Let’s start with food*. Labor Day weekend was delightful for me because I got to eat tasty food with a variety of old friends. But the biggest food news this month is a new hip-hop album. Torrentz, the rap supergroup I sometimes work with, has released a food-themed album called The Big Kahuna. I’ve got verses on a couple songs. Every track on this album is food-related hip-hop, and the whole album is free to download. Which means if you don’t hate hip-hop and food, you should give it a listen to see if you like it.

Finances are tricky. Mine, naturally, remain sub-optimal**. But I wrote an epic limerick about the crumbling finances of America, which was recently published in the Providence Journal under the title of Debt Be Not Proud.

Still, I’m mostly trying to focus on having fun***. September is our annual Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge, which we’re currently right in the middle of. By far my most anticipated gaming event of any year, and one of my favorite events of the year overall. For those of you wonder if having to write about games as a job has diminished my enjoyment of board gaming: Nope.

Speaking of fun, I’m still enjoying the other comedic stuff I’m doing. My most recent humor column was a Back to School Glossary for the young and old. And between working with my improv troupe and doing stand-up comedy, I have a number of performances coming up — including a fundraiser for some folks in Williamstown who were displaced from their homes due to Hurricane Irene and the associated flooding.

Sometimes it’s hard to write a good conclusion****.

* If I had a nickel for every time I said this, I’d be a wealthy man.

**** If I had a nickel for every time I said this,….

No, that’s not a typo. I don’t make tyops.* I’m talking about Woe. As in, Woe is Me. Or to explain more accurately, Mug of Woe, the hilarious new book of true embarrassing** stories, includes a story by yours truly. Also, their website has a spotlighted contributor each week, and this week it is me. So go take a look at the site for Mug of Woe, and if you’re looking for a “Chicken Poop for the Soul” sort of book, consider getting yourself a copy. (After you buy all of my books, if you don’t already own them. Priorities.)

Anyway, we’re now in August. I’ve always liked August, but I have to admit, August is a weird month. One of those months in the middle you sort of skip over in planning, because it’s neither summer nor fall. Well, I didn’t skip over it entirely. I played lots of board games. Yet more Scepter of Zavandor (a favorite), some Gates of Loyang, and some Nightfall. Speaking of boardgames, I am still writing both boardgame strategy and boardgame reviews.

But I’ll admit, I’m excited that we’re only one month away from the Fourth Annual Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge. Related to gaming, but unrelated to boards, I just have to say the announced always-online requirement for Diablo III significantly reduces the chances I’ll end up buying the game at full price. When I play D2 and BNet keeps dropping me, I can still play single-player instead. Worthwhile purchase. Without that option… not so much. (RMAH, on the other hand, I do not care about.)

Also I like cheese. The other night my partner made dinner and told me, “Yo dawg, I heard you liked cheese, so I put some cheese on your cheese…” I am a lucky man.

*I like that this is one letter away from “tyoops”, which makes me think someone is in the middle of typing a quick thank-you to someone when they accidentally knock a pile of papers off their desk.

***I would prefer an Otto-spell-checker, wherein a German man with a big bushy moustache looks over my shoulder and points to each mistake and says, “Das ist wronk!” (I am presuming that “wronk” is German for “wrong”, based on my knowledge of German that comes from bad action films.)

Heaven and Hell are on my mind tonight, like the angel and devil that sit over my shoulders and tell me to do things. Actually, angel and devil aren’t quite right. It’s more like the productivity cheerleader over one shoulder, and the other shoulder has a guy who just wants to watch Daily Show episodes online and play old video games*.

Also, I might be thinking of Heaven and Hell because today (July 31, 2011) is the scheduled date of the apocalypse, according to some very scientific calculations that I made up in a column titled Apocalypse Soon. Some say the world will end in ice, some in fire**, and if it ends in fire, you’ll want my tips for staying cool.

But the main reason I’m thinking of Heaven and Hell is because I experienced them both this weekend.

