BrockLi Soup

I’m not sure how many people dressed up as Mark Foley this year, but I was one of them. I figured it would be easy, and it was - I just wore a button-up white shirt and called it a night.

As it turns out, though, not many of my friends’ friends follow the news. People would say, “Who are you?” and I’d reply with something inappropriate, like, “I’m Mark Foley. Let’s wrestle in our underpants!”

Maybe a quarter of the people at the party got it. One guy said something about a cage match (Mick Foley, of WWF) and someone else warned me to stay away from the coffee table (Matt Foley, of SNL).

I was worried about offending people, but I think the responses I got mean we have much more to be worried about.

As I may have mentioned, I got rid of my car when we moved into The Manor. My office is within walking distance (about a mile up the road) and we’re a couple blocks from the Metro, so I knew that I’d rarely need a car to get anywhere I needed to be.

ZipCar does a pretty good job of filling in the rest - you reserve a car for a few hours (or days) at a time, and pay by the hour. It’s perfect for the times that I need to pick up some groceries, or go out to a client’s office. Had I kept my car, I would have needed to get some stuff fixed to pass inspection, pay higher insurance, and $75 a month just to park it here. With ZipCar, I pay $9 - $14 an hour (depending on the type of car) and gas and insurance are included.

For the most part, the Metro, buses, and ZipCar get me where I’m going for a reasonable price. Totalled together, I’m spending a lot less on those than I would be for the basics on my own car. Every once in a while, though, I need to catch a cab home (like last night), and those add up quick. There have also been three different weekends that I’ve rented a car to go out of town for a few days, and those certainly aren’t cheap.

And then there’s the days like today; the Arlington Central Library is having a book sale (again), but I didn’t reserve a car yesterday because I didn’t know when I’d actually be up and moving today. The earliest I can get a car now is 2, which isn’t awful, but I wanted to go early (”early” meaning 11). According to WMATA, there isn’t a bus that goes past there (they’ve been known to be wrong), but I don’t want to try to get a big box of books home on there anyway.

When all is said and done, I know it’s a hell of a lot cheaper without my own car, but sometimes I really miss the convenience.

Yes, it was my birthday. I’m 23. Whooptie-do.

Work sucked. I left early after spending most of the afternoon running in circles trying to solve problems with the project I’m working on.

I came home and fell asleep for a couple hours, which was nice. Sharon and Gavin had a Halloween party tonight, so I caught the Metro out that way. And then I got a bus to their house, except I got on going the wrong direction. Thankfully, I realized it before I got too far, and Sharon drove out to save me. The party was a blast, and a nice contrast to the rest of the day.

Since the buses stop running around 11 or 12, I called a cab to get back to the Metro to get home, and arrived five minutes after the last train, which came a half hour earlier than I thought (it’s worth noting that the cab took 35 minutes to get to their place). I hopped in another cab to get home. In the end, it cost me $38 to get back from Falls Church. Incidentally, that’s about how much I spend on gas when I drive from Arlington, VA to Rochester, NY.

I never got a chance to eat dinner, so I’m starving. I’m going to make a sandwich, and I’m going to watch some TV, and tomorrow had damn well better be pretty fucking great.

Also, I have hiccups. Perfect.

Wanna see something fucked up? How about thirteen year-old blonde twins that produce white nationalist bubblegum folk pop?

Yeah, that’ll restore your faith in America.

(got it from Jym, who got it from BP)

Yesterday was Flugtag in Baltimore, and the harbor was absolutely packed with people for it. For the uninitiated, here’s the quick explanation: teams build “flying machines” with a wingspan up to thirty feet, weighing up to 450 pounds. They do a little performance on the launch pad, and then push the whole mess off the end into a body of water and try to make it go as far as they can.

This time round, the body of water was Baltimore’s inner harbor, and the “as far as they can” was up to 81 feet (for one team - the new record in the US). The whole thing was hilarious - one team of firefighters did a dance to Disco Inferno before hauling their massive fireman’s helmet off the ramp. Another team had a giant Dumbo that didn’t quite make it off the ramp, but fell apart and rained pieces (almost) right into the guy who had been “piloting” it before he fell off into the water (as far as I know, he didn’t get hit with anything). Some of them went really well - most of them were designed like some kind of glider, and the winning team (a Three Stooges-themed group) even made theirs glide for a bit. A team that came all the way from Bulgaria had a big blow-up glider sort of thing, and they probably would have done well if the cross-wind didn’t interfere with their take-off (they got stuck halfway down the runway).

I don’t know if Flugtag will be coming back this way again any time soon, but if it does, I want to get a team together. You spend about three weeks building a machine that can fly (or at least float, so they can get it out of the water easier), and it’s all over in the three seconds it takes to drop from the 30-foot launch ramp. How can that NOT be fun?

Thanks to Miss Hannah, I’ve learned that Brittanie has made a post concerning NaDruWriNi, which is good because now I don’t have to worry about it, and I wasn’t entirely clear on the rules as it was, not that I’ll be following them anyhow, but that bit’s beside the point.

