Let's Talk About The Savage Land and Savage Times

Memo From The National Affairs Desk

DATE: August something or other 2012 (it's kind of foggy let it go)
FROM: Edward R. Wallick, MCSE, MCNGP, A+, D.D.S.

Subject: Savage Times in a Savage Land Call for Extreme Measures & Liquor

When the Managing Editor of this site first asked me to write him an article I was somewhat taken
aback. To be honest, he still owes me money and seems to have a talent for disappearing from
any given room that happens to have the poor luck of containing both of us at the same time, it's
a gravitational mass thing. We think heavy. But then I recalled, through my hazy thoughts of that
morning, that his bedeviled text messages (yes, plural! messages!) had dragged me laboriously
from a lovely dream where I was once again being worshiped by several thousand Polynesian vestal
goddesses. This bastard would have to pay for that if nothing else in a just and fair world. Also, I
remembered that in addition to the several thousand in cash, he owed me a ballad with which I wanted
to try and seduce the first real island bred goddess that happens to cross my path. But still, none of this
is unusual for me on any given Tuesday morning.

But then this Tuesday actually was a special Tuesday and by special I don't mean it was 'Taco
Tuesday', which though a great value is diversionary from our topic here. This morning, I found upon
reading the papers, was the day one of my favorite GOP ring wraiths had decided to allow his state
to kill a mental deficient, a disabled person, a special needs person, a dummy, a moron, you know, a
retard!

Don't misunderstand, I have no problems with a good public stoning of your whores of Beersheba or
even a lippy divorcee. I like to hang the occasional itinerant wandering carpenter up on some of the
larger Redwoods here in NorCal myself, not for any moral reason I just like to keep busy on Sunday
mornings. But even I have never killed a mental deficient, which is tough for me. That personal choice
in victim selection takes most active members of the GOP and local Tea Party off my 'active roster'.

I do however have a problem with a man whose IQ was tested at 61 being put down like a dog when
he most likely was railroaded. Even if he wasn't, the issue here is his mental culpability, the guy really
believed as they were killing him he was going home to Jesus. What more proof could be required of
his delusion and naivete? A written record of him voting for a Bush?

The victim in this case was an undercover 'drug informant'. Meaning, someone the cops in Texas had
busted for a drug offense and intimidated into becoming their informant in order to reduce or overturn
entirely his own charges brought about by drug activity. This guy was already a dead man because he
broke the first rule, never open your fucking mouth. Don't get mad at me, it's not my rule it's a 'criminal
seedy underbelly types' rule, so take it up with their local subcommittee in your region. In fact if
anything I'd suspect this poor mentally deficient man was instructed to kill that rat by someone smart
enough to know he'd take the fall. Unfortunately for our victim he took that fall and an additional 6 feet
in the end.

I don't understand how we can allow a 'Born Again Christian' to let a mentally retarded person be
clinically killed by a state? It's not ok to abort them but it is ok to kill them with a chemical? Why?
Because a bullshit piece of fiction written by multiple authors who never knew the truth about the
universe all worked independently and then had their works thrown together like some ancient fucking
Barnes & Nobles Classical Stories Collection?

I know an itinerant carpenter who travels all over America we'll call him 'Steve', he is real and he walks
this earth today. I love him! He's a friend of mine! But none the less I wouldn't follow him, or any of
his philosophies, if he died tomorrow because he got hung on a tree by a bunch of whacky citizens
from Oregon (they are literally the closest thing to the Romans in the world today) who were on a tear
for some reason.

There are several reasons for this: First, just like with Jesus we don't know what Steve was doing from
the ages of 12 to 32. It's a literal fucking mystery that hasn't been solved to this day! I'm not even
certain that Steve knows himself actually, he claims he was in schools and working at various jobs but
there is no verifiable proof! We know he used massive amounts of drugs and alcohol during this period
as well as fathered up to 3 children out of wedlock whom he has trouble supporting to this day. Second,
and this is actually the most important reason, following people on blind faith is for children, people
with special needs who can't understand logic or reasoning and stupid ignorant little brained people.

