Bottle in Front of Me Vs. Frontal Lobotomy

I've had an earache for three weeks to the day now. I even lost a set of tennis to a 75 year old man in part because of this. It doesn't so much hurt as much as my head is numbed and I can't think. Is this what a lobotomy is like? All I can to take my mind off it is munch Ibuprofin and drink.

Will you Swedish Sloth readers with lobotomies out there please comment and let me know if you can still drink with a frontal lobotomy? Then again, Randle Patrick McMurphy didn't look so good at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In fact I've never seen any pictures of people with frontal lobotomies who didn't look like drooling imbeciles. The doctors, of course, will all go to Hell (or Ohio, whichever is closer) when they die.

Is it possible to live one's life as a successful alchoholic with a lobotomy? Because it's not possible with an inner ear full of water and a bunch of Swedish doctors.

Abba at Eurovision '74

I was 3 when this video was made. I wish it was the 70's now. You could smoke inside and drink Chardonnay in the morning, and eat fondue and quaaludes for dinner, and white people could have afros, and Swedes could be international pop-stars, and everyone thought it was groovy.

Ouch Me Back

I fricken love tennis. I started competing locally when I was 11. I started out 0-4 and then won my last 7 matches to finish 7-4. At the award ceremony I got an award for most improved player of the season.

But then I spent the winter eating pretzels, drinking cokes, and playing ColecoVision. I got fat. The first match of the next season I hadn't swung a racket since the award ceremony.

I thought I could play on talent alone and I was very wrong. The first kid I played was dressed in white with sweatbands and everything. I felt pudgy and moving around the court was difficult. I lost 6-0, 6-0 and pulled a muscle in my leg and I couldn't walk for a week. I was so pissed off I quit tennis and took up golf instead (but that's another story).

Well now I am 36 and playing tennis again. I won my last match on Saturday 6-0, 6-3. The next day I had a lesson at 9am. I hit well and was feeling awesome. After the game I bent over to pick up the last ball before going home and I haven't been able to bend over since.

But this time I will not give up. I plan to get back in shape and play for the rest of my life. But there will be challenges. Although it's not ColecoVision, pretzels, and cokes anymore, now it's XBOX 360, whiskey, pizza, beer, & cigarettes.

I need to recover for a week, drop a good 20 pounds before May and get back in the swing. Wish me luck. And if you are in Stockholm and need a hitting partner let me know. Gotta run my ass around a bit.

Merry New Year

All hail the Axe Anti-Hangover Shower Gel, without which I wouldn't be alive today.

No really. New Year's lasted long into the night. I met lot's of new people and partied all night. I want to say that New Years in Sweden kicks the shit out of New Year's in the States. People really get into fireworks and drinking here. You could die with all the amateur displays out there.

In effect it's like 1,000 mini fireworks displays happening all at the same time all over the city. No firemen, no police, no barges like in the States. The best thing to do is to get high (in elevation!) and watch in awe. It lasts all night, really.

For people who like to explode things and kill and maim so much, The USA has some some pussy fireworks laws (and thus displays) in comparison. Viewing one of them would lead you to believe it was a civilized country. Probably the fireworks laws got passed in the 70's when Carter was in power and all the Republicans were either on quaaludes or devilishly planning the Reagan years.

One Swede told me that fireworks were the only good use for gun powder and it's fitting that the USA would ban them from the public. Ha ha. Merry New Year. May it be the best one yet for drinking, smoking, and screwing. And the worst one yet for hangovers and killing and maiming (fat chance).

Happy Christmas - Not

One of my pet peeves is people saying, "When are you going on holiday?" In my mind it is impossible to go 'on holiday'.

Christmas is a 'holiday'.
Easter is a a 'holiday'.

When one stops working and goes somewhere because they are tired of working, that is called a 'break' or better still a 'vacation'.

What is my point? My point is that one cannot go 'on holiday', any more than one can go 'on Christmas' or 'on Easter'.

One can, however, go 'on vacation'.

And that's I intend to do for the next week. Thank you.

And while we're at it, one eats 'candy', not 'sweets'.

