Cowboy Bill's a major player in the cowboy scene.......

Me and M'Lady

Pepperal is Awesome

Programmed to Party

Gail and Katie........Goddess and Crack Head 

Friday: Go to Westfield, eat Sushi with Geoff, Oliv and Kendra, use TONS of wasabi....DELICIOUS, watch Afterlame, and go to bed early. The place we usually go to for sushi in North Hampton was full, and I don't think they have ever had to turn customers away before. They pretty much told us that we could not eat at their establishment, but in the most awkward way possible.....weird.

Saturday (part one): Wake up at 11 to get ready to go to Kendra's game. Put on some clothes, brush the teeth, and drive to the field with Amanda. Fred and Susan Newell are alreay there, and we say hello and make small talk. Kendra's name is called, and she recieves a nice pillow and a bag because it is her last regular season game of her college field hockey career. The game starts, and eventually Oliv, Geoff, Gail, Katie, Uncle Gary and Aunt Laurie show up. Susan then asks me if I could drive to Applebee's to pick up the chicken wings half way through the game, and I really don't have any choice in the matter so I agree. I pick them up and get back to the field just in time to see the game go into overtime. Westfield then promptly loses. After the game, there is a pot-luck reception, and I eat a lot. I also have the pleasure of viewing a horse-faced woman, which is a rare treat. After the game we go back to Kendra's appartment and Kendra's relatives that were at the game come by and check it out. They are impressed, and leave after something like 20 minutes. The next couple of hours are spent getting ready to go to RPI to see the glorious Striepeck and go to the graveyard party.

Saturday (part two): We (Gail, Kendra, Katie and myself) pile into my car with our costumes and over-night supplies. There was initial talk of Geoff and Oliv coming as well, but they fled to the great north country of New Hampshire after some highly unnecessary drama went down. (Keepin' it REAL lame. This is not middle school anymore.) The ride to RPI is uneventful and dreary. We grab some pizza at I-LOVE while Gail continues to sleep in my car. We then go to the liquor store, and I buy some Jagermeister while Kendra and Katie get 3 bottles of Andre for 10 bucks.....what a great deal. When we get to the house, most people seem to be assembling their costumes and getting ready for the party. Beardo is busy at work on his Green Monster costume, which is giant and unwieldy. Everyone puts on their costumes while simultaneously starting to drink. There is Magic Hat #9 in abundance, and it has the distinctive sharp taste of a fresh batch. Thank you Kate!

The costume run-down is as follows:
Kendra -- Superhero
Katie -- Crack Head.......a truly amazing performance from Katie Devaney....unbelievable
abiGAIL -- Greek Goddess and object of Ioffe's ridicule
Bill Striepeck -- A cowboy, very reminiscient of a young G.W. Bush.....
Kate -- A sex ed teacher
Beardo -- The Green Monster
Peppe -- Alcoholic Rambo.....fucking awesome costume
Stephen -- The Flamingo Again
Rossi -- A robot, very similar to Mercaldi and Tripp last weekend, but Rossi installed some LEDs and implemented the 555 timer to make them blink....classic

After everyone's constumes are on, we do some Jager shots and then get down to M.C. Hammer. This is one of my favorite parts of the night. Striepeck finds a ghetto blaster with a single tapedeck. He holds it on his shoulder, and we stand around him and do some real shitty break dancing. The ghetto blaster is classic......thin, tall, and grey. You cannot buy things like this anymore, and this is a shame. I challege all of you to go to the store and try and buy a boom-box with a single cassette deck and a radio....impossible. This all happens around 8:30. After the break dancing, Billy and I go and played a bunch of Ween songs, which is great. Playing the guitar with Billy is always a lot of fun. A little while later the band arrivesd (Off White, I believe). They are cool dudes, and I am wasted for most of their set. Rossi, Billy, and myself are right up in front of the band, and I piss a lot of people off by being what amounts to a one-man mosh pit for a while. Around this point things get kind of hazy, but i do remember putting Kendra to bed in Beardo's room and then hanging out on Beverly with Katie and Blue for a while. After that, I go to bed.

Sunday: Wake up, retrieve Gail, and collect our belongings. No one can seem to find Striepeck. He went down to the Ruck, was a complete mess, got kicked out, got into a cab and then went missing. Sounds like a plot for a shitty major-network crime drama. Kate spent something like 5 hours trying to find him this morning. Apparently, he was in the cab with some girl and Blue, and when the cab stopped to let the girl off Billy got out as well. So he spent the night at the girl's house, and then woke up and got a ride back to the house. Crazy shit. We eat at Mannory's, and then go back to Westfield. Overall, a gloriously brown weekend indeed.

