Author: Dean Brooks

Novelist.

TikTok is Trying to Kill You

On By Dean BrooksLeave a comment
Photo by Mitja Juraja from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-skull-970517/

TikTok is like some kind of fictional mind virus from a dystopian sci-fi novel. 

Except the video app with the psychedelic logo is quite real, and it often targets people with completely insane and sometimes even deadly hashtag trends. 

Like almost every social media app, TikTok operates on an algorithm, curating videos based on a user’s interests. 

But this is an evil algorithm. 

It targets the young. It targets children. The ones who make up most of TikTok’s user base. The app is quite intuitive at collating communities around addictive hashtags, which can lead users being exposed to all sorts of crazy shit. 

Sometimes, this can be a productive thing. For example, “BookTok,” TikTok’s highly active army of book worms, is transforming the publishing industry. I wrote about it in article here.

But goodness on TikTok is purely accidental. There’s also a very dark, very deadly, and very weird side to an app that seems to have sprung straight out of Satan’s asshole. 

Here are just a handful of ways TikTok is trying to kill you:

The Blackout Challenge

Originally known as the equally ominous “Choking Game,” this viral self-strangulation trend has claimed the lives of numerous children over the last few years. 

The idea is simple as it is ghastly. Participants are encouraged to choke themselves in order to to get high, or to fall unconscious, all while on video. People have used belts, ties, ropes, and other devices to purposefully hang themselves in the hunt for internet points. And it’s costing them their lives.

Last July, 2021, an eight-year old girl named Lalani Erika Walton hanged herself with a rope from her bed after absorbing hours of TikTok videos of others attempting the challenge.

Earlier that February, a nine-year old girl named Arriani Jaileen Arroyo also fell victim to the trend. She had used the family dog’s leash to hang herself. Her father found her unresponsive.  

Then later in March, there was a 12-year old boy named Joshua Haileyesus who was rushed to the hospital after being disovered unconscious by his twin brother. He spent 19 days on life support before finally passing away. 

As a child growing up in the ’90s, I remember learning about how you can purposefully choking yourself to get high. But back then you generally only found out about that stuff word of mouth, and usually from some weird kid in a torn up Metallica t-shirt who sat in the back of the class. 

But with TikTok , a bizarre and risky trend like that can spread faster than Covid on a NY subway. For many kids, who are highly impressionable, it seems thrilling and fun. They do it without knowing the enormous risks. And it’s killing them or injuring them for life.

The Fire Challenge

Scratch what I wrote above about TikTok being a dystopian mind virus. It’s more like a digital demon that possesses people.

This trend started from a user who sprayed hairspray onto a mirror, and then lit it on fire to create different designs. Imitators quickly spawned, including Nick Howell, another 12-year old, who wound up burning 35% of his body in March of this year, when he accidentally ignited a bottle of rubing alcohol.

In June of last year, a 13-year-old Oregon girl wound up in the hospital with severe burns on her body due to exploding a bottle of isopropyl alcohol in an effort to mimic the mirror trick. 

But if manipulating people into lighting themselves on fire isn’t ghastly enough, how about — 

The Eye Challenge

Which got people to put bleach in their eyes, which supposedly changes eye color. 

This one, like many of these TikTok fads, started off as a joke from some kid named Greg Lammers trying to show off his cool video editing skills. In his video, Lammers instructed viewers that if you fill a plastic bag with jelly, hand sanitizer, bleach, or shaving cream, and place the bag against an eye, it can change their eye color. After performing the deed, Lammers then cut to a new shot, showing off his supposedly changed eye color. Except he had actually used a contact lens (duh). 

While Lammers never expected his video to go viral, it did. To the tune of 300,000 likes, 25,000 chares, and 3,000+ comments. Imitators then started posting their own attempts at the technique, which only resulted in them burning their eyes. Big surprise. 

The Milk Crate Challenge

This trend blew up about a year ago. People made videos of themselves trying to scale pyramids of milk crates they had cobled together, which often resulted in them falling down and getting injured. Hospitals saw an influx of patients with cracked ribs and other broken bones over the course of the hashtag scourge.  

Like in all the previous deadly and dangerous trends, TikTok made sure to issue a statement about how the app supposedly:

Prohibits content that promotes or glorifies dangerous acts, and we remove videos and redirect searches to our Community Guidelines to discourage such content.

Right. “Prohibits.” Totally. 

The problem is that by the time a trend has become big enough to cause real damage, it’s too late. TikTok was the most popular app in 2021, having been downloaded 3 billion times, and having garnered a mind-blowing 1 billion users. 

One freaking billion! That’s one seventh the world population. 

About a quarter of TikTok users are children or teens ages 10–19, and the kiddos are spending roughly 75 minutes per day on the video-sharing app. Another statistic of note is that the majority of TikTok’s successful ads communicate their message or product immediately. As in like 3 seconds. 

In other words, TikTok is custom built for short attention spans. And because of its ravenously-obsessed youthful users base, a trend, however absurd or dangerous, can spread at the speed of human stupidity (which is WAY faster than light, contrary to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity). Millions of clips are posted daily, and users are often sucked into a rabbit hole of algorithmically curated videos designed to keep them hypnotized. 

There’s no logistical way TikTok could realistically govern or filter out a questionable trend because of the speed at which they grow through the app’s multiverse-sized ecosytem.

So, what is the solution, if any? 

I’m reminded of the thematic summation in the classic Mathew Broderick-starring 1983 film War Games about the Cold War threat of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction.”

“The only winning move is not to play.”

The only way to beat TikTok is to delete the app, and make sure gullible kids can’t see it in the first place. 

Yeah, good luck with that. TikTok and all its poison, is here to stay.

Hot Blonde Bimbo Teachers Can’t Stop Fucking Kids

On By Dean BrooksLeave a comment
Source: Screenshot from Marka Bodine’s YouTube Channel

It’s become a real epidemic in this country. Worse than Covid. Worse than Monkeypox.

In U.S., we are currently suffering an outbreak of super cute, model-quality, bimbo, usully blonde, usually married teachers who can’t stop fucking their male students.

What the hell’s going on?

Now look, as a red-blooded American male, I could sit here and make the obvious joke, all while chortling like Beavis and Butt-head, “Herr-durr, why couldn’t I have had a teacher like that? These boys today are so lucky, heh-heh-heh.”

But this is no laughing matter. This is serious. Chris Hansen, where are you?

The latest episode of As the Hot Femme Pedo Turns completely blew my mind. Check out this summary from Breitbart about 32-year old Marka Bodine:

A former Texas sixth grade teacher will spend two months in prison for having a three-year relationship with one of her students, who was between the ages of 12 and 15 at the time. She will be given until June 2023 to surrender for her brief prison sentence due to the recent birth of her child.

The screenshot source above is no typo. Ms. Bodine has a YouTube channel. There are only a few videos, but it seems she did some for online learning during Covid lockdown. In the video I took the screenshot from, “Week of 3–30–20,” she instructs her students to come up with a “hashtag summary that describes your week.”

Hmm, wonder what sort of hashtag would best describe Ms. Bodine’s last few days. How about #pedoteachergetsoffeasybecauseshesfemale? Too long?

The case against Ms. Bodine started last year. According to affadavits, she went to the principal at her school, Tomball ISD north of Houston, to complain about a 16-year old student of hers who was harassing her and threatening to harm himself.

During the investigation, the student admitted that he’d had a sexual relationship with the teacher that had started when he was 12. The two initially started messaging through Fortnite, then progressed into texting. The relationship turned sexual sometime after the child’s 13th birthday, and continued for several years afterward. She sent 40 nude images to the child, and even moved into the same apartment complex as him. The two had dalliances in her classroom and her car.

Source: Spurstalk

Prosecutors were seeking a minimum of 20 years in prison for the teacher. But in a bad M. Night Shyamalan twist, Ms. Bodine was only handed TWO MONTHS in prison and ten years probation. She doesn’t even have to go to prison right away, due to the recent birth of her child.

Oh yeah, she was preggo, but NOT with her victim’s child. Her huband’s. Who is now her ex-husband.

Damn, imagine getting cucked by a 13-year old. If that ever happend to me, I wouldn’t just get divorced, I’d change my name, get plastic surgery Michael Jackson-style, and move to Brazil.

Ms. Bodine has until June of 2023 to report to prison, giving her a whole year to destroy another innocent life. A ridiculously light sentence when you consider that some of the male perverts snagged on Chris Hansen’s classic To Catch a Predator, and the reboot Hansen Vs. Predator, served years in prison for visiting a decoy after sending explicit texts, without ever having had a physical relationship with an actual flesh and blood minor.

Ms. Bodine banged this kid for three years and only got two months and probation. WTF?

