 So Crissie’s not pregnant. STOP ASKING ALREADY. I was wrong and she was right. Now we’ve resorted to science and went and bought a modulation kit so we can tell when she’s modulating. She has to pee on a stick and if a line shows up it means the eggs are ready. Last Tuesday the stick said the eggs were done and I watered them with my weiner. Now we wait. Not sure how long. But hopefully not too long… I have shit to do, you know? I was saying to Crissie and my sister-in-law, Julia, that I know it’s a bit late in the overall scheme of man’s evolution but if I could get God’s ear for a minute I’d would suggest to him that to make things easier on couples trying to get pregnant, to help eliminate the guessing game, that maybe he could rig it so either the lady’s belly button pops out like a turkey timer to indicate the eggs are dropping or maybe just have one of those plastic Easter eggs drop out of a woman’s vagina onto the floor to show it was time for baby-making. Those are my suggestions. If anyone knows God’s email or if he has a blog site, please forward it my way.
BREAKING NEWS: Crissie just pissed on the other stick and stuck her head in my office… not pregnant again. I think there’s something wrong with her.
Anyway. Getting back to my vague recollection of my summer Skinema book tour I must now tell you about my misadventures in Austin, Texas. I was looking forward to Austin because Carnie told me I could find crack pretty easily there and my good friends Pat and Heather Roach live there and I hadn’t seen them in a year. Plus my friend Sean Carberry said he had a cute friend there who would show me around while Pat & Heather were working and possibly take nudie photos for my next book. To make things better my buddy Kelly Roberston, and NJ Skateshop’s sales rep for Bones wheels and bearings, happened to be staying at his brother Ryan’s farm 30 minutes outside of Austin and he invited me to shoot guns, fish, swim and stare at the sun. Basically, my stay in Austin was looking like AWESOME times a thousand as I got into my rental car at the airport. (Did I already mention that Red Bull took care of all my travel, rental cars and lodging? They did. They’re awesome. Vice got the free Colt 45, so that has to count for something, right?)
First I went and saw Pat and Heather at their Lowbrow Emporium shop. I’d only seen photos of the place up until then and the photos looked insane. Everything was marble, there was a water fountain and I think a wading pool too. Walking in I got extremely jealous. The space was formerly owned by marble company and they did the whole place up with no detail missed. I get boners off of good store presentation and Lowbrow might have one of my favorite vibes of any store I’ve ever been in. Design aside, they carry cool shit. That’s their whole thing: toys, bouncy balls, skateboards, books, artwork, panties, whatever; if it’s cool and they like it, they sell it. And they have a POS system and that is like PORN for a retailer. If you’re in Austin or hitchhiking across country you should go there and check out Pat & Heather. But be warned. Pat will wrestle you.
 The next day I went out to see Kelly and Ryan Robertson. When I pulled up I thought I was going to visit the Unibomber. There was shit everywhere on his property. Dead cars. Working cars for the road. Windowless trucks for the farm. Dogs. Cows. Ten foot tall aluminum can pieces of “artwork” worth thousands (“People have tried to steal my cans before. I shot a few rounds over their head and they took off running.”). Inside the house was no different: guns, dogs, no windows, no toilet paper, an empty fish tank, dog food bowls next to breakfast dishes. It was basically camping in a cement tent. I was stoked. “What do you want to do first?” They asked. “Let’s go shoot some shit.” I said. And off we went in his truck to find some shit to shoot. I saw, like, 50 cows. “Oooh! Can I shoot a cow?”
“No, we don’t shoot the cows.” Then I saw some horses. “Can I shoot a horse?”
“Why would you want to shoot a horse?” Ryan asked. “To say that I did.” I told him. “We don’t shoot the horses.” He told me. Then I saw some pigs. In a pen. Before I could ask he shook his head and said, “No.”
“Well what the hell are we looking for? What am I allowed to shoot?”
“Boar. We got a wild boar problem out here. So that’s what we shoot.”
