ADVENTURES IN THE SEX SHOP (REDUX)

I recently re-posted an old video of me on Facebook in which I sing Elvis Presley’s “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” at a karaoke show while dancing with a blow-up doll, who I named Mercedes. It brought back memories, and I suddenly recalled that I’d written a blog about me purchasing Mercedes from the local sex shop. I thought it might be worth revisiting the blog, which is so old it originally appeared on MySpace. (www.myspace.com/tabardinn, if you care, but be warned, I’m almost never there.)

I edited it down a bit because there was a lot of stuff in there that wasn’t important to the main story, stuff about work that no one will give a fuck about. I first posted this thing on the morning before I went on stage with Mercedes, so I also cut out my invitation for people to come out to the bar and witness this train wreck in person. I left the rest of it alone, even though I wanted to tinker with it a little.

Without further ado, here’s “Adventures in the Sex Shop,” originally posted on April 23, 2009:

The atmosphere inside a sex shop is always a bit strange. There are all these toys and novelties and such hanging off the walls, and none of the customers can look each other in the eye. They ignore each other as much as possible. They fondle the wares in absolute silence. They furtively crouch to see items on the bottom shelves.

Some of these toys are so large you can’t possibly imagine using them on someone, unless you planned to beat that person to death with them. But clearly there are women who can accommodate these enormous objects, as a nearby magazine demonstrates.

One patron accidentally brushed up against another, and they froze like scarecrows. Neither met the other’s eyes. Everything went silent for a moment, and their mouths worked as if they wanted to say something. But they didn’t. They turned away from each other, not a word spoken, and continued perusing the shop, intent on seeking out their respective pleasures.

I found an entire bookshelf dedicated to blow-up dolls of all kinds. All of them were female except for a lonely John Holmes model. Much to my surprise, almost all were small enough to fit in a box roughly the size of a VHS tape. Could these things be really full-sized? I needed a doll that was at least five feet tall, as I intended to dance with it.

I looked all over one package, but I couldn’t find out how tall this thing was. I went from box to box, and none of them said anything more than how the doll was shaped. Many of them were made for doggie style. Some had pictures of porn stars on their faces. But no practical information, aside from which holes were available.

And then, near my feet I noticed a few packages that DID say how big the dolls were: three feet. At first I thought it was pretty funny. Who would buy something like that except for people who wanted to bone midgets? But then I thought about who else might want to buy small blow-up dolls: pedophiles. My stomach turned. Well, I thought, if they have to fuck something, why not a fake kid? That would be so much more acceptable than actually fucking real live kids. Maybe there was a social use for mini-blow-up dolls, after all.

I grabbed an Asian blow-up doll, mostly because she was advertised as not being bent over for doggie style. I needed the doll to stand up, so I could dance with her. I brought the box up to the counter and asked the cashier, “How big is this thing?”

She was very polite, as someone who works in a sex shop must be. She offered to open the box for me and show me how much material was in there. With two quick slits made by a box cutter, she pulled out the doll and showed me that they could actually fit a lot of doll into such a small box.

I told her I’d think about it. She sealed the box again, and I went back to browse some more. This time, I found a pregnant blow-up doll, which was really creepy. Distantly, I wondered if there was another doll inside her belly. And then I saw the alien blow-up doll, which was purple and had three tits.

Yeah . . .

And then I saw a bigger box hiding behind the John Holmes doll. Ah! This one actually stood up to full height! She had huge tits and even clothes! I knew I had my winner, but I wanted to look inside, just to make sure.

The cashier opened the box for me and showed me the flattened doll’s body. “Aw, look!” she said. “She’s got hair! You can do her hair, if you want.”

Darkly, I said, “It’s not her hair I plan to do.”

She laughed. “I think you make a great couple.” And she rang me up. While I was waiting for my receipt, I noticed a warning on the bottom of the box: PLEASE PRACTICE SAFE SEX. DO NOT SHARE YOUR LOVE DOLL WITH ANYONE ELSE.

Could an STD really survive inside a sex doll in much the same way as it does in a person? And besides that, who the fuck shares their blow-up doll with someone else? If such people do exist, would they resort to wearing a condom while swapping dolls?

I got in my car and started driving home. It was only then, as I found myself easing into traffic, that I wondered what would happen if I got into a car accident. The paramedics who would pull me from the wreck would not understand the presence of a blow-up doll at the scene. If I died, my grandparents would have to go to the morgue to collect my belongings, and they would find my blow-up doll. As they put my corpse in the ground, they would wonder what kind of pervert they had for a grandson.

