Alabama Crimson Tide Football

Tits And Bits

I was checking something on my blog for a friend and realized I haven’t posted anything since September 9th.  I figure that’s way too long to not punish y’all write a post, so here I am.

How’s my decrepit, traitorous back?  Thank you for asking.  I can now bend over without using every curse word I know (and that’s a lot) and I’ve put the heating pad away for future old lady ailments.  I’m not googling “How many damned Motrin can I take before I overdose my lame ass?” everyday just to make sure the answer hasn’t changed.  My deep tissue massage went well.  It made me more sore (sorer?) for a couple days but I think it helped.  I have another one scheduled for next month because I’m a masochist like that.  We are planning on going back to Six Flags over Georgia in a few weeks for Fright Fest and I plan to give the Mind Bender a lot of side eyes and shade for screwing me up.  Bitch.

Let’s get on with the August/September issue of Tits and Bits, where I clean out my list of funny and maybe not so funny tidbits (your mileage may vary) one liners and happenings which may or may not deserve a whole blog post or I’m just too damned lazy to write a whole blog post about.

Me:  I had a nightmare.  I had another baby.

E:  Was it mine?

Back off.  He’s taken, ladies.

My friend Lulu was dealing with some hair in a spot she’d never dealt with being hairy before and asked for my advice.  Well, I actually don’t remember if she specifically asked for my advice but as I do in all situations like that, I gave it to her anyway.  My response was “Shave everything that doesn’t move and if it does move, you chase that shit down and shave it anyway.”

When I was in Texas this past July, my besties and I went to my brother’s bar for another wonderful drag show.  Yes, I still owe you a post on that.  I’ve been busy doing old lady shit like lounging on heating pads and cursing Time.  Anyway, Fantasia somehow talked me into agreeing to get our nipples pierced that night as soon as the bar closed.  I agreed because I was drunk and apparently I’m a pussy and can’t say “Hell no” to friends.  Luckily, the tattoo shop was closed by the time the bar closed.  Fantasia still won’t let it go, though.

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Fantasia, I’m making it official.  I do not want to have big ass stainless steel needles inserted into my precious, tender nipples.  They have never done me wrong and you’re asking me to subject them to this treachery?  I don’t know what your nipples ever did to you but they seriously need to sit your ass down and have a heart to heart.  Y’all need to hug this shit out.  I guess I could possibly turn on my own nipples under certain circumstances but you’re probably going to have to roofie me.  Like more than usual.

And I’ll get that Girl’s Night At The Drag Show wrap-up post written soon, y’all.  I promise.  I mean it this time.  Don’t leave me, baby.  I’ll do you right from now on.

We were in Daytona Beach this past summer and that place is chock-full of alligators.  E and I started talking about how to successfully wrestle a full grown gator.  You know, because we’re experts on that being Texas natives and now living for the past several years in central Alabama, where the closest I’ve gotten to a free range gator is the deep fried variety when we eat at Pappadeaux’s.  Anyway, I said “To capture a gator, you just use the same technique I used to capture you, baby – blind them and sit on them”.  You’re welcome for that advice, single ladies.  Be sure to send me an invite to the wedding.

I was recently caught in a web surfing worm hole and came across an article titled “30 Reasons You Need A Pair Of Leather Pants”.  Here’s 30 reasons I don’t:  The 29 pounds I’ve packed back on and all of the deep South for 10 months out of the year.  I swear, these bitches.

I’m married to an engineer so I can’t avoid being ensnared in some scientific mumbo jumbo talk every now and then, despite my wailing and gnashing of teeth.  During one of these discussions, E condescendingly asked, “You know what an EMP is, don’t you?”  After I flipped him off, I said indignantly, “Yes, I do.  I saw Godzilla, thank you very much!”

On a side note, “Let them fight” is one of my favorite movie quotes of all time.

