For the Love of Moose

One of my favorite tropes in stories – and it’s weird that it’s my favorite, because it doesn’t happen that often – is when bullies realize they suck and join up with the good guys, or at least acknowledge that the good guys are good guys. Like I said, you don’t see it often, but it crops up in some more intelligent fiction. Freaks & Geeks. The end of the Harry Potter books, where Dudley Dursley realizes he’s been an asshole for no reason and thanks Harry for saving his life. Rushmore, which is probably why it’s my favorite Wes Anderson movie.

And then there’s Moose. Marmaduke “Moose” Mason, the big dumb lunkhead of the Archie comics, whose inner rage isn’t all that inner and whose IQ can be measured in double digits. Massive, with a military-grade blonde crewcut, and always ready to beat on anyone who looks twice at his girlfriend Midge. He’s been around since the late 1940s, and his size and his anger have been fairly constant sources of intimidation.

Well, until sort of recently.

Dig a little deeper into Moose Mason, and you find a flawed, almost tragic figure who’s just trying to make life make sense. In one issue of Archie, we find out that Moose is dyslexic, which is why he always seemed so dumb. Later, he becomes fiercely protective of class nerd Dilton Doiley. Gradually, the Riverdale gang grew to accept him as one of their own, and he accepted them. It sounds all touchy-feely, and maybe it is. I just like it when bad guys become good guys.

Anyway, I got into Archie comics doing research for a book about Stephen King. He wrote an essay on Archie once and I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Some way, some how, Archie became a focal point of my comic-loving life. I love it all: the goofy-funny main title (which I apparently livetweet, to the delight of my tens of readers!), the more serious and fascinating alternate future timelines book, Life With Archie. Zombie comic Afterlife With Archie. Betty & Veronica. I read it all. And while all the stories are good fun, it’s the Moose stories that always resonated most with me, especially in Life With Archie. In one storyline, future Moose becomes the janitor of Riverdale High; in another, he becomes Mayor. Such is fate.

There are plenty of iconic images I could have gotten tattooed to my body to showcase my love of Archie comics. There’s the famous Veronica/Archie/Betty sharing an ice cream soda picture. Anything with Jughead eating a hamburger. Even a harried-looking Mr. Weatherbee, perhaps wondering what that crazy Archie Andrews was up to this time.

But for me, it had to be Moose. Not only because of the bully-turned-buddy backstory, but also for more prurient reasons. Moose is a big dude. A big dude with a crewcut and a tiny little hat that bends up. Why is that hat so hot? Because sweet goddamn is that hat hot.

I brought my Moose concept to John as the sun went down, wanting Moose alone in a big spotlighted circle. I’m good with inked circles. “Blue inside,” I said, and John suggested we match the gradated blue on my Drive-By Truckers tattoo. Capital idea! “I’ll give him a little halo effect,” John said, because John reads my mind and gets what I need.

I knew it wouldn’t take long, but even I was astonished at how quick it was and how little it hurt. My comics-and-cartoons arm – previously only the domain of the Daredevil symbol and my big Baloo the Bear – now gets the anchor. When you have three in a theme, you can’t really go back. Robin Hood? Soon. Swamp Thing? Not yet.

Sometimes my tattoos have Meaning and Importance, something that resonates with my path in life or my relationship with my father or something equally profound. And sometimes I just get tattoos because I dig the idea, and they represent one of my many, many jams. This time, I got a little Moose in a little hat, I’m super happy with how it turned out, and everything’s Archie.

Spiraling Into Panic!

BOOM!

We are in the exciting final hours for my new Kickstarter project, PANIC TOWN: A Crime Novel by Kevin Quigley. Quite a lot of people have donated to the project, which has never been less than hugely gratifying. More, I know a lot of people are donating because they have found something they like in my writing, not just because they think I'm some sort of swell guy. (Although I am a pretty swell guy!)

If you backed my book last year, hopefully you are reading and enjoying ROLLER DISCO SATURDAY NIGHT now. I have begun sending out query letters for the book in the hopes of it getting published and in actual bookstores. I hope to continue the process next year, when PANIC TOWN has been written and edited for publication.

This whole deal is pretty thrilling for me. These donations are something of a book advance for me, something established writers get as a way to keep them going until they publish and get royalties. Your help is keeping me going until these books make it into stores and I head to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List!

If you haven't checked out my project for PANIC TOWN, there's still time! We have a few hours left to go and there are still some rewards - both electronic and physical - left to claim! Thanks again for helping to make this book a success!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/521727074/panic-town-a-crime-novel-by-kevin-quigley/

Let’s Panic

I have rarely felt more excited or gratified as I am at this moment. As of midnight last night, my Kickstarter project for my novel Panic Town was fully funded.

If you’ve been following me, you know I’ve had a bit of a crappy year. For awhile, I thought it was just in comparison to the prior two years, which were some of the best of my life. It took abruptly losing a job on top of all that other stuff to make me realize, no, Kev, you’re having an objectively bad year.

Now, look. I know I’m not playing Job here. There aren’t locusts. I know me dropping my phone and having the glass shatter isn’t going to make Rwandan refugees feel my plight. Bob Costas had an eye infection and he went on national TV. It’s not like most sketch groups don’t fall apart. People lose jobs. People get bronchitis. Sometimes peoples’ favorite actors die, and you just keep living your life and trying to make it a good one.

But all of that is kind of beside the point. Or it should be. See, I didn’t want people to donate to my Kickstarter because they felt bad for me. There was a situation, and while it wasn’t dire, it sucked … but that’s not the reason I created this. I do Kickstarters when I have a vision for a book I want to create. When I have a clear concept and a passion to see that concept through to completion, that’s when I do these things.

Wayne Corbin, my private eye, has starred in four novels so far. I wrote the first one in 1999, when I first met my husband and I was still living in a studio apartment in deep suburbia. I was still new to writing novels, and I had never written a crime or a mystery novel before. That one was called The Eighth Acre and it was an okay start. Pretty good. Some of the characters went on to feature in other books, non-mystery novels that still figure into the Wayne Corbin universe because most of my books connect. Not in obnoxious ways (except for that long sequence in Maybe You’re Right when the entire cast of Find the River shows up and it took forever to sort things out), but they’re all part of one shared universe. Even the horror novels.

I wrote the second Wayne Corbin book, The Color of Blood and Rust, a year later, in 2000. It remains the shortest of my books (except my first one, Spare Parts, which is like a novella with a few extra pages), but it was leagues better than The Eighth Acre. Blood and Rust is where I really figured out what made Wayne Corbin tick. More importantly, it’s where I figured out that the obnoxious brat from the first book, Wayne’s girlfriend’s daughter, was actually way more interesting than I’d first thought. Tamatha, who I’d created specifically to be a foil for Wayne’s relationship with his girlfriend, became the second most important character in the series.

The third book, Roses in the Rain, was the biggest so far, and the most fun to write. I just dove in. I explored character motivations. I looked deeper into Wayne’s friendships. And I think I actually wrote a pretty compelling mystery, for once. I also got to take some jabs at superfans who hate the thing they say they love.

Then came The Taste of Concrete On Your Tongue, the hardest book I ever had to write. People that had been reading the series all along hated me for what I did in that book. It was the best written, and it utilized a storytelling device I’ve always liked but use sparingly because it can be indulgent: when the plot gets too much, the main character just leaves it. Goes somewhere else and has adventures there for awhile before coming back home. I love writing that stuff. I loved it so much that I used again it in Maybe You’re Right.

But those final things take a lot to come back from. Wayne’s entire paradigm changed. The status quo of the first four books is different now. And for the last five years, I’ve been trying to figure out what that means to Wayne. How he’s different. How his friendships and relationships are different. How things are the same. I always had ideas, but without any clear direction for how to utilize them.

