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It was a brisk night in Madison on April 21, 2006. Craig and I arrived in “Mad-Towne” around 9:30 that night, and we went straight to Mitch and Matt’s. Once in their neighborhood, I was yelled at by someone to “LEARN HOW TO DRIVE A STICK!” I was in a puddle and my tires chirped out of it. My car is an automatic, and he is retarded. Mitch greeted us outside and led us into the house. Once inside I saw Matt, sitting on the couch playing golf on the NES. We had to wait for Mitch for almost two hours while he got ready for the evening. “I just like to look good for the college chicks” he proclaimed. After Mitch finished primping we picked up Jennifer and hit downtown. We started off at State Street Brats where Mitch said let’s get shots; I said I wasn’t doing shots. Four shots later we had Tequila, Jager, McGillicutty, and some pineapple vodka shot, with beer in between, lots, and lots and lots of beer. Mitch got a picture with some of the oldest timers in the bar and then we went upstairs to sit by the Cap’n. We then left for Amy’s pub or bar or tavern, not sure which but it had some nice outdoor seating where a couple dudes fell onto and knocked over the railing. It was around 11:30 then and I was straight fucked up with no end in sight, mostly because everything in sight was blurry. I knew I had come to that fine line between drunk and useless bastard, so I leapt forward with no regard for my well being. Come 12:30 we were drinking Sierra Nevada and pushing each other into to passers bye. We seemed to be invisible to them, as they were too busy talking about foreign affairs and hating Bush to have any fun. I guess most people in Madison are fragile, pacifist, conscientious objectors. I did not know that. I did find one person I managed to piss off at Paul’s Club because she barged into a conversation that Mitch, Blake and I were having and I said something along the lines of, “Just because you overheard our conversation does not mean you have an invitation to come in and voice your opinion. Go away.” Here is Mitch holding her at bay and telling her, “He didn’t mean that,” while she is drunk pointing, and calling me an asshole. I’m not an asshole, am I? Blake gave her the “look at this girl” thumb and she flipped me off. Fuck her. Blake showed up a little before that girl was rude and had a few drinks with us and thankfully drove us all home. Craig sat down with a couple girls and it looks like he is saying “I know, I hate it when strange men just sit down and talk to me too.” The girl in the red is pretty much laughing at him while the other is trying to keep a straight face. Before Blake took us home, we walked across the street for some late night pizza at Ian’s Pizzeria. After Pizza, we found Blake’s car and he took us all home. On the way Mitch asked Jennifer if she wanted to come over but not in “THAT” way. Nice Mitch. Blake dropped off Jennifer, and then took us back to Mitch’s. I guess he didn’t drop us off directly in front of Mitch’s house because I spent about two minutes leaning on and banging the shit out of some poor fuck’s front door thinking It was Mitch’s. It had a for sale sign in the front yard that Mitch drunkenly kicked in, then proceeded to run away like someone other than us saw him do it. We eventually made it upstairs and instead of doing the right thing and throwing up, I passed out. I paid for that in the morning. I woke up dizzy as fuck and could barely stand. While I was struggling with my vertigo, Craig just kept saying “He-Man pee pants.” I still don’t know what the fuck he meant by that. That’s Craig I guess. I managed to get to the bathroom and throw up my Pepperoni Pizza I ate the night before and a little alcohol to boot. I have not thrown up since my 24th birthday I had in Des Moines with Broox and Mitch. I hope you had a good night Mitch because I paid for it in full Saturday.

Here are the rest of the pics.

Per Jennifer’s Request, Dancin’ Rick.

