#27 - my spicy home state.

at the age of four my father & i took a trip from my parents' chelsea, ma apartment up route 93 to windham, nh, where my parents (then aged 25 & 27) were in the process of building their first & only house. as i remember it, he & i walked around on dirt through the shell of the house as men hammered around us. you could still see through the stairs to the second floor, where the bedrooms would eventually be. a house had become more of a priority for my parents, as my now-28-year-old brother was on the way, upping the kid total to three. we would move in soon after & that's where i lived from then until i moved 45 minutes back down route 93 to boston for college. new hampshire sweeping upbringing assessment...good education, boring surroundings. a few nh facts fo yo mind:

- new hampshire has no sales tax, so people from massachusetts come over the border to shop, particularly at our state liquor stores, located both close to the border & directly off the highway, they're like rest areas with no place to pee but a wealth of "the cure for what ails ya"...very convenient for mass area fraternities looking to purchase grain alcohol for tubs of punch...i'm jus' saying is all.

- we host the first state primary, which i think makes us a skew corollary to the color red. bonus political fact...if it wasn't for arizona, we would have been the last state to declare mlk day a holiday.

- we've begat one president...franklin pierce...yes, his actions did result in the creation of the republican party & he is the only elected president to seek the nomination for a 2nd term but not get it & is often referred to as one of the worst presidents ever. thanks for noticing.

#27 - my spicy home state.
snack: lindt excellence chili dark chocolate bar
drink: v-8

turns out that lindt & sprungli (lindt usa) is based out of my home state. stratham, to be exact. just southwest of portsmouth. i'm snacking on one of their lindt excellence chili dark chocolate bars. i've been all about the fancy gourmet chocolates these days. in my book, i figure if i'm gonna need to consume chocolate to remain sane, a fancy imported chocolate bar beats a lame-o possibly-been-melted-in-the-bodega hershey bar any day of the week. gourmet chocolate (& specifically dark chocolate) is the future, people. if you've invested in clean technologies, i'm sorry to have to break that news to you.

omg. so i had been feeling guilty about drinking so much soda & thinking of what i could replace it with & thought about drinkable chili chocolate complements & went for the "tomato/vegetable goodness" of v-8. tomato...chili...sounded right to me...big mistake. i couldn't even get past the half way point of a 12oz glass. v-8 is nasty. i mean, on one level, it is only one letter & 32 numbers away from being a toxic lubricant. at first, i told myself the reason why i couldn't drink it was because i was in the middle of watching true blood (specifically something that happens in the 2nd episode) but it goes deeper than that. i will say it once...tomato juice is good for nothing but creating bloody marys. you can try to tell me that it's good for me. you can try to tell me it'll make me straighter (as if that's possible!). you can call it "splash" and pair it with berries. you can lock me in a room with nothing but v-8 & yoo hoo and i will choose yoo hoo every time.

that is how awful v-8 is. it almost ruined this blog entry...i originally wrote 95% of this on sunday night, but my life was thrown into such a whirlwind by the awfulness of the v-8, that i just couldn't finish it until now, three days later...new slogan = v-8...tastes like puke, but without the vodka & tabasco.

#26 - shawn's fantastical hoighty toighty ice cream sandwich.

...so i'm watching the emmy awards tonight on abc & it's a three-hour show, so that means tons of commercials & of course, that means tons of commercials for abc's fall lineup. that means tons of commercials for a lineup that includes samantha who?, ugly betty, desperate housewives, boston legal, brothers & sisters, eli stone, dirty sexy money, life on mars, grey's anatomy/private practice and pushing daisies...oh, and the crappy reality tv shows.

the best part about the ads for these shows is that each commercial ends with the note that next week is, "national stay at home week," an occasion created & announced by abc's pr team about a month back. what this means is that with tomorrow being the start of fall, we should avoid the outdoors at all costs & plop our asses down on the couch for the next week to absorb the abundant wonders of abc's fantastic fall lineup.

if you choose to not celebrate national stay at home week, you're disobeying a national holiday & not only would that make you a communist, but christina applegate would probably never talk to you again. samantha who? sassy christina applegate, that's who!

