
Contemplating life at The Bellagio
3.31 CONTEMPLATION
03.15 NUMB THUMB
I don’t own a comb. In fact all that’s in my bathroom is a bar of soap and a $0.79 bottle of shampoo; you know, the cheap stuff that could probably dye your hair orange if you weren’t careful. I keep my hair short enough where I never have to use any hair products. You have to consider the ratio on time spent grooming your hair to getting laid. After five minutes it’s diminishing marginal utility, probably the only term I remember from college level Economics. The reason I sport a 1/8” long buzz cut is that I love to roll out of bed and look like a million bucks (well, maybe a thousand bucks). Anyone with a Mohawk is trying too hard. Once your mohawk gets longer than 10”, it becomes impractical. Every girl wants to touch it, you have to duck under door jams, and your hair gel expense report rivals my drinking tab.

If there was a song that played when you walked into the room with your mohawk, it should be some Indian tribal shit in an effort to remind you that
back in the 1700’s, Native Americans didn’t have hair gel, they used cured fat from dead animals to lather in their hair. I mean why else do you think they lived in teepees? They needed to vent all that rotting smell upward towards the atmosphere.
I’ve been bitten by a dog twice. The first time isn’t really story-worthy, because my friend’s dog just plain bit me. That’s seriously the entirety of the story, there’s no potential for embellishing.
The second time I got bitten by a dog I watched a homeless guy get hit by a Nissan Sentra in front of the grocery store. I dragged him over to the curb and his mongrel quickly latched onto my forearm. After kicking it senseless in the head (solely for good measures) the firemen came and lawyers leaped out from the bushes unleashing a flurry of business cards. But they didn’t introduce themselves to me: apparently I wasn’t a victim. Looking back on that day, a lawsuit could only get me possession of his grocery cart full of bottles and cans for a grand total of $2.35. The firemen provided some alcohol swabs for my puncture wounds and a bottle of Aquafina (which they bottle in a smelly chemical plant in Latham, NY. I know this because I lived 5 minutes away from it).

Even though I’ve been bitten twice, there’s just one dog I’m afraid of. The only truly vicious, heartless, brutal dog was in that Zelda GameBoy game. It was always chained to a fence and would lash out at you if you came within two button pushes of a carpel tunnel syndrome. 
That reminds me, what’s with all the DJ’s mixing fucking video game music into their tracks? Yea hearing Super Mario is going to get me some ass; I get flashbacks of blowing dust out from the back of a grey Nintendo cartridge in 9th grade thinking about that hot chick in Honors Math class. God I was a fucking loser in high school, I don’t think I got laid once. Then I went to college, grew some facial hair and “looked like that guy from Incubus.” What? Get the fuck out of here you acoustic-piece-of-groupie-shit. I resorted to carrying stray guitar picks and managed to sleep with a handful of sluts, but it wasn’t from going within 50 feet of a video game console, I can guarantee you that. The most intense video game mashup I heard recently is the theme song to Zelda: Link’s Awakening (OG GameBoy edition). It gave me painful memories of walking through the beginner level village with my dinky sword hacking away at the bushes and hoping to find some of those rupees to buy a bow and arrow from the general store. Of course I never had enough patience to accumulate a sufficient amount of rupees, but there was a secret glitch where if you tried walking out the door ~75 times, you could steal the bow and arrow, but forever be banned from the general store, get electrocuted the next time you walk in, or get maimed by the rabid dog.
The main character had an insane haircut. It resembled a blowout with a little green elf hat perched on top. How he never had to take a break during
the middle of a battle sequence to maintain that perfectly groomed coif still escapes me.
If Zelda lived in the real world, he’d spend all his rupees on hair gel, and become a kleptomaniac stealing shit from the drug store, ultimately leading into a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol; realistically he’d probably just drink the hair gel. How much alcohol content does that shit have? 1.5%? I just realized that by reliving my teenage glory years, I’ve been playing this fucking game for over 3 hours… I can’t feel my thumbs.
02.17 ROCKLAND

Nerlande at Rockland Toyota
02.13 ¡PURO PARTY!

