Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 25

WRITING DIALOGUE

Among the many tattered hats I wear is that of occasional guest lecturer at various universities which teach writing popular fiction. I have decided to make the notes I use during these lectures available here in The Writer's Place. The first two in the series, "Writing Violence I & II" are already accessible here in my archived blogs. Feel free to share, quote, use, etc. as you please, but please remember to attribute, as these notes are under copyright.


Man forms himself in dialogue.
-- Anne Carson

I.

Clausewitz once remarked that there is a fair country distance between simple and easy. Within the craft of writing, this statement applies to dialogue more than any other factor. Dialogue is like weight; in concept, what is simpler than lifting 1,000 lbs? You get on the bench, grab the weight, and push. Simple. But if you've ever tried to bench 1,000 lbs, you understand that while it may be simple to explain, it is definitely not easy to do.

Dialogue is very much like art: our response to it is instinctive. That is to say, we “feel” that dialogue is good or bad without always being able to define why we think so. And this is at the core of why so much bad dialogue is written. People confuse the idea that all art is subjective – what's trash to one person is treasure to another – with the idea that there cannot be actual standards by which good or bad dialogue is written. But this applies only if we consider all writing an art. If writing is in fact a craft, then there is no reason why writing good dialogue cannot be taught in the same way as the proper use of a semi-colon.

The definition of “dialogue” is “conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie.” This definition falls under the sub-definition of “no kidding” or more frankly, “no shit!” A more useful definition is “to take part in a conversation or discussion to resolve a problem.” I find this description to be extremely useful, because it reminds us that dialogue has a point. It is not merely conversation; it is a means to a specific end. And that is where I'd like to start this module: with the understanding that dialogue is not merely an exchange of words between characters, but a tool. And like any tool, it must be selected carefully and employed properly. Or it won't get the job done.

II.

The primary objective of any writer crafting dialogue is to write dialogue well. This statement is so blindingly obvious that one is tempted to ask why it needs to be stated at all. So consider these passages taken at random from fiction, non-fiction and screenplay:

“Yeah,” Goldie said. “I know from experience during the Big War. People get killed in a war: women, some old and ugly, some in the flower of youth; babies, some nursing at the mother's breast; toddlers, two-and-three year-olds; little boy babies, little girl babies...cuddly, smiling, laughing, gurgling bits of warm, pulsating flesh and blood....”
-- Donn R. Grand Pre, Confessions of an Arms Peddler

DEBORAH: We've got to stop them!
MICHAEL: All in good time. The spider, to be successful, must spin the perfect web!
-- Daniel J. Pine, “Killing Time"

“Why do you think we have been so successful in our legitimate dealings?...Because our rates are lower? Ah, you know our rates are higher. Higher! But they fear us, and because of their fear, they do good business. The steel fist in the velvet glove. But if this is to continue, if our legitimate enterprises are to flourish, we must maintain our reputation. We must let businessmen know who we are, of what we are capable. Not frequently, but occasionally, choosing incidents that we know will not be lost on them, we must let the public know that beneath the soft velvet glove is bright, shining steel.”
-- Lawrence Sanders, The Anderson Tapes

All of these are examples of bad dialogue, because in each case the author has made a serious mistake. He has forgotten that the definition of dialogue is different than its purpose. Dialogue is conversation, but it not merely a means by which information is disseminated or character established or conflict carried out or a problem resolved. Dialogue is a way of entertaining the reader, and also of weaving the spell we call suspension of disbelief. Description, internal monologue, plot, characterization and so forth are integral elements of a novel, but dialogue is the means by which the characters speak directly to the reader. It is how we get to know them. Dialogue is the most intimate point of contact between reader and writer. If the dialogue is bad the spell is broken, the intimacy ruined.

Of course, in using the phrase “good and bad dialogue” we are presupposing that it is possible to make an objective judgement about a subjective question. As I said before, artistic and creative tastes differ. Nevertheless, there are means by which we can draw more or less clear distinctions between the two. To start, we must establish a few basic principles, most of which come in the form of questions.

III.

The first question in regards to how we write good dialogue is simply: What type of book are you writing? It is a cardinal error to assume that the standards for good and bad dialogue are fixed and unwavering, that dialogue which is “good” in one genre is “good” in all, and vice versa. Dialogue, like many other factors in writing, is partially dependent on the context in which it is written, i.e. the type of story in which it appears: dialogue which is appropriate for a work of black comedy and satire like Catch-22 would be grossly inappropriate for a historical romance like The Winds of War, even though they are both set in World War II. Again we return to the analogy of the tool. The dialogue must fit the story just as the tool must fit the task. In this sense it is easy to determine the good from the bad, simply by asking the question, What are the basic demands of the genre? In a hard-boiled crime novel, the audience expects a certain type of palaver: terse and cynical, delivered in a rapid-fire, often deadpan manner. This little gem, from an old-time radio program, is typical of the breed:

PROSTITUTE: Hey baby, looking for a good time?
HERO: I'm a married man.
PROSTITUTE: I know. That's why I asked.

This litle exchange fits perfectly into the expectations of the audience. But in a Victorian romance, they will expect ornamentation apropriate to the period, with a great deal of verbal cicumlocution and pleasantry, much of which is nuanced in such a way as to mean the precise opposite of its meaning. The British of that era could use politeness as a deadly weapon; therefore a writer must know how to convey this scalpel-like courtesy. The same applies to their version of sarcasm. Take this remark made by Sherlock Holmes apropos of a criminal he and Dr. Watson are about to confront in "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League:"

"His grandfather was a royal duke and he himself was educated at Eton and Oxford. So, Watson, bring the gun."

This is exquisite dialogue precisely because it is so realistic to the period. Holmes is making what amounts to a subversive remark about the cruel habits of English aristocracy, but he is doing it through sarcasm rather than an outright broadside against the institution itself -- something which, in the Victorian era, a gentleman like Holmes would never do.

Many authors put dialogue in the mouths of their characters which simply does not fit. If you look at the examples I used at the beginning of this essay, in each case the character – an arms dealer, a terrorist, and a Mafia boss – is using language which such people would never employ. It is possible for characters of different races, religions, ethnicities, social classes, educational levels, etc. to have the same thoughts, but it is foolish to believe they would express them in the same way. An Example -- funny but not facetious:

Victorian Character, 1888: It is a matter of the utmost moment!
Mafia Character, 1979: It's really fuckin' urgent.

In both cases the characters are expressing the same thought, but using language which is appropriate to their background and breeding. For an uneducated Mafioso to talk like a Harvard graduate is as foolish as having a character "educated at Eton and Oxford" talking in Cockney.

Another question that must be asked is: is the dialogue technical? If so, have you integrated normal turns of phrase amidst the jargon? Technical dialogue is not limited to hard sci-fi and techno-thrillers. It occurs whenever characters employ legal, medical, military, scientific or any other type of specialized speech. Such dialogue enhances the credibility of the work, but it can be dangerous to over-employ; else your characters sound like machines and not people. Integrating normal turns of phrase, slang, swear words, regional expressions, etc. amidst technical verbiage reminds the reader that the character is human. Let's say we have a Navy chief petty officer who is from the boondocks of Oklahoma and has a ninth-grade education, but 25 years in the service. He will be able to give a long, complex speech on every aspect of gunnery, which is his speciality; but at the same time he will pepper his phrases with ain'ts and various curses and slang expressions.

Bad CPO dialogue: The explosion, gentlemen, was caused by the overpressure in the breech. The gas expands at 100 feet per-second per-second and is released by the ejector at intervals of one every tenth of a second, which insufficient to relieve the pressure that builds up during rapid continuous fire, and can cause breech repture, which will kill everyone in the TCR.

Good Chief Dialogue: It's caused by the goddamned overpressure in the breech. The gas expands at 100 feet per-second per-second but the goddamned ejector only releases it at intervals of one-tenth per second, which ain't sufficient to relieve the pressure that builds up when we're doing rapid continuous fire. The pressure hits a certain point and you get breach rupture and its adios muchachos for everybody in the TCR.

Conversely, let us say we have a very erudite lawyer from a blue-blooded family talking about a point of law. His speech is well-structured and proper, but to make him sound less like an adding machine we could have him curse as he spills coffee onto his rep tie, or end a complex sentence with a vulgarism appropriate to his personality. Failing that, he might make reference to something appropriate for a man of his education and background, i.e. an analogy about being on the crew team at Harvard, etc. The idea in any situation is always the same: to prevent the spoken word from carrying what Harrison Ford calls “the cadence of the typewriter.”

A good example from Michael Crichton's Rising Sun: “There will some who will tell you that foreign investment is a blessing, that it helps our nation. Others take the opposite view, and feel we are selling our birthright. Which view is correct? Which should – which is – which – oh, fuck! What's the line again?”

In this instance, Crichton broke up a long tedious speech about trade policy by having the senator forget his lines and curse, which is not only funny, but realistic.

I do not wish to repeat myself, but frankly it bears repeating, so I will do so: in every instance, when someone opens their mouth, we must ask ourselves: What type of character is speaking? What is their personality and background? Education? Temperament? There are numerous examples of good authors falling victim to the trap of putting words in the mouths of characters that simply do not belong there. Authors as august as Mario Puzo, Stephen King and Lawrence Sanders are all guilty of this. In example #3, the Mafia don sounds like an Oxford don. His speech is totally unrealistic. Before writing a single word of dialogue, every author should remind themselves who is speaking. An outlaw biker is a criminal, but he will not speak the same way as a Mafia soldier, who will not speak the same way as a Crip from South L.A. Nor will a lawyer speak the same as a street cop, or a parish priest from NYC as a lay preacher from Arkansas. What turns of phrase, slang, expressions or cadence do they use when they speak? You must know the characters before you write for them.

In Stephen King's From a Buick 8, King often forgets that his main characters are Pennsylvania state troopers whose formal education is usually limited to high school. So this quote by one trooper, “He was a person who had carefully and consciously narrowed his vision to a single strip of knowledge, casting a blaze of light over a small area,” is utterly unrealistic. I'd have tackled it something like this:

“Curt was a fella who knew a lot about a little. I mean, maybe he didn't know much about women or sports or how to fix a hole in a garden hose, but he knew everything there was to know about that goddamned Buick. He was the go-to guy, the professor, the expert. Beyond that, shit. He didn't have much to say.”

(I mean no disrespect of Stephen King, but he never lived in Pennsylvania or dealt with PA State Troopers. I have done both.)

One very simple trick in regards to writing realistic dialogue is to ask yourself, Have you read it aloud? Even the best dialogue can be improved by doing this. Does it sound like authentic speech? One process I use in this regard is called "sanding the edges." Much of this procress consists of what I've already mentioned, i.e. humanizing speech patterns to make them more realistic. But sanding the edges means more than human touches, it means eliminating words and phrases which no ordinary person uses. It is the elimination of extraneous words, a “tightening” of speech patterns, so that obvious set-ups ("I don't understand!" when the audience already understands) are cut away. By reading aloud we often expose flaws in our dialogue we didn't know were there. Here is a silly, but unfortunately not very exaggerated, example:

MAN: We gotta stop for gas.
WOMAN: Why?
MAN: We're almost out.

Better example:

MAN: I'm gonna stop for gas. We're just about on vapor.

Notice that it was not necessary for the female character to add anything here. However, it would be just as effective, or perhaps more, to write it thusly:

MAN: I'm gonna stop for gas. We're just about on vapor.
WOMAN: Why the hell didn't you stop when I told you to?

