A Slap Update: Do I Still Have That Blog?

"Hey man, do you still have that blog?"

"Yeah, I think I do... although I don’t really remember the last time I put anything in it."

"Are you kidding me? You basically wrote nothing all of last year, just posting pictures of naked ladies.”

“Surely that’s not true."

"Oh yeah? Go take a look."

Time passes.

"Holy shit. You’re right. I basically just posted naked people."

"Yeah, as if the internet doesn’t have enough of that. What the hell were you doing?"

"Don’t know. I think I got tired of writing. I spent all my day at work writing. It’s exhausting."

"Yeah, but now you finally figured out how to dictate voice-to-text, feed it through AI, and let it make sense of your rambling, right?"

"Oh yeah. We’re doing that right now."

"That’s right. So, you know, writing is not as painstaking as it used to be. Why not get back to it?"

"But I’ve got so many cool cowgirl-looking pictures, and people like them."

"Alright. Make yourself a deal. You can only post your weird picture collection on the internet if you attach something that you wrote along with it."

"You mean, like this?"

"Yup."

The two gentlemen of the "perfect phone call"

 

Raising awareness for National Distracted Driving Awareness Month, you Mother Fuckers!

 

Attracted to Opposites

See this lady?  Badass.  I should love her.  Tough, fit, redhead, with an interest in outdoorsy fun.

I also interacted with her on her social media, and it turns out she's a total 2A or Die, Qanon, they stole the election, anti-vax... well, I have thoughts.

Guns, rural life, fitness, cowboy asethetic- things that draw me to the genre also draw people that are the polar opposite of me in so many ways.  

BTW, if these picture are you and you want them down, just let me know and I'll delete the post.

Staring into the mid-winter campfire

Sometimes I look at the pill box and it’s 13 pills per day and get depressed.  “What would you have done 500 years ago?” I ask myself.  Truthfully I imagine other people judging me in that voice.  Let’s take a look at that question and take an inventory of what my life would have looked like at various ages if I was born in, say, 1824 and came of age in the heyday of the “Wild West”.

Age 0: I wouldn’t have made it to day one.  I have real doubts that my mother would have made it through the pregnancy, and infant mortality was over 10%.

 

Age 10: I might have made it this far.  Being born with a seemingly small yet major heart defect meant that I was small and underweight for most of my childhood, and was susceptible to fatal cardiac infections from cuts unless I was given antibiotics.  Lacking penicillin it’s likely that I would have died before this age, or not long after.  Child mortality rates at this time were 25%.

 

Age 30: On the remote chance that I wasn’t killed by a minor infection by now, 1854 would have been an interesting time.  Mid-30’s is where the periodic mental health issues started to become more regular.  In the 21^st century I was able to manage them with time by myself and time outside, which turned into six years as a long distance runner.  In the 19^th century I would have joined the migration west to get away from the crowds and maybe would have found something similar, but certainly not had the farm and giant passel of free labor / children, and the odds of death through infection would be that much more.  I would also have been more likely to self-medicate with alcohol or opium, and possibly soiled doves. 

 

Age 36: If infection, alcohol, sexually transmitted diseases, overdose or suicide hadn’t gotten to me by now, 36 is where it would have ended.  This is the year my heart stopped working, and I had to have my chest opened up, some original equipment taken out, and some new equipment installed.  This surgery wasn’t invented until 1952 and wasn’t common for a few more decades.  If I was born 150 years early in 1824 I would have died of heart failure or an aneurysm as the Civil War was starting.

 

Age 45: Let’s imagine that the heart problem never existed and I managed to not die of infection, this would have been a breaking point.  Even with a healthy diet, plenty of exercise, and clean living I still started to deal with levels of anxiety (and to some extent depression) that were inhibiting daily life.  Some of that is personality, some of that is personal history, and most of it is chemical and treatable today with select serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitors (NDRIs).  By 1869 I would likely have either self-medicated my way to the grave, self-harmed my way off this mortal world, or died violently in an anxiety driven outburst.

