The Wicked Life of a Golf Monster

The Golf Monster Goes Hollywood!

2012-01-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

Typically my Winters are kind of a dreary time for me. The weather puts a damper on business so I typically have an abundance of time off. As you know, "idle hands do the devil's work," so I often spend a good chunk of January and February doing things I probably shouldn't be doing, causing possibly irreparable damage to myself in the process. But every late January, a little culture invades our area of the country and shakes things up a bit, and I look forward to it every year. I'm talking about the Sundance Film Festival.

The Festival kicked off this past weekend here in Salt Lick and up in Park City, bringing with it, it's share of celebrities, what passes for "musicians" these days, starstruck onlookers and grumbling locals that hate anything different coming their way. I first started going to the festival way back in 2004 when my buddy Nick and I attended the documentary premiere of Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. Say what you will about the film's content or subject matter, but this was a totally different kind of movie watching experience. There were no screaming kids, everyone was polite and the filmmakers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (the cats that produced the Paradise Lost trilogy about the West Memphis 3) actually gave their own insight before the screening and had a Q&A session after it was over. The ability to interact with the people "making the sausage" if you will turned me from just a casual fan of movies into a guy that was very interested in the whole process of film making and the stories behind it.

In subsequent years, I've added the amount of Festival films screenings that I've attended. I tend to avoid the "big" premieres featuring your typical Hollywood megastars. There's a better than average chance those movies will secure wide distribution and you'll be able to see them anyway. Instead we typically shoot for documentaries and weird, quirky, and often times pretty gruesome films that aren't likely to reach a wide audience any time soon. Sometimes, they're great, I Saw The Devil, a Korean revenge movie, was the third best movie that I saw all of last year. Sometimes, not so much. The Oregonian might have been the shittiest film I've seen in my entire life. Last year, with my buddy VodkaRob and my sister, I attended four features that were paired with three shorts. This year we're due to see six features this week. Here's a quick preview. I'll be doing reviews of each after it's all over.

THE FEATURES:
BLACK ROCK

Starring: Katie Aselton, Kate Bosworth, Lake Bell, Jay Paulson
Directed by: Katie Aselton

Official Description: Sara invites her childhood friends Abby and Lou, on a reunion trip to a remote island in Maine. There will be laughter, tears and boozy catharsis. It's the sort of weekend that can transform the three into fully realized, grown-ass women. You already know this movie right? Wrong.
Emotional release will come, but this is no weepy ballad of reconciliation. Working from a script by her husband, Mark Duplass, Katie Aselton returns to the festival with a taut, satisfying thriller. As the danger rises, the gorgeous cinematography transforms the bucolic island into sinister and formidable terrain. Kate Bosworth, Lake Bell and director Aselton capitalize on the material and deliver remarkable performances, imbuing moments of unbearable suspense with raw emotion.
So get your chick-flick jollies somewhere else! The women of Black Rock have to confront something far more dangerous - and heavily armed - than their feelings.

My take: Wasn't terribly excited about this one until I saw who put it together. I'm a huge fan of the highly crude, yet fucking hilarious show on FX called The League. And both director/star Katie Aselton and writer Mark Duplass are two of the anchors of the ensemble cast of that show. So this is worth taking a flyer on based on that alone. And hey, Bosworth played Lois Lane, so she's got that going for her.

V/H/S

Starring: Joe Swanberg, Adam Wingard, Sophia Takal, Calvin Reeder
Directed by: Adam Wingard, Glenn McQuaid, Radio Silence, David Bruckner, Joe Swanberg, Ti West

Official Description: When a group of petty criminals is hired by a mysterious party to retrieve a rare piece of found footage from a rundown house in the middle of nowhere, they soon realize the job isn't going to be as easy as they thought. In the living room a lifeless body holds court before a hub of old television sets, surrounded by stacks upon stacks of VHS tapes. As they search for the right one, they are treated to a seemingly endless number of horrifying videos, each stranger than the last.

My take: It seems like this one is right up my fucked up alley. I love the weird stuff. There are two red flags though. First, there's SIX directors. Could be a case of too many cooks spoiling the soup. And then there is the involvement of Calvin Reeder, the "visionary" behind the shittiest film I've ever seen, The Oregonian. Could be trouble.

ROOM 237

Director: Rodney Ascher

Official Description: Have you ever seen a hidden message?
In 1980 Stanley Kubrick released his classic horror film, The Shining. Loved and hated in equal numbers, the film is considered a genre standard by many loyalists, while others viewers dismiss it as the lazy result of a director working far below his talent level. In between these two poles, however, live the conspiracy theories of ardent fans who are convinced they've decoded The Shining's secret messages regarding genocide, government conspiracy, and the nightmare we call history.

My take: Kubrick was awesome. The Shining is awesome. A documentary about Kubrick and The Shining has got to be awesome, right? We'll see.

EXCISION

Starring: AnnaLynne McCord, Traci Lords, Ariel Winter, Roger Bart, Jeremy Sumpter, John Waters
Directed by: Richard Bates Jr.

Official Description: Pauline isn't your typical teen. She picks scabs, dissects roadkill and fantasizes about performing surgery on strangers. Her fascinations disturb her parents and her classmates. Pauline reserves special disdain for "the church" and her "therapist," Reverend William, who, in Pauline's mind, is in no position to judge, or indulge in, her psychosexual fantasies. No one understands Pauline except for Grace, her younger sister, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. An outcast at school and at home, Pauline decides she is ready to lose her virginity...and this is where the weirdness really begins.

My take: HOLY SHIT! LOOK AT ALL THE BLOOD! Plus, you've got the involvement of John Waters and Traci Lords. Should be awesome. Evidently this one has been making the festival circuit for several years now and just now made the Sundance cut. So who knows how much they had to punch it up to get it in.

THE PACT

Starring: Caity Lotz, Casper Van Dien, Haley Hudson, Sam Ball
Directed by: Nicholas McCarthy

Official Description: Annie returns home to attend her much-despised mother's funeral as a favor to her older sister. Sleeping in her old bedroom, Annie senses something unfamiliar in the house. She enlists the help of a local cop and a clairvoyant to answer some questions surrounding her mother's death. As long-repressed nightmares begin to haunt Annie's life again, an unsettling presence emerges in her childhood home.

My take: This film debuted at last year's festival as a short. It played before the aforementioned The Oregonian and completely blew it out of the water. There wasn't time for your normal horror movie payoff, but the tension built up in the short was insane. I'm pretty excited to see a fully fleshed-out version of that film.

THE SHORTS:
LAZAROV

Starring: Nietov
Directed by: Nietov

Official Description: Refusing to accept the decline of the USSR, a handful of Russian scientists work secretly to resurrect Soviet power through the mysterious program, Lazarov.

My take: Hell and yes. This one is paired with Excision and from the short trailer I've seen, it looks like an entry into the "found footage" genre. The holy grail of which is stuff from behind the Iron Curtain. For a good example check out Metallica's music video for All Nightmare Long. The movie is only five minutes, but it looks pretty cool.

ONCE IT STARTED IT COULD NOT END OTHERWISE

Starring: Who knows?
Directed by: Kelly Sears

Official Description: A mysterious force invades a 1970's high school.

My take: Short and sweet. Might be good, it might suck. They don't give us a hell of a lot to go on here. It screens with The Pact.

So there you have it. This is going to be a very interesting week of movie watching. But like I said before, it's not just the entertainment value that makes these screenings worth it, it's the educational insights into the independent film-making process and the interactivity with those involved in making these films that make this festival a "must attend" event year in and year out. For my Utah friends, I encourage the hell out of you to get out and see some of these movies. The vast majority won't see the light of day otherwise. And it's only fifteen bucks a feature, which isn't all that more expensive than a usual night at the movies anyway! The American version of Cannes is in our backyard folks, give it a shot! Reviews coming up next week!

Time Just Fades The Pages In My Book Of Memories...

2011-12-21T01:33:00.000-07:00

Well, the air outside is freezing-ass cold and so filthy you can taste it. The grass is turning random shades of brown and there's barely enough time after the frost comes off to finish eighteen holes these days. Yep, it's Winter, and that means I finally have some time to sit down and put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, or something to something. After a summer in which I finally achieved some success, made a competitive comeback, fell back into some bad habits and ultimately walked away from my dream, I've got some shit to get off my chest. And in the next couple months, I'm going to cover that and a whole lot more. It's time to GET IT ON!

Last week Guns N' Roses made their way back to Salt Lick for the first time since the Use Your Illusion era, eighteen years ago. In that span a whole lot of things have changed. Everybody knows that the band is completely different these days. Lunatic frontman, Axl Rose, is the only member left from the famed Appetite For Destruction lineup. In the twenty years since Appetite era drummer, and famed coke fiend, Steven Adler quit/got shitcanned, the band has gone through almost as many lineup changes as my beloved Chicago Bears have had starting quarterbacks. Yet still, Axl remains, after eighteen different members have come and gone and come back and went away again, he's the only really consistent thing about that band anymore.

In that same period of time, my own life has taken many turns as well. Even in my early teenage years, where every kid is a crazy, loud asshole, well I was still and asshole, but a quiet and reserved asshole. Thinking back, I kinda was the creepy kid in the back of the classroom that liked reading non-age appropriate novels and listening to oldies bands that went out of fashion twenty years previous. But I did play baseball, and I was pretty good at it so nobody gave me any shit. As much as I loved it though, the game eventually started to feel more like work than anything else. So I took up golf, simply because it was something almost nobody my age was doing at the time. In fact, since this was the pre-Tiger Woods era, playing golf was about the least cool thing you could probably do at that age.

But a new kid came to school in the ninth grade, Bryan, a big Texan kid and the first person my age that I knew could swing a club. Together we were the lone freshman kids on the Carbon High golf team that season and through that, we started hanging out. He was really one of the first post-baseball world friends that I had where we'd hang out other than at school or practice. It was Bryan that introduced me to one of the segments of pop culture that have really defined me in the last twenty years, the world of hard rock and heavy metal.

As I mentioned before somewhere along the line, we didn't have much for local radio in Price. We had a right-wing talk station, a soft rock station, six or seven country stations (at least that's what it seemed like) and the one I gravitated towards (because that's all my dad listened to), the oldies station. We had cable, but outside of Remote Control, I didn't watch a ton of MTV back then. Of course, why would I? Most of the bands I knew and loved at the time had their heyday twenty years before then! I think I was hipster before hipster was hipster! But I remember vividly, always stopping while flipping channels by three videos in particular: Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer," Metallica's "Enter Sandman," and Guns N' Roses' "November Rain." So I kinda always was a closet hard rock fan, but I felt like I'd painted myself in a corner as far as my musical tastes go. I was so scared to fucking death of looking ignorant discussing it, because it was one of the few things I didn't feel like I had and encyclopedic knowledge of and because I was so afraid of being considered "uncool." I ultimately didn't realize that I was already the least cool kid in my hometown (which considering where I grew up put me in contention for least "with it" guy nationwide,) simply because I was always afraid of being true to myself. In other words, a typical teenager.

In keeping with the trend of staying about ten years behind the times, I got my first stereo and Sony Discman for Christmas in '95 and began spending almost all of my job and lawn mowing money building a music collection. My first two CD's: The Best of The Doors, and the soundtrack to The Big Chill. I WAS 16 GOING ON 50! But in the Summer of '96 things kicked into high gear as far as my musical education goes. We had a full-fledged group now. Bryan, Odie, Jahon, White Chocolate, Trey, Olie and myself formed our very own band of idiots. Also that Summer, Bryan introduced "The Tape."

"The Tape" was a mixtape he had made containing all the popular standards of heavy music from back then, Metallica, Megadeth, GN'R, Ozzy Osbourne, Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Van Halen and more. We played that fucking thing back to back in Bryan's "Pimp-Mobile," a shit-brown 1982 Buick Regal, all summer long. And while the grunge tunes didn't excite me too much, I was fiercely attracted to the speed and power of the thrash bands, the technical mastery of Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, and the sleazy swagger of Guns N' Roses. I set about spending almost every spare penny I had for the rest of my high school life finding every recording I could of the 80's hard rock and thrash bands. I'd finally found a real passion about something outside of sports that I could share with my friends. And with the way the dynamic of that group was set up, and the way we busted balls, quiet and shy no longer cut the mustard. So I was forced to discover a confidence that I never thought I had. Didn't help much with girls, hell, I still clam up and have no idea how to act cool around the ladies, but I was at least finally sociable.

The Crew. Probably before a nice night of roadblocking or committing random acts of mischief!

Two years later, my folks split up and my family melted down. By that time, I'd taken a couple sophomore kids (Little Nick and Ben) under my wing and brought them into the fold. I'll always be thankful for the support of my friends during that time, but I was a mess. I took up drinking as a hobby and started to retreat back into myself again. To their credit, they wouldn't let me crawl all the way in that hole. But I was a pretty pissed off guy and not happy with life in general. Other than gaining another new friend in my Junior College coach, Skwez, by the time the JC years were over I was ready to get the fuck out of town. I was ready to put it all in the rear-view and move on.

Towards the end of that last summer, we got the whole gang back together for one last barbecue. I spent a good chunk of the evening out on the patio, brooding, pounding Miller Genuine Drafts and generally being a drag. Bryan sat down and started talking, but I wasn't in too much of a listening mood. He was talking about who was hooking up with who, how they had the dog eat some of the tapped melon and how excited but nervous he was about Metallica's upcoming album release of their collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, S&M. He realized he wasn't getting through too well until he launched in with a tirade that has stuck with me since that day. My recollection for detail in that era is for shit, so I'll paraphrase:

"Nickas, stop being a dick. Do you think you're the only one here with any problems? Tomorrow, I'm leaving for Colorado, and you're moving to Salt Lake. Tomorrow, we're both starting from square one in the friend department. Sure, there might be a few people you know in the community, but that's not going to be enough. We're both living in dorms and are going to be around strangers nonstop. Would you want to live with someone that hates the fucking world?"

He was right. I had a real choice to make. Be the type of antisocial asshole I always was scared shitless of becoming, or at least put on a good face and be sociable. Thankfully I made the right choice. As luck would have it, or maybe it was some kind of sick experiment in the Dean's office, everyone in my dorm unit came from a broken home. Some more recently than others, but we all had that in common so we had a place to start. And we all helped each other deal with those issues that will always linger.

It didn't take long, but soon I was no longer faking happiness, I was enjoying my place in the world. That confidence came roaring back, and soon, some of my more overbearing personality traits took over and I got LOUD. I started to preach the gospel of rock and roll to my new friends and before long, I was getting them into hard rock and metal tunes too, dragging them to shows, meeting some rock stars. I was simply excited to share my passion, and I was going to do it whether they liked it or not. It was like I didn't just come out of my shell, I completely obliterated it! Some of them probably didn't like it, but by the time school was done, I'm pretty sure they at least had an appreciation for it that they didn't have before.

In late 2008 Guns N' Roses released their first all-original album since I was twelve years old, Chinese Democracy. My old college roommate, and biggest GN'R fan that I know, VodkaRob and I hit the indie record store on the very night of its release to pick it up. By then we'd both settled into careers. He was a computer tech, I'd just been promoted to Head Golf Professional at the University of Utah. And even though that record sounded absolutely nothing like the classic GN'R of my youth, and you can argue that it doesn't hold up at all, I couldn't deny that chill I got when I heard the first chord on the title track officially (heard tons of demos over the years,) for the first time. I realized that while the band was completely different, I was completely different as well. An hour later we came to the conclusion that with the exception of a few songs, that album basically sucked! But deep down, I didn't really care, I was just happy to share that experience with a friend. And folks, that's one of those things that makes life worth living. Experiencing that kind of shit with your friends.

When I started writing this, I fully intended to do a concert review of that GN'R show from last week. Instead I had a flood of memories and got a little sidetracked. If ya'll don't mind, I'll give the review its own post later this weekend. And down the road, I'll be sharing a few stories from the shenanigans that my old crew of high school buddies and I would get into. Think of them as a "dorm days prequel!"

The True Confessions of a Film Freak: Second Edition

2011-02-26T01:56:00.003-07:00

I've been back to work at Rose Park for the last couple weeks and that's seriously hindered my movie watching time. Gotta pay the bills though, right?

Here in Salt Lick we've got a pretty sweet movie theater called Brewvies that actually has a full liquor license. They showcase films that are kind of in that limbo area in between their prime theater run and their appearances at the dollar theater. So last Thursday we ventured down there and finally saw True Grit. Also being reviewed this week after my brief TV watching week is a film a few years old called Pauly Shore Is Dead, a documentary titled The Two Escobars, a short called Nosebleed and my Basic Cable Standard for the week, Rocky IV. We've got a little snow in the forecast and the Griffin Golf team is on Spring Break this week, so hopefully I'll get to see a few more movies before my next update. On to it!

THE FEATURES

Starring: Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Barry Pepper, Josh Brolin

My little old Great Aunts down home are big western movie fans and I remember watching the original 1969 version of this flick back with them when I was twelve years old. I'll be honest with ya'll, I never quite got the reverence folks had for the John Wayne. There's no denying The Duke had a great body of work, but for the most part, I always thought he was severely lacking range, and most of his performances seemed wooden as hell. His rolling over for HUAC and selling out his fellow actors and writers to that McCarthy douchebag back in the early 50's doesn't exactly make me want to root for the guy either. As far as westerns go, I preferred Clint Eastwood's stuff a lot more anyway.

While I didn't like the original that much, it's a great story of frontier justice and revenge. So when I heard that the Coen Brothers were remaking True Grit, all I could think was, "that's gonna be badass!" Ever since Raising Arizona, those two guys will always get a lifetime pass from me. And holy shit, they cast The Dude as Rooster Cogburn? Sign my ass up!

Bridges was fantastic as U.S. Marshall Cogburn, as was Matt Damon as Texas Ranger LeBoeuf. But the breakout role belongs to newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. It's hard to think of a fourteen year old girl as a badass, but she absolutely was. Of course, seeing as how most folks died at 45 in those days, she may as well have been an adult. She took absolutely no bullshit from anyone in this flick and chewed up scenery in every act. Give her the Oscar! Of course though, it says a lot that Josh Brolin has his name in huge letters on the poster and she gets nary a mention. Especially considering that he's in the movie for all of about ten minutes.

For as huge of a flick as this was, it didn't fall into the typical trap that most epics fall into these days in that it wasn't overly long. In fact, I'd say this was the most well-paced Coen Brothers flick since The Big Lebowski. Safe to say, this was my favorite movie of 2010.

Starring: Pauly Shore, about a million other stars

Back in September of 2004, I took a little vacation out to Los Angeles for a concert. I stayed in the Sunset Hyatt Hotel, famous for being trashed by various rock stars back in the 70's. Next door to the "Riot House" as it was called, is the world famous Comedy Store. The greatest stand-up comedy club in the world. On the marquee the weekend of my vacation was the message: "MY SON ISN'T DEAD." I had no idea what this meant, other than I did know that the Comedy Store was owned by Mitzi Shore, mother of 80's MTV personality and actor Pauly Shore.

Three years later, I'm shopping at my favorite indie record and movie shop Graywhale, and I saw Pauly Shore Is Dead on the shelf. I couldn't pass it up. Bought that sucker and was not disappointed. This film is a single-camera mockumentary of Pauly's life in the mid 2000's. Pauly in the late 80's and early 90's was never really that funny, and his movies were pretty shitty (although Carla Gugino, Joey Lauren Adams and Tia Carerre were pretty nice to look at at the time). Pauly in the 2000's however, was pretty much how you'd expect given the beating in popular culture just about everything from the late 80's and early 90's takes. Jobless and semi-destitute (although still having a couple ducats in the bank), the film begins with Pauly being evicted by his home's new owner, Carrot Top. Forced to move back home with his mother, he wanders LA, running into random celebrities and unsuccessfully begging for movie roles. He eventually takes a job parking cars at the Comedy Store.

One night he's visited by his guardian angel, the ghost of legendary comic Sam Kinison, who advises him to kill himself so he could go down in history as a legend who died before his time. So he fakes his own death and becomes a media sensation with every celebrity you can think of weighing in on how much of a genius Pauly was. Pauly holes up in a motel room and cackles maniacally at the TV as for once, he's back on top. But it's only a matter of time before he gets found out.

This flick definitely doesn't take itself too seriously, with Pauly and the multitude of celebrities taking shot after shot at his act and career. It's hilarious. And what a lineup! No less than Pamela Anderson, AJ Benza, B-Real, Todd Bridges, Tommy Chong, Vern Troyer, The Dahm Triplets, Carson Daly, Ellen DeGeneres, Screech, Andy Dick, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Fred Durst, Perry Farrell, Heidi Fleiss, Paris and Nicky Hilton, Clint Howard, Kato Kaelin, Craig Kilborn, Carl LaBove, Tommy Lee, Kurt Loder, Michael Madsen, Bill Maher, Mark McGrath, Jason Mewes, Pat O'Brien, Nancy O'Dell, Sean Penn, Matt Pinfield. Sally Jesse, Chris Rock, Ja Rule, Britney Spears, Jerry Springer, Vince Vaughn, Montel Williams, Sully Erna, Whoopi Goldberg, Wes Borland, Hanson, Dexter Holland and Ben Stiller all show up to weigh in. It really becomes more of a game of spot the cameo as the story gets a little more ridiculous as time goes on.

