Monthly Archives: January 2021

Gentlemanly Pursuits

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Martin Luther King Day kicked this week off and I thought a run through Loose Park seemed a fitting place to start my journey. This park is responsible for my first double digit run on my way to my first half marathon way back in 2010. Yet with all that time I’ve never taken in the park for what it is, the site of the Battle of Westport, otherwise known as the Gettysburg of the West and considered one of, it not the, biggest Civil War battle west of the Mississippi.

It seemed fitting given the importance of Dr. King’s message and two days away from the inauguration of a President tasked with restoring sanity to a nation on the brink of what he has called an “uncivil war.”

But then weather and stupidity got involved.

I distinctively remember saying to myself, out loud, as I was putting on my new, never been worn running pants, that they seemed awfully thin. Drafty if that’s even a thing with pants. Then I decided that maybe they were just light weight but still warm.

God I’m a fucking moron.

Do you guys know what it’s like to wrap your nasty bits in nothing but tissue paper and let the wind wail on them while howling maniacally?

I wish I could tell you I took the time to let my senses take in the park in a whole new way. To see the battle, hear the cries of dying soldiers, and smell the gun smoke. That I really took the time to taste the history. In truth getting home and giving my balls the chance to come out of witness protection became my all-consuming goal.

Safely tucked back in the warmth of my apartment, it was time to combat the cold. I had never really seen the point in making soup from anything but a can unless all it involved was throwing shit in a crockpot and walking away. Until now. Inspired by my clam chowder redemption and a comment from my friend Sarina, I decided that minestrone soup from scratch with an honest to god grilled cheese sandwich was the perfect meatless dinner for a Midwestern Monday in January.

Starting with vegetable stock then packing it with crushed and diced tomatoes, veggies, beans, and pasta left me feeling hungry every step of the way. What’s that Campbell’s Chunky phrase? Soup that eats like a meal.

My tongue will never look at a can of soup the same way again.

Not even a soup that eats like a meal is complete without a two sliced sidekick. I slathered two pieces of bread with butter, smashed some gouda between them and let George Foreman work the body for five minutes. I am never going back to the way the peasants make grilled cheese with their puny little pans again.

My body hungered for more than food and the weather gods saw fit to provide my first trail run of 2021, in a little slice of woodland hidden right in the heart of the city. Swope is one of my favorite trails, tucked away from the chaos surrounding it, it has always been a convenient way to commune with Mother Nature within the confines of my urban jungle home.

Trail running is a great way to escape civilization even if for just a short time. The whispers of the woods and the feel of Mother Earth beneath my feet are soothing to the soul. It was a sunny late afternoon, and the shadows were getting long as twilight descended on the trail. A perfect end to a hard fought and hard-won day.

A good trail run leaves you the good kind of tired. The kind of tired that keeps you wanting more.

As a red-blooded American male, I am always on the hunt for red meat in all its glorious forms. Green Room is a small joint tucked away in the back of a building, at the bottom of a hill, in a parking lot for a strip mall. I had forgotten all about it until I remembered.

The sign of a good burger is when the juice is dripping down your chin, saturating your beard, and you don’t even care. Dragged through the garden and on the rare side of medium, I took that first bite, and I didn’t stop until I was done licking my fingers clean. All of them.  A handful of emptiness and a belly full of happy.

The perfection continued as I washed that gloriousness down with the best fucking root beer I’ve ever had in my life. It’s made by a kid in Bucyrus, Missouri and tasted like every root beer float from my childhood. The tears of an angel don’t taste this good.

Fueled up on red meat and root beer it was time for my walk through the ages of our ancestors.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is a national treasure. Literally. And it is located in my backyard. When the city’s forefathers built the museum in 1933, they built it both to last and to compete.

I’ve been to countless traveling exhibits over the years and was fortunate enough to se the KC Rep’s performance of Sundays in the Park with George hosted there. I even got to stroll through the main event itself with a dear friend before the world changed.

The first thing I noticed as I ascended the marble stairs was a Greek sculpture of a lion protecting and watching over the exhibits. It was originally sculpted to overlook a cemetery and the man who created the piece had in fact never seen an actual lion in his life, instead drawing from his knowledge of other animals, melding them with a description of the beast to create his cemetery sentinel.

There is poetry in what that says about art.

