Special 'Best-Of' Two-fer: March 2007

I've been looking for this article for a while - it ran back in March of 2007, and was titled "So Gay." I found it, so give it a once over. It's not very deep or thought provoking, but I enjoyed writing it and I got a lot of positive feedback from a lot of readers. So anyway.... go:

So gay that even gay guys are like "wow, that's really gay."

Lately I've been tivo-ing alot of Reno 911 because, well... that shit is hilarious. It's hilarious, because as a former law enforcement officer, I've encountered in real life a lot of what the beleagured deputies of the Reno Sheriff's Department seem to come face to face with on a daily basis.

Shit's hilarious.

So, as I'm enjoying a chicken pot pie, fresh from my oven, from a box, from my freezer, I have the tivo'd episode of Reno 911 playing in the background. And since I have it on my DVR I can skip over the commercials, and I usually do. But the timer on my microwave went off so my attention was on my delicious chicken pot pie, and not on the fact that the episode was lapsing into a commercial coma.

So imagine to my surprise, when I came from the furnace-like oven with my oven mits on and a cookie sheet in my hands, I see this commercial for the gayest shit ever....

"Guys Gone Wild" is the obvious spin off of the softcore porn DVD franchise of "Girls Gone Wild." The commercials for "Guys" seems to only play after midnight (using my detective-like skills, and my Tivo, I observed that the episodes that featured these commercials were recorded around 0100-0300) and feature hard bodied young, "college aged boys" strutting around shirtless, wet, laughing, embracing, wrestling, pushing each other into pools.... strangley, I was quick to notice, there isn't a chick anywhere around.

As "Girls Gone Wild" panders to lonely, horny men (whom obviously can't navigate the internet well enough to find actual hardcore porn, for free... ahem, AL4A.com... ahem.....) who are with a twenty dollar bill burning a hole in their pocket, who want to watch ditzy drunk chicks expose themselves, kiss each other, fondle themselves and act like good ol' American College Girls in the eyes of Al Qaeda. "Guys" it seems, is the same idea, but just supplementing the girls with Turbo Jocks with enough shit in their hair to make an oil tanker spill look only slightly more dangerous to the collective enviroment.

I watched three of these commercials for the "Guys" DVD (before my critics wittingly accuse me of being gay myself, I will quickly point out...) to get a sense of what the ad was exactly stating and where to send my money order to... I mean, uh, to ... uh... fuck it, next paragraph.

I wanted to compare, honestly. We've all seen the ad for "Girls Gone Wild" and we're all very much aware that we can expect roughly 90 minutes of conventionally hot chicks stripping down, playing with themselves, moaning for the camera, biting their lips, etc, all to Heavy Metal guitars and Hip-Hop beats. I wanted to see what "Guys" had to offer.

I mean, when you think of it, it seems like a pretty obvious idea: You take the standard formula of attractive people, attractive in the sense that we all agree on that they're hot, and have them parade around in skimpy clothes for our private enjoyment. We had girls doing it for close to a decade (if not more, ...my fact checker is out this week) so filming guys doing this would be the logical step.

I don't see the DVD sales comparing though. Those who buy "Girls Gone Wild" are lonely/frat boys who want to stare at tits, constantly stating in a monotone "dude she's so fuckin' hot." over and over again. The typical buyer of "Guys Gone Wild" will be a lonely gay guy.

After the third viewing (I didn't rewind, I just happened to sit through the ad thricely) I had gone from embarrassed, to ashamed, to amused. I was embarrassed at first because it was something overtly homosexual, and I can freely admit that I myself am not comfortable with such an... god the gay jokes forming in my head as I sit here thinking of the next line.... In Your Face (HA!) presentation of the homosexual lifestyle.

