hotdogstorm

So if I ever start playing Dungeons and Dragons again, I found a pretty good picture for my next Paladin:
 
Looks like I just made my saving throw vs. going to Hell!

 Today marks a rather odd reunion in my life. A little over a decade ago, I was forced rather against my will to go to a church youth group ordeal that was held in an old storefront in the mall. This was a weekly struggle, because even in my young age the whole religion bit never stuck very firmly. It only took a week or two for me to figure out, however, that I could excuse myself to the bathroom and just go wander around the mall until it came time to pick me up. Individually, more and more kids figured this out, and the mall stopped letting the church meet there, an early volley in the war between malls and their client-base.

Like any young friendless nerd, I more or less immediately headed to B. Dalton, which provided me with all sorts of lurid dreadful things that fascinated me to no particular end. Chief among these were Dungeons and Dragons books, more than partially fueled by the fact that my uncles loved the game and my mother more or less saw it as one step beneath active devil worship. Roleplaying games appealed to this primal reptilian pleasure knot in my still-forming brain that listed to see numbers become bigger numbers through the help of juvenile fantasy and random number generation, a lust that still exists inside me and has seen more development than my work ethic or emotional control. Around this time I even made my own little solo game with the dice in our Risk set that ended up bearing more than a passing resembalance to Dragon Quest, right down to Goldmen and a spell that was probably just as originally named as HURTMORE. Naturally, when my family found out why I was constantly checking a sheet of numbers after rolling and comparing red and white dice, I was in for a pretty intensive amount of prayer.

DISCLAIMER: My family has since then considerably cooled on the more insane parts of Christianity. My mother now leaves her pornographic "urban horror" novels strewn about the house without a care as to who finds out about the fact that she pounds down two or three books about nubian werepanthers engaging in BDSM with ghoul strippers or whatever a week. 

My favorite books to read are the Monster Compendiums, given that when you don't know what 2d6+2 means, it's a lot easier to fall back on kind of crazy illustrations and descriptive text. I grabbed one of the smaller ones that particular Wednesday, and met the creature that would sell me on fantasy for more or less the rest of my life:
Disgusting, yes. A juvenile idea that more than likely came from a fat bong rip and the hundredth listen of a 5th generation tape dub of Cannibal Corpse's Gallery of Suicide, but it stuck with me. I was never much into dragons and found most undead to be fairly wanting, but this was a brave new milestone for what I could consider fantasy. It wasn't long before I was consumed with the idea of a fighter ready to dispatch his nth zombie of the encounter finding his target absorbed by a wall of larval insects. Being chased through an underground labyrinth, his since of direction completely scrambled by the shimmering white wall of necrotic ruin closing in on him. Backed into a corner and swinging wildly, watching his sword do little else besides collect the occasional grub. Not even being able to scream as the maggots consumed him, using his body to hunt down his friends, sating the creatures for only a moment. I doubt I even left that page for the rest of my brief window of freedom, just absorbing this terrible idea while glancing at my watch to make sure I got to my mom in time to pretend I learned a lesson in forgiveness or whatever.

I may be romanticizing the story a bit, but I believe that was the last time the youth group met at the mall. Maybe the freakish fat kid staring at a single page in a D&D book was a bit too much for management to handle, or more likely some boys tried to shoplift  something from the baseball card shop. Either way, it would be years before I finally decided to "rebel" in my own way by picking up some D&D books, and never actually saw the entry for Golem, Maggot again until just now. But it always stuck with me in some regard. And my hobbies still change pretty often, but I find myself drawn back to fantasy again and again, unable to give up the allure of a world that I'd last three seconds in. And everyone I know has a giant writhing mass of putrid flesh and maggots to thank for that.

Want to see a picture of me before I was ugly, but looked regrettable in exciting new ways?

OMAKE:
Speaking of regrettable, my arm is around one of the most terrible and insincere people I have ever known!

(commercial on radio)
Victoria Amps make the authentic sound of post-war Chicago come alive.