“Don’t they have tusks,” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Can’t they attack me?”
“Yeah.”
“Rad.”
So we drove around for an hour looking for boars before I said, “WE AIN’T FOUND SHIT!” I think Kelly and Ryan felt bad about not finding anything to shoot and so they pulled over by a little pond and said, “Ok. Here you go.”
“What?”
“The pond.”
“What about it?”
“Shoot it.”
“What?”
“Shoot the pond.”
“Shoot the pond?”
“Shoot the pond.”
“Ok.”
And so I got out of the truck, loaded up the rifle and shot round after round into the water. In the back of my head I wondered if this was how Peta members hunt. Shooting anything but animals. I didn’t really care. I was shooting a gun. I even spotted a spider the size of my hand in its web and I shot it point blank range. I felt like Rambo. (Did you see the new Rambo Trailer? So sick.) Kelly made us a bet that he could cast out and catch a fish in three tries. After I had put 100 rounds into the pond and scared the shit out of the fish so badly that I saw them all get on a bus and go back to Mexico. Obviously, he lost the bet. He didn’t care. He was loaded and to prove he was still in good spirits he pissed his pants for our amusement. (I filmed all this stuff and it should go up on VBS one day. But I’m actually holding the footage hostage until they give me the tapes of the interviews I did with the girls of Burning Angel back in June, where I sweated in a bedroom for 5 hours with no AC only to have Vice tell me that the long, leading questions they gave me in the interview shouldn’t have been so leading and they really only wanted one or two word answers for sound bites. Rad, right? I’m still trying to figure out how to answer the question, “Tell us about your childhood.” In two words or less.)
The next day I went and drank beer with Heather at Lowbrow. We pretended it was a book signing but no one showed up. Well 2 people. But I think they were asking for directions. Seems although I kept reminding my babysitter, Sarah, that I wanted to do something at Pat & Heather’s place they never scheduled it or advertised it. So it was like a secret signing, just for me and Heather.
Afterwards I went to the biggest bookstore in Texas for a reading. They happened to schedule me the day before the release of a little book called HARRY POTTER. Guess who sold more copies? Me or Harry? The room I was showing my slide show in had a podium. I’d never stood in front of a podium and doing so, I felt quite presidential.
 The bookstore gave me a babysitter for the day. She was a stunning, black-haired, tattooed gal in a rockabilly dress and glasses. We were rather flirtatious from the start and making really bad jokes for each other. I think maybe 13 people showed up to hear me. Which was 11 more than I expected. Earlier that day some Get Rich Quick speaker was there. 4 people showed up for him, so at least I beat him. The first image in the slide show is of my buddy Gabbi, a large, strapping, black, Portuguese man, passed out drunk in the bushes. Being in Texas, I tried some regional humor and said, “This is not a dead black man… but being in Texas I’m sure most of you wish it was.” Four people stood up and walked out. Things went straight in the shitter after that. Seems they had forgotten about the time they dragged that poor fellow behind a truck with chains. Afterwards I signed some books although most people didn’t want my signature and just wanted to leave as quickly as possible. I stood in front of the door and said, “You don’t leave unless I sign your book.” Defeated they all opened their front covers and obliged me. Then my babysitter told me I should sign all the rest of the 50 copies of Skinema, “That way they can’t send them back,” she told me. And so I signed them all. It took forever because I write slow. And poorly. As I drew and wrote, her and I talked casually about everything: my wife, her boyfriend, drinking, opium, doing drugs, getting off drugs etc. It seemed like a very natural, two-way conversation. I asked her if she wanted to go with me to the signing at The Skatepark of Austin and to Pat Roach’s buddy’s birthday party afterwards since I didn’t know my way around town nor did I have anyone to hang out with for the next 6 hours (due to my buddy Sean’s friend and my tour guide blowing me off). She declined and that was that. I packed my stuff, plugged the skatepark’s address into the navigator and off I went. That was that.
So I thought.
