You Dirty Rat

So I had just come home from out of town... i don't remember where, so for excitement's sake, well say uh, Portugal. It was lovely. Upon my return, Mike tells me that frankenstein had brought a huge rat into the house while I was away. I don't believe him - this was SLC not dirty NYC - we don't have giant sewer rats.
The next morning I wake up to see Frank having a staring contest with a clothing bag of stuff i was getting rid of in the hall. Anytime this ADHD cat is focused on anything, it generally ends poorly for all involved. This was no exception. Thinking that he had his weekly mouse/ bird (of which we kept a running tally on the fridge; 9/4 at the time), i pulled the bag away from the wall to see a HUGE freaking rat. "Holy crap," were my only words as I pushed the bag back toward the wall with my foot. Curse Mike for being right! The rat was back - its body the size of a 20oz coke bottle with an almost equal length pink, worm-like tail.
My interference was the catalyst for the rat's escape attempt, and he bolted into the living room with Frank in hot pursuit. There he cornered himself under a table and sat in defense position staring down frank, the great hunter (so great that I still have no clue how he carried that thing in to begin with).
Mike had caught it in a big box, and had ran it 5 blocks away and dumped it out. I was now scrambling down the driveway in my boxer briefs to grab the same box - my neighbors staring at me like i am crazy. So I grab the box and a my putter as the instrument with which to guide him into said box. Meanwhile Neighbor mike and son come in to see what all the commotion is - My question: "what the hell do I do with it once I get it in the box?" To which his only response was, "well, you are holding a golf club..."
That is no good. I am no wuss about most things, and I have no trouble killing stuff like bugs or strippers (because they're already dead on the inside), but listening to bones crunching beneath my fingers is a little much for me. So I corner Ratonio and start shewing him into the box fairly aggressively with the club - the whole time he is nipping at it and HISSING at me. Yeah - I didn't know what sound a pissed off rat made either. I get it in the box, shut the lid and take a deep breath. Now What?
I decide to call the toughest person I know, my mom, for advice. She surely will come to my rescue. "Mom, I just caught a huge (expletive deleted) rat! What do I do?" Calmly, she asks, "Do you have a shovel?" Dammit! No help again. I guess was going to have to do this on my own.
But I am smarter than some stupid rat, right? I will simply outwit the bastard - princess bride style. So I go the the bathroom medicine cabinet, break out a bottle of sleeping pills, grind them down in a mortar and pestle, and mix it into some peanut butter on top of a tortilla. Genius! Now it's lunchtime for both of us. Worried that he may try and chew through the box, I put it in Kevin's enclosed shower in the basement, and go out for grub.
An hour passes, and I am excited to go home and find Ratos Ratos Jr in his eternal slumber of doom! No. Such. Luck. That little SOB didnt even touch the stuff. So onto Plan B. Oh wait, I don't have a plan B...
The next brilliant idea I have is to throw him into the big city garbage can, and pouring in bleach and ammonia: a simple mustard gas death-combo. This seems like the best possible way... for about 5 minutes. Upon further review, I decide this may be a terrible idea. I don't know what its effects are - aside from killing you, and I only want HIM to die, not both of us. So the move becomes poison for just one of us, with the classic D-Con waiting game. I really don't give a damn if he knows it's poison or not, eventually he'll get so hungry he'll eat it anyway, and I'll have to win the war he has waged! I double check to make sure the shower door is snugly secured, and head to the store.



