Euripedes Nuts
It’s almost over. And there’s a lot I’m going to miss about living alone. But it’s time.
This time next week, I’ll be (partially) moved into a new place with my old roommate.
We lived together for almost three years until I abruptly decided to get a place by myself. I needed to figure some things out.
In that time, I started this. I started doing stand up. And I learned how not to freak out when I was by myself.
I had a problem with that before.
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I’ve lived in a lot of apartments. Houses. Duplexes. Dorms. I think I’m on my thirteenth move in ten years.
That’s a lot of moving. I hate moving.
My first apartment was with my friend, Toph. We moved to Fort Worth together in the year 2ooo, along with 6 other friends to go to college.
And we were trouble from the get go.
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Our first apartment was at a place called Copper Creek Apartments. We moved in early August. Some of our friends moved into the same complex a week before. They were our upstairs neighbors.
They’d suggested the place to us. And it had been suggested to them by one of their friends. And so on and so on.
Within a few days, we realized that 24 people out of the 80 in our theatre department all lived at Copper Creek.
Or, as we affectionately called it, Club Copper Creek.
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Our apartment was on the second floor and had a wonderful view of the parking lot. And a giant white wall that looked like it was meant for stopping floods. It clearly wasn’t for show.
Just above the parking lot and the white wall, atop a hill, stood the Oakland Hills Branch of the Fort Worth library. A library I never thought we’d have to use.
But we did.
Once.
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Our first big assignment in our first theatre class at Texas Wesleyan was essentially a book report. We had to pick a play from one of the three major Ancient Greek playwrights: Sophocles, Aeschylus or Euripedes.
It seemed simple enough. We’d just go to the Campus Library, check out one of the books of plays, and we’d do the project.
The only problem was that we were the last ones to go to the Library and all of the play anthologies had been checked out by our classmates.
No big deal, we thought, we stare at a library from our balcony everyday. We’ll just check a book out from there.
Easier said than done.
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We went the Library the following day after school. We only had a week to do the assignment and we’d already lost a day. We found the theatre section of the library. I grabbed the Collected Plays of Aeschylus and Toph grabbed Ten Plays by Euripedes.
The woman working the desk looked irritated.
“Do you have a Library card? she said.
“No, we just moved here last week. Can we get one?” Toph asked.
“Yes, I just need ID from from both of you.”
Like it was a damn liquor store.
We showed her our ID’s. She smiled.
“These ID’s aren’t going to work. You have to have a valid Fort Worth address to check out books from the FORT WORTH public library.”
She was enjoying this. I was starting to get frustrated.
“Like my friend said, ma’am, we just moved here last week. We haven’t had time to change our ID’s yet. We do have mail. An electric bill statement that establishes our residence. Will that suffice?”
She rolled her eyes.
“No, it will not suffice.”
“It’s a word. I used it properly. You work in a library. Seems like you guys would encourage the use of….”
Toph cut me off.
“But, uh, back to the lecture at hand. Listen, we live in those apartments right behind you. If you look out that window, you can see our balcony. If I go back home, stand on my balcony, and wave at you, will that establish residency?”
“I don’t care if you waved at me from the moon, without a valid Ft. Worth address on your ID, you can’t check these books out for free.”
“So we can pay for them? This isn’t a bookstore. It’s a library.” I said.
“You’re right. It is a library,” her tone dripping with sarcasm, “but for non-residents we sell punch cards that allow you to check out 5 books for $15.”
“Fine,” Toph replied. We need the books for class. So we’ll do that.”
We pooled our money and came up with the $15. We handed her the money and our two books.
She handed one of the books back to Toph.
“Also, you can only check out one book on the first visit,” she said.
“And it didn’t occur to you to tell us that first. We’ve been standing here with these two books the entire time.” I replied. I was furious.
“It’s your first visit. Rules are rules.”
Without missing a beat, Toph walked out the front door of the library…and turned right back around and walked back in.
“I’m back. It’s my second visit. Can I get my other book now?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” she said.
It was complete bullshit and we knew it.
“Give us the one book. And we’ll get out of here. This is ridiculous.”
She checked out our book with a big, shit-eatin’ grin on her face.
“Thank you for using the Fort Worth Public Library. See you in two weeks,” she said, as she handed Toph the book.
