I’m a wiener!

So Trena over at You me and a Baby had herself a little competition. She had in her possession two Rachael Ray cook books which she no longer used/wanted, and decided to give them away. All you had to do was leave a kitchen related story in the comments, and it counted as one entry, and she would number all the entries and randomly select one on the cut off day, which was yesterday. Well, besides my love of Rachael Ray’s face/ass/cooking, I also have a wicked competitive streak. Most of the time I’m pretty chill, but once you get me competing in something, I tend to get carried away. I believe there were three other stories posted, and I posted something in the neighborhood of ten stories. I did not want to lose! And I didn’t, cause I’m a wiener. Sorry to everyone who got left in my dust, I’ll think of you while I’m eating all the delicious new food I can cook.

This will be a retelling of the entries I submitted, with a little more elaboration wherever I feel like it, cause it’s my blog, and I can do whatever I want dammit! Also, I apologize in advance because once these suckers were strung together, I realized it was a freaking long ass post. So if you have something important to do, or you don’t feel like reading right now, or you need to pee, save this post for a later date.

Entry 1:

This one time, I was at my brothers bachelor party, which was being held at his home. Everyone got pretty liquored up, and at some point in the evening my brother went sprinting across the back yard in bare feet. Well he lived in the ghetto, so there was broken glass everywhere. He got a small, I repeat small cut on hit foot and began bitching and moaning for half an hour or so.

well I got tired of hearing it and told him to man up and shut up. We were back in the kitchen taking shots, and there was this brand new knife set, I think they got it for the bridal shower thingy. Anyway, to illustrate that getting cut didn’t mean you needed to cry about it, I grabbed one of the sharp new knifes and slammed it down on my finger.

In retrospect, this was not a well though out plan. Fortunately, the bone stopped the blade before it chopped off my pointer at the finger nail, but I learned to respect cutlery that day, and now play around with sharp knives much less than before.

The best part was that Sami, his fiance, (wife now) called right then. And he was all like, “Oh hey baby. Yeah we’re doing good, yeah everyone is having fun. Hey look I gotta go, Josh is getting blood all over the kitchen.” *click* It was pretty funny hearing her side of the conversation when she got home.

Entry 2:

I was in high school, that lovely awkward gangly time between boyhood and manhood. I was high as hell and I needed something delicious in my belly. So I sauntered over to the fridge and peeped around for a while before I settled on some spaghetti. I picked up the pot full of spaghetti sauce which was covered only in plastic wrap, and as I turned to carry it over to the counter, I stepped in a puddle of melted ice and completely busted my ass. The sauce, which I tried mightily to save, landed flat on my chest and shot straight up. It made this perfectly circular splat on the ceiling, pausing only momentarily before it came plunging back down all over me. Despite the fall, I only really injured my pride. I might have even been able to laugh at myself if cleaning it all up weren’t such a pain in the ass.

Edit: this actually happened to my lawyer friend, Golden Boy, but in the interest of winning some cook books, I borrowed it for the entry.

Entry 3:

Oooh, I just remembered a good one from my early bachelor days living in this wild party house that my friends still give me hell about, four years later. I had been watching the Food Network a lot, and there was a documentary on sandwiches with Alton Brown I think. Anyway, I was all hot and heavy for sandwiches since I had been blessed with all this sandwich related knowledge. My head got big and I was sure I could make the best sandwich ever. So I began thinking about what sort of sandwich I could make that no one would have ever had, but would be delicious.

I eventually landed on lobster. I mean, lobster is really really good, but you never see it in between bread. What the hell! It became my mission, at least until I went to Food Lion and saw how much lobster costs. I was on more of a raman noodles and pbj sandwich sort of budget. So I splurged on a compromise. I went with crawdads. Now I don’t know anything about cooking crawdads. I had never attempted it before. In fact, until that day I had never even had one. But I figured crawdads were like tiny little lobsters, right? Wrong!

What I ended up with was only barely a sandwich. The crawdad was burnt to hell, with lots of guts and shell fragments all in the meat. (btw, how can a crustacean that large have that little actual meat on it? lame!) It stunk up the house like nasty seafood for a week, and my hell-wich was so greasy and gnarly that I ended up getting sick from it. And I was that bachelor dude who was famous for eating anything, no matter how old it was, and not getting sick.

Well I still haven’t ever made myself a lobster sandwich, but I guarantee you one day, I WILL sink my teeth into one. And it will be delicious, and no one who made fun of me for my crawdad catastrophe will get to try any. (that means you Kenny!)

Entry 4:

As a kid, come holiday time we would all help my mom with some of her cooking. She liked getting everyone involved, not because little kids are actually helpful, but because for some reason females enjoy children. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea.