I obeyed the speed limit and came to a stop behind the white line at red lights.

When I got home, I thought I’d inflate my doll to take her on a test drive. NO! Not like that. You people have a lot of growing up to do. I just wanted to make sure I could dance with her and pull a few moves while still holding a microphone.

A few things took me by surprise.

I never expected blow-up dolls to lack fingers and toes. It looked like she was wearing mittens and booties.

I never expected blow-up dolls to have a cherry. Not just one, but two. Both the vagina and the anus each had a cherry one could pop. Some of you are drooling and saying, “You bet.” The rest of us are saying, “That’s fucked up, when you think about it.”

I never expected blow-up dolls to have hair. This one’s was like a Barbie doll’s, except it was only attached to her forehead. The rest of her pate was bald. I was tempted to shave the rest of it off.

I never expected blow-up dolls to be so . . . tight. No, I didn’t test it with my dick; I used my fingers. I popped the doll’s front cherry with my fingers and then tried to push them all the way in. I could only fit the first two digits of my index and middle fingers in, and that was at a vertical angle. Horizontally, I could only do one finger. The same held true for her mouth. [EDIT: For the record, when Mercedes popped a few weeks later, her back cherry was still intact, so I never tested her back door.]

There’s no way I could have fit my dick in this thing. Only a micro-penis could get in this doll. Now clearly these things are popular. They’ve been sold for who knows how long? But can there be that many dudes with micro-penises out there? And even then, those guys would have to make their peace with the slightly sharp edges of the vagina. I don’t see that happening.

Anyway, I learned that she would most definitely do for the onstage performance I had in mind. Time to deflate her. I pulled the tab in her back, and air came hissing out, but not fast enough. I pressed her against the floor in an attempt to speed this up, and when that wasn’t as helpful as I was hoping, I pushed her face down into the carpet with all my weight and folded her legs behind her head. As her air blew into my face, I suddenly felt ashamed, as if I was assaulting a woman for real. It reminded me of a story I’d written in college about a guy with a wife-beating habit who went to a shrink for help. He was then instructed to start beating pillows instead. It worked at first, but he got tired of it. The pillows weren’t good enough anymore. He went out and bought a bunch of blow-up dolls, which he then proceeded to beat mercilessly. I never got the chance to market it, though, because shortly after, I read Hunter S. Thompson’s SCREWJACK, which features a character with a similar background.

I shook these horrible thoughts from my head as I bunched her body up into a ball and stuffed her back in her box. I hid her in my closet, where she will wait until my performance tonight.

[At this point, I invited everyone to come out and watch me serenade a blow-up doll. I should make note that, as evidenced by the video, the crowd loved it. However, it turned out that management at that bar was not pleased with me. Instead of talking to me about it, they bitched out and talked to my friend, who ran the karaoke show. I had to play nice from then on out. A few other stunts I pulled: changing Weird Al’s “My Bologna” to “My Salami” and pretending to go down on myself onstage, dressing up like Dean Stockwell in BLUE VELVET and singing “In Dreams” to a cardboard standup of Freddy Krueger, and singing Denis Leary’s “Asshole” in an attempt to win a $1,000 contest. I also did Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling” with a pair of bells hanging from my belt. I was originally going to wear a dildo for this performance, but I heard back about the Mercedes incident, and I toned it down so my friend wouldn’t lose his gig.

It’s a good thing I did. That night, I was picked up for DUI after leaving that bar. Explaining a dildo to the arresting officer would have been next to impossible. If he’d busted me a week before that, I would have had to explain Mercedes to him, because she was sitting up in my backseat like a person, wearing a seatbelt and everything.

For those interested, you can find my DUI Diary on this very site. Start here.]

EVERYONE'S GOT ONE #29: SMOKING BOOZE

As many of you are aware, I almost died a few months ago when my pancreas stopped working. I was told by the ER doctors that I could never drink again. I learned from my regular doctor that I technically could drink, but since I drink to get drunk, I shouldn’t. I heard the same thing from a friend of mine who is in med school. Essentially, I can have a couple of drinks every once in a while, but that’s it.

Where’s the fucking fun in that? No one drinks because they like the taste. It relaxes them. Gives them a buzz. Gets them fucked up, if they need to be fucked up. You mean to tell me I can never experience that again?

And then I remembered something my father had taught me to do on one of my visits to Nevada. I’d tried it when I was with him, but I’d been drinking at the time, so I couldn’t really gauge its effect on me. I had to do some research first, though.

