Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 22
May 2, 2021
A VAXSPERIENCE, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR ME AND FOR THE WORLD
It's a happy memory, but I don't live there. -- Geraint Wyn-Davies
According to The Washington Post, 146.2 million Americans have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine as of today. That represents 54.7% of the total population -- every other person. Me sharing my own experience in this regard may therefore seem either rendundant, pointless or just plain narcissistic; but it's my understanding, backed by considerable evidence that the effects of the vaccine vary from person to person and to some extent, vaccine to vaccine. For posterity for the hell of it, and for curiosity's sake, I am sharing my own experience here, if only to see if it provokes a few others to share their experiences with me.
In the United States, three forms of the vaccine are currently in use: Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. I received the Pfizer vaccines on 4/9 and 4/30 of this year, respectively. I would have liked to have gotten mine considerably earlier, but in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where I have resided for better than half of my pandemic-era experience, I was ranked "1c" in order of vaccine eligibility. I tried and failed not to be insulted by this, given the essential nature of my work, but c'est la pandémie.
Like many people, I had some reservations about taking the vaccine even though I had been praying for the existence of one ever since the declaration of emergency early last year. AIDS, to quote a perhaps problematic example, has been a public health menace since the early-middle 1980s, and yet we still have no vaccine -- and ,according to experts, may not have one until at least 2035. It similarly took decades of continuous effort to create a safe and effective vaccine for polio, once the scourge of the First World. So the idea that, barely a year after the unwelcome discovery of Covid-19, we all ought to cheerfully allow ourselves to get pumped full of who-the-hell-knows-what in the hopes of avoiding the dreaded Coronavirus does involve a certain amount of trust, faith and, well, perhaps fatalism, too.
Armed with these things, as well as a burning desire to resume what we all refer to as "normal life," I went to a local Rite-Aid at six o'clock on Friday, April 9, 2021, to get "the jab." The line was not overly long, but it was slow-moving, and once the paperwork was completed, I had to wait ten or fifteen minutes before a tired and somewhat grim-looking pharmacist's assistant told me to roll up my sleeve. While I may box from a southpaw stance, I'm a rightie, so I elected to sacrifice my left arm to the needle. I'd been told that "you'll barely feel it" but this was definitely not the case. I have no especial fear of syringes or needles nor any especial sensitivity to them, and I have also been tattooed twice, but the insertion was surprisingly painful. The nearest analog I can come up with is being stuck hard with the neck of a broken bottle. The pain didn't last too long, but it surprised and disappointed me, as I cannot remember a vaccine ever having caused me much more than a momentary prickling of discomfort.
I waited the obligatory fifteen minutes to see if I'd have a negative reaction, and having none, drove home. Ordinarily, on a Friday, I'd have polished off a beer or two or a glass of whiskey to celebrate the conclusion of another week's work in the salt mines of the district attorney's office, but I'd been told not to take any alcohol. What's more, I'd been told to keep my body hydrated. I wasn't worried about side-effects, since the first of the Pfizer shots was reputed to have few if any. And this was indeed my experience...on Friday. The next three or four days were something of another matter.
On Saturday morning I awoke knowing I had to drive to Atlantic City. This is a three-hour drive from where I live, and I was expected around one o'clock, so I left at ten. I had no issues in the morning, during the drive or for the first hour or two after my arrival. Upon conclusion of my first meal of the day, however, I felt distinctly nauseous. It came upon me suddenly and did not last long, but when the nausea passed I found myself feeling drained and somewhat weak. This condition became more pronounced on Sunday, and persisted until Tuesday afternoon, a full three and a half days after I took the jab. I was always tired and sluggish, though my mind was clear and I did not feel feverish, sick, nauseous or in any pain. At this time I heard anecdotal evidence to the effect that anyone who'd had Covid before would suffer more from the first dose of the vaccine than anyone who had not been infected. I have no proof that I was ever infected, but I suspect that I was, early in the pandemic, albeit mildly and with unusual symptoms. If this was true, then it made more sense to me that I would be sensitive to the first dose, though again, this is mere speculation.
Once the side-effects faded, they were gone and I went about my life until last Friday, when I returned to Rite-Aid for the second jab. This time there was no line and almost no waiting. Nor was there any appreciable pain from the insertion of the needle, a fact I found most curious because the same woman who'd dosed me the first time dosed me on this occasion as well. Different needle? Different technique? Different mood? I have no idea. I waited the perscribed ten minutes to check for a bad reaction, and then, having none, drove home.
This time the effects were felt the same night as the jab, but they were very different than I had expected. Many had said the second dose was a real bastard, and would leave me flat on my ass for as long as three days, wracked by chills, fever and body aches. In point of fact, what I experienced was a feeling strongly reminiscent of my time on Oxycontin. I felt warm, sleepy, and completely at peace with the universe. This sensation grew more powerful as the night wore on, and I went to bed and slept quite well for a good eight or nine hours. I awoke in the same "morphine-high" state and found it very difficult, not to get out of bed, but to want> to get out of bed. Indeed, the entire morning, I felt as if the physician's assistant must have screwed up and shivved me with the wrong syringe. Clearly, instead of Pfizer #2, I'd gotten some kind of happy juice. The only negative effect was quite a sore arm. But when you've blocked as many punches as I have with your shoulder, one more owwie doesn't make much difference.
Around noon, the effects of the happy juice began to wear off. I remained sluggish, but my skin, especially along my back, took on a raw feeling, as it does when I have influenza or use the wrong detergent. I also noticed a throb over my left temple which eventually graduated into a full-blown headache. A friend of mine and I went for coffee, and I felt curiously cold despite modest temperatures, and very, very tired. In fact I had difficulty staying awake and had to rest my chin in my hand to support my head. Later, my headache got worse, necessitating a pill. I continued to drink lots of water as everyone had cautioned me to do, and I did notice a higher level of thirst than usual considering my lack of exercise; but whether this helped or not I have no idea.
In the evening, I went to dinner with two friends. At first I had no appetite at all, a condition which had affected me all day, but as I began eating I found I was somewhat hungry and cleaned my plate. My headache grew worse but then gradually recded, due to the pill or the food or something else -- human contact? -- I don't know. By the time we finished and said our goodbyes, I actually felt much better. It had now been somewhat more than 24 hours since I took the second dose, and I was cautiously optimistic that the worst was behind me and had not been very bad. Indeed, I felt a little restless and wished I could get some exercise, though I decided against it, just as I had decided against drinking any alcohol during my meal.
I went to bed that night as per usual, reading a book (The Bridge over the River Kwai) , and slept well. In the morning -- we're at Sunday now -- I felt perfectly fine. Just a bit wrung out, the way you feel the day after, say, a long day of travel. I got up, went through the normal morning routines, and then for coffee. Occasionally I felt a touch feverish but it caused me no distress. It's now been 36 hours or better since I had the shot, and there is nothing more to report. Unless I get clobbered out of the clear blue by more symptoms, I can report that I am now fully on the other side of the line drawn more than a year ago.
I set all of this down because the Pandemic is one of a small handful of events which have forcibly reshaped the world during my lifetime. I am just old enough to remember, as a small child, the enormous lines for gas during the Oil Crisis of the late 70s. I remember the Cold War and its climax, the Gulf War, and of course, 9/11 and its seemingly endless aftermath. When the Pandemic initially struck, I remember feeling as if I were experiencing either an extended bad dream or the business end of one of those end-of-the-world mini-series (you know, like The Stand). Shit like this, I assured myself, only happened in the minds of (ahem) overheated television writers, not in the actual world, and especially not in what we refer to as The First World. And once reality sunk in, once masks and social distancing and lockdowns and Zoom everything became the new normal, I felt a sulky, entitled, furious impatience with that monolithic body we simply refer to as "Science." Surely "Science" would get off its collective ass and deliver us a cure so we could go back to a time when masks were for Halloween and the thought of going to a concern or a movie theater didn't fill us with trepidation and dread.
Well, Science has done its job, and in record time, too. I can't think of any human endeavors, except the development of the atomic bomb in the early-mid 40s, and the space race of the 50s-60s, which saw such concentrated effort upon a single daunting task, and ended with such decisively affirmative results. Doubtless this first wave of vaccines are primitive, rather like the fighter planes and tanks our factories churned out in huge numbers immediately before and in the opening stages of World War Two; doubtless booster shots and 2.0 and 3.0 vaccines will emerge in the coming years, and we will all have to submit to further "jabs" as Science and the Virus battle it out for the lead spot in this particular race. This is not really what people want to hear, but the "novel coronavirus" is not going anywhere. Like influenza, it is now a part of human life and we will have to deal with it as we deal with the flu and the common cold. But we seem, for the moment anyway, to be getting a handle on the bastard. And having gotten that handle, it's only normal to want to return to normal life. But -- and I must stress this fact -- there will be no actual return. As Herman Wouk pointed out, wars draw dividing lines through history and separate one era from another. But "war" is a curious thing and not always fought on a military plane. Any great struggle can constitute a war. The Great Depression killed the Jazz Age. World War Two killed the Depression. The Oil Crisis ushered in a whole new polito-economic reality for the First World. The end of the Cold War altered the very raison d'etre of the post-WW2 "free world" and destroyed an entire political system and ideology which had ruled a huge part of the planet for 70-plus years. 9/11 maked a sea change in America's relationship with the world and itself. And this Pandemic will alter many aspects of our ways of living even after it itself is just a bad memory. Many of the "temporary" changes, like having people work from home and employ Zoom or Microsoft Teams to do their jobs, are hardening into permanency already. Brick and mortar offices are now taking the same hit that brick and mortar buildings have been taking since Amazon became the dominant retail force in this nation. Carrying a mask -- something literally everyone hates or at least dislikes doing -- will now probably become as normal as having a cell phone on one's person: we may not use them, but we will probably feel we have to have one handy for years to come.
The future that is coming is different than the one we imagined in 2019, and in some ways very much more unwelcome. In a macro sense, are reaping what we -- ourselves, our forefathers -- have sewed since industrialism began. This virus was one manifestation of our environmental policy as a species, which is to plunder and rape everything in sight for short-term gain without thought of future consequence. We have been at this for 200 years or more, and the world is finally telling us, in its own ways, that it has bloody well had enough. Those who insist everything will return to "normal" in 2022 or 2023 might want to consider that there is at present no vaccine for the huge fires, sweeping droughts and destructive storms of every type which have now become normal features of weather in much of the world. There is no vaccine for crop failure, shortages of fresh water, spiking cancer rates. We all want, on some level or other, to live a life of comfortable materialism on the one hand, and on the other, know that "nature" is out there for us to play with when we're in the mood to get our feet dirty. That was the world we grew up in. But it is not the world we live in, as anyone who lives in California or the Midwest, or the Gulf Coast now nows. You can now get a jab for Covid, if you want it; you cannot get a jab for 110 degree temperatures in November.
My point here is that life's insistence on changing, on taking our familiar ways and traditions and sense of normalcy and smashing them or twisting them into something still recognizable and yet definitely different, is never going to be easy to swallow. The folks who lived in the Jazz Age and were of the economic class which was capable of enjoying that decadence to its fullest, were no doubt dismayed to see it all fly to pieces in 1929. I know that September 11, 2001 put a definite and terrible end to my belief that 80s-90s prosperity could be sustained indefinitely, or that democracy had already won the worldwide struggle against totalitarianism and religious fanaticism. The truth is, we all have a peculiar and particular definition of "normal life" and "the way things ought to be," and this viewpoint colors much of our conduct and attitude, even in daily life. But life by definition is unstable and constantly attacks and chips away at our sense of normalcy. We can only shift our slang, our clothing style, our technology, etc., so much before daily life becomes an exasperating game of musical chairs and we begin to experience waves of nostalgia for the past -- waves which, if they crash into us enough, tend to lead to a type of social and sometimes a political conservatism. Whether this is "good" or "bad" is not the issue: the issue is that outward change creates inward change, often whether we want it or not. In the end, our success as human beings -- success meaning happiness, not material wealth or social position -- rests largely on our ability to adapt. And this, in closing, brings me back to the virus.
The success of viruses on this planet is not merely due their genetic simplicity (many scientists do not consider viruses as living things but rather organic androids, since they do not meet hardly any of the critera we assign to life), but their propensity for mutation. As the animal body adapts its defenses to kill an invading virus, the virus shifts its own genetic definition and becomes something else, something against which the animal has lesser defense. The immune system then adapts in turn, or tries to, and a game is inaugurated which is in a sense without an ending. And this grim contest is a microcosm of our human lives. Life keeps chucking changes at us, large and small, welcome and unwelcome and ambiguous, and we keep trying to come to a sense of normalcy amid the hailstorm. It ain't easy, but neither is staying alive and sane and happy; so when someone comes along with a needle and a solution, however stopgap and temporary, it's best to take a moment to be remember how adaptable our species truly is, and what remarkable feats we are capable of achieving if only we'd stop fighting each other and, like Gatsby, looking backward into the past.
According to The Washington Post, 146.2 million Americans have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine as of today. That represents 54.7% of the total population -- every other person. Me sharing my own experience in this regard may therefore seem either rendundant, pointless or just plain narcissistic; but it's my understanding, backed by considerable evidence that the effects of the vaccine vary from person to person and to some extent, vaccine to vaccine. For posterity for the hell of it, and for curiosity's sake, I am sharing my own experience here, if only to see if it provokes a few others to share their experiences with me.
In the United States, three forms of the vaccine are currently in use: Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. I received the Pfizer vaccines on 4/9 and 4/30 of this year, respectively. I would have liked to have gotten mine considerably earlier, but in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where I have resided for better than half of my pandemic-era experience, I was ranked "1c" in order of vaccine eligibility. I tried and failed not to be insulted by this, given the essential nature of my work, but c'est la pandémie.
Like many people, I had some reservations about taking the vaccine even though I had been praying for the existence of one ever since the declaration of emergency early last year. AIDS, to quote a perhaps problematic example, has been a public health menace since the early-middle 1980s, and yet we still have no vaccine -- and ,according to experts, may not have one until at least 2035. It similarly took decades of continuous effort to create a safe and effective vaccine for polio, once the scourge of the First World. So the idea that, barely a year after the unwelcome discovery of Covid-19, we all ought to cheerfully allow ourselves to get pumped full of who-the-hell-knows-what in the hopes of avoiding the dreaded Coronavirus does involve a certain amount of trust, faith and, well, perhaps fatalism, too.
Armed with these things, as well as a burning desire to resume what we all refer to as "normal life," I went to a local Rite-Aid at six o'clock on Friday, April 9, 2021, to get "the jab." The line was not overly long, but it was slow-moving, and once the paperwork was completed, I had to wait ten or fifteen minutes before a tired and somewhat grim-looking pharmacist's assistant told me to roll up my sleeve. While I may box from a southpaw stance, I'm a rightie, so I elected to sacrifice my left arm to the needle. I'd been told that "you'll barely feel it" but this was definitely not the case. I have no especial fear of syringes or needles nor any especial sensitivity to them, and I have also been tattooed twice, but the insertion was surprisingly painful. The nearest analog I can come up with is being stuck hard with the neck of a broken bottle. The pain didn't last too long, but it surprised and disappointed me, as I cannot remember a vaccine ever having caused me much more than a momentary prickling of discomfort.
I waited the obligatory fifteen minutes to see if I'd have a negative reaction, and having none, drove home. Ordinarily, on a Friday, I'd have polished off a beer or two or a glass of whiskey to celebrate the conclusion of another week's work in the salt mines of the district attorney's office, but I'd been told not to take any alcohol. What's more, I'd been told to keep my body hydrated. I wasn't worried about side-effects, since the first of the Pfizer shots was reputed to have few if any. And this was indeed my experience...on Friday. The next three or four days were something of another matter.
On Saturday morning I awoke knowing I had to drive to Atlantic City. This is a three-hour drive from where I live, and I was expected around one o'clock, so I left at ten. I had no issues in the morning, during the drive or for the first hour or two after my arrival. Upon conclusion of my first meal of the day, however, I felt distinctly nauseous. It came upon me suddenly and did not last long, but when the nausea passed I found myself feeling drained and somewhat weak. This condition became more pronounced on Sunday, and persisted until Tuesday afternoon, a full three and a half days after I took the jab. I was always tired and sluggish, though my mind was clear and I did not feel feverish, sick, nauseous or in any pain. At this time I heard anecdotal evidence to the effect that anyone who'd had Covid before would suffer more from the first dose of the vaccine than anyone who had not been infected. I have no proof that I was ever infected, but I suspect that I was, early in the pandemic, albeit mildly and with unusual symptoms. If this was true, then it made more sense to me that I would be sensitive to the first dose, though again, this is mere speculation.
Once the side-effects faded, they were gone and I went about my life until last Friday, when I returned to Rite-Aid for the second jab. This time there was no line and almost no waiting. Nor was there any appreciable pain from the insertion of the needle, a fact I found most curious because the same woman who'd dosed me the first time dosed me on this occasion as well. Different needle? Different technique? Different mood? I have no idea. I waited the perscribed ten minutes to check for a bad reaction, and then, having none, drove home.
This time the effects were felt the same night as the jab, but they were very different than I had expected. Many had said the second dose was a real bastard, and would leave me flat on my ass for as long as three days, wracked by chills, fever and body aches. In point of fact, what I experienced was a feeling strongly reminiscent of my time on Oxycontin. I felt warm, sleepy, and completely at peace with the universe. This sensation grew more powerful as the night wore on, and I went to bed and slept quite well for a good eight or nine hours. I awoke in the same "morphine-high" state and found it very difficult, not to get out of bed, but to want> to get out of bed. Indeed, the entire morning, I felt as if the physician's assistant must have screwed up and shivved me with the wrong syringe. Clearly, instead of Pfizer #2, I'd gotten some kind of happy juice. The only negative effect was quite a sore arm. But when you've blocked as many punches as I have with your shoulder, one more owwie doesn't make much difference.
Around noon, the effects of the happy juice began to wear off. I remained sluggish, but my skin, especially along my back, took on a raw feeling, as it does when I have influenza or use the wrong detergent. I also noticed a throb over my left temple which eventually graduated into a full-blown headache. A friend of mine and I went for coffee, and I felt curiously cold despite modest temperatures, and very, very tired. In fact I had difficulty staying awake and had to rest my chin in my hand to support my head. Later, my headache got worse, necessitating a pill. I continued to drink lots of water as everyone had cautioned me to do, and I did notice a higher level of thirst than usual considering my lack of exercise; but whether this helped or not I have no idea.
In the evening, I went to dinner with two friends. At first I had no appetite at all, a condition which had affected me all day, but as I began eating I found I was somewhat hungry and cleaned my plate. My headache grew worse but then gradually recded, due to the pill or the food or something else -- human contact? -- I don't know. By the time we finished and said our goodbyes, I actually felt much better. It had now been somewhat more than 24 hours since I took the second dose, and I was cautiously optimistic that the worst was behind me and had not been very bad. Indeed, I felt a little restless and wished I could get some exercise, though I decided against it, just as I had decided against drinking any alcohol during my meal.
I went to bed that night as per usual, reading a book (The Bridge over the River Kwai) , and slept well. In the morning -- we're at Sunday now -- I felt perfectly fine. Just a bit wrung out, the way you feel the day after, say, a long day of travel. I got up, went through the normal morning routines, and then for coffee. Occasionally I felt a touch feverish but it caused me no distress. It's now been 36 hours or better since I had the shot, and there is nothing more to report. Unless I get clobbered out of the clear blue by more symptoms, I can report that I am now fully on the other side of the line drawn more than a year ago.
I set all of this down because the Pandemic is one of a small handful of events which have forcibly reshaped the world during my lifetime. I am just old enough to remember, as a small child, the enormous lines for gas during the Oil Crisis of the late 70s. I remember the Cold War and its climax, the Gulf War, and of course, 9/11 and its seemingly endless aftermath. When the Pandemic initially struck, I remember feeling as if I were experiencing either an extended bad dream or the business end of one of those end-of-the-world mini-series (you know, like The Stand). Shit like this, I assured myself, only happened in the minds of (ahem) overheated television writers, not in the actual world, and especially not in what we refer to as The First World. And once reality sunk in, once masks and social distancing and lockdowns and Zoom everything became the new normal, I felt a sulky, entitled, furious impatience with that monolithic body we simply refer to as "Science." Surely "Science" would get off its collective ass and deliver us a cure so we could go back to a time when masks were for Halloween and the thought of going to a concern or a movie theater didn't fill us with trepidation and dread.
Well, Science has done its job, and in record time, too. I can't think of any human endeavors, except the development of the atomic bomb in the early-mid 40s, and the space race of the 50s-60s, which saw such concentrated effort upon a single daunting task, and ended with such decisively affirmative results. Doubtless this first wave of vaccines are primitive, rather like the fighter planes and tanks our factories churned out in huge numbers immediately before and in the opening stages of World War Two; doubtless booster shots and 2.0 and 3.0 vaccines will emerge in the coming years, and we will all have to submit to further "jabs" as Science and the Virus battle it out for the lead spot in this particular race. This is not really what people want to hear, but the "novel coronavirus" is not going anywhere. Like influenza, it is now a part of human life and we will have to deal with it as we deal with the flu and the common cold. But we seem, for the moment anyway, to be getting a handle on the bastard. And having gotten that handle, it's only normal to want to return to normal life. But -- and I must stress this fact -- there will be no actual return. As Herman Wouk pointed out, wars draw dividing lines through history and separate one era from another. But "war" is a curious thing and not always fought on a military plane. Any great struggle can constitute a war. The Great Depression killed the Jazz Age. World War Two killed the Depression. The Oil Crisis ushered in a whole new polito-economic reality for the First World. The end of the Cold War altered the very raison d'etre of the post-WW2 "free world" and destroyed an entire political system and ideology which had ruled a huge part of the planet for 70-plus years. 9/11 maked a sea change in America's relationship with the world and itself. And this Pandemic will alter many aspects of our ways of living even after it itself is just a bad memory. Many of the "temporary" changes, like having people work from home and employ Zoom or Microsoft Teams to do their jobs, are hardening into permanency already. Brick and mortar offices are now taking the same hit that brick and mortar buildings have been taking since Amazon became the dominant retail force in this nation. Carrying a mask -- something literally everyone hates or at least dislikes doing -- will now probably become as normal as having a cell phone on one's person: we may not use them, but we will probably feel we have to have one handy for years to come.
