I can be a horrible creature of habit. For example, if I don’t hit the comic book store on Wednesday I get panicky as all hell. Granted, I’m usually weeks behind on my reading, so I won’t even get to the books that I’m purchasing for several weeks, but I have to hit the shop on Wednesday. Irrational? Yes, but who doesn’t have an irrational behavior or twelve?

Similarly, I have a list of books (comic and conventional) that I tend to read over and over and over. I’m not sure if this is a unique behavior (I would think not) — but who knows?

The first of these books is Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. This book opened so many doors into my budding love of secret societies and cults back when I was in high school. It’s a fantastic story of “what if we make up a conspiracy to sell some books” that gets way way out of hand.

This is a book I read about once every two years just to keep the material (and paranoia) fresh. After I read the Da Vinci Code, I immediately read Foucault’s Pendulum to cleanse my palette. This is a book that was shelved with its own concordance when I first picked it up. Shit like that makes me do a happy dance.

The most important book that I read over and over and over is The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. Anyone who knows me well should read this book just to see how my brain works. I’m not saying this book will change your life or anything, but THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!!!!!

I read this book every year without fail. Sometimes I read it twice just for good measure. I’ve already finished my first reading of 2010 and I’ll probably pick it up again after I finish reading the odd young adult fantasy series I’m reading now (Fablehaven for those who are interested).

The third multi-read book I keep close at hand is of the comic variety. Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan.

Spider Jerusalem is almost as bad ass as Warren Ellis himself and Transmet (as those in the know are oft to call it) is the ultimate in dystopian futures. It’s got drugs, politics, social commentary and oodles and oodles of bad attitude. The fact that it makes me giggle like a little girl is just the gravy on the cake.

While it is always nice to read Transmet all the way through, if I need a quick fix, I read what amounts to the first collected volumes.

Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein is also quickly crawling up as being one of those books I’ll read over and over, but I need to give it a third read just to make sure.

So, gentle blog reader, any books you revisit on a regular basis?

There isn’t much in the world more interesting, at least to me, than subversion and secret societies. I’m not sure if it’s because I grew up in the waning years of the Cold War or that my love of history just took a random tangential turn somewhere when I was around thirteen, but the mysterious little things people do for reasons known only to themselves (world domination, free internet, kittens & porn…) fascinates me incredibly.

I’m sure I’ll end up writing several postings about the hows and whats of me becoming obsessed with the Illuminati and the Discordian Society, but this one is even more tangential.

I high school (when my obsession du jour was cyberpunk) I read a novel by Jonathan Littell called Bad Voltage. It had some pretty interesting concepts presented in it, but what really stuck with me was the presentation of the cataphiles who explore and organize mischief/mayhem/productivity in the catacombs underneath Paris.

Bad Voltage) made it even more enticing by putting a couple of maps of the catacombs in the front of the book and then proceeded to explain how it was illegal to go into the catacombs. How do you get a teenager excited about doing something? Tell him it’s verboten.

Most recently a gentleman who I am mildly acquainted with by the name of Sean Michaels spent some amount of time doing research on the catacombs and a seemingly clandestine secret society known as Urban eXperiences. Sean put his research and experiences into an incredible read for the literary journal BRICK.

Read this article as soon as you can.

What Sean uncovered is stuff you can’t make up. It was like reading a shortened version of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. It’s got mystery it’s got intrigue, it’s got secret(ish) societies and a wildly interesting mystery man/men.

After you’ve read the article, email it to a friend. Hell, email it to your entire address book. The Atlantic originally commissioned a shorter version of this article, but killed it. They are utter morons.

Now I just need an acetylene lamp and a ticket to Paris.

Yeah, so I’ve been a little lax in the writing these past few weeks, but I’ve got a good (if not lazy) excuse. Ladies and gentlemen, it is World Cup time!

Typically a large majority of Americans have to be reminded that this grand culmination of the FIFA championship is going on. This year, however, a couple of factors have conspired to bring the World Cup to the attention of Americans.

