Pirates life is for me - Day 3 - Mo-Mo-Mojito!

Because I know everyone wants it, here's Day 3 of "Melissas Do (it on) the Pacific 2006."

Screams from fellow hostages woke our lazy butts up Tuesday morning, and the first thought that popped into my head was "great, they're taking us to the Mexican prison work camps. I knew this damn trip was too good to be true. Paco is going to make me his little weiner pinata. Perfect! Great idea, dear, planning a trip down to Mexico."

I get out of the hammock (that's right, Royal Caribbean loves to make their hostages feel like they're really on the sea, living like Gilligan and the Skipper), scratch my ass because it's there and wander out to the balcony. That's when I realized the screams were squeals as folks were pointing out Flipper and his fellow dolphins racing the ship, jumping over the wake and playing chicken with the our little tug boat.

But the 'phins where just the opening act that morning. While we were watching them frolic like high school boys at a sorority party, in the distance we could see the tell-tale sign of moby dick - a white puff of spray shooting through the water. Our captain, I'm sure his name is Ahab now, pipes up on the ship's intercom and tells his hostages that whales are on the port side of the ship - the only port I know is wine, so him telling us whales were on the port side meant about as much as to me the square root of Pi - but it just so happened that was our side of the ship. And as Ahab finished pointing out the obvious, the whale breaches near a fishing or whale-watching boat (we never received a consensus, but there was no sign of George Clooney or humongous, pee-inducing wave, so we were banking on it being a sight-seeing vessel. But it was Mexico and I'm sure whale is good eating) and out pops its tail. Chris, who had also just woke up from his couch-laden slumber (what a trooper, 7-days on a couch bed? Gitmo prisoners are treated better.) took one look outside and summoned his camera with the Force. Luke Skywalker couldn't have called for his light saber faster. To his credit, Chris snapped at just the right time to catch the tale sinking back into the inky ocean.

We have - what else - the breakfast buffet before disembarking (fancy word for ditching the seasickness manufacturer) onto smaller barf buckets that shuttle us to Cabo San Lucas' dock. It's our first port for "Melissas Do (it on) the Pacific 2006" and all our group is talking about is Cabo Wabo, Sammy Hagar's bar.

"Chiclets for a dollar?"

"Jewelry - almost free."

"You like these bracelets, senor? $1 or free."

"I have trips into the desert, beach trips, lunch trips, I'll even take you to the moon if you like."

The locusts - Cabo street vendors - are nothing if not creative. They make you laugh and almost gets you to buy. Almost. But what the hell am I going to do with a necklace that will leave me with a good case of lock jaw and a green, day-glo ring around my neck after just three hours?

We finally hit Cabo Wabo after walking through the splendidness that is Cabo's inner-city, stopping only so we can take a picture of me under the "Husband for Rent" sign. Folks, I can't make that kind of shit up, there was such a sign.

I'll give it to Hagar, even if he was dumped by the Van Halen Gestapo, he knows how to mix some mean drinks. While everyone orders margaritas and mojitos (more on those in a minute) I order a beer - Pacifico - and I stick out like a straight guy at a lesbian rally. What the hell was I thinking - Pacifico. I take one sip of Wife's margarita and realize the folly of my ways. When in port for your first drink with the group, something with a straw and ice should be the order, not barley and Mexican piss.

However, that's when our lives changed - for the better. Juan and Sugar - who learned more about me than really should have been taught, but more on that in another post - the seasoned travelers they are, ordered mojitos. They gave us all free taste tests and we dutifully slobbered on their straws to realize the yummy goodness that is a MOJITO (it really should be capatilized now. I'll call the Associated Press so they insert it into their next style guide). I saw God and Jesus and a choir of angels and James Brown who was singing"I Feel Good" (I guess that was foreshadowing on God's part seeing as the Godfather of Soul kicked the bucket two weeks later).

There were nine fresh MOJITOs the next time the waiter stopped by our corner. What's in a MOJITO? Lime juice, sugar, rum, a sprig of mint and God's kiss. It was a religious awakening. If they served this at communion, I'd attend every Catholic mass I could find.

Wife polished off two, along with her margarita, and was just giggles and hiccups from that point on. I could have taken her over to the five-star, hourly rate motel across the street (the grease and grimed streaked windows, cracked wood siding and shroud of Turan-like drapes really sold me on it being the perfect joint to make some sweet lovin'. Nothing says "I love you" like rolling around on sheets they wouldn't use to cover dead bodies.

And while the MOJITOs were amazing, I had to spin the wheel one more time and try the Waborita, which Jerry tested twice before convincing me it was tasty despite it looking like Windex and Clorox just mated. While the MOJITOs were refreshing and nice and a sweet caress from the Virgin Mary (I'm going to Hell), the Waborita was a kick in the nuts by Satan. Oh, don't get me wrong, it was a special kind mmmm mmmm good, with a punch.

We walked out of Cabo Wabo an hour or two later (really, who can keep time under the MOJITO's power?) ready to board the ship for some prime jacuzzi time. Well, to clarify, everyone but Wife walked out of Cabo Wabo, she more or less stumbled until I could steady her feet and teach her how to walk with mucho alcohol in the system (yeah, we all know three drinks ain't much, but don't tell her that). But before the ship saw our extremely happy faces return, we couldn't pass up the siren call of "5 beers for $10" on the dock. It's really the only proper way to say good bye to Cabo San Lucas, luke warm Mexican piss in brown bottles brought to you in a steel bucket. Clean and healthy, just how I like it.

Maybe God stepped in later that night to save us all by giving us rocky seas, which, as we've all learned now, is not condusive to drinking. It does, however, help the appetite apparently. I polished off - in order - scallops in a light alfredo sauce, minestrone soup, a lamb shank ("Mary had a little lamb, and did it sure taste good") and shelled shrimp. If I could remeber the dessert, I'd mention it here, but I think I went into a food coma after the last shrimp.

Luckily, Wife was able to revive me so we could bee-line it to the lounge to enter the ship's version of the Newlywed Game. We didn't pass their strict selection process (our raffle ticket wasn't chosen) and were relegated to watching the game show and wondering what might have been as we both relayed our answers to each question and finding we would have smoked the couples chosen to make fools of themselves. "What's his most annoying habit?" "Passing gas," please dude, you're an amateur. Let me know when you get to my level - blaming the gas on the cat, which Wife uttered, verbatim.

Poor Jim, though. His wife of 58 years - holy crap, I said we'd be lucky to make it 58 hours before one of us throws the other into a full bathtub with a fired-up hairdryer - dragged him up there, literally, as he moved about as fast as his 80-something year old legs would allow him (think a turtle on heroin, that was Jim's speed). The interesting thing about Jim, besides the fact that he was still alive with the reflexes of granite, was that his pharmacy in Los Angeles was frequented by the like of Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Groucho Marx (who he said would lie on the counter and smoke cigars) and Jayne Mansfield. I could have listened to the old guy all night instead of the crackhead buttmunch cruise director.

There were three other couples on stage, no where near as fascinating as Jim and Margie, although when the question was posed to one husband about his wife's most ticklish spot on her body, he hemmed and hawed like he was trying to decide whether to launch a nuclear attack on Uraguay before finally blurting out her boobs. Just what us hostages wanted to picture, pal, you feather-dusting her na-nas until she's sprouting a stack of dimes. Thanks, schmucko. Thankfully, that was the last question and they put this abomination to bed.

With a full day behind us, I crashed out on the balcony, just myself watching the 5-10 foot swells smack the boat. There was a roar to the ocean that belied the soft ballet that coursed through the water. White caps peaked at the balcony, winked, and rippled under itself. Miles of liquid blackness dotted by thin, roiling strips of foam surrounded our ship. It was one of those moments that reminded you no matter what life experience you packed away - be it MOJITOs in Cabo, or the simple fringe benefits of free soft-serve ice cream - we're all just a wine cork bobbing in this vast ocean of a universe.

What'ya looking for?

Jonesing for Day 3 of "Melissa Do (it on) the Pacific?" You'll have to wait until after Christmas. I'm just building the suspense. Consider it a late Christmas present.

We'll be at Disneyland, humping Mickey's leg. And I'll leave you with a special present. A song that will never leave your brain once you hear it...

"It's a small world after all."

Enjoy, and Merry Christmas.

Pirates life is for me - Day 2

Sorry folks, life got in the way of posting on our recent vacation, "Melissa Do (it on) the Pacific 2006." However, I'm back for today with more gory details.

Royal Caribbean, and cruise ships in general, are missing the marketing boat (ha ha! get it? marketing boat - cruise ship ... man I slay me!), instead of pointing out all the cool shit you can do on their tug boat while sailing the seven seas, they should pimp the sleeping qualities of the subtle rocking off the ocean and gentle slaps of water as the ship cuts through the blue waters. If I knew it would only cost me $600 bones to get the best 7 days of sleep in my life I would have signed up decades ago.

