How I lost a delicious free meal

My girlfriend and I live a half hour away from her parents' house, and she makes regular visits there. It's not to see her parents, brother, or childhood friends, it's to see her fucking dog. Frankie the dog is a small black hyperactive mutt that's shaped vaguely like a giant meatloaf. She'll regularly abandon me to visit the little bastard. The conversations go like this when she tells me she's making a visit (Please note that this is a word-for-word transcript and in no way exaggerates my sweetness or prowess as a boyfriend):

Me: I'm so excited that neither of us have to work tonight and we have the opportunity to bask in our mutual love. I've cooked a luxurious smoked salmon dinner for us. I plan for us to enjoy it by candlelight. Afterwards, we'll watch a Katherine Heigl movie of your choosing that I will view without complaint. Then we'll move the action to the bedroom for a carnal encounter in which I will selflessly pleasure you for hours and expect nothing in return.

Girlfriend: I'm visiting Frankie tonight!

Me: FUCK

Her affection for the dog has reached levels that go miles beyond the realm of inexplicable. One time she told me that Frankie is completely adorable when she poops. She then went on to describe the motions and position the dog takes when she expels her waste. It took all of the restraint contained within my body to keep from vomiting as she graphically described the wonders of a dog taking a shit.

I already have a dad who enjoys the company of his dog more than me, and going 0 for 2 against a species whose daily agenda involves 2 straight hours of asshole licking is too much to bear, so I've taken a decidedly hostile attitude toward her fucking dog, hence my equating the dog to a meatloaf, and hence the existence of this blog post. It came to a head when she entered Frankie in her workplace's cutest dog contest.

This particular contest had two categories: adult and puppy. Frankie doesn't usually photograph very well. My girlfriend blames this on a variety of excuses such as the color of the dog's fur, flash photography being unflattering, and the dog making unphotogenic facial expressions. I blame it on the dog not being as cute as she thinks it is. To solve this dilemma my girlfriend used an admittedly adorable picture of Frankie as a puppy and entered it in the puppy division. She ended up winning the puppy division and the grand prize of a $10 Subway gift card.

I looked at all of the other entrants and realized that Frankie won the contest by default. I'm not exaggerating when I say that bears have shit cuter things than the other entrants. Based on the pictures I agree that Frankie deserved to win the contest, but I took issue with the fact that the picture that my girlfriend submitted was multiple years old.

You see, I argued that the dog was completely misrepresented by submitting an old picture, and winning the cutest puppy contest with a dog that hasn't been a puppy in years is clearly tantamount to cheating. I argued that if a fully adult Frankie is allowed to win a cutest puppy contest based on an old picture, these are true as well:

-Raquel Welch should be in Maxim's Hot 100 based on photos taken of her in 1967

-Ernest Borgnine is a lock for at least 4 Kids' Choice Awards this year

-Len Bias should be inducted into the Professional Basketball Hall of Fame sometime soon

-Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps should have a race sometime in the next month to establish who is the greatest

-Brad Pitt should sign a lucrative modeling deal with Huggies

After relentless taunting and disparaging remarks about how she won her contest through cheating, she finally got fed up and told me she was planning on sharing her gift certificate with me, but now I was shit out of luck. In a world where morality and decency are pimped out and forced to suck upon the cock of the wicked, a fresh and delicious Chicken Bacon Ranch is the price I paid to stand up for my beliefs. Damn you, Frankie! Damn you to hell!

Michael Jackson: 1958-2009

No panic attacks today. I'd have one over Tito before him.

RMP Book Review: Gasping For Airtime

I recently finished reading this memoir in which Jay Mohr recounts his two years as a featured player on Saturday Night Live. My first thought when reading this book was, "How in the fuck can 22 of the allegedly best comedy writers and 15 of the allegedly best comedy performers working today only produce about one and a half funny sketches a week?" The huge popularity of Saturday Night Live has always baffled me. I assumed it's only been allowed to stay on the air all these years because it's riding on the past success of the older episodes, but I rented a few DVDs from the first two seasons, and I'm now 100% sure that the show has never been funny at any point in its existence.

But that's beside the point. This book isn't very funny, but it is entertaining in a sense that it's interesting to learn about the politics of the show and how it's put together every week, and it's always fun to hear a guy dish about celebrity hosts and musical guests as well as cast members. In one section Mohr reveals that one of his fellow cast members was completely bald and still secretly wears a toupee to this day, and while he claims to be a gentleman who won't reveal who it is, he leaves enough obvious clues to make it clear to the reader that it's fucking Mike Myers.

