I hope you are enjoying your summer! I personally hate summer – I prefer the long, cold, dark, lonely nights of winter, when it’s perfectly acceptable to sit inside a poorly-lit basement bar, drinking pint after pint of cheap draft beer, cursing yourself and the difference between the potential you once had and the person you have become – but hey, maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, I wanted to drop and note to say hi and tell you about some shit I’ve got going on that you may also interest you, my friends.

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I’m on Spotify. And so are a number of my playlists and 7,000 of my songs.

I gotta be honest: I’m not totally sure how Spotify works. I find the interface awkward and the whole thing a bit clunky. I easily put my music on there, but I have no idea how to update the playlists or find other users unless they subscribe to one of my playlists and find me first. I’ve been able to post playlists on my Facebook and Twitter accounts, which is nice, but that’s about it.

But having said that, boy, this mother fucker has potential. If you’re not familiar with Spotify, think of it like one large iTunes that we can all share with each other. You can search the entire database of users (supposedly) and find almost any song you want (this I’ve done successfully). And, as mentioned above, you can subscribe to other user’s playlists.

All my playlists I’ve talked about over the years – Let’s Make Out or Something, Sad as Fuck, The Best (five star songs), Seriously Good Shit (four star-plus songs), Good Shit (three star-plus songs), etc – are on there. So sign up and have a listen. Once I figure out how to work it better, I’ll continue to add new playlists and songs. If you click on this link, it should get you to Good Shit, and from there you should be able access my profile and other songs. Happy listening!

(And once you’re on there, send me some of your favorite music, please.)

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If you have an e-reader, I have good news: you can now get my book – or any of 19 other great Harper Perennial titles – for just 99¢ in August.

99¢!!! For a whole book that took me months to write and has a bunch of funny pictures! And that people said good stuff about! Like:

- Booklist (“[Mulgrew] clearly subscribes to the Sedaris school of memoir writing”);

- John Hodgman (“Few essayists are as bravely–and hilariously–self-revealing and self-abusing”); and

- Rob McElhenney, star, creator, and producer of IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA (“People who grow up like this tend to become agoraphobics, serial killers, or really funny writers. Mulgrew, I think— hope?—is the last of these three things. His stories of childhood made me laugh out loud. Jason: I did your quote; please don’t murder me.”).

So now is a great time to pick up my book and load up your Kindle or Nook or whatever else you got with a number of funny/hip/cool titles. You can get months worth of reading materials for about the cost of a burger and beer!

And of course, please feel free to spread the word and alert any and all of your e-reader friends. This is only for the month of August. 99¢! What is this world coming to?

Thank you in advance. I can promise you that my book is definitely worth 99¢ – it’s at least in the $1.15-$1.20 range, so you’re getting some serious bang for your buck.

(And if you’re like me and haven’t made the switch to digital, you can get yourself a hard copy for under $6. I mean, c’mon already.)

Here are the e-reader links:

- Kindle

- Nook

- Google eBookstore

- iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch or iTunes

And FYI, book two is coming along rather nicely and is roughly scheduled to be released just around this time next year. It’s about high school. And it’s got some pictures. And writing it has been an emotional roller coaster (in a good way) (mostly). I’ll let you know more in the next few weeks and months, but if you liked the first one? This one’s going to blow your doors off. Promise.

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Finally, I got engaged. To be married. To a woman. Who has an IQ above 70*. Who speaks English as her first language and whose American citizenship was not a condition of our engagement. Who has no obvious physical, mental, psychological or emotional defects. Who is (probably) therefore (way) too good for me.

(* I never thought I’d be googling “maximum IQ for retardation” when explaining/writing about my engagement. I am certain that my fiancée has an IQ well above 70, but in case you were wondering, an IQ of 70 is the cut-off for retardation.)

(“I am certain that my fiancée has an IQ well above 70.” And who says romance is dead?)

No, we do not have a date set, and we have only the vague idea that whatever we do, it will not be traditional. Yes, I proposed in the kitchen of our apartment. No, I did not use the Engagement Ring Dossier (I know, I know – it’s still genius, but she was simple: I knew she preferred one big round stone, and I knew her ring size from a previous ring I’d gotten her). Yes, our family and friends are happy and are asking these and a million other questions on a daily basis. Which is fine.

I don’t have any major regrets about leaving the single life. I had a good run – way, way better than I should have – so I’m alright with that. I do have some minor regrets, like never having slept with a black chick (dammit) or never having had a threesome (not gonna happen now) or never having paid two junkie runaways to come back to my place and let me watch them have sex (this one still has a chance). But there are only a few men that can go through life and check off every box on their sexual wish list. These are the DiCaprios and the Clooneys and the Timberlakes of the world. They are not the overweight bearded guy who works in law firm marketing and wrote a moderately well-selling memoir and enjoys masturbating on the roof of his apartment building because he finds the fresh air and the danger sexually invigorating. So I’m ok with no longer being single.

I’m also ok with the commitment. Now that I’m engaged, I don’t have any greater wisdom, nor do I have any grand proclamations about the nature of love. Except this: Love you read about in poems or see in movies is horseshit. Real, actual, non-fantasy love comes down to three things:

1) Do I like to kiss this person?

2) Do I like to hang out with this person?

3) Does this person make me laugh (but is not funnier than me) (which is very important in my case)?

If you can find someone who makes you answer each of these questions with a resounding, 100%, no-doubt-about-it yes, then you gotta lock that shit down. So I did.

It doesn’t have to be much harder than this.

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Enjoy the rest of your summer. Thank you for reading and following the shit out of me on Tumblr and Twitter.

Hugs,
Jason