So with choppy-sea inducing seasickness behind me (I'll stick with seasickness until the day I croak, yeah, that's what made me sick) and the time being on the long side of 10 a.m., Wife, Chris and I rushed to clean our sea-drenched butts so we could make it to the breakfast buffet. We catch it at the right time, too, as the crew is in a meal change - going from lunch to breakfast. There's nothing mixing hash browns, water-logged scrambled eggs and lox with crab salad, rigatoni in marinara and crab salad. My stomach, grumbling and disoriented at the same time, may or may not be ready for the brunch celebration but that doesn't stop me from piling the free (again, the greatest word in the English language) chow. I'm not even deterred when Wife hands me a hunk of turkey sausage that she and Chris described as tasting like toe jam. I taste the link, agree there is a toe jam-quality to Mr. turkey sausage, and then finish it off. Why? Because I can, plus there are starving kids in this world who would give their eyeballs for a little piece of Toe Jam Sausage. I can't let good food - or bad food - go to waste.

It's not a vacation if I can't gamble (scuttling away personal finances is more accurate) on something, and lucky for me Royal Caribbean provided such an outlet - a blackjack tournament with a $20 buy-in. The blackjack pit is a scurrying mess, which consists of three whole tables when there isn't a tournament, with throngs of hostages/losers (myself included) huddled around the ONE tournament table like we were Philadelphia dock workers crowded around a trash-can fire for heat. There are seven seats and each sucker is given $500 in chips to bet how they want in seven turns. After those seven shots, new suckers are given life. Of course, getting that life is harder than playing the actual game. It's survival of the fittest, so the blue hairs are getting pushed to the back where us youngsters whallop them a few times so they don't try to snake our spot at the table. However, some of those old fogies bite, so we had to steal their teeth to guard against them chomping on our achilles tendons. Once all the suckers have been given a shot, you can either re-buy (i.e. get screwed again, this time with lotion) or take the losers' walk of shame back up to the pool deck for some comforting buffet food and soft-serve ice cream (again, all free ... whoopee!). I fell in the latter category and didn't last the full seven turns in the round. It took three - 3 - hands to spin my ass out of the chair. The dealer nailed 20, 21 and 20 again, and the last time I played blackjack 17, 15 and 19 were not the higher numbers.

Fretting over the Melissa family "fortune" being $20 lighter, we brainstormed some ideas on how to win back the cash. Knocking over a bar on the ship wasn't going to work - the getaway would be messy, and likely wet. Working as a crew member wasn't appealing because I knew how hard Wife and I made these shmoes work, and I didn't want to be put through that test. The last option was selling my body for sex in the Viking Lounge. I thought it was a good idea, but Wife didn't think I'd make enough. Then, as if she was the voice of God but funner and bubblier, the blonde activities planner (or the fun nazi as we chose to name her) for the cruise gets on the loud speaker: "Just 30 minutes until Bingo. Get your tickets now." Wife, Chris and I unsuture our butts from the comfy lounge chairs and shove every walker-toting blue hair out of the way so we could nab the lucky bingo cards. Little did we know bingo was Royal Caribbean's biggest scam. For the paltry sum of $35 you can buy a packet of five bingo cards for the five different bingo games they'll play that day. Do the math. One card (with six different bingo combinations) for one game. There's no reusing these cards for the other games that day or durin the week, and if the blonde bingo lady catches you doing so, she takes you behind the bingo stage and feeds your extremities to the whales they keep in an aquarium on the ship before releasing them for 30 minutes around into the ocean so us hostages believe there are really wild whales out there. I know better. I saw through that scam.

"Hell," I say, "bingo is easy. We should clean up at this game." I think we hit two numbers during the five games - total. We should get a prize for not getting within sniffing distance of a bingo. But no, instead, we take it in the shorts while an inbred couple from West Virginia wins the big prize - a Royal Caribbean t-shirt and a free teeth whitening in the spa. Damn, I wanted that because I didn't like the way bleach tastes when I whiten my choppers.

We had our first formal dinner of the cruise, which meant tuxes and fancy evening gowns for some, and the Dodger tie with my blue (at least Wife tells me it's blue) suit. That's right, I'm the snazzy shit. I feel like I'm at oscar night. Wife sure knows how to dress me.

Mustafa opens the menu and it's like Christmas morning. I really wish they just made dinners a buffet in the dining room, it would save us all a load of time. I finally decide on a pair of appetizers - escargots (if I knew snails tasted this good, I would have taken them from the garden to the kitchen instead of crunching them with shoes) and my favorite - lobster bisque. For dinner, I go with Daffy Duck. Never having water fowl of any kind for dinner, I wasn't sure what to expect. Mustafa (who always looks at me like I'm Cousin Eddie in the Vacation movies) slides a plate under my greedy chops and there lies some meat that looks an awful lot like chicken. I taste the dark meat, and yep, it's chicken masquerading as duck. It tastes phenomenal, don't get me wrong, but I can't shake the feeling that someone mislabeled the meat as duck when really, we were eating Foghorn Leghorn.

For dessert, you can't go wrong with a good cheesecake, and I wasn't disappointed. Robert (Mustafa's poor lackey) forklift over what the menu called Double-Strawberry Cheesecake, a brick of cake with it's own strawberry patch slathered on top. They had a low-fat version on the menu which seemed about as out of place on the menu as a ham and cheese sandwich at a Jewish delicatessen.

With dinner over, and the seas finally calm, we take it easy for the night and make it to bed early. We needed our rest anyway, Cabo was coming up and we'd want to be energized for some heavy lifting at Cabo Wabo.

Next up - Day 3 and how the Mojito changed our lives forever.

Pirates life is for me - Day 1

It was March when Wife decided to loosen her claws on the Melissa family "fortune" and floated the idea of a cruise for our fifth anniversary.

At first, I thought the woman was yanking my chain (that came later). I get quite suspicious when I hear the purse creak open because I don't hear it often. Hell, she has a combination lock on her purse - Bank de Melissa - and won't give me the combo. I don't blame her, if I had access to the bank, I'd likely take the wad and blow it on something unproductive like a riding lawn mower so I stop fainting in kitchen after cutting the greeds (grass and weeds) in the Melissa Back 40. Who am I kidding? I'd spend it on those bath tub-sized beers at Old Chicago.

So dubiously I agreed, waiting for her to laugh evilly before pulling away the football just as I'm ready to kick it.

But lo and behold, Wife was serious for once - she's the joker, I'm the mature/serious one in this relationship - and before I knew it we were booked on our first cruise. "Uno mas cerveza por favor."

She called/e-mailed/homing pigeoned everyone we knew, including those we pay to hang out with us, to join us on "Melissas' Do (it on) the Pacific 2006" and before you can can say "Donde esta el bano?" we had seven folks joining us: Chris, Jerry, Angela, her parental units Juan and Sugar, Ben and Brett. God (Al Pacino) help the poor servers who had to deal with this rag tag bunch of goof offs.

I ate so much I pooped out four-course meals. I drank so much I never knew whether it was me rocking or the ship. We took enough pictures to keep Canon in business, and some of the shots are clean enough to show to the public.

So, as promised, albeit a few days late (I'm a slacker, I know, but TBS had a "Wizard of Oz" marathon that was begging to be watched), here is my recap of the trip - day by day:

Day 1 - Watch out 110 freeway, here we come
We leave from my Parental Units ' double-wide in Hemet, armed with two suitcases you could fit an Ethopian village in; two duffle bags, one of which was body-bag sized and I figure that's what Wife will use to haul my drunk ass back to the ship in case I had too many shots at Cabo Wabo; and a small suitcase that housed enough over-the-counter medicine I thought I was married to Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

I'm already a nervous wreck by 10:30 a.m., and I hadn't hit the freeway. The Chargers are playing Buffalo and I can get the game on the radio. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and I'm often a blissful dude. Listening to my teams while operating a machine that travels 80 mph intermingled with like machines is not the best thing for humanity.

Wife and Chris are talking about what they want to do when we get on the ship as I'm meandering through traffic like I'm Ladanian Tomlinson and we make record time to the dock, but with one huge problem, there's still 10 minutes left in the game. I rush us through check-in, saying yes to every question the lady asks us - which explains the strip search and the German shepard's nose up my pooper - so I can catch the last few minutes of the game. We wander around the lobby waiting to board the ship to begin "Melissas Do (it on) the Pacific 2006" and there it is, the most beautiful TV (and the last one I'll watch for seven days) I've ever seen because it is showing the Charger game. They call our boarding number but I let it pass since there's two minutes left in the game and the Bolts are holding on to a Nicole Ritchie-slim lead. I'm nothing if not obsessive and I'm worried that by leaving the car and radio broadcast I somehow screwed the Bolts' chances of moving to 10-2 on the season. But, by the grace of Al Pacino, they hold on to win and I clear our happy little group of three (I think they were happy on the inside, because after waiting 10 minutes for the final two minutes to finish they didn't look too pleased on the outside) for departure.

