Looking Forward, Smiling Backward

Well, getting a little reminiscent here, sitting with Thurston (new puppy) and looking at some of the photos on my old G4. It’s good to go over that stuff every now and then and discover exactly what makes you tick. Well, maybe not exactly, because some of the shit I found shouldn’t really make a person “tick.” But you know what I mean, for every time you’ve grown a mustache or done something stupid or put on a ridiculous outfit, you’ve taken a picture. Those records are priceless for me because I look back and truly, positively, without a doubt realize that I wouldn’t change one god damn thing.

From good friends to dressing up like an asshole to doing some of the stupidest things you could conceive for entertainment, it’s been one hell of a ride, and I hope the path never diverges.

Some things have changed. I can’t just take off and do whatever I want because — as of two days from now — I’ll be a homeowner. Even my little Time Sponge, Thurston, is a bit of an anchor if you chose to think of it that way. It’s pretty crazy to think about, but for all the times I could have died, maybe should have died, doing untold amounts of unsafe, pointless, sometimes criminal activities, I’m still here and still kicking ass. This house and dog won’t change that. Hell, Thurston will probably be jumping off the roof into the pool with me if he’s half the pooch I think he is.

Things really have changed though. Now I’m mostly a vegetarian, a homeowner, a parent, (of a needy little Alligator-cow-chicken puppy) a young professional, (well, as close as I’ll ever get) and a responsible US citizen. Pretty big change from breaking into industrial ruins wearing stupid costumes eating 12 meals of the crappiest foods you can imagine.

Anyway, I need to shower (more of this grown-up stuff) so I just wanted to document how good it’s been, and how excited I am for what’s to come. Love it. Everyday. Peace. Cheers. Love.

Jill the Hound

Oh my gosh it’s been so long since I’ve written for pleasure I can’t even type correctly. Shit crap damn yeah! So many times I’ve wanted to say so many things while writing for “the man” that I’m too excited to even type right now. See that? I went from correctly to right. My grammar is digressing, spelling is getting worse—things are getting back to normal!! When I say the man—just to clarify—I mean my job, but if you have to work for the man, this is a good one to work for. I mean crap, I can work ALL THE FLIPPING TIME and still not mind it that much.

But anyway, babies, we’ve got some catching up to do because while you’ve been faithfully checking this blog daily, hourly, maybe even more frequently, I’ve been partying, wakeboarding, making movies, playing quite a bit of guitar, and—as we’ve already covered—working for the man. I wish I could individually ask each and every one of you beautiful babies what has been taking your work time and repose, but since I can’t we’ll discuss topics near and dear to my heart, like dogs.

I attempted to acquire a dog the other day—a Catahoula Leopard Hound—and she was quite possibly the best thing to ever happen to the world, that is until I lost her. It happened like this: first of all, never go to the pound unless you know all the facts about your landlord, your income, and your tolerance for incompetence. I ambled into the Orange County Animal Services building with absolutely no faith in falling in love with one of the canines. I rounded the first, prison-like corner with an ambivalence normally reserved for a date set up by one of your relatives (or something more clever, you know what I mean) and saw the first puppies and knew I wasn’t getting out of there easily. Stalin could have just genocided 1000 people by personal firing squad, eaten a sea urchin, and lost a grand at the casino and still walk out of there teary-eyed for the poor little puppies. I was no match, obviously.

I passed the first few cages and stayed pretty strong. I came to Jill the Hound and she didn’t come over when I called, nor did she really give me more than a cursory glance. I moved on. Cold I know, but remember all that Stalin stuff? I had to watch out for my own heart.

I got to the end of the west cell blocks, turned on my heel, and resolved to leave sans dog for the time being. Then, a worker came up to me and aggressively asked if I’d like to see any of the dogs one-on-one. I was immediately put off at her dictionary-salesmen tactics and brushed her off, but as my eyes rolled, as it were, they ended up on little Jill the Hound. “I guess I’d like to see this girl,” I said with a definitive tone.