You know what unstuck me? Remember a comic book graphic novel called The Archer’s Quest, a Green Arrow story by Brad Meltzer and Phil Hester. See, Green Arrow had gotten resurrected and was alive again after dying or some such nonsense. And basically, he wasn’t really feeling alive. Like Buffy in Season 6, he was alive but not really living. What helped Green Arrow was a quest, a road trip of sorts that Green Lantern went on with him. (What helped Buffy was some rough sex and a realization that she had a lot of self-hate issues, but that’s not where I was going with Wayne).

So: a quest. An adventure. A caper. Wayne hasn’t had a caper before. And if he’s still dealing with everything that happened in Concrete, he’s going to need something sort of fun to shake him out of it.

Well, I can write fun. I can write fun well. Well, as fun as fun can be when it starts with a decades-old murder and maybe more bodies in the future. I don’t know.

But that’s just it. I don’t know. But for the first time in forever, I have a way in. I know how to start.

Last year, my Kickstarter for Roller Disco Saturday Night was very successful. A big part of that is my cult of personality. I like things a lot, and a good number of people enjoy knowing someone who bases his life on liking stuff. As my friend Duncan recently said, I have a lot of jams. Plus, I try to be good to people. I like people to be happy and successful. I put people on stage. I review people’s work and give them better exposure. I post links to their sex toy party business. I want people to succeed. And people respond to that, too. I’m not sad about that. If people want to donate to my projects because of good stuff I’ve done, that’s fine. More than.

But that’s not what it felt like this year. With some exceptions, the donations this year didn’t feel like, “We like you, take our money” or, “sorry you lost your job, here’s some money.” It felt more like, “Hey, that book sounds cool. I want to back that.” For awhile, I was worried that Panic Town wouldn’t succeed as a project. But then folks started coming out of the woodwork to tell me that they liked my writing. They had more confidence in my ability to spin a yarn than I did. And that, my friends, is even more gratifying than fully funding this project. More gratifying by half.

There are still about 50 hours left for Panic Town. I am fully funded, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still donate if you want to. There are still plenty of prizes, including signed trade paperbacks – actual books! – I can then mail to you. So, if you haven’t donated yet and you want to, I will be pleased as punch. If you didn’t, hey, that’s okay, too. Maybe you’ll buy the book when it eventually comes out.

For all those who have donated: thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I quite honestly could not be writing this book without you.

Click here to donate to PANIC TOWN: A crime novel by Kevin Quigley

About to Panic

This year has been ... kind of a challenge.

Now look. 2012 and 2013 were two of the best years of my life. Maybe the best years. I had a great sketch group I’d brought to the New York City Sketch Fest. I was writing constantly and getting paid for a lot of it. I ran a comedy show every week at a bar near my house. I had a great job that sometimes sent me to warm places in cold months and paid for me to stay in five-star hotels. I was living The Dream … or at least a version of The Dream that happens before the Real Dream of being a bestselling novelist takes hold. But things were good. Things were great!

Things were shaky. And I didn’t even know it.

On New Year’s Eve, my husband Shawn and I toasted 2014 as another fantastic year. Why wouldn’t it be? Everything was laid out for some major plans, and I was at the head of the change. Never stopping. Always going. Drive. Will. Adrenaline.

Then the bar I did my weekly show at burned down. Not entirely. But burning happened, and when the sprinklers came on, water damage destroyed the place. Now, the owner of the place absolutely had it worse. She’s a sweet woman who didn’t deserve to have something that horrible happen. The fact was, though, that I was out a night of comedy, and because one of my credos was to always pay people who performed, the Boston comedy scene was out a paying venue to peddle their entertainment. I never paid a lot, but I paid what I could. Doing right by people is one of those karmic things.

Then the sketch team imploded. I won’t go into the whys and wherefores, but some stuff went down that made me realize the current trajectory was untenable. I still think dissolving Duct Tape Revolution was the best move for what happened, but it hurt. It hurt like hell to do that, and that plunged me into one of those clinical depressions I have every few years.

Was that before or after the eye infection? It was definitely before I had to have gum surgery, but after the bronchitis I had for a few weeks. Oh, it just keeps piling on.

Then, last week, one of my four jobs abruptly and shockingly let me go. Now, I knew the terms. It was a temp job. More weirdness: it was a temp job at the place I used to work at that laid me off in 2009. It was strange being there, but I liked the people I worked with, and the pay was great. It ate up a lot of my time (especially given that I was also working my normal full-time job on top of that), but I needed the money. And it was good money. The plan was to have me there until either May or June, and then I’d transition out once they hired someone real.

Only it turned out that I actually wasn’t supposed to be working there that long. Some snafu with payroll meant that I should have sort of stopped working there in January. Maybe February. The problem was, no one told me that, or my supervisors, or anyone in power. They just sort of figured it out Friday an hour before the close of day. And so I was gone. My most lucrative job set me free. Just like that.

When I set out to do a Kickstarter campaign for a novel I’m writing, it’s not for the money, not really. It’s for the freedom of being able to live my writing life without having to worry about getting a fourth or fifth job to support myself. (That is not hyperbole. I am currently working four different jobs, one of which mostly pays enough to live on, the others … not so much.) I love to write. I’ve written my whole life. I’ve been writing novels since 1999, so technically I’ve spanned three decades of novel writing. I’m good at it. More, I finish my work. I’ve turned in the completed books for my last two Kickstarter projects, and they’ve been polished, clean, publishable novels. Now I want to do it again, from scratch.

I love to write, but I need to be able to justify not getting yet another draining, time-sucking job I don’t want so I can keep doing it. That’s where this campaign fits in. My novel Panic Town will be a crime novel in the grand tradition: long-ago murders, missing manuscripts, sexy widows, scheming families, and a worn-down private eye who needs a reason to live again. I can’t wait to start writing it. I’m clearing my desk now and getting my research and outlines in order. I have a lot of work to do, and with your help, I can do it more easily.

I have four days to go, and I need to raise less than $1500 to get there. Thank you for all your help and support. My year looks to be getting better already!

Donate here to get PANIC TOWN off the ground!

Whole Night Out

02-25-14

SHAWN GIVES ME AN IDEA

The crazy ideas happen all at once.

It’s a Saturday, midday in early January. The day’s been cold but not, like, freezing. I’ve somehow coerced Shawn to hang out at Starbucks with me, which is diabolical on my part because he doesn’t really like Starbucks, and at some point, I’m going to need him to take off so I can futz around with my novel for a few hours while swimming in my haze of chai. It’s Saturday, so I’m vaguely thinking ahead to FaceOff, the 10:00 improv show I almost never fail to attend, and maybe – in the distant reaches of my mind – Rocky Horror. My attendance at Rocky wanes in the winter, because the show is downtown and I am not. Walking from there to home takes about three hours, which is fine in the spring or summer or fall but ball-frostingly cold in the winter. Riding a bike is so much easier – only a half hour – but I use Hubway, the shared-bike service in Boston, and while Cambridge still offers Hubway in the winter, Boston proper does not. Neither does Somerville, where I live, which means I have wheels for the middle part of my journey from Rocky to home. It’d be like only watching The Two Towers, only with considerably fewer Ents.

Anyway, back at the Bucks, where Shawn is reading the local scene paper and I’m probably letting my eyes glaze over to an AV Club article about a long-gone TV show in which I barely have interest. “Hey!” he says, jolting me out of my vague captivation with the intricacies of Gilligan’s Island or Get Smart or something. “MIT is doing a sci-fi film festival!”

