Big Red

"Big Red: The Story Of A Cornhusker From Out Of Town"
a sports memoir
by Austen Montero

TAGLINE:
Nebraska will kick your asska if you don't read this book.

Quitting

"Quitting: the only thing more rewarding than succeeding is quitting"
a wealth of knowledge shared
by Jake Kilroy

BACK COVER:
Did you actually buy this book or did somebody hand it to you 20 seconds ago and now you're considering maybe using it as some kind of sexual object?

Well, if you bought it, you're off to a bad start. Buying means beginning. Shopping means starting. No, sir (or madam), you need to be the laziest son of a bitch if you intend to quit as much as this book tells you to.

Even now, you're still reading this, but I suppose to need to learn how to quit in order to quit. Or quit now and you'll be ahead of this book. But what will happen years down the line when your kids are in school and your wife works hard? You'll want to quit then. Maybe have a nervous breakdown. Maybe eat some pills like cereal and finish it all off with a bourbon tank and a firearm aimlessly hitting the night sky. Or morning sky. It's all about to you, quitter.

Quitting's easy. It's trying that's the hard part.

Come Home With Me

"Come Home With Me: Spending A Season With My Family And Other Suicide Missions"
by Katy French

BOOK SLEEVE EXCERPT:
So after the Christmas tree and the cats caught fire, the kids ran around screaming with smoked presents in their hands, thinking they were glued as gift-wrapped. The turkey had been thrown out the window when Uncle Eddie yelled at Aunt Mara for letting the kids smoke in the house, though it was Uncle Eddie that had started the fire with his "magic" (lighter fluid, old saloon cards and a top hat that went all wrong). My mother was swimming in scotch and my father was light as a feather (and as high as one, shooting off toy guns at the neighbors, though they weren't aware they were playing "War"). Cousin Arch was sipping on water he found in the radiator. Marco Marcowiz was playing a Halloween song on the trumpet he got for Easter. Disastrous Diana, our most oddball second cousin, was on the roof with fireworks and Jimmy, the local boy she loved. Kevin had already fallen off the roof and not moved off the front lawn since Grandma Crans gave him a bottle of vodka to waste away the pain. Grandpa Sceers had fallen asleep on the dining room table. And there were 16 more guests.

All while I was having the cigarette of my life on the porch, watching the cops roll up.

Party In Pairs (With Class)

"Party In Pairs (With Class)"
by Mallory Larsen

BACK COVER:
Who's going to hold your drink when you kiss or fight someone? Who's going to smash things with you when you say the party sucks (after you've been asked several times to leave)? Who's going to steal stuff from the party you just had to leave? Who's going to hail a cab by flashing it down instead of flagging? Who's going to take you to your bed and either go saint or sinner on your ass (literally)? Who's going to buy you breakfast the next morning, saying that you totally wanted it and "taking advantage" is libel?

Well, I don't know. I'm a book. But I bet someone is!

Situations where this book may help:

- An ex just showed up to the same party as you with a date, and you can't find your switchblade, so you make your friend look so good, your ex kills his or herself on the dance floor with a dirty knife he or she found in the sink.

- A circus where the ringleader asks for two volunteers and you don't want to work with an audience clown or real clown, because, well, screw clowns .

- Some board games suggests you need a partner and you'd rather have sex with a handle of vodka before you force yourself into a threeway.

- You chose a song at the bar and some bitch changes it. You gotta punch some lessons. Who's gonna hold those arms while you dump a something-tonic all over their face, yelling racial slurs that don't make sense, like "lagibaloo!"

- You want to get down.

Why I Haven't Cared About Real Sports Since I Was A Kid

"Why I Haven't Cared About Real Sports Since I Was A Kid"
a therapy session with Jake Kilroy
by Jake Kilroy

AN EXCERPT:
Chapter 5:
Overexcited Baseball Fans That Get In My Face For Not Appreciating America's Pastime

Ok, I'm sorry I don't care about statistics outside of school. Or even in school. What's his ERA? What is an ERA? All I know is that it's some capital letters that when put together means an extended amount of time signifying some kind of plateau in between two changes in culture and/or science.

