A friend and I were out recently buying a new set of tires for the balding Spaldings on her old Mazda. This was her first time buying tires, so we basically listened to the sales guy’s advice on what she should get.

“Well, you know the Eagle Eyes are pretty good,” he began “They’re better for winter driving than the Commanders, but not as good as the Ice Claws. But then again, if you’re on a budget then there’s nothing wrong with the Destinys. Sure, they’ve got a slightly lower mileage than the Evertreks or the Neverending Trails, but they’re definitely going to be better bang for your buck than the Hunter XTs or the Peregrines.”

Seemingly targeted at the little sack of testosterone hanging in the back of guy’s brains, tire names conjure up images of grit, muscles, dirt, and birds of prey. I think we have to presume the big tire companies tested other names, but they just got the thumbs down from the focus groups. That’s why you can’t buy a set of Flying Chickadees, Sidewalk Renegades, or Rainbow Escapades.

But however they came to be, one thing’s for sure — tire names are a tiny bit of hilarious nonsense we can all enjoy.

AWESOME!

Anyone else out there have a bladder the size of a walnut? One that fills up after a few spoons of soup and is on attention, ready to drain any time of the day? If you’re afraid of getting a drink before the movie or having a glass of water anytime after 6pm, then you’re with me. My small and weak-bladdered brothers and sisters of the world, unite!

See, we got issues, me and you. We’re terrible on airplanes. We never get to experience the 7-11 Super Big Gulp. And maybe worst of all, we’re always forcing our friends to help us find public washrooms when we’re walking or driving anywhere, which really drives them crazy. Sorry, friends.

If you’re with me on this one, then you know these searches for decent public washrooms really are a fine art. That perfect place to unzip and drip is always out there, but you really need to be careful. With that warning, let me present to you the Top 5 Places To Pee When You’re Out Somewhere:

• #5 Gas stations. Gas stations know they are easy prey for the worst kind of fly-by urinators — those who don’t live nearby, give their name, or plan on ever coming back. Those kind of people do not respect bathroom facilities — that we know from the racist scrawls on bathroom walls and the obvious mistaking of floors for toilets. Bad ones smell rancid. Good ones smell like a flatbed truck full of urinal pucks sitting on a garbage dump. But hey, sometimes gas stations appear like toilet mirages on the horizon, and at least you know they’re almost always open, and almost always have a toilet. So we give you Number 5, gas stations. Thanks for coming out.
• #4 Bus or train stations. Bus or train station bathrooms are just like gas stations, but with one key difference: maintenance. Whereas gas stations are usually being run by individual owner-operators or a couple of teenagers working the midnight shift who employ the use of a key on a big piece of wood instead of a toilet brush and mop, bus or train stations are generally run by formal transit authorities or city governments who employ people just to clean the place up, because otherwise they’d look bad and maybe get kicked off the board or something. The other plus to bus or train stations is size. They usually have rows of stalls or urinals instead of one. Very little chance of having to wait. So thanks, bus or train station bathroom. You’re there when we need you.
• 3. Restaurants. Next, restaurants! Okay, we’re starting to get into decent bathroom territory now. Here there’s maybe an extra ply on the toilet paper and perhaps a sports section or Far Side comic pinned up over the urinal. Restaurant bathrooms are much better, but they are a little hard to get at — you’ve either got to sit down and buy something, or pretend you’re looking for someone before running to the back of the place. Care and delicacy is required. Not for the full or faint of heart.
• 2. Somebody’s nearby house – Always great for a pit stop when you’re driving. This is where you make the mid-trip pit stop at a local friend’s apartment or house. They don’t necessarily have to be hanging out with you at the time. Just buzzing their place and asking if you can use the can is completely fine. Once you get in you’ll be living large with thick toilet paper, some fancy tangerine-pomegranate cream soap maybe, and occasionally a stack of dog-eared magazines. Try not to judge them based on all that hair in the sink, the bath towel laying on the floor, or the bright, glowing toilet bowl ring staring up at you like the eye of Sauron. Don’t judge, just enjoy and get out.
• 1. Hotel lobby bathrooms – Now we finally reach the cream of the crop, the cherry on the sundae, the top of the roller coaster. Yes, the spacious, luxurious, over-the-top hotel lobby bathrooms really are magical when you’ve been walking around all day, sweating under a backpack and blazing sun, just searching for a place to lighten your load. Hotel bathrooms are great because they are so sinful and wasteful. Really, nothing in there is necessary! In a hotel bathroom you can pretend you’re the Emperor of Toilets, commander over a vast plumbing empire, ruler of all faucets and mirrors for miles around. Hotel lobby bathrooms treat us street-walking folks like uppity business class travelers. I mean, who likes to dry their hands with face cloths anyway? Who needs chairs or couches in the bathroom for that post-dump lounge? And who really wants one of those bathroom butlers sneakily wedged into a corner wearing a tux, holding out cologne and towels for you? Who needs this?

