As a child I was absolutely terrified of loud noises. Anything loud would cause me to freak the fuck out like Rainman seeing a tub of hot water. This is one of those stories.

Since I was mortified of anything loud, running the vacuum was something of an ordeal at the Coons house, my dad tried to solve the problem by talking to me in a calm and concerned manner.

“Why are you afraid of the sweeper?” he asked.

“It’s so loud!”

“…but why is it loud?” he asked.

Rather than addressing my emotions, like an ineffectual pussy, my dad wisely chose to address the thing which caused the emotion, actually fixing the problem rather than merely painting over it.

“Because it sucks things into it and chops them to bits its fan blades!” I told my dad, and presented a number of mauled Transformer guns that I had left on the floor in evidence of my viewpoint.

The sweeper may or may not have also played a role in Crane loosing his other arm, causing him to become the wonky, crippled, “Hey, wait up you guys!” Constructicon. The other Constructicons only kept him around because A) they needed him to form the upper-torso of Devastator, and B) my parents adamantly refused to replace him, no matter how good I was.

My dad chuckled to himself, and led me to the hall where he was sweeping.

“See? It’s not doing a thing…” he said as he stroked and fawned the sweeper, as a misdirection. “…it can’t hurt you at all! It just…”

At that moment, he turned the sweeper on, and began shrieking.

“Oh God!” he shouted. “Oh God, no! It’s got my foot! Help!”

I vapor-locked. My dad threw himself to the ground, and clawed at the carpet in an unsuccessful bid to escape his untimely demise.

“Run!” he shouted as he lay on the floor, shimming toward the sweeper to create the illusion of being sucked in. “Run! Save yourself!”

I ran back in to my room and slammed the door, panting frantically as I braced myself against the door frame, to prevent the sweeper from entering from when it inevitably comes to life. I realized that this all had to be some sort of elaborate prank, like on those “TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes” specials we would watch on NBC. I threw open the door, and the sweeper was still running, but my dad was gone. Surely, he didn’t run down the hall and watched me from around the corner. No! Clearly, he had to have been consumed by the damnable machination in the hall.

I went from wide-eyed horror to a squint and ran back into my room. I didn’t know what the sweeper’s deal was, but I knew one thing — that it had to die. I dashed to the toy chest, because it had enough toy guns to overthrow imaginary Central American governments… and I did.

See, unlike 50% of my readership, I grew up in the 1980’s (I’m looking at you, Purdue), The Children on the 90’s grew up watching Pokémon, Barney & Friends, and The Effeminate Rainbow Pals; however, in the 80’s childhood looked a little something like this:

I rummaged through my toy box for the largest gun I could find. I don’t exactly remember what it was supposed to be a replica of; I just remember that I eventually broke the trigger off from shooting too much.

A great number of red headbands littered my toybox, as one was bundled with most Rambo playsets. So i grabbed one of them, and dramatically tied it on with a mighty pull. I would like to take this time to inform my younger readers that at the time, this was considered a normal thing for children to do. At any given time, half of my first grade class would be wearing camouflage t-shirts and redhead bands like Corey Feldman from the fuckin’ Lost Boys.

I threw open the door with my gun rhythmically clicking, screaming at the top of my lungs as I broke down into tears, and then screamed and cried at once, shooting and shooting.

After a minute or so, my dad quit laughing and came out from the corner, and picked me up. It didn’t help at all. I kept shooting, screaming, and crying. I always kind of wondered why my Dad did that to me, until the answer came to me one day — because that was the most badass awesome thing you could ever do with a little kid.

Man, I am so glad that August and Joe will have kids soon, so that Uncle Coons can pull shit like this on them…

I didn’t think yesterday was going to be epic, oh, but it was.

I went to work and plotted some points, and managed to leave work such that the rain started right when I opened the door to my building, and made dinner such that I was done right when the tornadoes started. After that, I read some journals, and washed the dishes, and read more journals. And then, right around midnight, Mike Brownstein left a post on my Facebook. A link to a one-line news article that said that “Touchdown Jesus” off of I-75, was on fire.

Then, like that, I grabbed the ol’ SuperFunAdventureCodex, and crossed one more item off my list.

A transcript of the list is given below.  (The items are listed in order of importance.)