Oh, good, you stand to hold yourself invested in and devoted to a group of local multimillionaires that play the same sport you did as a kid. Alex Rodriguez has never publicly written or painted anything. He's never recorded a song. He's not an artist. He has no creativity. He was just paid $252 million to play baseball for ten years.

I'm not worshipping that. Sure, I'll continue to gamble on these players (and attempt to fix the games) but I won't hold them in high esteem. Men who know everything about sports are like aliens that know everything their soil. Did that make sense? I don't care. Chapter over. Whatever. I'm only good at apathy, I guess.

Ok, if apathy was a sport, I'd be Willie Goddamn Mays.

But then that would make me good. And you know what? I'd beat your asses. Ok, now I suppose it's empathy. Because I care about beating you. You'll probably cry.

Ugh. I remember one time that me and Tommy Watson got into a fist fight in the outfield during some Little League practice. That guy was such an asshole. And now he's probably some big baseball star and you totally love him. Man, you'd lick his goddamn knees just to taste his scabby sweat.

Seriously, that guy was a total dickhead.

What?

Wait, seriously?

No way. You're making that up.

Oh. Wow.

No, I had no idea.

Well, of course I wouldn't make fun of that.

Ok, nevermind, it turns out that Tommy Watson's just a stupid meth addict these days. Like an asshole.

Aimless

"Aimless: one man's journey without any sense of direction"
another adventure
by Jake Kilroy

PREFACE:
Tennessee, Whiskey & Beatnik Poetry: The Adventure

My friend Grant and I were dying of boredom and bored of dying on the West Coast. We decided to do something about it, we decided to wreck Tennessee and drink ourselves to death.

So, we're flying out to that flat trapezoid state that's half an east coast fury and half a southern belle. Once again, I plan on living like Jack Kerouac and any beatnik poet writer that ever thought the written word was worth more than alliteration and oxygen mixed together in a cocktail.

Grant said, "We're going to live like Dean and Sal, though I don't know which of us is which. I'm not sure who will be the writer and who will be the screw-up. My girlfriend says if I were traveling with anybody else, I'd be the voice of reason. But, I think because I'm traveling with you...that makes me the crazy one."

He's talking bar fights and I'm talking jail nights. I told him that I had planned on being Sal anyway, just because once we finally dragged our broken bodies and fiery souls home, I intended with every dedicated sweaty ounce in my body to document our furious chaos in scribbles and frantic sketches of the countryside. I'll even buy a typewriter, I thought.

And that's where this comes in. This is the manifesto I wrote on the road, a pen dipped in magic, a luxury I haven't always had to my own disintegrating name.

So, I'm Sal, Grant is Dean, and I hope to Christ that he (or He) steals us some cars, just in case we leave the rental in a river. Maybe while we're swimming, we'd leave it in neutral, and so would be the story to tell the curious grandkids. While we're jumping off barren cliffs in the Midwest (if such landmarks exist in the clunky cornfields and miles of the Western Promise not yet corrupted by urban sprawl), we'll soon realize that we may have done ourselves in. We'll tread water (Grant maybe with a cigarette or chewing tobacco in his mouth, and I maybe with sunglasses on), and watch our great ride home sink to whatever river it is that we may pass the afternoon in.

The sun will shine as we watch it bounce off the license plate before it finally submerges, coughing up bubbles to where we tread the deepest water. We'll both stare, gawking as we stay afloat, before I know both of us would laugh like mad, acutely aware that we have no way of making it back to California, but also being excited to tell the story whenever we return by whatever means we'd later figure.

We'd be botched extraordinarily if that asphalt ship went down, but we'd laugh for days as we took the bus home from Kansas across sketchy looming time zones. And besides, time zones only matter on maps. It's not like Grant or I will care if it's two or three in the afternoon. We just want to be sure that we have another hour of sunlight. And we'll realize it soon enough when the sky breaks orange and sputters yellow and some raggedy purple, and finally the clouds are red, and it's nothing but a paintbrush shadow carrying us into quiet evenings of fireflies and conversation.

Also, whiskey.

