Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came - and he finally came in paperback

So I'm at Wal-Mart today looking for printer ink so I can print some of my photos and decorate my desk wow -weird to think of it - took me 7 months and being shuffled around 3 different derpartments, but I am no longer a deskless vagrant - I ended up not buying any ink - turns out Wal-Mart is not always cheaper, I can actually get it at half their price elswhere... but alas, the trip was not a waste, because I finally spotted it. It - the book I've been wanting to get my hands on since last christmas, but have been unwilling to pay $35 for the hardcover edition. The book that ends the series I began reading back in 1997, when I first picked up The Gunslinger . The series that Stephen King began working on in 1970, when he wrote "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." on a sheet of green paper, inspired by Robert Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, who was in turn inspired by Shakespeare (so I guess that means I have to stop unequivocally hating old Bill as a glorified creator of what would someday become known as the soap opera). The series that somehow ties in almost every every other book Stephen King has written, and which he finally completed in 2003, with the book I spotted on the shelf at Wal-Mart today.

I am talking of course, of The Dark Tower. Not The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, or The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, or The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla, or even The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah. I'm talking about the big one. The end of it all. Numero Siete. The Dark Tower. The books that had me hooked for roughly 5 years (at this point I think I was on Wizard and Glass) before I finally understood what the hell the Dark Tower really was (I made this discovery while reading the sequel to The Talisman - Black House - A book which technically is not part of The Dark Tower series, but like I said, Mr. King ties it all in).Before then, it was always fun guessing and theorizing with equally hooked college classmates during circuit analysis lectures as to what the Dark Tower was or represented (gimme a break, we would have been bigger geeks had we been paying attention in class).

Anyways, this promises to be a good one. Even before I jumped into the story, Mr King has impressed me twice in the opening pages. First, by printing the lyrics to Trent Reznor's Hurt (do yourself a favour and click on the link for the Johnny Cash cover right now). Second, with this particular piece of art:



I just love that depiction of the eye of the Crimson King. In fact, I scanned it and edited it a bit:



And am thinking about printing it off on some sort of sticker paper and putting it on my guitar (it is after all crimson).

Anyhow, before I go bury my nose in the forementioned book, while I'm whoring products I may as well mention that I've also bought the first CD in close to a year - Tool's '10000 Days'. It's got a great mix of songs - hard rock with strange and varying time signatures, and a few Pink-Floydesque soundscapes. The single, Vicarious, got me hooked with the time signatures. (and it has some pretty good fanmade videos to go with it, some much better than the one I linked to, but they may be considered offensive, so there's a Lord of War tie-in for ya).

Oh and the unconventional CD case with the stereoscopic lenses for the artwork - pure genious.

P.S. - Apologies again to the couple of people who I tentatively invited for pizza, beer, tunes and guitar jam - but I had my fill of intoxicating substances last night and decided to take it easy today:



(craptastic cell phone shot at last night's party @ Capt'n Nut Nut's - my camera is somehwere in the Ukraine at this point, but if it wasn't so low quality I wouldn't be posting pictures of anyone anyway, plus, it graphically describes very well the way I was feeling by the end of the night - of a girl building a tower of shot glasses)