Friday was Comedy Heaven. Performing locally just a few minutes from home, my improv troupe and I put on a fabulous show, culminating in an incredible musical nightmare scene where a teddy bear came to life, poisoned the dog, revealed itself as a demon, and was killed by earl grey. And then I had a 10-minute set during the stand-up portion that went very well, everyone laughing at all of my jokes.

Saturday was Comedy Hell. As the opening act, I had 15 minutes of material prepared. I arrived at the (farther afield) venue to find the headliner had an emergency, and I was the whole show. I did 15-20 minutes of surefire material, and the audience was dead like Jerry Garcia. The only thing they’d responded to was my rap, so after a brief intermission, I came back and did a lot of freestyle rapping, but even that did not impress them. An hour after I’d stepped on stage, I’d exhausted all my material and my voice, and judging from audience reaction you wouldn’t think I’d outperformed the salad.***

I think any comedian has stories of comedy heavens and comedy hells. I sure hope to get more heaven stories soon. But I guess I better hurry up; I hear the apocalypse is today.

*Like Diablo2, while I wait for Diablo3 to come out. Oh, Diablo… maybe it is a devil on that shoulder.

***To be fair, burlesque is always popular, so people like to watch salad dressing.

June seems to have escaped me. Which makes me feel lame because it should not be that difficult for me to make one post a month. And yet, here we are. I suppose I could have done some backdating* and pretended I was on time, but June just flew by and I have to admit it.

To be fair, part of the reason is that I spent the last week of June in California at my brother’s wedding. You could read about my anticipation of the trip or even some of my trip highlights. But basically, the weather was consistently nice, there was copious tasty Mexican food, and my brother got married.

Now it’s back home, and trying to catch up on everything I’ve fallen behind on. Thankfully I managed to write the latter column while on vacation, and had finished my June submissions to the About.com boardgame site before I left, but I still feel like I wasn’t done with June yet. June could get 40 days, and that would be okay**.

Meanwhile, it’s not as if I’m starting July yet. Coming off the tail of a flight, I now have friends from afar in visiting for the 4th of July festivities.*** So it’ll probably be mid-July before I settle down and re-engage with the world around me. But in the meantime, there are copious amounts of food, friends, and fireworks, and two out of three ain’t bad.

*Not to be confused with Back Dating.

It’s a shame I was out of town for Spring. See, I’d gone to visit some friends on Friday, and it was suddenly a beautiful Spring day, after many months of winter and then a week of rain. And then when we returned two days later, it was 86 degrees outside and blazing hot summer sun. Basically, the Berkshires only gets a few days of Spring each year, and I’m sorry to have missed them. But no matter; enjoying the month anyway.

So tonight we’re sitting on the couch watching an action-packed movie with various things exploding and heavy gunfire in the middle of what is supposed to be a tense action sequence, and I realize that my partner and I are having a conversation about Spanish etymology.* This is indicative of something, which I had initially suspected might be the lack of acting talent** in the film we were watching, but which I eventually decided was simply the fact that my life is awesome.

Case in point: I’m now officially a Board Game Reviewer for About.com. For those of you keeping track, that means I now am a professional reviewer of board games, books, and restaurants. All I have to do is wait for someone to pay me to review my friends, and I will officially be a professional reviewer of everything I love.

Sure, it may not pay very well, but there’s something to be said for job satisfaction. I enjoy having a humor column where I can write about Tolstoy and truth if I feel like it. Or, if I’m feeling sillier, I can write about my propensity to consume questionable food. I’m pretty much living the dream***.

When I was young, I told myself one day I’d be fabulously wealthy and live in a house with a big room filled with food, and a big room filled with games. Well, here I am in a tiny victorian house, but it does have a pantry filled with food, and I do have a room filled with many, many boardgames. And heck, if one considers my friends rather than my finances, I would even account myself wealthy.

Of course, that kind of wealth doesn’t pay the bills, so don’t forget to buy my books.

