Wolfenbüttel is a town in Lower Saxony, Germany, located on the Oker river near Brunswick. Devoted fans of competitive strength competitions are no doubt aware that Wolfenbüttel hosted the three day International German Bus Pulling Championships in May of 2009, but to most people Wolfenbüttel is better known as the home of the herbal liqueur Jägermeister, which in turn is better known as the stuff that kicked my ASS while I was in Wolfenbüttel.

I plan to tell you all about this adventure in the very near future. But at the moment I'm staring down the barrel of a deadline for the manuscript of my next book, tentatively titled "Living Loaded: A Life-Affirming Journey to the Depths of Humanity... with cocktails." So in the meantime, here's a never-before-seen snippet from the book...

My job/lifestyle combo is like a supermodel serial-killer -- it might look great, and be a whole lot of fun, but it will cut your throat if you take your eye off it for a second. As the poet said, writing about music is like dancing about architecture. If that’s true then what I do is like smoking crack about crack. I am a professional risk-taker. I am the king’s taster: the Medieval peasant who got to live the good life, eating a steady diet of foie gras until his luck ran out and one of the one-in-a-thousand morsels with arsenic in it landed on his plate. There’s a saying among commercial deep-sea divers that “there are old divers and there are bold divers, but there are no old, bold divers.” This profession isn’t all that different. In a heartbeat that breezy walk in the park can turn into a sprint through the fields away from a tornado.

That said, it is the best job for picking up chicks. Too bad it’s also the worst for keeping them. In fact, writing this book is only serving to underscore the central conflict of my existence – on one hand, I want nothing more than for “Living Loaded” to become a huge bestseller because I’ve found that stunningly beautiful women are prone to sleeping with famous authors.  On the other hand, if I do a truly great job at writing an unsparingly honest expose of my working life, any self-respecting woman who read it would rather date Tom Sizemore or Charlie Sheen or Eliot Spitzer before me.