Category: bros and friendship

“GZ, what is the next ‘big thing’?”

This question from Mr. R Dario and as sure as shit Zamboni will answer it now, pleasingly and accurately…

There are several things which together form a new wave of next big things Mr.Dario, and here they are:

Myspace: This will puncture a hole in the wobbly and balding tire that is facebook.

Anti-Dolphin and Pro-Dolphin eating movements: It turns out those smiles they have are evil and Dolphins regularly rape people and each other.

Eating Squirrel: As we look ever more for the cutting edge of free-range, locavorism, and organic, within twenty years no one will eat anything they did not kill in their own backyard. Raccoons make very good eating by the way so do not despair. here is handy guide for you to see. http://www.artofmanliness.com/2012/01/16/how-to-field-dress-a-squirrel/

Zombie Movies Which Show How Scary Humans are as Opposed to Zombies: We will start to see the Zombies and merely diseased victims of corporate pollution and victims of discrimination and predjudice.

Bro-Marriage: Straight guys will begin to marry in order to make hanging out with each other easier, like beer drinking and hunting. It will also be a more honest way of telling women, “I am not looking for something long-term, see, I am bro-hitched already”.

So there you have it, and Rob D I appreciate the question, and the questing… live in truth and Zamboni!

“a mystery here for Z”

“How do we know if we really like our pals or if we just think we do?” This question comes  from Susan K. (Palmettah)

A good question, and simple to answer. Lets say you have nothing to do in the evening after a long day of working at the glass factory or baking prune danish. You are going to watch important  game on TV and eat the wings of  buffalo, but you wish not to be alone.. In  short you want to be around not  just a friend you can talk to, but more importantly- one you can be quiet, even silent with.

Today we have too many friends, way too many. We “like” everything from Walmart to Emily Dickinson (how did she make her facebook page from Death?) but I, great zamboni say, we know we truly like a pal when we want to be around them even when we are quiet and not our best. We like them when they make us laugh and laugh at our jokes. When they don’t ask us how our work is but how our soul is. (not directly of course and always after a few beers)

We think we like those that impress us, make us feel stupid, make themselves seem more important than us. We don’t.

I have spake, what do you think?

Can men and women be friends?

This questions comes to zamboni from Pyrex Thrombosis (obviously fake!) who claims to be from a place called PooPootie Louisiana. Though his identitty seems questionable it  is  a frequent question which I the Zamboni field very much.

No..

It’s really like an elephant befriending a rhino. At first of course it is exciting, “wow, you’re so much shorter than me and your johnson is three feet long, and you have armor plates on your ass!” And the rhino thinking, “wow, you can give yourself a shower! and your floppy ears are so totes lol!”

But soon the novelty starts to wear thin. Common interests, feelings, and experiences just aren’t there. Ultimately, it is our differences that attract us, but our similarities that make us stick. It starts to be like, “hey you’re so short, I can’t see you, what did you say?” and , “is that trunk sanitary, and is it a nose or a mouth?”

So truly Pyrex, the answer to your question, is No*.

They can be many things, man and woa-man: copains, compatriots, colleagues, co-conspirators, but not really friends.

hey, are things like.. weird between us?

*and yet, that 1 in 100 exception can be stronger than anything else. The exception proves the fool, as they say the saying goes.

Zamboni goes to New Orleans

That is right people, you wont have your favorite Zamboni to kick around for a week or so as I am going to New Orleans- there I am going to learn the secrets of three major forces in the Universal Energy Field:

1.Voodoo

2.Hope after Disaster

3. Beignets

I will miss you probably half as much as you will miss me! but remember- Just when you are thinking, “how helpless I am without the great zamboni’s thoughts stalking my every move!“, remember that the only one thing that basically all Zamboni’s diatribes come down to is this: the answer is not in Zamboni, it is in you. 

But we do all need a little help from our friends too- and so today I would like to thank some: E.L.Wise, Ralf The Bart, D.J.M.W., Bird la Bert, E.H.W. , SKDancing, “LuLu” A. Dylan Winestock, Rye ODonnell, Jiannush Warrenski, Phillipus Gormensch, and because she has lost someone very near and dear,  and to me she is like the sun that comes up to a long night, Cass E. “Joe Di” Maggio, Zamboni always is sending you strength and patience.