What had my father taught me? With just a few household objects, he taught me how to vaporize whiskey . . . SO I CAN SMOKE IT.

I checked up on a few things, and much to my glee, when you smoke whiskey, it doesn’t go through your digestive system, hence it stays away from your pancreas. Instead, it goes to your lungs, where it is instantly processed into your bloodstream and is sent to your brain, creating a buzz faster, in theory, than you could get from drinking it.

That’s the good news. There isn’t a lot of solid bad news, though. The one danger is, since you can’t gauge how much you consume in such a fashion, you’re more susceptible to alcohol poisoning, and there’s not much you can do to stop yourself from dying. When you drink, your body protects you from such poisoning by making you puke if you imbibe too much. There is no way for your body to eject alcohol if you’re smoking it.

The other danger, although it’s not really backed up by hard evidence, is that if your lungs don’t process the booze right away, it could turn back into a liquid, which would lead to a very boozy pneumonia.

I weighed the positives and the negatives and decided that it was worth the risk. As a public service, I thought I’d tell you all about it here.

How does one vaporize booze? It’s simple. You need a few things: a water bottle, a cork (or rubber stopper, but I’d recommend a cork) and a bike pump. That’s it. You put maybe about a finger of booze into the empty water bottle. Then you stick the bike pump’s needle through the cork and stick the cork tightly into the neck of the bottle. Give it three or four pumps and pull the cork out. You’ll get a loud popping sound, and you’ll see vapor instantly form in the bottle. Suck it down and hold it in. Aaaaand repeat. Every once in a while, you’ll have to replace the whiskey with another finger’s worth.

I suggest using a cork instead of a rubber stopper because if you get a solid stopper, you’re going to have a hard time getting the pump’s needle through it. It’s pretty hard to do with a cork, but the going is easier. Actually, cork is a lot tougher than it looks. The cork I got was a bit too long, so I had to cut some of the bottom off. It was a tough motherfucker to get through, and putting the needle through from top to bottom was a hell of a chore.

Anyway, I pumped it up and sucked down a cloud of whiskey. The first thing I noticed was that I could actually taste the whiskey in the back of my throat. And instead of feeling a burn in my guts, I felt it in my lungs. Best of all, when I exhaled, I couldn’t detect a boozy odor on my breath.

I spent an evening doing this maybe two months ago, and I did get a slight buzz. However, much later in the night when I stood up, I did not feel anything more than that. I walked a straight line, and I touched my nose with my eyes closed, no problem. I wasn’t nearly as drunk as I should have been.

It was a very disappointing experience. It’s a shame because there’s a pretty cool ritual that goes with it. Ritual is always fun when it comes to intoxication, whether you’re chopping out a line, cooking a spoon or preparing a glass of absinthe. But in this case, it’s a lot of effort for almost no reward.

Even worse, if you drink the booze that is left over after you pump all the alcohol out of it, it tastes like shit. It’s kind of like drinking a Coke that has been opened for a few days. Flat. And it leaves a bad aftertaste.

But! There is one interesting catch. Just to test things out, I had one drink—equal to about a shot—after I stopped vaporizing whiskey. It hit me so hard that I almost passed out. I felt sleepier than I ever have in my life. Maybe it was the fact that I hadn’t had anything to drink in a month. Or not. Who knows? But I’ll say one thing for sure: it was the best night of sleep I’d gotten since the week before I went into the hospital.

So is this my new way of getting drunk? No, sad to say. Like I said, it’s waaaaaaay too much effort for the effect. I’d have to spend the night pumping away for something like three hours or so and then drink one shot. No thanks. It’s not worth it. Besides, I like the ritual of drinking too much to ever be satisfied with smoking it. There’s just something about the feel of a tumbler in your hand, sitting in a bar with friends, feeling yourself on the cusp of something that could turn out to be a fucked-up adventure. Or it could be a night of laughing with friends. Or you could get laid. The sky’s the fucking limit.

It’s too bad. I’m going to miss that life. I had a lot of fun, and as a friend of mine recently said to me, that’s a good thing, because I paid dearly for it.

Hey. There’s always heroin, right?

