these are a few of my favorite things…(a sunday farewell sixer)

i SO coulda gotten sappy with this…

…a sunday sixer where i say good-bye to stuff. stuff i’ve loved and lost. with all the crap going on in my personal life this easily coulda degenertated into a self-absorbed, depressing, pity party for one.

fortunately, that ain’t gonna happen.

so here, without further ado, are six things i loved in my life, at least at some point and time, that are apparently no longer with us…

6. cruz real cigars – my third favorite mexican import behind el tesoro tequila and ME. had two i swiped of relatives of the non-girlfriend, second one went up in smoke earlier this week after months ago i googled and found they were no more. i think rocky patel owns the name now, but it’s just not the same…

5. ufc in the theater – alas, all good things must come to an end, and apparently the ufc nights where shane and i spend a COMBINED $25 and get the fite, food, and booze are one of those things. (shane wanted “chuck lidell with a championship belt” to make the list, but i’m not as die-hard a mma guy as he is, even though i like lidell and his sense of humor since he didn’t kick my ass for making fun of his hair at the rock in vegas. never mind all that now…)the lockhart theater got sold to new owners, who don’t do the cheap-ass b.y.o.b. fite nite we came to know and love. found a new home (i think) at sean patrick’s irish pub, where we had a primo table, decent beer prices, cheap-ass wings, and college-aged eye candy. speaking of the latter…

4. peaceful morning workouts – i love me some workouts as s.m.a.c., my old gym stomping ground (san marcos athletic club) and used to enjoy the mornings post-older people rush, pre-lunch professional rush, but those hours (roughly 9:30 to noon) have been filled in most days with college-age kids machine hopping and socializing and scribbling their workouts down in little spiral notebooks ’cause the owner has pimped out the place (meant in the ‘sold it for an hourly rate’ way, not the ‘mtv made it fancy’ way) to the local university for weight lifting class. nice eye candy for the most part (half of the class is short-shorts wearing twenty-something year old girls) but it kinda gets annoying when you KNOW none of ’em are gonna fuck you. of course, they might with the weight starting to drop, but that would’ve been faster in the old days thanks to…

3. ephedra-infused hydroxycut – truth be told, this stuff made me MORE of an asshole than nature already has, which produced some uncool results from time to time. ’caused les and i to fight a bit. but were it not for setting aside half my last bottle of it, i never would have been able to pull the twenty-one hour straight beaumont to miami drive that got alex here. now that i type that, maybe i AM better off without this one, huh? (only kidding alex). trying the new stuff (ephedra free) now.

2. the taco bell frito burrito – not to be confused with “the frito bandito”, beloved mascot of the chip line that was forced into retirement when racial stereotypes that made fun of blacks and latins were no longer considered cool (but native americans and irish ones are still okay, from what i see…)

(the one on the left is more offensive than the one on the right? what the fuck? let’s move on…)

this was a wonderful thing, and long after i knew of any other taco bell carrying this, the one in san marcos still did, it was only a block from sundance records (where i worked at the time) and was under a buck (which when you’re getting paid retail money circa 1998 was a blessing) – it was kinda like a frito pie with the “chili” and “cheese” ingredients being swapped out for the chili-like-substance that taco bell uses as burrito filler along with taco-bell-brand genuine nacho-cheese-flavored cheese food product and REAL fritos all wrapped up in the taco-bell flour “tortilla” (for all who don’t get why that’s in quotes come to texas). healthy? GOD, no. do you know what animal you consumed, if any? GOD, no. but it was still good – at least at the time. would probably wreck my insides nowadays…

…and finally…

1. JUMBO SIZED BOOZE AT CHACHO’S – this broke my heart. for the first month or two after losing work i was still running around with my friend benita, as i had been for the last couple months before losing work. she claimed that no s.a. girls liked to go to chacho’s, herself included. but ME and i used to go there. les and i used to go there. kimberly and i used to go there. hell, EVERY girl i ever ran around with in s.a. liked to go there EXCEPT her. she preferred this hole-in-the-wall strip mall bar a couple blocks from there, so i would be so close, yet so far away. lamenting this to kramer after lunch at southside bar-b-q (the only restaurant in soutside s.a. that’s proud to be salsa-free!) he insisted we do a chacho’s run, and run we did – i practically ran to the counter to order my usual jumbo frozen jack ‘n coke only to be DENIED and told they cut out the “jumbo” size a month or two prior, when i was trying to get benita to go. so, it’s a farewell i missed on that one…the large still has a bit of a kick, but it’s just not the same. do you know how many post-show nights were MADE by that drink? how many whore bits? how much s.a. girl drama? a sad farewell indeed, even if the non-man sized version is still available…

(shane’s nomination for the number one slot was guiness from ireland instead of canada, as most of the bottled guiness in america is canadian rather than irish, but that’s why i switched to smithwick’s)