by Damon Martin

Have you been looking for a new way to let Jesus into your life? Well, this list of God-related businesses, products and services might provide the answer. And before you ask, no we didn't make any of these up.



[Al in Habit]

10: Gamers 4 Jesus (free / advertiser supported)

Blowing people up on Call of Duty is fun, let's admit it. But you know what's even more fun? Blowing people up on Call of Duty while letting everybody know you're holding hands with Jesus the whole time! This website is for strictly for gamers who love the Son of God; to join you must agree with their statement of faith. They even hold bible study sessions. And once you've finished reading your scripture, you get to smite thyne enemy with God on your side!

9: Christian Life Coaching (Silver Self Coaching $29 per month / Gold Interactive Coaching $209 per month)

We all have goals we want to achieve in life. Whether it's starting a new business, a new job, meeting the right person or just coping with everyday stress. But there's a better way - Godly way. Yep, that's right, if you plop down some money a "qualified professional" will show you how to apply "proven truths from Scripture" so you can
discover "the unparalleled adventure that we call the Christian Life!"

8: Christian Soulmates (free / donation supported)

If you're looking for that special someone, and God is not leading you down the right path, let the internet do it for you! On this dating website, the front page lays it all out for you: "It's all Christian, all single and all here!" You know it's Christian because they use the word 19 times on the home page alone. Yes, it's just that Christian!

7: JC's Girls (free / donation supported)

If you're an exotic dancer, but you just can't get that relationship with Jesus going, this ministry has you covered. Started by an ex-dancer, JC's Girls provides spiritual guidance for those involved in the sex industry. Also knows as the Pussycat Preacher, Heather Veitch calls herself a 'modern day Mary Magdalene.' Just makes me want to start putting clothes on to avoid this one.

6: Pole Dancing for Jesus ($20 per class / free with church program*)

Yes, Texas has figured out a new way for people to look at their state and shake their heads in shame. As if rewriting textbooks to include creationism wasn't bad enough, a fitness studio in the Lone Star State is offering pole dancing classes in the name of JC. The first 11 lucky ladies that bring their church programs to the studio on the 2nd Sunday of each month get admitted for free! Nothing says "I love you God" like reading scripture while hanging upside down from a pole. (*restrictions apply)

5: Holyland Experience (Tickets $35 / Annual Jerusalem Gold Pass $120)

Based in Orlando, Fla. this amusement park is a living, breathing Bible experience. They feature full sized replicas of buildings that are described in the Bible, as well as a live action crucifixion of Jesus! The best part about the Holyland Experience? Free parking! (Sadly their "Pastors Appreciation" promotion is all sold out.)

4: Confession: A Roman Catholic App ($1.99)

Need to unburden yourself but don't have time to make it to the local church? No worries the Catholic confessional app has you covered. You can confess your sins through your iPhone and, based on conscience, choose from 7 different acts of contrition. You also have the "ability to add sins not listed in standard examination of conscience." Angry Birds? How about Confessing Catholics!

3: Windy Ridge Trapper (fees paid for pelts vary from $0.25 for a short green raccoon hide to $60 for a 36" grade I bobcat).

Yep, he's the preacher who buys fur. Based out of West Virginia, this born again Christian wants to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to you, just don't keep any exotic animals around or he's liable to skin them for their fur. He apparently believes in love thy neighbor, just not love thy animal.

2: Miracle Soap ($13.95 / 22oz)

Nothing says clean like being washed in the spirit of the Lord. This family based company has developed a cleansing product stripped of all the harmful chemicals that poison us on a daily basis, replacing them with...yep, you guessed it...Jesus! The sales pitch for their Miracle Soap reads: "The only product that is made in the world that can wash a newborn baby or clean up an oil spill and everything in between." So if your baby ever falls in an oil spill, you're set with a bottle of Miracle Soap!

1: The Catholic Church - Nuff said.

***

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In his recent Suicide Girls column Richard Patrick talked about religious authority. He said, “Many years ago, peasants were stealing from each other and murderers were running rampant throughout the world. To deal with the mayhem, rulers came to the conclusion that putting the fear of God in the masses would keep them in line. Organized religion started as a way for those in power to get what they needed from the people.”

That’s pretty close. And it’s not entirely untrue. But there’s more to it than that. It wasn’t just that the rulers — the upper classes, the fat cats in power — who got together in a dark room somewhere, smoked some cigars and made a decision to create religion in order to control the rest of us. The development of religion was the work of the internal “ruler” we all carry with us wherever we go — that little voice in every one of us, whether peasant or king, that wants order and longs for control.