Well us, that’s who! We thimble-bladdered folk need this once in a while. I’m sorry but we need it. A little pampering and comforting for our terrible genetic sins. So thank you, hotel lobby bathrooms for treating us with grace and dignity amongst a world of people who don’t like to hang out with us.

AWESOME!

Rare is the Santa Claus who can earnestly grow that full lion’s mane of bright white hair. But I’m sorry, it’s what We The People demand. Fake beards on Santa Claus are an insult. They mock the jolly Christmas cheer, like a wreath made out of lettuce, gingerbread house made of saltines, or a turkey made out of Tofurkey.

So let’s get one thing straight, Kringle — grow the real beard or don’t apply at the mall. It’s that simple. And it’s what the fraternity demands.

AWESOME!

My friend Mike once broke a tooth on a Buffalo wing. Snapped a big chunk off one night when he chomped down on a fatty, bony, Buffalo sauce-drenched chicken wing. But you know what? Mike just kept right on eating. With his new fang he looked like a bear who just woke up from hibernation, stumbled to the river and scooped a salmon out, then started gnawing viciously on its raw belly, pink guts spraying everywhere.

No, there wasn’t anything more important to Mike at that moment than finishing that delicious Buffalo wing, not even if it meant infecting exposed roots, cracking more teeth, or spraying sauce all over the table. He was in the The Any Food Requiring Moist Towelettes And Napkins Zone. His eyes stared straight ahead, his sticky, coated fingers balancing and turning the wing an inch from his face, Mike didn’t stop until he had turned the wing into a needle-thin bone and tossed it on the scrap plate. Then he leaned back on his chair gasping for air, bright red chicken wing guts smeared all over his mouth and fingers.

When I tell people this story they usually nod their head and say something like “Were the wings any good?”, or “I love Buffalo wings.” But this makes sense, because who really cares about Mike’s tooth? He’ll get it fixed. The point here is that wings are delicious. In fact, any food that requires moist towelettes and a stack of napkins is delicious. Ribs, rotisserie chicken, chili cheese fries? Delicious, delicious, even more delicious. All requiring a stack of napkins and some moist towelettes.

We know these foods are great because of what happens whenever you’re out late at a bar, and somebody orders a pitcher, and then somebody else raises their eyebrows, looks around the table, and goes “Wings?” If this happens, no matter what you have to say: “Ohhhhhh….no, I really shouldn’t.” Then you let another really long pause just hang in the air as you slowly purse your lips and allow a very thin smile to reveal itself on your face. Then very quickly give an exasperated ‘I give in’ laugh, a head shake, and an “Alright, I’m in!”, and you’re done! (To show decisiveness and finality, it’s also recommend you toss your menu into the center of the table and tell a really long story about some hot wings you once ordered that turned out to be much hotter than you expected.)

So there you go. Messy, sticky, saucy food is great. You order it, you polish it off, and then there are three ways to use the moist towelette and napkin combo at the end:

Method #1: Use the napkin first. Draw off all the extra sauce and random fried crumbs, and then clean up real nice afterwards with the moist towelette. Perfect!