What can we learn from this parable? Obviously, Jesus fathered many, many children whom he
abandoned all over Judeah. Mostly with drunken women he'd met in bars based upon Steves parallel
period 'wandering the lands and ministering to the less fortunate' in North America during the late 80's
and early 90's. Basically Jesus was a whore monger, a drunkard and a meth abuser. And Gov. Rick
Perry is a stupid slack jawed pig killer of cognitively disabled people who follows his 'laws'.

This country was founded on a lot of really great ideals that were great as long as you were white and
wealthy when it was founded. If you weren't white, if you didn't own land or if you weren't pretty
enough to marry up and out of your class restrictions by polishing a good 'knob' then you knew (even
then) that evil is part of America's core. It reared it's head the minute we set foot on the shore and
started killing the natives. It was so full of evil that once we'd killed off the local natives we should
have enslaved we imported exotic natives to do the same work doubling our initial costs. Oh, if only
we'd left more Native Americans alive we'd have turned a bigger profit while we stole the West and
completed our God given quest of manifest destiny.

Today is just another day in America. Just another evil, vile, disgusting little day. We all let a retard get
killed in Texas last week. Because we're either too lazy to fight for someone we don't know or we're
all just too frightened to really stand up and say what we believe when we see something wrong going
down.

Because it's a scary thing when you're seeing the death of the American Dream on a 1080p HD LCD
screen in your living room. Especially when you can't find your ammo.

--ERW

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Let’s Talk About the Hashtag Comedy Show

Donate to the #hashtagcomedyshow here!

Podcasts are fun.

Half of the fun is sorting through all the sludge to find something reasonably passable.  Some podcasts have balls-to-the-wall production value, with studio-grade microphones and top-tier recording software and hosts that could easily be situated anywhere on the radio or television.  Some podcasts are recorded by four or five high school nerds all huddled around a Blue Snowball microphone in their mother’s garage.  Some are even worse – some are Destination:Asphyxiation with Tom Bevis.  Just like the best part about Minecraft is spending hours digging around in dirt and the best part of riding a bike is the peddling, the best part of listening to these things is tossing out your net and sorting through what you pull out of the massive, unfiltered ocean that is the world wide web.

But, man, Jesus Christ, holy moly, gee whiz and other such phrases – nothing beats the feeling you get when you find one that’s worth your time, one that justifies all the wasted hours and hard drive space you spent milling around iTunes, Podomatic, Podbean, Libsyn, etc, etc ,etc, pulling out cover after cover.  It’s that spark of gold while you’re panning in California, it’s the shine off that toy you lost and discover under your bed, it’s the fucking groan you feel when Indiana Jones escapes that temple at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the monkey head idol intact. 

It's a lot easier to subscribe on iTunes.

I used to listen to podcasts.  And, I tell you, that search can be relentlessly cruel.  But I was lucky enough to be adopted by the podcasting family through a few sarcastically warm-hearted connections who took me in for no reason other than I wouldn’t go away (c’mon, it wasn’t my award-winning personality), and this made my search a lot easier.  And since then, I’ve heard more podcasts that I can count, and many of them are good.  Well above the international average curve – that is to say, better than those pimply-faced loners locked up in their basements talking about Dr Who (I’m one of those self-hating podcasters). 

And as wonderful and entertaining as podcasts are, sometimes, they take on a life of their own.  A notable exception is 1 August’s Royal and Doodall day.  Now, I came in half-way through this adventure and all the facts I have are secondhand, so if I get anything skewed, write me a letter about how stupid and lame you think I am, send it to tomfromda (at) gmail (dot) com, and I’ll read it, chuckle, then delete it promptly.  As I understand it, though, Royal and Doodall day was proposed by yet another podcast, The Dhead Factor, in an attempt to boost the ratings of the well-deserving Royal and Doodall podcast. 

BFF's are fucking boring, listen to these guys instead. @Royal_n_Doodall

The idea was on 1 August, 2012, all the podcasting and twitter community between these two shows and all their respective tributaries would subscribe, rate, download, etc The Royal and Doodall show to up the numbers on Stitcher and iTunes and all that.   The guys at Dhead Factor had something similar for The Gee and Jay Show – something of an internet sensation themselves now – previously, but Royal and Doodall decided to up the ante and do a full-blown live extravaganza that nearly became an international phenomenon (we’re not talking Beatles big, but close enough).  People connected to the show from most reaches of the world.  Not all of them, mind you, even God’s arms aren’t that big, and believe it or not, some places still don’t have internet. 

