My Chemical Romance have you heard the news that you're dead? No one ever had much nice to say but I really liked you anyway

How could anyone not be in love with these incredibly talented
musicians and singers? I'm SO MAD RIGHT NOW!

Okay, so just when I thought that March of 2013 couldn't punch me in the gut one more time, I hear that one of my favorite bands has broken up. WTF?! Seriously guys? You couldn't have waited until April.

So now I've lost The Clone Wars, Young Justice, Green Lantern: The Animated Series, and My Chemical Romance???

Please, Please, Please let this just be an angsty, "I'm mad at everyone," phase
and take like a year or two off and then come back together again guys.

Hold on a second while I clear my throat and yell "AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!"

There..I feel just a wee bit better. So, you might be wondering why I loved "My Chemical Romance." Well there's many reasons actually, but probably the most prominent one is that I've been listening to them for literally seven years. I think that none of their songs sound the same, they wore elaborate costumes which appeal to me, and they seemed to be a band built around ideas and actions, hopes and dreams, with song lyrics that played hard and fast and were quite easy to understand.

Yes, they were loud but not the "kind of loud" that doesn't have an insane amount of talent behind it. They were without a doubt the emo band that I and many others loved because they saved people. MCR helped outsiders feel a little less alone. I look at my own catharsis that I felt every single time I played the song "Dead." I would literally describe it as an outflow of pent up anger at all the nameless people in my life that I perceive are oppressors--the damnable hordes of the self-righteous who are only appeased by failure from anyone that is not within their click.

So I guess us survivors are now left to pick up the pieces. I swear, 2013 is starting to look a lot like it's cursed.

Here's my favorite song from MCR. I think it's just incredible. It's called "Dead" and it seems oddly appropriate. Please listen to it if you have the time. It's wonderfully expressive and for me, definitely as good as any therapy session.

The members of "My Chemical Romance" were Gerard Way, Ray Toro, Mikey Way, and Frank Iero. "The Black Parade" in 2006 was the album that made me a fan and to this day, I still listen to all of the songs on my way home to visit my parents (a four hour drive).

My Chemical Romance have you heard the news that you're dead? No one ever had much nice to say but I really liked you anyway. :'(

May you forever Rest in Peace. XOXO -A fan signing off.

I could have predicted the rise of Asian French stoner food in the American zeitgeist if I'd just paid attention

CLICK TO EMBIGGEN. Is the hipster to blame for the tragic clash
happening in American cuisine. Magic 8 Ball says "Yes." Click for
source of Image.

I could have predicted the rise of Asian French stoner food to its prominence in the American zeitgeist if I'd paid attention to what was happening in Pocatello, Idaho about 10 to 12 years ago. And not that any of this "prediction" would have made an impact on my life, but I think from the standpoint of someone who looks to societal trends to stay in tune with what's interesting to hipsters, I might have enjoyed the validation of being right yet once again. At the time and crossing into that milestone called the thirties, I had both stoner friends who spent every extra dime they got on pot to friends that had plenty of discretionary income and were too smart for their own good because Idaho did not provide them with the challenges or the stepping stones to achieve greatness.

In my opinion, Asian food, French food, and stoner food all had their consumers. My friend Brad (one of the brightest men I know) was the first person that dropped the phrase "Japanese French fusion," and I remember I had no idea what that was. But the passion and excitement with which Brad approaches anything (whether it be poker, a movie, or the talk of fine coffees and food) explodes from his very presence like the Trinity bomb set off over White Sands, New Mexico. You know...the one where Dr. Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhadavad Gita and said, "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." Well, Asian French stoner food could very well be "I am become Death, destroyer of food and your wallet", and there's a part of me that feels I should have seen this coming. And maybe the fact that I don't appreciate all of it with the same jubilation as stoners in Colorado do over their decision to legalize pot...is a sign that this particular liberal democrat is indeed getting gray.

I'd grown up in a Japanese household that regularly ate things like sukiyake, sashimi on gohan, and sushi (to name a few dishes). And by the time the 90's ended, I'd been to a French restaurant or two and tasted fine things like chateubriand, foie gras, risotto, and could appreciate an excellent fromage even though I don't drink wine. This latter bit is not out of choice. I just happen to be allergic to alcohol and after a couple of sips or two, I need a Benadryl or it's going to be a trip to the hospital (I can eat things cooked in wine no problem).