Things I’d Like to See:

• Christopher Walken performing a spoken-word version of David Bowie’s “Heroes”
• Ally Sheedy naked
• Jesus Christ on fire
• solid room-temperature superconductors
• Nuclear power renaissance
• identity of “Deep Throat” revealed
• functioning and economical EUV lithography system
• destruction of the Roman Catholic Church
• a cure for diabetes
• Labyrinth II
• electric cars gaining widespread popularity
• the Kurzweilian Singularity
• the domestication of the Komodo Dragon
• old-school breakdancing making a comeback
• the identity of who killed Laura Palmer
• Sarah Palin running for office again, so we can continue to make fun of her.
• Dolph Lundgren fighting Jet Li
• Reliable jetpacks
• Gene Hackman in drag
• Concise, coherent, and preferably closed-form solution to the Problem of Evil
• Collapse of the Kim Family Regime
• Passage of the ERA
• Passage of a amendment to legalize same-sex marriage
• Men everywhere wearing fedoras and flat caps at all times, like they did in the 1920’s
• Freddy Kruger fighting Jason Voorhees
• all my friends living happy and fulfilling lives
• repeal of fireworks laws
• to see BP go under

For those of who have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, a little backstory.

Shortly after I moved to Ohio to start grad school, right around the time the neo-cons and Christo-fascists went mad with power, the Solid Rock Church spent $500,000 to build “King of Kings,” a 62 foot bust of Jesus Christ facing I-75. The statue was ostensibly to help people by serving as “a beacon of hope and salvation,” but in practice, the colossal eyesore merely served as a navigational marker to lead people to the flea market. Within minutes of its dedication, the people of the greater Cincinnati area rechristened the statue “Touchdown Jesus,” for obvious reasons.

Well, last night, Touchdown Jesus was struck by lightning by the same thunderstorm that not-killed me with tornadoes, cloud-to-ground lightning, and baseball-sized hail, proving once again that Yahweh is some linear combination of retarded, incompetent, and/or drunk.

Also, their was apparently the Hustler Hollywood sign for the adult store across the street was completely undamaged, signifying that Larry Flynt is truly favored by the Lord.

Also, apparently statues can catch fire.

That kinda threw me for a loop, for we tried to set literally everything in the universe on fire back in Boy Scouts. Then I found out Touchdown Jesus was made of styrofoam, and everything made sense. It was a giant metal frame, next to pond, covered in styrofoam with a fiberglass skin. Apparently it had a lightning rod, but it didn’t work. I’d like to take this time to point out that lightning rods are a proven technology and have no moving parts.

The comments for that YouTube video are priceless, by the way. I could say more about this, but I’m going to let Percy Shelley take over from here:

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

You may ask: “Wasn’t Boobquake was like a week ago, isn’t this a little late?”

Yeah, it is. But I wanted to keep tabs on New Madrid before I spoke up.

See, I’m more qualified to report on this than some of the proper media outlets, because I actually know what was going on, because I’m friends with Jennifer McCreight. I joined her Non-Theist Society about three years back, and in that time she lead me on some wacky adventures, which really helped me grow as a person. I also learned a lot about her that isn’t reported elsewhere, such as her inability to ride a bicycle.

Jen only ever invited 50 people, whom I was one of. I didn’t invite people, because I can’t go around asking chicks to show me their cleavage without looking like I was Creepy O’Creeperson or something. In the meantime, the intertubes caught fire and all hell broke loose. By the time the day in question came about, about a million people were invited. As in 10^6. Granted, [at the time of writing] only 213,918 participated, and an unknown (but presumably significant) portion of which were dudes, but that’s still larger than all but 94 cities in the US.

I did go to the meeting by the bell tower, which Jen setup after several media requests to have something film-able. Girls in low-cut tops milled about as geology majors set up seismographs to monitor the Boobquake epicenter. Fun was had by all. Still, before going out, I used my Facebook status to inform my friends of my final wishes, in the event of death by misadventure, as that shifty Yahweh has been after me for some time.

For the record, if I were to die:

1) All of my worldly goods are to be sold on eBay, with the revenue generated to be used to commission Jan Hammer to compose a requiem for me — so that I may live forever wherever synthesizers and moderately-priced causal dining meet; and

2) I don’t want to be buried in a Pet Sematary; I don’t want to live my life again. Oh no. Oooooooh noooo…..