The result was a six-or-eight hour long affair between Twitter, Skype, Ustream, Google Hangout, and etc.  Yours truly was even involved briefly.  In fact, if it weren’t for RnD Day 2012, I probably never would have gotten into podcasting myself.  That sense of community, of camaraderie, showed me that there will never be a shortage of people willing to beat up on me and say they’re my pals (just like growing up!) and that I could call someone a goddamn dickweed without them unfollowing me on the Twitter machine.  Now that’s friendship, man!

We all owe a debt of gratitude. @thedheadfactor

And that was great.  That was fun.  People are still talking about it (fifty percent of those people are me, but who’s counting?).  Well, the next big thing to grow out of a podcast and become its own thing is the Hashtag Comedy Show, sprouting from a seed planted by Travis and Brandi Clark in their podcast, TinyOdd Conversations.

Tiny Odd Conversations is one of those aforementioned good podcasts.  In my opinion – which, honestly, is the Law of the Land in this stream of HTML coding and RSS feeds – Tiny Odd Conversations is one of the best podcasts out there.  In their most recent offering, Episode #62, titled Martian Sandal Tops, Travis declares that if the duo raises $20 through the donate button on their website, they will produce a solo comedy album by Brandi, titled the Hashtag Comedy Album.  The $20 was easily achieved, and Travis was egged on by one Angus Doodall (one half of the Royal and Doodall podcast) to up the ante himself.

Seriously, don't make me yell.  Listen to this show. @TOCpod

And by George, Travis didn’t back down.  Hell, this is a guy who boiled and ate seeds from a fucking alien pod that a tree in his yard dropped on him for no reason other than the internet machine demanded it.  It’s been established that he’s fearless.  So, in response to these chimes, Travis let it be known that he would strongarm Brandi into performing a full-on comedy show, to be streamed across the internet, distributing video copies to donators and inviting “gold level” designated contributors to attend. 

This, my friends, is where magic happens.  For every 2-Girls-1-Cups and OMGTHISCATSISWEARINGGLASSES that pops up on the internet, there are people willing to go to extraordinary lengths, break their backs and vocal chords, and embarrass the hell out of their wives (“You’re making me do things I don’t want to do,” Travis tweets, relaying a conversation with his wife, “It nervouses (sic) me.”) for the very sake of your entertainment.

No one has ever seen the real Travis Clark. @thatguytravis

But, my friends, these things aren’t free.  All the goodwill and honest-hearted entertainment in the world can’t exist without the help of the people who enjoy it.  The Clark’s invitation is simple: you can enjoy this feat of internet-based entertainment organized by a pair of people who honestly love to entertain at the very small cost of a generous donation.

Travis has set up a donate button on the Tiny OddConversations website with no minimum (and, by God, no maximum) donation.  In short: if you want this to happen, and I’m sure you do, or you wouldn’t still be reading, toss them a few dollars to front the bill.  It’s that easy.  And in return, you’re guaranteed at least thirty minutes of solid entertainment.

Presenting: your star! @serialnerd

And even if that isn’t your speed, keep in mind that unless you’re Marc Maron or, eventually, Weird Al Yankovic (you goddamn know that fucker will be podcastin’ with the best of them one day), podcasting is a labor of love.  That is to say, the hosts and producers of these shows don’t get paid for their work.  Even Podfather Marc Hershon of the SuccotashShow doesn’t bring in money for all the stellar work he does.  Much like television and radio in the past, the podcast is in its infancy and has yet to be significantly monetized.  This means two things, the first is it’s still a free medium, still a forum where anyone (even those high school kids I keep talking about) can participate.  It also means that there is no bread being made from all the work, and a guy’s really gotta eat.