 

Age 48:  If I made it this far, this is the year that I learned all the diet and exercise in the world wouldn’t keep my cholesterol from increasing exponentially every year.  My story would, inevitably, have ended in a few years, just before the Centennial.

 

A Feast for a Ranger

 

Y'all know that I also an obscure and little-read author, right?  This short story is pretty clean and sells for 99 cents.  Go check it out!

An Interlude at the Campfire

Today I learned that cancer is going to take down another friend.

Time is a predator. Time is a gift. Time is an illusion. Time is a paradox. Time is a flat circle. Time is a constant. Time flies by. Time is precious. Time is infinite. Take your time. Don’t waste time. 

The wheel of karma keeps spinning; hope you find your dharma in time. 

See you next time around. 

Celebrating the day I was kicked off Facebook!

On January 6, 2021, I swapped my profile pic on Facebook to an American flag in a moment of rare solidarity with Congress and hope for the continuity of democracy.  However, since the flag was usurped that day by miscreant fascists intent on murdering the Vice President, this move was conisdered the act of a dangerous insurrectionist and my Facebook account was quickly shut down with no appeal.  

Donlad Trump, the leader of the insurection?  He got an appeal.  Sure.  Fuck Facebook.

Wrestle You Way Into the New Year with Toni Storm

In the spirit of total transparency, I started staging posts to cover all of 2024 way back in the late summer of 2023, because I loved the notion of filling my blog in it's 12th year with more posts than ever before.  A lot of that was finding the random pictures I've collected and putting them on posts.  I found this collection of someone I believe is a professional wrestler, in a vaguely western themed photo shoot, and decided to kick of the year with this.  So enjoy.  Or not.  The last few years have been a crap shoot.  God may not play dice with the universe, but he sure does play Russian Roulette with you.

Staring into the Year End Campfire

When I set out to find the perfect Western, Biden was a Vice-President, Putin was a Prime Minister, Ukraine was a Russian client-state, Trump was a game show host, I had a heart that was 100% natural, and had never heard of the eight limbs of ashtanga yoga.  A lot has changed since then.

In those days, and the couple of years that followed, I spent a lot of meandering mental energy thinking about man in nature, the folly of civilization, completely ignored Hobbes, and longed for some kind of Tyler Durden-esque collapse of the status quo that would certainly have killed me within days.

(Side note: you know how life expectancies were so low back in ye olden days?  It wasn’t because everyone died at 35, it was because so many people died of things that we can prevent or manage today.  If I were born 50 years earlier I would not have lived past 40, and probably would have had trouble making it to my 20’s.  A friend asked me mid-pandemic why I was so cranky and depressed all the time and that it was bringing down all my co-workers.  I said that if the Qanon-MAGA hat crowd decides they don’t like the election results and start a civil war I’ve got 60 days max before a disrupted pharma supply chain kills me.  He thought that was ridiculous, then we had Jan 6.  He also occasionally read this blog.  Hi RC!)

In the decade since the allure of the return to primal has faded… a little.  I mean, I did save the picture above from The Last Book You’ll Ever Read, a graphic novel by Cullen Bunn about that exact re-wilding of civilization.  A lot of my non-western hiatus was spent reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, time travel hunting books, pulp safaris, Hemmingway’s hunting stories, etc.  I think that with a lot of yoga study I saw that there is a happy hunting ground between civilization and the wilderness.

Several times I’ve set out to make a Dungeons and Dragons character that felt like a Saddhu, the ascetic wandering yogis that still exist today.  My buddies assume that I’d make a monk, but the times where I’ve done it I’ve always made some kind of Druid. 

Yoga, particularly Shaivist Tantra yoga I study, is pretty primal.  You can’t really experience it unless you can experience it in your body first.  Not that you’ve got to be a super athlete; I started my study without a sternum, not a lot of complicated yoga postures happening at that time.  The quintessential yogi for me is Shiva- one of the three faces of God, Lord of Yoga, sitting on a mountain, meditating and surrounded by animals.

