with instruments that shouldn’t even be within a 50 mile radius of your damned HEAD, the appointment went well…until my dentist started dropping terms like “abscess” and “root canal” in regards to MY teeth. He suggested I get three of my four wisdom teeth removed. I later figured out why your four molars are dubbed “wisdom teeth”: it is wise to leave them in, no matter how severely they might decay.

He recommended me to a few oral surgeons in the area to have the procedure done. I’m sure he had the means to do this type of operation in his own office, but my guess is that, were he to do it, he knew that I would never trust him again to place anything in my mouth that wasn’t a steak.

So I ultimately visited one of the three recommended experts; I know now that my decision was the wrong one, for one of the plaques hanging in the waiting room had the typical engraved recognition of the guy’s work…and a fucking GAVEL attached alongside it. Of all the possible objects one thinks of attaching to a plaque that will hang in the waiting area of a DENTAL expert, the LAST thing should be a small HAMMER. It’d be like walking into a proctologist’s office and seeing a bronzed erect dick on the wall.

Anyway, I got X-rayed and was forced to sit in a room alone with the results:

Personally, I thought all of my teeth looked perfectly fine. Sure, I was basing this judgment on whether or not my teeth were all there, but I guess that wasn’t good enough for the dental community.

Soon, the dentist arrived: a tiny, wrinkled elder who might have performed surgery on Moses’ mouth. He looked more like the type of guy you see cruising down the Interstate in the left lane with his blinker on, going a whopping 16 MPH, his entire body frame pressed up against the steering column. And I was supposed to trust this man with sharp objects near my gums?

I had opted for the “local” anesthesia (meaning that I would be awake and Novacaine would be applied to my gums), which, in retrospect, was one of the dumbest decisions I ever made since insisting that we all eat at White Castle. This is not to say that I am an advocate for the “general” anesthesia (where you are put to sleep), either, for what you don’t know about this is the fact that you have to sign a form acknowledging that you understand that such a practice carries with it, among other things, the slight risk of CARDIAC ARREST and DEATH.

DEATH for a TOOTH? I’ll opt for Tom Hanks’ ice skate procedure that he did in “Castaway.”

A few nurses came in, bringing the grand total of people who would be extracting objects that had been in my mouth since infancy to THREE. Fucking THREE. My family’s mechanic can fix an entire damn CAR by HIMSELF. After they—why not?—took my blood pressure, it was time for the Novacaine.

Which was in a syringe.

Which had a needle attached to it.

Which was being poked into three of my GUMS.

I’ve been a fan of the MTV show “Jackass” since it premiered and loved its subsequent movies. One thing I failed to notice about the show until that day was the fact that not a single one of the “Jackass” cast members underwent oral surgery. They would ram shopping carts into each other, attach bottle rockets to their schlongs, shove toy cars up their butts, and intentionally give each other paper cuts…but they apparently (and wisely) drew the line at oral surgery.

“This might hurt a little” the doctor said as he advanced the needle towards my mouth. Several excruciatingly painful moments later, I realized he is also probably the type of person to remark that the Pacific Ocean is “just a little damp.” As we all waited for the drug to numb my face, I decided that coming here in the first place pretty much carried with it Class A Retard Status, so I decided to keep going with the stupidity. Before everyone present could start to small talk with me about sports or some such shit, I informed them all of my then-upcoming trip to Honolulu.

Dropping a bombshell like this in the middle of February in Pennsylvania is guaranteed to make just about anyone jealous. But doing so in an oral surgeon’s office probably intensified the jealousy to the point where they undoubtedly felt that the pain they would soon inflict on me would be well justified. Maybe I hoped that releasing this information would somehow cause them to say, “Oh, well, you don’t need to have these teeth removed, for the air in Hawai’i will automatically cure them.” No such luck, though.