On a final, sad note, Alabama lost against Ole Miss last Saturday night.  Someone didn’t read my Primer To Being Friends With Me During College Football Season or my Amendment To My Primer To Being Friends With Me During College Football Season.  I know that’s a lot of reading but my friendship is usually worth it.  Okay, not really.  I wouldn’t go to the trouble, either.  Anyway, I had my own little meltdown and this was the product of that.

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As soon as I think I have all my Alabama football bases covered, some Einstein gets a football hard on and thinks they found a loop hole to my football rules.  New amendment.  And seriously, this shit is getting old.  I can’t keep track of all this fuckery.  Watch your own damned shitty football team and worry about your own damned dogs in the fight.  Anyway, back to the Amendment to the Amendment to my Football Primer Guide To Staying Friends With Me During Football Season:  Texts to E will NOT be read to me, motherfuckers.  Also, I’m not sending your ass that delicious Harry & David’s Baklava this Christmas.  That’s right.  You done shit your bed.

Roll Tide, anyway, y’all.

Thanks for reading, as always, even you motherfuckers.  Have a good weekend, y’all!

Simple Man

I’ve had a few shots of whiskey to be able to write this.  But it’s time to write this.  It feels right, tonight.

I met my good friend Nan when we served on our kid’s school PTA together.  She was President and I was Vice President.  We had been spending a lot of time together, gearing up for the school year, redecorating the teacher’s lounge, going to lunch quite a bit.  We had taken the entire committee to Austin for the annual weekend long conference where bonds were forged and weaknesses like being scared shitless of bats and our true tolerances for alcohol were exposed.

The school year got rolling and I was working in the copy room one morning when the school Principal found me and told me simply “Go find Nan, I think she’s going to need you.”

I’d skipped my workout that morning, and my usual morning phone call with Nan, because I just felt strongly that I needed to be at the school.  It was one of those things that can’t be explained.  This was big because I had only lost about 12 pounds at that point in my weight loss “journey” and my gym time was steadfastly adhered to.

So I found Nan at her home, where she’d just been informed by the military that her husband had died when his Chinook helicopter went down in Iraq.

We all hear of fallen heroes.  We see them on television.  We see the families, who have to carry on without them.  We pray for them.  But it’s something else entirely to see it first hand, up close.  I witnessed her first tears as a widow, I hugged her and told her “You are loved” because I didn’t know what else to say and that was the truth, the simplest and most honest of truths, anyway.  You can’t really go back to being casual friends after that nor would I ever want to.  She’s my lifelong friend now, whether she likes it or not.

So when she told me she was dating someone a few years later, I was so happy for her.  As long as she was happy, I was happy.  I joked around at length with her and Freddie on Facebook and I liked him.  He was funny and smart and had wicked taste in music.  I was a Freddie fan, right from the get go.  Nan would let Freddie read some of our private messages, our little gaggle of girlfriends, and he loved our craziness.

I was at lunch with E very soon after that and Nan texted me “You’ve got a fan”.  I always love to hear that!  Who doesn’t love to hear that?  She asked me if it’d be okay if he sent me a friend request and I emphatically replied “Yes!”

Over the next 4 years, Fred Man (as I came to call him) and I shared a love of music, specifically Pantera, Slayer, and Van Halen.  He wasn’t an Alabama football fan but because I was, I’d occasionally get supportive text messages from him on game days.  This was our last one about football:

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Fred Man never got wordy, unless we were talking about music or Texas Rangers baseball, that would get him going.  I’ve never met a bigger Rangers fan than Freddie was.  Freddie and I could also trash the Dallas Cowboys for hours.  The mere mention of Jerry Jones would send us into full-on rant mode.

I escaped a party one night to find him on the back patio, smoking alone.  We drank some beer, I smoked a couple with him, and he told me of all the epic concerts he’d attended.  None of this reunion shit that goes on nowadays, either.  He saw the metal bands back in the day, when they were huge.  He saw some shit, y’all.  Good shit.

Fred Man was opinionated.  He never backed away from what he thought was right and was never scared of going at it with anyone.  If he believed it, he’d back it up every single time with good old common sense, never wavering.  He called out the bullshitters and had no patience for their enablers.  You got Freddie exactly as he was, no fronts, no airs put on for others, no fucks to give when common sense was being tread on, politically or otherwise.

