So I have this new gig, and it’s ridiculous. I am now getting paid to write about alcohol. As with all my writing endeavors, I’m making very little – less so in this case because I have to go to places, imbibe, and then write about it, so foom! There goes my paycheck! But it’s fun. It’s my name in places. It’s my ego arching its back and rubbing its head against the leg of the kind publication that has let me do something so crazy insane awesome. It’s me, forever indebted to the Universe. It’s the job every shiftless, overeducated and unemployable liberal arts graduate thinks he should get to have.

It’s me telling my twenty-one year old self, after he got rejected from Teach for America and the Peace Corps, that things really do end up working out, at least a little, and have a drink because later you’ve got some writing to do, mister.

The other thing about it is that it’s really steady work. One of the weirdest things about being a journalist is the Black Hole – as soon as something’s filed you have to turn right back around and churn out something else, or guess what? NO MONEY FOR YOU. Sometimes the other side effect is NO PAPER FOR ANYONE ELSE! I always tried to drill this into journalism students’ heads when I was Teaching Assistanting them, but I’m not sure how many of them got it. No resting on your laurels! No patting yourself on the back! Wake up, get yourself some hair of the dog, and get right back out there, Mary! Work work work! Drink drink drink! Chug chug chug! Write write write! Lather, rinse, repeat.

Almost all my other gigs have been jobs of convenience. I could write when I had time and the world wouldn’t stop when I didn’t. Now, I find myself scratching and clawing to keep up with the pace. The weirdest thing of all is how much I love it. This week a piece of mine got rejected. Straight-up rejected and sent to be with Jesus. But in corresponding with my editor I realized – this is going to make me better. What’s happening right now will not happen again, because I’m better now. I know how to do this – or, I know more.

So – beer me!

We’re heading into my favorite time of year, now, and the next month of our lives holds great promise. This comes as a welcome relief after a spring and summer that so thoroughly kicked our asses in every single way that asses are able to be kicked. This weekend we have two birthday parties, a whole battalion of friends in town from otherwhere, and, thankfully, the first Oklahoma football game of the season, featuring of course Landry Jones’ ironic mustache. Next week is our annual pilgrimage to Choctaw for Oktoberfest, followed the week after by the opening of the Oklahoma State Fair.

In three weeks we’re headed to New York City, where I will pitch my novel to a group of editors from some pretty big publishing houses. It hasn’t sunk in to me that this is happening yet, but the days are on the calendar, the plane tickets are booked. This thing is real. The weekend after that we’re headed to Dallas for the Red River Rivalry game.

I’ve never been so happy to see a summer end.

Brian and I spent today overhauling this website, which has gone long neglected ever since I got so sick of looking at it that it became hard to write. This happened sometime back in March. Then our lives went down the Crazy Hill Of Crap that has been mid-2010, and I just lived with it.

The other day I mocked up a new site in Photoshop. It was so devastatingly simple that I thought today might be a good day to tackle it. And here we are, ten and a half hours later – brand new site! What’d you do today?

I have more to say about what inspired this site’s look and where we’re going moving forward. Also, I’ve got some new stuff coming out for This Land, and a new Gazette gig, and a bunch of cool writery stuff happening that I’m eager to tell the four of you about. But I have some hungry friends who want to grab some late-night Big Truck Tacos, and frankly I can’t think of anything that sounds nicer at this moment. So in the meantime, this:

We spent a very hot but extremely enjoyable weekend at my uncle’s home in Tulsa earlier this month in celebration of the boatload of birthdays that occur from late July into mid-August in our family. We golfed, we swam, we cooked out, we talked, we laughed. Also, on our last day there, I nabbed this photo of a gigantic butterfly near the pool. I’m submitting it for the Greeblepix contest, but really I’m just putting it up here because I like it. A lot. There were others I took without the butterfly in motion, but I just like this one better, somehow. In general I’m not a big fan of August – and with five straight weeks of 100+ temperatures (thanks, climate change!), it’s good to have little reminders like this that the sun hasn’t decided to go red giant 5 billion or so years early and that eventually, autumn will come.

