KingLou Drops Science 2.0

Tonight I am supposed to be performing improv with my team from The Project. I missed the last show because I was in Vermont skiing. Now I am probably going to miss the next show because of my IBS. Over a week ago I ate something or did something that gave me pretty much bizarre stomache disress and continues to do so in weird bursts. Tonight I made the classic IBS error of eating a little too much at dinner. This is a classic gut trigger. I got a serious cramp as we were about to leave the restaurant. A quick pit stop too care of that instance. Then after that we made it about 5 blocks from the restaurant when that dull ache I'd had at the restaurant, after going to the bathroom there, turned into a major "If you don't start heading to Barnes & Noble you are going to have pudding pants" moment. Thank goodness for Barnes & Noble. Without their bathrooms New York and the world would be a sadder, smellier place. I made it home after that and have been contemplating trying to make the show. I took my anti-spasmodics, my fibre and a tums. Now I don't think I need to go to the bathroom but my stomache is making some awful gurgling noises. Just awful. And I think it's the tums doing it but it feels like something is racing around my upper GI. To compound my troubles the trains are all fucked up this weekend so I don't think I can make it on the closest train to me. Plus once I get there I don't know if I could even use the bathroom since it's near the front of the stage. I feel awful beacuse I know my group isn't going to perform again until March at the soonest. Fuuuuuuck..... Plus people I know were planning on seeing the show... Double fuuuuck.... Right now it doesn't look like I am going to make it. The show starts in 10 minutes and my group is due to go on in 40 and I am a 25 min train ride away if I don't have to get off the train and find a bathroom. I am sad. EDIT: Now I missed the show and I am feeling better. Jodi made me some calming tea and that seems to have done the trick with the pain. The pain is probably also helped by my stomache shrinking as all the food passes through it. My guts are making some horrible sounds still. Of course I regret not going but it's easy to look back and say I would have been okay. 30 mins ago I would have been on the train terrified that I was going to shit myself or beseiged by stomache cramps. Time to visit the gut doc again I think.

I had an extremely bizarre subway ride home last night. It was a typical after work train ride. I was trying to read some manual for a software app and started feeling sleepy. I closed my eyes and drifted off for maybe a stop before I was awakened by an totally insane sound. I opened my eyes and looked around and standing by the door to my left was a big black dude in a felt hat, spiffy suit and leather overcoat. But what he was wearing isn't what woke me up. What woke me was his insane voice and the fact that he was using it to sing terrible songs into a little tape recorder. For the next 30 minutes, due to a guy who fell onto the train tracks slowing everyhing up, I was forced to listen to this nut job singing his gratuitous sex jams. Now what was weird about his voice? It's hard to explain precisely. It sounded like a Speak'N'Spell that had been chain smoking for 30 years. The deepest, gravelly voice I have ever heard I think. And so he sang song after song in with that crazy sound about fucking ladies. His first jam was, I assume, "Sit Upon It". It was a daring song in which he asks his female conquest to impale herself on his organ. Mostly it consisted of saying "Girl, situponit, situponit, dig in your heels and grin'upon'it." But that isn't where the weirdness ends. His next 4 songs included a womans part which he also sang in an completely and totally insane falsetto. So high in fact that its was pretty much unintelligible. From his second song I was able to glean the following lyric. "Me like de girl with de good hygiene, brush dem teef and use listerine" followed by the womans saying she is clean or something. Then in between songs he would say something in a normal human voice introducing the next song and then right back into insane computer voice. The best part is that he wasn't asking for money. He was just being mildly weird on the train to the great amusement of myself and all the black women on the train. Most of the other people in the car seemed to be just annoyed. I was getting annoyed by the 5th song but luckily it was my stop. When I got home to relieve the nanny I told her the story and she knew whom I was talking about. She said she had been on a train with him and the police had to come take the guy off the car because he was doing the same thing on a packed rush hour car and screaming his crazy lyrics. Like in the face of someone on their way to work. Earlier in the week I made some photoshops for a something awful thread. Basically the idea was to change inappropriate protest signs from the lovely people at goghatesfags.com with stupidity. They had gone to the funeral of the 12 miners who died in that fire just to let people know that because America has embraced homesexual culture that he kills miners. That's right, all bad things happen because of fags. Out of context the signs are just weird probably not very funny but I enjoy it. Finally, happy birthday Trogdor

