I’m participating in Six Sentence Sunday, a cool effort that invites authors to post six sentences from one of their works on Sunday morning. Six Sentence Sunday will then link the post on their site. It’s a slick concept, and I encourage everyone to check it out. This post is six sentences from my essay “The Secret of Love,” which is available in my book Bring Us The Head Of The Velveteen Rabbit.
Love just mystifies the hell out of me. I can certainly recognize it when it wanders by. But love’s like a really slick cell phone; I can see the cool stuff happening, but I don’t have the first idea how it works. I’m absolutely a falling in love kind of guy. But I’m also a falling off the ladder kind of guy, and I understand the inner workings of love no better than I understand the inner workings of gravity.
I am less important than a piece of plastic. Actually, I’m less important than an electrified hunk of plastic that lets you text, tweet, play music, web surf, play Angry Birds, and replicate noises made by the human anus. My 16-year-old niece, Wendy, made sure I understood this last week as she sat on the other end of my couch communing with her smart phone as if it were an iBuddha. Her ear buds protected her in case I wanted to talk about the weather, or the horrible old days when we found things by using maps and the Yellow Pages. She had merged her eyes with that tiny screen, and as far as she was concerned I could have been another sunflower-print couch cushion.
At one point I thought she might reenter the world of human beings when she lowered her phone, but I heard her ear buds still blaring something that might be music, or it might be someone building shelves with a variable speed drill. She snaked one hand into her messenger bag and pulled out a Kindle. I’d given it to her for Christmas, hoping she’d read something more complex than a description of a YouTube video. Indeed, she now began reading, her head twitching in time with the music.
Feeling a bit frustrated and whiny, I snatched my own smart phone and fired off a text to her: I’m sitting right here. WTF? A moment later she raised her phone to read my subtle hint, and then she pulled out the ear buds and smiled at me. “Sorry, I got distracted. What’s up?”
I suggested that blinders might solve her distraction problem, and she shrugged. Then all of my ideas for conversation evaporated. Now that I had Wendy’s attention I had nothing to say. Looking around like a dope, I spotted the Kindle and asked how she liked it.
“It’s great! I read all the Twilight books on it.”
I should have just nodded, but being less important than a piece of plastic had worn down my self-esteem and patience. I said a couple of bad things about Twilight. I might have used the words “puerile” and “skank.”
Wendy said, “Come on, it’s not that bad, you know, just lighten up a little. I mean, it was nice of you to give me those other books like Moby Dick and The Age of Reason, but, well… at least I’m using it, you know?”
This had been my second greatest fear. The greatest fear was that she’d never read anything more sophisticated than one-sentence tweets and blog posts about shopping for lip gloss. But my second fear was that she was just going to read the literary equivalent of Pop Tarts, and that’s meager fare with which to feed your soul.
I thought about Tecumseh’s magnificent observation, “When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness.” Then, like I had Tourette’s or something, I blurted out old Tecumseh’s sliver of wisdom and preened as if I’d just delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
She stared at me for an uncomfortable time before saying, “Huh?”
I looked down at the Cheese Whiz stain on the couch cushion and sighed.
“Well, I read other stuff too,” she said. “Everybody who was reading Twilight was talking about The Hunger Games too, so I read those books. The movie was good, even though they left out some stuff.”
Gazing at her like a dog that hoped she had a beef rib in her pocket, I asked if she’d read anything else.
“Yeah, I figured that was a sci-fi game thing with kids, so I found this book called Ender’s Game. It was really cool.”
My head popped up, and I peered at her to see if she was kidding. She didn’t look like she was yanking me around. In fact, she looked like she’d forgotten me again as her phone buzzed and she read the incoming text. I dared to ask her what she was reading now.
She rolled her eyes at the text and said, “I liked the Ender thing, so there’s this website that says what books are like other books. It said that Huckleberry Finn was kind of like Ender, so I’m reading that now.”
I tried not to let my mouth drop open. Instead I asked her whether she liked it.
“It’s pretty good,” she said. “It’s better than the creaky old books they make us read at school. It’s pretty funny.”
I told Wendy that I thought it was funny too, and I said some other stuff that was probably stupid. I don’t remember because I was marveling that she’d gone from Twilight to Huckleberry Finn in six months. It struck me that reading is reading, no matter what you read, and for some kids Twilight must be like a gateway drug, except that it leads to Brave New World instead of shooting up smack.
Swimming in hope and satisfaction, I asked Wendy if she planned to read Tom Sawyer next.
“Nah, I think I’ll read a couple of those racy romances. Mom reads them all the time.”
