A Healthy Dose of Perspective....

I've been drinking and sitting here trying to overcome the trauma of going 0-4 on my Final Four picks. I am not bitter though, after all watching the games today has been a great learning experience for me.

In between the 85-minutes of actual basketball they somehow managed to cram into just under 215 minutes of commercials, I began to realize some things about my life and my future. For example, I am not saving anywhere near enough for retirement - and my two best choices are either the lava lamp company or the one that somehow managed to get an elk into a gym. I am going with the elk in the gym. It's both timely and completely believable.

Of course that's not all I learned today. My cell phone is woefully out of date. I don't even know how I managed to make it all of these years without a cellphone that's capable of streaming 20-year old video highlights of old final fours that I have already seen at least 300 times each. I swear until I get that phone I am going to feel as foolish as touron in Italy sitting at an outdoor cafe with Gespacio all over my face while my ultra-hip Asian friend is checking his voicemail.

As horrifying as it is to think of myself facing another day with insufficient retirement funds, a shitty cell-phone that barely even qualifies as 21st Century and no final four teams left in any of my NCAA tournament brackets, I still can't help but feel that I am not the most cursed person on the planet.

That honor belongs either to the innocent looking 9-year old girl I saw when I went for a walk in the park today.

It was a beautiful sunny day here today. 75 degrees and sunny. It was one of those days when you walk outside and just want to keep on walking and reveling in the arrival of spring. That's exactly what I did.

I walked down to the park, and there was so much to enjoy; The family flying the kite that looked like a dragon-fly, the gay dudes with a french poodle with that ridiculous french-poodle grooming. (At one point the dog broke away from it's owner and ran up to another dog and tried to get it to play with it. The other dog just sat there and stared at it as if it was wondering whether or not it should even take the poodle seriously. Eventually it humored the poodle with a quick sniff then trotted away looking as freaked out as a homophobe that has just been come-on to by a transvestite hooker.

That happened right by the basketball court by Foster Beach. The only reason I remember this is because of what happened next.

I looked back over my shoulder to cross the bike path and turn around, and that is when I saw the fat dude in the blue gym-shorts and the white t-shirt with the sleeves cut off peddling toward me fast and furious on the front of a tandem bike. As he zoomed past me pouring off gravy like nobody's business I noticed that the co-pilot on the back of the bike was the poor nine-year old girl I mentioned before.

It happened so quick, but I couldn't help but notice how she kept turning her head tryign with all of her might to see around he father's massive love-handles, but no matter how hard she tried all she could see was the same thing I could see: Her father's gross, massive plumber's crack smiling back at the whole world and enjoying the bright sunny day just like the rest of us.

As they zoomed out of sight, all I could picture was this girl on a couch 250-pounds overweight and working with a psychiatrist, to try and get to the core of lifelong fear of excersize. Or at least that's what I was thinking till the 65-year old roller-blader dude in the spandex nearly ran me over- snapping me back to reality and reminding me I needed to get back home before I missed any more basketball.

But of course, hindsight is 20/20 and looking back on that crack and imagining spending an hour or two with that view instead of just a few seconds really does help to put things into perspective. Sure maybe I don't have a chance of winning my NCAA pool, maybe I don't have any money for retirement and maybe this blog is a complete rip off of a fairly unoriginal theme, but at least Fox Sunday night is finally over, spring is coming and, now that I have nothing invested in it, being forced to miss the Final Four for a wedding next weekend won't be anywhere near as traumatic as it could have been.

No, I am not saying I am suddenly becoming an optimist or anything like that. But maybe just maybe what I am saying is that if I were that little girl trapped on the back of that bike, I'd stare at that chasm ahead of me and see nothing more than a man with his ass-crack half covered.

