A Meaty P-Trap

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Speaker 2 The world is falling apart around us, John, and I'm dying inside.

Speaker 2 On this episode of the Commercial Break,

Speaker 2 the pipe is only so big, and if it gets a lot of stuff stuck in there, it's going to back up. So I thought, well, yeah, it's probably the meat, babe.
Probably the meat.

Speaker 2 So now we're on our way to Chuck E. Fucking Cheese for one of my kids' birthdays.
And now I got a full-blown emergency under my sink. I got a bunch of meat stuck in my P-trap.

Speaker 2 And if you know what a P-trap is, look it up. I'm not going to explain it here.

Speaker 2 The next next episode of the Commercial Break starts now.

Speaker 2 Give me a small crap.

Speaker 2 Ah, yeah, Gatson Gittens. Welcome back to the Commercial Break again.
I'm Brian Green. This is my dear friend and the co-host of this show, Kristen Joy.
Only best of you, Chris. That's D.
Brian.

Speaker 2 Best of you out there in the podcast universe. You don't know it, but that's the seventh time I've said that to you in the last couple of minutes.
That's De Brian. That's De Brian.
Best of you.

Speaker 2 Best of you. No, no, no, no.
Best of you. How are we doing? We okay? Everyone recording? All right, good.

Speaker 2 Christina and everybody else learning the ropes here in the brand new studio. We're still learning.
Yeah, we're still learning.

Speaker 2 We went without a studio TV for like four days, and then Brian decided this morning at six o'clock in the morning that we probably needed to see someone we're going to talk to later on today.

Speaker 2 So I rushed to Best Buy, asked for a very specific television. That guy was like, you know what you want.
Then tried to sell me on another television. And I was like, dude, I've been through it.

Speaker 2 Just, can you please get me the TV?

Speaker 2 I don't have long. People are dialing in from the UK.

Speaker 2 Anyway, check out, speaking of the UK, check out Russell Howard, our guest this week, a very lovely, talented, popular comedian in the UK, making his way to the United States for another round of tour dates on the West Coast.

Speaker 2 All the information is in the show notes from Tuesday's episodes. We sure do hope you go watch it.
I am currently watching my new favorite obsession, The Fish Tank Viewer. It's called the Fish Tank.

Speaker 2 It's a house somewhere in the United States of America where they give people free room and board. And the catch is they are being videotaped 24 hours a day.
I think except for the bathrooms.

Speaker 2 I don't know because I didn't actually pay to watch the site, but I keep on watching their Instagram.

Speaker 2 There's very few people that are onto this right now, but it is literally a fish tank and you are viewing crazy people living together in a crazy situation. Isn't that Big Brother?

Speaker 2 It is Big Brother, only this is real crazy people. Like the Big Brothers now, I think all celebrity crazy people, and who fucking cares? They They know they're being watched.

Speaker 2 The difference is they know they're being filmed because there's cameras in the house. They don't know it's live.

Speaker 2 They know they're being filmed. They don't know it's live.
So I don't know how they don't know it's live, but they don't know it's live. So at least that's the catch that they say.

Speaker 2 So if you want a very interesting Instagram account to follow. What have you seen? I've seen people getting in fights.
I've seen women throwing food at men.

Speaker 2 I've seen women doing weird things to themselves, not sexual things, but weird things to themselves while apparently nobody else is watching.

Speaker 2 I mean, just like strange human behavior that we probably all do in some form or fashion. I mean, honestly, you know, I said this a couple of weeks ago, and then I saw it on Russell's special, too.

Speaker 2 And I think this is probably coming into the collective consciousness now.

Speaker 2 Our phones are constantly recording devices, and they're taking notes, and they're reading our text messages, and we're putting everything we do, all of our notes, everything that we do on these phones or on social media.

Speaker 2 All of us are going to be arrestable at some point. All of us are going to have arrestable offenses at some point on our phones.
But if you could watch, yeah, there's another thing going wrong there.

Speaker 2 Let's just fix that now, too. What a disaster.
This episode is.

Speaker 2 This will be the funniest episode of commercial break history, guaranteed, because that's the way it always works out.

Speaker 2 But, you know, if someone could record me 24 hours a day, I don't think anybody would like me. I just don't.
I do weird shit all the time. I'm constantly walking around doing weird shit.

Speaker 2 If you got the version of me that Astrid gets, you wouldn't like me either. That's all I got to say.
Astrid feels obligated to stay with me because she knows I'll fall apart if she leaves me.

Speaker 2 I'll just be a

Speaker 2 drunken, disorderly mess.

Speaker 2 Yes, I'll be one big reason to call the cops. That's what it'll be.
And the children certainly aren't going with me.

Speaker 2 No judge in their right mind is going to look at the commercial break and go, yeah, they should be with him.

Speaker 2 He eats cream and cereal for breakfast. The god knows how many drugs the guy has done.
Exactly. And he doesn't have a straight thought to save his life.

Speaker 2 Plus, I'm pretty sure that studio is a fire hazard of epic proportions because it is for sure.

Speaker 2 Anyway, new studio and the TV looks nice. I like that.
I think we look better on this TV than we did on the other TV. This one's an actual 4K.
I think the other one was just pretend 4K.

Speaker 2 Remember for a while they kept saying, you know, 4K. Yeah, coming soon.
4K capabilities. But then when 4K came, my TV didn't change.
I just, it just got weirder. Like, the TV looked weirder.

Speaker 2 It looked like we were, you know, like an old video camera or something. Do you know that when it was on that weird setting? Yeah.
And I couldn't get my, they couldn't get that TV off it.

Speaker 2 So, anyway, so here we are with our new TV in the studio, and finally we're recording. So you're hearing actually what we're doing.
There you go.

Speaker 2 So speaking of drugs and a hot mess,

Speaker 2 I read the most interesting article the other day, and it hit very close to home because it's very close to home. Let me explain.

Speaker 2 The New York magazine wrote a very lengthy article on the new drug craze sweeping the nation, what they called the next drug epidemic.

Speaker 2 And the title was something along the lines of The Next Drug Epidemic Comes in Blueberry Flavor. Really? Yes.
And the new drug epidemic they were talking about is something called galaxy gas.

Speaker 2 Galaxy gas is just nitrous oxide, nitrous oxide, the laughing gas that you get at the dentist office that keeps you from going literally crazy as they're drilling a hole in your fucking head.

Speaker 2 Or outside of a Grateful Dead show. Or outside of a Grateful Dead show or any fish show or goose show.

Speaker 2 You know how it goes if you've been there.

Speaker 2 That's the noise you hear. Balloon Fadal.

Speaker 2 Balloon Fadal.

Speaker 2 Trip, trip, trip balloons. Trip, trip balloons.
$15.

Speaker 2 Buy one, get one. Pop for 10, pop it.
Five to ten. Five for ten.
Refills free. You know how it goes.
Buy the balloon. Refills free.
$20 balloons.

Speaker 2 And then there's some huge line by otherwise seemingly regular adults looking to get their fix like they were a child hooked up to the nitrous tank because listen we all go to the dentist at some point even my son got it my son the last he got it to have a cavity filled very young kid and the doctor said should i get should i apply nitrous and i said yes you should because that's the only way you're going to get that kid to sit still while you have a drill in his mouth i know my child and i also know nitrous oxide and while i don't want to get my kid used to the idea of being high.

Speaker 2 I'm not, I also don't want the kid to suffer.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Like let him doze off.
And man, did he? He was saying some weird

Speaker 2 shit. Yeah, like Little Mermaid was on that TV up there or something.
And he was like, you know, before they actually came in to do the procedure, he was like, Daddy, do you think fish can fly?

