Everything is Bigger in Texas

The hometown team is in the Super Bowl, so other than being in the actual game, where's the next best place to be? Obviously it's Chicago Dallas. Some highlights and observations from Super Bowl weekend:

- If you don't know, the Super Bowl hangout, now in it's fifth year, is the longest running tradition among friends. Some unintended mini-traditions have come out of the big one, and just like Matt Hardy, they just won't die:

Super Bowl drinking game - with Texas playing host to our festivities, this year's shot of choice for every touchdown scored was tequila. Little did we know that the saying, "Everything is bigger in Texas" also meant super huge shots...and the drinking game ended as abruptly as Da Bears scores.

Someone falling - Karma strikes once again as Carl body-checks and tackles Eric against a wall in our hotel room and both fall interlocked in a pretty uncomfortable position. Also unlike last year, I'm not the one leaving the trip with a broken camera.

I get sick - For the second straight year, I've come into our annual get together pretty sick. I don't have a reason why I was sick last year, but this year I can definitely attribute my dizziness to Eric's driving and my nausea to Eric's bad gas. Both of them really stink.


Other highlights:
- I think I had more fun at the hotel going up and down the glass elevator in the hotel than sight seeing in Dallas. For some reason, all that walking in Dallas gave me the shits.



- Speaking of the shits, there's nothing more sacred than the personal time spent taking a nice healthy poop...unless you're with Jackass-lite



- Dallas-Fort Worth Airport is neither in Dallas nor in Fort Worth. Talk amongst yourselves.

- Can you guess the single one, the married one and the soon-to-be-married one?


- Centuries from now, kids in Dallas will learn about me at school. After searching the city for coffee only to find that the best coffee Dallas has to offer is at some a bar, I left my mark on Dallas history by peeing out the beer I drank on a downtown building in the middle of daylight. Seriously, who goes to a bar to drink coffee?

- I knew it was a long shot, but in visiting the site where JFK was killed, I also scavenged the street for any long lost forgotten pieces of his brain. My goal was to start up a new website where people could post their own theories using the free brain fragement they receive (with purchase of said website subscription, of course) as evidence to prove their theory. Was he really shot from the grassy knoll? Use your brain to prove it!

It''s a Girl!

Meet Domino, the new addition to our family!

2006: Year in Review

As much as I’m glad to celebrate the New Year, I hate to see that 2006 has come to an end. Exactly 365 days ago, I was laying next to my then-girlfriend-now-fiancé in her home state of Washington watching how drunk Seattle news reporters ring in the New Year atop the Giant Prick (a.k.a. Space Needle). I was jobless, depressed and down on my luck, and even though I was to fly back to Chicago in a few days, I really wondered if coming back was truly the right thing to do.

It didn’t take very long to see whether or not the craptacularity was going to carry over into 2006. A week after coming back, I received word that Ed had gone missing. After searching his place for clues and discovering that the WrestleMania 22 shirt that I gave him and a Chuck Palahniuk book that I loaned him were missing, I felt comforted in a sick and perverse sort of way at the thought that those items could be his last worldly possessions before he was raped, killed and raped again Katie Vick style before being dismembered and eaten by a pack of hungry werewolves horny for some shit-brickin’ mud-butt flesh. On the other hand, my worries of his disappearance were deepened further by the discovery of his hockey stick. Oh Ed… you should have known that the hockey stick would not only have made a great weapon in self-defense against werewolves, but would have also given you better stability in preventing another dislocated knee or twisted ankle running away from said werewolves in the middle of some the meanest and scariest Wisconsin woods. In retrospect, Ed never was in any real danger, and the best thing that came out of that night was a free dinner courtesy of his uncle.

In February, I flew out to Tennessee to hang out with Carl and Eric for our annual Super Bowl outing which is now the longest running tradition among friends. The trip started out well – sight-seeing in Nashville and a tour of the Jack Daniels distillery – but took a turn after I literally hit rock bottom and fell into a river. Camera!

No matter how shitty the year was going so far, the one thing that kept my spirits up was WrestleMania at the end of March. Next to the Olympics and World Cup, WrestleMania is probably the next biggest global phenomenon out there, and I was glad to be a part of it sitting ringside along with three of my closest wrasslin buddies and the people from around the world that we met there.

