As told by Kenny...

This site originally started in 1999 as a way to sell tee shirts.  A bartender friend of mine was in one night and said he had an idea or a shirt.  "The Fraternal Order of Bartenders:  To Protect and Overserve."  Great.  Fantastic!  An instant classic!  The only problem was, I knew he would never make them.  Seizing opportunity (a nice way of saying I ripped off the idea), I found a Fraternal Order of Police logo, created my own version, did the artwork, and began making shirts.  I never kept track of how many I sold, but it was around seven or eight dozen.  I decided to expand beyond the local outback of Scottsdale, Arizona, and get a website.

Feeding off the "let's mimic public service agencies," I turned my attention to the International Association of Fire Fighters.  The guy who printed the FOB shirts had someone make a logo based on the Maltese Cross logo that the IAFF uses.  I told him to call it the International Association of Drunk Bastards.  We put the FUN back in dysFUNctional.  It took me a while to translate "Get Drunk, Act Stupid, Fall Down" into Latin for the inside of the logo to mimic the IAFF's Latin verbiage on theirs.

Those didn't have the same mass appeal as the FOB shirts, but they still sold well.  Needless to say, firefighters were none too happy with my little brainstorm.  I wasn't insinuating that firefighters were drunks (even though many of them can definitely turn their wrist with the best), but no arguing on my part would change their minds.  I even had a few threaten to sue me if I kept selling them.  However, since the IAFF logo is based on something hundreds of years old, I don't know where the copyright infringement would be.

With two whole shirts under my belt, I looked for a domain name.  IADB.com was taken.  So were drunkbastard.com, drunkbastard.net, and others.  Finally, I decided on drunk-bastard.com.  I didn't want to use a URL with a hyphen, because you would be surprised how many people get confused by the little fucker.  Now I needed a name for the shirt portion of the site.  Submitting the chance to name it to my friends, one came back with LastCallWear.  BRILLIANT!  Well, at least I thought so.  So I registered lastcallwear.com as well.  What the hell it was only $15 a name.

Now, designing a website.  This was something I had never done before.  Someone I knew from college was in the business, so I e-mailed him and asked him how much to set it up.  Twelve hundred dollars for a basic site.  Blow me.  Another guy I know suggested I buy FrontPage, saying it was the easiest package.  I still use FP to this day, albeit the 2002 version, not the 98 version I had originally bought.  Drunk-bastard.com had three sections:  jokes, alcohol, and shirts.

I wish I had a back-up of the original site, just to see what it was like.  It took about 4 Mb of disk space.  Most of the pages were text because my ability to use graphics back then was limited at best.  Now most are text because I can't afford the bandwidth that graphics suck.  The alcohol section contained the Drunk Bastard Cocktail Guide, How To Set Up A Wet Bar, and a section called Newz-on-Booze, where I combed the internet for stories related to alcohol.

This is brilliant, I thought.  This will wow everyone, I thought.  I'll make a ton of money, I thought.  I e-mailed all my contacts, told them it e-mail it to theirs, etc.  Kinda like Heather Locklear in that shampoo ad from way back when.

So much for thinking.  I had a couple of hundred visitors the first day.  About 40 the second.  And then it petered off into relative (total, actually) obscurity.  I resorted to blasting chat rooms on AOL with the hyperlinks.  Traffic still never got anywhere near what I wanted, or what I would have even been only moderately embarrassed to tell my dog.

I sold a couple of shirts to a guy in Pakistan.  One was the fireman logo shirt.  The other was one that said "DRUNK MAN WALKING" on the back in huge black letters.  One year passed and shortly after switching to a new webhost, I lost my cushy little bartending job.  Needless to say, the belt had to be tightened.  I pulled the plug.  I was still broke and contemplating drinking household chemicals in order to achieve the buzz I could no longer afford through alcohol, but, ah, no.

