Can I kick myself much harder?

I was gonna write up the final chronicle of the Palm Beach trip, but came up with this instead. I think it is because I read that Chuck Klosterman thing on the Sport’s Guy’s website today and he said something about people writing about music being retarded. I can’t really remember. Either way I had some rules for this list. Nothing new (or the whole list would be The Go! Team and Bloc Party songs), one song per band/artist, and I think that was it. I cut it off at 30 because it would have taken too long and I have no attention span these days. So here you go, in no particular order:

My Favorite 25 Songs Ever (That I Could Think Of Today)

1 – Kid Dynamite – Shiner
2 – Beastie Boys – Get It Together
3 – DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince – I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson
4 – Atreyu – Someone’s Standing On My Chest
5 – The Pee Tanks – Sad Eyes Again
6 – Thrice – See You In The Shallows
7 – Pet Shop Boys – Being Boring
8 – Matthew Sweet – Superderformed
9 – Outkast – B.O.B.
10 – The Get-Up Kids – Red Letter Day

11 – The Pixies – Gigantic
12 – Green Day – When I Come Around
13 – Smashing Pumpkins – Tonight, Tonight
14 – Treble Charger – Even Grable
15 – Micheal Jackson – Blood On The Dancefloor
16 – Cee-Lo – Gettin’ Grown
17 – The Fugees – Ready Or Not
18 – NOFX – The Decline
19 – Placebo – Teenage Angst
20 – Strung Out – Deville

21 – Compromise – The Wings I Once Possessed
22 – DL Incognito – Audio Coke
23 – Nirvana – Come As You Are (Acoustic)
24 – Gob – You’re Too Cool
25 – Snoop Doggy Dogg – Serial Killa
26 – Sneaker Pimps – 6 Underground
27 – AFI – A Single Second
28 –Sixty Stories – Anthem Red
29 – The Bouncing Souls – Say Anything
30 – Foo Fighters – Everlong

Turns out I said 25 but came up with 30. That is too bad. I’m going to Atmosphere tonight. It is going to be dope as all heck.

Peace.

They’re closing the bar and they want us to leave

So, much to the disappointment of everyoneI know I just can’t find it in me to do actual rundowns of the remaining days of the Fuck The Hurricane Tour. I recognize that for possibly Mark and/or Brehon this news is devastating (Tim doesn’t give a shit because he thinks blogs are gay and only has time for fantasy football or as we have taken to calling it D&D for jocks). In any case, what follows are summaries of the good times that were had and the debauchery that went on. There are pictures to go with most of these stories, but I just can’t bring myself to link to them. If anyone who had even the remotest bit of respect for the 4 tour participants ever saw these pictures they would probably hang themselves. Plus I think there are 2 pictures of girls, and about 300 of dudes in various stages of undress, making the trip seem far more homoesque than it actually was (I swear).

Good Time #1 – Vista Cruisers
This was probably my favourite afternoon of the trip. Brehon, Tim and I woke up drunk and proceeded to sit by the pool while formulating plans for the afternoon (while drinking). We decided that renting the sweet cruiser bikes from the hotel was a plan and a half. The best part of this was the bikes were in the shot for some Access Hollywood thing they were shooting at the hotel. So drunk Tim drops his drink while getting on the bike and then bikes through the shot, resulting in a ton of people getting pissed off. We started biking and made it off the island (Palm Beach) to the mainland (West Palm Beach). We got to Bradley’s (where shit went down later in the week) and order lunch that no one can eat because we are all hung-over/drunk and super dehydrated. This was the start of our bodies quitting on us. Halfway through lunch is starts absolutely pouring rain. We decided that would be a good time to leave and start biking back to the hotel. There was about a foot of water in the parking lot that we walked out through to get our bikes, and then decide that biking through the parking lot would be awesome. We start doing laps, and pulling off sweet power slides on our Vista Cruisers, and the entire restaurant gets up to watch the retards on bikes in the parking lot. It was far too much fun. We somehow got back to the hotel after biking all around Palm Beach and sat down at the outdoor bar after getting kicked out of the pool (apparently swimming in the lightning is not allowed there). At the bar our MO was to drink one of every kind of daiquiri they could make for us. I don’t think we could have been more excited about an afternoon after this one. It was solid gold.