My 3:15 appointment ended a little before 4:00, which might mean it took 45 minutes (possibly less) in actual time, but in Guy-Who’s-Stuck-in-the-Chair-Having-the-Procedure-Done Time, it felt more like several years. Before digging in my mouth for enamel treasure, the doctor put his hand on my shoulder and pressed lightly on it.

“See what I’m doing here? I’m just applying a little pressure. That’s all you’re going to feel: just a little bit of pressure.”

Yeah.

In all honesty, aside from some definite, noticeable “pressure,” the first tooth came out relatively easy. But the SECOND and THIRD teeth, who were now aware of what was going on once their upper left side neighbor was forcibly evicted, decided that there would be no better time to firmly embed themselves in my jaw as hard as they could. In other words, their removal was the largest pain I or anyone else has ever felt. I would have rather had a screwdriver stuck into my eyeball. I would have rather had a piece of the lead from mechanical pencils shoved up my penis hole. I would have rather listened to the collective works of Kenny G and Yanni SIMULTANEOUSLY.

It honestly felt like he was pushing the tooth further BACK in my mouth instead of pulling it out. I have no idea what tools he was using, for I kept my eyes closed the whole time. All I can tell you was that a fucking DRILL was started at one point to aid in the removal. I had my mouth twisted open every possible and impossible way, and the fact that the “spit sucker” had made my mouth drier than the Sahara Desert in June wasn’t exactly helping matters much. Twisting, pulling, pushing, and virtually every other action (except that “slight pressure”) that should never be undertaken in a mouth were performed on me by the three experts, which I swear had multiplied to about 50 by that point. I guarantee that, when you go to Hell, you do not eternally burn in bubbling cauldrons; you get wisdom teeth pulled. When you’re having that done to you, soaking in giant black pots over the hottest flames in creation is a much more pleasant alternative. It was somewhere in this conscious nightmare that I formed the first rational thought of the day: the lone wisdom tooth that remains in my mouth…the one whose removal the doctor said was “optional”…is staying right where it is, along with all of my other teeth. Cavemen never had to have their teeth eventually replaced with “dentures”, and they are still alive today (at least according to certain Geico commercials).

Still not entirely positive that it was still February or even the year 2006, I was eventually free to go. My molars had been officially replaced by a seemingly infinite taste of blood and two pieces of gauze on either side of my mouth. In fact, to rub it in, they gave me ADDITIONAL gauze in case I were to need it:

In fact, this was given to me before the operation commenced, but the ensuing pain caused me to twist and rip the poor innocent package to shreds. The package pictured above, which I have thankfully yet to open, was the second one bestowed upon me.

Now in possession of dry lips with no feeling to them, I also noticed that the gauze and leftover Novacaine had left me sounding like a Special Olympics athlete, which served me right, seeing as how the entire decision to get this done in the first place was retarded.

I also got a prescription for some sort of pain medication:

…which my sister, who works at a doctor’s office, later informed me was exceptionally “weak.” She suggested I take ibuprofen with each dose and, having already achieved my life’s highest stupidity levels that day, decided to listen to her, despite her being the same person who once thought that we wouldn’t be able to start our car because the power went out.

In addition to the $635 bill, I was presented with a list of rules to follow in the days after the surgery. Basically, I was not allowed to eat anything firmer than pudding and that everything that entered my mouth can be no other temperature aside from “lukewarm.” Interestingly, it tells me not to touch the affected areas with my tongue or fingers…but then states to brush my teeth no later than the next day! In other words, my tongue, which really doesn’t have an option to leave my mouth or rub up against its enamel neighbors, is not to even look at either side of my mouth, but a damn toothbrush is more than welcome. Yeah, I’m supposed to insert ANOTHER thin object into my mouth.

The rules also tell me to rinse my mouth out with SALT WATER the next day. Yeah, salt on three separate wounds. That will be fun.

Anyway, I came home, situated my ass in bed, and was generously waited on hand and foot by my family. Many cups of vanilla pudding were ingested, as were numerous pain pills and water.

And why?

