This Is Not an Odd Book Review – What the Hell Is Going on in France?

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Last year on Houdini’s Revenge, I wrote about how the media worldwide completely mishandled the details of the arrest of Varg Vikernes in the summer of 2013. Seriously, it was a complete mess, and the hearing that occurred on June 3rd of this year was chilling in what it revealed and the implications for anyone in France who may espouse ideas that are contrary to a particular party line.

Before I begin to discuss the situation with Varg, I need to make a couple of statements, one for clarity and the other just because it always comes up and it’s tiresome. First, let me tell you how I know Varg. I met him when I was working on a project I started before 9/11 that eventually fell apart because I am sort of chaotic and was even more so back then. I consider him a friend, and I assume he considers me one, too, though we frequently butt heads. Second, despite considering Varg a friend, I don’t share all of his beliefs. I mention this because I get shade from both sides of the fence and it’s annoying, when it isn’t amusing. Some people assume I am an anti-Semite because I like Varg and that makes them angry. Interestingly, some remain angry when I explain I don’t hate Jews because they think I should revile Varg for being an anti-Semite. But then some people who agree with antisemitic ideas find out that I like Varg and that I am not an anti-Semite, and they get angry. Not long ago some dude who thinks he’s like Charles Martel because being anonymous on the Internet is evidently pretty empowering was so annoyed by me that he social media snarked me with, “Oh, you are a multicultural white genocide supporter?”

Isn’t that how journalists used to know they were on to something – when everyone was pissed off at them? That’s what I tell myself these days. So please know I don’t want to hear your opinion about my beliefs, unless you feel that freedom of speech is a bad thing and then I will totally be willing to throw down with you in comments.

The Man Who Saw His Own Liver by Bradley R. Smith

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: The Man Who Saw His Own Liver

Author: Bradley R. Smith

Type of Book: Short story collection, semi-autobiographical

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Smith, as a writer, has an interesting writing style and Smith, as a man, is a polarizing figure.

Availability: Published by Nine Banded Books in 2007, you can get a copy here:
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You can also buy it directly from Nine Banded Books.

Comments: Bradley R. Smith may be the only Holocaust revisionist who writes about topics that have nothing to do with the Holocaust. And that’s good because while I know just enough about the Holocaust to hold my own in such conversations, I also am not invested in the topic enough to want to read books along the lines of what one expects from David Irving and Ernst Zündel. Admittedly, I haven’t read Smith’s book about his journey into Holocaust criticism, so perhaps then he concentrated exclusively on revisionism to the point of minutia, but I don’t think that’s the case. We’ll see when I read it.

Perhaps he has more to write about because Smith has led a far more interesting life than Irving or Zündel, once you remove the legal drama. But then again, Smith has had his own share of law troubles, and not the kind you might think. In 1962, Bradley R. Smith was convicted under California’s obscenity laws for selling a copy of Tropic of Cancer. In 1963, he appealed the verdict and the higher court sent the case back down to the lower courts in light of the California Supreme Court having determined Tropic of Cancer was not, in fact, obscene. Taking this anti-censorship stance bankrupted Smith. Regardless of how you feel about Holocaust revisionism, it’s impossible to deny that Smith is more than the one-topic obsessives who are often attracted to Holocaust studies because such topics feed their antisemitism and loathing for institutional intellectual authority. Smith has suffered financially and socially supporting freedom of speech – even speech liberals respect. He has gone on record as saying:

I do not believe in thought crimes, in taboos against intellectual freedom.

Perhaps that is what makes this book so odd – Bradley R. Smith is a living intersection of ideas that, on their surface, may seem mutually exclusive. But people and ideas are never wholly black or white. This played out vividly for me in terms of Smith’s personal politics because I generally have little patience for most libertarian ideas yet could see at times where Smith was coming from and could sympathize with his point of view. I think that was because Smith didn’t cloak himself in Randian-superiority. He mostly just wanted to be done with intrusive influences in his life. I can respect that.

This book of vignettes was initially conceived as a one-act play. When you read it as a dramatic piece, it feels much more powerful than a series of remembrances, but the book still carries a lot of power as a series of short stories. Through a proxy narrator called A.K Swift, Smith discusses his life and his ideas in a manner that is confessional, almost Beat-like in style. Though Smith does have this proxy narrator, the details in this book closely mirror his own life enough that I am just going to refer to the narrator as Smith, but that choice is also just to make things easier for me because I tried to refer to the narrator as “Swift” initially and ended up calling him “Smith” so often that I just gave up and switched to Smith.

