So most of you are females who read this blog. Or gay. Come to think of it, you are all females or gay. Hmmmm………..perhaps I need to broaden my demographic. Nevertheless, I’m going to talk about a couple of things that only chicks or gay dudes can possibly understand. I’m not saying a female would understand all of this or a gay guy would understand it all, but chances are pretty good that you can relate to what I’m about to post. Okay, enough with the fucking rambling.

A couple of months ago I started chatting online with this guy. We talked on the phone once and text back and forth before going out on what I could classify as two dates. There was little to no spark between us. Certainly he seemed like a nice enough guy, it’s just that there is nothing there. But, we continued to text. He seems to have very little interest in me and I’ve got mild interest in him at best. But, I have sent him about two or three text messages last week and he never responded. Obviously, it is safe to assume that he is no longer interested, which is totally fine, but honestly, it just bugs the hell out of me that he doesn’t give me the courtesy to say he is not interested. I know this is how guys are and have always been and always will be, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not rude and doesn’t piss me off a little. Damn though…………..I didn’t even get to see his cock!

But, upward and onward. Time to move on. There are a couple of guys at work who I’m interested in. Of course, the problem is I have no idea if they are gay. And being a work environment, it’s not like its easy or even close to being proper for me to kinda find out. I have to pick up little clues or drop little hints. Because I’ve got a completely malfunctioning and useless gaydar, I have no idea if either one is gay. Certainly there has got to be a way to find out without getting fired or punched. Look, I’m not saying I need to walk up behind them and stick a dick in their ass to confirm homosexuality, but I also can’t go around guessing or assuming heterosexuality. There has got to be something in between dick in the ass and assuming for fuck’s sake. I mean, gay people have been hooking up for decades in the workplace before their was internet to stalk one’s sexual prey so I know there has got to be a way. So if anybody has any ideas that don’t involve me getting them totally hammered, please feel free to lay it on me like a dick in the ass.

My mom’s birthday is February 1. Ever since my mom died in 2000, I have always had a dealer’s choice poker game in her honor right around her birthday. Most of the time, I’ve had it the Friday before her birthday. See, my mom was the biggest gambler I have ever known. I’ve always said that she had such a bad gambling problem that the only way she cured it was by dying. Let me give you some examples of just how much she loved to gamble.

Some time ago, circa 1997 or 1998, my mom had her gambling friends over to play dealer’s choice Labor Day weekend. They started about 5pm on a Saturday. Being a guy in my young 20s, I went out with friends for the night about 7ish. When I got home at 3 am, they were still playing. Of course, I went to bed. I got up at 11 and guess the fuck what, they were still fucking playing! They had even ordered take out breakfast from a local place. I think they finally finished playing about noon and her friends left and she went to bed. She got up a few short hours later and went to the riverboat casino for more gambling, getting home at like 4am. The next day, Labor Day, they played cards again for about 5 or 6 hours.

In addition to cards, my mom loved just about all gambling. Like every old lady, she loved bingo. Of course, there were the slots and lotto tickets. She would stay out until all hours of the night gambling. I remember being in my early 20s and staying out until 6 am and beating my mother home. How pathetic was that? Here I was, a young guy and my 60 something year old mother was staying out later than I was!

So this past Friday was the annual card game. We started at 8 in the pm. We had 6 guys playing including myself. I try to keep this game about as exclusive as possible in that I try to only invite people who knew my mom. At one point, we were playing a game called The Good, Bad and the Ugly, which is a five card poker hand that takes FOREVER to play. Why does it take forever? Because after the cards are dealt, the dealer flips up a card from the deck. That card is good in that it is wild. Commence with a round of betting before another card is flipped up. That card is bad in that if you have that card in your hand, it is now dead. Another round of betting and the ugly card is flipped up and if anybody has that card, it kills the hand and we re-deal. The game can not end until nobody has the ugly card. It is quite the pot builder. My friend Dave does not like it. So, what does he do when my brother decides to play it, he bets $5, causing everybody but one person, me, to fold. I call him because I’m not going to let him get away with doing that shit. So next round of betting, he bets another $5. All of a sudden, I grow a set of stupid fucking balls. I get my wallet and everybody is thinking I’m going to put the $5 and keep going. Instead of $5, I pull out two twenty dollar bills and throw them in the pot. The look on his face was nearly priceless; if I had to put a price on it, it would be $40. He sat there stunned, thinking to himself “what the fuck just happened” while everybody else’s jaws dropped. I think he was kind of goaded into calling me because he put $40 in. And guess what? The next card was a kill card so we had to play another hand. And in that hand, I won the pot.

