Life is great. I live with my amazing and thoroughly supportive girlfriend in a beautiful condo which we're going to buy within the next few months, I have an awesome job that allows me time to pursue writing and I have a lunatic smooth coat collie named Rodney that licks my face every morning and shows me how good he is at chewing his toys. I'm in the best shape of my life, running half marathons and actually paying attention what kind of food I shove in my face. My bad credit is slowly being whittled down, I'm no longer having to decide whether I'm going to eat or go to the bar and I rarely go without much of anything. My best friends in the world all live close to me and I see them all regularly. I look at myself now and am amazed at how much I've grown personally over the last five years. The five-night-a-week boozing, fucking and fighting KungFu Mike of five years past definitely didn't see this coming.

This is Rodney.

You'd think that living in my own private little oasis I'd be able to bang this heart-wrenching, emotionally straining screenplay out in no time, but apparently that's not how it works. With any other project, I used to be able to go to the local cafe with my laptop and start plugging away. I'd get a large iced hazelnut, throw my headphones on, blast some music and create. I can't do it anymore and I really miss that. Even though I've already lived through the subject matter, even though I started this project a few years ago and have re-read the material I'm putting down a million times over, I still catch myself crying a lot during this process. I'm basically taking the worst parts of my life, breaking them down into their basic elements and stringing them together in a such a way that the public can consume and digest them. When it's all laid out in front of you so plainly; when every awful, embarrassing, gut wrenching moment of your existence is put in a little flip-book and spun through in front of your eyes...it's sobering and brutal and real and honest and everything, all at once and way too fast for it not to shake you up in ways you couldn't have seen coming. I guess that's what makes it good.

I think my biggest mistake regarding this project was making my first feature-length effort the most important story I'll probably ever tell about myself. This would have been much easier if it was a compilation of my funniest stories adapted into something titled "FireFuck Boobsplosion". All I know are two things; the process of pouring my soul into this work is forcing me to evolve as a writer in a way I don't really understand, and that when it's finished, you're going to have a hard time believing I wrote it because it's unlike anything you've ever seen from me or from Rudius Media.

My goal is to have it completed by the end of 2009. I've set the rest of my vacation time up for the rest of the year to be used strictly for working on this project and have managed to secure a log cabin way up by the Canadian border for extended writing sessions.

I'm really sorry for not posting on here regularly, despite my promise to in my last update. I have a few hilarious stories that I can't believe I haven't published on here yet all outlined and ready to flesh out. If I can, I'll take a day to post a few of them to make up for lost time. I'm sure the bulk of you are busy following the awesomeness that is the I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Premiere Tour which is raping - er, I mean...having consensual, sober sex - and pillaging across the country as we speak. I'm really proud of Nils, Tucker and everyone involved in this thing. I know how draining it is to manage and run a cross-country promotional tour from back when IHTSBIH was first published, and these guys are doing a great job keeping composed under the insane schedule they've put together. With any luck, Ben Corman will return home to a fresh liver waiting for him in an Igloo cooler and Jeff Waldman won't have gone to prison for accidentally putting some fan to sleep forever.

My girlfriend and I just moved into a condo, and held a housewarming party to celebrate with our friends and family. I was celebrating extra-hard, mostly because I'm finally living somewhere that doesn't smell like a hollowed out horse carcass baking in the desert sun, and decided it would be a good idea to test our puppy's new bark control collar on myself. It took a while for me to figure out that barking wouldn't set the collar off, but a low-level DMX-esque growl would do just right. Luckily, my friend Teddy just picked up a Blackberry and decided to use its camcorder function, albeit late enough that I was forced to electrocute myself twice.

Also, I'm working on a new story for you guys and I should have it up sooner than later. Sorry for being a phantom for so long.

Hello there, Internet Land. I just wanted to check in with you to let you know I have not been kidnapped by Hamas or murdered by some jealous boyfriend. I know a lot of people out there just now lost a bunch of money in their respective "KungFu Mike death pools", and I apologize.

I've been working hard on the book the past few months and I just started a new position that allows me to work strictly from home and on my own schedule, which is going to facilitate my writing schedule in a very positive way. Hopefully I'll have so much time on my hands that I'll be able to pump out some new entries for you guys. I have a list of half sketched-out stories that I'd love to put up here.

One thing that I think about a lot while I'm writing this book is about its believability. The closer I get to finishing everything, the more I'm afraid that my life has been so tragic and ridiculous and self-mutilated that people who don't know me will refuse to believe any of it when the book is done. I mean, I have plenty of people I know in real life who will always vouch for its credibility and I'm not going to get James Frey'd out of existence, but it's still something I worry about because I always feel irrationally guilty about shit. It's the same reason I can't walk out of a store without buying something. I'm worried that someone will think I'm shoplifting so I'll buy a pack of gum, even though I don't look suspicious and I don't have any ill gotten merchandise stuffed in my boxer briefs. I watch Curb Your Enthusiasm and I almost have to change the channel every time Larry David makes a mess out of things. There's an evil gnome in my brain that prods whatever lobe that evokes guilt at strange intervals, and I am slave to it. I'd delve into that further, but that would spoil a bit of the book for you.

I started writing this entry when I was sober, but then my friend called me and I went to the bar for a few hours. Just keep harassing me about those new entries so I don't forget.