Stupid Children by Lenore Zion

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Stupid Children

Author: Lenore Zion

Type of Book: Literary novel

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Children are tortured with nasal balloons and animal entrails.

Availability: Published by Emergency Press in 2013, you can get a copy here:
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Comments: The cover of this book drew me in. A white little girl – white skin, white underwear, long blonde hair – is standing behind a rope in a ragged backyard in late fall, or early winter. The look on her face is unfathomable to me, but the confrontation is undeniable. She is standing there, in her socks and underwear, unprotected in the wind, literally holding on by a string, and staring at you, the reader. Her expression could be anything from veiled disgust to melancholy to vague interest in the camera as a break in the bleak boredom of the landscape.

This book, at turns neurotic and gross, touching and funny, is grounded by this cover. This book has a strange, over-the-top cult that engages in really nasty rituals. The heroine of the book is hilarious and neurotic. The plot-line gets loose at times and the wackiness of the book can occasionally make the reader forget that at its heart this is still a book about a little girl whose mother is dead, whose father is in a mental institution, who ends up in foster care in the home of cultists who marry her off to an old man in a scenario reminiscent of so many stories that came out of the FLDS sects. Zion handles all of this heaviness with a humor and open-minded acceptance of the bizarre, but the cover ensures you remember a smart little girl in a forsaken place is at the center of the story. Outside of House of Leaves, I can can’t recall a time when a book’s cover ensures you don’t miss some of the most important details of the book. The girl on the cover helps you remember that this is a very upsetting book, even as you find the prose quite amusing at times.

Quick synopsis: Jane’s mother is dead and her father had a breakdown. He attempted suicide and becomes a long-term resident in a mental hospital. Jane is sent to live in foster care and ends up living with a family indoctrinated into the fictional Second Day Believers, a strange cult that merges properties of Scientology (weird ideas about mental illness and its treatment), FLDS (marrying young girls off to older men powerful in the cult) and a very gross, borderline pagan attraction to animal entrails. Jane becomes close to her foster brother, Isaac, and their relationship takes a dark turn as Isaac becomes rather unhinged himself, a young proxy in Jane’s affection for her unbalanced father. Jane eventually becomes far more valuable to the cult than the cult is to her but her love of Isaac keeps her from leaving the madness until Isaac forces the issue in an act of numb but horrifying violence.

Let me get the hard criticism out of the way before I sing this book’s praises. The ending was rushed and, in a way, a bit contrived. It all happened too fast. The reader doesn’t get to see what happens and because it is so rushed, we miss out on some catharsis. The reader needs that catharsis because this book, as funny and sarcastic as it can be at times, also has some hard and upsetting content. We need to have that BAM! moment and it gets lost in the rush. Not entirely – you won’t be left feeling like doors were left open, but you also don’t get the satisfaction of hearing those doors slam shut.

With my main criticism out of the way, let’s dissect why this book is worth reading.

Thirteen Girls by Mikita Brottman

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Thirteen Girls

Author: Mikita Brottman

Type of Book: Fiction, themed short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it made me feel a bit less odd about my own obsessions.

Availability: Published by Nine Banded Books in 2012, you can get a copy here:

You can also buy the book directly from Nine Banded Books.

Comments: This book is deceptively simple: Brottman wrote short stories about the deaths of thirteen young women, some killed by famous serial killers, some picked off like ducks in a row, casual victims in an ugly world. While this is a work of fiction, the stories in this collection are based on real women and real crimes. The stories are told from varied perspectives: police report, perp interview, anguished mother, dieting co-worker, angry boyfriend, sole survivor. There was a game-like element for me as I read, wondering if I could guess who the girl was and who killed her before I reached the end of the story. Given my prior interest in serial murderers as well as just murderers in general, it was surprising I only really knew five, though several more rang some bells that didn’t ring clearly until I got to the end of the book. One I missed was a victim of serial killer Bill Suff. I should have known that one. I became obsessed with trying to track down the whole text of a cookbook Suff wrote, all the more interesting because he evidently ate body parts from a few of his victims, going so far as to use a breast from a prostitute he killed in his “famous” chili recipe. I’m not sure why I wanted a cookbook written by a serial killer cannibal – the late 90s was a weird time in my life (but I still sort of would like to have a copy…).

