Apocalyptic Epics and Killer Crime Thrillers by Robert Chazz Chute
Author: rchazzchute
Robert Chazz Chute writes full-time from his blanket fort in Other London. The winner of fifteen writing awards, he pens apocalyptic epics with heart and killer crime thrillers with muscle. A graduate of the University of King's College journalism program, he studied book and magazine publishing at the Banff School of Fine Arts. He has worked as a crime reporter, science journalist, editor, book doctor, speechwriter, and magazine columnist.
Shiny Shoes II, an excerpt from the ebook Self-help for Stoners; a story about a night at the theatre that goes horribly awry; Tweets of the Week; miscasting Jerry McGuire on purpose; and the DJ who, predictably, goes ballistic. Enjoy the air travel tips, too, but maybe you shouldn’t follow the advice about slapping a child. It’s not safe for work, unless you work with headphones. Or the hearing-impaired.
The Self-help for Stoners Podcast is a weekly trip into the weirdness.
With rants, raves and comedy sketches, this is a little escape from any thought of the creeping Reaper who stalks you.
You can upload the The Self-help for Stoners Podcast from this page or from iTunes.
Self-help for Stoners is the podcast to listen to when you’re high. Or not. Still fun, either way. In Episode 1, find comedy, fun fictions, lies to break your heart and rants to tickle your brain. Read the book, Self-help for Stoners, Stuff to Read When You’re High. Find all the books by Robert Chazz Chute on Amazon.com.
Wow. This is cool. Goodreads is a great site for readers to find books they’ll enjoy. (And, I hope, my books are in the To Enjoy list.)
I was slow to get on board but now I love it.
Find books you’ve read, books you want to read, rate books and write reviews. I found it especially fun to zip through and rate some of the books in my library, just to revisit what my brain had already eaten.
1. If you’re too old to go out begging for heart disease, convince your kids they might be allergic to nuts. There’s so much hysteria…excuse me…”awareness” at school that your precious children will gladly give up the Oh Henrys without a fight. You’re implicitly threatening them with asphyxiation and a horrible death, after all. The rest of the year, you have to be much less subtle in threatening your children with asphyxiation and horrible death.
2. You want diabetes. You’re using Halloween to speed your way to your sexy, blind amputee fetish. I understand. But if you’re too old to go out and beg for dependency on an insulin syringe, at least put a lot of effort into the costume if you want candy from me. Occasionally some older teens will show up at the door on Halloween and they don’t have a costume at all. “Sullen, entitled teen” is not a costume. Do that and I’m going to have to see your tits before I give up the candy. (“Show me them titties!” so weirded out that bunch of seventeen-year-old boys last year, they probably gave up on trick or treating altogether. You’re welcome.)
3. And goths? You dress like that every day.Not a costume. Show up all smiley and “Up with people!” and I’ll reconsider. Or “Show me them titties!”
4. Slutty costumes. I’m no prude. Hell, I wrote three books with “sex” in the title. Still, Halloween used to be about scaring small children. When did the costume store turn into competition for a Stag Shop? It’s not that I object to sexy nurses, sexy firefighters and sexy veterinarians experimenting with animal husbandry. (I’m especially in favour of sexy nurses. In fact, I think that should be the rule whenever anyone goes to the hospital. Give those leukaemia kids extra motivation to make it!) But slutty is all the costume shop offers! How am I to terrify small children and haunt their nightmares? (Come to think of it, if I squeeze my ass into the sexy veterinarian’s costume, that might do the job.)
5. I’m sorry, but I cannot accept any representation from the Twilight series as an acceptable costume. If you’re going to go vampire, it’s classic Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Buffy or nothing. Edward is more emo whiner than vampire. Show up as Spike and you get extra candy bars. In a more perfect world, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would never have ended. Ever. And Joss Whedon would rule the earth as a benevolent dictator and the economy would be based on comedy-horror-dramatic entertainment alone and the world’s hungry would be catered to at the craft services table. Sigh.
6. Homemade costumes score more points and therefore earn you more candy. Mr. Miyagi made Daniel a costume with a shower curtain for the Halloween dance so he could hide from the Cobra Kai gang and that rocked. Then Mr. Miyagi beat the shit out of Cobra Kais that same night, which rocked harder. When I beat up local teenagers, people say it’s “wrong.” What is that?
7. The ninja thing? It’s over. It died when Sho Kosugi killed it with the movie Pray for Death in 1985. Let. It. Go.
8. To you, does Halloween mean throwing eggs and toilet papering houses and soaping windows and petty acts of vandalism? I feel for you, little buddy. For me, Halloween means shooting vandals with a double-barrelled .12 gauge filled with rock salt and then burying you alive in the local cemetery à la The Bride in Kill Bill Volume II. We’re misunderstood is what we are.
