The Litter Box Bar League

A friend called me up and said he needed one more team to sign up for a volleyball league that takes place on a sand volleyball court outside of a bar in Chicago on Wednesday nights. I threw a team together and showed up that first Wednesday and couldn't believe that it was even worse than you would expect a court outside of a bar would be. At first I was pissed that I had committed my friends and I to playing in an unsanitary and unsafe environment once a week, but slowly all of these quirks have grown on me. I took some pictures to help you get a sense of just how crazy this whole thing is because I don't think you would believe me unless you saw it for yourself. 

Here is the court. It is a bunch of sand poured into a giant plywood box, which is why we started calling it Litter Box Volleyball. The net permanently droops in the center, and there is no way to adjust it. You get the volleyballs from the bar before your game, and many of the balls have bite marks in them. Why, you may ask? Because when the ball goes over that wall you see pictured, it lands in a Doggy Daycare. When that happens, the ball either flies over the fence back to us right away and we say thank you to the staff, or it mysteriously flies back over 45 minutes later, or it never comes back at all and becomes a permanent chew toy for the doggies. Because this disrupts the game and because the balls are expensive, whoever is deemed at fault for having the ball get into the jaws of the hounds has to take an immediate shot of room temperature Malort, which is just about the grossest liquor you'll ever have. 

The sand is not nearly deep enough, and in some spots there will be two inches of sand with concrete underneath. I dove a couple of weeks ago and cut my knee up really bad. One of the Litter Box veterans then told me, "Oh yeah, don't dive." Don't dive? I can't help it. I just react and go if I see a ball about to hit the sand on my side. Right when it was just about healed from a week or two before, I dove again and opened the cut right back up, which is what you see above. 

So you got the DoggyDaycare on one side line, the other side line is a street, and then on one end line you have two very smelly dumpsters, as you see pictured above. It's smells terrible on that end of the court, so dumpster side always serves first. Seems fair. If someone spikes one past you that doesn't get stopped by a dumpster, then someone has to run down the street barefoot to fetch the ball. Sometimes it sort of veers down the street and just rolls forever downhill. This is why I have found that when I'm holding down the dumpster side, it's good to keep my flip-flops handy so that I can slip those on and run down the street more swiftly and safely.

On the other end line you have the back wall of the bar, and there is an apartment above the bar. Sometimes the ball will hit the satellite dish, knocking out the transmission on the NASCAR event viewed by the regulars in the tavern, or it will land on the upstairs tenant's porch. The guy up there has visitors that come by very briefly and leave, there are some strange chemical smells coming out of there, and other signs that make us think maybe he runs a "business" out of there. But would he take such a risk with all these yuppies in his backyard drinking beers and playing volleyballs in his backyard? Maybe so because the other night he had not problem drawing attention to himself by hopping on his bicycle/motor cycle, cranked up that engine, and went around the block to fetch two tallboys of Icehouse beers. It looks to me like this is what we called a "mini bike" as kids, only this one has an engine attached to a bicycle so he has the option of pedaling as well. It was loud too, let me tell you! A five city block radius is always aware when this dude is making a beer run.  

There is one little nook where a ball can go down this alley as well. There are rusty nails everywhere,  so this is also a good opportunity to slip on your sandals before venturing in. Tetanus shots should be given out as readily as Malort shots around this joint. I'm serious. 

We usually drink buckets of beer outside by the shabby court, but on one rainy night my friend and I noticed the fine array of beef jerky flavors prominently displayed behind the bar. In case you can't read them, the flavors from left to right are as follows: Jerk This, Tickle My Teriyaki, Pepper My Cornhole, Blowout Cajun Jerky, Fire In the Hole, and Hot Habanero. You'll notice that's my hand throwing out a pair of scissors because I was thinking it would be a fun game to play paper, rock, scissors and the loser has to try the jerky of the winners choosing. If a guy had already Doggy Daycared a few balls that evening and earned a few Malorts, some Pepper My Cornhole jerky could really push him over the edge to have a reversal of fortune, or at the very least have a very, very rough Thursday ahead of him.

What do you guys think of Litter Box Volleyball? Anyone want to sub in next Wednesday? Anyone play in any goofy leagues of any kind this summer that you want to share with us in the comments?

