I don’t think that I was a prude, just a nerd. To be honest I think it was a case of not really seeing the point behind drinking, when I was a teenager. I was hanging out with my friends, gaming, and doing well with the ladies so how was drinking going to make any of that better? I was not straight edge or righteous about the whole thing, I just did not drink. To the best of my recollection my first full beer was shared with my dad, on a family vacation to Canada, on my 21st birthday. It was a Labatts Blue and I ordered it over everything else because they advertised during Flyers games. Hooray marketing.

In the military I continued my standoffish relationship with alcohol but mostly because of bad examples. I was assigned to a room with 3 other guys who were nicknamed “the Beam Team” as in Jim Beam. They were all around great guys but I watched them get hammered and break ankles, throw furniture out the window, shave each other’s eyebrows and chest hair, ride shopping carts out of second story windows, and accidentally cut themselves wide open. So yeah, I appointed myself designated driver of the room and held off on the full-scale drinking.

But I told you all of that so that I could tell you about the “Saint Patrick’s Day Massacre.” It started as an innocent get together. My Ex-wife, my friend, who we will call Bear since he is the size of one, and I decided to open up our house to all our friends for a hootenanny. Somewhere along the line my brother decided that this was the night I needed to get hammered. He was going to be my usher into the theater of fuckedupitude.
Im going to skim over a lot of it, partially because I want to focus on one particular moment and partially because a lot of my memory is hazy for some of the details.
I remember we started with Bowman’s vodka (classy in the screw top bottle!) moved on to Aftershock, then hit the beer in earnest. Yeah…
I do remember the following happening:
-I grabbed and pointed out my ex wife’s breasts to the party
-I had several heart to hearts with good friends that ended in hugging
-I drank more than one thing handed to me in a cup that I had not identified

And then came the moment. It was late in the party and folks were getting ready to go home. There was a bit of discussion and general amusement about what should be done to keep me from having a terrible first “morning after” and it was decided that I should be made to throw up. That way I would purge my system and not get sick in bed. So my brother, my Ex-wife and I all crammed into a half bath downstairs with the idea of getting me to throw up. It was not happening and my brother left. Then the door flew open and my friend Bear pushed into the small room. He was very drunk, very large, and very angry.
He shoved his big finger in my face and demanded. “DID YOU SLEEP WITH MY SISTER?” I forced my eyes to focus; looked up at him and asked…”which one?” this apparently was not the answer he was expecting and he left the bathroom to figure out which sister. At that point I was hustled upstairs and into bed. Truth be told I’m not sure why I asked that because I had never slept with either of his two sisters but I am convinced to this day that response saved me from a drunken ass beating.
I have since settled into a comfortable relationship with booze. I have learned I don’t throw up, I don’t pass out and I don’t get hung over. Even with all of those plusses I still count the ability to be clever while hammered among my greatest assets.

My local rink was unimpressed by the 6-7 inches of snow that fell in our area on Saturday and Sunday so it went forward with our first round of the playoffs that were scheduled for Sunday night. The game was scheduled for 8:15 and I left around 7 to give myself plenty of time to get there. I should have realized that kind of planning ahead only meant trouble, well ok, not trouble per se, but weirdness for sure.
Getting to the rink was not horrible; the local roads were sketchy but passable and the interstate was dry as a bone. I arrived around 7:30 to see two teams who had started their game at 5 still on the ice. Yeah, they were in their third 20 minute overtime. They had played the equivalent of two back to back to back games and were still skating away. Even though they wrapped it up about 15 minutes after I got there it meant that the game that was slotted before our match, the 7:00 game, did not start till 8. You see where I am going with this? Once everything was said and done we didn’t drop the puck until 9. But at least the shenanigans were not for nothing. We put together a good game, I played well and we posting a playoff, shutout, win. The first round was single elimination so that puts us through to the second where we will face the second seed in a best of three series. That’s the good news, the bad news is that it looks like we will have a VERY short bench for the first match of that series. Like 6-8 skaters short. Ouch…
So we have seen the good and the bad, here comes the weird.
So post game, and post game bullshitting in the locker room, I head out to toss my stuff in the car and head home when one of my teammates comes up to me.
“Hey man, can you do me a favor?”
“Sure, what’s up”
“It looks like someone on the other team slit my tires after the game, can you take my girlfriend and her two kids back to my place? I live over by you”
I said sure, but what…the…fuck… It appears that one of the other team, upset after getting into a small donnybrook with one of our players, knifed the tires of what he though was that guys car. Turns out he got the right team but the wrong player.
I want you to reread and digest that. Some pathetic fuck slit the sidewalls of someone’s tires over a minor fracas and defeat in a beer league hockey game…Yeah…

So I took the three of them home while my teammate waited with his car for a tow. The ride home was loud as the kids were wound up and the girlfriend was pissed off. I will summarize the high points with a list.
–There were multiple threats of spankings and multiple occurrences of child sass
–I got called “old man” and accused of “driving crazy”( by the little girls, not the girlfriend)
–The two little girls started messing with my goalie sticks, which I asked them to leave alone. They refused and the ensuing shenanigans, between them, led to one getting busted in the lip hard enough to make it bleed.
–I discovered I had enough napkins in the glove-box comfort her and stop the very minimal bleeding.

In the end everyone got home just fine and I got to call Genie around 11 on my way back to our house.
“Hey, remember how I said it was a good thing that we finally had an early game cause I would be back at a reasonable hour…”

More soon.

We played the last game of our regular season last night getting a win. I wanted to post my numbers here so I could see them later. Statistically I had my best season ever going 13-2 with a 1.93 GAA. With in the league we finished 3rd out of 11 and qualified for the playoffs. For some screwed up reason the prize for finishing 3rd is to play the 5th place team as opposed to if we we finished 4th when we would’ve played the 6th place team. When we asked why that was the set up the league stated it was for “variety”. Um, ok.
We play Sunday and several members of our team will be out of town, so wish us luck. Then again, if we get the snow we are supposed to we may not be playing at all.

Hey out there, fellow video gamers. Tired of being portrayed as ne’er do wells by the dipshit media? Want to do something to help those less fortunate? Click on the pic below and support helping kids during hard times in their lives. Its a great organization started and supported by hard core gamers. Go! Level up your Charity skill now!

I am, as a rule, not a beard guy. Do not think this means that I am a shave every morning guy either. No, normally I rock the “lazy nerd” look pretty hard but a full beard is not something that I have ever tried. There have been goatees and the occasionally ill-conceived mustache type thing but never a full beard.
Why? Call it residual military brainwashing or the fact that I figured i would look like an axe-murderer, I just never gave it a try. Until now, well, up until yesterday that is. I think the last day I shaved previous to last night was the day we brought Ian home. Standing in that blessed hot water, taking that glorious shower I went for the full shave, soap and scrub. But since then I have let it grow, wild and free. It looked alright, I suppose. Kind of like a white collar lumberjack, but in the end it itched and got in the way of eating and drinking and last night around 9 I just had it. Off it came.
I took a few photos ahead of time as I had a feeling the big shave was coming, one is below and another is on my flickr. Enjoy.