I got off work early and met Mitch and Jamie at my house where we loaded our shit into my car and headed out to Iowa City to meet up with Jeffy. When we arrived in Iowa City Jeff sent us on ahead because he was waiting for Will to show up so he could go too. No problem, off to Des Moines. About an hour down the road I got a voicemail from Jeff saying that Will’s car broke down so he had to go pick him up in the opposite direction. I am glad we didn’t wait around for Will. We got to Derek’s house around 8:30 and saw that he had 3 pop kegs of Rock Bottom’s Beer there. Sweet. 5 gallons of light, 5 gallons of red, and 5 gallons of brown. From there it is a bit of a blur. I know we did a shot of Cuervo Black to get the ball rolling then we tackled the kegs. Mitch slammed my hand into the wall, we picked on “Brandon” to the point Broox told me to quit it, Broox lost and found his camera next to the Gamecube, Mitch fucked the back of Jamie’s head, we tried to have Ninja do a keg stand, (he wasn’t having that) and we had some fun in the garage. We even pulled off a multi-angle picture. Around 1 we decided to go to Stix, a bar down the road from Derek’s, for last call. I am pretty sure everyone who was there from Derek’s house was already pretty torn down; why not top it off by driving to the bar. It was within 2 miles so it wasn’t illegal. Once in the bar’s parking lot we were greeted by Derek. Once we got in, we had a couple drinks, watched Derek and Chuck dance to Kung-Fu Fighting, and had my camera put out like a fucking cigarette by Jeff. I dropped the camera, and Jeff thought it was a glass from the bar and proceeded to crush the life out of it. This is the last image it captured. It took 1,692 pictures before it’s demise. We went back to Broox’s after they kicked us out of Stix. We got back really fast due to little traffic and little to no common sense that time of night. All that was left of the beer was the red so Mitch tossed the “empties” into the yard and got kissably close to a sleeping Kari. After a few more beers, I passed out.

The rest of the pics.

Friday, March 3rd 2006 I got my first tattoo. I had been throwing many ideas around for the past two or three years, but nothing really stuck. I think I was trying too hard to come up with something instead of just letting it come on its own. For those of you who know me well, know I have read comic books for a long time, and I probably will continue too until my eyes are as bad as my father’s. One of my favorites is Transmetropolitan. That is where the first idea came from. The main character is a journalist and wears an interesting pair of glasses that are also a camera. The right lens is a green rectangle and the left lens is a red circle. If you have been around me for more than an hour you would know that I love taking pictures. So on my computer, I opened up paint and threw the lenses on the screen. I kind of looked at them for a minute and thought that would make for a pretty simple and unique tattoo for my left shoulder blade. I also thought of another idea, and that was to put the scar that is around Herr Starr’s right eye in Preacher, on my right shoulder blade. So I drew that one up. The more I looked at them the more I liked the ideas, but they seemed too simple. I then thought about incorporating them together on my left shoulder as one tattoo. I drew that one out and that was that. Off to Sam’s! She took the ideas, and the pictures I printed for her and came up with this. I wanted to be able to see the scar a little behind the lens, and she pulled that off pretty well. I was really happy that she understood what I was going for. She tweaked it a bit by elongating the scar, and shifting the point of view perspective and I was more than happy with it when she sent me the final copy. So Friday Amanda and I went to Sam’s at 7 P.M. and I walked out around 9:30.

Here are all the pics in order, the last three are from today.

