Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 18
January 29, 2023
TWENTY FIVE POINTS FOR LIVING
Anyone's life, viewed from the inside, is probably just a series of defeats. -- George Orwell
When you lose, don't lose the lesson. -- Ed Tom Halleck
I do not pretend to be a guru. If you examined my life objectively, you'd probably declare it a minor disaster, akin to a partially contained forest fire: The fire chief is confident it will be brought under control, but he can't say when or exactly how, and in the mean time, danger remains high. I expect most people's lives would be judged similarly if subjected to real scrutiny, but I'm a writer, and let's face it, when it comes to fuck-ups, we are a special breed. The average writer is a drunken, antisocial misanthrope, more comfortable with books than with people. On the other hand, writers read a great deal, and it is through reading as much as through actual life experience, that one acquires wisdom: not mere knowledge, but actual wisdom for living.
Over the course of my life I have discovered myself to be somewhat different from many other writers of my acquaintance in that I have traveled slightly more than the average, and also had more what might be called "unintellectual experiences:" I was in a fraternity, I've trained in various martial arts, I succumbed to the lure of "being a Chad" when my looks and a temporary illusion of money made that possible, I worked in law enforcement, et cetera and so on. In retrospect, much of my behavior was embarrassingly shallow, self-consciously fake, and altogether stupid. I was emulating the people who I had despised in my teens but also been horribly jealous of: the bullies, the jocks, the cool and popular rich kids. When the time came that I was able to become one of them, I did so with enormous enthusiasm, to the point where I hid whatever natural intelligence I possessed so as to blend in, and even pruned my speech so I wouldn't out myself as a closet intellectual. This self-crippling phase was actually quite productive in a certain sort of way: it allowed me to see that the grass was not much greener on the other side, that popular kids and tough guys both are equally unhappy when nobody is looking, and that there are distinct and cruel penalties for hiding who you are and denying what you must become. In short, it let me learn that there is much wisdom to be gained from stupidity -- or at the very least from making mistakes. Mistakes are fundamental to the learning process. However strange it might sound, they are the fuel without which growth, and success, are impossible...provided, of course, that we learn from them.
It follows that along the mistake-strewn path of my life, I have accumulated a number of wisdom-pearls which I would like to share with you now. Each of them has served me well, and while I do not claim to have originated any of them, or even to have followed their dictates consistently, they are undeniably true and can yield tangible results. So here we go: 25 rules for living, brought to you by a guy whose qualifications can be summed up in two words: I'm alive.
1. The day has the same number of hours for everyone, billionaires and homeless people. It's not “having time,” it's what you do with it. If I had a nickel for every time someone whined they didn't have time to go to a gym or take a Spanish class or learn how to change spark plugs, all while they reached for their sixth beer of the evening, I'd be richer than Gates. If you want to do it, you'll find the time. Period.
2. Everyone is talking about motivation nowadays -- finding it, keeping it. Screw motivation. Embrace discipline. With discipline you don't need motivation. I didn't go hiking on Friday evening in the bitter cold, through inch-deep mud, because I felt motivated to do so: I'd had a long day at work, I was tired, and I was also hungry. What I wanted was to eat, lie down, and watch re-runs of "CSI." And I did all that. But first I went hiking. That's discipline. How did I come about it -- me, a naturally lazy, disorganized person? Well, it takes only three weeks to break a bad habit, and it takes the same amount of time to begin a good one. Force yourself to be uncomfortable doing something healthy for yourself, and before long you won't be able to stop if you try.
3. Rethink your priorities. Most people treat their cars better than their bodies. They pay more attention their presence on social media than their real friendships. They spend vast sums on things that actively harm their physical and mental health but complain "they don't have the money" to eat healthy, join a gym, etc., etc. Take a moment here and there to see what you're prioritizing in life and question whether the order looks right to you. If it feels wrong, it is.
4. People will tell you explicitly who they are with their actions. Believe them. It may be curious for a writer to downplay the value of words, but in real life, talk is cheap. Pay attention to what folks actually do,not their line of gab. And apply this to yourself as well. It will kill the hypocrite within you faster than a bullet.
5. Start saying “I will” instead of “I want” and see the change. Most limitations are self-imposed. The mind is an incredibly powerful tool, but it can also be an incredibly powerful enemy.
6. Don't think about what you want, think about what you want to be. They are usually not the same and can sometimes be diametrically opposed. What you want is probably a cheeseburger and a beer, but what you want to be is in better shape. Or better educated. Or better tempered. Et cetera and so on. Learn to differentiate between momentary wants and your actual goals.
7. Attack life with a prepared mind. Bad things will happen anyway, but the prepared mind deals with 'em better. Take that 15 minutes before bed to lay out your clothes, pack your lunch, shave, and go over your schedule for the following day, and see how much easier your next mornings will become: no scrambling, no running out the door with your shoes untied, no arriving late for work.
8. Going without will teach you want from need. Whether it's caffeine, nicotine, porn, sugar, or the dopamine hit you get from your iPhone, try going cold turkey for a few weeks and see how it affects you. You might be surprised how easy it is to give up some -- SOME -- of the things you think you need.
9. Learn to feed off the negativity of others. People are always going to naysay and hate, why not turn it into fuel? I owe a lot of my success in writing and the entertianment industry to wanting to make my own personal doubters eat their words.
10. If you weren't happy before the shiny object, you won't be happy after you get the shiny object. Happiness is an inside job. Work on you, and if someone hands you a trophy down the road, or you decide to buy that Ferrari with your bonus money, enjoy it for its own sake without confusing it with your worth as a human being.
11. You can acquire things or you can acquire experiences. You'll get bored with the things sooner or later, but you never get tired of your memories. Travel when you can -- even if it means one county over, to some forgotten Civil War battlefield or winery or bed and breakfast. Go to the sporting event, or the concert, or the poetry slam. Hike the woods in the fall instead of watching the NFL. Drive two towns over to read the book in that cool coffee joint you've heard so much about. Ask your old army or college buddy to go on a weekend roadtrip. Give yourself a trove of memories to enjoy when you get old.
12. Bitterness is the only completely useless emotion. You can use hate. You can use anger. You can even use jealousy or spite. But you can't use bitterness. It will eat you away and give you absolutely nothing in return.
13. Your thoughts determine your emotions, your emotions determine your actions, your actions set the course for your life. It all starts with your thoughts. Be mindful of negative thinking. Find out what works to get you out of that loop, whether it's dark chocolate, a call to a pal, a walk with the dog, a cup of tea or just a deep breath. And be patient. Bad mental habits are like any others, they take time and conscious effort to break.
14. You don't die from the bite, you die from the venom. An incident is just an incident, it's how you react to it that matters. People will do you wrong. If you let that ruin you, that is more on you than it is them. Anyone who deliberately wrongs you doesn't give a shit how you feel anyway, so why let their actions control how you feel and behave?
15. The wake does not drive the boat, and exhaust does not drive the car. Your past has no say in your present or future. People who cry about their past are still living in it. You can change course at any moment. Read that twice.
16. The devil has no power over you except that which you give him, and you can take it all back at any time. Whatever demons plague you, they are in your head at your own invitation. Throw them the fuck out. If you can't do it yourself, get help. If the people around you won't assist, they're part of the problem. Throw them out, too.
17. Try new things. Fail at them. Try again. Make yourself uncomfortable on a regular basis. You will never discover greatness, or even true satisfaction in life, if you don't take risks. Whether it's a cooking class or a karate tournament, give it a shot.
18. People come and go, so enjoy them while they're around. Not everyone is a long-hauler in your life, nor you in theirs, so just take a moment to appreciate the people passing through. I'd pay a pretty to tell some of the folks from my past what they meant to me, even if they were only around a semester or two in 1996 or a few months in 2013.
19. Never dim your light to let others shine. The world is full of jealous, spiteful people full of clever, convincing arguments as to why you should trim your sails for their benefit. When you burn your brightest, the people who love you will be pleased and proud, not threatened. Pay attention to how others regard your triumphs. Some people will be sympathetic as hell when you fail, but seethe with envy when you succeed. Their sympathy is just a case of misery loving company, failure being comforted by fellow failure. Get rid of them. Better to have no friends at all than "frenemies."
20. Wayne Dyer once said, "You can't get thin by hating being fat." How much you revile a situation or a state of being won't change it one iota. When I was at my lowest a few years ago, I finally realized the sheer intensity of my misery wasn't changing the situation. I had to do that for myself. I had to come up with a plan for change and then execute it. The good part? The mere act of taking a paper and pencil and writing out your plan will start the shift you're looking for. The act of planning change is the first step toward change, and you can do it from your dinner table.
21. The world doesn't owe you anything, it owes you everything. It was made to be your playground and proving ground both. Experience is why you exist, why you have a brain and senses to interpret what we call reality. But you've got to go out and collect what the universe owes you. It won't send you a check.
22. Contrary to what generations of high school gym coaches taught you, quitters CAN win. Quitting is perfectly acceptable if you defer it everlastingly into the future. I can't tell you the number of times I've gotten up a literal or figurative mountain by saying, "I'll quit in 100 more yards." Then I cross that 100 yard distance and say, "OK, I'll quit in 50 more yards" or "I'll quit in 500 more yards." Before I know it I'm atop the mountain. A lot of victories in life are achieved through self-hypnosis, self-bargaining, or just plain lying. From a purely internal standpoint, it's not how you get there, it's THAT you get there.
23. If you don't make fun of yourself occasionally, other people will...continuously. We're all ridiculous occasionally, just go ahead and admit it. But also be on guard: I have never in my life met anyone worth a damn that couldn't laugh at themselves a little, now and again. The inability to do this is a very serious character fault and indicates you're in the presence of an egotist or even worse, a narcissist.
24. There is no courage without fear. I get so sick of Hollywood telling us the Vin Diesel and Steven Seagal character types, the completely fearless Mary Sues, are heroes. Heroism is the mastery of fear, not the absence of it: if you're not scared when you do the brave deed, you're not brave.
25. It is never too late to start over. In my own life I have re-invented myself more times than Madonna. I went from being a popular, athletic ringleader to a friendless, basement-dwelling misanthropic nerd; a drunken fratboy to a Dean's List student; East Coast law enforcement to Hollywood; and the shallowness of Hollywood to the troubled deeps of victim advocacy. And I have done all of this while writing furiously in multiple mediums. I am now 50 and have zero intentions of stopping. Mind you, some people are quite happy where they are and have or feel no need to change, but if a divorce, if a disease, if some unforeseen disaster or unexpected boon presents you with the need for a radical re-invention of your life and circumstances, rest assured it is possible. If I can do it, absolutely anyone can.
There you have it. It's not my entire store of fortune-cookie wisdom, but it's a heaping helping of same, and it never fails to amaze me how much better my life gets when I remember these principles and try to stick to them. The saddest thing in life is the person who manages to go 20, 30 years into his adulthood without really learning anything: the look of dismay, of bewildered agony, they wear as they fail yet again to lose weight, or find a better job, or quit a bad habit, or just plain feel better about themselves is truly painful and depressing to behold. Don't be that person. If none of this resonates with you, sit down and systematize the lessons life has taught you, good and bad. You'll be surprised by how much you've learned.
When you lose, don't lose the lesson. -- Ed Tom Halleck
I do not pretend to be a guru. If you examined my life objectively, you'd probably declare it a minor disaster, akin to a partially contained forest fire: The fire chief is confident it will be brought under control, but he can't say when or exactly how, and in the mean time, danger remains high. I expect most people's lives would be judged similarly if subjected to real scrutiny, but I'm a writer, and let's face it, when it comes to fuck-ups, we are a special breed. The average writer is a drunken, antisocial misanthrope, more comfortable with books than with people. On the other hand, writers read a great deal, and it is through reading as much as through actual life experience, that one acquires wisdom: not mere knowledge, but actual wisdom for living.
Over the course of my life I have discovered myself to be somewhat different from many other writers of my acquaintance in that I have traveled slightly more than the average, and also had more what might be called "unintellectual experiences:" I was in a fraternity, I've trained in various martial arts, I succumbed to the lure of "being a Chad" when my looks and a temporary illusion of money made that possible, I worked in law enforcement, et cetera and so on. In retrospect, much of my behavior was embarrassingly shallow, self-consciously fake, and altogether stupid. I was emulating the people who I had despised in my teens but also been horribly jealous of: the bullies, the jocks, the cool and popular rich kids. When the time came that I was able to become one of them, I did so with enormous enthusiasm, to the point where I hid whatever natural intelligence I possessed so as to blend in, and even pruned my speech so I wouldn't out myself as a closet intellectual. This self-crippling phase was actually quite productive in a certain sort of way: it allowed me to see that the grass was not much greener on the other side, that popular kids and tough guys both are equally unhappy when nobody is looking, and that there are distinct and cruel penalties for hiding who you are and denying what you must become. In short, it let me learn that there is much wisdom to be gained from stupidity -- or at the very least from making mistakes. Mistakes are fundamental to the learning process. However strange it might sound, they are the fuel without which growth, and success, are impossible...provided, of course, that we learn from them.
It follows that along the mistake-strewn path of my life, I have accumulated a number of wisdom-pearls which I would like to share with you now. Each of them has served me well, and while I do not claim to have originated any of them, or even to have followed their dictates consistently, they are undeniably true and can yield tangible results. So here we go: 25 rules for living, brought to you by a guy whose qualifications can be summed up in two words: I'm alive.
1. The day has the same number of hours for everyone, billionaires and homeless people. It's not “having time,” it's what you do with it. If I had a nickel for every time someone whined they didn't have time to go to a gym or take a Spanish class or learn how to change spark plugs, all while they reached for their sixth beer of the evening, I'd be richer than Gates. If you want to do it, you'll find the time. Period.
2. Everyone is talking about motivation nowadays -- finding it, keeping it. Screw motivation. Embrace discipline. With discipline you don't need motivation. I didn't go hiking on Friday evening in the bitter cold, through inch-deep mud, because I felt motivated to do so: I'd had a long day at work, I was tired, and I was also hungry. What I wanted was to eat, lie down, and watch re-runs of "CSI." And I did all that. But first I went hiking. That's discipline. How did I come about it -- me, a naturally lazy, disorganized person? Well, it takes only three weeks to break a bad habit, and it takes the same amount of time to begin a good one. Force yourself to be uncomfortable doing something healthy for yourself, and before long you won't be able to stop if you try.
3. Rethink your priorities. Most people treat their cars better than their bodies. They pay more attention their presence on social media than their real friendships. They spend vast sums on things that actively harm their physical and mental health but complain "they don't have the money" to eat healthy, join a gym, etc., etc. Take a moment here and there to see what you're prioritizing in life and question whether the order looks right to you. If it feels wrong, it is.
4. People will tell you explicitly who they are with their actions. Believe them. It may be curious for a writer to downplay the value of words, but in real life, talk is cheap. Pay attention to what folks actually do,not their line of gab. And apply this to yourself as well. It will kill the hypocrite within you faster than a bullet.
5. Start saying “I will” instead of “I want” and see the change. Most limitations are self-imposed. The mind is an incredibly powerful tool, but it can also be an incredibly powerful enemy.
6. Don't think about what you want, think about what you want to be. They are usually not the same and can sometimes be diametrically opposed. What you want is probably a cheeseburger and a beer, but what you want to be is in better shape. Or better educated. Or better tempered. Et cetera and so on. Learn to differentiate between momentary wants and your actual goals.
7. Attack life with a prepared mind. Bad things will happen anyway, but the prepared mind deals with 'em better. Take that 15 minutes before bed to lay out your clothes, pack your lunch, shave, and go over your schedule for the following day, and see how much easier your next mornings will become: no scrambling, no running out the door with your shoes untied, no arriving late for work.
8. Going without will teach you want from need. Whether it's caffeine, nicotine, porn, sugar, or the dopamine hit you get from your iPhone, try going cold turkey for a few weeks and see how it affects you. You might be surprised how easy it is to give up some -- SOME -- of the things you think you need.
9. Learn to feed off the negativity of others. People are always going to naysay and hate, why not turn it into fuel? I owe a lot of my success in writing and the entertianment industry to wanting to make my own personal doubters eat their words.
10. If you weren't happy before the shiny object, you won't be happy after you get the shiny object. Happiness is an inside job. Work on you, and if someone hands you a trophy down the road, or you decide to buy that Ferrari with your bonus money, enjoy it for its own sake without confusing it with your worth as a human being.
11. You can acquire things or you can acquire experiences. You'll get bored with the things sooner or later, but you never get tired of your memories. Travel when you can -- even if it means one county over, to some forgotten Civil War battlefield or winery or bed and breakfast. Go to the sporting event, or the concert, or the poetry slam. Hike the woods in the fall instead of watching the NFL. Drive two towns over to read the book in that cool coffee joint you've heard so much about. Ask your old army or college buddy to go on a weekend roadtrip. Give yourself a trove of memories to enjoy when you get old.
12. Bitterness is the only completely useless emotion. You can use hate. You can use anger. You can even use jealousy or spite. But you can't use bitterness. It will eat you away and give you absolutely nothing in return.
13. Your thoughts determine your emotions, your emotions determine your actions, your actions set the course for your life. It all starts with your thoughts. Be mindful of negative thinking. Find out what works to get you out of that loop, whether it's dark chocolate, a call to a pal, a walk with the dog, a cup of tea or just a deep breath. And be patient. Bad mental habits are like any others, they take time and conscious effort to break.
14. You don't die from the bite, you die from the venom. An incident is just an incident, it's how you react to it that matters. People will do you wrong. If you let that ruin you, that is more on you than it is them. Anyone who deliberately wrongs you doesn't give a shit how you feel anyway, so why let their actions control how you feel and behave?
15. The wake does not drive the boat, and exhaust does not drive the car. Your past has no say in your present or future. People who cry about their past are still living in it. You can change course at any moment. Read that twice.
16. The devil has no power over you except that which you give him, and you can take it all back at any time. Whatever demons plague you, they are in your head at your own invitation. Throw them the fuck out. If you can't do it yourself, get help. If the people around you won't assist, they're part of the problem. Throw them out, too.
17. Try new things. Fail at them. Try again. Make yourself uncomfortable on a regular basis. You will never discover greatness, or even true satisfaction in life, if you don't take risks. Whether it's a cooking class or a karate tournament, give it a shot.
18. People come and go, so enjoy them while they're around. Not everyone is a long-hauler in your life, nor you in theirs, so just take a moment to appreciate the people passing through. I'd pay a pretty to tell some of the folks from my past what they meant to me, even if they were only around a semester or two in 1996 or a few months in 2013.
19. Never dim your light to let others shine. The world is full of jealous, spiteful people full of clever, convincing arguments as to why you should trim your sails for their benefit. When you burn your brightest, the people who love you will be pleased and proud, not threatened. Pay attention to how others regard your triumphs. Some people will be sympathetic as hell when you fail, but seethe with envy when you succeed. Their sympathy is just a case of misery loving company, failure being comforted by fellow failure. Get rid of them. Better to have no friends at all than "frenemies."
20. Wayne Dyer once said, "You can't get thin by hating being fat." How much you revile a situation or a state of being won't change it one iota. When I was at my lowest a few years ago, I finally realized the sheer intensity of my misery wasn't changing the situation. I had to do that for myself. I had to come up with a plan for change and then execute it. The good part? The mere act of taking a paper and pencil and writing out your plan will start the shift you're looking for. The act of planning change is the first step toward change, and you can do it from your dinner table.
21. The world doesn't owe you anything, it owes you everything. It was made to be your playground and proving ground both. Experience is why you exist, why you have a brain and senses to interpret what we call reality. But you've got to go out and collect what the universe owes you. It won't send you a check.
22. Contrary to what generations of high school gym coaches taught you, quitters CAN win. Quitting is perfectly acceptable if you defer it everlastingly into the future. I can't tell you the number of times I've gotten up a literal or figurative mountain by saying, "I'll quit in 100 more yards." Then I cross that 100 yard distance and say, "OK, I'll quit in 50 more yards" or "I'll quit in 500 more yards." Before I know it I'm atop the mountain. A lot of victories in life are achieved through self-hypnosis, self-bargaining, or just plain lying. From a purely internal standpoint, it's not how you get there, it's THAT you get there.
23. If you don't make fun of yourself occasionally, other people will...continuously. We're all ridiculous occasionally, just go ahead and admit it. But also be on guard: I have never in my life met anyone worth a damn that couldn't laugh at themselves a little, now and again. The inability to do this is a very serious character fault and indicates you're in the presence of an egotist or even worse, a narcissist.
24. There is no courage without fear. I get so sick of Hollywood telling us the Vin Diesel and Steven Seagal character types, the completely fearless Mary Sues, are heroes. Heroism is the mastery of fear, not the absence of it: if you're not scared when you do the brave deed, you're not brave.
25. It is never too late to start over. In my own life I have re-invented myself more times than Madonna. I went from being a popular, athletic ringleader to a friendless, basement-dwelling misanthropic nerd; a drunken fratboy to a Dean's List student; East Coast law enforcement to Hollywood; and the shallowness of Hollywood to the troubled deeps of victim advocacy. And I have done all of this while writing furiously in multiple mediums. I am now 50 and have zero intentions of stopping. Mind you, some people are quite happy where they are and have or feel no need to change, but if a divorce, if a disease, if some unforeseen disaster or unexpected boon presents you with the need for a radical re-invention of your life and circumstances, rest assured it is possible. If I can do it, absolutely anyone can.
There you have it. It's not my entire store of fortune-cookie wisdom, but it's a heaping helping of same, and it never fails to amaze me how much better my life gets when I remember these principles and try to stick to them. The saddest thing in life is the person who manages to go 20, 30 years into his adulthood without really learning anything: the look of dismay, of bewildered agony, they wear as they fail yet again to lose weight, or find a better job, or quit a bad habit, or just plain feel better about themselves is truly painful and depressing to behold. Don't be that person. If none of this resonates with you, sit down and systematize the lessons life has taught you, good and bad. You'll be surprised by how much you've learned.
January 22, 2023
THEY JUST DON'T GET IT: WHY THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY SUCKS
Are you not entertained? -- Maximus
I think we would all agree that the entirety of the entertainment industry is in a bad way nowadays. Television, film, gaming...it's not going downhill so much as falling off a cliff, and burning on the way down.
Everything about entertainment is markedly, noticeably, objectively worse than it was just a few years ago. The few shows, films and games which are really good only highlight how terrible, or at least how mediocre, almost everything else has become; and there is as yet very little sign this is going to change anytime soon. No surprise there: in order to fix a problem, you have to know that it actually exists, and admit it, at least to yourself. The Industry is not ready to do this, and so it continues to fall, and continues to burn.
I could a tale unfold as to how this came to be, and I will someday soon enough, but I am going to keep this one short and to the point, folks:
The Entertainment Industry is rubbish because it no longer entertains. It has forgotten its mission, the very reason for its own existence.
You know, to entertain.
The word, in case you were wondering, means "to provide someone with amusement or enjoyment." And this is precisely what Hollywood has stopped doing. They no longer amuse or entertain. The relief they used to provide us from the pains and pressures and anxieties of everyday life, through comedy, through drama, through fantasy, through role-playing, is no more.
Instead, they lecture us.
What people used to rush to as an escape is now something from which they require an escape. The refuge has become a trap. It is almost impossible to find a movie, television show or immersive video game made in the last five years which doesn't try to beat you into complete submission with its political, racial, and sexual takes. The basic premise of entertainment, which storytelling, has been thrown out: in its place we now have political propaganda tailored for the sort of people who can't live without Twitter....the trouble here being that Twitter was not, is not, and never will be representative of Americans or even common humanity. Twitter is a fringe, an outland, a dumping ground. It is a sluice where political obsessives, passive-aggressive weaklings and monomaniacs are irresistably drained. But because industry executives and pundits scroll through it all day, they have come to believe it matters, that the badly-written opinions within it actually reflect the feelings of the broad masses, the actual population. One may as well take a Gallup poll in a lunatic asylum or a methadone clinic. The answers you get will be honest, but they will not represent reality. Not for the rest of us, anyway.