We'll land in Tennessee with a tent, two sleeping bags, an acoustic guitar, a bottle of whiskey, a small bag of clothes, and a notebook and a camera. We're going to wander through the airport looking like "those guys," the ones who look completely out of their minds or the most brilliant men walking the earth, traveling and searching for the almighty goal of immortality. We'll be the men/boys on the street who look like we know which direction paradise is, like we know where the answers lay, somewhere beyond the city, and most certainly somewhere beyond the working man's mental realm.

We have no intentions of high luxury. We will sleep in our car or tent the whole way home.

We will pause to swim early mornings in rivers and talk entire afternoons in Midwestern cornfields. Our car's antenna will pick up folk, country and blues only. Our arms will be tan from dangling out the window under an overbearing Midwestern sun and our bodies will be cold at night under a harvest moon, always climbing as a giant over the trees, over the mountains, above the small quiet desolate towns, pinned tight against the nocturnal sky.

Life will be some joyride, us in the front seat with days and nights to kill with our best songs and tape recordings of dialogue. Never with any mal intention, never murdering our days and nights, but rather overwhelming these passing afternoons and evenings well into slumber. For how long, I couldn't even begin to imagine or wager.

We will throw concrete jungle philosophy around small farming towns, just to see how it all fares across this roadmap of a nation. We will find heartache and blessings on the open road. There will be no sunset we won't see and no sunrise that won't cause shift in our sleep. We'll live like cowboys dependent on a rented car. And we will read used book store fiction and fall asleep to a cracking fire and strumming guitar.

Our hearts will beat so loud and affectionately that it will always sound like we wear it on our sleeves, but we'll probably just leave it back in Tennessee with whatever sense or reason we once had in our claustrophobic hometown.

I don't want to feel like I'm moving through motions.

I want to feel like I'm traveling through some kind of warp, straight through that highway I've always dreamed about. It's the one where I'm everlasting, the one I felt occasionally in high school when everything made sense but I was still out of my head entirely (junior year), the one that caused such an uproar in my heart about living and maybe dying in Australia, where I may or may not have been a drunk philosopher poet who attended the operas with his beatnik woman who spent her afternoons playing records and teaching me how to dance.

You see, it's all poetry for the crumbling eras living and whispering in your heart.

We are all everlasting, and we'll travel through jungles and oceans, but there's some city that we don't catch up on, inside us, and we make snide remarks about it all, never realizing our own truth. It's when you finally start moving fast enough or slow enough that the times are making sense to you, where you finally go to bed immediately. And the death of insomnia isn't from a long day or lack of previous sleep weighing upon your skyrocketing skull. It's from some closure that covers you better than the blanket you only hold onto for sentimental reasons.

There's truth in all of us, and it just seems like everyone has their own separate timebombs that will blow them up apart to the same conclusion: we are everlasting. And we should all know and act upon it.

We won't come home hungry and we're not coming back thirsty.

We're coming back complete.

The Irish Drink

"The Irish Drink"
by Jake Kilroy

PREFACE:
I’m doing you a favor, chum.

The Irish Drink is a conversation starter. Is it a sentence? Is it a noun? Is it the book you’ve come to keep next to your family photo albums? Is it maybe the favorite book of the blonde at the bar? Is it 21st Century's Ulysses?

I don’t know (but I think we all surely doubt it's not the last one). However, I don’t live with you and we're not drinking buddies…yet. Hold tight, I’ve got a book to write. Yes, of course this book will have scattered rhymes. I’m Irish, you know. There’s poetry in nearly everything I spout.

Still, the Irish remain drinkers, and drinkers still consider it a good destiny to be Irish.

So let us consider what history has been made by the Irish and what of it had to do with a good pint. Maybe a dirty whiskey sitting on ice. Maybe a cleaner bill of health. Maybe a cleaner bill of dirty whiskey.

History has drinkers. Drinkers have history. Only sometimes you can drink history.

They named a whiskey after Michael Collins. Eamon de Valera didn’t even become a rum. Maybe it was because he wasn’t sweet enough. But then again, what philosophy can you imagine with ice instead of dreams?

Whiskey was first counted in the early 15th Century as being distilled by Irish monks. History!

Some cultures have peyote, some cultures have whiskey. The Irish are clearly under the latter umbrella. And a good pint is and has been the cornerstone of all western socials.

But I think it's hard to know what came first, the person or the problem.

