No, not the Johnny Travolta / Vinnie Vaughn movie-- I'm talking about reality here. You see, I just spent the better part of a week at home with my family. Now, being that I'm largely a domestic homebody and the Thanksgiving holdiay involves copious amounts of eating, you'd think this would go off without a hitch. However, there was one thing I didn't foresee: Yoosuk.

Yoosuk, of course, being the best friend who's previous girlfriend I wrote about in the previous post. As far as women goes, Yoosuk is pretty much my hero. In fact, as far as most things go, Yoosuk is pretty much my hero. You know, my role model. I always wish I could be like Yoosuk, be as erratic and fun-loving (hell, fun-having) as Yoosuk. And he has taken and does take every opportunity to take me by the hand (in a non-homo way) and drag me along with him into his madness. Kind of like Phinneas from A Seperate Peace, only without that war or the tree. Or the wheelchair. I think there was a wheelchair.

Anyway, one thing that Yoosuk has that I don't really envy is his ability to warp reality so that the opposite of the desired reality comes to bear. Consider the following historical example: On "Big" Stephen Proud's 21st birthday, Steve, Yoosuk, and I decided to load into Steve's Ford Escort and drive to X-Site, a laser tag place, and then hit up the bowling alley. Steve had gotten in once accident in this car-- on the day he bought it, a car rear-ended him not long after he left the dealership. That day, Steve bought a pair of lucky Fuzzy Dice to ward off any futher problems, and, until Yoosuk came into the picture, it worked. It was raining when we left the X-Site parking lot, and I noticed the dice and thought I would be a good time to tell Yoosuk about their powers. "And after he got those dice, he has never had another accident,' I said. BAM! We plowed through an intersection and T-boned the hell out of a Niessan Altima, which crumpled like the proverbial Lois Lane wet tissue paper example. After the accident, we did go bowling, incidentally.

Flash forward to Thanksgiving break. My sister's friend had inadvertantly exploded a can of golden spray paint in my house and then grasped it screaming and ran around while it emptied out. So natuarally, my parents were a little, um, on edge, when my friends (including Yoosuk) arrived for some darts and drinking that evening. As per a specific request from my father, we were going to take extra special care not to make any noise, not to make any mess, and most importantly, not do any irreprable damage. Should have known better. Because at 4 AM, just before he was about to leave and I was going to have made good on my promise, Yoosuk does a handstand to demonstrate his handstand skills, and of course, breaks a lamp.

In over 4 years of hanging out at my house, we have never broken anything. We made a smell that hung around for awhile, but we never caused any havoc that couldn't be repaired by opening a window. Then on the one day when it is of utmost importance that we don't break anything, a lamp gets broken. A $130 lamp no less, although I gotta belive that the value of this lamp had depreciated somewhat over the last 11 years.

So, with that in mind, I say this: Yoosuk, if you are reading this, under absolutely no circumstances should you ever win the lottery and then decide to give me a sizeable portion of your winnings. Never, you hear me? Never.

It worked! It actually worked. In the hours before the release of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, I was pacing around. "How am I gonna get my hands on a Playstation 2?" No one would loan me one, and I surely couldn't afford to buy one. Then I remembered the words of some budget filmmaker. Kevin Smith or someone. "Buy your cameras on credit card, then return them when you're done." Hey, I thought, I have a credit card.

So I did some research. Gaming stores have draconian return policies designed to prevent people from doing what I wanted to do... try the product without fear of having to own it and its steep price tag. But I remembered from my days as a Wal-Mart stockman that Wal-Mart is really fair to customers with regards to returns. So I went there and dropped $351 on the system and a memory card. Step one.

Step two was actually getting the game. So I went and stood in line with cultural observer Tistofer Tickleson at the Software, Etc store in the College Mall. I had really wanted to buy the game from Electronics Boutique, which has been my release-day software source since the Street Fighter II: Turbo Edition was released on the SNES. What can I say, even though companies have proven time and time again that they want brand loyalty to be a one-way street and that they will abandon their customers and employees whenever it behooves them, I still believe in loyalty, probably because I'm brainwashed. So I did want to buy from EB, but the Bloomington store is staffed by the least knowledgeable employees that I have ever encountered. Previously, I had gone to the same store to find a copy of bleem! for Dreamcast, Metal Gear Solid edition. So I asked the worker if they had it. "Uh... no." he said not even looking up from counting the money in his drawer. Greed, I tell you, prevented him from providing customer service. And the sad thing is that since EB is the only store in America that carried bleem! for Dreamcast, I had to hunt around the store on my own to find the product and still buy it.