Put more simply, they are making entertainment for an audience that doesn't exist.
One does not have to be a right-winger (I'm not, incidentally) to detest the state, and continuing, direction of entertainment. Nor does one have to be intolerant of the politics of others. One merely has to remember the days, not so long ago, when the purpose of a TV show, movie or video game was to engage its audience rather than talk down to them or try to fill their head with theories generated by university professors who have never held a real job. When a storyteller could try to make a moral point without revealing his own personal voting habits. When a showrunner or game designer understood that there is a fair country distance between giving a story a philosophy and pumping it full of ideology.
Everything sucks nowadays because the people making it suck at what they do. Suck on a fundamental, foundational level. They are surgeons who don't know how to cut, electricians who don't understand electricity, handymen with no tools. And they cannot fix the problem either because they are too stupid to know there is a problem, or too arrogant to admit it, which amounts to the same thing.
They just don't get it.
I said above I wasn't going to get into the "why" here, but now I find I cannot avoid it.
The stark fact is that a lot of this idiocy is driven by a debasement of the very idea of activism caused by the internet generally, and social media specifically. In my parents' day, "activism" meant risking getting your skull split or your life taken to promote a cause you believed worthy of your blood. Now it means tapping "like" as you swipe a screen from the comfort of your couch. It follows that actual action, i.e. spending money or going somewhere physically, and the simulacrum of action embodied in clicking "like" or "downvote" on a video or a post or a thread, has also been conflated. A generation raised on the idea that social media is real, that it matters, that it is vital and necessary, cannot distinguish between "likes" and actual, meaningful actions taken in the real world.
What I mean by this is that getting 40,000 likes on Twitter for your defense of "She Hulk" or "Velma" or "Willow" doesn't mean those 40,000 people will watch the shows in question. They simply agree with the politics which drive the creation of those shows in the first place. But their likes, their snarky Tweets and clever Facebook and Instagram posts, do not actually translate to ratings, sales, or dollars. The act of clicking a screen and the act of going out to see a movie, or spending money to watch a show or buy a video game, are not at all the same. They are not, in fact, even connected. One exists in the real world, and one does not. One is a simulation of reality, and one IS reality. And lest you think I am lecturing you, I learned this the hard way when I first became a novelist. I spent thousands on Facebook ads which provided me with the most mouth-watering analytics imaginable. They showed me, via attractive-looking graphs, that tens of thousands of people were "engaged" by my ads every day. But "engagement," and even the far more elusive "clicks," did not translate to actual sales. There was a fatal gap between what I was being told and what was happening, or not happening, to my bank account. It turned out the advertisements were being pitched to people who had zero interest in the product: it was "side of the bus" advertising, which reaches huge audiences but not necessarily to people with any interest in what I was peddling.
It's the same here. No matter how hard Hollywood panders to the extreme left, it will not change the fact that the extreme left is only a tiny percentage of society and not, as a rule, interested in what Hollywood has to offer regardless. They will "like," but they will not buy. And Hollywood has yet to accept that fact. They keep doubling down, keep rewarding failure, keep blaming everyone but themselves for the situation. But the funny thing about reality is that it always trumps denial in the end. Always. You can deny your plane is going down 'til you're blue in the face, but brother, when it hits that mountain, you will know it. Capitalism is ultimately a very Darwinian process. If folks want what you've got, you're a millionaire. If they don't, well, as Dalton said in "Roadhouse," there's always barber college.
In the real world, when a business fails to deliver a product the consumer wants, the product fails, and ultimately the business itself. In Hollywood, the products are failing left and right, but the business considers itself "too big" to meet such a fate, and continues to churn out wokeist, box-checked entertainment almost nobody wants out of sheer spite. Whether this is sustainable, and Hollywood really is Too Big To Fail, I don't know: it's possible that if quality storytelling ceases to exist entirely and audiences have absolutely no alternative but to watch shows like "The Rings of Power," they may actually end up doing so out of sheer boredom. But so long as media exists from the Before Time -- before wokeism, before box-checking, before pandering to extremists became the norm -- audiences will also have something to compare modern TV shows, movies and games to. And that does not bode well for the people in studio offices and writer's rooms today.
I think we would all agree that the entirety of the entertainment industry is in a bad way nowadays. Television, film, gaming...it's not going downhill so much as falling off a cliff, and burning on the way down.
Everything about entertainment is markedly, noticeably, objectively worse than it was just a few years ago. The few shows, films and games which are really good only highlight how terrible, or at least how mediocre, almost everything else has become; and there is as yet very little sign this is going to change anytime soon. No surprise there: in order to fix a problem, you have to know that it actually exists, and admit it, at least to yourself. The Industry is not ready to do this, and so it continues to fall, and continues to burn.
I could a tale unfold as to how this came to be, and I will someday soon enough, but I am going to keep this one short and to the point, folks:
The Entertainment Industry is rubbish because it no longer entertains. It has forgotten its mission, the very reason for its own existence.
You know, to entertain.
The word, in case you were wondering, means "to provide someone with amusement or enjoyment." And this is precisely what Hollywood has stopped doing. They no longer amuse or entertain. The relief they used to provide us from the pains and pressures and anxieties of everyday life, through comedy, through drama, through fantasy, through role-playing, is no more.
Instead, they lecture us.
What people used to rush to as an escape is now something from which they require an escape. The refuge has become a trap. It is almost impossible to find a movie, television show or immersive video game made in the last five years which doesn't try to beat you into complete submission with its political, racial, and sexual takes. The basic premise of entertainment, which storytelling, has been thrown out: in its place we now have political propaganda tailored for the sort of people who can't live without Twitter....the trouble here being that Twitter was not, is not, and never will be representative of Americans or even common humanity. Twitter is a fringe, an outland, a dumping ground. It is a sluice where political obsessives, passive-aggressive weaklings and monomaniacs are irresistably drained. But because industry executives and pundits scroll through it all day, they have come to believe it matters, that the badly-written opinions within it actually reflect the feelings of the broad masses, the actual population. One may as well take a Gallup poll in a lunatic asylum or a methadone clinic. The answers you get will be honest, but they will not represent reality. Not for the rest of us, anyway.
Put more simply, they are making entertainment for an audience that doesn't exist.
One does not have to be a right-winger (I'm not, incidentally) to detest the state, and continuing, direction of entertainment. Nor does one have to be intolerant of the politics of others. One merely has to remember the days, not so long ago, when the purpose of a TV show, movie or video game was to engage its audience rather than talk down to them or try to fill their head with theories generated by university professors who have never held a real job. When a storyteller could try to make a moral point without revealing his own personal voting habits. When a showrunner or game designer understood that there is a fair country distance between giving a story a philosophy and pumping it full of ideology.
Everything sucks nowadays because the people making it suck at what they do. Suck on a fundamental, foundational level. They are surgeons who don't know how to cut, electricians who don't understand electricity, handymen with no tools. And they cannot fix the problem either because they are too stupid to know there is a problem, or too arrogant to admit it, which amounts to the same thing.
They just don't get it.
I said above I wasn't going to get into the "why" here, but now I find I cannot avoid it.
The stark fact is that a lot of this idiocy is driven by a debasement of the very idea of activism caused by the internet generally, and social media specifically. In my parents' day, "activism" meant risking getting your skull split or your life taken to promote a cause you believed worthy of your blood. Now it means tapping "like" as you swipe a screen from the comfort of your couch. It follows that actual action, i.e. spending money or going somewhere physically, and the simulacrum of action embodied in clicking "like" or "downvote" on a video or a post or a thread, has also been conflated. A generation raised on the idea that social media is real, that it matters, that it is vital and necessary, cannot distinguish between "likes" and actual, meaningful actions taken in the real world.
What I mean by this is that getting 40,000 likes on Twitter for your defense of "She Hulk" or "Velma" or "Willow" doesn't mean those 40,000 people will watch the shows in question. They simply agree with the politics which drive the creation of those shows in the first place. But their likes, their snarky Tweets and clever Facebook and Instagram posts, do not actually translate to ratings, sales, or dollars. The act of clicking a screen and the act of going out to see a movie, or spending money to watch a show or buy a video game, are not at all the same. They are not, in fact, even connected. One exists in the real world, and one does not. One is a simulation of reality, and one IS reality. And lest you think I am lecturing you, I learned this the hard way when I first became a novelist. I spent thousands on Facebook ads which provided me with the most mouth-watering analytics imaginable. They showed me, via attractive-looking graphs, that tens of thousands of people were "engaged" by my ads every day. But "engagement," and even the far more elusive "clicks," did not translate to actual sales. There was a fatal gap between what I was being told and what was happening, or not happening, to my bank account. It turned out the advertisements were being pitched to people who had zero interest in the product: it was "side of the bus" advertising, which reaches huge audiences but not necessarily to people with any interest in what I was peddling.
It's the same here. No matter how hard Hollywood panders to the extreme left, it will not change the fact that the extreme left is only a tiny percentage of society and not, as a rule, interested in what Hollywood has to offer regardless. They will "like," but they will not buy. And Hollywood has yet to accept that fact. They keep doubling down, keep rewarding failure, keep blaming everyone but themselves for the situation. But the funny thing about reality is that it always trumps denial in the end. Always. You can deny your plane is going down 'til you're blue in the face, but brother, when it hits that mountain, you will know it. Capitalism is ultimately a very Darwinian process. If folks want what you've got, you're a millionaire. If they don't, well, as Dalton said in "Roadhouse," there's always barber college.
In the real world, when a business fails to deliver a product the consumer wants, the product fails, and ultimately the business itself. In Hollywood, the products are failing left and right, but the business considers itself "too big" to meet such a fate, and continues to churn out wokeist, box-checked entertainment almost nobody wants out of sheer spite. Whether this is sustainable, and Hollywood really is Too Big To Fail, I don't know: it's possible that if quality storytelling ceases to exist entirely and audiences have absolutely no alternative but to watch shows like "The Rings of Power," they may actually end up doing so out of sheer boredom. But so long as media exists from the Before Time -- before wokeism, before box-checking, before pandering to extremists became the norm -- audiences will also have something to compare modern TV shows, movies and games to. And that does not bode well for the people in studio offices and writer's rooms today.
January 17, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "MEGAFORCE"
In this week's installment of Memory Lane, I revisit the 1982 action-adventure film MEGAFORCE, directed by Hal Needham and starring Barry Bostwick, Persis Khambata, Edward Mulhare and Henry Silva. If you were not a child of the 70s, you probably cannot understand the anticipation and excitement this film generated among kids and teenagers before its release. It was merchandised heavily in advance, and given lavish attention by trade and fan magazines (which were what we had instead of the internet). The movie was even examined by the U.S. Army as it was being shot to observe the Hollywood-designed "attack" dune buggies for their practicability in battle against tanks. Alas, what ended up on the screen was not quite what we were hoping for. So let's step in the time machine and go back to when Ronald Reagan was still the gipper, Michael Jackson released "Thriller," and gallon of gas cost $1.22....
I saw this movie in the theater in 1982 and am still waiting for my refund.
All joking aside, this is one of the biggest pieces of shit ever to come down the pike.
I rewatched the flick as a grown man, hoping to find in it the sort of camp, kitsch and enjoyable shlock that makes so much of my childhood cinema fall into the category of so-bad-it's-good. But this movie is beyond that categorization. It is beyond COBRA in its silliness and cringe-worthiness and complete lack of self-awareness or shame. It is so bad that it is awful, although it opens itself up to Rifftrax/MSTK-style ridicule more than any other movie I can think of. This is one of those flicks which achieves its few level-ups by accident. The jokes aren't funny, but the drama is. It's like a live-action Saturday morning cartoon. And not a good one either.
As kids, we had a special vocabulary to describe things that were especially bad in popular culture. The titles of very bad television shows or feature films were a kind of shorthand to let other kids know how bad something was. If you likened something to, for example, "Battle Beyond the Stars" or "Warlords of the 21st Century," the other kids knew it was trash, but passably enjoyable trash. If you talked about "Krull," that meant a really bad movie which was actually a lot of fun if accepted on its own terms. If you referenced "Automan" as an insult, thems were fighting words, because that show was horrific (this also applied to "Masquerade"). But the lowest of the low, the insult of insults, the unholy of unholies, was "Megaforce."
Some of our approbrium probably stemmed from the movie's hype. It was Cold War time, and America was in the early stages of achieving catharsis for Vietnam by embracing ultra-nationalistic shoot-'em-ups in which all wrongs could be made right with napalm. Kids are especially vulnerable to military jingoism, and to the ideas that military service is like summer camp with guns, and that war is glorious fun in which you get to fiddle with cool gadgets and blow things up without harm to yourself. The pre-release propaganda campaign for this movie hit those notes pretty hard. At the same time, we were in a post-"Jaws" era where the summer blockbuster had become a regular weapon in Hollywood's arsenal, so the marketing blitz, which included magazine articles, ads on comic books, toys, etc., etc. had been going on for many months before the movie debuted. So confident was the studio that "Megaforce" was going to be a hit that they'd already begun pre-pre-production on the sequel, "Megaforce 2: Deeds Not Words." There was, however, one small problem, one tiny flyspeck of blight on this sunrise of golden optimism:
This movie SUCKED.
From the pompous opening crawl to the so-bad-it's-like-wrenching-stomach-cramps last image (the infamous "thumb kiss"), "Megaforce" baffles even its pre-tween audiences with its horrible, cringing, sniveling stupidity. It literally defies analysis how it could have been green-lighted, because everything about it sucks. The writing sucks. The acting sucks. The art design sucks. Even the music sucks. Plus, it's got Persis Khambatta AND Michael Beck, and meaning them no personal insult, either one is the kiss of death to almost any big-ticket project they were involved in: put them both in the same flick and it's like whatever the two-object version of a trifecta is.
The plot of the film is basically this. A mercenary warlord played by Henry Silva is doing bad things in some made-up country in the Middle East or North Africa or something. The locals, represented by P-Khambatta and the redoubtable Edward Mulhare (of "Knight Rider" fame) prove helpless, so they journey to America to enlist the aid of folks who REALLY know how to blow ---- up. These folks are Megaforce, a super-secret band of tippy-top soldiers recruited from all around the globe and financed by the world's democracies to fight evil with the highest-tech weapons available. Basically they are G.I. Joe, except they wear horrible gold lame jumpsuits that leave NOTHING to the imagination and ride dirt bikes and dune buggies. Megaforce is run by Ace Hunter (Barry Bostwick), who is basically a blond, bearded, blow-dried James Bond crossed with Evel Kneivel. He agrees to take Megaforce to the made-up country and battle Henry Silva, who is actually an old friend of his. After that, a lot of things explode, but in a curious forerunner to the days of the A-Team, absolutely nobody gets hurt. I mean it. With the exception of three bad guys who seem to get vaporized, nobody dies or even bleeds in this movie. It's mainly horrible dialog shouted over explosions, designed to show us the utter invincivbility of Megaforce. The best thing about MF is that it keeps doubling down on the cringe, in a kind of antic blackjack where you can never exceed twenty-one. From the crotch-hugging gold lame jumpsuits to the horrible romance between Barry B and Persis K, in which affection is expressed by kissing thumbs, to the multicolored, vaguely patriotic smoke screens eminated by the bikes, to the flying motorcycle...this movie is a bottomless pit of trash. Barry Bostwick was coming off a long stage run when he took this role, and he acts as if he's still on stage...at the open air theater at Universal Studios. His every movement and facial expression, even his tones of voice, and melodrama turned up to a comic 11. Persis K cannot act, cannot even smile convinincingly. Henry Silva enjoys his scenery chewing so much I suspect he may have been high during the entire production. And Edward Mulhare is to be pitied for having to do his dignified, stiff-upper-lip Brit shtick for fare which wouldn't have made the cut for the worst episodes of "Matt Houston" (one of which he was in, may God rest his actually Irish soul).
The word "toyetic" is used to describe films which are essentially 2 hour commercials for toys, trading cards, lunch-boxes and the like. "Megaforce" scales it around 97 minutes, but it is basically one of the more toyetic movies you'll ever watch with a grimace of disbelief and vicarious flop sweat. Even by the VERY generous standards of early 80s action flicks, this movie has no depth at all. There is no arc, no character development, not even the rudimentary development you see in one of the later Friday the 13th films, where the heroine has to overcome some inner demon before she can vanquish Jason. Megaforce is not even the story of an event so much as the solution to a problem: somebody asks you what 2 + 2 equals, so you write "4" ... but you do it with gasoline and 3 and a half tons of fireworks, while singing "The Star Spangled Banner."
What astonishes me about the movie is that even at the time it was understood to be awful, so awful that 10 year old kids like me -- no great critic of cinema -- could see it for the garbage it was. I have vivid memories of running out of the theater across the bridge to the parking lot with my older brother and some friends, laughing and shouting with disbelief that anything could be this bad and get made. Throw in 35 odd years of time, and what we have is a time capsule filled with you-know-what rather than vino.
"Megaforce" had a $20 million price tag ($61.5 million today) and director Hal Needham, who'd helmed "Cannonball Run," "Hooper" and "Smokey & The Bandit" probably seemed like a no brainer to helm the project. After all, it was essentially a series of car stunts and pyrotechnics with some acting sprinkled over the top: but no amount of money, fire or exploding tanks could salvage the terrible script, cartoonish premiuse or the lamentable casting choices. I know Barry Bostwick can deliver, and he can even pull of action roles (he was superb as the cigar-chewing, lady-klling, Japanese-slaughtering submarine ace Carter "Lady" Aster in "War & Remembrance,") but he's not of sufficient charisma or acting firepower to carry a movie this bad. Nobody is.
To sum up: unless you want to punish yourself for some past-life transgression, like being a tower guard at one of Stalin's gulags, or you love 80s cheese and nothing since 12/31/89 has satisfied your craving since the clock rolled over, avoid this trash. Bad enough to waste the time, but paying the $2.99 rental fee?
Two thumb kisses down.
I saw this movie in the theater in 1982 and am still waiting for my refund.
All joking aside, this is one of the biggest pieces of shit ever to come down the pike.
I rewatched the flick as a grown man, hoping to find in it the sort of camp, kitsch and enjoyable shlock that makes so much of my childhood cinema fall into the category of so-bad-it's-good. But this movie is beyond that categorization. It is beyond COBRA in its silliness and cringe-worthiness and complete lack of self-awareness or shame. It is so bad that it is awful, although it opens itself up to Rifftrax/MSTK-style ridicule more than any other movie I can think of. This is one of those flicks which achieves its few level-ups by accident. The jokes aren't funny, but the drama is. It's like a live-action Saturday morning cartoon. And not a good one either.
As kids, we had a special vocabulary to describe things that were especially bad in popular culture. The titles of very bad television shows or feature films were a kind of shorthand to let other kids know how bad something was. If you likened something to, for example, "Battle Beyond the Stars" or "Warlords of the 21st Century," the other kids knew it was trash, but passably enjoyable trash. If you talked about "Krull," that meant a really bad movie which was actually a lot of fun if accepted on its own terms. If you referenced "Automan" as an insult, thems were fighting words, because that show was horrific (this also applied to "Masquerade"). But the lowest of the low, the insult of insults, the unholy of unholies, was "Megaforce."
Some of our approbrium probably stemmed from the movie's hype. It was Cold War time, and America was in the early stages of achieving catharsis for Vietnam by embracing ultra-nationalistic shoot-'em-ups in which all wrongs could be made right with napalm. Kids are especially vulnerable to military jingoism, and to the ideas that military service is like summer camp with guns, and that war is glorious fun in which you get to fiddle with cool gadgets and blow things up without harm to yourself. The pre-release propaganda campaign for this movie hit those notes pretty hard. At the same time, we were in a post-"Jaws" era where the summer blockbuster had become a regular weapon in Hollywood's arsenal, so the marketing blitz, which included magazine articles, ads on comic books, toys, etc., etc. had been going on for many months before the movie debuted. So confident was the studio that "Megaforce" was going to be a hit that they'd already begun pre-pre-production on the sequel, "Megaforce 2: Deeds Not Words." There was, however, one small problem, one tiny flyspeck of blight on this sunrise of golden optimism:
This movie SUCKED.
From the pompous opening crawl to the so-bad-it's-like-wrenching-stomach-cramps last image (the infamous "thumb kiss"), "Megaforce" baffles even its pre-tween audiences with its horrible, cringing, sniveling stupidity. It literally defies analysis how it could have been green-lighted, because everything about it sucks. The writing sucks. The acting sucks. The art design sucks. Even the music sucks. Plus, it's got Persis Khambatta AND Michael Beck, and meaning them no personal insult, either one is the kiss of death to almost any big-ticket project they were involved in: put them both in the same flick and it's like whatever the two-object version of a trifecta is.
The plot of the film is basically this. A mercenary warlord played by Henry Silva is doing bad things in some made-up country in the Middle East or North Africa or something. The locals, represented by P-Khambatta and the redoubtable Edward Mulhare (of "Knight Rider" fame) prove helpless, so they journey to America to enlist the aid of folks who REALLY know how to blow ---- up. These folks are Megaforce, a super-secret band of tippy-top soldiers recruited from all around the globe and financed by the world's democracies to fight evil with the highest-tech weapons available. Basically they are G.I. Joe, except they wear horrible gold lame jumpsuits that leave NOTHING to the imagination and ride dirt bikes and dune buggies. Megaforce is run by Ace Hunter (Barry Bostwick), who is basically a blond, bearded, blow-dried James Bond crossed with Evel Kneivel. He agrees to take Megaforce to the made-up country and battle Henry Silva, who is actually an old friend of his. After that, a lot of things explode, but in a curious forerunner to the days of the A-Team, absolutely nobody gets hurt. I mean it. With the exception of three bad guys who seem to get vaporized, nobody dies or even bleeds in this movie. It's mainly horrible dialog shouted over explosions, designed to show us the utter invincivbility of Megaforce. The best thing about MF is that it keeps doubling down on the cringe, in a kind of antic blackjack where you can never exceed twenty-one. From the crotch-hugging gold lame jumpsuits to the horrible romance between Barry B and Persis K, in which affection is expressed by kissing thumbs, to the multicolored, vaguely patriotic smoke screens eminated by the bikes, to the flying motorcycle...this movie is a bottomless pit of trash. Barry Bostwick was coming off a long stage run when he took this role, and he acts as if he's still on stage...at the open air theater at Universal Studios. His every movement and facial expression, even his tones of voice, and melodrama turned up to a comic 11. Persis K cannot act, cannot even smile convinincingly. Henry Silva enjoys his scenery chewing so much I suspect he may have been high during the entire production. And Edward Mulhare is to be pitied for having to do his dignified, stiff-upper-lip Brit shtick for fare which wouldn't have made the cut for the worst episodes of "Matt Houston" (one of which he was in, may God rest his actually Irish soul).
The word "toyetic" is used to describe films which are essentially 2 hour commercials for toys, trading cards, lunch-boxes and the like. "Megaforce" scales it around 97 minutes, but it is basically one of the more toyetic movies you'll ever watch with a grimace of disbelief and vicarious flop sweat. Even by the VERY generous standards of early 80s action flicks, this movie has no depth at all. There is no arc, no character development, not even the rudimentary development you see in one of the later Friday the 13th films, where the heroine has to overcome some inner demon before she can vanquish Jason. Megaforce is not even the story of an event so much as the solution to a problem: somebody asks you what 2 + 2 equals, so you write "4" ... but you do it with gasoline and 3 and a half tons of fireworks, while singing "The Star Spangled Banner."