The Purdue Exponent managed to succinctly capture the zeitgeist of the moment in a single headline. Jen managed to summarize it even better at the bar a week later:

“The media is retarded. I knew this before, but this only reinforces the belief.”

No seriously, look at this shit:

The problem with twenty-four hour news channels is that news doesn’t really doesn’t happen twenty-four hours a day. There’s maybe twenty-four hours of news in a week. Granted, that’s how Jen & Co. managed to get on, but Jeanne Moos interviewed Jen for two hours, and the finished product consisted of random annoying people on YouTube, YouTube footage of the event itself, a camera being held up to a monitor that had YouTube clips playing on it, and part of a Skype interview. Even TV realizes there’s nothing good on TV, and plays on the computer instead.

I refuse to comment on Jeanne Moos’ Chroma Key boobs, because I wish to maintain my willing suspension of disbelief, and pretend that shit never happened.

Also, old media camera guys are dicks. Did you know that? Yeah. They just walk up to chicks and say: “Show us your cleavage. C’mon, show us your cleavage.”

Hey now! I happen to know those cleavages, as well as they women they’re attached too — and that’s no way to treat women. Hell, the camera guys didn’t even give them beads, like in those Girls Gone Wild videos. Hell, they didn’t even politely goad them for twenty minutes, like in those shitty knock-off Girls Going Crazy videos.

In the end though, Boobquake was a good thing. In the Soviet Union, the intelligentsia enjoyed broad creative freedoms that the remainder of society did not. The reason is that the intelligentsia posed no threat. Churches and countries come and go, but many of them can endure the most profound of philosophical treatises, but the legitimacy of any regime is easily eroded by a joke that catches on. For this reason, atheists, agnostics, pastafarians, et.al. everywhere can only profit from making fun of people.

“Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions…” -Thomas Jefferson; excerpted from a letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, July 30, 1816

I went over to a Super Bowl party tonight. I’d tell you my thoughts on the game, but apparently re-broadcasting, or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game, without the express written consent of the National Football League, is strictly prohibited.

My friend Brian made chili seriously amazing chili. I couldn’t stop eating it. Now I feel like something’s going to burst out of my chest like in Alien. So, I’m going to take a break from studying for the quals to curl up with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol until this all blows over. Still, there is the very real chance, given my genetic make-up and family history, that I am currently having a heart attack.

So, with what may or may not be my dying breaths, I want to tell the world that I hate Christianity, because they keep doing shit like this:

That cost $3.01 million. That guy in there was Tim Tebow, who’s made something of  a name for himself by being pretty and using makeup, effectively making him the Taylor Hanson of collegiate football. The ad was paid for by Focus on the Family, a non-profit, tax-exempt hate group which runs the gambit of all the common causes with which Christians poison our society. They are devoted to the suppression of individual liberties through a staunch anti-choice agenda, compounded with a decided anti-science philosophy via their alliance with the Discovery Institute.

Most heinous of all, Focus on the Family opposes the rights of people of all orientations to marry the ones they love. Read that again. They oppose people being in love, and anyone who opposes love is the enemy of Yellow Hat Man.

Focus on the Family begged for change to scare up $3.01 million, to tell people that abortion is bad. I beg to differ, case and point:

I wondered how many people starved tonight, because the Religious Right was neither: opting to keep Haitian food banks empty to keep the cable networks laden with their precious propaganda. I made a few calculations to see what exactly $3,010,000 can buy in this day in age:

At this point, August has already sent an angry letter out to be proofread before sending it to me. This is about when other Christians approach me and say: “You complain about how these ‘Christians’ act…but that’s not the ‘real Christianity’…” Everyone claims to have the real Christianity. Well, I offer a challenge to the “real Christians”. If you really love your neighbor, you’ll find a way to stop these people. Have your God use his magic if you need too. I thought I was a real Christian for a while. Then I remember that Jesus was a long-haired construction worker who shot his mouth off at every opportunity. If Christ were here today, he’d walk into your churches, break all your shit, and somehow weasel out of doing any jail time. He did it before, and allegedly, he’ll do it again.

