I spent a good four or five hours in a Borders on Saturday, reading my own book, Prelude to a Super Airplane.

(My ego isn’t that crazy – something I’m working on has a a few loose tie-ins, and I wanted to make sure my continuity wasn’t getting screwy.

That said, I’ve read it purely for pleasure something like 27 times.)

In any case, I didn’t get much reading actually done, since the two elderly ladies over my knee there spent lengthy amounts of time talking about the merits of Nick Cannon, whom one of them referred to as, “that colored fella from America’s Talent Show“.

As if that – and my need to IM everything I was hearing to a friend – wasn’t enough, at a tumultuous moment, the following seven people came in and sat at a nearby table.

- white female/21
- white male/52
- latino male/16
- white male/28
- white male/48
- latino female/58
- white female/35

This was an amazingly odd grouping of people, because they didn’t seem to know each other at all.

Book club? No books.
Parent-teacher thing? No – there was a lot of introductory conversation, and the mix wasn’t right.
Fellow Nick Cannon enthusiasts? No mention of Nick Cannon.

It was really starting to bother me – there were no logical scenarios.

My IM companion said I should go sit down and apologize for being late, which I considered, along with simply asking them, “WHO ARE YOU AND WHY ARE YOU HERE, YOU SOBs. ALSO DO YOU WANT TO BUY MY BOOK.”

You may think I wouldn’t do this – I assure you I would, minus the SOB-calling and book-selling.

I didn’t have to though, because the 16-year old boy was squeezing the 21-year old girl’s leg under the table. She smiled, and had braces – I reasoned she wasn’t 22 at all, but rather 15 or 16 herself.

Then a flurry of info came forth – 35-year old whitey has infertility issues. She said this with a conviction and volume that amazed the entire cafe section. 52-year old white male runs down his family’s health history.

Adoption and “staying in the baby’s life” are discussed.

28-year old whitey – now reasoned to be in his mid-30s – tries to discuss Madden 2010 with the boy. He’s full of wonderment about how, “All the real players are in the game now…wow, how neat.” Buddy, they had that 20 years ago when you were growing up – did you only play Metroid and Zelda.

In any case…these teens were pregnant, and having a nice meeting about giving the baby away.

At BORDERS.

By the way, if you go to that Borders, there’s now a signed copy of PTSA randomly placed in the Cooking section. Where would you have your baby-momma adoption meeting.

(This is @kelliesimpson, my first Internet Wife.)

I don’t know if stuff like this goes on in like Second Life or those other online community games, but as all this social networking gets more real world, ie people are online who they are offline, I’m convinced there’s money to be made somewhere in the concept of Internet Married.

Whether it be a venue for heavy flirting as it is now (I’m Internet Engaged to at least 5 girls), or an actual non-legal but formal arrangement wherein you can only be internet married to one person at a time, there’s just something there.

For example, let’s say InternetMarried.com had like a lot of traffic, and the gist of it is that two people (who met on Twitter or wherever) decide they want to get Internet Married. It’s submitted to the community for a judgment, and then like some kind of something is issued.

(Naturally, you have an offshoot site called Internet Divorced.)

So like someone go run with that and get rich off of it. I think the real money would come when a real marriage came out of it, and then you started doing talk shows and writing books, pretending you’re some kind of relationship expert.

Oh – another idea I have is called Nuclear Internet, which is like the regular internet, but nuclear, and everything has like plutonium dripping everywhere. I don’t even think you need to issue judgments or have a central website for this, so like you could get started like immediately.

Thoughts on all of the above?

(Follow me on Twitter here.)
(Download the first 55 pages of my epic, pretentious, and stupid book, Prelude to a Super Airplane, here – it’s available in paperback, or iPhone/Kindle for only 1.99.)

I’ve only seen this show once for 10 minutes, but because I love reading about paparazzi action, I’ve recently become really into their adventures.

The summation is thus: they had twins, then had an additional litter of six. TOTAL OF EIGHT KIDS. Got a reality show on TLC.