March also marked my return to the workforce. After working at several big name organizations since coming out of school a few years ago, I could honestly say that I’ve finally found my niche in the workplace.

One of the things that I’ve always wanted to do was spend a week driving cross-country from one end of the United States to the other. In July, I came close to doing that, driving across two-thirds of the country from Washington State back to Chicago. After doing the drive through the most boring parts of the U.S., I don’t think I want to drive cross-country anymore.

A month later, Cathy and I made it to our vacation spot, the San Juan Islands. A beautiful sunset along the Pacific Ocean, I couldn’t ask for a better time and place to propose than right at that moment.

And the rest is pretty much history. 2006 started out rough, but things smoothed out eventually. It was a memorable year and hopefully there will be more good times to come in 2007. Happy New Year!

Public Service Announcement: Google Reader

I’m not usually one for giving tech tips or web advice, but in the wake of this week’s tragic story, sharing something that I use everyday with others is the least that I could do for someone who, through the articles he wrote, has educated many including myself in the way of new tech gadgetry.

For those of you who aren’t using a news aggregator, why not? News aggregators can save you quite a bit of time since the content on all of your favorite websites can be found in this nifty one-stop-shop web tool. And since aggregators are updated dynamically, you’re always in the know with the most up-to-the-minute information. Most content is in headline format and includes the first couple sentences of an article – this gives you the ability to quickly skim and read only the articles you are most interested in.

Do me a favor and get Google Reader (it’s in their Google Labs section). If you’re new to RSS technology or unsure about what to do with those XML buttons that you see on websites, Google Reader makes it really easy to subscribe to groups of websites at a time by clicking on a single button. Need a news feed? Click on the News bundle and you get feeds to six different websites. Google Reader is blog-friendly as well. If the blogs you like to read are on popular host sites like Blogger, Flickr, or Myspace, all you need to do is enter their user name, and just like that, you’ve created a feed to that user’s blog.

Another great feature of Google Reader is the ability to “star” certain pieces of content so that you can share it with others. Bloggers like me have used this feature as a side item to their blogs giving readers the ability to check out websites that bloggers look at on a regular basis.

So go ahead and get Google Reader. And while you’re doing that, make the Google Personalized Homepage your home page. You can move gadgets around to truly make it the page you want it to be and include only the things that are most important to you.

Our First Christmas Tree

And it's a real one too! I never knew that picking up fallen needles and watering the tree constantly could be so much fun. If only the fake ones could smell this good...

Hit and Misses

Well, it appears that my run at being in a television commercial has finally come to an end. After getting through the first round of auditions, the USA Network Powers That Be decided to go “an alternative route,” whatever that means. Oh well, at least it wasn’t all for naught. I never envisioned myself auditioning for anything, so to do this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. I wonder what the casting agency did with my audition tape, because seeing me impersonate Triple H’s water spit or John Cena’s five knuckle shuffle is more than enough to win on America’s Funniest Home Videos any day. Damn.

I have never shopped on Black Friday before, and after waiting in line all night in 30 degree weather just to get kicked out of line only minutes before the store was to open, I have come to the realization why I’ve never done it before: BECAUSE IT SUCKS! What sucks even more? The $k0ki3 police department...I’ll show you “civil disobedience” – never have I wanted that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you piss on the car of the cop who royally pissed you off than right at that moment.

While I was having a joyous time exchanging heated Thanksgiving tidings with the cop, my fiancé was earning her ring by freezing her ass off waiting in another line – at Gamestop...for the Nintendo Wii! And here’s a lesson for you soccer moms – waiting in line for one of the most coveted items this holiday season requires you to do one simple thing – wait in line. You get props for being there overnight and thereby pretty much guaranteeing your kid a system, but we take those props back since you didn’t go that one additional step and actually leave the warmth and comfort of your car to join the vigil of people willing to lose a frostbitten finger or three. Stupid soccer mom. They should all just stay at home and make me some babies.

Three Months, But Who's Counting?

It’s been awhile, and a lot’s gone on. Like watching your favorite porno, let’s fast forward to the good parts, shall we?