She slipped into her temporary noose collar (never pulling, mind you) and we went to the play room. The play room consisted of a chain link fence surrounding a concrete slab. The volunteer gave me some treats and we got to work. She told me to make Jill sit and I did, then she told me to give her the treat and I did. The first time she reluctantly sat she had my heart. What a good girl. Cute as a button too. None of the anxiety she originally had showed through when she was one on one. How had this dog stayed here so long? She was only nine months old, gorgeous and well-behaved. Well I didn’t stay around too long to ask questions, we just cuddled for a while, threw the ball until she didn’t feel like doing that anymore (hounds are like that) and then I said I’d take her.

We went to the front and it seemed to be a done deal until they asked the question about my landlord. Was she cool with it? I didn’t know. Had she been cool about anything in the past? Nope. Maybe we could foster her for the month she’s going to be here until she can get into her permanent home? Nope. Shit.

Well if you’re going to be closed for the next few days until Wednesday and you’re closing right now, I suppose I can wait and pick her up then. Long story short, I didn’t get her because they changed their hours and I couldn’t pick her up because I was in MN visiting my relatives. Shit. You may be able to tell how much this bothered me because I NEVER write a serious post. When I broke my jaw you got a side-splitter. Just about nothing gets me out of the comedy, but this did it. Look forward, however, to plenty of good stories as I scour craigslist.com for her current (and inadequate, I’m sure) owner to get rid of her so I can go resuce

Daytona 500 Query Letter

Hello my dear, sweet, ever-loving reader. This is a quick post (more of a transcription actually) of a query letter I'm sending to the Orlando Weekly in an attempt to get some cultural awareness about the sport of Nascar. I'm being required to attend the Daytona 500 to film some wakeboarding (odd, I know, but you'll see what it's about) and I want to fully engulf myself in the experience—really take in all this event has to offer. Is it our modern-day colliseum fully equipped with mustached gladiators in 700 horse power chariots? Is it a testament to man's ability to fuse technology with backwater instinct in a symbiotic relationship of skill and sport at its highest pinnacle? Is it a reason to hang on? Does it provide hope to the dejected and the will to live for a goodly part of the population? (I'm trying to be objective on this, but early numbers don't look good for this last conjecture.) Or is it just a bunch of overgrown children living adolescent fantasies of driving really fast and never turning right? Rest assured, my above-average congregation, I will find out. If I have embarrass myself in front of millions on national television, my pride crashing and burning like so many Nascars (can I use that word as a noun?) on an oil-slicked spit of asphault, I will report my findings and finally get to the bottom of one of societies most asked questions: What's with this friggin' sport?

Without further adieu, here is my letter to the editorial staff at the Orlando Weekly:

Hi there,

My name is Craig Kotilinek and I'm the Managing and Digital Media Editor for Wakeboarding Magazine. I would like to write a story about the cultural phenomenon that is Nascar, and specifically the microcosm that will continue to assault us in the next couple weeks: the Daytona 500. Why would I want to attend such a demographically undesirable event, you ask? I don't. I'm being sent on assignment for WBM to cover the wakeboarding that will take place prior to the race in the lake at the speedway's in-field. Turns out a boat company called Centurion has a partnership with Nascar to do boat wraps, so this is its moneymaker.

My story angle would be a complete outsider looking in on the blissful, money making fish bowl that is the Nascar industry. The "sport" holds a decent part of the population in a mullet-sporting, neck-bearded death grip while the rest of us remain completely apathetic about "Little E's" winless streak or Jeff Gordon's unsavory flamboyance. I can provide clips upon request.

Let me know what you think.

Craig Kotilinek

Fasting sucks

23 hours into a 24 hour fast and probably the best word to describe what I'm feeling right now is "sirloin." Oh yeah, that and HUNGRY!!!

Why sirloin? Well, we had an eight-hour meeting earlier (actually about an hour and a quarter, but you'll see why it felt longer) and the only magazine I had in front of me was Saveur. This is the premier food magazine with amazingly glossy pics of all your favorite, hunger-staving dishes. On the cover was, guess what, sirloin.

