Renaissance Oaf

Lipping Off

2012-01-16T10:03:00.000-08:00

(Photograph courtesy of Kent Young,
who may well have been my first babysitter.)

A Brief Exchange Accurately, if Dishearteningly, Reflecting the Level of Discourse:

The Sister: What's with that balloon-headed dwarf on your shirt? Is that supposed to be some kind of retard?

The Oaf: It's a Miro, you cretin. You know, Miro? The painter? Idiot. I scored it at a gay couple estate sale. That's where everything I wear comes from these days.

So Friday went well. I was planning on doing a greatest-hits report on the reading, but Joe Clifford beat me to it, and said some very nice things about me. Frankly, I'm probably going to re-read that post every half-hour or so for the rest of my life. For the record? The show was strong from beginning to end, and it was a particular thrill to hear Mckay William's first reading, a genuine slice of history.

If you didn't read Joe's piece already (you should), he very generously praises the honesty of my execution. Well, I took some risks on Friday and I did so in order to achieve a greater degree of openness.

The last piece I did was the story of a physical assault, and my delivery was extremely aggressive. This time, Joe and I discussed the idea of pulling back. Joe mentioned David Gilmour's vocals in this connection, how he used flat expression to allow the listener emotional room for response, and that made me think of the old-school country and folk I love.

It also made me realize something. As we approached the reading on Friday, something was itching at the back of my head. In Joe's post, he mentions the significance of persona. Well, I realized that I was specifically looking forward to delivering a number of extremely confrontational lines, stuff along the lines of "Nothing kills a budding romance with a revivified suicide than her discovery that you've been stroking off to her debris."

And I realized that that particular type of provocation is defensive. That by putting physical necrophilia on the table I drew attention from emotional or spiritual necrophilia.

It also, let us be honest, makes me feel tough and dangerous to say crazy shit. I have some fairly serious social anxieties, and I have an actual fear of crowds. Despite this, standing up in front of an audience is one of the most natural, comfortable experiences I've ever had. I love it, but there is an edge to that enjoyment of the experience. To grip an audience firmly by the face, finger in the eye socket and thumb hooked under the jaw, to make them watch me draw the blade and force it in...

Have you ever had to fight a crowd? Physically? It is a moment of complete abandon. It is like taking flight. When you know the worst will occur, you are free.

And when you are free you can do amazing things. In fact, you cannot do amazing things unless you have both absolute restriction and absolute freedom.

The freedom to do nothing but fight.

That is the freedom performance offers me, but performance is not a fight. The initial creative act is mine, but after that I work for the audience. I come from a preaching people left and right, mother and father, and while my beliefs are not religious, my concern is with the state of the human soul, and this requires honesty first and foremost.

And I realized that in this piece, my confrontations were internal, and that if I were to deliver an honest experience, I needed to invite the audience into my world rather than assault them. That those nasty, brutal lines I had delivered over and over in my mind had to go.

When I was at Taos Toolbox, there was a sign on the wall. In big red letters it read, "Kill Your Darlings." Everyone who really writes is nodding in sympathy now.

I was fighting this in my head all day long. I did not make my decision until it was time to start reading.

I did my final line-edit while I read. I removed -- and I believe I did so seamlessly -- the most aggressive, confrontational passages in the manuscript, shifting the focus from shock value to introspection.

It was the perfect choice for me. A situation of maximum risk, where I felt a sense of absolute control. (This was an illusion -- I completely forgot about the existence of the mic, and just spoke as loudly as usual. It worked out, but next time, damnit...) Engaging the crowd, reading, performing, and line editing at the same time felt as though I was tap-dancing on a high-wire. Only perfectly normal, as though it was an embedded function.

I believe I need to find ways of doing this a little more often.

Last Year/This Year

2012-01-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

Don't forget -- I'm reading this Friday at 7:30 at Pegasus Books in Berkeley at 2349 Shattuck!

At this time last year, I was beginning a course of psychiatric medication that would prove disastrous. Since I have mixed-state bipolar syndrome, when they gave me effective anti-depressants, even ones intended to have a strong sedative effect, they may as well have given me meth. I mean that quite specifically; the effects were very, very similar. Compulsive activity without focus or purpose, irritability, etc, etc. I'm not a meth fan, but at least you get a fucking rush with that stuff. With this? It was like being four hours into a bad high and four to go, all day, every day. It was the first time in my life that I've had to give serious thought to the possibility that I might be institutionalized.

This year? Once a week I go see a counselor, and our focus isn't on symptom management. We're working on figuring out how I'm going to fit into the world. Rather than feeling like a sack full of crazy or a potentially dangerous situation, I'm being taught to regard myself as an unusually gifted person who needs a little extra care.

Last year I was facing the realization that I was never going to be able to work a conventional job again. When I dropped out of my editorial training program after a stress reaction had me vomiting blood for days, when a whole series of psychiatrists told me I was unemployable in flat, absolute tones -- it was obvious that I wasn't going to fit into the straight world, no matter how hard I tried.

This year? Everyone in my life, my spouse, my family, my friends -- all agree that I am an artist and a writer, and that is what I should be doing. That my proper place in society is as a creator, and that they will support me in that end.

Last year? After workshopping my novel Ghost Rock at Taos Toolbox and Nick Mamatas' class on writing popular fiction? (Both crucial in my development as a writer, and both highly recommended.) After two additional drafts? Still sucked.

This year? It's nailed. I'm putting the fine buffing on it, but it is a working, functional piece of art. And I've started doing live readings to good effect, I've had another story published, I have my own Amazon page...

Last year? I was paralyzed. I lost the whole winter. Didn't get anything done, and felt nothing but misery.

This year? I am grumpy in patches, but I'm semi-functional. Not at the superhuman levels I'll display come spring, but I'm getting stuff done on a daily basis, and what work I'm doing is of an adequately high quality. And when I don't work? I don't give myself shit about it.

The best part is this feeling... it's hard to say how true it is, but I feel as if I've hit a certain momentum. I still have little or no idea where I'm headed in the long run, but it certainly seems as if I'm headed somewhere.

The real struggles I faced this last year had to do with accepting myself for what I was, recognizing that the traditional path that people take in our culture has never been an option for me, and allowing myself to have faith in both the value of what I do, and my value to the people around me.

There are less pleasant struggles, let me tell you. For a bad year, it's been pretty good.

I'll Be Reading On The Thirteenth

2012-01-03T18:56:00.000-08:00

Yes, Joe, I am jealous as fuck every time you blog about your fucking home gym. I used to be a monster, goddamnit! Now I'm a brain in a fucking bucket.

The time has come once again. Hey, everybody! At 7:30 on January 13, I'll be reading at Pegasus Books at 2349 Shattuck in Berkeley for Lip Service West, the series of edgy readings run by Joe Clifford.

Edgy. Heh-heh. Edgy is not the word for my piece. It is probably the single harshest, most emotionally brutal work I've ever done, and are you at all familiar with my range? It would be easy to point at subject matter like suicide, gore, and necrophilia as the reason this is such an ugly experience, but I like to think that those elements are finally subsumed in larger, more disturbing questions of morality, identity, and obsession. I'm proud of it, I will stand by it, I am not ashamed of what it portrays even if I am disturbed by myself.

But this one is a serious motherfucker. It hurt me to write it. I had to dig deep into things I'd really rather have left forgotten or unthought. There are laughs. There are even a couple of funny laughs.

But there are reasons people tend to describe my work as if it were violent crime rather than art. You want to know the truth? I think the main reason Joe Clifford is using this? I suspect a certain clinical interest. I think he wants to see what it does to an audience. For scientific purposes.

So come on down on the thirteenth, and be part of science!

Future Lovecraft Contest

2011-12-28T09:57:00.000-08:00

I have two copies of Future Lovecraft to give away. It contains my story Deep Blue Dreams, which is my first Real Book publication. (Not to sneer at my Real Internet publication, which was quite lovely.)

So a contest! A contest!

Right now, I really should be promoting myself. But it's the winter, and I'm too fucking miserable to make a convincing case. I'm at a stage where I need to start establishing a presence on Amazon (I've decided not to fight gravity), and I need to get a professional website up, get cards printed, get a mailing list going -- in other words, begin actually establishing a professional persona in a conscious fashion.

So.

There will be two prizes, consisting of a signed copy of Future Lovecraft, inside of which will be tucked a small piece of signed original art. Possibly a pencil sketch, possibly a linoleum print or ink drawing, it will be a) old, b) shabby, and c) actually a decent piece of work suitable for framing. Which makes it a lottery ticket that pays off if I am successful in the arts. Whee!

One prize will be given to the person who provides me with the best bit of promotion on Amazon, whether it's a review, a posted link, or some other action beyond my primitive imagining. Either post a link in the comments or send me an email at craven dot sean at gmail dot com. Here is my Amazon page. And here is where you can read Tourists for free -- but that's not to discourage you from throwing me (and Macmillan and Amazon) money.

(And reviews of Future Lovecraft should be based on the Kindle edition or lie to me or ask me to send you my story or something. Here is a possible and legitimate 'or something.' It's the middle of the winter and I'm stupid. You figure it out.)

The other prize will be given to the person who gives me the best advice on building my public persona. This advice may take the form of a link to information, a book recommendation, etc. Anything actually useful is game. Again, leave your advice in the comments, or email me at craven dot sean at gmail dot com.

This contest will run through January 10, and I will announce the winners as soon afterward as possible, and maybe even before if I lose my damned mind.

Let me tell you a story, folks. (clutches hat to chest; his expression would be pathetic were it not for a touch of sly humor in his squinty little eyes)

When I was a kid, my favorite TV preacher was Doctor Scott, because we hadn't graduated to Robert Tilton yet. I loved the way Doctor Scott would refer to the idiots who sent him money as his 'King's Houses.' It was basically a term of abuse, I suppose, but it still thrilled me when he'd hear how the contributions were rolling in and he'd leap to his feet in rage and point his finger at the ceiling.

"What kind of lousy numbers is that? What kind of King's Houses have I got, anyway? If I don't get five thousand more dollars in the next five minutes, I'm putting the damned singers back on again and see how you like that."

Doctor Scott looms large in my consciousness, and right now he's rising up inside me, looking at you -- YOU! -- my friends, relatives, and readers, and he's asking a question. He is thinking of this contest, and of how my poor old Amazon items have no reviews and precious few sales and he knows you -- YOU! -- can do something about this and he wants to know.

What kind of King's Houses have I got, anyway?

Plus, the prizes! Cool prizes!

Stay tuned to find out what art will be shipped out!

Watch Me Destroy Good News! or Up The Amazon Without A Paddle

2011-12-21T20:26:00.000-08:00

Well. Here it is, on sale at this very moment. My first hard-copy publication outside the underground.

It hasn't really gotten to me. I noticed a typo, and a bad word choice. What kind of crawling scum would write, 'bubbled furiously' instead of 'seethed?' That's six syllables to one! That's a terrible fucking score! What the hell was wrong with me? I will be made to suffer for this transgression against Our Lady Language...

Aside from that, though, it hasn't really gotten to me.

But it's led to a situation. I mean, it turns out.

Well, there's this fucking thing.

I mean, what the fuck? Was somebody drunk? Isn't there some kind of firewall in place to keep this shit from happening?

Let's be honest. I see Amazon as a fundamental bad. It concentrates wealth and power in ways I distrust, it adds to the environmental impact of consumer culture, it treats art as an economic commodity, thus training people to undervalue culture and be unwilling to give it legitimate economic support. Life for fiction writers has gotten shittier and shittier since Amazon came on the scene. When you tell me thus-and-such a percentage of writers get thus-and-such a percentage of their income from Amazon, I think of all the Macmillan writers who lost income when Amazon refused to sell their books for weeks after the dispute with Macmillan was settled. That was harm done to innocent parties for spite, and that is Amazon. Amazon also publicly defended their passive support of predatory child molestation with the good old, "We're not censors," bullshit.

So, yeah, I hate Amazon, I hate Bezos, and I hate what they stand for. My fucking story in Future Lovecraft is predicated on Amazon's collapse. And you pretty much have to buy it from Amazon. That is my situation, right there.

Unfortunately, for a writer in the twenty-first century to hate Amazon is like a farmer hating dirt. And I noticed on my way in to my author's page? Amazon made big deal out of how they have no connection with me, made me sign a statement that they provide me with no support, have no responsibility for their distribution of my information.

As grownups, we understand this is bullshit, right? You can't dispel an onus with that kind of protective phrase, no matter how well it might hold up in court. But hey. They're admitting up-front they don't like me any more than I like them. For some reason, that makes me feel more at ease.

So. Maybe it's time for me to set aside my need for ethical (by my twisted standards) purity, and make a compromise. The simple fact of the matter is that unless you exist at the top or outside the system, your work goes to benefit horrible, horrible entities of one kind or another. Otherwise, they wouldn't send you a check.

I don't know. I'm going to reflect on it. But it looks as if I'm going to be in bed with Amazon no matter what, and it would be shrewdest to cooperate.

I don't know, he said, looking at the paw and the trap, trying to figure out what is morality, what is self-denial, and what is pure finickiness. I just do not know.

This Winter Sucks Less

2011-12-18T11:45:00.001-08:00

I'm having a much easier time this winter than I usually do, knock wood. While my symptoms of depression are fairly acute -- loss of appetite and weight (a bit of a mixed curse), insomnia, lack of ability to function, and so on and so forth, it's not actually bothering me that much.

Here's why.

I'm eschewing a great deal of typical self-destructive behavior now that I'm coming to value myself. And I'm coming to value myself because the world is validating me relentlessly.

It is difficult to walk around feeling like a loser when every few days a person beloved, admired, respected, makes a point of telling me how fucking brilliant I am. It will take a long time for me to get tired of that.

I've crossed a threshold, gathered a certain amount of critical mass -- even if I fall into a state of semi-collapse, folks want me to be with them and they want me to do art for and with them. The world has started to notice me, and it's saying, "Hey! I want to play!"

Almost better? If I ask myself, "What did you do today?" and answer, "Looked at musical instruments online, fucked up the vegetables for lunch and then spent six hours staring into a corner while feeling sad," I then congratulate myself on a job well-done, and go tell the missus how wonderful she's being with me.

See, I'm a registered, official crazy person now -- so when I display clear signs of mental illness, I'm not going to shit all over myself. I wouldn't do it to someone else. Doesn't make sense to do it to myself.

My counselor pointed out to me how much I'd actually done this fall. "Winter is a time to lie fallow. To rest. Maybe you're just hibernating."

And that's easy for me to accept -- I can look back at four years worth of blogs now, and see the shape of my year delineated as if it were outlined on graph paper. There is no reason for me to expect that discipline can overcome neurochemistry.

I get more done in the fall than a lot of people get done in a year, and then I do it again in the spring. I do what I do because I do it, and viciously accusing myself of lack of discipline and praiseworthy zeal strenuously exerted just uses up energy that I'd otherwise devote to my work. Wish I'd figured that one out earlier.

So I'm getting a lot more done than I usually do this time of year, with a lot less accompanying drama. I'm down to about six vertical inches of line-edits, from a high of nine. Things are coming along. When I look at the novel, see how excited the readers are? Again, it's hard to feel like a loser.

And when I remember, I've finally found a creative activity that I can engage in when emotionally distraught. Music, of course. I don't discuss it on the blog to any great degree, but I love playing music. A friend showed me some scales and made me practice them -- which I now know I did very, very poorly -- but aside from that, I'm pretty much self-taught. Bass, ukulele and baritone ukulele, now I'm starting to mess with open tunings on guitars. Drum programming, synthesizer music, singing... I'm not good, but I enjoy myself.

It's the ukulele and the baritone uke that are saving me. Unlike the bass, I can play them in bed, on the couch, in my recliner. And unlike the bass, when I play by myself it sounds like fucking music. I'm starting to be able to pick up chord progressions and hooks by ear, I'm getting some calluses.

And when I play music? It's like running a comb through my thoughts. Definitely soothing. A serious stress reliever. Playing music creates extremely complex patterns of neurological activity, requiring much of the brain to interact harmoniously. It's got serious and solidly-proven health benefits. And I play well enough to reap those benefits. To actually have a little fun and wring a little expression out of the fretboard.

Finally, the missus has been wonderfully supportive. We've had a few spats, but for the most part things have gone smoothly. She's going to visit her family in Ohio soon. I'll miss her, but I'll survive.

I don't have swine flu. I'm not vomiting blood.

This might be my best winter ever!

A Cover for Ghost Rock

2011-12-13T09:53:00.000-08:00

Yes, this looks like a stoned fourteen-year old did it in study. They're called roughs for a reason...

First, it needs colors that spang across the room. So primaries for the most part -- yellow for the background, then the big lettering in red, white, and blue with black outlines, and a full-color, painterly illustration in the center.

The center image will be given a decorative frame based on those found around guitar soundholes; it's also intended to bring to mind such obsolete, rock-age music media such as CDs and LPs.

I'm looking forward to the next stage of the project -- the lettering. I've done hand-lettering for cartoon and comic work before, but this will be my first shot at decorative lettering. For the title, I'll be using sixties/seventies psychedelic posters and album covers as a jumping-off point -- I want something that's both legible and a little hard to read.

Bright colors grab the eye, while a small fully-rendered image and elaborate lettering request further inspection. Pick it up and take a closer look...

Anyway. I'll be rendering the title lettering in pencil on tracing vellum, using a print of the above template as a design, then importing it into Illustrator and autotracing it to get a scalable version. The goal is to have the separate elements of the cover ready to resize and reconfigure to easily, tastefully, legibly inhabit various sizes and formats of cover.

The letters themselves will be eccentrically shaped, full of color and detail. Ugly as sin, in an appealing way.

The lettering for my name and the subtitle will be done in brush pen. I'll do ten or fifteen versions of each letter to be used, select the most attractive and harmonious, and then autotrace and arrange them in Illustrator, making whatever adjustments to size and weight are necessary to make them read properly.

Why does my name go on top? Well. Name on top indicates that the author is more important than the work. But usually, name-on-top authors are a draw for readers -- your Kings and Tans and Krantzes and Koontses. So their names are in big fat easily visible slabs of non-serif solid-color type. This time? I ain't a name. So my name is in modest type. But I'm designing the damned cover, and I wrote the damned book. So my name goes on top.

As for An American Folktale. One of the major subtexts in the book is the integration of personal, national, world, and archetypal mythology. I regard popular fiction, and especially the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, as being in many instances a naive or folk form, and I've tried to bring as many of those virtues to the work as I can -- I think that if someone comes to this book wanting nothing more than a good slam-bang adventure, they will be perfectly satisfied at the end of the book.

But I've put a lot more effort into undermining and examining the assumptions behind those kinds of stories, not so much out of an intent to subvert as an attempt to see if anything of worth can be reclaimed from what seems to be cultural detritus. If anything can be profitably applied to real life.

And while not overtly political, and not historical fiction -- it is set very much in a Never-Never Narnia version of the US -- it does speak of history and our national origins and how these still define our lives in a very subtle way.

Look, it's a little puffed-up and douchey to have a subtitle like that. It says, 'There is more here than meets the eye.' But in this case it's fucking true, and I think a lot of readers will get more out of the book if they go in wondering, "Well, what makes this shit an American folktale anyway?"

So why the fuck am I doing the cover, you may well ask? Writers don't do their own covers! They don't even have much say in the covers, right? And don't you have better things to do? Like Swill and the book itself?

Well.

Here's the thing.

I'm inching along. And breaking up my work with something like this helps me inch.

I'm going to give copies of the novel to a number of friends and cohorts, and I want a nice cover for that. And the bit about how publishers aren't into author input on covers? I might be wasting my time, but I suspect it applies more to people who aren't actual designers than to me, he said arrogantly.

If there's a strong cover attached to the project from the beginning? Even if it doesn't get used in the end, it's still a useful way of drawing attention. And my time with Swill -- which also has a cover in the works -- has taught me that there's a certain emotional response I get when a project gets to the point where you do the cover. "Yep, that's it, it's almost out of my hands now." I want that feeling with the damned novel.

Plus, you know. I've never done anything like this before, and it's got my Stanley Mouse/Roger Dean vibe on the rise. Hand lettering! That's going to be fun.

I Am A Proud Patriot!

2011-12-05T14:55:00.000-08:00

This is Violet Oakley's painting of George Fox, from The Founding of the State of Liberty Spiritual frieze cycle in the Governor's Reception Room, Pennsylvania State Capitol, 1902-06. Taken from The Rose Red Girls, by Alice A. Carter, published 2000 by Harry N. Abrams.

You can keep old George Washington; that vicious grifter did my kind no favors. Give me a lunatic idealist like George Fox any day of the week!

And when a gay Christian Scientist paints a Quaker? That's my America, right there.

So when I do a post complaining about US cultural, social, or political mores, I always come away with the little couplet from the Mikado dancing through my mind -- "And the idiot who praises in enthusiastic tones/every century but this and every country but his own." Makes me feel kind of shitty.

Well. My family has been on this fucking continent for twice as long as the US has been here, and while some of us have been ardent patriots, there have always been a few who have no damned use for nations. We hated it in Olduvai, then we hated it in Scandinavia, then we hated it in France, then we spent so much time bitching in England that they shipped our preachy asses overseas.

When we got to America? We hit the ground running, trying to get the fuck away from the assholes. One branch of my family has been in California for more than two hundred years, and the only reason I don't live in the goddamned Pacific is I'm too broke to afford a fucking inner tube.

My Quaker ancestors helped with the underground railroad -- fuck the law, thank you very kindly -- and militated for Native American rights when that cause was very unpopular indeed. My dad is one of the founders of the letter carrier's union, and as a child I nailed picket signs together.

So when I bitch about America, I do so from a certain fucking position. I am as American as you can get, and hating the government and the robber barons that employ it is part of that tradition.

As an institution? I hate America.

But this is my place, and these are my people, and I am sick of having my sense of connection determined by how offended I am at our national excesses -- or to put it another way, it doesn't look good to run around screaming, "I hate America!" at the top of my lungs every so often. Just because I track the history of our nation from the first smallpox virus through Michele Bachman doesn't mean I shouldn't avail myself of the privileges attendant to patriotism.

Of course I'm a proud patriot. It just took me a while to figure out how everybody else does it -- they inspect the history of the US, take what they like, figure out how much of the shitty stuff they can stand thinking about, choke down as many lies as they can believe, and then put together an imaginary nation they can worship wholeheartedly.

I write fantasy and science fiction. I can do that. I can do that easy.

First off, I'm going to have to pick some sides. The two biggest teams in America (apologies to my fancy international friends, but as a patriot I'm afraid I must refer to my nation of birth as America rather than the US or the USA -- according to playground rules, I have to stick with the nickname) are the Utopians and the Grifters. The Utopians are, for the most part, fuzzy-minded losers entirely too prone to getting all hopped up on Jesus, but the Grifters are the vilest, most pernicious pack of predators the planet has ever seen -- the air we breath is thick with the stink of their venomous words and deeds, and we labor and suffer under their yoke, our skins blistered by the radiance of their self-satisfied grins.

So I'm a Utopian!

Patriots worship the Constitution. For a lot of folks, it's a secular Bible. I can dig it -- there is some very stirring rhetoric there. My two favorite passages 0f writing are the Preamble -- thanks to Schoolhouse rock, I have the damned thing memorized -- and Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham jail. And the Bill of Rights is solid.

The rest of it is pretty much concerned with creating and maintaining the privileges of the monied classes, and you can insert the Declaration of Independence into the founding father of your choice (mine's Hamilton -- I hate everything I know about that bastard, and would like to bring him back to life so I could shoot him myself). That piece of shit was basically a bunch of rich guys writing a check they cashed with poor guy's asses. Shall we discuss the issue of scrip?

Right, right. Patriotic and proud, let's stay on fucking target, you lout.

I'll claim a bunch of cultural stuff. I am aligned with the great American tradition of outsider artists from Walt Whitman and Emily 'Doo-Da' Dickinson through Harry Partch to Henry Darger, and also with that great refuge of outsiders, popular culture.

Let's go for a bit of genuine pride -- while their America is oppressing people? The resistance is listening to my America's music. Ask the Soviet bloc countries if rock and roll has power, if it can change the world. Go look at the fucking statue of Zappa in Lithuania -- he meant freedom to someone.

My America gave them that.

Let's go further. The civil rights and egalitarianism that we see as essentially American -- and this is in fact the case in my fucking America -- were not handed down to us by a cabal of Deist sots in periwigs. That creep Jefferson had enough grandeur in his soul to give us the words, but it was resistance on the part of the populace that made those words come to life. The people who gave us the right to vote? The right to protest? The right to strike?

Those rights were never given. Those rights were taken by my Americans, one protest and one rebellion at a time. And it appears that America is still willing to protest and rebel.

I've mentioned that my thoughts on the Occupy movement have been shifting. I've spent my whole fucking life bitching about the need for a populist movement to come along, and when one does? I send it back because it isn't the kind I like. Fuck that; the Occupy movement is part of my America, and hopefully, more functional movements will grow out of it.

There we go. That's a start. It's rough, but it's enough to work with.

I suppose I should learn to like sports next. Or cars or telephones.

Church might be interesting...

Fear And Loathing In A Pupating Police State

2011-12-02T06:54:00.001-08:00

I am making this post because I am frightened and angry, and if I do not speak in public because of my vulnerability, I will feel like a coward.

The defense budget currently in legislation is one with provisions that would make the US into a police state -- civil courts would remain in existence, sure, but at the discretion of the authorities, any individual could be placed into the military justice system, and civil rights would no longer apply.

Look this up. Do a web search. You will find it much, much easier to find this covered in the international press. I am frightened and angry -- is the American media failing us accidentally or intentionally?

Right now the US has the highest percentage of its population imprisoned of any culture in the history of the world. This is true. America has long since abandoned any right to describe itself as the land of the free. So they decide that the problem is that we need more ways to get people behind bars.

Warrentless wiretapping -- and now this.

They are justifying their position by describing our nation as a battlefield. We have not had any active conflict with the terrorists on our soil for quite some time -- but it seems as if there is a conflict brewing at home.

The conjunction of this with the occupy movement makes me feel paranoid. Nutty.

Terrified.

I will say this much. If this bill makes it all the way through, if President Obama signs it? I will no longer be able to take pride in having voted for him -- and I just might lose faith in the process entirely.

I am seeing America as a literal police state, run by corporate interests, with universal wiretapping taken for granted, and the right to imprison without cause. This is not fiction. This is actually happening.

Every person who supports this bill is actively and effectively militating against liberty and democracy, plain and simple. They have declared themselves the enemies of all that is decent in our national soul, and intend to turn this country into something far closer to Maoist China, the USSR of Stalin, or Nazi Germany than I had ever imagined. The monstrous arrogance on display here has robbed me of the capacity for hyperbole.

I do not say that lightly, and I would say it to any of their faces.

Fear and loathing have come full upon me.

November: The Gateway Month

2011-11-29T07:08:00.000-08:00

One of the interesting side-benefits of the blog is that I have a sort of fossil record of my behavior and mental states to which I can refer. When I boarded the bummer train a few weeks back, I told my dad that it felt as though my winter depression had started.

"Isn't it a little early for that?" he asked. "It isn't even Thanksgiving."

On Thanksgiving, his question resurfaced in my head, and I realized that there was a way to research the issue.

So I went back and looked up what I was posting around that time for the last three years. Well. It turns out that I suffered a catastrophic failure during the first two weeks of November for at least four years in a row.

Last year it was a trip to the hospital after a stress-induced three-day bout of blood puking. The year before? A shattering fight with the missus followed by a swine-flu enhanced trip to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had me destroyed all winter. The year before that? Exactly the kind of flat semi-unmiserable yet thoroughly non-functional depression I was bitching about a few posts ago.

I don't think these four years are aberrant. I think I need to start planning for November. It seems as if I'm vulnerable then.

And that means that I need to buckle down and find better ways of accommodating my seasonal depression. Now that I can look at the record and say that yes, for about a third of the year I am of extremely limited utility. How do I get the best use out of myself under these conditions?

Or perhaps I should look at it another way. When I was experiencing my fall hypomania, once I recognized what it was, I decided to treat it as an endogenous drug experience rather than a dangerous mental state. Set and setting, as they say. By doing so, I was able to re-invent my writing style and rewrite the novel in less than two months, in addition to two short stories, spoken word pieces, art, a fairly heavy web presence, etc, etc.

Essentially, I said, "Free endogenous cocaine? Well, for the next while I'm going to sleep less, eat less, talk too much, work compulsively, be brilliant, be obnoxiously aware of my brilliance, and exhibit a curiously exhilarating magnetism that suggests my state is communicable."

So. How can I make depression less of a bummer? I am experiencing it, I will experience it, but there are degrees and qualities, you know? Right now, the missus and dogs are snuggled warm in the bed downstairs, it's foggy out and the last few leaves are wet and drooping from the fig tree outside my window, and an old friend has come back into my life with his life in glorious turmoil, and it is all mist and shadows, we dance like flames and then vanish...

This is pretty good, so far as depression goes. I've always scorned the whole romantic Goth ("Okay, from sacking Rome to skinny nudes to the Castle of Otranto to the Sisters of Mercy to Hot Topic -- make the connection.") relish for the weeping soul, but fuck it. If it's a biological condition, why not have fun with it? Style might not be a bad approach -- a different persona for different seasons. Now I enter my October Country/Adam's Family persona, stark, grim, poetic, and yet not devoid of a sense of fun. Maybe -- just maybe -- I'll consider becoming an all-black clothing person during the cool months. "I'm not evangelical about depression, but sometimes gloom suits me."