That internal ruler drives us to seek external rulers, to seek God outside of ourselves. We have rulers and authority figures because we want to be ruled. Religion is a product of something all human beings have in common — the desire to live in an orderly place. We cannot live together unless we have some sort of governor to keep the peace. Religion serves that purpose, among others.

Well, sometimes it serves that purpose, anyway. But, as we all know, religion often goes in terrible directions and becomes a force of destruction. It makes people fly planes into office buildings. It makes them vote against peoples’ rights to choose who they can marry. Governments and other institutions intended to maintain harmony and keep peace among groups of people living together also go wrong in similar ways.

If you think about it, it would seem that the governor we need to keep societal peace and order doesn’t really have to be an outside entity like a king or a pope or even God up in heaven. We all have the potential to govern ourselves. But human beings rarely live up to their own potential in any area. Why would we expect large groups of them to be able to live up to their potential not to be assholes to each other? This is why I love the idea of anarchy but would be the first person high tailing it as fast as he could out of any country that declared its intention to do away with its government and police force. We seek external power to govern us because we intuitively know our own shortcomings even if we won’t admit to them.

Unfortunately the real God, if he exists, isn’t available to rule us. Maybe he’s too intelligent to run for office. Or maybe he’s just got too much other stuff on his plate. In any case, we’re forced to seek a human substitute. In the old days we used to pretend the person we chose to rule us had a direct line to God and could tell us what he wanted us to do. Lots of people still believe that. But most of us don’t. In fact, I don’t even believe that most of the people who say they believe in humans who speak for God really believe it.

Belief in what people tell you God thinks is called “faith.” Dominance and submission play a big part in how faith works. We all have a side to our personality that longs to be submissive. Religion is a good outlet for this because it offers us a socially permissible way to be subs to the ultimate dom. Sometimes followers of religious authority figures are so into that submissive head-space of the worshipful servant they will believe and do absolutely anything just so long as it means they can keep their subservient position. It also means that they can keep deferring responsibility for their own conduct onto their master. This never works, by the way. No matter how hard you try and avoid it, the universe will always make you take responsibility for what you do. To say you’ve lost faith in your religion or its appointed spokesperson means you’re no longer able to be a submissive to them. Generally I count loss of faith as a positive thing.

Of course, personal responsibility is just one area that religion gets into. Religion goes beyond merely governing people and keeping the peace among them. It attempts to answer the deeper questions of what it means to be human, it tries to discover the origins of the universe itself. But we don’t need to look to anyone outside ourselves for these answers anymore than we need someone outside our selves to take responsibility for our actions. In fact, no one else’s answer to those deep questions will ever satisfy you. Just like its ultimately impossible to defer responsibility for the things you do, it’s also impossible to accept the “big answers” given to you by someone else.

Yet in the commonly accepted religious scheme of things we’re supposed to have faith in what our religious authorities tell us. And more than that, we’re supposed to have faith in our religious authorities themselves.

That kind of faith will always fail us, no matter how hard we try to make it work. Faith that is directed outward, away from ourselves is like a fire hose pointed away from the fire.

Of course, there are other meanings to the word faith and not everything people call faith is altogether negative. But when it comes to the subject of having faith in religious authority figures, you can always count me out.

When you feel disappointment in a person you deemed Great because she or he does not meet your expectations, this is a good thing. That kind of disappointment is a better teacher than the person you were looking to for answers. It points your faith back where it should be aimed, at yourself.

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

Buy the new CD by his band Zero Defex at CD Baby now!

While sitting in JFK last month reading Green Hermeticism, a book inspired by the eponymous conferences held by the Suluk Academy on alchemy and ecology, I was struck by a quote from the German Romantic philosopher Novalis, translated "the sciences must all be made poetic." I sympathize. Despite the generally laughable efforts of creation "scientists," we (not to be too West-normative) seem to frame faith and science not as complements but as combatants. Rationalists and nonbelievers feel like Romans watching barbarians approach intent on sacking our institutions and libraries; the religious feel that their concerns are ignored in favor of the sweeping indoctrination necessary for our liberal, humanistic society. This image of Christ and Darwin fighting bareknuckled in a steel cage is, of course, oversimplified and polarized in a way to appeal to the idiots on either side. The complex relationship between Faith and Science isn’t inherently a conflict, and its substance isn’t all evolution and fluff.

