Big Moments, Part 3

For awhile I debated about including this next Big Moment in the series because I feared it would make me seem like the degenerate, deadbeat drunk I've been trying to be less and less in the recent months. Then I realized you can't run from the past. Even if I'm not the sputtering, stumbledrunk of yestermonth, I was that person at some point and it helped making me the quietly muttering, sitdown drunk I am today. So, with personal reflection aside, I present Big Moment 3, 'The First Time I Drank Key Ice'

It was February 2008, a month many will remember for giving us such humanity-improvers such as, well, pretty much nothing. However, for one young college freshmen, the world was about to be rocked. I believe I was at a party, some type of mass bro-out, getting weird sort of thing. Lot's of beers were being crushed, raucous laughter filled the air and a general fratitude pervaded the air. There was enough testosterone in the air to sprout chest hair on even the lily whitest young lad. Amidst this jubiliant boisterousness, a friend of our we'll call Hurricane Brien walked, or moreso, drunkenly hobbled up to me.
Before I go any further, we should take a quick note on the life of Hurrican Brien. He is a disaster. He has been known to blackout on a whim and roar through an establishment with the kind of shouting, teeth-gnashing bravado reserved only for the much too drunk. He once took a TV--around which several people gathered, watching a movie--and thrown it unceremoniously out a 3rd floor window because someone said 'he was too big a pussy to do it'. He has thrown bricks at people, woken up in strange garages, and berated a bartender for not knowing how to mix the purely imaginational 'Strawberry'.
On this night, however, Hurrican Brien wasn't acting as agent of chaos, but as a bearer of good things. In his deep state of inebriation, Brien stumbled to me and held out a can of Key Ice, offering, 'You wanna beer?' I took the can in my hand, tossing my empty Natty Light can on the floor. What is this? I thought. The can was sleek and black, I thought it might be European. I cracked it open and sipped. It tasted different from regular Keystone. Something I couldn't put my finger on. On I drank. In my child-like wonder, I asked Brien what the difference between Key Ice and Key Light was. Hurrican Brien responded, a true scholar, 'Ice has more fuckin' booze in it, man!'
This shook my foundations. There was a beer out there with MORE booze in it? This is the best idea any one has ever had. I began lapping up Key Ice with gusto, and soon learned that while Key Ice has more booze than your average beer, it also posesses an unknown ingredient that can turn the mildest-mannered of men into a raving, semi-violent maniac. It brings out the beast in the best of guys, it is truly a substance that can make or break your night, week, month or life. Stupidity thrives in the grip of a Key Ice frenzy. On another semi-important note, the night I 'enjoyed' my first Key Ice was also one of my inaugural lessons in the science of Alcohol By Volume, or, ABV. Now, my knowledge of ABV is a curse and blessing, as I can be seen standing in a liquor store, seemingly endlessy, taking down bottles and reading the ABV, making sure I get enough bang for my buck.
The First Time I Drank Key Ice was indeed a big moment for me, as it closed the casual drinker chapter of my life and opened up the section on being a full fledged rageoholic.

Big Moments, Part 2

This next tale of my formative years brings us to the winter of my 13th year. 7th grade, what a glorious time. The particular event on which we will dwell was a wellspring of the very essence that grips me to this day. Yes, dear reader, this big moment is 'The First Time I Bro-ed Out With the Boys".

