Journey to the Homeland

Took a lil' vaca to my native land last week. A story or two will follow but here's a few highlights.

The reason why I held my poo from LAX through DEN to OMA. Cleanest. Facilities. Ever.

Even graffiti in Nebraska is good natured though I don't think fighting racism with homophobic barbs is the best way to go.

Skyfari!

If I were the king of the jungle and confined to a glass cage, I'd tea bag the world too.

The most bad ass shark in all of Nebraska.



Jellyfish.

Leave it to the greatest bar in the world to still have been accepting checks in 2009.

Penis of the Plains, Cock of the Countryside, Hard-on of the Heartland, Wanker of the West, Meat of the Mid-West, Schlong of the City, Dick of Downtown, Phallus of the Farmland, The Length of Lincoln, The Prick of the Prairie, The Gear of God's Country.

Tom Osborne is not a piggy back ride dispenser.



Woolly Mammoth!



A bargain at twice the price.



Thunder/hailstorm!

Safe to say I've broken just about everything listed in the Conestoga Mall Code of Conduct.

I knew there was a good reason I was holding back on cheeseburger consumption.

All this for six bucks. Can you say cheaper than Mexico?



Reminiscing about two summers of sheer terror.

More fan art!

Nothing goes together like unicorns, rainbows and cannibalism.

Wonder if Larry was in the same platoon as Walter Sobchak

One of my favorite stupid things to do is read the Letters to the Editor section of my hometown newspaper. They're often hilarious, frightening, atrociously written and sometimes all three which makes for a very entertaining read.

Take this one by Larry Wajda for example. He starts out strong. Seriously, that first paragraph is the start of a movie right there but ol'Larry ain't about the prose. And he didn't got to the 'Nam only to be told 40 years later to wear his seatbelt and smoke outside.

Too many choices being taken away

By Larry Wajda
Ord

Published: Sunday, July 12, 2009 12:24 AM CDT

July 4, 1968, did not exist for me. I crossed the International Dateline at exactly midnight. I was on my way back from Vietnam, where I thought I was fighting to preserve the freedoms and rights of choice of the American people.

However, I now find that other people have the right to order me and my friends to stay outside, in what could be a 20 to 40 mile an hour subzero blizzard, if we want to go to a bar to celebrate New Year's Eve. Also these same people have the right to order me to wear a seat belt even if I drive across the street.

How many more of my rights of choice are they going to take away before I die.

I do love though how the last line in Larry's letter isn't a question but a statement. Nobody is gonna tell Larry to use a question mark.

Sorry if all the awesome melts your computer

First up, I received this little nugget of joy from my buddy Kjeld.

You are not on drugs. You're simply looking at a tire cover featuring a rainbow and a unicorn holding a very large gun. It's hard to tell but based on the girth of the piece I'm guessing Springfield 1911. On a related note, I'm having trouble deciding if this tire cover is the gayest thing ever or just straight up gangster.

Second, my friend Lucy sent me this photo of the Michael Jackson and his baby mama.

Lucy, being astute as always, noticed that Debbie was photographed wearing the Sweetest. Shirt. Ever. Now the dilemma with Debbie is if she's like totally serious about her shirt and is really into wolves or if she's a hipster who just happened to have birthed the seed of MJ.

Personally, I'm leaning towards Debbie being into wolves because I can't really remember ever seeing a hipster who looks like Hulk Hogan with smaller tits.

A little gift from my good buddy Jeff...

This is Jeff. Before proceeding, see if you can figure out what makes his shirt rather shocking.

Once you've figured out the Olsen twins started out in show business as babies, then these pics he recently emailed me will be much more understandable.

This is Jeff's arm.




This is Jeff's other arm.

At least he'll be able to Captain Pike his way through life if he ever takes a shotgun blast to the throat and no longer has the ability to speak.

Also, he should be very glad his armpits never crossed paths with my dear mother circa summer of 1991.

Back then I was starting the puberty and the first and only thing to show up was hair in my underarm area. I was 5' 7" and weighed a buck thirty with a full stomach but I had armpit hair down to my elbows. Armpit hair which my dear mother made me shave.

OK, I think I've got everything as awkward as it can get around these parts so I'll just stop there and continue with my therapist.

If only this Prius ran on rainbows and magic.

Apologies for the quality of the camera phone pic, but if you concentrate on the photo for half a second you will notice this Prius has been decked out in a ocean motif complete with Mother Earth covering the back window and a pod of dolphins swimming across the bumper.

Really, was this necessary?

If the owner of this car cared about the earth that much, they wouldn't be driving a car in the first place let alone a Prius and they certainly wouldn't be driving said car to the airport to pick somebody up when public transit from the airport is available.

And even if they couldn't commit to not having a car, you'd think they could have at least had the good judgment to not wrap their ride in a giant sticker that's going to be peeled off the instant the car changes owners.