I dug my fingernails into my leg, smiled, and nodded. After a few seconds she went back to her Kindle, apparently assuming from my glassy silence that the conversation was over. I kept telling myself that reading is reading, even if the book’s cover features a bare-chested pirate with no body hair and de-emphasized nipples.
So what if tomorrow she’s reading a romance like Pirate’s Raging Passion? Six months from now it could be a romance like Wuthering Heights.
Pirate’s Raging Passion – a hurricane of lust. (photo by Courtney Martin)
I’m participating in Six Sentence Sunday, a cool effort that invites authors to post six sentences from one of their works on Sunday morning. Six Sentence Sunday will then link the post on their site. It’s a slick concept, and I encourage everyone to check it out. This post is six sentences from my essay “I Hate My Brain,” which is available in my book Bring Us The Head Of The Velveteen Rabbit.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that brains get a little weird when your body produces a smidge too much of something or other, or when things get out of whack in the lobes, or sometimes really for no reason at all. But there’s only so long you can go with your brain making you act like a crazy man before you say a dignified, “Enough.” I’m not positive what my brain has to say at this point, because we’ve only been communicating through my thyroid. For example, I’ll say to my thyroid, “Hey, ask my brain how to calculate the distribution of a chi square test,” and the thyroid will come back a little later and say, “Your brain answered, but it was just a bunch of squiggly symbols I don’t understand. How about some extra hormones instead?” That’s not as helpful as I might wish.
Again, please check out some of the other authors linked at Six Sentence Sunday.
Yesterday I almost beat my barber to death with a blow dryer. I held myself back because there’s no beer in prison, and because I suspected in some vague way that it might be wrong. I’ve known the fellow for years, and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about movies, and his kids, and the weather, and semi-automatic pistols while he gave me a severe buzz-cut. I could have paid a chimp and gotten the same haircut, but he’s a good guy who reminds me of the guys I grew up with.
As my buddy trimmed my sideburns yesterday, he decided to talk politics. He further decided to expound about a jagged rainbow of social problems, and he did it with such malice that I felt sick. I might have yelled at him, or even punched him if he wasn’t holding a pair of scissors an inch from my jugular. Please note that I’m not saying which side of the debate he stood upon. I don’t want to talk about the issues. I want to talk about murder.
When he’d finished I said nothing. My dad always told me that no one ever changed somebody else’s mind about politics or religion by talking to them, so save your breath. I hurled a venomous glare at my former friend and hoped my 20 dollar bill gave him paper cuts. I took a distracted left out of the parking lot and cut off a dump truck. Then I drove around without a destination for an hour, wondering how someone I’d liked for so long could turn out to be such a spiteful, terrible person.
I don’t have a priest or minister to turn to when the universe has turned to crap and I don’t know how I’ll ever again relate to my fellow man, not even when I’m miserable because the universe is busy hiding cruelty from me like putrid Easter eggs. In these cases I turn to the wisest man I know, Fat Mike, the owner of Fat Mike’s Rib Shack. Seven blocks later I pulled into Fat Mike’s parking lot, right between a Christian bookstore and a head shop.
I found Mike preparing for the dinner rush, which meant he was sitting in a duct-taped executive chair with his bare feet up on the counter, a paper plate piled with ribs balanced on his round belly, and a red plastic cup of sweet tea in his hand. He waved the tea at me as I walked over, dribbling some barbeque sauce on his purple Hawaiian shirt, and he said, “Hey Bubba. Cheer up—you ain’t making decisions where people might die today, and nobody’s shooting at you. It’s a good day.”
That failed to cheer me up. I explained about my friend the barber and about my existential crisis, while Mike peeled a rib with his teeth. When I was done, he swallowed and said, “That’s a tough one, Bubba. I don’t have a great answer, but here’s what I do. Actually, what I do depends on how good I feel at the time. Now if I feel really bad, say I’m hung over, or doing my taxes, or my wife has locked me out of the house, I just say to hell with the bastards. I go ahead and hate them worse than diarrhea and just accept that there’s people in the world more useless than a monkey fart. Then I go on about my business.”
Mike pitched a denuded rib bone at a gray trash bin and missed. As the bone skidded into the corner, a yellow mongrel dog charged out from under the counter, snatched the bone, and trotted back under the counter out of sight. Mike said, “When I’m feeling better and everything’s all right, my car’s washed and my grass is mowed, I look at it different. I figure this is the world I’ve got and these are the people I’ve got, and I can’t change any of them. I might as well try to make something good out of sharing the planet with the miserable toe-suckers. I don’t let them stomp all over me, but lots of misery in my life has come from trying to change shit I can’t do anything about. Rib?” He held out a dripping beef rib, and I said no thanks.