As much as Fred Man loved to read our private messages, you wouldn’t find him in the middle of us girls when we hung out at Nan and Fred’s house.  He’d gladly watch baseball by himself or entertain Landon.

Freddie loved Batman and Landon would ply him with questions about Batman and all super heroes.  Freddie had the biggest heart and would talk with Landon about anything Landon wanted to talk about.  I’d tell Landon to give Freddie some space and not talk so much and Freddie would just tell me to go back to my hen party and that it didn’t concern me anyway, that he and Landon had things under control.  I can always judge a person’s heart by how good they are, how patient they are, with special needs kids.  Landon loved talking to Freddie.  I didn’t need anything else to confirm my affection for Freddie but if I had, that would’ve sealed it.

Fred Man would send me random texts out of the blue, always hilarious.  He totally got my sense of humor.  Most of the time, it was just a picture or funny meme.  Here are a couple of my favorites.

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As you have probably guessed, Freddie died on February 15th.  He fought kidney cancer for a long, hard couple years and still went down fighting.  I was blessed to see him less than two weeks before he died and I’ll always be grateful for that.  We talked, joked, and laughed for about an hour before I could tell he was exhausted.  I gave him about three vacation’s worth of magnets.  He collected magnets and kept them all on display behind his incredibly cool bar at home.  Gracie and Landon looked forward to picking out a magnet for “Mr. Freddie” everywhere we went on vacation.

I’ll tell this story just because I know Freddie would get a huge kick out of it.  We were on a cruise over Spring Break a few months ago.  While we were eating, I caught myself saying “I guess we don’t need to buy Fred Man a magnet…” I trailed off because I realized we wouldn’t be buying Fred Man a magnet ever again.  Just when I thought I might cry, Landon (remember he’s autistic and has a very straight forward way of thinking so literally imagine Forrest Gump saying this) sighed heavily and said very matter of factly,  “Nope.  Because Mr. Freddie is dead.”  After a few seconds, E, Gracie, and I busted out laughing and agreed that Freddie was looking down and laughing, too.

Here is Freddie’s obituary, which tells you much more about what kind of person he was than I ever could.

Fred Man’s memorial service was full of good music and laughter.  Of course, there were tears but I left thinking that Freddie would have loved it.  I’m sure he loved it.  His best friends and his brother told stories about him and there was so much laughter.  It was a true celebration of life.  There were more rock tee shirts there than I’ve ever seen at any other funeral.  Freddie would have had something to say about every single one of them.  I wore my Pantera tee shirt because Freddie was such a huge fan of them.  Pantera is from Arlington, Texas, just like Freddie was.  Freddie was a huge fan of Dime Bag Darrell.

One of the songs played during the memorial service was “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.  Freddie was simple but so much more than that at the same time.  What you saw was what you got.  No faking, just truth and simplicity in the best form possible.

This is how I’ll remember Fred Man, just hanging out with a beer in his hand, always rocking.

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Forever rock on, brother.  You are loved and you are missed.

Bitches Gots To Learn: A Primer To Being Friends With Me During College Football Season

It’s college football season, which can only mean one thing:  I’m going to lose at least four friends before we hit New Year’s Eve if past seasons and the inherent assholery of some of my friends are any indications.

Last year, this meme was posted on my wall by different friends about six times:

Roll Mother Fucking Tide!

I’m just shocked they think I’m a classy lady all those other months.

Moving along, here is a College Football Season Code Of Conduct for friends who still want to see my Facebook statuses after January.

1.  Blood does not matter.  I have de-friended family due to their hard-ons for hating Alabama football.  Even when Bama won the game, Family Member Zeke would traipse his redneck ass over to my wall every damned Saturday (Thursday night games threw him off so I got a break on those) and point out what Saban & Co. did wrong with joyful, childlike, horrifically misspelled glee.  Zeke’s team wasn’t even playing Alabama.  That’s right, Zeke chose to be a douchebag when he didn’t even have a dog in the fight.  Zeke is dead to me.

