Beginnings: Cutting Out

Well, we’re coming to the end (for now). As far as where I’ll be on an almost daily basis after this week is done you can find me at The Hive, there are new threads starting up on a daily basis besides the scheduled discussions. There’s still the DC Conspriacy blog – and I’ll even be writing stories and catch-ups here twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays – probably just a bunch of short “Peanut Gallery” types of stories when I’m in the mood for one.

Beyond that, and beyond my super secret project, I’m taking on a new gig. I’ll be editing Josh Fialkov and Scott Keating’s upcoming World’s End, a full-color action/adventure romantic romp through post-Apocalyptic Earth filled with mutant freaks, radioactive wasteland, tricked out motorcycles and tough guys with really big fucking guns. We have a production blog started up where I’ll be dropping by once or twice a week to give some insight into the editing process (got my first post up, actually). Josh and Keating will be by as well to drop their thoughts, ask for opinions and keep you all up-to-date on the book’s progress. So stop by and say “hi”, please – you’re going to love the book and we want you involved from start to finish.

One more thing before the story. It turns out there’s another Moose in the Closet. When I first caught wind of this I admittedly got a little territorial – it’s not a big closet I live in, you know? But after some careful consideration I realized that if I had to share my closet with anyone it might as well be a lady – it’ll be like back in the day when I used to play “Seven Minutes in Heaven” – the girl I shared the closet with would lovingly tell me, “If you even look at me I’ll kick you in the balls.” The only downside to sharing my closet is that there’s a chance it'll ruin the best Google image search query of all time.

Ok, story time…

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Most of you who’ve been with this site from the beginning understand of how horrible Junior High School was. Between friends turning, the muggings for some of the most ridiculous things and the awkwardness of trying to fit in – Junior High was two years of my life that I was more than happy to put behind me.

My boy G was the valedictorian at JHS142; Alex was once again the salutatorian. G getting valedictorian was the worst thing that could possibly happen to the kid. He was already kind of timid, wasn’t much of a public speaker and didn’t want much attention turned towards him. If he had to do a speech in front of twenty friends and family he’d probably be a bit weary.

But in this instance, he had to do a speech in front of a thousand people, 90% of which didn’t give a shit about the valedictorian – 50% of which actually harbored a level of hatred towards the valedictorian.

That’s like George Bush giving a speech in Palestine about how Israel is doing a bang-up job keeping the peace.

The graduation ceremony was a joke. People were bringing beach balls and toilet paper, yelling and shouting during the entire event. No shit, when cats went up to get their diploma they were jumping across the stage, crying out to the audience, singing – grabbing the microphone from the presenter and making fucking speeches – it’s all well and good to be proud of yourself for making it through the difficult two years of junior high but Jesus Christ, I haven’t seen people this proud when receiving PHDs.

My father, always the sarcastic one, made the quip that these people were so excited because, most likely, this is the only diploma they’re going to get. And it’s sad but it’s true. This has nothing to do with race, the thugs in our school were evenly distributed across all races, but the fact is they were straight thugs. And whereas some of them were capable of straightening themselves out the majority of them had two destinations – Bishop Ford if they could afford it and John Jay if they couldn’t. And most likely they weren’t going to make it through either of those schools.

Side note, I got a full scholarship to Bishop Ford and my mom insisted I went because it was free when it would otherwise cost a couple of grand a year. The logic is retarded, because Midwood High School is consistently one of the best schools in New York (and easily one of the best free public schools) and tens of thousands of people apply to it and get rejected each year. But Bishop Ford was obviously a better choice, because most people going there are paying for it.

Nothing wrong with that mentality, it’s the kind of thinking a lot of families who don’t have much take. Even Robin went to a famous prep school solely because she got a free scholarship there – she hated it, transferred after three years. But that’s her story, not mine, and this little digression isn’t today’s story, either.

So – toilet paper and beach balls and people screaming out words of praise every time someone grabbed a diploma. Then it was G’s turn to take the stage and man-oh-man was that some hostile environment type of shit.

Can you imagine some people actually booed? And by some people I mean half the people who were there – parents and their kids. I shit you not, thirty year old women sitting in the audience and booing G when he took the stage.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

I didn’t hear a word he said, everyone was talking and screaming and booing and throwing shit. G kept his head down, read his cards, and walked off the stage without once looking at the audience reaction as if it was possible to ignore it. I felt so bad for the kid.

The marching band came out after that and the place exploded, people dancing in the aisles – singing, just rocking the fuck out, the entire ceremony falling apart.

There were two days of classes left after graduation, if I remember correctly, and I didn’t go to either of them. I was done. G went to both days and told me they were fun, everyone was just hanging out; they played lots of basketball, no fights, no nothing. I felt kind of shitty for not going but that feeling was completely erased by the exhilaration of starting high school.

Beginnings: The Speech

Before I get to today’s story, the first story in the last week of Moose stories (for now), I just wanted to ramble a little bit. I’ve been working pretty fucking hard on my super secret project and this weekend I literally did nothing except write, think, and design while visiting a variety of coffee shops and book stores (sometimes to get work done and sometimes to do some research and talk to the owners…ohhh…cryptic hints).

Anyway, Robin went out Friday night and I fell asleep on the couch at about eleven – just passed the fuck out. She comes home and our little rat terrier purse-dog jumps off the couch and starts barking at the person at our door like she always does. So I wake up and starting thinking to myself, “Fuck – did I lock the door – Robin’s sleeping,” and then find the door opening up. I flip out man, total adrenaline rush, jump off the couch and charge the door ready to fuck up whoever comes through hit. Stop just in the nick-of-time when my brain processes it was Robin, I almost took her out.

Not twelve hours later I get a package from my mom with some stuff she was supposed to send. Being a good mom, she included some scratch tickets. The object of one of them is to match my cards to the winning cards. My cards were an 8, 5, 4 and Jack. I’m scratching off the cards I need to match and I’m winning like mad. 5-bucks, 15-bucks. I scratch off a five-hundred dollar spot and lose my mind, I’m so psyched. Than I get to the last one, it’s a jack and the prize is 500,000 dollars. Total adrenaline rush, again – I’m flipping the fuck out, obviously. Turns out I needed to match suite and card – I didn’t even realize that – and I won nothing.

Moral of the story – I almost had two heart-attacks this weekend and I desperately need some fucking sleep. Bitch slapping comics is going to be the death of me.

Announcement tomorrow regarding the next project I’m editing (and it has nothing to do with the super secret project). For now, story-time…
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I might as well get this out of the way so you all can laugh about it and then get on with the rest of the story: I was the valedictorian at my elementary school. That’s right; my elementary school had a valedictorian. Get all the laughs out now and then we’ll get back down to business.

Towards the end of the sixth grade there was this intense race for the valedictorian between me and this kid Alex. Alex was a character – I knew him from kindergarten straight through high school – he’d always try to impress the ladies with his piano skills which were really good in elementary school but never improved significantly beyond that.

But that was his thing back in 58s, man – he’d play that fucking piano for every assembly, get down with it too – head swaying like he’s Stevie Wonder and shit. When he wasn’t playing the piano he was making these comic books which featured our friends as super heroes. Everyone had these cool powers – G could shoot ice and Ross was a ninja – everyone except me who had the ability to stretch. I was basically Mr. Fantastic except I wasn’t super intelligent – I just kind of reached shit that was in high places, that was my job. I was always getting killed or injured five pages into the story, dying the hero’s death after I got the key that was dangling thirty-feet in the air and was needed to open the door to the secret temple.

There was a bit of a rivalry, you know? He’d always try to push me out of hand ball games in the school yard by using the “it’s my ball routine”. We even went to swords over a girl in the fifth grade, this chick Laurie, hairy like a fucking gorilla at a ridiculously young age. Alex and I went head-to-head for her until G pointed out to me that she has arms like my father’s – that’s enough to get me to back off and let Alex have her.

But it was all shit like that – the girls and the comics and the handball and the piano – that defined the relationship between Alex and I – childhood rivals that played humanly together – and it all came to a head towards the end of the sixth grade.

There could be only one valedictorian.

Mr. Ringston pulled me out of class to tell me I got it – I wasn’t even happy for myself or proud or anything like that, all that was on my mind was that I was going to be able to rub it into Alex’s face. That it was going to be me giving the closing speech at our graduation, the last kid standing on the stage. When I walked back into the classroom I looked over at Alex and smiled, he immediately knew what just happened.

I fucking won.

I wrote my speech with the help of my parents. It was pretty straightforward, talk about friendships and teachers – the usual sixth grade valedictorian shit. I had this one line I was proud of , I was to say, “…as we walk through THAT door for the last time,” while pausing reflectively to point at the door at the back of the auditorium, reminiscing over my childhood while mentally preparing for junior high – that, right there, was my fucking money shot.

When graduation day came I was prepared, king of the fucking world, index cards in hand and ready for my five minutes of fame. They went into the awards – I shit you not when I say I won twenty-four awards. Everything from attendance to these special city-wide awards signed by the Brooklyn Borough President himself, whom I believe was Howard Golden back then.

