Justin Achilli

Whooh, Sweet Zombie Jeebus, help our suburbs!

Oh, man.

Somebody bring me a mop and bucket. I need to clean up after my tears of laughter.

Unpleasant? Callous? Least-common-denominator mean?

Yes.

But also funny. And, more importantly, true.

Please note that this makes me a hypocrite. But as Michael Franti once said, “Hypocrisy is the greatest luxury.” I think he meant it as a condemnation, but he also said it before the popularization of the Internet.

In less obnoxious news, special thanks to DJ Caz10, who’s being a sweetheart and letting me borrow his speakers and amp for our GenCon room party.

What’s that? Room party? Yes. Come by the booth at the show and ask for me.

So, there we were: Once again, bottomed out, the collected villains, jackasses, shitheads and associated girlfriends of the monkey circus gathered at Uranus for a night of Jell-o wrestling. It’s not an uncommon thing. Because we know one of the bartenders, we always get our drinks stiffer than a Steiner clothesline. Because we love that bartender, we keep "winning" parties. In fact, we don’t even have to enter anymore. The club’s manager just calls Brian and asks him which night he’d like to turn his stupid but well-tipping friends loose on the place. Jell-o wrestling night is Wednesday night.

This Jell-o wrestling night was a particularly good one, as a dozen girls had all signed up for the gladiatorial spectacle. The wrestling wasn’t scheduled to start until maybe 11 or so, and we had indeed "won" a party, which entitled us to an hour of free drinks, so we did what any sane human being would do at a nightclub under such circumstances. We watched Heavy Metal on the club monitors and proceeded to get hammered.

The usual complement of ringers was there. Kiki, of the "Swedish Bikini Team" girl-on-girl kissing sensation (I swear she pays her rent with club promotion money) was ready to whup some monkey ass, as was Georgia, whose style was reminiscent of something Greco-Roman, but it wasn’t wrestling. Katie was absent this time around, though, probably because they had enough people to put on a show and didn’t need her particular "talent," which is pulling up her sports bra and flashing the crowd for the cheap pop and fan-favorite win when it comes down to such.

You know this part. All the girls wrestled. I was drunk as a fucking monkey and didn’t have any idea what was going on, so I pretty much confined my participation in the event to screaming WOO like a good redneck should.

I did hear one new policy, however. Apparently, one lucky stud would have the opportunity to hop in the Jell-o pit and wrestle the full stable of girls. All you had to do was buy a drink. With each drink, you earned a raffle ticket, and the joker emceeing the event would draw randomly from the stubs and pick the guy who would face off against the women-warriors.

I decided to be that lucky stud.

With all five of the non-slurred words still left in my speaking salvo, I bellied up to the bar and asked our secret teammate, Nancy, to put in the fix. This she happily did, and I thank God to this day that she took mercy on me; read on.

Still somewhat giddy with the prospect (and still toe-up drunk), I anxiously awaited the calling out of the winner’s number. True to her word, Nancy came through, and that weird dude who comments on the matches hollered out my number.

Okay. So.

I was presented with a liability release, which I suppose I signed, and then I was told to strip down to my skivvies and put my hands behind my back.

People, what the fuck was wrong with me? Let this be a lesson to you: Drink in moderation. Drinking to excess makes you do really fucking stupid things, like taking off your goddamn pants in a fucking bar and letting them duct tape your hands behind your back. Yeah. And then — and then — they slicked me down with baby oil, presumably to keep people from accidentally coming into the sort of contact with one another that requires surgery to heal afterward.

There I stood, in my underwear, doused in oil, my hands taped behind my back, in the center of a nightclub, surrounded by maybe 50 people, anxiously awaiting the full-tilt ass-kicking I was set to receive.

Here, the story diverges based upon the teller.

To my own memory, there were a dozen girls in the Jell-o pit with me. When the emcee "rang the bell," I worked my hands free of the duct tape while my opponents sort of bobbed around, unsure of how to attack. Their hesitation proved their undoing, though, because once I had freed myself, I became a dervish of martial terror. When the first girl came after me, I grabbed her around the waist, locked my hands, and rolled back and sideways. Those of you familiar with amateur wrestling might recognize this as a barnyard takedown; those of you familiar with the WWF’s "sports entertainment" will recognize this as an early-release belly-to-belly. Those of you unfamiliar with wrestling, I grabbed this girl and threw her ass out of the ring. One down, a million or so to go. The next one came in low, presumably to catch me under my center of balance (Ha! I was drunk! I didn’t have a center of balance!) and put me down for the dogpile. Because of my skills as a warlord, however, I caught her around the neck and shoulders, locked the hold, and again rolled back. Martial artists know this as a tenchitouraku, or "head falling from heaven to earth." Wrestling fans know it as the DDT. For the uninitiated, I flipped this girl over and dropped her on her head. At that point, it was all over. The bevy of remaining ninjettes swarmed over me and knocked me to the pit’s bottom by sheer force of mass. While pinned beneath them, I did manage to wrench my shoulder loose from contact with the ground, but the emcee three-counted me anyway. I was fucking robbed. I do remember being terrified of drowning in the Jell-o, though, so it’s probably for the best that the debacle ended there.

