Mac vs PC

I have a freshly purchased Mac laptop now, so I’m sure my blogs will come across much more pretentious and snide, a la Justin Long in the commercials. ‘Hey, i’m young, slender, and cute — you’re pudgy and old with a suit John Hodgman! You can’t put your hands in your jeans and dryly make fun of people like i can, you dickless nerd! Take that Bill Gates!’

I felt bad retiring my Dell. It was a soldier. I spilled coffee on it, I crumbed on it (let’s say that’s a verb) with asundry foods, and I threw it around more than Ike tossed around Tina. Last month the hinge holding the screen to the cpu snapped. So, instead of staying firmly in place, it would just impotently flop around like Hefner’s junk. Then the plastic casing started peeling and cracking off the keyboard. Finally my Dell gave up. It was like it said ‘Screw you, bitch, I’m not even gonna waste my time and energy looking for a wireless signal if you treat me like such dog shit!’

My first stop at Best Buy was in the back corner, home of the Geek Squad. I marched there morosely with my old Dell, wondering if she could be resusitated by the Geek Squad equivalent of House, M.D. In all seriousness, I was convinced some fat dude with a Harry Potter fetish would wave a wand or roll a 20-sided die and presto, my shit would be as good as new.

After waiting about 45 minutes in the computer service line, I presented my sad little laptop to a faux-hawked ‘Geek.’ When I told him my Dell was about two years old, his whole demeanor changed. He looked at me as if I were presenting him with a butter churn and a musket.

“There’s probably no point in fixing this. Have you thought about getting a new computer?”

“Maybe, do you guys carry Dells?”

Faux-hawks look of pity morphed into unabated disdain. It was as if I had just asked him what sauce is most delicious on fried baby flesh and do they have any in stock.

“Uh… no,” he said, with a wince followed by the smarmiest of smarmy smiles.

Now, I did just get a brand new Capital One credit card. Since this new card promises ‘NO HASSLES!’, I had a completely false and emboldened sense of entitlement and wealth. I felt like the asshole during family Christmas Monopoly with hotels all over Park Place. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sort of looking around for some idiot with a video camera saying ‘You find it and we’ll buy it!’

Alas, the only idiots at the La Brea Best Buy were the ones in the blue shirts.

Then I asked the dreaded question no one should ever, ever ask:

“If I do buy a new laptop, should I make the switch from PC to Mac?”

Enter the box of Pandora.

Nerdo went off about the genius of Mac and the evil of PCs like a Windows Vista operated dingo had snatched his baby.

First off, let me just say the pc vs. mac debate is hilarious because EVERYBODY feels a vehement need to offer their expert judgment. Every tech guy not only has an opinion, but it seems like their entire self-worth and philosophy on life is predicated on this opinion. It’s the nerd equivalent of the Ali vs. Tyson argument in sports.

It seems in these debates, no one really cares about what you want or need; they just want you to be aware that they’ve been in the trenches with serious gigabytes and RAM orgies and virus armageddons and lemme tell you what the real scoop is the great unwashed consumer!

Apropos to the current Apple commercials, I couldn’t help but notice that the flavor of the rhetoric rings very similar to the Barack Obama versus John McCain dialectics from last year. Obama is a Mac — hip, young, in touch with the hopes, dreams, and style of today’s youth. Mccain is the pc — archaic, contradictory, trying desperately to hold on to the glory of the 70’s and 80’s… and with saggy balls.

Like Obama, Mac seems to have won the popular vote, with a view stodgy holdouts insisting that it’s all hype and going apoplectic about the mac like it’s a kid on their lawn. ‘Macs are a waste of money. They’re not nearly as strong as a pc. Viruses? To Hell with viruses! When i was a kid, my computer had more viruses than a Bangkok hooker after Labor Day!’

I freed myself from Faux-hawk finally and found other blue-shirted sales rep to help me make a more informed decision. But they were all, seemingly, in sync with the masses:

‘No question, the mac man… (snicker, head nod)… it’s amazing… it’s the change this country has been looking for… (smirk)… if you get a PC you don’t care about black people.’

