Drunk Mail Bag

Readers, it once again is time to dive into the drunken mailbag. That’s right, as you know from time to time I like to read your questions and comments. To give them their full weight I read them while dropping my morning deuce. After long rumination I respond to them here in my column. First up, to gratify my gi-normous ego, fan mail.

Dear Drunken Years,
I have been reading your column since the beginning. I like your funny insight into culture. You’re so witty and you remind me of a younger, handsomer Zack Braff. Keep up the good work, beautiful!

Sincerely,
John E. Gay
(via email)

Thanks John for those positive words. It really motivates me to know that someone out there appreciates me for what I am and not how damned sexy I am. Now, any more fan mail? …

No? Okay, on to hate mail then. Any of that? How many bags?! Okay, we can do one or two.

Dear Drunken Years,
You’re an idiot! You can’t write, you can’t fight, and you can’t hold your liquor!

-Angry passerby
(via him yelling it at me)

Sorry if I don’t remember you, sir or madam. People yell that at me all the time so faces tend to just blend together. However, to address your points: first, I am writing right now. Booyah! Two, I’ll give you that. Ouch. Three, however… I concede to you as well. But last Tuesday I successfully avoided becoming blackout drunk. I drank a pitcher through trivia, switched to a liquor drink during happy hour and alternated that with a coke. Twelve dollars later I walked home. My BM the next morning was the rankest liquid I have ever seen. I really gotta stop drinking well liquor. It’s like eighty proof Draino for the gastro-intestinal track.

Dear Drunken Years,
Why do you suck so bad?
Norma_J1963@bellesouth.not

Words like that do nothing but insult. No understanding can be gained. And coming from you mom, that really stings. Enough hate mail. Any questions? Questions about me. Not about me sucking?

Dear Drunken Years,
Did I see you riding your bike down Baytree?
L00ks@Ubik.ing
(via made up email)

Yes, that was me. I’m like a ninja on my bike. Like a bike-ninja cyborg or something. And I have wings. I consider Baytree my home turf since it lies between home an work, which we’ll call The Turf. I know those side walks like the backs of my hands. That’s a new freckle… the city recently upgraded all the sidewalks, installing ramps at every curb. Maybe soon they’ll do the same to the sidewalks around VSU– some blocks near campus don’t even have sidewalks. My common sense says that in a college town there should be sidewalks on every block within a three block radius of the campus. Most buildings there are either student housing or off-campus college services.

Dear Drunken Years,
I see you at the bar and you always wear cool hats.
Top_of_my_head@fedora.net
(via CIA radio signal to my molar)

Well that’s not really a question, more of a comment, but alright, fair enough. Actually I wear the hats for two reasons. One, to be quirky. You cannot understand how important that reason is.
Two, I used to wear bandanas but finally realized what Brett Michaels hasn’t– I’m too old to pull them off. Not only am I old, ancient by bar standards, on the doorstep of thirty, but I am balding. I’m at peace with the male pattern baldness, I just wish I had a say in the pattern. Consider me an angry gardener with a bad sod job. On a lesser note, the grays are coming. No, not the aliens– they won’t arrive until 2012. No, I’m getting gray hairs, have been getting them for a few years now. Those I’m not worried about. If I ever succumb to utter vanity I can always dye away the grays. Then again gray hair looks dignified on a man. On a woman it makes her look old, or like a witch, or like and old witch.

Dear Drunken Years,
Got any good drink recipes?
N_E_bri8ed@yaeger.bmb
(scrawled in Sharpie on urinal)

Yes! There’s the Miley Cyrus– a double shot of Kentucky bourbon on the rocks with Mountain Dew. Or the Courtney Love– gut-rot vodka up with a splash of coke and three cigarette butts. Makes a great frozen drink as well.

Thank you for all you warm emails, letters, ticking packages, boxes of feces and powdery white substances. You can continue you hate and contempt for me on the interweb.
TheDrunkenYears.blogspot.com, twitter name: john.e.gay, or by cruising over to ValdostaToday.com and clicking on the ‘Entertainment’ tab.

Sick Piggies

Sizzlin’ Swine Flu Facts

(As of April 29, 2009, 11:00 AM ET)

U.S. Human Cases of Swine Flu Infection
Arizona– 1
California– 14
Indiana– 1
Kansas– 2
Massachusetts– 2
Michigan– 2
Nevada– 1
New York City– 51
Ohio– 1
Texas– 16, 1 death
TOTAL COUNTS: 91 cases, 1 death

A Mexico City toddler who traveled to Texas with family to visit relatives is the first confirmed death in the U.S. from swine flu.

Nearly a week after the threat first emerged in Mexico, Spain reported the first case in Europe of swine flu in a person who had not been to Mexico, underscoring the threat of person-to-person transmission.

Egypt slaughtered the roughly 300,000 pigs in the country as a precautionary measure against the spread of swine flu even though no cases have been reported here yet.

The Center For Disease Control label for this outbreak of swine flu is 2009 H1N1.

Even if the CDC's seed stock of virus were to be released to vaccine makers today, it would take the companies anywhere from four to six months before the first inoculation could be ready for public use.

