Homecoming.

Homecoming.

Suggested Soundtrack: “Homecoming” by Kanye West

In less than two days, I will once again be a resident of San Diego. This is wonderful news. It’s no secret that I prefer the sunshine and beaches of San Diego to the thunderstorms and desolate urban sprawl of Dallas. When I first got here, you could actually hear my bitching, faintly, all the way to the tip of Point Loma.

At the same time, I am leaving behind a place that I grew to like quite a bit. The people make the place, you see. It’s easy to love San Diego, because there is a beach and the weather is awesome 99% of the time, but without lots of fantastic people living there, I wouldn’t feel this strong urge to return. It’s the people that are staying in Dallas that makes me sad to go. I’ve made great friends here, and found new family. I know that if I want to or need to, I can come back. That being said, I’m probably going to cry a little when I leave here.

As you may or may not know, I am not coming to San Diego alone. Two of my good friends have decided to go on this adventure with me. Really, I’m going on the adventure with them. Daniel and Adam have never lived outside of Texas. Both of them have 25 years of history here, with friends and family that will devastated when they go. To me, this is huge. The fact that two guys I’ve known less than two years are willing to move to another state with me is mind-boggling. Both have visited San Diego. Both fell in love the same way I did when I visited from Palm Springs almost a decade ago. And both will be happier than pigs in shit when they spend their first lazy day at the beach. I can’t wait to ride bikes with them and show them their new city. Their City. I’m envious of them, because they get to experience San Diego in all of its glory for the first time. As for me, I’m excited to be back home, among a group of friends that I love dearly in a city that makes me happy to be living there.

Since this is officially the last post of Nik Does Dallas, I’m gonna take a moment to go over some of my favorite posts from the last two years. Join me, won’t you, as we go back in time…

sunday, july 29, 2007

“What was originally supposed to be a two day drive instead became a grueling all-nighter.

It was a long and sometimes surreal journey. I started in Palm Springs, at my dad's, waking up at 8am. At 10am, I left and drove to San Diego to pick up some crap that I left. Left San Diego at 2pm, determined to do the drive in one go, but unsure if I could or, for that matter, should. But then I figured: ‘Fuck it.’

So I drove. I drove through desert, across rivers, up mountains, and down them. I drove past billboards for "The Thing?" which was "400 miles ahead," then "200 miles ahead," then "100 miles ahead," then "only 50 miles ahead," then was sped by at 75mph, then was forever behind me, thank goodness. I drove until I needed gas, or a bite, or to stretch, and then I'd stop, do whatever it was I needed to do, and then I'd drive some more. I drove past cops, and cows; through counties, and states; on good road, and bad; while singing, and silently; through good weather, and poor; with windows down, and windows up; while smoking, and eating; from sunset, to sunrise. Drive is what I did. ”

monday, august 6, 2007

“I chain to a tree. Shopping is without incident. This Walgreens is almost exactly like a California Walgreens, except that everyone is slightly nicer, and they sound funny. Finished, I go unlock the bike. As I mount my bike, the unmistakable feeling of a bug stuck to my leg makes me pause to smack it. In doing so, I realize that both of my legs are covered in ants. One hundred ants. Red ones. What followed was probably pretty funny for spectators: I hop off the bike, dancing around the parking lot, slapping myself in the legs while letting out an unbroken stream of curse words that would make a sailor blush. All the while with cheery music from ELO piped into my head from the iPod. Once the slaughter was finished, I rode home (more of the same: pedal, pedal, smack, pedal, pedal, smack), went inside and relayed my story to the Martin family.

‘Better hope those weren't fire ants.’

But guess what?

They were.”

monday, august 13, 2007

“SATURDAY:

10:00am Wake up to the sound of many children yelling and playing

10:15am After peeing for a solid ten minutes, I head into the living room. The kids ask, ‘What time did YOU get home last light?’ I think to myself: ‘Time? HOW did I get home last night?’ but out loud I say, ‘Real late. Now, Uncle Nik needs some cereal.’ Eat and read quietly, drink water

4:30pm Head to Mike's for dinner and booze. We make a big batch of strong lemon-and-vodka drink, and drink it all. Then the two of us, plus another guy, finish off a bottle of Crown. ‘Finally, my hangover is gone,’ is the last thing I remember thinking”

thursday, august 16, 2007

“I finally found something cool about the office where I work. It's the walk to lunch.

Off I went. I had my iPod going, my shirt untucked, and the sun in my eyes. The Subway was around the corner, across the street. The side of the street I work on has no sidewalk. I crossed the street, fully exposed to our closest star, in what was to become the only real hot portion of the walk. Because on the other side, there was a little sidewalk I had not noticed before. It ran between two twin rows of shade trees. The entire walk was shaded! I was cool as a cucumber, stretchin' my shit out, listening to Stevie Wonder and loving life. Thus began a tradition (if something I've done 6 times to date can be considered tradition).

I get alone time, which is nice. I see things that other people in the office never will. I see lots of bugs. My friends the fire ants pop up here and there. Of winged insects there are no shortage: butterflies galore, dragonflies, and the occasional yellowjacket, who tend to buzz around my ankles for a few yards before flying off to do whatever it is that yellowjackets do besides scaring the crap out of me. Huge mushrooms grow out low and flat in places the sun doesn't reach. One time, I got to see a little bird with a long beak nab a dragonfly out of the sky. He landed, set it down and gave it a peck, only to have it fly off. He quickly re-caught the fat green insect as it landed on a leaf, went back to the ground and pecked it twice. Problem solved. As I watched, singing ‘The Circle of Life’ to myself, I realized that although I am not very happy with most of the aspects of my life right now, this walk is mine, and mine alone, and as long as I'm working here I'll have the walk to keep me the slightly sane and tolerably happy.