What’s disturbing about this case isn’t just that Ms. Bodine preyed on this child starting from the time he was 12, it’s that she evidently fucked him up so badly psychologically that he threatened to harm himself. There are few intimate details about the nature of the relationship, but it’s not hard to imagine that the kid became helplessly infatuated. Might she have even put off the relationship due to her pregnancy, resulting in the boy’s subsequent mental breakdown? Who knows.

Source: Spurstalk

Of course, this isn’t the first time a blonde bimbo teacher has shagged a minor. It’s become somewhat of a cliche at this point. The website Zimbio has a article titled, “The 50 Most Infamous Female Teacher Sex Scandals.”

Probably the most famous scandal is Mary Kay Letourneau, a Seattle elementary school teacher, who began a relationship with a 13-year old boy way back in 1996. She became pregnant from the teen and gave birth to a girl the following year, after the illicit affair had been discovered. Then she got pregnant again in 1998 with a second daughter from her underage lover. After serving a prison term, Letourneau then actually married her former victim. The couple even threw a “Hot for Teacher Night” at a Seattle bar.

Then there’s the case of Debra Lafave, a 23-year old former model turned Florida teacher who got arrested in 2004 for having sex with with a 14-year old boy. This one gobbled up a ton of media fenzy. Ms. Lafave tried to plead not guilty due to insanity, as she evidently had bipolar disorder. When that didn’t work, her defense attorney even tried to argue that his client was too pretty to go to jail. She later received house arrest, probation, and was forced to register as a sex offender. Later she would whine to Matt Lauer on a Dateline interview about how, like, it’s so hard for her to accept the fact that she’s a predator teacher.

Years later, Matt Lauer would himself get fired from NBC for “inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.”

Which means that Dateline interview may mark the first time where a major network TV report took place in which 100% of the people shown on your screen were psychosexuals.

Source: Dateline NBC

Who knew pervs were such camera hogs, too?

Marka Bodine is just the latest episode in an ongoing sordid trend that’s been largely marginalized and humorized from late night talk shows to Van Halen songs.

For sure, some of the teachers caught for raping minors receive just sentences. But for the most part they get far more leniency than a male predator ever would. And this is even after flagrant and prolonged relationships with minors.

Why the double standard? Why does society put female predators, especially attractive ones, on a pedastal? Why are female child rapists like Lafave given comfortable TV interviews, while male child rapists are treated like a dangerus virus under glass?

Part of it probably comes from a broad societal inability to perceive women as anything but victims when it comes to illicit sexual activity. Obviously, in nearly all sexual assault cases, women are the victims. Women simply “can’t” be the aggressors due to the biological aspect of sexual intercourse.

This makes the cases of female teachers banging minors outliers. They’re seen more as a curiosity than as a legitimate crime.

But there’s another aspect. In many of these cases, I noticed that the female teachers often maintained an ongoing “normal-esque” relationship with their underage victim, which makes it seem like both parties were fully consenting. Of course, a child cannot give consent, even if it is a horny willing male with raging hormones.

Rather than being perceived for what it is — a horrendous sex crime, these female teachers are often excused for falling victim to temptation.

Why I Don’t Drink Alcohol

On By Dean Brooks2 Comments
Photo by Marta Dzedyshko from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cognac-on-cut-glass-bottom-placed-on-table-6341420/

Except very rarely, as in once a year.

The Acceptable Poison 

I could probably count on one hand how many alcoholic drinks I’ve had in the past six years. Drinking is like my Halley’s Comet.

I remain steadfastly unswayed by the festive environments of Christmas, New Year’s, St. Patrick’s Day, and my birthday. 

Even watching my beloved Eagles win the Super Bowl four years ago was a dry affair. I only had one beer — the East Coast favorite Yuengling — the next day, during lunch, and only because a family member paid for it.

This is apparently “bizarre” and “abnormal” behavior, even for someone middle-aged like myself. Commercials (especially during NFL season) constantly tell me how freaking AWESOME it is to drink, and how good-looking drinkers are, and how it’s maybe even actually healthy. Every once in a while some article pops up touting the benefits of drinking a glass of wine a day. No doubt paid for by Big Grape.

Maybe drinking alcohol in moderation is healthy. It’s no doubt a good social lubricant. You see all those happy couples out there strolling down the sidewalk and holding hands? I bet half of them are only together because of alcohol. According to Jerry Seinfeld, it’s the only way ugly people can date.

Guess that means there’s no hope for me. 

::sad slide whistle::

The “Twilight Zone Realization”

It wasn’t always like this. Seven years ago, I used to drink strongly and regularly. Brandy was my drink of choice. I liked it because it’s heavy and warm. I find beer too fizzy, stimulative, and inconsequential. Beer is like the fast food of drinks. Mixed drinks like rum or vodka are too “party mode” for my liking.

But brandy. VSOP. Middle shelf quality. The honey-brown bottle with the blue label felt like a little trophy in my hand on my twice-weekly trips to the liquor store. Occasionally I’d sample the top-shelf cognac buys when I felt my liver needed something higher class. 

Brandy was perfect for me. It felt right. Classy. Aristrocratic, even.

Said Benjamin Guggenheim on the Titanic: “We are dressed in our best and prepared to go down like gentlemen. But we would like a brandy.”

One of my favorite movie quotes. Though soon it would prove a sad metaphor for my life. Guy, sitting there alone, enjoying a drink, while everything around him sinks. 

Unlike beer, which intoxicates you incrementally. Or party drinks, that bomb you into submission. Brandy’s effect is subtle, cumulative, and compounding. Almost tranquil. It sneaks up on you.

You can sip brandy and gently coast away into oblivion. 

But after a while I came to one of those “Twilight Zone realizations.” You know, where the main character finally figures out what’s really going on, and their whole world gets upended.

I realized I was using alcohol as a crutch. As an escape hatch from reality. And that rather than it enhancing my life in any way, it was actually causing me to atrophy and isolate.

In low moderation, alcohol can be a fun spice. But for the most part, it’s like a garrote slowly squeezing the life out of you.

Alcohol deadens the senses. It distracts you from improving and adapting your situation.

So, I quit. Not gradually. Immediately. 

I’m a good quitter. I had quit smoking cigarettes almost ten years before, cold turkey. Believe me, it wasn’t easy giving up my Lucky Strikes. 

At the time, I couldn’t exactly articulate why I needed to quit. I just knew I had to. I don’t think I was technically an alcoholic. I would sometimes go on “purges” for days or even weeks, before eventually returning to Inebriation Island. And once I started back up, it never stopped at just one drink. 

But I could have “quit anytime I wanted.” I mean, sort of. 

Alcohol no doubt was exerting far too much gravity in my life. But not all the reasons I quit were noble or life affirming. Some were just practical. Some were even vain. But here they are:

Seven and a Half Reasons Why I Don’t Drink (except very rarely)

1.) I’m cheap as hell.

I don’t like spending money on frivilous things. And for me, alcohol is about as frivilous as you can get. You’re blowing wads of cash on bitter-tasting flavored water that will just give you a headache. I think my brandy used to cost me $16–$18 a bottle. At twice weekly, that was almost $40. $160 a month. Not big money, sure. Some people spend that on porn subscriptions. But it’s money for which you get nothing of value back in return. At least if you throw money away on lottery tickets there’s a microscopic chance you jump a few tax brackets. But booze? It’s guaranteed waste. 

And that’s even if you’re a budget-conscious drinker, like I was, and you imbibe at home. If you go out to bars and clubs, the costs can balloon ridiculously.  

2.) I don’t like feeling like shit.

Maybe alcohol doesn’t agree with me on a genetic level. Some people mix with it, others don’t. Alcohol doesn’t make me want to party or hang out with people. It generally just makes me tired, and when drank to excess, it is guaranteed to make me feel like terrible the next day. Who wants to feel like they got run over by a steamroller when they wake up in the morning?

In addition to the physical side effects, there are the mental ones, too. Drying out during the day always made me feel anxious and volatile. Because drinking dehydrates you, the whole next day you’re playing the hydration catch-up game to get yourself back to equilibrium. And since you’re technically in chemical withdrawal, you tend to rush through things so you can get back to the bottle. It’s a cruel cycle. Even though you know it’s wrecking you, you have to keep it going in order to feel “normal.”

3.) I like to (try) get a good night’s rest.

Alcohol interrupts your brain’s ability to get deep sleep. The brain needs that serious downtime in order to “wash” itself. No joke. The brain emits cerebrospinal fluid like a car wash all over your cranial lobes while you sleep. Think of it as cleaning out the gunk between the gears of your mind. But even small amounts of alcohol can blow up that cycle, and make it impossible for your brain to scrub itself clean. What happens when you don’t change your car’s oil filters regularly? Your engine eventually locks up. It’s the same idea with your brain. When it’s never given the chance to clean itself, it malfunctions. This is why alcoholics are often so irritable and can’t think straight. They’re literally working with a busted machine inside their head.

