The Barryfest Chronicles

When you’re drunkenly balls deep in a plate of cheese fries at F&M’s on a Thursday night, it is easy to forget that there is a lot more to Louisiana than New Orleans.  This is the “Sportsman’s Paradise” for chrissakes, and I’ve been down here for almost a year and have not actually done anything even remotely “sporting.”

To remedy this, I spent the weekend at Fountainebleau State Park with a crew of brave souls willing to endure some good old fashioned outdoor living in what could easily be the coldest weather any of us will see all year.  Yeah, the winters are pretty mild in southeast Louisiana; but the fact that the mercury doesn’t dip too far below 40 degrees over a 12 month span doesn’t make those 40 degree gusts any toastier when they are whipping across your campsite.

But the trip was a blast, and when I wasn’t gathering firewood, complaining about non-Kosher hot dogs, smoking Natural American Spirits, slugging persey bottles of Charles Shaw, pounding packets of BC, dancing on top of a picnic table to Rilo Kiley, tossing hard-boiled eggs into Lake Pontchartrain, or freezing my dick off after passing out in a tent with no pillow or sleeping bag, I engaged in my new favorite pastime: hypothesizing about whether or not Chinese Democracy is going to be any good. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Dan,

As I was headed to work the other day, I saw something that I might be of interest to you and yours.  That’s right.  The lot that I offered to you as a prime location for the newest Trader Joe’s location has apparently just been listed to the public.

Check out those stats:  over 39,000 square feet of building space and over 113,000 square feet of total property.  I wasn’t jerking you around when I told you this place had an ample parking lot!

I really think you should give the Talbot Realty Group a ring.  If you would like, I would be more than happy to put a call in to break the ice.  You know, tell them what a great operation you are running.

Just think about it, man.  I would hate to see this great opportunity pass you by.  I may not know much about real estate investment, but I definitely have a pretty good handle on how much I love Charles Shaw wine.  And I think this would be a great chance for me to be able to more conveniently buy that shit by the case.  That’s got to be worth something to an upstanding businessman such as yourself.

September is half in the bag and the heat and humidity down here are still turning my brain to mush on a daily basis.  I’ve been told that there is an end in sight, but I sure as shit haven’t caught a glimpse of it.  I will never act like I am going to miss the Chicago winters – the way they arrive out of nowhere with bone-chilling cold and don’t let up until the torrential rains of spring blow through – but I do feel another dose of seasonal affective disorder creeping into my UV-damaged, sweat-soaked psyche.

I think New Orleans is slowly making me insane.  Thankfully, this is not the type of “insane” that is caused by a bad breakup and then fueled with a steady diet of prescription pills and whippets.  No, no, no.  The “insane” I am feeling now is a good thing; maybe the best of things.  It is a liberating and enlightening psychosis that makes the Charles Shaw taste sweeter and the drunken heaters seem more satisfying.

Unlike up north, where even in the dog days of summer a pleasant cool breeze tips you off that day is turning into night and, eventually, that summer is fading into fall, the shitbird weather down here is in dire need of a desk calendar and a fucking Flick-Flack. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Dan,

Across the street from my apartment, there is a decent sized, stand-alone building that formerly served as a Robért Fresh Market but is now completely boarded up and dying for occupation.  Other than the two days the ample parking lot served as base camp for the cast and crew filming Carmen Electra’s new movie, it just sits there, an apparent casualty of the disorganized jack-o-lantern spattering of property revitalization that has been trudging along since the storm of 2005.

Don’t get me wrong, there is amazing work going on all over the city; in every single neighborhood and on every single block.  But there are some shocking plots of land that, for one reason or another, have just been left behind.  This is one of them.

I think it would be a perfect place to open a Trader Joe’s.

I mean, you’ve got stores in Minnesota and those fucking rubes make you jump through hoops just to grab a sixer of microbrew with your groceries.  If you were to open in the greater New Orleans area, there would be no need for that loophole exploiting pay-for-your-groceries-at-one-register-then-walk-through-the-antechamber-to-the-booze-shop bullshit I had to go through at the St. Louis Park location up north. Read the rest of this entry »

I never really liked my job when I was living in Minneapolis.  And, considering I was putting in consecutive 65+ hour weeks at some points, my memory of life in the Twin Cities is unduly influenced by the days I spent doing little more than programming spreadsheets and running HOST reports.  Or the time I was answering to the VP of Merchandising because there had been a run on wiper fluid after a huge fucking snowstorm ripped across the Midwest.  Or the time the guy in the cube next to me wouldn’t stop listening to “Throw Some Ds On It” over and over again for the better part of a month.  Or the time I got gang-raped by a group of supply-chain experts in the cafeteria.

That last part might be a bit inaccurate, but I’ve been out of there for almost a year now, and the mental images and vignettes warehoused during my term are getting hazy and disjointed.  Add to that all the work I have done to actively misremember the unfortunately large part my former employer played in my former life, and my ability to recall many of the great times had while not slaving over a hot keyboard in seizure-inducing florescent lights has been severely compromised.

Luckily, a few things from the Mpls Era have stayed with me, such as:

1. How, when driving over the Hennepin Ave bridge to St. Anthony Main in the early evening, the orangish glow from the setting sun and the Steely Dan blasting from the car stereo made me look 15% more attractive than I actually am
2. That time I caught a Police concert and a Prince concert in the same week
3. Memorial Day of 2007, which was spent cruising around Like Minnetonka at the the helm of a pontoon boat, blasting “Play Deep” by The Outfield. Read the rest of this entry »