The whole night was so much fun. Later on, Dave wound up getting a natural royal flush in a game of Screw Your Neighbor. The group of us have been playing cards together for the better part of 17 years and this was the first time anybody had ever gotten a natural royal flush. Of course, he won the hand, but it goes to show you just how rare and hard a royal flush is to come by.

Last night was more poker at another friend’s house who is not part of the group of guys I played with on Friday night. He wound up  having 18 guys for his Texas Hold ‘Em tournament. The first game I finished 4th which was good enough for $30. The next game out of 14 players I finished 7th which was good enough for me to go home.

So people are always doing posts with fun facts about themselves. Since I couldn’t come up with things to write about, I thought I would take the easy route and list disturbing facts about me:

• I once murdered a man. Except replace the word man with an entire faml……….uhhhhh, wait, maybe I shouldn’t put that, after all it’s going to sound like a confession. Come to think of it, maybe I should forget all about the disturbing facts and just do some fun facts instead of disturbing facts.
• As pathetic as it might be, at a whopping 5 feet, 6 inches, I am the tallest person in my family. And the 5’6 is rounding up! My parents were both short and obviously had short kids. Hell, my 46 year old sister is only 4’7. Our family is so short, that even our dog was small.
• I was born with four birth defects: epilepsy, a heart murmur, a cyst on my junk, and a twin brother. While I out grew the epilepsy, the murmur and had the cyst removed while I was a baby, I can’t seem to get rid of the twin.
• I can’t remember if I ever put this before, but I sat fourth row at a Chicago Cubs game and fourth row at a Chicago Bulls game on the same day, April 8, 2003. What is even more amazing is that I was early to both games and somehow managed to go from Wrigley Field on the north side to downtown to the United Center on the west side during rush hour in a little more than an hour.
• My mom was the last of nine and I’m tied for the youngest of six. My mom was born in 1934, my dad in 1930. My mom’s oldest brother was born in 1920! Somehow, he is still alive. I’ve got cousins who have kids that are older than me. It’s kind of funny. 
• My social security number is…………..oh, wait, I’m being told I’m illegal and don’t have a social. DAMNIT! Strike that from the record as well, as that could be used as evidence as well.

And I’m spent!

Every year I watch the State of the Union address and usually text back and forth with a Republican leaning friend of mine. I always find it interesting watching the reactions of all of the people there. So here is my take on it:

• Was anybody wondering how many times John Boehner was going to cry during the speech? I think he nearly choked up twice.
• Speaking of Boehner, it turns out that he is actually darker than President Obama. Furthermore, he is so dark that he seems to blend right into the chair he was sitting in.
• Hey, John Kerry, why the long face? Oh………….shit, that’s right, he is half horse.
• I swear, Vice President Joe Biden was baked during the speech. Did you see all of the giggling and the blank stares off into space. It was like he was in his own, little, stoned world. And he was drinking water like he had the worst case of cottonmouth ever.
• Why were people sitting in the aisle, aren’t they worried that McCain would stumble over them on his many trips to the bathroom, after all this is a long speech and he is like a million years old.
• Ahhhh, you gotta miss Nancy “Skeletor” Pelosi back there, she was always so creepy and made the strangest old lady Skeletor noises back there.

Oh, I gotta go, now the Republicans are going to give their condescending response.

Are you like me, are you a multitasker? Do you try to do more than one thing at once as often as you can? You must, we are the society and generation of not enough time and multitasking. Well a couple of weeks ago I manged to outdo myself. I did something that only I could do. Allow me to explain.

See, I’ve been working tons of hours at work the past few months. I’ve been getting up at 5 in the fucking am and working about 12 hours. Well, one of the things I try to do to save time, even though when I think about it, it probably does not save all that much time, is I brush my teeth as I take a piss. I know, disgusting right? Well when I’m done with the brushing I always use mouthwash. So, a couple of weeks ago, there I was taking a piss at 5:15 in the morning when I go to make the transition to the mouthwash. Well, lo and behold, I get the damn bottle open and my clumsy fucking ass drops it! Sound bad enough? Well, I managed to catch it on its way down. Some of the mouthwash splashed out of the bottle and some how, landed in my fucking right eye! Meanwhile, the cap to the mouthwash was on a wild journey. Just guess what happened to it? That’s right, it passed through the stream of piss and landed in the toilet! Picture the scene, me with mouthwash in my mouth (oh, I didn’t stop to not have the mouthwash, after all, I was multitasking), mouthwash in my eye, bottle of mouthwash in one hand and my junk in the other all while peeing. I tried to hurry up because the mouthwash burned like hell in my eye, especially with my contacts in. So I quickly finished peeing, spit out the mouthwash, grabbed the cap and put it back on the bottle.

