Laissez le bon temps rouler, moins les fruits de mer

This past Saturday, I did a very Southern thing and went to a crawfish boil – but not just any crawfish boil, mind you. This was the first crawfish boil I’ve ever willingly attended, due to my overwhelming aversion to the hideous creatures featured on the menu. I’m not sure how or why a person would ever decide to try eating one of the squirmy and alien looking crustaceous bastards, but somewhere someone did, and the rest is Southern History. I just can’t get over how repulsive the creatures look, even after they’re boiled and seasoned and take on the color of a cheap whore’s Crotchfire-Red lipstick. They’re just disgusting to me and, although I know my aversion is purely visual and has nothing whatsoever to do with how delicious they may (or may not) taste, I can’t bring myself to crack open a bumpy red exoskeleton to find out. This is, of course, seen in the South as a sort of questionable form of mental illness, but I’m used to being a stranger in a strange land, even after I’ve lived here for thirty-five years.

Brittany, on the other hand, has no problem with ingesting the horrid little mudbugs. Being mostly Cajun herself, she’s used to eating troubling things that have no business being tasty. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something about life on the bayou that breeds great chefs, almost as if the availability of only hideous creatures inspires potential cooks towards lofty heights of culinary greatness. You’d have to be a genius, after all, to make things like crawfish or blackened anything not only taste good, but to become so legendarily delicious that they’re known the world over. As proof of the culinary brilliance of the Cajun mind, I offer the famous example of the weird and wonderful soup/stew/mud known as gumbo. Gumbo is, by all rights, a nasty looking concoction, resembling nothing so much as river mud and algae with vegetables and bits of dead animals tossed in, but it’s delicious all the same. Recipes can be as different as Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar, but they’re almost always universally scrumptious. I’ll actually eat gumbo, provided I know what animal bits are suspended within its viscous goo and that those bits are made up of only dead cows and/or chickens. You can keep your squirming aquatic critters right out of my bowl though, thankyouverymuch. I’ve nothing to do with the otherworldly horrors of seafood, from the ubiquitous crab all the way through to the great and terrible Cthulhu squid. I hate them all.

Trey, apart from the occasional fish stick at Grandma’s house, avoids seafood as much as me, although I attribute this to the simple fact that’s he’s three and the embarrassing fact that I eat like a three year old. He did enjoy playing with the crawfish, though. He was nervous at first, but as other kids showed up and started prodding the loathsome creatures with various sticks and pokey things, he slowly started to join right in. He eventually developed a sort of friendship with the critters, going so far as to encourage one of the cooks to feed the crawfish with the large jar of Crab Boil seasoning he was carrying over to the pot, which Trey mistook for “crawfish food”. Later, after Brittany ate her fill of the little boiled, bright red bastards, Trey walked over and looked sideways at her box top filled with the discarded carapaces. “They’re not moving?” he said, as a sort of curious complaint, with concern dripping from the question mark. I responded by redirecting him to the fact that the dog had just stolen his frisbee, and so we avoided any complicated conversations of life and death and the nature of the predatory food chain when hungry Cajun stomachs are involved. Instead, he enjoyed running around what he called “the party house” while he played with the other kids and roasted marshmallows over a bonfire later in the evening. By the time we headed home, he was protesting that he never wanted to leave the party, which he elaborated on the next day. Upon waking, he promptly informed Brittany and I of his plans by saying, “After I wake up and go tee-tee, we can go back to the party house!” It was a difficult morning.

The event itself was held at a co-worker’s house, who is the sort of man who collects random pop culture ephemera and revels in the acquisition of really bad art. He’s a gracious host and a solid guy, although he’ll happily steal all your money over a game of poker and still make you feel like you had a good time losing. If he were a movie character, I imagine he’d be someone along the lines of Jeff Bridges’ character from The Big Lebowski, only with less hair and better hygiene. He sits across from me in the newsroom, where we share a pod of four desks with two other equally interesting souls.

The first of these fine folks is the paper’s resident tech guru, who works to keep the online side of the news flowing freely into the Intertubes by way of alternating between being exceedingly helpful and explosively angry. He works hard to lend aid to anyone who needs it, and he does so politely and nicely, along with a whole bunch of other adverbs that make him out to be a swell guy. However, while his people skills are finely polished, his relationship with technology is a seething caldera of unbridled rage, ever poised on the edge of a violent eruption. Usually, these sorts of explosions happen when the computer does something he doesn’t want it to, which places his keyboard in mortal peril. You can work out the timing if you listen closely to how hard he’s striking the keys as he types – once the pace slows and each key is thwacked with deliberate and forceful intent, it’s never long before he starts Teaching It A Lesson. This involves a bit of murmuring followed by muffled yelling, which in turn transforms into a full Hulk Smash before it’s all over. I’ll let your imagination fill in the detail, but anyone who’s ever experienced Techno Rage can understand, if only they ratchet the hate up to eleven. If he were a movie character, I’d have to pick any random Adam Sandler flick where the normally nice and well-tempered guy is always poised on the raggedy edge of a precipice overlooking a vast canyon filled with rivers of whitewater fury. You may think it’s not quite so dramatic as all that, but that’s only because you haven’t been around when a telemarketer makes the terrible mistake of dialing his extension…