PS Quick Thought Added 3/26/07: One thing I forgot to mention in my drunken stupor last night: Remember when they used to actually show the Final Four teams cutting down the net? That was one of the best parts of the whole weekend, especially if your team won or if it was a cinderella story, and it led to some unforgettable moments like in 96 when the late grate Al Macguire was in the middle of a victorious Syracuse team dancing while John Wallace and Z Sims were singing "When the 'Cuse is in the House, Oh my God!! Oh my God!!" Macguire sat there for a few seconds looking blankly at the camera wondering what to do, and then, as if an angel had whispered the magic words into his ear-piece, he started awkwardly doing the cabbage patch. It was a great time to be a basketball fan, a time we will never re-live, because with all of the commercials now, the games are so long and so over schedule CBS is forced to jump straight to the tip-off of the second game and then straight to 60-minutes. I suppose losing one of the great moments of being a college basketball fan is a small price to pay for a few extra 2/5 Men and Amazing Race Promos.

The Beauty of Unintentional Comedy

I've been drinking. I guess tonight it's sort of an Irish Wake as I celebrate yet another nail in the coffin of what was once Fox Sunday nights.

It was bad enough when they canceled Futurama but kept King of the Hill running. But at least King of the Hill had a few really good seasons, and it still can occasionally make me laugh. It hurt, but I didn't say anything when Malcom was replaced by American Dad, even if all American Dad succeeded in doing was pointing out how formulaic Family Guy has become. (I watched the last season of Malcom. It had clearly run its course)

I was outraged when they canceled Arrested Development in favor of the War at Home, but I still tuned in because it gave me a good half hour to cook dinner before Family Guy came on. And I still had the HBO Sunday night line-up to look forward to.

But now that HBO is in between seasons and football is over, the curtain has been pulled back and the true suck fest that is Fox Sunday night is exposed before us all like an old man's backside in an ill-fitting hospital gown. The Simpsons are the gross saggy cheeks that once housed the powehouse buttocks that made a young dynamo go. The Family Guy is the ass crack, a gross shriveled canyon that might be alright if they would just clean it out, and American Dad is the Sphincter, a disgusting, white-pubed, puckered abyss the mere sight of which makes everything around it look that much worse. And as if that isn't bad enough, tonight The Winner debuted, and we were treated to two nice long looks at the polyps removed from the old man's colon.

I can't remember the last time I was less entertained by a TV show than the premiere episode of The Winner. The show was so bad, half way through all I could think about was "Thank god, there is only 15-minutes left, and then I never have to watch this again." For crying out loud the TV commercial I saw this afternoon with the old guy demonstrating his colonoscopy with a pea and mashed potatoes resonated more with me than The Winner, and that's just fucking sad.
The commercial was aimed at someone at least 20-years older than me, but The Winner is supposed to be a winner with me. Instead it's just another crap-bomb, dinkelberry half-hour in the dinkle-berry Fox Sunday night line-up brought to you by the increasingly annoying and over-exposed Seth Green. The Fox Executive who made the decision to put their cherished Sunday Night in his hands ought to have his colon scoped with a barbed, rusty crow-bar.

But I don't blame Seth Green. I think that the truth is scripted TV is Dying, but even more so comedy is dying. Other than arrested development, the last sitcom that me laugh for more than a season was Scrubs, and that jumped the shark years ago. My name is Earl isn't bad, but it needs to be on HBO or some other cable channel where they can really have fun.

And it isn't just TV. Well maybe it is. The shitty thing about TV is that for some reason 18-34 year olds are always lumped into the same giant demographic and we are sold the same basic shows. But the thing is, I am approaching the high end of the demographic, and I just don't find a lot of this shit funny any more, and I certainly don't find it compelling or engaging. I swear some Sunday nights, I sit watching the newest Simpsons, and I am so disconnected, I am convinced I must have had a lobotomy and no one told me.

So maybe I am getting old, but if this is true why do I still find old Simpsons and Family Guys to be truly hillarious? Maybe part of it is me and the combination of increasing maturity and decreased pot smoking, but I also can't help but think it is because nobody knows how to write original comedy anymore. And people are being told that things are brillaint and funny and frankly they just aren't.

