Long ago, in a land far far from here, I lived in a punk rock group house with a lot of fans of Steve Purcells’ Sam and Max characters and their unsavory pals. Sam and Max was a hilariously antisocial comic strip. Assuming one thinks punk humor is hilarious and freelance talking animal police are a good source of humor.

Some time later, LucasArts decided to make a game based on the Sam and Max comics. The internet tells me that LucasArts was Steve Purcells’ day job and Sam and Max were a long-running LucasArts in-joke, which is the sort of little fun fact to know and share that tended to be unknown pre-internet. I could comment on this more, assuming I read all of the background info (which I haven’t yet), but suffice it to say that LucasArts actually made a pretty pleasingly unsavory game based on Sam and Max. The internet also tells me that the characters were eventually made into a television show which aired on a secondary FOX channel called FOX Kids. Which is weird both because it is simply weird and because I’ve never watched it, despite my affection for Sesame Street and Back at the Barnyard.

I’m excited to report that the awesome old Sam and Max comics are all back in print now. Full disclosure: the source of the new mega-packs of Sam and Max comics, DVDs, XBox, swag, etc. is an advertiser on Blue Blood. I haven’t checked out the new game yet, but the printed stuff is definitely worth picking up. Watch out for the bunny.

A while back, I asked the Blue Blood boards Have you ever been fired from a job? It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that most of our members are extremely talented and conscientious and hardworking, yet have personality, err, quirks which make it hard to always fit in at a job.

I know my personal experience of working in other people’s offices was that everyone always adored me for the first two weeks. I did a lot of contract design work where I would get called in when everyone was crashing on deadline, and horribly behind, and I think I got love for saving the day with my efficient work processes. Unfortunately, after about six weeks in any of these offices, I would start contemplating the fact that I wouldn’t have to go to work if I drove off the road on the way. I also had the tendency to have trouble with some of the social portions of work.

Running my own media empire, I have become more reserved over time, but I did not used to really have any comprehension of corporate culture. I mean, I could wear a suit and twist the colored parts of my hair under and pin them down, but I was still me. I would cheerfully explain to my coworkers that I thought health insurance was the big lie the overculture used to force us to live small lives. I would explain how I lived in a punk rock group house with a dozen other people, so my occasional corporate paychecks went really far, and I could afford to spend a lot of my time having adventures. I would bring in copies of first my antisocial punk rock humor zine BLT aka Black Leather Times and then later early issues of Blue Blood in print. Occasionally, I would work for a client like MTV who would specifically request back the girl with the “wild zines”, but, as most of my work was Federal contracts, government presentations, management consultant graphics, and such . . . well, I think the experience can be summed up by saying that, when I worked for EDS for a full three months, they really wanted me to work there permanently, but they also totally freaked out when I wore red stockings with a Brooks Brothers suit one day. And I’d thought I looked both especially conservative and especially attractive that day and usually I felt like I only hit one metric or the other.

I could never quite seem to match up my abilities and education with a job which really fit and challenged me and gave me room to grow. I know this is a very familiar frustration for most folks here. Sometimes the jobs which were obviously intended for trained monkeys were the most comfortable to do, more pleasant than the ones which were a whole step up from trained monkey where they expected me to be grateful for the low-end nonsense I could do in fifteen minutes and had to pretend took all day.

Forrest Black, in his quest for the perfect cheeseburger, came across the Serious Eats site. Serious Eats featured a funny article about a hot tattooed punk guy who got fired from Burger King for bathing in the kitchen sink . . . and posting it on MySpace and YouTube. The hilarious video posted above lead various Serious Eats readers to opine that he was trying to get fired.

They just don’t understand. I suspect he did not particularly care if he got fired. I suspect he has a skill set which should allow him to do something a heck of a lot higher end than work at Burger King, but somehow he never quite plugged into the right position. I think probably half the people I know, probably including myself, never quite slotted into something challenging and inspiring and really the right fit for their personality and capabilities. Sure, some people are lazy. But it takes a certain amount of effort to do your hair, take a bubble bath in the workplace, have someone videotape it, and post it all over the interwebs. So that is not laziness. It is not trying to get fired either. It’s just not having, fitting into the corporate culture, high on the to-do list, at a low-end job. Doing something amusing was higher priority. If you have ever been there, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, maybe it is still a head-scratcher.

According to 2News WTDN, the Xenia, Ohio NBC affiliate, Mr. Unstable’s BK bubble bath kind of sucked for the shift manager Karen Cragg, who apparently has only held fast food jobs and was fired, along with the bather and pals. She feels that Burger King corporate mistreated her by firing her when she didn’t even know about the incident until the sink was already punk rocker soup. She might be able to cope with some of that frustrated rage by doing something appalling for fun at her next job.

So, after knowing each other for nearly a decade, and working together on multiple projects, over many years, I finally finally got to meet Scott Owens of EroticBPM fame in person! We once almost met in the flesh when he got stuck at LAX on a layover, but I’d just finished being somewhere one good friend of mine was attempting to sleep with the husband of another good friend of mine and having to give a police report on some psycho who was incoherently threatening me outside a nightclub for firing a girl she just met and barely knew but had a crush on or something. So anyway, I didn’t think I’d be at my charming best when I got to LAX, which also happens to be my least favorite California airport.