I was called up for every one of them. Language Arts. Math. History. Three awards from Field Day. I was like the Lord of the Rings crew at the Oscars except five times dorkier.

Then came time for my speech. I took the podium and rocked it, all eyes on me, moved by my spirited words and especially touched by my “walk through those doors for the last time” line.

We all stood up, marched out, our parents cheered us on.

The next day they added my name to the PS58 plaque of valedictorians. Right there, etched in gold-painted metal, it said “JASON RODRIGUES”.

With the “S” – continuing a long tradition of getting my name wrong and proving that sixth grade valedictorian means shit.

And on that note, I was off to Junior High.

Toys

One of those fucking nights, man.

Saw pages from Josh Fialkov’s and Jay Busbee’s upcoming projects – both of them were beautiful. This was the day after seeing pages of Jay’s other upcoming project and reading the script to Josh’s other upcoming project. I’m talking gorgeous, here. Different. The kind of shit you just read and never complain about, try to order prints of the pages so you can put them up on your wall.

Then I had a two hour phone call with Chris Stevens. You don’t know him yet but you most likely will. His book looks gorgeous – Art Adams, Jae Lee, Farrell Darymple, James Jean, etc, etc, etc. Best part is the dude is a ridiculously talented writer so it’s more than just eye candy. It’s practically done and we’re talking about where he should take it. When your book is so good you’re deciding what publishers to go with instead of what publishers will go with you, you’re in a good position.

Meanwhile I’m learning Illustrator CS which I just installed, trying to get some copy and graphics together for a little something-something so I can send it to the ridiculously talented Jason Hanley to make up some material for me that I can bring to New York Comic Con and maybe, you know, beat the shit out of this industry with it.

Just one of those fucking days, my man. The kind where you see change coming.

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Going through some old pictures today, trying to get inspired to write a story, saw this one with my old Castle Greyskull in the background and started thinking about all my old toys. Way I see it, next week is all the sign-off shit, the closing out the story drama. So, you know, let’s just talk about toys today and leave the heavy lifting for next week.

But not the good toys, that wouldn’t be very “Moose in the Closet” like. Let’s talk about the shitty toys.

Like Madballs. What the fuck was up with that? I mean, whereas it was cool having a ball that looked like a deformed head they didn’t really throw all that well, they just sort of went with the wind and never really traveled too far. The only thing they were good for was soaking them with water and lunging them at someone’s head, giving them a face full of wet ugly.

But no matter how useless the Madballs where, nothing will ever top the #1 gayest toy I ever owned. Worst than my Pound Puppy. Worse than my Care Bears. I owned a Popple.

That folded into a soccer ball.

Popples where these plush dolls that tucked into them selves and became plush balls that were great for…I don’t know, rolling. I guess in an attempt to get boys to buy them they made the sport versions. Well, it worked, because – you know – I had the soccer ball Popple.

Only soccer ball I ever owned. And yeah, I used to walk around the house kicking it. It got old after a little while but when I first got it – hot damn I was rocking Pele-style with my plush soccer ball that transformed into something that vaguely looked like the type of bear that loves to be the bitch in bear-prison.

I was always the fan of the big Playsets. I love my Castle Greyskull. Boulder Mountain – my dad drove his ass out to Toys R’ Us after working two friggin jobs to get me the Boulder Mountain Playset from M.A.S.K.. Wasn’t my birthday or anything, I just wanted it; he knew I wanted it, he got it. Got the Cobra Terrordrome for Christmas one year, big ass playset. I had the original G.I.Joe base, the Dagoba Playset from Star Wars as well as the Ewok Village which was easily my favorite fucking toy as a kid next to my AT-AT. Hell, even my Snake Mountain playset was dope despite the fact that the Horde started as a She-Ra villain. The friggin thing came with a snake hand puppet that you can use to swallow He-Man whole – bad ass.

I swear to God, I don’t think I ever had a playset that I didn’t like.

Vehicles, however, almost always left me disappointed.

Like the G.I. Joe Bridge Layer, for instance, which I didn’t ask for but got it anyway this one Christmas. What a piece of crap that turned out to be – it was a playtime killer. If at any point you’re playing with your G.I. Joes and your plot calls for the Bridge Layer you instantly realize that your thread is dead and you should just put away your toys and try again tomorrow.

Vehicles – if ain’t the Millennium Falcon it shouldn’t exist.

I also love the weak figures in an otherwise powerful line. Like the Rock Guys from He-Man. This was He-Man’s attempt at cashing in on the Transformers craze – they were these figures that “transformed” into rocks. And by “transform” I mean you bend them over and they look like rocks. And by “rocks” I mean boring-ass rocks that you end up using as background scenery during playtime.

Even Transformers, the greatest toy line of all time, had their shitty toys. I had these guys - they essentially folded over and became drills. You pull them back and they roll on their own for about three seconds before popping open and landing on their feet. So, it was essentially a transformer that took a second to transform and was capable of moving on it own for a little bit provided your room wasn’t lined with carpet which mine was.

Shitty toy.

But nothing beats the Go-Bots. Talk about a line created solely for the shitty toys. I remember this episode of Go-Bots where this submarine Go-Bot needed to go under water. He turns to this kid and says, “I’m just happy to help. I’m sure you can imagine there isn’t much need for a submarine on Gobotron.” And here I am, a little six year old kid, and even I said, “So why the fuck is there a submarine on Gobotron?”

“Oh. To sell toys.”

And I bought them, obviously. And complained that they weren’t transformers.

Gross!

Well, technically my second article for The Hive should be up this morning but Buzzscope’s been acting up all night so I don’t know if it’ll be there. I hope so, trying to build some momentum with this bitch. UPDATE: It's up!

I’ve been busy. Busy, busy, busy. Some of your have been contacted, some have not been (but you will be) and some of you will have words with me at New York Comic-Con whether you like it or not. Busy man – exciting things. Tease, tease, tease…

Updated my business cards for NY, coming to town with a fresh batch. Suit’s in the dry cleaners and ready for that Saturday. I still need to go get a new hat for the suit, I’m thinking I might get a kangol to go with it. You really don’t give a shit about any of this, get on with the story you say, we’re almost done, next week is the last week.

The Moose is almost out of the fucking closet…

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Today’s story is not for the faint of heart, prudish, or squeamish. Everything today falls under what Chris Piers would call “too much information”. It’s not even a story, really, just a collection of little tales that are meant to make you laugh a bit and perhaps remind you that you’re not alone in this world – we all have our gross moments.

Like when I was thirteen and had diarrhea and thought I could hold in. Instead I sharted and it ran down my leg and out my pants, left a nice little present on the living room floor which I didn’t notice and instead kept on walking, tracking mud as I went. Five minutes later I hear my mom yell, “ill” and telling my dad that Elizabeth, my sister, had an accident on the floor. It took me all of three seconds to put it together and check the inside of my pants – sure enough there was a mudslide running down that I was somehow oblivious to. I didn’t speak up, though, it’s not like they were going to punish an almost-two year old for shitting on the floor.

Oh, I’m just getting warmed up. Wait until you hear about the love sock.

But first, how about I tell you about the vat. The vat was this gallon jug half filled with apple juice my roommate and I kept in the close freshman year in college. As part of a year long science experiment we tried to see how disgusting we can make it’s contents. We threw everything in there – cigarette butts, pieces of bread, banana peels, bugs – every once and a while one of us would be holding something in our hand and we’d decided that it NEEDS to go into the vat.

We’d have to lift our shirts over our noses because the smell would make you puke. We quickly take off the cap, throw the object in, put the cap back on, mix it up and leave the room for several minutes to let it air out. The fucking vat became its own ecosystem eventually, new strains of bacteria and molds were springing up daily – you’d look inside it and see shit moving and wonder how it got in there –the stuff we were putting into the vat was spawning new life

Eventually my roommate wanted to get rid of the vat but I refused to let it go. There were only a couple of months left in the school year and there was no way I was willing to pull the plug prematurely. Besides, I’m pretty sure if I tried to get rid of it the vat would revolt.

On the last day of school, before we were kicked out of the dorms, we blocked a sink in the bathroom and filled it with the contents of the vat. I still feel bad for the poor fuck that had to clean that shit up.

And sometimes you don’t realize how gross something is until someone tells you…

My Grandpa John – he gave me handkerchiefs one year for Christmas. It’s such a weird present, the kind of thing a kid would only get from some old man that doesn’t believe in tissues. Not wanting to waste the present, I started using the handkerchief.

It was all good until I got a nasty cold, my nose was running like mad and every five minutes I’d pull the handkerchief out of my jacket, blow my nose, fold it up and put it back in my jacket. I was dating M at the time and after watching me take this crusty, snot filled rag out of my jacket pocket ten times or so (and even then after using it for a week straight) she stops me and tells me that what I’m doing is quite possibly the most disgusting thing she’s ever seen and I should use a tissue like a normal person.

I didn’t use the handkerchief after that. It lasted an entire week – unlike my torrid affair with the love sock.

