Entry 135: Your *MOM* Can Use The Correct Change

I have some... history with the vending machine downstairs.  It's basically a fucking dewsh.  If it were a person it would be the love-child of Tucker Max and The Situation.  With Justin Bieber's hair and Kristen Stewart's face.

As with any cliché vending machine problem, it started by hanging my snacks up on the coils without actually releasing them.  And they HAVE to release, both because my arm is not long enough to reach all the way up to grab them and because everyone knows that snacks taste better when they fall.  But that's just average douchery for a vending machine.

Also, I love blue Doritos.  Do you think they stock them regularly?  Nope.  Like a great sexual metaphor, they just put it in once to let you enjoy it and then tease you by never putting it in again.  Yeah, I *GUESS* I'll have fucking red Doritos, but I'm not going to be *HAPPY* about it! IWANTCOOLRANCH!!  5 months, 2 weeks, and 3 days now.  No Blue Doritos.

Where the *FUCK* are my blue Doritos!!!

But check this out.  If you put in 4 quarters (that's 1 dollar, Becky) and buy something that's .90 cents?  You get the item and .10 cents change back.  If you put in a $1 bill and try the same thing, it says "Please use correct change"  Um, what?  It's the same fucking thing!  Are you anti-bills, you racist piece of shit machine? I hate you.

I figured out last week that it gets even weirder. If you put in that same $1 bill and one nickel, it will give you the item plus .15 cents change!  So I guess "using the correct change" was a fucking lie, wasn't it?  Wasn't it, Douche McSucks-at-vending?

And for you smart kids out there, no.  It won't give you 4 quarters back if you try and get change for your $1 bill.  It just spits it back out (and it's never nice to spit, kids). 

This didn't get elevated to "I have to share how much I hate this machine" status until this past week.  I saw some Grandma's brand fudge cookies, which are awesome because they're the only type of cookie Grandmas makes that don't use "Sawdust" as their #1 ingredient.  When I ran down there to buy them though... some mark-ass trick had put some peanut butter ones in front!

Wait a minute... I can see another peanut butter one behind the front one, but what's behind that?  Can't... quite... see... maybe I'll just buy the front one to get a look back farther.  Surely the fudge ones are back there.  


So I do.  I use my $1+nickel scheme to buy the front one.  No luck.  The one behind it is another peanut butter.  Curses!  Foiled again!

But I look closer and I think I see the "C" of "Chocolate," which probably means it's my "chocolate fudge super chocolate chip fudgy awesome cookie."  And I ain't goin' down like no punk bitch.  I whipped out my wallet and started buying.

I finally get to what I think are the good cookies, only to see that they've been totally replaced.  By chocolate chip.  Which, in any normal setting, are my favorite cookies ever.  But I think "Grandma" got senile and royally fucked up the recipe because HER chocolate chip cookies taste like Ashton Kutcher's career.

Defeated, I trudged up to my friend's desk to break the news that the vending machine had won again.  There would be no fudge-awesome cookies today.   Just this pile of shitty cookies, a stack of nickels (it only gives change in nickels, wtf?), and my shame.   God. Damnit.

It was at this point that I thought I would expose and humiliate this damn machine for the dewsh it is.  But, I needed proof so I brought my friend to watch as I put a $1 bill in and it demanded "correct change."

I think you know what happened.  It decided to work.  First time ever.  EVER.  I got the chips, the change, and instead of "Use the correct change" I got "Have a nice day."

Fuck.  You.  To.  Hell.

It's hard to capture the full sentence since it was scrolling, but you get the idea.

Caleb "yeah I know I could just buy blue Doritos from the store, but I don't *want* to" Shreves

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Entry 134: Too Much White Powder Can End A Party In More Ways Than One

Duh! Winning!

I'm thinking of starting every post with that from now on... what do you think?

Okay, kidding.  But I WILL show you this picture:

But I digress.

For the following story I'm going to hearken back to the days of yore...

Back in 2002-2003ish, I lived in a charming duplex with one of my BFFs, Jenkins.  Click his name to read about some of his shenanigans... and know that I could probably make my next 30 posts about stories of him or the two of us polluting the universe.  His hobbies include Fa-Donking, Bomb Burritos, and drunken gymnastics. He's also the reason that Nair now comes with new warning labels:

Jenkins and I lived in the main floor and basement of an old house, and a girl we knew lived in a separate apartment upstairs.  Since we were young idiots we thought the house was great, though my dad still speaks of the place with the same tone he reserves for hooker-filled crack houses or dumpsters full of hobos in Moldova.  I'm paraphrasing based on memory, but if you ask him about it now he usually says something like:

"I'll never know how you spent a single day in that shit-heap of a house.  It was the worst thing I've ever seen.  Had I known how bad it was from the beginning, I would have faked my own death to collect the life insurance and put you up in a decent apartment for a year.  And Jenkins lived in the basement- THE BASEMENT!  You were at least spared from some of the millipedes, dirt, mold, and what-have-you by being upstairs, but that poor kid could have DIED!"



