Bacon

A.C.: Atlantic City or Adult Children?

2006-07-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

"There is no possible way that Pee-Wee had sex with Chair-y. Now Cowboy Curtis and that dog chair, on the other hand, is a different story. that nose was right on his crotch."

"Here's the most obvious hint: once Optimus Prime gets done fucking this person, he screams real loud."

"Yeah, I think that if you landed on top of that, you'd be Rod Roddyed."

"I can't believe that you were thinking of Balki at the exact same time I was!"

"If that female puppet fucked me, I'd be getting sex AND a handjob at the same time!"

"I'll give you $2 if you go up to that window and ask if Santa Claus is working."

"I would fuck a poster. It can't say no."

"'The Price is Right' is still my bitch."

"Amy Jo Johnson and Dot from 'Animaniacs'? That'd be beastiality, pedophilia, and screwing someone from a different realm of reality all in one! In fact, the lesbian aspect would be the LEAST taboo."

Believe it or not, the above is a mere SAMPLING of some of the sounds our vocal chords produced recently when I, my sister, and my friends Dan and Rusty decided to take a late-night trip to Atlantic City, New Jersey. And I have yet to post the most offensive one.

Interestingly, this trip almost failed to occur. See, it came at the tail end of the early July 2006 week that New Jersey lawmakers could not agree on a budget, which resulted in...what else?...a complete and utter shutdown of the entire state government. Now, while this would be an improvement for most states (not to mention the country as a whole), it really fucked up the Garden State, which is no easy task. Since gambling operations are regulated by the government, all reels, wheels, and other gaming terms that end in "-eels" came to a halt once employees assigned to casinos were told to take an indefinite unpaid leave of absence. Those who have not been to the area don't realize that A.C. is no Las Vegas. In Vegas, there are actually activities outside of gambling: world-class entertainment, trips to Hoover Dam, prostitution, etc.

Atlantic City, without its casinos, is essentially Harlem with a beach.

Of course, this initially put a sour spin on our plans, which we made extremely far in advance (the previous Tuesday). If we missed this opportunity, we might have to wait an entire WEEK before we'd get another one like it! I soothed Dan's dreary outlook with the observation, "Hey, if we still go down when the casinos are closed, we'll still leave with the exact same earnings we left with each time they WERE open!" What can I say? I'm a confident bastard.

Fortunately for us (but not for people who were there during the shutdown, but fuck them), the budget crisis was straightened out THAT DAY and all casinos reopened. Sure, New Jersey increased its sales tax by 1% as a result (to 7%), but that didn't matter to we 6%-sales-tax-paying Pennsylvanians...or to the filthy rich New Jersey citizens who feared that the budget solution would eat away at their tax breaks. So the mom with three kids has to pay more for milk, clothing, and therapy; what matters most is that Jacob Wellington Pewterschmidtt III gets to keep his yacht. However, I must admit that I did find humorous that citizens who frequent A.C. bitched about the sales tax, seconds before (or after...or during) they fed the better part of their annual salary into a video poker machine.

Despite living within an hour's driving distance of the Garden State's gambling Mecca, which made our late-night trip (we LEFT suburban Philadelphia close to 11pm) a worthwhile possibility, it nevertheless produces a sight that I have yet to see on ANY day trip I have taken:

The sunrise.

Seriously. Sure, I've seen the sun SET numerous times and have often departed and returned home within the same 24-hour span (yet with both the departure and arrival times ending in "AM"), but I have never seen the beginnings of the next day before. Fortunately, this happened well after I had taken everyone back to their respective homes, so I just chalked it up to being overly tired and hallucinating, which is a perfect state to be when you're traveling on an Interstate highway through one of its many construction zones.

The Saturday on which we left had a few minutes left to live as we pulled into the neon-lit chaos of what is commonly referred to as "A.C." by writers too lazy to continuously type out lengthy words like "city." Needless to say, the trip down was more or less uneventful, though we did amuse ourselves by partaking in an activity that is highly amusing to each and every person on the planet...assuming Dan, Rusty, and I were the last people on Earth: saying insane shit in front of tollbooth attendants.

We figure that tollbooth attendants have a pretty dull job, so we figure that we will take pity on those who take money by engaging in psychotic, often embarassing conversation as we hand over our toll. At least we give these highway drones an opportunity to go home and tell their significant others (assuming they have one) the story of a car full of guys enthusiastically discussing whether or not select characters on "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" had sex with each other. While we did indeed start these conversations on purpose, we did not count on actually CONTINUING them as we drew closer to the city limits, which explains the existence of the puppet comment in the quote list heading this column.

Aside from that, which will grow into a full-fledged, albeit just as fucked up, competition later on in this column, the only other point of note during the route involved a road sign. Seriously. Dan thought that he had seen a sign advertising Margate City's infamous "Lucy the Elephant" attraction alongside the darkened highway; had said highway not been the Atlantic City Expressway (which has a speed limit of "Autobahn"), I would have instantly spun around to double-check. A few days later, Dan, on another excursion to A.C. (sans the rest of us), not only got a good look at the sign which only existed in a "possible" sense prior, but actually called me to tell me about it. Seriously. The background noise on his end of our phone conversation gave away that he was indeed still on the road and had literally JUST PASSED this sign.

Yeah we need to get laid.

Anyway, we made our way to the Monopoly-themed streets of the city and began scouring a parking location. While each casino-hotel-buffet restaurant has its own set of unique charms, we decided to park at Ballys for a very special reason near and dear to our collective hearts: it was free.

Apparently, Ballys was sponsoring some type of car expo throughout the entire week and was offering free parking as a way to draw people in. The mere fact that I'm not 100% certain as to what exactly the occasion was even NAMED should be enough of a clue that the event's plan wasn't exactly thought all the way through. I mean, take a look at some of the events casinos sponsor: car shows (I think), boxing matches, live entertainment, etc. All of these should possess SOME degree of loudness...yet no one ever notices, thanks to their unyielding focus on three spinning reels containing pictures of various fruits or digitally rendered playing cards in front of them. If the events of 9/11 happened to take place in "A.C.," there would have been a hell of a lot more casualties than what was seen in New York or Washington. The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center proved that people will run as far away as possible from their job. Hell, I want to do that right now and no airplanes have even come near the place. But slam an aircraft into a casino...and you'll have people either not notice or who will give that slot machine handle one last pull before the building TOTALLY collapses.

Applauding for a series of really cool windmills that dot the back bay of the resort town, even though the night sky prevented me from seeing them 100%, we made our way through the parking garage and to the elevators leading to the casino floor. I attempted to touch the ceiling a few times; while I succeeded in slapping my palm against the hanging concrete rafters, trying for the part of the ceiling itself resulted in my success at touching the (just as concrete) floor with many parts of my body at once, much to the collective amusement/embarassment of the others.

As the elevator made its descent, it did perhaps the last thing you ever want an elevator to do: it stopped at a floor where about 12 overweight drunk fucks were waiting. Oblivious to the mechanical carriage's 2000 pound weight limit, these assholes, one of whom was openly smoking a cigarette, essentially squashed we healthy people into the back wall for the remainder of the trip. Sadly, Dan and his 5'2 stature were forced behind a woman who took Sir Mix-A-Lot's 1990s hit "Baby Got Back" to heart. We later deduced that we were within full legal authority to slaughter the pack (even though none of us possessed a military tank, which would have been the only effective weapon).

ME: We could have killed them to uphold the weight limit and "No Smoking" rules.

DAN: We could have killed them because I had a face full of ass!

Fortunately, posters featuring rather hot Asian women advertising something (I really don't remember...and I shouldn't be expected to) lining the passageways between the elevator lobby and casino floor made us feel better. I felt better when realizing (and stating aloud) that I would fuck one of the posters, for it cannot say no. Dan felt better because he looked normal next to the asshole behind him expressing a desire to fuck wall-mounted pictures.

With my first $15, a few pulls of the slot handle resulted in my being ahead by the usual amount (a figure that ended in "cents"). Of course, such a lucky streak was short-lived, as that $15 and another twenty spot were gradually sacrificed to various one-armed bandits as the night wore on. And a lot of that managed to transpire before we even departed Ballys.

With no business lacking a coin redemption booth open, we passed time in between casino stops by strolling along the shore town's boardwalk. I learned the hard way that the beach's "Bikini Bar" was a very false advertisement, which, given the size of some of the patrons, wasn't entirely a bad thing. Being the animal lover he is, Dan expressed his lifelong desire to feed an Alkaseltzer tablet to a sea gull, as he had heard wondrous tales of the results of such a thing...from his father. Humph. Well, I'm glad that MY father doesn't do things like that; he instead engages in more mature activities, like intentionally running over neighborhood squirrels with his Jeep.

We entered the Trump Taj Mahal Casino-Hotel-Spiffy Restrooms for the sole reason that we had come to the end of the boardwalk's line of establishments. Inside, I made sure to slowly donate the aforementioned twenty spot and some pocket change to Uncle Donald's newest toupee. That's right, you "Apprentice" bastard, I can insult you on the Internet; you took my money! Okay, well actually YOU didn't take it, the slot and video poker machines took it...and that wouldn't have happened had I not consciously placed the bills within grasp of their money slot and pressed the "Spin" and "Deal/Draw" buttons instead of the "Cash Out" button. But still! You, er, never gave it back! Bald fuck.

Pardon the resentment there; I may still be a bit pissed from a trip Rusty and I took through the casino. See, a large array of signs dotting one wall advertised slots reflecting various themes, among them "Star Wars" and "The Addams Family." Rusty and I must have walked for over 5 whole minutes looking for these phantom devices, finding nothing more than "Munsters" machines. Hey, Fred Gwynne was an all right guy, but I still say that "The Munsters" is like "Diet Addams Family." Fuck Al Lewis; give me John Astin any day...at least the latter man is still alive (though he holds a prominent spot on my 2006 dead pool...which, in retrospect, could have netted me a winner had I replaced him with Lewis, who expired in January of this year).

Fed up with disproving each and every casino billboard's "99% payout" slogans, we made our way back to the parking garage. Fortunately, the elevator ride was uneventful, unless you count my attempt to start up the "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" debate while we...and another middle-aged man...were aboard, much to everyone's shock/amusement/contempt.

Maybe it was breathing in New Jersey's chemical-filled air after having been awake for over 16 hours, but somewhere on the car ride home, we decided that we should...why not?...extend the "Pee Wee's Playhouse" discussion a bit. It started out small. Following a discussion of Bill Kirchenbauer (the dad on the 1980s sitcom "Just the Ten of Us"...and don't ask how he got brought up...somehow, he always manages to snake its way into each and every word exchange Dan and I have), Dan had what he called the perfect fucked up conversation to have in front of the tollbooth attendants. To keep the improvisational nature of the discussion strong, he told me that it did indeed involve Kirchenbauer...but would not mention whom the actor was engaging in X-rated relations with.

ME: Let me guess. (Pause) Is it Balki?

DAN: Holy shit!

Not since the guy we rode with in the elevator two paragraphs ago have I seen someone with such a shocked look gracing their face. Out of nowhere, I had come up with the obscure 1980s sitcom character Dan was thinking of, which pretty much made him scared of me the rest of the night (though I'm sure the topics I brought up before had a little hand in that fear as well).
So naturally we made a game out of it.

Now there's no way I can prove this, but I'm fairly sure that we were the only people on the Atlantic City Expressway that night who were guessing the identities of exactly which two obscure 1980s and 1990s sitcom stars were fornicating, as pre-selected by another member of our party. Exactly why a car full of straight males (and one straight female) were casually holding conversation about sodomy between personalities who had not enjoyed fame since the Gulf Invasion is still beyond me to this day. But fuck, it passed the time.

Then I came up with it.

The most offensive line ever. One that did not make it into the previous batch of quotes because I wanted to draw specific attention to it (meaning that I wanted to shoo away readers who are easily offended). I said most of this quote in front of the Walt Whitman Bridge's tollbooth attendant before laughing through the final few syllables as we pulled away. Ready?

"If I were gay, I think I'd want a hand job from Michael J Fox. He'd do a pretty good job, don't you think?"

Amazingly, the only thing that bothers me about that above statement is whether "hand job" is a one- or two-word term. I'd look it up here on the Internet, but yeah, that wouldn't yield intended results.

Yeah, I'm going to the V.I.P. section of Hell. Dan would later remark in an Instant Message conversation that even if I went to confession every hour, swam in an ocean of holy water, and prayed the rosary a million times, the BEST I could POSSIBLY hope for in the Afterlife would be A SHOT at purgatory.

I will end there, partly because I already gave away the ending (I saw the sunrise, remember?) and mostly because no joke or humorous observation (or even sick observation, for that matter) can top that line. So the next time you decide to take a trip to Atlantic City, roll up your car windows so the air full of my rather filthy language doesn't seep into your car.

The Worst Line in the Universe

2006-06-26T07:25:00.000-07:00

One day, as is the norm, I became bored at work. It was one of those bouts of boredom where you constantly find yourself checking each and every e-mail account you have, in hopes that someone, somewhere sent you something worth reading in the 3 or so minutes since you last logged in to check.

I considered actually doing my job, but decided that this too would be boring.

Instead, I decided to call upon Google to locate me some reading material. Interested in finding pages devoted to topics of my liking, I typed the following phrase into the search field:

"i hate people"

I am a very twisted individual. Sue me.

At the time, the first result was a site entitled "The Best Page in the Universe." I clicked the link and entered the site.

And I became hooked.

The Best Page in the Universe, which can be accessed from a number of domain names, including "thebestpageintheuniverse.com" and "maddox.xmission.com," is an advertisement-free, simply arranged site featuring little more than columns on a number of topics. Written by a self-proclaimed pirate assuming the moniker "Maddox," each and every column is full of hilarious and well-written rants on the subject at hand, whether it is Helen Hunt, "Titanic," or hate mail people have sent him regarding a previously-written piece. Among some of his work:

"To be fair, having a rock that sort of looks like a face as your state symbol is like diving into a tub full of tits when compared to Idaho, where there's so little going on that they proudly proclaim how famous their potatoes are on their license plates. Are you kidding me? Celebrities are famous. Landmarks are famous. The starchy, underground stems of plants that are used for deep frying side dishes are not."
--from the column "Idaho Blows"

"I'm sick and tired of lazy gluttonous Americans bitching about immigrants "taking" our jobs. It's not like they can literally come to America, ambush us in the parking lot and take our jobs."
--from the column "Oops! You're Racist!"

"More and more, I'm running into dumbass jocks I went to highschool with bagging my groceries, cleaning my dirty dishes and renting out my videos. They're the ones stuck doing shit work after being out of highschool for 4 years. Oh sure, they ate coal and shit diamonds when they were in highschool, acting all high and mighty with their rented limos and cheap perfume, taking their dates out to school dances and bragging about the sub-par action they had the following day, but now it's a different story. They're no longer rewarded for screwing off in class because they're on the school football team. They're no longer let out early to go run laps and throw baseballs. They're no longer favored by coach fill-in-the-blank that's teaching math instead of a real teacher. Nobody gives a shit anymore jock-boy, now BAG MY GROCERIES."
--from the column "That's right asshole, bag my groceries!"

You should have a pretty good idea by now of not only Maddox's writing style, but also where I personally am influenced. If you don't, then you're a moronic asshole. Go bag my groceries, prick.

Anyway, since its late 1990s launch, Maddox and The Best Page in the Universe steadily grew in popularity to the point where he bragged about having his text-based, ad-free page visited more than the homepages of corporations such as McDonald's, Pepsi, etc. By 2005, he had landed a book deal, and a few short weeks ago, that book, "The Alphabet of Manliness," was published.

And I was going to have the bastard sign it.

Maddox was appearing at a Borders Bookstore in Bridgewater, New Jersey, which is your typical suburban community: predominantly white populace, right-turn lanes instead of sidewalks, traffic-attracting shopping mall, etc. Approximately a 2 hour drive from my home in suburban Philadelphia, it is safe to assume that the fact I spent the better portion of a rainy Saturday afternoon making this journey proves I absolutely have no life whatsoever.
I mean, think about it: I was driving two hours to a bookstore in the New Jersey suburbs to meet a guy who bitched about Idaho on the Internet and have him sign a $15 book I purchased.
With rain pounding my car the entire way up, I slowly but surely made my way across the Delaware River, through several towns that neither I nor anyone else residing outside of those towns are aware existed, and to the shopping center housing the Borders Bookstore. Gripping my copy of "The Alphabet of Manliness," which I still have yet to read, I made my way across the massive parking lot and into the store.

Now, for a moment, I'm going to guide you through my mind.

First of all, this is not the first time I went out of my way to meet an Internet celebrity. In a previous column, I noted that I had met Tucker Max (of the website tuckermax.com, which itself provides a link to Maddox's page) when he kicked off a book tour at the University of Pennsylvania. Max was signing copies of his New York Times bestseller "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" in the lobby of one of the Ivy League university's fraternity houses; having learned about his site through both Maddox and my friend Bill, I became a fan of his as well and plunked down yet another $15 for his own hilarious tome.

When I attended this signing, maybe 5-6 people stood ahead of me in the rather anorexic line, with a dozen or so more students doing nothing more than hanging around. In fact, as I waited, some people actually entered the frat house and WALKED PAST Max and his books, en route to their rooms to study or shower or do something equally stupid. Maybe I had gotten there early, or maybe not too many people in the vicinity took enough of an interest in Tucker Max, but whatever the reason, I got TWO copies of Max's book signed in a very tiny amount of time.