There is also some evidence that Cernunnos (the Celtic & Gaulic god that is a precursor to Herne, the Wild Hunt, and the Green Man) is Shiva.  So yeah, the druids were yogis.

That ascetic, austere seeker going to the mountains to meditate always appealed to me.  Why do people go to find enlightenment on top of a mountain?  Because you are never the same person at the top that you were at the start.  I even wrote about that way back in 2013.  Just this week I got thinking about this chain:

The Saddhu, seeking a quiet perch on a mountaintop to meditate.

The Druid, wandering the expansive forests and mountains of Britain getting list in vision of the Otherworld.

The Mountain Man, leaving the civilization that defined him to live apart from societal binds and expectations.

The Saddhu, the Druid, the Mountain Man, all connected.

Happy New Year.  Time for one last hike.

 

Staring into the Campfire

At the end of the summer this year I spent almost eight days camping in a patch of desert called Salt Flat, TX.  Every morning Mrs. Slap and I got up just after sunrise and cooked breakfast; when it started to get hot we went up into the Guadalupe Mountains to hike; towards sunset we found some shade, made dinner, then watched the nightly dance.  Sunset in the mountains to the west, Milky Way spiraling overhead, full blood red moon rising over the mountains in the east.  On a busy day we might see five other people.

What passes for reality set in with work, crowds, politics, inflation, family, war, plague all crushing in as we got back to civilization.  I wasn’t right for days.  Weeks.  Months.  I miss it.

I think often about a pair of conversations in the film Jeremiah Johnson:

Bear Claw Chris Lapp: [Seeing the striped military trousers Jeremiah's wearing] Missed another war down there, hmm?

…and later…

Jeremiah Johnson: How does the war go?

Lt. Mulvey: Which war?

Jeremiah Johnson: The war against the President of Mexico.

Lt. Mulvey: Why, it's over.

Jeremiah Johnson: Who won?

No one wins.  The war in Ukraine is going to drag on into another attritional trench war for years, or someone is going to have to decide to cede the East to Russia.  The war in Gaza is… I have no idea where that was going.  Anyone with sense can tell that Iran pushed Hamas into attacking with a bunch a crazy “hail mary”s hoping to provoke an over-response from Israel that would pause or cancel the impending Saudi-Israel formal alliance that was in the works.  I doubt anyone thought Hamas would get as far or do as much damage as it did, or that Israel would have to save face with an endless shock & campaign followed by a ground invasion.  This is the Iran-Saudi cold war turned very hot, and it’s bringing in resources from all over.  Including every American’s tax dollars which are going to munitions fired into Gaza.  All because someone in Tehran got a smart idea.  And people are going to forget about the 1,200 deaths and innumerable attrocities in Israel as the body count goes well into the tens of thousands in Gaza.  No one wins.

And then there’s Trump, who might still be President again despite it all.  The average life expectancy for a male in the US is 77.28 years.  Maybe nature will play the odds and clear the slate.  I’m still holding out for a Romney-Manchin 3^rd party run. 

Via con dios, pards.

Update on Slap, and why all the Nekkid Cowgirls

Hey cowpokes!  I'm out in west Texas, wandering the mountains, trying to find a savage jackalope and put the problems of the northeast behind me for a spell.

My loyal readers may be wondering if this blog is just posting scantily clad cowgirls.  

Mostly?  Maybe?

I am putting together some stuff for Weird West month and next year's Brokeback month, but yeah, this is what I've got in the saddle bag right now.

Via con dios...

How Wild Wild West Almost Ruined My Marriage

Back in the 1990’s I lived in a town with a pretty cheap movie theater and an even cheaper second run theater.  Mrs. Slap and I went to the movies a lot, usually once a week or more, and back in those days you assumed that you wanted to see movies in the theater- no steaming yet, no big flatscreens at home, etc.  We also read a lot of movie magazines (that actually came in the mail!) so we knew what was coming out and what we wanted to make sure to see.