It does have some really goddamn funny scenes though, such as Corey Feldman trying to score drugs, Tom Sizemore getting emotional and tearing up about Pauly's "death" even when he's completely surrounded by half-naked hookers and Pauly getting some helpful advice from Charlie Sheen!


Would you buy produce from this man?

Not to mention a totally awesome scene where Pauly comes across 80's Latin act Gerardo (AKA Rico Suave) who happens to be reduced to selling oranges on a freeway off-ramp. Beyond ridiculous, but it might've been worth the purchase for that scene alone. Netflix it for some mindless fun for a couple hours.

MY FEATURE DOC OF THE WEEK:

Directed By: Jeff and Michael Zimbalist

I'm not a fan of soccer, but for some reason I'm fascinated by the drug culture of the 70's, 80's and early 90's. This is kind of weird, because I'm not really a drug guy, but some of the stories are incredible. The Two Escobars chronicles the rise of soccer in Colombia in the mid 80's, and its inevitable fall after a horrible mistake costs them the 1994 World Cup.

Soccer in Columbia was pretty much in the doldrums in the early 80's. They had some good players, but there was no money in it back then. Along came Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellin drug cartel and one of the most polarizing figures in Colombian history. People either felt he was Satan incarnate or a modern day Robin Hood with no in-between. He starts sinking thousands of dollars into the local club team, Atletico Nacional, which soon becomes class of Colombian and eventually South American soccer. Back then though, nobody really talked about where the money was coming from (even though they knew), but they were enjoying the spoils. "Narco-Soccer" ushered in a golden age for soccer in Colombia with drug lords all over the country competing with each other to have their team be the best. And very few ended up being as good as Nacional. The film examines this period as well as the violence that drove it with no qualms whatsoever. They even managed to score an interview in a prison with Pablo Escobar's right hand man, a dude who claimed to be personally responsible for something like 80 deaths on his own. Unreal.

Along side the batshit-crazy stories of violence and revolution, the film also chronicles the rise of another Escobar, Andres and his rise to fame as the captain of first Atletico Nacional and then as the undisputed leader of Colombian National team. By all accounts, he was a shy, spiritual, family man who did all that he could to rise above and shun the violence the drug cartels created. Unfortunately, his career was tied to it whether he liked it or not. And when he accidentally kicked the ball past his own goalie in a 1994 World Cup elimination game against the host United States, the cartels sought their bloody retribution.

This film was incredibly dark and sad. I'm still no soccer fan, but the way it was edited with old game films and newsreels from Colombia as well as some classic period music kept me enthralled throughout. This one stands right up there with Billy Corben's Cocaine Cowboys as two fascinating portraits of that era.

AND NOW, A SHORT REVIEW OF A SHORT:

Nosebleed: David Arquette's nose starts bleeding. He tries to stop it. Sticks a bullet up his nose. Should've fired it out of a gun.

THIS WEEK'S BASIC CABLE STANDARD:

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Talia Shire, Carl Weathers, Brigitte Nielsen, Burt Young, Tony Burton

Rocky IV! Between HBO in the late 80's, and TNT, USA and TBS since then, I'm pretty sure I've seen this movie 1327 times. And before I shuffle off the mortal coil, I'm pretty sure I'll see it a thousand times more. It's easily the most accessible Rocky flick to get into, I mean, who can't get into the old-school USA vs. USSR conflict? Okay, anyone not born after 1985, but I digress. Once again, this passes the "remote control test." If I see it while flipping channels, I'll watch no mater how far in this movie is.

Who didn't want one of these things to bring you beers as a kid?

The plot is beyond simple. Rocky's back on top after knocking out Mike Tyserrrrrrr... Clubber Lang in III and is seemingly content with polishing his Lamborghini and hanging out in his mansion with his wife, kid, alcoholic brother-in-law and their creepy-ass robot servant. He gets a call from his old adversary and unlikely trainer Apollo Creed who is looking to take on the first professional fighter out of the Soviet Union, Ivan Drago, in an exhibition match.

THROW IN THE FUCKING TOWEL JAGOFF!

Oddly enough, this turns out to be a horrible idea. I mean c'mon, the Russian was half his age and may or may not have been a fucking cyborg! Anyway, Rocky ruthlessly murders Apollo by not throwing in the towel as Drago rains titanic shot after titanic shot down on Creed's head. This leads to the inevitable revenge match in Russia, on Christmas (OOOOOH SYMBOLISM!) with Rocky battling Drago in a fifteen round fight for the fate of the free world. Or something like that.

DRAGOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Along the way we're treated to no less than three badass sports-movie montages. The hallmark of any good sports movie of the 80's. First, after yet another one of his wife Adrian's wet-blanket "just give up" speeches, Rocky tears ass through the Philadelphia streets in his Lambo, going at least 150 miles an hour with a deeply contemplative look on his face as he flashes back through the series. As a matter of public safety, it might've been nice though if Rocky just once WATCHED THE FUCKING ROAD! Then there are two fantastic training montages in Russia that juxtaposed Rocky's grass roots, farmer-in-the-dell training methods (SEE HIM DIG A SLEIGH OUT OF THE SNOW! WATCH AS SCRAPPY ROCKY DOES CHIN-UPS IN A BARN AND LIFTS A GIANT NET OF ROCKS!) with the high-tech, steroid laced methods of his Russian killing machine rival. The funny thing is, that at the time in real life, Stallone was 'roided out of his mind. The montage is capped by shots of Rocky ditching his KGB chaperones and running up a 25,000 foot mountain in a pair of boots and a leather jacket. Utterly ridiculous, but fucking awesome all the same.

AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!

And how about that fight! Forget about the ridiculous circumstances (Rocky vacating his title, no prize money, in the Soviet Union, on the Baby Jesus' Birthday) and just revel in the violence! If this fight were real, I'm pretty sure it would've shattered every PunchStat record in history. You could count the misses for each fighter on one hand! Back in the day, title fights went fifteen rounds instead of the twelve from the current era, and you just knew this one was going at least that far; with the (SPOILER ALERT FOR IDIOTS) hamburger faced Rocky vanquishing his Soviet foe and single-handedly ending the Cold War all in a two minute span.

I'm pretty sure Rocky was summarily tossed into a gulag, never to be heard from again after that. My cousin Pete swears he had a Poli-Sci teacher quote that speech in class once, cracking him up and getting him in trouble. I'd have laughed to, because between the two of us, we've both seen each of the Rocky flicks enough times that we now just refer to them as "Rocky," "II," "III," and "IV." We both agree that Rocky V never should've gotten out of a pitch meeting.

Sure, at this point, they're cliched, predictable, and no doubt overexposed, but if I'm ever flipping channels and I see a Rocky flick on there, I can guarantee I'll be sucked in for a couple hours at least. Hell, I'm pretty sure the TNT channel never would've gotten off the ground without showing this and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome on an endless loop back in the day!

Why don't you have a seat...

2011-02-21T00:47:00.000-07:00

"What are you doing with that rope and a bag of Trojans?"

If there's one thing I love almost as much as bad movies, it's bad TV shows. It's really the baser elements of popular culture. The stuff with so little redeeming value that it almost has some in an ironic sense. Author Chuck Klosterman refers to this stuff as "Low Culture," and I'm hooked on it like a coke fiend.

When NBC News' Dateline program started filming their ...To Catch A Predator series, their goal was simple. Expose the dangers to your teenager that creeps online pose. And right out of the gate, they achieved that goal. But like everything else in life, too much can sometimes be a bad thing. As they did more and more of these specials, the reactions from the viewing audience changed from the anger and shock of the proliferation of pedophiles online, to reactions of joy from the entertainment contained within each episode. I know I laugh at these shows a lot more than I probably should. I don't think that's necessarily the reaction the producers of the show intended.

After a while, the show begins to get a little predictable. They show a few online chat-logs between the predator and a decoy. These start innocently enough (for as twisted as this shit is), but almost always devolve into said predator emailing pictures of his junk to the "kid." The guy shows up at a sting-house and is let in by the decoy, who always manages to stay out of the direct eyesight of the predator. As she steps into the back to take care of some last minute laundry, we are treated to a few uncomfortable seconds of the sicko mentally prepping himself for action.

One beat later, the hand of god steps through the curtain. Chris Hansen, surely representing all of our collective judgment, walks onto the scene, along with four cameras and a boom mic; commencing to give the shell-shocked pedophile an interrogative colonoscopy. After two minutes of grilling, the whimpering pederast is allowed to leave the house, and makes his exit into the gentle arms of the local police department. The show usually wraps up with text line of each featured subject and the amount of time he received from the court. Simple and effective, it's public justice for the 21st century.

As predictable as it can be, it's the little details that had me hooked on the show. Hansen's deadpan reading of the chat-logs are awesome: MenudoFan69: do you like the angle of my dangle? I love the amused look on the decoys face as she describes whatever kind of regional snack she's prepared for the predator to nosh on while she throws her soiled shirt in the off-camera washing machine. It's always sweet tea if they're down South, lemonade in California, and cookies or a bowl of candy anywhere else. The guy almost always denies he was there to do anything sexual, but for some reason always has a bag full of rubbers and either a six-pack of Miller Genuine Draft or a bottle of Boone's Farm. And it's always a kick to see the glimmer of hope that he is off the hook in the creep's eyes when Chris says the magic words, "You're free to leave." Of course that always results in about ten angry cops pinning the guy to the driveway as they slap those weird plastic handcuffs on him. Good times.

Sadly, they don't seem to be doing these shows anymore. It came to an end when a District Attorney in Texas suspected of soliciting minors committed suicide rather than face THE LONG DICK OF THE LAW. His family blamed the show, who was in the area filming at the time and a lawsuit was filed. It was later settled and NBC moved on to other stories. There's no doubt the show was effective, but it does bring up some legal questions. Chief among them are the possible entrapment issues their stings brought up, as well as a possible tainting of the jury pools in the cities in which they were filmed.

But when you think about it, they really don't have to film anymore, do they? Because nobody recycles old shit better than current shallow Cable-TV, and that's where ...To Catch a Predator lives now. Predator Raw: The Unseen Tapes on MSNBC shows the original stings WITH BONUS COMMENTARY! And even though I've seen it all before a hundred times, and I know what's going to happen, here I am on a Sunday night waiting for my fix. And I highly doubt that I'm the only one.

The True Confessions of a Film Freak: First Edition

2011-02-10T03:31:00.004-07:00

For anyone that knows me well, they know I'm a movie junkie. I like them all, from great movies like Casablanca to films that are pretty much universally considered to be tripe. Freddie Got Fingered comes to mind there. I like long movies, short movies, documentaries, and everything in between. As I was mentioning in my previous entry, I'm a regular listener to a weekly podcast called The Film Vault on ACE Broadcasting. This ought to be required listening for anyone into the cinema. On each show, the two hosts, Anderson Cowan and Brian Bishop spend a segment discussing the last few films each of them have watched in the previous week. This often leads to some frank discussion of each others tastes, and frequently involves some bustin' balls. Always good stuff. So I figured I'd bare my movie loving soul for ya'll on a weekly basis. I'll confess a few movies that I've watched in the last week. This will typically include two or three features, a documentary, and a segment on a basic cable standard, and I'll sprinkle my opinions on each. I'm not going to pretend to be highbrow. But hopefully, I can point you in the direction of some decent movies, or some horrible movies if you need a laugh. Oh yeah, there will be a spoiler or two, but only on the older flicks. Here we go!

The Features:

(1984)

Starring: Michael Keaton, Joe Piscopo, Maureen Stapleton, Marilu Henner, Peter Boyle

What the hell happened to Michael Keaton? That guy was all over the place between Night Shift in 1982 and Batman Returns in 1992. It was an incredible body of re-watchable work in a ten-year span, many of which I'll be profiling in this space. And then, really nothing of note save for the occasional cameo here or there. Damn shame if you ask me. Dude was every bit as comfortable playing an over-the-top role (Beetlejuice) as he was as a straight man (Hunt Stevenson in Gung Ho). He could even play a stone-cold psychopath (Carter Hayes in Pacific Heights). He had great range.

Johnny Dangerously features Keaton as a mobbed up guy with a heart of gold in a sendup of 30's gangster flicks. He takes up crime as a young boy as a means to pay for his mother's comically expensive surgeries. Joe Piscopo (who made Keaton's post '92 workload look like Bruce Willis') plays his rival in the gang, Danny Vermin. Great fucking name. Maybe the best sounding internet handle after Jackie Treehorn. This flick throws out sight-gag after sight-gag and wacky hijinks ensue.

This came up on the HBO comedy channel at around 1:30 AM the other night, and that might be the best time to see it, in a sleep-deprived haze. I must have seen this movie a hundred times growing up. It was one of my old man's faves. His favorite character being that of evil nightclub owner Roman Maronie, played by another 80's character staple, Richard Dimitri. Maronie unsuccessfully attempts to murder the leader of Johnny's gang and commits wholesale slaughter on the english language as shown here:

Fargin Iceholes! Goddamn hilarious. Bottom line, if you like stuff like Airplane!, give this a shot.

(1976)

Starring: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, William Katt (The Greatest American Hero!), Nancy Allen, and an if-you-blink-you-miss-him John Travolta

Yeesh! Carrie was goddamn creepy the first time I saw it when I was twelve, and it still gives me the chills to this day. This story of a teenage misfit with telekinetic abilities taking out the frustrations of a shitty home-life on her tormentors by ruthlessly massacring them on prom night will freak you out. Jesus, the first time I ever saw the very last scene I nearly pissed myself, and it still gives me the douchechills!

Director Brian De Palma's set design did a great job of making ordinary, benevolent things look strangely menacing. The creepy-assed St. Sebastian statue in Carrie's prayer closet is a good example. LOOK AT IT'S FUCKING GLOWING EYES! But he really gets his money's worth out of his sound designer who combined popular soft-rock songs of that era with creepy sounding organ music, and enough squeaks, screams, and bangs to create an almost Hitchcockian atmosphere.

I don't know whether to pray for forgiveness or run away screaming like a kid with a skinned knee and shit

But the real standout star in my opinion was Carrie's psychotic, religious fundamentalist madre, played by Piper Laurie, who, sadly ended up doing mostly TV Movie of the week work after this. She had several awesome monologues in this movie. Just absolutely chewing scenery in an unreal performance. Here's my personal favorite:

I LIKED IT! IIIIII LIKED IT!!! What a whackaloon! See this one if you haven't already. IFC's been playing it at night every few days lately.

My feature Doc of the week:

(2010)

Directed by: Josh Fox

GasLand popped up on HBO last summer the day I got back from a vacation to see the Yankees in Phoenix. It begins with the filmmaker, Josh Fox receiving a letter from an energy company offering a few bucks to drill for natural gas on his land. The most popular natural gas extraction method is known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" in which a highly pressured mixture of water and volatile chemicals is injected deep into the ground to break up shale rock formations and release the gas.

Not sure what that would do to his land, he set off across the country to see how this method of natural gas extraction is affecting the people who made the decision to allow the drilling rigs on their land. I know you guys want an example. Here ya go:

Here's the thing. These gas rigs are absolutely dotting the landscape all over the place these days. Where Saudi Arabia and "The-Iraq" have the world's largest petroleum deposits, the United States is pretty much the exact same way with natural gas. So there's tons of jobs at stake, and a glimmer of hope for energy independence. But for fucks sake, people's water shouldn't be lighting on fire. This flick was a real eye-opener, and it was recently nominated for an Academy Award. It's damn good. And it kinda freaked me out considering my hometown is virtually surrounded by huge natural gas fields.

And now, a short review of a short:

(2009)

Moth: Hot actress burns a J, hoovers three rails, and pops a handful of pills. Trips out in a bathtub and sees wolves and shit. Kinda sucked.

This Week's Basic Cable Standard:

(1989)

Starring: Ralph Macchio, Pat Morita, Thomas Ian Griffith, Martin Kove, Robyn Lively, Sean Kanan

Karate Kid 3! While the first Karate Kid movie is an undeniable watershed moment of my formative years, the brand got a bit watered down as the years went by. But this one might be one of the most re-watchable of any of the multitude of unnecessary sequels to early 80's flicks that were released in the latter part of that decade. Simply because the plot is beyond ridiculous.

Millionaire industrialist asshole takes time away from doing whatever it is that millionaire industrialist assholes do to assist his old buddy from Vietnam's attempt to ruin the life of a high-school karate champion and resurrect their evil dojo franchise. After about twelve beers that actually seems to make sense. Sober however, it fails miserably.

What makes this flick enjoyable are the little things you notice when you watch it for the 563rd time. It also benefits from a small amount of research. I'm fascinated by the fact that Ralph Macchio, the aforementioned Karate Kid, was actually a year older than Thomas Ian Griffith, playing Terry Silver, said billionaire industrialist asshole. Daniel-San was supposedly a senior in high school in this movie. This means Terry Silver was up to his asshole in the muck in in Southeast Asia, mowing down the North Vietnamese with John Kreese AS A ZYGOTE during the height of the Vietnam war.

Robyn Lively puts up with a lot as Jessica, replacing the iconically yummy Elisabeth Shue from the first film, as Daniel-San's apparent love interest. I say apparent because he seems much more interested in hanging out with a 65-year-old maintenance man than with her, Describing Mr. Miyagi as "my partner and best friend." But hey, Miyagi has the ability to massage a body part back to life. The jokes write themselves. This movie might be joining Top Gun as two of the most sneakily homoerotic movies ever made.

It's a great testimony as to how much of an unlikeable douchebag Daniel-San was, that in three movies spanning the course of a year, three different groups of people on two different continents took time out of their busy lives to fuck with him. Is it any wonder that people are making homemade cuts of these flicks, casting the Cobra Kai in a more sympathetic light? They were obviously just misunderstood. STRIKE FIRST! STRIKE HARD! NO MERCY!

This flick had a great run on basic cable throughout the 90's. TNT, USA, and TBS were literally built on the backs of films like this, Road House, Rocky IV, and Beastmaster 2. And now it's popping up again on Encore or HBO 8, The Ocho. It still passes the remote control test.

The one where a random musing reminds me of an old Dorm Days Flashback...

2011-02-07T23:44:00.000-07:00

Coming up later this week will be the debut of a weekly feature here on the ‘Monster. I’m calling it the “True Confessions of a Film Freak.” If you listen to the awesome weekly podcast on ACE Broadcasting called The Film Vault (and if you aren’t, you should, it’s a must-listen for any fan of the cinema), they have a segment on each of their shows where they confess to the movies they’ve watched in the previous week. Their tastes tend to run fairly high-brow. Mine, unfortunately, do not. It’s been established that I have very little in the way of shame, so weekly here on the blog, I’m going to confess the films I’ve seen that previous week and accept your mockery.

Today I was spending some time filling out a little paperwork. But it wasn’t just any paperwork; it was a Resident Advisor Candidate Recommendation Form for one of my Griffins Women golfers. She wants to be an RA next year. Now, for anyone who has read my writing, especially the stories about my college life, The Dorm Days, know I was never a big fan of rules back in the day, and would expend a foolishly ridiculous amount of effort to circumvent them. I was a moron. So the irony wasn’t lost on me as I answered some questions as to why I think she would be an awesome college dorm authority figure. She’s going to be a great RA. And not by the “college-me’s” fucked up standards, but because she’s exactly who they are looking for.

That leads to tonight’s entry. It was one of the last on the old site before it died, so a lot of you probably missed it. It’s a tale of heartbreak, frustration, debauchery and redemption. This is the final classic piece of my writing from my old blog, and the last of the original “Dorm Days: The Penthouse Chronicles” stories. Don’t worry, there will be some new ones coming down the pike:

“The Good, Bad Week”

(August 2001)

Originally posted to the old blog in January, 2008

There was a light at the end of the tunnel and it was called my senior year of college. The old digs had been abandoned. The Penthouse of Room #302 in Residence Hall #3 had finally passed on to some new denizens as Big Nick, VodkaRob and I had just moved into the newest building on campus, Residence Hall #5. The standard 6-bedroom setup was no more, now we had a choice between 2, 3, 4, and 5 bedroom apartments. In the springtime of the previous year, the administration had an open sign-up date to request roommates. Big Nick and I thought we’d give the 2-bedroom apartment a shot, but there were only three available in the new building so we figured we’d have to be the first in line to sign up, like waiting in line for concert tickets or something. So I slipped a buddy of mine on the maintenance crew twenty bucks and he let us into the Dean’s office waiting room at 5:30 in the morning. Not even the cafeteria cooks would be coming in until 6:00! We had it for sure! The cafeteria opened at 6:30 and people started crowding in around the waiting room’s locked door. They were pissed when the Dean finally showed up to unlock the door, only to find Big Nick and me already in there! Especially considering we were already her favorite targets of scorn, (see: pretty much every story up to this point!), it made it especially satisfying at the time to get our requested room.