What astonishes me about the movie is that even at the time it was understood to be awful, so awful that 10 year old kids like me -- no great critic of cinema -- could see it for the garbage it was. I have vivid memories of running out of the theater across the bridge to the parking lot with my older brother and some friends, laughing and shouting with disbelief that anything could be this bad and get made. Throw in 35 odd years of time, and what we have is a time capsule filled with you-know-what rather than vino.
"Megaforce" had a $20 million price tag ($61.5 million today) and director Hal Needham, who'd helmed "Cannonball Run," "Hooper" and "Smokey & The Bandit" probably seemed like a no brainer to helm the project. After all, it was essentially a series of car stunts and pyrotechnics with some acting sprinkled over the top: but no amount of money, fire or exploding tanks could salvage the terrible script, cartoonish premiuse or the lamentable casting choices. I know Barry Bostwick can deliver, and he can even pull of action roles (he was superb as the cigar-chewing, lady-klling, Japanese-slaughtering submarine ace Carter "Lady" Aster in "War & Remembrance,") but he's not of sufficient charisma or acting firepower to carry a movie this bad. Nobody is.
To sum up: unless you want to punish yourself for some past-life transgression, like being a tower guard at one of Stalin's gulags, or you love 80s cheese and nothing since 12/31/89 has satisfied your craving since the clock rolled over, avoid this trash. Bad enough to waste the time, but paying the $2.99 rental fee?
Two thumb kisses down.
January 9, 2023
WHAT I DO ALL DAY
You can make a killing as a writer, but you can't make a living. -- Unknown
Just a day, just an, ordinary day
Just tryin' to get by
Just a boy, just an, ordinary boy but
He was looking to the sky
-- Vanessa Carlton
Like most writers, I do not make most of my income by writing. As the above-quoted passage tells you, writing is a trade which either pays very little, or, in rare cases, vast fortunes. There is not really a middle class. I don't mean there aren't writers who pull down, say, 50 - 100 K a year and do nothing else, but even these folks have a high degree of economic uncertainty. They have to work ceaselessly, pay for their own medical benefits, and pray what they're peddling doesn't go out of fashion or the publisher decide they "want to move in another direction." Indeed, the line between a middle-class writer and a hack is a fine one, through no fault of the writer. He wants to work, and he's got bills to pay, so he goes where the money is, banging out true crime paperbacks or formulaic romance novels (four a year) or ghostwriting memoirs or what have you. The fact that what he really wants to do is pen cozy mysteries or epic sci-fi novels is lost in all that sweaty effort to pay the mortgage.
When I was working in the entertainment industry, I saw a variation of this everywhere I went, so much so that I dubbed it "The L.A. Trap." You go out to L.A. to make it in The Industry, but brutal economic realities demand you take that job waiting tables, or working security, or sharpening pencils at a law firm, and before you know it, the struggle to pay the rent eclipses your desire to Make It. Your priorities begin to reverse themselves, and within two years your script, your comedy routine, your band, has become a hobby and your "day job" the center of your life. You never intentionally sell out to necessity: you just surrender the dream here and there, a half-percent at a time, until one day you're 38, have a second kid on the way, and realize you haven't looked at your screenplay in two years. Without ever realizing it, without consciously raising the white flag, you've entirely given up. Or -- and this may actually be worse -- you actually break into the industry, but in an area for which you have no passion or even interest. You want to be a stuntman, say, but end up as an office manager at Warner Brothers. Or you're hellbent on being a movie director, and find yourself working on video game trailers instead. You become like a fish in a tank, who can clearly see the outside world but cannot partake in it. An invisible wall keeps you in a different environment, one which may be comfortable and even lucrative, but does not speak to the desires of your heart.
I have been fortunate enough never to fall completely into the Trap, though God knows I came close more than once, and may yet do so -- as I said, you often never realize it's happening to you, present tense, until it has already happened, past tense. But I do have a "day job," and unlike my former day jobs in video games and the make up effects industry, it is one which requires more than my physical presence and some level of effort. This one has real stakes, meaning real consequences for failure.
As you may know if you've read this blog in the past, I worked in law enforcement from 1997 - 2004. When I hung up my spurs then, I thought it was for good, but the criminal justice world is surprisingly like the Mafia or the Irish Republican Army: once in, never out. And when I decided to shake the dust of Hollywood from my feet in 2020, I found myself employed, once more, by a district attorney's office, this time as an advocate for victims of crime. I had been publishing for four years by this time, and making an uneven flow of money, and winning the occasional award. I had not, however, reached anything like economic independence: I needed steady, full-time work, and as a middle aged man, I also needed reliable benefits. More than that, however, I needed to feel as if I were doing something truly substantive with my time. Something more meaningful and real than baking blobs of pink latex goo into masks for background actors on "The Walking Dead," or ADHD-style video game trailers for the latest iteration of "Call of Duty." So I threw my hat back into the criminal justice ring, and the rest of me with it.
Today is Monday, and I think it rather a typical one for a person in my line of work, both as an advocate and a writer. So without further blather, let me walk you through the last 24 hours of my life.
Sunday night found me banging away at these keys on SOMETHING EVIL, that epic horror novel I've been working on for six-plus years, which is now within just a few thousand words of completion. I have never had such an exhausting, drawn-out experience writing anything as I have on this book, and seeing the finish line approach was both a tease and a relief. I'm convinced every writer has at least one project like this, a nightmare first draft that won't end: well, whatever past-life sins I'm making up for ought to be expiated by this experience.
Because I'd skipped the gym that day, I took frequent breaks to do prison-style calisthenics: I clocked 200 push-ups alone before about ten o'clock. Unlike many writers, I make a concerted if sometimes failing effort to stay in shape, or at least to remain vigorously active, and so whenever I became too restless or unfocused, I started pushing. Last year I might have hit the bourbon to cure those feelings, but in 2023 alcohol is verboten in my home, because like most writers, I have a problem with alcohol, which is to say I have no problem drinking it to cure restlessness, quiet my nerves, mollify boredom, or create a certain mood or atmosphere in my mind.
However, because I didn't get in my cardio or get enough fresh air, I had trouble sleeping. A lot of trouble. My back was inexplicably sore, and I felt intimations of anxiety that never blossomed into a full-blown attack. Come morning I was tired enough to want to call in sick, but of course in the real world you can't do that, so up I went, knuckling the sleep I didn't get from my half-shut eyes.
I dress very formally for work. Today it was a silver-gray blazer with a purple-and-gold pocket square, a paper-stiff white shirt with a mauve tie, black belt, black trousers and black police shoes, topped off by a silver with an amber stone of blood-orange hue. For personal protection, not related directly to my work but rather to my neighborhood and the fact I am recognizably part of the apparatus of the criminal justice system, I sometimes carry a 9mm Walther P-1 in a shoulder holster, but the truth is that carrying guns is a pain in the ass, and so today I was most definitely unarmed. It was cold, so I pulled on a longish black leather coat, grabbed my leather briefcase, and went out the door.
The courthouse is just up the street from where I live. I was at my desk by eight, so for an hour I tried to get some idea of what the week was going to be like -- where I was supposed to be, when I was supposed to be there, what I was supposed to do. To reduce anxiety, I returned a series of calls left on my voice mail over the weekend. I hate doing this, because I never know what I'm getting into when I call these folks: it may be a pleasant and polite five minutes or an hour of shouting. At nine o'clock, however, I had to get up and go: I had to be at a district justice's office at ten, and it was 18 miles distant and slap-bang in the middle of cow country.
In the state in which I live, preliminary hearings in criminal cases are held at magesterial district justice's offices, and every county has a share of them. I am responsible for four. That is to say, every criminal case with a victim in those four jurisdictions belongs partially to me. I drive out, meet the victims, explain the process, and help translate the district attorney's legalese. If there is no D.A. present, I act as a buffer between the victim and the police officer on the case. A surprising number of cops, actually a majority, are quite good with victims, but police work is not always a profession that lends itself to tact and diplomacy.
Today was an easy one. We had no actual hearing. We managed to resolve the case without one. The defense attorney, prosecutor and myself sat in a conference room and worked out the problem among ourselves. There can be wild conflicts between defense and prosecution, just like on TV, but for the most part, some snarking and sniping aside, it's quite professional and businesslike, even friendly. We are players on different teams, in opposition but not necessarily enemies. I have passed many a dull hour in the middle of nowhere with good-natured public defenders, and even some private attorneys.
I drove back to the office. I distributed donuts I'd bought on the way. I don't eat donuts -- I can't hack the sugar rush, or more properly the sugar crash which follows -- but they bring joy to my much-tried coworkers. There is not one secretary, not one paralegal, not one victim-witness coordinator, county detective or attorney in the office who couldn't be making anywhere from 20% to three times the income in the private sector. They do what they do, by and large, because they believe in what they are doing. The quest for substance, for work of real meaning and value, is hardly unique to your humble correspondent: I see it mirrored in the faces of most of my co-workers every day, and this is not idealization. I am way past idealizing anyone. I'm just stating the facts.
Calls and e-mails had piled up, and one of the prosecutors ducked by to ask me when I'd be free to call a whole slew of victims about potential plea bargains in the works. I rummage my notebooks and give him an answer. It's sincere, but probably not true: making plans in our office is almost impossible. Things happen. We do not really control them.
I put in notes of various phone calls and hearings into my computer system. This is a tedious task because I have so many stacked up, and my handwriting is terrible, so translating it takes time, and I always end up feeling like I'm dictating a telegraph message circle 1888 ("JONES says she is OK with the offer 3 - 23 months in county plus costs and fines for the defendant SMITH provided he gets MH and D&A evals with followthrough on recommended TX plus a no contact order...."). While I do this, I take several calls, and have to make notes on them, too. I often discover, later on, that I was interrupted while making notes on Case Y and my paragraph stops in mid-sentence. Then I have to figure out what the hell I was going to say.
Lunch comes and goes. I have it at a bar restaurant down the street with a friend from college. I haven't eaten all day and my fork trembles on its way to my mouth. I can't really afford to eat lunches out like this, but my social life is on the critical list, and even this quick meeting pumps some new life into it. Before I know it I'm back in the office, but not back in my chair: a sudden, urgent request to observe a hearing and report its results to a faraway victim takes me upstairs into Courtroom "B". Of course nothing in court ever goes off on time, so I watch a sex offender get 20 years for hideous crimes, a drug dealer's case get continued for 30 days, a parole violator get remanded to county jail, a mouthy drunk driver nearly get held in contempt. It all sounds terrribly exciting, and sometimes the tension is indeed unbearable, but courtroom proceedings are slow, thorough, and deliberate, and it takes a great deal of patience to sit through them unless one has a personal interest. An advocate must balance their human feelings with the need to keep some level of professional distance. Sometimes this is impossible and we take the jobs home with us. A not guilty verdict in a rape case, a murder case that ends in a mistrial, a scheduled guilty plea in an aggravated assault case that is canceled at the last minute to the outrage of the victim, these things are hard to endure and harder to explain to those seeking justice or vengeance. I have broken out in goosebumps over glorious victories, and had to walk out of the building after crushing defeats, sometimes on the same day. It takes a toll. Every week is a check written against my goodwill, and some weeks the checks bounce. The account is overdrawn. It is for this reason that I have started to curb my drinking and up my exercise. Stress is a killer, but it kills slowly and silently, making us fat, making us drink too much, eat too much, sleep too little, until, bang, we drop in our tracks.
I'm back down to my desk by four. Make a call to the victim to report on her case. Talk with some co-workers about their cases. We advocates are constantly bouncing problems, small victories, chafing defeats, funny or moving stories, off each other, and I know that if I quit this job tomorrow what I will miss most is the M*A*S*H-like cameraderie of the trenches, the way we cover for each other, shore each other up when one of us is buckling, pitch in with advice or inappropriate jokes.
The assistant district attorney who wanted to make calls with me at three now appears at four-fifteen. He knows I'm supposed to knock off at four-thirty, but we have a whole slew of calls to make, and we won't want to do them tomorrow, either, and so dinner must wait. We talk to a half-dozen victims, touching base about fraud cases, assaults, dog bites, car accidents, this, that. I learned a long time ago never to minimize or trivialize a case's importance, because while a $50 theft may seem inconsequential to me who is assigned a half-dozen homicides at any given time, it may be the most important thing in the world to an elderly victim on a fixed income. So our approach is always the same. We always try to put the victim in the driver's seat, empower them, give them a real voice in our strategy. In the vast majority of instances it works. I have never been a people person, and nobody was more surprised than I at how diplomatic I can be, how patiently I can work through righteous anger or what I sometimes feel is petty entitlement, to find a relatively positive outcome to a bad situation. I take my losses of course, and sometimes I take them home...or to a bar to be drowned in High West whiskey on the rocks...but I try hard to fight the fights that need fighting and be content in that itself and not necessarily the outcome. In the end, most victims recognize when we -- detectives, prosecutors, advocates -- have kept faith with them even if we were unable to deliver the verdict they wished. A lot of people forget that Rocky Balboa lost the first fight with Apollo Creed, but the movie was never about winning. It was about victory, which is another thing entirely.
It's well after five before I get home. Pitch black Pennsylvania winter. Another advocate and I stop on the street to commiserate in the cold. Once again I feel that bond, that strength of comradeship which is different than conventional friendship, because it is born out of pressure: the brotherhood of the foxhole.
I'm damnably hungry, so I warm up the food I prepped Sunday night and chop a salad to go with it, pausing occasionally to slip treats to the cat, who also wants dinner. I eat in my undershirt, the thing I no longer call a "wife-beater" because of my job, while watching a television show. The show is about people vaguely like me, having vaguely similar experiences in a big city in Canada, and some folks I know wonder why I would choose this as my entertainment, since it's basically my life with better editing and a musical score. The truth is that stuff like this connects me with the reasons why I choose to do this five days a week, this exactly and not something else which would pay better and make me produce less cortisol. In the fictional adventures of Domenic Da Vinci, the coroner of Vancouver, I see myself, fumbling my way to better karma.
After dinner I realize I once again don't have time to get to the gym before it closes at nine, for I still have to get out my Monday blog, peruse that goddamn horror novel, check on the status of my online book tour, prep my alledgedly liver-cleansing breakfast shake of kale, kefir, and blueberries, prep my morning cup of Mudwatr, lay out an outfit for tomorrow, and get in a shit-ton of push-ups. Oh, and see if the artist I want to do the cover art for a novella of mine is interested. Oh, and check my e-mails about another book tour I'm trying to get from an English promotional service, since I have a surprising number of fans in Britain. Oh, and see what Novel News Network had to say about my latest novel, THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER. Holy shit, it's a good review:
"This book was way more than I was expecting.
I thought this was a great read that really encompasses so many different themes.
Overall I found it to have a great writing style that had such a great storyline. I flew through this story in one night; it is truly a remarkable book."
Trust me, not every reaction to my work is so effusive. This novel has been entered into no less than nine book awards competitions, and so far is 2 - 3. It truly is damned good, but being a sequel, is probably not as approachable to a cold reader as its predecessor would be. I recently had a dream in which a Hobbit -- yes, a Hobbit -- told me, "You're starting in the middle: that's no way to begin a journey!" Maybe he was talking about this. In any event, I wrote down his advice, because in addition to writing fiction, non-fiction and a weekly blog, I also keep a journal, and in that journal record my dreams.
So there you have it, really. It's now 9:45, and I keep remembering things I have to do, like shave, get in those push ups, read a little of "Chinese Diaries," and decide whether or not I need 1/2 a tramadol to actually get to sleep. I know I'll get to it all, but I'm damned if I know how. This is the life of an ordinary, working-poor writer with a day job...which is a little more than a day job. But a helluva lot less than a trap.
Just a day, just an, ordinary day
Just tryin' to get by
Just a boy, just an, ordinary boy but
He was looking to the sky
-- Vanessa Carlton
Like most writers, I do not make most of my income by writing. As the above-quoted passage tells you, writing is a trade which either pays very little, or, in rare cases, vast fortunes. There is not really a middle class. I don't mean there aren't writers who pull down, say, 50 - 100 K a year and do nothing else, but even these folks have a high degree of economic uncertainty. They have to work ceaselessly, pay for their own medical benefits, and pray what they're peddling doesn't go out of fashion or the publisher decide they "want to move in another direction." Indeed, the line between a middle-class writer and a hack is a fine one, through no fault of the writer. He wants to work, and he's got bills to pay, so he goes where the money is, banging out true crime paperbacks or formulaic romance novels (four a year) or ghostwriting memoirs or what have you. The fact that what he really wants to do is pen cozy mysteries or epic sci-fi novels is lost in all that sweaty effort to pay the mortgage.
When I was working in the entertainment industry, I saw a variation of this everywhere I went, so much so that I dubbed it "The L.A. Trap." You go out to L.A. to make it in The Industry, but brutal economic realities demand you take that job waiting tables, or working security, or sharpening pencils at a law firm, and before you know it, the struggle to pay the rent eclipses your desire to Make It. Your priorities begin to reverse themselves, and within two years your script, your comedy routine, your band, has become a hobby and your "day job" the center of your life. You never intentionally sell out to necessity: you just surrender the dream here and there, a half-percent at a time, until one day you're 38, have a second kid on the way, and realize you haven't looked at your screenplay in two years. Without ever realizing it, without consciously raising the white flag, you've entirely given up. Or -- and this may actually be worse -- you actually break into the industry, but in an area for which you have no passion or even interest. You want to be a stuntman, say, but end up as an office manager at Warner Brothers. Or you're hellbent on being a movie director, and find yourself working on video game trailers instead. You become like a fish in a tank, who can clearly see the outside world but cannot partake in it. An invisible wall keeps you in a different environment, one which may be comfortable and even lucrative, but does not speak to the desires of your heart.
I have been fortunate enough never to fall completely into the Trap, though God knows I came close more than once, and may yet do so -- as I said, you often never realize it's happening to you, present tense, until it has already happened, past tense. But I do have a "day job," and unlike my former day jobs in video games and the make up effects industry, it is one which requires more than my physical presence and some level of effort. This one has real stakes, meaning real consequences for failure.
As you may know if you've read this blog in the past, I worked in law enforcement from 1997 - 2004. When I hung up my spurs then, I thought it was for good, but the criminal justice world is surprisingly like the Mafia or the Irish Republican Army: once in, never out. And when I decided to shake the dust of Hollywood from my feet in 2020, I found myself employed, once more, by a district attorney's office, this time as an advocate for victims of crime. I had been publishing for four years by this time, and making an uneven flow of money, and winning the occasional award. I had not, however, reached anything like economic independence: I needed steady, full-time work, and as a middle aged man, I also needed reliable benefits. More than that, however, I needed to feel as if I were doing something truly substantive with my time. Something more meaningful and real than baking blobs of pink latex goo into masks for background actors on "The Walking Dead," or ADHD-style video game trailers for the latest iteration of "Call of Duty." So I threw my hat back into the criminal justice ring, and the rest of me with it.
Today is Monday, and I think it rather a typical one for a person in my line of work, both as an advocate and a writer. So without further blather, let me walk you through the last 24 hours of my life.
Sunday night found me banging away at these keys on SOMETHING EVIL, that epic horror novel I've been working on for six-plus years, which is now within just a few thousand words of completion. I have never had such an exhausting, drawn-out experience writing anything as I have on this book, and seeing the finish line approach was both a tease and a relief. I'm convinced every writer has at least one project like this, a nightmare first draft that won't end: well, whatever past-life sins I'm making up for ought to be expiated by this experience.
Because I'd skipped the gym that day, I took frequent breaks to do prison-style calisthenics: I clocked 200 push-ups alone before about ten o'clock. Unlike many writers, I make a concerted if sometimes failing effort to stay in shape, or at least to remain vigorously active, and so whenever I became too restless or unfocused, I started pushing. Last year I might have hit the bourbon to cure those feelings, but in 2023 alcohol is verboten in my home, because like most writers, I have a problem with alcohol, which is to say I have no problem drinking it to cure restlessness, quiet my nerves, mollify boredom, or create a certain mood or atmosphere in my mind.
However, because I didn't get in my cardio or get enough fresh air, I had trouble sleeping. A lot of trouble. My back was inexplicably sore, and I felt intimations of anxiety that never blossomed into a full-blown attack. Come morning I was tired enough to want to call in sick, but of course in the real world you can't do that, so up I went, knuckling the sleep I didn't get from my half-shut eyes.
I dress very formally for work. Today it was a silver-gray blazer with a purple-and-gold pocket square, a paper-stiff white shirt with a mauve tie, black belt, black trousers and black police shoes, topped off by a silver with an amber stone of blood-orange hue. For personal protection, not related directly to my work but rather to my neighborhood and the fact I am recognizably part of the apparatus of the criminal justice system, I sometimes carry a 9mm Walther P-1 in a shoulder holster, but the truth is that carrying guns is a pain in the ass, and so today I was most definitely unarmed. It was cold, so I pulled on a longish black leather coat, grabbed my leather briefcase, and went out the door.
The courthouse is just up the street from where I live. I was at my desk by eight, so for an hour I tried to get some idea of what the week was going to be like -- where I was supposed to be, when I was supposed to be there, what I was supposed to do. To reduce anxiety, I returned a series of calls left on my voice mail over the weekend. I hate doing this, because I never know what I'm getting into when I call these folks: it may be a pleasant and polite five minutes or an hour of shouting. At nine o'clock, however, I had to get up and go: I had to be at a district justice's office at ten, and it was 18 miles distant and slap-bang in the middle of cow country.
In the state in which I live, preliminary hearings in criminal cases are held at magesterial district justice's offices, and every county has a share of them. I am responsible for four. That is to say, every criminal case with a victim in those four jurisdictions belongs partially to me. I drive out, meet the victims, explain the process, and help translate the district attorney's legalese. If there is no D.A. present, I act as a buffer between the victim and the police officer on the case. A surprising number of cops, actually a majority, are quite good with victims, but police work is not always a profession that lends itself to tact and diplomacy.
Today was an easy one. We had no actual hearing. We managed to resolve the case without one. The defense attorney, prosecutor and myself sat in a conference room and worked out the problem among ourselves. There can be wild conflicts between defense and prosecution, just like on TV, but for the most part, some snarking and sniping aside, it's quite professional and businesslike, even friendly. We are players on different teams, in opposition but not necessarily enemies. I have passed many a dull hour in the middle of nowhere with good-natured public defenders, and even some private attorneys.
I drove back to the office. I distributed donuts I'd bought on the way. I don't eat donuts -- I can't hack the sugar rush, or more properly the sugar crash which follows -- but they bring joy to my much-tried coworkers. There is not one secretary, not one paralegal, not one victim-witness coordinator, county detective or attorney in the office who couldn't be making anywhere from 20% to three times the income in the private sector. They do what they do, by and large, because they believe in what they are doing. The quest for substance, for work of real meaning and value, is hardly unique to your humble correspondent: I see it mirrored in the faces of most of my co-workers every day, and this is not idealization. I am way past idealizing anyone. I'm just stating the facts.
Calls and e-mails had piled up, and one of the prosecutors ducked by to ask me when I'd be free to call a whole slew of victims about potential plea bargains in the works. I rummage my notebooks and give him an answer. It's sincere, but probably not true: making plans in our office is almost impossible. Things happen. We do not really control them.
I put in notes of various phone calls and hearings into my computer system. This is a tedious task because I have so many stacked up, and my handwriting is terrible, so translating it takes time, and I always end up feeling like I'm dictating a telegraph message circle 1888 ("JONES says she is OK with the offer 3 - 23 months in county plus costs and fines for the defendant SMITH provided he gets MH and D&A evals with followthrough on recommended TX plus a no contact order...."). While I do this, I take several calls, and have to make notes on them, too. I often discover, later on, that I was interrupted while making notes on Case Y and my paragraph stops in mid-sentence. Then I have to figure out what the hell I was going to say.
