pop-culture for the people

I was just thinking about the old days of getting drunk and having fun while I was in college.  Well, I was at college, but wasn’t actually taking classes, interesting story for another time.  Fun times when Drunk Chugner absconded with a keg complete with kegerator from a frat party when nobody was watching.  Or the time when Dr. Babykicker and I decided that our friend Bob wouldn’t mind being tossed from the third floor of the Dr.‘s dorm.  Fortunately there was a heat register that met with his head before we could lift him high enough as I probably wouldn’t be writing this and the good Dr. wouldn’t be continuing on his mystic journey in the Alaskan wilderness right now.

The usual Upstate New York classic drinks consisted of Genny, Rolling Rock, Molson’s Canadian, Beast and of course the ever popular Guinness.  There were times when we branched out into other areas like cheap 40’s and Future’s occasional Manischewitz.  We also liked to partake in some of the cheap local wines.  A well known local winery named Bully Hill puts out some pretty good ones.

This of course leads me to the subject of this article, my favorite Bully Hill wine: Love My Goat.  Love My Goat is the type of wine you would expect to see a high class wino drinking, outside of a bag, proudly showing off the label.  The kind of wino that takes his time to brush his few remaining teethe every morning in the local park fountain.  Yeah, it’s good stuff.

Love My Goat (referred to as LMG from now on) is a great wine for making sangria.  It is a great wine to drink after you are already schlockered from drinking better wines because your taste buds are so retarded at this point to notice.  It beats most wine-in-a-bag and a bottle of Boone’s but just barely.  This is not because it is cheaper, better tasting or comes in a bigger bottle.  No, it is because of clever marketing.  The goat.  The love.  The label.

Like all Bully Hill wines it has unique artwork on it, consisting of a crazy dog faced goat hybrid.  If this label were to be seen in Southern California, folks would be heading for the hills to protect them from the chupacabra.  The label beckons your dollars and after staring at it for a bit you find yourself reaching for your wallet and putting down that nice bottle of merlot you picked up in the next aisle over.  You know when you see that bottle that an adventure awaits you.  An adventure that only you can experience with a bottle of wine and a goat.  No, I’m not talking about this kind of adventure.

This is an adventure of the taste buds.  How can one describe the flavor of LMG succinctly?  I’m not sure it is possible as the flavor seems to differ from bottle to bottle.  I can only assume it is due to: mutant grapes, farmer piss, cosmic rays, dirty bottles or it is cut with grape juice and malt liquor.  The stuff is easy going down and I would guess if you drank enough of it is easy coming up too (convenient!).  Admittedly, most bottles are actually pretty good for a cheap wine especially if you are eating with it or just planning on getting wasted, in which case the adventure continues.

I’ve sometimes found myself amused to think of those silly Romans and all of their gods.  I would guess that Jeff the god of Biscuits and Bacchus would probably get along pretty good because afterall bread is a good way of sopping up the alcohol on a good bender and I think it is safe to assume there were times that being able to walk straight to talk up the lady gods without them slapping you for acting fresh would come in handy.

If I were Bacchus I would have LMG running through every fountain, river and ocean.  Of course we’d have inebriated fish but what do they do that requires sobriety anyway?  They swim around, reproduce and get eaten.  Sounds like a pretty easy life to me.  The only downer I see is that red wines don’t go well with fish.

Anyway, I thought I would remember Bull Hill and all of their cheap wines that helped me through times when beer wasn’t good enough and neither was being sober.  To Bully Hill and their cheap ass wine:

No bag can hold you, No self respecting wino would be without you.  We salute you!

-hollywood

What other staffers think:
Warhol:  Absolute garbage!  Yet… delightful.  How do they do it?!

I am from Port Byron, NY. I hate buying things in stores. I also hate buying things on the Internet. My father taught us never to get credit cards, because they ruin your credit. That still seems very logical to me in a paradoxical sort of way. My Dad said that anyone can take your credit card number off the Internet. He also said jeans shouldn’t cost more than twenty dollars. Belts should cost around five dollars. I bought a reversible belt once in a K-Mart forty minutes away from my house. It was ten dollars, and it was two belts in one. Sweet. I now live in Orange County, and I just spent $50 on pants.

I am embarking on an aggressive program to earn more money and respect from my peers. My plan is to gain weight, wear nice clothes, and improve my communication skills. Throughout my journey, I will keep this log of life lessons so you can share in my rise from under-appreciated hapless creep-dork to all-around okay guy who doesn’t have to be scared of getting a wedgie in his adult life.

There’s so much that needs alteration if I am even going to tread water in the adult world. Currently, I see myself as a child, my co-workers as older brothers and sisters, and anyone in a position of authority as a full-fledged adult. And it is impossible for me not to be terrified of them, and of most people, for that matter. People are terrifying. Especially nowadays here in Southern California. People are aggressive and pushy to extremes. Where I come from waitresses have to go home to their redneck husbands to get the kind of abuse I see them take from OC local business men and their trophy wives. On the freeway, I’m scared of giant trucks and sports utility tanks jamming violently at one other across four lanes of traffic. It’s absolute lawless insanity—a frighteningly Darwinian experience just going to Ralphs to get some bread. And my reaction for the past year has been one of isolationism. But at night sometimes, I have trouble sleeping because I’m afraid. Not just of losing my job, my hair, or my financial stability… I’m scared that my right to a decent life has been usurped and that one day I’m going to wake up hopelessly whimpering at the soles of people who never even had a spark of hope to stifle.