And I'd also made plenty of stoner friends. What did they like to eat? Pretty much just fat...anything from nasty pork rinds to grilled cheese sandwiches (which have always made me gag--not a fan). Well those two worlds, probably thanks to the meteoric rise of celebrity chefs, gourmet kitchens, and the Food Network have now collided in every eatery from Salt Lake City to Montreal to San Francisco to New York City that wants to brand itself hip, and then go and charge you an arm and a leg for food which is essentially fat-on-fat and will challenge anyone's notion of appropriate caloric intake. It doesn't surprise me at all, since America as a whole is a place that has never respected food.

So what am I seeing? Craving tacos? Remember when "fish taco" was a surprising twist? Well now it's tacos stuffed with bulgogi, pigs' tails cooked in root beer, and a nationwide movement by foodies to instill the idea that literally anything can be improved by cooking it with some part of pig. Bacon hot chocolate anyone? Yeah...it's a real thing, and supposedly, "to die for."

Growing up, I would have insisted (if these foods were real people) that they were narcissistic much like my old intellectual friends I made in Pocatello, Idaho. I had a ton of fun with my narcissistic super smart friends (and I miss them a lot), but in the end, I would hope that they would never hook up because that would be a disaster. It would have been just too much of a clash to handle. Or would it?

So now you can go places in just about every town that has hipsters and money and order dishes like bite-sized hamachi sushi made crunchy with fried pork rinds or get sashimi slipped into a stack of flapjacks. Really? Picturing grilled cheese sandwiches? Let's stuff foie gras in there, garnish it with cucumbers pickled in rice wine vinegar and see if you gag. How about Arctic char, cured with sugar and lime zest and smoked for breakfast? How about the cold water fattiness of mackerel served with a plain old bed of crushed potato chips?

I admit, some of this stuff is really good but there's a mental tug-of-war going on in my mind. I wonder where it all stops, or where it all ends. Is the new Saturday normal eating breakfast pancakes with raw fish, salmon roe, and lime yogurt? When asked what's for lunch do I respond with "creamy cod fritters with strands of pickled cabbage and a garlic aioli." Is there ever going to be a time when I'm not the only one staring at a plate of barbecue sauce, raw and pickled cabbage, mayonnaise, pickled shallot, sriracha, shoestring potatoes, and spreadable egg yolk and think...this is grotesque.

Maybe food is like the sparrow in the mine. It's the pulse of America and as our population swells it is becoming harder and harder to have a voice and more difficult to distinguish ourselves from the person standing next to us. And the youth today according to many psychological studies are more vain and fame-obsessed than any generation that has ever walked the earth. Reinventions and reboots happen faster and faster with a continuous devaluation of the old as a trade off for finding something original to be "wowed" by and to rave about to our friends. Maybe too many of us cling to the notion that we are all interesting, when in fact, there are many uninteresting folks out there. But at some point in our lives, the line is crossed, and the sparrow dies. Let's just hope that none of us experience that from a restaurant and pay a truly astronomical sum for the privilege of eating garbage.

The fiction that reflects our troubled times

Is there a more disturbing line in Shakespeare than the one in which Shylock promises to Solanio in the Merchant of Venice when he says:

"If you prick us do we not bleed...and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

It is a promise, delivered via monologue, that Shylock shall stop at nothing, even if it means to sink to the level of those that wronged him. In my reading of the December issue of The New Yorker, I thought of this line.  It happened when I came across a remarkable story written by Margaret Atwood called "Stone Mattress" which is part of what I see as a new surge or re-invention in crime fiction. I'm going to say that this genre caught fire with Stieg Larson and the publishing of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

If you think about the plot, you know it already. A man terribly wrongs a woman via a brutal rape. The wrong that is done to the protagonist of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the same thing that is done to Atwood's Verna in Stone Mattress. A few generations ago, or even on Law & Order, this kind of story would focus on how terrible the villain is and then follow some law enforcement agent to tracking down the villain and bringing him to justice. Usually there would be some moral authority present to assuage the woman's anger at being brutally violated.

Well this story is cliche and has been reinvented. Now it's all about revenge. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo empowers herself over her rapist and effectively castrates him (if you consider that rape is not a sexual crime but one of power). Atwood takes this a step further in the Stone Mattress and makes a life-long female serial killer out of Verna. Many of the men that Verna kills are actually innocent of any wrong-doing toward her. Yet she destroys them anyway, because well...she was wronged.

At first upon finishing this story, I wondered if the writer took some sick pleasure in living within the skin of a protagonist in order to experience a complete evacuation of character and complexity. It's a touchstone of moral ugliness the same as a scene from American History X where Edward Norton curb stomps and kills some black gang members when he finds them breaking into a truck left to him by his father. In this case, the justice DID NOT fit the crime. But you can't help but watch because you realize, yes...humans are capable of such things. And therein is the horror. Anger, rage, and hatred that are allowed to flow so unchecked that there is nothing that we can recognize left behind, yet to which any number of us can relate. Is that ironic? That in a state of pure hatred we are perhaps at our most human?