I enjoyed hearing about how the show is made and liked hearing him talk shit about celebrities, but my big problem with the book is that most of it is devoted to Mohr trying to garner our sympathy by telling us about how often the intense pressure to come up with good ideas and get a decent amount of airtime gave him horrible panic attacks.

Here we have a guy who scored a dream job in the field of comedy that literally thousands of people audition for every year, earning a six-figure income, trying to make us feel sorry for him that he couldn't hack it and had panic attacks as a result. Speaking as a person who has a long and storied history of panic attacks, I couldn't give less of a shit about his plight. Here is a list of just a few of the things that give me panic attacks:

-Having my throat touched or even lightly grazed by human hands or any sort of foreign object
-Driving my car on a highway
-Feeling any sort of pain in my chest (Here I'm convinced I'm having a heart attack)
-The pain in my chest ending (Here I'm convinced my heart has stopped beating)
-Trying to fall asleep
-Performing comedy in front of any group larger than 10
-Smoking pot
-Drinking a somewhat above average amount of coffee
-Attending virtually any college class that lasted over an hour
-Being the passenger in a car that's going over 80 miles an hour
-Being the passenger or driver in a car that's going over a bridge over a river
-Going to a loud concert
-Finding out that a celebrity I like has just died
-Watching an extremely loud movie at the theater
-Having a hard time taking a deep breath because my stomach is too full of food and milk

-Being inside a church for any reason
-Finding any mark on my body that looks like it could potentially be a staph infection
-Riding on the exercise bike too long only to find that my penis and balls are completely numb

So yeah, suck a cock, Jay Mohr. The only pressure in my life is bills that are easily paid by my dead-end job that is frighteningly easy to perform, and I still manage to find ways to spend 85% of my waking hours in complete and total psychosomatic white-knuckle terror. I would kill to have my insane tendencies be the result of professional sucecss. Your book, which is intended to be a horror story in which you make six-figures and are seen by 8 million viewers most Saturday nights at the expense of drowning in psychological hell, seems like a fucking dream to me.

One Minute of Praise Received!

Today at work I experienced a level of corporate fuckery from my bosses that had to be shared. Allow me to set the scene. I used to work for a restaurant that was part of a small laughable corporation that is currently going through chapter 11 bankruptcy. My managers didn't give a shit about anything we did, and allowed us to get away with anything we wanted. Completely incompetent management that paid little to no attention to anything that happened within the restaurant carried huge benefits and huge downsides at the same time.

I think this situation successfully illustrates both sides of this. One day at 5:30 in the afternoon on a Friday, our general manager decided to completely turn off the water to the restaurant. Nobody knew why it happened and to this day I've never received any sort of explanation. Seeing as how Fridays after 5 are pretty fucking busy hours for a restaurant, this was about the worst possible time you could do this. The only drinks available for us to serve to customers were coffee, unsweetened iced tea that was already brewed before the water was shut off, and a few bottles of Coke and Diet Coke that the assistant manager bought at the Target across the street.

After the water was shut off I had a table of six. Me taking their drink orders went something like this:

Customer: I'd like a Cherry Coke
Me: Actually, that's not available right now
Customer: Okay, I'll take a Sprite
Me: That's not available either
Customer: Fine, I'll have root beer
Me: We don't serve root beer
Customer: What do you have?
Me: We have Coke, Diet Coke, iced tea, and coffee that was brewed about 3 hours ago
Customer: What's the deal here?
Me: This is the worst restaurant in the entire tri-state area

You can clearly see all of the frustration that comes with working at such a place, but the huge benefit was that I could tell a customer straight to his face that our restaurant is the worst within 60 miles, an offense that would get most servers fired, without so much as a slap on the wrist.

Working at this place was a total blast, but the problem was that the location was horrible and the place being so incompetently run resulted in orders taking upwards of 40 minutes to make their way to customers, and that resulted in minimal business, and it also resulted in the few customers that did show up being completely pissed off, and that resulted in me making about $250 a week. I had no choice but to quit and leave for a more respectable place run by a larger corporation.

I won't say which restaurant chain I work for now, but I will say that they have about 600 locations nationwide, they have a history of discrimination lawsuits, the first word is a common perjorative term for white people, the second is a wooden container in which you might shoot fish, and they do not franchise to local owners. Every single location is ruled by the iron cock of corporate policy. My entire first week of training was just a list of shit that will get me fired. Apparently any evidence of theft, racism, or sexual harassment will get me shitcanned. I don't know about you, but any place where I can't whip out my penis and slap unsuspecting coworkers in the face with it while stealing containers of Apple Butter and ranting about how much I hate blacks is not a place that I'm comfortable with being at.

