Stealing Inspiration From a Dead Man

While I was in college, I spent a summer working at an amusement park in Ohio.   During that summer, I dated a few girls and left miserable.

I dated the first girl during the first couple weeks of the summer and it was a complete disaster because, well, it just was.  I mean how else do you explain someone who goes out to the bar with you, gets shit faced drunk, grinds all over another guy, then comes home with you to her room only to leave and go hot tubbing with guys in another building for the rest of the evening and into the morning?  

The second was at the end of the summer and I spent the bulk of the gap between those two swearing I would never ever date another girl from that particular room.  I even made a rule about it.   So, we spent the better part of that summer just being lunch buddies and friends and it never amounted to anything else until I was set to leave due to being sick with severe bronchitis.    As the news hit that I was leaving, I realized that she was interested and I asked, "Are you kidding me?  Why am I just finding this out now?"  She said, "Well, you were the one who made the stupid rule."

So, we went out once and it was the date I had been hoping for all summer long.   You see most people at the park called a good date getting completely drunk and hooking up with someone cute.   There was no sense of romantic ideals because you're only there for three months.  Why bother with romance or ideals?   And that led another girl to tell me that I would make a great husband one day.   No 21 year old male wants to hear that come from a woman of the same age, especially one they find attractive. 

When I got back to school, I felt that it would be appropriate, if not romantic, to write her and being the theater major I was, I sent her one of Shakespeare's sonnets in the letter.  Why?  Bitches love sonnets. 

What I didn't realize was that it was completely stupid to do this because for one, she had no clue about Shakespeare as far as I knew and two, I was basically going out to a book and looking for whatever applied to the situation or my feelings and copied it down.   I was leveraging the words of someone else to further my own intentions.   I was stealing inspiration.

If I truly, truly had a sense of romance, I would have come up with my own, but at 21, I was not that clever.  I was half the writer I am half of now and I lobbed a softball of sentiment towards the unsuspecting head of the intended recipient.

But as time has gone by, I've decided to lean on the poets and bards of history as a source of inspiration and citation and not as a spokesperson for my thoughts.   I am fully capable of saying the words that need to be said in the time that they should be spoken.   And one day I will. 

For I am the greater fool who is tired of making stupid rules and I am willing to bend the heavens to prove that ruination is not a permanent state.  I will get the paint to stick if I have to strip the surface of every layer of hate and loathing that has been applied by other tenants.

It's a work in progress... as am I.

History Incorporated

It’s no mystery that I am a purist.   I love my favorite shows and movies right where they were, in the past.   Remakes. Adaptations.  A purist craves not these things.  That’s how the blog started.   Someone in Hollywood was making a remake or something and I felt a great disturbance in the pop culture force.  I opened an email and began typing furiously to… no one.  Then, I joined blogger and shared all the crap that’s inside my head.  Now, five years later, you’re all worse people for enjoying it.  ;)

However, there are few times when something gets remade or rebooted and it is phenomenal.   It doesn’t happen very often.  It’s about as frequent as Haley’s comet around here.  But it happened recently and I cannot be happier with the results.

Let’s go back to the 60s. 

A little cartoon came along about a mystery solving gang and their beloved Great Dane.    Scooby-Doo Where Are You? debuted in 1969 and has run in some incarnation all the way through 2013.   That’s 44 years.    And while some instances weren’t all that great, *cough*Flim Flam*cough*Scrappy-Doo*cough* the show has managed to maintain a central theme since the original show.

It’s one of the few shows I have been able to enjoy all over again, thanks to my kid and DVD collections.  She loves the old episodes along with the Blue Falcon ones, as well.  But when Mystery, Incorporated came on Cartoon Network in 2010, I was skeptical.   It was the first time a Scooby-Doo show didn’t take place on Saturday Mornings.  Not only did it not serve as a continuation of the original series, more of a reboot, which angered me, but it also introduced elements of relationship drama that never existed before.   It used to always be the running gag that Fred would go off with Velma and Daphne, leaving Shaggy and Scooby to fend for themselves, cementing Fred’s pimp status.  And if he didn’t take Velma, it was a joke that she was a nerd and therefore, Fred wouldn’t be interested anyway.   However, in the new series, the relationship between Fred and Daphne is laid out, humorously at that and the real triangle occurs between Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby-Doo, oddly enough.  Nothing disgusting, more a “Bros before Hoes” mentality.

I gave it a shot, though.  My daughter and I would load up some OnDemand Doo and watch.  While she just enjoyed the show, I carefully scrutinized the plot and the connection to the canon of Scooby-Doo.

I.  Became.  Hooked.

Not only was this new incarnation smart and witty, but it dovetailed into the old series nicely and stood as a companion to the old episodes.   The only thing that changed was the timeframe for Mystery, Inc. coming together.  They made nods to every old “guy in a rubber suit” character and even self deprecated themselves by calling out how bad Scrappy-Doo and Flim Flam were perceived by fans.

The show also makes a lot of pop culture references to other movies and television shows that aren’t so blatant that you go “I see what you did there”.   It’s more like, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe they worked that into the plot.”  For example, a recent episode saw Scooby-Doo attending a side-kick competition with all of the other Hanna Barbera side-kicks like Jabber Jaw and Speed Buggy.  There are other cross-over episodes, just like the older series, but with a twist.  Instead of the usual Blue Falcon persona, we are given a somewhat bad ass  ex-security guard turned vigilante.  The real twist is that Dog Wonder’s cybernetic components are a product of Quest Laboratories.  He still retains the somewhat dim personality.    In the same episode Zin shows up. 

Even the voice casting is a reference in and of itself.   While Matthew Lillard reprises his Shaggy from the Live Action films, Casey Kasem plays his Dad.  Grey DeLisle reprises Daphne, and Mindy Cohn reprises her role as Velma, but Linda Cardellini, who played her in the movies, becomes the hilarious Marcy Fleach/Hot Dog Water.  Jeffry Combs from the Re-Animator shows up as H.P. Hatecraft.  Even Vincent Van Ghoul comes back, albeit voiced by cartoon everyman Maurice La Marche.

The show also introduces an arc, which crosses the complete series.  A mysterious artifact seems to be tied to the history of Crystal Cove as well as the emergence of mystery solving teens, complete with an animal companion, in various decades.   There is even an overall villain, the previous Mystery Solving Club’s anthropomorphic side-kick, Professor Pericles, played by scenery chewing Udo Kier.

In the end, though, the storyline comes to a close and manages to effectively tie in all the history surrounding the various incarnations of the show.   They’ve been here before.   In each generation, the mystery solving group has never been able to free the demonic entity controlling their fates.   Much like the ridiculous plot to LOST, the latest version of Mystery, Inc. serves to meet that end, and they do.  But they also defeat the demon and reboot their own history.   All of the bad things never happened.  All of the masked monsters never got caught because they were not brought together to solve mysteries.  They were just kids in a town that was no longer the Most Haunted Town in America.  Except that Harlan Ellison, playing himself noticed, as did they.   He said they changed something that affected them remembering the alternate timeline.   He asks them to come to… get ready for it… Miskatonic University.  So, in essence, they set out on the road, just like they did in every iteration of Scooby-Doo.   Sometimes they are with Fred and Velma… sometimes they are with Flim Flam or Scrappy-Doo.  Sometimes they are with guest stars.   In any case, the explanation for all the different versions of Scooby-Doo cartoons are contained in this one episode. 

Pure. Genius.

I usually hate this kind of thing.   You know.  The turtles are aliens.   Yeah, but it totally works in this fashion.  In fact another full length movie that came out recently was very well done.    Mask of the Blue Falcon went for that crossover feel once again, but sort of went meta on the fact that Blue Falcon was a television show in their world, but not an actual superhero that the gang interacted with, when in fact the first episode of Blue Falcon indeed had the gang helping Blue Falcon catch the same villain in this film, Mr. Hyde. 

Jeff Bennet provided the voice of an elderly Owen Garrison, a play on the name Gary Owens, the original voice of Blue Falcon.   His take sounded so much like Adam West, that I In fact thought it was Adam West.

The references to HB properties are a plenty as Frankenstein Jr. and the Herculoids make an appearance at a ComiCon style convention where Blue Falcon was featured, signing autographs and waxing nostalgic about the good old days.  The theme builds on the apathy towards remakes of old cartoons and comic books that I feel every day.

As much as I don’t like my childhood being rebooted and retconned.  I like the direction some of these folks are taking.   Perhaps one day, we can catch Hollywood in a complex trap and they can give up their crappy ways, while exclaiming they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for us pesky pop culture kids.

WUMF: September 2012 Edition

OK... so, I've been distracted lately with stuff.   It's kept me from regularly posting, and I'm still late on my Labor Day travels post,  but the culmination of a few things have led to another thrilling edition of WUMF!


The Replacements
We all know that the replacement refs suck.  Fine.  But really, does the NFL care?  No.  You know why?  Because even bad publicity is good publicity.  Was it a bit petty that the league did not cave until the blown Green Bay/Seattle game??  Yes.  But the league generates a billion dollars. Even though the regular refs get like six figure incomes for working half the year and first class airfare, that's a still a huge disparity. 