I blink. “Like a 24 hour thing?”

“No, just overnight. They’re starting with Tremors and ending with … whoa, they’re ending with Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie.” For those who need a refresher course on my love of MST3K, I got a box set for Christmas, another one for Recalcitrant Shopping Day, and picked up a Tom Servo tattoo last year from one Kelly Barr, Wonder Tattoist. “It’s at 4:00 in the morning.”

The cogs start turning in my brain. Is biosteampunk a thing? It should be a thing.

“I want to see that!” I actually said, “I want to go to there,” but 30 Rock is over and I should learn how to deal with it.

“You know,” Shawn says, a glint in his eye, “you could see your FaceOff show, then Rocky, and still make it to MST3K.”

“My thoughts exactly! Oh my God, you should come with me to all those things!”

“The fact that I don’t like improv that much, or Rocky, or staying out late, or MST3K since the 90s isn’t cluing you in to the fact that you’ll be doing this alone?”

“It’ll be fun! Who doesn’t love exhaustion in the name of having a good time?”

“Me! Most people!”

So this was to be a solo venture. But first, Shawn returned home and then came back to that same Starbucks, where I had successfully futzed around with my novel for hours. He had returned with my gloves and hat.

“I don’t need my gloves and hat. It’s super warm out!”

“It’s 37 degrees out. Your sense of warm is relative. Plus, aren’t you going to be walking across the Mass Ave bridge at 2 AM?”

“Um, no. I’ll grab a cab from Loews to MIT. I’m not dumb!” Note my use of subtle foreshadowing.

FIRST, THE COMEDY

But first, domesticity: there was a sale at the local Newbury Comics, where we picked up some CDs despite the fact that I don’t have an optical drive. (I got comedy CDs: the new Maria Bamford and The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart. I like funny things from prior decades.) Then, skiddle-dee-doo, off to Central Square, supped at Mary Chung, whose title by all rights should be in the possessive but isn’t, and I headed out into my Whole Night out packed with starch and duck sauce and joy.

My first of three theaters was ImprovBoston, my secondlife home. I’ve haven’t been to the IB as frequently as I’d like to be lately, for a lot of reasons but mainly because I don’t work there anymore. But I almost always make it a point to see a late show there Saturday night, because it’s good to laugh on a Saturday and because I’m nearly 39 and I like to start my night at 10. This night started with an improvised stand-up show called Tight Five, in which a bunch of comedians have to make up a new set on the fly, given prompts by the hosts. I very much enjoy jam shows like this, in part because it takes the concept of standup shows and makes things seem fresh and fun, and in part because standups are hot and the whole night is sort of one long erotic cabaret.

I fled IB under cover of the night. It was 11:30 PM and I was running a little late. Next stop: CVS, where I picked up my Rocky Horror essentials: a big-ass Red Bull and a 5 Hour Energy Drink. My heart doesn’t like Rocky Horror. Usually this would also be the time where I purchased some Red Vines or Twizzlers or something, but I’ve been off sugar snacks since January 6, so thanks but no thanks, CVS. (I got trail mix and a couple of protein bars.)

RAH RAH RAH

Recently, I passed my 500th viewing of Rocky Horror, because I’m psychotic. There was a whole ceremony. My friends Mark and Kurt came. Shawn brought his Mom. I got to be a part of the virgin ceremony, which was fun, but not nearly as sexy as that last show at the Harvard Square theater where I got to switch clothes with a chubby college guy. Some people call it obsession. I call it honoring the stuff you love. My friend Alonso once asked me if my repeated trips to Disney parks was “chasing the dragon,” always searching for that same elusive high I got the first time I went to Disney World, way back in 2007. I don’t know if it’s quite that. Rocky is a cumulative experience for me by this point. I first realized I was gay when I saw the movie on my bleary TV set with my uncle and his then-girlfriend when I was fifteen, and every time Meat Loaf strides on screen, that revelation hits me anew. Watching it with the first guy I was ever in love with in high school. My whole 20s was going every Saturday night with Tracey. That last Harvard Square show with Vickie. My times at the Chelsea show with Duncan and Marty and Jeff. All those memories come with me, along with my actual affection for the film, and the callbacks I’ve learned and made up. It’s never short of a thrilling time for me, every time.

The show ended at 2 and I headed out into the dark Boston night, where the bars are just closing and there’s a weird amount of traffic around Boston Common. Way too much traffic to get a cab. And besides, it’s not that cold out, I can just walk. I’ve got my audiobook of The Red Badge of Courage (because what warms you up faster than Civil War battlefield depression?), and even though I don’t have my heavy coat, I now have my hat and gloves, and well, oh wow, this walk over the Mass Ave bridge is a little cold, like Jack London “To Build a Fire” cold, and goddammit, my phone picks now to run out of juice, and I’m cold and bookless and there’s still half a mile to go? What accursed wretch made me do this, oh btw it’s me.

By the time I got to MIT, my ass felt like those Christmas-themed Popsicles that are still in the freezer at Easter and now they have an ice rime. The front doors loomed, monolithic and imposing, gateways into regions of knowledge I have only glanced off. My biggest terror at this point is that the doors will for some arcane reason be locked, that the movie is playing in a different building and I can’t get there from here, that they’ve somehow canceled the movie altogether and no one told me and I can’t check because my phone’s dead.

ANALOG MOMENT IN A DIGITAL WORLD

Then I was in the main lobby, and it was empty enough to echo with the sounds of my footfalls. And warm! Oh, it was like lying down in a giant, freshly-made croissant. My 21st century eyes scanned the wall and there, just off MIT’s Infinite Corridor (which runs, seemingly eternally, through the heart of MIT’s main building), was an outlet. With no shame or hesitation, I plopped down on the floor, plugged in my phone, took off my jacket and arranged myself a little picnic: one energy bar, some trail mix, a bottle of water and my 5 hour energy drink. It was nearly three-fifteen by now; my movie wasn’t starting until 4 all the way at the other end of the Infinite Corridor, but I had time for a little picnic. Mere weeks before, Shawn had given me my best Christmas since 1990, and one of my favorite things was a book by Lawrence Block called The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, which he had self-published and released on Christmas day. In the midst of my weird, wild night out, I loved taking that half-hour to just sit and eat and get warm. Sometimes when I write about my big events, I forget to talk about the quiet moments. Those three chapters and vaguely healthy snacks made the night all worth it.

Soon enough, I was on my way, trundling along that Infinite Corridor all by myself. When I got there, Aliens was still playing, and a part of me lamented not having gone to the rest of the SF marathon. That ended, though, when I stretched fully out on a couch and waited for Aliens to be over. As much as I would have enjoyed seeing Sigourney Weaver bitchslap alien ass at 2:00 AM, this was better.

SNARK FOR BREAKFAST (ALSO WAFFLES)

The theater opened on Aliens’ credits, and immediately started in on Pharrell Willaims’ “Happy” video, which they played on endless repeat while we all got situated. Why that song? Why just that song? The young women selling the tickets informed me that they’d be serving breakfast foods before the film; for me, that amounted to a sort-of warm Eggo waffle and some orange juice. Bliss? Somehow yes.

I settled into my super hard seat, and it’s only now that I remember I saw A Late Quartet, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, in this very theater, probably in this very seat. The tragedy was still in the future at that point, though; I only had happy memories here at that point, notably seeing my 498th Rocky Horror during the summer. As for MST3K: The Movie. I was going for the experience, having remembered this particular MST3K not being as good as I wanted it to be. Happily, my memories proved faulty. I’ve been on a long journey with MST3K, from watching alone in my little rooming house to making it the central part of Geek Sleepover with Dave and Tracey and Shawn, to rediscovering it later with my buddy Dennis. I have a Tom Servo tattoo. I let the film wash over me, and laughed at all the jokes I’d forgotten, and really just relaxed as we marched toward six AM, and the close of my Whole Night Out.

