#15 - i've been a bad, bad man.

last night, i was walking back home from picking up a fast food dinner & needed to make a stop & pick up a pint of newcastle for my roommate & to my surprise, after stopping in no less than six bodegas, i still hadn't procured the pint. the six bodegas didn't even have a six-pack of newcastle. if only my roommate liked smirnoff ice, everything would have been fine. judging by the coolers at aforementioned bodegas, people love that smirnoff swill. sure, the roommate had mentioned that i could go with bud as a backup, but based on the love that newcastle & i have for each other, i assumed that at least one bodega would come through & help us all avoid the bud.

nobody came through for me...not even stop #7, the midway between a bodega & a supermarket locale with the somewhat-diverse beer selection...my last option...so i formulated a quicklike alternative...

#15 - i've been a bad, bad man.

snack: kettle brand island jerk krinkle cut chips
drink: guinness draught in a bottle

seconds earlier, i had been scoping the chip area for snack yumminess on my way past to the beer coolers & the words "island jerk" had popped out at me. when i arrived at the beer coolers & realized that there was no newcastle to be found on that stretch of 4th avenue leading to my apartment, i called the roommate, requested that he split a six-pack of guinness with me & developed this concept for a blog entry...follow my convolution...

island jerk...brooklyn is the west coast of an island...i live in brooklyn...i like guinness...guinness is an irish beer...i'm a good % irish...when irish people find themselves in a stereotypical situation with too much guinness, they can be jerks...me...island jerk.

concept: a blog spawned by the duo of kettle brand island jerk krinkle cut chips & guinness draught in a bottle, detailing three of my jerkier yet still blog-safe moments...friggin' brilliant, right?

#1: the fights of pre-high school - growing up, in terms of popularity pecking order, i was in some sort of in-between world, where i wasn't a cool kid but i wasn't a nerdoid. as a result of this ambiguous social status, i took it upon myself thrice during the 1st-8th grade period to start fights with the kids who a few of us thought were the least cool kids in our group of friends that week. this was some sort of attempt to oust the least cool person from our group, thereby upping the overall group coolness. the stupidity of my thinking is obvious now & anyhow, it never worked & i got body slammed once. sorry eric bonde, rich rittenhouse & bill gadoury.

#2: remember when there was no interweb? - near the end of my sophomore year at b.u., when i was pledging chi phi, i met a girl who was pledging a fellow sorority. we hung out a bunch for the last few months of that school year & i thought she was a cool girl & when the summer came, i went back to nh & she headed down to alabama. before leaving, she wrote her phone number on a piece of paper for me & we said goodbye for the summer. a few days later, i was back home & looking to call her & could not find the piece of paper anywhere, a fatal flaw, as i didn't exactly do the email yet (yeah, 1995) & found myself with no way to get in touch with her, effectively killing what relationship we had. thanks a lot, non-prevalent interweb. sorry ada.

#3: mind your own damn business - after college, when i had returned to boston after a brief ft lauderdale stint, i was dating ms mj & we were with melissa shaw & an unknown third person. i've always looked quite young & as a group, i suppose we looked quite young. we were standing in coolidge corner waiting for the c line to take us back to my brighton apartment & i was smoking a cigarette. a woman of about 60 walked near us, looked at me & said "put that cigarette out." i looked at her & said "excuse me?" she came back with "you're too young to be smoking, put out that cigarette." i was 24 years old & told her so. her response..."you are not. you're sweet sixteen never been kissed." i've always been a bit insecure about being called a liar & about being talked down to because of my apparent youth...so i told her straight up to mind her own damn business. sorry nosy old lady...sorry that you were such a nosy old lady. i may have been a jerk, but you were probably miserable.

in conclusion, try the island jerk chips...even if you live on a peninsula.

#10 - a delayed fortune.

on tuesday at work, someone put out the office-wide call for the lunch special at sea asian...not to be confused with sea, the uber-hip uber-loud locale in williamsburg that features a friggin dj (do people actually enjoy bass-pumping beats with their pik pow squid?) normally, i'm a bring-my-own-lunch kind of guy, but i was feeling a bit saucy that day, so i threw caution to the wind & heeded the call with an order for chicken pad see ew. i'm just that crazy.

as expected, the order came with fortune cookies for all, so when i was done with my pad see ew, i grabbed one & made my way back to my desk. in the usual spirit of my job & my temperament, i got distracted & forgot about my cookie & fortune for the rest of the day. when i was leaving for home, i looked down at the lonely cookie sitting on my desk & tossed it in the side pocket of my backpack. i couldn't leave the lil guy by himself in the office all night & i figured i'd make him into a snack later that night & possibly end up with a blog-worthy fortune.

it is now saturday & through what i can only assume is the result of some sort of cookie mind trick, the cookie still remains.