Lunch comes and goes. I have it at a bar restaurant down the street with a friend from college. I haven't eaten all day and my fork trembles on its way to my mouth. I can't really afford to eat lunches out like this, but my social life is on the critical list, and even this quick meeting pumps some new life into it. Before I know it I'm back in the office, but not back in my chair: a sudden, urgent request to observe a hearing and report its results to a faraway victim takes me upstairs into Courtroom "B". Of course nothing in court ever goes off on time, so I watch a sex offender get 20 years for hideous crimes, a drug dealer's case get continued for 30 days, a parole violator get remanded to county jail, a mouthy drunk driver nearly get held in contempt. It all sounds terrribly exciting, and sometimes the tension is indeed unbearable, but courtroom proceedings are slow, thorough, and deliberate, and it takes a great deal of patience to sit through them unless one has a personal interest. An advocate must balance their human feelings with the need to keep some level of professional distance. Sometimes this is impossible and we take the jobs home with us. A not guilty verdict in a rape case, a murder case that ends in a mistrial, a scheduled guilty plea in an aggravated assault case that is canceled at the last minute to the outrage of the victim, these things are hard to endure and harder to explain to those seeking justice or vengeance. I have broken out in goosebumps over glorious victories, and had to walk out of the building after crushing defeats, sometimes on the same day. It takes a toll. Every week is a check written against my goodwill, and some weeks the checks bounce. The account is overdrawn. It is for this reason that I have started to curb my drinking and up my exercise. Stress is a killer, but it kills slowly and silently, making us fat, making us drink too much, eat too much, sleep too little, until, bang, we drop in our tracks.
I'm back down to my desk by four. Make a call to the victim to report on her case. Talk with some co-workers about their cases. We advocates are constantly bouncing problems, small victories, chafing defeats, funny or moving stories, off each other, and I know that if I quit this job tomorrow what I will miss most is the M*A*S*H-like cameraderie of the trenches, the way we cover for each other, shore each other up when one of us is buckling, pitch in with advice or inappropriate jokes.
The assistant district attorney who wanted to make calls with me at three now appears at four-fifteen. He knows I'm supposed to knock off at four-thirty, but we have a whole slew of calls to make, and we won't want to do them tomorrow, either, and so dinner must wait. We talk to a half-dozen victims, touching base about fraud cases, assaults, dog bites, car accidents, this, that. I learned a long time ago never to minimize or trivialize a case's importance, because while a $50 theft may seem inconsequential to me who is assigned a half-dozen homicides at any given time, it may be the most important thing in the world to an elderly victim on a fixed income. So our approach is always the same. We always try to put the victim in the driver's seat, empower them, give them a real voice in our strategy. In the vast majority of instances it works. I have never been a people person, and nobody was more surprised than I at how diplomatic I can be, how patiently I can work through righteous anger or what I sometimes feel is petty entitlement, to find a relatively positive outcome to a bad situation. I take my losses of course, and sometimes I take them home...or to a bar to be drowned in High West whiskey on the rocks...but I try hard to fight the fights that need fighting and be content in that itself and not necessarily the outcome. In the end, most victims recognize when we -- detectives, prosecutors, advocates -- have kept faith with them even if we were unable to deliver the verdict they wished. A lot of people forget that Rocky Balboa lost the first fight with Apollo Creed, but the movie was never about winning. It was about victory, which is another thing entirely.
It's well after five before I get home. Pitch black Pennsylvania winter. Another advocate and I stop on the street to commiserate in the cold. Once again I feel that bond, that strength of comradeship which is different than conventional friendship, because it is born out of pressure: the brotherhood of the foxhole.
I'm damnably hungry, so I warm up the food I prepped Sunday night and chop a salad to go with it, pausing occasionally to slip treats to the cat, who also wants dinner. I eat in my undershirt, the thing I no longer call a "wife-beater" because of my job, while watching a television show. The show is about people vaguely like me, having vaguely similar experiences in a big city in Canada, and some folks I know wonder why I would choose this as my entertainment, since it's basically my life with better editing and a musical score. The truth is that stuff like this connects me with the reasons why I choose to do this five days a week, this exactly and not something else which would pay better and make me produce less cortisol. In the fictional adventures of Domenic Da Vinci, the coroner of Vancouver, I see myself, fumbling my way to better karma.
After dinner I realize I once again don't have time to get to the gym before it closes at nine, for I still have to get out my Monday blog, peruse that goddamn horror novel, check on the status of my online book tour, prep my alledgedly liver-cleansing breakfast shake of kale, kefir, and blueberries, prep my morning cup of Mudwatr, lay out an outfit for tomorrow, and get in a shit-ton of push-ups. Oh, and see if the artist I want to do the cover art for a novella of mine is interested. Oh, and check my e-mails about another book tour I'm trying to get from an English promotional service, since I have a surprising number of fans in Britain. Oh, and see what Novel News Network had to say about my latest novel, THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER. Holy shit, it's a good review:
"This book was way more than I was expecting.
I thought this was a great read that really encompasses so many different themes.
Overall I found it to have a great writing style that had such a great storyline. I flew through this story in one night; it is truly a remarkable book."
Trust me, not every reaction to my work is so effusive. This novel has been entered into no less than nine book awards competitions, and so far is 2 - 3. It truly is damned good, but being a sequel, is probably not as approachable to a cold reader as its predecessor would be. I recently had a dream in which a Hobbit -- yes, a Hobbit -- told me, "You're starting in the middle: that's no way to begin a journey!" Maybe he was talking about this. In any event, I wrote down his advice, because in addition to writing fiction, non-fiction and a weekly blog, I also keep a journal, and in that journal record my dreams.
So there you have it, really. It's now 9:45, and I keep remembering things I have to do, like shave, get in those push ups, read a little of "Chinese Diaries," and decide whether or not I need 1/2 a tramadol to actually get to sleep. I know I'll get to it all, but I'm damned if I know how. This is the life of an ordinary, working-poor writer with a day job...which is a little more than a day job. But a helluva lot less than a trap.
January 2, 2023
MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "CSI"
New year, new ideas. This Monday, the first of 2023, I am inaugurating a new series within this blog. In it I will be looking back at the television series, mini-series, video games and cultural what-not of yesteryear: some still enormously famous, others half-or-completely forgotten. It's a pretty straightforward assignment, but that last word requires some clarification on my part. “Yesteryear” is a word used nostalgically, with a reverence for the past which may or may not be justified: in MEMORY LANE, if I allow myself the luxury of nostalgia, it is because I feel nostalgia plays a role in the enjoyment and the retroactive perception of the series in question. I will strive to separate these feelings from my objective analysis of the show.
I should also like to add here that as someone who lived and worked in Hollywood for thirteen years and still keeps a hand, or at least a few fingers, lightly dipped in the game, I am occasionally going to be to cite examples from my personal experience or knowledge which I feel will add to my examination. It may be that I worked on the show myself in some capacity or knew people who did. On the other hand, it may be that I have no special knowledge whatsoever of the subject of which I speak and am merely coming from a viewer's perspective. In either event I will state the location of my perspective clearly.
That having been said, let's get this (sorry) show on the road, and begin by looking back at “CSI.”
Some shows come out of nowhere to achieve cultural dominance. “CSI” was no such phenomenon. Before the pilot had even been produced it was already one of the hottest properties in Hollywood, with actors fighting to land an audition, and seems almost destined to have become a hit, though the actual impact of the show was something no would could possibly have guessed. Created by Anthony Zuicker, “CSI” tapped into a burgeoning interest in the field of forensic science which initially began with "Quincy" in 1974, but really took off in popular culture after "The Silence of the Lambs" was made into a hit film in 1991. “CSI” harnessed itself to this trend, but in a distinct way. Featuring an ensemble cast, it was first and foremost a procedural, with the characters serving as agents of the story, and the stories themselves as mystery boxes which could only be unlocked through the application of forensic science. Audiences would get to know the characters well enough, but only in terms of their reactions to events and the way their personalities affected their methods of investigation. Science was to be the star, technology its co-star.
This is not to say that “CSI” lacked memorable characters. On the contrary, in Gil Grissom (William Petersen) it created one of the greatest television detectives of all time. Unlike the volatile, haunted, mentally unstable Will Graham of Michael Mann's “Manhunter” (1985), which Petersen also portayed, Grissom was conceived as a brilliant, eccentric loner, emotionally removed from his cases and to some extent his colleagues, obsessed with science as a thing-in-itself. In his own way he became a modern take on Sherlock Holmes: seemingly sexless, uninterested in money, fame or titles (he was a Ph.D. but seldom used the handle), he sometimes came off as an intellect trapped unwillingly in a human body. Nonetheless, he carried an air of pathos about him, a sense, on some level, of wanting but being unable to connect with his fellow human beings. Likewise, the original supporting characters, Kathryn Willows (Marg Helgenberger), Nick Stokes (George Eads), Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan), Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) and Jim Brass (Paul Guilfoyle), all found their favorites among adoring audiences, as much for their flaws as their merits: Willows was hotly defensive, territorial and intolerant of criticism, Stokes overly cocky and immature, Brown a short-tempered junkie gambler, Sidle emotionally unstable and needy, and Brass often just a plain, old-fashioned jerk.
Rewatching the first season, what struck me was how the show in its first episodes both resembled and differed with the show which was to come. The show was written at a fairly high level from the pilot episode, with an emphasis on wordplay and snappy dialog, often laced with double entendres, cultural references and jokes, one example being:
GRISSOM: (observing a rave) Teenage wasteland.
BROWN: Who?
GRISSOM: Exactly.
There was also an immediate attempt to define the show's basic premise through exposition delivered by Grissom, who is tirelessly preaching to his investigators that “evidence can't lie,” that the CSI's were “scientists, not detectives” and that personal feelings only muddle the process. Pushback to this comes primarily from Willows, who is equally obsessed with “why” rather than “how” and often allows her emotions to become entangled in her work. The tension of this dynamic drove the series from the pilot. Everyone quested for truth, but how they arrived was not always by the same path.
The characters established in the pilot stayed remarkably constant from that point, Grissom being an exception and Sara a smaller one. Grissom is initially more emotional and “human.” Sara is sexier and more facetious. As time went on, the former divested himself of some of his humanity while the latter became angrier, touchier, more unstable. The other characters, including a whole series of lesser characters who were elevated to full-time status (Doc, Ecklie, Super Dave, Hodges) were allowed to develop over time, but retained their initial personalities and stayed true to them.
“CSI” later became famous, and somewhat notorious, for its lavish, atmospheric set design and its habit of “painting with light” to produce luridly beautiful visual landscapes which were also somewhat cartoonish. The initial episodes do not reflect this. The CIS lab is depicted and lighted realistically, as a ramshackle government building. Atmosphere is created by contrasting bright light with deep shadow. This attempt at realism is generally in keeping with the way the CSIs are actually depicted as such, with large liberties taken in the scope of their powers for the purposes of drama, but the emphasis being on forensic science. Before long, however, the show began to deliberately blur the line between crime scene investigation and police work, so that in later seasons one would assume a CSI and a police officer were essentially the same thing. The CSIs interrogate suspects, chase them down alleys, draw guns and use them. They direct investigations rather than assisting with them, and are often seen ordering around cops like coolies. This heightened the drama at the expense of any sense of realism, but it did not in any way effect the show's watchability.
As CSI aged, it became more self-conscious of its cultural impact – the famous “CSI effect,” which actually reached real-life jury rooms (I have seen it firsthand in law enforcement), and in-jokes began to appear in the scripts. Nods and winks, borderline breaks in the fourth wall. It also became increasingly slick, sometimes to the point of greasiness. The dialog remained snappy and memorable, but was often constructed to produce affect, i.e., written for its sound and catchiness, rather than for its substance and content. More and more, the solving of mysteries involved the use of scientific techniques so sophisticated and unrealistic they bordered on the magical. This trend was to continue to the series finale, where bees are employed to catch a killer, and became rather a joke among audiences, and not always a kind-spirited one. The world of “CSI” began as a Hollywood take on forensic investigation. Suspension of disbelief was required but minimal. It ended as something of a fantasy.
One formula “CSI” adopted in the first season and never abandoned were over-arching stories about ingenious, elusive serial killers, sometimes lasting multiple seasons. The best of these, and the most memorable, was the Miniature Killer storyline, which went on for years and was by and largely extremely well-handled, though it also started a troubling trend of introducing serial murderers who also seem to have unlimited financial resources as well as advanced technical knowledge of just about every subject imaginable. By the end of “CSI,” this concluded in its logical absurdity, where the serial is in fact also a billionaire: but for a long time, it worked and worked well.
An unexpected element of the show was the development of a disaster-plagued romance between Grissom and Sara. This romance was handled deftly and in small installments, so it rarely seemed to be intruding into the show's procedural format. Petersen and Fox had very good chemistry together, and the particular nature of their romance – spiritual rather than physical, one might say – was in keeping with their character's personalities. Audiences began to root hard for these two to find their happily ever after.
The decline and fall of Warrick Brown was another tenent of the show which seemed true to life. Brown was depicted from the start as a first-rate investigator who often fell victim to his many personal demons. Gary Dourdan did fine work in this regard, and George Eads as well, in his role as a man trying to stop his best friend from disintegrating. Eads' Nick Stokes was in many ways the most realistically depicted of all the characters, because of the genuine way he reacted, emotionally, to trauma despite his cocky attitude: in one episode he weeps and begins to beg for mercy when a killer points a gun in his face. A lesser show would have had him spewing fake tough-guy dialog. Eads' face when suddenly confronted with possible death is beautifully depicted, and made us like and relate to him.
The effect of trauma on the characters is not ignored. Sara is as much a victim of what she sees as the victims themselves, and ultimately falls apart under the constant exposure to the visceral horror of crime scenes. It's true that when Jorja Fox returned full-time to the series after leaving for several years, she seems strangely unaffected and apart, a sort of android version of herself, but repeating this storyline would have been pointless.
The diversity of the characters was perhaps best reflected in those of Brass and Sanders. The former was a cynical, acid-tongued veteran cop who often quarreled with the CSIs (particularly Brown); the latter was a geeky lab rat who was convinced he was cool but had trouble convincing anyone else. The character of Brass deepened over time: he developed an abiding respect for the scientists he once despised and even formed lasting friendships among them, friendships which allowed him to endure terrible personal disasters in the show's later seasons. Sanders, on the other hand, evolved from a facteious and immature “counterculture kid” into a seasoned professional tested by personal tragedy.
“CSI” was set in Las Vegas, and serves not only the stage for the series but also a character. Though shot mainly in Valencia, Cailfornia, Vegas was simulated brilliantly through a combinaton of matching locations, green screens, second unit photography, and actual visits to the city. Many storylines revolved around Vegas-centric themes such as the casinos, gambling, nightlife and tourism, while others delve into Vegas's history, which is interwoven with greed, corruption and organized crime. Still others examine the city off the Strip, alternatively lavish, prosaic or crime-ridden. The portrayal is usually glamorous and sexy, but there is never any effort to hide the squalor and vice which seethes beneath the glow of the neon.
Ultimately, however, the setting was mere set dressing. The driving theme of “CSI” was the quest for truth. That one must follow the evidence, and while the evidence could not lie, it could be misinterpreted. Technology and procedure could produce data, but human beings had to make the conclusions. The show was a constant tension between head and heart, logic and passion, reason and instinct. The shallowness and frivolity of the city are belied by the grim and almost sacred work performed by the team.
All long-running shows have eras. “CSI” had three: the Petersen Era, the Fishburne Interlude, and the Danson Era. The first, which lasted about nine seasons, was unarguably the best. During that time the original cast with its fine chemistry remained intact, the quality of the stories remained strong, and the scripts were consistent. It is this part of the show that one tends to think of when one thinks of “CSI” at all. However, in a short period of time between seasons eight and nine there was a cast reshuffle in which Petersen and Dourdan left and Lawrence Fishburne arrived, and after that it was essentially a game of musical chairs. Jorja Fox left, returned, left and then returned. Marg Helgenberger left. Paul Guilfoyle was written out for budgetary reasons. Fishburne was shown the door after barely two years and replaced with Ted Danson. Minor characters were elevated to full-time status and then left themselves. New characters were written in with limited success. By the final season, of the truly original cast from the pilot; only George Eads remained, and technically he was fired at the end of it, though since there was no season sixteen his firing meant only that he failed to appear in the series finale the following year. Some continuity was maintained in the form of George Szmanda, Robert David Hall, Wallace Langham, etc., but by this time the show was more popcorn entertainment than anything else. It remained curiously addictive right to the end, but began to lack resonance and relied on increasingly preposterous plots and scientific maguffins to carry the day. Danson's performance was sound, but the show remained haunted by the ghost of Grissom, and quite wisely, he figured prominently in the series two-hour finale.
So where does “CSI” stand in retrospect?
Watching it over again, what struck me at once was how right it was, how well it worked, how completely it hit what it aimed at and achieved its intended effect. All series are unstable at their beginnings: they seek to discover what Dirk Benedict once referred to as their “spine,” the structure by which they will ultimately become known. During this process some shows change almost out of recognition. Yet “CSI” required remarkably little in the way of adjustment, and most of that was purely aesthetic. I had a very long meeting with Anthony Zuicker once, and what struck me about him was his absolute self-belief, his arrogant cigar-chewing confidence in the stories he wanted to tell and the way he wanted to tell them. That sort of attitude can be dangerous, and it is true that Zuicker has never again reached the heights he scaled with “CSI,” but it is also true that where this series was concerned, it was the right attitude. His dream became a billion-dollar empire with massive cultural impact, and to climb that mountain twice is perhaps asking too much of the universe. He created characters which will stick forever in the mind of those who witness them, and one, Gil Grissom, who has become an icon of crime fiction, beloved by millions.
Looking back, there is, too a certain nostalgia to be found, especially in the early seasons, when the technology is so visibly dated. I keenly remember the optimisic pre-9/11 world we see in the first season or two so keenly and fondly it brings me physical pain. Likewise, when I see how youthful the characters look at the outset: I had occaison to meet and speak with several cast members in more recent years, and to contrast them as middle or late-middle-aged men, with their younger, polished, eager selves is jarring in the way that looking at photos of yourself in high school is jarring. But what really strikes me now is the show's devotion to logic and reason, to scientific principles, to the idea that objective truth exists and will eventually out: Grissom's mantra that one must abandon personal prejudice, follow the facts, and trumpet the conclusions even if they violate one's own dearly-held beliefs. In the post-Trump, post-social media world, a world where Bill Nye has yielded to Alex Jones, a world of “alternate facts” on one side and Wokeism on the other, where conspiracy theories are now the cornerstone of major political parties, a world where mathematics are viewed as racist and political ideology is actively attacking the scientific method, such a view strikes me as sadly naive, almost pitiful. “CSI” was popcorn entertainment, but popcorn entertainment with an underlying purpose: to demonstrate that science was sexy and that a hard explanation lay behind every mystery. It was a world that , for all its glitz and mood lightning and woo-woo techie talk, Sherlock Holmes would have understood and identified with. The degree to which that world has vanished in such a short time is frightening, and today's mystery is of a very different variety: is it possible for us to learn how to think logically again? To embrace science? To grasp the importance of hypothesis and empircal data? To accept how little our unexamined, uneducated, uninformed opinions actually matter?
It's a mystery worthy of Gil Grissom himself.
I should also like to add here that as someone who lived and worked in Hollywood for thirteen years and still keeps a hand, or at least a few fingers, lightly dipped in the game, I am occasionally going to be to cite examples from my personal experience or knowledge which I feel will add to my examination. It may be that I worked on the show myself in some capacity or knew people who did. On the other hand, it may be that I have no special knowledge whatsoever of the subject of which I speak and am merely coming from a viewer's perspective. In either event I will state the location of my perspective clearly.
That having been said, let's get this (sorry) show on the road, and begin by looking back at “CSI.”
Some shows come out of nowhere to achieve cultural dominance. “CSI” was no such phenomenon. Before the pilot had even been produced it was already one of the hottest properties in Hollywood, with actors fighting to land an audition, and seems almost destined to have become a hit, though the actual impact of the show was something no would could possibly have guessed. Created by Anthony Zuicker, “CSI” tapped into a burgeoning interest in the field of forensic science which initially began with "Quincy" in 1974, but really took off in popular culture after "The Silence of the Lambs" was made into a hit film in 1991. “CSI” harnessed itself to this trend, but in a distinct way. Featuring an ensemble cast, it was first and foremost a procedural, with the characters serving as agents of the story, and the stories themselves as mystery boxes which could only be unlocked through the application of forensic science. Audiences would get to know the characters well enough, but only in terms of their reactions to events and the way their personalities affected their methods of investigation. Science was to be the star, technology its co-star.
This is not to say that “CSI” lacked memorable characters. On the contrary, in Gil Grissom (William Petersen) it created one of the greatest television detectives of all time. Unlike the volatile, haunted, mentally unstable Will Graham of Michael Mann's “Manhunter” (1985), which Petersen also portayed, Grissom was conceived as a brilliant, eccentric loner, emotionally removed from his cases and to some extent his colleagues, obsessed with science as a thing-in-itself. In his own way he became a modern take on Sherlock Holmes: seemingly sexless, uninterested in money, fame or titles (he was a Ph.D. but seldom used the handle), he sometimes came off as an intellect trapped unwillingly in a human body. Nonetheless, he carried an air of pathos about him, a sense, on some level, of wanting but being unable to connect with his fellow human beings. Likewise, the original supporting characters, Kathryn Willows (Marg Helgenberger), Nick Stokes (George Eads), Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan), Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) and Jim Brass (Paul Guilfoyle), all found their favorites among adoring audiences, as much for their flaws as their merits: Willows was hotly defensive, territorial and intolerant of criticism, Stokes overly cocky and immature, Brown a short-tempered junkie gambler, Sidle emotionally unstable and needy, and Brass often just a plain, old-fashioned jerk.
Rewatching the first season, what struck me was how the show in its first episodes both resembled and differed with the show which was to come. The show was written at a fairly high level from the pilot episode, with an emphasis on wordplay and snappy dialog, often laced with double entendres, cultural references and jokes, one example being:
GRISSOM: (observing a rave) Teenage wasteland.
BROWN: Who?
GRISSOM: Exactly.
There was also an immediate attempt to define the show's basic premise through exposition delivered by Grissom, who is tirelessly preaching to his investigators that “evidence can't lie,” that the CSI's were “scientists, not detectives” and that personal feelings only muddle the process. Pushback to this comes primarily from Willows, who is equally obsessed with “why” rather than “how” and often allows her emotions to become entangled in her work. The tension of this dynamic drove the series from the pilot. Everyone quested for truth, but how they arrived was not always by the same path.
The characters established in the pilot stayed remarkably constant from that point, Grissom being an exception and Sara a smaller one. Grissom is initially more emotional and “human.” Sara is sexier and more facetious. As time went on, the former divested himself of some of his humanity while the latter became angrier, touchier, more unstable. The other characters, including a whole series of lesser characters who were elevated to full-time status (Doc, Ecklie, Super Dave, Hodges) were allowed to develop over time, but retained their initial personalities and stayed true to them.
“CSI” later became famous, and somewhat notorious, for its lavish, atmospheric set design and its habit of “painting with light” to produce luridly beautiful visual landscapes which were also somewhat cartoonish. The initial episodes do not reflect this. The CIS lab is depicted and lighted realistically, as a ramshackle government building. Atmosphere is created by contrasting bright light with deep shadow. This attempt at realism is generally in keeping with the way the CSIs are actually depicted as such, with large liberties taken in the scope of their powers for the purposes of drama, but the emphasis being on forensic science. Before long, however, the show began to deliberately blur the line between crime scene investigation and police work, so that in later seasons one would assume a CSI and a police officer were essentially the same thing. The CSIs interrogate suspects, chase them down alleys, draw guns and use them. They direct investigations rather than assisting with them, and are often seen ordering around cops like coolies. This heightened the drama at the expense of any sense of realism, but it did not in any way effect the show's watchability.
