I Got This Killa Up Inside Of Me

This is the song I was bumping the other day driving through campus on my way home from work when I happened to pass Cliff Alexander (incoming freshman and top 5- nationally ranked recruit in the nation) walking down the sidewalk.

I'm not usually one to be blasting my music so loud that everyone can hear it, especially when it's rap.  I'm much more likely to be following the Michael Bolton in Office Space strategy.  But on this particular day, we had just finished off our fiscal year end and I was feeling pretty good about myself, so I was rolling with my windows down and my system up, as Eminem might say.

This is when I happened upon Mr. Alexander.  He glanced over when he heard M.O.P., and got a good chuckle when he saw a white boy driving.  As I mentioned, I was feeling frisky, so rather than hastily rolling up my window and mashing the volume down, I embraced his laughter, hung my head out the window, and yelled, "How about some hardcore, Cliff?  Rock Chaaaaalk!"

Have I mentioned lately that I love working at KU?

Applications For The Wolfpack

From left:  Hendo, Me, Double D, Marcus Mumford wearing Russell Westbrook's glasses, JDub.  My apologies for the poor quality of the picture.  It looks like it was taken with a disposable camera in 1993, but you can tell that it's not that old because of Double D's shirt.  Oh wait.  I guess you'll just have to trust me that it's not from 1993.


Recently, we lost a good man from our crew.  Hendo received a job opportunity he couldn't pass up, moved almost six hours away, and just like that, our four-man wolfpack was down a member.  Everything moved so quickly that I don't think the remaining three members have a full grasp on the fact that Hendo is actually gone.  I've been listening to a lot of Boyz II Men lately.  It sucks.

In the meantime, we really need a replacement Hendo.  A wolfpack needs to be four, not three.  Three is too many for a regular tag-team match, but not enough for a Survivor Series rumble.

So we'll be placing an advertisement in the local newspapers and job posting websites shortly.  We're not expecting to fully fill his shoes, nobody could-- but we'll take as close to a replacement as we can get.  Here's a sneak peak at the requirements for all applicants:

Required qualifications:  Must enjoy golfing, drinking, acting afool.  Above average ability in lawn and/or tailgating games a must.  Participation in, and enjoyment of, pointless arguments such as "If you could only hear one song for the rest of your life, what would it be?" or "If you had to die tomorrow, how would you choose to go out?"  Must possess a healthy lust for video games; including, but not limited to, Call of Duty, NBA Jam, MarioKart, and Golden Tee.  Must be, at minimum, a diehard college basketball fan.  Having an unhealthy obsession with the sport is not frowned upon.  Potential applicants who cannot name at least 50% of Final Four participants for the last decade need not apply.

Preferred qualifications:  Ability to hit a golf ball a long, long way.  Membership to Cigar of the Month Club-- possession of a humidor a huge plus.  Proficiency in Microsoft Excel, in order to manage our major golf tournament gambling spreadsheets.  While members of all college basketball fan bases will be tolerated, some are more welcomed than others (being a fan of someone other than the Kentucky Wildcats immediately gives you a leg up on your predecessor.)  Should consider watching multiple episodes of a TV show back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back "quality hanging out time."  Legitimate knowledge of a musical instrument also a plus.

Please attach a cover letter, resume, three references, and your top 5 list of movies that you would bring with if you were stranded on a desert island.  Thank you.

Started From The Bottom Now We're Here

It wasn't too long ago that I was one of the worst tailgaters in all of Omaha, Nebraska during the second weekend of June every year.  Getting black out drunk and getting separated from my only friend before nightfall; getting thrown out of Rosenblatt for not being "committed to a particular tailgate"....just about every move I made was bush league.

But now, I've attended the College World Series seven years in a row.  And thanks in part to those other two knuckleheads pictured above, Addy and Gangel, we're a well-oiled machine.  We're grizzled vets-- we know our roles, and we play them well.  No more getting tossed from the premises, or forgetting why people are calling you 'Josh Beckett' at a party that you don't remember going to, or running out of supplies at the tailgate.  It's smooth sailing now.  Pack the car to within an inch of its life, be one of the first cars in Lot B, get the grill set up, throw up the beanbags and jumbo jenga and wait for the random strangers to roll in, make friends with the strangers, bing bang boom.  Now, when ESPN comes by to record our tailgate during one of their lead-ins to commercial, we barely even bat an eye (especially Addy, amirite?)  We're able to act like we've been there before.  Lot B Champions.  (I mean, we did kill the battery in Nicole's car before noon, but c'mon, nobody's perfect.  Don't be a dick, man.)

