Watch Out, I'm Doin' a Grateful!

I'm doin' a Grateful! I'm doin' a Grateful! Watch out, everybody! You know it's a thing! 

MOST IMPORTANT NOTE OF THIS BLOG: This ain't some deal where I have anything to do with the Grateful Dead. I just got to clear that up at the front of it. (No offense to anyone in the band or to anyone who has devoted a big part of their public armpit schedule to that band, but I hate that damn band. To me their music is like if your car doesn't start when you're on your way to go buy a melody but instead of worry about it, you go lie face down under a hedge and smile.)

(Except for Box of Rain. Box of Rain fully captures the loose textural honesty of the California folk-rock land-run that the sonic tin and other unchecked aggression of Dr. Byrds failed to achieve. The ghost of Clarence White weeps for the gently pulled strings here, which bleed into soft focus like orange light drawn across the Painted Desert, yours truly under serape and sedation.)

No, indeed! This is all about that positive energy that cats like my boy "be-ful-ness coach and buttered coffee pioneer" Tim Ferris be dumpin' up the web. I probably rap on energy styling so much y'all be like, "Ray! Hey! Hey! Shut the fuck up! Be the oak, not the damn branch on the wind!" I know, I know. I'm the oak, like, real, but y'all can suck my Aston Martin if you can't be the branch sometimes. Now...Let's Get Positive!

What I am damn grateful for at this present moment:

1. НЕ ДЕТСКИЕ ПРИКОЛЫ (18+) 

I got no idea what this means. My guess is, "He Was Attacked by the Acetone Baby in Public." Look this action up on YouTube. Just paste that Russian right in there, in that YouTube search box. Russians have such a classic idea of what is funny. Russian "funniest home videos" make Bob Saget look like a fiberglass horse hitched to a cement mixer on cinder blocks. You are gonna see some old-school thonged-out ass cheek, but also a dog costume guy who "pees" thirty feet at rich people. (Spoiler alert)

2. Manicotti

Okay, so the age of fetishizin' micro-regional Italian food has pretty much come to a close. Remember back in the '00s, when the latest craze was some Ligurian barnacle that grew on the left side of this one rock, and everybody with two Riedels to clink together set aside $250 for whatever specially-designed copper cooking vessel Williams-Sonoma was schleppin' for it? Yeah, that's done. We back to the "careful, the plate is very hot" era of Italian gustatin', and I couldn't be too much more thrilled. Red gravy, garlic butter on sourdough, ground meat, soft noodle, and browned cheese. Rock me, Italy, but I am so down to tug your granny-panties.

3. Home Cologne Lessons

I had come to see cologne as somethin' I had to do myself. It came down to a pretty primal feeling: why let some other creature wet up my crannies and mark me his own?! No gene-set with a few bucks and dignity to match should ever flash another tribe's stank! That's when I knew I needed to call Guerlain. French stank-house since the 19th century, these are the roundest-ball players. I had current G-poppa Thierry W. and his local fix Anpromimoué up for cantaloupe and day-six cream with basil (my own favorite cold-infused herbal extraction method), and we ended up talkin' aged leathers and Tunisian patchouli-trafficking way into their boarding pass. Nice thing about players like them though is that nothin' matters but the ideas at hand. A first-class plane ticket goin' gray is just another neat phone call to an agent who wants to make the world perfect 'cause you're the best.

All that said, I'm still drivin' my own style hard on my first fragrance product. Base notes of Meyer lemon, middle notes of organic lemon, and top notes of Kanye West's @Oblivious.

Whew! It is so good to share some of my many vitalities with you. You remember when you were a kid on the playground, and you had a red pocket knife, and you met a kid who never saw one before, and the kick you felt gettin' to share that piece with him had you feelin' like a million bucks plus genius and god? That's this, but a million readers over.*

-=Poppa Ray=-

*I don't know if it's a million. I don't like lookin' at website stats. Truth be told, if it takes a password, Ray ain't play. Maybe only two people read this. Maybe I don't even hit "publish" in a way that sends the typing out to the world. Can't care, won't care. Peace and love in ya fleshdom.