Investing 101: Guaranteed ROI!

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Max T Kramer

I visited my tomb today. I like it there.  There’s a big tree out front, I’m told it’s a poplar. Whatever it is, it’s the only tree in that portion of the graveyard, and its right beside my tomb, so that’s pretty cool.  I’ll be the envy of all my neighbors. They might not say much anymore, but I can tell they’re impressed.

My mausoleum (technically I guess it’s still a cenotaph at this point) is granite, a simple cube structure with a slightly pitched roof. No windows, one door of heavy wrought iron. It’s going to be cold in the winter. I thought about doing marble, but for long term durability nothing beats granite, and let’s face it, once I move in my occupation is going to be very long term. What the interior lacks in creature comforts, it more than makes up for in peaceful dimness. I’m glad I bought it.

My girlfriend thinks I’m crazy. “You’re crazy,” she says, “what do you need a tomb for, you’re not dying. You’re only twenty-five years old!”

Exactly. Do you know what mausoleums cost? It’s a big investment. I feel sorry for the poor suckers who never even get to see their grave before they are interred in it. What kind of return is that? By doing it my way, I now have years of tomb-based pleasure to look forward to. The kids want to spend a night or two camping out? Send them to the tomb. All the closets at home are getting filled with clutter? Jam it in the tomb. Need a place to host late night strip-poker games? You guessed it, the tomb.

All these are pale diversions compared to my all time favorite tomb-game however. This one is best done with friends. It’s even better if one of your friends happens to be a Hollywood horror movie make-up artist. If one of your friends isn’t a Hollywood horror movie make-up artist, get new friends. Yours stink.

Okay. So. Here’s how the game works. You get your friends together, the morgue the merrier (see what I did there?), and under the cover of darkness you jam them into your
mausoleum. Really pack them in there, like a 60’s phone booth, or a VW bug. Then, you wait quietly. You’re in a graveyard remember, show some respect.

Once the sun comes up, the burial services begin. If you can, do it Wednesday morning,
those are the busiest burial days, but Thursdays are okay too. Either way, hopefully it’s a crowded day because when you finally all come boiling out of that crypt like termites from a mound, you are going to create total pandemonium. You’re going to be stiff and sore from being packed in a small stone room all night, you might even moan and drool a little in your agony, but that’s all part of the magic. You’ve probably figured out what the make-up artist was for by now. You’re exactly right. You’re all dressed like zombies. Brilliant!

“Dear friends, we are gathered here today for the tragic purpose of laying to rest our beloved great aunt Mirna, may she rest in peace, ashes to ashes, dust to dust and OHMYGODZOMBIES! EVERYBODY RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!! LEAVE THE CHILDREN BEHIND; THEY’LL ONLY SLOW YOU DOWN!”

People are running everywhere, they are screaming and crying, uncle Fester has fallen into the grave and broken his hip, and it is the single most glorious thing you have ever seen, and it’s all possible because you, like me, have made the excellent decision to buy your tomb ahead of schedule.

I hear the DOW and the NASDAQ are down again. Sucks for you. My investment is still paying dividends straight into the fun bank, and will be until the day I die. Then it will get really useful.

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Bar Pooper: The most pitiful man in all the land

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Max T Kramer

I am currently playing the surprisingly popular form of Russian Roulette commonly referred to as eating a hot-pocket. (Philly Cheesesteak style). There is nothing more thrilling than choking down a nutritionless salt-bomb with a dry flaky crust made out of tractor-trailer brake dust and old chinese newspapers (they’re full of essential inks), especially one whose internal contents come in only two temperatures; i.e. frozen solid, and surface-of-the-sun hot. Let me tell you, a bloody anus caused by explosive diarrhea really lets a man know he is alive.

Sure, I may be stuck in my bathroom for the next 6-12 hours, choking on the abombinable aethers of my sphincterious maximus, or wishing for a swift death as my gastrointenstinal tract dissolves, but it will all be worth it because 1: Hot Pockets are kind of almost tasty, and they take 1 minute to prepare, and 2: I still won’t be the most pitiful form of man.

That distinction my dears, goes to the bar pooper.