I love black people, so I bought the Mac. A 13 inch Macbook Pro. I used a Capitalone No Hassles Gold Card that I plan to pay off in 2012, shortly after the Mayan calender ends and the world implodes.

Upon purchasing the Mac, I went from feeling douche-y to feel that I was better than everybody else that had a PC. It was a quick invasion of the body snatchers transformation. I drank the punch, and it had pretty icons and a webcam.

I returned to the Geek Squad to get my data transferred from the amish butter churning device known as a Dell into my Mac. They said it would take 3 hours, but when I returned 8 hours later, it hadn’t budged.

So I found a little asian girl named Jenn and I started ranting and raving about how I was lied to and I need my computer to do research (translation: to google myself).

She was really sweet and listened to my little bitch rant politely and told me she would personally take care of it herself. My heart rate slowed, I apologized, my pupils went back to normal size, and then I noticed that this Japanese geek was smoking hot. I also, vaguely, remembered that I was single now and that single people are allowed to flirt and pick up.

“So I went with the Mac. Good call?”

“You know what they say: once you go Mac, you never go back.”

She grinned with good teeth and smiling Japanese anime eyes. Wow, she was smoking. Maybe the Mac WAS the right call — even hot asians love it!

“I should get your number in case I have any problems with it, huh?” I said. I couldn’t help but third-eye notice that my pick up ability was about as subtle as a meat cleaver to the cranium.

“Sure,” she said. “Call me if you have questions about the Mac.” She scribbled her name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to me with my freshly loaded laptop.

“I’ll be honest, I’m gonna call. But not about the Mac.”

“I know,” she said with a coquettish smile.

I had no rebuttal other than a silent blush, so I grabbed my new Mac, my dead Dell, and I went to the parking lot, thinking about my American computer and my Japanese future ex-girlfriend.

When I got home, I still had the computer but had somehow, with the magic of ADD and absent-mindedness, lost Japanese Jenn’s number.

I tried to see if I could look her up online and that’s when I found out the truth: my internet was down. The Dell was fine, someone had just accidentally unplugged my modem.

Oh well, I can always return the Mac to Best Buy. At least that would give me an excuse to find Jenn’s number again…

MAKING A MESS IN THE SWAMP

So the movie I’ve been touring with I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL opens on September 25th at a theatre probably nearish you and I hope you come see it.

At the end of 6 weeks of being on a tour, I’ve been thinking “What Would Doogie Write?” Or what would the narrator at the end of “The Wonder Years” say. Or even what would Sarah Jessica Horseface clickety clack at the end of a “Sex and the City” episode.

Frankly, I am not sure if I learned anything or grew or matured in the slightest on this tour. If anything, I may have regressed emotionally and mentally. I pretty much went out and drank every night instead of going back to the hotel on the tour bus. After each show, I”d meet a group of guys and girls (okay, usually girls to be honest) and say “Take me out on the town; just make sure I get back to this address.” Then I would hand them a day sheet with the address of our shitty, way-out-of-the-way hotel. Since most of the shows were in the south and the Midwest, people were usually pretty accommodating and happy to be hanging out with Tucker’s proxy.

My first out-of-body experience happened in a bar in Gainesville, Florida. Crowded. Every guy was like 6″2′, backwards baseball caps. The wet tile floor suffused a smell so distinct, that fraternity rush week witches brew of day-old draft beer, sneaker grit, sweat, and the smallest waft of yesterday’s vomit. I sniffed in the Proustian wave of my undergraduate Saturdays, when I was still wide-eyed and convinced I might be a functional and contributing member of society. Ahhhh college.

Some Belushi-esque guy came over with shots and handed me my very own pitcher of the pisswater they had on tap. The shot went down - Jaeger bomb — and all I could think was how malicious shots have been getting now that extreme caffeine is part of the equation. What a chemical cocktease that is: ‘I need to sleep…I must fight!… I wanna watch TV…I’m gonna paint my apartment.’ Dealing with women’s mood swings in my generation is bad enough; I can’t imagine what these kids have to adapt to with confused college girls who have a WWIII of Red Bull, hard liquor, estrogen, and molestation memories being waged through their frantic neurons.