And I don’t hate them. That doesn’t work for me. That fact alone makes me feel more isolated, especially nowadays when so much camaraderie is derived from hating other people.  I try not to hate anybody.  But I don’t want to share the fate of the world the way it’s going. And I don’t want to be here standing around dumbfounded on the freeway when the whole place turns goes Chernobyl realizing that I did nothing my whole life except serve the kind of people who would let the world go to hell. I can’t bury this anymore, but I’m too weak to fight for myself. I’ve always been that way, subversive and passive-aggressive at most, and at worse, I’ve been an enabling mind, easily enslaved by corporate America, giving 110% everyday for someone else’s vision.

The time has come to identify the errors in my personal conduct and the character flaws which make me so meek and pathetic. I have a strong advantage in this endeavor: the potential for growth. I have more faith that I can do this than I have faith in the world suddenly becoming fair and honest. I have more faith that I can grow into the kind of person who can carve a life out for himself than I have faith that the world will simply continue to hand me its dregs at the price of my sheepish servitude.

The number one thing a human being needs in order to build his own life is security. You can not live a quality life terrified of the world around you. There’s no progress to be made, no accomplishments to achieve, no real art in the denial of the basic conflicts of your existence. For my entire life, I have lived terrified for some reason or another. As a boy, I was scared of other boys. Most of them are cops now. As a young man, I was scared of beautiful women, and most of them have stretch marks from crapping out hordes of babies. Now, I’m afraid of my bosses, I’m afraid of traffic, and I’m afraid that one day I’m going to be in the middle of a wad of yelling strangers in business suits accusing me of scratching someone’s BMW. And I’m afraid that someday someone with enough money and free-time to appear empowered and wonderful and will swipe my entire life into his big car and stuff it into the corner of his big LA estate and leave me alone regretting all the things I never did with my life.

I fucking hate this place, but it’s a place I’ve always been whether it was some jock shoving my head in the toilet, some daddy’s girl that I over-aggrandized telling me she wasn’t interested, or some big shot know-nothing in a suit telling me I have to work overtime. It’s all the same feeling. I’m terrified of the world outside my head, and until I can feel some kind of safety, everything good in my life is hinging on my best efforts at obscurity. It’s part of why I haven’t been speaking to anyone in depth lately. It’s become common practice to remain underneath the radar where no one can tell I when I’m happy or sad so no one can make me feel worse.

It’s really irritatingly textbook and mundane. Often I feel I’m too damned smart be outmatched by the gloppy and disgusting shape of a lazily constructed world of half-wits. I say this not because I am a genius or a better person than anyone else out there. If I felt that way, I wouldn’t have the problems I do. I say that the world is run by morons because it is. I look at it honestly, the small things about the place where I work, wasted money and efforts… and our world leaders, religious war in the 21st century, cowboy politics and greed upon limited natural resources… and the E! Channel! Yet, all these stupid complaints don’t make any kind of difference coming from someone like me, because first and foremost, I feel like someone like me has only a slim right to life and the pursuit of happiness. My whole life, I’ve been expecting that becoming a grownup would mean my constitutional right would become a relaxing guarantee, but it’s not. It’s a tiny sliver I’m constantly having to gouge out from between the knuckles of stronger people.

Lack of participation is always the easiest way to go. No one really figured out how to turn over mob rule, and I don’t think I’m even close to important enough to start a revolution of any sort. This is just a personal quest to become someone capable of fighting for himself and his family. I can’t get married or raise kids and have them see me cowering and bowing for a small place in the world. I don’t want to raise anyone with the feeling that they should count their blessings and never expect anything more than what luck will award them. Yes, I’m lucky to have been born in America. I’m probably lucky to be young and white and male, but I’ll tell anyone who wants to know what it’s like in that middle ground between being a man and a child, it’s a dog fight and a rotten dismal practice of concessions and politics. Innocense is lost in all the details, whether you go forward with eyes open or closed.

Everyone wants security, and no one around here seems satisfied with how much they’ve already got. The cars are getting bigger. The neighborhoods are barred. The houses all look the same. Planning committees dictate even what colors are safe. My goal is not to be so easily trampled by bullish progress, to take a necessary stand against fearful, reactionary, and irrational people who threaten my ability to be happy. It is not about preemptive strikes or radical tactics. It’s about having the guts to honk at an asshole on the freeway, while not becoming one of those jaded bitches who explodes in fury every time they get cut off in traffic. It’s not about playing stupid political games to rise to power in some bullshit corporate job. It’s about not being a sputtering pussy whenever someone in a suit jacket stops by to remind me why he has an office and I have a cubical. Security for me is just about feeling like the remainder of my life’s work will help me build some bit of early comfort for my children. Not to shield them from life, but to give them the security to develop a healthy degree of self-respect.

So, this all comes down to being a stronger and better equip man for my environment. An upgrade of personal worth in a project I will call Man of 5000. Will I lose all of my principles? Will I just quit and slump back down in my cubical eating Doritos? I guess I’ll figure that out as I go. I will continue to document this attempt at transformation in hopes I can recognize the bad patterns and reward myself for personal achievement with some good old fashion selfish ego-mania. Frankly, I need the confidence right now. And writing these things down, knowing they’re out there, is the only way I can feel like my efforts make any impact. Hopefully, I can get over that, and in the meantime, I don’t expect anyone to actually read this garbage.