Utah hicks, Joe Biemel bobblehead night and accidental prostitutio

It's all over now. After a hair under 3000 miles of driving, countless slabs of beef jerky, countless bedbugs from unsanitary hotels and an interesting night in Vegas I'm comfortably sitting in my living room in Burbank, California. The last thing I want to do is write about the tediousness of counting down the miles until you reach that oh-so-eventful California/Nevada border. So, I'm gonna make fun of stuff instead.

I'll begin with a compliment because it's good to endear yourself to an audience before you call them a bunch of retarded schoolchildren: it's just good sense. I must say that the drive from Denver to Vegas was phenomenal. I got up crazy early so I hit the Rockies right as the sun was coming up (pictures forthcoming) and it was really quite something. Once I left the Rockies I drove through the high deserts of Utah which were surprisingly interesting as well. You'd go up, you'd go down and sometimes you could stop and take pictures of rocks. It really needs to be seen to be believed. It's difficult to appreciate natural beauty when you live in shitass Allston/Brighton for a year. The closest thing to natural beauty on Comm Ave was the man-made lake by BC which wasn't even a little bit natural. Kudos to Colorado and Utah for redeeming the otherwise dogshit mid-western part of this country. Nevada gets love for Vegas and essentially creating the ultimate escapist paradise which, oddly enough, somehow includes a nightly performance of the comedic stylings of Carrot Top. I shit you not. He's got his own billboard.

The fun part for me started waaaay before I even got to Vegas. It began in a little town called Thompson Springs, Utah. It's important to remember that calling Thompson Springs a town is disingenuous because it's little more than a Shell station and the broads that work there. The two who I encountered had little use for books, combs or dentistry but they seemed like good folks. They told me about the typhoons that came through last night.







Wait for it.......






It's coming.........






Typhoons. In Utah.

Fuck.

Please tell me these two are felons and therefore are not allowed to vote.

So, yeah, tyhpoons apparently have been a problem in Utah because whenever it's windy and rainy at night that means a typhoon is happening. Because as everybody knows all a typhoon really is is wind and rain at night. Right? well, not really. If you were to simply look up typhoon you would find that it is impossible, by definition, for a typhoon to happen in Utah. Or Nevada. Or Kansas. Or really any other fucking state in the Continental United States because tyhpoons occur in the NORTHWEST PACIFIC OCEAN. Whatever, they had good beef jerky.

My evening in Vegas got started off right when a 50-year-old French woman started explaining to me in a completely, unfixably, beat-to-shit broken English that she had never been to Vegas and she loved America because Yellowstone National Park was pretty and New York City was "wide". It was nice to hear a foreigner appreciate my home country but some things they don't teach you in those "Learn Engrish!" CD sets and these things are non-verbal cues. When I turn around and start humming/whistling "Midnight Train to Georgia" that means I'm pretty much done talking for the time being. Needless to say, once I got out of line I couldn't wait to start gambling.

My anxiousness to get to the blackjack table turned out well for the Tropicana/New York New York/The Luxor/MGM Grand because I lost a lot of money very, very quickly. After I got up from the table and realized if I didn't slow down I'd have to pay for my drinks that night I decided I'd go on the installment "win back the money you just stupidly lost" plan. I worked in 30 dollar increments. If I was up 30 dollars (3 hands) I'd leave the table, walk around and finish my Jamison on the rocks. Then I'd return to a different table and do the same thing. It was a perfect plan that had absolutely no chance of failing.

But then I got hammered.

I'd actually almost won all my money back and I decided to "raise the stakes" (see: "lose it all quickly"). That was the end of my gambling and I was in a sour mood. My sour mood was made much better after chatting up a few broads and the rest of the evening is not something I really feel like putting up on the internets for all to see. Let's just say I was forced to make some difficult decisions and as we all know the reasoning process breaks down after your 9th whiskey. I'll only share this one part because it was the peak of my decision making prowess and it was only 1 in the morning.

I'm walking into the Tropicana and this broad I've never seen before stares me in the eye and says "Hey." Now, I was drunk and a little flummoxed so I gave a look that indicated that I had no fucking idea who she was or why she was talking to me. I know my look conveyed this because she soon made both of those things rather clear.

Broad: What are you doin' tonight?
Me: It's my only night here. So probably a few board games. Shoots n Ladders, maybe.
(long long long pause)
Me: Uh...what are you doin?
Broad: Goin' home with you I hope.
Me: Oh.....oh, sorry that's not really my thing.
Broad: Having sex?
Me: No, paying for it.
Broad: (not pleased and getting defensive) Well....everybody pays for it.

And she stormed off. When a hooker storms off away from you in a fit of righteous indignation then you've really got to question exactly what sort of life you are leading. It sucked too because her and almost every other hooker I saw were pretty damn good lookin'. The problem I'd have had, besides the whole ethical question of paying for sex, would be the guilt. I'd try to reform her or something. It'd be Pretty Woman but with acting.

I woke up the next morning feeling like 215 ponds of shit. I grabbed coffee, Carl's Jr, my final tank of gas and get the crap out of the awesome/horrifying experience that is Las Vegas.

My first night in LA was a real larf. I ate french dip and some place that began with the letters 'Ph' and that's about all I can remember. I found out that tailgating in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium is strictly prohibited. That prohibition did not stop myself and Stacy from pounding an Old R before entering the game. That's when we got our Joe Biemel bobble heads. The guy's an average middle reliever. Apparnently, he was voted by the fans because they simply could not go another year without a bobblehead bearing the head of everybody's favorite relief pitcher. In our collective rage and hatred for all things Dodger, Stacy and I ripped the head off of her Biemel bobblehead and showed it to everyone to let them know that being from Philadelphia pretty much means you are an angry bitter person. After they Phils blew the lead and eventually lost in the 9th, I ripped his body in half and turned it into a prison shank for protection. We'd kind of been talking a whole fuckton of shit the whole game so the peanut gallery was really letting us hear it when the Dodgers won. I stand by every single one of my witty barbs.

I live 5 minutes from a driving range thats on the side of a mountain. It never closes because it's never cold. So far I'm doin' just fine.

Holla