So I’ve got this friend who likes Nerf…

He told me a few months ago that, in a drunken stupor at Target, he picked up a double barrel shottie Nerf gun and had some fun times with it in his apt. Well, it just so happened that Kate and I happened to be in Target one night on the eve of a major snow storm so we stocked up on Nerf for the weekend.

After multiple impromptu battles of foam flying melee, I had the brilliant idea of applying what I learned with my car project to the guns via various antiquing techniques. Even better, why not experiment on a gun for my buddies upcoming birthday.

The one issue (which was most important here), was that it was cold as shit outside. I learned my lesson in the past that spray painting in the bathroom was an extremely bad idea, I decided to make my storage space my makeshift paint booth. This was no easy task because it took a drive to the space in the wee hours of the night to escape the security guards while I painted but damned if I wouldn’t suffer for my art.

Behold the fruits of my labor:

The original product after a good sanding down

First coat of primer after a basecoat of flat black

Finally laying down some color: flat army green

Kate was intently busy supervising (and playing doodlejump)

Still more drying time

So after everything was painted, I brought the parts back home and took a fine brush of silver paint to the pieces to make it all look nice and used. I also wrapped the grips in tape and dyed them with black and brown shoe polish and engine grease

The final product

Facebook

Facebook is dead. I’m calling it. Facebook has finally reached total and complete market saturation. It’s now a noun as well as a verb. I remember being on myspace, before they let teens on, and it was pretty cool. I could add some friends here and there, whatever. I was too old and out of school to get on facebook so it served my needs to flirt with girls and well, flirt with girls.

Then facebook let everyone in. Holy shit, it was like the world was brand new again. I was finally allowed into this awesome night club that was so exclusive and awesome and well, it was kind of like myspace. Minus the 12 year olds with horrible, browser-crashing css skins and sparkles and auto-playing P.O.D. songs.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is wonderful and clean and brilliantly coded. It has allowed me to find every single ex-girlfriend I’ve ever had back to junior high. I have found people I used to work with a decade ago. Hell, even my mom is on facebook.

Over a year or so, I accumulated a few hundred “friends” in my arsenal. You know how many I actually give a flying fuck about? 10. Maybe 11. Why do people have the need to add someone they sort of know and never even talk to them again. Is it some hunter gatherer thing? Are they afraid that if they don’t add them, then and there, that they will lose the chance to add them forever?

I’ve realized that a lot of the people I’ve added and sort of attempted to rekindle the past with and find out what they are up to now; I really could care less in the first place. Great, you got married and look just like you did in highschool, just… puffier and never left your hometown. Yes, yes I would love to continue being friends with you even though we barely spoke a word towards eachother 10 years ago.

Facebook is kind of cool to fuck around with your friends and call them faggots and homos when they post a photo of themselves passed out on the floor but other than that, if I want to interact with my friends, I will get in my car and go to their house, or see them at a show, or pick up my phone and give them a call. You know… real world interaction. Imagine that.

I bid thee farewell facebook. It’s already started to happen. The spammers and evil apps and 12 year olds have already infiltrated your ivory castle more and more. I’m giving it a year until we find a new cleaner and more exclusive nightclub.

Hell, maybe friendster will finally make a comeback.

more

yes please

(open in new window for larger pics)

From a friend…

At college a big project I had to work on was “Italian Fashion Show”. Everyone doing my course had to make some Italian fashion and do a catwalk show in front of the dean, guests and parents. It was a big deal and intended to showcase the talent on the course.

I got together with my college mates and plotted what we’d do. We ended up deciding that we’d make a massive plate of spaghetti on a table, that we all get underneath and stick our heads through whilst wearing brown stockings on our heads full of scrumpled up brown paper. We were to be the meatballs. We thought it was an excellent idea.

We spent days building this thing in the college yard cos it was so big, made a table out of cardboard with legs, put a tablecloth over it and had a huge plate on top that we filled with “spaghetti” rolls of paper. It looked proper good but when we had a walk about and looked at what other people had made we had a real “oh my god what the fuck have we done” moment.

So it came to the night of the show and we were a bit embarrassed. We decided to go down into Peckham and get some booze from Crack-a-Jack, the big off-license. We bought two bottles of whiskey, a bottle of blue alchopop stuff and some beer. Bad idea. When it was time to go on stage we were pretty much legless. My friends and I put the stockings on our heads, filled them with brown paper and poked them through the holes in the plate we’d made and walked to the cargo lift. It was too small. There was no way we were going to be able to get it into the building.

