KayaBound

My week(s) with Captain Trips, the 3rd – sexy goth chicks, wizards detectives, vampires and witches, the living dead, and of course, Agent Pendergast.

Sep 022010

This is the third and maybe final, blog post left over from my time of illness.

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Now my family may say differently, they do seem to disagree with me quite a bit, but I think I make a pretty decent sick person. There is only one cardinal rule. Leave me alone. Let me suffer in my own way; quiet and pensive. After a few days I am typically back to normal.

This last bout didn’t quite go as well as planned. The cough turned to bronchitis, which turned to pneumonia – all during my “break” before the fall semester of my senior year – and I passed some of it to my oldest. Ugh. Urgent Click here for discounted Textbooks care is not your friend, but we were there nonetheless.

It is over now and school is back in full swing and my free time has disappeared along with my sanity.

I hate being sick, but my quiet, pensive, hermitical approach to healing gives me a lot of time to read or write. I tore through books as if the Library of Alexandria was burning and my feet were the kindling.

I devoured the latest book in the Dresden series Changes, by Jim Butcher in a day. Fun stuff! He and Kim Harrison read very similar in my eyes, but his with a more – as one would hope so – masculine slant. It’s comic book literature. I say that with most sincere appreciation and probably helps explain the popularity of his Spiderman novel. Too bad the Sci-fi the television show didn’t last. I thought it was pretty decent.

I burned through all of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Pendergast series and then some. Pendergast is an FBI agent with a mysterious past and the novels written by this dynamic duo are filled with archeological, supernatural, and anthropological references and tidbits. Right up my alley. I finished the books during the time of ill, but actually read them all over the entire summer. I recommend them all, but if you want to go with the short list… I would go with Relinquary, the sequel to Relic. However, I loved Cabinet of Curiosities and the heroine within, Corrie Swanson – hey guys, shouldn’t she be due for a cameo, or at least shouldn’t she be graduating from college and becoming an excellent replacement for Constance as Pendergast’s ward? – seriously, Constance has begun to wear on me, can’t we just lock her up for the next half a dozen novels?

I apparently have a weakness for those smart rebellious Goth chicks – Christopher Moore’s Abby Normal and Lily, Kim Harrison’s Madison Avery, Preston / Child’s Connie Swanson, Jim Butcher’s Molly… there is a pattern here.

I also finished an autographed copy (thanks Kim and Guy) of Kim Harrison‘s Once Dead, Twice Shy. Enjoyable and probably a stellar book for the YA crowd, a good toned down mix of her much more sensual – she about killed me with all the lesbian teasing between Ivy and Rachel – and adult oriented The Hollows series. Once Dead, Twice Shy is a touch of Dead Like Me, with some inkling of the teen angst of Twilight – thank god, only an inkling – think of it as a Princess Bride “Only the Good Parts” version, but then it’s not about vampires… so maybe not a true Twilight connection there, but it gave me that feeling while reading it. Probably, Darren Shan is a better comparison, yet she isn’t as gritty as he is either. Oh hell, it is basically just Kim Harrison writing for a younger audience. And it’s good.

However, I did only read it because it was:

1. Kim Harrison (and I have an autographed copy!!)
2. What else am I to do while I wait on the next Hollows release?

If you haven’t read any of Kim’s books I really can’t suggest anything other than start with the first and be ready to be upset when you finished the last. Vampires, werewolves, witches, elves, and pixies all living in the Cincinnati of today side by side with us, the humans – they are just fun reads, she enjoys what she does and it shows. However I have a hard time deciding who I am more in love with, Rachel or Ivy… shit, there are those women as main characters again!

She also doesn’t try so hard to force a story or connection like some other authors, or at least if she does you can’t tell – Elizabeth Kostova *cough* please go back and dump everything after Dracula dies in The Historian. This will retain the 90% of the book that was superb and then you can reprint it so the next group of readers doesn’t have to endure the pointless wrap up and innocuous attempt at leaving the door open for a sequel, it’s Dracula for god’s sake, you were already writing a sequel when you wrote that one and we all know Dracula dies, just never permanently. He’s like Jan Brewer in that way, the bad, predictable, stereotyped and continually recycled stock character that shows up, sucks the life out of everything around him and then just won’t go away – plus Kim doesn’t use words like twinkle. Although, Scott Sigler actually made great use of Meyer’s twinkling in his book Ancestor, so it can be done if done right, and in jest. Admittedly, if it wasn’t for Alice, I don’t think I would have made it through Meyer’s Twilight saga myself.