If all else fails, try wearing mismatched socks- it makes it harder to take yourself seriously. Thank you reading.

Hit “comment” and leave a question!! Would it kill you?

“We’ll always have the Diner”

(The following aint Zamboni, he’ll be back soon after his maple syrup 3-day immersion therapy)

French fries and gravy..

If you wanna talk you always got the guys at the Diner, you don’t need a girl if you wanna talk.

You told her, (didn’t you show her?)

Fenwick’s in the manger!:the smile of the week, definitely The Smile of The Week!

"You're gonna get coffee before we go to the diner and get coffee?"

You ever get the feeling there’s something going on we don’t know about?

Everything I learned in school I should have learned from Diner. I spent most of my late teens, early twenties not realizing the importance of friends. I thought it was about being social, having somone fun to pass the time with, excitement. I had more friends who were  women than men. I felt more comfortable with them. Of course there was always the underlying excitement and  possibilty of more. I confused this with friendship. These connections always broke because feelings started to overflow the  borders, invariably it got messy. I never could figure it out, or just never tried that hard. Maybe Checkov was right, you can only be friends with a woman after you’ve been lovers first. Or maybe it just takes more maturity than I have. Besides one amazing woman from way back in college days, I’ve never been good at the old friends with women thing.

In the words of George Michael, I should have known better. It was  in my junior year I discovered Diner and watched it with my little circle of guy friends numerous times. We wrote it down word for word. We went to all night diners and drank way too much coffee, pissing off waitresses asking for french fries and gravy, and cherry cokes,  then reciting dialogue from the film.

I had a best friend in high school, Sean,  in fact we were best friends since third grade, like brothers. In high school we opened up our dyad to include a few others. They seemed to feed off our close connection and we became a tight foursome, often fivesome- no accident  we became obsessed with a movie about a very close fivesome of guys in Baltimore in 1959. Five friends clinging to each other on the eve of both their inevitable adulthood and the huge social changes about to take place in their still just barely buttoned down world.

Another irony is that this was the last moment before sex and love in all it’s multi-armed-goddess might and glory stepped to the forefront of our lives. Adolescence for me, and maybe other guys, is basically one long hangout with your buddies while you wait to lose your virginity. After you do, there’s less to talk about and less time since you’re now busy trying to lose it over and over again. We should have learned from the movie that it was more than clever dialogue and great retro tunes- it was trying to tell us, “hey idiots, keep these friendships, there the ones that last…girls have a way of coming and going..”

We didn’t. I didn’t. Sean and I went out in a blaze of gory after a great run into our late twenties. I’m sure I was to blame. I’m sure he was to blame. I’m sure it had everything to do with all the years before and maybe not so much to do with a nasty letter, ugly words- who knows. The fact is, it was like losing a brother who was  also a best friend, a role model, an idol..if I went on i’d probably excavate more root causes and, well,  this isn’t therapy is it? Don’t answer that.

I’m at peace with it now, but I still watch Diner, and still love it, still yearn for the old friends. The ones you have a private language with. The ones who get your eyebrow raises, your smirks.. the small stuff. Enough inside terms and code words to fill a dictionary with.

Now my son asks to watch Diner every Christmas. He’s  10 but he gets it. I hope he keeps it with him, and I hope we’ll always have the Diner.

“Zamboni, what actually does happen in Vegas?”

This question comes to me from Howard, who is perplexed by these “what happens in Vegas” advertisements.

at Mix Lounge, in the bay of Mandalay, everyone mixes, heirarchies get all mixed up.

Well my friend, Zamboni has spoken about the Las Vegas of Death afterworld, but not yet about the real one. In this Las Vegas, as you see above, you make a new best friend that you have never met before and will never, perhaps, ever see again. You meet this new best friend at bar and he is a banker and he is there for convention but none of this matters and after 4 pomegranate mojitos 6o floors above the desert you are now best friends. You then have a fifth with his boss who evidently has his own plane but at this moment is just another drunken idiot like you trying to charm married woman from Fresno. Everyone is equal.