#26 - shawn's fantastical hoighty toighty ice cream sandwich.
snack: bierkraft's dark chocolate gelato & cherry blondie
drink: lakefront cherry lager beer

with the emmys, i'm enjoying a dark chocolate gelato & cherry blondie from bierkraft, the local yummy beer & cheese & gourmet food shop. a few weeks back, i went there to buy some beer & on the way in, noticed a sign they had posted on the door that suggested pairing their chocolate chip ice cream sandwich with a smuttynose old brown dog ale. i passed on that particular occasion, but filed it away for later.

the other night, i decided to go back & pick up the combo. i got the smuttynose but when i saw the ice cream sandwiches in the freezer, the dark chocolate gelato & cherry blondie made getting that pathetic chocolate chip one a non-option. at the register, i discovered i was purchasing a $5 ice cream sandwich. hoighty toighty. that night, i totally drank the smuttynose & then the freezer door got left open for a couple hours at some point during the evening, so the ice cream sandwich got a little thawed/melted. undeterred, i went back to bierkraft today & picked up the lakefront cherry lager to pair with it.

they're both really tasty. the ice cream sandwich itself is so rich & tasty & filling that it's a two-sitting ice cream sandwich...it'd better be for $5! as for the beer, it's brewed with wisconsin cherries, which i assume are good based solely on their work in the field of dairy.

in closing, yay mad men yay!...and people sure do love tina fey, huh? "the elaine may of our time," according to alec baldwin's speech...which means she has both a mikey & nickey and an ishtar in her. people probably love tina so durn much because she's wittier than any other female on earth & a verifiable stone. cold. fox. seriously, i'd give my left...

#25 - kids these days.

the other night, i was on the phone with a good friend who lives on the other side of the country & we got to talking about how we always see kids these days round our respective cities guzzling red bulls & monster energy drinks & whatnot, leading us to believe that they either have no energy & need the drinks to function properly or that they are seriously amp'd all the time, which actually explains a lot of behavior i encounter on the subways. those kids are all full of sugar & guarana & roots & junk.

there's this triad of kids i've seen multiple times on the train. they have a boom box & they dance & clap & spin & flip the tiny one in the air & he kicks the ceiling when he hits the top of his arc, which usually brings at least one gasp & the attention of pretty much everyone in the car. those kids are probably sooooooooooo high on energy drinks & funding their habits by performing on the train. it explains a lot, actually.

when we were kids, we didn't have energy drinks & we were off doing sports & running around our suburban yards & going on scouting excursions just fine thank you. sure, now that i'm all grown up & perpetually tired from late nights & long days, i take in a lot of caffeine myself, occasionally in energy drink form, but i'm an adult, who can obviously handle my caffeine intake.

these are kids we're talking about though. where is the regulatory system/religious group who should obviously step in & speak out against such consumption? we're in an election season, people!

#25 - kids these days.
snack: smuckers uncrustables peanut butter & strawberry jam sandwich
drink: sparks

so it's saturday late afternoon/early evening & i'm feeling a bit run down from an early wakeup & the rare doing of things before noon & realizing i could go down one of two roads at this point. i could settle down for a couple hour nap & still have the evening ahead of me when i awake or i could guzzle the sparks that i bought on a whim the other night & ride the alcoholic energy drink snake. i chose the road paved with sparks, figuring that if i crash & burn once the caffeine & malt liquor has worked its way out of my system hours from now, so be it.

for me, sparks is a beverage that i often feel should not be. i liken the taste of a sparks to that of an orange willy wonka bottle cap, meaning that its flavor is fruity with a chalky, tooth-decay-enveloping aftertaste.

shortly after i moved to nyc, sparks was introduced to the city, specifically to hipsters & often in brooklyn. it was one of the first markets sparks was available in, i assume. i was going to a boatload of concerts at the time & quite often, there was free sparks available, to give hipsters a little shake to their step. now i think they just do coke instead.

anywho, if you drink more than one, you will probably get sick. one evening after work, i saw ted leo during cmj at the now defunct rothko. i didn't have time to grab dinner & was likely broke & so took advantage of the free sparks on hand. by the end of ted leo's set & my second sparks, i was 95% sure that some part of my stomach had eaten a less fortunate other part of my stomach. for a brief moment, i felt like i could identify with kurt cobain. luckily, tonight, i am older & wiser & only have one on hand.

along with the sparks, i'm snacking on a smuckers uncrustables peanut butter & strawberry jam sandwich. it tastes fine. it's basically what you'd get if yo moms made up a bunch of sandwiches one night all crispin glover style & then stored them in the freezer for you, rationing them out to you one at a time, asking you if you'd like a pb&j and when you say "yes," telling you to wait 30-60 minutes so she can thaw one out. maybe yo moms has a court order preventing her from using knives. if so, these smuckers joints are right up your alley.