Good sleep is hard enough to come by, for me. I’m lucky if I can get a solid 6 hours of quality shut-eye. I don’t need booze wrecking what little sleep I might be able to get. Plus, I like a well-scrubbed brain.

4.) I don’t like being dependent on chemicals or drugs for anything.

That goes for medications, also. I don’t even like taking aspirin or cold medicine unless I really need to. It’s not a macho thing. It’s a control thing. I like to remain sovereign over my mental faculties at all times. I think it’s why even when I did drink heavily, I had a knack for toeing up to the line, but rarely ever going full-blown Chernobyl. Even as a habitual drinker then, I stayed in the driver’s seat as much as possible.

5.) I just don’t have the time for it.

Looking back, I don’t know how I ever made time to drink. It’s funny. When you’ve got a good buzz on, time just melts away, and before you know it, it’s 2 AM, and you’re realizing you have to get up that morning for work. As in like four hours.

Alcohol is like a black hole. It sucks up everything in your life, and suddenly, everything revolves around the bottle. You plan your whole day by it. Work is just something you do before you can drink. Eating is just something to be gotten out of the way so you can drink. You ignore healthy, productive activities and hobbies and even people in order to reserve time for drinking. 

It’s a pure time suck. And a life suck. It’s a true vampire. Life is short enough not to spend 20% of every day (or more) half-conscious. When I think back to how much of my life I wasted avoiding reality behind a bottle, it honestly hurts.

6.) Alcohol withdrawal is a motherfucker. 

It can actually kill you. While I never got to the point where not drinking was a threat to my life, I had some uncomfortable experiences during my occasional cessation periods. A burning sensation in my chest. Heart palpitations. Sweating. Inability to sleep. Anxiety. Cold symptoms. Even hallucinations. I remember one night tossing and turning in bed, and seeing an owl, or some kind of bird, perched near the ceiling, partially hidden in shadow.

None of that shit is appealing whatsoever, obviously. 

It’s crazy the heavy toll alcohol extracts, even when you’re not drinking and making the effort to clean up. It’s like trying to get out of the mob. Better be ready to take a beating. It’s no wonder so many get sucked back in after sobering up for a short spell. 

7.) I value my health, and…

Alcohol is basically all sugar. And when you drink, you usually eat like shit on top of it. Or you lose your appetite the next morning because of the hangover. You’re throwing your body’s chemistry and digestive rhythm out of whack. You’re packing on excess calories. It’s why so many guys (and gals) get that gross fanny pack gut the more they sling those six packs around. 

And if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the sad sack potbelly look that frankly too many fucking middle-aged dudes are bizarrely okay with having these days. 

Can’t be me, man.

7.5.) …drinking ages you

I don’t get it. Aging already degrades your appearance no matter how well you take care of yourself, or how evolved your genes. But alcohol puts rocket thrusters on the whole crypt-keeper look-a-like deal. 

It dries out your skin. 

It can give you diabetes. 

It ruins your internal organs. 

It eats your brain. 

It chews up your heart. 

And it ravages your biochemistry, until your body thinks it actually needs alcohol to function.  

Life is short enough. You’ll lose your youthful bloom and looks fast enough already. Why the hell would you hasten the process?

Nowadays

Life is better now without alcohol. I don’t miss the sickness that drinking ultimately became. I value the ability to think clearly and cleanly. When you’re younger there’s a tendency to want to run and hide from life. To cope somehow with raw reality. I think this is why binge drinking, drugs, bad relationships, or sex, can become such pitfalls. They’re escape portals from the scary real world. 

But as you get older, and the patterns of life become more familiar, you start to lose that hopeless lost at sea feeling that oftentimes plagues you when you’re just starting out. You start to appreciate things as they are. You care less about what others think. You learn to value what actually matters. And you start to lose that fear and anxiety and angst that powers a lot of bad decisions. 

Sometimes, you even look forward to dealing with problems, rather than running saway from them. You start to see them more as puzzles or opportunities rather than evil afflictions. 

This doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process.  

I’m not an anti-alcohol born-again evangelist, or something. There’s nothing morally wrong with drinking. I still enjoy an occasional beer, usually with family, or for special occassions. It’s just alcohol is something that doesn’t jive with my programming. I realized that for me, it’ll always be a net negative. 

Plus, and this was hard to accept, but it’s too much of an addictive temptation. When I drank regularly, I could never just have one glass of brandy. It was at least three to four, until it knocked me out. It’s not easy to recognize a weakness in yourself, but eventually I had to admit the truth. But fortunately, one of my strengths is being able to pivot strongly once I’ve (finally) realized I’ve taken a wrong turn, and then learning from the mistake.

I’m glad alcohol is out of my life. Lucidity really is an underappreciated state of mind. 

‘Kuffs’: Overlooked Crime Comedy or Pure ’90s Cringe?

On By Dean BrooksLeave a comment
Source: Universal Pictures

Believe it or not, there was a time when Christian Slater was considered the King of Cool. A sort of poor man’s Jack Nicholson crossed with a cartoonier James Dean. Slater blew onto the scene in 1988’s Heathers, a dark comedy about a sexy “heroic” outcast who tries to blow up a high school.

Yeah, try making that one today.

Then came a turn as the troubled Will Scarlett in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, aka the guy Kevin Costner shoots through the hand with an arrow.

Slater would solidify himself further in 1993’s True Romance, the Quentin Tarantino-penned romantic crime drama with one of the most hilarious monologues regarding world history ever delivered. Why couldn’t my high school teachers could have made learning that delightfully scintillating?

But before going on the run with 25-year old future Oscar winner Patricia Arquette, Slater would have to do penance with a sorta funny, half-baked, dimly-plotted crime comedy with 15-year old future Resident Evil fierce femme, Milla Jovovich.

I’m talking about 1992’s dumped-in-January release Kuffs.

A movie with the ultimate ’90s tagline: “When you have attitude who needs experience?”

To which I say, “When you’ve got Rotten Tomatoes, why watch Kuffs?”

This is a brief look back at one of the minor forgotten films of the crime comedy (“cromedy”) era that was big in the ’80s through the early ’90s, until about when Tarantino (and better taste) took over and evolved the sub-genre.

I remember Kuffs popping up once on either TBS Superstation, or USA, or some non-premium cable channel back in the late ’90s. Either on a Sunday afternoon or evening. It was an oddball change-up from the usual rotation of Leon: The Professional, that weekend’s godawful Steven Seagal film, Die Hard II, and Falling Down.

Kuffs must not have proven popular even in syndication, as I only remember it coming on once, and then the channels promptly returning to Michael Douglas machine-gunning a phone booth. For the longest time I wasn’t even sure it was actually real, and not something I’d mixed up with another film. All I remembered was a scene where Slater answers the door without a shirt on (with attitude).

Then a few weeks ago, for whatever reason, the title Kuffs came to my mind, and I had to investigate the Mystery of the Shirtless Slater. So, just like a hard-boiled detective cracking open a cold case, I did a rewatch.

Source: Universal Pictures

So, what the hell is Kuffs all about?

George Kuffs is an unemployed high school dropout loser living in San Francisco who, of course, has a hot girlfriend whom he’s just knocked up. Terrified of taking responsibility for a family, he bails on the poor college girl, leaving a hastily-scribbled note about how she’s better off without him. He high-tails it to his older brother, 30-year old Brad, a respected officer in the Patrol Special Police, and begs for a loan so he can flee to Brazil.

The San Francisco Patrol Special Police is a unique privatized neighborhood security force that is not an offical part of the city police. Officers are given charters, or territories, and provide security to their residents for a rate.

After failing to secure a loan, George finds his brother gunned down brutally inside a church by a wackily-dressed hitman. Then, to make matters worse, he watches the killer walk free, in perhaps one of the most brain-dead plot points I’ve ever seen in a film. A city prosecutor (I think, it’s never made clear) explains that because Kuffs didn’t actually see the guy pull the trigger, the suspect can’t be held. This is despite Kuffs running into the church and seeing the guy standing there literally holding the gun over Brad’s body, and then the thug actually dropping the gun on the floor. I guess fingerprints, ballistics, and the fact that Kuffs sees the guys face doesn’t matter? I know it’s San Fransico, but come on, man.

Anyway, after grieving for all of two seconds over his dead brother, Kuffs finds out he’s inherited Brad’s district, and decides to straighten up his life, become a private cop, and get justice for his brother’s murder. But he soon finds out the hit on his sibling was just part of a deeper conspiracy that involves an evil businessman and $50 million in stolen art.

When it comes to these mid-’80s to early ’90s crime comedies, there are tiers. On the high end, you’ve got your fan-favorite mega-grossers like Beverly Hills Cop, 48 Hours, and even Die Hard, if you count it as a comedy. Just below that, you’ve got your quality dark comedies like Miami Blues and Falling Down. Then you’ve got the experimental cool dude flicks like Desperado and True Romance.