Shrugging, Mike gnawed off some rib meat and chewed while he said, “When I’m feeling really good, like when I win a $50 scratch-off or find a station with real cheap gas, I figure that I don’t know what some vile turd’s life’s been like or how he got that way. Hell, I’ve got a nephew who’s a tumor of a man, a real cast iron ass-crack, but I remember him being a toddler, playing in my lap, a sweet kid. And I know how he got to be a louse. If I met some horrible asshole and knew him the way I know my nephew, I might look at him a little different—maybe.”
Mike stood and dumped the plate of rib bones in the trash, and I heard a whine from under the counter. Using a paper towel to wipe off each finger, Mike said, “When I feel great—I mean fantastic—like I’m headed to Disney World tomorrow, or my wife bought me a table saw for Christmas, I remind myself that I don’t know what that rancid piece of crap is thinking. For all I know, he may think I’m the nasty jerk, because he’s ignorant of stuff I know. And he knows things I don’t know. Hell, maybe I am the nasty jerk, and I don’t know it. Probably not, but it makes me stop and think before I condemn the guy to shovel shit in hell.”
“So there you go, Bubba. That’s how I handle it, from nasty to not quite as nasty,” Mike said as he strolled around the counter and put a hand on my shoulder. It almost felt fatherly until I realized he was steering me towards the door and out of his hair. As he pushed open the screen door for me he said, “And one last thing I guess. When I’m feeling honest, as opposed to feeling good, I have to admit that no matter what lousy crap that person has done, I’ve probably done just as bad at some point, if not the same dang thing.”
Mike let the door slam behind me, and he said through the rusty screen, “Or maybe I’ve done stuff even worse. How do you think I can stand to put up with you?”
“So, where do you stand on immigration reform and capital gains taxes?”
When something says, “All Guys Need to Read This,” I pay attention. I figure it may be critical information about prostate health, or maybe a TV show where they blow stuff up. So when I read a post titled “All Guys Need to Read This” and found it full of advice on dealing with women, I felt perplexed. I was pretty sure that guys who prefer other guys don’t need to read it. But beyond that, it’s full of lousy advice written by some well meaning fool.
The post laid down 14 points regarding manly devotion to a woman, and I am not making any of them up. I don’t want to dismiss all of them. A few seem solid, whether you’re dealing with a woman or a man. Some even seem solid when you’re dealing with a child, or a cocker spaniel. The solid ones include:
“When she says that she loves you she really does mean it”
“When she tells you a secret keep it safe and untold”
“When you see her start crying just hold her and don’t say a word”
“Kiss her in the pouring rain”
“When she steals your favorite hoodie let her wear it”
I support every one of these. For example, if she says she loves you, and you think she’s lying about it, why are you even talking to her? Send her to the movies and change the locks while she’s gone. If you intend to share someone else’s secrets, you’re just a jerk. When someone you love starts crying, don’t try talking them out of it. That’s like walking into a fire and tossing around a few nuclear bombs. Kissing in the rain is always good in movies, so we know it has to be good in real life. And if someone you love wants to wear your hoodie, are you going to fight her for it? Hit her in the knee with a golf club?
The problem with all of that wisdom is that the only advice here worth uttering is the warning about shutting up when someone cries. I wasted 15 seconds of my life reading the others, and that’s time I could have used to eat one of those little bags of potato chips.
Let’s look at the rest of this instruction manual for people with penises.
“When she pulls away pull her back”
Maybe this guy intends to express his love, but he’s expressing assault in my book. When a woman pulls back, she probably wants to get away from your annoying words, behavior, or smell. Let go already.
“When you see her walking sneak up and hug her waist from behind”
This one seems problematic. I can see it being romantic under certain circumstances, like walking around the house with nothing much going on. But if she’s doing something interesting or important to her, snatching her around the waist is kind of like saying that what she’s doing doesn’t mean crap compared to your interest in a quick grope. Use with discretion.
“When she’s scared protect her”
What are you protecting her from—a jaguar that jumped through your living room window all of a sudden? You may get disemboweled in a pretty snappy fashion then, but okay. However, fear can be good. It tells us we’d better do something, and that thing is usually good for us. Don’t prevent her from doing that good stuff for herself because you were protecting the hell out of her.
“When she grabs at your hands hold hers and play with her fingers”
If that’s what she likes, sure, but as general advice this is just weird.
