Jibber Jabberer At the Gym and a Totally Unrelated Funny Story

I was at the gym today on the treadmill, and there was a woman next to me talking to someone on the phone while she was working out. Now, this is okay if:

Q: 1. Was it an important call or a business call?

A: Almost certainly not because she was laughing loudly and all the content of the conversation that I overheard was completely meaningless.

Q: Did she at least keep her voice down?

A: Absolutely not. I would have been fine if I had my headphones, but even then the big belly laughs would cut right through the heavy-ass jams I would likely have been playing. Probably something obscure and rocking, like this, a stoner rock band out of Portugal called Sulfer Giant with endless infectious Sabbathesque riffs.



At some point in my frustration at having only the bad gym music and no sports to watch on the television (just the closed captions of guys talking about football) and forced to listen to this lady jabber on, I started getting perhaps a little too critical of her. Now, I really don't like to judge people at the gym for whatever workouts they're doing because who gives a care, right? I know that one time a giant Thor-looking dude, like that blond schmuck from the Packers (sorry, I'm a Bears fan) tapped me on the shoulder (interrupting my beloved rock music for God's sake) to tell me that I was doing an exercise with poor form or something. I know that made me mad, so why am I judging this woman?

(You won't get gains doing it your way, bro. Also, you'll get more volume in your hair if you switch to my dope shampoo. Bro.)

At least she made it into the gym, I tried to tell myself. Perhaps she really hates working out but loves catching up with her homegirl, so she rewards herself with that - and that's what keeps her going to the gym. Maybe that is the case, but couldn't she do that on the ride there or the ride home? And couldn't she at least keep her voice down a little? And here comes me perhaps being a jerk. She was walking the whole time. If you're able to carry friendly banter like that, are you really working hard enough? And keeping her hands on the railing the whole time is really cheating herself.

Well, am I complete gym-bro ass wipe for letting this lady bother me that much?

Hey, here is something totally unrelated. My buddy, Night Train, and I were at a bar the other night, and we ran into one of his old roommates, this great-looking super buff gay guy. We got talking about how this guy dogged out fellas like a lot of men do with women. He would have all different types of guys that he would take home, and more than once he would have a fella come over when he was gone and they would just hang out with us and wait for Buff Roommate to come home. Night Train said one morning he saw one of the hottest women he had ever seen in his life come out of Buff Roommate's bedroom. He told Nigh Train that he mixes up once or twice a year and throws a woman into the mix. Night Train said to me, "God damn this guy! I'm in a slump right now, and he can easily pull the hottest girl out of the bar whenever he wants, and he is gay!?" Oh my God did we ever have a laugh at that one.

Hey, I got to run. Mrs. Noisewater has my 40th birthday celebration planned for me that I have to get ready for, and I have no idea what activities we are doing. Perhaps it will be a blog worthy tale I can share soon. Be well, friends.

Don't You Hate It When Your "Ant" Comes to Visit?

My kitchen has ants. It was only a matter of time with five dudes at a time living in this joint for centuries, but even if it was all too predictable, it's still disgusting, unnerving, and annoying.

My one roomy is going to buy something that worked when she had ants in her car (huh?): you leave this shit out, the ants gather it up thinking it's food, bring it back to their nest, and they all kick the bucket. I love that concept because only one or two come out at a time, so we need to infiltrate somehow, and this is the only way. We need an ant on the inside . . .

I got thinking about this one ant who brings back this bad, bad shit. Maybe you have been to a party, brought some taco dip you left in your car an hour or so too long and some people got the shits. That's a dick move, but did everyone die? Did thousands of ants (people, whatever. I'm confusing myself) die??? That ant has to feel like a real bone head - just before he bites it.

The Course of Events on the Night Before the Night Before Christmas

I woke up yesterday and immediately put on music. I do this most every day, but for some reason on this morning I needed to hear Ain't Nobody by Rufus and Chaka Khan, with a reasonable amount of volume. I think I got carried away, because I woke up one of my roommates, one of my INSANE roommates, and he proceeded to blast his OWN music super loud so that now he and I weren't just awake, but all 5 roomies, and perhaps the tenants below us were now awake. If they didn't wake up from the music, and bad music in my estimation, and not bad meaning good like Chaka, they were surely given a rude awakening by the ensuing ferocious door slamming. He has a hair trigger temper and seems to have a revenge philosophy similar to that of Sean Connery's character in The Untouchables ("They send one of yours' to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue, etc"). If the door slamming and music blasting doesn't convince you that he has the philosophy, then you have to believe me when I say that when I went into the bathroom which we share to shower I saw that the shower was running, left on hot. I had reason to believe that he did this intentionally to run me out of hot water, so I was slamming my fists on the tile walls of the shower in a fit of rage, which is totally out of character for me. Dead-on in character for him, but not me.