Kuffs sits in the medicore middle, with other forgotten cromedies. It’s not in bad company. It’s got flicks like Bill Murray’s Quick Change and Robin Williams’ Cadillac Man hanging out with it. It’s quite a precipitous drop below, where we find appallingly outrageous anti-classics like Samurai Cop and Hard Ticket to Hawaii. The latter of heavy doobie-smoking skateboard assassin fame.

Kuffs by itself is not really nostalgic for me. I only saw it once, and was left mostly unimpressed, even as a credulous teen who, at the time thought Steven Seagal was the bomb. But the spirit of the cromedy genre, and the time period from which it hails, is endearing. Back then you could get away with a ridiculous premise. All you needed was a rascally underdog protagonist, stick in a bad Hans Gruber Xerox for your villain, mix in some snarky atittude, and there you go.

It was a simpler time. Before the internet. Before audiences got savvier and actually expected better, or at least bigger. Nowadays, you’d likely only see something like Kuffs dropped on a streaming service late at night like an abandoned firehouse baby. Though the sub-genre has had its big-budget ressurgences, like 2010’s The Other Guys, the 21 Jump Street reboot, and Kevin Hart’s Ride Along.

So, what does Kuffs have going for it?

Not so much its humor, which mostly sputters. It’s largely off-putting and tonally jarring. It struggles to be edgy and irreverent, but becomes undone by over the top silliness. There’s a sleeping pill sequence that belongs in a 2000s gross-out comedy. Late in the story there’s a drug-sniffing dog joke that looks like it would have been right at home in Beethoven. And for some reason uncooked turkey becomes a recurring gag. The attempts to be clever and self-aware generally come off more as cringy and juvenile. It might have worked as a dark comedy. But it’s like the writer and director just decided to hell with it, and went with every bizarre and weird impulse, resulting in a brash and stiched-together final product. Which is odd considering both of them were Oscar nominees from previous ventures.

It has one somewhat clever scene. Kuffs and his real cop handler bicker in the car, and their swear words are bleeped out. This was done supposedly to poke fun at the PG-13 rating, which only affords a single utterance of the F-word. Though the meta mockery seems misplaced, random, and unearned.

Then there’s Kuffs’ Ferris Bueller-esque fourth wall breaking throughout the film, which I actually didn’t mind that much. Slater is no Woody Allen, à la Annie Hall, but his smarmy charisma works for the sub-genre. It reminded me a lot of Deadpool, actually. I guess every decade is entitled to its own smart ass who talks directly to the camera.

Source: MillaJ.com

Lastly, I’d be remiss not to talk about a little icky something. That wasn’t a typo up top. Milla Jovovich, the college-aged love interest, really was 15 during principal photography, while Slater was either 21 or 22. And the movie has several passionate make-out scenes. Yes, a full grown man sucks face with a minor in a mainstream studio film. Kind of hard to believe what movie studios got away with back then, and what audiences either didn’t know about, or maybe didn’t care about. Imagine pulling that with the Moral Outrage Twitter Brigade today.

Overall, I designate Kuffs as a quintessential ’90s cringe cromedy. Worth a watch to get that unique crime comedy flavor.

What’s Riskier: Marriage, or Living Next Door to Jeffrey Dahmer?

On By Dean BrooksLeave a comment
Source: https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/jeffrey-dahmer

Over the course of 13 years, Jeffrey Dahmer, also known as the “Milwaukee Cannibal,” killed 17 people. He targeted mainly young men, finding them in bathhouses, and luring them back to his house, where he would drug, rape, and murder them.

Hey, what else are you going to do for kicks living in Wisconsin, right?

Sometimes, if Jeffrey was feeling in need of further stimulation, he’d disembowel them, too. He was also a necrophiliac, and liked to preserve the body parts of his victims. When he was finally caught by police in 1991, he was in the process of building a throne made of human skulls.

Wow, that’s pretty creative, to be honest. I can’t even put together a 100-piece puzzle without having a mental breakdown, and this guy’s over here building Skeletor’s throne.

But even Jeffrey Dahmer, human plague that he was, can’t hold a candle to something far more horrifying —

The institution of marriage.

Marriage, in sharp contrast to the creepy bespectacled image of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, is often portrayed as a blissful union between two people who love each other, want to spend the rest of their lives together, and may even want to raise children together.

In reality, marriage is responsible for untold misery, death, and destruction, especially when it leads to divorce/separation (which is often).

So, what’s riskier: Getting hitched, or living next door to Jeffrey Dahmer?

Jeffrey committed some of his murders while living in his grandmother’s house in West Allis, Wisconsin. However, while Jeffrey killed hitchhikers and gay men in bathhouses, it’s very important to note that he never killed anyone living right next door to him. He never even killed his own grandmother, who finally asked him to move out due to the “funny smells” coming from the basement of her house.

Thesis: I contend that marriage is by far riskier and deadlier than living next door to Jeffrey Dahmer.

Don’t believe me? Well, let’s take a look at some alarming statistics about murder and marriage.

According to The Atlantic, which reported a study by the CDC, 55% of murders of American women are committed by an “intimate partner,” meaning a former or current romantic partner, or the partner’s family or friends.

Source: Huffington Post

The study goes on to report some more disturbing facts:

  • A third of the time an argument precipitated the murder, with 12% of the deaths associated with jealousy.
  • 15% of the women killed were actually pregnant at the time of death.
  • And almost half the murders were committed with a gun.

It gets even worse. Back in 2019, the Huffington Post, citing a study by Northeastern University, reported that domestic violence murders are on the rise.

  • In 2014, there were 1875 people killed by an intimate partner.
  • In 2017, that number rose to 2,237, almost a 20% increase.

Then there’s this startling little nugget:

  • “Every 16 hours, according to one estimate, a woman is fatally shot by her boyfriend, husband or ex.”

Meanwhile, here’s a few fast facts about Jeffrey’s serial killing career:

  • It lasted 13 years, between 1978 and 1991.
  • 17 boys and men were murdered, often quite gruesomly.
  • Most of Jeffrey’s victims were non-white, including a 13-year old Laotian boy.

Now, let’s consider a few points.

According to Legal Jobs, the average length of a marriage in the U.S. is only 8.2 years. That’s almost five years less than Jeffrey’s serial killing enterprise, which shows that unlike all these short-timer married folks, Mr. Dahmer possessed a capability for long-term committment. Had Jeffrey not been caught in 1991, he’d likely have just kept on killing. And why not? The dude was clearly awesome at it. Whereas it appears most people are looking to bail on their marriages A.S.A.P.

‘Till death due us part? LOL, yeah right. What a sick joke.

It’s a sad testament to today’s society when a serial killer like Jeffrey Dahmer is a greater model of reliability and dedication than the institution of marriage itself.

Furthermore, unlike with marriage, Jeffrey was a danger exclusively to males. If you’re female, he was as harmless as a Lifetime movie, though certainly far more entertaining.

But all joking aside, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR), in 2019, 2.2 million women were married, a rate that has been stable since reaching a 45-year low in 2010.

Source: NCFMR

Now, factoring in some of the above-mentioned statistics concerning intimate partner homocides, if on average 2,000 women are killed every year by their SOs, while about 2 million women are married every year, that means a woman has roughly a one tenth of one percent chance of being murdered by marriage.

Mind you, she plays those odds every year she stays married. Hmm, maybe there is something to that 8.2 year average divorce deadline, afterall.

Only about 5% of murdered men are offed by their romantic partners. In fact, about 500-750 married men are whacked each year. That works out to under three hundredths of one percent of men married each year being killed by a spouse.

Now, those numbers may look pitifully low. But they are orders of magnitude higher than Jeffrey’s body count. Jeffrey only killed 17 guys over a 13-year period. In that same period of time, marriage might have killed almost 26,000 people. Roughly the population of Neenah, Wisconsin, a small town 84 miles from Jeffrey’s birthplace of Milwaukee, and famous for making manhole covers.

Now, let’s a break from all the murder and mayhem, and discuss something far more important.

Money.

Did you know that the cost of an average wedding AND an average divorce both come out to about $20,000? Combined, that comes to a grand total of $40,000, which is just below the median income in the U.S. of $44,225, according to Zippia. For comparison’s sake, the average person only loses about $500 gambling in Las Vegas per trip.

Man, marriage can end up being a pretty big blow to one’s net worth.

But you know who never reduced anyone’s federal income tax bracket? Good ol’ “Kill ’em cheap” Jeffrey Dahmer, that’s who. A budget-minded serial killer, who often plied his victims with offers of free food and drinks to lure them back to his apartment.

This adds up to a pretty disturbing truth: Strictly financially speaking, it’s not only cheaper, but likely more profitable, to be killed by Jeffrey Dahmer, than to end up in a bad marriage, or one that leads to divorce. At least with Jeffrey you get treated to a good meal and (possibly) mindblowing sex before your visit with the Grim Reaper. Which is more than what many can say about their failed marriages, much less the dating scene itself overall.