Just kidding, I threw that damn cap right the fuck into the trash, how disgusting do you think I am?

Over the year my family has had a lot of run ins with the toilet. I remember one time about 15 years ago my brother was clipping his toe nails while taking a crap and dropped the clippers into the toilet. See, now that is disgusting. And another time, my other brother dropped his electric razor in the toilet. One time when I was a kid, I dropped a bar of soap in the toilet as I was flushing.

But, it’s all in the name of multitasking so it’s all good!

So it has happened again: another senseless, tragic massacre of people. Of course, I speak only of the recent shootings in Tuscan. Mass shootings like this seem to happen several times a year in America. And several times a year, people pretend to be upset and bothered by it, only to let it fade away into the dustbins of  history, forgetting all about it until the next shooting. What makes it so sad, is that people don’t seem to care enough to invoke any real change, so guess what, it keeps happening again and again.

A lot of pointless time and talk has been devoted in the time since the shooting to the overblown rhetoric of politics, in spite of the fact that clearly, this was not a shooting that was inspired by something Sarah Palin or any of the other blowhards on the right said or did. People want to find a way to drum up controversy and attention by blaming it on politics, but the reality is that politics had about as much to do with it as the weather. What it comes down to, is, guns; our country’s obsession and addiction to guns.

My question is, when is enough enough? When do we get to the point when we take drastic steps to prevent these things from happening in the future? Some might say I’m writing this out of emotion or I’m having a knee jerk reaction to the shootings, but is it a knee jerk reaction if it is something that continually happens? The NRA and gun lovers always hide behind the second amendment and even go as far as to say that these things wouldn’t’t happen if MORE people had guns, but that doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense. Realistically, even if everybody there had a gun that day in Tuscan, there still would have been at least one person shot. Also, gun sales have soared since Obama took office, yet there have still been several mass shootings since he took office,

The entire story is tragic in itself. But for me, the most tragic of all of the stories is the nine year old little girl who was killed. Of course, she is one of only many children and people shot to death each DAY in America. While I certainly do believe that people have a right to defend themselves, how many times does it have to happen before people realize that human lives are more important than people’s rights? Sure, we have the right to own guns, but are that any solace to the parents of a dead child?

What is frustrating is that outlawing guns is probably not the answer. Guns are far too engrained in our society that prohibition of firearms would never work. There needs to be an overwhelming shift in the importance of guns in our society to effect any real change. Guns are everywhere:  T.V, movies, music, athletes, politics, and everywhere and anywhere in between. And it spreads across all types of people, rich, poor, black, white, Hispanic, young, old, it really doesn’t matte the background, guns have about as widespread popularity as drinking.

How many more times does this need to happen before the country finally wakes up?

I wrote this last night and for a posting today. In the day since I wrote this, there was another school shooting, this time in Los Angeles. Granted, this one appears to be an accident and only injured two. But, it goes to show you that it never ends.

Today of course, is Martin Luther King Day. Usually on MLK Day, people say that we have come so far with race relations but we still have a long way to go. Call me nuts, but do we really have a long way to go? I guess the bigger question is, where is it exactly that we are going? What exactly is that mountaintop that he spoke of? I guess that is a question that is kind of open to interpretation.

Now I’m not going to sit here and be arrogant enough to be able to even think that I know what he was talking about. My guess though, is equality for all and an end to racism. If that is the case, than this is where the pessimist in me rears his ugly head. While equality for all can be achieved, and end to racism is virtually impossible. Sadly and pathetically, there will always be somebody somewhere in the world who is a bigot. All you can do though, is be responsible for your own thoughts and beliefs. You can only be racist if you allow yourself to be racist.

I was also thinking today if there are any black leaders in the world today who are in the same vein as Martin Luther King. While there are certainly some influential blacks in the world, there is no stalwart of black civil rights to lead blacks in the same way as King. Oh sure, Obama and Oprah are both very important and powerful, but neither are bastions of black civil rights and neither are looked upon as leaders in the same way King was. Than again, maybe that ship has sailed and there is no longer a need for a strong, black, civil rights leader like King or Medgar Evers

When I think about it, America is sorely lacking in civil rights leaders for minorities. Not only is there no Martin Luther King or Harvey Milk, but there is nobody even in the same league that can be a strong and loud voice for minority civil rights. Which begs the question, are we there yet?

I can’t remember the last time I did a post this late at night, but the reality is that I’m at a point where I’m pressed for time and I’m bored on a late Saturday night. Don’t worry though, it will be a short post.