VodkaRob and Crazy Pete were the next ones in. In retrospect though, it turned out to be a mistake. Crazy Pete ended up getting a spot in the Navy House, and left VodkaRob on his own. Big Nick and I should’ve gotten the 3-bedroom setup with VodkaRob. As it stood, the only thing that could split up the chemistry of #302 was our own stupid decisions. We shouldn’t have left him hanging like that, and that’s one of my big regrets from that period in time. We could’ve had some fucking fun. Luckily VodkaRob ended up only two doors down in room #304, so it wasn’t like he was clear across campus or anything. Not only that, but it turned out his bedroom seemed like it was as big as Big Nick and my whole apartment! But still, it was kind of a bummer. As luck would have it Big Nick and my top-floor 2-bedroom unit had a familiar number. Yup, we were in Apartment #302 Part II!

Anyhow, that may be the very first example of somebody starting a story off with an aside. Kids, that’s guaranteed to get you a “D” on any paper you write in the future! But fuck it, it’s been awhile, so I figured I’d better bring you folks up to speed. This story is going to chronicle the third week of school, my senior year. It was easily one of the most eventful weeks in my college life, and certainly the biggest roller coaster. I went through damn near every emotion there was that week, and still somehow came out of it with a smile on my face. We’re just gonna take this one in chronological order.

Tuesday, August 28th, 2001

I was getting ready to head to work when Coach DP called me down to his office for a chat. I should’ve known something was wrong when he was sitting in there with the athletic department’s liaison to the registrar’s office. She was the one that certified us and made sure we were all academically eligible to play our chosen sports. “We’ve got a problem Nickas,” coach said with a concerned look on his face.

“What’s up?” I replied, wondering what the hell was going on.

“According to the NAIA rules of progress, we just discovered that you are 1 credit hour short over the course of the past 4 years of your eligibility. We just caught it, and we’ve filed an appeal on your behalf, because it was our mistake. But during the appeals process we’ve got to hold you out of the first two tournaments this season,” said the liaison.

Evidently I’d been borderline eligible throughout my stay at Westminster, but I had taken a just-above-full-time schedule the previous semester that pulled me a single hour short of the limit. The one summer-session class that I’d signed up for getting cancelled due to my being the only registrant didn’t help either. They explained the steps I needed to take, and had me sign the appeals paperwork, and I just walked out of the coach’s office, pissed off. I went to work and lost myself in the driving range.

What a shitty start to the school year! Golf Girl was gone, she’d transferred elsewhere two weeks before school started, never to be seen again. My buddy VodkaRob got ditched by his roommate, and now this! Things can only go up from here, right? Nope.

Wednesday, August 29th, 2001

After a mostly sleepless night, I awoke to a brand new day. After meeting up with VodkaRob and Crazy Pete for breakfast down in the cafeteria, I cruised to my first class, sociology of the elderly, and realized I’d forgotten my notebook and a pen. Not good, but luckily, the swingin’ gal sitting next to me, Jan, hooked me up. “You all right?” she asked.

“Must be losing my mind or something,” I mumbled. Smooth man, real smooth.

Sitting in class was like pulling teeth, but it just seemed like I was biding my time for the afternoon. I was scheduled to play in an 8-man team golf match with my co-workers at Rose Park Golf Course against those rotten bastards from Park City Municipal Golf Course. 12:30 hit and I jetted across campus like I had a rocket up my ass, grabbed my sticks and loaded up in my Blazer, affectionately known to my high school friends as the “Sweet Ride.”

I popped a copy of Pantera’s “Cowboys from Hell” into the CD player and turned the key in the ignition. Dead silence. Hit the key again and the indicator lights lit up my dashboard like a Christmas tree. Nothing. “No no no no no no no!” I yelled. “Fucking electrical shit!” That was one of the few things I didn’t know how to repair on my own. Things had been acting strangely with the truck and I was hoping to get my pops to look at it that Sunday when I went down to the old hometown to play in the “Beer League.”

It looked like I was going to need a jump to get it started, so I figured I’d save it and take my chances on the trip home Sunday. I dialed one of my bosses at Rose Park, D, who thankfully was still in town to get a ride up to Park City for the match. “No problem bud, I’ll be right over,” he said.

We arrived at the Park City Municipal Golf Course at 1:30. Just enough time to warm up for a half hour before my partner, a plastic surgeon named Doc Baldwin, and I led off the pairings against Park City’s #3 and #4 players Richtenburg and Veloso. I went through my pre competition routine of washing down 3 big and blue Advil with a can of Mountain Dew; sticking my wallet, keys, and cell phone in my bag; putting my divot tool and ball marker in my left pocket and two green tees in the right; and taking about five swings with each club up through the bag. It wasn’t my greatest warm-up session, but I felt like I was ready to go.

The rain started to fall early on and just got worse as the round wore on. The four-ball match was a dead heat as Doc Baldwin, while overmatched was just playing out of his mind. I struggled to put Richtenburg away and as we hit the 18th tee, he had pulled to even. He absolutely smoked his drive right up the pipe on short par-5 hole. “Gotta pull out the big dog,” I said as I reached for my Titleist 975 D (yes, all you golf aficionados, I was still rocking this model in 2001. Best center weighted driver ever!). I cranked one down the right side of the fairway, leaving myself about 190 to the center of the island green. Unfortunately the ball managed to settle into an old divot. Richtenburg pulled out his 5 iron and gave it a run at reaching the green in two. His shot landed about 4 feet over the water and struck a sprinkler head, catapulting his shot straight into the air and finally landed about eight feet from the hole!

Needing to reach the green in two myself, from a ridiculously shitty lie, I pulled out my six iron. Needless to say, that the way this week was going, disaster had to be looming. I smothered the ball out of that divot, pulling it about ten yards left of the green right into the middle of the pond. Game over. Our team as a whole got blitzed by the Park City guys on their home track that day, so my match didn’t mean much, but it still sucks to lose, you know.

So D and I pulled up to the dorm, I took my gear out of the trunk of his car and reached into the pocket to grab my keys and wallet. Oh shit. Something was missing, and it wasn’t my keys. My wallet was gone. Jesus Christ! Can things get any worse?! After sticking my head out the window and unleashing a growl that probably could’ve been heard in Magna, I jogged through some scenarios and did what I could to recover it, including borrowing VodkaRob’s Explorer to drive to Park City to retrace my steps.

It was long gone. After making some phone calls to cancel my ATM and charge cards, I took a double shot of NyQuil and passed out. Tomorrow, it was time to crawl out of the hole.

Thursday, August 30th, 2001

BRRRREEEEEP! BRRRRREEEEP!

At 8:00 AM I awoke in a daze, my phone was ringing; it was the front desk of Residence Hall #5. My Godmother had arrived to bring me her spare junker car, a banana yellow and rust 1987 Pontiac Grand Prix. “I’ll be down in a second.” I said, groggily. God bless her, my νονά had taken on a motherly role to me in absence of my own (at the time). She wasn’t going to let me miss a day of work just because my truck was dead. I gave her a lift back home, kissed her on the forehead, and scrambled back to campus to get to class.

After four hours of Abnormal Psychology and The Sociology of Marriage, I cruised on out to Rose Park to clean up the driving range. One of the two jobs I carried through college, (the on-campus job gets a chronicle of its own eventually), I was in the words of Bud Light’s Real American Heroes - Mr. Driving Range Picker Upper Guy:

Yup, that about sums it up. It was a fun job, I got to blast some tuneage in my not so protective tractor and play human target for four hours. But what it did get me, besides some extra spending cash and an occasional welt when a ball would fly through the net, was free golf anywhere in town. Unfortunately, as fun as that job was, on Thursdays I needed to leave an hour and a half before closing time in order to make it to my night class at 7:30. So back across town to the campus I drove, stopping by Room #302 to pick up my books. Big Nick poked his head out of his bedroom door.“Where are you goin’?” He asked with a goofy grin on his face.

“I’ve got to go to class man, Greek and Roman History,” I replied.

“No, you’re not.”

“Uhh, yes I am.”

“No, you’re not.” He said laughing. “You’ve had one of the shittiest weeks known to man. You’re going out tonight. Rock, Pablo and the other guys are waiting for us. We’ve got the cure, a Death-Star.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Just get cleaned up, you’ll see.”

“I guess I’m not going to class,” I said as I looked at the clock, now reading 7:35. I grabbed a can of Fosters out of the fridge and hit the shower, cranking Def Leppard’s Pyromania album. I threw on a pair of jeans and a Superman t-shirt. On our way out the door, Big Nick, shot a look my way.

“You got any ID man?”

“Fuck, I didn’t even think of that.” I said. “Waitaminute, I’ve got an idea.” I ran and grabbed a couple of items from my desk.

We jumped into Big Nick’s Jeep and pulled into a little strip mall up in Highland in front of a Mexican restaurant called El Chihuahua. I’d be lying if I wasn’t thinking that Mexican food sounded pretty fucking good right about then. We walk into the cantina where Roc, Pablo, Trig, the Masshole and a few of our other buddies were sitting around a huge table munching on chips and salsa.

“Something to drink?” the waitress said as she approached our table. One by one everybody had the same answer, “DEATH-STAR.”

“I guess I’ll be having a Death-Star.” I said, wondering what the hell I was getting myself into.

“I’m going to need to see some ID” she said, as everybody pulled out their drivers licenses. Seeing as how I was sans-wallet, I laid a copy of my birth certificate and my Salt Lake City employee card out on the table. The poor girl called out her manager, who also happened to be tending bar, who noticed that my Social Security Number was on both documents and hooked me up.

After about ten minutes of cracking jokes and busting balls, the drinks arrived. The Death-Star came in a giant fish-bowl sized glass that looked like a purple version of that drink Garth ordered in the first Wayne’s World flick. The bartender/manager guy came over and explained to us that in order to get around some of Utah’s more archaic liquor laws, certain alcoholic parts of the drink had to be labeled “flavorings.” The Death-Star was comprised of ten shots of different “flavorings” and five shots of various juices. I took a drink, “Wow! This tastes just like antifreeze!” I thought. I took another drink, “sweet, sweet antifreeze.” And another, “hey this isn’t half bad.” And another, “this is actually pretty good.” And finally, “I think my face is numb, and I can’t even taste it anymore.” The Death-Star folks, it’s a keeper!

After we all had a Death-Star (one was all it took) and a shitload of various Mexican delicacies, we cruised back to the dorms. That Death-Star plus a couple of beers pretty much made me forget the next hour or so, but the next thing I remember was rolling down the road in Big Nick’s Jeep, while Pablo and Trig shot fire extinguishers out the back. Not sure where those came from. Typical college, drunken behavior but it was still funny for some reason. Oddly enough, "Death-Star" night is a tradition among college kids in Salt Lake that continues to this day. What can I say, we were trendsetters!

Friday, August 31st, 2001

I awoke with such a headache, that it felt like somebody was stabbing me in the right eye with an ice-pick. “Christ, I can’t handle the hooch like I used to.” I thought. Thankfully, there were very few Friday classes at Westminster, which allowed for maximum “Margarita Thursday” recovery. I went down to the Dean’s office to fill out the paperwork to get a new school ID. Surprisingly the picture actually looked better than my previous ID. Maybe things were looking up.

I got back to #302 just in time to meet Big Nick. He gave me a lift out to the hellhole known as the DMV. We blasted Anthrax’s The Sound of White Noise on our way out there. Nick had never heard them before, I think he was hooked, but that might’ve been because it was cranking out of his ridiculously awesome system. I forgot to mention, he had the top off of his Jeep and we had to take the freeway to the DMV, so I ended up with one of the most bizarre hairdos in the world for the next 5 years on my new driver’s license. I looked like a husky version of Wayne Static!

Only fatter

We got back to campus around 1:00. On our way back up to our building, I ran into my friend Jess, (the girl I took to the AC/DC show, as well as several others, plus, her dad had owned a record store). “I’ve got some CD’s for you if you want ‘em,” she said.

“What do I owe ya?” I asked.

“Not a damn thing,” she said, “I’ve already got most of them. It’s all extra stuff my dad had lying around.”

“Sounds good, just drop by a little later this afternoon, I’ll be around after golf practice.”

“Good luck.” She smiled.

Well, after that, how could I not shoot a 1-under par 71 in practice that afternoon? It was easily the best round I had shot on Wingpointe since I was in Junior College. And it just made me even more frustrated about my eligibility situation. But still, it felt good to be striking the ball purely and putting out of my mind. If only Golf Girl had been around to see that.

I got back to #302 around 5 o’clock to find a stack of about ten CD’s on our counter. Pretty good shit there, some Danzig, Slayer, Tears for Fears and several other pretty decent bands of stuff that I didn’t have already. Goddamn that Jess is a sweetheart. It was time to get ready for the evening’s festivities. Nick and I were “bouncing” at a house party, and it promised to be one for the ages.

Friday Night, August 31st, 2001 The PartyBig Nick, Rock, and I piled into his Jeep and drove up to Pablo’s condo up on Wasatch. The first thing we noticed was two giant tubs full of red liquid that would’ve made the Reverend Jim Jones proud. “Jungle Juice man!” Pablo jumped into the room. Good god! There had to be $200 worth of liquor in those tubs. I wonder how many people they expected to show up for this shindig.

Big Nick and I took our positions at the door. In order to keep the “ratio” good, and to pay for the provisions, Pablo had erected a sign. “Chicks - $1.00 Dicks - $5.00 Cups - $1.00 We reserve the right to deny entry” I guess we were taking money at the door too. People started to arrive, in droves. The music was thumping, the booze was flowing and everybody was having a good time. Nick and I busted up a couple of fights, and had just finished tossing a couple of punks out on their asses when I noticed I yellow object sticking out of Nick’s back pocket. “What is that?” I asked.

“My taser,” he replied, matter of factly.

“What in the blue hell do have that for?”

“Just in case, man.”

“What, a rampaging gorilla decides he really needs a drink, or wants to fight?”

“You’re paranoid,” he said, grinning.

The party raged on, and I must’ve had $400 in my pocket. Hate to admit it, but damn, I was having fun. It was like every shitty thing that had happened that week didn’t matter anymore. Everybody seemed to be having fun, and this was easily the biggest party I’d ever been to. There had to be at least 100 people crammed into this condo with another 30 or so in the back yard and hot tub.

Suddenly, an obviously wasted party-goer crashed into me. “Duuuude, I think the cops are here man.”

“I haven’t seen any, none have come in the door, and we haven’t let any in.”

“Man, I got to get out of here maaaan…” as he ran out the door. I walked outside to get some fresh air and looked down the road to see a massive caravan of police lights rolling up the street. I heard some thumping and looked up to see a helicopter with one of those giant spotlights trained down on the house. Oh shit! It’s the cops!

I ran back into the house, just in time to see the “one guy that nobody knows at the party” pull a Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office badge on a chain out of his shirt. As more of his buddies popped in the door, and people started scrambling around I couldn’t help but kind of snicker at the scene. The house looked like a giant circle pit. The biggest deputy bellowed, “All right! Everybody over twenty-one, whip out your ID’s, show them to the deputy at the door and leave! Everybody under twenty-one, go to the backyard. You’re in for a long night!”

Big Nick and I were two of the first few back through the door. God knows, I was happy to have an ID again. As we made our way out, I overheard some of the cops talking about possible charges they could ring our friends on. Things you wouldn’t even think of, beyond shit like contributing and things like that. They were talking about things like the size of the party and the amount of people constituting an “event” which would require an “event permit” and an actual liquor license. On our way out, they asked if we owned the house or knew who did. We denied everything. Hell, they’re the government, if they want to know bad enough, they have the resources, they can find out.

We got half a block away, when Big Nick decided to turn back, explaining that he had left the faceplate of to his Jeep’s stereo in the house. I didn’t think that was a very good idea, I mean, we just got away from a virtual hornets’ nest with a shitload of cash in our pockets, but there was no stopping that dude. He handed me his roll of the door money and took off on a dead sprint back to the house. Bad idea.

About a block away, I ran into one of the guys who owned the house who was just coming home to join the party and had missed the chaos. I handed him the stack of cash. “You might need this to bail out your roommates, bro.” He asked what all had occurred, so I laid the details out to him and suggested that he make himself scarce. He agreed and made a hasty retreat back to his car. I made it back to the Jeep and waited for what seemed like an eternity, before starting back down the sidewalk toward the house. I paused at the corner which overlooked the back yard and quietly observed the carnage. There were at least four lines, twenty people deep waiting in line to blow into a tube. Cops were literally EVERYWHERE! I wondered just how much the local taxpayers paid to have their sheriff’s department bust up this gathering. It must have been a slow night on the crime front. There were perfect little Mormon college princesses with tears streaming down their faces, knowing that their reputations were now tarnished. It was a surreal atmosphere.

Suddenly, Pat, another one of our buddies ran up. “Nickas! They’ve got Big Nick down on the floor, spread eagle! I think they’re gonna cuff him!”

“Oh shit!” I thought, “Maybe I should have hung on to that money to bail Nick out!” I started to mosey back towards the house, trying to think of what to do, when I saw Big Nick shuffling my direction. “Christ almighty man! What happened?”

“They found the taser dude.”

“And they just let you go?” I asked with a quizzical look on my face.

“Yeah, but they confiscated it.” He replied, dejectedly.

“Well shit man, let’s cut our losses, get the hell out of here and regroup back at the apartment.” I said, “Looks like we’re lucky to get out of here on our own terms!”

Aftermath

We met up with Pablo and those guys at a local diner the next day. The statistics were staggering. Over 90 consumption tickets were handed out. I can’t remember for sure, but I think those guys incurred a small fine, which in this state is getting off light. Rock had to call his dad to tell him about his consumption ticket, but carried around his breathalyzer tube for a week, kind of like a merit badge. Big Nick, after his close call in nearly avoiding a weapons charge, mellowed out quite a bit after that episode. And that party went down in history.

As for myself, well, I never did recover my wallet, but my dad figured out the electrical problem in my Blazer and managed to fix the problem in about ten minutes. I won my eligibility appeal and was reinstated for the last half of the last season of my collegiate career. That week put a lot of things in perspective for me. I felt like if I could weather that particular shitstorm and still come out smelling like a rose, then I’ve got to be pretty much bulletproof. It certainly helped later in life when I have come across a rough patch here and there. Things settled down and I had a pretty good senior year. I figured out that no matter how low I got, at least it has never gotten bad enough for the police to have to call my folks! And for some reason, I took a lot of comfort in that.

Sundance Yourself To Death!

2011-02-01T18:29:00.012-07:00

I've always been a fan of the Sundance Film Festival and independent film in general. There's this retarded thing in hollywood where a director has a vision and wants to see it fleshed out. But by the time he brings guys on to finance it, a studio to back it, and a distributor to get it out there, suddenly there are hundreds of people all with a stake in the final product. Unfortunately, that means all these people have a say in the final product, and what might have once been a good, original idea gets watered down. So there's something to be said about guys that max out ten credit cards and deal with having to cut back on bloated effects and production values in order to distill their idea down to what matters. Characterization and story arc. The Sundance Festival is often times your only chance to see some of these films because more often than not, they're not going to see the inside of your local cineplex. Sometimes, there's a really good reason for that, but on the flip side, once in awhile, there's some truly great ideas that never get the chance to reach a wide audience. There's not a whole lot that I like about living in Salt Lake, but I do consider myself lucky to have access to something as great as the Festival every year.

Four feature films and three shorts this year was by far the most I've ever seen in one Sundance Festival. Sadly, I didn't make the trip to Park City for any of these, instead opting for the screenings within walking distance of my apartment here in Salt Lick. I kinda missed the mountain ambiance (and the $10 beers) of a night in Park City, but on the other hand I discovered a new independent theater, The Broadway Center, that I'm planning on frequenting in the future. I'm even thinking of joining the Salt Lake Film Society as well to support it. Here are my brief reviews of the seven films that I screened at the Festival this year.

First up was a film titled I Saw The Devil. It was directed by Ji-woon Kim, who was also one of the writers for The Uninvited. This movie was in Korean and thankfully had subtitles. Which was nice, because even though at least half of my lesson clients early on in my career were Korean, I still didn't understand a damn thing. But even if there weren't subtitles, you could still pretty easily figure it out. This movie stars Byung-Hun Lee (who played Storm Shadow in that GI Joe flick last year) as a Korean Secret Service agent whose fiancee falls victim to a serial killer. He then sets off to find the killer and put him through hell, possibly at the cost of his own humanity.