2.  Do you go to church regularly?  Every Sunday, you say?  Well, friend, your chances of  being a total and complete jackass just went through the roof of Bryant Denny Stadium.  Church people are the worst about posting smack on my wall.  It’s incredibly difficult to follow the Minister of Music in singing “I’ll Fly Away” on Sunday morning when all your mental energy is focused on not charging the stage to rip out his spine in retaliation for blasting your team on Facebook a mere 12 hours earlier.  Church people, read the Ten Commandments before you come over to my wall to post that “really funny” anti-Bama meme.  God doesn’t like ugly, y’all.

3.  Would you like it if I shat on your team’s jersey, set it on fire and then threw it in your yard?  Yes?  You’re a sick fuck.  For the people who emphatically shook their heads “no”, this is for you.  My Facebook wall is my house, so to speak.  Do not come to my house and shit in my yard by posting a “really funny” Bama meme that you got from your Minister of Music’s wall (see Guideline 2, above).  Post what you want on your own wall but don’t you dare tag me in it.  That isn’t a loop hole, Einstein.  It’s the passive aggressive douche canoe way to do it, for sure, but it still counts as shitting on my lawn.  For my really crafty, local community college type of friends, typing my name in an anti-Bama post without tagging me in it also counts as shitting on my lawn.  You ain’t smart and you ain’t sneaky.  Just don’t do it.  I will not miss seeing your really bad haircut, pictures of your stubby toes sporting a brand new pedicure or your 4,200 calorie dinner on Facebook.  Try me, suckers.

4.  Did you go to school with me?  You have about a 99.7% chance of being a total twat waffle to me during college football season.  Former classmates, we lived in a very, very small town.  Males and females both, the following is for you:  I know what you looked like in school and I have pictures.  I won’t name names but I probably/definitely shot Elmer’s glue up your nose one day in retaliation for stealing my markers.  You used to bring the Sears catalog to school and point out which engagement ring you were going to buy me someday.  I might have accidentally pushed you off the monkey bars one day because you refused to quit pulling my pig tails even after I warned you to stop multiple times.  We stuffed our training bras together because, you know, girl unity and all that shit.  We traded Swatches in the hallway in between classes.  I was your lookout when you just had to smoke that cigarette in the girl’s bathroom.  I taught you how to kiss using the air and my own lips, bitch.  You used to listen to Sting incessantly and insisted on wearing nothing but trench coats because it “looked cool” and Sting-y.  I know who your very first kiss was, maybe even your first lay.  I helped cover for you when you were making out hot and heavy in the back of the band bus on the way back home from away games.  Do you really want to piss me off over a football game?  A game that includes the two-point conversion option, which I have had to explain to you multiple times?  I didn’t think so.

5.  Do you know someone who went to school with me and we became “friends” through witty banter on Facebook but you’ve never actually met me in real life? I’m not sure how to say this, but your chance of being the biggest ass clown in the world just went terminal.  There is no hope.  You have little or nothing at stake.  We have no past history so your dick grows ten times its normal size and you feel free to trash talk Bama at will to me.  I have lived without your ass for 44 years and I can live without it for another 44.  Tuck your tiny dick back in your pants and look up your own team’s stats for entertainment.

6.  Then there are those people who don’t get excited about college football until Alabama loses and makes a bit of room for their sucky team in the standings and then suddenly, THEY ARE ALL ABOUT THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL.  They want all the college football.  They haven’t posted once about college football all season but suddenly turn into Lee Corsos and Kirk Herbstreits right before my eyes when The Tide takes a licking or their team pulls their heads out of their asses long enough to finally pull a two game winning streak.  Football becomes EXCITING AND FUN.  I call these people “bandwagoners”.  I have gotten trash talk texts from people who have literally never texted me before, or at least in years, because Bama had a bad day.  Those people are usually the bandwagoners.   I have a new rule.  Instead of ignoring your pussy texts like I did last year, I’m going to update this blog post to include your picture then send you the link every hour, on the hour, for a full 24 hours after I receive your texts.  M’kay, sweetie?

