Louis CK is a hilarious Talking Man, but he’s more than that; better than that. He’s a Talking Man who isn’t lying. He makes no bones about the fact that he wants to get paid for making up bullshit. That’s refreshing to me. God knows how many bullshitters we’re paying every day who claim to provide some other tangible service. Those men and women are frauds. Louis CK is not.

No, Louis CK is not a fraud, and he has a new thing. You should buy it.

Better than that, Louis CK is trying a new means of communication against the best advice of people in his life. He’s trying to sell content directly to us, the consumers. This is great news.

It’s great news for anyone who:

• Thinks ads are annoying, pushy, and cacophonous, on top of occasionally being disingenuous when they’re not outright lies.
• Thinks censorship is wrong.
• Thinks artists should have complete creative control over their work.
• Is tired of Hollywood’s bullshit, TV’s bullshit, etc.

By cutting out the content distributors and middlemen, Louis CK is delivering hilarious entertainment directly to us. This is how it should be done. This is the way forward.

Buy his new thing.

I’ve always been a fan of informational signs that include people getting harmed. You know, like the one at your apartment complex that shows the dude getting squished by the gate? Or the one on the arm of the thing that stops you from driving your car out of the parking deck at work showing a dude being beaned in the head by the very same arm? My favorite is the one where the giant angry shock cloud is totally zapping the shit out of some hapless dude.

I was reminded of those when I spotted The included image in the Thornton Road Chick Fil A yesterday.

Here’s what those numbered points say:

1. If the victim is choking, call 911. Let the victim know you are going to help them.

Hey, I’m going to help you, but first I’m going to make a quick phone call. Don’t worry, you’ll pass out long before the ambulance can get here.

2. Give 5 back blows.

Seems to me like this is something that should happen at the end as a means of thanking the person who just saved your life, but I am not a doctor or anything.

3. Make a fist with your hand and place your (blurry words here about fisting)

I’m realizing here that no mention has been made of Dr. Henry Heimlich. What ever happened to him and his maneuver?

4. Grip your fist with your other hand and press into the victim [sic] abdomen with 5 quick inward and upward thrusts

If you should happen to graze victim jiggling breasts in the process, do not make a big deal out of it. Just file it away for later.

5. Repeat until object is dislodged

Or until you reach completion, whoever comes last.

I saw one of my teachers choking once in high school. A classmate of mine performed the Heimlich, a piece of potato came rocketing out, and pretty much everyone was embarrassed.

Not sure if there were any back blows, but I don’t really want to know anyway.

I texted an idea for a fake news story that I had to Nick, and he responded a few hours later.

“What is wrong with you?” he asked, so I figured it had potential and wrote it out.

I remember watching a History Channel show about prison life in which a former prison hit man is talking about having to store his stabbing weapon up his backside. He referred to it as a “keister stash.” It’s kind of a terrible juxtaposition, you know, since being a hitman might be the most manly thing a man can be, while getting penetrated anally is arguably the least. You could see the conflict in the man’s face on the television.

That got me thinking about how uncomfortable it must be physically to carry a knife that way, and then I started thinking pragmatically about what a person might do to ease the discomfort.

And so, the idea of the dildo-handled shank was born. Here’s the full article:
“Prison Hitman Ostracized for Fashioning Dildo Handled Shank”

I’m also in the process of moving to an emerging neighborhood, which got me thinking: what must it be like to have a smartass move into your neighborhood and have the gall to refer to it as “emerging.” What a smug prick!

So, I wrote an article about that very thing:
“Emerging Neighborhood Emerging Too Slowly, Reports Homeowner/Victim”

And I was also tricked into watching Grey’s Anatomy by Cheryl, though I did get dinner out of the deal. That got me thinking about what other sorts of deception someone else’s Cheryl might engage in to get them to watch Grey’s, so I wrote an article along those lines as well.

It is here:
“Grey’s Anatomy Treachery Suspected”

I’m still working on my novel project, although I haven’t had a lot of time to get into it over the holidays, what with the eating and the drinking and the moving. December should be a strong month, ideally.

I also had an idea for a story today. It goes like this.

Two vacuums who are both standup comedians by trade are talking. The older, more established one is mentoring the younger newcomer.

“Listen,” the older vacuum says. “You’ve got to get the change jokes out of your act. Everyone does jokes about change. We’ve heard it all before. When you’re run over change it makes a lot of noise and just falls out again. We get it. That’s hack shit.”

The younger vacuum is hurt but tries not to show it. “Well, yeah but my joke is a play on words. We fear change. Get it? Change like money but also…”

Older vacuum cuts him off. “I get it, and I’m telling you it’s hack shit. What’s next? Mao Tse Tung? ‘Change must come from the barrel of a gun’?”

The younger vacuum looks as though this is a pretty decent premise for a joke he’d have happily included in his act had this conversation never occurred. The older vacuum senses that he’s not getting through.

Older vacuum tries again. “Did you look at the crowd out there?”

“Of course I looked. I thought it went-”

“Well it didn’t went. You bombed. You did not suck.”

“Aw, come on I totally sucked.”

The older vacuum realizes he is talking to himself. Not that he’s not being heard, but that he’s talking more to a younger version of himself that he sees in the younger vacuum than to the younger vacuum. He relaxes his attachments and leans back a bit. The younger vacuum senses the tension go out of the conversation.

“You know,” the older vacuum says, finally, “You’ve got a lot of promise, kid. You are going to be fine.”

