floorpie

Vegas baby, Vegas. There are a few things I learned on my latest trip:

.: I am moving to Vegas
.: Spanish 21, though similar and less crowded than regular 21, is not at all the same. They are, in fact, about $250 different.
.: Walking into the Poker Room not only makes you feel like a big man, but it makes you look like one, too. Especially with a huge pile of $100 $1 chips in front of you.
.: After 6 hours at the table, and a number of free drinks, everyone is my brother. “What’s up, Brother?”, “How you doing, Brother?”, “Double-down on that shit, Brother!”, etc. There are many examples.
.: You absolutely can eat three buffets in two and a half days.

And I still, still am getting hits from people searching for Japan see-thru skirts. You people are 2 years behind on the meme curve!

.: Pop vs. Soda: Cool graphic showing generic soft-drink names by location. Seeing as I always say, "I'm gonna go get a Coke," (despite being an ardent Pepsi addict) I must belong in the South (to my great chagrin).
.: "I punched Saddam in the mouth": A rare first-hand account from the man who pulled The Bastard from The Hole

I was searching through my archives for something when I came across this. It’s not required to actually follow that link, by the way, my post was only one line:

2.28.2003
I just spent $27 on a tank-full of regular 87 octane gas. Thank you, President Bush.

Listen to the angst! Feel the outrage! Revel in the insightful, dripping sarcasm!

This week, I filled a similar tank with a similar octane gasoline and it cost me a mere $45. Forty-five dollars! This is really getting out of hand. Barely two years ago, I was paying nearly half that. Which means, given the linear nature of these sorts of things (notice the sarcasm again) I’ll be in the low $100’s long before my mid-life crisis.

I should probably start saving now and stop buying so much porn and cheetos. Well, maybe just the cheetos.

I am getting increasingly bad at celebrating other people’s holidays. Next month is both my mother and father’s birthdays, Mother’s Day, followed quickly by Father’s Day… not to mention my friend K’s birthday whom I’ve missed for years, and M’s that I missed a few weeks ago.

My plan for each of them, though not fully fleshed-out and realized yet, is the result of countless hours of deep and thoughtful consideration for what these people mean to me.

Oh wait, that’s right, I have no plans. I’m such a bastard.

I am going to Vegas this weekend, though, so that should fix everything.

I’m not mad… or at least not very.

But why didn’t someone tell me that The Next Karate Kid was so awesome?! For years, people have been saying “Karate Kid III sucks, and the 4th one is even worse!” I’ve been saying it sucks with stuff like, “I haven’t seen it, but it’s supposed to be really bad. I mean, it has Hilary Swank from before she was even hot in it.”

But not only does it not suck, but I’m posthumously nominating it for best picture of 1994. The reasons are obvious:

.: Mr. Miyagi’s in it!
.: He does the slap-the-hands-and-rub-them-together thing and heals a hawk’s broken wing!
.: He does the thing where he says, “Ka-rah-tay in here!” and points to his heart!
.: Hilary Swank (Julie-san) does wax-on wax off… and loves it!
.: The leader of the gang of no-good teens is the high-school football coach!

You just really don’t get more awesome than that. Oh, and Hilary Swank is totally HOTT in it… even when she was wearing those ridiculous They’re Overalls, They’re Shorts, They’re Both at the Same Time! that were so popular in the early 90’s.

Best. Movie. Ever.

This post brought to you by 'sarcasm' and the letter 'P'though I really did have a totally good time laughing my head off

Hot damn, I love me some spam!

From: a mental giant
To: Someone who clearly doesn’t need this

extand your tool now!
what hasn’t been already said,
safe, simple and effective : 10 minutes and you’ve got yourself an enormous tool,
and be sure reasults are permenent and no surgary is needed.
you’ll get tired of banggin’, for sure 🙂
come try now!

I’ll get tired of banggin’ for sure!

Reading what I wrote about a trip to Baja two years ago (that long?!) makes me want to hit the road again. An excerpt:

3.18.03
Let’s blow this taco-stand. Upon awaking, it is no longer raining (gracias Dios), which emboldens us to continue on to San Felipe.

We stop for the first time for petrol at one of the many Pemex stations in Ensenada. I opt for “premio” with the thought that if the gas is as cleanly as the streets, I had best go for the best I can find.

