http://endhits.portlandmercury.com/endhits/archives/2008/07/20/win-tickets-to-the-hold-steady Comments On: Win Tickets to the Hold Steady!!! by Ezra Caraeff en-us Copyright 2009 Portland Mercury. All rights reserved. This RSS file is offered to individuals, Portland Mercury readers, and non-commercial organizations only. Any commercial websites wishing to use this RSS file, please contact Portland Mercury. webmaster@portlandmercury.com (Portland Mercury Webmaster) Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:01 -0800 Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:00:00 -0800 Foundation http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Posted by jake]]> Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:31:57 -0700 Portland Mercury
I was waiting to get confirmation from both authors before announcing the winners: Pat and Fathertorque. It was close and came down to one final vote.

Keep reading Jake, we're sure to have more "wet fart" contests coming soon. Thanks!!
Posted by ezra]]> Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:54:45 -0700 Portland Mercury Posted by jake]]> Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:34:57 -0700 Portland Mercury Posted by jake]]> Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:03:10 -0700 Portland Mercury
I mostly walked around campus taking swigs from the bottle, sharing a bit with friends here and there. I sat around in the campus center, trading shots for scraps of food that people would donate to me. (I had liquor, but no money for food, of course.)

As the afternoon turned into night, I went over to a friend's dorm to see if he'd hang out. I tried biking there down the dirt road on campus (a mistake) and crashed into a parked car. I walked the rest of the way... Eventually I got there, and he let me hang out for awhile. I sat around in his nice la-z boy chair, took off my pants, and was informed later, had my penis hanging out of my boxers. I have no recollection of this, nor most of the rest of the evening. Apparently, I got hungry, and without money or a nearby restaurant, I dug around in the refrigerator at my friend's dorm. I found a few eggs and a raw chicken. I cracked the eggs and drank the yolk and white. The raw chicken got nibbled on a bit. Soon, though, I puked that all up.

I was starting to form a bit of a crowd of slightly annoyed, slightly curious onlookers. Apparently, I ran around the dorm, forcing my way into peoples' rooms, hanging out for awhile, and then leaving, after pocketing pencils and pens and other small items that looked nice to me at the time.

Soon, I had to piss pretty bad. I guess the bathroom was in use, and I didn't feel like waiting or something, because I climbed up onto the pingpong room/balcony over the kitchen, and pissed off the ledge onto the kitchen floor. I don't remember this but have been told by several people. After that I guess I was forced out of the dorm by some of its inhabitants, so I went back to my own dorm, a few hundred yards away. I think I blacked out on the way there, but I'm not sure... Anyway, it seemed really late to me, but who knows? I started drinking early enough so that it could easily have been before 11pm. I went into what I thought was my dorm room, and passed out on the bed. I woke up a little later to what was an angry tenant, forcing me out of his bed and directing me to my own, where I stayed for the rest of the night and the next day too...

If she says we partied, then I'm pretty sure we partied. I really don't remember...
Posted by 40ozpabst]]> Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:36:58 -0700 Portland Mercury
My 21st birthday was bound to be noneventful, because I was in the middle of study abroad in Cameroon (Central Africa) where there is no drinking age, but it ended up a bigger let down than I ever could have imagined.

I had malaria on my 21st birthday. I spent the day puking, but for all the wrong reasons. Instead of going out to celebrate, I lay in bed, aching and sweating, and worrying that my 21st birthday would be my last.
Posted by EJ_EJ_EJ]]> Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:20:24 -0700 Portland Mercury
If you aren't familiar, the Manhattan is 100% alcohol. Having majored in college in binge drinking, my naive 23yo self thought - "What could be better? All alcohol!"

The party started at 6 pm. The last thing I remember was talking to a cute girl I had a crush on at 8 pm.

Fast-forward to my next memory: me standing on the corner of 34th Street and Broadway, stunned at how I got here, checking my pockets and bag to make sure I didn't leave my wallet or my keys or any important pieces of clothing at the party. Somehow, they were all still there. I called my friend, who I was supposed to meet up with after my party.

"What time is it?" I asked her first.
"10:30."
"Uh-oh."
"What?"
"I think I blacked out for about two hours, and I just woke up here on 34th street."
"Well, that's odd. Because you've been calling me every twenty minutes for the past hour. You'll say -- meet me here, and I went there. And you were gone."
I uttered apologies and asked for another chance to meet up, promising that I would show up this time.

The next morning, I was sure to get in early -- I didn't want anyone to think I was hungover! After diligently working for about an hour, I hear a pair of giggles behind my cube. I turn around to see two delighted coworkers.

"How are YOU doing?" they asked in unison, and I knew this wasn't going to be good.

"Uh, fine, fine, did you have fun last night?"

"Yeeeeeeees. Did YOU have fun last night?"

"Um, yeah. Ok, what did I do?"

They proceeded to tell me that first, I led the dance floor in an electric slide. What it lacked in technical merit, I apparently made up for with flailing enthusiasm. And then, after wowing the crowd with my performance, I eagerly ambled up to the buffet table, letting the suits soak in the glamour of a true office Star. All the higher ups left at the party were less than ten feet away when I crashed into the buffet table, throwing stuffed mushrooms and carrots into the air.

