i guess i’m lucky in that the only time i’m not in A/C is the walk from the car to the train station, from train to station in DC, on the the metro plaform (they’re sorta air conditioned) and then the walk to the office. though yesterday i had to stand on the train home, and the spot in the car where i was standing was not in the airflow of the AC, it was pretty fucking terrible.

yeah so that’s that. another month and it’ll cool of.

yesterday i harvested my first zucchini from my fledgling vegetable garden. we’ve had pretty good luck with our tomatoes this year. on a whim i planted a pumpkin, watermelon, honey dew, squash and zucchini plants in what should have been the space that just the pumpkin needs. so far we have one big ass pumpkin that is already orange. all the vines are all mixed up, i’ll be surprised if we get anything else. henry has also done a number on the middle of the pumpkin plant. fucking bastard. anyway, for years i maintained that there was no point in growing your own food. i’m actually enjoying it. next year i’m gonna establish an official garden area, and put in some real fencing to keep henry and the rats out. yeah, my life is this exciting.

so i think i’m completely apple challenges. for the life of me i can never get itunes to do what i want. for the boy’s birthday, i created a playlist. i then wanted to put back on my standard commuting late 80′s and 90′s hardcore playlist. for some reason it wanted to put on every song i have on my ipod, which doesn’t have enough space, so it wouldn’t do anything at all. the fucker. after a fair amount of back and forth, i got songs on the fucking ipod, but not the exact songs i wanted. well anyway.

so there are some songs on there that i didn’t have on there before. some how danzig’s first album is on there (you know the one with mother and twist of cain). so i’m going down the escalator the other day and the song ‘soul on fire’ comes on. i’m pretty sure it’s been 10 years since i heard it (why did i put it in to itunes you ask? i don’t remember)

so suddenly, the song triggered a series of memories from the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. it was pretty fucking amazing. the story goes like this:

so i always hung out on periphery of several different groups, until my senior year when i sorta settled in with my friends that i carried through college. i’d hang out some skaters, even though i was completely terrible at it, we had a little skate rock band that was oddly well accepted. but that’s not the point. so one night, during the summer, i was with some friends and a younger guy’s house. he went on to be a pro snowboarder actually.  but anyway, he had a mini half pipe and a trapoline and shit. so the others would skate, and i man the boom box and such. well at one point i tried to learn to drop in, but it was a miserable failure. i digress.

this guy’s mom was a nurse, and she’d work the night shift. his parents were divorced and his dad lived in another part of the state (i think) so there was no direct adult supervision (can you imagine?–this was before i drank. actually, more importantly–can you imagine me before i drank?)

on this particular night, 3 sophomore girls came by his house. i can’t remember why, but they did. normally, having to be around a girl would have made me roll up in to a ball and cry, but i guess because they were younger, i had some sort of false confidence, or something. i don’t remember the ins and outs of it, but at some point, i ended up on the deck of the ramp, with one of the girls, a semi notoriously slutty girl (well a kissing slut, she didn’t bang), alone. next thing i know, we’re making out. (sorry natty). so we do that for a while, and then she asks me to drive her home. (!!) so i go to take her home, and she suggests we stop off at this little park/field near her house (awww yea!)

so we do, and i lay down my leather jacket (rock!) and we make out a bit more. so she stops at one point, and says

her: you’re a singer for your band, right?
me: -yeah

her: well sing me something
me: -what???

her: sing me something, i’ll like it
me: –uh what do you want me to sing?

her: i dunno something, something sexy
me: (!!!!!)

so how fast can a 17 year old male’s brain recall lyrics for songs when he perceives (wrongly) that sex is a strong possibilty?

well, basically none. my mind was going in like 900 directions, my heart was pounding. it was incredible and terrible at the same time.

the final answer: that danzig song.

so lying there on my leather jacket, with a 15 yr old girl, in a field, thinking i’m about to get laid, i start singing ‘soul on fire‘

i think i even realized at the time how redicoulous the whole thing was–but i did it.