Albertson's Aisle Five: I am looking down at an array of blessed pest products that should help me finally alleviate my problem; his life. This is the moment when Beth calls to see what I am doing - "Can't talk, buying poison, killing rats."
"WHAT? Aaron, if you kill that rat I am not having sex with you for TWO WEEKS."
Abstinence = Aaron's Kryptonite. I sit in stunned silence on the other end of the phone for a solid 40 seconds before trying to renegotiate, "but baby!?" .... "TWO. WEEKS."
I should never have answered that phone! She says that there are places that will take it in humanely. I remind her its a rat, not a puppy, but she is insistent. She also thinks its kind of cute and names it Templeton. Shoot me now. Another amount of time passes, and this has been all i have done all day. Beth calls and confirms that no place will take our disease ridden sewer monster. I feign surprise with a playful facetiousness. They do tell her some fun facts about rats though - like that they can sniff their way back up to 9 miles.
And so the headache grows. The only solution in Beth's gorgeous little eyeballs, is to drive it beyond 9 miles away and let it go. The box has been getting dripped on the shower for damn near 4 hours now and I am worried about its integrity. Beth arrives at my house and we quickly transfer Templeton into an old kitchen garbage can - duct tape the lid closed and start driving. I reset my odometer and drive him 12 miles, just for good measure, up Emigration Canyon. I hear him snarling through his yellowed, jagged teeth as I pick the trash can up, and decide its best to come back for it later... like when it's empty. I cut the tape, give a quick love kick to the can's side and let him go...right where I end up moving 6 months later. Fortunately, we never met again and the only reminder of him was the new category on Frank's death tally:
9 mice, 4 birds, 1-2 huge freaking rats.

A Week in a Monastery (pt 1): Blue Man Group

Monks:
They Came. They Saw.
They Conquered Boston.
Monks are most often represented as devout buddhist men like the Dalai Lama, living at high altitudes in Tibet, where they never speak or have fun. Anyone who knows our household or our vices can predict that our "monks" are the exact opposite. They are rather our close crew of friends from SLC who happened to wear robes to our Halloween party one year. Here is Part One of their recent trip to Boston:

Day One: "The Don" arrived bright and early at the crack of 9:00am. This is abnormally early to be awake, but since it was a celebratory reunion, I greeted him in my pajamas like any true friend would - with shots lined up along the countertop.
This was going to be the start of an exhausting week.

After pouring a solid set of starter shots down the hatch, we energetically and enthusiastically began our trek into Boston. With a couple of 1/2 pint flasks, we hit Newbury st to check out the local talent and ended up in front of Trinity Church - which seems to be where we always accidentally end up. Low and Behold, a hot dog cart awaits our anxious stomachs and we grab the best they offer - a sausage dog covered in sauteed green peppers and onions. We take a seat on a bench and begin to enjoy our tasty snack, when the local transient population took a liking to our presence and our lunch. "That looks goooood. How much d'ja get that fo?" Their verbal disbelief that we paid $5.50 each lasted a solid 5 minutes. "How much did you pay for that stereotype perpetuating Tall Can?" $2. Trust the homeless to know where to find the best deals on booze. After we ate in front of them and bullshit about only thing we had in common - alcoholism - we hit up a BosTix office. We found that we could get some half-price BlueMan tickets, and since this was a much better idea than buying homeless people hotdogs, so we spent our money here instead.
BLUE MAN: Naturally, we were wrecked out of our gourd for the show...which ended up being a peculiarly perfect way to do it. Neither Jesse nor I had been before and sat back, dumbfoundeed in disbelief that what we were witnessing was actually real. In addition to the cult-like, perfectly sync'd audience reading from the numerous scrolling marquees, was an eerie crowd participation that seemed too surreal to be legitimate. Example: Everyone, I mean EVERYONE (even the huge, tattooed muscleheads in biker leather) had tied on ninja headbands out of white crepe paper. The only saving grace to this overwhelming feeling of being surrounded by puppets was the fact that we could only see half of the stage, so any time something was out of sight, it helped ground us back to reality.
The best part though is the end. Our shitty, last row seats proved invaluable in the grand finale where 100's of trees were shamelessly wasted. Behind us were massive rolls of paper towels, suspended by paint rollers that had been wall mounted. At the end of the show, the Blue Men start unraveling these from all over the auditorium. A flood of paper rushes toward the stage from everywhere to create a sea of white in the center of this little theatre. Now we were participating ourselves. A lumberjack's abhorrence couldn't have fueled a faster killing of trees. After we finished our rolls, the couple next to us saw how much we enjoyed it and gave us theirs. Bad Idea. It was off the roller, so we now began tearing of huge lengths and transforming them into massive paper snowballs and beaning the rows of happy families in front of us without reservation. I don't know if I have ever smiled wider or laughed harder. A snowball execution of helpless, unknowing faces. I only wish I could have heard their tears over my roaring, maniacal laughter.