Thanks to my parental units, we knew to hit the buffet first. If Royal Carribbean's serving, I'm eating. And I announce my pressence with authority at the lunch trough, piling on pasta with roast beef with something they just labeled "fish" with assorted salads with soft-serve ice cream. Us professional buffeters don't waste time.

With potato salad seeping out my ears and my skin secreting au jus from all the beef I just ate we decide to explore the headquarters for "Melissas Do (it on) the Pacific 2006." We walk along the port side, we traverse the starboard side, we wander along the aft and hike through bow, and if I knew what all the crap meant I'd have a better idea where we went on the boat. As it was, I decided I would write a letter to Mr. Royal Carribbean explaining he really needed one of those Disneyland People Movers to shuffle the 2,500 hostages - I mean - vacationers around the boat. When he hears this idea, man, it's easy street for the Arizona branch of the Melissa Tree.

Duringour Lewis&Clark-like expedition, we foundthe spa, or as I like to call it, the money leechers. They do teeth whitening and hot-rock massages on the ship, for the nominal fee of a gazillion bucks. Some lady with an exotic accent talks about both processes, and Wife must sense I'm ready to verbalize my outrage and yanks my back hair to quiet my vocal skills - if I want my teeth white,I'll drink a gallon of bleach, and if I want a hot-rock massage I'll roll on the Arizona asphalt in July.

The hostages are called down to Deck 4 for "mustard." Wife explains it's not "mustard" but "muster", and I tell her I don't care what they call it, I can't eat anymore (at least not until dinner). The Safety Wench in the orange shark attraction device - she maintains it's a life vest, but I know better - tells me to shut my yapper and step in line so we can be counted before we're forced to swab the deck or hoist the sails. She scares the livin' bejeezus out of me so I do what she says. However, Royal Carribbean's big mistake is attaching whistles to these life vest and before long I'm whistling "The Bridge over the River Kwai" as she's calling out room numbers. Safety Wench shoots me glare which said she was ready to send me off the plank, so I stop with the whistle and play with the shark attraction light instead.

We watch the ship pull out from port, the group of nine together now, and I have a thought as I'm watching the lovely San Pedro docks Los Angeles beaches fade into the murky darkness of the Pacific Ocean, "Holy crap, I'm off land and at the whims of some Captain who's from Norway. What the heck does he know of Mexico if he's a wood-shoe wearin', windmill turning Viking?" We're screwed, but at least the sparse city lights dotting the hills surrounding the docks and bay are a sight to behold. Like little fireflies waving good-bye, I can feel four months of stress wash away with the waves.

With everyone settled in, we meet at the cheesy piano bar - little did we know that this would be home away from home for the next 7 days - and vacation officially begins with everyone drinking frosty, umbrella drinks because we're suckers for pina coladas that are more pina than colada. Over drinks, we realize Angela, Jerry and her family have the Leo DiCaprio "Titanic" rooms, Deck 2 in the back over the boat's motor. Ben and Brett are one level up, while Wife, Chris and I are in the Kate Winslett and Billy Zane suite, only with a smaller balcony.

We dress up a bit for dinner and I immediately work our poor waiter, Mustafa. "Dude, I can't decide between the cod and the shrimp ravioli. I wish I could have both." I give our man Mustafa the same eyes our pooches give us when we short change them on doggie biscuits and he gives in, bringing me a side of the ravioli. He doesn't know what he started, the flood gates are open and I'm Hurricane Michael. Both dishes are orgasms in my mouth, and I have to stay a little longer at the table waiting for my weiner to go back down because food excites me in a special way.

We finish the night watching Karaoke, including Jerry and Angela belting out some notes, both sounding very good. They work on me to get up there and I get as far as picking out a song, but just don't have enough alcohol in me (I'm a six-beer karaoke-er, and by that math it would cost me almost $30 bones to cackle out a tune - that's money we could spend on something worthwhile like Bingo) to pull the trigger on J. Geils Band "Centerfold."

Midnight, bushed, just one more drink at the Schooner Bar - home away from home - and that one drink lasted two hours. We meet Manolo (who pronounces his name Manilow), Ricky (who says his name is Barry) and Rowell, three guys from the Phillipines who 1) are not afraid to mix more Jack Daniels in Cokes than the other way around, and 2) tell us there's no need to return to the dining room for dinner the rest of the week, the Schooner Bar has everything we desire, including a pool in the back. It's like first day at school where you introduce yourself, as we make newcomers to the bar do the same. We instantly become one happy drunk family, especially with Manolo "freshening up" our drinks and not charging us. That's the way to my heart, my friend.

And if it weren't for the choppy seas after the closing down the Schooner Bar and tasting shrimp raviolis on the way back up, it would have been a perfect day. On the whole, I had to give it a 99 out of a 100.

Time for that winter sweatshirt

Arizona has been on the wrong side of 80 degrees for the past month and I'm sick of it. Bring back my triple digit heat advisories and shoe-melting asphalt, you can have this nipple-hardening cold crap.

Picked up our dinner tonight at the local Cat in Soy Sauce restaurant (no offense to my Chinese friends, the cuisine is wonderful if you like domesticated animals mixed with red peppers hot enough to solder your tongue to the roof of your mouth) and while the AAA office digital thermometer read 75 degrees, my nuts knew differently. Think peas in bowling ball bag. Got the image now?

"Horse puckey," I yelled, farting again because the Mean Green Melissa Machine takes 10 minutes to pump out heat, and it's only a 5-minute drive to the Cat in Soy Sauce joint. I gotta keep warm somehow.

I moved to the Grand Canyon state for three reasons: 1. Warm weather and no snow; 2. Spring training baseball; and 3. Wife said I had to. No where in our discourse over the move did Wife mention that December through February gets wiener-shrinking cold. Oh, she railed about the heat, made it sound like its wonder she survived 20-plus years of her ass frying on leather-upholstered car seats, but she forgot to mention the snotsicles I'll get when moving the trash out to the curb during a blustery December night.

A couple of weeks ago, I had put blankets on my citrus trees. That's friggin' cold in my book. When trees need bundling up, you know Jack Frost is nipping at your ass. Trees don't need blankets. Their TREES. You don't see them blowing on their branches to stay warm. Their not stamping their roots to get the sap moving. They sit there and let the wind blow through the leaves.

I'd build a fire in our fireplace, but Wife thought the grate made a better setting for an array of colorful candles. So now, our fire place looks like a prayer box in a Catholic Church.

"The candles bring color to the family room. Don't you think?"

She looks at it like it's a master of work of art. All I see is a misused heat source that would be better spent thawing out my undies.

"The blue in my frozen extremities brings color to the room, too, sweetheart." I add the sweetheart to most sentences to distract Wife from the sarcasm hoping she'll only hear the endearment and forget the opening clause. It hasn't worked yet.

She tells me to bundle up in a blanket if I'm cold, and I say I would, but the trees have them all.

Admittedly, I'm a wimp when the temp drops. I check the thermostats in the house a couple of times per day thinking something's wrong with the heater because it reads 68 and the house should be at 70. Dammit, those two degrees matter. Who cares if we're facing an energy crisis? I'm facing an energy crisis too. My blood ain't moving fast enough because it's too damn cold, hence I'm dragging ass, energyless because my thermostat has conspired against me.

At least I have these red Chinese peppers to keep me warm during these 50 degree nights. At least my gut will be warm as I'm chowing them down with my cat in soy sauce.

Sir, you have to check your walker at the door

Somewhere between early Pearl Jam and today the concert rules changed. I wasn't consulted, interviewed or asked to ratify these new rules and I can't help but feel a little like a feeble grandfather shoved into a corner during Christmas dinner muttering about the good ol' days. "Back in my day," I say through loose-fitting dentures, "we slam danced at punk shows, bounced at new wave shows and never crowd surfed during set changes."

I knew the concert world had moved on without me after Tuesday night's show, 103.5's "How the Edge Stole Christmas." The show should have been called "Old Fogey Rocker Infests Teenage Safe Haven." I was a scorpion in an ant hill. A mouse in a snake pit. A fire hydrant in a dog pound. The kids were everywhere, crawling, no, swarming - my God they swarmed - across the main floor. I thought maybe I should have called security, let them know they had an infeststation of wild-haired whipper snappers, but didn't think the rent-a-cops had a bug bomb large enough to gas the lot of them. They had their hands full anyway with the hooligans crowd surfing over the front barricade like cockroaches sneaking under a house's floor boards.