It's almost like being on my bike, which always made me feel like I was getting more out of travel than anyone in a car was. For instance yesterday, as I thought to myself that there are more and more dead leaves and acorns on the ground with each passing day, a brief but powerful wind kicked up in the middle of what had been a perfectly calm day. For close to a minute, all of the trees waved, letting loose a rain of leaves that poured out sideways and flew in circles, little tornadoes of leaves, as far as I could see, going up and down and around, getting in my hair, smacking into my face, while the leaves already on the ground skidded along like a moving carpet. It made me want to spin in circles with my arms outstretched. Instead, I just took it all in, and when it was over, when all the leaves had settled on the ground and the road and the sidewalk, I smiled and looked at the cars driving by and thought: ‘Suckers.’ ”

saturday, august 18, 2007

“There is a peculiar custom here in Texas. This is in their terrible handling of traffic accidents. Namely, they leave them there. I've seen this a few times now. A car will rear-end another in the middle of the freeway, and officers arriving on scene will leave it sitting there. So a fender-bender can shut down a major freeway in rush hour traffic. You find yourself stopped on the interstate, late for work, and getting later, creeping slowly ahead. ‘If there isn't a dead body up there,’ you think, ‘if I don't see a dead human, in pieces, splayed across three lanes, I am gonna be PISSED.’ Sure enough, when you get to the bottleneck, you see flares shutting down a half mile of three lanes, a Jetta with minor front end damage sitting in the middle of it, and sixteen state troopers in cowboy hats with their thumbs looped into their belts, kicked back and chewin' the fat. ‘Stupid hicks!’ you say. To yourself.”

sunday, september 23, 2007

“Flying at night takes the sometimes ugly scenery of the flyover states away and just leaves the shiny pretty stuff. The Atlanta to Dallas portion only had one thing worth mentioning: the guy sitting next to me was an absolute mystery. While the flight was boarding, and as it taxied and took off and flew along, the guy was writing tiny notes in a full size notebook. Not the page-filling, serial-killer-from-that-movie-Seven kind of tiny notes, but more like islands of itty-bitty writing on a sea of paper. He'd put one near the top, another to one side, and then flip the page and start on the next one. I tried to peek while pretending to read, but I couldn't make a bit of sense out of it. No rhyme or reason whatsoever. I don't think he was scary-crazy like the screaming guy in SD, but more of a kooky-crazy, like he had a pointy tinfoil hat at his apartment and owned a ferret. I can't say what I wanted more: to read his notebook or to magically make him not smell as bad as he did.”

monday, october 1, 2007

“Went to my hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana last weekend… The world is sometimes a very ugly place, full of sad people in unintentionally funny clothes, people for whom smiles are few and far between. At least it is that way in my hometown. It's a poor and backwards part of the world, the embarrassing older brother of American culture. It's worse than movies make it out to be. It is quite miserable. I am so happy that my parents moved us kids to California when we were young, and I called my father later and told him just that.

Next time you see Britney Spears on the TV driving on a suspended license while intoxicated and using her infant children as airbags, I want you to understand that she comes from Louisiana, and the statement that starts with, ‘You can take the girl out of the trailer park...’ is absolutely true. I was happy, for once, to be heading back to Dallas.”

monday, november 26, 2007

“In other news...

My foster mom's out of the country again, picking up the new kid from the Ukraine, so the duty of doody collector falls again upon my thin shoulders.

Since I am going to talk about dog shit, again, I think I'll introduce the dogs this time. 

BELLE

Belle the retriever, is a good girl. She listens, doesn't beg, and tolerates the stupidity of the other dog, who is younger yet larger then herself. Belle is not just a good girl, she is a considerate crapper who shits dainty, hard little tootsie-roll-type shits that rattle around on the shovel and don't smell bad.

MIA

Mia the mastiff (aka the "couch cuddler" since she always climbs up on the couch with me when I'm watching TV), who weighs as much as I do, is as dumb as a bag of hammers and produces extraordinarily large turds. Lots of them.

Mia's turds are the size of baguettes (but not the color).

They frequently have foreign objects sticking comically out of them. This is because Mia is the dog that will eat anything she can wrap her jaws around. She especially wants whatever it is that you're eating. For example, I was carrying a dirty plate out of the TV room that had bits of trash on it (I was tidying up, you see) and Mia was plodding along behind me, jamming her snout into my ass like she always does. A candy wrapper fell off of the plate and Mia, without a moment's hesitation, ate the wrapper. Just because it came off the plate and she figured it was probably people food and knew that she wasn't allowed to eat it, so she did so quickly. 

Which brings us back to this morning, where I'm scooping up a giant turd partially covered in a bright orange Kit-Kat wrapper.”

monday, april 28, 2008

“I recently got a pair of sunglasses. Since my opinion on the matter is that sunglasses always end up getting lost or broken, so spend accordingly, I got my pair on the way to Austin at a truck stop in Waco. Seven bucks. Rosy-tinted, gold-framed aviators.

