Today, I can sort of read a German magazine and can carry on a German conversation. I can sometimes follow German TV or radio. When I lived in Luxembourg in 1998, I even watched Alf in German. Get this: the German word for Alf is “Alf.” 

It wasn’t always so rosy. I started learning German in high school, where I was taught how to tell people my name, how to ask where the disco was, and how to inquire as to whether or not Mrs. Schmidt was at home. At first, I didn’t understand everything. I didn’t get that when my teacher said “Pass auf,” she was requesting our attention rather than our unconsciousness. But it got easier, and I slugged through it. By the time I graduated high school, I was able to determine the whereabouts of the train to Berlin, what Wolfgang and Helga were doing after school, and at what time we would be invading Poland. 

So, when I got to college, I was okay but not great. I figured I’d take my required two more quarters of German language, and then begin the arduous process of forgetting all of it. 

College German required a lot of partner work, and my partner was a freshman named Jim. We were told to introduce ourselves to each other over and over and to tell each other our ages and to inquire whether or not the other liked sauerbraten. When we learned a new construction, we were told to create sentences using that construction. If we didn’t know how to say something, we were allowed to ask, but had to do it in German using the phrase ‘Wie sagt man…?”  It all made me mentally tired — as if I was going to pass auf. 

Once, deep in the midst of an assignment on relative pronoun phrases, we walked over to our T.A. to ask a question.

“Ja?” she said.

“Wie sagt man ‘pistol-whip’?”

She didn’t understand, so I pretended to beat Jim with the butt of an imaginary revolver before repeating the question.

” ‘Mit einer Pistole schlagen.’ “

Jim tried it out in German. ” ‘The man, who is wearing the blue hat, is pistol-whipping Tony Danza.’ ” He nodded. I thanked the T.A. and walked away.

More questions arose as we continued with the assignment. “Wie sagt man ‘flesh-eating bacteria’?” Jim asked later.

“Wie sagt man ‘break-dancing fiasco’?”

“Wie sagt man “David Bowie’s hairdo’?”

By the end of the session, we were turned around on the German language. We were further turned around when the T.A. brought in a popular German CD for our listening enjoyment. On the cover were four very white people in ostentatious studded sunglasses and various ridiculous hats — a hip-hop group by the name of “Die Fantastischen Vier,” or “The Fantastic Four.”

“Isn’t that a group of superheroes?” Jim asked. 

The album turned out to be brilliant, and thanks to my increased skills, I was able to easily translate the lyrics (”The Smudo, the Smudo, I am the Smudo. I don’t know Karate and I don’t know Judo.”), which made me feel smart. I took the borrowed DFF album to the deli I worked at and played it loudly and proudly. 

My boss, Ryan, was intrigued. He said that he only knew two German words. One was “dankeschön” (which he, like everyone else, mispronounced as “dunka-shane”) and the other was “lederhosen.” 

“What does that mean, anyway?” he asked.

I knew that “hosen” meant pants, but the other half of the word had me mystified. So I pulled out my dictionary and looked it up. 

“Here it is,” I told him, running my finger down the page. “It means ‘unfortunately.’ “ 

“So ‘lederhosen’ means ‘unfortunately, pants’?” he said.

“I guess.”

“As in, someone puts pants on their head instead of a hat and you point out their error by saying, ‘Excuse me, but unfortunately… pants.’ ”

I agreed that this was odd, so I asked my T.A. She was still afraid of me after the pistol-whipping incident but informed me that although “leider” did in fact mean “unfortunately,” “leder,” which was correct, meant “leather.” 

“Dunker-shane.” I told her.

Her wariness of Jim and me did not improve with time. We were scheduled later in the day to perform a dialogue for the class about a campus issue. We had chosen the oft-lamented parking problem.

“There aren’t enough parking spots here,” I began, speaking in German.

“Yes. Yes there are not,” Jim agreed.

“There should be more.”

“Yes. Yes there should.”

“What if there was less parking?”
 
“That would be unfortunately,” Jim said, capitalizing on what we had learned about leiderhosen.