There are a great many areas of fascinating and unusual intersections between the natural sciences and spiritual belief; the "Law of Attraction" popularized in The Secret claims provenance in quantum mechanics, specifically the (heavily disputed) interpretation that the observer’s consciousness causes wave function collapse. ("What the hell are you talking about, Fluxy?"). Does human (or other) consciousness affect the universe in a demonstrable physical way or is it just pseudoscientific rubbish? Beats me, but all my attempts to materialize a ziti pizza whilst writing this article have failed. I call bullshit!

The Bahá'í, Faith teaches that science and faith are harmonious, with ‘Abdu'l-Bahá writing that

Philosopher Karl Popper rejected classical empiricism, the idea that theories can be "proven" through observations of the natural world, in favor of a standard of falsifiability. A scientific theory can’t be confirmed, only proven false or found to "correspond with the facts." I tend to view the world in a manner similar to this: a collection of plausible explanations and non-falsifiable theories rather than a world ordered by Cartesian rationality or by the hand of deity. As such, I have a hard time grokking the die-hard atheists or the true believers; I apply Fluxy’s Razor to everything.

So, back to Green Hermeticism. The authors argue that the beginnings of the Enlightenment occurred as a battle between non-dualist Rosicrucians and dualist Cartesians. Isaac Newton wrote more about alchemy than about physics, but eventually the worldview we’ve come to associate with him won out. Later, Romanticism and its affection for the natural world were crushed by Industry and the inevitable clash between capitalist and Marxist ideologies. So homeboys suggest that we revive our sleeping hermetic tradition and take the Gaia hypothesis to the next level; that we create a joyous spiritual ecology that recognizes that we are part of, not separate from, "Nature."

Nature: It’s not just national parks anymore!

This isn’t really new. The movement called "deep ecology" has argued essentially the same thing for years, albeit from a less alchemical angle. But consider this:

Not to be too much of a frou-frou new age hippie ("too late!" you say), but to me, there’s something worthwhile to such a worldview, and not just in the Fluxy’s Razor sense. We are part of the vast biological system that is this planet. Some people wonder if we’re the cancer afflicting Gaia, but being the happy-go-lucky optimist that y’all have come to know and love and loathe, I suspect that perhaps we are her brain. If we can accept that spirituality has a healing effect when used judiciously and graciously, then why not act as the soul of that which has come to be called creation? I’m not talking about communing with your crystal dolphin inner child in the name of the great mother goddess (although if that blows your skirt up, by all means, go for it.) No gods necessary, but perhaps a little faith in ourselves and our ability to change and to heal our world. Without that, we’re stuck in fatalism and in death.

In 1982, stood before the Nobel assembly and spoke of the soul of Latin America:

García Márquez was speaking of the ability of humanity to triumph over tyranny and disaster, but this optimism applies just as powerfully to the world in which we live, so long as we use all the tools available to us, be they "Religion" or "Science." Science informs us, and spirit (whatever that may mean to you) inspires us.

Nothing is written. Everything is permissible, possible, and alive. So now, my chilluns, go out and change the world.

Flux got really drunk and started writing a leftist spiritual manifesto that revolves around hilarious, tongue-in-cheek pantheism a few weeks ago. She promises that this article isn’t an attempt to fish for prospective book deals. She swears.

Merry Christmas Eve from your local Buddhist columnist!

I’m down in Knoxville, Tennessee with my sister and her family. This week I appeared on my niece, Skylar’s YouTube show. Check it out:




Also check out my blog for the outtake version.

Tonight children all over the world go to sleep believing a mysterious man will break into their house late at night to leave them fabulous gifts. My niece is 11 and gave up on Santa Claus a few years ago. But she has some friends her age who, she says, still believe or at least pretend to believe to please their parents. I gave up on Santa when I was about seven, but my sister was two years younger so I made-believe I believed a bit longer. But I think most kids have outgrown the Santa myth by first or second grade.

For kids raised in religious families, the time you stop believing in Santa (or Hanukkah Harry or Kris Kwanza or whoever you choose) is often highly traumatic. I mean if Santa, Rudolph and the toy making elves aren’t real, what about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost? Even though my own family was not religious, I can clearly recall going through this dilemma in my childhood. For friends of mine who grew up in more religious households the realization that Santa was made-up triggered a massive crisis of faith from which some of them still haven’t recovered.

