Years ago I wrote a gag for a film I never shot because I smoked too much pot. It was about a little boy who wondered why you should never look a gift horse in the mouth. The boy was given a pony as a gift for his birthday, and while no one was looking, he lured the pony closer with a sugar cube, pried its little jaws open and stared deep into it's maw. Suddenly, a second set of jaws (ala Alien) snapped out of the pony's throat and into the little boy's face. I have bad ideas when I get stoned.

Now, I'm a person who puts a lot of thought into the gifts I give the people I care about. If the gift has no meaning to the receiver then it is a meaningless gift, and who wants those? I like taking the time to really think about what to give someone, because I'm an obsessive nutcase and it distracts me from all of the things I really should be doing, like cleaning the apartment or finishing the book I've writing all year. For instance, my friend Jessi's favorite show was The Golden Girls, so I spent days hunting down an old VHS of Estelle Getty's workout video for her. My other friend was going through a divorce, so I bought him a set of ninja throwing stars. You get the idea.

So, last year I was sitting in my Los Angeles apartment smoking my medicinal marijuana and racking my brain over what to give my good friend Aaron, the designer I used on Augusten's website, for his birthday. The two of us met at a party ten years ago and I immediately recruited him for a sketch comedy team I was putting together. He's one of the funniest people I've ever met, and over the years we've had a friendship so impossibly gay you need special goggles to shield yourself from all the rainbows. He's one of my favorite people on earth, and every year we give each other the dumbest gifts possible on our birthdays - such as bacon flavored jellybeans, or a framed print of Christopher Walken building a robot in his garage.

I was living 3,000 miles away at the time and was excruciatingly bored, so I hit eBay to look for something good. Aaron is the biggest sci-fi nerd in the world, so I remember looking at a set of TRON action figures to buy him, when - somehow - within two clicks I found myself in an auction for a dozen dried raccoon penises (God bless eBay). The seller referred to them as "Prairie Toothpicks". I stared at the screen for a good long while contemplating a purchase and ultimately thought what any sane, rational person would think: nothing says "happy birthday" like a box of dicks. So, I clicked the BUY NOW button and fired off a quick email to Bubba's House of Wangs (or whatever the eBay store was called) asking him to ship the box of Prairie Toothpicks to my good friend Aaron in time for his birthday and, most importantly, to include a little birthday note in there for me. I got an email back from Bubba himself saying "No problem."

In the days running up to Aaron's birthday I think I must have asked him if he'd gotten anything cool about seven hundred times. Each time the answer was "no" and I was beginning to think I'd gotten stiffed on the raccoon penises (have fun with that sentence). What a brilliant racket that would be -- who on Earth is going to write eBay to complain that the dozen penises they ordered never arrived? I was starting to think old Bubba was a brilliant criminal mastermind. As it turns out, he was just one lazy redneck.

The day after Aaron's birthday I asked him one final time: did you receive any cool gifts in the mail? "No," he said. "But something seriously messed-up happened."

As it turns out, Aaron's new girlfriend arrived at his apartment before he did on the evening of his birthday to find a shoebox wrapped in brown paper on the doorstep. There was no return address on the package, and without giving it much notice, she had torn the paper from the box, opened the lid and immediately went into hysterics. Apparently, Old Bubba had neglected to leave my note.

"Someone sent us a sandwich bag of bones," he said. "She freaked the fuck out."

Aaron got home to find his girlfriend shrieking "Where are the cats! Find the cats!" thinking some psychotic person had murdered and de-boned his little tangerine kittens Odie and Q*Bert, who were no doubt crouched somewhere, hiding from the screams.

I wasn't really sure what to say, but it wound up being a shaky, sing-songy "Haaaaaaaappy Birthdaaaaay... it's a box of raccoon penises."

"You asshole! What's wrong with you?", he said. Then added: "She was about to call Homeland Security!"

Aaron and his girlfriend were married two weeks ago at a beautiful ceremony in New Jersey. It was an honor to be invited and to see one of my best friends in the world walk down the aisle with the woman of his dreams.