The future that is coming is different than the one we imagined in 2019, and in some ways very much more unwelcome. In a macro sense, are reaping what we -- ourselves, our forefathers -- have sewed since industrialism began. This virus was one manifestation of our environmental policy as a species, which is to plunder and rape everything in sight for short-term gain without thought of future consequence. We have been at this for 200 years or more, and the world is finally telling us, in its own ways, that it has bloody well had enough. Those who insist everything will return to "normal" in 2022 or 2023 might want to consider that there is at present no vaccine for the huge fires, sweeping droughts and destructive storms of every type which have now become normal features of weather in much of the world. There is no vaccine for crop failure, shortages of fresh water, spiking cancer rates. We all want, on some level or other, to live a life of comfortable materialism on the one hand, and on the other, know that "nature" is out there for us to play with when we're in the mood to get our feet dirty. That was the world we grew up in. But it is not the world we live in, as anyone who lives in California or the Midwest, or the Gulf Coast now nows. You can now get a jab for Covid, if you want it; you cannot get a jab for 110 degree temperatures in November.
My point here is that life's insistence on changing, on taking our familiar ways and traditions and sense of normalcy and smashing them or twisting them into something still recognizable and yet definitely different, is never going to be easy to swallow. The folks who lived in the Jazz Age and were of the economic class which was capable of enjoying that decadence to its fullest, were no doubt dismayed to see it all fly to pieces in 1929. I know that September 11, 2001 put a definite and terrible end to my belief that 80s-90s prosperity could be sustained indefinitely, or that democracy had already won the worldwide struggle against totalitarianism and religious fanaticism. The truth is, we all have a peculiar and particular definition of "normal life" and "the way things ought to be," and this viewpoint colors much of our conduct and attitude, even in daily life. But life by definition is unstable and constantly attacks and chips away at our sense of normalcy. We can only shift our slang, our clothing style, our technology, etc., so much before daily life becomes an exasperating game of musical chairs and we begin to experience waves of nostalgia for the past -- waves which, if they crash into us enough, tend to lead to a type of social and sometimes a political conservatism. Whether this is "good" or "bad" is not the issue: the issue is that outward change creates inward change, often whether we want it or not. In the end, our success as human beings -- success meaning happiness, not material wealth or social position -- rests largely on our ability to adapt. And this, in closing, brings me back to the virus.
The success of viruses on this planet is not merely due their genetic simplicity (many scientists do not consider viruses as living things but rather organic androids, since they do not meet hardly any of the critera we assign to life), but their propensity for mutation. As the animal body adapts its defenses to kill an invading virus, the virus shifts its own genetic definition and becomes something else, something against which the animal has lesser defense. The immune system then adapts in turn, or tries to, and a game is inaugurated which is in a sense without an ending. And this grim contest is a microcosm of our human lives. Life keeps chucking changes at us, large and small, welcome and unwelcome and ambiguous, and we keep trying to come to a sense of normalcy amid the hailstorm. It ain't easy, but neither is staying alive and sane and happy; so when someone comes along with a needle and a solution, however stopgap and temporary, it's best to take a moment to be remember how adaptable our species truly is, and what remarkable feats we are capable of achieving if only we'd stop fighting each other and, like Gatsby, looking backward into the past.
March 24, 2021
As I Please V: Neurodivergent Edition
Probably the greatest thing about owning and operating your own blog is the absolute freedom involved. In terms of literary spaces, there is none so like the Wild West as a blog -- and not only is it the Wild West, you are free to play the outlaw if so you choose. In almost every other area of my writing life, there are some rules, even if they are only self-imposed. In other words, there is a sheriff or town marshal stalking about the town somewhere with a scowl and a scattergun, sure to make trouble with me if I violate an ordinance. That sheriff might be called Contract or Deadline or even Lazy Writer With A Bad Conscience, but as I just said, if I want to cheese him off I can do so by simply placing the black hat of outlaw upon my head, and fucking off in any direction I like, sunset or no.
You see, when I write in other mediums, from novel to short story, novelette to screenplay, poem to essay, I am doing so with very definite objectives. I may be trying to frighten the reader, or to make him think, or to make him angry or thoughtful, or to experience a certain atmosphere, or simply to entertain him for the short period in which he happens to be reading my story. I might fail miserably in my goals, but the objective is clear to me even if the path to it is not, and to reach that objective I have to follow certain obvious rules of structure and logic: a horror story, for example, should be frightening and not amusing, nicht wahr? Likewise, if I am writing an essay, I must have a point, and must take steps to make that point in a way that will hold up under hostile examination. But in a blog I am free to say whatever the hell I want, whenever I want, in any style I so choose. Conversely, I can say nothing at all, and almost nobody will care, and I don't have to care if they do.
Maynard James Keenan, who among many other things is the lead singer of the bands Tool, Perfect Circle and Puscifer, was once asked at the curiously undefined, nebulous nature of the latter band's sound. He responded that Puscifer was "simply a playground for the various voices in my head...a space with no clear or discernible goals, where my Id, Ego, and Anima all come together to exchange cookie recipes."
This quote struck me enough that I wrote it down as soon as I heard it, for I am a firm believer that everyone needs a playspace within one's own mind which has no clear or discernible goals; which exists for its own sake. For me, blogging is one such playspace. It gives me the chance to escape rules, logic, discipline, deadlines and the strictures of contracts and handshake deals, and simply do what I want as the impulse strikes me.
I mention this because the time has come for yet another installment in the As I Please franchise -- that branch of Stone Cold Prose which allows me to demonstrate what having a neurodivergent mind is really like.
* I've often railed in these pages, and on social media, about the extreme difficulty of getting reviews on Amazon (not sales, mind you, but reviews, either positive or negative). Recently I decided to conduct an experiment to prove that even greater exposure does not yield more reviews. For the first time ever, I temporarily made a large portion of my catalog of fiction available for free download on Amazon. Though response was initially slow, before long I was hitting 200 downloads a day, and one of my books, Devils You Know briefly became an Amazon (irony alert) best seller in three different categories. For all of this, I noted -- after a suitable waiting period -- only three or four new reviews on various stories. If I didn't know almost every other writer out there was suffering the same fate, I would find this humiliating: instead it is merely a source of frustration. So please, folks; the next time you read anything, leave a review. It doesn't have to be good: even a bad review has value so long as it demonstrates some level of intelligence. It's chic to support local businesses, why not independent authors?
* In my latest appearance on the LCS Radio Show, we were discussing "fun" bad movies, and the bad movie I selected for us to watch was BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, a God-awful knock-off of STAR WARS which appeared in 1980. This movie is really, really bad, but for some reason it triggered within me a certain nostalgia for 80s cinema of all kinds -- especially forgotten or just plain awful 80s cinema and television. I came away from this orgy feeling a bit shaken. Some of the flicks I'd witnessed (MEGAFORCE, for example) were gut-wrenchingly, almost surpasseth-understanding terrible, while others (RUNAWAY, BLUE THUNDER) were surprisingly engaging despite obvious flaws. Likewise, the mid-to-low-range television shows, shit like MATT HOUSTON, T.J. HOOKER and THE FALL GUY, are both simultaneously: objectively bad, yet strangely fun. What struck me, however, was the spirit of cheerfully cheesy innocence which marks so many of them. In these shows and in many of the films, at least the PG-rated ones, the heroes operated by strict and almost unwavering codes of honor; they were never tempted by villainy and if they were, they always managed to emerge unsullied and stronger than before. Likewise, even a show as dedicated to exposing problems and injustices within society and "the system" as something like QUINCY, M.E. placed all of its faith quite firmly in both: the idea was to remind us to live up to our societal ideals, not that our ideals were wrong; to trust that "the system" would work if only we would fully participate, not to junk it altogether. I don't remember precisely when the tone of movies and television began to darken into cynicism, moral ambiguity and "Realism" in the old, brutal German sense of the word, I imagine the process was quite gradual, but the fact remains that it did, and there is zero sign of any desire by the big public to set the clock back. From a qualitative standpoint this is a good thing, but I'm not so sure that cheesy, family-friendly shows with hammer-heavy moral and patriotic messages becoming as extinct as triceratops will do us much benefit in the long run. The idea that evil and corruption will always be defeated, that the good guys ought to win and do win more often than they lose, that not everyone is tempted by flashy objects or power for its own sake, is one that deserves a hearing.
* Having re-entered the criminal justice system, I am once again reminded that its depiction by television and film is so far from anything which might be called reality as almost to constitute an act of fraud. Much of television is devoted to the idea that courtrooms are inherently dramatic places, and on the surface of things this would seem to be a no-brainer. Drama is conflict, and courtrooms are intrinsically adversarial systems -- you literally cannot have a trial, even a civil trial over a trifling issue, without conflict. Yet anyone who has ever sat through an entire trial can testify (pun intended) at how miserably, almost paralyzingly boring time in a courtroom can be. Many years ago I attended a trial of bank robbers who shot a police officer while trying to escape; I even knew the officer, who was present in court. And yet after about an hour or two of observation I was bored stiff. Nothing much has changed. There are moments of great tension and suspense, sharp exchanges between individuals, even humorous little asides, but by and large the wheels of justice grind slow, fine and dull as hell.
* One of the most interesting battles of World War 2 is also almost completely unknown. The Dodecanese Campaign, which lasted from September 8 - November 22, 1943, saw the British, acting on their own and without any American support, try to seize a string of islands off the Turkish coast from German and Italian control. For the lover of military history, or for those passionate about the political and economic forces which shape and drive military campaigns, this battle has absolutely everything: political infighting, military treachery, side-switching, code-breaking, airborne and amphibious assaults, naval battles, air attacks, commando raids, massacres of POWs and civilians, the debut of new technology, and a whole slew of tragic friendly-fire incidents, some with five-figure death tolls. The only thing it seems to lack is a happy ending...for the Allies, anyway. The battle was a tremendous German victory. It kept Turkey, who was Hitler's only supplier of chrome, from joining the Allies, and ensured that the Spanish would also continue to supply vital tungsten to the Nazi war effort: it also prevented the Allies from sending war supplies through the Dardanelles Strait to the USSR. Its failure weakened Churchill's already wobbly position vis-a-vis Roosevelt and Stalin and had an effect on postwar Greek politics. It also led to the near-extermination of the Jewish populations of the islands after the battle, when they transferred from Italian to German agency. No doubt the unhappy conclusion is why it has little to no place in the history books or popular culture: indeed, the sole movie I can think of which references this phase of the war is The Guns of Navarone, a story which has absolutely no basis in reality: not only the fabled guns but the island they reside upon never existed. The novel simply the attempt of a feisty hack writer with curiously fascist emotional leanings to slap a happy face over a bitter, humiliating defeat in which the Germans inflicted anywhere from 5 to 50 casualties for every one they sustained. Ditto the admittedly entertaining film. I tell you this: WW2 war may be over, but the rug under which all the costly blunders and defeats have been swept is very lumpy indeed, and one is tempted to wonder what is really served by editing our history in this way. It is grossly disrespectful of those who did not die in glamorous victories, yes, but there is a larger issue at stake. Defeat teaches us more than victory, and the Dodecanese Campaign could teach today's world political leadership a great deal about how not to fight a battle -- something they sorely need.
* I am once again doing the Whole 30 cleanse, in which, for 30 days, I eat only fruit, nuts, meats and vegetables, and drink only water and unsweetened coffee or tea. No sugar. No dairy. No alcohol. No processed foods. And no grains of any kind. This cleanse is a huge pain in the ass and every time I do it I wonder why. A particularly horrible feature is something called the "keto flu," which is an early and temporary side-effect of going off sugar and bad carbs. Your body is used to fueling itself with that crap, so when you take said crap away, it doesn't know how to draw energy from the food you do ingest, and has to re-learn the skill. This period of learning is known as the keto (ketogenic) flu, and can last several days or longer. During the period, you suffer from a tremendous sense of physical fatigue, and find yourself weak, apathetic and prone to sighing a lot for no goddamned reason. In my case it seldom lasts longer than 36 - 72 hours and never returns, but those 36 - 72 hours suck. And just generally speaking, the diet is a pain in the ass and a bore. On the other hand, it does a great deal to clear up the skin and reduce inflammation (especially around the lower belly). The first time I did it, I went 32 days without any booze, sugar or bad carbs, and my skin had a positive glow when I finished. I also dropped 4 lbs, despite eating like a pig the entire time.
* When I was living in California, I seldom wore anything dressier than a sports shirt and rarely more than shorts and flip-flops. I spent months in tank tops and often whole seasons with a baseball cap wedged firmly upon my head. Shaving was a ritual engaged in at my whim, and I went intervals of seasons without a haircut. "Work clothes" meant a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. Now that I reside in Pennsylvania once again, I wear suits, vests, watch-chains, and have two tie racks and will soon need two more. Indeed, I have an entire walk-in closet devoted to suits and suchlike. I'm not sure that's progress, but it is an enormous change and reflects a certain change in outlook as well. One of the main benefits of life in SoCal is that it is essentially an endless summer, a retreat into a permenent state of late adolescence. On the other hand, this is also one of the main drawbacks. When it is summer, no one thinks about tomorrow; when it is always summer, tomorrow never comes. There is no desire to plan, no urge to grow up or accept responsibility. A major advantage to the rhythm of seasons is that they remind us that life is not eternal, that youth cannot be clung to infinitely, and that in one form or another, the school bell will ring come September.
* One of the major differences between what we call "the left" and what we call "the right" in this country is in how they deal with internal party strife. You may know the left by this sign: when one of their own fucks up, be it Joss Whedon, Al Franken, or Andrew Cuomo, he is torn apart so quickly and violently by his own kind it is rather akin to watching a side of bloody beef being dipped into a shark tank. When a rightie screws the pooch, a la Marjorie Green, the worst they can generally expect is a knuckle rap, after which the entire Republican establishment will circle the wagons, load up the rifles, and prepare to die in their defense. Without getting into morality, ethics or psychology, it's a fascinating phenomenon and probably bears further study.
You see, when I write in other mediums, from novel to short story, novelette to screenplay, poem to essay, I am doing so with very definite objectives. I may be trying to frighten the reader, or to make him think, or to make him angry or thoughtful, or to experience a certain atmosphere, or simply to entertain him for the short period in which he happens to be reading my story. I might fail miserably in my goals, but the objective is clear to me even if the path to it is not, and to reach that objective I have to follow certain obvious rules of structure and logic: a horror story, for example, should be frightening and not amusing, nicht wahr? Likewise, if I am writing an essay, I must have a point, and must take steps to make that point in a way that will hold up under hostile examination. But in a blog I am free to say whatever the hell I want, whenever I want, in any style I so choose. Conversely, I can say nothing at all, and almost nobody will care, and I don't have to care if they do.
Maynard James Keenan, who among many other things is the lead singer of the bands Tool, Perfect Circle and Puscifer, was once asked at the curiously undefined, nebulous nature of the latter band's sound. He responded that Puscifer was "simply a playground for the various voices in my head...a space with no clear or discernible goals, where my Id, Ego, and Anima all come together to exchange cookie recipes."
This quote struck me enough that I wrote it down as soon as I heard it, for I am a firm believer that everyone needs a playspace within one's own mind which has no clear or discernible goals; which exists for its own sake. For me, blogging is one such playspace. It gives me the chance to escape rules, logic, discipline, deadlines and the strictures of contracts and handshake deals, and simply do what I want as the impulse strikes me.
I mention this because the time has come for yet another installment in the As I Please franchise -- that branch of Stone Cold Prose which allows me to demonstrate what having a neurodivergent mind is really like.
* I've often railed in these pages, and on social media, about the extreme difficulty of getting reviews on Amazon (not sales, mind you, but reviews, either positive or negative). Recently I decided to conduct an experiment to prove that even greater exposure does not yield more reviews. For the first time ever, I temporarily made a large portion of my catalog of fiction available for free download on Amazon. Though response was initially slow, before long I was hitting 200 downloads a day, and one of my books, Devils You Know briefly became an Amazon (irony alert) best seller in three different categories. For all of this, I noted -- after a suitable waiting period -- only three or four new reviews on various stories. If I didn't know almost every other writer out there was suffering the same fate, I would find this humiliating: instead it is merely a source of frustration. So please, folks; the next time you read anything, leave a review. It doesn't have to be good: even a bad review has value so long as it demonstrates some level of intelligence. It's chic to support local businesses, why not independent authors?
* In my latest appearance on the LCS Radio Show, we were discussing "fun" bad movies, and the bad movie I selected for us to watch was BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, a God-awful knock-off of STAR WARS which appeared in 1980. This movie is really, really bad, but for some reason it triggered within me a certain nostalgia for 80s cinema of all kinds -- especially forgotten or just plain awful 80s cinema and television. I came away from this orgy feeling a bit shaken. Some of the flicks I'd witnessed (MEGAFORCE, for example) were gut-wrenchingly, almost surpasseth-understanding terrible, while others (RUNAWAY, BLUE THUNDER) were surprisingly engaging despite obvious flaws. Likewise, the mid-to-low-range television shows, shit like MATT HOUSTON, T.J. HOOKER and THE FALL GUY, are both simultaneously: objectively bad, yet strangely fun. What struck me, however, was the spirit of cheerfully cheesy innocence which marks so many of them. In these shows and in many of the films, at least the PG-rated ones, the heroes operated by strict and almost unwavering codes of honor; they were never tempted by villainy and if they were, they always managed to emerge unsullied and stronger than before. Likewise, even a show as dedicated to exposing problems and injustices within society and "the system" as something like QUINCY, M.E. placed all of its faith quite firmly in both: the idea was to remind us to live up to our societal ideals, not that our ideals were wrong; to trust that "the system" would work if only we would fully participate, not to junk it altogether. I don't remember precisely when the tone of movies and television began to darken into cynicism, moral ambiguity and "Realism" in the old, brutal German sense of the word, I imagine the process was quite gradual, but the fact remains that it did, and there is zero sign of any desire by the big public to set the clock back. From a qualitative standpoint this is a good thing, but I'm not so sure that cheesy, family-friendly shows with hammer-heavy moral and patriotic messages becoming as extinct as triceratops will do us much benefit in the long run. The idea that evil and corruption will always be defeated, that the good guys ought to win and do win more often than they lose, that not everyone is tempted by flashy objects or power for its own sake, is one that deserves a hearing.
* Having re-entered the criminal justice system, I am once again reminded that its depiction by television and film is so far from anything which might be called reality as almost to constitute an act of fraud. Much of television is devoted to the idea that courtrooms are inherently dramatic places, and on the surface of things this would seem to be a no-brainer. Drama is conflict, and courtrooms are intrinsically adversarial systems -- you literally cannot have a trial, even a civil trial over a trifling issue, without conflict. Yet anyone who has ever sat through an entire trial can testify (pun intended) at how miserably, almost paralyzingly boring time in a courtroom can be. Many years ago I attended a trial of bank robbers who shot a police officer while trying to escape; I even knew the officer, who was present in court. And yet after about an hour or two of observation I was bored stiff. Nothing much has changed. There are moments of great tension and suspense, sharp exchanges between individuals, even humorous little asides, but by and large the wheels of justice grind slow, fine and dull as hell.
* One of the most interesting battles of World War 2 is also almost completely unknown. The Dodecanese Campaign, which lasted from September 8 - November 22, 1943, saw the British, acting on their own and without any American support, try to seize a string of islands off the Turkish coast from German and Italian control. For the lover of military history, or for those passionate about the political and economic forces which shape and drive military campaigns, this battle has absolutely everything: political infighting, military treachery, side-switching, code-breaking, airborne and amphibious assaults, naval battles, air attacks, commando raids, massacres of POWs and civilians, the debut of new technology, and a whole slew of tragic friendly-fire incidents, some with five-figure death tolls. The only thing it seems to lack is a happy ending...for the Allies, anyway. The battle was a tremendous German victory. It kept Turkey, who was Hitler's only supplier of chrome, from joining the Allies, and ensured that the Spanish would also continue to supply vital tungsten to the Nazi war effort: it also prevented the Allies from sending war supplies through the Dardanelles Strait to the USSR. Its failure weakened Churchill's already wobbly position vis-a-vis Roosevelt and Stalin and had an effect on postwar Greek politics. It also led to the near-extermination of the Jewish populations of the islands after the battle, when they transferred from Italian to German agency. No doubt the unhappy conclusion is why it has little to no place in the history books or popular culture: indeed, the sole movie I can think of which references this phase of the war is The Guns of Navarone, a story which has absolutely no basis in reality: not only the fabled guns but the island they reside upon never existed. The novel simply the attempt of a feisty hack writer with curiously fascist emotional leanings to slap a happy face over a bitter, humiliating defeat in which the Germans inflicted anywhere from 5 to 50 casualties for every one they sustained. Ditto the admittedly entertaining film. I tell you this: WW2 war may be over, but the rug under which all the costly blunders and defeats have been swept is very lumpy indeed, and one is tempted to wonder what is really served by editing our history in this way. It is grossly disrespectful of those who did not die in glamorous victories, yes, but there is a larger issue at stake. Defeat teaches us more than victory, and the Dodecanese Campaign could teach today's world political leadership a great deal about how not to fight a battle -- something they sorely need.
* I am once again doing the Whole 30 cleanse, in which, for 30 days, I eat only fruit, nuts, meats and vegetables, and drink only water and unsweetened coffee or tea. No sugar. No dairy. No alcohol. No processed foods. And no grains of any kind. This cleanse is a huge pain in the ass and every time I do it I wonder why. A particularly horrible feature is something called the "keto flu," which is an early and temporary side-effect of going off sugar and bad carbs. Your body is used to fueling itself with that crap, so when you take said crap away, it doesn't know how to draw energy from the food you do ingest, and has to re-learn the skill. This period of learning is known as the keto (ketogenic) flu, and can last several days or longer. During the period, you suffer from a tremendous sense of physical fatigue, and find yourself weak, apathetic and prone to sighing a lot for no goddamned reason. In my case it seldom lasts longer than 36 - 72 hours and never returns, but those 36 - 72 hours suck. And just generally speaking, the diet is a pain in the ass and a bore. On the other hand, it does a great deal to clear up the skin and reduce inflammation (especially around the lower belly). The first time I did it, I went 32 days without any booze, sugar or bad carbs, and my skin had a positive glow when I finished. I also dropped 4 lbs, despite eating like a pig the entire time.