****

*”Fuego” meaning fire, not only as in the sense of burning flame, but also in the sense of “to fire a gun”. This seemed like an odd coincidence to us. But the word “droit” in French means not only “right” as in the opposite of left, but also human rights. So maybe these bizarre connections are the same between languages sometimes. Then again, “watch” in French is “montre”, which means “show”, which is the opposite. So who knows. I suppose it’s possible the movie just used a crappy not-in-context translation. Or maybe fuego is like droit. I don’t know.

**Sylvester Stallone is probably not someone who springs to mind as a good actor. But then again, he did a quite decent job in comparison to Arnold Schwarzenegger. I guess when you’re making a film where the budget all went towards explosions and car chases, acting talent and non-sucky endings fall in the category of the Expendables.

***And not that one where you’re late for your final exam and also you forgot your pants.

****This footnote isn’t related to the entry, just closes it, but I wonder if all blogs have to either end up self-absorbed or talking about politics. Maybe next month I’ll write about politics. I suppose I could share rejected jokes with you, like my friend who talks about anime all the time who I call “The Last Earbender”.

Normally I would deal with the arrival of National Poetry Month by writing some sort of poetic blogpost, but frankly, I’m already writing enough poems at the moment. See, if you live in the Berkshires, you may be familiar with the annual WordXWord Festival in August. Well, the organizers of that festival have put together a blog and for National Poetry Month, they’ve asked a few different poets to write a poem a day all through April. And yes, I’m mentioning it here because I’m one of those poets, and I’m mentioning it now because I’m pleased with my most recent poem. But you should look through all the days, and all the poets, which include names you might have heard of like Taylor Mali, and names you might not have heard of but whose poetry you might quite enjoy nonetheless.

External accountability is a good thing for me. I’ve noticed that without it, my default is perhaps not to be very productive.* Left to my own devices**, I play a lot of games and don’t write as much as I perhaps ought. That’s why I’m delighted to have appeared in some publications this year. One of my poems appears in the first issue of Moral Relativism Magazine, which is a great joy to me since it lets me pretend that my philosophy degree is finally coming in handy. The poem itself is not readable online, but since 30 of my poems will be on the WordXWord site linked in the previous paragraph, I don’t feel too guilty.

And, while I very rarely write fiction, one of my short stories appears in the new Damn Faeries collection of short fantasy. So all of that is sort of nice for me, since it allows me to point to things I’m writing out in the world. Sure, I still have my local humor column, but I fear I may have alienated some of my readers with my April Fools column, a joke that ended up going slightly further than I thought it would.

Oh! And I almost forgot the exciting news — I’m now a contributing board game writer for About.com! The past few weeks here have been crazy, but going forward you can expect to see new articles from me on a weekly basis, on topics ranging from Settlers of Catan Strategy to Battleship Rules. At home, of course, we’re still playing all sorts of new board games, from Mines of Zavandor to The Golden City. So now in addition to thinking about games in all my spare time, I’ll be writing about them occasionally as well.

And I can’t help but end with a quatrain
Since it’s poetry month, after all,
And for four-lined rhyme schemes I have got brain,
Even if my metrical sensibilities were largely influenced by the work of the great Ogden Nash, whose metaphorical and versical presence over my work simultaneously casts a great light and an occasional pall.

* Last week I was very productive, but largely what I was producing was phlegm.

** Or even a single device, if that device is the Internet. “De Internet is device,” say the voices in my head.

Well, we’re past the Ides of March. But I still had three or four Caesar salads* in the past two weeks, which were delicious. And unlike most other delicious things I’ve made of late (such as greek meatloaf), with the salads I even feel like I’m eating something healthy.**

Anyway, I have to say, this March has been a fairly eventful month for me. First, I mean that literally — March has been full of events. I did another presentation at a temple for God To Verse, attended a few different birthday parties for good friends, had the usual bunch of gaming events and random gathers. And I also had an enjoyably busy weekend where each day, I was quickly trying to create something to perform that night. Third Fridays of each month are now Comedy Night at Main Street Stage, and March’s edition saw me in the role of both stand-up comedian and improv comedy performer. I love improv because it’s made up on the spot, but I was still honing my stand-up act right before the show.