But I digress. The important thing is that I waiting in line to buy this game. It was the first time I waited in line for a game since Legend of Zelda: Ocrarina of Time was released in, uh, 1999 or something. It had been awhile. You know, I don't know exactly how I feel about this whole idea. The fact that the culture molds me to the point where I feel like I need to consume these products on the day they are released, yet also put such an economic premium on that consumption that it makes it difficult for me to do. It's just not right, I think. Granted, I am anti-greed and pro-freedom of information, but I've always been told that with great power comes great responsibility. And I think that when you wield power over your fans, such as you have a group of people who will line up to buy your game, see your movie, read your comic, etc, you have a great responisbility to make sure that this material is available to those fans without being excessively costly. As close to production cost as possible, with just enough of an incentive to keep the next installment or whatever being made.

But I digress again. Step two was get the game. This proved to be of minor difficulty because the managerial entity of Software, Etc insisted that I also buy a stupid stragety guide with the game, otherwise he wouldn't sell it to me. His reason? His district manager wants him to do that. "You know what, cheif, you are a tool. Why in the hell," I wanted to ask him but am ultimately too timid to actually do so, "do you care what your district manager wants? You're a person, not a job." And then I had to jump through a number of hoops in order to return the book to another store, the third store I tried, incidentally, because the retail world seems to be populated with people who mysteriously, take their retail jobs seriously. Now, brace yourselves, because I'm going to say something very important. I'm going to put it in bold type. No retail job is worth taking seriously. Your existence is just to serve as a cog in a money-making machine. Especially worthless are jobs at the wage-earning, customer-interaction level. So please, people, wake up and smell the pointlessness of your position and the lack of value that your employers actually place on your and toss that lack of value right back at them. You'll probably end up being promoted, incidentally.

Step three was beat the game. I did that, and the review of the game will be seperate, incase any of you find my musings on capitalism to be interesting but my review of video games to boring. So, we'll skip ahead to step four: return the Playstation 2. Needless to say, I was nervous about this. But man, I'm patting myself on the back. Sony puts this seal on the box, theoritically to prevent people from opening the box and passing it off as unopened. I carefully cut this seal to open it and carefuly used tape to seal it up again. Here comes the beautiful part. When I took my box with taped seal back to the return counter, the woman violently tore the seal open in order to see into the box. EVIDENCE DESTROYED! I was so excited that my return had gone off without a hitch that I in advertantly left my empty Wal-Mart sack right on the floor in front of the return counter.

So I went to my second Dave Deglick kegger. Dave throws the best parties of any that I've been to in B-town, which is admittedly not a lot.

I met a number of interesting people at this party. First of all, the girl who took my money, Stacy, was extremely hot-looking. That's about all there is to this part of the story, although I will say somewhat cryptically that I tried to phone her ass but inadvertantly called a Karen. Also, Stacy and her boyfriend seemed to have a little spat, which I hope I did not cause when I mentioned the ass-phoning incident to him on the porch and, not knowing that his girlfriend was Stacy, asked if he wanted me to "run intereference" on his girlfriend so he could go for Stacy.

I also met a gentlemen named DJ Somethingorother. He's a big guy, a wrestler. Only drank water. He's training for the Olympics, eventually. I told him I was mostly interested in pro-wrestling, but I try to keep an eye out on the amatuer circuit because a lot of those guys end up in the WWF. I asked him if he had any interest in "going pro." He said that was his goal. I remarked that a lot of amatuer guys have a real snooty attitude about pro-wrestling, but DJ said that for him its a matter of getting paid. He said if he does well in the Olympics, he can expect to make a million dollars in endorsements. In the WWF, with that same reputation as an Olympic medalist, he can probably start at about a million-a-year.

The most notable thing of the night, though, came when I gave a cigarette to this guy, didn't know who he was. As we smoked our cigarettes outside in the cold, we got to talking. His name was Josh and he was traveling across America on his way to Nashville to be a country singer. He started in California, where he's from. He hauled some horses to Texas for $500, bought some things he needed and used the rest to fly to Alaska, where he landed with $46 to his name. Eventually, he made is way to Indiana, to the apartment next to Dave's which belonged to a friend of his from high school.

Eventually, Josh sang Dave and I an unaccompanied song. It was beautiful. Later, as the crowd grew on the porch, he sang a song he'd written back in high school, an irreverent country number called "Tap that Ass." Finally, as the crowd died back down to just me and Missy, he sang another really beautiful song about a girl that he loves in Wyoming -- a lament that although his calling is on the road, his heart is in the "green state of Wyoming." Later Josh and I talked, and he said he can go all over the country and sing to all sorts of people, but he can never sing to that girl in Wyoming or to his son back in California that he's never met and never will. In the end, I gave Josh my pack of cigarettes in return for the song. He thanked me kindly, gave me one cigarette back and told me to put it behind my ear, which I did and said goodbye to my cowboy friend.