The World Health Organization (WHO) raised the pandemic swine flu alert level from phase 3 to 4, two levels below the declaration of a full pandemic

Movie Review- X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Since this article prints after the movie’s May 1st premier I can say that without fear of being fired or sued. Since I obviously saw it in theaters the version I saw was complete. It was definitely not missing CG effects nor did it occasionally have dialog notes at the bottom of the screen. Now that we’ve cleared that up, the movie itself was good, a well paced, well acted action movie. Liev Schrieber plays Victor Creed, brother of James Logan. This is Hugh Jackman’s fourth feature as Logan so he has no trouble playing the brooding hero. Logan and Creed are both gifted with enhanced senses, reflexes and rapid healing. They each also have animalistic qualities, such as Creed’s claw-like nails and sharp canine teeth. The long-lived brothers fight through the American civil war and every major conflict after until Creed’s savageness on the battlefield warrants the brothers a firing squad in Vietnam. Their rapid healing ability saves their lives and draws the attention of para-government operative William Stryker. Stryker, played by Danny Huston, convinces the brothers to join his special team of mutant soldiers, played by Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool), Will.i.am (John Wraith), Kevin Durand (The Blob) and Dominic Monaghan (Bolt). Though Creed is comfortable with Stryker’s merciless tactics Logan leaves the program in pursuit of a nonviolent life. In other words, he pulls a Rambo. He becomes a Canadian lumberjack and falls in love with local schoolteacher Kayla Silverfox, played by Lynn Collins. Inevitably Stryker tricks Logan into returning to the program in order to have adamantium, an unbreakable alloy, grafted to every bone in his body including his retractable bone claws. Logan- now calling himself Wolverine- sets out to track down his brother whom he thinks killed his lover Silverfox. Many plot turns and fight sequences later we discover Logan has been a pawn in Stryker’s plan to create a supersoldier mutant to exterminate other mutants. The climactic final fight ends with a nuclear reactor in ruin and Logan an amnesiac. During the credits we see him in an Asian bar, suggesting the series is far from over.
Minor fanboy gripe: continuity is broken from the comics and the previous movies- Sabretooth is a completely different character than in X-Men. Major gripe: clunky plot device. Stryker, knowing he cannot kill the neigh-indestructible Wolverine, decides to give him amnesia, not with a good old frying pan to the head, but with adamantium bullets. Kudos for putting Gambit in the movie. His small but important role is more or less a gift to fans, kind of a ‘sorry about the amnesia with adamantium bullets’ thing. Origins was not a great as the hype, but this happens so often that I automatically reduce my expectations by half for any big budget blockbuster. Going in with my hopes thus halved, I was not let down.

City Gardening

There's a small garden box in front of my apartment and out of some primitive desire to reconnect with nature I've adopted it. My first attempt at taming the wild planter met with moderate success- everything I planted died except for some determined beans and tenacious carrots. I plowed under the abortions of my labor and replanted. This time I thoroughly weeded the garden and am watering it twice a day when there's no rain. So far the outlook is good. I have several rows of corn growing as fast as only corn (and perhaps sunflowers and bamboo) can. As for the rest of the garden, I must admit I made a rookie mistake: I didn't mark where I planted what. In a few weeks I'll have a better guess but for now I don't know if the tiny sprouts I'm fascinated with are squash, cucumbers, onions or what. The determined green beans come up to my knee nearly and have buds that are on this very day opening. In a hanging basket on my back porch the tomatoes I grew from seeds over a month ago have finally produced a fruit. Sure, it's green and the size of an english pea now, but it's drinking milk, so one day it'll be big and strong. Hopefully the radioactive plant food I used won't have any negative side effects, especially side effects that people would enjoy watching in a horror film.

Playlist for the day

The Drunken Years

There is a time in every boy’s life when adolescence sets the world on it’s head. Girls (and sometimes other boys) suddenly become interesting in a less-than-innocent way. For the first time a boy starts to think like a young man; inevitably, he fully realizes his role in society. That is when adulthood is truly achieved. The wonder years are those golden few before adulthood’s onus weight burdens man’s mind.

Contrarily, the drunken years are those of prolonged adolescence. Drugs and alcohol relieve us of our need to be responsible in action, in fiscal matters and in relationships, otherwise known as adulthood. At some time my drunken years transformed to something beyond that, beyond just drinking to kill time. If you keep adding fat people to the life raft, eventually you’re going to sink. My brain has been bailing buckets of bourbon out of its inflated rubber dinghy loaded with survivors of the HMS We-Eat-Alot. I’m still in my drunken years, but I’m on the outer edge of them.

Memories are footprints– they tell us where we’ve been. I don’t know where the ‘F’ I’ve been, if you’ll pardon the harsh letter. I’ve walked across a great sand dune. Imagine my dismay when I look back to see that not even my footprints remain. My footprint-eraser takes the form of drunken blackouts.

The first major wave lead to my DUI two years ago. This year, I’ve rode my bike home in that state many times, as my scarred joints can testify. I’ve started two fights– that’s dangerously close to tipping my “fights I’ve been in that I caused” to “”fights I’ve been in that I didn’t cause” ratio. It’s like I’m Dr. Sam Becket on Quantum Leap, except that instead of leaping from body to body hoping the next leap will be the leap home, I go from blackout to blackout hoping that the next one will be the last. The blackouts have brought me many epiphanies of late, as if they transform me into a drunken Delphic Oracle. I’ve grown up more in these drunken years than in any of my sober ones.

I look back at these events not with shame but with curiousity. I’m curious as to what could drive me to go that far. I’m curious about my subconcious, because ultimately that controls those most primitive urges, be they drinking to dull the voices, drinking to dull the pain, drinking to be less inhibited or drinking to be cool. I’m not advocating it as a path to complete self awareness, though. I tried that path and have many blank pages in my mental journal. There are even a few sections I’ve tried to scribble through, but you can still read them. But it is as it should be– some things you have to learn the hard way. For everyone those things differ, but one of mine is and will always be liquid amnesia. I don’t know how many more leaps I have to make, but Al says Ziggy is giving me a 37% chance of being home next time. Tune in next week.