One of the things that struck me as I walked the hallowed halls was how eclectic the art selections were. Everything ranging from Egyptian, Chinese, and Indian artifacts dating back to a time before Christ to modern masterpieces that show inner depths that sometimes seem to leap off a page. And as a good Kansas City Boy I have always been partial to Kansas City’s own Thomas Hart Benton.

Vivid colors and imagery screamed while the nine roman muses whispered their secrets in my ears as the outside world raged on.

After my carnivorous lunch and lengthy stroll, I decided to turn to the sea for dinner. I love easy. I love quick. And the me that went eleven years without a dishwasher loved the idea of One Pan Shrimp Fajitas. Every time I cook shrimp I rediscover that peeling and deveining only takes a fraction of the time I think it will. One of these days I really need to stop rediscovering that and start remembering it. I’d probably eat a fuckload more shrimp.

The most time-consuming part, which took no time at all, was slicing up three different colored peppers and the red onion. To be honest I was skeptical about the need for all that color. I thought that it was more about plating than palate.  

And I was fucking wrong.

That rainbow colored masterpiece was all about flavor and a head fake at healthy after my cheeseburger from paradise. I was so hungry that once the pan was done, I slathered those things up with all the fixings and ate right there at the kitchen counter like a neanderthal.

Being single means you don’t have to be refined.

With my second food baby of the day gestating, it was time to settle in for a tale from across the pond.

I had no idea how much I missed Guy Ritchie doing Guy Ritchie things until I watched The Gentlemen. This was seriously his best effort since Snatch, which was one of the movies that defined college for me. We used to quote along with that movie while playing spades in a smoke-filled room. We wore that DVD out in an age before streaming took over the world.

As with most of his movies this was brilliantly cast with several actors almost unrecognizable compared to their traditional roles. Except Matthew McConaughey, who is always Matthew McConaughey. And Michelle Dockery is even more smoldering than she was in Good Behavior, which I didn’t know was possible.

It’s hard not to love a movie with lines like, “If you wish to be the king of the jungle, it’s not enough to act like a king. You must be the king. There can be no doubt. Because doubt causes chaos and one’s own demise.”

I have also always envied the Brits for their liberal use of the word cunt. Quite frankly we should do our best to emulate that in America, especially since we kept their language when we won the war.

After the movie it was time to curl up in bed with Chuck.

Every time I think I have a dark, fucked up mind, I just read something by my good friend Chuck Palahniuk and I no longer feel alone in my depravity. The Invention of Sound sucked me in until it’s last death rattle. A sadomasochistic woman who is addicted to pain and kills others in pursuit of a career creating unique screams for Hollywood producers and a grief-stricken father who hires hookers to pretend to be his long lost and (presumably dead) daughter are on twisted collision course in this instant classic that has shades of such wholesome fare as Invisible Monsters and Tell-All.

God I read some fucked up shit.

My third full week of exploring ended with the sculpture garden at the Nelson. A tankard of Mother Earth Coffee kept my warm as I walked the grounds of the building I had explored less than 24 hours before. As I strolled, taking in the signature shuttlecocks and artwork ranging from the abstract to the in your face, I contemplated one of the quotes lining the museum walls, “The soul has a greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist. It is by the ideal that we live.”

The brick path is in fact responsible in part for my getting started running back in 2006. I used to spend hours running and walking lap after lap getting back in shape, taking in the vibrant expansive lawn. This was also back when iPods were bulky and cost prohibitive and eons before smartphones and Spotify would go on to render those obsolete.

Back then I had to soldier through with nothing but a no-skip discman, which only held up its end of the deal if you held it exactly right. Do you have any idea how ridiculous a man looks trying to hold a discman exactly right while running? My whole body shuddered at the memory. Smartphones and Spotify went straight to the top of my gratitude list.

Art has truth. Take refuge in thee.

Welcome to The Oyster

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This is the second week of me chronicling my year of new experiences. You can check out the first week here.

This week’s tale starts once again with Meatless Monday, brought to you by Top Ramen (and a bunch of other shit). My inner frat boy was grunting, growling, and salivating as I pulled the ramen package out the cupboard. He proceeded to go cross-eyed with confusion as I lined the counter with veggies and eggs. His shock complete as he watched adult me prepare to cook in an actual pot, even though the microwave was right fucking there.

This isn’t the first time I’ve dressed up ramen, but I just recently realized that I didn’t have to add meat to make it a meal. It was time to go nuts.