He laughed.
“You think I’m bringing this back?”
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12 years and counting….
It only took 7 years, but…
Back in 2004, I was working at General Nutrition Center in Highland Park, the rich uppity area of Dallas.
I was selling shit I didn’t know about to people who didn’t give a shit about what I knew.
They bought it. I made money. Everyone won.
Not really.
I had to sit in that awful store for 8 hours at a time by myself. Lots of times I brought a pen and paper. Sometimes a voice recorder. And I would write.
Or talk to myself.
I was trying to write jokes. I wanted to do stand up. So I tried to write jokes. I never did do it. I was too scared.
Most of the jokes were pretty terrible. The note pad’s around here somewhere. Probably in my writing suitcase.
Either way, I sacked it all. Except for one little nugget I remembered.
It was a joke about a horror movie called Helen Killer.
I started using it when I actually worked up the nerve to do stand up.
It’s not the best joke I’ve written, but one of the fine people at RooftopComedy.com decided they liked it and put it on their website.
Here’s to Publicity. Here’s to sticking with an idea.
Here’s the link, because I’m functionally illiterate on a computer, and have been trying for an hour to get the damn thing to be on here…
Meh.
This Side of the Curse by F. Scott Fitzgerald Kennedy
I had a really good teacher in Community College. I only had her for one semester. It was a first year English class.
She’d written her Master’s Thesis on some of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works.
So, of course, she had us read The Great Gatsby. I’d read it two years before in high school.
I take that back. We watched the movie. And I can say with absolutely certainty that I slept through it.
I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it this time around, either. But I was totally wrong.
My high school teacher didn’t give a shit. She showed us the movie.
My college teacher loved Fitzgerald. She made it really interesting.
She knew all sorts of obscure facts about the author, and his process, and his crazy wife.
It made a huge difference. I learned a lot.
She’d go off on a lot of tangents. She once spent fifteen minutes explaining to us that eighty pages of Fitzgerald’s first book, This Side of Paradise, were taken directly from an unpublished novella he’d written called, The Romantic Egotist. This Side of Paradise ended up as a 305 page novel.
Seemed like unnecessary information at the time.
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I’ve been trying to write a bunch of new jokes lately. I was trying to think of funny things that happened to me. Something that would make for a good story. And I remembered something that happened to me at the Austin City Wide Garage Sale last year. It didn’t make for a good joke, but I like it as a story.
Here it is:
i love going to the city wide garage sale. i just go to haggle. i love the thrill of haggling because im a huge pushover, so if im gonna do it, i like the stakes to be low. about a year ago, i’d just moved into my first apartment by myself and i was looking for shit to hang on the walls. i saw this famous portrait of Robert and John F Kennedy for $15. it was just a print. the frame was nice. but there was something stuck on the inside of the frame…along the gold border to the print. so i asked the lady what it was…she said. its just a piece of paper. i asked her if she would remove the piece of paper. so she popped the back of the frame off…went to remove the “piece of paper” and she discovered what i already knew… it was tape….and that she’d just ripped the gold border.
her face sunk. i said, there’s no way im paying $15 for a damaged portrait. i turned to walk away. she said, but…
i turned around and said…$5…she begrudgingly sold it to me.
i won. i’d haggled and won.
i took the portrait home and opened it up to see if i could cover up the part she tore. i went to pull the back off it…and the piece of glass for the frame sliced my finger open. the top and bottom had been rounded off…but the sides were razor sharp.
as i sat there, nursing my wounds, my first thought was, “this is what you get for trying to rip someone off.” like it was a karma thing. but then i thought…she was gonna hose me if i didnt hose her…so it couldnt be karma…
i looked down at the portrait and it dawned on me.
it’s that goddamn Kennedy curse.
it knows no bounds.
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Little known fact:
I actually took 25 words from that story directly from a Facebook Status I posted a few minutes after I cut my finger.
I think it got 22 Likes. And some comments.
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What’s that?
Yeah, you’re right. I guess great minds do think alike.
The Scrambler, Part 2: The Cafeteria
As a rule, cafeteria food is terrible. It just is. You suffer through it for years in school. I’ve never understood the draw of places like Furr’s or Luby’s.
It’s terrible food.
