It has been over a minute and a half since my last post. Shameful. Churlish.

Warranted?

The thing is, I haven’t been posting, not because I dislike you and want by my absence to make your lives a meaningless hell of joyless despair, but because I’ve been busy. I’ve got big stuff going on. BIG STUFF.

Big Stuff 1 – My next book has been completed. That’s right, the first draft of The Night Ripper is done! I am still plugging away on editing and formatting and whatnot, but the story has been completed. Guys, I think you’ll like it. It’s got monsters. It’s got aliens. It’s got spaceships. It’s got jokes. If you enjoy those things, you’ll enjoy this book. If you’d like to read an advance copy to help edit and provide feedback, let me know. Look forward to its release sometime this summer. For me to make my self-imposed release deadline however, I need to spend a portion of my limited free time actually working on the book. Thus, less blog posts.

Big Stuff 2 – I’m lifting again. I mean, I never stopped exercising and I’ve tried to remain as fit as my sedentary office job allows, but I’m lifting HEAVY again. Relatively speaking of course. I won’t be invited to compete in any World’s Strongest Man competitions anytime soon, but I am working to get back in to the 1,000 lbs club. The prerequisites for being in this club are simple: Lift over 1,000 lbs cumulative between your squat, deadlift, and bench press. Admittedly, this is a very attainable goal, and is not especially impressive to actual power lifters, but for a slim baby with bad knees like myself, it’s a good goal. Being in the 1,000 lbs club  is basically the minimum weight required for you to be allowed to answer yes to the question: do you even lift, Bro? I want to answer yes to that question again. So I’ve been working out. Thus, less blog posts.

Big Stuff 3 – I’m getting married. That’s right. After only a decade of living together, I bent the knee and asked Mistress Kay to upgrade to Wife Kay. (Downgrade?) She said yes. So I guess you could say it’s getting pretty serious. I mean, we talk or whatever. What this means for me is that since the original has been upgraded to fiance 1.0, I suddenly have the unenviable task of trying to find a new replacement mistress while faced with the added handicap of being old and gross and completely undesirable to any of the opposite sex in my advanced age. The odds are not in my favor. It ALSO means that in my negligible free time, which has already been lessened by my writing and lifting efforts, I’m now dealing with all the soul-crushing minutiae involved with planning a wedding. Venue visits, vendor meetings, food tastings, guest lists, engagement party plans, wardrobe, decor, wedding website design (maxandmarissa.com), save-the-dates, invitations, the list is endless. If I need to spend one more second deciding which stationary card stock has the right weight and feel necessary to convey our love to our potential guests, I’m going to chop of my ding-dong and use it to hang myself from a ceiling fan set on low so that my dickless dead body does stately loops of the living room. Which brings me to Big Stuff 4. All these fancy wedding plans we’ve made cost money. My job pays me just enough to enjoy the mediocre lower-middle class lifestyle I have grown accustomed to. No more. So I’ve gotten a second job.

Big Stuff 4 – I work in retail now. That’s right, I’m a janitor at a shoe store. I asked for my name tag to read Al Bundy, but they refused, so you can see how well things are going already. Because nothing says SUCCESS like being a 32 year old part-time retail employee. Especially when you’re the only male employee, and all of your coworkers are high school students who make more than you because they’ve been doing it longer. Plus sometimes I get to see people I know who are shopping while I’m working, and that’s not at all awkward or embarrassing. Today at work I ran into a girl I graduated college with who I at the time thought was beautiful. Turns out she is still beautiful. She is still beautiful, and I was wearing an apron with my name on it and dragging a mop bucket to clean up diarrhea from the bathroom floor. Again, the last time we saw each other, WE WERE GRADUATING COLLEGE TEN YEARS AGO. She was probably pretty impressed with how much I’ve achieved since then. I’ve gained not only an apron, but also a bucket full of dirty water. Well, gained access to at least. I need to leave them behind when I go home at night. I would have loved to have spent some time catching up, but instead I had to mop diarrhea for $10/hr. Luckily I only do this every weekend and most week nights. I guess you can say things are going pretty well for me.

So there you have it. I admit I have not been posting as frequently as I want to, or as much as you would like, and for that I apologize, but there have been mitigating factors. They are temporary at least, so I should be able to return to a more regular posting schedule soon enough. That, or you know, there’s always the penis noose idea.