Billy Idol Will Destroy Your Home

Recently i've decided to give the whole sobriety thing a go. It's not that i drink often anyway, it's just that when i do, i get trashed as fcuk. I was just looking back through my archive to find alcohol-related stories, and was surprised to see that Phone Books is the only one. I'll have to rectify that soon, i think, because i have a lot of good drinking stories. Or, more to the point, Amanda has a lot of good stories about me drinking.

But anyway, what led to this decision, this giving up of the alcohol, was last week Wednesday when Dan and i went out to the Knuckledown Saloon (you know, where we filmed the bar scenes for Ed Wood Part II) after my kickball game. Normally, after kickball, the team goes out to Slice's, a small bar near the field where they provide the kickball players with free tater tots. But it was a late game, and everyone was complaining about "working in the morning" or "having kids" and other such nonsense. I wanted my damn tater tots. So i went home and baked myself up a big batch of those fuckers, and texted Dan that i was feeling "bar-y." I burned my hand on the toaster oven, a wound which is still oozing weirdness juice a week and a half later. Dan, coincidentally, had just gotten off of work.

We were at the Knuck until they kicked us out at bar time. Dan drove me home, because i was in no shape, and then he was like, "You know, i could use another drink!" So we stayed up until 6am and finished off my supply of Captain Morgan (about a quarter of a handle, plus almost half of a smaller bottle) and even broke into the amaretto. Amanda's brother, who lives with us now, came downstairs at 4am to put away some mashed potatoes that he'd made himself for dinner and left out, only to find that i had already eaten them. So instead, he poured us all a round of shots and then went back to bed.

6am i went to bed. 7am i woke up puking. Despite the copious amounts of booze i generally consume on these events, this was my first experience puking from drinking.

I was still hung over on Friday morning. It was seriously a 36 hour hangover.

But enough about that. Here's another drinking story which Amanda's wanted me to blog for a while now.

Last Halloween, we went out to Rocky Rococo for dinner with Amanda's whole extended family to celebrate her sister's birthday (That's how her family does things - the whole extended family shows up for every single birthday. We eat out a lot.). Rocky Rococo, for those not in the know, is a pizza place based in Madison. They don't get out much - 38 of their 40 locations are in Wisconsin. Their mascot is an insane Italian man with no eyes that always shouts "HEY HEY!" and impersonates either current or famous movies in their ads.

I hate their pizza. I think it's terrible. But it's a big thing with her family, so we go there for probably 80% of these birthday dinners. So i always get the salad bar ("The Garden of Eatin'"). When you get the unlimited salad bar, you also get a muffin.

At this particular birthday dinner, i did not eat my muffin. I just wasn't in the mood for a muffin, i guess. Filled up on salad. So i wrapped the muffin in a napkin and stuck it in the cupholder of Amanda's car as we left. We went directly to Bob and Ashley's Halloween party from there.

We walked in and my costume was immediately confused for Spider from Powerman 5000. I guess i have to admit that Spider and Billy Idol share a hairstyle, but really. I was wearing fingerless gloves and a fake leather vest. Spider wears some kind of spacesuit, and he doesn't do that awesome angsty sneer that i couldn't get off my face all night.

The party ended up featuring me and Ken so absolutely, completely wasted that we spent the end of it rolling around on the kitchen floor, because we couldn't get up, sort of beating each other up for absolutely no reason and to absolutely no results. Eventually Alyssa decided it was time to get Ken out of there. She had to put his shoes on for him, because he couldn't do it himself. Amanda let me stay for a little while longer but we were out of there soon enough.

Once she got my drunk ass home, she was trying to get all of our stuff out of the car and into the house (really, thinking back, i can't come up with anything that this would entail) and she charged me with the duty of bringing my muffin in the house. That's it. I had one job, and it was to get that muffin safely into the house. It may as well have been god damned brain rocket surgery science.

As we were heading into the house i was jibbering nonsense about where to put the muffin once it got inside. My first thought was to put it on the counter, but no! The cats would definitely get it there! This muffin needed to be kept safe!

Obviously, i should put the muffin in the cupboard to keep it away from the cats. But no! There are MICE in the cupboard!