The point, of course, is that I’ll be falling-down drunk on Saturday, November 4th, and I’ll be sharing it with all of you. I won’t be doing any real writing, to be sure - I can barely handle that when I’m sober, even if I don’t do as much of it as I’d like. No no, good people, you’ll be getting the grittiest, tritest, unfiltered-est crap that wanders haphazardly into the path of my train of thought, and very little of it is likely to make sense even to me, unless I stumble on some nugget of staggering genius regarding the existence of thought and humanity, in which case I hope I can draw a meaningful picture that will make sense in the morning.

I encourage you all to join me. For you locals, I’ll probably begin the evening with a few mixed drinks here at my place, then head down to the pub for a few pints (this part will hopefully feature notes scribbled furiously in my Moleskine), then stumble back here again, where I can be left alone while I beg the room to just sit still for a damn minute so I can find the pisser. Surely, it will be an evening to remember.

PS: I’ve had a couple of Jack & Coke’s this evening. Not only do I participate in NaDruWriNi, I even practice weeks beforehand. That’s how dedicated I am.

Apparently my birthday is next week. Now, this would normally mean that Brocktoberfest had been planned already, or at least considered once or twice. I keep forgetting that it’s coming up, and since I don’t know many people in town and don’t want to piss of the neighbors, I have no intention of throwing a huge party at my place again this year.

But, I have an even better idea: let’s get drunk and go to the driving range. I like cranking golf balls when I’m sober, so I figure it can only get better. Then maybe we’ll hoist a Geo into a dumpster or something - I don’t know, we’ll see what happens, but the important part is that we get drunk and smash golf balls. Actually, screw the driving range - we can do it from my roof, Fight Club-style. And Jym’s got a couple bowling balls we could toss off, too. And that extra coffee table.

So who’s with me?

It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve written much of anything, but let’s make this quick, shall we?

About a week and a half ago, my parents and youngest brother came to visit for a long weekend. We hit some museums, looked at some monuments, and spent a lot of time just hanging out. I was the de facto tour guide, but since I don’t know the city terribly well, we almost got lost a couple times. I took some pictures - see?

This past weekend, BP, Otto, and Freshman came down to visit. We spent most of the weekend drinking and BBQ-ing, and I’m still recovering from it all, but it was wonderful. During the BBQ (and after a number of drinks), BP and I agreed that we would get tattoos together on Monday. Turns out, I had to work and he had to drive back to New York, so that didn’t happen, but it will sooner or later.

On Sunday night, BP and I drove up to Baltimore to see Flogging Molly (the fourth time I’ve seen them, the third time with BP) at Rams Head Live. The venue was pretty good for it - medium-sized and conveniently located on the closer side of Baltimore. Zox (not bad) and Bedouin Soundclash (”horribly average,” as a guy at the bar described them) opened the show, and thankfully, neither of them did a full set like the last time. During Bedouin Soundclash’s set, Nathan Maxwell (the bassist) came out from backstage and hung out with the crowd between the bar and the pit. I wandered over to shake his hand, mostly so I can say I touched a Molly.

BP and I made our way into the pit about 15 minutes before Molly took the stage, and, being a few beers deep, spent the entire time getting the crowd around us riled up with sing-alongs, stretching exercises, and bare-knuckle fisticuffs. It was definitely the best show of the four times I’ve seen them - the crowd was fantastic, I had just the right amount to drink beforehand, and I even managed to hang onto a bottle of water in the pit (you get thirsty in there). Dave King came back out alone for the encore and did the first half of Black Friday Rule acoustic, before the rest of the band jumped in. It was OK, but definitely didn’t touch the thirteen-minute version. The openers could have been better, and we could have convinced more friends to come with us, but really, the show was so good in so many respects that I can’t complain.

It was a rowdy rowdy weekend, and totally worth the hurt Monday morning. Right now, I think I need a weekend without extra people around, but I’m already looking forward to the next big party here at Brockstone Manor.

Dave Matthews

Can we all PLEASE just agree that we’re over him and get on with our lives? I can remember being in middle school, when Crash and Under the Table and Dreaming came out, when everyone was swooning over him and his posters went up in countless college dorm rooms across the country. It’s been a decade since Crash came out, yet we’re still swooning and the posters still hang. There’s a time and a place for Dave, and that’s the scene in the movie when the sensitive-guy protagonist walks dejectedly through the night streets after being informed by the true love of his life (who, incidentally, is engaged to an asshole) that she will go through with the wedding the next day, and then there’s a shot of her looking absentmindedly in the mirror as her wedding gown is given a final touch-up and you know that he’ll crash the wedding or she’ll run from the altar and they’ll leave town together in the back of a Greyhound bus that was just about to leave anyway.

The worst part is that I still like him so much. I was just checking the years on those two albums and saw a half-dozen tracks that bring back fond memories of my childhood. And maybe that’s why I’m pissed: just the thought of his songs brings the same feeling as that cliche scene in the movie - it’s going to turn out all right - but it took me ten years to understand why everyone likes him so much.

Is anyone else tired of hearing about Mitch Albom? I never read Tuesdays with Morrie or The Five People You Meet in Heaven, but I think I’m going to purposefully NOT read For One More Day just because I’m sick of seeing him everywhere.