Up for Whatever pt1

Super Bowl Commercial

Scene: a loud bar. A man walks in the door and sits down at the bar and shouts over the noise of the music and the other patrons. 

Man: “Can I get a Bud light?”

Bartender: “If I give you this drink, are you up for whatever happens next?”

Man: “Uh, Sure. What?”

Bartender: “Ok, here. Thanks for being up for whatever.”

Man: “Whaa? How did you speak with italics?”

Bartender: “Nevermind that. It’s just to make this dialogue easier to read.”

The bartender hands the man a bottle of Bud Light. The Man is immediately surrounded by a pack of midgets dressed as pac-man. The midgets are grinding and gyrating all over his ankles. The man tries not to lose his balance and step on any of them. 

Man: “Um, Can I help you guys?”

Midgets dressed as pac men: Dancing harder

Man looks up at the bartender who was suspiciously accepting a bulging envelope from a group of Clydesdale horses.

Man to the drunk next to him: “Dude, are those horses over there?”

Drunk: “Shouldn’t have gotten bud light, Man.”

The bartender walks to the other end of the bar and pulls a lever. The man falls through a trap door, taking a few of the midgets with him. 

Man: “Ahhh!”

Midgets dressed as pacmen: “Weeeee”

Drunk: *takes Man’s bud light*

The group falls through a dark tunnel for a few seconds, then crash onto a concrete floor.

Man’s Legs: CRUNCH!

Midgets: dead.

Man: “AAAHHH… Uhhh… Whaaaaat the…”

Dark Figure: “Let’s go, Bud, somebody’s up for whatever”

The two dark figures pull the Man onto a ping pong table. The Man stares at the ceiling that is plastered with movie posters.  The Expendables. Napoleon Dynamite. The Man blacks out.

The Man comes wakes up with throbbing pain. He looks around in a dirty corner of a blaring club. One Republic is playing. He looks down and sees a large incision across his stomach. He loses consciousness as they sing, “everybody knows where we’re going, yeah, we’re going down.” 

The Man dies. His family tries to sue Anheuser-Busch for stealing his kidneys, but they lose the court case because the bartender testifies that the Man agreed he was “up for whatever.” 

 

 

Hold it!

Dear Interwebs Strangers:

Yesterday I checked the integrity of concrete sludge storage tanks as part of my job. (I’m a structural engineer) (Yes, Sludge means what you think). I awarded the concrete tanks 10 integrities, in case you were wondering.

We (my 2 coworkers and I) left at 7am, for our 2 hour drive to the jobsite. No big deal, right? Wrong. My colon doesn’t like confined spaces such as tight pants, medium-sized cars, or even larger sized boats. Like a baby knows when mom is away, my colon knows when there is no bathroom nearby. And he is not afraid of throwing a temper tantrum.

I’ve taken this trip about 5 times now for different sludge storage tanks, (humans produce a Lot of sludge… some more than others…*Blush*) and this is the first time I’ve asked to stop for a bathroom break on the way.

I wasn’t sure if it would be better to say “I gots to go to the bathroom, fellas… I’ve got ulcerative colitis.”  Or just, “If you don’t stop this car now, Imma crap my pants.”  I went for some variation of the latter.

My question to you, reader, is do you think I should have told them about my condition, or just let them wonder as to why I’m so fond of bathrooms?

What would you do? What do you do? (Lol. do do).

Have you ever…

have you ever wore a new pair of socks that were so new they were slippery and every time you stepped in your dress shoes, your feet slid forward about half a centimeter (for my American readers, think of this as about the width of a french fry… McDonalds…not Wendy’s) and made a squeaky vibrating noise that was so annoying you tied your shoes tighter but that cut off the blood circulation to your feet and then your feet fell asleep so you walked around lifting your sleeping feet up and down like you were a puppet on a string?
No? Oh. me neither.
Just asking.

“I’m Da best”

A question my friends never ask me, but I wish they would is this: “In these days of financial uncertainty ¹, what is a sound investment?”
Well, thank you for asking, hypothetical friend.
Here is a bit of wisdom I learned in an investment seminar²:

“You will always get a good return on your investment when you invest in yourself.”

It’s on the internet, so you know it must be true. Check it out.

Which, of course, is true if you are someone like bill gates or elon musk. However, a fundamental truth about nearly everyone I’ve ever known is that the average person thinks they are better than the average person.

This has always been the case, but is now painfully evident with the internet. Now any number of idiots can write about anything they want… say, their ailing colon… and expect people to listen and read their musings.

So, in short… you’re probably not that great, but keep trying cause that’s how you improve. (I’m thinking of writing here…if you suck at other things, like juggling knives…maybe it’s best to not keep trying while you still have a few limbs left)

I recently read a great blog post about what is valuable when using social media. Check it out here.

 

¹ I’ll be honest, I have no idea if the markets are financially unstable. But, I did see a scary click-bait add on Weather.com about a guaranteed market collapse within 5 months. (It turned out to just be an add…but still, you never know)

² by “investment seminar,” I mean “overheard at chipotle.”  But hey, at least it wasn’t Qdoba, AMIRITE!

E-BLAST!

When did emails become “e-blasts”?  Did my companies HR department get taken over by the military?

 

 

Mmm Cake

My wife made me a marble cake…
But I mistook it for a granite cake.

That joke exemplifies how I feel about blogging. If there is something humorous to write about, I kill it with poor delivery.
But that’s why they call it a “blog,” I guess. (In Latin, “blog” means “a pile of steaming chicken poop, but we see that you made an effort, so good job nit wit” Latin is laden with insults, which is why Latinas now speak Spanish instead of Latin. true story.)