Method #2: Use the moist towelette first. Rub that towelette until it turns red and cleans off your fingers, then dry off with the stack of napkins. Perfect!

Method #3: Here napkins are used pre- and post-towelette. The idea is that they first remove all the big crumbs, then the towelette comes in to clean everything off real nice, and finally the napkins return for the big dry-off. Perfect!

Whatever your style, one thing’s for sure: When that handful of Wet-Naps and stack of napkins arrives at the table, you better get yourself ready for a great night.

AWESOME!

You know the feeling: you just spent five minutes chasing all the corners of the elastic form-fitting bottom sheet around your bed and then you laid and tucked the top sheet tightly into the mattress. You found some pillow covers in the linen closet, squeezed and shook your pillows in there, put your blanket over all of it, took a deep breath, and then just dove right into the fresh, cold, mothball-smelling sheets.

New sheets are great because they don’t smell like The Sleeping You, with your armpit hair all squishing around in there all night, your drool leaking all over the pillows, and your crusty old feet flaking off into little piles of dead skin shavings at the foot of the bed. And let’s not forget the hot farts you pop out when you’re sleeping, too. Don’t deny it! We’re all disgusting when we’re asleep, and new bed sheets are great for letting us temporarily escape our own filth.

Really, only one thing can add to that new bed sheet feeling and that’s when it’s your first seasonal sleep in thin, cotton summer sheets or thick, linen winter sheets. As you close your eyes softly, crickets chirping outside your window, moonlight and tree branches shadow-dancing on the walls, you know right then and there: It’s going to be a good night.

AWESOME!

High fives are good. High tens are great.

Picture it — jaw dropping in slow-motion silence, eyebrows furrowing in mock-angry rage, head slowly wagging side to side, both hands lifting high up top, waiting a brief moment for your friend to answer your call and deliver a booming double palm-on-palm SMACK.

Now that’s a beautiful picture. That’s the happy dial turned to 10. That’s a good day giving birth to a great one. That’s a photo from Appendix A of The Study of The Best Things Ever. Lady, I don’t know who you are, where you live, or what you’re all about. But I know that you gotta love that beautifully loud high ten and its satisfying twenty-finger crack. It’s just explosive.

Like I said, the high five is good, too. But really, almost anyone can deliver a high five. It’s just one hand! Once you start tenning, the five starts to look wrong, incomplete, and unfinished. It becomes a half, a partial, a sort of, like a flop with no flip, yang with no yin, pong with no ping, or a unicycle.

But the high ten! Sugar, let’s talk about that high ten. Now that’s the celebratory hand-on-hand gesture for you and me. See, the high ten takes guts for two big reasons:

1. First off, higher chance of looking stupid: You throw a high five up there and no one answers it, no problem. You just put your hand nonchalantly back in your pocket, scratch your head, or swipe it through the side of your hair, Fonzie-style. No one notices you covered it up and all is well. But you throw a high ten up there and you get left hanging? Well now you just look foolish — like you’re trying to get the wave started at your kid’s T-ball game or just airing out your pits.
2. Also, there’s more coordination required: Think about it, during a high five all eyes are on that one hand. With four eyes focused on one slap, there’s not too much that can go wrong. Yes, there’s the awkward pinky-on-pinky slap, but those really don’t happen too much. Now, the high ten’s a different animal. This time each person has to focus on two slaps. Time them right. Aim them precisely. Smack them hard. You can’t just high ten perfectly the first time. It is very difficult and requires a lot of practice.

However, the good news is that once you work up the nerve to pull off the high ten, it can be a very rewarding slap. So give it a shot. Test it out. See what it’s all about. And hey, maybe even try laying a thundering double palm-on-palm SMACK on one of your closest friends…today! Then maybe go out for beers or something. Wings too, if no one’s eaten.

AWESOME!