This Week's Music:

Holy Ghost Revival: Peacock EP
The White Stripes: Elephant
The Crack Pipes: Snakes in My Veins

Aerola Ale 

The Dinosaur and his Beer Wench 

Golman does it again 

Robot Battles 

 

Another good weekend. On Friday night Tripp, Mikhail, J-Ho, Uncle Beardo, Jorzik, Ioffe, Ian Boyd (no relation), Fake Howard Stern, and myself went to Boston. It was the usual debouchary, and everyone had a good time. We started at Boston Beerworks and then went to some shady (and more fun) irish bar down the road. Then we took a cab back to Mercaldi's house and passed out. Saturday was kind of nutts. We woke up and ate at Johnny D's in Davis Square. Johnny D's rules. Delicious food, and Little Meg (from days of yore at RPI) was our waitress. There also always seems to be a mysterious jazz guitar player there, making our breakfasts even better with his slippery (and deft) lines. Then we went to the Homo Deposit where Tripp and Mikhail got their costumes for the Home Brew Halloween Party. They went as robots, and it was glorious. I borrowed Abbie's flamingo costume, and Jon went as a dinosaur. Kata went as the St.Pauli's girl. We brought our first batch of homemade brew, as well as two mason jars full of potatoe magic, which is an old Lawler family recipe. The beers (and their special labels), as well as the 'shine, were big hits. Everone seemed to have a great time, and the Red Sox won. Hoooraaaa. Jon and I got into several fights throughout the night, which was great fun. During our last scuffle, Kirk's 350 pound friend (who looks exactly like The Dude) manhandled us both with a quickness. After the fisticuffs, Jon and I decided that an athletic challenge was in order, so we had a road race outside of the appartment. I won by a few inches in a last minute come-from-behind victory. During all of this, Tripp was in the kitchen, touching some mams. Good for him. Goldman was also present, and hit relentlessly on Kata all night long. This was extra-special because Jen was also at the party. Goldman would make his sleazy moves on Kata, and Jen would be sitting right next to them. Hilarious. All in all, it was a fantastic night.

Fucking Amazing night. Gail, myself, Liza and Lyndsey were at The Grog again tonight, and I don't think any of us will forget tonight. As I watch the news, it's 12:46 am and riots are starting in Boston. The police are coming out in riot gear, but it seems that they can't do anything about the fans. Too fucking roight. HHAAAAAHHHHHHAAAAA FUCK YOU NEW YORK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was indeed a rather strange weekend. I was planning all week to go to Boston on Friday with whomever was around, but everyone ended up bailing and I forgot that Liza had the night off so I neglected to call her. Shame on me. This was not all really that bad though, because I got to go see Kendra a day early, which was very nice. Kendra, however, could not go out on Friday night because of her field hockey game on Saturday, so i hung out with her until about 10:30, then I went to an 80's party that wasn't really an 80's party with some of her friends. This was really cool of the Lady, because it had been a really long week and I was itchin' for some rowdy fun. When we got to the party, we were some of the only people dressed in 80's attire, which was really cool actually because we brought our own CDs and rocked out downstairs for a while to the sounds of the "Me" decade. It's also great to get shitty looks from assholes that you don't know. The rest of the night was fun, but, once again lacked the precious spark of insanity that I have come to live for during my weekends lately.

Saturday was spent drinking relatively early, in anticpation of what was supposed to be a great baseball game. Instead, the game turned into one of the most depressing sporting events that I have ever seen. I stopped watching about half way through, and Kendra and I searched frantically for somewhere to go and something to do. We finally heard about a party and got a sober ride there from Laura, but we arrived just after the party had been broken up by the cops. So we turned around and went home. I hate to say it, but the Westfield college scene is getting kind of boring. Please do not misunderstand that statement; Kendra's friends are awesome and usually a really good time to hang out with, but I'm getting real tired of the same old drinking in appartments for seemingly no reason. I realize that I go to Westfield to see Kendra, and partying is definatley secondary, but it is still a part of the weekend. Shitter. I think that variety is the key to making it fun again. So we'll work on that.

Sunday was a giant boring disaster, and it was totally our fault. Tripp came up, and we were going to find this abandoned logging town in Southern Vermont. We got lost on the way up, however, and it took 3 hours to get in the right area. We never found the place, ended up eating in Bennington, and then made it back to Westfield at 8:3o. Six hours in the car, and I still had to drive home. Listening to the game on the way home kept me wide awake, however, and the day was not really as bad as it sounds. It could certainly be far worse.

Anyway, tonight is GAME 7 and I have a feeling that the Sox will make history yet again. The Sox this year are incredible to watch, and I'm glad that I started seriously paying attention to them over the last two years. You can bitch about bandwaggons all you want, but I have developed an appreciation for baseball lately, and it fucking rules to watch this series and truly care. Holler.

Albums of the Week:

Radiohead: Ok Computer
Modest Mouse: This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About

Also, this weekend is the Home Brew Halloween Party. HOT DAMN!! Reminds me of cornbread and applesauce. OOOOOHhhhweeeeeee!