* When I was living in California, I seldom wore anything dressier than a sports shirt and rarely more than shorts and flip-flops. I spent months in tank tops and often whole seasons with a baseball cap wedged firmly upon my head. Shaving was a ritual engaged in at my whim, and I went intervals of seasons without a haircut. "Work clothes" meant a T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. Now that I reside in Pennsylvania once again, I wear suits, vests, watch-chains, and have two tie racks and will soon need two more. Indeed, I have an entire walk-in closet devoted to suits and suchlike. I'm not sure that's progress, but it is an enormous change and reflects a certain change in outlook as well. One of the main benefits of life in SoCal is that it is essentially an endless summer, a retreat into a permenent state of late adolescence. On the other hand, this is also one of the main drawbacks. When it is summer, no one thinks about tomorrow; when it is always summer, tomorrow never comes. There is no desire to plan, no urge to grow up or accept responsibility. A major advantage to the rhythm of seasons is that they remind us that life is not eternal, that youth cannot be clung to infinitely, and that in one form or another, the school bell will ring come September.
* One of the major differences between what we call "the left" and what we call "the right" in this country is in how they deal with internal party strife. You may know the left by this sign: when one of their own fucks up, be it Joss Whedon, Al Franken, or Andrew Cuomo, he is torn apart so quickly and violently by his own kind it is rather akin to watching a side of bloody beef being dipped into a shark tank. When a rightie screws the pooch, a la Marjorie Green, the worst they can generally expect is a knuckle rap, after which the entire Republican establishment will circle the wagons, load up the rifles, and prepare to die in their defense. Without getting into morality, ethics or psychology, it's a fascinating phenomenon and probably bears further study.
February 20, 2021
FEAR, PARADOX AND PROPHECY
I woke up this morning in a contemplative mood, and the thing I am contemplating is the paradox of fear.
Fear is probably the keenest-felt of all human emotions. Neither love nor hatred achieves such a sense of absolute immediacy, and with good biological reason: fear keeps us alive. Our ancestors survived long enough to evolve into us because they took counsel of their fears. You are reading this now instead of occupying a few cubic feet within a coffin, or a few cubic inches within an urn, because the region of your brain which periodically causes you to feel afraid has by doing so, also prevented you from dying prematurely on countless thousands of occasions. In a less dramatic sense, you have probably gone farther in your life than you might have, had not fears of a less visceral variety dictated a more sober course of action than you actually wanted to take. The jobs we do, the relationships we enter into and maintain -- or don't -- and the daily lives we lead, down to very fine particulars, are all dictated to some extent by generalized fears which prevent us from behaving stupidly or destructively. To be successful in modern life, one must have a healthy and well-developed sense of fear, and if our fears today are not the fears of our ancestors 300 or even 30,000 years ago, well, the tent of fear is a large one. We may not have to worry much about being eaten by saber-toothed tigers anymore, but modern life can still devour us easily enough, albeit in different ways.
Viewed through this lens, fear, like pain, is a useful necessity. But in modern life, fear is also a strangely inhibiting and dangerous thing. It can be dangerous to us physically, and it can most definitely be dangerous to us mentally and spiritually.
As I said above, fear at its core is a very simple thing. It's a sudden rush of chemicals which punish risky behavior with negative emotion while rewarding us with enough adrenaline to escape sudden danger. But fear, like everything else, has evolved with time and become complex. It has spawned children, among whose names are anxiety and dread. Anxiety, by my own personal definition, is fear spread out over time, spread like a film over daily life, so that one is constantly dealing with stress on the body: adrenaline trickles. The heart beats too fast. Concentration is difficult. Temper is short. Sleep comes poorly. As for dread, what is that but a pervasive sense of impending doom? A sense that, metaphorically speaking, the lion in the tall grass is getting closer and closer? One suffers from dread as from a low-grade but chronic ailment: it poisons everything, makes nothing seem worthwhile, inhibits pleasure, contentment, and joy. Indeed, it makes the act of simply being alive a contest of endurance. To exist in a suspended state of dread is to long for escape -- even if it means dying. The irony of this is too obvious to merit much comment, except that there is a deep, foul bitterness in the idea of the thing which keeps us alive making us feel as if life itself is unbearable.
The life we lead nowadays as a species is not the life evolution designed us for. Fear was intended to be a very powerful burst of emotion and sensation which produced a single end: protection of the human who felt it. But in modern, "first world" life we no longer need fear being eaten by bears or poisoned by snakes or clubbed to death by rival tribes. Our glands no longer explode into action and then fall into dormancy. They are awake at almost all times, steadily pumping chemicals into our bloodstream that tax our bodies and make us unhealthy. The matrix we have built, civilization, has elminated one set of well-defined fears but replaced them with a much larger, much less dramatic set of fears which we have proven incapable of managing. Fear of debt. Fear of joblessness. Fear of homelessness. Fear of societal ridicule and alienation. Even fear of old age -- a problem our ancient ancestors didn't have, but probably wanted. The result is a crisis of mental health problems, drug use, alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and suicide. But less dramatically, it has led to a different sort of crisis. The fear of living. Of actually being alive.
The fear of living is something I noticed at a relatively young age, when I was also noticing that I had different dreams than those around me. Most kids in my age group had specific desires for what they wanted to be -- firemen, astronauts, etc. As we grew up a little into our teenage years, our ambitions matured and crystalized. You'd hear someone say she or he wanted to be an interior designer, or an environmental lawyer, or go to Wall Street or medical school or what have you. I myself never harbored any of these ambitions. From the time I was ten years old, possibly even younger than that, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to create imaginary worlds full of imaginary people which and who would seem more real to the reader than the things and people in their actual lives. I wanted to create things and bring them before the masses. More vaguely, I also wanted to be a part of Hollywood: exactly what part varied from year to year, but the general goal was to be involved in the making of the same type of movies and television shows I myself liked to watch. In the broadest sense, I wanted to entertain people, and, I suppose, gain attention and praise for myself.
Some years later, I found myself, as most later twentysomethings do, in the "real world." It is worth noting here that the phrase "real world" always connotes an atmosphere of unpleasantness, harshness, disappointment, and even menace. The implication is that the life you've led from birth until the age of about 21 - 22 or so was to some degree or other fake; a warm, pleasant illusion cast by loving parents and reasonably forebearing teachers, neighbors and lesser relations. Once in the "real world," however, the spell was broken, as a deep, contented sleep might be broken by a bucket of cold water. Suddenly life, which was aglow with rosy optimism, was now a loveless, comfortless environment in which dreams were quickly and messily put to death, and all sorts of cruel, jarring realities came knocking on the door with knuckles of spiked brass.
The general tenor of the gospel of "the real world" is this: "Childhood is over, kid. Time to put on the big-boy pants. Nobody loves you out here, and your folks can't protect you. This world is full of sharp edges and damned few safe spaces. From this point on, you're on your own, and you've got to bring home the bacon or starve. Put away your dreams like they were Star Wars toys, because from now on its alarm clocks, commutes, water-cooler politics, 1.9 kids and a mortage."
For someone like myself, whose goals were unrealistic from the gitgo, and who had little interest in a conventional life, "the real world" was a horrific experience. I was surprisingly successful at navigating it, but I enjoyed none of the process and was plagued from ages of 23 - 31 with an almost continuous sense of deep unfulfillment. Sometimes this sense was unendurable: I began to experience anxiety attacks, panic attacks, and other physical symptoms of depression including migraine headaches. These things, I realize now, were my body's way of telling me that I was, to quote Orwell, outraging my true nature by harnessing myself to "the real world." I was experiencing a midlife crisis while still a young man, and the crisis was brought about by fear. Not fear of death, but fear that one day I would die without having done those things I was put on Earth to do. Nobody, literally nobody, wants to depart this vale of tears with their music still inside them, and the knowledge that I was chugging steadily toward this grim fate plagued and haunted me.
At the same time, I had a different fear: the fear that if I chucked up my job and went after my dreams of being a novelist and a Hollywood player (of however modest a caliber), I would fail miserably...and be seen to fail, be cataloged as a failure. Whenever I incautiously mentioned my dreams to others, I almost invariably was either laughed at to my face or grimly questioned as to the practical consequences of defeat. I won't say I got no encouragement, but I can say that my e'er-supportive Mom aside, most of the encouragement I got was either tepid and qualified, or came out of love for me rather than a belief that "going for it" was the right thing for me to do.
But the bitterest attacks against me all came from people who, I realize now, were themselves afraid. They were not afraid that I would flop, but rather that I wouldn't. Any success I had at chasing the brass ring would simply touch the open would they nursed within their own souls, the wound left by their own practical, perhaps cowardly, choice not to seek a ring of their own. There is no hater so fiery, so full of energy, so relentlessly vicious and inventive with viciousness, as one who knows that he or she lacked the courage to go for it when it mattered...and must now watch as you possibly succeed where they most definitely failed.
The fear that I was wasting my life and talents had all but paralyzed me, and this paralysis led to greater and greater fear as the months went by. The other fear, that if I did act on my ambitions I would fail in spectacular and humiliating fashion and have to come "crawling back" to my old life in two years time, paralyzed me further. I didn't want to fail, but I really didn't want to be humiliated.
You see what I'm driving at here. The natural, healthy instinct of self-preservation had turned, curdled somehow, and become an inhibiting force in my life. It had trapped me in misery, an act which only increased that misery. A cycle had been created and to break it I would have to overcome my fears. I would have to embrace risk -- the thing fear is designed to avoid. In short, I'd have to pull a kind of George Costanza and do the exact fucking opposite of everything my fear-glands were telling me to do and not to.
If you're reading this, you already know what I did, and the successes (and setbacks) I had a result. I have often likened the period between my choice to quit my profession and chase down all my ambitions, and today, when I am now balancing both "the real world" and my dream life, to a bareknuckle boxing match of infinite duration. There have been times when I was on the ropes. There have been times when I was down, dazed, and listening to the count. There have been moments when I was spitting blood and broken teeth into the bucket while my trainer jammed smelling salts beneath my busted conk. But there have also been moments of tremendous, validating triumph. I won't bore you with a list of accomplishments, any more than I will torment myself with a litany of missed opportunities, near misses and failures, but I will say this: Lawrence Sanders was right when he wrote, "Nobody wins the final decision, but with luck we can pick up a few rounds."
At this point you may be wondering why I placed "Prophecy" in the title of this epistle along with fear and paradox. The answer is that the one leads to the other and to the other still. Fear leads to the paradox that the very thing which was designed to keep us alive kills us spiritually and even physically if we give it too much heed; this paradox leads to prophecy of a self-fulfilling nature. The coward -- and we all have one inside of us -- will always look at someone who took a chance and ended up on his or her ass and say, "I told you that would happen." And indeed the coward did. As the saying goes, the view is good from the cheap seats and the coward always occupies the cheapest seats of all: the peanut gallery. From this inexpensive but lofty vantage, he can see everything, especially negative outcome. But he does not look with the purpose of navigating around those outcomes. He looks with ways of surrendering to them, or worse yet still, avoiding them entirely by demanding that you take no chances at all. He is a gray and timid soul who wants all souls to be gray and timd lest he stand out for what he is. That is his special fear, the fear of the hater, which in this case is the self-hater: that he will be exposed. That his reasons, his arguments, his sober observations and heartfelt warnings will be rightly appraised as his fear of daring, of failure, of climbing down from the gallery and into the arena where the real men and real women fight to see their dreams come true.
Looking back, I can see now that every time in my life when I lost, or deliberately ignored, the line between healthy, reasonable fear and the self-restricting, self-defeating, self-destructive kind preached by my own inner coward and those around me who did not have my interests at heart, I not only disappointed myself, I lost some sense of who I was as a human being. Unhealthy fear is like a fog that makes navigation difficult or even impossible, and triggers an instinct to kill the engines and lower the anchor. But there is no safety in immobility, because there is no safety in "the real world." Life is degrees of risk. The only question you have to ask yourself is which one you wish to take.
Fear is probably the keenest-felt of all human emotions. Neither love nor hatred achieves such a sense of absolute immediacy, and with good biological reason: fear keeps us alive. Our ancestors survived long enough to evolve into us because they took counsel of their fears. You are reading this now instead of occupying a few cubic feet within a coffin, or a few cubic inches within an urn, because the region of your brain which periodically causes you to feel afraid has by doing so, also prevented you from dying prematurely on countless thousands of occasions. In a less dramatic sense, you have probably gone farther in your life than you might have, had not fears of a less visceral variety dictated a more sober course of action than you actually wanted to take. The jobs we do, the relationships we enter into and maintain -- or don't -- and the daily lives we lead, down to very fine particulars, are all dictated to some extent by generalized fears which prevent us from behaving stupidly or destructively. To be successful in modern life, one must have a healthy and well-developed sense of fear, and if our fears today are not the fears of our ancestors 300 or even 30,000 years ago, well, the tent of fear is a large one. We may not have to worry much about being eaten by saber-toothed tigers anymore, but modern life can still devour us easily enough, albeit in different ways.
Viewed through this lens, fear, like pain, is a useful necessity. But in modern life, fear is also a strangely inhibiting and dangerous thing. It can be dangerous to us physically, and it can most definitely be dangerous to us mentally and spiritually.
As I said above, fear at its core is a very simple thing. It's a sudden rush of chemicals which punish risky behavior with negative emotion while rewarding us with enough adrenaline to escape sudden danger. But fear, like everything else, has evolved with time and become complex. It has spawned children, among whose names are anxiety and dread. Anxiety, by my own personal definition, is fear spread out over time, spread like a film over daily life, so that one is constantly dealing with stress on the body: adrenaline trickles. The heart beats too fast. Concentration is difficult. Temper is short. Sleep comes poorly. As for dread, what is that but a pervasive sense of impending doom? A sense that, metaphorically speaking, the lion in the tall grass is getting closer and closer? One suffers from dread as from a low-grade but chronic ailment: it poisons everything, makes nothing seem worthwhile, inhibits pleasure, contentment, and joy. Indeed, it makes the act of simply being alive a contest of endurance. To exist in a suspended state of dread is to long for escape -- even if it means dying. The irony of this is too obvious to merit much comment, except that there is a deep, foul bitterness in the idea of the thing which keeps us alive making us feel as if life itself is unbearable.
The life we lead nowadays as a species is not the life evolution designed us for. Fear was intended to be a very powerful burst of emotion and sensation which produced a single end: protection of the human who felt it. But in modern, "first world" life we no longer need fear being eaten by bears or poisoned by snakes or clubbed to death by rival tribes. Our glands no longer explode into action and then fall into dormancy. They are awake at almost all times, steadily pumping chemicals into our bloodstream that tax our bodies and make us unhealthy. The matrix we have built, civilization, has elminated one set of well-defined fears but replaced them with a much larger, much less dramatic set of fears which we have proven incapable of managing. Fear of debt. Fear of joblessness. Fear of homelessness. Fear of societal ridicule and alienation. Even fear of old age -- a problem our ancient ancestors didn't have, but probably wanted. The result is a crisis of mental health problems, drug use, alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and suicide. But less dramatically, it has led to a different sort of crisis. The fear of living. Of actually being alive.
The fear of living is something I noticed at a relatively young age, when I was also noticing that I had different dreams than those around me. Most kids in my age group had specific desires for what they wanted to be -- firemen, astronauts, etc. As we grew up a little into our teenage years, our ambitions matured and crystalized. You'd hear someone say she or he wanted to be an interior designer, or an environmental lawyer, or go to Wall Street or medical school or what have you. I myself never harbored any of these ambitions. From the time I was ten years old, possibly even younger than that, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to create imaginary worlds full of imaginary people which and who would seem more real to the reader than the things and people in their actual lives. I wanted to create things and bring them before the masses. More vaguely, I also wanted to be a part of Hollywood: exactly what part varied from year to year, but the general goal was to be involved in the making of the same type of movies and television shows I myself liked to watch. In the broadest sense, I wanted to entertain people, and, I suppose, gain attention and praise for myself.
Some years later, I found myself, as most later twentysomethings do, in the "real world." It is worth noting here that the phrase "real world" always connotes an atmosphere of unpleasantness, harshness, disappointment, and even menace. The implication is that the life you've led from birth until the age of about 21 - 22 or so was to some degree or other fake; a warm, pleasant illusion cast by loving parents and reasonably forebearing teachers, neighbors and lesser relations. Once in the "real world," however, the spell was broken, as a deep, contented sleep might be broken by a bucket of cold water. Suddenly life, which was aglow with rosy optimism, was now a loveless, comfortless environment in which dreams were quickly and messily put to death, and all sorts of cruel, jarring realities came knocking on the door with knuckles of spiked brass.
The general tenor of the gospel of "the real world" is this: "Childhood is over, kid. Time to put on the big-boy pants. Nobody loves you out here, and your folks can't protect you. This world is full of sharp edges and damned few safe spaces. From this point on, you're on your own, and you've got to bring home the bacon or starve. Put away your dreams like they were Star Wars toys, because from now on its alarm clocks, commutes, water-cooler politics, 1.9 kids and a mortage."
For someone like myself, whose goals were unrealistic from the gitgo, and who had little interest in a conventional life, "the real world" was a horrific experience. I was surprisingly successful at navigating it, but I enjoyed none of the process and was plagued from ages of 23 - 31 with an almost continuous sense of deep unfulfillment. Sometimes this sense was unendurable: I began to experience anxiety attacks, panic attacks, and other physical symptoms of depression including migraine headaches. These things, I realize now, were my body's way of telling me that I was, to quote Orwell, outraging my true nature by harnessing myself to "the real world." I was experiencing a midlife crisis while still a young man, and the crisis was brought about by fear. Not fear of death, but fear that one day I would die without having done those things I was put on Earth to do. Nobody, literally nobody, wants to depart this vale of tears with their music still inside them, and the knowledge that I was chugging steadily toward this grim fate plagued and haunted me.
At the same time, I had a different fear: the fear that if I chucked up my job and went after my dreams of being a novelist and a Hollywood player (of however modest a caliber), I would fail miserably...and be seen to fail, be cataloged as a failure. Whenever I incautiously mentioned my dreams to others, I almost invariably was either laughed at to my face or grimly questioned as to the practical consequences of defeat. I won't say I got no encouragement, but I can say that my e'er-supportive Mom aside, most of the encouragement I got was either tepid and qualified, or came out of love for me rather than a belief that "going for it" was the right thing for me to do.
But the bitterest attacks against me all came from people who, I realize now, were themselves afraid. They were not afraid that I would flop, but rather that I wouldn't. Any success I had at chasing the brass ring would simply touch the open would they nursed within their own souls, the wound left by their own practical, perhaps cowardly, choice not to seek a ring of their own. There is no hater so fiery, so full of energy, so relentlessly vicious and inventive with viciousness, as one who knows that he or she lacked the courage to go for it when it mattered...and must now watch as you possibly succeed where they most definitely failed.
The fear that I was wasting my life and talents had all but paralyzed me, and this paralysis led to greater and greater fear as the months went by. The other fear, that if I did act on my ambitions I would fail in spectacular and humiliating fashion and have to come "crawling back" to my old life in two years time, paralyzed me further. I didn't want to fail, but I really didn't want to be humiliated.
You see what I'm driving at here. The natural, healthy instinct of self-preservation had turned, curdled somehow, and become an inhibiting force in my life. It had trapped me in misery, an act which only increased that misery. A cycle had been created and to break it I would have to overcome my fears. I would have to embrace risk -- the thing fear is designed to avoid. In short, I'd have to pull a kind of George Costanza and do the exact fucking opposite of everything my fear-glands were telling me to do and not to.
If you're reading this, you already know what I did, and the successes (and setbacks) I had a result. I have often likened the period between my choice to quit my profession and chase down all my ambitions, and today, when I am now balancing both "the real world" and my dream life, to a bareknuckle boxing match of infinite duration. There have been times when I was on the ropes. There have been times when I was down, dazed, and listening to the count. There have been moments when I was spitting blood and broken teeth into the bucket while my trainer jammed smelling salts beneath my busted conk. But there have also been moments of tremendous, validating triumph. I won't bore you with a list of accomplishments, any more than I will torment myself with a litany of missed opportunities, near misses and failures, but I will say this: Lawrence Sanders was right when he wrote, "Nobody wins the final decision, but with luck we can pick up a few rounds."
At this point you may be wondering why I placed "Prophecy" in the title of this epistle along with fear and paradox. The answer is that the one leads to the other and to the other still. Fear leads to the paradox that the very thing which was designed to keep us alive kills us spiritually and even physically if we give it too much heed; this paradox leads to prophecy of a self-fulfilling nature. The coward -- and we all have one inside of us -- will always look at someone who took a chance and ended up on his or her ass and say, "I told you that would happen." And indeed the coward did. As the saying goes, the view is good from the cheap seats and the coward always occupies the cheapest seats of all: the peanut gallery. From this inexpensive but lofty vantage, he can see everything, especially negative outcome. But he does not look with the purpose of navigating around those outcomes. He looks with ways of surrendering to them, or worse yet still, avoiding them entirely by demanding that you take no chances at all. He is a gray and timid soul who wants all souls to be gray and timd lest he stand out for what he is. That is his special fear, the fear of the hater, which in this case is the self-hater: that he will be exposed. That his reasons, his arguments, his sober observations and heartfelt warnings will be rightly appraised as his fear of daring, of failure, of climbing down from the gallery and into the arena where the real men and real women fight to see their dreams come true.
Looking back, I can see now that every time in my life when I lost, or deliberately ignored, the line between healthy, reasonable fear and the self-restricting, self-defeating, self-destructive kind preached by my own inner coward and those around me who did not have my interests at heart, I not only disappointed myself, I lost some sense of who I was as a human being. Unhealthy fear is like a fog that makes navigation difficult or even impossible, and triggers an instinct to kill the engines and lower the anchor. But there is no safety in immobility, because there is no safety in "the real world." Life is degrees of risk. The only question you have to ask yourself is which one you wish to take.
January 11, 2021
AMBITION: OR, THE CRIMES OF ICARUS
When I was growing up, "ambition" was a dirty word. Or at least television and film worked very hard to make it so. I cannot tell you how many times, in soap operas, melodramas, mini-series, sit-coms, prime-time TV hits, and feature films, the word "ambition" was used either as an insult -- it seemed to denote an unscrupulous lust for power -- or as a kind of warning, as in "Look out for Susan...she's ambitious.". I observed this phenomenon so many times that, when I became older, I began to wonder if it wasn't a deliberate act. If Hollywood, or rather the wire-pullers who run Hollywood, hadn't decided the best way to safeguard their position and power was to enure following generations regarded ambition as a crime.
