Big Pimpin

Predator Press

Punch-Drunk Drunk

Predator Press

[LOBO]

ADAM Sandler will doubtlessly be suing me after this post.

No, I’m serious. I spent all of Saturday and Sunday poring over dizzyingly-long subpoenas, and it turns out he is among the proud and few not suing me yet. And I can't counter-sue until Adam Sandler sues me first.

What does this all mean? This means Adam Sandler has completely lazy and worthless lawyers: they are overpaid and pasty gelatinous SLOBS swishin’ around in lil skirts.  Soon we will hear half-full Chinese take-out boxes, chicken bones, and small unfortunate animals tumbling through air pockets trapped in mountainous, groaning layers of Adam Sandler lawyer flab as it lunges in desperate pursuit of that one last cheerleader to roll over before the fire department hoists their STD-riddled, flea-infested fat asses out of pricey condominiums via numerous helicopters and cranes while dead, rotting hookers flop lifeless out from under ample bedsore-covered acres of greasy cellulite and acne once-rumored to be human Adam Sandler lawyer flesh.

-The universe has no place for idle, dawdling lawyers!

See, I am losing huge in all my countersuits on average too … and I figure Adam Sandler is easily worth $1,000,000 in fat countersuit greenbacks: that is exactly what it will cost to burn the memory of Eight Crazy Nights out of my brain.

But what do Sylvester Stallone, Hillary Swank, Mark Wahlburg, and Adam Carolla have on the mighty Adam Sandler?

Hm?

Boxing movies.

I want Mister Sandler -Adam, if I may be so bold- to read my script Punch-Drunk Drunk. It’s a sequel to Punch-Drunk Love -a stoic follow-up that finds Barry Egan succumbing to his seven evil sisters, thus being forced to eek out a meager existence boxing grizzly bears.

But boxing grizzly bears is a terrible way to eek out a meager existence, especially when you just got promoted to astronaut!  In the final match, the Emperor Grizzly Bear cheats and punctures Barry's pressure suit in the third round and is disqualitied.  (I think Rob Schneider is a shoe-in for ‘Best Supporting Actor,’ particularly because he doesn’t appear in this movie.)

So Barry is now Boxing Champion of the World and Emperor of the Grizzly Bears.  But the controversy surrounding the victory yields only mockery and taunting from sports fans of virtually every species. Tormented, Barry gets hooked on 5-Hour Energy Drinks. He doesn't know what he needs energy for -let alone 5 hours worth- but suddenly he’s a quarterback in the NFL too. Eventually Sarah Palin shoots the evil Former Bear Emperor, and -thusly befriended- the grizzly bears team up with Barry, and together they go and defeat the vampires.  And the Raiders.

(I still have to write Acts II and III.)

People Say "Book Burning" like it's a BAD Thing

It was a one night stand
... stop calling me!

 Predator Press

[LOBO]

Now working for a book distributor, I'm developing an increased awareness of how many of you nerds weren't left smashed on the schoolyard good 'n proper.

Books were things teachers made us endure because they hated and liked to punish us.  And yeah I sell them.  I sell them for the same reason everyone else does.

Miss Addington, have you met Elmo?

-Spite!

But every day I see perfectly good, normal-seeming adults flipping them open and watching these 'books' for hours on end, just like it's a football game or something.  I'll sneek a peek over a shoulder every now and then just to make sure I'm not being tricked -you know, like maybe they're watching American Idol on a concealed iPad or cellphone?

But no, it's usually just another one of those bookwatchin' cult weirdos starin at squiggly lines.  Sometimes there will be a picture, but they don't move or anything.

No Kim Kardashian, no "Situation," no cartoons ... yet these bookwatching freaks just sit there, hour after hour.  I'm squeamish, too: Christ, watching people do this to themselves is the equivalent of cutting the top of my skull off, and pouring in salt and broken glass.

What has America come to?

This is just plain depressing.

*** BONUS CUT ***

Just in case you guys doubted these books exist, I decided to link the pics to places they are being sold.

But Amazon.com made me shoot coffee through my nose when I saw this:

Quotes from Amazon page:


"Share your own images"

"Gift wrap available"

"23 used from $0.41"

"Want it delivered Monday, November 28 ... ?"

Independence Day

Predator Press

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The only problem I have with an “official” holiday is that everyone else is on one too.

When I take a sick day for instance, the world carries on as normal: television is on regular scheduling, stores are open, et cetera. But on an “official” holiday such as Independence Day, well, virtually anything I might have done is on holiday as well.

-And if you lazy bastards don't get back to work pronto, my head is going to explode.

“Honey,” says Terri, knocking softly at the door.