The first of those factors are the two goals that FIFA officials robbed the US team of in the first round of play. Nothing unifies Americans faster than the thought that we are getting screwed over by some foreigner. That combined with the general hatred of referees in any sport and you’ve suddenly got Joe Six-Pack talking about the World Cup with his buddies on their bass boat.

The second, and way more important, factor has been the ever-present drone of the vuvuzela.

Never before has a two dollar piece of mold-injected plastic generated such a buzz (see what I did there?) on such a grand scale. Broadcasters have had to create new audio filters to cancel out some of the noise, whiny players (I’m looking at you Cristiano Ronaldo) have complained that is breaks up the players’ focus and doctors have been all over the media warning about potential hearing loss due to the 144 decibels these little monsters can pump out.

At first I really didn’t think twice about the hub-bub. It was kind of nice having something to distract from the inane commentary while I watched the first round of matches.  After the third day of three-match-a-day footie (and yes, I’ve been watching every single match), I just began ignoring them.

Then I tried watching an MLS match.

The play was good, I had beer and grilled meats, but something was missing. That’s right, I wasn’t enjoying my footie because it didn’t have the constant drone of the vuvuzela. In just one week I had been turned into Pavlov’s bitch.

Lucky for me, however, I had a variety of means at my disposal for faking that vuvuzela feeling. The easiest was to just get on the internet and download an mp3 of the buzz. Next, I hopped into the iTunes app store and found a couple of free apps that filled my need (plus it’s a great app for confusing people in bars).

So, damn the naysayers. I can understand banning vuvuzelas at events like Wimbledon and the US Open, but these plastic horns are here to stay. Besides, I’ve been seeing them at high school and college football games for years.

Haters gonna hate.

For the past couple of days I’ve been up in the mountains of New Mexico breathing clean air (a novel concept for most Dallasites) and tromping around at an elevation that would give most Texans vertigo.

I’m not sure if it was the hypoxia or the ethereal creativity that seems to float around in the air like the damn cottonwood fluff is right now, but ideas seemed to come to me pretty easily while I was slacking off. It might have also been a type of vision quest brought on by the sheer amounts of chile (red and green) that I consumed over the three day period. Either way, I don’t care.

The first of my ideas that I was really excited to commit to paper was my ace in the hole: a treatment for a television pilot that would be a guaranteed grand-slam. A cross-cultural buddy cop dramedy hit that has the potential to change the way the world looks at itsself: “Hyde & Sikh.”

The concept is pretty simple; in a freak accident, Dr. Henry Jekyll is transported from Victorian England to the 1970’s stuck in his Mr. Edward Hyde transformation. After wandering the Earth (like Caine) for more than a decade, Hyde settles in San Francisco and joins the police force. After quickly making detective, Hyde is partnered with the new hotshot transfer from Hong Kong by way of Punjab: Vikram Gony. Together they are Hyde and Sikh: dispelling prejudices and squashing crimes in the Bay Area.

The episodes practically write themselves.

For the past couple of years, squeezle and I have spent our Memorial Day weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We are big fans of Santa Fe (read that as “we like to drink and eat a lot in Santa Fe, NM”), and we try and make a trip at least once a year to relax, throw the munch at some of our favorite restaurants on the planet, and spend money on art that one would usually not expect to be showcased in Santa Fe.

In fact, the Memorial Day Weekend is when we travel to Santa Fe for a very special event. No, it’s not Pancakes on the Plaza (which falls on July 4th and is pretty damn awesome), rather, it’s POP Gallery’s POP Femme Sugar Coated Strange opening and reception. Squeezle and I have been incredibly impressed with Michael and Sharla McDowell’s little shack of wonders since they opened it back in 2007. We had known both of them from their work with the Chuck Jones Gallery in Santa Fe, so we were both delighted that they cut out on their own to showcase artists and works that were more in line with their own tastes, and, subsequently, ours.