“When she looks at you in your eyes don’t look away until she does”
Maybe this is supposed to be romantic, but it sounds like a prelude to a gunfight to me. So you hung in there and stared her down until she looked away first. Is that a good thing, or is it like trying to establish dominance with a Rottweiler?
“When she’s mad hug her tight and don’t let go”
I’m sorry, but this is the stupidest advice ever. When she gets mad, it’s for a reason, and being restrained like that guy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest will solve the problem in only a tiny percentage of the cases. I don’t advocate doing this unless you want to get bitten on the face.
“When she says she’s ok don’t believe it”
I was wrong, this is the stupidest advice ever. If you both want to go insane trying to figure who’s sending what secret signals and who’s playing what game today, this is the ideal thing to do. If you’d prefer not to sit in divorce court arguing over who gets the chipped plates from JC Penny, then cut this crap out.
“Treat her like she’s all that matters to you”
She’s the only thing that matters to you, huh? I guess that means she’s responsible for your entire happiness then. That’s no pressure on her, though. After a few years she’ll leave you or stab you in your sleep.
“When she runs up to you crying, the first thing you say is, ‘Whose butt am I kicking baby?’”
Because when she’s upset the most important thing to do is threaten violence. That will make her feel better right away. Bonus points for using the word “baby” in the context of a felony.
Thanks for hearing me out on this. These are just my opinions, but I think there’s a chance that I’m right, and the possibility of it approaches 100%. Now I’m going to spend the evening with my wife, without assuming that she doesn’t mean what she’s saying, without treating her like a kid I need to take care of, and without the risk of my nose being bitten off.
This young lady is practicing the facial expression that precedes leaving a man forever, or possibly stabbing him in his sleep. You were warned. Photo from photobucket.com.
I will infiltrate the DFW Writers Conference this weekend. I hope to make important contacts, find people who tell me how great my work is, learn writing and publishing secrets, and meet a an agent who thinks my novel is so marketable they’ll run over orphans while rushing to get it into print. That’s what I hope. I expect to meet writers who are struggling as much as I am, find people who drop into a coma after the first sentence of my pitch, learn what stupid mistakes I’ve been making, and take a vicious pounding from agents about how much my idea, my writing, and my haircut sucks.
It’ll be fun.
In addition to taking in all the classes such as “The Wild West of Publishing” and “How to Write for Boys,” I will pitch my humorous adult fantasy novel Six White Horses. I think I’m ready. I’ve practiced my one minute pitch. I’ve practiced my elevator pitch, which is short enough for a ride from the exhibit floor to the floor with the buffet. I have business cards with my name, photo, contact info, and my tag line: “Fantasy so sarcastic it bleeds laughter.” And my pitch is printed on the back of the card.
I’ve prepared a number of flash drives containing important documents, just in case anyone sees the brilliance beneath the blotchy skin of my first novel. They contain a one page query, an overview, a synopsis, a full proposal, and the first three chapters of the book. The conference organizers warned me in authoritarian terms to bring no paper copies of anything, and to bring no full manuscripts whether on paper, flash drives, or burned into the skin of a buffalo. Electronic media it is.
The conference encourages agents and writers to mingle at a reception Saturday evening, on the patio, weather permitting. Barring a tornado or a barrage of hailstones, I hope to chat in a casual yet professional fashion with everyone in sight, if I can do it without looking like a mule’s scabby hind-parts. I may hold a drink, which I think would make me look worldly and literary, especially if it’s not a bottle of Bud Light. I’ll be able to identify the agents by the writers swarming around them like German fighters around an American B-17 bomber. I don’t think I can push my way through them without looking desperate, though. Maybe if I offer them free drinks they’ll go away—at least that’s the way it would work in a bad novel.
Like I said, it’ll be fun. And if it’s not fun, then I bet it’ll be educational.
I couldn’t find any open license photos for the conference, so here’s a photo of Tolstoy and the rest of his Ukranian Oompah band in 1856. If only they could attend this weekend.
Twelve years ago it was easy to hide from my boss. He couldn’t find me after work unless he was psychic, because I didn’t have a damned cell phone. Once I got a mobile phone, it was the same as being at work all the time. Seriously, I felt like a Domino’s Pizza franchise. But whenever my boss interrupted my mom’s birthday party or a dinner that I hoped would lead to sex, he could only talk. He couldn’t actually give me any work to do right then.
