So I want to start writing in this blog more, and I want to podcast more, and I also want to attain a state of perfect happiness in terms of DVD ownership and the nagging need to buy more damn DVD’s. You can’t have everything, unless everthing was sold in one of those toy in a plastic bubble vending machines in the front of most grocery stores, and even then you probably wouldn;t get the super cool everything that looked a lot like a mini rubix cube, a real metal watch, or that tiny transistor radio. No you’d probably get the everything that looks a whole lot like speckled super ball or a glob of super gloop. Or possible even a generic Little Homie. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that out of the three, I’ll probably be able to blog the most.
So here is the first of hopefully a full month worth of daily posts that will delve a little deeper into my sad world. Up first, two prized possessions. The first of which is to the right and it’s probably my mostest favorite thing int he whole wide world (fiancees don’t count in this game.) It’s my Movie Monsters paperback book that my friend Darrel gave me sometime in high school for god knows what reason. Now this alone is a shining example of a prized possession, a gift from a friend, a friend I haven’t seen or spoken to in quite a long time. And it’s got tons of cool black and white pictures of monsters in it, which is always a bonus. But the fun doesn’t stop there. See I was quite broke in high school, so broke in fact that I had a regular lending game going on with another friend to get the money I needed for comics. See, my friend Steve would loan me $10 (he had an after school job) so that I could get caught up on all the comics I couldn’t afford. Then I’d not eat lunch the whole week and use the loot earned from that to pay him back. I was always a week behind though. Anyway I was so broke, broke enough that I couldn’t afford a yearbook. Since I didn’t have a picture in it anyway (I ditched that day), I decided to use the Movie Monster book as my yearbook.
Man, people thought I was a idiot, though not quite as much as an idiot as I was in middle school when I stole my algebra book at the end of the year and used that as my yearbook. Anyway, now there are three damn fine reasons to live me this book. But my friends, the fun does not end there. I decided to start bring it with me to the annual comic convention I went to, Dragon Con., and I started having a bunch of artists and such sign it as well. So all over this littel monster book is the scrawlings of such great people as Bernie Wrightson, David Prowse, Art Adams, and the super cool Ben Edlund, not to mention two high school crushes, one annoying vegan, and all of my bestest friends (or some junk.) Here’s what it looks like, here, here, here, and here.
My second most prized possession is very similar in that it was an item that I’ve had a whole mess of people sign. It’s also near and dear to me because of what it is, and what it is, is a can of Spam. See because I was a dork in high school I had complete artistic license to carry around cans of Spam and treat them like pets. I even made leashes for them. Well one year at Dragon Con I was awarded a can of Spam from the Con Suite, a room set up with free drinks and shitty snacks, simple because I was the only one who wanted it. To eat? No. To take around the Con floor to get it signed. I got in all kinds of scraps over it too. Jim Steranko cursed me out for trying to get him to sign it, while a a dude in a Spawn costume who worked for Todd MacFarlane called me fat while he was signing it, and Glen Danzig? He was not all that thrilled to sign it, though he did, which is a testament to what he’ll put up with for the fans. All in all it added an amazing level of fun to an otherwise dull Con and years later a lot of the people who signed it remembered me when I came by their booths, so it was surely memorable. Here is the infamous can, Here and Here.
So anyway, I guess that is a window into my autograph habit, which has almost completely lost interest for me. Every once in awhile I’ll get a book signed, but I pretty much stopped standing in line for people’s ink stains years ago. You know there is only so many times you can have a childhood hero sign something than look up at you as you tell them that they meant so much to you and then not get sad when they ask for their $10.