EVERYONE'S GOT ONE #28: TRIGGER WARNINGS ON BOOKS IN THE CLASSROOM

I was going to sit down and write a bunch of stuff about the controversial topic of trigger warnings on books in the classroom, but then I remembered that I'm not a student, and I don't have kids, and schools are highly unlikely to ever teach a book by me (unless a teacher figures out a way to make a space giant fucking the sun with a monster cock relevant to students), so this doesn't have any effect on me. I will continue to lead my life as I always have. Ultimately, I have no say in this, so I'll shut up. The rest of you: discuss.

EVERYONE'S GOT ONE #27: NOAH IS A GREAT FUCKING MOVIE

Let’s start this out by saying that I love Darren Aronofsky’s work, ever since I first saw REQUIEM FOR A DREAM way back in the day. He’s got a great sense of story, but even more so, he’s got a great eye for aesthetics, and that’s what primarily drives his films, in particular THE FOUNTAIN.

When I first heard about NOAH, I felt kind of turned off. First of all, it’s a silly Bible story. I love Bible stories, generally speaking. They’re fun. They’re gory. They’re sexy. But the story of Noah’s ark is pretty silly and uninteresting. To make matters worse, it looked like they were going for a gritty retelling, more GLADIATOR than Bible story. Fittingly, they got Russell Crowe to star in it as the title character. Again, I love Crowe’s work, ever since I saw him in THE QUICK AND THE DEAD. He’s better than people give him credit for. But as Noah? It sounded like they wanted to take a silly Bible story and turn it into an action flick.

But then I heard that Aronofsky was going to be at the helm. I have a lot of faith in his work, and I knew he wouldn’t disappoint.

Sure enough, he didn’t. I loved the shit out of NOAH. As much as I love Bible stories, they’re terribly written. This is probably due to the limitations of writing back then. Moses, who is traditionally considered as the author of the Torah, which is where Noah’s story appears in the Bible, had a lot to go over and probably didn’t have a lot of material to write with. As a result, he probably had to keep things short, especially since the laws are more important than the stories. So, in essence, I believe we need fleshed out versions of Bible stories written by experienced authors. NOAH is a great step in this direction. However, Aronofsky managed to piss a lot of people off with this movie. Why?

Let’s take a look at what’s in the Bible. Noah, who is the son of Lamech, who in turn is the son of Methuselah, is a 600-year-old man with a wife and three sons, Shem, Ham and Lapheth. In those days, the Nephilim still walked the earth, and they had a habit of fucking human women, who would then give birth to great men. God became sick with the wickedness of man’s ways, so He decided to kill everything. It should be noted that there is nothing in the Bible about Him deciding to start all over again at this point.

Everyone on the planet was evil, but Noah stuck out as being a good guy, so God decided to spare him and his family. In that moment, He also decided to start over by having Noah build an ark that would contain two of every animal so they can repopulate the world. As a reward for this, God gives Noah and his family (which includes the wives of his sons, as well; so the grand total of people on board is eight) permission to get on the ark and survive with the rest of the animals. Keep in mind, the Bible is very clear on this point: God directly speaks to Noah.

Noah builds this ark to God’s exact specifications (and they are VERY specific) just before the rain begins. Everyone gets on board, and it rains for 40 days and 40 nights. Everything not on board the ark dies. Noah then starts looking for dry land by sending birds out to find it. A dove brings back an olive branch on the third try, and before long, in a very WATERWORLD-type moment, Noah finds dry land. Everyone gets out of the ark. Noah builds an altar to the Lord and starts making sacrifices with clean animals (so, uh, not all the beasts got to renew their species). God loves the smell of these burnt offerings, so He promises Noah that He will never again sentence everyone to death. He chooses a rainbow as the symbol of His covenant with humanity.

Noah becomes a farmer, which is not very important to the story. He also becomes a vintner, which is waaaaaay more important to the story. Noah, it turns out, loved the grape so much that he became the first winemaker by building a vineyard. He was one of the first great drunks in history, and when he drank, he liked to party naked. One day, Ham discovers his father naked and passed out. He’s kind of disappointed in the old man, and he asks his brothers to cover Noah up. When Noah wakes up, he’s furious to find that someone was offended by his nudity enough to cover it up. In one of the biggest overreactions in Biblical history, Noah condemns Ham—the guy who thought to cover up his father’s dick, not the two sons who actually covered it up—and his descendants to a lifetime of slavery. This is the Bible passage that everyone points to when they’re defending slavery in America before the Civil War. It’s generally thought that Ham was black, and that his descendants were Africans. (One of his sons was Egypt, and Egypt is in Africa, so . . .)

Anyway, Noah lives to be 950 years old, and then he dies.

