Life Spent In A Babylon Sandbox

I used to think lipstick was just for girls, but that was more than thirty years ago, before Asia and the sandbox. If you want nice, you’ve come to the wrong place. Please turn the page and don’t read any more, or you might be in danger of just suddenly turn­ing to stone.

Sodom and Gomorrah are not terms that often pop up these days, unless you’ve gone off on a religious bent and trust me, a little random verve never hurt anyone. At least not where the bruises show during your day job, or else that safe word came up in the nick of time.

This year, as in other years, I decided to once again compile my written rants, raves and all variants between the cracks of my mind into one place called a book. However, this year, with life under a volcano of collective disruptive events, things seem to have turned into a savage beast that no one is capable of taming. It’s beyond Zootopia.

I found my thoughts turning, as they often do, to caffeine inspired rhetoric and the outcome is the latest collection of burnt ends entitled “Slave to the Bean”. But these simple words did not seem enough so I enlisted my slightly demented and incredibly talented friend, Jason Gagliardi, to frame the massive craziness with digital artistry. The task has turned into an ugly monster, as the all-nighters ensured, and his lone mission, tapped out on an iPhone and iPad, became something of a freefall descent into the ashes of Babylon.

However, in the end, the awful craziness has been rewarded with inspiring visual eye candy, and some haunting storylines, which have turned into a yin and yang, intertwined with hopeless depravity. Life in the sandbox means that I don’t really need a vacation: compelling as it is all-consuming, and one never knows where the next airplane might land.

Note: the story above is from the January 2016 issue of Bikinis and Martinis magazine and written by Bill Barnett