I assumed Maddox's signing would be the same.

I assumed wrong.

We may now leave my mind.

Beginning somewhere near the front of the store, the line of people waiting to get their copies of "The Alphabet of Manliness" signed actually stretched AROUND THE ENTIRE FUCKING INTERIOR. It was the first time that I had ever stood in a line this long that did not have some sort of amusement park ride at the front of it.

Somehow, every last computer geek in the entire state of New Jersey had managed to cram their way into the store. Despite there being enough people present that day to fill a stadium, the diversity was about as varied as that found in, say, a Ku Klux Klan meeting. Damn near 100% males, the line members all looked like those kids that you avoided talking to or walking near in high school. Even I would have avoided these people in high school, and I often consider myself to be a peer!

Picture this: you're standing for over a full HOUR behind two male teeny-boppers (so noted because of their inability to make any statement that did not sound like a question: "So we went? To the mall? And we were gonna buy this game?...") who were trying to get their PSP portable video game systems to access the store's wireless Internet. At their just-graduated-high-school-last-week ages, I would not be surprised if they were more envious of an IT engineer than they were of a Hollywood celebrity. These guys weren't nerds; nerds could kick their asses. They were BELOW nerds.

Behind me, I found the clones of the two Nerdy Boppers in front of me, only aged about 10-15 years further. Actual IT geeks, they seriously used words like "analog" and "coaxial cable" in colloquial, public conversation as if they were discussing the weather. While my knowledge of computers is a bit more advanced than that of most people I know (which isn't really saying much), it is still limited. Nevertheless, just by listening to these two hold a casual conversation, I felt a sincere belief that I could build a computer network from scratch. Using coaxial cables, of course.

As we inched ever closer, the Nerdy Boppers exponentially increased their levels of annoyance. Every single object in sight was awarded a loud description and ensuing discussion, broken only by continued attempts to render their PSP operable or to answer their cell phones. Every book we passed was picked up and reviewed, every chair that we passed was sat in, etc. I could just see them running...er, being driven in an SUV by their divorced mom reeling in alimony checks...home after meeting Maddox, popping the latest "Grand Theft Auto" release into whatever ridiculously advanced video game system is all the rage these days, and spending the remainder of the weekend holed up within their McMansion, exiting only to check the mail to see if their latest eBay purchase had arrived yet.

If these types of males were in a war, their role would be "bait."

I wasn't the only one pissed off at these two. The Tech Geeks behind me apparently perked their ears up when the Nerdy Boppers began a laugh-filled conversation about adoption. "You're adopted because your mom think you suck!" was one of the many gems of knowledge expelled. One of the Tech Geeks turned to the other one and said, loud enough for everyone in line to hear, "I should tell them that I have adoptive parents because my biological parents were killed in a car accident."

Want to know the killer part? Though both groups of geeks were within audible distance of each other, neither replied to the other. It was the real-life version of a chat room's empty threats.
Another odd aspect of the day included Borders staff members visiting each and every person in line and affixing various stickers to their copies of "The Alphabet of Manliness." To illustrate this, my copy of the book entered the store with nothing else aside from its receipt.

At one point, some bitch came around and affixed a gold-colored sticker featuring Maddox's "pirate face" symbol onto each person's book. Underneath the image was the phrase "Official autographed copy." Yeah, as if the fucking AUTOGRAPH wouldn't be enough to prove that I had a signed copy.

A while later, the same bitch came back around, this time making sure that everyone had paid for their book. Those who didn't got a red sticker. It was like fucking school.
Even later, the bitch came around again with yellow Post-It notes, on which we were to write our names and paste them to the page Maddox was to sign. Couldn't we accomplish this just as effectively with, oh I don't know, vocal chords?

Just before we got to the signing area, we were given torn pieces of a Post-It note to stick into a certain page of the book, for the tome's illustrator was also signing and would more efficiently perform his duty if he knew exactly which page to turn to that would allow him to sign over his artwork.

My book, which entered the store resembling a piece of rectangular literature, now looked like it had thrown up Post-It Notes and gotten several tattoos.

As for Maddox himself...you know, the guy who I drove two hours, only to wait another hour in line, to meet...was a very nice guy in person:

"Mike:
I am amazing
Maddox"

Hopefully those five words increase the value of the tome once I get sick of reading it and decide to make it the latest eBay item. By the way...yes, I am aware that he is wearing a crown, but no, I have no idea why.

The book was passed to Tom the Illustrator, whom I kind of felt bad for, seeing as how he was more or less a second, maybe even third, banana to Maddox. He was like Judy Winslow from "Family Matters".

Aside from the rain, four hours of driving, one hour of waiting, and damaged brain cells, the day wasn't all that bad. I met the second of many Internet personalities that I had hoped to come across before I decide to grow up. In fact, he even replied, rather promptly, no less, to an email I had sent him containing the above picture. It was definitely a decent gesture and one which definitely makes me recommend not only his website, but also his book.

Now bag my groceries, assholes.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.com/

I Went to Atlantic City and All I Got Were These Empty Pockets

2006-06-05T08:10:00.001-07:00

Looking at my debit card's activity history for this past Saturday, I spent over $100. Even though this figure isn't THAT astronomical an amount, one would think that, at the very least, it was translated into something worthwhile.

Aside from some digital photographs documenting the day, the three-digit amount of money I spent resulted in nothing more physically than a plastic 7-11 cup and a stuffed elephant. But, oh, the wordy stories contained in the acquisition of these items!...

Atlantic City, New Jersey is one of the few Garden State areas that people actually view as a destination; the rest of the state's towns merely serve as labels for highway exits and grassy areas to place each subsequent "_________ miles to New York/Philadelphia/Delaware" sign. Often dubbed the "Las Vegas of the East" by people who have never been to Las Vegas and are thus unaware that it cannot be compared to any other place, the coastal town of "A.C." served as the destination of my friends Dan, Rusty, Chrissy and I. The fact that none of us currently own a mansion should be proof that none of us have ever had titanic luck at the gambling Mecca. I personally have had the luck of the Titanic, but never titanic luck.

It had rained on the Friday before, producing the usual giant puddles and clots of frustrated suburbanites saying "It doesn't rain all week, but once the weekend comes, it pours!", all of whom completely forget that they would have spent the ideal "nice weather" holed up inside a shopping mall. Fucking retards.

Anyway, the amount of rain that was poured onto the tri-state region on the aforementioned Friday made us believe that there simply wouldn't be any precipitation left to fall until maybe September 2009. I should note that the "us" used in that previous sentence included not only my friends and I, but also the meteorologists at the Weather Channel, who had filled their cable channel's information screens with forecasts detailing how rain would be ending "early Saturday morning," leaving the remainder of the day to bask in 72-degree temperatures. We believed this to be true.

We all, at one point, also believed the legends of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and God to be true.

Under a steady stream of water succumbing to gravity a half-hour shy of high noon, we made our way to the Walt Whitman Bridge, one of several Delaware River crossings linking the 2nd state in the union with the 3rd state.

Note that I said we simply made it TO the bridge. We sure as hell weren't going to make it ACROSS the bridge, seeing as how cars were apparently being produced en masse from an assembly line located somewhere on the Philadelphia side of the span and immediately shipped out. I switched on the region's all-"news" station (I utterly refuse to leave "news" outside of quotation marks when referring to this particular Philly AM frequency, seeing as how the Philadelphia Eagles' mere EXISTENCE in the Super Bowl XXXIX city of Jacksonville, Florida was a top breaking news story for much of January 2005).

Here's what the traffic report LED with:

"Well, let's update the main problem spot in New Jersey, right at the base of the Walt Whitman Bridge..."

Oh how fucking wonderful.

It turns out that some cars decided to get into an accident and overturn. Now, if you know me personally or plan to continue reading this sentence, you'll know that I am all for people getting into accidents and ridding the world of themselves and (presumably) their gas-guzzling SUVs. But don't they realize that there are places OUTSIDE of our destination's route wherein this can be accomplished?!

A detour that got us out of the jam eventually led us into New Jersey via the nearby Ben Franklin Bridge. From there on out, the only thing that was going to further keep us from reaching our destination was the desire of yours truly to see a giant ass elephant.

A few months ago, I was turned on to the "Weird N.J." series of magazines and books to the tune of more money than I spend per month on student loan payments. Unbeknownst to me, the Garden State contains more roadside oddities than its 49 compatriots combined, or so it seems. And seeing as how the town acting as our destination bordered a town containing one of these attractions, I decided that our trip could very well include a quick stop to this yet-to-be-named place. I used the following argument to substantiate my desire:

"Because I'm driving."

We departed the tree-lined Atlantic City Expressway and immediately found ourselves in shopping-center-and-furniture-outlet-filled Random New Jersey Town #44035-A. We didn't even escape this area without a laugh:

Check out the signs between "Kohl's" and "Michael's". I'm only 26 in terms of years aged. Mentally, I'm still 14. Fuck you. Poophead.

According to Google Local, whose interactive online map was, in my defense, still relatively fresh in my mind, the road on which we found ourselves was to almost immediately dump us out onto Ventnor Avenue, which leads to Margate City, home of my desired destination.

For years, Dan, Rusty, and Chrissy will not be able to hear the term "Ventnor Avenue" without suffering extreme rage and immediately seeking me out, wherever I am, and beating me mercilessly.

I ignored the claims of "I think you passed it" and "We're in Atlantic City, for Christ's sakes!," going so far as to deny the latter claim, despite being within walking distance of the Trump Taj Mahal casino-hotel-buffet. Upon finding Ventnor Avenue, it was now time to travel "a bunch of blocks" (which I had actually written on my hand-drawn map and directions) until coming to Decatur Avenue, which fails to intersect with Ventnor, as we learned the hard way. Despite being geographically closer to the bay separating southern New Jersey from Delaware than to any viable New Jersey location, I nevertheless turned the car around, turned onto nearby Atlantic Avenue, and drove back down towards A.C. until we saw it:

Oops, maybe that isn't the most flattering view. But it IS the first view we saw, which didn't exactly make the 45 minute duration between our exit from the expressway and now that worth it.

That's better.

Lucy the Elephant, overlooking the beach in Margate City, New Jersey, is the last of her kind to exist; for some reason, there is not much of a market for 65-foot-tall wooden pachyderms. Having once had cousins in nearby Cape May, New Jersey and in not-really-nearby Coney Island, New York, the innards of Lucy did not house authentic, oversized replicas of elephant intestines or anything, but rather (according to Wikipedia) a hotel, restaurant, tavern (yeah, that must have been fun to see, especially when patrons exited after happy hour and turned around to look at the building they just departed), and even a business office.

A BUSINESS OFFICE.

Can you imagine draping your ass in a bland white shirt and tie every day, only to travel to a fucking ELEPHANT? I gaze dreamily out of the windows at my current job, thinking how pathetic it is to be cooped up in a dull office park building. Suppose I was doing this at the window built into Lucy's ass?

Though jumping from that window would have made for one funny-as-fuck suicide.

I guess Lucy as an alternative skyscraper failed when clients would show up to the address they were forwarded, only to find an African mammal the size of their McMansion at the location. Of course, the place currently serves as (why not?) a museum, dedicated to (surprise!) the history of Lucy. Today, Lucy enjoys a spot on the National Historic Landmarks list and tourists may visit her interior for a mere $5, provided the crazy parking lot lady doesn't give you any crap, which was not particularly the case with our visit.

Parking the car in the designated lot, a clipboard-toting older bitch who looked like she had forgotten to take her medication since the 1980s dashed up to us and, with the urgency of an NYPD officer stuck on crowd control during the actual collapse of the World Trade Center, asked, "Are you here for Lucy?"

Look at a map. There really isn't anything else to Margate City aside from this thing. But no, a group of people dressed like it's early March with out-of-state plates are here for the fucking beach.

ME: "Uh, yeah."

WHACKJOB: "Good. Because he tows people who aren't. Like right away."

He? Who? Jesus? Snuffleupagus?

We headed off to the gift shop (what elephant DOESN'T have a gift shop?!) as the crazy lady wrote down the make and model of my car for some inexplicable reason. None of us really wanted to spend $5 and a half hour touring this stupid thing...but then again, we didn't want Whackjob and the still unnamed "he" to tow our car, claiming that it was well-justified since all we did was visit the gift shop. Finally, I came up with a financial compromise that would benefit all involved:

I would buy a stuffed "Lucy" doll for $10 (twice the price of a ticket), and Dan, Chrissy, and Rusty would look at me like I was an idiot. Dan and Rusty would silently make plans regarding who would drive home later that evening when the last of my brain stopped functioning.

But it was worth my ten dollars plus tax! For I am now a proud member of the "Save Lucy Foundation," which was announced to me by her highness, the Gift Shop Cashier. She honestly let me in on this with the enthusiasm Cuba Gooding, Jr. exhibited upon winning "Best Supporting Actor" all those years and bad movies ago.

Our need to see, in person, a giant wooden elephant was now satisfied for the next few millennia; now it was time to quit wasting our money on worthless souvenirs and foundation dues and instead spend it sensibly: on slot machines.

Now let's make a sharp left into the parking lot of a 7-11, much like I did upon seeing Atlantic City's Atlantic Avenue outlet of the nationwide convenience store chain.

About to assume the role of "embarrassed female," Chrissy watched helplessly as her own boyfriend, along with Dan and I, plunked down a good $2.50 for perhaps the coolest piece of merchandise to have ever come out of the 7-11 corporation this week:

Just so you don't think I'm the only person who documents their experiences with regards to novelty cups purchased at 7-11, please check out this link:

http://www.i-mockery.com/blabber/?p=43#comments

UPDATE: More Superman cup reviews and thoughts from X-Entertainment:

http://x-entertainment.com/updates/entries/archives/00000782.html

Dan and I were immediately sold upon following this link.

Yes, I, the same person who once would have hesitated spending a dollar to save an immediate family member from death, now spends $2.50 (plus tax) on a cup from a movie based on comics he's never read and following movies he hasn't seen simply because a website BLOG made it look cool.

As Rusty suffered numerous bouts of "brain freeze" at the hands of his Super cherry Slurpee, during which I helpfully suggested that he should have followed my lead and purchased the Coca-Cola-flavored Slurpee like I did, we made our way through the sea of casino buses and taxi service cabs to the 8th level of the "Ballys Parking Place" parking garage.

For those of you who are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the area, "Ballys Park Place" is a popular casino. "Ballys Parking Place" is an awful pun that wouldn't even meet Disney's standards for corny phrases. We should have been allowed to park there for free just for the suffering encountered reading that phrase everywhere.

Hunger struck. We made our way out of the garage (via enclosed, elevated, and motorized walkway that featured visual and audible advertisements, including a man declaring in a booming voice "Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER!!!!!!!!!!"), through the casinos (whose majority of slot machines no longer have coin slots!), and out into the rainy southern New Jersey atmosphere. Neglecting a return trip to Bill's Gyros, where our friend Bill had gotten drunk and insulted a Greek waiter whom he had deemed Santa Claus simply because he had a white moustache...and no other features associated with Kris Kringle, we decided on the Random Upstairs Buffet to eat. Approximately $8 per person, this buffet offers all sorts of delicacies for the gambler who has next to nothing to spend so he goes to all-you-can-eat places, only to be promptly kicked out at closing time:

--Lukewarm pudding of differing colors (I'm not entirely certain that there were actual differing FLAVORS of said pudding)
--Bacon bits manufactured when "Schoolhouse Rock" was still being produced
--A carpet of pepper sprinkles, underneath of which may or may not be turkey slices
--Vending-machine quality soda at aforementioned Superman cup quality prices
--Saltines that have been stepped on for your convenience
--Fried chicken featuring the latest culinary breakthrough: actual RED meat. Not pink. RED.

As our digestive systems contemplated going on strike each time we came to New Jersey, we decided to behave completely unlike most A.C. denizens one last time and actually get something for our money. "Something" in this case happened to be a $13 admission to:

Yes! Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Spend the better part of a 20 spot walking through what the traveling carnival's funhouse charges three tickets for!

(Seriously; the place had air shooting out of the floor and a two-way mirror)

Yes! Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Come See the World's Tallest Man and People Who Have Had Yard Implements Shoved Through Their Faces! Or statues of them anyway! Accompanied by grainy, possibly Photoshopped photographs!

Come see shitloads of stuff made out of matchsticks! No we don't operate under this newfangled "fire code" thing!

Come see optical illusions that you will never see anywhere else, unless of course you have access to the Internet or some moments to spare in Borders' "Magic Books and Puzzles" section!

Despite my exclamation-mark-filled criticisms, Ripley's was seriously a pretty neat experience...and I'm not only saying that because they blast the music from "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" onto the boardwalk. Upon paying, you self-guide yourself through a series of rooms, all of which are filled with interesting phenomena, most of which is constructed out of matchsticks. Seriously; who has the time/patience/lack of masturbation skills to construct such things?

All 5 feet and 2 inches of Dan posing next to the World's Tallest Man's official mannequin. The statue may have Dan beat in the height department, but Dan wins hands-down when it comes to not resembling a mentally challenged Waldo from the "Where's Waldo?" books.