For example, a guy I work with is really into improv comedy, and he thinks he is God's gift to writing and comedy, but the thing is last week he showed me this cartoon he has been working on and talking about ad nauseum for the last six months. And all I could think when I watched it was that the cartoon embodied everything that I hate about modern comedy. It was quick one-minute skit about Satan giving kids PS3s in exchange for their souls. Really good idea, but it went straight down hill from there. The "punchline" of the skit is God coming to Satan and saying "Dude that's pretty low." To which satan replies, "Dude, it's been a slow year, alright."

I can see how someone might think that this is funny and deep and brilliant, except it isn't. The idea of someone selling their soul to buy into a fad is not original. And to imply that Satan is having a "slow year" at a time when this country is embroiled in a war led by an administation that if it is not the puppet regime of an elephant with downes syndrome is guilty of at the least of being the most, arrogant and ignorant ever to grace the White House and quite possibly of just being flat out evil. (Quick political aside, I should point out that I am a Registered republican, and I am still more conservative than liberal.)

There are horrible atrocities going on in the Darfur. China is taking over Africa's economy, human rights be damned, and we are already gearing up for auditions for Big Brother 8. But it's been a slow year for Satan?

I know I am letting this bother me way too much, and a lot of this anger is misplaced and should be directed at it's real source, the fact that that everyday the orbit of my world is moving further and further away from the center of the universe that is the 18-34 year old white male, and no matter how I hard try to fight it, I am being pulled more and more toward the black hole of a world where colonoscopies are more than just a punchline guaranteed to provide a quick laugh.

I could probably get more into that, but it's getting late, and I just remembered I still have to clean the vomit off my coat from Friday night at the Sovereign; a night that ended with a drunk, deaf Ethiopian named Tony inexplicably opening up to me about how disappointing his life is and at one time even crying, before collecting himself, apologizing to me and telling me "I don't know why I am telling you this. I feel I can just talk to you. You seem so......pleasant."

Maybe I should introduce Tony to my co-worker. He could probably teach him a few things about timing and good old fashioned unscripted ironic comedy.

God My Life is Exciting....

I've been drinking. I know that I shouldn't be, but fuckit, it's Oscar Night. And I for one am proud to announce that for the 31st consecutive year, I will not be hosting, attending or watching the Oscars.

Call me crazy, but I just don't understand people's fascination with the entertainment world and celebrities. I understand that there are people who love movies. There are people who are passionate about making, writing, producing , editing, scoring and even acting. I understand that there is nothing quite like watching a great movie and getting lost in the story, and to an extent I even understand why someone would want to win an Oscar. There is something to be said for knowing that your peers respect and admire you.

However, while I am sure that I would completely appreciate being given an award for Best Tech Support Operator for a specialty Software Vendor at this year's annual Eggbert Awards for Technical Support, I am also quite sure that nobody in their right mind would sit down and watch my speech on TV, or wonder just who's pocket protector I am waring or what designer made the tape for my classes. Unless of course they had me in the Eggbert pool.

So while it is true that I for one have no need to sit down and watch the Oscars, I suppose I can just chalk it up to another one of the many things in this world I am starting to realize I am out of touch with - a list that over that past few months has grown to include: Technology, outside of work, skiing technology and winter sports in general, popular music, my friends, MP3 players, video game systems, and of course What people in their mid-early 20's find funny/ cool.

So anyway, that's about that, and as a way to catch all of you up on the goings on in my life over the month since I last posted, I have decided to honor all of you Oscar freaks, movie buffs and gamblers alike, by giving out my own awards, the Dannees. Note that all categories are randomly made up in stream of consciousness mode as I come up with them:

Best Three Day Weekend: last weekend. President's day weekend. First time in over two years I have had a long weekend or anytime off from work when I did absolutely no traveling and was able to completely relax. Highlights included: Alexi Murdoch at Martyr's friday night. Hangover brunch at Dunley's on the Blvd, and soccer on Saturday. 32-hours of NCAA 2K7 combined on Saturday and Sunday. Monday trip to the Art Institute with my girlfriend. Roasted a duck for dinner.

