In order to make my blog more attractive to web surfers I have decided to begin referencing the very subject these folks are searching for: celebrities. It is a lazy marketing strategy.

Today, I woke, and ate a delicious breakfast of bagels that Jerry Seinfeld would approve of. I then I traveled to my bathroom, a den of sloth that would turn Martha Stewart directly to the sponge and ajax. Here, I shaved my face into a handle bar mustache reminiscent of the great hero Hulk Hogan. Not Brooke Hogan, she’s different, although more popular in web searches, from what i hear. This was mustache week for our company and we rocked it, hard. The visages of Charlie Chaplin, Burt Reynolds, Adolf Hitler, Dennis Eckersley, General Stonewall Jackson, Albert Einstein, and Ned Flanders could be seen all around, and all were highly disputed. I was shocked to notice, for the first time in my life, how many people wear a handle bar mustache on a daily basis. Phenomenal. After the game, which was played by the Boston Red Sox who have a celebrity named Dice-K, I saw David Duchovny walking on Belvedere (which means beautiful view in italian (home mainly to George Clooney)). The conversation with my new friend David Duchovny went as follows:

Me (in my mind): Holy shit! Thats David Duchovny, I love Californication! and i kind of remember the x-files!

Me (out-loud): Hey buddy, you want a ride?

David Duchovny: (curt head shake, no)

After the shift I went home, and as I was walking, drinking a vitamin water (a company owned by 50 Cent), a woman with fake teeth and some sort of gout-like illness approached me and told me that i “look like Kris Christopherson, you know, with the face,” and then asked if i could give her 20 dollars for cheap pharmaceuticals. Side Note: who the fuck is Kris Christopherson? After returning home I drank water, like Michael Phelps probably does after a race. Britney Spears Paris Hilton.

It’s the gears at work…
The tourism industry of Boston is very strange for me to understand. I am sure this unique in no way to Boston, but she is our subject at hand.

At times it appears that people get off of busses and proceed in a conveyor belt fashion towards certain objects, many of which aren’t historical or in any way interesting.

I grew up outside the city, but I have never been to the Union Oyster House. To many tourists this would be baffling! To see Boston, you see Fanueil Hall, The North End, and eat at the Union Oyster House. Many tourists come to Boston, see these three things and leave, believing that they have one-stop-shopped their vacation. In the time I have worked here, I have always been asked how to get to the Union Oyster House, but never how the food was.

Just because you are traveling doesn’t mean you need to eat at PF Chang’s (do real asian people initial things like that?) or where Rick Steve’s told you. Enjoy yourself, take chances, and explore. If you don’t like the ambience or the smells coming out of the kitchen, walk the fuck out and try again. This goes for every part of your trip. You are on vacation after-all, why rush around and do what everyone else with a map in their hands is doing? Don’t let the blind lead the blind! As long as you are respectful, and realize that your dollar helps drive the gears of this town, the city is your playground. Ask people who live here where they eat and hang out, get the full list of flavors available and you can customize your trip and have a truly unique experience to remember. You will also have more meaningful interactions with people and  support local businesses, who will appreciate both you and your dollar much more than those (robots?) that own William H. Chang’s.

I spent today out pedicabbing in the beautiful tourist plucking grounds of the North End. The sun couldn’t decide if it wanted to stay out or not, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted to work very hard or not. I ended up doing a lot of sitting around on Hanover street until a coworker, Brett, decided to take a nap in that great new park over the big dig near the union oyster house. He was soon the victim of the 2009 Boston Massacre as Matt Segraves and I assaulted him via a wave of water ballons. Brett lay back, knowing full well that his own soaking may very well foreshadow a stormy tempest slated to roll into the city tonight. Or something.

Also:

One common excuse for not taking a pedicab is saying that you need the exercise of walking. I am sorry, but very few personal trainers would advocate a 10 minute walk once a day as a great cardio workout.

“Pedicab, it’s more than just a punchline!”

Never assume a woman you meet on the street is pregnant, she may just be overweight and strangely proportioned. And also angry.