I love ‘em. And I was never really a sunglasses kinda guy. I’ve always been more of a squinter. Clint Eastwood is also a squinter. But I got these glasses, and now I’m having to learn what to do with them, and to try and build good glasses habits. For example (and here’s the word of advice), always put your glasses in the same spot while not in use. I like the little ‘V’ that is formed by the collar of a button-up shirt. That’s where my glasses go when they’re not on my face. Some people prefer the shirt pocket, others will hold them and set them down on the table, whatever. Whichever person you are, consistency is key. Same spot, every time or else. Otherwise, you may go to lunch one day and on the way out, you may realize your glasses aren’t (for example) in the ‘V’ of your shirt collar, nor are they in your car, so you may just run back into the restaurant and look around the table, and then you might go over to the trashcan and hold the little ‘Thank You’ flap open and look inside to see, yes, okay, that’s my trash on top but still no glasses, and then you might even walk up to the counter because one of these little minimum wage kids might have taken the sunglasses you like so much, and then, as you get up to the counter, you might just all of a sudden realize that the glasses are there, right there, perched on top of your own fucking head, so you stutter something to the counter kid and leave, and because this could happen to you, because this may have happened to someone you know, I urge you to be consistent in your glasses spot.

Thank you.”

sunday, may 11, 2008

“My friend Daniel just got a cool bike, and he lives in Addison, so I convinced him that we should ride our bikes to the festival. He was reluctant but he agreed. The only problem is that Addison is really really bike unfriendly, as only a master-planned suburb comprised of housing developments and strip malls can be, which is to say no bike lanes and intermittent sidewalks. It was treacherous. But we made it and had fun on the way. After the ride, Daniel was fully converted to a bike lover. 

This festival itself was a very good time. The Black Crowes, those hippy-rock throwbacks, were live on stage and jammed the fuck out. We were under the influence and the show was great. Afterward, we went to a local bar and got even more drunker.

Everything was perfect, then…

Let’s take a moment here to go over the reasons why you should always, always ride your bike in the street, namely a) the street is smooth, straight and usually well-lit, and b) the sidewalk, by comparison, is fraught with peril in the form of uneven concrete, large cracks, sharp turns, road signs, fire hydrants, low-hanging branches, and debris.

But at two in the morning, when the streets are full of drunks hauling ass to get home, and there are no bike lanes, what are two intoxicated guys to do? Take the sidewalk home, of course.

Which is why, today, I am hurting. ”

sunday, august 3, 2008

“Since I knew one of the dancers well, and a couple more through her, I was well taken care of. Drinks weren’t ten bucks a pop, they were three. So I drank. Kept drinking. Traded a hundo for ones. Made it rain to the extent that I could. Making friends like I do, I had people there to talk to that weren’t working. At one point, one of the dancers I knew came up to me. She had a bunch of pills in her hand. ‘Want some?’ she asked. I was completely plowed, and remember this with only the haziest of memories. ‘Yes,’ I said without hesitation. She gave me four. If I had any common sense left at that point I would have asked what the hell it was I was about to eat. I pride myself on the fact that while I’ve had my share of prescription drugs, I’ve never taken Ecstasy (big fucking deal, right?). Here I am, completely fortified and staring at four little white pills in my open hand. I hesitated for a split second, and the guy next to me asked, ‘What are those?’ ‘I have no idea,’ I said, ‘you want some?’ He did. He grabbed two. Then, like the drunk moron I was, I threw the remaining two in my mouth and swallowed them down with a big gulp of Jack and coke. I had made the decision (unwisely) to take whatever the night threw at me. Then, a thought: What the fuck had I just swallowed? Was I in real trouble here? I sobered up slightly, as one does when one is driving tipsy and a cop is tailing the car and one realizes that one just might be Well And Truly Fucked. It was at this point that I understood what I had done, and the possible consequences flooded into my drunken skull. Shit. Depending on what it was that I swallowed, the night could a) end quickly, b) never end, c) turn into a Dali-esque nightmare of distorted vision and twisted thoughts, or d) become chock-full of heightened sensory perception that made me just wanna lovingly rub couch cushions and chew on the inside of my cheek. None of those sounded good at this point. Not only had I eaten the mystery pills, I had actually given some to the poor stupid motherfucker who was sitting next to me. As I looked on in horror, he popped his two pills into his mouth. Too late. He wasn’t even swallowing them with booze, the dumb bastard was CHEWING them.

‘These are mints,’ he said.”

Sunday, September 7, 2008

"I'm going to take a quick second to mention that there really is nothing like In-n-Out Burger in Texas. Every so often, some ignorant bastard will make the "Whataburger tastes just like In-n-Out" statement. This is wrong. Whataburger is a filthy shithole with burgers that cause explosive gas 99.9% of the time. The burgers are greasy, the fries are for shit, and the staff mopes around like sweatshop workers. There is no comparison. The lack of Double doubles (animal style, with whole grilled onions) is an empty part of my Texas existence, the same kind of emptiness I have from the lack of three-dollar, two-pound Carne Asada Burritos..."

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

"There was plenty of powdered chocolate milk mix to go around. This gave me an opportunity to observe their mixing technique, which is, in my opinion, just as important as the powder/syrup issue. There are two techniques.

The Roomies went with technique one: each put two heaping spoonfuls in their respective cups, added milk, and stirred like crazy.

This is wrong.

Technique one leads to sludge at the bottom of the cup.