In the summer of 1999 I was really excited to see Wild Wild West, with Will Smith as Jim West and Kevin Klein as Artemis Gordon.  I was a big fan of the original series and Smith was on a roll with his buddy action comedies.  Unfortunately, that was also a busy summer, including a move to our first two bedroom apartment, and we didn’t make it the Wild Wild West at the first run theater.  Okay, we’ll see it at the second run.  Then that window was closing, on the last day that we had to move out of our apartment.

I must have been whining about missing the movie, and annoying Mrs. Slap, so she kicked me out to go see the last show at the second run.  The right move would have been to say “no, honey, I love you and supporting you and our family is more important than seeing potentially the greatest movie ever”, but we’d only been married a couple years by that point and I was stupid.  Off I went to see the masterpiece Wild Wild West.

It sucked.

I came home to find Mrs. Slap dirty and tired from the final cleanup of the old apartment.  I caught a look that I had never seen before and, more than two decades later, don’t think I’ve seen since.  We recovered and loved that new apartment for the next two years.  Lesson learned.

Unpacking the Saddle Bag; or, Things I Found On My Phone

 

The story of Hugh Glass is just amazing.

From Thomas Jefferson, who is learning to be a math teacher.

On Instagram I randomly fell across this picture of Misty MacCallister, a writer who gets some attention with mostly undress photos; not sure that will work for good old Slap. 

Even as a former vegetarian hippy I love following hunters on Instagram, especially ones who post stuff like this. 

Is Red Dead Redemption a western role-playing game or a dress-up game?  Both, of course.

Why write a blog?

Your content is so awesome it generates ad revenue

(Nope- I currently have no ad services turned on)

To sell your own adjacent product

(Nope- after 11 years of intermittent posts I just put a link to my small collection of Kindle publications on this blog)

Vanity

(Nope- seriously, who the fuck reads this?)

So what's the deal?

On reflection this is more of a journal than anything else; in which case, I suppose I should have used LiveJournal.  A variety of therapists over the years have recommended writing in a journal, which has never really worked out for me.  This kind of writing, though, seems to be better.  Just knocking out the random narratives that run through my head, with bizarre pictures attached, may be just what the doctor ordered.

If the doctor was Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor.

St. Patrick's Day, Deep Roots, & the Pornographic Joys of Cultural Appropriation

I wish I could find this one.  It looks ridiculous.  A saw a quick clip and, with the help of screenshots, it seems to be the sexy ‘70s adventures of a proud native American helping vanilla white women raise their spiritual awareness with his penis.  It’s a perfect picture of the culture of the United States, and gives me a great opportunity to rant about racial politics on St. Patrick's Day. Commentary between screenshots.

The mainstream American culture (which has shifted greatly over time) comes into conflict with a minority. It smashes them, abuses them, harnesses their bodies, criminalizes their culture, then suddenly reverses course and venerates these noble people.  Rinse and repeat as he borders change and new immigrants come in.  Native Americans are the clearest and most extreme example of moving from genocide to reveneration, but there’s others.  Let’s look at my own history:

Irish?  Scum, potato farming drunks, barely better than darkies.  In fact the “white” majority made the Irish afraid of emancipation, because the blacks would all come North and take the low paying jobs that only Irish would do.  Now everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.  Kiss my ass, I actually am Irish.  (To a point- my great grandfather was a war orphan from a part of Ireland that was never really fully held by centuries of occupiers and had a lot of British troops on the prowl- there’s at least a few British soldiers in my Irish ancestry, an interesting possible precursor to the Nigerian section below.)

German?  Once the endless tide of the liberal Catholic immigrant horde fleeing war and oppression in Europe, threatening to destroy America.  Now, firmly a part of the “white” majority, despite the two world wars.  That changed fast.