I did not show up to the wedding with a gift. I'm told I have a full year after the wedding to find them the perfect present.

I think I'm going to have to sit and think on this one for a good, long while.

Mom sent me frozen alligator steaks.

Dad sent a DVD of "Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus"

It's already shaping up to be a pretty awesome day. Longer rant to come once I recover from last night's birthday shenanigans.

I love you, blogosphere.

So my jaw just hit the floor.

I was just catching up on some cartoons on AdultSwim.com and on the latest episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force there's a shaved Wookiee character (who looks a lot like what I look like naked) and take a wild guess what his name is?

Here's the clip:

http://www.adultswim.com/video/?episodeID=8a250aae212fa9c3012130170c690029

I'm a happy boy

This is why I'm still single.

One Friday night about four years ago, I had showered, shellacked my hair, laced up my favorite pair of Vans and was about to switch off the TV and head out to the Party of the Year when a commercial came on the T.V. that stopped me in my tracks. When the commercial finished, I sat back down on the couch, cracked a beer, kicked off my shoes and called my buddy Aaron.

"Hey man. I'm not gonna make it out tonight."

"Are you fucking serious!? Why not?"

"You want the truth?" There was no way to say this without it sounding dumb. "There's a movie on the Sci-Fi Channel tonight about the Chupacabra. You know, the Mexican goat-sucker?"

A long pause.

"I'm listening..."

"It's about a Chupacabra that stows away on a Carnival cruise ship and eats everyone. It's called Chupacabra: Dark Seas"

Another pause. "Wow," he said. "I totally understand."

And so all my buddies went off to dance in a loft with hot girls until 6 AM where it was raining free beer, psychadelics and handjobs, while I sat on my ass at home and watched a legendary Mexican monster eviscerate senior citizens on a shuffleboard court. It was totally worth it.

I am a huge lover of crappy movies. When I was eighteen, my family shelled out a ton of money to send me to The Dramatic Writing Program at NYU. I was a C-student in high school with extremely average SATs, but I was somehow accepted to my top choice college which my folks hoped would mold me into the next Martin Scorcese. I just wanted to be the next Roger Corman. I sat in dark classrooms for hours on end, where we watched and analyzed the works of Kubrick, Antonioni, Coppola, and all the while I was fantasizing about making the Raging Bull of giant animal movies. I had friends who wrote screenplays which were eventually produced by Gus Van Sant while I sat in bars and coffeeshops trying to scribble out a good plotline for my movie Quahog, about a giant killer Rhode Island clam.

My college roommate Bongo dropped out of film school to work with Troma Films, makers of such fabulous crap as The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke'm High, Surf Nazis Must Die and Bloodsucking Freaks. He was making six dollars an hour, but I was insanely jealous. A good part of his job was revolved around the promotion of Killer Condom, where he had to stand on a street corner with a dude dressed as said condom and hand out flyers to screenings. As far as I was concerned, Bongo had the hookup. We were even able to have my 22nd birthday at the premiere party for Sergeant Kabukiman, NYPD.

God, how I wanted to make movies like this. It just isn't easy to get people onboard for the ride. I had a genius idea for a movie called Prawn! about killer radioactive shrimp, but you try convincing your girl friends to stand in the surf in Coney Island in bikinis, screaming, while you chuck buckets of frozen shrimp at them.

And so, like my professors advised me, I focussed on selling-out - writing the kind of scripts a studio might actually be interested in. Like every other schmo in film school, I wrote my coming-of-age scripts, my Tarantino knockoffs. I was proud of them, but they all suffered from a horrible lack of having a giant anaconda, crocodile, or genetically engineered wolverine gobble up my protagonists in the end.

When I was in Los Angeles a year and a half ago, an old college friend called me up. We hadn't really spoken in ages. He was a working actor of some renown, and had produced a number of small independent films. I had a decent reputation as a writer in college, so he wanted to meet with me to see if we could work together.

He brought his idea to the table first. He was a dramatic actor who had made a film about being homeless which was extraordinarily moving and impressive, so I knew anything this guy was going to be in was gonna be good. The film he wanted to make next was a biopic of a famous choreographer who died of AIDS. It sounded interesting.