See what I mean? It’s a silly story. It makes very little sense, and there is no mystery to it. It’s very straightforward, even in its goofiest moments. Aronofsky would have to go to great lengths in order to make a great story out of this. And he does. Here’s how he does it.

Take Lamech and Methulselah. There is nothing in the Bible about these guys except their names and their ages. This gives Aronofsky room to play. Lamech, who is also played by Crowe, teaches a young Noah the importance of farming, and he makes it very clear that animals are not to be eaten. Noah and his family are vegetarians, even though in the Bible, God clearly tells Noah that it’s OK to eat animals, that that’s what they’re there for. Interesting development.

It should also be noted that Lamech blesses his son with a snakeskin which presumably came from the devil in the Garden of Eden, since Aronofsky shows such a snake shedding its skin several times in the story. The skin is clearly magical, as it glows when it blesses Noah.

If you’re thrown off by such magic, hold on to your britches. There’s more to come.

Remember that throwaway mention of the Nephilim? They don’t figure much into the Bible story, but in the movie, they’re fallen angels. They spoke up in favor of humanity to God, and they were punished by being kicked out of heaven. They suffered on earth, their golden, fiery bodies becoming lumbering stone monstrosities. Now that they suffer for their choice, they hate human beings and want to kill them. Early in the film, they corner Noah and his family (which consists of his wife and three sons—no wives for them—and the injured little girl that they’ve taken in, who is not mentioned in the Bible at all), but one of them hears Noah’s story and talks the others into helping him.

Here’s another point of difference: God doesn’t speak directly to Noah. Instead, He sends visions. Noah, being just a dude, doesn’t know what any of it means, so he’s on a quest to find his grandfather, who is good at figuring out dreams. This is very important, because this is a story about faith. The problem with faith is that nothing is clear. If it was clear, there would be no reason to have faith. As a result, the message isn’t interpreted properly, which we’ll get to later.

This leads Noah to planting a seed from Eden in the middle of a desolate wasteland, thus growing a great forest, which he then culls to make an ark.

It should also be noted that Aronofsky replaces man’s wickedness with something else: industry. In his version, mankind has razed forests in favor of building giant factories, thus polluting the world and killing most natural things. Hm. Sound familiar? Could it be that Aronofsky is trying to make this silly Bible story, I don’t know, relevant to us?

With the help of the Nephilim, Noah builds his ark. The pairs of animals, birds, lizards and so on come to him, but so does the king of the realm and his warriors. This, by the way, is the guy who killed Noah’s father and now possesses the snakeskin. These guys are savages. They keep slaves, they eat human flesh, they take joy in slaughtering people. Real bad guys.

Obviously, they don’t make it. There are some complications, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. The most important difference between the Bible story and NOAH is Noah’s misinterpretation of God’s intention. Noah doesn’t understand that God wants to repopulate the world with humans, too. He’s of the opinion that God knows He fucked up with humans, and He wants to rid the world of them. Let the animals survive. They did nothing. They’re true innocents. He believes that it’s his duty to end the human race.

Wow. That’s some pretty heavy shit, right? No wonder a lot of people are so upset. Noah knows that he and his wife will be buried by his sons, and then his sons will be buried by his youngest, Lapheth. And he’ll be the last human, and no one will bury him. One problem. Remember that little girl? She’s in love with Shem, but due to her injury, she’s sterile. However, God, through Methuselah, heals her. She’s pregnant on the ark. When Noah finds out, he wants to kill her to ensure his interpretation of God’s plan is carried out.

Any ordinary guy in that situation would take it as a sign from God that he’s wrong. Not Noah. He decides that this is a test. After an argument with the family, he comes to the conclusion that he’ll let her give birth. If it’s a boy, he’ll do nothing. However, if it’s a girl, he will kill the baby.

Heh. As it turns out, the woman gives birth to twins, and they’re both girls. A lot of the climax of the story consists of Noah chasing after her and her babies, intent on slitting the little babies’ throats.

Again, you can see why this film didn’t sit well with most audiences. And you can probably see why this film sat very well with me. This isn’t a Bible story; it’s a horror movie, and it’s a pretty brutal one at that. It is essentially the struggle of one man to help the creator end His own creation. There is a great scene late in the movie when a bunch of violent scenes are juxtaposed together, matching with the first act of violence in history, the moment when Cain murders Abel. This is what Noah is fighting to destroy. It’s the ultimate scorched earth policy. That’s some scary stuff.