Shortly, I am going to discuss the two stories I liked best, but before I do, I want to discuss the overall nature of this book. I enjoyed reading it but, at the end, I found myself feeling like the collection hit a discordant note in some of the stories. I felt empty after I read them and felt that Brottman had missed the point somehow, that the stories were flawed because I felt flat after reading them, yet felt so engaged with some of the others. The reason I felt that way was because I was the one who had missed the point.

If some of these stories don’t evoke emotion, it’s because they aren’t supposed to because Brottman is showing us the different windows through which we can observe brutality. While I appreciate this collection for attempting to give the back or parallel stories associated with these murders, the casual memory of death Brottman showed in several of these stories is what makes this collection mean something more than standing as a mawkish look at dead young women. It’s a sad reality that not all deaths are memorable and that all murders do not change those who knew, however fleetingly, the person who was killed. The hell of it is, in terms of media and social awareness of victims, it can often seem like particular victims do not matter at all. Sometimes the lack of interest plays out in the form of a phenomenon called “Missing White Woman” syndrome – black female abductees and murder victims don’t get the media time afforded to white female abductees and murder victims. But on a more personal level, sometimes a murder means little to those left behind. There is a sentimental viewpoint in some of these stories, but these stories are anything but sentimental.

Grudgepunk by John McNee

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Grudgepunk

Author: John McNee

Type of Book: Fiction, themed short story collection, noir, transhumanism with a smidge of steampunk, horror

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it is the first book that contains steampunk elements that didn’t make me want to throw the book at the wall. And he didn’t screw up the transhumanist elements of his stories. Believe me, that’s all very odd.

Availability: Published by Bizarro Press in 2012, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I first encountered John McNee in 2011 when I read a relatively mediocre extreme horror short story collection. His story was the best in the book, a dystopian, transhumanist nightmare that made the rest of the stories in the collection seem almost amateurish in comparison. I wondered how McNee would do in longer form, if he could take the amazing world-building and characterization and keep the intensity of his monstrous characters outside of the limits of a short story length. Turns out he can. If I had been in a position to have a “Best of” list in 2013, this book would have been at the top of the list. I can say with no equivocation that this is an excellent book.

Though this book is released by a bizarro imprint, I hesitate to call it bizarro. It’s noir. It’s trans-humanist. It’s extreme horror. It’s brutal and intense and at times strangely touching. It defies classification because it is a perfect synthesis of so many different influences without becoming a pastiche. This is not an imitation – it’s a creation. Because I am not a person much given to steampunk or noir, I should not have liked this book as much as I do but it speaks to McNee’s skills that he mixed subgenres I don’t much care for and I still couldn’t put the book down.

Quick synopsis of the book: In the city of Grudgehaven, we are presented with a place much like Gotham late at night combined with Sin City at all hours, with some side steps into Blade Runner and Repo: The Genetic Opera as run through a Cherie Priest novel. Criminal syndicates are at war, wreaking havoc. A gorgeous dame sings at a club and forms a strange friendship with a taxi driver. A man fights to keep his ailing wife alive during a riot. A sentient severed hand is on a mission. Human motels, in that they are motels made of human skin, have relationships with real humans. A writer finds herself in a sticky situation when she is hired to write the autobiography of a very bad man. The daughter of a preacher makes a deal with a devil of sorts. A boy made of clockworks longs to be real. And all of these single threads weave the tapestry of The Grudge, a town without pity but with plenty of malice.

Because of that pesky second X-chromosome I have, the story of Louie, his wife, Marianne, and the lounge singer Dolores, was the price of admission part of this book, though the stories of Cynthia, the woman tasked with writing a book about the worst man in The Grudge, and Alesa, the preacher’s daughter, are both excellent. The tale of Louie is such a great story that I am going to discuss it in depth, and mostly spoil it in the process. I don’t like doing that but if I don’t keep myself focused on one story, I would want to write about every story in the book and this discussion would be about 40 pages long. But I also must spoil it because spoiling it is the only way to show how excellent it is.