"And what about you, Drew? You have anything you want to work on?"

I scootched forward in my seat. Rolled back my sleeves.

"Okay. Buckle the fuck in." I took a sip of my beer. "In Australia in the early 1930s, the sugar cane crop was being decimated by a little bug called the cane weevil, so the government brought in the North American bullfrog to take care of them. The thing is, the bullfrogs wound up multiplying and eating up everything but the weevils. So, to this day, the Australian countryside is overrun with these frogs, right?

"So our hero is this American scientist who makes it his mission to rid Australia of this scourge of frogs, so he decides to make this new kind of poison to kill them off. What it really winds up doing, however, is making them giant! The size of Volkswagons! Imagine that: being eaten by a giant frog. People will be shitting in their seats!

"And there's layers to this, you see. It's all a big allegory for American intervention in ... ah, who gives a shit? Giant fucking frogs, man! And the best part is the title. You ready for this? ... CROAK! ... Boom. That's it. I'm telling you, man. This cocksucker's gonna make us thousands!"

I never heard from him again.

Ah well. One of these days, Drew. One of these days...

I'm not a big believer in the afterlife, but if there is one, I will kiss the good lord's purple tentacles if it's anything like Austin, Texas: a paradise of pork and whiskey, great music, and the friendliest people on Earth. After months of juggling four jobs at once and trying to live and party in NYC on less than a hundo a week (harder than it sounds), I couldn't wait to get to South By Southwest and I felt like Austin was waving me in with welcome arms. By some fluke in the weather it even made our plane land three hours early -- who has luck like that? Oh cloven-footed Gods of Austin: how many cute and fuzzy woodland critters must I sacrifice to show my thanks?

My buddy Hersey and I flew down to stay with one of my favorite people on the planet, Jessi Cornett (buy her jewelry), the wonderfully talented Tara McPherson (buy her new book from Darkhorse Comics), and the lovely April Mirvis. Two months ago we had a dinner party in my dark little Brooklyn kitchen and I served these ladies roast pigeons that I had purchased in Chinatown. Amazingly, they are still my friends.

Our first night in Austin, Hersey and I got to see H.R. from Bad Brains, and The Circle Jerks - who I've been a fan of since I saw "Repo Man" in high school. The frontman for The Circle Jerks is 53 years old, and still jumps around the stage like he was 18. It was one of the better shows I've seen in years. The Circle Jerks recorded a song with Debbie Gibson (yeah, that Debbie Gibson) in the 90s, and I was a little bummed she didn't leap on stage and belt one out with them. I think my heart would have popped out of my chest like in Alien.

At 5 A.M. that night, I *somehow* managed to get a head wound at Jessi's house, which has since turned into a pretty awesome scar. It was an insanely lame and hilarious accident which I will not recap here out of shame, but we quickly decided to come up with a story to cover the real truth about what happened. The new story is that I was hit in the head with a flaming log at The Circle Jerks show. But you should see the other guy. That's my story and I'm stickin to it, and lucky for me I have friends who have my back. I was chatting with some tattooed guy at an afterparty one night and he was quick to ask where I got my scar. Tara just smiled and looked and me and just said "Circle Jerks". And we all clinked beers. Love her.

South By Southwest is something everyone who is interested in music should experience. I'm not a big fan of the Lollapalooza breed of festival where you need binoculars to see your favorite band. SXSW is held in tiny bars and clubs around Austin, which is a far more intimate way to see your favorite bands. In just 24 hours I was able to see my three favorite songwriters, Andy Falkous (of the Welsh punk band McLusky), Lou Barlow (of Sebadoh and Dinosaur, Jr.) and Daniel Johnston (Netflix this film immediately) all from less than 10 feet away.

I'm realizing that this post has quickly devolved into the lazy rantings of a music geek, so I am going to cut it short. But if you would like to see some pics from one of my best holidays in recent memory, they're up on my Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27780059@N07/sets/72157616107276446