A Novel Idea

Ridin Dirty

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:28:20 -0500

Ridin Dirty

82.6 Miles, 5:17 a.m., 83 MPH, 1 Amazing Night

Thu, 22 May 2008 07:34:44 -0500

I am falling in like with you…

…deal with it.

Blissgasm...

Thu, 15 May 2008 10:22:00 -0500

That voice in my head is back, “I have to shake this one off. I need some moral support. Whatever you do don’t call Roy he won’t be helpful. Joe, call Joe.”

Dialing… “You have reached the voi…”click,

“Fuck Joe.”

Dialing…”Hello.”

“Roy, it’s Rich, we need to talk”

“Dude what did you do this time”

“Just shut the fuck up and listen.”

You know those times in your life when you have been in a relationship for a while and you just get, well, comfortable. You pick up little habits, gestures, reflections of the other person that don’t necessarily translate to anyone other than the person you are with. It might be the way you fall asleep together, the way your feet just happen to cross one and others under the sheets, or the way her head just fits under your arms when you put your arm around her. These are the things that make relationships worth being in. But, how awkward is it when that person is gone and you start all over with a new girl. All of a sudden she doesn’t like your feet touching her when you sleep, or you just happen to let out a little sigh when you hug her tight for the first time.

Hugs are a very crucial part to the beginning of any physical relationship. It is the building blocks of getting comfortable enough with another person to let them touch you. Hugging starts at such a young age, subconsciously we have years of experience hugging others, how to hug them, how long, how tight, where to put your hands. Still despite my years of experience I recently had one of the most awkward hugs in my entire life. Before we get to that though, I want to go over, from a guys perspective what different hugs mean, if, for no other reason, to further embarrass myself at the end of this story.

The most basic of hugs is something I like to call the side-hug. This is the most basic hug in the book. This is a complete sign of friendship and nothing else. Guys, if you are trying to get a feel for a girl and she side hugs you, things are going well from a romantic standpoint. The side hug is a one handed maneuver where the guys hand goes around the girls head and the girls goes around the guys waste. A slight pull is executed so that the side of the hugger’s hips touches briefly. Now the next iteration of the side hug is for closer friends and the only difference is that the girls arm goes around the guy’s neck and the guys arm goes around the girls waste. This is still using just one arm, but it does set you up for a cheek kiss if one is necessary. Again, guys, if you only get one arm in regardless of location, whether it is high or low, you are in the friend zone. Deal with it.

Now the next step in hugging is the double arm variation. This is where you are wrapping both arms around the person you are hugging and squeeze. Now the first part of this hug is when the guy hugs a girl around the neck and the girls arms are around the guys waste. This is the perfect hug for the end of a first date that was completely mediocre. No fireworks. No fist fights. Just vanilla. This hug is safe. As a guy, it shows you that the girl is comfortable with you touching her, but she isn’t that into you yet. If you see a girl go for your waist and you are planning on kissing her guys, you should strongly reconsider. Now the final and best type of hug is when the girl wraps both arms around a guys neck and pulls you in close. Guys this is when you put your arms around her hips and let her start getting used to having your hands in the vicinity of her ass. Now girls, this might come as a shock to some of you, but you have a secret weapon when this hug is deployed. It’s called the boob press. When you are into a guy and hug him, as a queue that you are ready for the hug to end, you will press just your chest into his, essentially pressing your boobies into his heart and then release. Guys, if you happen to ever get boob pressed you are so in.

So now that we are all squared away on body language and hugs let’s get back to that conversation between Roy and me. I had been out of a particular relationship for a while, but I was just starting to date a new girl. I still had all of the old habits from the old relationship fresh in my mind. I hadn’t made my move with the new girl yet, and one night after a particularly good date, I decided it was the perfect timing for that first kiss. She was leaving my house and I was walking her to her car. It came time for the hug. Her arms went high, awesome, I let my hands slide down from the top of her shoulders to the very small of her back. Our eyes met, both glistening with anticipation, our breathing deepened momentarily, our bodies were now meshed together, I had picked her up slightly off of the ground for and then set her down, there it was, the boob press. I was so in. I pull her in close…”hhmmmmmmmm.”

My eyes shot open. That voice in my head that is constantly running chimes in, “Uhhh Richard, (yes I talk to myself in the third person) what the fuck was that? You did not just hhmmmmmm on this girl. Oh shit, you did, you hmmmmmed all over her. Jesus you are lame.” Now for those of you unfamiliar with this hhmmmmmm sound that really does not translate well in text. It is that sound you make when you are with someone for a long time and just the feeling of them next to you sends you into bliss. The noise is half of a blissful sigh and half orgasm. We can call it a blisgasm for the remainder of this tale actually. So I end up quasi pushing this girl away out of sheer panic. No kiss. Hell, I couldn’t even find the words to say goodnight. Just me standing there waiting, wishing, that she did not just hear me blisgasm while hugging her good-bye. She got into her car and drove away.

