Hi, heroes!

For your information, I will be sharing table 1710K with my esteemed and bearded co-writer/bff Adam P. Knave at this year’s Baltimore Comic-Con! If you happen to be in Baltimore August 20 or August 21, please stop by our table for book signing and chatting and whatnot!

We’ll have copies of the POPGUN books! Adam will be selling his terrific novel STAYS CRUNCHY IN MILK and his hilarious book of essays I SLEPT WITH YOUR IMAGINARY FRIEND! And I’ll have some of those silly DO YOU BELIEVE IN NINJAS? poetry books!

Oh, and we’ll have a special, discounted, 100 copy run of our one-shot comic AGENTS OF THE W.T.F.! It features stories that appeared in POPGUN 3 and 4, plus some bonus coolness.

Really, to be perfectly honest, it’s going to be the best time.

Love,
D.J.

Yes, this is an early, poorly timed announcement due to the fact that the San Diego Comic Con will fulfill all your comic needs for a while, BUT Adam P. Knave and I collected our AGENTS OF THE W.T.F. stories from POPGUN 3 & 4 into one handy comic that we’ll be selling at the Baltimore Comic Con in August! When the proof copy from Ka-Blam arrived, with that glorious Matteo Scalera art, those crisp Palao Ferrante inks, Antonio Campo‘s lovely colors, Thomas Mauer‘s letters of power, and that Cara McGee book design snazziness — I just had to show it off!

Normally I walk to work, but it was raining (well, drizzling) this morning, which required I get in my car in drive. Good thing I hadn’t had my morning bourbon yet! Did I type “bourbon”? I meant coffee. Coffee with bourbon.

Anyway, I got to work, and who should I see in the parking garage but my good buddy Christopher Lambert! (“Christopher Lambert” is not my friend’s real name, but I won’t presume it’s okay to just put his name on my widely read* blog without his permission… and I just don’t want to ask for his permission.)

He was sitting there with the car running, and my first thought was, “Oh crap… Christopher Lambert wants to go gently into the night, even though it’s the morning!”

I walked up to him and explained that the parking garage was way too large and ventilated for what he appeared to be doing to work. He explained that that was not what he was doing at all, but that he was instead getting an odometer reading for his car insurance since he moved and — oh shit, I need to change my address with MY insurance. Wait, where was I… ?

So, anyway, I tell him to hurry his ass up and get out of the car. How long does it take to write down a few numbers? And why did the car have to be on to do it? Christopher Lambert doesn’t make any sense half the time.

He gets out of the car to follow me to our awesome  day jobs, closing his door as — oh crap. “Did I really just do that?” Christopher Lambert asks, billy goat eyes wide, face full of terror.

I look at his car, headlights pointlessly on (really, why did he have those on to check his odometer?), engine humming. “Do you have a spare key?”

Christopher Lambert said he did… at his apartment… and his apartment keys were with his now trapped car key. I made some other dismissed suggestions as Dan Cortese (named, for the purposes of this story here, after the famed MTV SPORTS host in order to protect the real individual’s name à la Christopher Lambert) parked near us. I innocently asked Dan Cortese if he had “breaking into car skills,” which Christopher Lambert deemed racist. Whatever he was commenting on didn’t occur to me, as, to me, there is but one race: the human race. (And dolphins. So maybe two races.)

Anyway, Dan Cortese didn’t know about breaking into cars, and Christopher Lambert was freaking out. I felt guilty, as my talking to him had probably caused Christopher Lambert to stupidly close his locked door with his keys still in the ignition of his running car. It was all my fault, and soon Christopher Lambert would realize it and guilt me into having a terrible day. Just a terrible, awful day.

But then Christopher Lambert’s face changed from a look of despair to one of triumph! “I have a spare car key in my jacket in my cube upstairs!” This was a great moment and one deserving of a hi five even as Christopher Lambert needlessly elaborated that he was going to wear his hoodie but instead wore the jacket in which he always keeps a spare car key.

After he’d used his spare key to turn off his car, he came to the realization I knew he would: this whole fiasco was essentially my fault. Thinking fast, I lied that this had all been part of my plan. I came upon a man who looked broken and inept at suicide. Though this was not the case, I continued on as if it was, for to see the light, one must sometime travel to the depths of the dark… I knew he’d end up locking his key in his car! I knew it’d cause moments of panic and fear! BUT I ALSO KNEW that he had a spare key, which he’d realize hopefully before tears started welling up in his puppy dog eyes!

This day would now be the greatest day he’d ever known. A day that started with triumph out of adversity. And I’d insisted I’d knowingly given it to him.

Okay, now I have to call my car insurance company, a company I’ll call, oh, All State (not really, but I want to protect my insurance company’s name instead of asking it for permission to mention it here), to change my address.

*Untrue. Quite the opposite in fact. – Truth Police

I like to sometimes pretend I know karate. No, I don’t go doing karate moves or breaking bricks with a chop of my hand or kicking things. I just like to tell people I know karate.

Looking at me, one does not normally think, “Whoa. I am talking to a karate master. This big, doughy, pale yet red-nosed fellow is a master of karate. I should tread lightly.” The most common thought is more like, “This guy clearly enjoys fried foods and cheese. He should take better care of his insides.”

When that type of thinking, true as it may be, fills my brain, I decide I’d like to pretend I’m learning karate. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s a smaller kind of lie or, if I don’t blatantly say it aloud, gentle self-delusion.

Fooling myself into thinking I’m the kind of guy who is taking it upon himself to learn the ancient and understandably feared art of karate helps me walk a little taller. At 6’3″ walking taller might seem a bit excessive, but it helps my posture. And I look like a goon when I slouch, which is unfortunately often.

Yes, like millions (thousands?) of people on this earth, I could actually learn karate. The only thing stopping me from doing so is my own laziness. But that laziness makes me who I am. And who I am is a big lazy guy who thinks it’d be cool to know karate even if I’m too lazy to actually study karate and… try.

The ending doesn’t read as positive as I’d hoped.

When I first heard of “No Shave November,” I was like, “Hm… that’d be a good excuse not to shave.” And so… I joined in! I joined in with vigor!

It just so happened that I’d shaved for my Halloween costume. Yeah, Clark Kent AGAIN, but here’s a sample of that clean shaven face…

Now, ignore the look on my face… actually, just ignore my face entirely aside from the fact that that’s how I look after shaving with a razor and shaving cream and the whole bit.

My facial hair is one of the few manly things about me, so I was quite excited by the No Shave November possibilities. For serious, sand paper texture and 5 o’clock shadows appear moments after shaving… My hope was to have a big ol’ bushy monstrosity for all the world to fear after a month of not shaving or even trimming.

Instead…

It’s like the dang thing grew to a certain point and then stopped! This is barely different than a week’s worth of normal facial hair grooming neglect!

The moral of the story, kids, is that even my facial hair can let me down. That Sam Elliott ‘stache I was hoping to achieve for next year’s “Movember” now seems about as likely as my dream of becoming a karate expert via nothing but wishing…

Good-bye, dreams.