What I’m trying to say is – if you have no interest in hearing or seeing Brandi Clark attempt stand-up for the first time (although you should), donate to Tiny Odd Conversations anyway.  If you don’t listen to Tiny Odd Conversations (again, you really fucking ought to – here’s that link again), then donate to your favorite podcast.  And if you don’t listen to podcasts at all, why the fuck are you still reading this?

So, just to sweeten the already ample pot, I’m tossing in a Destination: Asphyxiation t-shirt to anyone donating to Tiny Odd Conversations for the Hashtag Comedy Show.  It’ll be guaranteed not to fit so you never have to wear it, so it’s a win-win.  Consider it a Christmas present to yourself

Seriously! Donate to the #hashtagcomedyshow right HERE!

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Episode Two: Let's Talk With Bonnobo

So, I tried to rebrand it!  In an attempt to protect the credibility and integrity of my guest hosts, I'd tried to launch the podcast with a different label so my writers' names wouldn't be dragged through the mud because of anything I may or may not say.

Too bad for all parties involved, Destination: Asphyxiation stuck, and we're moving forward with that just fine.  Now available is episode two, wherein I talked with the wonderfully pleasant Bonnobo of the Bonn and Obo Show about guitars, the UK, why America is big, and, of course, his brilliant podcast.

Special segments include:
The Adventures of Casey Delaware
Weekend Movie Forecast
and Levi Thomas' punishment for being my friend.

Special thanks to Bonnobo (@Bonnobo) of The Bonn and Obo Show (@BonnAndObo) for calling in as guest cohost

Additional voiced by Michael Cornog and Levi Thomas

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Let's Talk With Ed Wallick

The first episode of 20 Miles Past Weird, the Destination: Asphyxiation podcast edition has launched in a stellar flame of mediocrity.  Hear it now!

Let''s Talk With special guest cohost Ed Wallick about Cash Cab, The Dark Knight Rises, good script writing, and appropriate Twitter grammar.

Special segments include:
The Adventures of Casey Delaware
Weekend Movie Forecast
and the unveiling of secret weapon Strike Plan Operation Alpha, codenamed: STROPHA

Special thanks to Ed Wallick (@EdWallick) of Don't Quit Your Day Cast (@DontQuitYourDay, www.dontquityourdaycast.com) for calling in as guest cohost. Huge ode of gratitude to "An English Gentleman" for his contributions, as well.

Additional voiced by Michael Cornog and Levi Thomas

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Let’s Talk About Writing Fiction

You know all about me and know about my background in fiction and all that stuff.  The truth is, I love writing fiction because I love reading fiction, but one thing I don’t like is posting my own fiction to websites.  So when I decided that I wanted to launch a fiction section here in addition to the many other new sections I’m launching to match the overall newness of the site, I realized there’s only one thing better than posting my fiction here for free – and that’s posting yours for free!

Requirements:

The requirements for the fiction section are pretty much the same as the requirements for the rest of the site in that there are none.  Or very little, anyway.  Here are some general guidelines:

• Submitted fiction must be written as fiction and in English.  That is to say, no nonfiction narrative essays about why you think [insert substance here] should be legalized, written in Portuguese. 
• The fiction in question must be written originally by you.  Not because I’m against anyone who isn’t you, but because I’ve gone twenty-four years without getting sued and I’d like to keep my record. 
• General length guidelines should fall around 750-10,000 words.  This isn’t concrete.  If you send me a 400 word story and it’s the best story I’ve ever read in 400 words, I’ll probably put it up and send a beer and rolled tacos to you via USPS.  Similarly, if you send me a 20,000 page manuscript and it’s fucking worth the length, I’ll put that up, too.  But really, if it’s good enough for me, get that shit published for real.

As far as genre/subject/tone/etc, I could give you a bunch of flowery, pretty adjectives or gritty and mean words to try and seduce you into sending me something in the hopes that your writing will forever be associated with aforementioned nice and/or mean adjectives, but I don’t have time to make up any lists like that.  I have a full-time job, a rock-and-roll band, and the rest of this website.  So let’s just say if you can write fiction and find a way to be a smartass, jackass, lameass, or whore’s ass about it, I’d probably love to read it.  And of course, if I’d love to read it, my narcissism will instruct me that others, too, would love to read it.