“But,” I pointed out, “that would mean more room for a…” I paused, then turned to the T.A. “Wie sagt man ‘Taco Bell’?”

” ‘Taco Bell,’” she answered.

“That would mean more room for a Taco Bell,” I told Jim.

“We should no parking places, and Taco Bell make,” Jim agreed.
 
“But what of the commuters?”

Jim rubbed his chin. “They need parking places?”

“They need.”

“We could kill all of the commuters,” he suggested, nodding.

“But what would we do with the bodies?”

“We could throw them in the river.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding back. “Yes. Let us eat tacos.”

We looked to the T.A. when we had finished. After a silent pause, she slowly offered one criticism. “When you talk about throwing the bodies into the river,” she explained, “you should say ‘in den Fluß,‘ not ‘in dem Fluß.’ Using dative case implies that you aren’t throwing bodies into the river, but are instead standing in the river and tossing them around.”

“That’s what we meant,” I said.

“Like a Frisbee,” Jim added, doing a pantomime for emphasis.

By the time I went to Luxembourg, I was set. I knew how to explain my tossing of bodies. I knew about Die Fantastischen Vier. And fortunately, I knew about my unfortunate pants. Which is pretty essential to getting the attention of Germans, as it turns out. 

To most people, 5am is an ungodly hour — one they pass dreamily while camping nude with the Rockettes in pre-war Germany or fixing a birdfeeder with their girlfriend from junior high. 5am is not a time when you’re up, reading Tweets that don’t concern you. It’s not a time you should be deleting Viagra spam email. It’s a time that you should be asleep — blissfully, forgetfully asleep. Ah, how I miss sleep.

But instead, here I am, awake. And about the only good thing I have going on is that it’s quiet at 5am — except for this baby here, who agrees with me about this stupid time change.

Let’s start with a little history lesson. Approximately 120 years ago (or maybe even longer), either God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe and programmed the sun to rise in the morning and set at night, which was a pretty good system as it lined up well with when most people were asleep or awake. He then created time zones, and decreed that said Zones shall not necessarily follow state boundaries, even though that would have been less confusing. In His infinite wisdom, He placed California three hours behind the east coast, thus ensuring that the two worlds would forever be incompatible with and alien to one another, even prior to and following Schwarzenegger’s tenure as governor. Then, because He was late for a Toastmasters meeting, He trusted the mortals to assign times to the zones and wrote His instructions on an amulet, which He gave to Karen Allen. And it was good.

But an evil French man named Belloq tried to steal the amulet. He crafted his own Staff of Ra to take to the Map Room at sunrise, but did not take back one kadam of its length to honor God, and was shown the wrong times. And while Indiana Jones followed soon after, Jones was thrown into a tomb filled with snakes and the correct information was lost forever. So for half of the year, we travel back in time one hour and live our lives in increased darkness. Having solved the problem of shortening days by making it worse, thus were the dumb Children of Earth pwned, so sayeth the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Amen.

I hate the time change. I don’t say that lightly, like saying I hate nuts in brownies. I mean that I want to find the time change where it sleeps, slit its throat, and eat its brains. I want to burn its house, destroy its crops, and salt the earth so that nothing will ever grow there again. I want to kill its livestock and sell it to Longhorn Steakhouse. I want to convert its pets to Scientology and record over all of its TiVo programs with reruns of Eight is Enough.

It’s terrible that we have this time change, but honestly, what makes it worse it the welcome it receives. My fellow citizens have sold out! People, you are given one extra hour of sleep on one night — true. But the price you pay is five months of darkness at 5pm! Yet people don’t see that. They only see their forty acres and a mule.

Well, no longer.

I say we fight the time change. And in fact, let’s go in the other direction. Move your clocks two hours forward, negating last weekend’s change and then reversing it. Let’s go to work two hours earlier than yesterday and then leave two hours earlier. Let’s reclaim 7pm. And, let’s reclaim 5am.

My daughter has started the movement already. Who’s with us?

“Sure, no problem,” I tell them. “The best way to describe it is this: It’s really, really retarded.”

