If you don't buy this right away, there is really something wrong with you. (Found courtesy of Rip Taylor dot com)

Now the US can finally see Vincent Gallo get his suck off. The Brown Bunny will be showing at the E Street Cinema here in D.C. on September 10th. You know, I think I'll just look for the minute or so worthwhile footage from this film on the internet and save the $10. Still, kudos to Mr. Gallo for being able to pull this off.

I now have a reason to keep blogging! This is an interesting concept, if ultimately nothing more than a creative time killer. I can't believe such a site exists. And hey, I have a shareholder! She bought 4000 shares of The Experience. (Sorry boys, the only one among you who also has a shareholder is SR. Keep blogging!)

And for those who read about my MCCXXIII dilemma: I opted not to go. I did wind up going to Mexicali Blues with Mr. and Mrs O., who were joined by some friends o' the missus. A good time was had, especially as the laughter I induced in Mr. O led to pain in his leg.

Some things I don't get...

Guys who wear buzzcuts/flattops with absolutely no military affiliation.

The popularity of televised poker. I love poker, but to me, it's one of those things that is much more enjoyable to play, but maddeningly dull to watch on TV.

People who think Van Halen was better with Sammy Hagar. I just saw a commercial for Best of Both Worlds, which features the best of Hagar-era and Roth-era VH. In the commercial, they alternate clips of songs from each era, and it's no contest that the Diamond Dave era was far superior.

UPN still exists? C'mon, did they give Fox this long to fail miserably? They should pull the plug on this awful network. Case in point: this abomination. Not to mention they tried to revive Dan Cortese's career. For that act of insanity alone they should have their broadcast license revoked.

***

In other news, I'm going to MCCXXIII tomorrow after work. Well, I'm tentatively going. I've been invited, I've said yes, but I think I'm going to back out. The reasons? One, money. Even though it's just a $15 cover for open bar from 5-9 (plus tips, of course), I'd still rather save the money for something else, clothes in particular. Two, my rule about not mixing work with pleasure. These are my boys, true, but I'm still trying to keep a clear demarcation between the hotel and my home life. I fear the slippery slope this could introduce. Three, it's MCCXXIII. This flies in the face of my "fuck any club with a velvet rope" personality. Four, and this isn't really an issue (I don't think) but I like the possibility, nonetheless, violence. Considering my showing during the bar crawl a couple of weeks back, the fact that I'm going to hate 95% of the people in this joint and it is practically an open bar for five hours, well, the chance of a drunken, violent outburst, no matter how remote, is there. Especially if one of the hated 95% turns out to include some unsavory co-workers who have been known to frequent MCCXXIII on occasion.

Oh, I'm feeling nerdy: I seriously think I might have to make this. I know I'll likely have no takers among the Entourage, but I'm putting it out there anyway, in case anybody needs to know my whereabouts on the weekend of October 2. Though, how dull do you have to be to turn down a chance to meet one of the stars of Tron?

(This was found when I was checking out the minibosses site to see if they might be playing on this coast any time soon. And sure enough, they will be at MagFest. Thanks again to CLJO for clue-ing me in on this band. This almost makes you a credible hipster. Ha!)

Snippet of my current conversation

ML: ...I also saw The Stepford Wives.
Me: Ugh, why would you see that?
ML: Because I didn't know it would suck ass worse than any movie ever!

What kind of fucking morons would claim responsibility for this?

The Return of the Great Assholio (pt. ii)

So, we leave Lulu's and head to Porters. This is another establishment that nobody had been to before. We get in, grab a beer, and kinda hang back by this area at the end of the bar near the door. Then, we decide (and I may be mistaken, but I believe this was prompted by a skirt) to make our way back. I get a slight separation between myself and the boys, which is just enough not to see where they go. I choose wrong, of course, and go downstairs. As it turns out, it was only wrong in the sense that this was not where the boys were. I found out, upon our reunion, that it was definitely more happening than the upstairs route they took. Anyway, we return to the floor on which we entered and found a nice spot near a beam and these benches along the wall. We basically just surveyed the scene, with me taking a break to "sing" along to "Kiss" (by Prince) when it came on. We officially declared it "dead" (ha!) shortly after and left. Our next stop: Sign of the Whale, right around the corner.