Team Strike Force and One of the Best Summers of Dr. Ken's Life

Many moons ago some friends and I played in a coed softball league and drinking team.  I'm not making a joke here; The sponsor bar actually kept track of how much all the teams drank after each game, certain types of drinks were worth different points, and the highest point getting team would win a free party for all their friends.  Hence, at the end of the season there would be a champion on the diamond and another in the bar.  This is not something that would be allowed now, and it probably wasn't allowed back then seeing as it encourages competitive binge drinking.  Team Strike Force finished near the bottom in terms of our record, but our drinking statistics were the stuff of legend.      

We weren't anything to brag about when it came to playing the actual softball games, but we did have one guy who was maybe the best player I've ever seen.  He could scoop up a ball on the run from anywhere, and throw from deep in the outfield to hit any plate he wanted right on the button.  Plus every time he stepped up to hit it was an automatic extra base hit.  Come to think of it, his girlfriend (now wife) was a really good player.  The rest of us were just biding our time to prove we were worthwhile at the bar immediately following the mere formality of the actual softball game.   

These were the two best moments on the field (because all the other memorable moments were at the bar):

1. One guy's girlfriend (also now wife) had no baseball experience whatsoever, so naturally we put her at catcher.  She was one of those people who could never get past pointing the open side of the mit straight up instead of turning the wrist inward so the open hand faces out.  You know, so you don't worry about plunking her in the face when you throw to her?  Consequently, she was very rarely able to catch much of anything, usually jumping out of the way to avoid getting hurt if you threw to her.  For this reason, the pitcher typically covered home in the event of a play at the plate. 

The RIGHT way

However, one time our stud player with the rifle arm sent one home with a runner on third and first and second base open, and our favorite female catcher was our only chance to tag the runner out.  She stepped up to the front of the plate, actually caught the ball, and jumped up and down saying "yay" as the runner trotted in behind her untagged.  There was no force at home, so she needed to apply a tag.  Nobody on our team cared because it was the funniest thing we had ever seen, and we didn't want to spoil her joyous moment of catching a softball.  Like I said, we sucked.

We would not have challenge the real Strike Force to any athletic event.  Except drinking. 

2. Then another time we were playing our arch rivals.  They had a guy on their team that was friends with a girl I dated not long before that team started.  This guy cheated on his girlfriend with a number of girls, including the one I was dating.  Not at the time I was seeing her though, but maybe.  Who knows.  She was not such a good girl for me, but at the time love was blind and I was young and stupid.  He was a butt hole on the field as well as off because he was like the coach figure, encouraging all his male players to take walks.  When you're a grown man you swing the bat.  That is what you signed up to do, right?

Also, he would yell at the girls when they screwed up.  This made us all really mad, and we found ourselves consoling his girls when they would get on the base paths and yelling at him to take it easy.  It made for a strange dynamic where the score of the game didn't matter; all that really mattered was that this a-hole drop dead.  Then there was another line drive single hit out to center field to our one good player who came up firing the ball towards home plate as Captain A-Hole ran home from third.  Boom!  The ball plunked him square in the back, and he winced in pain as he scored the run.  None of us gave a damn that he scored.  In fact, we were all cheering him getting hit with a ball.  You see, our guy is good enough to have gotten him out.  He chose to peg him in the back from fifty yards; He was that good.  It could very well have been the single most impressive athletic achievement I have ever seen and certainly the most rewarding.

We lost that game and many others that season, but again, in the bar we were champions.  I will never forget the two highest point-getters were a table tapper of Saint Pauli Girl, and a bottle of Tsingtao, a horribly skunky Chinese beer that led to wicked hangovers the following Friday morning.  Win or lose, our table would be littered with table tappers and buckets upon buckets of the green Chinese death juice: Tsingtao.  Then we would all text each other the next day how General Tsingtao had beaten us down with yet another crippling hangover.  But we would do it all again the following Thursday for the good of the team because champions fight through adversity. 

I remember one bye week (a week where our team didn't play) I still went up to the bar to make sure we at least got a few points.  I brought a girl with me who wasn't a heavy drinker.  She could only muscle down one Tsingtao that I insisted she order, and I powered back the other four in the bucket.