When I was a kid, I loved the sludge. When I was done, I would tilt the cup way up, position my open mouth at the bottom, and wait for the sludge to slowly creep its way down. Then I would chew the stuff, which was slick on the outside, and powdery on the inside. Only kids can enjoy this. Kids also eat frosting and leave the cake. As an adult, though, I now appreciate the fully-mixed cup of chocolate milk, one that I can sip away at for a little while, and then, at about the halfway mark, finish in one long swallow. I drink orange juice this same way. It allows for measured enjoyment for a while, and then the kind of flavor “hit” that only someone who drinks or smokes or does drugs to excess can appreciate. Having a pile of sludge at the bottom after drinking my chocolate milk in the sip-sip-sip-then-guzzle manner would be like chewing the ice at the bottom of a cocktail, eating the filter of a finished cigarette, or drinking the bongwater: more of the same, but worse." 

Thursday, November 27, 2008

"Grown men in homemade superhero costumes exhibit creativity, and chicks dig this. Guys who asked if I made the bat-hoodie myself probably thought I was gay when I told them I did. Girls who made this same inquiry were always impressed, because even bull-riding Texas girls sometimes dream about being with an artsy guy, at least for a little while, and wonder what life would be like with a man who creates brilliant things but also chainsmokes, drinks cheap gin straight from the bottle, and is strung out on painkillers. They see a guy that turned an umbrella into bat wings and they think, “We will have an apartment over a bar, and sleep until two in the afternoon. We will listen to music I can’t even fucking conceive of right now, and get high, and then he’ll have me model nude for him. After he’s done painting me, we’ll have passionate sex for hours. After about a month of this, I will move back to my parent’s ranch in Horsepatty, TX.” I am almost completely sure that every girl has this fantasy."

Thursday, November 27, 2008

"The last night I wore the goatee was Halloween night, where my bangs and facial hair added to the Emo look of my costume (see Dall-o-ween post for costume details). The following night, a bar in my neighborhood was having a costume party, and I switched to my other costume: 1970’s-era tennis player. This consisted of a tight white polo, short (short!) white shorts, tall socks, head- and wristbands, my aviator shades, and a pink sweater tied around my shoulders. I had worn this to an 80’s party months ago, and everyone loved it because grown men in tight clothing and short (short!) shorts is funny. This time around, I was bringing something else to the table in the form of facial hair. But goatees weren’t very 70’s. I needed less. I needed a mustache.

Sadly, I only wore the mustache for two more days.

I miss it now. 

“Why not grow it back?” you might ask. Because I am lazy, is my reply. I value interaction with attractive females more than I value the support of guys I know that insist facial hair looks good on me. I cut my hair off shortly after this, and I was back to Nik as usual.

Even though the ladies may love my clean-shaven look, I know now that I have lost something more. It’s hard to tell when it happened. At first, I was a boy pretending to be a man. Now that I’ve shaved it, I feel like a man pretending to be a boy."

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

"Thing two: I am moving back to San Diego. I am most likely bringing Texans with me. My friends Daniel and Adam, who have both visited San Diego with me at some point, have decided to come on this adventure with me. 

They are awesome guys and I couldn't be happier or more excited. I am sure this will be a wonderful move and I hope to get back in school and become a teacher, because the work I'm doing now crushes my happiness to a degree I did not think possible."

***

And now here we are. Over the next day Adam, Daniel and I will be loading all of our earthly possessions into a huge UHaul truck and driving that shit to California. I look forward to hanging out with you soon.

Nik Did Dallas.

A Moment of Silence, and A Decision

Suggested Soundtrack: "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel



Been a long time, and though I'm known for that kind of thing, I'm still sorry. Let's get down to business.

First of all, let me just say that I'm in a hotel room in Shreveport getting fucked up. Then I'm gonna go eat, find a shitty bar, and get more fucked up. I'm in Shreveport for a funeral. A lot of my extended family (Mom's side) is here, too. By here, of course, I mean Shreveport, not the hotel room. If you haven't read my last post, now would be the time to do that, since it covers all of the depressing family shit and has a prediction in it that came true. At any rate, my Mom is here. I haven't talked to her in AGES. And there's a real good chance she'll be at the service tomorrow. So in addition to mourning the passing of Mimi, I gotta worry about seeing Mama. Lacking someone live to talk to, I'm getting tossed and writing. I have no idea what to say or how to act if she does show up, and usually I'm a whiz at that shit. Hopefully an overnight drunk is a good way to prepare for tomorrow. Time will tell, I guess.

The other shoe in a pile of poop is the fact that my goddamn car broke on the way here. Some crucial pulley froze up, a belt blew, and then my car started barfing smoke. Luckily at the next stop there was a service station. So at this service station is the worker guy and the owner. The service guy is an earnest country fellow, and I tell him my problem and tell him I'm trying to make a funeral, he springs into action. He was awesome. He figured the problem out, got me an estimate, and then the owner guy offered me a ride to a car rental place. We talked mortgages. I urged him to hold off on a refinance because his current loan was just fine. Anyway. They were so nice it was silly. And I made it. Hooray.

On to better things! 

Thing one: I finally finished this video/slideshow thing I've been working on. It's from the pub crawl I went on in San Diego for my friend's 30th birthday. It's at the end of this post, since putting it in right here would almost be like I was forcing you to watch it, and it's just a bunch of pictures and video of awesome people getting drunk and having a good time, including riding a mechanical bull, all set to great music, and that might not be your thing. You know, looking at other people get polluted. But it's great. It's down there. The visit associated with this pub crawl was also fantastic, and it further cemented in my mind the fact that I need to move back to San Diego.