#24 - beantown.

seriously, boston. sometimes i just don't give you the love you deserve, especially when it comes to your music scene. i was born in 74', which means that i was in high/school college when the notable boston/mass bands included the pixies, sebadoh, belly, morphine, the lemonheads, juliana hatfield, buffalo tom, the mighty mighty bosstones.

until much later, i didn't listen to any of them, save a buffalo tom song on the no alternative compilation. a recent girlfriend was shocked dumbfounded surprised that i had never listened to the pixies. luckily this was a few years prior to their reunion tour, so i was hip to that when it came round.

during my high school/college years, i was giving compton & seattle & york, pa a lot of my love, but my boston area bands were letters to cleo & dinosaur jr, a testament to my preference for pigtails & guitar soloing weirdos.

& then i moved to nyc (save five months in 06') and to me, the boston music scene became as familiar to me as the akron, oh music scene.

#24 - beantown.

snack: ghirardelli intense dark citrus sunset 60% cacao
drink: blueberry cobbler flavor new england coffee

seriously, that's how you spell that company's name? ghirardelli? c'mon? really? the letter combos make me afraid to even run that one through the spell check.

so tonight i was walking to pathmark to pick up a few things, including a snack for the evening and on my walk there, was listening to the new amanda palmer album (the videos are the best part!)...boston music...a boston artist who has been around since the beginning of the decade as half of the dresden dolls but who has flown under my radar until recently. it is officially my favorite album right now, with that okkervil river album coming in at second. alphabetically, it is the first album on my ipod, which means that if i just keep pressing the play button on my ipod all monkeylike, without really even paying attention, it goes to that album by default. the first note is loud & hurts my ears sometimes when i do that though. anyhow, maybe you should give it a quick listen or maybe you shouldn't.

...so i walked to the store listening to amanda palmer & anticipating a boston creme pie to snack on in celebration of boston. when i got to the store & went to the freezer section, i thought differently. boston creme pies are friggin' $8. f that. ain't nobody's birthday up in my apartment tonight.

so instead, i went the gourmet chocolate route with the ghirardelli (thank you cut & paste function) citrus sunset...cacao beans for beantown.

i needed to re-up on the coffee as well & to my delight, the bags of fresh ground new england coffee were on sale for as much as the run-of-the-mill pathmark brand, so i went for the blueberry cobbler flavor. new england represent. fruit represent.

the results...the chocolate is really good. it's dark chocolate with bits of orange and caramel crunch, all things i love. the coffee is also really good. so good that the two cups i've consumed should have me up into the morning with caffeinated bloodstreams. usually the caffeine doesn't have extreme effects, but right now, i'm amp'd, folks. oh, wait...

AMP'D.

...and a side beantown note...this is blog entry #24...the number worn by my favorite baseball player growing up & the owner of the one of the top moustaches in red sox history.

#23 - running on empty.

enough is enough. i will never again watch an episode of saturday night live. it is horribly acted, both by the guest hosts & the stable of actors. nobody cares enough, it seems. season premiere, folks. michael phelps, thanks for trying. couldn't we occupy this valuable time slot with something a bit less stale? lorne, are you steinbrenneresque in your vanity?

i'm sure michael showalter could come up with something. i hear judd apatow is hot.

#23 - running on empty.
snack: none
drink: water

if i was to eat anything right now, i would puke it up. that is how bad saturday night live is. it has killed my desire for snacking.

...i might as well have some water to calm my stomach. i don't feel that i can fully speak for chris farley, but i have to believe he is rolling over in his grave.

i rushed home from the bar for this. ick.

r.i.p.
s.n.l.