Yes, I agree, at 34, I've become my grandpas. I sit on my front porch and yell at cars to slow down. I have a slingshot at the ready in case some punk decides to cross my line of demarcation and tread on my front yard. "What, your ball is on my property? Tough noodles, son, how 'bout I give you a swift kick in the ass for walking on my freshly raked driveway?"

Lucky for me and the group I roll with (that's right, I roll. I'm one hep cat) has connections and we landed in a suite. But wait, this wasn't just any old suite, this was the OWNER'S suite. Our good friend Chris works at the Swift air terminal at Sky Harbor. The head big wig at Swift is the top cheese for the Phoenix Coyotes of the National Hockey League. So our main man Chris gets hooked up with tickets to anything at the Glendale Arena every once in awhile. And as payment to watch Money Pit 1 and Money Pit 2 when Wife and I escape the Arizona walls, he takes us to the suite at the Arena for free chow and beer.

The concert featured six bands, 1 of which I had never heard of (Shiny New Pistols), 2 of which I had vaguely heard of (Say Anything - should be named See Anything but these Schmucks - and OK Go) 2 more I knew only by name (Plain White Ts and Taking Back Sunday) and finally the headliner - AFI. Watching these six bands, I realized there has been another rule change of which I was not consulted - singers scream now. It's not a few random "Yeahs" anymore, they're screaming out whole verses. I could be wrong - there's been just one recorded case, ask Wife - but I'm guessing that's not something taught at the Juliard School of Music. I don't think "Screaming Songs 401" (it's a higher-level class) is on the curriculum. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy hearing a dude scream until his larynx shears off and falls to the stage, but how about picking the spots. Going to the well too much waters down the message.

It was a good thing I was in the safe confines of the Owners box too, because two bands decided to cover a pair of songs from my faves - Depeche Mode and Violent Femmes. 'Pistols' covered a post-Violator (Mode's best album) song and OK Go did the Femmes' "Prove My Love." While the latter's lead singer didn't conjure any images of Gordon Gano, it was still solid, but I'm sure 95 percent of the punks on the floor were asking themselves "Isn't this a song from that 'Blister in the Sun' band?" If I heard that I'm sure I would have freaked out like Dustin Hoffman at the airport in "Rain Man". I'm pretty the hooligans would have attributed my bezerkness to my age or the prescription drugs I must take to stay regular and then called security. That's ageism at its finest, dump on the old guy while the acne-faced teens bombard the stage and get redirected back to the concert nest. Meanwhile, I'm in the pokey being eyed by prisoners like I'm the lamb and they're the wolves.

I should have known I made a wrong turn at Albuerquerque when I traversed through our nation's furture in jeans and button-down shirt. Not my typical concert attire but Wife - who we all know dresses me because she never had a Ken doll when she was a kid - reminded me that I was sitting in the owner's box (again, thanks Chris) and that Mr. Moyes may just be there tonight (yeah, an alternative-rock-slash-punk show seemed just the place for a trucking magnate). I thought I could assimilate with teenage bugs by wearing old-school Vans, but after seeing a pair of blonde mohawks, a dude in a kilt and plenty of black eyeliner - ON THE BOYS - I knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore. Hell, the state wasn't even in my rearview mirror.

When did things go cuckoo? We used to dress similar - the eyeliner stayed on the girls usually - but the hair was long and dirty. It was a much better effect when head banging. Yellow rooster hairdos don't capture the head-whipping action quite the same.

The highlight of the concert was OK Go. They were dressed like they should be running a bank - 3-piece suits sans jackets - and hopped all over the stage like frenzied rabbits looking for bunnies to inseminate. I'm out of the loop with them and the Internet, I guess there's some deal on YouTube with the band dancing on treadmills (they didn't bring them to the concert) and in their back yard. Both routines are synchronized between the four band members and are funnier than Christoper Walken gliding to a Fatboy Slim song. They performed the back yard dance to close their set and I snorted beer and nacho cheese out my nose. If you have the opportunity to do so, don't. That's Grandpa Michael's advice for the day.

The only thing that saved Taking Back Sunday from being renamed Give me Back my Tuesday was the lead singer's deft twirling of the mic. I couldn't take my eyes of him, more because I thought he'd wrap the cord around his neck and forget to spin out of the wrap job before the cord crushed his throat sending his adam's apple through the back of his neck. That never happened, though, instead he'd twirl away from the coil as if he was a top and then launch the mic high above him only to catch while kneeling down to scream out some more lyrics. For a second, I thought we were watching Cirque du Solei without the contortionists, trapeze or humans-in-unitard pyramids.

I wish I could remember how AFI looked, all I remember (memory is the first to go at my age) is that everything was white, which tells me either I was dead and heading toward the white light, or that's the band's thing - white speakers, woofers and trees. Instead I was again transfixed by the teenimites on the floor. They slammed - perfectly acceptable - but the pit looked more like a large-scale barroom brawl than a dance-a-thon. Elbows, hooks, jabs, even a body slam were being thrown from all angles. It was WWF night set to rock music. One humongous human being stood in the middle of the pit, and I was sure that was Andre the Giant back from the dead.

I checked my outdated concert rule book and Rule 42(a), Section 32 states: Thou shalt not throw forearm shivers or head butt fellow slam dancers inside said pit. One new rule I do like, however, is the handshakes and one-armed hugs given by the slammers after each song. That was something missing back in my day. You were lucky to get a hand up before being trampled by 1,000 screaming concert goers back then. Now, it's slam dancing Barney-style.

Hmmm, a giant, purple dinosaur outfit maybe that's the natural progression for concert clothing. I think I'll call the rules committee tonight and suggest the ammendment, we're about ready for another rule change, aren't we?

I'm such a tease

Back from chumming the sea with freshly eaten cod and shrimp raviolis. Someone should have warned me that mixing two dinner entrees, a towering buffet plate that would make Babe Ruth say, "Damn, my boy, that's a crap load of food," and two well alcohol-downed Jack and Cokes is dangerous when the water is as choppy as chef at Benihana.

Here are some of the highlights, day by day, with a promise of more to come by the end of the week (call this foreplay if you want):

Sunday: Tremendous shrimp raviolis despite their unfortunate outcome (hello toilet bowl, you're my friend tonight), free booze from our new friends Manolo and Ricky at the Schooner Bar and watching my two rock star friends make a pair of songs their bitches during Karaoke night. They tried to get me up there - I was going to throw down on some J. Geils Band "Centerfold" - but luckily for the Vision of the Seas crowd the alcohol was too overpriced forcing me to watch my consumption/cash flow ratio.

Monday: Lost $55 in just 1 hour between blowing 3 hands in a blackjack tournament and scuttling $35 for six whole Bingo cards. It took Wife and I a while to wipe "Sucker" from our foreheads. Fancy dinner saves the day as I munch down snails (yep, the same snails we crunched with our shoes when we were kids - or just last week), lobster bisque (my favorite soup, I'd bathe in it and use if for aftershave if I could) and then tore through a duck for dinner (not sure if it was Daffy or Donald).

Tuesday: Cabo San Lucas and our introduction to Mojitos thanks to Angela's parental units. It has mint and sugar in it, other than I don't know. It could be a Mexican dude taking a leak in each glass for all I care, it still spells yummy. We did this at Sammy Hagar's joint - Cabo Wabo - which after taking a pull from Jerry's Waborita (Sammy's fave the bartenders say) I down my own. It's blue, so I had to suspend my ban on drinks of color (unnatural color). But unlike most blue drinks, it doesn't taste like sweet Windex.

Wednesday: City tour of Mazatlan where the driver takes us to an open-air fish mart that is no where near the ocean, instead it's in the middle of town and is comprised of a dozen or so blue over-turned trash buckets used as tables and busboy trays filled with various seafood items, including Jumbo shrimp. Try small-dog sized shrimps, not those shrimpy shrimps you find in Top Ramen. Order Tequila Sunrise on board, and find it's more tequila than sunrise. Quest game after dinner (I'll say that one female member of our group watched the last part of the game topless while a male member wore women's clothing and lipstick then paraded around the dance floor ... read the day-to-day posts when I get them finished) which left many people in the lounge in various stages of undress. Can't beat that, can you?

Thursday: Puerta Vallarta where I became a spider monkey in the morning, and felt like a spider monkey in the evening. All I have to say is "dos para uno mojitos. Gracias." My new favorite Spanish saying.