So we were making some peanut brittle, and I measured out the ingredients. We go to cooking, and the smell of fresh sweets is filling the house. Our little kid mouths are sloppy with drool, and we’re bouncing off the walls to get something tasty in our gullets, like pronto.

The peanut brittle comes out, finally cools, and we all get a piece. Immediately upon entering our collective face holes, all of it is spit back on the counter/table/floor. Whatever was in front of us. That was the first time I learned you have to be very careful when reading the measurement of ingredients. I apparently switched the portions for salt and sugar. What came out was in no way peanut brittle, but more like something you would use to bait deer or melt ice off your sidewalk.

Entry 5:

I have worked at a plethora of restaurants and fast food joints in my time. The most notable of which was at Little Caesars. The thing that made that job cool was that my super good friend for many years, Kenny, was the General Manager. Once he got the position he just began hiring all of his friends to work there. And we screwed around a lot. I mean a LOT! Not that we slacked off, we were actually the best store in the district, but we had a lot of fun when we worked.

Namely we would create fun games and activities to do whilst the store was slow. We had dough ball HORSE. (I loved dough ball HORSE) Once we played I Believe in a Thing Called Love by The Darkness for four hours straight. And we forced all the employees to stop whatever they were doing and clap over their head when this one part came on. They eventually mutinied and told us to change the music or they were all quiting, but it was fun.

Edit: I fucking love this song. To this day I can still sing along to every word, and every note of every guitar solo. And the video is one of my all time favorites. And much like the Sponge Bob video I posted recently, this one has a guitar that shoots lightning. Plus there are monsters. And I don’t care how homoerotic the beginning is, I want a giant hairy monster to hand dry me when I get out of my space jacuzzi.

I started a trend where we would draw off color cartoons and elaborate line art all over our time card, to the point where it was difficult to read. Corporate put a stop to that though. We drank in the back. I put up a porn poster over the sexual harassment poster in the bathroom. Apparently you can get fired for that. But I wasn’t.

We had a hurricane roll through, and we constructed a sail out of LC signs. We then went out to the parking lot and shopping-cart-surfed in the hurricane. That was really fun.

But the most memorable game we created was one we called Pocker. That’s short for fiery pan hockey soccer, a fun indoor sport for the whole family. We had found this weird grate that fit into the top of our pans, but we had no idea what it was for. I guess it must have been a relic from some long discontinued menu item. Anyway, we would spray down the floor with water, so it was really slippery. Then we would fill the pan with packed up tissue paper, cover it with the grate, douse it in WD40, and light it on fire. then we would kick the Pocker puck around the kitchen until it went out or a customer showed up. Basically there was no points or rules, except try not to light anything else, including yourself, on fire.

Turns out Pocker is also a great game for that time of the year when your yard is covered in snow or ice. The pan really slides a long way. One of our privacy bushes met an untimely death that winter, but it was well worth it. Pocker: I salute you!

Entry 6:

My first bowl met his maker in the kitchen of a Chic-Fil-A. Yes, the drug paraphernalia kind of bowl, not the cereal kind. You see, I was young and cock sure and I wasn’t scared to tell anyone that I loved me some weed, and argue some of the finer points of the marijuana legalization debate. Well, I was working my first job then at the uber Christian chicken sandwich joint called Chic-Fil-A. And on a regular basis I would get into arguments about how pot should be legal and it wasn’t bad to smoke it and everyone should try. Blah, blah, blah.

Well one evening when we were just about finished cleaning up the restaurant, one of my managers called me to the side and asked me if I had my bowl on me. And I wanted to know why, so he told me he was just curious because he had never seen one before and he wasn’t sure what they looked like or how they worked. So I pulled mine out and handed it over. He ooohed and aaaahed for a minute as I showed him how perdy it was, and how you would operate the thingamajig with the hoonanny.

He went to hand it to me, and since God hates me, my hands were all covered in grease and whatnot from cleaning. Poor old Baby Blue slipped right out of my fingers and fell to the floor, shattering into a hundred pieces. I then had to grab the biggest pieces, (to salvage the resin) and clean up the rest before the kitchen filled with the reek of stank ass resin. I didn’t get in trouble, but I did lose my Baby Blue. I’ll see her again in heaven. RIP Blue.

Edit: for those of you who don’t smoke weed, go smoke some and stop being such a square. For those of you who aren’t familiar with drug paraphernalia, or who aren’t familiar with american slang for drug paraphernalia, here is a picture of what my bowl looked like. Well, at least the closest I could find, but it’s almost exactly how I remember Blue. And hot damn, looking around at all these pictures of people smoking up to find this picture really reminded me how much I loved pot. I miss it. I’ll have to post about that soon.