Don’t try to save me. Save yourselves from yourselves.

I’m doing the Christians a favor by going to Hell. By going to Hell first, I’ll have the keg tapped by the time they all get there, so I’ll have worked out those first few cups of foam.

I can’t bad for the Whos, and I’m glad they get robbed. Yeah, I said it. Because I too, have been driven to madness by all the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise!

The problem with X-Mas music, is that very rarely, is it sung or performed by actual musicians. People play X-Mas music because its X-Mas, and not for any artistic merit that it may have. The record labels know that, and will mint a metric fuck-ton of CD’s every year of whatever scuzz they could scrape from soup kitchens and plasma centers to sing the same damn songs, over and over, because they know people will buy those discs without ever looking at them.

I remember back when I was at Miami, there was this one radio station that would switch to all all-X-Mas 24/7 format on November 1, and stay that way until January 1. That’s 16.71% of a goddamn year. I shared an office with this one chick who kept her radio on, and tuned to that station, even when she wasn’t there.

Because of this, I wanted to stab people in the face, all day, every day. After class, to prevent face-stabbing, and its legal repercussions, I would leave immediately, with a note on the door reading “Office hours have been canceled due to incessant X-Mas music.”

I asked her to please stop, but I was only met with the “You’re a Grinch who hates Christmas,” which would lead into the “you’re with us or against us” rhetoric that was popular at the time. If I wanted to hear that crap, I just would have hung out with out delusional neo-con department chair.

The only reprieve came from Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band. Only the Boss knew X-Mas. Well, the Boss and Bowie.

Then I went home. My sister replaced her text-message ring tone with the Whos singing their Whoville song. So anytime she recieved a text, at maximum volume, her phone would blast:

“Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays… Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays…”

Ten seconds later:

“Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays… Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays…”

Ten seconds after that:

“Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays… Fah-hoo-door-heys Dah-hoo-boor-hays…”

This repeats until I go to karate, go to a bar, or leave to start the Spring semester. Sometimes she’ll take a nap on the other side of the house and just leave her phone on, so it just keeps going off until she answers it in a few hours, or until I snap and pull the battery in a few minutes.

Also, around 2000, for reasons known only to her — and in spite of all evidence, which only points to the contrary — my mom became suddenly and irrevocably convinced that Yoko Ono was the single best thing that ever happened to music.

Yes, you read that correctly.

My mom bought one of those cassette tapes of butt-ass horrible X-Mas music explicitly for “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” and nothing else. My mom would play it as we came into the dining room for our Christmas Eve dinner, and when it ended, she would get up, go into the other room, rewind the tape, play it again, sit back down, and get up three minutes and thirty-seven seconds later to do it again.

After the fifth time, I dropped my fork.

“I can’t do this. I refuse to be part of a family which enjoys the music of Yoko Ono.”

“Oh come on, Ryan, why not?” said my mom.

“Because that malignant cunt broke up the Beatles!”

“Don’t use that word!” said my mom.

“Sorry. That vorpal cunt broke up the Beatles!”

My dad wanted to be mad, but couldn’t because he knew I was right. He used “Rocky Raccoon” as his CB handle back in the 70’s, and was the one who turned me onto the Beatles, and taught me the importance of hating Yoko Ono. The soundtrack of my high school years drew largely from Sgt. Pepper’s, so we were both offended, just I was more vocal about it.

All these stories went on in tandem, and became annual traditions, like the January 8^th Party, Mouthpiece Cleaning Day, or Indiscriminate Thursday. So once X-Mas degraded into Post-Halloween Psychological Torture Season, it became pretty easy to hate X-Mas. It became hard not too.

Fortunately, I no longer feel this way. Apparently, the rest of the universe must have felt as I did, because the then-novel Trans-Siberian Orchestra quickly became mainstream, and an annual favorite. On top of that, other artists followed suit, and began to produce much-needed unshitty X-Mas music. My sense of hope in mankind was momentarily restored in 2006 when it was announced that Billy Idol released a X-Mas album.

