Michelob

Posted on 12/17/2011 by peter

Relax, friends, and enjoy a Michelob.

Beaten down by Christmastime worries? Not sure where the next paycheck’s coming from? Scavenging for food from a dumpster behind Perkins? A cold, tasty Michelob is the cure for what ails ya! Join me on this bean bag and imbibe!

I regularly turn to Michelob’s classic bottle shape and crisp, amber refreshment when I’m in need of a pick-me-up. Sometimes after I run down a cat with my Hyundai, I need a way to slow the adrenaline and feel the emotions of the moment. That’s when I reach for a Michelob. Cracking that bottle open, I feel like a man applying clown makeup for the first time in his life: purposeful and renewed.

In case you didn’t know, Michelob is a kind of beer.

There’s just something about Michelob (beer) that makes me want to live a vigorous life. It makes me stand up and dance – not the effeminate sort of dancing you might see on television, but a Michelob sort of dance: standing in place in front of a full length mirror and thrusting one’s pelvis while biting’s one’s bottom lip. Michelob brings out the best in me; it is the Stephen A. Douglas to my Abraham Lincoln.

Me, beer

Michelob is like Stephen A. Douglas in other ways, too. Both are short, squat, and advocate popular sovereignty.

Setting the issue of slavery in the territories aside, my offer of a stout, frosty Michelob still stands. Though you brusquely declined and left the room several minutes ago, I will continue my entreaty indefinitely and keep a bean bag warm for you. There’s a whole case of Michelob where this one came from! Drinking it will make our friendship blossom!

Michelob: casually racist beer for lonely men.

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Vanishing Tinsel

Posted on 12/15/2011 by peter

Hey, what ever happened to tinsel?

Unless you’ve lapsed into a egg nog-induced coma (henceforth to be referred to as “nogbrain”) you’re no doubt aware that the Christmas season is here. This is a glorious time of year in which children become ulcerous with anticipation and adults hazily reminisce about the disappointments of Christmases past.

Also, aunts are briefly spoken with.

Sadly, in recent years I have noted a general absence of tinsel. Once upon a time, tinsel was synonymous with Christmas. Its shiny brilliance signaled the splendor of the savior of the world coming to Earth and its cheap artificiality made it available to everyone from the portly plutocrat to the lowliest Irishman. Today, however, trees are rarely draped with tinsel. Instead they are debased with a smorgasbord of crafty knick-knacks and pop cultural twaddle. Our Christmas trees now look as if a Hallmark store vomited all over a Balsam Fir. We have traded the nobility of tinsel for fickle tchotchkes, like a man trading his Buick Regal for a single night with a Cambodian street woman.

Like all things true and pure, tinsel came from Germany. Emerging in the 1600s from the black forests of Bavaria, tinsel found favor as a simple, shiny distraction from the Thirty Years’ War and unspeakable Hessian godlessness. Much later, a single strand of tinsel was then brought to America by a doe-eyed orphan boy. The tinsel-bearing urchin was received at port by the corpulent President Grover Cleveland, who rewarded him with mustache-tickles and a pony. Newspaper accounts of this memorable encounter delighted Americans and popularized tinsel itself. All of this information and more is available in my new book, This is My Truth: The History of Tinsel & Everything Else.

I guess we’re left to try to somehow enjoy a Christmas without tinsel, which is like an Independence Day without hot dogs or a Columbus Day without scolding editorials. I’d say we’d all be better off nogbraining ourselves.

See you in my coma dreams!

Posted in Best of the JLP, Rants | 5 Comments

Middle School Retreat Excitement

Posted on 12/8/2011 by peter

Hey friendly friends! You feel that buzz in the air this morning? It’s not from the dozen 5 Hour Energy drinks I just sucked down – it’s because we’re loading up the bus for my school’s middle school retreat!

In just a few moments, I’ll take my seat for the two hour bus ride into the deep recesses of Minnesota’s frigid wilderness, accompanied only by dozens of giggling pre-teens playfully stealing each other’s hats and babbling about Justin Bieber’s exquisite mouth. Sometime during the trip, I will demand silence from the students and deliver a 40 minute harangue about what it was like when I was a teenager: when Huey Lewis’s “Power of Love” blasted from every boom box and old Doc Brown was nothing more than a disgraced kook making side deals with Libyans. The students will likely stare back at me blankly, only escalating my agitation and forcing me to loudly, hurriedly tell them about all of my adventures through the circuits of time.