Not a bad start, if I do say so. Take one of my standard prejudices, invert it, turn it into a joke, and there you go. A playful approach to the situation, one which defuses some of the threat. I'll need a couple of pairs of black pants, maybe a non-T-shirt or two. I do have the hat for it.

Okay, that's good. I can use that.

Winter hibernation isn't a bad one either. Last year, when Karen was gone, I simply gave up on everything but laying around with the dogs reading and watching monster movies. As a creative type, it is important for me to absorb information and the creative works of others; perhaps this is also a receptive season.

I believe I shall set out a program of study -- Nabakov's Lectures on Literature and the novels he covers are calling to me from across the waves, and actually reading an entire dictionary of literary terms would do me no serious harm.

And speaking of study. I need to work more on music. It is good for the brain, good for the mood.

Mostly, I need to focus more on taking care of the details. Eating. Sleeping. Exercise. The missus suggested keeping a diary. I think I should. Not a blog, just a simple journal that would let me track my moods and behavior over time. It would seem shrewd to put the observation of my habits on a scientific basis.

Thankfully, this year I have the greatest Christmas present a depressed writer could ask for -- a manuscript line-edited by five different people to worry into shape. It is a task vast, rapid, and immensely gratifying, and it has to be done in bed.

And finally. Finally! There will be a payoff when I'm done. It will be time to start nudzhing agents and editors, and I'm actually looking forward to that.

So despite my complaints, I've actually been having a much better time of it than I did during the last two Novembers, and circumstances favor me for the remainder of the season. The missus and I are getting along fine, despite my irritability and odd sensitivity. Is not so bad.

Bear up, Oafboy. Never say die.

And get back to work on Swill!

Of Course I'm Thankful

2011-11-25T10:14:00.000-08:00

I'm working on a bit of line-editing for a friend right now, and I've gotten enough of it done so that even if I get no further, I've made a legitimate contribution. So I'm taking a quick break to make a post. That's right, posting on the blog is my idea of recreation. I'm lame that way.

So what I'm I thankful for? Loads and oodles of things.

Number one would be the missus. Of course. She's gone again, culting it up with Ama the Huggin' Guru. I miss her, but I've got the project and let me be honest. She always comes back from the cult filled with positive love vibrations, and that makes her a hell of a lot easier to live with.

I'm also grateful for the other components of our household, the dogs. Roxie and Laszlo are good pals and good company. Even if Laszlo has taken to sleeping with his face mashed against me so I can feel it when he grinds his teeth and Roxie won't shut the fuck up.

And last night's puke -- look, when you break an involuntary stress-fast with wine and gravy the results are predictable -- was easy, delicious, and blood-free, and when it was over? It was over. No extended nausea, no 'do you need to go to the hospital' -- it was beautiful. Like a dream.

I'm thankful for my mental illnesses. You call it mixed-state bipolar, I call it an artistic nature. You call it post-traumatic stress syndrome, I call it common sense and keen observation. You call it obsessive compulsive disorder, I call it stick-to-it-iveness and attention to detail. You call it fetal alcohol syndrome, but I call it ADVENTURE!

(For the uninitiated? There is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between an impaired ability to make appropriate decisions and ADVENTURE!)

I'm thankful that the keys of C and G are interchangable on the ukulele and baritone ukulele -- if you play a ukulele G-chord on a baritone, it's a C, vice versa, and that goes for the other chords in the keys as well. So it's easy to drop the key of ukulele songs to fit my voice, sort of an anti-capo, and once you learn a song on one instrument, you've got it on the other. Since I don't have an intuitive grasp of fretboard math, this actually scares me a little. But I like it! I like it! Learning about music is really helping me through this round of depression.

(Just learned Only a Paper Moon, which is perfect depression music -- sad enough not to repel, not so sad that it makes things worse. Maybe I should do some Dylan, who occupies a similar emotional space and is so fucking musically backass that even I have an easy time figuring his shit out.)

Being good at stuff. I can do things that are important to me, and do them very well indeed. This is a recent development, and a welcome one. These days, when I work on writing or art my competence is a tangible, welcome, positive presence. I can feel it, and I think this feeling is that pride thing people have been giving me shit about my entire life.

I'm grateful that my old man has finally started coughing up some wisdom and guidance. The last few months he's been laying one piece of solid, useful information on me just about every time we get together. "You may not know this, but just about everything people do is based on hierarchy." I did not know that! What an eye-opener! "You don't want to impress people who are impressed by scars." That's totally correct! Those people suck!

I'm grateful that Andrewsarchus might be an entelodont. I mean, that would so totally rock. First off, it would make it possible for me to fake an Andrewsarchus reconstruction. But more than that, it would mean that the largest mammalian predator was an entelodont, which would mean four points for my side. 'My side' being weird, ugly, obscure predators.

(Again, for the uninitiated. Andrewsarchus is regarded as the largest fossilized predatory mammal. It's only known from one skull, so it's a frustrating mystery. Entelodonts were piglike predators, something like giant carnivorous peccaries with legs like racehorses. I have an inordinate fondness for them. They give every evidence of having been awful.)

I'm grateful that I'm a cheap pet. The song goes, "No kids, no car, no money -- shit!" But if you don't have kids or a car, you need a fuck of a lot less money. There is a certain pleasure in shaving one's life to the bone. If everyone thought the way I do, the whole world would grind to a pleasant halt.

Of course, I am a grubby materialist at heart. I'm grateful for my Thai mortar-and-pestle, my fifty-year-old umbrella with a reinforced stainless-steel frame, my musical instruments, Breaking Free! featuring Genuinely Vicious Anarchist Tintin, shelf after shelf of high-end books, and all the other goodies that university-town yardsales have dropped at my feet.

And fuck it. My attitude toward the Occupy movement has been adjusting. If I don't make any further statements on the subject? My attitude until now has been influenced by defensiveness, jealousy, and guilt. It is ridiculous to spend decades bitching about class consciousness in America, and then turn up my nose at the first populist movement that comes along. I stand by my prior statements, but I am now officially thankful for the Occupy movement. It is to be devoutly hoped that some purposeful, functional movements find their roots here.

I'm grateful that I don't have a fucking turkey carcass sitting in the refrigerator. The problem with turkey is that I don't like it, but I don't dislike it. That means that if there's an obligation to eat it, I don't really feel I have the right to say no to it. Which sucks. Fuck a bunch of turkey, you know?

But most of all, I'm grateful for the simple pleasure of not being doomed. A seriously mentally ill person with a bad back does not have as many options in life as most people do; thankfully, my options are the ones I would have chosen for myself if given the chance. These days, when I feel that there is no place in the world for me, that life is a game I lost a long time ago, that the possibility of joy is banned to me, that I am a person of no value or consequence, I have to examine the evidence and say, "Dude, you are full of shit."

Believe me. I'm grateful.

The Stars Are Right For Kindle

2011-11-23T09:04:00.000-08:00

The anthology Future Lovecraft is now available for discount pre-order!

It's also on the Kindle format from Amazon -- here is the link, god damn it. It is loaded with with the work of edgy writers, including my pal Nick Mamatas. If you use the fucking Kindle, give Amazon some money and help strip-mine the culture.

Because then you get to read my story Deep Blue Dreams. It is typical of my work in that it is weird, dense, bleak, and tricky -- and since its premise is based on the demise of Amazon, you can have a lovely lick of schadenfreude at no extra cost!

Plus, there are drugs and it's kind of gross and dirty. How can you go wrong?

And if you're buying Kindle stuff, why not cough up a buck for my story Tourists? Unless you'd rather read it for free.

For concerned parties; my state is unpleasant, but does not warrant concern -- there are no physical issues, and I am capable some basic functions including hope. The primary issues are paralysis and irritability, both harder on the missus (who is being swell) than me.

The Art of Eating

2011-11-15T17:27:00.000-08:00

Recently, Warren Lutz asked me if I could suggest some books for him to read. Warren is a strong contender for Best Writer I Work With (you will hear of him, I assure you -- here's a taste), and he wasn't after something fun to fill an afternoon. He wanted the good stuff, the kind of writing that makes you want to reach a little further, try a little harder.

My immediate response was to go to the shelf and pull out The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher.

It would be reasonable to suggest that my regard for this book is tinted by nostalgia -- I first read it on Christmas vacation during the fourth grade. My mother and I had taken a trip to go Christmas shopping in Berkeley, taking advantage of the still-exotic BART train. On the ride home, I complained that I was hungry; my mother passed the book to me, open to the chapter called How To Be Cheerful Though Starving.

Mom knew that would shut me up. I have always been a sucker for prose and M.F.K. Fisher is an absolutely first-class prose stylist. (Note: the phrase 'absolutely first-class prose' is third-rate and cliched. But true.)

This book is a mixture of history, food essay, and memoir, all swirled and mixed. There are recipes; to regard this as a cookbook is simply inaccurate. This is an exceptionally fine work of literature, one which provides the pleasures of exquisite craft, sensitivity, and refinement in the service of a powerful and distinctly feminine intellect.

But while this book serves the intellect well, with passages dealing with everything from historical observations to the deliberate cultivation of a relationship with food, it is the emotional presence of Ms. Fisher which grounds the book, providing it with its most consistent element.

While it does not have a narrative, this is one of those books that provides one with a real sense of the wealth of life, of the profusion of joys and sorrows that constantly attend our existence. Love and death, sickness, madness, violence all have their turn on stage, but this is a reality rooted in the need to provide food for yourself and those you love, and it is through the alternately cold and loving demands of domestic life that all of history and all of Ms. Fisher's life are eventually filtered.

What I'm saying, this is a book rich and wise and singular. Much of my ability to enjoy life has its roots in the lessons provided by Ms. Fisher's elegant and practical Epicurianism.

This is not a book to read straight through. It consists of five volumes of loosely-connected essays. Serve It Forth alternates memoir and history, Consider the Oyster adds natural history to the mix and focuses on one food item (this one was my favorite as a child, although I hate seafood), How to Cook a Wolf was done as a series of satire-laced advice columns during WWII. The Gastronomical Me was my least favorite as a child, but as an adult I have a greater tolerance for its estrogen-redolent atmosphere of romance and sexuality. If you don't require explicit descriptions, the eroticism here has a dark, nasty punch. An Alphabet for Gourmets happily wanders the field.

Which is what I'd suggest to the reader. Leaf through it, pick around, read an essay at a time until you feel compelled to bite off larger and larger pieces. Some books are company; this book -- wise, sweet, coldly practical, possessed of the wry musty humor of a true scholar, fiercely, achingly vulnerable -- is a true friend.

The Wrong Revolution

2011-11-14T08:56:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna try and pull my head out of my ass and get some posts up this week, even if I don't do anything else. So here's the big question -- why aren't I over in Oakland catching rubber bullets? I could fucking walk there -- what's my problem?

The problem is this, my droogs -- there ain't nothing over there for me to agree with.

I don't believe the myth of the revolution. I can't think of many cases where a revolution turned out to be an improvement in terms of quality-of-life. The ability to tear down a government and the ability to build a healthy society require entirely different skill-sets, and if you got one? You probably are severely lacking in the other.

And the basis for the protest here eludes me completely. It seems as if all people want is to be seen, to be heard -- well. I've got a fucking blog for that nonsense.

The culture of protest here in the East Bay has a genuinely honorable heritage, but that heritage is gone, its last vestiges buried underneath the flung scat of the tree people. Right now all all I can hear is the wail of an angry child.

If I had any sense of a coherent message with which I could align myself coming from Occupy Oakland, I'd be there. It breaks my fucking heart that I look at that situation, and see a bunch of kids taunting the toughest gang in town. It looks idiotic. And the self-lubricating jackoffs trying to up the levels of conflict are not the kind of fools I suffer lightly. The arrogance of their position statements disinclines me to their aid.

Look. I started working as a janitor when I was thirteen. I have been hungry because I've been out of work and money. And it is very difficult for me not to see revolution in America as a middle-class sport, the kind of privileged passtime that justifies buying a bunch of Spandex and Gore-Tex and then threatening the fucking cops while in someone else's fucking neighborhood.

Normally, I don't discuss politics on the blog because I'm not well-socialized enough to really understand them, and I'd just as soon not look like a fool. But let me make a few statements here.

The problem is not the 99% versus the 1%. There is an absolute sense in which the needs of the poor and the luxuries of the rich do exist in conflict. That is not the problem we face in this crisis.

The problem is specifically the financially predatory classes, those who occupy a strange netherworld where money exists not as a means to regulate the exchange of goods and services, but rather as a thing in itself. It is their pursuit of abstract profit through the manipulation of the law that has brought us to this pass.

Anyone capable of viewing the teachings of Jesus Christ and Ayn Rand as congruous should be regarded with extreme suspicion.

I bet you think I'm joking. I'm not.

When the statement 'occupy Wall Street' first entered my consciousness, my first thought was an image of a sinking ship, and a bunch of people gathered around the snack bar protesting the prices.

Wall Street is not the problem. What's happening on Wall Street is the result of deregulation.

Don't occupy Wall Street. Don't occupy Oakland. Occupy Capitol Hill -- that is where regulation and de-regulation occur.

Or perhaps health care is the issue. Fair enough. Again, Capitol Hill.

Let me put it this way.

When Wall Street wants something done, do they send people to Wall Street? No. Where do they send people?

To Washington.

Fuck Oakland, and fuck Wall Street. We need to occupy our own damned government.

Depression for Dummies

2011-11-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

It's been a rough patch lately, and among other things, I've experienced three distinct forms of clinical depression. Allow me to taxonomize.

First came agitated depression, in which mania and depression occur simultaneously. This is regarded as a particularly dangerous state because the built-in safeguard of depression -- lack of energy, lack of will -- is bypassed. You're depressed, but you have the ability to act on that depression.

This is the most intolerable of my mental conditions. There is no way to settle down until things pass -- I'm compelled to physical activity, usually walking the streets.

When I'm like this, I'm a disturbing, unpleasant, even threatening presence. Frankly, it makes me feel like a terrible person, a bully and a bastard.

Then the agitation passed, and I got into the regular old 'there is no hope once the capacity for joy is eliminated' vanilla depression.

So my eating, sleeping, and so on have been thrown all to hell.

Thankfully, the missus has been particularly sweet and that's enough to lift my mood. This puts me into a particularly tricky situation.

Right now, I'm capable of experiencing pleasure and hope, and of feeling gratitude for the good things in my life.

This is swell so far as daily existence goes. But it's pretty much a pile of leaves and branches hiding a pit with spikes on the bottom. Because while this state is easier for everyone to live with, it is still clinical depression. Decreased appetite, decreased sleep, nausea, lack of motivation and focus, easily confused, emotionally volatile, etc, etc.

This state was a serious issue for me for a long, long time. I'd assume that since I didn't want to gouge my eyes out with a fondue fork I wasn't depressed. But when I'm like this, there's a genuine apathy in regard to my well-being. Last winter when I was like this while the missus was out of town, I wound up not eating for a number of days and then not drinking for three solid days. Pure inertia. Apathy. "Hmm. Seem to be going downhill here. Tongue feels slick, like leather. I bet this is real bad for my teeth."

So I've learned to keep a close watch on myself when I feel okay while displaying clear symptoms of depression. It's good, in that it's a step away from the pit. But it's tricky.

Right now I'm trying to decide whether I should try and get myself pumped back up again, or if it's time to start hunkering down for the winter and just accept that I'm going to be useless for a while.

Now that I put it into words, the answer seems obvious. So. That's the next question. What to do for a moral boost.

I will think of something. Goddamnit.

The Me Me Meme

2011-11-08T16:59:00.000-08:00

I think this would be fine for wallpaper or pajamas. On a tie, the phallic symbols would hit critical mass and impregnate the wearer.

Maybe an ascot?

So. I've been gone because I've been in a terrible mood, and I haven't had anything decent to say. Sometimes silence serves the public good. Okay? Okay.

That said, it seems that during my absence I've been memed by master of stage and page Neil Vogler. So now all I have to do is answer a few simple questions without degenerating into a ruinous slop of morbid self-pity. Let us commence!

If you could go back in time and relive one moment, what would it be?

This question is a Schroedinger's bitch. It's not a matter of selecting one lovely moment worth reliving -- it's a matter of discarding all the others. It is not so much the moments in themselves as the people who made those moments worthwhile. This question demands that we cast all of those we love into the pit unless they were there in that one moment we choose to cherish above all others.

Well, it looks like I fucked that one up pretty good. Let's start over.

So this one time? Me and the hon. Richard Talleywhacker were in a parking lot and I coughed and spat. Neat, flat trajectory, went a good twenty feet before the gobbet intersected with the flight path of a Monarch butterfly, which thereby met its demise and, slime-laden, dropped like a stone to the grass. I would never do something like that intentionally, I assure you. But if I could put a clip of that with Little Green Bag playing in the background on my resume? I would.

Next question, maestro.

If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?

Well, I'm not sure what the scale is here, what the intent. I feel a little at sea, so I figure I better cover all the changing-crap-in-time basics -- big humanitarian, little selfish, and something to make Hitler's life shorter or more unpleasant.

Big humanitarian? Okay. K-T boundary asteroid? Chicxulub Crater? Fuck that shit. I never asked for it. So no asteroid hits the Earth at the end of the Cretaceous, and the big dinosaurs don't die off.

No parking issues. No last, current, or next administration. None of that horseshit! It would be perfect.

Little selfish? Go back in time and whisper a few little words in my ear. "Get out of high school pronto, get your GED, take a variety of classes at a community college until you learn some study and social skills. Then go to a university back in the eighties when it was more affordable. And just for the record? The big redhead at Grayhavens who threatened to beat you about your head and shoulders with her breasts? The twin models in Malibu? You were being set up to lose your virginity both times, you dumb fucking worthless idiot two-legged Labrador bastard. Jesus, you're stupid and I hate your fucking guts."

And when Hitler is an art student, he's swept forward in time to work as a janitor at the Guggenheim, and it's not my fault what happens when he snaps because I only got to do the one change. So if you want me to just kill him, you should tell me now.

Now there we go! That one was downright chipper, mostly.

What movie/TV character do you most resemble in personality?

Well, this one stumped me. So I went downstairs to ask the missus, and she wasn't just puzzled by the question, she was worried. But! But! He cried.

There is another authority. Someone who has roomed with me at two different events for a total of three weeks. Someone who has seen me go through some remarkable highs and lows in that brief time. Here he is; Christian Walter, his interview and his terrifying image.

Christian believes I resemble Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski. And when I look back on my behavior at Viable Paradise and Taos Toolbox, I suppose he's right.

If you could push one person off a cliff and get away with it, who would you choose?

This is not a question I can answer lightly. There are hundreds of questions to be asked, like is Neil Bush still legally allowed to run for president?

Name one habit you want to change in yourself.

My persistent disinterest in my physical well-being. Eating, drinking, exercising, sleeping. The simplest basics of existence are frequently ignored, and then I wonder why I'm 'grumpy.'

Why do you blog?

Ego gratification, writing practice, communication and the maintenance of a social network, exposure, the practical use of the essay as a means of exploratory thought, simple delight in casual, complex, pretentious, esoteric, goofy fucked-up prose that I would never, ever allow into the pristine pages of my fiction.

Name at least three people to send this to:

I will think on this. I will ponder.

What's Next?

2011-11-01T09:31:00.000-07:00

I ain't even gonna try and talk about the last few weeks. Life is fucking insane, you know? But it seems as if things have settled down. And the novel is in the hands of readers. Honestly, I think it's good enough to market now, but I'm going to wait until I've had a chance to hear back on the whole thing from at least one reader and then given it one last strunking. So right now I'm in the horrible zone where I'm waiting.

So it's time to figure out what I need to do next.

First off, some editing and reading for pals and Swill, and working more on my synopsis.

There's a whole Swill thing. Since I've begun looking at the literary scene, I've come to realize that once again, I've seriously underestimated what I've got on my hands. Swill is a fucking contender.

Nobody reads it, because neither Rob nor I have the knowledge or inclination for sales and marketing.

So I guess I've got to learn a little about marketing. Get Swill into some local stores, find out if there are any distribution companies that handle this kind of thing...

The art for the next issue of Swill is on the fast track as well.

Right now, I don't have a real website. The missus is currently indignant about this situation and I don't blame her. So it's time to start putting together an honest-to-gosh promotional site that would allow me to begin marketing my art, writing, and so on.

Which means I also need to get a card. Dang.

Of course, I've got the loser side of my life to attend to. Shame has kept me from pursuing my health care and goverment check. It sounds crazy, but I had to get the novel into a state where I could at least race the publishing industry against the government to see who can fund me first, with my pride as the stakes.

Whee!

Along those lines, I need to get in with my pain doctor, get set up with a fucking cortisone shot and so on. God damnit.

Once I've got a site with a gallery and artist's statement up, I can begin hitting up galleries, grants, and so on seriously.

And it's time for me to start hitting up the writer's colony circuit as well. It turns out that it's good for me to have isolated writing time -- important, even.

Holy smokes. Bone Chips, my trilogy of spoken-word pieces, is finished. I suppose I'd better start figuring out how to acquire a venue. Huh. Perhaps a podcast? Tell you what. Folks hear those stories in a row? They might need counseling. Brutal stuff, even by my standards.

Speaking of podcasts, I would like to acquire video capacity. Since I'm dead broke this could be tricky.

And just between us, I've been feeling a musical itch lately. I've been doing a wee tad of recording... I'm not a trained musician, I'm a fuck-around-until-it-sounds-like-something musician. But I've been one of those for long enough for it to start turning into something. Finding out that I can record what sound like electric guitar tracks with a piezo pickup and a ukulele puts me in a position where all I need is leads.

Speaking of which, I've had a build-it-yourself electric mandolin kit sitting around for more than a year now. Seven frets between strings? All those frets so close together on that tiny little neck? This looks like the four-string lead instrument. Time to start scanning the weather reports so I can spray the finish when I've got a few days of sun.

Also, find some scrap linoleum for the studio floor. I'm getting nasty splinters from time to time. I do not like nasty splinters.

Plus, it's about time I set up a mailing list. Get my contacts organized. Start putting my online presence in order. Social networks; branding.

Speaking of which, I should contact the FogCon people and volunteer and find out what all this convention nonsense is all about.

I've got a piece of short fiction that needs to be marketed. I should get something off to Tor. I should probably be tracking the various anthologies.

And the thought of doing a Kickstarter campaign for a pre-professional edition of Ghost Rock...

That screen printer in the shed... T-shirts...

Shit.

Guess I'll be keeping busy. I suppose the first thing I should do is take this post, put it into a list format, prioritize...

A Mean Man Looks At American Fiction

2011-10-24T13:02:00.000-07:00

They put you in plastic, Eddie. I'll make them pay for that.

Right now there are terrible things going on in my life and wonderful things going on in my life and I can't talk about them and you know what?

I'm in a bad mood. And when I'm in a bad mood, you know what does me good?

Fucking shit up.

So let us inspect the current state of American letters. To be blunt. Has a genuinely distinguished American writer emerged since, I don't know, let's say, John Irving? (Who would be a second-rate Steinbeck if Steinbeck was as good as his reputation, which he isn't. Fuck them all.) Somewhere in the eighties, American fiction died. It's not that the writing and publishing stopped. It's not that there isn't any work of merit being produced.

But nobody seems to be swinging for the fences any more. The whole scene seems weak, trivial.

Here's what's going on.

First off, the reorganization of the publishing industry as a bona-fide business fucked everything up. The arts are dependent on artists, and the years of effort it takes a writer to develop their true strength are dependent on either extreme good fortune or the knowledgeable patronage of their financial betters.

As a business, publishing has said, "Fuck you," to the notion of nurturing talent. If there were no writers, only best-selling books, they would be perfectly happy.

So as readers? We only get the talent of people who have nurtured it themselves.

And in America, art is not a means of expressing a unified culture. Rather, it is a bitter cup of consolation offered to losers and lunatics such as myself. Which is why there's a paltry, resentful quality to so much of American art and letters.

So. You nurture your talent yourself. Here are the two paths to disaster you can take. Or, as I said to Nick Mamatas (Writer! Editor! Master of mayhem!) the other night, "Incompetence and professionalism both lead to predictability."

You can be classy, and enter a Master of Fine Arts program in literature.

If you do that, you will get four years of free time to write. Doing this when you are young and inexperienced is not a great way to get good writing.

And if the evidence is any indication, you will be taught Jack. And then you will be taught Shit. My recent perusals of current fiction has shown me multiple simple errors in craft on every single page of every single work that wasn't written by someone who's a proven old-school talent, your Joyce Carol Oateses (my favorite new plural) and T. C. Boyles.

They do not know sentence structure, paragraphing, word choice, fucking dialog tags. The technical elements of writing are not there.

What they do have is a willingness to experiment with language. Without skill, that isn't a virtue.

There's a horrible pattern in all recent literary novels I've read. Writer writes cute, chases their tail until they get two-thirds of the way through the book, and then pull in some ridiculous bit of business so there seems to be some kind of story going on. And inevitably, it's a movie or television story, not a literary one.

One afternoon's worth of plotting instruction would put paid to this repetitive nonsense.

Now, if you're as lumpen a prole as I am, you will turn to those writing instruction books, workshops, community college writing courses...

... and you will, with effort and expense, get a decent set of technical skills.

This is where I begin to giggle. Because it's true, it's true, it's really, really true. Literary fiction no longer has better prose than genre fiction. Pull out a copy of a Gardner Dozois Year's Best Science Fiction, and compare the writing, page for page, with The Year's Best American Fiction. Again, with the exceptions of the old warhorses of literature, the prose in the SF will demonstrate clearly superior levels of craft.

Of course, most of the writing will, as most professional writing does, come to feel much the same after a certain point. The problem with the workshop circuit is that the creative pool in genre fiction is a small and incestuous one, where riffing off of a limited number of themes and approaches is part of the game.

And everyone who participates in these workshops can trace their instructional ancestry back to Milford and Clarion. The instruction offered, while tremendously useful and tremendously valid, is so persistent in the field that its influence must be consciously wrestled with in order to produce unique material.

That this highly useful, but extremely specific skill-set is applied to work that's primarily derived from fiction rather than life does not help.

Let me be blunt. I think most American fiction is over-rated. The very best of it tends to be minor, obscure, or otherwise limited. The clearest, strongest American writing has taken place in journalism, memoir, and other areas of non-fiction.

That fiction is no longer at the core of popular culture has an effect as well. Talents that might be drawn into the field wind up diluting themselves in group creative efforts such as television because fiction writing simply is not an attractive career for someone with material aspirations.

So that's why American fiction is shitty and boring.

Wanna fight?

How I Will Survive The Next Week

2011-10-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

So things have not been optimum around the house lately. A vast confluence of events ranging from my work on the novel to the missus's relatives and so on and so forth have all been good. But. I'd say the boat's rocking too much, but I love a boat in motion. Maybe there are too many turns on this mountain highway. There comes a point where equilibrium is desired.

Ain't gonna happen soon. The missus, who is a bit of a rock-star type, is being flown off to a bodywork convention. Whole shebang's paid for. Picked up by a limousine. That kind of thing. That's my gal.

Frankly, I love the idea that she's gonna get this kind of boost. But I hate the idea that she's going to go away for a week. Especially now when I'm feeling a wee tad vulnerable after the various to-dos.

So, we've worked things out. I've got protein bars, hot dogs, V-8, sprouted whole-grain bread, veggie burgers, peanut butter, three bean salad with extra long beans, and tangerines. This is not something that I'm proud of, but when I'm alone I rarely give a shit about eating, so it turns out I'm best off giving up on doing anything but grimly stuffing down whatever calories I can get myself to ingest. So I've stocked up on the lowest common denominators, and allowed myself medical defense for my gastronomically abject status. Sainted Ghost of M.F.K. Fisher, think of sludge and forgive me.

That said, I've got a leftover pack of chicken thighs and a guest-purchased jar of Bulgarian buttermilk, and I think I may have to make something along a green curry/tandoori axis. Although fried chicken would be very nice...

And I'm going to eat out a good bit. Taking advantage of my parasite status, I reached out to friends and said, hey. I'm gonna go nuts if I don't get some company. So I'm going to have company nearly every day.

In addition, I have a straightforward task ahead of me, and one which I will relish. Line edits and plot polishes. Lots of time in bed with the dogs and a red pen and masses of marked-up manuscript from readers. Lots of time examining every use of the word 'I.'

And both advice and experience have lead me to the final act. I'm gonna read the fucker out-loud from beginning to end when I'm all done just to make sure it truly flows properly. I do hear the words in my head as I work, but it's not a hundred per-cent. I need to know that it's possible to read this out loud. Because I'm going to have to read this out loud. So why step on my own self?

So. Daily phone chat with the missus, regular company -- even to the point of hanging out with people more than once a day sometimes! -- a steady diet that will neither kill me nor require me to work anything more complicated than the toaster oven, the presence of the dogs, and a genuinely fascinating and rewarding task.

Yes, I want my sweetie home. I hate sleeping alone, all respect to the dogs. Yes, I long for a sense of return to routine and semi-stability.