Most of the people who hate this movie do so because this is not the Bible story they grew up with. They expected to see a big screen version of it, and they were greatly disappointed. Ordinarily, I would tell these people to go fuck themselves. You can’t get pissed off at a work of art just because it didn’t match your very specific expectations. That’s stupid. However, there are extenuating circumstances with this one, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

I’ve called this Bible story silly many times, but I also recognize that most people don’t agree with me. That’s fine. I understand why that is: everyone who grew up with this story sees themselves as Noah. No one is ever the bad guy of their own story, and while most people recognize their own flaws, they always see themselves as good guys, usually better than most other good guys.

It’s the same thing with zombie flicks. Everyone who fantasizes about the zombie apocalypse assumes that they’re going to survive it. Everyone who identifies with Noah assumes that God would choose them to survive while the rest of humanity ends.

The Noah in NOAH is impossible to identify with. No one wants to see themselves as a guy who wants to stab babies to death. But at the same time, these are the same people who completely miss the point of this massive character flaw.

You all know that I’m atheist. I’m not going to rule out the impossibility of God, since I don’t know everything and all of the evidence isn’t in, but I’m pretty sure, at 99.99999999999%, that God doesn’t exist, which is sure enough to live my life as if He doesn’t. That puts me in the minority.

The argument could be made that God can never give us actual proof of His existence because that would negate the need for faith. I think that’s bullshit, but that’s how a lot of the world looks at it. Everyone else is OK with a creator who plays mind games like a paranoid girlfriend, and that’s fine with me, just so long as no one gets hurt over it. But since 100% of religion depends on faith, that means that God (and that’s a catch-all for whatever deity you wish, not just the Christian one) has to speak through religious documents. This leaves a lot open to interpretation.

Taking the end of Noah’s story in the Bible as an example, people thought this was God giving white people permission to enslave Africans. There are other passages which show why homosexuality is a sin. There are even passages which people used to sentence people to death for witchcraft. Every night, preachers and talking heads use their beliefs to justify all sorts of crazy bullshit.

None of these people EVER wonder if maybe, just MAYBE, their interpretations of the word of God are wrong. You have to be very careful when it comes to this kind of thing. Maybe, instead of wanting help with the end of humanity, God wants your help starting over with people. So instead of jumping the gun and running after your kid’s wife so you can knife your baby granddaughters to death, you should reconsider your interpretations.

That’s the ugly truth that most people who hated this movie can’t face. No one likes being wrong, but people are constantly wrong. Instead of letting things escalate because you’re too afraid of being wrong, you should stop acting like a madman and fix things.

I don’t fault these people entirely, though. Normally I would, but these poor bastards were tricked into seeing this movie by Paramount, or whoever promoted the movie for them. The commercials I saw for this movie were drastically edited to hide a lot of the things I’ve talked about here. I’m astounded by this scam, I really am.

For example, you know the moment in the trailer when Ray Winstone and his warriors confront Noah, and they make a great deal over how Noah’s alone and outnumbered? Noah says, “I’m not alone.” The unspoken implication is that he’s got God on his side, which speaks to the people who are familiar with the story. However, in the actual movie, Noah is not referring to God; he’s referring to the Nephilim, who are hiding as piles of rocks. When the battle begins, they fight for Noah, decimating the king’s men.

Remember the moment when Noah is underwater and surprised? That implies that it is a vision of the coming flood, which viewers understand right away. Edited out of that scene, however, are a bunch of dead bodies floating around. Those expecting the feel-good story from the Bible probably wouldn’t appreciate all of those corpses.

How about the beautiful moment when a warrior throws his sword down and ignites a field with a wave of fire? Well, in the actual movie, the army that was in the field, which also contained the giant Nephilim rock monsters that Paramount is so desperate to hide from potential viewers, and they are ALL EDITED OUT OF THE IMAGE.

There are more moments, but I think you get the idea. Paramount went to great lengths to misrepresent this film in an attempt to get a lot of the people who came out for THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST to come out for this movie. It’s a lowdown, dirty trick, and that’s why I’m excusing all the people who hated this movie for not being what they wanted it to be. I’m disgusted with the studio’s desire to use people’s religious beliefs for purposes of greed.

I don’t think Aronofsky or any of the cast and crew are responsible for this. This is definitely a studio stunt. I recommend the movie wholeheartedly because it’s a wonderful story with great actors and a solid message. But don’t believe the lies of the studio. This is not a Bible story. This is a story. Period.