The textbook definition of ambition is "a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work," and it has often been noted that tyrants, who rise by ambition, fear it in others and try to discourage it in the broad masses. But in politics, even non-tyrants are known for crushing ambition in those around them: witness such politicians as Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump, neither of whom could abide anyone whose personal desires rose far above licking their master's boots (or pumps -- whatever).
I don't know if Greek mythology is still taught to children today, but my own teachers seemed obsessed with it. To this day, I can rememeber the exhaustive thoroughness with which we studied the Greek gods and the Greek myths, and as late as high school we were still chewing through Homer. One of the most arresting stories, and one hammered into our brains repeatedly, was the story of Icarus. It may be remembered that Icarus was imprisoned in the Labyrinth, but given wings of wax and feathers that he might escape. However, having taken to the sky, he became exhilarated by his own power and flew too close to the sun: the wax soon melted and he fell to his death. More than one modern cultural anthropologist has made a point of telling us that Icarus stood as a deliberately chosen warning about the perils of, yes, you guessed it, ambition. Icarus wanted to fly higher than was better for him, and death was his reward. Indeed, most of those damned Greek myths seemed to be about punishing those who grew too big for their britches. The lesson was clear: the gods are jealous, they believe in caste systems, and punish without mercy those mortals who want more than they have or try to rise above their station.
I was a strange and difficult child, but I had a gift for seeing through smokescreens, and even then I recognized that the criminalization of ambition was not a beneficent act. Those teachers, preachers, parents and Hollywood types who encouraged us to aim low were doing so with the intention, the very conscious and deliberate intention, of closing our horizons. The child who believes ambition is a sin is not likely to threaten the power structure as an adult. And indeed, it was not until I was an adult that I learned the tale of Icarus as it was told to me was missing an important part. Deadalus, the designer of the wings and Icarus' father, did indeed warn his son not to fly too close to the sun lest the wax melt: but he also warned Icarus not to fly too low, lest the ocean soak his feathers. He understood the capabilities of the wings he had created and wanted his son to heed them, but the boy, being young and reckless, got caught up in the thrill of the moment. It was not ambition that leads to Icarus' destruction, it is simply a mistake in judgment.
Some time ago I had occasion to take umbrage with an actress who complained on social media that she did not want to be described as "aspiring" but simply as an actress, despite her lack of actual acting credits. I pointed out that she was indeed an aspiring actress, and that there was no shame in her aspirations: having a goal is the first step to achieving it. Why not own that and be proud of it? I don't regret what I said, because I am sick and tired of words like ambition and aspiration being used as code for hubris, power-hunger, Machiavellianism, or some species of greed.
I am an ambitious person by nature. I have hardly achieved all my ambitions or even most of them, but they are largely what keeps me going in the face of endless discouragements. I have a strong desire to achieve certain specific things and those things all require discipline and hard work. And I am not afraid of either one...provided they serve my ambitions. If they don't, it is very difficult to exert myself, and such exertions as I can muster leave me exhausted, bored and depressed. On the rare occasions I mention this I am often called selfish. Most people, I have come reluctantly to understand, not only inculcated the lesson that ambition is a character defect when not wedded to some one else's ambitions (e.g. "it's okay to have the ambition... to serve the company, church, country, etc...just not yourself personally"), but maintain a low-grade hostility to those who try to achieve their own. Perhaps in their hearts they despise themselves for giving up their own dreams. Perhaps the success of one who is personally ambitious threatens their decision to tuck their own interests away and play it safe. In any event, I no longer have time even to pay lip service to such gray and timid souls. Such people are inevitably on the sidelines when anything happens: always the spectators, never the performers.
In my studies of revolutionaries, it struck me that nearly all of them came from what could roughly be described as the middle class. From Hitler to Castro, from Lenin to Mao, from George Washington to Simon Bolivar, the men who spearheaded violent overthrows of existing systems hailed from the middle strata of society. Some were in the upper middle class, to be sure, but even Napoleon descended from very minor Italian nobility of paltry means. There is, of course, a very definite reason for this. If one accepts Orwell's theory that the human race can be divided into the high, the middle and the low, it naturally flows that the high, being high, have no ambitions but to retain their power, while the low are too exhausted by physical labor and hunger to try and achieve power. The high eventually stagnate, ossify and lose their vitality through decadence, while the low are too inert, uneducated and distracted to effect change, though they are a fertile source of cannon fodder for those who will. That leaves the middle, who have education, covet what the rich have, and fear what the poor are. Everyone knows that Marie Antionette said, "Let them eat cake," but it is seldom considered that those who baked that cake (and all the others) were neither poor nor rich, but in the lower middle class. And they were the same people who later dragged her to the guillotine.
Ambition is at the root of all change. In order for change to occur, one must conceive of a different situation for oneself than presently exists; then one must come up with ideas for how that situation might be brought about; and then, of course, one must act upon those ideas. Reality is a certain way; desire is another way. But reality bends to desire. This is the nature of ambition, and it is also what separates the sheep from the goats. And if I may bring this thought back to its start-line, it is in the nature of the high, those who have power, to encourage the sheep to be a sheep. Why not? Sheep do not threaten. They bleat. They herd. They give up their wool, their milk, and eventually, their lives if need me. Rams are a different story. They are restless. They challenge the fence. The yearn to roam and run free...and will fight if caged. Which is why the sheep-hearders try to cut off their balls.
The textbook definition of ambition is "a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work," and it has often been noted that tyrants, who rise by ambition, fear it in others and try to discourage it in the broad masses. But in politics, even non-tyrants are known for crushing ambition in those around them: witness such politicians as Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump, neither of whom could abide anyone whose personal desires rose far above licking their master's boots (or pumps -- whatever).
I don't know if Greek mythology is still taught to children today, but my own teachers seemed obsessed with it. To this day, I can rememeber the exhaustive thoroughness with which we studied the Greek gods and the Greek myths, and as late as high school we were still chewing through Homer. One of the most arresting stories, and one hammered into our brains repeatedly, was the story of Icarus. It may be remembered that Icarus was imprisoned in the Labyrinth, but given wings of wax and feathers that he might escape. However, having taken to the sky, he became exhilarated by his own power and flew too close to the sun: the wax soon melted and he fell to his death. More than one modern cultural anthropologist has made a point of telling us that Icarus stood as a deliberately chosen warning about the perils of, yes, you guessed it, ambition. Icarus wanted to fly higher than was better for him, and death was his reward. Indeed, most of those damned Greek myths seemed to be about punishing those who grew too big for their britches. The lesson was clear: the gods are jealous, they believe in caste systems, and punish without mercy those mortals who want more than they have or try to rise above their station.
I was a strange and difficult child, but I had a gift for seeing through smokescreens, and even then I recognized that the criminalization of ambition was not a beneficent act. Those teachers, preachers, parents and Hollywood types who encouraged us to aim low were doing so with the intention, the very conscious and deliberate intention, of closing our horizons. The child who believes ambition is a sin is not likely to threaten the power structure as an adult. And indeed, it was not until I was an adult that I learned the tale of Icarus as it was told to me was missing an important part. Deadalus, the designer of the wings and Icarus' father, did indeed warn his son not to fly too close to the sun lest the wax melt: but he also warned Icarus not to fly too low, lest the ocean soak his feathers. He understood the capabilities of the wings he had created and wanted his son to heed them, but the boy, being young and reckless, got caught up in the thrill of the moment. It was not ambition that leads to Icarus' destruction, it is simply a mistake in judgment.
Some time ago I had occasion to take umbrage with an actress who complained on social media that she did not want to be described as "aspiring" but simply as an actress, despite her lack of actual acting credits. I pointed out that she was indeed an aspiring actress, and that there was no shame in her aspirations: having a goal is the first step to achieving it. Why not own that and be proud of it? I don't regret what I said, because I am sick and tired of words like ambition and aspiration being used as code for hubris, power-hunger, Machiavellianism, or some species of greed.
I am an ambitious person by nature. I have hardly achieved all my ambitions or even most of them, but they are largely what keeps me going in the face of endless discouragements. I have a strong desire to achieve certain specific things and those things all require discipline and hard work. And I am not afraid of either one...provided they serve my ambitions. If they don't, it is very difficult to exert myself, and such exertions as I can muster leave me exhausted, bored and depressed. On the rare occasions I mention this I am often called selfish. Most people, I have come reluctantly to understand, not only inculcated the lesson that ambition is a character defect when not wedded to some one else's ambitions (e.g. "it's okay to have the ambition... to serve the company, church, country, etc...just not yourself personally"), but maintain a low-grade hostility to those who try to achieve their own. Perhaps in their hearts they despise themselves for giving up their own dreams. Perhaps the success of one who is personally ambitious threatens their decision to tuck their own interests away and play it safe. In any event, I no longer have time even to pay lip service to such gray and timid souls. Such people are inevitably on the sidelines when anything happens: always the spectators, never the performers.
In my studies of revolutionaries, it struck me that nearly all of them came from what could roughly be described as the middle class. From Hitler to Castro, from Lenin to Mao, from George Washington to Simon Bolivar, the men who spearheaded violent overthrows of existing systems hailed from the middle strata of society. Some were in the upper middle class, to be sure, but even Napoleon descended from very minor Italian nobility of paltry means. There is, of course, a very definite reason for this. If one accepts Orwell's theory that the human race can be divided into the high, the middle and the low, it naturally flows that the high, being high, have no ambitions but to retain their power, while the low are too exhausted by physical labor and hunger to try and achieve power. The high eventually stagnate, ossify and lose their vitality through decadence, while the low are too inert, uneducated and distracted to effect change, though they are a fertile source of cannon fodder for those who will. That leaves the middle, who have education, covet what the rich have, and fear what the poor are. Everyone knows that Marie Antionette said, "Let them eat cake," but it is seldom considered that those who baked that cake (and all the others) were neither poor nor rich, but in the lower middle class. And they were the same people who later dragged her to the guillotine.
Ambition is at the root of all change. In order for change to occur, one must conceive of a different situation for oneself than presently exists; then one must come up with ideas for how that situation might be brought about; and then, of course, one must act upon those ideas. Reality is a certain way; desire is another way. But reality bends to desire. This is the nature of ambition, and it is also what separates the sheep from the goats. And if I may bring this thought back to its start-line, it is in the nature of the high, those who have power, to encourage the sheep to be a sheep. Why not? Sheep do not threaten. They bleat. They herd. They give up their wool, their milk, and eventually, their lives if need me. Rams are a different story. They are restless. They challenge the fence. The yearn to roam and run free...and will fight if caged. Which is why the sheep-hearders try to cut off their balls.
January 2, 2021
Reader's Favorite's verdict: 5 Stars for SINNER'S CROSS
Now that 2020 has mercifully met its end, we can begin the long process of digging out from the rubble of its unment expectations. That is at any rate what I am endeavouring to do in this newly-minted year of 2021.
If you are one of the (coughs) elite thousand or so who read this blog on a regular basis, you already know that in addition to all the other monkey wrenches 2020 chucked into my own personal gears, it managed to jam, for no less than six months, all my attempts to promote my most recent novel, Sinner's Cross. As Frank Burns said in M*A*S*H, I don't chew my cabbage twice, so don't fear a repeat of any earlier whining you may have overheard. I simply say this to let you know that I am now once again both willing and able to put the word out about what I consider the best thing I have ever written.
At the very end of that year whose name we won't mention, SC was named a finalist in the Independent Author Network Awards. It also got a very favorable notice from Writer's Digest:
"This expertly crafted historical fiction takes readers into the trenches of WWII—and into the minds of soldiers on both sides of the war. With careful attention to the psychological impact of battle, the author gives voice to men in the impossible position of carrying out orders that disregard human dignity, including their own. This book is not a comfortable read. It begs questions about who really wins when the fighting is over. While there is an ever-present sense of futility in each episode, the reader will not be left feeling he has wasted his time on a morbid retelling of history, but rather given the opportunity to ponder anew the excruciating sacrifices soldiers make during wartime, and whether they are worth it."
These accolades come on the heels of it winning the Best Indie Book Award for Historical Fiction (2019), the Book Excellence Award in the category of Action (2020), and the Literary Titan Gold Medal (2020). However, on New Year's Day, I woke up to see that it had also been reviewed by Reader's Favorite -- specifically by Grant Leishman, author of The Second Coming, Rise of the Antichrist, and The Photograph. Mr. Leishman gave the book five stars and wrote:
Sinner’s Cross: A Novel of the Second World War by Miles Watson is a no-holds-barred account of one of the lesser-known actions in Europe of the Second World War. Prior to the well-publicized and dramatized Battle of the Bulge in the Ardenne Forest, an equally violent and deadly encounter took place in the forests of Hürtgen on the German/Belgian border, from September 19, 1944, to February 10, 1045. American and German troops faced each other in the dense forests of Hürtgen as the winter of 1944-45 descended, where the flower of both country’s youth was sacrificed in a futile battle over an unknown and unwanted piece of land. The author introduces us to both sides of this titanic and bloody conflict. Half the story is dedicated to a group of American G.I.s led by the inexperienced and terrified Lieutenant Breese, facing off against one of the most formidable of Germany’s units, the Paratroopers, led by multi-decorated and seemingly fearless Major Zenger, affectionately known to his troops as Papa. The author takes us deep inside the psyche of these terrified, mud-splattered, and intensely uncomfortable men as they prepare, yet again, for a counter-offensive, which like so many of them seems rooted in both pointlessness and failure. In this maelstrom of battle, blood, and gore, each man must face up to his own personal demons, fears, and horrors and either overcome them or walk away.
"Sinner’s Cross is without a doubt one of the most powerful anti-war novels I have ever read. Miles Watson’s incredibly descriptive narrative takes us right into the infernal 'hot zone' of the battle and describes the actions and the reactions of the soldiers with sharp, incisive, and incredibly descriptive prose. It is powerful and compelling, as much as it is sickening. What I particularly liked about this book was that the author showed the battle from both sides of the fence. His description of what occurred in the mind of Major Zenger was a clear attempt to remind us that the enemy soldiers were just human beings long before they were Nazis. The German troops were just as horrified, terrified, and tired of the endless battles as the Americans. He did a wonderful job of outlining the different perceptions of war from the psychological makeup of each individual soldier, his needs, wants, and fears. No-one can possibly read this book and conclude that war is, in some way, heroic or worthy of honor. The reality is clearly displayed in the crushed, broken, dismembered, and devastated bodies that would forever lie in the forgotten forests of Hürtgen. A truly powerful novel but one that left me drained by the end of it."
Now, contrary to what you might think, since I so often use this blog for publicity, I do not actually enjoy boasting or even bringing attention to myself. That is to say, I do like attention, and am among the very few who enjoy public speaking, but certain childhood incidents have left me with an almost morbid fear of being being scrutinized by large groups of people. When I decided to put my fiction out into the mass market, where it could be exposed to criticism online, I knew I was, as the saying goes, dropping my pants in public and inviting all and sundry to judge what they saw. So far the judgments have by and large been flattering, but this doesn't mean I haven't heard my share of boos. A writer, especially an independent one, must do everything in his power to attract attention, even if the act of attracting attention is distasteful to him. And as I have recently discovered, even a rising profile in the literary world has its own pitfalls. I cannot run a search on myself without discovering a new pirate book site which features my complete works. Honest to God, I wouldn't mind the fact that people are stealing from me if only there were some way of monitoring the traffic to let me know just how many thieves there are. If I could prove, for example, that for every sale I make, 3 people (or 30, or 300) were illegally torrenting my novels, it would go a long way to establishing further credibility as an author. In the mean time, hope you will I hope forgive me if I occasionally use this platform as little more than a bully pulpit for my own propaganda.
Sinner's Cross: A Novel of the Second World War
If you are one of the (coughs) elite thousand or so who read this blog on a regular basis, you already know that in addition to all the other monkey wrenches 2020 chucked into my own personal gears, it managed to jam, for no less than six months, all my attempts to promote my most recent novel, Sinner's Cross. As Frank Burns said in M*A*S*H, I don't chew my cabbage twice, so don't fear a repeat of any earlier whining you may have overheard. I simply say this to let you know that I am now once again both willing and able to put the word out about what I consider the best thing I have ever written.
At the very end of that year whose name we won't mention, SC was named a finalist in the Independent Author Network Awards. It also got a very favorable notice from Writer's Digest:
"This expertly crafted historical fiction takes readers into the trenches of WWII—and into the minds of soldiers on both sides of the war. With careful attention to the psychological impact of battle, the author gives voice to men in the impossible position of carrying out orders that disregard human dignity, including their own. This book is not a comfortable read. It begs questions about who really wins when the fighting is over. While there is an ever-present sense of futility in each episode, the reader will not be left feeling he has wasted his time on a morbid retelling of history, but rather given the opportunity to ponder anew the excruciating sacrifices soldiers make during wartime, and whether they are worth it."
These accolades come on the heels of it winning the Best Indie Book Award for Historical Fiction (2019), the Book Excellence Award in the category of Action (2020), and the Literary Titan Gold Medal (2020). However, on New Year's Day, I woke up to see that it had also been reviewed by Reader's Favorite -- specifically by Grant Leishman, author of The Second Coming, Rise of the Antichrist, and The Photograph. Mr. Leishman gave the book five stars and wrote:
Sinner’s Cross: A Novel of the Second World War by Miles Watson is a no-holds-barred account of one of the lesser-known actions in Europe of the Second World War. Prior to the well-publicized and dramatized Battle of the Bulge in the Ardenne Forest, an equally violent and deadly encounter took place in the forests of Hürtgen on the German/Belgian border, from September 19, 1944, to February 10, 1045. American and German troops faced each other in the dense forests of Hürtgen as the winter of 1944-45 descended, where the flower of both country’s youth was sacrificed in a futile battle over an unknown and unwanted piece of land. The author introduces us to both sides of this titanic and bloody conflict. Half the story is dedicated to a group of American G.I.s led by the inexperienced and terrified Lieutenant Breese, facing off against one of the most formidable of Germany’s units, the Paratroopers, led by multi-decorated and seemingly fearless Major Zenger, affectionately known to his troops as Papa. The author takes us deep inside the psyche of these terrified, mud-splattered, and intensely uncomfortable men as they prepare, yet again, for a counter-offensive, which like so many of them seems rooted in both pointlessness and failure. In this maelstrom of battle, blood, and gore, each man must face up to his own personal demons, fears, and horrors and either overcome them or walk away.
"Sinner’s Cross is without a doubt one of the most powerful anti-war novels I have ever read. Miles Watson’s incredibly descriptive narrative takes us right into the infernal 'hot zone' of the battle and describes the actions and the reactions of the soldiers with sharp, incisive, and incredibly descriptive prose. It is powerful and compelling, as much as it is sickening. What I particularly liked about this book was that the author showed the battle from both sides of the fence. His description of what occurred in the mind of Major Zenger was a clear attempt to remind us that the enemy soldiers were just human beings long before they were Nazis. The German troops were just as horrified, terrified, and tired of the endless battles as the Americans. He did a wonderful job of outlining the different perceptions of war from the psychological makeup of each individual soldier, his needs, wants, and fears. No-one can possibly read this book and conclude that war is, in some way, heroic or worthy of honor. The reality is clearly displayed in the crushed, broken, dismembered, and devastated bodies that would forever lie in the forgotten forests of Hürtgen. A truly powerful novel but one that left me drained by the end of it."
Now, contrary to what you might think, since I so often use this blog for publicity, I do not actually enjoy boasting or even bringing attention to myself. That is to say, I do like attention, and am among the very few who enjoy public speaking, but certain childhood incidents have left me with an almost morbid fear of being being scrutinized by large groups of people. When I decided to put my fiction out into the mass market, where it could be exposed to criticism online, I knew I was, as the saying goes, dropping my pants in public and inviting all and sundry to judge what they saw. So far the judgments have by and large been flattering, but this doesn't mean I haven't heard my share of boos. A writer, especially an independent one, must do everything in his power to attract attention, even if the act of attracting attention is distasteful to him. And as I have recently discovered, even a rising profile in the literary world has its own pitfalls. I cannot run a search on myself without discovering a new pirate book site which features my complete works. Honest to God, I wouldn't mind the fact that people are stealing from me if only there were some way of monitoring the traffic to let me know just how many thieves there are. If I could prove, for example, that for every sale I make, 3 people (or 30, or 300) were illegally torrenting my novels, it would go a long way to establishing further credibility as an author. In the mean time, hope you will I hope forgive me if I occasionally use this platform as little more than a bully pulpit for my own propaganda.
Sinner's Cross: A Novel of the Second World War
November 30, 2020
2020's Hindsight
Man Proposes, God disposes.
-- Thomas à Kempis, 1427
One day, many years from now, we will look back on 2020...and still won't find it the least fucking bit funny. In some ways, this is the year that never was, and it is particularly difficult to swallow for me personally when I consider the grand ambitions I had for my writing career.
When 2020 began, I had two principal ambitions. The first was to determine if I was going to stay in Los Angeles or leave, and then act on the decision without any of the Hamlet-like dithering for which I am justly notorious. The second was to take my writing to the next level in terms of audience reach, profits, and diversity of attack.
Everything started according to plan. My third novel, Sinner's Cross, which had already won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Historical Fiction at the end of 2019, took the Book Excellence Award in the category of action before the ink on 2020 was dry. Not long after this, it was awarded the Literary Titan Gold Medal. My search for jobs and apartments back East was also yielding some interesting prospects. The, quite out of the blue, I was contacted by an up-and-coming director to see if I was interested in working as a writer on his next horror movie. You know that moment in Return of the Jedi when the Emperor gloats, "Everything is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen" --? That's how I felt in February of this year. I had made very ambitious plans, and how they seemed to be coming to fruition. I probably should have remembered that for the Emperor, Return of the Jedi does not have a happy ending.
I have oft noticed that one of the basic contradictions of life is that without making plans for how we are going to live, life is rather like being a passenger on a rudderless ship: you are powerless twice over. Yet at the same time, making even the most detailed plans and following through on them with all your power and passion by no means guarantees those plans will come to pass. Simply put, life does not take dictation.
