Delta f and the Vicissitudes of Life in Windsor

It's that time of year again!

You know: the time of year where all popular media tells you that what you should be doing is just what all those Americans are supposed to do - and what a hell of a lot of Canadian students do just as well: It's time to pack up a car, get in the plane or shove the rubber floating duck ring into the train and head somewhere 1) Warmer, 2) With a beach and 3) with a small year-round population that begrudgingly caters to the North American well-to-do during spring break - athough accepts their money without so much as a "make sure you make it to a toilet if you vomit."





You detect a bit of mirth? Why, how perceptive of you. Yes, yes I know what you're thinking. "But Tyler, the money that those small beach communities make during Spring Break is integral to their economy!" and it is true, I do agree with you. It is true: Where would the people in Daytona beach be without the American college students? They'd have to settle for NASCAR, and nobody wants to do that. Wait, Floridians? Bad example. But I digress: that's not why I'm pissed.
Well, I'm not really that pissed. Per se. As much as getting drunk off two bad, watery Budweisers because of my almost hospitalizable sunburn on a beach would be awesome - and it really would - the negative affect that I'm exhibiting can be attributed to a more sinister emotion: Jealousy. Yes, that's right - if you hadn't figured it out already, I'm jealous that I'm going nowhere farther than my hometown of Toronto for the break. I'm jealous that I don't get to have a kegger on a rooftop in Tampa. I'm jealous that I don't get to streak in Indian Shores. But c'est la vie. What can you do, eh? Well, we can have fun where ever we are, that's what!





For those of us that are dwelling in the cold for this spring break I implore all of you to have the best time possible. Who the hell wants a sunburn, anyway? I'd prefer to get freezing windburn instead from tobboganning. Sand in my swim shorts? Naw, I'll take snow in my snowpants, thanks. Getting accosted by the police for public drunkenness? Shit, you can still do that in the cold!
So where ever you are, I hope you're planning a kick ass March break. Unless you're in Ajijic, then I hope you get fucking hepatitis. But for those snowed in, I want to see some pictures of cold, winter fun. I'll post them, I promise. And I know that you guys out there have digital cameras - I've used them - so no excuses. I will give preference to 3) Tobboganning related injuries, 2) snow penises and most of all 1) naked snow angels.

Happy Spring Break!

I don't know if this is good news or bad news,
For me, for the most part, this is bad news. As you might have heard by now, the father of Gonzo Journalism, Hunter S. Thompson killed himself last Saturday night. They say that he shot himself in the head. How fitting. Thompson had been an inspiration to me since I have been able to analyze what I read. His scathing satire of everything from American politics to the superbowl led me more often than not to want to do more drugs, but at the very best his writing taught me to live for the moment and not take any shit from the Man! Thompson's contribution to the advent of Delta f can not go over looked - I had been reading quite a bit of his stuff back then in rez when I came up with this crazy idea. I've secretly (maybe not so secretly) been trying to use his style when I write about what we often do, which is get loaded, ostensibly under the guise of an anti fraternity. In that context, he will be missed.




On the other hand, as mentioned above, I had been reading a lot of Thompson's writing lately. The classics have to be mentioned: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which began as a column covering a motorcycle race is by far the best. The movie stays true aswell, possibly being one of the best adaptations out there. Johnny Depp does a spot on Thompson. The Rum Diaries is good aswell, but not in the same style. Thompson was in his early twenties at the time he wrote it, and obviously hadn't had enough time to ingest the heroic quantities of alcohol it took to write his later works.
Ah yes, but then we get to his more recent material. ESPN has a good compilation of his recent columns that I've been plugging through for the past little while. The Bush and Kerry material is not that bad, I must say. I'll post it under Links. Unfortunately, his recent novels prove him to have turned into an old crank with a typewriter. You know that friend of your mother's that has a bit too much to drink when they come over and gets all glassy-eyed and yells at anyone in the room? He'd moved into a fortified compound, for Christ's sake. Fear and Loathing in America reads like a novel by that guy that had declared himself Emperor of the United States at the turn of the century.
Yeah, that's what Thompson had turned into: the old man that you show to the door when they pull out their hash joint.
It pains me to say these things, but I just had to get them out. I hope that wherever Thompson is, he's having a good time.

Here's a link I've had for a while to an article by a guy who's probably not that surprised anymore.

People (usually the ones featured on this site) always ask me the same thing when they read this blog...
"Gee Tyler, how come there are never pictures of you doing stupid things on here?"

