road trip

I accompanied my brother Andrew on his journey from Oklahoma to Orlando, along with a friend of his.

Got in the car about 6:30. Icy cold. Drove for a bit, had to poop, did so in some bushes. Wiped with Mapquest directions, long live TomTom. The back suffocated me. Had to sit with my legs up, straight, not moving. I got to drive through Louisiana. That state is goddamn beautiful. Trees and rivers and steel bridges. Marshland, stumps just rising above the waterline. Around eleven o'clock that night I got tired. Lawton, Oklahoma to Pensacola, I believe. We had about six more hours to go. My idea: get a hotel, get something to eat, crash. Wake up at six AM and get to grandparent's house about 12. Little brother was not having it. I don't know whether that thought made him nervous or whether he was simply a mess, frantically needing to be near his woman. Shrug. He decided, instead, to drive straight through, get to grandparents house at 4, and sleep until...you guessed it, 12. This made no logical sense to me. But I disagreed and therefore I was just a grouchy naysayer. You were with Andrew or against him. Rational dissent was not to be had. I disappeared into a Flying J to charge my phone, and this enraged him, which enraged me. I needed fifteen minutes to charge my phone. That was it. He told me "you have one minute. you can do without facebook for four hours." When I told him he was being uncompromising, he said, "I let you poop". Sigh.

So now we are here. I enjoy visiting the family. Florida is palm trees and fountains. Strip malls that look like Colombian drug lord compounds. Tomorrow I'm going to get a hot shave. Then I'm going to go to a comic shop. What I need to do, is hit up a bar. I need a drink.

5 best albums this year

1) Sleigh Bells - Treats. Probably the most unique, loud, obnoxious sound I have ever heard. I love this album so much, the only thing guaranteed to make me dance, regardless of mood or limbic fortitude.



2) Das Racist - Shut Up Dude/Sit Down Man mixtapes

These are for free online. If you heard them from that Taco Bell song, man you really don't know how hard these dudes bring it. The best beats, the funniest/cleverest/dumbest lines of the year.



3) Robyn - Body Talk

My new muse and inspiration. This woman has charisma and strength out the ass. And the songs, this one I listened to over and over and over.



4) Major Lazer and La Roux - Lazerproof

This one's another freebee mixtape that I just wore out this year. You've got a little dub, a little Carribean, dance hall kind of stuff. It goes so hard and yet I'm 90% sure you can make a baby to it.



5) Big Boi - Sir Luscious Leftfoot

Albums like this make me wonder if I'm not too forgiving with the hip hop I normally listen to. When someone brings it this hard it makes you shake your head at the rest of the hip hop in your collection, at least for a little bit.

My first novel, BY THE TIME WE LEAVE HERE, WE'LL BE FRIENDS, is available.

It's got a badass wraparound cover by the awesome Alex Pardee:



From the back cover:

Siberia, 1953. Stalin is dead and a once-prosperous thief named Alek Karriker is feeling the pressure. Trapped in an icy prison camp where violent criminals run the show, betrayed by his friends and his body, Karriker is ...surrounded by death and disorder. Bizarre Inuit shamans are issuing ever-stranger commands that he must obey. Opium is running scarce and bad magic is plentiful. Razor-tooth gangsters can smell Karriker’s blood and they plan to murder him more than once. The only option: ESCAPE.

Enlisting the aid of an aging guard, a cold-blooded killer, and a beautiful, murderous nurse, Karriker must now secure his getaway by finding a "calf": a gullible prisoner to be cannibalized when the tundra is at its most barren. As the vice grows tighter and life in the gulag becomes increasingly surreal, Karriker must hurry to find his mark and convince him...

BY THE TIME WE LEAVE HERE, WE’LL BE FRIENDS

It's also got some lovely praise from kick-ass authors Monica Drake, Cody Goodfellow, Kris Saknussemm, Stephen Graham Jones, and Paul Tremblay.

This is a cold, brutal, bizarre piece of fiction that I am extremely proud of. I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

bizarro review #3

"Asphalt Flowerhead". Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink. 2008.

Wallets are cumbersome things. Mine shit the bed a while back and I figured a driver's license and a library card didn't warrant a new one which meant fresh real estate in the back pocket. Now, whoever had the idea to make Forrest Armstrong's "Asphalt Flowerhead" the size of those little green Bibles deserves a beer because I've been able to carry it with me everywhere, in my back pocket, opening it at random and savoring Armstrong's deft, vivid prose one or two paragraphs at a time.

The novel opens at a literal hole in the wall, Club Africa, an art gallery/drug den run by the enigmatic Brad Kelly. The club is raided and we follow the friends through the diaspora. Bill is a painter, arrested on his first offense and dropped into a hallucination chamber. Nail is a junky who gets bailed out and sets out to create a new drug in the questionable hope that the proceeds might bail out his friends. Johnny is a junky who seeks spiritual enlightenment at the risk of self combustion. And then there's Chevy, born into a perpetual acid trip, an Einstein-esque father of a weapon of mass destruction more deadly than any atomic bomb. We follow these characters at a lightning pace, leading to my one complaint, which is that, while I don't need character names to be Pynchonian, in a story that moves this fast, it would be beneficial to have slighlty more distinct character names than Bill, Brad, and Johnny.