Everyone has a different story of how the pandemic effected them personally. Setting aside personal tragedy -- the loss of family members, the loss of friends, the loss of economic power and security -- it has proven to be as big of a monkey wrench in our various life plans as John McClane's presence was to the criminal ambitions of Hans Gruber in Die Hard, and I am no exception to this. From the time of the initial lockdown back in early March, until my furniture showed up at my new home in Pennsylvania near the end of August, almost everything I wanted to achieve in my life on a creative level was in a state of unwilling suspension. Yes, I was able to get a new job and move across country during a pandemic, but goddamn, was it difficult. When I state that I would not relive the period from roughly July 6, when I was offered the job I presently hold and began making preparations to move 2,650 miles in said pandemic, and September 4, when my furniture finally arrived in the new place and made the empty box in which I was living a home of sorts, for any goddamned amount of money whatsoever, I am not kidding. You could not pay to do that again. It was not only one of the most drawn-out periods of stress I have ever endured, and a financial apocalypse in which I spent every last cent of the money I had saved while living in Los Angeles (plus two or three thousand more I borrowed), it put every one of my creative endeavours on a hard hold. And the easiest way to explain what this did to me is to pose a question.
What is it you cannot go without in life? I'm not talking about things you merely enjoy doing. I'm not even talking about the things you genuinely love doing. I'm talkig about the things you actually feel make life worth living, the things which, if they were taken away from you, would decrease the interest you have in staying alive. For me, one of those things, probably the main thing, is writing. As I've often said before, writing is not something I do, it's something I am. You can't take it away from me and expect me to give all the fucks I gave before. But between the month of logistical preparation and work required in moving, the move itself, the 3 weeks I spent living in a friend's basement while my apartment was being readied for habitation, starting an extremely demanding new job, and then waiting an additional two weeks for furniture (including a bed) to arrive, I had neither the time nor the energy to write. And even when I finally did, I lacked the money to promote my books. Thus, Sinner's Cross, which had begun the year on such a hot streak, spent month after month in a kind of suspended animation. I was not only unable to capitalize on its early momentum, I had to watch in frustration as that momentum turned into inertia.
In 1880, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke wrote in Kriegsgechichtliche Einzelschriften that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. He may as well have said, "No life plan survives contact with life." At the beginning of 2020, one man -- me -- proposed a bold plan of action, designed to take my entire existence to a higher level of success and satisfaction, but God disposed of my plans in an entirely different way. Of course, when one compares my personal disappointment and frustration to what some people have had to endure over the last eight or ten months, it hardly seems to matter in comparison, but as my brother is fond of saying, any emotion we feel is valid because it is real. It is the actuality, the reality of our situation. The fact that things could have gone much worse for me at any one of a thousand points this year did little to alleviate my feeling that I had been cheated of an important chance.
There is, however, another saying of great utility here. It is Greek, and it translates to, "The man who says he never had a chance never took one." I would like to expand on that and say that taking a single chance, however bold, is not an end, but only a beginning. For me to cry and whine and groan because my battle plan did not survive first contact with the enemy only reflected a need for personal growth on my part. Or, as my friend Mark likes to say, "I've diagnosed you with a case of being a little bitch. My prescription is to man the fuck up."
The way in which I chose to man up was severalfold. Two very significant breakthroughs came when I, a) began to work on cultivating a sense of gratitude for what I'd accomplished and what I had, rather than a childish sense of entitlement coupled with a tendency to tantrum about what I did not, and b) realizing that the ability to adapt in the face of setback, crisis and defeat is probably the most important tool you can have in the toolbox. The trouble with being on a hot streak, especially an extended one, is that it tends to produce a sense of invincibility, and a belief in your invincibility, believe it or not, is just another form of entitlement. As embarassing as it is for me to admit -- and it really is pretty shameful -- I got to a point, just before the March quarantine, where winning even coveted awards meant very little to me, because I had come to expect it. Yes, I worked hard and believed in the end result, but I took winning the gold as nothing more than my due. It was a bad case of "thank you, next." It took a lot to knock that out of me, but as we all know, 2020 has packed a mean punch. (It's also fond of eye-gouging and knees to the groin.)
In hindsight, I have seen that some, perhaps all, of the beatings I took in 2020 were necessary for my growth as a writer and as a human being. Pain is the best teacher, but no one wants to go to his class, and as much as I like to lecture others on the necessity of enduring pain and maintaining discipline (which is simply the way the civilized man maintains contact with pain), it turned out that the one who most needed to hear the lecture was yours truly. Becoming better is never easy. Change is supposed to hurt. That's what I forgot. Life reminded me of this by putting its foot in my ass.
Recently, life has finally settled into enough of a routine that I find myself once again able to poke my early-year ambitions with a stick to see if they are still alive, and there are distinct signs of movement. The first of these is that Sinner's Cross has been accepted by Blackthorn Book Tours for some long-overdue and much-needed promotional work on both sides of the Atlantic, starting in February of next year. The second is that it picked up its fourth honor to date when it was named a Finalist in the Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards. The third is that it is up for nomination in the Eric Hoffer Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing. The fourth, completely unrelated, is that I have finally released new fiction for the first time since Sinner made its debut late last year. My novelette Seelenmord is now available for electronic download on Amazon, and within the next week or two will be available in paperback as well.
Seelenmord is different from anything I have ever written or even attempted before. It is an allegorical horror story about cultural destruction and the awesome power of very bad ideas. In this troubled and uncertain age, where demogogues are on the rise, objective truth is under systematic attack and slogans have replaced thought, I found that the things which most scared me were no longer demons or ghosts or masked psychopaths lurking in brooding woods, but the capacity that men have to use their ideas to enslave and destroy other men. In the semi-classic horror movie Candyman, Tony Todd's strangely sympathetic villain murmurs seductively to Virginia Madsen's fuddled heroine, "Be my victim." These are, for my money, three of the best and most pregnant words ever uttered in a fright film. For isn't one of the greatest paradoxes of life our historical willingness, even our need, to submit to those who wish us only harm? The villain of my piece is old, weaponless, and weak of body. He has no physical ability to dominate the protagonist or his tribe, but wages his war on the plane of ideas...and finds there many a willing victim. Their attitude toward the villainy he represents, and not the villainy itself, are the beginning of their end.
It is, you see, all of a piece. 2020 has shown me once and for all that it is in attitudes that the key to life rests. One man is dealt a blow and quits. The other is dealt the same blow and finds in it a lesson. One folds, and another adapts. In the original draft of Conan the Barbarian, when Conan is finally released from the Wheel of Pain, he kisses it out of gratitude for the strength its torments have placed within his muscles. I am not quite ready to kiss 2020 yet, but I am nonetheless grateful that it made me man enough to be grateful for its lessons. If only in hindsight.
-- Thomas à Kempis, 1427
One day, many years from now, we will look back on 2020...and still won't find it the least fucking bit funny. In some ways, this is the year that never was, and it is particularly difficult to swallow for me personally when I consider the grand ambitions I had for my writing career.
When 2020 began, I had two principal ambitions. The first was to determine if I was going to stay in Los Angeles or leave, and then act on the decision without any of the Hamlet-like dithering for which I am justly notorious. The second was to take my writing to the next level in terms of audience reach, profits, and diversity of attack.
Everything started according to plan. My third novel, Sinner's Cross, which had already won the Best Indie Book Award in the category of Historical Fiction at the end of 2019, took the Book Excellence Award in the category of action before the ink on 2020 was dry. Not long after this, it was awarded the Literary Titan Gold Medal. My search for jobs and apartments back East was also yielding some interesting prospects. The, quite out of the blue, I was contacted by an up-and-coming director to see if I was interested in working as a writer on his next horror movie. You know that moment in Return of the Jedi when the Emperor gloats, "Everything is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen" --? That's how I felt in February of this year. I had made very ambitious plans, and how they seemed to be coming to fruition. I probably should have remembered that for the Emperor, Return of the Jedi does not have a happy ending.
I have oft noticed that one of the basic contradictions of life is that without making plans for how we are going to live, life is rather like being a passenger on a rudderless ship: you are powerless twice over. Yet at the same time, making even the most detailed plans and following through on them with all your power and passion by no means guarantees those plans will come to pass. Simply put, life does not take dictation.
Everyone has a different story of how the pandemic effected them personally. Setting aside personal tragedy -- the loss of family members, the loss of friends, the loss of economic power and security -- it has proven to be as big of a monkey wrench in our various life plans as John McClane's presence was to the criminal ambitions of Hans Gruber in Die Hard, and I am no exception to this. From the time of the initial lockdown back in early March, until my furniture showed up at my new home in Pennsylvania near the end of August, almost everything I wanted to achieve in my life on a creative level was in a state of unwilling suspension. Yes, I was able to get a new job and move across country during a pandemic, but goddamn, was it difficult. When I state that I would not relive the period from roughly July 6, when I was offered the job I presently hold and began making preparations to move 2,650 miles in said pandemic, and September 4, when my furniture finally arrived in the new place and made the empty box in which I was living a home of sorts, for any goddamned amount of money whatsoever, I am not kidding. You could not pay to do that again. It was not only one of the most drawn-out periods of stress I have ever endured, and a financial apocalypse in which I spent every last cent of the money I had saved while living in Los Angeles (plus two or three thousand more I borrowed), it put every one of my creative endeavours on a hard hold. And the easiest way to explain what this did to me is to pose a question.
What is it you cannot go without in life? I'm not talking about things you merely enjoy doing. I'm not even talking about the things you genuinely love doing. I'm talkig about the things you actually feel make life worth living, the things which, if they were taken away from you, would decrease the interest you have in staying alive. For me, one of those things, probably the main thing, is writing. As I've often said before, writing is not something I do, it's something I am. You can't take it away from me and expect me to give all the fucks I gave before. But between the month of logistical preparation and work required in moving, the move itself, the 3 weeks I spent living in a friend's basement while my apartment was being readied for habitation, starting an extremely demanding new job, and then waiting an additional two weeks for furniture (including a bed) to arrive, I had neither the time nor the energy to write. And even when I finally did, I lacked the money to promote my books. Thus, Sinner's Cross, which had begun the year on such a hot streak, spent month after month in a kind of suspended animation. I was not only unable to capitalize on its early momentum, I had to watch in frustration as that momentum turned into inertia.
In 1880, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke wrote in Kriegsgechichtliche Einzelschriften that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. He may as well have said, "No life plan survives contact with life." At the beginning of 2020, one man -- me -- proposed a bold plan of action, designed to take my entire existence to a higher level of success and satisfaction, but God disposed of my plans in an entirely different way. Of course, when one compares my personal disappointment and frustration to what some people have had to endure over the last eight or ten months, it hardly seems to matter in comparison, but as my brother is fond of saying, any emotion we feel is valid because it is real. It is the actuality, the reality of our situation. The fact that things could have gone much worse for me at any one of a thousand points this year did little to alleviate my feeling that I had been cheated of an important chance.
There is, however, another saying of great utility here. It is Greek, and it translates to, "The man who says he never had a chance never took one." I would like to expand on that and say that taking a single chance, however bold, is not an end, but only a beginning. For me to cry and whine and groan because my battle plan did not survive first contact with the enemy only reflected a need for personal growth on my part. Or, as my friend Mark likes to say, "I've diagnosed you with a case of being a little bitch. My prescription is to man the fuck up."
The way in which I chose to man up was severalfold. Two very significant breakthroughs came when I, a) began to work on cultivating a sense of gratitude for what I'd accomplished and what I had, rather than a childish sense of entitlement coupled with a tendency to tantrum about what I did not, and b) realizing that the ability to adapt in the face of setback, crisis and defeat is probably the most important tool you can have in the toolbox. The trouble with being on a hot streak, especially an extended one, is that it tends to produce a sense of invincibility, and a belief in your invincibility, believe it or not, is just another form of entitlement. As embarassing as it is for me to admit -- and it really is pretty shameful -- I got to a point, just before the March quarantine, where winning even coveted awards meant very little to me, because I had come to expect it. Yes, I worked hard and believed in the end result, but I took winning the gold as nothing more than my due. It was a bad case of "thank you, next." It took a lot to knock that out of me, but as we all know, 2020 has packed a mean punch. (It's also fond of eye-gouging and knees to the groin.)
In hindsight, I have seen that some, perhaps all, of the beatings I took in 2020 were necessary for my growth as a writer and as a human being. Pain is the best teacher, but no one wants to go to his class, and as much as I like to lecture others on the necessity of enduring pain and maintaining discipline (which is simply the way the civilized man maintains contact with pain), it turned out that the one who most needed to hear the lecture was yours truly. Becoming better is never easy. Change is supposed to hurt. That's what I forgot. Life reminded me of this by putting its foot in my ass.
Recently, life has finally settled into enough of a routine that I find myself once again able to poke my early-year ambitions with a stick to see if they are still alive, and there are distinct signs of movement. The first of these is that Sinner's Cross has been accepted by Blackthorn Book Tours for some long-overdue and much-needed promotional work on both sides of the Atlantic, starting in February of next year. The second is that it picked up its fourth honor to date when it was named a Finalist in the Independent Author Network Book of the Year Awards. The third is that it is up for nomination in the Eric Hoffer Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing. The fourth, completely unrelated, is that I have finally released new fiction for the first time since Sinner made its debut late last year. My novelette Seelenmord is now available for electronic download on Amazon, and within the next week or two will be available in paperback as well.
Seelenmord is different from anything I have ever written or even attempted before. It is an allegorical horror story about cultural destruction and the awesome power of very bad ideas. In this troubled and uncertain age, where demogogues are on the rise, objective truth is under systematic attack and slogans have replaced thought, I found that the things which most scared me were no longer demons or ghosts or masked psychopaths lurking in brooding woods, but the capacity that men have to use their ideas to enslave and destroy other men. In the semi-classic horror movie Candyman, Tony Todd's strangely sympathetic villain murmurs seductively to Virginia Madsen's fuddled heroine, "Be my victim." These are, for my money, three of the best and most pregnant words ever uttered in a fright film. For isn't one of the greatest paradoxes of life our historical willingness, even our need, to submit to those who wish us only harm? The villain of my piece is old, weaponless, and weak of body. He has no physical ability to dominate the protagonist or his tribe, but wages his war on the plane of ideas...and finds there many a willing victim. Their attitude toward the villainy he represents, and not the villainy itself, are the beginning of their end.
It is, you see, all of a piece. 2020 has shown me once and for all that it is in attitudes that the key to life rests. One man is dealt a blow and quits. The other is dealt the same blow and finds in it a lesson. One folds, and another adapts. In the original draft of Conan the Barbarian, when Conan is finally released from the Wheel of Pain, he kisses it out of gratitude for the strength its torments have placed within his muscles. I am not quite ready to kiss 2020 yet, but I am nonetheless grateful that it made me man enough to be grateful for its lessons. If only in hindsight.
November 22, 2020
WHAT IT'S LIKE
Every now and again someone asks me what it's like to be an author. I'm never sure how I'm supposed to respond. After all, what's it like to be a surgeon? Or a plumber? Or a soldier? What's it like to be a fisherman or law clerk or stuntman? What's it like to be a financier or work at a soup kitchen? You can describe the details of your training and your everyday work-life in minute detail, but you can't really convey what it truly means to do the job unless you've actually done it.
Because describing what you do for a living presents such obvious difficulties from the start, it's probably best to simply say that before I am an author, and indeed after, I am also a human being. It is on that point that you and I are most likely to have a place of contact, something in common, a frame of reference from which we can operate. This is why I generally don't mention my status as a writer to people when I initially meet them – and sometimes, not for months afterwards. But I occasionally enjoy a challenge, so I am going to try to explain what a writer's life is like, at least at my particular level. (What it's like for Stephen King I couldn't possibly tell you.)
First and foremost: the writer, if he is a real writer and not a hobbyist or a poseur or dilletente, is always a writer. He is always on. Nearly everything he sees, observes, thinks about, or experiences is filtered through the lens of his creative faculty. What I mean by this is that reality, everyday reality -- walking around town, driving to the grocery store, jogging, watching a sunset -- has to pass through a kind of screen which lets the forgettable stuff pass but allows the interesting fragments to accumulate in what I call The Writer's Place, a portion of the brain which stores things that might later turn up in a story. Nothing, now matter how trivial or tragic, not even his dreams, are immune from this process. The writer is constantly gathering material, and this is process never stops. There is no "off" switch. In this sense he is both blessed and cursed. The blessing comes from the fact that he can take trivial incidents that others would certainly forget and turn them into pieces of mosaic; he can create art from the most random thoughts, ideas, glimpses, and happenings. The curse is that this faculty, never resting, intrudes on all of his experiences and emotions in the most vulgar and tasteless way. In the grip of terrible grief, the writer is still a writer. Part of him, a part without any sense of decorum or human feeling, is recording and filtering his own pain, evaluating it for its utility as source material for a future book. There are times that the writer cannot help but despise himself for this. As Thomas Harris wrote in Red Dragon, "Graham regarded his own intelligence as grotesque but useful, like a chair made from antlers. There was nothing he could do about it."
Actually writing a novel, or even a short story, is a very difficult thing to describe. The process by which the idea, or set of ideas, comes to a writer may develop over years or come in a single flash, and there is no set ways by which one arrives at the flashpoint. Sometimes a single image, a line or two of poetry, a bad dream or even a misheard lyric can result in a 400 page manuscript. It a species of magic, and like all magic suffers from explanation. But the other process, the one where the idea becomes the 400 page manuscript, is totally different and much more relatable to the non-writing, non-creative person, because it is simply a job of work. Granted, it is a job of highly peculiar work, but it is work nonetheless, a mechanical process. When the idea within a writer's mind takes on sufficient power and clarity to spark him to actual effort, the mechanical process finds its beginning. He begins with the obvious: the first sentence. But again, we are dealing with a commonplace which nonetheless has several hidden facets. The first sentence in any story is always the most difficult point in the whole process, with the exception of the very last. A boring or mediocre first sentence can kill a good idea in its cradle, and so the writer often spends hours, or days, staring at a blank screen or a blank sheet, considering and discarding various openings. Once he has selected the one he feels is right (notice I did not say "the right one") the words generally begin to flow more smoothly, but "more smoothly" is something of a trick phrase. More smoothly than what? Burlap? Sandpaper? A porcupine? When one is writing, one is extracting ideas which within the mind seem concrete and obvious, but when transferred to paper seem to consist mainly of smoke. What you see in your mind never entirely translates onto the page. Something is always lost, and yet at the same time, something is always gained: new ideas form over the old ones rather like creepers over an iron-wrought fence, leading to a final product which is neither what you originally envisioned nor anything entirely new and different. The baby is a hybrid, a kind of bridge between idea and action. I don't suppose any writer in human history has made a 1:1 translation between idea and draft. The whole undertaking is in essence as difficult as exactly relating not only the substance but the actual specifics, the dialog and colors and sounds, which occur within a dream.
During the writing of any piece, regardless of length, there are moments when the writer loses either his enthusiasm or his sense of direction. He either cools off on the very ideas that motivated him in the first place, or reaches a point of creative fatigue, or simply temporarily runs out of ideas. He may also end up writing something so different from what he intended that, like any unfortunate who finds himself lost, he stops and tries to take his bearings. Either way, progress ceases, and the dreaded "half-finished draft" is born. What separates the professional from the amateur writer in this case is simply the ability to power through these inevitable stoppages until inertia is overcome and momentum regained.
(Every self-styled "writer" has drawers full of scripts, plays, novels, and short stories...and none of them are finished. Until he comes to the point where he can complete his works, or most of them, he is a hobbyist, not a writer.)
This momentum may be regained in a few days, or it may take weeks, months, or even years. I have novels that I wrote in ten months, and other novels, of the same length, which took three times that long. I have short stories I finished in a week or even a day, and short stories that took two decades to complete. Unless I am working under a deadline, I rarely judge myself for this. The important thing to me is that the draft be finished, not necessarily the timeframe in which it is. And you must remember, writing is a steel cage death match with no rules, any means or methods used to cross the finish line on a story are fair play, and it hardly matters if the first draft is written in the blood of the saints or an unreadable piece of shit so long as it is complete.
The emphasis on completion at any cost, regardless of quality, is not a fetish. Once you have a draft in your hand, you can do anything: there is no limit on the number of drafts a story can be put through, and no idea so bad that it can't be fashioned into something better, or at least something different, rather like the proverbial knife that has had seven blades and five handles. But you can never get to that point if you keep stopping and going back to the beginning and starting again. A professional will see even what he comes to realize (or believe) to be a bad idea to its conclusion, because it can always be salvaged later. Nothing whatever can be made of a half-finished story...except a completed one. But knowing this and getting to that point are two different things, and so the writer is often haunted by his own half-finished works and damnably sensitive about them. Nothing rankles a writer so much as when a non-writing friend blithely, or perhaps contemptuously, asks, “That book of yours – when is it going to be finished?”
Because writing is a solitary process, the ordinary writer probably deals with more loneliness than most people, but it follows that this too is more faceted of a statement than it sounds. Writers being artists, they live in a constant relationship with their art which most others cannot understand. The process I described above separates them from other people, but this is not the only obstacle to forming and maintaining human relationships. Writers are often some form of introverts, comfortable only on their own ground and within their own sphere of interest. Writers of the Hemingway or Hunter Thompson type, who are life-devouring raconteurs and bon vivants, are a relative rarity and even they may be faking it to a degree. Writers make-believe for a living, so it is only natural that they are more comfortable in make-believe worlds than anywhere else. No writer worth anything has not fantasized regularly since childhood about living in some other universe, be it fantasy, science-fiction or something else entirely. This is not mere projection: it is a reflection of the discomfort they feel as human beings in a world that does not understand them, and which they themselves do not understand. It is a curious phenomenon indeed, for the true writer is a student of the human condition and of life itself, and he makes it his business to be an expert on worldly life; yet he is generally at odds with both humans and what we would call everyday reality. Perhaps it is this very alienation which allows him to make the observations, the deductions, the conclusions which escape those who are happier and better-suited to this world. Perhaps only one who is "in but not of" can truly understand the world. But this ability, like the other, comes with a price. Writers probably fantasize about being "normal" almost as much as they fantasize about being Captain Kirk, or Harry Potter, or Bilbo Baggins, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet they can never be normal: normalcy is the one thing they may never be and still hope to be writers.
