Look, it’s not my place to gloat. Firstly, I don’t have all that much to gloat about and secondly it is wildly against my general disposition in regard to how I present myself. I will admit to being prideful; indeed I will admit to holding my ground when pressed on a subject or activity in which I feel any sort of confidence. I will also admit to not pressing myself too heavily to bend my person to make those around me feel better about themselves; those days are over.

That said, it is ridiculously difficult for me not to sound very much like I am gloating in saying my life is just about as awesome as I am prepared to deal with just now.

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Much in the same way a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with what is technically an all beef patty but is in actuality some sort of strange beef-ish distortion of man’s idea of what it is to hate, so too is this website technically a blog. One may argue the value of the chopped, reprocessed and undoubtedly out of date content presented here and I think that one would be wholly justified in doing so. Not only because it is like one to make these sort of well-formed fourth-wall penetrating observations but also because one tends to wear nice clothes, really did knock it out of the park at last week’s meeting and has an almost supernatural ability to make the right decisions in terms of delicate soaps. Here’s to you, one, and your taste in classical music!

It would seem, however, that those bone-dry days of skinnytie.com being just plain outdated are over.

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The Chicago transit system is always packed during my commute. This makes little sense as I don’t commute the same schedule every day and routinely watch trains opposite to my schedule fly by empty as though a great plague has set itself through their hollowed shells.

As luck and some level of statistical improbability would have it, today I happened onto the same train, and – in point of fact – same car as one of my distant co-workers.

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You’re out in the wild, doing your thang thang, and you get the approach. Maybe you’re at a bar and you should expect this, or maybe you’re just on the train on the way to work; you get that doe eyed look from someone you’ve never seen before – or perhaps you’ve met him/her only briefly – and he/she wants to talk.

You do the smalltalk thing, looking over his/her shoulder so as to draw attention to the fact that you are not at all interested, but he/she persists. We all know you; you’re a great person who is normally not like this but in this one nagging moment you desperately need to tell this person to go fuck him/herself with something not at all unlike a small Buick.

You can’t though because of how great you are. You wouldn’t want people to think poorly of you, right? You wouldn’t want the whole world to know you hate people, especially when they are interested in you. Or, perhaps, maybe you are frightened; this person may have the ability to actually kill you if spurned directly. Or perhaps you’re just not interested and don’t want to deal with the big let down just now.

No matter the case, we’ve got you covered. A little bit of creativity, a little bit of programming; Lex and I present to you Coastertoast.com.

The premise is simple: Give out a fake email address (anything@coastertoast.com) and Coastertoast rejects your would be suitor/stalker. Use your own name! Use your friend’s!

Dig it.

Lex and I took in a midnight showing of Transformers: The Movie last Saturday night at the Music Box. It was truly an event beholden of the markedly epic dreams I had as a child of doing things exactly like this when I became an adult.

The idea that I’d be in the theater watching the shit out of this movie again twenty-two years later was something of a super secret wish that occupied the same box as being paid to play with computers, being one of the Ninja Turtles and getting right the hell into Arcee’s pants. I am glad to say that I’ve done it, along with two of the remaining three super secret wishes. If you’re wondering which of two I mean, let me explain to you that I have been into – and currently have no-restriction access to – Arcee’s pants.

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