Denver – Good morning, everybody! I hope you are having a safe and great St. Patrick’s Day. Scientists in Sweden have recently discovered a large, massive black hole that poses considerable threat to human life! And! Plus! Each day, the black hole gets bigger and bigger with no end in sight! The black hole is man-made and scientists are calling it, “Congressionally-funded AIG!”

Freaky
We’re gonna get freaky tonight.
We’re gonna get freaky tonight.
Freaky
We’re gonna take it to the limit tonight. Ahh ah.
You didn’t know there’s a limit, well there is and we’re in it. Tonight.
We’ll go beyond the limit.
Then you’ll think, “Why was there a limit if we can go beyond the limit?”
We’re gonna get freaky tonight.
Freaky

HaHa!

Flight of the Conchords rules!

Anyway .. today is St. Patrick’s Day and that means lots of people will get drunk this morning. And this afternoon. And tonight!

GEESH!!

But, if you’ve never had an Irish Car Bomb, then I suggest you try one tonight. In fact, if you are a woman over the age of 50 and drink occasionally, then I really suggest you try an Irish Car Bomb tonight.

Many moons ago during a wedding reception in Taos, New Mexico, I was introduced to Irish Car Bombs. I had been chatting with a few people when an older gentleman asked if I wanted to join a competition held at the wet bar to see how quickly people could quaff an Irish Car Bomb.

Intrigued, I agreed and followed the man to a makeshift bar, where a small group of people over the age of 50 was circled around a wooden crate from which a petite, and attractive Hispanic woman acted as the barkeep or something. The barkeep had just finished pouring drinks into glasses and someone else had finished pouring Irish crème into shot glasses, and both were passed around to everyone in the circle.

And then someone raised their hand and everybody in the circle held a half-full glass of Guinness in one hand and the shot glass of crème in another hand. And then when the same someone dropped their hand, everybody in the circle quickly dropped the shot glass into the Guinness and then gulped and guzzled the Irish Car Bombs as quickly as they could.

The first person to finish their Irish Car Bomb was a small, white-haired 50ish woman. And to be honest with all ya’ll, I was shocked – I had never seen a woman drink her beer that fast before.

I mean, it was like .. she had no gag reflex!

I digress!

Eventually, I was asked to try an Irish Car Bomb and I did. The Bomb itself was a mixture that tasted a bit like chocolate milk slightly warmed, and I liked it. And before long, I was in the circle myself, trying to out-drink the woman who had made men as tall as 6’6 with massive muscles look like squealing college girls tasting tequila for the first time.

When it came my turn to competitively quaff a Bomb, I finished well after the woman, though I did manage to finish faster than some of the other men. The second round, I did better though I still did not quaff mine as fast as the woman, who was probably someone’s dear old grandmother.

By the sixth round, I was shit-faced and the woman didn’t seem to be so shit-faced as she continued to slam Bomb after Bomb with alarming impunity. It was then that I decided that the whole notion that masculine men can “hold their liquor better than women” was completely bullsheeet.

BULLSHEEEET!

Tonight, if you are a woman between the age of 50 and 60, I suggest you try an Irish Car Bomb – tonight might be your lucky night in more ways than one. And if you are a masculine man, then I suggest you defer to the little women of the world tonight because you probably will not win an Irish Car Bomb drinking contest.

Aigh’t?

Be safe and have fun tonight! Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Be good .. or be good at it.

Paotie

Denver – Good morning, everybody! I hope you have been doing well.  I have great news to report: I have found my own life-coach! He is successfully shrewd – he lost his house without paying a cent! And then he got another house and no longer makes mortgage payments on that house because President Obama will bail him out! And! Plus! He is happily married to a cheating wife!

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee,
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff. Oh!

HaHa!

I love introductions!

Anyway .. let me ‘splain something: not all deaf people read lips – only the smart ones do.  And the ones who read lips better than most are really smart people. Every other kind of deaf person does not exist, okay?

