Tag Archives: drinking

March 9, 2012 · 3:05 PM

Beauty and the Beast: Part I

A Beauty in Brooklyn

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For a person who’s as social as I am, I can function quite nicely as a lone wolf.  It ain’t uncommon for me to go out midnight marauding by my damn self, whether it’s because I just need some time alone with the man, the myth, the legend (that’s me, for those of you keeping score at home) or everybody else was just lame as hell and couldn’t motivate.  The kid will make something happen if that is what he so desires, and it was on just such an occasion that I met one of the most interesting characters that I’ve come across in New York.

I was fresh from downing my second or third Five Points (think Long Island Iced Tea but for people with class) at 67 Orange Street in Harlem, walking down Frederick Douglass Blvd.  By the way, I mean literally walking down the middle of the street – Five Points is no jizzoke – when my gaze ran across this slim, caramel woman with a whole lotta gams and, to literally top it off, close-cropped blonde hair.  She was working at the beer garden across the street.  (Yes, there’s a beer garden in Harlem.)  Before my internal cop could say, “Move along.  There’s nothing to see here,” I saw her see me.  Then she did the unfathomable: she yelled out, “Come on in!”  Apparently, my internal perp was still a bit skittish, ’cause I yelled back, “Who, me?” as if I were getting fingered blamed for some crime that I had yet to commit.  “Yeah, you!”  Was the retort, complete with hands-on-hips action.  My ass was across that pavement before you could say, “Lederhosen und hefeweizen.”

We became fast friends.  I say “fast” because within 10 minutes Shahi was asking me to accompany her on a boat party the next day.  Oh, and I say “friends” because within 11 minutes Shahi had disclosed that she was married to a man who was back in Toronto.  But she needed somebody to go on this cruise with her!  And it was going to be so much fun ’cause it was a soca themed cruise!  Yay!

Have I mentioned, dear reader, that I get seasick like it’s my government job and that I HATE soca almost as much as I HATE reggaeton?  How about the fact that I can swim about as well as the sperm of a 75 year-old former cyclist?  No?  Well, yeah.  All of that.

A Beast and His Teeth

So, did I go?

You’re gonna have to tune in next week to find out.  In the meantime, I’ve included a little something to get you fiends over the hump and soothe the savage beast.

It turns out that one thing that Little Miss Mrs. Shahi didn’t disclose within the first 11 minutes of our meeting was that she can muphuckin’ sing.  I mean, I look up on Twitter one day and all of sudden I see that she’s mentioned me in a tweet with a link and lo and behold, babygirl has auditioned for “Canada’s Got Talent,” singing “Fly Me to the Moon.”  (Watch the audition here.)  As soon as I heard it, I knew that I was gonna have to get in there (Ahem.  AHEM!) and snatch those a cappella vocals, then put ’em on track that I’d build from the ground up.  I wanted to flip it so that it would put a totally new spin on a pop standard…and show Shahi that she wasn’t the only one that can do damn surprises around this joint.

I did this totally without her input or knowledge initially, ripping her vocals directly off of YouTube, so blame any shortfalls on me.  But if you like it…give me like 75% of the credit.  OK, OK.  60%.  Check it!

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October 6, 2011 · 3:00 PM

F*ck Girls’ Night Out: Part I

Guess which witch was my one wish?

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Ah, the delightful delectability of a night out on the town. Maybe you’ve been cooped up in the crib and need to stretch out a bit. Maybe your boss has had her six inch heel up your ass all week like disturbingly graphic foot fetish porn. Maybe Questlove is spinning and you’ve got the ridiculous urge to watch ridiculously dressed black teenagers do ridiculous dances from a bygone era on ridiculously large screens in a ridiculously inconvenient part of town. Whatever the reason, you want to go out and get your groove on.

Unless you’re suffering some severe mental dysfunction, you realize that this means that you’re going to be in a social setting, i.e. around other people. Presumably, you also comprehend that a significant portion of those individuals will be of the opposite sex. For straight men, that last tidbit is not just an assumption, it’s actually a desired outcome. If we get to a bar or club and the place has more wieners than a Berlin beer garden in October, we will be none too happy. The artist on deck could be the reincarnation of J Dilla, Beethoven and Marvin Gaye all rolled into one, but sheeeit…ain’t no music that fuckin’ good. For men, women are to social events what ketchup is to hood cuisine: they just make everything better. Without them, shit is just shit.

From my experience as a storied amateur sociologist, females seem to have a similar need for the presence of males when they’re out and about. Heck, I’ve certainly been out with my homegirls and heard them complain about girl-heavy parties I’ll affectionately call “coochellas”. If this is true, it would appear that harmonic equilibrium is maintained. But see, that’s where everything actually goes completely batshit CRAY.

Although women certainly want us around when they go out, far too often it seems that they really only needs us to function as a sort of final aesthetic touch. Whereas women are a must-have for any self-respecting man when he’s out to party, no matter if he’s booed up or lustfully single, this is far from the case for the fairer sex. For them, going out with their girlfriends is the process by which they strengthen the bonds of sisterhood through the creation of common memories. Men are only useful in as much as they further the feminine bonding agenda.

If women are our ketchup, we’re just garnish to them. That’s why, nine times out of 10, when a dude walks up to a coven on the dance floor, he’s approaching a Circle of Death.