But whatevs, at least with the ocean motif this big wad of waste will blend right into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

From the File Marked "Greatest Days Ever" Pt. 2

If you're just tuning in, and there's really no good reason why you should be considering Part 1 is just below, the story left off with my roommate Aaron and I on a quest for much needed extra credit so that we wouldn't fail the History of Rock Music class we were taking over the summer.

We found a possible source of extra credit thanks to a classified ad in the paper. Some silly goose was selling a pair of tickets to the KISS show in Kansas City the following night.

We didn't think there was a chance in hell such hot tickets would still be available but we called anyway. The guy on the other end of the phone said they were still up for sale and that if we wanted them we better show up quick because he was heading out the door. Apparently his snakes needed feeding and he was fresh out of mice. I felt his pain and frustration. I always hate it when that happens.

Aaron and I high tailed it over to his place, (basement apartment, black lights and coordinating posters, tasteful though- not gaudy, and half a dozen snakequariums or what have you) to pick up the tickets.

This guy, (purple cut off sweatpants that really set his forest of red leg hair ablaze, sleeveless tee, perfectly feathered thinning hair topped him off) really didn't seem like the sort of guy who'd miss the KISS Reunion Tour. And he wasn't about to. Apparently, his diligence at calling into 106.3 The Blaze- "Lincoln's Home for Pure Rock" scored him a couple of seats on the station's party bus which included a set of floor tickets.

We took the tickets off his hands and I was left with $14 and whatever change I could find in the couch to my name. Really didn't matter though. Mayhem was scheduled to begin in less than 24 hours.

But first we needed to find some beer.

Being 20 is probably the worst age someone can be. You might as well spend the entire year stuck in a waiting room until the real fun can start at 21.You're an adult but not old enough to buy your own adult beverages, which means you've gotta channel Malcolm X and obtain beer by any means necessary. For Aaron and I, that meant beggin' our permanently stoned neighbor to get off the couch to run a 5 minute errand. We had about as much luck as someone who gets struck by lightning while standing next to a Leprechaun.

And politicians wonder why so many kids turn to drugs. Could it because they're easier to purchase than a 12 pack of beer?

The big day arrived and went by all too slow. Aaron had to work until 5:30 and KISS was scheduled to throwdown when the clock struck ocho. The looming problem was that Kansas City was three hours away.

Would his little Mazda find the power to knock half an hour off our journey?

Didn't matter though. While he was at work, one of his co workers picked him up a case of beer. Aaron worked as a runner at a law firm and coaxed one of the lawyers into the breaking the law on the basis of a seldom used special occasion statute.

There was gas in the car and we had beer. The only problem was we had no ice and July in Nebraska is hot enough suck the beer right out of an aluminum can. Sure,we could have stepped up our game and spent a buck on ice but that dollar could no doubt be put to better use on the road so we lined a cooler never opened bags of frozen broccoli that for some mysterious reason had come with our apartment.

Before long, we were on the road. There's nothing barreling down the road 90mph in a car that really isn't meant to do 90- especially when the windows are rolled down due to lack of air conditioning. The sheer amount of noise kept the conversation to a minimum but that was OK. We had plenty of beer and cooler full of thawing broccoli if an unexpected emergency reared its ugly head. The miles started racking up and in just over an hour, we unpeeled ourselves from the vinyl seats that had fused to our skin for the trip's only pit stop.

If you've never set foot in Missouri, the state boasts one particular quirk that makes it a bit like the Mexico of the the Midwest. Just about every type of firework/explosive device meant to be detonated in the name of fun is available for purchase 365 days a year. Once inside the boundaries of Missurah, Costco sized fireworks stands line the highway like a never ending convoy of outlet malls that would only exist inside a redneck's wildest dreams.

We stopped at the biggest one we saw and for the first time in our young lives both regretted that we never took up smoking. Just how funny would it have been to walk into a store with more explosive devices than a lot of third world countries with a cigarette dangling carelessly from your lip and mosey up to a clerk and ask in all seriousness, "Where da y'all keep the thermonuclear shit?"

Then again 10 years later here in 2006, that same idea would probably much funnier if that someone were Arab and wearing a turban instead of a generic white guy in a sleeveless White Zombie t-shirt.

It didn't take long to make our purchases. We knew what we wanted going in. Growing up in a place like Nebraska where the 4th of July gives Christmas a run for its money, fireworks are a way of life. So much so that time and money has been spent to pass laws to banish specific types- namely bottle rockets and M-80 firecrackers. The only items on our shopping list though the might M-80 had been toned down considerably since the days of yore when a single firecracker packed as much wallop as a quarter stick of dynamite.