Friday: No where to go but the ship. Walked around the track hoping a side passage would open up to another mainland port that would produce more fun, but none showed. But with p.m. snacks of hot dogs and Ben & Jerry's ice cream (the Dogs were my favorite price - free), I really couldn't complain. Plus it was lobster night! Three was my total, but I could have tripled that number with my eyes closed

Saturday: Finally did the rock wall on the ship. Ring three bells 200 feet above the ocean. Screw that punk Leo DiCaprio, I'm king of the frickin' world. Day just got better from there with a dinner of shrimp cocktails, orange salmon blossom, and pasta in vodka salmon sauce. Oh yeah, this is what heaven is like, mix and match foods so your mouth orgasms every night. Our favorite bartenders tell us we can have free drinks if we get on the next cruise. Little do they know that I was thisclose to buying the ticket before Wife found me and pulled me through the ship's purser area by my ear.

Sunday: Disembarkation day. I ain't ready to leave, and the group must pull me away from the breakfast buffet. I throw a 34-year-old's tantrum, hanging onto the waffle bar, tears streaming down my face, yelling "Hell no, I won't go."

But now I'm home and no matter how much I beg Wife won't put together a choice of dinner appetizers and entrees, like the ship's nightly menu. I'm stuck with either Campbell's Clam Chowder soup or a dog biscuits. It's not exactly choosing between lobster tails and prime rib, but it's a touch decision nonetheless.

This is hard work

This blogging crap is hard work. I need a vacation after just three weeks of work. Why didn't any of you chuckleheads tell me how much of a job this really is. I'd tell Wife I should get paid for this drivel, but she'd just laugh until she hiccups and I'd still never see a dime.

So I'll be off to the Mexican Riviera, which is a nice way of saying we're visiting Mexico. We're cruising down south in search bars, booze and bathrooms - likely in that order.

Want to go? When I return from this sabbatical I'll give you a daily run down of life vacationing with the Club Melissa. Sober or well intoxicated, I will take notes and relay every scintillating detail of "Melissa's Take the High Seas" 2006.

See you in a week.

Uno mas cerveza, por favor. Donde esta el Bano?

Oh yeah, I'm ready.

Gym dandy

As much as ESPN has ruined it's money-maker, SportsCenter, I still feel compelled to watch it. Where else am I going to get my Yankee, Red Sox, Patriots, Cowboys, Lakers, Pistons fix? Those are the only teams that matter according to the Oh Holy Gatekeeper of Sports News, right? They sure don't feed us news about other teams like, say, the Dodgers and Chargers.

The Gatekeeper is the first thing I turn in the morning, the first thing I turn on when I get home from work, and what I look for when I'm doing my 45 minutes of hell at the gym. By that point, like a heroin junky after a good spike, I lay back content with all the gatekeeped sports news ESPN has given me. I might turn it on later at night when Wife has sauntered out of the room for the moment, but like a teenager watching a nudie move on late night Cinimax, I flip it back to the "Dharma & Greg" reruns we're watching before she saunters back into the room.

"What were you watching?" Wife says.

"Uh, nothing. It was a commercial dear," I say, but the blushing pink hue floods my face and she knows just where I've been on TV. "OK, I needed to know who won the Longwood University/McNeese State game."

"Why?" Her question pains me. Wife doesn't even pretend to sympathize with my addiction. No "It's OK honey, we'll get through this together," or "There's help out there for you, we'll find it." Instead, I get an accusatory stare that says I'll be banished to the tool shed - again.

"Nevermind, let's watch the end of 'Dharma & Greg.'"

My windows for watching the Oh Holy Gatekeeper of Sports News open only as wide as a rear window in a minivan. Fifteen minutes in the morning and five before the gym, making my final viewing of the day all the more important. Forty-five minutes of hell go by like 42 minutes when the Oh Holy Gatekeeper is spewing stats at me like a gumball machine. Those minutes are almost bearable. When I can't get my fix because all the gym TVs are tuned into either "Oprah" or "Family Feud", the eliptical trainer I'm gassing myself on is like one of those Mac trucks being pushed by humans who are roughly the same size as said truck in the Strongest Man competition on late-night ESPN (check your local listings).

And then there's yesterday. I'm motoring along on the last trainer in the row, which sits behind four Stair Master machines (more on those later). I've got a good sweat going (I'm not sure what a bad sweat is, and I don't want to find out either). My legs feel like runny jello and my chest is about to implode, but the sweat cascading down my ever growing forehead (I'm not going bald, I'm just experiencing a forehead growth spurt) is top notch. No one sweats as good as me, I tell myself while watching the Oh Holy Gatekeeper deliver news, stats and highlight-reel plays from the ceiling mounted television (I think everyone needs a ceiling-mounted television). I'm nearly orgasmic with this overload of sports information. This would be heaven if I didn't have to run like I was being chased by rabid, scrotum-eating rats on a device I'm sure was used to torture detainees at Guatanamo Bay.

This is where I play the gym etiquette card. "Got any etiquettes?" "No, Go Fish, sucker!"

This guy is 8-1/2 feet tall if he's a foot. Stick him on a Stair Master and he could clean my rain gutters without a chair or a ladder (I need a 30-foot extension ladder just to get close, and at that point I'm on the rung that says 'Hey, dumbshit, if you step here, you'll break your ass.') There's four empty machines and I'm behind the last one the Gatekeeper's channel. I'm confident the galoot won't choose the Stair Master in front of me. No one would be that inconsiderate, would they? Just in case, I make sure I'm looking at the TV when he walks up. He'll have to get the clue.

He passes the first machine.

No worries, there still two to choose from.

He passes the second machine.

Curious.

He passes the third machine.

Maybe he's going to stretch those stilts he calls legs.

Ah crap! The beanpole takes the fourth and final Stair Master, blocking my view from the Gatekeeper. Why not just blind fold me and kick my junk up through my esophagus? Just another case of the big men keeping us shrimps down.

At this point, I realized there were only a few options: 1. Ask him politely deroot and move his Redwood ass one over, but I'm pint-sized runt that would get lost in the grooves of his tennis shoe when he steps on my head and crushes me into the carpet; 2. Use my car key (which I take with me just in case I need it for something just like this) and shank his kidney like we're in a prison fight, but then I wasn't sure if the key would work in the truck so I vetoed that idea; 3. Move over to the next eliptical trainer to finish my 45 minutes of hell.

Guess which one I chose.

That's right, I packed my balls and made the trip to the next one. Yeah, I know, I'm a bad ass.

Our chickens look an awful lot like dogs

Big dogs should strike fear in people. They should make grown men take a step back while grabbing their crotch, make women shriek in fear and make little kids cry in terror. That's what big dogs should do.

Our "dogs" (Money Pit 1 and Money Pit 2 for short) don't do any of that. In fact, I'm sure Wife and I bought chickens from that dirt farmer in Northern Peoria. She guaranteed they were Lab/German Shepard pups, but we were duped. We purchased Colonel Sanders' top seller - farm-fresh chickens. If I was a thief breaking into the Melissa Compound, I would be more scared of our declawed cat Coco - the cat whose meow comes out like an angry old lady yelling at kids to stay off her lawn - than our two "dogs." Oh, they bark (just ask the neighbors) and have no problem patrolling the Back 40 to make sure the birds aren't flying off with the garden tools, but you stick a 4-year-old munchkin in front of them and they're shivering messes cowering behind Wife (they think I can take care of myself against the 4-year-old hooligan). That munchkin may as well be a dog-eating creature from the planet Catopia. The "dogs" tuck their tails, droop their ears, and look at Wife and I with big, fear-stricken eyes that say "please don't let this mini-human defile me."

Then there's the groomer, or as I like to call her the Dog De-stinker. It's one of these mobile groomers, so you give her a call, let her know the dogs rolled in their own poop (if she's lucky they may have made it their afternoon snack) and irrigation water (which is a step above mosquito infested swamp in Florida) and she pulls up in your driveway. Here's a snapshot of a De-stinker visit (it's from today, and it hasn't changed in four years):

1. Doorbell rings, "dogs" get excited with the thought of a visitor stopping in to see them. Maybe they'll get a treat - I can see their pea-brains working.

2. Open door to greet De-stinker. "Dogs" take one sniff of her canine fear-scented smock and run for the farthest corner in the house, hoping to blend with the wall and rug. I'm not the brightest bulb in the lamp - I attended the University of Nevada Las Vegas, you do the math - so I'm sure the "dogs" are shocked that I can find where they're hiding every time. "Seriously, he can't even lick his own privates," I'm sure is their rationale in thinking I won't find them.

3. Thinking like a dog, I pull down the leash and tell them we're going for a walk (5 feet past the out the front door and into the grooming van, but I don't tell them that). While I think I'm smart by trying to trick them, they're just as smart and instead sink deeper in the corner, melting into the wall and tile, forming a puddle of dead weight that I must now manipulate into the van.

