January 2013

Holy shit, I have people who follow this thing!  That’s wild.  Thank you for being interested in my liver damage!
So I’ve decided to break it down into the five categories of: Beer, “Good” Beer, Cocktail, Wine, Shot.  What constitutes a “good” beer you ask?  Well, friend…  A “good” beer is something that doesn’t come in a 30 pack, generally comes in a bottle, or is a microbrew can, etc.  So like, Budweiser is just beer.  I mean, it’s great and I like it, a lot actually, but it’s just a beer.  Red Stripe on the other hand is considered a “good” beer since it rarely comes in a can, tastes better, and is more expensive.  So yeah.  Whatever, you’re a grown up, you understand where I’m going with all of that.  So here’s January…

Alcoholic beverages:

Beer – 125

“Good” Beer – 29

Cocktail – 18

Wine – 0

Shot – 1

Total – 173

Avg per day – 5.5

Number of 30 packs – 5.7

Dollar amount at an average of $4 per drink – $692 (ouch)

There was one day that I didn’t drink all month long.  I don’t remember if it was because I was hungover or if it was because I just didn’t feel like it but it happened.  I’m adding this to the things I’ll keep track of as well.

I also read two books and started a third in January:

The Lost World – Michael Crichton

• I thought this was great.  I came right off of finishing Jurassic Park.  Was it as good?  No, but it was fun.  I couldn’t stop picturing Jeff Goldblum as Malcolm like in the movie which may have taken away from my enjoyment but I bet it made it even better.  Jeff G rules.

Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End – Manuel Loureiro

• This was a free Kindle book through Amazon that I figured wouldn’t be that good but I was dead wrong.  This was really awesome.  It’s everything I wanted World War Z to be and more.  I highly recommend this if you’re into that sort of thing.

I’ve started Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling.  So far good.  I never read Harry Potter so this is my first experience with her as an author.

Movies (An asterisk denotes having seen it in the theatre):

Argo*

• Have you seen this yet?  No?  Go see it.  

Inglorious Basterds

• I’m the last person on the planet to see this movie.  I liked it a lot.

Zero Dark Thirty*

• I really wasn’t sure what to think about this going into it.  I liked it.  There was very little character development but it was interesting enough.  It could have been way better though.

Black Swan

• This movie rules.  

Bridget Jones’ Diary

• Yeah, it’s good. 

Superbad

• One of my favorites.  

That’s pretty much it for January.  I hung out with my  buddy Dave once, that was cool.  I saw this band Tick Tok once at Radio.  My band recorded for two days.  That’s about it.

Thanks for reading.  I really appreciate it.

–Best

It took a few days…

So I decided to put down The Lost World and start it over on January first to avoid any confusion.  So far the new year has started off fairly well.  I’ve had about 40 drinks so far (more on this later), I’ve seen a few movies and I’m making progress with The Lost World.  I’ve been busy and haven’t had a chance to put in the rest of my accomplishments for last year but that will come soon.  First, a quick question for all of my hundreds of readers…

For alcoholic beverages this year… I’m absolutely going to keep a count like I did in 2012 but I would like to have a bit more info about those drinks.  What I’ve been doing thus far is keeping track of exactly what the drinks are, for example I’ve had 1 Bloody Mary, 11 Rolling Rock, and 7 Coors Originals so far this year.  Keeping track in this manner has proven to be quite difficult though.  I’m wondering if it would be better to track like this:

• Beer: #
• “Good” Beer: #
• Wine: #
• Cocktails: #
• Shots: #

Is that fine do you think?  Should I just go with hashmarks like I did last year?  I’m going to keep going with the tracking of every type of drink for now but would like to get away from that if possible.

 

Now, on to my wrap up of 2012!…

 

Movies: (* denotes having seen it in the theatre)

January – 

• I know What You did Last Summer
• Crazy Stupid Love
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall
• Bridesmaids
• What’s My Number?
• Contagion
• Moneyball

February – 

• Date Night
• The Social Network
• Sleeping With the Enemy
• Tucker and Dave Vs. Evil
• 50/50
• Martha Marcy May Marlene
• Hump Day
• X-Files

March

• Gone*
• Silent House*
• The Hunger Games*

April

• Fright Night (2011)
• Cabin in the Woods*
• Young Adult
• The 5 Year Engagement*
• Glengarry Glen Ross

May

• Until The Light Takes Us
• Daybreakers
• Hall Pass
• Due Date
• Paul*
• Lord of the Rings: Fellowship

June – 

• The Muppets
• Goon
• Prometheus*
• Chronicle
• Jurassic Park
• Wanderlust
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Jeff Who Lives at Home
• Ted*

July – 

• Congo
• Rango
• 28 Days Later
• The Elephant in the Living Room
• A Little Help
• The Dark Knight Rises
• The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
• Groundhog Day

August – 

• Friends With Kids
• The Godfather
• Crazy Stupid Love
• The Dark Knight
• The Sitter
• The Campaign*
• Limitless
• Super 8