Give Me Pizza or Give Me Death

Nine hours into my first fast. Things have grown hazy and soft-focused. I haven’t eaten a bite of food (except a half-handful of Tibetan Goji Berries, which shouldn’t rightfully be put in the category of food. I’d tell you why, but look at the name. I mean, come on.) since wolfing a whole-sized Italian sub at Quiznos around 1:30.

I feel pretty healthy.

More than this, though, I feel HUNGRY. I want a cheeseburger stacked on top of a BLT with chocolate sauce on top, all washed down with a gallon of Oatmeal Stout. I want a quadruple grilled cheese with a pizza on the side and 35 cheese curds. I want 12 scoops of Cold Stone Chocolate Devotion with 27 beers.

At no time, nine hours into a 24-hour fast, have I wanted celery. Neither have I wanted carrots or broccoli (unless first deep-fried and served with ranch sauce) or spinach or lettuce. This is incredible to me. The fact that I haven’t eaten in nine hours—probably longer than I’ve abstained from sustenance in at least as many years—and I still don’t think healthy food sounds good. There’s just something about eating pizza and pizza rolls and pizza pockets and anything else that’s terrible for you and then accepting your food coma like a man happily condemned as you lay down and wait for your arteries to close.

The only positive things I can think of—besides the supposed health benefits prescribed here http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16513299 at NPR’s website—is that I haven’t had to brush my teeth (because they don’t really get dirty from drinking water) and I haven’t spent any money on food. Apart from that, my incredibly malnourished brain can come up with only one other benefit: tomorrow morning I can get up late because I don’t have to eat breakfast. Yippee.

So I shall take my low energy reserves to bed for the night and wish, Dear Friends, that you might eat just a little extra tonight so that I might imagine you all enjoying delicious onion rings and burritos and all sorts of other artery clogging goodies that make life worth living and fasting not worth trying. You lucky ducks.

Boat tests

There is no respect for human life on boat tests. After much much concluding, that is the conclusion I have come to.

It’s a well-known fact that man cannot live on simply ale and grease-ball bar food for an extended period of time, but the fact is, the human body can sustain an incredible amount of abuse for a decent chunk of time and function at a somewhat acceptable level.

Boat tests stretch the limits of this human endurance.

As much as the BT crew is expected to live up to the constant rigors of demanding boat manufacturers and butt-crack-of-dawn call times, so it is expected to push itself beyond the supposed limits of acceptable human behavior into the realm of iconic and even god-like consumption of goods, services, and sustenance.

So it is that the BT crew lived up to this level of debauchery for over a week in Lake Tulloch, California.

I don’t know what else to say. This is one of those times that you almost had to be there.

I may end up editing this post later, but for now, it’s just important for you to know that there is no respect for human life on boat tests.

Project: Revolution/this post gets a lot better, don't give up

Hello everyone. Hope everything is well and you’re all chasing down your dreams or—more productively—you’re checking ahead with them and hooking up with them later. So it’s been an interesting couple of weeks. I’ve gotten fingers up my butt, a new job, a new place, and lost a girlfriend (that last one we won’t discuss…it’s too new, you know how it is).

Why all the changes, you ask? Well, I’d like to say that I started chewing volupa root from the foothills of the Northern Congo and it’s brought not only luck and prosperity (again, leaving out the whole ex-girlfriend thing, which was neither lucky nor prosperous), but also all the energy of crack without the nasty hangover and cadaverous look. However, the truth is that I simply followed a maxim that has brought me almost exclusively good things from the moment the little voice in my head (which coincidentally sounds just like Billy Idol) started repeating it when things got tough or annoying: Stay the course.

Now, I like to think my sailing uncles instilled this in me at a young age around a warm campfire used to fight off the bitter arctic cold as we roasted bits of Emperor Penguin in preparation for the next day’s Polar Bear hunt—using only sharpened whale bones and our wits, of course.

I like to think this. That doesn’t mean it’s remotely true. I probably just heard Danny Tanner say it to Michelle Tanner on a particularly poignant episode of Full House during my tender college years.

