I’ll be telling a story onstage at the legendary Stonewall Inn next Wednesday night, if any of you are so inclined. This is perfect, actually — I have a big show coming up in late March, and this should be a perfect short-term deadline to write the story, test it out, and generally get my shit together.

The show is with Peter Aguero’s BTK band. I know Peter from The Moth and other live story shows in New York — here’s a bit of copy about him and the band:
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Leon digs a ditch

Originally uploaded by Brother O’Mara

Remember those eyewash units in science class? The ones you used to get acids or whatever out of your eyes, sorta like twin drinking fountains? Imagine leaning over one of those for a quick ocular rinse and realizing that they’ve been swapped with fire hoses.

That’s what work’s been like for the last several weeks.

Everyone loves to talk about how important it is for businesses to engage with customers on blogs and Twitter and whatever. And it is. There are legions of bald-headed honkies with glasses who love to advise people on social media strategy, but I’ll tell you this: very few of them actually do it day in and out.

If they do, there’s one thing that they’re forgetting to mention: sometimes it really sucks.

Everyone loves to talk about how Twitter is the new conversation platform, and it is. It’s not the new platform for nuanced, intelligent conversation, though. It can be a river of dashed-off half-baked ideas a lot of the time.

For me these past few weeks, it’s been a steady source of unsolicited performance reviews in 140 characters or less.

My savior here is this: Muay Thai training. After wallowing in a digital shit-rain all day and fighting online, I go to a gym here in Midtown, strap on the gloves and actually practice kicking real human beings.

Which may come in handy the day some bozo from the Internet actually tries to punch me in the dick.

So the blog’s suffering a little at the moment. It’s not gone, though.

And there’s this, too. My immediate coworkers are really great people. For real — I get a lot of leeway, lot of freedom and trust. Also it is totally cool to cuss very loud in my office as long as it doesn’t get into someone else’s phone call. It’s kind of like a cross between Mad Men and BoingBoing around there.

Keeping a job is what it’s all about these days. I know so many people out of work, so many people just terrified and scrambling right now, and for now, maybe just only for now, thanks to grace and good fortune, I’ve got a job. I’m hanging onto it with both hands and all my teeth and digging that digital ditch every day.

And sure, yeah, it’s hard and exhausting and whatever, no free time, cry me a river, right? I know where my food’s coming from and for that I am incredibly, unbelievably grateful.

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I spent most of the NYC ComicCon lurching in circles with my mouth half-open, hunting for a copy of Detective Comics # 587 and spending way too much money on plastic bullshit that reminds me of my childhood. The experience was spectacular.

I haven’t been to a comic book convention since 1991, in Virginia Beach — the whole enterprise was dusty, pasty and pungent. Not now, baby. Now that comics, computers and sci-fi are billion dollar businesses, nerds are out of the basement and blinking in the klieg lights. Pop culture’s always been a byproduct of marketing campaigns, but we are now in a golden age of hype and shiny bullshit.

Today’s thirtysomethings were the target audience back in the ’70s and ’80s when Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other pop mythologies did the first Triple Lindy into the collective consciousness. Now we’re just old enough to have kids who get just as pumped about Star Wars as we did, and fetishizing fictional universes is a family affair.

Whenever alien archaeologists unearth whatever temples we leave behind, they’re gonna think that Spiderman was our God and stormtroopers were some kind of high priests. Frankly, I’m thrilled. Digging through comic boxes and buckets of chipped action figures gets me all stoked and unstuck in time and I get the same sense of wow, cool wonder that I got when my dad took me to see Star Wars for the first time.

But this thing was for everybody. Really, it was just like the Mermaid Parade except indoors and marginally less sexualized. The people-watching and the costumes were spectacular and totally worth the admission price.

This is my favorite photo from this weekend’s NYC ComicCon, but there’s a lot more after the jump:

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In the audiobook version of his autobiography Dreams From My Father, now-President Barack Obama reads some choice phrases originally spoken by one of his high school friends.  But taken out of that context, we get these sound clips of a swaggering, hard-cussin’ new Commander-in-Chief.  Listen UP, y’all.  Don’t MAKE him say this shit twice.

Well, okay… do make him say this shit at least twice, ’cause it’s pretty awesome:

“Now, you know that guy ain’t shit. Sorry-ass motherfucker got nothing on me. Right? Nothing.”

“You ain’t my bitch, nigga!  Buy your own damn fries!”

“There are white folks, and then there are ignorant motherfuckers like you.”

and, for all the ladies in the house:

“Sure you can have my number, baby!”

(via The Boston Phoenix)

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I’ve been walking past this movie poster on the way to the subway for at least a week — after the jump in case your workplace is squeamish about the words “A Guy Who Ejaculates Fire” written in giant flaming letters:
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I wear a three-piece suit to work every day now. Now punk rock’s a prepackaged dream, a preservative-riddled batter you can spray out of a can and into your lifestyle, cook it up and presto, instant rebellion. Music’s not scary anymore, and when people howl and flail at their guitars it’s an animatronic history lesson, not the real thing.

Also those damn kids keep running on my lawn.

I don’t mean to be cranky and morose. But Lux Interior died today, and the world’s a lot more boring without the Cramps.

I made this photo in the Sleeveface style as my own little R.I.P.

Bonus points if you see that I’m wearing the album cover on my t-shirt, too.

I wrote a little story about my relationship to Lux and the Cramps — check it out after the jump if you like.
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