The day the music (amost) died

And by music, I mean the Nagoogin family name. If you know my family at all, you would think that this is a preposterous proposition—I have a huge family, one on a scale I don’t think you can fathom. You see, by grandfather and my grandmother must have enjoyed a prodigious sex drive, as unsavory a thought as that may be. Perhaps there was nothing to do in the old county aside from growing rice and fucking each other’s brains out. Gramps, being a traditionalist, hailed from the rhythm birth control school of thought, it was just too bad the man had no gift for timing since they ended up with seven kids. (At this time I should point out that grandpa had an additional two kids from his other wife. The other wife he was still married to while he was screwing my grandmother. To answer your questions: 1. No, we aren’t Mormon and 2. yes, being a playa does indeed run in the family.) With my father being only one of seven siblings I have a lot of cousins, so many in fact that I cannot remember all thirty of their names despite seeing them multiple times a year for the last twenty-two years of my life.
Of roughly thirty cousins, there are only four of us that enjoy the rights and privileges of having a penis: Smilie, Tigger, Phileas, and myself . Since there are only a few lads we all enjoy some measure of special treatment that’s helped shape me into the narcissist asshole I am today, but we’ll touch on those fine points later. This is the story of how the four uniquely equipped members of the Nagoogin clan almost ended the bloodline forever.
One of my cousins, Smilie, just got his private pilot’s license and his own Cessna as an accessory to go with the fabulous card that gives him the right take to the skies like Iceman. Over dinner Smilie casually suggests that we take a short trip out to the Long Beach Airport and take his plane out for a ride and enjoy the Southern California sunset (SMOG does have its virtues). We all pile in to the car and make for the airport, half way there Smilie casually asks us how much we think we weight—and that the plane might have a weight limit.
Me: I don’t know, last I checked I was about 140
Tigger: I’m 143, haven’t gained a pound since high school!
Phileas: Oh, about 165—why, what is the plane’s limit?
Smilie: [period of tensioned silence while he crunches the numbers] Oh fuck it, we can just dump some shit out if we have trouble lifting off
Any other group would say “wait, maybe we should hop on the scale at the airport and figure this one out before we taxi out to our deaths”—us, not so much. Life’s not worth living it you aren’t willing to take risks, right? Fuck it, we all declare with machismo—after all we aren’t a bunch of limp dicks; and I'm certainly not going to be the pussy that questions the group plan.
We head out to the plane and go through the battery of checks an aircraft goes through before it is clear for take off. Everything goes off without a hitch, we are a go for launch. We pile into the tiny cockpit and hook in our individual headphone/mics that make us look like a legit crew. After some witty bantering (and by that I mean regurgitating some sweet lines from TOP GUN a la ‘I got a need’… ‘A need for speed’ followed by the obligatory high five) a nervous calm settles in the cabin as the plane makes its run for the skies.
About two minutes into the flight, Phileas nonchalantly declares “Do you realize all the males in the family are on this plane?”, bollocks I think to myself—there aren’t any god damned peaces of wood on this titanium coffin of a plane to knock on. We’re all fucked, destined to die in a huge ball of flame hurtling across the sky, the only remnants of our charred corpses at the bottom of the impact crater. I can already hear the news forecast that would air that night, my father shouting “DON” just like Ritchie Valen’s mom in the movie. Next, Don McLean is going to redo the verse to American Pie. Bye, bye Ms. American pie; I am going to miss you.

I Should Have Stayed In

Every so often I do the responsible thing and check my bank account just to make sure my spending is somewhat in check. Most of the time I find myself broke— last weekend, however, was not one of those times. To my chagrin I find my accounts all square and I have some spending money to lavish on myself, being the unselfish guy that I am—I decide to take a girl I’ve been kind of seeing out. If you’ve never been to San Diego before, you would be disappointed to find that its utterly void of any pillars of gastronomic excellence. I’m not saying that there aren’t decent restaurants, but there certainly aren’t any exemplary ones—a shame considering how big the metropolitan area is.

After walking around we settle on a place downtown. The façade is nice, in keeping with an upscale (but not crazy expensive) place, busy (but not too busy), and the pace has a nice tables outside so we can people watch wile we enjoy dinner. We get seated and the waiter treats us to a forty minute monologue chronicling the nights specials, not a good sign. We’re both quite hungry and tear into the stale focaccia at the table. After what felt like hours and two refills of the bread basket our food is served.

My rib-eye arrives at the table looking grand. The hunk of meat shares a plate with a heap of garlic mashed potatoes, and there in the middle is the perfectly crusted mac-n-cheese. From what I just described you might be predicting the perfect meal, well—you would be horribly wrong. Right there next to my perfectly cooked steak is what looks like a skid mark on an otherwise pristine white ceramic canvas. Who the fuck would mess with culinary perfection, you ask? The douche bag wanna-be Thomas Keller in the kitchen, that’s who. The stupid bitch though he would try to be cutting edge with my meal, the dumbass decided that he was part of the “foodie” crowd, the stupid-fuck went molecular gastronomy on my ass. What could the “chef” have done that was so egregious? The bitch put an asparagus foam on my plate.

If you’ve never tried a foam before, its basically a puree that’s pressurized so that the result is an airy goo. In my case, a white-ish brown goo. Basically, right next to my delicious steak the glorified Applebee’s line cook decided it was in my best culinary interest to have a side of splooge with my steak. My mistake, maybe next time I should order my rare rib-eye and ask them to hold the sperm, or at least set it on the side.

An asparagus foam dude? Really? I hope your kids get Down syndrome, and not that high-functioning Down syndrome either—I hope they’re so retarded they hump random household objects any time they aren’t getting fed or sleeping.

No dessert for me, I’d hate to see what’s in the canoles.