Wasted Coffee and the "A" Word

Hello again folks. I won't bore you with the steamy details of why I have taken so long to update this blog. You know what...I think I will bore you. The fact of the matter is this: I've been a bit busy (believe it or not) and plopping my rotund (but luscious) butt down on a chair to pound out a couple thousand words that nobody but my wife and some 13 year old boy that's been tied up in a pit in his basement by his over-bearing father will read just hasn't climbed it's way up to the top of my "To Do" list.
But I do want to thank you for stopping by and checking out the blog. At times, I find myself jotting down a few phrases or key-words on the back of an old McCook's receipt or some other random piece of paper that is strewn around in my truck. I haven't been doing it so much lately, but I did come across a small Post-it note resting nicely by a diamond-hard french fry underneath my seat. So we'll let that oily little post-it note be our guide and go from there.
My post-it notes tend to typically be heavy with sports subjects, so if you're not a sports fan...well...you probably won't enjoy this blog which, coincidentally, puts you in the same class as 99.9% of the rest of those tuning in to this thing we call "J-Bird's Blog". I could lie and say "Stick with it" as if there's a payoff somewhere amongst the drivel I'm typing, but...I respect you and the fact that you've made it this far before you've clicked off and headed to some porn site or something, so I feel like I shouldn't lie to you.
One final point. I have been advised by a few people that I should focus on quantity and not quality. Since "quality" writing is not in my repertoire, I will turn my steely focus to "quantity". My hopes are that I will update this site more often instead of one gigantic entry every 8 months or so. My last entry, by the way was titled "Good-bye 2008" if that gives you any indication of the infrequency of my updates.
Having said all that, here's a few quick entries for the "new" format. Enjoy.
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I hate Christmas. A few people have the guts to say it and I completely appreciate and agree with what they're saying. Oh, there are a few moments I enjoy during this blessed season. I enjoy the family get-togethers and the excellent food contained within. I especially enjoy Christmas music. Not too much of it, but a few good tunes always makes the season nice. I love the excitement my kids have for the holiday. I guess it is all about the kids after all, isn't it? Isn't everything in our damned lives about those *$@&! kids! Stupid kids.
I've long ago passed that age where I was excited about Christmas. There are, in my mind, three stages of Christmas that I have gone through so far:
Stage 1: When you're a kid, the anticipation of what Santa might bring you. Sitting with the JCPenney catalog and circling EVERY single toy that you would want. Waking up Xmas morning and that total joy of walking down the stairs and seeing the tree hidden by gifts. Even as you got older and your belief in a certain Saint called "Nick" passed, you still got tons of gifts and it was fun and easy.
Stage 2: This is the middle stage...a transitional stage. You're still young enough to get a lot of presents, but now you must go out and get presents for others. I'd say this stage starts some time in High School and ends about the time you have your first child. This stage sees you still getting some nice stuff but now you are burdened with the pressure of having to buy gifts for others, especially your current girlfriend. This is why the "Turkey Drop" is so popular. The Turkey Drop is the name of the process people go through prior to Thanksgiving. If you're going to dump each other, do it before Thanksgiving so that you will not perceived as a total jerk for dumping your broad prior to Christmas. Being single during Christmas would, in my opinion, be fantastic as you wouldn't be required to spend your time/money searching for some over-priced craptastic gift for your woman for Xmas.
Anyhow, the days of just waking up and opening a plethora of gifts is long gone for you at this stage. Now you gotta' work a little bit on your end in hopes of getting something nice in return.
What? That sounds rude? Let's be honest, folks. EVERYONE enjoys getting gifts. Don't let anyone tell you different. "Tis better to give than receive" is total bullsh*t. And now the pressure is on you to spend your hard-earned cash on everyone else
Stage 3: The current stage I'm in. Christmas, at this point, has become a commercial annoyance that manages to eat at me at nearly every moment of the day. You are bombarded by cheesy-ass jewelry commercials (which continue relentlessly until February 15, the day after Valentine's Day). Everything bothers me at this stage. The fact that stores are hawking Christmas stuff the day after Halloween irks me. Hearing Feliz Navidad on the radio sends a shooting pain similar to the one you feel while eating foil with fillings in. You'll see advertisements showing some sonofabeech presenting his wife with a brand new $60,000 Lexus..with a giant red bow on top...and it makes me f'n sick. I'm not sick because someone's getting a $60k Lexus, I'm pissed because I'm NOT getting one!
