Writers Block

So this blog used to be a daily meditation for me, more or less. As my second marriage deteriorated, I found it easier to sneak drinks away from my computer—she knew I was escaping the world when I blogged, though I used the blog as an excuse to do more things that would make good blog posts. I obsessively carried my Nikon in its big camera bag with me everywhere, photographing things I saw in my bike commute, things I did with my kids, the garden, various homebrew efforts. This blog was an open diary, and most of it was written under the influence of alcohol.

I'm 319 days California Sober as of this writing. I can tell I write differently, at least to my ear, than I did in those days. But I don't feel the need to share the details of my daily life in this weird way.

I have, however, been back on 'the novel.' This is a different novel than the one I struggled with 20 years ago. Wealth Effects may eventually be a novel I write, starting from scratch. The elevator pitch is three childhood friends grow up to be suburban drones who conspire to rob a bank to resolve their various financial woes as well as the boredom of their daily lives. They succeed beyond the dreams of avarice, as bank robberies go they get real money and the cops have no idea who they are. Hilarity ensues (really the book is about how their money problems aren't because they needed more income, they spend faster than they earn, that doesn't change with a bolus of cash.

I had 186,000 words in a 'rough draft' at one point. I despaired in the rewriting process, I hated re-reading everything I'd written. I'm not too shy to self promote, I think a suburban bank heist could really have legs. Of course, the exciting part is the robbery itself, that part seems easy enough to write but it doesn't tell a story in particular.

The novel I've been working on sober is Jaws of Victory. This is a sendup about an NFL owner hiring a shaman to influence the outcome of games and fate of his team, the Kansas City Funk nee Chiefs, a team he plans to move to Jakarta for the larger media market. This is set in the middle future, 2061. The world building is very satisfying because I reflect on how different life is now than it was 35 years ago, and project the changes I see coming for 35 years from now.

35 years ago only rich, pretentious cunts had cellular phones. I didn't have an email address. I worked on a computer but your microwave is a more sophisticated piece of hardware. Fax machines were state of the art. We had cable. Nothing streamed, you rented VHS tapes from Blockbuster to watch movies. I might be fudging the time of certain things by a year or two, but basically the phone was still a thing bolted to the wall and the only thing it did was place phone calls. You had to buy an external device to get messages, phones were that dumb.

You watched a TV show when it was on. I remember not even wanting a cell phone because isn't it nice that there are places where nobody calls you? What's the point of stopping off at a bar on the way home if your wife can reach you at the bar stool?

Anyway, as with Wealth Effects, I have trouble re-reading what I've written so far, and as with the earlier novel (every novel I've attempted, Wealth Effects was just the one I sustained the longest effort with). In case you thought this was going to be a confession that I write badly under the influence. That's almost certainly the reason for some of the bad drafting I did with Wealth Effects, I'm not saying I write great drunk. But sobriety doesn't seem to be any guarantee I'll like what I come up with.

I seldom re-read books anyway. When I know how it comes out, I lose interest. There are a few books I have read or listened to multiple times, A Confederacy of Dunces comes to mind, but I have trouble finishing books by Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace because I see the patterns and feel like I know where the book is going. Another talking dog, another dirge on addiction. So I guess if I have trouble reading their finished product, I can be a little easy on myself for bad rough drafts.

Though I'm a fairly deliberate writer. I fully verbalize what I read and write, like almost to the point where my lips would move. I don't know how you read, I took a speed reading class in high school and I can't do what they claimed we could do skimming along. With verbal shit, I either get it all or I don't fucking get it. The result is my rough drafts read relatively polished, at least in my incredibly humble opinion. Which makes editing hard.

If I commit the sentence and bother saving the document, I generally felt very sure about what I wrote. I do a lot of back-spacing and editing on the fly. Sometimes I can refine what I was trying to say, though most of the time I just hate everything. It's what I meant, I thought it expressed something at the time, but now I can't see it.