I suppose I may be reading too much into a book that I didn't write or read. But I did write this book. Haven't read it since though. A problem? Oh, I've got shelves of them.

And, you know, maybe it’s not so much that I’ve got a drinking problem. Maybe the drink has a me problem.

I mean, didn't you ever wonder what you were toasting to?

Cheers,
Jake Kilroy

The American Flag And My Body Are On Fire

"The American Flag And My Body Are On Fire"
by Jake Kilroy

AN EXCERPT:
Thank goodness the elephants and donkeys started starving. It only seems to be a fair trade for the gluttony of years before.

The elephants began begging for peanuts and the donkeys started begging for attention. It seemed mildly ironic that the elephants were scouring the planet for their own energy when they seemed so against alternative fuel, like they had stabbed themselves in the chest and were wondering where the last butter knife in the house was. The donkeys were hardly more of an attraction. They slept in shadows. Without a spotlight, no good deed has self-praise, and nobody cares if a donkey dies in the dark.

Maybe the elephants should have rethought their policies and the donkeys should have reviewed their politics. The elephants had too much confidence, so they never thought they'd go hungry and the donkeys were too meek, so they were to scared to eat their fair share.

Both parties shall starve to death, their bones laying waste to what was overlooked. As their carcasses sink further into the earth, as the rivers pour over the graves and the flowers magnificently bloom over what was once a sputtering cough of a dying animal, there will be peace.

Being Jesus Isn't Hard

"Being Jesus Isn't Hard: Walking on water, and other miracles I can do without trying"
by Kim Orr

TAGLINE:
The only thing harder than being Jesus is writing a book about it

AN EXCERPT:
Can you imagine?

A 7-year-old that was accidentally turning water into wine everywhere she went! I hated it!

My parents were always mad at me for having alcohol in my room and all my friends thought I was making sour Kool-Aid. Naturally, I developed a little bit of resentment for my powers.

And then I thought, "Hey, this all sounds familiar. Didn't this happen in some kind of Disney movie?"

But I was quickly reminded that it was the Bible. This all happened to Jesus some good years ago.

Poor Jesus was just like me, probably going through the same stuff I was: doing wacky things to his friends' fish, having to explain things all the time, dealing with long hair and making good use of wood.

How did He deal with it? What did He do? What would He do these days with the archaic choices of cheap drugs and porno mags? With the computer and television? With ski resorts and beach houses?

Wouldn't Jesus just shrug and start cruising along the 101 listening to The Who? Wouldn't He join safaris in Africa and watch the animals play? Wouldn't He play Scrabble and Boggle? Wouldn't He know where good outlet malls were and go to matinees? Wouldn't He flunk science? Wouldn't He count cards in Las Vegas?

I mean it. Really, what the hell would Jesus do?

WTHWJD?

Strangers

"Strangers: the last known whereabouts of four men in a foreign land"
by Jake Kilroy

BACK COVER:
The forests had never been so quiet, the beaches had never been paler tombstones and only an island in the distance seemed further. It was the end of the world. They had reached it. They finished the rum and slept on the shore. All that was found a week later were two guitars, an empty pack of cigarettes and a note in the sand that read, "Bob Seger sucks."

They were missing, and it got weirder in the wilderness....or did it get wilder in the weirdness?

The Spanish Diary

"The Spanish Diary: A Transatlantic Account of Settling an Old Score with an Older Empire"
by Jake Kilroy

AN EXCERPT:
Let's keep going with the present. It's the only time I'm good at. The only thing I can do with the past is write hectic folk songs with the same chord progression about some damage I did when I was a teenage heart(throb/attack) and the future is basically one careless trigger pull away from a massacre. Do you see what this life of movement does to a soul that sleeps in the same time zone on a regular basis?

Time does the writer a tremendous justice when he finally admits that he has nothing else to say at home. When he finally admits that the books on his shelf are worth more as kindling than archaic tributes to humanity, the writer should skip town. Keruoac did it when he breezed the back roads looking for "it" and let's just say Shakespeare swallowed a clock.

Tell Me About It, Canada

"Tell Me About It, Canada"
a road trippy memoir
by Jake Kilroy

TAGLINE:
Some thousand miles. Four friends. One van.