He could have just nunchucked you right there and you would even have known it!

This movie was fucking violent, as most Korean revenge flicks tend to be, and at times hard to watch. But as gory as it was, psychologically it was even more brutal. Beautifully shot, but might've been a little too long. Good movie though. Afterward, I stopped into the coffee shop next door to the theater to take a piss, and ran into the Byun-hun Lee waiting outside the door to the john. Talked to him about the movie for a few minutes, seemed like a pretty cool guy. My buddy VodkaRob told me I should've tried to fight him for raping our childhoods with GI Joe though. Good thing I didn't. Dude would have beaten me about the head and neck with my own severed limbs.

A day later, we tied one on at The Tavernacle and walked down the street to the Broadway for the one we'd been looking forward to the most, Hobo With a Shotgun. It was preceded by a short film titled The Legend of Beaver Dam. It was the story of a group of wilderness scouts singing songs around the campfire that according to legend, summons a crazy killer. Chaos ensues in a bloody, vulgar, and musical fashion. As a fan of movies like The Goonies and The Monster Squad, I've got to say that I love kids that curse. It was a fun twelve minutes.

Where you probably won't get I Saw The Devil at your local cineplex, there was actually a legit buzz around the festival circles for Hobo With A Shotgun. What can I say? People seem to like the truth in advertising. This flick stars Rutger Hauer (who seems to have entered the Mickey Rourke zone of guys who you aren't sure they are even acting anymore) as said transient.

Got any spare change?

He jumps off a train during a stopover in Hopetown, a run-down metropolis that makes Detroit look like Dubai, that is ruled by an evil gangster named The Drake. Seeing injustice at every turn and meeting the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold (usually they just take your wallet), he forgoes his dream of starting his own lawn mowing business and instead takes his last fifty bucks and turns it into a pawn-shop 12-gauge and a seemingly unlimited amount of ammo. From there he sets about taking back the streets of this urban hellhole, one shell at a time. This one was a bizarre, bloody and overall batshit crazy exploitation-type flick. If you like those types of movies from the mid-70's you'll enjoy this one. From what I hear, they've sold this movie to a distributor, so come April it'll be in theaters nationwide.

Arguably, the best part of Sundance is the documentaries. So a few days later, I took my little sister to a screening of Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. Before the feature, was a five-minute documentary short titled The High Level Bridge. The film profiled the High-Level Bridge that spans the Saskatchewan River in Edmonton, Alberta, its man-made waterfall and its reputation as a local suicide hotspot. The filmmaker sounded clinically depressed himself. One of the ladies on the golf team that I coach is from Edmonton, and when I asked her about all the suicides off the bridge and if it's an accurate representation of her hometown, she said "That's not what we're aboot back home." Touche'. Here's the film in its entirety:

A very interesting real life mystery is featured in Resurrect Dead...The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. Dating back to the early 80's, somebody has been gluing peculiar signs to the streets of Philadelphia with a strange four-line message:

Creepy!

These tiles fascinated a local layabout named Justin Duerr who began a quest to document all known locations of these tiles (which are found in eight states and three South American capitals) and find the mysterious artist who put them there. He teams up with the filmmaker, John Foy, and two other like-minded individuals to attempt to finally solve the mysteries of who, why and how. It was a fantastic documentary and it was interesting to see how these four guys were able to tie together seemingly unrelated clues into solid leads. I can't quite call Resurrect Dead... the best movie that I saw at the festival, but I can say that it was probably the most enjoyable of the bunch.

Finally, VodkaRob and I wrapped up our Festival experience last Friday night with a midnight showing of The Oregonian. Attached to this movie was a short titled The Pact. It features a pair of siblings in the home of their recently deceased mother discussing a secret that they share, something that happened in the basement. This one was genuinely scary, as opposed to the feature it was paired with, which I'll get to in a second. And it brought on those feelings of dread without any typical "payoff."

I went into The Oregonian expecting a grindhouse-y type of horror flick. What I ended up getting was a throwback to those late 60's early 70's psychedelic movies or something reminiscent of those "Coffin Joe" Brazilian horror flicks from the mid 70's. It featured a heaping helping of washed out colors and a horrifyingly brutal sound design that was light on dialogue, but heavy on shrieks, grunts, squeals and insane laughter. It was by far the loudest movie I've ever seen. My ears are still ringing. It lacked any semblance of a plot, or overall narrative other than a bloodied girl (True Blood's Lindsay Pulsipher) wandering in the woods encountering strange scenarios. It did, however, have plenty of horrifying visuals including a creepy old lady breathing hard while grinning from ear to ear, a redneck dude pissing all the colors of the rainbow during a pit-stop, a guy in a furry frog costume jerking off against a window, random hicks drinking pina coladas made with gasoline and some suspect-looking milky liquid, and plenty of people drooling bile while laughing. Read that sentence again.

Thank god this is a still photo!

Most of it was gross, and none of it was scary. It was marketed as a horror flick and ended up being an arthouse flick. The Oregonian was basically an hour and twenty minute acid trip and I was sorely disappointed. But at least I made it all the way through it, which can't be said about the twenty or so people that walked out in the middle of the screening. It came into the festival with a considerable buzz and left the festival getting absolutely crushed by critics and viewers alike.

So in a week's span, we saw some pretty good films, and a real stinker. Like I said, sometimes there's a reason these aren't studio pictures. But overall it was an awesome experience for any film geek for sure. You ought to make it out here for the festival at least once in your life. I guarantee, if you spread it around a little bit, you'll come away seeing something you like. It literally has it all.

In which our hero returns with another Dorm Days Flashback to whet your appetite for things to come…

2011-01-31T00:43:00.003-07:00

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We're so glad you could attend. Come Inside, come inside…

After a couple "false-starts" I'm ready to give the blogging thing a go again. I've got a lot more direction these days, and a lot more creative fire. I'm also ready to talk about what has been happening to me professionally the last couple years. It's been gone now for two years, but I think the story of the last years of the University Golf Course need to be told. I'd also like to branch out a little bit and do some reviews, as well as sound off on a few things going on in the world to anybody that'll listen, or read. So sit back, get comfortable, and feel free to peruse some of my earlier work on this site.

Here's a little flash back to my Dorm Days to whet your appetite a little further (or turn you off completely.) I've cleaned it up a little bit, mostly for typos (of which there were many), and changed a few more names around to protect the guilty. I've got to say, I'm fairly shocked at the amount of F-bombs I used to throw around! Anyway, here we go!

"On The Map"

(January 2000)

Originally posted to the old blog in March, 2006

We had just returned from winter break, and I've got to say, it was great to see Apartment 302 once again. I was the first one back, and the first thing I noticed was my John Belushi "College" poster on the wall was stripped of its "frame" of about 90 friction-rubbed beer bottle caps. They had cleaned the joint up! That frame took a lot of work from Big Nick and me to put up there, so much work that I couldn't even remember doing it! But the snapshot Big Nick took of the poster was still stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. "Oh Shit! Hope they didn't discover the stash!" I thought as I went into the back of the utility closet and found, thankfully in the box my stereo came in, five 20-packs of Bud Light 6-percent bootlegged from Evanston, Wyoming (You can only get 3.2 ABV beer here in Salt Lick). Well, at least it was going to be a good homecoming!

But coming back was a little bittersweet. The good news was, the missionary kid, who had threatened to report any of Big Nick's or my own "misbehaviors" to the Dean "for our own protection" no longer seemed to be rooming in The Penthouse, his room was empty. Unfortunately, the old guy "Jerry Flynt", the guy that cooked for us when the cafeteria just wasn't cutting it, was gone as well. While we tried everything we could to get the missionary kid tossed the previous semester, but Jerry's departure hurt. The dude fed us, man.

I heard some keys unlocking the door, "I wonder who is left?" I thought as I hurled the door open to find The Hottie R.A. from across the hall leading a fresh-faced youngster into the apartment. The kid had a Yankee hat on, so well, he had that going for him, which was nice. "Nickas, this is your new roommate, Doug. He's NINETEEN (emphasis on the NINETEEN), make sure he stays out of trouble," she said with a wink as she sashayed out the door.

Shit! Big Nick's birthday was last week. We were finally all twenty-one years old in here. Finally, we could all party out in the open in here without getting written up. And the fucking dean's office had thrown us a curveball. According to the ridiculously detailed ol' Westminster handbook, you could consume alcohol in the main area of the apartment if all residents were over the age of twenty-one. If not, the demon alcohol could only be consumed in the individual bedrooms or the bathroom. Which I always thought was kind of funny. Not that we ever really gave a shit about the rules anyway, but it would have been nice not to get written up for throwing on a drunk after class in our own living room.

Always the fucking ambassador, I introduced myself and helped the kid haul his shit into the apartment. Like everybody else in the apartment, he was the child of divorced parents. But he was the only one with a father in prison! Hardcore! He'd recently quit the Mormon Church to become Catholic, but was having extreme difficulty getting his name off of the church rolls. I knew of a few people who had at one time the same problem, so I understood what he was going through. All of this, and this was his first time away from home. It was pretty overwhelming for the kid, and since he was now part of the family, I figured we all needed to help him out.

Big Nick and The Nate showed up a couple of minutes later and they got their first impressions of Doug. They were admittedly pissed that the Dean's office had given us an underage roommate. But at the same time, and this is a good indicator as to how good those guys were, they made it abundantly clear that it wasn't Doug they were pissed at, but the Student Life office in general. And like I said, since when have we ever given a shit about the rules anyway? Big Nick had stacked one of the 20-packs in the fridge when he had walked in, and the four of us had a toast to a new beginning. The Nate even tagged Doug with a nickname within an hour, and "Junior" was born.

We figured we needed to get Junior acquainted with as many people as we could. So the first week of class, we started introducing him to as many of our friends as we could. Big Nick took him down to the weight room, a newly returned Dowder (the "fifth" roommate in the way that Pete Best was the "fifth" Beatle) introduced him to the Frisbee guys in the quad and I took him door to door on the third floor and the apartment directly below us to meet the neighbors. You had to get in good with the girls on the floor below because then they'd be more likely to talk directly to you about excessive noise than an RA.

We came to the apartment directly across the hallway from ours and I started to get a little nervous. Not only was this particular apartment the RA's room, but also this was where Jules lived. I'd kind of been crushing on this girl pretty much the entire holiday break. Before the break, I was working on the infamous "One-Night" fifteen-page term paper in the small Residence Hall 3 computer lab when this girl came in and asked if I could listen to her class presentation. Evidently somebody had told her that I'd done my fair share of public speaking back in the day and had some advice to offer. So I helped her iron the bugs out of her presentation and we shot the shit briefly before I had to get back to the term paper. A few nights later we met up again at the "Midnight Breakfast" the night before finals began, and I was pretty hip to the idea of asking this girl out. She went home to Alaska for the holidays, and I spent two weeks thinking about what to do.

Junior knocked on the door, and Jules answered it. "Hey, hey! Just wanted to introduce you folks to the motley crew across the hall's newest member, this is Doug!" I bellowed. She invited us in. It was on. We sat down as two of the other girls, Alice and Elizabeth came out to say hello. They started chitchatting with Junior and Jules hollered at me to go into the other room. "How'd your presentation last semester go?" I asked.

"Pretty good, I got an A." She said as she gave me a hug. It was on. "Hey Mike, I think Elizabeth's got a crush on Doug. She said she saw him in the hallway the other day and she won't shut up about it."

"Well, that's certainly interesting. I don't know man, she's pretty Mormon," I thought to myself as I nodded my head.

"You think you could maybe encourage him to get lunch with her or something?" Jules asked.

"I'll say something; see if he's feeling it." And then my brain finally kicked in. For years, I'd been the kind of shy quiet dude, always afraid to really go after something or just plain say it. So instead I made an event out of shit. I wanted to get with this girl, so my primitive brain thought; "I've got to do something big." "I've got a better idea," I said, "Let's throw a party Friday night."

"Like a mixer?" she inquired, eyebrow raised.

"Like a big, wild mixer." I said nodding my head thinking to myself, "if the party in Can't Hardly Wait could be considered a mixer". "The Penthouse, Friday night. Tell all your friends." It was so on.

Now, doing anything of this sort on a wide scale in the close quarters of the residence halls presented a few logistical problems. How not to get caught by the RA's and administration was chief among those concerns. One of us was going to have to fall on a grenade. We left that up to The Dowder, who asked The Hottie RA on a date that night. Hesitantly, she accepted. Next, we had to find out who was the RA on duty. Luckily it happened to be the Comrade. All it took was a bottle of Stolichnaya and a burned copy of Metallica's S&M album and the Comrade was properly bribed off.

Next was the liquor. I had no idea how big this thing was going to get so I went to where I usually got some cheap advice, my Maxim Magazine collection. I found an article from issue #12 in the "How To" section titled "How to throw a soiree'" and followed its suggestions of two large jugs each of rotgut tequila, vodka, gin and whiskey. Plus I bought a new bottle of Makers' Mark and a bottle of Champagne for myself. Adding in the mixers and I must have dropped about $150 on liquid refreshment. With the girls across the hallway making the food, this sucker was on! There was an actual legitimate buzz going around the dorm about it.

I got home a little bit late from basketball practice that Friday afternoon and hurriedly set everything up. Junior and Big Nick got the bar area up and running and cleaned up the house. I cleaned out my Bud Light keg bucket, filled it with ice and got the champagne chilling on my desk in my room. While I was taking care of the last minute preparations, The Nate took it upon himself to start the festivities, mixing himself a gigantic Electric Lemonade. He used his own high-end liquor and we estimated that particular drink in a bar would probably cost about $25. The Dowder, who usually resembled Pigpen from the Peanuts Gang, came out of his room as clean as I had ever seen him, in a nice sweater and khakis. He pounded a shot and left to pick up The Hottie RA. I grabbed a Fosters can out of the fridge and hit the shower for a long one.

I wrapped up my shower about a half hour later and got dressed. "Fuck it. Let's go all out," I decided. I owned at that time this maroon and black Heffner-esque silk smoking jacket. I didn't even smoke! It was cheesy as all hell, but dammit I was feeling it that night, I was going to class this shit up. I was an idiot. One of my high school golf teammates used to wear one on the overnight trips and I always thought it was hilarious, so I picked a jacket up right after I'd moved to Salt Lick. I was comfortable. I walked out and we all had a good laugh. I looked over in The Nate's direction, "How many is that bro?" I nodded at his drink.

"Number four dude." He replied, downing the last few drops of Electric Lemonade and started to pour number five. He was already getting a glossy look in his eyes.

The doorbell rang; it was two of Big Nick's gal pals, Heather and Shauna. They came in, mixed drinks and retired with Big Nick to his room for some "entertainment." We wouldn't see them again until things were wrapping up.

Suddenly people started showing up in droves, we got the music pumping and it was becoming a boisterous occasion. There were at least thirty people crammed into that little apartment. Some friends of ours, but mostly people we didn't know. I couldn't believe we'd thrown something like this together in a few days. The girls from across the hall arrived with a gigantic 7-layer dip in a huge baking dish. The Smokers descended upon it like buzzards to a fresh road kill. Elizabeth had a surprised look on her face. I don't think she imagined a dorm "mixer" to resemble anything like the rager that was taking place. And then there was Jules. She looked absolutely fantastic, with a smile that could launch a thousand ships. "Why the hell does she wear those baggy clothes all the time?" I thought to myself. She was in tremendous shape.

Junior was really starting to get after it, and so was The Nate. The Nate was a big guy, probably twice my size. As I was mixing myself my third or fourth martini of the evening, I looked over at him sitting on one of the bar stools. He was HAMMERED! He saluted me with his sixth Electric Lemonade, leaned his head back and raised his glass to his gullet. As he leaned back, I saw it. Dude's eyes rolled back into his head and he kept going back, going, going, gone. BOOM! He landed flat on his back on the floor. Room 302 shook. The windows rattled. The stereo skipped. Everybody paused for a second, looked, and went back to their revelry. I still had my wits about me so I rushed over to where he was laying on his back, making that sick moaning sound that usually signaled that he was going to hurl. This was a problem. If he honks on the floor, the party is pretty much over based on the smell alone. So I got my buddy Little Nick to grab The Nate's legs and I snagged him by the armpits and we slowly dragged his 350 lb. ass down the hallway to The Nate/Dowder bathroom, I filled up a glass of water and set it down next to his huge, corpse like figure. That boy was destroyed. I looked at my watch, 11:30 pm. "This has to be some kind of drunk-record for Nate." Little Nick quipped. We rejoined the party.

Dowder returned from his date. Dammit! He was supposed to keep The Hottie RA occupied until at least 1:00! "No worries brah," he said, "I dropped her off at her friend's house. That's a weird girl, man." He said as he gathered his crew of stoners and retired to his room to spark up. Everybody was having a good time, but people started getting paranoid. Every time there was a ring at the doorbell, everybody scrambled to hide their drinks and the sub-21 kids hid themselves in the closets and showers. Fucking hilarious.

I had damn near worked up the courage to ask Jules out on an actual date when the first glass was broken. We looked up and saw Junior panicking in the kitchen. "What happened bro?" I asked.

"Sorry, man. I broke your glasssssssss." Doug slurred.

"Are you all right?" I asked as I saw the bottle he was holding in his other hand. It was Everclear, and there wasn't very much left in the bottle. "Dude, you didn't drink that whole bottle did you?"

"Yeah man. It tastes like shit, but I can't stop drinking it. THIS PARTY IS GONNA PUT US ON THE MAP DUDE! WHOOOOOOOO!" He was starting to lose it.

"Bro, that's like pure grain alcohol. I don't think you are supposed to drink that much of it (or any of it for that matter), especially straight up." I don't think he knew what he was doing. But hell, he was a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old kid. I was there once. "Just settle down a bit." I suggested.

Things got progressively louder and more out of control. Everybody was having a good time. I made the rounds, being a gracious host by saying "hey" to everybody in my ridiculous smoking jacket and leopard print cowboy hat. I looked like I was half-crazy. I'd finally made it back to Jules when there was a loud knock on the door. "Campus Police! Open Up!" Everybody scrambled to hide their shit or themselves as I looked through the peephole. Sonofabitch. It was Squirrel fucking with us. He actually was a campus police officer, but he was off duty and ready to party. Sometimes it's good to have friends in high places.

Things had reached a crescendo when there was another crash of breaking glass. This time it was from the living room. And once again, Junior was the cause. Only this time he was half hanging out of one of the windows! Little Nick, who was some kind of everywhere-at-once super-hero that evening, yanked him back inside. The booze had taken the kid over. Thankfully, I knew a couple of the maintenance guys on campus, and that hinge looked mighty rusty, so we were able to eventually go around the dean to get it fixed. Thank god for the lowest bidder. Poor Elizabeth, both overwhelmed and upset ran out of the apartment in a huff with Jules and Alice in tow. On her way out the door Jules gave me the "call-me" signal. So I had that going for me, which was nice. But I was definitely in a sour mood as Little Nick and I carried a now passed out Junior down the hallway and tossed him onto his bed.

Around 3:00 AM, things finally fizzled out. People started heading home. Thankfully, they all seemed to have had a good time. I checked up on The Nate and helped him to his room with the trusty coffee can. He would have a three-day hangover. Little Nick and I commenced to cleanup duty. At 3:30 Heather and Shauna slipped out of Big Nick's room, giggling, and took off. Big Nick poked his head out the door, rubbed his eyes, looked at the carnage, laughed and shut his door. Little Nick and I finished cleaning up the broken glass, empty beer bottles and plastic cups. He went home soon after, leaving me and the bottle of Champ-an-ya that I had hoped to be sharing with my new lady-friend alone in my room. I popped the cork, took a giant swig and passed out. This was a sad attempt at seduction gone horribly awry.

The next day I woke up and made myself a bowl of fruit-loops. As I walked into my room a girl busted out of my wardrobe, apologizing profusely holding her head. Evidently she had gone in there to hide when there was a knock on the door and had fallen asleep. I shooed her out of the apartment and turned around to find Junior and The Nate sitting on the living room chairs with identical "death-warmed-over" looks to them. "Rough night, fellas?" I asked. Neither of them remembered anything from the night before. They looked at the busted window and then at me. "Last night put us on the map." I said to them as I cruised back to my room for breakfast.

EPILOGUE:

Well, the administration found out about us. Not from our odd request for a new window, but from an upset Elizabeth mentioning the party in conversation to the wrong people. I reckon we were on "double secret probation" for the rest of the semester. I finally worked up the stones to ask Jules out, and we went to a hockey game for our first real date. This kicked off my first real relationship in college. Good times! Junior and Elizabeth never did hit it off, although he did take a run at The Hottie RA, later in the semester. That night however resulted in us having more friends than we knew what to do with for the rest of the year. The Super Bowl party a few weeks later went swimmingly, and the motley crew of Room 302 became sort of the unofficial leaders of the campus community.

