The Red Flag Next Door

The Supreme Court ruled that a guy in Texas could still own a gun along with a couple ounces of marijuana. It was an old law, 1968, that was the 'red flag' of the time. It was attributed as a reaction to the assassinations of 1968, but were Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King shot by Rastafarians? Like present day red flag laws, the public is broadly supportive when something sounds like common sense on the face of it.

Should a mentally unstable person, who might be prone to homicidal and suicidal actions because of an illness, keep their guns? Well, no. You can't even get Trump to say anything against that, and he says outrageous things for sport. Of course, definition of terms, it's not that simple. Likewise, in 1968, it was easy to sell people who believed Reefer Madness was real on the idea that stoners must be kept from having guns.

From a public health standpoint, I'm not sure if it matters that much. There was a period of ten years when you couldn't have found marijuana in my house. I was a family man with a job that under some circumstances drug tested. Weed made young me paranoid anyway, so it was easy for me to say the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and just abstain. So I'd be the perfect gun owner.

A perfect gun owner who put away six to ten craft beers per night. Who kept the gin in the freezer so he wouldn't dilute his martinis with ice. Who made ten gallon batches of beer in his driveway on weekends. I was your typical functional alcoholic.

And the thing is, I don't think my alcohol use was that unusual. The people I worked with lived very similar lifestyles, and in fact when comparing weekends I often marveled at how much more alcohol they claimed to use than I did. A casual reference to drinking 18 beers, Festivus poles made of beer cans taller than the drinker, etc. Or the mentioning that they were 'hammered' on the golf course. I didn't tend to drink during other activities (beer judging and homebrewing allowed some cover for the fact that drinking was my main activity.

Now, as to whether I should have been red-flagged for being addicted to alcohol and forbidden from owning guns? I do have anger issues, and booze is no help with that. I've never had a run-in with the law, not even a DUI. I used to say I put the fun in functional alcoholism because I managed, for a lot of years, to avoid the worst potential consequences of my consumption. I was adept at going to work hungover but on time.

I'd say it's probably a good thing that the guy who drinks to blackout every night doesn't have a loaded gun by his bed. I have a friend who was a cop, he almost shot his wife by accident one time. He was sleeping in the day because he was working nights, she dropped some cans in the kitchen and he drew down on her before waking up enough to size up the situation. I had a daughter with autism who got up at one in the morning for the day (an even bigger reason for me not to keep guns in the house).

I still say if you're going to red flag me in my 30s, and you probably should if I didn't beat you to it by having more sense than that. But if you're going to take my theoretical guns, you'll have to take the real ones from practically everyone I know because they all have some sort of booze in the house. Maybe they don't drink as much as I did, maybe they drink even more, doesn't matter to the argument.

I guess this is to say, what if SCOTUS went the other way on this case? Would we be red-flagging all the drinkers who own guns, right along with the potheads like me. That's right, I haven't had a drink in almost a year, what you call California sober. People aren't static. The best argument for gun control is that everyone, sometimes, is eligible for a red flag. The answer to that isn't necessarily more gun laws, this is something that needs to change in the culture. It needs to be socially unacceptable to hoard unnecessary firearms. Not a criminal offense, treat it like smoking in the car with your kids. Everyone knows good parents don't do that, and that makes it pretty rare.

So if you hunt, keep those hunting rifles by all means. In a safe or with a trigger lock until it's hunting season. But buying hardware just because, or hoarding it for some imagined 'second American Revolution' civil war makes you the kind of idiot they ought to take guns away from. I really think it's a matter of social pressure. That allows for the fact that the calculus is fundamentally different in Wyoming versus New York. Even now, the social acceptability of guns is very different between urban and rural people.

Which is to say I'm glad the Supreme Court didn't uphold this bizarre double standard that weed is somehow a different breed of intoxicant. Stoners have the same right to keep and bear arms the drunks have. It's unnecessary for most of them to own guns at all though.

Daily Constitutional

Just like I'm pushing myself to write every day, something, anything, I'm trying to get my ass moving again.

I can't believe how out of shape I've become, so I'm walking daily now. One loop around the block is right at a half mile and it's the upper limit of what I can do comfortably (on day two I have a little soreness).

I didn't feel like going today. Not because of the hip discomfort, though going did make that a little worse. No, I just didn't feel like walking, but I did. Something. Anything but sit here and sink into my mounting disabilities.