The next day was a poetry slam, and even though I was only going to be reading two poems, I always feel I should perform at least one new piece whenever I attend a slam. I’d had a vague idea for a while, but hadn’t managed to write anything new. But right before the event was scheduled to start, a bolt of inspiration suddenly struck me, and I realized what I wanted to do with my poem. Sure, I couldn’t figure out how to do it, but I could at least write about what I wanted to do, and thus managed to finish and print my poem and still arrive in time to enter the slam.

Sunday after some logistical snafus, I was slated to attend a friend’s birthday party, and suddenly had the idea that I should bake and bring something interesting. So once again, although it made me late, I did arrive bearing freshly-baked wasabi-sesame-ginger cookies.***

March has just been filled with things. I traveled to Boston and then Rhode Island, doing some research for another RI book. I decided that I have too much stuff, and need to stop acquiring random stuff. Then I ordered another box of board games, because they were on sale, and I’d wanted At the Gates of Loyang for a long time. (Perhaps I can justify that as research too, as I may soon be writing About Boardgames.) Before the month is out, I may go see a poetry reading by Marie-Elizabeth Mali and Taylor Mali, or even go on a bizarre expedition that combines RPGs with speed dating.

Suffice to say, March may only be three days longer than February, but it has certainly felt very full.

*Oddly, the only popular dictator food. Nobody ever orders a Hitler sandwich. I suppose you could argue that the Earl of Sandwich should count, but he wasn’t really a dictator. Although now that I’m thinking about it, perhaps they should make dictator tots.

**Which of course isn’t entirely the case given the copious dressing and cheese. But I guess since there’s some lettuce, I am technically eating something healthy.

***My own recipe, of course. Where by “recipe” I mean “vague idea of three ingredients I wanted together in cookies”.

I just drank some wasabi dust.

You might be wondering why I would do such a thing, and the answer is, it was in my cocktail glass.

Then you might still be wondering why I am drinking wasabi, and additionally wondering why I have a cocktail glass given how infrequently I drink alcohol.* Well, I’ve decided that wasabi peas, sesame sticks, and bits of crystallized ginger make a lovely snack mix, so I had a cocktail glass full of it. But I kept shaking it to mix it up, so a lot of the wasabi coating on the peas all sunk to the bottom. Which meant that after I was done eating everything, there was a bunch of wasabi dust still in the bottom of the glass. Which, since it technically qualifies as food, means I am not allowed to throw it away.**

Anyway, it’s been a good run of wasabi. Previous to the wasabi peas, I had some delicious wasabi peanuts, sent by a kind fellow from BGG.*** And I also acquired the game Wasabi!, which is fairly simple in terms of mechanics, but has lovely art. Where by “lovely”, I mean, “likely to make me hungry because it looks like sushi”.

Had a few good improv performances this month, which is a fine way to start a year. My columns seem to be taken down as fast as I can share them, but at least temporarily you can read my column about Facebook — or as I like to call it, VisageTome.

* I did almost have a drink last week, when I ordered some mead at The Olde Forge. Sadly, they were all out of mead, and so I had water. Apparently the honeymoon is over.

** I operate under a very strict moral code. If perfectly good food is left on the plate, it should either be saved for leftovers or consumed. Yes, I will ask to eat the food left on your plate. I am a delightful companion for dining out.

*** Yes, by now I expect I can just abbreviate BoardGameGeek.com as BGG and you’ll know what I’m talking about. I spend a lot of time there. At this point, when I type “www.” into my browser, it autocompletes with BGG.

For those of us with logistical difficulties, there’s always plenty of worries to go around before any large-scale event. The annual New Years Bash* is as always one of the events I most look forward to each year**, but as usual, roughly nothing seems to be going as planned in terms of who will be where when. I just hope my friend who is supposed to arrive in 12 hours or so still manages to show up then with no difficulty.