Now you see the holographic Mr. Ripley...

...and now you don't! Camera flashes make men vanish!

Wooden arrows through a glass bottle. Believe it or not!

Anyone carrying Jesus' head on a plate is perfectly OK in my book. I'm assuming this scene was deleted from "Passion of the Christ."

A fur-covered trout. Or possibly a regular trout with some extra shag carpeting glued onto it and mounted on a wall for idiots to gawk at. I'll go with Option #2.

Hopefully this mannequin with the fence post shoved through his chest didn't have to suffer much. Ripley's was very anti-mannequin.

A wall full of Monopoly money. The bear in the foreground is made of shredded paper money...money that COULD have gone to me, but god forbid Ripley's goes without a bear that could have been made out of matchsticks or something.

Stuff that lights up when you push a button is more than amusing to people in their mid-twenties. I personally must have spent ten solid minutes at this exhibit...and I still have no idea what its topic was. It could have been "Pictures that Light Up When You Push a Button" for all I know.

A pile of books apparently defying the law of gravity...and Rusty reaching for one. I bet no one else has ever thought to pose in this manner!

Now here is something that I KNOW was for something else unrelated to a man and a horse sleeping with each other, but the image alone was all that I needed to capture.

Exactly how a mannequin of an old man taking a picture of another mannequin (not pictured) is a "Believe It Or Not!"-type attraction is beyond me, but it did allow Rusty to get in touch with his "I like to fuck fake old men" side.

Way back in ancient times (which, to me, is any period of time before my birthyear of 1980), Asian countries used to force women's feet into rather uncomfortable shoes, resulting in such painful foot formations. I guess this is back before these countries discovered manga, anime, and other forms of artistic expression that concentrates on virtully every part of Asian women EXCEPT for the feet!

More mannequin abuse. Suspended from his nipples, this thing rotated around in a circular pattern. Talk about a titty twister.

This staple of the museum's much-sought-after restroom is just cool. And I was right on target. Don't worry, I checked; there were no bullseyes inside the regular toilets.

Wow! Water coming out of a spigot that isn't attached to anything here in this day and age of filtration pumps that are sold at Spencer's!

Sadly, one picture that is not included thanks to its non-existence was one of Dan and I on the opposite side of the two-way mirror, directly giving people the finger as they look at themselves in the mirror, attempting to "roll their tongue" in front of it because a sign says so.

Finally, it was time to gamble.

Between three different casino-hotel-gift shops (Sands, Ballys, and Caesars), I donated over $40 to the wallets of their corporate executives. One gallon of Leer jet fuel on me, guys! I hope it catches on fire when you're over the Pacific!

Many things were going through my mind, most of them swear-laden, as I bit my fingernails in anticipation of seeing what my latest push of the button/pull of the handle would do. Some things, however, did not penetrate my consciousness:

1. The fact that I was biting my fingernails after using them to touch a button/handle that 1000 others had touched in the past hour.
2. My life circa 1999, when I was employed in retail at the local mall, earning a benefit-lacking, part-time pay a staggering 10 cents above minimum wage. Those days, I would have my dinner at the mall's Mr. Bulky candy shop, for it was the only store in the mall selling various food items for under a dollar. $1.25 could get you a five-course meal there, provided that you don't mind your "courses" being a 2 X 2 inch box of Nerds candy, a single Pixy Stick, etc. Amazing how times and priorities change.
3. The fact that, despite posting numerous photographs of their bigtime winners near the entrance, each casino wouldn't have enough space in the CITY to post photographs of all the people who lost.

But when you gamble, there is no room for thinking. Gambling and thinking are natural enemies. I personally am a college degree holder AND 8th grade spelling bee champion...yet will still spend $1.25...multiple times...to align some cherries and black "bar" symbols on a computerized machine programmed by Lucifer himself.

Want even more proof?

This is a pool of water that is part of the fountain near the boardwalk entrance of Bally's Wild Wild West Casino (which really makes you feel like you're in the Old West, assuming the time period had overweight, chain-smoking senior citizens and trailer park residents sitting perfectly still, their eyes permanently bonded to slot machines). As if the massive amount of change lining the floor of the fountain wasn't enough...there are actual DOLLAR BILLS floating in it! Yes! Dollar bills! Dropped into a FOUNTAIN!

This is Dan at one of Ballys' "Price is Right" machines, which he was more elated to see than his college diploma. After the late "Price is Right" announcer Rod Roddy blared "Thank you for playing," Dan wandered away and became the first person in the casino that day to say, "I made the Price is Right my bitch!"

It was a nickel slot, so he won about $2.

Next, we vacated the boardwalk-hugging edifices for one of only three casinos built on the city's marina section. Sure, we literally had to exit town and make a U-turn to get to there, but that didn't matter. It is against the law to go somewhere in New Jersey and NOT spend more time in the car than you do at the actual destination.

The Borgata is, as of this writing, Atlantic City's newest casino-hotel-resort-Starbucks location. It is the site where Jennifer Lopez' mother won a cool $1 million, much to the dismay of everyone who was not Jennifer Lopez' mother. If my friends and I are any indication, no one has won shit there since.

So, you might ask, what did I take away from this place. Its overly posh interior? Its 34-1 ratio of hot girls in revealing clothing to senior citizens (which is grossly reversed elsewhere in the city)?

Nope. This view:

I had seen these things from one of the boardwalk hotels:

...but not until parking did I realize how many of them there were! I have no idea why, but I found these things to be among the coolest inventions the world has ever seen. Even if they serve no other purpose than to spin, that is totally all right with me.

This is when Dan, Rusty, and Chrissy began walking further away from me. Personally, I don't know what took them so long.

We all enjoyed dinner in some Borgata restaurant possessing a name that I couldn't pronounce. All I can recall while ordering is that there was some menu item with the term "three-way" in it, of which I lamented not getting photographical evidence.

Needless to say, I exhibited other examples of high class, seeing as how I have been to Dennys on multiple occasions and thus am an expert on fine dining:

--Reaching for my own ID when Rusty and Chrissy were the only table members purchasing alcoholic drinks
--Scooping each individual vegetable piece out of my soup
--Phonetically pronouncing the wine list
--Expressing my hatred for the pickle served alongside my bacon cheeseburger by tearing the piece of the roll that came into contact with said pickle off
--Finishing half of my burger...but ALL of its bacon, strip by strip

A few plays of the slot machines (and one "I'm not paying $60 to see Lewis Black!") later, we were on our way out...though not before Dan and I swiped some washcloth-quality paper towels from the men's restroom. Honestly, you could wash dishes with these things. By now it was dark; the bright lights of A.C.'s various establishments illuminated the sky majestically:

A few Slurpee refills at 7-11 and we were back on the expressway, speeding towards home, pausing only to pay tolls

...and have inane conversations about whether or not select female comic book personalities use strap-on devices

...in front of the tollbooth attendants.

I couldn't think of any better way to end such a day.

Oh, wait...yeah I can.

I could have taken THIS home instead of a damn plush elephant:

Check out Dan's less wordy (and probably funnier) account of the trip upon his posting at http://whatdanlearned.blogspot.com

What Ex-Communications Majors Do When They Are Bored, Part I

2006-05-08T04:06:00.000-07:00

Sometime between 8:30am and 9am on a recent Saturday, I stopped in a convenience store to buy a hot breakfast sandwich and an energy drink.

I mention this because it turned out that it was the last time that day that I would do anything even remotely normal.

My friend Dan and I both work in office jobs five days a week. Lately ("lately" meaning "since we got hired at said jobs"), we discovered that the tedious, boredom-inducing nature of this daily hell had to be complimented somehow.

My friends Shana and Tara are days away from their college graduation and have spent the past few weeks devoting their lives to making sure they accomplish every task that was thrown to them at the last minute by surly professors who are pissed off that they get to leave High School 2.0 in a few weeks whilst they are stuck teaching the same crap to a whole new group of students in a few months' time. Lately ("lately" meaning "since they decided to pursue secondary education"), they discovered that the tedious, stress-inducing nature of this daily hell had to be complimented somehow.

And a lot of their normal friends were unavailable that day.

When you live in suburban Philadelphia and wonder aloud if there is anything more to life than repeating the work-eat-sleep cycle day in and day out for extensive time spans, you tend to participate in activities that don't exactly fall inside the realm of what most of society considers "normal" or "sane." Most people our age have since accepted the fact that, no, there really is NOT anything more to life than the work-eat-sleep routine.

Then again, none of them majored in communications.

Dan and I majored in the very laughingstock of a major from which Tara and Shana will soon graduate. Moreover, we all studied at the same university, which, as we discovered too late, assigned its communications studies department the same level of importance as it did the vending machines in the student center (which were often broken). Those of you who think that I'm joking may think differently upon my revealing of the fact that not only was the major the only one of its kind on campus to be operated out of, seriously, the basement of an old church, but also filled its 8- or 9-person staff with incompetent and inept instructors whose sole contacts in the entire communications industry were each other.

So, yeah, when you recall that you spent part of your collegiate years editing a video laced with "fucks" and "shits" and one "Holy rim jobs by the Virgin Mary" directly underneath a room containing a set of pews and an altar, it makes you realize that maybe how you spent a Saturday is relatively "normal" in comparison.

RED BANK, MIDDLETOWN, AND LEONARDO

Being females who have social lives and other friends, Shana and Tara had yet to realize that filmmaker Kevin Smith's library of classic films ranging from "Clerks" to "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" to "Clerks II" was indeed its own subculture, as opposed to a bunch of should-have-been-released-directly-to-video flicks rife with B list celebrities.

Dan and I, meanwhile, had solidified our places in said subculture when we joined the numerous other soon-to-be-disappointed fans in theaters when Smith released "Jersey Girl" in 2004. Additionally, he and I had completed an excursion to the former hometown of the director/producer/writer/editor/co-star/catering service abuser a mere two months earlier.

So in order to justify spending a heaping amount of toll and gas dollars to travel the distance between southeast Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey (where Smith hails from and where he shot most of his movies), I actually brought a portable DVD player with me and had the girls watch a rented copy of "Clerks" in the car, with yours truly providing helpful narration from the front seat based solely on what I was hearing.

ME (without looking at the screen): See that guy on the right? That's Kevin Smith.

Several Hi-C Shoutin' Orange Tangergreens (the juice company's current equivalent to its much more beloved beverage of the past, Ecto Cooler) later, New Jersey's major highways were behind us and we pulled off at the Garden State Parkway's Red Bank exit, where we were greeted with:
"Perot for President" sticker (center of pole, bwtween "One Way" sign and white square).

This sticker has not only been there since our last excursion to the northern reaches of the Chemical Commonwealth, but apparently also since "Saturday Night Live" was still watchable.

A few wrong turns (no trip to New Jersey is complete unless you make at least one wrong turn during your trip) later, we were in the heart of Red Bank. Aside from showing off the exact same "Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash" novelty store I had just been to/inhaled the comic book ink odors of two months prior to Tara and Shana, there really isn't much more to say.

However, both girls agreed that I would make a great tour guide, which I took as a compliment despite the fact that my knowledge of Red Bank doesn't go more in-depth than what I saw in "Chasing Amy" and "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back," whose Red bank filming locations are directly across the street from each other. As far as I know, the town was constructed just FOR the filming of "Chasing Amy" back in 1996-1997.

Of course I couldn't leave the Stash without three issues of what is slowly becoming my new favorite magazine, "Weird NJ." The fact that New Jersey is so fucking strange that there is a MONTHLY publication devoted to oddities is something I find rather intriguing and thus something well worth the $4/issue price.

Obtaining directions to the Quick Stop and RST Video stores in Leonardo, New Jersey (sites of Smith's first film, the ultra-low budget "Clerks."), we headed back to the car and prepared to enter the throes of New Jersey once again.

Unbeknownst to our female companions, however, Dan and I had been preparing for a "quick stop" of our own on our way to the "Clerks." locale. Yes, they probably wished that they ran away from us the second we parked in Red Bank when I pulled into the parking lot of a Spirits Liquor Store on Route 35 in Middletown. Were we planning to purchase alcoholic beverages that we would then consume whilst traversing unfamiliar New Jersey roads, quite possibly ending the trip in tragedy?

They wished.

Yes, the "Evil Clown of Middletown" (New Jerseyians' official name of it) that Dan and I had lovingly dubbed "Jackoff" for obvious reasons on our last trip upon first seeing it. Funnily enough, this turned out to be the site at which we spent the most amount of time outside the car in the Red Bank-Middletown-Leonardo area. Our arsenal of digital cameras and my new digital camcorder made our way to the towering circus character, where each one of us, even Tara and Shana, posed for pictures.

For the record, not a single one of us even stepped foot in the actual liquor store, despite all of us being of age.

En route to Leonardo, Dan and I were saddened to discover that a public library's exterior sign that had had the "L" removed from "Public" on BOTH sides of it on our last trip had been repaired.

Of course, we were both relieved to see that one could still adopt a roadway jughandle:

...and could also patronize this establishment:

...which I'm assuming is a darkened hospital whose employees look at you with dreary eyes and suggest "suicide" as a remedy for any and all problems you come to them with, including a stubbed toe.

We arrived at the intersection of Leonard Avenue and NJ Route 36, a few feet from which sits a small strip of stores boasting Quick Stop and RST Video, the latter of which has since closed up shop.

Taking a few pictures of the exterior not so much for tourism as much as it was for later inclusion in Photoshop documents, we entered the Quick Stop, where I blew $8 on:

Quick Stop is one of only two stores in the galaxy that I know of that sells La Choy brand fried rice. Oh, it might not look/smell/taste all that good. Oh, it might leave a nasty metallic aftertaste in your mouth for up to two days following consumption. Oh, and the thin layer of dust coating the lid of the can...probably the only cylindrical tin food container that has not yet been replaced with those sanitary "pull-tab" lids...might mean that the product is a few years past the date appearing under the "Best Used By" stamp. But I've been eating it since I was young.

Then again, I also believed in the tooth fairy, God, and other mythical creatures when I was young.

Fuck, I don't know why I buy the stuff. At $1.79 a can, no less.

The latter item is like a symbol of our day. Tell someone that you bought a laser pointer that has an FM radio built into it at a convenience store and they will almost certainly reply, "You did that in Jersey, didn't you?"

You know, once they say the obligatory "What the fuck?" comments first.

We met a few other people inside who had come all the way from Michigan to see a punk rock show in Newark and were stopping to see the Kevin Smith sites at the request of the group's sole (surprise!) male member. Out of all 8 people in the store (our group, the Michiganites, and the clerk behind the counter), only the clerk hailed from the store's actual state.

No doubt that said clerk was wishing all of us would die via spontaneous combustion, seeing as how she can probably barely afford to travel the distance from her house to work every day, what with paying today's tremendous gas prices with money earned from jockeying a register at a dumbed-down 7-11. Meanwhile, the rest of us had come from other STATES to this store just so we could gawk at freezer cases we saw in a horribly edited, horribly acted, superbly written independent filmn that was over 10 years old.

So we had been to/seen the facades of a number of local businesses that had been featured rather prominently in one director's array of filmwork. Ben Affleck, Jason Lee, Smith himself, and numerous others had been to and subsequently immortalized the very places that we visited...places whose continued existence, upkeep, and appeal serve as strong evidence that, yes, independent cinema can indeed have an impact.

In other words, we all agreed that Jackoff the Evil Clown was the best part of the journey thus far.

It was time for us to officially complete the first leg of our journey, a leg that would take us past a hilariously named chicken stand:

...before our eventual exit. We made our way back to the Garden State Parkway using an impromptu route that I had suggested after clearly (or so I thought) remembering its layout on Google Local a day earlier.

By the time NJ Route 36 and NJ Route 18 eventually dumped us out onto the Parkway, Dan, Shana, and Tara were pretty much convinced that, if I ever wanted to go from New Jersey to England, I would travel WEST and circumnavigate the globe to get there.

Unlike our last trip to the tri-town region, we were NOT going to have our meal at White Castle. We had done so previously because none of us knew better and fucking John Cho and Kal Penn made the food look so damned tasty in "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle". At no point did the 2004 film mention the fact that the miniscule dinner rolls that the "burgers" were served on probably had more meat in them than the actual patties, which were made of some random gray matter that I and several top scientists have yet to identify.

Once our digestive systems forgave us several weeks later, Dan and I decided that we would never eat at White Castle again. Never again would we eat at a place simply because a movie made it look cool.

NEXT POST: Our trip to a "Medieval Times" restaurant, which our only exposure to was through Jim Carrey's 1996 flop "The Cable Guy."

Be sure to check out Dan's much less wordy account of the day...the entire day, no less.

WTF

2006-05-08T03:52:00.000-07:00

--I drove an hour and a half to go to a comic book shop and a convenience store, then another hour to go to a restaurant.

--I convinced 3 others to come with me.

--As I ate chicken, I watched a swordfight

--I stood in line to see up close a guy in a plastic bubble filled with water

--I bought a soda for the sole purpose of balancing its bottle cap atop my forehead.

More to come, once the attendants allow me something sharp to write with.

United 93

2006-04-28T07:05:00.000-07:00

"United 93" opens today.

And I probably won't be seeing it.