Good Time #2 – Cucina’s
Cucina’s is presently the owner of a large chunk of our collective finances. We shut the place down either 4 or 5 times. I am not certain of the actual count. This place was awesome when it was dead because they had that Fuel channel and we got to watch snowboarding. It was awesomer when it was busy because it was full of really, really, really hot girls. Like off the Calgary scale hot. We devised a separate rating scale for the girls in Palm Beach. I guess the point of this paragraph is that the girls there were really hot (and out of our league). Yes, even with the assistance of the bar’s manager and general manager we could get no play in that place. I’m not even sure we tried. The drinks were too damn strong. Way too strong. It was the best drinking place I have been in a long time. There are probably really good stories from Cucina’s beyond the ridiculously hot clientele and staff, and the incredibly stuff drinks. I can’t remember them. Mark had a boner for this place.

Good Time #3 – Mark Getting Mad
It is probably impossible to pinpoint the exact point in time that Mark got mad, but I would like to attribute it to the time in Cucina’s when he wanted everyone to join him in a team high five over the table at Cucina’s. We all politely declined as team high five’s are about as cool as my job, and Mark got mad and said some really mean shit. There were other episodes of Mark getting mad on the trip, but that one sticks out the most for me. He is probably mad right now because I wrote that we got mad. Wait until he reads the next paragraph.

Good Time #4 – Mark Getting Worried
I’m actually putting this in just to get Mark mad because this should really be combined with the last paragraph. Mark was kind of like a den mother for us for the first 4 days of the trip until he was really able to cut loose, or just completely gave up on learning anything in his course (not sure which). Either way he didn’t trust our drunken asses to perform any tasks of moderate importance (not that he really should have). Maybe you had to be there for this to be funny, but I thought it was.

Good Time #5 – Monster Limo
As we were living beyond our means (my entire trip was financed by credit at 20%), we decided it would be a good idea to live way beyond our means. This involved taking the Monster Limo out to Blue Martini and Resort on Day 2 night. The Monster Limo was just a limo named such by a huge geek named Steve. I think it was part owned by Steve and by Thomas. The limo was mint on the inside and it would have been a sweet ride to take around if we could have filled it with girls. Either way we took it out a few times and felt like high-rollers. This went well with our cover story that we were the Red Dragon snowboard team. Ya, I consider that a good time. Fuck you.

Alright, that’s all I have the brain for right now. Next time I’ll talk about all the other good times, like beating the machine with the claw and smoking 3 packs of cigarettes in one night.

Peace.

Another century spent pointing guns at anything that moves

Please note that this is not the second day of the Fuck The Hurricane Tour diary. I simply had a few items I wanted to put up before I forgot. Tour diary comes later.

First, Under The Bridge. This is an online video magazine (does that even make sense?) put together by some dude who I am presuming is in the Saskatoon punk scene. It is probably the best thing I have come across in a long time. I heartily recommend episode #3 as the first band featured is The Fjords. You may know them from that link on the bottom of this page, or my current long term house guest, who also happens to be the lead singer of the band. The archives are up on the site, and it is all free. You have no excuse to not go check it out, because anyone who reads this is obviously just trying to kill time.

Next item up is the beauty of our national broadcaster. I have often gone to the CBC Radio 3 site to dig up the 4 live tracks performed by John K. Samson in whatever issue it was. Turns out that the people who run the site started putting out podcasts after they stopped making the online magazine. You can search them out in the iTunes store. It is nice to have something different to listen to at work, and interested people should check it out as these are our tax dollars at work.