Well, the simple answer is that I just don't do stupid things that often - with a camera around, anyway. This is not to say that it doesn't happen, it's just that I don't seem to have the gene in me that seems to turn people into magnates for mishap when ever there's a digital camera around. Most of the time. Don't get me wrong though, we love you guys; this blog wouldn't exist without you!
For the people who've been raising eyebrows at the fact that I never post pictures of myself on here, say, I dunno - falling off a couch, amognst other things - then here is your chance.



It was a couple of weeks ago, and the all of us decided to go out to Rock Bottom in Sandwich Town, fulfilling our promise to ourselves to do just that more often. If you've even been to this site before you know that when the entire house goes out, something interesting is going to happen.
Needless to say, Rock Bottom was awesome. Good live rock music (provided by One Man's Opinion, if you're looking for a good rock band in Windsor) and the recently opened upstairs bar provided a good setting for gluttonous beer consumption.

As usual, the mood was set right after a few pitchers of good beer. I had brought my video camera out on this particular evening and the footage gets interesting (again, as it always does) by the time we reach this stage of the evening. It's too bad I don't have any footage of Mike dancing again...



That guy sure can cut up a rug. Can anyone tell me what the Hell Coty has in front of him up here? After some close inspection I've concluded that looks like a clear plastic bag full of beer, which if you think about it, for us is not that far-fetched. In fact, at this point pretty much all we can see is beer, so it would make sense that we'd want to bag it, right? Right.



I even try my hand at hypnotizing whoever is behind the camera here...

Do you feel sleepy? Good, neither do I.


The night wears on. We drink more. I get the great idea (I don't mean that sarcastically) that interviewing random people on the video camera would be really fun. Unfortunately, the first few interviews don't actually make it on tape because of some technical errors (forgot to press Record), but there is at least some footage of very confused civilians being asked random questions. Why do I say civilians? Well, as we're walking downstairs to leave the bar, I notice that most of the ground level of Rock Bottom has been taken up by a few dozen guys fully decked out in fatigues. We were still in interview mode - jackpot.
I pass one of them on the stairs, introduce myself. It turns out these guys are reserves who've done their maneuvers for the month and are now going out to get pissed. Reserves? Alright, so this guy won't mind if I ask him a few questions on camera. As soon as I pull up the ol' Sony, the guy stammers that he has to ask his superior officer if it's alright. I've had a few by this point, so I play along - what the hell? Some military guys would be golden footage.

Sure enough, the officer, a ram-rod straight guy no older than me comes up with an air of grand military importance and asks me what I'm doing in his best Macarthur voice. These guys are in the reserves: They put in barely eight hours a month of training, and not to say I know a lot about army life, but these guys are not exactly Navy Seals.
"Oh, I'm just doing a school project and was wondering if I could do a short interview with one of you guys - if you don't mind, of course," I ask him in my best just-doing-this-for-school voice. Macarthur doesn't buy it. In fact, he starts giving me this spiel about how what I'm doing is unpatriotic. Unpatriotic? What the fff... But he goes on! He tells me that I should have respect for them because a guy he knows in another unit, knows a guy that dated a chick who's brother is in Afghanistan. Did I mention that these guys were fucking reserves? Not exactly the front line, you know.

We leave without any footage of the grand warriors, but satisfied in the knowledge that security guards at Wall Mart have more training than most of those guys combined. Then we vow to laugh at the Canadian "Armed Forces" whenever we get a chance.



Ah, yes. Then we make it home. Here is where the night gets a little hazy, to say the least. Most likely, this happened before we went skating (I'll get to that in a minute...), but here is what you've all been waiting for: Gravity and I have a disagreement for the first, but not last time of the evening...




What can I say? that damned this just snuck up on me. One minute I was one the couch, the next I was staring at the ground. As you can see though, it does look like I had some help. I can't blame them though, I would have done the same to me, too.

As some of you will know, not far from our house there is a pool. As fewer of you will know, in the winter they don't empty out the pool all the way, so it makes a great skating rink. Most of the rest of the house had been out to play hokey on the rink in the last little while, but I hadn't been out there yet. We decide to go skating.
I feel I have to mention at this point that we're pretty drunk. I think I fell a few times before I even get to the rink, but worse problems were ahead of us. For instance, when we do get to the rink, the hole in the fence where people usually get in is patched up. This is a fifteen-foot fence. Did I mention we were pretty hammered?
Mike, JM, Coty and I must have looked pretty funny trying to get up that fence, because we weren't having too much luck in our state. Gravity and I have another disagreement when I'm half way up the fence one second, and the next second I'm on the ground - staring at the sky this time - with my hands still out in front of me. There is also a lot of pain in the back of my head that wasn't there before. In fact, Coty is the only one that makes it over the fence, which is good because he is able to fetch Mike's skates which he had thrown over the fence before he realized that he wouldn't be able to make it over.