Yet, it kind of backfires when the biggest names in team ownership see their games impacted by the botched calls.  The Krafts, who own the Patriots, and the City of Green Bay, which pretty much own the Packers both had games with controversial end game calls, resulting in losses for them.  That might be why the talks finally resumed and came to a conclusion.  So, now, we can get back to bashing the regular refs for blowing calls.  At least we get to see the Hochuli pythons signaling touchdown or holding.  Flex them you douche.  Flex them all the way to the bank.

SPPPPOOOOOON!
If you know what that's from you'll know what the hell I'm talking about. On Sunday, my wife was about to give our five year old a bath when she noticed what looked like a blackhead on her back.  Turned out to be a tick.  I looked at it for a second and just said, "Eff it!"  I pulled it out.   I managed to get it all out, intact.  It sat on my finger nail looking at me, wiggling.  So, I flushed it.

In hindsight, I should have saved it.   We took her to the pediatrician on Monday and they actually wanted to hire me to do tick removals.  Seems to be OK.  They gave her an antibiotic to treat a sinus infection and after three days, the bite is hardly noticeable.   No, "Bullseyse", as it were.   We'll keep an eye on her, though.

Now, we have some woods around our house, but we don't go near them.  In fact, on Sunday, we were only outside to go to the store, and then she was outside with m for about twenty minutes while I grilled steaks.  She played on her swing.  She didn't go anywhere near brush.  So, I don't know if she got it then, or if those damn strays passed it along.  That situation is getting ridiculous.

Slenderman
The other reason I haven't been posting is that I got sucked into watching these videos.  For those of you who do not know.  Slenderman was part of a competition on the Something Awful forums.  The task was to doctor up some photos to make it look like some scary phenomena.   The result was this thing that looked like a cross between the Gentlemen from Buffy, and a sperm.  Go look him up.

Anyway, it turned into an ARG, which is an alternate reality game where a group of people started posting videos like they were found footage.   Under the guise of making a "Student Film" called MarbleHornets, a friend is given a bunch of tapes from the production and is told to "burn them".  Of course, you can't do that, so the person starts watching them and posting them as entries online.  What happens is that you see strange things like video and audio distortion, shapes, SLENDERMAN!

You get sucked in, even though you know the whole thing is fake, just because they capitalized on the thing that made Blair Witch so popular 12 years ago. There is no explanation for why it's happening and that's part of the fun.  You hardly see the monster.  Of course, when you do, it's so badly constructed, but still, it creeps you out a bit.   After three years and 60 some entries, it's gotten a bit ridiculous, but damnit if I won't watch every single one of them.  There's even free video games online surrounding the hilarity.

Hitchcock was really good in using fetishistic scopophilia in films like Rear Window and Psycho.  That's when you are entertained by watching others' as in the case of Norman Bates looking at Marion Crane through the peep holes or L.B. Jeffries looks at his neighbors across the courtyard.   But what really ratchets up the excitement or terror is when you are simply observers, unable to control what's happening.  You simply sit and watch something.  In the case of the MarbleHornets videos, you are given a POV (Point of View) experience and the person filming takes you along on for the ride, passive and unable to control what is happening in the frame.

That Whole Writing Thing I Was Going To Do

Last year, I made this grand proclamation that the state of Mongo, Angry. Mongo Smash! blog was one of in flux. I was losing the bandwidth to post with regular frequency in order to focus on other, more important obligations. However, I was going to concentrate that whole writing aspect into producing some original work in the form of an ebook, perhaps.

That’s still on the plate. I have not forgot about that. Still, I’ve run into several problems.

For one, time. I don’t have time to write out all that stuff. Truth is, I have the stories. I have PLENTY of stories. Whether they are good or not is up for debate. The material is there . Actually sitting down and writing it out is a bit harder. I’m already two chapters into a book that is most likely going to be the lead off title.

I was originally going to put up some nonfiction but my original plan was to see if I could actually sell something and make a profit without compromising my business model of being a lazy, cheap ass entrepreneur. Unfortunately, the material for that book is kind of dependent on others actually selling. Not to mention that the nonfiction business related book is a static view of an otherwise constantly changing and evolving state of mind. What methods I document for today’s market may change tomorrow, rendering the book passé and not worth reading. The point is to generate content that is readable and adaptable in any year.

That’s why fiction works. It’s not meant to be a treatise of what is actually going on at the moment. It’s left to be interpreted by the reader and good fiction is something that can be written a thousand years ago and still speak to the nature of humanity and the odds we face today.

You also have to take into account your audience. Because I’m a procrastinating slowpoke, I could write an epic novel about the supernatural, vampires, or swords and sorcery elements and it may eventually get finished after the whole craze surrounding those genres have worn out their appeal. Once again, passé.

That’s why I like the t-shirt business. It’s not hard for me to knock out a pretty decent design for a current event or meme while it’s still relevant. But those trends will die out and others will follow and I can keep coming up with stuff because the turnaround is minimal. Writing for a blog has that advantage, too, though the ability to generate a profit from it is limited.

With writing novels, there is more planning involved and I want to stay true to my ideas and my process without having to say, “Hmmm, zombie love stories are trending on Amazon. I better bang something out by the end of next week for people to gobble up.” I don’t work that fast or in that manner when it comes to storytelling.

I’m always reminded of the production triangle when it comes to things like these. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s a triangle with three sides, or areas, representing the choices available for a production or business project:

• I want it done Cheap
• I want it done Fast
• I want it done Well

The Production Triangle by mongo, angy. mongo smash.



You are only allowed to pick two. It makes sense, really. The same goes with writing. If you want it done cheap and fast, it will be crappy and riddled with errors. If you want it done fast and well, you going to have to pay more (as in time away from your job to work on it resulting in costing you more… or a publisher paying an ungodly amount for quality work, now.). If you want it done well and at a lower cost, you better be prepared to wait a while for it to be done.

The writing I hope to make money off of will probably fall into the category of “Done Cheap and Well”. Since I am lazy and a cheap ass.

A second problem is content. I have the ideas. I just haven’t got my arms around on the best way to present it. Do I write a short story and sell it for a buck, taking in around 30% of the profit? Do I plan out an epic series and hope that there is enough interest beyond the first book? How long should it be? Do I write a collection of short stories, perhaps with a common theme or interconnected to each other?

The work I’m currently two chapters in to writing is a basic haunted house story. I’m not trying to go and reinvent the genre. It’s simply a story that I had formulated based off of a weird dream I had a few years back. Consider it, Inception… lol.

What about marketing? Since I am planning on doing this on my own, I have my own marketing tools to rely on for some much needed buzz. Do I release the first chapter on my blog and then provide a link to download the rest of the book through Amazon or Barnes and Noble? What if it sucks? People may read that and not want to buy it. Then again, if I’m worried about that then I should feel really crappy if someone were to buy one of my books, sight unseen, and then write a scathing review. I may fool some people into spending their money but word of mouth will kill my chance at making a run at writing.

Lastly, it comes down to sustainability. DO I REALLY WANT THIS? Well, of course I do. If I can prove that even a hack like me can make a few dollars off of a book, then anyone can. But that doesn’t bode well for the industry I so often bash for having no originality or quality control. “Hey, look at me. I’m a complete and utter jackass and made money at writing.” If that works, I need to improve. I need to do more. I will be forced to stay on top of a little itty bitty experiment I tried to so if I could replicate the success of being a cheap ass, lazy shirt designer. If I can’t keep up with that and the time spent just to manufacturer a small amount of revenue is counterproductive to me being able to hold down a full time job, shirt design business, and family, then I run the risk of failing somewhere else, if I haven’t already.

I will suffer from what most businesses suffer from in the world, inability to manage what works. Companies that do one thing well, can generate a good profitability when that’s all they have to focus on in the course of their day. When they start trying to take on more than they can handle, the quality of their core business erodes. Think back to the triangle. Quality vs. Money vs. Time. But in this case, it’s Quality vs. Offering vs. Money.

Do you want to increase your offering while maintaining quality? You will have to increase the amount of money you spend to manage those ideas.


If you want to expand your offering but cut back on costs, you will lose quality.

And if you want to maintain low overhead while maintaining the quality of your work, you need to focus on a core business and not worry about the white space.

So, in closing, I guess that while I figure out how to achieve what I want, I will need to prioritize that list of three items and figure out where I need to focus my attention. Hopefully, I can manage to figure it all out before the ebook industry tanks like when I tried to push Mongo out onto MySpace and it all went pffft.

OK, I’ve babbled on long enough and I didn’t even earn a cent for all that. You’re welcome… I guess.

The Future of M.A.M.S.

While I’m not convinced that my longevity as a blogger is a given, I do understand that if I don’t put out content, people won’t read. Even if it’s crap, it’s out there and someone will eventually stumble over it like a tricycle in the yard. However, the demands of my real job are going to cut into my ability to keep up with this. Why? Because, I spend more time on the road and have less time in the evening to write. I have to balance this with other stuff like shirt designs and family. So, it’s safe to say that I may not make my long standing quota of three posts a week. Believe me, if I could do this for a living, full time, I would.