Sitting in a bath of deep bubbles, my copy of The Best of Philip K. Dick tented on my forehead, I’m pondering the story I just finished darkly. Dick, a favorite author, took an unexpected detour in his story Faith of our Fathers; for this he seemed to channel another favorite author of mine, H. P. Lovecraft. And I was wholly unprepared for the exceptionally-

Another knock. Louder.

-bleak moral. But a lot of PKD’s stuff is edgy, provocative and foreboding: he wrote Minority Report, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and We Can Remember it for You Wholesale after all (although Hollywood would take liberties with them; most people know the last two as Blade Runner and Total Recall respectively.)

Terri tries the locked door. “Honey are you okay?”

PKD’s impact on Hollywood doesn’t rest there, either. I could make a case that the whole Terminator series is a spinoff of his short Second Variety-

Another knock.

“Yeah,” I says reluctantly.

“Honey I need a favor,” says Terri through the door. “Will you watch Jessica while I give Maude a ride to get some formula?”

Scowling, I remove the paperback from my head and set it on the edge of the tub. “I‘m very busy,” I reply.

“You won‘t have to do anything,” says another voice. Male.

The Butterbean kid.

-To get you up to speed, Maude is Butterbean’s mom, and Jessica is Maude’s newborn baby girl.

I grab a towel. "I don’t do diapers ‘an crap. It’s a strict policy I learned from Hillary Clinton. 'No Child’s Behind Left'"

“That’s 'No Child Left Behind,'“ Terri corrects.

“Even better,” I agree.

The rather debilitating sulk that Faith of our Fathers inspired didn’t drag me down alone. Neverlution, a heady and potent stand up routine by one of my favorite stand-up comics Christopher Titus debuted yesterday, and it seemed to round up all my demons into a nice little package: he covered everything from major depression -one of my many diagnoses- to the state of our mighty-yet-currently staggering beloved nation. Did we lose our Mandate of Heaven? Or was it always myth, like Bigfoot and the female orgasm?

I think I tried to be depressed for the country instead somehow, and it just made things worse.

-Nothing to buoy to, I suppose.

“We’ll only be ten minutes or so,” Terri adds. “I just want an adult here. I couldn’t find one, but you’re the next best thing.”

Ha ha.

“I’ll take care of everything,” Butterbean repeats.

Still toweling off, I contemplate this soberly. “You’ll take care of everything, eh?”

“Yeah,” he replies with the surfeit of confidence only found in adolescents.

“You'll have to prove your competence then," I says through the still-closed door bathroom door. "You can have any four guests for dinner. Who do you invite?”

Butterbean pauses behind the door. "Uh-"

"Quickly!" I demand.

Then suddenly he blurts, “Ben Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and ... Socrates.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong,” I says, pulling on my boxers. “Jesus who could eat with all those dead people? The place would stink to high heaven. The correct answer is Adam Carolla, Drew Pinsky, David Allen Grier, and Justin Bieber.”

Duh, I thought, drying my hair some more in the mirror.

For the first time in my life I’m forced to admit I look like shit; I don’t think I’ve never been in this much cumulative physical and psychological disrepair. Perhaps worse, even the frail forty-minute sleep increments I manage -among the most painful experiences of all- are further complicated by a nasty bout of hay fever.

Still, the back surgery went really well and physical therapy starts tomorrow. The broken wrist is marginally usable already. The ankle, however, complicated by two breaks, not so much -the jury is still out on a possible additional surgery.

I do intend to blog all this here soon. Probably at the end of this month, as it will coincide with an important announcement.

But I need a nice tall pale beer first. And maybe a plate of pork chops.

-Or a good steak.

“So will you do it?” asks Terri.

In the mirror, checking for acne, I spot a small red spot on my cheekbone. I zero in. I think it’s acne.

“Do what?”

Holy crap … I hope it’s not melanoma.


Note: That mirror pic is from a great site I tripped on called Funny World, and the gallery is here.

-But shh! Don‘t tell them I stole it!

A Contest of Wills

Predator Press

[LOBO]

I have concluded that if for some weird reason I should die, something has gone horribly wrong.

While difficult to imagine the concept of mortality and a chiseled phenomena such as myself in tandem, it must at some point come into consideration. Let’s face it: throughout history there is just a shit-ton of creative killing. One might even be forced to conclude that as a species we’re pretty fucking good at it.

Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, LOBO -the thought of future generations dealing with these tragic losses is just depressing. And you know some weird religious sect would pop up -doin crazy rituals and building pyramids an crap- in hopes that I would rise from the dead. Truth be told I hate acoustic guitar: this would be totally unacceptable. If I do rise from the dead, me an Jesus are takin out those weirdo hippies first.