The weekend was a good time, even though things didn't really go as planned. On Friday night Abbie, Liza Geoff and myself went to the Tap and the Chit Chat Lounge in Haverhill. My expectations for the Tap were pretty high, because it's a microbrew/restraunt and I ususally really like places that make their own beers. We got there sometime around 9:30, and the place was dead. Geoff and I order their Leatherlips IPA, which is the single most bitter beer that I've ever tasted. I usually really like IPAs, but this one sucked. The bitterness is beyond words. After that we tried their Black Boot stout. This was better, but had a very high alcohol content which left a slight champagne-like after taste in my mouth. I guess that I was not that impressed with the place overall. The only cool thing about going there was that we got to sit outside on the street. We saw a bunch of people that we knew (Dave Nazzaro, Kenny Bianchi, Jake Tucker and OLSEN!!), which was cool and entertaining. The Chit Chat lounge was across the street, and there was a shitty cover band playing. The band brought this weird, fake, bad Bradley Nowell impression reggae style to all of their covers, and they were pretty terrible. The only cool thing that they did was cover Baby Bitch by Ween. The Chit Chat lounge had a lot more people in it, and we got some beers and then went upstairs, where another musical suprise awaited us in the form of some kid playing keyboard and singing. He was awful at carrying a tune, and was not very good at the keys. It was one of the most decidely un-rocking performances that I've seen in a long time. He was, however, pretty hillarious to watch, and would interject absolutley awful jokes in between songs that kept Geoff and myself in stitches. We left too early, in my opinion, because he promised me an Elton John cover as soon as he was done with his shitty origional song. No one else wanted to wait out the origional compostion in order to get to the sweet Elton, so I never got to hear it. Them's the breaks I guess.

Saturday was spent installing some lights on the outside of my house. This took a long time, but after I was done I went and bought a Canon Powershot S410 digital camera. It's tiny and takes really good pictures, so that should make these updates more interesting. Geoff, Oliv and myself were supposed to go to Jon's condo for some party party at night, but that fell through and I became terribly unmotivated after I broke a new guitar string and Geoff cancelled. So I spent Saturday night at home and went to bed early. On Sunday Jon and I went to the Manchester skatepark again, and I got a flat 20 minutes after we got there. We spent the rest of the day trying to find a place to find a tube. Along the way we found Sully and Kirk's appartment, but they weren't home. Anyway, this is a real long post about pretty much nothing, so it's getting cut off.

Have been spending way too much time in front of a computer lately, as demonstrated by this post, which is the second of the week. I feel as though it's turning me into a news/political junky, which has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. Advantages being that I feel like I can explain more succinctly my dissaproval of Bush to other people that I get into political discussions/arguments with. The drawbacks are that I feel like i'm wasting too much time computing. Cut back and you suffer from news withdrawel. Feed the monkey and you feel like a piece of shit who hasn't done anything worthwile in a long time.

Anyway, It's real cool to see Bush's lead starting to slip in the polls. I am honestly worried about the direction that our country is headed in, and, while i realise that things will not change over night if Kerry is elected, hopefully we will at least be taking steps in the right direction. To make the stakes of the election even higher, it looks like a Bush victory will bring about the prohibition of abortion in about 30 states. This is because the supreme court is reconsidering the case (which was origionally decided in '73 I believe) that made abortion legal in the US. 5 of the 9 Justices are pro choice. However, if one of them retires before this decision is made, the chance is high that a re-elected Bush will appoint a Justice that shares his strongly pro-life point of view. And since 8 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices are over the age of 65 (this is the logest serving Supreme Court since the 1820's), a retirement would not be unlikely. If this decision were to be repealed, several old laws that were blocked by the 1973 decision would go into effect in many states that would ban abortion. And the socially conservative governments of some other states that do not have these old laws on the books would also act to outlaw it. Terrible.

Two new music recomendations today:

Ugly Cassanova: Sharpen Your Teeth
The Arcade Fire: Funeral

I just bought these on the ITunes music store. That thing might become a problem for me.......it's waaaaay too easy to spend money on music just sitting here in my chair and have it instantly....shhhiiiitttttt.

HOLLA

A silly weekend, to be sure. Kendra and her field hockey team destroyed Plymouth State (whom they have never beat) on Friday night. It was a shutout, yo. The ensuing drinking precipitated by such a glorious and unprecedented victory kidnapped my sweet honey and replaced her with an evil twin known to persons who know such things as the dreaded and terrible Captain Sea Legs. The Captain is disagreeable, difficult (if not impossible) to reason with, loves to talk shit, orders others around with the very real threat of a golden shower, and stumbles around the room like a pinball in the old school Star Wars pinball machines. On Saturday we watched "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", and it was damn good. I recommended it. On Saturday night we got a keg of Molson Canadian for Kendra's apartment. Who knew that kegs of Molson were only 60 bucks?? What a great deal. And it was delicious. Sunday was spent driving home and then riding a fun-yet-shady skate park in the great state of New Hampshire. It was good fun that i really needed. Some kid who was a real smooth operator on his bicycle tore a good inch-long gash in his knee. It was a serious hole, and since his knee was already swollen, the hole relieved the pressure that his knee was under and shot out clear liquid like a Vegas fountain. Disgusting. Right next to the park there was a large public swimming pool that was mostly empty. It had really steep transitions which were hard to ride, but in the end just made it all the more fun. That pool was the best thing that happened today.

Cheerio.