9. It’s Halloween. Don’t give out an apple or toothbrushes or pencils. This is about Death. Honor the holiday properly. You see all those pretty fallen leaves? Death is everywhere and we laugh at mortality by walking around the neighbourhood dressed as the ghosts we will all be someday too soon! We stomp and crunch the pretty orange, red and yellow leaves and tell ourselves that drying up and blowing away and dying means nothing! Nothing, GODDAMNIT! Ahem…excuse me. I seem to have something in my eye…
10. And finally, this Halloween is a great time to rob a bank.The economy’s lousy and let’s face it, the bank robbed you first. This Halloween falls on a weekday, so grab a mask (I like the V for Vendetta mask and cape), roll on down to your local bank close to closing time, and do the logical thing to feed your family and buy a new iPhone. (It’s so worth the risk because you can talk to the new iPhone and it will talk back, thus severing any need for human contact, friendship and all that icky interaction your family insists upon.) Have another costume ready in the getaway car to switch into and to throw off the cops. This strategy works best if you’re a midget so you can blend in with the early evening toddler crowd dressed up as princesses and doggies and pumpkins.
You’re welcome.
Have you read the free book excerpt from Self-help for Stoners, Stuff to Read When You’re High yet? No?
No one seems to acknowledge luck in the making of their success. Every bonehead who wins Survivor calls themselves brilliant at the finale, but everyone knows the truth. Each winner could have been tossed off the island many times, forced to shamble along the Walk of Shame. As Douglas MacArthur said, “In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.” It’s true for everything else, too. We’re to all as brilliant as we’d like to think. (Corollary: Often we lose, but that doesn’t mean we suck as human beings, either, so cheer up.)
Daughter #1 saw an old newspaper story about me on the wall and asked if that was my proudest moment.
“Nah. You and your brother are my biggest accomplishments.” Yes, this is the obligatory answer, but it’s also true.
“What’s next?”
“Conning your mother into thinking I was the best she could do.”
Long story short: I went for a walk a long time ago at the University of Ottawa. Had I turned right or left at just the wrong time, The Saint/Hottie/She Who Must Be Obeyed and I would never have gotten together. I didn’t know it then, but I had one shot that fateful night. What if I’d gone east instead of west? What if I’d waited another hour or not gone out at all? I often think how easily things could have gone another way. I’m sure I would have ended up in Toronto anyhow, but I’d probably still be there now in an awful job paying alimony to a couple of angry ex-wives.
“What’s your next biggest accomplishment?” Daughter #1 persisted.
At this point, I started to panic that she was looking for a list of ten or something insurmountable like that. “Uh…early in my career, back when I was a healer, I got a woman out of a wheelchair.”
“Why aren’t you still doing that since you were so good at it?”
Kids. They sure make you sweat. “I think…” I said, having no idea what I’d say next, “that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it forever.” Also, being a healer is outlawed by my alternative health profession. I found that I was constrained by my profession as a massage therapist to a more technical approach since my return to Ontario. I peaked early and did my very best work in the first four years of practice when I wasn’t under The Man’s thumb. It chafes, that gap between the ineffable and the bureaucratic. That work was right at the right time, but that suit doesn’t fit anymore. I’ve changed and so has the profession of massage therapy in 20 years. I haven’t liked where it’s been going and needed to break out.
I need to assert my indie-pendance. And here I am starting Ex Parte Press and writing books and putting them out there and being the real me.
But that suggests I planned something. I didn’t plan anything. I fell into things. I succumbed. More decisions were forced upon me than I made proactively. In short, I lucked out.
I have been following my heart and writing for free or writing for very little for some time. Thank Zeus I didn’t send out any of my novels and get accepted somewhere. I might have gotten locked in prematurely to a bad deal with a publisher. Now is a great time to be a writer and get on the self-publishing train. I wasn’t waiting in any conscious way. My career path is not strategic. I just kept writing books without submitting them, preparing for forming this company and publishing my stuff on my own. I didn’t know I was preparing for the future. I was just answering my heart’s call.
That’s how I fell into being a healer, too. Now I’m falling into this soft place where I hide in my basement bunker and write or type (and sometimes I don’t know which of those things I’m doing.) I hope the luck will be the good kind again.
Obi-Wan didn’t believe in luck. But he was a suicidal Jedi who couldn’t manage to kill a guy he chopped up and left to die by a lake of fire. Who cares what that loser thinks? If you’re going to kill Darth Vader, you better have the guts to finish the job!
