Michael "Mikey" Blackburn's Westside BBQ

First off, I'm sorry that all of these have been kinda angry spouts of fire. Saying that, I'm gonna have to let you guys down again with yet another whiney slop of a post. I hate whiney people. I'm sorry for whining at y'all but I just gotta say something about those damn buses. I'm a firm believer in rapid transit and public transportation. It'd be great if everyone could just spend a buck, hop on a bus and get wherever the hell they needed to in a city. Unfortunately, that is not the case here in the wonderful world of St. ___. I got up this morning needing to get to the north side of town to meet a meat guy about, well, meat. I'm gonna start smoking twice as many cuts with this increased demand and I was looking for a better deal on ribs and butts. Chuck, my supplier, agreed to meet to negotiate today. I went outside, sat on the bench and waited for the 9:15 bus. Stop 15 on route #28. Well, there must have been some crazy shit going on at stops 14...

Now this was a weird day. So I'm walking back from the restaurant at about 9, right? and as I walk past the fountain, I see all these people acting weird and pointing and the police have got the square all roped off. I say to myself "now what are all these people doing pointing at the fountain?" I thought they told those people from the 'cult of the fountain' or whatever they call it never to come back. Then I look at the fountain and -get this- there's a GATOR in it. Turns out some zookeeper turned crackhead let these wild animals loose in the city. This tiggle (a tiger and a lion had a baby) thing ran off and got caught by animal control along with his buddy the ostrich but their pal the gator hid in the fountain and they hadn't got him out yet. Another day I might've stopped and pointed with the rest of them but I had a lousy day at work with all these job applications to turn down. Doesn't take too many people to operate a meat smoker. So i...

The day started with a rude awakening (just minutes before my alarm went off) by the backfiring of an unmuffled bike engine in the street below. How do you like that? Could he have just waited until 5:31 to gun it down the middle of the road? At least that way I might have avoided the barely-conscious battle that ensued between me and by bedsheets as I attempted to get to the window to check out what I was slowly coming to realize were probably not gunshots but some asshole's jacked-up Harley going nuts down the middle of Bond street. After that it was your typical wake-up-already-a-little-mad-at-the-world morning, saved only by a mediocre cup of coffee, the mediocrity of which cannot be over-emphasized. Sometimes if I'm lucky, not too much goes wrong until around lunchtime, but that's a once-a-week sort of thing, with today firmly outside of that category. To cap it all off, I have this whole damn post written and then the power goes out with a bang. The first draft, los...