RIP: The Napalm Assault

Some of you may have noticed the sudden absence of www.thenapalmassault.com. I’m sorry to say that I have to announce the passing of this lovely website. It was fun while it lasted, and I hope it brought entertainment to at least one person. If it was just one person, the whole thing would have been worthwhile.

It was always Leo Perez’s brainchild. He came up with the idea, but more to the point, he paid for it. Lately, he’s been making great steps forward in his comics career, and he just can’t afford to keep up the Napalm Assault while making a name for himself as an artist. He gave me fair warning, and I prepared for the end.

It’s a shame. I look back at what the website was supposed to be, and it never lived up to our expectations. Originally, it was Leo, Cliff Breaux and me. There were a few other interested parties, and the main cast was joined by the Righteous Sandwich for a while. But I have my scribbled notes from when a bunch of us got together to brainstorm what the website should be, and I’ve got to say, we were ambitious motherfuckers. Here’s a look at some of the ideas:

--We were going to have a great cheeseburger competition between Jim Sauve and me. I’ve always contended that the Country House makes the best burger in the area. He was going to challenge me on that.

--We thought about having a rotating political humor column.

--We came up with strange ideas for reviews. We wanted to review things people ordinarily didn’t review, like graveyards and websites.

--Fucktard of the Week.

--The Horrors of Channel Surfing.

--We thought getting me liquored up and unleashing me on some kind of local event would be a good idea.

--The Napalm Podcast. Believe it or not, there are actually episodes of these, starring Leo and Cliff, but none of them have been posted for the public.

--Investigative reporting of funny shit, not important shit.

--Cliff had a tongue-in-cheek opinions column in mind called something along the lines of “If You Don’t Agree With Me, You’re Racist.”

--Animal Shelter of the Week.

--We were going to have a monthly contest in which readers could win a chance to date one of us. That’s not as egotistical as you might think. We figured no one would actually enter, that it would be a bit.

--Not Just Wrigleyville—meaning, fun things to do in Chicago that, well, you get it.

--Vegan food reviews.

--And then there were reviews in general.

--I also wanted to invite a few friends to write for us. Fitz would do Nintendo retrospectives, and Jason (now known as the Drudgeon at Forced Viewing) would do horror movie reviews.

--And then there was the list of things I wound up doing for my own blog and posting links on The Napalm Assault: The DUI Diary, bar reviews, whiskey reviews, Meeting Authors, etc.

That’s quite a menu. If only we could have gotten this thing off the ground. That’s one of my big regrets. At first, there were posts from all of us, but over time, I wound up being the only one posting anything. It got to the point where Leo just handed the reins over to me, but by that point, I knew it was done. The site continued slogging along for a while, but it was a lingering death. It’s probably for the best that it’s gone.

I remember when I first started working on the site. The thing I offered first and foremost were comic book reviews. I think originally, Leo was going to cover DC, Cliff would do Marvel and I would cover all of the others, including and especially the indies. But I’d reviewed comic books for the college paper, and I was kind of eager to get back to it. That led me to wanting to do Cool Shit, and other comics-related coverage.

It was fun. It really was.

What does the passing of The Napalm Assault mean, going forward? I’ll be retiring a lot of my regular posts. Comic book reviews, which were posted, for the most part, at the Napalm Reviews Tumblr, will cease. Cool Shit will end, and that’s probably for the best. I only ever talk about the same books, anyway, and it is probably my least popular column. Only about 20 of you read it on a regular basis. It’s fun to do, but it’s time has passed. (Can you believe I’ve been doing Cool Shit for almost four years?! Here’s alink to the first one, just so you can see what it was like.)

The same with other reviews. Writing them takes up waaaaaaay too much of my regular fiction writing time, and let’s face it, I’m never going to get money for my reviews. The time has come to cut the weight holding me down. Don’t worry, I’ll still be reviewing horror movies for Forced Viewing.

I’m sorry to say that I’ll be ending One Question Interviews, as well. There is a lot of positive response to this column, but it’s not turning into what I want it to be. I was hoping to use the first five posts as a springboard to get a wide variety of writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, stand-up comedians and more to participate. I have not gotten a favorable response in that area. John Everson is the only person I don’t know personally who was interested in taking part with this column, for which I am very grateful.

I will also retire any convention coverage. It will be weird to go to C2E2 and not write anything up, but so be it.

It's weird. I started writing about comic books in college, back in the late 'Nineties. Back then, no one gave a shit about comics. The fact that there was a regular comics column in the college newspaper was absolutely mindblowing. I even won a state award for it. Now? You can't escape from comics. Somehow, I think the world will survive without my coverage.