Because most people do not understand the writing process, writers are often unintentionally insulted by those around them. J.K. Rowling humorously observed that the movie studio suits she dealt with regularly seemed to act as if the Harry Potter books were crystals, or mushrooms, or slalagmites, forming by themselves almost independently of Rowling herself. Trapped in an endless series of meetings and conferences, she was continuously asked why the book wasn't further along – as if somehow it could write itself (magically, one supposes) while she was away from her computer. Nor did the suits grasp that writing is work, very hard work indeed, and that a novel, particularly a lengthy one, may take years to complete even if the writer scarcely takes a day off. Writers involved in lengthy projects often hit stumbling blocks or waste time proceeding down false paths, and these futile asides can absorb them for months, even years. In my own life, I have often noted that most people not only do not understand this, they take the opposite view to a logical absurdity. I have been told by more than one overweight computer programmer that what I do does not compare with what they do; when I point out that we both sit in chairs in front of computers all day, but they don't need any imagination to do their job and I require an enormity of it, they stare at me as if I had just insulted their mothers. But it is a fact that writing is not only imaginative but utterly exhausting work. To constantly tap the creative faculty requires from me more energy than I expend when swimming or hiking or going to the gym. I was never so famished after an hour in a martial arts studio as I was after three hours of graduate school classes devoted to the study of writing popular fiction. Brain work is hard word, and when you throw the creative side into action alongside the logical one, the energy drain is enormous.
There are factors which effect writers which many do not fully appreciate even within the writing community itself. George Orwell once remarked that we live in a political age, and that it was folly to believe writing in any form could not be affected (or tainted) by politics. This sad fact is more true today than it was in his lifetime, and this weight is felt by every writer intelligent enough to feel the contours of those forces which press against him and try to squeeze his thoughts and creativity into pre-arranged shapes, or worse yet, censor them entirely. Many novels, during the editing process, are filtered through "sensitivity reads" to screen for potential "bias, racism or unintentional stereotypes." This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that such things are often very difficult to quantify and come down to subjective judgments made by people with their own biases. One senstivity reader may find bias or stereotype in a novel; another may regard its depictions as spot-on accurate. Whose judgment is correct? The question and the answer are equally subjective in nature and so the writer finds himself hoping he lands the "right" reader, i.e. one who sees no evil in his work. This may seem only an inconvenience, part of the game so to speak, but the effect of this in the larger sense is to make many writers avoid certain topics entirely, or to bastardize their writing to please certain specific people within the industry rather than their readership. This has the most chilling possible effect on the writers of fiction, and the existence of social media, particularly Twitter, have only served as an impediment to freedom of thought, expression and creativity. There are a whole legion of creativity police who troll the net constantly, trying to impose their constipated views of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, politics, religion, and God knows what else on the rest of the world. These people are so full of contradictions and hypocrisy, and so nakedly confused as to their final object, that they would be figures of pity were they not so effective in murdering books, writing contracts, and movie deals.
The dilemma of a writer of my sort – straight, white, middle-aged, male – can be summed up in this simple exchange which I made up for your benefit, but which, I'm sad to say, not an exaggeration:
TWITTER: Put more black people in your novels.
WRITER: Okay.
TWITTER: What makes you think you're qualified to write about black people?
These sort of obstacles, of course, vary enormously depending upon whether the writer you know is traditional or independent. The traditional author has enormous advantages over the indie: he gets paid much better, is provided valuable services like editing free of charge, and is freed from the time-consuming and exhausting task of marketing himself. His reach is much greater and his books will probably be in physical bookstores. He may get a movie or a TV deal based on the success of his work, which will bring with it a hefty set of paychecks and possibly an entire second career as an executive producer. He also has the prestige associated with having a publisher. On the other hand, once he signs that contract, he is no longer his own master but is owned and operated by that publisher almost as a piece of machinery. What he writes, how long his book is, when it will be released, the subject matter of the book and even its cover art, are all decided by others. The writer becomes a mere employee instead of an artist; a draftsman rather than an artist. But it actually is worse than that. A mystery writer who also loves science fiction will not be allowed to publish that fiction under their own name, less they damage their brand by “confusing” their audience with this creative diversity. And God help the traditional writer of mysteries if he loses all enthusiasm for for mysteries. They will spend the rest of their contract, and possibly their entire career, cranking out lifeless hackwork for money.
The indie author has just one area of superiority over the traditionalist, but it is a large one. He can write anything he wants and publish it whenever he chooses. This freedom is what attracted me to the indie life and it is an intoxicating one. My “brand” is omni: I write whatever the hell I want, and should I happen to offend someone, efforts at punishing me would prove futile. I can't be boycotted, I can't lose my contract (I don't have one) and any attempt to subject me to public ridicule would simply raise my profile and increase my sales. On the other hand, my audience is smaller, my profile is lower, and my bank account very considerably lighter. I have eight writing awards in my trophy case, but you could spray a fire hose off a marquee in Times Square on New Year's Eve and not hit a single person who has heard of me or my works. There are months I can pay my rent on my royalties, and seasons where I can barely pay for my coffee with them. I live in a kind of gilded anonimity, with my integrity and self-respect fully intact, and my imagination as free as a wild animal; yet I remain dependent on a day job for the majority of my income, and am constanly wishing there was a third path open to me, one which gave me my freedom yet also allowed my work to reach, and be judged by, a much larger audience.
The problem of reach is an especially frustrating one, because it is circular in nature. In order to make money I have to sell books; in order to sell books people must be aware of my work; and in order for people to be aware of my work I need money to promote myself. Nothing is more galling than booking a promotion, seeing sales skyrocket, and then watching them plummet the moment the promotion ends, knowing your advertising budget is now exhausted. Beyond that, there are the constant, annoying demands of people for free or massively discounted copies of my books (autographed, no less). These demands would not bother me if the people in question were willing to write reviews of my books on such platforms as Amazon after the books had been read, but I have found that getting people to follow through with reviews is nearly impossible. Back in the days when Goodreads allowed authors to host book giveaways for free, I ran five in quick succession and had 2,844 people enter for a chance to win the works in question. Of the 45-odd winners, I would estimate eight, or perhaps ten, actually bothered to write reviews. I was very annoyed by this at the time, especially considering I was paying, in some cases, for book deliveries on the other side of the planet; but this review ratio, which is about fifteen or twenty percent, is much higher than the one I get from readers who buy my books online. My most-reviewed novel, Cage Life, has a review ratio of maybe three percent. The reviews are generally very good, which is of course pleasing, but honest to God, I wouldn't mind more critical or even poor reviews so long as the total number increased.
By now you may think the writer's life nothing but a litany of complaints. This is not the case, but I'd be remiss in my duty to the truth if I tried to paint more roses into this picture than actually tend to bloom. The life of any artist is full of frustrating contradictions and painful, even humiliating concessions to reality. This is true of the musician, the comedian, the painter, the actor and the poet; why not the writer, too?
Still, if there is no actual rose garden for such as me, there are roses, if only of the wild-blooming variety.
The first, I suppose, is the sheer pleasure that writers take in the selection and arrangement of words. Any writer worth his skin has a deep and abiding love of the language in which he writes and takes immense satisfaction in exploring its potentialities. Related to this, but separate from it, is a passion for the power of words as things in themselves. A writer is more aware than most of the power he possesses not merely to provoke people's emotions with words, but to establish a sense of atmosphere, or going further, an entire fictional world which (if the writer knows his business) may be as real to the reader as the one in which he physically exists. There are huge numbers of people, literally millions or tens of millions, for whom the worlds created by J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, J.K. Rowling, George R. R. Martin, or Anne Rice – just to name a few – hold considerably more charm than the real one. I don't have millions of readers, in fact it took me a very long time to have thousands, but I know, because I have been told, that some of them have lost themselves in worlds of my creation, if only for a few hours. This is a very heady experience indeed.
The power to create characters is an awesome one, but not merely for the obvious reason that the author controls their fates and thus assumes a god-like power which is entirely absent from his real life. Conjuring a really good character, by which I mean one which is not only real to the reader but deeply memorable, is a pleasure almost nobody living understands, but it carries with it the curious, contraidctory, perhaps completely indescipherable secondary power of creating something you cannot control. A fully realized character can be defined as that which can't be forced to act against its nature. More than once I have created a character who I intended to be brave, or cowardly, or treacherous, or noble, or this, or that, only to discover that said character had taken on character-istics which ran contrary to my plans; and having taken on these characteristics, could not be induced to act against his or her nature. This is frustrating, but it is also delightful, because it means that writing the novel contains as many surprises for the author as it will for the reader. We tend to think of Dr. Frankenstein as a cautionary example because his creation ran amok; but what if Frankenstein's monster had gotten up off the table and then invented the longer-lasting lightbulb, or learned to play the violin, or become the best damned mayor Ingoldstadt ever had? My point here is that we tend to think of losing control as an inherently negative experience; in fact it is nothing of the sort, a fact may writers eventually discover.
Seldom-discussed perks of the writing life are those moments in which a complete stranger contacts you to relate the joy they experienced while reading your works. Or a website, magazine or blog asks you to do an interview. Or some agency bestows upon you an award. Or you (coughs) look yourself up on Amazon and see that someone has written a lengthy, thoughtful review of one of your books, and you realize that you have effected them very deeply indeed. Even bad reviews can be tremendously heartening. A friend once pointed out to me that my black comedy novelette The Numbers Game had a scathing notice from a reader who found it deeply depressing; my friend then observed, “Wow. You really got under his skin, didn't you?” I thought a lot about this remark, and the more I thought about it the happier I became. I never write anything simply to shock or provoke, but if someone is emotionally affected by my work, even if they also happen to hate it, well, so much the better.
In addition to this, there is also the deep-body, I-just-drank-brandy-and-smoked-a-Cuban pleasure of getting notifications of sales in places like Mexico, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany or Japan. The idea that people on the other side of the world are reading my books is as intoxicating, in its own way, as any award I could ever receive. Being asked to autograph something, while not exactly an everyday occurrence for yours truly, is also a large if admittedly very shallow enjoyment.
There is also a species of wild rose known as the royalty check. I do not know why, but a royalty check, even a pathetically small one, carries with it a wonderfully illicit feeling of having gotten away with something – even more than that, of being rewarded for having gotten away with something. We are often told in our teenage years that we must give up our dreams and accept “real life,” as if “real life” by definition meant accepting that you will never get what you want. Every time I get one of these checks reminds me that it is possible to live in the “real world” and still accomplish goals others consider unrealistic or even fantastic. James Marsters, who played Spike on Buffy and Angel, once remarked in my presence that he felt he “stole the prize money” by landing the role that he did. Well, whenever a check shows up in my mailbox (electronic or literal), I feel as if I have made off with a fat sack of cash and jewels, like Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. There is part of me that will always wonder at the idea of people handing over hard cash for the product of my imagination; but it is a happy wonder.
And then there is this. Sometimes I will look down at a stack of my books and realize that I did this. I made this. I had ideas and the discipline and passion to bring them into physical being. I slaved over my keyboard for weeks, months, even years to bring this tight little bundle of paper pulp into a physical existence and offer it for sale. It began as an image in my mind, and now it exists. It's real. It has height, width, dimension, weight. And it will still be here when I am not. They say all we leave is bones, children and a tombstone, but authors leave something else. Fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years from now someone may enter a dusty secondhand bookshop and spy a dog-eared old copy of one of my books on a shelf and take it home with them, and I will live again, through my characters, if only for a few hours. To write a book is in a sense to extend a middle finger to the grinning specter of Death. He will get my body, but so long as one copy of one of my novels physically exists, he cannot extinguish my legacy.
Looking back on these passages I see I have probably failed in my object of answering the seemingly simple question of what it's like to be an author. The truth is the answer is different for everyone and no doubt many authors, reading this, would disagree with my opinions and conclusions, or point out the areas I have failed to illuminate. And this brings me to my concluding point. To be a writer is to attempt to do the impossible on a daily basis. Using only words on a page, one must create sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile experiences which are vivid enough within the reader's mind to supplant reality. Using only ideas, some of which may be contradictory, incomplete or incommunicable by language, he must nevertheless weave a story which is not only coherent and logical but interesting, even compelling. Using only his petty store of personal experiences, he must convince the reader that he, the author, ought to be taken seriously when he assumes the viewpoint of the hero, the monster, the martyr, the madman, the saint. All of this is functionally impossible. We, the writers, achieve it only because, as Carl Sagan once observed, writing is a species of magic, and magic by its definition is the achievement of the impossible through impossible means. So if you truly want to know what it means to be a writer, my suggestion is to try and pull a rabbit out of a hat, or make an elephant disappear, or saw a woman in half without breaking her skin. It can't really done, but I think you'll discover that's most of the fun of doing it.
Because describing what you do for a living presents such obvious difficulties from the start, it's probably best to simply say that before I am an author, and indeed after, I am also a human being. It is on that point that you and I are most likely to have a place of contact, something in common, a frame of reference from which we can operate. This is why I generally don't mention my status as a writer to people when I initially meet them – and sometimes, not for months afterwards. But I occasionally enjoy a challenge, so I am going to try to explain what a writer's life is like, at least at my particular level. (What it's like for Stephen King I couldn't possibly tell you.)
First and foremost: the writer, if he is a real writer and not a hobbyist or a poseur or dilletente, is always a writer. He is always on. Nearly everything he sees, observes, thinks about, or experiences is filtered through the lens of his creative faculty. What I mean by this is that reality, everyday reality -- walking around town, driving to the grocery store, jogging, watching a sunset -- has to pass through a kind of screen which lets the forgettable stuff pass but allows the interesting fragments to accumulate in what I call The Writer's Place, a portion of the brain which stores things that might later turn up in a story. Nothing, now matter how trivial or tragic, not even his dreams, are immune from this process. The writer is constantly gathering material, and this is process never stops. There is no "off" switch. In this sense he is both blessed and cursed. The blessing comes from the fact that he can take trivial incidents that others would certainly forget and turn them into pieces of mosaic; he can create art from the most random thoughts, ideas, glimpses, and happenings. The curse is that this faculty, never resting, intrudes on all of his experiences and emotions in the most vulgar and tasteless way. In the grip of terrible grief, the writer is still a writer. Part of him, a part without any sense of decorum or human feeling, is recording and filtering his own pain, evaluating it for its utility as source material for a future book. There are times that the writer cannot help but despise himself for this. As Thomas Harris wrote in Red Dragon, "Graham regarded his own intelligence as grotesque but useful, like a chair made from antlers. There was nothing he could do about it."
Actually writing a novel, or even a short story, is a very difficult thing to describe. The process by which the idea, or set of ideas, comes to a writer may develop over years or come in a single flash, and there is no set ways by which one arrives at the flashpoint. Sometimes a single image, a line or two of poetry, a bad dream or even a misheard lyric can result in a 400 page manuscript. It a species of magic, and like all magic suffers from explanation. But the other process, the one where the idea becomes the 400 page manuscript, is totally different and much more relatable to the non-writing, non-creative person, because it is simply a job of work. Granted, it is a job of highly peculiar work, but it is work nonetheless, a mechanical process. When the idea within a writer's mind takes on sufficient power and clarity to spark him to actual effort, the mechanical process finds its beginning. He begins with the obvious: the first sentence. But again, we are dealing with a commonplace which nonetheless has several hidden facets. The first sentence in any story is always the most difficult point in the whole process, with the exception of the very last. A boring or mediocre first sentence can kill a good idea in its cradle, and so the writer often spends hours, or days, staring at a blank screen or a blank sheet, considering and discarding various openings. Once he has selected the one he feels is right (notice I did not say "the right one") the words generally begin to flow more smoothly, but "more smoothly" is something of a trick phrase. More smoothly than what? Burlap? Sandpaper? A porcupine? When one is writing, one is extracting ideas which within the mind seem concrete and obvious, but when transferred to paper seem to consist mainly of smoke. What you see in your mind never entirely translates onto the page. Something is always lost, and yet at the same time, something is always gained: new ideas form over the old ones rather like creepers over an iron-wrought fence, leading to a final product which is neither what you originally envisioned nor anything entirely new and different. The baby is a hybrid, a kind of bridge between idea and action. I don't suppose any writer in human history has made a 1:1 translation between idea and draft. The whole undertaking is in essence as difficult as exactly relating not only the substance but the actual specifics, the dialog and colors and sounds, which occur within a dream.
During the writing of any piece, regardless of length, there are moments when the writer loses either his enthusiasm or his sense of direction. He either cools off on the very ideas that motivated him in the first place, or reaches a point of creative fatigue, or simply temporarily runs out of ideas. He may also end up writing something so different from what he intended that, like any unfortunate who finds himself lost, he stops and tries to take his bearings. Either way, progress ceases, and the dreaded "half-finished draft" is born. What separates the professional from the amateur writer in this case is simply the ability to power through these inevitable stoppages until inertia is overcome and momentum regained.
(Every self-styled "writer" has drawers full of scripts, plays, novels, and short stories...and none of them are finished. Until he comes to the point where he can complete his works, or most of them, he is a hobbyist, not a writer.)
This momentum may be regained in a few days, or it may take weeks, months, or even years. I have novels that I wrote in ten months, and other novels, of the same length, which took three times that long. I have short stories I finished in a week or even a day, and short stories that took two decades to complete. Unless I am working under a deadline, I rarely judge myself for this. The important thing to me is that the draft be finished, not necessarily the timeframe in which it is. And you must remember, writing is a steel cage death match with no rules, any means or methods used to cross the finish line on a story are fair play, and it hardly matters if the first draft is written in the blood of the saints or an unreadable piece of shit so long as it is complete.
The emphasis on completion at any cost, regardless of quality, is not a fetish. Once you have a draft in your hand, you can do anything: there is no limit on the number of drafts a story can be put through, and no idea so bad that it can't be fashioned into something better, or at least something different, rather like the proverbial knife that has had seven blades and five handles. But you can never get to that point if you keep stopping and going back to the beginning and starting again. A professional will see even what he comes to realize (or believe) to be a bad idea to its conclusion, because it can always be salvaged later. Nothing whatever can be made of a half-finished story...except a completed one. But knowing this and getting to that point are two different things, and so the writer is often haunted by his own half-finished works and damnably sensitive about them. Nothing rankles a writer so much as when a non-writing friend blithely, or perhaps contemptuously, asks, “That book of yours – when is it going to be finished?”
Because writing is a solitary process, the ordinary writer probably deals with more loneliness than most people, but it follows that this too is more faceted of a statement than it sounds. Writers being artists, they live in a constant relationship with their art which most others cannot understand. The process I described above separates them from other people, but this is not the only obstacle to forming and maintaining human relationships. Writers are often some form of introverts, comfortable only on their own ground and within their own sphere of interest. Writers of the Hemingway or Hunter Thompson type, who are life-devouring raconteurs and bon vivants, are a relative rarity and even they may be faking it to a degree. Writers make-believe for a living, so it is only natural that they are more comfortable in make-believe worlds than anywhere else. No writer worth anything has not fantasized regularly since childhood about living in some other universe, be it fantasy, science-fiction or something else entirely. This is not mere projection: it is a reflection of the discomfort they feel as human beings in a world that does not understand them, and which they themselves do not understand. It is a curious phenomenon indeed, for the true writer is a student of the human condition and of life itself, and he makes it his business to be an expert on worldly life; yet he is generally at odds with both humans and what we would call everyday reality. Perhaps it is this very alienation which allows him to make the observations, the deductions, the conclusions which escape those who are happier and better-suited to this world. Perhaps only one who is "in but not of" can truly understand the world. But this ability, like the other, comes with a price. Writers probably fantasize about being "normal" almost as much as they fantasize about being Captain Kirk, or Harry Potter, or Bilbo Baggins, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet they can never be normal: normalcy is the one thing they may never be and still hope to be writers.
Because most people do not understand the writing process, writers are often unintentionally insulted by those around them. J.K. Rowling humorously observed that the movie studio suits she dealt with regularly seemed to act as if the Harry Potter books were crystals, or mushrooms, or slalagmites, forming by themselves almost independently of Rowling herself. Trapped in an endless series of meetings and conferences, she was continuously asked why the book wasn't further along – as if somehow it could write itself (magically, one supposes) while she was away from her computer. Nor did the suits grasp that writing is work, very hard work indeed, and that a novel, particularly a lengthy one, may take years to complete even if the writer scarcely takes a day off. Writers involved in lengthy projects often hit stumbling blocks or waste time proceeding down false paths, and these futile asides can absorb them for months, even years. In my own life, I have often noted that most people not only do not understand this, they take the opposite view to a logical absurdity. I have been told by more than one overweight computer programmer that what I do does not compare with what they do; when I point out that we both sit in chairs in front of computers all day, but they don't need any imagination to do their job and I require an enormity of it, they stare at me as if I had just insulted their mothers. But it is a fact that writing is not only imaginative but utterly exhausting work. To constantly tap the creative faculty requires from me more energy than I expend when swimming or hiking or going to the gym. I was never so famished after an hour in a martial arts studio as I was after three hours of graduate school classes devoted to the study of writing popular fiction. Brain work is hard word, and when you throw the creative side into action alongside the logical one, the energy drain is enormous.
There are factors which effect writers which many do not fully appreciate even within the writing community itself. George Orwell once remarked that we live in a political age, and that it was folly to believe writing in any form could not be affected (or tainted) by politics. This sad fact is more true today than it was in his lifetime, and this weight is felt by every writer intelligent enough to feel the contours of those forces which press against him and try to squeeze his thoughts and creativity into pre-arranged shapes, or worse yet, censor them entirely. Many novels, during the editing process, are filtered through "sensitivity reads" to screen for potential "bias, racism or unintentional stereotypes." This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that such things are often very difficult to quantify and come down to subjective judgments made by people with their own biases. One senstivity reader may find bias or stereotype in a novel; another may regard its depictions as spot-on accurate. Whose judgment is correct? The question and the answer are equally subjective in nature and so the writer finds himself hoping he lands the "right" reader, i.e. one who sees no evil in his work. This may seem only an inconvenience, part of the game so to speak, but the effect of this in the larger sense is to make many writers avoid certain topics entirely, or to bastardize their writing to please certain specific people within the industry rather than their readership. This has the most chilling possible effect on the writers of fiction, and the existence of social media, particularly Twitter, have only served as an impediment to freedom of thought, expression and creativity. There are a whole legion of creativity police who troll the net constantly, trying to impose their constipated views of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, politics, religion, and God knows what else on the rest of the world. These people are so full of contradictions and hypocrisy, and so nakedly confused as to their final object, that they would be figures of pity were they not so effective in murdering books, writing contracts, and movie deals.