Blackout Summer In The USA - Another Dorm-Days Flashback

2009-04-08T23:54:00.004-06:00

This week's Dorm Days Flashback takes us all the way back to the Summer of 2001. At the time I was working at a little golf course on the west side of Salt Lick known as Rose Park. Oddly enough, a month ago, I just started a new job at that familiar little golf course on the west side of Salt Lick known as Rose Park. Like a lot of things in my life, it seems like I take a long and arduous journey just to get back to where I started. But like I always say, it doesn't matter what happens to me as long as I get a story out of it. The story of how I just ended up back at Rose Park will be told at a different time, but to tide you over until then, here's a twisted look back to my first summer away from home.

"Blackout Summer In The USA"
(June 2001)
Originally posted to the old blog in February 2006

It was the summer of 2001, and it was a scorcher. During the summer the only kids still living on campus were people enrolled at least full time, or worked a campus job for ten hours per week. I had a job at a local golf course in Salt Lake, Rose Park, and really did not want to quit and return to Price for the summer. So I got Coach Connor to sign off on ten hours per week as a personal assistant to his staff, and got to stay on campus. VodkaRob, in a similar situation, didn’t feel like returning to his small hometown as well, so he kept his campus job. Without school and less responsibility than ever, could VodkaRob and I, the remaining members of Room 302, manage not to party ourselves to death over the summer? Could we avoid pissing off the administration and getting kicked out? Would we make some new friends? These are all questions hanging over our heads as we cruised into my favorite season of the year.

The administration’s solution, at least to the second question, was to split us up. They wanted to “keep an eye” on all of us summer stragglers, so they confined every on-campus resident to a new building, Residence Hall 4. VodkaRob and I drew different apartments on the ground floor of the new building, and each had five new roommates to get acquainted with. Rob, on the basis of his prior military affiliation ended up with a rowdy bunch of Naval ROTC kids. I ended up with a crew of hard partying, occasionally womanizing members of our Griffin Soccer team. I really can’t stand soccer, but these guys were pretty cool. And considering they were touring the country with various clubs and attending camps and clinics, I pretty much had the apartment to myself, which was a strange place in itself.

I ended up in the ADA compliant room. This meant that the cupboards and appliances in the kitchen were lower as were the sinks in bathroom. For the first time since I quit getting taller at age 13, I actually felt tall! But the best part of all was the bench in the shower, and detachable massaging shower-head. As sore as I’d be when I’d either return home from a golf tournament or unable to stay on two feet due to a few too many, at least I could relax a little bit getting cleaned up.

After returning home from a hard day at work with darkness falling over the city, happy hour would begin, and Residence Hall 4 would spring to life, people starting their own engines, getting ready to hit the town, or tying one on at home. VodkaRob and I along with whoever wanted to join us would load up a little mini cooler with various alcoholic beverages and hold court on a picnic table out in the main quad. While liquor was allowed in the dorms, it was pretty taboo to have it outside of the rooms. But this restraint was either lifted or overlooked that summer. It was like a little outdoor version of Cheers every night, as our group would shoot the shit and relax in the cooling evening air. Once in awhile we would drag out the electric guitars and do our best GN’R impression out there to the delight of no one in particular. Maybe that is what retirement will be like.

It was on one particular Wednesday night that our story takes place. I was deep in preparation for one last run at qualifying for the Utah State Amateur Golf Championship. The qualifier that particular year happened to be in my hometown of Price, so I was prepared to leave nothing to chance as far as getting in. I’d been practicing for hours a day the few weeks prior, before and after work, during my lunch break, hell, I’d even tap two foot putts in the hallway for an hour every night before I went to bed. I was ready, and that particular Wednesday I’d played in my final competitive tune-up, in an 8-man team match for Rose Park against our hated rivals from Mountain View at their home course. I fired a 3-under par 69 on my way to thoroughly destroying my opponent, the son of a Senior PGA Tour star going six holes up with five to play. I needed to unwind before I left town for one last day of preparation down home in Price.

I returned to the school at approximately 9:00 pm that evening. Now, the all new Residence Hall 5 was currently under construction on top of our usual parking lot, so we had to park all the way on the other end of campus. As soon as I got out of my truck I heard the concussive BOOM of an explosion in the distance and started hearing sirens. “Jesus, that sounds like its right in the neighborhood” I thought to myself, not noticing that the normally brilliantly lit up campus was much darker than normal. I grabbed my gear and started trekking across the school grounds. When I reached the dorm quad to find that the fellas had already started happy hour without me.

“A substation bit the dust homey! The power is out dude.” Mikey Hip-hop, a lanky, blond haired, blue eyed kid in a FUBU shirt, and one of VodkaRob’s new roommates hollered my way as I crossed the bridge with my golf bag. “It doesn't look like you boys are jammin’ tonight.”

“I guess not,” I said sorely, “Rob, you got any vodka?”

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?” He replied. I stowed my gear into my room, lit a couple of peach candles and hit the shower to pound a can of Fosters to warm up. It was time to unwind; we were getting seriously tanked tonight, in the dark.

I grabbed two of my commemorative Westminster College glasses, a quart of half and half, my bottle of Kahlua Especial, and a flashlight and picked my way through the dark down to VodkaRob’s apartment. I was currently in my The Big Lebowski, white Russian phase. But as usual I overdid everything. I preferred my stuff in a big glass. Mixing drinks in the dark is no small task, and these were pretty damn stout. We went back outside where pretty much the entire dorm was hanging out on the grass around the fire-pit. Somebody brought out a battery powered tape player and we had a little impromptu party in the dark.

After about two hours and several trips back into the dorm for refills (couldn’t let the milk spoil!), we heard the muffled sound of the generators kick back on and the lights flickered back on dimly. As I stood up, it hit me. My eyes blurred, and my legs felt like spaghetti. I looked at VodkaRob and slurred, “Man, I’m fucked=up. But I haven’t had more than I usually have.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, all I had was Stolichnaya 120. It’s a little more powerful than Skyy.” VodkaRob said matter-of-factly as he downed the remainder of his whiskey sour.

“Great.” I thought as a bunch of us made our way down to Team Navy’s apartment. Rico, another one of VodkaRob’s roommates opened the door.

“Dudes, check it out, my buddy sent me some funny videos!” he said as he giddily dropped a DVD into the player in the main area of the apartment. This kid evidently was some kind of porno connoisseur, as about six of us dudes and three girls were treated to this sick bastard’s new favorite title, “Gag-Factor 8.” The women featured in this particularly degrading, yet humorously titled piece of verite’ seemingly enjoyed fellatio so much they would vomit during the process. Fucking heinous. But most of us were so destroyed that we just kind of stared blankly. The room started to spin, and I excused myself to use the john.

When I returned Rico and his collection had disappeared, and all that were left were VodkaRob, Mikey Hip-hop, and a couple of other guys named Chad and Jeff were talking with the lone remaining female in the room, some gal with frizzy blonde hair named Monique. “Sorry fellas, I think I passed out in there.” I said as I noticed that about a half hour had passed since I went in. I had blacked out.

“S’cool homey! We was just discussin’ some fly art yo!” Mikey Hip-hop shouted, maybe a little too loud as I snagged a beer and sat in the big chair.

“Oh really,” I said, suddenly interested in something besides finding the bottom of my bottle. I do enjoy art very much, especially the really weird shit like Van Gogh, Basquiat, The Dali’ and Picasso. Someday I want to be able to afford some good paintings, not only can they be an interesting conversation piece, but it’s one hell of an investment as well. Monique talked about some of the stuff she had done, and it sounded like it was up my alley. She specialized in canvas paintings with different materials other than paint. “Like what?” I asked. Hey, inquiring minds wanted to know.

“Oh, foods, cleaning supplies, biologicals.” She said.

“Biologicals?” VodkaRob inquired.

“Yeah, plant, animal, and human fluids. It’s been especially difficult getting approval for my latest project.”

“Which is?” I asked, my curiosity peaked.

“It’s a commentary on the misogyny of college age men and their attitudes toward any artistic expression of powerful females inside of the artistic medium.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Chad asked.

“Well, in layman’s terms, I’ve painted a female figure, and I’m going to get five college guys to ejaculate on the canvas and shine it under a black light.”

As completely obliterated as I was, it actually seemed like a sensible idea to me until I looked over and saw the horrified look on VodkaRob’s face. And then it hit me. There are five of us dudes in here right now; I think this crazy woman is propositioning us. When Hip-hop enthusiastically volunteered to do it, I knew it was a bad idea. “What the fuck are you thinking?” I asked myself, and then the room started to spin again. Time to bail. “Sorry folks, I’ve got a long drive tomorrow morning, it’s time for me to retire.” I like weird shit, but not that fucking weird.

I walked back down the main hallway to my apartment, and paused about halfway through and took a knee to gather myself. “Nickas, This shit is getting beyond out of control You better lock it up before you do something really dumb that will ruin your already less-than-stellar reputation.” I thought to myself as I willed myself the rest of the way down the hallway. I managed to choke down two large glasses of water without throwing up to lessen the hangover, and hit the sheets.

The trip home the next day was mostly uneventful; I had a tremendous headache and played like shit during my practice round. I shot a 7-over par 77 on the course I’d played hundreds of times as a kid. My dad and I went down to his old bar, the Savoy, for a beer after dinner. “You all right?” he asked, “you looked like shit out there today.”

“Dad, I think I’ve been living a little too hard lately. I’ve got to reel myself in a little bit,” I said, reluctant to get into specifics.

“You’re not doing any drugs or anything, are you?” he asked.

“No, but I have been drinking a little too much lately. It’s not messing with my job or the way I’m playing or anything, but I can see how things might get out of control if I don’t rein it in.” Unbeknown to my dad, I’d gone through a phase in my mid teens where I kinda lost it, and it seriously messed my grades as well as some relationships with family and friends. It took a lot of hard work in the years since to get things back under control and become the real Nickas again. “I just don’t want to do anything stupid.”

“Well, do what you have to do. You know what you want out of life, if it doesn’t happen, the only one you have to blame is yourself. Just don’t let it bother your schoolwork when that starts again, or then I have a problem too.” Things may not have turned out the way he imagined in his life, but as far as life smarts go, my old man is freaking Einstein. He did not say anything I did not already know, but just hearing it from somebody who had been there in his own past made me feel a lot better.

The next day I did not play especially spectacular. My grandparents and great aunt came out to watch my first few holes, the first time they had ever seen me play competitively. I stayed steady enough until the 18^th hole but I didn’t think it was going to be good enough to qualify, when one of the tournament officials asked each of us in our group where we sat. “I’m at 3-over right now,” I replied.

“Mr. Nickas, it would do you some good to get a birdie on this last hole.”

“Well, thanks for that. No pressure or anything.” I thought to myself as I stepped to the tee and crushed the piss out the ball, but pulled it a little left. It looked like it was about fifteen yards left of the green, but in the rough on the short, par 4. Everybody else in the group had laid-up off the tee with iron shots, meaning they played their approaches first. This gave me a little extra time to think over my own shot, a pitch out of a semi-buried lie in the tall grass. “Shot of your life dude,” I thought to myself as I drew the club back. The ball felt good coming off the club, it landed about halfway to the hole on the green and rolled smoothly over the ridge to the back pin location settling about twenty-four inches from the cup. I made the longest two footer of my entire life, and managed to qualify for the State Amateur by a single shot. Despite all of my problems, I had managed to become one of the 75 best amateur players in the state.

Qualifying for that tournament gave me something new to focus on. VodkaRob went to Oregon for a couple of weeks to see his lady-friend, which afforded me the chance to take a little break. Not that it was his fault or anything, it was all on me, but I had the chance to sink my mind back into my work and my game. That’s not to say we gave up the good times completely, but it never got to the point where I considered spunking on a painter’s canvas a reasonable idea ever again.

Crazy Pete Gets The Girl - Another Dorm Days Flashback!

2009-03-05T23:51:00.005-07:00

Hey chickapees, how are ya? I hope you're enjoying the tour through my days of yore. I promise to have an original piece that's tentatively titled "The Ballad of the UGC" up by the end of this weekend. Tomorrow is probably going to be my last shift at my current job up at the University of Utah, and I'm pretty sure I won't have much to do except to craft a story in dedication to the rich tapestry that was golf at the "U." So be on the lookout for that. Anyway, tonights bawdy tale flashes back to February of 2001. There's a few new characters in this one. I dole out a little relationship advice, which in itself is hilarious. God knows, I don't think I've had a relationship last longer than twenty minutes in the last ten years. But I did listen to Loveline every night, so that means I'm qualified, right? Also, make sure you read through to the end for a little bonus video action featuring a few appearances by the characters in this story, just so you won't think I'm making this all up. And away we go:

"Crazy Pete Gets The Girl"
(February 2001)

It was in late February of year 2 in Room 302 and all of us were finally gelling as roommates. Earlier in the year, The Nate, Big Nick and I were pretty stunned when Junior and The Dave did not return, but the new guys VodkaRob, Jose' and Crazy Pete fit in with our fairly messed up personalities quite nicely. We were actually going to make it a full year without somebody giving up on us! Unfortunately, The Nate was becoming increasingly withdrawn, taking part in our weekend binges less and less frequently. Apparently something about Pete and Jose' rubbed him the wrong way. But none of us could figure out what. Kind of a shame, he missed out on quite a few good times down the stretch that year, even some not so good, and some that were both like the subject of the story today.

It was your typical Friday at Westminster. The best kept secret of that school is the vast majority of classes ran from Monday to Thursday with very few classes on Fridays. So if you played your cards right, it was almost like a three-day weekend every week! It was perfect for nursing a Post-"Margarita Thursday" hangover. And man-oh-man; I was feeling it that day. But hell, it was worth it, because tonight was the school's Mardi Gras celebration as well as the beginning of Spring Break.

We also just happened to be one day away from tickets to the AC/DC Stiff Upper Lip Tour going on sale. If you did not live in the Salt Lake area, you probably would not know just how big of a deal that was back then. After an incident with a fan getting trampled during a Razor's Edge Tour show a decade before, the band had not scheduled a tour stop in Salt Lake since. So Crazy Pete, VodkaRob, Jose' and myself were especially stoked to see those legends grace the stage once again in our neck of the woods. Crazy Pete seemed especially excited for the show, but he had been growing increasingly anxious about something else.

There was this certain female classmate of his that, in his words gave him that familiar "climbing the rope in gym class" kind of feeling. The dude was smitten with her. One problem though, she was afflicted with what was known in the Latin as "Boyfriendus-Douchebaggus." You know, she was with the wrong guy. Crazy Pete was the right guy. And since I was in the midst of a not-so-ideal situation myself with Golf-Girl, it was one of the few things Crazy Pete and I found some common ground on. Women were the subject of many of our beer drinking sessions.

Anyway, I had finally got home from an all-afternoon session in my office down at the gym assisting with breaking down tapes on UM-Western for the basketball game the next day. I stopped in the kitchen to pour a shot, grabbed a Michelob out of the fridge and cruised down the hallway to my room. Crazy Pete stopped me in the hallway. "Nickas! Dude! Candace finally broke up with that prick!"

"That's great! How'd you find out, brah?" I asked.

"Well, we were in this study group this afternoon and she told me while we were planning out the work on our class project," He replied.

"Sweet! So she went out of her way to tell you?"

"Yeah," he said, "I thought it was kind of weird."

Now, one thing that I am not very good at is catching a hint, especially from girls. Hell, the writing was on the wall between Jules and I before school even started, but that did not stop me from feeling pretty blindsided three weeks into the year when the hammer finally dropped. And after I took her to see Def Leppard too! But this situation right here seemed obvious as hell to me. "Dude, you have to call her. She wouldn't have told you about her breakup if she didn't dig ya!"

"I don't think she wants me too." He said sheepishly.

"Bullshit man! This is your chance! Call her right now!" I had no idea if that was a good idea or not. Sadly, my biggest problem over the years when it came to women was inaction. I never made the call at the right time if I ever made the call at all. "Dude, make something up, invite her over to work on your project or something." Why the hell was he listening to me?

"I don't know man." He started to wear down.

So I went over and picked up his phone, looked at her number pinned to his bulletin board and started to dial. "Pete, I have fucked up way way way way way too many times. If I let you walk away from this I won't be able to live with myself." The alcohol was definitely talking there. I got to damn near the last digit when he grabbed the receiver out of my hand.

"All right, man, I'll do it." Crazy Pete hit the last button on the phone and pulled his best Optimus Prime impression by transforming into fucking Mr. Suave! He made a little small talk and invited her over to work on their project and hang out that night. It fucking worked! Even I was surprised!

"Are you going to take her to Mardi Gras tonight?" I asked. "I think Jose' and I are going to cruise down there in a couple of hours or so."

"We'll probably just work on the project and hang out." And then he said the magic words: "We'll see what happens."

I snagged a giant can of Fosters out of the fridge to drink in the shower, entered the bathroom and flipped on everybody's favorite rock and roll institution KBER 101. Motley Crue into Metallica into AC/DC into White Zombie into Def Leppard into Godsmack; is it any wonder why I love that station as much as I do? By the end of my shower I felt good and loose. I loves me a long hot shower with a little alcohol. Anyway, I hopped across the hall to my bedroom and got dressed in the nicest pair of cargo pants and the cheesiest looking Hawaiian shirt I could find. I went with the Hilfiger with the Woody cars on it. Real subtle. It was time to get festive! I entered the kitchen/living room area to find a bunch of girls from that room down the hall and VodkaRob pounding down some cocktails.

As I was joining in the festivities, I heard Crazy Pete knocking on The Nate's door. "Can I borrow some tequila, man?" he asked. The Nate shot him down. Things were starting to get a little uncool with old Nate, but at the same time, he had a $50 bottle of Herradura he did not want going to waste. So I kind of understood. Fortunately I had a huge bottle of Cuervo in my stash that I was more than happy to part with for a good cause, and this certainly qualified as a good cause. "What are you mixing up bro?" I asked.

"I thought we'd just do some shots or something."

"Well Pete, I'll tell you what, use as much of that bottle that you want, but if Candace isn't up for tequila, you can use whatever of my stuff you want, except for the Goose. That shit is expensive!"

VodkaRob and the girls from down the hall soon vanished, leaving just myself, Crazy Pete and Jose' playing some Tony Hawk II on our little television. Big Nick and Ali were in his room "taking a nap" which usually involved a lot of slapping noises and laughing. The Nate and his girl Lisa had locked themselves up in his room and were pounding something against the wall, probably each other. Good times! It was about 10:00 when we heard a knock at the door. In his excitement, Crazy Pete nearly busted his ass tripping on a stool while running to the door. In walked Candace who seemed just a little too made-up to be coming over to work on a class project. This was a slam dunk for the Pete-ster! As Col. Hannibal Smith of The A-Team once said, "I love it when a plan comes together!" They went down the hall to VodkaRob's room to use his computer while Jose' and I had a shot and caught our ride down to Mardi Gras.

One thing Westminster always got right was the parties they threw. As opposed to the student events thrown down at the College of Eastern Utah, these were typically wild-assed soirees where the liquor flowed, the tuneage thumped and everyone was dressed to the nines. I'll get a little more in-depth about those parties in a future story. They were a doozy!

We got down there around 10:15, met up with Peeze, Dane-o, and The Line-Stepper and commenced to having a couple drinks, limbo-ing and having a good time. I didn't intend on staying too long just because we had to get up early the next day to stand in line for the tickets. The years of self abuse had taken their toll by then and I just could'nt hang anymore. So I bailed around 11:15, catching a ride with Rachel, one of my teammates from the golf team.

I got back to 302 to find some of the girls from down the hall digging through the cupboards in the kitchen. "Where do you keep your bread?!" one of them yelled at me.

"What bread?" I slurred, my head already starting to pound. "What in the blue hell is going on?"

"She's in there throwing-up!" She hollered.

So I headed back up the hallway towards my room and I heard the moaning and retching noises coming out of the open bathroom door. I saw a trail of vomit leading from the door to the john as two more of the girls from down the hallway nearly ran me over. "Where are your paper towels?!"

"Paper towels? They're in the pantry." I answered. Why the fuck were they yelling at me? I looked in Crazy Pete's room. He was lying down on his bed, the faint odor of tequila and hurl was in the air. I looked on his desk, the entire fifth of Cuervo was reduced to about 3/4 of an inch in the bottom of the bottle. I had to look at the clock twice. 11:30. Yup, only an hour and fifteen minutes had passed since Candace had arrived. Zero to puking in an hour! "That's got to be some kind of a record!" I thought. "Pete, are you all right?" I asked shaking him back into the land of the living.