As CSI aged, it became more self-conscious of its cultural impact – the famous “CSI effect,” which actually reached real-life jury rooms (I have seen it firsthand in law enforcement), and in-jokes began to appear in the scripts. Nods and winks, borderline breaks in the fourth wall. It also became increasingly slick, sometimes to the point of greasiness. The dialog remained snappy and memorable, but was often constructed to produce affect, i.e., written for its sound and catchiness, rather than for its substance and content. More and more, the solving of mysteries involved the use of scientific techniques so sophisticated and unrealistic they bordered on the magical. This trend was to continue to the series finale, where bees are employed to catch a killer, and became rather a joke among audiences, and not always a kind-spirited one. The world of “CSI” began as a Hollywood take on forensic investigation. Suspension of disbelief was required but minimal. It ended as something of a fantasy.
One formula “CSI” adopted in the first season and never abandoned were over-arching stories about ingenious, elusive serial killers, sometimes lasting multiple seasons. The best of these, and the most memorable, was the Miniature Killer storyline, which went on for years and was by and largely extremely well-handled, though it also started a troubling trend of introducing serial murderers who also seem to have unlimited financial resources as well as advanced technical knowledge of just about every subject imaginable. By the end of “CSI,” this concluded in its logical absurdity, where the serial is in fact also a billionaire: but for a long time, it worked and worked well.
An unexpected element of the show was the development of a disaster-plagued romance between Grissom and Sara. This romance was handled deftly and in small installments, so it rarely seemed to be intruding into the show's procedural format. Petersen and Fox had very good chemistry together, and the particular nature of their romance – spiritual rather than physical, one might say – was in keeping with their character's personalities. Audiences began to root hard for these two to find their happily ever after.
The decline and fall of Warrick Brown was another tenent of the show which seemed true to life. Brown was depicted from the start as a first-rate investigator who often fell victim to his many personal demons. Gary Dourdan did fine work in this regard, and George Eads as well, in his role as a man trying to stop his best friend from disintegrating. Eads' Nick Stokes was in many ways the most realistically depicted of all the characters, because of the genuine way he reacted, emotionally, to trauma despite his cocky attitude: in one episode he weeps and begins to beg for mercy when a killer points a gun in his face. A lesser show would have had him spewing fake tough-guy dialog. Eads' face when suddenly confronted with possible death is beautifully depicted, and made us like and relate to him.
The effect of trauma on the characters is not ignored. Sara is as much a victim of what she sees as the victims themselves, and ultimately falls apart under the constant exposure to the visceral horror of crime scenes. It's true that when Jorja Fox returned full-time to the series after leaving for several years, she seems strangely unaffected and apart, a sort of android version of herself, but repeating this storyline would have been pointless.
The diversity of the characters was perhaps best reflected in those of Brass and Sanders. The former was a cynical, acid-tongued veteran cop who often quarreled with the CSIs (particularly Brown); the latter was a geeky lab rat who was convinced he was cool but had trouble convincing anyone else. The character of Brass deepened over time: he developed an abiding respect for the scientists he once despised and even formed lasting friendships among them, friendships which allowed him to endure terrible personal disasters in the show's later seasons. Sanders, on the other hand, evolved from a facteious and immature “counterculture kid” into a seasoned professional tested by personal tragedy.
“CSI” was set in Las Vegas, and serves not only the stage for the series but also a character. Though shot mainly in Valencia, Cailfornia, Vegas was simulated brilliantly through a combinaton of matching locations, green screens, second unit photography, and actual visits to the city. Many storylines revolved around Vegas-centric themes such as the casinos, gambling, nightlife and tourism, while others delve into Vegas's history, which is interwoven with greed, corruption and organized crime. Still others examine the city off the Strip, alternatively lavish, prosaic or crime-ridden. The portrayal is usually glamorous and sexy, but there is never any effort to hide the squalor and vice which seethes beneath the glow of the neon.
Ultimately, however, the setting was mere set dressing. The driving theme of “CSI” was the quest for truth. That one must follow the evidence, and while the evidence could not lie, it could be misinterpreted. Technology and procedure could produce data, but human beings had to make the conclusions. The show was a constant tension between head and heart, logic and passion, reason and instinct. The shallowness and frivolity of the city are belied by the grim and almost sacred work performed by the team.
All long-running shows have eras. “CSI” had three: the Petersen Era, the Fishburne Interlude, and the Danson Era. The first, which lasted about nine seasons, was unarguably the best. During that time the original cast with its fine chemistry remained intact, the quality of the stories remained strong, and the scripts were consistent. It is this part of the show that one tends to think of when one thinks of “CSI” at all. However, in a short period of time between seasons eight and nine there was a cast reshuffle in which Petersen and Dourdan left and Lawrence Fishburne arrived, and after that it was essentially a game of musical chairs. Jorja Fox left, returned, left and then returned. Marg Helgenberger left. Paul Guilfoyle was written out for budgetary reasons. Fishburne was shown the door after barely two years and replaced with Ted Danson. Minor characters were elevated to full-time status and then left themselves. New characters were written in with limited success. By the final season, of the truly original cast from the pilot; only George Eads remained, and technically he was fired at the end of it, though since there was no season sixteen his firing meant only that he failed to appear in the series finale the following year. Some continuity was maintained in the form of George Szmanda, Robert David Hall, Wallace Langham, etc., but by this time the show was more popcorn entertainment than anything else. It remained curiously addictive right to the end, but began to lack resonance and relied on increasingly preposterous plots and scientific maguffins to carry the day. Danson's performance was sound, but the show remained haunted by the ghost of Grissom, and quite wisely, he figured prominently in the series two-hour finale.
So where does “CSI” stand in retrospect?
Watching it over again, what struck me at once was how right it was, how well it worked, how completely it hit what it aimed at and achieved its intended effect. All series are unstable at their beginnings: they seek to discover what Dirk Benedict once referred to as their “spine,” the structure by which they will ultimately become known. During this process some shows change almost out of recognition. Yet “CSI” required remarkably little in the way of adjustment, and most of that was purely aesthetic. I had a very long meeting with Anthony Zuicker once, and what struck me about him was his absolute self-belief, his arrogant cigar-chewing confidence in the stories he wanted to tell and the way he wanted to tell them. That sort of attitude can be dangerous, and it is true that Zuicker has never again reached the heights he scaled with “CSI,” but it is also true that where this series was concerned, it was the right attitude. His dream became a billion-dollar empire with massive cultural impact, and to climb that mountain twice is perhaps asking too much of the universe. He created characters which will stick forever in the mind of those who witness them, and one, Gil Grissom, who has become an icon of crime fiction, beloved by millions.
Looking back, there is, too a certain nostalgia to be found, especially in the early seasons, when the technology is so visibly dated. I keenly remember the optimisic pre-9/11 world we see in the first season or two so keenly and fondly it brings me physical pain. Likewise, when I see how youthful the characters look at the outset: I had occaison to meet and speak with several cast members in more recent years, and to contrast them as middle or late-middle-aged men, with their younger, polished, eager selves is jarring in the way that looking at photos of yourself in high school is jarring. But what really strikes me now is the show's devotion to logic and reason, to scientific principles, to the idea that objective truth exists and will eventually out: Grissom's mantra that one must abandon personal prejudice, follow the facts, and trumpet the conclusions even if they violate one's own dearly-held beliefs. In the post-Trump, post-social media world, a world where Bill Nye has yielded to Alex Jones, a world of “alternate facts” on one side and Wokeism on the other, where conspiracy theories are now the cornerstone of major political parties, a world where mathematics are viewed as racist and political ideology is actively attacking the scientific method, such a view strikes me as sadly naive, almost pitiful. “CSI” was popcorn entertainment, but popcorn entertainment with an underlying purpose: to demonstrate that science was sexy and that a hard explanation lay behind every mystery. It was a world that , for all its glitz and mood lightning and woo-woo techie talk, Sherlock Holmes would have understood and identified with. The degree to which that world has vanished in such a short time is frightening, and today's mystery is of a very different variety: is it possible for us to learn how to think logically again? To embrace science? To grasp the importance of hypothesis and empircal data? To accept how little our unexamined, uneducated, uninformed opinions actually matter?
It's a mystery worthy of Gil Grissom himself.
December 26, 2022
2022: CRITIQUE TIME
“Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.” – Jean de La Bruyère
The last Monday of 2022 has arrived, and with it, my final blog of the year. It's a curious thing to bid goodbye to a year. On the one hand, the whole thing is simply made-up nonsense, like the days of the week or the hours of the day. They are constructs, like traditions, folkways, and societal norms: they seem to make sense because we are born into them, but they don't hold up well under strict examination. Yes, I know a year is the time it takes the Earth to revolve around our sun, but for practical purposes the 365th day of this year is no different than the 364th or the 366th. The arbiters of the passage of time are limited in real terms to the changing of the seasons and the usually too-subtle-to-see changes in our own bodies as we age. In Errol Flynn's autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways he recounts a tribe he encountered in the South Seas with no concept of time at all. Their climate offered no seasons, so they did not think in terms of years or understand the concept when it was explained to them. I have always found that passage to be delightful. Imagining not being subject to what Orwell referred to as "time neurosis" -- a life ruled by the clock. It's not easy. My own life is ruled by the clock to a degree that frightens, disgusts and angers me. And the older I get, the more conscious I am of the clock's ticking.
I once wrote an essay called "Not Wheels, but Wings: Thoughts on the Passage of Time" which is included here on Goodreads, and I've no desire to repeat it. But I will say, as I sit here in my bedroom, listening to the sound of sirens coming through my hallway windows, as my cat warms himself below the reading lamp on my night-table, as I digest the vegetarian sausages I ate for breakfast, that in the last 20 years or so, a lot of my life has been devoted to trying to make that passage feel slower. Mechanical time is objective, and a second is a second is a second, but human time doesn't work that way. In the human world, subjectivity is law. Whether something feels slow or fast makes it so, to the person experiencing it. 2020 felt endless to me (and countless millions of others) because it was so rotten, so fear-filled, so isolating and depressing, and yet at the same so full of personal changes. This year, on the other hand, seems to have lasted about six to eight months at the absolute maximum: sometimes it feels like a mere season. Fortunately, I keep a journal, and as I look back at its opening pages helps bring things into perspective. This year had its repetitions, its rituals, its samenesses, but it was not Groundhog Day. No year really is, and it's important we remember that. And even more important that, when it begins to resemble groundhog day, that we actually do something about it. Powerlessness in our own lives is a common theme in modern existence, but before a certain point it is an illusion. So, in the hopes of inspiring myself and others, I have listed 20 accomplishments and experiences I had this year which I felt worthy of note.
1. I am learning to cook. OK, granted, I've been cooking for 30 years, but I never got beyond a "yellow belt" level in the kitchen. This year I began to use a food delivery service which comes with an app containing (nearly) idiot-proof recipes. It has greatly enhanced my knowledge of cooking and my confidence with stoves and ovens, and also been a pleasurable experience in and of itself: it's even saved me some money.
2. I released my fourth novel, THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER: A SINNER'S CROSS NOVEL. It is my first full-length novel release since 2019, and was many years in the making.
3. Said novel won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award and the Literary Titan Book Award Gold Medal.
4. I turned 50 years old, and celebrated my birthday with a roadtrip up to Coudersport, PA, a beautiful little town two hours deep in a state forest preserve. Made a lot of memories there.
5. I completed a dark fantasy/horror novella called WOLF WEATHER which should come out next year. I had a lot of fun with this tale, and really let my imagination run riot. As soon as I commission a good cover from the right artist, I will be letting it run wind.
6. I completed a short novel called EXILES; A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLE OF MAGNUS which will also be released next year. This novel happened almost by accident: I banged it out in three months, as opposed to my ususal year to year-and-a-half, and enjoyed every second of writing it. It's a prequel to my novella DEUS EX, and reunites audiences with the villainous Magnus Antonius Magnus in the early stages of his career -- but in a very unusual way.
7. I was the featured guest on THE HOLLYWOOD GODFATHER PODCAST (Episode #160). I am a frequest guest on the LCS Hockey Radio Show and Comic Book Syndicate, but this was a higher level of exposure than I'm used to: 11,000K views just on the Podcast's homepage alone, and never mind Soundcloud, Goodpods, Apple, etc., etc. A video of the podcast is available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulE8s...
if you want to see a horribly unflattering view of my face as it appeared last winter (pale, fat, bad haircut, shoddy video), by all means tune in.
8. While this isn't exactly a happy memory, I got into the first street fight I've been in since 1997, and won. A lunatic screaming that he was a prophet of Jesus, along with various anti-gay and anti-Semitic slurs (neither of which apply to me even theoretically) tried to jump me in an alley. He failed. What impressed me about the whole farsical yet terrifying situation was how instantly my martial arts instincts kicked in once he put his hands on me. I even had enough presence of mind to call 911 immediately afterward, though they never showed up. Baby, I've still got it. Minus the t-shirt he ripped off my body. (Ironically, a Glory Kickboxing t-shirt.)
9. Halloween orgy. As recounted here, I watched 31 horror movies in October, went to a costume party, and carved a jack o'lantern complete with candle and accompanying gourds. I've been wanted to do that sort of thing for years, and now I have.
10. A very attractive girl slipped me her phone number in the sneakiest way possible. No one has done this to me in years -- more years than I care to remember. It made me feel several hundred years younger than my chronological age.
11. Finally got 'round to attending a minor league baseball game at my local stadium, which is just up the street from my apartment. I had a terrific, very American time: beer, crackerjacks, hot dogs, and one bench-clearing brawl.
12. My old short story collection, DEVILS YOU KNOW, which I released back in 2016, hit three different #1 rankings on Amazon when I listed it as a freebie: horror anthologies, horror short stories and horror comedy.
13. I had a colonoscopy. No, this wasn't fun, but having turned fifty it was the prudent thing to do. Results were negative, and the whole thing was only a figurative pain in the ass, as opposed to a literal one.
14. I finally saw Toad the West Sprocket in concert. I've been a fan of this band since their 1994 release "Dulcinea," but was never able to catch them live. Imagine my surprise when they showed up to the venue literally on the same block as my flat -- a walk of about 300 paces. It was a great show, and unless I'm mistaken, I have now seen every band extant that I actually wanted to see perform in person. They were literally last on the list. I guess I need a new one.
15. I got asked to run for mayor. Yes, you read that correctly. A small group of "connected citizens" approached me one night about the possibility of me throwing my hat into the ring to run this hard-knock town of 45,000 souls. They liked my stances on local issues, my friendships with downtown businesspeople, and the fact I actually live right here, in the midst of things. For a minute I felt like my fictional hero, Dominic Da Vinci, on the show Da Vinci's Inquest when he's asked to run for mayor of Vancouver, B.C. But life is not a TV show (alas!) and nothing came of it. It's a pity, because as much as I hate politics, I think I could have made a difference. However, like an Oscar nomination, it's an honor just to be asked.
16. Took an ancestry test and settled a long-standing debate in my family. I found out I'm:
French & German: 25.8%
British & Irish: 20.4%
Scandanavian: 7.2%
Broadly Northwestern European: 13.6%
Eastern European: 5.7%
Italian: 24.3%
Spanish & Portuguese: 1.4%
We weren't sure as to the ethnicity of my mysterious and enigmatic maternal grandfather: know we know he was Southern Italian and Sicilian. I've always had an affinity for Sicily, so this perhaps explains it.
17. I received the last of twenty paintings I comissioned from my friend Jack, a fabulous artist who also painted the cover of my novella NOSFERATU Jack and his wife had me over for dinner, and then the artist and I went out on his boat and got happily sunburned on Lake Nockamixon while sipping beers and discussing old times. I'd forgotten how hard it is to tread water, especially while spinning yarn, and my lip got so sunburned it cracked, but it was a small price to pay for getting to drive the boat through such beautiful waters with an old pal.
18. To test a theory that I no longer have any discipline, I decided to eat nothing but broccoli and chicken, and drink nothing but black coffee, unsweetened tea and water, for a period of seven days. I did it. It sucked, but I did it. I then counted calories ruthlessly for the 90 days leading up to my birthday, and upped my cardio in the bargain. (It's amazing how much less you eat when you pay attention to what's going into your mouth.) At any rate, while the results weren't what I'd hoped aesthetically speaking, they at least showed I can muster some of my old self-restraint.
19. I got paid a fair pile of money -- fair by my standards anyway -- to write two scripts for projects I can't yet name, because they haven't been released. But I've already been shown actor's audition videos, footage from principal photography, and even a thank-you from one of the actors. That felt damned good. I had a feeling that I'd get more writing work from Hollywood if I left the place, and it's turning out to be true. Now, I have much bigger creative fish than this frying in my pan, but they are merely frying and not yet edible, which is a dumb way of saying they haven't paid off. These projects did. Money made this way is sweeter than any other kind of money I could make.
20. I'm winding up the very last pages of an epic horror novel, SOMETHING EVIL. This goddamned project has been my own literary Vietnam: an endless bog. It began in 1995, when I concieved a lengthy cold open for a horror movie whose plot I hadn't yet figured out. It began again in 2008, when I tried to turn that stubborn, alluring seed of an idea into a screenplay with the help of a partner. It began yet again in 2016 or thereabouts, when, having completed the screenplay but abandoned any hope of having it made into a movie, I decided to turn it into a novel. As I wrote above, I usually take between 12 - 18 months to turn out a full-length book (80K - 120K words). This fucking thing has taken me SEVEN YEARS or more, just in its novelistic iteration. It's a big story, it will probably 200K words in its first draft (at least 600 pages), but that's no goddamned excuse. The truth is, the story is so massive, and has so many characters, that it proved outside my abilities to write it as I conceived it: I had to develop whole new levels of storytelling craft to reach the finish line, like a guy learning new languages as he hitchhikes across the world. That's a good thing, but holy hell, has this been a battle. I pity my editor when the poor guy sees this thing clunk into his e-mail inbox. His "notes" will be a novella in themselves.
I suppose if I combed my journal more thoroughly I'd find a great deal more to discuss, but I think I've made my point. In any year of our lives, a great deal of what we do is numbingly repetitious. When I get up in the morning on a weekday, and think about what awaits me, I sometimes do feel as if I'm in Groundhog Day, or one of those "Star Trek" episodes where everything is stuck on repeat. Hell, the fact I've had three different tenures in this same neighborhood (2000 - 2002, 2004 - 2007, 2020 - present) only reinforces the deja vu: there's nary a streetcorner that doesn't hold some memory, good or bad, and I often feel as if I have to elbow aside the ghosts of my younger selves as I move from Point A to Point B. I know I'm not alone in this, either. But if we do shove past the ghosts, we see that while life may follow a circular track, the scenery changes, partially by accident but partially because we will it to change. And that's all it really takes: will. We cannot make time go slower, subjectively or objectively speaking, but we can do more with the time we have, by consciously pushing out of the repetitious cycles which mark our daily lives. By constantly seeking ways to disrupt the routine without destroying its necessary and beneficial aspects. So, as 2022 draws to its close, ask yourself this question: Against the balance of days in the year, how many stand out? How many memories and experiences will you carry away from this time, and how many will you leave behind, because they blend in so completely with the gray mass of uninspired days? And knowing this, how prepared are you to repeat that story next year, knowing how few you have, relatively speaking, until your counter reaches zero?
It's worth thinking about.
See you in 2023.
The last Monday of 2022 has arrived, and with it, my final blog of the year. It's a curious thing to bid goodbye to a year. On the one hand, the whole thing is simply made-up nonsense, like the days of the week or the hours of the day. They are constructs, like traditions, folkways, and societal norms: they seem to make sense because we are born into them, but they don't hold up well under strict examination. Yes, I know a year is the time it takes the Earth to revolve around our sun, but for practical purposes the 365th day of this year is no different than the 364th or the 366th. The arbiters of the passage of time are limited in real terms to the changing of the seasons and the usually too-subtle-to-see changes in our own bodies as we age. In Errol Flynn's autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways he recounts a tribe he encountered in the South Seas with no concept of time at all. Their climate offered no seasons, so they did not think in terms of years or understand the concept when it was explained to them. I have always found that passage to be delightful. Imagining not being subject to what Orwell referred to as "time neurosis" -- a life ruled by the clock. It's not easy. My own life is ruled by the clock to a degree that frightens, disgusts and angers me. And the older I get, the more conscious I am of the clock's ticking.
I once wrote an essay called "Not Wheels, but Wings: Thoughts on the Passage of Time" which is included here on Goodreads, and I've no desire to repeat it. But I will say, as I sit here in my bedroom, listening to the sound of sirens coming through my hallway windows, as my cat warms himself below the reading lamp on my night-table, as I digest the vegetarian sausages I ate for breakfast, that in the last 20 years or so, a lot of my life has been devoted to trying to make that passage feel slower. Mechanical time is objective, and a second is a second is a second, but human time doesn't work that way. In the human world, subjectivity is law. Whether something feels slow or fast makes it so, to the person experiencing it. 2020 felt endless to me (and countless millions of others) because it was so rotten, so fear-filled, so isolating and depressing, and yet at the same so full of personal changes. This year, on the other hand, seems to have lasted about six to eight months at the absolute maximum: sometimes it feels like a mere season. Fortunately, I keep a journal, and as I look back at its opening pages helps bring things into perspective. This year had its repetitions, its rituals, its samenesses, but it was not Groundhog Day. No year really is, and it's important we remember that. And even more important that, when it begins to resemble groundhog day, that we actually do something about it. Powerlessness in our own lives is a common theme in modern existence, but before a certain point it is an illusion. So, in the hopes of inspiring myself and others, I have listed 20 accomplishments and experiences I had this year which I felt worthy of note.
1. I am learning to cook. OK, granted, I've been cooking for 30 years, but I never got beyond a "yellow belt" level in the kitchen. This year I began to use a food delivery service which comes with an app containing (nearly) idiot-proof recipes. It has greatly enhanced my knowledge of cooking and my confidence with stoves and ovens, and also been a pleasurable experience in and of itself: it's even saved me some money.
2. I released my fourth novel, THE VERY DEAD OF WINTER: A SINNER'S CROSS NOVEL. It is my first full-length novel release since 2019, and was many years in the making.
3. Said novel won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award and the Literary Titan Book Award Gold Medal.
4. I turned 50 years old, and celebrated my birthday with a roadtrip up to Coudersport, PA, a beautiful little town two hours deep in a state forest preserve. Made a lot of memories there.
5. I completed a dark fantasy/horror novella called WOLF WEATHER which should come out next year. I had a lot of fun with this tale, and really let my imagination run riot. As soon as I commission a good cover from the right artist, I will be letting it run wind.
6. I completed a short novel called EXILES; A TALE FROM THE CHRONICLE OF MAGNUS which will also be released next year. This novel happened almost by accident: I banged it out in three months, as opposed to my ususal year to year-and-a-half, and enjoyed every second of writing it. It's a prequel to my novella DEUS EX, and reunites audiences with the villainous Magnus Antonius Magnus in the early stages of his career -- but in a very unusual way.
7. I was the featured guest on THE HOLLYWOOD GODFATHER PODCAST (Episode #160). I am a frequest guest on the LCS Hockey Radio Show and Comic Book Syndicate, but this was a higher level of exposure than I'm used to: 11,000K views just on the Podcast's homepage alone, and never mind Soundcloud, Goodpods, Apple, etc., etc. A video of the podcast is available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulE8s...
if you want to see a horribly unflattering view of my face as it appeared last winter (pale, fat, bad haircut, shoddy video), by all means tune in.