Certainly, it’s safer (and healthier) to be Jeffrey’s next door neighbor than to be a divorcee, no matter what your gender. A study that appeared in Annals of Behavioral Medicine showed divorce linked to a “wide range of poor health outcomes, including early death.”

Meanwhile, Jeffrey’s grandmother, Catherine Jemima Hughes, whom he lived with during his first three murders, lasted to the the ripe old age of 88, dying on Christmas Day in 1992.

And this leads to a realization that really rocked my world —

It’s possible that actually being married to Jeffrey Dahmer might have been the safer option, rather than being married to some other random person. Jeffrey never killed anyone he lived with, or next to, remember.

Married folks, let me emphasize that: Statistically, you would have been safer being married to Jeffrey Dahmer than to your current husband/wife.

Finally, we get to the issue of race. As mentioned earlier, Jeffreys victims were primarily non-white. Many of these melanin-enriched unfortunates were picked up in gay bars and clubs. Which goes to show that Jeffrey, for all his shortcomings, was definitely not a racist. Or a homophobe.

The institution of marriage on the other hand? It’s practically wearing a pointy white hood.

Even though, according to Gallup, U.S. approval of interracial marriage has hit a new high of 94%, Wikipedia points out that, “White Americans were statistically the least likely to wed interracially.” Even very recently, according to Pew Research, only 19% of newlyweds in 2019 were interracial couples.

Source: Pew Research Center

By contrast, Jeffrey judged not by the color of his victim’s skin, but whether they’d make a fine addition to his skull throne. His body count was a color-blind meritocracy, just as Dr. King would have wanted. Given Jeffrey’s racial preferences, you could even say he was a devout anti-racist before it was cool to be a devout anti-racist.

The results are clear: Jeffrey Dahmer wins this debate pretty handidly. You would have been statistically safer living next door to him during his killing spree than you would have been getting married.

A quick recap:

If you’re a woman, you have a low but not insignificant chance of being murdered by your partner. But you would have had a ZERO chance whatsoever of falling prey to Jeffrey Dahmer, even if you were living with him. Or married to him.

Point goes to Jeffrey for his chivalry.

If you’re a man, you also have a greater chance of being killed by your spouse or partner than ending up part of Dahmer’s body part trophy collection.

Another point to Jeffrey.

For either sex, marriage can lead to breaking the bank. Death by Dahmer? Zero out of pocket costs. And you might even get a free dinner and drinks.

Jeffrey scores again.

Marriage itself? Sadly, still an institution rife with racism and homophobia. Meanwhile, Dahmer was all about diversity and cultural enrichment.

Jeffrey with the clincher here.

And there you have it. Jeffrey Dahmer wins out on virtually every metric that matters. You’re better off living next door to a serial killer than getting married.

Looking for a Good Time? Hop Aboard Sean Baker’s ‘Red Rocket’

On By Dean BrooksLeave a comment
Source: https://a24films.com/films/red-rocket
Source: https://a24films.com/films/red-rocket

“Life is sweet,” Mikey Saber, the former porn star and charismatic scumbag main character says in director Sean Baker’s sensational latest film, Red Rocket.

And you could say that about the movie, too.

A writer/director since 2000, Baker achieved notoriety for his experimental 2015 film Tangerine, which was shot exclusively on an iPhone 5.

Red Rocket follows washed-up porn star and manipulative degenerate Mikey Saber, a 40-something human wrecking ball of sorts, who has just fled Los Angeles under dubious circumstances, to return penniless to his hometown Texas City, TX after a 17-year absence.

To say Mikey is disliked in his hometown is a bit of an understatement. For starters, he first has to contend with his estranged wife Lexi, whom he left destitute years ago, and her bitter elderly mother, Lil.But one of Mikey’s super powers, aside from his unflinching dogged amorality, is his silver tongue. Eventually, he’s able to beg his way into staying on the couch, under the conditions that he get a job and help out with the household chores.

Mikey next runs afoul of a few moralistic diner and General Store owners, who aren’t too keen on hiring an ex-porn actor, even for petty pay. He’s forced to return to his roots as a small-time pot dealer for the local crime boss, Leondria, and her permantly scowling daughter, June.

Reduced to riding around a dead end town on a cheap bicycle peddling dope to skaters and construction workers might be enough to cause any man to despair. But not Mikey Saber, who appears filled with unshakable, if inexplicable confidence, of eventually getting his mojo back.

It’s after treating his wife and mother-in-law to a donut shop to celebrate his newfound pot gains that the story really begins — when Mikey first sets eyes on 17-year old cashier Strawberry. Not only does he become completely (and quite disgustingly) smitten with the barely legal red-headed teen, he sees a potential chance to use her to get back into the porn industry.

Source: https://a24films.com/films/red-rocket

Yeah, this guy’s a real dirtbag, if you hadn’t picked up on that already.

Despite its racy and raunchy themes, Red Rocket is one of the most thoroughly entertaining films I’ve seen in a long while. Mikey Saber, flawed as all get out, is an unforgettable character. A sexual tornado, inflicting one disaster after another on anyone within shouting distance with his impulsive and reckless behavior.

I first heard about Red Rocket from a Mike and Jay video awhile back, but didn’t get around to watching it until recently. It initially premiered in December of last year with little attention or theatrical release. But it’s been Simon Rex’s performance as Mikey that has been its primary calling card. He’s won, or been nominated for, a slew of awards for his role.

Rex’s character Mikey is somewhat of a meta performance for the actor, as he performed briefly in a few solo porn films at the start of his career. Though initially stung by the scandalous reveal of his explicit films during his rise in the early 2000s, now at age 47, Rex saw the role as suitcase pimp and lascivious manipulator as an opportunity. He says in The Daily Beast:

“I was at a point where I just had nothing to lose, like at my age and with my career,” he says. “I don’t mean to say ‘I don’t care,’ but I truly was just like, ‘Fuck it. I’ve got nothing to lose.’ I could just go for it and not worry.”

Meanwhile, Baker has established himself as a very unconventional and unique indy director. Just as The Florida Project and Tangerine, two films I definitely want to check out, he doesn’t shy away from showing the raw and risqué side of Americana

But aside from Baker’s technical sophistication and Rex’s superb portrayal, Red Rocket is just a blast. Mikey Saber ranks up there with the types of unforgettable characters that make movies worth watching. Characters like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield, or Howard Ratner of Uncut Gems. The kind of seemingly otherwordly characters that remain grounded enough to make you think they could actually be real people. Everyone knows a Mikey Saber-type, either from high school, or maybe more recently in life. You know, the charming bastard who lives life by the skin of his teeth, yet still is somehow a panty-dropper. T-rash with a capital “T.” Yeah, that guy.

Check out Red Rocket as soon as you can. It’s a real trip.

Choosing a Book Cover: Not always an Easy Task

On By Dean BrooksLeave a comment
Photo by Monstera: https://www.pexels.com/photo/book-with-white-hard-cover-on-table-6373305/

But a fun and fulfilling one, for sure.

For my latest self-published novel, The Lek, I used Fiverr to find a designer to make the book cover.

Fiverr is a fantastic resource, by the way. You can find pretty much any kind of freelancer on there. Ghostwriters, copywriters, video editors, animators, songwriters, voice over artists, programmers, beta readers, and consultants in virtually any field.

I’d used Fiverr before for my first novel, Nemesis. A story about a middle-aged suburban father who’s contacted by a mysterious organization with a strange offer: To eliminate one enemy in his life. The choice is easy. He has his abusive father, now elderly, and in a retirement home, killed in clandestine fashion. It all seemingly goes according to plan. Until his estranged twin sister, a paranoid schizophrenic, shows up, determined to take him down and get justice for her father’s murder by any means possible.

Nemesis was a darkly humorous psychological “suburban thriller” in the vein of the 2015 Jason Bateman film, The Gift, or Scott Smith’s brilliant and intense 1993 novel, A Simple Plan. I’ve always been drawn to stories with fiery family dramas, interpersonal conflicts from the past left unresolved, or that involve some kind of moral dilemma. David Cronenberg’s 2005 film A History of Violence probably encapsulates everything I look for in a smart thriller.

I’ve found that most thriller book covers tend to be pretty basic. Nemesis was my first self-published novel. So I went with something straightforward.

Cover of my book, Nemesis

I think the results were acceptable. I didn’t exert much scrutiny toward the design. It was my first experience hiring a designer on Fiverr. I didn’t really know what to expect. And I hardly communicated much of a “vision” for the design.

Good communication is very important when working with a designer.

You can’t expect a stranger to just intuititively know what’s in your head. This was a learning process for me, who, like I suspect many writers, has a bad habit of getting stuck in my own throught process.