But I'll be fine. I'll have a few laughs, and I'll get the job done. Won't sleep as much as I like, spend too much time pacing and fidgeting and so on.

But I'll be fine. As they say, planning and preparation prevent piss-poor performance. And I'm learning that many of the key tricks to being gifted rather than crazy come down to planning and preparation.

Ghost Rock Draft 11 Is Done

2011-10-11T16:34:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between seven and eight years. Eleven drafts. (And three drafts of volume two, and an outline for volume three...) I ain't going over the names of the people who helped me right now, but I'm thinking of them.

I still have the delightful process of line edits and minor fixes and fussing with my writer's groups. Then? Off to the races.

There will be submissions to both agents and editors, with a particular eye cast on foreign markets.

And there will be a pre-professional edition. This is still in discussion and consideration, but tentatively? Two magazine-format volumes, illustrated, a signed, numbered limited release for friends and publicity. Most of y'all reading this will have a shot at one of those if you're interested. Just going to fish for some buzz...

Yeah, the book is an encrypted transformative ritual, a dissection of PTSD anatomized as landscape, an integration of personal, national, pre-Classical, and archetypal mythology with pop culture and genre fiction, about as thinly-veiled a memoir as you could ask, and so on and so forth to an intolerable extent. This is not a novel; it is a meme bomb in which the arts, sciences, and personal pathology intertwine to a hideous degree.

But how the fuck can I get an agent to look at the goddamned thing? Here's my first shot at a synopsis. Please, this would be an excellent time to comment -- does this make you interested in the manuscript?

Ghost Rock

If they put out a benefit calender for terminal virginity, Matt Cassad would be Mister February. Janitor Matt spends his time in his room, futzing around with his sketchbooks and his bass while pursuing his life-goal of withering into a bitter husk.

His cozy, miserable life goes all to hell with the entry of Lulu and Willy, a pair of homeless musicians. Something awakens in him, a sensitivity to an unseen world. Then a shoving match over an attempted mugging leads to a vengeful death by fire. Matt's involvement propels him into an escalating series of vividly biological hallucinations. When reality shatters, he finds himself the rescuer of a decaying afterlife – and a participant in a post-mortem vendetta as he’s pursued between worlds by the ghosts of the men involved in the mugging. (He's killed them once or twice, depending on how you count these things.)

Someone else wants Matt. Corrie. Is she the green-haired goddess of a bizarre evolutionary hothouse, an ageless siren with wisdom beyond human years, or is she "a four-hundred-year old little fat girl who talks like a cross between Benjamin Franklin and Madame Blavatsky?" Opinions vary.

The gods, guns, ghosts, madness, monsters, superpowers, and explosions are Matt’s meat and drink. Matt is ready to fight, and Matt is ready to die. Matt’s struggle is inside, where hatred of self wars with the need for others. This has always been Matt’s fight to lose. Now, when Lulu and Willie's lives are at stake, what chance does he have?

That depends on the power of love. And rock and roll.

An Immigrant In The Country Of Love

2011-10-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

This essay started when I tried to express my gratitude to my dad for a burger, and my friend Deborah for her generosity -- two cocktails, a beer, and another burger was the specific damage. When putting the post together in my head, I realized that I'd done a print expressing the theme for the last issue of Swill. I almost never incorporate humans in my art -- but when I did this piece, I used a photo of Deborah. Odd loops, odd loops.

Can you picture your house? Not the house you live in, not the house you grew up in. Your internal house. The place your soul lives.

The image of my house comes instantly to mind when I call on it. The sky is cool gray, the ground is warm gray, the house is neutral gray. No rain will ever fall from the roiling clouds that stream across the sky; they're heavy with the debris of distant explosions. The ground is blasted ash, worn into coral-like shapes by the wind; boots sink inches into it. You cannot walk without destroying the only beauty in the landscape.

My house is a concrete cube. Curved and pointed, black horns and thorns sprout in rough profusion along its edges. On each side, high and in the middle, there is a small window. There are no doors.

If you see this house, your death has been contemplated. Probably not considered with intent, but if you see this house? Your body is an object. Objects are broken sooner or later. This is war, and no-one survives.

The top of the cube is open to the weather and undefended. I never thought anything that flew would want to hurt me.

I have decided to move; you have taken me to a different place, and while I understand why I made my house the way I did, it no longer acts in service to my life. I still spend much of my time there, but I prefer to live with you. One day I will walk away and I will not feel as if I'm leaving home. On that day, I will become a citizen of the country of love.

I've been mistaken for a military man by people who have served. I believe this stems from my basic approach to life -- it can erupt in savagery at any moment, so be ready to fight all the time. I have consciously struggled my whole life to be open and available emotionally to the people around me, so it's been a surprise to find that there are parts of me I've guarded so fiercely that they've never been touched before.

Illness and poverty have stripped away certain illusions I have entertained about myself, and my place in the world. I have always valued myself based on utility. What am I good for? How can I contribute? What can I do to help?

And despite the kindness that has been shown to me over the years, I've seen the world as a fundamentally hostile place to a much greater degree than most people do. To the point where it has undermined my ability to function in the world. I know what it is like to be hated, and I know what it is like to be despised and I know what it is like to be held in contempt and I know what it is like to be feared.

Much of love is new to me.

I'm not talking about romantic love. I'm talking about the binding regard and affection that people have for one another. Now that I'm in a place in my life where I am of virtually no practical use whatsoever, I have been brought face-to-face with what I currently regard as the root good in life.

Connection. Kindness. Mutual regard. Affection.

It is easy enough to give lip service to these things. When you see them clearly, they are frighteningly powerful. These days I find myself periodically overwhelmed by the sensation of being cared for. The idea that I'm a passing concern in the minds of people I will never meet. The idea that I'm a source of pleasure and solace in the lives of those close to me. I don't sob, but tears flow painlessly from my eyes, and all I can do is endure the feeling that I am cared for, thought of, held in regard, valued. It is joy experienced with the same overwhelming intensity as rage.

The idea that we live in a hierarchy angers and frightens me -- but that anger and fear are being ameliorated by the notion that kindness is also an organizational principle, and it's one that has been brought to bear on me.

Here's what brought this home to me. What dropped right on the roof, where there are no defenses.

I mostly gave up solitary drinking a while ago. I stopped buying comic books more than a year ago, ending a lifelong habit in order to finance my writing education. The very last bit of my money ran out a while back, and I am currently living on kindness and the seeming likelihood that I may receive a disability pension.

This means that there are no little indulgences readily available to me. The tiny treats that I used to coax myself an inch at a time through life are, at least for the moment, over, and have been for some time. If something goes wrong, I don't have the option of promising myself a reward. If things go right, I don't have the option of celebration. There is nothing special at my command.

I missed this dreadfully at first. Dearth sucks.

But here's where things got squirrely on me.

I do get a drink and a smoke. I do get a book and some music. From time to time I get to eat at nice places. I've even traveled a little.

I get the small pleasures in my life from the people around me, and they are given to me because I am valued. Because time spent with me is a small pleasure in itself, a nurturing indulgence, and people like it. What initially seemed like incredible generosity on the parts of my friends has revealed itself as compassionate self-interest.

If I read a new book or look at new art or listen to new music, it is because the missus got it for me at a yard sale. So when I take in these aesthetic experiences, they are flavored by the knowledge that this is something the missus desired for me. She like it when I get things I like. It makes her happy when I enjoy them.

When I have a drink, it is because someone I respect and admire wants to have the experience of drinking with me.

If I take a trip, it is because my company is desired.

When I fell ill, I was cared for, and the manifest kindness of the people around me was overwhelming. And now, as my life continues, that kindness has failed to abate. I've always understood that I'm not supposed to kill myself because it would make other people miserable. I'm just starting to understand that to my true friends, my delight in life is a tangible and valued resource.

This is radically changing my experience of life. I'm gaining a much more feminine perspective -- I value myself based on who loves me as well as what I can do. As a result, I feel more valued both internally and externally. And the process of connecting with the world is increasing in intensity as it builds -- I'm a long way from equilibrium here.

What I thought was true was wrong. I am not actively hated. The world does not seek my destruction with intent. Most intent that is held toward me is positive. I thought I had a house but it wasn't a house. It was a bunker. You know who lives in bunkers during peacetime? Prisoners. Now I don't have a house, but I'm at home in the world. Uncertain but at ease. I don't know where I am, but I don't feel lost.

When I decided to take my art into the world, I approached it as though entering battle. My metaphor was entirely incorrect, and much of the emotional destabilization of the last years has been due to this.

Now I see my art differently. I see myself differently. And I see my place in the world differently.

I am no longer at war. I have been taken into the country of love, and war has no place there. I have to face the challenge of allowing people to be kind to me. Altruism is a basic desire, and to allow others to fulfill it is a kindness in itself, and I have to struggle for that kindness.

To ask for what I need -- let alone what I want -- is one of the greatest difficulties in my life. To do so when I am useless for nearly all practical purposes runs contrary to my rules for myself -- while I certainly wouldn't apply this to others, useless people should die. I feel as if I have been presented with a coward's life.

But if I'm honest with myself, I know that the feeling of having done something good for someone is terrific. And to a certain degree my resistance to having my needs and desires met is a form of hostility. A preemptive rejection.

I am learning to be open about what I want without expectation of either fulfillment or disappointment, how to be grateful without resentment, and most of all to appreciate that there is a mutualism in generosity, and that sincere gratitude and appreciation are worth the trouble just so I can feel as if I'm taking my part properly.

First I felt like a shovel. Then I felt like a broken shovel.

Now? I feel like a treat. I'm a stinky cheese, a single-malt scotch, a neat nugget of the kind bud, a hit of DMT. You wouldn't want to live on a diet of me, but for some folks? If they don't get a little now and then, they feel deprived. Being a luxury item is disturbingly pleasant.

I do not believe I will always be poor. I know how people who know react to my work. I think I will go someplace.

But I am no longer conducting a war. I am no longer staking outposts with my work, and I am growing less interested in chastisement and more interested in the cultivation and encouragement of life's joys and beauties. I can do Swift and Kafka fine; I can do the Thompsons Jim and Hunter. I can Giger your ass nine ways from Sunday, Bacon you til the cows come home. That end of the spectrum seems juvenile in isolation. I want to be able to do Bach and Renoir as well. I am trying to pry my arms open so I can embrace the world.

Hell is easy for me. And I never take the easy way.

I am not pursuing a career in the arts. I am using my talent and abilities to enter into new places so that I can find more friends. Thusly do I accommodate the trauma of discovering that the art world is a social world. At some point, some of my friends will make money with some of my projects. (This sounds dippy. It's solidly practical. Just you watch.)

This is the hidden gift of the outsider -- I belong nowhere, but my friends are everywhere. I have drank with winos and with millionaires, and I am realizing that my whole attitude toward the human species is racist, and that I need to get over it. There is an element in my regard for mankind that is genuinely hateful. I need to cut that shit out. People are people, and I like people.

I do not have a house in the country of love. But I have been made so welcome that I do not feel the need yet. I'm still a warrior, but I like having parts of me that aren't edge or armor. I allow myself that luxury both because of you and for your sake.

As I've said before, I don't love myself, but I don't need to love myself. I have a team that takes care of that little problem, and they do a much better job than I ever could.

If I had a great big blog, I couldn't say this. But this is a small room, we pretty much all know each other, and any strangers that wander in are either welcome or entertainment.

So.

Thanks, y'all. I appreciate it.

Riding The Snake

2011-10-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

I was looking for an appropriately serpentine image in the file I keep of art jpgs for the blog when I ran across this little wonder. What the fuck do you suppose was going through my head when I put this one together?

The self is the greatest mystery, my friends. The self is the greatest mystery.

For the record, I'm not a Marxist or even a communist. I'm a socialist, sure, but Marxism's full of Easter Bunny crap like the withering away of the state, and the Marxist obsession with the taxonomy of class makes me think of string theory -- it could well but true, but so what? (We will ignore my willful Maoist streak for the moment, as it is distasteful.)

(And now that I've had a moment or two to consider, I remember the cereal as being shockingly awful -- the box offered legitimate gastronomic competition. Perhaps my statement was that eating it was a radical act of self-criticism? And would it have been funnier with Germain Jackson instead of Tito? Political humor is so difficult.)

Normally, at this time of year I am in a state that would easily enable the missus to have me committed, should she so desire. We’re talking case-study stuff, no fooling. This year? Only two mood swings, neither lasting more than a few hours, both occurring under circumstances when both myself and the missus were in emotionally needy states for specific, defined reasons.

What’s the difference?

Applied self-knowledge.

As initially troubling as the diagnoses I received were – for those unfamiliar with the story, PTSD, OCD, mixed-state bipolar (next time you meet a shrink tell ‘em you’ve got that one and watch the expression on their face – it’s fun if you have a cruel streak), fetal alcohol syndrome, and the suggestion that there might be some massive brain trauma that could explain everything – they’ve allowed me a basis for understanding my behaviors and misbehaviors in a constructive fashion.

As an example, my hypomania – a state of excitation similar to but milder than mania – is a byproduct of my PTSD. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder hypersensitizes one to stress reactions. In effect, it gives you what I refer to in private conversation as a ‘crank gland,’ mimicking the effects of everything from coffee to raw meth. (Mimicking is the wrong word – it’s the exochemicals who are the big fakers.) While I’ve experimented with stimulants, they are not my drug at all. Not even coffee or chocolate. I’m much too sensitive to them. Imagine if minor upsets in temper were accompanied by a stiff line of crank, a nasty rush of volts up the spine and out to the fists – that’s a defining element in my experience of life. From time to time I get complimented on my patience and detachment – they grow out of this. I can’t need to kill twenty-four hours a fucking day, so I simply cannot give a shit about minor inconveniences. If I did? Locked up.

My hypomania is strongly seasonal. I experience it constantly during the spring and fall. I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that my SAD does not track closely to the actual seasons. This year, I realized that it tracks to the school year. The beginning and end of the school year were particularly traumatic times for me, and I suspect that my developing body simply got into the habit of going into overdrive during times when I’d have to put up with additional amounts of abuse.

But let me tell you a little something about hypomania. When you feel good? It feels really, really good. It delivers what cocaine promises. You actually do accomplish, and you do so at the peak of your abilities. Hypomania is how you find the peak of your abilities. Me, I mean, not you.

This is the secret of stress reactions. When you feel both stress and a sense of control, your body makes one of the best chemical cocktails available. Top-notch. Only love is better, and not always then. Stress and no control? One of the worst, again with love as the only serious competitor.

So this year, I’ve been treating my seasonal mood disorder as a drug trip. I don’t want to waste it. And as a result, I’ve only gotten bummed out when the missus harshed my buzz.

No fooling.

Set and setting, as that modified dip Leary wisely stated. (It is occasionally unpleasant to have culture heroes that are a fucking pack of self-important idiots, said the self-made man of his models.) I went into this knowing what I was getting into.

I have told myself and those around me that I am in a temporarily altered state, and that there will be loud talking, bragging, vainglorious claims for the future, a rapid-fire stream of compulsive witticisms, and a mercurial temperament. Interestingly, many people seem to take a particular pleasure in my company when I’m in my incandescent mode – old friends have been reappearing, people who know me are expressing strong approval of my current state, and strangers seem to find me attractive.

I put myself into a position to take advantage of my energy. I’ve been writing and arting and musicing like a ring-tailed son-of-a-bitch, starting when I get up and ending when I see that it’s much too late. It’s been a period of peak performance. I’m doing the best work of my life currently. Feels good.

If I’m a bit snappish? If I have more insomnia than usual? If I can’t shut up about my enthusiasm of the moment? So fucking what.

One of the central negative aspects of my life has been completely reversed. Instead of this being the second-worst time of the year, it is the best. I’m shining and people like it. From now on, I’m timing my major projects to take advantage of the spring and fall.

Now all I have to do is figure out a use for the end-of-winter pit of despair. You know, that thing I get about halfway through January that lasts into April? Dysphoria, anhedonia, lethargy? “Gosh, if I had any moxie whatsoever I’d gouge my eyes out with a pair of needle-nosed pliers?” “Gee, I hope I don’t apathetically let myself die of thirst. The missus would be entirely justified in getting pissed off at me for that.” Yeah, that one.

There has to be something useful I can get out of it.

Respect

2011-09-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

Why isn't the novel done?

Right now, if I had two straight days of solid, uninterrupted work, I'd be done with the draft. Three days? Ready to send out to readers.

While I have been working every day -- more than three thousand words yesterday -- that statement has been true for a solid week now. If I had gotten two consecutive days of real work in the last week, I'd have finished the novel.

Why isn't the novel done?

I made plans. I declared limits. I asked for assistance.

Why isn't the novel done?

Well, it's not like I haven't been doing other things. For instance...

Shit.

When I broke it down for myself, the first layer of explanation involved other people. My momentum was broken by requests for various forms of assistance and companionship and so on and so forth.

So? What makes my work their responsibility? Most of the time, I never even hinted that people were eating time I could ill afford. And I wanted to do everything I did. And even when people were being unreasonable, I still had the option of yelling, "Leave me the fuck alone, I'm trying to fucking work here!"

The reason this is an issue all of a sudden is that I'm having a new kind of creative experience. It is now possible for me to hold the novel in my head. I understand the story, I know the page-by-page flow, the breakdown of scenes, everything down to subtle thematic issues and obscure references to science, pop and high culture, history, etc. I do this with short stories, but this is the first time I've been able to do it with a long-form work.

This allows me to do the fine manipulation that I haven't been able to do before. I can understand how specific word choices, specific pieces of information, can affect the entire work. It's a holographic understanding, and it is kind of an incredible piece of thinking. You'd be proud of me.

The thing is? It is intensely demanding of my concentration. It takes me an hour or two of fucking around on the internet and poking at the manuscript before I can erect the whole thing in my head.

Once it's up, I can work like a son of a bitch. But any confusion, any need to think about other stuff? It collapses catastrophically, and the experience of massively disorganized thought is intensely uncomfortable. Honestly, the temptation to physically hurt myself in order to restabilize... huh. I was going to say I've avoided giving in to it, but my cuticles tell a different story. (Hey, cutters! Cuticle mutilation is our version of nicotine gum.)

Blaming others is pointless. I tend not to treat my work time with respect. If someone wants me for something, they can get me. It's assumed that as the layabout, I'm the one who needs to make way.

I make that assumption as well.

This is okay when it doesn't interfere with the work. If I am working in a way that lets me pick up and put down the work at will, that's fine. But right now?

I need a higher level of respect from myself and the people around me.

I'm getting this done, and it will finish off at its own pace. But it will be done faster and be a stronger work if I am allowed a period of relative isolation in which to work.

So. Right now, the missus has her father coming to visit. It would be a war-between-the-sexes crime if I were to insist on that right now. I shan't. I'll enjoy him while he's here, shore up the missus as she's pummeled by the brutal tides of family, and then?

Well. I need to devote a little thought to it, but I will arrange my life to temporarily accommodate a period of functional insanity from me. I will need to spend a chunk of my day in isolation, and I won't be able to read or watch any stories. Words other than the novel are active enemies at this point.

I've started hearing back from the writer's groups, and the word is good. What I've got so far is doing what I want it to do, finally. Interestingly, after I resentfully lopped out most of the drug-themed sub-plots, all of a sudden a number of different readers started spontaneously using the word 'psychedelic.' About damned time -- this is adventure fantasy for people who read Hunter S. Thompson for the adventure and Carlos Castenada for the fantasy. This is me claiming Star Wars/Lord Of The Rings territory for the stoners who form their core audience anyway.

So why isn't it done yet?

The Liebster Award

2011-09-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

I have been sitting on this for a bit, as much out of bashfulness as anything else. I'm not sure how important this award is in the greater scheme of things -- I'm guessing more than the Nebula or the Nobel peace prize, less than a Golden Globe or whoever gets the NASCAR crown or belt or whatever they give those guys. Is it a helmet? That would make sense.

But this came to me from Neil Vogler, of A Writer, He Muttered, along with the kind of encomium I'd order from a catalog if given a choice. Check it out. I'll be posting on this later, but he's given me cause to contemplate my developing public persona. (Holy smokes, there actually is one. How the hell did that happen?)

I've been reading Neil's blog since he posted a comment here some time ago. Thoughtful work by an introspective young writer/musician, well worth your time.

So. As one of the conditions of receiving this award, I need to pass it on to five recipients with less than two hundred followers. I'm using Neil's protocol; if I have a hard time figuring out how many followers someone has? They're in.

I've recently done a post in which I covered my usual suspects. Here are some people I am not always going on about.

Glendon Mellow's blog, The Flying Trilobite, concerns science, art, and the areas of their intersection, as well as Glendon's developing career. As I've mentioned before many times, Glendon and I have been engaging in a glacially-paced long-distance conversation about art for some years now, and he's turned my views upside-down more than once. And right now he's got a post up about the development of a rather nice painting -- I'd go take a look if I were you.

In the spirit in which the Leibster award was given me, I'd like to send you to Letters From Valentina Hepburn. Valentina commented on one of my posts the other day, and I tracked her back to her blog, where I proceeded to spent the next two or three hours, enchanted.

I suppose I need to provide a bit of context here. A while ago, the missus picked up a Billy Joel collection at a yard sale. Due to my keen ability to move away from the radio, I've never heard a Billy Joel song all the way through. I thought it would be a giggle to listen to it. I don't mind simplistic pop, I have an occasional taste for musical garbage...

Big mistake. Big, big mistake. It damaged my brain. And I'd like to single out the song Pressure. In any truly civilized nation, the hook for Pressure would place Mr. Joel outside the protection of law.

I had that hook jammed in my brain for days when I started reading Letters From Valentina, and it immediately evaporated, to be replaced by the infinitely-preferable Dave Edmunds version of Girl Talk. Valentina's blog is very feminine in a very particular way, and honestly? To me it reads like a fairy tale. A place of wonders and perils beyond my (sullen, brutal, unwashed) imagining. A world so distinctly removed from my own that I can't bring myself to believe it exists.

But I really hope it does.

Let's head to the other end of the spectrum, shall we? I suspect that Nick Mamatas may have too many followers to qualify, but I believe I've already weaseled my way out of that one. Nick's blog is as political as well as writerly. He has a tendency to point upward, and you look, and by golly, there's the sole of a boot coming right at you. Over and over again. He won't participate in this, of course. It's not his kind of thing, and if you were to put that banner on that site? The internet would evaporate.

E.F. Kelley's Port Terra is an insider view of media-based pop culture that places the current science fiction tradition squarely inside the larger world of the media. Frankly, he's one of the reasons I'm less dismissive of movie and television-related material than I used to be. The thought he displays in his discussions of Star Trek and comic book babes makes them interesting to me in the same way that Glendon helped make fine art more accessible to me. (If I don't expand in both directions, I might warp.)

Finally, I suppose there's no excuse for this. But he is a pal. And he's a working father developing a writing career and editing/publishing a literary magazine, so if we can lure him into posting more frequently, we might be able to deprive him of sleep entirely. What jolly fun!

And anyway, don't you want to read about Jesus, The Egg-Laying Bunny?

Of course you do. Ladies and gents, Rob Pierce, Two Verbs!

What Happened At Homework Club

2011-09-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

So, for the record? Not gonna make it on my novel writing challenge. I am closing in on it, will be done in a few days, but I found that I had a choice between working well and working quickly, and I chose the former. Still, the experiment was a rousing success. I am getting better at getting work out of myself. And this finally feels to me like something that has a chance in the market.

Next novel? Massive preparation, rapid execution. Probably won't be the next volume in the trilogy, because I want to do something fast and goofy and commercial.

Also, I lost a good chunk of time on Swill-related issues. The next issue is solidifying nicely. But in the course of that, I ran into an... amusing situation.

One of my pieces that might see publication in the next issue of Swill is also the piece that's been accepted for an upcoming Lip Service West. It originated in a blog post that I put up a while ago; I'll include a link later. You don't necessarily want to go there. But when I wrote about the dangers of working with horror? Here's a cautionary tale on the dangers of memoir. (Of course, in my case it may not be possible to distinguish the two.)

Now. I've written before of the particular lust that falls upon one when a story is submitted that is not... quite... there. It's a form of pimple-squeezing, let's not dignify it any more than we have to. When Rob Pierce saw the piece, he said, "I want more details. The little things. I want to be grossed out. And this isn't a romance. Where's the fucking love? You're not tearing my fucking heart out."

Rob has a distinct editorial approach.

So I ponder. I think back. I summon mental images. I return to that frame of mind.

Ooh, there it is. I kind of hate Rob, but not as much as I hate my brain.

So I beef up the gore and the emotional content, and send the revised version out to Rob and, since it's going to Lip Service West, Joe Clifford as well.

Joe responds with terrifying promptness. And his request?

My depression needs to be more visible.

Well, that's a new one. It's certainly something I could do.

So I did it.

And I sent the newly-revised version on.

So then comes the Wednesday night Homework Club meeting. I wish I could show you a clip of how this went. You kind of need to know the cast of characters in order to get the full effect. Rob's small, lean, blonde, bit of a roosterish affect -- verbally aggressive, forward in his body language. Warren Lutz is tall, gentle, soft-spoken if not particularly quiet. I am about what you would expect. Maybe a little more so.

Rob: The ending reads like a punchline. This is a romance. Romance needs to be like a spike through the chest!

(Do you ever have difficulty refraining from comment? I did, right then.)

The Oaf: Okay, okay, I'll turn it over in my head and see what I can do. But Jesus! I send you an amusingly macabre little anecdote (Yeah, I do talk like that.) and between you and Joe it's turning into this fucking nut-crusher. It was supposed to be a fucking punchline!

Rob: Anecdote? Anecdote? When I first read your fucking anecdote on your blog it wrecked my whole Saturday! It was the most fucking depressing thing I ever read! And now I've read this like seven or eight times and I can't feel anything anymore! I've broken something! You've ruined me!

(Of course, nothing can live up to Rob when he is at full flood, but here's the appalling story in question. The current version is much, much, much worse.)

Warren: Well, it looks like you made Sean's day.

Sean: Rob, it ain't like I like to see you miserable. I just have to take pride in a job well-done.

Countdown: Five

2011-09-19T07:24:00.001-07:00

Today's starting word count: 36,198

I know, the count seem puny, but what I've done the past couple of days? It's been about taking words out of the remainder of the manuscript.

Or to put it this way -- the pile of finished work is 135 pages thick, and there's only 83 unfinished pages left. There are a few scenes-from-scratch, but I'm well past the halfway mark. Regardless of whether or not I get done in time, the experiment is an official success.

And I'm polishing two short pieces, so there are three short works soon to be released into the wild. One goes into Swill, but I want to submit the sensitive story of the single mother and her raccoonabe child to The New Yorker, the puberty story to McSweeney's, and the autobiographical horror porn to Salon. I like the SF world, I will have my photo taken next to the SF world, and the SF world can come to my birthday party. But I don't want to limit my options. I'm sure you understand.

Here is one aspect of the novel that's the kind of thing they don't cover in classes or workshops. When I realized that I was writing a novel with strong horror elements and that the protagonist was strongly autobiographical, I entered into a minefield.

Many difficulties in people's lives come about as a result of falling into unconscious patterns of behavior. There is a certain point where these patterns overlap with ritual. The execution of a large-scale work of art, one requiring months or years of effort, is a ritual. It was important that I was conscious of my intended goal when I set out on the ritual of writing this novel.

At that point, writing strongly confrontational, abrasive horror was one of my primary creative goals. I was putting my rage and self-disgust down on the page as directly as possible.

Hey, I still do a bit of that from time to time, but writing that kind of material is the result of self-excoriation. If I were to do it as a career? I'd be using self-excoriation as a tool to generate material. Horror can be an emotional bitch to work with.

So I needed to make the work one that ended well for the protagonist, and as it developed, I realized that despite all the weird trappings, I had a straightforward hero's journey story here.

While that story form may have its roots in tales of ancient kings, its real strength is that it serves as a metaphor for maturity, for the process of developing yourself, taking your power, and finding your place in the world.

My thought was that I'd write the book, and by getting it finished and eventually published, I'd complete the hero's journey on my own.

But the book grew too large, was split into thirds, and so I was working toward a different end, one I hadn't clearly thought through. Where was Matt, my stand-in (or 'fiction suit,' in the terminology of Ellis and Morrison), supposed to be at the end of the first volume?

Well, he would end the first volume having had his first real taste of using his power intentionally. He'd be someone just starting to come into his own, with a freshly-minted and hard-earned sense of himself. He'd have established a small, but real place for himself in the world.

Up until the past few days I hadn't realized that I needed to reach that state in order to successfully complete the book. I thought the completion of the book would achieve that end, but it doesn't work that way. If I wrote about that feeling without having experienced it, the book would have been a lie. I would have been making a promise to the reader and myself that was not founded in truth.

I'm a lot of things, but I ain't that.

Once I processed the idea that I actually do suffer from serious psychiatric conditions, I started to realize something. I'd spent my entire life in a struggle against my own nature, trying to make myself fit in to the norm, because the norm was right, and healthy, and successful.

But an inability to plan and execute plans, poor focus, constant conflict with social norms, and so on and so forth, have all rendered me an utter failure as a child-engendering car-driving job-having regular guy.

I spoke to the missus about this, about how letting go of the idea of ever being normal has been such a relief, that the only thing I was any good at was being me. That while I am completely inadequate at the Fred-and-Barney level, I am more than adequate on other levels, and that I wanted to live on those levels and just be who I was. And she responded with such genuine warmth and support that I still feel the glow.