So, even though by "growing up" I'm really talking about "sitting in a parking lot for 13 hours and drinking enough beers to drown a horse".....still, it feels good to be growing up.

Bach Party Drinking Power Rankings

Top row:  Ike
Middle row:  Russell, Me, BroMo, Morley
Bottom row:  Jake, Murph, Easy E, T-Nels, Fundy, Schultzy, Tommy
Not pictured:  AJ, Endo, Kory, Gundy


16.  AJ (not my brother though)-  He was only able to make it for the round of golf Saturday morning.  I'm not even sure if he had one beer, but he did lose his wedge in a lake on #7, so I feel comfortable including him on the list, even if he was dead sober.

15.  Kory-  The only time I hung out with him for an extended period of time was during one stretch of blackjack when everyone else disappeared.  We got along great, mostly because he was laughing at all my blackjack shit-talking schtick, so he couldn't have been too drunk, right?  Clearly his judgment wasn't impaired at all if he found ME funny.

14.  Endo-  Managed to pull a bastardized version of an Irish Exit before 7pm.  We left him at the tables at Canterbury, he never made it on the shuttle to Mystic Lake, and we didn't see him the rest of the night.

13.  Tommy-  I know for a fact that Tommy did something really stupid during the day on Saturday, something that we subsequently ripped on him for-- a joke that lasted a few hours at least.  However, I have absolutely no recollection of what that thing was.  This is one of the reasons why my spot on this list is still quite a ways away.

12.  Jake-  If this was the cigarette smoking power rankings, he'd be #1 in a landslide.  The judges would also have accepted 'eating continental breakfast with his headphones in' as well as 'muttering "Goddammit Russell."'

11.  Gundy-  He was responsible enough, he did a bang-up job during his shifts on Easy E patrol...but he was also staying on 12s against a dealer showing 10 multiple times at the blackjack table at Mystic Lake.  What the fuck.

10.  Ike-  Ike pretty much just has one speed now.  Back in the day, he was one of our more volatile drunks.  He's put a few holes in the doors/walls in his old apartment, and I wish I had a taco for every time I've talked some random guy out of beating the crap out of Ike-- since he loves to chirp at dudes ten times stronger than he is.  But now, whenever we booze together, he pretty much just gets hammered, then spends most of the rest the night talking about how he can't drink like this anymore, and that he might die from his hangover the next day.  Rinse, repeat, see you at the wedding next month.  Can't really blame him; dude's got like nine kids now or some shit.

9.  Murph-  I don't have anything to say one way or the other about Murph.  He was everywhere, and he was nowhere.  The middle of the rankings is perfect for him.

8.  Schultzy-  Was going around slapping everyone in the dick, and when someone would (inevitably and obviously) ask him why the hell he just did that, he would respond "That's what you get for being a pussy."  So to recap, if you are a pussy, you get punched in the dick.

7.  BroMo-  He dipped out early on Friday night to bone one of LZE's friends, when everyone knows bachelor parties are supposed to be duders before hooters.  Then again, we were hanging out with ex-strippers old enough to be our mother (see below) so I'm not sure I can really dock him points for that choice.

6.  Russell-  Pretty much just for this picture alone.  I don't know who put one of our shirts on that woman, and frankly, I think I'm better off not knowing.

5.  Morley-  Befriended a 54-year-old ex-stripper during Cosmic Bingo, who then hung out with us for a loooong time after that.  I'm about 80% sure that her and her husband were swingers and were out on a scouting trip.  Weirdly enough, she looked eerily like Manada's roommate from freshman year of college, so we started calling her 'Nadean of the Future.'  That joke is funnier if you paid any attention to the Disney Channel lineup in the mid-2000s.

4.  Me-  I could almost see sliding myself down a few spots; I mean, I was in control enough to be on Easy E patrol at the end of the night on Friday.  But if I did move myself down the list, then one of my buddies would read this and probably call me and say something like "Yeah, but remember when the opening notes of 'Party in the USA' started during bingo and you immediately stood up and shouted "Who's that chick that's rockin' kicks!  She's gotta be from out of town!"  Or when you pointed at the elderly black lady playing slots and said you were going to go smell Rosa Parks' hair?" So I'll just leave myself at #4.  I was up to the bridge of my nose in a LOT of hair that night.

3.  Fundy-  He was talking to all kinds of strangers all weekend, and if you know Fundy, that alone is enough to vault him into top 3.  Fundy initiating conversation with everyday strangers is the equivalent of you or I walking up to Kim Jong-un or Charles Manson or somebody, saying what up, and offering a fist bump.