I was left standing in my driveway, alone. I had just prematurely groanjacualted during a hug that should have lead to our first kiss. I am going to be single forever. I am going to live with my mother, her 8 cats, and have the highlight of my week be wearing my nice pair of pleated khakis to starbucks on the weekend for a five dollar mocha frappacino’s. Fuck.Me.Running. Seriously.

10 minutes later.

“I can’t believe you hhmmmmmmmed all over that girl. You are going to be single forever.”

Thanks Roy.

Video

Thu, 15 May 2008 08:12:53 -0500

Wow. This actually happened.

Tue, 13 May 2008 22:07:28 -0500

Me: Well what else is going on with your life right now.
Her: I am getting married...
Me: Oh...should we get together and talk about that
Her: I don't think he would like that.

Kanye West, Late Registration, Track 16

Tue, 13 May 2008 21:55:00 -0500

The accusation of being self involved isn’t a new one to me. Looking to the past events of my life I have always put myself before others. I guess that is just part of my personality at this point. It isn’t something that I am particularly proud of, but it is something that I learned to accept. It is also amazing to me just what, especially at a young age, your mind can decide what is too painful to store and pushes those memories deep deep down, where, in my opinion, they should stay.

Regardless, when I was in fourth grade my dad walked into my bedroom one night and told me that my mom was pretty sick and needed to go stay at the hospital for a few days in order to get better. I don’t know why that didn’t seem out of place to me at the time. No clue. But again, there I am, even at the age of 10, self involved to the point that I am focused only on beating that next level on the video game that I don’t even think to be more inquisitive to what is wrong. To me, that is how hospitals worked. You get sick, you go, you get better, and you go home. I didn’t even think it was strange when my aunt, my mother’s sister showed up to stay with us. To me, in my world, it just seemed like a convenient time for her to be here. I had no clue what was going on.

A few days later I visited her in the hospital and that’s when things got difficult for me. My dad told me that she was very tired so if she didn’t seem like the same kind of person that I am used to not to be alarmed. He told me not to touch her because she might be sore from some of the tests that the doctors had performed on her. I still can smell that hospital room in my memories. It is awful. It is one of those smells that makes your throat swell shut, either from the stench itself or from the tears it brings back. Those tears crashing from the inner depths of your memories right up front. A tsunami of grief that has been lying in wait for just the right mix of odors to come back. Walking into that room, smelling that awful smell, seeing pipes, fluids, machines, monitors all attached to her, I immediately new I should have paid more attention to what my dad was saying. All of a sudden the visiting rules were banging in my ears. Don’t touch, be quiet, and tell her you love her.

She kept calling me Jason. That’s my older brother’s name. She told me there were small leprechauns in the corner that had just gotten married. She told me that there was an angel that would sit in the chair next to her each night and hold her hand. She said the wings were the whitest thing she had ever seen. Well in all fairness she told me that the angel was whiter than the leprechaun bride’s dress, but I guess when you are stoned out of your mind on pain medication that is about the same thing.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother had just had her right breast removed. She had been struggling with breast cancer for a couple of months and the decision had been made to remove her breast before the cancer could spread. As an adult now, I realize how long this process must have been to come to this conclusion and I knew nothing about it. Literally at this point, all I knew was that my mother was seeing mythological Irish creatures in her room and that she thought I was my brother. I hadn’t been part of the process at all. There must have been weeks of doctors appointments, second opinions, preparation for the surgery. All of this being done to my mom and I was shut out.

I remember her coming home and being locked in her room for days. I wasn’t allowed to see her. I would catch glimpses of my dad or my aunt walking out with bloody bandages at times. I remember hearing her cry at night. If ever there is something worse in this world than falling asleep to your own tears, it is falling asleep to the sound of your mothers.

There were people constantly dropping by with dinners. Our freezer was full of food. My dad told me no matter what, even if I didn’t like the food, I had to thank the person for giving it to us. I’ll never forget that my 5^th grade teacher brought us a spinach casserole that stunk to high hell. I had to thank her for this crap? Fuck that, I thought, I can remember her asking me how my mother was doing and I had to fight the urge to tell her that her nasty ass dinner had made her sicker. It wouldn’t have been a good joke at the time, but let’s be honest, when in my life, has the prospect of making a bad joke ever stopped me from making it. I guess I had more discretion when I was younger.