¡PURO PARTY!
02.08 PEARLY WHITES


NINA and NINA’s retainer photographed by Ben DeCamp
01.30 ALWAYS LURKING

GOLDIE making her bed in Pacific Beach photographed by Ben DeCamp
01.24 FRANNY

NICOLE about to end Franny’s life photographed by Ben DeCamp
01.21 KNOTS KNOTS KNOTS
Cleaning metal tables with Windex was a task so humbling, I could feel my Bachelor’s degree quivering on my parent’s living room wall. I tried to lurk away from the office, so as not to be assigned to some other menial task when one of the editors informed me, “You’re going on a fishing trip with Ween in 2 hours.”

Granted I was probably the most bearded intern they could throw a yellow poncho on and pass off as some sort of glorified fisherman, but the prospects of night fishing on a boat left me woozy and scrambling for a Dramamine prescription. I hadn’t even thought about the band Ween in over 5 years and immediately images flashed through my head of some sort of Deadliest Catch “VICE Edition” where on sinking ship, greenhorn interns lacking life preservers are forced to construct their own and sleep inside the carcasses of dead tuna on a deserted coastline. I left full of justifiable apprehensions with Rob Lanham, writer/founder of Free Williamsburg. He rented a ZipCar, aka some piece of shit Toyota that was stuck in 2nd gear for the first half an hour and hovering at 7000rpm. Why we didn’t just wake up at 4am and drive to NJ still escapes me, but we ended up at a sports bar in Long Beach Island with Dean Ween and his friend Nick, the vagabond travel writer, all poised on our forearms anxiously watching the World Series and assuming various stages of drunken shit talking/peanut-throwing.

After a few miniature hot dogs and chats with the bartender who allegedly, “Won the Mega Millions lottery twice!”(yet still pours drinks in a vacation town offseason?) we crammed into Dean’s trailer. He ran back out to his truck and told us he had outtakes from Dancing with the Stars UK edition; we looked around at each other puzzled, but he came back inside with the cult classic JAWS to get us in the mood. The DVD player broke halfway through the movie, but we got to see a bit of carnage to mentally prepare us for using “The Punisher,” his oversized hammer used to beat the living daylights out of a great white shark, or whatever we dragged flopping onto the beach.

I would have been perfectly happy to go to the rundown strip club and just claim we went fishing, but Rob was adamant that without a fish we didn’t have a story. I agreed and imagined out loud, “Think how glorious it would be to strap the catch to the roof of the ZipCar and then plop down a mutant striper in the magazine’s lobby. The entire office would huddle around a mini-Weber grill and have a bonding experience.” Nick changed the channel to the Public Access Network. It’s a 24/7 continual loop about the marine conditions and community events. Dean claimed to fall asleep to this woman every night; it’s like therapy. Her voice was tantalizing, it was robotic and borderline erotic. “Seas 3 feet from the Northeast. Winds at 5 to 10 knots, knots, knots…” Her prerecording got stuck on various words and she convinced me that the local spaghetti dinner was the highlight of any socialite’s week. After too many beers we hustled back to the decrepit motel for check-in. I started taking pictures of the exterior and the elderly owner asked, “Why’s that boy taking pictures of my property?” Rob replied, “Well sir you’ve got a beautiful hotel.” “Yea, I know. Here’s the remote. This controls the television. You press this to change the channel; you press this to change the volume. Checkout is at 11, but you’re the only ones staying’ here so you know, you know. Well, you boys have fun tonight…” Did he think we were a couple? Fucking Christ. We turned on the TV to discover of the 5 channels available, Jimmy Kimmel re-runs dominated 3.
Combined with Rob’s snoring, a questionable version of JAWS starring Jimmy Kimmel and talking tuna would haunt my subconscious for the duration of the night.

I’d tell you about the gigantic striper we caught, about not having waders and losing the feeling in my legs from the icy Atlantic, or about the shell-shocked-post-stroke-non-fishing war veteran, who informed me that there’s no such thing as El Nino; that climate change and their coastal flooding problem was a direct result of Earth’s axis shifting from a gigantic hole and change in weight distribution left behind by Middle Eastern oil extraction. But based on how large the fish grew by the time we arrived back in Brooklyn, I wouldn’t believe any of that bullshit either.