Regardless of whether this book succeeds or fails, or even if it's possible for me to make a living writing novels, I know that I am a real artist, and that I have acquired a substantial and respectable body of skill. I know that because of that, regardless of where I go or who I am with, I am anyone's equal.

My greatest fear has always been my own inadequacy. I'm now at the point where I am not dependent on success in the greater world to feel a sense of value in myself or my work.

A couple of years ago, I put this up on the blog.

When you're in your element you're different than when you're not, and it struck me that real confidence is the ability to create your proper place inside yourself so you can carry it around with you, so that when it's appropriate you can withdraw without feeling diminished. Ponder ponder.

I've finally done that. My faith in my ability to achieve highly in the arts has been confirmed by people who would know in terms I would pick out of a catalog if given the opportunity.

I needed that in order to write the ending of the novel truthfully. And that is the real reason the damned thing has taken so long, and so much work. It's not just a novel I'm writing. It's myself.

Of course, this has me terrified of the fact that Matt doesn't get laid until the third volume. What makes me do these things?

Countdown: Seven

2011-09-17T10:33:00.000-07:00

If the Dizzy Toilet Devils ever finish another goddamned album, this is going to be the cover. The album will be called Girl Hammer.

Today's starting word count: 34,187

Yesterday's experiment was very interesting. The writing proved to be much more difficult than I'd thought -- I'm having to do much more from scratch than I'd thought, I'm encountering plotting and continuity issues, etc, etc. I was expecting yesterday to basically be a cut-and-paste situation, and instead I had tons of hard composition.

But did you see those numbers? Seven thousand words in a day -- good fucking words -- is a feat entitling me to a blue ox.

Interestingly, though. If you were watching a movie, and someone intentionally overclocked their brain, what would happen?

Last night, I got a nosebleed. Just like in the movies. I wonder if thinking too hard can raise your blood pressure.

Still. Seven thousand words. Damn. I said I could hack my brain and I did. Exactly when do you get to define something as a superpower?

Just remind me I'm a silly-assed fool who's been broke his entire life and has never asked a woman out if I start quoting Nietzsche.

from
GHOST ROCK
(copyright 2011 Sean Craven, all rights reserved)

The silhouette coming toward me is taller than I am and only approximately human. It has two heads, one centered on its shoulders, the smaller one back and to the left. The broad torso is made of two bodies fused together. One arm is normal, the other too big, with an extra elbow and a hand that has more fingers than I can count in a glance. It has a blanket wrapped around its waist, partially concealing three legs, and another around its shoulders.
The little head has short brown hair and a bald spot. The front head has a yellow beard on a red face.

It’s Arnie and Jeff.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Jeff says. “We don’t know him, he could have a gun or something.”

“If you’re scared you can wait for me,” Arnie says.

“You don’t have to be mean.”

“Well, you don’t have to be a little bitch.”

Fuck me. Is this Hell?

No way.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey boy,” Arnie says. “You must be lost, huh?” He grins at me, big yellow teeth. His flowing golden teeth. “I bet you got lost and now you’re scared, right?”

Jeff is just visible over his shoulder. “Hey, I know this guy.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Arnie says, then looks at me. “Hey, I do know you, don’t I?”

“Yeah, we ran into each other before.” I look right in his eyes.

“Wait a minute, it’s starting to come back to me,” the blonde head says. “I think I remember some fucking Nazi likes to beat people up, people littler than him. That’s you, right?” He steps forward. His ugly hand drags its clustered knuckles on the walkway, then whips up to stroke his beard. They look at me, Jeff half-nervous, half-friendly, Arnie just plain mean.

I’m not getting past them. They fill the fucking walkway. I step forward. He’s a fucking monster now. I beat him before and that is still there. Face still and gaze steady. Look right in the eye he tries to hide.

His eyes are primary colors, red veins, yellow whites, blue iris. They are soft. Stare at the soft eyes and think about the brain behind them. Break the bone to get to the brain. He moves once and I take his eyes I punch his throat when he’s on the ground he gets the boot. Keep staring. “Yeah. Arnie and Jeff, right?”

Arnie’s head goes to one side and he grins, looks down, slaps my shoulder. “Shit, dude, I’m just fucking with you. We’re the only ones out here, right? Got to stick together. I ain’t the kind of guy lives in the past.”

Countdown: Eight

2011-09-16T07:43:00.000-07:00

These two are some of the most popular images I've put up on my blog. They get downloaded all the time. Recently, I did a search to see whether or not any of my art was being used on-line. I found these on some dude's site. The site was in a Northern European language I could not clearly identify, but these were in a list of images labeled WHAT I'M ALL ABOUT.

Well, all right. Providing stoners with self-image is a service I feel naturally qualified to provide.

And today's starting word count? 27,280

So. The good news? Yesterday I got a little over four thousand words down. The bad news? Two days into the countdown, I'm three thousand words down. I knew I was going to have trouble on this section, but it's done.

Three reasonable ways to look at this.

One, I seem to have set myself a difficult goal. If I keep up at this rate? My initial estimate of two, three weeks to finish the work would prove accurate. If I buckle down and try harder? Well, the work ahead of me is much easier than the work behind me. Almost all the scenes are blocked out in proper order, a lot of the writing is still functional after I pull it into the present tense. I may still have a chance.

Two, of course I have a chance. Even if I miss the ten days, I've got an extra day before... well. There's a deadline motive I haven't mentioned. I ain't gonna tell you right now, but I'll spill it in the next few days. But I have an extra day, if I stay on track, three thousand words in a day is fine.

Three. Since this stuff is going to be easier, maybe I should just break it down into slightly larger chunks and make sure that each day's work gets finished no matter what.

That certainly sounds reasonable.

I'm not gonna be reasonable. I put myself here for a purpose, goddamnit.

So what would a genius do? He would change his work procedure, rewire his brain, and clock in more manuscript pages than ever before, not just recovering lost ground but gaining a safety net.

I like that word 'genius.' I always wonder whether or not I get to self-apply it.

Here is the issue.

Writing is tremendously fatiguing for me. As I work, I have to continually resist the urge to take little breaks, and I actually do have to break quite frequently. Usually, I can only do three or four hours worth of writing in a day before my brain says, "Fuck you."

Art? Art is refreshing. I can do art for hours and hours and hours.

This has to do with level of focus on detail, and the nature of that focus. Writing is granular in many ways, focusing on individual issues in a concentrated fashion. In art -- for me -- those kinds of details aren't regarded personally, but as little dots in the whole.

This is why writing is so fatiguing.

I have a mass of manuscript that needs fucking with rather than complete re-writing. It has been line-edited -- I mean strunked, it's been strunked, and it will be getting one last strunking. So I am going to try and process writing through the section of my brain that handles rendering when I do art. That part of me is great with details, etc, but it has much more stamina than part I use for writing.

This is probably reflective of actual neuroanatomy.

So. I will work with music on. I will allow myself to lose focus and drift mentally. I will detach from the work itself, and let reflex guide me as I use the Find and Replace function until I could plotz. I will work from a meditative rather than an active place.

I will post the results tomorrow. We'll see how much of a genius I am then.

Countdown: Nine

2011-09-15T08:06:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's true. That's the printing of Walter Jon Williams, author, bon vivant, and practitioner of the martial arts. Here is his eBook store; go buy Days Of Atonement. No fooling. I need to do a post on that one.

Jesus! He's got some stories about the industry that make being eaten alive by rats in a trench while the mustard gas rolls in sound like fucking brunch.

Today's starting word count: 23,270

Okay. Bad news? Only three thousand and some words yesterday, well under goal. Good news? This section is going to take a lot longer than the rest of the book. Totally new material.

And that leads me to today's good news. I was wrestling with the get-out-of-bed-and-get-to-work issue when I realized what had slowed me down yesterday. (Yes, three thousand words of remarkably fine prose is a slowdown for me at this point. I will have to mention hypomania at some point. I'll just say that it's the mental state to which cocaine aspires.)

The infodump scene. All of this crazy, crazy shit has been going on and now the lead and the reader are face to face with someone who has information.

This is the place where genre fiction dies. It does not die quickly; the rope does not break its neck. This is where mysteries win. They have the explanation scene at the end of the story, the story makes its unfortunately short drop and begins to strangle on the rough hemp loop, and then it ends.

With fantasy and science fiction, the explanation scene comes early, makes it plain that the author is addressing the reader, and then unlike the mystery, the poor story is left to clutch at the noose and twist, pissing its pants as it slowly strangles.

This is the prospect immediately before me.

The lead, injured and lost, has been taken in by the character who will be his own true love, and she's the one who has been in the other world from the beginning.

So if I explain things to the reader, not only am I killing the story, I'm killing my main character's love life. I kind of identify with him. So I'm reluctant to do that.

And then I realized my way out of the situation. I don't know if anyone's used this before, but.

The person providing the information is full of semidigested jargon, does not think in a particularly clear and linear fashion, and regards herself as the one who truly knows what's going on.

Not only will she confuse the shit out of the reader, she'll irritate the lead.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

Here's your taste for the day -- now the title will make more sense.

from
GHOST ROCK

(Copyright 2011 Sean Craven, all rights reserved.)

“You got me curious,” I say. “Can I have a listen?”

“It’s not ready.”

“Play the fucking song,” Willy says.

Lulu shoots her elbow into his ribs, then leans over the laptop, goes through a menu and hit the space bar. The music starts. It’s funny, her saying that she was trying for a Beach Boys sound in such a dark song. I can hear what she meant but the sound of the traffic is too intrusive for the music to really work.

Willy plays for a while, just matching the melody, then hands me back my instrument. “Man, I should play more bass. I always forget how much fun it is.”

“We’ll have to redo all the vocals.” Lulu stops the song.

“Hey,” I say, “can I tell you a stupid idea?”

“Sure,” Lulu says.

“What if you started off with just one vocal track, then pulled them in one at a time? So the traffic sound sort of builds up slowly?”
Lulu’s fingers flick over the laptop’s keyboard. “Let’s see what …” She starts the song without the vocals. As it plays she adds the vocal harmonies one track at a time. The muddy noise of the traffic builds up slowly and becomes part of the music.

I can’t help messing with my bass as I listen. It’s as though my ears and hands operate independently of my brain.

Lulu looks over at me, sideways.

“Sorry.” I stop.

“Don’t stop.” She goes back to the start, and fades the tracks in instead of popping them into place at full volume. I start to vary what I was doing, build some hooks, sort of surfy, James Bond-y sounding stuff. Not what the rest of the song sounds like, but it’s coming out that way. Lulu stops the music. “What you did, the last verse? Could you just do that over and over?”

“Okay,” I say, “but gimme a second.” I fumble around until I figure out how to take the pattern through the chord changes. “Okay.”

She starts the song. This time there’s something different and it’s not just the bass line. As Lulu brings the vocal tracks in one by one the sound of the traffic builds up and up until at the end everything else is covered by the sound of engines and horns and tires. I play softer and softer, then stop one verse after everything else had been swallowed by the sound of the street. I’ve never done anything like that before. Hell, I haven’t done anything; it just happened.

“I really liked that.” Lulu leans forward and smiles. “Can I ask you a big old big old favor? Would you let me record that sometime?”

I grip the neck of my bass. “Sure. We can give it a try.”

\Lulu starts unplugging the laptop.

“Hey, can I see that for a second?” James reaches out to Lulu. “I just want to check something on line real quick.”

Lulu pauses, then slowly passes the laptop over to James.

“I thought you liked playing bass on the keyboard,” Willy said. “You keep telling me it’s part of our sound.”

“Will you please go fuck yourself, William?” Ouch, Lulu’s actually pissed. “You could try playing bass yourself, you say it’s so easy.”

“It is easy. It’s so easy bassists do it all the time. Sorry, man.”

“I’m good with the stereotype,” I say. “Play a G, play a C, play a G, play a C. It’s pretty much all my tiny mind can handle.”

“They finally put something up on the police blotter,” James said. “Shit.”

I go to read over his shoulder.

Shit.

Deirdre says, “What?”

“People died,” I say. “I think that guy I fought died.”

Countdown: Ten

2011-09-14T07:56:00.001-07:00

Sigh. This is the cover I used to use for reader's copies, way back when...

And the day starts with 20,182 words in the bag, 30-40,000 to go.

So, this last week a number of things came together and I found myself working on the novel again. I feel better about it than I ever have, completely confident as to my control over the material. A number of recent realizations have allowed me to see the full shape of the story in my head at one time, the story now has the shape and feel of a conventional story despite its fucked-upedness, and everything I've been trying to do seems to be happening.

It's short as hell -- gonna be in the Animal Farm/Brave New World range, but given the way it reads, that's a very good thing.

So here's the deal. I looked at what I've done over the past nine days, and I look at the manuscript, and if I double my speed?

I'm done in ten days, tops.

After some seven or eight years, the idea of doing the finished version in eighteen days seems brilliant. Impossible of course, but that's what I've needed all along. An impossible deadline.

Today is the do-or-die day. The next section is entirely new writing, and it's very tricky stuff. If I can finish it today, it's relative cake from here out. If not? It's a maaaaaybe.

I also have a bit of extra motivation, which I'll tell you about later. But first.

I've decided to post samples of my work while I'm engaged in my hysterical fit, just to keep my spirits up. Here is how it starts:

GHOST ROCK

(Copyright 2011 Sean Craven, All Rights Reserved.)

“You’re going to find a girlfriend.” Why would Deirdre say something like that to me? I bet she tortured bugs when she was a kid.

I had to say, “Prove it.”

Shoulder the door open, hands on the mop handle. The mop bucket rattles across the parquet floor, then up and over the ridged metal and rubber strip marking the entrance to the main women’s public restroom, set discreetly to one side of the Lingerie department. Textured yellow linoleum, beige stall dividers, brown tiles up to four feet, apricot walls above the tiles. What do the colors say? Hygenic but human, feminine but disciplined. That’s what the colors say when they’re clean.

Prove it. Oh, that was clever, oafboy. May I have more trauma, please?

“Katie said she wanted to sleep with you, but she knew you’d take it too seriously.”

“I take everything too seriously. I mean, that’s what I do. I mean, fuck. That’s enough to do it? It’s really that bad?”

“Cut it out! I’m trying to cheer you up.”

“I like Katie.”

“She likes you too.”

“Thanks. I think I’m going to go lay down with a damp towel over my face in case my head just fucking explodes or something.”

I still feel shitty. Katie’s nice. And smart. Nice people shouldn’t get near me.

And now Deirdre’s friend Lulu is coming to visit. That should be just ducky. I hope she’s not my type. Of course she is, she’s a composer and I am a sucker for talent. She’s from Tennessee, Deirdre says she’s from the hills.

Dolly Parton, dude.

Quit torturing yourself. Fill the bucket with hot water and pine cleanser and sniff the disinfectant scent of artificial Christmas. Dust the tops of the stalls and the vanity lights around the mirror. Always work from the top down. Gravity is the main force that distributes filth. On to the sinks, and the water in the first sink does not drain.

Take the needle-nosed pliers from the bucket, dig between the sodden fiber and the side of the drain, grip tightly enough to hold, not so tightly as to tear, and pull. The tampon slides out slow and steady, the irregular perimeter of the maroon stain edges up past the chrome and hey, this is my Arthurian moment; Matt Cassad, you have cleared this drain and shall henceforth be King of the Third-Floor Lady’s Room. There’s another tampon in the next drain, and the next, all the way down the line. How does this even happen?

Maybe it starts with cool white walls, small minimalist prints modifying the arctic curse of the room. A little girl tosses her bangs out of her eyes and sighs with dramatic intent. “Mother, I’m bored!”

Mother, angled and elegant as a carpenter’s ruler: “Well, when I was a little girl, your grandmother used to take me to Sharpe’s downtown, the nice store where we get your ski clothes, and we’d go to the lady’s room and play special games.”

The worst things in the men’s room are stray pee or a diarrhea blart. I’m not sure if the nightmare in here is a matter of sexual politics or just the convenient supply of used tampons. Pull a bag out of a tampon bin; oh, God, that’s a couple of pounds, when I open it I’m going to see a miscarriage, a translucent doll’s hand slicked with blood, beckoning…

Dirty diaper. Why the hell isn’t it in the trash? And the next bag is half-full of pee. I picture a woman hanging from the stall divider like a treefrog pissing, I picture a woman bailing away with a cone-shaped paper cup as the tampons swell and float. No, and no, and Jesus I hate my brain.

Women can’t possibly do crap like this, right? Whoever does this is a male employee with off-hours access to the bathrooms. Has to be.

Oh, shit. From that perspective everyone I work with looks like a pervert.

Don't worry about Matt, kids!
He's going to Narnia!
Or the equivalent.

Submit To Swill

2011-09-13T08:18:00.000-07:00

Please send fiction submissions
to Swill Magazine!

Rob Pierce -- we like to refer to him as the man with two verbs for a name -- founded Swill long enough ago so I'd have to look it up. Make it around six years ago. He asked me to help him with it because I was capable of putting together a semi-competent magazine and he knew he could get decent fiction from me.

Rob was sick of fiction that was more interested in being fancy than being fun, and he also packed a serious dose of epater la bourgeoisie. Punk rock was a touchstone. Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions series was another. Our goal? To publish stories that wouldn't fit in anywhere else, and to do it so well we could say 'fuck you' to anyone.

I think we've done so.

Swill is a writer's magazine more than a reader's. Welcome to reality -- there is no real popular market for short fiction.

Which is a shame, because short fiction occupies a very important role in our culture. If nothing else, it is the essential training ground of the novelist -- what athletes do in the gym is as important as what they do on the field. And we are devoted to short-form fiction for its own sake.

At Swill, we take care of the fiction. We edit hard, and then proofread paranoiacally. The layout and illustration of the magazine are obsessively crafted to support the writing, to add resonance without affecting meaning. If we take your story, we treat it as well as we possibly can.

This actually compromises the magazine's quality for the reader at times -- it is typical for us to take a certain number of stories each issue not because they blew us away, but because we thought they were fixable. I know that sounds arrogant, but we work with the writers, and we do so out of a dedication to craft. We have never spoken of this, but when something comes in and the writer just needs a boost, it is irresistible to us.

There may be an editing chromosome.

But most of the people we publish have respectable track records. We've even published a writer I was familiar with for years before Swill came along, someone who's been represented on my bookshelf since the early eighties, John Shirley. You want to see him read the story he gave us for issue 4?

Check it out.

I saw this. I saw it on my birthday. I walked away wondering how I could get up on stage myself. Flat-out, that video? It's why I wound up reading at Lip Service. (Joe, I bugged him when I sent him Swill 5.) Here's my post about that night. If you're a regular reader, my! Hasn't my life changed since then?

(And let the plugs roll. Don't be a fool, buy In Extremis. These are my favorites of Shirley's work. There are certain points in my writing where I ask myself if I'm being too gentle with the reader or myself. The two stories I refer to are Joe R. Lansdale's The Night They Missed The Horror Show and I Want To Marry, Says World's Smallest Man, which is in In Extremis. Most people doing work with this kind of focus on transgression come across as faking it. Shirley feels real.)

Anyway.

Swill needs your stories. If you have work that is odd, knotty, ugly, too short, too long, if it is flawed but beautiful, then send it in! Send it in!

We promise to love it just as much as if it were normal.

Caution -- I may accuse you of being a, "dain-bramaged Bukowskabi who's sucking the prose from my head," and Rob may send you personally insulting rejection slips. You can't get Swill love without Swill hate.

(Better, Joe?)

Your New Verb Is Strunk

2011-09-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

STRUNK!
STRUNK!
STRUNK!

So I've been plowing through Joe Clifford's copy of The Best American Short Fiction 2010. At first I was horrified but the situation is nowhere near as dire as it seemed at first. I will say that I have now officially added 'grad school' to 'prep school,' 'epiphanies,' and 'The Great American Novel,' in my 'why American fiction sucks' list.

But I went into this book expecting to be schooled. I had it in my mind that my fiction was a little musty, carried a bit of a library whiff because most of my fictional models are fairly old.

Instead, I'm finding myself quite critical even when pleased. It turns out that the sloppy-ass prose on this blog is closer to current standards than the prose in my fiction. Go figure. Most of this stuff wouldn't make it into Swill, which may be one reason we're having trouble filling the sixth issue. Maybe we are actually too picky.

(Nah.)

Anyway, one story -- a perfect example of science fiction by someone who doesn't get science, fiction, or any combination of the two -- was bad enough to provoke a voice in my head to say, "Somebody needs to strunk the shit out of that motherfucker."

For a moment I was baffled, but the definition swiftly followed.

"Strunk: To aggressively line-edit for concision. From William Strunk, of The Elements Of Style."

Thank you, brain. That is an excellent word, and one I'm already using about eight times an hour.

Strunk.

'That bad boy needs strunking, dude."

"The problem was? After I strunked the damned thing, turned out there wasn't a story under all those modifiers."

"Man, why don't they strunk this shit before it gets into print?"

Strunk. Strunk. Strunk.

I will be using this word. Kindly do me the courtesy of understanding it.

Strunk!

A Hell Of A Catch

2011-09-06T15:47:00.000-07:00

Here is the problem.

I have begun work on the eleventh draft of the novel.

The last two drafts stalled out after the first act due to my lack of confidence in my work.

Here is the Catch-22 of my situation:

This work is so odd, and so personal, that I have come to be very, very sensitive about it. Critiques that fail to understand what I'm doing have become actually painful for me to deal with.

This is not how I think of myself reacting to criticisms. I have an iron hide, damnit!

But I don't. Not now. This book is an open wound, and I'm stitching it shut by writing it. I don't need anyone poking around in there!

But! But!

If I don't get regular feedback and praise, I lose confidence, my will to perform shrivels, and I work less and less, and then...

nada.

It looks kind of gross to me, but there it is. I need to figure out how to get regular doses of praise that will keep me interested in working on the novel, while not getting any critiques that trigger my overdeveloped defensiveness about the quality of my work.

Here is one thought.

At this point, I've written a volume's work of short fiction. Short fiction does not sell; publishers do not like it.

I'm very curious about self-publication.

Perhaps I should start going through my back catalog, revising weak works and compiling strong ones, and put together a collection. Do a story every week, every other week, while I work on the novel.

But what if I can't do both at the same time? What if interactions based on the short fiction don't bring energy to the novel?

I've got to do something. Any ideas?

The Stone 3

2011-09-05T16:34:00.001-07:00

And there we go. This will do. I have to remember to be patient and put it through a few states before I call it quits, print different versions and compare, and so on. This is a printmaking process!

Although the visual qualities of this approach seem closer to painting in some ways. Starting off with a gray background really threw me at first -- it took me a while to realize that while in conventional drawing, I'd ground this kind of image with clearly defined areas of solid black, in this case it was the white highlights that nailed the image to the eye. Very, very different for me, and I've still got a lot to learn. But I think I managed to get a decent composition here.

The Rhetoric Of Scorn

2011-08-30T11:50:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Swift, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Hunter S. Thompson -- the writers who use words as weapons have always held a powerful fascination for me. As a child, I read the original Gulliver's Travels, and the book's obsessive fixation on the horrid nature of mankind seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

I have learned from them, and from talking trash back in Richmond, and from the languages of criticism and scientific analysis. I know how to use words to strike out, and I relish the opportunity to do so.

This is a situation I regard with some unease.

Yesterday's post on Ken Ham and his book Dinosaurs Of Eden has been overwhelmingly the single most popular post I have ever put up on this site. It was also a total razor job, with any respect or mercy being shown to Mr. Ham used purely for the sake of keeping a firm grip on him while I cut.

I believe I was fair and reasonable, and that he merited what I said.

But I mistrust the pleasure I took in that rebuke, and I'm wary of the attention that post is getting.

I believe that all the writers above suffered as a result of the world-view that made them such remarkable masters of invective. The type of judgment I display in my post on Mr. Ham is the type of judgment I turn on myself continuously, and on those around me, and those I read of, and hear about, and imagine.

This pattern of judgment is one I'm trying to break.

But on the other hand, there genuinely are times when fools and scoundrels are in need of a drubbing, and my suspicion of my own cruelty need not imply ignoble pleasure to the delivery of a well-deserved blow.

Do I feel bad about what I said about Ken Ham?

No. My only regret is that I forgot to include my, 'someone needs to give James Gurney a hug,' joke.

Do I feel bad about being the kind of person who says things like that?

Well, that's more complicated. Here is the thing. If I find something that bothers me, and I can't let go of it without saying something? I find that acceptable. That's what happened here.

But if I had heard about Mr. Ham -- and I heard about him a long time before his idiot book dropped in my lap -- and sought out his book in order to make fun of it?

That might not have been cool. It might have been, it might not.

I don't want to encourage myself to seek out things I hate in order to vent my spleen on them. If some magazine were to want to pay me to, say, sit in on a Goldman-Sachs power breakfast and then spray bile, I'd be tempted.

And I like seeing numbers on my blog, I like getting readers. If I were to put up more posts attacking religious figures, I suppose I could get more readers. I did okay with my Pope slam.

But how much of that do I want to do? How much do I want to reinforce the pattern of resentment and attack?

Okay, if someone wants to pay me money to spit acid, I'll do it. And if something comes up that I can't get out of my head, I'll use the rhetoric of scorn as a scouring pad. (There's that space whale rape story. I can't stop thinking about it.)

But aside from that, I think I'll be avoiding the intentional pursuit of prey. Yeah, it would be fun to spend all my time thinking of horrible things to say about people I imagine I dislike, but you know?

I may be a foul-natured brute with a tongue like a file, but that don't mean I've got to be evangelical about it.

A Wrong, Bad Book

2011-08-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

This post is getting a massive number of hits, so here's a little self-promotion. I'm an artist, and I sometimes work with paleontological subjects --

Here's my Redbubble paleo-art gallery.

Oh, yard sales, what wanton agents of fortune you are. I have been looking at this book for the last six months, trying to figure out how to write about it. The problem is that it's hilarious.

Ken Ham is a young Earth creationist. He argues that the Bible is literally true, and consistent with the fossil record, and that dinosaurs have lived alongside man until very recently.

Every single page presents one with a worldview so patently deranged that reading it is like being slapped with a rubber chicken over and over again. Nothing about it isn't funny.

Except that it's presented to children as fact, with the promise of Heaven and the threat of Hell held over them as a goad to belief.

I am an atheistic materialist. I find this is the only worldview that is both internally consistent and congruent with observed reality. I do not object specifically to the existence of religion, although I regard it as a sign that humans are not perfect thinking machines. I will say grace, I will attend church if invited, I will pray alongside the faithful when it is important to them. My feelings about religion are mixed. I state this up front so as to make my perspective clear.

Let me tell you something. If nothing else, living under the Bush administration taught me something about the banality of evil. This book features evil whose banality has gone baroque, and it announces itself as clearly as the hard buzz of a rattlesnake.

Young people often ask the question, "If there's so much evidence for the Flood all over the earth, and if it's so obvious God created, and the Bible is true, wouldn't the scientists surely believe these things?"

The answer is that scientists, like everyone else, are sinners. Because of this, they don't want to believe. It has nothing to do with the evidence. (Use of bold taken from text.)

If you are an adult, and you find, "Because I said so, and only bad people argue" convincing, you are an idiot. If you find the blanket condemnation of scientists as willfully-ignorant sinners acceptable, you are contemptible. But if you hear this when you're a kid, and your critical faculties haven't been developed, well.

In the future, the US will be able to look to Mr. Ham and say, "He helped keep our children away from science." I do not believe that will be regarded as a good thing. Mr. Ham is militating for a stupider nation.

I am not going to do a point-by-point refutation of Mr. Ham's position. I simply shrug, and say, "Geology, biology, paleontology, astronomy, chemistry, and physics all view the world the same way, and they work. You don't have the integrity to keep your own story straight, so not only is everything you say wrong, it isn't even wrong from a conceptually valid stance. Nothing you say is correct once you drift from the idea that people should be nice. Arguing with you is like braiding worms, and I will not do it."

I am going to engage in a bit of humor at the expense of Mr. Ham and the Snellenbergers. But as I do, please understand that I've imagined being a small child, and having the minister I have heard speaking with authority on the subject of sin and the fate of sinners come to me with this book.

I'm thinking about how much larger the minister is then I am. I imagine cologne, and warmth from his body as he sits next to me. This is a man of authority. He shows me a picture --

Take a close look at that gorilla. The single most important goal of this book? Get teeth wrong. Every damned time they show or mention a tooth? They get it wrong. Oh, and it's Eden so of course lemons are delicious. What kind of dummy are you, anyway?

-- and tells me that the only reason anyone would disbelieve it is that they are sinners and they choose not to believe.

What happens if I laugh? I don't know. But there is no way this situation could ever work to the benefit of the child.

I wanted to make this clear before I start with the haw-haw -- I am not belittling Mr. Ham when I mock his beliefs. Rather, I fear and despise the power he has over the lives of others.

He may be a good man. He may be, in the balance, a good father. But to present a child with this kind of cognitive dissonance is damaging, and worthy of strong rebuke, and I cannot find it in me to respond to this book and its mindset with anything but condemnation.

I understand that religion is the most important form of folk culture in the world, that the intellectual tradition springs from religion, that it is an important force for social organization. But it is the easiest way in the world for someone to simply claim a position of authority and begin exercising power and...