Ashkenazi?  Russian AND Jewish?  Not as welcome in the United States as they thought when they took the boats over from the old country, but at least it’s better than pogroms by idiots who believed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  No wonder so many became gangster, just like my great grandfather, the mysterious “Mr. X”.  A century later and most Americans can quote entire episode of Sienfeld.  Be the Master of Your Own Domain. 

Nigerian?  Tough tits, America, my black great great great great great grandma was bought by my white great great great great great grandpa, they had a daughter, repeat for several generations, and my grandfather had a nice tan but never knew he was a descendant of multiple generations of slaves and their rapists.  That’s some fucked-up genetic baggage.  I’m here, I’m 1/64 Black, and I’m here to stay.

Rant over.  Éire go Brách, Slava Ukraini.

A long, long pause in Red Dead Redemption II

 

It’s getting on nearly a year since I last picked up Red Dead Redemption II for more than just a few minutes.  It’s not that I don’t like the game.  In fact it’s one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, and I think about it and the narrative all the time.  The problem is that I know where it’s going.  Arthur, that beastly rapscallion who grows a heart despite his thuggish past, was deep into decline with tuberculosis the last time that I played.  I’ve read enough about the game to know that, much like John Marsten in RDR, Arthur does not make it to the end of the game.  Maintaining the illusion of a vital Arthur so far is worth the delayed gratification of seeing the game through to the end.

Complaining About The Comancheros

Pandemic, death, cancer, inflation, political instability, people who won’t wear their stupid masks at the gym… of all the things happening in the world, you know what really ticks me off today?

The Comancheros, starring and ghost-directed by John Wayne.

It’s been nearly a year since I watched it and it till makes me mad for being a stupid piece of trash.  Here’s my biggest beeves with this crapfest:

• The main character, Paul Regret, starts the story in 1843 New Orleans by killing a US Army officer in a duel over a woman.  He flees the country for the then-independent Republic of Texas. Despite his name, he never shows regret over the killing.  This is our hero.  
• The main character, Paul Regret, starts the story in 1843 New Orleans by killing a US Army officer in a duel over a woman.  He flees the country for the then-independent Republic of Texas. Despite his name, he never shows regret over the killing.  This is our hero.
• The movie goes on with a range of shootouts, Indian attacks, and double crossing.  The “Comanches” look like someone’s idea of northern plains Cheyenne from central casting, and their scenes are mostly just groups riding in formation at the camera with lots of disjointed yelling and shooting in the air.  If you’ve noticed the label “Outdated Cultural Reference” on movies lately, it’s because of nonsense like this.
• By the end of the film, the entire body of Texas Rangers (led by Wayne) outright lies to United States authorities about Regret’s whereabouts and actions so he can avoid being held responsible for his actions.  Again, these are the heroes.

Why does this film still bother me, a year after I watched it?  Perhaps because it’s a little close to the “Ra! Ra! Truth, Justice, American Way! Law & Order! As long as it’s convenient and doesn’t conflict with my poorly defined sense of personal freedom!  January 6 was an FBI plot!  It was ANTIFA!  It was a peaceful protest!  F your feelings!  Own the libs!” attitude that my least favorite cable news promotes.

Qanon Shaman and Congressman Gaetz would fit right in with Wayne's Texas Rangers

(Before the flame begins, IMHO their competitor is almost as bad and I find John Stewart and Rush Limbaugh equally contemptable).

The Comancheros is also filled with a bewildering number of errors and anachronisms that a viewer with an even vague grasp of history and geography will note; the following list comes (with light editing) from the Internet Movie Database.