Faith is a tricky subject. While some Christians try to pass amendments recognizing Christmas, other Christians don't even have faith in Christmas. When faith means believing in the literal reality of things you cannot see, hear or touch you’re bound to run into trouble. In that very narrow sense of faith, faith in the reality of Santa’s Workshop in the North Pole and faith in the reality of Heaven and its Angels on High are precisely the same. They are both objects of the mind and, as such, both equally insubstantial and unreal. There is no more reason for a rational person to believe any more in one than the other.

This is why faith often turns people into psychopaths. It’s very hard to maintain the façade of believing in something you know deep down is just a figment of your imagination. In order to try and destroy your perfectly reasonable doubts you have to resort to all kinds of crazy shit. You might even fly a couple of airplanes into some big buildings just to prove to everyone you really believe in some bizarre fantasy although you know perfectly well you don’t.

People who come to Buddhism trying to escape from that kind of faith into something more sensible are often shocked when they hear Buddhists talk about faith. In fact a lot of Buddhists avoid talking about faith to those unfamiliar with the Buddhist take on the subject for fear of scaring them off. This sometimes leads people to feel they’ve been duped when they finally hear their teachers mention the subject a couple of years into the practice.

But faith and belief are important aspects of Buddhism. Human beings need faith and belief. This is one of the many reasons atheism is such an unsatisfactory alternative to religion. When we try to completely give up on faith and belief we feel empty and discontented. Like that poster on Agent Mulder’s wall says, we all want to believe. And like Agent Mulder, when traditional religions fail we’ll turn to UFOs, or Comet Hale-Bopp, or the The Dear Leader, or just about any whacky thing just to satisfy the very deep desire we all have to have faith in something.

To be sure, a lot of what falls under the heading of faith in what passes for Buddhism these days is little more than the substitution of one fantasy for another. Even the faith in “Enlightenment experiences” professed by some mutant strains of Zen Buddhism is just another fantasy. For my man, Dogen, though, faith was never directed at any object of mind. Faith was a matter of practice. You could have faith in the practice of zazen because you could actually enter into the practice yourself at any time. It’s not necessary to hang on to any belief in things unseen or far away. As your practice deepens, your real experience of the object of your faith grows. You come to see that the image of reality you’ve been fed by your parents, teachers, and religious leaders is utterly mistaken.

Tim McCarthy, my first Zen teacher, always liked to say that to practice Zazen you need an equal amount of doubt and faith. Without some kind of faith it’s just too damned hard even to sit yourself down on the cushion and do the practice. But without an equal amount of doubt, you’re far too likely to fly off into some kind of fantasy about the practice. The mistake that religions all make is to try to promote faith exclusively and kill all doubt. That just makes people crazy.

As far as Santa Claus is concerned, I’ve gone from not believing in him to having complete faith that he really exists. This comes from the explanation I heard my sister give Skylar about her take on Santa. Santa, she said, is just a name for the spirit of free giving that exists in all of us. The image of Santa as a fat man in a red suit is just an image we’ve created to express that spirit of free giving.

When we look at it that way, Santa is real and the Easter Bunny is real and Hanukkah Harry is real, and so too are Jesus and Heaven and Muhammed and all the rest. Even Buddha is real.

Me, I hope Santa brings me a copy of that new KISS DVD.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

People are always saying "I don't read books." Too often, the problem is reading too many of the wrong books, thus turning a potentially great experience into something they'd rather avoid. This is where _DictionaryGirl_ and PointBlank come in and let you borrow something awesome. Let's go to town and make some recommendations, shall we?

Last week, my internship at the West Coast branch of Writers House literary agency came to a close. I’ve spent every Tuesday and Thursday there for the past ten months, reading manuscripts, arranging postcard art, debating the importance of Ted Leo vs. Colin Meloy in the pretense-rock arena, and packing down delicious holiday food. It was the ten best work-related months I’ve had to date. So, in honor of the passing of such an era, I’m dedicating today’s Suicide Bookshelf to one of Writers House's biggest recent successes; it also happens to be my number-one, desert-island, top favorite book, as written by my number-one, desert-island, top favorite writer. Hell, you wouldn't believe the kind of unprecedented self-restraint it's taken to hold back from featuring this as long as I have. I should get a medal.

King Dork by Frank Portman

This is a book about a song.

See, much like the two in my last spotlight, this book has a very specific tie-in to music; only this time, instead of songs taken from books, this one goes the other way around. The song in question is the A-side to this little seven-inch split single by a little band called The Mr. T Experience. (The other side is by Gigantor, FYI, but they can get their own book spotlight.) The title of the song, shockingly enough, is also “King Dork.” Clocking in at a semi-brief two minutes and forty-two seconds, it’s a sweet and funny little song about a hopelessly nerdy guy trying to win a girl’s affection with comparisons to Monty Python and promises to keep their relationship a secret—so much the less embarrassment for her. I could argue that the book bleeds over in reference to several other earlier songs, but it would all be hearsay. The “King Dork” split-single is what counts.