I then became ashamed because I suddenly thought to myself, what kind of stigma would be attached to these young men once these commercials air? With the girls in "Girls Gone Wild" they're kind of dismissed as either "drunk sluts" or they simply get a free pass because it's college. And then that made me think about the double standards attached to homosexual behavior. Girls can be "bisexual" to an extent and it's largely acceptable to society. Almost on the verge of encouraged I'd say. If a guy makes out with another dude at the bar after alot of drinks, even if it's one time! ...he's a fag for life.

Think about it. I'm not making this claim based on my personal feelings in this matter, gentle readers... think to yourself, how you'd react in this situation: You're at a bar, and it's a crowded friday night. It's a college crowd. You look to your right and you see two hot blondes full blown making out. There's a crowd around them, mostly guys, and their cheering them on. What're you thinking? At worst, you're thinking that they're attention whores. At best, you shrug it off. So What?

Now look to your left, and you see two attractive guys face-locked. What're your reaction? At best you're like "wow, that's ... not ... usual..." and you sip your drink and look back towards the hot blondes. At worst you pick up a bit of kindling and go to blow out one of those fag's teeth in a fit of repressed homophobic rage.

So then upon my third and final viewing of the ad, I felt amused. Why? Because these kids in this video are doing it for the money, that's why. I consider myself somewhat attractive, and if some chick (and I imagine it's a chick) approached me in a bar, and I had just too much to drink and she whispered in my ear a proposition to video tape me jacking off in some musk-smelling motel room up the road (where presumably three or four of my fellow frat brothers have previously jerked off) and was willing to pay my tab, plus give me a hundred bucks, fuck it, why not? Who's going to see this video anyway? Knowing in the back of my head that I don't even know anyone who's gay.....

The fast forward. My father... Charles W. Nason, never sleeps. He'll sleep maybe two hours at a time, and then be up for another two hours with his acid reflux. He tends to watch a lot of Comedy Central and Adult Swim (I take pride in introducing him to Family Guy and Aqua Teen Hunger Force). What made me so amused was taking the previous "for instance" and applying this bit of information at the end... my dad, up with severe heartburn, sitting on the couch, with his bowl balanced on his expanded beer gut, and then suddenly....

"What? What was that?"

And BLOOPBLOOPBLOOP goes the tivo...

And cut to a scene of me, in the aforementioned musky motel room, beating off shirtless to the encouragement of a young lady who's paying my tab plus another C note to spunk into a sock for her.

Hey, at least it beats spunking into a sock for nothing....

Best Of: August 2007

Another myspace.com throw-back. Not "throw-back" in the sense that it wasn't well written and I threw it back like an undersized Carp, but "throw-back" like an reproduced Magic Johnson jersey a black guy would wear.

Anyway, this originally ran August 18th, 2007. I hope you enjoy my laziness.

I can't lie for shit.

And while many of you reading this might think that's perfectly fine; a trait no one should be proud of having, I must tell you that it sucks not being able to be a good liar.

I've come across instances where lying would've either saved my butt, or furthered me in some sort of career. It would've at least made my life easier by being able to look some one directly into their eyes and not told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me god.

I just can't do it! And by it, I mean really lying, not just telling a slight "mistruth" or "inaccuracy" or "white lie." And example of one of these would be not telling your sister that her new boyfriend is a total dickhead because you went to high school with him, or that .... see, I can't even come up with another example of a little lie! That's how bad I have it.

But before I go any further, I'd like to create a distinction between "lying" and just not giving enough information. A lie is telling something completely false, whereas not giving any or enough information is technically not lying. If someone asks you directly if you ate the last slice of pizza and drank the last beer too, and you certainly did, but tell them you didn't, that's a lie. Same scenario, but they ask "do you know who..." blah blah blah pizza and beer, and you say "I do not know" I don't think that's technically a lie. You're just withholding information that would incriminate yourself. There's an actual aspect of the Bill of Rights that protects you from doing that very thing! ...So if our fore fathers thought that was ok, then it must be fine to do.