Two years later my mother had her second breast removed. She had reconstructive surgery this time and I could over hear her bragging to her friends that she was getting two tattoos after the surgery. The tattoos were new nipples. Cancer might have taken her breasts, but she was going to keep her femininity. To this day, I have never met a more amazing woman in my life than my mother. She has lived through 3 marriages, breast cancer, working in child protection for the State of Louisiana, and being a widow. Not to mention raising 3 sons and a daughter who have never been appreciative of everything she has given to us.

Dear Jill…

Tue, 13 May 2008 13:05:25 -0500

Dear Jill…

How bout a revolution?

Tue, 13 May 2008 10:35:00 -0500

For some reason there has been a ton of references in my life about poker these days. There was a time, you see, when I was a legitimate poker player. A rounder, a true grinder, a shark in sheep’s clothing. Poker as an acceptable hobby was still in its infancy and I was part of it. I had been playing cards since I was 20 years old, I started playing legally in casinos a year after that and I was good. In my hay day I played in underground tournaments three times a week, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights. The weekends I would play in the casinos, Friday nights I would skim money off of the drunks stumbling in off of Bourbon Street, Sunday nights were spent with grandmothers looking to blow their grandchildren’s inheritance. I called my Sunday sessions the Social Security game. Considering the fact that I had a full time job and that by all estimates the money I am currently putting into Social Security I am never going to see back, I would justify my check raises by collecting back the money that afforded a 78 year old woman the luxury of spending her last days at a poker table.

Poker players are just like fishermen in the fact that each of us has a good story. We all have a tale about that huge fish that got away or the time we landed our prize and it was as big as your head. Let’s face it; part of the appeal of poker is seeing just how much bullshit you can pipe into somebody before they call you out on it. This of course is a huge part of the reason I was successful. To me, life, like poker, is made up of moments when you decide; how beneficial is it going to be for my success to completely and utterly lie to someone with a straight face. It is one of my tragic skills. It is one I have perfected. Thanks mom and dad for that divorce, who knew that me pretending to be okay with that would benefit me so well.

Now, there was a particular evening that still sticks out in my mind as one of the most memorable evening s of poker I have ever played. As cliché and awful as it is, I feel like I have to quote O.A.R. on this one and tell you that, it was a crazy game of poker.

It was my Thursday night tournament that I was becoming a regular at. It was at a bar in my town and it usually started around 7 in the evening and had to be done by 2 in the morning for the bar to close. It wasn’t a very exclusive tournament, but people wouldn’t just open up to you for a while. When you play poker with the same group of people over an extended period of time the only thing that will get you from one week to the next is your reputation. Everyone there called me the kid. At the age of 22 I was at least 15 years younger than the next oldest person at the tables. The other players constanlty made fun of my age. Asking if it was alright if I stayed up past my bed time or if my mom was going to pick me up after they won my money. I usually just sat there in silence, occasionalling retorting something about my mom being asleep, but their wife said she would be by to pick me up. My reputation was that of a very solid player who rarely would bluff, or do anything fancy. I was vanilla; I was the egg shell white on the walls of your new house, unthreatening, easy to get along with and boring. This was an act that I had built over the course of many weeks. Walking into the bar people would acknowledge my presence and then go back to doing whatever else they were up to. I would pull a chair up to the bar waiting for the game to start and the bar keep would have a cherry coke waiting for me. Still to this day I get a rush from the smell of cigarettes and cherry sodas. Those two things just feel like poker to me.

In this particular game there were 40 players, 5 tables and it only cost 30 dollars to play. The winner of the tournament got 800 bucks, second place got 200 bucks and the remaining cash went to the others in the top 6. Now I can’t tell you anything about this game up until the final table. I am sure there were hands that I played very well and there were some hands that I absolutely mis-played, but somehow when it got down to the final 6 I had the most chips out of everyone and it looked like it was going to be a very profitable night for me. Two players were knocked out and things were pretty getting pretty close between three of us. I knocked the 4^th player out and going heading into the final 3 I was the chip leader again. Now, for those of you who play poker can attest to, when you have been playing poker for over 5 hours straight and it is getting late into a tournament and early into the mornings the size of your stack is more important than any other factor. I was happy with where I was and I began analyzing the remaining two players. One player was a young Hispanic kid. He knew the strategy, he knew the math, his judgment was off at times and I knew that it would take a solid hand for me to take him down. The other man was Mickie. Now, Mickie is exactly the type of guy that his name implies. Mickie was way past three sheets to the wind. His head was bobbing at the table trying to half stay awake and half try to keep the bar on a level plane in his mind. His words were slurring and you could see sweat pouring out of his floral shirt. His chest hair poking through the unbuttoned top 3 buttons were like wet vines trying so desperately to escape the jungle he was wearing. His gold chains were able to suppress some of them, but others were not so lucky. Mickie was my mark. He was my ticket to the 800 dollar pot that night. But there was the 2 o’clock deadline looming out there and Mickie was setting up for a war of attrition. You see, if it came to be 2 before there was a winner, the remaining players would just divide the money evenly. This meant that each of us would win a little over 300 bucks, which was fine with Mickie, who had the least amount of chips, but for me, was unacceptable. There was an hour and half left and we would need every second of it.