What can this teach us about life back in the reality of our real homes? Perhaps that though we see ourselves as islands, as people that only a small group of folks appreciate and understand, that in fact we are mistaken. Perhaps there are really hundreds, thousands of people that we could see eye to eye with, but we just don’t see them. Of course there are. Are you really that different from anyone?

In Las Vegas, everyone is equal in the pursuit of pleasure. Hedonism? Yes, but equality nonetheless.

So I urge you, general public of readers of me Zamboni, it is not that you need to go to Las Vegas -though everyone should- but that more importantly, learn this, that in the words of mystic sixties rock n’ roll Jefferson Airplane:

“No man is as island, he’s a peninsula”

Zambones has spoken.

 

I am a woman; How Can I be a “Bro”?

It is a great question which comes from reader, Hermia. She also says to Zamboni, that she is always losing her man friends and not knowing why, and so wishes to know how to be more of a friend that keeps the man friends that she has.

Dear Hermia, Zamboni can help you with this, and I will first tell you it is most difficult and even in the way of your asking I am noticing how you go wrong. But don’t worry, if you follow a few simple rules, I can have you knocking back beers and laughing very loud in no time.

1. Bros are never posssessive. Already with your “hey how come you never call?” type of feelings, you are already travelling far from the land of the Bros. My bro may not call for one or two weeks, but when he do,  I answer only with “yo! waasup bro! let’s hang, its been too long.” Be very careful you are not answering with faint passive-agressive, “oh…hey…..you called…..I thought you were dead……ha…” That will immediately cloud the waters of Bro-dom into very murkiness. Bros don’t need guilt from their bros, they get this already.

2. Bros talk about sports, movies, or funny bullshit for like first two hours of bro “hangtime.” This, while starting to eat and drink, sets a neutral, healthy tone to the evening, letting each bro know they are in a safe-zone of non-threatening palaver. During this time, never get pensive look on your face, rest chin on one hand, look misty eyed and thoughtful while you say, “so……how are you?” Emphasizing “are.” This will send hair on back of bro straight up into defensive posture.

3. Bros do get very real with details. Yes you will have to give details of sex and your emotions. Many womens are embarrassed to talk of sex, and get all giggly and strange when conversation moves to this. They don’t want to seem slutty, or want to retain mystery, etc. You, my female friends must become comfortable with tossing out the craziest details of what you did last night. After two hours of drinking, the crazier the detail the funnier, and hence better. You know you have said they right juicy bro detail if it is met with wide eyes and “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? NO WAY!!!!” and the like.

4. Bros do share their emotions. Just not over tea. “Oh I love how I can tell you anything, just like my girlfriends!” No thank you please. Give us your feelings, leave us our gender.  See #2.

5.Bros don’t let bros drink alone. Or drive drunk, “dude, just sleep on the couch”, etc.

6. Hi five often. Or other little tappy finger bomb thingees. It’s fun to have  private customs that border on silly. Life is too serious not to  do stupid handshakes on occasion or raise your voice inappropriately.

7. Keep deeper stuff confidential, for gods sake.Trust.

6. Bros need you to be a wing man, an encourager, but never a competitor or a mom.  Let’s say you have come this far and the bro has accepted you and you him. He expresses a crush he has on this girl that really understands him, that is fun to hang out with, easy going, cute, you know, the whole Piroshki. Since you are a girl, unless his crush is of Sapphic nature, then you have advantage over male bro; you are not competitor for girls attention. Encourage bro to call, make date, but if bro doesn’t, don’t lecture or make to guilt.

But what if the crush is you? What if even after following all these precepts, your bro and you develope a real spark and out of the ashes of your burnt up bro-ship, the phoenix of love might arise?

That my friend is the danger, because once you do the touching or make the beast with two backs, things will get weirder than two frogs milking a goat, and you find you are very much a girl and a guy now.

But  then again, there is no love without risk eh?

And women look even better in tuxedo

To avoid this my female reader, go easy on make-up and sexy dress when you have bro-nites and  it wouldn’t kill you to pick your nose or scratch the crotch a couple times too. Or find gay bro and avoid much of this.

Most importantly, DUDE, GOOD LUCK! (Hi five)

Zambones has spoken.