Speaker 2 Ah, I, Daddy, why do I sound so weird?

Speaker 2 Talking in like riddles. Yeah.
And I thought, wow, my kid is much more fun on Galaxy Gas.

Speaker 2 Here's, here's the thing, though. That NO2 is also used in a specific product called Whippet or Whip Cream.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Whippet is owned by a company that will also sell you that gas in a container, small little metal container called an NO2 cartridge or what some people on the street, like me, would refer to back in the day as a Whippet.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they've been around forever. Yes.
And you could go to your local head shop and you could get a...

Speaker 2 can you get a pack of those whippets they were just one hit right and you could buy like it were like five dollars a piece so you'd spend 180 to get 20 of these things then you have to buy the accoutrements to crack them open and put them into a balloon because if you tried to do it straight in your mouth then your mouth would freeze and your teeth would fall out so

Speaker 2 you don't want that you just want your brain to freeze you don't want your teeth to freeze you want your brain to freeze and that's what it does It is essentially starving your brain of oxygen, which then gives you a certain kind of wah, wah, wah feeling, like you're high, you're floaty, you're leaving your body.

Speaker 2 You've been to the dentist, you know what I'm talking about. Imagine that times 10.
And that's what a whippet does in a very small dose. And now they've made a blueberry flavor? So here's the story.

Speaker 2 There is a place not too far from where I live. There are many of these, so don't try and Google it to figure out where I live.

Speaker 2 But there is a place not too far from where I live, and very popular here in Georgia and now throughout the country called Cloud 9.

Speaker 2 Cloud9 is a head shop, a head shop that sells. smoking devices for your tobacco, like a 15-foot bong.
Why you you would want to smoke your tobacco out of a 15-foot. You know how.

Speaker 2 You walk into one of these head shops and they start telling you not to say anything that would make it seem like you were doing anything illegal. It's like the rules of the head shop.

Speaker 2 You don't say we have any weed smoking devices. You say, do you have a tobacco smoking device that's 15 feet long that I can, you know, get shit faced with.

Speaker 2 Crack pipes. Lighters that, light crack, lighters that have flames that are way too big, you know, patchouli.
Tapestries. Tapestries.
Yes, tapestries. That's right.
Tie-dye t-shirts.

Speaker 2 Grateful dead skulls. All kinds of incenses.
Probably Kratom, the

Speaker 2 opioid receptor

Speaker 2 stuff that you chew or smoke or drink in the tea or whatever. The dick pills.
Well, I bought 3,000. Yeah, you're in that store.
Oh, I am definitely in that store. All kinds of shit that a regular

Speaker 2 adult grocery store refuses to sell, not because they can't make money, but because grannies and grandpas won't like the fact that their bong is sitting next to PERT Plus.

Speaker 2 Do you understand what I'm saying? Okay, now you got me. They're on every corner, in every town, everywhere.
It's a head shop.

Speaker 2 The head shop Cloud 9 is owned by a couple of young, enterprising guys, brothers, who went to Kennesaw State University.

Speaker 2 They found that during the pandemic, people were coming in in droves looking for whippets and they could not keep them in stock.

Speaker 2 So they did some homework to find out exactly who owned this market and how the gas got here and who was making the containers and how all of that stuff worked and the legality of selling NO2 directly to a consumer.

Speaker 2 And what they discovered was the largest producers of Whippets were the whipped cream company Whippets.

Speaker 2 So the same company

Speaker 2 Where that sells you the stuff that makes your apple pie delicious on Thanksgiving is the same company that's selling your teenagers the shit that's getting high after a Grateful Dead show.

Speaker 2 Now, it's long been known that there is something called the hippie crack mafia. If you're into this kind of thing, then you will know that at fish shows, Grateful Dead shows, widespread shows,

Speaker 2 jam land production shows. That's right.

Speaker 2 Minus that one fashion show we did where I said, no whippets allowed this time. No whippets.

Speaker 2 That people would be somehow getting huge containers like medical grade NO2, the stuff you would see at a dentist's office.

Speaker 2 They would be getting these huge bottles that were like, you know, four feet tall, and they were balloon after balloon, filling up balloons and selling them for $5.

Speaker 2 It was always curious to me, how did they get a hold of that container of NO2? Do they have a dad that's a dentist? Yeah, I always thought it was a dentist connection.

Speaker 2 Apparently, you used to have to have some kind of medical license or at least convince somebody that you had a medical license in order to get those.

Speaker 2 And the hippie crack mafia, there was a big expose on them a number of years back, was just faking that they had a medical connection.

Speaker 2 And they were getting like hundreds of these bottles at a time and spanning out across the United States. Although they claimed it was never a racket, it probably was a racket.

Speaker 2 There was probably a guy who was selling these to other people who would then go out and sell them individually, just like drugs, any other drug.

Speaker 2 Well, the guys at Cloud9 figured out that they could call China. And they could have this gas delivered directly to the United States without any kind of permit.
Really?

Speaker 2 And it was was legal as long as they delivered the gas safely. It was more about how they got the gas contained

Speaker 2 than it was whether or not they could sell it to people.

Speaker 2 And they figured out how to get people to cheaply make containers that were much bigger than the single-dose Whippets.

Speaker 2 And they could flavor that gas and then they could sell it in their stores. And man, did they.
Wow. Millions and millions of dollars, millions and millions of dollars worth of galaxy gas.

Speaker 2 They branded it galaxy gas. So they were buying it from China.
They were filling it up in containers. They were delivering them across the United States and they were expanding huge.

Speaker 2 Now these stores are everywhere, these Cloud 9 stores. And people were coming in and buying

Speaker 2 something that would give you maybe 200 doses, 300 doses of this galaxy gas. It's like a two or three.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like two or three feet, the biggest ones, right? And they're $120.

Speaker 2 So rather than pay $5

Speaker 2 for one one Whippet, now you were paying like $120 for 300 Whippets. So they were making it cheaper.
They were making it more flavorful.

Speaker 2 And they were making the delivery devices more accessible to everybody.

Speaker 2 And what they found, what the managers of the stores found, is that people sometimes weren't even leaving the parking lot

Speaker 2 before they were running out of one bottle and going to buy another.

Speaker 2 They were maxing out their credit cards. People bust their heads.
Of course.

Speaker 2 Driving on Galaxy Gas. I couldn't even imagine driving on it.
No.

Speaker 2 Within 20 minutes. That's why the dentist

Speaker 2 makes you sit there for 15 minutes with pure oxygen afterwards to get your head clear. And that is a relatively low dose of NO2.
They are mixing like 10% gas with 90% oxygen.

Speaker 2 Maybe 20% of your dentist likes you. You know what I'm saying? Chrissy, this was crazy to me.

Speaker 2 The stories that some of these managers were telling inside of this article about how addicted normal human beings, teenagers, 20 somethings, were becoming, they were ruining their life trying to get a hold of galaxy gas.

Speaker 2 It was so popular that they couldn't keep it in stock. And the manager, the owners of these stores kept pressing and pressing, sell the galaxy gas, sell it, sell it, sell it.

Speaker 2 But they were getting nervous at the same time because of the things that they were seeing.

Speaker 2 Now the stores were getting robbed for galaxy gas. Now that people were coming in and they were

Speaker 2 grabbing the galaxy gas in the middle of the store, putting it on the the counters, pretending they were about to pay, and running out with the galaxy gas.

Speaker 2 And the owners told the managers, don't get the police involved. Whatever you do, don't get the police involved.

Speaker 2 Even one time when there was an armed robbery, they said, don't get the police involved.

Speaker 2 This is an internal thing. Yeah, because they knew.
Yeah, they knew. If the authorities got a hold.