The night started off at Rascals. We played pool, Sean got his nose picked, and Brent shared a very funny story with me. After a short stint at Rascals, we went to The Carriage Haus for a few drinks. I managed to capture a pic of some dude undoubtedly saying “Fagedaboudit.” It was around 10:00 that I called Tom Satterly, the guy who sold me my Honda, to see what he was doing for the evening. He informed me that he quit at Lujack’s, and was at his new job, managing Tuxedos Show Club. He posed an interesting question, “Why don’t you guys come up here?” Well, a trip to the gas station and a short drive later, we arrived at Tuxedos. In most instances at the strip club, after you pay your hard earned dollar to the “entertainer,” she gladly smashes her boobs in your face. Well when that time came for Cliff, I believe he said to her, “How about the lips instead of the tits?” As if that were not bad enough, she asked him to repeat it, just in case she misheard him. Nope, even louder he repeated, “HOW ABOUT THE LIPS INSTEAD OF THE TITS?” The stripper was taken back by what was said to her, and then yelled to her in a very drunk manor. I do not agree with what he said, cause it’s gross, but C’MON…aren’t most strippers soulless temptresses of the night that are only animated by the beat of house music and cocaine? I thought they were all fucked up and dead inside, who knew? Anyways, she told Satterly and he had to say something to Cliff and that was all. Lindsay was drunk enough to not realize that a strip club is still a public place, and there are people who knew her in the room. Translation, her boobs came out a few times. Eventually word got around to the girls that it was Sean’s birthday…too bad for Sean. They put him on stage on all fours, ripped the waistband off his favorite boxers, took his belt off and whipped the shit out of him. I mean he got whipped on the ass, face, and back. She then pulled his pants down a tad for a quick suck and bite on his ass. That was the last bit of entertainment that the strip club had to offer, so we went back down to The Carriage Haus to finish the night out. Once there, we were sitting at a table when Ray Terhune walks up with a fresh beer in each hand, one for him, and one for his friend. After about ten minutes of explaining what he is going to be doing with his life he goes to leave. He has had a few swigs of his beer while telling his story and picks it up off the table and says to me, “Yours is more full, I gotta get back to my friends.” I replied, “Yes Ray this full beer is mine that I bought and brought over here.” He didn’t get it. Thanks for the beer Raybone. We are all pretty drunk and tired come 1:45. So much so, that Sean was only able to throw a Peace Up A-Towne Sideways. I hope Atlanta forgives you Sean. So we left The Carriage Haus and went back to Sean’s. Sean and I watched a bit of Family Guy and then I passed out.

The end.

Extra pics.

Where to begin. Okay, initially this was going to be a 2 weekend project, tops. We started this project on 11/25/05 and finished it on 1/15/06, so much for that idea. We were going to take out all of the carpeted shell in the trunk, remove the spare tire, and build a box to set in the space where the spare tire was. We then were going to make a top piece to set over that so it would lay flush. The only problem was that my 15” sub takes 3 cubic feet of airspace. So a flush mount would put the box about 5 inches above the line where my trunk lid would close. It would fit, but look and sound like shit, back to the drawing board. We basically were at a point where I needed a bigger trunk, or a smaller sub. I was not interested in either. So Matt is in the trunk with a tape measure, and he starts yelling out dimensions to me that seemed to be larger than what we had space for. He asked me to figure out the volume for the dimensions he gave me and it ended up being 3.02 cubic feet. Just about perfect. I then asked where he picked up the extra space. He told me that in Scrote’s trunk, in order to save space he tried something new. He used the actual spare tire steel well as the bottom of the box and built a wooden lid for it. Using liquid nails to seal it, it worked out perfectly. So it was then up to me if I wanted to go that route. Well that was an easy decision after all of the thought we put into the design of this only to hit a wall because of space. We stripped the trunk of everything to the point where we were looking at a steel floor. We then sealed every hole we could find with heavy duty liquid nails. Then we figured out the dimensions of the lid, built it, sealed it and laid it in. From there we ran the sub wires and power for the light in the sub under the lid and sealed it down. When it was all set and sealed we had went through 9 caulk size tubes of liquid nails. That had to set up for at least a week. We waited four. The glue was still mushy after two weeks. Once the glue was set, we put the plastic sidewalls back in and made a cardboard template of the top layer to make sure it mated well with the existing carpeted plastic molded side walls. We then cut both halves of the top layer, temporarily mounted the sub, laid the halves in, and made some adjustments on the hole. The sub then came out, and we carpeted the top halves, and laid a small ring of carpet around the hole on the top of the box where the sub sits. We then wired and mounted the sub, secured it over the carpet, and we dropped the top pieces in and mounted the amps. In order for me to keep my stock deck, which I love, I had to buy a line out converter. It converts speaker wire into a RCA output. Most of these are junk and 25-40 bucks at Best Buy. I didn’t want junk so I did some research on a good line out converter. The one I bought was from Automotive Innovations. It is a JL Audio Clean Sweep. It has a RCA input for my iPod, 4 channel speaker wire inputs and 4 channel 8 volt RCA outputs. Most CD players and line out converters only have a 4-6 volt output. So we wired from the dash to the Clean Sweep, then from the Clean Sweep to the JL Audio e4300, from the e4300 to the internal speakers, and also from the e4300, a summed RCA output of the inputs from the Clean Sweep to the Massive Audio D100X, and from the D100X to the Massive Audio CW 15 Stage 2 15” subwoofer. We hid the Clean Sweep under the top layer, and ran all the wires through ports we cut in said layer. We had to take the back bench seat out to hide all of the wires, and we ran the D100X gain control and the Clean Sweep gain control under the carpet and out the underside plastic of the center console. Here it is all finished, and here is a pic of it in the dark bumping.