Here's an important one. What is the emotional circumstance in which they are speaking – happy, frightened, angry, cool? People's speech patterns change according to the situation, but remain consistent with their personality. In “War & Remembrance,” Herman Wouk establishes the character of Werner Beck as speaking excellent English, except when he is agitated, in which case he switches p's and b's and 'fs. Thus, the character's “tell” is consistent even when his speech is not. On the other hand, in his novelization of Aliens, Alan Dean Foster carries out a dialogue between two Colonial Marines which is totally inappropriate for the desperate, terrifying circumstances in which they find themselves. Always ask yourself, are your characters speaking “in the moment?” If you are getting shot at, you aren't speaking the way you do at the dinner table. However, because characters' reactions to stress, pleasure, danger, etc. may different, trying situations can do much to show your characters' personalities as well as the differences between them. Consider this humorous exchange from an episode of Star Trek called “Patterns of Force.” In it, Kirk and Spock have just been whipped by their guards, and are now left alone in their cell, where they begin to effect an escape.

SPOCK: To reach that light, I shall require some sort of platform.
KIRK: (Kirk kneels and forms human stepledder) I would be honoured, Mister Spock.
SPOCK: (Spock climbs atop Kirk's bleeding back) Now, the rubindium crystals should find enough power here to achieve the necessary stimulus. As I recall from the history of physics, the ancient lasers were able to achieve the necessary excitation, even using crude natural crystals...
KIRK: (in pain) Mister Spock, the guard did a very professional job on my back. I'd appreciate it if you'd hurry.
SPOCK: Yes, of course, Captain. (pauses) You realise that the aim will of course be very crude.
KIRK: (shouting) I don't care if you hit the broad side of a barn! Just hurry!
SPOCK: Captain, why should I aim at such a structure?

This is a scene in which the characters are speaking consistently with the expectations of the audience. Spock is logical, unemotional and literal; Kirk is at first sarcastic and then exasperated. The humor of the scene rests entirely in the fact that both characters are acting -- and speaking -- exactly the way the audience expects.

Building on this, is your dialogue consistent? Nothing is more annoying than a character whose behavior is unrealistically erratic than a character whose speech patterns shift according to the author's whims or degree of negligence. A CHARACTER SHOULD SWIFTLY BECOME IDENTIFIABLE SOLELY BASED ON HOW THEY EXPRESS THEMSELVES, WITHOUT THE USE OF DIALOGUE TAGS. Without any other identifiers, I as a Star Trek fan know which lines match which characters responding to the exact same stimulus:

KIRK: Oh my God.
SPOCK: Fascinating.
McCoy: What in blazes – !
UHURA: (gasps)
SCOTTY: Och!
SULU: (silence)
CHEKOV: (screams)

You know you have partially succeeded if the character can be identified by the way they speak without identifying tags. We are looking for a distinctive voice, and that brings me to, well, the establishment of voice. Of course, voice does not estabilish good dialogue in itself; but consistency is a foundation stone of good dialogue. An excellent way to achieve this is to practice writing dialogue between your characters with no tags in a two or three-way conversation: when you finish, see if it is possible to determine who is speaking without much difficulty. If you can't, your characters may need a more distinctive indivdual voice.

Some will ask the question: What about stylizied dialogue? Is that “bad” merely because it is unrealistic? My answer to this is simple. Stylization is fine if the novel you are writing is highly stylized. The individual thread, whatever it is, must fit the pattern and not diverge from it. Frankly, it call comes down to genere. If the novel is realistic, stylized dialogue is out of place unless the character is an eccentric. If the novel is period-based, you must have an idea of how people talked within the period in question.
You must know where the threshold is.

IV.

To sum up, the basic elements of good dialogue are: realism, consistency (voice), brevity, selectivity, and decisiveness.

Realism: be true to the character, period, and general situation.

Consistency & Voice: concentrate on and be aware of the character's manner of speaking at all times so that it “sounds right” to the reader. Buffy fans know Willow from Xander, and Star Trek fans know Scotty from Spock. It's the same in novels. Make sure your characters are staying within the lanes you have established for them, because your audience, if they are truly familiar with your material, will immediately detect any deviation.

Brevity: eliminate unecessary words and anything else, like dialogue tags or internal monologues, which needlessly break up dialogue flow. Never say in ten words what you can say in six unless the character is long-winded. Even then, be careful in how long-winded you let them be. Boring dialogue is bad dialogue no matter how beautifully it is crafted.

Selectivity & Decisiveness: be selective in the words your characters use. Pick words which are evocative, strong, and effective in communicating the desired emotion or information. Don't be foggy or vague. Nobody hammers a nail for fun. Have a purpose. Get there quickly. No conversation in a book should meander. If you've been brief and selective, close the show with a decisive climax to every conversation, even trivial ones. If you end a chapter with spoken words, make them strong.

Remember that the same principles which apply to writing description apply to dialogue. Cut every extraneous word. Streamline. Buff, polish, sand. Trim tags and slash anything within a talking sequence which slows down the pace. Remember at all times the voice of your characters, and to have them speak naturally – that is to say, whatever way is natural for them, under the circumstance. It is perfectly fine for Mr. Spock to sound like Mr. Spock, but it is not fine for Mr. Spock to speak in the voice of Scotty. Wondering why I'm referencing television so much? For the same reason I referenced old time radio. TV, movies, plays and radio shows are all dialogue-driven.

Finally, some tips on how to practice: write dialogue-only sequences between two characters. No description, no dialogue tags. Just let the conversation flow. And if you're feeling really bold, write an entire chapter as dialogue-only and see how coherent and understandable you can make it. You will discover the true power of dialogue when it is the only tool you have to tell the story. Hell, there is a reason why old time radio scripts from the 40s often possess much better dialogue than today's feature films. What seems like a constraint may force your creativity into directions and levels of subtlety you never guessed were possible.

Writing Life; or, I Live Rent Free in My Own Head

"It dawns on me that being published is secondary to the act of writing, so after the fact and unncessary...except for the pleasure of the possible reader."
-- Michael Moriarty

J.K. Rowling once made the acidic observation that few people respect or even understand the writing process. When she was still working on the “Harry Potter” series, she was often dragged into interminable meetings with studio executives who wanted to know when the next book would be finished – not seeming to grasp that every moment she spent traveling to, attending, or returning from such meetings was time away from the typewriter. She wondered, not entirely facetiously, if the executives thought the books wrote themselves, through some kind of organic process that did not require her presence.

The creative process is admittedly not well-understood in any of its forms. Science has failed rather miserably to explain why one person turns out to be Mozart or Tolstoy or Michaelangelo, while others, intelligent as they might be, have not an atom of creativity within their souls. Indeed, the ordinary, non-creative person either spares creativity no thought at all, or views it with a kind of mystical reverence. Neither attitude is credible. Those who do not create art benefit directly from the process of creation and probably ought to show it proper respect. On the other hand, those who do create have no right to pretend, as the martial artists of yesteryear did, that they are in control of awesome, mysterious forces; strange, arcane magicks that allow them to write music, or pen novels, or paint portraits, or craft comedy routines or sculpt marble. Creation is work, and my own particular specialty, writing, is goddamned hard work indeed. Few people grasp how hard it is, or how unrewarding it can be in a financial sense, or the sacrifices the writer who must maintain a job, or jobs, must make to keep writing. A mixture of apathy and awe have prevented people from seeing the gritty, ugly, often half-farcical reality. Like the executives who bored and badgered Rowling, the non-creative type (and please note I offer this description merely as a description and not as a criticism or an insult), simply does not understand the process.

If you interject at this point and ask, “Well, why the hell should they?” I must confess the question is legitimate. I can employ a surgeon, an electrician, a plumber, an accountant and a lawyer without grasping the intricacies of what they do: after all, what I'm paying for is the result, not an explanation of how someone arrived at it. Indeed, one does not need to understand a process to enjoy its end product, though speaking, a basic understanding will probably increase your appreciation for both. But if one does not care about how the creative process works, it's still worth taking an interest in what might be called the Creative Life, if only to avoid sounding like the sort of clueless Hollywood executive who believes "Harry Potter" novels grow on their own, like so many stalagmites.

Now, when I chat with friends who haven't seen me in years, and complain (as I inevitably do) about my finances, I am always asked the question, “But what about all that money you make as a writer?” This is sometimes augmented with: “Didn't you just win another award? How can you be poor? What's up with that?” Believe it or not, I have conversations like this at least once a week. So, for those of you who are curious about what life is like for a creative person trying to make a living off their creativity, or who are creative types yourselves who have not yet embarked on a quest to turn a profit from your talents, I offer the following. I do not know if it is truly typical of my breed, but I have a lot of anecdotal evidence to support my belief that it may be.

MONDAY. Awakened at 8.12 by hungry cat. Hung over to the point of paralysis, rise and feed said felis. Enter bathroom. Swill mouth wash. Attend to nature. Check for messages about work – any work. There is nothing. Check for messages about fiction submissions – also nothing. Check for announcements about literary awards – still nothing, even though you have, at present, one book and three short stories in contention for same.

8.40, still unshaven and clad in pajamas, walk down the street to buy coffee. Reflect on need for coffee-maker: it will save money in the long run, but right now you can't afford the expense. You just bought that blender, which cut $17 deep into your meager savings.

8.45, examine bank balance at ATM. It's worse than you thought, only $89.60 to your name. Looks like you won't be paying any bills anytime soon. You check your Unemployment account: $1.46. They were supposed to start paying you three weeks ago but they haven't, and who knows if they ever will. Complaining is useless. The Unemployment office is like a landlord, or the police: they only take interest in you when you've done something wrong.

9.00 – 10.00, return home, sit at desk reading the news and scanning social media feeds. Post on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram because that's what everyone says you have to do: be active on social media. Make your presence felt. Let the world know you exist. OK, here goes: a quotation here, a meme there, a photograph over there. You have a stash of photographs taken over the last ten or fifteen years with various celebrities and athletes, but the stash is dwindling. You've posted pictures of you with Carl Weathers, Lance Henriksen, William Shatner, Val Kilmer, Michael Bisping, Fabricio Werdum, and Mike Tyson. You've got Mel Gibson, Martin Landau, Cary Elwes and Burt Reynolds in reserve, but the photos are of dog-shit quality. Note to self: get more and better pictures with more celebrities. It's a shallow undertaking but it makes people believe you're more important than you are. Now, with some reluctance, examine what you wrote last night under the influence of 10mgs of high-grade marijuana and four glasses of Point Rider whiskey ($8.99 a bottle). It's not too bad, actually, but there's too much of it: even though the chapter isn't finished you already feel the need to make an editing pass. Change some word choices. Tighten up that loose prose. But you know if you start now you'll get sucked in for hours and your blood will turn into syrup and you'll get grumpy and irritable. So, stiff and sore and still hungover, you get ready for a hike. This will burn off your excess energy and allow you to concentrate later. It will also give your unemployed ass a feeling of accomplishment.

10.27, arrive at Wildwood Canyon Park. It's an ugly day: cold and damp and smoggy. You're stiff and sore and dehydrated, and every step up the long, winding, overgrown trail cut into the side of the Verdugo Mountains is a tax both on your muscles and your will to continue. But if you don't keep in condition you're bound to get fat, and a fat writer is a cliché. So up you go, 1,000, 2,000, 2,500 feet. When you stop to take a gulp of water you see the whole Valley before you, drowning in smog. Only the upper stories of the office buildings in Glendale and downtown Los Angeles are even visible: they look like the masts of sailing ships emerging from heavy fog. And this is what you are putting into your lungs every day. Note to self: question of why writers often die young has been partially answered.