Speaker 2 If the authorities got wind of what a problem this was becoming, then certainly they were going to cause unwanted attention on this Cloud 9 and the Galaxy gas. Well, it happened.
Someone died.

Speaker 2 A problem came. People got sick.
Families started complaining. You know, DAs started looking into this.

Speaker 2 And so the guys at Cloud9 decided to sell their Galaxy gas business and take it out of the stores altogether. This just happened at the middle of last year.

Speaker 2 But the amazing thing is, is that a simple Amazon search will show you that it's very easy to get this gas delivered right to your fucking front door in relatively similar containers with relatively similar amounts.

Speaker 2 This was a novelty when we were kids. You'd see it at the Dead Show, the Fish Show, whatever.
You'd occasionally have a friend who'd bring a packet of whippets over, and, you know, maybe you'd get...

Speaker 2 I tell you the story,

Speaker 2 the one time where we cleaned a store out of whipped cream cans and we had to explain that we were having an ice cream party. Yes, yes.
And the girl at Kroger was like,

Speaker 2 with 100 cans of whipped cream. We were like, it's a freaky whipped cream party.

Speaker 2 And And I got the headache of all head. I mean, we sat up in a weird loft one time, just whipped cream all over the place.

Speaker 2 It was a disgusting scene. I'm disgusted with myself.
Disgusted with myself that all these, I woke up with all these empty whipped cream cakes.

Speaker 2 Wait, I remember you did tell this story, and it was because you had gone to your dad's and you had opened the refrigerator and seen a can of whipped cream. And you did not.

Speaker 2 I did not do the whipped cream. The whip it.
That's right.

Speaker 2 Because if you don't shake the can and you hold it up straight you can get the no2 goes to the top and you get the no2 out of it and when i worked at chili's they had to lock the whipped cream away

Speaker 2 because everybody they would buy it in boxes and everybody would find themselves in the walk-in cooler doing whip it's when the manager wasn't looking it was just a thing it was a thing but it was a novelty it was relatively like you i mean you know once a year somebody would have a no2 cartridge and you would you know get high i remember one time at a festival like a small festival here somebody brought one of the medical grade bought like had you know the hippie crack mafia type thing had those things and it was a parking event where it parked camp like parking camping like you would park your car and you would camp next to it i the guy parked next to us

Speaker 2 and my friend could not get to the he had to leave the festival like four times no to get to the atm to get more money to buy more hippie crack it was insane he got got addicted over the weekend.

Speaker 2 In a weekend, he got addicted. And I can't think of how many balloons were empty sitting around the car by the time we were done.

Speaker 2 It was insane. Because, you know, the guy who was selling the hippie crack decided that he cared about people's germs and you couldn't use the balloon twice, whatever it was.
This is crazy.

Speaker 2 And I guess you could see this train coming down the tracks. But here's what I have to say.
More than don't get addicted to hippie crack, because don't get addicted to hippie crack.

Speaker 2 It's a terrible way to go and it's dangerous and don't drive and all that other stuff I'm not saying you shouldn't do it I'm saying you should do it smartly like every other drug unlike Brian's rules of drugs which is do it until you cause so many problems in your life that you have to stop to do it I am saying that don't ruin it for everybody by being a fucking moron do your drugs by yourself at home late at night with the curtains drawn like everybody else in their right mind does

Speaker 2 Please don't ruin it for everybody.

Speaker 2 Because when you're outside the parking lot of a Cloud Nine and you have to buy three or four tanks just to get your fill in a day, you've got a fucking problem.

Speaker 2 You need to stop for a few weeks, pretend like you're sobering up by smoking weed or drinking alcohol like the rest of us do, and then go back and buy one at a time. One a day.
One a day.

Speaker 2 Isn't that enough? Can't you say that's enough? Here's what I'm trying to share with you. It's idiots like you that ruin it for everybody else.

Speaker 2 And if you're going to do your galaxy gas, do it like a regular drug addict.

Speaker 2 Like my uncle said, don't fuck up while you're fucking up. And that is my PSA for today, Chrissy.
Sounds good. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Giving advice to the children. Galaxy gas.

Speaker 2 I can't wait till my kid comes to me and he says, hey, episode 7,326 of the commercial break says, if I'm going to do galaxy gas, do it in the privacy of the own home.

Speaker 2 So don't mind the tank of NO2 I've got stuffed in the closet. I'll be wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, right back.

Speaker 3 It's a new year and a new me, which means I'm bringing you the exact same information I always do.

Speaker 3 So follow us on Instagram at thecommercial break and on TikTok at TCB Podcast. Do something new this year.
Text us or call us and leave us a voicemail at 212-433-3TCB.

Speaker 3 And go, please go watch our YouTube videos at youtube.com/slash the commercial break. I mean, we put all of this effort into our studio, so just go take a gander.

Speaker 2 You gonna love it.

Speaker 3 And finally, go to our website, tcbpodcast.com, if you can't be bothered with anything else, because everything we have is right there on that site.

Speaker 2 Bye.

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Speaker 2 Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

Speaker 2 So, uh, like NO2, Freon has a similar effect to your brain. Freon, the thing being

Speaker 2 the car Freon, the air conditioning Freon.

Speaker 2 So one time a friend of mine had this wise idea that he, or he saw or he heard, this is long before you could go on the internet and figure these things out.

Speaker 2 He figured out from somebody that he could get Freon from an air conditioning unit by taking a screwdriver and pressing a little nipple and it would spray the Freon backwards.

Speaker 2 So he went out, he took a garbage bag and he got Freon out of an apartment complex. Like all the air conditioning units were lined up.
So it's the middle of the day and he's got a garbage bag hanging.

Speaker 2 Chrissy friends. Chrissy,

Speaker 2 he would pull the, he wrapped the garbage bag, he got the Freon, and then he pulled the bag up, and it sounded like there was a rock in there.

Speaker 2 That's how heavy the gas was.

Speaker 2 What? He came back into the apartment of this girl that I lived with, who I did not know. I just moved in with her, like, I don't know, four weeks earlier.
She was like a friend of a friend of mine.

Speaker 2 You invited that guy over? Dude, this guy went everywhere with me for a while. He was trouble with a capital T, and I made life no easier on him.
We were troubled together with two capital T's.

Speaker 2 Trouble trouble. Yeah, we were the tits of trouble.
And so he's the right one and the left one. So

Speaker 2 true boobs. That's what we were with true boobs.

Speaker 2 Men at their base nature, just doing stupid shit for the sake of doing shoot stupid shit. Impulsive was our middle name and sometimes our first name.
This guy walks in the apartment.

Speaker 2 He's like, you know what?

Speaker 2 Takes a huff of the Freon and he's like,

Speaker 2 He's like spinning around. His head's like, he's bobbing and weaving, and he almost kind of falls over.
And I'm like, So, after he comes to, I'm like, Oh, dude, you almost fell over.

Speaker 2 You got to be careful with that. So, then he's like, You know, I got the garbage bag.
I take a little bit, and I go totally

Speaker 2 blank. Yes, like my eyes go

Speaker 2 like, and I'm like,

Speaker 2 and I wake up, and I'm like, that wasn't fun. That felt like way too much No, too, like, I was out, you know, and so now he's got the bag, and he's like, He's got to do it right away,

Speaker 2 Takes a big one. He's standing up in front of one of those old televisions that's sitting on a stand.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he goes shoulder and head first into the television.
The television falls and breaks. And then I'm picking him up off the

Speaker 2 now. The television is cracked and broken.
And I'm picking him up. And I'm like, dude, are you okay, Dean? And he's like, oh man, that was intense.
And the bag, by the way, fell out of his hand.

