Fantasy Football In August Is a Dirty Trick

Less than an hour until my first fantasy football draft of 2018. Jenny has gone roller skating, so I’m going to put an ice pack on my elbow and wet my beak with a ten dollar draft.

August 1st. And I’m sitting here at Zombie Logic Press headquarters so bored I’ve broken my own rule about not doing any drafts before the third preseason game.

I’m sort of liking a few sleepers in the middle to late rounds like C.J. Anderson, even though I realize Cam Newton is the goaline back in Carolina, Deonte Foreman in Houston when Lamar Miller inevitably is proven slow and old, Jordy Nelson in Oakland to have one more good year, and Sterling Shepard in New York for no good real reason. Isiah Crowell is appealing to me again this year with McGuire out in New York, even though Crowell burned me last year.

As far as quarterbacks, it seems like just wait and pair up a couple like Luck, Ryan, etc in rounds 9, 10, 11. Derek Carr is another one I’d like to get even later than that. Gives you a chance to stack up some of the players from the previous paragraph, maybe throw a flier like the rookie running back in Detroit or Denver, get some solid depth on your roster.

One thing I’ll be conscious of trying to do this year is differentiate between early season and late season guys. That’s where players like Donte Foreman and a couple of the rookie running backs in Indianapolis come in. You want to think ahead and already have the waiver pick up of the year that wins people championships on your roster already.

But like i said, I got no business doing a draft on August 1st, or even talking about one. At this time last year if I’d seen someone like Kareem Hunt of Leonard Fornette or even Deshaun Watson coming I could have stacked up top players in the middle rounds, even though they didn’t finish the season strong. Rookie running backs aren’t going to catch anyone by surprise this year, but I think the trend of drafting a rookie and running their wheels off then drafting another one is here to stay, at least for now. I think you really need to bookend a couple of top flight running backs right away then go out and get your wide receivers.

Thus spaketh the Dirty Tricks Squad

 

An Evil Orang-Utan Is President and Business Is Good

Can’t believe the Dirty Tricks Squad completely slept through the election of 2016 and the installation of Donald Trump as President of the United States by the Russian government.

I imagine millions of people were turning to us, being the only real and true Dirty Tricks Squad, to get some idea of what was going on, and there I was just enjoying my life and wondering if it really made any difference to me who was the President.

Turns out it doesn’t.

Trump has been even a little better for me in terms of what I do for society.

Business is good.

Not the getting people to buy books and read them business, because that business is most decidedly bad. Just last month I had a printer, Edwards Brothers Malloy, who had been in business since the 1800’s, go out of business on me with my latest book in their pipeline, and I had to scramble to get it ready for the client in ten days, but since I’m just about the best in the world at what I do I got it done.

I hope you’re all having as much fun, too, waking up every day unsure if anything will still be the same. These are truly the interesting times the Chinese wished for us, and the Russians so generously made a reality.

Enjoy. Back in two more years.

 

True Stories By Outlaw Poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg

I don’t feel like a bad ass. But when I read my own poetry it is clear to me that I am. Not the kind of faux bad ass I have seen posting poems that are Bukowski rip-offs for decades now, but …

Source: True Stories By Outlaw Poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Iced Cream By Jesus Correa: Outsider and Outlaw Poet

When I founded Zombie Logic Press in 1997, my sole purpose was to publish my own books of poetry. I had grown weary of the small press scene, as at that time you still had send paper manuscripts to…

Source: Iced Cream By Jesus Correa: Outsider and Outlaw Poet

Dirty Tricks and Bad Dudes

Jenny asked me why I never inducted Donald Trump into The Hall of Bad Dudes, and it didn’t take me long to formulate an answer. “Because I’ve never taken him seriously,” I answered. And until now, I haven’t. He’s always seemed like a buffoonish villain to me, something you might see in an Austin Power’s movie. I never watched The Apprentice. To me Donald Trump was always exactly where he needed to be: on a reality tv show that had nothing to do with any reality I was currently experiencing.

Then shit got real.

Gradually, and suddenly, enough people started taking Donald Trump seriously as a candidate for President that it got scary. Fast. It’s like that slow fight you see unfolding before your eyes where it starts with good-natured ribbing, then someone’s feelings getting hurt, then anger, then a little pushing and shoving, then a full-scale knock-down drag-out fight, while all the time you’re thinking somebody is going to step in a stop this. The adults are going to show up eventually.

But in this case something unusual is happening. No one is listening to the adults. There is no one who has the authority to intercede and put to a stop a conflagration of anger, hatred, and pent-up desire to scapegoat entire groups of people  that is eerily reminiscent of other times and other places where dangerous leaders with dangerous followers turned into genocide, pogroms, witch trials, crusades….

Personally I’m not surprised by any of this. I grew up in a small town where if you weren’t racist you weren’t trying. Hell, I went back to that town last summer to go to a concert with one of my relatives and heard guests also going (school teachers) use the n word all the way to Chicago. So, no, I’m not really surprised by the onslaught of bigotry and hatred we’re seeing from Donald Trump’s supporters. What does surprise me is more Americans not telling them to sit down, shut the hell up, and behave themselves.