10.49, while listening to Four Star Mary's EP Pieces, Part 1 on your headphones, you experience a minor epiphany, not about the novel you're presently writing, but about one you finished years ago and never tried to publish, because you didn't like the first act and didn't know how to fix it. You can't trust your leaky memory, so you pause and breathlessly mumble the idea into the recorder app on your cell phone. As you do this you notice that there are 27 other “notes to self” on your phone, some of them years old, and you realize you've never once listened to any of them. So you make a 28th note and then a 29th, this last one being a reminder to listen to the other twenty-eight.

11.08, you get a text message about possible work. It's a low-paying gig helping make video game trailers for an outfit headquartered in Hollywood. The hours will be bad and you're not crazy about the company in question, and in any case it's not a hard offer, just a heads-up that this outfit may be looking for warm bodies. Well, you're a warm body: damn warm at this point. You continue climbing.

11.30, still slogging, you recall another celebrity photo: you hoisting a beer with Tad Looney, the lead singer of the band you are presently listening to, who supplied so much music for "Charmed" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Party of Five" and various MTV shows. Of course, Tad is not really a celebrity because Four Star Mary is not really famous. They're too damn good to be famous. Note to self: quality may actually be a bar to fame. Fuck!

12.15, on the downward leg of the hike, another text comes through: another possible gig, this one in make-up effects, running foam latex for an outfit based in the Valley. You know and like the people involved, but the thought of returning to make up effects tightens your guts, because your nervous system cannot tolerate the toxic chemicals you will be exposed to every day, and despite about 200 IMDB credits, this field is hardly your passion. You're reasonably comptenent, but you'll never be great the way you are at (ahem) writing and (coughs) making love.
Note to self: you need to be pay the rent anyway, shithead, so be grateful that in Hollywood people tend to fail upward. Or at least sideways.

12.27, while driving home your car begins to handle sluggishly and make strange noises. You pull over and discover your right rear tire is flatter than a pancake. Your car is seventeen years old and has 260,000 miles on it and if it isn't one thing breaking or falling off, it's another. Too physically tired to be angry, you leave the car on the curb and begin the walk home on sore and blistered feet (note to self: you need new shoes. You can't afford 'em, but you need 'em). No sooner have you made it a hundred yards, however, than a third text jangles your phone. To your horror, you realize the sit-down interview you've got with “X” Magazine, which you thought was scheduled for tomorrow, is actually today – now, as a matter of fact. You haven't shaven in a week, you smell like a pile of panther shit and you're dirty and exhausted, but you turn around and walk down Buena Vista to Magnolia Park, to the coffee shop where the interviewer awaits you.

12.45, because you look like shit and smell worse, the reporter turns out to be a very attractive female in her middle twenties. She buys you a cup of iced coffee and asks polite questions about how you became a writer, what you write about, the awards you've won, the sales you've made, what you're working on now, and your advice for other writers. You answer all the questions, realizing as you speak that you never actually brushed your teeth this morning. It makes you feel important to be interviewed, though, so you nearly forget you have a flat tire that has to be dealt with before you can take the much-needed shower you're longing for. As you talk, you reflect on the interviews you've given in the past – four or five at last count. Note to self: read through them again to see if you're coming off as a pretentious fuckwit.

1.16, having decided to leave the car where it is, you arrive home on foot, strip, brush your teeth twice, and take an enormously long shower. Then you look at your mail. It consists of three bills, three royalty checks, and five letters from the unemployment office. The bills come to $247.50, the royalty checks to $17.79.

1.30 – 3.00, you eat lunch at your desk, and look at the sales of the two novels, one short story collection, one novelette, and 17 individual short stories you presently have for sale on Amazon. Not very good, not very good at all. The first three months of the year you were selling like the proverbial hotcakes, but this month – just a trickle. You peruse your master list of promotional services and try to remember which ones have been working for you lately and which are merely taking your money. You double check the announcement dates for the literary contests you've entered, and then get out The Writer's Market 2019, because you have four unpublished novels looking for a home.

3.00 – 4.30, watch DVDs of 70s – 90s television shows and avoid calls from debt collectors. Watching shows like "Magnum, P.I." makes you remember when you were growing up and felt safe and loved and confident about a brilliant future. Watching "Highlander" makes you remember how fit, handsome, popular and sexually potent you were when this show was on the air. Turning the player off makes you remember that it's 2019 and you're now a middle-aged man with expensive advanced degrees you can't use, crushing debt, and a long list of relationships that didn't work out. But hey, your cat loves you. Unless he's just faking it until he can push you down the stairs. But the joke's on him. This is California and your house has no stairs! (It doesn't have any insulation, either.)

4.30 – 5.30, work on a freelance writing assignment which is due the following Sunday. You're terribly behind because the assignment is boring and pays poorly, but poorly is better than zero, and writing for money has its own pleasures. It gives you the same glow 5mgs of marijuana or a couple of glasses of Point Rider do, because you're actually getting remunerated for your craft – something damnably few writers ever experience. You personally had been published in magazines four times before anyone paid you anything.

5.30 – 6.30, nap. You only sleep for 30 minutes but the cat has passed out on your feet, so you have to lie in bed for an extra 30, reading. You remember you're supposed to read 30 books this year and it's now June and you've only read nine, so you'd better find time to catch up on your reading, because writers who don't read are like quarterbacks that don't practice. As you read, you glance over at your pile of unread books. Like all writers, you buy way too many books and they often sit for months or even years before you crack them. There are ten books in your “immediate” pile and about twenty more in your “I'll get to it eventually” pile. Some of these, of course, you will never in fact get to. Others you'll begin but never finish. Note to self: be more selective before you buy books.

6.35, go down the street for coffee. Rehash the interview in your mind and ask yourself if you dropped too many names while doing so. It's okay to picture-drop on social media: hell, it's expected. But when you drop names in conversation you look like an asshole. Note to self: you probably looked like an asshole. Curb the impulse next time.

6.55, dissolve 2.5 mg tablet of marijuana in coffee, pour two ounces of whiskey in after it, make another note to self to visit the marijuana dispensary on Magnolia over the weekend. Reflect briefly on your law enforcement career and the people you locked up for possessing marijuana, which is now as legal as rotisserie chicken. Experience guilt, self-loathing, and a vague desire to buy each of those people a drink – or a joint. Now consider the problem of reviews. The more people who review your works, the more you figure in Amazon and Goodreads search algorithms and the simpler it is to convince promotional services and publishing houses you're for real. Unfortunately, it's easier to play water polo with the fucking kraken than it is to get the average Joe or Jane to write a review. They'll buy your book, they'll even send you a DM on your author page telling you how great they think it is, but when you thank them and politely ask 'em to leave even a one-sentence review on Amazon, the sound you hear after that is (crickets). You've tried a number of tricks to increase your rate of reviews vs purchases, including direct appeals, book giveaways and whatnot, but nothing works consistently. It's exasperating. Especially because the reviews you have are excellent.

7, 20, You fire up the computer and get to work on your own manuscript, an epic horror novel you've been laboring away at for two and a half fucking years. Your normal turnaround time for a novel used to be a year, but this project is a monster and like most monsters it doesn't take orders well, not even from its creator. It's a bit hard to get into the groove so you put on some music to help you. But listening to Mazzy Star while drinking whiskey makes you nostalgic and lonely. So at 8.15, you step into the drizzle and duck across the street to the pub to have a pint and a cheeseburger and be around other humans. At the bar you get hit on by an English girl with a pretty face but the worst teeth you've seen since Pennsylvania. You just can't get past the teeth, so you make your apologies and slink back home, acutely conscious of the image of yourself as a slightly drunk, extremely broke, increasingly respected yet still largely obscure author. All that's missing is an Irish accent. Now you're in the groove and you write for three hours straight, going so deep inside your horror novel that your heart races as if you're in as much jeopardy as your characters. Egotism, or just good writing? The reader will have to decide.

11.45, open e-mail from traditional publisher, rejecting your submission. Well, fuck you, traditional publisher! Open another e-mail from a small literary magazine back East, which expresses interest in publishing your short story...provided you make certain adjustments. The editor is quite specific that he wants the ending changed, but he doesn't say what he wants it changed to. He also hints broadly that your chances of publication will spike if you subscribe to his magazine for a year. Drum your fingers on the desk-top and ponder the percentages. On the one hand, this magazine pays exactly $50 for a story. On the other, it's fairly prestigious within its own circle, and getting into print is allegedly the reason you got into this writing racket in the first place. You turn over a few ideas for alternative endings, but it's hard to switch from the genre you were writing in a few minutes ago (horror) to the genre you were writing in here (crime): your brain can't turn on that particular dime. So you table the whole thing until tomorrow morning.

TUESDAY. 12.20 (am), sunburned, sore, and slightly drunk, you climb wearily into bed. You're too tired to read and you turn out the lights, but not before you spy the row of writing awards you have on your shelf. You wonder about your obsession with recognition. Not fame: any asshole can be famous. It takes actual talent to be recognized by your peers – which, you realize, is why you crave more awards. You want to be acknowledged and you are being acknowledged. But then you think about your debts, and your bills, and the backed-up drain and the leaky faucet and the flat tire and the cost of promoting your books by yourself, and you wonder for the thousandth time if the decision to publish independently, without the muscle or the money of an established publishing house, was a fool's errand. You consider e-mailing the big New York agent who respects the hell out of your ability but has a nasty tendency to try to re-write -- not edit, but re-write -- your books to suit his own tastes. And that sort of thing, of course, is why you chose to go it as an indie author in the first place.

2.15, you wake up in the midst of a nightmare you realize is a powerful anxiety attack, and the thread of your earlier thoughts becomes a needle: knit one, purl two, knit one, purl two, except the needle is going in and out of your heart. What if the landlord ups the rent again? You'll have to move from Burbank, which has been your home for six years almost to the day. But prices everywhere are skyrocketing and even the hottest, dustiest, dirtiest, most crime-ridden areas of the Valley are beyond your economic reach. When you get bored with that woe, another one looms: Have you become a horrible cliché – the writer doomed to be unappreciated in his own time? Success won't do you much good when you're dead. Please God you're not like Van Gogh or Poe or any of that lot! A third woe appears to get in on the fun: no wonder all your romantic relationships fail. You've got your head so far up your own ass you form a perfect circle. There's no room in your universe for anyone but you and your petty pains and morbid ambitions. Fourth woe: if you don't land a gig or a contract soon, you'll have to borrow money from your cousin again. He doesn't mind, but you do: every request is another chunk of your self-esteem, because a man ought to pay his own way in this world, nicht wahr? Fifth woe ....sixth woe...seventh....

4.40, utterly exhausted by worry, you fall asleep once more.

