Once My Looks Go, I've Got Nothing

April 9, 2018 Rough morning. Double vodka sodas may be less nourishing than previously imagined. Unsure if I should have eaten less fried chicken last night, or more. Only cure is more food. Fortunately, we have a pretty exciting lunch reservation today at Antoine's. Antoine's is one of the truly iconic New Orleans restaurants. It's been run by the same family since 1840, and the bio on the menu boasts of introducing the world to a number of iconic Creole dishes. The restaurant has no less than fifteen dining rooms, and has served celebrities and dignitaries for generations. That's cool and all, but frankly, I'm here for absurdly cheap cocktails and a three course meal. I am not disappointed, greeted by an interior dimly lit to perfection and an affable server more than happy to keep the twenty-five cent lemon drops flowing. I'm feeling better already. I bypass most of the menu and head straight for the lunch special . For $20.18, you get an appetizer,

The idea came, as grand ones often do, after the drinks began to take hold. My girlfriend and I were drinking what could fairly be described as an excessive amount of alcohol for a Monday night, while watching the extremely appropriately-titled WWE Monday Night Raw . We had been discussing the possibility of going on vacation soon, when serendipitously enough, a commercial advertising the upcoming WrestleMania event howled across our television screen. Held in New Orleans, a city we both had long desired to visit, could this event be the unlikely inspiration for our next adventure? Long story short, yes. The plan was simple: we would spend a week in the Big Easy, starting with WrestleMania and moving on to sight-seeing, exploring, drinking, eating, eating and eating over the course of the following days. And so, mere weeks later, we departed a gloomy, drizzly San Francisco and headed down south. Our flight was largely uneventful, save for the child behind us who found great amusem

I have to show you something. Look: Do you see that? That is an actual photo from within my living quarters. Some might say it represents a wall of obsolescence, a shrine to the preferred audio format of a bygone era, when physical copies of your music were a thing and mp3s took a full afternoon to download and were probably just virus traps. Others might say, "Wait...THREE different Kris Kross albums?" Yes, I have a lot of CD's. And, like proctologists, there are some great ones, and there are some bad ones. But then there are the ones that defy such simple categorization, and are not so much good or bad as they are baffling and inexplicable. You will find few greater examples of this phenomenon than those contained within what I have dubbed the Celebrity Wing of Joey Marsilio's EXXtreme CD Collection. Gaze upon these works, ye Mighty, and despair! Or at least like scratch your head or something. Hulk Hogan- Hulk Rules & "Macho Man" Randy Sav

Between my screeds about Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and my critically acclaimed novel , people sometimes forget that I am quite an accomplished comedy writer. I mean, it takes a certain level of talent to create public access television for literal years (let's not speculate on specifically what level that is). In addition to chortle-inducing articles for this blog and my hilarious off-off-Broadway musical comedy Oh, Bridget! , I once wrote a screenplay for a sitcom pilot that my father described as "kind of funny, in places." Why am I telling you all this? Well, you see, I have recently taken it upon myself to begin another intensive comedy proyecto , and I have come to realize in the course of working on it that I could get a twofer going and turn it into a lesson for you, my loyal and enraptured audience. A real master class in comedy, if you will. Allow me to explain. Comedy, much like open heart surgery, is quite difficult. But you know what they say: spl

As you may have noticed if you've been paying attention to my blog over the years, I have a, shall we say, staggered posting schedule. You may be tempted to chalk this up to laziness, but the narrative that I'm going with is that I'm not the type to just toss a few sentences about my lunch up online and call it a day. I want to make sure that every single one of my posts is fully realized and interesting, so I space them out and give each one a lot of thought. Quality over quantity, as it were. Trust me, I've made nearly $5 off my blog's ad revenue. Clearly I know what I'm doing. This sort of thoughtfulness goes into my social media posts as well. To wit, the subject of the day: my Instagram . Or more specifically, a set of circumstances surrounding an Instagram post that taught me a valuable lesson using one of the most effective educational tools of them all: crushing disappointment. Our story begins on a little avenue near my apartment that links a main st

Christmas is a time of family, traditions, family traditions, and the looming specter of insurmountable debt. And nothing shrieks "tradition" like Christmas music, which has not evolved one bit in hundreds of years, give or take. In my family, one of our annual Yuletide traditions was listening to the album Christmas Comedy Classics , or Triple C if you're of the Guy Fieri school of thought regarding abbreviations. A collection of humorous holiday favorites, this compilation got innumerable spins on our CD player, which was a new technology at the time. And to be honest, I was never sure whether or not I liked it. I found some of the songs hilarious, some of them annoying, and most of them either depending on my mood. As such, I decided it was time to take a look back at this album now that I'm a Big Mature Adult and determine once and for all whether Christmas Comedy Classics is overflowing with Christmas cheer or merely a lump of coal being pounded into your ea