The Twelve Days of Gheorghe-mas: Six Rules Worth Knowing

On the sixth day of Gheorghe-mas, Big Gheorghe gave to me...

Six Rules Worth Knowing

Five Golden Rings
Four-gone Conclusions
Three Saluki Tallies
Two Recurring Features
And a Doofus Dancing (hee, hee)

Coach Bobby Finstock had some simple rules for life (go to the 2:30 mark if you are impatient):



Damon had his five-point plan:

Damone Gives Out Dating Advice
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Building on these cultural icons, we present to you six rules addressing the random, sometimes illicit parts of your life. These are crucial. They may save your hide one day.

Rule 1: Marinate your meat (ngs).
This is not a cooking blog. And it's not a dating blog. It's a blog about living your life with a smile. And to all my meat-eaters out there (ngs), don't put virgin meat in your oven, on your frying pan or on your grill. Marinating makes you look sophisticated to both your lady friends and your meathead dude friends. And it makes meat taste better (ngs). Leave it to marinate a long time. Over 24 hours is better. Trust me. I'm kinda fat, so I know these things. Bamm!

Rule 2: Never ever ever pay any attention to the best looking girl at a second-rate strip joint.
This rule is different from going to a "good one" at a bad time (ie, 2 PM on a Tuesday, when your boss and your wife think you are at a conference in town). I'm focusing on the truly mediocre strip clubs. We all know when we are in one - it is a bad city, a bad neighborhood, or just a clearly sub-par place that a drunken crew lands on - but we all need to recognize when we are there and act accordingly.

In general, women know their sexual pecking order. This is magnified in a strip bar. Unless it is a top-notch joint, where a couple dozen women are interchangeably stripperiffic, there is a clear Alpha Stripper vibe among the (top-)heavy hitters, if only because the lower echelon ladies at sub-par strip bars fall into the "way gross-to-she looks like a streetwalker" categories. When you vie for the attention of the queen stripper bee, you acknowledge her place and take away any power you have. She'll demand a drink and/or bilk you for an exorbitant lap dance. Nobody needs that. Always shoot for the middle-of-the-road lady in the place. Assess your environment and act accordingly, gents. The hungry ones will show you a better time. Everybody wins.

Rule 3: Always sneak down to better seats at sporting events.
Confession here - I am jaded live sports attendee because I live in the exorbitantly priced tri-state area surrounding New York. I loathe the owners of most of the local sports team (especially you Jimmy Dolan, you bloated waste of space). And I am hesitant to transfer any more cash into their pocket than I need to. So I make up for this by opportunistically upgrading myself at sporting events. I avoid doing this when I think there is a decent chance of being caught, because I hate looking like a schmuck, but I am all over it when it looks reasonably easy. It has been an amazingly simple process at sparsely populated Knick games at Madison Square Garden in the last five years. And what's more fun at a bad basketball game than getting close enough to the court so that when you heckle people like Ira Newbie and Greg Ostertag, you know they hear you and get bummed out?

Rule 4: Always have a 15-second dance routine for wedding receptions in your back-pocket.
Wedding dancing is usually dumb. The participants are either lame, sober old people marching like zombies to "What a Wonderful World" or sweaty, disheveled obnoxious people pumping their arms off-key to Buster Poindexter. And then there are the infamous dance circles, a group dance occurrence that pops up at proms and weddings. Everybody stands around and claps and waits for somebody to hop in the middle and be funny. Our rule focuses on this moment. For a single guy at a wedding, having a pre-canned routine can be a make-or-break moment at a wedding reception. It offers an opportunity to show some personality and pelvic coordination to the game little ladies who have congregated to the dance floor. A good sequence makes everybody hoot and holler, genuinely energizes the party and gives a lady an opportunity to approach you. Frankie D., an old friend of many writers on this blog, may have been the Caucasian master of this situation. He had the Rerun dance down pat. It's that simple. Everybody loved it every time. When you have a simple routine, people will laugh. And you'll be more apt to pull it off when you're half in the bag. The bar is low for doing this. Dust off your moonwalk, your worm (forwards or backwards), your pop rock or your Russian squat lunge dance. It doesn't matter. Sacrifice two hours while you're home alone watching sports. It will be time better spent than all those hours you talk to yourself about starting to do crunches on a regular basis.

Rule 5: Never pay for porn.
No matter your fetish, you can find it for free on the internet. Just make sure your firewall is up to snuff. At least that's what I heard on last Tuesday's episode of Z-Man and The Teej, located at 106.9 on your FM dial. These guys would know.

Rule 6: Never ever ever ever drink well-booze if you're older than 21.
When I was 22 and poor, I discovered gin and tonics. It's a delicious drink. It gets you drunk. It seems more sophisticated than eating beers when you're in the company of ladies, and it tastes great if the bartender knows how to pour it. But if you don't specifically state the booze you want, you risk getting the well junk. And you don't want bad gin in your system. Ever. Same goes for bad vodka or whiskey. Many of us cut our booze-drinking teeth in the 'Burg, where a mighty big bottle of Odesse Vodka could be procured at a low price. Although it seemed like a good deal and worked sufficiently when we were pouring it down ice-blocks into the mouths of 19 year-old sorority girls, it was a bad move. The brutal hang-over is just not worth it. Especially with gin, where upscale labels like Hendrick's or Bombay have distinct and scintillating flavors that a sophisticated pallate can enjoy.

Happy holidays. And happy living.