Four years ago I bought an iPhone, even though I knew it was a stupid thing to do. It was so slick and cool and sexy and fun. I had no more will to resist than a turnip on rufies. But once I clasped my iPhone in my hand, my boss was not limited to making me talk about work at inconvenient times. Now he could send me actual work whenever he wanted and expect me to do that work right away. That’s a lot to pay for the ability to receive spam wherever you go, play solitaire on the toilet, and wave your iPhone around like a lightsaber. But I accepted that I’d made that bargain with the Great Satan Apple, and in return I started looking for some neat apps like flashlights and restaurant finders. And despite the fact that the iPhone had wrecked my personal life, I used it so much that I began wishing I could pay some corrupt doctor to graft the thing onto my forearm. I didn’t even care that it would make me look like a cyborg and might make Sheldon Cooper die from envy.
I swore I’d never buy an iPad. I mean, what the hell? It doesn’t make phone calls, and it’s not a full computer, so what good is it? I bought one last year, and I have no idea how it happened. I just remember walking out of Best Buy with the box in my hand. Again, turnip on rufies. Within a week I felt despondent that I’d lived my life without an iPad up to that point. Now if I allow my iPad to get more than twenty feet away from me I begin weeping.
This is all so sick. And I blame it on the apps, those tiny bits of software that make my iPhone and iPad do stuff. Sometimes that stuff is fun or useful, like IMDB, or Angry Birds, or the Amazon app that lets you spend more money faster because you don’t have to be at a computer. But for every cool app there are 10,000 that are hacked-together, shit-sucking wastes of irreplaceable minutes that we could have spent on something valuable like refinishing furniture or cooking a pie. For example, I have several apps that turn my phone into a $400 whoopee cushion, including Farts-a-Lot, Wet Fart Machine, Fart Knocker, Jedi Mind Fart, and Farts Like an Egyptian.
If I’m going to accept being a minion of Apple Darkness, I demand superlative apps that provide far greater value than we have seen to this point. I mean astounding value. I want apps that will change my life. I now challenge the app development community to give us apps like these:
Dumbass Firewall: You talk, you text, and you email using your phone and tablet. You can communicate faster and to more people than ever before. Within seconds you can tell dozens or hundreds of people that you’re a thoughtless, grunting twit, with your head so far up your ass you can smell your pancreas. This app will save you from your stupidity in real time by screening every outgoing scrap of voice and text for moronic and inflammatory statements that could get you beaten up, divorced, or imprisoned. The app will dump these chunks of stupid-as-hell into a folder for you to review when you calm down or sober up.
Perky Pickup Lines: Almost no person on Earth is good at walking up to an attractive stranger and saying something that’s not idiotic. There may have been a few, but I’m certain their friends soon killed them. So, every unattached person can use an app that analyzes the situation and provides a great pickup line. Desperate single people will no longer have to say things like, “What time do you have to get back to the insane asylum, ‘cause I’m crazy about you,” or, “Do you have a job?” to make an impression. For an extra 99 cents you could install the add-on Great Go The Hell Away Lines, providing the perfect words to crush some pushy asshole’s ego down to the size of a carbon atom.
Calorie Savant: The App Store bulges with apps to count, record, identify, estimate, and plan calories for every item a human can eat without dying. They all suck. They suck because they exist in an idealized world in which every day is under control and every meal is a rational transaction between you and a baby spinach salad. Calorie Savant would consider the day’s events and the proximity of various foods in providing calorie estimates. You may have planned to eat a 200 calorie granola bar after work, but Calorie Savant would recognize that you got a lousy performance review and that jerk in Purchasing hit on you again, so it dumps the granola bar from its plans and substitutes that 3,200 calorie bag of Double Stuff Oreos on the top shelf. Accurate information is the key to victory.
Blowhard Deactivator: Mobile devices keep you connected at all times. Unfortunately, you’re connected to people, and more unfortunately, some of those people are blowhards. You’re familiar with blowhards—those folk who pound out their political, religious, and moral opinions across the social bandwidth, trying to shout down all dissent, calling everybody ignorant lackeys, and ruining the fun for everyone else. Blowhard Deactivator would analyze the blowhard’s latest blaring manifesto and scan the internet for no less than 20 dissenting sources, then drop those links onto the offender like the firebombing of Dresden. For 99 cents you could install an add-on that tracks whatever the blowhard writes on Wikipedia and then automatically erases the dolt’s moronic rants behind him.
Fair Tip: This app is more of a public service than a utility, but it will help you in the end. Tip calculators seem pretty simple. In fact, if we weren’t a nation of math cretins, we wouldn’t need this kind of app. The problem is that these apps let people pick the tip percentage, and people haven’t learned that 12% is a crappy tip for someone who brought you a nice bowl of chili and makes a whopping $3.00 an hour. In fact, 12% is the kind of tip that condemns you to hell for being a stingy bastard. The Fair Tip app would assume that 20% is the standard tip, and for every point you dial it lower, the actual tip percentage would be cranked up one point. If you select 12%, then Fair Tip will secretly calculate the tip at 28%. If you’re like most people you’ll never catch on. If you do catch on and find some other way to calculate your crappy 12% tip, then I guess you’ll just have to go to hell.