That’s it for today. If anyone wants to find me tonight I will be at Broken City casually bobbing by head in time with John K. Samson’s acoustic set.

Peace.

Tats saying “Rich Bitch” down both of my arms

Fuck The Hurricane 2005

While I am not yet home, I am considering this trip over for all intents and purposes. I will be jumping aboard yet another plane in about two hours, and I plan on taking this time to try and remember what the hell happened to those last 7 days of my life. I’m writing this from the Maple Leaf Lounge in the Vancouver airport where I am having a hell of a time resisting the siren call of booze. I will do it though, because I have no desire to go through another night like the last one. Let’s just say that brain damage may have occurred over the course of this trip. I am hoping it is all cleared up when I try and fall asleep tonight.

Day 1 – Palm Beach
Where I last left off I had just met up with Tim and Ryan. Things got off to a pretty good start with my executive decision to take the stretch limo over a regular old cab. I thought that might start the trip off on the right note and I have to say it did. As we were all crashing in one room and had no desire for extra room charges Tim and I went to wait in the lounge while Brehon checked in. Two retardedly expensive Jack and Coke’s later (purchased from Eric, the first hotel employee we met other than the girl Mark met, but that comes later) we knew that any notions of budgets and having cash at the end of the week were fucked. Ryan and Mark then joined us and we got up to see our room.

Right now this may seem like far too much detail explaining where we were and why we were there, but I guarantee you that there won’t be much detail in a bit as this was one of the last times on the trip that we were all sober.

Not entirely certain how the rest of this went down, but I am pretty sure we went to the mall next to pick up some gear at PacSun. I believe that with Mark’s purchases in Dallas the prior week, that store took about $1k off us. We are now playing with fire. The other important fact from this trip was our driver. We were looking for a cab to the mall, but lucked out and got a guy named Thomas who said he would take us there for a reasonable fee. So we hop in a black Lincoln with this dude who sort of sounds and looks like he might be a made man. So he asks where we are from and why we are down, the whole thing and starts giving us some ideas of what we can do while we are down there. Turns out that the VMAs were in Miami that night and he had a limo we could rent to take us down there if we could get tickets. Checked with the hotel, but they didn’t have any, then Thomas got looking for us and had calls in to a bunch of guys to dig them up. Best deal he could find was $250 for nosebleeds or $6500 for right behind the nominees. Not entirely certain if our financing would hold out with an $850 limo ride and $250 a piece on the first night, we declined. It would have been dope though. We did promise Thomas that we would take the limo out one night that week and got his card.

As an aside, I am not entirely comfortable with the name of the tour anymore now that I have seen what one can actually do. However, fuck it. End of the aside.

On the way back to the hotel we got Thomas to stop at the liquor store and get us some drinks. Photos of our bar reside in the photo dump. I am not entirely certain how the rest of the day played out because it involved drinking and delicious booze clouds my memory. I do recall being really x-treme and attempting to ride a pilfered boogie board in some not so large surf. Then the next thing I recall is that we all got looking really good and went off to Cucina’s for the night. This is the place where Mark happened to run across a most attractive hotel employee the night before, for whom he was sporting a permerection. Little did we know at this point in time, but Cucina’s is sort of a black hole filled with really attractive people and absurdly strong drinks. I think it managed to suck us in at the end of every night of the trip save one.

I’m not really certain how one would go about describing the place, but Cucina’s was a little restaurant (apparently one of the top rated in South Florida, if the websites I have found are telling the truth) that turns into a weirdly mixed dance party at the end of every night with the most deliciously attractive females the four of us had ever seen gathered in one place. We didn’t see any of this the first night as it was pretty dead in there and drunk Brehon managed to offend the GM right off the bat. He fixed this the next night by apologizing, but it still warrants a mention. I recall getting really drunk on something ridiculous, and ending the night on a really good note when Brehon lost both his digital camera and his wallet. Please keep in mind this is still our first night in Palm Beach. We were off to a rock and roll start.