I can't tell you about all the hookers, drugs, dead bodies, or that thing that Mikey did to the goat in the petting zoo at the rodeo, cuz we decided what happens in Reno, stays in Reno. But I can tell you that Bert was a perfect gentleman in bed both nights.

Watershed moments of the Reno Trip:

Bri G told us that The Gap now has "scratch and sniff" jeans. He said that the idea is that you don’t have to wash them as often. So like, when your pants are starting to stink, you can scratch them and stuff to make them smell better. Personally, I'm holding out for the commercial where some guys is wearing the jeans and he goes up to some girl and says, "Scratch my balls" and then she does and then she says "Mmmmmm, strawberry."

Bert reminiscing about how we don’t call each other "pecker you" as often as we used to.

Discussing the rodeo that we would be attending, the conversation naturally drifted to the subject of bulls' balls. I was anticipating them being all leathery and stuff. And you know they tie those suckers up for the rodeos to piss the bulls off (I'm thinking: Mission Accomplished), or so I hear. So we were saying that we should have made and worn shirts that said "Free Bulls' Balls."

Was it my imagination or were there Rice Paddies on the way to Reno?

Nothing puts a hop in my step like seeing someone picking their nose and then looking at it. Good times...

We were all talking about something (whatever), and Bert said "...and something." I was blown away. You see, Bert is more of an "and stuff" guy than an "or something" guy, and me, well, I'm the opposite. So to hear him mixing idioms was pretty crazy. Crazy good times...

Crowning: when you have to go real bad and it starts to peek out, it is called crowning. Bert pretty much made my night when he used that line in our hotel room whilst trying to expedite the line's movement (oi, get it). That is, until I found and exploited the All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp buffet later that evening.

You know what is weird? Some people poo several times a day. Some people don’t poo for days. Me, I poo once a day. Unless, as it turns out, I am in Reno at the rodeo. Or in the aftermath of rodeo dinner. Folks Sunday was a different kind of day.

Rodeo dinner: One BBQ pork sangy, one BBQ beef sangy (which suspiciously looked and tasted EXACTLY like the BBQ pork sangy), and a Killer Boat, split 3 ways between Bri G, Bert, and myself. Mikey like ate peanuts and stuff. No wonder that guy got so hungry at the end of the night. Say, what's a Killer Boat? A Killer Boat is when you take a basket of fries and dump BBQ pork (I think the Latin name for it is "pulled pork") on top of the fries and then dump cheese on top of the pork. Gnar gnar.

Rodeo gives you camp boogers.

The people we sat around at the rodeo fucking hated us by halfway through. First, some of us couldn’t sit still and had to keep getting up for beer and cigarette breaks *looks away*. Second, at a certain point, every time a new cowboy or whatever would come out onto the rodeo field (or whatever), Mikey would yell "You're my boy Blue," which proved to be quite contagious. Plus I got drunk and kept asking the old lady next to me what the fuck was going on. She started out nice and friendly, but I think she sort of wanted to be left alone after a while. And the people behind us, when we asked them when the bulls were, named the whole schedule from memorization. When we asked what their favorite part of the whole rodeo was, they said, "All of it." And I talked to an 18-year-old girl who was slanging techy-saddles (at a rodeo vendor kiosk) and in some dire fucking need of a dentist appointment (not surprisingly she was from "around here"--here being Reno). And at one point, even though there was a line for the Port-A-Poddies, I went right up to Mikey's and yelled through the door, "You're my boy Blue." To which I heard the muffled-by-plastic-walls-of-the-Port-A-Poddy reply of "You're my boy Blue." The rodeo was an all-time freak out session for "male masses of tucked-in plaid shirts."

I gotta tell you, there are a shiteload more cowboys than cowgirls. Now I know why they say being a cowboy means leading a lonely life.

You know how at places like Whole Foods they have a salad bar taste test area for olives (and you know I get real nasty in those)? At the rodeo it is just like that except they do it for beef jerkies. Good times...

The brunch debacle: So Mikey is a total trooper. He comes with us to wherever to eat even though he is a vegetarian, and he never complains (he is more of a cheese-oriented vegetarian than a vegetable-oriented vegetarian). So when he said that there was this "cool vegetarian café" that he had been to before and that he wanted to go to, we figured it was the least we could do. He said that the people that worked there were "just like us." So we walk to this place (off the strip) and go in there. And I don’t know if Bert or I said it first, but we simultaneously though "we are not like these people." Around this same time Bri G declared that he suspected that the restaurant was "not up to sanitary codes." Regardless, we took our seats and looked at the menu. The eggs appeared to come a la carte so when I ordered my eggs (with cream cheese, onions, and jalapenos--which wasn't bad) I asked our server if they had potatoes (I did not see them on the menu, which was all weird and spaced out and shit). He looked at me like I was nuts, and said "yes." Then I asked for a side of potatoes to go with my eggs and he looked at me like I was from the moon. When the food came, of course fake-ass-Luke-Wilson-looking motherfucker forgot my potatoes. So after he didn’t come back with them I asked him about it and he was like all oh sorry, I will get those to you in just a couple of minutes. When he brought me the potatoes and put them down in front of me, I was A) shocked, B) pissed off, and C) in confused disbelief. During the couple of minutes between my reminding the guy about the potatoes and his delivering them, a raw potato was sliced, lengthwise, into about 12 pieces and thrown into the microwave for 2 minutes, had a slab of butter dropped on top of it, and that was it. I could have literally pushed the potato into its original shape. And it was all hard and "skinny" and raw and flavorless. Bert took one look at the potatoes and my face and just burst out laughing, which really helped defuse the situation for me. This is a fucking vegetarian breakfast restaurant; how the fuck do you not have breakfast potatoes? Dumb fuckers.

Other observations from the whack-as-all-hell Pneumatic Diner: all their waffle makers were on the outside of the kitchen, on a little table between our table and the next table for diners. There was a fucking acid-trip spaced out-looking blond haired dude with a bandana on (that Bert totally nailed, saying he looked like the surfer dude from Apocalypse Now) who was manning the waffle station and like using his hands to flip the waffles. Hey stoner, why the fuck would you need to flip a waffle over if it is in a waffle iron? Did I mention he seemed "unclean?" The irony being that he was in charge of cleaning the waffle irons between uses, using what looked like an old school style shaving cream brush. And to get syrup and stuff you had to go to the condiment station, and their syrup was kept in this nasty, weathered, 80s looking bicycle water bottle that you had to squeeze. Ew. Even I think that syrup bottles that make fart sounds when you squeeze them are inappropriate.

I again failed to fear and respect the buffet. The guys should have staged an intervention when I started making sexy talk about "pyramids of shrimp." I just get so pumped. I stole the wine-butter sauce that the clams came in to use to dip my shrimps in. *this guy*

I went poo at the hotel lobby bathroom next to a guy wearing spurs. That had never happened to me before. I texted a few people about that...

I don’t know who brought up the idea of having a Jacuzzi with club soda as the water but I know it was me that giggled at the thought of those bubbles tickling my balls.

I decided about halfway through the trip that I would no longer be captured in pictures unless I was doing my *this guy* pose. Good times...

If you look closely at a couple of the darker pictures from the trip (link on the main page), you will see that our hotel parking garage had a whole half-floor that was reserved, with proper signage denoting as much, for "dually parking only." You will definitely see *this guy* posing next to that signage. It was a surreal fucking moment. They even had a sign out in front of the garage that said "Let us park your dually."

by Justin