1. Soulja Boy Tellem's proliferation of American culture has to reach breaking point soon, right?

2. There is an ad on the radio, reminding me that I am listening to the radio. It's really quite oppressive, using selling points for the medium like "It's already in your car," "In public places you can't avoid it," and my personal favorite, "This way, you don't have to bother making decisions." The last one is kind of creepy, like those infomercials where someone is bewildered and possibly mutilated by putting a lid on a jar, only it extends to your personal tastes. No wonder the medium is dying when the best argument it can make for it's continued existence is "Bitch, you can't do anything better than me. I hit you because I have too!"

3. There has to be a better way to sell people on your shitty club's ladies night by inviting "All you ladies of the female persuasion" down to "Wild Woman Wednesdays." What does the first selling point even mean? Do they screen for weapons, drugs, and vaginoplasty at the door?

4. Apparently the best way to sell dollar hot dogs at your shitty gas station is to play a clip of a dyslexic girl attempting to puzzle her way through the alphabet, then point out how juicy your hot dogs are for the remaining seven seconds.

5. Apparently the best way to sell the station's morning Zoo Crew DJ is to have him harass the mailman on the air for being black.

So instead of sleeping like the responsible adult that I probably should be, I started writing a short story. Feel free to tell me that I shouldn't bother to go any further, because this is the first voluntary piece of short fiction I've written in years, and the first one that doesn't deal with suicide in probably forever:

David stumbled clumsily into consciousness around three in the afternoon on a mattress stripped of sheets. There were sheets for the bed, and they were even clean, in the sense that he washed them about a week ago and left them in a pile at the corner of the room. But David really didn't see the point in putting them on the bed, only to dirty them again, so on the floor they stayed, perpetually clean, perpetually unused. The only difference is that this afternoon, there was a cheerful man in an astronaut costume waiting for him when he awoke.

This no longer surprised David.

There really was no questioning whether this man was really an astronaut; his suit was not much more than a costume, and certainly not spaceworthy. The reason for this was simple: David had never actually put much thought into what it would take in a suit to keep a man from exploding into his base components whenever exposed to the void of space, so the spacesuit just resembled the thick off-white suits from the reels they showed in grade school. Sometimes, when David was feeling creative, he was even colored in rapidly flickering neon, like an early promo for MTV. Simply, his appearance was not one of a legitimate astronaut, a fearless explorer of the godless void of space. He looked like what a lonely thirteen year old might imagine an astronaut might be after a long diet of Ace mass-market paperbacks, Saturday morning cartoons and afternoon syndicated sci-fi, and years of parental neglect.

Coincidentally, this is exactly how McKinley, brave space explorer and David's only friend, came into existence.

“Hello David, what sort of adventures do we have planned for today?” McKinley asked in a booming baritone that reeked of optimism, apple pie, and a massive post-war economic surplus. “Fuck off, spaceman,” replied a groggy David, briefly considering the pros and cons of throwing a pillow at the grinning, chiseled face of the ever-cheerful astronaut before deciding it would be entirely too much effort to retrieve it when he wanted to go back to sleep. “I haven't wanted to see you in years, much less go on any fucking 'adventures' with you.” McKinley chuckled in the way that a man would at a racy joke on his favorite radio program, a wholesome laugh laced with mild discomfort over the fact that his creator was working blue. “But David, the coupons came in, and you know you are out of microwave pizzas! It must be serendipity, because Foodplex has a coupon for seventy-five cents off the asking price (limit five per customer.)”

“Jesus, McKinley! I've been asleep for thirteen hours. There is no way that you could have checked the mail while I was passed out.”

“You were the one that was asleep, David,” Said McKinley, an otherworldly hint of malice in his voice that would have been drowned out by the pure wholesomeness of his tone to any other listener. “I've been here the whole time, and figured at least one of us should get a start on the chores.”

If you feel this is really going nowhere, please use this forum to be the first to tell me. Except for grammar issues. It is 4 AM, and I will happily drag grammar out to the streets to be shot.

oh man, Street Fighter IV

OH MAN
(XBL name: CJ Awesome. My Rufus is unstoppable. Bring it on)