I’m working on my (hopefully) debut novel, about a troubled space cop named Dangerous Dan right now, about 1/10th of the way through. It is a space adventure, inspired, of course, by Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and the Great Prophet himself, Vonnegut. Obviously I don’t claim to be 1/10th as good as they, but we can dream.

This is a short selection. I’m still introducing the main characters and their environments.

Here I’m describing how the Martian colony came to be what it is. Enjoy!

The human race discovered that it was the only sentient form of life in its solar system at about the same time as the first aliens came around to politely mug us. Human scope took a great leap then. At one moment, humans were warring bitterly against each other over Earth resources, and the next they were hugging each other in mortal fear and fighting as one.

We have now adopted the much more civilized practice of financially ruining one another rather than the barbarian practice of hacking each other to bits. Some call it progress. Some say it is better to be dead than ruined. Only the ruined say the latter, though, and they’re famously maudlin.

In the course of repelling the first wave of muggers, Earth scientists captured and reverse engineered every piece of alien tech it possibly could. By war’s end, humans found themselves able to travel the heavens with relative ease, which led to manned exploration of the solar system. This, in turn, led to colonization attempts on anything that had a solid surface to stand on, and a few new kinds of celebrities.

Some planets had supported colonization very well. Others not so much. The colonists were nothing if not enterprising, however, seeing each and every planet as a giant ball of resources just waiting to be mined.

Of the colonized planets, Mars was the most heavily populated. It had a surface that one could stand on, a little water, and wasn’t too cold. Miners had flocked to it hoping to discover untold riches in gold or diamonds, but had limited success. What gold they found was barely valuable enough to pay for the process of mining it and shipping it off world. In short, Mars was exactly what it appeared to be from above: a giant ball of rust.

Not willing to give up so easily, the wealthy Earth businessmen who backed the colonies bought heaps of advertising and a fleet of lobbyists on Earth to tell the story of the first planetary gold rush. Books were written. Blockbuster movies were made. The tourism trade flourished, generating many thousands of times more money than any mining operation. Profits soared, weighed down only by the cost of the mining that the tourists had come to see and take part in in the first place.

As a result, the miners became adventure travel guides. They began to be paid not on the value of the minerals they mined, but on how miner-ish they looked. Geologists and engineers were fired, and hard men with lantern jaws were hired in their places. This was fortunate, as mining crews occasionally fought over the most scenic travel spots, and engineers are quite useless in a scuffle.

A few months ago, I devised a plan. Yes, a plan to go outside. Not only that, I planned to go outside, armed only with a few cleverly sewn bits of nylon fabric and a mound of pop tarts, and stay there for a few days. This weekend that plan was realized.

Having done my last hiking trip solo, I knew that to be a poor plan. Thankfully, my friends Chris and Brandon agreed to come along. The three of us piloted my car up to Vogel State Park on Friday. As the driver, I operated the wheely turny part and the pedal mechanisms. Chris navigated using his iPhone, and Brandon snored in the back seat.

Vogel State Park, or “The Vog,” as local refer to it, is quite lovely. It is situated in a narrow valley, has a very pretty lake, and is surrounded by trees.

It is also surrounded by bloodthirsty 500lb bears who would like nothing better than to bite my soft city ass off, but I’ll get to that later.

Once at Vogel, we paid for a hiking permit, a fishing license, and a parking permit, and checked our gear. I had all the essentials. Sleeping bag: check. Hiking poles: check. 16oz Bourbon: check. Red Crocs: check.

We shouldered our packs and headed up the road to the start of the Coosa Backcountry Trail, marked by the yellow blazes. If you don’t know what a blaze is, it’s a little patch of paint on a tree that shows a hiker which trail they’re on. These trails spiderweb through the backcountry, you see, and it can be confusing to navigate them even with a map. The blazes help a lot, usually. On this particular trail, however, the blazes came in as bewildering an array of colors as Crocs do.

We hiked three miles to West Wolf Creek, found a suitable site, and set up camp. It should be said, at this point, that the common wisdom is that one does not cook and eat one’s dinner in the same area as one’s tent. This is because food smells attract the aforementioned bloodthirsty bears, who will happily disembowel city dwellers and prance merrily on their innards.

For these reasons, we cooked and ate our dinner a suitable distance from our tents, then gathered around a fire as the light faded. Belly full and bedtime fast approaching, I happily nipped at my bourbon.

Brandon sipped coffee. Chris looked out into the distance, toward where we’d cooked dinner. “That,” he said, with admirable calm, “is a bear.”

We all looked. It was indeed a black bear, wandering around near where we’d cooked our dinner. Later, on retelling the story, many have asked me if it was big. I’ve only ever seen one wild bear. It looked to be the size of a schoolbus. He wandered back and forth over our cooking site, then disappeared into the woods. The three of us chatted excitedly, exchanging wild conjecture and ideas for hasty bear defense.

Brandon was in favor of sharp sticks. Chris wished he’d brought a gun. I suggested we appease the bear with sexual favors but was voted down. In any case, the bear had left the scene and did not return.

His memory, however, lived on in technicolor. Once in my sleeping bag, I began a long mockery of sleep. The wind blew in the trees, causing them to rub and creak together. Every little sound was the bear returning to slay me and my friends. Do bears like bourbon? I had no idea.

After a long, long while, it was day time. I had survived the night. We hiked in excellent weather and didn’t see any bears for the rest of the weekend, but I know they’re out there, waiting to kill me.