Louie is a cab driver who is down on his luck. He has a sick wife and he has a lot of trouble making ends meet. He meets a gorgeous club singer named Dolores, who gets him caught up in a surprising double-cross. This is a story that has been told so many times that it hardly seems remarkable enough, on its face, to be one of the best stories in the collection. The delight (and sadness) is in the details.

Sleep Has No Master by Jon Konrath

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Sleep Has No Master

Author: Jon Konrath

Type of Book: Fiction, themed short story collection, lunacy

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: I don’t even know how to tell you all the ways this book is odd. I am mostly reminded of this Hunter S. Thompson quote:

Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ‘the rat race’ is not yet final.

Availability: Published by Paragraph Line Books in 2012, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This book gave me the fear. Like I was going to go full Gonzo-paranoid and end up locking myself in the backyard shed with a gallon of whiskey and a loaded gun. As I read parts of the book, I thought, “I wrote this. I wrote this book and I forgot and Konrath sent it to me in some passive aggressive ruse in order to show me he has access to my thoughts and computer and probably even my medicine cabinet.” I read the title chapter out loud to Mr. Oddbooks, who peered at me nervously from his side of the bed, no doubt wondering if I had had (another) psychotic break (there was a… problem when I read a particular Zippy the Pinhead cartoon that referenced the Oscar Meyer Wiener-mobile, but that was years ago).

A quick summary of the book is likely in order: this is a short story collection that tells the tales of a dude who does stuff, sometimes alone, sometimes with his loser friends. Through these dudes, Konrath hits on too many details of my life for this book to be legal. Some of the topics that include details far too specific for my comfort: insomnia, unlikely car customizations, Varg Vikernes, specific conspiracy theories, a complete inability to use eye drops as a child, over-the-counter sleep aids, corpulent Asians friends, microsleep, the bizarre belief that one’s eyelashes are inverting back into one’s eyelid (mine grow sideways, toward my nose, and it’s a problem), spending most of one’s work days searching eBay listings, self-torture via medical sites, Crispin Glover, gg allin, disgust for how badly movies tended to represent computer capabilities in the 80s, the Voynich Manuscript, fear of what diet sodas may be doing to my brain, and so much more. This book is, when I can tamp down the paranoia, deeply funny, verging on hilarious at times, but the paranoia lurks because who really could have so many weird idiosyncrasies in common unless something nefarious is happening?

The story “Sleep Has No Master” contains a paragraph that pretty much confirmed for me that Konrath needs to go to jail, the fucker, because I know I wrote this at some point:

I started researching sleep disorders online, the usual death spiral of fanatical WebMD queries, and stumbled upon something called fatal familial insomnia. It’s an incredibly rare four-stage inherited prion disease that starts with progressively-worsening insomnia and panic attacks. Then you dive into a wonderful world of Nixon-esque paranoia and vivid hallucinations. By the third stage, you cannot sleep at all, and your body starts breaking down with rapid weight loss. It all leads up to a crippling dementia, before you finally buy the farm. Barbiturates and induced comas, which you’d think would knock you out, actually speed up the disease. In one famous case, the doctors completely nuked the patient with heavy sedatives, but his brain would not shut down. This is the exact kind of thing you don’t want to read at 3 AM when you’ve been awake for 40 hours straight and you’re trying to find some homeopathic bullshit to turn off your brain for the evening.

Seriously, I am rethinking the microwave brain readers that Gloria Naylor insisted were used to read her thoughts. You know how when your cats freak out and run frantically into the other room, only to stop immediately and then stare, wild-eyed at the wall? I think that’s when Konrath is warming up the brain-microwave.

This Is Not an Odd Book Review: Biblio-Curiosa, No. 4 by Chris Mikul

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Title: Bibilo-Curiosa, No. 4

Author and Editor: Chris Mikul

Availability: You need to contact Chris directly at chris.mikul88@gmail.com. The ‘zine itself is $5 Australian, so those outside of Australia need to get a quote from him directly. For Americans, if I recall correctly, it is $8 USD an issue, shipping included.

Comments: Last year was a complete waste for me. Dozens of books were left unread, dozens of discussions never happened here. Truly pitiful. But in the spirit of not dwelling on the past and various failures, I want to begin 2014 with a discussion that is long overdue and about a writer whose work inspires me. I’ve said several times that I really envy Chris Mikul’s writing style and research expertise, and his fourth issue of Biblio-Curiosa further cements my opinion of him (I also have two books of his I really want to read and discuss this year – fingers crossed).