Speaker 2 So he was like, what happened to the bag? And I'm like, dude, what about the bag? What about the TV?

Speaker 2 So we've, it's cracked, it's all spider.

Speaker 2 Chrissy, I wasn't worried about this guy's head. The things I'd seen him, too.
Yes.

Speaker 2 And so we put the TV back on the stand, fixed all the stuff, like put the books back, and then we left and went to the bar. Oh my God.

Speaker 2 I got home that night, and she was like, What happened to the TV? And I was like, Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 What happened to that TV?

Speaker 2 I eventually fessed up to it. Yeah, I had to spend the TVs back then were like $7,000 for some shitty TV.
So I had to.

Speaker 2 But yeah, like, don't, you know, be careful with the NO2. It's something that you can get addicted to.
Let me now be a serious adult for a second. Be careful with the NO2.
You can get addicted to it.

Speaker 2 It's called hippie crack for a reason. It probably makes you feel like crack.
Not that I've ever smoked it, but if I did and it was like NO2, I would tell you that it's similar to crack.

Speaker 2 So don't smoke crack and don't do hippie crack. Okay? Okay.
All right. Now, speaking of adult stuff,

Speaker 2 the other day we were leaving the studio, and my wife is yelling at me that there's water pouring out of our cabin. And this was just after it had snowed.
So I'm thinking, uh-oh, burst. Me too.

Speaker 2 Exactly. That's what I did.
Because do you let your pipes drip? I do let my pipes drip. You did good.
Okay, I do. We did too.
I'm pretty keen on that. Like, I understand.
That's a good thing to do.

Speaker 2 But, you know, I have this, like, when we redid the house and we renovated it, we made the pipes, most of them, all PVX, which is a plastic, like, you know, it's like PVC, but it's a different type that's supposed to be.

Speaker 2 I love that Christina's nodding along. Christina knows everything about pipe.
I know everything about pipes, about water damage.

Speaker 3 Don't get me started.

Speaker 2 It's terrible, and it happens all the time.

Speaker 2 And for a couple extra bucks a month worth of dripping water, you save yourself tens of thousands maybe in fixes because if it gets under your floorboards, it gets into your walls, everything's got to be replaced because then you have mold and all that other shit.

Speaker 2 And even if it dries, sometimes it does the structure of the house, the integrity of the home can be ruined. So the first thing I'm thinking is burst pipe.
Holy shit, that's terrible.

Speaker 2 So now I'm freaking out. Girls are leaving the studio.
I'm freaking out because not only because I think that there's a burst pipe in my home, but because I know what looking at the pipes entails.

Speaker 2 It entails

Speaker 2 going under the house. I know I saw you going over to the side of the house.
Chrissy, this is the scale. You have a flashlight and stuff in hand.
I saw you go in.

Speaker 2 I wished you well. Thank you.
I heard you. You said good luck.
You screened out. Yeah.
And I'm like, fuck you.

Speaker 2 I did. Out the window.
Good luck.

Speaker 2 I was cursing your name. I'm like, fuck you.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you got to sit in Atlanta traffic, but I have to go into this scary, scary house. That's a scary, scary crawl space.

Speaker 2 It's a crawl space, not a basement. And it's a crawl space from a house that was built in like the 40s.
So it's really scary down there. It is decades and decades and decades of old pipes, wires.

Speaker 2 I don't even dead children. I'm not even sure what's down there.
Right. But I don't want to know most of the time.
I know how to change the filters on my two HVAC units, and that's about

Speaker 2 that's right. You get in, you get out.
I don't even look in opposite directions. I don't even look because I don't want to know.

Speaker 2 There's probably a possum down there, and he's probably mad at me because he can hear under the floorboards what I'm talking about. I've actually had, I actually had a fucking,

Speaker 2 not an Xfinity guy, a charter cable guy. Fuck you, charter cable.
Because the fucking charter cable guy, he went under the house to go, you know, make sure that the wires were installed properly.

Speaker 2 So he didn't have to like run them through the side of my house. And he comes back out and he's like, listen, dude, they're done rat poop down there.
And rat poop carries Legionnaires disease.

Speaker 2 And I ain't about to get Legionnaires' disease. So you can call my boss.
I don't give a shit. I ain't installing the cable down there.
Do you remember that?

Speaker 2 And I said, fuck you, charter. Upward and onward to AT ⁇ T.
Now, listen, besides Charter just being a terrible cable system altogether, I'm sorry, but it is.

Speaker 2 I was kind of happy about this because now I could explain to Astro that we didn't need the cheaper charter. We needed the more expensive AT ⁇ T.
The faster. The faster internet.
That's right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Charter goes at about five megabits per minute. It's like, it was just not good.
Anyway, so.

Speaker 2 Luckily, we got found someone who was willing to go into the house and do this, but he was right about it.

Speaker 2 it i mean we've talked about this on the show we had a friend willie the mouse that was in our house for a long time that's right he was scaring astrid in the mornings because there was food misplaced boo was or not boo boo nico

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 2 the ghost dog

Speaker 2 that's right

Speaker 2 we had a camera that we set up to see exactly what was moving the food around our counters at night. It was Astrid who first caught on to this.
She was like, there are pears on the floor.

Speaker 2 And I was like, Well, maybe they just fell off. And she's like, Brian, I don't think fruit just jumps off the counter.
And I was like, Well, I don't know, maybe.

Speaker 2 And so we set up a camera. And at the time, because Nico and Blue, Nico had had some surgery, and Blue kept on attacking Nico.

Speaker 2 So we put Nico in the kitchen to go to sleep with a little gate so that Blue couldn't get at Nico. Blue, you bitch.

Speaker 2 And so after a couple of nights of this happening, I thought, well, Nico's not barking. There can't be anything live in there.
Nico would certainly be attuned to that. Meanwhile, Nico was like 50.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Nico was 107 and smelled like he was 107. I do miss Nico.
I know. He was so sweet.
I put a webcam up and I was recording it, a motion camera. And what I saw was the most amazing thing ever.

Speaker 2 There was a mouse, a cute little mouse, not a rat, a mouse, a cute little mouse. who was literally going into the kitchen at night, coming up from the where, I don't know, but

Speaker 2 from the crawl space he was coming up he had found his way in he was coming up and he was eating

Speaker 2 food from nico's bowl where nico was sleeping right next to it and nico lifted its head up

Speaker 2 looked at the mouse and the mouse looked at nico and they made a gentleman's agreement i won't tell if you don't and nico went back to sleep nico stared that mouse in the face and thought yeah that should be here it's not even wasn't even a a dog and to be fair nico really wasn't a dog it was more like just a

Speaker 2 small child that was in dog form he cried about nothing he was it was a weird dog but anyway lovely dog the sweetest dog you could have ever had very sweet and poor blue poor nico blue just tortured that dog

Speaker 2 tortured that dog anyway So there we know that there have been rodents. Like most people, there are rodents.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it happens. The rodents are looking for warmth and food and water and all that stuff.
And a house provides all that things for him.

Speaker 2 But it's been a long time since we've had the house sealed up for approval. But I went down and I have to go to the very end of the house.
The way that my house is.

Speaker 2 Right. Oh, my God.
I didn't even think about that. The way that the house is, is there's a crawl space entrance under the new part of the house that we just built a number of years ago.

Speaker 2 And you can probably at least bend over to get in that part. But the further you go to the older part of the house,

Speaker 2 the smaller it gets until there is only a two and a half foot, two and a half foot

Speaker 2 space between the mud, the floor, the actual earth, and the rafters of the floorboards. It is very tight back there.