8. While this isn't exactly a happy memory, I got into the first street fight I've been in since 1997, and won. A lunatic screaming that he was a prophet of Jesus, along with various anti-gay and anti-Semitic slurs (neither of which apply to me even theoretically) tried to jump me in an alley. He failed. What impressed me about the whole farsical yet terrifying situation was how instantly my martial arts instincts kicked in once he put his hands on me. I even had enough presence of mind to call 911 immediately afterward, though they never showed up. Baby, I've still got it. Minus the t-shirt he ripped off my body. (Ironically, a Glory Kickboxing t-shirt.)
9. Halloween orgy. As recounted here, I watched 31 horror movies in October, went to a costume party, and carved a jack o'lantern complete with candle and accompanying gourds. I've been wanted to do that sort of thing for years, and now I have.
10. A very attractive girl slipped me her phone number in the sneakiest way possible. No one has done this to me in years -- more years than I care to remember. It made me feel several hundred years younger than my chronological age.
11. Finally got 'round to attending a minor league baseball game at my local stadium, which is just up the street from my apartment. I had a terrific, very American time: beer, crackerjacks, hot dogs, and one bench-clearing brawl.
12. My old short story collection, DEVILS YOU KNOW, which I released back in 2016, hit three different #1 rankings on Amazon when I listed it as a freebie: horror anthologies, horror short stories and horror comedy.
13. I had a colonoscopy. No, this wasn't fun, but having turned fifty it was the prudent thing to do. Results were negative, and the whole thing was only a figurative pain in the ass, as opposed to a literal one.
14. I finally saw Toad the West Sprocket in concert. I've been a fan of this band since their 1994 release "Dulcinea," but was never able to catch them live. Imagine my surprise when they showed up to the venue literally on the same block as my flat -- a walk of about 300 paces. It was a great show, and unless I'm mistaken, I have now seen every band extant that I actually wanted to see perform in person. They were literally last on the list. I guess I need a new one.
15. I got asked to run for mayor. Yes, you read that correctly. A small group of "connected citizens" approached me one night about the possibility of me throwing my hat into the ring to run this hard-knock town of 45,000 souls. They liked my stances on local issues, my friendships with downtown businesspeople, and the fact I actually live right here, in the midst of things. For a minute I felt like my fictional hero, Dominic Da Vinci, on the show Da Vinci's Inquest when he's asked to run for mayor of Vancouver, B.C. But life is not a TV show (alas!) and nothing came of it. It's a pity, because as much as I hate politics, I think I could have made a difference. However, like an Oscar nomination, it's an honor just to be asked.
16. Took an ancestry test and settled a long-standing debate in my family. I found out I'm:
French & German: 25.8%
British & Irish: 20.4%
Scandanavian: 7.2%
Broadly Northwestern European: 13.6%
Eastern European: 5.7%
Italian: 24.3%
Spanish & Portuguese: 1.4%
We weren't sure as to the ethnicity of my mysterious and enigmatic maternal grandfather: know we know he was Southern Italian and Sicilian. I've always had an affinity for Sicily, so this perhaps explains it.
17. I received the last of twenty paintings I comissioned from my friend Jack, a fabulous artist who also painted the cover of my novella NOSFERATU Jack and his wife had me over for dinner, and then the artist and I went out on his boat and got happily sunburned on Lake Nockamixon while sipping beers and discussing old times. I'd forgotten how hard it is to tread water, especially while spinning yarn, and my lip got so sunburned it cracked, but it was a small price to pay for getting to drive the boat through such beautiful waters with an old pal.
18. To test a theory that I no longer have any discipline, I decided to eat nothing but broccoli and chicken, and drink nothing but black coffee, unsweetened tea and water, for a period of seven days. I did it. It sucked, but I did it. I then counted calories ruthlessly for the 90 days leading up to my birthday, and upped my cardio in the bargain. (It's amazing how much less you eat when you pay attention to what's going into your mouth.) At any rate, while the results weren't what I'd hoped aesthetically speaking, they at least showed I can muster some of my old self-restraint.
19. I got paid a fair pile of money -- fair by my standards anyway -- to write two scripts for projects I can't yet name, because they haven't been released. But I've already been shown actor's audition videos, footage from principal photography, and even a thank-you from one of the actors. That felt damned good. I had a feeling that I'd get more writing work from Hollywood if I left the place, and it's turning out to be true. Now, I have much bigger creative fish than this frying in my pan, but they are merely frying and not yet edible, which is a dumb way of saying they haven't paid off. These projects did. Money made this way is sweeter than any other kind of money I could make.
20. I'm winding up the very last pages of an epic horror novel, SOMETHING EVIL. This goddamned project has been my own literary Vietnam: an endless bog. It began in 1995, when I concieved a lengthy cold open for a horror movie whose plot I hadn't yet figured out. It began again in 2008, when I tried to turn that stubborn, alluring seed of an idea into a screenplay with the help of a partner. It began yet again in 2016 or thereabouts, when, having completed the screenplay but abandoned any hope of having it made into a movie, I decided to turn it into a novel. As I wrote above, I usually take between 12 - 18 months to turn out a full-length book (80K - 120K words). This fucking thing has taken me SEVEN YEARS or more, just in its novelistic iteration. It's a big story, it will probably 200K words in its first draft (at least 600 pages), but that's no goddamned excuse. The truth is, the story is so massive, and has so many characters, that it proved outside my abilities to write it as I conceived it: I had to develop whole new levels of storytelling craft to reach the finish line, like a guy learning new languages as he hitchhikes across the world. That's a good thing, but holy hell, has this been a battle. I pity my editor when the poor guy sees this thing clunk into his e-mail inbox. His "notes" will be a novella in themselves.
I suppose if I combed my journal more thoroughly I'd find a great deal more to discuss, but I think I've made my point. In any year of our lives, a great deal of what we do is numbingly repetitious. When I get up in the morning on a weekday, and think about what awaits me, I sometimes do feel as if I'm in Groundhog Day, or one of those "Star Trek" episodes where everything is stuck on repeat. Hell, the fact I've had three different tenures in this same neighborhood (2000 - 2002, 2004 - 2007, 2020 - present) only reinforces the deja vu: there's nary a streetcorner that doesn't hold some memory, good or bad, and I often feel as if I have to elbow aside the ghosts of my younger selves as I move from Point A to Point B. I know I'm not alone in this, either. But if we do shove past the ghosts, we see that while life may follow a circular track, the scenery changes, partially by accident but partially because we will it to change. And that's all it really takes: will. We cannot make time go slower, subjectively or objectively speaking, but we can do more with the time we have, by consciously pushing out of the repetitious cycles which mark our daily lives. By constantly seeking ways to disrupt the routine without destroying its necessary and beneficial aspects. So, as 2022 draws to its close, ask yourself this question: Against the balance of days in the year, how many stand out? How many memories and experiences will you carry away from this time, and how many will you leave behind, because they blend in so completely with the gray mass of uninspired days? And knowing this, how prepared are you to repeat that story next year, knowing how few you have, relatively speaking, until your counter reaches zero?
It's worth thinking about.
See you in 2023.
December 18, 2022
WHAT I READ IN 2022
Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. – William Faulkner
I no longer read as much as I used to, and this bothers me enormously. I have always taken enormous pleasure, and found immense relief and inspiration, in the act of reading. This goes back almost as long as I can remember. As a small child, I used to pull volumes off the shelves of my parents' considerable home library and attack books so far above my reading level it was almost comical: I didn't understand many of the words or expressions, and lacked the life experience to grasp the adult nature of the stories within, but I was neverthess compelled to keep after it. Being the child of journalists, it was part of my makeup to be drawn to the written word. Being a creative person, I was just as naturally drawn to words which sparked my imagination. I will never forget, for example, the beautiful prose I encountered in a biography of Al Capone written by John Kobler. It was so colorful and vivid, and yet so sparingly written, with nary a wasted word, that I felt as if the author had driven each individual latter and punctuation mark into place with a hammer. I had a similar reaction to a biography of Adolf Hitler penned by Robert Payne. The Englishman managed to paint word-pictures so vivid that I felt as if I had been transported back to the Vienna of 1910, the Munich of 1925. I didn't quite understand how these and other writers were able to affect this sorcery, but I knew I craved that power for myself.
So I read. As the above-quoted Faulker stated, I read everything, from Joe Silva's "Captain America" novels (such things exist, and they were amazing) to the complicated science-fiction of Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuinn. I read historical fiction, mysteries, horror stories. I read biographies and memoirs and history books. When I got old enough, I even read the fiction they published in "Playboy," when my gaze wasn't otherwise occupied. Part of this reading was for pleasure and part was escape. All of it contributed to my growth and development as a writer.
There is, however, one curious fact about me which I have mentioned before in this blog in a different context. I suffer from anxiety. And as an anxious person I find great comfort in repetition. I rewatch television. I rewatch film. And nary a year goes by when I don't re-read certain books, such as Howard Fast's "Spartacus," George Orwell's "Coming Up For Air," or Lawrence Sanders' "The Sixth Commandment." Because of this tendency, I realized about ten years ago that the actual amount of new reading I was doing must be fairly small. I started keeping track of just how many new books I was reading per year, and was shocked at how paltry the number was: I was averaging -- at most -- a new book every other month, say 6 - 7 a year. For a writer who professes to love reading, those are sorry statistics indeed. By 2015, I had better than doubled that figure, but even this did not leave me contented, and my figures for the next three years were as follows:
2016 - 20 books
2017 - 22 books
2018 - 26 books
This may not seem like many to some reading this. I see people on Goodreads who claim to read 100 books or more each year. I myself wouldn't do that if I could, because I would never retain any of what I was reading nor would I savor the process. It would be like eating chicken McNuggets every day. (I'm of the opinion that books should never be relegated, in the main, to mere "content," but that's just me.)
Unfortunately, the next few years showed a very different trend. Circumstance piled upon circumstance to cut down on the time and the inclinination I had to read, leading to these pathetic figures:
2019 - 17 books
2020 - 15 books
2021 - 9 books
Well, as the saying goes, what you don't change, you choose. When 2020 came around, I made a resolution to arrest and reverse this trend. And I succeeded. Not impressively, but I succeeded. It turns out that the faculty for reading is like any other muscle: if you neglect it, it atrophies, and must be built back up again through intelligently applied effort. It also turns out that if you lack a single goddamn place in your apartment which is truly comfortable to read, you don't do it. So I bought myself a comfortable chair with matching Ottoman, and got down to business.
I am still two books short of what I need to consider 2022 a reading success, but I have thirteen days left in the year, and I don't anticipate any difficulty in finishing two or even three before the ball drops. It is therefore premature for me to make the following list, but I'm going to do it anyway. The following is what I've read so far.
Passchendaele and The Somme: A Diary of 1917 by Hugh Quigley -- This is one of the most bizarre books I've ever read, and got me off on the wrong foot. Quigley's memoir of his WWI experiences is written in a vague, florid, dreamlike style which was more poetry than prose. It quite literally was like trying to write down the events of a wild, nonsensical dream. Here and there he has moments of lucidity but by and large the book was an incomprehnsible if pretty mess, rather akin to talking to a poet on acid.
The Life and Death of Lenin by Robert Payne: Payne, despite his flaws, is one of my favorite historians and while quite bloated, his bio of Lenin is highly readable and atmospheric. He depicts a man who wanted to burn down the system and didn't have the faintest idea what he wanted to replace it with.
Mine Were of Trouble by Peter Kemp: Having read Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" many times, my perspective on the Spanish Civil War came from a hard left-wing angle. Kemp, like Orwell, was an Englishman who fought in that war, but for the Fascists rather than the government. His side of the story, and his motives, made for a fascinating read and helped balance the scale.
The Life and Death of Trotsky by Robert Payne: Payne's bio of the infamous Trotsky, Lenin's chief co-conspirator and the creator of the Red Army, is another win for him, though like "Lenin" it is somewhat bloated. Payne depicts a brilliant scholar and home-made soldier who lost a power struggle with Stalin and was effaced from history so thoroughly that Orwell fashioned the character of Goldstein in "1984" after him. An interesting and tragic tale.
Now and Then by Joseph Heller: This book bored me to almost literal tears. Heller wrote "Catch-22" so I figured a memoir about growing up Jewish in Coney Island in the 1920s - 1930s would be fun and interesting. It wasn't. Men who boast about how unsentimental they are should not write memoirs about happy childhoods. It just doesn't make any sense. Jesus, was this a bore. I had to force myself to finish it.
Johnny Carson by Henry Bushkin: I enjoyed this breezy tell-all about the last real King of Late Night TV by his former lawyer, friend and allaround fixer. Bushkin paints a fascinating if not terribly flattering picture of Carson as the hard-working product of an absolutely loveless mother: an immense talent but a psychological mess, both Jekkyl and Hyde, often simultaneously. It's also a tale of Bushkin's own seduction by fame, money and reflected glamour.
Fire and Blood by Ernst Jünger: This short book is essentially a "director's cut" of the final chapters of his seminal combat memoir, "In The Storm of Steel." It recounts the day before, and the day of the enormous 1918 attack the German Army mounted against the Allies, as witnessed by Jünger himself. It is a fascinating, fast-paced, pitiless depiction of war by a war hero who drew a very different moral from his experiences than, say, Klaus Maria Remarque ("All Quiet on the Western Front.")
War as an Inner Experience by Ernst Jünger: The notorious Jünger, sometimes referred to as "The Intellectual Godfather of Fascism," writes a fascinating little book here, one of the five he penned about his WWI experiences: it's broken up into a series of chapters devoted to one aspect of war each, (waiting, fear, battle, etc.), as the author sees it. This quick spiritual-psychological study of the German combat soldier of 1914 - 1918 is worth reading alone just for the horrible passage about fighting in a burning house full of corpses in the middle of the night, only for someone to accidentally trigger a player-piano. You can't forget imagery like that.
The Border Wolves by Damion Hunter a.k.a. Amanda Cockrell: This book probably holds the record as the Most Delayed Sequel in Literary History. "The Centurions" was a 1980s trilogy of novels about a sprawling military family in ancient Rome. The third book ended with everything unresolved, and fans like my father and me waited in vain for more.Hunter/Cockrell finally self-pubbed the fourth and final installment in 2022, after a pause of almost forty years...and it was more or less worth the wait. Although she really should have written at least one more novel to round out the saga -- it feels disjointed and incomplete at times -- I found it an enjoyable and largely satisfying end to a wrongly forgotten, very entertaining historical romance.
American Nightingale by Bob Welch: This is a very readable and informative biography of Frances Slanger, a U.S. Army nurse who was killed in action while serving in Europe in WW2. The thoughtful and compassionate Slanger, a Jewess originally born in Poland, had a special sense of mission and her death sparked an outpouring of national grief. She was truly the "Ellis Island immigrant who made good" in the face of cultural prejudices from her own family (Jewish women shouldn't be nurses) and society at large (women shouldn't be in uniform, much less serving overseas). It was also fascinating to see how combat nurses were trained and the hardships they had to endure, and did endure, uncomplainingly, much to the admiration of their patients and soldiers generally.
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass: Probably no former slave contributed more to the destruction of slavery than Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave whose literacy proved his greatest weapon. Douglass lays bare the horrors of antebellum slavery, but it is his description of of the mental and spiritual anguish of being mere property, rather than the physical torment which came with it, which struck me most. Degredation, and not the whip, was what Douglass came to hate the most. Douglass's story is not a quest for freedom per se as much as a quest for dignity, the dignity of choice without which life is meaningless. (His writing, incidentally, is quite easy on the eye despite the heavy, formal, flowery style of the 19th century: contrast it with the plodding, turgid "forward" written by a famous abolitionist).
Crosses in the Wind by Joseph Shomon: This is a short, informative book about the Graves Registration service of the U.S. Army during WW2, told by the C.O. of one of its most prolific companies: his tiny outfit alone buried 21,000 American soldiers killed in action in Europe between 1944 - 1945, sometimes coming under heavy fire themselves to do it. While his historical background is quite badly written and sloppy, when Shomon writes about his own experiences the book is quite good, informative, and fast paced. He pulls a lot of punches to spare his audience, but nevertheless gives a fairly detailed picture of what life was like for men whose business was, even more than combat soldiers, quite literally death.
As I said above, I have a few more books to go this year, but I will at least complete the Goodreads Challenge for the first time since 2016, which will come to me more as a relief than a victory. Getting out of the habit of reading was a huge lapse on my part, an egregious failure of self-care, and I look forward very much to wearing out my reading chair in 2023 -- that is, if my cat doesn't destroy it first.
I no longer read as much as I used to, and this bothers me enormously. I have always taken enormous pleasure, and found immense relief and inspiration, in the act of reading. This goes back almost as long as I can remember. As a small child, I used to pull volumes off the shelves of my parents' considerable home library and attack books so far above my reading level it was almost comical: I didn't understand many of the words or expressions, and lacked the life experience to grasp the adult nature of the stories within, but I was neverthess compelled to keep after it. Being the child of journalists, it was part of my makeup to be drawn to the written word. Being a creative person, I was just as naturally drawn to words which sparked my imagination. I will never forget, for example, the beautiful prose I encountered in a biography of Al Capone written by John Kobler. It was so colorful and vivid, and yet so sparingly written, with nary a wasted word, that I felt as if the author had driven each individual latter and punctuation mark into place with a hammer. I had a similar reaction to a biography of Adolf Hitler penned by Robert Payne. The Englishman managed to paint word-pictures so vivid that I felt as if I had been transported back to the Vienna of 1910, the Munich of 1925. I didn't quite understand how these and other writers were able to affect this sorcery, but I knew I craved that power for myself.
So I read. As the above-quoted Faulker stated, I read everything, from Joe Silva's "Captain America" novels (such things exist, and they were amazing) to the complicated science-fiction of Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuinn. I read historical fiction, mysteries, horror stories. I read biographies and memoirs and history books. When I got old enough, I even read the fiction they published in "Playboy," when my gaze wasn't otherwise occupied. Part of this reading was for pleasure and part was escape. All of it contributed to my growth and development as a writer.
There is, however, one curious fact about me which I have mentioned before in this blog in a different context. I suffer from anxiety. And as an anxious person I find great comfort in repetition. I rewatch television. I rewatch film. And nary a year goes by when I don't re-read certain books, such as Howard Fast's "Spartacus," George Orwell's "Coming Up For Air," or Lawrence Sanders' "The Sixth Commandment." Because of this tendency, I realized about ten years ago that the actual amount of new reading I was doing must be fairly small. I started keeping track of just how many new books I was reading per year, and was shocked at how paltry the number was: I was averaging -- at most -- a new book every other month, say 6 - 7 a year. For a writer who professes to love reading, those are sorry statistics indeed. By 2015, I had better than doubled that figure, but even this did not leave me contented, and my figures for the next three years were as follows:
2016 - 20 books
2017 - 22 books
2018 - 26 books
This may not seem like many to some reading this. I see people on Goodreads who claim to read 100 books or more each year. I myself wouldn't do that if I could, because I would never retain any of what I was reading nor would I savor the process. It would be like eating chicken McNuggets every day. (I'm of the opinion that books should never be relegated, in the main, to mere "content," but that's just me.)
Unfortunately, the next few years showed a very different trend. Circumstance piled upon circumstance to cut down on the time and the inclinination I had to read, leading to these pathetic figures:
2019 - 17 books
2020 - 15 books
2021 - 9 books
Well, as the saying goes, what you don't change, you choose. When 2020 came around, I made a resolution to arrest and reverse this trend. And I succeeded. Not impressively, but I succeeded. It turns out that the faculty for reading is like any other muscle: if you neglect it, it atrophies, and must be built back up again through intelligently applied effort. It also turns out that if you lack a single goddamn place in your apartment which is truly comfortable to read, you don't do it. So I bought myself a comfortable chair with matching Ottoman, and got down to business.
I am still two books short of what I need to consider 2022 a reading success, but I have thirteen days left in the year, and I don't anticipate any difficulty in finishing two or even three before the ball drops. It is therefore premature for me to make the following list, but I'm going to do it anyway. The following is what I've read so far.
Passchendaele and The Somme: A Diary of 1917 by Hugh Quigley -- This is one of the most bizarre books I've ever read, and got me off on the wrong foot. Quigley's memoir of his WWI experiences is written in a vague, florid, dreamlike style which was more poetry than prose. It quite literally was like trying to write down the events of a wild, nonsensical dream. Here and there he has moments of lucidity but by and large the book was an incomprehnsible if pretty mess, rather akin to talking to a poet on acid.
The Life and Death of Lenin by Robert Payne: Payne, despite his flaws, is one of my favorite historians and while quite bloated, his bio of Lenin is highly readable and atmospheric. He depicts a man who wanted to burn down the system and didn't have the faintest idea what he wanted to replace it with.
Mine Were of Trouble by Peter Kemp: Having read Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" many times, my perspective on the Spanish Civil War came from a hard left-wing angle. Kemp, like Orwell, was an Englishman who fought in that war, but for the Fascists rather than the government. His side of the story, and his motives, made for a fascinating read and helped balance the scale.
The Life and Death of Trotsky by Robert Payne: Payne's bio of the infamous Trotsky, Lenin's chief co-conspirator and the creator of the Red Army, is another win for him, though like "Lenin" it is somewhat bloated. Payne depicts a brilliant scholar and home-made soldier who lost a power struggle with Stalin and was effaced from history so thoroughly that Orwell fashioned the character of Goldstein in "1984" after him. An interesting and tragic tale.
Now and Then by Joseph Heller: This book bored me to almost literal tears. Heller wrote "Catch-22" so I figured a memoir about growing up Jewish in Coney Island in the 1920s - 1930s would be fun and interesting. It wasn't. Men who boast about how unsentimental they are should not write memoirs about happy childhoods. It just doesn't make any sense. Jesus, was this a bore. I had to force myself to finish it.
Johnny Carson by Henry Bushkin: I enjoyed this breezy tell-all about the last real King of Late Night TV by his former lawyer, friend and allaround fixer. Bushkin paints a fascinating if not terribly flattering picture of Carson as the hard-working product of an absolutely loveless mother: an immense talent but a psychological mess, both Jekkyl and Hyde, often simultaneously. It's also a tale of Bushkin's own seduction by fame, money and reflected glamour.
Fire and Blood by Ernst Jünger: This short book is essentially a "director's cut" of the final chapters of his seminal combat memoir, "In The Storm of Steel." It recounts the day before, and the day of the enormous 1918 attack the German Army mounted against the Allies, as witnessed by Jünger himself. It is a fascinating, fast-paced, pitiless depiction of war by a war hero who drew a very different moral from his experiences than, say, Klaus Maria Remarque ("All Quiet on the Western Front.")
War as an Inner Experience by Ernst Jünger: The notorious Jünger, sometimes referred to as "The Intellectual Godfather of Fascism," writes a fascinating little book here, one of the five he penned about his WWI experiences: it's broken up into a series of chapters devoted to one aspect of war each, (waiting, fear, battle, etc.), as the author sees it. This quick spiritual-psychological study of the German combat soldier of 1914 - 1918 is worth reading alone just for the horrible passage about fighting in a burning house full of corpses in the middle of the night, only for someone to accidentally trigger a player-piano. You can't forget imagery like that.
The Border Wolves by Damion Hunter a.k.a. Amanda Cockrell: This book probably holds the record as the Most Delayed Sequel in Literary History. "The Centurions" was a 1980s trilogy of novels about a sprawling military family in ancient Rome. The third book ended with everything unresolved, and fans like my father and me waited in vain for more.Hunter/Cockrell finally self-pubbed the fourth and final installment in 2022, after a pause of almost forty years...and it was more or less worth the wait. Although she really should have written at least one more novel to round out the saga -- it feels disjointed and incomplete at times -- I found it an enjoyable and largely satisfying end to a wrongly forgotten, very entertaining historical romance.