Scrubbing Bubbles: All of us have made poor decisions. Our poor decisions generally don’t last forever, since people tend to forget or even die after a while, which resolves the situation nicely. But poor decisions made on the internet do not go away. That sloppy, ranting, tequila-fueled love poem you wrote to that actress who was hot five years ago but you can’t stand now—it’s archived on LiveJournal. Your heavy metal manifesto from your anarchist phase is still on YouTube. And that picture of you hanging upside down and naked on the front door of the First Baptist Church? Your potential employers at The Children’s Miracle Network are going to love it. You need Scrubbing Bubbles, the app that scours the internet for every single mention of your foolish self and annihilates it as if it were flushed down a toilet connected to a black hole. After this app has done its work, no one who’s not in your physical presence will believe that you ever lived.
There’s the challenge, app-writers. Make all this connectivity worth the pain. I want to see some prototypes in two months. I have to go now—while I was writing this I got a voice mail, three texts, and an email with five attachments from my boss.
The triumphant launch of the new app Maybe It’s Another Drill- ACK! that simulates the sound of a stormtrooper’s head being sliced off by a lightsaber.
I used to have some pretty cool retirement plans. They would have required a whole lot of strenuous not doing much. I figured I’d go to movies with my wife, ride my bike around the neighborhood, play a video game or two, cruise the Danube River, and all that kind of stuff. Take it easy and appreciate life. But I was kidding myself, just like some movie producer who’s out there planning to make money on Highlander V – in 3D.
Life rubbed my face in this fact recently. A while back happened to have some time on my hands. My regular work scaled down for a while, so I found myself in a mini-retirement. I thought to myself, this will be cool. I’ll kick back and have some fun. It’s been a tough year, so look out world—the fun train is rolling!
Since nobody cared whether I accomplished anything or succeeded in any way, I gathered up my high spirits and took on a small, fun project. That was so much fun that I moved right into a big project. And while that was going on I tacked on a huge project, which was also fun but really damned huge. By now I’ve given up all the leisure activities I had before my mini-retirement started, and it’s common in the evenings to hear me say, “Sorry sweetie, I can’t watch that movie with you tonight. I need to get some work done.”
So, you can see that mini-retirement didn’t work out for me. My retirement plans were as solid as the prediction that the Lost City of Atlantis will rise, and that UFOs will tow it to Disney World while Godzilla rides a unicycle through its streets.
My dad is retired. I’m pretty close to my dad, but something has gradually separated us. When I was younger we worked closely together for thousands of hours, and we did it comfortably and with a like mind. My dad made his living in the construction business most of his life. Before construction, he climbed out of helicopters and shinnied down ropes for a living. Before that he shot at young Chinese men for a living, and their friends shot back at him, as you might expect.
My dad lived his life in a world of things, of doing things and of making things. A very smart guy, but he didn’t graduate with the rest of his high school class because he failed English. He wouldn’t read the fiction books because he hated reading about things that weren’t true. But he unofficially attended graduation so he could receive all of the sports awards. Like I said, he’s a “doing things” guy. And as I’ve gotten older I’ve dealt more with “non-things” like numbers and words, and my life has moved gradually farther away from his.
Circumstances forced my dad to retire pretty young. A bunch of broken bones from his days of jumping out of helicopters caught up with him. His ability to do things and make things dropped to almost nothing. He never displayed much emotion—when his mom died he didn’t show much grief. One day not long after he stopped working, the city was repairing streets in his neighborhood. You could hear the construction equipment moving earth around. My dad walked outside, and he stood in his front yard and wept.
I don’t understand much. But I’m getting a sliver of understanding of what my dad’s world became once the doing of things and the making of things were taken away. I hope that separates us a bit less. Also, I guess I’d better get my shit together in case the things that my life is about disappear for me someday.
My planned career in retirement – selling sites on which to build bowling alleys.
Just to let you know, this funky piece is pulled from my e-book Bring Us The Head Of The Velveteen Rabbit. All the other essays in the book are far better than this one. You’ll be shocked. I chose this one because I didn’t want to build your expectations up too much. You might particularly like”The Least Romantic Man in America,” and “Days of Wine and Mammoths.” Check it out at either Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Now I’m going to take my unapologetic, grasping, mercantile ass home and mow the yard.