I splurged and made two soft boiled eggs, cooking them up in the same spiced veggie broth I was using for the noodles to save time because veggies make me smart. Then I packed it full of roasted red peppers, snow peas, celery, carrots, broccoli, and mushrooms.

In short, I adulted the fuck out of that ramen.

With all the attention on my stomach, my ears were feeling ignored.

I’ve heard fiction podcasts referred to as “television for your ears” and I have yet to come up with a better descriptor. A blend of old-time radio dramas and modern storytelling can help liven up even the most mundane tasks.

The Oyster is a dystopic podcast best summed up by the line “the shadows were much more comfortable uncharted.”  Across seven episodes the drama tells the story of a president who turned democracy into a dictatorship, a systemically racist event called The Sorting killing 20% of the population so that the remaining 80% could fit underground, where they had to live because global warming fucked everything up and mother nature put us in timeout, and everyone is becoming more addicted to digital realities, ignoring the real world, and becoming mindless sheep.

The first novel I ever studied in a college was Brave New World, and the blockbuster movie The Matrix came out a year later. I can feel the influence of both pulsating throughout this story.

Horror doesn’t scare me like it used to.  But a dystopic future that hits a little too close to present reality?

Take my money and torture me slowly.

Speaking of books, this will come as no surprise, but I’ve always had a thing for bookstores. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to hang out at Barnes & Noble. You read that right, my friends and I used to hang out at a bookstore. For fun. On purpose. The kicker is, there wasn’t a Barnes & Noble in Grandview, we had to drive across the state line.

Fuck we were dorks.

Then when I was a young adult I lived on The Plaza. I’d cruise the aisles of B&N with a cup of coffee, breathing in air saturated with pulp and ink, listening to the whispers of authors long dead and the screams of writers newly born.

The first thing that caught my eye about this locally owned treasure was the name, Wise Blood. A bookstore named after a Flannery O’Conner novel that I studied in creative writing?

You had me at hello.

Ensorcelled by so many written words, my blood pressure instantly dropped by twenty points. Being swaddled by so many pages had me cooing as I perused the eclectic selection of new and used books, quietly debating what to take home as spoils from my journey.

I settled on two homegrown gems. This Is the End of Something but it’s Not the End of You by a local author named Adam Gnade, and an anthology series, Kansas City Noir, neither of which I would have never discovered if I hadn’t popped in.

Famished from my travels, I headed toward Mario’s Deli. It’d been years since I’d had their famous grinder and I could practically taste it as I walked down the block. What I didn’t realize was that Mario’s closed in 2017. I needed a plan B.

Mickey’s Hideaway called to me like a siren, and my stomach hungrily followed her song. Mickey’s was in the old McCoy’s space, a haunt from my misspent youth.

The layout was the same, some bones don’t break, otherwise there wasn’t a flicker of the old place in the joint.

McCoy’s was relatively unremarkable. The fact that it was comfortable and known is what kept it in business for so long. Mickey’s on the other hand had a striking combination of a contemporary feel with a fireplace and exposed brick coupled with wallpaper of black and white photos. The styles should have clashed, except they didn’t.

Until the moment I walked in, I had forgotten that it was Restaurant Week. Every year, I tell myself I’m going to let my inner fat boy take the reins for that week, pocketbook be damned. Then I forget until it’s too late.

The gods of gluttony wanted me to partake just once in 2021.

And they really wanted me to have a Smoked Chicken-Chorizo Fundido appetizer with chihuahua cheese, manzana sofrito & street tortillas. I don’t know what half that shit is. I do know I licked the bowl clean.

Still not satiated, I engulfed a Short Rib Grilled Cheese with white cheddar, fontina, caramelized onions, horseradish aioli, and parmesan fries. I left with a food baby in my womb and it was beautiful.

But on most days, home is where the heart is. And with the heart goes the stomach.

When I got my air fryer, it came with a small cookbook that I only kept for the cooking times cheat sheet. Idle curiosity guided me to a simple recipe for Inside Out Dumplings, which are essentially meatballs with water chestnuts and ginger.

But now I get to say I’ve made dumplings from scratch.

I’ve never seen the point in meatballs. If your not making a burger, what’s the point of molding ground beef (or in this case turkey) into anything? But this is a year for new things, so I decided to try it, if only for the fact that I’d never bought water chestnuts in my life.