7.  I am capable of calmly and rationally talking football with you.  If you want to engage in an unemotional, factual discussion about college football and you can resist buying into the hype and drivel the latest talking head on ESPN is spewing, let’s do it.  Just don’t try to tell me how much of a legend “Johnny Football” is (Kenny Hill just blew that two year long bullshit saga out of the water last night with his performance against South Carolina) or that Bumfuck State may be able to make a run to the big game because they have a new water boy.

8.  Know your own team.  I met a Texas A&M Aggie fan last summer.  He was in a big group of people I went out to dinner with back home and was proudly wearing his Aggie cap.  It was August and football camps had started.  He got this smug “Oh, this is cute, I’ll bash Bama football with a defenseless girl” look on his face and attempted to do just that.  It took very little time for me to discover that he didn’t even know the date of the upcoming Alabama vs. Aggie game or basic stats of the previous season’s game between our teams yet he proudly boasted and crowed about beating Bama.  He didn’t know who the Aggies were playing in the first game of the season.  I quickly relieved him of the notion that girls don’t know anything about football and I had the smug “Aren’t you cute?” look in the end.  Not to pick on Aggie fans, but I’ve also talked football with an Aggie who, although he most definitely knew who “Johnny Football” was, could not tell me the name of his Head Coach.  It’s Sumlin, by the way.  Don’t insult me by attempting to belittle my team when you don’t know shit about your own.

9.  There are exceptions to every rule.  Last year, someone tried to call me out on what they saw as inconsistency in doling out my football policy.  There is literally one person who can get away with (although I might not talk to his ass for a week or so) joking with me about Alabama football.  He is an Oklahoma Sooner fan and long before OU kicked Bama’s ass in the Sugar Bowl last season, he supported me.  He supported me as a friend because he’s certainly not a Bama fan.  He knows the emotion I have for my team because he has the same for his team.  He knows how completely gut wrenching and literally sickening it is when you lose a football game when you care so much, when your every Saturday is completely structured around your team’s game, when offseason is spent comparing recruit stats and Depth Chart Day actually means something.  There have been many times during a game when things were looking down for Bama and my friend would send me a message, pointing out Bama’s strengths and not our weaknesses, telling me and E not to go into a spiraling depression, that Bama’s “got this”, even when we didn’t believe they did.  His wife, who has family in Alabama, sent me an Alabama Scentsy warmer for Christmas.  These unseen-by-most and very rare acts of football fandom kindness earn them a bit of extra leeway.  If that means I’m a hypocrite, so be it.

10.  I’m leaving this one blank because I’m sure some dipshit will make me amend these guidelines sometime this football season.

Y’all support your teams, be your team’s biggest fan, get naked and wear your team’s colors all over your body on game day and please send me a picture if you do that.  But play nice.  Stick to your own wall and don’t shit in someone else’s yard.  I’ve done it, I’m not innocent but the last several years have really opened my eyes to what “friendly joking” is and isn’t.

Being an Alabama fan has provided me with lots of opportunities to boast.  Many, many times, I could have retaliated by posting memes and jokes on friend’s walls after Bama pummeled their team, after that friend had posted trash talk and memes on my wall the whole week before the game.  Some won’t believe this but I get the greatest satisfaction from winning by remaining silent.  If you have a huge dick, you don’t have to shove a tube sock down your pants.  Feel free to make that your Inspirational Quote Of The Day but be sure to credit me.  Oh… and ROLL DAMN TIDE!

USA! USA! US.. Hey, Whatcha Got In That Bottle?

The coolest women EVER. I lived in the wrong damned era but I’m currently taking applications from super hot women who also love the booze so we can restore this lost sport to its rightful place.  For America!

We were in Nashville a couple weekends ago (Jack White and Third Man Records follow-up post coming up soon!).  We visited the Cuntry (see what I did there?) Music Hall of Fame.  We had some time to kill after that, so we walked around downtown Nashville.

