Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Heyyyy, guyyyyyyy...

Long time no see...

Yes, yes, The Ford's sure you're very bitter about his abrupt departure from The Official Blog over the past week.

And really, The Ford would love to feel bad about that.

But, y'know what?

That's not what The Ford does.

He is a pityless, merciless, guiltless, unstoppable blogging machine.

Even when, y'know, he's ... not.

Then again, you might be the sorta person who didn't even realize The Ford was AWOL.

That's cool, too.

If you're OK with being as emotionally dead as The Ford is, then The Ford's OK with it, too.

Nevertheless, read on for the, er, condensed version of The Official Non-Hawaiian Vacation of The Official Blog of The Ford.

Day 1

The Ford, armed only with a trusty companion from The Official Birth State, his friendship well-honed since their days at The Official Alma Mater, sets out to experience parts of Detroit he's unfamiliar with.

Dinner at Lebanese restaurant mostly satisfies this. Heavy drinking while playing Golden Tee satisfies the rest.

Sure, there may have been a visit to a gentleman's club, but in The Ford's defense, well, it wasn't his idea.

(That's actually the rule for visiting gentleman's clubs: It's OK, as long as it wasn't your idea. Which is why every guy outing with the potential to go wild/crazy includes at least one guy willing to suggest a visit to the strippers. It's similar to how eating someone else's dessert doesn't make you fatter, but with more nudity.)

Day 2

The Ford promises himself no more outings to the gentleman's club. As he finds out later, accuracy with articles is vitally important.

More drinking.

More Golden Tee. (The Ford's dropped 20 strokes off his score in two days. At this rate, he'll be Tiger Woods before too long. Unless his first abysmal score was simply the result of a poor performace, and he doesn't have that much room to improve. The mathematician part of his brain starts charting this as a logarhythmic function, until silenced with a steady flow of alcohol.)

More strip clubs. The Ford realizes he should have specified "no more outings to A gentlemen's club," rather than just that particular gentleman's club. Caught in his grammatical conundrum, he's forced to accompany his group -- "his boys," as 10 beers have inspired him to say repeatedly -- to a different club.

Day 3
Road trip -- entirely planned -- to Chicago.
Companions' travel snafus force The Ford to hole up in Billy Goat Tavern for several hours. This seems like a good idea at first, with great hamburgers and a White Sox game on the TV. When Old Style No. 6 intersects with Will & Grace episode No. 3, The Ford begins rethinking this.

And thus, a walking tour of downtown Chicago, at least until it gets too hot to walk, and The Ford retreats to the Billy Goat.

More Will & Grace. Seriously, The Ford's beginning to think WGN's getting paid to show it in bulk.

More walking.

Retreat, once more, to the Billy Goat. Finally, Will & Grace is over, and Drew Carey is on. Also, bartender recognizes The Ford, and comps him Old Style No. 9.

A graceful fade to the evening, capped by observing a near-fight in the hotel bar, a game of pinball in the hotel game room, and a beer at a bar that's open till 4-freakin'-a.m., since the hotel room doesn't have any Internet access.

Day 4

Pitchfork Music Festival
, a.k.a., God's Plan to decimate Hipster Nation.
With temperatures AND humidity peaking well above 100, The Ford is an innocent bystander in the horrible heat.

On the plus side, women are scantily clad (When all is said and done, The Ford's pretty sure the inventors of the tube and tank tops are getting in the express line for the promised land upstairs.), bands are pretty good -- especially Ted Leo, Futureheads and Band of Horses -- and water is cheap.

Yes, on this day, hottest of all hot days, The Ford has abandoned the ol' standby, and gone all clear and distilled. And he ain't talking vodka.

The Official Head is hung in shame.

Thankfully, late recovery at bars around town boost ego, if not pocketbook.

Day 5

Day 2 of Pitchfork opens with the promise of cooler temps and rain clouds.

Of course, this turns out to be Mother Nature's bait-and-switch attempt to lure all the hipsters she didn't kill the day before back for another attempt.

Naturally, it worked on The Ford.

Well, really, it was the promise of Jens Lekman and Spoon that nabbed The Ford, but the imminent rain and lack of tickets into Wrigley Field sealed the deal.

And then the rain didn't come.

Then again, The Ford's generally in favor of approaching unconsciousness with the women he's hanging out with. He's just used to doing it on an open bar tab.

More water.

Beer later, once the incompetent hotel staff figured out how to get extra towels to The Ford's room within 90 minutes of the original request.

The Ford's handy travel tip No. 1: When sharing a suite with 3 women and an obsessive runner, always hoard towels. You'll thank yourself when you're NOT stewing in teriyaki-soaked shorts.

No, that's not a euphemism. The Ford ended up getting a fair amount of teriyaki sauce dumped on his legs.

The Ford's handy travel tip No. 2: When eating potstickers steeped in teriyaki sauce, STOP WALKING. Your shorts will thank you for it.

Day 6: The return to the Motor City
A long, early morning drive, which The Ford was having no part of. (Thanks, trusty Washingtonian compadre!)

Upon arrival, The Ford discovered his cell-phone plan -- long enjoyed for its ease of use and cheapness of payment -- was being discontinued, due to vaguely monopolistic practices of The Official Cell-Phone Provider.

So, of course, The Ford goes and reups with the The Official Cell-Phone Provider. (Hey, they ain't Official for nuthin'.)

Of course, he ended up with a much more kick-ass phone that he has no idea how to use.

Other than the camera-phone option. That, he's got DOOOOWN.

Then again, he's pretty sure retarded monkeys could figure out how to work a camera phone, given enough bananas and women in low-cut blouses.

Still, y'know, that's just not enough spending for The Ford.

So, it's off to Dearborn, for some groceries.

Hey, did you know that the 20 familes with the most annoying kids in Dearborn go grocery shopping at 9:30 p.m. on Monday nights? The Ford didn't, until he became personally acquainted with the majority of them.

Sigh. If only "personally acquainted" was a euphemism for "ran them over with his cart -- twice," and not "attempted to maneuver his cart so as not to ever be in the same row as a child-bearing family."

Finally, a return home to The Official Couch, for a good long, though unexpected, nap, interrupted only by the news that The Ford was needed in the office in the planned Day 7 of his vacation.

(And you wondered what could possibly stop The Ford from blogging for a whole week...)

And thus The Official Non-Hawaiian Vacation came to an end, not with a bang, but with a camera-phone. There's probably a lesson in there, somewhere, but The Ford's justifying his complete lack of photos of hot chicks in this here post. Apparently, the more of a life The Ford has, the less time he has to expound upon Miss Universe. (Yeah, there's an expound/Miss Universe joke in there, too, but The Ford's too sober to make it. Right now, at least.)

Thus restraineth The Ford.

3 Comments:

At 3:18 PM, August 02, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's about damn time. I hadn't had a vicarious strip bar experience in far too long. From now on, this fancy-man phone better be able to upload straight from alcohol-soaked brain to blog.

 
At 4:50 AM, August 03, 2006, Blogger Marcus said...

I almost, almost, called to make sure you weren't dead.

 
At 5:03 AM, August 03, 2006, Blogger The Ford said...

Yeah, the only thing worse than being me being found dead on your apartment floor a week after I died would be having people figure it out only by my having gone a week without blogging. Note to self: Return more phone calls/e-mails.

As for the phone, well, we're close to getting it blog-equipped. It does have a speakerphone option. Which is apropos of nothing, but it seemed like something to throw out there...

 

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