Lean ground turkey was the absolute wrong choice when making meatballs. It’s sticky and after molding the first one you are stuck with clumsy meat hands until you’re done. Neanderthals who hit things with clubs have more dexterity than a 41-year-old manchild with meat hands. And these meat wads did not resemble the photo in the book. My meat wads were not photogenic.  

Thank God I’m single and wasn’t cooking for a date.

I paired my meat wads with Black Narcissus, a mini-series that had been staring down on me from Hulu for quite a while. It checked quite a lot of boxes. Historic fiction. Check. Supernatural elements and religious imagery used for dark purposes. Check. On FX which has a kick ass track record when it comes to dark content. Check. Watching that was the longest three hours of my entire fucking life.

It was like watching nuns watch paint dry in a convent. In India.

The highlight of my evening was when I figured out the male lead also played Nick Cage’s brother in Face/Off. But Nick Cage wasn’t there this time. Nick Cage turned this down.

You have to pack a lot of suck into a script for Nick Cage to tell you to keep your money.

Between the meat wads and the mini-series, date night with myself did not go well. In fact, I didn’t even score.

After that I needed to get the fuck out of my house.

Hyde Park is so old that it was originally part of the City of Westport before it merged with Kansas City in 1897. And I found my forever neighborhood when I moved here from South Plaza seven years ago.

Janssen Place, a subdivision where nineteen captains of Kansas City industry gathered to build magnificent homes back at the turn of the twentieth century, is hidden within the folds of my awesome neighborhood. And I have been running among them for years. Until this past Sunday I had never once taken the walking tour, complete with pamphlet.

Taking on a mission of this magnitude in the frozen tundra of the outside world required fuel. My first stop was at newer, more modern Hyde Park staple, Mother Earth Coffee.

I should probably mention that I fucking loathe coffee shops.  They are douche sacks dripping in pretention. As such, the persnickety attitude of my barista was on brand and predictable.  I wanted to tell him that that rosewater scented body spray wasn’t washing away his sins, but he would have held my coffee hostage.

The coffee was good enough for me to buy a bag to keep at my house, so I could support this local business without having to ever set foot in it again.

Fueled by an egg and bacon croissant and with an organic dark roast to keep me warm, I let my stroll through KC’s past begin. The sun had come out and it had turned into a vibrant morning.

On my journey I learned that Janssen Place was developed by Arthur Stilwell, who founded KC Southern Railroad, which is still a giant today. The iconic limestone gateway was designed by architect George Mathews, who studied under Henry Van Brunt, who was enough of a heavy hitter to have a boulevard named after him. I also learned that my favorite house, the house I’m going to buy when I hit it big like Stephen King, is called the Pickering Mansion. This brick and stone structure was built by the VP of the Pickering Lumber Company which at the time was among the largest lumber companies in the world. It also turns out that I’m into Italianate Revival architecture, such a renaissance man am I.

I also learned that the actual Hyde Park was the first golf course in Kansas City, the Kenwood Golf Links. I’ve driven, walked, and ran past it thousands of times and never realized I was driving past the place that introduced the full-bodied frustration that is golf to my native city. I may or may not have mimicked my god-awful golf swing in salute. Passers by may or may not have wondered if I was having a stroke (see what I did there).

I did have one more experience that I wasn’t looking for this week. I got stuck in a fucking elevator. Like the had to call the fire department, get me the fuck out of here, stuck in an elevator.

At first, I didn’t believe it was happening. This shit only happens on TV.

In all honesty, it could have been worse. After all, I remembered to take a piss before heading out, just like my mother taught me. So that was a small mercy. But fuck that elevator went from small to suffocating in the blink of an eye. I will never look at the phrase “the walls are closing in” quite the same way again.

Time works differently in a broken elevator. Just as you are suspended in air, so are you suspended in reality. I was certain that weeks, maybe years, had passed since I first lost contact with the outside world. At a minimum I figured I missed the Chiefs game and Biden’s inauguration.

Turns out it was less than thirty minutes. Our fire department rocks. I made kickoff and my fur niece and nephews nursed me back to health.

Fur baby snugs can solve everything.

