All content © Chris Onstad, achewood.com, under the nom de plume Ray Smuckles, excepting the actual reader submissions. Apr 30, 2003 My First Column! Hello, what’s up doggies. Ray here. Gosh, this is my first column for y’all but I am just so darn tired. I really should have started this earlier in the week. I would like for my first column to have been better but I guess already it is pretty bad. Wait! I can go pour myself a little Ketel One and be back in the saddle just long enough to bang out my five hundred words! That would help wake me up after that huge Mexican dinner that Téodor made tonight. Man...between the beans, rice, tortillas and brew, I just feel like one big gas bubble, on the brink . But anyway, hold on. I have to go to the kitchen for a minute and pour me some diamond juice. Hello! I’m back. Man, I just had a sip and already I can feel it cutting through all that heavy jive in my belly. Whew! WHOAH! Alright, I didn’t say this at first but I put a little tonic in the vodka. The bubbles helped me make this massive, incredible burp just now! Oh my God it was like a huge amount of what was bothering me after dinner just came shooting right out. I feel so relieved. It was like what it must be like when the people on death row get that needle in their arm: it was the final release. I just realized that I might get a lot of hate mail about that last line, the one about death row and comparing involuntary death to the relief I felt when I burped just now. I guess that is pretty bad and I think I could do better. Hold on. Alright, I think I thought of something. The relief I felt after that massive burp was like the relief you feel when you’re way too turned around on liquor and you know you’re gonna puke, and then you finally do, like in an upstairs bathroom where the party can’t hear, and then it’s like immediately all better. You feel great. You even go back down and talk to people. Man, this isn’t starting out classy at all. At first I thought I would kind of have this “Playboy” type column— you know, real gentlemen’s stuff, but with kind of a sense of hipness and adventure. Good clothes, good food, high-end electronics and digital cigar cutters, maybe a little bit of etiquette and tips on personal grooming. But here I go, talking about puke. Man, this has got to be the worst “bon vivant” column ever. What does a real gentleman talk about, anyway? I guess a real gentleman doesn’t do the talking, but rather guides conversation in a clever yet undetectable way. Man, I ain’t no good at that. Plus, a column only has one person talking, so it’s got to be kind of self-directed. Alright, I’m sorry this has been so pointless. I am feeling a lot better now though and I think I’m ready to get started. It’s kind of like the gassiness has all either blown out through my mouth or is just makin’ its way down through the pickle factory. Maybe it’s time to choose a topic! Alright, I think I’m going to discuss the right way to eat Mexican food and some things you should avoid. Here we go! GENTLE READER: few things in life are so uncomfortable as the enormous “wind bubbles” one’s body creates after eating some delicious, tempting Mexican food. And just what is it about Mexican food that creates such a troublesome atmosphere within us? The answer: it is a complex system of enzymatic chemical reactions which occur when soft, starchy foods meet the digestive acids which naturally pool in our stomachs. Oh man, I can’t write like that. It sounds too much like the regular Playboy writer. I feel so phony and additionally I think people will feel like I am just ripping him off. Why don’t I just try to write in my normal style. I think that is the only long-term solution. Okay, here we go! (and no italics this time.) Look people, if you are going to eat a bunch of Mexican food then you are basically just screwed. You’re gonna blow up like a balloon and feel all disgusting, and you are going to hate yourself. Man, if some jerk-ass friend of yours has a dinner party and makes some cheesy “burrito bar,” just play it cool. Eat a full meal before you go there, so that you aren’t tempted by the hugely gassy foods. This way, you can tuck into a cold Bohemia or Negro Modelo and not worry about it reacting with your dinner, requirin’ all kinds of suspicious private walks on the driveway. What you’ll find at one of these “burrito bar” parties is that the food is so delicious, all salty and filling, that everyone just fats up on the stuff, getting seconds and thirds of the tasty cheeses and beans. They stuff themselves on tortilla chips and tortillas, plus nice Spanish rice. Then there they are, sitting like powder kegs lined across the couch, trying to ask each other to change the channel from C.O.P.S. to the ball game, but they can barely get more than one or two words out at a time because these real acidic tomato sauce flavor hiccup-burps keep punchin’ back on up their throat. And do you know what the flame is, that will ignite the fuse of their esophagus? It is a beer. Man, if you were to take the contents of one of their stomachs after that big dinner, and just pour it in a steel mixing bowl and then pour a nice Mexican beer all over it, you’d get one of those little volcanoes like you made as a kid, all with baking soda and vinegar. Now imagine that happening inside a little bloody balloon, and you’ll know what’s goin’ on with your stomach next time you eat Mexican food. You can see why the stomach is so distressed. Play it cool and just just do some tequila shooters (tequila-salt-lime), maybe dip a chip or two with the hottest salsa they have (hot salsa thins the blood, which is excellent for you). Then you will escape the pain of a terrible Mexican food party. Okay, maybe this wasn’t the best first column a guy could write. I mean, I really wanted this to be about like jet skis, night vision Ray Bans and the double-stitched pebbled leather interior that you can get in the new Hummer. I looked back over this and it’s all just about farting?! Man, I wish I hadn’t signed a year-long contract, goddamn it. Next time I go to negotiate I am definitely not going to get all torched first and then just repeat what anyone says to me right back at them. Until then, Gentlemen, -=Ray=- _*_ May 14, 2003 What Is With Tequila Shooters?! Okay, so in my last column I mentioned sort of as an aside that the right way to do a tequila shooter is to slam the tequila shot, then lick the salt, then bite the lime wedge. Apparently some people think this is not the right way to do it. Man, at first I was all like “who cares, leave me alone” but then I thought maybe I could get five hundred words out of the subject and finish my column for the week, so I grabbed this old bottle of Cuervo I had lyin' around and brought out the limes and salt. The first thing we got to do is figure out why exactly drinking tequila is so complicated that you would need so many outside ingredients. I mean, you can drink beer out of the bottle, and vodka out of the glass, but tequila needs this special fruit-and-gurney operation just to get it past your tastebuds. What's up with that? I asked a friend of mine, Dr. Paul P. Davis of the Larhova General Medical Center, to help explain why exactly tequila requires so much ceremony to be enjoyed properly. At least, I thought Dr. Davis was a friend of mine. He seemed all chummy when I went in there for a bunch of ingrown toenails last summer, but when I called him on the phone just now he totally blew me off! I guess some people just tend to forget who butters their bread. I had even sent the dude the rest of this bottle of Grey Goose that I really liked! Well anyway, I need to have at least some factual information in this column, so I guess I will look on that “Google” for why people need all the salt and limes when they're drinking tequila. Okay, so I looked on Google using search terms of “salt, tequila, limes, why, shooter, reason, help” and all I got was like this real messed-up story about a guy who wanted to lick his own mom's nipples. Is that all that's out there? Should I just give up on the Internet now? It seems like every time I try to use the Internet it's all just this garbage, about a weird sex pervert who has dirty ideas he wishes to express.