–right. so lets take a moment to describe this young woman. her name was ashley. she was cute, although chunky she has a very scratchy voice, she acted very very very ditzy most of th time. (i think she was a genius though) it was rumored that her older sister slept with the entire football team in a huge gang bang and then went on to be a porn star (unsubstantiated). most importanly: ashley has incredibly huge (well relatively) breasts.

so i finish singing.

she lifts her shirt, and i swear, flicked the front closure of her bra, causing the thing spring open like a fucking trap or something. i was then instructed to pay attention to the monsters she had unleashed. i swear it was straight out of a jon hughes film.

however, i think she had a stop watch or something. i was given like 5 mins. and then they were taken away and she had to get home before curfew. we hung out one other night about a week later. it was pretty much more of the same, sans singing (thank god). the only other contact i had with here was about 4 months later, when she came up to me drunk (her now me!) at a football game (what the hell was i doing at a football game???) and groaped me in front of a recently ex-girlfriend.  sending that ex in to a fit of hysterics (yeah, like wasn’t a rocker heartbreaker)

so lets see, where did we leave off, oh yeah…We’re buying a house!!, no wait after that…We’re getting a dog!!…hmm after that. oh i got it…natty was 6 months pregnant and i’m freaking out about being a first time father.. no, well anyway.

i’ll work backwards, from uh, about an hour ago and eventually get to the big bang, and by that i mean the orgy we went to last weekend. (rimshot) no no, just kidding, been reading too much acw lately.

So it’s suddenly summertime here, and that brings all sorts of fun fun stuff along with it. Henry, inspite of his hip problems, is having a very good kill year so far. I think we’re up to 4 birds so far, the latest of which was saturday. I typically take the carcass and but it in to the dog shit garbage can and forget about it (umm the smell though, lovely). so i did that, and well it’s been about 110 degrees everyday (no joke, really 100 fucking 10) in the sun and shit, and the shitcan, with the dead robin in it has been in the sun. so this morning, at about 6:11 am, and i go to the shit can to tie up the bag and take it to the street for garbage day. i prepared myself for the stench by holding my breath, what i wasnt ready for, was (were?) the 50 maggots all over the bag, lid and rim of the shitcan. no sir, wasn’t expecting that.

now one would probably be freaked out and puke at such an early morning surprise. well not jefke 2006. no sir, i exclaimed “ick!” threw the cover on the ground and took the whole shitcan to the curb, and took the bag out and left it. no puking, no screaming no throwing up. and i have joe rogan to thank for it. well maybe not him exactly, i dunno how much he really has to do with the content of fear factor, but for better or worse, he is the face of fear factor, and after seeing people pretty much swim, eat, have sex with, insert into their butts, etc. all manners of maggots, cockroaches, pig testicles, cow nostrils, chicken thyroids, musktrat anus’ over the last i dunno 10 years or whatever that the show has been on, a shit can full of maggots didn’t really phase me. This is progress people, really. and people say reality TV is ruining our culture. poppycock, I say.

It was a long US bank holiday weekend last weekend (for all you non A-murricans) and i had big plans for sitting on super patio, drinking lots of cheap beer. well so as it turns out, natty caught some sort of plauge, and the capt then caught it as well, so that didn’t really come together like i had hoped. On friday, our fancy pants table arrived, which I put together on saturday. i was supertastically pleased to discover that our fancy pants umbrella and stand doesn’t fit under the table, which led to a super awesome ‘debate’ between natty and i on how to resolve the situation. like most good debates, it really wasn’t about the table or umbrella or the umbrella stand, but that’s what tripped it off. (it was really about our countries current polictical climate surrounding illegal immigrants), but it was some good times-arguing on a 90 degree day with 2/3rd of the household sneezing and coughing. ah holidays.

ah so speaking of kids with colds. i never knew how accruate the phrase “snot nosed kid” was.  till, well i had one. interesting.

building off of the fear factor thing. about 2 weeks ago, natty and i identified a foul odor coming from somewhere in the front yard. naturally she accused me of taking a shit somewhere out there (ok she didn’t) but she did ask if i put down manure or something.  we also noticed a shit load of flies everywhere. turns out our new mulch has brought this to down.  whicih is just luvely, lots of rancid smelling little phallus’ all over the yard, really who could ask for anything more? apparenly they’re a delicacy in asia. i think people just make that shit up. it seems that anything that we find disgusting is a delicacy in asia. someone’s making some shit up–believe you me.

