Some time ago I woke up on a Saturday morning feeling a bit loopy, my brain clouded by an immense preoccupation with, um,  dice.  I don’t know what it was that had invaded my dreams the night before, but whatever it had been, it had left an imprint in my mind that I couldn’t shake.  Considering that I’ve never had much interest in gambling just made the whole thing even more random and odd.  Nevertheless, there it was, or rather, there they were, two dice, in the forefront of my thoughts.  I understood that, for whatever reason, the day would consist of a pair of dice stuffed into my jean pockets, bouncing across a bartop, or resting in my open palm, their black snake eyes staring up at me, guiding me.  But why?   As the day wore on, it slowly began to dawn on me just what role these dice were going to play.  Soon I understood.  Oh yes, yes I did.

I grabbed my phone and called my buddy, Thane.

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I went to an awesome show at the Earl on Sunday – Joey Cape, John Snodgrass, and Cory Branan – and had intended on spending the night composing a thoughtful review of the show, only to discover that writing about other people is not nearly self-indulgent enough for my current blogging limitations, and so I scrapped the post.   Oh well.  But, I’ll mention one cool thing about the show:  Joey Cape’s music, be it the skate rock tunes of Lagwagon or the experimental stuff of Bad Astronaut, have played like a soundtrack to a hell of a lot of good times over the past decade or so of my life, and man, it was a joy to find out that this guy was as cool as I could have hoped!   He was lighthearted and hilarious, laughing with the audience, taking requests and playing a bunch of old stuff, and was really damn good up on stage – just him and an acoustic guitar.  I found myself  standing there with a shit-eating grin on my face for the entire show.  Man, what a good time.  All three of the guys were great.  If you ever get an opportunity to catch any of them, don’t miss it!

Ahh, well, that’s really all I’ve got.  Pretty boring, no?  Shall we talk about something else?  How bout snakes?  Want to talk about snakes?  Imagine a snake with a rocket on its back.  That would be awesome, wouldn’t it? What would you name this snake?  Eric?  Funny, me too.

Hey, so, in a pathetic and desperate attempt to come up with something to write, I went to dictionary.com and typed in the word “thon,” hoping that I could come back here and tell all of you that “thon” is a real word.  It’s not.  :-(   I then typed it into wikipedia and discovered that Thon is, however,  a figure from Greek Mythology.  No, not Thor.  That’s Norse, you asshole.  Thon.  Thon was a Lord who’s mistress, Polydamna, is mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey.  Wikipedia then goes on to completely ignore Thon, but to mention that Polydamna gave Telemachus a drug capable of “robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories.”  Strange, this drug of which they speak sounds a lot like something else with which I have intimate knowledge:  beer.   Weird that I would type in an arbitrary word like “thon” and end up with a reference to beer.  I think I know why.  I think that I am supposed to be the one responsible for introducing “thon” into the American vernacular, and I’m pretty sure that it’s supposed to be another term for beer.  So, let’s try it, shall we?   I’m going to take a sip of this thon.  Sipping.    Mmm, that’s pretty good thon.  Yeah, actually I think this works. Don’t you?

Wow, what a wonderful surprise.  Here I thought I was in the middle of a complete blog fail, and it turns out that I’ve just invented a new word.   Amazing how these things work out.   Well, it ain’t gonna get any better than this, so I’m gonna roll out of here.  Not to mention, it’s Thon-thirty, which means it’s time for a thon.

I absolutely abhor all that I’ve just written.  I also hate the wheel.  And other things.

Not too long ago an idea popped in my head for a social-network competitor to Facebook.  Course, I don’t have the time to build the world’s next Web2.0 “killer app”, nor would I even have the gall or the balls to use this application if it existed.  But, since it came to mind, I might as well write it down and present this idea to the internet, to do with it what it will.