Anyway, the origin is not the point. The point is what I’ve chosen to do with this information, and that is to take it quite literally and set myself to what I’ve chosen to do with my life. I realize that sounds a lot like blowing smoke up my own ass, and that’s because it is quite easy to blow smoke up there after I was violated by an attractive female medical practitioner not one day after hearing I’d gotten the position of Managing and Online Media Editor of WakeBoarding Magazine, which brings me to my next point: If someone is going to stick her fingers up your butt, even in a medical scenario, there has to be some ground rules. You can’t just go probing any innocent, law-abiding, wakeboard-loving citizen who is having pain when he poops. It just isn’t FAIR.

It happened like this. You already know why I was in the doctor’s office. I was sitting on the table, fifteen minutes late, when the doctor walks in (Think Elliot from Scrubs only with bigger boobs and less clothing). Okay, I may be exaggerating ever so slightly, but ever so slightly would not be the way I’d choose to describe how Dr. Barbie broke the news to me that she’d have to do a digital rectal exam (heretofore referred to as DRE in an effort to alleviate some pain and leave some memories unrekindled). She didn’t offer me Chardonnay. She didn’t massage my back and neck. She didn’t whisper sweet nothings in my ear. She wouldn’t, though I repeatedly requested, give me any Valium.

She did, however, extend me the polite consideration of telling me to “bear down.” What the fuck does that mean? Well, just relax like you’re going to poop.

Okay, let me break this down for you, missy, you want me to relax my butt while you just called the nurse in for reinforcements, you wouldn’t massage my neck and back, you wouldn’t whisper sweet nothings in my ear, buy me dinner, or offer me Valium and/or Chardonnay, and now you want me to relax while I’m laying on my side with my butt exposed as you’re dumping half a tube of KY on your fingers and you haven’t even taken your Super Bowl ring off? Forget it, lady, you can—shit, there it is, your fingers are in my butt.

And just like that she had violated me and whipped the glove off and she was out the door and out of my life, not even responding when I mustered a “call me” through salty tears in the fetal position on the sterile doctor’s office table with nothing that even resembled mood lighting.

You’d think the story would end with me pulling my pants up and trying not to slide off my leather car seats (remember that half-tube of KY?) while I cried all the way home, but my comfort level only bends further in this twisted story of heterosexual humiliation.

You see, one of the many small courtesies Dr. Barbie neglected on her hasty retreat from my rectum onto her next victim was the politeness to tell me she had prescribed some nice little butt missiles for me to discover when I got home. That’s right, folks, suppositories. Very comfortable. So obviously I did the only thing a secure heterosexual male does when he is prescribed anything to shove up his butt: I stared at the container listening to Neil Diamond until I wept the slightest of tears and waited for my roommate to get home so I could tell him about this and he could laugh.

Now, it turns out, my roommate is something of an expert on this subject (I don’t feel like I have to re-identify the subject of this travesty) and was a tremendous help in getting me through the emotional maze of things going into my butt instead of coming out.

In case you’ve been following my little butt predicament—whether talking to me directly or reading it in the tabloids—you might be wondering why this post is a little dated. Well, that’s partially because the emotional trauma that comes with sticking a little white apothecary up your backside leaves scars that don’t heal in a matter of weeks. It takes months and sometimes years to overcome such an experience (emotionally as well as physically) for any normal man, but it happened to me a little over a month ago (in Craig time…that basically means less than a year but more than a week).

You’ll be happy to hear that as I sit (mostly with comfort now) and type this fair account to you, I am in mostly good health. I’ve begun walking normally again, I can have a bowel movement without crying, I can lay mostly on my side without post-traumatic flashbacks, and I am almost ready to date again (although never to love…once a girl digitally assaults you and voids your life like a…well, you know...it changes a man).

So it is with hope, Dear Reader, that I scribe to you today. Hope that you may never have this experience, but that if you happen to have rectal issues, hope that this post makes you at least partially more comfortable in an incredibly uncomfortable situation. Good day and be sure to eat plenty of fiber.
-Craig Kotilinek