Please e-mail all submissions to tomfromda (at) gmail (dot)com either as in-body text or as a Word or richtext format.  Put something catchy and hilarious in the subject line, too, so I know who you are and what the email is regarding.  Then just sit back, have a drink, and watch the spectacularly unspectacular magic happen.

A Word About Rights:
We're not a real magazine.  It goes without saying, but at no point will we ever reserve any rights to any piece of fiction.  Honestly, no non-subscription based website should.  If we plug your shit in to the site here, you're free to send it to other sites/magazines/publishers as you wish.  Similarly, if at any point you believe that your stuff being up here for free will jeopardize your opportunities to ever get paid for it, I'll gladly remove it and wish for the best for you on your side.  That being said, send me some fucking emails.

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Let's Talk About Starting a Podcast

These are general truths about your character:

• You’ve never wanted to host a radio show, but you’ve always wanted to be on a podcast.
• You desperately want to be my best friend/cohort/faithful life-partner.
• You’re ready to get moving on a new project.
• You can bake like a fucking pro, but you’re very modest.

As it just so happens, I have the remedy for three of those above-listed characteristics (the modesty is your own problem to solve – try walking down the street in the buff, that might work).  Within the following weeks, as I finish the final modifications to site and finalize domain registry, I’ll be focusing on developing 20 Miles Past Weird, the first-ever and officially official Destination: Asphyxiation podcast.

But I can’t do it alone, people.

I’m now accepting applications for the coveted Cohost position on 20 Miles Past Weird.  To apply, please send your credentials (or lack thereof, I won’t judge) to TomfromDA (at)gmail (dot) com for immediate consideration.

Required skills and qualifications:

• Seriously?
• Take a look around this site and you’ll quickly realize there’s little skill to be found.

So, no required skills and qualifications.  However, to be a part of the show, you either have to own your essential recording and/or broadcasting equipment (microphone, home computer, etc etc) or be located in the San Diego area so we can team up in brilliant Technicolor and use my rig together.

If you’ve never listened to a podcast, that’s alright – we’ll consider your position here at Destination: Asphyxiation a learning experience.  During recording, we’ll talk about everything and nothing at all (the same subjects we cover in text on the site), play two games exactly, and prank call those boys from Royal andDoodall.  If I haven’t driven you away yet, go ahead and send that email telling me I have no other choice but you.

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Let's Talk About Anna Karina

Marilyn Monroe is Clown Shoes: Stop It

By Robert Patrick

Anna Karina is a touchstone of French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague, for those of you who are brooding elitists and clerical mavens). The slight, doe-eyed symbol of Jean-Luc Godard’s affection is forever branded in monochrome stills as a foxy chain-smoker with the lettuce of Clara Bow. Karina’s flippant mane was later worn by the foot herself, Uma Thurman, in Quentin Tarantino’s jazzy, sardonic Pulp Fiction. That maintained mop of hair Karina sported on her proud dome ensnared viewers into a celluloid bear trap.

Karina was a music box ballerina with a smoking gun and the heart of a maimed lioness. Marlene Dietrich was steely, cool and aloof. Audrey Hepburn was wiry, frail and steamrolled with mascara. Marilyn Monroe was an hourglass smeared with lipstick. Karina, though, balanced her cigarette like a baton and dusted her fingertips over sticky coffee tables.

You decide who wore it better.

She was an existentialist’s muse. A woman who padded her lungs with cigarette smoke and wore frumpy sweaters with fuzz balls. A woman who single handedly out smoked an entire circuit of New York cocktail lounges in the 1960s.

So why the deal with that cooing, salacious Marilyn Monroe?

Why is her porcelain mug branded onto stamps and lacquered onto walls? Because she pursed her lips and mewed, slunk around with serpentine abandon, and struck walls with the wingspan of her eyelashes. Maybe for her time, if you were a hammered Charlie who used his drunken hips to play pinball with bar stools, you would be smitten over the curled locks belonging to MM. Today, I have no idea why teenage girls fawn over the star’s hushed whispers and flighty, staccato speech.

Unless every seventeen year-old girl is a reincarnated JFK.