"Oh fuck dude, give me a minute." He moaned.

I figured things would get a little messy so I went into my room, flipped on Scott Ian's "Rock Show" on VH1 and changed out of my good clothes tossing on a pair of basketball shorts and my Megadeth t-shirt. Whitesnake's Still of the Night video kicked on as I decided it was time to take over. I retreated to the kitchen, filled a glass of water and went back down the hallway. I went into the bathroom where poor Candace was praying to the porcelain god. "Hey. Are you gonna be all right kiddo?" She looked up, the sweat and tears making the mascara bleed down her face, giving her the vague appearance of Alice Cooper in the early years. "Here, sip some of this, real slowly." I handed her the glass, trying to not look completely horrified. "It's just some cool water." Crazy Pete shuffled in. "Grab a washcloth out of the drawer, and soak it in some cool, but not cold water," I hollered at him.

"You asshole." He hissed as he handed me the washcloth.

I handed it to her, "Here, wash your face off a little bit and hold it against your forehead." I turned my attention to Pete, "Why am I the asshole?"

"If you hadn't have made me call her, this never would have happened. This is all YOUR fault, man!" He wasn't making any sense. In my previous days I probably would have let him have it, but my many years of experiencing consistently fucked up situations had tempered me. He was obviously still pretty drunk. Anything I said probably would have made the whole situation worse. But Christ, what the hell happened in that hour? And where the hell was VodkaRob? He better be having some fun. In my best Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction impression I looked Crazy Pete dead in the eye and very calmly laid it out.

"Pete, we'll talk about this in the morning. Right now, we've got a sick girl on our hands that we need to take care of. And considering both you and VodkaRob are still underage, if we draw the attention of the RA or the Dean we are ALL fucked. So sober your ass up right now and help out. Go and empty out one of my cans of coffee." Evidently my great aunts, bless their little old hearts thought I drank twenty cups of coffee a day. So every time I went home to Price they'd send a giant-ass can of Folgers up with me.

Pete shuffled down into the kitchen and I got poor Candace another glass of water and a multi-vitamin. I walked past my room to see one of the girls from down the hall in there looking at my music collection. "Something I can do for ya?" I asked. She looked up, blank look on her face, "I like the heavy stuff too. Are you into Creed and Vertical Horizon?" she asked. My eyes rolled, this was definitely a conversation I did not need to have right now.

"Uhhh, not now," I said more annoyed than anything as I grabbed my extra blanket and pillow out of my closet and tossed them on the couch. "Okay Pete, I'm going to need some help right now dude. She threw up her shoes a minute ago so I think she's done yakking, let's have her lie down. We need to move her out to the couch." Pete and I carried her out, layed her down on the couch, propped up her head and threw a blanket on her. The girls from down the hall finally left and I grabbed a Dewzer out of the fridge. Pete sat down on the big chair and hung his head. "Pete, you did a good job tonight. I'm proud of ya. The two of you are going to be all right, man." I said.

"I think I love this girl." He slurred. "What went wrong?"

"Cheer up dude, you've still got a chance. One bad night isn't going to kill ya's. You saw how she was dressed when she came in, it's pretty damn obvious that she digs you." I continued, "Just take it a little bit slower next time, Dude." Silence. "Pete? Hey, bro?" I looked up at him. He had his head in his hands and was passed out snoring. I threw a blanket over his shoulders, turned out the living room light, and grabbed a mop. He was probably right, it was all my fault. I guess I deserved cleanup duty.

Metallica's Motorbreath jolted me out of bed at 7:30 the next day. Thankfully the headache was gone. I jumped in the shower, cleaned up and got dressed. Tickets went on sale promptly at 9:00 AM so we had to bust ass down to the store. As I walked out, the living room area was deserted. No sign of Crazy Pete or Candace. VodkaRob popped his head out his door, looking a little worse for wear. "Hang on, let me put on some pants and I'll go with you." He said groggily.

"Take your time. Just meet me out at the Blazer." I said walking out the door.

Rob walked up to the truck looking disheveled to say the least. "Rough night?" I asked.

"You don't want to know?" he replied.

We met Jose' and another buddy of mine, Little Nick, down at the grocery store and waited patiently for the ticket lottery. In walked Crazy Pete about twenty minutes later. "What a trooper bro! You're alive!" I exclaimed. "Why aren't you in bed dude? Rob and I could have handled this."

"I had to be here man. AC/DC." he replied, horns up.

"How much of your project did you get done?" Rob asked.

"Not a whole lot. That chick is nuts. I can't remember too much."

That's probably a good thing.

Epilogue:

We ended up getting awesome seats for AC/DC, right on the floor. I even scored a hottie rocker-chick, Jess, from the dorm for a date. This was a first for me for a big rock concert. Before the show, we shot a little video in the parking lot that planted the seed in VodkaRob, Jose' and I for a little project we're coming out with in a few months. VodkaRob started an on-again/off again relationship with one of the girls down the hall. And as for Crazy Pete, well, Crazy Pete got the girl. Pete and Candace got an "A" on their project and dated well into the following summer. She became yet another one of the crazy characters woven into the tapestry of the Room 302, the Penthouse of Residence Hall 3. Score one for the good guys.

Bonus:

Here's a rough cut of the video we shot in the E-Center parking lot before the tremenduous AC/DC Stiff Upper Lip show. Hope ya'll like it!

The ten albums that best describe who I am...

2009-03-01T16:24:00.006-07:00

My old 9-Ball/trivia bitch Ben stumbled upon a hell of an idea. Which ten albums do the best job of explaining your personality. Kind of a desert island list here. What are the ten albums that shaped your world? Here's mine in no particular order at all:

1. AC/DC ~ Live (1992):
The first hard rock album that I ever purchased. This record captures their best recordings from one of the old Monsters of Rock tours. It was the first live record featuring Brian Johnson on the lead vox and the first live album the band released since 1978's If You Want Blood (You Got It) featuring Bon Scott. Now that one might be the better live record critically, but I didn't wear out two copies of that album in my old truck like I did with the Live record. It wasn't until I finally saw them live back in 2001 that I finally realized just how damn good that band really is. They are every bit as good and dare I say even more powerful live than they are on record. As a bonus, they're one of Keith Richards' favorite bands, and really, has that dude ever led us astray?

2. The Rolling Stones ~ Let It Bleed (1969)
Speaking of Keith Richards, when discussing the Stones, the first album almost every rock critic pulls out as the pinnacle of their career is 1972's Exile on Main St. But for my money you can definitely do worse than the record that came before it, Let It Bleed It captured the band in a state of flux. The band's founder and original rhythm guitarist Brian Jones died on the day the last tracks for this album were recorded. A lot of the band's most recognizable material came from this album like "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and "Gimme Shelter" but I kind of liked the deeper cuts like "Love In Vain" and "Monkey Man." This album also has Keith's lead vocal debut on one of my favorite songs called "You Got The Silver." Back in my senior year of high school, I had a shitty little clock radio that would also play tapes. So for the better part of a school year, I was woken up by a different Rolling Stones song every morning. "You Got The Silver" woke me up on the morning after I learned that my family was disintegrating. So that song kind of earned the title of the first song of the rest of my life.

3. Led Zeppelin ~ Houses of the Holy (1973)
Gotta echo Ben's sentiments here. Some of my most vivid memories growing up were playing this album on a seemingly endless loop while we were down in Nick's basement shooting pool and crushing Market Express Cherry Cokes. In fact, that record might have been the background music for "what Chad said," the single greatest psych out in amateur billiards history. I remember those times often because, things weren't exactly going the greatest for me at the time with the family situation and all, and I was a bitter, pissed off kid. Those days helped me get past it. Plus it also helped that one of those Page and Plant tours was the third concert we ever went to. My personal favorites off this disk, "D'yer Mak'er," "No Quarter," and "The Crunge." Also had a great mention in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure when noted thespian Keanu Reeves referred to ancient Greece as a "countryside that much resembled the cover of Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy."

4. Supersuckers ~ Motherfuckers Be Trippin' (2003)
I spent the better part of 2003 recovering from a very dark period in my life. Early 2003 found be flat broke, busted, unemployed and destitute. A buddy of mine took a chance on me and gave me a job that put me back in the golf business. Only this time, I was sitting on an overheating mower for eight hours a day in 105 degree heat. I actually really liked that job and it made me a more rounded professional later. Anyway, as I was sitting on a fairway mower hallucinating daily from heat sickness and trying to go in a straight line, more often than not, I was spinning this disc in my ancient CD player. I don't know why I didn't get into this band sooner. I think it was primarily because up until this point most of their songs were about smoking dope, which is one thing I've never really been into. This album though was primarily about drinking and fighting, which was a little bit more my speed. This one's a pretty solid punk and hard rock record highlighted by what's become a staple of their live sets the last few years "Pretty Fucked Up," as in "She used to be pretty, but now she's just pretty fucked up." It's a tune that finally made sense to me recently when I reconnected with an old friend. And in a lot of ways almost wish I hadn't. But hell, it's all good. Other awesome tracks on this disk include "Bruises to Prove It," "A Good Night For My Drinkin," and "Sleepy Vampire."

5. Metallica ~ Load (1996)
Okay, not their best album by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, most people would probably say pretty much every album not named St. Anger (which I actually kinda liked) was better than this one. And I'd be hard pressed to disagree. But for its time and place, namely rolling around in Bryan Wischer's 1982 Buick Regal in the summer of 1996 it's got its moments. Our little gang must have spun this cassette tape at least 1436 times while driving all over the state playing golf, camping and raising hell that summer. It provided a pretty good soundtrack to the last summer before our senior year. My personal favorite song off this one is the closing track "The Outlaw Torn," and was happy to see that song get fully fleshed out on their S & M album three years later. I also dug "The Hero of the Day," "Wasting My Hate," and "King Nothing." During my first Metallica concert, up at Weber State's football field, they were playing "Bleeding Me" when Ben, Nick, Chris and I, ditched our shitty seats, jumped the fence and stormed the pit. Along with about 1000 other heshers. Good times! Although, if I were stranded on a desert island I'd probably pick a different album from my favorite band.

6. Social Distortion ~ Social Distortion (1990)
I came along pretty late to this band, but was turned on to them by a few of my Metal Sludge brethren. Great old-school punk band that brought a lot of outlaw country influence (at least thematically) to the mix. Most hardcore fans of theirs will point towards Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell and White Light, White Heat, White Trash as better albums, but this album's got probably my favorite three songs of theirs: "Ball and Chain," their cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" and "Story of my Life" which is more or less my theme song nowadays. When I'm announcing games on the PA for Westminster Basketball, I play a lot of varied stuff that you'll rarely hear at any other sporting event, I'm not much of a "jock-jams" guy. But for the last 3:30 of halftime I've made it a custom to spin "Ring of Fire" as the team comes back out to get ready for the second half. When the crowd hears Mike Ness' chugging intro riff to that song, they know it's about time to get rowdy again and will the Griffins to victory.

7. Anthrax ~ The Sound of White Noise (1993)
Just an overall punishing record. When the band ditched Joey Belladonna in favor of Armored Saint's John Bush, they took on a much more serious tone than the goofy punk-infused thrash that they were known for previously. I'm usually not too big a fan when a band starts putting out more serious material. That's usually a good sign that they're becoming a little too full of themselves and are starting to get a little blowhardy. I listen to music primarily to elevate my mood, put a smile on my face, and get me jumping around like a freebasing orangutan. But this album just, plain works. They became more of a straight-up metal band with this record, and you're going to have to travel far and wide to find a better album sonically. My fondest experience listening to this album had to be borrowing my old college roommate's jacked up, top-off Jeep to drive across town one morning my senior year of college. My old Blazer was broken down, and I'd just had my wallet stolen the day before so I was feeling particularly shitty. And I needed to hit the DMV to get a new drivers license. He let me borrow his badass ride, complete with as loud a sound system as you could fit into that little thing, to run that errand. I threw in The Sound of White Noise, cranked it to eleven, and when the first couple blast beats from "Potters Field" kicked in I could literally see the windows on the dorm shake. Awesome. Great release and needless to say, I felt better. Also has the track "Black Lodge" which had one of the weirdest videos ever, directed by David Lynch and starring Jenna Elfman. I just had to sneak that track onto my playlist the day I got to host a four-hour show on the local rock station KBER 101.

8. Motley Crue ~ Motley Crue (1994)
Not a lot of people outside of the Metal Sludge community don't know about this hidden gem of a record. Hell, a lot of people don't even consider this a proper Motley album due to the band's firing of longtime lead singer, Vince Neil, a couple of years previous. In some ways they have a point, because this almost sounds like a brand new band. Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee and Mick Mars decided to soldier on and tabbed journeyman frontman John Corabi, formerly of a little known but excellent L.A. band called The Scream, to take Vince's place. The song's on this record took a decidedly darker and heavier tone on this album than the typical Motley party anthems that came before it. I'll tell you what though, I don't think Tommy Lee's drumming ever sounded better than it did on this album, and adding Corabi to the mix also added his solid rhythm guitar work as well. So instead of having to do all of the guitar work on the songs that freed up Mick to concentrate solely on the leads giving all of the songs a lot more depth. Corabi's scratchy, blues soaked vocals did turn off a lot of fans used to Vince's cleaner, high pitched wail. I played the hell out of this album back in college, often playing along with it with my own guitar, much to the dismay of my roommates or any dogs that happened to be in the neighborhood at the time. Listened to this record a lot on the driving range warming up for golf tournaments. My own personal favorite tune on this one is "Til Death Do Us Part," but I also like "Hooligan's Holiday," "Smoke the Sky," and "Uncle Jack." Give this one a chance folks, trust me, if after two or three spins you just can't get into it, feel free to call me an asshole.

9. Alice Cooper ~ Trash (1989)
I'd be remiss if I didn't include at least one Alice Cooper album on my list. The guy is hands down, and I will not argue about this, the most original American rock star of all time. And it's a goddamn crime against humanity that he isn't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame right now while tripe like Steely Dan, and James Taylor is. Unbelievable bullshit. Anyway, I can't just pick a favorite Alice record because, well he's got 32 of them going back to 1967. Over the years, I've managed to acquire all of them and there isn't a shitty one of the bunch. But the Trash album got my foot in the door with the guy. Senior year of high school, on those long debate trips, I was spinning the hell out of that album in my little discman in the back of the bus. Always liked "Poison," the lead track but this disc was loaded with good tunes. "Bed of Nails," "House of Fire" and what's become my favorite over the years, "This Maniac's In Love With You." Alice often credited golf with helping him to finally kick his alcoholism and eventually save his life, and I certainly can relate to that. I can't imagine what kind of mess I'd be right now if I didn't have the game in my life. People need to get wise. Based on his total body of work, both with the original Alice Cooper Band and solo, Alice Cooper is the undisputed heavyweight champion of American rock and roll and it's not even close.

10. Guns N' Roses ~ Appetite For Destruction (1987)
Lightning in a bottle. One of only a few absolutely perfect albums ever made. And that's a statement backed up by hardcore fans, critics and even people that don't seem to like heavy music all that much. Even they all agree on this one. There isn't a single bit of filler on this record. Just an onslaught. Although songs like "Welcome to the Jungle," "Paradise City," "Night Train," and "Mr. Brownstone" are lyrically about the kind of trouble you can find if you try to "make it" in the big city and fail. Anybody that grew up in my little hometown could find something to relate to here. I didn't know too many kids my age that didn't own this album back home. When my buddy Rob and I went down to Vegas to see the "new" Guns N' Roses a couple of years ago, they ended up playing most of this album. It's now wonder, as much as I like Lies, Use Your Illusion, The Spaghetti Incident?, and even Chinese Democracy, they don't quite measure up to the debut. Lately I've been cranking it whenever "Out Ta Get Me" and "It's So Easy" pop up on the shuffle in my car. But the closing track, "Rocket Queen," I'm convinced, is probably the absolute apex of hard rock. One of my top 5 songs of all time. The whole album still gets regular spins in my car.

Honorable Mention: Prince ~ Purple Rain (Dude played the halftime show of the first Bears Super Bowl in 22 years!), L.A. Guns ~ A Nite on the Strip, Live! (Probably my favorite "hair" metal band), Rob Zombie ~ Hellbilly Deluxe (All of us on the 1997-1999 CEU Golf team played the hell out of this album on trips), Metallica ~ Death Magnetic (Great return to form for the band and has been the soundtrack of the chaos my professional life has been in since September), and a special honorable mention to my buddy Bryan Wischer's famous mix, "The Tape." (The only other cassette that ever seemed to find its way into the deck in his car during the Load summer.)

How say you folks, what are your "ten albums?"

The World Famous Dave Story, a Dorm Days Flashback...

2009-02-24T00:38:00.006-07:00

Okay. Some good stuff happened last week, but it's all part of a bigger picture that I don't quite want to spill the beans on yet. But to tide you over until I get that story written, we'll continue the tour of some of my past writing. Here's an eight part story dealing with one of my roommates back in college. I originally published this story back on my old MySpace.com blog three years ago in January of 2006. It made the semifinals of a rather large writing contest that year and got me a little bit of attention. I often said that I'd be telling stories about this kid for the rest of my life, so I figured a few of these stories needed to go down on paper so my often booze soaked brain would never forget them. Strap in, this one is a little long, but there's a good message here. At the time we thought we were making this dude a better guy. It turned out that he made us better people. A quick disclaimer, as with all my Dorm Days flashbacks, time, and a couple thousand beers, can make things a little bit fuzzy. This was how I remember things went. If you were around back then and you noticed that I screwed up the details a little bit, let me know!

"The Passion of The Dave"
(March - May 2000)

I:
I awoke from my afternoon nap around 4:30 on Tuesday afternoon on March 28, and wiped the sleep out of my eyes. Suddenly I heard a faint ringing from the apartment's main phone line. This was never a good sign, none of us even knew the number for that phone and every time it rang, something bad was about to happen. Only administration types had that number. I saw the caller ID on the phone; it was the Student Life Director's office, which probably meant we were in trouble again. It had been about a month and a half since the party we had thrown in our dorm apartment, room 302 - The Penthouse of Residence Hall 3. The story of that party will be told at another time, but just so you know, there was fallout involved. Ever since, we felt the ever-watchful eye of the Dean upon all of us. She made it pretty clear to us that she was not to be fucked with. "Hello?" I picked up the phone.

"This is Britton Bates, Director of Student Life, do you have a minute?"

"Yeah no problem, what's up?" I slurred out groggily.

"We have a solution to your roommate problem Mr. Nickas"

"I wasn't aware we had a problem."

"You have two empty rooms in your unit and we just found you a new roommate."

"Well, the more the merrier, I guess." I replied.

"But there may be some issues," she continued, "He grew up in a troubled home, and lived a sheltered life. We figured down here, that if anybody can crack his shell, it would be you guys."

"So what are you getting at?" I questioned.

"Listen Nickas, he's suffered through a traumatic childhood, but he's a brilliant student. It was all he had. If you guys can show him a few methods of peer interaction, and try to make him feel a little more normal, it'd go a long way toward smoothing out your reputations with the Dean." She absolutely sledgehammered that last point down. From what I could gather, helping this kid out might buy us a little bit of leeway and get our crew to the end of the semester without getting kicked out of school.

"When is he moving in?" I asked.

"In about three hours."

"And it's a done deal?"

"Yeah, he'll be there about 7:30."

I took inventory of the situation. We're getting a new roommate in three hours. There's only one month left in my first school year away from home. Where the hell were the other guys? Junior was at work, Big Nick was down at the weight room, and The Nate was in class. I've got class in a half hour! So I called Junior at work, he was not pleased, but empathized with the situation. He was the new guy just three months previous. On my way down to the cafeteria, I ran into Nate. He was not very hot on the subject to say the least. I grabbed a tray of food and plopped down into a booth where Big Nick, lean protein fanatic, was crushing his post workout meal of a couple of grilled chicken breasts with salsa.

"Are we going to make this work?" he asked.

"We don't have any choice in the matter. She sounded pretty serious on the phone, at least this might get us out of trouble."

With everybody warned and ready to roll out the welcome wagon, I cruised to class where I endured an hour and ten-minute lecture on the consequences of the deteriorating European treaty system in the late 1800's and how it eventually led to WWI. Doc Welsh was a fascinating teacher, but this was one of the less interesting lectures he'd given all year and I was chomping at the bit to get back to 302 and figure out a plan.7:15 hit and it could not have come soon enough. I was back to the penthouse in a flash. Big Nick and his Tuesday night girl Heather, Nate, Junior, and my girlfriend at the time Jules were all in the kitchen having a drink. They asked me exactly what was said on the phone, so I grabbed a Michelob and relayed the story again. Nobody was thrilled. We all agreed to meet over breakfast in the morning to discuss what we were going to do. Room 302 had been a revolving door since December when Jerry Flynt and the Mormon kid had left. The Dowder had quit school just three weeks ago. We just wanted some stability. But as I grew to learn, stability was a luxury we never were going to enjoy.