We were back on the road in no time. A pile of empty Busch Light cans littered the floor next to a big bag of explosives. We'd worry about where to hide the fireworks before returning to Nebraska later. Around the fourth, runs over the border in the name of really good fireworks are so popular that the Nebraska State Patrol actually sets up a major sting operation at the border. Hmm... Aaron and I thought maybe we could throw them off the scent of illegal gunpowder if we picked up an illegal alien somewhere along the way.

Downtown Kansas City came into view only 15 minutes before showtime. Riding shotgun I examined the map and feared for the worst. Out current situation was eerily similar to the last time I tried playing navigator through Kansas City. Just a few months earlier on our way to an Ultimate tournament, we drove off course for a good hour before I realized the map I was staring at wasn't of Missouri but of Mississippi. Isn't it funny how you get a little stupid when you're stoned?

Things were a little better this time around. We only took one wrong turn and arrived at the arena not too long after showtime. In the Midwest fashionably late dosen't exist and we were probably the last people to arrive. We were so late that some people must have already left because we found a too good to be true sliver of a parking spot between a couple tour buses that appeared to be the only one available in the entire lot.

We rolled the tow truck dice, took the spot, and sprinted into the arena. The house lights were already down and the crowd was going bat shit crazy. For the first time since we scored the tickets we started to grow curious about just where we were going to be sitting. The hesher we bought them from said they were dead center but he failed to elaborated that they were dead center in the upper deck of the absolute last row of the arena- so far up in the nosebleeds that you could lean back and rest your head on the wall. But they were happily waiting for us and by the looks of things had to be the only unoccupied seats in the entire arena. Maybe it was a fair trade for such good parking.

We didn't even have time to catch our breath or even think about adjusting to our surroundings before an at least 20 year old announcement bellowed a few very important words to the audience.

"You wanted the best and you get the best. The hottest band in the world- KISSSSS!"

What happened next is a little hard to explain as it all happened about as fast as the fight between Neo and Mr. Smith in "The Matrix."

Right as the fifth 's' in KISS started to fade, Ace Frehly ripped into the opening of "Duece." A few notes in, the Vader black curtain cocooning the stage dropped at the exact same moment the whole world exploded in a ball of fire. The the falling curtain and the rising flames going up passed each other along the way leaving KISS already rocking out with the hammer down. Their opening was a very bold statement that seemingly taunted the audience to go ahead and try to catch up the pace the were setting.

Sure, you can see these guys on TV and have a good idea about what is going to unfold but until you see the chaos live you really have no idea. Aaron and I were easily the youngest people in our section and we by far the most blown away. None of the concerts we'd ever been to representing some of the finest acts of our generation did anything remotely close to the kind of show KISS delivered onstage. Not even Metallica could hold a candle to these guys. Their pyrotechnic show durning their encore of "One" now looked like a chubby little girl in a tutu waving a sparkler in each hand.

By the time Ace started his guitar solo in which his guitar A) started on fire and B) shot missiles that from our vantage point just had to somehow be fake*, we were fully lobotomized by their brand of rock and roll. True, the vast amounts of grass (as the old timers around us called it) being passed around helped too.

Just a scant 15 years earlier the very site of KISS had me running for cover after I saw their appearance on 3-2-1 Contact, a childhood scarring moment that ranks right up there with the time my mom took me to see "The Shining." Now, I couldn't believe that I was blessed enough to witness the greatest show on earth. Up yours Barnum and Bailey.

When the show climaxed with "DetroitRock City." Aaron and I were completely wasted both mentally and, well, mentally I guess. I knew the only cure for what ailed us could be found thirty or so miles in the wrong direction from home where the northernmost Waffle House (#281) could be found. Don't ask how I know.I just do, OK?

There's no such thing as a late night trip to a Waffle House that isn't weird and this one was no exception. The only other diners at midnight on a Wednesday were a group of older folks who'd also been at the KISS show. They could tell by our glazed over euphoria that we'd also been at the same place. And they had a few questions for us youngsters, specifically about the opening act we missed- Alice in Chains. How the hell could people our age think the shit they played was anything close to music? The best part was when the lady with the femme mullet who asked the question stood up on a stool at the counter and acted out Jerry Cantrell's put you to sleep style of playing guitar. "All he did was stand there like this and the blond guy just yelled stuff that didn't make sense. How is that supposed to be good?"

A couple summers earlier Aaron and I saw "Alice" play Lollapalooza and thought they were rad. Now after seeing KISS we realized we grew up in the wrong era and the folks who were our age in the 70's had used up all the fun. Lane Staley probably knew it too as that opening gig for KISS was the last show ever did.