Couple that with my problem of worrying about the plot holes and I get some serious paralysis going. I worry about how would this entrepreneur find a practitioner in the first place? I wouldn't know how to recruit one because Robert the Psychic would rather stay a humble janitor than risk engaging in black magic, and that lunatic is my whole roladex when it comes to psychics. My former mother in law is in the Sacred Fire faith, another friend is in the OTO, but I'm all out of ideas on where you'd hire someone to do ritual magick for hire.

Not to brag, but I know a lot of freaks and I don't know where you'd look for one of those. But that's the magic of the novel, they must have agents for that kind of thing or something because I'm telling you, this shit happened. Well, it happens 35 years from now.

And no, I don't think I'm Thomas Pynchon. Part of the problem is getting published isn't the same barrier it used to be. I don't know how Pynchon got past the gatekeepers, V. wasn't exactly mainstream fiction. Or to pick someone more relatable, Vonnegut. I think even Max Barry, who was published in the old school sense, his novels were represented by an agent and published by traditional book publishers. Same with Palahniuk. They happened to sell enough copies and be good enough at promoting themselves that they've retained that publisher's backing.

The path for most, these days, as in music is to start off self-producing/self-publishing. I was brought up to think of that in a bad light. "Vanity publishing" my dad called it. A good way to end up with 10,000 copies of your book clogging up your garage. The self publishing houses always market it with examples like Mark Twain and Frank Herbert. But of course they are the exceptions.

Nothing has changed about that general assessment of self publishing, who the hell do you think you are, with the millions of volumes libraries don't even bother keeping in book form anymore, you who haven't even read all the great literature of your age have something to say? I might, when I eventually self-publishing my novel, actually call it The Vanity Press.

So I guess I'm just committing to continuing to plug, every single day, at this novel until I manage to accumulate a story I can bear to publish. Maybe in the meantime I can figure out some kind of way to street team the book, promote it in the discord communities I have friends in. Critical Mass, Rennaissance Festival, etc. Because I think if anyone is going to like my ideas, it's going to be in those groups, and hopefully that means word of mouth could do me some actual good. I don't need to write for the mainstream, I need to free myself to take Frank Zappa to heart, make my art for whoever it is turns out to like it.

Playing the Tard Card

My late daughter Molly had Special Needs (specifically a severe form of autism, functionally nonverbal, with a bonus serving of seizures).

When you have a kid who rides the short bus to school, you end up knowing the other families, so I knew a lot of parents dealing with the same sort of things. And you end up, as a parent, having to be an advocate for your child, ask for accommodations when necessary, that sort of thing.

I was on a date one time with the mother of an autistic girl, so naturally we had lots to talk about on that front.

Like Molly hated the 'sensory friendly' movie screenings. These were showings of family films where they left the house lights up and encouraged the kiddos to just do their thing. Molly knew the protocol for a theater, and despite how obstinant she could be about babbling on, that kid just sat down and shut up for the most part. Seeing other kids violate the rules of the theater only stressed Molly out. She was like, Dude, I'm the one everyone talks about right in front of me, and I know how to act in here. Get it together!

My date was an advocate of making all your matinee family film screenings be in the supposedly spectrum friendly rules and lighting. She felt all kids needed to be free to squirm and speak and not sit like little zombies. I was like I'd end up taking Molly strictly to R rated movies because the matinees would drive her to distraction with all their autism-friendliness.

But she had a great line about what she felt when advocating for things like this for her daughter. Asking, can we not kill the house lights because my kid has sensory issues, asking for acommodations of any kind because of your kids' special needs, was "playing the Tard Card."

I know, we're not supposed ot say the R word, but in this case I think it's both hilarious and a little justified in terms of, that is how people react to such requests. Most of the special ed parents, whether they wanted the same exact things for their kids or not, at least understand that you're not asking to be a pain in the ass, our kids really are different and they deserve to have a positive experience just like everyone else. It's to the oblivious ones, the families whose kids all pass for neurotypical, because you can get someone to quit saying a word, the R word, the N word, whatever slur you want to target.