It never hit home with me how controlled every aspect of the place is by corporate policy until today. Our general manager and an assistant manager were eating lunch near one of my tables. They observed me greeting my customers, getting their drink order, getting their food order, entering all of it into the computer, and bringing out the drinks. As I walked away, the assistant manager took me aside and asked if he could speak with me for a minute. He informed me that I greeted and took their order perfectly, and praised me for doing a good job. I smiled and thanked him. Then, he pulled out a "Notice of Employee Praise" Form.

He told me that I needed to sign the form to confirm that I had received a minute of praise from a managerial figure. There was a section on the form where the manager could indicate the degree of praise that the underling received. It ranged from "One minute of praise" to "3-4 minutes of praise" to "Written Commendation." I signed the form, prideful that my minute of praise was officially logged in corporate records.

I imagined in my mind a theoretical bit from the horribly strained disaster that The Office has become where Michael briefly praises Jim and then asks him to sign a form, only for Jim to smugly inform Michael that he has only been praised for ten seconds and won't sign it until he's been sufficiently praised for 50 more seconds, which causes Michael to awkwardly improvise "hilariously" inappropriate compliments about his hair and nailing a hottie like Pam. Then I slapped myself for being a giant dipshit.

I realized that this moment of receiving an official notice of praise from one of my bosses would be completely at home in a network TV sitcom. As as result I have either gained an incredible amount of respect for the writers of The Office and how expertly they've captured real-life, or I've been crushed with the knowledge that my life is a fucking sitcom or cartoon devoid of any real meaning.

Then I though really had about the true implications of my official notice of praise, and I realized, did you get an official notice of praise from your boss today? Did you? Oh wait, you fucking didn't! SUCK IT! SUCK IT HARD!! I got official praise! It's even in writing!! It's been signed by my general manager AND my assistant manager. Your boss didn't sign shit for you today, and if he did it sure as shit wasn't an official document confirming that you're awesome. Fuck you if you're reading this, because YOU SUCK HUGE DICKS!!! Fuck you right up your stupid black ass! I EARNED THE PRAISE! MY LIFE IS VALIDATED BECAUSE I FOLLOWED THE RULES AND MADE MY BOSSES HAPPY!!! FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOU SO FUCKING HARD!!! EAT MY SHIT, COCKSNUGGLERS!!!!!!

God my dick is hard right now.

I got on Deadspin!

Well, it's not like I got a featured column or anything. Today they posted their feature on why Wrigley Field sucks. As you know, I responded to the challenge by sending them this e-mail. Despite all of my work, and all of the sexual humiliation I suffered at the hands of that enormous, curly haired man, the guy from Deadspin posted exactly one sentence of the two-page e-mail I sent:

"I half expected to find the Ark of the Covenant before I found my seats, and the smell was like taking a Fantastic Voyage inside a penis."

If he had to post only one sentence of the e-mail, I guess I'm glad he picked this one because I think it's pretty funny, although it's taken out of context and the actual point I was making is obscured and twisted to fit the point that the writer is trying to make. I feel kind of like a Michael Moore interview subject in that sense.

In the e-mail I sent, I remark that the stadium looks and smells like a shitty abandoned warehouse, hence the reason I expected to find the Ark before I found my seats, an obvious reference to the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the Deadspin article, the quote is taken out of context and it looks like my main issue with Wrigley Field is that your seats are hard to find. Anyone who reads the article who has also been to Wrigley undoubtedly finds themselves thinking I'm a fucking retard who can't read signs. So to anyone who thinks this was the case, allow me to reassure you that despite what you may think, I actually have mastered the advanced concept of looking at the numbers on my ticket and matching them up with the numbers on the hanging signs.

As an added bonus, here are the Deadspin comments that directly respond to my line:

"How can you half expect something?"

"I'm having a hard time even beginning to process this sentence"

"This would explain why the Urological Society of America holds their annual convention at Wrigley every year"

Rejecting Notre Dame

Every year, thousands upon thousands of hopeful high school graduates receive thousands upon thousands of brutal rejection letters from universities. Most of them are pretty bland "We regret to inform you, blah blah blah" type letters, but sometimes colleges get downright nasty. A couple years ago a high school friend of mine applied to Notre Dame. He knew he probably didn't have the grades, test scores, or extracurriculars to make it, but he sent and application anyway in the off chance it might work out. Notre Dame responded by sending him an extremely brutal specially made rejection letter just for him, that boiled down to, "What the fuck were you thinking even wasting our time?!?"

