Surreal Night at Houston Rodeo

Dirty Hands
Originally uploaded by CJ Sorg

Thomamas invited me to the Chili Cookoff yesterday afternoon when I was on my pilgrimage to DFW.

I'm not sure that I can make it. This week sucked. And, I'm tired.

You need to be here. There's talent and free drinks.

Well, I'm not one to leave a brother in need of a wingman. Hear that, Bolivian?

Parking was bitch so Thomamas picked me up and we parked at his reserved spot at Shoney's. That's how we roll.

The vodka sodas were flowing, but all the food was gone by the time I got to the party. We headed out into the ruckus to check out the other parties and maybe track down some food.

We were busy gawking at the Crown Royal babes when a lady in a Matrix style leather trenchcoat walked up with a box of BBQ sandwiches offering each of us one. Savor that moment will you. A Trinity-like babe with BBQ. Mmmm, delicious.

T and I were still talking about our free sandwiches like teenage girls talking about JT. I think I peed my pants a little.

I was just about to unwrap my sandwich when I felt a slap on my butt and a girl circled around my right side. A strange exchange followed.

[Girl] Y'all go to Massachusetts last weekend?

[Thomamas] What?

[JB el JB] Huh?

[Girl] Y'all go to Massachusetts last weekend? You know 'cuz they offer gay marriage?

[Thomamas] What the hell?

[JB el JB] Shhhh. That's our dirty little secret.

[Girl] You gonna ride the ferris wheel? It's romantic.

[JB el JB] Nope.

[Thomamas] We'll need two people to ride it with us.

[Girl] So y'all wanna buy some carnival tickets. I'm having trouble selling them.

[JB el JB] Uh...no.

[Thomamas] We're not buying any tickets.

[Girl] Y'all aren't any fun.

...

[Thomamas] Damn carnie. (Censored content)

[JB el JB] She smelled like cabbage.

[Thomamas] And had small hands.

BBQ Trinity made it all better by bringing Thomamas another sandwich.

Ten long days are in the books

My ten day journey down The Master Cleanser path came to an end today. Words seem to fail me as I describe my level of excitement. As hard as that is to believe, here's an excerpt from an email I wrote earlier tonight.

The recovery starts tomorrow and lemme just tell you that I'm FUCKING EXCITED (sorry for that display of my limited lexicon) that the salt water purges are finito.

Perhaps my body excreted my vocabulary along with toxins?

Here's a quick run down of FAQ from my experience.

What was the hardest thing to give up during The MC?
The worst part of the cleanse was abstaining from the social aspects of dining. It creeps out some folks to have a non-eater sitting at the table watching folks eat. The experience was a bit weird for me, too.

What happens next?
There is a three day recovery period during which I reintroduce my body to something besides lemonade. Day 1 is OJ Day; basically OJ is substituted for the lemonade. Day 2 is the more of the same with veggie broth/soup in the evening. Day 3 is OJ for the morning, soup during mid day and real, chewable vegetables for dinner. Day 4 is chicken fried steak. :)

What is the first thing you're going to eat once the recovery period is over?
The jury is still out on this, but I'll likely stop in for some soup at Jenni's Noodle House or some pho (real) at some place where no one speaks English.

Did you lose any weight?
Yep, 15 pounds, but I expect that some of that will return once I start chewing again.

Are you going to become a vegetarian now?
I've strongly considered it for health reasons, but there are too many dishes that I dig that involve meat or meat related items. Of course, April is vegetarian month, a.k.a. sushi month, so I'll be a vegetarian then. I'm going to work towards making smarter choices regardless of my meat-a-tarian / vegetarian slant.

This MC ain't got nothing on me

It is after Noon on Day 5, which means that there are officially a fewer number of hours left in my Master Cleanser journey than the amount that I have already invested. Kick. Ass.

In short, Day 3 sucked. Apparently on of the side effects of the MC is that you may get a cold or some cold like symptoms due to you body taking its revenge on you for drinking way too much and eating way too much red meat. I'm sure I had a fever, but didn't get probed to make it official. I was ready to conk out. But I sucked it up. I'm not getting beat by too many glasses of lemonade.

I'll spare you the gory details, but my evening of "sleep" on Day 3 resembled the depictions of a junkie going through heroin withdrawals. I could not get warm no matter how many blankets I used or how much I peed on myself. KIDDING. I also couldn't stop hacking up junk from my lungs. Nyquil would be my standard answer for this type of misery, but no dice due to the MC.

Is passing out from delirium the wrong way to fall asleep?

Waking up at 4:30 AM sucks

Day 2 on the MC was a tough one for the kid. First, I have to fly to Ft. Worth on Monday mornings so I was up at 4:30 AM to insure that my quart of salt water had fully processed prior to getting stuck on a plane. The salt water nearly made my puke even after I adjusted it from 2 tablespoons to 2 teaspoons. I think my stomach knew what was coming and wanted to stage a revolt.

I arrived at my client site with enough lemons and syrup to make my lemonade for the day. But, there really isn’t a convenient place to make it. And by convenient I mean a place where folks can’t see what you’re doing. I didn’t want to have answer a bunch of questions about what was going on. I ended up sitting on a picnic table outside the break room to do my mixing.

Day 2 passed without any severe hunger pangs or urgent calls from Mother Nature. I did duck out of a meeting early to go drink some lemonade when I began to feel faint.