…or so I thought!

One of the principal attractions of Whole Night Out was the fact that I could take public transportation at both ends. I could get one of the last trains to Rocky at night and I could catch one of the first buses to home in the morning. But as I stepped out of MIT into the first light of dawn, I checked the bus schedule on my phone and saw, to my dismay, that bus service in Central Square doesn’t start until 6:45 on Sunday. Drat! The walk from the front gate of MIT to Central Square – about half a mile – is nothing on warm days, but somehow, the coming of the sun had not warmed Cambridge, and the dull freeze soaked into my bones at once. As quickly as I could move, I made my way toward central, wondering how quickly frostbite set in, irrationally hoping that the gym would be open at 6:00 on Sunday so I could at least take a shower. No such luck! The only things open were the CVS…

…and the Starbucks, beckoning me inside like a benevolent siren. I collapsed in a chair, warmth prickling into my skin like tiny needles, and eventually grew mobile enough to get a hot chai and some oatmeal. It was six-fifteen AM. The bus wasn’t coming for a half hour. That was plenty of time to get some writing done. Plenty of time indeed.

So in that last half hour out, as exhaustion gripped me and the cold worked its way out of my hollow places, I opened up my laptop and got to work.

Kev

In and Out

2-20-14

“So, the conference is in Boston?”

“Yes.”

“And I live in Boston.”

“Obviously.”

“I just want to verify once again that you want to put me up in a five-star hotel three miles away from my house, and pay for my meals and transportation so I can attend a conference in the building in which my actual office is.”

“Indeed!”

“I’m not going to ask twice!”

Guys, I asked twice. Maybe three times. I mean, last year, my company set me up at the Taj, which used to be the Ritz, which is an even fancier hotel than the Westin I stayed at this weekend, but I was sick the whole time and it didn’t count. I mean, I love staying in hotels. Nice hotels. Fancy hotels with soaps in the shape of leafs (which, b t dubs, do not turn me into a tanooki when I unwrap them; whatevs, Westin). Quite a lot of my life has been desperately wanting to have the means in which to live as a fancy gentleman, which is obviously why I chose to pursue writing hard-to-classify novels as a passion. Now, thanks to the soulless faceless one percenters, I get to pretend I’m rich and get my Starbucks paid for without climbing the corporate ladder all that high. Thanks, America!

How’s the depression, no one asked? You know, it’s depression. Wanna hear something weird? When I was at the Drive-By Truckers show, I was having a blast, an absolute blast, but I found myself not connecting as fully or as deeply as I usually do. My whole self wasn’t given over. And it wasn’t the band or the people I was with. The part of me that feels everything awesome all the time seems to be … not in hibernation, but in intermittent hiding. Looking back at the show, I keep remembering a time or five when things finally hit me. I was here. This was real. I was happy. And I screamed or shouted or cried or danced, and lived my full self in those moments. Then it flipped away. This happens sometimes in my every day life, but when it happens during big moments or important times (like when it happens at Disney World), it’s the most frustrating. I want to be in it, and I can’t, and it’s like wanting to run with two broken ankles.

But it’s getting better, always better. With my work conference so close to my home, I’ve been able to have my cake and eat it too, except that I haven’t had any cake since January 6th and I might have to murder someone for a fucking slice of Duncan Hines (seriously; there were trail mix bars at the meetings and, oh yeah, piles of candy I can’t even, and I wouldn’t allow myself the ones with chocolate in them. I AM GOING TO PUNCH A BABY KITTEN.) Shawn came over on Tuesday and we had snuggle times, then I went out to karaoke last night and killed “Solsbury Hill” and “Sex On Fire.” (PS the night might have had its own triggers, but what the fuck, I’m going to acknowledge my brain weirdness, but I don’t have to be a slave to all of it). Back to the gym today and launched into some article writing, with a few hours set aside for the novel later tonight.

I think a part of me firmly believes that my depression will just evaporate if I have some goddamned cookies, but I’ve come this far, and if a part of this is withdrawal, then I’m going to shake until it’s over. I’ve got a Month of No Starbucks coming up in March and if I’m going to survive, I need to make a stand somewhere. I’m tempted to laugh at myself regarding my stupid addictions, but even though it’s not, like, meth, this still feels real.

Wow, this was supposed to have a whole theme and through-line and it so does not. Next time. Now I’ve got other stories to write.

The Shape I’m In

There was a chunk of years – 1999 through 2006, roughly – when I was given to daily, public introspection. Everything I did, thought, said, or experienced was fascinating to me. I kept a daily journal and I treated it like storytelling. I wove tales about me and my friends, sometimes gave over to hyperbole and embellishment, and made sure my life was given a structure. That’s what nonfiction is, especially when it’s memoir: a way to give the messiness of life a through-line. I put my life online, first under an alias and then out loud and public. And then I stopped.

It wasn’t a conscious decision to stop. I just got too busy with my actual life to document it. One of the things people used to say to me is that my life was “so fascinating; I don’t have that interesting a life, so I don’t journal.” My response was always, “Well, no. I don’t have that interesting a life either. I just make it look like I do.” Neat nouns and vivid verbs, that’s what I was taught in high school, and always make sure your conversations read well.

But as I’ve indicated, my life didn’t stop when I stopped writing about it. What kind of sucks is that the last two years were among the best of my life. 2012 and 2013 were an explosion of fecundity for me. My writing, my comedy, my Disney life, my friends, my obsessions, even my boring day job – everything got better. And it just kept getting better. Never once did I feel like it could get worse, because I kind of don’t believe in that. I believe we have peaks and we have valleys, but it’s all a part of some grand tapestry that makes up who we are. Besides, my dreams came bundled with an abundance of drive and ambition: I wasn’t just whiling my day away, wanting things to get awesome and not doing a thing about it. I was out there every day, busting my ass making sure I made manifest the things I wanted in life. I wrote novels and nonfiction books. I took my sketch comedy team to New York City. I became a stand-up performer. I became a host and producer of a comedy night in a bar. Everything was great and everything was perfect until it wasn’t.

You don’t see harbingers until later, I think. The bar I hosted a show in had a fire, then water damage, and then the owner had a stroke. That night was put on hiatus; only later, online, did I find out the bar would be closing permanently. Then …

Okay, making this a list sucks. It’s not a list. It’s my life. My sketch team imploded. Duct Tape Revolution ended. Not organically. Not well. And I did it. I stopped it. I broke up the band, for reasons I don’t want to dive into, but they seemed like good reasons at the time. Most days, they still seem like good reasons. Do I regret it? Every day. Would I change what I did? I don’t think so. Am I sad? Yes. I’m sad.

Breaking up the group happened as a major confluence of negative events tornadoed into my life. Philip Seymour Hoffman died. He died. He overdosed on heroin and he died. He won’t make any more movies. I had to give up my hope of someday meeting him in person and shaking his hand. For so long, he was my favorite actor, and always remained in the top 2. I had a crush on him and he died. Looking in from the outside, it’s almost ridiculous of being this thrown and tormented by the death of an actor I never met, but it fucked me up.

Then I got sick. It wasn’t the worst sickness, just a bad cold, but it drained me and I had to give up my routine. No gym. No Rocky Horror. No karaoke. No work one day. Around this time, I found out that one of my jobs would be dropping me in a couple of months – a thing I’d known logically for awhile, but hadn’t yet accepted emotionally – and that I was going to have to get one of my teeth yanked, probably. Am I having the worst tragedies in the history of the world? No. I’m still writing, I have a new comedy night at a new bar, and me and my sweetie, Shawn, just passed our fifteenth anniversary. I have my Disney friends and I travel the country seeing Drive-By Truckers and I’m on a new diet and exercise routine that seems to be working. I’m fine. I’m fine.