2.  T-Nels-  He pulled off the ol' Daily Double on Saturday.  He was hammered enough at 6pm to be falling asleep as we ate dinner in the food court, took the next few plays off, then got re-drunk and rallied to an impressive finish, eventually having a "dance-off" in the middle of the casino floor towards the end of the night.  I put that in quotation marks because it wasn't much of a competition.  It was Fundy and T-Nels, doing the white boy dance where you move your arms more than you move your feet, going up against a couple of black guys who were legit break-dancing.  So you could say Fundy & T-Nels almost won the dance-off, in the same sense that Custer almost won the Battle of Little Bighorn.




1.  Easy E-  If you ask him, I'm sure he won't agree with this ranking, since his performance on Saturday was pretty mundane.  That's my point, though.  He went wayyyyyy too hard on Friday, to the point that his performance on Saturday was severely lacking.  So basically, it was like EVERY OTHER TIME IN OUR LIVES THAT WE'VE DRANK BEERS MORE THAN ONE DAY IN A ROW.  At some point, the ability to not get Patrick Ewing'd the first night of a vacation and ruining the second day has to kick in.  Either that, or he needs to be better at being hungover.  Dude, it's 3am, and we have a 10am tee time tomorrow.  You know, when everyone else is joining up for your actual bachelor party, you remember that?  You probably don't need to order two tall Mich Goldens and a Skinny Pirate right now.

I Feel So Much Like Giving Up

So Minneapolis....I left about noon on Friday, arrived about 7pm, and boozed til about 3am.  Woke up, started drinking when we teed off at 10am, and stayed saucy until 4am that night.  Then turned around and was on the road again at 11am on Sunday.  So if you're scoring at home, that's 14 hours of driving, 14 hours of sleeping/eating breakfast/showering, and 26 hours of drinking.  Or, by using selective endpoints, we can make it sound more badass:  Starting Friday night at 7, I was drunk for 26 of the next 33 hours.

During my insanely hungover drive home on Sunday, I saw a deer get absolutely destroyed by a car on the interstate.  And my second thought (right after "HOLY FUCK!!!") was that I was just a tiny bit jealous of the deer, since at least it was all over for him now, while I still had a bunch of interstate in front of me, and this hangover was effing brutal. 

And we haven't even got to the part yet where Sunday night was Hendo's going-away party, so I had to go out drinking AGAIN that night.  A true bender, especially for a 31-year-old.

So all of this is to say that a recap post will be coming, but you've got to give me some time to recover-- mentally, physically, and emotionally.  So you should see something from me sometime in mid-October. 

I know I've used this joke at least once at some point in this blog's existence, but basically this hangover is the equivalent of Owen Wilson's entire life during the last half hour of Wedding Crashers.  I've been trying to come up with a name for it, like maybe calling it a 'Beckwith' in honor of his character's name or something like that, but ironically enough, I've been too hungover to come up with one.  Does anyone ever feel like they're disappearing?

What Comes Before Part-B? PART-A!

We've got Easy E's bachelor party this weekend in Minneapolis, so I'm about to hop on the interstate for one of my many trips up I-35 this summer.  I'm looking forward to golfing, gambling on horses at Canterbury, gambling on pocket aces and hard 14's at Mystic Lake, potentially falling into the proverbial raspberry patch, and Easy blacking out and insisting on watching war movies at the end of the night, immediately followed by him falling asleep sitting upright, with a beer in his hand.  (Cue up this classic song.  "Yo man, you see Eazy hurling in the parking lot?")

Last time I spent time in Minneapolis, this happened.  This weekend, not only do we have that exact same crew (me, Morley, Easy E, Fundy, and T.Nels) but we're adding another 10 dudes on top of that-- no homo.

So this should go well.  Probably won't drink too much or anything.

Home Ownership

You know what's awesome?  When your next-door neighbors have moved away, but the house hasn't sold yet.  Now the lawn barely ever gets mowed, and so no matter how shitty my lawn looks (which is pretty shitty, don't get it twisted) it still looks immaculate compared to the adjacent lawn, which looks like Robin Williams just rolled double threes during a game of Jumanji. 

So I'm going to go ahead and adjust my mowing schedule accordingly-- meaning you'll be lucky to see me out there more than twice a month.  Edging and trimming just got rescheduled to once every six weeks.  Spraying for weeds and watering the grass will occur during the next political regime change in Cuba, or whenever Halley's Comet appears again, whichever comes first.

(On a related note, if you ever wanted to live next door to me, now's your chance.  It's a great 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom unit, built in 2001 and ready for immediate move-in.  Yard needs work.)