The only thing better than news of a Billy Idol X-Mas CD was Mike’s reaction to it. It went a little something like this:

Do you want to know what the real dicked up part about the Billy Idol X-Mas album is? Your grandma will love it. No, seriously:

I thought that was the non plus ultra of holiday-themed awesome. I thought wrong. A year later,  We Wish You a Metal Xmas…and a Headbanging New Year was released, featuring every single type of awesome. No, seriously it has:

• Ronnie James Dio and Vinny Appice (Dio; Black Sabbath)
• Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath)
• Lemmy (Motörhead),
• Dave Grohl (Nirvana; Foo Fighters)
• Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top)
• Geoff Tate (Queensrÿche)
• George Lynch (Dokken)
• Jeff Scott Soto (Yngwie Malmsteen; Journey)
• Chris Wyse (The Cult)
• Ray Luzier (Army of Anyone; Korn)
• John 5 (Marilyn Manson; Rob Zombie)
• Rudy Sarzo (Quiet Riot; Ozzy Osbourne; Whitesnake; Dio; Blue Öyster Cult)
• Scott Ian (Anthrax)
• Bruce Howard Kulick (Grand Funk Railroad; KISS)
• Carlos Cavazo (Quiet Riot)
• James “JLo” LoMenzo (Megadeth)
• Simon Phillips (The Who; Big Country; Toto; Asia; Pete Townshend; Jeff Beck)
• Tim “Ripper” Owens (Judas Priest)
• Steven J. Morse (Deep Purple)
• Tracii Guns (L.A. Guns; Guns ‘N’ Roses)
• Steve “Luke” Lukather (Toto)
• Joe Lynn Turner (Yngwie Malmsteen)
• Tommy Shaw (Styx; Damn Yankees)
• Kenny Aronoff (Cinderella, Bon Jovi, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Smashing Pumpkins)
• John Tempesta (White Zombie)
• Stephen Pearcy (Ratt)
• …and Alice Cooper

I mean, listen to this shit! It’s perfect!

If there’s one thing which Christian holy days need more of, it’s Black Sabbath.

(Yes, I know that Toto is totally not metal, but I don’t care. Toto IV is a great album.)

Earlier today, Ray “Bananaman” Comfort and Kirk “College Kids are to Young to Remember When I was Famous” Cameron, went viral with their remix version of Charlie Darwin’s smash hit, On the Origin of Species.

Their version intentionally omits a few chapters, and includes a fifty page reductio ad Hitlerum introduction, which Comfort wrote/plagiarized.

These doctored copies were then distributed around the country to be handed out to random-ass people on the campuses of top universities yesterday. That makes sense, because when I think of a fundamentalist Christian jihad, I immediately think of MIT and Caltech. They came to Purdue a day later, since I guess we were a second-round draft pick.

I’d review the introduction in detail for all of you, since they were being handed out here, but I didn’t get one, which sucks. I knew I should’ve taken the long way home today.

However, since turnabout is fair play, I have come out with my own version of the Holy Bible. The SuperFunAdventureBible clears up and confusing or flowery passages and allows the reader to concentrate on the real crux of the Christian faith:

Christians should be thanking me, as I carefully removed (with a utility knife) all of the times the Bible urges people to participate in:

• murder (Ezekiel 9:5-6)
• genocide (Deuteronomy 20:16-17; Exodus 17:13-16)
• incest (Exodus 6:20; Genesis 19:30-38)
• abortion (Hosea 13:16)
• cannibalism (Jeremiah 19:9)
• materialism (Proverbs 14:20)
• domestic violence (Proverbs 20:30)
• shit-eating (Ezekiel 4:12-15),
• genital mutilation (Genesis 17:9-13)
• …and Communist party membership (Acts 4:32-35)

Thanks to me, the Christian apologetics have less to apologize over. Now, Christians can concentrate on the central themes of intimidation and greed without the requisite cognitive dissonance.

Yesterday, in a stunning blow to freedom and justice, gay marriage has been re-illegalized in Maine. This anti-civil rights campaign was received large amounts of funding from a number of notorious hate groups, such as Focus on the Family and the Catholic Church, in another example of the Religious Right being neither.

Sure we read in Leviticus 18:22 (and Leviticus 20:13) that “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination,” but that doesn’t say anything about girl-on-girl. And why would it? Yahweh is said to be male, and therefore, by definition, is a big fan of lesbian porn.