Except: goddammit, I’m used to better than fine. I’m used to awesome. I love awesome. My three-week deep depression seems to have lifted, but I’m still not over stuff. And I know that it’s going to take awhile to get over stuff. To live through the bullshit of a normal life. I can do it. I’ve done it all my life. My life has been a series of getting through a lot of bullshit so I can do great things that matter. Eventually, the residual sadness will also depart, and I’ll be great again. That will happen. It’s just not happening yet, and that makes me sad, too. Knowing that you’re ready to be back on top and you can’t quite get there yet is its own special version of hell.

So yeah. That’s the shape I’m in. Better days ahead, right?

Like a Grand and Miraculous Spaceship

1
This could be an in-depth look at tattooing, about what it means to me and how it feels and how the agony folds into ecstasy and then back again. I could talk about how sexy Kelly the Wonder Tattoist is, or how talented, or how his shading techniques are pretty damn near legendary around these parts. I could tell you about the planning stages, which took much longer than normal, or the actual sitting, which took close to two hours.

Don't mess with Texas.

I could also tell you all about how my tattoo was so complex and so detailed that it is the first to require a second session, meaning that the brand new ink I’m carrying around right now is technically unfinished. Just when that second session is happening is a matter of a little debate, but it’s going to be sooner rather than later. After all, this thing has to be healed before late September.

But I’ve told you all that before: the euphoria, the pain, the process. It’s all been done. So instead, let’s just look at some kick-ass pictures taken with Mark's kick-ass camera at a work in progress that, I have every confidence, will turn out to be the best ink I’ve ever gotten.

Since the dawn of recorded time…

Kelly told me that geometry wasn't his strong suit. I begged to differ. Like, begged.

Two. Hours. My foot fell asleep twice.

Just the stenciling took over an hour. Weirdly, the stenciling didn't hurt as much as I'd feared, making me remember that the werewolf on the other leg didn't quite hurt as much either.

Then came the shading.

Kelly explained that he didn't much care for Disney. I gleaned that when he stated, "I hate Disney with such a passion I can taste it." He further explained it's because they treat their animators like crap, a notion I tried to dispel by explaining all about the shift in management. No one was listening to me. Mostly because I was explaining this through grunts and gasps and mewlings for help.

As the work stands now, it almost looks finished. Sort of like Epcot meets the Death Star. But it's damn impressive already - almost giddily impressive, especially since Kelly was unsure whether he could do it. When it's done ... you guys, this thing is going to be amazing. I honestly think this is going to eclipse my werewolf as the most technically amazing ink I have. And it might also be my favorite.

I'm going to stand under Spaceship Earth in September and I'm going to look up at it, feeling dwarfed by it as always, but also feeling at one with it. This is the first step in a grand journey, a way station toward owning a piece of magic I could only touch fleetingly before.

...And as our appetite for information and knowledge grew, the world began to shrink.

I think it fits well.

2

And here we come to it:

This is the finished product, kids. We wanted to leave a crescent-shaped wedge of the design open. With the lines and the shading branching out and the “sunset” shading on the right, Spaceship Earth looks more spherical and less like a disc. This, initially, is what I wanted the design to look like, but in Phase One, Kelly left a little too much open, so that it looked unfinished. Filling it in entirely would be a mistake, I think, because skin isn’t paper and making it look like the sphere it is would have been impossible. This is the first time I really asked for the impossible from Kelly; I think he did pretty damn good.

Looking at it close-up in the picture, I’m even more impressed. Kelly did almost all of this freehand, which stuns me. I love how the branches edge out from the facets to the left, and the gray shading gives the impression of depth. An unexpected plus: this really didn’t hurt. Almost at all. Apparently, this part of my leg is really okay with tiny, tiny needles prodding it into submission. Not only that, but Phase One healed remarkably easily, with little itching and almost no scabbing.

You guys, I am really pleased at how this turned out, and I can’t wait to see how it looks up against the real Spaceship Earth next month. I also can’t wait for my next ink, which may or may not happen before the end of the year. I’m getting two at once – I refuse to have thirteen on my skin – but what exactly they are and where exactly they’re going to go … well, you’ll just have to stay tuned.

Epcotattoo! Woo hoo!

3

When Kelly the Wonder Tattooist moved down to Dallas, I was a bit bereft. He’d done all my best pieces, from my Springsteen sneakers to my Steampunk Dr Pepper, and he’d even come back to town to do my Seger Eagle, still one of the actual badass tattoos I have. (My body is sort of a tapestry of cute and fun tattoos like Baloo and Tom Servo, and cool tattoos, like my werewolf and my aforementioned Steampunk Dr Pepper.) He’d recommended me to John, also at Chameleon, to do my ink back in Boston. John proved he cold do good work with my Cooley Bird – the Drive-By Truckers band symbol – and he proved he could do great work with my Hardy/Arbuckle comedy & tragedy concept.

When I came to him with the idea to expand my original Spaceship Earth tattoo, he took to it with aplomb. I loved Kelly’s original work – my favorite building in the world, standing monolithic midway down my leg – but as my body was getting more and more crowded with art, I was starting to realize I wanted some actual scenes. Nearly all of my work so far has been iconic, symbols of things I love summed up in a simple image. With Spaceship Earth, I had long thought that I wanted to add a monorail to it, and build it out as a thing actually of Epcot, of Disney World. Plus, I wanted to somehow capture the kinetic feel of the place, and maybe a sense of the rich history of it. I sent my ideas to John and he was down.

Oh, and here’s something that’s never happened. Every time I’ve gone to a tattoo artist – from my first few people to Kelly to everything with John previously, they’ve drawn up my concepts on paper and then applied them to my skin. That’s how it’s done. Except when I went in for my consult? John drew freehand on my leg. He literally brought out some markers and just drew on my leg. I watched, agape. And then he started injecting ink into my flesh with a million little needles and I didn’t watch for awhile.

My tolerance for tattoo pain hits its peak around two and a half hours; it’s then when I stop riding the rollercoaster of euphoria and agony and start just wishing it was over. We pushed my first session – outlining, some shading – to three hours, by which time I was wondering if the sweet release of death might be achievable with the implements around me. John released me, but not before scheduling my coloring appointment for after my next Disney trip. Meaning, if I was to assign sentience to a theme park, which I would never do because creepy, Epcot itself would only see the work three-quarters done when I was there. Would Epcot be pleased? And would I maybe read too much into the fact that the first day I was there with my tattoo and my friend Jeff, the ride inexplicably broke down and I had to be evacuated from it?

So many questions. Now, onward!

4

I never lived Epcot history. I have to revel at it from a remove of time, like those guys who do Civil War reenactments, or people obsessed with the Titanic. You all have my buddy Joe to thank for that. On my third trip to WDW, when I was starting to wrap my mind around the scope of Disney history, Joe showed me a video of the old Horizons ride, and I was hooked. The whole idea of classic Epcot had a massive appeal, in the same way that steampunk would – it’s retro-futurism, the history of the future as imagined in the past.

A lot of Epcot looks like it did in 1982, when it debuted, but there are changes, both major and subtle. To me, the most significant change is in the forecourt in front of Spaceship Earth. Right now, they have these granite slabs featuring faces of people who bought the right to be a part of Epcot back in the 1990s. I get the concept of them – they’re supposed to be a little stark and desolate, trying for beauty in simplicity – but back the 80s, the whole court was lined with palm trees and water and it was warmer and, in my opinion, more welcoming. That’s what I wanted for the ink. As much as I love current Epcot, I am in deep with vintage Epcot; well, EPCOT Center. I wanted palm trees.