Beat Concert: Alexi Murdoch at Martyr's: Awesome up and coming singer songwriter. More indie pop and commercial than the traditional hippie fare I like. But what can I say? The guy has an amazing voice and writes some awesome lyrics. I count myself lucky to be among the people five years form now who will be able to say I saw him in a club with 500 of my closest friends.

Best Dinner: Roast Duck with Orange Sauce, Asparagus and wild rice and mushroom pilaf. This one wins not only because I cooked it myself, but also because it everything came out perfect. It narrowly edges out the rosmary crusted pork chops my girlfriend and I had for our valentine's dinner simply because I fucked up the wine reduction sauce that night.

Best New Musical Obsession: Josh Rouse. Again a lot poppier than what I traditionally like, but damn this guy can write a song. Plus every album follows a concept and is completely different, yet all of them are unmistakenly Josh Rouse. Best one's to check out: 1972, great concept movie where every song is crafted like a 70's AM pop song, only with better lyrics. Chester, co-written with alt country genius Kurt Wagner (Lambchop).

Best "New to me Album": Zoyisa - Bottle Rockets. Fronted by Brian Henneman, a one-time Uncle Tupelo sideman. This band plays alt country firmly rooted in it's punk/ rockabilly roots. By far their best album since their first. If you like Drive By Truckers you might like this band.

Best Video Game purchased: NCAA2k7. I have played non-stop since I purchased it, including 32-hours in a 2-day span.

Worst Video Game purchased: NCAA2k7. I have played non-stop since I purchased it, including 32-hours in a 2-day span.

Acutally when you get down to it. The last Danee pretty much sums up everything. If there has been one overriding theme to my life these past few weeks it has been obsessive compulsive playing of NCAA 2k7. I have stopped showering, cleaning, cooking and for the most part eating. When I am home all I do is sit and play. I have sat, gross and sweaty in the clothes I slept in, in my old leather easy chair for a minimum of 50 hours a week since I got the game, and what do I have to show for it. Sore wrists, a gross apartment. A horrible smell coming up from my chair that can only be cleaned by a gasoline fire, and in my second season, I have Colgate 31-0, number one seed in the East Regional and all set to play a sweet 16 match up against the mighty hawks of St. Joe's. It'll be a tough matchup to win before the nightime cold medicine kicks in, but I think we can do it.

A cold dark day in Milwaukee...

I've been drinking. I'd like to say it's a lot since it has been so long since my last post, but that's just not true. OK. In actuality it is. What with the holidays and all. How can a man not drink?

Still, I have definitely slowed down since last holiday season. Maybe it's my age finally catching up with me, or maybe it's the new work schedule which seems to leave me even more exhausted than before in the early evenings. Then again maybe it's just the fact that none of my male friends own a car, so lately I have been stuck driving to anything good.

Take Sunday for example, some friends and I headed up to Milwaukee to see the Cuse take on the Golden Eagles, or as my friend's father informed me, the Golden Warriors, as the team is still referred to by all true fans.

The game itself was pretty amazing, especially since Syracuse won. It was very much a see saw battle. It seemed that Syracuse would get a four or five point lead, and sensing that I was starting to relax, immediately turn the ball over three straight times. This really was one of the sloppiest games I have ever seen. Both teams committed over 20 turnovers, and nobody could hit a shot or a foul shot.

Before I get to my main point, I just want to point out how maddeningly frustrating it is to watch Syracuse this year. I was about as far away as I could be from the action in the Bradley Center, but even I could see that Syracuse had vastly superier front court athletes to Marquette's, and though their guards were somewhat overmatched by Marquette's, there was no excuse for the types of turnovers Syracuse committed. Most of them came on lazy passes by the guards, or ill-advised attempts to force a fast-break when they didn't have the numbers.