The girls couldn't stop laughing as they told there tale; I put my head between my hands and wondered when I would get the call that would put me on probation, or fire me, or humiliate me in a way I had not yet imagined.

But the real punishment was that no call ever came. Instead, for the next six years that I worked in the office, I eyed everyone I passed in the hall with suspicion: were they there when I played the drunken fool? Did I spill any ranch dressing on their suit or cocktail dress? Are they still laughing at me under their breath? But the question I'll never know the answer to is: How did I manage to walk 20 blocks through Manhattan, blacked-out drunk, without being run over?

To this day, I am somehow still alive and still work at the same company (though now I telecommute from the PDX). I have not, however, dared to have another Manhattan.
Posted by Pat]]> Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:50:23 -0700 Portland Mercury
It was my best friend's wedding. He married a girl from college and they decided to get hitched in her hometown of St. Louis. I was a groomsman, and we all stayed at a swanky downtown hotel. After the reception and much drinking, me and the other groomsmen and decided it would be a brilliant idea to hit the pool on the top floor. Trouble was, the door to the pool was locked.

No problem. Since the door was a giant pane of glass, we handily smashed it with a fire extinguisher and marched on in.

No alarms. No bells, no flashing lights. No problem. We were starting to get comfortable, when a security guard sprinted past the other side of the swimming pool, and ran down a stairwell.

Holy shit. He didn't see us?

The guard slowly came creeping back. He saw us, all right. And quickly called the cops. Before I knew what was happening, we were all handcuffed together and on our way downtown.

I won't go into too much detail about being in the St Louis jail--I don't remember much, but it wasn't pretty, and we were the only non-crackheads in the joint--but the worst part was not knowing anybody in town to call for bail.

As it turned out, the father of the bride--a man I'd never met before--had to bail us out, but the most humiliating part was vomiting in the holding cell toilet, with each wrist cuffed to a different groomsmen.
Posted by jailbird]]> Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:55:28 -0700 Portland Mercury
One night at the hostel bar I met up with a few Germans and ended up out drinking til 7am. One otherwise-friendly local insisted that I admonish all American beer as shite, but somewhere in between the persecution he mentioned a 500-year-old monastery/brewery called Kloster Andechs a little ways outside town. Next day I looked it up in my library travel guide, which claimed it to have the best beer in Germany (akin to the laziest man in Los Angeles county theory).

A few days later I did some daytime sightseeing, then set off to Kloster Andechs in the early-evening. This meant taking a 40 min train ride from Munich to a small rural town at the end of the line, then a 20-30 min bus ride to the monastery. When I reached it (around 6pm), I found out between the bus driver's poor English and my worse German that I was on the last bus of the night and would have to take a cab back.

Fast forward several liters of sacrelicious beer, and I staggered out of the place to where I thought the cabs were supposed to be. Either I missed them or they weren't there, but I just started walking in the general direction I thought the town/train station was. Soon I found myself drunkenly walking in the cold, 5000 miles from home, along a countryside forest highway by only moonlight, hoping I picked the right road and wondering about the wolf population in Germany's wilderness. Cars zoomed by once in a while, usually in sync with my roadside pissing breaks, but I didn't quite try hitchhiking...not sure I'd want a ride with someone who'd pick up a random 6'2 black-hoodied dude night-walking alongside a highway in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, I power-walked in this fashion for about an hour til catching sight of civilization...another 30 min and 3 attempts at 'sprechen sie Englush?' after that, and I was sobering/thawing in the train station. In short, killer monk-brew almost killed me.
Posted by fathertorque]]> Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:44:22 -0700 Portland Mercury
I set out on the half mile walk to my house and perhaps it was the torrential rain, the liver full of HRD or maybe just my perpetually ass-fucked internal compass but by the time I stopped walking and managed to focus my eyes on a road sign I was somewhere on SE 19th and Morrisson. And water logged to almost twice my weight. And mysteriously lacking my wallet and cell phone.

Somewhat taken aback by this realization I wandered in the direction of some enticing neon lights which turned out to be a bar and struck up a slurred conversation with a heavyset man outside of the watering hole (I was refused entry after proving unable to properly operate the doorknob) who gave me two cigarrettes and a detailed account of the guns he had stored in his basement in preparation for the inevitable collapse of society. I somehow managed to communicate to him my desire to call a cab and my newfound friend quickly informed me that there was no such need. He would give me a ride as soon as he downed another and cleaned some "sloppy gunk" out of his truck. I bolted soon after he re-entered the bar.

Not having paid much attention to which direction I'd bolted in I soon found myself in an unrecognizable section of town of whose poor street lighting was making walking increasingly difficult. Fortunately though, I happened upon an inviting Lutheran Church which I entered with the intention of resting in for a second to dry off and get my barrings.

I awoke the next morning curled up on a church pew with an ancient blue haired woman informing me that she'd just called the police who were on their way to arrest me for tresspassing. I thanked her for the information and made an somewhat hurried exit, evading both my octagenarian companion and the hands of local law enforcement as I saught out a bus and high-tailed it back to Northeast from what turned out to be a neighborhood slightly south of Woodstock.

Massive nights, y'al. Massive nights.


Posted by farmstyle]]> Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:53:37 -0700 Portland Mercury Posted by ezra]]> Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:32:38 -0700 Portland Mercury Posted by Graham]]> Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:26:17 -0700 Portland Mercury