American Nightingale by Bob Welch: This is a very readable and informative biography of Frances Slanger, a U.S. Army nurse who was killed in action while serving in Europe in WW2. The thoughtful and compassionate Slanger, a Jewess originally born in Poland, had a special sense of mission and her death sparked an outpouring of national grief. She was truly the "Ellis Island immigrant who made good" in the face of cultural prejudices from her own family (Jewish women shouldn't be nurses) and society at large (women shouldn't be in uniform, much less serving overseas). It was also fascinating to see how combat nurses were trained and the hardships they had to endure, and did endure, uncomplainingly, much to the admiration of their patients and soldiers generally.
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass: Probably no former slave contributed more to the destruction of slavery than Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave whose literacy proved his greatest weapon. Douglass lays bare the horrors of antebellum slavery, but it is his description of of the mental and spiritual anguish of being mere property, rather than the physical torment which came with it, which struck me most. Degredation, and not the whip, was what Douglass came to hate the most. Douglass's story is not a quest for freedom per se as much as a quest for dignity, the dignity of choice without which life is meaningless. (His writing, incidentally, is quite easy on the eye despite the heavy, formal, flowery style of the 19th century: contrast it with the plodding, turgid "forward" written by a famous abolitionist).
Crosses in the Wind by Joseph Shomon: This is a short, informative book about the Graves Registration service of the U.S. Army during WW2, told by the C.O. of one of its most prolific companies: his tiny outfit alone buried 21,000 American soldiers killed in action in Europe between 1944 - 1945, sometimes coming under heavy fire themselves to do it. While his historical background is quite badly written and sloppy, when Shomon writes about his own experiences the book is quite good, informative, and fast paced. He pulls a lot of punches to spare his audience, but nevertheless gives a fairly detailed picture of what life was like for men whose business was, even more than combat soldiers, quite literally death.
As I said above, I have a few more books to go this year, but I will at least complete the Goodreads Challenge for the first time since 2016, which will come to me more as a relief than a victory. Getting out of the habit of reading was a huge lapse on my part, an egregious failure of self-care, and I look forward very much to wearing out my reading chair in 2023 -- that is, if my cat doesn't destroy it first.
December 12, 2022
CONSISTENCY AND CONTRADICTION
“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” — Mark Twain
Back in 2016, just a few months after I started this blog, I was in Vancouver, B.C., on a video game gig. In case you don't know, a good part of how I made my wages when I lived in La La Land was by working in the VG industry, and if memory serves, we flew up to Canada to work three days on "Gears of War III." Well, one morning, as we ate breakfast before going to the studio, I remarked to my boss that I had begun blogging to support the release of my debut novel, CAGE LIFE.
"How often do you blog?" He asked.
"Whenever the spirit moves me," I replied. "I don't really have a schedule."
With a look of faint contempt, mingled with pity, he shook his head like a disappointed schoolmaster. "Do it religiously. Once a week, every week. And drop the blog on the same day, preferably at the same time. The only way to get a following is to be consistent with your content creation."
Now, God knows I tend to bristle at anything I do being dismissed as mere "content," but even I must confess that blogs, however brilliantly or cleverly or passionately they may be written, usually fall well short of art, and mine, being almost always written off the cuff and subjected to very little editing, probably fall even shorter of that mark than most. Unlike the weekly columns my dad wrote for The Chicago Sun-Times back in the 70s and 80s, they are mere outpourings of thought, the one similarity being the occasional effort I have made to whip them into some kind of coherent, structural shape. I certainly don't get paid to write them. Indeed, Goodreads long-ago removed the meter which showed how many views these missives get, so I have absolutely no way of knowing how many people are still reading them, or indeed, if anyone is reading them at all. This, however, is not the reason I have struggled with the consistency that my would-be mentor encouraged me to display six years ago. The fact is, somewhat ironically and paradoxically, that I am a writer. And being a writer, I am also a Bohemian. A creative type. A free spirit. In other words, I'm undisciplined, lazy, and generally incapable of sustained effort over long periods of time. I hate obligations and deadlines, and even the good ones tend to fill me with anxiety and dread. At the same time, I'm riddled with guilt over my frequent failure to bring in my personal projects over the finish line at the appointed moment. The trouble with being one's own boss is that one usually has Homer Simpson as an employee.
I suppose I do have one good reason for my inconsistency amid a host of lame excuses. Because I am a Bohemian, I literally cannot work 9 - 5 hours on a creative project for many months before I begin to experience severe burnout and mental exhaustion. To quote Captain Kirk, "genius doesn't work on an assembly-line basis: you cannot simply say, 'Today I will be brilliant.'" It is often necessary for a writer -- for any artist -- to take a day, a week, even a month or a whole season, off a project, and let the creative well replenish itself. Otherwise the final product will resemble a loaf of bread left in the oven a few hours too long. Such is what I tell myself, anyway, when I miss a deadline.
In the last two months, however, I have finally managed to release a blog every Monday night. It is my earnest hope that I will continue to do this all throughout the coming year, even if it is just a few lines of well-meaning nonsense. The reason for this is simple. However Bohemian a man may be, he also requires discipline, which finds definite expression in the act of consistency. Most people think of themselves as undiciplined and inconsistent, but if they held their lives up to scrutiny they would see many small examples of these things in their daily activities. Everything from brushing one's teeth in the morning to taking the dog for a walk to going to the gym or yoga or dance class is an act of discipline. It is only because some of these acts are so deeply ingrained as to require no thought at all, and others pleasurable to a degree, that we do not see them as such. Disciplining yourself to consistency may be as much an act of self-hypnosis as anything else, a sort of Huck Finn confidence scam, except that you end up painting your own fence, and enjoying it.
When I was a boy, I was unable to maintain enthusiasm for anything for any length of time, including exercise. All my natural athletic talents atrophied because I was not able to slay the dragon of indiscipline until my mid-late 20s, by which the boat had sailed. From a creative standpoint, until I was probably in my early-mid 30s, my life was a litter of half-finished projects: I abandoned everything short of the finish line. After graduate school I was able to come to terms with this failing, and since then have generally gotten the better of it when it mattered. But I have also discovered that this is one dragon which will not stay dead. Any weakness on my part and he roars back to life, incinerating my sense of responsibility with his fiery breath.
In everyday life, I do not find consistency to be terribly difficult. I don't find it terribly easy, either, but I've grown comfortable with being uncomfortable in that regard. It's simply part of life, something necessary. When I finish this, I'm going to the gym. I won't really enjoy it, and I'd rather be doing a hell of a lot of other things, but I'll do it anyway. I'll be physically present but mentally absent, get the work in, and go home. Writing, however, is a different animal. One cannot write anything worth reading without totally focusing on the object at hand. And if one wants an audience of any size, then one must also be consistent enough in one's production to attract and maintain that audience. The best television shows in the world would have bombed flat if viewers had tuned in at the appointed time each week not knowing if they were getting a new episode or a test pattern.
This, then, is the contradiction of the writer's life. He's a lazy, shiftless, aimless bum, generally content to sit around in his wife-beater and sweats, eating pretzels and drinking beer and watching "Murder, She Wrote," rather than working on that goddamned novel; but he is also haunted by his own laziness, his own lack of production. Those half-finished stories gnaw at him and goad his conscience. He cannot truly enjoy his idleness when he knows he could be using the time productively.
All of this is a rambling, roundabout way of saying that in 2023 it is my intention to become much more consistent with writing both here and in the arena of fiction. I have fallen into some lazy habits of late, hitting the keys only when the spirit moves me, and overlooked the role this blog could play in my reclamation. By posting here consistently, week in and week out, every Monday night for the fifty-two weeks of the coming year, I hope to habituate myself once again to hitting deadlines -- both the ones I set for myself and the ones others set for me. Fifty-two blogs in 365 days is a lot of blogs, but hey, this is a blog about everything, and there is a hell of a lot of everything out there. Let's get after it.
Back in 2016, just a few months after I started this blog, I was in Vancouver, B.C., on a video game gig. In case you don't know, a good part of how I made my wages when I lived in La La Land was by working in the VG industry, and if memory serves, we flew up to Canada to work three days on "Gears of War III." Well, one morning, as we ate breakfast before going to the studio, I remarked to my boss that I had begun blogging to support the release of my debut novel, CAGE LIFE.
"How often do you blog?" He asked.
"Whenever the spirit moves me," I replied. "I don't really have a schedule."
With a look of faint contempt, mingled with pity, he shook his head like a disappointed schoolmaster. "Do it religiously. Once a week, every week. And drop the blog on the same day, preferably at the same time. The only way to get a following is to be consistent with your content creation."
Now, God knows I tend to bristle at anything I do being dismissed as mere "content," but even I must confess that blogs, however brilliantly or cleverly or passionately they may be written, usually fall well short of art, and mine, being almost always written off the cuff and subjected to very little editing, probably fall even shorter of that mark than most. Unlike the weekly columns my dad wrote for The Chicago Sun-Times back in the 70s and 80s, they are mere outpourings of thought, the one similarity being the occasional effort I have made to whip them into some kind of coherent, structural shape. I certainly don't get paid to write them. Indeed, Goodreads long-ago removed the meter which showed how many views these missives get, so I have absolutely no way of knowing how many people are still reading them, or indeed, if anyone is reading them at all. This, however, is not the reason I have struggled with the consistency that my would-be mentor encouraged me to display six years ago. The fact is, somewhat ironically and paradoxically, that I am a writer. And being a writer, I am also a Bohemian. A creative type. A free spirit. In other words, I'm undisciplined, lazy, and generally incapable of sustained effort over long periods of time. I hate obligations and deadlines, and even the good ones tend to fill me with anxiety and dread. At the same time, I'm riddled with guilt over my frequent failure to bring in my personal projects over the finish line at the appointed moment. The trouble with being one's own boss is that one usually has Homer Simpson as an employee.
I suppose I do have one good reason for my inconsistency amid a host of lame excuses. Because I am a Bohemian, I literally cannot work 9 - 5 hours on a creative project for many months before I begin to experience severe burnout and mental exhaustion. To quote Captain Kirk, "genius doesn't work on an assembly-line basis: you cannot simply say, 'Today I will be brilliant.'" It is often necessary for a writer -- for any artist -- to take a day, a week, even a month or a whole season, off a project, and let the creative well replenish itself. Otherwise the final product will resemble a loaf of bread left in the oven a few hours too long. Such is what I tell myself, anyway, when I miss a deadline.
In the last two months, however, I have finally managed to release a blog every Monday night. It is my earnest hope that I will continue to do this all throughout the coming year, even if it is just a few lines of well-meaning nonsense. The reason for this is simple. However Bohemian a man may be, he also requires discipline, which finds definite expression in the act of consistency. Most people think of themselves as undiciplined and inconsistent, but if they held their lives up to scrutiny they would see many small examples of these things in their daily activities. Everything from brushing one's teeth in the morning to taking the dog for a walk to going to the gym or yoga or dance class is an act of discipline. It is only because some of these acts are so deeply ingrained as to require no thought at all, and others pleasurable to a degree, that we do not see them as such. Disciplining yourself to consistency may be as much an act of self-hypnosis as anything else, a sort of Huck Finn confidence scam, except that you end up painting your own fence, and enjoying it.
When I was a boy, I was unable to maintain enthusiasm for anything for any length of time, including exercise. All my natural athletic talents atrophied because I was not able to slay the dragon of indiscipline until my mid-late 20s, by which the boat had sailed. From a creative standpoint, until I was probably in my early-mid 30s, my life was a litter of half-finished projects: I abandoned everything short of the finish line. After graduate school I was able to come to terms with this failing, and since then have generally gotten the better of it when it mattered. But I have also discovered that this is one dragon which will not stay dead. Any weakness on my part and he roars back to life, incinerating my sense of responsibility with his fiery breath.
In everyday life, I do not find consistency to be terribly difficult. I don't find it terribly easy, either, but I've grown comfortable with being uncomfortable in that regard. It's simply part of life, something necessary. When I finish this, I'm going to the gym. I won't really enjoy it, and I'd rather be doing a hell of a lot of other things, but I'll do it anyway. I'll be physically present but mentally absent, get the work in, and go home. Writing, however, is a different animal. One cannot write anything worth reading without totally focusing on the object at hand. And if one wants an audience of any size, then one must also be consistent enough in one's production to attract and maintain that audience. The best television shows in the world would have bombed flat if viewers had tuned in at the appointed time each week not knowing if they were getting a new episode or a test pattern.
This, then, is the contradiction of the writer's life. He's a lazy, shiftless, aimless bum, generally content to sit around in his wife-beater and sweats, eating pretzels and drinking beer and watching "Murder, She Wrote," rather than working on that goddamned novel; but he is also haunted by his own laziness, his own lack of production. Those half-finished stories gnaw at him and goad his conscience. He cannot truly enjoy his idleness when he knows he could be using the time productively.
All of this is a rambling, roundabout way of saying that in 2023 it is my intention to become much more consistent with writing both here and in the arena of fiction. I have fallen into some lazy habits of late, hitting the keys only when the spirit moves me, and overlooked the role this blog could play in my reclamation. By posting here consistently, week in and week out, every Monday night for the fifty-two weeks of the coming year, I hope to habituate myself once again to hitting deadlines -- both the ones I set for myself and the ones others set for me. Fifty-two blogs in 365 days is a lot of blogs, but hey, this is a blog about everything, and there is a hell of a lot of everything out there. Let's get after it.
December 5, 2022
BILLIONAIRE WORSHIP: WELCOME YEAR ZERO
What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome. What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak. The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it. -- Frederich Nietzsche, "Antichrist"
What do Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg have in common?
I wouldn't give you a nickel for the lot of them.
Oh, yeah, and they're billionaires. So chances are they probably don't care about my opinion. Or my nickel. But still, they can't have it.
Now, I must admit they are not just any billionaires. They're among the top 20 billionaires in the world, the poorest of them having $40,000,000,000 to his name, the richest $200,000,000,000. I write out all of these zeroes because only by doing so is it possible to get even a glimmer of understanding in regards to how rich they really are. At that level of wealth, there is nothing materially they cannot buy, no expense they cannot pay, and nothing -- including spaceflight -- they cannot finance. Someone once defined enlightenment -- Nirvana -- as ceasing to exist in the material plane, and in a very real sense these men and their ilk have done just that. They have shed every orindary human concern except, I suppose, the fear of death. No concern which darkens the brow of ordinary mortals such as you or I troubles them. They have ascended to a sort of Olympus, a rarified place where one has so much money that money itself becomes meaningless, and the only things worth having are those things money cannot buy. Or at least cannot buy as easily.
History shows us that men who have achieved, for all intents and purposes, unlimited wealth, are not satiated by its possession. Having scaled the Olympus, they seek new worlds to conquer. In the Britain of 200 years ago, the nouveau riche industrialist class found the one thing they could not purchase was respectability, so they made a pact with the decaying and bankrupt aristocracy of England: let us marry into your families so we can lay claim to your titles, and we will replenish your coffers with our gold.
In the America of today, men who have amassed titanic fortunes do not ease back and live lives of hedonistic luxury: they quest for political power and social influence. Greed has not led them to satsifaction, it has led them to more greed.
Why is this important? Because it seems to me that in the last few years a curious cultural shift has taken place around the world. Men of extreme wealth are now becoming pop culture heroes with passionately devoted fans, sometimes numbering in the tens of millions. Steve Jobs was the first billionaire that I can recall truly achieving this status: not just fame, but popularity, especially with the youth. The fact that he was in many ways a ruthless and unscrupulous man, whose image of kindliness and benificience was as crafted as a department store showroom, was simply ignored by his adoring fans. Mark Zuckerberg also enjoyed enormous popularity before he unmasked himself as a cretin, and Jeff Bezos, too, before his tendency to ape the characteristics of Bond villains became too gross to ignore. Donald Trump, who falsely claims to be a billionaire but does so with such relentless, shameless gusto it is accepted as a fact even by those who know it is a lie, is often held up as a model of business success by his supporters, who are somehow able to dismiss civil fraud convictions and bankruptcies as unimportant flyspecks on a shining window of success. And indeed, the fact that I am able to rattle off the names of a half-dozen billionaires so easily despite claiming not to care about them, says a lot about how the attainment of colossal wealth has replaced success in politics, sports, or the entertainment industry as the goldest coin of the realm just in the last decade or two. I know their names even though I don't particularly want to, and that, my friends, is real fame.
The rise of the billionaire class -- there are at present over 3,000 of these people on the planet -- is not a cause for concern. It is a cause for horror, because it points to a much deeper problem which underlays and to some extent all of our other problems. The decline of religious feeling.
Now, I myself am not religious. Spiritual, yes, but not religious. I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Hindu; I consider Buddhism a philosophy and not a religion, and though I have Jews in my family tree, I am not Jewish. But I recognize the power of religion in the field of moral training. Indeed, the Church of England was, for several hundred years or more, openly recognized in Britain as the agency responsible for teaching young men a strict moral code "while all but forgetting the name of Jesus." The social engineers of the British Empire understood that a strict moral sense -- however flawed it might be when examined objectively in retrospect -- was imperative if the Empire was to survive. The gradual collapse of this code in the face of relentless attacks by the left-wing intelligencia of Britain played a huge and seldom understood role in the death of the Empire.
In the United States, it was long taken for granted that America was a "Christian nation"; later, this was modified to "Judeo-Christian," but the principle was the same. This viewpoint alienated atheists and people from non Judeo-Christian religous backgrounds, but it served the purpose of casting a single net over the entire country, a net of shared values. Prior to the rise of totalitarianism on the one hand, and unfettered capitalism on the other, it also provided a moral underpinning to ordinary conduct. Neither power for its own sake nor wealth for the sake of wealth was encouraged in the realm of Christian thought. Since the end of the Second World War, however, Christianity has been markedly on the downgrade in the States, and Judaism in its American expression is now much less of a religion than it is an ethnic identity laden with traditions that look religious in character but feel secular in practice. Indeed, the Western world is secularizing rapidly, and with that secularization comes a new set of problems which Karl Marx once fretted over when laying down the tenents of communism. Communism, he believed, answered every question except, possibly, the question of the soul. Not that Marx believed in the soul per se; but he heard "the sigh of the soul in a soulless world." That is to say, the need to believe in something more than cold political and economic doctrines. And it is not an exaggeration to say that the ferocious moral decomposition which accompanied the rise of Communism was in no small part created by its failure to address the need for humans to believe in the divine, and to see a divine spark in themselves. Without some type of spirituality, the human being is simply meat, and meat gets cooked. Just ask Stalin. He tried to replace the Father, Son and Holy Ghost with Marx, Lenin and himself, and ended up wallowing in oceans of blood for his trouble. Those who carp endlessly about witch hunts, inquisitions, fatwahs, jihads and crusades when they denounce organized religions might wish to dwell on the fact that atheistic and quasi-atheistic ideologies like Communism and Nazism have killed far more people than Christianity or Islam. This is not a defense of religious persecution or theocracy: they are indefensible. But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Organized religion can be extraordinarily dangerous, but so can organized secularism, with its tenents of moral relativism and its replacement of clear-cut ideas of right and wrong with mere psychology, in which no one is to blame for anything.
It's axiomatic that when a great power dies, be it an individual, an organization, a nation or a religious faith, a vacuum is created, and nature abhors a vacuum. While researching a completed but as yet unreleased novel of mine, I came upon this quote whose author I unfortunately cannot remember. I incorporated it into the story with modifications, but here it is in its original form:
"The longing in our hearts to worship, to devote ourselves to something, is a universal longing.
The absence of God has created a vacuum, and those who do not worship God will worship something else."
Which brings us back to billionaires.
Mr. Orwell, never short of observations, once acidly remarked on the tendency of Americans to admire success for its own sake, especially if that success was achieved in a bold, breathless, cruel sort of way. He found our fetishization of robber-barons and gangsters inexplicable except viewed through the lens of Fascism, which he described simply as "the worship of power." No better proof of this can be found in the somewhat sanitized Hollywood version of George S. Patton's famous, and very profane, speech to his troops, in which he stated:
"When you were kids . .you all admired the champion marble shooter. . .the fastest runner, big-league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner.. . .and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed...The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans."
In America, as in other places which have adopted the American outlook, the necessity for arguments camoflaging base motives have dissolved over time. Our forefathers, the British, were not content, as Hitler was, to conquer the world simply for the sake of conquest and exploitation: they needed to believe the British Empire was a force for good in the world. And when they no longer believed this, when the sham could no longer be maintained, they had to let it die. They let it die reluctantly, but they let it die, and have struggled ever since to reconcile themselves with the people they once enslaved. Americans, on the other hand, have shrugged off the idea of moral authority and replaced it with the worship of success and power, which in America is synonymous with extreme wealth. We have abandoned the idea that we will win because we are right and embraced the idea that we are right because we win. The logic is chillingly, childishly simple: in a purely material world, the billionaire takes the place not only of the selfless hero, but of the saint; indeed, of God himself, because "he has more money than God." Except that no man, no matter how extraordinary, is a god, and when men assume or are burdened with the godly mantle, what we usually get looks more like Hitler than Jesus. The very existence of democracy, of republics, is founded on this stark fact. And yet the grotesque cult of billionaires continues to find new adherents, even as individual members of the pantheon -- Zuckerberg, Bezos, and soon perhaps, Musk -- are discountenanced by their amorality and blind greed.
I do not know what human beings ought to worship in the absence of the traditional God they are abandoning, but I do know that the one true blasphemy remaining in anyone's faith is to seek divinity within the billionaire class, or within any individual billionaire regardless of his politics or percieved "genius." In the end, the fetishization and deification of men like Musk and Bezos really is nothing more than a conscious acceptance of a counterfeit Christ, a dime-store Buddha, a graven-image Muhammad, with the worshipper seeing in these flabby little demigods their own deepest desires for wealth, fame and power independent of any code, any morality or convinction. Like Nietzsche's "Antichrist," which I quoted at the beginning of this essay and which deeply inspired Hitler, it is a faux religion which cannot help but lead to atrocity and disaster.
The band Ghost once wrote a song called "Year Zero," which mockingly comments on the first year of the reign of Satan following the fall of Christianity. The last stanza goes as follows:
He will tremble the nations
Kingdoms to fall one by one
Victim to fall for temptations
A daughter to fall for a son
The ancient serpent-deceiver
The masses standing in awe
He will ascend to the heavens
Above the stars of God
The song ends: "Hail Satan! Welcome, Year Zero."
I don't know if we've arrived at Year Zero just yet, but I'm beginning to sweat flipping calendar pages.
What do Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg have in common?
I wouldn't give you a nickel for the lot of them.
Oh, yeah, and they're billionaires. So chances are they probably don't care about my opinion. Or my nickel. But still, they can't have it.
Now, I must admit they are not just any billionaires. They're among the top 20 billionaires in the world, the poorest of them having $40,000,000,000 to his name, the richest $200,000,000,000. I write out all of these zeroes because only by doing so is it possible to get even a glimmer of understanding in regards to how rich they really are. At that level of wealth, there is nothing materially they cannot buy, no expense they cannot pay, and nothing -- including spaceflight -- they cannot finance. Someone once defined enlightenment -- Nirvana -- as ceasing to exist in the material plane, and in a very real sense these men and their ilk have done just that. They have shed every orindary human concern except, I suppose, the fear of death. No concern which darkens the brow of ordinary mortals such as you or I troubles them. They have ascended to a sort of Olympus, a rarified place where one has so much money that money itself becomes meaningless, and the only things worth having are those things money cannot buy. Or at least cannot buy as easily.
History shows us that men who have achieved, for all intents and purposes, unlimited wealth, are not satiated by its possession. Having scaled the Olympus, they seek new worlds to conquer. In the Britain of 200 years ago, the nouveau riche industrialist class found the one thing they could not purchase was respectability, so they made a pact with the decaying and bankrupt aristocracy of England: let us marry into your families so we can lay claim to your titles, and we will replenish your coffers with our gold.