My pal Finn did me the great disservice of alerting me to one of the greatest travesties to befall my chershed childhood favorite band, Devo. Apparently, Disney has decided to make a new kid friendly child band to do Devo covers. The name of this super awesome meag team? Dev2.0. It's hard to decide what I think it the worst part of this offense. I mean, Devo was the bomb to me when I was a kid. I loved their bizzaro theory of de-evolution, their obsession with asians, potatos and recombo-DNA labs. They've never been as successful commercially as I really thought they should be but thats what any good fanboy will say about their pet band. Seriously, their song for Dr. Detroit should be the national anthem. That's right, of the United States. CALL THE DOCTOR! Anyway, this new Dev2.0 is insane. Kids watching this today out of context will think this is totally shitty, which it is, but for all the wrong reasons. I guess all the weird potato and subversive imagery is there for the parents who might have some clue of what Devo was all about but it's just weird if you don't know the real band. The videos section, which I think is there to sell the DVD of these awesome songs, contain possibly the least inspired performance of DEVO songs possible. The girl singer looks like a retarded mannequin & she moves like a reanimated corpse. I think I might remove my eyes instead of watching the videos again. There is like 1 part of devo per million of disney shitty shit. I know in my heart that this will NEVER take off because 1) kids won't like it 2) It's like the shittiest half-assed thing I have seen in a while. Classic Disney re-tread. Blech. I wonder if they will keep the Rod Router and Big Daddy Know-it-all plots that kept the band so interesting. If I ever hear these kids say "Disease in punishment" I may change my mind but I doubt it. Feh. Rant over and out.

Saturday night we went out to Alma again for some mexican chow with our friends Regan & Anders. In a rare stroke of luck we actualy got seated upstairs so we were treated to the amazing view of lower Manhattan all teh way to New Jersey. The food was pretty good as usual although I have to say I doubt I will get the guacamole again. I have been spoiled by places that make it at your table in the big old stone bowls. The guac last night was cold and just made me think "This just came out of the fridge." I had a tangerine margarita there. They are so delicious it's scary. Luckily they are totally priced so that I can't drink more than 2 w/o feeling terrible about my bank account. Afterwards we tried to go to Lidos, which was a bar across the street. Anders was pretty sure they had a pool table there and that it was the kind of place where no one would be playing it. He was right about the no one there but also missing was the pool table. Turned out they had moved it for the night becuase they were having a pajama party there that night. The bartendress, who was a large woman, was literally spilling forth from her outfit. You could have easily parked a bicycle in her cleavage. I referred to her as "Largely Be-Titted" or something which was odd but I think accurate. I am a master of the English language to some degree... hmmmm.... Anyway, we decided to head back to Atlantic and ended up stopping into the first bar that we saw which was the famed Montero Bar & Grill. A peek throught the window revealed a lonely, if tiny, pool table so we set up shop in the back of the bar. As was the case the last time I played pool the first game I played I made some crazy shots and won the game. Specifically I made one of my classic weirdo cut shots and with total luck the ball settled in for some kind of game winning shot or something. And again as with the last time I played pool the next game I tried to do something like that and I scratched the 8 ball in like a retard. Such is the game of billiards. The bar itself was pretty funny. It's fucking old and looks like they barely take care of it. The mens room has a toilet, with a paper holder like you have in your home except it has no paper in it. Or a rod for the paper to go on. Or paper towels to use in leiu of that... There were two old dudes at the bar who eye everyone who comes in and kind of patrol uselessly while the bartender doesn't listen to your order and repeatedly only brings you half the order. I am not complaining! Whatelse do you expect at a place voted Best Dive Bar 2004? Exactly. Sunday was kind of a wash as we were mildly hung over and Jodi has brunch plans with her old classmates. I had a couple hours to kill and I barely did anything with them. The rest of the day was a blur of dealing with Ace and making some food (turkey tacos) for dinner. We made the tacos with the Pendrey's Bold Taco Spice. It was a total success. Probably the best taco mix we've bought in ages. No hot sauce necessary. After the tacos was a wash. Nothing on the tube. Unimportant football and cops. Now it's 2am again and I have to be at work early... argh.