There were not mice in the cupboard. It had been a year since we'd seen a mouse or any indication of mice living in the house. There was no reason for there to be mice in any of the cupboards.

"The mice only go in the bottom cupboards," Amanda explained to me gently. From their previous habits, this was true - they'd never gotten into the upper cupboards. I was appeased for the moment. I put my muffin in one of the upper cupboards.

Minutes later, Amanda was taking care of the dogs for the night and i was still standing in the kitchen. Clearly, i had already forgotten what Amanda had just told me about the mice in the cupboards. Suddenly, with Amanda out of the room, i shouted, "WHAT AM I DOING?! THERE ARE MICE IN THE CUPBOARDS!" and i grabbed the muffin out of that cupboard as though i were a cop pulling an innocent out of a riot or something.

I think Amanda was trying to get to me so she could reason with me some more, but i had already solved the problem. There was only one safe place for that muffin, and that was in the refrigerator. I shouted the results of my findings: "THE MUFFIN NEEDS TO GO IN THE REFRIGERATOR! IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO BE SAFE!"

I imagine that the refrigerator itself cringed in fear as i bellowed that strange battle cry at it, shot my arm straight out and yanked the handle back like a bad stop-motion animation that's missing some tween frames. If you understood that analogy, congratulations! We are film school dorks.

Now that the refrigerator door was opened, i wound up like some baseball star and just fucking pitched that muffin into the refrigerator. It crashed into a bunch of stuff and made a huge mess of things, of course, but i wouldn't find that out until morning. When i slammed the refrigerator door, some magnets and things fell off; not all of them survived.

And all for the love of a muffin.

The next day, Alyssa shared a similar story with us about Ken. When they got back to his apartment, he asked her if she wanted to see a trick. I guess the first trick was him trying to slide down the stairs on his feet, like some cartoon character, or some snowboarder somewhat lacking in board and snow. She prevented him from doing this.

Once they were in the apartment, he asked her again if she'd like to see a trick. She reluctantly acquiesced. So he grabbed his desk lamp, jerked it upward in much the same manner that i had opened the refrigerator, and slammed it back onto the desk, demolishing it. He then threw it across the room and went to bed.

In the morning, Ken asked Alyssa what the hell happened to the lamp.

You've Got to be Kidding Me.