... remember what I said about the banality of evil?

Anyway.

Click on this image for madness. QED, motherfuckers.

What I love about this diagram? The implication that there is no problem here, see? They fit!

Now, the myth of the ark makes sense if you only know about a couple of dozen types of large animal, but by the time you take the world into account -- how many types of tapir are there, anyway? -- you have to start getting into some serious handwaving to get it to make sense, and our boy Ham here decides fuck it, pedal to the metal, we're including the entire fossil record as well. All of it.

Do you think he has a little cart in which to carry his balls, or do attendants bear them in a sling?

Is is just me, or does that kid have a holster? What kind of Bible-science bullets does it shoot? Or is it a zap gun? Probably a zap gun. This is all so exciting!

What's cute is the way Ham hates science so much he's going to reclaim silver jumpsuits for the faith. And the Biblical control panel is a concept resistant to speculation -- what happens when you turn the knobs? Maybe it adjusts Leviticus so you can stone people you don't like without having to eat kosher.

And let's take a moment to notice the semi-competent art. I bet the Snellenbergers have taken classes, maybe even have a degree or two between them. But the stiff, clumsy, vaguely ugly quality of the illustration is of a piece with the text.

When religious belief takes on a quality of grandeur, when it truly does exalt the human spirit, then it's hard for me not to get swept up in the moment. But this book shows a world without wonder -- flat words and images have condemned it to a sort of folding-chair spirituality, a cafeteria of the soul, a holy linoleum.

Okay, start at Babel, head North, and then turn left when you get to the white part.

I'll give them this much. I like this one. The idea of a polar pack-Pachycephalosaur is genuinely charming, in a crack-brained way.

I can't tell you how much pleasure and concern this terrible, terrible book has brought me. But interestingly, it has also led me to perform a dangerous act only to have my faith in mankind renewed.

These horses show up over and over again in the background of illustrations in this book, and they are never given a name. Actually, they aren't horses. The only type of living wild horse is Przewalski's horse, and these aren't those.

My current thought is that these are a Snellenberger's concept of a quagga. But the question of their identity was really bugging me. So I did the only Google search that I thought might give me some solid information. It was also the single riskiest search for images I've done since Harlequin ichthyosis.

"Wild ass images."

Of course my fear was getting into the eyebleach zone with scat porn at best and having my understanding of human sexuality expanded at worst. There are reasons the Internet age is also the age of hand sanitizers -- after the things we see, the entire world seems filthy.

But in this case?

Zebras, onagers -- wild asses. The ones I was looking for. The first screen I called up was entirely crazy little horsies of one kind or another.

I actually responded emotionally to the moment. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel crappy if I run across a picture of a cute butt on the net, but the idea that I could get clean results from that search seemed nothing short of miraculous. Perhaps I sensed the hand of God at work, a kinder God than one who'd put an old drunk on a boat with a bunch of fucking dinosaurs.

I didn't go to the second screen. Why tempt fate?

The Stone 2

2011-08-24T18:59:00.000-07:00

Writing today sucked, but the art compensated. Here's the basic image I started out with, compiled from three different photos. The goal is to create something simplified, more painterly, and more coherent in appearance. It needs to be reproducible through laser printing in black-and-white. So here we go...

And there it is -- the first Swillistration for issue six. I am not satisfied, but I am pleased, and I think the technique worth exploring. I start with a neutral gray background, and then render up and down in tone, developing the image simultaneously as highlights and shadows. Next art? A turtle. Plesiobaena antiqua, to be precise.

The Stone 1

2011-08-22T17:43:00.000-07:00

Swill is being a pain in the ass. We need more stories, and I am girding my loins to begin the process of begging. I've also recalled how much of a pain in the ass it was last issue when I had to do all the art at the last minute. It worked out well, but it was a horrid experience.

So I'm starting a little early this year.

As I mentioned in previous posts, I'm working on a new technique. I want it to look less photographic, more expressionistic. I want size-independent resolution. I want the option of easily reworking the images in color. And I want something that will allow me to use a wider variety of sources with less concern about the initial qualities of the images in question -- I want to be able to blend scans from the newspaper, sketches, and photographs from cameras bad and good seamlessly.

What I'm doing is making composite images in Photoshop, then rendering them as black, white, and .25, .50, and .75 flat gray images on separate layers using a combination of the magic wand selection tool and the pencil tool. Then I bring separate files for each layer into Illustrator, autotrace them, and Bob's your uncle. (First time when that phrase seemed right. Apologies to Bob.)

Here's an early attempt. It's still too photographic and busy.

This time around, I'm laying out color roughs first and only using the photograph as a guide, and the composition already seems a lot livelier to me. Now to find a few hours to noodle compulsively until the edges are clean. Or, rather, dirty in the right way.

Thinking About Drinking

2011-08-22T11:21:00.001-07:00

I was working with great difficulty on my piece on hierarchy, when I had a bleak moment of realization. Since I’ve begun putting myself out into the world, one aspect of my stance has gotten a lot of comment. That’s my honesty, my willingness to present myself both clearly and without any defense but truth. This is the public face of a private conviction – that the denial of unpleasant truths is the most direct way of empowering them.

I reached this conclusion by observing my mom and Grandma Jean. Both of them presented faces of unlimited optimism. And each hid despair. This dichotomy tore me up when I was younger, because I assumed that either one or the other could be true, and their optimism had a distinct odor of bullshit to it. Now I understand that things aren’t as clean cut as that, but I still have the mental habits formed by those reactions.

So as the concept of hierarchy proved resistant to organization, I reflected on the nature of my difficulties. How much easier would this be if I wasn’t crazy?

Look. I don’t want to take an, ‘I’m a victim, pity me,’ position here. But in my case, this is a legitimate question. I have to ask it to approach an understanding of my situation.

Difficulties in focus and decision-making are symptomatic of fetal alcohol syndrome, and I’ve definitely got that one. You can look it up if you want, but the symptoms can be roughly summed up as either, ‘ne’er-do-well,’ or, ‘asshole.’ Poor impulse control, emotional volatility, not too bright in general.

I am far from a typical case, but I am far from typical. I’m lucky enough to have compensatory brain power, so I’ve been able to function despite my condition, but it has had a very powerful impact on my life. If you deal with me and at times you wonder if I am actually a small child or poorly acclimated Martian, this would have something to do with it. The combination of genius (yeah, I’ve decided to claim that one too) and brain-damage mimics autism at times, but it ain’t the same thing at all.

(My current frame of mind is that if I’d been healthy? I’d have wound up working either for the oil industry as a marine micropaleontologist, or as a flavor chemist, or if I was not entirely healthy, just more functional than I am? I’d have wound up in the military. So it might be a good thing that I’m totally defective.)

This led me to wonder if anything else was going on. I seem to favor the layered look in mental illness, so it would be fucking typical if I had a few extra lesions and bruises floating around the old cortex. Head blows would be one possibility. I’ve been watching the news about brain-damaged football players with interest and dismay. Could be part of my problem.

My mom always said it was because I had a high fever from a bout with pneumonia when I was a baby in Ceder Rapids, Iowa. In fact, she took me around to doctors a number of times when I was a kid. Some said bullshit, most said yeah, there’s some kind of brain damage there.

I remembered that when I was running through the shrinks. One particular MD, not a shrink, was openly dismissive of the brain damage theory in a particular way. There are certain diagnoses that doctors use to indicate that there’s a problem and they don’t want to confess complete ignorance. ‘Borderline schizophrenia’ is one that I’ve gotten before, and then had explained to me by better shrinks.

I think ‘brain damage’ falls into that category.

My mom also involved my brother and I in a study exploring the possibility that gifted students who did badly in school were suffering from food allergies that caused learning disabilities. (Long story short – bullshit on that, simply not true.)

Now here’s what crossed my mind at this point in contemplation.

Mom ran a day care center. She was beginning her course of study in child development, one that would lead to her MA. And my visible signs of fetal alcohol syndrome were the basis of family jokes. I’ve mentioned that I get mistaken for Asian periodically.

It suddenly dawned on me. Did Mom know or suspect of my condition? On one hand, she was one of the shrewdest people I’ve ever known, a real student of the human condition, and in training to deal specifically with my kind of problem. On the other hand, her capacity for self-deception and selective observation is the stuff of legend.

But then I thought of the way Mom and I came to emotionally separate from one another.

Mom had moved to Merced, and got in the habit of calling me drunk late at night in order to more-or-less beg me to tell her that I had a perfect childhood because she had been a perfect mother.

When I lived with her one summer, Mom’s intake was twenty-four Buds a night, minimum. Minimum. And she weighed somewhere between ninety and a hundred pounds. That’s the equivalent of me having fifty drinks. Every night. Minimum. I could knock out a couple of cases of Bud if I had to, but taking weight into account…

Not that you could tell, most of the time. She paced herself, you got drunk with her (there was no point in my drinking career at which I would even contemplate pacing Mom), you never even noticed when she got a little blurry, a little glossy.

But when she called on those nights she was hammered. Slurring, repeating herself, not responding to what’s said – and desperate for confirmation that my childhood was the kind you read about, that kids should be buying stickers with pictures of my childhood to put on the heads of their beds, where they would bring pleasant dreams.

This was not the case, and I ain’t much of a liar. Things were not pleasant. I’d dance around the fact that my childhood was fucking awful like a bear on the end of a pole, shuffling around a cesspit. Mom wanted solid statements. I’d evade.

Oh, it was ugly.

And then the calls stopped.

This morning, I wondered. Why was it so important to Mom to hear me tell her she was a perfect mother? Did she suspect that she hadn’t been?

Because now I know four things I did not know at that time. I know I have fetal alcohol syndrome, and what that implies about Mom. I know that at that time, she was undergoing radiation therapy for lung cancer, and she would never, ever tell this to anyone, including her treating physicians at the end of her life. I know that the missus spoke to Mom, and Mom thought she’d been told never to call me again, and if you are capable of getting a straight story out of the combined testimony of Mom and the missus?

You are a very special person.

But the fourth thing, the thing that just caught my mind as part of the context, is that Mom had started her brief career working with at-risk kids.

I know some of these things from clearing out Mom’s files after her death. When I got to the section dealing with her clients, I tried to avoid looking, literally taking the files out in huge handfuls unexamined.

What I was unable to avoid was horrible. When my sweet little mother described an eight-year-old girl as a relentless sexual predator in unsparing and clinical language, I lost innocence I hadn’t known I had.

(An aside for writers. I knew as someone who works the noir side of the street? I was throwing away money. And by denying myself that information, I limited my view of humanity.

I think I did the right thing. I’d do it again.)

What crossed my mind this morning? I’ll bet some of her clients had fetal alcohol syndrome. Did this play into things? What went on there?

And that, of course, led to the real killer of the day.

Mom died of massive cancer that started in her lungs and erupted through her skull. Her lifestyle was black coffee, Budweiser, and Filter Kools in industrial quantities. She was self-medicating like a ring-tailed son-of-a-bitch.

My question.

Did she suspect that I had fetal alcohol syndrome? When did this thought cross her mind? Did it contribute to the levels of stress she experienced? Did it in some way contribute to the voracious consumption of chemicals necessary for her to maintain a bearable state of mind?

To what degree am I a link in the chain she forged for herself? How much responsibility can a person actually have for another one?

Fuck.

I am not tipping into the dark side again, don’t worry, but this is a bit of heavy contemplation for me.

Honestly? I want a drink.

Passing It On: Blogs I Read

2011-08-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

Attention: I did a cut-and-paste which introduced some crazy old HTML into this page; I am too inept to erase it without screwing things up. Size and greenness and so on carry no meaning other than, "Gee, he's not very good with computers, is he?"

So Amy Sundberg over at The Practical Free Spirit was given a validation ticket by Parking Lot Confidential. In turn, she mentioned a number of writing-related blogs she read, and this was among them.

I left a comment on her site recommending some blogs; may as well post it here. Among them I mentioned Miranda Suri's Comedy or Tragedy? It was pointed out that I mention that one a lot.

Well.

Let's start out with Candy and Cigarettes by Joe Clifford. Yep, he's the guy who runs Lip Service West, where I've read twice and have another piece in the hopper. Nepotism rocks. His blog covers his experiences as a new father, his memories of the good/bad old days, and most importantly, his efforts to push forward as a writer.

Honestly, the man has a direct, workmanlike approach to the situation that's provided me with a lot of good ideas already. He decided to target specific markets and write to them directly. This is the kind of thing that raises my artistic hackles, but you know what?

His work improved dramatically, he placed all his stories...

So I'm working on doing the same thing with the high-end lit mags, The Atlantic and so on. Yes, I am stealing his idea. And "put the love story up front" is actually damned good advice.

The Erin O'Brien Owner's Manual for Human Beings is just delightful. She doesn't write about writing, she's a fucking writer. Everything from phone-cam roundups with appropriate commentary to links to her professional work, with a strong local flavor. Since Harvey Pekar died, this is where I get my Cleveland fix. It's the New Journalism grown up with a kid, sitting with a can of beer at the kitchen table, and one of the counters to nihilism upon which I rely.

And, finally, I'm breaking with writers (although he writes). Glendon Mellow, the Steel Tzar of Toronto, has recently begun the Symbiartic blog at Scientific American in partnership with scientific illustrator Kalliopi Monoyios. (I covet her skill, so her work makes me a little unhappy when I see it.)

Glendon is an artist who incorporates imagery of meaning to scientists into symbolist- and surrealist-influenced compositions with a strong narrative component, typically executed in oil, frequently featuring novel materials such as stone. (He also does pictures of Man-Thing.)

Symbiartic covers areas where scientific and artistic interest overlap. Everything from the flexure of tetrapod necks to the optical qualities of oil paint gets covered. For me, this is heaven. If you're a fiction writer who deals in ideas as well as character, this is a goldmine.

And when you're done with those, take a look to the right. If a blog's there, I think it's worth reading.

And tomorrow? Gonna discuss my position in the hierarchy.

Considering The Virtues Of Stress

2011-08-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

"You need to act as though you're allergic to stress," the nurse said. "Like a peanut allergy."

For those who might be stumbling onto the site for the first time, this was said to me last winter when I'd been told to go to a psychiatric health center by some emergency room... well. You know. Like that. It's one of those stories.

Anyway, I agreed with the nurse. And that's how I've tried to live my life. Minimalization. Cut back on the input. Don't get involved. Don't get political. Don't get into hassles.

Right. If stress is such a toxin to me, then why have I had the habit of stalking the rough parts of the Oakland/Berkeley border looking for trouble when I'm emotionally distraught? Why is a public exchange of hostilities with a street crazy something that brightens me up for days?

If I'm allergic to stress, then why did I cheer up and start eating and sleeping when we had a series of shootings in our neighborhood a few years back? Why do I sooth myself with things like dangling from heights and cutting?

I don't even have to get as far as cutting most of the time. Simple negligence of low-level physical safety means that I've never had a moment in my life when I didn't have half-a-dozen little scrapes, bruises, cuts, and dings healing. I never thought to ask about that until just a couple of days ago, and the missus was horrified.

When I moved from Richmond to Santa Cruz, what did I say? I feel like I been drug up from the depths and my swim bladder's coming out my mouth.

Let's put this in another context. What about the reading on Friday? I loved that. But let's consider this.

How do I feel about crowds?

One of the most uncomfortable conversations I have ever endured in my life was one where my wife was on one side of me, my first girlfriend on the other, both making physical claims on my person while discussing my shortcomings. Thank God for open bars.

Anyway, one subject that came up was crowds. It turns out that what I perceived as the occasional dry witticism was actually a steadily muttered series of descriptions of mass murder, including specific details I will not print here because they would work. And that every time I was in a crowd in either of their companies, I'd begin emitting this at some point.

Ew. I stopped doing that.

But I didn't stop thinking it. I hate crowds, I hate large groups, they frighten and anger me. I have been attacked by crowds. I have been surrounded by crowds and forced to fight people one by one.

And I adore standing up in front of crowds. Love it.

Here's what I think now.

I think I need stress. Lots of it, on a regular basis.

I think that growing up the way I did left me needing stress. When I collapse it's because of a lack of concrete demands as much as anything else.

But I think I need stress applied under circumstances where I have control. Where I am confident and active and functional. And there are places in the world where this happens. I need to place myself in situations where my strengths are the strengths that apply.

These circumstances alter the proportions of stress hormones released under stress. There are two types of stress reaction -- prepare for performance, and prepare for a beating. I need to train myself to respond to stress with a performance-enhancing mix. Let me tell you, that is a serious cocktail.

Honestly? If I wasn't fucked up physically, I'd start checking out martial arts and danger sports, but my back is too vulnerable. So that leaves me with one arena in which to exercise this particular peccadillo.

The arts.

The most stressful situations for me are social ones, especially dealing with strangers. But the world of the arts is partially a meritocracy, and I do well there. The long-dreaded, long-avoided task of putting myself out into the world has proven to be very different than what I've been led to suspect.

People tend to react well to me. I get some hassles, I'm dorky and awkward at points, but I've got something going here. I'm being not simply received by the world, but welcomed. I may as well see if I can get some mileage out of it.

So I'm going to engage in human society.

If only for therapeutic reasons.

So How Was The Reading?

2011-08-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

On Thursday night, our stove went crazy and turned into a sort of jet engine. By the time things were settled, I'd called 911, burned my fingers, and so on. So I didn't get a lot of sleep, and I had a bit of a dose of anxiety at the start of the day on Friday.

I had my reading to do that night.

When I first began feeling the jitters, I assumed they were leftovers from the night before. But as the day progressed, I realized that despite my confidence, even eagerness regarding the reading, I was still experiencing stress.

But it didn't really bother me -- I was nervous, I was jumpy, I was stalking around the house, but I was in a good mood. I had no idea I was setting myself up for one of the most spectacular endogenous neurochemical events of my life. I will go into further detail in later posts, but I've been forced to rethink my positions on both the place of stress in my life and my relationship to the concept of hierarchy.

I showed up early, and there were few people there. As folks trickled in, I saw that people I'd expected hadn't shown up, but people I hadn't, had. Fair enough! It was particularly pleasant to see Chrissy from my last scriptwriting class and Chris Cornell from Viable Paradise, but I was very happy to see everyone.

There was an unexpected but welcome change in personnel -- Allison Landa was there, reading from her memoir. It was nice to hear how she'd been working with the material since I'd last seen it; Joe was lucky to get her.

Howard Zalkin read a marvelously hallucinatory piece about recovering from encephalitis. Pamela Holm gave us a look at middle-age adolescence and addiction in which warmth and snark mingled pleasantly, and W. Ross Ayers told us about how much fun it is drinking in redneck bars. Exactly as much fun as you'd guess.

And then it was my turn.

I'd been feeling more and more disconnected from my immediate surroundings as my moment approached. I felt strong, I felt confident, and I knew the actual piece was rock-solid. It deals with issues of racism and violence, and it is not intended to be a source of comfort. I'd spent the afternoon carefully re-formatting it so as to clearly establish a rhythm for performance -- lines which needed to be said alone were set apart, paragraphs broken up to ensure that I maintain eye contact with the audience, etc.

Because there are two things I'm using in conjunction here -- there is the quality of my actual prose, and then there is my ability to emote, to project, and to, well. Project a certain intimidating physical presence. It is my intention that this be not simply a reading but a performance of a piece intended to be read aloud.

The style of writing I used is more flowing, more musical, more polysyllabic, less concerned with word-by-word clarity than with the human voice; that said, it is as clearly and directly written as possible.

I've spent the show standing at the back; when Joe calls me up, I have to walk the length of the room.

When I reach the stage, I look back. Damn, the room a lot shorter from the other end. I can hardly see the people in the back. I take a second and make eye contact with Joe, give him a nod -- "Thanks for the chance, dude" -- and then...

I take a breath. I turn around slowly, inspect the entire room, the entire stage. And I take another breath.

I'm in no hurry. I'm claiming this place. Where I stand, what I see?

It's mine. This is my place and my moment and I own it.

Then I take a shallow breath, announce the title of my piece, and begin reading. The piece begins with a lengthy bit of exposition. My favorite part is when I look out at the audience and say, "You are all racists, and I am a racist, and that is how it is in a racially divisive culture." You cannot imagine how much I enjoy the little pause I give them after that statement. "How the hell is he going to get himself out of this?"

I find that it's taking an effort for me to stay near the mic, and through my performance one of the things that bothered me was drifting off-mic and then scooting back. I have the kind of voice you don't really need to mic, but this is being recorded.

I am loving this. There is an impulse to perform in me, and those who converse with me can testify that there's a point where I slip into performance mode. I struggle with this, even though folks seem to like it, because it's sort of loud and attention-hogging, and you know what?

I can fucking unleash up here. I hold nothing back. I am angry and honest and wretched. I do not tell people how I want them to feel; I tell them the truth and give them the space to react to it. The pressure is forcing laughter out of them every time a line reads as a little less grim than the ones around it.

Then the expository passage is over, and the moment I begin reading the actual story of my experience?

My brain blossoms, lobes opening like the wet, fleshy petals of an orchid.

(For the record? I was stone cold sober. Didn't even hit up the wine.)

My field of vision registers not as an assembly of solid objects, but as flat areas of tone, shifting and overlapping like so many cut-out pieces of paper. I have vertigo; more, a sense that my body is dismembered, each joint a real gap in space.

But I am a skull ranger; I know this is my brain fucking with me and I know how to cope. The sheer emotional pressure I'm experiencing blasts the associated hallucinations into the edges of my mind. I can see the writing on the paper, one paragraph crystal clear and the rest like gray ants warring, and I do not move my body more than I have to.

It isn't dismembered; I'm a four-dimensional creature in disguise, the visible 3-D cross-sections of my body cunningly arranged to give the impression of humanity. If I keep my hands within three feet or less of my shoulders they'll never know.

Again, these stray thoughts, like my visual flow of data, are blown to the corners by the massive, the concrete blows of emotion that travel through me. The cauldron of rage that I keep in my chest isn't a cauldron, it's a blast furnace and it's pointing right at the audience. All of my anger, my violence, it's all right on the surface right now nothing held back.

And the words flow smoothly, the contact with the audience constant, palpable. I am shattered but I am whole, more complete than I've felt in as long as I can remember. Everything about me that I hate or fear -- the rage, the bitterness, the judgment, the brutality, the madness, the capacity for violence -- all of these have been forged against the anvil of my morals, turned to tools, and now I am speaking the truth as strongly as I can.

The feeling of strength, of precision, is overwhelming. I cannot be wrong in this moment. I am absolute.

Fuck you all, this is Art, this is big Art, this is the real motherfucking thing, and it's blowing through me, pumping me fat as a firehose, rigid with pressure, the eternal explosion inside me finally powering an engine.

This is mine. This moment. This place. These people. This art.

And when I finish, I have an experience that I've longed for my entire life, since reading about it in childhood. Syneasthesia, interpreting input through the wrong sense. Smelling colors and so on.

The sound of a handclap is a white spark, like fireworks.

The applause blinds me like a burst of flashbulbs, I feel it as pressure, but when the sound dies down and my eyes clear, the first thing I see is the missus. And what I see in her face? It's not just affection. It is the face of someone who has just been completely blown away, who is amazed at what I am, and who likes what she sees.

And she ain't the only one.

So how was your Friday, motherfuckers?

Dottie and Howard

2011-08-11T13:40:00.000-07:00

That is not dead which lives forever and a day,
And come strange eons, even Cthulhu gets a lay

(With apologies to George and Nick -- I just had the impulse to litter on your side of the street.)

"I'm sick of this shit," I say.

"What? What?" The missus spooks easily these days, and I guess it's my fault.

"Oh, my brain keeps throwing me these fucking Howard Waldrop stories. I don't want to write historical fiction, ever! There are always people who are righter than I am about history. It's too much work."

She looks up from her iPad, and then her phone, and then her computer, and then she actually looks up. "What are you talking about?"

"The thing is, there's a market for this kind of crap. If I did it right, I'd be signing checks."

The missus sighs. "So?"

"Okay, here's the deal. Nineteen-twenty-five. Dottie needs a new hat, right?"

"Who's Dottie?"

"Dorothy Parker. She's looking for a hat, sees a store and goes in. It's Sonia Greene's store, and while she's shopping, she mentions that she's working at a magazine that just started. It's called The New Yorker. And Sonia tells Dottie that her husband is a writer."

There's a sound of music as the missus goes back to her maze game on the iPad. "Sonia's husband..."

"Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft. He winds up a traveling reporter like A.J. Liebling or Calvin Trillin, only earlier. So it would be kinda like a cross between The X-Files and The Thin Man. Screwball romantic comedy with supernatural mysteries."

"How do you get romantic comedy out of that?"

"Look, Dorothy Parker said that all she needed in a man was that he be ruthless and stupid. Lovecraft's exactly wrong for her! It's got to happen! And you look at the history, you get the impression Sonia wasn't really that into Howard. He was just a project to her."

"O000000-kay."

"He'd put some brakes on Parker's boozing, and she'd make him eat his fucking greens. 'O crepuscular light that shines from the East, I think the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents.' 'Well, it doesn't just happen, darling. Get me another, and make it a double or I'll pretend I don't know what crepuscular means.' They'd be swell together.

"And the whole New Yorker would change. I mean, Lovecraft mentions he's got a line to the forgotten Boy Poet of the Sierras, starts sending Ross letter after letter until he breaks down and publishes Lafcadio Hearn and Lord Dunsany.

"And let's be serious. What we call New Journalism? It started back then. Lovecraft was a lefty Tom Wolfe, but Robert Howard's reporting on the Texas oilfields was sober gonzo, the most motherfuckingest shit you ever read, and Ross whipped that shit into shape, put a real shine on it."

I can sense my enthusiasm getting the better of me.

"That was the best fucking magazine of all time! It had the best qualities of the early New Yorker, Weird Tales, sixties and seventies Rolling Stone and Esquire -- but what really gets me? H.P. Lovecraft and Dorothy Parker get happy, fulfilling lives. They give each other mutual annihilation of tragedy, the way we do."

The music from the missus's iPad stops as she freezes the game. "Wait a minute. Did that really happen?"

"No."

And then the question comes, posed in that sweet tone of innocence that makes me wonder how much she's joking.

"Why not?"

Appearances

2011-08-11T07:43:00.000-07:00

The missus and the hon. Richard Talleywhacker hate this honest self-portrait. They are so superficial.

I got involved in a little Twitter exchange, and found my opinions being choked off by the narrow bandwidth. So Terriaminute, here's what a hundred-and-forty characters would not carry.

My feelings about appearances were fixed early in childhood -- try and ignore them as much as possible. They are definitively superficial, and when you pay attention to an unattractive surface, you may be doing harm to a heart.

This has been reflected in the way I present myself to the world. Not only do I know almost nothing about grooming and dressing, until quite recently I took pride in that -- it showed a certain purity of character.

Now I think my attitudes about superficiality were a little shallow.

Unusual appearances can be isolating, and it is important not to make assumptions about people based on aspects of their person that are not decisions they've made.

As someone who can present a relatively conventional appearance, there is a lot of nonsense I simply do not have to deal with. But at times, I have not presented as a typical human being, and I have dealt with the rude personal questions and comments that come the minute you step an inch off the common grounds. Anyone with an innately attention-grabbing personal appearance deals with a continual flow of shit unimaginable to anyone who hasn't witnessed or experienced it.

This affects who you are, and how you respond to other people. It can bring defensiveness and it can bring dignity. One reason I try and be open to unconventional people is that I'm more likely to find a common attitude there, or a willingness to accept my rough edges. A lot of my personality was formed when I was socially isolated, so it's a suggestion that someone might be able to understand me. So appearances do have a substantial effect, even though they aren't legitimate cause for judgment.

When someone makes a decision about their appearance, then it does say something about them. The decisions I've tended to make about my appearance did say, "I am a soul above the petty trappings and extravagances of the social realm," it also said, "I wear the uniform of the single-parent army with a notable lack of grace; I am unfit to care for myself, and if someone cares for me, they don't bother to screw my clothes on evenly."

And there are people willing to look past that. Thank you, thank you, thank you, kind people, the missus in particular.

But a while back, I ran across a Malcolm Gladwell book in which he mentioned that in many ways, New York's improved crime rate was the result of improving the appearance of the city.

I'm a street kid, so I've always approved of graffiti -- it's a way of reclaiming a sense of power. But it turns out that it also tends to produce a certain tone in the environment, one that made people conscious of the option of crime. When things got cleaned up, and it was proven that they could be kept clean, it had a deep effect on the culture.

Appearances, and the ability to take responsibility for them, have real power. I'd like to acquire some of that power.

So these days, I try and pay attention to how I look. Minimal dog hair. Don't wear clothes I actually dislike. Wear a jacket or overshirt if possible -- try and not look like an overgrown toddler while wearing a T-shirt. Distinguish between punk rips and throw it out rips.

Punk! Perfect example.

I've always felt like a punk fraud. During the punk days, I was listening to the Beatles, Randy Newman, Taj Mahal, and a terrifying collection of fifties debris including everything from Harry Belefonte and The Kingston Trio to The Best Of Gilbert And Sullivan. I heard the names, saw the pictures, thought they were hilarious, thought I Wanna Be Sedated was great, thought the Sex Pistols sounded like a pissed-off cat sliding down a shale slope.