Now, everyone has their own reasons for wanting to avoid the first major theatrical release to capitalize on the events that ruined countless lives and instead see something like "R.V.," which merely ruined Robin Williams' credibility. A lot of people are saying that it is "too soon" to make a movie showcasing what transpired on September 11, 2001...a point which Oliver Stone took to heart, as his "World Trade Center" opens a few months later. "April is too soon, but August should be OK," thinks the "JFK" mastermind. "Also, most people should have seen 'Superman' by then."

What's interesting is that a lot of these people probably had no problem whatsoever driving up the profits of "Pearl Harbor," "Titanic," and "Saving Private Ryan." It's okay to capitalize on a disaster, just as long as it occurred before our birth and has a good-looking, well-known male lead. Put Ben Affleck or Tom Hanks aboard "United 93" and people might shut up about it and obediently plop down cash.

The reason I hesitate when people ask if $9 of my money will be exchanged for a "United 93" ticket is actually twofold. It has nothing to do with the actuality of the disaster. Yes, I know it's still relatively fresh in everyone's minds...but I've also learned that Hollywood is going to capitalize on ANYTHING sooner or later. The reason that the aforementioned movies came out when they did is because Hollywood still had some original ideas during the time span separating the actual events and their respective celluloid reproductions. With the exception of "Pearl Harbor"'s 2001 release, the film adaptations I mentioned above were 1990s flicks. Shit, back then, "American Pie" had yet to be made! The only films to possess multiple sequels were those beginning with "Friday the 13th" or "A Nightmare on Elm Street." In short, Hollywood wasn't exactly yearning for new and different material.

Compare that with today, where not only is there a "Scary Movie 4," but freaking "Big Momma's House" and "Basic Instinct" were granted sequels! Take a look at the list of movies that are scheduled to be released during summer 2006 and tell me how many of them do NOT end in a number. Hollywood needed ideas, so it finally tapped 9/11, which, if you will recall, was being exploited long before the first reel of "United 93". Shit, in some ways, it was being exploited AS IT HAPPENED.

"Our CBS-2 weather cam is showing that a second plane has now hit the World Trade Center."
I swear I heard something to that effect.

Anyway, the reasons I will most likely avoid "United 93":

1. I already know what happens.

I guess this is a given. But don't you go to movies to ESCAPE from reality...to become engrossed in a story whose outcome is always a surprise, be it good or bad? Yeah, I know that everyone realized how "Titanic" ended, too, but at least that featured the death of Leo DiCaprio as a bonus. Seeing a movie where you know all the main characters will die is kind of depressing, whether it really happened or not.

2. The guy in the promos is NOT Johnny Knoxville.

One character I saw in the theatrical preview was played by Johnny Knoxville...or so I thought. While the rest of the audience was more than likely bothered at the reality contained just in the movie's preview, what bothered me was whether or not this guy was Johnny Knoxville. A later IMDb check debunked this claim, but this morning's screen capture of the movie on MSN's home page actually caused me to click the image and read through the cast one more time, just to make sure:

You have to admit that it's a damn strong resemblance.

Think of how cool that would have been. I know that whatever character Knoxville played would have died anyway, but at least he could have some "Jackass"-style fun with the hijackers. He could have stuck a firecracker in their turban or something. See how much of a help "Allah" is when you have Knoxville (and maybe Steve-O, in a surprise cameo) barrelling down the aisle in a shopping cart!

So if you see "United 93," enjoy it; if you don't...uh...don't enjoy it, I guess. Everyone handles large and small-scale events differently, and neither I nor anyone else should tell people what movies to see/not see and why they should/shouldn't.

But if you do see it, don't tell me what happens.

Tard-becue and Hamburgerth

2006-04-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

Half the time, my days spent at work are uneventful. The other half of the time, my days spent at work are FUCKING uneventful. These are the days wherein I find myself making 4 trips to the restroom every hour, even if I don't have to do anything, just out of boredom. Needless to say, the events that I will outline in this column took place on such a day.

I was sitting there at my computer regretting some of the mistakes I have made in my past, such as squeezing out of my mother's uterus without a fight. Behind me, some co-workers suddenly turned their attention to a TV monitor stationed in the room. For what it's worth, this monitor is hooked up to a traffic camera feed and thus broadcasts little more than dull shots of Philadelphia area roadways and the traffic contained on them. So whenever more than one person's interest arises at the sight of the monitor's current images, it is a safe assumption that something must be going on worthy enough of our collective attention.

School bus fire.

Having worked in various facets of traffic production since 2003, I have witnessed all sorts of roadway incidents via television, so a bus with flames shooting out of it wasn't exactly something brand new to my eyes. For the record, this occurred shortly after 9am, so unfortunately there were no kids on the bus.

Someone then pointed out that this wasn't any school bus: it was a SHORT bus!

Tard-becue!

Several co-workers began imitating retards and making comments like "There's no kids on the bus; they all ran off into the woods." Those of you who have the misfortune of knowing me personally will surely be surprised to hear that yours truly kept silent the whole time. I was actually upset. Why?

Because OTHER PEOPLE got to the retard comments before I could!

Besides, it got me thinking about Hell. Again, those of you who know me personally are aware by now that the Satan-controlled ethereal plane will most likely be where I spend eternity once the Grim Reaper comes knocking. While my atheism has historically kept me apathetic to this fact, the events of this day almost had me considering repentance. See, I don't believe that Hell is a maze of caverns bathed in eternal heat; rather, I believe that each individual person experiences his/her/its own version of Hell. In other words, Hell would be, in my case (as well as in the case of pretty much everyone reading this entry) an eternity at work.

And if the people who made the retard comments today are any indication, I will have the EXACT SAME CO-WORKERS in Hell. It's almost as if Satan wants it to be an authentic replica.

Anyway, once we saw that the fire wasn't going to spread to the bus' gas tank any time in the forseeable future, causing it and the dumbass state troopers wandering around the scene to fly several atmospheres straight up in a massive fireball, I and my future damned souls returned to our workstations. From there, the day was pretty much uneventful, as I spent the remainder of my paid hours performing complex, Internet-related tasks such as checking my Hotmail, MySpace, and Fark.com accounts continually, in the hopes that in the three minutes that had elapsed since I last did so would register a flurry of activity. No such luck.

Once I left work, I decided to stop at a local Wendys for my meal. Notice I don't say "lunch" or "breakfast" or anything like that; when you work shifts as ridiculous as those bestowed upon me, meals lose any and all connotations. It's just Meal #1, Meal #2, etc. What sucked is that I decided to go at a time that the general vicinity's gaggle of white-collar workers refer to as "lunch," so a crowd consisting of about as many people as the population of Chicago had also decided to crowd into this same restaurant.

One of these crowd members, who was not only behind me in line but who also decided to sit directly across from me while I ate, was this overweight computer geek, lisping everything he said to some other dumbass, who really didn't look like he gave a fuck. Sporting a bald head and sunglasses, the man on the receiving end of the geek's diatribe and spittle fit the profile of your average ex-convict. I bet the judge assigned the guy to hang out with this lisping fat fuck all day as some form of community service. And I also bet that, if that were the case, Baldy would never again commit another crime.

Not only in line, but also at the table, Lispy talked about nothing else...and I mean nothing else...but TiVo. It was as if he had just discovered the service that morning and just had to tell the only person willing to spend more than 5 minutes alone with him (a convict serving community service) every last detail. He was even talking about TiVo's WIRING system...and how you can record DVDs or some such shit with it...and how he and his dad were watching "Cinderella Man" and that the movie stopped one hour and 33 minutes into the film and the screen went blank. I'm dead serious; he actually recalled the EXACT SPOT in the movie at which it stopped.

All the while he was eating...and all the while maybe 30% the food stayed in his mouth, for "Cinderella" became "Thinderella"; "wires" became "wireth"; and so on.

Hey, soon-to-be high school and college graduates...welcome to life.

Neon black

2006-03-30T18:07:00.000-08:00

It's kind of eerie actually.

Bill moved to Hawai'i with the money he was originally saving to buy a car.

And, this past Tuesday, I bought a car with the money I had originally saved to move to Hawai'i.

But, as they say...

Out with the old...

...and in with the less old.

I'm not really sure which exact factor led me to give up the 1992 Ford Tampon...er, Tempo...that had acted as both my source of transportation as well as my source of bank account draining for the past year or so. Maybe I never really did want to part with the metallic eyesore that was originally constructed back when "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze" was a recently released movie for a cool $800.

Even today, a tear comes to my eye (probably as a result of my contact lens) when I think back to how, just recently, my dearly departed automobile somehow created a rhythm from the various "oh shit" sounds it made, thereby guaranteeing that I had at least something to listen to after my $98 CD player was stolen because neither of its two doors locked.

My street doesn't seem the same without the car, whose once light blue but now rather parched exterior glistened in (or perhaps was further deteriorated by) the sun. Sure, its interior dome light popped off easily after being brushed by the head of the aforementioned CD player thief. Sure, its entire ashtray and car lighter unit became permanently dislodged after my friend Brian's leg brushed against it one day as he sat down in the passenger seat. Sure, the hood produced light smoke each time it idled longer than two seconds. Sure, the windshield wipers would inexplicably stop working when on the "intermittent" mode. And sure, I saw my occasional backseat passengers mouthing prayers each time I so much as turned the ignition key through my rearview mirror (on those occasions that I actually got it to balance on its cradle).

But will a new car be able to replicate such grand memories?

I fucking hope not.

Inching ever closer to the new millenium in my car selection process, the successor to my 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra (1998-2001), my 1991 Ford Tempo (2001-2003), and my aforementioned 1992 Ford Tempo (2004-this past Monday) is a 1999 Plymouth Neon. Aside from its jet black color and its current inclusion of hubcaps and a transmission that has yet to falter, it is not all that different from "Pisces," the name that my sister bestowed upon her white 1997 Plymouth Neon.

Some of the vehicle's more desirable features, which will give you some insight as to what kind of metallic turds I have been ferrying myself and frightened others around in since my 1998 license acquisition:

--You can actually see your reflection in its exterior body

--It has a horn

--Its doors all lock

--It has a working radio

--Its windows go all the way up

--The "Service Engine Soon" light is not permanently illuminated

--The dashboard lights work

--Its gas cap actually locks

--The speedometer does not end at 80MPH

--It runs without making any sounds that sound like metal scraping against metal and/or asphalt.

Yes, I and all of my friends are still miraculously alive...though a number have moved away, two to different time zones.

As with any $4000 purchase that I haven't had in my possession for a full 48 hours yet, I've spent my time outside the car rather terrified, for a number of reasons.

First of all, I must say that I am proud of this car; it is not one that I expect my passengers to enter into in fright. While historically such a trait has passed quickly, I am still currently protective of my "wheels." It is freaking IMMACULATE at the moment; no crumpled-up papers or forgotten food dating back to the Bush/Gore debates has yet to grace its interior.

That's what scares me, though.

Why?

Are we forgetting another person who was very protective of his ride?:

And we all know what happened afterwards.

I have no desire to go to the Alamo or ride big rigs with ugly-ass ghost women.

Furthermore, the last black car that came into an immediate family member's possession was a Chevrolet something that my dad seemed to be more proud of than anything my sisters or I had accomplished up to that point (I think this was sometime in the late 1980s, when Fred Savage was still a big staple of my life).

It was short-lived, sadly, as some local idiot lacking auto insurance ran a Stop sign and crashed into my dad, effectively totaling his prized possession. Physically he was unharmed, but emotionally he was crushed. I think he still is, seeing as how his next car was either that 1982 Buick Regal (which he insisted on keeping even after its passenger door refused to open, its ceiling liner peeled away, and, worse of all, I started driving it) or that 19-something Chevy Citation (which he kept until it could no longer ascend the 1-degree incline leading up to a railroad crossing near our house).

Other than that Chevy, no one in my immediate family has owned a black car.

Finally, what scares me the most is my cursed short-term memory. After almost two straight years of scanning parking lots until I found my sun-bleached, ratty-looking Tempo, I am now going to be completely lost anytime I go to leave a mall or something. No longer will my car be the lot's sole decrepit resident. I'm sure that, one of these days (it thankfully hasn't happened yet), I will be scanning the lot for my Tempo and, upon not seeing it there, make a panicky phone call to someone saying that my car got stolen.

Needless to say, this other party, be it a friend or family member, WILL remember that I got a new car, meaning that THEY will think that my brand new $4000 purchase disappeared.

Oh, that will be fun.

Weird Hawaii

2006-03-27T11:48:00.000-08:00

There is a New Jersey magazine series appropriately entitled "Weird NJ," which has since grown to the point to include not only its own website (www.weirdnj.com) but also a batch of books detailing oddities in not only New Jersey, but also New England, Pennsylvania, California, and other select states. There is even one for the entire country.

Here's a few pictures from my recent trip to Hawaii that should make "Weird Hawaii."

And no, I'm not even referring to these creepy-ass Tiki things:

Those creepy-ass statues that always fuck up the Brady Bunch's vacations.

There's more.
1. Jack Lord Statue

As you exit Kahala Mall in suburban Honolulu, you are met with this bust of "Hawaii 5-0" star Jack Lord, which I can tell you from experience is creepy as fuck at nighttime.

Why they pay such an homage to a C-list celebrity that's been dead since my high school graduation is beyond me. Maybe it's because he's one of the very few white, non-Asian people to have ever been associated with the island.

Inscription on Jack Lord statue

"He loved the sea, these islands, and their people"

...so we'll make a bronze sculpture of his head and sit it outisde of a Macys.

There's only one person I know who was a huge fan of this guy:

(I apologize to the 6 or so billion of you who haven't seen the 2000 Norm MacDonald movie Screwed who don't get this reference)

2. Aloha gas station

As if trying to understand what the fuck "aloha" meant in the first place wasn't difficult enough, now it apparently is interchangeable with "Texaco". Plus, I like the 7-11 right next door. It's like a reminder you're in the giant mess of bland corporations that is modern-day America.

Speaking of which...

Ahh...Hawaii...sun, surf, and savings on socks.

3. Sewer signage

I guess the little fish is supposed to make this enforcement "cute". God forbid if you don't stop to take care of slimy, scaly things that don't really serve you any real purpose outside of seafood restaurants.

At the very least, the islands are protective of their ocean, which, presumably as a result of signage implanted in sidewalk tiles, is crystal clear and actually blue.

Ocean in Wildwood, NJ

Ocean (and rinse-sand-off-your-feet fountain) in Waikiki beach

Yeah, there's just a small difference in the quality/color of the water both resort areas lure swimmers to. Waikiki apparently figured out first that people like to be able to see the portion of their bodies that happens to be beneath the surface of the water whilst they swim. New Jersey has yet to do this.

Then again, they haven't even figured out "self-serve" gas stations in that state yet.

4. Interestingly-named store #1

Here's where they make people from my old high scool.

Believe it or not, "The Stupid Factory" is actually somewhat of a CHAIN in Hawaii (it might have stores elsewhere; I'm not certain). It's nothing more yet another clothing store, only with an odder name. I believe this one is adjacent to one of Waikiki's larger, more luxurious hotels.

Although I must say I find the fact that the poster in its window is in the form of a film reel is hilarious. Maybe they're making a statement about America's glorious film industry, which has gone from...

...to, well...

I should have asked those working inside the place if Paris Hilton was a frequent shopper.

5. Interestingly-named store #2

The big shopping center in Hawaii, which some actually compare to the Mall of America in Minnesota, is the Ala Moana Center. This is one of their businesses. I had no idea that coke came in seed form.

6. Mountain Town

Giant mountains are all over in Hawaii...and these people all decided to...why not?...make part of one their damn NEIGHBORHOOD. Now, I'm no expert on geology or whatever the hell it is...but wasn't Hawaii formed by, uh, VOLCANOES?

The LAST place I would build a house worth hundreds of thousands of dollars is on the side of a potentially-volcanic mountain!

I bet the view kicks ass, though. You need something nice to look at when you're running at warp speed from flowing lava.

7. People get thirsty in Hawaii

Another gem from the Ala Moana Center, this time from a stand in its food court called the "Thirst Aid Station."

Yeah, I initially gagged upon hearing the name, too. I half-expected to hear canned "Full House"-esque laughter upon seeing it for the first time.

But look at that cup on the left. A HALF GALLON! You can actually buy a HALF GALLON of soda pop here!

8. Heavily-decorated pay phone, restroom sign

Things like the pay phone and restroom sign are actually among my criticisms of Hawaii. Maybe I'm just used to New York City and the fact that you can hop on a subway for ten minutes and be in a completely different-looking area...but in Hawaii, you're constantly reminded you're on a tropical island. After about 4 days, I was saying, "Ok, you have palm trees and flowers and stuff everywhere...is that it?" It'd be like New York City having Times Squares all over the place. Or if every last Philadelphia business reminded you that you were in the home of the Eagles.

Oh wait...

9. Typical intersection in Hawaii

The intersection of Kalanianaole Highway (pronounced "How the fuck do you say that?") and Pu'u'ikena Drive(pronounced "I'm not even going to try saying that").

This REALLY pissed me off. No matter how I tried to pronounce these alien names, Bill would laugh hysterically. Sorry, but it's not my fault that I like my words to have, you know, consonants. I'm sorry if I can't pronounce names that have 25775947549571 vowels back-to-back in them, not to mention randomly-inserted apostrophes. Hey, Hawaii...over here on the mainland, we have crap like Elm Street, Main Street, Broadway...take a hint!