But back to actual lying and the fact that I can't do it. This has plagued me most of my adult life. I can't look someone in the face and tell them a falsehood and I don't know why. When I do, or try to, I feel very transparent; I feel as if they know they're being lied to, and I feel like a snake for doing it. I feel like I'm insulting their intelligence, and they know it. It's like if you ask me something directly, I can't avoid telling you the truth of the matter. And I don't mean that I'm brutally honest with people:

"Does this dress make me look fat?"

"No, your face makes you look fat."

That's not the case at all. I just feel compelled to tell the truth.

This has followed me since I was with NYPD and that whole mess, it's haunting me where ever I go. I've blown polygraphs because of it, because I was too afraid of the truth, so I denied it and failed. I was so anxious at MEPS earlier in the week because I was afraid of some falsehood surfacing in my paper work that when they took my blood pressure I was 165/90. The tech taking it had to take it twice more because he thought his equipment was malfunctioning.

"Holy shit, is your BP normally that high?" he says to me.

"No... I don't know what's up..." I say.

"Must be white coat syndrome," and it takes me a good two minutes to get the joke, but I chuckled anyway.

And that brings to mind something else when it comes to people and lying: Most people out there want to be lied to. Whether it's in their jobs, or just the simple aspects of life, people do not want to know the awful truths that are out there.

A woman does not want to know her boyfriend is cheating on her, she'd rather go on suspecting for the rest of the relationship, than to know the truth.

People love to live in little safe bubbles where everything is ok. Take for example these military personnel that work at the MEPS. They do not care if you lie on your paper work. It's actually encouraged! ...But they won't tell you that. They actually make you watch this long Powerpoint presentation about how if you lie on your paper work and are caught you'll go to jail and be dishonorably discharged, etc. But if you read between the lines, their lives, your life, the recruiters, etc, are a lot easier if you just "forget" to mention some things in your paper work.

This was the case with me. I had very minor surgery when I was 15, got hit by a car when I was 22-23 and went to the ER for observations, and saw a shrink one time when I was 23-24 ish. I put all this information down on the sheet provided to me at MEPS and now I'm on hold. My recruiter was slightly pissed, because it's extra paper work for him to sift through, the techs at MEPS left me with the impression that I was wasting their time, and if I had just checked "no" on those above boxes, no one would've bothered to look into it and I'd be cleared to start basic or OCS. Instead, I'm on hold til the 27th. But with the lie hanging over my head, that's how my blood pressure got so high.

As my father put it when I told him I was on hold "Jim, its the federal government...you think they have time to go looking into 'no' answers? They see 'no' checked off, they leave it alone. Jesus Christ you're dumb." And this was largely confirmed by my service member friends who I asked.

So I decided to do some research on lying, and to see if there's some way I can learn to be better at. At least for the sake of my poker game. Because honestly, if I get a good hand, I act like a retard on a farris wheel.

I type "how to lie" into the Google and I get 91 and a half million responses.

The site WikiHow.com had the best tagline disclaimer out of all the other sites listed (most were really sketchy, like "so you wanna learn how to lie, huh" or "make'em believe you anytime, anywhere" I think it's the fact that I read those lines like some shady business men or used car sales man, or ... men hanging around in a back alley waiting their turns for a gummer from a used whore. Basically I felt raped while reading...) which read "by taking this advice you are putting into jeopardy relationships, friendships, and you're good word. Proceed at your own risk." My kinda place it would seem like.

The site gives pointers about how to act and psychologically how to feel. "Believe in the lie, make it the truth to you" it says. It even quotes George Costanza from "Seinfeld" "It's not a lie if you believe it!" Great, I'm totally not feeling like a scumbag right now.

The site goes on to give me tips about my physical appearance, how to smile, to try standing in front of a mirror and lie so I see how I look when I tell the lie, etc. I try this out for a few minutes, with something simple: I make up a lie that I went fly fishing yesterday, simple and painless enough. I stand in front of a bathroom mirror and recite over and over again that I spent my day fly fishing yesterday, making it into a little story.