We must have played through 7 hands in an hour because Mickie was acting so slowly. This had frustrated the younger guy at the table to the point that he had thrown away much of his lead over Mickie and now the three of us were sitting pretty close in the amount of chips we had. Finally the kid gave in a bet away all of his chips when he shouldn’t have and Mickie won. There were 20 minutes left before the bar closed and all of a sudden I went from being the sure winner in this, to the under-dog. Now, with 800 dollars on the horizon, Mickie was in a rush to play each hand. Seeing that he was drunk and emotional and not in any state what so ever to make any kind of decision I perked up in my chair, raised my baseball cap and spoke to him. “Mickie, there are 15 minutes left before the bar closes. The way I see it is that you have two choices right now. You can split the remaining grand with me, 500 bucks each straight up. Or you can play me for another 15 minutes, by the end of which I guarantee, I will have not only all of your chips in front of me, but also 800 bucks. This is a 300 dollar choice and I am leaving it up to you.” Everyone in the bar laughed. Hell I would have laughed too. Mickie told me he liked his chances. I looked him square in the eye, “Well, thanks for the extra money then.”

I quietly slumped back into my chair and waited. I waited and waited, I played slow, and Mickie was getting more and more angry. He let his anger control his bets. He would throw up huge bets trying to get me to fold when he had nothing. He was so drunk I knew he didn’t have an accurate count of the chips and with about 3 minutes left I did a count and realized I was slightly ahead of him in chips. He hadn’t caught onto this yet. Then I get dealt pocket 10’s and I was the first to act. I just called his big blind and of course, in typical Mickie fashion, he raised me something ridiculous like 8 times the big blind. I put him on at least on Ace and I knew that regardless of what happened on the flop this was the hand I needed to make my move on. Ace. Seven. Ten. I just flopped trip 10’s. A great hand heads up. An even greater hand heads up against a drunk Italian man who was holding an ace. I check, hoping he is going to take the bait and bet big, he doesn’t, he checks. Shit. Three. Now, most people here sitting with trips are going to put out a bet and see what happens, but I am waiting for the knock out and I know that if I slow play this he is going to try to bluff his way out of the hand. I check. He checks. Fuck. Now I have to bet the next hand. I asked how much time there was left before the last card is dealt. They bar says that the next hand has to be the last one. The last card hits the table. Ace. I looked at Mickie, “Well Mickie, looks like we are splitting that money after all. There is no way I could bet on that Ace, I check.” He is furious. His $800 payday just got reduced. In a fit of anger he yells at me, “Well I am all in.” Click. Snap. That is the sound of the trap being sprung.

I have a full house. 10s full of Aces. It isn’t the nuts, but in this case it is the better of two hands. It also wins me $800. I tell Mickie that I call and lay the two 10s in my hand down on the table. His eyes drop. “You mother fucker. You fucking piece of shit, I will fucking kill you. We still have one more hand. You think you beat me, I will get that fucking money.”

“Not tonight you won’t Mic, I have you covered. Thanks for the extra cash though.” It was smug and perfect. Everyone in the bar would be talking about this for weeks. We had to get a third person to count the chips to be sure, but at the end of the count, I was right. I had won. The entire bar of rounders came up to shake my hand and tell me congrats. Mickie was nowhere to be seen. His girlfriend at slapped him after he got up from the table. “That was rent money asshole.” I am sure he went after her somewhere to make up for his short comings as not only a man, but as a poker player. I was enjoying the attention inside the bar.

People were actually calling other players from the night at 2 in the morning to tell them about what just happened. It was a great feeling to be part of this and it was an even better feeling to know that I had just won a little less than 2 weeks salary at the job I had. Then there was the yelling.