I was on a long flight not too long ago, one where they turn the lights out for most of the trip and everybody is just laying like jelly all over their seats fast asleep. Legs propped up over armrests, seats reclined into laps, and headphones, blankets, and eye masks creating cocoon-like defenses against all light, sound, and touch.

Frankly, I don’t like flights like this because I feel really uncomfortable. I think I’m going to wake people up and bother them. I feel like I’m hanging out in a nursery and I’ve finally got all the babies asleep, now I just have to sit in a rocking chair in the corner taking quiet, calculated breaths until the sun rises.

It’s very stressful.

I have always been paranoid about waking people up. When I was younger and would come home late I would take about twenty minutes to get from the driveway into my bed. I tiptoed up the walk, slid my house key in the door very slowly, took my shoes off outside, and tiptoed up the stairs to the bathroom. Often I wouldn’t even flush until morning, preferring to let my business simmer overnight rather than wake somebody up with the sound of excrement zooming through the walls on it’s way out of the house.

On the airplane I don’t tilt my seat back too far because I think I might crowd the person behind me. I walk down the aisle slowly and analytically, quickly grabbing chairs and overhead compartments for support so that a sudden jolt of turbulence doesn’t knock me into a sleeping grandma’s lap. I have brief visions of shattering her hip and sending her dentures flying into someone’s glass of wine.

It is because of my attempts to keep really quiet on these Voyages of the Subconscious that I am fascinated by the toilets in the airplane.

First of all, they exist! The fact that you can go to the bathroom on an airplane is pretty novelty. I bet nobody expected that a hundred years ago. Can you imagine two sailors looking over the front rails of their massive ocean liner in 1908, one of them pointing way up in the clouds and whispering to the other “One day a man will take a dump up there.” No, me neither.

Anyway, after we get over the fact that these bathrooms exist, let’s talk about that amazing flush. You do your thing, close that lid, hit that little plastic button, and a second later there’s a full five seconds of giant, full-force, vacuum-sucking noises. It’s so loud it’s unbelievable — like a transport truck full of silverware flipping over on the dirt patch between two World War I trenches.

I used to think that the airplane toilet was a little hole that opened up right to the outside of the plane. I looked down when I flushed expecting to see clouds or little cities below maybe, and figured someone had just done the math and proven that dropping dirt bombs from thirty-thousand feet didn’t actually hurt anybody. It was just a matter of gravity, distance, and atmospheric pressure or something.

Turns out I was dead wrong about that.

See, according to the Internet’s geek patrol, regular ol’ house toilets just don’t do the job in the airplane world. The combination of toilet bowl water and rough landings tend to leave splotchy autumn-colored rainbows all over the plastiform vanity and walls. For this reason airplanes use a whole new type of toilet called vacuum toilets. I guess these vacuum toilets are perfect for the job because they don’t use much water and are fairly low maintenance. Just one little side-effect, though: When you flush them it sounds like somebody’s making a smoothie out of rocks.

Now personally, I love that beautifully loud airplane toilet flush. I can’t very well leave a gift bowl for the next passenger, so I’m forced to press the button. The power and noise of that flush undoubtedly wakes up the last few rows on the airplane every time so I have no choice but to confront my fears.

So I say thanks, airplane toilet flush. Your whooshing, vacuum-packed boomflush wakes the whole world up.

AWESOME!

From electric shavers that work in the shower to whitening paste you can coat your teeth with overnight to lasers that zap away unwanted body hair, we sure are surrounded by a lot of fancy and expensive personal hygiene technologies these days. That’s why flossing is so great. It’s just a piece of string.

AWESOME!

Tell me something: Have you ever rolled down your window at a gas station to catch some hot whiffs? While pumping gas have you ever spilled a few drops on your shirt for some free take-out smell? Baby, I know you’re with me. Because you know that the smell of gasoline is one of life’s simplest pleasures.