But just because they don't say it out loud, doesn't mean they don't think it. I'm glad Molly was a good movie companion, there were things I couldn't take her to do because of her limitations. For years I kept an AMC Stubs membership for each of us, and Saturdays meant Daddy and Mo go to a movie. For a good five to seven years we saw every major release with a few exceptions.

Straight up dramas didn't work for Molly. She loved slapstick, action, horror, everything that didn't focus on deep interpersonal interactions. Office politics, straight romance, blech! But if shit's getting blown up or threatening the entire world, she was all about it.

The Well Rounded Outcast

If you've read the earlier posts of this blog, you know I have radical tendencies in my politics. I'm that libertarian guy in pretty much any circle I'm a part of, the real thing, votes for third party candidates, engages in real activism and even ran for office one time.

And obviously my politics evolve over time. I fancied myself a Marxist for a minute or two in high school, though Hunter Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke soon blew away the competition. Marxist revolutions always suck for some reason, and Marxists always seem to think the problem is with leadership. If I were king, and king I will be, there shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny and so on and so forth. Which is a Shakespeare quote and that's what I came here to talk about.

Not Shakespeare per se, but the way I think. I think the reason my own radicalization has never been dangerous has a lot to do with the broad exposure to literature I stumbled into as a curious and precocious child.

Dad was a high school teacher who had, at some point, thouight he might aspire to doctoral endeavors, become an English professor. It's not what he was cut out for, he'd have probably been very happy and successful as an engineer. But he accumulated the books, I doubt he read half of them. I do the same thing, I hoard books, buying books with every intention of reading them along with the dozen others I haen't gotten to. I purged a lot of paperbacks in my divorce, but I come by my hoarder tendencies honestly, and I spent a lot of time in the stacks downstairs rather than being bullied out in the neighborhood.

And what a library it was! There was Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, etc., but there was also Trout Fishing in America and Robert DePugh's Blueprint for Victory. Before I was initiated into the Science Fiction Convention scene, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Roger Zelazny. I was describing my dad's library to the late Rich Nadler and he observed, "Your dad was kind of a head."

Which, I still laugh out loud at, literally. My dad is a lot of things, but a head is not on the list. I know he taught the Martian Chronicles to an English class, so I'm sure he read some Bradbury, but I'd be shocked if he could tell you who Philip K. Dick or Roger Zelazny eve are. I don't know why he had those books, but I think exposure to such a broad world of ideas fortified me against the worst dangers of radicalization.

Another example of how I'm That Guy, and I'm telling you, all the That Guys that you know are probably as susceptible to radicalization as me or Ted Kazinksi or whoever you want to pick who did something horribly consequential for ideological reasons. But susceptible to radicalization doesn't mean dangerous. Most of us are just obnoxious Sovereign Citizen types. Just bring up Orwell around me.

I love George Orwell, and not for the reasons you think. Because I've already identified myself as a libertarian or some sort, one would expect me to love how Animal Farm and 1984 critique socialism. Don't get me wrong, those books are great at exactly that, and I'm glad they teach those books in school but it's not enough Orwell for me.

Down and Out in Paris and London and Road to Wigan Pier should be taught as well. They are very, very different books from the two you're familiar with. My elevator pitch is this: If you think he hates socialism, wait til you get a load of Orwell on capitalism. Orwell was a committed socialist and you don't have to agree with him about that, but you should hear what he has to say.

Which is what makes us True Believers such a pain in the ass at parties. We actually study the opposing view. To be sure, we do it to armor ourselves for battle, know your enemy, all of that. That's why Charlie Kirk's death is a sobering thing to me. The cunt who shot him is one of us, of course, but so was Charlie. I identify with Charlie Kirk because while I've never been racisit the way he was, I've certainly been a less successful version of Charlie back when I worked for Rich Nadler in the right wing press. I think it's horrible that he was killed that way, I also think that Charlie himself would give the scene high marks for irony, he was in the act of running his mouth combatively on the subject of gun law when he was shot by an unhinged lunatic.

And that lunatic was probably just like me if I hadn't been exposed to so many philosophies and extreme ideologies in my dad's musty book hoard.

