IT BEGINS

Right. It's blog time again. Let's do this.

As I write this, the hour is late. The sun is sinking slowly over the horizon, the auburn-golden rays of fading light intruding into my dimly lit living room where I type this, aimlessly searching for a subject on which to write. Where can I possibly start? My still recent seeming engagement? My fledgling career as a writer of web articles and short fiction? My tri-state chain of family style restaurants, Smith's Country Fried Trough?

I could write an entry full of shout outs to my InterFriends: a shameless shoutout to Lyssa Bee and her "blog" is here offered. Perhaps, though, it would be best to regale you with a story of half truths and half lies to distract you from a world of unrest and strife.


It was many years ago in the glittering metropolis of Atlanta. It was Dragon*Con, and I and my assorted friends were making merry far past the time when sensible people who knew the feel of sunlight upon their cheeks - non nerds, we'll call them - would be asleep and not shotgunning their fourth Monster of the day. So it was me, Cody, Ricky, the Blind Wizard and the Jewel Thief. These were all friends of mine from my high school days, with the exception of the Jewel Thief who was a traveling vicodin salesman wishing only that we would buy from him some pills as was the Atlantan custom.

Having procured a large quantity of autographs and trinkets that day, we milled around the hotel lobby with the stormtroopers and the sexy Vulcan ladies, imbibing in ungodly and nearly lethal amounts of libation as I began to ramble about post-imperial India and how the lobby seemed to get "progressively more fucked up" as the eve-morning progressed. Adjusting his monocle, Cody informed me while he agreed with my sentiments, this was neither the time nor the place to discuss the backwardness of caste systems. "Felicia Day is here." He told me, clapping a hand on my shoulder "and she's wearing a cleavagy shirt." It was indeed rumored that she was weaving through the crowds in that very hotel and was near the repugnant duct-tape-bikini-women-who-had-no-business-wearing-duct-tape-bikinis-due-to-lard and at my wheelchair height, I'd be at perfect height to surreptitiously snap a picture.

There was no Felicia Day.

Having been sent by my "friends" on a drunken boob hunt, I was bewildered to find myself surrounded on all sides by pasty fat with a tremendous loss of sobriety due to vodka. Crying and dizzy, I somehow ended up in the hotel across the street playing Dungeons and Dragons with Robert Picardo. He rolled a High Elf archer. I was a Drow wizard. I then proceeded to throw up on the table and awoke in the Motel 6 several hours later.

Crying.

Wandering out into the orange safety light glow of the early morning, I smelled bacon and wandered into the nearest Waffle House. It was then that I noticed that I was still wearing my Soviet Army uniform - costume of that year - and the clientele were predominately Republican. I ate my fucking bacon anyway.

The point of the story is this: don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things. Thank you for your time.