In fact that segues right into my point, the future. Call it “Writing as a white space.” For those of you not familiar with the term, it means that exploring a part of the business that I have not yet capitalized on, yet. I started out blogging. I moved onto shirt design. I moved into social media. I blogged more about how all of those concepts work together. I made money on the shirt side, but not the other stuff. Granted, some of the shirt money might have come from those other input channels but most of my sales are because someone went searching blindly on a shirt site or search engine and landed on my designs and clicked “ADD TO CART”.

So, why not use the shirt business to sell some books? Now, I’m talking about selling other people’s books. I’m talking about writing my own. It’s something I’ve been kicking around for awhile now and I better jump on it soon. Why?

Self publishing is right up my alley because I’m a cheap ass, lazy entrepreneur. As a kid, I had this dream of being a writer. When I was 12, I wrote my first story. When I was thirteen, I wrote my second one. When I was fourteen, I wrote my third one. When I was fifteen, I quit writing.

Why?

In those three years, I wrote the stories but did nothing else with them. I had delusions of actually being a paid writer and didn’t think about getting a publisher or what it costs to print and sell a book or the actual need for my work in the market. When I realized that, it was either never going to happen or take a while to happen, I switched game plans. In either case, it was not profitable. But, I held onto the works just in case. Hell, those stories are probably sitting on a 5 ¼ “ floppy disk somewhere in my parents’ house.

20 years ago, I could never conceive of actually becoming a published author, but, in today’s world, a writer can simply write, upload and sell their work for Kindles and Nooks and bypass publishers all together. Some have actually sold a million copies of their books, strictly through ebook sales. So, I am going to try an experiment. I am going to write a book on exactly what I’ve done in the last few years from the business side. I will then attempt to sell it on Amazon or through my site (Those details are sketchy). If I can make a case to myself that it is worth me putting forth the time to write something with the expectation of being paid for it, then I will revisit the idea of creative fiction. Believe me, I still have stories floating around in my head that my nearest and dearest friend/editor has told me to get written.

The caveat is that I have to see a significant interest in this venture before I take the time to attempt a 300 page novel. I just don’t have that kind of free time. Not to mention, I have a few friends with degrees in English and teaching that would probably want to see me DIAF if I actually wrote something and tried to sell it for profit.

The reason I am trying to fast track this experiment is that the new fad smell of self publishing and Kindles are probably going to wear off, soon. Stephen King had once said (paraphrased) that “Ebooks would account for probably 50% of all book sales by 2013. Maybe 2012.” However, he also says that people get tired of the new toys.

By that note, I have an ever shrinking window of opportunity to establish myself before the fad of ebooks or self publishing becomes the MySpace or worse, Friendster of writing avenues.

I still plan to blog as much as possible because I have a great source of material, my kid. Still, the point of MAMS was to rant and rave over the decline of entertainment via the distorted view of a pop culture observer. Those posts take a lot more time to prepare and vet and I have neither the time nor the ambition to do actual research.

I do hope those 4.5 readers I still may have will keep on reading but don’t be surprised if you wake up on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday and don’t see anything new… or worth reading for that matter.

Suprural

Say it with me.  Suprural.

I just made that word up. As far as I know, or at least as far as Google is able to tell me, it doesn’t exist in the English language. It’s not in the dictionary, which surprises me. Even after adding words like 'Muffin Top' and 'OMG' to the Oxford Dictionary, the word suprural is nowhere to be found. Spell Check is even yelling at me for this one. I’m sure someone else may have said the word suprural, before. They may have even used it the way I am. But no one has officially coined the term as far as I know.

But what does it mean?

Over the years, I’ve written about growing up in my hometown and I’ve struggled to classify it among the available words for residential communities. This is a city of less than 10,000 people, according to the 2000 census. It was around 13,000 in 1940. Estimated population in 1909 was 22,000. The peak came during the coal days. Even in the 1970s there was still a substantial amount of business being done in the city thanks to the glass plant on the outskirts of the Southern part of the city. But that ended years ago and the city has sort of stagnated.

But what is the exact type of classification of where I grew up? The downtown areas and the residential areas bleed into each other with no clear definition. I can’t call it suburban because we lived on the main street.

When we built the house that my parents live in now, we moved out of the actual city limits and into a township. The residential sprawl had a patch work of houses and housing plans dotting the landscape primarily filled with farms and pastures. Over time, newer developments overtook the farms and the once rural area became more like the suburbs but not quite.

It was nice to be able to stand out in my yard on a full moon night and not need a flashlight and to be able to hear total silence in the crisp winter air. I could climb out onto the roof right outside my window and see the lights of downtown and or the various moving tail lights heading up the hill a mile away. It was a huge contrast to my college years of in the urban setting of tall buildings, hospitals, hospital transport helicopters flying over my dorm.

So, it wasn’t exactly suburban because it was more rural in nature, yet it wasn’t rural because of all the houses in the area. That’s why I thought of suprural. If suburban is a smaller classification of an urban area, usually residential, then suprural is a larger classification of an area that is more developed than a rural area.

Get Oxford on the phone. Hopefully, they won’t refudiate my submission.

The Cursor Blinks In A Mocking Fashion

I’m staring at a blank screen. The little cursor blinks in a mocking fashion. I have such a mental block that it frustrates the hell out of me. I have so few precious moments to sit and spew forth all the pent up strangeness that inhabits my brain and to waste them by staring at a blinking cursor is ironic.

Does that ever happen to you? There are times when I have so many ideas in my head just waiting to burst forth, like Athena ready for battle, and I find myself inundated with other tasks that I cannot get the voices to be quiet and wait for a moment when I have the capacity to explore them. Then, when I find myself with ample amounts of moments with little to no distractions, I just sit there and go all catatonic.

I’ve tried everything from putting on music to just going to a quiet place and organize my mental schedule and the brain just locks up like an engine void of oil.

I try to do my best to put out three posts a week and sometimes I phone them in, I mean seriously, do you really care about Jar Jar Binks or Return of the Jedi that much that you would applaud my efforts to expound on their impact on pop culture? The fact that I just typed out that statement with a straight face shows I need help. Let’s face it, for someone who wanted/wants to be a writer, I’m dropping the ball on quality.

The three post a week rule was more for me than anyone else. I’m trying to stave off a stagnated mind and enhance what little skills I have left, if I ever had them to start. I’m not saying that the views I get from day to day are anything to laugh at. Readership, or at least views of the blog, has increased but sooner or later, Cousin Oliver is going to kill the ratings here. Cousin Oliver being my inability to come up with something good to write about it.

The easy answer is that I’m trying too hard. I know that seems laughable when you continue read, what is now, six paragraphs of shit. I mean “trying too hard” in that I’m trying to force magic. I’m trying to produce something to hit a deadline. I’m throwing away quality in favor of quantity. Post, post, post or the readers will go away, right? But when you have little time to write because you have a family and a full time job along with a part time job that feels like a full time job you begin to think that maybe pulling the plug is the best option.

Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. It’s OK. I know you just feigned shock and sadness at the prospect that the least read blog in the world was going to call it quits like Amanda Bynes or more like Brett Favre. Truth is, I want to write. Sometimes I feel like if this was a full time gig I’d find better topics and more inspiration instead of scuttling it to the back of brain and telling it to wait a moment. Sort of like telling that to a child who wants to you inform you of some huge important deal like the puppy just licked his nose.

I guess that’s enough for Monday. I guess that’s a post. I’ll take it, for now. Tomorrow is another day.

Homeless Man Behind Bar Finds Home Behind Bars

Don’t think about that title for more than ten seconds or blood will shoot out of your ears. Last month I spoke about the greatest case of life imitating art when a homeless guy broke into a closed down bar and reopened it, serving around 30 people a day before being busted by authorities. By all accounts, the tale of Travis Lloyd Kevie would have made a spectacular 80s movie in which I envisioned him being played by Michael Keaton. Down on his luck, Kevie gets hired to help clean out a local watering hole that suffers financial disaster. He breaks into the bar one night, turns on the “OPEN” sign and begins serving liquor to patrons. Starting off with a six pack, he reinvests his profits into the business by buying more alcohol. Two weeks later the authorities step in and shut him down.

Now, he’s been sentenced to 15 days in jail and a fine of $160 for selling liquor without a license. He’s also been ordered to steer clear of the bar unless he’s lawfully employed there. So, wait, he served around 30 people a day for 15 days and was made to pay a fine of $160. What about the large sum of money and alcohol that was seized by police? Does he get to keep that? That’s a little bit of profit for his trouble.

I say, he should sell his tale for enough money to buy a liquor license and lease the building from the original owner. Then he can lawfully operate the business with a liquor license and job title, bar manager. If I had the money, I’d buy the rights to his story and help him on his way. If anything, this latest development gives me the ending I was looking for when I first wrote about this story. Mark my words, this guy’s story isn’t over yet… as long as it doesn’t end up a made for TV movie, I’ll be happy.

