Dollar Christmas Bullet

Christmas. So. Close. Yep, it's that time of year. The time when people start slacking at work/school. The time when you only hear Christmas music on the radio. The time when the whole state of Colorado closes for a day. Wait, that's got nothing to do with Christmas and everything to do with the ridiculously tall mountain range they have running through their state.

It's all over, man. Mary in accounting has five stockings and tinsel and Christmas candy all over her cube. Dex in purchasing comes in this morning with a Santa hat on and bells on his keys. Darryl in IT jiggles like a bowl full of jelly. The company brings in a catered lunch for the whole staff. Everyone sits down and eats and engages in meaningless chit-chat while the contracted magician pulls sponge balls out of his pants. Joy. Yep, it reeks of Christmas.

I thought this year for Christmas, I'd do something a little different. I thought wrong. I barely found time for Christmas cards. I went to the store and just wandered around aimlessly looking for the perfect gifts before walking out with two purchases, both for myself. I tackled a salvation army bell-ringing Santa for looking at me strangely when I tried to shove a gordita wrapper into his money pot. Actually, that last part isn't true. It was a woman dressed up in a gorilla costume who pretended to hurl feces at me.

Bah! I didn't tackle anyone this Christmas season. Lies. All lies. But hey, it sounds better than the truth. The only thing I plan on tackling this holiday is a case of bullet. I love the frost-brew liner and the skinnier-than-normal cans. They make me feel skinnier as I drink tons of their "diet" beer. The only potentially cooler can is the huge Fosters oil can. I forget exactly how much it is, but it's somewhere between 24 and 26 fl. oz. of fun. Heck, last time I tried to shotgun one, it took me three tries. Then again, I made the mistake of doing it cold. That's just too much cold on the throat all at once. Need warm beer. Warm beer also absorbs faster, so it's a quicker drunk. So all you pussies doing jager-bombs are weak tits. Jack, straight-up, room-temperature for a quick blue-ribbon zero-to-barroom-hero effect. That, and then you won't annoy others around you by being all wound-up on Red Bull when you're drooling-on-yourself-and-everyone-around-you drunk. You'll be passed out in the corner faster than you can say, "Dammit Spot, stop licking my face immediately after finishing with your balls."

On a different note, how the hell can vending machines be so different? Some of them gobble up a buck and wait for you to make a selection. Some of them take the dollar and make all kinds of noise even after it's disappeared. Some machines spit out a bottle right away, and some of them have a good five second lag before they spit one out. The last place I worked, they even replaced a vending machine that worked perfectly with another one that basically sucked. It wouldn't tell you when to use exact change, so suddenly it would owe you money, and there was no way to get it back. It also delivered your selection via a little cradle that moved horizontally on a track, which in turn moved vertically on two larger tracks. All this to move a bottle from anywhere in the machine to the right lower corner. Kind of a waste, as the machine it replaced used a little thing we like to call GRAVITY to accomplish the same feat. I wonder what'll fail first, gravity, or the multi-rail system. Probably gravity, as I can't count the number of times I've dropped things that would've otherwise smashed me in the toes, but instead they just stayed motionless in the air.

And you know what? Vending machines are the perfect example of why the U.S. should get rid of the $1 bill in favor of a dollar coin. Really, the only remaining good use for paper money in that small of a denomination is the strip club. I mean, beyond that, $1 bills just suck. Trying to cram them into a vending machine sucks in comparison to dropping in a single coin. And if you've ever woken up after a long night out, you know how tens and twenties in a wallet magically convert themselves into a pocket full of crumpled $1 bills. If you had ten fairly large coins in your pocket instead of ten $1 bills, you'd want to get rid of the damn things right quick. And how often do you get a $1 bill that looks like it was last handled by a person with razor blades for fingers, who used it to clean his/her bicycle chain? No thanks.

Anyway, that's it for me. Before I go, though, the coin thing does remind me of one of my favorite things to say. The next time you're chatting with buddies, and you see a police officer, ask your buddies what pennies are made out of. The answer, of course, is "dirty copper".

Happy holidays to you and yours.