Kate is a slightly controlling/cold sort, who’s become enamored with her own fame and looks like a completely different human than she did two years ago.

She’s also stated for the record that she has an “obligation to the public” to keep her children on TV for the duration of their collective childhoods.

As you can imagine, Jon looks like he wishes he were still eligible to go on spring break.

Allegations and rumors of two-way marital malfunctions are rampant, and the kids have no chance. I’ve been talking it up on Twitter.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Jon slings a guitar over his shoulder and walks away from the house in slow motion.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Jon drinks by himself in the dark and listens to Dido.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Jon watches Fight Club 47 times in a row.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Kate grounds the kids for not spending their allowance on her new book.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Jon fails in his attempt to snowboard into a tree at 88 miles per hour.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Jon makes up a fairy tale to explain his new cutting habit to the kids.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Kate hires a marketing firm to re-brand the twins.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Jon is conflicted when he learns his will to live is no longer part of the ongoing storyline.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Kate considers whether to re-conceptualize the show as Kate & Kate + Kate.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Jon decides to hide his soul @Public_Storage in case Kate wants a snack.

Next on Jon & Kate + 8, Jon has a nervous breakdown when he sees an old friend as a contestant on The Bachelorette.

This will go on until I run out, which should be never.

Their media onslaught has inspired me to sit down and actually watch the show, so I haven’t even begun to mine material. The one segment I did see was Kate telling the kids they were getting puppies, and then stating that she’d already named them, and those names were not negotiable. I need to see it again, but I’m pretty sure you can actually see the life-force of one of the twins drain from their body at that point.

Side note: avid blog participant @alexiskn has reviewed Prelude to a Super Airplane over at her secret identity website. She has Disqus comment/points system, so go be all, “OH YEAH GIRL!!” like @jerryricetwo.

Add’l side note: I have no Finals pick – I’m just not interested. Sorry. :(

(Follow me on Twitter here.)
(Download the first 55 pages of my epic, pretentious, and stupid book, Prelude to a Super Airplane, here – it’s available in paperback, or iPhone/Kindle for only 1.99.)

(The following is an excerpt from my book, Prelude to a Super Airplane. It can be purchased by clicking on any of the roughly 400 banners adorning this site, or by clicking here. It’s also available on Amazon.

I’ve posted the first 20 chapters (roughly 55 pages of PTSA) on this site. Links to each of those are at the end of this post, or you can download all of them as a pdf by clicking here.

Dr. Ramie Fromica stared at the walls and walls of books that lined her fancy, five-walled psychiatry office.

She loved to read, which is why she had so many walls. Without this vast amount of wall space, there was no way she’d have room to store all her books.

Nathan Hamm was lying on her fancy psychiatry sofa, and Dr. Ramie Fromica was thankful that his hour was almost up. Nathan Hamm was, in Ramie’s eyes, a raw, savage human being, not unlike her husband.

The doctor knew that Nathan owned a large beverage company of some kind, and was very stressed, and that this often caused him to talk loudly, and that it was her job to help him fix these things, and that he paid her well to do this, and…it was, as it was on most days, all quite unbearable.

She sighed to herself, but out loud, so that her patient could hear her frustration with his presence in her fancy psychiatry office. Was this all there was? She also said this out loud, and to her surprise, Nathan Hamm began to answer this question, in detail, and of course, a high volume.

In this moment, Dr. Ramie Fromica was glad that Nathan Hamm talked with his boisterous volume, because it allowed her to finger her Blackberri Tornado, which was far more important and interesting than whatever he was speaking of.

(The irony of this was not lost on Ramie Fromica, because Nathan Hamm had been speaking all day of a disastrous, fiery series of explosions that had taken place at his company, setting great numbers of his employees on fire.)

And so, if it was not already clear enough, Dr. Ramie Fromica was feeling unsettled in her life, despite her efforts to shoot metaphorical injections of excitement into her day-to-day doings.

She was planning a new tattoo, and had joined a new reading group, and was suggesting ill-conceived courses of action to her patients, so that their problems became larger than hers.

