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You just don't see comic books like this in the Ukraine.

Only in America.

God bless America.

No; really.

What Do You Do? November 16, 2001

"The future smells of Russian leather, of blood, of Godlessness, and of much whipping." ––Heinrich Heine, 1842

I’ve been on sort of a quote kick, lately, when I’ve needed to fire up the ol’ writing engine. You know what I mean; sometimes reading a little short something by someone else, some pithy turn of phrase or a laser-like obser vation, well-described… it kick-starts the thinking meat and then we’re all off to the races. I think I first heard of this little exercise in my first job out of college; if you’ve been reading these columns for a while, you’ll remember that my first honest job after receiving the sheepskin was as production coordina tor for Worcester Magazine, a tabloid independent of the Village Voice stripe, in central Massachusetts. I was like a line producer on a movie; I made sure all the different departments all knew what the others were doing, who they were doing it with and when, and what they were wearing as they did it. If we got to Tuesday morning and hit up against the dead line crunch (as the WoMag came out Wednesday morning), I was conscript ed to do all sorts of stuff: waxing and paste-up, run the stat camera, proof read, help the strippers with the film, whatever was needed. Because on Tuesday morning, I was already well into the next Monday in my responsi bilities…

…but that week’s paper needed to hit the streets. Man, I loved that job. Anyway.

One Tuesday I was proofreading the Hunter S. Thompson column that was syndicated at the time, and for which WoMag had purchased the reprint rights. Thompson had gone off about stealing Bibles from hotels to open up at random intervals to juice his brain in a direction to write, when he was stuck for inspiration. There was just something so… irreverent… about that. "Thou shall not steal," and such… and yet stealing the thing that told you not to. Sort of post-modern, if you will.

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