I laid down. Shawn poised, ready to take pictures and Vines. John played “Thunder Road.” And got to work.

Another two hours later, I stood up and observed what had happened. I was blown away. Every step on this road to my Epcot ink has been exciting, each new session another building block toward something bigger. John created cartoonish “bubbles” on the top and the side, in case I wanted to continue the scene around my leg. Even before it healed, I knew I did want that: I wanted Space Mountain next, continuing around the side of my leg and connected by the monorail. And maybe, sometime later, the Tower of Terror – even though in real life, the monorail goes nowhere near there.

Walt Disney once said that Disneyland (and, by extension, Disney World) would never be finished. Not to be too grandiose about it, but I like to think that in some small way, I can apply that philosophy to my right leg. It’s a future we’ll take – and make – together.

Dream Baby Dream

Let’s keep this light. Sorta.

So, 2005 sucked. Yes, the whole year. There was a seismic shift in my friendships. A combination of a stupid argument and my stubbornness resulted in nearly all of my friends dropping out of my life, one by one. I hermited. I retreated. I listened to American Idiot and Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut and hated everyone and everything, including myself.

See, light?

Shawn was there for me as much as he could be, but when I tell you things got sad, I mean, man, they got sad. I mentioned the obsession with American Idiot. Therapy ended up helping. Writing helped, too – I did my first NaNoWriMo novel in 2005; it was called Welcome to Bloomsbury and it wasn’t bad. But, as usual, my beloved pop culture was what really saved me. In 2005, John Irving published a book called Until I Find You, and Bruce Springsteen put out an album called Devils & Dust.

I fell into both with fervor. Devils & Dust turned out to not be Springsteen’s best album, but it was absolutely the one I needed at the time. The title song went a long way toward waking me up: I got God on my side / and I’m just trying to survive / what if what you do to survive kills the things you love / fear’s a powerful thing. Yep. Yep.

Irving’s newest book was, among the usual tropes of wrestling and Vienna and sexually interesting older women, about tattooing. I’d gotten three tattoos by that point: my bear claw, my The Stand silhouette, my Daredevil DD icon. But it had been awhile and I hadn’t really considered getting more. But falling into the exotic tattoo shops in the book, living with the inkers and the inkees, sleeping in the needles … all of it thrilled me. What thrilled me more was that, during the research of the book, John Irving had gotten a tattoo of his own, on the inside of his arm. His was a circular symbol representing a wrestling room, and while the symbol meant nothing, I loved the shape and the placement. I knew then I wanted a new tattoo and I wanted it to mean something. It didn’t take me long to realize I wanted something Springsteen-related, and after some research, I found what I wanted: a circle with an image of the Chuck Taylor sneakers hanging from the Boss’ guitar on the Born to Run press materials. Boom, perfect.

After a series of misfortunes involving a short-lived shop called Mongo’s Tattoo Madness, I ended up at Chameleon, where I met Kelly Barr, the eventual beefy and resplendent Wonder Tattooist. He slapped that thing on me good and proper, kickstarting my recent obsession with body art and helping to lift my depression, just a bit.

See, it all fit, these things that were working to cheer me. Inspired by Irving, shaped by Springsteen, injected by Barr. I had my tattoo when I went to my next Springsteen concert, the acoustic one for the Devils & Dust tour. He played all the instruments himself, went through his entire catalogue, radically changed some stuff, brought to life some stuff that suffered under overproduction, and let his solo stuff out to shine. Interestingly, his closing number each night was not his own song; it was a proto-punk chant-song by the band Suicide called “Dream Baby Dream.” At the end of each show, Springsteen would sit down at the pedal-powered organ to the left of the stage and launch into the extraordinarily simple song, which consisted of a few simple lines repeated over and over:

“Dream baby dream / dream baby dream / come on now and dream baby dream / open up your eyes / come on and open up your eyes / keep the fire burning / come on and dream baby dream / open up your arms / come on and open up your arms / I wanna see you smile / I just wanna see you smile / come on and dream baby dream / dry your eyes / come on and dry your eyes / you gotta keep on dreaming / come on and dream baby dream / I wanna see you smile / I just wanna see you smile / I wanna see you smile / I just wanna see you smile.”

I spent a lot of 2005 unhappy, and something about this – maybe it was the simplicity of it, the intimacy of the concert with one of my heroes, the mantra-like nature – sunk in. “I wanna see you smile, I just wanna see you smile,” and oh God, did I need to hear that. I stole the line and put it in my next book, but I could never approximate what it meant to me. I could never underscore how vital those words were.

So I kept myself alive, got back to happy, and kept on dreaming. Flash forward to now. Over the past few of weeks, I directed two sold out comedy shows, directed my team in ensemble show that also sold, booked us for a gig in another city, launched the production for my big September show, submitted to the New York Sketch Festival, and took a class in directing. My editor told me he loved I’m On Fire. One of my nonfiction books is coming out next month, as is a book featuring one of my short stories – my first print fiction ever published. I got paid for another nonfiction book. I finished my first novel since 2009, placed a labor-of-love article at FEARnet, and got mentioned by name on Ain’t It Cool News. August has been good to me. I wanted to honor that.

The cover illustration of Until I Find You is a broken heart with the title of the novel written in script across a floating ribbon. I asked Shawn if I could get a variation of it, “but with an unbroken heart.”

“Where?”

“On my chest,” I said. “Near my heart.” He’s been consistently against chest tattoos.

He contemplated. “The heart will be unbroken?”

“Absolutely. This is a celebration, not a lament.”

“All right then, you can get it.”

I got to Chameleon early. A lot has changed since the first time I went there. Kelly moved back to Texas and now John Meredith is my at-home inkslinger. John always plays me at least some Springsteen when I get inked, as opposed to the psychobilly Kelly favored. I became a comedy producer and director and writer and sometime actor. I went from four tattoos to twenty-two. I’m not sad anymore. That’s the big thing: I was so sad for so long, and I’m not sad anymore. I’ve worked hard. I’ve thrown myself into my accomplishments. And I’ve kept on dreaming. It took years of ambition, drive, and caffeine, but my dreams are finally coming true.

Ender Wiggin Will Save Us All

I am having some complicated feelings.

When some of my gay friends decided to keep eating Chik-Fil-A, I was outraged. "But it's so good," they said, and I rolled my eyes. They are giving money to a corporation who actively supports anti-gay hate groups. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just chicken.

Now here comes the Ender’s Game movie. I won’t deny it: I went through an Orson Scott Card phase so intense that it rivaled my love of Stephen King for a few years. Ender’s Game was the start of all that. The first four books of the Ender series shifted my way of thinking about what heroism means, and how people are sometimes at the mercy of their compulsions, and how it was important to tolerate the parts of other cultures that seem weird to me. Yeah: Speaker for the Dead, the second book in the series, is specifically about being tolerant and accepting of other societies you don’t understand.

I read a lot of it. Lost Boys, Card’s only real horror novel at the time, gave me a glimpse into the world of Mormonism, and his depictions made it seem interesting and supportive (a view which grew when I read Ken Jennings’ Brainiac years later). I read Lovelock, the intermittently fantastic Homecoming saga, and the balls-out mindblowing Alvin Maker books. I read criticism about him. I formed opinions of his work. I loved him.