Exploring Experiences

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A few months before the world got gangbanged by the four horsemen, I made a pilgrimage to Chicago to visit my best friend. This glorious trip kicked off with a luxurious dinner at an authentic Chicago steak house and tickets to Hamilton. The adventure went on to include authentic Chicago hot dogs, a tour of the world-renowned Chicago Institute of Art, an evening at a Die Hard Pop Up Bar, a Ghosts and Gangsters tour and a the best crustless pizza I’ve ever tasted. Sprinkled with the kinds of debauchery and comfortable conversations only best friends can get into

During that trip I had lunch with a fraternity brother who had recently moved there and described 2019 as his “year of the yes.” He took every opportunity to try something new. And he came out of 2019 with a slew of new and wonderful experiences and memories.

I came home revitalized, rejuvenated, and with the realization that I had a lot of exploring of my own to do. There are so many wonderful places and events in my city that I have either never experienced, or it’s been years since I’ve taken the opportunity. There are scores of recipes saved but uncooked. And although I am a carnivorous consumer of all things content, there is still a fucking ocean out there waiting to be discovered.

I realized I had settled into comfortable routines and had become content with the familiar.

I resolved myself to change all that in 2020. I was going to become an explorer. Then we packed a decade’s worth of bullshit into a shitstorm of a year, and it all fell to crap. So I am recycling and repurposing my goal into 2021. I’m going to become an explorer, like Magellan or Cortez only without all the killing and pillaging.

The first steps of my journey came in the kitchen.

I love meat. As a growing Midwestern manchild, meat is the foundation of my diet. Veggies are fantastic, meat’s faithful sidekick has a place on my plate. But making a meal with them centerstage? Who would do this to themselves on purpose? That kind of thinking is why Meatless Mondays are one of the ways I am going to expand my culinary horizons. I made it easy on myself for this first week and made Black Bean Enchiladas.

Cooking this almost felt like cheating. Mix up some black beans, corn, chunky salsa, shredded Colby/jack cheese, and enchilada sauce. Stuff that shit into some tortillas. Top with some more cheese, sauce, black olives, and green onions. Toss it in the oven and relax while the cheese melts.  

If vegetarian dishes were are all this tasty, I just may restrain my inner carnivore a little more often.

I’m also going to break out of my slate of go to recipes by trying one new dish a week. My leadoff hitter was an Instant Pot Clam Chowder that had been on my “recipes to try” list since I got my Instant Pot a couple years back. Although there are tons of recipes on that list, there is a particular reason I was as gun shy as an angsty teen trying to get to second base for the first time.

When I was a twentysomething idiot first teaching myself how to cook, clam chowder was one of the first things I tried. It’s one of my favorite soups and it didn’t look overly complicated. I was hosting a dinner party and I wanted to impress my friends. The odds were forever in my favor.

One problem, I didn’t quite have all the cooking terminology down. Specifically, I didn’t know the difference between a clove and a bulb. This recipe called for five cloves of garlic. Do you have any idea how fucking long it takes to mince five bulbs of garlic by hand? How much stupid it takes to not realize how excessive that was? The fucking smell alone should have been enough to set me straight. But I am as bullheaded as the rest of my taurus brethren and I soldiered on. Even through the blurry eyes, runny nose, and carpal tunnel I trudged through to the bitter end.

Then, bless my heart, I tossed it in a pan and cooked until fragrant.

Have you ever wondered what Satan’s asshole tastes like?

We ended up ordering pizza. I was never allowed to cook for them again.

Thankfully, my second attempt went much better, and not just because that was a low bar to clear. Aided by my trusty Instant Pot, it had a made from scratch taste when all I really did outside of a bit of sautéing and chopping was toss a bunch of ingredients into the pot and let the device to the work.

Timing was key in terms of when to release the pressure and not let the dish boil once adding the half and half. Much easier than mincing five fucking bulbs of garlic. Sprinkle in some oyster crackers and it was practically a meal of its own even without the tuna melt I made to go with it. I spent my Saturday night satiated, fat, dumb and happy.

Home cooked food is wonderful and satisfying, but I could hardly call myself an explorer if all my quests took place in the house.

I decided to cap off a productive week with a late lunch at Café Sebastienne which is housed in the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art both of which had been off my radar screen for way too long.

It had been so long that I had forgotten that everything was locally sourced and that it was relatively inexpensive and high quality. The bulk of the restaurant sits under an expansive skylight, and the space is so open it almost feels like you are dining outside. But the setting is only as good as the food it accompanies.