Speaker 2 And then you take into account the piping from 1920, the wires that the charter guy left down there. Fuck you, charter guy.
The old telephone cables. I'm not even kidding.
Telephone cables, gas lines.

Speaker 2 I know. Our house is 100 years old.
So I've, yeah, I've peeked into

Speaker 2 it.

Speaker 2 and turned around. So as soon as you girls leave,

Speaker 2 I get a flashlight lantern, like one of those flashlights that

Speaker 2 it's this huge thing, but it puts off a lot of light because I said, if I'm going down there, I need reinforcements. I'm going to bring this big lantern.
I'm going to bring an actual flashlight.

Speaker 2 I've got my phone light on. I'm recording.
I'm ready for anything. Anything's possible.
And I'm ready. And I start crawling and I'm over the HVAC,

Speaker 2 you know, whatever they call that, the duck duck work. I'm over the duck work, and then I got to go under the duck work, and I got to pass the first HVAC.
Oh, my God. Then I got to get behind.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, at the end, I am shimmying, but there's a gas line that sits right there. And I know I cannot fuck.
You don't want to fuck with the gas. I don't need two problems now.

Speaker 2 In order to get to really see where that leak is, I can see that there's water on one of the pipes, but to see if it's actually spraying or something, I've got to go under or over that gas line.

Speaker 2 And it's right in the middle of that two and a half feet. So I went under.
I put my face on the ground and I scraped it along this side.

Speaker 2 Rat shit and all.

Speaker 2 I just scraped my face under and now I am full, in full panic claustrophobic mode. Yes.

Speaker 2 And I am sitting under a house where the rafter is right at my nose and I can see the pipe in between the rafter and luckily it's not spraying.

Speaker 2 So I know that it's not a problem with the going, the water coming in the house. It's a problem with the waste going out of the house.

Speaker 2 So it takes me about another half hour to get back to civilization. So you have to backtrack shimmy back.
And shimmying back is the harder part. Do you know what I'm saying? Like you get there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but then you know what you have to do to get back. And so I'm scared and nervous and I'm like a little boy.
You're very brave. Yes.
I'm checking my phone to make sure I have bars.

Speaker 2 Aster, by the way, has gone

Speaker 2 somewhere away from my house. She's decided I want nothing to do with this.
I'll see you later, Brian. So she's gone, and I'm now under the house all alone.

Speaker 2 So if there's a ghost or a monster or an alligator or, you know, I don't know, a

Speaker 2 swimmy swimmy wolf wolf, then I'm not, no one's here to help me. I have to call 911 and I'm ready.
I'm prepared to call 911 and tell them exactly where I am.

Speaker 2 I get out of there and I go, okay, it's with the drainage. So let's go start fiddling fucking around with that.
I don't know the first thing about anything, guys.

Speaker 2 I'm really not a very intelligent human being. I read a lot.

Speaker 2 on the internet and I watch a lot of Instagram and I pick little bits and pieces up that make me occasionally sound intelligent, but I'm soft in the middle. If you press me, ooze comes out.

Speaker 2 Do you know what I'm saying? Poof, poof.

Speaker 2 Yeah, boy. Exactly.
I'm as intelligent as flavor flavor.

Speaker 2 So I go upstairs and I open the kitchen, you know, the cabinet doors, and I see that there's water down there. And I can see where it's coming from.
I start doing a series of tests.

Speaker 2 Turn on the dishwasher,

Speaker 2 turn on the faucet, and I can see where it's coming from.

Speaker 2 It's coming from the hose that goes from your dishwasher into your disposal, which I have, which a lot of people have here in the United States at least.

Speaker 2 And that disposal, there's a drain from the disposal that goes out of the house and down onto the house and then out of the house.

Speaker 2 And then there's a little hose where the dishwasher water drains out into the disposal that then goes into that drain.

Speaker 2 If that drain is clogged and the dishwasher comes on, there's nowhere for that water to go. So it's just going to start spilling out of it,

Speaker 2 backing up and spilling out of wherever. It's spilling out of that hose.
That's what's going on. And And then it's making its way down into the rafters of the house.
It's going through the holes where

Speaker 2 the hoses come up, right?

Speaker 2 So I'm like, okay, I got this licked. I know, I at least know where the problem is.
So I'm like, Astra, you know, when did this start? I don't know, a couple days ago. I don't know.
A couple days ago.

Speaker 2 I said, oh, wow, that's really weird. Maybe the disposal is clogged.
I turn it off. I stick my hand down there.
I can't feel anything.

Speaker 2 And she's like, well, I mean, you don't think it was the meat I put down there the other day? And I go, meat? You put meat in the disposal? And she goes, yeah, but it was stew meat.

Speaker 2 And I go, what is stew meat? Meat that's been stewed. And I go, you can't put meat down a disposal.
And this is news to me because I have been doing this. Yes.

Speaker 2 A disposal is like a second cord on a parachute. You only use it in case you need to.
That's it.

Speaker 2 A disposal. It's everything down there.
Yeah, I know. That's probably why Jeff is going to be on it.
It's just whole onions. Whole onions.
Well, you know, when you cut off the tips, and

Speaker 2 it's not a food processor.

Speaker 2 It's a disposal. Chrissy, no.
No.

Speaker 2 Okay, okay. I won't do it anymore.
Listen, I realize there are two schools of disposal. I don't want to have to go under the girl space.

Speaker 2 Do you know my dad, Ned, didn't even put a disposal in his brand new house? You don't want to know why? Because he says it's just a reason for things to leak.

Speaker 2 Because everybody decides that anything could go down there. There's two schools of thought on disposal, and I get it.
And Astra comes from a place where there are no disposals. So I also get it.

Speaker 2 It's not really her fault. She did what she thought the disposal was supposed to do, which is chop everything up and make it nice and tidy to go out the house.

Speaker 2 But that's not how it works. The pipe is only so big.
And if it gets a lot of stuff stuck in there, it's going to back up. So I thought, well, yeah, it's probably the meat, babe.
Probably the meat.

Speaker 2 So now we're on our way to Chuck E. Fucking Cheese for one of my kids' birthdays.
And now I got a full-blown emergency under my sink. I got a bunch of meat stuck in my pea trap.

Speaker 2 And if you don't know what a p-trap is, look it up. I'm not going to explain it here.
I'm not Tim the Tool Man Taylor.

Speaker 2 So now that I've, you know, now that I've got a half a cattle stuck in my fucking P-trap, I'm like, well, okay, I know what I need to do. I need to go get one of those thingies to stick in there.

Speaker 2 The plunger? No,

Speaker 2 I don't know. The auger.
The auger. Yeah,

Speaker 2 I know. I know.

Speaker 2 I auger my pipes. Yes, thank you.
Finally, someone with common sense. An auger, a snake.

Speaker 2 I need to go get one of those snakes and the things that you can stick in there and twist around and then it pulls everything out or pushes it down or whatever. Loosens it.

Speaker 2 Auger is basically an electric version of that yeah you can do an electric version but i think i thought i i have if i get a 15 foot one that i'd be fine i could stick it down there and twist it around you know they make manual ones too so we go to chuck e cheese story to be told we go to chuck e cheese and then afterwards i said okay i'm going to the lows and i'm going to go get the the shit that we need so i go and then i go i'm really i'm going to probably stick with first breaking it up with some draino is what i'm going to do

Speaker 2 so i go to my opinion yeah i agree christina's shaking her head. No.
Well,

Speaker 2 listen, there's situations. Drino is really

Speaker 2 good. Well, listen,

Speaker 2 it is, but if you don't put it down there all the time, if you put it down there once in a while, you'll live to tell another day. You'll live to tell another day.
Oh, for emergencies.

