Folks? Listen up. When you spend an evening getting shitfaced and scarfing White Castle in a Microtel with with a doctor of religion, certain things are… expected of you. Namely, you should prepare to participate in silly internet memes which, despite how much you pretend to dislike them, you actually have a great deal of fun doing. Because, let’s face it, everyone is looking for a chance to talk about themselves. Hence the blog-culture.

The gateway drug...

All of which is a wordy preamble to my announcing that I have been “tagged” by the esteemed Dr. Kim Paffenroth. Be prepared, intarwebz. Ask not for whom the meme tolls. It tolls for thee.

THE RULES (for this game of tag):
1) LINK TO THE PERSON WHO TAGGED YOU.
2) POST THE RULES ON YOUR BLOG.
3) WRITE SIX RANDOM THINGS ABOUT YOURSELF.
4) TAG SIX PEOPLE AT THE END OF YOUR POST AND LINK TO THEM.
5) LET EACH PERSON KNOW THEY ARE TAGGED AND LEAVE A COMMENT ON THEIR BLOG.
6) LET THE TAGGER KNOW WHEN YOUR ENTRY IS UP.
7) DON’T BREAK THE CHAIN (not actually a rule).

1.) I am a Zen buddhist, although self-identifying as a Zen buddhist is in and of itself not Zen, so (to revise) I am a very shitty Zen buddhist.

2.) I was a theatre nerd in high school. Inexplicably, I was invariably cast in lead rolls, despite being short, awkward, weird-looking, paunchy, and having the least cool haircut in the history of mankind. My favorite roll? Lawrence “Guts” Regan, the gangster love-interest in Ayn Rand’s “Night of January 16th,” a roll I was abysmally ill-suited to play, since no one has ever been, nor will ever be, afraid of me.

3.) My wife and I got married on October 13th at the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio. She was magnificent, absolutely and shockingly beautiful from head to toe. We held the reception at the Dayton Packard Museum, and rode from the Art Institute in a vintage convertable Packard. In the pictures from that day, we look dangerous and opulent and romantic, fictional renderings of a near-benevolent Columbian dictator who never existed, and the beautiful, clever bride he never took. We danced to “You’re my Best Friend,” by Queen.

4.) My dog’s name is Henry Winkler. Like the Fonz. Ayyyyyyy.

5.) I can’t fucking STAND that book, House of Leaves. Taco Bell is to mexican food what House of Leaves is to slipstream fiction. It seems tailored to impress a whole generation of twenty-somethings with nothing on their bookshelves but Chuck Palahniuk and a few textbooks they forgot to sell back. There are some really brilliant novels out there that play with the way a story is told through the format of the physical book, but this is not one of them. There are NO CHARACTERS OF ANY LASTING DEPTH in this book, and I am therefor expected to be carried through on novelty alone. Well, novelty does shit for me, so thanks but no thanks.

6.) When I was thirteen, and caught up in the RAH-RAH SCARE YOUR PARENTS MARILYN MANSON GRRR!!! craze of the mid to late nineties, I owned a fishnet shirt, a pair of platform boots with buckles up the front, several t-shirts of the kind which only seem offensive to the tragically sheltered and those who wish them to be offensive, the Vampire: The Masquerade player’s guide, and three different colors of eyeliner pencil. I ultimately failed to scare anyone’s parents, least of which my own, who happily helped me dye my hair any variety of ill-advised colors. I did, however, have to sneak around to watch professional wrestling, which was the smelliest of all subhuman entertainments to my folks.

Okay, so now I have to tag 6 people? Fuck, Doc, I don’t think I KNOW 6 people…

Well, there’s Kyle Johnson. Hi Kyle…

Aaaaand…

Kealan Patrick Burke
Andersen Prunty
Matt Fucking Wallace
Brady Allen
Maurice Broaddus

Okay, that should do it! Internet meme completed.