Now, I know a lot of people out there seem to think the smell of gasoline ain’t great for your brain. They insist you’re fritzing out all your head circuitry with these evil airborne hydrocarbons, the equivalent of releasing a sack of rats into the restaurant kitchen or pouring a can of Coke into your laptop air vent. And you know what? Maybe they’re right. I do fully agree that huffing gas fumes is really bad for you. That’s really not debatable. But the regular ol’ smell of gasoline just lingering around the fillup station? I say the jury’s still out on that one.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I have no idea why, when my dad pulled our old wood-paneled station wagon up to the Shell pumps, I’d love to get out and take a giant sniff of that hot, gassy air. But I know I did. Maybe I felt a bit like a woodsman stepping out of his cabin holding a cup of coffee, a baker pulling a tray of fresh, hot croissants out of the oven, or a wine tester swirling a big fat glass of Merlot before the big sniff. Maybe for a kid growing up in the suburbs the smell of gasoline at the local pumps was the same sort of deal. Just one of those great smells of life. A smell that says something about who you are. Something about where you come from. Something… about what you believe in.

AWESOME!

Toronto is home to some of the best hot dog street vendors in the world. Street meat, we call it proudly, waiting in lines to get char-grilled, crisp-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside, big, brown beautiful hot dogs. The dogs usually come set perfectly in a puffy, yellow bun, like a smiling child tucked tightly into bed. Yes, it’s a glowing little beef-tube of heaven, a spicy little meat-wand of joy, the perfect company for a movie or a long walk home after the bars.

Now, despite the powerful taste-punch to the mouth the street vendor hot dog delivers, I’m sorry to say there is just one little problem: my friend, there is spillage, and plenty of it. Hot dog vendors pride themselves on their never ending array of toppings, from spicy mustard to onions, pickles to olives, sauerkraut to banana peppers. It’s a delicious den of germs just sitting out on the street in little glass jars, protected from gas fumes, building exhausts, and pigeon crap by nothing more than a large umbrella.

Now, like most people, I love hot dog toppings. But you and me, together we face a common problem: trying to balance piles of wet toppings on top of a round, slippery wiener. It ain’t easy, homes. Usually the relish slips off first, and you get those artistic looking ketchup and mayo swirls dripping onto your pants. Worst-case scenario you get a rogue pickle coated in mustard leaving a big yellow skid mark right on the belly of your T-shirt. The ladies sure love those.

I laugh, but folks: this is a serious problem.

Thankfully though, there is a solution: Yes, I’m talking about The Toppings-First Method. That’s right, believe it. Now here’s how it all goes down:

1. First, ask for your bun while the hot dog is still cooking. “Mind if I get the bun first?” There, just like that. Most vendors will just hand it over, so now you’re holding a big empty hot dog bun in your hand. Everyone with me so far?
2. Next is the very important bedding step. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this step. You can’t just lay your wet condiments down in the crack of the bun and expect the integrity of the bun to hold up. That would be ridiculous. No, you need to lay down a layer of condiment bedding first that gently cradles the wet toppings while preventing them from soaking through. Your ideal choices here are diced onions, pickles, or even lettuce if you have to.
3. Okay, now… load that bun up like there’s no tomorrow! Just keep piling the wet toppings in there! Deep red river of ketchup, bright yellow pools of mustard, generous spoonfuls of relish. Load it up. Believe me, the dog will still fit.
4. Finally, dog up! Rest that beautiful Fat Jim right down on your sugary bed of condiments. It may lay a bit high on the bun, but don’t you worry. Everything will still fit. Now the hot dog serves as shield and a guide, protecting your pants while escorting the delicious condiments into your hungry stomach below.

This is a magical technique I first learned from my friend Chad. He has perfected it to a science, where he has a very specific condiment architecture involving categorizing condiments into “wet”, “gritty”, and “cheese.” He can talk for five minutes about how relish is the most underrated topping or how proper cheese placement is key to fine melting. The point is that there are more advanced versions of this technique, but you really need to master the basics first. Sure, I’ve given you a guide. But only you can do the rest.

AWESOME!