Syracsue is clearly a very talented team, but they just seem to be lacking the proverbial "mental toughness," "basketball IQ" or "Moxy" that a great team has. For example, how many times this year have you seen Josh Wright commit a stupid charging foul or devendorf commit a stupid foul on the other team's side of half-court? Perhaps the best example I can think of from Sunday's game came with 11 seconds to go in the first half. SU was up by one, and Devendorf had the ball. Instead of holding for the last shot, he attempted an alley-oop pass which was mishandled and went out of bounds. Marquette got the ball back and scored to take the lead giong into the half. It didn't cost Syracuse the game but it could have.

Now onto my main point. The MArquette crowd. There was a good 14,000 people there I guess. Before the game, they played a video of Tom Creen on the big scoreboard where he begged th fans for their support and told them how critical theor noise and intensity was to the home team. Kind of cool, especially since it was clear that the video was taped just for this game.

For the most part the crowd was pretty raucous. At points it was really loud, especially when it was tied 46-46 and Devendorf made a really acrobatice scoop shot, then lingered under the basket for an extra second to give the "shhhhh" gesture to the student section. The cuse fans loved this, but it sent the Marquette fans into a frenzy. I for one though this was both great, and terrifying. The last thing you want is to give the opponent's crowd the chance to keep rocking.

Of course, as it turns out I was greatly over-estimating the MArquette crowd. They, likeme, seemed to be trapped on the emotinal roller-coaster ride that this cgame became. They were loud when Marquette got within a point or two but quieted quickly when SU would go up by four or five. All in all it was one of the more interesting crowds I have ever encountered.

As much fun as I was having ranking the crowd, it was a lot more fun when SU finally started hitting fould shots and began to pull away. But still things were close until the final minute, and with about 45 seconds left SU led by 8, 66-58. MArquette had the ball, the crowd was feeling it. Loudly urging them on. The shot goes up. Air ball. SU ball with 41 seconds to go.

It's looking bleak for Marquette, but there is definitely still a lot of time. But apparantly the crowd didn't see it that way. It was if the airball sparked some sort of trigger mechanism in the entire crowd because, all of a sudden everyone just got up and left. It was unbelievable. I have never seen anything like it before in my life. It was like watching a waterfall as the fans poured down out fo the stands and into the aisles. The last time I saw a section clear that fast was the time I was in high school and one of my friend's tossed a stink bomb into a crowd at the Carrier dome.

At least the students stayed, until Terance Roberts hit one foul shot. By the time the game ended, there were maybe 200 people still in the crowd, and at least half of them were SU fans.

Somehow I expected more out of the Marquette fans, and Milwaukee sports fans in general. I mean these are the same people who make Brewers games so much fun to attend, cheer so passionatley for the packers and even continue to support the Bucks. Hell, Marquette even brings a good crowd to Chicago when they take on DePaul. I know they are used to losing, but that is no excuse for giving up on your team.

Now don't get me wrong. I still love Milwaukee and will continue to find excuses to travel there, but still this is one of those seminal moments in life when the romantic illusions that you build your ideals around are shattered, kind of like the first time you beat your dad or older brother at a sport or finding out another relative you really look up to has a history of cheating on his wives.

Yes, sports mean that much to me.

Random Thoughts on a Cold Chicago Night.

I've been drinking, and curling up under blankets trying to keep warm. The cold weather has finally hit Chicago, just in time for a shift in my work schedule that has me getting to work a half hour earlier.