4. Reminding myself that the De-stinker is behind me, and I have no desire to be on the evening news for shoving bike training wheels up my "dogs'" whoo-whoos so I can wheel them into the Salon di Fifi (which is a van with no rear windows and wood-paneled flooring. I think it's more of a dog-abductor van and I'm pleasantly surprised each time when the toothless Dog De-stinker returns the pooches back into my care), I break down and do my once-every 8-week exercise - doggy lift - whereupon I haul a pair of dogs (80 pounds and 55 pounds respectively) from the back room, through the kitchen, family room, living room and finally out the front door and then across the bed of hot rocks that is the Arizona earth before depositing the man's best friend into said Salon. Repeat step 4 when 1st dog is returned - smiling and happy to be freed of the shitsicles hanging off its rear - and it's 2nd dog's turn.

I can only imagine what goes on inside Salon di Fifi, but for our mean, vicious watch dogs to be more petrified of a 5-foot, bobbed-hair grandmotherly woman than the vacuum (which can cause tail maiming when I'm drunk and trying to clean up the carpet after a 4-tequila shot mishap) tells me there must be some scary stuff in the dog-abductor van. Blowers, clippers, shampoos, perfumes, things that likely go up the ass; something must spook these two vigilant watch dogs.

Maybe a visit to the groomer for the pooches is like a visit to the dentist for me. I'm always afraid they'll yank on a bottom molar only to find it's attached to my ass. They'll pull and pull and pull, meanwhile I'm tasting my sphincter. And when I walk through the front door I'm just happy that I'm home again and I can have a treat for going.

I think the pooches have reason to be scared, then.

Gobble Gobble-a, Gobble-Gobble-di

Man, oh man how I love Thanksgiving.

Any day that celebrates stuffing one's mouth with high-carb, high-saturated fat, high-heart risk foods is a grand day indeed. Those pilgrims and indians knew how to party. And believe you me, I've been practicing this week. Gotta stretch out the gut, or as I like to call it "The Factory" (things get manufactured inside and noxious fumes get emmitted to the outside). Last night, I polished off a plate of refried beans - The Factory really likes beans - and a rather large chicken burrito with all the fixins (see, I am in Turkey Day mode, got the vernacular down and it's not even Thursday). The Factory did some overtime, but since it's a short week it accepted its duties without complaint.

From turnips to green beans with onion pearls to mashed potatos to yams with marshmallows of course to stuffing with raisins and sausage to turkey (i'm a dark meat man - and like they say, once you go dark you never ... well nevermind about that), it's all good eatin'. Mix in a good red wine (or is it supposed to be white wine? Hell, mix in some booze, any booze) and that's how the Tribe does Thanksgiving.

Typically, I'm glued to the TV watching Detroit get whooped like a sorry-ass mule, beer welded to my hand while Uncles discuss something above my pay grade while Father Unit splits time between the game and computer/business/stock speak. Us guys know where we're best utilized, obviously, because I didn't mention any of us in the kitchen. We all know better. Step inside the combat zone and you're liable to get pasted with one of the 21 different styles of potatos being concocted. Oh no, it's much safer on the couch, which is not within potato-flinging distance. Maybe a hurled turkey leg, but not potatoes (don't ask how I know).

I try to help cleanup until I break something and then I'm politely asked to join the guys outside for a cigar. It works every time.

So there you have it. That's Thanksgiving Day with the tribe. I hope you have a good day with your family and friends. Wife and plan to. HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Snip, snip, buzz

Wife laughs at me - often - because I get indignant when she doesn't comment on my haircut when she first sees me (I make it point to say her hair looks nice after her day long trip to the Salon, no matter if it was a quarter-inch trim or a full-blown color and wax and whatever else you chicks get done to your mane). If I'm spending $13 of my hard-earned bucks on my hair I want folks to notice.

Wife can't believe I had long hair at one time. Jesus-length long hair that I refused to pull into a pony tail because I hated that look of frizzy long hair in a pony tail. No matter how tight you pull that mane together, you still can't contain each and every stringy strand. If I needed the rat nest pulled into a pony, I would plaster it down with a enough hairspray you could paste paintings to the wall. If you're out of industrial glue and need something to piece together your Ming vase because a spouse decided it would be fun to reenact Ladanian Tomlinson's latest touchdown run and ball spike, pull out the AquaNet and spray away.

I had my flowing locks hacked off after all my friends did the same. I guess they realized long hair was something for 24-year-olds, at 25 we were approaching the near-dead rocker stage. So a week or two shy of my quarter-century birthday I lopped off the split ends and joined the civilized world once more.

Flash forward nine years and I finally dragged my beer-guzzling ass into the barber shop. More accurate, a Fantastic Sams, which is no different than a Simple Cuts, Great Clips, Friendly Scissors, Barb's Big Buzz or whatever those McDonaldized hair joints are called in your hunk of the planet. Barber shops is where Ward Cleaver and Andy Griffith went for a trim and a shave. I can't do those places; the head cutter's hands move to quick and I'm afraid I'll end up losing my iPod earphone holders (get an anatomy chart to figure that one out, this ain't physiology class).

So, I stop into Sammy's shop - I don't know why Sam is fantastic, I thought the place and my cut was mediocre - for two reasons: 1. It's two blocks away from the Melissa Compound, and 2. I had a coupon. I collect the latter like I used to hoard baseball cards. Wife says "Let's go out to eat," and I reply, "How 'bout Applebee's? I have a coupon." I have coupons for go-kart racing, plays, car washes, pantyhose, and to shops such as Bed, Bath & Beyond and Ulta (Wife stops in, loads up the basket with hundreds of vials - I'm sure it's crack because each vial is that size - and it costs me $100 each time. It's gotta be crack at those prices). If I can save a buck on a $13 hair cut, god damn it, I will.

I like haircuts; the feel of the scissors sifting through the hair, the buzzer tickling the neck (I better watch out or I'll have to charge $19.95 to read this post), it's just delightful. However, being held captive in a chair that is more super market kiddie ride than job necessity and forced to make small talk, well, let's say I'd rather the hair chick just jab me in the ear with the ubersharp scissors. Aside from asking about Thanksgiving and mentioning how busy it seems, I have nothing. I could ask more about her Turkey Day, but I'm afraid she'll think I'm planning to stalk her or seeking a dinner invite. I figure that ain't my business. Neither is it my bees-wax whether she lives around here, is a desert native or likes mustard on her grilled-cheese sandwiches. So instead, I smile at my reflection and wait for her to say "tilt your head forward." That's our conversation, she shouts out directions and I follow like a good soldier. "Yes ma'am. This way? How does this do ya?" That's the extent of our conversation.

Now that I look at it, getting haircut is not that much different than being married.

Rising Rivers - get your Phil

Nineteen years, 11 quarterbacks, and four playoff appearances since Dan Fouts wore the lightning bolts in San Diego.

That's the snapshot for the San Diego Chargers behind center. Aside from undersized, uberscrappy QBs (Stan Humphries and Drew Brees) the Chargers have had eight junkyard leftovers commanding the offense. They went for the flash (Jim McMahon), the "proven winner" (Jim Harbaugh), the "tools" (Billy Joe Tolliver, John Friesz), the place holder(Mark Malone), the faceless (Craig Welihan), the old (Doug Flutie) and finally the new (Ryan Leaf). The Chargers were an unsurprising 41-87 during those years with just one .500 season, under Harbaugh (8-8).

There's an old saying, "A great quarterback only comes around once in a generation." It took the Chargers two quarterback generations to find their Terry Bradshaw.

And Phillip Rivers couldn't come along soon enough for a beleaguered fan base.

The comparisons to Charger saint, Fouts, border on hyperbole because he has been that good. Through his first 10 games, Fouts completed 44.8 percent of his passes (87-194) and threw 13 interceptions to six touchdowns. Rivers, through his first 14 games (spanning three seasons), completed 65.5 percent (199-304) with 14 touchdowns and four picks.

Of course, it's a little disingenuous to the hall of famer to compare his first season to the North Carolina State product. Fouts, who played behind Johnny Unitas during his first season for the Bolts (1973), was given the reins for good the next season. Rivers had two years to prep for this season while backing up Brees.

Those two years have proven invaluable.

Granted, Fouts didn't start with an offense as explosive as what Rivers was given this season - when you have the best running back since Barry Sanders in the backfield your job becomes infinitely easier - but it's interesting that Fouts didn't reach the 2,000-yard mark until his fourth season. Rivers needed 14 games.