Once we arrive at the rustic retreat center, the students will get to spend the next 24 hours binging on nature. We will learn about owls and recycling and which girls have a crush on which boys. We will trudge through the woods in the bitter cold listening to some college student talk about wolves and wishing we could just go home where it’s warm and there aren’t as many wolves. Then, upon eating a breakfast of steamed eggs and gray, rubbery meat, the learning objectives of the retreat will have been accomplished. Probably the only thing worse than going on a middle school retreat would be the Bataan Death March, in which some 10,000 American and Filipino POWs died a cruel death. Aside from that though, this is the worst.

Fortunately for the students though, they don’t know that yet. Right now, they’re excited. I suppose I’m a little excited too, but mostly for the steamed eggs.

This is why I got my Master’s Degree.

Posted in Raves | 2 Comments

The Vikings as a Microcosm

Posted on 12/3/2011 by peter

Tomorrow I will don my authentic Adrian Peterson game jersey to attend a meaningless Vikings game in which Adrian Peterson will not be be playing due to injury.

Malaise.

This is my life.

Some of you readers may be rolling your eyes as if to say, “Hey Peter, snap out of it! You’ve got a loving wife and two beautiful children and a great job and a magnificent beard! You’ve got it all! Women love you and men want to be you!” Of course all these things are true, but they aren’t enough. What’s the point of having a hot wife and a sensible Hyundai Sonata if the Minnesota Vikings are 2-9?

To make matters worse, the Vikings will be facing Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos. Tebow, as you are no doubt aware, is the buzz of the NFL – a balanced blend of Johnny Unitas’s moxie and guile with St. Francis of Assisi’s piety and throwing motion. Tebow and the Broncos have shown a remarkable ability to defeat miserable, lethargic teams like the Vikings after lulling them and the entire viewing audience to sleep through the first three and a half quarters. Odds are, I and the other fans in attendance will be fed a steady diet of punts, Toby Gerhart runs and wildly errant passes for three hours amidst the dreary, unnatural ambiance of the Metrodome.

I’d rather have horrible diarrhea in a mall bathroom than do this.

However, since I’m going on the occasion of my dad’s birthday with he and my brothers, it seems only right that I should tag along, albeit sullenly. After all, my dad has given me so much over the years, and my brothers each attended my wedding, so I suppose I owe them something.

Seriously you guys, nothing matters.

Posted in Rants | 2 Comments

Lounge With Me

Posted on 12/1/2011 by peter

Come and lounge with me.

Let us drape our bodies over one another as we lay relaxed on fine leather furniture. We will coil our appendages tightly together like two boa constrictors strangling a grizzly bear, yet the touch of our skin will remain soft and giving, like a fat man dry humping a cake.

Unnatural similes aside, I beckon you to join me in a sensual, mutually satisfying lounge. My arms are open and my lips are moistened slightly in anticipation of our relaxing recline into one another. In the sweet stacking of our bodies, our two essences will pool together into metaphysical union. In our repose, we will become one, just like Reconstruction make America one again, except ours will feature no flagrant racism or carpetbaggers.

A great riddle in my life has been the lack of reciprocal lounging I have been able to entice people into. Be they friends or random passersby or Tom Bosley from Happy Days, others have shown a striking resistance to my invitations. I have tried every conceivable approach to these requests, from tearful to profane to shockingly profane, and nothing seems to work. Recently I have taken to displaying myself in an enticing manner on tabletops in public spaces. This has won me only a scolding from a shift manager at Burger King.

Now that you know my history, I will make the stakes clear: without your body warmly enveloping mine, I am nothing. Without the weight of your body pressed against my chest and your breath soft on my neck, I will almost certainly throw myself into an empty mine shaft. I have lost all perspective on this.

Just give me this one thing. Come lounge upon me. It will be glorious.

Us, now.

Posted in Meh | 1 Comment

Outtakes & Bloopers 2011

Posted on 11/28/2011 by peter

Arise from your filthy beds, thirsty children, and slake yourselves off the chafed nipples of Rock TV!

Hooray for a new outtakes video! This video (like our outtakes projects in 2009, 2007, 2005, & 2003) features winning smiles, jocular belly-slaps, and giggles aplenty. It also features Todd Luker repeatedly demanding beans.

I don’t have a ton to say about this project, other than to note that it was a pleasure to assemble. I was happy that I was less promiment this time than I was in the 2007 & 2009 incarnations , though this was due more to the fact that I had fewer acting roles than any increase in my professionalism or ability to properly deliver a line. Fortunately for the ministry, Will Hines stepped in with a few well-delivered ad libs about kidnapping Al Gore’s children to save the video for us.

Enjoy the pleasure!

P.S. The song is “Skate With Me” by a Minneapolis band called Kubla Khan.

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