The Lek cover proved a challenge. In contrast to the more grounded Nemesis, The Lek is a trippy, irreverent and provokably profane dystopian satire about a deadly contest where males compete for reproduction rights with a female.

For more details, check out the article I wrote on The Lek here.

For that kind of bizarro concept, I needed a cover that really communicated the weird, wild, and exotic environment of an X-Rated story filled with a lot of sex and violence.

While writing The Lek I drew on inspirations from such dystopian favorites of mine like Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog, as well as Stephen King’s The Long Walk and The Running Man. So naturally, I wanted a cover that not only evoked the elements of the story, but that era as well. Sci-fi book covers back in the ’60s and ’70s used to be awesomely psychedelic and high-concept, especially for authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick. It truly was an experimental age.

Of course, communicating that vision proved tricky. Not everyone will vibe with that. It really is interesting how different artists will interpret your ideas for a cover in their own unique ways. This led to a few false starts before getting to the type of cover I wanted. But I enjoyed the whole process, and I found it a good learning experience.

It also helped get me out of my comfort zone. As a writer, it’s so easy to get used to working alone, and doing your own thing. But there can be a lot of components that go into content creation, whether we’re talking writing freelance articles, copywriting, or self-publishing a book about twelve dudes trying to win a deadly contest so they can bang a hottie.

There’s also marketing, which is something I’m just now beginning to learn about. It’s embarassing how little I know about it, but I’m trying to change that. The actual physical discipline of producing the written word I’ve never had an issue with. I know how to smash words out, baby. It’s getting those words out in front of people— selling myself — that I’ve always struggled with. But that’s for another article.

Anyway, here are a few designs I considered before getting to my chosen one. I thought it would be interesting to go through the book cover selection process of self-publishing. Feel free to tell me what you think of each one.

The first design team I went with was based overseas, and had a lot of attractive samples on their Fiverr profile page. They actually produced two samples based on my ideas for something trippy and ‘70s-era sci-fi-ish.

Cover Attempt One:

A rejected cover for my novel, The Lek

I didn’t care for this cover at all when I first saw it. Then I kind of warmed up to it a little bit. It captures the bloody nature of the Lek gauntlet contest that occurs in the book. There are a lot of creative kills as the males are picked off over the course of the story.

This cover also indictes the thriller aspect of the story, à la King’s The Long Walk. The deep ruby red hints at not only the intensity, but the violence, and maybe even a little bit of the dystopian nature. I did like the “X,” as a subtle reference to the name of my name character, or as perhaps a symbol of the the Lek contest itself.

This rendering certaintly has a few good things going for it. The problem is that it’s far too serious. It doesn’t evoke the main genre — satire. Doesn’t hint at the dark humor, or the weird playfulness of the concept, much less the sexuality throughout the novel. It’s certainly not trippy or ‘70’s-ish. A cover like this indicates more of a straightforward thriller. It makes me think Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsyth, or even Tom Clancy.

Plainly put, it misreprents the story.

This is the challenge when working with graphic designers through a freelance website as an indy author. Unlike with a traditional publishing outfit, where the in-house staff has read your book, and likely knows how to convey your wacky-ass idea in a cover design, you won’t necessarily have that luxury through Fiverr. It’s a bit more hands on.

As for the second cover sample, it completely missed the mark.

Cover Attempt Two:

A second rejected cover for my novel, The Lek

About the only thing somewhat redeemable about this cover is the apocalytpic background with the collapsed buildings. Other than that, it doesn’t work at all, as it evokes a 1950’s-era monster movie type story like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Attack of the Crab Monsters, or Tarantula!.

This is an example of where sometimes a designer can take things too literally from a description or from the ideas you submit. In my story, the title of the female the males are competing for is “Queen Bee.” And not just because she’s the most beautiful and desirable female in the Lek’s history. But because, as the title suggests, she’s expected to reproduce prodigiously with her Lek winner to help repopulate the earth. There is not an actual killer bee chasing any of the males. And the cover doesn’t work as a visual metaphor either, as none of the men are running from the contest, but indeed, quite excitedly toward it, grisly potential deaths be damned. So, like the first cover, this one misrepresents the story.

After rejecting these two samples, I realized something. I was going to have grab the bull by the horns here. See, up until this point, I’d been merely communicating a general idea — the gist — of what I wanted. I figured that would be enough. But that’s hardly fuel adequate for a designer. You need specifics. You need a clear visual with details. Basically, you’ve got to do everything but draw the damn thing yourself.

All the designers I messaged on Fiverr were talented artists. But designers on there are also time-constrained. The impression I got was that they would prefer to simply be told specifically what to make, rather than brainstorm ideas for the cover. Other designers on there may work differently, but that was the experience I had with the ones I dealt with.

To be clear, all of the struggles I encountered were 100% my fault due to inadequate communication.

Even though I was still pretty new to the cover design game on Fiverr, I definitely could have done a better job articulating what I wanted. I certainly will in the future.

It also doesn’t help that I’m a habitual maximizer. But, that too, is for another article.

After climbing up that learning curve, I decided to finally try out an idea I’d had, but remained a little hesitant about revealing. I thought about why exactly I was drawn to the psychedelic ‘70’s-era book covers for my novel. It was the experimental, carnival tone that they conveyed, mostly. It was also how many of them really took advantage of their out-of-left-field concepts by illustrating something striking and different. As opposed to your standard cover for a thriller novel of a guy running, or a dude holding a gun or something.

They also tended to use simple visual metaphors to represent the central conceit of the story. Oftentimes, in a minimalist manner. Minimalist book covers are a whole sub-category unto themselves. There are a lot of artists on Fiverr who specialize in those. Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about.

For The Lek, I didn’t think a minimalist take would work, though I was drawn to the design aesthetic initially. So instead, I went with something a bit more audacious.

The Final Cover:

Cover for my novel, The Lek

I really like this cover because it conveys the tone, conceit, genre, and humor of the novel pretty, well, starkly. It’s colorful without being too garish or clashing. It gives a sense of playfulness and adventure while hinting at some of the dark themes. It also subtly pokes fun at the takes-itself-too-seriously Young Adult dystopian sub-genre that my novel satirizes. Most importantly, it sticks the sexuality front and center.

Overall, I found the process of coming up with a book cover more challenging than I anticipated. It’s strange how I have no problem writing tens of thousands of words imagining all sorts of crazy scenarios, but developing a cover proves problematic. The whole ordeal helped me to be more appreciative of design artists, and showed me the importance of good communication when sharing my ideas. The book cover step in self-publishing may not be the most important. But it is a crucial one. At least next time it shouldn’t be as formidable.

Releasing My Second Novel, THE LEK

On By Dean Brooks1 Comment
Available on Amazon Kindle.

I’ve just released my second novel, The Lek, on Amazon Kindle. For now, it’s available as an ebook, but I’ll release the softcover version in the near future.

Here’s the summary:

—

THE LEK. An irreverent, X-Rated, dystopian satire.

In a post-apocalyptic future where procreation is strictly regulated, twelve males, known as Potential Seeders, pre-selected by a female, known as a Queen Bee, must compete in a deadly competition known as the Lek, a gauntlet comprised of twelve challenges. The winner earns not only reproductive rights with the female, but a place in a utopian society called Haven, built for the New Humanity. 

“X,” a charismatic and cunning cripple, and eleven other males, are competing for Jezschwick Klump, the most beautiful Queen Bee in the Lek’s history. But Jez, a rebellious and clever girl, having escaped her handlers, has determined to destroy the Lek by any means possible.

While the males are eliminated one by one over the course of the gauntlet, Jez’s fledgling rebellion gradually unites the districts against the Lek.

But can the Lek really be toppled? Can true freedom be obtained? Jez will have to join forces with X to find out the truth.

—

I’ve usually referred to it as an X-Rated Hunger Games.

Writing The Lek is, without a doubt, the most fun I’ve ever had on a novel. It combines my dark, irreverent sense of humor with a lot of sex and violence, all streamlined into a pretty tight, well-structured, and fast-paced action/adventure.

It’s also a bit of a mix of various post-apocalytpic/dystopian type novels and movies I love. Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog is a big influence. As are other classic works like Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Stephen King’s The Running Man and The Long Walk.

I was inspired to write it out a desire to lampoon the rash of Young Adult dystopian novels and movies that started with the massive popularity of The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner. For awhile, it seemed like every weekend there was a new movie or book about plucky teenagers somehow managing to overthrow an autocratic militarized regime. Always set in the same run-down dystopian world where there’s a severe class divison between the unwashed masses and the thin sliver of political elite, people wear burlap sacks for clothes, government officials lecture from jumbo TV screens, and all of society is at the tipping point for a revolution, needing only a handful of attractive teenagers to light the way. I remember watching the previews for Hunger Games and thinking of the absurdity of a teenaged girl with a bow and arrow somehow taking out a Nazi-level government.