Leviticus 11:12 tells us to avoid Maine lobster, and Leviticus 19:27 bans shaving and haircuts, but we ignore those. Why? It all comes from a little thing theologians like to call “exegesis.”

Exegesis is the process of sticking one’s hand up God’s ass, in order to make him talk. Since the Bible is the compiled mythology of wandering Bronze-age goat headers, it cannot be made applicable to modern day without creative interpretation. Say I wanted to convince people of something, like that I had the power to fight off a pack of crazed unicorns (Pslams 22:21), or to go about rationalizing the destruction of an entire race of people, like those fucking Hittites two doors down from me (Exodus 34:11-14). Well, the Bible is a pretty thick book with a large number of whacky statements, so I just need to leaf through it and cherry-pick out some lines, and then pepper them in to my next hate speech/homily to make my personal agenda sound like it’s God’s agenda, much like how I’m about to do.

See, in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus explicitly states that homosexuals should be able to legally marry in the State of Maine.

No, seriously. I just leafed through the one of those little green Gideon’s Bibles which tend to pile up in my office, and I saw it there plain as day:

Sure, your bible may be a different edition, and that line may have a different wording, or not be presented in my large, effeminate, cursive script, but it’s just as true as anything else the Bible has to say. God divinely inspired the hand of [this] man to write [in] the Bible. So although it was written by [this] human[‘s] hands, it is is none the less the inerrant word of God. This is true, and I know it’s true… for the Bible tells me so.

I wouldn’t go as far as to have ever called myself a “Conservative Christian,” but up until I started graduate school, I was both conservative, and Christian. Shortly thereafter, the neocons went mad with power and began to force their Christo-fascist agenda onto most aspects of American life. Upon realizing that the Religious Right was neither, I renounced my erroneous ways in an attempt to atone for my past.

Lately, the whole US is ranting and screaming one way or another about Obama’s plan for universal health care. Last I checked, LBJ and Reagan were the ones who socialized health care in the United States, and no one goes around bashing them for that, or even talks about Reagan’s socialist policies.

I could make all kinds of rants about health care, like the ones available at 10^34 other places on the internet, but I don’t want to go through all that. Instead, I want to show this video i found of some guy, because this is the true face of health care in the United States of America. This is what the greatest country in the world has chosen to to offer its citizens up to now. Keep in mind, this guy could have been sitting next to you at the movies:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a video is worth 1000*[frame rate (frames/s)*video playtime (s)] words. This passes for health care in the US. Beer and some paper towels.

I first walked into the main floor at WizardWorld with joy and wonder. Then Mike stopped us.

“Dude,” he snapped. “Liefeld’s here.”

We all sprung into crisis mode.

“What do you mean?” said a surprised August. Liefeld was not on the list of guests, but about three booths to the right of the door was “Liefeld” in that sketchy, completely linear Rob Liefeld font.

“Oh shit!” said August. He still has a soul, so he worries about other people and their feelings. I, on the other hand, have nothing but my dreams, and apparent they came true. I knew what to do. We were joking about this on the car ride over, what to say if Liefeld were to magically show up. I knew what to do.

I walked up to him and spake: “Hi, my name is Ryan Coons…”

“Hey!” said Rob Liefeld. He didn’t even look up at me; he just kept sketching away at yet another blocky, disproportionate, and overly-linear picture of one of my beloved childhood heroes. This time, it was Wolverine, in a mirrored swipe of Jim Lee’s cover for X-Men #11.

“…I am a huge Captain America fan…” I tell him with jazz hands and a huge fanboy gleam. “…and as such, I demand an apology for Heroes Reborn.”

Rob stops. He gives me an action hero sneer and said, “Hey, it was nice to meet you,” and followed it up with a fuck-off get lost nod. You know, the upward one. I walk off and hyperventalate for a while, because I can only process a set amount of awesome at one time. That’s why it took me four hours to watch 300 the first time.

Rummaging through the boxes when I came across a copy of Lee & Buscema’s seminal text How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. We were in awe.

“Coons! You need to buy that!” shouted Mike. I was thinking about it, because I’ve wanted a copy of that for some time now.  “You need to give it to him!”

“You’re right! Rob needs it more than anyone!” I said.

“That’s why we’re here Coons,” said Mike. “The planets have aligned.”