In February 2001, after I had several people ask me whatever happened to the site, I decided to re-do it.  I dusted off FrontPage, scoured the internet for more jokes, and started coming up with shirts.  On 28 February 2001, I purchased drunkbastard.net - whoever had owned it in 1999 decided to part ways with it, and one man's trash is another man's treasure.  Unfortunately, drunkbastard.com was, and still is to this day, taken by a stupid fucking site that has NOTHING to do with drinking.  I paid for a year with a new webhost, uploaded the pages, and decided that it would be a simple little diversion, a small billboard on the information superhighway and nothing more.

The first few months, traffic wasn't anything spectacular still.  Sometimes I would get over 200 visitors a day, but the median traffic was about 50 per day.  Some days were as low as 15 people.  Oh well, at least some people were enjoying it, and it wasn't costing me much, so why not?

And then on 12 June 2001, the roof blew off.  I used to check my stats every day (maybe every other) just to see what was happening with the site.  11 June, I had 212 visitors, which was a huge jump.  12 June I had 5,403.  What the FUCK?  I looked at the referrers, and a site called memepool had stumbled across the résumé I had posted.  I won't go into its history, you can find it in the Humor Pages.  Suffice to say it wasn't my résumé.  Memepool is like a blog that promotes the weird, the stupid, and the downright idiotic side of humanity via the internet, and that 10-page résumé was their kind of shit.  The next day, 9,573 people had hit the site.  The world has awoken!  Humanity will worship at my feet!  I will become immortal!

Well, temporarily immortal.  Immoral, well, that's a different story.  But anyway...  the traffic lasted about a week and a half.  Between 12 June and 19 June I had 27,209 visitors.  In one week.  Even these days, that's a good MONTH.  Up until then, almost three and a half months, I had 6,324 people stop by the house.  After that, traffic dropped to a hundred or more people per day, still way above where I was.  I started putting more things up like pictures and cartoons, trying different things like The Otis Award, none of which worked.  People wanted to look, but they didn't want to do much else.

Shirts were doing miserably, mostly because of bad exposure and partly because it was costing me too much to make them.  I had all kinds of designs, but no market.

It wasn't until the beginning of 2002 that I started writing anything original here.  It had been until then a repository of internet humor but not much else.  Then I started ranting.  The Rants Page started one night when I was half on my ass with vodka and needed a vent.  It was about America bashing, and I just went off.  I liked the first one so much I wrote another.  And another.  I was on a roll, an angst-ridden madman with booze and a keyboard.  Every little thing that crawled up my ass got its due here.  Then I started Tales From The Bar because I'd always thought that some of the stuff I'd seen and done would make a good book.  Unfortunately, I couldn't remember much.  Besides, most of the shit was a soap opera-esque saga, not cute and compact little anecdotes I could present.  The page is still there, I just haven't done anything with it.

My last ex-roommate was the inspiration for My Life.  It started on 1 June 2002 when she lost one of my dogs.  I wanted to tell the world, in my own sardonic way, just what had happened.  The response to the story was pretty good.  Encouraged, I wrote more.  No one wants to read boring blog bullshit like, "Had Corn Flakes for breakfast.  Wow, I love the rooster on the box, I hope they don't change the artwork.  Went to work.  Came home and went to bed."  A lot of sites are like that.  Who fucking CARES?!  My humor inspiration has been the angry guy - Dennis Miller, Lewis Black, Jay Mohr.  I started talking about things that happened to me, trying in many cases to put a humorous, or at least sarcastic, spin on them, but sometimes just wallowing in the slime of my own misery.  It's my party and I'll cry if I want to.

I started The Girl of the Moment after I saw a similar thing on Se7en-X's website.  I also wrote the 404 page and the Nude Girl page based off of his 404 page that was e-mailed to me by someone I know.  It was brilliant, beautiful, and my versions are the two most hit pages on this site (not counting the main page, which would rank second behind the 404 page).

And, really, that's it.  The site now uses over 500 Mb of disk space, has 7,519 files including pages and pictures, and gets over 70,000 visitors a month.  People just like you.

Don't you feel like you just flushed five minutes down the toilet reading this?