One of the best things about the Sugar Coated Strange show is that it really bucks the mentality of a typical art gallery “opening.” Sure, there are loads and loads of fabulous pieces of art, patrons swigging back glasses of champagne, but where it differs is that it really seems to be more like a reunion than an opening.

While this year’s show is just the third, it seems like it’s been going on for just about forever. Squeezle and I have been fortunate enough to meet a gaggle of very talented artists and really get a better feeling of where their art really comes from.

One of my favorite things about this show is that it involves artists who do an incredible amount of “crossover” work into the realm of vinyl and resin toys (one of my other obsessions), as well as other media. See if you recognize some of these names: Kathie Olivas (and, by proxy, Brandt Peters), CJ Metzger, Miss Mindy and (former Dallasite) Marie Sena.

Squeezle and I have purchase multiple pieces from each of these artists and consider ourselves very lucky to have had the opportunity to have met them and spent some time chewing the fat.

All-in-all, it’s a party with just about everything I love about a nice chill weekend. It’s got booze, it’s got green chile, it’s got art, it’s got friends and it even has tattoos (Marie is an incredible tattooist as well as an incredible artist). If you throw in a soccer match, I’d think I had died and gone to heaven.

What I’m saying is that you should go to Santa Fe and definitely go to POP Gallery. At the very least, spend some time with their website and pick out a piece or dozen you’d like to add to your collection. What, you don’t have a collection? Well, it’s high time you got in touch with Michael and Sharla to get one started for you.

If you’re there on Memorial Day Weekend, let me know and I’ll buy you a beer.

I’m not sure if a recent head injury (reference my zombie hammer posting below) managed to rattle loose the plaque clogging up my artistic side, but I’ve been scribbling on just about everything for the past week or so.

I have one gigantic stumbling block when it comes to artistry, however: I can’t draw a straight line to save my life. Sure, everything looks just peachy in my head, but transition to paper is a Herculean effort of “over-the-mountains-and-through-the-woods” between my brain and hand. To make matters worse, the frustration of the effort makes my lines even shakier than they normally would be.

If, by some chance, I do indeed manage to get out a decent representation of what I was attempting (typically on the piles and piles of random scrap paper I keep in my office), I am often hard-pressed to duplicate whatever effort I just made look acceptable.

Even more scary is that the current things I’ve been doodling out look like stuff that Martin Ontiveros has done whilst having a seizure during an earthquake.

By no means do I let any of this distract me from putting ink and graphite on paper: it’s just adjusted my approach a little. I spend much more time experimenting with lines I normally draw straight and seeing if I can duplicate the opposite side of a curve. It’s frustrating as all hell since I’ve been spending the better part of the last decade popping out computer generated graphics like crazy. Photoshop and Illustrator are much more forgiving that good ol’ pen and paper.

I’ve got no problem with computer graphics, and still rely on using the computer for almost 90% of ideas I’d like to move forward into any semblance of a physical manifestation of my creativity, but there is just something fundamentally different between printed images from the screen and something that was plotted out and drawn on a given surface.

Recently I’ve begun playing around with customizing the paint schemes on designer toys (my beloved RealxHead mini fortune cats in particular). The challenges of working with a two and a half inch tall piece of vinyl really turn into a matter of scale. I’ve got grand plans that need to be executed very small, so I’ve turned to working with stencils and my newly acquired airbrush setup. On the screen everything seems just perfect, but trying to cut out wee tiny stencils after printing is just about one of the most annoying things I’ve ever done.

I realize that the more I practice, the easier this will all go and the better I’ll eventually get. It’s a painfully slow process, but I’m willing to stick it out (for now).

Something to consider each and every day is your level of preparedness when the zombie apocalypse comes.

This may sound farcical, but being ready to not be overcome by flesh-eating masses of the undead will pretty much make you ready for anything. To this end, I spend more than my fair share of time thinking about how best to defend myself if set upon by shamblers, runners or both.