But the cafeteria at my college, Dora’s (named after Dora somebody, maybe the Explorer) was the worst. Worse than all the other schools I’d ever been to.
Spoiled Milk.
Questionable Meat.
Spoiled Meat.
Questionable Milk.
It took down the best of us, and at an alarming rate. It really was like Russian Roulette.
We ate there because we’d already paid for it. We didn’t have a choice. It came as a package deal with the dorm room.
And we were too broke to eat elsewhere.
At the start of the Winter 2002 semester, the University announced that Dora’s, or Dirty Dora’s, as we affectionately called it, would be unveiling a new menu.
This is what I wrote in The Scrambler, about the proposed changes, under the pseudonym Harmon Kardon.
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Dora’s unveils new, possibly improved menu
“Hopefully the food won’t suck anymore,” Employees say.
After receiving countless complaints about food quality and temperature, Dora’s Cafeteria has come up with a new and/or improved menu. The new menu items will be unveiled beginning Monday morning. The staff is encouraging students to try some of its delightful new delicacies. Students and teacher alike were rejoicing after the announcement late Friday afternoon.
“It’s about damn time. I’ve been living off of crackers and Ramen noodles for the last two weeks,” Junior Robert Paulsen said.
When asked why he hadn’t eaten in the cafeteria for the last two weeks, he gave this reply, “…because it made me sick, dude. I felt like I was constipated and had diarrhea at the same time. Have you ever dry heaved out of your butt, man? It’s no fun, I can tell you that much.”
In an attempt to boost its image on campus, the Dora’s staff decided to invite the socially elite Scrambler staff to a preview dinner. The menu for the eight course meal read as follows:
1st course- Pickled Dog Collars
2nd course- Roasted Beaver
3rd course-Regurgitated Squirrel Droppings
4th course- Lion Fur Burgers
5th course– Grilled Horse (my personal favorite)
6th course- Deviled Ass (Donkey)
7th course- Urine Stew (it’s not just a clever name)
8th course- Pepto Bismol
After I got out of the hospital, I managed to interview a fellow staff member, Alan Crabdoodle, who was unaffected by the meal. Let it be known, however, that he did live in Turkey for five years, so his stomach was used to such torture.
“I loved the Deviled Ass. I just couldn’t get enough of that Ass. Oh and the fur burgers, they were exquisite. Who’d've thought lion fur could be so darned tasty?” he said.
His advice to the rest of the student body, “Get there early, before they run out of Pepto. You’ll need it.”
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The following year, they hired a new company to do the “catering”. They lured us in with an everyday omelette bar. Then they moved it to once a week. Then I graduated and didn’t give a shit about omelette bars.
I’m not saying The Scrambler had anything to do with affecting the change, but kinda I am.
You’re welcome.
The Scrambler, Part 1: Jesus ate after “The Last Supper”
I got a package in the mail the other day. It was from my friend Toph. It contained about 20 pages of writing I thought I’d never see again.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to post some of my favorites from the collection. But first, here’s a little back story.
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Back in 2002, my college roommate, Justin, and I started a fake newspaper for our campus. We’d originally tried to get jobs at the actual newspaper.
But they assigned us really shitty stories.
So we never went back. Never turned in our stories.
And started our own paper.
The School Newspaper was named The Rambler.
So we started The Scrambler.
We didn’t tell anyone we did it. We used aliases. And we made up bullshit stories. It was our attempt at The Onion.
Everyone loved it at first. Most of our friends figured us out pretty quickly. Neither of us was very well known outside the theatre department. So we maintained relative anonymity.
The more attention The Scrambler got, the further we started pushing it. It spiraled into the absurd pretty quickly. We killed off a fictional staff writer in the second issue, but not before we printed a transcript of his mental breakdown.
Then the fourth issue came out.
The entire front page (aside from the Headlines Sidebar) was this story I’d written under the pseudonym, Carl Bernward.
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Jesus ate after Last Supper
“It was just a snack, really,” Christ says.
The Christian world as we know it was turned upside down Saturday afternoon, when theoarchaeologists unearthed a scroll unknown to the entire Christian community, buried in a petrified pile of camel dung. The document was supposedly written by the one and only Jesus Christ. The specifics of the document have not yet been released to the general public, but we have been told that it has something to do with Jesus eating after his alleged “Last Supper.” The Scrambler tried to interview Mr. Christ via prayer, but he refused to comment.