We decided to run at it, ripping the sides of the table off and wedging ourselves in the lift. When we got to the floor we were supposed to be going to we fell out of the lift, barged past everyone queuing to go up the catwalk because we couldn’t see what was going on, went up the catwalk, hit the end of the stage and turned round to go back. We missed the catwalk on the way back and fell off the front of the stage and as we did one of my mates puked. Have you ever seen someone with a stocking over his head puke? It’s not a good scene. I crawled out of the hall, out of the door and never went back into college again. Funny thing is is that it turns out they loved it and used photos of us in the prospectus for the next year!

Ok, so I’m sorry for saying god damnit…

Today:

- my dog tore both ACL’s which will require two surgeries @ $4k a pop
- some dumb whore ran into my bumper at lunch today
- my hard drive with 140 gigs of music, literally every song I have amassed since 2000, just died
- my brand new blackberry is locked with a password I do not have

anything else you want to add dude?

That’s pretty weak dude…

So Carson has a bad hip right now. He’s going to a specialist this Thursday (*crosses fingers) but until then, he is pretty much a three-legged dog. Something happened to him last Friday and ever since, he has been limping around the house and generally not moving from his sprawled out position unless motivated by a bone.

I also live on the third floor of a condo building so this proves to be a tricky situation when Carson has to give back to nature. He’s great with going downstairs on three legs and personally, it’s really funny to watch, but by the end of his walk, he is completely spent and totally unable to make it up the three flights of stairs. At first I tried walking up and encouraging to “walk it off” and climb the stairs like a champion but right now, my dog is clearly a bench warmer and isn’t up to the task.

So it finally came down to me physically picking him up and scaling the stairs myself. I have literally picked Carson up three times in his entire life of ten years. Once when I found him in an abandoned trailer, once when I picked him up to put him in the car for the first time and once when I picked him up when we were wrestling to assert my wrestling dominance. Suffice it to say, he isn’t used to being handled in such a manner. Let me try to illustrate what it’s like to pick up Carson. Imagine a 90 pound dead body on the ground where both it’s legs and it’s arms are sticking up in the air, stiff as a board. Now imagine trying to pick it up and maneuver it up three flights of narrow stairs.

Ok, so here’s the reason of why I started writing this post in the first place. Today was a hard day at work. I got home, grabbed a beer from the fridge and took the dog out for a walk. All was going well, dog did his thing, he limped home, everything was as normal as it could have been. We get to the stairs and I walk up a flight. I encouraged Carson to give it another try but he just looked at me with the same doe eyes he’s been looking at me with for the past few days so I walked downstairs to give him a little aid. I put my beer down on the first step, tried out a new carrying method (see figure 1a) and we were on our way.

Figure 1a

We get to the top of the mountain, I put the dog down and prepare to make my descent to retrieve my beer. What happens next? Yup, the dog follows me all the way down to the bottom. Fuck my life. So I sit there with beer in hand, take a sip and then look at the dog and motion him back up the stairs. What does he do? He runs up the stairs on three legs wagging his tail the entire way.

I’ve been conned for four fucking days into carrying my 90 pound dog up three flights of stairs.

*sigh

Best letterhead evar

So many typefaces!!!

2009

Bad:
- my second mom died
- I had my first nervous breakdown which left me homebound for weeks
- I worked with an absolutely horrible psychiatrist who mis-diagnosed me as well as prescribed medication which made me worse
- being let down by mechanics
- forgetting how important kate was to me
- I was laid off from an increasingly horrible job due to the economy
- I was forced to take a mind-numbingly boring corporate job
- I started up my own company but quit
- christmas
- realizing that some “friends” only come to you when they need something from you

Good:
- I found a great shrink who put me on the right drugs and now I’m not that crazy anymore
- I can’t even begin to emphasize how important Kate was to me to get through this summer
- Getting absolutely trashed on the river with a gaggle of my friends this summer
- hide and go seek games in the house
- remembering how important kate was to me
- working on Roxy with jason
- getting a sex drive again
- getting into PVW (finally)
- actually loving my job and my co-workers for once
- playing beer pong on a linen table and having waiters continually bring us pitchers of beer
- meeting/making new and old friends on my blog, boards and at car shows (special shout to the cbox crew haha)

just another day at the office…

JKREW: well have fun at your sexual punching party
lbear: Ew.
JKREW: hey I’m not the one writing “dirty” coupons, whatever that means
lbear: It was hot. And artfully done with embossing and sparkly ink.
Paper Source is my mecca.
JKREW: “hot” and “sparkly ink” don’t belong in the same sentence
lbear: It was hot!
JKREW: Thats like writing “Good for one night of ass to mouth” and drawing hearts over the i’s
lbear: I’ll do that next time except for the part where that’s fucking GROSS
I don’t do ass to mouth.
JKREW: you never do ass to mouth