Our election process is dumb. Two people run, and each picks a running mate. Then, each team heads out into the world to call the other team a couple of assholes. It’s important to do a good job of calling your opponents assholes, and to effectively deflect asshole references directed at you. Then there is the talent portion of the contest, in which each candidate demonstrates how well he can infuriate Tom Brokaw. Then eveningwear, and then the swimsuit competition.

However, ultimately, each election is decided based on media photography.

Consider the past few elections and you’ll see I’m right. As you think about each pair, try to think like Joe the Plumber. Joe isn’t really thinking about his political allegiance or his plumbing business. Joe is being fed images between reality TV shows, like all Americans. (You know, except you. You’re actually smart and awesome. And you can fly.)

Let’s look at our first pair:

Who are you going to pick? The guy who looks near death, or the guy who looks like he’s totally going to nail the soccer mom down the street? Now look at the next election:

Again, the choice is between a walking corpse and a guy who plays the saxophone on Arsenio while wearing badass sunglasses. Even Bob Dole said privately that Bob Dole wouldn’t vote for Bob Dole if Bob Dole didn’t have a vested interest in winning because Bob Dole was Bob Dole. Bob Dole!

Now let’s check out 2000:

Okay, our choice is a cool party guy who snorted coke off of the backs of hookers while waterskiing nude through a half pipe made from the bones of legendary rock bands, or a dude who breathes fire. Easy choice.

Now obviously, by 2004, Bush had proven himself to no longer be a legendary party guy and had lost the confidence of a lot of the country, but check out the choice we had to make:

I mean, he’s older, whiter, and his ears stick out more. He can barely speak English, and he’s being serviced by a turkey. But just look at Kerry. This country can’t have a president who can’t even catch a fucking football.

Okay, caught up to the present. So the question is, who will win on Tuesday? John McCain, or Barack Obama? Well, let’s look at the evidence:

Okay, wait… that’s a pretty bad picture of McCain. Caught at a bad moment; it could happen to anyone. Let’s try again.

Hmm. I’m thinking he was in a pirate play, or perhaps yelling at kids to get off of his lawn. Try again.

Hang on, try this:

Wait.

Oh, come on! Now he’s just doing it on purpose.

Sorry, John. You seem like a good guy with some good ideas, but I don’t think you’re going to win this one. Not based on that photo record. It’s late in the game, but you might think about getting some sunglasses or a sax. Or doing more drugs. Or maybe wearing a funny hat. But make sure it’s funny in a “cool guy” way, not a “what a douchebag” way.

Oh, and lay off the telephone calls. Barack never calls me, but your people are on me like three times a day. For real, John… put the phone down. And the sax. Get a saxophone, and get some hot chicks to stand around you. It’s your only chance.

I went to college at the Ohio State University. For my first two years, I lived in an air conditioned mausoleum known to OSUites as Lincoln Tower. In each room, Lincoln boasts one 2×2 window that cannot be opened and absolutely no intermingling with the outside air. Lincoln and its sister Morrill Tower are identical in all ways but two: First, while the entirety of Morrill is a dorm, the bottom fifteen of Lincoln’s thirty floors are administrative offices staffed by people whom the university deemed deserving of a terrible punishment. And second, while Morrill is basic student housing, Lincoln is one of OSU’s honors dorms.

OSU created honors dorms for people who had been deceived into thinking that the purpose of college was education. In general, the honors dorms had much less noise, much less partying, and much less sex than their plebeian counterparts. While our vending machines were stocked with candy, pop, and over-the-counter stimulants like No-Doz, Morrill’s were stocked with condoms. The one saving grace was that we did have our own nerdy breed of shenanigans. Though I never woke up in a pile of naked sorority girls, I did see a pickle electrocuted more than once.

Life in Honors suited my lifestyle perfectly. I was such a partier that I would occasionally have up to one drink in a row, and I was a devious ladies’ man who had been on more than two dates by the time I turned 18. Some of my roommates managed to be cool and smart at the same time (like the guy who used to roll the 32 gallon bathroom trashcan into his room on Friday nights “just in case,” and often woke up in last night’s clothes and asked us how he got home) but many were more like Henry, who would stand behind people while they were working and mouth-breathe heavily.