Several weeks ago a friend and I came up with what could be one of the best zombie survial tools to date; a device we simply call the “zombie hammer”.

The construction of the zombie hammer is quite simple. Cast a pretty decent sized sledge hammer in titanium with a slightly over-sized head that is hollow. Fill the hollow head with mercury and you are all set to swing for the bleachers.

When considering a zombie weapon it is important to think about upkeep and portability. Guns will run out of ammo, and swords/knives will probably lose their edge (ever de-bone a chicken?), but hammers and/or maces seem pretty solid. Putting a spike on one end may provide for some more damage, but if you get stuck while a horde is on you, a spike could be a problem.

Let’s talk about the power behind the zombie hammer: a head half-full of mercury.

When I was a kid my brother and I had one of those over-sized plastic baseball bats that we used to smack all manner of objects around our backyard.  Quite by accident we discovered that filling the bat a bit with water allowed us to smack the crap we were swinging at a lot farther. The weight to power ratio was pretty damn amazing.

I was further able to test the power of the zombie hammer this past Friday when I managed to smack myself in the eye giving myself a slight concussion. The offending object? A half-filled Camelbak water bottle.

That’s right, I conked the crap out of my face and managed to give myself a black eye in the name of science! I can say, from firsthand experience, that the zombie hammer is quite effective against human flesh. Please don’t try this testing at home, I’m a pseudo-professional.

My embarrassment of concussing myself while standing in my bedroom were only compounded by the fact that America’s Funniest Videos was on the television. Oh the humanity.

As I’ve stated before, I’m set to “run” a five kilometer “thing” tomorrow morning (a mere nine hours as of this writing).

As is expected, I’ve got a few whiskeys in me, so I’m both at the pinnacle of my athletic prowess and about ready to be done with this at the same time. I’m a soccer player; I run for about sixty yards at a go and I sprint that sixty. I’m not saying I’m fast or anything, but I can beat that diabetic kid down the block with no problem.

Anyhoo, I’ve just come to the realization that my motivation for running is vastly different from my motivation for playing soccer. Before a typical soccer match, I juke myself up with a nasty mix of old 70’s and 80’s punk tracks with an average length of about fifty seconds.  This is fantastic for the quick blast down the field followed by an elbow to some poor chump’s jaw, but does nothing for a 3.1 mile gerbil wheel.

That means it’s crisis time.

As I said before, I’ve got a few of John Jameson’s finest blends in me, so I’m in perfect shape to think about motivation relating to a run that goes in conjunction with Dallas’ “Irish Season.” For that reason, I’ve beefed my playlist up with the Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly and The Pogues. For added motivation, I threw in some live No Use For A Name, Tiger Army and a mess of the Old 97’s. For some reason I can always get motivated to move my sorry ass around Dallas when I’m listening to the Old 97’s:  I think it’s in the water.

Next comes the self-control. To my poor wife’s dismay, I tend to make an utter fool of myself in public. I’d like to do something about that, but it’s honestly my nature. If she’s lucky, I’ll be concentrating on my next drink/smoke and paying no attention to the hundreds of people around me, but I’m not sure which side I’m going to fall on. More than likely, I’ll zone out on the heels in front of me and forget all about being a total ass and just work my way around the course. That’s the best I can hope for, but I’m not promising anything.

So, dear readers, if you see a guy wearing his green on his skin (and not just the tattoos up his left arm) jamming out to some unknown tunes while a gorgeous woman scowls at him tomorrow while you are running the 5K around Greenville Ave. in Dallas, TX tomorrow morning, give me a shout. At the very least, give me something tasty to drink because you know what they say about that hair of the dog…

I suck at Skee-Ball. There, I’ve said it. I also suck at most carnival-related game (even though all of them are fixed in one manner or another), so I had little hope for Iconfactory and DS Media Labs’ little torture device of an iPhone/iTouch game Ramp Champ.