Homeless Man Breaks Into Bar Starts Selling Booze Makes Great 80s Movie

What you call a crime, I call great entrepreneurial spirit. The story goes like this. A local bar closes and a homeless man gets hired to help clean out the place. One night he breaks into the bar and instead of doing any burgling, he throws an “OPEN” sign up in the window and starts selling alcohol. First, he runs across the street and buys a six pack of beer and immediately sells that. Then he starts using the profits to buy more alcohol and then sell it. He starts to gain more patrons, upwards of 30 a day, and it all comes crashing down when he gets busted. Why? Word got out that the bar reopened. He was even interviewed and everything. The kicker… he was a former bronco rider who was estranged from his family.

Think of this, recently, there was a story about a teen who turned an old cell phone into a Porsche and it wasn’t an alien being come to Earth to protect the All Spark. He traded up from the cell phone on Craigslist.

When I heard this story, I was immediately reminded about the One Red Paper Clip story where a guy turned a red paper clip into a home. I may have to try this but I wonder where I could go with it. I’m sure if I head over to Craigslist I’ll find thousands of items in the barter section. Each one probably posted by someone trying to duplicate the success of the "One Red Paper Clip" and "Cell Phone Turned Porsche".

What you call a weird story in the news, I call a great 80s movie plot.
The spirit of the entrepreneur is a staple of 80s movies, especially ones that were based on real events. Look at films like Night Shift and KidCo, a favorite in the rotation on HBO, growing up. Then you have the more familiar films like Secret Of My Succe$s and the more recent, Accepted, to play with the themes that are in line with this story. That got me to thinking. This entire news entry has the basis for a run of the mill 80s movie.

Look at all the elements it has in common. Down on his luck guy hired to do a menial task and then gets the idea to go into business for himself, albeit in an illegal manner. I can see it now. A local homeless man gets a temporary job cleaning up a closed down bar before the owner leaves town. Our hero is standing inside this empty bar, sweeping up. Realizing that the job is done and he will be back on the streets with no paycheck he decides to break into the bar and squat there as a resident. He invites two other friends to spend the night off the streets. One, is a “Hooker with a heart of gold” type who really wants to change her ways. The other is a Vietnam Vet who hasn’t been able to hold down a job because of his PTSD.

He turns on the lights as they all enter to make preparations for sleeping. Along with the interior lights coming on, the “OPEN” sign lights up attracting a patron. The unsuspecting or at least uninformed patron sits at the bar and our hero reaches into his own personal cooler to grab a beer and promptly sells it to the patron who pays him for the beer as well as tips him for the service. He leaves and our hero suddenly gets an idea. He then runs across the street to a six pack shop and uses his newly acquired profit to purchase more alcohol. Soon, he has his vet buddy working as a bar back and cook while the hooker works as a hostess and cocktail waitress. You can even include bits like the hooker counting her tips stating that this is the most money she’s made without taking off her clothes.

The second act picks up in the middle of their success as we see them make improvements to the décor, done in a inspirational musical montage, pantomimed with a host of clichéd sight gags involving power tools and paint. Our hero has also hired more homeless friends to work at his bar. He hires a cook who is used to working with road kill as a menu and promotes his vet buddy to Head Of Security. He hires another bartender in the form of an out of work juggler from a travelling circus. He even brings in the stereotypical, out of work and on the street blues guitarist to do play sets, revitalizing his career as a musician. He also starts to attract the suspicion of the local liquor control board. The fact that he’s made it this far is only helped if this actually happened in the 80s. As he continues to see success he starts to develop a relationship with the hooker. The last line of the news article states that the man was estranged from his family and this could be used as a subplot where the hooker finds out he has a wife and rebuffs his affection.

Then we get to the all too important and often seen conflict for the gang. A local orphanage, where our hero grew up, is in dire need of funds. Wanting to repay the sisters for their kindness, all those years ago, he enters the bar, and himself into a bartending competition which includes flair [juggler] and speed pouring events. Just before the competition is set to go, they get busted and he is promptly thrown in jail. Violating several laws, including breaking and entering, serving alcohol without a license and several others he appears before the judge on the morning of the competition. Without bar sponsorship, even the juggler cannot compete, so they are pretty much screwed. At his grand jury trial, his inept court ordered defense attorney fumbles his way through the entire proceedings which leaves a trial date set for the same day as the competition.

During the trial, everything looks bleak but the hooker ends up forgiving our hero and gathers all of the employees to act as character witnesses at his trial. The gag is that, at first, the flood of unseemly people into the court room, such as hookers, homeless people, and other members of the Untouchable-like crowd appear to be the proverbial nail in our hero’s coffin. However, each one gets on the stand and explains how their life was in ruins and our hero offered them a job, a place to stay, and a chance at a better life. Now, we could have the twist where the jury finds him guilty and the judge changes the ruling or some other breath holding moment, but in the end, somehow, he gets acquitted or is found guilty with time served, probation or some other form of commuted sentenced and he’s able to compete with some kind of bar sponsorship and they go on to win the contest allowing him to save the orphanage. Of course, success is short lived as he and all his employees are now homeless and jobless, again.

In the end, whether or not he is able to open the bar again is up in the air but, in my mind, I see him opening up another business, say a temporary employment agency that finds jobs for all his friends. He ends up with the hooker and even a home with a white picket fence.

Of course, being that I put this in the 80s, you’d have to have an 80s cast from the 80s.

Our Hero – Michael Keaton / Mark Harmon / Steve Guttenberg / John Ritter
Our Veteran – John Goodman / Gary Busey / Bruce McGill / Jim Belushi
Our Hooker – Karen Allen / Shelly Long / Fran Drescher / Carole Davis / Geena Davis
Our Cook – Vincent Schiavelli (only one choice there)
Our Bad Guy – Dabney Coleman / Charles Grodin
Our Juggler – Bill Irwin (Mr. Noodle from Sesame Street)
Our Blues Singer – Buddy Guy or John Lee Hooker
Your Honor – Harry Morgan / Wilford Brimley / Harold Gould

Ok, must get out my big old typewriter [clack clack clack], chomp on my big stinky cigar [puff puff wheeze], and write this masterpiece. Then I will have to get a DeLorean equipped with a Flux Capacitor in order to go back in time and make this film.  Yet, if I were to be in Hollywood and make this film, now.  I would not only set it in the 80s.  I would write it and film it like an 80s movie.  Think, Wet Hot American Summer style.

Oh, it could so work.  Where's that extra plutonium I had lying around?

No Show For the Poe Toaster

For the last 60 years a ritual has occurred which rivals that of the annual pilgrimage to Punxsutawney to see if a groundhog will see his shadow. Every January 19th since 1949, a figure known as the Poe Toaster has appeared on the grounds of Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore, MD. He or she, disguised in black, makes their way to the grave of Edgar Allan Poe, raises a toast of cognac and then leaves the rest of the bottle along with three roses. It is believed that the roses are meant as a remembrance of Poe, his wife, and her mother who all are interred at the cemetery.

Diehard Poe heads are usually on hand to witness the mysterious event without ever knowing the identity of the toaster. In 1999, a note indicated that the original toaster had died or had at least passed the torch onto a “son” or new toaster. Last year, no note was left, which was odd being that it was the bicentennial of Poe’s birth. Even stranger yet was the no show of the Toaster this year.
Some observers actually cried when the news of no toast had taken place. Some wonder if the toaster had taken ill or had died prior to handing off the torch to another. In any case, the curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum intends to keep a close watch over the site for the next couple of weeks in case the Toaster just happens to show up.
Now, I have a great and profound respect for Edgar Allan Poe. I’ve read several of his stories and poems over the years like Eldorado and The Gold Bug as well as The Masque of the Red Death, The Casque of Amontillado, The Raven, and The Pit and the Pendulum. The one story that has eluded me over the years is the Fall of the House of Usher, but it is definitely on my to do list. Still, this event that has taken place over the last 60 years is something I would definitely get a kick out of attending. Being a native of South Western PA, one would think I would be more up to making the trip out to “Punxsy” as we call it to see Phil’s shadow. Not bloody likely. First of all, I’ve watched the recorded event on cable and it seems like a big drunken party. The observance of the Poe Toaster has that air of macabre being set in a cemetery and the only imbibing to be taking place would be that of cognac or some port wine, which does not come in a box.
To sit in silence and witness such a mysterious event would interest me more than crowd surfing with a bunch of drunken coeds who would rather do a body shot of the groundhog’s belly than to actually be a part of something more steeped in history and culture than a prognosticating Punxsutawney Phil.
But from the looks of this year’s absence of the Poe Toaster, one can only speculate if 200 years after the birth of Poe was a good stopping point. Perhaps a toaster will show up and most likely it will be a copycat trying to keep up the tradition. Given the ravenous fandom of this event, it would be rather humorous but off putting to see multiple Toasters show up at the same time. Perhaps a coordination of members to a secret Poe club can keep the dream alive. After all, It’s hard to think that one will raise a glass to Poe’s memory nevermore.

$9.99 For the Toilet Parts $150 For the ER Stay and X-Ray

My issues with home ownership are strewn all over the blog. Just look up the label and you’ll see them. Recently, we had issues with a toilet in our upstairs bathroom. I am by no means a plumber and have very little desire to be on my hands and knees in a cramped space with no room to work. However, the water just stopped flowing one night. The tank will eventually fill up over time but you have to schedule time in the bathroom over the period of the day or grab a jug and fill up the tank. Needless to say, I needed to get to work on it.