Now I can escape into Game 5 of the NBA Finals, could be a deciding game. I've got enough of a rooting interest in the Knicks for it to be a pretty healthy dopamine jolt if they win it. Or even if it goes to a Game 6, as long as it's competetive. I know in the UK I've read they prescribe exercise like walking as a first Rx against depression, I wonder if sports fandom should make the list. Dopamine and oxytocin baby, any way you can get it.

Sportsball Buzz

For a teenager who hid in his room the night the Royals won the World Series in 1985, I have blossomed into quite the sports fan as an adult. I make time for the Chiefs, I find a way to be in front of a screen when they're playing. The Royals I more listen to on the radio. Depending on my work situation, some seasons I listen to the majority of their games.

Then I got increasingly into the WNBA. I consume the Olympics rabidly when they're happening. Now it's come to this: I have watched all four games of the NBA Finals so far. I never imagined there would be a day when I wanted to watch an NBA basketball game.

I know that part of it is all the W I've been watching. The more you watch a sport, the more you understand it. Especially when you start to follow particular players.

I picked the New York Liberty (or they picked me) as my focus in the W. Because I'm a libertarian? Because of the romance of New York City? Because Sabrina Ionescu is breathtaking? I mean, professional athletes are an attractive lot, but if I'm hiring them for their looks there's lots of pretty WNBA players. If you like tall women, and I do, the sex appeal is pretty broad across the league, but I don't think that's why I watch.

I get sucked into the storylines, just like any good sports junkie. The Liberty are as good a team to follow as any when it comes to players who fuel narratives. Stewie, Sabrina, JJ, they give you a lot to talk about.

Once I got acclimated to the sport, though, I found myself watching other WNBA games, Sparks vs Mercury, Dream vs Sun, Fever vs Sky, I'll watch any of them. It's generally very competitive, and there's always personalities. There are several reasons why I think I like the women's game, a leading theory is the women of today are closer in size to the players Naismith was working with when he invented the game. Though the Liberty's big three mentioned above all tower over Nineteenth Century men. Still, there's not a lot of dunking going on in the women's game. Anyway, it's good television. I'm starting to think even NASCAR might be fun if I'd bother picking a driver and following the sport. I probably won't, but like I say, been watching NBA finals, which seems pretty off-brand for me.

But this game last night, Knicks and Spurs Game 4, wow. The first half just sucked. I found myself kicking myself for not spending this time writing. Even a blog post like this, that's something I did with my time besides let my brain be addled by the play by play. It wasn't competitive, the Spurs were humiliating the Knicks on their home court. It didn't help that I'd decided before Game 1 that I'm pulling for the Knicks. The glamour of NYC? Cool fans like Spike Lee in his superfan getup, Taylor Swift with her "Steve Knicks" t-shirt? The fact that the Knicks are one of the OG franchises yet haven't had a fresh banner to hang in over 50 years?

That last one is probably part of the reason I've adopted the Knicks as my NBA team for the moment. The fact that the Spurs are from the blighted state of Texas would be enough for me. I don't think I could root for a Texas team over a New York team, all things being equal. The Spurs have the more fascinating star in Victor Wembenyama who's a gawky thing even among the giants of the NBA. And he's got the dedication to go with the undeniable talent and physical traits. If you were going to Weird Science a basketball star, you'd get Wemby. But still, Texas. The worst.

Just so you know, I'm aware how ridiculous my anti-Texas bigotry is. It is also genuinely how I feel.

But I almost turned off at halftime, the score was 76 to 49, the Spurs lead had been as much as 29 points. You don't come back from deficits like that no matter how many celebrities you line the court with. I wasn't crestfallen, the Knicks are only kind of my team. I was excited for the Bucks to win it a couple years back, didn't watch the games but another old franchise ending a long drought. Spurs versus almost any team from the East would have me pulling for the East because of my deep seated contempt for Texas. There are places like Atlanta that also seem like Hell on earth to me, but I'm indifferent to Atlanta, not hostile. But yeah, Boston, Philadelphia, I could root for anyone against a Texas team.