We all thought we heard a scream at first, we weren’t sure if it was a scream or if it was just Mickie drunk accelerating out of the parking lot and screeching his tires. The sound of shattering glass a moment later confirmed this for us. We all ran outside to see what had happened. Again, in life, much like poker, assumptions can ruin your life. Mickie’s car had a broken wind shield, but was parked in the same spot. His tires were fine, it was his girl that had been screaming. She had a cut above her right eye and the blood was just starting to run down her cheek.

“What the fuck Mickie!” someone in the crowd yelled, “What the fuck did you do?” None of us saw the loaded gun in his hand yet.

"Yeah I know it has been a few days since I have posted anything, but be patient friends there will..."

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 09:27:22 -0500

“Yeah I know it has been a few days since I have posted anything, but be patient friends there will be an update soon…”

Every now and then I get a little bit scared when I see that...

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:37:07 -0500

Every now and then I get a little bit scared when I see that fucking look in your eyes…

My life is complete…

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:22:19 -0500

My life is complete…

Hurricane Dean

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:09:00 -0500

So in light of recent events I seem it necessary to e-mail you and tell you that I almost died yesterday and it was in the least bit awesome. As a matter of fact it sucked. Actually I will go as far to say that it fucking sucked. Put on your PJ’s and fix a cup of tea because this e-mail should be pretty long. I have also sprinkled some obscenities into this e-mail so you understand the passion with which I not only have experienced these events, but also that with which I am writing them. So without further ado, the tragedy that was my life yesterday.

After we get cut off I try for about 10 minutes to call you back. I didn’t have anything particularly important to say, but I feel like one of the worst things in life is the lack of a proper good-bye. It was a bad omen of things to come. So after I stop calling I for some reason keep imagining you off to some Dragon’s cave in the dark ages where Ukranian peasants have doomed you to a life time or servitude to the demon beast. You had on one of those cone hats with the ribbon on top and it was pink. Strangely enough that is all you had on. Just kidding, well kind of. Actually I am not kidding, we should make this happen one day, sans dragon of course. Ok stop laughing so you can better appreciate the seriousness of this e-mail. My flight to Miami wasn’t bad because I slept the entire time. I had been up since 4 in the morning and it felt good to get an hour nap in. Which brings me to United States Weather Systems and the nerds who love them. We have a hurricane named Dean chillin in the gulf right now. He is a category 4 and pretty much did his best to send Jamaica back down to the bottom of the ocean. Now I don’t even know why I am even going on this trip considering that if you draw a line from Miama to Port of Spain, Trinidad, you will run smack dab into Dean. I was wondering how we were going to manage getting through this mother fucker of a hurricane and get my slightly over weight ass safe into yet another country I have never been before. Come to find out the wise agents at american airline had already thought of a solution. Oh we will just fly around it.

I knew it was going to be interesting when we spent on hour on the tarmac waiting for some “routine” maintenance to take place on our aircraft. Now just some background info on me and flying. I used to be pretty scared of it, now I am okay. I am okay as long as I get on board, the plane then leaves, the plane flies around for a while, and then the plane lands. I also need these events to happen in that order. I am not okay with routine maintenance coming in and fucking up my flow. So after the maintenance is done we take off. And about an hour into our flight the pilot come on to the PA and says “We would like to welcome you to our flight, our flight time is slightly extended today due to the course correction needed to bypass Hurricane Dean. In case you are wondering if you look out the right side of our aircraft, that is Hurricane Dean” Yeah you could see the hurricane from the plane. It was pretty cool actually, cool like seeing a tiger in bush right before it pounces on you and then rips your throat out into a million little threads. It was about 20 minutes after this announcement that the real fun began. We started hitting a little turbulence which is no big deal to me. It was the fact that this bouncing around lasted for another half hour that started to concern me. Then things got worse. The plane was dropping and rising and moving all about spontaneously and it was really intense. All the flight attendants had been ordered back to their seats and everyone on the plane was quiet. It was surreal now that I think about it. Then we hit some sort of wall and people started yelling because the plane was really all over the place. I am just waiting for the oxygen masks to fall from the ceiling. So here I am about to die and all I can think about was “God Damnit the last thing I had to eat was a fucking blueberry scone from starbucks” Seriously, that could have been my last thought in life. Not, “Man I should have done more for the kids” or “I wonder if I have ever really experienced love.” My last thought would have been about a fucking scone! How crazy is that? It was such a Garden State moment. Everyone on the plane is freaking out over life and not wanting it to end and I am Zach Braffing it all the way to the ocean floor. Seriously if the Shins would have been on the loud speakers I would have been like ok what the hell is going on here?