Thing two: I am moving back to San Diego. I am most likely bringing Texans with me. My friends Daniel and Adam, who have both visited San Diego with me at some point, have decided to come on this adventure with me. 

They are awesome guys and I couldn't be happier or more excited. I am sure this will be a wonderful move and I hope to get back in school and become a teacher, because the work I'm doing now crushes my happiness to a degree I did not think possible. 

Thing three: I have been cooking a lot lately and I love it. I'm starting to understand why my dad loves it so much. Part of it has to do with the part when everyone digs in and you can tell that they think it's delicious. I just made five people happy with food that I prepared, you think. That feels really good.

Well, that's all I got in me for now. Talk to you all later. I leave you with a different song, a happy (if not downright ridiculous) song. Peace out. Sorry for all the italics.

Until next time...

A Long Overdue Holiday Post

Suggested soundtrack: “You don’t know me” By Ben Folds (with Regina Spektor)


(This is not the official video, this is the only one I could embed, and it's pretty shitty. Check out the official video here, Tim and Eric did it and it rules: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSYjbxUoOQM&feature=related)

Holy Shit.

It’s been too long. If you care about these things, I’m sorry. Regardless, I have a post for you. It goes over a few weeks worth of shit. I’ll try and leave out the crap parts.

Okay.

Week before Thanksgiving went to see Papa in Colorado. Ate good food and did a lot of hiking.


On one hike, saw a stick that was just asking to be a walking stick, so I grabbed it and over the next day fashioned it into a smooth, cloth-handled Moses cane. Check out the before:


And the after (the wrapping for the handle part was made of shoelaces and fashioned after Samurai sword handles):


Three quick side notes:

One: People in Colorado love their Subaru Outbacks. I’ve never seen a greater concentration of these earth-toned four-wheel drive vehicles outside of a car lot. At the parking lot of one of our hikes is where I had my eureka moment, and my dad was like, “Yeah, they’re fucking EVERYWHERE,” and sure enough, I was able to easily take a picture of two parked next to each other. As I took the picture, no shit, another one drove by, but I couldn’t frame the shot quick enough to take it all in. Here’s the original picture:


Two: I love fast food chains that have not yet spread to Texas, because I love to always bitch about how much better everything is in California, and fast food is a major talking point. In-n-Out is a perfect example. In-n-Out should never, ever go to Texas because a) Texas doesn’t deserve burgers that good, and b) everyone in Texas tries to tell me that Whataburger “is just like In-n-Out” and they couldn’t be more wrong because In-n-Out never fails to be awesome and Whataburger never fails to give you explosive diarrhea. Anyway, another of my Cali favorites is Del Taco. For Mexican fast food, Texas has Taco Bell (terrible, except for the Double-decker taco supreme), Taco Cabana (decent, with delicious tortillas that taste like buscuits and should be ordered by the dozen and eaten plain), the very wrongly named Taco Bueno (see Whataburger for gastrointestinal details on Taco Bueno), but no Del Taco. I love Del Taco for the chicken soft tacos, macho combo burritos, and especially for the Del Scorcho sauce, which is allegedly as hot as taco sauce gets. Del Scorcho was the true test of manhood when I was 13. Well, there was a Del Taco in Colorado and I couldn’t pass up a chance at some west-coast fast food. Apparently, Del Scorcho is no longer the hottest shit there is, and some asshole upstart named Del Inferno has bumped Del Scorcho into “medium” territory. Bullshit. Here’s photographic proof:


Three: Anyone need an antike phone? This was posted in the common area of my dad’s condo complex, and I love this kind of crap:


By day four, the fresh air and beautiful scenery wasn’t enough to distract me from the realization that I can’t be around my father for more than three days at a time. We are the closest of friends, and I obviously love him to death, but we were always better as co-workers than as roommates.

Went back to Dallas, had a great Thanksgiving with the Roomies and some dear friends.

For the holidays, we all had to tart up our cubes with wrapping paper. The boss brought in three terrible designs, with cartoon penguins and reindeer or some such shit, so I brought some of mine from home with a nice argyle design. It was classy and still in the spirit of things. See for yourself:


Next trip: San Diego for Christmas. It was Kendra’s annual Drunken Christmas Caroling party! Good times! For the uninitiated, this is where a large group of adults drinks themselves stupid, sit on a trailer towed by a truck, and aided by microphones and large speakers, Rock the Holy Fuck out of some Christmas Carols while being driven around a neighborhood. The turnout was so good this year that they had two trailers behind the truck. The second trailer, which I was in, seemed less like a trailer and more like a hay wagon, and just looked dangerous. Normally this would concern me, but I had a bottle of whisky on me so it wasn’t that big of a deal. Many many thanks to Kendra and her awesome family for giving me a holiday tradition I can really believe in.


Ended that night partying with my old crew from Outback, and it was awesome. Saw some people I hadn’t seen in ages, and am looking forward to seeing again on the 24th.

Also had some time to go shopping with my Sister, her husband, their son Micah, and my brother’s daughter, Gabby. We got clothes and books and some dinner, and it was great to see all of them.


I got to spend a lot of time with some old friends that I missed more than I knew, and I got to spend not enough time with lots of other friends. I’m glad everyone understands that I have so little time when visiting SD, and accepts the fact that I may only have an hour to hang out. Someday, someday, you’ll have more of me than you’d ever want. Someday soon…

Then back to Dallas.