Oh yeah...

So, we get there, passing the Madhatter (just next door), which has a ridiculously long line coming out of its roughly Fotomat sized interior. People, please. There are so many bars on this crawl, why not go find one where you are not constantly dry-humping strangers just to get close enough to the bar to ask for a shitty Bacardi O? Of course, SotW was not much better. We go in, and something just snapped in me. It may have been the music playing (fuck Bon Jovi, okay?), or (much more likely) my testosterone and alcohol levels were pushed into the red simultaneously. Whatever it was, I went kinda insane. I started screaming "can you believe all the guys in here with vaginas?" and "this place is packed wall to wall with pussy" and so forth. When I would pass some duck, I'd say (loud enough to be heard, mind you) "excuse me, miss" or "pardon me, ma'am." Unbelievably, nobody decided to play the role of tough guy. Not a one. And I found this, in my fabulously inebriated state, disappointing. I think I was really ready to deal on the first jackass who even looked at me cockeyed. At one point, while we're in the back, beers in hand, this clown walks by and I start to mock him with this little jig (if you've seen the movie So I Married An Ax Murderer, you should know the one I'm talking about; yes, I was so drunk I stooped to ripping off Mike Myers). Well, as I'm doing this, this cute girl and her friend ("I specifically requested...") walk by, and the girl starts dancing right at me. Then she comes up to me and tells me I have to flip my collar up...

(RANT: Okay, why in the world is this fucking fashion disaster back? I find it an atrocity and I think the precious men and women who have started flipping their collars up, in some futile effort to look fashion-minded, should be stoned in the street and then sterilized. Fucking wastes of blood and tissue, my lord...)

I tells her, I says "You have to give me one of those beads if you want me to do that." So she obliges. Being a man of my word, I flip it up, and she puts her arms around me so her friend can take a picture of us. Post photo, I immediately return the collar to its natural non-Queer Eye state, and ask her what she's doing the rest of the night. She said something drunkenly about drinking more (*swoon*) and going to another bar (possibly Lulu's) but now she had to go to the bathroom. Somewhere in all of this, she must have asked me for my name (or I offered it, who knows), because as she's coming back from the bathroom, she stops by and says "Damian, you have to keep this collar up" and she clumsily pulls it up, then walks off. After our beers are finished, it's back out into the night. Again, all the way out, whenever I have to press by a guy, it's "excuse me, miss" or "pardon me, ma'am." No takers. Oh well, that's probably for the best. Still, this is turning out to be a terrible "Year of the Bar Fight."

Oh yeah, re: the photo, CO stated "you know that's going to be on somebody's blog tomorrow." Ha! I can only wish for such immortality.

Once outside, we decide to head to The Front Page, up in Dupont Circle. I am definitely more calmed down now, though I'm still taking swipes at ducks here or there, including outside the men's room at FP, while waiting for JG to emerge, when I directed some dudes coming down the steps by saying "bathroom's this way, ladies."

We go upstairs, and we stand by the bar on the side of the establishment near the restrooms. There, we watch this totally trashed (and slightly trashy) girl gyrate sexily for her boyfriend. After a few minutes here, we walk to the other side, near the dancefloor and get some more beer in us. On this side, we watch another drunk girl freak this guy she's with at the bar. The way they were going it would lead one to believe that they were mere seconds away from one of those "beside the dumpster in the alley" fucks. But, when I went up (ha!) and asked the dude if he was going to be hitting that, he actually said he wasn't. Hilarious.

After our beer, we decided to leave again and go back to Lulu's, by which time things should have definitely picked up. And things were definitely livelier, but not in any major way. We grab the same table we were at the last time and got more beers. (Oh, this just came back to me: on one of the visits to Lulu's--I believe it was the first--I squirted a dollop of ketchup on my hand, a la the salt for a shot of tequila, and sucked it right off. What in the world was I thinking?) Unfortunately, I had backslid a bit into my misanthropy for the night, mocking some of the ducks that passed by our table. At this point, I believe the boys just gave up and withdrew a conversation about...something. War, cars, the price of tea in Kenya. Something. All I know is that after the discussion, I turned to CO and says to him, "So, who would win in a fight, Rommel or Francis Marion?" I'm pretty sure he came back with "I will stab you" or something like that. After hitting the head one more time, we decided to call it an evening. We parted ways at the exit of Lulu's, the boys heading to the Metro while I went home, stopping for McDonald's (again...ugh) on the way. I got home, killed the food, talked to EMT on the phone for a bit, and then crashed, waking up seven hours later to begin this day, which was an awesome outing with AK. I shall detail this soon, I suspect. Until then, read and laugh at my public shame. 'Nuff said!