The Towers were arranged in suites. Each door off of the hallway led into a wedge-shaped common room walled with what looked like yak hair, and beyond that were four two-person rooms and a shared bathroom. So while I only shared a room with one person, I was essentially living in a group of eight. After the first year, a group of us higher-functioning nerds sifted out the spazes and mouth-breathers and formed a group of seven who would live together in Lincoln again during our sophomore year.

We could not find an eighth, so OSU found one for us. His name was Jesse Lee Baker III.

From the very beginning, Jesse Lee felt like an odd fit. He used to pop his plentiful chest acne and leave pus on the bathroom mirror. He would blow his nose in the shower, without using any sort of tissue. He took Playboys into the common bathroom and would peruse them on the john. On Friday and Saturday nights, he would comb his tiny, ratty mustache and head out to a club, asking his roommate Andy ahead of time if he could sleep elsewhere when Jesse Lee came home with a girl, which never actually happened.

Culturally, he was an enigma to us, but we tried to see past this because he shared one large similarity — he, like us, was apparently an honors student. However, this final bond vanished when we discovered that he wasn’t taking 300-level calculus like the rest of us, or even an underachieving Math 101. He was actually taking Math 050, which was remedial. And he was failing it.

To his credit, Jesse Lee did think he was intelligent. After all, OSU had put him in an honors dorm, and he was surrounded by students who understood things like information technology, political science, and soap. He would hear a discussion about astronomical “red shift” and chime in with, “Oh yeah, I know about that — red light” in an “I totally know what you’re talking about” one-up gesture. When one of the other guys couldn’t figure out how to solve a differential equation, Jesse Lee would sigh and say, “Let me look at that.” And in return, Andy helped him with his own homework by giving him the formula for perimeter: “just add up the sides.”

He was loud and he was brash. His habits mystified us in an anthropological sense, the way gorilla behavior would mystify us. One time Andy heard a hairdryer and entered the room to a shout of, “Dude, knock first!” Andy had assumed that there was no need to knock because Jesse Lee was just drying his hair. However, his assumption was only partially correct. Andy found Jesse Lee naked, with one foot up on the bed, blowdrying his undercarriage.

It didn’t make sense — and to be honest, it made us mad. We weren’t getting drunk; we weren’t getting laid. All we asked in exchange for our monastic college existence was to be sequestered away from the Jesse Lee Baker III’s of the world.

The riddle demanded investigation. Luckily, all good nerds have an inappropriately cordial relationship with the local authorities, which in this case took the form of our ostentatious 250-pound hall director, LaTisha. Andy pumped her for information and found out that Jesse Lee was in fact part of a sociological experiment that the university was conducting. The idea was to fill vacant spots in honors dormitories with low- to no-ability students in an attempt to better their academic standing. That might not be the exact wording, but I know for sure that “low- to no-ability” is verbatim because I have never heard a more accurate description of anything, ever.

We were definitely not supposed to know this, and we didn’t tell Jesse Lee. We did tell each other, as an act of self defense. Because what OSU failed to consider was that beyond the possibilities of Jesse Lee’s academic betterment or stagnation (it ended up being the latter), there was a third possible outcome to the experiment. Rather than us buoying Jesse Lee, he might well have dragged us down.

I loved my time at OSU. I paid them, and they gave me an education and some fun times. It was a fair trade, yet the university keeps calling me today, asking for donations. But what they don’t realize is that I remember the Jesse Lee Baker III experiment.

It will always be my opinion that they owe me.

More photobombers

What you don’t realize is that in a household of two adults, a four year old, a baby, two dogs, three cats, and three horses, there are a lot of tasks. What you don’t realize is that when you’re the only responsible party in that house, you have to be constantly in motion or else you will be killed. Literally killed by your own children and eaten by your dogs. True story. 