Now, I was aware the shot and the petrie dish of college “draft” beer wasn’t a good idea, but since the breakup of my relationship with my girlfriend, I decided to become a yes man and just say “yes” to whatever was offered me. So, I sat down on a wet stool and put the v of the pitcher to my lips. Mmmm, tepid and tasteless, the same flavor I remember from my collegiate experience.

I looked outside and there was a tall girl, about 6″1′, trying to get my attention. I wasn’t finished with my pitcher so I can’t say she was “cute,” nor could I understand what she wanted with me. That’s when I saw her look behind me to Tucker Max, who, per usual, was being bombarded by a bunch of guys who insist “Dude, I’m just like Tucker Max” or “That book is my Bible” or whatever sycophantic bullshit it is that makes them feel like they have the right to surround him like a prologue to prison gay porn. One woman put it best: “Tucker is like a mall Santa. They all want a turn on his lap and they all come up to him with their hopes and dreams…and questions about whether or not he’s the real deal.”

I knew Tucker would probably want to part the sea of Douchebags for a leggy blonde, so I called over to him.

‘Hey Tucker, this girl wants your attention,’ I said.

‘Sweetie, I can’t get you in if you”re under 21,’ he said with a shrug.

Something I had heard earlier struck me suddenly. Tucker is a huge college football fan and bleeds Kentucky blue. And, like all Ketuckians and most NCAAF fans, hates the Florida Gators and wishes Tim Tebow would get caught in a public bathroom gay sex scandal already.

‘Dude, go fuck her on the football field,’ I said.

Almost as if he was in the wings of a Broadway show and this was his big cue, Tucker instantaneously exited the bar to the giggly delight of the leggy blonde and the confused consternation of the Affliction tee-shirt wearing wannabes.

I drank my pitcher and had a bizarre conversation with a grad student with a rose tattoo on her left breast who kept dropping her thesis title on me. She was getting drunk Gecko eyes and I knew it was close to time for me to go back to hotel Sportscenter.

About 30 minutes later, Tucker came back with the girl. The illegal break-in into the football stadium and subsequent consummation of their love for each other in the world famous “Swamp” was announced, and high fives broke out faster than herpes 2 at a state school in Arizona. Word spread throughout the bar and the high-five fission reaction continued.

The music changed and DAVE MATTHEWS came on the corner jukebox. The dregs on my pitcher was all that remained.

I paused for a second and thought about it. Was I the biggest overgrown loser on the planet and should feel guilty…or was I being given the rarest of rare chances - the opportunity for a “DO OVER.” College again but knowing what I know now? I”ve fantasized hundreds of times about “If I could go back….”

Suddenly, I didn’t feel so bad. Suddenly the grad student with the environmental thesis and faded ink on her tit seemed slightly more interesting. And suddenly, I wanted a Jaeger Bomb….

The I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL tour bus is more than halfway done. We’ve been as south as Gainesville and as north as Toronto. One thing I learned is that DOUCHEBAG isn’t latitudinally contingent. You’d think the type of audience for the movie and the level of discourse would elevate commensurate with the slide up the longitude ring, but you’d be wrong. The exact same type of idiot in the south is up north, just with slightly rounder vowels and more gold chains. Some of the fans of Tucker Max get really belligerent and, for lack of a better word, headlocky. When guys want to exert their special form of ‘I just had my first beer’ male bonding, sometimes it’s okay, but sometimes… you’re in Boston, where the douche degree gets turned to 11. Due to legal constraints regarding the events of the tour, I’m not allowed to say what happened in Beantown, but I CAN say that it is not untrue that possibly someone didn’t not get choked out by a producer of the movie in a location not unlike outside an alleged movie theatre… you get the point.