So the legend goes like this: the power and impressionability of a band like Mr. T Experience (pop-punk, not entirely dissimilar to super-early Green Day) seems to strike best during one’s tender teenage years; that's when they got me, anyway. But fans grow up as they are wont to do, and one fan had, by the time he met Frank Portman (still more well-known as Dr. Frank at that point), grown up to become a children-and-young-adult lit agent. So he was like, “Frank, you should really think about writing a book,” and Frank was like “ehhhhh…” and Steve (which is the super-agent in question's name, by the way) was like “no, really, I think your songs would translate really awesomely,” and in this fashion, neatly summarized for your consumption, the 344-page book version of a less-than-three-minute song was born.

And here’s the thing: it translates beautifully.

To summarize as much as possible, which is no small feat because this book is impossibly dense, the book revolves around one Thomas Charles Henderson, or Tom—also known as King Dork, Tom-Tom, Chi-Mo, Hender-fag, Sheepie, and any number of other nicknames of varying denigration—and his travails in the matters of rock and roll, weird family, and semi-hot girls within the scope of the small-time hell that is high school in late-1990s suburban California. As if that’s not enough, his entire life turns upside down when he uncovers a copy of The Catcher in the Rye that once belonged to his father, and imagines them to be clues to unlocking the mystery that shrouds his father’s death—and maybe unlocking the secrets of this one girl while we’re at it, because some otherworldly dad-advice never hurt. And then there’s the devil-head, and the Dud Chart, and the Festival of Lights, and his genius alphabetical-order best friend Sam Hellerman, and the most disturbing bumbling associate principal you could ever hope not to meet, and…

See, it’s actually extremely difficult to give a straight-up synopsis of King Dork, because there is so much going on (sometimes bordering precariously on the edge of too much, but never spilling over), story arcs all twisting and unraveling around each other simultaneously, involving wild subplots and 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary (which is the greatest way to help you ace the SAT- or GRE-verbal since slipping words like “conflagration” and “surreptitious” into song lyrics). Also, one of the best parts about the book is its element of surprise, and it’s hard to really, really get into it without ruining something crucial. So instead, here are some things you need to know.

Probably the first thing you need to know is that there’s a very strong literary tradition of the geeky somewhat-loner misfit high school protagonist – the kind of shy kid who spends a lot of time thinking, perhaps too much for his own good, and yet somehow ends up winning the day at the end – and this one fits the mold. It’s a familiar theme because, well, who hasn’t felt like that at some point? The most obvious prototype of such a character is Holden Caulfield, everyone’s favorite catcher in the rye. This is about the moment when Tom would look up from whatever book he’s reading to give you the kind of weary and withering look that might say “....really?!” Our King Dork faces the inevitable comparisons head on, and lets the reader know at every possible juncture in the book that he is really, truly over Young Master Caulfield. Which is cute, in a dramatic irony sort of way, because he’s pretty Holden-y in spite of himself. Which, in the end, makes him an intensely likable narrator, because even through his cynicality he's one lost and confused kid who just wants to rock a little. Still, the matter of being forced to read it in nearly every class since the dawn of high school time is enough to drive anyone crazy, and the explanation he gives toward the end of the book – directed more at the phonies who revere the book than the book itself – is almost thoughtful to the point of some sort of transcendence.

That’s probably the second thing you need to know – the thoughtful parts. Portman’s transition from songs that speak deeply to high school kids into a book that speaks deeply of the high school experience is seamless, and one of the most important parts of that is the weaving in of somber reality. The high school trauma is all there to wild exaggerations, but more importantly, so is the tedium to balance it out. The ludicrous and mystifying world of Advanced Placement is explored with equal bewildered wonder and reverence (because it still beats the hell out of the “normal” classes).

But the comedy is interspersed with parental breakdowns, trips to a surprisingly understanding shrink, and awkward but noble and ultimately kind of tragic attempts to bring a family a little closer together. The book also makes no Revenge of the Nerds pretenses about every dork in the school banding together to overthrow the jocks – we are made aware of the daily humiliations faced by the other untouchables like Bobby Duboyce the Helmet Boy and the unfortunately-named Pierre Butterfly Cameroon, but as anyone in real life should know, even amongst the misfits there are cliques, there are factions, and there are limits.