I'm a Repo Man punk, God help me. I had a Mohawk in the eighties, I've recorded more than one song with 'Fuck' in the title, one of which I am not allowed to ever release because my chickenshit bandmates were all scared of no-fly lists and shit. They said, give us a rant, I gave 'em a rant, they got all excited, and then once they listened to it in cold blood, they were terrified. Pissants.

So I see young punks on the street, teenagers with more money invested in leather and studs than I've ever seen at one time, and I feel a certain... "Uh-huh. And what do you play?" Or, "That is so fucking quaint. That's like someone in the seventies wearing spats." Annoyed superiority, which is one of the worst things, bad like fly bites or rotten onions.

But I scored a leather jacket a while ago for fifteen bucks. I'm six-three with ape arms, I don't find jackets often. Me in black leather? Too much -- but it's a Ramones-style jacket, and it fits, and fifteen bucks...

So last winter, I went out on a cold day. Cold enough to justify the jacket. Black T-shirt with a red Maori face, black fedora with the dog hair cleaned off it so it's actually black. I took a minute to look in the mirror, make sure everything is right...

... and out on the street, I walk a little taller, have a hint of a smile. I know I look a little silly, but it's fun. Passing the Jack-In-The-Box down on San Pablo, I noticed a couple of baby punks at the intersection. While I waited for the light, I noticed them whispering to each other, and then they crossed the street.

"Hey," the guy said. "We like your hat."

Normally, when someone says something like that to me, they're yanking my chain. But this time, it honestly seemed as though they just wanted to... Fuck, how do you put this? Touch the hem of my garment? Receive a benediction? There is no way of putting this that doesn't smack of hubris.

All of a sudden, I stopped feeling like a wan little wannabe all punked out out in the boonies, wishing I could touch the real thing. I was transformed into a wise old punk, one who had been in the scene at times and in places where the scene would otherwise not have existed. It was as if they could sense the Mohawk I had in Sonoma. The dryer-in-a-stairwell quality of my bass.

It just charmed the living shit out of me.

So we had a nice little exchange, and went on our ways. And ever since then? When I see a punk on the street, I no longer see a pathetic overpriviliged wannabe, and I no longer feel defensive. I see someone looking for an identity, finding a culture, and preserving a tradition, and someone who would have respect for me in that tradition. Punk is not what it was, but it is not something I hold in scorn. No more snotty remarks about Gilman Street from me. And no more embarrassment about my own punk phase. I earned it, I own it.

Think of it this way -- punks revere their elders. This isn't just a cultural pun, this is an ironic tap-dance worthy of Wodehouse. And they do so to such a degree as to confer benefits to the likes of me. That is so sweet!

And now the urban landscape looks different to me. Friendlier. Black leather and tattoos mean I'm included.

So you can see why I'm becoming more and more fascinated with appearances. They are the primary tool you use to determine how people will react to you. Which means they really are most of what you are for most of the people you encounter.

There's real depth to superficiality.

Learning To Love Lichtenstein

2011-08-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

My assignment? Criticize an artist! My choice? Roy Lichtenstein! My feelings when I saw a Lichtenstein painting in person? My God, look at the technical control here, the way he dominates the canvas -- I love this guy! I was wrong!

(Appropriated from art by Al Milgrom from Secret Wars II, Beyonder character copyright Marvel Comics. And for the record? This wasn't just a scan. I had to recreate the damned thing, down to the Benday dots, carving every edge of every ink mark -- this was more laborious than generating a painting from scratch. The print is two feet on the short side.)

But I always loved Chuck Close. I had a blast doing this. Why did one artist seem fraudulent to me and not the other?

Being able to look at my own work and have pleasant feelings makes it a lot easier to open up to new experiences in art. Defensiveness is a creative dead-end.

Glendon Mellow has reposted his critical piece on the subject of art, illustration, and the aura of a painting. He and I have been engaging in a conversation about art for some years, and I've found it quite useful -- my views of art have changed considerably since we've begun exchanging views. (Toward the end of Glendon's piece, he has links to the post at Laelaps where our conversation began -- scroll down to the comments -- and an earlier post of mine on the subject of art.)

The main changes in my attitudes toward art grow from my rejection of personal defensiveness. In order to feel some degree of strength or position in the world of art, it was at first important to me to say, "This thing you think is not art is, and this thing you say is art, isn't."

These days?

I would rather enjoy art than feel superior to it. And contrariwise, if I don't like something? That doesn't mean it's a fake, or inadequate. It is not art's job to live up to me, or vice-versa. I find myself responding genuinely to a much wider range of art than before.

That's because I don't feel like an outsider in this world any more. I've seen my work in a real gallery, a guerrilla gallery, and a number of kitchen walls, I've gotten praise from some very respectable sources, and more than that -- I've found that I can walk into a museum or gallery and feel comfortable, and if I talk? People listen to me with interest and respect. I've even been asked about my degree. (I learned art history the way I learned music theory -- I only know what I failed to avoid.)

Since I now feel part of that world, I no longer need to feel as though specific works or artists are somehow inferior to me, as if disregarding them lends validity to my own work. Instead, expanding the range of work that I'm willing to respond to has produced a corresponding expansion of my interior world.

Glendon's piece brought this to mind, because it was a face-to-face encounter with Roy Lichtenstein's work that initiated this sea-change. I'd always assumed that his appropriation of cartoon images was essentially a rip-0ff, that he wasn't really a painter, etc, etc.

But when I saw some of his pieces in the context of the museum, I was riveted. It wasn't just the painting, though. It was the entire context -- the gallery itself primes you for certain types of aesthetic experiences, the size of the work strongly effects impact, etc. It made me realize both that I couldn't judge art based on reproductions, and that there was something childish in my earlier reactions. That I was trying to prove something by disliking particular artists or works.

It is more than a little embarrassing to recognize that I 'hated' Jeff Koons the way I 'hated' Eric in the third grade. (With less cause -- Eric threw rocks.) To recognize that I dislike the works of Jackson Pollack out of defensiveness, on the basis of ignorance.

It's not a bad idea to dislike genuinely bad art. To assume that certain elements in the artistic canon are fraudulent, and that you maintain status by bad-mouthing them?

Terrible idea. Terrible. It doesn't matter if you're an illustrator bad-mouthing Pollack or a science fiction writer bad-mouthing James Joyce. You just look like a jealous idiot. You only appeal to those who are defensive in precisely the same way you are. I'm trying to cut it out, so I'm really noticing it in other people.

You build bridges when you act out of attraction. When you do something because you like it. Avoiding things, cutting off potential avenues of exploration? It's necessary. You can't do everything. But you will never fully express yourself if you pick and choose influences on a reactionary basis.

And that goes down the perceived hierarchy as well as up. I no longer feel comfortable dismissing a work for being a television show, for instance. When you see how serious and intelligent practitioners of everything from cute dinosaurs to cartoons to Star Trek can be, it forces you to do some re-evaluation.

To put it another way -- if I love the folk art and literature of other times and places, why shouldn't I knowingly, intelligently embrace that of my own? To try and imagine how the products of my time and culture might impress those outside of it?

Or to put it another way.

I know a good bit about criticism. I know how to take things apart.

These days I'm much more interested in appreciation. As an artist, it's a lot more useful for me to see how things get put things together.

Why I'm Scared Of White People

2011-08-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

So my reading -- you know about my reading, right? Here's what Joe Clifford, the guy running the thing, says:

It's a brutally honest piece about violence, ignorance, and racism, a dangerous topic, and Sean doesn't shy from illumining his own prejudice and weakness, his own part in the play--but just as importantly, he does not apologize (as so many writers in his spot might do) for the same in others. In short, it's a gritty, real, and raw story about American, urban living in the modern age. I am proud to have him read at Lip Service West. (And you should come, because he's right: he fails to bring 10 people, I take the thumbs. Them's the rules. He knows that going in.)

Lip Service West
Friday, August 12
5512 San Pablo Ave. Oakland, CA
7 p.m.

There will be wine and cheese and hot dogs and such things as well as a solid line-up of writers performing edgy autobiography -- this actually is an enjoyable event.

Anyway. Speaking of race and violence, I just put things together, and I realized one of the reasons white people scare me. Aside from Goldman-Sachs. Yes, I am white, but I'm fucked-up white -- my mom was raised by an ama, spoke Tagalog before English, and had the physical habits and mannerisms of a Phillipino. Since I have fetal alcohol syndrome, I have epicanthic folds in my eyes, and have been mistaken for Asian more then once. I grew up in a community that was primarily African- and Mexican-American, and a lot of my speech patterns and mannerisms come from there. I get called everything from 'rice boy' to 'mister man' to 'funky nigger' when I step out of my door.

In other words, yeah, I'm white, but I am under no fucking obligation to be a goddamned example of whiteness, okay?

Anyway, white people creep me out. It's true, and I need to get over it, but there are reasons.

Good reasons. Don't-go-in-the-attic-reasons.

The subject of UPC codes on books came up in one of my email discussion groups, and I just got a full and massive white person flashback. Everything fell into place and I understood why I don't just think of white people as people who tend to be pink-to-buff, but as a group.

A conspiracy.

It started when I was a kid. In my school, whites were very much in the minority, and there was a filthy little trick the administration played in order to increase racial tension enough to mandate regular beatings for the vulnerable.

There was a series of classes, one for each grade, that was designated as being for 'bright' or 'advanced' children. Which meant any white kids who weren't regarded as actively defective, and any non-white kids who actually were bright.

Yes, I was known to be bright. Bright the wrong way. They did not want to encourage that shit.So the only white kids in my classes? The other losers. That's what made them stand out. And I was the biggest loser of them all -- or, rather, the skinniest and weirdest.

I saw the kids in the advanced classes, and they seemed as though they were all together, a unit, and somehow even the other white kids in my class were part of it. I was white, but I wasn't one of the White People.

Events occurred, and junior high, high school, and all along I still feel as though I'm outside of this thing -- but I also know that I'm the kind of person who's prone to feeling this way. How could there actually be a White Thing?

In high school, this white guy named Marty sits in front of me in math, and tells me just the craziest shit I've ever heard a human being say out loud and expect to be taken seriously. There are lasers burning invisible UPC codes into people's foreheads (Marty ruined zebra labels for me), and that lets the government control their minds, and everyone's history is on file with a computer called The Beast, see, like the Beast in Revelations, and...

I mean, he went ON. He did not stop. And every word was crazier than the last, and he insisted that he'd learned this science fiction shit in church. Which I knew was bullshit, because come on. There is no way you'd go to church and hear stuff that was, well. Obviously, transparently false. Nutty.

At that time I was working at the Point Richmond Child Development center, and one of the instructors there invited me to attend her fiancee's baptism. It's always a little hard when someone targets you for conversion -- it's a compliment, but a terrible, stupid, embarrassing compliment that's impossible to receive gracefully.

When I show up for the baptism, I'm first taken aside to attend Sunday School, and that's where I get a shock. All the biggest assholes --

Okay. Black dudes? Generally, one fight. A lot of the time, they'd even act as though they were friends with me afterward, which confused the living fuck out of me. The bad ones?

Black girls and white boys. Black girls would actually hurt you, cut you, do tricks with bobby pins that left blood blisters, and they'd look right at you while they did it, faces cold and mean. It was important to them that you know they didn't like you and they wanted to hurt you.

White boys were just too fucking dumb to live. Stupid, mean, and looking for another white boy they could safely pick on. And every bad-news white boy I knew was in that Sunday school classroom. These were the shitheads who had beat on me for years, just pounded on me until I got scary and they stopped, and here they were talking about the Prince of fucking Peace, and the Love of Christ, and you know?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

They were so glad to see me. Real warmth. Whether I got a beating or a cookie depended entirely on how these thuggish sluggish meatloaves related me to their favorite fairy tales. This is a human trait that always inspires me with genuine revulsion.

Anyway, that guy Marty from my math class was there. And he had not been shitting me. All of them were spouting off about how the Wankel engine had been predicted by the Elders of Zion and so on, all of them just radioactive with mutually-reinforced self-approval. So pleased with their lunatic beliefs that they just glowed.

Anyway, after spending an hour listening to these poorly-crafted hominids congratulating themselves on being compassionate, humane, and altogether Christlike, we adjourned to the...

Fuck it. You had to call it a theater. It had theater seating, and a huge glass tank behind red curtains on a stage, and it was dark except for the stage. The preacher came out and began an extensive sermon, one dealing specifically with the yawning mouth of Hell and the torments awaiting the unbeliever.

He was preaching to me.

He had clearly been informed that I was coming, and he addressed himself directly at me, going so far as to point at me in order to punctuate such words as 'sinner.'

How very nice, I thought to myself. As my eyes grew accustomed to the lighting, I was able to look around me and see...

... them. The White People. All the pale folks I seen in school, the ones who had nice clothes and nice lunches, who played together. The ones who had hit me, kicked me, threw stones at me, called me faggot. The girls I had crushes on. The ones on the inside of the White Conspiracy.

All of them, looking at me, smiling hopefully, faces shining in the dark.

Live Oaf On Friday 12

2011-08-05T08:22:00.000-07:00

I don't want to have to work the space bar with my forefinger!

Jesus, I'm getting ahead of myself. Okay, deep breath.

On Friday the twelfth, I will be reading at Lip Service West, Joe Clifford's ongoing series of readings. Literary writers reading transgressive autobiography. It's an impressive series. It's my second time reading there. I am all excited and shit.

FAVOR REQUEST

Please come. If you live in the Bay Area come, and if you don't live in the Bay Area, please spread the word.

Sean Craven
Lip Service West
Friday, August 12
5512 San Pablo Ave. Oakland, CA
7 p.m.

Why should you go? Well, the show is solid. Joe gets good people in, and makes them work. While I've seen some insane performances elsewhere (John Shirley, who proves that there is real punk in cyberpunk), from beginning to end this is the best live literary experience I've seen.

And I, he said with no trace of false modesty, will be devastating. I am candid about my weaknesses; forgive me if I am candid about my strengths.

My piece is one of the very best things I've ever written, and I wrote it in blood and at great personal cost. I have taken one of my most shattering personal experiences, and one that I have not shared with many people, and turned it on both myself and society with as much honesty as I am capable of.

I talk about things you aren't supposed to talk about, and I do so clearly and at volume. If you've ever spent time with me and had the experience of getting a sudden, nasty time bomb/pit bull vibe? This will give you some idea where that comes from.

I was confident before my first reading; that confidence was accurately placed. I will be better this time -- the work is stronger, and now I know that when I am in front of an audience, I am in my proper place, and I have power, and I know what to do with it.

It's not often you get to see someone's balls drop in public. Don't miss the opportunity.

And besides. If I don't get enough people to show up?

Joe Clifford takes my thumbs.

And I don't wanna work the space-bar with my forefinger.

Love And Hate And Other Chimps

2011-08-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

My dad's recovered enough from his back surgery so that today we were able to take a walk. I was explaining to him that I'd recently figured out the main reasons why the past few years have been so hard on me, despite my finally beginning to get my art and writing out into the world.

For whatever reason, I have always admired artists and scientists more than any other type of person, and I have always mentally linked the arts and sciences as being representative expressions of a particular quality of mind.

I spent my whole damned life sitting in my room studying the arts, going to school for the arts, thinking that if I ever got to be good enough, I might be allowed into the world of the arts. I lost the sciences when I lost the university system, but the arts I could do on my own.

And I thought the world of the arts was going to be The Arts. That once in the door, I would bask in the glow emitted by my superiors, contaminating myself with their glorious radiation until I, too, was luminous. We would do the art and nothing but the art!

Well, yeah, as far as it goes. But it turns out that the world of the arts is like any other human endeavor -- it is primarily social. The arts serve an organizational and focal function, and are frequently central in the lives of individual participants, but the actual world of the arts is a club, or a gang, or a trend, or a hangout far more than it is an activity.

"The thing is," I told my dad, "I feel like I've pissed some people off just by showing up to play."

Dad got a little solemn. "Well, there's something that I think nearly everybody pretty much knows instinctively, and I don't think you do," he said. "Every group of human beings is going to be more concerned with hierarchy than anything else, and just about everything they do is about figuring out who goes where."

I was not prepared for this. I mean, I heard it and it made perfect sense, but. If you had told me ahead of time in a way that allowed me to actually understand? I might have simply evaporated from terror on the spot. I certainly would have wondered if it would be a good idea for me to follow the path I've taken.

I am not good with groups. I strongly prefer to interact with people one on one, as equals. I assume that I am on the outside of any group, and above the top or below the bottom of any given hierarchy. I am very emotionally vulnerable, and have a desperate need for affection and attention. I have very poor boundaries. I am quite naive about a lot of things, particularly sexual things. I do not expect to flirt or be flirted with; I expect to be treated as a neuter by women.

And there is no way to say this without sounding like a caveman, but you know what? I'm a primitive motherfucker. I expect men to behave as though violence is a natural arena for contention -- in other words, if someone's acting like a dick it means they think they can fuck with you, and if you let them keep acting like a dick, they will escalate to violence -- dickishness is just the soft edge of violence, and pulling it out is starting a fight. So men are polite to one another if they aren't interested in fighting. I mean, this is how it is, right? Right?

Guess what.

There are some folks I have run across that have been snipey, snipey, snipey, nasty, guilty apology, snipey, apology, etc. And I never believe they're being rude to me at first. I think about it, I ask any witnesses for opinions, I grill the missus, my dad, the hon. Richard Talleywhacker for their opinions before I feel anything but hurt.

This is a pattern. It's not just my writing, I've gotten this reaction with my prints as well. It has repeated four or five times in the past three years, and it honestly seems to be antagonism based on my ability or my modest successes -- people who actually dislike me on a reasonable personal basis don't behave this way.

And this comes from people who are hypothetically on my team, and who are in positions where we are supporting one another. People who are poorly served by their antagonism. It feels like a betrayal to me, it makes me wonder what I've done to deserve it, and it has cost me more topsoil over the last three years than anything else.

The only way I can cope with these situations is to emotionally place those people outside my circle, to say, 'I work with them, but they are opposed to my best interests, and in any emotional conflict they are regarded as opponents. I will not choose to hurt them, but I do not actively support their interests.' A friend who hurts me? I can't do anything about that. An enemy? That I can understand. It makes me feel coarse to categorize people in this fashion, but it is also invigorating. Necessity!

I need to recognize when people are actually being rude to my face. I've put up with things from people in classrooms and labs that would have gotten them terrorized if they'd tried it on the street. I absolutely will not pull any tough guy crap around this, but I shouldn't be taking shit just because I'm scared of being a bully.

I need to make room for this so that I don't shred myself every time someone fails to love me to a sufficient degree. It ain't their job to love me.

And too much love is hard to accommodate, too. Oh, it's turning out I ain't neuter. I need to be conscious of this. Not hitting on women and not cheating isn't the same as being sexually continent, and I prefer to be the latter.

For instance, did you know that some women interpret genial, good-natured bullying as a form of flirtation? And here's one I only figured out about six months ago.

I talk to people one-on-one, remember. Most of my friends have been women. If a woman and I are pals, we will spend a certain amount of time talking by ourselves alone, and that is a sexual safe-zone. I assume that sexual neutrality.

But recent readings and reflections suggest to me that when a woman goes into an isolated location with a man, much of the time she's going to be very conscious of being either vulnerable or available, and she's not always going to feel comfortable about that, and sometimes she's going to feel entirely too comfortable about that.

I am not going to go into details, but based on those two revelations I can now see how I have been a horrible, baffling tease at times. I don't want to be that kind of rotten person! I didn't even know you could do that to girls!

On the other hand, a little harmless flirtation isn't something that should cause me to bolt like a startled horse, writhe in guilt at my unfaithfulness, or fall hypnotized with my mouth hanging open. I'm gonna get flirted at, I may as well learn to enjoy it.

Having people look up at you and go, "Ooooh!" is a drug. When those people are attractive women, that drug is freebased. I am officially hooked, and I now need a certain amount of admiration in my diet. It makes me feel gross, but there it is. I am now doomed to go out into the world every once in a while and impress girls if I don't want to wither and die.

But having people admire my talent also feels kinda wrong and creepy. It's a freak show feeling, as though what's being admired could be easily detached from me and idolized on its own. I suspect this is how it feels to have an admirable bosom. It's fun, but you can get too much of it and it could lead to feelings of disrespect toward the admiring, and that sucks. Who wants to be admired by people they look down on? Defeats the whole purpose.

So, basically what we're facing here is the collapse of my previously-adequate Jane Goodall posture, where I regard humans as a fascinating alien species demanding compulsive study despite the obvious dangers involved. I have set down the clipboard, and set out to establish my place in the troop.

Pray for me.

Attention: I'm OK Now

2011-07-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

Well. It's been weeks since I've had a mood swing or an episode of vomiting. I'm feeling consistently optimistic and excited, and I've never written stronger material than what I've produced recently. My episodes of paralytic confusion have almost entirely dissipated, and I've recovered from my withdrawal from psychiatric medications.

So I'm declaring myself officially well, for the foreseeable future.

The missus has said all along that this period of crisis has been about my fear of success. That's not quite right, but it's definitely leaning in the proper direction. I've got another piece to write about this, but essentially, my journey into the world of professional fiction has been much more complicated than I thought -- I am being forced to change my relationships with both myself and society in general in radical and expansive ways.

I was able to tap-dance around the increasing levels of stress in my life until I started puking. Hospitalization and my first round of treatments left me feeling like a psychiatric patient instead of an artist, and that period of last winter and spring was one of the points in my life where I really hit bottom.

Interestingly, I did not experience true despair. The burden of self-hatred that had been lifted from me at the Viable Paradise workshop has made these times dangerous for me in the past, but now the temptation to self-destruction is much weaker. And the missus, rather than drawing away from me, treated me with a sort of tenderness that hasn't been part of our relationship before.

But I'm better now.

I've started counseling in the last few weeks, and that's helping to solidify the gains I've made over the past months. The missus, bless her heart, decided that I had fallen through the cracks in the system, so she found a counselor who would trade for bodywork. This does make me feel a little weird, but very grateful. I'm still on the lists for public assistance, because it would be a good idea for me to have access to sleep aids and tranquilizers, but I feel good about the person I'm working with now.

My counselor is not a psychiatrist, so she does not see me as a collection of fascinating symptoms, a sort of living crossword puzzle, which is the reaction I get from medical types. Her position is that I'm in the process of assembling myself into a functional human being, and she seems excited by the prospect.

I've decided that the optimum state of mind for me is not that of conventional mental health. That just isn't an appropriate ambition for me. Rather than fighting my nature, I'm learning to embrace the positive and ameliorate the negative.

For instance, rather than struggling with my sleep, I've gotten in the habit of going to bed between nine and nine thirty, then waking up at two or three, going to my studio to listen to music and look at art books for an hour or so, then go back to bed and lay down. I don't always get back to sleep. I don't usually get back to sleep. But if I lay there quietly in a meditative frame of mind, I get enough rest so that the next day has a warm fuzzy hallucinatory edge rather than a sharp, brittle one.

And right now I'm getting my eating habits in order. Cleaning up my studio. And so on. And so forth. Regaining a sense of control over my life.

I know I'll go through the cycle again -- it's pretty likely that I'll be useless for a month or two in the middle of the winter, for example -- but things feel different. Even when the recent situation was at its worst, I didn't feel as threatened or endangered as I have at comparable earlier points in my life.

One of the reasons for this is that I felt as though I was part of a community. Both the science fiction world and y'all here on the net have formed some attachments with me, so I felt a continual sense of...

"Well, I guess I can't afford to lose here. It'd fuck shit up for too many people."

I know when I contemplate everything from your health to your careers, there are times when I feel concern. Sometimes I let people know, sometimes I don't, if it doesn't seem quite needed.

But I have also felt concern from you, and that helped keep me focused on getting past the situation rather than sinking into it.

One very interesting aspect of this whole thing is that I turned to a lot of self-help and popular science books for assistance, and I am damned lucky to be going through this during a time when cognitive science is starting to really understand how the mind functions.

I have been doing some very deliberate skull hacking, and have even been integrating this information with the techniques of meditation and ritual I learned while studying occult traditions. As the man said, "We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon/Our method is science, our aim is religion." (Yeah, I know, he was an asshole. All my heroes were assholes. This is key to my identity crisis.)

So.

Right now, the process of reconstruction has advanced to the point where I am working again, and substantial improvements are being made to my support system. I have greater stability than I did before going through the crisis. I am happy-by-my-standards, and pleasant company.

Yes, my life situation could be better. Sort of. Yeah, I would like to be financially stable, and not a lunatic, and so on. But when you have a life filled with good people, a sense of purpose, and the ability to pursue that purpose effectively?

What the hell is there to complain about?

Fictional Me: A Daydream Game

2011-07-20T08:20:00.000-07:00

This is taken from the collection Lat's Lot, copyright 1977 by the Malaysian cartoonist Lat. Lat's work is just wonderful, the kind of thing I periodically force down people's throats.

Anyway, I'm not the only one who plays this game! This is a panel from a cartoon Lat did on the same subject. I remembered it while writing, and was able to track it down.

It's been a while since I did something properly goofy. Just for fun, here's one of my daydreams.

Hey, writers? I have actually gotten a number of stories from this little game. And if you read this blog for soap-opera purposes, I will no doubt make some truly unfortunate unconscious revelations here, along with some tragic misapprehensions of self. Should be good for a laugh.

Here we go:

If I were in a thus-and-such type of story, what would it be like?

And to clarify, the whole thing has a casting sort of quality to it -- there are roles that I've played in certain books, I can always get work standing in the back of a Viking scene, that kind of shit. Remember -- daydream.

Hard-Boiled Detective

I'm starting here because in this genre? I am not the lead. I'm the guy who knocks the detective out. You can tell it's me and not just a random thug if there is --

-- a revelation of unexpected depth of character lending a tragic tone to my inevitable demise.

-- a hint of sympathy directed toward the detective.

-- I turn out to be a sadistic intellectual who smugly torments our hero.

(As an aside, I also play this basic role in a number of Daniel Pinkwater books, but I'm a butler for one of the heroes in those ones.)

Police Procedural

An amusing witness or suspect. Really, not a whole lot of point to me in this genre. I'm just another one.

Cozy Mystery

I hate cozies. Hate, hate, hate 'em. The domestication of murder for the amusement of human housepets rankles severely.

Too bad, because I am custom-made for cozies. I'm a fact reservoir, a detail-noticer, a loveable good-natured eccentric, and when that one little moment comes when violence is threatened? By cozy standards, I am a warrior king. Thankfully, I am also bound and determined to mind my own damned business.

But as all fiction writers know, that just means I'll be dragged into the mystery kicking and screaming against my will. How? The writer's groups. The band. My attempts at breaking into the arts. These all provide interesting points of contact with the world that could fuel a series.

But worst, and most obvious of all?

The missus. She throws herself into the middle of every dramatic situation that comes along because if it interests here, then it's her business, isn't it? And yeah, we do in fact banter amusingly, bicker ceaselessly, and come to one another's rescue on a regular basis.

I really wish I liked cozies, because that series writes itself.

Adventure SF

I'd be good here, but nothing special. I'd fit in all kind of roles. One of the settlers on another planet, a field illustrator in a time travel story, the guy the aliens first contact, all that stuff. Unfortunately, I'm too quirky for the starring role in this stuff. Fine with me, he said huffily, you're all a bunch of dummies anyway. (I'm just bitter because I wanted the male lead in a Stanley G. Weinbaum planetary romance, and the woman has to be the quirky one in those.)

I'm putting this here because of the psychic powers in Known Space, but Larry Niven could get a good alien race out of me.

Hard SF

Similar, but with less scope. I'd be the one who asks the questions the reader wants answered. Maybe if I'd had more study skills when I first tried college...

Quest Fantasy

Again, a tooth-gritter. No really good roles for me. I might be like Beorn from the Hobbit or (oh, I hate this) Tom Bombadil. The good-natured outsider with an uncanny link to the natural world, who provides both a place to rest for the heroes and a vague sense of menace.

Or I'd be an orc, or a troll. Ah, well. It's work.

Heroic Fantasy

God help me, this would be the perfect fit. If you've ever read blurbs describing characters like Conan ("A man of great mirths and great melancholies...") or Kane ("Half-savage, half-savant, with a dash of Satanic seasoning..."), well. Jesus. Have you ever hung out with me?

I even have a knack for swordplay -- when I studied fencing in high school, a number of instructors gave me free lessons, and I kinda got the impression they thought I might go somewhere with it. Too bad money issues ended that.

My main problem with life is that it isn't sword-and-sorcery fiction.

Memoir

It's been done. I'm The One That I Want by Margaret Cho. My brother Duncan is a major character. I'm the briefly-mentioned bit player who means nothing to the reader but the writer needed to acknowledge. At least I can walk into bookstores and see my name in print.

Mainstream

Well, you should be able to figure this out. I do not have a mainstream life, my life's subject matter has been strongly genre. So I'm stuck in an outlying subplot -- 'Whatever will become of our beloved shining nutjob?' I wind up dead in a lot of these, usually suicide. I blame society.

Underground

Do I look like an idiot? Ask me in person. You might want to get some booze in me first.

Superheroes

Okay, three ways to go. In mainstream comics, I'm definitely a Marvel guy -- I'm uneasy with the ideas of good and evil as supernatural forces influencing the world, and there's a lot of that lurking in DC's mythos.