So, after my cold shower that left me feeling like pneumonia's wet dream, I was off to take pictures of Santa!! I was ecstatic to see that I had a GREAT crew when I got there. I've worked on and off with photography company employees "C" and "W" for over a year, and both know what they are doing, are a lot of fun, and I consider them friends. W brings a lot of energy to his job, like me, he may be a roommate real soon (see last paragraph) and both of us were amazing and jingling the sleigh bells to get the babies looking at the camera, and then snapping the picture with expert timing. All in all it was a pretty fun gig, and I think we did really well. It's a stupid, weekend job, but as I've said in previous posts, I take pride in my work and like when everything goes to plan, and the customers are satisfied.

That evening I went out for a few cocktails with two of my buds. Together we made up 3 of the 4 Horsemen. The fourth had to close the restaurant he manages. I know it sounds nerdy, but we have always called ourselves the 4 Horsemen, because we hit it off so much when we go out, and it has a nice ring to it. It seems that it's tough to get all of us together, and even tougher to get all of us together AND single. Currently, the guy that didn't make it is engaged, one guy is headed that way, one of them is really excited about a girl he's been talking to, and one of them is me. Our favorite bar, The Liar's Club, had a small crowd on the day before Christmas Eve, since many Chicagoans had already packed up and went home to their families. This enabled us to get the table that is elevated five feet in the air, which we found to be a lot of fun, if you can endure the heightened smokiness. With our bird's eye view, oldness, and wise-cracking ability, we likened ourselves to Waldorf and Statler from The Muppet Show.

Our one friend was having a lot of doubt about the idea of marriage. He loves his girl, but he has had A LOT of marriages around him crumble. Through the course of our conversation, it became evident that all 3 of us want kids, but are unsure about wives. Anyway, we decided we will start a Four Horsemen Commune, where the 4 of us will live and help each other raise our children, which we will adopt, etc. It would almost be like a TV's Full House situation, only with one additional uncle, and less vomit-inducing corniness.

Okay, I'm off to see my non-commune family for Christmas. Hope you all have a super holiday!

Sincerely,

The Gancer

Former Roomy Wow's Me With Hook-Up

It had been a couple of months since I had been to the Liar's Club (my favorite Chicago bar), and the minute I set foot in the joint I felt like my chi was centered and my cholesterol was somehow lowered.

My good friend, HLP (Heterosexual Life Partner) had spent the entire day at a Cubs game with his friend's girlfriend and her friend. He had made the mistake of mentioning that he thought the friend was cute once, and ever since this couple has been forcing this girl on him like they are desperately trying to breed a couple Siberian Huskies for the Iditarod. I'm sure you know a couple yourself who seems to think all is not right with the world until everyone is paired off like them, so that they have lots of couples to get together with and play Pictionary, or do whatever it is sets of couples do these days. Although he's not into her too much, Friend of Girlfriend is very into HLP, so she was coming onto him all day. This will play a factor later . . .

So I'm watching HLP hitting it off with a random girl at the bar, but there were two major road blocks.

1) She had a friend with her. No problem right? He is with a great friend (The Gancer) who could run interference for him. However, she was a HEAVY friend. I have jumped on many grenades for buddies, but tonight was my first night in Liar's Club in two months, so running interfence on this gal would have prevented me from fully enjoying the experience. His prayers were answered when I noticed Heavy Friend was leaving! So he's good right? Wrong. Enter road block 2.

2) Just then Friend of Girlfriend made a final play to win Roomy's heart. She was knowingly, outright, full-on C-blocking, but I guess she figured she had to go for broke.