“What’s this?” asked Javier, the dude who was working the booth we were at.

“We’re going to by a copy of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, then he’s going to give it to Rob Liefeld,” said Mike.

Javier was awestruck.

“How much is this?” I ask.

“All trades are five dollars, but if you’re giving that to Rob Liefeld, then I…I…well, I can chip in,” said Javier, digging through his wallet. “Here’s two bucks.”

I give the man three.

“I’ll be back,” I tell Javier.

I waited for a bit, I wanted him to forget about me, I wanted him to think he was in the clear and have him let his guard down. Also, I fully expected to get thrown out for these shenanigans, and I wanted Mark Millar to sign my copy of Superman: Red Son, and that wouldn’t be for another few hours.

In the mean time, I took the time to personalize his gift.

On the blank front page, I wrote:

Rob,

I know you aren’t willing to apologize right now. This manual will help you in you future endeavors. Please study it carefully, and consult it before rebooting another comic title. If you still wish to apologize for “Heroes Reborn,” you can do so by emailing me at YellowHatGuy@gmail.com.

Let’s make things right.

Sincerely,

Ryan Coons

Then, I slipped my business card in between the pages, to make sure that Liefeld knew my name, website, email address, and cell phone number. Then I put his gift in a nice bag…

…and I was ready.

“So, you’re going through with this?”

“I have too. It needs to be done,” I said.

“What are you going to say to him?” asked August.

“I’m not going to say anything,” I told him. “I’m just going to set it in front of him, and then walk away.”

“…and then what?” asked August.

“I don’t care,” I sad. “I don’t care what happens. You can watch if you like.”

I started sweating pretty bad, and started to hyperventilate. “You okay Coons? You gonna make it?” said August.

Immediately, I regain my composure.

“No, I have to do this. I’ve waited thirteen years for this,” I tell August.

So I walked over to Rob Liefeld, who was busy ignoring everyone in the entire convention center. I set the package in front of him, and patted it a few times, and the walked away. According to Mike, the following ensued:

“Rob didn’t look up, but the bald guy did, and pulled it out and showed it Liefeld. He shook his head and got all pissed off. Then the bald dude opened it up and red the inscription, and busted out laughing, and laughed for like, five minutes straight, and Liefeld’s face just tightened up and he just got more and more pissed off.”

I’m not a bad guy. All I want is an apology.

I had major plans for July 11. We’re set that Saturday aside for celebrating my birthday, and I had a full schedule of fun planned. I was going to a karate seminar at August’s new dojo, go to a cookout, watch UFC 100, and get the fuck drunk.  I was only able to do three of those.

About three hours into our training, Mr. Capella was having us work on harai goshi. I was going pretty well. I was a judo player when I was studying at Oxford*, and harai goshi was one of my signature moves. I was kind of leery when people were practicing on me, because four years and nine days earlier, I had dislocated my left shoulder in a harai goshi accident.

I was practicing with August for a while, then I went to work with Joe for a bit. He was throwing me, but it wasn’t harai goshi. He was having problems with working the swinging leg into the equation, as Joe throws are typically of the “pick them up and drop them” variety. They work, but tits not compatible with the sweeping part, which makes harai goshi a faster and more brutal throw.

In order to help Joe get the feel of rolling the opponent over the hip,  Mr. Capella was showing him how to do seoi otoshi, which is basically the standard body drop (tai otoshi) executed from a front stance rather than a side-facing stance.

Seoi otoshi is a good move to have.  Seoi nage, the standard judo throw, can be easily countered if your opponent places the palm his hand on your hip when you comes in to throw him. This way, you never get close enough to have good leverage, and you opponent retains his balance, making him impossible to throw. If this counter is used you on,  the setup for seoi nage can quickly be changed to a seoi otoshi setup, allowing you to counter the counter.

Rather than pulling me straight forward, Joe pulled at an angle, so rather than fall forward, I fell at and angle. On my way down, my arm hit his knee.

I laid face down on the mat motionless.

“Ahhhh,” I said lackadaisically. I didn’t feel a thing, but I knew something was wrong. My arm was numb and paralyzed. I couldn’t feel my arm, but if I could have felt my arm,  it would’ve hurt.

That’s when my day got weird.