But I am skipping over too much. Perhaps I should mention things that have occurred between my previous post and now. For example, I wrote a column about how I’m trying to overcome my addiction to the bottle. And speaking of addictions, I bought some board games from Fantasy Flight during their annual Holiday sale. They are all currently sitting on my couch, as I was already out of shelf space before this purchase. But so far we’ve played Age of Conan (decent), Atlanteon (constant ties are lame), and the World of Warcraft Adventure Game (fun, if more simplistic than WOW:TBG)

Then it was Christmastime, and so it was off to the local Oriental Buffet for my traditional meal. I also wrote some new TSA Christmas songs which you might enjoy. And then the holidays were mostly over, although you should still feel free to peruse my previous post for potential presents to proffer your preferred people.

Of course, chief among said potential presents is From God To Verse, about which I was recently interviewed. There were more things I wanted to say, I am sure, but I am off to prepare to revel in some New Years revelry***, so I hope you all enjoy the dwindling remainder of 2010.

*Hit 2011 with a stick! HIT IT!

**The other being the Alphabetic Boardgaming Challenge.

***“Revel Revel!” (said in Hamburglar voice)

No, not a reference to my music video for Dump Stat, delightful though it is. Of course, I believe there is a magic to rhyme itself, but in this case the two topics are separate.

On the Magic front, recently I’ve been wondering if the way I think about money is related to the way I think about Magic. For example, it’s so easy to make my money disappear; it practically happens without any effort on my part.* But what I was actually thinking about was Magic: The Gathering. See, I’ve always felt that any serious gamers can’t help but look at the world sometimes through the lenses of the games they play the most. And while Magic has roughly a bajillion rules**, the one that has always stuck with me is upkeep.

In the game of Magic, upkeep is something you have to pay at the beginning of each of your turns, and it sucks. It can be anything from life to cards, but is most often mana. Mana that you have to keep paying each turn, and thus can’t spend to cast the really cool cards in your hand. And sometimes there’s even cumulative upkeep, which just gets worse every turn, until attempting to pay for that spell makes it impossible to do anything else.

This is how I view credit card debt. I have avoided getting a credit card largely out of fear of this kind of upkeep, and a supreme dread of credit card debt. And I found myself wondering whether as a group, those who had played Magic seriously were less likely to find themselves in credit card debt that those who had not.*** I don’t think anyone’s going to commission a serious study, but it is something I’m curious about.

Enough of that! Let’s talk about rhyme. Rhyming is fun, that’s why I do it all the time. And just last week, about an hour away, I was performing at the BTF’s Cabaret. There was magic and rhyme, in the form of MacBeth, interspersed with a few bits of rap from Seth. And you might think, “Why tell me about that show? It already happened, so it’s too late to go!” And that’s technically true, but if you haven’t heard, this week Pittsfield is hosting WordXWord. And on Tuesday the 24th at this spoken word festival, you could go and see poetry from the best of fools****.

And speaking of***** rhyme, the book I’ve been working on since 2001 is FINALLY almost ready to release. Yes, God To Verse will, barring unforseen circumstances, be available for purchase on Amazon within a few weeks. Expect a post early in September with lots more details and exhortations for purchase. Meanwhile, please ignore any rumors you may hear about my sub-standard nutrition being again the subject of a column in the Washington Post, and trust my humor column to provide you with accurate information on my commitment to nutrition.

* More accurately, without sufficient effort on my part, it disappears right quick.

** Creature: Serrated Bajillion. 2/2. Tap to cause Wizards of the Coast to drastically revise combat rules yet again.

*** People who foolishly went into debt to feed their Magic addiction notwithstanding.

**** By which of course I mean yours truly, though I don’t mean to praise myself unduly.

***** But no longer in. Because it’s a sin. Damn, I can’t win, I really mean it. Anybody want a peanut?