Have I mentioned that the fiancé and I are now living together? Honey, I love you dearly, but next time you leave me home alone to run some errands, can you PLEASE do me a favor? There’s nothing more uncomfortable than having a gigantic Mexican man stop by to install our cable and internet with scented candles burning and light jazz playing throughout our place. If this wasn’t awkward enough, the thought hit me as he was staring at one of the walls thinking of where he wanted to poke a hole with his drill...at least I hope that’s what he was thinking.

I usually stand my ground and comeback with something for anyone who talks shmack my way, but when a guy on a bicycle dressed in hee-haw overalls and a straw hat at 6:30 in the morning in a non-rural neighborhood is raging at you because you’re in his way, what else can you do but stand there dumbfounded in shock and awe. Did I see that? Someone please tell me I just didn’t see that.

After your woman has been drinking non-stop the whole night and spilling a little bit of wine on your suit jacket here and there, never, never, never make a comment about having to take said suit jacket to the dry cleaners. Because if you do, she’ll claim that the room is spinning and begin to regurgitate and spew all over said suit jacket along with matching suit pants, suit shirt and suit shoes, and thus re-inforcing the need to go to the dry cleaners. Somehow I feel that after a few years, I’ll have enough stories to write a book on the uncomfortable and unfortunate injustices men have had to go through because of women.

To the person that said that fear is the greatest motivator, I think I may have found something even greater – embarking on a late night trip back to Chicago from Milwaukee, and underestimating the time it takes for the White Castle burgers you had at the beginning of the trip to slide through your system. The thought of taking a shit in your own car is pretty terrifying, but the need to get to the friendly confines of your toilet at home is all the motivation anyone really needs to overcome that fear. As if you needed another reason to jet out of Wisconsin anyways.

Even I have my limits. Downing part of a bottle of hot sauce was easy. Downing a beer in a glass of chicken wing bones took a little effort. But downing a cup of bleu cheese? Since someone out there has photographical proof that I spit and definitely don’t swallow, my chances of running for a government office are pretty nil. If it's any consolation, while Drew is trying to sell a few insurance policies to the girls at Hooters, I'm offering them something more useful - a hotel room. I love the hospitality industry!

Last but definitely not least, have you ever laughed so hard you started to cry? Going to dinner with my buddies Carl and Eric is an experience like no other. Especially when we’re going to a decent restaurant and Eric’s stuck having to wear a t-shirt that says “I did it all for the Wookiee”. And if that wasn’t enough:

Eric: Do you have chips and salsa?

Waitress: Yes.

Eric: What does that entail?

Waitress: Ummm, chips and salsa?

Carl and Erwin: OoooooooH

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

After having our flight cancelled and re-booked to the following morning at the last second...

After being stuck in traffic (Seattle traffic nonetheless) for almost three hours...

After just missing the ferry and having to wait another two hours for the next one...

After getting onto the island just in time for one of our regular places that we normally frequent when we visit to tell us that they're closed...

This makes the entire frustration of sixteen hours of travel by plane, ferry and automobile so much more worth it:


A trip to the winery for a congratulatory bottle of wine and two glasses: $30

Ferry ride to the San Juan Islands: $65

Round trip flight from Chicago to Seattle: $400

A marriage proposal overlooking the Pacific Ocean at sunset: PRICELESS

She said yes!

The Beginning of the End

With the money I just spent, I could have bought:

- A really nice TV and home theatre system
- A PSA 10 Gem Mint 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie card
- The platinum travel package for next year's WrestleMania in Detroit for myself and the people who went with me to WrestleMania this year

Instead, I bought this:



The things you do for love...how much head is this worth?

A Bad Omen?

From the "It Can Only Happen to Erwin" files:

Question: What are the chances of being about to leave a bank and running into an old friend who you haven't seen since his wedding day three years ago and him telling you that getting married is the worst thing you can possibly do?

Answer: Pretty high if you're me and you just went to the bank to send your very first bank wire to pay for an expensive piece of jewelry...like an engagement ring.

That's right, folks, you've read right - I sent my first bank wire!

The Move

After three plus years of imagining it, thinking of it and talking about it, the wait’s finally over – like a shady Albanian drugging an under aged girl that he met on Myspace and then having a one night stand with her in a Kane costume, the Erwin and Cathy Far From Scenic Please Be Uneventful Road Trip Short of Hell (also known as “The Move”) has come and gone. Let’s break this road trip down parte dalla parte, shall we?