II:
There was a knock at the door. I opened it up and found an unruly mop of dandruffed hair staring back at me. He looked up, his Peter Gallagher style eyebrows arched, "I'm David, your new roommate."

"Welcome to the club dude! Come on in!" I exclaimed in a manner that didn't exactly convey my true emotions at the time. Dave took one step in the door, caught our doormat in just the wrong way and went flying ass over teakettle, crashing to the floor in a heap! We're talking Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford style here. His little shaving kit burst open, spilling pill bottles all over the kitchen floor.

"Holy shit dude! Are you okay? Let me help you," as I started putting the bottles back into his bag. I noticed a few of the names on the prescriptions, Lithium Carbonate, Xanax, Haldol, and penicillin. "Nice cocktail of anti-psychotic, and mood stabilizers," I thought silently, just happy to have remembered any of the shit from Psychology outside of the classroom. I helped him to his feet. "David, this is Big Nick, Doug or as we call him Junior, Nate, Heather, and Jules. I'm Nickas. Anything you need dude, just let us know. Your room is right over there, just don't touch the wire coming out of your wall. It's our cable hookup." Jerry Flynt had a cable TV hookup in his room that they conveniently forgot to shut off. A little creative wiring later, and we all had cable.

"Do you need any help carrying anything in bro?" Big Nick offered.

"I've got everything in my bag here, but thank you." He said quietly. His whole life was in a little duffel bag and a backpack.

Everybody sort of separated. Big Nick had to work on a paper so he sent Heather home. The Nate hit the sack. Junior took off to find himself some strange ass, and Jules and I retired to my room to finish our drinks and kick back. About a half hour later, I see Dave walk past my door toward Big Nick's room. For about fifteen minutes there was dead silence. I peered out the door to see Dave staring at Nick while he was typing. Five more minutes go by. Big Nick finally looks up, "What's up buddy?"

"Thank you." Said Dave creepily, as he slowly turned walked back towards his room. Jules and I finished our wine and said goodnight. I was more than a little nervous and slept with one eye open that night.

The next morning I met Big Nick and Junior down at the cafeteria. You could tell none of us slept a wink the night before. Where the hell was Nate? As I got up to grab another cup of coffee Nate crashed into our booth looking a little worse for wear. "What the hell happened to you, amigo?" I asked.

"Dude, I'm alone with him on that side of the apartment. He's fuckin' weird, man."

"Care to elaborate?" Junior quipped. "Yeah, this morning I woke up to hear him making noises in the shower. Strange noises. Like the Three Stooges or something, NYUK! NYUK! NYUK! WHOOOO! I don't know what he was doing in there, but it was freaking me out!" Two minutes of masturbation jokes went by and then we finally decided to storm Ms. Bates' office and find out what his deal was. She was less than thrilled to see us, but gave us what information she could. It turned out that he had found his father swinging from a shower rod when he was a small child and grew up with an alcoholic and abusive mother. He had some serious emotional issues growing up. We still weren't sure how we could help, but we figured we would just try to treat him like a normal, everyday Joe. Little did we know, just how tough that would end up being.

III:
None of us saw Dave until three days later, until I returned home from my job one afternoon to see him sitting in the living room talking to Annie, our hottie RA. Typical situation for anyone new to the dorms, but a very atypical scene based solely on what he was wearing. That is, he wasn't wearing any pants. All that he had on were just a pair of briefs and a sweater. For the first time since I moved to Salt Lake I did not know what to say. You could tell that Annie was uncomfortable as hell to say the least, but her policy was that she always had time to listen to her residents. She got up to leave looking at me like she had just seen Elvis alive or something, said hello to me and walked out the door. "Everything all right?" I asked, as I snagged a Michelob out of the fridge.

"Everything is great." Dave muttered with a goofy look on his face as he went into his room and closed the door.

"Well, that wasn't weird or anything." I thought to myself as I threw Anthrax's The Sound of White Noise disc into my stereo and plugged in my guitar.

IV:
A few days later, I was alone in the apartment cooking up some Philly cheese steaks in the kitchen and in walks Dave. He was dragging his right leg, which seemed to be encased in some kind of giant full-length splint. "Christ dude, are you okay? What the hell happened?"

"I just...I just woke up this morning, and my leg felt like it was broken. So my grandmother brought me a brace."

"What did the doctor tell you?" I asked. "He said he couldn't find anything wrong. I don't believe him though." Dave replied and walked into his room before I could ask any more nosy questions.

I finished plating my sandwich, grabbed a beer and went into my room. Five minutes later I hear somebody running past my door, slamming into Big Nick's door, and then running back past mine again down the hallway. I opened the door, peered down towards Nate and Dave's half of the apartment and saw nothing. Ten minutes later, I heard the same thing. Same result, only I heard a door slam on the other half of the apartment. "It sounds like he's running ladders or something." I thought, plucking the strings on my Epiphone. The next day I had two separate conversations with both Big Nick and Junior who had heard the same thing over the course of the previous week. Double weird.

V:
The next weekend, I went home to Price for my family's Easter celebration. We typically barbecue a whole lamb on a spit, and make a big party out of it. The local Orthodox priest even joins us, about twenty-five people in all. It is always nice to see everybody, even if it is only once a year. Anyway, that Saturday night, WWF wrestler The Rock, with special musical guests AC/DC hosted Saturday night live. Thinking that it might be a good show, I dialed up The Nate to ask him to hit record on my VCR when the show started. "I might not be able to." The Nate said quietly over the receiver, almost whispering.

"What's the matter?" "I'm stuck in my room. He's outside my door, wigging out at the mirror."

"What the hell?" I said, "What is he saying?" I wasn't really buying it, but who knew?

"He's wearing a jacket with a clip-on tie. Get this though, he is not wearing any pants, just his underwear! He's yelling shit at the mirror like "YOU LOSE! YOU LOSE! YOU'RE RUINING MY LIFE!"" The Nate started to sound scared. "I'm watching out the peephole in my door. Uh-oh," He stopped.

"Nate, what the hell is going on?!" "I think he saw me. Jesus Christ, my door is shut, but I think he knows I've been watching him. He looked up in the mirror!" The Nate paused momentarily, "I think he just left." He said exhaling.

"Okay, keep your door shut and lock it tonight before you go to bed, and if he leaves, hit record on my VCR bro. Just sit tight, I'll be back tomorrow night."I hung up the phone. That episode of SNL was probably the high water mark of that particular era. The Nate managed to hit record in time.

VI:
It was two in the morning a week later, Jules and I were curled up under a blanket watching "She's All That" or something equally Prinze-ey. The credits rolled, "I've got to go home. My friend's coming to visit in the morning." She said.

"I'll walk ya over there, kiddo." I replied, not sure if I was still asleep or not. As she was putting her shoes back on, I smelled something burning. Like a melted tire. "Christ almighty, what the hell is that?" We creeped down to the end of the hall to the little sliding door that we had taken to shutting lately. This sealed the Big Nick/Junior/Nickas half of the apartment from the main area. I could hear someone milling around in the kitchen so I cracked the sliding door open very quietly and peered into the darkness. There was Dave in his familiar sweater/jockey shorts garb standing in front of the microwave. All I could see was something blue spinning around in there. But the smell was something else entirely. It could strip the varnish off a footlocker! "You better wait a second darlin'." I whispered.

"Let me see." She said, poking her head through the sliding door. She pulled back quickly. "Wow. Just...wow. Does he do this all the time?" she asked.

"Naw, this is the first time I've seen this," I said as the eerie blue light emanating from the microwave grew brighter and brighter. By this time, Big Nick and Junior had joined us in the hallway. And all four of us were quietly watching the scene unfold. Dave started rummaging through the utensil drawer.

"Shit! He's using my tongs!" Big Nick hissed.

Dave used the tongs to remove some kind of smoky, dark mass the size of a softball out of the microwave. The smell threatened to knock us all over. He dropped it into a little black bag, zipped it up and shuffled down his and Nate's hallway, quietly closing the door. We collectively exhaled and made our way into the common area. Suddenly Nate slipped out of his room in his blue bathrobe, wild look in his eyes. "I told you he was crazy! You assholes thought I was nuts, but what do you call that?"

"Pretty weird." Was all I could muster as I walked Jules across the floor hallway to her room and gave her a kiss goodnight. We never did find out what the blue thing was.

VII:
Junior was sitting in his room typing up a paper on his laptop one afternoon. In shuffles Dave. "Doug, do you have any scissors that I could borrow?" he asked.

"I don't, but ask Nickas, he might have some." Junior said, probably wary to give him any sharp objects.

I overheard this and dug through my shoebox full of school supplies. I did not have any decent scissors, but I managed to come across a pair of those shitty rounded safety scissors from the fucking third grade. "I know they suck bro, but will these work?" I asked as he came into my room.

"Thank you." He muttered quietly as he walked away toward his and The Nate's half of the apartment.

About half an hour later I heard the main door close. Dave must have taken off to get some chow or something. Nate soon came home from work. The guy had started to get a little less personable over the last month or so. Dave's antics were obviously a little too much for him and seemed to be wearing him down little by little. Nate obviously saw shit that none of the rest of us had, but was reluctant to talk about it. I think the episode with the mirror really fucked with his head. And he was clearly agitated that he had to deal with it after he paid $20,000 a year just to attend the school.

"You guys! Get in here and check this out!" he hollered. Junior and I grabbed our beers and cruised down the hallway. In the bathroom sink, there was a large pile made up of clumps of hair of varying length. My shitty ass scissors lay on the floor. Dave had given himself a haircut.

VIII:
I arrived home from class a few days later to find Dave in my room perusing my CD collection. I had an open door policy with my room. If you wanted to borrow a disc or a movie or something, feel free. Just let me know when you see me. He looked up as I walked in. "What's up buddy?" I asked.

"You have quite a strange collection. Of music." He said quietly. I had everything from some Johnny Cash gospel albums to Morbid Angel in there. Kind of contradictory, but I like it. "Some of this is, well, kind of Satanic. You're not into the occult or anything are you?" He looked almost scared holding my copy of Slayer's Seasons in the Abyss. Having had this same conversation with my grandmother the previous summer, I patiently explained to him that it was all an act, they did not really worship Satan and neither did I. Hell, I was a Christian, just not necessarily of the fire and brimstone type.

"I just like the guitar work." I said.

"Oh, you play guitar?" He spied my shitty little Epiphone Strat sitting in the corner.

"I just like to dick around with it a little bit, I'm really not any good." I said laughing. "I straight up suck! You play?" I asked.

"A little, but I haven't played in a long time." He said.

"Well here, strap it on dude." I handed him my axe and kicked the power button on my shitty little Peavey amp. Next thing I know, he's laying down a bitchin' little bluesy guitar solo! "Dude, where'd you learn how to do that!?"

"My grandpa played a little bit for me when I was a kid. I only know that one." He said, turning red in the face. "Nickas, can I ask you a question?"

"I'm all ears bro, what's on your mind?"

"Do the other guys hate me?" I was a little taken aback. "No, nobody hates you David, but to be totally honest, you have made us a little bit nervous from time to time." I said honestly. "How so?""Well..." and I kind of laid out some of the stuff that had happened over the last month. "Now listen" I told him, "I'm trying not to be judgmental or anything because maybe it's just your shtick, but some of this stuff might be seen by a lot of people as, well a little strange. At first everybody was a little weirded out, but now we're kind of concerned."

"Sometimes my medicine makes me kinda black out and I don't know what's going on. I'm sorry about that."

"I've been meaning to ask you about that bro. Now I know it's none of my business, but my textbook says some of that shit shouldn't be mixed together. You might want to narrow it down to one doctor who knows his shit and can take care of ya." He nodded in agreement. "And trust me," I added, "If we didn't care about you, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation. If you live in this unit, you're one of the family. We're all a little bit fucked up in here. Hell, I think that is why they put us all together. We just don't want to see you getting hurt. And for god sakes, next time you need a haircut let me know and I'll loan ya $20, leave that to the pros!"

That was the first time I'd seen Dave laugh since he moved in. I shook his hand, and told him that for the next week, if he was not sure about his response to a certain situation, to not be afraid to ask what to do. And he definitely took us up on it. We even got him to lob his first middle finger at some asshole in the cafeteria! For the first time in his life, he was just one of the guys.

Epilogue:
A week later we all went our separate ways for the summer. None of us are really sure what happened to Dave. But I heard from a fairly reliable source that his grandpa had passed on and left him a rather sizeable inheritance. Dave was no longer crazy. He was eccentric! I ran into him recently on the train ride home from work one day. He still had the unibrow, but he looked anything but the disheveled outcast we knew back in the days of Dorm Apartment 302. He even had a steady job working at a little watering hole downtown, not that he has to work anyway. He said he just liked being around people. I learned a lot from that kid, and I am glad to see he is doing okay.

Flashing back a few years...

2009-02-22T23:36:00.007-07:00

Okay, this first one is from a few years ago. This is the first time that I ever really described in writing one of the two main reasons why I love the game as much as I do. I'm not the most religious guy in the world, but I definitely felt something otherworldly. Or maybe the wind finally quit blowing down there, who knows?

Confessions of a NyQuil Addicted, Hard Rocking, Golf Pro From Hell Part 2:

(Originally published on the old blog back in November of 2005)

It's been a really weird year. Financially, it's been decent, but I'm still barely above water. Like idiots, my sister and I re-upped for another year in our apartment. It's the kind of place that I'm pretty sure any building inspector worth their salt would probably condemn on the spot. Our landlord is a total asshat. But the location is too convenient to leave. I worked pretty hard on fixing things up inside and trying to make it nice. But the end result is a beautiful crumbling mess. It'll get better.

Business was pretty good this year. Shop work was pretty much the same as it always is, but despite being crippled by a no-compete lesson policy that prohibits me from advertising my rates, I've actually made a few new lesson clients this year and have really improved as a swing teacher. Hell, I even taught a semester of an actual "for-credit" golf class, which probably makes me the worst former college student on record ever to actually teach for a major university. Da Professah! I even managed to win a few bucks in tournaments this year, although I was a major under-achiever in that department.

Now on to the meat and potatoes of this episode of "Confessions." I recently returned from a weekend getaway to Las Vegas with some folks I met on my vacation last year out in Hollywood. Had a hell of a great time out there with the Cracker, Nate, Cross, Gray, Desiree, and Renee. Drank more than should be legal, lit some cash on fire playing the slots, and made one of the greatest blackjack comebacks of all time to come out ahead a whole dollar! Saw the shark aquarium at the Madalay and some Muay Thai Kickboxing which was some brutal shit. May the Westward Ho rest in pieces. Their $2 margarita was quite simply the greatest liquor value known to man. It was kind of refreshing to be able to walk around on the street with a drink, compared to Utah where you can only drink in a basement with the lights turned off. The Bears won and I still lost my bet. But it's little sacrifices like using my shitty luck to propel them to victory that make a playoff contender! The Fremont Street Experience was the freakin' bombola!

The last time I visited Sin City was waaaaay back in December of 1996! That was the last time my family ever took a road trip/vacation together. On that trip, I was kind of in my "retreat inside myself" phase so I pretty much wandered the strip by myself or with my buddy Curtis the whole trip. Pausing only to eat breakfast and dinner with my family, I had a damn good time. Even won a couple small jackpots. Much like now, I looked a hell of a lot older than I was. Hell, I was just a senior in high school! As an icing on the cake, I returned home to find out I was seemingly the only person in the whole debate club that wasn't suspended that week due circumstances surrounding what ended up being pretty much the only tournament weekend I didn't attend in two years! Funny shit!

Unfortunately, I've got some serious regrets about that trip. Little did I know, my family was crumbling all around me, and my ass was just too much of a space cadet to realize it. This was probably the last opportunity I would ever have to have some quality time with my sister, mother, and father all together. Three months later, my mom split town on us and threw my life into a tailspin. It seemed like everything I had ever believed in my life was now bullshit. For awhile I completely withdrew from everything, save for a small group of friends and my dad. At first I was bitter, and pissed off, throwing blame around like any ignorant teenager probably would.

Then one day, the following summer I was out by myself playing golf at good ol' Carbon Country Club. As was typical at the time I was thinking about what a mess I was. It was late in the day, right around dusk, and the course down home seemed completely deserted. I striped my tee shot down 18 and walked to my ball. When I reached my ball, I had a good look around and something weird happened. I noticed the grass was the most beautiful shade of green I'd ever seen. The sand in the trap seemed pearl white, even though it was the same shitty sand we'd always had. The clouds in the sky looked to be on fire as the little remaining light cast what seemed to be the air around me in the most surreal shade of blue. The scene gave me pause, and then for the first time a sense of total calmness came over me as all the chaos and strife in my life seemingly lifted away. It was almost like someone or something else was there standing next to me letting me know that everything was going to be all right. Then I stepped up to my ball, and shanked it straight into the weeds. But you know what, I didn't care, because I was in a good state of mind. Things were going to be all right.

Now, in the years since, I've certainly had some ups and downs. But ever since that day I've been chasing that feeling again. That's kept me around golf more than any reason. Just so there's a chance I might feel that indescribable presence and feeling of calm again. I'm telling you it felt better than any over the counter, prescription drug or liquor I've ever had. Who knows what it was, but I'd love to feel it again just one more time.

The Great Westward Ho Blackjack Comeback of 2005
L-R Alan, Nate, The Golf Monster, Cracker

Been awhile...

2009-02-22T23:19:00.003-07:00

Folks! Sorry it's been so long. Been kind of a weird Winter and as soon as I'm able, I can't wait to let you know what's been going on. Got some big changes coming up for me professionally, and I'm both nervous and a little excited. I promise some regular, new material on this site very soon. So, to tide you all over, I'm going to import all of my old writing over to this site over the next couple weeks. If you've seen it before, I hope it's still as good. If you're just stumbling across this stuff due to my incessant whoring over on the Facebook page, please let me know what you think! Thanks!

This week's "Dorm Days" Flashback!

2008-10-30T19:39:00.001-06:00

In light of my last post on my new job as the new Associate Head Coach for Men’s and Women’s Golf at Westminster College, I figured that I’d dig up an old entry from my old blog over on myspace.com. So this’ll be my first “Dorm Days Flashback” for the new site. I’m pretty far removed from the guy I was back in 2000, although I can understand why some might think that my new coaching gig might be a “fox in charge of the henhouse” kind of idea. Anyhow, enjoy this “Dorm Days Flashback”…

"The Wacky World of College Athletics"

(October 2000)

Now, during my years at Westminster, I did a lot more than drinking, raising hell with the fellas up in room 302, getting yelled at while working for the basketball team, and occasionally attending class. I also competed as I did at both the high school and junior college levels on the varsity golf team. Golf on the college level was much different than it was back in high school. You played a practice round on Sunday, followed by a thirty six-hole marathon session on Monday and then a final eighteen holes on Tuesday. No carts either, it was all on foot. Four of your teams' individual scores comprised your team score. There were kids in a lot better shape than I was literally crying in pain after the Monday rounds. College golf was more of a physical and mental endurance test than it was based solely on skill. But the trips themselves were a nice chance to get away from all the pressures of college life and decompress. Well, they usually were, but here is one example of a trip that did not exactly go as expected.

I had just turned 22 years old and was the old man of a pretty green group of men and women college golfers. You had the innocent, church going folks in T-Sick, The Juice, and Meg, Bradford the rocket scientist, a savvy and highly touted freshman player in Rache, Brightie the private school princess with a wild streak, and a stereotypical redheaded kid in Loony Zack. And then there was Golf Girl. Ahhh yes, Golf Girl, a kind of goofy, but drop dead gorgeous 6-handicapper transfer student from Idaho State. She was a total knockout with an unbelievable swing to boot. She was just what the doctor ordered for this old, rotten bastard to finally put my failed relationship with Jules behind me and move on. She was any serious golfers dream girl. And we were about to embark in a five day van trip to Billings, Montana to wrap up the Fall-half of the Frontier Conference golf season.

Coach DP thought it would be a nice idea if we left a day earlier than what was typical. We took off from Westminster on Saturday morning so we could spend a relaxing day seeing the sights in beautiful Yellowstone National Park. I was especially excited because I hadn’t been up to Yellowstone since I was in the 9^th grade. Outside of the mountains in Alaska I have always thought that our nation’s first national park was the most beautiful place on Earth.

