The Advocate

Been a minute since my last post. Got caught up in the grind, as we all do from time to time. Forgot about the take back, clap back, but it's a long weekend and some things have not yet arrived, so here we find ourselves. There are times when I've got that itch, that restlessness, that skin-crawling tingle. The feeling that keeps me up at night doing chores no one has any business doing at 4 AM. The feeling that keeps me up listening to another Bon Iver album, sweating in my boxer-briefs, typing into the cyber-ether. My proverbial shout from the mountaintops to the bottom of the sea. I hope you don't mind this divergence into something a little more personal. There are times when my fingers must. When they have to. Have to type. Have to spin words like spiders must spin webs, like electronic daemons must crawl the interweb, trawling cyberspace until the end of time. Soon, I'm going to be a father. I am going to have a little girl. It could happen at any time. She...

So, my latest collection has FINALLY arrived for your reading pleasure! Available in Kindle, NOOK, Apple ibook, and other ebook formats, as well as traditional softcover from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , and Ingram. This collection has been a loooooong time in the making -- a lot of writing, editing, rewriting, reediting, scrapping, emotional upheavals, existential crises, and cash-strapped budgeting. But, after almost eight years of hard work, it's done. (Seriously, I could give GRRM a run for his money when it comes to the wait between books.) I certainly could never have done it without the support of my wife, my brother, and a lot of inspirational artists I know in real life as well as not in real life, including/especially Melanie Matranga who contributed the cartoon artwork for this collection. I also owe a big thanks to Amber, and all of the Dog Ear Publishing team who helped me turn this collection into the electronically as well as physically bound reality before y...

Okay, so a lot has already been written about how Pokemon Go has literally taken the world by storm, whether it's going to save our souls or destroy mankind as we know it. But, nonetheless, here's my two cents. Spend them how you will! First of all, I can't seem to find any goddamn Pokemon! I've been trying at the mall, at my office, at the supermarket, at the park, along the freeway, down sketchy alleyways in the dead dark of night wearing black leather. (Well, that escalated quickly.) But nope, I haven't found any. I'm still level 2 for crying out loud! Meanwhile, some people have already beaten the game! And here I am, can't even get a PokeStop or a Gym to respond to me half the time. Why? ...Why? WHY??? I blame my spoiled Gameboy-playing ass. I'm used to handhelds where I don't need decent WiFi or an LTE connection to catch some Pikachu. I'm not used to having to micromanage a battery pack, a GPS, and handheld camera to snag a Ratt...

Status update! Sad Bastard Poetry, my latest collection has completed it's proof pass phase and is approved for printing with Dog Ear Publishing!! I anticipate having a solid release date for ya'll soon. In the meantime, here's another sample of the original artwork I had commissioned for this collection, as well as the back-cover description to give you an idea of what you're in for: "Since the very first quasi-mythological scratchings of the written word, and probably long before it, people have been sharing stories of the tragicomic concept known as Love. Those heights, and depths, were plundered no more infamously than by a writer named Billy the Bard, also known as Willy the Shake and Old Bill (unless you count that incestuous paedophile E.A. Poe). His gratuitous impact sparked the name for this collection in which you will read about the grotesque, photographic, melancholic, eviscerating, and hilarious faces of Love in all its forms, from romantic and sweet, ...

Has there ever been an anime more perfect than the Space Opera meets Western meets Jazz solo known as Cowboy Bebop ? Rhetorical question. Obviously the answer is no. I started watching circa September 2, 2001, (merely a week, or so, before Nine-Eleven destroyed my nations uniquely American sense of invincibility) on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim . It was the first anime I ever seriously watched an anime. I think it may have been the first time I ever seriously watched anything . And fuck, the show was cool, in every sense the word was ever meant to evoke and invoke. As an awkward teenage boy, the gunfights, spaceships, and frenetic saxophone, mixed with tantalizing bits of fan service captured my imagination in a way perfectly designed to tap that angst and loneliness so pervasive amongst young White men . (Though, being Jewish, I wonder if I was less predisposed to devolve more towards sappy blog posts instead of violent mass murder.) It touched just the right nerve at just t...

(Credit: Kevin "Rashid" Johnson) If you're a fan of Netflix's  Orange is The New Black, then you know exactly what I'm talking about here. With the release of season 4  this sentiment has been brought to the forefront of a show that not only pushes the boundaries of television, but of our entire concept of social justice in a country simultaneously more progressive than ever and yet also more oppressive in sheer numbers than at any other time in history. But for me, the core of what OITNB has shown us over the course of this season is that, regardless of what you've done: y ou are still a person . Maybe you sold crack. Maybe you robbed someone. Maybe you even killed someone. That doesn't mean you are no longer human. That doesn't mean you deserve the kind of treatment we're seeing in America , courtesy of the prison-industrial complex, bigotry, and apathy. As seen through the eyes of prisoners, former prisoners, and investigative journa...

( Credit to playwright Ernest Hemmings. ) Whether you're talking 'bout President  Obama is spreading Ebola , Secretary  Hillary deliberately caused Benghazi , or the thought that Earth is, actually, as flat as the ass of pancake , conspiracy theories seem to reproduce like a rabbit-mouse hybrid in heat. I grew up amongst many of them through the 90's and early 2000's. From apples laced with razor blades to HIV-infected needles in the parks and playgrounds of the neighborhood, or on the handles of the local gas station pump. Others were less well-known, such as the Native-American ghosts that haunted our high school campus and killed the science teacher on back-to-school night. Or the mysterious oil-derricks hidden between Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa in a locked-down facility that, purportedly, housed a testing ground for experimental weaponry and post-apocalyptic machinery. Indeed, I've actually tread those very lines myself as a teenager, searching f...