Then I read something in an obscure magazine that talked about his time in the theater. He said (and I’m paraphrasing), “I’m fine if my theater friends want to be gay. I don’t hate them, I just hate that they do that. Being gay and acting on it are different things.”

I was outraged. At the time, I was probably twenty. I went to Pride every year, and I told my friends who didn’t that they were betraying the community. Ellen had recently come out on TV. I’d been out since I was sixteen and I was still fired up about it. The early 1990s were a historically significant time to be gay. Things were shifting, and I was disappointed that one of my favorite writers wasn’t shifting with them. Of course, the accusation of homophobia had been labeled against my favorite human in the world, Stephen King, but there had been enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that King didn’t hate gay people at all. This was solidified when he moved the production of The Stand miniseries out of Colorado when they banned gay marriage; his daughter coming out likely had something to do with it.

Back on Card: from that point on, I was determined that I had to separate the art from the artist. I bought his books used. I had people dub me his audiobooks. Then came a book called Legends, which was comprised of novellas set in the worlds created by famous fantasy writers. There was a Pern story by Anne McCaffrey, a George R. R. Martin Game of Thrones story, a Stephen King Dark Tower story (which is why I bought it), and an Alvin Maker story, by Card. I read it … and was profoundly sad.

I could separate art from artist, but apparently Card couldn’t. In the middle of this fun story about Paul Bunyan, Alvin Maker literally makes a speech about why male/male sexuality is wrong. A speech. It’s out of context with the story and the character, and clearly feels like the author stopping the fiction to espouse his rhetoric. Shawn, my guy, later read further than I did in the Ender series, and told me the speeches didn’t stop there. He actually got so disgusted by one of them that he stopped reading Card, forever.

And so did I. I’ve tried to separate art from artist. I know there’s a more direct sequel to Ender’s Game out there, and as badly as I want to read it, I don’t want to suddenly find out that Ender Wiggin, who was a hero to me in my twenties, is behaving erratically because his author is fucking with him. Making things worse is that Card became something of a poster child for anti-gay marriage, speaking out about it publicly and vehemently. And when DOMA got shut down, he was a super sore loser about it.

There’s a lot of stuff at play here. I find that I’m able, in general, to continue to love a singular work of art, no matter what happens later. Sequels, prequels, adaptations, shifting perceptions, an author’s later output – none of it matters to me if I like the original work. You don’t retroactively hate Pulp Fiction because Death Proof wasn’t A+ work. No matter what happens in Doctor Sleep, I’m still going to think The Shining is one of the best books ever written.

But this is different. Right? Or, better: it has the potential to be different. Because it’s not just crappy work that hinges itself to better work. It’s the author discovering a political/sexual agenda, and then forcing his characters to support and voice that agenda. His nonfiction has mixed into the fiction, and that’s the problem I have. And when he goes back to writes stuff in the world of the fiction I love with this new agenda, that’s an even bigger problem. An awful movie adaptation can’t ruin the book on which it’s based. It can color your perceptions, but it can’t ruin the work. What Card started doing can ruin the work. And that sucks, because it’s still amazing work.

So. The movie. The movie I wanted to see more than anything else in my bleak year of 1994, when I was hungry a lot and lived in a rooming house where junkies and the elderly died. The Ender’s Game books buoyed me up during that time and made me happy at a time I desperately needed happiness. And I wanted to see that spectacle on the big screen. So bad.

The film’s distributors, Lionsgate, are doing everything to distance Card from the movie. They released a statement saying that they do not share Card’s views on gay marriage (or, as my friends refer to it, “marriage.”) Lionsgate touted recent movies they released that focused on gay-positive messages, and they’re doing a benefit premiere for the LGBT community. I know it’s all about marketing and saving face, but I still think it’s the right move. Some people have called what they’re doing “pandering,” but if they didn’t do anything, those same people would say they were supporting Card implicitly. I suppose the only way to “win” an argument like this is to just not have made the movie … but I’m glad they did.

Look, I’m going to the movie. I will try to sneak in or see it for free, but that’s going to be the extent of my political involvement. What I find weird and disturbing is that a lot of my friends who still frequent Chik-Fil-A are all up in arms over this film and telling me that my wanting to see it is a violation of my basic rights. What they’re saying is that directly handing money over to people who support hate groups is less offensive than seeing a movie that will eventually partially benefit a koo-koo writer who doesn’t like that I like dudes, and that the company making said movie is going out of their way to make sure they love the gays. It’s homophobia in both cases, and none of it’s good, but it’s also bad math.

I’m going to the movie because the book was a bright spot in a really bad time of my life. I’m going because the author betrayed me, but the book didn’t. I’m going because I want to see Harrison Ford be cool on screen again.

I’m going because it’s not chicken.

Don't Panic!

If there’s anything in your life that makes you fondly recall hauling redolent, rank bales of trash into huge subterranean dumpsters, scoop up that something and carry it in a bushel basket. During my second iteration as a B. Dalton employee – the one where I was an actual, contributing member of the staff and not just the guy who lazed around all day and paid fealty to the Stephen King section in the guise of organization – I was Trash Guy. Well, one of them. At least twice a week, it would be my duty to gather up all the trash and the recycling in the store and stack it in big canvas bins on wheels, and drag it down to the mall’s basement. Our dumpsters were near the ones for the food court, so my trips, especially in the summer, were accompanied by the mephitic aroma of bourbon chicken and tacos and sub meat all tossed together and rotting in the heat.

My saving grace was audiobooks. I’d discovered them on my first go-round working at the mall, where I held down three separate jobs because it was better than going home to the rooming house, what with all the junkies and old men dying and such. I had a Dashiell Hammett young adulthood, but instead of making the mistake of sleeping with incongruously hot dames, I made the mistake of sleeping with one of my stalkers. He had webbed toes and seven cats. I did a lot of living in my late teens.

Anyhow, my audiobook thing started because this was before I discovered Bruce Springsteen, and I needed something to occupy me on the bus to and from work. The bus ride was always long and always horrible and never came at opportune times, so I did my best to maximize my fun. I spent a lot of my time at the Quincy Public Library, and at some point I realized that there was an all new way to love Stephen King. So of course I jumped. I had a Walkman and with it, I could do anything. Except listen to CDs, but that was ok because they’d probably never make a portable CD player I could afford, right? Right? (1993, people. There wasn’t even an Internet yet.)

I went through my Stephen King trove pretty quickly, and then I went foraging. I know I listened to some Robert Parker. Then one afternoon, under the concerned gaze of the librarians who worried about how much time I spent there, I went alphabetical, and that’s where I found it. Adams. Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Interestingly enough, this was not my first encounter with Hitchhiker’s Guide. Indeed, when I was young and disastrously poor, occasionally my Mom or my Dad would take us to visit their rich friends. Rich friends were those who could afford more than twenty videocassettes. (One of my aunts had laserdiscs. That was a level of rich I couldn’t even comprehend, like Margot on Punky Brewster.) One of the rich friends had a computer, and let me play with it. One of his games was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and at the time (was I seven? Eight?) I couldn’t wrap my mind around text-based adventure games. A few years later, when Mulcahey Middle school introduced a computer class (!), I got reacquainted with my old nemesis. Amidst all the learning games like Odell Lake and Oregon Trail, I did my best to master Hitchhiker’s Guide. I generally got as far as learning the word “analgesic.”

Still, it was one of the first instances of recurrence in my life. I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, but occasionally, there are things in my life that seem to want to be noticed and appreciated. Stuff that seems interesting, but hangs out in the background until I’m ready to “discover” it. I went through several minor phases with comics until I met Shawn and he made me a convert. I liked a lot of Springsteen songs before I realized they were all by one guy. Stuff like that. In hindsight, patterns emerge. When I found that audiobook, my first thought was, “Wow, there’s a book, too?” I was young, guys.