10. Typical island flora?

Look closely at this picture.

Typical palm trees, astroturf-like grass, and mountain-hugging homes on the left...

...fucking CACTUS on the right.

Yes, that's a full-size CACTUS that this guy living off of Kalanianaole Highway has in his front yard.

To see all of my photos (those that I posted anyway) and repeated jokes located in the captions therein, go here:

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/fenn_mike/my_photos

Airplane: Part I

2006-03-11T08:15:00.000-08:00

As I write this, I am sitting in Atlanta, Georgia's Jackson-Hartsfield-Atlanta International Airport, utilizing $10 of my debit card for the Internet access.

Somewhere around 4:30AM this morning (March 11), I woke up from my own bed for what could possibly be the last time.

That's actually a good thing, seeing as how my mattress has decided to deteriorate over the years and make me aware that it is indeed made of uncomfortable metallic springs capped with a fabric no thicker than a chewing gum wrapper.

I helped my parents lug my multi-ton luggage out to the car, each bag containing roughly 8 years' worth of possessions that I probably will never use again and whose only purpose will be to take up space in Bill's bedroom, making my Hawai'i roommate seriously rethink extending me the invitation to live with him in paradise.

My red, already-blistering hands should indicate that the most painful experience of my trip was lugging my carry-on baggage around the airports serving Philadelphia and Atlanta, the latter being my first "layover" stop. While I'm almost inclined to state such a theory as fact, I will admit, at the risk of sounding all corny, sentimental, and otherwise non Mike-like, that the most painful experience was saying goodbye to my family. The wee hours of today marked the last time I'd hear/see my parents and twin sisters in person for what could be an extended period of time...and it was definitely rough. Sure, we had driven each other nuts...so much so that at points I was ready to hop the next Philadelphia-to-Atlanta-to-Los-Angeles-to-Honolulu plane...but in reality, saying "aloha" to any immediate blood relative for any reason for any period of time is difficult...and the fact that I may not be coming back from this particular trip simply served to intensify things.

But that damn luggage of mine is a painfully close second.

I feel like I have been spending the past few hours balancing Rush Limbaugh on my shoulders whilst carrying an entire weight set in alternating hands. Of course, I am exaggerating...Rush and weight sets would be much lighter than my carry-on items: a plastic bag from an airport newsstand filled with books, a duffel bag roughly the length (and weight) of a cruise ship, and of course my laptop case, itself chock full of various things stuffed inside it.

I was damn afraid the plane wouldn't take off.

The Philadelphia skyline, as seen from the E terminal of Philadelphia International Airport.

Fortunately, despite being loaded with multiple bags of mine...

...the Boeing 757 jet emblazoned with Delta logos managed to leave the jetway promptly at 7:30am, with yours truly in the (window) seat of 32F.

We left the actual runway closer to 8am.

The reason for the delay is not my luggage...I don't think...but rather because there were a number of aircraft in the sky that day heading to Atlanta. Georgia's capital city is one of the main hubs of Delta and, as a result, pretty much every flight, including the Paris-to-Rome flights, must go through Atlanta and force 1/168 of its passengers to lug obese duffel bags around for three hours.

While taxiing to the runway, "we ask that you switch off all electronic devices" is the last thing we hear before a videotape detailing the safety lecture plays.

Uh, isn't that played on an electronic device?

The flight itself was uneventful. I did manage to see my house as we took off before it and the rest of the suburban Philadelphia area that I called home for the first quarter century of my life became a constant view of cul-de-sacs and highways.

While there was no full-scale meal or movie, they did serve snacks and drinks at least:

The Tucker Max book "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" was served by my bag, which cut down on its weight in the same sense that taking an eyedropper full of water from the Pacific Ocean would cut down on its liquid content.

ATLANTA

I think all there IS in Atlanta is its damn airport; a "Futurama" episode confirms this if I'm not mistaken. While just as busy as PHL, if not more, I entered ATL and found it to be extremely quiet. I thought someone had died or something.

On my way down an escalator, I saw a pilot who had various stickers on his briefcase, one of which read : "9/11: We'll Never Forget." A PILOT had this, for Christ's sakes.

Okay, I know that September 11, 2001 was horrible and everything; it was a day where a few planes managed to completely destroy buildings, lives, and trust in Bush forever (except during the 2004 elections, of course). However, I think a freaking AIRPLANE environment should be one wherein we WOULD like to forget 9/11. No matter how courageous you might think you are, I guarantee you up and down that, ever since that day, you get that "Oh shit" feeling everytime the plane takes off, lands, hits turbulence, makes some strange sound, or turns off the fasten seatbelts sign.

And I swear I saw that look in fellow Caucasian passengers' eyes each time someone with skin any darker than theirs arise from their seat to use the restroom. This even happened as an Asian man made his way to the REAR of the plane.

Anyway, I wanted to pretend that I was an order of groceries, so I stood on one of those movable walkways to travel from the Philly-to-Atlanta flight's arrival gate to the terminal from which will eventually depart the next leg of my trip: the Atlanta-to-Los-Angeles flight.

Now, those of us who remember history know that, not only did Georgia vote "red" in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, but also was one of the slave states during the Civil War. Thus, I was surprised at ATL's plethora of African-themed art lining the connector tunnel. Especially this one:

Girls in my high school were in this position every weekend.

A quick meal at Burger King (which did NOT serve any type of chicken product) and, well, the creation of this update were what allowed me to pass the time in between baggage-lugging. In a little under an hour, I will be on a Delta flight bound for L.A., from which I will depart to Honolulu following a layover of approximately an hour and 40 minutes. I may not get a chance to update once I've reached the Pacific coast, so maybe I'll post an entry detailing the certain-to-be-grueling 12-hour portion of my journey once I arrive in Honolulu and before I pass out for about a day and a half.

Take care everyone; I'll be back soon.

February 18 part II: February 25

2006-03-05T21:33:00.000-08:00

WARNING: This entry is roughly as long as the Bible (and makes about as much sense). Unless you have a few years' time, I suggest reading Dan's account of the events of the day:
http://whatdanlearned.blogspot.com/2006/03/new-yawk-new-yawk.html

Even though I have been to many major cities up and down the East Coast, the only metropolis on this overcrowded yet Kerry-supporting slice of America that I would live by choice would be New York City.

In my younger years, my only exposure to New York, city or state, was accomplished via trips to the Long Island suburb of Islip, where my mom's side of the family had relatives. The Statue of Liberty was nothing more than something we had to strain our eyes to see as we passed over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which is of course the structure linking northern New Jersey with Long Island that I still, to this day, forget to include the "Narrows" term in its official title.

In April of 1992, well after I had viewed the first two live-action "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movies as well as "Quick Change" and "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York," I got close to the city for the first time: I, my family, and two cousins visited the Statue of Liberty. Sure, back then, the five boroughs were nothing more to me than something to admire as the overpriced passenger ferry made its way from Liberty State Park in Jersey City to the Ellis Island and Liberty Island tourist traps...but I knew that I HAD to visit this wondrous place more often.

My family and I made a few more trips to the actual city itself, staying well within the touristy borders of the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, but it's safe to say that my first real exposure to the town came in June 1998, when my aunt and (late) uncle treated my cousin and I to an overnight's stay in Manhattan as our high school graduation present. Armed with a Panasonic Palmcorder that had been my gift from my parents, I shot damn close to two hours of footage from every last spot we visited, including Central Park, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Empire State Building, Madison Square Garden, Battery Park, and Liberty Island (again). Having re-watched the now 7-year-old VHS-C tape over the years, I realized that, at one point, I also had managed to get the lower levels of the Twin Towers on tape. We had driven right past them while finding our way out of Lower Manhattan.

The occasional visit with my family to the same old Times Square-Rockefeller-Empire State Building neighborhoods bridged the gap between 1998 and 2001. My first visit to the city, sans family, came in January of 2002, barely four months after 9/11. Bill, the friend with whom I will be living in Hawai'i, was visiting a girl at Columbia University and decided he wanted to see the World Trade Center site before we did so. Since our suburban asses' only exposure to city life at that point had been strolls around the clean 1/20 of Philadelphia, we stupidly decided to WALK from our parking garage's neighborhood (two blocks from the Times Square district) to the pile of rubble that was currently passing as the World Trade Center.

It was on that day...a Friday afternoon to be exact...that I rode the New York City subway for the first time.

Even today, I slap myself in the face...hard...when I recall the phrase I used to obtain a subway token from the attendant manning the Chambers Street station's bulletproof booth:

"Can I get a one-way ticket to Times Square?"

Fortunately, that rather mild January day was the first of many trips I would make to the Big Apple by myself or with friends. As the years progressed, I grew more and more familiar with the city. Many day trips and two more overnight excursions led me up and down the island of Manhattan as well as to Roosevelt Island and the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. I strolled across the Brooklyn Bridge, traveled to the Empire State Building's observation deck, saw live tapings of "Saturday Night Live" and "Last Call With Carson Daly," performed stand-up comedy at an open mic night, and even walked past Rhea Pearlman.

This past Saturday marked the last time I would visit my beloved New York before I departed for its much smaller yet much warmer Hawai'ian counterpart, Honolulu.

Dan, Rusty, and Rusty's girlfriend Chrissy, all of whom accompanied me to northern New Jersey one week prior, had agreed to visit alongside me, as did my friend from college, Shana. We also planned to meet up with another college friend of ours, Nikki, and her father, upon arriving; Nikki, who had gotten married in May and moved to Alabama, was in New York for a one-day acting seminar.

Okay, enough with my personal history.

In my past journeys to New York, I either drove or took a series of local commuter trains, the latter of which took up 3 hours of the day. So today, to make things quasi-interesting, I decided to do BOTH: we would drive from Philadelphia suburbia to Trenton and take a local New Jersey transit train the rest of the way into Manhattan. This way, I wouldn't have to worry about my 1992 Ford Tempo, whose uh-oh mechanical noises had been significantly growing in recent weeks, breaking down somewhere in northern Jersey on the turnpike or, worse, actually getting there and thus subjecting us to the uber-high Hudon River crossing tolls and weekend parking garage rates.

After a 9am departure, I, Dan, Rusty, Chrissy, Shana, and whatever we had purchased at a local convenience store made our way north on I-95 to its interchange with U.S. Route 1, which led us into Trenton, but not before providing an excellent view of this gem:

Laughter and cries of "What the fuck does that mean?" filled the car as we collectively realized that we were once again in the Garden State, whose oddities were the basis for a damn MAGAZINE SERIES:

A search for parking at the cheap parking lot adjacent to the Trenton train station naturally proved fruitless, so we were forced to abandon my vehicle in a parking garage down the street, which isn't exactly an ideal location when its early morning in late February in the northeast. But we weren't about to let potential frostbite ruin our day, for we were already at our halfway point: the beautiful New Jersey state capital of Trenton.

Gorgeous, isn't it?

Upon boarding our train, which was costing us each $19.50 for a round trip, Dan and I BOTH immediately snapped pictures of this poster...

...asking ourselves what the hell a blind kid was going to do with a car. Since the actions we have both taken in our quarter century of existence had pretty much guaranteed our afterlife to be one involving fiery caverns and oral surgery, we decided that such a mean-spirited observation was more than OK to make.

To occupy ourselves on the hour-and-ten-minute-long train ride that separated us from Trenton and midtown Manhattan's Penn Station, we decided to...what else?...make fun of the names of various stations along the route. Cases in point:

Even though Metropark isn't a town (the station is actually located near Edison, New Jersey), it's still a stupid name. I don't know why, but it is.

Metuchen. This sounds like the noise you make when you sneeze.

This place continues to piss me off to this day. First of all, Newark is like Camden; a wannabe shithole of a city that sits across the river from an actual city people have heard of and probably plan to make their destination. Secondly, here in the northeast, people like to do EVERYTHING as quickly as possible, including talking. Thus, I'm sure that many a NJ Transit passenger has de-boarded their coach here because "Newark Penn Station" sounds so much like "New York Penn Station" when said by a foreign-born conductor over a run-down-McDonald's-quality intercom system.

Finally, we reached the end of the line: NEW YORK's Penn Station. Fuck Newark. Come up with your own damn name for your train station.

After mistakenly making locales in the state of New Jersey our destination the week before instead of understanding what the state is best used for...passing through quickly to get to an actual destination...we were finally in a DECENT city. We stood in one of the busiest train stations in the known galaxy, the sights and sounds of the United States' largest and most important city beyond its walls.

The first thing to do was to find a rest room.

Being the dumb tourists we were instead of the faux New Yorkers that I myself always liked to pretend I was, we actually followed signs for Penn Station's facilities. REAL New Yorkers, be they male, female, or other (and believe me, there is plenty of the latter category roaming around the Big Apple), would have relieved themselves upon the floor or even upon the train platform.

If they were stupid enough to go to Penn Station in the first place, that is.

So after following signs for a few minutes (which, when translated into "I gotta take a major piss" time, was more like 5-7 years), we came upon a small hallways housing the mens' and ladies' rooms. Naturally, the latter had a line snaking out of the door, as if a Lifetime personality was inside signing autographs and having coffee with each individual patron. Since we didn't want the females in our group to have to board a subway to get to wherever the end of the line was, Dan, Rusty, and I were gentlemen (meaning that, when we rolled our eyes at the sight of the line and thus realized we wouldn't be able to do our business inside the line-lacking men's room that was right here, we had our backs turned to the females) and set off in search for another set of facilities.

The 34th Street two-story Kmart is actually accessible from Penn Station, conveniently located near the starting point of our initial restroom search. We entered and for some reason made our way past several associates until we were successfully lost among the tiled interior. It was at that point...and at that point only...that we ("we" meaning "Dan") asked a passing associate where the restroom was.

"Restroom closed" was his reply, spoken in a tone of voice as if he had already been asked it 55 times that day. Or it could have been the only English phrase he knew.

It was the closest I had ever seen Dan come to actually crying.

Even though Dan and I both were close friends with Shana and Rusty was dating Chrissy, we decided that their needs were no longer important. We were going to go back...all the way back, that is...to the facilities we had somehow managed to stumble upon before and use them. We didn't care if the girls had to wait in a line that originated in central Vermont; chances are, the time it would have taken them to move through the line would have been equal to that we guys would have spent relieving our bladders.

After leaving roughly 2 Pacific Oceans' worth of urine to clog up the midtown Manhattan sewage system (sorry, Ninja Turtles), we decided to see what else there was to do in this city besides searching for available restrooms (even though said activity kept us busy for 10-14 years).

The Golden Tickets to the New York City Subway System. Each of us armed ourselves with this $7 piece of easily-loseable plastic, thanks to my suggestion that we avoid taxicabs to get us from one place to another and instead take advantage of the subway. My philosophy is that cabs get stuck in (and are pretty much the reason for) Manhattan's famous traffic congestion, whilst the silver trains of the MTA gracefully slide UNDERNEATH said congested streets (when their workers are not striking, of course).

I am always oblivious to the fact that cabs take you straight to your destination without any other stops and don't require you to stand during your ride amongst a clot of people whose collective positioning of hands line up perfectly with your jacket pockets.

A train of the Number 1 line whisked our group, as well as the entire population of the tri-state area, away from Penn Station and its lack of restrooms a whopping 8 blocks to the 42nd Street station. Much to the amusement of the few New Yorkers stupid enough to ride a Manhattan subway train on a Saturday, we exited here, climbed the stairs, and found ourselves in the heart of Times Square.

I don't have to explain what Times Square is, in either words or pictures. Primitive tribal members in African jungles know what Times Square looks like, for Christ's sake. Instead, I will share with you my favorite portion of it:

This advertisement for Ramen noodles has been there since at least the late 1990s, which has got to be some sort of a record for Times Square, seeing as how its advertisements change on pretty much an hourly basis. In fact, at the time I took this picture, I was so hungry that I could have consumed a cup of noodles that large. Of course, thousands and thousands of individual Ramen noodles packages (total value: about $11) would have been required for such a feat, so I decided to wait.

If you were one of the underpaid workers at King of Prussia Mall in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania (a small Philadelphia suburb that pretty much consists of nothing more than the King of Prussia Mall) who had to cart the massive, multi-ton teddy bear out of there once the mall's branch of F.A.O. Schwartz closed down and ultimately became a Sephora makeup joint, you have this place to thank for it. Proving that New York City only has room for one oversized toy store to sell ludicrously-expensive pieces of plastic to the parents of screaming children in, this Toys R Us utilizes its location in the heart of Times Square to its full advantage. The original F.A.O. Schwartz, located another 15 or so blocks north (and east) of here, is still open, but only because it obtained historical landmark status or some such shit. Only in our materialistic capitalist country could a fucking store obtain such status.

And I bet the same thing would be applied to this place should a 12-story Kay-Bee want to open up down near Madison Square Garden.

After entering, a cheerful employee with a thick accent from some wretched nation whose citizens probably make the toys sold here comes up to you with a camera and snaps your photograph against the timeless backdrop of other tourists attempting to get in the store. Handing you a ticket, you are free to roam around and gawk at the store's overdone displays until you're ready to leave, at which point you have the option of plunking down the better part of $20 for a picture of yourself that you didn't agree to have taken in the first place.