And one drinks 'soda', not 'fizzy drinks'.

Okay, now I am going to take a 'little blue pill with a V on it'.

Happy Christmas for real. Not not. I am drunk. I plan on staying this way after putting up with Swedes all month on their home turf. They are starting to get to me.

Plus Linda and I are upset because half our salary went to taxes this month. Merry Christmas. The government here is the living realization of Orwell's Big Brother. But there are people dying and people who can't afford alcohol. I think of those people a lot. And then get depressed and I drink and then I get mad again and want my taxes back. Let them die. I want to die a petty fool with my tax money in my hand. And if I died of a disease it wouldn't hurt so bad to be stolen from. The end. No merry Christmas for real. Only Brits say Happy Christmas and I am 100% Drunko Americano at this time.

The New Cure For Winter Swedish Jetlag

Well I just spent two weeks in NYC and FLA visiting friends and relatives. Pictures soon. Great to see everyone again especially Mc, Kyle, Lee and my little nieces. They are the cutest things ever.

Now that I am back in Sweden I am JETLAGGED as a mf. I swear jetlag is like the bad part of being on drugs (not that I would know what that's like).

As a frequent trans-Atlantic traveler, I am often a victim of this disease. In the past I would just pop a few valiums (melatonin is a joke) but in Sweden there is no such thing as a connection, so finally I got around to looking up a cure on the Internet.

It said to stand outside in the sunlight. Gee. The author of that little gem obviously never spent a winter in Stockholm because I will have to wait until March to get some sunshine around here.

So it's off to the liquor store for me. Passing out is the Swedish Wintertime cure for jetlag.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from everyone at Swedish Sloth. Oh shit, it's just me, isn't it?

I Had a wild New Year's Eve. What little of I remember it was really fun. Thanks to lovely Linda, Pia, Philipos the Greek God of Smoking, Anna, Johan, Matthias, Ulrika, and all the other countless people I met whom I will never remember.

I reckon I'll be able to think coherently by Friday when the pills wear off. Until then save the last paracetemol for me.

All I want for Christmas...

All I want for Christmas is a pint of Bailey's and a bunch of Swedish girls with candles on their head to serenade me while I drink it. Oh yeah, and a trip to Thailand sometime in February would be nice.

Drinkin' at the Ritz

After staying with the lovely and talented pride of Germany, Svenja, for a few drunken days I'm now staying at the Ritz Hotel by Green Park. I know that makes me sound like a posh twat but I'm sleeping on a sofa bed. Personally, I would rather stay somewhere else, but I can't afford 100 pounds a night for my own room somewhere else. You see I'm crashing with the parents who are also in town. This is the irony of my life - I can't afford the Holiday Inn so I stay at the Ritz. The room is of course comped by my dad's company. You gotta love that. Half the reason the wealthy are wealthy is because they never pay for anything. That is just weird how life works.

Anyway, I've been out drinking for a few days now, and recently finished a review of the new Babyshambles album on Pax Acidus... and since you were obviously really bored if you were looking here for some entertainment you can read that instead. Love from Sloth. And if you're still bored after that you can see if you can break my new record of three bottles of wine in two hours... it's harder than it sounds. No puking though or you forfeit.

http://www.paxacidus.com/down-in-albion-pax.php

Swedish Beer: Åbro Original

Many people, including my lovely Linda, often say to people that Spendrups or Pripps is the archetypical Swedish beer. I beg to differ. For me it's Åbro.

Why? Well, it's 5.2 percent, it's drinkable, and it's got a rather sweet malty taste that begs the question... can I have another?

I remember before even coming to Stockholm I was trapped in London watching an Eminemn DVD (okay I admit it I am a closet Eminem fan, shame on me, etc.) and he was doing a skit about a concert they had done in Stockholm where he pronounced the beer, "Eh, bro". So it was like,

Eminem: "Eh, bro."
D12: "What?"
Eminem: "No it's the name of the beer, Åbro!"

But Linda who is sometimes a poopy pants when it comes to making fun of the Swedish language and people was quick to but in that that he had bungled the pronunciation and that it should be pronounced "O-ah-bro" not "AY-bro".