#10 - a delayed fortune.

snack: four-day old fortune cookie
drink: fort collins brewery the kidd lager

it is mid-afternoon, 95 degrees outside & today's the day of the siren festival down in coney island. although i didn't attend in 2001 (the first year of the festival & the year i moved to the city), i'm a sucker for the indie bands, so i went every year from 2002-2006. the yearly rundown of my experience with the siren festival:

2001 - didn't attend. two months later, the pre-9/11 generation came to an end & we will never forget & whatnot.
2002 - my first festival, with the shins, liars, yeah yeah yeahs & sleater-kinney and sound quality rivaling thomas edison's first phone call.
2003 - the crowd was so friggin huge that i watched modest mouse from outside of the concert area, at an angle off to the side of the stage behind some carnival ride.
2004 - there were a full schedule of bands, including the thermals, tv on the radio, mission of burma & ...trail of the dead. as usual, the crowd continued to grow & the situation was particularly hot & sweaty.
2005 - spoon & mates of state headlined. particularly hot & sweaty again.
2006 - i went down early to see man man & then, afraid of the heat, took the train back home & chilled indoors for a while before hopping back on the train & going back down to catch art brut...once again, a record setting crowd.
2007 - it was too hot, or at least not cool enough where i would go down there to see cursive, who i had already seen a bunch of times during my omaha-loving phase. 100,000 people. record crowds.

now, it is 2008 & it is the hottest day of the year thus far. this year's lineup has a number of standouts--parts & labor, annuals, ra ra riot, islands. of the headliners--stephen malkmus & broken social scene--i am so bored with everything stephen malkmus does, but broken social scene are one of my faves these days.

still, it is now two hours before broken social scene goes on & it is so hot outside that i haven't yet been able to convince myself that traveling to coney island is a better option than sitting in my relatively cool apartment watching the red sox game and drinking the leftover beers from the tasty fort collins brewery 12-pack we got last night before the deerhoof show. this one i'm drinking right now--the kidd lager--is tastetastic & according to the label, "looks dark, drinks blonde."...just how i like my women.

will i leave the comfort of my apartment? based on my fortune cookie, i guess i'll figure it all out sooner or later:

your ingenuity and imagination will get results.

i waited four days for that & to top it off, the fortune cookie mirrored the fortune...stale.

#7 - having it my way.

holy storms, batman! this weekend, there were a series of storms here in the city that brought me back to the summer storms of fort lauderdale, where one second it'd be all sunny & happy & a'birds tweetin' and the next, the sky would turn black & sheets of rain would come crashing down on your face.

as an example, on saturday, i left my house & jumped on the subway up to union square. when i left my apartment, the skies were grey, but there was complete skyness dryness in action when i descended into the subway station to catch the train. when i came out of the union square station 45 minutes later, the GAME HAD TOTALLY FLIPPED & there were masses of tourists & nyu students & citizens & trader joes/whole foods bags & baby strollers & a viola taking cover at the top of the stairs exiting the subway...taking cover from the torrential downpour that could have had irreversible effects on us all...if we were mogwai...which i'm pretty sure we aren't. five minutes later, the rain had stopped & the evil scientist with a weather machine hidden deep in the bowels of columbia's pupin hall cackled with glee.

i didn't want to take the chance that i might be even part mogwai, so with the sporadic violent half-hour storms this weekend, i stayed indoors a bunch overall, assembling quite a lazy dog-dangling agenda.

on saturday night in particular, i decided to have some indoor netflix time with two films...3:10 to yuma & the bridge...a western & a documentary about suicide at the golden gate bridge. to prep for a four hour plus span of couch-sitting, i stopped by the rite aid & picked up the awesomest bag of snack i could find & went down to bierkraft to get a few beers that made me feel snooty...

#7 - having it my way.
snack: burger king ketchup & fries flavored potato snacks
drinks: abita purple haze, victory hop wallop, porkslap pale ale

at around 10:10, i started off with 3:10 to yuma, probably the first western i have watched since i watched dead man for the 7,000th time earlier in the year. anyhow...very entertaining film. i didn't want to kill russell crowe half as much as i expected that i'd want to.

a little bit into the film, i broke open the bag of bk potato snacks. the verdict: they don't really have the bk french fry taste to them, but they definitely taste like ketchup. basically, if you've ever paired a can of potato sticks with a bottle of heinz, you're feeling bk with these snacks. by this time, i had finished the abita purple haze & with the fruity beer out of the way, i moved on to the victory hop wallop. it was hoppy.

just after midnight, i started watching the bridge & cracked open the porkslap pale ale (click on the barn doors if you visit the site!). the porkslap comes from butternuts beer, a brewery located in a town midway between syracuse & albany, both places that are cold in different senses of the word. i'm a sucker for beers like theirs--the kind that come in cans but don't taste like piss. under fear of ketchup overdose, i could not eat another bk potato snack at this point & hid the bag safely in the kitchen cupboard.

the bridge...in 2004, filmmaker eric steel, inspired by a new yorker article about suicides on the golden gate bridge, moved to san francisco & got permits to film the bridge. in that year, a pretty typical one, 24 people died by jumping off the bridge, again making it the top location in the world for suicides. he captured 23 of them amongst his footage & then combined this with interviews with friends & family of ome of the victims.

jumping off the bridge is pretty easy to do, in fact. there's no fence stopping you from doing it. the golden gate bridge district has made sure of that by taking forever to put up some sort of barrier. sure, if there were a barrier up, people would probably just rule that method out & find another (one person in the film likens choosing the method of suicide to picking out a college), but a deterrent is a deterrent in my book.

anyhow, if you are ok with watching a movie about suicide & how people get to that point & what effect it has on friends & family, check this movie out. burger king ketchup & fries flavored potato snacks are optional.