Friday night, the baby fought going to sleep and then woke me twice. Then she peed through her sleeper. Then my son woke up at 4am and announced that his pajamas and sheets were wet too. It was like some sort of urine free-for-all, where rules need not apply. So 8am Saturday morning, I was dragging out of bed. 

I went to my office for five minutes. Robin was soon up, and I knew this because I could hear her mechanized approach on the crutches, sounding like an Imperial Walker from Star Wars. Then my son got up. I knew this because I heard crying and assumed the baby was awake, then realized it was just the boy’s theatrics. I ignored him. Then the baby started to cry for real, and the fun began. 

Change the baby. Bring her to the table. Get a bottle for the baby. Get a bowl of cereal for the wife. Get bib for the baby. Ask the boy what he wants to eat. He decides on cereal, so deliver cereal. Get juice for the wife. Push in the boy’s chair. Attempt to get my own breakfast. Fail.

“Daddy, I’m done,” said my son. “I want another bowl of cereal.” 

But the boy had already had one bowl, so he was going to the end of the queue. 

“Your request is very important to us,” I told him. “Please wait, and it will be answered in the order in which it was received.”

Let the dogs out. Feed the dogs. Let the dogs back in. Realize they’ve been outside for fifteen seconds; let dogs back out. 

“Daddy, I need my vitamin.”

What the hell. I’m headed that way anyway. 

Get his vitamin. Get Robin’s vitamin. Get that second bowl of cereal while I’m at it. Notice the yogurt in the fridge; remove it to begin making my breakfast shake. Fail. Instead, deliver vitamins. 

“Did you feed the horses?” Robin asks. 

“Their request is very important to us,” I tell her. Then, to my son, “Do you want juice to drink?”

“I want milk.” 

“We’re out of milk. I used the last on your cereal. Do you want juice?”

He said no, so I went about getting Robin’s fish oil supplement. She can’t swallow pills, so it’s a liquid — mixed with Crystal Light to make it palatable. Pour. Mix. Deliver. Return to the counter to make my own food. Fail.

“Daddy, I want juice.”

“You said you didn’t want juice.”

“I want mommy’s juice.” Meaning the Crystal Light.

Whatever. 

Pour Crystal Light. Deliver. Look longingly at yogurt for my breakfast shake. The boy announces he’d like a third bowl of cereal. Pour cereal, add water because we’re out of milk. First everyone pees the bed, now we’re putting water on cereal. This household is crazier than a car dealer.

Realize the baby needs her rice cereal. Make it; deliver it. Get bib again, because what I grabbed last time turned out to be a pair of socks. 

“Can you get me some ibuprofin?” Robin asks. She’s supposed to start taking it today, so I look up the doctor’s instructions. 200mg. Two tablets. Three times a day. So is that 200mg three times a day, or two tablets twice a day? Or are the tablets 200mg? Do they make different doses? 

“Daddy, more cereal!”

But the kid has had enough; he’s going to barf and then I’ll have another task. So I deliver the ibuprofin. Refill water glass; deny first-born. Pick up dishes and return them to the sink. Open the dishwasher to get a spoon to make my shake; realize all of the dishes are covered with strange white detritus. Re-run dishwasher. Realize we’re out of milk for the shake anyway. Attempt to think around the problem. Fail.

“Daddy, because I ate three bowls of cereal, can I have that green sucker?” He indicates the “get well” bouquet of candy that my mother sent to my wife. He’s been harvesting it since it arrived. 

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because breakfast isn’t the time for suckers,” I said. But I knew I was kidding myself. 

Robin rises and begins Imperial Walking out to the living room. I know that if a small fighter dragging a wire were to fly around her four ground-touching limbs at this point, she’d fall forward and the rebellion would rejoice. I do not point this out. 

“It’s cold in here,” she says. 

Walk to a vent. Feel cold air. Go downstairs, touch flue. It’s warm, not hot. Change furnace filter, which is thick with the hair of five animals, three of which are yelling at me. Feed cats. Go upstairs, re-check vents. Better. 

“Could you bring my pillows from the bed?” Robin says. And on my return, she adds, “…and my pills and water?” 