The weekend before Christmas, I decided to take a three-hour drive to my hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, to visit my Grandparents. When I visit, I stay with Aunt Anna, since I can barely stand to be around the grandparents for long periods of time, which I know sounds really really terrible but if you are honest with yourself you, too, will admit that most times hanging out with grandparents is a fucking chore. Aunt Anna is someone I’ve known since I can remember, and it wasn’t until much later in life that I realized that Aunt Anna wasn’t my aunt at all but was in fact my father’s first wife. She’ll always be Aunt Anna to me, anyway. Plus she’s a badass. She smokes, cusses like a sailor, and loves to play cards, so when I visit we stay up late talking about crap my dad got up to when he was my age (there’s a novel worth of great stuff in those stories). Well, on this holiday trip, after crashing at Aunt Anna’s on the first night, I headed out to see Grandpa Bob, who is now living alone because Grandma (“Mimi”) is in the nursing home….

(Okay, quick aside. I know I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky guy, and I’ve caught some flak in the past for some of my early-Dallas depressing blog posts. Well, this part coming up, which involves my family, is depressing. It’s gotta be, it involves my family. As Jeff Lebowski (the millionaire) put it, “Strong men also cry.” This bit of the story touches on such themes as the inevitability of death and the fear of losing one’s mind, and also features a surprise guest appearance and a bit of an upbeat ending! But, it’s mostly sad as fuck. So skip ahead if you need to. Look for the picture of me with a dog as a sign that the story has ended. Now, where were we…)

I headed out to see Grandpa Bob, who is now living alone because Mimi is in the nursing home. Grandpa isn’t my real Grandpa, but he is the only Grandpa I know since the other one died when I was a baby. After spending a bit of time at his place, we head over to the nursing home. Last time I visited, Mimi knew I was a relative of hers, but couldn’t quite place me. Now, three months and a stroke later, she simply stares into space and shakes from time to time. It is terrible. She did not acknowledge me at all. I stayed with her about an hour and a half, during her lunchtime. Around us sat a bizarre collection of elderly people all at various stages of losing their minds, doing things that would not be out of place in a Kindergarden classroom. When Mimi started eating lime green jell-o with her hands I almost lost it. This is not the Mimi I’ve known all my life. This is a husk of a person, and being there made me feel horrible and wanting to leave made me feel even more horrible. After a while, Bob got me out of there, and in the car he told me that Mimi doesn’t have much longer to live. So this was probably the last time I’d see her alive. I chewed on that for a while. I’m not used to being around death, aside from a good friend when I was 19. Any relatives I’ve known that have died were all in Germany. So this will be the first big death in the family, which sounds morbid, but is true. Mimi passing away is going to be rough, but part of me thinks that where she is now might be rougher. For all I know, she’s in a happy place, but for those of us will full mental capacity, it is really painful to watch her fade away. For me, dementia is one of my biggest fears. All I’ve really got is my mind, and if that goes, I’m fucked.
As all of this swirls around in a stew of misery in my head, Grandpa Bob asks me if I’d heard from my Mom at all. To make a very long and very painful story into a haiku,

Post-divorce, Mom went
bad crazy. Nik brought this up.
They haven’t talked since.

So no, I hadn’t heard from my mom at all. Last I heard she was living in a small town in Texas, had remarried and found God,
and was involved in an annoying letter-writing campaign directed at my little sister.

Well, apparently my mom is still crazy, and decided to get involved in another campaign of annoyance, this one directed at my grandparents, that consisted of multiple threatening phone calls placed at all hours of the day. Social workers got involved, who got deputy sheriffs involved, the end result of which was my mother being held at the jail in Shreveport! So this was the largest gathering of my Mom’s side of my family in years, only one member wasn’t free to meet us at the buffet, and another one wasn’t aware of what a buffet actually is.

Obviously at this point I am in a bit of shock, and the day seems to be headed straight to hell.

After dropping grandpa off, headed back to Aunt Anna’s, where we prepared a traditional German feast of pork, sauerkraut, and potatoes that really hit the spot. Anna had some good things to say about my fucked-up family which put some things into perspective, and as the night wore on, I figured that would be that and Christmas was going to be sucky once again. But then! As I sat reading, late at night, the phone rang. It was Jessica and Amy in San Diego, who were drinking wine and singing the new Ben Folds/Regina Spektor song that I had played for them on my recent visit. It was a wonder call from some of my oldest and dearest friends from my days at the Outback and boy was it nice. Thus cheered, I got back to reading. But the Christmas miracles were not over yet! The phone rang again. Upon answering, I was greeted by the sound of someone singing “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey. It was another group of my old Outback friends. Indeed, this was “The Europe Girls,” three of the four girls that went around Europe with me years ago. After serenading me with perhaps the greatest song ever written, they took turns cheering me up and after the call ended, I was back to being happy Nik. Self-reflection time was over. There was nothing I could do about my fucked-up family. So it was time to get into the Christmas spirit and accept the fact that miracles DO happen, and that having dear friends that think to call and sing to me is the greatest gift of all.

And now, a picture of me with a dog!


Back in Dallas, Christmas day was awesome. Hung out with my Dallas “family,” who seem to like me more than my family for whatever reason. I totally got hooked up, gift-wise. Mike got me a dinosaur print onesy (onesie?). He had one of his own:


Got the kids some individual gifts and Mario Kart for the Wii. The lucky kids also got Rock Band 2, so we rocked out for a few more hours in the afternoon.