September – 

• Project X
• Your Sister’s Sister
• Grave Encounters
• What’s My Number?
• The Woman in Black
• Rise of the Planet of the Apes
• The Village
• What to expect when you’re expecting
• A good old fashioned orgy
• Howard Stern: Private Parts

October – 

• Jaws
• The Dictator
• Lucky
• The Stepfather
• Aliens
• Cabin in The Woods
• The Lorax
• I Love You, Man
• The Town
• Buried
• Monster Squad
• Bridesmaids
• Blades of Glory
• Our Idiot Brother
• Jaws
• Semi-Pro

November – 

• The Vicious Kind
• Brick
• Goon
• Bernie
• The Fighter

December – 

• Middle Men
• Mystic River
• The Dark Knight
• The Kings Speech
• After Porn Ends
• Flightplan
• Transsiberian
• Cabin in The Woods
• Signs

Please keep in mind that I wasn’t particularly diligent with my movie count.  Also, I watched a lot of movies more than once and almost never wrote it down a second time.  What I have written down there is 93 movies.  Not too bad.  That’s 7.75/month and 1.78/week.  I must have been a busy dude in 2012.

 

Shows: in 2012 I started a band with two of my closest Friends.  I think we played together for the first time in April or May.  We played five shows last year and they’re listed below…

 

July 28th – Oswego, NY @ The Raven  – Beardfest III

With: Cayetano (Philly), Gorge (Oswego), Mayflower (Philly/NY)

August 10th – Allston, MA @ WWTA

With: Fools Rush (PDX), Ken Valentine (MA), Kind of Like Spitting (PDX)

October 5th – Somerville, MA @ Starlab

With: Great Lakes USA (Boston), Prevenge (Mtl), Mayflower (NY/Philly)

October 20th – New Bedford, MA @ Black Watch Pub

With: Hookerclops (MA), 1 Cent Peep Show (MA), The Leo Vaz Project (MA)

November 12th – Cambridge, MA @ TT the Bears – Great Lakes USA record release

With: Great Lakes USA (MA), Save Ends (MA), Battle Cries (MA)

 

So that’s the rest of what I kept track of last year.  I’ve got some new stuff for next year so stay tuned.  

Books…

So it may be a little early to write out the list of books I read in 2012 but with only five days left and my most recent novel reaching about 500 pages I’d say that it’s fairly safe to assume I’m not going to be finishing this before the end of the year. So, similarly to how I didn’t count Kitchen Confidential in my list for 2012 as I started that in December of 2011 I will not be counting The Lost World, that is unless I somehow manage to plow through it in the next day or so. I’ll keep you all updated as I’m sure you’re extremely interested in my lists of bullshit.

Anyhow, my goal for 2012 was to read 52 books. I went into this goal knowing that it wasn’t going to be possible. I even tried to pad it with some short stories that were released as stand-alone publications, but alas I only made it to 30 this year. The list is below. You’ll see that there’s an awful lot of Stephen King on there. That’s because he rules.

I had more to say about some of these than others, don’t let my lack of comment sway you from reading anything though.  That’s just how it came out.  Anyway, here is my list…

1. 11/22/63 – Stephen King

• This was released near the end of 2011 and was the first book I bought with my Kindle Fire that Dani bought me for Christmas last year. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, such a great story. Stephen King is the master of fiction writing and hands down my favorite author.

2. Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

• C’mon… who didn’t read this shit this year? The movie was super disappointing but this book was fun as shit.

3. Catching Fire – Suzanne Collins

• At some point I’ll reread this series and be able to say for sure whether I liked the first or second book best, currently I think it’s book 1 but this was really great.

4. Mocking Jay – Suzanne Collins

• Like with most series of books the ending is ultimately disappointing, still a great series and absolutely worth the read.

5. Off Season – Mark Ketchum

• This was recommended by a coworker. I’m not sure if I liked this book or not. It seemed at times to be violent and gorey for the sake of it. Not particularly original but a decent read I suppose. I feel like a bunch of kids in dark clothing who listen to shitty music would eat this up.

6. Catch A Wave: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson – Peter Ames Carlin

• I love Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys, this was my first biography I read about him/them and I think a great place to start. Fuck you, Mike Love.

7. Story of My Life – Jay McInerney

• I liked Bright Lights, Big City a lot in college so I figured I’d go back and give something else a shot. This was okay, not great but it’s a lot of fun if you’re a fan of Bret Easton Ellis to read his peers and see how they compare.

8. Ur Stephen King

• This was my first short story that I read to try to catch up to my goal of 52 books. Worth the read for sure, and it’s like $1 so why not?

9. Blockade Billy – Stephen King

• Another short story. Really great read though. Highly recommended.

10. Cobra Event – Richard Preston

• Holy shit. This read like an episode of Law & Order on steroids. Such a great fucking book. Scary as hell. You’ll wash your hands forever when you finish.

11. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War – Max Brooks

• I think I had higher expectations for this than I should have had. It’s more a collection of interviews than a story. That’s not bad at all, just not what I was expecting or what I wanted I suppose.

• After I read this and heard that they were making a movie of it I got really pumped but it appears that they’re leaving out the interview aspect and going for a straight zombie film which is a bit of a bummer.