What will continue? You’ll still get the occasional Everyone’s Got One. Whenever I have the material, I’ll post more Meeting Authors. If it strikes my fancy, I might do another Forgotten Comic Books. And as always, if something fucked up in my life happens, I’ll blog about it.

Well, that’s it, then. A door closes on a chapter of my life, and maybe another one opens. I hope you’ll join me. Whoops, there was one more regret I wanted to mention.

I really, really, really wish Leo had let me call the site The Third Testicle.

COOL SHIT 4-17-14

AMERICAN VAMPIRE: SECOND CYCLE #2: Wow. Back for two issues, and already things have just gone off the fucking rails. First of all, it’s great to see Cal again. But under the circumstances? I’m sure all things considered, he’d rather be in Philadelphia. And now that we’ve met the Gray Trader, things are probably going to get even more fucked up, especially if he’s really what Cal says he is. I’m so glad this book is finally back.

THE TRANSFORMERS: WINDBLADE #1: Ever since the animated movie, people have been baffled by Arcee’s existence. How could there only be one female Transformer? What are they, fucking Smurfs? Well, IDW has decided to address the issue by bringing in more women characters. As previously seen, they were taking care of the dying Metroplex up until now. Now, they’re on Cybertron and they’re trying to help Starscream get things up and running. Windblade is the only point of communication they have with Metroplex, since she’s the only one who can speak his language. It’s interesting to see this concept in action, but what really made me crack up was when Rattrap voiced it in a very awkward moment: “So . . . uh. What’s the—uh—whole you both being called ‘she’ thing about?” I could be mistaken, but I think Mairghread Scott is the first woman writer to ever tackle this title. Too bad they’re only giving her a mini-series.

ROVER RED CHARLIE #5: Only Garth Ennis could take a story about animals and make it as obscene as possible. I love the way these dogs think. “I’m a dog!” is how their frantic barks are translated. Oceans are big splashes. Humans are feeders. Those who haven’t had their balls cut greet each other by fucking. Take this POV and put it into a zombie apocalypse, and you have this book. In a previous issue, artist Michael DiPascale portrayed a human licking shit out of a dog’s asshole. Somehow, in this issue, Ennis and DiPascale outdo that scene with the short bus. I’ll let you read about that all on your own, though. It’s that good. I hate stories about animals, but I’m going to miss this one when it concludes next month.

STRAY BULLETS: KILLERS #2: It’s good to see Eli all grown up, and it would seem that he lost his foot in that car accident. He lost his father in it, too. But it looks like he’s gained a few interesting stories, and he might be getting laid pretty soon. But this isn’t his story. This is about a troubled young woman named Virginia, and her relationship with her aunt and uncle. David Lapham does two kinds of stories really good: tits and violence stories and depressing stories. This one is the latter, and the ending is just a heartbreaker.

IT'S NOT JUST A KEVIN COSTNER MOVIE: A whiskey review of Tincup

The first thing you notice is the odd look of the bottle. It seems taller, but that’s only because it doesn’t have much of a neck. It’s also shaped like a hexagon with a tin cup for a cap. Very intriguing.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Colorado whiskey, made from Rocky Mountain water. At first, that seems like blasphemy. Very few good whiskies are made outside of the American south, but Tincup will change your opinion.

Distiller Jess Graber is a man who loves his booze. You can tell that right away, as soon as you open the bottle. It smells like bourbon, but there’s also a hint of rye in there. It’s 84 proof, which is a little low for the newer generation of whiskey, but that makes for a nice and mellow experience.

This is some seriously smooth booze. It goes down with the ease of water, and it doesn’t even give you an afterburn, much less an aftertaste. And due to its low alcohol content, it won’t completely fuck you up. You’ll get a nice buzz going, and it won’t sneak up on you. It won’t play tricks. It will put you in the perfect enjoyment zone.

So why call it Tincup? And what’s with the tin cup cap? Graber says he “made Tincup in honor of Colorado’s first whiskey drinkers and the cups they drank from.” How awesome is that? The only problem is, the tin cup it comes with sucks. While it looks cool as all hell, it leaks out the bottom. Not too much, but just enough to make you feel guilty for wasting booze.

But that’s kind of like getting pissed off for seeing a Country House cheeseburger on a paper plate, a minor complaint. This is some good shit, folks. You should try it as soon as you can.