Ah, the love sock. When you’re just hitting puberty and learn the joys of masturbation you try new and exciting things out. Usually these new and exciting things are along the lines of, “hey, I wonder what jerking off is like standing up?” or “hey, I wonder what jerking off is like if I invert my right hand so it’s like an upside down left hand?”

Every once and a while us guys (or me, at least, really putting myself out there), go all MacGyver and try to figure what we can stick our dicks in so as to emulate fucking. I don’t remember every object I tried to have sex with at that young age – I think toilet paper roll is standard, I know of several other guys who tried that. Rolling the blankets into a tightly packed ball never worked. Shampoo bottles always seemed ideal – you screw the cap off and there’s a natural lubricant in there, luckily for everyone in my household I never rocked a pencil dick – what I don’t have in length I make up for in girth (and my dick is above average length which means it’s girthy as all fuck if you’re doing the math).

Turns out the best item in the household I could use for a jerk-off assist was a nice, cozy sock – my thermal socks, actually.

The thing is, I was paranoid that my mom would catch on when she pulled my sock out of the hamper and it was stiff as a board. So the only logical thing to do (to a young teenager, that is) was to keep using the same sock. I’d hide it under my mattress and take it out when I needed a little “extra” attention – it was like a special treat. Well, a year into that and the sock was practically walking on its own – I finally decided to throw it out.

That sock was by far the most disgusting thing to ever exist. The cum was so crusted that the fucking thing made this scraping noise whenever I put it on – little white flakes falling on my muff and making it look like I have pubic dandruff.

God, it was so gross.

Oh, and I was also a picker/sticker as a kid so the wall behind my mattress was caked in boogar, in case you wanted to cram one last image in your head.

Putting the Mega in Jesus Christ

I'm putting together two pitch packages - one for this site and one for a super secret project you'll hear nothing about until April at the earliest. While putting together the pitch for The Moose I'm compiling some stats on what I've done in the past year here. I isolated the publishable stories, not the blurbs or the ramblings. My original estimate for words published for this year-long project was 168,000 words – 240 stories in a year at around 700 words a piece. That’s close to three industry-standard novels.

The count so far, with seven stories left to go - I’m a couple of hundred words away from 200,000. If you add in the blurbs and the two weeks of guest stories there has been 276,443 wordspublished on the Moose in a year. If you add that little 50,000 word novel I wrote in November the number climbs up to 326,443 words in a year - and that's not counting the 17 Here's the Thing..., two books I edited and full-time job I worked. Not to pat my own back but "fuck yeah".

I don’t know - something to be proud of. And they’re entertaining, I think, people keep coming back – you know? The Saturday after this is all said and done I’ll post the numbers for the pitch packet including some thoughts on the experience, my favorite stories, shit like that.

But for now, seven stories to go.

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First semester senior year I decided to try my hand at directing for my troupe’s Fall One-Act festival. I decided on a play, “Judgment Call” by Frederick Stroppel – a ten minute show about umpire’s dealing with life after a bad call leads to a player committing suicide.

Of course I did a baseball show, what did you expect?

I presented the play to my troupe and it was accepted, I began to prepare for auditions. There were three one-acts in the festival – Q was doing Nina Shengold’s “Anything for You” and this girl Katie was doing Israel Horowitz’s “Line”. Since my cast was all men and Q’s cast was all women we didn’t butt heads. But Katie – oh man did we get off on the wrong foot.

She wanted all of the best actors that auditioned with us and she wouldn’t budge. It got to the point where we had to get the president of the troupe involved and he had to basically tell her that she couldn’t have everyone she wanted, Q and I had the right to at least two of her first picks. I ended up nabbing two of the three actors I wanted and Q got one of the two he wanted.

Directing was fun and working with an all male cast made it more of a bonding thing than a work thing. We went to ballgames together, watched baseball movies – I tried to get these guys in a baseball state of mind. I stressed timing as being more important than the lines themselves – we’d have exercises where we’d sit around a table and deliver our lines while staying stationary to ensure we grasped the beats between lines, I was kind of notorious for putting a ruler to the knuckles if a line came too fast or too slow.

Another advantage of an all male cast – no-one will complain if you physically abuse them during rehearsals.

By the time the one-act festival rolled around my play was the tightest, and that’s more than my ego talking – everyone was saying it. Just delivered perfectly, everyone hit their lines just right and the comedy came out strong as did the drama. After the show people who’ve worked with us in the past were telling me they wanted to be in the next show I directed - I was even considering pitching a full length for next semester I was so excited with the response for this one.

But the theater gods had something else in store for me.

Before the second night of the one-act festival I was messing around on stage and belting out some show tunes. Greg, the troupe’s president, overhears me and asks if I’d want to do a one-man musical. I tell him, “sure, let me write one.”

Guam and I sit down and within a week have a pitch for Jesus Christ Megastar. We pitched it to the troupe and it was instantly turned down. Didn’t have a “story”, as if a musical really needs that.

We retooled the story and repitched. Greg loved it but the other two people in charge; they weren’t so down with the one-man musical that’s potentially offensive to every religion on earth. We got the go ahead to put it on BUT we had to produce it ourselves. Every penny for that play came out of mine and Guam’s pockets.

I already talked enough about the play (right here and here, mainly, along with audio samples) so I won’t rehash all those details.

We recorded the soundtrack in the Tower’s music room; a little place none of us knew existed until the day Q showed it to us. We had a little two line mixer and recorder, made the cheapest recordings imaginable and sold the CDs at 5 bucks a pop to turn a slight profit on the show.

The recordings and the writing sessions and the rehearsals – it was all captured on film. For Robin’s project she was doing a documentary on the making of Jesus Christ Megastar. It was entirely her idea, she followed us around for a couple of weeks with lights and cameras and make-up kits, interviewing us and pulling quotes for her film.

She screened the documentary one evening for some subset of her film school. I couldn’t make it, unfortunately – I actually never got to see the final version although I helped out a bit with the editing. Apparently there was one line that caused a lot of discussion amongst the people she screened it for – I said that JCMS was my last creative endeaver – that after it was all said and done I go into the real world, put on my tie and start earning a paycheck.

That sparked a bit of back-and-forth over why I felt like I couldn’t find time to create just because I was going into the “real world”. Robin couldn’t answer for me and I wasn’t able to defend myself but, six years later I’d say they were all right – you can create and work full time, JCMS wasn’t my last hurrah, just the start of a thought I’ve yet to finish.

The following year the people within the troupe who refused to pay for the play decided to try and emulate what we’ve done with JCMS and produced what they called the “Senior Play”, completely cheapening what we managed to achieve. For JCMS, there were people who came out to every show. We were signing autographs when it was finished. I was getting email requests for the video, people who were willing to buy a copy off of me. From what I understand, the Senior Play couldn’t even compete with JCMS, a five man musical, written and produced over one semester.

There are people with vision and then there are the blind people who try to follow in their footsteps – it’s true in theater much like it’s true in comics.

Paintball

Gearing up for the second article for The Hive dealing with supplemental content. The last one got crazy busy and I’m hoping this time has even more people showing up – a good chunk of people popped on by the introductions thread since the last discussion so that means we should have a light increase, at least. These first three weeks aren’t very sexy, either way; it’s all the preliminary stuff. Financing, distribution and marketing – that’s when The Hive blows up.

Anyway, The Moose continues…

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Senior year in high school I played paintball for the first time. It was outdoors, in the snow, a bunch of kids from high school playing this massive 30 on 30 game of capture the flag – it was a great time. People hiding behind snow banks, climbing into trees and laying down cover fire. The snow made the paintballs wicked frozen and, in turn, it felt like people were pelting you with rocks. At the same time, when they didn’t jam in the gun, they rarely burst so the games where over pretty quick – a speedy runner can grab the flag and be back at base without getting a single paintball opening up on him.

I was the general for one round – I ordered half of my troops to take a frontal assault and sent a small group of ten to circle around the back and surprise the enemy.

They were the first to get shot up, we lost that round.

After hours of playing and having fun, both guys and girls alike, we left that snowy field with a newfound love of paintball, ready to play again, talking about getting our own guns and making seasonal trips out to the countryside to play wargames.

Freshman year in college was the second and last time I played paintball.

My boss from the dining hall organized a trip out to Brockton, Massachusetts – the fucking white trash jewel of the East Coast – to play some indoor paintball. Pretty much everyone who worked in the dining hall signed up and some of us brought friends along – I brought R, for instance, and we were ready for an afternoon of frolicking fun and paintball goodness.

We were supposed to have the place to ourselves – at least that’s what the owner told us. Ten minutes before we were to start this pick-up truck pulled up out front, guys jumping out with full camouflage and a variety of paintball guns strapped to their body. Thick glasses, flat feet and fucked up teeth – these were the guys that couldn’t make into the marines and were pissed to all hell about being stuck in their jobs at the gas station.

The owner tells us that these guys are going to play with us and we’re obviously not too happy about that but, we figure, what the fuck, right? It’s only paintball. Meanwhile these guys are talking about flanking patterns and practicing their cover formations and hand signals, looking at paintball magazines and saying how they need to invest in a scope or some paint-mines.