Nabbed this photo from ShopGirl at the Oklahoma Gazette. It’s of 23rd Street back in the day, with the Tower Theater sign intact, and WITHOUT the buzzing concrete spine of the Broadway Extension in the background. God, I’d have loved to see it back then. Click the photo to find out more about its origins, etc.

My senior year our football team was pretty terrible. Truth be told, it was never great the whole time I was there. But by the fourth game of the season – against Del City I believe – the entire senior class was pretty disheartened. The school was entering its tenth year and several of the things we’d spent our entire high school careers looking forward to – message squares in the yearbook, bright red t-shirts – were taken from us. We devolved into a loser class pretty much right off the bat. By that Del City game people had gone from pouring a bit of Everclear into their Sonic cups to sneaking 6-packs into Moore High stadium.

By the fourth quarter of the game things were getting ugly, both on the field and in the stands. The team was getting what in sports terminology is known as a "red-ass beat down," and the crowd – the seniors especially – were getting ugly. When the cheerleaders launched into a raucous round of a cheer, someone shouted "Shut Up!" The next thing I saw and heard, a brown bottle arced high through the air, landed and shattered at the feet of the cheerleaders, who scattered like roaches before bright light. The smell of beer rose up through the student section.

I was a terminally boring good kid – I didn’t drink. I didn’t party. I was never invited. This was fine with me; I was focused to a ridiculous and almost unhealthy degree on school and getting into a good college. I also wrote for the school paper, and I decided to vent my frustration in an opinion piece that I thought was pretty fair – if you’re going to drink, you’re going to drink, but can we maybe draw the line at chucking glass bottles at poor, helpless cheerleaders?

It didn’t go over great.

The day after the article came out I was in my weightlifting class. A few guys came up to me and started pushing me around. "You think you’re better than us?" they asked. "You think you’re better than us?"

Knowing me at the time I probably said something brilliant, like, "Right now, yeah, I kinda do." But to be honest, I don’t remember.

They backed off, went over to a bin full of footballs, and began hucking them at me. Suddenly I knew what it was like to be stoned to death; great. There was a lull when they ran out of footballs and went to gather them up so they could begin again. I walked over to the gym teacher, a tall, humorless woman who couldn’t stand me because I’d rather have been in Calculus.

"Can I please leave?" I asked. "This is ridiculous. If you’re not going to do anything about this, then at least let me leave."

She looked down at me. "You wrote that article," she said. "So you have to stand by what you said."

"I wasn’t aware that included having footballs hucked at my face."

"If you want to take a stand, then take a stand."

She didn’t let me leave. I spent the rest of that period barely bothering to dodge the footballs and the mean glares of my classmates.

I still stand by that article. And if my teacher wasn’t going to do anything to protect a student who took an unpopular – and yet ultimately a right – position in front of his classmates, that’s between her and whatever higher power she believes in. I hope God brings it up in her end-of-life performance review, but I know I have no control over those things. Of course I’d have rather spent the rest of the class period in the library, by myself, ignoring the scorn I’d already grown pretty accustomed to from people. But I had to stand there and take it, and I did, and I’m proud of it, still, to this day.

Hm. I don’t know what made me think of that.

Note: I’m turning comments off on this post. I have reasons; don’t worry about it.

This song came on during my run this morning and single-handedly gave me my second wind. Then, lo and behold, I click on Facebook and find out it’s the second single from one of my favorite albums of 2010 so far and the video is out today! Huzzah!

I love the Sisters. I’ve loved them since the first time I heard the first notes of "Take Your Mama" in the summer of 2004. I want to be best friends with Ana Matronic. Back before I met Brian I dreamed of having a torrid affair with Babydaddy. These guys do glam rock right; this is what Lady Gaga thinks she’s doing.* They’re the true successors to David Bowie, Queen, et al.