For those unfamiliar with Biblio-Curiosa, Mikul’s ‘zine is part book review, part in-depth research. He reads genuinely strange and obscure books and writes about them, but he also engages in deep research into the lives of various writers, sometimes trying to track down authors whose names are very nearly lost to history. Every issue is a fascinating read.

Issue 4 has four articles, and begins with a look at what can only be called a lunatic book. The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman doesn’t sound that loony on its face – just sort of pulpy. Written by Arthur N. Scarm (yes, Scarm, though it is spelled “Scram” on the title page) in 1972, it is a novelization of a Spanish film called La Noche de Walpurgis, released in the USA as The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman or Werewolf Shadow. The movies, going by title, sound cheesy enough, but as Mikul notes, the novelization is… not entirely true to its source:

…the book bears only the most passing resemblance to the film. Instead, it takes off on innumerable mad tangents of its own, and brims with cartoonish sex and violence, ludicrous dialogue and scenes that border on the surreal.

The book changes the protagonist’s name from Waldemar to Waldo, changes his personality from a shaggy, animalistic creature into an urbane, sophisticated wolf-dude, and introduces all sorts of previously unknown and probably created on-the-spot werewolf lore. It is here I feel I should mention that Waldo can do all sorts of nefarious and odd things, like shrink boobs with his mind. Montague Summers would weep if he read this book.

Waldo ends up with a vampire woman, as described in the title, but before he does he engages in all kinds of strange seduction. Take this snippet Mikul shares from the book:

Handling the girls like toys, he planted them on their backs, one on top of the other, and with Elvira on top, got on top of her. Ruth was on the bottom and he made love to her through Genevieve and Elvira, with all three girls screaming because it was so uncomfortable.

Yeah. This hilarity aside, this article gets even more interesting when Mikul looks into who “Scarm” really was.

2013: The Year I Mostly Lost

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

I can’t even think about doing all the end of year stuff that everyone who writes about books engages in come around mid-December. Because of Houdini’s Revenge and that site I launched looking into that way-weird woman who scams everyone online, I barely even read this year. Like I am embarrassed by the paltry number of books I managed to finish. It’s pretty shameful.

I intend to remedy this because I miss being able to read. All the research into the weird woman is wearing me down. I really miss this site. I will work on my other sites, to be sure, but IROB has always been my first love and I hate that I have neglected her so.

But I have no idea when business as usual will resume. I am typing this entry at 4:00 in the morning in the dark as my mother sleeps in her hospital bed. Some people could work in this situation, but I can’t. I’m popping acid reducer pills and thinking about re-reading the Harry Potter books because my brain is too tired for much else.

But life settles down. It always does. So I will be back when I can be back. Just keep me in your readers or bookmark me or whatever. I will be back, hopefully soon.

Got Me Wrong by Kevin Akstin

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

Book: Got Me Wrong

Author: Kevin Akstin

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, gently weird

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It’s not the full-bore weird I generally discuss on this site, but it is one of those books that is neither fish nor fowl. It’s not lit fic but it’s not wholly experimental. Complete inability to classify a work is often a very good sign it is strange in some manner.

Availability: Self-published on the Lulu platform in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Before I begin this discussion, I want to point something out about this self-published book: it is far better edited than most books that come from small and even large publishers. When I received this book in the mail and saw it was self-published, I had a small twinge of trepidation before reading it. My distaste for the increasingly slap-dash efforts that go into editing books is hopefully well-known by now and I feared I would have to gently tell yet another aspiring writer that I could not discuss his or her book because the editing was so bad all I would be able to do would be to savage it. Sometimes I like savaging books, but most of the time I don’t enjoy it and will not throw the same disgust I lob at say, Edward Lee, at a new and struggling writer. It was such a relief that such concerns did not play out with Akstin’s book. It is impeccably edited. Some of the spacing and indentations in my copy are a bit off but when the grammar is spot on, I can overlook wonky paragraph alignment.