This tale begins, unassumingly enough, on a church youth group ski trip. Before I go any further, it is imperative that the reader know that my hometown is on the cashing end of some sort of bizarre genetic jackpot where everyone had sons and no daughters. In my youth, there were four families all with four sons living within a ten mile radius of each other. Every now and then someone managed to have a girl, but these tend to look like boys anyways. So, I continue, this ski trip was set upon with my original crew of tween bros. There were 8 of us, I believe, on that fateful Saturday, and we set out in a convoy of Chevy Suburbans and Dodge Caravans, headed for Laramie, Wyoming. After a day of talentless and graceless skiing, we set to return home. But providence held something else in store. Yes, the winds were blowing that day, the winds of new discovery and burgeoning manhood. Oh, and they were blowing a bigass snow storm towards Laramie, too. As our noble drivers tried to navigate the perilous blizzard, their actions grew more and more futile. The storm was too bad. We were snowed in. We'd have to stay in Cheyenne.
This was the most momentous news of our young lives. Us? Stay in Cheyenne? Why, this gaggle of 8 very eligible bachelors would be staying--only semi-supervised--in the classy digs of the Cheyenne Holiday Inn? This was it. This was our chance to break our small town bonds of continual parental supervision, our chance to spread our wings, our chance to fly! Oh, and fly we did. We ran rampant--or at least what at 13 seems rampant--over that hotel. We jumped in the pool in our underwear. We filled our bathtub full of ice and tried to throw someone in. We jumped on the bed and watched the dirty late night shows on HBO! However, the Bedlam drew to a somber close around the unheard hour of 2 am when, amidst the disarray of frenzied juvenescence, a lamp was broken. This was very serious to us, and we spent the better part of the next hour concocting a fool proof alibi. One of us was a sleepwalker and had broken the lamp in an intrepid bout of nocturnal locomotion. This would surely convince them of our innocence!
The broken lamp certainly dampered the rest of the night, and some of us lay sleepless worrying of the broken lamps long term reprecussions. We walked out of that hotel to the cleared interstate the next day filled with a new emotion. This was the first time we had known a regrettable morning after a night of wanton mayhem. We were charged from our boisterous antics but leary of the consequences of our rough shenanigans. And while nothing ever became of the broken lamp, that day would always be remembered as 'The First Time I Bro-ed Out With the Boys'.

Big Moments, Part 1

I was looking back on my life today--as I often do--and I asked myself the age old question, 'How did I get here?' Here I am, 21 glorious years old, with a luscious head of hair and future full of promise, and as I reflected on the long path that brought me here, I realized that there were a few seminal occurrences that made me the man I am today. So, in the good spirit of a new year, I decided I'd share some of these 'big moments' in an ongoing series called 'Big Moments'. Hope you like it, show your mom.

Part 1: The First Time I Smashed Something



I was 8 years old the first time I participated in what is now one of my favorite pastimes: smashing things. My folks had just purchased a new TV (a 32" Sanyo, I believe) leaving our old television set (a completely inadequate 27" Phillips) sitting derelict on the back porch, waiting to go to the Dumpster. That's when my brother, aged 11, had one of the best ideas he has had in his life to date. Hey Mom, he said, can we take that TV and uh break it? Sure, my mom said, thus cementing her place in my heart forever, completing the process started by birthing and nurturing me. So, we took the old TV, drug it over to the trees by our house, raided the garage for hammers, crow bars, baseball bats, broomsticks, wrenches, I think a knife might have even worked its way in there. Shortly put, we armed ourselves to the teeth with anything we thought would be awesome to hit an old TV set with. Then, we waled on it. Oh man, did we wale on it. I was only 8, I could barely lift a crowbar, but when I drove the hook end of that iron bar through the glass of the screen, I knew I had found true love. We beat that TV with a savage rhythm. Those older TVs are full of parts and we smacked that TV around until everyone of those parts was strewn on the ground and shattered to bits. We beat it to bits, smashing the tiny pieces into the ground, and if we would have had some gas to dump on it and burn, I'm willing to say we would have done that to. People that do heroin say that the first time they shoot up is the best time, and every other time is just an attempt to recreate that feeling. Well, smashing things is pretty much the exact opposite of that. Every time you smash something, it's just as awesome as the first time or the second time or the third time. Seriously, you're destroying something with your bare (bear) hands; what could be better? So, that's why "The First Time I Smashed Something" was, in fact, a big moment in my life.