Anyhow, this is why I've taken my dad's attack for Christmas time. Let your wife do the shopping. Nod in agreement to every present she's purchased. Crack open a beer and plant yourself by the shrimp tray and smile (well, the last part about the shrimp tray...that's all my idea)
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If you remember my last posting (found in the "archives" on this very site), you may recall an incident I had in the late fall of last year. I flipped my truck and miraculously escaped serious injury. A few weeks later, I battled some mysterious sickness that laid me up for a while. It was those two events that ushered in this new-found urgency to try to do something significant. And perhaps "significant" isn't the proper choice of words. Just doing "something".different...something I may have thought about doing before but never followed through on.
It was then that I put on my internet surfing shoes and delved into the seedy underworld of "Podcasts". For those of you that don't know, a podcast is simply a broadcast over the internet. Unlike radio, they aren't necessarily Live (although they can be.)
So my painstaking research began and I found, luckily, that it takes neither vast computer knowledge or expensive equipment to put this thing together.
I'm jumping around a bit, but I'll tell you why the podcast even came into my tiny little head. My buddies and I often have some of the most outrageous, hilarious, obscene discussions you'd ever want to hear. Many times we've said, "This should be recorded...this is a show!". Of course, we were joking. Our humor most definitely emanated from the massive proportions of frothy beer that we had poured down our gullets thoughout the course of that particular day and, as we all know, you're always a hundred times funnier when you're nearly blamo-d...even if in sober reality you're really not.
Two friends in particular always seemed a bit more interested in this than the others. Gill and Jake.
So, continuing to jump around...I did all the research, secured a website, and did all the technical administration so that, essentially, we were ready to do a show.
We created a name for our show. We call it 3 Monkeys and a Football. Have you ever heard someone say "they look like a bunch of monkeys trying to f*** a football!"? That how our name came about, three idiots in the cold of winter in the shop of my barn, fumbling around trying to figure out how a certain button works or that we should tape one of our microphones to a propane torch because we don't have mic stands (we still use this, by the way...keeps us grounded)
I'm not afraid to say that our first couple of shows were an absolute display of inept suckiness, sort of like the Cleveland Browns offensive production. And, admittedly, our more recent shows still display this inept suckiness, but it's a bit less prominent. Our new shows should come with the heading, "Now with 50% less suckiness!"
A typical show begins early that week. An email goes out between us three, "Can we do a show?". Once we determine that we're all in, we start putting effort into our particular segments or topics we have to talk about. Sometimes we have a guest. I think that our guests, who show up with usually nothing more than a 12 pack, are often surprised at the technical aspects of the whole set up, and by golly, it is impressive that three bumblef***s like us can actually put together something like this.
The bottom line is this: The show can be, at times, off-color (we spent the first few episodes trying to convince Jake that innuendo and playfully referring to spicy topics instead of coming right out and blurting “*@&!!#” was the route to go. Needless to say, we’ve failed at that endeavor. But, to be truthful, that’s just Jake…and that’s how he rolls.) Gill is the faithful sidekick that both Jake and I unleash our playful wrath upon. He also comes up with some of our topics and most of our quiz segments. The show’s audio quality is similar to listening to a symphony through 10 miles of underground conduit…poor. The introductions to start the show are HORRIBLE, so much so that the introductions have become a joke of themselves. Who writes the intros? Me. Who used to sit for hours with pen in hand, empty paper in front, and a blank stare trying to come up with something clever? Me. At this point, I’ve given up.