Anyway, something made me stick with it past halftime. The first two games of the series, the Spurs won the first half. Game 3 notwithstanding, the Knicks seemed to sustain four quarters of effort better than the Spurs in the series so far. Still, 27 points down at the half. I took a few minutes to beat myself up for not just wasting time on sportsball when I should be writing or doing anything more productive with my time, but then the Knicks started clawing their way back. Narrowed the lead to 20-ish, then 15-ish. And the excitement started to build.

By the time the Knicks won it on a last second tip-in, the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history, I was fairly buzzing. I might have had a little THC helping that out, but the neurochemistry was obvious. Watching 'my team' climb back out of the abyss and steal a win right off Wemby's plate was a rush.

I've heard that people make better dietary choices the day after their sports team wins a game, and I believe it. It's kinda a shame that there have to be losers to create what the winners feel, because ideally everyone involved would be high as a freed balloon at the end of every sportsball event. I'd even suggest doing so could bring about world peace or something, all those people making better choices because they watched a game and the sports gods smiled upon their tribe.

This is not me working on my novel, but it speaks to the core of what my novel is about. One of the principal storylines in it is about the owner of an NFL team who hires a shaman to influence the outcome of games. You can't have Game 4 and not believe there's some kinda magic involved. I joke about how many celebrities were seated courtside, but you know there were lots of prayers sent up. Why not a little black magic, too? Remember that woman with a voodoo doll of Patrick Mahomes in the stands when the Chiefs fell apart in the Super Bowl?

If you're a religious person, be careful. Sports fandom is a form of idolatry if you're keeping track.

And I suppose if you're an addictive person, and I am, you should stay mindful of your buzzes, even clean ones. Fortunately watching a little athletic competition isn't going to aggravate my fatty liver or my dodgy kidneys.

Going Into Publishing

I've wanted to write about my years in the right wing press and have struggled with where to even begin.

K.C. Jones was an alternative tabloid newspaper published for roughly seven years in the 1990s. At its peak it was a weekly, though most of that time it was a monthly, modeled off the Pitch and Riverfront Times but with a decidedly conservative/libertarian editorial perspective. The Village Voice but with William F. Buckley as editor.

I worked there literally instead of going to college. It did function as a university for me in several ways: I learned a lot, including my trade; I formed lifelong friendships; I had a lot of fun and to top it all off, I got paid almost as much as a student.

My ambition was to be a writer, and I published a lot with Nadler Publishing, but that's not what I got paid for. Initially, my main contribution was distributing papers (all our publications were free, advertiser supported, we put them under the Thrifty Nickel's racks, on cigarette machines, etc.) and helping as I could with layout.

I wasn't even computer literate, but there was more work than Rich Nadler, our editor in chief, could manage by himself. I was given a stack of folders with ads to go in the upcoming issue, an IBM 8088 computer with a 10 MB hard drive running a program called PublishIt! 2.0 and told to see what I could figure out.

I say I wasn't computer literate, actually every chance I got to get my hands on a computer, I did so in my teens. A girlfriend's dad had a Mac with music composition software I played with. Another friend's dad was an IT guy back before there was a term for it, and I messed around on that family's Commodore 128. I transcribed a four part harmony arrangement of the head to Cherokee on that primitive PC.

But when I needed a computer for school, I got a Brother 'word processor' typewriter. It got me by, the internet was just a few academics, this was 1986. So in 1990, when I was sitting down to an already obsolete PC (Rich had the big horse, a 286, that's a few generations before Pentiums—the plains were black with buffalo and generic cigarettes were less than $10 for a carton) in 1990, it wasn't like I'd never hacked anything out on a computer.

So I hacked out those ads. It came somewhat naturally to me, though the ads I came up with were graphic abortions. The fonts had to be generated one at a time per size and stored on that wee little hard drive, so you picked fonts based on what you had that fit the space you were working with. Couple that with the fact that I've never taken a design class, those were some horsey-ass ads.

I have a partial archive of the K.C. Jones to this day. A flooded basement claimed some of it, and nobody has the second issue unless Rich's widow has a copy somewhere. I don't know if she's a hoarder, I know Rich was, so there's a good chance a complete archive exists, but mine is probably the second most complete to that. It's a trip opening it up, seeing my columns, all the crazy contributors we had.