While I am enjoying the getting home from work before 5:00pm, and the relative lack of people in the el cars, the train platforms and the sidewalks, there is one definite downside. The smell of stale homeless people that lingers in those earlier El Cars can sometimes be overwhelming to the point that rather than being in an el car, you feel as if you are riding along inside one of their dirty old sneakers. The smell is pretty much there year round, but it gets worse at this time of year. Maybe it's because more of them seek shelter in the trains at night, or maybe it's because the forced heat that blasts the smell right into your face when the train stops and the doors open compounds the effects of the smells. All I know is that there is nothing worse than climbing into an el car that a particularly smelly person has slept in, unless of course that person is still sleeping there. But those cars are pretty easy to tell. They are the ones where there is one person slumped over sleeping at one end of the car, and all of the other passengers are crammed into the opposite end. If you are unlucky enough to get stuck in one of these cars, about the only recourse you have is bury your face in your hands and breathe through your mouth. And believe you me, when you finally get to your stop that first breath of fresh cool air that fills your lungs when you step off the train and breathe deeply for the first time in about 15-minutes almost makes you thankful for the winter chill.

All in all, it's enough to make you want to stay home and not leave your apartment, which is pretty much what I have done. I did venture out on Saturday to head out to the De Paul Kansas basketball game. We ended up with pretty good tickets right behind the student section, so we had an excellent view of both DePaul's amazing second half comeback and all of the cops and security guars lining up along the baseline to prevent the students from storming the court as De Paul closed in one of it's biggest wins in years.

This is easily the most exciting De Paul game I have been to, and it's one of the two most exciting games I have ever been to, the other being the SU-ND game at the Dome in 2003 in which Melo led them back from a 12-point deficit in the last 10 - minutes, and G-Mac nailed a three at the buzzer to give them the win.

I sat in the student section for that game too, and there was no doubt that the students were storming the court. In fact, to me storming the court after a big win in college ball is pretty much a given. I guess that is why I was so surprised that all of those cops seemed hell bent on stopping it from happening.

They didn't stop the kids from trying. A few of them even made, but for the most part, being good upper-middle class, white-kids, most of the fans gave up quickly at the first signs that an "authority" figure might not approve. There was one kid who didn't though, and tried to make a run at the corner of the court, where ran smack into a big burly looking cop who looked sort of like Pvt. Pyle from full metal jacket, only dumpier and stupider. The kid was only about 5'5" and clearly drunk, so t he cop rebuffed him pretty easily. The kid tried again, and this time the cop spun him around and pushed him back toward the stands. I don't know if the kid said something, or if bending over in the opposite direction of a cop is considered a threatening position, but I do know that the next thing that I saw was the cop holding his night stick in both hands, perpendiculr to the kids back, and he was slamming down repeatedly on him. I counted about six hits before the kid could finally get away. He tried to yell at the cop and get in his face, but thankfully one of his friends finally came and got him out of there.

The moment marred what was otherwise a great afternoon for me, and I am sure it would have bothered me the whole way home, if it hadn't been for the unbridled joy of all the De Paul fans in the hallway, all of the people I high fived, and of course the two drink kids trying to lead the crowd in a chant of "Dee -EEe - M-O-N-S" and spelling it "D-e-m-o-s-s"

Ehh overall life is pretty good, Bones is finally over. There's a show that is clearly meant to be watched with the sound down. The TN-Memphis is geting pretty close again, and I have a whole fridge full of ice cold beers and a couch with a nice warm blanket calling my name.

Play Stationary.

I've been drinking, and cursing my laziness as I think about the fact that I have been so negligent in my bloggin duties over the past few months. It's not like I haven't been creative. Hell, you should hear some of the excuses I've come up with for not blogging recently.

Things like, "I am exhausted, and I hardly get any time to myself anymore." or "Well, you know I played raquetball yesterday, I went for a bikeride on Sunday, I have to hang out with Audra and her friends on Friday and then Saturday is pretty much wasted because of football, and its the one night that I get with all of my friends, so I guess I need tonight to just kind of hang out and recharge."