As bleary as I felt that morning, my mind was still sharp as we played a little game during the drive using Trivial Pursuit cards. We split into two teams, if your team could answer all six questions on a card, you earned a point. I scored the first point of the day answering a question regarding Yankee pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson swapping wives before the 1973 season. "Only Nickas would know something like that." Coach grumbled as he honked the horn displeased that his team was now down 1-0. Ten of us, crammed into a fifteen passenger van with all of our equipment. It almost felt like family.

We pulled into West Yellowstone early in the afternoon and received our room assignments. The girls were all stuffed into one unit, and the guys ended up divided by, well, cultural lines. T-Sick and the Juice doing their bible study, while Bradford, I and Loony Zack piled into a room. Now, Loony Zack's shtick was, well, he made everybody a little nervous. He had transferred to Westminster from Dixie College, where one of my old Junior College coaches at Eastern Utah had taken a job a year earlier. The kid was what we call in the team golf world, a horse. Always came through with a solid round no matter what. He was what you would think would be the ideal teammate. And from a purely competitive standpoint he was. But there was also something a little bit off about the kid. He would wear these clear sunglasses that magnified his eyes as he stared at you. He also had a nice little habit of getting just a little too close to you when he would talk to you. He wasn't exactly standing on your toes or anything, but he was just close enough to make you uncomfortable. That was when he talked which he didn't do very often. Mostly he would sit on the back bench of the van chanting along to his latest trance-music CD. I would wager to say that at least 90 percent of the team thought he was some kind of a serial killer or something. I was pretty much the only guy that was not scared shitless about rooming with the guy. I thought it was hilarious.

Bradford, who may have been psychic or something based on what happened later asked me if I would be offended if he roomed with the other guys. He had a huge physics exam when we got back into town and wanted to spend his off-course time studying. This left me alone with Zack. "No problem at all bro," I said, "but I think it would be a good idea if you went to the park with the rest of us today. You know, get to know everybody a little better." I just wanted the whole team together. Build some unity.

"Sounds like it might be some fun," he replied.

We drove into Yellowstone and cruised to my personal favorite feature of the park, the Norris Geyser Basin. Norris is a wide valley full of hot springs, low clouds, bubbling geysers of many beautiful colors and herds of bison walking around. We hiked along the wooden trail, checking out and taking pictures of one of the widest actively volcanic areas in the country. I sat down on a bench as one of the biggest buffalo I have ever seen walked no more than ten feet away from me. Goddamn I love nature! Of course, no trip to Yellowstone is complete without a stop at Old Faithful where we wrapped up our afternoon as I snapped our unofficial team photograph right in front of the world famous geyser.

Back in West Yellowstone, the team split up for dinner, T-Sick, Bradford and The Juice hit a diner with Coach, while the rest of the squad and myself took up residence at a local bar and grille. Something about a gigantic buffalo steak and a couple of cool brews with my teammates made me put school and the hijinks of Room 302 behind me. At the time, I was all about putting on a good show to impress the girl. I would get kind of loud and a little obnoxious, kind of like Vince Vaughn as Double-Down Trent in Swingers. I was putting on a show tonight! Pretending that I knew a damn thing about the one or two rotguts on the wine list, and trying to be semi-refined, but acting like a know-it-all jackass, I was an idiot. But Golf Girl seemed to dig it. I knew she was a good girl, and your typical Utah cultural issues doomed any hopes I might have had, but dammit, I had fallen for this girl. Eventually the beers mellowed me out a little bit, and we had a nice conversation once the food arrived.

We finished dinner and walked back to the hotel. Zack, Brightie and I stopped along the way at the local grocery store. Now for those who don’t know, in Utah our beer selection is pretty sparse. And it is a weak 3.2 percent ABV to boot. So I always made sure to take an extra large clothes bag on these golf trips in order to bootleg some of the good stuff back to Utah. Stuff like that sweet golden elixir known as Alaskan Amber. While at the store Zack and Brightie picked up some items and I snagged two cases of my favorite sweet, sweet microbrew. We got back to the hotel where I left my contraband by the back door as I was not sure the prying eyes of Coach needed to see anything like that.

I finally got the stuff up to the room and was packing it away into my clothes bag when Loony Zack suddenly appeared about three inches from my face. "Hey, man." He asked quietly, "Brightie and I are hitting the hot tub. You want to join us man?"

"Naw dude," I said taking a step back, "I'm just going to take a bath in some Icy-Hot and hit the sheets. My knee is killing me." I was out of shape, unless round is a shape.

"Oh. Hey man." He got in close again, "Can we borrow some of your beer, man?"

"Knock yourself out dude. I'll catch ya in the morning."

After a nice long bath, I felt relaxed enough to hit the sack. I made the rounds to my teammates rooms wishing them all a good night. My old ass was like the team dad or something. I wanted to be a leader so bad, sometimes I overdid it. I went back to the room, flipped on the television and cracked a beer. Nothing was on, except the Bruce Willis/Ben Affleck vehicle Armageddon. Not the greatest movie of all time, but a nice chance to see my future ex-wife Liv Tyler looking as stunning as ever. As they were drilling the asteroid, I passed out. It was 12:30 in the morning.

I am a shitty sleeper, so when my eyes opened and saw the clock still read 2:30 am I was not too surprised. I rolled over and was welcomed with a sight somewhat common on your average rock band's tour bus, but not seen pretty much ever in my traveling career. There on the bed next to mine, were Loony Zack and Private School Princess Brightie knockin' the boots! And what was that on top of the television? Yup, it was Loony Zack’s mini-camcorder, and the red recording light was definitely on. Holy shit! Those two crazy bastards are making their own homemade porno in here!

Now, here I was, faced with a decision. What do you do in this kind of situation? I kind of had to take a whiz, but obviously for them anyway, there was a beautiful moment going on, and who am I to screw it up? I had no aspirations of becoming a movie star anytime soon either. And those two had kind of been putting on that whole Woody Harrelson/Juliette Lewis "Natural Born Killers" vibe all afternoon, listening to their trance and Fugazi discs. There was that off chance that if I interrupted, I may be the unsuspecting victim of some kind of ritualistic blood orgy or some shit. Who knows? All this shit was running through my head as I shut my eyes and tried like hell to fall back asleep. The last things I heard between the moaning and grunting as the NyQuil kicked back in and I drifted back to slumber was Brightie whispering to Loony Zack, "Isn't it kind of weird, with somebody else in the room?"

"Yeah man. It’s kind of a turn-on, man." Zack replied. He really did talk like that ALL of the time.

I woke up the next day, and sauntered down to breakfast. I was nibbling at my toast and pounding coffee when the remainder of the girl’s team nearly knocked the table over sitting down. The inquisition began. "Brightie never came back to the room last night, what happened?" "Was it her and Zack?" "What happened?" Over and over again they asked the same question as I stared blankly into my coffee cup. I finally looked up.

"Ladies, put two and two together and subtract me because I didn’t have anything to do with what those two did last night."

"You mean they...?"

"I'd rather not talk about it," I said as I nodded my head and took another sip of coffee. “Let’s just say that was possibly one of the weirdest fucking nights I’ve ever had." They knew my reputation and got the message. If I thought it was strange, it would probably be traumatic to most god-fearing people.

Something about that night kind of took my head out of things that weekend. I played a hell of a practice round, my best round of the year actually that day, a 6-under par 66 at the Peter Yegen Golf Club in Billings. I had high hopes going into the tournament. Coach must have had a losing night playing cards with the other coaches the night before, because suddenly there were all five of us guys crammed into one room. No way Zack would be nuts enough to try it again with and extra four guys stuffed into the room. But who knows? I fell asleep not feeling right at all. Must have been something I ate.

The tournament started the next day, I warmed up great and managed solid pars on the first two holes when it hit. It felt like I was being repeatedly kicked in the gut. I barely made it to the bushes when the vomit started to flow. Yup, it was food poisoning. I was on hole-three of thirty-six for the day and I could barely stand. This wasn't going to be a good day at all. Pretty much every other hole we played, I would honk in the weeds. We finished the first 18 and as we were checking our cards I was shocked to see I had managed a 73. I signed my card and handed it to Montana-Western's coach who handed me a bag lunch in exchange. The second that turkey-on-a-roll hit my gut it was on its way back up again. We still had 18 holes to play, and I had no way to refuel. "You okay man?" Western's coach asked as I shook my head.

"How's my score matched up with my teammates so far?" I asked.

"Yours is the second lowest round carded on your team," he replied. "One of your guys got D-Q’d though. Are you sure you’re going to make it?"

"Got no choice now, if we don’t post a tournament score, we can’t go to the Regional. Going to have to gut this one out." I wish I had felt as confident as I wanted to sound.

Round-two wasn’t much better than round one. Although about six holes in, I was able to keep a little cone-cup of water down. My drives were getting weaker, my vision was blurry. I felt like I was turning into a 90 year old man. Montana-Western's coach rolled up again about eleven holes in to the round and stuck a bottle of Gatorade from his team's own stash into my bag. "Just try it, see if you can keep it down. Some of the other coaches and I are taking bets on if you're going to finish."

"How are my odds?" I asked weakly.

"Well, I'm pretty much the only one banking on ya."

"What does my coach think?"

"Don’t know. Nobody’s seen him since the first round." He replied.

Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen hide or hair of my own coach since the driving range that morning. Glad to see he cared. Maybe I should have played for Montana-Western. "I’m so taking this program over after I graduate!" I thought as I took down a baby-swallow of Gatorade.

We finally hit the eighteenth hole of the round and thirty-sixth hole of the day. And I had to take a knee to tee the ball up. At that point I felt so weak; I could barely hit the ball across the street. I popped the ball out into the fairway. Thankfully it was a short hole and I only had about 140 yards in. By then a small crowd of about thirty already finished players was surrounding the green. I embarrassingly grabbed a 6-iron out of the bag. Ordinarily that was way too much club for this shot, but in my condition, this was barely going to get there. I swung the club back and threw my hands at the ball. Thinned the piss out of it. That ball barely got three feet off of the ground and landed about twenty yards off the green. Surprisingly, it bounced forward, nearly rolling off the back of the green and left me with about a 45 foot putt back to the front-left hole location. Two putts to go and I can finally lie down. The other two guys in my group, Chad from Rocky Mountain and Colt from Carroll had both knocked wedges to inside four feet. I could barely see the damn hole from that far away. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied Golf Girl in the crowd. I was suddenly overcome by a familiar feeling of calm. Good lord she was beautiful. "Man up dude! Just get it close." I thought as I jabbed at the ball. "Aw hell!" I hollered, as I saw the ball burn a trail to the hole, "that better hit it, or it’s off the fuckin’ green!" Maybe it heard me, because next thing I knew my ball slammed into the back edge of the cup, hopped in the air a little bit and then settled at the bottom of the hole as a collective shriek went up in the crowd, which to my blurry eyes and ringing ears, looked and sounded like Sunday at Augusta. I staggered forward to snag my ball out of the hole, but Chad from Rocky already had it.

"You are the toughest son-of-a-bitch I've ever met." He said as he handed me my ball.

We sat down at the scorer’s table to sign our cards, when I finally realized after adding up the numbers I had shot a 1-under par 70. My pen had barely finished autographing the scorecard when I blacked out.

The next day I felt a lot better, but could not get the putter to work. I struggled to a 76. But I had still managed one of my best three round tournament scores in years. Not that I really cared, I was just happy to hold my lunch down. Unfortunately my coach wasn't as impressed. He came up to me while I was happily crushing some Taco Johns with my teammates. "Nickas, if you would have shot 74 today, we would have taken 2^nd place. I’m going to need better scores from you down the road." He said matter-of-factly and walked out of the restaurant. Dude couldn’t have saved it for his office when we got home. If we weren't 700 miles from home, I would have throttled him right there. Let’s just say things were a little cold between coach and me for a long time after that.

The ten hour ride home was long and quiet. Where things were jovial a few days earlier, everybody kind of did their own thing. While Juice and T-Sick read their prayer books, Zack and Brightie shared a blanket in the back giggling. Bradford and Rache studied physics and Meg and Coach talked basketball. I slipped my copy of Alice Cooper’s Hey Stoopid into my Discman and did some thinking. "Am I just spinning my wheels here? Is this even worth it anymore?" Then I looked over at Golf Girls sleeping head next to me. "Are you kidding," I thought, "this weekend was the time of my life!"

Since that was the final trip of the fall, we all kind of went our separate ways for the winter. Zack and Brightie broke up something like three days later and nobody ever heard from them again. They did not return the next semester. T-Sick and The Juice both went on church missions, so I never got the chance to play with them again. Coach stuck around for a few more years before moving on to bigger and better things. After the events of that weekend, I figured I had absolutely nothing to lose. I had seen it all so I worked up the gumption to ask Golf Girl out to the homecoming ball. But that is a story for another day.

Here's a photo of that team:

Back Row: Meg, Brightie, Golf Girl, Rache, Coach DP, Bradford, Juice

Front Row: Loony Zack, The Golf Monster, T-Sick

Coach Nickas! I kinda like the sound of that...

2008-10-30T00:14:00.003-06:00

Earlier this past summer I received a phone call from an old college acquaintance She had heard about some golf classes that were being offered by our alma mater, Westminster College; and was wondering if I was the one they had tabbed to teach them. I wasn't even aware they were teaching classes down there. Now, I do teach some classes at the University of Utah, but up until that point, I was completely unaware that Westminster was offering any classes. Three days later I got a call from the Athletic Director from Westminster asking if I'd like to go to lunch and discuss a few things. I'd been working during the winters as a public address announcer for the basketball teams ever since I got out of school and I assumed that they were going to talk to me about teaching some of their golf classes.

So we sat down and talked a little about basketball, and how awesome the teams are going to be this year when we were joined by the women's basketball coach, JD. He'd also been the men's and women's golf coach on the side ever since my old college coach, Coach DP quit. The team had recently risen up to become pretty successful, placing 2nd at the NAIA regional tournament just 2 years ago. So imagine my surprise when he said that he wanted to scale back his involvement in the golf program and concentrate on basketball full time. I asked him why, and he replied, "Because we think you can get them to the next level." Without any kind of a formal interview or application or anything, they offered me a coaching job. I don't even think they got the actual sentence out before I said I'd do it.

The hitch though, I didn't exactly inherit that awesome team from a couple of years ago. In fact, only two players from that Men’s team remained, and they were both graduating in December. There were only three returning ladies from last year’s women’s team! We actually had to do an on-campus recruiting drive to fill the rosters! It was not exactly a moment that most of the big-time programs have to deal with. Anyway, we managed to find five more guys that could shoot reasonably well for that side of things, but the women's team is a different story altogether. 5 out of the 8 gals on the roster had absolutely no competitive experience whatsoever! And 4 of those had been playing for 4 months or less. I always had a desire to coach the program, and I’ve been pining away for the gig for years, but in every vision I've ever had I was inheriting an established team. They were asking me to basically build the thing from scratch and we had less than 1 month until our first tournament at Montana Tech.

To top it off, I didn't quit my Assistant Pro job at the University of Utah, I've been doing both. But what that meant was that every moment I wasn't in the shop or teaching private lessons, I was basically teaching the bulk of my team how to play golf. Which is a gargantuan task compared to just making a few swing tweaks. But for a solid month, those kids worked their asses off, probably slacking off on their studies to learn how to play the game properly. They practiced hard almost every day and I put my social and professional life on hold to get them ready. They were primed to take on the world, and as we rode the same bus I never thought I'd ever thought I'd ride again six years ago, I couldn't help but beam with pride.

So they competed, and I coached my ass off. In fact, I seemed to be about the only coach that was out on the course with the players. I had always hated the fact that I rarely ever saw my coach out on the course, so I made it a point to spend at least a hole per round with every one of my kids. Actually I pretty much decide that my coaching strategy was to do pretty much everything the opposite of what he would’ve done. While the other coaches were holed up in the clubhouse watching football, "waiting for scorecards" I was out reading putts, getting yardages and delivering snacks and drinks for the kids. And the end result of my awesome coaching job? The Men took 7^th out of 9 teams and the women took 8^th out of 9 teams after the first tournament.

That was pretty punishing to the old ego. There was one bright spot, one of my guys won the individual! But overall I was kinda down on myself. But then I remembered the words of my old Junior College coach, the only coach I've ever really gotten along with, when he said, "you can't hit the shots for them." I flashed back to when I was in school and how I never really felt like I played up to my potential because of the weight that class, work and relationships had on my mind. And I realized that those kids were going through the exact same stuff that I was going through a few years ago. So on that long-ass bus ride home from Butte, Montana, I talked to the kids about what they felt that I was doing right, and what they thought I could do better. Together, we kind of re-designed our practice sessions to make them more efficient, and by the end of the ride home we were talking about just about everything BUT golf. Damn, I felt like I was back in college again!

The next week the men managed to improve by one spot in the standings, and while the ladies didn't move up, they dropped a full ten shots off their stroke average as a team! And the following week, at the Rocky Mountain Invitational, at the Peter Yegen Club in Billings, MT, they gave me what might be my finest hour as a golf pro. Going into the last round at the same course I once littered with vomit (see tomorrow’s “Dorm Days” flashback story for the full skinny), the men trailed the hated Carroll College by nine shots for 5th place (the top-4 teams are unbelievably loaded this year). Carroll had been taking us out behind the woodshed all season long, and had been doing a fair amount of shit-talking along the way. I really wanted to beat those guys, so I gave a couple of the guys my first f-bomb laden pep talk of the season. I was trying to channel Al Pacino from "Any Given Sunday" but sounded so ridiculous that we were all cracking up! It must've loosened them up a little bit because those guys ended up breaking one of my old teams' single day scoring records, 4-under par as a team! We also edged Carroll by twelve shots on the day and 3 for the tournament! The ladies, well it's not important where they placed, but out of the fifteen rounds (3 apiece) that the 5 team members played, there were 8 personal best rounds recorded! Their team average was now down by 30 shots better than the 1st tournament. Pretty insane! I don't even think they realize how proud of them that I am.

The Fall college golf season has concluded, but it picks back up in the Springtime. But unlike in previous years, I'm not going to break this team up. We're going to keep working at it through playing and practice until the snow flies, and I’m going to try to hire a trainer to write them up a weightlifting and cardio program for when there's snow on the ground so we can hit the ground running come April. I'm also setting to work on recruiting, which is something I've never done before. It's out of control, but I've got to say, the last two months have easily been the most rewarding of my entire career and maybe my entire life.. Our Sports Information Director is a little swamped, so our team website hasn't been updated in a hell of a long time, but here's an article about us. It's a .pdf file so it might take a few minutes to download. Scroll down to page 6:

http://www.westminstercollege.edu/pdf/forum/Issue%204.pdf

Here's a few photos of myself and some of the kids from this past fall season:

The team stuffed into a little bus (a short bus if you will) on our first trip

Throwing out a little encouragement to one of our men's team, Nick Cruz

Discussing a little strategy with one of my ladies, Jesika Hilton

Go Griffins!

Welcome to my nightmare....I think you're gonna like it....

2008-10-29T22:20:00.000-06:00

Hey Folks!

I’m kind of in a weird stage in my life right now. For those of you that know me, I just hit 30 last week. Now some people say that the 30's are the new 20's; and yet others say that the 30's are when things start to go downhill. I think it may be somewhere in between. But after the last couple of months, I can honestly say that I’ve never felt more alive than I do right now! Now, when I’m feeling good, I feel creative. And after a few years of posting a few stories here and there on my old MySpace.com blog, and a few videos on YouTube.com, I felt like making a webpage that isn’t hampered by the limitations of those particular sites, and can reach the widest audience possible. So please, welcome to my new blog: The Wicked Life of a Golf Monster!

Now, that’s not to say that golf is the only thing I’m going to be writing about. I mean, it is my job; I am a Golf Professional and a college Golf Coach. And tales from that world are going to pop up from time to time. But I’m not the type of guy that feels good about pigeonholing myself under any type of category. One of my biggest regrets in life is never keeping any kind of a real journal over the years, so that’s kind of what this is going to be. Although, I’ll be honest with you, I’d have a hard time reading about my day to day life too. So what this is going to be is a place where I’ll occasionally tell the more interesting tales of what’s going on in my life. I’ll also have the occasional commentary on what I think is going on in the world, share some interesting reads and views from all around the web, and even post a few of the other projects I’m working on, i.e. videos and such. I’m also going to share a few tales from past days, hearkening back to the college and high school days, including some reworked versions of tales from my old blog. This is going to be the new home of "Dorm Days: The Penthouse Chronicles." It should be an interesting mishmash of stuff, and I hope you all enjoy it.

Oh yeah, if you’ve got virgin ears or eyes, I’ve got to warn you. I write the way I speak, and a lot of times, I tend to artfully drop a little salty language when I’m speaking. But if you want to be entertained, just sit back and enjoy the ride with me! Coming up first, a little description on what’s been going on in my latest career venture; that of the Associate Head Coach for Men’s and Women’s Golf for my alma mater, Westminster College…