The Scrambler has since e-mailed the Chief Theoarchaeologist about what the document really says. Though he asked us not to publish his reply, we’re doing it anyway, because we don’t operate on any type of Code of Ethics.
Here it is, and unedited email from Jesus Christ via Chief Theoarchaeologist, Bob Woodstein:
I am typing this email to you from the site of the “The Find of the Century.” Our Aramaic translator just finished translating the document. It took him several days to finish due to the unbelievable stench emanating from the petrified dung. Who would’ve thought really old camel dung could smell that bad? Anyway, the translation is rough at the present time, but I will type out what we think Jesus was trying to say:
Dear Diary,
Wow! Today was such an awesome day, Diary. I had “The Last Supper” with all of my friends today. But I feel bad. I know it’s silly of me to worry about it, but I am. You see, after we all left, “The Last Supper”…I love saying that…”The Last Supper”, it makes it sound like one of those distinguished dinner parties my Dad always goes to. N*E*wayz after all the of my friends left, I was still kind of hungry, because all we really had to eat was bread, so I went and bought a Snickers from a street vendor. It was just a snack, really. There were Dill Pickles at the “Supper” too, but they weren’t Kosher, so no one ate them. I think Judas brought them…
The rest of the document was illegible, but I think you get the idea. That’s all for now. We’ll keep you posted.
Christians are not the only ones affected by “The Find of the Century”. Artists around the world are scrambling to their canvases, trying to be the first to churn out “The Last Snack”. Art critics say the piece could go for over $8 million.
It is also rumored that Snickers is seeking Christ for a new series of commercial advertisements, but no deal has been signed thus far.
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For the most part, everyone loved it. They thought it was funny. I thought it was funny. I thought it was absurd enough that no one would take it seriously.
Someone took it seriously. It was a Methodist school, after all, even if it was only in name (Texas Wesleyan).
It caused a pretty big backlash.
Campus officials wanted to know who was behind it. We didn’t step forward. So the school newspaper started writing stories about it.
Our paper had become the front page story of the actual paper.
Apparently, the school officials said The Scrambler was in trouble for calling itself, “The Official News Source of the Texas Wesleyan Student”.
We thought we could get away with it because said “of the student” and not “of the university.”
Meh.
The other thing they tried to get us on was using too much of the school’s paper.
Bullshit, right?
We kept doing it on the sly. And all of the attention upped our popularity around campus. We made some pretty important friends.
One of the teachers on campus was such a big fan of our paper, he gave us a printer code to The Faculty Copier. Every faculty member had their own code. He gave us the code of a teacher in his department who was on sabbatical.
We changed it to “The Unofficial News Source…” and went back to business.
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They never really gave us much guff after that.
We managed to produce it without using the computer lab. So we weren’t really violating any rules anymore.
We managed to keep the paper going for about a semester and a half. It was a lot of work. But it was fun.
Not all of the issues survived. Toph sent me 8 of them. There might have been 15 or 16 total.
Either way, I’m glad to have them back. And I’m gonna sprinkle them throughout the blog in the next few weeks.
Happy Birthday, Wanda June
I’m actually pretty short on ideas at the moment. But I’m awake (barely).
It’s June 18th. I started this website one year ago today.
Some numbers:
1,914 pageviews
Busiest day: 56 views (December 12, 2010)
I believe it was for Rednecks and Ringtones (which I’d actually written in 2008).
Busiest Month: December 2010
Total number of Posts: 34 (35 if you count this one)
47 Comments
Total number of words: I don’t know
Other things that have changed:
I am an Uncle.
Address. Remember the Rats.
I no longer work the graveyard shift.
I have more time to write.
Goals for the next year:
Double my output from last year. So I owe you guys 68 posts this year.
Double my pageviews.
Learn basic stuff that makes a website look nice. Instead of just making it all words.
Add a weekly podcast.
Some video shorts.
Figure that’s enough goals for now. I can always amend the list.
Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who subscribes, reads, comments, and passes along the link to others. It means a lot. I’m glad you enjoy it.
Here’s to another year.