I’ve been a fan of Iconfactory for a whole mess of years, so the game caught my eye when I was looking for a new time waster a few months ago. I played it a couple of times and then jumped right back to my standby of Bejewelled to numb my brain. A couple of weeks ago, however, I came back to Ramp Champ. I had it in my head that I could earn a few more trophies (three are available per “ramp”) and maybe even earn enough tickets to buy some cool in-game trinkets.

Did I mention I suck at games like this? To date, I have one trophy each in the four ramps that come standard with the game: Clown Town, Breakwater Bay, Space Swarm and the Icon Garden. Wait, I have two in the Icon Garden now (I got you, you bastard Moof). Anyhoo, my lack of being any good at the standard ramps made me venture into some of the expansion ramps that are typically available for a pittance in order to expand my trophy collection. Not only do the new ramps come with new trophies, but they also come with new crap you can buy with your virtual tickets. Sure, it all just ends up being dusty pixels on dusty pixelized shelves, but who am I to laugh in the face of reward-based instant gratification?

The coolest thing about Ramp Champ is the huge variety of little targets that pop up after being knocked down in a certain order. In Grave Danger, for example (part of a Halloween expansion that I just wasn’t going to say no to), depending on which tombstones you knock down determines what pops up. Kill the three tiny stones with crescent moons on them and a moon appears. Hit the moon and a full moon appears along with three wolves. It’s Skee-Ball, so you get nine chances to get all the points you can muster, so I’ve not managed to see what happens past knocking all wolves down.

The real secret is to figure out a way to knock down multiple targets with a single ball. It’s tricky as hell, but there are certain techniques (I like to think) that maximize the potential for double and triple target clearance.

I’ve spent 45 minute jags just doing round after round after round trying to uncover new sections of a ramp while getting so infuriatingly frustrated that I really wanted to throw my phone across the room. To me, that’s the sign of a damn good game. Despite the fact that a trained chimp could probably score thousands of points more than me, I’m not giving up on Ramp Champ.

Oh crap, it’s a snow day. Rather than go with a “Genius” (is it me or does Apple throw that around a bit too loosely?) generated playlist for today, I’m going for shuffle again. Instead of limiting the selection to my paltry 60 GB iPod, however, I am going to run the shuffle from the 232.09 GB library I have on my main workstation at home. There are tracks on here that absolutely no one listens to; not even the artist who made them. Well, I might as well get my painful death over with.

1. Brick – Dazz
According to my tracklisting information this is the number 41 single from 1977. While I was alive in 1977, I really don’t remember hearing this song. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard this song. Apparently, “Dazz” is a shortening of “Disco Jazz.” My life is complete now.

2. The Nightmare Before Christmas – Making Christmas
Damn I love me some “Nightmare.” It saddens me that Jack Skellington and crew have been co opted by the Hot Topic crowd. That’s just my bitter old “cool” guy coming out. After seeing this movie for about twelve times, Oingo Boingo became really really funny to me. Trust me, you won’t be able to unhear that one.

3. Jon Snodgrass & Corry Branan – Designated Drinker
This is a live track from 3 Kings (not sure where) from November 9, 2007. I’m pretty sure someone sent this to me when they figured out I was a Drag The River fan. It’s humorous and drunken, but I see why I haven’t listened to this one before as well. It does have a genius line in it, though: “The only time anything got in my pants on tour was when fire ants invaded my bunk.” That’s just plain ‘ol good writing.

4. Sigur Rós – Staralfur
Like all Sigur Rós, this is yet another epic song. I find it very relaxing to put on Sigur Rós when I’m working through the middle of the night as it magically aligns my thinking for some odd reason. I’ve always believed that Iceland really is the place where gnomes and frost giants lived out in the open; Sigur Rós just reinforces this belief.

5. Misfits – Abominable Dr. Phibes
I have way more Misfits tracks in my library than I probably should, but, every time I go for a shuffle (yeah, I’m trying to coin that one), it always comes up with a track from American Psycho. I think my computer isn’t a Misfits fan and this is how it’s punishing me. That shit is just mean.