I’ve been working so much and so early lately and it REALLY sucks. Last night (and by last night I mean Friday) I had the chance to see a band that my brother invited me to. The only problem was that I had to work early in the morning on Saturday. I still went though and did something I HATE to do: I left early. Some might not consider 12:15 early, some might think it is early (obviously, I do) but for me, it was early because for once, I was not the last one to leave and I didn’t wait until the band was done playing to leave. I had to be up at 6 in the fucking AM though, so I decided to leave.

Tonight we went to the Chicago Wolves game. Those of you not from Chicago probably don’t know, but they are a minor league hockey team. Although I am a huge sports fan, I’m not a hockey fan in the least so outside of checking out the hot players and other hot guys at the game, it held very little interest for me. I only went because a friend of mine bought 30 tickets and needed me to go. I guess I still had a good time though.

Fuck. I’m kinda tired.

I’ve always been fascinated with history. Call me lame, but I often wonder what it would
be like to live in another time period. Don’t get me wrong, I love living in the time and age that we live in now; in many respects I can’t imagine living in another time. But, I’m a curious person by nature.

I’ve always had a strange and curious fascination with the 1920s. I loved the 1920s so much that one time I had a 1920s murder mystery party. What a time to be alive, I mean with the exception of prohibition. Babe Ruth, Al Capone, flappers, it must have been a great time to be alive. Actually scratch that, I don’t think Al Capone made the era great.

I also love the old west; however I do realize that I would have lasted about 6 seconds in the old west as it truly was not a place for somebody like me. But, there is still a certain degree if amazement and fascination with the old west. Man, could you imagine the STDs that were raging through the old west? Fuck, it’s amazing we survived.

Do you ever wonder what people of the past thought the world would become? For example, what did the founding fathers think the year 2011 would be like?  Let me explain a little bit more. 40 plus years ago, there was the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey which depicted life in 2001. Of course, 2001 was nothing like the movie. Do you think people 300 years ago could have ever imagined a time in which we have cars and planes and air conditioning and the internet and fresh smelling vaginas? Conversely, what does the future hold for us?

Certainly the world we have become is probably a lot different than what people hundreds or thousands of years thought it would have become. Just think of where we are now and where we can be in say, 500 or a thousand years? What will people remember about our time; will legends like the Beatles and Pauly Shore hold up?

See, this is part of what makes dying so fucking sad and depressing. We never will get to see what life will be like. Sure, we know all about the past but the future, we know nothing. This is one of the things that I would love to know; what the future will be like, yet it is impossible for me to know.

Sometimes, it sucks being a curious person.

As you probably know by now, recently I went to New York City. Being born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, I’m supposed to hate New York; it is supposed to be a natural rival of ours. This was my second time in New York and honestly, I loved every second of it. Turns out, New York is a great place.

I’ve got a very good friend of mine who was born and raised in Chicago. She is hardcore Chicago and insists that Chicago is way better than New York. She makes this proclamation in spite of the fact that she has never been to New York.  Now I love Chicago as much as anybody; even more than I love New York.  But, I am humble enough to admit that New York City is better than Chicago. My friend on the other hand considers such a belief blasphemy and pretty much treason to Chicago.

I used to have a strong hatred of New York and everything New York. Much of this had to do with the sports rivalry between the two cities. Being a rabid Chicago Cubs fan, it is my duty to hate the New York Mets more than life itself. And being a huge Chicago Bulls fan, we grew to hate the New York Knicks because of the team’s rivalry in the 1990s. Wait, rivalry is probably a strong word, after all, the Jordan led Bulls of the 90s routinely kicked the shit out of the Knicks, rendering the so called rivalry pretty one sided. Ahhh, it’s great to be from Chicago.

But, now that I have had a chance to experience New York for myself twice, even in a limited engagement, it is clear to see why NYC is better. That being said, not everything about New York is better than Chicago. I do believe Chicago has a better skyline; there is nothing quite like driving down Lake Shore Drive while gazing at the breathtaking skyline. New York does not have a road like Lake Shore that showcases the amazing city to one side and the active lake to the other side.

Also, from all accounts I have had, Chicago pizza is better than New York pizza, yes, even the thin crust. But, that too is in a limited sample size as my New York pizza experience consisted of two slices of Ray’s pizza in Times Square. I am certainly going to need to have more NYC pizza before I can render a final judgment.

New York, however, has it all. Oh sure, much of what you can get in New York you can get in Chicago. But, there is something about New York. The vastness of it all; the desire for people all over the world to be there. New York is the big time.

All that being said, you really can’t go wrong living or visiting either city as both are great. I’m just fortunate to be able to live in one and have been able to visit the other.