Reading lips is a science and an art form and requires years of practice. Lots of people think lip reading is natural for deaf people to use, but that is incorrect: lip reading requires an understanding of the spoken language (such as English), or else the lips mean nothing – unless you’re in a topless bar or a darkened alley at the corner of Central and Van Buren.

I digress!

But some people are harder to understand than others, and for many lip readers like myself, there can be situations in which understanding a person is difficult at best. Like, once, I went to a job interview in Phoenix, and the man interviewing me was from Japan and had a super-duper thick accent.

And to make matters worse, I guess in Asian cultures, looking people directly in the eyes is forbidden or taboo. What I mean to say is that the guy would not look at me, which made reading his already-impossible-to-understand-English even more difficult.

He’d say something and I’d be clueless. So, I’d nod and say, “Hai.”

And then he nodded quietly, pretending to read my resume and whatever else was on his desk. He asked me something and I reminded him I was deaf and he nodded again before asking another question, to which I replied, “Hai.”

After a few minutes of pantomiming – and repeatedly bowing my head – I asked him for a pen and some paper, and he gave me a pen and a notepad. I wrote to him, “I am deaf. Me no hear. Me work good job.”

He paused and nodded (again) and then said something to me. Like before, I had no idea what he said, so I said what I always do when I do not understand something people say: “Hai.”

He expressed surprise again and seemed bewildered about what to do with me. We exchanged notes and eventually got around to the particulars of the job I had applied for, but it became painfully obvious to me that I was not what he or his company was looking for, anyway.

I wrapped up the interview by thanking the guy for taking his time to write me notes and he seemed irritated with me for some reason or another. I foolishly stuck my hand out to shake his when we arose from our seats, but he didn’t do the same.

He squinted his eyes s’more – I had bowed and he had not.

I shrugged and said, “Hai!” and left.

Anyway, does anyone have any suggestions about a good travel spot in Japan? I think I’d have lots of fun in Japan – a deaf boy in a foreign land!

GOOD TIMES! GREAT VIBRATIONS!

I’m just sayin’ ..

Be good .. or be good at it.

Paotie

Denver – Good morning, everybody! I hope you have been doing well. There is good news and bad news to report! First, the so-so news: it has been warm here in Colorado over the past few days (good for chicks, bad for snowboarding). Now for the good news: there’s no bad news. Now for the bad news: there’s no good news.

“Mmm .. ‘kay,” you say?

I know! I feel the same way!

Anyway .. I have a story for today.

Many eons ago, when I was in high school, I had a friend who lived on a street called, “Knight.” Or rather, my friend, A’ight, lived there with his parents in a house on Knight Street in a middle-class section of Albuquerque.

A’ight, whose real name was Jimmy Gemgem, lived with his parents and a younger sister in a typical suburban, brown adobe house found everywhere in New Mexico. His father was always working and rarely home; his three older siblings lived on their own, and the younger sister who lived at home was barely starting middle school.

His mother – a raging Catholic – worked as a secretary and hated her job, her life and me.

Mrs. Gemgem and I did not get along. I mean, that’s kind of understating it: she thought I was an evil, “white boy” and once asked if I had lice after I scratched my head in quizzical fashion. And I never really knew why she hated me, either.

In fact, despite the fact that we routinely got caught coming home late, or got into fights, or had the police call to say their son had been caught quaffing a 40-ounce bottle of malt in the parking lot of Kmart, Mrs. Gemgem’s belief in the Old Testament about deaf people being “possessed by demons” remained constant and never-wavering.

She did not like me because I was deaf.

I had first met A’ight at a restaurant in the northeast heights section of Albuquerque, near a large shopping center, where we were hired as dishwashers and had taken a quick likening to one another.

In fact, the very first time I met A’ight, I had trouble understanding his name. Since I read lips (I am deaf), I sometimes have difficulty understanding certain words people say, and our very first conversation went something like:

“What’s your name?”

“Paotie. What’s yours?”

“A’ight.”

“‘Eight?’”

“WORD!”

“Eight, eh?”

“A’ight!”

“Were you the eighth child born or something?”

“HaHa. No, A’ight.”

“I-Ate?”