In the final week of the season we were eliminated from any chance of winning on the field, but we were very much in the running to win at the drinking.  The only team who had a chance at catching us was the arch rival team.  To make sure we beat those jerks we set up an evite (remember those?) and got all our drinking buddies up there.  We let all our friends know that if they helped us win, they would all be invited to the free party we would earn on a Saturday night for $500 of free boozy fun!  There were five or six tables full of friends for that last night to earn points, and some of those friends were very tangential.  We were marketing wizards and very heavy drinkers. 

And we "must have" bought a hundred that night.

The culminating pivotal moment did not come on the field; It came when Captain A-Hole from the team we hated came over to our table counting up all those buckets and table tappers and he asked, "Shit, you guys aren't team Strike Force are you?"  "You're damn right we are," we all said and a loud cheer roared through out our section of the bar.  Arch rival team only had five or six people to our giant hoards of booze hounds.  It was a lock for Team Strike Force.  We won that "free" party to drink whatever we wanted through paying for tons of types of beer we didn't like every Thursday night.  If you did the math, we likely lost a lot of money, but you can't put a dollar amount on being drinking champs and having that much fun.

I can't run around the bases as fast anymore, I certainly can't drink that much on a Thursday these days, but I can always can look back on that summer as one of the best of my life.  Let's put it this way, If someone asked me right now if I would rather be the first man on Mars or be transported back to the summer of 2005 to watch that guy get pegged with a softball in the back and tip back some celebratory horribly skunky Tsingtao, I would have to give it some serious, serious thought.      

This has got to be the longest time I have gone without updating my blog, and I apologize.  Here are some updates . . .

Mrs. Noisewater and I finally moved out of our tiny apartment where our bedroom window faced the alley of decadence and a Chicago life of excess.  Just about every night we would hear a couple getting ready to get it on, some people doing cocaine, a fight breaking out, but usually just people being loud and drunk.  I really knew it was time to go when I saw the aftermath of what I could only assume was a hobo orgy.  This is an actual picture that I took:

Aren't you glad the bums are being safe?

So now I'm back in Lakeview, my favorite neighborhood where I lived for around 7 years before the party-alley-place.  But back then I had 4 roommates.  Now I just have one, and she's the best roommate ever.  Does it bother me that Mrs. Noisewater is more handy than me and is painting, hanging up shelves, and using power tools that I don't know how to operate?  A little.  But I'm in charge of . . . the record player.  And that's important stuff.

Our landlord is a Chicago cop part time, and despite the fact that he looks precisely like Vic Mackey from "The Shield," he is actually a really nice guy.  He doesn't want us grilling on the balcony because he doesn't want us burning the place down, so he lets us use the grill and smoker in the courtyard and even buys and replaces the propane tank for us.  Now that's a hell of a deal.

"Don't beat a confession out of me!  That was me playing Captain and Tennille on my record player last night.  And singing along."

Our downstairs neighbor is an elderly four and a half foot tall Japanese woman who has been living in the building for forty years, and when she moved in her rent was sixty bucks a month.  Very sweet woman, but a bit of a hoarder.  She has filled up the basement with years and years of useless crap.  She was telling me one day when I was doing laundry down there that sometimes she buys two of something because she forgets she already had one.  Probably because it was buried under other stuff.  Landlord Vic Mackey has given her until the 15th of this month to have all that stuff moved out of there.  She will often offer us something, and usually we say no.  But sometimes we will take something just to make her feel that some of those objects have a home.  I fill a thermos of hers up with Gatorade all the time and tried to tell her I was using it, but her English isn't very good.  I have been thinking about taking some things that she offers and just throwing it out for her - a few dumpsters away so that she doesn't see that I tossed it.  That way she's happy and I'm helping her clear the joint out, right?