In the America of today, men who have amassed titanic fortunes do not ease back and live lives of hedonistic luxury: they quest for political power and social influence. Greed has not led them to satsifaction, it has led them to more greed.
Why is this important? Because it seems to me that in the last few years a curious cultural shift has taken place around the world. Men of extreme wealth are now becoming pop culture heroes with passionately devoted fans, sometimes numbering in the tens of millions. Steve Jobs was the first billionaire that I can recall truly achieving this status: not just fame, but popularity, especially with the youth. The fact that he was in many ways a ruthless and unscrupulous man, whose image of kindliness and benificience was as crafted as a department store showroom, was simply ignored by his adoring fans. Mark Zuckerberg also enjoyed enormous popularity before he unmasked himself as a cretin, and Jeff Bezos, too, before his tendency to ape the characteristics of Bond villains became too gross to ignore. Donald Trump, who falsely claims to be a billionaire but does so with such relentless, shameless gusto it is accepted as a fact even by those who know it is a lie, is often held up as a model of business success by his supporters, who are somehow able to dismiss civil fraud convictions and bankruptcies as unimportant flyspecks on a shining window of success. And indeed, the fact that I am able to rattle off the names of a half-dozen billionaires so easily despite claiming not to care about them, says a lot about how the attainment of colossal wealth has replaced success in politics, sports, or the entertainment industry as the goldest coin of the realm just in the last decade or two. I know their names even though I don't particularly want to, and that, my friends, is real fame.
The rise of the billionaire class -- there are at present over 3,000 of these people on the planet -- is not a cause for concern. It is a cause for horror, because it points to a much deeper problem which underlays and to some extent all of our other problems. The decline of religious feeling.
Now, I myself am not religious. Spiritual, yes, but not religious. I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Hindu; I consider Buddhism a philosophy and not a religion, and though I have Jews in my family tree, I am not Jewish. But I recognize the power of religion in the field of moral training. Indeed, the Church of England was, for several hundred years or more, openly recognized in Britain as the agency responsible for teaching young men a strict moral code "while all but forgetting the name of Jesus." The social engineers of the British Empire understood that a strict moral sense -- however flawed it might be when examined objectively in retrospect -- was imperative if the Empire was to survive. The gradual collapse of this code in the face of relentless attacks by the left-wing intelligencia of Britain played a huge and seldom understood role in the death of the Empire.
In the United States, it was long taken for granted that America was a "Christian nation"; later, this was modified to "Judeo-Christian," but the principle was the same. This viewpoint alienated atheists and people from non Judeo-Christian religous backgrounds, but it served the purpose of casting a single net over the entire country, a net of shared values. Prior to the rise of totalitarianism on the one hand, and unfettered capitalism on the other, it also provided a moral underpinning to ordinary conduct. Neither power for its own sake nor wealth for the sake of wealth was encouraged in the realm of Christian thought. Since the end of the Second World War, however, Christianity has been markedly on the downgrade in the States, and Judaism in its American expression is now much less of a religion than it is an ethnic identity laden with traditions that look religious in character but feel secular in practice. Indeed, the Western world is secularizing rapidly, and with that secularization comes a new set of problems which Karl Marx once fretted over when laying down the tenents of communism. Communism, he believed, answered every question except, possibly, the question of the soul. Not that Marx believed in the soul per se; but he heard "the sigh of the soul in a soulless world." That is to say, the need to believe in something more than cold political and economic doctrines. And it is not an exaggeration to say that the ferocious moral decomposition which accompanied the rise of Communism was in no small part created by its failure to address the need for humans to believe in the divine, and to see a divine spark in themselves. Without some type of spirituality, the human being is simply meat, and meat gets cooked. Just ask Stalin. He tried to replace the Father, Son and Holy Ghost with Marx, Lenin and himself, and ended up wallowing in oceans of blood for his trouble. Those who carp endlessly about witch hunts, inquisitions, fatwahs, jihads and crusades when they denounce organized religions might wish to dwell on the fact that atheistic and quasi-atheistic ideologies like Communism and Nazism have killed far more people than Christianity or Islam. This is not a defense of religious persecution or theocracy: they are indefensible. But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Organized religion can be extraordinarily dangerous, but so can organized secularism, with its tenents of moral relativism and its replacement of clear-cut ideas of right and wrong with mere psychology, in which no one is to blame for anything.
It's axiomatic that when a great power dies, be it an individual, an organization, a nation or a religious faith, a vacuum is created, and nature abhors a vacuum. While researching a completed but as yet unreleased novel of mine, I came upon this quote whose author I unfortunately cannot remember. I incorporated it into the story with modifications, but here it is in its original form:
"The longing in our hearts to worship, to devote ourselves to something, is a universal longing.
The absence of God has created a vacuum, and those who do not worship God will worship something else."
Which brings us back to billionaires.
Mr. Orwell, never short of observations, once acidly remarked on the tendency of Americans to admire success for its own sake, especially if that success was achieved in a bold, breathless, cruel sort of way. He found our fetishization of robber-barons and gangsters inexplicable except viewed through the lens of Fascism, which he described simply as "the worship of power." No better proof of this can be found in the somewhat sanitized Hollywood version of George S. Patton's famous, and very profane, speech to his troops, in which he stated:
"When you were kids . .you all admired the champion marble shooter. . .the fastest runner, big-league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner.. . .and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed...The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans."
In America, as in other places which have adopted the American outlook, the necessity for arguments camoflaging base motives have dissolved over time. Our forefathers, the British, were not content, as Hitler was, to conquer the world simply for the sake of conquest and exploitation: they needed to believe the British Empire was a force for good in the world. And when they no longer believed this, when the sham could no longer be maintained, they had to let it die. They let it die reluctantly, but they let it die, and have struggled ever since to reconcile themselves with the people they once enslaved. Americans, on the other hand, have shrugged off the idea of moral authority and replaced it with the worship of success and power, which in America is synonymous with extreme wealth. We have abandoned the idea that we will win because we are right and embraced the idea that we are right because we win. The logic is chillingly, childishly simple: in a purely material world, the billionaire takes the place not only of the selfless hero, but of the saint; indeed, of God himself, because "he has more money than God." Except that no man, no matter how extraordinary, is a god, and when men assume or are burdened with the godly mantle, what we usually get looks more like Hitler than Jesus. The very existence of democracy, of republics, is founded on this stark fact. And yet the grotesque cult of billionaires continues to find new adherents, even as individual members of the pantheon -- Zuckerberg, Bezos, and soon perhaps, Musk -- are discountenanced by their amorality and blind greed.
I do not know what human beings ought to worship in the absence of the traditional God they are abandoning, but I do know that the one true blasphemy remaining in anyone's faith is to seek divinity within the billionaire class, or within any individual billionaire regardless of his politics or percieved "genius." In the end, the fetishization and deification of men like Musk and Bezos really is nothing more than a conscious acceptance of a counterfeit Christ, a dime-store Buddha, a graven-image Muhammad, with the worshipper seeing in these flabby little demigods their own deepest desires for wealth, fame and power independent of any code, any morality or convinction. Like Nietzsche's "Antichrist," which I quoted at the beginning of this essay and which deeply inspired Hitler, it is a faux religion which cannot help but lead to atrocity and disaster.
The band Ghost once wrote a song called "Year Zero," which mockingly comments on the first year of the reign of Satan following the fall of Christianity. The last stanza goes as follows:
He will tremble the nations
Kingdoms to fall one by one
Victim to fall for temptations
A daughter to fall for a son
The ancient serpent-deceiver
The masses standing in awe
He will ascend to the heavens
Above the stars of God
The song ends: "Hail Satan! Welcome, Year Zero."
I don't know if we've arrived at Year Zero just yet, but I'm beginning to sweat flipping calendar pages.
November 28, 2022
Ever Since I Left
Stick around, nostalgia won't let you down. -- Jimmy Eat World
Ever since I left California, I've been wondering when I would miss it.
I lived there just short of thirteen years. A quarter of my life. And those thirteen years were hardly wasted time. I was busy. In retrospect many years I was everlastingly working, sometimes seven days a week -- sometimes nearly 100 hours a week, independent of the time I spent writing. And yet even when I was unemployed, broke, and frustrated almost out of my mind, I was busy. There was always something to do that didn't cost much if any money. I could hike any number of mountain ranges and parks, from the Hollywood Reservoir to Pico Canyon to Wildwood Canyon to Cahuenga Peak. I could (though I did so only rarely) go to the beach in Santa Monica or Malibu. I could zip down to Hollywood and catch an old movie at the Egyptian, or go just a little further and swim beneath the palms of Park La Brea. From there I could hit the Farmer's Market and do some writing over a cup of coffee, occasionally spying a celebrity walking obliviously through the crowd. And once upon a time, I could get some excellent beer and a wicked marguerita pizza at Callendar's on Wilshire Boulevard, served to me by local legend Jimmy the Bartender. There were also, in Burbank, any number of comic book stores, curio shops, and secondhand clothing outlets where one could browse without buying anything: I was passionately in love with Book & Movie World on San Fernando Boulevard, and had a great fondness for Dark Delicacies on Magnolia. Los Angeles is nothing if not bursting with things to do.
There is, too, a mystique about Southern California and L.A. in particular. It's massive, noisy, rambling, dirty, gorgeous and crammed with history. The archieture, from Art Deco to Spanish Colonial, tells many a story and all of them fascinating -- I was always particularly fascinated by the homes in Beverlywood Canyon, where I ran into Kevin Costner and Christopher Nolan at different times, and by those south of my old place in Mid-City West near the Beverly Center, once you crossed 3rd Street. In the late afternoons, a beautiful whitish haze, like the filters you used to see in Tony Scott films, settled over everything, most especially the ever-present palm trees. Sunsets were drawn-out affairs, especially on -- go figure this -- Sunset Boulevard, which is precisely as beautiful, and as sleazy, as you'd expect it to be, depending where you end up on it. If you are an afficianado of movie or television history, you will soon begin to recognize one landmark after another no matter where you go. It's a curious thing indeed to stand on a spot once occupied by Guy Pierce, or William Shatner, or Sarah Michelle Gellar or Russel Crow, or for that matter, Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe. Many is the time I have finished watching some old TV show from the 80s, only to find myself, purely by accident, at the exact location at which it was shot. It's a surreal experience, at once amusing and a little frightening somehow -- frightening because places have no memory, and don't care who stood where or did what.
When I think of my time there, all those years hustling for work, and either not getting it and fretting myself into madness over that fact, or getting way too much of it and falling asleep at the wheel on my way home from work, I am struck by the sheer weight of the memories, and their ferocious intensity. L.A. is a very tactile city in every respect. The sky is a deeper blue, the air has a taste like burned paper, the light seems to be almost a living thing, and the heat can break your spirit at times, as can the terrible, terrible dryness of late summer, when the asphalt shimmers and the tar bubbles and you long for rain with all your might. Your shoes crackle over broken glass, and my cousin Scott once reflected, as we walked through Hollywood, how you never truly appreciate just how much it stinks of human and canine piss until you travel about it on foot. In every way, good and bad, L.A. reminds you that you are inside of it, part of it, one cell in a very large, obnoxious body.
I could go on endlessly about things of this nature -- midnight swims beneath the stars in February, chance encounters with famous folks in nightclubs, sixteen hour days spent on set, on location, or in windowless editing bays in Mid City, Hollywood, or Pasadena, the bull sessions on balconies overlooking the Sunset Strip at three in the morning when we were all exhausted and sharing our fears...but that would not really be getting at the core of things. Most of everyday life in L.A. is as prosaic as anywhere else. Groceries need to be bought, and bills need to be paid. Laundry needs to be folded and dishes washed. The cat has to be gathered up from his sleeping place beneath the orange tree before you go to the gym, and dinner has to be cooked before you can relax afterwards. It would be the same in Topeka or Eagle Rock or Jacksonville -- or for that matter, York, Pennsylvania. What sets L.A. apart in a way that has so far prevented my inborn nostalgia from kicking in, is the accursed traffic.
Everyone has heard of how bad the traffic is in Los Angeles, but like battle or childbirth, it must actually be experienced to be understood. Sometimes I think the acute depression I suffered for the last three years I lived there was no caused by exposure to the ghastly chemicals used in the special effects industry, or the cruel and capricious bosses (many of whom are practicing sociopaths), or the unfairness of the pay vs. the brutality of the work, or the way the whole industry thrives on stealing credit from those who actually deserve it -- no, it was the fucking traffic. Words are an insufficient medium to describe how much I hated crawling through no-end-in-sight jams on the 101 or 5 freeways, or worse yet, the impenetrable vehicular prison created by events at the Hollywood Bowl. Rage does not describe the feeling I had every day when it took me 3 hours to drive from Mid-City West to Malibu, a journey which ought to take about 45 minutes. I got so sick of this commute I ended up abandoning the accursed 10 freeway for a massive detour on the 101 that took me through the mountains to the Pacific Coast Highway, literally doubling the distance of my commute to 60 miles one way, but at least allowing me to move the entire time. Indeed, sometimes when I think back to my years in La La Land, my main memory is of me fulminating behind the wheel of my car because it was three in the morning and somehow I was still stuck in traffic, far from home, with no prospect of escape.
Since moving back East, I have encountered new challenges to temper, mood and mental health, but none so consistently daunting and rage-inducing as Los Angeles traffic. Indeed, when I made my as yet only return visit out there last Christmas, I immediately found myself stuck in a jam on the 5 south, which I suppose was the city's way of welcoming me "home."
While living there, I noticed that the happiest and most successful people I knew had all made their peace with L.A.'s traffic. They considered it the price of doing business and were quite philosophical about it. This is a state of mind I could never consistently achieve. I went so far as to buy books on Buddhism to help me cope with my hatred, and they did help, but they did not cure my condition. I suffer from depression. My depression manifests not as sadness but as anger. Being stuck in traffic triggers my depression and therefore, my angry state, and if I have a visual image of myself, a sort of 3rd person view of myself in the last few years I lived there, it is of a sweat-drenched, middle-aged man in a shitty old Honda Accord, raging incoherently because the three-mile trip home from the gym is taking him half an hour, and all the peace he discovered at the treadmill and heavy bag has been destroyed by frustration.
I am a nostalgic person by nature. When I was in junior high school, I was sent into fits of sentimental longing by Eddie Money's song "I Wanna Go Back," even though the experiences he was singing about belonged to my future and not my past. As an ex-girlfriend once pointed out, I also tend to romanticize things, even things in my recent past that I disliked when I was experiencing them. I don't think this is a very serious character fault, but the fact that I can regard the immensity of my experience in California so calmly, so unemotionally, says a lot to me about just how little I enjoyed being angry so often. Some people are rage-a-holics, but I have always disliked being angry, even though (and perhaps because) that emotion came over me so often. Outbursts of anger always make me feel foolish afterward, and often exhausted, discouraged and ashamed in the bargain. So I suppose anger, exhaustion, discouragement and shame overlay every memory I have of Los Angeles, acting as a kind of barrier to sentiment. I remember everything: I romanticize nothing.
How long this will last is anybody's guess. If my ex- was right, I will eventually begin to forget the effect all that wasted time and frustration had upon my psyche, and begin longing for midnight swims in the moonlight beneath the palms, spur of the moment trips to the Egyptian to catch a Friday night flick, Martinis at Maestro's with a good friend or a beautiful acquaintance -- all the things it is actually legitimate to sentimentalize about my former home. Perhaps at that point I will contemplate a return. If my life has proven anything to me, it is that I can do anything I actually set my mind to doing, provided I mull over the idea long enough, and thus wear away the edges of my fears. For now, however, the thought of crawling down Ventura Boulevard at two miles an hour, in the general direction of a shabby one bedroom apartment for which I am paying $2,000 amonth, makes my blood run as cold as the Pennsylvania winter which is now fast approaching.
Ever since I left California, I've been wondering when I would miss it.
I lived there just short of thirteen years. A quarter of my life. And those thirteen years were hardly wasted time. I was busy. In retrospect many years I was everlastingly working, sometimes seven days a week -- sometimes nearly 100 hours a week, independent of the time I spent writing. And yet even when I was unemployed, broke, and frustrated almost out of my mind, I was busy. There was always something to do that didn't cost much if any money. I could hike any number of mountain ranges and parks, from the Hollywood Reservoir to Pico Canyon to Wildwood Canyon to Cahuenga Peak. I could (though I did so only rarely) go to the beach in Santa Monica or Malibu. I could zip down to Hollywood and catch an old movie at the Egyptian, or go just a little further and swim beneath the palms of Park La Brea. From there I could hit the Farmer's Market and do some writing over a cup of coffee, occasionally spying a celebrity walking obliviously through the crowd. And once upon a time, I could get some excellent beer and a wicked marguerita pizza at Callendar's on Wilshire Boulevard, served to me by local legend Jimmy the Bartender. There were also, in Burbank, any number of comic book stores, curio shops, and secondhand clothing outlets where one could browse without buying anything: I was passionately in love with Book & Movie World on San Fernando Boulevard, and had a great fondness for Dark Delicacies on Magnolia. Los Angeles is nothing if not bursting with things to do.
There is, too, a mystique about Southern California and L.A. in particular. It's massive, noisy, rambling, dirty, gorgeous and crammed with history. The archieture, from Art Deco to Spanish Colonial, tells many a story and all of them fascinating -- I was always particularly fascinated by the homes in Beverlywood Canyon, where I ran into Kevin Costner and Christopher Nolan at different times, and by those south of my old place in Mid-City West near the Beverly Center, once you crossed 3rd Street. In the late afternoons, a beautiful whitish haze, like the filters you used to see in Tony Scott films, settled over everything, most especially the ever-present palm trees. Sunsets were drawn-out affairs, especially on -- go figure this -- Sunset Boulevard, which is precisely as beautiful, and as sleazy, as you'd expect it to be, depending where you end up on it. If you are an afficianado of movie or television history, you will soon begin to recognize one landmark after another no matter where you go. It's a curious thing indeed to stand on a spot once occupied by Guy Pierce, or William Shatner, or Sarah Michelle Gellar or Russel Crow, or for that matter, Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe. Many is the time I have finished watching some old TV show from the 80s, only to find myself, purely by accident, at the exact location at which it was shot. It's a surreal experience, at once amusing and a little frightening somehow -- frightening because places have no memory, and don't care who stood where or did what.
When I think of my time there, all those years hustling for work, and either not getting it and fretting myself into madness over that fact, or getting way too much of it and falling asleep at the wheel on my way home from work, I am struck by the sheer weight of the memories, and their ferocious intensity. L.A. is a very tactile city in every respect. The sky is a deeper blue, the air has a taste like burned paper, the light seems to be almost a living thing, and the heat can break your spirit at times, as can the terrible, terrible dryness of late summer, when the asphalt shimmers and the tar bubbles and you long for rain with all your might. Your shoes crackle over broken glass, and my cousin Scott once reflected, as we walked through Hollywood, how you never truly appreciate just how much it stinks of human and canine piss until you travel about it on foot. In every way, good and bad, L.A. reminds you that you are inside of it, part of it, one cell in a very large, obnoxious body.
I could go on endlessly about things of this nature -- midnight swims beneath the stars in February, chance encounters with famous folks in nightclubs, sixteen hour days spent on set, on location, or in windowless editing bays in Mid City, Hollywood, or Pasadena, the bull sessions on balconies overlooking the Sunset Strip at three in the morning when we were all exhausted and sharing our fears...but that would not really be getting at the core of things. Most of everyday life in L.A. is as prosaic as anywhere else. Groceries need to be bought, and bills need to be paid. Laundry needs to be folded and dishes washed. The cat has to be gathered up from his sleeping place beneath the orange tree before you go to the gym, and dinner has to be cooked before you can relax afterwards. It would be the same in Topeka or Eagle Rock or Jacksonville -- or for that matter, York, Pennsylvania. What sets L.A. apart in a way that has so far prevented my inborn nostalgia from kicking in, is the accursed traffic.
Everyone has heard of how bad the traffic is in Los Angeles, but like battle or childbirth, it must actually be experienced to be understood. Sometimes I think the acute depression I suffered for the last three years I lived there was no caused by exposure to the ghastly chemicals used in the special effects industry, or the cruel and capricious bosses (many of whom are practicing sociopaths), or the unfairness of the pay vs. the brutality of the work, or the way the whole industry thrives on stealing credit from those who actually deserve it -- no, it was the fucking traffic. Words are an insufficient medium to describe how much I hated crawling through no-end-in-sight jams on the 101 or 5 freeways, or worse yet, the impenetrable vehicular prison created by events at the Hollywood Bowl. Rage does not describe the feeling I had every day when it took me 3 hours to drive from Mid-City West to Malibu, a journey which ought to take about 45 minutes. I got so sick of this commute I ended up abandoning the accursed 10 freeway for a massive detour on the 101 that took me through the mountains to the Pacific Coast Highway, literally doubling the distance of my commute to 60 miles one way, but at least allowing me to move the entire time. Indeed, sometimes when I think back to my years in La La Land, my main memory is of me fulminating behind the wheel of my car because it was three in the morning and somehow I was still stuck in traffic, far from home, with no prospect of escape.
Since moving back East, I have encountered new challenges to temper, mood and mental health, but none so consistently daunting and rage-inducing as Los Angeles traffic. Indeed, when I made my as yet only return visit out there last Christmas, I immediately found myself stuck in a jam on the 5 south, which I suppose was the city's way of welcoming me "home."
While living there, I noticed that the happiest and most successful people I knew had all made their peace with L.A.'s traffic. They considered it the price of doing business and were quite philosophical about it. This is a state of mind I could never consistently achieve. I went so far as to buy books on Buddhism to help me cope with my hatred, and they did help, but they did not cure my condition. I suffer from depression. My depression manifests not as sadness but as anger. Being stuck in traffic triggers my depression and therefore, my angry state, and if I have a visual image of myself, a sort of 3rd person view of myself in the last few years I lived there, it is of a sweat-drenched, middle-aged man in a shitty old Honda Accord, raging incoherently because the three-mile trip home from the gym is taking him half an hour, and all the peace he discovered at the treadmill and heavy bag has been destroyed by frustration.
I am a nostalgic person by nature. When I was in junior high school, I was sent into fits of sentimental longing by Eddie Money's song "I Wanna Go Back," even though the experiences he was singing about belonged to my future and not my past. As an ex-girlfriend once pointed out, I also tend to romanticize things, even things in my recent past that I disliked when I was experiencing them. I don't think this is a very serious character fault, but the fact that I can regard the immensity of my experience in California so calmly, so unemotionally, says a lot to me about just how little I enjoyed being angry so often. Some people are rage-a-holics, but I have always disliked being angry, even though (and perhaps because) that emotion came over me so often. Outbursts of anger always make me feel foolish afterward, and often exhausted, discouraged and ashamed in the bargain. So I suppose anger, exhaustion, discouragement and shame overlay every memory I have of Los Angeles, acting as a kind of barrier to sentiment. I remember everything: I romanticize nothing.
How long this will last is anybody's guess. If my ex- was right, I will eventually begin to forget the effect all that wasted time and frustration had upon my psyche, and begin longing for midnight swims in the moonlight beneath the palms, spur of the moment trips to the Egyptian to catch a Friday night flick, Martinis at Maestro's with a good friend or a beautiful acquaintance -- all the things it is actually legitimate to sentimentalize about my former home. Perhaps at that point I will contemplate a return. If my life has proven anything to me, it is that I can do anything I actually set my mind to doing, provided I mull over the idea long enough, and thus wear away the edges of my fears. For now, however, the thought of crawling down Ventura Boulevard at two miles an hour, in the general direction of a shabby one bedroom apartment for which I am paying $2,000 amonth, makes my blood run as cold as the Pennsylvania winter which is now fast approaching.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
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