My boy trent has gone off and gotten himself in India to shoot a Documentary about this woman we both used to work with. I don't know the story very well but it has to do with her being adopted from the streets of India or something and being rasied in Europe and so on. Trent has been the camera guy on both of my short films Friday the 13 Incher and Fugitive Chef. Trent has a a great blog about his travelling life which can be read a The Pocket Mayors. I really dug his stories from his journey across Austrailia and I have high hopes for this trip, too. Once he gets back to the USA you can expect it to drop off as he isn't as inspried by his surroundings or something. I strongly encourage you to check it out if only for the great pictures. He just arrived there and it's entertaining already. In other more me news Ace work up at 4:45am last night and is still up! Hooray for us... booooooo

Last weekend, MLKjr B'Day weekend, the Fernandez clan packed up into the rented SUV and headed up North up by Vermont way a piece. On the way up we got stuck in some pretty shitty traffic. Jam after jam of cars. On top of the slowness there was this insane fog like I have never driven through. Total classic pea-soup in bands of grey nothingness. It would break and we could see for 100 feet and then nothing but fog and by then we'd be back in it. That was pretty terrifying! We finally crawled past the totally fucked up accident site reason for all the slowness. It involved the totally crushed front end of a car and a completely dented highway guard-rail. After that the traffic finallly relented and we were able to drive the real speed limit: 80mph. At one point we stopped for some gas. As I was pumping the gas I stopped to notice that I was pumping the gas in a t-shirt and I wasn't too cold. That was a bad sign for skiing. Typically when you go skiing you want it too be cold. The forecast wasn't promising but when you make skiing plans you go even if a volcano bursts out of the top of the mountain. My mom and brother were driving in her car and were way ahead of us but thanks to my reckless driving we continued kicking ass on the highway until we caught them, just as they arrived at the condo. The condo was very nice. It was definitely one of the more "lived in" condos we've stayed in. Lots of personal touches. Most importantly there was a four foot tall bear carving which has been named "John Bare-Ass III" by the hilarious owners. Waa-waaaaaaa. The really nice thing was it had a hot tub and we made nice use of it. Saturday: We woke up Saturday to the pitter-patter of torrential rain. True to forecast it was 50 degrees and rained all day. We basically sat around in our longjohns and watched TV. We did manage to watch about 4.5 hours of 6 hours of the Documentary "Country Boys" about some learning challenged kids in Kentucky or something. It featured my favorite TV moment in a while. One of the kids who's dad killed his mom and then took his own life is now in a Christian rock band. The guys is introducing their first song as they play on the road in West Virginia at a Christian rock club called "The Rock". He tells about his fathers murder/suicide and how he himself dabbled in drugs, satanism and witchcraft and only found the truth in Jesus. Then he said "All praise is do to our Lord. This song is called Death." Then the song is basically a death metal song about his father killing his mom. Actually stepmom who was a stripper. As the day drew on the forecast again proved true. As the sun went down the temperture dropped to 20 and it started to snow. It snowed 8" by the morning. SUNDAY: Normally if you wake up to 8" of snow and you're skiing you're psyched. However is the snow is preceeded by a million inches of rain you're in trouble. The rain had stripped the snow off the mountain and left it covered in hard as fuck ice. The mountain had been making snow all night allong with the natural snow but the wind was just whipping it into the woods. We hit the slopes and headed to the lifts. The temperature was like zero degrees and with windchill it was 20 below. The wind was insane. On the lift up to the top of the mountain we were all in total agony as the wind ripped straight through our clothes. After our 2nd run we decided to go into the lodge and thaw out. It was crazy. No one wanted to go out into the cold because it was total