so as many of you know, rolling rock was bought by budwiser, (well pretty much) so like many, i went out and got some RR for old times sake. for one summer in college, the whole world was about rolling rock snubby bottles. I maintain to this day that there is something in rollign rock that fights hayfever–that summer i discovered that i’d sneeze and wheeze all day until i downed my first beer. then it would go away. maybe that PA water. i dunno i personally think the wet dog taste is really wet dog, adn there’s something from that, but i can’t prove it.
all of a sudden people seem to be all upset that the company  was sold to our friends at interbrew/bev a few years back. I can still remember when i saw my first RR bottle at a belgian bar. I was obvious that the bar had to stock it as part of some sort of contract. when i asked the bartender for one, it took like 8 tries (oh yes i know i dont’ know dutch, but if there’s one thing I DO know it’s how to get a damn beer). when it arrived it had that classic wet dog taste and was sold with a lollipop. not sure what the deal was with that.

well anyway, farewell rollilngrock, not to be a doomsayer, but i doubt that NJ will brew you in the same way.

ok well that’s it for now. i’ll try to keep on top of this shit. but hell who am i kidding.

His scope dare post, and the ensuing loaded at school post hits to fucking close to home i really need to tell this story. i’m pretty sure my mom no longer reads this site, but if you do mom, you might as well skip this one b/c this’ll prolly piss you off a bit. but hell all’s well that ends well, right?

oh and a general disclaimer, i think this one might get away from me, so this might be a long one. i promise to spell check before i publish it. granted we both know that spellchecking is only part of the solution, but hey baby steps.

jefke, a pint of rumplemintz, computer science class and rehab.

So for the first 3.25 years of my high school career, i didn’t drink, i was in fact straight edge. oh i didn’t have a shaved head or a super huge champion hoodie, but i liked the music and didn’t drink, or smoke, or fuck (not really be choice on that last one, but it was easy to claim it was a "choice" and make myself feel better).

you see, in my town, the super cool kids were jocks, but jocks like in john hughes films, more like the jocks in dazed and confused, they drank a shit load and smoked a lot of pot and had, well pretty much mullets actually (long in the back) and all loved the grateful dead and shit. Lacrosse was the sport in my town, and if you were good at it you could get away with murder, well not murder but certainly date rape and stealing destruction of private property. so somewhere in 9th grade or something, whilst being picked on and/or teased by said jocks, i decided that i thought that they were assholes, and i wanted to be as different from them as i could possibly be. the skaters were a much more accepting bunch (on some levels) so i tried to get in tight with them. problem was, i couldn’t skate, but like any other group, they needed a mascot/jester, and jefke has always been good at that. so i started hanging out with them. most of them were straight edge. so that’s how i found that shit. and man did i feel good. to have a moral ground to say "i reject your sports/beer/pot/asshole culture".  well it felt like it anyway. everyone needs something to cling to at 15 right?

so as we moved along in highschool things got more complicated. some skaters stopped skateing and became punks, and long with that got in to the punk related boozin and drugs. some jocks weren’t assholes. it got very confusing to me. so come senior year, i realized that 1) i’d never been drunk and 2) one really shouldn’t judge people with out knowing what they’re talking about and 3) i was pretty pissy and miserable anyway. so i decided i should get loaded. to see what all the fuss was about. first mistake right there. so a group of non jocks and non punks were having a party, with a keg (ohhhhh) and i was friendly wiht them, so several of us made overly elaborate plans to go and get in on this beer thing. i’m rambling but long story short, i had 3 keg cups, got slap happy, and had a fucking great time. so next thing you know, i’m a drinker. 

given my personality, i wasn’t satisfied with the occasional weekend beer. no  no, sir, i wanted to be loaded all the time. and why not, why wouldn’t some one want to be loaded all the time. given that it was senior year, pretty much everyone but me had established booze procurement procedures. so i simply leeched off of them.  I found that booze transcended my rigid social constructs. i was ending at parties where i would normally get beat up, but i was so plastered that again, i became something of a little mascot/jester for them too. oh yes, i have stories of me in a corner actually talking to a paper machee sphinx that someone’s little brother made for 6th grade histoyr class. oh i was a freakshow.