++ DVX: THE DAMIAN VEGA$ EXPERIENCE ++

Sports note: congratulations Maria Sharapova for winning, in a most convincing fashion, your first Wimbledon. Kournikova with skills, indeed. Has anybody thought about what kind of response this final might have received in the 60s? A strong, black American woman taking on a Russkie? America's race issues pitted squarely against its patriotism? Comedy!

Check me out America...

I'm being an asshole!

Ahhhhh...Friday. What have we done to you?

The day was short (burned a bit of my overtime to leave early) but sweet, as we had thai food for lunch. That's solid, no? Anyway, I left work a bit early so I could meet up with JG and CO for a little bar crawl action. Despite my advanced age, this is, in fact, my very first bar crawl. And she was a solid one.

Things kicked off at Mackeys, a bar on L St., where the main registration was held. Registration was $13 on-site, or $10 with a couple of cans of food. Or, if you weren't lazy like I, you could have registered in advance for $7. Met JG at the metro, then we both met with CO, who was already at the bar. Registered, and the drinking was on. Stood outside with the other participants, packed neatly into the little patio area. Things of note from Mackeys:

There was a surprising lack of baseball caps (at least standing outside), save two guys with their Red Sox hats on. Believe me, these ducks embodied everything wearing such a chapeau would indicate.

"Circus ugly." Okay, I'm certainly not a GQ model, and it is mean to just be slamming random women, but there was a girl there who was just hideous, and became sort of the running joke of the night, as she wound up being at many of the bars at the same time as we (since there were a number of bars on the list, and there is no order of attendance, this is actually odd). She had a Mrs. Potato Head-thing going on. Sorry, but just thinking about her again makes me vurp. (See? Asshole!)

The guy at Recessions, next door and also part of the crawl, had a creepy, Everquest playing, van with tinted windows look going on. He was out there announcing "$2 shooters!" but was not getting much of a response. Shocker, no?

So after Mackeys, we bail on to Rumours, which is at the corner of 19th and M. Again, we got on the patio and just took it all in. Not a bad spot, especially when one of the dancers for Camelot walked by in all of her wonderful, beautifully fake (as opposed to "painfully fake"; I think we all know the difference) titted glory. Magnifico! We are eventually joined for a bit by CO's co-worker, T. Good guy, funny guy, nearly made me choke on my beer when he pointed out some old dude coming up the street (in my current, slightly hungover state, I cannot remember what he said about him). He eventually left with some femininas (friends of his) who did not want to pay the cover (all the bars were charging $5 covers if you had no wristband for the crawl). I should state that our selection of this venue was not entirely random, as JG spotted a couple of hot youngbloods on the patio that we had noticed at Mackeys. Sadly, I don't think we saw them the rest of the night. (I know I didn't.)

So once we're done with Mackey's, it's on to Lulu's, which is 23rd and M (I believe). On the way, we stop at McDonald's, so I can get a little bit of food into me (just a burger) and I called my mom, in a semi-inebriated state, to check on my sister, who is having some medical issues that are pretty common in my family. I should know by next Thursday (approx) what exactly is happening on that front. I have a feeling everything will be okay, but that doesn't dampen my concern any.

And now Lulu's. First, this was the first Lulu's experience for all of us, which is surprising considering we've all been in this area for the last 10-odd years. We probably would have gone on President's Day '03, as Girls Gone Wild was there, but that was also the weekend we got a couple of feet of snow dumped on us. I was stuck in Silver Spring for 4 days. Good times.

Second, it was really dead at that point. Lulu's was definitely going to be the finishing spot for the night. So after a beer, we beat it out of there. Nothing much to report from this establishment. Up next, Porters.

(I'm running out of time, as I'm about to meet with AK for a glorious day of fun, so I'll post this now and finish it later. Believe me, you do not want to miss that. Stay tuned, bitches!)