It really is just a matter of perspective though. For instance, the stairs down to the basement included a  very green and trendy feature:

My first attempt at drawing stairs.  

As you can see, the stairs were actually built directly into the ground.  So, in essence, the outside was part of the inside.  Which, kids, is how babies are born.

While we didn't make any babies in our shit-hole house (well, probably not), we decided one day to celebrate our "holy shit we're, like, fucking ADULTS!" house by throwing a massive party filled with underage kids.  Though for the most part each group of music students sort of partied on their own, Jenkins and I thought we could use our powers to summon them all together into one party.  Like how the Planeteers summoned Captain Planet.

That's how you draw black people, right?

It worked, we had a massive amount of people show up at the house, and we perfected the "frozen lemonade but use beer instead of water" drink for all to enjoy.  I'm not naming it, because I've seen fights break out because people disagree on what to call it.  I call it delicious. 

Oh, speaking of Asians.  There were two of note at this party:  our great friend, Natty, who once beat me out of a 1st place trophy at a high school jazz fest (no, I'm not bitter, fuck off) and my ex, Ethyl, when we were just starting to get a bit more serious about things.  Read: she hadn't done anything crazy yet.

Everyone was having a grand ol' time, the music was hoppin', and I was downstairs telling hilarious jokes to young co-eds.  As it usually does, the universe decided to break up my game and throw in an event of awesome and unbelievable scale.  All of the sudden, the group of us in the basement heard from upstairs what sounded like a Dance, Dance, Revolution contest between a herd of wildebeests and Godzilla.  That was followed with screaming and what sounded like a rush to the front-door side of the house.  One drunk guy was heroic enough to scream down a warning to we basement-dwellers, but provided little in the way of information.

I'm working on the stairs.  Suck it. 

By this point we realized that everyone was stampeding towards the door, something was terribly wrong, and there was some sort of smoke cloud starting to fill the doorway and seep into the basement.  Jenkins and I ran up to investigate, and saw one of the most fucked-up scenes I've ever seen in my life.  Since I don't have a picture of the old house, and I'm certainly not capable of drawing it, I will show you the scene via a random picture of a house.  Before:

This looks, literally, nothing like our house.  Great job, Caleb. 

 

 

Here is the scene of devastation we saw when we got to the top of the stairs:

 

What the fuck, right?  It's like Charlie Sheen just sneezed in our kitchen.  As we cough and sputter, waving our hands in front of our face and finding the stereo to turn the music off, I see what you might see in the second picture there.  Yup.  Look closer.  CLOSER.   I'll zoom in on my drawing:

Our very old house had been equipped with a very old fire extinguisher, and poor half-drunken Natty accidentally knocked it off the kitchen wall where it fell to the floor.  There, its safeguards against accidentally going off failed and it flooded our entire upstairs with a cloud of white, cocaine like powder that I read is some combination of baking soda, water, and Justin Bieber's hair.

What was extra funny is that Natty was completely covered in white powder.  He looked like the scene in Ace Ventura 2 where Ace dusts for prints in the cage of the sacred bat.  In his typical unflappable manner, Natty held up the fire extinguisher and said "I think I know what happened."

Indeed. 

Apparently huge commotions, screams, dozens of people stampeding out of a house, white powder seeping from the windows, and a fleet of getaway cars screaming down a residential street is enough to warrant the attention of the police, who showed up promptly about 30 minutes after the incident.  Whoever hadn't scattered, scattered.  That left me, as usual, as the "reasonable" person left to explain to the cops what the fuck had happened.  Which is awesome, because I love telling cops an outrageous story that is perfectly true.  I even showed the main cop the empty extinguisher.  When he saw how fucked up our entire house was, he had pity and gave me a warning.  He gave ME a warning, not Jenkins.  You know why?  Jenkins had vanished.  Ninja-style.  Gone.  I asked him the next day what happened:

No, I suppose they don't.  Lesson learned. 


If you were wondering, most of the white dust finally settled and we spent a day cleaning and vacuuming.  The shit was honestly everywhere though.  Everywhere.  When we moved out and two friends of ours moved in, they STILL complained that they found the white "Natty-Dust" everywhere.   Probably still some there today.