horrorshow out there. We went back out there a few more times before we decided that it just wasn't worth the suffering. Once we were on the trails we would forget about the misery until we got back to the bottom of the trail. The snow was great where it wasn't total shear sheet glacial ice but that ice would just suddenly appear and totally fuck up our runs until we figured out where they were. We picked up Ace, who we'd dropped off at the mountain daycare and headed back to the condo for some de-icing in the hot tub. We watched the new season of 24, which was awesome, and chilled. I made some of my classicly delicious fondue and called it a night. Monday: We packed up our gear and headed out to the mountain. The mountain snow guys were working all night on the main made snow and it showed. The winds had died down do the snow wasn't difting all over. We found some kick ass trails with great conditions and stayed on them. It was still cold but only around 10 degrees above zero instead of below. It's funny that as a family we've never been one of those families that saves $ by bringing all their food and just leaving a bag in the lodge. We always choose to buy a mediocre industrial grade meal for 300% it's worth. Why? I don't know. Skiing is expensive enough as it is! We called it a day at around 3pm and headed back to the big apple. Driving back to NY was crazy. We got to crawl past yet another serious car accident. This one involved a car that did something so naughty it caught fire and needed two fire engines to make it not be all flamey and burny. The rest of the drive was basically bumper to bumper but everyone was going 60-70mph. It was basically a deadly mishap waiting to happen but luckily it didn't. We pulled into Brooklyn at aroun 9:30 and totally lucked out and got front parking. I was planning to return the SUV back to Alamo when we were done with the unloading but I was told that if I returned it on Monday I would be hit with an "Early Return Fee." WACK! So I had to drive it in first thing in the morning. Oh Alamo Car Rental, why can't you be cheap and not weird? Tuesday we had a rehearsal with Gunshow that was pretty awesome. We've been working on some new stuff to get us out of the rut we'd been in for a few months. I like the fact that we pick things up so quickly. By the end of the rehearsal I felt like we'd really done some good work. Gunshow had a show Weds night but I couldn't make it due to work. As it turned out I wouldn't have gone anyway due to my magic illness. But I woke up on Weds feeling kid of weird. I went to work and enjoyed my usual bowtie & coffee. About 10 mins after my breakfast I was feeling like shit. I put my head on my desk and kind of went in and out of passing out for an hour before I started to feel okay again. Then as the day went on I kept fading and recovering. By the time I went home I was feeling pretty crappy. I ran a minor fever most of the night but woke up feeling okay. I decided I was well enough to make it into work. However about an hour after making it in I started to feel shitty again. My boss and co-worker accused me of trying to make everyone sick. I headed out early and made it home just in the nick of time. Literally as I put the key in the front door of my apartment I was siezed by a fierce urge to crap my pants. I resisted this foul push and made it inside to the bathroom. I missed filling my trousers with liquid feces but only by a second. I no longer felt as sick. No fever. Not quite as queasy. However Friday I was woken up by almost crapping in my bed so I decided it probably wasn't the best idea to go 45min by train to work. I thought I might do something interesting with the day off like going to a movie or something but instead I felt crappy and fell asleep for most of the day. Now as the day is over I am not really as concerned about my guy anymore but seem to have developed an insane deep lung cough. More irritating is that I am missing Ryan & Matt's 7 years in NYC party. It surely would have been a slammajamma of a party. Of course now that I couldn't make it I am sure it was just a slamma. How could it have been both a slamma & a jamma without Lou? Exactly. I knew you'd agree. I would have gone even with this cold but we couldn't find a sitter.... fucking sitters. Fuck this weather and this winter. It's fucking 60 degrees in January... We're fucked.

