Low Men in Yellow Coats is now BigCoffinHunter :-P
Ah, much more comfortable :-) This is Low Men in Yellow Coats here, now known as BigCoffinHunter, which has been my E-Bay name for the past seven years and the name I wanted on Dark Tower.net, but when I signed up it was already taken :-( Well it's all mine now! Muahahahaha!
I guess I'll answer the questions here like everyone else:
How did you discover the Dark Tower?
Fell asleep reading The Gunslinger in my local library when I was in grade school. The rest is history.
Who is your favorite charcter?
I always loved Mr. Munshun, mostly because I think his painting in Black House is awesome.
What is your favorite book?
Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass. The last of the Dark Tower books were okay, but King could have stopped with Wizard and Glass and I'd have been just as happy.
How old are you?
24
Where are you from?
Originally, Chicago, Illinois. Now, Nashville, Tennessee.
do you have a nickname?
My friends call me T.J.
Pleased to meet you: won't you guess my name?
Hello, all!
I am known by another name on the darktower.net; my attempt to join up here by that name seems not to have worked properly, so I chose another. I doubt it will take those of you who know me very long to figure out who I am; I'm not very good at hiding my louder personality traits. But what a nice, new virtual living room we have here! It's truly lovely, I must say. . .
Anyway, there are perhaps a few obscure short stories written by Stephen King out there that I haven't read, but not many. I have read the Dark Tower entire three times, and the first four books a few more times (like five or six); I've read The Stand seven times; IT six times and most of his other top-notch novels (you know, Carrie, The Shining, Salem's Lot, The Dead Zone, The Talisman, The Dark Half, Needful Things) at least three times. Not that I haven't read plenty of other things over the years; I'm a fast reader. But King is my favourite fiction; along with Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Ira Levin, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Harris (his last two Hannibal Lecter novels, in which Hannibal is the hero) and Anne Rice before she rediscovered Christ. Otherwise, I tend to read history books, biographies, and books about religious history in particular, as well as those rare and precious books with something real and useful to say about the occult. I've tried reading political theory, but the sincere stuff (read: leftist) is usually painfully dull, and the rightist stuff is utter rot, so why bother? All you really need in that department is a little Marx, a little Lenin and that little red book of Mao Zedong's, and the knowledge that socialism wasn't meant for societies just scraping their way out of fudalism, and you'll understand why the 20th Century was such an abject disaster. Capitalism requires no deep analysis, as it's really no more complex than the law of the jungle; it makes beasts of us all. All one needs to know about that is how to mitigate its dehumanising effects through generosity and creativity, and by resisting every impulse that comes of living in a capitalist society, as that way lies a bestial exitence and death. And never, ever trust any public official who spends his speeches telling you how perfect and wonderful you are, and that you don't need to change. Only a fool looks in the mirrior and sees perfection. On occasion I'll pick up something about quantum physics or some other scientific subject that isn't far from being occultism in itself; it perpetually amuses me that, as we progress, scientists are sounding more like mystics and zen masters every day! I wouldn't be all that surprised if they did discover a dark tower at the centre of everything eventually!
If you don't know who I am yet, that means you really are new to this random aggregation of oddballs. I'm sure the old hands spotted me just by the length of this post! At any rate, it's good to be here; as Keith Richards likes to say, it's good to be anywhere! As I sit here at the station shown in my avatar, eating a delightful meal of breaded veal scallopini, I am delighted to see the community growing. Who knows? Perhaps we'll really see the films come into being in the next few years, and even more people will come to know the story of Roland in the coming years! But we who've read it will remain the vanguard, and having places like this to meet and exchange ideas is truly a blessing. May we all be well met in this place!