These games went fast as well – not because the paintballs weren’t rupturing or because they were getting jammed but because we were getting fucking killed. R dropped out within an hour, two deep bruises on her skin from well placed paintballs. I was taking my lumps, spending most of the days in a “defensive posture” which basically meant I found somewhere to hide and only shot if my opponent was alone and within three feet of me.

The indoor game – it made the paintballs hurt a lot more, people turning corners and shooting you in the gut from five feet away. The professionals we were up against had these automatic guns and they’d lay down three or four shots within a second and a half, hit you first on your arm that’s brandishing the weapon, twice in the chest and once in the mask for good measure. They were fucking insane.

One time I was “defending and there was a hole in the wall above my head. A fucking paintball gun comes through the hole while I’m not paying attention and presses against my head. The inbred idiot quietly whispers, “You can take it or throw your hands up.”

Seriously, who the fuck would take it? Who’s the tough guy that would take a paintball to the cranium from two inches? If there was any doubt that this was a dangerous situation we got ourselves into it was erased right there – these guys were future fucking killers.

I throw my hands up and walk through the building yelling, “Dead Man coming through”. I see my boss sitting in the neutral zone, drenched in paint, and I tell him this was the worst fucking idea he’s ever had – why Brocton? Of all the places we could have went to, why did we need to pick this shit kicking town?

We had a ROTC chick on our side, she was the only one that was really producing for us, she’d just run through rooms popping shots. One time me and her where laying behind this shield, there were two of our opponents across the room from us and holding us down. She looks at me and tells me we’re going over, asks if I’m ready. I say yeah, I’m with a fucking marine for shit’s sake. She yells “simper fie”; I get amped and bring my body up about three inches before taking a paintball to the head.

I shit you not – worst pain of all time. You see stars, your brain hurts, and you’re dizzy. Ms. Marines asks me if I’m all right and I just whimper. I finally have enough in me to stand up again and I just yell “Dead Man coming through” and get the fuck out of the hot zone, call it a day. R’s pissed at me, the whole crew is beat to shit, we never won a single match – paintball just isn’t for me, I guess.

Sweat Shop

Two weeks of Moose left.

I was away this weekend, got to relax a bit and read Fables V6 as well as the first issue of Miriam’s jobnik! Fables is just such a guilty little fun. It’s not great comic booking but it doesn’t have to be – it’s just a shitload of chuckles and “ohhhs”, isn’t it? Watching Little Boy Blue wreck shop in the Homelands, cutting people in half and lopping off heads – that’s good ole’ popcorn flick comic booking right there. I’d love to see this made into a movie – probably more so than any comic book around now – it’s just made like a movie, a healthy dose of sex, violence, adventure and fantasy.

jobnik!, completely different but just as good. It wasn’t at all what I expected, subtle little things that you need to look over several times because you’re not sure whether you’re seeing what you thought you saw the first time around, an interesting character study where the writer is the character she’s studying. Miriam puts it all out there, I give it up to her – readers of this site know that I’m a fan of honesty and reflection. I learned a lot about myself by doing this site – you kind of see a sense of self realization within Miriam as you turn the pages of her book.

Good comic booking all around this weekend.

And I got a hot stone message. Goddamn that felt good. And my masseuse had some sexy-ass feet. I love feet.

_____________________________

The summer before I started college my father convinced me that I needed to get a real job and make some money before going off to Boston – the video store wasn’t going to pay me enough to get through the summer and buy my school books. So my father set me up with a job at the print shop he worked at in Queens.

My father, at this point, was a hot shot printer. He was running a big-ass press, running off baseball cards and what not. His press was on the second floor of his shop, all clean looking and right near the corporate offices. He never really got to see how the other half lived, the downstairs people who were running the collating machines and the shitty printing presses – it was essentially a sweat shop.

And I worked down there for two summers – earning minimum wage – while my bourgeois father got air conditioning and a clean, safe working environment.

I was the only American born in the massive, windowless bottom-floor, the only one who spoke fluent English, really. There were three groups of people – the Hispanic women who were fresh off the boat and did the most mindless jobs imaginable like labeling boxes, the Hispanic men who worked the dangerous presses like the ones that applied ultraviolet ink and corrosive chemicals, and then there was Tony, the Asian guy who fixed everything.

My first couple of weeks on the job I was just sort of filler, if someone didn’t show up I took their place. This had me occasionally applying labels with the Hispanic female crew, rumors started going around that I was hot for one of them. She was the only young one of the bunch, probably 19 or 20. She was cute, had a little bit of a femme-stashe but the kind that was still a little on the sexy side in a weird sort of way. She didn’t speak a word of English though, when the rumor that I was hot for her got to my pops he joked with me that the only word that girl knew was “Green Card”.

Anyway, nothing happened there – I can’t even say I was interested and the fact that she was attractive didn’t even occur to me until people started telling me I was supposedly hooking up with her. It’s hard to notice things like cute girls when it’s 95-degrees with no air circulation or sun light and you’re getting paid five bucks an hour to huff boxes across the print-shop.

Usually the only thing you see is spots.

One time Tony, the Asian fixer-upper, needed my help for something and we fixed a printing press together. Tony took a bit of a liking to me and I became his assistant for the rest of the summer, hung out in his workshop until we were needed.

Life got a lot easier.

We spent a lot of time outside, one of the projects we got tasked involved installing a new ventilation system on the roof of the print shop. Tony had a thick Asian accent and one day he was telling me we need to do some extra work on the roof because it’s not “yevow”. I kept asking his why the roof being yellow matters and he was yelling back, “No, no, it’s not “yevow”. Finally I’m like, “Ohhh…level…”

That pretty much summarizes every day with Tony.

One time during the roof project my ladder fell and Tony was nowhere in site. I had to climb down through the window of the third floor (which was a floor much like the first but with more immigrants and windows) and ran through the floor, embarrassed, no-one up there knew who I was and I didn’t want anyone to accuse my ass of trespassing. People were getting all freaked out because some white boy came through their window and started running around, they likely thought I was INS or some shit.

And that was that summer, every day it was a different story involving me looking like an idiot (like the time I broke the sink). The following summer working there, however…that was a little different.

This guy Cliff picked me up before Tony got a chance to – I worked the boxing machine all summer, the most mindless job imaginable. I don’t know if it was called the boxing machine but that’s what I did – the boxes came to me folded up and I put shit in them, taped it up, and put them on a skit. That was my day. For eight hours, five days a week, all summer. I’d actually count boxes to past time – when your best entertainment is to count the hundreds of boxes that pass through your hands, you know your job sucks.

If someone ever needed me to run some other errand I’d just disappear and never come back, no-one knew I was missing. I’d get called away, some Hispanic woman would take my place, and I’d finish my task in two minutes and then climb on top of a massive pile of boxes and take a nap. I used to actually refer to myself as “Silent Ninja Deadly Cat” and I’d crawl around these fourteen foot high pile of boxes (and skits) until I felt confident in finding one outside the line of sight of anyone on the floor.

And then just sleep. Maybe read some comics. Punch out five hours later.

My father told me he wanted me to work at his shop to make some college money but, in all honesty, I think he wanted me to do it to teach me a lesson – do good in school, no college grad will work the jobs I was working no matter how you do.

I got a new level of respect for my dad out of it. When I was going up he worked in the windowless print shop, the big-ass machine and the lack of circulation – he worked the day and night shift when I was kid to do right by his kids. And he made well with it but it took him over twenty years to get there.

You respect someone a lot more when you see where they started as opposed to where they ended up.

My B, B

Two weeks left to the Moose. I’m excited. Monday's story may be late, spending some time out of the city with the Lady.

Story time…

______________

I think I’ve grown over the past year. There’re two weeks left, I’ve written over 240 stories so far, there’s no way I haven’t grown. At the same time, though, this little writing experiment has proven to be wicked therapeutic. I’ve learned a lot about myself and my relationships and in some instances I’ve come to realize that I was the asshole.

Like with B, for instance.

B stopped talking to G and I sophomore year in college – no return phone calls or emails. G and I always assumed it was because we played strip poker with his girlfriend. Hell, we were told that by his boy Jimmy. But already on this site I told the story about how we almost killed him and I now realize that there might have been other things that sent the relationship sour.

Like Speed Pool, for instance. B was the only friend of ours with a pool table so we always found ourselves getting a game on at his place. Sometimes that game would turn into Speed Pool which is regular 8-ball accept if you hit the cue ball after it stops moving you scratch. Whereas it’s a remarkably fun game the ball has a tendency to fly off the table, hit people and, at least once a game, put a hole in a wall. We put quite a few holes in his wall.

There was also the chauffer factor – B was one of the few kids with a car and he was also the only one that didn’t drink so we had him drive our asses all over Brooklyn, calling him up in the middle of the night like he was our own personal car service, inviting ourselves out to his place in Bay Ridge but insisting that he picked us up first. I can imagine that would get pretty annoying.

He was also one of the first kids to have AOL and we’d always use his screen name to either talk shit to the people on his buddy list or to have cybersex with someone who claimed to be 17 and a female – he’d always get weird IMs pop up from people asking if he wanted to have another go and he would have no idea what they were talking about.