Hope you're enjoying your summer as much as I am, readers!  

it's summer and it's hot. jump in the pool!

the cast period

this post and a a bunch to follow will be in all lower case with minimum characters (shift buttons are not easy for me these days) and with a lot of typos because this cast on my hand is messing up my blog functioning.  it's cool though because this will be known as the 'cast period' when i'm studied in blogging courses at universities some day, or more likely in case profiling for nut-jobs. 

i think i mentioned in a previous post that this is a kickball injury.  yes, the game we played in recess as a kid.  yes, the ball is big and mushy, so there is no logical answer for how i could manage to hurt myself other than i'm a fragile wuss of a man.

knowing that i would have to get surgery on the finger monday morning, screwing up most physical activity for just about the whole summer, i decided to soak up as much beach volleyball time as possible sunday afternoon by lake michigan in chicago.  volleyball on sundays in the summertime for me is like church to people who go to that sort of thing - people with beliefs and a moral compass.  volleyball is one of the first things i think about when i think of chicago summers, and my whole week is out of whack if i don't get out there.  that being said, i was geeked to get onto the beach, and only an hour or so in, a giant storm comes out of nowhere.  it got suddenly dark with insane winds, all the seagulls were getting the f' out of there in a hurry, and a voice comes over the p.a. telling us to do the same.

oats and i sought refuge by his place for a while and put on the cubs home game to watch for when they pulled the tarp to play ball as a means of gauging when the storm was going to blow over, which it eventually did in a couple of hours.  so i'm hauling balls on my bike back to the beach on the lakeshore drive bike path, and when i'm almost to our courts, this middle aged man i'm about to pass suddenly decides that he needs to do a u-turn right into oncoming traffic without looking.  i actually reasoned in my head that i had zero time to avoid this and just braced for impact, t-boning him, knocking us both off our bikes.  he kept asking if i was okay, and i told him i was - but only to get away from him without swearing at him.  then he asked if my bike was all right, and i saw the chain hanging off and the front tire knocked flat.  still, i said i was fine and locked the thing up to get a few games in before fixing it at the boathouse up the road.

because the back tire still had air, i just flipped it upright and literally ran to the bike shop barefoot.  on my way i heard a squak and felt a shot to the back of my head and immediately knew it was that asshole bird who dive-bombs the back of people's heads.  i wrote a post about him years ago, but i'm too lazy to provide you with a link.  the point is that this was just not a good day for me.  then the bike guy tells me that the wheel is all screwed up and it cost me around 70 bucks.  guess i should have taken the idiot who hit me straight to the shop instead of jumping right into a few rounds of v-ball, but i was sort of in shock and very pissed.

when i got into the shower that night i found some very gnarly bruises and then found a few more scrubbing up before surgery this morning.  i had to tell the doctors where all t he damage was so no one could think or claim that  some whacky stuff went down during the operation. 

this stupid injury is very annoying to me because i'm an extremely active person, and there are very few types of exercise i can do.  also, at my summer job i need to handle things quickly and efficiently (like dealing with each customer for around 12 seconds), which i love, but it's going to be a pisser with this thing on me.  however, the way i see it, there are people in the world with afflictions far worse than this, and many of them had much more critical surgeries down the hall from me this very morning.  as for work, i remember a girl i worked with years ago doing the same job with very little use of one hand, and that was permanent.

it has just been a bad couple of days so i wanted to get it down onto the page, even if i have it more in perspective now.  thanks for listening if you have made it this far into this whopper-long post.  and here's a pic of edward .44 magnum hand, and yeah, i have eyes.  that's just my trademark here at the the gancer:

have gun, will travel - and write corny captions.

The Lobster Man

The last two summers I rode a rickshaw bike/cab as a summer job, but the 4 or 5 summers before that, I was at Navy Pier, taking pictures of tourists.  I'm back on the pier for this summer, and I had my first day back yesterday.  I really like it there.  I have limited responsibility since I'm starting back at entry level, and it's not a job where I have to use my brain a lot - like my real job.  What I do a lot of is getting sun, cracking jokes with customers and coworkers, and just enjoying myself.

Because of all of this, I was in a terrific mood when I saw The Lobster Man walk by.  He is a man who appears to be in his 40's or 50's, has long blond professional wrestling hair and build, always shirtless, always tanned/leathery, and he's always drinking beer outdoors on the pier.  He looks almost exactly like Dog the Bounty Hunter if that helps.  Someone I knew who tended bar out there got to know him a little, and evidently he claims to have had a high profile government job for many years that he couldn't talk about much, which affords him the lifestyle to drink 7 or 8 beers at $7 a pop every other day or so during the summer.  I know another guy who has heard about him and is pretty sure he is the same guy he sees shirtless driving around in a Ferrari. 