Long story short, Friend of Girlfriend finally threw in the towel, he made out with the random, and got her number. I got a call from him this morning and he asked me if I caught her name. Problem. I came up with a solution to this dilmea, which I happen to think is brilliant. What he has to do is call her on a work day at a time that she is almost certainly working, like at 10:00 AM. That's his best chance to catch the voice mail, where she will almost certainly give her name. If she picks up, well, then I guess he just says, "Hey, you!" or "Hey, pretty." or "Hey, homegirl." or "Hey, Mulva . . ."

Unorthodox Workout Planners and the Roommates Who Love Them

One of my roommates is out of shape, and he has a hard time motivating himself to exercise after working hard all day. Today he called me up on his way home from work and asked me if I’d like to accompany him on an exercising excursion. I really didn’t want to, but because he so rarely gets the gumption to propose such a thing, I got the feeling that if I said no he wouldn’t go at all. However, while his plan on the phone involved taking a long walk to a basketball court and shooting some hoops, his plan upon arriving home was almost identical except we were to end up at a bar somehow. Oh well, I wasn’t going to argue with him, because whatever it takes to get him exercising is okay by me.

So the brisk walk there goes well. Then we do a rapid paced shooting around with one guy rebounding and giving the shooter his lay-up when he misses, and then switching roles. If this is done fast, it can be a decent workout. If you’re horribly out of shape like my dear roomy, sorry if you’re reading big fella, this is enough to make you sweat like a whore on Nickel Night.

I was hoping he had forgotten the bar portion of the exercise plan or maybe after such a good workout it would dawn on him how counterintuitive that part of the plan was, but no such luck. He was intent on going to the bar. Well, if I was going to go to a bar on a Monday, I figure we should at least try out some new ones, so my dumb ass suggests we should hit all 3 new bars on Ashland that we hadn’t been to, since they were all on the way home. Here’s our results.

The Foundation: This bar was a little bit too classy for us. They were playing Postal Service, which is encouraging, but we felt out of place wearing gym shorts and carrying a basketball. We asked for a menu and left. I think I’d go there, but there’s a similar place a little closer to me, so it’s not very likely.

Four Shadows: As I walked in, an a-hole knocked the basketball out of my hand with a big shit-eating grin on his face. He meant well, but I still wanted to punch him in the ear. I have this thing about people doing stuff like that. Whenever someone knocked my hat off my head I really wanted to go ape shit on them. It’s weird because I’m not at all an angry guy, nor do ordinarily have a fiery temper. I think in a former life I may have been an Old West guy who shot people for doing that. I hope that past life guy was careful about who he told his pet peeve to, because in my experience it only makes people do it more, which for him would have meant budgeting for more bullets.

Sorry, about the tangent. When we asked for specials she named a few so-so ones and then she said they $6 pitchers of Stella. Now I don’t think it’s good for two people to drink pitchers on a Monday, but you have to understand how good a deal that is. You can’t get pitchers of CRAP beer for fewer than 7 bucks in Chicago, and Stella is a damn tasty libation. As we sipped our frothy brews we chatted up our rock-hard body, yoga-obsessed, female bartender who was planning a trip to China to study yoga under the Shao Lin monks. We both really wanted stay there and hear more off-the-wall shit from this gal, and there was plenty of it to be heard, but we HAD to make it to our third and final bar.

The Ashland: This bar looked exactly like it did when it was the Skylight, which is the bar we had our New Years party at in which we had over 150 of our closest friends. It was a smashing success. Anyway, the only new element in this incarnation is that you can play beanbags, or corn-holing if you’re from Indiana, there on Sundays, and you can play video games at the bar. I wowed the bartender and my roomy at my ability to rapidly flap my ostrich’s wings to jump on my opponents’ eggs before being killed by other ostrich riders and the dreaded Lava Troll in the game of Joust, and then we were on our way. We thought about going back to the previous fun bar, but opted to go home. Well, roomy opted to stop off for a bottle of jack, which I think he’s still working on, and then we went home.

I think if I accompany him on another exercise trip, I’m going to have to insist that his regiment is not capped off with copious amounts of alcohol, but I’m glad I got out there to explore these new establishments. You HAVE to know all your local watering holes. Anyone want to share his or her favorite spot and why he or she prefers to spend his or her money at said bar? I think some of you know that my loyalty lies with The Liar’s Club, but I also like this dive around the corner called Cody’s which has a bocce ball court out back. I haven’t played yet, but when I start throwing some bocce balls around regularly my blog entries may be even more inconsistent. Good night.