From homicidal fascist cops to a robot destruction of Amsterdam, the story is so surreal and apocalyptic and the voice is so eloquently angry that one can't help but imagine the words being shouted through a bullhorn, from atop the burned out shell of an SUV, which, in my opinion, is something all serious literature should aspire to.

I believe that Forrest Armstrong is the real deal. I believe that his talent for language is something to get excited about, and I think "Asphalt Flowerhead" is a great introduction and an ideal place to become a fan.

Buy it here.

bizarro review #2

"Peckinpah" by D. Harlan Wilson. Shroud Press, 2009.

In 1994 Alan Moore wrote a short story about a woman named Maureen Cooper, a bartender who slowly comes to realize she exists only as a character on a popular TV soap. The story was dense, verbose, brilliant metafiction, blending the story of Maureen with that of the actress who played her (who was herself not who she seemed) with a vicious polemic on television and its effects on society. It was called “Light of Thy Countenance” and there are two reasons I bring it up: first, because I feel that it is the spiritual predecessor to D. Harlan Wilson’s amazing “Peckinpah”, and secondly, because of Alan Moore himself, who felt strongly enough about this book to provide a blurb on the cover.

“Peckinpah” is difficult to categorize, a satirical meta mash up of microfiction and microcriticism into something that maybe resembles a novel but is, I think, something much more interesting.

The back cover blurb does its best: it tells us “Peckinpah” is about Felix Soandso, the husband of a murdered woman who must wreak righteous vengeance on her killer, Samson Thataway, the hyperviolent leader of the Fuming Garcias, a Reservoir Dogs-esque clone army. Sure thing, back cover, but I’d argue that the story is just as much about a man who tears pigs in half or a shoe store clerk witnessing his coworkers disappearing beneath a stampeding tractor or corn stalks that open to reveal chainsaws.

Amidst all the absurdity, a wide variety of film motifs come under fire, such as rape scenes, lazy endings, and the fetishism of weaponry and violence. But it’s the oversized role of film and television in our lives that seems to be the biggest target: pay attention to the chapter in which Felix Soandso is introduced to the single worst moment in his life through the screenplay excerpt that we have just read. Or the only chapter in which a book makes an appearance, the cover depicting an alien riding the blast of a nuclear explosion.

Throughout its entirety Wilson manages to keep the language terse and punchy. It is a brief novel made briefer by the force of its language, but if you’re like me, you’ll pick it back up and read through it again, slower the second time. And once again it will entertain and, more importantly, once again it will get you thinking.

Next up: Forrest Armstrong's "Asphalt Flowerhead"

Light of Thy Countenance (the whole story)

Buy "Peckinpah"

bizarro review #1

"Ass Goblins of Auschwitz" by Cameron Pierce. Eraserhead Press, 2009.

Growing up, I watched a lot of TV. Nickelodeon, mostly. Ah! Real Monsters, Rocko’s Modern Life, Ren & Stimpy. They were light-hearted and funny, sure, but deep-down they were kind of unsettling, and with your eyes glued to the tube, you felt like you were given a glimpse into truly twisted minds, minds that were trying their very best to warn their audience of the darkness of adulthood to come. These cartoons with their drab colors and their focus on offal and snot and lint and gas were just too ugly and honest to be on the Disney channel.

“Ass Goblins of Auschwitz” is what happens when those kids, so mesmerized by the cartoons of their youth, grow up and write stories of their own. AGOA is a Nickelodeon cartoon pushed to the extreme and injected with cynicism. You’re born, things are good, you start to check out girls, and before you know it a goblin has his finger in your ass and is turning your friends into cider, you’re mutating and growing wings and you’re becoming one of them and you’re rebelling and you’d do anything to get out of the prison you’re in.

I promised myself I wouldn’t use the word “imaginative”, but AGOA is so filled to brimming with the products of a big, Mountain Dew-fueled brain that other words fail. The first half of the book is gripping, every page contains a unique, surreal image or idea, but it does not let up for a moment, and if you are not careful, by the end it could bury you under them. I enjoyed the quick pace and the brevity, but I also found the last twenty pages to be exhausting, a wild dash for the finish could have been sharper, more fleshed out.

That said, I can’t wait to see what Pierce will do next. With an imagination as fertile and frenzied as his, I’m sure I won’t have to wait long to find out.

Buy it here.

executions

People sometimes give revolutionaries like Che Guevara shit for executing folks. The Batistas, I think they were called. I hear some people say that what Che did was monstrous, that he was a monster. But I’m just saying, that if I rose up and took a country, and I had all these people of power, the people who continually made decisions that knowingly stifled my rights, these people who deliberately sacrificed the health and safety of me and my family for an extra dollar, the CEOs of all these big corporations with their ugly tans and bright white teeth and BMWs they earned off the backs of the poor, you couldn’t expect me to not to have every single one of them shot.

Just sayin.