I blasted through The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe, and Everything in days. They were read by Douglas Adams himself, and I thought that was so cool. I tell people I’m not into British comedy, but this was evidence against that. I loved Adams’ wry way of reading, and I found myself laughing out loud at stuff about towels and whales and fjords. (Speaking of recurrence: I had a preschool teacher who was obsessed with sci-fi and fantasy; after I graduated to kindergarten, she and my Mom remained friends and she would come over sometimes and read the Narnia books to me. Sometimes, we’d go to her house, and I remember she had a stack of to-read books, and on the top was So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. Patterns, seriously.)

In the days before Wikipedia, we got knowledge more slowly, so I didn’t even know there was a BBC miniseries for years. Maybe Tracey told me. Back then, she was nerdier than me, by which I mean she liked both Star Trek and Star Wars, and I was Trek only. She also had swords. Anyhow, by the time I found out about the miniseries, I was living in my studio apartment down the road from the rooming house, and I had an actual Blockbuster card. Things were pretty sweet by the time I turned 21. One of the coolest things about the miniseries was the cover of the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide, because it had the words “DON’T PANIC!” in large, friendly letters on the cover. I loved the font.

Recurrence: years later, I discovered that my friend Kenny – who is the master of most things uber-geeky – was deep, deep into Hitchhiker’s Guide. He furnished me with a track from the original radio series called “Marvin, I Love You.” It’s one of the best songs sung about or for a gloomy robot. I’m listening to it right now, and it’s just the best. It makes me miss Kenny, and happy that I know him.

The Internet exists now, of course, and of all the lunatic nerd-things that people get into, Hitchhiker’s Guide is one of the most pervasive. Of course, some of my other nerd interests are huge. I’m not sure that the Internet could exist without Star Trek, and Mario games are huge, and my love of MST3K is large enough and the fandom is niche enough for it to actually give me some nerd cred.

But Hitchhiker’s Guide? I mean, it’s geeky, it’s huge but small, and it’s British. I mean, this makes up for me not getting into Doctor Who, right? Maybe?

When I heard Kelly the Wonder Tattooer, a really hoopy frood, was coming back into town, I knew that I needed something nerdy. Not Disney nerdy, though because that’s not Kelly’s bag. He’d loved doing my Tom Servo, and he ... I remember him liking my Trek badge. And oh my God, was he all over my steampunk Dr Pepper. Hitchhiker’s Guide fit neatly into the camp of stuff I thought he’d like doing, but I absolutely did not want that planet with the tongue sticking out that’s on the covers of the books. (ImprovBoston’s old mascot, The Goon, also has a tongue sticking out, because that’s wacky! I got a giant leg piece of two fat, dead comedians just so I wouldn’t have to make The Goon my theater tattoo). Then it occurred to me: DON’T PANIC! Well, there’s a motto to live by. And a hidden “42,” because obviously.

I showed up today at noon and he positioned the stencil halfway between my Drive-By Truckers one (“It’s great to be alive” written beneath my Cooley bird) and my Tom Servo, a bridge between the profound and the highly geeky. I won’t go into the pain because it’s almost always the same: highs and lows and spikes of adrenaline. Shawn showed up right before and took videos and pictures and the whole thing was done in an hour. I have been assured that the letters are orange gradating into yellow, with some green highlights to make them pop. My colorblindness will prevent me from discerning all of that, because citrus colors are my weakness. Basically, I did this for y’all.

And now: maxin and relaxin at home for awhile, because when I exert on days I get tattoos, badness happens and I cry. Of course, I did just write a 1.5K essay about my love of a British novel that’s probably shorter than this, which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike relaxing. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go shower and wash this thing off. Now, where did I put my towel?

Dennis Blunden Doesn’t Love Me

The first guy I ever fell in love with was a crazy person. No, I don’t mean “crazy,” like the fun kind of crazy like Bill Murray in What About Bob? or even the borderline-dark crazy of Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, when all she really needed was some makeup and a few meaningful glances from Emilio Estevez to snap out of it. No, my first love was clinically bipolar, afflicted with megalomania, and had a violent persecution complex. He was also straight. Let’s call him Eugene.

I met Eugene in high school and I should have known what I was getting myself into, but the sociological climate of the early 90s was working against me. Depression and vague rage were popular due to the advent of grunge music, and because I was in high school, all that stuff was heightened. It would be beautifully narrative if I could think of my falling for Eugene as a symbol of our turbulent times – he was a brooding, mysterious loner, just like the misunderstood geniuses you see in Cameron Crowe movies. And I was finally admitting to myself that I liked boys; figuring that out at sixteen in a high school world populated by slackers and overachievers and the heavily medicated might have made Eugene’s unique brand of lunacy appealing.

But mostly, it was the fact that he could grow a beard at seventeen. That, and those blue, blue eyes.

Of course, like most straight-guy crushes, it ended disastrously. After Eugene uncovered my intentions – via an ill-advised game of Truth or Dare, no less – he actually seemed curious. What followed was an even more ill advised sticky-fumble session, during which I realized that while I was giving inexpert head to the love of my life, he was having an experiment he was only half-heartedly into. Of course, this only meant that grunge suddenly made way more sense. That Pearl Jam song, “Black”? Totally written about me.

The lesson I should have learned is this: keep the straight guys untouchable. This had worked great during my nascent gay days when I lusted after celebrities before I knew what lust really was. Remember that 80’s show Head of the Class? The first guy I ever crushed on was the chubby guy who sat in the back row wearing flannel and Chuck Taylors and cracked jokes and had this hair I used to imagine running my hands through. Played by Dan Schneider, Dennis Blunden was the wellspring from which all my other attractions erupted. The hypothesis goes as such: Dennis’s penchant for flannel begat my attraction for Al Borland on Home Improvement, whose beard got me thinking about Riker from Star Trek, whose hairy chest turned me into the bear-crazy cub you see before you. Essentially, my lust is Darwinian; if not for Dan Schneider, this might be a column about how much I’m into the vapid clone scene. Fetch me a Diet Red Bull, Marco, I’m late for the foam party!

Sadly, me being me, I found a way to ruin my first crush, too. You know that song, “Centerfold,” where the girl the guy is into is lodged in his memory as this pristine high school angel until he later sees her in a porno magazine? My thing is like that, except for a sad lack of naked Dan Schneider. See, I happened to stumble across his Twitter feed (“stumble across” in this case means “actively seek out,” because I am occasionally a lunatic myself), and signed up at once, perhaps hoping for a string of insightful self-reflective tweets captured brilliantly in 140 characters or less. Instead? His Twitter is almost entirely a marketing gimmick pushing the TV show he’s currently writing. Completely understandable, entirely normal … and overwhelmingly disappointing. When you’ve traced back every crush, every lust, every love back to one individual – one fictional individual – you’re inevitably going to feel disillusioned when you realize he’s just a regular working Joe trying to make a buck.

For what it’s worth, though, I ended up running into Eugene again not too long ago. I found him at random, bumping into him at a camping-goods store in town, where he was then working. We went out for burritos, and maybe, yes, I did harbor some illusions that he’d gone gay somewhere along the way and would desperately want to make out with me. Alas: he was still straight, and seeing a girl, and startlingly sane. (And, I must mention, still bearded.) No sticky fumblings this time, just one of those conversations between guys who went to high school together. Near the end, he said to me, “I’m sorry if I fucked things up back then.”

Back in high school, our climaxes had been anticlimactic. I’d been waiting years for real release. Which goes to show, I guess, that sometimes even one-sided sociopathic first love has a happy ending.