One of the best passages not-already-on-the-internet I could think of as an example that doesn’t also give away too much is in the first chapter, and it belies the fact that when you live in the suburbs, tedium doesn’t just attack your school life, but kind of punctuates everything, because there is absolutely nothing else to do. It’s where we are first introduced to obsessive fantasy-band documentation: an activity to which, to say Tom and his best friend Sam Hellerman (always Sam Hellerman, never just Sam, which somehow says something about them both) are both partial, would be an understatement. There is a certain amount of exhaustive meticulousness, but if you’ve ever rocked the suburbs high school style (especially before you actually own instruments), then you’ve had this conversation before. Or at least something similar.

At the back of the book, there is a comprehensive list of band names, members (real and imagined), and first album titles spanning the August to December over which the book takes place. The transformations are really kind of magical, especially when they place an important plot point at the crux of the whole shebang. There are also scattered song lyrics, as written by Tom and Sam Hellerman, which are all pretty fantastic.

The only real point of contention with King Dork, I have to say, is the ending. It’s much more open-ended than one would expect for what is at least partly a mystery story – frustratingly so. Especially for a mystery story that even sarcastically references two different Agatha Christie detectives. Tom spends a lot of time trying to wind every mystery in his young life together into one perfect spool of conclusion, as though the answer to one might unlock the answer to all; when it inevitably doesn’t, it breaks your heart a little because you knew that it wouldn’t, but still, you find yourself invested all the same. But hey, not everything has a tidy ending. Even in books. The way I like to think of it is, it definitely leaves you wanting more, and there is always room for a sequel.

For me, the fact that the book takes place in the late 1990s is one of the most interesting points, because I actually didn’t catch the part where it’s said explicitly until my second read-through, even though it might have been obvious just from the fact that that’s when the single was released. There’s this way in which Portman avoids specific technologies, the kind that can date a book faster than an iPod model goes obsolete, which gives the book a certain degree of timelessness without turning it into a period piece. No one really needs a cell phone, and Tom and Sam listen to music on vinyl because it’s cooler in that special pretentious sort of way. Still, in spite of being a girl and having two parents both alive, I felt so close to Tom that I couldn’t have imagined the story taking place at any other point in time than when I was in tenth grade myself, and when it turned out to be the actual case, I wondered if the effect of the book was somehow less strong for anyone from a different era. Then, the other day, I got a text message from my 16-year-old cousin. I had gotten him the book for Christmas, even though I was a little worried because he’s your standard emo-goth and goths are certainly not above Tom’s critical eye. The text message inquired as to whether or not I was aware that the movie rights to King Dork had been purchased, and I said you bet your sweet Elvis Costello glasses I did, and then he wrote back, exclaiming:

So I’m not entirely sure, but I think, in his own mid-2000s way, he’s trying to tell me that the effect is not diminished at all. Which makes me happy. Barring war and the threat thereof (the contrast of which, as it happens, does not go undiscussed), high school is easily the most terrifying and confusing place a product of suburban America will ever have to face, and that’s real no matter when you grew up. For maybe 5% of the population, it’s an unmarred haze of halcyon days, and if that’s your deal – if you call high school “the best days of your life,” for example – then this book might not be for you. But for everyone else, even you playful quasi-hip drama club dolphins, it was pretty much abject hell, punctuated by those golden moments of triumph that make life worth living, be it your first electric guitar or your first third-base experience. (Whichever one’s the more special, I’ll leave up to you. Both are covered here.) And it's you -- well, us, I guess -- that King Dork aims to salute. And salute, it does. A better one on the topic, I've yet to see.

King Dork (in case you forgot the title because I maybe haven't said it enough) is available through Little Type, and is coming out in paperback and in UK stores real soon. Get on it!

Recommended Viewing: Here is Frank reading an Advanced French segment from King Dork -- sounds a lot like AP Spanish 7/8, where Señora Woods-Petties laughed at me when I inquired as to whether I should spend my money on attempting the actual AP test. Yet, I still got a B+. Ah, high school!




The "King Dork" split-7" is the only Mr. T Experience recording on vinyl that _DictionaryGirl_ does not own. Isn't that sad?! Oh, irony! She is also very sorry that this is being posted a little late; it took twice as long to write as anticipated, is twice as long as she expected it to be, and even now she's going crazy-paranoid that she left things out. Stay tuned next week for something MUCH less angsty from PointBlank! It'll be a blast!