Category: stupid behavior

An Open Challenge to Meh

December 19, 2006 / / 0 Comments

There’s been a rise in graffiti in Madison over the last few years–nothing particularly serious, just some taggers trying to impress people by writing their pseudonyms all over town.

To be honest, it all looks like shit. I haven’t seen anything anywhere in this town that was inspired by anything but four cans of Red Bull and having borrowed Dad’s minivan.

Meh has scrawled his tag all over town in a juvenile attempt to make a name for himself. Well, Meh, I’ve seen your “work”–and it sucks. Simply writing your name all over everything doesn’t make you an underground artist, it just makes you a vandal. Here’s a chance to redeem yourself.

I hate my car. It’s a piece of shit, and it looks the part. So here’s my challenge: prove you’re not some useless little punk shit by actually making something people want to look at. My car is an open canvas, waiting for you to make your mark.

I drive a black ’93 Ford Tempo, and it’s parked on or near the 1000 block of Willy St just about every night. Go ahead, do anything you want with it–so long as I can still see through the windows.

I fucking dare you.

Fight Club, Vol. 1

July 18, 2005 / / 0 Comments

Back in the day, (July 24, 2002 to be exact) I posted this entry to Big Black Glasses about fighting in a semi-legal amateur fight night. At the time, BBG was a communal blog for Mike, Nate (not the one I’ve mentioned lately), Colin, Geever, and two or three other guys whom I may have only met while drunk, if at all. In its current incarnation, BBG is Mike’s personal blog.

I fought at the Raven Fight Club tonight, and got TKO’d. That was three hours ago. My nose is still bleeding. I’m going to do it again, until I win.

Sometime next month I’m going skydiving. Assuming I don’t end up liquefied in a field somewhere, that post will be volume 2.

I frequently wrote short, cryptic posts like this on BBG. They seldom, if ever, made sense to anyone who wasn’t a friend of mine or Mike’s. Here’s the explanation:

Raven Fight Club: There used to be a club where the interstate met the highway in a town that had developed solely for the purpose of drawing business from the interstate exit ramp. The town is called Newville, and the club was called Raven. It hosted small local bands, and it had an unwashed, grimy, dimly lit, unwholesome feel to it. On Tuesday nights during the brief summer it was open, they set up a boxing ring in front of the foot-high “stage.” Sometimes on Fridays and Saturdays, meager crowds would stand apathetically to listen to desperately hopeful young musicians. I went in with some friends from my martial arts club to check it out at Pedro’s suggestion, and signed up to fight sight unseen. I hadn’t checked out the competition, I’d never even seen the ring or the club yet–I packed a mouthguard, signed the waiver, and climbed into the ring as the first bout of the night.

…and got TKO’d: I don’t know the name of the guy I fought. I’m sure the announcer screamed it prior to the fight, but I was too nervous to concentrate on things like that. I don’t remember most of the fight, only brief flashes.
Apparently, it’s not uncommon for people to black out during fights. I had an instructor tell me that when his memory began again after a fight, his five attackers were gone (two or three of which were arrested later in the hospital) and he had a stab wound in his abdomen. I wish I could claim righteous fury or blazing intensity as the source of my memory loss. As it is, I attribute it to my skull being pummelled by a stranger’s fists.

I remember only a few flashes of the fight:

  • My opponent throwing a very slow, very clumsy, back spin heel kick. He obviously didn’t know what he was doing and was trying to impress the crowd. I hopped just out of his reach, then back in to hammer him with a hard roundhouse kick to the chest. Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have gone for his unprotected face.
  • Dazedly facing my corner in the ring and seeing blood on the cushioned post. I wondered disconnectedly if it was mine, and slowly realized that I was in the first fight of the night… that this was my corner… so yes, I must have somehow bled on the post between rounds. What round is this?
  • Getting a hard right hook to the jaw and collapsing to one knee for the second time. I can stand up and fight, I know it… why are you calling the fight? I could have gotten back up and fought. If there was a ten count, I never heard it. I can fight…

My nose is still bleeding: It bled until well past midnight, and friends and club patrons told me several times that it was crooked. I did my best to set it by grabbing it hard between my thumb and the knuckle of my forefinger and yanking as hard as I could. I went to the doctor the next day, telling my parents that there had been a mishap at Tae Kwon Do practice. It wasn’t broken, but it was close. The doctor confirmed that I had broken some of the cartilage, but not enough to cause black eyes or require any medical treatment.

