there’s aardbarks up in there

I dunno if it was just laziness or what, but we were all supposed to go see another show tonight (Pretty Girls Make Graves, right here in Sac) – and I bailed. Mostly because Sharaun had a late meeting at school and wouldn’t be getting home until 8ish – and I knew she’d be tired from her 2hrs sleep last night. I just felt the evening would be better served if we just crashed on the couch and hung out with each other. So, we did. She picked up some Mexican on her way home – and we ate our dinner out of styrofoam boxes while watching the season finale of the OC. Well, I watched it at least – she fell asleep about halfway through. Which is good, because it’d be awful embarrassing if she’d seen me bawling as Marissa hit that bottle of vodka. What have you done Ryan?, what have you done?!

Dan (the same guy who’s insinuated in the comments that the blog has, or is about to, “jump the shark” – punk) has been taking karate lessons for a while. While he was telling me all about what he’s learned, which thus far has been limited to defense moves, I got an idea. See, I’ve always been curious about how effective karate lessons really are. I mean, I’m led to believe that a black belt in karate could kick my butt. But what about the karate noob? How much better are your defense skills for a couple month’s lessons? So, Dan and I devised a plan. I will attack him with all I’ve got – no holds barred street-brawl-ignorant fighting. Just a hail of fists and throwing my weight around. During my furious assault, Dan can only use the defenses and blocks that karate has taught him. This way, we see if karate is real. I know, totally scientific, right? We figured there’d probably need to be some beer involved – just to loosen up the muscles and improve mental focus… and video documentation couldn’t hurt.

In high school, I was messing around with the tape recorder one day and figured out I could wire the microphone input directly into the earpiece of the phone. This inevitably led to the tape recording of prank phone calls. In the beginning, it was simply a few guys sitting around drinking, smoking (cough, cough), and recording prank phone calls. But shortly after our first 90min compilation tape, “Volume One,” made it’s way around school – each “recording session” became a small party. More and more people heard our pranks and wanted to be around when “Joey Cora” and “Pete Metacalf” made the calls. Over the course of a couple years, we made so many prank phone calls we couldn’t count them all. After each “session,” it was my job to edit down the resulting hours of calls into the best and funniest for inclusion in the next “Volume” of calls. We ended up with four 90min cassettes, Volumes One through Four, and one 45min unedited tape dubbed the “sober session.”

The goal was always to be as stupid as possible, to see how much people would put up with. There was always an unwritten rule that you should try to cram in as much foul language as possible – because everyone knows cussing is comedy gold. Often the calls were so thick with our stupid sense of humor and drunken notions of jokes that they were only side-splittingly funny to us, but listening back on some of them I still get a laugh. The dumber the response from the people on the other line, the bigger the kick we got out of it. The angrier and uglier you could be right off the bat, the better. It’s amazing what people are willing to put up with, especially when you can clearly hear several kids just cracking up in the background.

Although I’ve never fully converted the Volumes to CD, a few years ago I began a project to digitize them all and give copies to the prank crew for Christmas. I never got finished, mainly because we don’t own a cassette deck – but I did get the whole of Volume One ripped to CD. While working on the GDM project last night I happened upon the raw CD rips. So, I decided to clean up a couple calls an turn them into MP3s. So, here – for the first time on the ‘net – some samples of our first prank calls. I estimate that Volume One was made sometime in 1992, and you can tell we were just warming up. Some of the stuff on Volume Four puts this stuff to shame. Anyway, for your listening pleasure:

[audio:SCUBA_tanks.mp3]
SCUBA Tanks

[audio:Fireplace.mp3]
Didn’t Catch on Fire Like a Fireplace

[audio:Gold.mp3]
I Have an Allergic Reaction to Gold?!

[audio:Aardbarks.mp3]
There’s Aardbarks Up In There

That’s if for today folks, I’m outta here. Enjoy.

Also written on this day...

• skin - 2019
• live bees in the grocery store? - 2011
• learning... all the wrong things - 2008
• three our fathers - 2005