I lived next door to a hoarder who didn't lock their front door and had an arsenal of firearms ranging from black powder to high power rifles just lying around, and when I was eighteen I had romantic notions about the Irish Republican Army. But this is why my exposure to ideas kept me harmless, there was almost nothing I hadn't looked at from both sides by the time I was in adolescence. I might change my mind about where I land on an issue as I learn more things, gain nuance and understanding, but I know the broad outlines of why almost anybody is advocating anything.

I think that's also why it's important to push back on censorship. It does matter what ideas kids are exposed to in their libraries, but that's the reason to include more diverse viewpoints, not less.

Spotty Photographic Memory

I remember this circus act when I was a kid. The motorcycle was on a high wire, directly over me. The sound was enormous, the stench of fuel laden exhaust, and off it went across the high wire.

There was a cage built around the cable such that if the acrobat lost it, the motorcycle itself would dangle from the wire rather than crashing onto the spectators below.

It would be an unremarkable memory except for how early it is. When I was telling my mother about it, she remembered the circus but didn't think I could, because she wasn't even pregnanat with my kid brother at the time. Which means I wasn't even two years old.

18 month olds don't remember shit, right? So I've been lead to believe my whole life, but here I am with a vivid memory of what was likely Michealangelo Nock or a Bauer brother doing a motorcycle high wire act in 1971.

There was also candy. In my dad's desk at the bottom of the stairs in a house we lived in until I was five. It was a caboose made of hard licorice with a small toffee hammer for breaking off pieces of the candy. My mom doesn't remember it but my dad does, it was an ad specialty left over from when he tried to sell farm supplies on commission.

Again, a powerful memory of something incredibly stimulating. I would have been a toddler in all likelihood, and knowing there was a secret stash of candy in Dad's desk would have been high octane information with a powerful, random positive reinforcement that on occassion Dad would let me break off a piece of that candy.

And hard candy licorice is intense. It's a polarizing candy, part of why I have to special order the shit off Amazon because it's almost non-existent on store shelves. I don't mean ropes, 99% of what is sold as "licorice" doesn't taste anything like the real thing, I'm talking lump of coal black, hard candy with that intense anise/licorice flavor and aroma. It's borderline medicinal.

I don't even know if I like the stuff so much as I just have really positive memories associated with that taste and texture. When I think about it, licorice is nasty shit. An acquired taste? Perhaps, but if there is such a thing I acquire tastes almost instantly. Unfortunately that extends to things like spirits, I never didn't find whiskey an agreeable experience, see also gin, tequila, everything except vodka. The alcohol alone wasn't appealing until I was fully addicted to booze, at that point I'd trink 100 proof McCormick vodka straight if that was what was available.

I think this explains a lot about me (not my alcoholism, though it accounts for that in a way). I never thought of myself as having anything resembling PTSD, but I think it's because my memory is so specifically spotty. I remember intense experiences with a borderline photographic memory, but that memory is spotty at best because mundane experiences are barely recorded at all. Like, it borders on dementia symptoms and it's not new.

It's a lot of what fuels my writing, if you were memorable I just about can't forget you. Which means you were exceptionally kind, possibly. Generosity is remembered but cruelty is too. My childhood couldn't possibly have been the string of pure rejection punctuated with occasional ecstatic joy that my memory would indicate.

Which, in writing fiction, I default to changing the names of the real people who inspire the narrative. I'm not as autobiographical in my focus as David Sedaris, but to me he is more of a fiction writer than anything else. Creative biography, and it has alienated some of his family because they didn't sign up to be lampooned and caricatured.

Most fiction is just biography/autobiography in disguise. You change names and places, even set the story years in the future or the past, and of course you refine. Never let facts get in the way of a good story, and of course anything can be allegory.

And We're Back (Sort of)

I'm not sure if I'm really bringing sexy back or not, but it's been about six years since I sacrificed my blog on the alter of a failed second marriage. So much has gone on and changed in the intervening time. I quit updating my blog right before I fell down stairs in my own house and broke my leg; lost my job, became an Uber driver; got divorced and moved to a suburban duplex; lost my youngest daughter, Molly, who is featured prominently in these pages; got deactivated by Uber and eventually Lyft for reasons that are still obscured by algorithms, moved into my mom's basement to finish off the incel stereotype... And all of that before getting tased, handcuffed and dragged out of my lair on an involuntary psych hold and getting a toe amputated.