The dilemma of a writer of my sort – straight, white, middle-aged, male – can be summed up in this simple exchange which I made up for your benefit, but which, I'm sad to say, not an exaggeration:
TWITTER: Put more black people in your novels.
WRITER: Okay.
TWITTER: What makes you think you're qualified to write about black people?
These sort of obstacles, of course, vary enormously depending upon whether the writer you know is traditional or independent. The traditional author has enormous advantages over the indie: he gets paid much better, is provided valuable services like editing free of charge, and is freed from the time-consuming and exhausting task of marketing himself. His reach is much greater and his books will probably be in physical bookstores. He may get a movie or a TV deal based on the success of his work, which will bring with it a hefty set of paychecks and possibly an entire second career as an executive producer. He also has the prestige associated with having a publisher. On the other hand, once he signs that contract, he is no longer his own master but is owned and operated by that publisher almost as a piece of machinery. What he writes, how long his book is, when it will be released, the subject matter of the book and even its cover art, are all decided by others. The writer becomes a mere employee instead of an artist; a draftsman rather than an artist. But it actually is worse than that. A mystery writer who also loves science fiction will not be allowed to publish that fiction under their own name, less they damage their brand by “confusing” their audience with this creative diversity. And God help the traditional writer of mysteries if he loses all enthusiasm for for mysteries. They will spend the rest of their contract, and possibly their entire career, cranking out lifeless hackwork for money.
The indie author has just one area of superiority over the traditionalist, but it is a large one. He can write anything he wants and publish it whenever he chooses. This freedom is what attracted me to the indie life and it is an intoxicating one. My “brand” is omni: I write whatever the hell I want, and should I happen to offend someone, efforts at punishing me would prove futile. I can't be boycotted, I can't lose my contract (I don't have one) and any attempt to subject me to public ridicule would simply raise my profile and increase my sales. On the other hand, my audience is smaller, my profile is lower, and my bank account very considerably lighter. I have eight writing awards in my trophy case, but you could spray a fire hose off a marquee in Times Square on New Year's Eve and not hit a single person who has heard of me or my works. There are months I can pay my rent on my royalties, and seasons where I can barely pay for my coffee with them. I live in a kind of gilded anonimity, with my integrity and self-respect fully intact, and my imagination as free as a wild animal; yet I remain dependent on a day job for the majority of my income, and am constanly wishing there was a third path open to me, one which gave me my freedom yet also allowed my work to reach, and be judged by, a much larger audience.
The problem of reach is an especially frustrating one, because it is circular in nature. In order to make money I have to sell books; in order to sell books people must be aware of my work; and in order for people to be aware of my work I need money to promote myself. Nothing is more galling than booking a promotion, seeing sales skyrocket, and then watching them plummet the moment the promotion ends, knowing your advertising budget is now exhausted. Beyond that, there are the constant, annoying demands of people for free or massively discounted copies of my books (autographed, no less). These demands would not bother me if the people in question were willing to write reviews of my books on such platforms as Amazon after the books had been read, but I have found that getting people to follow through with reviews is nearly impossible. Back in the days when Goodreads allowed authors to host book giveaways for free, I ran five in quick succession and had 2,844 people enter for a chance to win the works in question. Of the 45-odd winners, I would estimate eight, or perhaps ten, actually bothered to write reviews. I was very annoyed by this at the time, especially considering I was paying, in some cases, for book deliveries on the other side of the planet; but this review ratio, which is about fifteen or twenty percent, is much higher than the one I get from readers who buy my books online. My most-reviewed novel, Cage Life, has a review ratio of maybe three percent. The reviews are generally very good, which is of course pleasing, but honest to God, I wouldn't mind more critical or even poor reviews so long as the total number increased.
By now you may think the writer's life nothing but a litany of complaints. This is not the case, but I'd be remiss in my duty to the truth if I tried to paint more roses into this picture than actually tend to bloom. The life of any artist is full of frustrating contradictions and painful, even humiliating concessions to reality. This is true of the musician, the comedian, the painter, the actor and the poet; why not the writer, too?
Still, if there is no actual rose garden for such as me, there are roses, if only of the wild-blooming variety.
The first, I suppose, is the sheer pleasure that writers take in the selection and arrangement of words. Any writer worth his skin has a deep and abiding love of the language in which he writes and takes immense satisfaction in exploring its potentialities. Related to this, but separate from it, is a passion for the power of words as things in themselves. A writer is more aware than most of the power he possesses not merely to provoke people's emotions with words, but to establish a sense of atmosphere, or going further, an entire fictional world which (if the writer knows his business) may be as real to the reader as the one in which he physically exists. There are huge numbers of people, literally millions or tens of millions, for whom the worlds created by J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, J.K. Rowling, George R. R. Martin, or Anne Rice – just to name a few – hold considerably more charm than the real one. I don't have millions of readers, in fact it took me a very long time to have thousands, but I know, because I have been told, that some of them have lost themselves in worlds of my creation, if only for a few hours. This is a very heady experience indeed.
The power to create characters is an awesome one, but not merely for the obvious reason that the author controls their fates and thus assumes a god-like power which is entirely absent from his real life. Conjuring a really good character, by which I mean one which is not only real to the reader but deeply memorable, is a pleasure almost nobody living understands, but it carries with it the curious, contraidctory, perhaps completely indescipherable secondary power of creating something you cannot control. A fully realized character can be defined as that which can't be forced to act against its nature. More than once I have created a character who I intended to be brave, or cowardly, or treacherous, or noble, or this, or that, only to discover that said character had taken on character-istics which ran contrary to my plans; and having taken on these characteristics, could not be induced to act against his or her nature. This is frustrating, but it is also delightful, because it means that writing the novel contains as many surprises for the author as it will for the reader. We tend to think of Dr. Frankenstein as a cautionary example because his creation ran amok; but what if Frankenstein's monster had gotten up off the table and then invented the longer-lasting lightbulb, or learned to play the violin, or become the best damned mayor Ingoldstadt ever had? My point here is that we tend to think of losing control as an inherently negative experience; in fact it is nothing of the sort, a fact may writers eventually discover.
Seldom-discussed perks of the writing life are those moments in which a complete stranger contacts you to relate the joy they experienced while reading your works. Or a website, magazine or blog asks you to do an interview. Or some agency bestows upon you an award. Or you (coughs) look yourself up on Amazon and see that someone has written a lengthy, thoughtful review of one of your books, and you realize that you have effected them very deeply indeed. Even bad reviews can be tremendously heartening. A friend once pointed out to me that my black comedy novelette The Numbers Game had a scathing notice from a reader who found it deeply depressing; my friend then observed, “Wow. You really got under his skin, didn't you?” I thought a lot about this remark, and the more I thought about it the happier I became. I never write anything simply to shock or provoke, but if someone is emotionally affected by my work, even if they also happen to hate it, well, so much the better.
In addition to this, there is also the deep-body, I-just-drank-brandy-and-smoked-a-Cuban pleasure of getting notifications of sales in places like Mexico, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany or Japan. The idea that people on the other side of the world are reading my books is as intoxicating, in its own way, as any award I could ever receive. Being asked to autograph something, while not exactly an everyday occurrence for yours truly, is also a large if admittedly very shallow enjoyment.
There is also a species of wild rose known as the royalty check. I do not know why, but a royalty check, even a pathetically small one, carries with it a wonderfully illicit feeling of having gotten away with something – even more than that, of being rewarded for having gotten away with something. We are often told in our teenage years that we must give up our dreams and accept “real life,” as if “real life” by definition meant accepting that you will never get what you want. Every time I get one of these checks reminds me that it is possible to live in the “real world” and still accomplish goals others consider unrealistic or even fantastic. James Marsters, who played Spike on Buffy and Angel, once remarked in my presence that he felt he “stole the prize money” by landing the role that he did. Well, whenever a check shows up in my mailbox (electronic or literal), I feel as if I have made off with a fat sack of cash and jewels, like Errol Flynn in Captain Blood. There is part of me that will always wonder at the idea of people handing over hard cash for the product of my imagination; but it is a happy wonder.
And then there is this. Sometimes I will look down at a stack of my books and realize that I did this. I made this. I had ideas and the discipline and passion to bring them into physical being. I slaved over my keyboard for weeks, months, even years to bring this tight little bundle of paper pulp into a physical existence and offer it for sale. It began as an image in my mind, and now it exists. It's real. It has height, width, dimension, weight. And it will still be here when I am not. They say all we leave is bones, children and a tombstone, but authors leave something else. Fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years from now someone may enter a dusty secondhand bookshop and spy a dog-eared old copy of one of my books on a shelf and take it home with them, and I will live again, through my characters, if only for a few hours. To write a book is in a sense to extend a middle finger to the grinning specter of Death. He will get my body, but so long as one copy of one of my novels physically exists, he cannot extinguish my legacy.
Looking back on these passages I see I have probably failed in my object of answering the seemingly simple question of what it's like to be an author. The truth is the answer is different for everyone and no doubt many authors, reading this, would disagree with my opinions and conclusions, or point out the areas I have failed to illuminate. And this brings me to my concluding point. To be a writer is to attempt to do the impossible on a daily basis. Using only words on a page, one must create sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile experiences which are vivid enough within the reader's mind to supplant reality. Using only ideas, some of which may be contradictory, incomplete or incommunicable by language, he must nevertheless weave a story which is not only coherent and logical but interesting, even compelling. Using only his petty store of personal experiences, he must convince the reader that he, the author, ought to be taken seriously when he assumes the viewpoint of the hero, the monster, the martyr, the madman, the saint. All of this is functionally impossible. We, the writers, achieve it only because, as Carl Sagan once observed, writing is a species of magic, and magic by its definition is the achievement of the impossible through impossible means. So if you truly want to know what it means to be a writer, my suggestion is to try and pull a rabbit out of a hat, or make an elephant disappear, or saw a woman in half without breaking her skin. It can't really done, but I think you'll discover that's most of the fun of doing it.
October 31, 2020
Remembering Sean Connery
Today is Halloween, and normally I would reserve these pages for a discussion of same. Perhaps I will do this later. For now I want to say a few words about the late Sir Thomas Sean Connery, who has died at the age of 90 years, leaving behind a gigantic legacy, and depriving us of one of the very last of the truly iconic leading-men. The number of such men is very small naturally and in some senses is limited to a different era, and every one we lose permanently reduces the total figure and cannot be replaced. Actors like Sir Christopher Lee, Charlton Heston, Michael Caine (technically Sir Maurice), George C. Scott and Connery were and are marked not only by their success as actors, their fame, money, awards, and (in the cases of the British), knighthoods, but by the fact that they were of those generations that grew up in remarkably tough circumstances. Lee served in WW2 in many capacities in many theaters of war and was wounded at least once. Heston also served in WW2 in the horrible Aleutian Islands campaign and was badly hurt. Caine grew up dirt poor, survived the Blitz, and fought in Korea. Scott served in the Marines and later used to hire bodyguards "to protect people from me."
Connery's mum was a maid, his father a truck driver. He had very little education and joined the Royal Navy at 16 because he had no prospects. After he got out of the service, he worked as everything from an artist's model to a milkman and often had multiple jobs at the same time well into his 20s. All the odds were against him succeeding at anything, but he was gifted with good looks and athleticism and his parents had instilled in him an almost brutal work-ethic. His first seven years as an actor brought him a total of ten movie roles, until at last he landed a small but memorable role in the classic WW2 movie The Longest Day. It may have been this appearance that got him cast as James Bond in Dr. No the following year. The rest was cinematic history.
Like most movie stars, Connery's career was a roller-coaster ride. He made a total of seven appearances as Bond but, like Basil Rathbone with Sherlock Holmes, he began to feel bored, constricted and even resentful of the role which made him famous. Connery felt he was an actor of considerable range, power and charisma, and playing the cartoonishly suave secret agent was hardly a challenge. He aggressively sought out projects which conflicted with the Bond image and which offered him a chance to show the world what he could do. Some of the choices he made were terrible: films like Zardoz,Meteor, Rising Sun, The Avengers and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are the sort of thing actors do when they are desperate for work or cash, or are bored silly, or because the project they buy ain't the project they get -- a fairly common occurrence in the movie business. At other times he was wrongly overlooked by critics who were too busy attacking the film in which he appeared without paying heed to the quality of his performance: The Name of the Rose is such a movie.
But even many of his outright box-office failures were triumphs in their own way. Films like The Hill, about the cruel, even vicious condition of a disciplinary camp for British soldiers during WW2, The Offence, in which Connery plays a trauma-haunted cop who murders a man during a "routine" interrogation, or his sword-wielding, peacock-feather-hat-sporting character in Highlander, showed that he was considerably more than a handsome guy who could fire blanks at extras and deliver droll, slightly cruel one-liners on the set of a Bond movie. Hell, even a film as frustrating in its execution as Outland showcased Connery's ability to play toughness at different levels, and to layer heroic roles with angst and vulnerability.
In addition to simply good films, or flicks in which he was good but the project left something to be desired, Connery can be said to have appeared in a number of classics both major and minor, from the aforementioned Longest Day to the greatest of all Bond movies, the letter-perfect Goldfinger -- the only Bond film in which we really see the character sweat, and the story is all the better for it. He delivered a masterful performance in The Man Who Would Be King as a down-on-his-luck mercenary who goes crazy with power when primitive tribesman believe him to be a god. He used subtlety to convey both the heroic qualities and the flaws of a real-life British general on the losing side of a battle in the WW2 epic A Bridge Too Far. But many will best recall his Oscar-winning performance in The Untouchables as his signature masterpiece. His portrayal of Jimmy Malone, a broken-down old Chicago cop who has to overcome his own fear to help bring down Al Capone, not only revived his career, it demonstrated (after more than three decades in the business) that he was the sort of actor who could make you forget that Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro and Andy Garcia were even in the goddamned picture. A rather outre Irish accent aside, he was that good.
But the best Sean Connery story of all Sean Connery stories has nothing to do with his acting career. It is a piece of badassery from his youth, and it is the final image I intend to leave with you today.
Back in the 1950s, Connery was in a pool hall in Edinburgh, Scotland playing billiards and chatting up the ladies. He had brought with him a very nice leather jacket which he lay on the edge of the billiards table. He did not know that the pool hall was turf claimed by a local street gang called the Valdors, who were known for inflicting brutal beatings, face-slashings and stabbings on their rivals and any who defied their authority. The Valdors' uniform was a leather jacket. They didn't care for young men who were not Valdors wearing leather in their sight, so one of the Valdors went up to Connery's table and slammed his very expensive jacket on the floor, then gave him a look as if to say, "What are you gonna do about it, mate?"
The place went silent. Connery looked at the gangster and said, in what I assume was his best Connery voice: "I'll give you exactly five seconds to put that back."
The gangster stared at him for four seconds... and then put it back. Evidently he saw something in that big bastard he did not care to tangle with. But he was now humiliated. So he hatched a plan for revenge. He and five of his mates waited a few days, then tracked Connery down to the Palais nightclub where he was employed. When Connery got off work they chased him through the streets, meaning to beat him to a pulp and then take his jacket as a trophy.
Connery scaled a 15-foot fence to get away but found himself cornered on a balcony. He had to fight if he wanted to survive. It looked like the end, because as a rule, it is only in the movies in which he had yet to star that one man defeats six; but there were factors the gangsters hadn't calculated.
1) Connery was in training for the Mr. Universe competition and was then regarded as one of the strongest men in Great Britain. Photos available online reveal that he possessed a truly awesome physique on a 6'2" frame.
2) His strength coach was a retired British Army physical fitness instructor.
3) To increase his actual physical strength, and not just the appearance of his muscles, as well as to provide for himself, he worked days as a laborer, mainly on construction sites.
4) His night job at the Palais was bouncer.
The gangsters attacked, but they couldn't get at him more than 2 at a time because of the narrowness of the balcony. Big mistake. Connery beat the shit out of all of them, one pair at a time. According to Michael Caine, one of Connery's best freinds, during the fight, he actually smashed two of the Valdors' heads together coconut-style, knocking them both unconscious. Connery beat them so badly that after it was over, the battered gang leader actually offered him membership in the Valdors. Connery "very politely declined" and after that had no more trouble with the gang.
In the end, the reason Sean Connery played a badass so well is that he wasn't playing.
Rest in peace, Sir Knight. And please leave something up there for the rest of us.
Connery's mum was a maid, his father a truck driver. He had very little education and joined the Royal Navy at 16 because he had no prospects. After he got out of the service, he worked as everything from an artist's model to a milkman and often had multiple jobs at the same time well into his 20s. All the odds were against him succeeding at anything, but he was gifted with good looks and athleticism and his parents had instilled in him an almost brutal work-ethic. His first seven years as an actor brought him a total of ten movie roles, until at last he landed a small but memorable role in the classic WW2 movie The Longest Day. It may have been this appearance that got him cast as James Bond in Dr. No the following year. The rest was cinematic history.
Like most movie stars, Connery's career was a roller-coaster ride. He made a total of seven appearances as Bond but, like Basil Rathbone with Sherlock Holmes, he began to feel bored, constricted and even resentful of the role which made him famous. Connery felt he was an actor of considerable range, power and charisma, and playing the cartoonishly suave secret agent was hardly a challenge. He aggressively sought out projects which conflicted with the Bond image and which offered him a chance to show the world what he could do. Some of the choices he made were terrible: films like Zardoz,Meteor, Rising Sun, The Avengers and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are the sort of thing actors do when they are desperate for work or cash, or are bored silly, or because the project they buy ain't the project they get -- a fairly common occurrence in the movie business. At other times he was wrongly overlooked by critics who were too busy attacking the film in which he appeared without paying heed to the quality of his performance: The Name of the Rose is such a movie.
But even many of his outright box-office failures were triumphs in their own way. Films like The Hill, about the cruel, even vicious condition of a disciplinary camp for British soldiers during WW2, The Offence, in which Connery plays a trauma-haunted cop who murders a man during a "routine" interrogation, or his sword-wielding, peacock-feather-hat-sporting character in Highlander, showed that he was considerably more than a handsome guy who could fire blanks at extras and deliver droll, slightly cruel one-liners on the set of a Bond movie. Hell, even a film as frustrating in its execution as Outland showcased Connery's ability to play toughness at different levels, and to layer heroic roles with angst and vulnerability.
In addition to simply good films, or flicks in which he was good but the project left something to be desired, Connery can be said to have appeared in a number of classics both major and minor, from the aforementioned Longest Day to the greatest of all Bond movies, the letter-perfect Goldfinger -- the only Bond film in which we really see the character sweat, and the story is all the better for it. He delivered a masterful performance in The Man Who Would Be King as a down-on-his-luck mercenary who goes crazy with power when primitive tribesman believe him to be a god. He used subtlety to convey both the heroic qualities and the flaws of a real-life British general on the losing side of a battle in the WW2 epic A Bridge Too Far. But many will best recall his Oscar-winning performance in The Untouchables as his signature masterpiece. His portrayal of Jimmy Malone, a broken-down old Chicago cop who has to overcome his own fear to help bring down Al Capone, not only revived his career, it demonstrated (after more than three decades in the business) that he was the sort of actor who could make you forget that Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro and Andy Garcia were even in the goddamned picture. A rather outre Irish accent aside, he was that good.
But the best Sean Connery story of all Sean Connery stories has nothing to do with his acting career. It is a piece of badassery from his youth, and it is the final image I intend to leave with you today.
Back in the 1950s, Connery was in a pool hall in Edinburgh, Scotland playing billiards and chatting up the ladies. He had brought with him a very nice leather jacket which he lay on the edge of the billiards table. He did not know that the pool hall was turf claimed by a local street gang called the Valdors, who were known for inflicting brutal beatings, face-slashings and stabbings on their rivals and any who defied their authority. The Valdors' uniform was a leather jacket. They didn't care for young men who were not Valdors wearing leather in their sight, so one of the Valdors went up to Connery's table and slammed his very expensive jacket on the floor, then gave him a look as if to say, "What are you gonna do about it, mate?"
The place went silent. Connery looked at the gangster and said, in what I assume was his best Connery voice: "I'll give you exactly five seconds to put that back."
The gangster stared at him for four seconds... and then put it back. Evidently he saw something in that big bastard he did not care to tangle with. But he was now humiliated. So he hatched a plan for revenge. He and five of his mates waited a few days, then tracked Connery down to the Palais nightclub where he was employed. When Connery got off work they chased him through the streets, meaning to beat him to a pulp and then take his jacket as a trophy.
Connery scaled a 15-foot fence to get away but found himself cornered on a balcony. He had to fight if he wanted to survive. It looked like the end, because as a rule, it is only in the movies in which he had yet to star that one man defeats six; but there were factors the gangsters hadn't calculated.
1) Connery was in training for the Mr. Universe competition and was then regarded as one of the strongest men in Great Britain. Photos available online reveal that he possessed a truly awesome physique on a 6'2" frame.
2) His strength coach was a retired British Army physical fitness instructor.
3) To increase his actual physical strength, and not just the appearance of his muscles, as well as to provide for himself, he worked days as a laborer, mainly on construction sites.
4) His night job at the Palais was bouncer.
The gangsters attacked, but they couldn't get at him more than 2 at a time because of the narrowness of the balcony. Big mistake. Connery beat the shit out of all of them, one pair at a time. According to Michael Caine, one of Connery's best freinds, during the fight, he actually smashed two of the Valdors' heads together coconut-style, knocking them both unconscious. Connery beat them so badly that after it was over, the battered gang leader actually offered him membership in the Valdors. Connery "very politely declined" and after that had no more trouble with the gang.
In the end, the reason Sean Connery played a badass so well is that he wasn't playing.
Rest in peace, Sir Knight. And please leave something up there for the rest of us.
September 17, 2020
As I Please IV: New Life Edition
Never say never again. It's a worthwhile bit of advice, and one I did not take, because on August 3, 2020, after a hiatus of sixteen years, I not only traded one coast for another, I returned to the criminal justice system...something I swore I would never do.