We thought the problem was originally because of my daughter, who is becoming more and more obstinate and independent. She is in potty training boot camp which usually consists of her wanting to use the bathroom usually before bath and bedtime. It used to be that she would walk into the bathroom, drop her drawers, and rip off her diaper like it was a parachute ripcord. I imagine the puffed out diaper deploying like the chute of a Looney Tunes character after the hapless cartoon animal hits the ground. Once de-pants she would saddle up to her potty, finish up, ask for paper and then wait for my wife or I to empty the contents into the toilet and then she would flush and close the lid. That was the case for about the first week. Come week two, we are using the potty as a step stool to sit on the insert that goes on the toilet seat. She is now in the minor leagues. Same protocol as before for cleaning up. Now, she wants to do it all by herself, without the insert, and content to just sit over the edge of the seat, teetering like Humpty Dumpty. If you try to get the insert or move the stool, she gets very upset to the point that she will toss the insert aside and move the stool back to its spot across the floor and move it back, all by herself. It’s safe to say the terrible twos are in full swing.

So, this week, after much debate and raised voices, she sat there and waved off my wife from trying to steady her and kerplunk she went into the bowl. That’s not why the toilet won’t flush but it occurred the same night. Turns out the fill valve in the tank is probably shot and needs replaced. Off to the evil blue store I go. I have no problem in admitting that I hate that big blue beacon of corporate retail. I lost some very good stores in my area thanks to it. It’s also creeping into my neighborhood in its attempt at global domination which will most likely increase traffic in an already burgeoning area, which is already congested and beyond road load capacity. Still, I was in need of parts and we were already near one.

My daughter, being little miss independent, doesn’t want to ride in a cart or hold your hand. We insist on it because, quite frankly, if my kid was going to get snatched up by some sicko, it would be here. However, she loves to go shopping and gets very haughty if we don’t all go in, if only for one item. My wife, on the other hand, can’t help but look at everything in the store, even though I have a specific item in mind and only plan on spending five minutes in the store. Can you tell I really did not want to be here? But, it was early in the evening and the thought of finishing up dinner, nightly chores and bath time before 9 PM was enticing enough to me to make the trip out. That’s usually when you find out that your night is going to turn out completely different.

Everything was pretty good up until checkout time. Yes, there was the embarrassing moment when walking through the bra isle, my daughter looked up and yelled “Booby Traps” loud enough that the couple in front of me turned to look and laugh at the comment and my blushing face. Still, for the most part she was being a pretty good girl. After switching guard detail a few times, it was my turn to hold her hand and my wife’s turn to push the cart. I informed my daughter that she had to hold my hand and could not let go. “Someone could take you,” I said. In my mind I remembered why they called the code for missing child Code*Adam. I remember growing up and watching the movie Adam on television. Mostly, I wanted to see it because at the age of seven, I watched Hill Street Blues and knew that Captain Furillo was playing John Walsh. Not knowing that this movie was based on a real story and after the fact, I kept waiting for them to find little Adam Walsh alive. It was the first time in my life I realized that kids were not indestructible and could be hurt and even killed. I suddenly realized that I am mortal and have an expiration date. As my thoughts from little Adam Walsh turned back to the little girl holding my hand, it happened.

It was all so fast. Her independence got the better of her and she tried to pull her hand away from mine. When she couldn’t succeed and started to spin around I knew that I was going to have to pick her up and carry her, cries for freedom be damned. Before I could bend down to pick her up she decided that her best course of action was to drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes. That’s when I felt the pop. She started to cry. Usually, when she doesn’t get her way, she cries. But it’s the cry without tears, the one for effect. The drama queen takes center stage and wants her way, announcing, “I do it myself.” But that didn’t happen here. After the pop, she immediately cried with real tears and grabbed her arm. At first, I didn’t think anything of it and picked her up. But the fact that she didn’t calm down made me wonder. Was she really putting on the act or was there something else. I set her down and she continued to cry, clutching her arm. Soon, my heart sank. She was wearing a coat and sweatshirt so I couldn’t a good look at her arm. It didn’t feel like anything was wrong and I kept squeezing little bits up and down to see if I could notice anything. Then I thought I was making it worse.

I tried to soothe her and get her arm out of the coat and sweatshirt to make sure my fears were unfounded. There was no sign of anything wrong, yet she continued to cry and clutch at it. That’s when it became worse. I asked her what happened and she looked at me, with those big puffy, teary and reddened eyes and said, “Daddy hurt me.” I wanted to throw up right there. I’m standing in the middle of the store with my kid, clutching her arm, declaring that her father hurt her. Immediately I felt my ears burn and the daggers of a hundred eyes piercing my body. I was that guy. I was the guy that beat his kid. It didn’t matter that I didn’t do it. I was merely holding her hand and she dropped to the ground. Perception is reality and in this day and age, when it comes to kids I am guilty until proven culpable.

Think of this. Twenty years ago, if you were to get on a plane and sit next to a passenger wearing a head wrap, what would you think? Nothing. But sit next to that same person after 9/11 and what do you think? I don’t care if you are the most objective and unbiased person in the world. You will ultimately profile that person as a terrorist, if only for a second. This is what we have become as a society and sometimes we need to be that observant. Other times we jump to conclusions and assume the worst of a person. Remember Henry Louis Gates, Jr.? Exactly. Here I was, a grown man, standing in the store holding his crying kid who just declared that her Daddy hurt her. I felt guilty. I informed my wife and headed to the car as she finished up in the checkout. She was livid. The first thing she said was, “What did you do?” I felt ashamed, sickened, and responsible. I explained what happened as we drove to the ER.

We checked her in and those stares, albeit in my mind, persisted. We headed back to a cubicle and the doctor came in to look at her. My daughter, crying more than I had ever heard her cry was being poked and prodded. My looked at me and this same grown man was reduced to a quivering ball of goo. My eyes, beet red and swelled up, dripped profusely. The sight of my little girl being in pain is hard enough, but to think that I broke her arm made me lose it, completely. I was waiting for a police officer to come in and separate me from my family. I was thinking that I was going to be in so much trouble. I felt guilty.

I stayed towards the back of the cubicle, trying to compose myself. I realize that my daughter’s fears and pain were exacerbated by my appearance and I needed to pull myself together. My wife was in charge of her at this point. I could hear the various voices through the ones in my head. “All better now. It’s fixed.” If it was, why is she still crying and not using her arm. The staff asked me repeatedly what had happened and in every instance I was told the following things, “It’s common”, “It’s nothing serious” and “It’s easy to fix” Ok, then why is she still crying. Why am I?

Soon, the crying stopped and she was clutching a Popsicle, the purple juice flowing down her tear streaked chin and onto her shirt. She still didn’t move her arm and touching it set her off on another cry. The doctor brought stickers and asked her to grab them. She was holding the Popsicle with her good arm and wouldn’t relinquish it. “It’s like a big ice cube,” she said. When asked to use her other arm to take the stickers she said, “No, thank you.” Another member of the staff asked her how old she was, hoping she would use her affected arm to indicate the peace sign that also meant two. “I’m a big girl,” she said. My kid is way too smart for you people, I thought. My wife even stuck the stickers on her unaffected shoulder, thinking she would use the other hand to grab them. She loves stickers, but would not budge, instead using her same hand to reach up onto that shoulder to grab the sticker, letting her hurt one dangle. In a last ditch effort we put the stickers on the bed and expected her to use both hands to peel them off the sheet. Nope, after she did not get any help from us, she used her teeth to hold the sheet and peeled away.

The doctor said he heard the pop and said it should be OK. He said that she would forget that it was hurt and use it again, but after an hour of being touchy about it, he suggested an X-Ray. The X-Ray technician was a friendly face. She was the parents of two of my wife’s piano students and knew us enough to know that we would never do anything to hurt our kid. Finally, I could relax a little because she looked at me and knew how I felt and reassured me that I did nothing wrong. Coming from her, I believed it.

The pictures came back fine, but they wouldn’t release her until she used that arm, much to her resistance. The doctor took one last look, bending and turning the arm, causing my daughter to write in pain and tears. Then, almost instantly, she rolled over on the bed, pulling the hurt arm away from him and supported her weight on it. He looked at me, smiling in a sarcastic way, “It’s a miracle.” Usually, an attitude like that was uncalled for, but I knew he was referring to her being alright and only crying for effect. Once again, perception is reality. We were cleared to take her home.

The official word was a new one for my vocabulary. Radial head subluxation or nurse maid’s elbow. Basically, all those times your parents said they were going to pull your arm out of its socket for being bad was not just an urban legend. I still felt like such an asshat for letting it happen. By the time we got home, the little one was laughing and playing and using her arm like nothing happened. We got ready for bed and she sat on the edge of the toilet, teetering again, but letting me steady her. I told her I loved her and that I was sorry. She said, “It’s OK. Sometimes, I get a boo boo.” At last, my heart went back into my chest. I no longer felt like some monster. She wasn’t crying at me and saying I hurt her, anymore. I understand that I have a temper. I see it in my kid. On her good days, she is the best of what make up myself and my wife. On her bad days, she’s the worst of us. So, I see how I am when it comes to temper. My wife used to say I was the most patient person in the world. Parenthood wiped that out and it fluctuates. I need to learn to calm down and relax and this whole incident was proof. I am, what the name implies, Mongo. I have all the dexterity of an oven mitt and am clumsy to boot. I break shovels and rakes just but doing basic yard work. Ask my family, my brother had no good toys left because I broke them all.