I'd start off as one of those guys who comes across as a villain at first because he's too caught up in his cause. I would guess an endangered species of some kind, probably a reptile. My costume would be one of those ones that looks dorky in a comic, but might be okay on Halloween. First appearance would be written by Don McGregor or Steve Gerber. The Avengers would have second thoughts after beating the shit out of me, eventually I'd lead the team for a brief run, and my unsuccessful limited series would feature me getting made a fool of by a sexy supervillainess in a complete tonal about-face from any prior appearance.

In the movies? Costumed adventurers would be all supervillains initially, carving the world into despotic city states. I'd be a man with nothing to lose, who in a moment of desperation finds that he once had powers, and they've been stolen from him, and he can only get them back by killing the bad guys one at a time. This one is just oodles of fun. I might write it someday.

Independent comics? I'd be a quirky, humorous hero along the lines of the Badger, Flaming Carrot, or maybe an oddly dramatic one like Kevin Matchstick in Mage or Go-Man. The book would be rough during the first few issues when the focus would be on me, but then I'd start taking a back seat in an ensemble piece.

I'd be an unbelievably neurotic hero for hire, whose staff manages to keep him in line enough to be a force for good, mostly, by cuddling, cajoling, badgering, threatening, teasing, and general bullyragging. It would be about the idea that it takes a dozen or so people to actually make one superhero -- or regular human being -- work. This one might get written as well.

Romantic Comedy

An unexpectedly good fit. The difference in appearance between me at my seediest and me at my best totally satisfies the ugly duckling requirement. My general emotional neediness and neuroticism make me a hard but satisfying nut to crack, romantically (the missus has a well-rehearsed performance on this subject), which is good drama. I can provide pratfalls and physical comedy, then turn and provide a strong masculine presence. I am easily flustered and embarrassed and given to blushing, and I have been given the impression that while in that state I am most amusing.

Truth be told? I tend to view my life as a humorous horror story, but it has a strong romantic comedy element as well.

Thrillers

I'm two guys here. The one who raises the monster and is heartbroken when it turns on him just as the story gets going, and the cannibal genius psycho-killer. The first one depresses me, and the second one has been thrown in my face on a regular basis since childhood.

When I read Silence Of The Lambs, I knew it was just a matter of time before someone said I reminded them of Hannibal Lecter, and I was right. It was amusing the first few dozen times it happened, but now when some distant acquaintance comes up to me and says, "I read a book/saw a movie last night, and there was this character who really reminded me of you," I just feel creeped out.

Horror

Oh, this is such a natural. There are two main roles for me here. The misunderstood monster, and the shapeshifter slowly devoured by the beast within. I could do a little mad science, if it was required. Maybe bravely allow myself to get killed so the lead could get away.

Situation Comedy

Like romantic comedy or sword and sorcery, a totally natural fit. But while I find it easy to put together something where I'd be the lead, I'm actually more a side-character. I'm the one who periodically sums up the situation in a bafflingly hilarious statement that turns out to be either dead accurate or utterly incomprehensible.

And so on. The fun part of this game is when the rules of the genre force you into a role you may not care for -- or which surprises you with its aptness. Yeah, it's fun and, if you write down what you daydream, do it well, and sell it, it's profitable.

There are times when I wouldn't trade being juvenile for anything in the world.

Bone Chips

2011-07-19T06:15:00.000-07:00

So I got a shout-out this week from Joe Clifford of (among other things) Lip Service West. He claims to be the last of the angry white male writers, and it's true. He was like three guys ahead of me in line when they ran out of licenses, and ever since then I just haven't been able to pull that shit off. I'm kinda pissed about it, actually.

Joe's been on a roll with his fiction, working smart and hard, and it's been fun watching him build his chops in stories like this and this.

So, as I mentioned before, I'm gonna be reading at Lip Service West on August 12. Save the date; I expect to see you there. It will be my second reading, and I'm looking forward to it.

Part of my pleasure here is stepping outside of genre fiction distinctly. (I am willing to be photographed with genre fiction, but I don't want us to be perceived as having a 'relationship.') But more than anything else, I look forward to the pleasure of terrorizing an audience. There will be a laugh or two; they will be emitted under conditions of great pressure.

I see this as the first story in a three-part sequence to be read as a one-man show. It will be roughly half an hour long, and it will be called Bone Chips: Stories Of Intimate Violence.

The first section will be the piece I'll be performing on the thirteenth. It concerns a beating I received in high school, and what it meant from a racial perspective.

The second will be the first piece I performed. This was based on an excised chapter from the novel, and concerns how being kept at a specific proximity -- not to near and not too far -- from a number of women led me to break one of my knuckles a couple of times.

And the third will be based on an old blog post, about how I developed a sort of wistful romantic nostalgia toward a splash-mark left by a suicide. That one goes a little dark, but it's probably the funniest of the three.

These were all formative experiences for me to one degree or another, and by taking them and using them in this way, I'm pulling some of their teeth. I own them, not the other way around.

Performing made me feel powerful. I felt at home on the stage, and I knew that when I meant the audience to laugh they'd laugh, and when I wanted them to cringe, they'd cringe. To watch people responding to me, moving in their seats, expressions changing to match the story, really feeling it. I sit here and tappety-tap-tap and think, "Yeah, boy, that's gonna get 'em," but writing ain't nothing next to DRIVING THE WORDS DIRECTLY INTO LIVING BRAINS WITH BRUTAL FORCE AND OBSESSIVE PRECISION.

And I want more. I feel that this is a very unseemly desire, but I have it, and I know that it will not diminish with time. I want to see an audience full of people who have come to see me. I need to take steps toward achieving that.

And this may be an unseemly statement, but I have the first requirement down. I got the goods, and I can deliver them. Now all I need to do is find out how to put something like this together, get funding, find a support crew, and then round up a bunch of people who are really into hearing me rant about blood-spattered nihilism. Sex and violence, audience! I've got sex and violence!

Notes on the Re-Acquisition of Mojo

2011-07-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

So. I needed some good news. So I went out and got some. Yeah, things will probably change eventually even if you just sit on your ass, but it does no harm to put some effort in.

I submitted to Lip Service West for the second time, tried forcing the novel to work, bounced off it, sought advice from Nick Mamatas, and on his suggestion impulsively submitted to an anthology of Lovecraftian science fiction.

The Lip Service West submission was a hard one. It's a piece I've had in the mix for a while, dealing with some fairly brutal autobiographical material involving race and violence. I submitted it in a state I knew was imperfect -- but that I also knew I could pull of solidly as a performance.

The submission to the anthology used some ideas I've had drifting around in the back of my head and tied them all together into a setting that I may use again. It was a piece that, had I submitted it to my groups first, I would have been told was a synopsis rather than a story. It is nowhere near polished. It was written, line-edited, and sent off in a two-day period.

Well. Both got in. I will be reading at Lip Service West on August 13. And my story Deep Blue Dreams will be appearing in the anthology Future Lovecraft.

So after all these months of struggling with my writing, I saw some extremely varied opportunities -- one oriented toward pop culture, the other toward the transgressive end of literary writing, and bim-bam, I pulled them both off.

Honestly? I made mouth noises and tried to demonstrate due humility, but in my secret heart-of-hearts I assumed that I could just get into both spots, never really doubted that I'd get in, and I was correct. Do you know how that feels?

It feels like walking into a glass door or having a chair pulled out from under me. It seems like a violation of natural law.

I mean, did I just do that? Is that kind of thing now an option? What the fuck? Is this some kind of superpower? This is a joke. Someone's messing with me.

Don't get cocky!

Maybe I can allow myself to get a little cocky. That shit doesn't just happen. First off, I never quit struggling with my writing. Even if it was shit, I was still writing. When my writing stayed shit for an intolerable period of time, I considered my situation, and decided to work laterally.

This is a tricky concept. But I've come to realize over the last bout of shrinks and research and so on that my most functional state is one clinically termed hypomania. Basically, I am manic and depressed at the same time all the time, and if the mania has a slight edge, I become creative, volatile, active, and social.

This may be a clinically recognized state, but it is also me at my best -- and potentially worst. Learning how to work with it has been a lifelong project, but I haven't experienced it since anti-depressants made me actually full-blown manic. That's the thing -- I'm really not easily medicated, because my stability is the result of a wide spectrum of contesting conditions. I need each of my little quirks to balance out another one.

So. How to either slightly lift depression or slightly accent mania.

The secret is stimulation. One of the problems I've faced over the last year is that between no longer being able to buy comic books and no longer being able to take art classes, I have wound up with fiction at the center of my creative world -- it has killed my fucking writing. I need the pressure of multiple forms competing for attention in my head. I need to feel the high-pressure buzz of fruitful compulsive thought.

I decided to try including another art form in my routine, and began developing a new technique for producing digital prints. This got me itching, got me thinking, gave me a set of solid creative problems to wrestle with.

It worked. I'm going to have to watch myself for the next while -- I will be prone to grandiosity, spending sprees, temper tantrums and incomprehensibility. But I'll also be functional.

There you go. The basic two-stroke of good luck is that it's something that occurs when ability meets opportunity. I've always had a pretty good grip on developing ability, but this whole seeking-out-of-opportunity thing is a new one.

If I can turn it into a habit, I'll be doing well. If I don't scare myself to death in the process.

Jungle Hat

2011-07-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

I'm in the process of returning to functionality, or rather the process has hit the point where it's obviously working. Nice to get some results. Here's how it started.

I was walking to go pick up my niece one afternoon. Because I have a shiny bald head and do not drive, I'm a hat person. Purely practical, but I've recently started thinking of them as part of a developing look. Hats are tricky. They're one of those areas of life where the chance of coolness is matched by the risk of dildonics.

Anyway, at the corner a big family was waiting for the bus. Mom and Auntie were talking trash while the kids went nuts, and as I came by, one of the little boys, probably seven or eight, planted himself on the sidewalk in front of me, scowling fiercely, knees bent and arms akimbo. (How often do you get a chance to use that word properly? I think this might be my first.)

I ball up my fists, lift my upper lip so my teeth show and my eyes go away, and shuffle toward him, fast, so he's startled but he doesn't have a chance to move.

He looks up at me and I grin at him, give him a thumbs up, and dodge past him respectfully, step off the sidewalk but give him just a little bit of a messin' shove -- I don't send him sprawling, it's just a hey-buddy.

And as I step past him into the crosswalk, he yelled. "Hey! Did you see that man? I want to go with that man! He had a jungle hat!"

Right then, I remembered being a little kid and getting that feeling of running across an adult and wanting to be part of their lives, or to have something of what they had. And I thought about how the boy oaf would respond to the adult me.

I would have had exactly the same response that kid had. I am in cold fact exactly the kind of person who most thrilled me when I was a child. The problems that have been weighing me down would have seemed both pitiable and romantic, more the latter than the former. They certainly wouldn't have provoked any judgment.

And I thought to myself, why don't I get to be the man in the jungle hat? I mean, why don't I get the fun of being one of those people? As I mentioned earlier, there are some areas where your chance of being cool is balanced by the risk of being a dildo, but hey. My chances of conventional dignity, respectability, and success are not just slim, they simply do not exist. It is too late. I am who I am.

I've known this for a while, but it's hard to really embrace yourself when it's obvious that you're an oddball, and self-acceptance means being a little more of a visible freak.

But my problem currently? What's been screwing me up over the last while? It isn't mental illness, and it isn't chronic pain, and it isn't poverty. What is is, is a lack of mojo. And mojo does not thrive in conditions of self-denial.

I needed my mojo back.

So I took steps. Here, courtesy of Nick Mamatas, is a taste of the results, which are still coming in. Nick's post deals with issues relating to the personal side of professional relationships, and should it ever become widely known, its essential decency will represent a threat to his carefully-maintained reputation as Satan incarnate.

If you're interested, next post will carry a big blast of bragging, and some practical techniques for mojo reacquisition.

That picture up there? That damn well looks like a jungle hat to me.

Touched By An Imbecile

2011-07-03T23:35:00.000-07:00

The fun thing about this technique is that it opens up all kinds of color possibilities for the images if I get the chance to do them as large-scale prints.

The missus is visiting her mom, so I decided to take advantage of her absence and indulge myself by pacing through the house in the dark instead of sleeping. (If she was here, she'd make me turn on a light.) Well, I got an idea so brilliant it impressed even me. I swear to God, I'll be able to retire on this one.

I want to do a TV show called Touched By An Imbecile. You'd get a group of regular old idiots -- you know, like the kind at work, or the ones who have a hard time telling you where the C-clamps are? No one so slow that you'd feel bad about making fun of them, but none of them so smart that it's a good idea to let them drive and vote and stuff. The kind of people who 'feel truth in their heart.'

So we'd give them a van, and have them go around the country and show intelligent, well-educated people that their so-called 'smartness' is just something they put on to avoid facing their basic humanity, and that all it does is keep them from seeing the magic in life. Fun and hijinx will naturally ensue.

Then at the end of the season, the van, with the cast in it, will be driven into a crusher. People will be able to bid on-line for the right to trigger the crushing mechanism a little at a time, and they will be given the option of having their name and image flashed to the people inside the van so they know who's killing them.

Most smart people don't have a lot of money, but if we do this we'll get pretty much all of it.

The State Of The Novel

2011-06-16T07:42:00.000-07:00

Been too long since I made an image. This is an early experiment with a new technique. The goal is to get something resolution-independent, so if I get a chance to print these large they'll look good. They need to reproduce via Xerox. And they should depart a little from the photographic look of the last batch. The various components of the image blend more smoothly if things are a little abstract.

The thing about this technique is that the luminance of the image is drawn less from the photo and more from imagination. Next time, I'll start with a neutral gray image and add tones globally from there.

I hate getting up every day, and trying to write, and either producing circular dithers or dreary statements of the obvious. I know I'm retraining my brain after withdrawal from the psychiatric medications, and that confusion is one of the symptoms I'm facing, but it sucks. It really sucks. It is like missing a hand or an eye or something...

That said, on the days when things work, it feels good. I was working on a piece the other day and I felt...

You ever see someone framing a building with one of those overweight hammers that destroy your elbow? Set the nail with one tap, then drive it home with the next, perfectly countersunk, one after another.

When I'm writing right, it feels like driving nails, and a few days ago I turned out a piece that will make readers feel those nails go right into their skulls. Bang, bang, bang.

But I haven't been able to make any progress on the novel in a couple of months. Here's what happened.

I got one bad review session from my Monday night group. I have two writer's groups that I work with, mainly, and on Monday night, the people I work with both write commercial fiction that falls under the broad heading of thriller fiction -- one police procedural, one urban fantasy. As a result, their ideas about the function and importance of plot are quite different from mine.

In this particular critique, there came a point where particular scenes involving leisurely, intimate, low-key character interaction came under fire, and it was suggested that if these scenes were pared to the minimum necessary to serve the plot, the book would have greater appeal to more readers.

And oh, my sisters, and oh, my brothers, when their polished ivory grins parted to release the words, 'more commercial,' it filled my heart with dismay, it smirched my pride. And oh, my aunties, and oh, my uncles, I must confess that in a relatively controlled and low-volume way, I lost my shit.

I believe I may have used the word 'art' in reference to my work. It is possible that I spoke slightingly of commercial aspirations. It may be noted that the modifier 'relatively' renders the rest of the modifiers meaningless, and when I saw the expression on the face of one of my readers, I felt like an abusive father.

And that's where things stopped.

The problem was, this occurred at a particular juncture in the book. It happened exactly at the transition from the first to the second acts. And when I stopped...

Okay. The book is written in first-person, present tense. Stream-of-consciousness. This is an approach that I associate with social realism, memoir, and other forms where the quotidian details are things the writer assumes the reader knows.

But I'm about to introduce a fantasy world that's modeled the way a science fiction world is modeled. I'm about to riff on things like speculative evolution, subjective passage of time, the world as organism, and so on and so forth.

Science fiction and fantasy take heat in some quarters because they retain approaches and techniques that date back to the early days of popular adventure fiction. But these approaches and techniques are not preserved entirely out of ignorance and nostalgia.

In those days, one of the functions of fiction was to act as a travelogue. It was assumed that the reader hadn't seen the settings of the scenes, wasn't familiar with the people, didn't know the lay of the land.

And these techniques are still used for the same purposes in genre fiction. And in previous drafts, I enjoyed a dirty little transgressive thrill by using those techniques in a self-conscious fashion.

But stream-of-consciousness depends on justifying every word as a thought. Which makes those techniques unusable.

You know how in the movies, just as they start crawling across the burning ladder between buildings, someone says to them, 'don't look down?'

You just saw me look down. Listen to my screams doppler into the distance.

Thud.

But the aftereffects of the medication aren't the only problem. I stopped going to school last winter, and the lack of routine, demands for production, and simple human contact are taking a toll on me. I used school as a substitute for work after I was disabled. Now I'm not sure what to do.

Because if all I'm doing is writing, I deflate. I lose interest. There's a certain critical mass of creativity that I hit, and it depends partially on my pathology -- watch me get crazy in the spring and fall! -- but a lot of it has to do with stimulation. There's a connection between writing, the visual arts, and music in my mind and I need them all going if I'm going to have any of them going.

So, with that in mind, I started in on another round of prints for Swill -- see above. And after working on that all day long?

That night I realized that I could use montage and other film techniques, and that while these can be clumsy in past-tense, they actually share a lot of characteristics with stream-of-consciousness, and will transplant neatly.

I also realized that I wasn't being true to my lead character. When he first walks into the alternate world, I just have him blithely go on and observe, when this guy?

He would be observing, and analyzing, and speculating, and coming up with genre-inspired explanations for the situation. This also gives me a chance to do more with imaginary biology, which is one of my favorite subjects.

So that was a couple of days ago, and my attempts at furthering things failed again. So I did the obvious, printed out the manuscript, and read it. It dropped through my brain like mercury through water, smooth, heavy, and fast. Have you ever watched a dog eat something and then be actually startled by the fact that they've finished it all of a sudden? It was like that. Aside from a few visibly bum sentences and some passages that seemed depressingly redundant? I couldn't get a fucking grip on it. I couldn't understand the fucking words.

So I wandered upstairs, and did some preliminary wandering around on the internets before working on another project.

And I saw this. Nick Mamatas is offering bargain editing this week. Won a Stoker for editing, nominated for a Hugo... Not a lightweight. Knows literature as well as genre.

In fact, Nick was the one who convinced me to write this as a straight-up literary piece in the first place.

Well. As I always say, I don't believe in supernatural forces but I do believe in spooks. So I'll be dropping off a copy of the first seventy-nine pages with him tomorrow evening.

This should be interesting.

Finding My Story 4: First Five Memories

2011-06-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

Well, I know I've written on this subject in the past, but I can't track it down anywhere. My memory is that the piece dealt specifically with my first three memories -- further reflection has increased this number to five. They would be from the ages of two through three.

Please remember that by this point, I'd been conversing at an adult level for some time. My level of thought, while not mature, was not really that of a child -- or, rather, it was that of a very strange child. Writing them down, this time, what strikes me is the sense of judgment and decision. These are the times when I made up my mind.

1.) My first memory is of a simple moment. My mother and I are walking hand-in-hand down a steeply-sloped city street. A story has a sign projecting from it, and years later I will recognize the image it bore as the 7-Up logo. Little legs, steep hill. San Francisco.

2.) I do not know for sure, but my memory of the light -- clear, mild, steely-gray -- makes me think this took place in San Francisco as well. We're in a large public space, a square paved with concrete, my mother, father, brother, and I, and I've found something. I don't know if it was a sculpture or a climbing structure, but at that age all structures are climbing structures.

So I split off on my own to go climbing, and when I'm hanging by my knees I slip and hit my head on the ground. The pain shocks me to tears, and I cry out, "Mommy! Daddy!" and they come running.

But the minute the words leave my mouth the whole situation seems ridiculous, fraudulent. I have never called my parents 'mommy' and 'daddy'; that's for babies. I call them Mom and Dad.

Why did I call them Mommy and Daddy? Because I was hurt and scared. But why call them? They can't do anything about a bumped head. It's been bumped, and there's nothing to do but wait for things to get better.

Before my parents reach me, I've promised myself never to call them Mommy and Daddy again.

I never did.

3.) I am lying in my bed at night. My brother sleeps in the next bed over. Between us is a banner; on his side a lion, on mine a wooden soldier. I hated that soldier. He was not on the same side I was. I wanted the lion.

I have to pee. I'm scared to get up and walk through the dark, and the sense I have is that the dark has scared me badly for a long time. (To be honest? I still get fears in the dark, and I kind of like them.) I make the conscious decision not to get up. I pee.

And years later when I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I recognized Joyce's description of wetting the bed as one drawn from experience. Just as he said, it is warm, and then it is cold.

As the urine cooled, I realized that wetting the bed simply wasn't an option. I felt angry with myself. I felt like a fool.

I would never do it again.

4.) That took place in our house in Richmond, where we'd moved from San Francisco. It was located so as to maximize convenience for my mother's mother -- it was near her work, it was on the same block as a Christian Science church, and it was a two-story house with upstairs and downstairs apartments. We were on the top floor, my Grandma Jean on the ground floor.

Thinking about that situation now, thinking about the difficulties between my grandmother and my mother? That must have been pretty brutal for all parties...

Anyway, because of the nature of the times and the cast of characters involved, I went to Sunday School on my own. Part of me is thinking, "Hey, it was literally two doors down, and we aren't talking about a normal kid, we're talking about me." But still -- letting a three-year-old walk to church on his own does sound a little crazy to me.

The memory in this case is of a nice sunny morning. I'm dressed in my church clothes, a charcoal-gray suit with short pants held up by suspenders.

Walking through the parking lot, I am contemplating the questions I have asked -- "What do you mean, God is Love? But if we're perfect reflections of a perfect principle, then how can we be capable of mortal error?"

(Okay, maybe it wasn't crazy to send me to church on my own. Maybe it would have been crazier to have to field these questions from a three-year-old.)

Their answers were the vague, poorly-reasoned horseshit you always get when you ask those questions, and they did not satisfy me, and as I walked home it hit me that those answers would not satisfy anyone who really wanted satisfaction, and that they never would. That the people in the church did not have the answers, and going to them for information was nuts.

I was not obligated to believe them, and there was no point in trying to get them to make sense. I did not have to do that. All I had to do was give them a quarter a week until I was old enough to stop going to church.

I can't tell you the sense of relief this gave me. The horrible weight of all that God nonsense, that 'You killed Jesus' crap, just evaporated. The fallibility of adults was a source of great comfort as long as I knew I was right and they were wrong.

5.) At that same house, I saw a cousin of mine attacked by our dog. I know she reads this blog, and I'm not sure how or even if she remembers this -- she's a bit younger than I am, and she wouldn't have been much more than a toddler when it happened. I'll be a little less colorful in my expressions here, because of this.

I was with our dog on our back porch. My cousin brought out a styrofoam tray with uncooked bones on it. (I now wonder what they were doing in the kitchen.) She teased the dog with the bones, and the dog bit her face. I called for help, and adults quickly came. Reconstructive surgery was required, and the dog had to be put down.

My emotional reaction to this was a curious one. I was both angry with and worried about my cousin, I knew this meant the dog I loved was going to be killed, I thought this might mean my cousin would die. My main response was a sense of shock and resentment at the poor judgment of my cousin. It dawns on me that I was three, which would have made her two or so. And I really, honestly felt that anyone who'd do something as stupid as that deserved what happened to them. I mean, she's two. She should know better!

Now that I think about it, at three Libertarianism would have made a lot of sense to me.

Next up? One of the real elephants in the room. My sorely-missed brother, Duncan Dead.

Lack of Enterprise

2011-05-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

So today I let myself get sucked into this thing over on Amy's blog, and then I sent her my critical pieces on Star Wars and so on, and then this evening?

I got to finish the job. The missus and I just sat down to try watching Star Trek: The New Generation.

I like it when we have a TV show to watch. It's kind of a drag, but it's still time spent together. I'll watch some fairly dubious crap for the privilege of sharing a couch with her.

So we sat down to the first episode of Star Trek: The New Generation, and I didn't last a full ten minutes. Here's how it went, dialog slightly paraphrased:

Q: You are fighty guys and I do not like you. Get the fuck out of here.

Captain Picard: Aw, dude! No way!

Me: Jesus, this dialog is fucking awful.

The Missus: Shhh!

Q: Blah blah blah blah 'your fellow comrade' blah blah blah.

Me: Holy shit! Fellow comrade? They paid someone for both those words at the same time?

The Missus: Shhh!

Q: You know what your problem is? You fight on Christmas and you fight on your birthday and when you get up in the morning you pack a lunch so you can fight until dinner. That's what your problem is.

Captain Picard: No, we are not either fighty guys and that is not the problem at all. You know what the problem is? Space dildos. Space dildos like you.

Me: Bwahahahahahahah!

The Missus: Leave. Now.

So here you go. My critical position on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I'm not allowed to watch it because I don't like it the right way.

Finding My Story 3: Toilet-Training Pterodactyls

2011-05-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

Reading yesterday's post, thinking about Mom, one of the things that strikes me is the weight of disapproval she dealt with her entire life. Looking at things that way, it's a familiar dynamic. I was always conscious of the people who were basically members of her fan club, but she must have felt some of the judgment directed at her.

But she did the best she could, kept progressing and growing throughout her life, tried as hard as she could to adhere to her own moral code even at personal cost. Her self-indulgence was obvious, but her self-discipline was not. She didn't care to advertise that part of herself, at least not to me. Just did her own thing her own way, head down and quietly plowing forward.

There's at least one specific trait I got from her. It's something I admire in others and resent and regret in myself -- the inability to live by rules contrary to one's own. It's a condition that occasionally requires sacrifice and effort. In my case, I think part of it comes from social confusion, part of it comes from self-will. Looking at my parents and siblings, I ain't the only one. It started early, the night Dad found a pterodactyl on the toilet.

(This story was told to me several times by both parents. "We thought it was normal.")

So they're starting to get an idea how pterodactyls reproduced... you aren't familiar with the questions around pterodactyl reproduction? Okay, quick version.

Pterodactyls were the first group of flying vertebrate animals we know of. They're regarded as archosaurs, which makes them close relatives of both crocodilians and dinosaurs. And right now, they seem to have reproduced in a very different fashion than birds.

The pattern in birds is nest-building, parental care, etc. However, birds vary widely in the amount of care they need as infants. In pterodactyls, there's currently speculation that they laid eggs with leathery shells in moist, hidden spots, and left them to hatch on their own. The hatchlings emerged ready to hunt and fly right from the eggshell. Independent.

After bringing me home, my parents settled into a routine where they'd put me in a crib in the living room at night and then go sleep in their bedroom.

This worked well. They were usually able to sleep through the night. But by the time I was a few months old -- I wish I had a number -- the pattern had settled into something a little different.

Rather than finding me in my crib at night, they'd get up and find my empty diaper in the crib, and my naked froggy body underneath the crib. It would have been summer by now, so I can see how they might be casual about this.

"They really are little monkeys," my mother would have said. "He can climb before he can crawl. How fascinating!"

"I can't believe he holds it in all night," Dad would have said. "That diaper is dry, and so is the floor. This is indeed a mystery."

One night he got up to pee. I imagine he was still a little groggy from the night before, possibly a little hungover. Shuffles through the dark, not wanting to move too precipitously. Opens the bathroom door, and feels the cold hand of the uncanny settle on his heart.

Something white and bony crouches, arms and legs sprawled over the toilet seat. It lifts its head, meets his gaze with expressionless black slits and croaks irritably.

He screams.

It's me. His little pterodactyl.

Finding My Story 2: The Getaway

2011-05-17T09:22:00.000-07:00

When I was in elementary school, sometime early on I noticed my parents celebrating their anniversary. By then I was able to add two and two, so I did a little subtraction and found the evidence supported the notion that I was conceived three or four months out of wedlock. (That makes me just a bit of a bastard.)

When I was born, my mother was twenty and my father was nineteen. Trying to imagine the situation, looking at the timing -- I don't know, and I probably will not ask, but I would be willing to place a five-dollar bet that my mother figured out what was going on and then clamped down and held onto the secret for at least a couple of months, maybe more. And during that time, she kept on doing her thing, which was smoking and drinking.

I mentioned that my mother's mother, my Grandma Jean, was a very proper woman. My mother? From an entirely different planet. Virtually no basis for mutual understanding.

In her early years, my mother was raised by an amma in the Philippines, and she spoke Tagalog before she spoke English. When I first saw Lynda Barry's drawings of her Philippine grandmother, she squatted and smoked exactly the way my mother squatted and smoked. Exactly.

(This introduces the question of what my Grandma Jean did to occupy her time in the post-war Philippines. Given the shadiness of the whole situation, I find myself curious.)

My mother began smoking and drinking heavily in her early teens and continued until the end of her life in her early sixties. When I was a child, she loved to tell me how she started drinking early by convincing her mother that ale was a non-alcoholic beverage, so she was allowed to brew for herself and her friends.

Mom was the center of her social group. That was her natural role -- wherever she was, her people would gather. And if she picked up and moved to a new place? She'd quickly gather a new group of friends. In her presence, lively, funny, intelligent conversation sprang up naturally. You read about pub culture from time to time? Mom was pub culture.