Margaret Atwood

So why are these stories so popular? I would never classify The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or Stone Mattress as dystopian because I feel that definition applies to "setting" and not "character". Both literary works take place in settings that are no different from what we see every day. If anything, they are stories of an internal dystopian that takes place in the latticework of the human soul. If you were to go into the dreams of these people, would you experience the empty, urban, and utterly Escher-like metropolis that Leonardo di Caprio built in the deepest layer of his subconscious in the movie Inception? Is it because the idea of an "eye for an eye" is no longer acceptable? The United States is a pretty divided place right now. The country has a lot of anger, and based off of the riots that we witnessed in London and the Arab Spring that took place in 2011, I think it's safe to say that the whole world is also pretty angry.

There is no question that rape has a life-altering effect on its victims. But I can't help but wonder if the rise of these kinds of stories are a temperature gauge for the anger felt by men and women the world over who are sick and tired of being exploited, economically raped, and who long for a better life because people finally feel that they can rise up and be successful against brutal oppression. So my question to you is, do you think there is any merit to this hypothesis? And when you write, do you use your writing as a catharsis for the expulsion of feelings and frustrations that you may live with and can find no other outlet?

Congratulations to Cindy Borgne for being our 10 Lords A Leaping winner, the Prometheus trailer, and Jedi Ninjas

At the end of November, blogger Sarah Belliston organized the 12 Days of Christmas giveaway. Well the day that I was told to announce my winner is today.

Huzzah Cindy Borgne

You have been chosen by random.org to win $10 to Amazon.

If you don't already know Cindy, she's an award-winning author of science-fiction. You can find her website located here.

UPDATE...Here is the Prometheus trailer I've been waiting all week for (it gives me shivers):

And here's a video of the greatest Star Wars tribute ever. Jedi Ninjas.

I found this video last week and it only had 315 views. It's since gone viral.

I tweeted about it, so you may have already watched it.

Welcome to the Bah Humbug Blahg Fest by none other than Grumpy Bulldog

Today is my post for the Bah Humbug Blahg Fest created by my friend, Patrick Dilloway. It goes all day long and you still have time to enter if you haven't done so already. If you don't already follow Patrick, please visit his blog and click follow. Then, create your post answering the following question:

What are the 12 things I hate most about the holiday season?

Here are my answers:

1. Christmas music 24/7 on every radio station. It isn't so bad now that I live in a city, but boy when I lived in a small town with only three radio stations on FM this got really really old.

2. The bitter cold (it lasts six months). I live in the northern hemisphere and December is miserable. Additionally, where I live, there's always temperature inversions creating smog through the whole valley for weeks at a time. 

I'm not a fan of this.

3. Hazardous driving conditions. Snow and ice make for difficult driving.

4. No sunlight. On the night of the winter solstice there is more than 14-hours of darkness. That just sucks. Christmas is only a few days after that so it's almost the same. It seems like all I do is live in darkness.

5. Television consists of mostly reruns because its the period following the November sweeps.

6. That Thanksgiving and Christmas are so close together. In order to visit family for both vacations, it requires lots of time off, travel, and you have to turn around and do it again.

7. Finding an affordable gift for someone that already owns everything that is affordable and who has few activities that don't cost a lot of money. In other words, they don't read...haven't read a book ever. They just want to go on vacations, remodel the home, and scheme about ways to buy exclusive cars. Hard to get something under a hundred bucks when what they really want is granite countertops.

8. The celebrity Christmas album that everyone is talking about. I don't want to hear how Justin Bieber sings "Jingle Bells".

Sure he's posed here in the snow. In reality he's tanning under lime
trees in California because he too hates the cold.

9. Receiving a gag gift from a friend that thought you'd think it was funny when in truth, it's crap.

10. People who make a big deal out of Xmas versus Christmas.

Everyone loves Monopoly, right? The Community Chest card "XMAS FUND MATURES"
never got any complaints in any game I played. Why does this always pop up?

11. Inflatable yard decorations. I hate them. They're ugly and people keep them in their yard for too long and the wind deflates them and knocks them around.

I will always live in a neighborhood with an H.O.A. so I can report
people that let this go on too long. You would either love me as
a neighbor or absolutely hate me. I don't think there'd be an
in-between state.