Something about this entry doesn't feel right. Cunt. Fuck. Fireworks. Tits. Monster trucks. Dead people. Blowjobs.

There we go.

A flawlessly sunny summer day. An audience of hundreds of thousands has congregated in front of the Washington Monument, all facing the same direction. They are listening to a lone speaker at a podium positioned in front of the reflection pool. The voice of the speaker is broadcast through vintage speakers in wooden boxes mounted on poles throughout the area. I was at the very back trying to get a look at the man at the podium through the tightly packed group and unable to hear the man on the microphone clearly.

I lift off of the ground and begin flying over the masses toward the monument and the speaker. I look down at the people below me. They are entranced by the speakers words; hanging on every turn of phrase and point of emphasis. I still couldn't quite make out what the speaker was saying, but it was definitely resonating in a powerful way with the people around me. I whizzed over the heads of hundreds of thousands of loyal listeners until I came within eye and earshot of the focus of the gathering.

Continue reading "Ginsanity; Part 5"

I was in bed with my girlfriend when we were woken up by a loud thumping noise and muffled screaming. It was 3 a.m. on Monday morning. At first it sounded like there was some kind of domestic dispute in the apartment upstairs, but after the grogginess of Sunday night football beers and a few hours of sleep wore off, we realized there was somebody outside trying to gain entrance to our apartment building. Every 20 seconds or so, the thumping and screaming would start and stop in a new location; on the front porch, on a window, on the vinyl siding on the side of the building, almost like James Bond rapping on a bookcase to find the secret passage behind it, but with less style.

BANGBANGBANGBANG. "RAAAWWRRKAAALLLLLLRRGHHHHHH!!!"

BANGBANGBANGBANG."RAAAGHHHHHHHRRRLAAAAARRR!!!"

Continue reading "The Prowler"

Ladies and gentleman; there isn't going to be a part 5 of Ginsanity on kungfumike.net.

The more I work on this series, the more I'm coming to understand it isn't going to be complete as a multi-entry blog post. In order to give it the detail and attention it demands, I've come to the conclusion that Ginsanity is going to be my first book.

Tucker has been telling me to do this for years now. "Mike, you're hilarious and everything, but you and I both know your magnum opus is going to be the story about you and your father." I always knew he was right when he'd bring it up at the bar or in a random email exchange, but I pushed Tucker's advice to the side because I knew I wasn't emotionally ready to tackle it. I always thought that one day I'd be stable enough to open the vault that contains all of the hurt and the guilt and organize its contents for you in a calm and calculated way, like some kind of dark Rube Goldberg mechanism that spits my soul out at the end of its process. The more I live, the more I realize I'll probably never be that pillar of stability, but the more I work on this series, the more I understand that Ginsanity demands that I lock myself in that vault in order to write it the way it needs to be written. I now know there will never be a perfectly ideal time for this project to take the front burner...so why not now?

I'll still update my site to keep you guys entertained in the meanwhile, but as of right now, the book is where I am going to focus the bulk of my energy. Well, I'll at least split it evenly between the book, the therapist and the bottle.

And boobs. Don't forget boobs.

I've been getting a lot of response to the Ginsanity series since I've started publishing it here on kungfumike.net. The bulk of the people writing in have been saying how mystified they are about someone so goofy and funny being so tortured inside. I guess the best way I can explain that is with the theory that the best comedy always comes from a very dark place. George Carlin, Chevy Chase, Mitch Hedberg -- The greatest comedians are usually the ones with the most sordid back stories. I can't compare myself to those guys on a talent vs. talent basis, but I can certainly stand in a line-up of people who have used humor as a defense mechanism their entire lives without being told I'm in the wrong place. You use it to protect yourself so much that you end up developing a skill without being proud of it or even noticing it.

I mentioned in a note before the third installment of Ginsanity about how the series is taking its toll on me as I write it. I also mentioned that also touched on how I have to "let the crazy back in" to give the piece an honest voice. What I'm now discovering is that my stability on this side of the laptop is deteriorating almost at the same pace as the Mike on the other side in the story. The worse Mike five years ago gets, the worse I get. I sleep three to four hours a night, sparsely eat and aftershocks of co-dependency issues from the same time period are resurfacing, choking the essence out of relationships I have in real life. I suppose that last part doesn't really matter; nobody is going to want to have anything to do with this lunatic motherfucker by the end of the series anyway. I've had to write the bulk of this from a local coffee shop, just to keep me in check. Even then I find myself blotting my eyes with their brown, recycled paper napkins when I get overwhelmed.

After the last bout of teary, chest knotting breakdowns at my apartment this weekend, I've decided to give therapy a shot. I need to make the rational decision to do this now while there is a semblance of self control and self preservation left in me. At least I still have the foresight to know someone's going to need to be perpetually talking me off the ledge as I complete this series, and I can't expect family and friends to be that sounding board. It would make me feel even worse to put that kind of a burden on them.

If you guys want, I'll post entries like this from time to time so you know I'm not taking sabbatical at Arkham or floating face down in a pool somewhere with an "I'm sorry" post-it pinned to my shirt sleeve. I'm working on part five of Ginsanity as we speak, and I'll post it for you as soon as I can.