Great times at Good Time

It started out like any other day: I was plucking out pound after pound of nose hair and weaving it into lockets to send my fan club - the best way to spend your days off, trust me. On about my 30th one, I got an invitation to go to the closing celebration at Good Time - a veritable cornucopia of childhood nostalgia. I meditated for a moment in preparation of pummeling some fools in skee ball, then out the door to enjoy the final day this place would ever be open. (soon to be replaced by an Ikea! Hot damn!)
Naturally, this is a place best spent with lots of friends, so the mass text i sent got almost no response. Whatever. I make my own fun and it's really easy when you have ADD. There ended up being three of us (in addition to the dozen people I didn't take time to get to know.)
This place is in the industrial anus of the city. To get there, we went into the highest crime density part of Boston, ran across a 6-lane highway, passed a bunch of smokestacks (that looked casually simpson-esque), and trekked the glass/ hypodermic needle covered ground.
This place was what dreams were made of...if your dreams have drunken, tattooed white trash families in wife beaters, weaving through clouds of cigarette smoke, that is. That aside, we had all one could ask: Free food, batting cages, go carts, an arcade, handfuls of hot jail bait, and a BAR with cheap pitchers.

Done. Downing three pitchers and wandering through a maze of arcade games can't be wrong. They may look like shit compared to my 360, but I was all for it. After hitting the classics like time crisis & cruisin world, I was ready for some "physical" activity. I got my ass kicked at skee ball despite my ego, so I decided to play an individual sport: the throw-the-football-through-the-hole game thingy. I have a great arm, so I surely couldn't fail at this! Well in my stride and just drilling them through, the unexpected unexpectedly occured: the cinematic slow-motion ricochet; The football somehow bounces back out of the hole, over my head (even though I'm so tall), nails a little kid in the chest and sends him to the sticky ground. My first inclination was to run, but my score was too good and I wanted to finish. So after my timer blared, I rushed over to check on him, and his mom immediately followed. "What happened!?" I told her and somehow still looked like the hero? Her bedroom eyes were beckoning like she could use another illegitimate child, so i told her what any smart man in my shoes would have: "Uh, yeah...I've gotta go play some video games now..."

Giggling to myself at how much fun I was having, I stumbled across god's gift to generation X: The Ninja Turtles Arcade Game. One other stranger joined and it was on. After pumping in token after unaccounted for token, we reigned victorious! So much fun that I decided to beat it a second time!
In the dwindling minutes of the night, I gave my Over 21 bracelet to some hoodlums that had tried to steal my beer, and set up a "hammock date" with a girl for the Ikea opening day. With a contact name like Samantha Good Times, she can't be bad.

What better way to relive middle school than without the bowl-cut and glasses?

POSTSCRIPT: In googling the Good Time Photo, I found out about the murders that have been perpetrated there.
P.P.S Girls on the Wave Runner Game look far too erotic for their own good. The only waves they were riding were the waves of lust!

P-P-P-Pig Roast

There are few things that are genius in the day-to-day schemes people come up with. BBQ's are always a good idea, but a frozen beef patty is nowhere near the level of what I have just had: My first Pig Roast.
Picture a 125lb porker, disembowled and skewered on a stainless steel, motorized spit. This is no Ronco, "set it and forget it" rotisserie (which I'll absolutely buy someday), this is a 6 ft pit, filled with hundreds of perfect, white coals.
The founders of the feast, Matt & Mac, started the laborous cooking process at 6am and let this bad boy slow roast for a solid FOURTEEN HOURS. Now this is someone else's hard work I'd like to enjoy!