Here are all of the pics.

From what I can remember, Amanda and I started at my Aunt Cherie’s for about an hour and played with Riley. Then realized that Gary’s band was playing down at Peacock’s, so we went there. When we got t0 Peacock’s They were about halfway through the first set and, and the place was packed, Scott was dancing, and there was a Lance sighting. Hi Lance! We went down to G’s for a bit before we went home and ran into Brent and Sean. I took about 200 pictures that night but you only get to see 23.

The rest of the pics.

Christmas morning started at Amanda’s house where we opened gifts from her mother and helped Nayte get his toys working. After opening all the presents, cleaning up and playing with Nayte, we went down to my Mom and Dad’s to open more stuff. My mother got me a pretty sweet new digital camera, the Canon SD450 and the all weather case for it. So come summertime at the Flamingo, there will be all new picture aspects for you viewers at home. I say that my mother gave me the camera because if my pappy had anything to say about it, I would have gotten a card that said “Fuck You this card cost too much.” So thanks for the camera mom. After opening all our presents there, Amanda and I went to Tom and Lori Calvert’s for her Family Christmas. Amber got to see her friend Autumn, and for some reason, she broke out in red anger blotches from seeing her. Who knows? Everything was going well until I dropped a full can of open Pepsi in between the back of Tom’s Mother’s chair, and Tom’s Mother’s back. All I could do is watch it slip out of my hands and fall in slow motion to her ass where it glug glug glugged all over her seat. Lori got her a dinner napkin for her to sit on and one to prop behind her to soak it all up. She didn’t even flinch. After everyone had a good laugh, lunch was finished, we had some dessert, and we opened presents. It seems Tom’s Mother’s feet were melting while we were opening presents. Anyhow, Nayte got a little plastic gun that shot suction cup darts which Amber and I had more fun with then he did. After Tom and Lori’s, Amanda and I went to my Aunt Cherie’s house. We basically sat around the tele and drank. Dad wore a rainbow themed shirt which he caught plenty of shit for and I got slightly drunk. Even Bri got a little drunk, thanks to Amanda. My mother’s father, Bob, showed up for a little while. He left about 30 minutes into 40 Year Old Virgin. I guess he didn’t find it funny. Sorry Bob. After a few more drinks and the majority of the movie Amanda and I went home. A few days later we had another Christmas gathering at Cherie’s for the rest of the family. Dan and Mindy were in town with my little cousin Riley. There was a gift exchange, and judging by this picture of Cherie, I doubt the Santa Soap Co. will be calling her for an endorsement.

Here are a few Christmas wishes from my father and Amanda, Mitch, Mike, and Derek.

Here are the rest of the Christmas pics.

Here are the pics from Nates Birthday. There isn’t much to tell other than drinks were had and Todd was really drunk.