I’m going to do it again, until I win. I never fought there again.

Sometime next month I’m going skydiving. Assuming I don’t end up liquefied in a field somewhere, that post will be volume 2. The post was entitled “Confessions of an Adrenalin Junkie vol. 1.” I never went skydiving.

Now, why, you may ask, am I posting about something that I did almost three years ago? Because I’m planning on doing it again. Raven Fight Club is long dead–someone else bought out the place and replaced it with what appears to be a low-budget Cheeseburger In Paradise. However, Turner Hall has recently started hosting fight night every Wednesday. It’s still small enough that it hasn’t yet attracted the raging psychos that scared me off of fighting at Raven, so I’m going to check out the competition in a couple days. If it’s not too fierce, I’m getting in the ring the week after. It’s the week that Mike’s going to be in town, so I fully expect him to be screaming at me from ringside.

Win or lose, it’ll be a good story.

Screaming Metal Death Trap

June 19, 2005 / / 0 Comments

I drive a 1993 Ford Tempo, and it’s on its way out of this world. I maliciously beat the hell out of it, maintain it only as much as is necessary to continue to drive it around, and occasionally stub cigarettes out on it. If you hadn’t guessed, I really hate my car.

The link above isn’t of my car, but it is the same model and color. My car is in far, far worse shape. Due to a number of front-end collisions, I’m missing the fiberglass front grill and my radiator is clearly visible. (One of those accidents was on my first date with Christine. Moderately funny story. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime.) The most recent collision buckled my hood, and it had to be replaced… with a hood from a white car. I spray painted the hood black a couple weeks later. While I was at it, I painted over a couple of the rust spots on the body. They’ve since rusted through again. I did a really half-assed job of spray painting, so the repainted areas aren’t the same black as the rest of the car, and they’re matte. Since I never wash my car (there’s no point), you don’t really notice the difference most of time.

I haven’t changed the oil since October. When I finally checked it last month, I found to my surprise that I was around three quarts low in a four-quart engine. (I’d like to clarify that this was due to indifference, not incompetence. I’d check my oil regularly if I gave a flying fuck about my car.) When I opened the oil fill port to add a few quarts of 10W30, smoke actually came out.

Due to a late-night incident with a curb, the hubcap for my left front wheel is in my trunk. I’d put it back on, but the wheel is so bent that the guys at Sears Auto couldn’t do it, so there’s no way I’m going to try. Having a wheel that warped makes it constantly feel like I’m driving on a bumpy road. I think that happened in November or so.

My front bumper is falling off from the combination of front-end collisions and my habit of intentionally ramming snow banks. I think three or four more good hits would take it right off.

My left headlight housing is partially shattered and wobbles whenever I hit a bump. I think the strobe effect bothers other drivers.

My brakes squeal, my tires are bald, my roof is buckled, my panel vents don’t work, my engine chokes and hiccups, there are knife holes in the dash and cigarette burns in the upholstery, the floor of the backseat has been partially dissolved by battery acid, and my transmission is failing.

I’ve decided to kill my car in the vicious ways possible and blog it for your amusement. As soon as I get a job that will allow me to make payments on a new vehicle, I’m going to begin the process of annihilating my car and blogging the results. I intend to keep driving around the Tempo until there’s nothing left of it, and then buy a new car.

I haven’t decided on a name for the site yet. I’m considering ScreamingMetalDeathtrap.com. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

FYI: I didn’t get the Microsoft position. Mike told me that it went to an internal candidate, and that they’re hard to beat out. This actually makes me feel better: if the person who got it had just been some jerk from Ohio, I’d have known that I wasn’t good enough. As it was, they went with someone that they knew for certain could do the job.