12. The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted – Andrew E. Kaufman

• Utterly forgettable. With Amazon Prime there are several books I can get on loan for free, this was one of them. I honestly don’t remember what this was about.

13. The Moonlit Mind – Dean Koontz

• I’d never read DK, I wish I’d kept it that way. This was only a short story but I had a really hard time keeping interested.

14. Under The Dome – Stephen King

• A book he started writing in the 70s but couldn’t get finished. I’m really glad he was able to. This guy knows character development. Not the most original idea on the planet but really a fun 1000+ page story.

15. Basic Training – Kurt Vonnegut

• Another short story. Good little book to kill time with. Great characters.

16. Throttle – Joe Hill & Stephen King

• They admit that Duel was a huge influence for this tory which was very obvious but it was still a fun read and I’m sure twice as fun to write for the father and son pair.

17. My Booky Wook – Russell Brand

• This dude is hilarious. Very interesting read. I had always assumed he shot his heroin for whatever reason.

18. The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel – Stephen King

• I was very nervous when I heard that there was a new Dark Tower novel coming out. Installment 4.5 was great though. It was really nice to visit with these characters again and to see that Stephen King is still thinking about them.

19. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

• Not the first time I’ve read this by any chance but it was on my shelf and I like it quite a bit so I took it down and read through it again. It’s no wonder there was so much backlash with this book but holy shit is it a good read. Highly recommended.

20. The Andromeda Strain – Michael Crichton

• Science and disease. Stay the fuck out of space!

21. Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac

• I read this for the first time when I was just out of high school and it blew my mind. Coming back to it as a proper adult but hoping for the same reaction was a bad move, still a great story though.

22. Prey – Michael Crichton

• Microscopic organisms will fuck your shit up.

23. The Green Mile – Stephen King

• Tears. Hell of a story. Again, wonderful characters. SK with another win.

24. The Long Walk – Stephen King

• Perhaps my favorite SK book (even if it was written as Richard Bachman) – this story will blow your socks off. It’s good for a reread at least once every year or two.

25. Needful Things – Stephen King

• I’d seen the movie way back when but never read the book. Dani said it was worth the go so I gave it a shot. It’s a very believable story about the devil, if there is such a thing. What I mean by that is the way the characters in this small town react to the things that are going on and how they treat one another. Great read.

26. Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

• This was another one recommended to me by a coworker. While Off Season was a swing and a miss Ready Player One was a home run. Great tale of where our world could be going set to the backdrop of 80’s nostalgia.

27. Carter Beats the Devil – Glen David Gold

• I joined the book club at work after Ready Player One and this was the selection. It was a fun read about a magician, I would never have read it if I wasn’t a part of the book club, and I missed the meeting to discuss it so I’m pretty bummed on that.  Would I have read this if I weren’t a part of the book club?  Probably not, honestly.

28. Wilco: Learning How to Die – Greg Kot

• This was lent to me by a different coworker who knew that I was a big Wilco fan. This is the story all the way from High School, through Uncle Tupelo, and into the release of A Ghost Is Born. Absolutely a must read for any Wilco fan.

29. The Hot Zone – Richard Preston

• You’ve seen Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman. This is the source material. Now, it was loosely based on this story so don’t expect the helicopter escape but you can expect one hell of a great Non-fiction story about Ebola. Another one that’ll have you carrying hand sanitizer on you at all times.

30. Jurassic Park – Michael Crichton

• The Source Material for my favorite movie as a child. Hammond was a fucking asshole! But a seriously great read, I immediately purchased The Lost World to start reading when I finished this.

So that’s what I’ve got for 2012. Hopefully I have more time to read in 2013, I have a great porch so when the weather clears up I’ll be out there with a beer after work more often than not I hope!

Thanks for reading. I hope this didn’t bore you all that much.

–Best.

Day one-ish…

Okay.

So I’ve always been very interested in keeping track of things.  For as long as I can remember I’ve made lists of things that I need to do, things that I want to do, things that I have to do, or even things that I haven’t done.  In 2011 I started keeping track of how many pages I was reading in books day to day.  Then it moved to how many I’d read on my way to work, on lunch, and on my way home.  While I was doing this I decided to keep track of every beer or other alcoholic beverage I drank during the entire year of 2012 so my girlfriend bought me a cool notebook to keep track in.  I also decided to keep track of every movie I watched, book I read, and show I played with my band.  So now that 2012 is coming to a close I decided to start a little blog to keep track of things in.  I’m definitely going to keep using my notebook because it’s awesome but the plan is to use this page to keep track of my things as well as many others.  For instance, I was thinking about my buddy Dave and how it’s been nearly three months since I’ve seen him.  Why not keep track of each time we hang out?  Maybe jot down a bit about what we did?  Who knows.  The possibilities are literally endless.  So seeing as it’s December 11, 2012 I will use the rest of this year to compile my list of 2012 which I will post here in a couple of weeks and then move forward from there with new things.

Let me know if you’re reading this or if you’d like more info on anything, less, etc.

Have a great day and thanks for reading this.  If anyone actually does.

–Best.