The other person in our pod must be described gently, since she suffers from a debilitating handicap due to an unfortunate birth defect which left her lacking a Y chromosome. She fights against it every day though, and her struggle to succeed despite her obvious disability is inspiring. It’s also kind of funny. If she were a movie character, I’d have to go with a Smurf (which works, because of that whole The Smurfs movie thing Hollywood is cooking up). Specifically, she’d be Codey Smurf since she’s a programmer and, by now, the Smurf village is bound to have finally gotten broadband and has the Internet on its tiny computers. A photo of Elton John hangs on the wall behind her, and I imagine him singing a steady chorus of Tiny Dancer all day long as she sits beneath him, coding the backend website mojo that powers the online news. She’s a small woman, who fills her desk with tiny things, like miniature trinkets and abnormally-sized food. The other day, she was eating an apple that appeared normal-sized in her Lilliputian hands, but was actually about as big as a really large berry when held by anyone else. She took three weeks to eat a tiny box of Nerds, and even then she gave the last of the miniature candies to Trey when he came up for a visit one day. She will often fill with tiny rage herself when the system behaves in an unpredictable way, but her outbursts are limited to a teeny fist clenched and shaken before the unimpressed phosphors of her computer monitors. It’s fun to watch, and kind of adorable. It’s kind of like watching a puppy yip and growl at a suspicious lamp it finds threatening or, as one reporter put it, “Righteous indignation never looked so cute.”

In addition to the inhabitants of our little pod, most of the rest of the newsroom was at Saturday’s crawfish boil, as well. It’s a strange and wonderful thing, to enjoy work outings that don’t feel at all like work outings. I enjoyed spending time with the people of my department at my previous job, but we rarely did anything as a group. When we did, it often felt forced and a bit artificial, so I preferred to spend time with just those few folks I’d developed strong friendships with. Here at the paper, things are different. There’s a sense of belonging to a greater whole, of being part of some kind of surrogate family – and I’ve only been here for one month. I don’t know everyone very well yet, but there’s an ease of getting along that comes, I think, from the nature of the business and from everyone working in the large, open environment of the newsroom. I guess it’s all to do with camaraderie or some such, but I’ve never had any truck with those sorts of nouns before, so it’s a new experience for me. I’m used to doing things on my own, as a sort of not-as-cool version of Han Solo, minus the ray gun and the Wookie. Still, at least I shoot first…

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NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

Humor | Nonfiction
Available now from the following retailers

Have you ever lived through an experience that was so humiliating that you wanted to die, but when you tell it to all your friends, they can't stop laughing?

Have you ever made a decision that seemed like a good idea at the time, but you're still living with the hilarious consequences years later?

If so, then grab a snack, get comfortable, and prepare to have all of your own poor life choices seem just a little bit more bearable.

You're welcome.

Short Stories
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The nine stories of rage and sadness collected here range from the most intimate of human experiences to the wildest realms of magic and fantasy. The first story is a violent gut-punch to the soul, and the rest of them just hit harder from there.

Those who tough it out will find a book filled with as much hope as despair, a constant contradiction pulling you from one extreme to another.

Life might knock us down, over and over, and will the beat the ever-loving snot out of us from the time we're old enough to give it attitude until the day we finally let it win and stop getting up.

Always get back up.

Gaming | Nonfiction
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This isn't just a book. It's a portal to other worlds where there be magic and dragons and hilarious pirates. Okay, not really. But this book is about those portals, except they're called video games.

The Life Bytes series of books take a deep dive into one man's personal journey through childhood into kinda/sorta being a responsible, competent adult as told through the magical lens of whatever video games he was playing at the time.

Part One starts way back in 1975 and meanders down various digital pathways until, oh, around about 1993 or so.

If you're feeling nostalgic for the early days of gaming or if you just want to understand why the gamer in your life loves this hobby so much, take a seat in your favorite comfy chair and crack this bad boy open.

I'll try to not be boring.

Horror
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What you are about to read is not a story. There is no beginning, middle, or end.

What follows is nothing more than a series of journal entries involving shadow people, sleep paralysis, and crippling fear. It’s not pretty, it doesn’t follow story logic, and nothing works out well in the end.

You've been warned.