7.55, awakened by hungry cat, you climb wearily out of bed and plunk down in your desk chair and peruse your social media feeds and e-mails through blood-hooded eyes. As you scroll mindlessly through the spam, the day stretches ahead of you – a blank and a bore. There's no work, and no money, and no response to any inquiries or submissions or news about any contests, and – hello, what's this? An invitation from the So-and-So Literary Awards to attend their annual gala in Hollywood next week? A black-tie, red-carpet ceremony with free champagne and free dinner and free publicity. And you get to take a guest. Fumbling for your phone, you fire a text to Y., your beautiful actress friend, and ask if she'll go. She says yes. So now you get to rock the red carpet with what will undoubtedly be the best-looking woman at the whole gathering, and guzzle Asti and exchange witticisms and anecdotes with the creme-de-la-creme of L.A.'s literary community. You'll have to borrow money from your cousin for the tux and the limo and, well, the whole goddamned enterprise, but hell, he's loaded and he doesn't mind, so fuck it, just fuck it. God, it's great to be an author!

Thoughts on Pain

Pain is a good teacher, but not one wants to go to his class.
-- Axiom

Pain will show you who you are.
– Ernst Jünger


Like most people in Western civilization – what we often call the First World – I am the living beneficiary of people who were tougher, more resilient, and more industrious than I am.

I had ancestors who were frontiersmen, including a hanging sheriff who allegedly traveled Missouri with a noose in his saddlebags and whose favorite three words were, “String 'em up.” I had others who hacked and clawed and sweat a living from the soils of the Midwest as farmers, and who put down their spades to exchange them for muskets during the four-year massacre known as the Civil War. The various wars that followed my antecedents served all over the planet – in the Pacific, in the China-Burma-India theater, in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, in Europe. Some of them rode in ships, some marched through the dust, some flew. Not all returned. They were a tough breed, born into meager circumstances, hardened by the Depression, flung into battle thousands or tens of thousands of miles from where they'd been born. They didn't want to fight: there was scarcely a career soldier in the bunch. They fought because they thought it necessary, and when the fighting was done they put down their guns and went home. But they were ready to pick 'em back up if necessary. My great-uncle, Ray Watson, a dyed-in-the-wool hero of WW1, resigned his colonelcy in disgust in 1942 when he was ruled “too old” for a combat command in the Second World War. The fact he'd been riddled with bullets and shrapnel during the previous war made no impression on his determination to serve again, if needed.

The women were tough, too. My maternal grandmother rode in a horse-drawn sleigh to an unheated schoolhouse on the windblown Indiana plains during the deeps of cruel winters. She frequented Capone-run speakeasies during the Depression and raised a child amid the shortages and rationing of the Second World War -- I still have her ration coupons. My paternal grandmother raised three children in a house in Chicago that was not much larger than my studio apartment, in an area notorious for producing mobsters, and she did it on a shoestring. Those Watsons were what is today known as “working poor.” Every penny had to be accounted for. An indulgence today meant privation tomorrow. If the children wanted to get out of their circumstances, they had to do it on guts and brains, because they had no money. My father ended up getting a fellowship to Harvard and went into journalism, becoming one of the most decorated reporters of his generation, covering the White House until his dying day. His brother, my uncle, became a top executive in the FBI. Their sister became a nurse, no easy thing to do for a poor kid when there are no loans for higher education. They worked hard for everything they had, and what they got was theirs. There were no handouts...no 'privileges.'

When I was growing up, I lived in the afterglow of my own parents' success. I had a very comfortable, very soft middle-class existence. I grew up in a neighborhood that was physically attractive and very safe. You could, as the cliché goes, leave your doors unlocked at night without fear; you could even leave your wallet or purse in your unlocked car and expect it to be there come the morrow. (I know because this happened over and over again without incident.) Children could and did roam far and wide on foot and on bicycle, having unsupervised adventures in open fields, empty lots, or the swampy woods by the Potomac River. No one preyed on them – on us. If I had to describe the situation in a single word, that word would be idyllic.

I am not, incidentally, looking back on childhood through a romantic haze; I am simply relating the facts. My ancestors had fought and sweat and killed and died for a prosperous, comfortable life, and I inherited it. But my inheritance came with a price. It made me soft.

I don't mean physically soft, although that was in fact the case after about the age of ten and until the age of fifteen or sixteen. And I don't mean mentally soft in the sense of being stupid – if anything I was probably over-educated, a state of being that guarantees one loses all communication with instinct. I mean I was soft in the spiritual sense. I was rambunctious, I liked exploring the world on my trusty bike, I wasn't afraid of getting dirty (I liked getting dirty), but there were important life-lessons which our middle-class status had prevented me from learning. They began making themselves known to me sometime in the mid-1980s, and that was when I began to understand that unlike some of the less-fortunate or more-mature kids around me, I was a crab without a shell.

Most people in our society define childhood, or want to define childhood, as a time when you are safe, loved and more or less the center of your own universe. When you have few concerns more serious than whether you can open the cookie jar when no one is looking. When you look forward to holidays like Halloween and Christmas with a combination of wonder and greed. And this childhood ends not because of growing physical maturity, but when you begin to realize that while you may be loved, you are not safe, and you sure as hell aren't the center of any universe. You're simply another human, one among countless billions. The terrible things you see on television, which you thought only could happen to “other people,” can happen to you, and they can happen to your loved ones. You realize you can die. And so can they. This is a necessary part of human development. We grow up immortal, but we come of age in the shadow of death, and all the attendant discomforts surrounding it. Yet in people like me that process had not taken place in the manner that it should have. It had been retarded, weakened somehow. When other kids were growing tougher, more self-reliant, more aware that the world could be a cruel place, I remained willfully, blissfully innocent. To lose this innocence would hurt, and I knew it, and feared the pain. What I didn't know was that to maintain it would hurt even more.

At some point in life we all have a rotten tooth which causes us great discomfort. The bold among us have the tooth removed – a moment of agony followed by immediate, blissful relief. The cowards, on the other hand, nurse the bad tooth for weeks or months or even years, because they cannot accept the truth that sometimes a great deal of pain now saves an infinity of pain later. By arresting myself in childhood when I had just begun to enter puberty, that awkward phase where we transition physically, mentally and emotionally into adults, I ensured that far from avoiding suffering, I would become its magnet. Because I clung to the trappings of childhood when my friends and classmates were learning to be “young adults,” I became socially isolated – an outcast. And like all outcasts, a figure of ridicule and later, a target for bullying. I spent between four and five years of my life in a state of wretched loneliness and misery. It was true that I brought much of this misery on myself, through my own actions, but it was equally true that once a person has been branded a pariah, it is damnably difficult for him to rejoin the cultural mainstream even if they wants to. My transition into a semblance of “normalcy” took an additional several years, and itself was fraught with difficulty and suffering. All of this because, at an earlier time in life, I had sought to avoid the perils of incipient adulthood.

As a grown man, I discovered that if I wanted to be a man, I had to experience suffering, privation, and hardship – all the things I had studiously avoided as a child. Perhaps subconsciously, I began to seek out ways in which I could test my mettle. I took on one of my bullies and beat him up. I joined a fraternity known for its propensity for hazing and crazy adventures. I studied the martial arts and boxing, and got beaten up and learned not to fear the process. I entered a profession, law enforcement, which was a snake-pit of potential dangers both physically and emotionally. This journey was clumsy and often humiliating, especially when I found out that my mettle was weak and needed more time in the blast furnace. But slowly, gradually, over the process of years, I began to become the type of man I wanted to be. Brick by brick I fitted pieces of myself into a new and more resilient shape. Through a conscious, artificial process, I began to achieve, in my twenties, a semblance of the toughness which my ancestors had learned as small children. Instead of avoiding pain at any price, I began, systematically and with forethought, to seek it out on my own terms, and to listen to what it had to teach me. This is a journey I began decades ago, and it has no destination, except in the sense that the journey is the destination.

It's not about being a badass, whatever that means; nor is it about becoming some physical specimen or strongman. I'm 46 years old, and I won't be taking on any 21 year-old studs in the ring, cage, mat or street anytime soon, if I can possibly avoid it. Taekwondo gave me an arthritic bone spur in my foot. Aikido, weight lifting and hiking tore my rotator cuffs three times. I have tendonitis in my right arm, too, and a host of other petty "old man" issues of the sort you get when you hit middle age after an active life. I used to be as flexible as Gumby. Now I'm as flexible as the Washington Monument. It is what it is. I work within the limits and try to push back at them when I can. As I said, the objective is not an objective; it's a process, a determination to embrace some discomfort, some difficulty, both for the obvious health benefits and to prevent myself from sinking into softness.

Sometimes I hike in the Verdugo Mountains on the edge of Burbank. I truly hate doing this. The trails there are steep and sun-blasted, and seem to go on forever. False summits are the rule, and no matter how far you've gone you seem to have another few hundred yards more to go. In dry weather the ground crumbles beneath your feet. In wet weather it has the consistency of soap and the wind, up there a few thousand feet off the ground, will cut you right to the bone. In hot weather, which is most of the year, sunstroke is a very real possibility – the mercury rises to over 110 degrees, and the very act becomes dangerous, actually physically dangerous, and never mind the rattlesnakes. Every time I go up I ask myself, What the hell am I doing here? Why the hell am I doing this? But I already know the answer. I do it for the same reason I spent years sweating and occasionally bleeding at White Tiger Martial Arts, for the same reason I entered kickboxing tournaments against younger, stronger, fitter men who were just warming up when I was already gassing out. Because while it may hurt, it's good for me. I do it because I need to test myself against what Erwin Rommel called “the inner pigdog – the little voice that says, 'Stay in bed – just another fifteen minutes!” I need to sweat, to strain, to fall down on my ass and dust myself off and keep going. My ancestors had to do this because it was necessary to fill their bellies. I have to do it because it is necessary to fill my soul. I have to remind myself of the practical, the spiritual, the emotional value of pain. I strengthen my body and my will now because if I don't, a time will come when I need them and find they are not up to the task at hand. As Rommel – and his brother-from-another-mother Patton – used to say: sweat saves blood. But it's not a battle I can win in the traditional sense, because every day it has to be fought anew. Yesterday's victories mean nothing. Victory is temporary, fear of pain is forever.

This struggle is hardly unique to me. Fear of pain – in all of its forms – is one of the most salient characteristics of the modern area. The German writer Ernst Jünger wrote contemptuously in the 1930s of those “who act as if the highest goal in life were the avoidance of pain.” A few years later, trying to explain the appeal of the Nazi ideology to people who had grown up in comfortable Western countries, George Orwell remarked that that not everyone wants safety, security and material prosperity – “a soft cushion for your bum,” was the way he put it. Some people crave extremes of experience – danger, hardship, violence, and a cause larger than themselves to bleed and to die for. While the Nazis used these impulses for their own evil purposes, they did not create them; the impulses themselves were rooted in the deepest parts of our own human nature. Properly channeled and harnessed, they can be of great use. But when we deny them completely, when we go in the other direction and try to mask all discomfort with pills and cowardly decisions, we do not actually succeed in avoiding suffering. We merely ensure it will come later, in another, possibly much more agonizing, form. The kid who coughs up his lunch money to the bully on his first day of school may avoid a beating that day, but he ensures he will spend the rest of the school year, and perhaps many school years to come, being beaten up in a different sort of way.

Knowledge that this kind of fear was warping our society was beginning to manifest in our own popular culture as long ago as the 1970s. On the hit forensic medical drama “Quincy,” the series protagonist, played by Jack Klugman, stated in one episode that, “Today's children are being taught that they should never have to experience a single moment of pain, discomfort or grief, and that if they do, they should reach for a pill to make it go away.” This mentality, which is now totally embedded in our society, was still in its infancy then, but it was recognized even at the time as being extremely dangerous, because it is a patently self-defeating method of going through life. Pain is as unavoidable as death, yet there is a huge industry, actually a whole series of industries, beginning with the pharmaceutical, which thrives on selling the notion that not only can all forms of pain – physical and emotional – be avoided, but that they should be avoided, avoided at all costs.