And holy crap, there’s the whole "zombie" possibility. Plus if my formal burial tinfoil hat isn’t aligned properly, there’s the chance of being remotely controlled by intergalactic robot dinosaur overlords or something -to aid in their sinister invasion plans!

-If you think about it, it’s in all Humanity’s interest not to allow or cause my death.

Nevertheless, if it cannot be avoided, I have decided I do not want to be buried or cremated or any of that witchcraft hoodoo.

I want to be detonated.

Instead of just bein plain dead, why can’t we have a little fun? I’ll bet it would be cheaper than all that funeral crap, too. Just dig a 12” X 12” diagonal hole in the ground (to focus the blast trajectory), fill it with explosives, lay my mighty corpse across the top, an pow, launch me mortar-style at something. Not a lot of explosives, mind you: bout six sticks of dynamite should do it -I don’t want to be vaporized per se; I want nice big, healthy chunks to fall down on something poetic of your choosing.*

-We should have a contest!

Gimmie ideas -like having all the parts fall on a PETA meeting during the “Meat is Murder” preamble. How about a Lohan family reunion or a Palin Thanksgiving? Or a Tila Tequila concert?


*Like Adam Carolla, I also want at least one really enormous black woman in pumps throwin herself over my coffin, tearfully wailing through a veil "Why Lawd!? O Lawd why him? Take me instead, Lawd ... !"

I’ll Take a Case of Those Baskets, Please

Predator Press

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This post comes with a battery of "hat tips." First, that image was found at CrownDozen.com -an interesting-looking site I'll certainly be exploring in some greater depth.

Second, this post is inspired by a podcast by Adam Carolla and Larry Miller; it was they who made the astute observation I’ll distill simply as “In ‘70s cinema, there wasn’t anything not to susceptible to demonic possession."

This goes for cars, dolls, kids, dogs, severed appendages, televisions, statues, totems, jewelry, clothing … ah cripes, that list just goes on and on and on.

Everything in the ‘70s would at some point would try and kill us. And if it wasn’t due to an outright demon possession, it was some crazy recluse exercising some unexplained mind control, sicking killer bees or hounds or something on some hapless and well-intended yet far-too-nosy tourists. Or a monster or robot that inevitably turns on it’s “master.”

Again, I’ll return to paraphrasing Adam and Larry’s funny dialogue: it starts with the indignant “How dare you! I made you!” But this former minion is undaunted, having gained some insight to it’s own evil misuse: right smack in the now-burning “control center,” it would kill the puppet master -and itself- even as the evil human mastermind unconvincingly screamed ”Noooooooooo …!”

The people who voted on the Oscars –“the Academy” or whatever- in the ‘70s must have been very, very bored and overpaid.

Still, another ten years or so of the ‘70s would have produced some fairly interesting results ... On that trajectory, a movie about robot zombie space piranhas would have been completely inevitable.

[*sigh*]

-Now I can’t get anyone to look at my screenplay.

Eve

Predator Press

[LOBO]

I’ve been following Adam Carolla since the Doctor Drew Pinsky Loveline days.

Indeed, as a former truck driver I used to schedule loads around catching the show: midnights in 2003 had me picking up loads from angry sleeping chicken farms and so forth. Today I own an unlicensed archive of thousands of hours of the audio.

The fact that his new show –one that six years later I could listen to live locally every weekday- was cancelled as of Friday was frankly heartbreaking.

But there were some cool and redeeming facets to the event.

Firstly, the show wasn’t cancelled due to lack of ratings or the management and wage disputes that are common in the talk radio spectrum. The home station simply caved into the bad economy and went to a fully automated top 40 format. It was a matter of numbers. And Adam could have –as is also common in the talk radio format- spent his last two days on air bashing his soon-to-be-former employer.

He didn’t. He spent the last two shows taking calls from fans, saying goodbye, and trying to get his newly-unemployed crew jobs. He let them read their resumés on air.

But -maybe more importantly- he went on to announce a desire to begin pioneering a uniquely internet-based presence.

This hit me in a weirdly patriotic kind of way. I don’t think we need to go to video stores anymore. Paper is dead. Telephones are obsolete, and above all corporations, special interest groups and marketing executives do not control anything anymore: these economies are entirely self-perpetuating monarchies choking on their own dwindling DNA fumes, and the failure to recognize this is half the reason America is caught in it’s own fiscal quagmire.

Since the advent of the internet, we have no business –literally- in these entities anymore.

Already a fan, I’m once again impressed by Adam’s unique insight: I think he represents the finest of the modern day “American Spirit.”

-And I’ll be watching AdamCarolla.com with keen interest.