This is something I’m starting and hopefully will keep up on a monthly basis. I watch a lot of movies and I’m astounded at how much garbage Hollywood puts out. This is nothing new to most of us and yet someone, somewhere, paid to see Paul Blart: Mall Cop or Dance Flick Wayans extravaganza 32. Meanwhile, absolutely amazing movies go relatively unnoticed by the public and only get retroactive publicity if they earn that rare Oscar nod or equally rare cult DVD status. My goal is to suggest a few amazing movies that you may have missed and a few that you should look for soon.  Read 

I’ve thought that I might die on more than one occasion in my life. The first time I can remember was when I was 8 years old and I crashed into a barbed wire fence on a quad runner. The most vivid time was when I was on a bike ride from Santa Monica to San Diego. We stopped at some beach near Camp Pendleton and I went swimming by myself. The riptide pulled me under and spit me out a minute and a half later, a quarter mile from the shore. I had almost blacked out and barely made it back to shore. Most recently, my disease made me lose almost 50 pounds and it started really scaring me into a Morgan Freeman/Jack Nicholson type situation at 22 years old. I thought about all of the things that I had done and all of the things that I wanted to do and it bothered me that I could think of so many things on the “haven’t done” list.  Read 

Where the hell have I been? I feel like this is a bi-annual question I pose to myself and subsequently decide to explain to the world. I disappeared from this site once again for a few months and a lot has happened both in my life and on this blog.  Read 

The frequency of my Las Vegas trips has been increasing lately, which is not to say that I’m against that fact at all. Quite the contrary. I may have mentioned this in passing once or twice… but I f-ing love Las Vegas. This trip, though, was entirely special on its own. My little brother finally turned 21 and I had to take him to Las Vegas so that he could experience the city for the first time in the best ways possible. In addition, I decided to add a story from the weekend onto here that I originally said I would never tell anyone, but decided was way too funny to leave out.  Read 

Remember long ago when I used to post drunken rants? I got busy, got sick, couldn’t drink alcohol, and then went on a multi-weekend binge. Here I am, after a weekend of bars in my old hometown and 2 days before leaving for a 5 day weekend in Las Vegas. This is the eye of the storm between two massive drinking excursions and yes, even in the eye I am drinking. Shit, it’s my little brother’s 21st birthday. How can I not?  Read 

Poker is never a boring game. You would think that the continual shuffling of cards, folding, and winning or losing money would get boring, but when you put together a house game full of friends, something interesting is always bound to happen. If not, well I hate to break it to you, but your friends suck. I had a poker game recently at a friend’s place, where the premise of the night was to finish off all of their recent party leftovers–food and booze–play poker and dabble with the new Guitar Hero game. After some turkey and PBRs we were all set to start our game of Texas Hold Em. I lost my first twenty quickly and had to re-buy into the cash game, and was getting a bit bored with the situation until somebody heroically came up with a drinking game to go along with our game of cards. The rules to the game were simple–whoever makes the best five card hand out of anybody who folds at any time in the hand has to take a shot.  Read 

Everyone who has had any kind of night that involves getting cut off from the bar, cutting yourself off, or taking a shot after one of the first two happened knows about the infamous morning after quote, “I will never drink alcohol again.” Almost from the first time anyone drinks, they have that moment where they wake up in the bowels of Hell, cursing the gods, and vowing to never again drink that awful liquid they call alcohol. For normal people, that happens once or twice when they first start drinking and they learn the lesson that hard drinking taught them. For me, it’s happened twice, and once was last weekend.  Read 

For anyone who was keeping track, I haven’t been drinking for a couple of weeks. I was on medication that reacted to alcohol like the drug Anibuse does. That isn’t good. Anibuse is the drug that they give to alcoholics in rehab. It makes you hate alcohol like Mel Gibson hates __________ (insert race that isn’t his own). My “February” or sober month ended a little early because the medication that reacts poorly with alcohol also reacts poorly with me, so I’m officially not taking it anymore. I had to celebrate and the Pierside was created.  Read