So, as I said, I'm already in a great mood when I see the The Lobster Man walking past me on the way to hang the hog (go pee), so I said, "Hey, good to see you, man!" as if I know him personally, which I don't.  He either recognized me, or more likely just played along when he said it that was likewise good to see me.  Strange that I was so stoked to be back on the pier that I just blurted out how happy I was to see The Lobster Man.  It's going to be a good summer.  I'll be having a $7 draft with him out of a small plastic glass with him really soon, and as the beer instantly gets warm from the heat, the two of us will talk about all the men he has killed for this great nation.  

Binge Drinking Recap #325

So yesterday I met HLP, his wife, and their baby out at a very hot and humid Chicago street festival nearby.  I'm really happy for him because I can tell he is totally content.  You know why?  He walks around a festival with tons of hot chicks around with a burp cloth on his shoulder, and when I point it out, he just leaves it there.  He had to go home, but luckily I bumped into some other friends, and Oats came out. 

We ended up at a random Lincoln Park bar because we thought they did karaoke.  Turns out they didn't, but everyone was smiling and we had a good vibe, so we just stuck around.  I like those bars where everyone talks to each other.  It didn't have those huge wolf packs of girls that only want to talk to each other.  One woman was there in a toga.  I mean, it was a really fancy toga, but still a toga.  Her friend said she picked her up and was like, "Okay.  A toga."  She was really nutty, so she kind of pulled it off.  She was nice too, but that didn't stop me from calling her the Iron Sheik and quoting Julius Caesar with an over exaggerated Charlton Heston voice. 

I then achieved a level of drunkenness where the Michael Jackson jokes just started flowing out of me.  That's a good level.  For me at least. 

Long Deserved Idle Time

My summer off from my real job started today. I start my full-time summer job tomorrow, but here’s what I did with my first day off in a long time:

1. I cleaned my bedroom. Since I live with 4 dudes, my bedroom is my safe-haven. I spend a great deal of time here, and as a result, I accumulate a lot of SHIT. Here are some things I found:
a) A wig, 2 joker hats, and numerous wristbands
b) A stamped envelope filled with a credit card bill and a check, signed by me, from February. This must have gotten buried and never sent. When I found things like this I kept thinking of Naked Gun when he’s cleaning out his desk, and he’s like, “The missing evidence from the Kelsey case; I’ll be damned, he WAS innocent.” Then the other guy tells him he got the electric chair years ago. Sorry if the quote wasn’t exact, but the sentiment of me losing important shit rings true.
c) Enough change to buy a summer home sompeplace, and in a related matter, I foresee a trip to a Coinstar real soon. Don’t you love those things? We pay money for a machine to count our money and give us another form of money . . . But the change IS money. ‘Well, yes, but it’s so cumbersome . . . ‘

2. I watched 3 of the 4 episodes in the History of Metal series on VH1. Just when I’m ready to write that channel off as shit, and think that they might as well go back to just showing adult contemporary videos like Gloria Estefan and Phil Collins all day, they come out with something really kick ass like this. The part of the show that really made my day was seeing my second favorite clip from Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years in which guitarist Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. (rumored to be an acronym for We Are Sexual Perverts) attempts to drink himself to death in his pool while his mother sits pool-side. He’s everything I want to be. In case you're wondering, odds are you're not, but just in case, my favorite clip from that film is when the girl wins the Miss Sunset Strip contest, or whatever they call it, and when asked what is next for Miss Sunset Strip, she says she is going to work on her ACTRESSING.

3. I finalized my Summer: Fuck Yeah disc (The title of the disc is an homage to a song from Team America). It was my roommate Neil’s idea for the two of us to each make 80 minutes of music which embodies summertime in Chicago, and we’ll debut them this weekend with some cocktails and friends. Here is the track listing for my disc:

1. Baby, Now That I've Found You 2:34 The Foundations
(Great oldie here, and you’ll see lots of oldies on the list cause any other time of year they can annoy me, but they rock in the summer. When I searched for a photo just now I noticed that they were an interracial band, about half and half no less. I always like to see that for some reason. I suppose there is something about me being two parts social worker and one part rock and roller which equates to the idea of a good interracial band being likely to give me a warm, fuzzy feeling, which it did.)