Oh well. However you pronounce it, it's still better than sobriety.

Swedish Beer: Wisby Pils

Flavor: 2/5
Palate: 4/5
Drinkability: 3/5
Price: SEK 11 per 33cl bottle

From the island of Gotland comes Wisby Pils. It's a beer that wants to be Czech, but unfortunately for it, it is Swedish. It's too refined, bland, and creamy of a pilsner to be Czech, however bad it yearns to be so. But why not strive to be the best? Czech beers are all the rage in Sweden and also with this sloth. Some of my favorite golden beers are Pilsner Urquell, and Staropromen.

Wisby Pils is named after the capital city of Gotland, Visby. The 'W' in the name of the beer comes from Sweden's constant confusion about their own alphabet. Why this confusion? I don't know. They mix up their W's and V's like the Dickens. And don't even get me started on the J's and Y's . But they probably say the same thing about us.

I first went to Visby on Gotland when I was 11 years old. I got drunk a few times surreptitiously but never on this beer, which didn't exist at the time. It's more of a microbrew, even though it is distributed by Spendrups, the largest beer company in Sweden. Drink it if you are in Visby or if the bar doesn't have any Czech pilsners.

Summary: This beer may be a Czech pretender, but it's still better than most Swedish beers.

The Aristocrats, A Drunken Post

Been seeing a lot of movies lately. I normally don't like films but for some reason in Europe they are a good way to keep in touch with the best of American culture without watching TV shows, which I refuse to do.

Recently saw a move called The Aristocrats. Probably didn't play in too many theaters in the USA because of the strong intellectual subject matter. No media companies want to be associated with that stuff. Worse than terrorism, it is. The last thing they want is consumers thinking. The cast was good... everyone from Cartman to Don Rickles to Bob Sagat was in it. 75 jokers in all, all of them stand-up comedians.

I love stand-up. I think Woody Allen, Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks are three of the best I've seen. I never understood what was so funny about Lenny Bruce, even though I realize he was sort of a godfather of modern comedy. Sometimes it's true that you had to be there. So much so that the actual originals sound boring because they are so copied that everything they say sounds like a cliche.

A literary example is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Julie, or the New Heloise", which I had to read in a Literature class in Paris and was so bad it made me want to jump off the Eiffel Tower instead of reading it. When I told the professor how bad I thought it was he actually agreed and said that because we are Modern we cannot read such things because we live them day to day and take we take them for granted.

What's the name of this post? Oh yeah. The Aristocrats. Funny joke? See for yourself. It's not a knee slapper but a perfect metaphor for the human condition. If you don't get it well then you gotta go see the entire film where they tell the joke 50 times and then evaluate it from every possible angle.

Don Ho is Still Alive

Last Night Linda and I went to see the Legendary Don Ho perform at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. There was a mediocre dinner and then the show. The room held about 300 people and was about 80% full. I wasn’t expecting much, perhaps a few famous songs from his past and a few corny jokes.

He was fucking hilarious. First of all, he was drunk and kept drinking throughout the entire show. He sat at some sort of “piano/desk” which had the strange appearance of being an altar. He worse sunglasseses although the room was very dark and had white hair. A woman sitting next to me at out table said he was now 75 years old.

Almost every song he sang he made the audience sing along, starting with "Tiny Bubbles". It was of course, completely awful. Audiences come to these things to be entertained by a legend so they can go home and tell people they saw Don Ho, not so they can sing ackwardky mouth along the words of Tiny Bubbles.

After the song Don admitted that he “Totally hated that song”. The humor and jokes were either self-debasing, marijuana-based, or else completely off the wall. It was fucking surreal. Does anyone really want/expect Don Ho to tell 15 marijuana jokes in a row? Not me. He kept referring to it in the Hawaian word, which is pakalolo or something similar. Then he would tell stories about how much his good friend Willy Nelson smokes pakalolo from dawn til dusk and how he is completely normal.