• The shootouts use guns that are completely anachronistic; the guns used in the movie are Colt single action revolvers model 1873, Henry lever action rifle look-alikes model 1860, and Winchester lever action rifles model 1892. The only correct period guns used were the single-shot percussion-cap dueling pistols used in the opening scene
•  John Wayne is shown wearing a Texas Ranger Badge. These badges were not introduced until the 1880s, 37 years after the year the movie story takes place (1843).
• There is a reference of guns being stolen from Fort Sill and a character having served five years in Yuma Territorial Prison. As the film is supposedly set before 1848, neither is possible. Yuma Territorial Prison was opened in 1876, while Fort Sill was first established in 1869. Both occurred after Texas voted to become a state.
• The movie takes place in 1843, but the song Red Wing (sung at various times throughout the movie) was not written until 1907.
• The White cowboy characters wear vaquero-style cowboy boots which were not commonly worn by Americans until around the time of the Civil War. Anglos did not wear vaquero style clothing as that could have resulted in their being mistaken for Mexicans or even the eponymous Comancheros, the film's antagonists.
• The majority of characters, including the lead actors, are shown to be clean-shaven which was rare at the time, especially outside of areas where clean water wasn't readily available. Additionally, most men wore at least a mustache, if not a full beard as it was the fashion at the time.
• Several characters wear pants with belts running through the available belt loops even though this was not the custom until the 1920s at the earliest.
• Paul Regret (Stuart Whitman) mentions to Melinda Marshall (Joan O'Brien} that he understands that her husband had been dead for four years. She answers that he was killed at the Battle of San Jacinto. The movie takes place in 1843 and the Battle of San Jacinto was fought in 1836, seven years earlier, not four.
• Wayne’s character is supposedly taking Regret back to New Orleans, Louisiana from Galveston, Texas after they get off the paddle wheel steamboat. The land on that route along the Gulf coast of Texas and East Texas does not have mountains, buttes or mesas.
• The Texas Rangers are presented like a squad that congregated around a headquarters and rode out like a posse. In fact, there were very few rangers and each was assigned a territory of thousands of square miles. Modern day rangers have offices in various locations around the state with a handful assigned to each office.
• The central headquarters in Austin, as depicted, is in an arid location surrounded by mesas, sand and scrub. In fact, Austin is very green, filled with rivers and lakes, and has the same relative humidity as Honolulu, Hawaii.

Watch it for the scenes with Lee Marvin, though, he’s great.

Let's Slap Some Bookleather!

 

Recently I stumbled across a ton of vintage grindhouse westerns on several web sites, and thought about putting together a list of links to those movies somewhere.  As I brainstormed ideas it occurred to me- don’t I have a western blog?

Yep, Slap Bookleather is still here, even though it hasn’t been updated since late 2015 (and that was just a few YouTube links, so really mid 2015).  So what happened?

For a time I lost my appreciation for westerns, and it’s certainly come back in the last few months.  Hard to say why, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that I stopped reading westerns the week after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States in the 2016 election, and only returned this summer when it became clear that there was no way that any reasonable person with a moral center would ever vote for decadent real estate huckster and pathological liar who mismanaged the government to the point where COVID could wreck the economy and kill or cripple my friends and family.

(Note: 70 million of you voted for him anyway.  I’ll chalk it up to the fact that I keep hearing people say “amazing, you never heard of anyone actually getting COVID until just a few weeks ago, and now it’s everywhere!”  Well, if you lived between Philadelphia and Boston you spent the Spring watching your friends and family get sick, go on ventilators, and sometimes die, and your hands turned cracked and bloody from constantly sanitizing everything.  New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey have had the virus under control for six months now and we still have the highest per capita death rates- update, the Dakotas just topped us, thanks Sturgis!  We hoped you would learn the lesson from us.  We hoped wrong.)

Regardless, some time in late 2020 a friend reminded me of my former love of westerns and I jumped back in.  You'll see a few pop up again in the next few weeks and months.  Let's see how my tastes have changed.