Because of these culprits right here. Here are two of the three little bastards that made Presidents’ Day 2006 one of the worst days of my life thus far (the other one came out in “pieces” and thus couldn’t be salvaged):

Sometimes, Nice-Looking Creatures Are in the Lagoon

One Saturday night in 2003, I found myself terminally bored due to the fact that Squall didn’t want to go to Dennys. My plans shot (not for Saturday, but rather for the entire weekend), I weighed my alternatives. When you’re a 23-year-old guy from the suburbs who doesn’t drink, smoke, or enjoy driving to places that require the consumption of Pennsylvania’s ever-expensive gas, your options are rather limited. I could always sit at home on my computer watching illegally-downloaded, horrible quality episodes of “The Simpsons” while using AOL Instant Messenger to converse with morbidly obese women (or men…or 13-year-old boys) posing as supermodels, but I decided against it. After wallowing in deep thought over my multitude of choices for the better part of 12 seconds, I settled for a visit to the Lagoon.

The Lagoon was a nightclub in my hometown that believes it can attract area residents away from downtown Philadelphia’s extensive array of much hipper nightspots that are not named after swamps. (For the record, it has since changed its name.) It does this by offering not only a dance floor and bar areas, but also a game room, outdoor deck, restaurant, and adjacent hotel. While these additional amenities are indeed attractive, the club as a whole nevertheless fails to produce decent-looking patrons. In fact, many Lagoon club-goers look like they crawled out of an actual lagoon, as evidenced by the fact that many of them happen to be local town residents. While my suburban town is middle-class, it rests on an island populated with restaurants, bars, factories, etc. that create a populace teeming with overweight, middle-aged chain-smoking alcoholics who would think nothing of showing up to a formal wedding in torn jeans and a barely-fitting T-shirt bought at a New Jersey shore town bar. So, you may ask, why would I choose this locale to spend hours of my time and dollars of my money over downtown Philly’s hotspots full of people closer to my own age?

Free parking.

Satisfied? Let’s move on quickly, primarily because the column is more than halfway completed without any mention whatsoever of why I chose to write it in the first place. So there I was in the Lagoon, pushing my way through the sea of beer bellies and sipping my favorite mixed drink (Coca-Cola syrup mixed with seltzer water), when all of a sudden, I came across a guy I knew from high school, “John”. John and I exchanged the obligatory handshakes, “How have you been?” greetings, and all the other cliched sayings two people exchange when they haven’t seen each other for more than two weeks. That’s when he hit me with a curve ball I was not expecting whatsoever.

“Hey, you remember Sarah?”
“Sarah,” short for “not her real name”, was John’s sister, who graduated high school with me back in 1998. I of course remembered the girl and was expecting Jeff to place in front of me the exact same short-haired brunette that had been “Sarah” to me for the four-year prison sentence I called high school. Instead, the girl he pulled into my line of sight was a tall, long-haired blond female with Sarah’s face and a supermodel’s body.

She was HOT.

In many cases since my late 1990s escape from the hallways and rubber cheesesteaks of high school, the people I ran into, especially girls, had all deteriorated into hideous-looking, female-resembling ghouls that appeared to have swallowed oil tankers. No matter how attractive I may have found them in high school, today they looked as pleasing to my eye as, say, Carrot Top. In my then-six years of running into fellow graduates, I must admit that it gave my 123-pound self endless pleasure upon seeing bitchy girls (meaning those who refused to date/talk/look at me) turn into, well, typical Lagoon customers. Sarah, who has always been nice to me and who was also reasonably attractive in high school, was one hot-looking exception. It was truly an amazing part of the night, having run into a teenage-years confidant who pretty much said “piss off” to the law of gravity.

With her muscular brother John standing there, I of course did not hit on Sarah; she and I just exchanged a hug and brief “How have you been?” statements before separating once again for what may be another six years.

And I’m sure she will still be hot.

