Category / Uncategorized

by Edward Champion

Paul Malmont in the Bay Area

I won’t be able to make this, but Paul Malmont, author of The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, will be reading in the Bay Area on the following dates:

Tuesday, July 18th @ 12:30 pm
Stacey’s Bookstore
581 Market St near Montgomery, San Francisco
www.staceys.com

Tuesday, July 18th @ 7:00 pm
M is for Mystery
86 East Third Avenue, San Mateo
http://www.mformystery.com/events.html

Malmont also claims (first come first served, one presumes) that he’ll be offering rides to those heading down to San Mateo from the City. San Francisco literati may want to take him up on the offer if they’re interested in an in-vehicle chat with the man himself. But I suspect this is an elaborate attempt on Malmont’s part to collect some gas money.

by Edward Champion

Thank You for Hating My Blog

“Actually, this is good,” my drinking buddy said when my blog got ignored once again by a few members of the literati. “You don’t want humorless New York types or Me Generation holdovers to sully your comic instincts.”

My drinking buddy then drew a caricature of my receding hairline on the back of a cocktail napkin. The thin reddish fuzz, the sad balance of my forefront follicles, resembled the collection of pubic hairs I had just seen in the men’s room after micturating into the urinal. As a former girlfriend put it, quoting Dr. J as was her wont shortly after smothering me with her bosom whenever we watched the Final Four, “I live my life trying to never appear to be a small man.”

Yet here I was, thoroughly ashamed of my drinking buddy’s slapdash sketch, which he had spent all of two minutes on. I was a small man. In the days that followed, I would still appear to be a small man. All because of the considerable alcohol I had ingested that evening.

It had left me impotent. I had downloaded several MILF Hunter videos from Kazaa, but it was to no avail. How could I get an erection again? Through the act of writing? Perhaps if Graydon Carter offered me a moist kiss, with his reassuring cigarette breath, then I might be small no longer. Indeed, to smell was better than being small, and all it took was switching one vowel. How often had I had this conversation with myself? How often had I stared at myself naked in the mirror hoping that the New York Times might subsidize my writing therapy? It was only through writing an op-ed column that I might be able to purge myself of these demons.

My writer friends thought the ignorance was great. They knew that I was a perverted bastard and that I should probably take a break from thinking about sex for a few minutes. It was an opportunity, a buzz word, a way for me to take up cross-stitching, a hacky sack I could bounce on the tip of my nose to turn into a hacky sack I could ricochet off my knee. Their ignorance of my blog suggested to me that there were other parts of my body besides my penis. I had conjured up grand conspiracies that they were all out to get me. And perhaps they were.

Of course, like every blogger, I had checked my Technorati rating every ten minutes. I had been obsessively monitoring the links to my weblog even before I started blogging on a regular basis, even before I had a blog, ignoring the advice of my drinking buddy, who repeatedly intimated that there was a world outside my apartment.

“Get a life,” said another friend, who was more blunt than my drinking buddy. “Get over yourself.”

By 8 p.m., my Technorati rank was far from the top 100. I basked in the knowledge that I would never be a Boing Boing or a Gawker.

“You see?” my drinking buddy said a week later. “Now let me draw a picture of your penis, since you seem to be having such problems with it.”

I told my drinking buddy to put down the pen. He asked for a small payment to stop sketching.

And all it took was $256.88, which I slid across the table to my drinking buddy. My penis was erect the next morning.

Edward Champion is the author, most recently, of Return of the Reluctant, a weblog of little worth that you really shouldn’t be paying attention to.