Back home, Roomie Daniel got Rock Band 2 too. But we were not to play Rock Band on Christmas night. No, Christmas night is
not for rocking. Christmas night is for…titties. Yes! Daniel’s birthday is on Christmas, and since he had been shafted for years (“Happy birthday, now watch everyone else open up presents too.”) he was determined to do something not Christmasy on his birthday. The strip club falls squarely into this category. Dallas strip clubs are BYOB, and the group of us (Roomies, friends, plus a lot of Daniel’s friends from is hometown) stayed from 10pm to 4am; making it the most time I did ANYTHING on Christmas, including sleep. I got a pot going for Daniel and raised lots of money for him to get lap dances with. I also took the time to explain to every stripper within earshot that it was Daniel’s birthday (“HEY! IT’S HIS BIRTHDAY! JUST LIKE JESUS!”), which got him some birthday lovin’. He said it was his best birthday ever.

I’m not a big family person, but this holiday season was chock-full of family – real and adoptive – and 2008 was the closest I’ve ever gotten to being fully immersed in the holidays. Lots of love for those who, for whatever reason, wanted to be around me, or wanted me to be around, for Christmastime.

Until next time...

Who's the Man? Races 2008

Here's a little video I shot while drunk the other night. The other guys in it are my Roomie, Daniel (who you may remember from my last trip to SD), and our friend Josh (a.k.a. the pirate). The races in question happened before and after dinner. What's missing is the dinner conversation, with Josh making excuses and talking shit. There was enough whining on camera, though, to get a good idea of it in the video. As always, you can watch the embedded video (awesome), or you can double click on it, go to youtube, and watch it in high quality (fucking awesome). Enjoy!!



p.s. See you in SD on the 12th!

How to fill a wall - a high speed painting movie

I had a blank wall. Then I painted this. This video shows the entire painting being done in high speed (a la Phil Hansen). Now my room is complete. I hope you enjoy it!



If you want to watch this in high quality, go to here and click "watch in high def:"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dROq5PAIbE

Who's that man in the Mustache?!

(Note: I made a new video for this post. Ordinarily, I will put my new videos at the top, but for this post, the video tells part of the story. It’s down there. Don’t skip ahead.)

Every year, as the days get shorter and a chill starts creeping in, I try and grow a winter coat. This usually means I don’t cut my hair for a couple of weeks, then cut it all off when it gets too hard to manage. I have a rule I live by, as far as my hair is concerned, and it is this: You must never spend more time doing your hair than it takes to brush your teeth. When I find myself wasting 10 minutes in the morning wrestling with the curls that sprout from the front of my scalp, it’s not long before I cut it all off.

This year, unmoved by the failures of every winter stretching back to when I was 19 and had really long hair, I tried again. I was gonna take it up a notch, though. This time, my face would also sport a winter coat.

The thing is, as anyone who has seen me shirtless can attest, I have no chest hair.


This is odd because a) I am nearly 30, and b) my arms and legs are hairy enough to give Robin Williams a run for his money. The lack of hair on my “core area” means that, for some reason, my facial hair is patchy and uneven. The area surrounding my mouth gets decent coverage, but cheek hair and sideburns are an absolute impossibility. Thus, a full beard would be impossible, but a goatee was possibly attainable. It was time to give it a shot.

Luckily, my job does not force face-to-face contact with customers, so appearance and hygiene are not really an issue except to those whose cubicles are directly adjacent to mine. This is fortunate because my appearance was going to suffer in the coming weeks and it was going to be hard enough just dealing with the fact that women were going to be appalled or amused by my attempts at looking like an adult.

Sure enough, it came in weak, looking like something you’d find on the face of a junior-high football player or an Italian grandmother. Three weeks in, though, it began to fill in, and look halfway decent, presentable at the very least. Then, at about the three-and-a-half week mark, there it was: A Full-On Goatee.


The Roomies liked it, but most females either hated it or had no opinion. As for me…
It was like a child to me. I haven’t worked this hard on something in a long time. I didn’t really know what to expect. It didn’t sing me to sleep or magically open doors for me, but it gave me something that I hadn’t had before, and that was something on my chin to fuck with besides pimples. Until then, I had no beard to stroke thoughtfully as I pondered things. I had nothing on my upper lip to catch beer foam. Now, though, I could rub my chin and take extra long to answer questions I knew the answer to, because that was what men with facial hair did. When I did answer the question after the allotted chin-stroke time, the answer had more gravity, and a lot of times it had shock value because whoever had asked the question didn’t have a goatee of their own to rub thoughtfully, and were hypnotized by my fine specimen. Or maybe it was jealousy. Whatever the case, the goatee was awesome.

On my annual October trip to San Diego, I got a lot more support for the goatee, but this may just have been because people in San Diego like me and don’t want to hurt my feelings.


The last night I wore the goatee was Halloween night, where my bangs and facial hair added to the Emo look of my costume (see Dall-o-ween post for costume details). The following night, a bar in my neighborhood was having a costume party, and I switched to my other costume: 1970’s-era tennis player. This consisted of a tight white polo, short (short!) white shorts, tall socks, head- and wristbands, my aviator shades, and a pink sweater tied around my shoulders. I had worn this to an 80’s party months ago, and everyone loved it because grown men in tight clothing and short (short!) shorts is funny. This time around, I was bringing something else to the table in the form of facial hair. But goatees weren’t very 70’s. I needed less. I needed a mustache.


The costume was a success. I was hanging out with Adam, who was going as Paulie Bleeker from Juno, so the men-in-short-shorts power was strong with us.