Well, some are. I see many Republicans condemning this despicable show of ignorance and vowing not to support Trump if he were to become the Republican nominee. I think no matter what happens in this lesson we’ve all learned a lesson. Whoever these people are that are so angry and so willing to blame someone else for it aren’t going anywhere. They weren’t created by Donald Trump, and the sad reality is they can’t even be dispelled if Donald Trump goes away now. They are real. They are the new reality. Maybe they were always the reality and we were all just living an illusion thinking America was becoming a better, more compassionate and accepting nation that was finally getting closer to achieving its stated ideal of “Liberty and justice for all.” Maybe we never really meant that at all.

 

 

 

 

Dumb Things I Like

Sometimes in life you work on something really dumb because you’re bored. I tend to work on dumb things because I am dumb, but aside from that I get bored, too, and I have a lot of goofy things that interest me. For instance, I love awful horror movies. Tonight I’m watching Blood Beach then Death Ship. I used to do a blog titled Zombielogic’s Incredibly Brief Movie Reviews where I only reviewed horror movies in a few lines. I don’t like to write negative reviews because most of my friends work in film and I know how hard it is to make anything in life, and what difference does it make if I tell you something sucks?

This week has got to take the cake for dumb, though, because I’m working on creating a fictional poetry slam league called the Outsider Poetry Slam League of America. So far I’m having a lot of fun creating the rosters.  I picked the first five teams from the Five Sacred Cities of Funny Names: Chemung, Paducah, Kokomo, Rancho Cucamonga, and Sheboygan, but I also couldn’t forget about Minooka, and when I learned there is really a Podunk, Vermont, it was in, too.

But I’m really here to talk about The Journal of Outsider Poetry, which I think is getting a bum rap by the search engines.

They just found a guy’s wiener in Blood Beach. See, there’s this monster that lives under the sand, and this guy was laying on the beach, and… you get the idea.

I’ve been contemplating making more of an effort to take over the search term Dirty Tricks, especially since they say it in election cycles all the time, but I got this pint of Butterfinger ice cream and a Xanax that says I don’t make any inroads on that project this night. We need a picture of something.

This is me holding an action figure my friend Andrew made for his comic book character Ape Face Rockefeller. We keep talking about making it into a real comic book, and maybe we will.

Get off that beach, dummy.

 

 

The Journal Of Outsider Poetry Is a Dirty Trick

The Journal of Outsider Poetry is a dirty trick, and editor Henry Wolfsburg should be ashamed of himself. We all have a deep fondness and admiration for Dr. Wolfsburg due to his bravery in the Zombie Apocalypse of 1978, but after nearly three decades he has emerged from his complex in Vermont to take a position as a specialist in poetry therapy at the Vermont Institute For Reformation.

Many find his techniques questionable, and his claim to be able to cure conversion and somatoform disorders unfounded by the evidence. His poetry circles have created some highly entertaining slam and spoken word poetry, for sure, but as a concerned colleague I have to ask at what cost?

Some fairly barbaric methods were employed during the darker times of psychiatry, but poetry? What kind of a sadist forces poetry upon his own patients. Most people spend their lives running from poetry, but Dr. Wolfsburg recommends an abrupt and total immersion into the nightmare world of poetry. Some have even accused him of running a poetry sweatshop where inmates write haikus, sonnets, even confessional poetry 12 hours a day.

I beg my colleague in this appeal to stop. Stop with the poetry already. It is a cruel and unusual method that went out with The Dark Ages. You’re better than this, Dr. Wolfsburg.

More Outsider Poetry By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

After my last blog entry, a mere five minutes ago, many people contacted me and asked me for more Outsider Poetry. Despite the fact, that like many others claiming the title of outsider poet, I didn’t even know what Outsider Poetry was two weeks ago, I felt as if I could oblige that request. So here you go. Outsider poetry by Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

Maritime Law by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

It is fortunate I remembered this poem, from my book Detached Retinas, because it is one of my friend Tim’s favorite poems, and since he’s animating another poem from the book, “The Jackal,” for Fall Art Scene, I really should  frame this print and give it to him. I’m excited about the Jackal. He asked me what music might be appropriate for it, and I at first suggested Satie, but he eventually gravitated towards “Pop Goes the Weasel.” What really sucked about choosing that particular piece is that it doesn’t increase the word count of this blog at all and now I’m going to be at this all night.

Unless…

Future Cliches

Tourists go to Mars, successful real estate developers go to Jupiter.

One download of SOMA a day will keep your aspirations of socialized yet effective health care away.

Treat a hologram like your wife and an automaton like a clone.

If water was wet everyone would drink it.

Behind every successful simulacrom is an androgenous lab assisstant.

It is what it is. Again.

Two megagigs may be enough to open a neuropeptide bar in Bakersfield, but it’s not going to get you into my pants.

In the future each one of us will be relieved of the enormous burden of fame our videocast has brought us for exactly fifteen minutes.