Nobody, or almost nobody, enjoys pain. I sure as hell don't. Few were the times I said to myself, “I'd like to grapple today,” or “I'd like to spar today” or “I'd like to go on a 7 mile hike in the hills today.” As I said before, I do these things because if I don't, I will regress into a pudding-like shape occupying a cushion on my couch, a wad of blubber resembling something between Lardass in “Stand by Me” and Jabba the Hutt. I have occupied that shape before, as a twelve year-old in my parents' basement, watching endless re-runs of Star Trek on Saturday afternoons when I ought to have been playing outside, and I don't wish to return to it. Civilization has moved past the point where I, personally, am needed to perform such tasks as farming or ditch-digging or standing watch on the parapet of a fort on the edge of a wilderness, as my ancestors did, but that doesn't mean the necessity of pain, of challenge, has lessened. Indeed, in a soft world, one of the most valuable assets one can possess is hardness.

When I look around me, I am continually struck by the relative absence of strength in the people I see, and I believe that in large part, this societal softness stems from our newfound obsession with the avoidance of pain and discomfort. According to The Heritage Foundation, “71 percent of young Americans between 17 and 24 are ineligible to serve in the military—that is 24 million of the 34 million people of that age group.” The article, which is based on Pentagon studies, states, “the main causes of this situation are inadequate education, criminality, and obesity.” They do not give statistics on these three factors, but I'd bet a pretty that obesity far outstrips inadequate education and criminality as a cause of ineligibility.

Obesity in America is a complex topic with a number of causes, but it is also a reflection of our love of pleasure and our horror, even our terror, of being exposed to unpleasantries. There is little more decadent, after all, than laying around stuffing one's face with food: in a sense, eating is the opposite of suffering, and in another sense it is probably what our grandparents wanted us to do -- live the life they couldn't. Yet it is precisely because our grandparents were exposed to so much that was unpleasant -- poverty, hard work, Depression -- that they were able to trade their pencils, shovels and hardhats for helmets, Tommy guns and combat boots and go out fight so stubbornly, so courageously, and so well. Strength breeds strength, weakness breeds weakness.

It's important to understand that when I talk about the absence of strength, I don't mean physical strength per se. I am not particularly strong and doubt I ever will be, and I am in a continuous battle with the scale and probably always will be. No, when i speak of strength I am referring to the sort of strength that causes someone to say, “I could sit on my ass today and eat Twinkies, but I think I'll swim 30 laps freestyle instead.” Or even: “I could stay up 'til 3 AM playing video games and nibbling cold pizza, but instead I'll work on my manuscript, or my comedy routine, or my resume or my bass playing or my (fill in the blank).” I am referring, in other words, to discipline, which is the harnessment of pain and discomfort for a practical end. And discipline can take very strange forms. One of the strangest, and the most important, is the discipline of the mind to accept that life is not a syllogism. We do not have to choose between eithers and ors, between pain and pleasure, between nerd and jock. Yet the idea that we can be more than one thing, i.e. that we can enjoy Star Trek and video games and pizza and beer and still want to keep our bodies in reasonably good condition and hone our craft, whatever that craft may be, seems almost to be dying out in the world. People slap their labels on themselves – jock, gamer, nerd, fanboy, party girl, what have you – and call it a day. They either lack the willingness to be more than one thing or the belief that a well-rounded personality is even possible. One must pick a lane and stick to it!

And this thinking, too, is a form of weakness, of softness. Because inherent in the act of saying, “Well, I love Dungeons and Dragons so the gym is just not my thing” is the refusal to accept that you can play Dungeons and Dragons and still have ripped abs, or bench press 300 lbs, or get a black belt in jiu-jitsu, or whatever challenge you set for yourself. And buried within that refusal, like a cyst within a cyst, is fear. Fear of stepping outside your comfort zone. Fear of being exposed to new things. Fear of being uncomfortable, of having to sweat, of having to strain, of having to bleed, even just a few measly drops, and I don't necessarily mean physical blood: the ego bleeds far more quickly than the flesh. Nobody wants to look a fool, and nobody ever looks quite so foolish as when trying something completely new.

Anyone who has ever been bullied, at home or at school, has social anxiety to some degree, and social anxiety is a prime cause of not trying new things. What I've discovered about myself, however, is that while having the anxiety is okay, acting on it – allowing it to dictate your actions – is not. The same goes for fear, for laziness, for minor health problems, you name it. You may have issues (obesity, metal health, poverty – the list is endless) which make setting goals especially challenging, but it's precisely the difficulty involved in meeting a goal – in other words, the pain involved – that makes the reward so goddamned sweet. I have literally seen people in wheelchairs in Tae Kwon Do classes. The fact that what they learn has no practical value is irrelevant. They are refusing to let fear, discomfort and pain dictate what they can and cannot attempt. That is more than courage, that is the highest field of human achievement: understanding.

In his infamous monograph ON PAIN, the German author and combat veteran Ernst Jünger wrote starkly, "Show me your relationship to pain and I will show you who you are!" Most of us, I've found, do not want to take this test. We suspect we're afraid, we're soft, we're weak, we're inadequate, we're this, we're that...but the truth is that pain is not a barrier, it is a teacher, and as I said at the beginning of this missive, nobody really wants to go to its class. Not wishing to go, and doing it anyway, is the essence of discipline, and it is discipline and not muscles or black belts which determines your true strength.

So do it, folks. Take the chance. Sign up for the course, start the hobby, join the gym, climb the hill, swim the sea, start the script, kiss the girl, jump the rope. Give it a shot, and fail -- and then, in the words of Peter Dinklage, get up, and try again, and fail harder, and fail better. Fail your brains out, and one day -- I guarantee this will happen -- you will wake up and realize pain and fear no longer hold their old power over you. They will simply be companions you hold in mild contempt. And the world will seem a larger, friendlier, more adventurous place.

Our Watch Is Ended: Final Thoughts on Game of Thrones

I remember it very clearly. The year? 2011. The place? Los Angeles. Around my apartment complex the usual bus-stop ads were going up, as they always did, during "pilot season" and its aftermath, "rollout season." The one-sheets for this new HBO show, GAME OF THRONES, seemed unusually clever. Each depicted a different character in costume, with what seemed to be that character's tagline -- in the case of one, later identified as King Robert Baratheon, it was "Killing things clears my head."

That stuck with me. I didn't start watching the show, and I didn't start reading the books upon which the show was based, but that stuck with me. This guy? This fat bearded dude with the crown, sitting on that uncomfortable-looking throne? Killing things clears his head.

Good to know.

Full disclosure: I'm no expert on fantasy. On the other hand, I'm not completely ignorant, either. I've read every one of Frank Herbert's DUNE series, and the Harry Potter books, and several by Ursula K. LeGuinn. I've perused C.S. Lewis, Piers Anthony and Tolkien, too. But an expert? Gods no. In fact, when I began reading the eponymous first GoT book, on June 23, 2015, it had been sitting unopened and unwanted on my shelf for six full months. It was a present from my brother the previous Christmas, and only when I ran out of all other reading material and couldn't conscience buying anything new when I had a big, fat, unread novel at hand, did I turn its first pages. And in fact, it took me some time to warm to George R. R. Martin's prose style and the immensity -- it's the right word -- of the universe he created. Truthfully, I wasn't certain I'd even finish the book. But I did, and when I did, I realized my first order of business that day was to go out and buy the next volume, A CLASH OF KINGS. Without realizing it, without even knowing it was happening, I had become a GoT fan.

In the end, I read all five books yet published in the series -- all 4,228 pages of 'em. But during this time, which took five months, I never watched so much as a frame of the HBO series which was running at the same time. I didn't want the series to ruin the books for me, and I didn't want my mental image of the characters changed by what I saw on screen. In November of '16, however, having no excuse not to do it, I queued up Amazon Prime and got myself a-watchin'.

As with the first book, I wasn't sucked in right away. In fact, I don't believe I even finished the first season until July of 2017. But just like the books, once the series got hold of me, it wouldn't let go -- until, this past Sunday, it finally had to.

I won't say I enjoyed every bit of it. There were times the brutality seemed gratuitous even for the savage world in which the story takes place. There were moments of frustration when plot-lines withered away unresolved, lost in the immensity of the story. There were characters killed too soon and others who lingered far too long. There were departures from the book which I disagreed with. But by and large I thought it was a spectacular achievement. It gripped. In teased. It misdirected. It infurated and terrified and enthralled. It was epic fantasy indeed.

Every now and then a TV show comes along which becomes the property of the nation as a whole -- not just an audience, not just hardcore fans, but an entire country. M*A*S*H was like that; DALLAS was definitely like that during its heyday, and probably BREAKING BAD, FRIENDS, SIENFELD, CHEERS, THE OFFICE, FRASIER and a few others (BTW, isn't it odd the way sit-coms, a genre that produces the largest amount of garbage on television, should also produce so many of the most beloved shows in TV history?). Well, GAME OF THRONES most definitely qualifies as both water-cooler hearthstone entertainment. People discussed it at work, they discussed it at home, and they discussed it - incessantly, meticulously, capriciously, hopefully, imaginatively, exhaustively and often obnoxiously -- online.
And now that it has concluded, these discussions -- I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt by calling most of them that -- continue apace.

Contrary to what you might think, I have no desire to rake the still-warm ashes of the GoT phenomenon and discuss every particular, every character, theme, sub-plot, or plot twist. Nor do I want to repeat the comments I made on Facebook about my exasperation with the eighth season as a whole. What I want to do here is discuss the broadest strokes, by which I mean analyze what the show was really about. Because unless that is clear, understanding its phenomenon, its rampant and obsessive popularity, is impossible; so too is grasping the nature of the controversy surrounding its final season.

Wikipedia, that font of all knowledge, describes GAME OF THRONES as "epic fantasy." This is true enough in and of itself, but the fact is, calling GoT "epic fantasy" is like calling THE GODFATHER a Mafia movie. It's true, but it hardly tells the whole story. THE GODFATHER is actually a simple tragedy: the fact that the characters criminals living in 1940s America is unimportant. They could as well be European royalty, or South American politicians, or Asian billionaires, or anything you care to name. The story of the Corleone family is ultimately about the corruptive, destructive nature of power. And indeed, with most great works, it's possible to sum up the essence of their message just as simply. Examples:

WALL STREET - seduction.
APOCALYPSE NOW - insanity.
JURASSIC PARK - hubris.
SCHINDLER'S LIST - reclamation.
PLATOON - the loss off innocence.
JAWS - facing your fear.
SERPICO - the price of honor.
STAR WARS, HARRY POTTER, LORD OF THE RINGS - doing the right thing.
CASABLANCA - the price of love.
SUNSET BOULEVARD - vanity.
E.T., THE GOONIES, THE KARATE KID - friendship.
ROCKY - heart.

Now, you may not agree with these characterizations, but at the same time, you could probably substitute your own in just as few words; and in any case I'm not suggesting that these simple descriptions are all these movies are about. Just the crux, the bare essence, the logline, the thing which ultimately ensares people and won't let go. So where does that leave GAME OF THRONES in this regard? What gives it its appeal and resonance? What of its essence drew people to it in such numbers, and with such intensity?