She was also tiny -- never topped a hundred pounds unless she was pregnant. Nervous as a terrier. Vomited more than anyone I've ever known -- you actually had to watch your speech around her if you didn't want to cause an incident. A compulsive reader, her particular vice being mysteries, the endless round of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout. She was also wanted to be a writer and was a very promising artist who was badly hampered by self-doubt.

You know the Elwood Dowd character from Harvey? "I used to be very, very clever, but now I'm very, very nice?" If Dorothy Parker went through a similar transmutation you might have something like my mom. Everybody loved her. She was smart, and she was funny, and she was nice, and she was drunk.

She was terrified of her mother. The Grandma Jean that had always been so good to me was the same woman who more or less drove my mother to drink by the time she was thirteen. Grandma Jean had a cold side that I could only detect by its effect on others, and whatever was wrong between them in the first place could not have been helped by the fact that my mother was a rabid party animal with four-wheel drive.

What was my mother doing at that point in her life? She was out of high school, and I don't think she tried college until some time later. I wonder if she was just living at home.

So I imagine my mother getting pregnant, and holding onto the secret, staying there in a state of indecision, still relishing the fact that she's the only one who knows, one eye on the clock, the other on the calender, smoke in one hand and beer in the other...

From what I can piece together, my father came into Mom's social scene from the outside, after everyone else knew each other for years, just sort of swooped in and there they were.

Dad's a big, good-looking guy. Handsome enough to irritate at times -- we've been mistaken for brothers more than once. He's a writer and political animal, and helped found the National Association of Letter Carriers. I'd like to note that he's a different man now than he was then. Quit drinking and smoking, generally put himself together. We're very close these days and spend time together regularly.

But back then he was a scared kid working on his own drinking problem. His mother had remarried, and he didn't get along with his stepfather.

So one fine night, my parents -- and I may well ask Dad about this -- sat down to discuss their situation, and make some concrete plans for the future.

And then they fled the state, telling no-one where or why. Hit the ground running. For a while they traveled with a con-man, a story I regularly pressure the old man to write.

While working on this, I had a flash of inspiration and looked to see if there were any recorded effects on a fetus if the mother experiences stress or anxiety during pregnancy.

It turns out that there are particular stages of development when a mother's stress can cause very specific types of impairment. And that mother's moods have been documented as expressing themselves in their unborn children. And that cortisol, a stress hormone that's particularly significant in the development of PTSD, travels through the placenta.

When I was a kid, Mom stated to me repeatedly and directly that she never smoked or drank while pregnant. I never asked, but she told me. Spontaneous denial is pretty much the effective equivalent of confession, and that is how this one payed out.

When I recently spoke to psychiatrists, Dad manned up and suggested that I get checked for fetal alcohol syndrome. The diagnosis was positive.

(This, incidentally, explained one of the great race identity mixups of my life. See, black people -- not African Americans, I'm including folks from Africa and the Caribbean -- tend to assume I'm Asian when we meet. It is not like a subtle thing and it's happened since childhood. Over and over again.

"Excuse me, I don't mean to be personal, but are you part Japanese?" was the most graceful phrasing. "Hey, rice boy! Hey, rice boy! Hey, rice boy, I'm talking to you! Oh, I'm sorry, white boy. I thought you was a rice boy," the most abject. Got a gray fucking beard and she called me boy.

And my brother and sister would speculate on my paternity with seeming seriousness -- there were candidates. Now, the resemblance to my father is unmistakable.)

You don't give someone fetal alcohol syndrome by having a stray beer here and a glass of fucking wine there. Mom got hammered, and I got hammered right along with her. And I'll bet anything the wee fishy proto-oaf found it a fucking relief.

Let me be straight here. I am not blaming Mom. If I was a pregnant teenage alcoholic sitting in my room and then fleeing my family across the country? I would not do that shit sober. It just wouldn't be sensible.

Anyway, Mom and Dad went from Richmond, California, to Ceder Rapids, Iowa, to have me. Didn't let anyone in the family know until the day I was born.

When I was a kid, Mom would tell me that they were so poor that for the week before I was born, all she could eat was ice chips. This is plausible. But I also recently read that a small mother having a large baby would sometimes be starved before delivery in order to reduce the birth weight of the child.

And so we have a picture of the nature of my gestation. I will set aside my sympathies for the other parties involved, as this is my story. I began life whiplashed between anxiety and drunkenness, and at the end of my term was starved into diminution. I entered the world already loaded with both genetic and developmental baggage, and the world I entered into was an Iowa February.

When I was hanging out with Mom in my late teens and we were both drunk, my will snapped and I opened my big fat mouth. "Mom, why on Earth didn't you have me aborted? I mean, what were you thinking?"

She looked at me with that monkey smile of hers, eyes gentle and sad, rocked on her heels and blew smoke from her nostrils. "Seany, I needed someone to talk to."

Finding My Story 1: Ghosts Are Gaps Shaped Like Grandfathers

2011-05-16T12:36:00.000-07:00

This is my impression.

On both sides of my family, the bulk of my ancestry immigrated from Britain during the early colonial period. On my father's side, many of them were Quakers, and participated in things like the Underground Railroad and protests for the rights of Native Americans and so on, and refused to fight in wars and so forth. I know less about my mother's side of the family, but was told that there were connections to both Meriwether Lewis and Thomas Jefferson.

Mostly, they were small farmers. My father was raised on a farm, and my mother's mother was raised on a farm, and it's small farms all the way back so far as I know.

My mother and father both came from single-parent homes.

My mother's family moved to the Philippines immediately after World War II, and it was there that my maternal grandfather vanished from sight. When I lived with my grandmother in my early twenties, every time I drank, she would tell me about how he died. Every time the story involved alcohol, and every time it was different. The degree of departure from reality this indicated was my first sign that my grandmother might be as crazy as I.

My maternal grandmother, my Grandma Jean, was very close to me. She was the one person in my childhood who provided me with a safe place and a sense of being cared for. She was a brilliant woman, a flapper-era UC Berkeley graduate with a career as a children's librarian that was publicly recognized by everybody's favorite president, Lyndon Johnson.

She was a world traveler, amateur photographer and natural scientist, and full-blown religious lunatic who habitually engaged in meditative practices for twelve to fourteen hours a day, no fooling. She slept four hours a night, and when she wasn't specifically doing something else, it was Christian Science. She was proper, correct, the kind of person who concerned herself with how forks were being held and whether infinitives were being split.

It is important to note that as generous and loving as Grandma Jean was to me, she had a basically adversarial relationship with my mother, which I was never closely involved in.

It was at the family get-together following her death that I heard an alternative version of reality. Supposedly, my grandfather actually become a wet-brained alcoholic while in the Philippines, and my grandmother smuggled him back to the US after claiming he died in order to claim his pension from the merchant marines. She stashed him in a St. Vincent de Paul up in Oregon under a false name and visited him yearly until he died.

I've also been told that a man who worked as an MP in the South Pacific during and after WWII once looked at a picture of my grandfather standing next to his best friend. He pointed at the friend and said, "That son of a bitch was the biggest diamond smuggler in Asia."

My father's father I know a little more about. He was a kind, gentle man with an intimate contact with nature who unfortunately would occasionally get naked on the bus and claim to be Jesus, which made him a disgrace in his small, religious community. After he began self-medicating with alcohol, my maternal grandmother had him institutionalized, where he eventually died. I spent my childhood believing that he had hurled himself from a high place -- the mental image was always a metal mesh catwalk, a man in shackles, a look of resignation as he jerks out of the hands of the guards -- but my father has since told me that he died of a heart failure, partially as a result of overeating in response to his situation.

Like my maternal grandmother, my Grandma Knight is a very religious woman, though in a much more restrained fashion. (By which I mean to say, she's religiously observant, not nuts.) She's a conservative woman with a strong personality. After my grandfather was institutionalized she provided for her family for a number of years during the fifties and sixties, I believe working at a meat packing plant. Again, remember that this was a small rural community, and reputation counted for a lot. Or so I imagine...

Neither of my grandfathers was spoken of when I was a child, and they fascinated me. In some ways, I don't quite seem like anyone else in my family, and I always imagined that my grandfathers the missing parts of the puzzle. I had to piece together my images of them from overheard conversations and dropped remarks and hesitantly answered questions and piles and piles of outright lies. But I wound up imagining that I was somehow a cross between them, that the mystic of the woods and the seafaring soldier-of-fortune combined to make me.

I don't know their names. I never knew their names.

There are things I'll never know, but I do know this much --

Until now it never struck me that if the revisionist version of my Grandma Jean's story is true, they both ended their lives in a virtually identical fashion. There may be something to this coherent narrative stuff, but it's already getting kind of creepy, isn't it?

Finding My Story: An Explanation

2011-05-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

It’s always interesting when two obsessions find a point of intersection. My long-running fascination with the idea that story and narrative have neurological basis, and are biologically inherent in human beings, and my recent research into the emerging sciences of the mind as applied to personal development and therapy hit an interesting nexus last week.

I suffer from a mosaic of mental illnesses ranging from fetal alcohol syndrome to OCD, and bipolar, but the big boy most of the year is post-traumatic stress syndrome. (During late winter and early spring, depression takes the lead, but that’s another subject.) No doubt further inspection would reveal more details – but the thing is, is that under the right circumstances, I function at a high level. It represents a quandary.

Since I’m close to the bottom of the income level, I’m not in a position to pay for the intensive therapy and/or medication that my situation seems to require. So I’m investigating my alternatives.

This is one of the alternatives.

It seems that a healthy individual has what is referred to as a coherent personal narrative. They have a clear sense of who they are and where they came from. My sense of self is fragmented and easily subject to disruption. In people with PTSD, this lack of narrative, of self-story, is symptomatic.

This next statement has not been demonstrated, and may be proven false. But my informed intuition tells me that story has a specific type of neurological effect. When someone is engaged with a story, specific areas of their brain are also engaged.

And given the hierarchy of the nervous system, it seems reasonable to propose that there is a feedback system engaged, where the language centers interpreting the words send their meanings to the parts of the brain involved in sensory perception, in recalled memory, in emotion – that when one engages in a story, one’s brain and mind become active and integrated, and this neurological activity is the real reward of narrative.

To have a story of your own, a sense of who you are and where you came from, a sense of place and purpose. These are complex neurological events, and they can be impaired. And repaired.

People who know me, know I have stories. But what’s the big story? I do not know, and life has put me in a position where the future is both thoroughly unpredictable and oddly optimistic.

I’ve approached writing about my life over and over again, rarely with success. The stuff I’ve done that’s cut closest to the truth has gotten me a consistent response from readers – this is your best stuff, but you need to do a lot of work on it.

So it goes in the trunk…

I’ve also resisted writing directly about my life because I don’t want to come off as engaging in race-baiting, family-directed guilt-mongering, insufferable complaining, claiming status as a victim or martyr, etc, etc, etc.

This is different. I am not in a position to pay a therapist to extract and interpret my narrative for me. But I can try and create the narrative myself. So that’s what I’m going to do. I am going to try and put down the Story of Sean. (See, even using the name ‘Sean’ seems weird to me. I don’t Sean-identify.) If I perceive my story as representing a danger to my reputation or the public well-being, hey. It’s me or you at this point.

Here are the rules. First off, these posts will not feature art. That would represent an additional level of effort that might keep me from continuing if I hit a rough patch. And this will also serve as a warning to those who prefer to avoid vicarious trauma.

Since this is supposed to be a story, I’m delivering it in rough chronological order. There will be a bit of leaping about if I run across a juicy running theme. If it makes since to say, “This happened in kindergarten, and then something like it in fourth grade and when I was twenty,” then I’ll do that – but for the most part, I intend a steady forward plod.

Next, this is a coherent personal narrative, not a literal documentation of the truth. I will stick as closely as possible to the truth, but I will also include tall tales, lies, and misconceptions, clearly labeled as such. These things also play a role in a personal mythology, and that is what I am creating here. One of the reasons I’ve been resistant to this notion in the past has been my sense of dedication to verifiable truth. Unfortunately, the most important stories of all, the stories of our lives, are composed of the flimsiest of materials – memories and other lies.

But this is what you work with. Recognizing it as a mythology helps me live with this.

In addition, there will be whatever asides as seem necessary to provide context.

My approach to these will be as casual as possible, but I am a writer, and I will be keeping an eye on the possibility that these posts may turn out to be the first draft of a finished work. That said, the novel comes first, and I can’t devote the energy to this that a serious project demands. But a casual approach may generate good results – not too much filter.

I’m putting this out on my blog for a number of reasons. One, is that I’m going into a profession that makes me a semi-public personality. Well, this internet crap is like training wheels for celebrity. As someone with terrible boundaries, it’s not a bad idea to mark them clearly. The other is that this is a format where I’ve established a currently-interrupted habit of productivity.

We’ll see how far I get. It’s an intimidating project, making sense of a life.

Especially a life like this.

Hela Thor or Waiting For The Great Pumpkin

2011-05-10T16:18:00.000-07:00

So the old man has a taste for movies with swordplay and gleaming armor and so on -- we wind up seeing things like Beowulf and 300 and Clash of the Titans, so it's just a matter of time before I wind up at a Tom of Finland retrospective with my father. That will not be a proud day.

Anyway.

He took my sister, my nieces, and I to see Thor, and we all loved it. We sat down, tipped our heads back, and laughed like a pack of fucking hyenas. I haven't laughed out loud at a non-comedy in some time. It's a good thing the people who made the movie weren't there. They would have hated us.

It's hard to say exactly what it was that infused this meatheaded pec-fest with the comic spirit, but it seems to arise from the details. They went to the trouble to really pay attention to the little things, and get every single possible detail wrong. For instance, the Celtic knotwork on Mjolnir, or Thor's... can it even be called an accent?

I once knew a woman for two years before I worked up the nerve to ask about her accent. It turns out she was Scottish, but had spent a long time in Denmark. Thor's accent was kind of like that, but more Dutch, somehow. In the liquor store on Dwight, they have Grape flavored blunts, but they also have Purple flavored blunts. Thor's accent is an accent the way Purple is a flavor. It's confusing in a way that makes you want to accuse someone of racism, but you don't know who or why.

That's why it's a good thing that Asian-American Viking and African-American Viking were around, because if it weren't for them? Asgard would have seemed kind of Eurotrashy.

Speaking of which, the plodding ugliness of the design was fucking relentless. Hope you like masses of gold. They got plenty. Pretty much everything's gold, except for Bifrost, the rainbow bridge, which emanated distinct Pottery Barn vibes, despite the steampunk raygun grafted to its front end.

(I'm not clear on how that worked. People got shot through the raygun or some damned thing. It was too stupid to bother understanding.)

Early in the movie, they had a scene where Thor pitches a hissy-fit and tips over some tables at a banquet, and all these pumpkins roll off the tables and down the golden steps. Spoiler Alert! You know how deluxe things are in Asgard? They got orange pumpkins -- and white ones too!

"Oh, Mighty Thor -- y'all eat those things, or are they just there for decoration?"

I figured, eat them for sure. They're gods. They could chew up pumpkins easy. Hell, they could probably eat plywood if they wanted. So basically I spent the whole movie waiting for the scene where Asian-American Viking turns to African-American Viking and asks, "Could you pass me a pumpkin?" and African-American Viking says, "Sure, you want orange or white?"

Ka-runch. Nonch. Nonchnonchnonch. That's some good pumpkin.

Now if I were to offer a genuine critique, I'd say something about how Thor's story here is based on a twenty-first century revamp of the character that eliminated the dramatic elements connecting him to the real world, and how the lack of grounding makes it impossible...

Oh, come on. If this were a real critique, I'd have brought up Kenneth Branagh's earlier films, and then staggered around the room, colliding off the furniture while clutching my scalp and screaming, "What the fuck? What the fuck?"

And that gives a bad impression.

Look, it's a crappy movie. When you spend this much money on a film and you can't even make it fucking look pretty, it's a sad state of affairs, and when a genuine talent is presiding over the shambles, it's sad enough to start seeming funny.

And then I remember the pumpkins, and I have to admit, it was a terrible movie and I loved it.

Loco Motion

2011-04-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

None dare call him Hoverbutt.

So, I haven't filled you in on Laszlo the dog in quite some time. He's now a thoroughly established member of the household, and I have to say it's a relief to have a thoroughly non-neurotic component in the social machine.

And here's the thing. He's my dog. Not a matter of ownership; he's my dog the way the missus is my spouse, or the Hon. Richard Talleywhacker is my guitarist. It's a mutual relationship, mutually agreed upon.

This is kind of a big thing for me. While I'm an animal person, I never really had a dog that was my dog until I moved in with the missus, and her Shar Pei bonded with me. Not to go into the sad details, but the poor dog wound up getting weird around children, so we had to put her to sleep. It wasn't easy on me, and since then I've had a bit of an emotional barrier between me and the household pets. Never thought of them as mine; I loved them, cared for them, but there was a distinct degree of reserve.

But Laszlo won me over. The simple joy he takes in my presence is something I can't help but return. I suffer greatly from anxiety at night, and I cannot express the comfort I feel when I'm laying there in the dark and I feel him stretch out against me or rest his head on my leg. I think of the first day I met him, how I turned around and saw him staring up at me like he was making a wish. I can't help but think that his wish came true.

It makes me feel good.

And like me, he has a tendency toward inadvertent physical comedy. It isn't simply awkwardness -- that lacks the touch of poetry that lifts ridiculous moments into the realm of the sublime. Rather, there is a combination of desperate, frenzied energy and a calm, joyful confidence in his athleticism that is frequently seriously misplaced.

As a long-bodied dog, his specialty is an arching leap that reminds me irresistibly of a dolphin. Shame about the landings, which typically involve the kind of crumpling that makes me fear for his long-term spinal health.

Usually I get to see these when he's getting ready to crash on our bed. His freedom of motion is limited, based on Roxie the terrier's growling territoriality, and the human reluctance to have certain body parts trod upon.

So Laszlo will pick his spot -- usually the lower right-hand corner -- and launch himself in a lovely gravitational curve that ends in a sprawling thump, rapidly followed by scratching, slurping, and snoring. "Sweetie! Watch how he springs into inactivity!"

But the other day he came up with something brand new. I think he may have been the first animal to ever make use of this particular type of locomotion. Science fiction writers, take note. Imagine a world where all animals move about in this fashion.

He and the missus were working on the concept of sit, and he had a conceptual breakthrough. You could see the light bulb over his hairy little cranium. The word, the act -- he was thrilled to sit. (I am not being patronizing. The missus and I are terrible at training the dogs, and they deserve all credit for any breakthroughs.)

Anyway.

So thrilled he was that his hindquarters rose an inch off the ground out of sheer joy. He forced them down again -- which compelled them to rise in response to his triumph. But Laszlo is a good dog, and his will to do right would not be defeated by a happy rear end. Down.

Up.

Down.

Up.
Down.
Up.
Down. Up.
Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down.Up.Down.Up.Down.Updownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownupdownup...

And he lifted. He rose like a fart-powered hovercraft, fidgeting to such a degree as to render himself frictionless on the hardwood floor, and began to skitter about, slowly rotating as he careened off the furniture and finally drifted out of sight into the bedroom. Have you ever played air hockey? He moved the way an air-hockey puck moves.

The missus was almost paralyzed with laughter, but she was still able to clap her hands and holler. "Laszlo! Here! Sit!"

Laszlo shot out of the bedroom, scrambled frantically to make the turn, hit full speed on the straightaway, then sat down when he was six feet away from the missus.

He slid those last two yards in the sitting position and came to a rest at her feet, gazing up lovingly, tail wagging. It was nicely done.

More then that, it did a damned good job of reestablishing his credibility. After that, most dogs would have wound up being labeled 'Hoverbutt' for the rest of their lives, but not Laszlo. It's been a couple of days and the name hasn't come up once. His dignity may not be all-encompassing or of the greatest magnitude, but it can take a good bit of battering and come out intact. Even enhanced.

And let's face it. The typical sit session is about the human telling the dog what to do. That was not the story here.

I'm not sure what it is this dog has, but I hope it rubs off.

First Hubris Of The Spring

2011-04-19T08:10:00.001-07:00

Her great complaint is my negativity,
but see how she reacts to a little optimism:

The Oaf: I just had a horrible realization.

The Missus: Well, stop it.

The Oaf: You know my ringer thing?

The Missus: Ringer thing?

The Oaf: I sit up in my room and work on my shit and feel lame and useless, and then when I feel ready I take it out to a classroom or a workshop and--

The Missus: -- you're a ringer.

The Oaf: The last class I took, the teacher actually used the word ringer, right there in front of God and everyone.

The Missus: Well, yeah.

The Oaf: Well, I'm feeling pretty good about the novel. I'm feeling ready.

The Missus: ........................ you, you ................YOU. ......................... You can't......... There aren't...... Who says.... There aren't standards!

The Oaf: There are.

The Missus: You can't be a ringer with a novel!

The Oaf: Just watch me.

Mystery Factor P

2011-04-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

Some months ago, the recliner that's at the heart of my work station broke. I was sitting up, there was a *snap* and a tiny piece of metal flew clicked against the bookshelf, and the chair froze in place, in-between a reclining and a sitting position.

When I purchased the recliner, I did so on the basis of the way it felt. It's the only piece of furniture that's ever fit me. I'm big, my body is a bit odd, and I don't really fit anywhere. Except in this recliner, which is exactly right. It's the only piece of furniture in the house that isn't bad for me.

But since it's broken, I've had to spend my writing time in a position that's been screwing up my neck, and I've had to spend too much time laying down in bed and on the couch so my low back has been screwed up as well.

And this is one of the reasons why my back went out on me when I was sitting in waiting rooms to get psycho pills.

Anyway.

The reason it took so long to get my recliner repaired is that the parts had to come from Norway, and I think they took the long way round. But now my work station is functional again.

And last night I lay in bed and thought about how strange it was not to hear my neck making horrible deafening cracks transmitted straight through the cerebrospinal fluid, and not to have shooting pains in my low back and right hip and thigh. It gave me a peculiar warm sense of well-being.

Then it struck me.

I do not like to bitch about my chronic pain because if I were to start, I might like it so much that I couldn't stop. I do not even bitch to myself about it most of the time. So I ignore the pain.

But to tell the truth, it's a major factor in my life. Weekends hurt more because I sit down when I play music on Friday evenings, and I ride in the car with the missus on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I recover over the week, especially if I get chances to take walks. If I fetch groceries from the store, or get a couple of books from the library? More pain.

And it all adds up. It's like money, and I'm always in debt. And if I get too far into the red?

I have to lay down. When my back first went out, I was in bed for more than a year. Went down to a hundred and forty, hundred and forty-five pounds, which at six-three made me a nasty spectacle. This is one of the reasons I did not love the movie Seven. Shit got a little real for me.

What's really interesting is that my resistance to the pain is very much a matter of will -- and as a result, when my will weakens, my perceived levels of pain increase.

What I wonder now is whether or not increased levels of pain can increase my stress levels even if I'm able to shrug them off and keep functioning. I know my pain levels have been bad for a while now...

And that has me thinking that I need to take better care of my back, and investigate getting a cortisone shot, see if that helps.

The missus -- and for that matter, all the public health people I spoke to -- asked, "What's different? Why are you having a crisis now?"

Part of it is pain, and that may be more important than I've previously considered. I mean, don't get me wrong, my chronic pain is not a tragedy. Lots of people have it worse than I do. Most of the time I don't even notice it, really. I actually have to go to an effort to recognize it if I'm doing well.

But I can't tell you how good it feels to have my work station functioning again.

What was it the Romans said? Mens something... A twisted mind in a fucked-up body? And a decent chair to hold the whole mess in one place.

The Zappa Test And Stream-Of-Consciousness

2011-04-14T08:54:00.000-07:00

There's never going to be a good excuse for Larry-hair Yoda, so here he is anyway.

The novel is back in play, finally, and the word from some of my long-term readers is that I'm working at my best. The current draft is written at distinctly higher level than any of my previous fiction. Part of my recent non-productivity has actually been due to the mental effort of improving my work. Sometimes you just need to lay around and obsessively dwell on the details. Figuring out how every event in the story fits into the background I've developed took a lot of thought, but I think the end results will pay off.

But the real reasons for the improvement lie in two areas. One is that I finally understand the basic story structure -- it's a pair of intertwined narratives, one dealing with a haunting, the other with quest fantasy in a bizarre otherworld. Each of these forces the protagonist into further contact with the other, until both intersect at the climax.

And once I really understood the shape of the story and the rules and reasons of the fantasy element, all of a sudden it became work to keep a lot of important characters and scenes in the novel.

So I took them out.

I wrote the living hell out of that shit, polished it for years, and as soon as I realized those characters and scenes did not serve the story they started to irritate me. To bore me.

So out they went. Because they failed the Zappa test. If you listen to too much Frank Zappa, you start realizing that his big complaints about the human race is that they waste your time and they fail to convey. I do not want the Vaprous Non-Existent Shade of Zappa making snotty remarks about my work, so that shit had to go.

It's like I cleaned a bunch of barnacles off the hull.

I also made a fairly major discovery. This is one of the big secrets, and frankly someone should have told me about this a long fucking time ago. There's an odd buzz around first-person present-tense. This particular mode is strongly associated with literary fiction, and I've always wondered why.

It's because it's the tense of stream-of-consciousness writing. This is my first extended effort at stream-of-consciousness, and boy, has it been a motherfucker. It turns out that I had been unconsciously engaged in an internal criticism of a certain type of conventional fictional language, and this brought it to the surface.

This is the language that is used by a storyteller addressing an audience. Once upon a time, and then, meanwhile, so they, the end. These are just the tip of the iceberg. My suspicion is that they originate in oral storytelling.

But in a printed narrative, they are either an artfully used affectation or a sort of tic serving no useful function. Instead, they not only waste time, they give the reader a dig in the ribs so they don't forget that this is a story.

When you work in stream-of-consciousness, you are forced to consider every word you put down as a thought. The end result is that the reader is presented with something resembling a found object that must be interpreted. Because of this, conventional narrative language sticks out as artificial and corny. Lame.

That doesn't mean that stream-of-consciousness is closer to reality than a conventionally-told story. Rather, it operates at a more sophisticated level of artifice, and makes a more sophisticated set of demands. Small details become crucial, and a careless or hasty reader will lose out big time.

This essential approach is not restricted to stream-of-consciousness, and I've been moving toward it in my fiction for some time now. But stream-of-consciousness laid it out for me, made it obvious.

Why didn't someone tell me about this?

Hand Scrawls 'O.K.'

2011-03-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

There's some great art out at the Albany Bulb these days, but it's a shame to see the ruins of those great paintings by Sniff.

They were sort of Bosch does Bukowski, with a circus theme, and I think they were executed in house paint. These days the panels they're painted have graffiti all over them, just tags and not even good ones. Oh, well.

I recently received a message on Facebook from a cousin of mine expressing some concern that I haven't been posting. It struck me that there might be a few other folks out there who might want to know what's going on.

First off, I'm doing much better. "I can tell just by the pitch of your voice," my dad said. "When you're feeling okay it drops an octave." The missus is quite relieved. It turns out that she was considering taking me to the hospital while I was detoxing from the meds. Oh, that would have been interesting.

I've established a pattern of sleeping that, while not optimum, is functional and seems fairly stable. And last night I slept right through for the first time since the anti-psychotics.

I'm mostly over the meds, thankfully, but there are some lingering difficulties concentrating, a few weird little intimate issues I'm not particularly enjoying... Ugh.

The difficulty in concentration is the main reason I haven't been posting. Writing is thought made concrete, and my thoughts have been variously flustered and bedraggled. It's been kind of like walking through a flock of muddy pigeons with an open mouth, and that metaphor may serve as an example of my recent writing.

But I have been doing some good writing as well. The novel is progressing, but it's going at a horrible creeping pace. And my decision to keep it out of my writer's groups is starting to feel weird and forced and uncomfortable.

Of course, part of that is my need for support, for validation, for a soft murmuring chorus saying, "Yes, you're a writer, yes, you're a writer."

Still, I think that I'm going to change my mind about that decision. Or, rather, I have changed my mind and I lack the fortitude of my convictions, and need to build up a little steam before I act.

I also have a number of blog posts in the works, but I'm starting to face an ugly fact. I want to put better-written material up on the blog, but once I start putting real work into something, I start wondering if I'm an idiot not to try and get money for it. As a result, the story of a memorable beating I received in high school is now being polished with a wistful eye cast toward Salon...

Right now I'm considering my alternatives for counseling or therapy. Under optimum circumstances I'd be in long-term analysis with a psychiatrist, but that isn't really an option for someone in my economic position. I've been considering Alanon, because that's for folks raised by drunks (and so on), I've heard good things about group therapy. I just need to get out there and experiment...

... but I ain't feeling that daring at the moment.

Right now, more than anything else I feel lost and confused and easily tired. The events of this last winter have changed the structure of my life and I'm still figuring out what to do. Out of school, disabled, nearing fifty, career plans derailed by serious health concerns in a collapsing economy.

These are scary facts to be facing, folks.

On the other hand, I have ambitions and the time and means with which to realize them. The idea that I can make a living with my art and writing is not an absurdity. I am surrounded by people who love and care about me. I am not in danger of winding up on the streets, and despite my financial situation I live in conditions of real prosperity -- I eat well, and sleep comfortably.

Right now I'm hunkering down, breathing deeply, struggling to get back to work, and trying to figure out my next move. I'm rough but I am definitely on an uphill slope.

Just so you know.