4/14/05 3:00 AM: "All things truly wicked start from innocence." -- Ernest Hemingway

REST IN PIECES: Terry Schiavo finally died. I'm very happy about that, since now I can have less of her on my TV. The pope died shortly after, since virtually no one knew of his illicit affair with the woman more than two decades ago. He's never let go of the hope, someday, that they could be together, so when she passed away, the life just went out of him. Well, okay, he was seventeen billion years old as well, and went to high school with Torquemada, but still.

Yes, this will be that kind of mad blog, why do you ask?

NOBODY EVER EXPECTS THE AFRICAN INQUISITION: So I've decided that I'll accept when the conclave of cardinals calls and asks me to be the next Pope.

After reading some of my work (especially the one where I said I was hired to kill Tupac, months before he was really killed) and he figured that I had just the right mix of administrative skill, global and political vision and utter ruthlessness to get the Catholic Church back on the right track after ideological assaults around the world and legal assaults (on kid groping) in the US. The organization has seen better days, and who better to return it to the times of sending warriors around the globe to whack guys than me? If this isn't the age when a man willing to send people to die in the name of faith can get ahead, well, Karl Rove is considerably more mistaken than all the facts would imply.

So I gotta get sized up for one of those funny hats, and I gotta make sure they get me an American-made Pope-mobile, in case I gotta get out and fix it myself. I also wanna, first thing, issue a papal edict that anybody who questions me about the Heckler and Koch MP5 that I'll have with me at all times catches a burst in the face. Unless she's really cute and flirting with me.

I know what you're thinking -- I'm not even Catholic, I'm not even a priest, I don't even believe in Jeebus. Blah blah blah -- all unimportant details. The Catholic Church was at its most effective when it was parachuting Jesuit shock troops into foreign lands, converting by book or by crook. Since Dubya (called "Dan Quayle Mark II" by my good friend Steven Grant) is otherwise employed, I'm the guy for the gig. These are the times for nonsensical militarism based on thinly-veiled spiritual superiority complexes. Who's better for that than Hannibal Tabu? Besides, chicks dig the hat, and I'd be the first to coin the phrase, "keep it Popin'" and appoint the Bishop Magic Don Juan as the Cardinal of Vatican City (imagine a pimp with diplomatic immunity).

THE 900 NUMBER: I've been entered in "Laymamerican Idol," a blog competition conceived by criminal mastermind John Layman. I'm up against a lot of other comics and culture wonks, and I'm given 4-1 odds. I don't even know what that means ...

CRIMINAL INTENT: Discussing Layman seems as good a place as any to divulge this short, shameful confession: I was stuck for a considerable amount of time on a certain mission on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas involving me dancing at a beach party. On the game, I'm good at two basic things -- driving and killing people. Dancing is something I can do in real life, but matching my movements with the correct button combos to make the character dance as the game prescribed ... that's for the birds. I got 3400 as the highest score, and the mission required 4000 points. So my dawg, the karaoke cowboy Jon Lawson came by (with our homegirl Dana for reasons that are currently a secret, due to my boss Tony), and whomped the mission for me on the first try. He's kind of an idiot savant that way.

Sadly, this opened up a lot more to do on the game, so I figured, "I'll just play for a little while." That was 3AM or so on Monday. I stopped myself at 1PM on Tuesday afternoon (remember -- I normally go to sleep around 7AM and sleep all day) and ended up going to sleep at 3:30. I barely dragged myself awake by 11PM, which threw off the whole day, and the next day, and blah. Oh well.

All that to say that the game discs must be laced with crack or something. In the space of those several hours, I took the Grove Street Families gang to eleven territories to more than thirty, murdering and killing my way through most of the south side of the city. I can't imagine how people are supposed to play this game without cheating -- I use a code that makes any car I drive virtually invulnerable and makes any car that hits me explode. Which is fun. With the scant few cheat codes I know off hand, I can get away with virtually anything. Which makes the game's central premise a little unusual -- the protagonist is being framed for killing a cop, but in the game I've killed virtually hundreds of cops, FBI agents, and even National Guardsmen. I can wipe away all my crimes and make the police forget me by just putting on a pair of sunglasses. It's not enough to really worry about, but it's a plot logic thing that doesn't work for me. Everything else does, sadly, all too well ...

IN EXCESS: If I haven't heard back by May, I'll know for certain that I was not chosen for INXS Rock Star. Which seems like it's more and more of a good idea as time goes on. I mean, if indeed they did choose to stick with whoever won as their lead singer, and the show just chose another band the next season, would they really be accepting of me? I don't expect anything to come of it, but I did learn how to make DVDs, which was cool. I also started singing "Never Tear Us Apart" (but that's part of the "repetoire of lies" shtick I'll get to in a moment).