Taly-Ho!

I have been in maine painting for the last week, so in lieu of my hiatus i will give yall a story from last year: It was around 1:45 AM on a friday evening and I was waiting around the outside of Dillon’s, a bar on Boylston Street in Boston. Bars here close at 2 AM and my friend were waiting to scoop some drunks up and shuttle their drunk asses around all over drunk-town. As the lights came on and they started kickin’ people out, a guy came out and approached my friend and I. Obviously attracted to our bright yellow t-shirts as if they were bug lights, he swaggered over. He told me, “I think you are cute,” and he waved a (probably naughty?) finger at me. He then asked me to drive him to Cambridge, usually outside the jurisdiction of our service. I refused. So he told me he would tip me $200 to take him to Harvard Square, but there was one stipulation: I would have to sing Neil Diamond songs the entire way. After singing the chorus to “Sweet Caroline” 20 times consequetively, I had made the easiest (and most uncomfortable) $200 of my life.

Tonight’s fanfare was headline free

So I will give you fragments:

Tonight was cold, probably 55. Is this June or April? New England weather is unique!

Two british women apologized that they weren’t as fun as the woman in the car in front of us. I told them its ok, she’s not fun, she’s just high on self tanner. She was a bronze Achilles, dipped by the heel, yelling at the top of her lungs.

Today I gave two rides to some friends on their way to and from House of Blues. Along the way, Shane Gibbons became the first person to ever make me a sandwich while in the back of the cab. Peanut Butter and Agave (sp?) on a fold over piece of wheat. Legendary. 

I think half the roads I used tonight were under construction. The back cab chatter sounded like porky pigs closing lines.

Rice Bowl is a great new chinese place at the corner of Hemenway and Boylston St.. It’s cheap and mmm mmm tasty.

Tonight was the kickoff to the Phish reunion tour at Fenway Park. You get an interesting crowd when you sell 15,000 tickets to see a jam band for a hundred dollars a pop. Hippies. Massholes on hallucinagens. Dave Mathews fans who decided to stick around for another night. Diehard Red Sox fans in withdrawal. 

The temperature dipped after the show started and the streets around Fenway were a wasteland of empty containers, food, and wasted Phish fans. I was making a return trip to the park and picked up a guy who who wanted to go back to the south end. As we started to move i tried to make small talk but all he would say was “my girfriend is dot dot dot.” I keep moving, thinking that he has had a problem with his girlfriend, maybe that she had run off with some dreadlocked man. I ask him another question and he doesn’t respond. Turning around, I saw that he had completely passed out in the seat of the cab.

I take him to Copley Plaza and slow down so i can ask him the address. Still unresposive, I tell the car beside us to honk their horn. They lay it down and he still will not budge. I stop at the Lennox hotel and clap many times and shake him. He finally responds and says: “Tremont” and I head that way. Closing in on Tremont, i hit a couple potholes to wake up my passenger. “West Brookline,” he says. Now approaching the target, homing in like i had a state of the art tractor beam, I found the street. Clapping to wake him again, I asked the him the number. “1…5…7.” We had found our destination. The man, wobbling like he was waiting for a KO punch in the fourth round at madison square garden, gave me a 20 and then yelled to his girlfriend “hey…baby,” stumble, lurch. I wonder if I am at the right address at all, or perhaps misheard his drunken mumbles. Finally, the door opens and he cries out in a heavy drunken slur: “Dot!”

I picked up two women from the Dave Matthews @ Fenway show. Being from Swampscot, they wanted to go to “the bahs.” We made our way down boylston towards one of the most hallowed of all Boston late-night breeding grounds: The Alley. While her friend talked to a manfriend on her cellphone, the more portly of the two grunted out “yah, work it baby” with all the tact of a sex-addled construction worker. As we approached our destination, to the surprise of dozens of scantily clad and boozed-up onlookers, this same woman proceeded to belt out an oprah sonnata in the most beautiful, warbling soprano.