High-Speed Piercings and Other Cosmetic Matters

You make a conscious effort to keep the peanut butter of politics out of the chocolate of your blog, and then along comes Old Man Reese with an assassination attempt. 

I initially wrote several hundred words on Donald Trump’s new piercing, how his love of the language of violence over a decade helped create an environment where his head was almost ventilated to the summer sky, and how the faux shock and pearl-clutching over how, HOW this could have happened will evaporate in denigration and more calls for 'retribution' before the end of the GOP convention this week - but it doesn't really matter. Trump’s near-death experience, while the wrong way to go about political disagreements, changes not one position of anyone involved in this race. The GOP will call for unity, but what they want is capitulation to a straight, white, Christian United States, where no one else has rights or a voice; the Democrats will still fail to connect despite any achievement they might have made in four years because critical thinking is largely dead in this country; and I just don't goddamn care anymore. I have one vote, and an AR-15 detailing doesn't change my mind about the GOP candidate. I’d sooner vote for a razor blade enema than for Felon Van Gogh, so make mine Joe in 2024. Still. And my passport renewal will be here before election day, just in case.

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After many, many months of laying fallow, my website is poised for an upgrade. Yeah - I'm keeping a website for now. I won't get to TikTok until the next generation has VR implants. Same basic look for the website, but better, almost 21st-century functionality. For instance, this blog is now writer-friendly because it’s site-adjacent versus the fifteen steps to post a blog of the site, which will continue helping me keep me hit a once-a-week deadline.

The online bookstore ordering system is also becoming a true cart-based system. If you purchased SHADY ACRES AND DARKER PLACES or HUNDRED ACRE from me previously, you know it was more convoluted than the average comic book universe - you send an order form, I send an invoice, you send a payment, I send a confirmation, I ship a book - it was only marginally better than asking you to send six box tops. Blame PayPal, which screwed a bunch of small sellers by eliminating simple buttons in favor of something needing a software developers kit and someone with an IT degree to function. Anyway, we’ve reduced the steps by 50%. We also now have the ability to add new items more easily, which opens the door to selling used books of ill repute from our shelves through the website (and maybe eliminate the 16% eBay takes for doing fudge-all as a selling platform in the process.) There will be a very small selection of nicely curated bits when the new site goes live in August.

The cart also arrives just in time for a BRAND NEW BOOK to go up for sale… but it’s not time to tell you about that just yet. Soon. Maybe even next week. But not quite yet. 

There will also be a more regular return to Free Fiction Friday in the not-too-distant future, as I get my arms around some things from the archives, including a piece from the late eighties that’s… electorally pertinent today.

As part of the overall streamlining, a couple of web pages have vanished. The Midnight-To-Three Publishing website, which never really got the time it deserved and never returned from its 2019 hiatus,  has ended as an independent entity and is now a sub-page to my personal website. One less URL to endlessly renew, and it was my own press imprint anyway, so it may get more attention in its new home. And shortly, the web page for Original Idea Films - which hosted several digital short films I made with Bernie and my movie-making cohort back in New York over a number of years - will be folding up its tent after a couple of decades online. No links - you can Google if you want to see primitive formats of even more primitive cinematography while they're still online. There’s still no idea where the films will wind up.

August. No date yet, but keep watching the skies.


Coming 7/23 - A Boy And His Cat Come Home