According to Grand’s tale, I faced eight girls. I hit my throws as I described above, but half of the attendant girls were so wowed with my dextrous, brutal, effortless dispatching of their number that they fled to preserve their own cowardly hides. That’s pretty cool, but mathematically speaking, that means I got my ass handed to me by only two girls in the aftermath, which isn’t quite as heroically as I would choose to recall the tale. That is, if you can call beating up girls while drunk heroic. Grand was also amazed that I managed not to expose my genitals to the assembled throng, as I was wearing boxer shorts. Heroism and modesty all wrapped into one; that’s me.

Chad’s version of the affair is, much like Chad, insane. The number of girls I faced increases each time he relates the story, so I think by now I must have faced a Greek phalanx of gladiatrices. Additionally, according to Chad, I managed to work one hand free before facing the first wave of assailants. Well, Chad, if I had one hand free, what the fuck was the one supposedly still bound attached to? Still, this story becomes the coolest in the end, as it results in me overcoming a veritable legion with only one hand.

Indeed, I am a mighty badass.

Then again, as Nancy pointed out to me in no uncertain terms, she had told the girls to take it easy on me. Their normal modus operandi is either to wedgie the Sweet Zombie Jeebus out of the poor guy or — ahem — remove his underwear altogther, after which they overwhelm him as he desperately tries to fig leaf his package from the crowd. I was treated with mercy and repaid it with head trauma.

Thereafter, when I gathered what was left of my green Jell-o tarnished dignity and shoved my ass back into my clothes, it didn’t get any better. In my condition, I demanded that we attend other bars on the strip (Buckhead has a million bars and clubs in the same neighborhood). Digging through my pockets, I found a pair of passes to Chaos, so Chaos it was.

Of course, Chaos has sort of positioned itself as an "upscale" club. It plays Chicago-style house music (well, not really, but it’s as close to Chicago-style as a mainstream club is going to get), it’s got a dress code, call drinks are about eight bucks apiece, and all of its bathrooms have attendants. Consider their horror, then, when this drunken maniac spattered in an unknowable green filth kicks his way past the bouncers and produces VIP passes.

Dutifully, Chad hit the bar and ordered a few Grey Goose-and-somethings, which I callously screamed at the bartender not to produce. Instead, I insisted that we shoot the vodka straight (those of you who have enjoyed Grey Goose know what an idiot I must have been by this point) and chase it with whatever Red Bull knockoff the bar stocked.

Which we did.

Poor Chad. Trying to babysit this barking loon of a "friend," only to be punished with viciousness. You can never turn your back on a drug and all that, or whatever it was that HST said in Fear and Loathing.

I guess the rest of the night must have been uneventful (though I do remember dancing on the upper-level dance floor while no one else was on it), because things progressed quickly to the crawl back to the car. Even then, that only stands out because I recall peeing in the street, facing an apartment complex, and being caught in the oncoming lights of some car. Bracing myself for the inevitable ticket, I was somewhat relieved (get it? Ha ha!) to hear Chad’s chiding voice intone, "What are you doing?" At this, I could only shrug.

Third Element’s new home (please adjust bookmarks) is:

http://personal.atl.bellsouth.net/atl/j/a/jachilli/

Ugly? Yep. But not as ugly as Earthlink.

I’ll leave the Earthlink/MindSpring address active for a while, but I make no promises. Possible alternatives to that monstrosity include moving the whole mess over to http://www.dj-dotcom.com (don’t go there now; there’s nothing there, but I own the domain) or some absurd ipfox masker. We shall see.

As a matter of fact, let’s just do that now. Here’s a less hellish URL that’ll give you the same result:

http://thirdelement.ipfox.com

Oh, and one last thing. The Buy Shit button works now. Pay my rent, please.

“Animals, which move, have limbs and muscles; the earth has no limbs and muscles, hence it does not move.”
– Scipio Chiaramonti (Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Pisa), 1633

“Negro equality! Fudge! How long, in the Government of a God great enough to make and rule the universe, shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to quip, so low a piece of Demagogism as this?”
– Abraham Lincoln, 1859

“I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary.”
– Ronald Regan, 1965

“I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
– Ronald Reagan, 1968

“When a beaver is pursued, knowing this to be on account of the virtue of its testicles for medicinal uses, not being able to flee any farther it stops and in order to be at peace with its pursuers, bites off its testicles with its sharp teeth and leaves them to its enemies.”
– Leonardo da Vinci

“X-rays are a hoax.”
– Lord Kelvin, 1900

“Fifty years hence… [w]e shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”
– Winston Churchill, 1932

“Gone With the Wind is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. I’m just glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling flat on his face and not Gary Cooper.”
– Gary Cooper, 1938

I wish I had a cancer-gun: a gun I could point at people and give them cancer. Their bodies would be wracked with malignant tumors, plaguing them with misery, until the whole mess went into remission a moment before they died. Then they’d catch on fire and burn to death.