Some contend that GoT was ultimately about feminism, or at least female empowerment, because the show, once some of the initial smoke cleared, largely seemed a contention between Daenerys I Targaryen and Cersei Lannister for the Iron Throne of Westeros. In addition, and just to name a few, Arya Stark, Yara Greyjoy, and Brienne of Tarth are not merely strong characters, but can fight on par with the best male warriors in the series.

Others contend that GoT was simply about power -- why people want it, how they get it, how they keep it, and in some cases, why they avoid, serve, or renounce it. Different approaches to the quest for, flight from, enjoyment of, or service to, power were embodied in Littlefinger, Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen, Cersei, Stannis Baratheon, Lord Varys, and Jon Snow -- to name a few.

Some maintain that GoT, like every good soap opera or prime-time drama of yesteryear, was simply a delightful exercise in all the things that once made soap operas and prime-time dramas must-see TV: intrigue, sex, lust, betrayal, incest, violence and deceit. And there certainly was enough of all that for anyone on GoT, up to and including Caligula.

Some contend that GoT is simply an analogy for the times in which we live, and that if you look hard enough at our political landscape, you can see direct analogs to such characters as Stannis or Tywin or Littlefinger. (I do believe I heard Hilary Clinton compared to Cersei about 200 times during the 2016 election. I also saw Trump equated to Joffrey quite often.)

All of this contains the truth. GoT is a master-study of power; it does feature a very large number of powerful female characters, and it certainly is a soap opera, what with all the escapes, long-lost relations, double-crosses, power-mongering, seduction, temporary deaths, abandoned plotlines, and brother-sister love. It too can be seen, if you care to see it that way, as a cartoon of contemporary politics (or just politics generally). But I'm convinced that everyone who categorized GoT as one of these things first and foremost found themselves extra-dismayed by the way in which the series actually ended. This is because, reduced to a single word, GAME OF THRONES was actually about family. Specifically it was about the Stark family, and even more specifically it was about Eddard Stark, who dies nine episodes in, and his wife Cat, who is killed in the third season.

In the broad sense, family dominates every aspect of the series from episode one. We meet the Starks, and learn their internal dynamics, their tensions, their traditions and strong and weak points. We meet the Lannisters and Baratheons and learn the same about them. We meet the Targaryens, ditto. Ditto, too, the Greyjoys, the Martells, the Tyrells, the Boltons and Tullys and Tarlys, the Night's Watch (which is a brotherhood), etc. and so on. And every time a new family is introduced, we get a sense of who they are, how they deal with each other, what they want, and what they fear. Far more time on GoT is devoted to family dynamics than to sex, torture, fighting, fleeing, questing, or anything else. And it makes perfect sense that this is the case. In my estimation, all the best TV shows are always in some sense about family, whether the characters are actually related or not. It is not the blood-relation which matters, but the dynamic, because everyone recognizes it, everyone relates to it, everyone gets it. And they get it all the more because TV and movie characters tend toward archetype, and GoT in particular is full of them. Let's face it: everyone's real-life family tree contains, in less dramatic and more watered-down versions, a Ned, a Cersei, a Littlefinger, a Sansa, an Arya, a Davos, a Jamie, a Joffrey, a Tywin, a Tyrion, a Stannis. These characters are simply mirrors for people already in our lives, or sometimes images of people we wish were in them -- the protective older brother, the kindly uncle, the loving sister, the wise old grandparent.

Among the families, the Starks are the first introduced to us, and it is they who produce the largest number of important characters on the show -- of the nine of them we initially meet (I'm counting Theon as a Stark, which, ultimately he chose to be), only Rickon is basically ballast. Everyone else is crucial, except Benjen, who is merely important. The Lannisters just about match this figure, but it's obvious from the moment they appear onscreen that this ruthless, incestuous, dark-scheming lot has only one really sympathetic member -- Tyrion, who is also the family shame, black-sheep and reprobate. Put another way, we know the Lannisters are the bad guys the moment we see them, and in knowing this, we also know the show is not truly about them. They are in the last extremity just an opposing force, the anti-Starks. All, or very nearly all, the moral force in GAME OF THRONES comes from the Stark family and their friends and allies.

But what was that bosh about the show being about Ned Stark, who dies in the ninth episode of the first season, and who never reappears, not even as a flashback, and Cat Stark, who only lasts two seasons longer? It isn't bosh, actually. You see, the old saw about a man's worth being shown through is children is basically the entire through-line for GAME OF THRONES. We see what sort of children the Lannisters and Baratheons and Targaryens and Boltons and Freys bred. In comparison, the Starks, even their presumed bastard Jon and their hostage stepchild Theon, shine in comparison. There is magic about this, no "chosen one" sword-from-the-stone bullshit. The Stark kids are good because Ned was a strong, brave, moral, ethical, and disciplined man, and because Cat was loyal, loving and kind. The parents die rather swiftly, but they live on through their children and the actions those children take.

Many people were dismayed and angry by Dany's fate in the series finale. I can only say that if your dismay comes from the fact that she did not live to take the Iron Throne, you may have misread her place in the scheme of the story. Dany, like Cersei, was a star of the show but never the star of the show. She was there to present a second external dynamic, the first being the Lannisters. It takes two forces to make a millstone, and the Starks were to be ground between these two very different slabs for eight years. The identical ambitions of Cersei and Dany were in the last analysis just different kinds of exterior pressures on the Starks, and since the show was ultimately about the Starks, the millstones had to be broken sooner or later.

The internal logic of this holds tight: if the Starks represent the power of a good family uprbinging, the Lannisters and to some extent the Targaryens represent the reverse. All the Lannisters are dysfunctional, and the Targaryen sibilings so damaged by their penniless exile that one of them is already insane when the story opens, while the other feels such a sense of entitlement to power that all her other qualities slowly drown. Neither family never really had a chance. As Sherlock Holmes once remarked, "How can you build a foundation on such quicksand?"

This is not to say I approved of the course of GoT's eighth season. Not at all. I thought the writing, plotting and particularly the characterization were lacking from the beginning. It was almost as if an entirely new set of writers, only superficially versed with the material, had been handed over the reins and told to go forward at a gallop. Everything felt rushed and forced, nothing was developed properly, Dany, Varys and Cersei behaved inconsistently, and the plot holes were endless. The absence of George Martin's hand on the tiller was palpable. Subtlety had been lost, and resolution of storylines was replaced by mere deaths. But the finale, riddled with WTF head-scratchers as it is, stays true to the basic internal logic I mentioned above, in that it remains about family -- specifically the Starks. It is their story. In that sense it left me satisfied.

GAME OF THRONES wasn't just a hit TV series. It truly was a phenomenon that offered, if not something for everyone, then certainly a lot of things to many people. It gave us heroes we could admire and villains we could despise, and set them in a spacious, well-appointed universe that was in some senses totally alien and in others completely familiar. It offered us sex, nudity, torture, violence, love, humor, pathos, philosophy and endless spools of intrigue. It was a soap opera in armor, a female-empowered show with plenty of T & A, a polemic about the price of power and thoughtful, intelligent fantasy that used the word "cunt" about 40 times a script. It was eight years of waiting for winter to come, and then, from fans, endless bitching about the temperature.

But mostly it was about family. And nobody can delight us...or disappoint us...quite like family.

And Still More Fiction For Ya

At the risk of seeming repetitious, I have another new release to crow about.

"The Arch Criminals," the second of three new short stories set in the violent but often black-comic world of CAGE LIFE, is now available for download on Amazon for the very reasonable price of 99 cents.

If you've missed the violent bumblings of Gino Stillitano's mafia crew since the release of KNUCKLE DOWN: A CAGE LIFE NOVEL in late 2016, this tale of robbery gone wrong ought to give you the fix you've been craving. But if you're new to the CAGE LIFE universe (which I am now pompously referring to as the CLU), be aware that these stories function perfectly well as stand-alones. It is not necessary to have read either of the novels in the series or the previous short story, "The First Day of School," to take a crack at "The Arch Criminals." These three tales are simply stories about life in the lower rungs of organized crime. They are amoral stories used to teach a moral of sorts, which is that crime is a lot like dealing with the devil: no matter how shiny the baubles it seems to offer you, the cost is ultimately your soul.

And that's just for starters.

Next Monday I will release the final (for now) story in this particular arc, a longish short called "Horse Shoes & Hand Grenades."

In the mean time expect a blog that has absolutely nothing to do with any of this, and quite soon.

Revelation, or; I've Got New Fiction For Ya

The First Day of School

I've heard life compared to just about everything you can name, but never to gambler's luck. To me, however, the analogy is fitting. If you ask any gambler how they are, they won't tell you about their health, their job, their spouse, kids or mother -- nope, they'll tell you how the dice are rolling: hot, cold or lukewarm. It is of intense interest to me that of the three states, it is the centermost which seems the least appealing to the gambler. He wants to be hot, but if he isn't hot, he'd rather be ice-cold than merely tepid. A cold streak, however long and bitter, is always thought of as ending with a sudden flare of heat. Lukewarmness can go either way, or worse yet, linger indefinitely.

It's my personal belief that most people, wherther they gamble or not, prefer one extreme or the other and rarely the middle. This is not logical, but humans seem to have an instinctive dislike for for all things wishy-washy. They prefer the clear-cut, the definite, the sharp-edged, and they prefer these things not only in their lives but their relationships. Nothing is worse than someone who doesn't know where they stand or how they feel about you, and according to the Bible, even God feels this way. In Revelations 3:16, the Lord says, "I know your deeds; you are neither cold nor hot. How I wish you were one or the other! So because you are lukewarm— neither hot nor cold— I am about to spit you out of My mouth!" God, it seems, would rather deal with a hardcore sinner or a pious devotee: what He can't stand is someone who straddles the fence.

The life of a writer is very much like the life of a gambler. Writers live for weeks, months and even years in the cold, trying to sell stories or pitch novels or win contests, dealing all the while with rejections and indifference (and the poverty, anxiety and depression that come with them), and for the most part they take it quite well. There is probably the same proportion of fools in the writing world as everywhere else, but not so many fools that most writers don't know what they are getting into when they decide to "make a living" by writing. (The very act itself is itself usually contradiction in terms.) The thing is, while writing may be what our British cousins call a "bad job," it is not a swindle. The cards are on the table and there to be read from the very first day. Thus, the cold doesn't bother us quite as much as people tenjd to think. It hurts, but it's an expected hurt, like frostbite in Siberia.

In 2016 I decided to ignore the advice of most of my peers and become an independent author. I knew in doing this I was, in effect, building a house in Siberia. Shit was gonna be cold, possibly for years to come. It was a decision I made wide-eyed and so far I don't regret it despite all the frostbite, because -- unlike many of my colleagues, who are plagued with more self-doubt than talent, even when their talent is considerable -- I knew that my product was what Hawkeye Pierce would have called "the Finest Kind." I'm good. I know I'm good. I believe in myself and I don't give a fuck if a certain lack of modesty in this regard alienates people or makes me look arrogant. I know I'm not arrogant. I just believe in myself, in my talents and in the enormous amount of hard work I have devoted over many years to mastering my craft (and yes, I know nobody ever really masters anything: to be a master is simply to admit you're a lifetime student, an act of humility that is the opposite of arrogance.) I am able to endure the cold and the ole chilblains because I know the sun is out there, and that bitch is hot.