One time a bunch of us were hanging out at his place and while he was out doing something we ordered a porno movie through his cable box. It was over in five minutes and someone dared me to order another one so I did. At the end of the month 16 dollars in porno movies showed up on his mother’s bill and we had to fess up – he wasn’t too happy about that, obviously.

And then there was the whole “taking Mike over to his place so the mother can patch him up after he got shot in the neck” deal.

On the whole, I think you can say we were bad friends to B.

Then there was the fact that he started dating Jackie who, back then, I had a bit of a thing for. I don’t know, it wasn’t a “thing” thing but there was certainly a little bit of thing – certainly a level of jealousy, like I was stuck at the friend level and yet he managed to find some way to jump it.

And then you take that into consideration and you look at everything else, all the attempted murders and strip poker games, and you start to realize that maybe, just maybe, that was behind it all.

And you realize that for the past eight years, the reason you and B stopped talking may not have been as cut and dry as saying, “I saw his ex-girl’s titties and her fine, fine ass.”

But, the fact of the matter is – I did see his ex-girl’s titties and her fine, fine ass.

And they were good.

Either way, my b, B. Too late now, I doubt you read this site, but I just wanted to say I’m sorry.

And that your ex-girl’s titties were spectacular.

Pets

The Harvey award nominee ballot is out and after talking it over with Josh we came to the conclusion that we, you know, want one. Or two.

So here’s the deal – I encourage all of you to fill out the ballot and vote for your favorite books but, if you’d like to be a Friend to Hoarse & Buggy, I went ahead an made this ballot that you can start out with (and there’s plenty of room to put all of your other favorite books down). Now, the ballots are due by March 3rd. You can print it out and mail it to:

Paul McSpadden
605 West Arapaho Road
Richardson TX 75080

Or email it to: pjcjmc2 @ comcast.net

Because fuck it, if we can't get people to buy the book we'll at least win a shitload of awards.

Anyway, I started filling out my own ballot – this is going to take some time but here’s where I’m at so far.

Story time…

____________________

When it comes to pets there is one simple rule life applies to me – if I like them they die a horrible death, if I don’t like them they live forever.

My first pet was a bird – a parakeet, I named her Frances after my Grandma Fran. I must have been seven or eight years old, woke up after having Frances for about a month to find it dead at the bottom of her cage. I buried her in the backyard and Grandma Fran asked me to not name any pets after her again.

That pretty much set the tone.

Garfield was my first cat – nasty son of a bitch but I loved him. He was just wicked playful, he’d always hide under the bed or behind some furniture and jump out, scratch up your leg and run away. The scratches didn’t hurt, it was more of a playful thing, but holy fuck did he scare the shit out of me every time. He’d also used to like to sleep on my head – literally, he’d lie down on my head while I slept and fall asleep with me, purring all night. If I ever tried to push him off he’d come back instantly, bat my forehead for good measure, and set himself back up.

About six months into having him he started walking funny, acting fatigued. My father took him to the vet – feline leukemia – they put him down.

My next pet was a dog – Chewy. A little beagle, cutest fucking thing imaginable. We got him when he was a puppy, friend of the family’s dog dropped a litter and we swooped one up. He was very timid at first; this little guy would always hide when there were people in the room. Eventually he started opening up to me and my sister, followed us around, played with us. It was cool shit, never had a dog and for the first time in my life I was seeing what the fuss was all about and I loved the experience.

A couple of months in we took him to the vet for vaccinations. One of the vaccines was for parvo virus. Two weeks later we were back at the vet – Chewy had parvo. Had to put him down.

The real kick in the ass? The vet ran us through the collection agency when we refused to pay the bill – how’s that for customer service?

“Sorry I killed you dog, that’ll be a thousand dollars.”

But my fucking hermit crab that I won at a festival? That goddamn thing lived for two years, I never gave it a new shell, hardly ever fed it. Finally I gave him to a neighbor because I didn’t want him and she did.

I had a goldfish – neglected to shit. Never cleaned the bowl, never fed it. We kept it on top of the microwave and hoped his integrated exposure of low-level radiation was enough to shut its liver down or something. It just kept growing bigger and bigger. Two years pass – you’d walk up to the bowl and the water was so murky that you couldn’t even see inside. Sure enough that fucking fish would swim up to the glass and mock you, let you know he’s still alive and doing quite well.

And then there was Yoda and Obi-Wan, my Siberian dwarf hamsters from college.

R and I purchased them together, kept them illegally for over a year. They were cute little guys, we’d put them in the ball and watch them run all around the dorm floor – they became mascots of 4-West after some time. One of the hamsters must have broken his leg at one point and we just left it be, I know it’s horrible but this was before Robin really turned me into an animal lover – back then I didn’t think to take a hamster to the vet – he was still walking around, still active and was never squeaking of anything.

When R and I broke up I had them at my place in Brooklyn – they became an extension of her and I kind of started to neglect them. My mom was the one to first discover that Yoda, the one with the broken leg, was dead. I buried him in the backyard and during on of my lesser moments I decided to let the other one go free because I was sure that was what he wanted.

Seriously, I 100% thought that.

So I set him free – in Prospect Park – and I still feel like an asshole about it to this day. I even felt like an asshole then, when it was done, but it wasn’t until Robin that I realized how much of an asshole move it was.

Robin had a rat when we first started dating named Sydney. Female rats are tumor prone and when Robin noticed a tumor on Sydney she wanted me to accompany her to the vet. I asked her, “For a rat?” The look she shot me was enough to know I should shut up.

Took the rat to the vet and the surgery to remove the tumor was something like three hundred bucks. Now, here I am saying to myself, “Three hundred bucks? The rat only costs eight bucks.” Robin, on the other hand, didn’t even hesitate to agree to get the tumor removed.

The next day we went back to the vet to pick up Sydney – the rat was wrapped up in bandages and the doctor told Robin to watch Sydney, she’ll try to take the bandages off. Robin stayed up all night watching her. Eventually there came a point when Sydney was unsupervised for an hour or so and she instantly tore the bandage and the stitches off. The rats bleeding, I figure this is done, right?

Nope, we get wrap her up, get in a cab, and go back to the vet who restitches Sydney. This time Robin stays up with her constantly and the times when Robin’s sleeping or not with Sydney, I or a friend of Robin’s is watching over her. The stitches heal.

A couple of weeks later I go over Robin’s place and she’s sitting on her bed crying, a dead Sydney in her hands. Robin tells me the rat died in her sleep. I take Sydney, put her in a shoe box and we go to the Charles River to bury her. It’s winter time, the ground is frozen – I have no shovel and I’m digging a fucking hole with a spoon. We get it just deep enough to put her in a couple of inches without the shoe box, cover her up, and Robin says some words.

During all this, the vet visits and the last rites, I’m standing there and saying to myself, “Holy fucking shit – I can’t believe I let a hamster go free in Prospect Park.” I shit you not, you want to talk about rehabilitation – watching Robin go through all this made me one of the biggest animal lovers in the world. Over the past five years living in DC we’ve had six rats. We currently have a parrot, three cats and a dog. Our vet bills cost us more than our own hospital bills. We go to animal welfare fundraising functions, volunteer at shelters, Robin runs the largest pet sitting business in Washington DC and I love hearing her talk about her day – changed man through and through.

And I look back at the past pets, the one’s that I liked that died on me, and I kind of have to wonder how many of those deaths could have been averted with a little more attention and without immediately deciding to put them down.

Perception is a tricky bitch sometimes.

Bits

My sister was born when I was eleven-years-old, my dad was supposed to take me out of school when my mom was ready to drop but instead I got the message relayed to me afterwards – she was born at 2 PM on March 14th, being part dork I like to think she was born at 1:59 PM so her birth date and time would be 3.14159, the first six digits of pi.

I was with G when my Titi Anita told me the news; I danced around like a silly monkey before getting in her car and going out to the hospital.

My mom wanted to call her Elizabeth Margaret, after the two grandmothers. Being eleven, I thought Marel would have be a great, truly original name. Just because I was always creative didn’t mean I was actually talented. Thank God my parents didn’t listen to me otherwise my sister would have gotten ragged on everyday for having a name that sound like a comic book company and, if I remember correctly, was also close to the name of a paper tower company. And you think my mom wouldn’t name her Marel but you’re talking about the person who wanted to call me Alawishes Isadore.

I loved my sister big time from the start – the eleven year age difference meant we never fought or anything like that. For the 6 years before I went to college she didn’t have a room, though – my parents put up one of those false walls in their bedroom and put her crib behind it, eventually a little bed – but that’s all the space she had. As she got older she started to nomad it a bit more, sleep on the floor of my room, stuff like that, but it wasn’t until I went to college that she got her own room.

She always called me Jay-Jay which made me think I was all Dy-no-mite! No kids can say “Jason”, I realize – all my cousins called me some variant of “Jay” when they were little.