Far From Scenic
With all the places we stopped for gas, our drive from Washington State to Chicago could easily have been called the Erwin and Cathy No Name Town Tour:

Ellensburg, WA
Kingston, ID
Custer, MT
Billings, MT
Clearwater, MN
Beach, ND
Fargo, ND
Hixton, WI
Rockford, IL

How I Did a 36 Hour Drive in 30 Hours #1 – Over 2,000 miles and the only things worth noting are crossing the Continental Divide twice and driving past an aluminum structure in North Dakota that proclaims to be the largest in the world – a foil eye.

Please Be Uneventful
I wonder what would have happened if I listened to the wifey and turned my head to look at a cave as I was driving through curves down a mountain going about 90 miles per hour.

How I Did a 36 Hour Drive in 30 Hours #2 – I’m pretty sure I averaged 90 – 95 miles per hour from start to finish. So much for the cops being out on 4th of July weekend.

Road Trip Short of Hell
The trip did have some memorable but infamous moments:
- Having to drive slowly through a section of highway where an accident investigation scene was ongoing with the bloody chalk outline of someone killed still on the road.
- Being unable to see through my rear windshield for pretty much the entire trip because one of the vacuum compressed bags that Cathy used to keep her clothes had filled with air.
- Eating breakfast at a McDonalds in Montana and overhearing a conversation among a bunch of 70 and 80 year old elderlies:
“I bought a bed at the flea market yesterday. It only cost me $9.”
“Did it come with a vibrator?”
- Driving on the first day of the trip from five in the morning to eight in the evening on only three hours of sleep and getting to our planned destination only to find out that all the hotels and motels in this Podunk town were booked because of a K K K biker rally and then having to stay at the only place that had vacancies – a hole in the wall motel/casino called the War Bonnet.

How I Did a 36 Hour Drive in 30 Hours #3 – Before the trip even started, I was told not to stop in Idaho while I was in Chicago, then I was told not to stop in Montana while in Washington, and then I was told not to stop in North Dakota while in Montana. Was it friendly advice or maybe a warning that colored folk just weren’t welcome?

Relativity

How I’d go about preventing someone from jumping off a building:

“There is no real meaning to life, only patterns. The adventurous type, the boring type, the quiet type, the flamboyant type, the cynical type, the geeky type, the perverted type, the suicidal type and so on and so forth. No matter who you are or how you identify yourself, you’re not the first to do what you’re about to do, and chances are, you’re not going to be the last either. No matter how different we perceive ourselves to be, we really are all the same. Everything is relative to everything else. Could you imagine what would happen if Kevin Bacon decided to jump off a mountain? The six degrees of Kevin Bacon would no longer exist.”

“And that’s a bad thing? “

“Hmmm, good point. I’ll see you in another life, brother.”

Okay, so maybe suicide prevention isn’t my thing. But you know what? I think White Castle burgers aren’t my thing either. I should have realized it after having to use the bathroom less than two hours of having my first White Castle burgers ever. I should have also realized it after having three more of those burgers after clearing out the inaugural set. Instead, the realization hit as I was running late to work this morning because my ass didn’t want to leave the toilet. What felt like a never ending stream of the squirts was actually excess burger, cheese, onions and steamed buns – the catalyst for a smooth ride out the hole. Pepto-Bismol, now that’s what I craved.

The time sitting on the pot wasn’t entirely full of waste though. I started to think of the previous day’s good times being in the company of great friends, and then it hit me.

The cheese sticks. The onion rings. The answer to the Bobby Brown question.

If my lovie was constipated and had asked me to take my hand up “there” to literally clean her system out, I would have to respectfully decline. If she then offered to sing that Whitney Houston song from “The Bodyguard,” I’d point to her and sing, “That Girl is Poison.” That’s right Bobby, let me put it this way: If Bel Biv Devoe busted a cap in your ass, do you honestly think Whitney would fist you to get that bullet? Shit, not if that bullet was filled with crack. “If It Isn’t Love?” What the fuck are you smoking dude?

I could see the comic right now in tomorrow morning’s newspaper:

“Love is...plopping your woman on the toilet and shoving White Castle burgers down her throat for instant constipation relief.”