Here lies the real problem of this event: Alcohol. On more than one occasion I have been asked if I am an alcoholic? Of course not. And here's my logic:
1> There's a difference between alcoholism and deliberately drinking.
2> Alcoholics don't look forward to taking a break after a long binge.
3> Alcoholics go somewhere so they can drink, Socialites drink to go somewhere.

If this doesn't make sense, you're probably an alcoholic. "No," you say? Well they say denial is a big sign too, so case in point.

Anyway, we are loaded when we arrive, anticipating eating immediately to help counterbalance, but the feast won't be ready for couple more hours. This only causes us to drink more in the meantime. I have on a brand new, expensive shirt so I immediately get Red Otter Pop spilled on it. This vexes me. I am terribly vexed. But I am also fairly inebriated, so I still feel great. While most people drink and get beer goggles, I get narcissistic and extremely flirtatious.
I chat with a cute girl in the kitchen, whose name i forget, whose number i throw away, and ask her to make me a drink. She asks "how strong?" and i say "surprise me!"
This is a bad idea. After 3 of her concoctions, I am literally* able to blow fire (*figuratively). The party heads to the roofdeck to watch the sunset and drink some delicious mircobrewed kegs. I remember little beyond this.
I hit on a different girl, who is not amused by my slurred speech, and proceed to tell the guy following her around not to look so desperate. He informs me it's his fiance. I say "maybe she doesn't know." He looks confused, and I simply walk away to let him ponder what that means. I am staggeringly drunk. My roommate puts me in a cab, and I pass out before I finish sitting. I wake up the next day in my bed to hear all the other outrageous gestures and conversations I had, and see a trail of my clothes from the front door. This is my signature. I don't even remember if the pig was good. If you're gonna embarrass yourself, you may as well make it funny.

Durian Durian

There's a lot to be said about the cultures of other countries; their customs, traditions, their delicacies... Unfortunately, in this case, we're saying that some should be forgotten because they are dumb and awful.
Southeast Asia, home of the Durian Fruit. This formidable contender weighs in from 4-7lbs and wears a coat of armor that is fully capable of drawing blood, so that the men walking beneath their looming branches are required to wear helmets when harvesting them.
During bar trivia Sunday, our friend Street Traffic Greg, boasts that he has found one of God's abominations in an obscure oriental market in the city and is going to try it Tuesday night for all interested. I am leary of his invitation, presuming that he wishes those around him to share in his foreseeable mistake. I crave excitement, even on new-fruit-small scale, so I accept. The big night rolls around and question as to the means of opening this fortress-fruit comes up. How do you break into heavily guarded produce? A few years ago, my cousin brought me an actual handmade machete from deep in El Salvador's womb. Obviously, I have never had a chance to use it, so defying all intellectual objection, I decide this is the way: Death By Machete. So I roll up my pant legs, weave the machete through my belt, put on a pirate hat and head to ground zero.
Despite its intimidating outward apprearance, the Durian is best known for its funk. Its scent ranges broadly from molding, sweaty gym socks to a molding, sweaty compost heap. Many places make it clear that while you are welcome, your stink-fruit it not, and take security measures to ensure compliance - like, checking bags and purses with their highly trained stank snouts.
Awaiting a sulfuric toxin to engage my gag reflex, I do not anticipate an enjoy-me-in-a-salad type of fruit, but rather the I-immediately-regret-this-decision type of fruit. And that's what I get. Gently persuading it open with the machete, we carefully split it into its three sections and are left looking a bit disgusted and a bit bewildered. Picture a fetus made of egg with the texture of oily, yellowish custard. And we're supposed to eat this. Some people crazy enough to like Durian claim that the worse it smells the better it tastes. This is not so. Your olfactory sense makes up a large portion of your sense of taste, so even science hates the durian fruit. I have my bite, swallow, and plan on it metastisizing in my stomach as it grows into an alien spore and bursts out through my chest, meanwhile vigorously scrubbing the scent off my hands. Being a good friend, I put a sample snack into a ziplock (read as: petri dish) to take home and make Mike try. He is less of a girl about it, but not by much.