Super Steering Wheel

Back in 2005, I was what I liked to deem a “professional mallrat.” As such, it went against everything I believe in to actually make purchases at the mall that can’t be easily ingested in some way. Seriously. I have been to malls of all shapes, sizes, and qualities, and, despite what stores are offered, rarely bought anything except lunch. On a Sunday in early 2005, however, all that changed due to my renowned love of late 1980s and early 1990s nostalgia. It all began (and, well, ended) with Hot Topic.

Hot Topic is a Goth- and punk-friendly retailer that requires you to have piercings and tattoos on every part of your body, including internal organs, just to request a job application. Fortunately, my hole- and ink-free self was not there to get a job but rather to browse amongst overpriced goods festooned with pop culture images from my childhood. Included in this merchandise was an assortment of Nintendo-themed goods that, in many cases, cost the same or even more than what the actual old 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System console sells for today. One such item was a Super Mario Bros. steering wheel cover, plastered with the familiar 2-D logos of the popular Nintendo game that spawned countless sequels and remakes that none of us turn-of-the-decade children care about. Due to its $14 asking price, the cover and I had always maintained a separate relationship.

Anyhow, this particular Sunday saw the steering wheel cover’s new home on a clearance rack, indicating that, for some inexplicable reason, there wasn’t much of a market for the item. A full 50% was slashed off of its price, dropping it down to $7, which I concluded was well within my price range. Upon taking it to the cashier, I discovered that it was eligible for yet ANOTHER 50% off, thus placing it in my possession for a grand total of $3.70 (while I prefer $3.70 to $14 any day, especially for something as elaborate as this, I am a bit confused as to why two 50% discounts didn’t add up to the sum of 100%, which would have enabled me to walk away with the steering wheel cover with little more than an “I’m taking this” statement).

Nevertheless, I now had (and continue to have) an authentic Super Mario Bros. steering wheel cover of my own! As I gazed at my new purchase with more love than I regularly gazed at my ex-girlfriend with, I could not help but realize just how appropriate an item this was for people my age. It’s as if the Nintendo corporation realized that its core 1980s-1990s audiences are now old enough to drive…and thus created this rubber novelty reflecting the staple of their video-game-playing years: Super Mario. Hot Topic’s array of just-as-poorly-selling Super Mario Bros. floor mats, Pac Man license plate holders, Bayou Billy engine blocks, etc. further intensify the video game conglomerate’s promotional move.

With some difficulty, I managed to slip the red and black wheel cover over my steering wheel of my old Ford Tempo, which now has Mario’s face surrounded by 2 “Power-Up” mushrooms on either side at the 2:00, 6:00, and 10:00 positions. The remainder of the red and black item is decorated with small patches of an “M” pattern, all of which leaves cool little “M” and mushroom-shaped indentations on my palms. Once I had it slipped on, thus ensuring that my car will now NEVER get stolen, it was time to make my purchase public.

Opinions towards my new accessory were mixed, as evidenced by the following table:

PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT IT WAS A WISE INVESTMENT: Me

PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT IT WAS A STUPID BUY AND ARE NOW EVEN MORE HUMILIATED TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH ME: Everyone else.

I was a bit surprised at the one-sidedness of this issue, seeing as how, a little over 10 measly years ago, these same people worshipped anything and everything related to Mario! I can still vividly remember the debut of “Super Mario Bros. 3″ being a hot topic (no pun intended) in 5th grade, ranking right up there with the release of the first live-action “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” movie. Why is stuff like this such a colorful and pleasant memory to me even today yet is borderline embarrassment to its former worshippers like my friends? Does it have to do with the fact that I never maintained much of an active social life between then and last Tuesday and can still tell you the location of the hidden “1-Up” mushroom in World 1-1 of “Super Mario Bros.” yet have no idea what comes in a margarita? Probably.

For the record, after I moved into downtown Philadelphia and eliminated driving from my daily routine, I still kept the steering wheel cover prominently displayed in my apartment.