The guys on the gridiron believe in their not-so-young QB. The defense can spot the opponents 10 (Pittsburgh), 17 (Kansas City) or 21 points (Cincinnati) and Rivers keeps the squad together. Once Coach Marty Schottenheimer loosened the collar and let the kid run on his retractable leash (see Oakland and Baltimore games) the Chargers have rolled. They lead the league in scoring (33 points per game, 35 touchdowns), and much of that can be put on Rivers' shoulder. Marty hates turnovers - he benched Brees during the 2002 season after too many INTs that were more due to the offensive line than the shrimp - and Rivers has kept the ball secret-service safe. He's had three picks this year and lost one fumble. If I had a baby and needed it thrown, I'd let Rivers do it. That's trust.

And Charger fans haven't had much to trust in the 19 years the Bolts have played Wheel of Quarterbacks. Maybe fans can let that wall of distrust crumble and enjoy a quarterback who could take San Diego to the game that will not be mentioned (it happens in early February, do the math.)

Turn over that leaf, folks, let it blow into the river and watch it flow away into oblivion.

Dog-gone Kids

Wife and I will soon bow to parental pressure and try to make a freeloader.

My parental units' itch for grandfreeloaders, which has grown into a full-blown rash these past few years, is approaching seven years. That's important because Wife and I have been married for nearly five. As for Mom and Dad-in-law, that itch has been something they could treat with cortisone cream, a little dab here, a squirt there and that urge to scratch goes away. However, I think they need a bigger tube of the junk these days.

I think their desire for grandfreeloaders is some diabolical plot for revenge against us. Some modern-day "Cask of the Amantillado," where they wall us into our tomb by spoiling and sugaring-up the freeloaders before sending them back home. Wife and I were both perfect angels during our formative years, though, never questioning authority, picking up our toys and always eating our brussel sprouts. No, no, we were no trouble. Our sibling freeloaders, well, they were another story. We just can't break the units' code for this elaborate scheme. I'm ready to stake out the Hemet Senior Center and The Manor Next Door, wait for the respective units to depart for dinner at 4 p.m. (that's when old people eat so they can have energy to make it through the 6 p.m. news without falling asleep), make their daily trip to the pharmacy, or wherever the heck units go without their freeloaders, so I can slip in and attach some bugs to their Metamucil or Maalox jars because they're never too far away from those necessities. This way, Wife and I can get to the bottom of their shifty scheme. I'm thinking mind control of our freeloader hatchlings is the units' end goal, but without surveillance we don't know for sure.

And we thought both sets of units would be placated with grandpuppies. No wonder they didn't fall over in uninhibited joy when we told them they were grand units to a pair of lovely, healthy doggies. They're not much different. Just last night, Wife handed out two different-flavored bones and both pooches eyed the other's treat then looked back to wife, then back to treat before sulking off to their doggy beds - yeah, doggy BEDS (I'm lucky if I get a sliver of mattress from Wife and the three cats, yet the pooches get their own Sleep Number beds) - all the while wondering if the other really had the better bone.

This behavior isn't saved for just flavored bones, either. Wife and I give each pup her own dinner bowl. They munch away as if they had never seen food before, yet they cast sidelong glances at the other's bowl. We can see the hamster turning in their canine heads, "Her food looks the same, but is it really? She's eating it quick, and she's drooling. Dammit! It's gotta be better than this crap. Holy Shit! They like her better. I knew it. I bet it's hamburger, or eggs or chicken. Christ! Those humans are screwing me over and giving that one all the spoils. And look at them, they're laughing. That's it, I'm poopin' by the pool table again. That will show them for giving me this swill."

We've practiced parental unitness on the pooches for four-and-a-half years now and haven't had to call on the $65 shot. So I guess we passed the test. And really, raising a freeloader and pooch is the same thing. OK, one walks on all fours and poops where it feels like, the other walks on two pudgy sticks and poops wherever it likes. Yep, no difference. I've also talked it over with Wife, and discipline for freeloaders will be much the same as with the pups - you do something bad, outside you go. Lucky for freeloaders, they have opposable thumbs and can turn the knob on the shed for some shelter on those cold Arizona nights (yeah, right). They can even sleep in the wheel barrow. Not exactly the Marriot, but it's better than sleeping in botanical garden of weeds known as the back yard grass. A couple nights in the wheel barrow will cure their badness and we'll have the perfect little Brady freeloader(s) (just as long as it's not Jan, I never trusted that bitch).

Am I ready for a freeloader? I'd like to think so, but I guess until that egg hatches and the offspring comes out looking for the car keys and $20 for pizza you don't know. Then, you're in charge of warping their minds, too. Wait, that doesn't sound so bad:

"Why should I hate the San Francisco Giants, Daddy?"

"Well, because they fry little kids in a huge pan before every game and then feed them to the Giants players. That's why none of them smile. Well, that and they have bad teeth, too. The Dodgers, on the other had, give little kids pony rides before each game and let's you eat all the ice cream you want."

Oh yeah, I'm ready. Bring on the freeloaders.

Christmas geeks

When did Christmas become a four-month holiday?

Wife took me hostage one August evening - "let's go to Rock Bottom for dinner, dear, you can get your favorite beer," that's her way of getting me out of the house - and dragged me into JoAnn's Fabrics, Crafts and Shit. She promised 10 minute visit. I knew better. When she says 10 minutes in a store, I check the Wifespeak-to-English dictionary and there, under the heading "Time," I see the conversion rate for 10 minutes is really 42:31. I wanted to point this out to Wife, but she bound my hands and gagged me, so a) I wouldn't break anything in the store, and b) so I couldn't discuss escape plans with fellow hostages.

The store is like a giant Mervyn's without sleeves. Clothing fabric everywhere, but nothing you can try on. I was doing fine trying to work my hands free to signal for help from a passerby who likely freed himself and escaped the Hallmark store next door, when I ambled into St. Nick's workshop. JoAnn's, that wench, transported me to the North Pole in August. AUGUST! And everywhere I looked was Christmas crap. Robotic Rudolphs, Frosty the Snowman inflatable snowglobes, wreaths that smell like Blitzen just urinated on it, ceramic villages where the people look so happy you just want to smash their little heads with a ball-ping hammer to bring them into the real world, and nutcrackers that still spook the bejeezus out of me with their gritting teeth and gaping maws.

I try to tell Wife, around the gag, that we must go before I poop myself in protest of JoAnn's selling Christmas crap when it was still 155 degrees outside (August remember). Decorating one's house for Christmas, or selling said crap, should be triggered by either a date, or a temperature if you're in Arizona (like Monsoon season, three straight days of sub-65 degree weather and out come the light nets and lumi-frickin'-narias). She doesn't listen to me, and five minutes later she's asked by Cathy the Craft Nerd Clerk to take me outside because shoppers don't know what smells worse reindeer urine-scented wreaths or poop-scented husband.

I talk about that to talk about this - on Nov. 1, I noticed Mr. Green House (it would be perfect it all he wore were green jeans, too) had already lined his fence, eaves, garage, windows, chicken coop and anything else that didn't move with Christmas lights. I checked weather.com, and nope, no consecutive days of sub-65 degree temps here in Arizona. I thought about hooking one of the Christmas lights to the bumper of my truck and pulling them off, dragging the strand down Loop 101 until I hear no more pops and tinkling of broken bulbs. I couldn't do it, though, because Mr. Green House sits on the county island and has chickens, therefore he's a farmer (chickens=farmers in my book). And every movie I've watched, the farmer is packing heat inside, be it a double-barrel shotgun, deer rifle or rocket launcher ("Red Dawn"). Call me crazy, but I don't want to decorate our house with a gory hole where my pumpkin pie holder, re: my tummy, should be.

Lucky for Perfectly Manicured Front Yard Guy down the street, I saw Mr. Green House's display two weeks earlier, because this afternoon, after seeing the former lining his domicile with Christmas lights, I would have taken a hammer and nail to each red and white bulb, even those on the roof. But by this point, I've given up. If they can't wait until after the Thanksgiving holiday, what more can I do? I guess I'll keep peeing on their extension cords at 3:20 a.m. until they get the hint.

Maybe they should just take a lesson from us ... Wife and I just left our blue and white twinkle lights up all year (more out of laziness than by design). Works out perfectly, but the Arizona sun does something to blue Christmas lights - it turns them green. So you'll recognize our house this year, its' the one with the faceless plywood snowmen and teal Christmas lights. Nothing says "ho-ho-ho" like teal.

The war at home - Front Yard Theater

I knew it would be a hard-fought battle, and lives could be lost but I did't run from the fight. That's what's important. I knew I'd win because, unlike the Bush administration, I furnish my army of one (me) with the necessary equipment to win the war.

That's right, today - Veterans Day - I decided to take the war to the front yard weeds rather then them invading more of my territory. Does that make the weeds the U.S. and me Iraq? Better not touch that one, I might get a knock on the door from dudes in black suits, white shirts, black ties and Ray Ban sunglasses.