My legs may have been cold, but my upper lip was warm. I figured I could rock the ‘stache for a couple more weeks, at least until I could curl the tips. Mustaches are cool, right? Of course! Just ask The Tick:



Sadly, I only wore the mustache for two more days.

Sunday I went to the King Tut exhibit and I looked, frankly, like a child molester.



Luckily, there was no trouble; I was afraid the authorities would drag me away to the gas chamber, no questions asked (the death penalty here is, as I have mentioned before, swift and arbitrary). I wore the ‘stache to work on Monday, as I had promised some co-workers that if I did ever take it down to that level I would at least show them. They were not disappointed, but goddamn, I looked creepy. Monday night, without fanfare, I shaved it off.

I miss it now.

“Why not grow it back?” you might ask. Because I am lazy, is my reply. I value interaction with attractive females more than I value the support of guys I know that insist facial hair looks good on me. I cut my hair off shortly after this, and I was back to Nik as usual.

Even though the ladies may love my clean-shaven look, I know now that I have lost something more. It’s hard to tell when it happened. At first, I was a boy pretending to be a man. Now that I’ve shaved it, I feel like a man pretending to be a boy. My face looks naked to me.

Next winter, though, it’ll be back. Maybe by then I’ll have some chest hair to match.

Dall-o-ween

Suggested Soundtrack: "Star Witness" by Neko Case


This is going to be one of my “light reading” posts, mostly filled with pictures and some commentary. Let it first be said that my costume this year was awesome, and that I made it with my own two hands. It took just two hours to turn a black hoodie and an umbrella into this:


This was my Budget Batman outfit. With my goatee and bangs, I looked like a hipster superhero. Bringing technology to the table was Roomie Christian’s costume, Budget Ironman:


Amateur seamstress that I am, I made this costume as well. It involved a yellow hoodie, a red t-shirt, a sharpie, one of those round, “stick anywhere” utility lights that are sold on TV at 4am, and a hockey mask I painted to look like Ironman’s face.

The costumes worked on three levels:

Level one: Grown men in homemade superhero costumes is funny. All we needed was a third guy with a red sheet and his underwear on the outside and we could have had Superman, too. A lot of guys, seeing us in our imaginary costumes, were (and I’m absolutely sure of this) instantly nostalgic and insanely jealous. Every man at some point wished he was a superhero, every man knows what it is like to turn a towel into a cape and bounce off the couch, over the coffee table, onto a bean bag. Our costumes are not the “official” superhero costumes, they are the costume you could have made as a kid, if you were creative and handy with a needle and thread. And speaking of creativity, we have…

Level two: Grown men in homemade superhero costumes exhibit creativity, and chicks dig this. Guys who asked if I made the bat-hoodie myself probably thought I was gay when I told them I did. Girls who made this same inquiry were always impressed, because even bull-riding Texas girls sometimes dream about being with an artsy guy, at least for a little while, and wonder what life would be like with a man who creates brilliant things but also chainsmokes, drinks cheap gin straight from the bottle, and is strung out on painkillers. They see a guy that turned an umbrella into bat wings and they think, “We will have an apartment over a bar, and sleep until two in the afternoon. We will listen to music I can’t even fucking conceive of right now, and get high, and then he’ll have me model nude for him. After he’s done painting me, we’ll have passionate sex for hours. After about a month of this, I will move back to my parent’s ranch in Horsepatty, TX.” I am almost completely sure that every girl has this fantasy. But most of those girls would be afraid of being poor, which brings us to…

Level three: Grown men in homemade superhero costumes is prescient. In these economic times, who has $100 to drop on a good superhero costume? Not I. A few people understood this level of the costume, and those would usually ask what I did for a living. I’m sure a lot of them thought I was joking when I said I work in the mortgage industry. They certainly laughed like it was a joke.

The other two roommates had costumes that worked well together: Daniel grew out his beard, bought a hajj, fashioned a dynamite vest out of a lifejacket and some paper towel rolls, and went as a suicide bomber. Marlina was going crazy trying to come up with something, and had asked for help, so the day before Halloween I said “Sarah Palin” and she went for it. Marlina already wears those dress-suit things and glasses, all we had to do was make her a “Miss Alaska” sash and she was done. Right before we left, though, worry sunk in. Marlina’s worry was that there would be a lot of other Palins running around, and I was inclined to agree. Daniel was confident in his outfit but the rest of us were a little worried that some might find it a touch offensive. We were wrong on both counts. Marlina was a hit, and Daniel’s reception was epic. EVERYONE loved Daniel’s suicide bomber outfit. For whatever reason, most people assumed Marlina and Daniel were a planned duo, and I guess it made sense somehow, at least it did on October 31st in Dallas.


Rounding out the bunch was Adam, spot on as Pauly Bleeker. He met a Juno outside the bar and took the perfect photo. Adam got a lot of love from girls who either: a) love the character from the movie, b) love Michael Cera, or c) love the idea of a guy like that (see also: Level two of the Budget superhero costume dissection).


All in all, one of the better Dallas nights out. Here are some random pics from that night, and any comments I feel the need to throw out there. In retrospect, this is not a “light reading” post, but I refuse to go back and edit that out. I hope you enjoyed my rant. Now, on to the pictures!!

The girls in the costume contest. One took her boob out. Winner!


Budget Ironman meets Budget Tony Stark!


Another Superhero meets us outside:


Enemies!


...and one more of The New Roomies:


Tomorrow look for "Who's that man in the Mustache?"

Until next time...