Despite some fancy Brazilian jiu jitsu moves, at this point in the tour it’s almost impossible to pick an interesting story or event that hasn’t been covered by Tucker Max and posted on www.ihopetheyservebeerinhell.com. One of the refreshing/terrifying things about touring with Tucker is his brutal honesty amalgamated with an I could give a rat’s ass what you think mentality. This makes him almost impossible to embarrass or one up. It doesn’t stop me from trying.

For example, during a recent screening of the film in Minneapolis, I was hanging out in the back of the tour bus, which is always parked directly outside the movie theatre when the film is rolling. I was brainstorming with the ‘vidiots,’ the two videographers who have the unenviable task of making me look as funny and as un-douche-y as possible in 2-3 minute montages of man on the street mayhem http://www.youtube.com/beerinhell.

The vidiots and I had dealt with protesters before the premiere that day and we were going over the video tapes of the protest. Well, it wasn’t really a protest – it was two spindly almost virgins with comic con tees, unfortunate grooming techniques, and a blind self-righteousness that could only exist in college freshman and on Fox news (okay, Republicans, Michael Moore too).

For the uninformed, there has been a small group of men and women who have upgraded Tucker Max, the writer of I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL, from sexist to rapist. Apparently – and it’s a good thing I didn’t know this in college when I was drinking straight from the tap and trying to hump anything with a bracelet – have sex while drunk is rape… or something.

More specifically, these die-hard protesters contend that Tucker, who goes out drinking and hooks up with women who ALSO go out drinking, is a rapist because a woman cannot consent to sex if she’s had (sic) a ‘few drinks.’ Tada!

Um, I think the calculus on that is woman + 3 jager bombs + Tucker Max = RAPE!

Thusly, according to these protesters (we got them in Raleigh, Boston, and Minneapolis), making sweet, sweet love to a drunken slut is always, and in every way, rape. I’m going to have to tell my dad to stop hooking up with mom.

Jokes aside, therein lies a slippery slope of consent. There’s no instance in the book where a girl resists Tucker and he roofies her or shoves a beer pong tube into her trachea or does some Criss Angel sleight-of-hand and presto is inside her bewildered vagina. It’s typical relatable stuff: going out to bars, getting hammered, making dubious choices, and waking up wondering why you made dubious choices. There’s a name for that cycle: college.

Daniel Tosh, one of my favorite comics, has this joke: “If no meant no, none of us would be here. No means work the nipples and neck and try again in 5 minutes.” Of course, 20 thousands comic could make similar jokes and saucier jokes about rape or consent and there would never be a picket line. Why Tucker? Because these kids look up to him as their idol and something about the written word gives it some sort of biblical gravitas to these whales with whistles, I mean protesters.

Which leads me to this: while debating this very serious subject and how best to portray Tucker as non-rape-y as possible, we hear a knock on the door to the editing bay in the back of the tour bus. It’s Tucker with an incredibly attractive girl – blue eyes, auburn hair, cherry lips, and a low slung floral print shirt dancing coquettishly over small breasts.

“Hey guys, go up front,” Tucker says. We look at each other, clueless as to what’s going on. For a second, I think Tucker wants to show his friend the editing bay. As I get up to leave like an automaton, it dawns on me. Duh.

We three head up front and sit in the common area, slightly dumbfounded. Finally, I manage a sentence.

“So, like, Tucker is fucking that girl or something back there?”

Nils Parker, Tucker’s co-writer, co-producer and best friend, looks up from his laptop computer and shrugs as if to say ‘Yeah, and it’s Tuesday, so what?’

15 minutes later, the nice lady opens the door from the editing bay and does the mini walk of shame out of the bus and into the theatre. Well, she didn’t look ashamed; she looked like the cat that ate the canary.

“Um, Tucker, is there a part of the editing bay back there I should avoid?” Greg, one of the vidiots, offers.

“No, it’s okay, I finished in her mouth.” Again. Like it’s Tuesday.

An hour later, during the question and answer period, I decide to embarrass Tucker in front of 300 plus people. A soldier from Afghanistan is telling Tucker how big a fan he is and how much his wife is a fan as well. He contends that he flew 8500 miles JUST to see the premiere in Minnesota.

