They still haven’t killed me.

That’s not to say there haven’t been a few close calls. That time I pulled the job on the Federation Bank on Ganymede? Goddamn, that pig went belly-up the second I scratched the skin, but I walked out with an empty clip and sack full of cash. Needless to say, I won’t be going back to Jupiter anytime soon.

Or that time I stowed aboard the Belt Skipper in the hopes of finding my beau for a real lunar tryst of a weekend. Of course, I was discovered halfway through, and that fuck of a captain tried the `ole airlock gag on me. Thing is, that shit only works on the criminally unprepared, and I’m nothing if not one prepared criminal. Fucker punched the release and I flashed him the bird before wrapping myself in a solar sail and then leisurely drifting to a comrade’s outpost.

Oh, and then just yesterday I was having a drink at Old  McQuarrie’s — bourbon and white wine, if you care – and all of a sudden the place goes neon! Bullets and beams whizzing past my head, Old McQuarrie crying behind the bar and doing that thing he does where he says those prayers and grabs at the – whatcha call it – that’s right, the Rosary beads! They managed to kill an old pervert sitting next to me, which is a shame because even though he’d spent a half hour shamelessly trying to get into my pants, everyone in the community really loved him.

So anyways, I end up having to basically gut Old McQuarrie’s with the better part of my arsenal – and I don’t just mean bullets and blades, I’m talking about pulse charges and pheno-drones, too. But, when someone’s trying to take your life, you don’t think to yourself, “Maybe I should save something for next time,” `cause the truth is that there might not be a next time.

They still haven’t killed me.
And I’ve got the privilege of next time.
But next time? They might just kill me.

—-

Welcome to the MONDAY MORNING COMMUTE, you salty dogs!

Y’either know the drill or y’don’t. If y’do, just keep movin’ along! If y’don’t, well here’s what’s what: first I warm you up with some half-baked bit of writing nonsense (see above). Then, I share what I’ll be thinking about or watching or listening to or doing over the next week. Finally, you hit up the comments section and share your own tentative plans?

Why do we do this here at OL? Well, because life can be brutal but solidarity can be liberating. We’re all just trying to make our days manageable — or enjoyable or maybe even, in rare instances, triumphant — and sometimes a good suggestion goes a long way.

Enough blathering, let’s freakin’ dance!

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It’s Labor Day here in the Empire. The holiday that has been co-opted and become a celebration of the successful completion of a Summer. It also signals what is for many the Long March towards Winter. Via Autumn. Me? I fucking love the Fall. Favorite season. It’s not too cold, but it’s cool enough to snuggle up with a blanket. It heralds my favorite Opiate of the Masses: football (and my 1a: hockey). In addition, a secondary market of cool balms to draw me out of my peretual existential crisis arrives in the form of Fall Television Programming. Finally let us not forget how it drums up my favorite gauntlet of Fabricated Reasons to Celebrate, which is the stretch from Halloween through Christmas.

So yeah, I’m down with Labor Day. Cool enough. But I’m really down with what it signals.

(Oh yeah wait this is Monday Morning Commute the column where we share the various aforementioned balms and  non-literal and perhaps literal sedatives that get us through the week with minimal scarring so I’ll start by giving you a rundown of what I’m enjoying this week and then you do me the solid of letting me know what you’re totally into this week and that way we will all be a happy commune full of run-on sentences and dementia and cool arts and farts to try out okay how does that sound?)

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I typically abstain from covering music here at OL, as I find it pushes the Internet community quickly into hair-pulling and name calling. However, I’m making a special exception for Nine Inch Nails, a band whose importance is great to many of us who contribute to the site. In fact, and while I’m not supposed to mention this, our own Patrick Bateman actually lost his virginity to The Fragile. Yep, that’s right. One wonderful Autumn evening, he galavanted into the woods wearing his WalkMan for a seven-mile run. There a druid spied his overdeveloped abdominal muscles, and offered him a deal he could not turn down. One luscious evening of deep butt interrogation, in exchange for Bateman’s own soul. While the fire has died in his eyes ever since that evening, having sloughed off his eternal soul, Bateman says he would never do it any other different. With equal certainty, he believes that it was Trent Reznor’s overly-orchestrated nonsense that spoke to the druid on a level he never could have conjured on his own.

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This is Monday Morning Commute.

It’s been one of those interminable Mondays. The sort that strike during the deadness of winter, challenging me not to stick the gas pump up my ass while singing falsetto at everyone staring at me. The dumb, dank, dirty snow. The middle-finger flipping ashen sky. One of those Mondays when I have to write this little column, and unfortunately all I can muster is, “man, I’m pretty much not excited about anything.” Everything is dirty underneath my bitter little gums today. Here is a list of begrudgingly rustled things that I’m kind of, sort of, enjoying.

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Can you feel the winds of progress caressing your face?

If there’s a breeze at your back, you need to turn around! Post-haste! Hurry up, goddamn it, or else you’re goin’ to miss it! No, not the future — the future’s already old news. Passé. The stuff of anthropology. Hell, every average seventeen year old possesses a single electronic device that can be used to make phone calls, research vast informational databases, watch movies, listen to music, and navigate via GPS.

And that average seventeen year old also wants the newer model.

But rather than letting these futuristic winds whip our backs, let’s trudge forward. Scratch that — let’s sprint. `Cause the fact of the matter is that it’s easy to spin our wheels here in the future. Hell, how could it not be? We’ve got everything that our parents and grandparents could’ve ever imagined. But if we hold our heads high, welcome alien gusts that tussle our hair, and keep movin’ ahead, we could go to some incredible places.

Let’s go beyond the future.

—-

Thanks for tuning in to the Monday Morning Commute! As per custom, I’m goin’ to show you the various bits of entertainment and brain-rot that I’ll be using to get through the workweek. After scoping out my pile of fun-detritus, hit up the comments section and tell us what you’ll be doin’ this week.

Time to party.

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Thanks to the internet, information travels quickly. Like, really quickly. Which is why despite  Trent and director Timur Bekmambetov wanting to keep it a secret, every disaffected emo fanboy and fangirl of Reznor knows that not only is he scoring Abraham: Vampire Hunter, he’s also acting in it. Reznor took to the NIN forums to comment on the insanity.

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