Return to kitchen. Down my own fish oil supplement, my own vitamins. Begin making my food. Pained grunting comes from the front room at this exact moment. It’s not my wife. It’s my daughter. And there is only one time at which she grunts like that. 

Change baby’s diaper. Realize furnace is now working too well; turn it off. Suddenly it’s 9:45, but at least suddenly, I’m able to make my own breakfast. The boy is watching SpongeBob SquarePants, so I sit down with my shake to watch it with him. Fifteen minutes pass. Then a half hour. 

At 10:30, I realize the horses are surely getting impatient. 

I had a double-urine extravaganza last night. It took me nearly two hours to make my breakfast. 

And now, the horses are hungry. 

I realize I don’t give a shit.

The subscription to Out magazine was addressed to Theodore L. Douchebag, which according to the person who ordered it for him is Bulgarian and is pronounced “dow-CHEB-egg.” 

Bound & Gagged came to Theodore L. Ballsack.

And the regular issues of Black Inches were delivered to Theodore L. “KOH-soo-KAY” – a French name with a proud heritage, spelled “Cocksucker.” 

“What the hell is this?” he’d grumble, then march out to the dumpster. And then my friend Chuck would lock him outside.

Mr. P was famous for being an ass. For real. He opened an ice cream store, yet didn’t like kids. He certainly didn’t like the teenagers that he employed, which was probably fair turnabout anyway because most of said teens robbed him blind and used to experiment with his food instead of serving it to customers.

Case study: If you microwave a hot dog for a very long time, it will blacken and the skin will wrinkle into a tough leather. We called these “leather dogs.” 

Further exploration: If you microwave a leather dog beyond the leather stage, it will eventually catch on fire and explode. Mr. P will not be pleased with the aftermath. So the only thing you can do is to scrape the detritus into a sundae cup, cover it with soft-serve, and put it in the freezer as a Mistake. 

You see, out front, Mr. P had a sign that read, “Mistakes half price!” This was supposed to mean that when a customer ordered a Turtle sundae without caramel but the employee accidentally added caramel, a later customer could buy that incorrect Turtle for $1.25 instead of $2.50. What it actually meant was that Mr. P’s shop hosted a kind of cruel and inhumane Freezer of Doctor Moreau – where buying a mistake was a breed of Russian roulette. 

A customer came to the window, angry that she had found bits of aged hot dog in the Mistake she had purchased. Luckily, Chuck knew how to respond to this complaint.

“Yes, putting burnt hot dog in a sundae was indeed a mistake,” he’d say. 

Other mistakes: Barbecued beef whipped with soft-serve to make a BBQ Cyclone. Slushies made with ketchup. Sundaes with bread in the middle.

“Yes, I understand. The customer who ordered it didn’t like it either,” Chuck said when a woman brought back a Mistake shake filled with mustard. “It was clearly an error on our part.”

To serve a soft-serve ice cream cone, you hold the cone under the dispenser as the ice cream is coming out and make a small circle with the cone hand, lowering as the cone gets taller. This creates the swirl effect. If you do this with a large-sized cone, the diameter of the swirl is large enough that until you top the cone, there is actually a large hole down through the center of the ice cream. Chuck would sometimes slide a hot dog down into this void and then top the cone, then set the cone in a sundae cup and put it in with the Mistakes. 

A woman came to the window shortly thereafter and asked what Mistakes we had. Mr. P showed her a few sundaes and a large vanilla cone. She chose the cone and was back shortly afterward. This time Chuck waited on her. 

“There’s a hot dog in here!” she said.

Chuck peered over the counter and inspected the pink interloper amidst the white ice cream. “Yes, looks like it,” he said.

“Well, what the hell?”

“Ma’am,” he said, “there is a hot dog in that ice cream cone. That is clearly a Mistake. Had that cone been made properly, there would be no hot dog in it.” 

You learn things when you work around ice cream for long enough. For one thing, you learn that a large cone can generally be sixteen inches tall before the lower swirls are no longer able to support its weight and it topples, then skates under the Slushie machine. Whipped cream, being lighter, appears to have no such limit as long as the base is wide enough.