Over the holidays Ace caught a little case of bronchiolitis. Just when he seemed to be getting over that cold now it seems that now he has something worse. Yesterday he had a little runny nose. Nothing to be concerned about. He slept kind of crummy but seemed okay this morning. Then as the day progressed he kind of crashed. Got listless and whiney. Then as the day went further along he started coughing a ton and having really shallow breathing. Like scary shallow. I looked up the symptoms on the internet and I took a shower with him to see if the steam would help. It actually helped a lot so we calmed down a little. I bought some menthol oils for his vaporizer and we gave some more albuterol for the breathing. He is sleeping now but uneasily. On top of that anxiety tonight was the first night of the The Project Reboot. I was chosen to be one of 10 new people mixed into the already talented pool of improvisors. There was a draft and the teams were picked and tonight was the unveiling of the teams and also each team had to perform for 10 minutes. It was a pretty crazy night. Major improv nerd action. I was retardedly anxious especially because in the improv world I am a virtual unknown. The improv group I've been in for 3+ years or something, Gunshow, while being really fucking solid just has never had that certain thing to get the shows and recognition that we deserved. Of late we'd been getting more shows but we've been doing them worse and worse so I don't know what that means. Anyhow, I got picked by Rob Lathan completely randomly and probably in the late rounds of picking. Sean Taylor told me he was going to pick me and Rob picked me right before him and totally at random so Sean was like "Why? You don't even know him!?" but the choice had been made so it stuck. My team is Rob Latham, Terry Jinn, Ptolemy Slocum, Jane Borden, Shelly Stover, Rachel Mason (Didn't show) & Carl Arnheiter. I have been coached by 2 of the people on my team and paid to see several other perform for years. It's a bit of a head trip. Ryan Sturt, also of Gunshow, was also chosen to for the project this time around and is on an awesome team. He performed really well considering he was complaining about a back injury or something. He wouldn't explain how he injured himself because he said it was embarassing. I assumed that he did it while masturbating with a 10lb weight or something. He didn't deny it so that's what I am telling people. Well, heavy duty jackoff injury or not Ryan did really well and has a team I am jealous of. Lots of fun and funny people on it. My team did pretty well for never having performed before. I even got a couple big laughs. Felt good. We'll see how it goes from here. Tomorrow I'm back at work. Again the weekend flew by. Doesn't seem like I had any time off. Saturday Jodi had a huge art opening at Exit Art. I brought Ace and of course he was a hit with the ladies. Especially at this one artists window display. The idea of the show is that the artists re-create their studios in the windows are Exit Art. One guy who thought the idea was dumb sent in a video of him playing in a pool. They invited him to re-create it in the window so he made a ball pool and furnished it with some inflatable chairs. So of course we brought Ace there. Luckily for him there were some friendly ladies there. They were smitten big-time and kept saying things like "I wish you were 10 years older." I didn't bother to tell them that then he's only be 12 and that would be illegal. There were also some gay guys who thought Ace was hilarious, too. One guy kept saying "He is so precocious." Over and over to the point of me wanting to being him a thesaurus so he could mix it up a little.

It's 2:20am now. I gotta hit the hay.

I just finished beating the xBox game Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood. It was pretty hard but typically short. I beat it in a couple of weeks. It was probably the best WWII game I have played in a while. The terrain is very well done and the bad guys are very smart. However the online play was not great because I couldn't just go online and start killing people. Instead I got bounced around always in spectator mode. I couldn't figure it out so I always ended up playing more Halo instead. I'll probably sell BiA:EiB pretty soon. I have a habit of hanging on to games until their resale value is nil. I just sold some games on ebay as a matter of fact. 2 games... I made a whopping $8. Thats after shipping mind you. Grrrrr....