But I notice something, and it's very subtle. The more I tell of the story, the less I can actually look at my face, I seem to keep focusing on my shoulder. It's as if I'm ashamed at myself even for telling something as innocent as falsely fly fishing friday. Ugh, I'm getting no where with this.

I guess in sumation I'm a horrible liar. Though this should come as shocking news to some of my readers, who have questioned the authenticity of some of my non-fiction articles in the past. I've in fact lead myself on some pretty outlandish adventures and written about them.

...Or have I? Because would you honestly believe someone who told you they were a horrible liar?

I Can't Figure Out If This Gets Filed Under "Kharma" or "Revenge."

Unless you live under a rock and don't receive cable or maybe you're capable of reading, you'd be wholly unaware of the abominal manifestation of materialism and greed that is Mtv's "My Super Sweet 16."

My readers will note that this is not the first time I've made mention of this show in one of my articles. But today I'm writing because of an article in the New York Times which I feel is worthy enough to be brought to the attention of my fans - who I presume find MSS16 the most unholy of televised programmes.

In said article (you'll find it below) the featured teenager gushes (no pun intended) that her daddy is an oil baron in the middle of WhoCares, Ky, and with all the oil he pumps out of the ground, he uses to buy her Louis Vuitton hand bags and BMW coups.

Well, when all of this was going down, someone from the Securities and Exchange Commission took notice and realized that this darling brat's father was scamming people on fake-ass oil company stocks or whatever. You'll read it in the article.

Savor it.

Danica Patrick

It's been three years since Danica Patrick broke the "gender barrier" in Indy Car racing. For those of you - like me - who don't really care, I guess it's something like breaking the "color barrier" in NASCAR? ...Something like that?

So after three years of racing, she's yet to win a single race. Yet, every time there's a commercial on ESPN or ABC for an Indy race, she's got top billing. In essence, she's become the Anna Kornikova of left hand turns.

Honestly, I don't care about Danica Patrick, and probably most of America would concur with that sentiment. So I think, after three winless years, we can probably allow Ms. Patrick to slowly fade into mediocricy, a sports figure-also ran (literally and figuratively), a gimmicky flash in pan to revitalize a sport no one in this country cares about.

Other members of the "Who Cares" All-Star Team include:

Previously mentioned Anna Kornikova
David Beckham
Barbaro the horse/roast beef sandwich
Bam Margera

Maybe they can all sit around watching highlight reels that don't feature them.

My Roommate's Date!

So right now in the living room the sound of female giggles is floating into my room, through my closed door, and to my ears. The giggles belong to this goth-lite shoe store employee named Jenelle who's a giggling idiot for my usually shy roommate. Meanwhile, my roommate is actually keeping his shit together and sounding pretty confident out there.

Not that I'm eavesdropping or anything....

Anyway, this all starts roughly 24 hours ago when me, the roommate and our neighbor were pulled over by undercover police officers and being questioned about our activities that night. You see, we walked over from the apartments to a little cafe to get dinner, but upon finding the prices at the cafe to be too steep (18 dollars for aps?! Crazy!) we walked back to the apts. well, instead of walking ALL THE WAY around the fence that separates our property from .... the Mongols? I dunno, but we decided to hop this fence. Shortly after getting into the car to try someplace else for dinner, blue lights appear behind us.

Sweatshirt-clad UCs approached the vehicle, and while keeping my hands flat to the dashboard, wearing my Ray-Ban "Stunnas" at 9 at night, we answered questions relating to why we decided to be lazy and hop and fence, and what we were doing tonight and where we were going and where we lived and who we were, and so on.

Then they found out we were Coasties, and their attitudes completely changed. Seriously.

"Ok guys, well, if I see you guys out there this summer, I'll be sure to wave!" Said the overly friendly sergeant as he handed back our IDs and wished us a good evening. We would observe no less than four or five separate police incidents throughout the evening from there forward.

Anyway, we end up at this Mexican joint: Sam Diegos, which, aside from it's unappetizing name, is the shit. The girls working there are retardedly hot, the food is amazing, I could go on and gush about this place for the rest of the article but it would be doing a disservice to my roommate and his date in the other room.