I suppose it would be harder to recognize in a female rest room, since I assume they all pretty much have stalls, and some might even have what for men are the almost unheard of luxury of stall doors. So maybe a young woman eats a little too much spicy indian food before going out for martinis with the girls, and she has to deposit a lumberous sacrifice at the altar of the porcelain god. No big deal. She gathers up twenty-six of her friends from the dance floor,waits an hour in line, and like a 5 star general invades the ladies room and deploys them in a strategic protective screen throughout the undoubtably sparkling interior, with it’s expansive foyer full of comfortable couches and rhinestone encrusted tampon dispensers, it’s easy listening smooth jazz, and its psychiatrist picked calming color scheme, giving her the freedom and privacy in her luxurious stall de toilette to make poop-poop, all while doing her nails, fixing her make-up, and updating her twitter feed (#DWEET@cindiOMG,IMHOGr8PoopFTW!X0X0!)

It’s a little different for men. First off, there are rarely lines. This is mostly because there are rarely toilets to wait in line for. The bathroom is usually simply a utility closet with an industrial drain, or a dank cave of natural origins that just happened to exist under the foundation when the building was created, and whoever owns the establishment, in their infinite generosity, has supplied a hollowed out log, or metal pig trough full of ice, or similar communal bucket based object to urinate in, but usually once you’re in there anything with a drain or a convenient spot to aim at becomes fair game. Unless they are governed by some sort of handicapped access building codes, there is very rarely a stall, and if by some miracle there is a stall, ten times out of ten, it won’t have a door.

So there you are, ready to burst and definitely regretting stopping at hometown buffet before the club, and it’s already too late to go somewhere else to find a more private/less incredibly disgusting environment, because miracle of miracles a “hot” girl was actually dancing with you for once, and you just know that if you leave she’ll be making out with your roomate in an instant, and so you’ve hung around too long, and you have but one horrible, poorly lit, never-been-cleaned, crowded, stinky, puke, piss, and herpes encrusted non-flushing option.

It’s scary, but you have to go alone, because no man in their right mind would ever ask a friend to accompany him to the rest room, and if he did, those friends would simply say no, because after all, they want him to leave, so they can start making out with that “hot” girl he had just been dancing with. And so you go, you drop your drawers, you squish down onto the rum and vomit soaked seat, and you do your business, all the while knowing that every other guy in that bathroom is judging you, and wondering what horrible plague you’re dying from that you would be so desperate as to dump in a bar bathroom. You, bar pooper, truly are the most pitiful man in all the land. Oh, and BTW, there’s never any toilet paper.

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25 year old man seeking babysitter…for 25 year old man.

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Max T Kramer

I should never be left alone for extended periods of time. Not because I get lonely, or scared. I don’t. I should never be left alone because I have entirely too much fun.

You know the child on the crime drama shows, whos parents have locked themselves in the master bedroom for a nice quiet game of “who can take the most tainted heroin”, and who have subsequently overdosed and died in bed together, wearing only a sweat-stained negligee and an interesting face-mounted rhinoceros horn dildo? The child who after hours and hours of unsupervised contentment, when the police finally break down the door because neighbors have been complaining about the smell, is wandering around the trashed house in a pair of mismatched pajamas, with his face covered in chocolate syrup and finger paint?

Yeah, i’m that kid.

You give me 6 to 10 hours of time alone and unsupervised, and i’ll have grown a three foot long wizard beard, disassembled most of the furniture for raw materials to build a zombie-proof living room fort, somehow run out of food and taken to eating the basic components of food for sustenance (hmm, if I eat this dry flour, and wash it down with a raw egg and some of this only-slightly chunky milk, it will turn into bread in my belly! Brilliant!), and have completed some sort of hideous or poorly thought out side-project.

Case in point. My sophmore year in college I lived in a suite with two other dudes. They made the appalling mistake of both going away on the same weekend, leaving me behind without scheduling a babysitter. Most any other young male in my situation would have spent his roomate-free weekend doing unspeakable things on every level surface in the room with various ladies of ill-repute. I, on the other hand, had a vision, so I barricaded myself in the dorm for some light-to-moderate renovations. Basically, I converted the large walk-in closet into a master bedroom by removing all the shelves, rods, and barriers, and then with some minor-adjustments, triple bunking our college issued beds in the ensuing cavity. I was very pleased with my work, but my roomates, when they returned to find their new, slightly cramped, (submarine-like it was described as) sleeping arrangements, were slightly less thrilled, even when I explained that the main room now had even more space for “activities”. I like to think my creation grew on them, especially when it could be used as a conversation starter whenever a new girl stopped by for tea, but honestly they just took to sleeping on the futon and the sofa in the main room.