Tuesday night, 12/06/05, was Amber’s 21st birthday party. It started at G’s around 7:00. When I showed up, Amber, Amanda, Brent and Bubby were there and about a half hour later, Tom and Lori Calvert arrived followed by Ryan, one of the Numatics regional salesmen from Ohio. On this rare occasion you can see Lori having a beer, and a shot. Ryan was in town to work with a couple of our outside salesmen and needed something to do for the evening. Amber had a drink and a shot to start the evening off right, and received 4-5 Jell-O shots from the bar for free. She also got a cock can lid from Amanda which was used only once for its intended purpose, and once as an artificial limb, and once as an oral stimulant. As it turned out, my mom was having her Christmas party for the library in the dining room at G’s while we were in the bar for her birthday. We disrupted that a few times but I don’t think anyone cared. After a short stint at G’s it was off to Duey’s for pool, white trash music, and more alcohol. Amber’s sister and brother-in-law showed up for awhile and Brent took Bubby home. It was around then that Lindsay showed up to join in the festivities. We played pool for a couple hours when Wes and Danny showed up. Even Justin showed up for a dance and a picture before he had to go to work. When Brent got back, we went to Peacock’s. Once at Peacock’s, we ran into Alexa and her drunk Asian friend from Western who was wearing very fancy footwear. Pool was played, drinks were had, Danny blew some smoke rings, and Alexa’s Asian friend imagined having an engagement ring of her own. Amber smashed Amanda’s head in her boobs not once, not twice, but three times that I saw and was able to capture. Amber snuck into a pic of Brent and Alexa unbeknownst to them. I also got some rare Dinosaur/Asian action photos. After Peacock’s we went back to G’s to listen to Clay play, not Coldplay (see definition 1). Amber had to sit down and have some water but soon caught a second wind and took over the mic for a minute to sing and do some pretty horrible stand-up. It was a long night for her, and I hope she had fun. Happy 21st Birthday Amber.

The rest of the pics.

Saturday was my first day of snowboarding for this season. I hardly slept Friday night, and was up extra early Saturday morning. Amanda’s brother Mike and his friend showed up at Nate’s around 9:30 ready to go, we waited around for another, but alas, a no show. Not a big deal, rad times were had anyway. We got up there after about an hour and fifteen minute drive to see a full parking lot. That was not expected due to it only being the second day the place was open. Mitch made the drive down to Chestnut from Madison to meet up with me. We got there around 11, and Mitch arrived around 12:30. He didn’t call me when he arrived, he wanted to find, and tackle me on the slopes. There were just too many people there, so after 3 hours, he gave up and called. It was all kinds of fun. They had the blowers on the whole time which sucked and was uncalled for. It was snowing hard there all day. Foggy goggles, and wind burnt noses were all around. We left around 7 with about 5 hours of solid snowboarding behind us. All in all it was a great season opener. Thanks for showin up to shred Mitch. I’m still so proud of you that you didn’t bust out your “attention tats,” even though you were so badly wanting to. “What are tatters?” “Show him.”

Here is Mitch’s take on Saturday:

Oh Droogies, it was lovely.
Current mood: clear.

Oh she was nice and warm and inviting and oh so enticing. I was as bundled up as much as a little man in space could be, her cold hard love sent ice through my veins as I shot down her belly into her lap and then back up again. Just the right size for somebody who hasn’t experienced that type of stimulation in over a year. It was glorious, I was glorified, liberated and in love.

As the day progressed we got more accustom to each other and she opened up to me a bit for I was feeling alone for half of the time I was as there and I drove 2 hours just to see her, I wasn’t being treated very nicely. I rolled up a couple of Nose Blunts and rode switch for a while and had about as much fun as I could have in one day then, I found the Rich(es). We laughed and cackled and yelled and screamed whilst riding the chair lift an finally near our last run down I eat shit. Blankets upon blankets of snow covered my 20 something face and I stood up and lauphed so hard for I haven’t felt that good since I was 22. So much snow, so much fun for only 3 bucks! I will be snowboarding my ass off this year and there aint nuttin you can do ’bout it. What a glorious Saturday. Thanks, Rich for talking me into it ya gayrod. Ya fat fuckin gayrod.

Too bad it was blowing snow all day or I would have torn those rails to shreds.