Speaker 2 No, no, I don't use it. Well, I know.
You've had a lot of drama around your puppy.

Speaker 2 This is trauma-informed,

Speaker 2 informed reasoning over here. So I go, and I'm looking at all the different selections of Draino.
They have drain this, grease that, do this, do that,

Speaker 2 supercharge. Yes.

Speaker 2 Guaranteed, works in five minutes, guaranteed.

Speaker 2 And who wants the one that's just like not? No, you don't want the regular drain.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you don't want drain.

Speaker 2 You want

Speaker 2 it? Maybe you can clean it with this, or you're definitely getting through. You want Drain Dragon 3000.
That's what you want. You know, we're trusted by professionals.

Speaker 2 Guaranteed to work in five minutes. So I get the one.
There is one literally that has a plastic bag wrapped around it. And it said, please put this back in the bag when done using for safety purposes.

Speaker 2 And I don't even read it. I go, that's the one.

Speaker 2 That is the one. I need that.
I need that.

Speaker 2 So I get it. I get the snake.
I check out. I go home.
I tell all the kids to get the fuck out of the kitchen so I don't hurt you. I put the dog outside.
It's 20 degrees, but whatever. She deserves it.

Speaker 2 And then I take this thing out of its plastic bag and I start pouring it into the kitchen sink, into the disposal

Speaker 2 and then i read the back label

Speaker 2 only then did you read it to which it says never

Speaker 2 use in a disposal oh my god ever

Speaker 2 and then it also says please put a porcelain bowl or tin pan on top of the drain after use

Speaker 2 in case of explosion

Speaker 2 and i'm like what is this devil that i just poured down down my sink? It is liquid lie. Yeah, the same stuff Mamafia uses to dissolve your fucking body is the shit that can dissolve your grease.

Speaker 2 I mean, you were trying to dissolve meat. I was trying to dissolve flesh, but you cannot put it

Speaker 2 in plastic pipes and you cannot put it inside of a dissolve. Which you just did.
Which I just did.

Speaker 2 Done deal.

Speaker 2 So now I quickly turn on the water to flush it all out.

Speaker 2 And I decide, okay, just go with the auger. And I think, okay, it's only been in there for 30 seconds, whatever, in 30 seconds.

Speaker 2 So I take the water, I turn it on, then I hear the water pouring out of something. And I look, and it's pouring out of the disposal.
And I thought, oh, it's the pipe. It's backed up again.
No problem.

Speaker 2 I take the P-trap off. I see that there is absolutely nothing but residue left in the P-trap.
I stick the auger in as far as it'll go, nothing. I don't feel anything.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, okay, either I just fixed it or I pushed it out or whatever happened. I put everything back together.
I tightened the connection. Clean as a daisy.
Everything's now flowing well.

Speaker 2 Only there's water pouring out of the bottom of the disposal. It's so strong that it had even

Speaker 2 burned through the rubber casing because lye, as soon as it touches any organic material, heats up to like a thousand degrees, sets itself on fire, basically.

Speaker 2 I have caused a chemical reaction inside of my disposal and I have completely ruined it.

Speaker 2 It is draining out of the bottom of the disposal right next to the power wire where I'm sure water is not supposed to be.

Speaker 2 Brian, fixed the problem that Astrid started and caused his own fucking problem. I'm having so much PTSD.

Speaker 2 I know. I'm so upset for you.
This is like, this is the worst.

Speaker 2 And so, of course, I just continue to blame Astrid

Speaker 2 throughout the night. But the truth is, I fixed one problem.
I caused another. That's right.
So now I've got to change my disposal out this weekend, which should be, you know, a whole dickload of fun.

Speaker 2 But I called my brother, who actually knows how to do stuff, and I said, listen, I don't need you to do it. I'm just going to buy you a six-pack.

Speaker 2 Can you sit there and watch me and make sure I don't set myself on fire, cause an electricity problem, or chop my hand up?

Speaker 2 Listen, I'm not the guy you call when there's a problem, like a mechanical problem, or an electrical problem, or a human problem, or a relationship problem, problem with your brain.

Speaker 2 I am the guy you call when you occasionally want to giggle at how stupid humans can be. I'll keep you posted on the brand new disposal.
We'll talk about Chuck E. Cheese after this.

Speaker 3 Have you got a hankering down deep in your soul to tell us what's up? Well, I am encouraging you to do just that. Text us at 212-433-3TCV and tell us what's going on.
Give us the haps.

Speaker 3 Tell us the dirty secrets of your life. That's all we've ever wanted to hear.
You can also leave us a voicemail at the same number that's 212-433-3822.

Speaker 3 And also follow us on Instagram at thecommercial break and on TikTok at TCB Podcast.

Speaker 3 And if you want to see any video episodes, you can go to youtube.com slash thecommercial break and they are all right there.

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Speaker 2 Trump's naming

Speaker 2 Sylvester Stallone and John Voigt and somebody else as special envoy to Hollywood. Hollywood is not a country.

Speaker 2 It's a fucking zip code. What are we doing?

Speaker 2 What are we doing? I notice he also invited all the Titans of Industry over to his inauguration. You know, Musk, Zuckerberg, and

Speaker 2 having a big inauguration party.

Speaker 2 The government is bought and paid for. It is official.
It is official. Expect your life to get a lot.
more miserable. And not just miserable, but it'll be publicly miserable.

Speaker 2 We'll know it's coming this time. It's not like everybody everybody else who keeps it a secret.
We'll know it's coming this time. Anyway, went to Chuck E.
Cheese for one of my daughter's birthdays.

Speaker 2 Okay. I love, I used to love Chuck E.
Cheese when I was younger. And the cheese is on top.
And I would tell you what, there is a whole section of the internet that just in love with the Chuck E.

Speaker 2 Cheese pizza. I agree.
You really?

Speaker 2 Everybody else agrees.

Speaker 2 It is fucking deliciosos.

Speaker 2 Well, that makes it more bearable. I got to agree.
I mean, listen.

Speaker 2 So we were going to do a party for my my very young daughter at an age where we've learned that they will not remember and it's unlikely they even understand what's going on.

Speaker 2 But a smile in a child's face is worth a thousand bucks. So, you do what you do.
We've always done big blowout parties on birthdays.

Speaker 2 Unlike my own existence, my own upbringing, where birthdays were barely even recognized. And that's okay.
It was a different time back in the 60s.

Speaker 2 And big parties. You did?

Speaker 2 I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Speaker 2 It was just, we just grew up in a different type of family. Yeah, we had big parties.

Speaker 2 We really didn't have like big celebrations. It wasn't like a birthday week.
It was more like a birthday minute where you woke up and it was like, happy birthday. Yeah, we'll have cake later.

Speaker 2 That's why I have a birthday month. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 I feel jealous of the people who really enjoy celebrating their birthday because I don't. And Astrid hates it every year.
I know I'm a miserable, sad sack of shit.

Speaker 2 And I've talked about it so many times on this show.

Speaker 2 my happy birthday is being miserable for my birthday. That's how I get all hyped up for it.
Okay, Scrooge. Yeah, I know.
But I love making a big deal out of other people's birthdays.

Speaker 2 I love my kids' birthday. I love my wife's birthday.
I do my best under this, given the circumstances. Given all my PTSD, I do the best I can.

Speaker 2 So we're going to have like a little family get-together this time for this young girl's birthday because, you know, we don't want to spend $10,000 doing a big blowout.

Speaker 2 And we've learned some things over the years. And that is they don't remember them.
They likely don't even understand what's going on. And they still want to go to bed at 6.30 in the evening.

Speaker 2 So, but the snowstorm hampered that party.