Well I'm not going to stand for it anymore. I'm 22 and college is almost a whole year behind me, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't strike back. I'm sick and tired of kids paying $150 for an application and poring over every single detail for days only to receive a rejection letter that will fall somewhere between thoughtless and written by a vindictive fucking asshole determined to crush an 18-year old he's never met. That's why I've decided to turn things around and write a rejection letter to Notre Dame in which I regret to inform them that I won't be attending their school. The following is a letter I actually sent to Notre Dame's admissions department:

To Whom it May Concern:

First, let me say that the following is not a decision that I made lightly. Let me assure you that I thoroughly considered every option and every aspect of my decision, talking it over at length with my friends and family, and staying up late at night wondering if I had made the right choice. That being said, I regret to inform you, University of Notre Dame, that I will not be attending your college in the upcoming fall semester.

Please do not take my decision as a personal insult against your facilities or prowess as a university, because I assure you that is most definitely not the case. I simply feel that at this time I wish to pursue my other options. My father is looking for someone to take inventory at his discount used furniture emporium, I have a great supplementary income stream hustling strangers at Golden Tee at the bar above my father’s furniture store, and I still have a promising night job as a male stripper at Broadsword’s Adult Entertainment Center.

I understand that you have faculty and a campus that can’t be beat. I appreciate your many, many years of tradition. I have a fondness for your motto of “Life, Sweetness, Hope.” It’s all well and good, but we have a slogan of our own at Broadsword’s: “Slaying them by swinging our swords!” In this case, “Slaying” takes on a special metaphorical meaning as it refers to dazzling the crowd, while “swinging our swords” refers to my penis. This is the organization I have chosen, and you shouldn’t feel like any less of a university because of that.

Your highly respected football program almost drove me to side with you. I certainly have the physique to be a great college football player, as evidenced by the hundreds of single dollar bills stuffed into my red, white, and blue Speedo. I wouldn’t be the highest paid male stripper in the tri-county area without rock-hard washboard abs and pecs that can dance the night away, that’s for sure. However, even if I didn’t make the team, simply being in the crowd would be a truly worthwhile thrill. But again, I find my life already offers all that I need as every Sunday night I don a football helmet and entertain the ladies as Peyton Manmeat. Sometimes I team up with my friend Dontrell who performs as Donovan McSex: The Erotic Quarterblack. It’s the simple things in life that I enjoy.

So again I apologize that I will not be attending your university in the upcoming year. Attending your school would be truly wonderful, but the friends I’ve made, the family I have, opportunities that face me, and nightly occupation of wagging my flaccid member at dozens of drooling bachelorettes is too much to leave behind. I know I never technically applied to your university, and you’ve certainly never expressed any interest in my attending, but I thought informing you of my absence would still be the professional thing to do. I will shake my ass extra hard in your honor tonight.

Sincerely,

Peyton Manmeat

If I receive a response, I will immediately update this blog with the result. Let's keep our fingers crossed on this one.

A few perfectly good reasons to hate Kentucky

Okay, now I admit I'm from Indiana, which isn't exactly a fucking bastion of cultural diversity and sophistication, but here are just a few local mannerisms and pronunciations that make me hate everyone from this state. It probably won't surprise you to find that almost all of them are related to food, seeing as how that kinda applies to my job.

1. They pronounce "Ranch" like "Wrench." This particular mispronunciation is a lot more difficult than most. For example, a lot of people around here pronounce "hell" like "hay-ull," which isn't a big deal since I can decipher from context clues the meaning of "Why the hay-ull are you fucking my pet dog?" The problem with asking for "Wrench" dressing is that there's this other reddish salad dressing that shares its name with a European nationality that sounds pretty similar.

2. "Promise" is pronounced, "Pamas." Listen to me, you little shits: This isn't fucking Boston where you can just leave out random consonants and change vowel sounds at your leisure.

3. Relish, that stuff you put on hot dogs, is referred to as "Chow Chow." This one is so fucking moronic that no level of snide commentary can do it justice.

4. "Crayons" is pronounced, "Crowns." How in the fuck do you get Crowns out of Crayons? Look at how the goddamn word is spelled. Look at it! One time this little racist asshole asked me if our restaurant has "Crowns." I thought he meant paper crowns like the ones they have at Burger King, so I told him no. Later on, his parents saw children at another table coloring with crayons, and they filed a complaint to my manager because I lied to them.

Suck my cock, Kentucky! Talk normal!