Moon Rabbit

I made a comic ebook for people who don't like my poetry but want to support my efforts and like my drawings. It's my take on an Asian fable about the rabbit on the moon. It's pencil and ink. I like it a lot, and I hope you do, too.

Scenic Drives in Virginia

I cannot wait to try some of these roads out with our 1980 Fiat Spider 2000, Marcello. Convertible, red, white racing stripe, awesome. Virginia has some really great back roads that I love to drive. Clears my mind and makes me feel like a better poet and bon vivant.

Chelsey Minnis is hot, plus I'm reading tonight

Soooo, if you've been reading my blog for a while, you know what a big fan I am of Chelsey Minnis's. I have only met her online, and I'm totally in love with her work. I didn't know she was so beautiful. Jeez. I wish she were in the bay area when I was there so that we could have hung out together and I could have posted pictures of us hanging out together and everyone would be like, wow, you're hanging out with hot, beautiful, talented poets. I wish I knew Chelsey Minnis better.

Tonight, I'm opening for my friend's book opening. That is, I'm going to read from my upcoming book, The Chris Hemsworth Sonnets before he reads from his book, George Washington Werewolf. It all goes down in about one hour. I can't believe it. It all is taking place at the Darjeeling Café in Staunton, VA.

If you have the chance to buy any of her books, you should. They are all magnificent. I should put a review of her last book on this blog. I think it's the only one I haven't written about. It's fantastic.

Cannibal Rabbit

I want to tell you guys I made a comic with just my fingers and free apps on iPad. I hope you like it.

New Books and New Movies

Now that I'm finished with Murdercycle Diaries, I'm finishing work on Harvest 1.2 and also starting work on a book called Kicking Your Asthma. They're both coming along pretty well.

The Kicking Your Asthma book is the first time in a long time that I've written nonfiction. It's a memoir about my own experiences with asthma and how I finally beat (more or less) the horrible disease. I hope that people at least find it helpful and at most it might save a life or two. Thousands of people die from asthma in this country. That's just not acceptable.

Harvest 1.2 is really revving my motor. It's sexier than the first quarter and it's a bit scarier I think. Much of it happens in Victorian England during the Great Exhibition, a time and place I have thought about for a long time. I even named a tea at my restaurant Victorian Fog inspired by the Great Exhibition. It's my favorite blend that I've come up with because it starts a little sweet, has an earthy journey, and ends very smoky. That kind of mixing is awesome. One of the reasons I love tea so much. The vampires in my book can't drink tea. Too bad for them.

The Murdercycle Diaries is a book of poetry, short stories, and comics revolving around a murderous pair of cupcake-eating motorcycle enthusiasts. It started out as a joke with Tao Lin ages ago, and now it's grown into something big enough to fill a book. Even though it's about murder ostensibly, I think it's not as angry as my last book, The Haunting of Ninjatown. I don't even want to compare them because they are really quite different projects. I hope you like them. I'm starting to ask people for blurbs on Murdercycle. So if you're a poet, know this: I will probably contacting you soon. You can always volunteer too.

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I saw Total Recall, which could have been incredible but was actually surprisingly boring.

I saw The Bourne Legacy, which was a little better than the last two in the series/franchise. And it was kind of ingenious how they layered the story of Bourne and Treadstone with the new storyline. And Jeremy Renner is from Modesto, CA: kind of cool. He's a pretty good action hero because he's not too much of a pretty-boy and he's got a hard edge, kind of like Daniel Craig in the new Bond films. I liked the action sequences in this one a lot more than the old ones, and even though it was still rather sexless and humorless, there was a bit because Weisz and Renner are trying so damned hard and it shows.

What is it with action movies these days? They used to be fun. They used to make you laugh and if you were 13 watching your first rated R movie, they might even give you a boner (oh no!). I would trade a big explosion for a little grown-up time with the characters any day. It makes them relatable and realer. It makes them vulnerable and grounded. Plus, let's not forget why people have been going to theaters since the Greeks: beautiful people. It's supposed to be escapist fantasy. Whatever happened to that?

I Think I can beat Mike Tyson

I've figured out what my problem is: I think I can bet Mike Tyson. I was running today and I was thinking about how I keep getting in the ring with Goliaths. It takes a certain type of individual to keep wanting to do that when everyone else is constantly making fun of you or saying you can't do it. Every time you try to do something awesome there is going to be someone there to tell you you can't do it or that you just suck. What are they doing? The over-whelming majority of people out there aren't having dreams, and ones that are are mostly sitting idle. They don't even try.

Maybe the Fresh Prince realizes that it was crazy to try to beat Mike Tyson, and all the people who told him he was a fool were right, but he still got in the ring. In Will Smith's real life, he kept getting in the ring even when people told him he was shit. Now he's rich and his acting has gotten a lot better, and he's kind of an icon for a lot of people. He's got a bunch of Grammy's and other statuettes if those things matter to you.

