Grill Master Of The Universe!!!

I went through a brief period of time when I was unemployed, and of course we all know that idle hands do the Devil's work. So in an effort to not become a felon, I decided to try and expand my culinary abilities. Figuring out how to turn on the oven was my first challenge, and it was all up hill from there. Up until that point in my life I had been about as domestic as a child raised by wolves.

Yes, this is an actual baby photo of me.

I had gotten to the point where I was comfortable cooking rice, soup, microwave dinners, and toast. I felt proud and almost adult. I could actually feed myself if I became stranded on a deserted island that happened to have a fully stocked kitchen. The day of the Chicken Incident started like any other; I woke up, took the dog out, and waved good bye to roommate as he left for whatever it was he did during the day, he had alluded to something about work, but it was hard for me to say. I have the attention span of a gnat; as soon as something is out of my sight, it ceases to exist in my microcosm and I no longer acknowledge its existence.

these are the things that go through my mind...


As soon as roommate left, I started scanning the kitchen to figure out exactly what I wanted to create for food that day. I was thinking of trying something really complicated, like a rice/soup/toast concoction. I rummaged through the cabinets and drawers, tossing random cans and packages of food around the kitchen.

Finally my eyes rested on the back deck, where roommate's brand new stainless steel grill sat. A maniacal smile slowly etched itself across my face, and gears in the back of my brain started to turn. An idea was hatching, and roommate wasn't there to stop me...

I believe that he paid roughly several million dollars for it, but it could have been several hundred, or he could have even gotten it for a handful of beans, I had no idea. But he seemed to think it was worth several souls at least.

My mind was made up, I was going to use a grill for the first time in my life. I approached the device with a little trepidation, and looked the whole machine over carefully before I dove in. It was huge and shiny; a mountain of stainless steel and random knobs. After an hour or so I got a flame going, and I was satisfied that I had become a grill-MASTER! Almost like He-Man, but with grills instead. I overflowed with confidence, and was ready to grill a whole cow!

Unfortunately roommate had not anticipated my sudden culinary genius and had not purchased a whole cow for me to cook, he and I would have a discussion about that later. I knew roommate would be home for lunch eventually, so I continued to dig through kitchen searching for something to grill. The neighbor's cat ran through the back yard, but I decided that it was too fast. I opened the freezer and there it was, in all its glory; a frozen chicken. It glowed like the holy grail and beckoned to me, The GRILL-MASTER-OF-THE-UNIVERSE!!!!



Inspiration courtesy of He-Man


I grasped the frozen chicken as though it were some lost relic, and proceeded to peel the plastic wrapping off of it. I vaguely remembered my mother cooking a chicken or some other fowel, then again it could have been a macaw for all I knew, and she had said something about giblets, or gibbets, or gerbils, again the details were fuzzy. But according to her there was definitely something within the chicken that we were not supposed to eat. I looked in the cavity expecting to find a black mamba nestled in there and I was a little dissapointed when nothing sprung out at me.

To the best of my knowledge I had the chicken fully prepared, and I was sure that Colonel Sanders was looking down from heaven in approval. I knew that I couldn't just toss the chicken into the grill carelessly, so I grabbed a cookie sheet, placed the rock-hard frozen chicken on it and popped the whole mess into the grill.

Of course side dishes were something way out of my league at the time so I figured roommate would be pleasently surprised with a whole roasted chicken. The last time I looked at the temperature on the grill it was somewhere around 450 degrees, and I figured that would be sufficient to cook the chicken, so busied myself with important work elsewhere: video gaming.

I had probably saved the planet from zombies several times, and I figured that roommate would be home soon, and the chicken should be done. I imagined a golden succulent chicken dripping with juice and maybe stuffing had magically grown inside it too. It was going to be an epic meal. Then a strange acrid odor permeated my brain, as though something was burning.

"Odd," I thought, "the neighbors must have burned something horribly by the smell of it, they really ought to be more careful." I turned off the video game and headed toward the deck and the amazing chicken that was surely waiting for me. What greeted my eyes was not what I expected. It vaguely resembled a mushroom cloud erupting from the grill. Hiroshima and Mt. Vesuvius had bred and this was their offspring. I had somehow split the atoms of a chicken.

For some reason I found the sight awe-inspiring, but was unsure what to do. A foggy memory of roommate demonstrating how to use a fire extinguisher stumbled through my brain, but all I could recall was him saying "blah blah blah fire blah blah blah... are you listening... blah blah you're going to burn the fucking neighborhood down Blah Blah Blah". He sounded sort of like a mix of Charlie Brown's teacher and Fire Marshall Bill from In Living Color. The flames went a bit higher, and I had a nagging feeling that roommate would be agitated if I somehow burned his house down. So I grabbed the extinguisher and snuffed the flames before the entire house was immolated.

As the last of the flames were extinguished, I turned around there was roommate. I think his brain took a few minutes to assimilate what he had just witnessed. His eyes zeroed in on the grill, and his face went through a vast series of emotions within a few seconds... you can see how his face morphed below in slow-motion.

inspiration for this illustration comes from Hyperbole and a Half's "New Pain Scale"

Of course we have to realize that the receptors in roommate's brain and the receptors in my brain work very differently... as pictured below.

I'm pretty sure it was somewhere between the two.

We finally worked up enough courage to see what might have been left of the chicken. The cookie sheet I had placed it on was black, and had somehow curled into the shape of a cup, which held some ashes and a few bone fragments. With a huge smile, I looked at roommate and said
"Holy shit! I incinerated it! Lets play video games!"


Yes, he is capable of turning this color

To this day no new grill has been forthcoming from either party.

So I am now a Blogger

So I guess it's official, I am now blogging... I have never done this before, so I can't promise how it will come out. I have all the technological skills of a badger with cataracts and I fully believe that computers were put on this earh for the sole purpose of vexing me and making me feel stupid. In my mind they are bizaare esoteric magical machines that are beyond the scope of my understanding. And I'm not even old, I'm in my mid thirties, one would think that I would have picked up on them just from the sheer proximity of the damned machines.I just got my first cell phone a few years ago, and I looked like a frickin monkey with a typewriter. I was so perplexed by the device, I was convinced that I had to sacrifice a goat or something to get it running.

yes, that is a sacrificed goat

As you have no doubt already noticed, I will be using my own poorly drawn illustrations throughout this blog. Please do not ask if I have hired a toddler to do my drawings, the last thing I want is a diaper filling brat running around my house. And who thought up the word "blogging" anyway, I mean it sounds like it was made up by someone with both autism and that disease Corky had on "Life Goes On". And NO, I am not politically correct, I will make fun of/poke at anyone: minorities, majorities, fat people, skinny people, handicapped people, gay people, straight people, Christains, Catholics, Atheists, nazis, bunnies, me, pregnant women... no one is safe. If I happened to miss whatever group you belong to, don't worry I'll get to to you eventually. If you happen to be one of those thin-skinned assholes who gets offended by the slightest off colored joke, you should go to another blog. Like Mary Mother Theresa's blog if she has one, or the Hello Kitty blog. I dont need e-mails telling me that I'm going to hell; I already know that.


random demons tormenting me in Hell



Now I must give credit where credit is due. The inspiration for this blog comes from Hyperbole and a Half, which was created by a genius of a girl named Allie. My favorite piece by her is Cat Safety Propaganda, I watch it almost every day and it still makes me crack up. Allie, if you happen to read my blog, please e-mail me and give me some tips, I sure can use them. Please check out her blog, I guarantee that you'll be laughing for days.

So again, if anything offends you, go to another blog.