Recently my girlfriend took a business trip to Las Vegas for a long weekend, and when she returned the house had burnt down, and both the cat and I were lying in the front lawn, our fur disheveled and full of twigs. I was almost pathetically eager to show her all the sweet inventions I had made in her absence, to which she replied, with saint-like restraint “Don’t touch me until you’ve showered, and where the hell is our house?”

It serves her right for expecting me to take care of myself for 4 whole days. Some people are just so unreasonable.

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The Word.

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Max T Kramer

Let us look at the newspaper, shall we? Huh, that’s odd. I thought that would be big news. There seems to be an absence of a certain belletristic piece. A headline regarding mass-awareness of a certain erudite variety. Oh, have you not heard? It was my understanding that everyone had heard…

I WROTE A BOOK! I’m highly surprised that you haven’t caught on to this yet. I mean, there’s only one copy, that I used up all my roomate’s ink printing out, and the binder containing it has been at my mother’s house for months, because she is one of only 2.5 people who have read it, but still, I wrote it like a year ago! Get with the program!

Okay. So perhaps there really would be no way for you to know about it. Maybe, just maybe, all the literary agencies, and publishing houses i’ve sent queries to have given me form rejection letters, if they bothered to respond to my advances at all. Maybe to them i’m a nobody from nowhere, with no powerful industry connections, no vast portfolio of published work, and no proven track record of creating sellable content to validate their initial investment. In their defense, I AM a nobody from nowhere. I’m new to the game. I’ve got no stats. My fan base is small, and consists mainly of people I share genes with. It’s still an ass-backwards, frustrating system.

If I sent out a thousand query letters, eventually lightning would strike and I would find an agent who wasn’t completely swamped with work already, who was actively seeking a new story from a new author in the specific genre of my story, and my letter reached them at a good time on a convenient day in between their morning coffee and their afternoon facebook session, and the stars were aligned perfectly in the heavens and dread Cthulhu’s mighty dreams had encountered a receptive mind, and then maybe, just maybe they would send a letter back saying “Your story sounds cool, i’d like to see it.” And then we’d still be a year plus away from bookshelves, because it would take at least that long for my new-found literary agent, who is also busy representing other clients, to find a buyer in a big publishing house to take on my work. I would just represent myself to publishers, but they are so busy and overloaded with oodles of guff work that the big ones don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts at all, so you literally need an agent to even be considered. Son of a bitch.

I don’t want to wait that long. I want some closure RIGHT NOW. I’ve got ideas for my next stories, I want to lay this one to rest. What’s a young gentleman to do?

There are options. Vanity press, POD, Self-publishing, call them what you will, there are companies that will publish anything for you, quickly and professionally. The problem? They will publish anything. AND  you have to pay for it. So not only do I have to invest my own money into this endeavor, but most bookstores are uncomfortable stocking self-published books, because honestly, most of them are nut and corn filled crap.

It’s tricky. I read a lot. Most books that actual publishers produce aren’t great, but they still sell. My book, Apostate Konstantin, is really good. It takes place in an interesting world, it has entertaining characters with exciting problems, it’s got plenty of action, and even a little romance. At the end of the day it is, in fact, fun to read, and better than a lot of stuff out there. I want you to read it. (You can read excerpts here)

Toward that end, I have decided to go through a smaller POD publishing service. I will have to pay for it, but I will retain exhaustive creative control, and the process will take much less time to complete. I’m tired of waiting. I want to see my book in print. And then I want you to buy it.

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Everybody hates Alastar Singh

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Max T Kramer

I’ve been pushing around this idea for a world where all the Gods of the various pantheons, religions, cultures, and time periods are real, and they live relatively normal lives among the rest of humanity. Sure, they’re immortal, and people worship them, but they also have similar problems to us mortals. You know, family issues, parking tickets, unfulfilling jobs. They also have a very big problem.

The Vrill-society, who, as everyone knows, is a secret Nazi organisation bent on dominating the world through the rediscovery of the forgotten secrets of a subterranean master race, purportedly descended from survivors of the Atlantis catasrophe, has actually unearthed an ancient Vrill-powered staff of power, which gives its operator unimaginable powers, like the power to kill Gods. Imagine that.

Enter human wizard Alastar Singh. Most of the Gods hate him. Luckily, that doesn’t stop them from asking for his help. I know where i’m going with this story. I’ll bet you wish you knew too.

Read. Godkiller I

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