Anyway, these colorful characters and crazy situations, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters have nothing on the Nadler Publishing show. But to write a fully cohesive, biographically accurate history of the company would be impossible even for me. I was there for most of it, but I didn't take notes and it's been a long time. I think I'm going to try writing anecdotes as short stories. Maybe I can put together a short story collection, which would allow me to change names to protect the, well, the guilty. I'm sure most of it is beyond the statute of limitations, but changing some names and dates would be polite. I don't have a way to contact some of the people (or even know for sure if they're still alive) because just to give one example, Pat McWilliams who wrote the Slings & Arrows column, was such a luddite that Rich took his column as dictation over the phone because he couldn't get Pat to type it into a computer himself. I don't know that I'll be outing Pat with anything, but he's not the sort of cat you can friend on Facebook and he's probably out there somewhere.

Anyway, I think a working title for the book would be something like You Can Always Go Into Publishing, because 'going into publishing' is B-school slang for failure, and somehow the K.C. Jones managed to be a failing publication for seven years. This was an 'entertainment' tabloid that ran cover stories about abortion from a pro-life perspective. One of the last covers advocated "If you want to save the planet BURN OIL!" This was the only local publication that has ever truly championed the free market, even has the free market did its best to snuff it out of existence.

In Defense of Data Centers

This is an unpopular opinion, but I don't think data centers are the antichrist they've been painted to be.

I'm not contesting the claims of water use and power consumption, that's all true, absolutely. But the same arguments apply to Amazon warehouses and things like the big Panasonic battery factory in DeSoto. That building is just like an Amazon logistics center except they're manufacturing lithium ion batteries in there. The Panasonic factory was courted by locals, the same people who seem to be coming out of the woodwork to NIMBY up when it comes to data centers.

If you want to preserve farmland, that's fine, buy some and farm it. We're not running out of arable land, no matter how true it is that they're 'not making any more.' They're not making any more water either, but thanks to the miracle of evaporation and the mechanics of fluid dynamics, that water isn't 'used' in the sense that gasoline is burned. Water doesn't get just one use and then it becomes not water.

I'm not here to defend how people (including yours truly) use AI. I like it for spit-balling ideas as a writer. Not letting it do the writing mind you, but bouncing ideas off against known facts. I did it just now, and was told by AI that AI does indeed use many times more resources than most light industry. Pardon my skepticism, but compared to what light industries? Offices, sure, battery factories? I have my doubts.

If you think AI is junk, don't use it. If you think it's got too big a footprint for the value it ads, don't use it. I'm fine with letting the good old market sort this out. Not because the market gets everything right, that's insanity. But it's not as insane as letting an HOA or a zoning board dictate what kind of light industry gets developed. We have a homeless problem in this country because nobody wants to allow affordable housing near their house, we need less NIMBYism, not more of it.

Think about that battery factory. Maybe you're against it, and again I'm fine with that if that's your position. I'm not here to tell you what to value. If the jobs that battery factory accounts for offsets the risks and harms of having a battery factory there instead of an asparagus farm or whatever "better" use the land could be put to, then you're probably in favor of the Panasonic plant. If you say no to a data center because it's the same problem minus the jobs (because data centers don't employ many people, and the people it does employ were not the Popular Kids), I guess you're consistent. But to claim the data center is Worse is a stretch to me. A server farm is far less likely to be a future Super Fund site than a battery factory.

Not Such a Blank Page

Today I made myself write a short chapter for Jaws of Victory. It ends up being more summation than action, covering a lot of ground for how oen of my principle characters came to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice (in 2061 there aren't many trillionaires but he's one of them).

I feel like I need to be unpacking these things and expanding, showing the action rather than the result, but then the action requires this groundwork.

Some of the literary influences that I think may account for how it's coming out, I think of Max Barry's Company and Terry Southern's The Magic Christian.

The problem is when do I get done summarizing and get on with the story? Practically everything I've written so far is world building like this. At least Max Barry gets on with it and has a conflict over a donut (that, if memory serves, is the central conflict of that fine novel, someone took an extra donut). That's Max Barry for you, he can turn anything into a great novel.

So what am I doing to be like Max Barry? Well, I'm back to blogging apparently (he was doing that before me even), but he wrote Syrup on his lunch breaks, so I'm trying to write every day even if it is another half backed chapter section and a blog post about writing (ugh! if you're reading this, I gotta wonder why you don't make better choices). I wrote today. I don't know if any of it is worthy of publication (I have my doubts), but I fucking did it.

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.