Anyway, Forrest Black, who is in charge of the look and feel of all Blue Blood sites, and I visited Portland and stayed with Scott and his charmingly negative head coder Antisocial and his beautiful bride (who, in a flash of small world, turned out to be a model from some of the earliest naughty sets I published from photographer Tom Hunscher.) We had an amazingly good time just hanging out in their gargantuan Pacific NW headquarters with them and their three very cute and almost disturbingly friendly and well-adjusted cats.

We also got to see old friends from our DC stomping grounds. We shot new stuff of the always fun Voltaire and of Rachel Face. Rachel has a new clothing line and we shot that, as well as a whole passel of new hotties. Parts of the trip were really bizarrely and gratuitously stressful, but most of it was really super nice. Portland is so beautiful and the air is so clean and we got to go up on the volcano which is the largest within city limits in the USA.

But the point I really must make here is that, when I wanted to connect to the internet from EroticBPM HQ, one of the networks was named Quark. I asked Anti if this was after the software, the TV show, or the actual thing. Having a background in particle physics, he didn’t mean the software or the show, but I told him I was going to pull his Dork Card for being unfamiliar with the show. Rather than having to resort to such extreme measures, modern technology allows me to share the show with you all.

I first saw Quark on the US Military television stations while living in Germany, on either ACTA I or ACTA II I believe. Basically, the Department of Defense at least used to provide American television channels to US servicemen and diplomats abroad. I wasn’t really allowed to watch TV, so I didn’t see much, but I did catch some re-runs of a sort of Star Trek spoof called Quark which struck me as absolutely hilarious at the time. I admit it doesn’t really stand the test of time and might seem a little, err, dumb now. Anyway, without further ado, I present Quark for your viewing pleasure and personal edification:

To a current sensibility, the BBC’s Hyperdrive is really probably a better bet.

The first time I ever went to Death Guild was when Forrest Black and I were out in San Francisco for Bat of House of Usher’s Zine Slam. We were there promoting Blue Blood in print and also my antisocial punk rock humor zine BLT or Black Leather Times.

This was like more than a decade ago, so when Vampira Bat and Nixon Sixx suggested dropping promoter Decay a line, I was thinking he might not remember me. Pretty much the first thing he ever said to me in person was to give me grief for not publishing an article he wrote and submitted to my zine BLT. His article was fine and contained some punk education; it just didn’t fit the BLT format. So the first thing he emails back to me yesterday is his cell number and the pledge “I promise not to give you shit about the story I submitted to you guys in 1990.” So we are two veterans who do indeed remember each other.

As most Blue Blood readers probably know, we are celebrating our fifteen year anniversary this year. Death Guild is also celebrating their fifteen year anniversary. Death Guild DJ Margo was even a covergirl for one of the older designs of BlueBlood.net. The moral of the story here is that having perserverence and longevity means that somebody somewhere will always remember it if there was that one night you drank too much, that one person you said that thing to, the time you gave someone a mohawk you were not supposed to, that guy you threatened with a shotgun, or potentially the weird factoid about that person they always confuse you with. If you stick to your guns and succeed, every little thing ever will probably haunt you. Just thought y’all would like to know.

For everyone in San Francisco and the surrounding environs who is searching for what to do this coming Monday night, I am excited to let you all know that Forrest Black and yours truly will be shooting more beautiful pictures and hanging out and generally having a blast at Death Guild at The Glas Kat aka The Trocadero at 520 4th Street and Bryant. We’ll be picking out just a few club-goers who represent the feel of the night and photographing them. With a dose of introspection as we kick it olde skool with some folks who have earned their stripes (or big boots as the case may be.)

I would like to say that I was aware of Tucker Max long before he was ever in print. On account of how I’m such a spectacularly plugged-in girl on the interwebs. The truth is that there are massively high traffic sites which somehow never have audiences intersect. In actuality, I was stuck in the Phoenix airport when visiting my family and, strangely enough, the Phoenix airport actually has a pretty good Borders. Which even more strangely contained a book with a sleek black cover featuring a gentleman with an antisocial smirk holding, I believe, a bottle and a bottle blonde with her visage replaced with a Your Face Here sign. The title was the clever I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I bought it along with a stack of noir novels.

Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell chronicles the author’s drunken and salacious exploits. He came of age as the offspring of a South Beach restauranteur. From his writing, I gather his taste thus unsurprisingly runs to big-titted blondes with fit but not skinny bodies. Mildly Southern demeanor potentially a plus. Too bad for him that his intelligence level is off-the-scale brilliant. Tucker Max has raised hitting on drunk human sluts to the art form, or perhaps sport, of a more advanced species.

He comes across to some reviewers as a misogynist. He does tend to refer to women as filthy whores and mention that they owe him a rib. The following excerpt from a tale of a horseracing tailgate party drinking contest is a pretty representative exchange from his book:

1:58: She raises the first shot and gives me a toast, “Give me chastity and give me continence – but not yet . . . St. Augustine!” All her little friends laugh and cheer. Amateurs.