What this cat sees when he walks up is one fine woman surrounded by two to four less attractive women. (Although there’s a chance that one of the others might also be cute, I’d feel more secure betting on Dr. Dre’s “Detox” to drop before Christ’s return. I’ll get into why this is true in Part II.) What this means is that he’s not only got to overcome any natural obstacles a woman might have to him personally, he’s got to deal with the fact that he just broke up their little Wiccan Beyoncé ritual. And that shit don’t fly. Unless you’ve got the goldenest of tongues, you’re pretty much toast. And not the buttery-and-flaky-but-still-soft-on-the-inside kind. I’m talkin’ about the scrape-the-black-off-it-but-you-gone-eat-it-’cause-we-broke kind. No bueno.

This shit is a travesty and a tragedy, and it’s gotta stop. Not only are you ladies doing us gentlemen a disservice, you’re doing your country a disservice. That’s right. I said you’re being un-American little bastiches.

Cats ain’t got no money to be rollin’ out to spots, buying drinks and whatnot, only to leave with nothing to show for it! Don’t y’all muthaphuckas know times is rough out here in this piece? Every dollar that a man spends paying to get into Black Lion, or Club Cheetara, or Castle Greyskull, is a dollar that could have gone to buying the new PSbox3 console. Every bar charge on his pre-paid debit card is one less dollar to give to Kandi and Kookie, the stripper duo he’s altruistically supporting as they make their way toward University of Phoenix Extended Junior Associates Degrees. Shame on you. Again, I say shame!

Now, before you start bringing up old shit about how this is a free country and all, save your breath. I know that you have the right to live your life as you see fit (until the next time the Republicans control all three branches of American government). If you want to roll out to the spot and get your drink on and party and dance with your girls while you give me and my brothers some analogical, girly version of the Heisman, go right ahead. I’m just saying that if you’d like to gather all your girls together and dance in a circle, sans hommes, you COULD just save us dudes some frustration, stay your frigid asses at home, and have a goofy-ass, manless slumber party.

Or you can join some kind of indigenous tribe. Either one.

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July 22, 2011 · 3:22 PM

Drink ‘Til It Helps

"The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies." - Sir William Temple

I didn’t start drinking until I was almost 22 years old.

It wasn’t like I was bowing to overbearing religious pressure or because alcoholism runs in my family and I didn’t want to unlock the fiend gene.  No, I had opted to ignore the strictures prescribed by my childhood faith long ago and my family has produced no more winos than your average American clan.  For me, I think it just came down to the fact that I couldn’t find a good reason to start.

Ever since I could remember, I was always the life of the party.  If there was conversation, I was in the middle of it.  If there was laughter, I probably instigated it.  If there was music, I danced hard.  Unlike some of my more introverted contemporaries, I didn’t need a social lubricant.  Even when I was undergoing the process of joining one of Harvard’s elite Final Clubs, famous for hosting parties where liquor flows as freely as the women who frequent their doors, I didn’t partake.  And at the time, I kind of believed that it would go on that way forever.

Looking back, I should have known that it would be a woman that would eventually drive me to drink.

In the interest of modesty (not mine, but hers), I won’t go into the details.  But let’s just say that I wanted our relationship to go to place that she did not.  Already having drunk deeply from an emotional cocktail formed of equal parts anger, frustration and lust (I like to call it “Palpatine’s Punch”), I decided that it was time to get chemically inebriated as well.  So I drank Smirnoff, I drank Bacardi 151…I just drank.  And I got TWISTED.

The thing is, despite almost losing control, nothing that happened was outside of the realm of my 22-year-old identity.  I mischievously embarrassed my friends, I freestyled interminably, and I made out with a girl with whom I had had no previous sexual encounters.  Fun, fun, and more fun.  It was all me, just at Level 10, and I happily duplicated this experience plenty of times in the years that followed.

Of course, turning the volume up to Level 10 doesn’t always mean that the music is gonna be upbeat.  There have been more than a few times when the song that played was deeply, deeply dark and disturbing.  I’m talking about torrential tears and mumbling with despair disturbing.  I’m talking, “Go walk a couple of miles in the NYC winter so that the wind can slap you until it cuts your face because you’re alone and no one actually cares that you exist so just freeze since you’re ice inside anyway.”  Yeah, like that dark and disturbing.

But guess what?  That was me, too.

I’ve come to embrace these inner visions, even when I don’t like what I see.  Even when I don’t know what the fuck I’m seeing.  Perhaps I enjoy the latter even more than the former – it’s then that I get answers to questions about me that I didn’t even know I had.  It’s like Jeopardy: The Me Edition.

And it’s with that in mind that I implore you to devote one day out of every month to getting unapologetically, undoubtedly drunk.

Now, before you go alerting MADD and AA and the NAACP and S.H.I.E.L.D., I’m not advocating drinking to the point where you lose control of your bladder.  Trust me, I’ve done it, and it’s NOT as refreshing as it might seem.  I’m just asking you to push yourself past the point where you start to want to make some bad decisions, and then halt just before you’re no longer able to define what a bad decision even is.  Once you master this ability, let’s call it the Drunken Dance, you’ll be able to drive yourself to the brink of shitfacedness while staying safely in the realm of passionate self-discovery.

Of course, if you know that you can’t handle your liquor, please disregard everything that I’ve written above.  No one wants to deal with an idiot who transforms into a complete dungmuncher if they even smell a Corona.  That goes for you, Mr. Space Invader and for you, Ms. Sloppy Slutnasty.  Back away from the margaritas and Jäger shots, thank you.

For those of you for whom drinking is not a fast-track to Loserville, I welcome you to heed my advice.  Let yourself go…at least once a month.  You owe it to yourself.  Besides, you’re probably too broke, too busy, or too afraid of the stigma to seek real professional help anyway.  Drinking is way cheaper, plus how often can you leave your therapist’s office with a hot little thing on your arm?  Double win!

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