#121 - getting car-ried away.

let's get one thing straight right off the bat. on a scale of one to ten, my ability to perform stereotypically male tasks is pretty low. i can hammer & drill things alright. i can play sports but haven't tried much since the clinton administration. i've screwed things here & there, but in instances like the most recent apartment snafu, where the pipes below the sink were occasionally dripping, rather than just sliding on under there & examining/rectifying the problem the first time like a proper adult male, every once in a while, i'd just give the thingy at the top of the pipe a quick lil twist until it stopped dripping. it was only this weekend, after a month or so of me doing that over & over & over again that i really gave it a good look & fixed it the right way.

this ignorance definitely extends to cars. i'm clueless as far as cars are concerned & during the few brief periods of my life when i actually owned a car, changing the oil meant a half-hour opportunity to read a book whilst my friendly neighborhood jiffy lube took care of business. i mean, i'm not entirely hopeless. i can drive a stick & have changed a tire in my time. changed a ton of windshield wipers. still, i haven't owned a car in years & wouldn't know a carburetor from a drive shaft. ok. well maybe i'd know that, but seriously, i don't know squat about the auto. for me, popping the hood & looking around to see what's wrong would be the adult equivalent of my saxophone contribution to my fifth grade band performance upstate...one big game of pretend.

my car owning strategy is as such: i'm holding out for electric cars. i'm holding out for at least a hybrid. i live in nyc, so having a car is pretty ridiculous...unless it's one of those sweet super tiny smart cars like the one that's often parked in front of my apartment building. i just want to pinch its cheeks! i figure by the time i'm able to afford a car, they're going to run on lawrencium or something, which is going to rule. that element's dense. it sucks that my parents didn't horde all of our old cars & turn the backyard into a car graveyard. i'm sure if they had, we could've kicked the squirrels out of one of them & fixed it up enough to get $4500 from the guvment as part of the clunkers program. gimme money fer my clunker, mister prez-dent!

it's really sad what's happened to the american automobile actually. what was once a status symbol, with fins & drop tops & whitewalls & junk, is now the majority of the time nothing more than a bland people transporter. sure there are some totally tricked out cars out there, but i can't tell most cars apart. i need a cool looking car to make me even care. i'm pretty sure that's something i inherited from my dad. through the years, he's owned a bunch of different cars, including a number of interesting shaped ones--a lotus, a VW bug, a boxy volvo, some sort of old ass diesel mercedes benz & now (at age 57) a mini cooper. i haven't owned a car in ages & until they come out with a car that doesn't kill the planet & also has two bubbles, three horns that play "la cucaracha," gigantic cup holders & an engine sound that causes people to think the world's coming to an end, i don't want it.

#121 - getting car-ried away.
snack: jack link's teriyaki beef jerky
drink: nos high performance energy drink



this past weekend, since i was low on fundage, i decided to make use of a gift card i got last christmas but had never used & take a trip over to the friendly neighborhood home depot to pick up some snacks & necessary cleaning supplies. since home depot's all manly & stuff, they have a small selection of food & drink that i'm assuming appeals to your average joe construction worker type. we're talking stuff like sports & energy drinks, tiny cans of pringles, snack mixes, candy & saturday night's snack, a 3 oz bag of jack link's teriyaki beef jerky. i've gotta level with you, mr jack link. the bag is much bigger than it needs to be. when i first opened it, it wasn't even half way full. hasn't somebody in your finance department talked to somebody in development about coming up with a smaller bag that leads to incremental plastics savings?

the teriyaki flavor's acceptable. i mean, as far as teriyakis go, it's better than most of the jerkys you're going to find out there. still, teriyaki is clearly at the bottom of the jack link jerky pecking order & there are a handful of jack link products that i'd choose first if i ever saw them for sale. for starters, there are flavors like maple & brown sugar ham, sweet & spicy thai & jalapeno carne seca. they have a turkey jerky & a buffalo jerky. they even have A1 steak sauce branded nuggets. i don't even like A1 steak sauce all that much, but it sounds damn appealing. to top it off, jack link is committed to "feeding your wild side" with growling sasquatches & adventure on their website. no wonder they're "america's #1 brand of jerky & meat snacks!" it's definitely the growling sasquatch.

every day last week, i'd foolishly stayed up til around two or three in the morn, so come saturday, when i didn't have to get out of bed for anything, i slept in & even treated myself to an afternoon nap. by the time night rolled around & i wanted to be awake, i'd entered that zone where i'd slept so much that i was still tired. to counteract this, around ten or so, i broke out a 22 oz bottle of nos high performance energy drink. since i haven't a clue about cars & haven't seen any of the the fast & the furious series of films or played need for speed, i had no idea that the bottle is meant to look like a n.o.s. (nitrous oxide system), which peeps use to give their cars boosts of power. they're one of nascar driver kyle busch's many sponsors. in fact, he held up a bottle of it after winning sunday's sharpie 500. seriously, that's the name of the race. there are many photos of him with a giant sharpie. oh nascar sponsorships.

on the front of the nos, it specifically says "caution: powerful" & there's some weird sort of warning symbol (beware of crabs?), but i didn't pay much attention to that. i figured it was just a gimmick. since i rarely have energy drinks, i probably should have at least given the label a good once over. if i had, i definitely would've heeded the warning. instead, i just poured the entire bottle into a big glass & fiddle dee dee went about my fun filled night hanging round the apartment whilst taking in its generic citrus energy drink flavor. i did some writing. i did some cleaning. i took in the prisoner: or how i planned to kill tony blair. i did some more writing. i watched a couple tv shows. i played on the internet. next thing i knew, it was three in the morn, so i decided it was time to go to sleep. my body had other ideas though & i tossed & turned for a full three hours in a state of half sleep until i finally crashed some time around sunrise.

when i woke up around noon, it felt like somebody had taken one of those tiny black school portrait combs to my innards. it was awful. later in the day, i was chatting with my roommate, an avid consumer of energy drinks & i was all "check out this energy drink. it's friggin nuts. i was up til six in the morn because of it." his first question was "how many servings is that?" the answer: 2.75. oops #1. i grabbed a can of red bull from the recycling to do a comparison. turns out that a small can of red bull has 80 mg of caffeine in it. a 22 oz bottle of nos has FOUR & A HALF TIMES THAT (357 mg). oops #2. on top of that, it has 2750 mg of taurine, 550 mg of L-carnitine, 274 mg of inositol & 136mg of panax ginseng. it's a good thing that my heart didn't explode. oops #3 averted. thank god. death by energy drink is not how i want to go.

side note: started writing this on sunday, came across an article about an energy-drink infused jerky the very next evening. check it. i can predict the future.