Girl: That was really sexist.”
Tucker: No it wasn’t, it was a joke. If I had said that women are nothing but life support for pussy, now THAT would be sexist.”
Girl: “Excuse me?”
Tucker: “If I had called her a hot mouth, that would be sexist too. Or, if I said that the only thing going for her is that she’s 98.6 degrees and has two wet holes, that would be very sexist. But I didn’t say those things, did I?”
Girl: “WHAT?”
Tucker: “Uh oh! Did I piss you off? Are you going to write angsty poetry?!?”

Women in the stories Tucker recounts also tend to say things along the lines of, “I can’t believe how funny I think you are and I’m a girl.” It is my opinion that they are either (a) easily manipulated chicks or (b) missing the fucking point. I’m not delusional, so I’m well aware that some people look at my own work and aren’t aware of anything deeper than quality photos of punk genitalia and gothic boobies, although there is more to it. But I do understand that sometimes pervy sex is the common denominator for a reason. Sure, Tucker regularly points out how much pussy he has thrown at him 24/7 and how great he is at acquiring even difficult pussy. His writing career started when he first launched his site as a dating application. Some chicks will always be attracted to a guy they believe other chicks want. Some guys will be impressed by any dude who claims to have laid miles of pipe. Although I went through a phase in the late 80’s where I liked to tie up blonde boys from good families, that was a long time ago, so some people will undoubtedly be surprised that I am such a huge fan of Tucker Max’s writing that I told my panelmates at the recent SXSW confab that I’d be late getting to the green room for our panel because I was going to watch Tucker Max speak at his first. Then again, readers who really got BLT, the antisocial punk rock humor zine I did in DC, well, I think they will understand the Tucker Max appeal.

The point is not that Tucker Max is a hard-drinking vanilla guy who has frequent sex with varied partners. The point is that his writing is brilliant, articulate, painfully insightful, and totally fearless and he is able to find the humor in absolutely anything. John Hargrave of Zug.com, the moderator of Tucker’s one man SXSW panel From Blog to Book called the author “a promiscuous drunken Tolstoy.” To give you an idea of the Zug perspective, my horoscope on the site today suggests I “Call a hardware store and whisper “stucco” into the phone over and over. “Stucco stucco stucco stucco stucco.” If they hang up, simply call back.” I used to manage an adult boutique where callers sometimes attempted this sort of thing. They might as well have been saying “stucco” for all the impact it had on folks who sold lingerie and vibrators, although only the serious submissives called back to speak with the manager, once I got through with them. At the end of the From Blog to Book panel, John Hargrave was kind enough to pour healthy doses of something called Tucker Max Death Mix. The ingredients of which are apparently Everclear, Lemon-Lime Gatorade, and Red Bull. No wonder so many Tucker Max Drunk stories entail such copious amounts of vomit.

Tucker Max claims to have little formal idea how to write properly. This is debatable as he went to both U Chicago and Duke Law. Both good schools. But he assured his SXSW audience that he has no clue how to use commas, confuses forms of the word ‘too’, and doesn’t really consider himself a writer. He says he tries not to consider his audience when writing, to just concentrate on telling his story in his own authentic way. “I write in my authentic voice,” he says. Oh yeah, and then he works on trimming the fat from his work. But the authenticity is key.

According to Tucker Max’s business card, the name of his company is Rudius Media. According to the Rudius web site, “a rudius is a wooden sword, given by the Roman Emperor to a gladiator upon attainment of his freedom.” It may be happy coincidence that this is probably also a play on the word ‘rude’, but whatever. The best thing about Tucker Max’s writing is the sense of abandonment, the extreme freedom. He’ll tell you his ferocious opinion of some lesser person that himself and he’ll tell you his dick is average in size, although a bit large to put in a midget or a small girl’s colon. He may be coy about whether he has ever done cocaine in Vegas, but he’ll tell you how much hostile fun he is on absinthe. He’ll detail how he drove a mildly inconsiderate girl’s car through the storefront of a donut shop. He’ll pressure all the law firms in Silcon Valley into raising their salaries for summer interns by posting sock puppet conversations with himself on Infirmation.com. He’ll tell girls he is in a Christian rap band and coerce his friends into playing along. He’ll get accidentally pepper-sprayed during the sex act. He’ll bring friends in Special Ops to a politically left wing cocktail party. He’ll get thrown out of IHOP. He’ll get thrown out of Denny’s. He’ll get thrown out of Mickey D’s. And he’ll pretty shamelessly tell you – and everyone else – about it. Although his book has been out for more than a year now, he says it is still selling a remarkable 2,000 copies a week to people like me who are just discovering him. He says he designed the flawlessly appropriate book cover himself too. Tucker Max challenges the SXSW audience to check his numbers on Bookscan because everything he says is true and this is one outlandish tale which is verifiable.

And why, you may ask, was I at the airport, while visiting my family, buying noir novels and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell? All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Actually, I have a pretty happy family, as these things go, but that just seemed like such an elegant literate way to close that I almost couldn’t help myself. Of course, now I fucked it all up with the disclaimer.