Friday Random 11

It’s one more random than 10!

I’m in blur central right now, and not the good “Woo-hoo!” late-90s kind. I seriously have no idea where the last two months have gone. I had no intention of taking a break from the blog, but the break sort of happened. There are the usual suspects—time, work, kids, football season and the obsessive fantasy management that follows. There was another suspect, my novel, which is moving along fairly well and occupying the brain cells allocated for joke production. But the bigger issue is that I felt like I didn’t have much to say, or that I was saying was repeating what I’ve said before (insert, "When has that stopped you before?" joke). I had increasing instances of writing things like the Top Tens or Random 11s and wondering if I was reusing a previous joke. I mean, I find “cock” and it’s many variations wildly hilarious, but there’s a point where I have to wonder if I’m sucking all the nutrients out of the fertile dick joke soil (that’s what she said!)

Sure enough, after a little time of letting the field lie fallow, some things started popping into my head. However, I then ran into that laziness like when you stop working out because you went on vacation. I kept thinking, “I’ll blog tomorrow” and tomorrow turned into next week and next week turned into next month, and next thing I know my little Circle Jerk at the Square Dance is instead dancing by itself. Now my sense of blog humor feels a bit bloated, sluggish, and full of processed cheese, but I’m going to attempt to hop up on the comedy treadmill and sweat out some bon mots. Hopefully I won’t pull anything (that’s what she—ow, my taint muscle!)

1) “All the Young Dudes,” Mott the Hoople. I recently saw my brother Tickle and our two twenty-something cousins, Youngblood and Zoolander, who Tickle has dubbed The Nasty BoyZ. The Nasty BoyZ are young and nubile athletes, both former college hockey players who have always been athletic. We went out to play some two-on-two basketball, the Old DudeZ (Tickle just turned 35) vs. The Nasty BoyZ. Tickle is a very good basketball player and in good shape, but my current physical condition and lifelong inability to dribble render me the pick-up equivalent of Kate Capshaw in Temple of Doom. There’s a lot of breathless screaming and scenery chewing and wishing I would just die by the end of the first reel. In fact, within the first few minutes of playing, suicide seemed painless compared to the air I was shotgunning in mouth-filling gulps. However, I am nothing if not a team player. I set picks, rebound, and generally try to harass as much as possible on defense. I also think the Nasty BoyZ were taking it easy on us, and Tickle and I won our first game in the best-of-five we played.

Midway through the second game, the FILFs (Fathers I’d Like to Fastbreak) shot up 8-2. Not only was Tickle unconscious with his outside shots, but I reached into some bag of homeboy magic and pulled out some respectable jumpers, layups, and even a sky hook. Right then, Youngblood flipped a switch and went into super competitive mode. In fact, The Nasty BoyZ are notorious for never passing to each other and then arguing that the other person is hogging shots. I joked before the game that Vegas set the over for their total assists at 1 and that I pounded the under. Not so this time. They set screens, backdoored (hey now!), and really tried to win. They came back and won the second game, and I figured it was nice while it lasted.

Surprisingly, though, I found a desire to win surpassing my desire to lay down and die. Right then, I decided hitting a winning runner over Zoolander before my heart shattered into a thousand heaving pieces wouldn’t be a bad way to go. I even started calling out plays like Prince in the Chappelle Show sketch (“Computer Blue!” “Darling Nikki!”). We beat the Nasty BoyZ in game three, and then in the decisive game four, I called out for “Computer Blue” again, passing to Tickle, who got nothing but net on the winning jumper. I felt like I’d just won a gold medal. The Nasty BoyZ were good sports, too, which is easy when you have young legs and washboard abs and don’t equate some meaningless pickup game with a triumph over your mortality.

2) “Calling It Quits,” Aimee Mann. I could use their washboard abs this week, because the pipes under my laundry room decided to call it quits (how is that for some transition offense?!). We had some water backup in our basement and yadda yadda yadda $13,000 worth of eventual plumbing repairs, half of which we need to do right now if we don’t want to take our dirty clothes to the Warshin’ Rock on Lake Michigan or TLB’s parents’ house. Plumbing repairs are doubly annoying because a) you don’t realize what a pain it is to lose using your washing machine or dishwasher until you face having to wash dishes by hand or (shudder) visit the laundromat, and b) you don’t get to see what you dropped an assload of money on. You buy a new roof or siding or a Drifter Composter, at least you get to see what you spent your money on. Although I’ll spend anything to avoid going to the laundromat. That feels like wearing condoms again. That’s for sailors, baby!

3) “Electric Band,” Wild Flag. Between this album last year and the new Corin Tucker album this year, I feel like Sleater-Kinney got back together, which is awesome. It’s the opposite of the way I felt when The Firm and The Honeydrippers released albums in the 80s, which almost made me wish Led Zeppelin had never existed. Do you remember/ when we rocked / instead of sounding / like a bunch of old cocks?

4) “Jail Guitar Doors,” The Clash. It occurred to me that, if I do continue doing the Random 11, should I shift from my own collection to doing a Spotify 11? That made me sad and I’m not sure why. It is amazing that, at any time, at any place with an Internet or cellular connection (we even had both in the UP!), you can listen to almost anything you want. This would have made me ecstatic at 15 or 20 or even 30. Now, though, nostalgia is holding me back. Why, I don’t trust no music that gets beamed into my phone, dag gummit! It has to be my music, not some gosh-darned shared collection that I rent with a million other hipsters. That’s socialism. So, for now, I’m keeping it local.