So, to think that Mongo broke his kid’s arm, accidental or otherwise is a bit of a wakeup call. I need to relearn that bit of patience my wife used to think I had. Now, in this case, it was totally a fluke but my wife knows how I am. Even with all the medical professionals around telling us that this was a common thing and that I didn’t hurt her, she still had that look in her eye. “Mongo strikes again.” Of course, I didn’t help with my breakdown. But at least my kid is OK and she loves her Daddy again. After she said that , I told her, “That’s why you have to hold Mommy and Daddy’s hand and not let go. And even if you want to, you can’t just drop to the floor like that because you can get hurt.” She looked at me and said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” She then finished brushing her teeth and we were off to bed. Then I went back into the bathroom and used a gallon jug to flush the toilet. Perhaps tomorrow, I can get that fixed, without another trip to the hospital.

I told her, “That’s why you have to hold Mommy and Daddy’s hand and not let go. And even if you want to, you can’t just drop to the floor like that because you can get hurt.” She looked at me and said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” She then finished brushing her teeth and we were off to bed. Then I went back into the bathroom and used a gallon jug to flush the toilet. Perhaps tomorrow, I can get that fixed, without another trip to the hospital.

Head In the Gutter

I’m sitting on my roof. I look out at the world around me, searching for something, some sign of hope. I am in dire need of help and so far I see none in sight. This is bad.

It all started not too long ago. I was doing just fine. I was outside, enjoying the warm weather on this sunny November weekend. But something happened. A wind of change blew in and threw my future into a tailspin.

Now, I’m moving towards the edge of my roof and looking over at the ground, contemplating my options. I could do it. I could just take a step and this would all be over. But something in me hesitates. Maybe it’s some common sense kicking into gear. Perhaps I should try to get some help before I resort to this step.

Soon, I hear silence. The once deafening noise in my head has been replaced with tranquil thoughts. I know my course of action. I walk back to the top to the highest point of my roof. I fill my lungs with air and cry out. As my words cut through the air, a voice calls back. It is my wife. She comes around to the front of the house and looks up at me. She helps me. She offers an unconditional hand to a husband in need. She steadies me. She encourages me that it will be ok. I reach the ground and I know everything is going to be ok. I look at her and smile. I thank her for her help and she says, “Is it finished?”

“Yes!” I exclaim. “The gutters are clean. I guess that sudden gust of wind must have knocked the ladder over. If you hadn’t stopped running the lawn mower you probably wouldn’t have been able to hear me call.” She laughs and thinks about how it would have been funny to see me panic at being stuck on the roof. I tell her I wouldn’t have been there long. “I was actually thinking about trying to shimmy down by the porch but would have probably broke my leg.” She looks at me in puzzlement. “You’re a dumb ass. The last thing I need is to haul you to the hospital because you fell off the roof. Now, get back to work on the rest of the yard.”


“Yes, dear.”




What, did you think I was talking about something else? Nope, I was just on the roof with my head in the gutter.

The End of the Beginning

Ok, you’ve all had time adjust or digest or discard the changes that are coming to the blog. This is the last post that will be used primarily as a topic for CaféPress store discussion. After this, I am unhooking this blog from the Facebook page that is devoted to the store and attaching the new blog. In case there are any fans who wish to continue seeing specifically blog posts dealing with the writing aspects of Mongo, here is a place to become a fan of on Facebook. Those of you who are already friends of the man behind Mongo will still see his self delusional attempts at writing legitimacy posted to his profile and your news feeds if you haven’t already tuned him out.

For those of you who wish to continue seeing posts about CaféPress shirt designs and are interested in seeing how some of the effects are achieved, then become a fan here, if you haven’t already. Starting tomorrow, I will begin posting some designs to the new blog. Mixed into the offerings will be a couple of tutorials on how to achieve certain effects like aging your images and making them look like they were inked, to name a few.

It’s been swell having you as a reader for the shirt side of Mongo but in order to deliver quality posts to the masses…yes you four know who you are… I need to separate the business from the pleasure and focus on one at a time.

Take care, so long and thanks for all the fish.

Mongo

Mongo 2: Electric Blogaloo

I thought about titling this something different but quite frankly I can’t stop dipping into the Breakin’ movie sequel well enough times for it to get old. That’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Ok, here’s why I’ve called you all here. This decision was not an easy one and I thought long and hard over a refreshing trip to the bathroom. I’ve decided to spin off the blog. Now, before you all start saying, “Mongo, you so craaaazy!” hear me out. Oh, who am I kidding, would you care one way or the other? Thought not.

Why am I deciding to take all the hard work I’ve done over the past 18 months and franchise it? My head is getting a little too crowded for all the voices in it. Really, thinking about it, it might be a good idea. The blog has had no real structure other than I post on a semi regular basis. Beyond that, it’s a chaotic cluster frak. I have posts about storytelling, pop culture musings, grumbles about society, and a heavy dose of CafePress shameless plugging…peppered throughout with some political nonsense and set to frappe. I need to organize my thoughts and separate the wheat from the chaff. Well, I’m not saying any of my thoughts are wheat, but at least for the sake of sanity, I need to make changes to this mess.

What’s changing?
Coming soon, I will be unveiling a new blog dedicated solely to CafePress dealings. I’ve decided to use it primarily for design tips, marketing, and showcasing of my work. There will probably be some way of incorporating the store functionality into the new blog with a direct order button makes the transition seamless, but I haven’t the foggiest on how to do it, yet.

The blog, here, will be business as unusual with the same smattering of tales from the life and times of Mongo, but the new blog will be a business first, and a distraction second. The only change to what you see here will be the absence of CafePress store updates and design posts (YEAH)…unless there is a pop culture or news worthy event that ties directly into a design… and possibly a reduction in the amount of posts to the blog (BOO). It all depends on my free time. Yeah, ok, bad idea. In any case, I think it will be a relief for anyone who is unlucky enough to have friended me on Facebook as well as become a fan of the M.A.M.S store page. They get a double dose of blog posts show up in their news feed and too much of a bad thing isn’t even tolerable.

Timeline
Once I chase down and tase my scattering thoughts, I will make a concerted effort to release the new site. After that, I will detach the feed from this blog on the store’s Facebook page and attach the new blog feed. Next steps will be to go through the whole process of advertising on feedburner and other sites, build up brand recognition again and hopefully drive some traffic to the new site while keeping some following here.

Unfortunately, I feel like a kid trying to open up a lemonade stand in Times Square, using only crayons to advertise on lamp posts. I’m probably investing more time and energy into all this with little ROI. For the most part, I may be blogging in a vacuum. Still, I never intended my site to become a huge success followed by millions of adoring fans. Fine, don’t believe me. I’d rather have longevity and a cult following than become the next Huffington Post or God forbid, Perez Hilton. I still like having a sense of anonymity, after all. And among those who know me personally, their opinions and support have been enough fame and fortune for me.

Now, I could give you a sneak peek into what the blog is going to look like but it’s not ready yet. I still have some bugs to work out in one of the features. So, as things become clearer, I will update it here. Until then, I’m sure you’re just quivering with Antici……..pation….or it could just be gas…

Rejection Is Not a Four Letter Word

This is a response to a great article from NPR. Rejection Is A Fact Of Life. Employers, Do It Right!

Quick summary. The author’s teenage son applied for an internship to which after he never received a rejection letter.

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been rejected before. I know you must find it surprising to hear that with all this talent and charisma, someone like The Mongo, who, besides pretentiously referring to himself in the third person, has been rejected. It’s true. I’ve been rejected more times than I care to remember.

Now, that’s not to say that rejection is a bad thing. Quite the contrary, rejection is grist for the mill. The moment you accept rejection as a final answer is the moment you fail. Of course, I’m not telling you to keep asking for acceptance when rejected. It is certainly a case by case basis. Persistence can lie somewhere just below stalking. Sometimes you have to know when someone is rejecting you for the right reasons and move on with your life.

But back to me, because it’s all about me, right? Rejection is an old friend of mine and sometimes I wonder why he hasn’t called sometimes. I mean there have been countless times in the past when I have applied for some job and never received a response. Worse yet, when you get an interview and then you never hear from someone again, that can be a little worrisome. Was I supposed to call them? Did they try to call me and I missed them? If you become too self involved with the job hunting process you could end up being Jon Favreau in Swingers. You get a little glimmer of hope, like an interview, or even a second interview and then you begin calling and calling, leaving countless messages with the company that become more erratic with each instance. Soon, the company has blocked your number. If they would have just told you the moment your application became an afterthought you could have regrouped or applied somewhere else or even just decided to go in a different direction.