Caleb "It WAS an accident, right Natty?" Shreves Tweet

Entry 133: I Should Probably Just Stop With The Whole Making-Out Thing

Why is it that when you put your life on the line to, say, save a child from a speeding car or a baby falling from a tree (they do that, right?) everyone thinks you're a hero.  Yet if you put yourself in harms way for the sake of a little 1st-3rd base action, it's "irresponsible" or even "hilarious?"  Well if "crazy you-almost-died-trying-to-get-some" stories come in threes, then I put the icing on the cake last week.  Fuck you, people who like metaphors to go together correctly.

Some of you readers already know the first 2 stories, so I'll only provide a brief recap.  Plus, I'm assuming- since you're reading this- that you're at least a little... slow, so I'll add some drawings to help you understand.  The first event was what I like to call "if a Caleb falls down in a hallway and only one half-dressed girl is there to hear it, does it make a sound?"  Here's what happened:

*not drawn to scale.

While making out with LJ (aka The Lizard) I had her pushed against the hallway.  I wanted to lean back against the other side of the hall which, as you can see, would have been completely fine given where I was in the hallway.  The problem was that I drank lots of Tequila and I was actually in a different part of the hallway:

Basically I toppled, flatfooted, into my living room and bounced several times on the floor.  I managed to take a picture of LJ laughing at me:

She likes hats.

While embarrassing, this event wasn't as bad as the second event.  Well, they were both bad, but the first one had a lot less blood and more time spent conscious. 

Yes, I'll explain what happened for those of you too busy winning (duh) to read old posts.  I'm, uh, getting it on in bed (yes, drunk again, what's it to ya?) with LJ.  Here's the setup.  Note the very dangerous dresser filled with dangerous objects.  Oh and in case my drawings are hard to decipher, the dangerous items on the dresser- clockwise from the Liger- are: Liger, poison-tipped spear, war mace, TNT, ninja-sword.

I was going to go back and add some poisonous spiders and nun chucks to the dresser, but I'd be belaboring an already exaggerated point.  Because, you see, none of the dangerous items on the dresser actually posed the real threat.  No friends, allow me to zoom in for you on the corner of my dresser. 

5,000,000x magnification.

See it?  I knew you would.  A CORNER!  A sharp corner, too.  I think you can already put together the fact that I smashed my head on it.  Bad.  The graphic part of the story is that it occurred AT THE SAME TIME as... another thing.  Ok, pervs, yes- I was just about to get mine.  And did.  Except I passed out... a little bit.  Luckily I came to (OMG! OMG! OMG! Entendre overload!!) after a brief spell and went to the bathroom to check out my head.  I thought I was fine, but saw this:

 

Yeah, I know kids, graphic.  Oddly enough, in the throes of passion LJ hadn't realized what had happened until she came into the bathroom after to see what was up:

My grossest drawing yet.  Yay me!

No, I told her what happened.  And I'm sure she was sympathetic and concerned, but it was hard to tell with her crying laughing and me wiping blood from my face. 

Then I thought I was free from incidents for a while.  Until last week.  Tell you what, readers, I'm going to show you 4 pictures and you see if you can guess what happened.  Ready?  Go. 

My car.

Lots and lots of these.

4 Lane one-way road with side street parking. 

Car MO action.  (MO= making out for you noobs)

Got it yet?  Huh?  Okay, how about one more for you slow ones out there:

Surely you have it by now, right?  And for the last one of you out there to get this (I'm guessing... Andrew?  Becky?) I'll submit this:

 

Yup, 3AM, thought I was parked in front of LJ's house, just getting my MO on, when I hear that alarming yell.  Cars move really slowly when they're just drifting in drive, so I figure it must have taken me a good while to get 3 blocks down the street.  Here's where I thought I was parked in relation to LJ's house:

 

Now we'll send our bird and his eye higher up in the air so you can see where I actually was:

Sigh.  I know there's some sort of moral to this story- probably about sobering up and being "responsible"- but I just can't help but feel that all of these incidents aren't my fault.   I haven't figured out how they aren't my fault yet, but I'm working on it. 

Oh, and I wanted to thank my bird friend for telling me what this all looked like from above.  He has a keen eye for detail and a fantastic ability to relay what he sees so I can draw it accurately.  Thanks, friend.

Will do, buddy.  Will do.

Caleb "Winning! Duh." Shreves

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Entry 132: Can't Catch Me, Hangover!