Speaker 2 So we quickly, Astrid, not we, Gastrid, I don't want to get, yeah, pivoted.

Speaker 2 She thought quickly on her feet and she decided, why don't we do, for like a couple of bucks, some discounted weekday price, we can do a Chuck E.

Speaker 2 Cheese party, invite just a couple of young kids that she likes to play with, and some of the other kids' young friends.

Speaker 2 And then we can wear them out for two hours, go from four to six, have some pizza, bring a cake, decorate the table nice, and everyone will love it.

Speaker 2 And at least then we know she's going to have a good time. And I thought, this is a brilliant idea.
Let's do this. So we do it.
So we reserve the spot. Put down 50 bucks, unlimited gameplay.

Speaker 2 Do whatever you want. You got the wolf package?

Speaker 2 We got the e-chees pizza.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we got the sleazy e-chees.

Speaker 2 The easy e cheese package, baby. One of those cards that doesn't stop.
You just go, go, go. Just press it and it just goes.
And we've been to other birthday parties of Chuck E.

Speaker 2 Cheese that are like this, and it's a lot of fun because the kids just go do whatever the fuck they want.

Speaker 2 They don't have to worry about tokens or I don't have to worry about spending $10 every five minutes. Daddy, I don't have any more points.
What were you doing? The claw? You can't do the claw.

Speaker 2 You don't know the claw. That's adults.
Adults do the claw. See that 49-year-old over there

Speaker 2 trying to make a living, selling claw-related on ebay yeah he is a l o s e r but that's okay he's got the easy sleaze package easy cheese package so we go and we pull up 15 20 minutes early to this party there is one car in the parking lot and by the looks of the car it's the manager of the chuck e.

Speaker 2 Cheese do you know what I'm saying? Like I know. I already know.
I know where it's parked. I know what kind of car it is.
I'm like, that's the man. We have the run of the mill.
It's after a snow day.

Speaker 2 It's a school night. It's It's four o'clock.
No one's going to be there. It's fun.
No one was there. Not another living soul, except for the manager of the Chuck E.

Speaker 2 Cheese, who, God bless his extraordinarily nice heart, took a long time to check us in.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, he was a very chatty fellow. He had to, he let me know that he'd been with the company for 29

Speaker 2 years since he was 16 years old. He'd been with the company.
He loves the cheese. He loves the cheese.

Speaker 2 I don't want to knock a working man because a working woman or man is a working woman or man. There's lots of different jobs out there.
And as long as you're working, that's it.

Speaker 2 Who fucking cares what you do at the end of the day? But man, 29 years listening to the Chuck E. Cheese theme song over and over again, dealing with small children,

Speaker 2 special kind of person. So the second that we get checked in, he's already trying to upsell me on shit, right? He's like, you want to go in the bouncy house?

Speaker 2 The bouncy house, by the way, is one small trampoline connected to another small trampoline that has a big gate, like a cage around it.

Speaker 2 And you can only go in there if you have a certain wristband. So I said, Well, how much is it? And he goes, Well, with your, with your special package, you can have it for a discount at $5.

Speaker 2 And I go, Okay, get the kids' socks. They have to wear special socks in there.
Yep.

Speaker 2 Then he says, Okay, you're you guys ordered, pre-ordered two large pizzas. Is that what you want? What time do you want it out? And I said, Two large pizzas.

Speaker 2 There's like 10 adults coming and seven children. We better up that to three large pizza.
Make it four large pizzas. And he goes, I'll extra large it for an extra $7 a piece.
And I said, yes.

Speaker 2 So now our extraordinarily inexpensive Chuck E. Cheese venture is already costing me hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
But I don't want people to go hungry. No, you can't be cheap at the cheese.
Yes.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 yeah, I mean, if you're cheap at the cheese, people are going to know. Exactly.
If you're splitting a personal pan pizza between 10 adults, they're going to know.

Speaker 2 They're going to go, hey, B, you want me to chip in?

Speaker 2 And if you ask people to chip in at the cheese,

Speaker 2 things aren't going so well for you. I thought that podcast was doing okay.
Aren't you guys on the charts or something? Yeah, that doesn't equal money. I'll tell you that much right now.

Speaker 2 So I say, no, no, no, no, no. Big spenders here.

Speaker 2 Let me break out that chime credit card that gives you $300 before payday.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Diner's Club. That's right.
Diner's Club.

Speaker 2 I am not Capital One, Capital Two. Because that's where the important people bank at Capital Two.

Speaker 2 So I said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's go extra large. Let's do, you know, a couple peps and a couple cheeses.
And I mean peps, I mean pepperonis. People who are into the pizza world know that.

Speaker 2 Maybe you know, you know. Yeah, give me a couple peps plus, and then give me the cheese.
And don't give me any of that uncooked pepperoni. I want those nice, you know, crispy, crispy peps.

Speaker 2 That's what I need. Crispy peps right on my cheeses.

Speaker 2 Get the chef out here is what I want.

Speaker 2 and by the way at one point during the check-in process the chef came out there was a chef middle eastern guy very old probably in his early 80s and he was so nice even though he did not speak a lick of english he was so nice he i mean speak a little bit of english and he was like he was like you know came up and he shook my hand and he goes you need anything

Speaker 2 like that he points to himself

Speaker 2 he was so cute i wanted to give the guy a hug he's wearing gloves and a hairnet. I loved him.
He was the best. I thought, okay, if you're microwaving my pizza, I'm good with you, right?

Speaker 2 Whatever's going on back there. However, you guys create those pizzas.

Speaker 2 So I get everybody, the wristbands, the socks, the things, and everyone's going wild. The kids are going crazy.
It's just a lovely time. You know, it's hard to have so many kids at a Chuck E.

Speaker 2 Cheese because they all want to play something with you and they need help. You know, one of my daughters is on the motorcycles for adults that go back and forth, but she's stuck on it.

Speaker 2 And it just keeps swinging back and forth. And she's screaming bloody murder.

Speaker 2 But there's so many other kids that I have to pay attention to that I don't notice for like four minutes that she's like just stuck on this motorcycle. That's right.

Speaker 2 And the birthday girl likes the carousel that's only three horses, three tiny little horses.

Speaker 2 Yes, she keeps on asking for more and more and more. She spent the entire afternoon on that thing.
So then, you know, whatever it is, 4:50. I said, I winked to my guy back in the kitchen.

Speaker 2 I go, dink, time for pizza. And man, he came out.
He was so proud of those pizzas and they were fucking delicious. I mean, so good.
He got cups and plates and glasses.

Speaker 2 Oh, let me tell you something too. Not only did I have to pay extra for the socks, but then the guy, I go, what about the drinks? And the guy goes, oh, well, you could get drinks.

Speaker 2 Like, we have the soda fountain, $2.99 for the cups, and then you get all you want. And I say, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let me get like 13, 14 of those things.

Speaker 2 So I paid an extra $70 for drinks. And what he failed to tell me was that the drinks came with with the birthday package.
What?

Speaker 2 By the time I'd already used the, we're already done, I'd already sucked up a bunch of soda by then. And I was like, fuck.

Speaker 2 Anywho,

Speaker 2 pizza's coming out. Everybody's having a great time.
My little girl is having, she's just like in shit heaven. She just loves it.
She's having so much fun. So many smiles on her face.
I loved it.

Speaker 2 And then it was time. The big moment arrived, and they told me this was going to happen.
5.15,

Speaker 2 Chuck comes out.

Speaker 2 Chuck is going to make an appearance. He's He's going to come say happy birthday, do a little dance party.
The mouse. The man.
The mouth. The myth, the mouse.
Chuck E. Cheese comes out.