So thanks to the few of you who muddle through the sloppy wording and poor comedic timing while I learn how to write good. I’ll be sure to thank you in my first book.

Pinkie Poo

I was thinking today (by thinking I mean “using the toilet”)…Since I use the bathroom about 5 times more frequently than someone who does not have colitis, it is five times more impressive that I haven’t gotten pink eye yet.

*edit: after a cursory check  of the internet, I have learned that pink eye can be caused by many things, and not necessarily always fecal matter in your eyes. But let’s be honest. If you have pink eye, everybody’s gonna assume you were slingin’ poo like a monkey at the zoo. Which is fine. You can sling poo like a monkey if you want to. As long as you don’t throw it at the monkeys. They don’t allow that. Trust me, I know. Some of my best friends are monkeys. Ha. Just kidding, I’m not cool enough to hang with the monkeys.

I had a little shadow

A high school sophomore job shadowed me today. At one point when I asked if I’m going too fast, he replied, “I think I’m getting some of this…”

That should have been a hint for me to slow down and not go so in depth, but I was Sooooooo excited that I didn’t have to use the bathroom (after a few days of being anxious that I’d have to use the bathroom 3 times in my hour and a half job shadow) that I just kept zooming.

I’m so fast! Look at me! I don’t even have to stop to use the bathroom!

(needless to say, he was quite impressed with my ability to hold my bowel movements)

He gave me an “Uh, what?” when I asked him to rank my ability to hold BMs. I’m assuming “Uh what” is equal to “off the charts” since it is, indeed not on the 1-10 scale I specified.

Thoughts from the Handicap Stall

Oh, hey you. I know you. You are the leading expert on all things political, racial, and sports doping related since reading Quartz this morning, aren’t  you?

Well, I’m gonna tell you about a bigger issue than all of those.

Deforestation.

Here is a test: think of the last pencil you used. Was it wooden? Nope. It wasn’t. It was mechanical. You know how I know?

Because they aren’t making any more wooden pencils. There are exactly NO more trees in existence that have yellow bark and graphite cores to turn into pencils. We used them all up before we even realized it. I know because I googled it.

Still feel smart, smartypants? hmm?

Move over

Readers, today I’m blogging about something very important.

Hmm. Ok, let’s be honest, I should say: Reader, today I’m blogging about something important.

Oh, fine.  Mom, listen up, I’ve written another blog post.

Grand Rapids (the city I live in) has some of the worst drivers. I know you think Your city has the worst drivers, reader (read: mom), but Grand Rapids has something nobody else does: the nice driver.

I was in a line of about 100 cars inching along on a main road on my way to work. Each foot was painfully slow. A single car pulls up to a stop sign ahead of me. I had been waiting in this line for nearly ten minutes, or about 5 “mattress blow out” radio commercials. Seeing that the car wanted to get in our lane, the guy (read: woman) in the car front of me immediately stops even though he (she) is halfway through the intersection.

She wildly waves him in, and resumes talking to herself.  (Ok, I couldn’t hear her, but I’m just assuming she was talking to herself since only a crazy person would let in a car that just got there when we’ve been waiting so long that all the mattresses are sold by now.)

Then, not ten seconds later, as we are still stopped, another driver pulls up, and is immediately waved in enthusiastically by the kind lady in front of me. I thought I was mad at first, but then she did it a freaking third time!

By then my front bumper was practically inside her trunk, so I had a good look at her face in the rear view mirror as she looked up and scowled at me. Naturally, I honked at her. Nobody gets away with being this moronic without Tim hoking at them.

Surprisingly, the honking did not help. There were no more cars to let in, but our line was still not moving.

Then the kind idiot reaches over and grabs what I assume was a very intriguing book and a blanket, and proceeded to take a 10 minute nap.

While yelling, “WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU DOING?” I inched forward and rolled down my window so she could hear me, then I inched some more. Which, as you may have guessed, did nothing.

Eventually she woke up and saw that traffic had cleared. Unfortunately for the half of Grand Rapids that was in line behind me, she also saw a squirrel in a tree ahead a few yards.  Naturally, she waved it across, too.

But the squirrel wasn’t interested in crossing the road. It was thinking, “Why is that Crazy waving at me? I wonder what book she is reading? I wonder if it is Who moved my cheese?” (Squirrels are constantly playing the question game… and reading books…they love to be informed…which is why my blog does so well in the 3-8 year old squirrel demographic. Just kidding. But I hope to break into that group soon with my new book Who moved my nuts? and the sequel: Who planted a tree right where I buried my acorns?)

Ok, where was I?  Right, the wavy lady was about to attack the squirrel. She left her car and climbed up the tree (as “nice ladies” sometimes do in the name of being a courteous driver) and shooed the squirrel across the road.

The oncoming traffic was not at a stand still, though, and the squirrel was squished by a black Cadillac SUV, killing half of my future target audience. (it is hard to train a squirrel to read).

Seeing the smattering of fur in the center lane was the last straw for the wavy lady. The only sensible thing was to pull her car into oncoming traffic so she could move it’s little body to the side of the road. She did just that. Surprisingly, oncoming traffic stopped safely and without honking or yelling. This must not be the first squirrel crazy lady has murdered.

As I watched her pick up and pet the oozing pile of fuz and guts and move it to the side of the road, I heard muffled honking in the distance.

As I strained to hear where it was coming from through the haze, I realized I was leaned over my steering wheel and drooling on my pants. When the fuzz had cleared and I had awoken completely , I saw that the road was clear in front of me as far as I could see, and there was a line of people behind me honking and yelling. The car behind me was nearly in my backseat, so I waved kindly and pulled through the light just as it was turning red.

I should really set an alarm for these stoplight naps.