Except my cousin Andy. He called me “Gay-son” or, sometimes, just “Gay” when he realized every kid called me “Jay”. Yes, there’s nothing better than walking down the street with a three year old kid calling you “Gay”. Anyway, her nickname started as ‘Lil Bit but then moved to just Bits. We had one rule in our family – no-one was allowed to call her “Liz”. No-one listened, even my sister started to like “Liz” as her nickname.

The weirdest thing about getting a baby sister when you’re eleven is that you instantly become a babysitter which means you also need to learn how to change diapers. In this day and age, no eleven-year-old kid should have to learn how to change diapers – we don’t have the coordination or the stomach for it. I’d stand there, cleaning up the noxious strained-corn poop, constantly gagging. I was trying to potty train her before she could walk so I wouldn’t have to do that anymore.

Yuck. Someone needs to invent the self-cleaning diaper.

The worst was when you accidentally get some baby shit on your hand. You don’t even know what to do, you just stare at it for five minutes in shock, completely ignoring the naked baby lying on the table, and you go through your day and try to remember if you had chocolate at any point. As soon as you realize the warm substance on your hand is shit beyond any reasonable doubt you freak the fuck out, running to the sink and wash your hands for twenty minutes – naked baby on the table so long the remainder of the shit is now crusted to her ass.

I hated changing diapers.

But beyond the diaper thing it was all fun and games. As soon as your parents went out you’d start dressing her up in your clothes and throwing her all over the apartment. Feed her food she’s not supposed to eat like pizza and hamburgers. Teaching her at a young age that mom jokes are the funniest jokes in the world.

As she got older she got wicked talented. Viola, cello – she taught herself piano, she reads music and can even play back songs she’s heard without ever taking a lesson. She plays softball, basketball, soccer and is one of the fastest swimmers on every team she swam for. She was like the anti-Me. I played the baritone for two years and was a starting lineman for three years on my high school football team because I was really good at knocking people over, came with my clumsiness.

We became really close, I got very protective of her, I already told the story about The Letter (which, to tie it into yesterday’s story, happened after the family reunion). But I was the type of dude that when someone made the “Dude, when’s your sister going to be 18?” joke that every guy makes I’d go with the double slap to really lay on the disrespect (yes, I am one of those people who believes that there is nothing in this world funnier and more disrespectful than a man slapping another man; I love to slap men and come back with the backhand – it’s hysterical).

When my mom and I were fighting she’d occasionally use my sister as a bargaining chip and that would get me going. She’d especially do it when she caught me smoking, tell me I’m not allowed to talk to my sister until I stopped. That shit would get me pissed like nothing else.

She looked up to me; too, but you guys already know that.

The Reunion

I must have been way too young to really understand exactly what the fuck happened at the family reunion but it was obviously bad. Maybe I was just too busy having fun to notice it but during the canoe races, barbeques and water balloon fights the Rodriguez family was cracking in half – the shit that goes on when you’re busy being a kid amazes me sometimes.

Somehow my family got hold of this campsite that the boy scouts use in upstate New York. No idea how it happened but we had cabins and tents and full use of the facilities – we were the only people up there and had to share the land with nobody. We got a bunch of these charter buses to get our asses up there and I think things first started going bad when a new boyfriend in the family went to the back of the bus, pissed in an Evian bottle and then dumped it out the window.

That didn’t make a lot of people happy.

When we got upstate we all started staking out our land – the adults were getting cabins and the kids were getting tents. While we were pitching our tents in pure Brooklyn-kid fashion (as in poles whacking people in faces, fabric getting torn and many declarations of “fuck the woods, man”) my father’s siblings were digging into their own little corner of the camp grounds and staying there, a tension surrounding them that I’ve only heard about years later.

I guess that didn’t make a lot of people happy, either.

But I had all my cousins around and we were having a blast. The property was right on this lake – we canoed out to a wooden platform and spent the afternoon diving off of it, raced our canoes back to shore – the kind of shit city kids never get to do. We rode our bike through the woods, roasted marshmallows and told ghost stories at night – played a variety of pranks of each other. I’m telling you, you put a teenager from the city in the woods and he’ll revert back to being five years old. We didn’t have summer camp or relatives that lived out in the woods. We had Red Hook during the summer; our relatives lived in Red Hook. We occasionally had Florida or a trip to the Jersey shore. I was twelve years old the first time I even saw a tent that wasn’t for sale at Models.

But we were hicks, through and through - we cooked rice and beans on the grill like every Puerto Rican family would do – woke up the bears with our music. We even busted out a karaoke machine one night. The kids slowly took it over, my cousins and I did Pharcyde’s “Passing me By”, I did a rendition of “Sabotage” where I kicked over a picnic table, prompting my family to shut of the karaoke machine and call it a night.

We had some fireworks, some smoke bombs. We’d lock people in a cabin and chuck several stink bombs through an open window, leave them there for ten minutes or so – they’d come out reeking of shit

At the end of the weekend we all packed up and went home. The cousins all hung out together on the bus, laughing having a god time telling the same stories from the weekend over and over again – describing the look on so-and-so’s face when he fell or how funny it is when so-and-so ran over the camp screaming while being chases by a bee. We couldn’t wait to do it next year, so many aunts and uncles we hardly ever see – everyone just having fun together, eating and reminiscing about the past.

It was a great time for us.

I didn’t see my grandparents for close to five years after that weekend.

Reading, Writing and Political Assassinations

Anyone watch 24? How’s that for fucking housecleaning?

I’m trying to figure out what I want to do three weeks from now. Fact is, The Hive looks like it’s going to be taking up a lot of my time (there are plans - oh, there are plans) and I really need to get some comics going.

The original plan was to take three months off and then get into Year II which would basically be the DC years, after college. I was going to do it three days a week instead of five and once again keep it going for a full year.

But now I’m looking in my notebook at the list of stories I planned to tell about the pre-DC years and realizing there’re close to fifty stories left to tell. So here’s what I’m thinking – after this month is over I come right back and do more of these stories but only twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday, maybe pop in every once and a while to do an update on the comic thing. I do that until whenever and after whenever is done I take on the second year of storytelling.

This way I still have a steady schedule, I’m still putting stuff out, but I free up time to work on The Hive and various comic projects. I also want to do guest stories again like I did last summer – maybe Wednesdays can be guest story days or something. How does that sound?

Ok, for now, story time. The next two weeks have no real theme; I’m just telling whatever the hell I want to tell. Third week ends a lot of stories and sets-up the DC stories for whenever I get to them.

__________________________

It’s funny how your brain remembers some things – not what it actually remembers but how little details make no sense to the big picture and you’re not sure if you’re making it up or if something similar happened. Looking back at Preschool, for instance, it all seems like one big acid trip.

I got accepted into the Brooklyn College Tutorial preschool program – it was this program that was almost impossible to get into and parents from all over Brooklyn tried to get their kids in. It was a bit progressive; we called our teacher Kathy and spent a lot of time studying art and watching plays.

There was a test we had to take before going to this school. We had to make an appointment, it was me and Kathy and she asked me all types of questions about shapes, tested to see if I at least knew the alphabet and was able to do basic math. There were also all of these memory tests and puzzles, it was all so odd but at the same time it’s one of the few memories I actually have from that far back. After she was done testing me she sent me to this backroom and this part is one of those “tripping balls” things I alluded to in the introduction.

Kathy’s assistant teacher was there, I forget her name. The room was all black like a sensory deprivation chamber and for some reason I remember it having these shapes projected on the wall and moving all around. I remember the lady testing my hearing and music perception, asking me how certain songs made me feel and if certain beats were faster than others – things like that. I shit you not I think she put some type of psychic trigger in my head, like when I turn 30 I’m going to start assassinating people when I hear the word “zucchini” or some shit. It was just fucking weird as I remember it – Clockwork Orange weird. You don’t think about shit like that as a kid but as an adult I look back at it all and wonder what the fuck that preschool was up to.

Other little memories – I remember board game time. Every so often we got to play board games, games like perfection and checkers – not Chutes and Ladders of Mouse Trap or other games kids wanted to play. We had fun, no doubt, but again looking back at it they were all games that inspired concentration and strategy.

We used to do a lot of arts & crafts type of stuff, too. Complicated-assed Christmas decorations – reindeers out of clothespins and these little Christmas pillows that someone sowed and I’m not sure if it was me. This wasn’t glitter and paper shit; we were busting out glue guns to get the reindeers eyes to stay on. Cards for our mom’s using photographs and a variety of mixed media.

Pipe cleaners were huge during arts & crafts, we used them for everything. Another one of those weird memories that makes no sense is running through these sheets that were hanging from the ceiling for some reason and this kid Nick running up behind me and jabbing me with a pipe-cleaner repeatedly while laughing.

Just weird shit, man.

They actually taught us to cook. I remember Kathy’s assistant making this zucchini dish and telling us what she was doing step by step – what’s really crazy is I don’t recall there being a kitchen in the school but there was obviously something there that was capable of cooking up the zucchini.

We put on “Twas the Night Before Christmas” and I got to play Santa Claus. The set was this large piece of canvas that we pained to look like the wall of a house, window, door and chimney. I remember they had us contribute to painting the set – what the hell kind of school has four year old kids painting sets? I look at pictures of the set now, though, and think we were either wicked talented or our “help” consisted of them telling us exactly where to paint what color and then fixing it up when we were done.