2. Lively Up Yourself 5:11 Bob Marley & The Wailers
(I needed a Bob song, and I always liked this one. How it’s not on the Legend disc I have no idea.

3. I Gotta Feeling (Just Nineteen) 3:30 Eagles Of Death Metal
(I just saw these guys live and they’re a lot of fun. No real reason for this song to be on here, except that I wanted a couple of friends to hear this track.

4. Just Like Heaven 3:32 The Cure
(This song makes me want to frolic around an open field like a nymph. No, not the type that sleeps with everything that everything that moves, the type from mythology full of whimsy and carefree fun.)

5. Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) 2:55 Looking Glass
(This is a tale of a lonely bar maid on a pier in love with sailors who will never be able to marry her, due to their devotion to “the sea.” The nautical theme is kind of summery I suppose, but again, I think all oldies qualify for summertime songs in my book.)

6. Shake Your Rump 3:19 Beastie Boys
(This is booty shaking good time)

7. Bananas And Blow 3:34 Ween
(I had to get Ween on the list, and this song qualifies for summer with that cabana flavor)

8. I Saw Her Again Last Night 3:14 Mamas And The Papas
(Another good oldie)

9. Me and Julio down by the schoolyard - Simon & Garfunkel (live)
(I like this live version a lot better than the recorded one. Fun song.

10. Werewolves of London 3:20 Warren Zevon
(Does anyone else picture Tom Cruise wielding a pool cue in Color of Money when they hear this song?)

11. Stay A Little Longer 3:25 Willie Nelson (live)
(This song sums up the summer lifestyle and friends being bad influences upon someone).

12. Fantastic Voyage 5:34 Coolio
(Who can forget that video when Coolio puts a gazillion people in his trunk and takes all their asses to Da Beach for one big ass party?)

13. Lake Shore Drive 3:49 Aliotta, Haynes, Jeremiah
(This is the perfect song to play when you’re riding down the highway for which the song was named. I could not believe a band that made such a cool song could possibly suck, but I played their greatest hits once, and sure enough, they sucked.)

14. Train in Vain (Stand by Me) 3:11 The Clash
(Fun song for a band that’s supposed to be all about Punk and fuck everybody sentiments.)

15. Panama 3:32 Van Halen
(I wanted to put Jump on here for the Chicago Cubbies, but when I played the start of this one, it just seems more about the summertime cruising and rocking, etc.)

16. Thank God I'm A Country Boy 3:24 John Denver
(This is a VERY guilty pleasure, but try to tell me it’s not infectious.)

17. Its A Beautiful Morning 2:31 Young Rascals
(It is not an exaggeration to say that this song is beautiful. Who actually says, “It’s a beautiful morning. I think I’ll go outside for a while and just smile?” When that’s the extent of your plans, it truly is a beautiful morning.

18. I Get Around 4:19 2 Pac Shakur
(There’s a lot of, to quote Wedding Crashers, “strange ass” floating around in the summer, and I had to have a song to cover that element; this one delivers in spades.

19. My Sweet One 2:07 Phish
(Phish is a summer band for me. I always revisit them this time of year.)

20. Glad Girls 3:49 Guided By Voices
(Great pick-me-up song on a disc and at one of their live shows. Every show I saw GBV live this song would kick in after 12 b-sides nobody knew, and everyone would jump up and down in unison.

21. Sweet Freedom 4:07 Michael McDonald
(What a dorky song, but it makes me think of Running Scared (a not so great Chicago movie) and the Cubbies (who were not so great in 1986). I guess it just reminds me of a summer in my childhood and gives me a chance to entertain people with my dead-on Michael McDonald impression.

22. Summer Babe [Winter Version] 3:16 Pavement
(Beyond the simple fact that this song title has summer in it and it’s by one of the best bands ever, it also is a song that makes me happy.

Well, what started as a quick blog turned into an entirely too huge blog. If you’ve made it this far, or were nice enough to skim this far, I hope you enjoyed a little taste of what it’s like to be the type of guy who sets out to write about what he did on his day off, but ends up with an entry with track list descriptions being longer than the actual subject matter. Good day.