5) “Flowers in Your Hair,” The Lumineers. Perfectly pleasant, but I don’t know if that’s enough for me. My foot taps, the chorus sticks, and yet there’s something lacking.

6) “Caught, Can We Get a Witness?” Public Enemy. I watched one of the excellent ESPN 30 for 30 documentaries, Ghosts of Ole Miss, about the year the Ole Miss football program went undefeated why the school nearly destroyed itself as James Meredith became the first black student in Ole Miss history. Watching stuff like this makes me really, really hate Tea Party crackers even more. Any pale fuckstick who complains about reverse racism or affirmative action or other #whitepeopleproblems should sit the fuck down and watch footage of James Meredith going to class surrounded by armed escorts while a sea of angry crackers looked hungry for a lynching. Even worse, he couldn’t hide his approach, because his enormous brass balls would clang every time he left for class. It’s a good thing for me white people don’t face real discrimination, because there is no way I would have the courage to do what he did. I just would have gotten a degree from University of Phoenix.

7) “Father Christmas,” The Kinks. People propose all kinds of idiotic Constitutional amendments, but we most definitely need one to block premature Christmas displays. I was at Tar-jay on October 30, looking for a costume (I was going as a procrastinator), and the Halloween stuff had been shoved into a two-aisle ghetto of bagged chocolate and flammable fabric so they could set up the Christmas displays. October fucking 30th! Think gay marriage is confusing to young people? What about conflating celebrating baby Jesus with slutty witch outfits?

8) “I’ve Changed My Address,” The Jam. This catchy little ditty is a pretty brutal tale of a guy ending his marriage (or engagement). I played this in the car recently and was singing along, which is funny considering this month marks the 25th anniversary of my first date with TLB. Not only is my middle name Monogamy, but I would rather stomp on my Xbox than make a woman cry. So why do I enjoy songs of malicious heartbreak so much? Do they touch some Grand Theft Auto nerve of wanting to run over pedestrians while evading the police and (if my joystick skills are good) the National Guard? Or is it just goofy fun with a catchy beat? My behavior would say the latter, but perhaps I should chase this with....

9) “Faithfully,” Journey. I hate myself for loving this. It is about as schmaltzy as rock music gets and makes Foreigner look like death metal in comparison. Yet it tugs at my heart strings every time. Steve Perry misses her so much! It’s so hard to go on the road and not fuck anything that moves (Honey, she had an all access pass. I only did it for the fans!) No, I’m not crying! You’re a baby, you baby!

10) “Spring Break,” The Fucking Champs. Get ready for tangent circle, but I wrote something today for the fantasy league that made me laugh, and this song triggered my desire to share it.

Being a child of the 80s, I watched a lot of MTV. MTV also introduced me to the concept of “spring break,” because they used to have the MTV Spring Break specials that would feature things like the cast of Remote Control hosting a wet T-shirt contests. I also seem to recall Gilbert Gottfried doing spots for MTV Spring Break, his lunatic rantings about “naked people and sand” introducing me to The Voice. I became a fan instantly.

Today, my fantasy league was e-mailing, and we were making fun of Uncle Andy, our oldest member. Uncle A is not really that old, only a couple years older than me, but he acts like an old man. His e-mails in particular are very elderly: they are in HUGE fonts and often make no sense. Today, Tickle said that Uncle Andy’s e-mails always reminded him of Gilbert Gottfried talking. Well, like a bolt of lightning, I had what I think is a pretty good Gilbert-style joke shoot into my head. I have to use all-caps because you can’t do Gilbert Gottfried in lowercase:

AN OLD MAN GOES TO THE DOCTOR. HE SAYS, “DOCTOR, I THINK MY PENIS ISN’T WORKING PROPERLY.” THE DOCTOR SAYS, “WELL, AT YOUR AGE, YOU MAY BE HAVING PROSTATE PROBLEMS.”

THE DOCTOR KNEELS DOWN AND STICKS A FINGER INTO THE OLD MAN’S ASSHOLE TO CHECK HIS PROSTATE. THE OLD MAN IMMEDIATELY GETS AN ERECTION AND EJACULATES ALL OVER THE DOCTOR.

THE DOCTOR IS FURIOUS. AS HE WIPES THE OLD MAN’S LOVE JUICE OFF OF HIMSELF, HE SAYS, “WHY THE HELL DID YOU THINK THERE WAS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR PENIS WHEN YOU HAD NO PROBLEM GETTING AN ERECTION AND EJACTULATING ALL OVER ME? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?”

THE OLD MAN SLAPS HIS HEAD. “I’M SO SORRY, I SHOULD HAVE SAID I THINK I’M GETTING ALZHEIMER’S.”

That’s the kind of quality comedy that I just need to share with the world. Here's the real Gilbert, roasting George Takei with some hilarious and extremely impolitically correct jokes.

11) “Anarchy in the U.K.,” The Sex Pistols. Is there any other vocal performance in the history of rock music that summons images of plaque and gum disease? You can practically hear how green Johnny Rotten’s teeth are.

Have a great weekend!