SOMNABULISM: I had a weird weekend. On Friday, I got home after my show and fell into bed by 3:30 AM, dog tired since I was up on Friday afternoon for reasons I don't really remember. I sat bolt upright in bed at 9AM, unable to get back to sleep. That sucked. So I stayed up until 5 Saturday night, mostly coherent, and tried again. 7:57 AM, there I am awake again. No loud noises, no weird happenings, just random. Messed me up all weekend. My sleep has been a bit wonky -- my goal is to get to sleep by 6AM or so, these days, and I'm super off my schedule -- and I wanna get it under control.

TELLING STORIES: I've been working on a lot of the fiction projects, especially since they mostly link up to my "big idea" (which will leap into sharp relief with Book Three of The Crown, which turns out to be the finale for the whole thing in a big surprise to me).

UNFORGIVEN: No, I haven't seen Sin City yet. I still haven't seen Elektra or even Ray. I just never seem to find the time, the same way I haven't finished writing "The Pie Song" or "Inscrutable," or even opening my beloved Garageband to craft tiunes so lovingly (and now I think about it, I don't even have the newer, hipper Garageband). I'm not terribly happy about that -- heck, I was hacked off I didn't get a screening invite until the big junket weekend, which was the same weekend as Wizard World Long Beach (yeah, that's no good). But thanks for asking, continually.

SING FOR A MOMENT: Late last Saturday, I went out to sing and screwed up. While singing "Creep" by Radiohead, my voice gave out on the big note near the end. Just scraping paint, but noticeable and twice. So that's done. I'm finding less motivation to sing harder songs. I started to learn "Ordinary People" by John Legend, but man is it an uphill climb. With half the effort, I could master "Let Me Go" or "Lonely No More." I don't even really do "Never Really Was," which I really like. I'm in a phase where I'm making my material justify its existence.

ZEALOTS: I wrote a new poem recently, one of two that are the first I've written in months and months. I was talking to some people about the insane things that women do in relationships -- I know a girl who recently stopped seeing somebody she really likes and is attracted to because a guy she's been dating longer -- who's a few years younger and who she's really sprung over -- wanted her to go exclusive. But he barely touches her, and she's miserable all the time, and blah. But does she leave and spend time with the one she likes? No. Female logic is just completely incomprehensible to me. People don't "suddenly recognize what they're missing" or "see the light" or "figure it out." People -- and I'm sad to say, particularly the fairer sex -- statistically remain with poor pattern recognition and bad decision making abilities. They have so much more processing power, on average, but use most of it on empty cycles and running in circles. Again, the idea of people fighting battles based on faith rather than, say, facts or profits leaps ahead, and the only way these kinds of people can win is in overwhelming numbers. I am saddened by a lot of what I see, and this poem sums a lot of that up. Makes me extremely reluctant to even practice jump shooting, due to the sad, repetitive nature of it.

FATHER FIGURE: Speaking of saddened, I am not going to talk about my good friend headed to Kentucky, because nobody asked me. But it saddens me, and the very cyclical nature of most of the people I care about also saddens me.

NOBODY SAID IT WAS EASY: The best thing to come of all of this is the songs I am working with. I now sing Sum 41's "Pieces" with such passion that it even bowled over people who hear me sing a lot. Likewise, I've lost none of my fervor for "The Scientist" (and I really see myself as a scientist facing legions of crusaders, which is a very unpleasant conflict), even with the slightly mocking spin I've put on it. Most interesting is my new "repertoire of lies" songs, which are largely contrary to my actual feelings -- "I'd Die Without You" by PM Dawn, for example, or "A Different Corner" by Wham! (people forget that song was on the album Edge of Heaven before Michael went solo on Listen Without Prejudice, Volume 1). I sing a lot of them in a softer vocal dynamic, with easier transitions into falsetto. A delivery as duplicitous as the emotions being sung -- I find my success, smiling through those songs, knowing their fallacies and foolishness. It's funny.

UNLEARN: So I've just figured out how to find TV shows on the 'net, which is a huge boon since I keep screwing up the VCR settings, and missed 24, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Arrested Development this week. None of that makes me at all happy. But now I can be less vigilant, I'm pleased. I have a lot of areas where I have to be vigilant all the time, and getting some slack on one is almost like a vacation.

CLOSING TIME: That's enough for this time, so I'll once again end with a quote:

"I didn't lie! I was writing fiction with my mouth!" -- Homer Simpson