At this moment, we have over 50 “followers” on Facebook. We also have a regular army of folks who email the show (3monkeysandafootball@gmail.com). We get stats of the number of people that listen and their geographic location. All in all, for a two-bit podcast with absolutely no operating budget, minimal on-air talent, and limited technical ability, I’d say it’s mildly successful!
The true verdict of how good (or bad) our show is can be found after I hand my dad, neighbor, dentist, rambling hobo or someone else a CD copy of our latest episode. I expect, in the coming days, to hear “That one part was hilarious” or “You guys are crazy!” or “Not too shitty”. But instead, it’s silence. The kind of silence you’d expect if you invited your friends over for a big blow-out party with strippers, a DJ, and a hooker you can snort coke off of and, once they arrived, you handed out pamphlets and talked about Scripture…Yeah, that kind of stunned, uncomfortable silence.
No matter. If nobody listened from here on out, I think we’d still do it. It’s the perfect getaway on a cold Ohio night. A couple of friends, hanging out in a barn, drinking ungodly amounts of beer, huddled by the soft warm glow of flickering laptops and unsafe amounts of CO2 from the heaters in the air…just laughing at ourselves and our stupid observations. There’s probably something somewhere in the back of one of our minds that tells us that we could strike it big or at least make money at it. But the reality most assuredly is that we won’t be more famous than the day we started it and we’ll definitely sink more money into it than we will ever reap…but damn, we have an absolute blast and the excitement is there with each one of us.
Oh…by the way, the site is www.3monkeysandafootball.blogspot.com and you can search for us on Facebook. And “YES”, we do accept checks or cash!
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A conversation between my four year old daughter and her mommy just the other day.
Kid: "Mommy, can I say the 'A' word?"
Mom: "What's the 'A' word?"
Kid: "Shit"
Mom: "Yes!"

Ahh. Those kids make me laugh constantly. I sure do enjoy them and I'm loving them as much as possible before the day comes when they completely hate their dad. The day when they get out of the back of their boyfriend's cargo van and walk by me without saying a word. Ughhh (shivers)...I am NOT looking forward to those days.
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My wife DOESN'T drink more coffee than the entire nation of Columbia. Let me explain that sentence. My wife pours and prepares countless cups of coffee...yet, I've discovered through intense scientific measurements (me pouring full cups of coffee down the drain) that she doesn't drink any of it. She has in her possession 5 or 6 travel mugs. They get filled up every morning for her commute and these cups arrive home at the end of the workday just as full and piping hot as when they left.
She has always said that it's more about holding the cup of coffee than actually drinking it.
She's the person you'd see at the posh coffee shop, sitting on the trendy couch with two hands curled around the abnormally large cup. The cup is held slightly below her nose as she slowly inhales its soothing smell. I think her ideal vacation would be to fly out to some swanky ski village for the simple purpose of plopping down in front of a fireplace while pawing a giant cup of coffee that she will never drink. No skiing, no hiking...just idly holding a cup.
It reminds me when I had a few tickets to the Bengals game in 2005 (vs. the Packers). As customary, when traveling to the game with Rosey and Jake, one must arrive at the parking lot outside the stadium at least 4 hours before gametime. We pull in around 7 am and pop the trunk. All of us men reach for a beer and let the good times begin. Suddenly, Rosey blurts out "What the *#$@!!!" We turn to see my wife carefully and happily unscrewing the lid to a thermos of coffee. She inhales the aromatic steam that rises from the cup and closes her eyes in total bliss, possibly thinking of that time in Paris with Jean-Luke. Opening her eyes and looking up from her cup she sees three angry men staring back at her. Her happy/content look immediately turned to one of concern. "What's wrong?" she asks.
After explaining to her that it was, "7 am, we're parked in a gravel pit 100 yards from the stadium, and we already have ham steaks cooking on the grill...it is no time for coffee drinking. Beer is the beverage of the day and it would be best if you join in!". Thus, another in a long line of wasted cups of coffee suffers the same fate as many before and many since.
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