Today we had to rush one of my cats, D, into the vet for an emergency appointment. D has nystagmus, a weird disorder of the eyes which causes her to constantly see the world as shaking back and forth. Most animals with nystagmus can only walk in circles, but D's brain has compensated for it and she's able to run with the best of them. However, she cannot jump. I don't mean this physically; her legs work just fine, she just can't judge distances properly and won't jump up to high locations as cats are generally wont to do and won't jump down once she's gotten to one. She'll climb if she can, though. Anyway. Today D found herself on the wrong side of the baby gate we currently have across the upstairs bathroom. Usually, the gate on that bathroom has holes wide enough for a cat to pass through, but for various reasons we've had to rearrange our gates in the house. So, with D in the bathroom, smacking the gate around and trying unsuccessfully to push herself under it, i decided to come to her rescue. I walked up the stairs and picked her up, and then i had intended to carry her down the stairs to sit on the couch and pet her. However, also probably due to the nystagmus, D does not like to be picked up. She clawed me in the hand and sprang out in the most opportune direction with all the fervor she could muster. Unfortunately, i was facing the stairs when this happened. She went flying down the whole flight of stairs, her back half hitting the bottom step with a terrifying crack and/or thud as her front flopped onto the carpet below. She then took off running for the basement for some reason, speeding down two more partial flights of stairs (we have a tri-level house; our staircases average 7 steps each) before i caught up with her on the bottom, in the basement. Why she rushed down there, i'll never know. I carried her back up to the couch and set her down next to Amanda, who you may recall is a Veterinary Technician. As i did, D let out a horrendous yowl and flopped over, limp. I was looking her in the eye when it happened and i swear they glazed over and went vacant. Panic set in and for a moment, both Amanda and i thought she was dead. We were about to rush her in to the UW Emergency clinic when she suddenly came back and started to act normal again. We watched her for a few minutes and Amanda determined that she'd probably be ok to make the longer trip to our regular vet clinic, which she did, and everything was fine. Amanda took her to work tonight anyway to keep her under observation. But there's nothing funny or entertaining about that story. That's not even the reason i set out to write this tonight - i hadn't actually expected that part of the story to be so long. So here's the TL;DR version of everything i've already said: my cat went to the vet, and it reminded me of another story. Last year, my other young cat, D's sister Seras Victoria, ate a dose of the dog's Rimadyl. In less than a second she ingested just over the lethal dose of Rimadyl for a cat her size. We immediately threw her in the car and drove her over to VES (Veterinary Emergency Services) on Madison's East side because it was closest. $400 later, Seras was ok, except for that we had to monitor her closely for the next month since there was a high probability of kidney failure. While we were in the waiting room at VES, as they were torturing my cat in the back room trying desperately to get her to vomit, my cell phone rang. It was Bill, the placement director for MMI, the school i was on the verge of graduating from. He asked how i was doing and i gave him a synopses of my current state, to which he was vaguely sympathetic but in a purely businesslike way. "So, i hear that you're the outdoorsy type and you like to hunt," he said with all earnestness. How do i respond to that? Slack-jawed, that's how. "What?" "I hear, that you're the outdoorsy type, and you like to hunt." "Did you mean to call Jesse?" i asked. Jesse's outdoorsy. He likes to hunt. He was in my class. Bill asserted that he had not, and in what was probably some kind of breach of a confidentiality agreement of some kind, informed me that Jesse was not eligible for the job and told me why. Not that Jesse wouldn't have told me himself, it just seemed a little unprofessional for Bill to be so forthcoming. "Well, i don't know where you heard that from, because that could not be farther from the truth." Seriously, it couldn't. If i were a type of wildlife, i would be a mushroom. I prefer a cool, dark, enclosed environment where i don't have to move around too much. I work a job where i sit in front of a computer. I'm aspiring to a better job where i sit in front of a computer. In my spare time, i sit in front of a computer. While i paced the waiting room at VES, waiting to find out if my furry little child was even going to survive the rest of the damn day, Bill went on and on talking about how great of a job this would be for me, where i would travel up to Canada during the ass end of winter, wake up and sit on a frozen lake at 4am every day, and film a bunch of guys shooting ducks. Ducks, for the love of god! Ducks! Can you read my screen name over there? The one that says, "Dr. Ducks"?!?! Let's recap all of this: i'm in the waiting room where the closest thing i ever plan to having to a child is probably dying a horrible death, and i am being offered lucrative sums of money to make snuff films of someone killing my namesake. I told him i'd think about it.

Tervor the Destroyer Goes to Hollywood

The kobold rogue known only as Tervor the Destroyer strode confidently into the office of his shady Thieves' Guild contact. The innkeeper and sometime crook seemed somewhat surprised to see him.

"What can i do for you, Tervor?" Sabin inquired.

"This job that i'm working on for you...is there another thief or group of thieves working on the same assignment?"

Sabin paused. "Not as far as i know. Why do you ask?"

"I was ambushed last night," Tervor explained. "A group of thugs...four of them...they appeared to have a great deal of specific knowledge related to my quest. They all had Thieves' Guild tattoos."

"Well," Sabin offered, "i can investigate this matter for you. Can you give me a description of these men?"

The kobold proceeded to describe the leader of the culprits, and was sure to include the tidbit about how he'd previously seen this man in Sabin's establishment.

"Your description matches a few different men that..."

"Well," Tervor broke in. "Maybe this will help." Tervor reached into his Bag of Holding and extracted a bloody severed head, which he plopped nonchalantly onto Sabin's desk, as though it were anything less disturbing.

Sabin stared at it for a moment. Cautiously, he proceeded: "I...am familiar with this man. I don't know him, exactly, but i have seen him before. I will find out who he is and why he was following you."

"Excellent!" Tervor exclaimed, turning to walk out of the office. "I'll check back with you tomorrow, or you can send word to my room at the Salty Oyster." He motioned toward Sabin's new paperweight. "You can keep that."