You know you want one… part 7…

a 57I know it’s tacky… but still…

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You know you want one… part 6…

a 56I think pillows are a good marketing idea for my blog. Everybody likes pillows. And, not only do they come with a picture of me and funny words, but each one will be stuffed with my own belly button lint… so… uh… yeah!

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This might sound a tad cynical… but everything you love is trying to kill you…

This idea popped into my head a moment ago… so I am just going to let the crack squirrels that live inside my head run with the idea and see where it takes them… maybe I should apologize in advance.

It started when, in the background, I heard some newscaster on the TV talking about the most recent mass shooting in the United States. And some cynical part of my brain said; “Yeah, us Americans, we sure does love our guns!” ***(I don’t really talk like that, but I was doing a sort of redneck voice in my head, and I thought I would try to convey that)***

Well, the thoughts just sort of began spiraling out of control from that one little notion… you know… like my thoughts tend to do… We love guns, and guns kill a lot of us. We love our cars and the freedom to drive anywhere, and a lot of us die in car wrecks. We love to eat sweets and deep-fried food, and a lot of us die from diabetes and obesity-related complications or just plain poor health.

I started to wonder if this was mostly just an American problem or if it translated internationally, but that might have required actual thought and maybe Googling statistics and it is too early for that nonsense… so I am just sitting at the keyboard and letting the crack squirrels dance on it.

They say… (uh, I mean the ‘they’ people always talk about, not the crack squirrels)… that you are far more likely to be murdered by a family member, someone whom you love and supposedly loves you in return, than by a stranger. That is a horrible thing to contemplate, but it does support my premise… so…

The more I let the crack squirrels dwell on this idea, the more it seems to hold up under scrutiny. If you get eaten by a shark, the odds are it is because you love swimming or surfing… or sharks. That crocodile hunter guy loved nature, so naturally he was stung in the heart by a stingray. Who didn’t see that coming?

Even diseases that kill us can often be traced back to what we love. Skin cancer kills people who love being tan. You could even make the argument that people who die from smoking loved to smoke, but I don’t want to stretch my point too far. I will say that a lot of people who die of unusual diseases loved to travel to exotic places. That is why a lot of those new commercials for medications include a warning like; “Do not take this medication if you live in or travel to places where fungal infections are common”… (Has anybody actually Goggled where those places are, because maybe we shouldn’t be traveling to those places anyway)…

Like many of my ideas that end up as posts, this one seems to be bringing up more questions than it is answering. It is obviously an oversimplified and rambling tract on not a whole lot. I am certain untold numbers of people die each year from things that they hate, or don’t care about in any way. But I like thinking about stuff. I like trying to make you think about stuff. Sometimes these posts generate some interesting conversations in the comments. On the other hand, my stats suck right now, so I doubt many people will even read all this.

Sorry… now the crack squirrels are just whining.

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Some very good reasons to read my new book… which is the third book in my action/humor science fiction series… and maybe even read the first two books as well…

a 3Yeah… it has tie dye-wearing ninja assassins from another dimension, trying to kill the hero… which, as it turns out, is me… but not this me, a me in even another dimension… Okay, the little bear isn’t really in the story… I just added that for fun… wait, I take that back, there are some aliens that our hero calls ‘Rainbow Bears’ that have a dark secret, so that little bear does sort of work in that context.

You also get to meet an alien who learned to speak English by watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus reruns and can only speak using lines from their skits… which is how I met Mr. Eric Idle on Twitter, and struck up a friendship, and got him to follow me on Twitter, but that is another story… And you meet an abominable snowman alien, and a bunch of human supremacists who hate aliens and alien supremacists who hate humans… but both those groups live right next to each other…

Oh, and you get to meet Fawnya…

a 2… who isn’t actually green, but rather blue, but I did this picture before I decided what color she was going to be… and her mate, Fadoodoo, who both live in a big volcano made of their own poop… although, technically, we never really do find out in the book whether or not it is actually their poop or not, and tend to speak like Russian spies from a bad Cold War movie.

And all this takes place as the hero… who is, once again, me… takes a walk around a giant alien space station called the Hubb… being chased by alien and human assassins sent from another dimension because our hero has screwed up the plans of an evil dictator who rules that dimension to come and invade his dimension. And because our hero is sarcastic and lazy and takes nothing seriously and hates responsibility… (once again, he is me, after all)… he is shirking his new duties as CEO of the largest alien/human intergalactic corporation in the history of any dimension… which the American president sort of forced him to take on, after he saved the alien space station from space pirates… in the first book… and saved San Francisco from being blown up by the old CEO of the corporation… in the second book… and now, because all his exploits were televised to the entire universe, and he is the darling of  billions of living beings, he is sulking and taking a vacation… which is bad, because that invasion I told you about, it is still going to happen. The good news is that he put all his human and alien poker buddies in charge of the company while he is off being juvenile, which, as it turns out, was a really good idea.

Hey, not bad for a guy who started off as the janitor at a Texas-style bar on the alien space station.

So… uh… yeah… just go over to the sidebar and click on the picture of this book…

a 1…0r the pictures of the other two books… and a link will take you to a magic place where they will print a copy of those books… or of my famous children’s book; I Like Monkeys… on actual paper made from actual dead trees… and send them right to your house.

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You know you want one… part 5…

a 62Now how is that for a ringing endorsement?

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You know you want one… part 4…

a 65Fashionable… and you have to admire truth in advertising, right?

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You know you want one… part 3…

a 67Because this way, you can wear tie dye without really having to wear tie dye…

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You know you want one… part 2…

a 68What could be better than a shirt with my face on it? A shirt with 4 of my faces on it!

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You know you want one… part 1…

a 66I mean, seriously, if you could order that shirt, you would, right? Just look at all the pretty colors. And it has me on it!

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I took your advice, for a change… here is the new back cover of my new children’s book…

new back cover copyMany of you said that my original artwork for the back cover (shown below) was too… ‘busy’… ‘jolting’… well, you used a lot of different words to tell me it wasn’t my best work…

back cover copyOkay, the thing is… and I could have kept this ‘thing’ to myself, and made you feel like I was getting better at taking your advice… but the thing… and the truth… is that my daughter, Jessica, who compiles and formats my books and sends them to the publisher… decided that, because of the fact that some of the art I did for the book was in a ‘landscape’ format, and some was in a ‘portrait’ format, we should go with a square shape for this book… and the new picture fits better.

That being said, she also agreed that the back page had too much going on.

So… see… I agreed with you… more or less.

Although I still think that first idea would have grabbed the attention of little kids…

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