Buffalo Rock State Park

Cleared for Takeoff

March 29, 1987 – The only light in my bedroom is coming from the television that is on channel nine, WGN news. I look over at the bottom bunk where my sister is sleeping peacefully, and I yawn, thinking that it’s past my bedtime too. It’s only around 9:30 at night, but at seven years old, 9:30 PM is more like midnight to me. My eyelids are heavy and I just want to lie down, but there’s something driving me to stay up and keep vigil, because there in my youth I truly believed that something big was going to happen. And it did.

“WGN news, tonight’s sports is brought to you by…”

As the commercial plays, sleepy weariness is replaced by an adrenalin rush. The light from the television seems brighter and I’m squinting because my pupils are trying to adjust. My heart appears to be beating faster. I have awoken.

The commercial ends and we cut back to the sportscaster at WGN news, but in what felt like not even a second, there it is:

I’m seeing Hogan vs. Andre. I’m hearing the words of Gorilla Monsoon, “The irresistable force meets the immovable object.” Both of them look at each other look at the sea of humanity, all 93,173 people at the Pontiac Silverdome for WrestleMania III.

The rest of that night is history. For me personally, that’s where it all began.

WrestleMania: WM3, Detroit – Where it all Begins...

Again – WM19, Seattle – Childhood dreams can come true...

And again – WM22, Chicago – Two words: Home City, One word: RINGSIDE...

And again – WM23, Detroit – The childhood dream comes full circle

It’s confirmed. April 1, 2007. Ford Field, Detroit. Silver package. I’ll see you in the lower level.

Touched by a Writer

Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke, Haunted, etc.) is one sick f*ck.



Chuck, thanks for agreeing with me. To all you in the Pacific Northwest, it's Ore-Ah-Gone!

A Modern Day Samson and Delilah

To all the fellas out there, I know you’ve heard this before, but I am going to officially join the millions (and millions) of guys before me and say that you cannot win against a woman. There’s just no way. It’s not possible, especially when it comes to making bets.

Men win bets simply because women let us. Women play to our needs knowing that we need instant gratification so they give us the quick and easy wins.

“Haha, you have to sing “I’m a Little Teapot” in public and you have to do all the motions.”

“Hizzah, make me a banana cream pie. Wait, why don’t you make that twoooo...and three quarters.”

“Heh heh, that’s right girlie, get underneath the table and do your thang while I have a nice conversation about politics and religion with your parents over dinner, yeah, yeah"...

...Okay, so not all these really happened. A second banana cream pie would have been nice...

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned though. To a woman, a guy winning a bet is like a tremor undetectable to the most sensitive of seismic equipment. It’s not really a big deal.

“‘I’m a Little Teapot?’ How about I wear a backpack with fake explosives and do it in Arabic in the middle of synagogue on Passover?”

But women are cruel like that. They toy with our emotions and monitor our happy meter; eventually all the little tremors build up into something catastrophic that blows up in our face:

“Wear that pink shirt, bitch.”

Or in my case earlier a few weeks ago,

“Stop being a wuss and lift up your arms so I can shave your pits.”

Yet another example of how a man’s misery can bring about a woman’s happiness.

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

Click here for more pics.

The Art of Storytelling

At my favorite place to go for lunch on a workday, the person at the register takes notice of the book I have in my hand and asks what I plan on reading in the sixty minutes I have to get my head off of work. “It’s Invisible Monsters,” I say, “the most fucked up book I have ever read.”

The person at the register grins and asks what the book is about. I tell him that it’s about the most fucked up story I have ever read. I tell him that it’s “Fucked up, man.” I tell him that the book is written by the guy who wrote the book Fight Club before it ever became a movie. I tell him, “And if you thought Fight Club was fucked up, you should check this book out.”

If Mr. Chuck Palahniuk was a porn star, he’d be Ron Jeremy. And Invisible Monsters would be his greatest fuck.

Jump to the next book in my reading queue, School for Stingers, recommended so much by two friends who took turns reading chapters to each other as bedtime stories, they decided to give me a brand new book free of Albani-Jew glue for my birthday.