12. Fattening sugary foods are everywhere. No matter where you turn, at the office someone has cookies, pies, cakes, rolls, candy...it's ridiculous. They bring them to work to fatten up the co-workers so that their families don't get fat. And I have a love/hate relationship with food. I'm at my best when there is no temptation.

Christmas calories don't count. Yeah, right.

ATTENTION YET ANOTHER BLOG FEST FOR DECEMBER 31ST. AHEM.

Before you leave I want you to know about one being run by Heather Arundel at her blog My Demon Spirits. In the contest, she wants you to write a holiday-themed story (it can be scary or whatever) that is 500 words or less, post it on your blog, comment on Heather's blog that you posted it and link back to it so she can see where it is, and then click "follow" on Heather's blog.

You can win a $25.00 Amazon Gift Card, a beautiful e-reader cozy, and a leather writing journal. The cozy's are done by Zizi Rho Designs by a lady that just happens to write and knit at the exact same time. You try pulling that one off.

Can you name all the vampires?

Have a great Thursday.

In a zombie apocalypse, I would want to live here

Just in time for The Walking Dead, the Zombie Apocalypse, and Halloween.

I assume it's affordable for any billionaire.

Don't forget...watch The Walking Dead on Sundays so that we can "squee" about it.

Have a great weekend.

Why I Can't Wait For Michonne

This mysterious black woman on the above cover is Michonne (pronounced ME-SHAWN). Her weapon is a katana and she's an expert at using it. This is her grand entrance which doesn't show her wearing a hood.  All badass people wear hoods. She shows up with two shackled zombies that she pulls along with a chain, one of whom is her former boyfriend and the other was his best friend. She cut off their arms and lower jaws to make them docile and unable to harm her.

Frank Darabont has confirmed that Michonne will be in the series but perhaps not until season 3.  Stephen King has also been signed to write one episode.

I leave you with more shots of Michonne who is arguably going to be the most badass character in any television series presently showing on any network.

In Writing The About You Section Of The Query Letter

A great response might be...

And just like that, you'll have an agent :)

Have a great weekend. >,<

Buying Too Much Computer

Back in 2009, I was a competitive gamer. So, I invested in a cutting-edge computer put together by this company named Digital Storm in California. They did an awesome job and I got an i7 chip overclocked with two monster video cards SLI-linked together so that I could play some great games.

Well...I've had nothing but trouble with this beast and I want to advise to any people out there...just stick with the regular computer companies. Dell, HP, etc. Just to be clear...this is not Digital Storm's fault. I bought a computer that I didn't understand with too many gadgets (like liquid cooling and overclocked RAM).

I had my motherboard fry out on this thing so had to have it shipped back. I also had a graphics card go bad and had that replaced by NVIDIA (great customer service). Well the latest thing that's been happening is I cleaned all the dust and gunk out of it yesterday and when I reconnected it, the RAID 0 solid state hard drives fell out of sync. I eventually got them resynced using an Intel program that does this kind of thing but now I occasionally get the blue screen of death. The only thing I can figure is that installing the new drivers for the video card might have done something that occasionally causes the desktop to crash.

I understand a lot about computers. But I don't understand RAID 0, AHCI, or some of the other error codes that I get. So yeah...lesson to learn from my mistake...avoid buying too much computer and you'll be happy. And always backup your stuff. I backup everything so am good even if my pc crashes for like two months and I have to ship it back to Digital Storm for them to fix. It just sucks being without your machine for that long.

There Are Days When...

I Weep For the Future...

Because more people watch this than know who the Speaker of the House of Representatives is.

Because these are the celebrity role models that the press writes about.

Because this is what your kids would rather do than read a book.

Because this man is a published author and on the most popular show on MTV of all time.

Because this is so so true.

Because I know people who feel that this really is being treated well.

Because wealth and beauty is all that matters.

I have no idea on what the fuck is going on here. But I do know that this is/was a POPULAR kids show.

...This needs no explanation.

Incoming Twitter/Facebook post and video uploaded to YouTube.

An Attempt At Writing YA

Teacher: "WHOEVER ANSWERS MY NEXT QUESTION CAN GO HOME."

One boy throws his bag through the open window.

Teacher: "Who threw that bag?"

Boy: "Me. I'm going home now."

GENIUS.

 

My Thoughts On Weekends, MG Fiction, & WWJD

FRIDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHTS...

NORMAL PEOPLE:

ME:

MY PERCEPTION OF MIDDLE GRADE FICTION:

AND FINALLY...WWJD (WHAT WOULD JESUS DO) IF HE WERE ALIVE TODAY?

Have I regaled you with my acerbic wit? Have a happy Hump Day :)