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.
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