From a fucked up book to a book of nothing but fucking, this is going to be interesting. While the cover of Invisible Monsters left something for people sitting next to me on the train wondering what the book was about, the busty chests on the cover of School for Stingers will have people doing more worrying than wondering if there’s anything else besides my monthly train pass I’ll be whipping out on the commute to or from work.

Jump to the next time I’m at my favorite place to go for lunch on a workday. The person at the register takes notice of the book I have in my hand and asks what I plan on reading in the sixty minutes I have to get my head off of work this time. “It’s The DaVinci Code,” I say, “the most heart pounding, fast moving, suspense thriller that will leave you breathing hard and gasping for air.”

Looking at my watch, I tell him that I’m actually a minute late today because I had to take care of something really quick.

I tell him, “No worries though, I’ve already got my head off of work.”

I tell him that the next fifty-nine minutes are going to be like the moment you leave work on a beautiful sunny Friday afternoon heading into a stress-free and worry-free weekend.

Nothing but pure relaxation.

I tell him to have a good rest of his day, and then I find a table for me to eat my lunch, and start reading my book with both hands clearly on the table for everyone to see.

During this post I Google'd: Venice Cafe, Chuck Palahniuk, School for Stingers, Perverts in Public

Push

One of my self mottos has always been “Push”.

The word itself has connotations of moving forward or making some type of progress, but if you actually look up the definition, there is so much more meaning:

- Ambitious drive
- To sell (another one of my mottos, “Sell or be sold” could be translated to “Push or be pushed”.)
- Strive to achieve a goal
- An effort to advance

“Push” defines who I am as a person. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that for someone who is constantly looking forward, one of the things I don’t do a whole lot of is look back. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy doing it. I just don’t do it as much as I probably should. There comes a point in time in everyone’s life where one’s memories become more important than their dreams and aspirations. That certain point in time is called a mid-life crisis, and I’m still light years away from having one of those.

That being said, given how the day of my birth coincides with the celebration of Christ’s rebirth this year, I feel that now’s a good time to reflect and look back at the path that brought me to where I am today...

...You really thought I was going to just give you the story of my life? Sucker!

Happy Easter!

Here are a couple free notable quotes to live by:

“A true champion is not necessarily defined by how much they’re admired, but instead their ability to stand up in the face of adversity.”

“If you can dream it, you can do it, and there’s no better place than here and no better time than now.”

WrestleMania 22!

What a weekend! My voice is still hoarse and my body is constantly reminding me that getting less than ten hours of sleep in the last three days is not a good idea, but it was so totally worth it. If fate is on my side, I will do it again next year, this time in Detroit, Michigan – Ford Field.

Now for some notes:

- Holy shit! Holy shit!...Ringside seats, camera side, row 6...Holy shit! Holy shit!

- From what I remember, the people that I met came from: Boston, Detroit, San Francisco, St. Louis, Alabama, Tennessee, Oregon, Wisconsin, Texas, Indiana, Florida, Louisiana, New York, Ireland, Germany, England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand.

- You know it’s time to go to bed when it’s two in the morning and you’re outside with an Australian and an Irishmen talking about being in a river with a crocodile, and an Englishmen who kept on shouting out, “Booze” and “Broads”.

- Hey Carl, you were right: people from Tennessee skip the middle syllables of any word that has more than two, speaking only the first and last (i.e. Shelbyville is Shelville).

- WrestleMania 22 set a record as it became the largest single day event in AllState Arena history, grossing more than $2.5 million. Glad to know that my $1,400 travel package, $60 jersey, $40 hooded jacket, $30 long sleeve t-shirt, two $25 short sleeve t-shirts, $20 program, $20 hat, $10 dog tag, and $5 ticket holder was all part of history in the making.

- When was the last time you shouted and screamed for joy? Seeing where I was sitting after a 402 day journey was a bittersweet ending. I felt like Frodo Baggins winning the WWE World Heavyweight Title.

- A few rows ahead were two people that kept on pissing people off because their Israeli flag was blocking people’s views. Why do “those people” always have to be in other people’s business? Dumb Jews...

- The WrestleMania 22 DVD comes out May 23. I figure since I was on TV, there's a good chance that I'll be on the DVD. If that's the case, I will be accepting bookings for autograph appearances shortly.



Click here for WrestleMania 22 album.