Obviously, these are young adult power fantasy books about sticking it the Man, confounding the adult world, trying to find your place in society, upending the established order with your own beliefs, asserting your own independence, and, of course, struggling with a hot love triangle all the while. I get it. They have a certain appeal. They’re not bad books, per se. They’re obviously popular as hell, and still selling. I think there’s actually a fourth Hunger Games movie in production. They’re going to the well again. I guess people are already nostalgic for 2012-16.

But like any good trend that runs its course, themes start to get recycled, plot points repeated, characters cloned. And pretty soon the whole thing begins to invite mockery and parody.

I’m not sure where the exact idea came from for The Lek. But one day it dawned on me that so many of these YA dystopian books were really more romantic soap operas dressed up as action thrillers. Throw in a slightly unique location/set-piece/premise, rinse wash repeat, and there you go. I still don’t know what the hell Divergent is even supposed to be about, and I’ve read the premise like ten times.

So why not just get right to the point of what a lot of these books are subtextually all about: mate competititon.

The idea of males having to compete in a deadly gauntlet for the right to reproduce with a female struck me as hilariously subversive. Always a key thing I look for when deciding on which novel to start next. It also felt metaphorically reflective of how mate selection feels sometimes in the modern world, where there’s endless dating apps, OnlyFans, empowered man-hating feminists, simps, chads, incels, femcels, and a widespread societal disregard for marriage and commitment. Both sexes suffer under these conditions. But I wanted to write a story that articulated what it feels like, as a man, to battle against the pressures of male competition, to hurl endless messages into the Great Unrequited Void, the struggles to meet someone in a new place, or to meet anyone at all. A book that captured the uncanny sense of hopelessness one feels trying to achieve the Holy Grail of oneness, and the oftentimes boring emptiness that follows after achieving supposed “success” in that pursuit.

At its core, The Lek is also about the lengths men will go to fuck a hot chick. Even to the point of risking life and limb.

But what is a “lek” anyway?

“Lek mating” is a scientific term that refers, according to Wikipedia, to an “aggregation of male animals gathered to engage in competitive displays and courtship rituals, known as lekking, to entice visiting females which are surveying prospective partners with which to mate.”

In the post-apocalyptic world of The Lek, procreation is regulated by a centralized government authority, which oversees a number of districts organized by labor specialty. Due to radioactive fallout and toxicity from rampant pollution, the global population has collapsed. As has man’s reproductive abilities. Sterility is widespread. This puts a high premium on healthy women capable of delivering successful births. And a value, though by no means a substantial one, on verile males able to play their role in the game. But just as in biology, where sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive, it is the fertile “Queen Bees” who are given the greatest status, and exercise the right to choose their own pool of male suitors. They hold all the gatekeeping cards to the next generation. Though to be clear, it’s expected they perform prodigiously once a mate has won his Lek gauntlet. The New Humanity ain’t gonna birth itself.

The Lek contest is held in a massive, labyrinthine skyscraper-sized structure built into the side of a mountain, and is comprised of twelve deadly challenges. Whoever manages to survive until the end is the winner.

Incidentally, and this was something I picked up mainly via osmosis while writing The Lek, but there is a global declining birthrate, in addition to worldwide declining sperm count and male fertility. When you combine those two factors with increasing industrialization, economic disparities and systemic collapses, and the fact that more and more women put off marriage and pregnancy until later in life, and you have a vicious cocktail for a population collapse. This is something Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been warning about for years, and become more vocal about recently.

I tend to be drawn toward stories that give me the opportunity to explore social issues or cultural phenomenon with a darkly humorous narrative vehicle. Like many writers, I’m constantly amused by humanity, and all its quirks. Especially my own.

That’s not to say I tried to make The Lek some great intellectual work. I’m not an academic in the strict sense. I don’t write to educate or preach. I write to provoke. I write to to entertain. To share my voice. I write because I thoroughly enjoy getting into the flow of a story.

Hopefully, I’ve written an engaging, relatable, and relevant book in The Lek. I wrote this story in the spring of 2019. Technically, it’s my third novel, but the second that I’ve self-published. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to leave reviews or offer feedback.

Finally, a special thanks to Handpedia, a freelance artist on Fiverr, who designed the cover art for my book. I wanted something with a trippy, retro design. Something that was reminiscent of sci-fi book covers from the 1970’s, such as those seen on Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick novels. I think Handpedia did a great job bringing my concept to life.

Why I Donate Blood to the Red Cross

On By Dean BrooksLeave a comment

Today is World Blood Donor Day.

First established by the World Health Organization in 2005, WBDD, “serves to raise awareness of the need for safe blood and blood products and to thank voluntary, unpaid blood donors for their life-saving gifts of blood.”

Today, it just so happens, is also the day I’m donating blood myself. While I didn’t plan for my appointment to land on WBDD, it’s a cool coincidence that it did.

I’ve been donating blood to the Red Cross ever since I was 17.

I’m not sure what attracted me initially to contributing to this non-profit that has been around since 1881. It may have been a desire to give something essential that wasn’t simply money.

I was just a high schooler after all, working at a Save-A-Lot supermarket in upstate Pennsylvania on the weekends at the time. I wasn’t exactly flush with cash.

It may have been a desire to finally overcome my fear of needles. I’d suffered a crippling syringe-phobia ever since I was five and had to be strapped down to the examination table for a booster shot.

Certainly not a preferred early childhood memory.

Probably it had to do with the idea that the simple action of giving a pint of my blood could help someone’s life, or even several people’s lives. That appealed to me more than giving other things, like money, time, or labor. As the Red Cross states, “Blood and platelets cannot be manufactured; they can only come from volunteer donors.”

Since that initial decision to donate blood, I’ve given 23 times, and am scheduled to go again today in the afternoon.

If I’m able to donate about four times a year for, say, the next 30 years or so, that means I could potentially donate up to almost 15 gallons of blood. I’ve given nearly three so far. You can donate whole blood every 56 days. While it would be great to be able to make it in perfectly on cue, it doesn’t always work out that way.

I’d like to donate 20 gallons of blood over my lifetime. I think that’s a reasonable goal.

When I lived in Philadelphia I donated like clockwork every two months at the donation center on Spring Garden street near Center City. On the way back home, I’d drive past John F. Kennedy Plaza, aka Love Park, and admire the famous red sign with the swooning letter “O.”

After moving to Williston, ND during the oil boom my donations became less frequent. Sometimes, when my work schedule allows, I’m able to make the blood drives that take place on occasion in nearby Sidney or Fairview, MT.

Other times in the past, I’ve actually driven six hours to Saint Cloud, MN to donate at the Red Cross center located in town. The phlebotomists there are friendly, and often they ask where I’m coming from. So when I mention Williston, they give me these weird looks. You drove six hours just to donate blood? At the Red Cross? Aren’t there places closer you can donate? Yeah. There’s United Blood Services, but I don’t give there. I’m a bit of a loyalist. The Red Cross takes me back to high school.

Hey, everyone’s sentimental about something. Music, movies, wine. You stick a Red Cross needle in my arm to draw blood, and suddenly I’m feeling nostalgic.

While it’s nice to donate blood and know I may have helped save somebody’s life, I also do it because it makes me feel good. I follow a strict dietary ritual the day before, eating foods rich in iron. Lots of fruits and vegetables. A big breakfast.

And, of course, drinking plenty of water. Always make sure you are well-hydrated before donating blood.

Seriously, I’m like an athlete prepping for a big game before I give blood. You’ve probably never met someone as excited to have their blood drained as me the day before a draw.

Giving blood compels me to stay active and in shape. When you donate you receive a mini-physical. They take your temperature, measure your hemoglobin levels, and take your pulse. When you go in for your appointment, the technicians there will have you fill out a lengthy health screening questionnaire.

While the Red Cross check-up is not a substitute for a full-body one by your doctor, it’s a good, cheap way to keep an eye on your health.

The Red Cross screens your blood before giving it to anybody, so if you have a disease or some kind of health problem, they’ll tell you. In my last donation, the Red Cross informed me that I had developed reactive+ Covid-19 antibodies. This means, according to the Red Cross anti-body test results page, that, “Antibody levels were detected at levels high enough that your plasma may be used as convalescent plasma.”

So, hopefully my blood went to someone who needed a leg up fighting that virus.

I have been told by several doctors that I have “great blood.” Which is no surprise. I work hard eating right and staying fit. I expect my crimson essence to be premium 94 octane.

I also think those who donate like me do so out of some unconscious need to affirm their own health and vitality. Some guys rip down the highway at 80 MPH on a Kawasaki motorcycle to “feel alive.” Me, I have a needle stuck in my arm to drain off a pint. It may not make for a Red Bull commercial, but donating blood is essential for millions of people every year who need transfusions or blood components to survive.