As the MC of the event, I grab the microphone : “Wow, you flew that far to see Tucker? If you were a really, really big fan, you’d let your wife blow Tucker on the tour bus.”

Immediately, I wheel the mike to face the blue-eyed nob slobberer from earlier: “What’s it like blowing Tucker on the bus, ma’am? Would you recommend it?”

The audience erupted. How embarrassing for her and Tucker! I am a master…. Until:

“I highly recommend it,” she says.

And he says “Wait, what’s her name came back into the movie theatre after? I didn’t know that.

Huh, okay, next question?”

Tuesday.

I stand there with the microphone defeated. Tucker is frankly out of my league.

Tour Week One – Spit in my mouth for a beer pong kit

I’ve just finished a full week on the I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL tour bus.   It’s like any other band tour bus but instead of gigging at each city, we are showing a sneak preview of the film, which opens September 25th.    This method of rolling a film is, to say the least, unorthodox, and right now Hollywood could give a shit about the cross country shenanigans of writers, producers, gophers, and ONE comic on a pimped out tour bus that sleeps 12.  It’s like John McCain’s ‘Straight Talk Express’ tour bus if, instead of preaching fiscal conservatism, John McCain was extolling the virtues of drunken debauchery and midget fucking.   And if this grassroots method galvanizes an audience for the film, it just might shake some things up.

We started out in Atlanta and then picked off the following cities on consecutive nights:   Athens, GA, Tallahassee and Gainesville, FL; Columbia, SC; Raleigh, NC; Blacksburg, VA; and Washington, DC.  Most recently we premiered at State College, the home of Penn State University, the Nittany Lions, and their 82 year old football coach Joe Paterno — the cutest codger to ever crap in his khakis on national television (Google it).

The tour bus itself hasn’t really been home to much insanity.  For a movie called ‘I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL,’ you would expect a modern day Fellini film – strippers, stoned sorostitutes, Hitler midgets, freaks, and omnipresent tour bus bj’s.  Instead, when you enter into the subdued fall colors of the pristine and fairly new interior, you will see writer/producers Tucker Max and Nils Parker working away on their computers, the vidiots cutting and uploading videos (http://www.youtube.com/beerinhell), and most everyone else sleeping in their sarcophagus-like bunks like vampires on the go.  Granted, many of the people on the tour are in a constant cycle of inebriation/recovery from inebriation, but even then it’s usually more of a quiet dad-in-his-favorite-recliner-bourbon-drunk than overgrown college kids trying to pretend it’s rush week at a state school.

Outside of the tour bus is a slightly different story:  sycophantic fans of Tucker Max and his runaway best-selling book hang around desperately like some weird post-modern inversion of the hippie character.  Instead of dreads and hemp shirts, they wear baseball caps – brims pointing semi-sideways, k-Fed style (like a compass pointing to Doucheville)—and Affliction t-shirts.   The Affliction?  Douchebaggery, I’m sure.

Juxtaposed with the beer ponging meatheads are the lonely dudes unable to get laid looking for a hero.   Some of the lines winding around campus blocks are proof positive that you don’t need to have a Muslim God and blow yourself up in order to see 72 virgins.

On the flip side of this are the women.   You would think that men would make up the majority of fans but, apparently, more women have been sexually molested at a young age than I previously imagined.  Women make up about half of the people lining up for each screening.  Beyond that, there is a baffling amount of beautiful, barely legal co-eds vying for a chance to sleep with Tucker Max at every stop.  Many of them, believe it or not, are virgins (for proof, again check out the youtube videos).

Mind you, my wonderment is meant in no way to disrespect Tucker – he’s an attractive and hyper-intelligent guy.  But the fact that nubile 18 year olds wanna relinquish their maidenhood to a guy who only knows how many women he slept with “plus or minus a hundred women” is something that will always be hard for me to absorb into my cerebral folds.  If I had know how sexually obsessive and aggressive women were when I was in my teens, I probably would have had a much more fertile adolescence.