We head back to the house in defeat - something that I don't exactly remember, but we must have because I woke up in my bed; and going to bed probably being the best decision I made the whole night. On that note, I'll leave you with picture of me doing just that. You're a bastard, Coty.



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Oh...my...god this is cool.
What with a little help from U.S Geological Survey and being so freakin' close to Detroit, we can now see most of the continent from declassified satellite information. Want to see what Bridge Ave. Looks like from space if you had a telescope pointed at Deltaf? Click on the link here, then zoom all the way in on:

Longitude -83.06126 and latitude 42.31266.

I'm not really sure when this was taken, but I don't think we were living in the house at the time. You can clearly make out our fucking picnic bench in our back yard, but you can't see any of the other things that we've accumulated around the house in this past year and a bit, such as our table with the umbrella. You can see our shed though.

Just a work for the paranoid: This is just the stuff that they've classified recently, and only a few computer nerds know about it. Just think about the resolution that the American military has right now. I hear that reading a newspaper that's sitting on the ground from some of the imaging technology that's our there isn't a stretch. Keep your elbows in the windows, folks, and pack the ceilings with lead.

If you haven't been called this by Mike, you just haven't lived...

Oh, it was just one of those nights, I guess. You know them: There's a bit of a party going down; everybody's having a good time; everybody's getting pretty loaded. Then all of a sudden it all goes downhill and someone gets hurt. Did anybody guess who would be the one getting busted? No. I'll tell you anyways. It was JM, and if you have ever heard any of JM's stories of hurting himself (and there's a few) then it's going to come as no surprise that JM got his head cut open by a pair of elk antlers. I am not making this up.
As they do, the night started out jovially. Nobody was getting hurt except for our livers. The usual antics of drinking at the bar ensued and there was lots of liquor consumed. As you can tell by the pictures, none of this is hard to believe.



I vaguely remember things up to this point. There is video of what we're doing, but you sure as hell can't hear what we're saying. I don't even think I would like to hear what we're saying. probably the expected drunken banter.
"You guys are awesome!" Or...
"Dare you to chugg a beer!" Or...
"Man I am sooooo loaded!"
None of which would be too surprising. It isn't until Mike or JM (we haven't really been able to figure out who) decided to run at each other a la bull fighting. Then things got interesting.


Mike has the great idea that the big pair of elk's antlers that JM brought back from up North would make a great prop for the matedor bit, so he lifts them up and charges at JM. Hey, can you blame him? I sure won't. I'll blame those bastards at the Molson Brewing company - those are the ones who should pay. I do feel that I should point out one ironic fact before I show the consequences: JM had been looking forward to getting these antlers down for a long time; since at least last year. This happened less than a week after he finally got them here...



Ouch. That had to hurt. Oh wait...He was loaded so it didn't. He did feel it the next day though. My favorite part of this story if that less than ten minutes after this unfortunate accident had happened, both Mike and JM forgot how it had happened. Now Mike I could maybe understand, but JM? He had just had his head cranked in! How do you forget that!? Or maybe that question answers its self.
So anyway, I Just decide to tell them that JM had actually just walked into the antlers himself. They buy it. I just let it slide for the rest of the night.


Despite JM cutting his head open, the party pretty much continued as usual!
Lindsay showed up for a bit....



For some reason or another, Mike and I decide to interrogate Chris, a move that I won't even try to explain - I'll just show the picture...

Very strange indeed.
What could we possibly be asking him? Maybe it had something to do with his amazing vomit feat of the evening, which was truly incredible. After chugging a beer (or something) at the bar, Chris had That Look. You know, the "I...Am...Going...To...Puke. Now" look. so we jokingly put a little cup in front of him and basically tell him to puke in it. He then pukes in the tiny cup and doesn't spill a drop on the bar!! By far one of the most incredible feats of vomit I've ever seen. Then he went and wolfed the rest of guts out into the sink though...

That was pretty gross. At least he cleaned it up.



So the night wore on and on. So far in fact, that Mike at one point must have forgotten that he didn't have a pipe to smoke...



This can happen to the best of us at the best of times. Somewhere around this point JM must have remembered what Mike had done to his melon...



But then he forgot and everyone was fine.

The next morning, Mike and JM were still under the impression that JM had done the damage to himself - by then the booze had worn off and the pain had kicked in. A quick trip to the doctor's office tolf him that he would indeed live, but I had to break the news of the real events that had transpired. They didn't seem to surprised. A greasy breakfast and some strong coffee and the incident was in the past. All is well that ends well, right? Ask JM about the scar on his forehead and he might not agree.


AntiFrats
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