Speaker 2 Which I'm pretty sure was just the manager in a mouse hat.

Speaker 2 Actually, I know it was because he had the same shoes off. But anyway, okay, all right, whatever.

Speaker 2 So he comes out, and my daughter was frozen in fear. Oh, I'm sure.
Frozen in fear.

Speaker 2 All my other kids were doing the dance party with him, and my daughter just, she was on the corner of the dance floor, and she kept taking one step back without moving.

Speaker 2 She kept taking one step back, one step back. And so I noticed that, and I went up and, you know, to make sure that she remembers this in therapy sessions later on in the life.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, you've already now

Speaker 2 scarred her with the wolf. Oh, the wolf she didn't like.
The wolf watch, and now the cheese man. I think it's that they don't move their mouths.

Speaker 2 I think that's probably the scariest part, is that they're talking, but there's no mouth moving, you know? Because there's a loudspeaker. He's, you know, he's doing this dance.

Speaker 2 Hey, you know, hey, G's heads. Let's.
Oh, and by the way, one of the characters, they don't do the characters anymore, the dancing characters, the animatronics. It's just all on a video screen.

Speaker 2 But there was a whole five minutes dedicated to a character called Munch the Mouse, which, you know, and he kept on saying, who wants to be a part of the munch pack? Munch, munch, munch.

Speaker 2 Who wants to munch with me? And I thought, eh.

Speaker 2 I know I'm a little bit older than these kids. But the munch pack,

Speaker 2 I don't know. I had a hard time.
I had a hard time with that one. I thought, this seems overtly sexual to me.
Who wants to be a part of the munch pack?

Speaker 2 I do, but I'm 48 and I don't know what it means to you, munch mouse, whatever your name is. So my daughter's backing up.

Speaker 2 So to make sure that she knows that I care about her, I walked up, I kneeled down, and I said, hey, listen, it's just pretend. If you want to say hello, you can say hello.
And so I picked her up.

Speaker 2 And she put her head in my shoulders. Then she turned around.
She looked at them. And I thought, this is it.
She's ready. She's ready for this.
And I started walking up to the mouse.

Speaker 2 And the closer, here's what happened. It was like a siren.

Speaker 2 I walked up.

Speaker 2 I walked back.

Speaker 2 It's like she had like a little, like, I don't know, like a little magnetic device in her brain. And the closer I got, the closer, the more the magnet electrified.
It was really, really strange.

Speaker 2 But all's well that ends well because Chucky tried to keep coming to her to give her a handshake. And finally, I had to tell her, I said, hey, Chuck, hey, leave her alone.
Back off.

Speaker 2 I said, I think it's enough with Chucky. That's what I said.

Speaker 2 I think it's enough with Chucky. And he goes like this in his big thumb, his big mouse hand.
He gave me the thumbs up.

Speaker 2 So, you know, we had cake. We had fun.
And then

Speaker 2 the most miserable part about any Chuck E. Cheese experience, Dave and and Buster's, what at Andretti's, you know the places, Great Wolf Lodge.

Speaker 2 The most miserable part about any of these arcade-based point systems where you get tickets or tokens or tickets, whatever the fuck it is, is that you have to then try and tell your children how that big stuffed animal costs 7,800 tokens and you have four.

Speaker 2 Four.

Speaker 2 We paid $700 for that card and you only have four tokens. You cannot get the 7,000.
Oh, see that 49-year-old over there at the claw?

Speaker 2 It's going to take him a year to get that stuffed animal. He's going to try and sell it for $100 on eBay because that's what he does for a living.
Daddy talks on a microphone.

Speaker 2 You make the call, whatever you want to do, or manager and Chuck E. Cheese, whatever you want to do, kid, but you do not have enough tokens for that.
And they all throw big fucking hissy fits.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, you, I'm turning you all into little spoiled shitheads. How do you think? Why do you think you deserve that? And you didn't do anything.
All those skee-ball tickets were mine.

Speaker 2 By the way, I did play a lot of ski ball I was I was I was rigging the ski I love skee ball skee ball is so much fun and I'm so good at it I can get in the middle almost every time if I get into a little bank shot at the top me too yeah it's exactly what you do that's the only way to do it right and it's like the real ski ball thing and by the way I took one of my kids' cards for like a long time and they kept on tugging on me like dad kind of my card back and I was like no I'm getting you tokens

Speaker 2 Daddy's in the middle daddy's in the middle of something yeah by the way I love how I'm and then I watched I said my twin brother was there with his fiancé, Carrie Ann. And I loved it.

Speaker 2 They were playing with the kids and having fun. But at some point, they checked out and then they were running around doing video games together.

Speaker 2 And I was like, first of all, where'd you guys get the card? I know you took it from one of the kids. And second of all, hey, what the fuck? This is for the kids, not for you.

Speaker 2 But I couldn't yell at him too much because you know what? I do love the games too. The games are fun.

Speaker 2 So anyone, anyway, everybody had enough for a rubber bouncy ball that I quickly threw away as soon as we got home. And that's my day of Chuck E.
Cheese. Fuck you.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's always an adventure. Oh, the chef came out.
He was like going home for the day or something. And he's like, everything good for everyone.
Good birthday.

Speaker 2 And I like, I just wanted to give him a hug. I know.
I was like, you're so good. Everybody at Chuck E.
Cheese was lovely, by the way. Lovely.

Speaker 2 It's making me want to go. Go.
Honestly. Do you know? The manager told me when I got there, there were two other, he said, you got the place to yourself at least till 5:30.

Speaker 2 He goes, but then there's another birthday over over there. He pointed, and then he goes, And that birthday right there is for a 46-year-old man.

Speaker 2 Oh, and I said, Well, we want to be out of here by then. What time does that guy come?

Speaker 2 And they always put stamps on your hand, like with the same party, gets the same stamp, so you have to check, but they never check. No, no,

Speaker 2 you got to keep a close eye on your kids. No one's going to watch your kids like you, dude.
That's right. That's all I got to say.

Speaker 2 All right, check out Russell Howard's brand new special available on his website. We'll ask Christina to put the link in the show notes.
You're the best.

Speaker 2 He's also on tour. Got lots of stuff on YouTube, his social media.
He's a really, really nice guy and extraordinarily funny. He's a really good satirist.
Satyrist? Is that what you call him? Satirist?

Speaker 2 Satirist? Satirist? Satirist?

Speaker 2 Tomato.

Speaker 2 Tomato tomato. If you want more information, go read the New York.

Speaker 2 I'm going to read that article. Yeah, I'll send it to you.
It's really fascinating, actually. It's really fascinating.

Speaker 2 Two enterprising young men found a way to get everybody hooked on no2 there you can go isn't that how it always happens though yeah

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 and also if you would please go to our website tcbpodcast.com all the information about chrissy and more facts and information that you could ever want about chrissy and i all the audio all the video Plus you can get your free TCB swag.

Speaker 2 Go to the contact us fountain drop-down menu says, I want my free sticker. Give us your address and away it will go

Speaker 2 please do follow us on social media there's more of you now than there ever was before

Speaker 2 but I'm not sure what that means I don't I don't know that you listen to the show at the commercial break on Instagram TCB podcast on tick tock and now all episodes available youtube.com slash the commercial break and as Astrid points out you want to see the new studio please do that 212-433-3822 questions comments concerns contents ideas we would appreciate it okay Chrissy, that's all I can do for today.

Speaker 2 I think so. I'll tell you that I love you.
And I love you. Best to you.
And

Speaker 2 best to you out there in the podcast universe. Until next time, Chrissy, and I do say, we will say, and we must say.
Goodbye.

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