Needless to say, by proof of this e-mail, I didn’t die. We survived the storm. That is two hurricanes in the past 3 years that have tried to kill me and failed. I have looked death right in the eye twice and you know what? Death blinked…err…blinked twice, maybe it has some dirt in its eye or something. Regardless the flight scared the hell out of me. Trinidad come to find out is awesome. It is a beautiful country with some really good food. I am going out exploring tonight and hopefully find a new adventure to annoy you with.

Just because I haven’t found a girl to marry yet...

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:17:00 -0500

Just because I haven’t found a girl to marry yet doesn’t mean I don’t have a first dance song already picked out.

This is a picture that goes with the below story. It was taken...

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:24:13 -0500

This is a picture that goes with the below story. It was taken as a reinactment of what my face looked like when the second cop jumped in the car. Please take special note of the amazing plane hair.

Africa....(First Draft)

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:50:00 -0500

The first thing you notice when you step off of a 14 hour flight from Houston to Luanda is that it is fucking hot. The second thing you realize, if you are anything like me, is that you have never traveled outside of the United States before and even though every movie you have ever seen clearly wouldn’t steer you wrong, the outfit you have on looks completely ridiculous. So there I am, trying to clear customs in a land that I have never been to before, about to meet people I have never met before, in flip flops, khaki cargo pants, and loosely buttoned forest green short sleeve shirt with pockets on both sides of the chest. I am a walking cliché.

Luanda smells like old leather, mildew, and sweat all mixed together. This wonderful bouquet fallows you around everywhere and eventually you just get used to it. As I am still adjusting to the odor I walk outside of the airport and realize very quickly that I have larger things to adjust to. The primary of which is a feeling that I had never experienced in my life. It hits you in the gut. It is very primal to say the least. It is a feeling of fear, but not panic. Your senses are heightened and immediately you feel very unpleasant in your own skin. This feeling I was experiencing is called minority. As a white male growing up in a country club in a suburb in Louisiana you can imagine this new sensation was something I could have done without. All of a sudden I realized that being a white face in a crowd could be a very dangerous thing. Being a white face, dressed like I am going on a god damned safari in the middle of a populated city is even worse.

It took all of five minutes outside of the airport for me to realize that the quicker I separated myself from the American thought process I have had for 24 years the better, especially considering the amount of AK-47s there were in plain view. As an American, every movie you have ever seen, the good guys are shooting at the people with AK-47s. Think about that for a minute. Try to find one reference in our American culture where the good guy uses an AK. You can’t, unless he is picking that gun up off of a dead terrorist or evil minion. Hopefully, I thought to myself, if something goes down these guns will be firing in the opposite direction. Come to find out, the people with the guns know how much they scare Americans. I had only been in the country for 3 hours when I had my first run in. And afterwards I got to change my outfit because I just about pissed my pants.

Now let me save you some time on Wikipedia and explain to you a little bit about Luanda. It is a city compromised of about 5 million people. This is a fact, what wikipedia will not tell you is that there are about 8 million cars in the city. I would say out of that maybe 100,000 of them actually run. This is pertinent to the story because as you can imagine, parking in this city, with the ratio of cars to people, can get a little tricky sometime.

After touching base with the main office in the city, I was heading to check into the hotel with one of the managers of the area, Mark, and his maid, who was a native Angolan woman. We hopped into the range rover to bring me to the hotel. Mark was driving, the maid was sitting shotgun, and I was directly behind Mark in the back seat. As we began to back the vehicle up there was a loud thud on the hood of the car. Mark immediately slammed on the breaks and we look to find that there is a police man banging on the hood. Mark puts the car in park and the moment he does this the back passenger side door opens up and another police officer jumps in the car with his gun. It has become very clear to me at this point, that the police officers have seen the velociraptor scene in Jurrassic Park one too many time. I see the gun, pointed in my general direction and all I can think to myself is “Mother fucker, my tombstone is going to read, Here lies Richard, he got raptored in Africa” It should also be made clear that, despite their tactics these aren’t exactly elite commandos here. They are very thin men, who stink to high hell, and talk way too loudly. Dude, you’ve got the gun, therefore you also have my undivided attention, please procede with your request using your inside voice.

Apparently, unknown to me, this kind of thing happens all the time here. Mark turns to the maid and asks her to talk to them. The speak very poor English and Mark speaks very poor Portuguese so as you can imagine negotiations begin as a complete cluster fuck of broken phrases and lots of pointing. The maid informs us that Mark and I are being placed under arrest. The charge is illegal parking. And we have to drive the police officers back to the jail. So that they can book us. Yes that right, we have to drive the police back to their own jail. My thoughts quickly switched from my tombstone to what the calling shotgun rules are if you are getting extorted by the police in a foreign country. I quickly came to the ruling that AK beats shotgun and whoever had the most bullets could sit wherever they damned well pleased.