So we're sitting around the dinner table and our friend John wants me to give his number to the waitress while he goes and gets the car. I have no problem with this, so as we pay our bill, I take the waitress aside and say "what'd you think of my friend sitting right there?"

"He was cute,"

"I know right? Listen, he wanted me to give you this," and in her hand I press this folded napkin with his number on it. She looks at it and smiles and says that she'll hold on to it.

As we're walking away, my roommate says "You're like the godfather and the Terminator rolled into one person," awestruck. And then it was my turn to be awestruck.

"So uh, I met this girl..." he drops on me. I stop in midstep.

"Really? Where? When?"

"Today," he says, "on myspace." I smile a little and shake my head.

"Ok, you're gonna have to show me her page when we get home..." And he does, and she wasn't that bad.

So fast forward to today. He says he's going to meet her at the mall, and for this article and my journalistic integrity, I tagged along. We went to the GAP, Best Buy, Banana Republic, etc, and the whole time he's text messaging her, getting more and more worked up and nervous. Twice he nearly called the thing off. It was so bad I had to take his cell phone from him and keep talking to her through text messaging.

"You need to slap me," he says.

"Slap you?"

"Yeah, like in the movies, when you slap someone to calm them down!"

"You want me to hit you?" And we stop in the middle of the walkway in the mall, looking at each other. My hand slowly forms into a fist at my side, my eyebrow coming up over my sunglasses.

"No," he says after a second, realizing I wasn't going to blow off his suggestion. He fidgets a lot and I can see him going more and more pale.

"Listen to me Ryan, you gotta relax and breathe here, ok? Slow down, she's just as nervous as you are and you're in a more advantageous position here. You're a good looking guy, she doesn't know you're nervous and don't know what you're doing. Worse case scenario, if she's totally busted, be polite, carry-on for a minute, and then say "hey, we gotta thing, I'll call you" and don't call her. You'll feel like shit for a day or two, and then you'll move on.... plus, you got me flying wingman for you."

"I dunno bro, I think I..."

"Shut up. You need to expand your comfort zone and the only way you can do that is by taking risks and stepping out of your tiny-ass comfort zone you have now. It's the only way you'll expand it and be comfortable doing these things. Be an adult, be a man, suck it up. You know what's considered a decent batting average in baseball? If you can hit .300 in a season, you're considered an All-Star. You know what that means? It means that for every three times you get up to hit, you strike out twice. And that's considered a success! The important thing is that you try, that you swing. You might hit it out of the park, but likely you'll take a big chop and land on your ass, and no one will care. Understand me?"

"Yeah," and the color returns to his face a little.

"Now who's in control here?" I ask him.

"Uh, you are." He looks at me uncomfortably.

"NO! ...well, yeah, but, no, you're in control here, with her. You need to make her realize that, that you're confident and in control. If you give her the idea that you're flying blind, she's going to fucking panic, you understand me?"

"Yeah."

"Ok, now get over there and be a man," and he looks over my shoulder and walks over towards the shop she works at. I hang back, watching everything from the pet store, making it look like I'm looking at puppies, but watching everything through the plate glass window outside of the pet store.

The two stand awkwardly in the middle of the mall, talking. The roommate's body language was closed and inward, where as the female was clearly physically smitten. I couldn't hide my smile. It was all very endearing.

So he ends up taking her to dinner, Sam Diego's ... again. And now, if I'm not mistaken, I just heard both of them crash into his bedroom.

Go get'em kid.

On The Road: The Blackberry Chronicles

Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to be so important as to have a super villian... An arch nemesis, etc - someone who was spending all their time thinking of ways of doing me harm and trying to best me....

Now that I have one I find that its not as great as I thought it would be...

Be careful for what you wish for kids.

On The Road: The Blackberry Chronicles

Today I learned what its like to shoot yourself in the foot after you've stuck it in your mouth.