One day I will weaken and stop beating this drum, but reading poorly edited books is a chore. I don’t like it when reading is a chore. Proper editing elevates even the most mundane novels and it certainly helped Akstin’s stories. Akstin’s writing style is not one that I am fond of, but clean writing goes a long way in making even that which is not my cup of tea something I am willing to drink. Though I think these stories would have been more memorable had there been more immediacy, I can also admit that applying my specific tastes to these stories and finding them lacking would be a disservice to Akstin’s goal because even as he writes of miserable, desperate people, he is telling the stories of very disconnected people. Immediacy and emotional depth would have spoiled that necessary disconnection. This book is full of addiction, fault memory, aborted and lost children, and brutal fights, and the muffled way the characters experience these traumas ring as distant as a Carver story but without the minimalism.

When I read this collection, I didn’t feel kinship with the stories. Despite having a glimpse into the lives of strangers, at times intimate looks, I never felt like a voyeur, looking through windows with a telescope. I felt like a clinician peering at slides under a microscope. It’s the distance in the prose that created that feeling. In this collection of 16 stories, Akstin presents a common theme of madness, guilt and a great desire for atonement with a creepiness that permeates all the stories. What made these stories interesting is that even as you feel like a dispassionate observer, there is a maddening yet compelling fuzziness to some of his endings that forces you to interpret the story, further driving home that reading his work is an act of interpretation, not connection. You are looking at the disease cells under a slide, not talking to the patient.

There were a few stories in the collection, as in all short story collections, that worked better than others. To keep this from becoming overlong, I’ll limit myself to the stories I liked best. Be warned: there will be spoilers.

2013: The Year Wherein I Realized My Limitations and Ignored That Realization

This post originally appeared on I Read Odd Books

So, I launched two websites this year: Houdini’s Revenge and Truth About Ruth. I enjoy writing for both of them and both of them require a ton of research on the front end and wonderful organizational skills on the back end. I can research like a champ but the sheer volume of comments and e-mails has been… sobering? a stark reminder of why it is a very good thing I never had children? It’s hard to say, but after spending 4 days doing nothing but responding to e-mails from TAR, I have to wonder if even a really organized person with excellent time management skills would have been able to cope.

At any rate, IROB is still my favorite of my three sites because it was my first real site and I feel really crappy that I have neglected it so much lately.

I have great stuff in the pipeline. In the next few weeks I hope to have up discussions of books by Kevin Akstin, Mikita Brottman, John McNee, Jon Konrath and others. I am working on an essay for another venture, a discussion wherein I apply the aesthetics of disgust to various bizarro novels. The Jim Goad ANSWER Me! discussion is also back on the table now that my “unpleasantness” is over. Not sure when that will happen but I am betting we’ll see it sometime in early 2014. It’s going to be a monster in terms of sheer word count so I promise that it will be worth the wait, if only in terms of volume.

I also have what I hope to be a very interesting look at books about disappearances in the national parks system. David Paulides, a Bigfoot researcher and former law enforcement officer, wrote two really fascinating books (actually, there is a third I have not yet read) about strange disappearances in various parks and the institutional stonewall and incompetence he encountered when he tried to get information about many of these disappearances. This discussion will be for Houdini’s Revenge but a lot of readers here may enjoy it.

And of course I will be cranking out content for Truth About Ruth. I had no idea it would become this massive of a research effort when I launched the site, and as of right now I don’t know if I will ever see the end of this woman’s scams and machinations. It fascinates me and is very interesting to me, but it also stabs my life in the face. Surely, as an adult with a ton of time on my hands, I will find a way to balance all the things I enjoy doing online.

On a completely unrelated note, my birthday last month was pretty much just another day – I’ve never been much of one to celebrate my birthdays in a big way. Dinner and book shopping is the maximum of what I am willing to do just because the clock ticked off another year. However, Mr. Oddbooks got me this:

It’s Captain Koons from Pulp Fiction, explaining the legend of the watch to my late cat, Adolph. He commissioned it from Ruth Marcus, a woman who specializes in painting your pets with various celebrities. Truly, this is the best gift anyone ever gave me. He got it professionally framed and I plan to hang it tomorrow. Adolph’s been dead for over three years and I still haven’t really gotten used to the idea he is gone. He was a remarkable animal. And he would have wanted to see a watch that spent five years up one man’s ass, two years up another’s. And we all know how I feel about Christopher Walken.

I also wanted to thank everyone who recently used my Amazon Affiliate link when they made purchases on Amazon. I really appreciate it!

See you all later this week. Let me know how you’ve all been doing!