Hmmm strong Gothy female lead again, Bella was after all just a whiny prima donna puppet and doesn’t even deserve lead credit in my book. Why do we have a Team Jacob and a Team Edward but no Team Alice?

With few exceptions – hello! Doctor Who, duh! – I have found, once again, television just doesn’t compare to a good book.

Beyond the enjoyment factor I have been doing it to learn. If I choose to apply to an MFA program they want to see some of my work. While I could probably dig up something and rework it I wanted to try something new. Me, as I write now. Me now, has to be better than me last year, or 10 years ago when I was a finalist for a writing gig with AOL, or even back in high school when I ghost wrote a short story for a friend of mine that she used (the teacher submitted it on her behalf) to win a Houston Chronicle contest 20 years ago. Come to think of it, I never did get properly rewarded for that piece of work with a proper piece of ass and she got to be in the paper! Anyway, as any good writer knows – at least they all say it so it must be true – in order to write you must read. So I have been and it has helped. I even started on the first contender for a legitimate MFA writing sample as well as a few ideas I can use for some upcoming contests.

Wow, that was a lot of books… I even left out all of Scott Sigler’s novel and The 13th Hour. I will have to come back to those later I supposed.

In the meantime, I have add the blogs of Scott Sigler, Christopher Moore, Neil Gaiman (who is working on a Doctor Who script right now in Cardiff), and Kim Harrison to the side over there.

Moore is hella funny when he posts something more than “signing and whatnot” updates. Kim is consistent and normally a quick enjoyable read into the real life of a successful author. Gaiman is as quick witted and funny there as he is with everything else he writes and Sigler, well Sigler… he’s just really impressive and a great success story that gives me hope. You should look into what he is all about because today; today, I just don’t have time to tell you.

Maybe later…

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Philosophy in a Bathroom Stall – Finding Hope

mid life college crisis, things not taught in school No Responses »

Sep 012010

I am a creature of habit and I know I am not alone.

We pass the same people every day; whether it is the stroll across campus on your way to class, the walks back and forth at work from your cubicle and the copy machine, or just the place you decide to take a crap each day. Don’t laugh. I used to know a guy that drove to the Lowe’s around the corner, as need, because he refused to use the bathrooms at work, which were always clean from my experience – however, there were some terrifying stories about the ladies room there.

So I tend to use the same bathrooms on campus, more an issue of the path I take, the biological needs of the elderly, OK – the aging; than anything related to cleanliness. For the most part they are all the same, but this one is in a major traffic area and is likely kept up better than others. However, the attention they spend on cleaning the men’s room is limited to items other than bathroom stall graffiti.

This makes for an interest read at times. But, I am not telling you anything you don’t already know. Stephen King became so fascinated with this that he took notes on his travels which developed into a story later called All That You Love Will Be Carried Away as part of Everything’s Eventual.

Green Day has lamented the power of the stall in “Jesus of Suburbia”:

I read the graffiti in the bathroom stall
Like the holy scriptures of the shopping mall
— Green Day

It doesn’t stop there, but I am getting off track here so let’s go back to my stall experience – no, I didn’t see Larry Craig – but I have seen the writings and as stalls go, they are a community experience.

Like the childhood game of Chinese Whispers or Telephone, each person that follows the last into a stall has a chance to make their own contribution. Sometimes these collusionary efforts becomes purely artistic, sometimes it is utter crap – look I made a funny – and other times it has such a deep meaning that it must be shared.
Earlier last week I saw this:

The fact that this individual was contemplating relationships while sitting previously where I was now sitting did disturb me at least a little, but what’s a guy to do.

A few days later the original graffiti had been modified, I suspect by a new visitor, but maybe not. It is always possible that our bathroom philosopher had come to a conclusion. An upsetting one, but still, a decision had been made and that’s better than I think some people are able to do in their own life. I was proud of my mystery philosopher even if deep down I know he had picked the wrong choices, but like most men, I suspect he is a visual individual and our campus is not lacking in visual stimuli. It is a veritable symphony of beauty most days. I just hoped it was the right choice for him.

Then today, same stall, same image, but a new modification.

There is hope; another guy has joined the ranks of realizing the priorities of maintaining a relationship. Really the most important thing you should get out of your college education if you ask me.