Headaches, upset stomach, bleary eyes, kicking fat girls out of your bed before they raid your fridge- nothing about a hangover is fun.  I've found that, while you can't always avoid the hangover, you can get a step ahead of it and evade it for a few hours.  Hangover-You will find and catch you, but if you add enough insanity to your morning routine you can keep him busy long enough to enjoy a few hours of fun.  And, since Regular-You, Depressive-You, and Reasonable-You are all wrapped up in the hangover, the You that is left to enjoy your morning is Manic-You, which is my favorite You of all.  You get all that?

Roses are red, Violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic and so am I.

The key when you first wake up is to sprint away from Hangover's icy-clutches with some immediate ridiculousness.  For me, this usually means creating an Olympic event out of the cat-put, which is similar to the shot-put except I fling my cat Ella towards the hamper instead of a 10 pound ball.  You may think this is cruel, but she's the one who sits by my bed and meows for hours on end until I wake up and put food in her dish.  And, since I was about to seal the deal with Elizabeth Hurley in my dream, you can imagine my frustration.  Don't worry, though- I think that Ella and I both get wrapped up in the majesty of Olympic competition and her hunger and my anger both turn to inspiration.  Especially with the theme music that I hear: please listen to the music in this video while looking at a few artistic recreations I made.  I think you'll understand how the nobility of the event supersedes any concerns of "safety" or "responsibility."  Think slow motion when you imagine my cat hurtling through the air.

 Yeah, drink that music in.  Let it fill you with grit and determination for a minute before you move on.  Oh yeah.  There it is.  

 

 

That's right- suck it, morning. 

By the time I've cartwheeled through the house to my coffee machine, Hangover is just waking up and starts looking for me in the bedroom.  But I'm not there!  Just a heap of clothes and a confused/hungry cat.  No, I'm singing loudly in my underwear and drinking coffee in my dining room.  

You know how a T-rex's vision is based on movement?  I think Hangover's vision is based on stillness.  As long as I keep doing crazy shit, the Hangover never seems to catch up to me.  This week I searched on Youtube for karaoke videos and found a bunch of Frank Sinatra songs.  I'm 27 now, so it's high time I learn all the words to "My Way," right?  Thought so.  Using a cigarette as a microphone and a coffee cup as my brandy glass, I gave an impromptu nightclub show in my dining room.  Pretty sure my thin walls do little to protect my neighbor's ears as they head to their cars in the morning. Oh well- free show for them and live audience for me!

Sometimes I get so into my singing that Hangover almost catches up with me.  As he brushes his cold hand along my spine, I feel a moment's panic and overcompensate with misdirection and erratic behavior. 

Sometimes it really takes some convincing before I can shake off Hangover and get back into my carefree, manic-to-goodness self.

Knowing my manic-energy is a finite resource, Hangover knows he can wait me out.  He watches my crescendo of crazy, but underestimates my reserves of still-drunk energy. 

Just when Hangover thinks I've finally exhausted myself, I take it to a whole new level.  Fun fact: when you're a good trumpet player who hasn't been playing regularly, you can play awesome for about 5 minutes until your lip gives out and you sound like 2 mice farting in a tin can. 

Hangover is, however, indeed correct.  I am running out of steam.  I've sang, conducted, cartwheeled, cat-putted, trumpeted, drank coffee, watched The Office on Hulu, smoked, and made some scramby eggs.  My manic tank is near empty and I generally throw everything left into one final shebang: this week?  An attempt to play a really high note on my trumpet.  An attempt to play a high note.  It doesn't go well.

Drained, exhausted, and now nearly passed out from my failed high-note attempts, Hangover finally catches up with me and claims victory.  As I lie on the ground, he bestows his evil gifts: upset stomach, tiredness, aching body, eye pain, and meningitis.  Okay, maybe not that last one.  It still sucks though, and usually lasts the better part of a day.  

There's only one way I know of to avoid Hangover: keep drinking.  That's right, like my dad says, "the only problem with drinking is when you stop."  The problem with this idea is that, the next day, Hangover is going to show up again.  With his crew.  And it's going to be worse. A lot. 

But hey- worry about tomorrow when it gets here!  Until then, crack a fresh Keystone, fire up Hulu, and tell Hangover he can go fuck himself!

Caleb "Did you hear it?  I hit a high C.  Did you hear it?  Did you? I heard it." Shreves

PS if you have not done so yet, go check out this video of me singing the national anthem.  I recorded myself in The Nerv's studio, then sang 5 harmony parts with myself.  This was definitely the product of a Hangover-avoidance morning! 

PPS Normally I don't ever go back and edit a post once it's out, but after re-reading this and really feeling inspired by "Chariots of Fire," I had to go back and add some flair to really help the reader get the majesty and dignity of the cat put event.  

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