Yesterday I experienced some of its heat. As I have already told you, my short story anthology, DEVILS YOU KNOW, was named a Finalist in the prestigious (some might say snobby, but you didn't hear it from me) Eric Hoffer Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing. This was a big deal, and while I'm not going to (further) crow about it here, it was precisely the blast of warmth I needed to keep the enterprise known as me going along my Siberian landscape. Some folks work for the weekend: I work for the moments when somebody pats me on the head and hands me a trophy. They are few and far between, and the glory they inspire and engender is fleeting...but goddamn, are they enjoyable.

So: I love the heat and I can take the cold. Bully for me. Yet like any gambler, I despise those lukewarm periods, and until yesterday I was dog-paddling on one for what seemed like aeons. My book promotions for April weren't flops, but they weren't successes either, and this neither-hot-nor-cold shit slopped into May. No matter how aggressively or intelligently I attacked the problem of selling books and getting my name and my work out there, the response was, well, goddamn it, lukewarm. So an idea struck me, and I decided to follow up on it in the hopes of changing the temperature.

When I wrote the first draft of what eventually became CAGE LIFE...well, that was a very long time ago, and I knew almost nothing about how to write a novel. In fact, I knew so little that I ended up writing enough material for three full-length books without once ever coming within screaming distance of what could properly be called a plot. Over the course of years, and graduate school, and my friendship with the author Pat Picciarelli and my graduate-school classmate and editor Mike Dell, I managed to hack and chisel and sand that mountain of words into a lean-and-mean little book that has (so far) won three rather hefty awards of its own. The process, however, was tough. It was in fact a cast-iron bastard. When you write 300,000 words and cut, oh, 225,000 of them, that's a lot of pencil-shavings, man. A lot of reel that ends up on the cutting-room floor. It's the price of crossing the finish line, but it's a hefty price and not one you enjoy paying.

Now, I have few virtues, but one of them is resilience, which various ex-girlfriends (and my father) would have called stubborness. So I never really accepted that all that writing, all those years of effort, were completely for naught. In that enormous heap of chapters that couldn't or didn't make it into CAGE LIFE or its sequel, KNUCKLE DOWN, I knew there were a lot of pearls, a lot of jewels, and hell, a even more semi-precious stones that could be picked up, given a polish and allowed to see daylight on their own. In fact, I even published one of them in the magazine Eye Contact in 2010, an enjoyably nasty little piece called "Unfinished Business." But it wasn't until Disney began riffing on the STAR WARS films with stuff like Rogue One and Solo that I got the idea that I could, if I wished, unleash a whole slew of these stories, independent of my novels yet set in the same universe. Stand-alone pieces, yet part of what might be called the "CLU."

The first of these, published when I was hot, was "Killing Time," which briefly spiked into the top 100 short stories selling on Amazon. But then a long, long lukewarm period followed and I released no more. But because even God spits out that which neither cold nor hot, I sifted through the enormity of material I had -- what young-uns call "content" -- and found some truly hot stuff.

Yesterday I released "The First Day of School." In this black-comic tale, a riff on BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, Mafia capo Gino Stillitano orders his underling Mick Watts to find the outlaw biker Remo and come back...with his ear. Needless to say, things don't go as planned, but when do they ever, in Mick's life, or in mine?

On the thirteenth of May I will follow it up with "The Arch-Criminals." This is another exercise in black comedy taken from the real-life experiences of Henry Hill of GOODFELLAS fame, in which our long-suffering protagonist participates in what the mob calls "a give-up." (A give-up is when you rob someone, but the victim is in on the robbery.)

Finally, on May 20, I am releasing "Horse Shoes & Hand Grenades," which is not comedy, black or otherwise, but a gruesome demonstration of how little honor there is among thieves...especially when the thieves fuck up a hit on a made man and don't try to pick up the pieces so much as cut each other with them.

There is, of course, a lot more forthcoming. Stories in the CAGE LIFE universe will be appearing at irregular intervals for years to come, even as I work on the third book in the series, and even as I release works in other genres. Crime is hardly the only oeuvre in which I write -- see yesterday's blog -- but it is the genre in which I began my large-scale professional writing career and it is a well to which I will always return, so long as the material and the audience remain. As I said at the beginning, writers are a lot like gamblers, and I'm betting my own particular house (modest as it may be) that this hot streak will last.

(All gamblers are suckers, of course, but that's another story entirely.)

Devils You Know

Devils You Know

Today would have been my father's 81st birthday. This is an especially melancholy fact because he died in 1993, at the age of fifty-four, and though he lived a full life in the sense of experience, travel and accomplishment, he hardly was granted that privilege where it (perhaps) counts most -- in the actual number of his living days.

I was barely twenty-one years old when my father died, and at that point in my life little more than a dissolute fraternity boy -- drunk most of the time, failing all of his classes, content simply to chase women and sleep 'til one in the afternoon. Part of this behavior could be traced to the strain the terminal illness of a parent places on a son, and part of it was simple selfishness. In any event, my father never got to see much in the way of academic excellence or creative success from his youngest child, nor much maturity or responsibility.

Now, perhaps it's just a coincidence, but this morning, his birthday, I awoke to discover that my book DEVILS YOU KNOW had been named a Finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing. As the Hoffer people told me in their message, "We consider this a distinction of its own merit." That is because though the Hoffer Awards have many thousands of entrants every year, they list less than 10% as Finalists, and bestow an award upon each (hence the capital "F").

This is an especially satisfying moment for me, not merely because of the timing, but because the work in question is perhaps the most personal thing I have yet published.

DEVILS YOU KNOW is a collection of thirteen short stories I wrote from 1990 to 2016. Some of them had been previously published, others I wrote specifically for the anthology itself. As I noted in the book's introduction, "these stories are not my life's work, but they are the work of a lifetime." Twenty-six years of it, anyway. I published DEVILS mainly because I was anxious to show the world that the genre of my debut novel, CAGE LIFE, was hardly the limit of my literary ambitions. In traditional publishing, when a person writes a horror novel, or a mystery or a thriller or a work of romantic suspense or any other damned thing, they are immediately pigeonholed: their publishers, agents and promoters say, "Good! Now write one of these a year until you die." Well, CAGE LIFE was a gritty, almost Pulpish crime novel, and while I enjoyed every moment of writing it (well, most of 'em, anyway) I hardly wanted to spend the rest of my life jamming lightning back into that particular bottle. The truth is, I read in almost every genre: why shouldn't I write in them all, too, if that's what pleases me?

Refusal to be pigeonholed, and an extreme reluctance to publish under a pseudonym -- my parents gave me my name, why use another? -- are the principal reasons I decided against traditional publishing as platform for my works. Had I a traditional publisher, DEVILS YOU KNOW would never have seen the light of day. They would not have allowed it. And frankly, the stories contained within are too goddamned good not to be read by anyone curious enough to do so. So I'd like to take a moment to introduce you briefly to each of the thirteen stories within:

THE ADVERSARIAL PROCESS - There are seven stages to grief. They begin with shock and end with acceptance, and somewhere in between are bargaining and anger. But in the mind of a powerful man, a man used to getting what he wants, bargaining and anger might become confused -- or simply fused. So that what follows is not so much bargaining as blackmail. Or extortion. This is the story of a high-powered lawyer in the depths of grief, whose grudge against God takes a turn so dark he needs a match to light his way.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS - Two guys walk into a bar. One is a gangster. One used to be. One is deep in the Life. The other is in Witness Protection. Time has passed, but it does not heal all wounds... and now there is time for one more.

A STORY NEVER TOLD - Paris, 1944. The Allies have liberated the City of Lights after years of grim German occupation. A young American infantry lieutenant, on his way back to the front after recovering from a wound, encounters a larger-than-life war correspondent in a bar on the Rue Daunou. And discovers that it isn't always wise to meet your heroes. Especially when you've had too much to drink.

NOSFERATU - Hannibal Raus believes in Hitler and his vision for Germany. He's willing to kill for it and, in the most honorable traditions of his country, he's willing to die for it, too. But when his determination to win a battle against the Soviet army lands him in an SS field hospital, he discovers there are men willing to go much further than he is for the sake of victory. All the way to hell.

IDENTITY CRISIS - Billy Verecker has a problem. He doesn't know who he is. He never has. And the harder he tries to find an identity, the more elusive it becomes. Would anyone notice if he died? Probably not. But that thought leads to another. Would anyone notice if he killed?

THE SHROUD - It's 1865, the South has lost the war, and there's nothing to be done for an ex-rebel but ride home and pick up the pieces. That's just what Simon Bonventre, the heir to the mighty plantation Court Royal, intends to do. There are only a few small obstacles: the bullet in his ribs, the fact that his horse is dying and the company of Union cavalry in his way.

SHADOWS AND GLORY - Germany. 1940. Hitler has ordered his U-boats to starve Britain into submission, and Commander Kurt Reinhard has answered the call -- so successfully he is now known as the "Lion of the Atlantic." Only his son Karl suspects that his father's devotion to the regime is not what it should be. But can a boy raised by the Hitler Youth reconcile loyalty to the Führer with love for a father who longs to turn his back on war?

D.S.A. - MacAfee is not the questioning sort. He marches where he's told to march, burns what he's told to burn, kills who he's told to kill. It's easier that way; easier to do and not to think. Then one day, in the middle of the Second American Civil War, he meets a man who has a story to tell, and that story gets MacAfee questioning everything.

ROADTRIP - There are times when what you see is what you get. There are others when nothing is what it is seems. In this story, four old friends hit the road in a convertible as the sun goes down, looking to have a little fun. But just what constitutes their idea of fun is anybody's guess...and somebody's nightmare.

A FEVER IN THE BLOOD - Revolutions start in the damnedest places. Beer halls in Munich. Bastilles in Paris. Village greens in Lexington and Concord. You never know what's going to set people off. It could be taxes. It could be war. It could be oppression, racism or greed. In this case, however, it's none of the above. What destroys the social order and plunges the whole city into chaos? An idiot on a cell phone. Think it's implausible? Look who's running for office.

THE ACTION - When his outfit gets diverted from the Eastern Front to help suppress the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, veteran German soldier Gerhard "Gigi" Gadermann just wants to make sure his naive young cousin survives the battle. It turns out, however, that there are much worse dangers lurking in Warsaw than bullets and bombs: there is the awful realization that the most terrifying thing a man can face in war is himself.

PLEAS AND THANK YOUS - Johnny Morra is no stranger to violence. He's a gangster, for God's sake. But when his boss orders a man tortured to death with a chain saw for a minor transgression, Johnny decides he's had enough. He's leaving the mob, right now. The only thing in his way is...the rest of the mob.

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW - Did you ever wonder what you were doing here? What your purpose was -- in this life, on this earth, at this moment? You're not alone. Doubt is everywhere. It creeps into the most unlikely places. The most unlikely people. The most unlikely...things. But never fear. There are those who don't have those doubts, those fears, or those feelings of existential angst. In fact, there are those who don't feel anything at all. And tonight, you're going to meet one of them. Isn't that comforting?

Thus DEVILS YOU KNOW. An unlucky number of stories come together to underscore a specific theme: that our devils -- fear and lust, hatred and jealousy, madness and bigotry and wrath and spite -- are part of who we are, but not always our ultimate evils and, in any case, occasionally good for a chuckle or two. If you know me at all, personally or through my work, you know that I believe that while the devil often gains the upper hand in our lives, his victories tend to be fleeting. It's true that darkness is the natural state of the universe, but it's also true -- scientifically true -- that darkness cannot exist in the presence of light.

