Skull Kicking Dracula's Dad

Random thought of the moment
Skull Kickers is awesome, and I recommend you read it. Also Fables. It's hard to describe exactly how good this series is. The first few books are an excellent read, and if such a thing is possible the story and the writing get better as you go. Recommended reading for almost anyone. Some of the content is really better suited for kids fourteen and over.

I'm the Dad
For those of you who know me really well, you will remember a time that I insisted I would never have a child, much less children. In the passionate rhetoric of youth I insisted that, should my resolve weaken, my wife and I would adopt, because the world is full of unwanted children (there are a few Angelina Jolie hasn't adopted yet) and it would be better to give one of them a home than to contribute to swelling the world's population. Years have a way of tempering passion into something far more valuable and enduring; perspective. My daughter was born in March and she has become a bright light in my world. With her I do things I never thought were possible for me to do, like pick another human being's nose and then call her cute.

I like to do drawings
So, I've been posting artwork to Facebook for a while, but they're a bunch of evil privacy violating, intellectual property stealing, fuckheads. It's getting to the point that I use Google+ because I don't want Mark Zuckerberg and the legion of Zuckernauts to sell my daughter's information to a phishing scheme that will run up credit card debt in her name just because I played the latest version of the Facebook municipal waste processing game. All of that said, the night that I write this I have also finished filling up a sketchbook with drawings. I would like to share some of those so I'll be posting them here as a daily feature. Some days it may be the only feature. What can I say, some days I have more to write than others. Here is your daily doodle.

The first R-rated movie that I saw after turning seventeen was Bram Stoker's Dracula. It featured actors I knew, actors who were big at the time including Anthony Hopkins, whom I'd seen in The Silence of the Lambs; Gary Oldman, whom I had only seen in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead; and Wynona Ryder, whom I'd been crushing on since Beatle Juice. The experience of seeing this movie in the theater with my best friend who'd turned seventeen only the day before was a defining one for me. Not only did I feel like a grown-up for the first time, but it was one of those movies that made me want to make movies for a living. It helped to shape not just the kind of story I would like to tell, but the way in which I would like to tell it.

Truth be told, the movie has not aged well. I'm not sure which scrapes a sore spot on my nerves more; Keanu Reeves and Wynona Ryder doing possibly the worst British accents I have ever heard, Gary Oldman hamming it up in over the top villainous fashion, or the sense of camp that doesn't feel at all intentional. I can't help but watch Bram Stoker's Dracula now and think, "Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow was scarier." Still, when I watch this movie I'm transported back to the Seven Hills 10 and I'm seventeen again, watching the movie with my childhood friends and feeling like a grown up for the first time. Also, the woman who played Lucy was fucking hot.