An angry patch of crab grass claimed a section of my driveway about eight months ago. It became a giant green, twiney ball of hate, swallowing two railroad ties and threatened to advance on our house. It was going to lay siege to Wife and myself. I can see it from computer room's window safely inside the house and the war-monger grass was definitely preparing an offensive of some type. I'm not exacly sure what type of attack it was planning - maybe when Wife or I decided to get the mail, the grass would lasso our ankles and pull us to it's den deep under the railroad ties so the Grass King could
have it's way with us - but something was being hatched.

Dressed in combat gear - ripped shorts, old University of San Diego t-shirt, and tennis shoes not allowed inside the house - I armed myself with a hand shovel and work gloves. We battled for nearly an hour; me ripping away at endless tendrils of angry crab grass, and it sending out agents of army ants (I knew they were called army ants for a reason) and fire ants to the front lines. Realizing a ground assault would not help win the war I went to the air. Inside the war room - the kitchen - I asked Wife to calculate how much spermicide I needed to kill weeds. After she pointed out that I was using Spectracide (weed killer) not Spermicide (same thing if you ask me, they're both killers), we planned our air attack. Using a Windex bottle and 3 ozs. of weed killer the plan was to soak the weeds in some biological-agent and then sit back to watch the giant ball wither into frail strands of straw.

It's 2 hours later since this war-turning battle and I have yet to see results. The bottle says fast acting, but obviously that's a subjective term. If the angry ball of grass returns with a vengence sending it's armies of dandelions and clovers after me and Wife I may have to do the unthinkable - go nuclear. I'm not afraid to drop a bomb of lighter fluid and set the war-monger ball on fire, but I'm sure Wife won't authorize the use of nuclear weapons. Since the chiefs of staff number two (me and Wife) and she gets two votes, I'm sure getting that declaration to pass will be a longshot, no matter how much fillibustering I do.

Maybe I should ask Donal Rumsfeld if he wants to straegize this war. I hear he's looking for a job.

Best laid plans...

I was all set to write a nice little post about the Chargers facing Cincinatti this weekend. I was going to explain how the game would likely be a shootout because the Bolts' depleted linebacking corps would have trouble sustaining a solid pass rush against the Bengals' line and Carson Palmer, despite allowing the 10th most sacks in the league. You can only expect so much from Carlos Polk and Marques Harris. And with the public griping of Chad "Christmas decoration" Johnson (serenading him at the game with "Oh Christmas Tree" seem appropriate now that he describes himself as a hood ornament) and TJ Housh... (I don't have time to look up Alphabet Soup's last name) I would expect the Bengals to throw left, throw right, throw down and throw up. If you have Rudi Johnson on your fantasy football team, bench him like he's the last kid picked for a touch football game. If he gets more than 12 carries in this game, Marvin Lewis is about as dumb as an Northern Arizona University grad (sorry Marc). I was going to explain how the Chargers offense should have some fun, though, facing a team that ranks 24th in yards allowed. LT will run left, Antonio Gates will catch passes to the right and in the middle a Rivers run through it (sorry, couldn't help myself, I'm a softie for bad puns).

All that said I thought the Chargers still had a shot to up their record to 7-2 with a 38-34 win in Cincy. I'd punctuate the post by saying if they could get through Shawne Merriman's 4-game suspension with a split - losses to the Bengals and Denver, wins over Cleveland and Oakland - they'd be in decent shape. So far, they're 1-0 Merrimanless.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say until I opened up the L.A. Times online and read Los Angeles Dodgers rightfielder J.D. Drew chose to opt out of his 5 year, $55 million contract. Drew's contract gave him the right to test the free agent market, and with that market being more mom-and-pop corner store size than Costco this offseason it was a sound business decision for the frail outfielder. I say frail, but that might not be altogether fair. He wasn't frail with the Dodgers, just unlucky. He missed the last half of the 2005 season when Arizona Diamondback's pitcher Brad Halsey broke Drew's wrist with a fastball. However, before that he was considered an injury risk, playing more than 140 games just once in his career. For the Dodgers in 2006, he played 146 games - the most in his career - and finished with a 100 RBIs, 20 homeruns, and on-base average of .393 and a .498 slugging percentage, good for second on the team. Those are solid face-value numbers.

What surprises me, and General Manager Ned Colletti if you read the L.A. Times article, was that Drew told all the local newspaper hacks that he was happy in L.A. and would not use the opt-out clause. He said that a little more than a month ago. It's a business decision, sure, and you can't fault him for that (heck, I can't deny I would likely have done the same thing if my agent urged said it was the right move), however, I can't help but think it was a little dishonest of Drew. It's like a girl you date for a month. You wine her and her dine her. She tells you how much fun she having on each date. Then, out of the (Dodger) blue, she says her boyfriend is coming back to town and she can't see you anymore. You're dumbfounded. What boyfriend? I imagine that's what Colletti feels right now. "I thought we were having a good time. You even said so."

On the bright side, that frees up $11 million to lure another free agent to Chavez Ravine. Maybe a bag of 3B Aramis Ramirez and carton of LF Alfonso Soriano of the shelf would taste good to Dodgers fans. Sprinkle on some Jason Schmidt or Barry Zito (the former of the San Francisco Giants who has finally found the error of his way) and you have a nice meal.

But they're the Dodgers, we all know it won't be that easy.

Ah, heck, I'm a geek now

I've fought this whole technology thing for years - I still don't own a cell phone, but Wife makes sure to saddle me with her's when I'm let off my leash, I guess you can call it a husband whistle, just like a dog whistle - but finally, at the urging of Wife and some well-meaning friends (who I'm sure were just tired of listening to me babble like an 80-year-old on pudding day at the local rest home.) I started one of these blog thingies. Here's how my mind works. I decided Sunday that I'd do this, it's now Thursday, just before Thursday-nite TV with Wife - Survivor, Earl, Office, CSI ... the networks must love us - and I'm finally getting something down on screen.

There's so much to consider when starting a blog. So much pressure. I don't do well with pressure. I tend to dribble on my self (I ain't tellin' you where I dribble from) and my hair gets crazy, like Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Anyway, first I had to decide what I would talk about. Wife tells me to write everyday crap since I live in Arizona, next door to the in-laws (when I say next door, I mean next door! Yeah, yeah, just like "Everybody Loves Raymond." Save the jokes, we've heard them all), we have crazy neighbors, and as Wife says I sometimes have a unique perspective on things. I think she's full of doo doo (that's right, I use the word doo-doo in everday speech), but here I am doing what she told me to do. I also have a passion - Wife says it's more like a sickness - for baseball and football. Mainly the former over the latter, and more specifically the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Chargers. So, there ya go, I have something else to prattle on about. I figure every Friday and Monday at least one post will be dedicated to one of those two organizations. The rest of the time will be me typing about life in the desert. Scintilating, I know.

Then, I had to come up with a name. I wanted it catchy, like an '80s one-hit-wonder song so you'd be singing the title at work until finally you admit you can't get it outta your head. That was more pressure, so of course more dribbling and since I came up with the name at the gym a puddle of drool pooled under me at the eliptical trainer so when I stepped off of my 45 minutes of hell I slipped in the salive swamp, twirled and crumpled to the floor, but the iPod did not become dislodged so I told the folks mired in their own exercise hells that the song in my head just makes me want to dance. They looked at me like I had a third nipple that spewed beer (mmm, beer) and kept gliding. Finally, I settled on what you see here. I had to explain the title to Wife, and she gave me the vote of approval after understanding my logic. Dodging Lightning - Dodgers and Chargers (or Bolts, as in lightning, if you will) - and the desert, well, if you know me you see how that fits.

Once that was done, I had to fill out blogger.com's CIAish questionairre (I didn't understand what they were asking me when trying to put this blog-thingy together - I won't be surprised if my posts come out with crazy characters only computers understand because they are plotting to take over the world, syntax errors [I don't know what a syntax is, I just hope it's not in my ass] and pictures of dogs humping [those might be my fault]) and decide what I want you to see on the screen. Since Wife won't let me post naked pics of Salma Hayek, I chose what you're looking at now. The sidebar is this weekend's project and maybe I'll get motivated and spruce the rest of the place up. Maybe I should just hire a cleaning service, 3 or 4 illegal immigrants to dust, wipe down the refrigerator and Windex the windows so to speak. It's Arizona, they're a dime dozen at at 6 a.m. in the Home Depot parking lot.

There you have it. That's how I was dragged into the 21st century. I'm not sure I like it or that I'm ready, but what the hell, I wasn't ready to have sex the first time either. I ain't got nothing better to do with my time. Drop in a comment, let me know what you think.

("Hey Wife, how do you sign off on this thing")