And the fact that the infinitely talented Michelle Williams had to dumb herself down to play the vodka inundated, lolling star has me rolling my eyes like a struck cue ball. If teenagers and twenty-somethings want to use their short bones to claw at an actress, why not pick Myrna Loy?

Norma Shearer, who was smug and sexual rather than naïve and crestfallen, is even a better choice. The Cliff’s Notes say that if you’re a girl, 15-30, and like the carbonated, fuzzy-brained Marilyn Monroe, you likely suck. You’re not a 1950s businessman with a perversely agape maw, so there is no reason you should be pining over Norma Jean – that means you, too, Elton John. Get your shit together.

Old school is foxy as fuck.

 At least the posthumous popularity of Audrey Hepburn is generating interest in someone other than the boggle-eyed Norma Jean. I don’t really mind when I see girls dotting their speech with compliments for the fair-browed Hepburn (though I mentioned her before in a semi-negative light). Sheathed in gloves, each one of Hepburn’s hands, as if a skewed liberty scale, weighed a cigarette and a cocktail glass. But she was still smart as a whip (ever see a blind Marilyn Monroe antagonize Alan Arkin in a dark room? I didn’t think so).

So, my advice to you is to go meet cute with Anna Karina in a smoke plumed 1960’s France. Go waltz with a coy Audrey in a Cary Grant misadventure. Watch Norma Shearer clink her teeth together in searing manipulation. Adhere to Myrna Loy’s slicked back buoyancy. Just shut the fuck up with this Marilyn Monroe garbage.

Go fourth, young person, and understand life!

Robert Patrick has worked for The East County Herald and Alpine Sun newspapers. He has contributed to The San Diego Reader and is currently the food reviewer at The East County Californian. He is part of the San Diego Film Critics Society and runs a website, far less active than the one you're on, called cinemaspartan.com. He is also a popular sports expert (Boston University women's ice hockey). Robert failed to make it into the fencing portion of the Olympics this year. He instead earned gold in forcing Tom to publish his work on this site.

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Let’s Talk About the Death of Jimmy Callaway

I met Jimmy during my first year of college (if you can call it that – it was a community college, so let’s say, my first year of half college, keep it up, champ).  I’ve always been the impatient type, so my first year of college began the summer of my high school graduation.  So, I think I graduated in 2006, so let’s say I met him somewhere along the summer of ’06.

Christ, that means I’ve known him for six years?  Something has to be wrong with my fucking math.  Don’t take any of this for fact, gents.

So, I met him in the hypothetical summer of ’06.  I was in an introduction to creative writing class.  C’mon, get off my back.  Everyone told me it was a pre-requisite to take the Masters of [INSERT LITERARY GENRE HERE] courses where I really belonged.  Turns out it was all a bluff and I probably coulda done whatever I wanted.  He came in, on behest of the instructor of the class, I imagine, and told us how to make our characters talk.

To this day, the first thing I remember when I think of Jimmy Callaway is him telling me that people can’t hiss a sentence – literally.  “Try it yourself,” he said.  “You’ll just sound stupid.”  Or something like that.  And it’s true.  People can’t hiss a sentence unless it’s made up entirely of “hi-“ and “-ss” sounds. 

He gave a short lecture, and when he left, our instructor told us he wanted to be a teacher.  Knowing him as I do now, I don’t think that was really true.  I mean, he was an English tutor at the school there, and he knows a bunch of stuff about some things, but I can’t imagine him having that special spark that teachers have, that patience, that utter lack of faith in the degeneracy of human beings. 

Still, what he taught us that day made more sense to me than anything I learned that entire summer.  Hell, it made more sense to me than anything I’d learned my entire time in college.  Later on, maybe the next semester, maybe the semester after that, he and I wound up – entirely by chance, I wasn’t stalking him or anything – taking a fiction-writing workshop together.  Our friendship was planted in the soil of a poorly written zombie yarn by yours truly.

Jimmy's private affair.