Good morning. I am your cat, and as you know I rarely speak. My vocabulary is poor. I cannot make myself understood by you and your human friends. Trust me, if it were otherwise I would be on the phone right now ordering Finding Nemo on Pay per View. But today God has granted me five minutes of articulate speech so that I can clear up a thing or two with you, my owner.
First let us crush some misconceptions. I do not own you. You have the ability to remove my genitals and my claws. So, let us not be ridiculous by talking about me owning you. Also, I am not all that independent. I like you. You give me food, and you do funny things like sit on the toilet. When you are gone I miss you, and when you come home I stick to you like a fuzzy, dignified rash. Sure, if you dropped dead I would happily eat your corpse, but I am not going to drag you down like a gazelle on the veldt.
Now that we have resolved that, let us get specific. You complain because I scratch up your couch. You gave me a charming scratching post, and I ignore it like it was the ghost of Lassie. You yell and squirt water at me, which makes me sad because you are missing the point. Your couch is as ugly as moose crotch. I mean really, sunflowers? I never scratch the ottoman, because it is a lovely piece of furniture. I am doing you a favor by pointing out an appalling item in our shared home, so please desist squirting me with that bottle. I think it has bacteria in it.
You often laugh at me when I play. I am happy to provide you amusement. Please consider how much amusement I provide for such a small investment. All I need is a crumpled piece of paper to entertain you. And yet, when you play it is in fact quite boring for me. I do not want to hurt your feelings, but seven hours of twitching your thumb in front of your computer or X-Box is hardly a laugh riot for me. Please consider my enjoyment when choosing your leisure activities. Play your Wii more often. When you are Wii bowling I laugh so hard I think I am going to pee.
Let me raise another sore point. Sometimes I meow a lot, and sometimes I whine. Yes, I admit that on occasion I howl at 3:00 a.m. when you have an important meeting with a real jerk in only four hours. Sometimes when you are asleep I lie on your face, lick your eyelids, and pull out your hair with my teeth. All of this behavior must puzzle you and even anger you. I want you to understand that I do these things because you gave me a stupid name. You named me Snowball, and my brother is named Macaroni. I know cats named Oatcake, Loki, Tigger, and Dammit. Come on. Would you name your son “Schmoo”? How about “Sassafras”? Stop naming us like we were roadies on a Def Leppard tour and you will have a lot more peace at home.
When I roll on catnip while gripped by a profound euphoria, I sometimes sense that you are mocking me. I suspect that you are saying, “Look at the silly cat! He’s going crazy for that catnip. That’s just so wild!” I may be wrong about your comments, and if so I apologize, but just allow me to say this. You drink martinis and smoke dope. I roll in catnip and chase laser pointers. No one has cause to throw stones here.
Sometimes I feel we have lost sight of our respective roles in the home. My role is to be cute, play, eat your food, sleep, keep you company, and throw up in your shoe. Your role is to feed me, provide a lap for me on demand, clean my litter box, give me toys, keep me company, and leave your shoes lying around. When we both know our job, everything runs smoothly. My job may seem menial or even boring. Yet I remind you that I have never had to explain a return policy to an angry customer.
I hope we now better understand one another. This was certainly cathartic for me, and I expect it was illuminating for you. Now we can achieve a more harmonious life together, one that is genteel and even generous. We may yet create a world where I walk into the kitchen to find a can of tuna by my bowl, and you walk into the bedroom to find a dead bird on your pillow.
“You call it a cabinet. I call it Mount Olympus. Cough up a can of tuna before I pop a thunderbolt in your ass.”
Pimping begins: I yanked this out of my e-book Bring Us The Head Of The Velveteen Rabbit, which is full of profound essays like “A Kick In The Shin Is Better Than Sex,” “The Iron Fist of Youth,” and “Read This, or My Goldfish Will Kick Your Ass.” It’s available at both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I now be done pimping.
I cannot testify that writing a book is like giving birth. I’m a guy, and I’d sound pretty dumb saying something like that. I will say that it’s like pushing a living thing out of you, despite the fact that you don’t have any exits that a logical person would think right for the task. And I won’t presume to talk about what happens after the miracle of childbirth, other than I hear that it’s hectic. But on the literary side, once you’ve finished writing a book you can then relax, have couple of drinks, and look at your family for a few days. Then the real work starts, because the book you just wrote is an abomination that would make any reader weep acid and bite off his fingers so he’s never again tempted to turn a page.