Yeah, it's a lot.

I am back to writing every day, or attempting to make that part of my routine, and I'm back on my novel. Well, different novel, though Wealth Effects might be in play once I get the current piece off my chest.

Jaws of Victory is my current project. It's speculative fiction, I guess is the way to describe it. Set in 2061 right here in Overland Park and Kansas City. I'm publishing chapters as I write them to a substack, which is a new outlet for me. The idea was in part to recruit readers to workshop these pieces.

I'm not under any illusions about the commercial viability of my novel, even I don't read books anymore. I read constantly but it's all on screens, and I think that's probably a problem but it's not one I'm going to address just yet. I'm 288 days California sober, trying to figure out some kind of employment that will keep my modest lifestyle sustainable and I have things I want to get off my chest. I don't expect a bunch of strangers to buy my book or read my substack, and I don't care.

Which is not a denial of literary ambition. I have loads of that. But who are my heroes, the ones I want to emulate? It's not who you might think if you're familiar with Lobsterland here.

I look like a DIY Hunter Thompson in some ways, except I embedded with a right wing tabloid in the early 90s and instead of riding with Hells Angels, I was Mr. Perfect Attendance at Critical Mass for a few years. As is evidenced by this blog.

But Max Barry, Chuck Palahniuk, Paul Neilan, Don DeLillo, T.C. Boyle, these are my literary heroes really. They come the closest to doing what I feel like I want to do. Throw a splash of David Sedaris in there for good measure, though I am making a conscious decision to change names when in doubt. I do want to write a memoir of my Nadler Publishing days, that ways a very special place and time and it rivals anything Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson documented a generation before. But I'm not here to out anyone and not only have the statute of limititations not run out on some of those shenananigans, but at least one person is still in prison. So that'll be a lot of fun if I get around to it, but it will almost certainly be a novel more than a memoir out of respect for the innocent and guilty alike.

I might continue to do this, update the blog here. I don't know if I'll include photos of my lunch and all the other bloggy things I've done in the past. I could today, we had lunch at 30 Hop to celebrate my brother's birthday and I took a picture of my delicious shrimp bowl as well as the tins of free mints promoting Yelp! that were at the front counter. I failed to figure out a way to explain Yelp to my octegenarian mother. She doesn't have a computer or a smart phone, so she definitely missed out on the meetings where we were all deputiized as restaurant critics.

Anyway, I don't even remember the log in information for my Filezilla to use my old formatting tricks to work the photos in quite the way I like for this forum. Not that I ever cared enough to clean up the links rolls, that was something from back in 2004 or whatever, that you were supposed to do to increase your site's visibility. This was before SEO, this was back when most texts told you how to use tables to fake it because CSS was cutting edge at the time.

Anyway, if I have you here, click on that Substack link, you might think my novel and short stories are funny. I hope they're not unintentionally funny like the horrible schizoid CDs of karaoke music one of my clients at the print shop used to bring in.

What's it about? It's about life and where I see things heading. In 2061 the Chiefs have a new owner, who is rebranding the team and eventually moving it to Jakarta for the bigger media market that represents. There is international corporate espionage, an army of gynoid sex robots, un-extinct dinosaurs and megafauna (Uniquorns, a breed of wooly rhino brought back Jurassic Park style, but also annoying packs of feral compies that have escaped and make life interesting for pets and toddlers in the outer suburbs.

And that's not even the crazy part. We've got black magic, a virgin sacrifice, an Unorthodox Amish guy manufacturing LSD, harm reduced cocaine and heroin available at dispensaries... We have flying cars, finally, but don't get too excited because only douchebags own them and they're obnoxious as hell.

I think this book is going to be half novel, a third self help book, three parts manifesto, 11% creative memoir and 600% terrible at fractions.