In my personal experience, most people break pledges to themselves out of desperation or desire. In my case neither status obtained. My decision came about after three years of exhaustively, some might say tediously, weighing the decision. And now that I have made it, I have no regrets. I am still a paid part of the entertainment industry, but it is now a side-job and one I do remotely. As for novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories, well, I can write those from anywhere, and will. For me, the decision to return to the criminal justice fold was largely based on a need (I think that is the right word) to be a part of something that actually matters. Movies, television, and video games do impact people's lives, of course, often very profoundly, but there are levels of impact and it was important for me to be involved at a much higher level. It was also important for me to get away from the fundamental corruption of the industry, with its poisonous self-importance, ass-backwards values and hypocritical caste systems. In no other place on earth is the concept of failing upwards put into practice more assiduously, and in no other place does credit get distributed with less regard for those who actually do the work. Let me give you some specific examples. A few years ago, I was part of a four-man team who put together a gigantic online and television advertising campaign on extremely short notice. This campaign required long commutes, seven day weeks and immensely long hours. It was delivered on time and considered a massive success. Some time later I was informed, more or less in passing, that it had won not one, not two, but three Cannes Lions. As one British writer put it, Cannes is "arguably the ad industry’s most significant global awards festival." In other words, it's the Oscars of advertising. So I was part of a team that had won three advertising Oscars. And yet not only did I never receive a statue (in fairness, they do cost $1,200 euros each), I was never even formally notified that my team had won them. There was no letter, no phone call, not even a text message. There was no "thank you" from those who had employed us. There was nothing. And yet somewhere, someone who had never stayed up 'til 3 AM night after night after night putting this campaign together, who'd had no say in the day-to-day operations or artistic direction of the ads, who hadn't even introduced himself to the people who were doing all the goddamned work, has three of those statues on his desk. And got to go to France to collect them.
Another incident that stung me more than I would care to admit occurred when I was working for one of the premier make-up effects studios in Hollywood. I was once again part of a team, which in this case was working on six different television shows simultaneously. One of them was The Orville, a sci-fi show which required not only a staggering amount of foam latex prosthetics for those who were playing aliens, but also the very highest level of quality for each piece. Unlike The Walking Dead, which didn't require a great deal of care for the zombie masks, cowls and so on because the zombies (walkers) were seldom shot in close-up, The Orville's pieces had to pass the high-definition close up test. The smallest imperfection ruined the mask. When you need both quantity and quality, a great deal of ass-busting is required, and bust our asses we did. There was many the day I came home from the studio so exhausted I didn't have the strength to open a jam jar. And you know what? People noticed. Seth MacFarlane, the show's creator and star, invited us to his house when the season wrapped for the cast-crew party. This is something I would have dearly loved to do, not only for the obvious reason that it would have been a blast and a great memory, but because I fucking deserved it. It would have been the reward for months of back-breaking, time-consuming, attention-demanding labor. Yet the invitation was deliberately withheld from us until after the party had been thrown. My boss, who had a habit of preventing his employees from getting individual recognition or attention for their efforts, to the point where he intercepted boxes of crew shirts and gave them away to his friends rather than the people who had earned them, had decided he did not want us there. After all, the more of his people who showed up, the less attention would be given to him. So: I never met Seth MacFarlane, for whom I worked for an entire year.
A final example. I worked five seasons on a television show with a format similar to Top Chef. (It was not, I hasten to add, Top Chef.) Though I slaved like a stevedore on that show, working all afternoon, evening and night into the next morning every other day, I was denied credit. Although my role was crucial, I was technically "shadow crew," which is an old Hollywood trick which allows studios to pay crew without allowing them any credit for what they do. This detestable practice is even more common in the world of video games, where those who do virtually all the work are enjoined from getting any credit whatsoever.
I could, if I wished, fill pages with such incidents, many of which happened to me, some to friends or colleagues of mine. I could fill even more pages with stories of those who ended up with their names on scripts they did not write, or won awards like Emmys they did not deserve. And I could scribble a volume on how certain people in positions of power exploited -- sexually exploited -- their employees or simply abused them. At one studio I remember my boss using his employee, an effects artist, as a mistress and personal assistant, and punishing her at work for arguments they had in their private relationship. This is the textbook definition of sexual harassment, but when I told him this, he said, "She won't do anything about it. She's got no self-respect." However, I think I've made my point. Life is unfair everywhere, but the natural unfairness of life is not an excuse to tolerate, to champion, and to perpetuate a system where idiots and assholes hold all the marbles. In any event, things like this are only a small part of the reason I left. They just made it easier when the time came.
I don't wish to give the impression that I left in a state of bitterness or regret. Not hardly. The thirteen years I spent in Los Angeles were probably the most dynamic and certainly the most accomplished of my life. The experiences I had there, the people I met and worked with, some of whom I had grown up watching on television or seeing in movies, were incredible and sometimes even surreal. I got to do, on some level or other, nearly everything I had set out to do, and quite a bit I had never imagined doing. And I am also very proud of having left on my own terms. Most people who want to work in The Industry last 6 months to 2 years in L.A., and leave only because financial pressures drive them away. Many -- probably most -- never make one dime in the field they wanted to become a part of. But I was getting work until the very day I left, including writing work, which is damn near impossible to land. And unlike some, I never fucked anyone over to get it. I never put my name on a script I didn't write, or claimed credit for things I never did, or stole a job from a friend and mentor because I saw it as my big break. I never let a corrupt system corrupt me, and I'm proud of that, too.
Did I accomplish everything I wanted on the scale I wished to accomplish it? Hell no. I'd be lying if I said that was the case. I had some painful near-misses and some crushing disappointments. Like everyone else in the business, I sometimes went months when the phone didn't ring and I wondered if I'd ever work again. But as I said, I'm not finished with the entertainment industry, and so far, it hasn't shown itself to be finished with me. Hollywood (the industry, I mean) is a remarkable place, and I suppose one day I will return, because like the Mafia or the Irish Republican Army, once in, you're never truly out.
Having caught you up on the reason this blog has been dormant for the last two months, I'd now like to get to the As I Please part of As I Please. These are random observations and thoughts which have occurred to me during the months I didn't have time (or an internet connection) to write this blog.
* Driving across the United States, I once again learned that the Southwest is beautiful, interesting and raw -- one minute it's 107 degrees, the next you are crawling through a thunderstorm so violent the lightning in the distance is welcome for the flashes of illumination it provides. One minute you're in pure desert, the next curving through gigantic rock formations so ancient even Father Time can't remember when they were built. Once you penetrate the Midwest, however, the scenery begins to dull. Missouri is wild country, and you can well imagine why Confederate guerillas made it ungovernable during (and after) the Civil War, but as you exchange it for Illinois the boredom begins. From my home state through Indiana and Ohio, across a corner of West Virginia and into Pennsylvania, the geography is pancake-flat and the scenery, minus a few large cities and some picturesque river crossings, about as boring as boring can be.
* When I finally got access to wi-fi, I streamed The Highwaymen, a Netflix movie about the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson. I was reluctant to watch this movie despite being interested in the subject matter, because Costner's movies tend to aggravate me. No matter who he is playing, no matter what the genre of film, no matter how unlikely the scenario, there is always a scene in which his character bullies and humiliates some other man who in real life could probably beat the shit out of him. It's almost as if he has a clause in his contract. But this movie was surprisingly good, and while Costner does manage to squeeze in the requisite scene where he thrashes a much bigger, stronger guy, this time I didn't mind, because Highwaymen is much more than a period piece cops-n-robbers movie. It's about how proud men deal with age, and with change; it's also about the culture, and the cult, of celebrity. Both are still relevant even after the 100 years that have passed since Bonnie and Clyde finally paid for their sins.
* I'm 48 years old and still can't order a plate of hot wings without wearing most of them by the end of the meal.
* The word "activist" is soft coin indeed nowadays. Like "hero," it has been applied to so many who don't deserve it that it has lost almost all meaning. Among my parents' generation, and my own, an activist was someone who lived for a cause and was willing to undergo all sorts of hardships, discomforts and risks, including the risk of physical injury, imprisonment, economic ruin or even death, to see their cause triumph. Today, an activist is someone who clicks "like" on a Facebook page or shares memes on Instagram or Twitter. To dub people who are politically active on social media, but nowhere else, as "activists" is an insult to the people who got blasted by water cannons, savaged by dogs, smashed by clubs, and in some cases shot dead, while fighting for things like civil rights. Let's be a little more careful with our words.
* Speaking of words: the following have lost nearly all meaning due to overuse/misuse: communism, feminism, fascism, socialism. Racism is on the verge of being a meaningless word since the definition of it is constantly changing and expanding to include more and more behaviors, thoughts, attitudes, tones of voice, opinions, and even body language. I was told yesterday that saying "I don't see color" is covert white supremacy, as is the scientifically accurate statement that "there is only one race -- the human race." I sometimes seriously wonder if Trump is funding the people who find racism and white supremacy behind every tree, because they are doing much to get him re-elected.
* Twenty years ago, in York, Pennsylvania, there was a big gray-haired man who shambled around town wearing oversized headphones and carrying a sack containing God knows what. He was dubbed Pub Claus, for his resemblance to Santa mixed with his propensity for occupying barstools, diner counters, anywhere he could set up shop with his books, music player, and sundry items. I saw him everywhere I went, from the street outside the courthouse to the local diner, and he annoyed the shit out of me. He was always blathering about anime and in short, behaving like what I considered to be a classic weirdo. Tonight I encountered him again, at the restaurant where I am writing this. His technological level has improved, but he's still the same weird old dude. The major difference is my reaction to him. I am now pleased and delighted that he is still getting at it, still being true to his own unapologetic weirdness. And it saddens me that twenty years ago I wasn't human enough to celebrate his decision to live a free life, untroubled by the judgments and opinions of others.
In my personal experience, most people break pledges to themselves out of desperation or desire. In my case neither status obtained. My decision came about after three years of exhaustively, some might say tediously, weighing the decision. And now that I have made it, I have no regrets. I am still a paid part of the entertainment industry, but it is now a side-job and one I do remotely. As for novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories, well, I can write those from anywhere, and will. For me, the decision to return to the criminal justice fold was largely based on a need (I think that is the right word) to be a part of something that actually matters. Movies, television, and video games do impact people's lives, of course, often very profoundly, but there are levels of impact and it was important for me to be involved at a much higher level. It was also important for me to get away from the fundamental corruption of the industry, with its poisonous self-importance, ass-backwards values and hypocritical caste systems. In no other place on earth is the concept of failing upwards put into practice more assiduously, and in no other place does credit get distributed with less regard for those who actually do the work. Let me give you some specific examples. A few years ago, I was part of a four-man team who put together a gigantic online and television advertising campaign on extremely short notice. This campaign required long commutes, seven day weeks and immensely long hours. It was delivered on time and considered a massive success. Some time later I was informed, more or less in passing, that it had won not one, not two, but three Cannes Lions. As one British writer put it, Cannes is "arguably the ad industry’s most significant global awards festival." In other words, it's the Oscars of advertising. So I was part of a team that had won three advertising Oscars. And yet not only did I never receive a statue (in fairness, they do cost $1,200 euros each), I was never even formally notified that my team had won them. There was no letter, no phone call, not even a text message. There was no "thank you" from those who had employed us. There was nothing. And yet somewhere, someone who had never stayed up 'til 3 AM night after night after night putting this campaign together, who'd had no say in the day-to-day operations or artistic direction of the ads, who hadn't even introduced himself to the people who were doing all the goddamned work, has three of those statues on his desk. And got to go to France to collect them.
Another incident that stung me more than I would care to admit occurred when I was working for one of the premier make-up effects studios in Hollywood. I was once again part of a team, which in this case was working on six different television shows simultaneously. One of them was The Orville, a sci-fi show which required not only a staggering amount of foam latex prosthetics for those who were playing aliens, but also the very highest level of quality for each piece. Unlike The Walking Dead, which didn't require a great deal of care for the zombie masks, cowls and so on because the zombies (walkers) were seldom shot in close-up, The Orville's pieces had to pass the high-definition close up test. The smallest imperfection ruined the mask. When you need both quantity and quality, a great deal of ass-busting is required, and bust our asses we did. There was many the day I came home from the studio so exhausted I didn't have the strength to open a jam jar. And you know what? People noticed. Seth MacFarlane, the show's creator and star, invited us to his house when the season wrapped for the cast-crew party. This is something I would have dearly loved to do, not only for the obvious reason that it would have been a blast and a great memory, but because I fucking deserved it. It would have been the reward for months of back-breaking, time-consuming, attention-demanding labor. Yet the invitation was deliberately withheld from us until after the party had been thrown. My boss, who had a habit of preventing his employees from getting individual recognition or attention for their efforts, to the point where he intercepted boxes of crew shirts and gave them away to his friends rather than the people who had earned them, had decided he did not want us there. After all, the more of his people who showed up, the less attention would be given to him. So: I never met Seth MacFarlane, for whom I worked for an entire year.
A final example. I worked five seasons on a television show with a format similar to Top Chef. (It was not, I hasten to add, Top Chef.) Though I slaved like a stevedore on that show, working all afternoon, evening and night into the next morning every other day, I was denied credit. Although my role was crucial, I was technically "shadow crew," which is an old Hollywood trick which allows studios to pay crew without allowing them any credit for what they do. This detestable practice is even more common in the world of video games, where those who do virtually all the work are enjoined from getting any credit whatsoever.
I could, if I wished, fill pages with such incidents, many of which happened to me, some to friends or colleagues of mine. I could fill even more pages with stories of those who ended up with their names on scripts they did not write, or won awards like Emmys they did not deserve. And I could scribble a volume on how certain people in positions of power exploited -- sexually exploited -- their employees or simply abused them. At one studio I remember my boss using his employee, an effects artist, as a mistress and personal assistant, and punishing her at work for arguments they had in their private relationship. This is the textbook definition of sexual harassment, but when I told him this, he said, "She won't do anything about it. She's got no self-respect." However, I think I've made my point. Life is unfair everywhere, but the natural unfairness of life is not an excuse to tolerate, to champion, and to perpetuate a system where idiots and assholes hold all the marbles. In any event, things like this are only a small part of the reason I left. They just made it easier when the time came.
I don't wish to give the impression that I left in a state of bitterness or regret. Not hardly. The thirteen years I spent in Los Angeles were probably the most dynamic and certainly the most accomplished of my life. The experiences I had there, the people I met and worked with, some of whom I had grown up watching on television or seeing in movies, were incredible and sometimes even surreal. I got to do, on some level or other, nearly everything I had set out to do, and quite a bit I had never imagined doing. And I am also very proud of having left on my own terms. Most people who want to work in The Industry last 6 months to 2 years in L.A., and leave only because financial pressures drive them away. Many -- probably most -- never make one dime in the field they wanted to become a part of. But I was getting work until the very day I left, including writing work, which is damn near impossible to land. And unlike some, I never fucked anyone over to get it. I never put my name on a script I didn't write, or claimed credit for things I never did, or stole a job from a friend and mentor because I saw it as my big break. I never let a corrupt system corrupt me, and I'm proud of that, too.
Did I accomplish everything I wanted on the scale I wished to accomplish it? Hell no. I'd be lying if I said that was the case. I had some painful near-misses and some crushing disappointments. Like everyone else in the business, I sometimes went months when the phone didn't ring and I wondered if I'd ever work again. But as I said, I'm not finished with the entertainment industry, and so far, it hasn't shown itself to be finished with me. Hollywood (the industry, I mean) is a remarkable place, and I suppose one day I will return, because like the Mafia or the Irish Republican Army, once in, you're never truly out.
Having caught you up on the reason this blog has been dormant for the last two months, I'd now like to get to the As I Please part of As I Please. These are random observations and thoughts which have occurred to me during the months I didn't have time (or an internet connection) to write this blog.
* Driving across the United States, I once again learned that the Southwest is beautiful, interesting and raw -- one minute it's 107 degrees, the next you are crawling through a thunderstorm so violent the lightning in the distance is welcome for the flashes of illumination it provides. One minute you're in pure desert, the next curving through gigantic rock formations so ancient even Father Time can't remember when they were built. Once you penetrate the Midwest, however, the scenery begins to dull. Missouri is wild country, and you can well imagine why Confederate guerillas made it ungovernable during (and after) the Civil War, but as you exchange it for Illinois the boredom begins. From my home state through Indiana and Ohio, across a corner of West Virginia and into Pennsylvania, the geography is pancake-flat and the scenery, minus a few large cities and some picturesque river crossings, about as boring as boring can be.
* When I finally got access to wi-fi, I streamed The Highwaymen, a Netflix movie about the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson. I was reluctant to watch this movie despite being interested in the subject matter, because Costner's movies tend to aggravate me. No matter who he is playing, no matter what the genre of film, no matter how unlikely the scenario, there is always a scene in which his character bullies and humiliates some other man who in real life could probably beat the shit out of him. It's almost as if he has a clause in his contract. But this movie was surprisingly good, and while Costner does manage to squeeze in the requisite scene where he thrashes a much bigger, stronger guy, this time I didn't mind, because Highwaymen is much more than a period piece cops-n-robbers movie. It's about how proud men deal with age, and with change; it's also about the culture, and the cult, of celebrity. Both are still relevant even after the 100 years that have passed since Bonnie and Clyde finally paid for their sins.
* I'm 48 years old and still can't order a plate of hot wings without wearing most of them by the end of the meal.
* The word "activist" is soft coin indeed nowadays. Like "hero," it has been applied to so many who don't deserve it that it has lost almost all meaning. Among my parents' generation, and my own, an activist was someone who lived for a cause and was willing to undergo all sorts of hardships, discomforts and risks, including the risk of physical injury, imprisonment, economic ruin or even death, to see their cause triumph. Today, an activist is someone who clicks "like" on a Facebook page or shares memes on Instagram or Twitter. To dub people who are politically active on social media, but nowhere else, as "activists" is an insult to the people who got blasted by water cannons, savaged by dogs, smashed by clubs, and in some cases shot dead, while fighting for things like civil rights. Let's be a little more careful with our words.
* Speaking of words: the following have lost nearly all meaning due to overuse/misuse: communism, feminism, fascism, socialism. Racism is on the verge of being a meaningless word since the definition of it is constantly changing and expanding to include more and more behaviors, thoughts, attitudes, tones of voice, opinions, and even body language. I was told yesterday that saying "I don't see color" is covert white supremacy, as is the scientifically accurate statement that "there is only one race -- the human race." I sometimes seriously wonder if Trump is funding the people who find racism and white supremacy behind every tree, because they are doing much to get him re-elected.
* Twenty years ago, in York, Pennsylvania, there was a big gray-haired man who shambled around town wearing oversized headphones and carrying a sack containing God knows what. He was dubbed Pub Claus, for his resemblance to Santa mixed with his propensity for occupying barstools, diner counters, anywhere he could set up shop with his books, music player, and sundry items. I saw him everywhere I went, from the street outside the courthouse to the local diner, and he annoyed the shit out of me. He was always blathering about anime and in short, behaving like what I considered to be a classic weirdo. Tonight I encountered him again, at the restaurant where I am writing this. His technological level has improved, but he's still the same weird old dude. The major difference is my reaction to him. I am now pleased and delighted that he is still getting at it, still being true to his own unapologetic weirdness. And it saddens me that twenty years ago I wasn't human enough to celebrate his decision to live a free life, untroubled by the judgments and opinions of others.
July 31, 2020
ALL APOLOGIES
A few years ago I was in Vancouver for work purposes, and as I enjoyed my first-ever sampling of Canadian bacon in Canada, I mentioned to one of my traveling companions, a marketing expert, that I maintained a blog on Goodreads.
"Do you have a regular release date for it?" He asked me immediately.
"No," I said. "I try to produce one a week but it just never seems to happen."
"Bad," he said. "Very bad. The key to a successful blog is consistency. However often it comes out, it should always be on the same day at the same time. That's the only way to maintain and build a readership."
I was annoyed, in large part because I knew he was one hundred percent correct. One of the ironic aspects of being a writer, of course, is that while we essentially live to write, we are generally undisciplined and Bohemian in our habits, making consistency very difficult. We fight against deadlines (look at George R.R. Martin, for God's sake), forget meetings, stumble over release dates, and try to make up for procrastination with speed. In short, we lack consistency. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I'm sorry my blog has been so inert for the last month or more. My main excuse, which actually does rise to the level of an explanation, is that I just completed a 2,650-mile move from California. The move came on relatively short notice, and required frantic weeks of work, because it isn't easy to deconstruct a life that took almost thirteen years to build, and transport that life across a continent during a global pandemic.
Having said all that, I am pleased to report that the last six weeks or so have given me a tremendous amount of ammunition for future blogs. The word "tremendous" has perhaps become discountenanced by the presidency of Donald Trump, but seriously folks, I have many subjects upon which I plan to opine in the coming weeks, and when I finally get completely settled here on the East Coast, I hope (notice that I don't promise: Bohemian, remember?) to finally get this blog the consistency my friend the marketing expert insisted that it have.
"Do you have a regular release date for it?" He asked me immediately.
"No," I said. "I try to produce one a week but it just never seems to happen."
"Bad," he said. "Very bad. The key to a successful blog is consistency. However often it comes out, it should always be on the same day at the same time. That's the only way to maintain and build a readership."
I was annoyed, in large part because I knew he was one hundred percent correct. One of the ironic aspects of being a writer, of course, is that while we essentially live to write, we are generally undisciplined and Bohemian in our habits, making consistency very difficult. We fight against deadlines (look at George R.R. Martin, for God's sake), forget meetings, stumble over release dates, and try to make up for procrastination with speed. In short, we lack consistency. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I'm sorry my blog has been so inert for the last month or more. My main excuse, which actually does rise to the level of an explanation, is that I just completed a 2,650-mile move from California. The move came on relatively short notice, and required frantic weeks of work, because it isn't easy to deconstruct a life that took almost thirteen years to build, and transport that life across a continent during a global pandemic.
Having said all that, I am pleased to report that the last six weeks or so have given me a tremendous amount of ammunition for future blogs. The word "tremendous" has perhaps become discountenanced by the presidency of Donald Trump, but seriously folks, I have many subjects upon which I plan to opine in the coming weeks, and when I finally get completely settled here on the East Coast, I hope (notice that I don't promise: Bohemian, remember?) to finally get this blog the consistency my friend the marketing expert insisted that it have.
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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