Enter the miracle of editing. I think of it as teaching my book to walk, to play well with others, to tie its shoes, and to stand up for itself. Maybe a little orthodonture if it’s lucky. Killers might chase the hero of my book a thousand miles, and in editing I realize they have no reason to chase him past the first hundred yards. Perhaps I use the word “macaroni” three times in the same paragraph. I might have written some stuff that’s just plain dumb. A few determined rounds of editing can transform my book from a wretched semi-hominid into a respectable literary creature.
Truman Capote said that “finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.” Give me an amen, brother. After all that editing, I feel like my book and I have spent a year together in a trench across from the Chinese army. I don’t want to let go. I dread saying, “I’m finished with you, you’re as good as you’re going to get. Let’s send you to agents and publishers who don’t care about you at all, and who may even hate you worse than smallpox.” My first novel is now being shopped to some fine agents, and every time I send out a query a sliver of my soul withers.
To distract me from my grief, I now spend my evenings editing my second novel. I’m on my third round of edits, and I hope it’s the last until some editor at Del Ray tells me my plot sucks and I need to fix it before they publish me. I hope for this even though no one at Del Ray is even aware I exist, so I think I deserve points for optimism. Anyway, this edit has taken a while because my book is long.
My first novel was 80,000 words, which is a respectable length. I figured I’d push myself with my second novel and go for 100,000 words. When I realized I needed another subplot, I cranked my estimate up to 120,000 words. When my hero told me he didn’t want to fall for that blond girl and to go screw myself, I gave up on estimating how long this thing would be. I finished at 180,000 words. As a point of comparison, that’s about the length of the New Testament. My novel has funnier dialogue than the New Testament, and fewer lepers. They each have the same number of world-shattering cataclysms.
I’m 150,000 words through my edit, and my fiercest enemies have fought me through every paragraph. They are the evil “adverb” and the baby-murdering “dialogue attribution.” I use these when I’m lazy, and they advertize my laziness by making my writing lame and squishy. And what are they?
Think about your meanest English teacher, the one who made you read The Scarlet Letter, and remember the things she told you. At one point she said that an adverb modifies a verb, or sometimes an adjective. In the sentence below, the word “confusingly” is an adverb:
“He confusingly explained to his readers what an adverb is.”
Why is that adverb bad? It’s not bad, it just turns the sentence into a blundering literary rhino. Try this:
“He baffled his readers with a lousy adverb explanation and an obscure rhino reference.”
“Baffled” does a better job than “confusingly explained.” At least I think it does. I’m not alone, since that literary heavy hitter Stephen King said, “The road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the highest rooftop.”
All right, let’s move on to this dialogue attribution business. When a character speaks dialogue, you have to let your reader know who said those amazing words that will soon appear on t-shirts and a Facebook meme. You can do that with the reliable “he said.” But you have so many alternatives from which to choose. You could write: he uttered, he grunted, he howled, he moped, he exulted, he agreed, he snorted, and many more. Aren’t these cool?
Well, maybe not. When I use them I’m just avoiding the work of explaining in detail what’s going on. For example, I may write:
“My dialogue attributions are awful,” he groaned.
That’s literary laziness. It’s the equivalent of tossing in a clump of dishwasher soap and flushing instead of scrubbing the toilet. By the way, I like to describe writing it relation to common household tasks. I think it puts all of this writing bullshit in the proper context. Here’s an alternative dialogue attribution:
“His forefinger punched the backspace key a few dozen times. Then he snatched his Red Bull and hurled it across the room, missing the cat by a foot. Dropping his head to the desktop with a smack, he said, ‘My lousy dialogue attributions are kicking my ass.’”
The lesson for me in all this is to not spend my time coming up with fun alternatives to “he said.” I should just use “he said” and instead spend my energy on real writing.
So, how does that play out in the book I’m editing, the title of which is No Good Deals, by the way? Here’s an example of a sentence that tortured me last night:
“’I’m bloody tired of you talking obsessively about monuments!’ Stan yelled angrily. ’I totally hate the idea of you finally getting a monument!’”
You can see that some of the characters in my story might or might not have monuments built to them. That’s got to be good. When No Good Deals is published, as I’m certain it will be someday, monuments are a good reason to hurry out and buy a copy. However, here’s the edited version:
“’Damn you! I don’t even want a monument. If you’re having a monument, that’s the last scum-flicking thing I’d want,’ Stan said. ‘I’ll pay children to throw shit at your monument after I’m dead!’”
I think that’s a decent edit and also a good example of my character’s level of sophistication. I already feel one step closer to getting this baby published.
All the reason I need to eliminate adverbs from my life.