As I tore our group's ticket to shreds (which was met with 0% resistance from the others), Dan snapped a photograph of the unlucky bastard who had to get dressed up in the Geoffrey the Giraffe costume that day. He backed up his actions with an explanation involving his childhood and how he always wanted to meet this character, even though it never made any suburban Philadelphia appearances.

His job title includes the words "Assistant director." Did I mention that before?

Ascending to the second floor, we were greeted with:

This animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex, which is sadly not for sale, once gave my friend Bill nightmares after its robotic eye looked at him and followed said look up with a loud robotic roar.

These are just two of the structures that tower above shelves selling Lego sets for the same amount of money I pay each month for auto insurance. The left is a replica of the Empire State Building, whilst the right is a replica of the Incredible Hulk character from Marvel Comics' famous series (Spider-Man).

If this thing had been in the actual "Hulk" movie, it would have been 1000 times better than the piece of celluloid shit that Ang Lee and Eric Bana crapped out.

While these and their nearby neighbors, including a Lego Statue of Liberty and a Lego Chrysler Building, inspire most people to snap a photograph, they instead inspire me to create. I loved Lego bricks as a child...and as a teenager...and as an early twentysomething until my mother gave them away...and would spend hours in my family's basement making awful-looking replicas of everything from Beavis and Butt-head to the Addams Family mansion out of Legos. In fact, upon stumbling upon an area of the store where people can make their own creations out of a seemingly infinite supply of Legos, I informed the others in our group that, if I lived anywhere near New York City, I'd spend my days and nights here doing just that. I almost considered giving up on my relocation to Hawai'i.

My job title has the term "exclusive producer" in it. Did I mention that before?

Our last Toys R Us stop was the ground floor, which housed its video game section. Although I failed to get photographic evidence, the Times Square Toys R Us' video games section not only basically has its own floor, but its own set of uniformed security guards.

Imagine telling that to people at your high school reunion. "I get paid good money to make sure no Russian tourists run off with Mario Golf."

Apparently inspired by the hordes of controllable digital media none of us could afford, the five of us decided to spend the rest of the time waiting for Nikki within the walls of the basement-level arcade adjacent to her acting class' building. While I personally elected not to get into any of the offerings, for if that would have happened, I probably would have never seen Nikki or even Hawai'i, Dan, Rusty, and Chrissy all fed hard-earned quarters to a few choice titles.

Dan opted for some good old fashioned Ms. Pac-Man, whose not-so-old-fashioned price of play was a cool $1. Fortunately for him, the entire dollar he changed into circular silver at the game room's change machine not only allowed him to start off with FIVE lives, but also revealed itself to be a "Crack-man" type console. When our pizza-resembling hero (or heroine) traverses the screen at speeds that would be illegal on most U.S. interstates, we dub the machine worthy of "Crack-Man" status; so far, only three such machines exist, one of which is broken thanks to my friend Bill and a rather good game he had going.

To give you an idea of how well Dan performed, allow me to repost a photograph from his own blog about the day:

Meanwhile, Rusty and Chrissy decided to help the arcade owner pay his rent this month by pumping some money into that "Jurassic Park" ride game. While I know a lot less about the "Jurassic Park" franchise than I do about the "Pac-Man" franchise, I nevertheless believe that these two were not only inspired by the mega video game department at Toys R Us, but also its Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Note: I wrote the above paragraph at 2:45AM, so to me it seemed witty.

We soon entered the building wherein Nikki was finishing her acting class. Before we got to her, we had to pass what had to be New York City's most apathetic security guard. Here's how the conversation went:

ME: Hi, we're here to wait for a friend of ours in that acting class that's here...

GUARD (who had never seen us before, did not know our names, and did not get the name of the friend we had come to see): Room 509. Take the elevator up to the fifth floor.

That guy would NEVER be allowed to guard video games at Toys R Us.

After a nice game of cell phone Tetris, we met up with Nikki and her father and proceeded to the nearest subway station, eager to escape Times Square and our then-current "Only people around who were actually born in America" minority status. We discovered that Nikki and her father had to obtain their Metrocards via a vending machine, for the only live person in sight was the woman manning the subway booth, whose job description seems to be solely to keep the seat warm for the next guy. Token/Metrocard sales to people who don't really like placing $10 and $20 bills into a midtown Manhattan vending machine were not part of her job description. Perhaps if they were, Nikki and her father would have received something other than actual $1 coins as change.

After a few moments of standing around on the subway platform, staring into the empty tunnel from which the train would eventually emerge, as if doing so would somehow cause it to instantly materialize, said diesel carriage arrived. Our group boarded, knowing full well that we were placing the next minutes of our lives in the hands of some MTA conductor none of us had ever met who is forced to pilot underground trains for 12 hours on a Saturday, and were whisked south towards Canal Street.

Introduced to me by Shana, Canal Street is a busy southern Manhattan asphalt strip eternally clogged with people and vehicles. Shops and sidewalk vendors line both sides of the street, selling tons of goods that weren't exactly legally obtained. That Louis Vitton purse you saw up at Saks Fifth Avenue that was selling for the price of your first house? You can get the exact same one...or at least a very good replica...for about $15 here (cash only, of course). Canal Street is the only spot on Earth where I did not only see vendors selling bootleg movies, but also their COMPETITORS. This guy has a copy of "Final Destination 3" in his trenchcoat? The guy on the next corner has it (and others) nice and spread out on an authentic stretch of canvas.

We had deboarded the subway here because a few (hundred) blocks' walk down Peddler's Alley brought us into the heart of not only Chinatown, but also Little Italy. I always loved the ethnic sections of large metropolitan areas; they actually make you feel like you're in an actual city from whatever country is being exploited...provided that city is made up entirely of restaurants and bootleggers. That shot of Italian blood that is dispensed in varying doses amongst all suburban residents led us to choose Little Italy's "Il Fiornao" restaurant as a meal site.

A cozy establishment operated by a staff of men who stare at your table eternally until you decide it is time to order, "Il Fiornao," whose name I am probably not spelling correctly, specializes in "authentic" (read: difficult to pronounce) Italian dishes. This was pretty much why I opted for the spaghetti and meatball dish to compliment my $2 can of Lipton ice tea. While this beverage's price and its lack of a "New York" title stamped upon the can (which was NOT the case with everyone else's soda cans, the batards) might deter some to other sections of the menu, allow me to share with you something else the beverage page offered:

I had no idea that a drink's inclusion of "gas" was an option when ordering beverages. Maybe this is why Pope John Paul II looked so constipated all the time; he should have gone with the Lurisia.

Tipping the staff what we believed was a fair amount for our $70+ bill (five bucks, most of it in unwanted $1 coins from the Metrocard vending machine), we scuttled back out onto the streets of Little Italy, some very angry yet silent Italians striding out after us to make sure we never came back and tipped at their establishment again. Now, I realize that our friends from the home of Rome have been very good to we boorish Americans over the years; Sophia Loren's character managed to fuck a smile onto Walter Matthau's face in "Grumpier Old Men" whilst Tony Danza proved that, even if you suck at everything in life, someone out there will still give you your own TV show (temporarily). However, when you recognize the fact that you responded to a group of Italians' continuous stares and subpar service (only half of the drinks were delivered at one point, but since I was one of the lucky ones who got to quench my thirst, this didn't bother me) with a tip equal to roughly 6% of the bill, the only Italian images that cross your mind upon seeing them actually follow you out and remain stationed at their place of business' front door is that of, well...

After a trip to the famous Ferraro bakery to buy dessert...a trip that took us back past "Il Fornaio" TWICE...we and another California population's worth of fellow passengers made our way back to Penn Station to bid Nikki and her father a fod ciao, which was preceded by some good old fashioned touristy staring at the neighborhood sights, including the Empire State Building, the Herald Square Macy*s, a two-story Victoria's Secret, and Madison Square Garden. And while the 34th Street Men's Big & Tall outlet isn't exactly a world-famous (or even 34th-Street-famous) business, it nevertheless provided us with one of the day's more amusing pictures:

That's not a lot of headroom, by the way. That's all five feet of Dan.

I suggested that we hop an express train to the Forest Hills area of Queens, on the totally mindless assumption that there was actually something in Queens worth our time. We figured this assumption's falsity out the hard, time-wasting way, noticing that Forest Hills (and probably all of Queens) looked no different than any given suburban area near our hometown...the only difference being a more diverse populace (in Queens, "diverse" means black, white, Puerto Rican, alien, etc. whilst in the suburbs, "diversity" usually means "white people who have brown hair, white people who have blond hair, etc.). We temporarily debated on whether or not we should each shell out $10 to see "Date Movie" before electing to abandon this idea, for we can see it for over 75 cents cheaper at a theater close to us. After we guys browsed in an EB Games store while waiting for the females to browse through what had to be the 750th "Saphora" store we had seen that day, we all bought drinks at a nearby Rite Aid for the subway ride back to Manhattan.

There, a legend was created.

I guess we had run out of things to talk about or something. I don't know what possessed me to do this, but I decided to--why not?--balance the cap of my empty Dr. Pepper bottle on my forehead. After the initial "what the fuck" stares from the other four had been released, Dan decided that he too would balance his cap atop his head.

It was a competition now.

Dan and I are both college graduates with full-time office jobs. In fact, Dan has his own place and is working on a Master's Degree. Nonetheless, Rusty, Chrissy, and Shana were amused/scared by the impromptu game we had just created, even more so when my cap eventually fell off, which awarded me the runner's-up prize of a much-needed head roll to get some feeling back into my neck. I cut short Dan's elation by challenging him to a "2 out of 3" match, which he took me up on as swiftly as if I had offered him a blank check signed by Donald Trump.

Once arriving back on Manhattan's side of the East River, we new athletes exited the E train somewhere around Rockefeller Center, which we strolled through briefly. As you may be aware, the marble interior of the 30 Rockefeller Center building is not only home to the NBC network (itself home to the studios of NBC Sports, NBC Evening News, Saturday Night Live, and Late Night With Conan O'Brien), but also to "Top of the Rock" (Manhattan's newest skyscraper observation deck), a well-publicized ice skating rink, the annual Christmas tree that was seen in "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York," AND what could possibly be the last-ever Waldenbooks (not Border's Express, but an actual Waldenbooks) shop:

Within blocks of Times Square, Central Park, and Fifth Avenue, the entire well-kept Rockefeller complex calls the NBC Today Show's studio, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Time-Life building, and Radio City Music Hall immediate neighbors.

Dan and I still talked about nothing but our bottle cap game.

A northbound Number 1 train (aboard which I won another game with Dan, which he will claim to the day he dies didn't count because, unlike me, he had nothing to rest his head on) shot us up to 116th and Broadway, just outside one of the main entrances to the campus of Columbia University.

Featured in, among other things, the "Spider-Man" movies and "Anger Management," this Harlem-bordering Ivy League school is beyond impressive, especially to a group of people who either attended a suburban Philadelphia community college or, even worse, Division III "school" Widener University (which, by the way, accepts 96% of the applicants it initially rejects). For example, let's compare, without photographic evidence, how Columbia and Widener house their respective radio stations. At Columbia, the facilities not only have their own building, but shiny steel call letters adorning said building, thrust proudly into the northern Manhattan skies.

Widener's WDNR is marked by a WDNR bumper sticker affixed to a door in the rear of a residence hall.

As we all lamented the selection of our respective higher learning locales, we strolled south on Broadway, passing by numerous Columbia students, all of whom were richer and smarter than we. Our tourism senses kicked right back in here:

If you are familiar with "Seinfeld" or background images in "Little Nicky," then the facade of this restaurant at 112th and Broadway should seem very familiar. While the "coffee shop" scenes in "Seinfeld" were shot on an extra-ridden sound stage in Hollywood, this oft-photographed building nevertheless served as enough inspiration to warrant an establishing shot in each episode. Using phrases like "I'm starving" and "Let's eat" in front of a homeless guy who unsuccessfully attempted to invite himself into our conversation (and into the restaurant), we made our way inside.

To me, Tom's Restaurant serves no better delicacy than chicken fingers. In addition to this usual choice of mine, which almost everyone else decided upon also (despite the fact that they were following the suggestions of someone who had just spent the better part of the previous hour balancing a bottle cap on his head), I also had chicken noodle soup and an iced tea, which started out unsweetened but, with a little help from this:

...became a concoction that distributed about 5 grains of sugar to each individual H2O molecule. A sugary carpet blanketed the bottom of my glass, which, much to Dan's amazement, actually made my tea appear to REFILL after each sip. Instead of the level of the liquid gradually moving down, it actually crept UP. I guess I failed to notice this fact, thanks to, you know, each individual drop of the liquid jackhammering away at the inside of my head.

Fortunately, my currently-diabetes-free ass was coherent enough to notice two things while using the official Tom's Restaurant lavatory.

1. Fortunately there are people out there who are not only bigger "Seinfeld" geeks than I, but feel the need to share this with the rest of the world:

Notice Cosmo Kramer's Dr. Van Nostrin (sic) alter ego? Eerily, as I wrote this, that episode featuring this persona of his aired.

2. Even while relieving myself, I can still do a damn good job of balancing a bottle cap atop my head.

Leaving a much more generous tip for the Tom's staff (including a penny I dropped into my soup bowl), we made our way into the chilly night air. As we headed towards the 110th Street station on the Number 1 subway line, we all noted that a group of emo-dressed patrons sitting directly behind us in the diner were using words like "juxtapose" while our loud asses let forth, among other things, a discussion over Rusty's question: "Why do lesbians like strap-ons? It doesn't make sense!"

Descending a set of subway stairs for my last time (marking the occasion by announcing loudly to nobody in particular "I feel like a sperm!"), we boarded the train and eventually emerged back at Penn Station. Our day in New York was done; we had visited two of the city's five boroughs, been in the presence of countless landmarks well-known to foreigners and "Seinfeld" fans alike, and even took bets on which track the NJ Transit train back to Trenton would arrive (I and my selection of Track 6 will never look positively at the words "Track 9" ever again). For some odd reason most likely involving New Yorkers' general hatred of anyone paying money to willingly travel to New Jersey, the monitors at Penn Station do not display the track numbers of departing trains until maybe 10 minutes before the departure time. Maybe there's just some sort of rule in New York that only titanic amounts of people can enter a train, not just one or a few at a time. Or maybe those in charge of the monitors just wanted to see a group of Pennsylvanians screaming random numerals at a glass screen, with one such Pennsylvanian (me) going so far as to shake a folded-up newspaper at the screen, not unlike what you see done at horse races.

Disappointed in the mention of Track 9 (the thing's got to be rigged somehow), we made our way to the train and took our seats, ready to enjoy the nice hour-long ride back to Trenton.

Bullshit.

The ultimate bottle-cap-balancing competition was about to get underway. Those ten-minute subway rides back in Queens and Manhattan that will give our former fellow passengers frightening stories to tell others for years to come were mere practice. A train ride lasting as long as a full episode of "Lost," commercials and all, was the best definition of "championship" that I had ever witnessed. Not only did this trip result in an eventual name of the game ("Capsize," courtesy of Rusty) AND a slogan ("Where the last man standing can truly hold his head up high"), but also some rather embarassing photographs that will hopefully be erased from cyberspace forever should one of us ever hope to run for office or marry.

Dan (right) and I engrossed in serious competition.

Rusty donning a bottle cap that I swear was superglued to his head, for it did not move ONCE during the entire multi-mile train ride.

Now, take note of this photograph:

There's me (right) and Rusty (left) still going strong, with Chrissy (left) and Shana (right) no doubt wishing that they had boarded another train, preferably one moving in the complete opposite direction. Wait, isn't someone missing?

Ah, yes, it's bronze-medal-winner Dan! So what if he didn't have to go 50 full miles embarrassed out of his gourd and was the only one of us with a healthy neck and upper spine upon our exit in Trenton? He LOST!

And, not to toot my own horn, but so did Rusty.

We seriously made it all the way to Trenton and began to exit the train with our heads still cocked skywards, me leading the others down the aisle. A barrage of swear words from behind me indicated Rusty's elimination...and a second later, his bottle cap (superglue and all) came flying at me, precisely striking my own cap and knocking it onto the tracks underneath the train. While I was upset at having lost the cap that had made me a champion multiple times that day (I was hoping to keep it as a trophy), I was nevertheless elated over my victory.

Yes, I have won a spelling bee, graduated high school and college, survived dental surgery, and am moving to Hawai'i...yet I can assure you that I will know no prouder moment than that late February night in Trenton, New Jersey, when I balanced a bottle cap on top of my forehead longer than two other people.

It should be noted that "Capsize" became a spectator sport of sorts, as a young child who departed at the station before ours turned to us and said "Good luck with that, guys."

Needless to say, his mother no doubt wished that she had had a coat hanger handy upon hearing "Congratulations, you're with child" several years ago.

Although, to be fair, Dan reported that she did elicit a facial expression of disappointment once his cap succombed to gravity earlier in the ride.

A twelve dollar parking garage fee and a 75 cent bridge toll later, we were headed back to Interstate 95, excitedly reminiscing about the events of the day, particularly those that took place aboard the New York-to-Trenton train ride. It was truly a day that I will not only remember, but also be proud of, for the longest time.

Until that diabetes kicks in, of course.