Who Doesn't Want To Be a Millionaire?

There is a luxury in regular, liberal states that we do not have the benefit, or burden of, in Salt Lake: Good Old Fashion Gambling. There is no legalized gaming whatsoever in Utah, even to the extent of cracking down on Bingo halls and revoking their business liscenses. I can't help but laugh at the mental image of a Swat-Team of bored cops, kicking in the door to a nursing home and billy-clubbing a bunch of geriatrics for "illegally gambling" away their green jell-o?
The novelty of being able to buy lotto tickets, scratch & wins, and travel mere miles to a Dog Track has yet to fade for me. Especially when friends from Utah come to visit - it's actually a treat to be able to throw money away every time you walk into a 7-11 or liquor store because it feels like rebelling somehow. So, this brings me to the point: I am about to strike it rich and leave behind the hoi polloi. A bunch of people from my work and I have collectedly gone in on around 70 tickets for the $196M jackpot that is being held tonight! Mega Millions spans twelve states, so having an innate gift for statistics, and having taken 2 stat courses, I have a 1/12 chance of winning x70= 70/12. For those of you who can't do math, try to keep up.
After taxes, my share should equate to around $10.8M. With that much money I'll be able to buy anything! Even a lottery ticket!
And thus, the position of feeding me grapes and fanning me with oversized feathers is now accepting applications.

What would your first 5 purchases be if you hit the lotto?
And don't say a shark tank or Scarlett Johannsen, because I'm two steps ahead of you.

Cape Cod (abridged version)

This is an abridged version of the tailend of the evening on Cape Cod. (note that this part of the story starts past midnight - excluding the 12 hours of adventure before this)

12:10am - We arrive in Hyannis and take 12 shots in 12 minutes. This feels like a great idea.

12:25am - Enter RooBar nightclub. Get shots and beer, and proceed to drink whatever wounded soldiers we find. After dancing off against a bachelorette party - and winning like we do - we were challenged to a late night game of kickball. Alas, the bump & grind session had only provoked their now angry bf's, husbands, and guys that wished they were us, so they flaked on the game. (pffssh..cockblocks)

1:00am - Armed with a fifth each, we are off to find a place to crash... immediately rejected twice from getting a hotel room - once because they saw us playing frisbee and drinking in the parking lot, and the other time because "they don't rent rooms to guys," presuming that 6 guys dressed like us were destined to gang-bang the night away. Understandable... donning silly hats including a crab, orca, pirate, fisherman, "Midwest" 80's beanie, and a pink cowboy hat i would have been suspicious myself...not to mention that we all had our faces painted at a charity carnival and were glitter-plastered with unicorns and aquatic wildlife.

1:45am - We realize that we have only walked 1/2 block in the search of another hotel in the last 45 mins... so naturally, sleeping on top of mcdonalds is the only viable option remaining and will put us in prime territory for some breakfast McDeliciousness. Since it's cold, the only way to stay warm until then will be excessive drinking. Only 2 of us make it up. We move on.

2:00am - Using the bad directions we received from the last hotel clerk (who is a douche) we continued the hotel hunt in the exact opposite way of any such thing. Now is when we realize we lost george. We call repeatedly and get no answer. Expect the worst with George.

2:45am - we have walked 45 mins to the middle of nowhere. Brett starts running to see if he can find a hotel. Mike is on the roof of an ice skating rink. Ben is trying to run up a telephone pole to do a backflip (pause for mental image of him repeatedly landing on his head). Frank is not pleased. George is likely dead. I am wondering if the booze is next to his corpse somewhere.