Entry 7:

I lived at this party house out on the edge of the county for a while. And in our kitchen we had a lot of fun. Just imagine four or five alcoholic men in their early twenties living with no female supervision and doing whatever they wanted. It was awesome.

First of all, there was a kitchen couch. Not a table to eat at, a couch. I loved that couch. The guy who owned the house hooked up with this nasty succubus who stole his nads and had him pussy whipped like hell, so we changed kitchen couch to porch couch, and eventually bonfire couch.

Second, we had this gigantic pink rubber dildo on a stick called Wibbly Peen, and we would pull it down from the top of the refrigerator and chase people with it at parties. We even made a short movie about Wibbly Peen, where it bacame a zombie peen and ran around killing people to get revenge for being chopped off, sort of like Ron Jeremy meets Jason Voorhees.

Third, we had a wall for throwing knives at. Well, I should say mostly throwing knives at, and occasionally getting drunk and throwing other things at, or just tackling. The wall even became a news set for the Wibbly Peen movie, and we drew news blocks on it, so we could be filmed like news anchors.

Me and Kenny decided we wanted to cover the entire ceiling in beer bottle caps. That lasted about one square foot before the succubus discovered what we were doing and ordered our cessation. And again, that wretched woman told us we had to either fix the knife throwing wall, or cover it up. So we put up a twister board over it, and changed it to “Naked Ass Twister Yo”. She wasn’t really happy, but we kept it.

Lastly, I threw up on a lesbians face in that kitchen. It was sort of like 2 girls 1 cup, but less gross, at least for me. She was surprising cool about it.

Oh yeah, and a lot of illegal tattoos were given in that kitchen too. Good times, good times.

Edit: This was all back when I lived With my good friend Kato out in Fuquay. I’ll definitely have to tell some more stories from that house. Those were some crazy fucking years. Imagine Animal House, but with less regard for safety, and more drinking.

Entry 8:

In fact that same bachelor pad kitchen seemed to be a poon tang magnet. I saw no less than three vaginas in that room, just by asking. Seriously, some chick I didn’t know would walk in and I would say, “Hey woman, show me your *expletive deleted*”. I was joking of course, never intending to actually see any of those magnificent meat lockers. I mean, I wasn’t friends with these chicks, so who cares if they get offended right? They can go bang whoever they came around to bang if they don’t like what’s going on in the kitchen. But I was shocked at how well a simple approach like asking worked. Yes indeed, me and the stove saw a lot of pink tacos. It probably didn’t hurt that the beer was located there. (in the kitchen, not the stove)

Entry 9:

I overdosed on speed in a kitchen once. I was broke and at my friends house, and his drugs were laying out. So I grabbed some pills whilst he was relieving himself. Well it turns out the pills were wicked strong, and I overdosed. I barfed for a while and passed out and sweated and convulsed, and eventually woke back up and got myself a beer and got back in the foosball tournament I was missing. I lived, obviously, but I never stole any drugs again. All thanks to a kitchen floor and some mystery speed.

Entry 10:

And speaking of weird drug experiences in the kitchen, I also learned a cool trick at my friends home. You see their mom was sort of a bad person, so she didn’t really care what we did. Well it turn out that if you need to burn something organic, and inhale the smoke, all you need is a range top, two butter knives, and a two liter bottle. You cut the top 1/3rd off the bottle, heat up one butter knife to red hot on the range top, and touch it to the afore mentioned plant matter which is resting on the second butter knife. Then you just hold the bottle top, which should be in your mouth, right over the smoking mass, and viola, you’ve got yourself a ghetto fabulous, waterless, gravity bong sort of thing in the kitchen. Minus the gravity, or the bong.

Entry 11: 

Here’s a good unobjectionable one. My parents live near some woods, and one night we found a baby copper head next to the front steps. Well I wanted to save him, but my parents didn’t want poisonous snakes near the house, so me and my mom went to catch it. She pinned his head with one of those little hand shovels for planting flowers, and I grabbed the neck of the poor little guy. We threw him in a bucket filled with acetone to suffocate him overnight. I thought it was a pretty crappy way to die, but they wanted the body intact. Well the next day we pulled him out and examined the critter. It was definitely a bad ass little snake. It died in the strike position, with it’s fangs out, dripping venom when we squeezed the head. So My mom kept it in a jar full of rubbing alcohol on the kitchen counter, next to the sink, to show all the kids who came over so they could be able to recognize what a copperhead looks like. One day I’ll catch a live one and keep that, but copperheads are pretty dangerous, so it will have to be some time when I don’t have a girlfriend or children around.