Contests
STARK WEEK CONTEST: Win a free book by talking about a crazy place you’ve lived
TIME FOR YOU TO WIN STUFF
For our final two installments of Stark Week, we’re going to turn things over to you guys. Thanks for reading all this stuff about this book, which as I said a long time ago (last Monday) I really do feel is worth checking out and talking about in a big way. I hope you have felt the same and have enjoyed these posts! I asked Sam to do a video where he read a poem and came up with a contest idea. One of the least shy people I know, Sam felt paradoxically shy about making a video (maybe because he is an old ghost man), but I think he did a good, spookily red job.
Here’s how the contest works: check out Sam’s poem from the last book of The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather, which is about a crazy place he lived, and then talk about the craziest place you lived in the comments. Craziest place—as judged by Sam and maybe his girlfriend or his friends or his pizza delivery guy—will win a free copy of The First Four Books. If you don’t feel like watching Sam’s poem or watching him make fun of me in the beginning of the video (cuz, like, you have really busy Sundays in your life), just leave a comment! Win a book!
Deadline: 11:59 PM Wednesday July 24th
Tags: bag boys bag boys, stark week
i once lived in a house with a shit ton of roomates: a couple of gay guys who teamed up with a lesbian (who walked around wearing a tool belt) to go dumpster diving and then resale the stuff they found in our backyard; a shut-in japanese guy and his gopher boy who basically did everything for him so he wouldn’t have to leave his room – ever; a bald headed meth addict named Waco who used to bring street kids home to party with him in the basement; and the gentle giant landlord who wore cut off gym shorts and a fanny pack the whole year round even through seattle’s cold ass wet winter.
I once lived in the deep end of an abandoned pool in this shitty mansion in Central Missouri. We covered the pool with tarps we stole from our jobs painting dorm rooms. I slept on a mattress we found in the mansion and every morning my roommates woke me up by rolling a skateboard down the pool slope until it hit the mattress. None of us owned cars so we skated into work everyday, stopping off at a cafeteria to load up on coffee. The deep end was maybe fifteen feet deep, so we set up a movie projector at one end of the pool and watched Tommy almost every night, projected on the pool wall in front of my mattress.
One time I lived on this guys couch. I lived there because I had just broken up with the girl I was living with and the guy has just broken up with the girl he was living with. A week after I moved in, he got back together with her and she moved in, too. It was a one bedroom apartment. I was subletting, which was verboten, so every time the handyman, who only had one arm, came to fix the air or I had to do laundry, I was afraid it would be discovered that I was subletting and I would be booted to the curb.
It came to be known that my roommate’s girlfriend was cheating on him with my other friend. So while I was at work, my friend would come over and listen to my records and do things with her. : /
It also came to be known that this girl texted pictures of me while I slept to my friend because she thought I was a cute sleeper.
At the end of the summer my roommate’s found out about all of this weird stuff and kicked everyone out of the apartment. A year later he sent me a text meager telling me that the newest Coheed & Cambria CD was really good. I never spoke to him again.
My wife feels that I’m a cute sleeper, too, but I’m unaware of any clandestine photos.
I once lived inside you. You collected Christmas trees, and
all your organs were made of tinsel. We drank eggnog, and then went for a swim
in Trinidad. I said I’d never leave you, but here I am.
I once lived inside you. You collected Christmas trees, and
all your organs were made of tinsel. We drank eggnog, and then went for a swim
in Trinidad. I said I’d never leave you, but here I am.
i live in america & that’s pretty fucked
yo momma so fat we all live inside of her. your mom is the universe. i love her. god bless you.
tinyurl.com/nc6x6hg
I lived inside an economy-sized can of creamed corn in the back of a warehouse supermarket megastore that was only open on Wednesday, so I had most of the week to myself which was pretty awesome. I also lived in a drug den on an island in South Carolina. We had a backyard full of mattresses.
In 1997, 3 days before graduating high school, I moved into a panelled room with drop ceilings and no windows, painted a dark forest green. The room contained a “closet” with a sheet thrown over it, a plywood shelf with a Commodore 64 on it, and a set of bunkbeds. For this privilege, I paid the owner of this “Concrete box buried in the side of a hill in the middle of nowhere” (the constantly cuckolded brother-in-law of my psychotic ex with carrot-top hair) $50 a month.
The yard was a perfect isosceles triangle bordered on two sides by Holsteins, Jimson weed and barbed wire strung on locust posts. The third side rested on a pair of doublewides and a steep gravel driveway that lead to the type of farmhouse that contained the kind of meth-fueled antics you’d only see in a Harmony Korine movie. Complete with a literal drunken chair wresting event. The chair won.
From the top of that driveway you could see every storm approaching and hear the thunder if it wasn’t being drowned out from the sounds of domestic abuse all around.
Sweaty ex-steelworkers and ex-coalminers who would spend more on 8-balls of cocaine than their own childrens’ school clothes would come by for eucre tournaments in the kitchen while we all swigged from bottles of home brewed dandelion and blackberry wines. The nearby graveyard provided the ingredients for both.
Cats had kittens in the walls of the old recycled barnwood shed, with its peeling fabric covered electrical system, and those kittens would bring us skinned baby bunnies when they got old and cruel enough. One kitten decided he was a dog and would follow me into the woods while I hunted chantrelles and boletes. He’d sometimes stay long enough to watch me build constructions out of deadfall while I wished myself away from that place.
Eventually, the man at the top of the hill with the den filled with taxidermied animals was imprisoned for molesting his 13 year old neighbor. The brother-in-law was left for a man who looked like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite and the ex decided to sell moped parts online, after a career as a small-time drug dealer. The graveyard sinks lower into the ground every year where the abandoned street car line collapsed. But the house is still there, and according to Google maps looks like the poor little 6 year old boy that lived there with us and through this has a 4-wheeler and does donuts in the yard.
i once lived, for far too long a period of my youth, in a ren and stimpy cartoon, the one in which that slab of fat in a can of baked beans is called the ‘queen bean’
[…] don’t forget about the tell-us-about-a-crazy-place-you-lived contest, which is running until the end of the night on Wednes…. Now go out and put your first five books in a book. Grow your hair past your hightops. Dunk the […]
[…] the winners of the STARK WEEK CRAZY LIVING contest are bemightee, Mark Williams, and Aimee Thorne! Winners, email me at mikeayoung at gmail […]