3:00am - we finish off the alcohol we have and Mike realizes he left the rest in a bag in the Mcdonald's parking lot. Idiot. We take brett's camera and film a podcast with Mike ranting about Jesus trying to find a hotel in Bethleham. I see something shiny and get distracted.

3:15 am - Ben & I form a search party for the MIA alcohol. We find george in the driveway of a firestation drunk-dialing EVERYONE he knows, except us of course. We tell him to stay put for 5 minutes while we try and rescue the booze. We go, it's gone, and there is no doubt an elated homeless guy blacking out somewhere on our dime. Good for him. We return to find George just where we left him and are surpised he actually stayed...until we realize the reason is that he's so drunk he cannot stand. So now, our group is reunited but with the news that there is no hotel within 2 miles any direction. Oh, hell. Now we have to backtrack all the way back to the car. En route, we actually find our booze-bag. The bum took everything else, but left a bottle of captain and the goldschlager with no lid. I guess even the dumpster-diving homeless have standards above ours.

4:00am - we are back where we started 3 hours ago. Cops keep passing as we pile into the car. One stops next to us in the street and watches as we try to heave george's body into the backseat. He looks like shit and it is easy to see we are all trashed. Still wearing silly hats and facepaint, we are surely fucked. The cop slowly drives away. We flip a U-turn and realize we are on a one-way street. If that cop is watching we are really screwed now as this traffic violation is the probable cause he needs to pull us over. We go the opposite direction, awaiting our inevitable arrests. It never happens.

4:30am - Enter Holiday Inn Express (we feel smarter already). Brett and I being the most convincingly sober drunks in our group, we field the front desk to get a room with two Queen beds. The clerk thinks we about to go toss each other's salads, and the look on his face shows it. We BS a story about how we are doctor's from Beth Israel hospital and in town for a Cancer Survivor charity event. I boast that I am the youngest resident surgeon EVER. We make small talk about fixing cleft pallets in cental america and how rewarding it is to do what we do. Saving lives....with a glittery purple squid on my face and hair that rivals Doc Brown's.
We get everyone into the room. 2 DOUBLE beds for 6 grown men. George lands on the first sprawled out like the vetruvian man. He is passed the point of no return. We immediately pull the entire comforter and george off onto the floor. You know that trick where you pull the tablecloth out from underneath the glasses and plates, but everything stays where it should? Picture the exact opposite. He lands, hard, but doesn't wake up. We roll him onto his stomach and check his pulse to prevent Neglegent Homicide charges in the morning. This seems adequate enough.

6-6:30am - For a full half-hour Mike makes throat clearing noises that sound like a seagull fighting Gollum in his larynx. Everyone wakes up but him. I punch him in the ribs out of spite.

730am - George gets up to use the restroom. He wakes everyone up by making whooping noises while on the john. He continues having a two-sided, one-man conversation about how to get to atlantic city. We giggle ourselves back to sleep.

11:00am - hotel checkout. George thinks he has lost his shoe. It's in the car, but we lie so he has to walk around like a jackass with one bare foot. Before breakfast, george and I decide to finish the Goldschlager. I am curious if little gold foil flakes will make my dump look pretty. We interrupt breakfast to go to the parking lot and leave a note for our server reading "Petting Wolves. See You Soon." And this is acutally what we were doing. Another patron had a timberwolf (named timber, because he's not clever) and a timberwolf-huskie mix. An actual wolf and a half. Fucking intimidating. 130 pounds of pure muscle, and as scary as it was impressive. We finish breakfast and george goes to destroy the bathroom. To make him feel worse, we leave while he's shotgun blasting the porcelain. In place of the car, we leave his shoe. We hide in the bushes expecting him to find it while we giggle at his misfortune, but he doesn't. Brett goes stealth to grab the shoe and throw it at george's back - it lands on the roof of the restaurant.

1:00pm - Shenanigans continue as we head home drinking and trying to find horseshoes.

5:00pm we find the jager in the trunk.
2 days later we found the bottle of rum.
6 days later we found the bottle of vodka.