Then the adventure begins. The Transpeninsular 3 crosses Baja California in a roughly southeastern tact, passing between the Sierra de Juarez and the Sierra San Pedro Martir mountains before entering the deserts that line the coast of the Sea of Cortez. It is, without question, a treacherous route. Gas is not reliably available for some 200+ km, and the two-lane highway is severely degraded for most of the trip. There are far more bumps and holes than I’ve ever experienced in the States, and the ferociousness of the countryside is clearly written in the numerous abandoned vehicles that line the road. They are, in total, without tires, seats or doors, all rusted completely, some on their sides or roofs, some partially buried in loose dirt, most covered in graffiti. They are in the middle of nowhere. What kind of day was it when these cars were left behind? What were the circumstances? What happened to the passengers? What had to have conspired against them to make abandoning their car forever a better option than retrieving it? I think back and see those people, and wonder at their bravery.

We pass through numerous towns that don’t really deserve appellations, but have them anyway: Ojos Negros, Heroes de la Independencia, Valle de la Trinidad. At the junction of the 3 & 5, a military checkpoint stops all traffic to ask your destination, and check you over. Besides inducing heart palpitations, the experience is mostly harmless. The soldiers look hot, and barely able to pull-off their own importance as they swelter in the heat, quizzing vacationing retirees in RV’s, and stupid, but not dangerous, Spring-Breakers.

This guy scares me.

There’s a reason I’m a horrible sinning ex-Catholic, and one of them is the Pope. Great guy, does good works I’m sure, but what’s up with being the gatekeeper to a higher power? I’m not good enough to speak to a god-figure myself? The problem is moot for me, of course, because I don’t really think there’s anyone to talk to anyway.

This doesn’t change the fact that religion seems to be kinda important to the masses, though, and an ultra-conservative leader is going to influence people in what I dare say is the wrong way.

Plus, he has scary devil-eyes.

And he’s 78! I don’t mean to be pessimistic or sacreligious or anything (yes I do), but the days of Moses living to be 120 are long gone. The Vatican will barely have time to get “Pope Benedict XVI” pimp-striped ont he Pope-Mobile before we go through this whole thing again.

My weekends don’t sound that exciting in bullet-point format:

.: Helped build a block-wall
>.: BBQ’d
.: Played an obscene amount of Burnout 3
.: Made plans for Las Vegas

If you saw the inter-personal drama between the lines of all of that stuff, though, you’d be impressed.

On an unrelated note, this sight is mostly observational, and less introspective. I did, in fact, have an ex-girlfriend once mention some years after our break-up, “There is absolutely nothing personal on your site, yet it leaves you with the impression that it does. How do you do that?”

I do that by being who I am, as that is what I do.

It started out with the intent of the opposite (introspective with idle attempts at observational humor) but then people started to find out about the site; people I know. And those people told 4 people, and those people told 4 people, and those people told…(I hope by now you are also remembering that one Brady Bunch episode where… never mind) to the point where basically everyone I know, now knows about floorpie. At any given point (even though not everyone who knows about it reads it), there is only about one-degree of separation between me saying something interesting, and everyone knowing about it; especially as those that do read it are vocal about it.
>
And I’ve embraced this.. it just makes it difficult to talk behind all of your backs…

At any rate, having said all of that, I’m trying to be more revealing of myself here. I’m not sure why, but I suspect it’s for selfish reasons. Therefore, in the interests of cathartic full disclosure, and to answer the comments and e-mails about it, I will say this, in uninteresting bullet-point format:
>
.: I am single
.: Before, when you also didn’t know me, I wasn’t.
.: “ADG” is the person I’m not with that I was.
.: A.D.G. are not her initials, though you might have thought they were. Well, one of them is, but unintentionally.
.: It has been a few months technically, and a lot longer in retrospect.
>.: I’m OK, you’re OK

And let’s close the floorpie.net mailbag. If there’s anything else you were wondering about, let me know.

Things I don’t care about:

.: That Britney is pregnant
.: That songs on Bush’s ipod might be stolen… of course they’re stolen, why are we wasting time thinking about it? Pray with me, adoring public: “Dear merciful god in heaven, please bring me a press conference in which Bush must defend his iPod songs with such phrases as, ‘I have the Dixie Chicks on for research’, and ‘I did not have relations with that band, Milli Vanilli‘. Thank you.”
.: That Jacko is doing anything… OK, maybe a little. I just used one of my free iTunes songs from Pepsi to get Billie Jean. I mean you have to people!
.: Four words: American Idol