I became friends with this one guy, brian–i should change his name i suppose but i can’t think of anything. so anyway,  brian had been drinking for  while, and well knew about it and he sorta took me under his wing. we’d split cases of beer, or bottles of vodka or whatever. which worked out for him b/c i’d be loaded after 4 and he’d drink the other 20. now brian was a man with out a country, in so far as he could circulate amongst all of the social groups, and i leeched of that as well, to a certain extent. (i’m getting there people stay with me)

He was friendly a jock that was edging closer to the burnout side of the spectrum, and this jock, andy we’ll call him, had several older brothers…and therefore he had ID.

quick backgrounder:

so at my highschool as a senior you were able to park in a special parking lot that was, in theory, closer to the school than the normal parking lot. thing is you had to walk in through the field house (gym) and then through the cafeteria, so in  essence i was further, but still it was the senior lot. also as a senior you had the privilege of leaving school to go fetch things’ from your car. i dunno who thought that was a good idea, but man–what a bad idea. so here was our plan:

Andy would go to the liquor store and purchase some airplane bottles of rumplemintz and keep them in his car in a cooler. brian and i would pay for his booze, and the 3 of us would go to the car at lunch time and drink the minty boozey goodness and then return to finish our school days, you know, a bit more relaxed. 

So we did this once and it worked wonderfully. we all had a little bottle each, and the buzz hit right after walking through the cafeteria, and we smelled of minty lovelyness.

Never one to rest on my laurels, i suggested that we do this again, the next week, but this time lets get a pint of rumplemintz, and share it, it’ll be more than 1 little bottle, and less than say 3 little bottles each.  everyone agreed.

so andy got the bottle for us, but then got himself a coupla miller lights i think. so that left brian and i to drink the rumplemintz, ok no problem. sure, right. now brian could hold his booze, well sorta. I could not. brian knew this, and i believe he thought it’d be funny to watch me fall apart. so, with him setting the pace, we quickly passed the bottle back and forth, and in about 5 mins it was gone.

we got back to the cafeteria, as it was lunch time. adn i think i skipped eating anything (oh yes i was that smart). he started acting funny, and i remember thinking "man he’s totally playing this up". I left lunch and went to report to my after lunch class, computer science.  that’s where the shit started to happen.

i sat next to this girl, kristen, who was a pretty straight laced, focused young lady. while she didn’t achieve valedictorian, she was 2nd in the class. her long time boyfriend was going to the airforce academy on a scholarship, they were very small town footloose-ish those two. so i stagger in to class and apparently start passing out all over the place. legend has it that i kept falling forward and banging my head on my apple IIe screen.  what’s awesome is have no recollection of any of it. the struck so fast, so hard, i went from sober to completely loaded with out any of the pleasantries in between. so ms. valedictorian was sweet enough to pull my head off the screen when ever the teach walked by to check on our "10 print "jefke rulez";" programming. I have no idea how that guy didn’t notice that i was totally fucked up, maybe he did, and didn’t care, maybe he just didn’t care period, i dunno. so after that, whatever it was, i didn’t get caught.

i staggered to my locker after that, and got my shit for my next class, physics. thank god it wasn’t chemistry or something with bunsen burners. even better, it was a lecture class in physics that day.

so i pretty much crawled up to the back of the lecture hall and completely passed out. I was later told that our whacky harley riding physics teacher gave a 2 hr lecture on teenage alcoholism. but i think people were just saying that to fuck with me.

after that class, there was 1 period left to the day, and i’m told that 2 people walked me to the library and set me up to sleep in one of the huge cushy chairs they had there.  i was awakened an hr later by a sweet librarian that didn’t want me to miss the last bus.

what happened to brian? as i recall he got his shit together and had a pretty normal afternoon. i don’t think anyone even noticed that he had been boozing. 

what’s prolly most ironic, was that after i got up from the cushy chair, and got my head together, i realized i had to meet my friend al’s girlfriend to drive up to see him in rehab.  see al had been getting in to some shit, and was busted with smoking pot with another guy. naturally his parents would have to put him in to rehab for that. so, hung over from my little adventure, i drove with his girlfriend to visit him  in a full on lockdown rehab center. you’d think that would scare me straight. it was goddamned freaky in there too. no touching, no talking too quietly or loudly. but the experience was totally wasted on the wasted me. never occured to me that, hmm, i could end up in one of these places–hell maybe james frey was there—there was a guy that started fights all the time. ok i’m making that up.

hmm, i think i thought there was a whiz bang ending for this one. i guess not. well the whole minty drunkeness in school thing was enough to get me to write it. anyway. kids don’t drink in school… there i said it.