Only President Justin Bieber could go to China.

Bouge. You like that poem? I wrote it while sitting on the bank of the Rock River in a location that was an ancient Native American fishing village, then an artist’s colony for decades. Then they decided to put a bar and a dock there so a bunch of rich white assholes could pull up their boats and act like jagbags all summer long. You know where you can see more groovy Outsider Poetry like that? not quite blank. Back to my story: my brother bought that bar and for three summers I lived in the dive motel annexed to it, and occasionally sat on the bank of the Rock River thinking this place might have had some mystical mojo at some point before all this white trash floated ashore. Then I’d write a poem about Buck Owens and go in to work. It’s hard to complain that people are sinful boozehounds when they’re throwing around hundred dollar bills like Rick James at a Shoe Carnival. Sure, that didn’t make any sense, but you weren’t reading it any way. The rain has stopped outside, and I just heard the five year old sneeze, so yay let influenza season begin. Three more words.

Several New Outsider Poetry Magazines Spring Up

While I have been sitting here all summer waiting for Straight Outta Compton to open, and for fantasy football season to begin, unbeknownst to me, several Outsider Poetry publications have sprung up online. The first, which I discovered just this afternoon while it was raining, is Outsider Poetry Magazine. Edited by Conservative talking head Charles Krauthammer, Outsider Poetry Magazine is a pleasant surprise to everyone who thinks Charles Krauthammer is a square and a little bit of a bite in the ass. He shows that he is not by including poetry by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, Scott Baio, and that kid from the Partridge Family. It must be apparent by now everything I am writing is complete nonsense and you’d be completely justified in tuning out.

Because there was no Cubs game today I had some time to read the internet, and while I was researching the topic of methods used to treat the mentally ill I saw The Journal of Outsider Poetry. The only disappointing things about this new psychological journal, which focuses on treatment of the mentally ill through poetry and art, is that for some reason Google indexed it with a lower case t in the word “the.” It’s unlikely they’ll ever change that.

It’s hard to say who the first Outsider Poet was. Maybe somebody like Walt Whitman. I have read some Medieval manuscripts chronicling the babbling of those supposedly possessed by demons, and a lot of it sounds like poetry. It is clear that since the beginning of art and the written word, those with mental illness have been writing in an attempt to exercise the “demons” of their mental illness, and just plain for the same reason everyone else does: to communicate.

An Outsider Poem by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

I’m having some Tab Cola for the first time in several weeks tonight. The 90 degree heat has broken and we’re watching John Oliver talk about organized religion and I really need to find something to talk about to get to 500 words. I also ate an entire sleeve of those fun size Milky Way bars. They were miraculous in raising my dopamine level even though Jack caught me and came over to see what I was eating. I lied and said I wasn’t only crumpling paper. He seemed to know I was lying, but since he couldn’t see the fun size candy bars there wasn’t much he could do. I’m going to write two more of these blogs tonight. The soda and candy bars have elevated my mood, but in general the whole experience has been rather crushing. School begins this week for one kid, and next week for the younger kid, so by the end of next week everyone in the house will be sick as a dog because no one seems to take care of themselves anymore or have the decency to not send their kid to school if they are sick. I never really did go see Straight Out of Compton yet, and we never got to the Minions movie this summer, even though we told the children we would a couple of times.

The Toughskin Rhinoceros Wrangler Company

I wrote my first children’s book, The Toughskin Rhinoceros Wrangler Company three years ago for my little guy Jack. The reason I wrote him a book about rhinos is that he was short and stubby and his chubby little legs reminded me of a rhinoceros. So I wrote a book about a little boy who was called every time rhinos escaped from a zoo. His mama drew the pictures, and his sister created a list of “Rhino Facts.” And we published it. It turned out beautifully, and because we did such a small press run we ran out immediately. They sold so fast, in fact, that I didn’t even get one.

The picture you’re looking at is me reading The Toughskin Rhinoceros Wrangler Company to Jack for the first time. After which he said “We should buy that book.” That seemed like the perfect response. He lives with a poet and an artist mama and a big sister who has already written her first book at 11 so it doesn’t seem at all odd to him that people make things. It is strange that this was the first time I had ever read it to him. We read books all the time, just not this one.

We did a second printing recently. Life is going by like a blur. I’ve had a serious heart surgery since the first printing, and Jack is getting tall and lean and doesn’t at all remind me of a stubby little rhinoceros anymore. The West African Black Rhino is gone from the planet forever since I wrote this book. All of life seems to be going by so fast.

I’d like for you to buy a copy of this book. Reading it just now I realized I’d included some really adroit sprung rhythms that made me smile as I untangled them in the reading. One of my challenges as a writer writing for children for the first time was not being sing-songy with my rhymes or condescending in my message. I wanted to make sure I was writing something I’d want read to me if I was a child again. I remember my mother reading Syd Hoff’s Julius the Gorilla book to me over and over as a child. It was one of my favorites.

                                                             Buy the Toughskin Rhinoceros Wrangler Company