And I am not gonna lie, I have been pretty stressed out this month. We are understaffed at work, so my phonecall volume has doubled and more and more I am finding myself questioning exactly what my role is at work and struggling to adjust to the new employees we have hired. On top of all of that I have been busy trying to find tenants for a rental property 700 miles away and coordinating getting all of the cosmetic work and other upkeep that needs to be taken care of. Honestly, I think that I have spent more time on my Cell Phone in the past two weeks than I did all of last year.

It's not fun, but I would also be lying if I were to say that it's the reason that I haven't been writing. No, that reason would pretty much be my PS2 and EA Sports NCAA 2007 that I broke down and bought on an impulse one day in late September. It was a day of major impulse purchases, as it was also the day I bought new rain paints and a rain coat for my bike. I will give you one guess which has gotten more use.

I know it's horrible, but there is just something so absorbing about playing that damn game. It's realistic but not really. As is the case of any computer sports game I have ever truly loved, I have already picked up all of the flaws in the computers gameplay, and of course, have been relying on my strategy of playing illogically. Still, this is the best football sim I have ever played, and it is clearly addictive.

You should see what my apartment looks like right now. I washed my dishes last night and wiped off a table, but right now on my desk I have about 5-weeks worth of mail and unread magazines piled up. There's a stack of envelopes with bills and cards I need to take care of, and dust on everything. Over to the right of me is a TV tray with two jackets, a towel and three sweatshirts piled on top of it. I am pretty sure there is even more unread mail under all of the clothes too.

The hallway back to my bedroom is cluttered with four bags of groceries i have been meaning to put away and my bike, which needs to have the tires inflated and the chain greased. The bathroom is a disaster area and so is my bedroom. I have never been good about laundry and putting clothes away, but I have literally been living out of a laundry bag for a month now. Last month I when I ran out of clean skivvies, I went to the store on my lunch hour to buy more rather than waste any precious gaming time doing laundry.

It's not as horrible as it could be. I still go out and do stuff socially, unless of course I am given the choice not to. But the thing is, the whole time I am socializing I am really trying to figure out how to get home and squeeze out one more game before bed, or just trying to figure out when I will be able to play. Honestly, Weds. is fast becoming my favorite day of the week because it is the one day I know I can go home from work and just play video games.

Of course, I usualy need to take a nap first. It seems that one of the new upshoots of my PS2 is that it has helped me to re-discover my night owl tendencies. Over the summer I was consistently in bed around 11:30 or 11:45 most nights and as early as 11:00 some nights, but these days, I am seldom in bed by midnight, and more often than not 12:30 to 12:45 is the norm, as I play by the rules that as long as I start the game before midnight its ok to stay up and finish it.

And lets not forgot the other great thing about videogame football. It is the world's most perfect drinking game. I swear if I didn't get so lost in the games that I can't bring myself to get off the couch to get another beer for a few quarters sometimes, I would easily be drinking twelve to 15 a night. As it is I am back up to 8 or 9, which I am sure, once they are combined with lack of sleep, are not making it any wasier for me to adjust to all of the new shit at work.

So there you have it. My life is pretty much a mess thanks to an impulse purchase of a PS2. SInce I have gotten it, every good habit I worked so hard to develop over the past two years has gone out the window. I have been drinking excessively, I have stopped cleaning and my apartment is infested with fruit flies and dust bunnies. I have gone whole weekends without sleeping or showering and even as I sit here telling you this, all I can think is "Just hurry up and get this done so you can play another game before the Simpsons starts."

It's all true, and what has it gotten me? Well besides a pile of bills large enough to make a double-knit blanket out of when my power gets cut-off, I have won two-straight national championships, six straight bowl games and 4-straight Heisman tropies, all with my weak side Wide Receiver. Oh yeah, and I am pretty sure this may also be last blog for a while, as I think I am developing pretty nasty case of Carpel-Tunnel Syndrome.

Wow, I hope fate sends me another miracle and breaks this PS2 too.

A Ghost is Born

I've been drinking, and I have also been ghost wrtiting. Rather poorly too I might ad, but what can I say, I have always been more into personal demons than ghosts. See for yourself.