Nathan Hamm was incoherent in his ramblings now, and so Dr. Ramie Fromica picked a list of prospective new patients, and chose one at random. To Dr. Ramie Fromica’s dismay, her choice was a young fitness model of some note with a “dual identity issue, and also a unique, airplane-based relationship problem”.

She sighed out loud to herself again, and imagined the pathetic and predictable first meeting, during which the fitness model would surely ask for a prescription within minutes, as all her other entertainment industry patients did.

Nathan Hamm was now standing on the fancy psychiatry sofa, screaming and swearing about his employees, and their tendencies to start large fires. Dr. Ramie Fromica sighed, and waved her hand at Nathan Hamm, wishing it would cause him to fall down and go to sleep. She was unsurprised when he did exactly that.

Dr. Ramie Fromica saw that she was, for all intents and purposes, alone in her office now, and she supposed this was by her own doing. At least she still had her walls, she thought to herself, out loud.

Her five walls, with all of their reading books.

Brad Radby’s Foreward, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 31

(When I write, I like to put on movies I don’t have any need to pay attention to – that way I can take like little 2-to-3-to-45 minute breaks without worrying about missing something in the film.

In conclusion, I hate Spider-Man 3 so much, but it’s perfect to put on while writing, because it’s totally watchable.)

I don’t know if weird things happen to me, if I subconsciously search out weird things to happen to me, or if I take normal things and make them weird through the way I handle them.

And weird things do happen to me – for example, I’ve been hit by cars four separate times, and every time it’s like this totally bizarre set of circumstances, with a bizarre conclusion.

(In case you’re wondering – once as a sober runner, once as a drunk pedestrian, and twice as a sober biker. I also hit a stopped car running once, but I think that’s a “been hit by a runner while stopped in my car” story for the other guy. It’s really his story. I hope he tells it often.)

In any case, I went to go get new car insurance yesterday, and the lady asked me, as they do, if I was married or single. “Single,” I replied.

She was really quick with a, “Well, why don’t we make up a wife for you – it’ll be cheaper.”

I asked if this was legal, and she reiterated that she was saving me ten whole dollars a month.

Anyway, we named my wife “Kay” and we’ve been married for a year and a half. Of course, throwing me into a scenario like this is usually something I do for myself (see: my twin sister), so I needed to flesh it out.

I began creating Kay while this lady processed all my paperwork.

“I think Kay is probably about two years older than me, but she looks way younger than me, don’t you think?”

(She did think so – I must have the look of a guy who would marry an older woman that actually looks younger.)

“I’ll bet Kay lied about her age, though. She’s a failed actress, so she’s always done that. Really it’s too late for her. And she a terrible actress. She’s always got these horrible ideas for short films she wants to make, too. God, it’s so annoying.”

(This woman was cool – she actually asked me if I was mad when I found out Kay lied about her age. Of course I was, but little did she know, I was lying about my age, too. To this day, Kay and I hide our drivers licenses from each other.)

“What if she’s like a pyromaniac? Like I’m always coming home to her lighting stuff on fire? I walk in and she’s pouring gasoline all over the bed, and I’m like, ‘No! Kay, not again! You can’t keep doing this to our furniture…and to us!’”

(I emphasized this scene by getting down in a heap on the ground, like I had to hold a weeping Kay, who only then realized how she was tearing our marriage apart.)

At this point, I had to sign some stuff, and noted that Kay hates my signature. She says it doesn’t even look like a name, it’s just like “three big swoopy things”.

Well, I’d had that signature long before I knew my fake wife, so it wasn’t going anywhere, right? The insurance lady agreed.

We kinda looked at each other for a moment, and I asked her if this stuff is why I don’t have a girlfriend.

She said it probably was, and I said it wasn’t – the reason I don’t have a girlfriend is BECAUSE I’M MARRIED. How she thought this scam was gonna fly if she can’t even keep it up between the two of us, I don’t know.

I thanked her for the transaction, and ensured her I would only use this insurance for good, not evil. I said this by saying, “Thank you for the transaction. I ensure you, I will only use this insurance for good, not evil.”