6. Bauhaus – Telegram Sam
I think it’s downright hilarious to hear Peter Murphy belt out this Bowie standard. In my mind, Pete’s skin is cracking off of his face as he jumps around the studio in the damn burgundy velvet suit he’s been wearing for the past twenty-five years. This is actually a pretty good cover, but I have a horribly overactive imagination and Peter Murphy is really just a mannequin.

7. The Clash – Janie Jones
Of all the older “punk” bands I listen to, I probably identify with The Clash the most. To me, they are my Beatles (other than the Beatles themselves). I hear their sound in hundreds of other bands, but don’t find their work to be cheap and fake because it derives from the alpha source. The Clash is a building block. Yeah, that’s deep.

8. Foo Fighters – Hell
I’m actually sort of surprised this was in my library. I like Dave Grohl and Co., but I didn’t think I had anything. Here’s a quandary for you. Technically Foo Fighters has always been a “supergroup,” but never really referred to as such. Just because it’s members didn’t achieve financial stardom in their previous efforts, does a band made up of people who came from rather influential bands not get to be a “supergroup?”

9. ABBA – If It Wasn’t For The Nights
Yup, the library finally went to the weird place. I grew up on ABBA, so I find nothing ironic about them other than the obvious hilarity of disco in Sweden. If anything, that damn movie/musical Mama Mia ruined ABBA. This shit is gold.

10. Lagwagon – Give it Back
Lagwagon are horribly under-appreciated. The few times squeezle and I have seen either Lagwagon or Joey Cape by himself have been some of the most fun live shows we’ve ever attended. Sadly, it appears that Lagwagon has now drifted apart and won’t be putting out new material anytime in the foreseeable future, but Joey’s solo shows are a good mix of his solo stuff and the best of Lagwagon. Ironically, the last time I saw Joey Cape, he was playing with Jon Snodgrass.

11. Face To Face – Fight or Flight
For years and years I wanted to see Face To Face live, but never got the opportunity. Then they went and broke up and dashed my hopes against the rocks of bitter regret. Luckily for me, they’ve reformed and I was able to see them at Fun Fun Fun Fest this past November in Austin. Holy freakin’ crap can these guys tear shit up. Now, they are working on new material, so that, to me, means tour. Maybe next time I can see them play without being soaked to the bone.

12. Black Flag – Damaged I
Ahh, ancient Black Flag. This is about as scaled down as Black Flag ever was. Henry Rollins doesn’t even sound like himself on this track even though it is indeed him and not Keith Morris, Dez Cadena or Ron Reyes. This song has the distinction of being the first writing credit Hank got with Black Flag. I’m not sure why I remember that, but it’s yet another useless tidbit that’s been stuck in my head for years.

13. The The – Kingdom of Rain
The The is one of those bands that cause people to go “Oh, that song?” I can seriously not think of another band who vary so much record to record. It probably has something to do with the fact that frontman Matt Johnson is batshit crazy. This particular track is from their record Mind Bomb. At this point in time, The The consisted of ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, Nick Lowe’s bassist James Eller and the drummer from ABC: David Palmer. However, Matt Johnson is almost always considered the only “official” member of The The.

14. The Cherry Cokes – Ill Weeds Grow Apace
I’ve professed my love for the Cherry Cokes before. This track, in particular, cracks me up because it really sounds like a lost Mighty Mighty Bosstones track to me. If you imagine that the vocals are a really drunken Dicky Barrett rather than a Japanese guy singing Irish punk, it’s pretty damn convincing. The Cherry Cokes prove that you can find a little bit of everything in Japan.

15. Bob Marley – Trenchtown Rock
I really thought I’d deleted all of my Marley tracks. I’ve got nothing against the guy, but his music has really turned into frat rock over the years. I realize that this is entirely in my head, but it just brings up memories of terrible college parties and terrible weed. Bob deserves better.