*Okay, that’s going to get me in trouble. I have nothing against Gaga. I love her image and the artistry of her work, and I own both her albums. I listen to them while running. And while I *like* her music, I don’t *love* it. To me there’s a disconnect between the throwaway pop sound of her songs and her out-there image. The Scissors have no such disconnect. Their music, while fun, dancy and poppy, is also pretty dark-humored and risque; even in this age when nothing surprises us I often find myself blushing or chuckling out loud at one of their lyrics, or getting chills at a particularly good riff. The tracks "Whole New Way" and "Skin Tight" off their amazing new album, Night Work (iTunes link), are good examples.

This is the kind of thing that local businesses are up against. It’s also why they are almost always better. The restaurants; the stores; the little, out-of-the-way places owned by your neighbors; the people in your neighborhood; the people you go to church with — they have to be a hundred times more creative, a hundred times more resilient and persistent and straight-up good, because they don’t have zillions of dollars for next-to-the-highway real estate and ad time during “The Bachelorette.”

The whole article is over at their website or, if you’re lucky enough to live in the OKC, in print.

Seriously, people. I know the Olive Garden has unlimited salad and breadsticks. Of this I am aware. But maybe the last thing America needs is "unlimited" anything – go to Flip’s. Falcone’s. Zorba’s. Nomad. Sophabella’s. Deep Fork Grill. Trattoria il Centro. The list of awesome locally-owned establishments in Oklahoma City is literally endless; keep the money local, people.

One great way to do so? Try as many of aforementioned Gazette‘s "Best of OKC" picks. They’re listed right here.

The famous triceratops dinosaur never actually existed as a separate dinosaur species, paleontologists say.

Known for its three horns and the bony, frilled ridge around its head, the triceratops was most likely just a younger version of the rarer torosaurus, say researchers John Scannella and Jack Horner at the Museum of the Rockies in Montana.

Okay, you guys. That’s like finding out there is no Santa Claus. That’s like finding out that eating McDonald’s is going to kill you.

You guys might not know this about me, actually – I am a huge science nerd. I went to science camp for two summers in high school. I read a ton of science and space blogs every day. I absolutely cannot wait for 2015 when we finally get to see up-close photographs of Pluto (and actually no, I wasn’t too devastated when they demoted Pluto. I thought it made sense, actually).

And while I never entered the sciences – I have this problem with being pretty good at math but alternately hating it and believing I’m awful at it – I’m always up to talk about it. I could gnaw your ear off about Wolf-Rayet stars, Alcubierre drives, and nanotechnology until you chew off your own arm to get away from me.

So while it’s fascinating what they found out about Triceratops – that dinosaurs seem to have gone through several morphologies over the course of their lives that have effectively fooled scientists into thinking Triceratops and Torosaurus were two different animals when in fact they were not (see also: Pachycephalosaurus [I didn't even have to look that word up to spell it correctly]) – it’s still sort of a bummer the way it was presented: ”Triceratops Never Existed.” Sure it is! Like, “Pluto isn’t a planet.” No, but it still exists! It’s still fascinating! We still know nothing about it!

Okay, fine. So Triceratops was Torosaurus. Finkle is Einhorn, Tyler Durden was the Narrator and Kevin Spacey was Keyser Söze. But until they come out with a report saying “Triceratops/Torosaurus Was a Weakling,” I’m going to continue to take a great deal of joy from my six-year-old fantasies of one day owning one and riding it up to the playground at Burcham Elementary in Weatherford, Oklahoma and immediately having all the kids want to be my best friend.* Meantime, I might take my forthcoming day off and go visit the Pentaceratops skull at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman, which has a fascinating history all its own.

*Actually it occurs to me that as a 30-year-old gay dude I MIGHT need to re-think my plan should I come into Triceratops ownership. Maybe we’d go drinking together. Or down on the sidelines at an OU game. Though he’d probably just poop everywhere and tear up the turf. I suppose I could charge people to see him like in Jurassic Park, but to tell you the truth the money I’d earn off of that wouldn’t really make up for the fact that I’d have to share him when really I just want him all to myself.