Career Aids

Cough...

A year ago, our employment was skipping queerly on a charmed career path, wrapped in flowing shrouds made from the finest compliments and toting a wicker basket bloated with wildly over budgeted CapEx projects and a healthy regional expansion outlook.

If you need our career today, its lying under a wet pile of crimson stained needle tips in a Detroit railyard squatter's nest wincing hysterically for more sweet horse. Our mom has already knitted a quilt patch for our current job, but denies this anticipatory action to prevent us from tossing all hope in front of a coal train run off tracks. We sit beside our sallow, emaciated profession at community clinics with sole aim in gaining enough free trial opiates to grind up, blend with a 5th of Military Special and funnel choking until coma.

We'd throw our face in this bucket if you'd promise to buy something this month.

We've got the career AIDs, but we got it from a transfusion, so we aren't definitely spending eternity in an evangelical hellfire playing heads-up 5 card stud against Boy George's libido for escorts. It was a transfusion of management which invaded our living utopia, propelling a blanket of frozen bricks at sales funnels with hooded prejudice. The old partners from Philadelphia think this style of management is a bit unfair.

We aren't the only wretches suffering from this viral coup. In fact there has been a veritable holocaust of casualties. You have to look hard past shallow attempts at hiding their deep facial bruisings and vast territorial yeast infections to observe the signs of plague, but its there. If sales orders are lifesavers, then jobs have been tethered to many a slow sinking boulder in open waters form months.

The only fix for this affliction is to rip a page from Magic Johnson's playbook and heave weighty bricks of cash in its general direction. By cash we mean bags of sales and yes, we're saying Magic Johnson cured AIDs with platinum smoothies* and diamond suppositories*, its fact, its science, its the NBA on TNT.

This guy has the HIV like we have Godzilla's tail in the front of our pants.

*We know there are no such things. Ervin cured his HIV with an amalgam of Chilean organs, chai tea and a kingdom of breaded protein.

Bob Schneider at the Mucky Duck

If you've never heard of Bob Schneider, then you never lived in Austin and probably don't have a methadone prescription or STI from Sandra Bullock, two life-projectiles which landed gruesomely close to us at one point.

Bob is a very gifted song writer/storyteller, who's music spans several genres, but stands juxtaposed in an acoustic concert setting. Its a gamut run of emotional outpouring as well as a filthly sing-a-long with Schneider. His personality comes through in his songs and performance, which is, we think, why we like him.

We remember him well going to Texas, as The Scabs (a group of which he is the front man) would shovel their sexually explicit lyrics and metaphors into crowded fraternity parties regularly.

This was our first time at the Mucky Duck, which didn't disappoint as a venue. The sound quality was crisp and not so loud that you hate yourself for a week afterwards. The pub food was well above average.

Quick Hits from the evening:

• Mucky Duck is a first class place, but we aren't sure its right for us all the time.
  
• We overheard that the owner of another frequented pubtype (color + animal) alledgely beats women smiling.
• Our favorite Bob song has always been Big Blue Sea, but Gold in the Sunset is nipping at heels.
• Our fellow Lord, Diesel Byrnes, has a favorite song too and not surprisingly its Where Have all the Cowboys Gone? by the talented Ms. Paula Cole.
• Our waiter was tragic from go, but got progressively better as we started to say rude things loud enough for him to overhear.
• Bob recorded this session.
• Helen Hunt is actually Asian. She had eye surgery in 1981 and bleaches her hair daily.
  
• Bob played with the help of a loop device and what sounded like a Matel MyFirst Piano.
• In a 4th grade spelling bee we proudly spelled nickel: N-I-C-K-L-E and cried ourself hypoxic right there in front of the entire grade.
  
• The Mark Portugal sandwich is deliciously flavored with real chunks of Mark Portugal.

Turkey, bacon, avocado and a career 4.32ERA deep fried in angioplasty and served with a dill pickle.

• Bob ended the night with a rousing rendition of Ass Knocker.
• If we were a musician, we'd definitely play the bassette clarinet and our first album would be entitled: Just Put Your Mouth on It.

Tales of the Unpleasant: Cahill's on Durham

Cahill's
903 Durham
Houston, TX
(713) 864-9400

For us, Cahill's is a proximately choice. Close and easy, the same way Arkansas men choose eldest sister for wife. Every time we decide to slop into Cahill's, the one bartender that looks like a fucking Ewok assaults us with his alarming face and gross inability to pour a decent pint of Guinness.

- "What a'll it be boys?"

Its unexplainable lack of seating and unplugged refrigerator scent make Cahill's the perfect place to ditch someone you hate. If you're the eighth person in the bar and still want a seat you're either leaning against the vomit stained walls or sitting on a toilet. We hear there's a rather fun patio over looking the barbed wire fencing on Durham, but since we doubt the waitress's translucent flesh has ever stepped outside to catch a single ray of sunlight, let alone take our drink order, we wouldn't know anything about it.

We regretfully ordered a hamburger there once. It becomes difficult to grade a dining experience when our plateful of greasy crime discharges antisemitic rhetoric and ultimately pulls a stolen .9mm on our blissfully Kosher digestive track. Our cowardly surrender lasted two porcelain nights, but in truth it never ended.

If you're like us and have awful friends who appreciate this black hole for all things enjoyable, then we'll certainly see you there.

We'll be the ones watering the circumference of the building with gasoline.

The Exact Change Bandit

Its a pucker morning at the office. We're wearing khakis and sandals because our boss is in Florida ruining someone's life a week before their pension matures. The air conditioning and our exposed toes banter with one another like two old men quietly being racist. The hive, relieved of some of its buzz after this most recent round of holiday firings, is throbbing with the macabre faces of forgotten hostages.

Our morning game is counting the number of times we hear customer service reps apologize to a stadium of unsupported customers and accounts.

At 9:30, the break room gets a visit. Much to our chagrins, we realize Armando from accounting didn't receive his pink slip on December 24th like we heard he would. Had we overseen the seasonal layoffs, Armongo's notice of termination would have been wrapped around a hurling meat clever. He nods in our direction then returns to pausing for breathes between aggressive bites of a McGriddle.

We ease our dollar into the vending machine and punch F4. Our liquid aspartame comes bucking down the drink shoot creating a familiar tune. In one motion we lift our Diet Dr. Pepper out of the catch and jam our sausage digits into the coin return ...

...wait...

...what the fuck...

...no...

...we bring our fore and middle fingers to eye line and they are both covered in shimmering ketchup. It appears, some fuckpang has flooded the office coin return with disdainfully sour condiments in a crude attempt to punish those of us without a coin purse. A bandit insisting on exact change.

To make the situation an even more a frostbitten penis, Armando throws his fat face in our direction and chuckles, "you just get your period?"

The Exact Change Bandit may be a filthy unstoppable menace, but his wake of destruction pales in comparison to the death toll amassed by the elusive Mexican Leprechaun...

Don't be fooled, that smile has killed with a knife.