My early waking time started to catch up with my around 7:30 when I left the office. I seemed to be stuck on slow; I’d like to have had an Airborne to fight off the cold that I felt creeping up on me. No dice.

I returned to my ho-tel after a run to Central Mark-up to fetch more syrup and lemons and a lemon juicer. Three dozen lemons, a pint of syrup and the juicer set me back $32.99. I need to open a grocery store.

It may have cost ten bucks, but the juicer is so choice. If you have the means... Don’t underestimate the utility of a lemon juicer when you need to squeeze a dozen per day.

T-Minus 10 Days to Fajitas

Sunday Shopping Trip
Originally uploaded by JaseMan

Today was my first day on The Master Cleanse cleansing regimen. The MC is basically one approach to ridding your system of contaminants that one may have ingested over the course of years spent living in a non-healthy way. Yep, it's still me JB over here. Don't leave.

I've been wanting to attempt some sort of a system cleanse for a few years now. I was close once before; I bought about $40 of herbs for a tea treatment, but was not patient enough with the complex mechinations involved. The herbs are still in my fridge. They can be yours for 20 bucks.

The Master Cleanse doesn't use fancy herbs or "gimmicks" if you don't count the MC as a gimmick itself. The regimen is basically fasting for 10 days save for drinking a funky lemonade consisting of lemons, maple syrup and cayenne pepper. You'll spend lots of time with your porcelain friend throughout the course of the diet, but that's kind of the point. Crap out the bad. Syonara toxins!

So, today was Day 1. Each day starts with a quart of water with some sea salt mixed in to facilitate your purging. Drinking a quart of salt water was tough. TOUGH. Tough as in, "I'm trying not to puke in the trash can tough." Perhaps I should have read the instructions a bit more closely. The MC calls for two teaspoons of sea salt. I read it as two tablespoons. Oops.

Thank God I called Stew tonight to talk about my first day experiences. [Note: yes, that Stew; he and Angela did this before and survived.] He mentioned that a friend of his also did the MC, but mistakenly used 2 TBS instead of 2 tsp.

"Yeah, you know, Dave, right? He used a tablespoon to measure the salt instead of a teaspoon. He said he could barely finish the quart of water because he kept throwing up."

"But, Stew, it calls for two tablespoons of sea salt.

"Huh. I thought it was 2 teaspoons. You should probably check just to be safe."

HOLY SHI'ITE! It is two teaspoons! My colon is probably trying to take out a hit on me right now.

No wonder I felt like I'd nearly drown in the Gulf.

I really have felt fine all day except for the miserable quart of salt water. I haven't been hungry. I haven't felt tired. I hope it stays this way. Should that occur, I may try to stretch out the MC as long as I can.

My biggest concern right now is making it through my flight to DFW tomorrow without having to answer any calls from nature while on the plane or out of reach of The President's Club.

Crazy About Chronology

I can hear what you're thinking.

"Where have you been?"

"I guess he's given up on this whole blogging thing."

"He's finally realized that we don't really care what you're doing. We just read your blog while we're: a) waiting for our pedicure; b) stuck in the bathroom; c) waiting for the latest posting from Dooce."

Well, you're wrong. Yep. I've been right here. Living. Obsessing. Working. Partying. Things have been going along as planned, or not so planned, but life has been happening, and I've been trying to hold on to my wits as the adventure continues.

A series of events lead to me not keeping up with my blogging effort. The holidays came and went. Events came and went. And, work started heating up. The point is that I didn't make the time to keep up with my chronicle of events. And, I have an issue.

Truth be told, I have issues, but only one is central to my current ramble and that is my mild level of OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Jack Nicholson's character had to wash his hands all the time in As Good As It Gets. I am compelled to blog in chronological order.

Blogs, like any journal, are essentially a collection of your thoughts in the form of posts that are inspired by happenings in your life. You wouldn't write a biography with flashbacks, would you? I wouldn't think so because of the reactions and interpretations of future events are built on and influenced by the context of previous events and experiences. Well, the same goes for my blog.

Some folks feel the need to arrange all of the labels on the canned goods so that they face the exact same direction when you look in the pantry. Others are driven to journal in chronological order. I have to do both.

Unfortunately I am not always inspired to write a blog entry for Event A before I'm inspired to write a post for Event B. So I wait. And, I wait some more. The inspiration to write about Event A is trapped at the back of an airport security line filled with old men and young mothers traveling with quintuplets and five laptops. Meanwhile life has progressed to Event L, but nothing makes it out on to the tubes.

This posting order concern may seem insignificant, but I am mildly convinced that my lack of posting (a.k.a. journaling) has lead to a backlog of stress in my very cramped noggin. The solution to this quandary hit me in the shower from whence most of my decent ideas come.

I'll write the posts whenever I feel like it. But, the posting date will match the chronology of the actual occurrence. Big deal you say. Yep. You're right. It is to me, and I'm the boss. The crazy boss.

In any case, you may notice that the front page of my blog may not change for long periods. That may indicate that I've fallen off the face of a mountain or that may indicate that I am writing about events that pre-date the front page contents.

Fret not. The events probably that weren't interesting or I would have written about them before now. Alternatively, you fretters can subscribe to the RSS feed which will alert you to new conent no matter what the official posting date is, unless it was in 1991 because that pre-dates Al Gore's Internets.

Now you know I'm nuts, but it was worth it so that you could keep up with my mental flossings.

Ciao ciao.