There’s also a very cool thing the Red Cross does that makes the ordeal worth it. They let you know where your blood donation went.

Usually just a few weeks or so after your donation, the Red Cross will send you an email with a message like the one above. It’s uplifting to know not just that your donation helps, but specifically where it did so.

Have you donated blood before? Or given thought to doing so? I know a lot of people are held back due to fear of needles, or concerns they’ll pass out or get sick.

Yeah, I’ve been there myself.

The whole blood donation process is mostly painless. I won’t lie, though. Sometimes it can hurt. It usually depends on the person sticking the needle in your arm. There’s a lot of finesse to finding the vein and inserting the syringe just right. I’ve had experiences where I barely felt anything. Other times the technician had to go digging around to find the right spot, and left me with black and blue marks. That sucked.

But look at it this way. You’re almost certainly going to have to have blood drawn at some point in your life anyway. Especially as you get older. You’ve probably already had blood work done up after an appointment.

At least if you get into the habit of donating regularly, you’ll get used to it. And you’ll be saving lives along the way. You might even become a freak like me and actually enjoy giving blood.

The technicians at the Red Cross are considerate professionals. They’ll make sure everything goes smoothly. It’s normal to feel light-headed after a blood draw. Having blood taken effects everyone differently. I’ve only had one instance where I felt like I was going to faint. That was likely due to being underfed and dehydrated before going in for my appointment. But the process has generally been a smooth one for me over my twenty-plus year Red Cross blood donation career.

This is why it’s so important to eat right and drink plenty of water before going in. Check out the Red Cross page on Tips for a Successful Blood Donation for more important details.

Anyway, I’m off to my 25th donation. Happy World Blood Donor Day.

Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: The Work Ethic of These Best-Selling Writers is Insane

On By Dean BrooksLeave a comment
Photo by Kateryna Babaieva from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-standing-near-fire-3361235/

That’s no hyperbole, either. Some of these writers have downright ludicrous levels of dedication and focus. They’re not even human, and quite possibly superhuman.

You think you’re a hard working writer because you banged out a few articles on Medium last week? Get the f*ck out of here. You’re nothing compared to these uber authors.

So let’s get started. Prepare to feel inadequate.

First up is, without a doubt, a name you’ve seen, because her books usually take up a half mile of shelf space at the library.

Source: daniellesteel.com

(Pictured above: the TX-9000 Writernator emerging from its luxury tank to obliterate writer’s block).

Her name is Danielle “The Woman of” Steel. To date, this weapon of mass production has written 185 books, including 141 novels, over a career that’s spanned six decades, and sold over 800 million copies.

And the romance novel queen is still going strong. In the first half of this year alone, she’s pumped out three books, with four more planned for the rest of 2022, including one this June. She publishes seven books a year like clockwork.

Her secret? No sleep, apparently.

According to Glamour, she works practically non-stop, sometimes all 24 hours in a day if she’s pressed for a deadline. Says Steel, “Dead or alive, rain or shine, I get to my desk and I do my work.”

For a true writing workaholic, you’d think Steel would have never had time for a personal life. But she actually has nine children. Nine! She’s also been married five times, including one marriage to a man who was an inmate at a prison when she met him for a journalism assignment.

Steel often juggles multiple projects at a time, outlining one, researching another, while writing and revising others, in order to maintain her prodigious output. She hardly eats, abstains from caffeine, scoffs at the very idea of burnout. She writes on a 1946 Olympia standard typewriter. A freaking typewriter. As in that thing Jack Torrance went mad click-clacking away at in The Shining.

Steel also has no concept of so-called writer’s block. Like every writer, she has tough days, sure. But this powerhouse offers this advice for the days when the muse is slow,

“I keep working. The more you shy away from the material, the worse it gets. You’re better off pushing through and ending up with 30 dead pages you can correct later than just sitting there with nothing.”

That’s easy for you to say, Ms. Steel, you’re a literal Terminator.

Up next is a guy some people get mixed up with Stephen King. And that’s because, like the horror master from Maine, he writes a lot of thrillers, some with supernatural elements.

source: deankoontz.com

(Pictured above: Dean Koontz, who actually wrote a whole book with his left hand on a hidden typewriter while this picture was taken).

But to be clear, Dean Koontz has a style all his own. He mixes and matches with different genres, often blending them together into his own special recipe.

Koontz is best known perhaps for the Odd Thomas series, which is about a short-order cook who can see dead people. But he’s been writing novels since the late 1960s.

He’s sold somewhere around 400 million copies of his books. The Wikipedia entry credits him with 91 books, but at this point it’s likely at least 130 plus. That’s another sign you’re a Robo Writer. Articles can’t even keep up with how many books you’ve actually written.

Don’t dare ask Dean Koontz if he’s working hard or hardly working. The Koontz Express is always rolling.

So, what is Mr. Koontz’s recipe for earning consideration as one of the hardest working writer’s today?

Koontz writes on the FAQ section of his website about his daily work habit:

“I work 10- and 11-hour days because in long sessions I fall away more completely into story and characters than I would in, say, a six-hour day.”

But lest you think that Koontz regards his phenomenally successful writing career just any old 9–5, the suspense master also mentions something special that keeps him motivated to churn out the pages:

“I am enchanted by the English language, by its beauty and flexibility, also by the power of storytelling to expand the mind and lift the heart.”

In addition, the writer stays motivated by his charity, the Dean and Gerda Koontz Foundation, which contributes to the severely disabled, critically ill children, and dogs.

Like his romance novelist counterpart Steel, Koontz exhibits profound focus, eschewing TV, the internet, email, and other distractions. After first starting out on a typewriter, he eventually bought an IBM Displaywriter, which he used to write for most of his career. Though recently, in 2020, he upgraded with a newer HP computer and Microsoft Word.

The type of writing tools Koontz uses may seem just seem like trivia, but it actually highlights a way he stays on task. Especially today with social media and texting, it’s easy for a writer to get distracted. But with a machine like a Displaywriter, or a typewriter, that can only perform a single operation at a time, all you have to be “distracted” by is the writing itself.

In an interview with Harvard Business Review, Koontz says:

By 6:30, I’m at my desk, then I work until dinner. I rarely have lunch, because if I eat, I get furry-minded. I do that six days a week or, if I’m at the end of a book, seven. If it’s the last quarter of a book, where the momentum is with me, I’ve been known to work 100-hour weeks.

In addition, he credits his wife Gerda, his wife of 56 years, who helps manage all the practical concerns of life (money and other domestic issues), allowing him to focus on the fiction side of things.

Never underestimate the importance of a good, supportive spouse. That’s true for writing. Or for any career, for that matter.

Man, Koontz and Steel are Warrior Writers, without a doubt. Who could possibly top them?

It’s time to talk about the gran jefa, the queso grande, the grand campeona herself.

The grand prize for Ridiculously Prolific Writer for the Ages has to go to Spanish romance author Corín Tellado.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cor%C3%ADn_Tellado

(Pictured above: Corín Tellado. You can call her “Boss”).

I found Senora Tellado’s output mind blowing. So much, I had to whip out the old calculator to try to crunch the numbers, and see just how much this mad scribbling machine did over her career.

Yes, Ms. Tellado got me, an English major, to actually reach for the dreaded calculator and do maths. That’s like Moses parting the Red Sea.

Tellado wrote over 4,000 books in her lifetime. Mainly novelas, that ranged around 100–150 pages each. But even sticking with steamy shorter-length books, at an average 125 pages for each book, times 4,000, that comes out to roughly 500,000 pages.

A typical MS Word page might be anywhere around 500–750 words, depending on the font and type of content (description or dialogue). But even if we’re taking the lower estimate at 600 words per page on average, that means Senora Tellado wrote about 300,000,000 words in her lifetime.

Tellado lived until age 81, and was an active writer from when she sold her first novel at age 18, until her death in 2009. Broken down by days (22,995), that means the Spanish author averaged about 13,046 words PER DAY.

Simply astounding. Even if you cut that number in half to 6,523 it’s still incredibly impressive. That’s like six average-sized Medium articles a day. Every day. For 63 years. It’s fair to say Tellado would have smoked Tim Denning.

All in all, she sold over 400 million books, and remains the second most read Spanish writer of all time, after Miguel de Cervantes (the Don Quixote guy).

And there you have it. Three superhuman uber authors. Don’t dare mention the words “ghostwriter” or “coauthoring” to them. All their books came from their own keyboard-hardened fingertips.

While it may seem these writers scale the literary equivalent of Mt. Everest every year like it’s no big deal, their big secret to word mastery is actually very simple.

Good old fashioned hard work. Yep, that’s it.

They sit down and punch letters. No matter what. Every day. For as long as it takes. Until the job gets done.

A sign hangs in Ms. Steel’s office that sums it up best: “There are no miracles. There is only discipline.”