Fast forward a week. I get an email from my Vice babysitter, Sarah, asking me what happened in Austin. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I got a letter from the bookstore people complaining about you.” She said. “Complaining about me? What? Why? Because I didn’t sell as many books as Harry Potter for them? Send me the letter. What did it say?” This is EXACTLY what the letter said:
“Sarah,
Just wanted to give you an update on the event this weekend.
Despite getting our press release picked up in The Onion A.V. Club, we only had 12 in attendance and sold 5 books.
Our event host did, however, have an unpleasant experience with Chris. She had some tattoos showing, he asked if she had others, she said yes but couldn’t show them because she was wearing a dress. He then continued to ask about the tattoos, then started asking about seeing her naked. She was extremely uncomfortable. I wanted to pass this onto you, simply because I thought you should know that his behavior on tour might not be ideal.”
 I was floored, overrun with a flurry of emotions: anger, disbelief, even sadness that someone mistook my joking demeanor to heart. I was blown away and unsure how to respond. I showed some friends the letter in LA as soon as I received it and they said, “Your behavior might not be ideal? When the hell is your behavior anywhere near ideal?” Sarah said for me not to worry about it, that they should have known what to expect just from the tone of the book. But then I went from feeling bad for the girl to feeling like someone who had been falsely accused of rape. Yes I asked to take naked pictures of the girl but not until after stating and restating it was for my next book and that I was happily married and uninterested in her beyond photographing her. Then some friends suggested that might have been the problem. Perhaps she was angry or felt slighted that I wasn’t interested on a physical level. Whatever it was it severely damaged the little faith I had left in humanity. When a man cannot JOKE with a woman in a sexual way for fear of lawsuit or complaint we have a real problem. I would hate for that woman to ever have to meet my Uncle John who has no problem asking a complete stranger what color panties she is wearing.
Rewind. After leaving the bookstore I went out to the skatepark to drink beers with the owners Yann and Jamie Curtis. I walked in and was like, “God. The bookstore was like trying stand-up material in Auschwitz. Where’s the beer? Let’s drink!”
“What beer?”
“The Colt 45. They were supposed to send ten cases of beer. That was Vice’s only obligation.”
“No one sent any beer.”
“Rad.”
After buying a few cases of Budweiser for the crew at the park and slamming a six-pack out of anger, I got in the rental car to meet Pat & Heather at their buddy Rob’s house for a birthday party. Pat used to be the lead singer of The Dimwits now he’s the lead singer of Roger’s Porn Collection. Rob is the guitar player. He is an OG punker who straightened himself out and became this high powered lawyer in Austin and his wife is a big time lawyer as well and they are rich as shit. Driving up to the house I had to recheck the address Heather gave me. I had to be in the wrong neighborhood. Rob’s house was nearly a city block in size. Then I heard the music. See, Rob is still punk as shit and he got 10 punk bands to play his party including his own R.P.C. It was the funnest vibe you can imagine: young and old punkers dancing and bouncing about as Rob’s office co-workers stood off to the side watching in awe in their boat shoes, Izods and khaki shorts. It was about the most awesomely, absurd moment of the trip. I stood in the middle of these two polar opposite groups of people and I laughed for hours. It almost made me forget the beer not showing up to the park. Almost.
Kill 'em all
Kelly & Ryan, Texas Livin'
Beer Can Art
Gun is my co-pilot
One on the floor...
Yee-haw! Ride em, Cowboy!
Pee-pee pants
In life, all you really need is a place to lay your head, a guitar, a TV and a gun
Mmmmm... Chocolate
The Sodomizer
Katzen rules
Pat & Heather Roach
Lowbrow Emporium
Roger's Porn Collection
Pat Roach is the singer in Roger's Porn Collection
Punk Rock has a new look...
Nieratko vs. Harry Potter. Guess who sold more?
I thought this was everyone that was coming. I got scared.
Please don't sit too close to me, it freaks me out.
Writing Skinema was not the roadmap to riches
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