And if I had known that fame made young women horny, I would have applied myself more in school.   I had experienced (to a much slighter degree) the Spanish Fly effects of fame while touring with Jamie Kennedy for 4 years, but it was nothing like this.  With Jamie, it was like ‘Why the fuck?’  With Tucker, it’s more like ‘What the fuck?!!!’

Apparently, the amount of attractiveness a man has to the opposite sex isn’t equal to fame plus asshole, it’s the multiplicative product of fame and asshole, if not fame to the asshole power.

On our very first stop, women were literally fighting to get into the minivan back to the Hampton Inn to sleep with Tucker.   Actual dialogue:  “How come that ugly girl gets to go home with him!”   “F*ck you, bitch!”  Something got thrown, some hair got pulled.   Like Jerry Springer, but these ho’s actually graduated high school.

Of course, it’s not just the women.  This underground swell of Tuckermania is worse with the guys.  In Atlanta, when I arrived to do pre-show interviews with my shotgun mic and videographer Greg, I was blown away to see a nerdy, pimply-faced guitar hero waiting outside the movie theatre at 4 o’clock – three hours before the 7pm screening.  His name was Adam.

“Hey Adam, how big a Tucker Max fan are you?”

“Dude, I’m…. like…. You have no idea….I’ll do anything!”

“Really?  How about you take that cigarette you’re smoking and burn a Breakfast Club scar into your forearm?”

Without the slightest of hesitation, the shaggy-headed high school senior reared the Marlboro back to grind it into his supinated arm.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?  I was kidding!”  I said as I grabbed his wrist an inch before the burning butt hit its mark.

I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the irony of the virginal fans juxtaposed next to one of the most prolific lotharios I’ve ever met.  Clearly, these kids needed a hero, and fictional characters in Narnia weren’t doing the trick anymore.   I wanted to call his mom and ask her why she didn’t love Adam more.

Clearly, I was entering into a different kind of fan base – the type of fans who truly represent ‘fanatics.’  It seemed I had only heard stories about these types from band legends.  I was soon to learn that fans like this not only exist, they exist in pretty much every city in America – dyed in the wool, desperate and searching, these people will do anything.

My videographer serves, in a way, as the devil on my shoulder.  Safely behind his large HD camera, he whispers evil things to do, and many of those things involve dares for the hardcore fans.  Every time he offers a new suggestion, I wince… but then I follow through, like his personal puppet.

“Hey ma’am, your friends here say you’re the female Tucker Max,”  I said.

“I’m worse!” she proudly beamed.

“Prove it:  there’s a 300 pound redneck chawing on a can of Skoal.  If you were such a huge fan, you would let him drool some dip directly into your mouth.”

Of course, in these moments where the rubber meets the road, I expect everyone to balk.  But here’s why I have little faith in the future of America:  little do.   Her three friends screamed ‘Nooooo, don’t do it!’ but she, Katy, looked at me with searching, slightly sad, eyes.  I felt compassion.

“Um, I’ll give you a free beer pong kit,” I said.  I have no idea what exactly is in a beer pong kit, but as I’ve been learning, the 18-24 demographic will do lots of dumb shit for it.

“Ok,” she demurred in spite of her friends’ accelerated and pitchier pleadings.

As we walked to find the drooling Dog the Bounty Hunter, she shuffled close to my shoulder and asked, “Would you do it?”

“No way, I’m not retarded,” I said.  It was the most honest reply I could muster.

We introduced Dipper to Katy, like it was some perverted eharmony commercial – two souls that would be forever entwined virally  — by the internet and hopefully not Herpes Simplex 1.  Katy, like a true fanatic, followed orders and lay on her back with her lips parted, gullet awaiting.
The Dipper lumbered down onto his knees and let gravity guide a slow stream of tobacco, saliva, and sadness into Katy’s mouth.   She spit and choked and the line of 320 people cheered and screamed.   It’s possible that in conducting this grotesquerie that a part of my soul died.  I couldn’t really tell because I was too busy laughing.

Little did I know, it was all about to get crazier….