Downtown Nashville is busy on the weekends.  There are lots of bars, record stores, bars, random ice cream shop from the Andy Griffith era and… bars.  Did I say bars?  They have lots of bars.  It was daytime, however, so we didn’t feel weird about dragging our kids down there.  We took a horse drawn carriage ride and took in the sights and sounds of downtown on a Saturday.

One of those sounds came from atop one of the two story bars.  I couldn’t help but think that the weight of all the humanity clustered together on the upper level would surely result in an awful catastrophe.  But I digress.  As usual.

I don’t follow soccer.  I hate soccer.  But that day, the chorus that rang from the second level of that probably-should-be-condemned bar was “USA! USA!  USA!”  And I thought how awesome it was that pretty much everyone you know, no matter where they’re from in the United States, could cheer for one team.

I’m an Alabama Crimson Tide football fanatic.  We moved here six years ago and I resisted all the hype for a while.  But it pulls you in, even when you think it won’t.  I vowed not to choose between Alabama and Auburn, even after being told multiple times by different people around here that I would have to.

I did eventually choose.  Some people ask why or how I chose Alabama over Auburn.  All I can say is that, after a while of watching the local news, listening to local sports radio, reading AL.com, etc., the choice just becomes clear to you.  I mean it.  It’s like Harry Potter and the Sorting Hat.  Your heart knows where to go.  If you make fun of me for that line, I will come to your house and kick you in the taint.

I have blocked family on Facebook because they acted like asses during football season and decided to post anti-Alabama shit on my wall, just because.  We weren’t even playing their team’s sorry asses.  They just hate Alabama.

You can’t escape football here.   It’s a living, breathing thing in Alabama.  Even during the off-season, news about football breaks every single day, multiple times a day.  I would not be surprised at all if one day a headline popped up on my Bleacher Report app exclaiming “Nick Saban Did NOT Eat His Traditional Little Debbie Snack Cake For Breakfast!”

You laugh, but I’m serious.  That could be an actual, real Alabama headline.

Chaos would reign.  Grown men and women would not come out of the fetal position all day, myself included.  Babies would cry inconsolably until Nick just did the right thing and ate his traditional Little Debbie snack cake breakfast.  Raging debates would ensue over what the hell this news meant.  How will his decision not to eat the Little Debbie snack cake impact the starting QB contest?  Why didn’t Nick just eat the damned Little Debbie snack cake?  He does it every single morning.  Every.single.fucking.morning.  College Gameday would set up camp in Tuscaloosa.  Kirk Herbstreit would predict WHEN he thought Nick would once again eat a Little Debbie snack cake.  Lee Corso would don a Little Debbie snack cake costume.  The local networks would interrupt regular broadcasting to ponder what this meant for our football season.  The sky would rain blood, frogs would fall from the sky.  Churches would remain open 24/7 so all could pray for Nick Saban, who has obviously given up on life and (way more importantly) football, because he didn’t eat the fucking Little Debbie snack cake.

All because, maybe, just maybe, Nick simply wants to cut back on his sugar intake.

I say all this to illustrate the passion that sports can bring out in people.  Irrational, totally crazed passion that makes one block family on Facebook.  Passion that inspires knowing your team’s stats so you can battle the haters that come from EVERYWHERE when your team starts to play in the fall, in my case.

It feels really good that everyone in my Facebook and Twitter feeds are posting “USA!  USA!  USA!” today.  I’m glad I don’t have obnoxious Germany fans, cluttering up my wall with USA hate and stupid memes that aren’t even funny or snarky, dissing my team.

As I write this, Germany currently leads the USA by a goal.  If pure excitement and unity count for anything, though, I think we got this.

USA!  USA!  USA!

Also, you might want to check out my friend Kari’s blog post from earlier today (which inspired my ass to finally write this post)  here.  Her conversations with her brother are the bee’s knees.  They make my brain hurt from all the intelligent words they string together.  At one time.  I’m in awe.  And I need an Excedrin.