Now I have thought a lot of things about Willy Nelson, none of them are that he is completely normal. I mean he’s a 70 year old hippie who plays country music. What is so normal about that? Most 70 year olds I have met do not travel the country in greasy long hair, evading their taxes, smoking grass, and singing songs about ugly women they fucked because they were too high and/or stoned to tell so at the time.

Before the end of the show, Don Ho played Tiny Bubbles again and had many musical guests, some of which were originals from the Don Ho show back in the 70’s which I watched a little kid. At the end he reminded everyone to “Tell everyone you know I’m still alive.”

Don Ho is still alive. If anything, its the rest of us who are probably dead.

Write as Rain

Well I've been on the sauce again. Not really again, since I never really stopped in the first place. Last night Linda called me an alcoholic when she caught me drinking the Jack Daniels out of the bottle again. I told her it was rock and roll but she reminded me I'm not a musician.

Tonight the Jack Daniels is gone so I bought some Vincent Van Gogh Dutch Chocolate Vodka. It's worth every penny of the 30 bucks it costs. I highly recommend checking it out if you live near any nice liquor stores that might carry it. It beats the other chocolate vodkas out there hands down.

It's funny as a kid I never drank hard alcohol straight. I used to swear it tasted like poison. Now it's what I enjoy most. I guess I really am becoming a fucking writer.

Speaking of writing, I passed a couple milestones this week. For one, I submitted over 200 corrections (typos) of my first novel The Ultimate Space Hit to Wasteland Press (thank you Linda for finding them) and I got back the updated books. I gave it to a friend who read it in two days and told me they LOVED it. That makes me feel so good.

Also, I surpassed 50,000 words on my second novel, The Living Dead Don't Get a Holiday. That one is only really supposed to be about that long... so it feels good to be breezing past that predefined limit. I may end up with another 20,000 words at this point. I hope to finish / edit it in Hawaii next month.

That's right Hawaii. A lot has changed since the last episode. I sold our car for our full asking price, and nearly everything in the apartment is slated to sell next weekend before we head out of here. Linda wants to spend her 30th birthday in Hawaii. Who could fucking blame her? Not me. We don't have a place to stay yet but that's trivial. We are trying to rent a condo but we might end up in some cheap tourist hotels and visit a different island every week.

Oh finally... I was reading the NME and tonight Shaun Ryder and Bez are spinning in the club that was approximately 100 meters from my front door when I lived in London. Just to think of them there... walking down the same street and seeing the same things as I did gives me chills. Bez is a fantastic writer, waster, and dancer. Shaun Ryder is a pure fucking genius. Enough blogging for now. Now its time for the Killers and some more chocolate vodka.

Still Feeling The Love Hangover

Yes, I partied too hard in Florida. I won't get into specifics, as this is not Pax Acidus, my sex, drugs, and rock and roll website. This is supposed to be a more normal website, where I can tell everyone my real name, Samuoz Yrral, and get over my fascination with being an underground literary superhero.

But its true so I have to say it. I blew my brain with too much blow and alcohol. I stopped doing it on the 4th night about 3 a.m. on the day I was leaving. I thought it was a good idea to stop because my nose started bleeding and I could no longer control my bladder. They got good shit down there. I am glad I don't live there. I wouldn't last too long. To add to the damage I probably drank about 100 beers and a bottle of rum. We had a whole keg Sierria Nevada pale ale. We finished it.

If any of my friends are reading this, I apologize for calling all of you. For those who don't know... I have a super bad habit of calling people on the phone at 3 a.m. when I am super fucked up and leaving insane messages on their voice mail. I think I got this bad habit from Matt, who has done 10 times as much as me if not more. I just have a hard time finding a peer group otherwise.

For those of you I do call... Linda, Daffyd, Lance, Mark, Matt, Ralph, etc, its only because I love you and I wanted you there. I am not just trying to ruin the REM patterns. I hate it when people call me at 3 a.m. when I am sleeping so don't try it unless you are in the area and have some to share.

For those of you I love who I don't call... its not because I don't love you, its because I don't have your number and I am too wasted to go through the 411 process. I think that's enough slothiness for today. I am not really even the Swedish Sloth yet...