Have you ever received a Facebook Friend Request from a past flame or maybe a random hook-up from the younger days? You think back to that brief moment in time with a touch of nostalgia, remembering how one simple college basement keg-bash ended up as a night of backyard romance.  Or maybe you shudder with regret at a fateful night many years ago that started with a group of friends and co-eds  playing Century Club, then Asshole, then “I Never” and led to drunken confessions with a stranger in the corner of a party, and ended up a morning of awkward side glances and a meek, “I’ll call you.”   You ever get one of these Friend Requests? I haven’t, because I’m pure as the desert sands.  But this game is not for sweet and precious virgins like myself, it’s for all you nasty sinners.
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I headed to the bottom floor of the office the other day to pick up some Mike and Ike’s, cause Mike and Ike’s kick some serious ass.  The vending machine we have at work is one of those old-school kinds, a big massive obelisk, its entire front covered in glass, welcoming its visitors to peer at the rows and rows of dazzling colors. Candies, chips, cookies, honey buns…  I always thought the Honey Buns seemed terribly out of place within that display.  With all those choices, did you ever pick a Honey Bun?  Anyway, all of these products of sloth are organized ceremoniously in their own lines, propped up by a weird white coil, and when you pop in your change and punch B11, the coil begins it’s creepy serpentine crawl, spinning slowly towards you, as if it would head straight through that glass if it could, boring right through your chest, grinding it’s way through your internal organs and out your back, where it would continue to swirl, spinning madly, slowly, straight down the hallway to continue it’s path of evil.  Fortunately for mankind, the coil is of limited length, and so instead of brutal human destruction, instead it just spins until it carries that dumb bag of candy to the edge of the precipice, where the bag eventually falls to its freedom, escaping the coiled bondage where it has spent the entirety of its short existence.
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My friends and I sometimes like to engage in a little exercise at the bar after we’ve been there a bit too long.  It usually starts when I begin to get anxious and start looking for strangers to annoy.  The exercise goes something like this:

BONES
(motioning to a random girl and waving her over)
Excuse me.

GIRL
(on guard, preparing to think of a fake phone number to hand out)
Umm… yes?

BONES
(points to himself, then to his 3 or so friends)
You see this group of fellows right here?

GIRL
Yeah?

BONES
If you had to pick one of us…

GIRL
Uh huh?

BONES
If you had to pick one of us…  just one of us…  to die…  which one would it be?

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I woke up this weekend in my bed with a hangover.  I began the morning as I often do in this state, rolling out of bed and immediately grabbing for last night’s jeans laid out on the floor.  Digging my hand in the pocket, I discovered a piece of paper.  What was this strange parchment?  Felt like a bar tab.  I unfolded it.  It was.  But at the top, above the bar logo, was handwriting.  Scribbled, barely legible handwriting.  It looked familiar.  Real familiar.  As if the author of these scribbles were me.  Or, a version of me…

The writing said, “Bones – you paid.”

Aha!

“Thanks, Drunk Bones,”  said I, Sober Bones.

And with my first paranoid post-beernight ritual out of the way, I could move on to whatever next neurotic task awaited me that morning.
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Oh yeah, I totally forgot to tell you how my first batch of homebrew turned out!  You’ve been on pins and noodles waiting for an update, yes?  Well, just in case you forgot, about a month ago I brewed up some robust porter, my first excursion into homebrewing in about 7 years.  And the result?  Success!   Yep, it turned out pretty damn good.   A nice warm copper brown color, thick cream-colored head, and a fresh, slightly sweet taste.    Awesome.  I’m drinking one right now, in fact.

I’ve been sampling a lot of microbrewed porters over the last few months, and of course my first beer doesn’t match the intensity of some of the craft-brewed delights in the market, but nevertheless, it’s a tasty brew!   And the fact that my initial attempt wasn’t a colossal failure is extremely gratifying, cause I now have a comfortable knowledge of what level of care is required in novice brewing, and more importantly, the sanitizing process.  And understanding what amount of cleanliness is the right amount is extremely valuable to an obsessive fellow like me, who could easily find himself going far overboard in the cleaning routine.

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On Friday the gang and I  stopped into a nearby bar to hang on to the remaining hours of the night after a wonderful evening of bowling and beers.  We bumped into a couple of lady friends of Jaguar and Golden John, and we all grabbed seats at the long table in the back.  I had run into these same friends the weekend before at the same place, and we’d briefly exchanged salutations and introductions – “Hi, I’m Bones.”  “Joe?”  “Bones!”  “Bones?”  “Yeah, Bones.  It’s just a dumb name that everyone has called me since…”, until we gave up trying to scream over the loud music and all went on our merry ways.  And on this following Friday, I found myself sitting next to one of these girls, who turned to me and asked, “Bones, what’s your real name?”

Ahhh, this conversation again….

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Many thanks to Joe at Suburban Wino for this contribution to my back deck, and to the quest of preventing mankind from suffering the wrath of the log dart.

I don’t believe in weather, but many who do were talking yesterday about a vicious windstorm tearing its way through my part of town, felling trees, taking out power lines, just generally causing all kinds of havoc. Coincidentally, as I drove home from work I noticed that all the street lights were blinking yellow, and as I pulled into my neighborhood I spotted tree branches and leaves littering the streets. The neighborhood across from mine was dark. Funny that all these people had been talking about this whole weather thing just around the time that the trees and street lights and power lines decided to fall down like idiots. Strange – almost like a cause-and-effect was at work here, but more likely just an example of group think gone terribly wrong. Whatever, I’m not a scientist, it’s not my problem to solve.

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