And I think that’s it, that’s the extent of my memories from preschool. Just weird little pieces of a story that, when taking out of context, make preschool look like a scene from The Manchurian Candidate.

Junior Year: Last Days

I wan to thank everyone who contributed at The Hive yesterday. It came off better than I imagined it would and next column will only be better.

With The Hive my readership here went up more than a little bit. Before I get to today’s story I need to ask you all once again to please, please, please support Elk’s Run. Order some copies. Go to our website and print out the order form, bring it to your retailer and ask him to order up some copies. We really need it – the book is solid, you’ll enjoy it – and it’s a shame that all we can do is ask you go through the convoluted ordering process but that’s all we can do, at the moment. Over the next year, at The Hive, we’ll supposedly come up with some new ideas but for now – if you like this site and you like The Hive and you want to show your appreciation in some little way I’m asking you to please get behind this book. That’s all, begging done – we appreciate all the support we’ve gotten already and I know it’s selfish to ask for more but we just want to be able to tell our story and I know a lot of you want to be able to finish it. So please, support the book. Thanks.

Three weeks of The Moose left. Today’s story is a bit light because The Hive took a lot of my time yesterday – I’ll try to make next weeks bang up for ya, promise, and the last week is already written.

Story time…
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Junior year started good and ended better. I was staying in Boston for the summer, hooked up with a job for the Office of Resident Life doing skits for incoming freshmen – I was working with Sleazy Steve and this girl that I had a little bit of a crush on – that’s a good set-up. Interviewed with Jillian’s and got my job game-teching at night which was a great job for the first few months but it got old after a while.

Meanwhile I checked out my new apartment on south campus, met my two roommates whose names I don’t remember. One was Asian and one was Russian – that’s all I got, honestly. Once Robin and I started hooking up I never stayed in the apartment anyway (she had air conditioning).

We had our RA awards dinner – it was a sit down ordeal with key-note speakers and the like. I actually won an award for outstanding RA. This wasn’t the “outstanding student” award they gave to every kid in kindergarten – this was the type of award only ten or twenty people got. You see, it’s funny, because…well…I friggin’ blew a police operation to save my resident’s from jail time. Good person, bad RA.

I don’t even know where the award is anymore. I don’t even remember what it looked like.

Classes ended much better than junior year, as in I passed and you can’t complain about that shit. I spent the last couple of weeks looking for a lab I could work in over the summer but had no luck. I really wanted to work in a controls lab – there was one professor who was doing this thing were stabilizers were placed by your ears and they kicked out a platform you were standing on and measured how much you swayed with and without the stabilizers turned on. I would have loved that job just to watch people fall.

I wrote the first draft of Sleaze and started working out actors, schedules and movie equipment – all of which fell through by the second day. A little bit later Guam and I got started on Mr. Sandman and that one made it through editing.

On the whole – a lot better than the way sophomore year ended – a lot better than I imagined junior year ending up.

I wrote a letter, nothing at all like the letter I wrote to my grandparents. It was sort of a “thank you” letter except I don’t recall it being THAT cheesy but it probably was. I reproduced it, sealed it, and dropped it in a bunch of the RA’s boxes. It just sort of explained how last year ended (minus the pill thing) and how this year was better than I ever imagined it to be and that I don’t think it would have been as good without them. Yeah, it’s cheesy, and very Golden Girls, but you’ve all been reading this site for the past 11 months and you know I have no idea expressing my feelings.

Packed up and “pre-moved” to Warren Towers for a week. Didn’t unpack anything, just lived out of a suitcase and tried my hardest to never spend extra time in that room if I didn’t have to. Warren Towers was the freshman dorm and I luckily never had to move there – the place was just depressing.

It was a good year but when all was said and done, I was ready for something different.

And that’s when Robin came in.

Junior Year: Turning 21 (Both in Age and Blood Alcohol Concentration)

Is anyone even here today? The Hive is fucking blowing up – go there, read, post, share – be positive mother fuckers.

EDIT: First column is up.

Well, read the story first (sorry if it’s a little sloppy, I didn’t get to edit it – The Hive has been keeping me busy). Then go.

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Before 21, college life was shitty beer and cheap liquor at your friend’s house. House parties with keg stands and Evil Dead running on mute in the back ground, maybe some porno projected on a wall. Homemade jello shots and special brownies served next to a bowl of Doritos and a bag of Hershey Kisses. People hooking up in closets or hallways. Thirty people standing out on a freezing cold porch smoking cigarettes and throwing the butts into a flower pot that didn’t sustain life since 1983.

But after we turned 21 – all that stuff above – that became the after party.

My 21st birthday was a pretty big ordeal. It started with dinner where all the not-yet 21-year-old people came out to the Sunset Grill and chowed down with me – must have been about 25 people. After dinner we went to Ri-Ra’s for dancing and heavy drinking, about half of the party left because they were underage but for every twenty year old that left, two twenty-one year olds took their place. We owned that bar all night, everyone having a good time. Even R came out, with her new boyfriend – which was awkward but I didn’t really care too much.

Interesting fact about that night. As far as I can tell, everybody got really drunk. Also, everybody except for me got laid – I got sick, instead.

After I turned 21 I was at a bar every night. I went to the BU Pub with friends in-between classes, met up with professors and tried to get knighted but I just couldn’t drink the shitty mixed drinks to do it. Getting knighted at the BU Pub was relatively easy – I think there were 52 different drinks you needed to put down to do it unlike other places where there were hundreds of different types of drinks you needed to consume before getting your mug on the wall.

But, easy or not, I couldn’t make it. No way in fuck a free mug with my name on it was worth drinking a Long Island Iced Tea.

Then there were our local bars. I already talked about PJ’s, the home of my infamous “pissing on myself” incident. Crossroads was one of my favorite places- great pizza and onion strings, the board games were a plus.

One time at Crossroads a friend of mine told me she’d kiss me if I chugged a pint of Guinness – not even a challenge, dropped that shit down in ten seconds and collected my booty. We used to go there and drink straight from the pitcher – one for each of us. We went there for my first 21+ St. Patrick’s Day. We had two tabs going that me and three friends were going to pay. We were buying drinks for people all night and by the time we were done the tabs totaled about three hundred bucks each, so 600 bucks split between the four of us. Now-a-days, that’s a good night out – in college that’s a fucking nightmare. But we paid it and left the bar with plenty of phone numbers which ultimately turned into absolutely nothing.

Wednesday Night was karaoke night at T’s Pub – we used to take that joint over. When everyone else would do “Hotel California” and “Respect” we’d roll twenty deep and do “We Are the World”. One time me and two friends did “No Scrubs”, choreographed dance and all.

I had a routine where I’d dedicate a song to Guam’s mom and sing it to her.

“Although we go! To the ennnnnddd of the road…
Still I can’t let Guam’s mom go…”

Or the now classic:

“And it got so good to Guam’s mom, you know what she told me?
Let me tell you what Guam’s mom told me, she said:
´Stroke it Jason Rodriguez, but don´t stroke so fast
If my stuff ain´t tight enough, you can stick it up my...´ WOO!

I be strokin!”

We also had this friend Eddie who did a mean impersonation of Kermit the Frog doing “Rainbow Connection”. It was awesome.

Ahh…alcohol.

When we were slumming we found ourselves at The Dugout which is everything you’d expect from a place called “The Dugout”, spit and all. I think we only went there when we didn’t feel like walking anywhere else – that place was just sad. It had a great location, besides the BU Pub it was the only bar in the middle of campus, but Jesus Christ it was a fucking dump.

There were the more haughty taughty places that we could never get a seat at and waited ten minutes for the bartender to even look at us like The Cactus Club. It was always some girl who’d suggest going there and every guy would groan – nothing better than spending twenty bucks on a communal margarita made with rail tequila.

But we went because we had to – because we always dragged the ladies to our dingy holes in the wall and it was only right we combed our hair every once and a while and paid it back.

Junior Year: The Theater

Hey, thank you all for stopping by The Hive forum and saying “hi” yesterday. If you didn’t get a chance to, please do so – it’ll be nice to have a strong showing right from the start.

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Theater and me – we’re old friends, we go back to the first grade when I played the policeman in Frosty the Snowman. In the fourth grade, I believe, I was a zombie in our school’s production of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, the best play an elementary school has ever put on. In the fifth grade I played the father in the Thanksgiving play because I was the only kid in the school that was almost six feet tall.

In high school I started getting more involved in theater, joined the drama club, played Grandpa in “You Can’t Take it With You”, all the usual rites of passage for a slave to the stage.

NYC high schools had Sing – did any of your high schools have that? Sing was when each grade had a coupe of months to write, produce, direct and perform a musical. It was a competition that was almost impossible for the seniors to lose – we had a bigger budget and the judges wanted to send us off with our victory.

For senior sing I played the roll of “Hoodlum 1”. I had my hair braided, wore a visor backwards, Hilfiger from head-to-toe, timbos on my toes and five beepers attached to various articles of clothing. I had memorable lines such as:

HOODLUM 1: Yo, that ice-cream look dope!