To win his affection, I remember I bought him a second-hand copy of Stephen King’s “Cell.”  Really, I thought, as a fan of the whole zombie thing, he’d appreciate it.  From there, we’d talk about comic books, why his band always played in bars (y’see, at the time, I hadn’t broken twenty-one yet and couldn’t legally go into those establishments), and he was a frequent consultant to my own writing.  But now I’m rambling.

I’d go on to briefly emulate Jimmy’s don’t-give-a-fuck overtly informal prose and shotgun crime fiction style.  I wasn’t as cool as him, so it didn’t work out well and I turned, instead, to cutting out words from everything I’d write and calling it poetry.  After his college graduation and my dropping-out, Jimmy would go on to become a figurehead in a small school of internet-based writers all sharing that same flare for crime – writers that you probably haven’t heard of yet, but most definitely will at some point in the future.  Writers like Keith Rawson, Cameron Ashley, Matthew Funk, and Josh Converse.  Seriously, if you want to read some good shit, google any number of those guys.

Jimmy’s first assault on the internet centered on machine-gun submissions to various online crime magazines – Flash FictionOffensive, Plots With Guns, and A Twist of Noir, to name a few.  Not to say I read them all, but I read many of them.  Nearly every one of them was better than the next.  It’s around this time that I read Jimmy Callaway’s novel, the name of which I forgot, and fucking loved it.  I then read a novella he penned called His Father’s Instruction.  Both very publishable, very marketable, very easy to read, enticing, et cetera, yet, for reasons unknown, Jimmy made little effort to get them published (from what he told me, anyhow). 

At that point, I decided it was my destiny to somehow be linked to Jimmy’s name.  So I did what any logical-minded individual would do: I adapted his novella to a screen play and shortened the title to Instruction.  It went equally distant into the plains of nowhere, so if anyone out there is looking to make a movie, shoot me an email and we’ll get it on track.

Original art by Callaway, I would assume.

Jimmy then shifted his focus to a number of online critic forums.  He’d long been maintaining  his personal blog about his one true love: comics.  The blog, Attention Children:Sequential Art was a monthly staple in my reading regimen.  A deep and thoughtful contribution to the discussions on the funny books in the stark language only Jimmy could provide helped pull things into focus around the industry and served as an invaluable tool to decide which comics were worth focusing on.

Then, he took it one step further and started yet another blog called Let’s Kill Everybody!. an examination of the slasher genre and its social implications.  It grew into as critical an analysis as there is out there for the genre and spawned the spin-offs Let’s Fight Everybody!, Let’s Fuck Everybody!, and Let’s DrinkEverybody!.  I mean it when I say this blog really took on a life of its own, as it grew and morphed into something bigger than a blog, with new writers coming in to help Jimmy out.  That was the beginning of Jimmy Callaway: Editor-in-Chief. 

Your one-stop shop for all things criminal.

Having a taste of editorial blood, I suppose Jimmy decided to keep on pushing, trying to get into the sweet tight-pants of the internet machine with the sole purpose of penetrating our eyeballs.  I don’t know the exact story behind the Criminal Complex or how Jimmy became attached to it, but it happened, and he did, and if you want to know more about it, then cruise over there. 

What I’m trying to say is that Jimmy Callaway is one of the most influential and daring writers you’ll never read.  Of course, now that you’ve read this, you’ll surely look up anything Callaway’s ever touched and read it for yourself.

No one knows for sure when Jimmy was born, but we all know that it happened sometime in the past.  Of course, he died doing what he loved the most: reading comics and being a smart-ass.  It was the ghost of Lee Marvin who finally did Jimmy in.  He didn’t appreciate his cameo in the aforementioned novella and came back for a bit of payback.

Life.  It imitates art, y'know?

Jimmy loved two things: crime and comic books.  And the Big Lebowski.  And I think he said he had a sister, so maybe he loved her, too.  As far as I know, he wasn’t married, so we don’t have to worry about accidentally cuckolding him in the grave.  And although I saw a guy who looked a lot like him once, this guy was old and ugly enough to be Jimmy’s brother, so it probably wasn’t his son.  So, no orphans, I hope.  I’ll always remember what you taught me: you can’t hiss a sentence.   Jimmy, old boy, you’ll be missed.

Happy Birthday, Calloway.  

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