March 3

2006-03-04T00:17:00.000-08:00

"Final Destination 3" isn't really a sequel to its two predecessors as much as it is a basic remake of its debut entry. According to each of the films in the series (the first two of which I have yet to see), death is a force that kills large groups of people at once, especially if they happen to be good-looking teenagers with acting skills rivaling those of dog shit. However, some of these people manage to escape their fate and thus find themselves dying very gruesome and creative deaths later on in a special order...all of which have been predetermined by both very subtle and blatantly obvious clues earlier on in the film.

I just wanted to see the movie because it featured Death by Roller Coaster. You don't see that too often in cinema anymore. Fuck, you barely see roller coasters in film, period.

Now, many people walk out of the "Final Destination" movies and find themselves frightened of everyday normal activities. People were afraid to fly after seeing a plane explode in the first flick (although I understand it was heading to fucking France, so death was actually doing everyone a favor) and were afraid to drive behind trucks stockpiled with logs after seeing the opening act of the sequel. And it is a pretty safe bet that, this summer, lines for roller coasters all around the country will be significantly shorter. Unless of course I'm standing in one, at which point it will retain its usual Great-Wall-of-China length.

Now I would be lying if I said that I walked out of "Final Destination 3" fearing nothing. Parts of it scared me to death...but not the death scenes. People getting impaled whilst riding a roller coaster doesn't scare me; it AMUSES me. And two giggling teeny-boppers who get roasted in a pair of tanning beds does not make me fear tanning salons one bit. In fact, after seeing it, I think ALL teeny-boppers should get more tans than normal.

No, what scared me was much different.

1. One of the characters was looking at the gravestone of another character who had died earlier in the movie. Needless to say, Hollywood (il)logic was in full force during this scene, as not only did someone who was buried maybe three days prior already have an engraved stone set in place, but also the grass surrounding the site was of the lush green variety as opposed to the barren earth variety that surrounds ACTUAL graves for YEARS after burial. That wasn't what bothered me, though. What bothered me was the fact that this character, who was a high school student on the verge of graduation...

...had a date of birth of 1988.

People who were INFANTS in 1988 are fucking graduating HIGH SCHOOL? Do the filmmakers have any idea how OLD that makes me feel?! In 1988, I had already accepted some of the best aspects of life: Nintendo and the movie "Little Monsters." I don't think I even believed in Santa Claus at that point in my life. Now you're telling me that someone who is a full Bill Clinton's presidency YOUNGER than I am is being handed a damn HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA?!

2. Speaking of high schoolers...it was this group of people who figured out all of the above plot about death and its potential modes of operation. Two characters accurately predicted...numerous times...which character was going to die next based solely on subtle clues that even I wouldn't have picked up.

These are HIGH SCHOOLERS! In the UNITED STATES! How the hell are they so SMART? People in my high school couldn't even do algebra! One ACTUAL high schooler signed my yearbook with the following phrase, spelling errors and all:

I cat watenun till w'll the gachudach

Now THAT is more repsentative of how an ACTUAL American high school student is like!

3. This last one scared me the most. The movie made it clear that it took place not only in America, but during present day. All well and good so far, right?

Several characters died horrible deaths via freak, Rube-Goldberg-type accidents.

And not a SINGLE lawsuit was filed. Not one.

Right there was what made me realize that "Final Destination 3" was a fantasy. Not the possibility that death selectively chooses people based on the order they were riding in on a roller coaster; that concept is more plausible than even one death occurring that is not followed by at least 947 lawsuits.

February 20

2006-02-21T13:51:00.000-08:00

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 today said “Okay, open up.”

A month or so ago, a toothache that kept me awake all night, despite multiple doses of Tylenol taken by me in a desperate and possibly illegal attempt to remedy the discomfort, 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.

Today, I 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 could have possibly 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 a New Jersey White Castle in my last post. 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 mechanic can fix my 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 2002 film version, “Jackass: The Movie.” One thing I failed to notice about the show until today 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.”

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 that one Geico commercial).

Still not entirely positive that it was still February 20 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 ibuprofrin 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 am not allowed to eat anything firmer than pudding and that everything that enters 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 water 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 have made Presidents’ Day 2006 one of the worst days of my life thus far (the other one came out in “pieces”):

February 18

2006-02-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

The two-state-spanning day trip a few of my friends and I took today was best summed up by a statement made by none other than yours truly on our way home:

"Today is proof that we are completely influenced by pop culture."

Back in the late 1990s, my friends Brian and Rusty clued me in to the films of Kevin Smith, which at that point only included "Mallrats", "Chasing Amy," and "Clerks," the latter feature being the 1994 independent flick made by Smith and his friends on a budget of roughly $27,000. Submitting his black-and-white feature length film detailing a day in the life of two New Jersey clerks to film festivals in the northern New Jersey and New York City general regions, Smith earned over $1 million for his efforts, not to mention a semi-lucrative career in filmmaking. He followed his first commercial flop ("Mallrats") and another hit indie film ("Chasing Amy") with the controversial 1999 release "Dogma" and 2001's heavily-hyped "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back."

While these efforts, coupled with a failed animated television series based on "Clerks" as well as a number of comic books featuring his film's popular characters, made about as big a splash in eternal fame as, say, Milli Vanilli, he nevertheless managed to establish a loyal following. Mainly comprised as social "losers" still living at home with the parents well into their late 20s and early 30s whose list of the "finer things in life" fails to include activities not related to comic books, alternative music, or computers, these fans follow Smith and his cast/crew members around the country as he speaks at comic conventions, universities, and other such venues.

Somewhere in the 2 year filmmaking hiatus bridging "Chasing Amy" and "Dogma," Kevin Smith and friends managed to open "Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash," a combination comic book store/movie merchandise outlet located in Smith's hometown of Red Bank, New Jersey (he himself has since moved to Los Angeles, which became the site of a second "Stash" just last year). Needless to say, these two businesses have managed to indirectly line Smith's pockets with even more money, as his fanbase loyally exchanged countless dollars for, among other things, a 4-inch-tall "inaction figure" of "Fanboy," signed by the character's actor (and inspiration) Walt Flanagan.

Now, your normal layperson/mental retard certainly wouldn't shell out a cool $15 plus tax for something like this. Hell, they would probably "accidentally" leave it at the restaurant if it were to come free with their value meal.

Not me.

This is simply one of the relics I acquired during our day trip. Said trip consisted of not only me, but also my friends Dan, Rusty, and Chrissy, with my sister and one of her friends along as supporting characters, traveling in two separate cars to Red Bank, New Jersey, a good hour-and-a-half ride from our suburban Philadelphia hometowns.

Since the trip to Red Bank and its sole attraction (in our opinions, anyway), the "Stash," required traveling on a number of interstates running through some of the dullest parts of the Garden State (which itself is an understatement; it's kind of like saying the wettest parts of the Pacific Ocean), I don't have much to report from this particular hour-and-a-half or so in our lives. This upsets me in a way, for some of the most hilarious conversations and random synapse firings to have ever escaped the mouths of Dan, Rusty, Chrissy, and I were had during this particular part of the journey. It's kind of like watching either of the "Grumpy Old Men" movies; you've heard the stories/lines millions of times already, yet can't help but spew forth torrential bouts of laughter at each retelling. Recollections of our respective collegiate and high school careers as well as previous outings with non-present friends, all of whose humor-inducing moments were coated with "You had to be there, I guess" paint, were shared between the four of us. Actually following the hastily-written directions in order to get to our destination was pretty much an afterthought.

Ninety-five cents in tolls and several tens of gallons of Dan's car's gasoline later, we finally exited the Garden State Parkway in Red Bank, with a "Perot for President" sticker attached to a light pole near the exit ramp officially reminding us that the current 1/50 of the United States we were in was rather ass-backwards in every way possible.

Yes, we had officially entered the (fortunately) only state in the union that acts as Philadelphia and New York’s collective closet full of unwanted items. Car dealerships and furniture outlets covering the same area as a football stadium line every street, punctuated by the occasional art deco building housing, say, a Starbucks.

By this point, we increased our attention to the various “make rights”, “turn lefts”, and “go straights” of the directions, which we found out wasn’t such a hot idea when said directions were copied from Mapquest. Not to do the website whose URL will never again grace my Mozilla Firefox address bar any injustice, but apparently its indication that “New Jersey State Route 35” and Red Bank’s Broad Street were indeed one and the same was about as accurate as George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” photo-op in 2003 Iraq. Our trip to Kevin Smith’s former suburban stomping grounds began with a tour of about four blocks near the town’s NJ Transit station, traveled in a complete circle. The long, boring drive and frustration with Red Bank’s layout made the four of us a tad insane, evidenced by the fact that we not only pointed out, but repeated the exact same jokes, in relation to the clock-tower-possessing Rite Aid branch near the corner of Front and Maple.

Finally finding the ACTUAL Red Bank Broad Street, we eased our way down its asphalt, Dan and Chrissy for the first time, Rusty for the second time, and yours truly for the third (and possibly final) time in our respective existences. The “Stash” and all of the (lack of) parking in its immediate area soon appeared and whizzed by, prompting us to seek a parking space that would allow as little exposure to the northeast’s mid-February (read: fucking freezing) temperatures as possible. Extracting ourselves from Dan’s car, we passed the time waiting for my sister and her friend to do the same by admiring the following sight on her vehicle’s front bumper.

“There’s blood on your car!” were the first words my sister and her companion heard from us upon exiting her auto. Following closer inspection (well-documented by not only my above photograph, but also a nearly-identical shot taken by Dan’s camera), we concluded that the plasmic splotch was all that remained of an unfortunate bird she must have hit on an Interstate; a lone feather and semi-digested worm gave the creature’s identity away. Playful cries of “murderer”, courtesy of my friends and I, filled my sister’s ears for the better part of 30 seconds until we all collectively agreed that it was too damned cold to stand there and discuss deceased bird life. We made our way back up Broad Street on foot and to the “Stash.”

Much-welcomed warmth and a steady odor of fresh comic book pages greeted us as we entered the store. The more “hardcore Kevin Smith fans” of our group immediately scanned the clerk behind the register and, after checking our memories for his face in any of Smith’s films, ultimately decided that he was a nobody.

This is not always the case, for I still remember to this day (more vividly than I do my senior prom, mind you) my last trip to the store a few years prior. None other than the aforementioned Walt Flanagan himself was manning the counter that day, answering my inquiry as to his identity with a depressed-sounding, I-hate-my-life-vibe-giving “Yeah.” This didn’t bother me, however, for I reacted in basically the same way an adolescent female A-cupper would in the presence of (insert name of person currently being interviewed on MTV’s “Total Request Live”). Parting ways with $5 of my money, I bought a pack of authentic “Mallrats” trading cards and asked him to sign one, which he obliged to. To this day, that card remains more of a prized possession than my college degree (and is just about as useful).

Walls and racks filled to the brim with comic books reflecting every major and minor character in geekdom were ignored by the majority of us as we furthered our trip into the store, feasting our eyes upon some of the actual props from Smith’s films. From a sweatshirt worn by a character with about 6 minutes of screen time in “Clerks” to Jason Lee’s white straw hat from “Dogma” to a car resembling a half-smoked marijuana blunt that must have been somewhere in the climatic scenes of “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” the six of us got in touch with our inner nerd. An example:

On the left is a statue of “Mooby Cow,” a fictitious character seen in “Dogma,” “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” and the upcoming “Clerks 2”. The six-foot-tall pile of sacrilege on the right is “Buddy Christ,” perhaps the most hilarious prop in “Dogma,” which, in the film, was created by a Red Bank pastor (played to perfection by George Carlin) as an alternative to the Catholic Church’s standard, “wholly depressing” half-naked Jesus nailed to a cross symbol.

I must have spent a good 15 minutes of my and everyone else’s time deciding whether or not I should purchase the $15 “Fanboy” figurine mentioned (and photographed) earlier. I circled the rack containing all two of the figures several times, as if doing so would somehow result in the formation of new figures or a sudden drop in the asking price (hey, it works for Wal-Mart’s “smiley face” each time HE circles a rack!). Finally concluding that I could hold off purchasing $5 fast food meals for the next three days, I collected the toy and took it to the front counter, all the while partially participating in a conversation with the cashier, an obvious small-time stand-up comedian who tested his material on anyone unfortunate enough to be in his presence. Somehow, the issue of how much guys/girls discuss sex was brought up; at the mention of “necrophilia,” I almost certainly made it into this guy’s next act by replying “Nothing wrong with that; they can’t say no.” A bit taken aback but ultimately getting back into character, he playfully informed me that he was going to charge me “more”, before lowering his voice and alerting me to the location of a nearby cemetery. I politely declined and instead asked for directions to the Quick Stop.

Jack’s Music Shoppe, located directly across the street from the “Secret Stash.” The apartment above this establishment served as the living quarters of the two main characters in “Chasing Amy.” The exterior made it into the movie a few times, and the stoop (not visible in this photograph) underneath its left awning (under the “30”) served as an impromptu seat for Ben Affleck and Jason Lee during a scene. We declined to investigate this further, for fear of catching any of Ben Affleck’s bad-acting germs that he might have left. Also, old Jack or one of his staff would no doubt look strangely at a bunch of people in their mid-twenties oohing, ahhing, and taking pictures of a slab of concrete adorning the front of his business. Also, it was still fucking freezing.

And this is a picture I attempted to take of the "Stash" (or "Sta" as it appears in this shot) while driving by, following our visit. Yes, I had managed to snap a photograph of a building exterior (Jack's Music Shoppe) that appeared very briefly in ONE Smith film, but the actual destination that was an essential shrine to ALL of the films AND the only edifice in Red Bank that we actually entered that day failed to make it into my camera until just this moment. Fortunately, there are plenty of "Stash" pictures on the Internet that are readily available for theft, including the one positioned a few paragraphs above.

The Quick Stop, located in Leonardo, New Jersey (a short distance from Red Bank) served as one of the principal shooting locations of “Clerks,” with its adjacent neighbor, RST Video, also posing as a location. To Kevin Smith fans like me, my friends, and our foul-smelling peers nationwide, this cramped convenience store and its video-renting-neighbor are basically our own version of Mecca or Jerusalem. It was here in 1993 or 1994 that an overweight, bearded comic book geek who worked at both establishments gathered a bunch of his better-looking friends around and shot a poorly-edited, poorly-lit motion picture that would go on to spawn not only a sequel, but five “sister” flicks, an animated TV spin-off, and countless overpriced merchandise…not to mention an army of fans who would probably, in a pinch, choose to save said geek’s life over that of their sibling/parent/comic supplier.

Of course, we had to navigate down a handful of unfamiliar suburban roads to get from one location to the other, armed with nothing else besides a set of directions that looked as if they were produced on a 1995 copy of Aldus Pagemaker and printed out on an inkjet printer. In between our collective agreements of how much the area perfectly resembled New Jersey towns closer to home, we took the time to observe, gasp, wittily comment upon, and occasionally snap pictures of some of the immediate oddities. Things like these PROVE that you have been to New Jersey:

This clown was lovingly dubbed “Jackoff” by Dan, whose camera was also responsible for these photographs, although I myself was the designated photographer. One look at the position of the character’s right hand will lead those of you with filthy minds similar to ours to the reason behind Jackoff’s moniker. Interestingly, this thing was part of a roadside advertisement for a liquor store, which are just as plentiful in New Jersey as air molecules and unknown chemicals.

Other examples of the home state of Bon Jovi, Jason Biggs, and the Coneheads:

You know how some municipalities allow one to “adopt a highway” by cleaning it of litter discarded onto it by passing motorists no doubt attempting to strike such kiss-ass environmental freaks? Well, in the Garden State, you can not only do this, but one may also “adopt a jug handle” (according to a sign on one of the many such road configurations that litter New Jersey since its driving populace is apparently incapable of being trusted to make left turns). While this sounds like caring for the thinnest part of a gallon container of milk during daylight hours, it essentially means that you are responsible for picking up the litter disposed by drivers who are angry that some New Jersey state law somewhere prohibits them from making direct left turns. Or maybe they’re just aiming at you and other people who enjoy standing around and picking up garbage.

A sign in front of a public library; the “L” in the word “Public” had been snatched, indicating that the book center mainly focused on the human body’s crotch region. Upon passing it again on our way back, we noticed that BOTH sides of the sign had the “L” stolen. You have to hand it to New Jersey pranksters for not half-assing the job…and also for residing in an area of the state wherein there really is nothing better to do.

A sign for some type of cancer treatment that included “knife” in some bizarre compound word, the exact word of which is currently registering a blank. All I know is that I remarked on how said “knife”-inclusive term sounded more like a kitchen superhero than anything even remotely related to cancer. This, in turn, prompted us to briefly…very briefly…consider creating a comic about superheroes fashioned after common kitchen items. Among our improvised “characters” included “Super Spoon,” “Mega Mixer,” and “The Great Grater.” I guess you had to be there and perhaps several years younger to appreciate it to the degree of throat-hurting laughter we all did.