So back to the charge of illegal parking. Getting arrested in a city with millions of cars for illegal parking is a lot like getting kicked out of a public pool for getting too wet. Mark knew the cops were just looking for a bribe and he asked me to very calmly step out of the car. So the three of us step out of the car which just pisses the police officers off. Now they are yelling at us in Portuguese and pointing there guns at us. Mark, who I am about 90% sure at this point has a death wish, pulls out his cell phone and calls everyone in the office to come downstairs to help out. The bigger the crowd in these situations the better. As he is calling me one of the police officers yells something at the maid. She translates to me that he wants to know who he is calling. I told her to tell him that he was contacting the American Embassy to let them know that we were being arrested and that they could contact us at the police station. She didn’t have to translate that one back to him. The second the word embassy shakingly dribbled off of my tongue his eyes got wide. “No, no embassy” he said. This quickly got the attention of the other police officer who came over to find out what was being said. I quickly told the maid to repeat what I had just said. She told both of the men the story again and the men quickly came back with a new demand that they weren’t going to arrest us, but there was a fine we had to pay. I told them that we had already contacted the embassy and that they were on their way down to the jail. The men sheepishly turned and just walked away.

It was as simple as that. No running, no yelling, it was like I was an upset mother who had told two sons to go to their rooms. They just kind of slumped away and turned down the next street.

Mark hangs up the phone and turns to me to find that the situation has been resolved. He asked if I had paid them. I told them I had not. He then asks, “Well what did you say to them” I just slapped my under developed biceps, gave him a wink, and responded, “I told them not to fuck with me.”

Rebecca...The E-mail

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:35:04 -0500

Dear Rebecca,

I understand that it has been a while since we have talked. After you and I broke up I was pretty sure you were, in fact, the biggest bitch I would ever come in contact with in my life.

However, upon further investigation, I have found that you are, in fact, only the second worst person I have ever met.

Thought you might want to know about the upgrade.

Sincerely Yours,

Richard Benjamin Kaufmann III

Ukraine...the e-mail

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:29:00 -0500

Ok guys here it is a play by play of the bloodbath that was my expedition into former soviet Russia. I will break it down by days: This is pretty long and boring actually, but it will explain a good bit.

Sunday: I arrive in Ukraine at 5:30 pm after spending the past 24 hours traveling from New Orleans, to Detroit, to Amsterdam, and finally into Kiev. Stefanie picks me up from the airport and first impressions are great. She looks amazing. She is a beautiful girl and has aged like a nice french wine. I pick her up and kiss her on the cheek and she is tells me how she had forgotten how handsome I was and we do the generally mushy first meeting bf/gf stuff. We take a cab to the apartment we are renting in the center of kiev. It is about a 20 minute ride there and the conversation goes really well on the way there. It is fun because the cab driver only speaks broken Ukranian and Russian and Stef and I are having a ball commenting about how much he smells like beer. Generally speaking it was good times. I settle in at the apartment and change clothes. I give Stef all of the things I brought to her, some food, some soaps, The Office DVDs and an external hard drive that she needed. She was so happy about all of this stuff I thought it was going to be a sure thing. That’s when the first red flag went up, she never said thank you. She expressed how happy she was to have all of these things, but never stopped and looked at me and said, hey thanks for brining this to me, it means a lot. I figured she was just saving the thanking for later and we decided to go out and eat. We ate at a Mexican food restaurant, (read this as Mexican food that tastes like italian food) in Kiev and at this is where things starting going south. We started talking about her family, bad move she hates her family, and how happy I was that she was nothing like them. Then she drops this bomb of a question on me. “Why didn’t you graduate college” I explained to her that I didn’t really like college and that at this point in my career, while I haven’t complete ruled out college, I was happy with not graduating because I have an amazing job and that within the IT industry being active in the field for 5 years is just as good as a degree most of the time. She then pretty much called me dumb and that she couldn’t imagine not being able to talk about Nietzsche or other philosophers, I told her that I read Nietzsche on my own and that if she felt the urge to talk about how god is dead and how we are all just part of a herd I was more than happy to oblige. Things went to awkward town after that and I was really looking forward to getting her to bed to end the first day after that. We climb into bed the first night and I lean over and give her a kiss and tell her that I was glad to be in Ukraine, she said she was glad too and then she went to sleep. My body thought it was still 2 in the afternoon so I didn’t sleep much.