HOODLUM 2: True, true, I want ‘dat too, yo!

Then I just sort of stopped doing theater in college – for the first two years, that is. I had better things to do like smoking dope and failing my classes, I had no time for theater. But along comes junior year – along comes a little brown kid called Guam – and me feeling free and refreshed and out of my sophomore year rut, I agree to go to improv with him.

Fuck it, I had a blast my first day of improv. I was loud, I was obnoxious – Guam and this kid Ryan ran the show and Guam loved my style but Ryan…Ryan wasn’t too fond of it. But I started performing and part of my shtick was to beat the fuck out of Guam in front of hundreds of people. We got laughs and Guam got hurt every night – it was good times.

There were fucking CHARACTERS at improv though.

Like Corey. The dude would fuck anybody who moved. If you complained of a stiff neck homeboy would materialize behind you like he got beamed down from the Enterprise and start massaging it. Boy, girl, inanimate object – didn’t matter, Corey will try to fuck you.

I talked about Chris. Christina was this Unitarian chick who was loud as all hell and rarely funny. In certain light she looked sexy but that light was some rare shit. Either that or her voice cracked the good light bulbs.

And then there was Ron. Ron was the definition of nerd. You know those girls who wear shirts that say, “I love nerds” or something like that? They’re not talking about Ron. Ron is true nerd. O.D. – Original Dork. He would tell these convoluted jokes that in order to “get” them you would need to know laws of thermodynamics.

I’m not kidding. We’d be at practice, Ron would be up, and he’d deliver some joke and awkwardly wait for us to laugh, follow it up with some shit like, “Don’t you get it? The Relativistic Boltzmann equation doesn’t supply an EXACT entropy differential so we wouldn’t know the room’s true state if it was indeed on fire.”

Fucking crickets, man. Every time.

We did it all for the cast parties, really. I honestly believe the cast party was the reason theater was invented. Same thing every party – show up at ten, get drunk, hook up with some girl from the troupe, sing show tunes, throw up, hook up with some other girl from the troupe, go to bed.

Of course, I usually skipped the hooking up part and sung show tunes all night – I can do a mean Colm Wilkinson, especially when I’m drunk.

Second semester found me sticking with improv but also acting in the spring one-act festival. A great little play called “The Whole Shebang” where I played white trash, wife-beater t-shirt and all.

As I’ve mentioned in the past I had a nipple complex of sorts and wearing the wife-beater in front of a large audience wasn’t really my thing. I spent the entire first show fixing my shirt – tugging on it, crossing my arms. R and I were friends again at that point and she came out to my show, commented afterwards how I need to stop playing with my shirt and my nipples aren’t that bad.

That’s an awkward conversation to have with an ex-girlfriend, right there.

The show went off well – I kept my hands away from my shirt for the next two nights – and the cast party was a good time, or so I was told. According to Guam I was “close to” making out with one of the girls in the troupe – a cute one, no-less, who was wearing these sexy leather pants and I’ve carried a bit of a thing for her during the year.

I honestly don’t remember almost hooking up with her but guaranteed, to this day, when Guam and I are drinking he’ll ask me, “Remember when you almost hooked up with ____ at the cast party?”

No clear definition of what “almost” means, unfortunately.

Junior Year: Romance

A couple of things before today’s story which will be shorter than yesterdays – that’s kind of sad when you consider the subject matter.

My forum for The Hive is up at Buzzscope. Please drop in and say “hi” in the introductions threadbecause, well, they don’t know me there yet and I feel like the new white female teacher on her fist day at an urban school where the kids are livin’ in a gangsta’s paradise.

Michelle Pfeiffer. I feel like Michelle Fucking Pfeiffer.

So please, do me a favor, and just go introduce yourself. And Chris, please don't go there and just say "poop"; I'm trying to run a serious show over there. You can say it on my site all you want.

My boy Jacob, who’s illustrating The Curse (page one posted yesterday), dropped an article on the DCC blog where he charts his page-count progress as an artist. It’s interesting because I find myself writing less each year while he’s writing more. I think as an artist gets good they reach a comfort level and can start churning out pages whereas when a writer gets good they begin to mull over a single idea for a lot longer and spend more time in rewrites.

Actually, who am I kidding – I think I broke 220,000 words since last January thanks to this site. I meant I don’t write comics a lot, also thanks to this site.

I went to a meeting today at a government agency that isn’t necessarily all hush-hush secret but you’d only know about them if you were looking for them. The guy leading the meeting looked just like Michael Douglas in Falling Down if he didn’t go bat-shit insane and start shooting up LA but instead stayed at his shitty job. Some other guy in the meeting looked just like Alec Baldwin. It was just weird.

Ok, story time…

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Romance was…lacking…junior year in college.

I wasn’t trying too hard, in my defense. I was getting into theater, making new friends, going out every night and having fun. I would occasionally get drunk and try to hook up with some chick at a bar but it rarely ever worked out – I’m not a pick-up kind of guy, I’m a slow burner – I have to get under the girl’s skin, infect her like the plague and pop painful nodules up on her body. So I don’t ever work well in bars; I need to account for the three day onset of illness that comes with my “mojo”. But there were a few attempts at getting a little steady action – none of them worked.

I think my first post-R attempt was with a fellow RA’s sister. We were all out at dinner together; the sister was mighty cute but seriously out of my league on a physical and social level. She was just really nice, played the violin or something – all high class, healthy, fit, non-smoking and wine drinking - compared to me, the wise-ass, beer gut, porn watching guy with the jeans I haven’t washed in three months.

Her sister left early that night so me and her got to talking, I walked her back to her sister’s place and got her phone number – wished her a good night and went home a tad tipsy, where I most likely violently masturbated while picturing her doing crazy shit with her violin bow, horse hair thrown all over the bed room, rosin flakes sprinkled all over her ass like glitter.

Because a guy like me, I know what the classy ladies like.

I had no chance, I knew it and she knew it, and when I called to hook something up I got the polite, “I’m busy until 2006.” So, you know, I think I have a date coming up – Robin’s not happy about it but I can’t get the violin bow fantasy out of my head.

My second attempt at a relationship was with this chick Danielle. Danielle was good friends with my college friend Kim whose best-friend Kristen I did ended up hooking up with later in the year. Truth was I wanted to get with Kim but instead kept picking off her friends.

Eh, whatever.

She was cute in a southern girl kind of way even though I think she was from Connecticut. She looked southern, though. But she had this laugh – it was more of a cackle but not in the evil witch way – sort of like the evil witch’s cute sister who brought dope to the party and wants to get tore up.

A tolerable cackle.

I think I had Kim plant the seed that I was interested and we hooked up a little date action. We went traditional – dinner and a movie. Italian joint, La Familigia on Newbury Street – we talked a bit and seemed to hit it off really well. Now, I don’t believe that a movie makes for a good first date – I think it’s actually the worst first date you can go on besides a baseball game. There are several reasons:

1) If the movie’s no good, date’s done. Not only is the date finished but it’s essentially wiped out. If you get that second date you’re basically repeating the first. Bad movie is an instant date killer.
2) If the movie’s too long the date is done. There’s no ice-cream afterwards, no walking through the park. You just sat through two-and-a-half hours of film that was moderately entertaining, not at all funny, but for the most part made you both too sleepy to continue on.
3) If you go to hold the girls hand and get the awkward dead fish – you need to decide whether to remove the hand and accept defeat or persevere and hope she likes the feel of cold, clammy flesh.

So, movies – horrible first date. That said we went to see the 2+ hour snooze fest piece of shit “What Dreams May Come” with Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding Junior and I went to hold her hand about twenty minutes into it, got the dead fish, and decide perseverance was the best course of action.

There was no second date, obviously, but the story doesn’t end there.

She got sick, supposedly, that’s why she wasn’t returning my calls and when I caught her on the phone she rushed me off. Her sickness was verified by all of her friends so I had no reason to believe she was faking the funk. So, I did the nice thing, went to Ankara Cafe, bought some chicken noodle soup for her and delivered it right to her door.

Knocked.

Let me tell you something, in case you didn’t know this. First off all, if you have tile beneath your door or some similar reflective surface, people can see when you walk up to it – they can see the light shift. Also, when you look out the keyhole and you happen to have a big ass fucking window behind you, opened up and letting light in, people know you’re there staring at them.

And when someone knows you’re at the door – that you’re looking at them through the peephole, you see them standing there with a steaming cup of soup in their hand and yet you still don’t answer the door – that’s just fucked up, right there.

I slowly backed away and make my way to Kim’s room where I ask her what the deal is. She tells me Danielle’s ex-boyfriend’s been calling her and she’s confused. I don’t really buy the story but I’ll tell you what – Ankara makes some kick-ass chicken soup and that shit warmed my soul right up.

And that’s it. If you count Kristen there were three honest-to-god attempts at companionship all of junior year. And then Robin came along but you all know that story already, both my version and her version.

Junior Year: Tales of an RA

Couple of things before I get into today’s story. First of all, I’d like to share the first page to t