Cruising down Leonard Avenue across Highway 36, we came upon the small building housing Quick Stop Groceries and RST Video, the latter establishment’s sign still proudly boasting “VHS and Nintendo,” which could very well have been obsolete even in 1994. Clever sonofabitch that I am, I pointed out that the field across from the lot of stores was barren, in stark contrast to “Clerks: The Animated Series,” wherein this same space played host to an L-shaped office tower, a shopping-mall-sized “Quicker Stop” (both of which were products of the series’ villainous “Leonardo Leonardo” character, humorously voiced by Alec Baldwin), and a traveling carnival. “Alec Baldwin lied to me!” I exclaimed to pity laughter from the others in the car, who no doubt were hoping that some miracle would cause me to suddenly don a straitjacket.

I had read rumors on the Internet, posted by people with even less of a social life than me, about RST Video’s recent decision to close down, and, sadly, these rumors proved to be true. In the store’s darkened gloom partially obscured by its door’s handwritten “Store Closed” sign, boxes of actual VHS movies lined the carpeted floor where Jeff Anderson’s “Randal Graves” character from the “Clerks” films/series/comic books strode across so many times in the past, often on his way out in order to chat with fellow clerk Dante Hicks who was employed at the Quick Stop next door. Needless to say, Randal’s frequent escapes from his post came at the expense of people wishing to rent/return movies, all of whom were met with sarcastic, expletive-filled comments from its sole employee. Maybe this is what happened in real life.

While its place is forever etched into quasi-Hollywood cinema, the business whose signage’s proud boasting of two horribly obsolete forms of media holds a different special place in my heart. On my last trip to the region, our friend Brian asked the RST Video employee currently on duty if he could use their restroom. As I and the two of my friends who rounded out that trip’s group made small talk with the clerk, we hear a camera shutter click from the restroom area. When Brian emerged, he wore one of those “Look at me! I shit my pants and ate it!” Ralph-Wiggum-type looks and proudly announced to everyone present (mixed company, mind you) that he had photographed himself in “midstream” urination. Mr. RST replied that Brian, I, and the other male member of our group, Bill, were forever banned from the establishment, although Holly, the fourth member, was not, most likely due to her current status as a decent-looking female.

Looking at the closed-down store, I guess he meant business.

Fortunately, Quick Stop was still open and (seemingly) serving as a steady stream of business, both for area locals and Kevin Smith fans who traveled the better part of 100 miles to get there. Each time I find myself standing outside the breathtaking exterior of this 7-11 wannabe, I find myself wanting to play hockey on the roof, chat with Cohee Lunden in the parking lot, and perform other activities undertaken by characters in Kevin Smith movies that everyone still reading this entry is no doubt aware of. Those who have no idea who Kevin Smith is probably stopped reading a long time ago.

This picture is the only one I snapped inside, for I’d probably be there all day if I were to go around photographing everything that made it into the final “Clerks” cut. Despite the fan that I am (even after that horrid “Jersey Girl” crapfest), even I know that I’d be shot with looks of disgust (and possibly bullets) by the actual minimum wage employee on duty if I were to go around wasting memory card space on a carefully-lined-up picture of, say, the coffee machine. I am also proud to report that, for the third straight time, I resisted the urge to imitate Walt Flanagan’s “guidance counselor” character in “Clerks” by smashing eggs, one by one, on the side of the refrigerated cases’ glass doors.

My fried rice!

For years, I craved this once-common staple of La Choy food products, displaying unbridled elation each time my dad brought can after can of the stuff home from the supermarket (and not only because I didn’t have to pay for it). Sure, it tastes like fried rice when you’re eating it but like the interior of its metallic can for the three days following the meal, but it is worth the putrid aftertaste! Sadly, all of the supermarkets in our immediate area stopped carrying the product some time ago; I was convinced that La Choy simply stopped making it and was concentrating all of their efforts on imitation bean spouts or something. Only in the past year or so did I locate two stores that sold possibly expired cans of the rice: a market in central Philadelphia and a hick supermarket in a corner of Montgomery County roughly 45 miles from my house (the latter location having since stopped sales). Fortunately, I have another location to add to the short list of establishments that carry my favorite expired dish in a can: the one and only Leonardo Quick Stop!

For the record, in case you’re pathetic enough to be keeping one this whole time, I also purchased a Dr Pepper from the Quick Stop. Sadly, I do not have the bottle anymore, for I decided to throw it away in a waste disposal unit looking eerily similar to the patch of roadway outside of Dan’s car. I only mention this because I had originally planned to wash out the bottle and keep it as a Quick Stop souvenir…it would have looked perfect next to the empty Pepsi bottle I purchased from the same store (and perhaps the same cashier) over six years ago that, yes, I still have.

And thus ended our tour of suburban New Jersey locations made semi-famous by largely forgettable mid-1990s movies. The day is over, right?

Heh.

Kevin Smith is but one director, and “Clerks,” “Mallrats,” “Chasing Amy,” “Dogma,” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” are but five movies in the excruciatingly extensive library of cinema permanently tattooed onto the brain tissue of my friends and I. With our visit to the area just barely eclipsing the amount of time it took us to drive there (just to drive THERE…not to drive there AND BACK), it was time to follow all of our directions in reverse order and finagle our way back through Leonardo and Red Bank to a nearby community known as “Eatontown.”

The reason?

To eat at a White Castle.

The reason for that?

Because of “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.”

In 2004, some of the people who helped in the production of the 2000 classic “Dude, Where’s My Car?” decided to follow up their smash hit with “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle”, with John Cho and Kal Penn respectively filling the roles of the title’s names (White Castle starred as itself). Even lesser known than Kevin Smith, Cho and Penn were actually billed in the film’s movie trailers as “The Asian Guy from ‘American Pie’” and “The Indian Guy from ‘Van Wilder’”. The plot basically tells the story of how Hoboken, New Jersey roommates Harold and Kumar get hungry after some pot inhalation and travel to White Castle to ward off the resulting “munchies.” Sure, they get sidetracked by, among other things, the theft of their car by Neil Patrick Harris, but they ultimately reach a location by the end and savor authentic White Castle “sliders” and other food items in beautiful slow-motion footage. Due to the release’s so-so performance at the box office and, well, the fact that it’s about two North Jersey stoners who want to eat and not much else, there hasn’t been much talk of any sequels or “sister” movies, as was the case with Smith’s movies. In fact, come to think of it, there hasn’t really been much talk of the actual movie itself since its 2004 bow.

But I was determined to eat at a White Castle, even if it took additional gallons of Dan’s gasoline to do so. Every time I watched that movie, it always made me hungry for an immediate meal at the establishment. The problem is that the last known White Castle branch in our area closed down quite some time ago, leaving behind nothing but a few scattered area residents (including my friend Rusty himself) who faintly recall patronizing it during its existence…somehow without the assistance of a movie. Adding to the agony was the fact that the White Castle in the film was supposedly located in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which is closer to my current home than some Pennsylvania towns located in my own county! An Internet search proved this to be dead wrong unfortunately, leaving myself and others angry and confused as to why a film that featured the star of “Doogie Hoswer” stealing automobiles in central Jersey would LIE to us.

Fortunately, northern New Jersey is a perpetual breeding ground for White Castle restaurants, one of which was located (according to Mapquest, anyway) just 5 miles due south of the “Stash”; it was on Highway 35 itself, just like the “Stash” was supposed to be. Nevertheless, the purple, damn-near straight line connecting our Red Bank destination to our Eatontown destination still shimmered in my memory, even as Route 35 snaked through the area in pretty much every direction BUT straight; at one point, we made a full 90° left turn to follow the route! But it was worth the aggravation (to me, anyway, who wasn’t personally driving either automobile) upon seeing the most beautiful building I had ever laid eyes on since twenty minutes prior at the Quick Stop:

Ah, White Castle! We passed pretty much every other fast food chain known to man to get here, but it DOES actually exist, just across a busy highway from the Monmouth Mall (which we initially assumed contained the White Castle inside, shielded from our view). Both vehicles were parked and we went inside. The smell of fried onions and ketchup greeted our nostrils, which the rest of my nose desperately tried to suppress because I loathe the smell of both such additives. We all used the facilities before ordering; looking back now, I realize that there was no “Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work” sign above the men’s room sink.

After we all made friends with our bladders again, we looked at the menu board. In the five or so minutes I stared at it, maybe 10 seconds was spent actually deciding on an order; the rest of the time was devoted to lovingly staring at the prices: 51 cents for a hamburger…$1 for a bacon cheeseburger…and so on. I had watched “Harold and Kumar” enough to realize that these “burgers” were really no larger than roller skate wheels and that 5-6 of them would amount to a full-sized sandwich at $2 or $3 above the price of said sandwich, but this didn’t faze me. I opted for two hamburgers, one cheeseburger, one bacon cheeseburger, and a “chicken ring” sandwich.

Yeah. White Castle serves their chicken in little Pog-shaped (and sized) “rings,” which single-handedly made me realize what a chicken donut would look like if someone were ever inventive/retarded enough to come up with such a delicacy. A “chicken ring sandwich,” which went for the gourmet price of $2.01, was nothing more than two chicken rings sandwiched on a dinner roll, not unlike those rolls that come in packages of 24 in the supermarket’s bread aisle around Thanksgiving.

I ordered my roughly $6 meal with the request that my food be denied of onions and that my Coke be denied of ice. Naturally, this means that I spent the pre-eating part of my meal painstakingly removing onion bits from my sandwiches and ice cubes from my cola.

Finally, for the first time in my life, I bit into a White Castle-brand hamburger.

And immediately I placed White Castle on a level equal to that of my favorite fast food restaurant, Burger King. In fact, Burger King only had two aspects White Castle did not:

Edible food.
The chance of me eating there in the future.

Awful can’t come close to describing the flavor that raped my taste buds that afternoon. I bet even poor old “Fanboy” the inaction figure out in the car tasted the disgusting items masquerading as the retarded cousins of food. ALL of my burgers were not only coated with an apparently invisible layer of the strongest, most belch-inducing (as I later found out) onion bits on the planet, but all also appeared to have cheese, which shouldn’t have been the case with two of them. Closer inspection revealed that the brownish-white substance was not melted cheese, but rather the grotesque result of fusion between the miniature patty and the dinner roll interior. It could have been a new life form for all I know.

And I could go on for several more blog entries about the meat-like substance that was allegedly the burger portion of my sandwich. Flatter than a single sheet of looseleaf paper, the patties looked and tasted like they never made it to the grill at all, but were rather stepped on in their “raw meat” phase repeatedly with a work boot until they changed color (needless to say, the owner of the boot was careful to coat the bottom of it with onion juice before each stomp). I swear, there’s more meat (and less boot residue) in fucking SPAM than there is in White Castle burger patties.

Regardless, I finished each and every morsel, for the principle of eating ALL the “food” I paid for was far more important than the risk of contracting intestinal disorders. Yeah, I may have made friends with my bladder, but my digestive system, small intestine, and sphincter have pretty much declared war on me. I did not eat anything else after the meal, primarily because the aforementioned organs felt that I didn’t deserve to eat if that was the kind of crap I planned to send their way. Besides, they were probably too busy trying to determine what exactly they were dealing with here (“Is that food or did the fucker just swallow part of that $16 plastic figurine he bought? I really can’t tell! Do you think stomach bile is even strong enough to dissolve this…this…refuse?”).

On the plus side, the bacon portion of my bacon cheeseburger was delectable and the chicken rings were made from the best dead fowl I have ever had. Of course, it is also entirely possible that both of these food products sucked ass but seemed delicious since they followed their “burger” counterparts.

I guess that’s what you get when your hamburger costs the same price as Kmart vending machine bling-bling. In fact, now that I think of it, 51 cents was way overpriced.

Declining to drive around the state in search of the New Jersey house that the members of the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” call home, we all decided that we had had our fill of the Garden State for the day/week/year. Sure, we will visit it again, for we must drive through it to get to New York City next week. It was time to go home to our families, pets, and toilets.

Trying to not recognize the fact that six of us spent many hours and dollars traveling to a comic book shop, convenience store, and putrid fast food joint…in fucking New Jersey of all places…we made our way home. The return trip was just as uneventful, save for the forty-five minutes we wasted driving through north Philadelphia just after sundown, the result of my suggestion to cross a certain Pennsylvania-New Jersey bridge that cost a whole DOLLAR less in toll money to get back on our side of the Delaware River. I guess you never realize that Philadelphia has the budget for only a limited amount of signs directing drivers back to Interstate 95 until you find yourself cruising along a one-way thoroughfare lined with check cashing places and dive bars. The six of us probably made up 100% of the Caucasian population in the neighborhoods we drove through at an extra slow pace, thanks to our inability to keep 0 cars between us. At some points, my sister, who has no idea where she is if her current location does not fall in a 10-foot radius of our house, was actually IN FRONT OF US.

Alas, we made it home, seven hours and several torn intestines after our early afternoon departure. Despite all of the little problems, both bodily and otherwise, I must say that I will really miss Red Bank. If you were to ask me what I’d miss most, however, I would definitely have to go with the $16 I blew on “Fanboy.”

Oh, and fuck Harold and Kumar, by the way. If they had gone to Wendy’s none of this would have happened.

By the way, check out Dan's account of the trip.

February 16

2006-02-17T20:07:00.000-08:00

My car looks like and generally is a piece of crap.

It's a 1992 Ford Tempo whose MSN-page-colored blue (if that doesn't prove my computer geekness, then nothing will) paint job is marred on the trunk and hood by this weird white stuff that looks like dried rock salt but, unlike dried rock salt, won't clean off with any chemical less powerful than new paint. With random dents and dings on its body, my car would appear right at home in an inner city ghetto, junkyard, or any other such place, as opposed to the places I actually drive it to.

On those occasions when it does drive, that is.

Oh, sure, my car gets me from Point A to Point B...if Point B happens to be five miles past Point A broken down on the side of the interstate. My actual destinations are somewhere like Point Q. With my treasured suburban upbringing causing me to be blind to the fact that my car actually does run well for weeks on end without incident, I can quasi-honestly say that it spends more time in the mechanic's garage than on the actual road. Speaking of the aforementioned mechanic, he has asked me on more than one occasion when I am going to get rid of the thing (he uses the term "get rid," not "sell" or "trade"), despite the fact that the repairs he performs on it alone probably put half his kids through college. Tires, brakes, fluids, a "system" or two, and practically the entire engine have had to be replaced at one point or another.

In short, my car isn't exactly the most desirable piece of machinery; auto theives should take one look at it and realize that the only object of value contained therein would be the gas tank cap.

"Should"

That hole pictured above was once home to my car's $98 car stereo that I bought used from Best Buy roughly two or so years ago, not too long after I actually acquired the vehicle. While visiting a friend of mine for no less than 3 hours one night, some cock-monger out there decided to help himself to my automobile's sole reliable part without my consent. The stereo itself was not only gone, but also missing was the device's faceplate and the music CD that was inside, custom made for me by my friend Brian and his illegally downloaded music files, one of which was a rather amusing song by Tenacious D with the following (actual) lyrics:

"You broke the rules! Now I'm gonna pull out all your pubic hair Motherfucker"

Having occurred sometime between 10pm and 1am, no witnesses were around to see this thief take his/her/its sweet old time completely destroying my center panel. Thus, I have no idea as to the clothing, race, gender, weight, appearance, or sexual preference of the bastard. While this may sound like an accurate statement, keep in mind that it was made by yours truly, who, as a suburbanite (at least for the time being), should have known better than to keep an open mind and to completely pinpoint the culprit as a fat African-American male homosexual (though not in those terms), as if doing so would cause the bastard to come forward or something.

What I can tell you is that he was tall:

That metallic inversion in my ceiling used to be home to my dome light, whose cover and light bulbs are now resting in my backseat somewhere. Apparently, the thief's head knocked into it somehow and, being the thick, blunt, brainless thing it is, knocked the shit out of my dome light. Unlike my stereo, this can be replaced with the original components, but that would involve going into my backseat, which I have dubbed "The Backseat of No Return." I don't know if this is the case with anyone else, but when we lazy people toss something in our backseats, we never see it again. In one of my previous cars, I recall finding a Burger King cup that one of my backseat-riding friends must have dropped back there. The cup was festooned with logos for a movie that had currently been in theaters but was on video by the time I found it.

If that isn't bad enough, I should tell you that the only way I came across the cup in the first place was because I had slammed on my brakes for some reason and it had come sailing out from underneath the seat into the front, which I like to keep semi-pristine.

In my 7 years of vehicle ownership, this vandalization marked the third time my car had been roobed. My previous automobile, a ketchup-red 1991 Ford Tempo that didn't really look much better than this current metallic crap pile (especially after I ended its life by accidentally rear-ending someone who decided to make a left turn sans-blinker in front of a patch of ice), had not only its license plate stolen, but also the faceplate to its stereo. The interior front panel's sorely damaged ashtray and cigarette lighter proved that the stereo itself was also a target but could not be removed.

Here's the interesting part:

All three incidents took place in the suburbs.

I have parked my car with its doors locked and (inadvertently) unlocked in many different areas of Philadelphia and New York City during all hours of the day. Never was it touched.

Yet on THREE separate occasions in the allegedly perfect, cookie-cutter suburbs to where middle-aged conformists scatter off so as to not only avoid the "big, scary, dirty, crime-ridden" city, but to also push this agenda onto their children and others, my property has been stolen.

AM and FM radio does indeed suck, but it's better than listening to nothing (aside from, of course, the various noises my car makes, indicating that it is almost time for another crucial part of its makeup to fall off/explode).