Ruckin’ With You | 11.18.16 | Ugh!

Late Edition. As I finally file this away for transmission to you on this fine Friday (71 degrees in mid-November), I am a miserable bastard who stayed home from work today due to having received the plague from my teenage daughter. I know how it happened too. It was last Saturday when I was enclosed inside a car with the infected child (Patient Zero — I call her “Outbreak Monkey”) when we all went to lunch that afternoon. That was the day–if not before or immediately after–that the insidious virus leaped from her body to my unsuspecting one. By Tuesday for sure it was gestating, and by Wednesday I was waking up in the morning with a sore throat. By Thursday it was full bore. So here I sit on a Friday cooped up on such a unseasonably nice day. I’m normally quite the iron man, capable of warding off most contagions. But not when you entrap me in a small space like a car with diseased individuals (especially a school-age child). Kids, man. They got no respect.

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Transmet

So in light (or dark) of recent sociopolitical events, I’ve decided to start re-reading Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s TRANSMETROPOLITAN graphic novel series that was originally serialized in comics form from 1997 to 2002. It features a Hunter S. Thompson-inspired gonzo journalist named Spider Jerusalem of the distant future who, after five years living alone “up a goddamn mountain” is thrust out of early retirement by the fact that he still owes his book publisher two more books. He must reintegrate himself with The City as a journalist who is after the undisputed societal truth to report to the masses, aided quite advantageously by his old newspaper editor who rehires Spider and furnishes him with all the accommodations a future gonzo journalist of his stature requires. Immediately he discovers that all is not right in The City and that those problems are being propelled by politicians, and he begins to uncover a deep conspiracy that leads directly to the  narcissitic head of The City’s government. Seems like a timely read, no?

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Raiding Tombs

For the past week or so I have been playing RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER (on Xbox One), the first sequel in the re-rebooted Tomb Raider videogame franchise. It’s been great fun so far with harrowing, but survivable action-adventures, fine character work and a mysterious plot. The graphics are phenomenal, the gameplay is fluid and well-engineered, and the environments and the game’s scope is vast. I’ve only scratched about 18% of it so far and I’m having a blast. Special thanks to the wife who got it for me last Christmas.

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I Still Bleed Metal

As evident by the font in this week’s featured image, I am a huge METALLICA fan (since 1987) and today is Blackened Friday–the day their first proper new album of new music in eight years, Hardwired . . . To Self-Destruct, is released. I procured my package (the 3-CD deluxe edition) earlier today and just burned it into iTunes for upload onto my iPod (my newfangled car thinks CD players are already obsolete). I’ve heard all 13 songs via their massive video releases on Wednesday and Thursday–a unique original video for each song–to promote the imminent release. Also released today was The Duke, a 5-track EP by LAMB OF GOD, one of my other favorite metal bands (since 2006). 

Also recently bought the 2016 releases by old thrash metal stalwarts in TESTAMENT’s Brotherhood of the Snake and DEATH ANGEL’s The Evil Divide. Both albums are very solid modern metal offerings with an almost throwback aesthetic to the heyday of thrash in the late 1980s when the entire genre was releasing its most seminal music. This is the kind of music that forced me into finally picking up the guitar in 1988. 

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Movies I Need to See

I still haven’t seen DOCTOR STRANGE. Nor ARRIVAL. I must rectify this ASA logistically P.

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Recently on RUCKERPEDIA

ICYMI

New additions to my Library of Works site include:

A collection of “on the road” pieces – “I’m Not From Around Here” (poem), “The Road is My Map” (WIP), “Going the Distance” (micro), “Road Dog” (double-drabble).

And one of my most romantic pieces ever written – “Living and Dying Under a Harvest Moon” (short story).

Check’em out and more as a patron of the RUCKERPEDIA library.

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I’m going to go ahead and end this one here. I’ll probably file another of these on Sunday or Monday where I will get into what’s next for me creatively and such. I haven’t filed a proper workbook update in a while here, so maybe it will double as such.

Enjoy your weekend. And try to do something nice for yourself and others. Kindness should be sprinkled when and wherever possible.

-BLR