“A’ight! Like, ‘It’s gonna be a’ight!’”

“It’s gonna be ‘tight?’”

“Yeah. No! A’ight!”

“I’m confused.”

I would sometimes crash at A’ight’s house during the weekend – usually after a night of hard partying or fighting – and we forever tried to sneak out of the house and past his parents. We often tried to sneak into A’ight’s house a few minutes before curfew, and then sneak back out of the house a few minutes after curfew had passed – and only after we’d made enough noise for his parents to know we had been home.

Sometimes, it worked perfectly. Sometimes, we had to wait hours for Mrs. Gemgem to fall asleep in the living room, holding a book in perpetual precariousness. Sometimes, we’d fall asleep waiting for Mrs. Gemgem to return to her bedroom.

And then one, cold late Friday night after spending countless hours cruising around Albuquerque, looking for chicks, booze and free food at All-You-Can-Eat restaurants, I found myself at the end of a stern lecture by A’ight. He explained under the dome light of his truck that his mother had caught us sneaking in well past curfew the weekend before and was probably keeping an eye out for us.

More importantly, he said that we had to be extra quiet.

“Be quiet – we don’t want my mom to hear us come home, a’ight? I got in trouble last weekend, a’ight, and if she hears us walk in, she’s gonna kill me, a’ight?”

“Okay, A’ight.”

“A’ight.”

As we both quietly shut the doors of his truck and walked the driveway to the house, A’ight gestured to me to “Be quiet.” And then he Shhh’d me again as he stood before the front door and quietly inserted a key into the top lock.

I leaned a hand against the wall on the opposite side of the door and sighed with relief. It had been a hard night of looking for parties and we’d barely escaped the clutches of an angry, drunken group of idiots from another high school that had chased us throughout Albuquerque earlier that night.

It was good to be safe at A’ight’s house, I had told myself.

And then I looked at A’ight and realized his face was suddenly pale. I wondered for a moment if he was sick because he suffered from a chronic stomach disorder, and then I dismissed it as bad lighting. The fading porch light gave off a yellowish hue that hardly illuminated anything, and in a way, it had made A’ight’s face look a bit grotesque, too.

Curious, I stared at A’ight and realized he had been talking to me. Not only that, but he looked desperately panic-stricken and asked, “Duuuude? What’d you do that for?”

I stood confused, unable to comprehend what he had just asked me. I sheepishly shrugged at A’ight.

“A’ight,” said A’ight through an exasperated sigh, “you rang the doorbell.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, you did. Now my mom’s gonna kill me, dude. A’ight?”

“A’ight.”

I mean, first of all, the last thing I ever would have thought about was a doorbell. I am deaf – doorbells have never been part of my life. But that fact didn’t matter to Mrs. Gemgem as hidden floodlights from every angle at the front of the house shone on us like convicts at the very last fence in a prison yard during a bungled, nighttime escape attempt.

A’ight sighed (again) and shook his head as more lights came on from inside the house. I had looked at the palm of my hand and noticed the rectangular shape of the doorbell barely imprinted in my hand, and then looked again at A’ight as the front door swung open and a dark figure appeared.

It was Mrs. Gemgem and she was mad.

Super-duper mad.

I tried to explain to Mrs. Gemgem that it was really my fault that we were late but she didn’t seem to particularly care to listen to anything I said. I tried to reason with her but she yelled at me before calling my Mamma to come and pick me up.

Twenty minutes later – and after a litany of religious lectures from Mrs. Gemgem – my Mamma came and got me. As we drove away from A’ight’s house on Knight Street and Mrs. Gemgem’s soul-burning glare, I explained to Mamma what had happened.

I explained that I had seen Mrs. Gemgem standing behind the curtains of the house when A’ight and I first pulled up to the house, and I that knew she’d be waiting for us. In fact, I knew she would be angry with us no matter what we did – all she wanted was to yell at me.

Mamma smiled before asking, “Did you ring the doorbell on purpose?”

“Of course not, Mamma – I am deaf. Praise the Lord.”

Be good .. or be good at it.

Paotie