Case study: A lady at the drive-thru asks for extra whipped cream. 

“Extra?” you say, “or EXTRA?”

If the customer replies with an enthusiastic “EXTRA!” then congratulations, you’ve just been given a license to steal.

From an assembler’s standpoint, you can easily make the whipped cream on top of a sundae exceed the height of a standard car window. The customer will generally try to tip the sundae into his car and drop most of the whipped cream onto the pavement, but every once in a while someone simply hauls it into the car, knocking the cap off and into his lap.

Customers pulled away from the drive-thru very hesitantly, balancing giant cones or sundaes. And once they were three feet from the window, Chuck would yell, “WAIT!”

Abrupt stop. Cone goes into windshield.

“You forgot your napkins.”

Mr. P missed most of this. Half the time he had been locked out, and the rest of the time he’d be in the back room watching game shows or fishing shows. The worst thing that could happen during a shift was for Mr. P to come up and work with the crew. Usually, when he did this, he’d eventually throw his apron on the floor and quit. He’d then march out to the corner and stand facing away from the shop with his arms crossed. Cars would honk at him.

And for Mr. P, the worst thing he could do during a shift would be to quit. More leather dogs and outrageous Mistakes occurred during these times than any other. And it was always sad when Mr. P un-quit, having realized that not only did he both own and live at his shop, but that his employees would burn it down if he stayed outside for too long.

Some very few lucky times, Mr. P, Theodore L. Cocksucker, would leave the shop entirely to run errands or to ride his bike. Those times were like paradise. And they probably were for Mr. P too, until his bike was hit by a car. Following that incident, Mr. P, shaken but miraculously unharmed, bought an orange helmet, orange reflective vest, orange tire reflectors, and a giant orange flag on a post for behind the bike’s seat. 

Before realizing the identity of this new safety rider, Chuck’s mother saw him riding and noted his keen look.

“Poor man,” she said. “He must be retarded.”

So given that I pay so much attention paid to my physical being, you can imagine the crushing feeling in the pit of my stomach when I realized that my grill was not all that it could be. 

It all started a few days ago, when I was thinking about the time one of my friends’ grandmothers called Midas Muffler to find out how she could get a rhino guard installed on her car. And so one thought led to another and suddenly I’m Googling rhino guards, and guards, and mufflers, and rhinos, and grills. I could find nothing about rhino guards, meaning that in today’s market, the neighbor’s rhino would have continued to dent Granny’s car with impunity. But I did find a lot of info about grills. And not car grills, but teeth grills. Or grillz.

In case you’re an ignorant jive motherfucker, having a grill is where you put lots of bling on your teef into your mouf so dat it sparkles when you smiles. And really, I have a lot of work to do because (and I’m ashamed to admit this), I have no bling in my mouf. Not even a tiny bit of ice to woo the bitches. 

Arguably the best site to see dope grills is on SeeMyGrill.com, where you can “rate da grill” as well as see live lists of the top 10 grills and top 10 hoods. (Unsurprisingly, Houston and Beaumont lead the hoods list — Texas being well-known for its liberal nature and support of gangsta life.) You can also order custom grils from IcedOutGear.com and refill your stores of Pimpjuice. 

But what’s cool about the site is that visitors can submit photos of their grill for others to rate. Some grillz are weak, but many are straight up bangin — holla back! My favorite grill is the one that Latin_king claims as his own, but which any fool knows is actually off of Bridgeport International. Fake pic or not, this grill is iced out and, as one of the comments points out, “off da hook,” with canines that look like vampire teeth . No wonder he frontin; can’t blame him from tryin to be a playa.

The thing is, though, I don’t have $10Gs or more right now that I can justify using to bling out my grill properly. That made me pretty sad until a friend happened to mention casually that MrBling.com is his new favorite website. Which is particularly odd given that he’s Jewish and sports no grill at all. 

At Mr. Bling, I can pimp my grill for $30. So look at me, I’m rollin. Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.