I can only begin to imagine the reasons for not contacting someone in regards to their application. It might be because they have to wait until the position is filled to contact those candidates that were not chosen. It might be an automated process within an HR recruiting application that spits out a list of tasks associated with applicants not being considered. There might be some underlying bureaucracy that hangs the position out to dry and until it is finalized they cannot contact all interested parties. Both cases offer a different reason for prolonging the inevitable but when a position hangs out in the HR aether for over a year because a suitable candidate has not yet been found, I think it should be safe to contact the “also ran” crowd and let them know they can exhale.

I have also been rejected as an artist. I’ve gone on countless tirades about how CafePress moves one of my images into pending status with either no explanation or one that is contradictory to why another, similar, design is considered allowable. Frankly, this is more about principle than about being right or wrong. I accept, wholeheartedly, that there are some designs that should be flagged, but at least be consistent about it. That’s all the page space I’ll devote to that abused expired equine.

I’ve certainly been rejected in love, many, many times. Yet I have come to accept that it only put me on a better path to where I am now. There’s no way to know what might have been had another woman accepted my affections, without the use of a DeLorean equipped with a flux capacitor and 1.21 gigawatts of power, but that could create a huge paradox and unravel the fabric of the space time continuum. Of course, but making that previous statement you have the answer as to why there is no need to wonder what might have been. Regardless, it wasn’t the right time or place for that to occur. There have been plenty of “Let’s Just Be Friends” moments in my life and a few cases of uncontrollable laughter that followed such declarations of feelings but one thing has always remained true. I’ve never found myself so distraught that I could not get up in the morning after being rejected. Rejection is a part of love as well as life and it should be embraced.

I’ve also been rejected as a writer, too. This must come as a complete shocker to you as part of the “reader elite” that makes up the average 20 hits I get per day. Just in case this isn’t coming across, this post is heavily laced with sarcasm. After all, I’m topical, humorous, grammatically proficient, and quite honestly engaging and worthy of a good read. But on four occasions I’ve had a screenplay rejected. The first one came in 1996. I submitted a screenplay directly to MGM. However, they sent it back unopened with a letter stating that they do not accept individually solicited screenplays. What did I know, I was 21 and thought I had a killer idea. I also believed that if I mailed myself a copy of the script, that was as good as a copyright. I was mostly wrong, on both parts.

The other three occasions came from the a screenplay I submitted three times as part of those Project Greenlight contests that happened back in the front five of this decade. In this case, a screenwriter submitted a piece of work and had to review and judge other pieces. Then a selection of the best pieces based on votes from other screenwriters would send a script to the next round where a panel of judges in the industry would narrow it down further. The winner would get their screenplay produced into a film with a budget of one million dollars. In the first two instances the winners came up shy of box office totals that exceeded their budget. According to my own suspicions I felt that the early judging process was a little slanted. In order to win, most people are going to trash other people’s work to give theirs a higher score. The actual percentage of objective critiquing going on there was probably small.

In my own house, I get rejected a lot, too. My gut feeling to do more work on leveling out the yard before putting up the pool was rejected in favor or getting the sucker up before the summer was over. Not that we’ve had a lot of great days to go swimming this last two months of summer. It’s been unseasonably cold and wet. However, there, in my yard stands a monstrosity that is 16 feet round and four feet deep…on one end. It’s also moving as the support pools are leaning to one side.

I’ve also been rejected on a lot of ideas I’ve had for how to get things done. My wife and I try to work together to accomplish goals like cleaning the house, running errands to the store, or general care of our two year old. Yet, we always seem to tackle these jobs together in the same space but with different approaches. I’ve constantly told her, “Let’s split up and tackle these simultaneously. I’ll go to the store, you stay here and give the baby a bath” or vice versa. Still, she feels compelled to go as a group into the fray and usually there is bickering and trampling of each other’s toes.

In every instance that I’ve ever been rejected it stings. A lot of times it pisses me right off to no end. But rejection is there to balance things out and keep you grounded. I’ve spoken before about how I detest the trend among community sponsored sports where there is no sense of failure. Soccer games that have no score and other sports where everyone gets to play and no one fails. Now, I can understand that to a three year old, failure is a rather moot concept and giving kids a sense of accomplishment is a good thing. So is a sense of reality for that matter. Kids need to know about failure. Kids need to understand that, in life, you can’t always get what you want. It’s going to get a lot tougher out there and the sooner they are able to process rejection and move on they will be able to not let it be a detriment to their character or persistence.

My kid fails on a regular basis. She falls down, clunks her head and cries. We kiss it and make it better and she goes on about her business. She constantly wants to take more stuffed animals in her crib with her at night and we tell her no. She gets a little upset and even goes into shut down mode which involves throwing herself on the floor in a crying heap. Eventually, she gets over it and goes to bed without further incident. She got rejected, processed it, and moved on to another thing.

So, the next time you get rejected think of it as a little more fuel for the engine in your spirit. Of course, I say that and I feel that my engine isn’t getting as good of mileage from rejection as it used to. Perhaps there is a program like Cash For Clunkers when it comes to rejection. If anyone actually read my work or shared it with others or even donated to the cause or bought a shirt that would be nice. Nope? Rejected again. Maybe next time.

It's Not a Tumor

Oh, wait. it is!

The plot device. In the hands of a skilled writer it can be apparent in the story yet unnoticed until it is used to resolve the action. In the hands of a bad writer, it can bring the action to an abrupt halt or throw everything out of joint in a contrived revelation to the characters. An example that crosses both boundaries of good and bad is the Ruby Slippers in The Wizard of Oz. The Ruby Slippers are the main motivation behind the Wicked Witch of the West’s pursuit of Dorothy, even more so than the fact that she did a house drop off the top ropes onto her sister. However, after the witch is destroyed they serve no real purpose until we she misses the balloon ride to Kansas. Feeling distraught, she is then told by the Glinda that she could use the Ruby Slippers to River Dance her way back home. The whole time she had the method to get home but it was a little contrived that after all this, all she had to do was click her heels. It’s a bit of lazy writing in my opinion.

The same goes for television shows, primarily in the genre of a soap opera. Now before I get blasted here, you can classify a Soap Opera as something you watch during the daytime while eating bonbons or you can look at what it is derived from, the serial drama. In both cases, the storyline progressives across multiple episodes, sometimes seasons, and yet sometimes they are tidied up or ended with a bad plot device.

In one of my many white board sessions, trying to explain how LOST’s time travelling conundrums work, I felt a sharp pain in my head. I was getting frustrated because I get what’s going on due to my several years of watching these kinds of shows like Quantum Leap and Back to the Future. She can’t grasp the fact that both sets of characters are being shown on screen in the same episode but 33 years apart from each other. Maybe the lack of the “Whoosh” sound is the problem. Anyway, that sharp pain didn’t give me a lot of worry, but considering recent events like my Mother in Law having a brain tumor and one of my friends from high school dying from brain cancer, I thought that maybe this was more than just a headache. It’s not. Don’t worry. You have to have a brain before you can get cancer in it.

But that sparked a longer debate between me and the misses. It seems that a lot of top notch television shows are using brain tumors to further their storyline or resolve them. If your DVR is at 98% because you’re behind on shows like I am, you may want to skip the next paragraphs.

ER – Dr. Mark Green
In the series 15 year history, it’s not hard to believe that a main character would develop a brain tumor. In this case, the actor wanted to move on to other opportunities and his character was written out after dying from a brain tumor.

HOUSE – Dr. Gregory House
OK, this is a false positive. House only faked a brain tumor but still, I’m seeing a pattern.

Grey’s Anatomy – Izzie Stevens
There it is. The tri-fecta of television doctor’s “suffering” (I know...see HOUSE) from a brain tumor. In one of the most bizarre turns on the tube, Izzie’s skin cancer metastasizes into a brain tumor. The first clue may have been her hoping in bed with dead Denny Duquette. The real clue for those with forensic television plot line backgrounds would have been the clinical trials that Derek and Meredith had been conducting. Bad bad bad.

Bones – Seeley Booth
At least by giving Booth a brain tumor, we get some hysterical hallucinations. I don’t mean dead soldiers helping him out of a ship that is rigged to explode. I mean seeing and talking to Stewie Griffin, an animated character from the Family Guy. It also drives the plot to make Booth the Baby Daddy to Bones’ Bundle.

All My Children – Jonathan Lavery
Of course, a Soap Opera is the brain tumor’s playground or at least the devilish writer’s playground. Although, it happened three years ago, I point out this instance because the discovery of a brain tumor in this character lead to a Deus ex machine type resolution to his storyline. Lavery came onto the scene, physically abused his girlfriend, killed his brother, and tried to blow up his other brother’s wife and friend, killed yet two more people (one a prominent character on the show), and then supposedly blew up in an explosion. After awhile it was discovered that his sister was taking care of him and he was admitted to a hospital and operated on to remove the evil tumor that caused all his mayhem, leaving him with the mental state of a child.

Eli Stone – Eli Stone
Not a brain tumor, but an aneurysm drives the entire plot of this prophetic show about a Lawyer with a conscience. Yeah, it got cancelled. Too unbelievable. Not, the fact that he had visions of George Michael dancing in his living room but that he had a conscience.