Maybe it was the same guy and his emotionally unstable, but intelligent beauty of last week went all academic on him and showed her true colors. Hopefully he will realize it is possible to find all three traits in one woman. I have, but if he doesn’t, at least he and hopefully the future readers of his magnum opus on life will take heed and run when the crazy bitches appear.

And they will, they always do

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Jan Brewer and the Twinkie Brigade spams me again! More bullshit about SB 1070.

lying, thieving, and whoring No Responses »

Aug 302010

OK, apparently the last few posts – and subsequent rise in traffic on this page – hasn’t seemed to get my point across.

The latest email is just as entertaining as anything else she has said or proposed.

It is titled: “Terry Goddard and President Obama are Wrong for Arizona”

Well, Jan, at least those people were voted into their offices.

However, I agree with you on Obama. If he hadn’t taken Janet from us we wouldn’t have to put up with your crap. So it is Obama’s fault! The Tea Baggers ought to like that, something they can pin on Obama that is real. Oh wait, they would actually see that as something he did good, wouldn’t they? Dumb asses.

I would even go one step further and add that you are not only bad for Arizona, but the country as a whole. We are a nation of immigrants. It is the strength and backbone of what created and continues to strengthen America. Yet, instead of working for a legitimate way to shut down the Mexican cartels by providing a path of immigration for those migrants that want to come here to work, or to find other ways to cut off their money – like Terry Goddard has – you would rather see them die in the dessert or arrest those Americans with the compassion to support them. Or I don’t know… quit making gun laws so lax that the Mexican Cartels come up here for the Gun-mart that is now Arizona.

You are setting a bad example for our children and I am tired of it.

She goes on to claim that “Terry Goddard is endorsed and supported by those trying to financially hurt Arizona.”

Last I checked you weren’t endorsing him Jan, so apparently that isn’t entirely true.

Her whole argument is based on the fact that some of the groups supporting Goddard are also those that are supporting a boycott of Arizona businesses and arguing for a the MLB All Star game to be moved to a state more interested in human rights rather than politically motivated agendas based on fear mongering and lies.

I remember moving to Arizona and finding out that Martin Luther King Day was not recognized and thinking what a bunch of backward ass dumbfucks. Well guess what, it is now. Why? Because the NFL said so, with any luck MLB will gain a backbone and push this issue just as far, but so far it doesn’t look like it.

Right now though, you seem a little desperate and worried.

Your speech at ASU’s pep rally the other day completely hid from the issues. Hell, you shouldn’t even have been there as far as I am concerned.

You have refused to debate Goddard on the issues that matter.

Instead, you rely on sound bites and the infinitesimal attention spans of your audience members to get your point across.

Any further discussion would just pull the wrapper off your Twinkie; you know that insubstantial food source that’s filled with creamy goodness that makes you feel good, that tastes yummy on your tongue, but offers nothing of substance you can count on to get through the day. It’s nothing but a quick high; a fleeting moment of ecstasy followed by the impending sugar rush that culminates in a full body crash that leaves you worse off than when you started. Sounds almost like crack and we all know how much that does? Highly addictive, gives you an immense feeling of power, then sends your life straight down the toilet.

Just like your speeches, your time in office, and what you are doing to the State of Arizona.

I like that:

Jan Brewer and the Twinkie Brigade. Better than crack cocaine!

Go ahead, feel free to use it, it fits!

So please, quit emailing me your bullshit. Hell, I am a registered Democrat thanks to my moving into the county when Bush was in office, yet somehow I made it on both yours and Bill Montgomery’s spam lists. Apparently your campaign department does as much research into receptive and likely constituents they should be emailing as you do on the reality of the stuff that spews forth from your lips.

I should be somewhere on the “unfriendly” list.

While your at… block my website from the Maricopa County offices, your employees are spending way too much time here. Nah, scratch that… maybe they will learn something!

So go ahead, take your Twinkie Brigade spam and bark up someone else’s tree. You might see these leaves shaking, but it is only because I am hoping that something in the form of HOPE might fall forth and I will wake up to find you have been deported.

A guy can dream. Another guy said he had a dream once, but you might not be aware of him. Apparently YOUR Arizona still doesn’t believe in that, but mine does and always will.

And next time I see you barking up this tree…well, I will just raise my leg in salute and have a nice long whiz.

Comments welcome, until you freaks get out of hand again!

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