The trip home was nothing but smooth sailing if what you'd call the events that unfolded at the end of "A Perfect Storm" smooth sailing. A textbook Midwest thunderstorm graced us with its presence. Gale force winds blew Aaron's little Mazda back and forth across the road and the buckets of rain made it impossible to see except when eye searing lightning lit up the sky a few seconds at a time. I had a hunch death was imminent and I figured there wasn't much I could do, so much to Aaron's dismay I decided to pass out and wait for the Grim Reaper with a belly full of waffles and bacon.

Turns out we didn't make it home in one shot. Woke up the next morning at dawn in the parking lot of some random Missouri rest stop with an opened pack of bottle rockets in my lap. I was confused for a moment but soon came to my senses. Aaron was still slumped over the steering wheel snoring like a freight train and decided it was best not to wake the tired fella up.

While I waited, I started to piece together the events that had unfolded just a few hours earlier but decided it wasn't worth the bother. Any day that starts with beer and ends with at wake up call in a rest stop parking lot without involving an anal buggering at the hand of a redneck trucker has to be a perfect day.

(*In regards to the asterisk that I know you forgot you even saw. A few months later KISS came to play a show in Omaha. Aaron and I went with our friend Jason who's greatest KISS moment involved singing "Heaven's on Fire" at his school's talent show. We got right up front and saw with our own eyes that Ace's guitar really did fire missiles.)

From the File Marked "Greatest Days Ever" Pt 1.

*If you're too lazy to do the math, I wrote this three years ago on the old blog. Like clockwork when I noticed the date, I paused for a moment of silence and paid my respect to what is still one of the most epic day/night/mornings I've ever experienced.

This is part one...


On this day in history, ten years to be exact, some shenanigans went down that will forever make this day a very monumental one in the world of Todd. No, it didn't involve the losing of my virginity. That happened a few years earlier and the select few who know that tale know it as the kind of thing that would only happen to a guy like me. I'm not really at liberty to discuss that landmark day but I will fluff you a bit and tell you it involved Steve Martin and a self inflicted nosebleed.

But please, don't feel gypped. The story that is set to unfold is every bit as good and it even involves more blood- a lot more.

You see, ten years ago on this very day I saw KISS live in concert for the very first time.

It was the summer of '96, otherwise known as the magical time between my first and second sophomore years of college. The only productive thing I did was sign up for a summer course to help negate the effects of getting a non-passing grade in Art History. Couldn't find Remedial English taught by a gym teacher named Shoop so I settled on the next best thing- The History of Rock Music.

I don't remember how I discovered it but the summer of '96 was the first time a course in rock music history was offered at the University of Nebraska (where the 'N' on the football helmets stands of knowledge!) and you really had to be a dumb ass not to sign up for it.

Really, could there be an easier class to take over the summer?

My roommate Aaron signed on too and for six weeks, our education consisted of in class showings of VH-1's "Behind the Music" and all six hours of PBS' documentary on Rock and Roll- the best part of which was the segment on Satan rock where Ozzy talked a ton of shit in the general direction of KISS about them being commercialized sellouts- "What kind of rock band has lunch boxes and little dolls of themselves?"

Last I checked, Ozzy bendy dolls were still available in the junky toy aisle down at Ralphs.

The only hard part of the entire course was one particular question of one particular midterm that happened to count for a lot of our overall grade. I think it was the professor's way of seeing if we were actually paying attention in class but regardless, it took a lot of cruelty to have one question count for half the grade of one exam. The question: Put all of the Beatles album and single releases (UK and US) in chronological order.

That question wouldn't be so bad if mixing and matching or multiple choice were an option but nope. All we had was a blank page and failing hopes about pulling down an "A" in the History of Rock. Holy shit was that a cruel question. The professor really wasn't into the whole partial credit for a partially right answer thing so everyone in the class headed towards the 4th of July break with a cumulative "D" hanging over our cumulative heads.

Oh man, what were we going to do? Aaron had aspirations of going to law school. I had aspirations of graduating before I turned 30. Over mooched iced coffees at The Mill, our favorite spot to mooch beverages and bask like leeches in the glory the of air conditioning, we tried to formulate a plan.

But what?

The only thing that could dig us out of such a deep hole was extra credit. In the syllabus, the proffessor stated that extra credit would be awarded for concert going. The bigger the concert the more bonus points you'd get. The only problem was we lived in Nebraska. A concert comes along about as often as Jesus rising from the dead. Still, we remained undeterred and I put applied everything I'd learned in Journalism School so far and rummaged around in the newspaper basket until I found the classified ads and looked for the section marked "Concert Tickets."

There was only one listing but we hit the jackpot- "KISS in KC two tix $40 ea."

Some of you kids might not know this but back then the internet really wasn't all that popular. There was no Craigslist or Ebay to help you find whatever it was your little heart desired. You had to do things the old fashioned way. That that meant finding a week old classified ad about two tickets to the KISS show in Kansas City and sliding quarter into a pay phone to find out if they were still available.

...to be continued...