I guess the point of this post is that I would rather endure the kibitzers and the haters, I would rather be beaten to a pulp, I would rather face the kind of ridicule and contempt anyone who aspires is bound to face than not try at all.

You don't like my book? Where's yours? You don't like my restaurant? Where's yours? You don't like my blog? What's yours say? You don't like my ethical stance? What's yours?

 But, just FYI, I have beaten Mike Tyson. It took a long time. I probably beat King Hippo a billion times before even got a punch in on Mike, but video games teach you that if you keep trying, you can find his weakness.

For some reason when I was looking for pics of Mike Tyson's anti-drug campaign, this shot of Rhian Sugden kept coming up. She's having fun with a HOLGA. I have an old original HOLGA. It's all black and has no flash. I used to take a lot of pictures with it, but now I don't because there isn't a professional film-processing place around here, and the internet is kind of expensive for me right now. When I have some money, I'd like to start messing around with photography again. In the meantime, if you want to see topless pictures of Sugden, this also came up in my search.

I never found images about the Mike Tyson "TKO Drugs" campaign, but if you watch the video it's there. It also says "Remember to vote" which cracked me up for some reason.

Reading Anyone?

Tonight is the open mic for writers night at the Darjeeling Café. I like this event a lot because I get to share what I'm working on with the people in my community and also to hear what everyone else is doing. It's mostly fiction writers, which gets a little monotonous if a lot go one after another, but most everyone is pretty good, so there's always something to come back to if you daze off.

To sex things up a bit, here's a picture of Danica Patrick, a photo yielded by google when I searched "sexy fiction writer who loves to fuck poets"

I'm glad there is a scene here, such that it is, but it also makes me miss my writer friends in big cities. I wish sometimes that I was back in a big city that had a monthly reading series or ten. I want to maybe start a reading series with poets from the east coast, but it's difficult to convince anyone to come to a backwater. Hmm. I'm thinking it would be fun to try. If anyone wants to come to Staunton and read at my restaurant to people who like literature and "edgy stuff," too, please email me. We'll get something started.

Clerihews for Trainwreck Union readers at THROW MAMA FROM THE TRAIN. 27 Apri 2007l @ Mama Buzz in Oakland

I wrote these for the poets I was introducing at the Mama Buzz reading of the Trainwreck Union. It was a great show. It was crazy to stumble across this on my computer. I haven't seen most of these people in a very long time. Some of them I miss horribly. I had a falling out with others. But there was a time when we were pretty awesome.

Hairy Scary J-Rod Roland
Met a girl in Warsaw Poland
She wasn’t bothered by taboos
until he showed her his crazy tattoos

Sweet little Gillian Hamel
By far the sweetest mammal
but if you try any crazy tricks
she’ll kill you with her ninja kicks

Cunning Connie Coady
All the jealous girls say she’s grody
For a catholic school girl that she once was
they can’t believe the shit she does

Slick Nick Roth
Quick as a three-toed sloth
I wouldn’t say he’s slow
He knows things that I’ll never know.

Madame Sara Mumolo
She has no need for gigolo
She’s the one they wanna take out
but she only wants to make out.

Happy Arron Pawlowics
knows brevity is the soul of wits
but he laughs so loud and so high
that he very nearly made me cry

Beautiful Beatrix Chan
She always has a plan
she went all the way to presidio
just to film a porno video

George Washington Werewolf

I read this good book this week. It's about the American Revolution against England and Werewolves. If you like either of those things, you'll like it too.
Kevin Postupack knows his history, and it really shows—not in the boring way so many history buffs write, but you get the sense that he is so comfortable with history he's able to trust his reader to get the wink and nod that he throws your way.

Along with the humor that you'd expect from a parody like this, he throws in a good dollop of horror that kept me interested. I really liked it, and I normally don't go in for werewolf books, or I never have. He doesn't let the jokes get boring or tedious, which seems to be the twitch most revisionist horror writers have. Once I get the joke, I usually want to put down the book, but Postupack keeps it fresh and fun.

To be critical, I wish we got to spend a little more time with the English so that their defeat was a bit more well-deserved. Cornwallis isn't introduced until the last chapter, and that's too bad because I would like to have him more deserving of his trouncing. Postupack trusts his reader a little too much there, expecting us to know that Cornwallis doesn't really show up until later in the war, and it's seldom in war we get a real villainous Hitler-type character. But seeing as how his imagination is so great, I think he could have just invented one, and no one would have minded.

All-in-all, a really fun and thrilling read. I liked it better than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

The Big Lebowski

I'm really excited because I'm going to see the Big Lebowski on the big screen tonight. It was the first DVD I ever when no one knew what a DVD was.