Desperate Housewives – Noah Taylor
Before zipping ahead five years into the future….yeah OK, Hello? LOST much? The show had a character named Zach whose mother not only killed herself in the pilot but provides narration from beyond the grave. Turns out Zach was adopted and his maternal grandfather, dying of a…you guessed it, brain tumor, was willing to leave everything to him if he proved himself a man. He did by unplugging grandpa’s life support, killing him.

Life on Mars – Det. Sam Tyler
Being an import of the BBC version of the show, it was hard to believe that the reason behind the problems with Sam Tyler’s grasp of reality would be a brain tumor. Yet, fans speculated on message boards and forums that the series would end with him having one. Nope, turns out he’s an astronaut with a garbled simulation running in his head….probably on Vista.

The Unusuals – Eric Delahoy
Trying hard to be like M*A*S*H and actually scoring well in some areas, this comedy drama has one of its characters dying of brain cancer. This leads to his over the top attempts to either be a hero or kill himself.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Joyce Summers
Ok, it was 10 years ago, but come on, but one of the best uses of a brain tumor in a show was the fifth season of Buffy. Although, the brain tumor was successfully removed, an aneurysm ultimately killed off Joyce Summers and leaving Buffy to not only save the world from the Hellmouth, but also run a household and help raise her teenage sister, Dawn. One of the best episodes of the series, The Body, featured no soundtrack and delves into the human nature of its lead character, a strong heroic figure that can kill demons, vampires, and all other sort of supernatural beings yet cannot save her own mother from death by natural means.

Well, that’s all I got but I’m sure I’ve missed a few and hopefully, you all will feel free to point them out. It is sweeps after all. There’s bound to be a few more shows out there with characters who have brain tumors. In fact, I think Fox just greenlit a show this fall about a brain tumor living in New York City, trying to make it as an actor. Is he kidding? Good night, everyone.

Friday Night Remote Fight: Best Movies to Kick Off the Weekend

WARNING:
The post you are about to read contains dangerous levels of sugar and caffeine. Side effects include lethargy and feelings of euphoric childhood fantasies.
Consult a blogger.

Friday night. It’s a magical and mysterious thing. Surviving another long week seems almost worth it when you have this to look forward to. Some people have big plans to hit the clubs or some other event. Here in Pittsburgh, there’s a little thing called the NHL Finals going on and we’re down a game to the Capitals, so you know a majority of Pittsburghers will be either in the Mellon Arena at the game, outside the Mellon Arena watching the game on the Jumbotron, or in a bar watching the game on television. But what about the rest of us?

There was a time when I lived for Friday nights. Somewhere in my socially deprived mind I thought that if I didn’t go out somewhere, anywhere, on Friday night I was missing out on some sociological event that would go down in the annals as EPIC! Usually, that meant hanging out at the mall or even in my day, the roller rink. Yeah, for a brief period between the years of 1986 and 1990 I would make it a point to go to my local rink and just be. Of course, that meant be by myself, spend a couple dollars on Rolling Thunder or Xenophobe, watch other people couple skate, and then go home.

Then there were some Friday nights, during my early teenage years, that I just spent up in my room. Ok, it’s not what you’re thinking. This was about 1987 or 1988 and my brother had been in college at the time. Our first home computer took the form of an Apple IIc and my brother’s roommate had volumes of floppy disks with games on them that he copied for me. Now, the degree of advanced graphics and sound cards were still years away but even the simplest of games like Conan or Bruce Lee kept me busy for hours. It would be nothing for me to grab a can of Pepsi, a bag of Doritos, turn up my RUSH tapes, and not be seen again until Saturday morning at 7:00 AM when I had to get up for my paper route. How pathetic is that?

What kind of childhood was that? It was like the real life equivalent of the first twenty minutes of Weird Science, before the bras on the heads. Although, I kept waiting for my bedroom door to explode and have Kelly LeBrock standing amongst the smoky rubble just waiting for me to utter the simplest command. Never happened for you either? John Hughes was such a lying prick, wasn’t he?

Still, I remember, with fondness the days, when Friday meant I was done for the week. It was the time when my brain could just shut down and I could spend the next two days just crashed out in my “play clothes.” There wasn’t a child that needed tending to. There wasn’t a yard that needed to be mowed. I wasn’t responsible for taking out the trash or making sure the litter boxes were clean. It was all about the pleasure principle, and I don’t mean a Janet Jackson album.

Looking back at my childhood, I continually mount a pretty good case for being born too soon. There was of course the Power Wheels defense of 1983. That was just the tip of the iceberg, the smallest visible portion of the massive amount of technological innovations that developed over the years of my life. Those advancements in fun always seemed to be geared towards the demographic just below my age range, robbing me of the latest and greatest in media, toys and other escapist devices. While video game consoles are probably the greatest missed opportunity, the advancement in home theater and movie offerings through DVD and cable providers ranks a close second.

Yes, young Whipper Snappers, you there with your Twit-ster and Space-Book have all the hook up in gadgets and distractions of heroin addict whose house just landed in a Ozian poppy field. OhgodohgodDorothyDorothypoppiesfieldpoppiesfield... (ten points for you old timers that get that moldy oldie reference to geekdom.) I’ve become the Luddite equivalent of my parents talking about walking to school, uphill, both ways, in three feet of snow, but I’m explaining how, in my day, we had to sit in a certain order on the couch and touch the lamp just so we could keep our fuzzy reception of HBO visible. We dared not move or the audio track would go from somewhat discernible to that repetitive “cheet, cheet, cheet,” sound. It was like the whispers from Friday the 13th, set to the speed of Chipmunks and blasted like a Greek chorus, chanting over and over again that we were “cheating” the cable company, yet we continued to fine tune our

I mean, God help me if I was alone. I had the skills of a SETI radio technician, fine tuning the little knob on the device that clipped onto the back of our television, just so I could see the glimpse of a fuzzy pair of breasts from Revenge of the Nerds late at night. You kids, with your DVRs and your Blu Ray. Bah! You don’t know how stressful it was to have only five minutes to return a VHS rental and then realize you had to rewind the damn thing. If only I would have been born in 1985 I’d be knee deep in WoW and failing my Rocks for Jocks that I needed to graduate with a degree in Undeclared Arts. I’d be Netflixing the entire Second Series of Dr. Who while searching for another little jug of iced tea from 7-11. This would all be done simultaneously while texting my friends and updating my status while recruiting more people for my Mafia and send them all flair based on how much I hate Twilight.

But, I’ve gone completely off the point as I tend to do in my pop culture dementia. The entire point of this ever disintegrating rant is to highlight a selection of popcorn confectionery cinema treats that are best served reheated and with copious helpings of greasy, shop delivered pizza and carbonated beverages. This selection is a prime example of a childhood gone completely off the reservation. This is the kind of pre pubescent nostalgia that has you up until way past midnight, fixated on your glowing screen in a quasi reversed Ludovico technique. Instead of causing an aversion to the images and acts on screen, you wake the next day and head out into your backyard or neighborhood, engrossed in an intense imaginative state, reenacting the best scenes from the film. In your possession is a broken stick that doubles as a sword or rifle and you are clad in a newspaper hat and a cape fashioned from your Mother’s hand knitted afghan.

So, here we go. Settle down into that butt shaped groove you’ve made into the couch, Rochambeau your loved one or best friends for the remote with that killer Paper/Lizard/Spock combo move you’ve developed and let the brain take the night off, you deserve it. Now, I’m sure I will have missed some more of the classics and well established films but this is just a sampling.

Comedy

Dude, where’s My Car?
Half Baked
Stripes
Superbad
Old School
Ghostbusters (Could technically be listed under Sci-Fi)
Weird Science (As could this)
Big Trouble in Little China
Heathers
Shaun of the Dead (It splits the genre with Horror)
Meatballs
Caddyshack

Horror

Christine
Evil Dead I and II (Dead By Dawn is more comedy but let's keep it where it's at)
The Lost Boys
Halloween (1978)
The Thing
The Frighteners
Bubba Ho-Tep
Night of the Living Dead
Cabin Fever
Final Destination
Grindhouse
Poltergeist
Jaws

Adventure

Raiders of the Lost Ark
National Treasure
The Goonies
The Mummy
Jurassic Park
Romancing The Stone
The Three Musketeers (1993)
Ladyhawke

Action/Fighting

Kill Bill
Kung Fu Hustle
Crank
Die Hard
First Blood
Commando
Predator
Point Break
Bad Boys
Hot Fuzz

Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Fellowship of the Ring
Terminator
The Running Man
The Matrix
Escape From New York
Tron
Aliens
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Stargate
Independence Day
Akira
Six String Samurai
The Black Hole
Back to the Future
Underworld

Those of you who can’t turn your mind off for 2 hours.

Donnie Darko
12 Monkeys
Strange Days
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Memento
Paycheck
Pi
North by Northwest
Cube
Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Rom/Com

The Princess Bride
The Wedding Singer
Sleepless in Seattle
Only You
One Fine Day
10 Things I Hate About You
Failure to Launch

Just be sure to wipe the drool from the corners of your mouth when you're done. Have a good weekend and Let's Go Pens!