Monday: I might have slept about 3 hours the night before and Monday morning Stef’s BFF comes in to meet me. This girl’s name is Shelly and she is actually pretty cool at first. Right off the bat Stef and Shelly start speaking Ukranian, which didn’t really bother me as I figured they were just talking about me and that was fine. 5 hours later they were still speaking Ukranian to each other and I might have actually said about four dozen words to them. Never once did this girl ask anything about me, not how I was enjoying the country, or what it was like seeing stef, nothing, I was a third wheel and this grew very frustrating for me. At dinner Stefanie turned to me and said, you know you are not being that funny, Shelly keeps telling me that she thought you would be funnier. Now I love being up-front and honest with people as much as the next guy, but this pissed me off. I turned to Shelly and said, sorry if I am not funny it is just that I don’t speak Ukranian and throughout this entire day that is all you and Stef have been speaking. Monday night was a bright spot for Stefanie and I because the day had been so rough without her really speaking to me much. We prank called some of her friends to freak them out and when we went to bed I thought we had gotten past the awkwardness between the two of us and that after her friend left things would be good between us.

Tuesday: Tuesday was the longest day of my life. We went to more churches and saw more statues and shit like that, which was cool, but I was tired and Stef and Shelly continued to basically ignore me. I hadn’t been drinking enough water since I arrived and I was pretty dehydrated. I could tell I needed water because when I would piss it pretty much looked like maple syrup. Shelly left at 6 and Stef and I’s train left at 10. Stef needed to buy our tickets for our trip back to Kiev so she stood in line for a while to buy that. I was standing in line talking to her when she turned to me and said, I just realized I don’t care about what you are talking about and you are speaking pretty loudly right now, so could you do me a favor and go somewhere else. Wow, this turned me on more than anything anyone has ever said to me. I told her I would be happy to and went and wondered around the train station by myself for the next hour and a half while she waited for her tickets. We went and sat at a cafe in silence when she go the tix and then boarded the train and went to sleep. The train was this post soviet monstrosity that smelled like a cross between old gym socks and a wet vagina, but not the good kind of wet vagina, the bad kind, the very very bad kind. We pull into her town around 4 in the morning and go to her apartment and fall asleep together.

Wednesday: We wake up Wednesday morning and I had pretty much had enough with the silent treatment and figured we could talk about what the deal was. This is when she turns to me and says. Honestly, I don’t like who you are, I don’t like the way that you act, and I think this trip was a huge mistake. She then proceeds to tell me that I am overly considerate and that she is insulted every time I open a door for her. I told her that it was a mistake for me to come and see her and that she was pretty much a liar just like the rest of her family. Things got pretty heated from there and she spent the rest of the day in her kitchen reading and I spent the rest of the day in her bedroom watching the office on DVD. There wasn’t any food in her town that day so I literally ate a tomato and cucumber the entire day. I was mentally and physically exhausted and was basically trying to get some water into my system so I didn’t have to die next to this bitch.

Thursday and Friday and Saturday: Basically after the break up things just went to hell. We traveled to Poltava together at which point we yelled at each other in the street. I had said something dumb, probably using the wrong tense of a verb or something like that, and she came back with some comment about me not graduating college. I immediately though of you guys and the pride that you would have for me if you were there about to witness the verbal lashing I was about to unleash on this girl. It went a little something like this, “Stef I understand the fact that you and I are not really getting along right now. I also understand how, you could have gotten the impression that I am a happy person. You see for the past 6 months I have generally enjoyed having you around, I have shared parts of my life with you that not everyone gets to see. You need to understand though that happiness is not one of my strong points, generally speaking, I am what most people refer to as an asshole. The things that make me happiest are the downfalls and short comings of others and up into this point I have not rejoiced in the presence of all of the things wrong with you. However, if you make another comment about this trip belittling me in anyway, I will call out your deepest darkest insecurities so quickly that you will have no choice but to realize the emptiness of that cold cavity you call a heart and send you crying back to America where you will realize that no one in this entire world wants to be with you.” Her faced dropped and she just turned away. I smiled for the first time in a week.

Yeah there are more things like that but you get the point.

I spent Saturday night in Amsterdam, where yes I did things that we will not talk about through my work e-mail. I also sent one of the best/worst e-mails in my life. I got home yesterday and couldn’t be happier.

Never, has there ever been in the history of the world, a more...

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:35:16 -0500

Never, has there ever been in the history of the world, a more accurate video of Roy and I’s relationship.

Monty Hall Mathematics

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:44:08 -0500

Monty Hall Mathematics:

For any of you guys still baffled by the problem presented in the movie ‘21’

Chip, incarcerated for riding dirty.

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:06:14 -0500

Chip, incarcerated for riding dirty.