On Reading Jory Sherman’s Sidewinder While Ordering Chinese Food

On a trip through the Raleigh-Durham airport yesterday I found a used book store in Terminal B, and even more surprisingly it had four shelves of westerns.  With just a few minutes to look before boarding I spotted a copy of Jory Sherman’s Sidewinder.  A vague memory that some blog had given it a good review came to mind, I plunked down my $4.50, threw the book into the backpack that passes as my briefcase, and boarded my flight.  I bypassed Sidewinder, though, and read comics on my Ipod and half of Peter Brandvold’s Dust of the Damned (review forthcoming, I hope).

Today after a long day of work I stopped on the way home at a chinese takeout place.  Knowing it would take a few minutes for my order to come together I reached into my backpack and found Sidewinder.  The girl at the register laughed when I ordered my General Tso’s Bean Curd (what, there are no vegetarian cowboys in China?!?).  Taking a seat, I flipped open the book.

Chapter one, page one, paragraph one.  Already there is a square jawed hero.  No, really, he is described as having a square jaw.  The rest of the page is exacting descriptions of two characters.  Our hero, Brad Storm (seriously?), is given more visual description in this first page than the Kid was given in 327 pages of Blood Meridian.

On to chapter two, in which our hero beats nine kinds of shit out of a rattlesnake.  I think.  That happened really fast and I’m not sure exactly what happened to chapter one.  I go back and reread all of chapter one.  I’m back to chapter two and the snake is still dead and the hero is dying.

Is this the book that got such a good review?  I look at the cover.  Yeah, I think this is it.  I hope the writing picks up.  Wonder what’s taking the food so long?  I like how the delivery guy has his collar flipped up like a bad boy from an 80’s movie.  Is that woman cooking the same woman who took my order?  No, she’s older.  Oh, there’s the cashier, she’s sitting behind the counter playing with her phone.  I’ve really found some good comics for the Ipod.  Wonder if the cook’s married to that delivery guy, they seem to get along.  Can you believe that woman at the other Chinese place by the yoga studio is having another kid?  Amazing.  I don’t have any kids.  She’ll have two.  She seems so young.  Oh yeah, I’m reading this book.

There’s some woman, and she knows how to handle a gun.  Sherman really knows a lot about guns.  I wonder if he knows how to develop characters without direct exposition?  I bet this woman is the wife of the main character and she gets kidnapped.  Let’s read the back cover.  Yup, she gets kidnapped.  Huh, what’s that say:

"Jory Shreman is a national treasure"- Loren Estleman.  

Estleman.  That guy can write.  Didn’t I listen to The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion on my morning walk?  Yeah, I’ll have to listen more in my evening walk.  He writes a lot of good books.  So does F.M. Parker, I should dig some of those out.  Like that trilogy of interconnected novels all taking place in parallel during the Mexican American War?  That was cool.  Amazing how Riders of the Purple Sage turned out to be such a crisply written, proto-feminist, erotic read.  Man I love that book.  Can’t believe Mrs. Slap loved it, too.

Always trust the opinions of Mrs. Slap.

Man, this food is taking a while.  Had to go hunt up extra bean curd.  Where was I?  Chapter four.  Four?!?  Are you fucking kidding?  Okay, now there’s an Arapaho and a Navajo who are helping out the poisoned hero.  Wow, that’s some bad dialog.  Did this come right out of the 1950’s crazy racist Injun dialog book? 

There’s the table with a stack of free magazines.  I should read one of those.  Maybe I’ll leave the book here.  No, someone’ll just throw it away.  People really seem to like this guy’s writing.  I wonder why?  If I review it on my blog and he reads it will he be pissed?  Last time I published an article someone told me to never read the comments.  Then I read the comments.  One day I’ll publish my novel and people will hate it.  That sucks.  Got to finish it first.  First comes my yoga certification, then I’ll finish the book.  Where’s my food?

I really should be reading something better than this.  Ed Erdelac sent me a copy of Merkabah Rider, what, a year ago?  And I still haven’t read it.  I bet it’s better than this.  

Ah, my bean curd.  Smile at the Chinese girl, she’s laughing at your bean curd.  That’s fine, I don’t have to read any more of this book now.