Until the moment I saw it on the menu, I had no idea that the deliciousness that is duck pastrami was a thing that existed.  Now I do and I am forever changed. My sandwich was piled high with that heavenly meat, gruyere cheese, dill pickled carrot, and slathered with whole grain mustard aioli on marble rye. I had to stifle the NSFW moans that would have loudly announced my foodgasm to the world.

Afterward, I walked off that sandwich with a stroll through the museum. As Kansas Citians we cultivate and encourage a vibrant arts scene. And there is no shortage of wonderful culture to take in. Before the world shut down, I was an enthusiastic patron of the performing arts and travelling exhibits, but had not paid much attention to our standing attractions. I look forward to changing that over the course of this journey. This was an interesting place for me to start, because to be honest, contemporary art is not my strong suit. I struggle to understand it more than I do other eras and artists.

Two exhibits in particular spoke to me. Dawoud Bey’s Night Coming Tenderly, Black, a series of modern photographs reimagining the last sites along the Underground Railroad at twilight. The photos and setting were striking to take in, especially considering the current state of the world. Combining black and white photography with these settings at dusk drew a crisp conflict embraced by an eerie tranquility. It was profound to view such an era of our history through that lens.

I also thoroughly enjoyed Elias Sime’s Tightrope, in which the artist uses repurposed electronics to create his pieces. The themes of how wasteful and disconnected we have become as a society leapt off the work in ways ranging from subtle to overt. In a culture where social media is the new god and keyboard courage has replaced human interaction it was a surreal exhibit to take in, especially in light of the events currently plaguing our nation.

A walk through the museum was probably not enough to walk off all that food, so at some point my journey had to put me on a running path.

I’ve been inconsistent with my running lately and it definitely shows. Reasons range from laziness (my fault) and what I think might be COVID long hauler symptoms (not my fault). Not to mention wind chill that turns your dicky-do into a dicky-don’t sucks balls. That is not a legitimate excuse, especially for someone who took pride in being an ultramarathoner. I am making it a point to get back at it, even if slow and steady must win the race for a while.

Although trail running is where my heart is, road running is a part of life. One of the best ways to spice up the pavement pounding is to get away from the neighborhood routes and to different parts of the city.

My favorite off the beaten path pavement route is Cliff Drive. As one of only five scenic byways in Missouri, it’s a gorgeous, tranquil, and as the name suggests scenic route in Kansas City’s Historic Northeast. The best part is that it’s closed to all vehicle traffic. It had been awhile, so I decided to take a jaunt down there and let my mind get lost in the cliffs and the curves.

However, it had snowed recently and I forgot that no cars means no plows and the cliffs mean no direct sunlight. This was not one of my brightest moments. This was a “did you eat paint chips as a kid” moment. So, I’m just going to brag about how I traversed the treacherous terrain. Because that sounds way cooler than “I managed to not fall on my ass.”

No weekly journey in my life is complete without my weekly worship at the altar of God Content.

For all my viewing, I am way behind on movies. My screen time gravitates heavily toward television. I loathe movie theaters and renting. Instead, I wait for the movies to find their way into the orbit of one of my eight-seven streaming services. And then I ignore them until they go away and wait for them to come back again.

Not today Satan. Or more accurately, not on Saturday, Satan.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood finally found its way to my screen. I love everything that Quentin Tarantino has ever written, and I stayed up past my bedtime devouring every moment of that movie.

I mean, where else are you going to see Tyler Durden beat the fuck out of Bruce Lee while closing with Leonardo DiCaprio reuniting with Margot Robbie. I submit that this shit only happens in a universe where Sharon Tate doesn’t die.

And of course, my eyeballs had to dance along the pages of a book for my week to feel complete.

My reading list grows faster than I could ever possibly read, such is the albatross worn by bookworms everywhere. There is whole god damn sea of books out there that I am never going to get to. I spent the better part of 2020 being Kindle Unlimited’s bitch when it came to reading. That’s not where a reader needs to live. It’s time to get back to the literary universe as a whole. And I’m kicking that off with a comic book.

The Hellblazer series has been on my list since forever. To a nerd who loves dark urban fantasy like me, the tails of cursed antihero and mystic John Constantine promises to be a wild ride. Throw in the fact the character was created by batshit crazy comic book god Alan Moore and with runs by greats such as Garth Ennis, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison this promises to be the dark and dirty kind of fun.

I haven’t done everything yet, but it’s on my list.

 

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