#6 - university salute.

i was raised roman catholic, meaning that i am totally down with the guilt & the shame. as a result, for about a week now, i've found myself reflecting upon the early bloggy days of eat! drink! snack! & feeling that the chosen snacks & drinks for my first few entries may not have been of the healthiest variety possible. also, the "snacks ain't healthy enough" issue may have had a tiny bit of something to do with my trip to the beach last weekend.

to combat this wickedness, i decided yesterday that when i was at home tonight, i was going to have some sort of snack that embraced health & more specifically, some type of fruit.

today was when i decided that regardless of whatever fruit i chose, i was going to take that fruit & dip it in nutella...& have it with a tasty beer.

#6 - university salute.
snack: strawberries & nutella
drink: wolavers' organic oatmeal stout

my senior year of college was the first year that i lived off campus, in a just-remodeled apartment in the allston area of boston, where i lived with three sophomore roommates i had met the year before. we had a porch off the kitchen, which gets me on a side track. i've yet to have a porch in new york...just rooftops. new york prefers rooftops to porches for some reason...maybe because porches are best for sitting & we can't sit still for a spell in this city to save our lives.

two of the roommates were a couple. the guy was a younger fraternity brother of mine from romania via lower jersey & the girl was in the same program as he & the daughter of a diplomat. she loved carnivale. they spent a high percentage of their waking moments together, many of them at the apartment. i don't think either of them had to do much cooking until they came to college, so when they ate, they fell back on a lot of the same foods & dishes. one such item consumed in mass quantities was nutella, or as i like to call it...chocolate of the gods. they ate it by the spoonful, dipped breads & fruits & meats & whatnot in it and for all i know, probably poured it all over each other. it is a wonder that they didn't both gain immense amounts of weight or develop a candy shell.

the other roommate was a girl who i also met the year before, a time when i was dating her roommate & she was dating mine. this roommate of mine she was dating was a good fellow, another of my fraternity brothers. he was totally from vermont, dude...the sort of guy who got kicked out of a yanni concert for brawling with a canuck.

in remembrance of this era of my life, tonight's snack pairs the healthiness of hazelnuts & chocolate with strawberries, who won out over the mango when i didn't feel comfortable with my ability to judge the ripeness of a mango on the fly. sure, i could have used it as an opportunity to strike up a conversation with someone, since i hear it is a great way to meet babes in a grocery store. does this mango feel ripe to you...babe?

that's not really my style though.

the wolavers beer, brewed by otter creek brewing company in middlebury, vermont, contains the healthiness & starting-your-day-right goodness of oatmeal with the certified goodness of organic beer. mmm.

vermontwise, middlebury is about an hour south of winooski (the town outside burlington where my former roommate grew up). to compare, winooski has its down-the-street proximity to higher ground & phish (who rumor has it may be reuniting!), but middlebury totally has a college that's a member of the little ivy league. they're so tiny those lil ivy leaguers! i'd pinch their lil middlebury panther cheeks if the panther wasn't such a ferocious jungle cat!

good pairing. definitely healthy.

#4 - drizzle fo shizzle.

i've been going through a bit of withdrawal lately, as, after almost a decade where tv shows were only a skew part of my life, i've recently fallen back in love with tv somewhat & run through the full offerings of the sopranos, the wire, lost, the 4400, dexter & weeds. with no episodes left of any of those shows, i reached out for mission hill over the past weeks, but it just didn't fill the void.

luckily, monday night was the season premiere of weeds. the season premiere of weeds seemed like it was somewhat of a snacking holiday by nature & as such, a few of us gathered at a friend's house, where we settled down around a table of snacks & watched the season premiere of weeds & the series premiere of secret diary of a call girl. boy does that show love sex. anyhow, on the table was a spread of super pretzels, nachos/cheese/salsa, bagel bites, market pantry (target) fruit snacks &...

#4 - drizzle fo shizzle.
snack: archer farms (target) chocolate drizzle indulgent snack mix
drink: harpoon summer beer

growing up, moms used to make large tupperwares full of homemade chex mix, way before chex mix had become just another of the seven million general mills products. the top level of her chex mix recipes was the chocolaty tasty one, with powdered sugar sprinkled on to boot, a pleasant change from the worcestershire sauce-laden version.

the archer farms brand chocolate drizzle indulgent snack mix comes close to mom's chocolate chex mix recipe, but with one slight addition to the recipe, an addition boldly mentioned on the front of the packaging..."& a kick of cayenne pepper." result = mmm.

harpoon, harpoon, harpoon...your summer beer is nothing special. overall, other than the harpoonfest, i'm not really sure why i thought your beers were so awesome at one point. yes, if given the choice between one of your beers & a bud light, i would choose you, but you don't really seem to be going out of your way to impress me. don't make me start talking about sam adams, a beer which i have a long-standing & currently smooth relationship with.