Well. It's 5:03 PM, a rare-as-a-total-eclipse thunderstorm has just broken over my modest Burbank home, and I'm off to Hollywood to watch a screening of ALIEN RESURRECTION with my friend Mark, who, as it happened, played one of the aliens in the film. It's a strange life we lead, my devils and I... but we wouldn't have it any other way.

Happy birthday, Dad.

The Memory Hole, or: Get It While You Can

A few days ago the surviving creators of THE SIMPSONS made an announcement which was greeted by little in the way of fanfare. As Fatherly.com reported:

"A beloved episode of The Simpsons is disappearing from the show’s online platform, syndication, and future physical media editions. The reason? It guest stars Michael Jackson."

The episode in question, "Stark Raving Dad," is considered one of the best and funniest shows produced during the golden age of America's longest-running primetime series. In it, Homer meets a man who believes himself to be Michael Jackson, and the faux-Michael (voiced by Jackson himself), teaches Homer and Bart a number of valuable life-lessons, some of them articulated through song. Due to the recent release of the documentary NEVERLAND, however, which alleges Jackson was a serial pedophile, "Stark Raving Dad" will no longer be commercially available. It has gone down what George Orwell would have referred to as "the memory hole."

In past blogs I have discussed the Roman concept of "damnatio memorae." It was a practice of destroying all physical traces of the existence of a disgraced Roman -- smashing his statues, chipping his name off monuments, striking his image off currency, etc. and so on. Those who were "damned in memory" were in effect, made "unpersons" almost 2,000 years before Orwell penned his famous novels about the malleability of the past, ANIMAL FARM and 1984. Michael Jackson, like Bill Cosby immediately before him, is now in the process of becoming an unperson, and as part of the process the media which bears his likeness and voice is systematically being effaced from the earth.

Some people applaud this sort of thing. Others have deep reservations about the wider implications of using an eraser on any type of history. I have already discussed the arguments about "separating the art from the artist" in either direction and have no wish to bring them up again. What I want to discuss here is something which came up again and again during my years working in the video game industry. It is the concept of ownership, which is undergoing a remarkable change even as you read this.

On the surface nothing could be simpler than the idea of ownership, and this was particularly true as a kid, when I first became interested in video games. Once you had a cartridge or a tape, or later, a disc, it was yours and required no additional time, effort or money to continue its operation. Best of all, so long as it was properly stored, it could last indefinitely. As evidence of this I exhibit my old Atari 800XL, which must have been purchased in 1980 or so. With one exception, every one of the cartridges my father bought for me for this game, and most of the discs, still function perfectly. I can play Pac Man, or Castle Wolfenstein, or the infuriating Transylvania (which I've been playing since 1982 and still can't beat), just as I did as a boy of ten. I can, and do, haul out these primitive but oh-so-enjoyable games and play them with my neice and nephew, and it's my fervent wish that if I ever have children, I can pass the system down to them. That, kids, is ownership.

At some point in the last two decades, however, the internet began to change the basic ideas behind gaming. The invention of online games -- games which allowed you to escape the self-contained confines of a cartridge or disc, and move around in a large world populated both by "bots" and other players -- revolutionized everything. Gaming became an immersive, ongoing, multi-player experience. It is now possible to log in and enter a world populated by dozens, hundreds, even thousands of other players -- to compete against them or join forces with them, depending on the demands of the game and the quirks of your own personality.

This development in gaming came at a price. When customers purchased a game, they were no longer receiving physical media, they were, in essence, simply paying for a sort of interactive television channel in which they had the ability to control one character. In practical terms, this put them completely at the mercy of those who controlled the game. It was now possible for two scenarios to unfold which would have been impossible in my day, the Era of Atari. Firstly, the game companies could and did offer "micro-transactions" which allowed players to pay more to receive bennies within the game (meaning that the initial purchase was just that -- the first payment, not the last). Worse, and dealing directly with the subject at hand, it also meant that any time a game developer wanted to discontinue a game, it could do so simply by shutting down the servers which supported it. Thus, if you paid $65 for a game and another $50 in micro-transactions, you might still find yourself out of a game a few years down the road. The company could simply pull the plug. Your ownership, in a sense, would be revoked. And this has happened to modern gamers more than once.

When one pays for something but does not truly own it, one does not own: one rents or leases. There is a world of difference in those words, and this brings me back to THE SIMPSONS.

"Star Raving Dad" is the first episode of the third season of the show, and as of now it will no longer be available in any legal way to those who wish to see it...unless, of course, like me, they bought the DVD, in which case nobody can tell them they can't watch it if they so choose.

I have quite a collection of DVDs. I have been buying them for going on 20 years and continue to do so despite the existence of Blu-Ray and various streaming services. I do this for the same reason I still occasionally buy VHS tapes of movies: I do not want to rent what I own. At the risk of sounding like any one of several characters on GAME OF THRONES, if Miles Watson owns something, he owns it.

People who swear by Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu etc., etc. do not have to deal with bulky DVDs or even bulkier VHS tapes. They don't have to worry about scratching them or losing them or breaking them or cleaning them. Their libraries of films and music and so forth are available instantly through any device with an internet connection. The advantages of this are obvious, but the disadvantages are painful. When the powers that be decide that Michael Jackson or Bill Cosby is now an unperson, they can also decide -- for you -- that the media of such people is no longer for public consumption. Chill with Netflix all you want: you'll never see "Stark Raving Dad" on it, nor will you catch "I, Spy" or "The Cosby Show." Before long you may not have access to any of Michael Jackson's music whether you paid for it or not. And should you have a yen for the unretouched, as-seen-in-theaters versions of the original STAR WARS films, well, guess what? You're out of luck. George Lucas took them out of circulation many years ago. They are no longer for sale in any medium, nor are they available on a streaming service. All of it is now out of your reach without resorting to illegal YouTube channels or other forms of soft or hard piracy, and in time they may be out of your reach altogether.

Faith in the Cloud, in any purely digital medium, is faith that your masters are beneficient and will never choose to take what you possess away from you. I lack this faith for the same reason I wholeheartedly support the Second Amendment. I put not my faith in princes. Never have, never will. Nobody is better qualified than me to decide what the hell I choose to lawfully posess.

We must face a hard truth. As time goes on, and our culture becomes more sensitive and more righteous about, well, everything, more and more artists will be discovered to be harboring ugly secrets of one kind or another. It is the inevitable outcome of the climate in which we live, and it will just as inevitably lead to more censorship of this type. Most recently, an almost 50 year-old interview with John Wayne, during which he said offensive things about blacks, gays, Native Americans etc., has been used to strengthen demands that the airport named in his honor be renamed. I couldn't care less one way or the other, but I am greatly concerned that this extremely belated outrage (Wayne died forty years ago) will call for demands that his films -- and he made nearly 100, including a number of all-time classics in various genres -- be removed from store shelves and streaming services. I am even more concerned that spineless executives at various studios will accede to them, setting a very dangerous precedent indeed.

Twelve years in the entertainment industry have taught me all I need to know about the moral courage of Hollywood executives.

Obviously I have no sympathy whatsoever with rapists like Cosby or (alleged) child molesters like Jackson. Such crimes are unforgivable and deserve all the disgust and anger we can muster. Nor am I a fan of John Wayne as a human being -- I never was, actually: even as a kid he struck me as a jingo patriot with a taste for bullying roles. But that is neither here nor there. The issue at hand is whether I, as an adult residing in an allegedly free country, have the choice to own the works of people who have in some cases gone beyond the pale in their personal or professional lives. It is also whether whether what I buy is my property or merely a rental which can be taken away from me at the convenience / whim of its true owners.

Most people who know me know I'm a libertarian, one who believes in personal freedom. And one of the most fundamental expressions of personal freedom is the right to decide for oneself what one reads, listens to, or watches on television. The country, however, is moving increasingly in the direction of centralized control, a state of affairs in which a self-appointed "elite" decides on our behalf what we need to see, hear, and in time, think. No need to develop aesthetic tastes or political, economic or religious opinions on your own, folks! Big Brother -- or Big Sister -- will do it for you.

Y'all might be thinking I'm making too much out of something as trivial as a 22 minute cartoon. Y'all may be right. But my money, as always, is on me. Having as much historical information crammed in my head as I do, I know all too well how easy it is to destroy the foundations of human freedom. Blasting powder and sledgehammers aren't required. Like Andy Dufraine in The Shawshank Redemption, who broke out of prison by slowly chipping away at the prison walls with a tiny hammer, the people who want to tell us how to think are content to play a very long game indeed.

Fuck Twitter.

We all don't swim in the same sewer.
– Clive Cussler

It was the last day of seventh grade, and I had a decision to make. A particularly ugly-minded bully, who had been one of the banes of my existence from September of 1984 until June of 1985, was getting off the bus about 100 yards away. I hated this kid enough to have killed him if I'd had the nerve, means and opportunity (fortunately for both of us, I was lacking all three), so I had settled on a much smaller-scale revenge. Specifically, I was going to shout a long stream of abuse at him, telling him exactly what I thought of his intelligence, hygine, family and prospects for future success: I was then going to run the very small distance, no more than 20 yards, to the safety of my own home. According to my plan, the bully would have all summer to brood over the names I had called him while I remained torturously out of his reach. Like most bullies he was astonishingly egotistical and vain, and the thought of grubby little Miles Watson, with his greasy hair and his hand-me-down clothes, having gotten the better of him, even for an instant, would have poisoned his entire summer. The thought of it warmed the cuckles of my twelve year-old heart.

When the moment came, however – that is, when I saw the bully emerge from the bus, such nerve as I did possess failed me. It was not precisely cowardice that froze my vocal chords, but the realization that my plan might actually be too successful for my own good. The bully would indeed have three months to brood, and by the time we met again, on the first day of eighth grade, he might concievably make it his first-day priority to exact a terrible, well-thought-out vengeance upon me.

So in the end I said nothing and trudged home. It was a discouraging way to end a bad year and I felt very much like the coward I believed myself to be.

Cut to the present day. Like just about everyone else on the planet, grown up Miles Watson has a cellular phone – a “mobile device” as they are more accurately called. On this device are many applications which I use every day. There are quite a few others I rarely bother with but keep as a kind of security blanket. There is only which comes and goes, being downloaded only to be erased a few days later in a fit of disgust...and then, inevitability, downloaded again. There is a name for this app. It is called Twitter.

As a man who grew up without mobile devices or the Internet, I entered my online phase of life the way a man enters a very cold body of water: toes first. I didn't get an e-mail account until 1998, and did not use a cell phone until 2004. The existence of my Facebook account is owed entirely to the actions of three female members of the York College swim team who barricaded themselves in my room one night in 2006 and started up a profile for me against my will (it was three days before they even gave me the password). Nevertheless, once I sank into the strange waters of cyberspace, I found myself reluctant to leave. E-mail was convenient, and for a long time so was instant messaging. Cell phones were an even larger convenience, and Facebook, while annoying, was also quite...well, convenient. Of Twitter I knew nothing until 2008, when I first heard it mentioned on the radio. People were terribly enthusiastic about it, which seemed to me sufficient cause to avoid it – and avoid it I did, for almost ten years. Then I went and became an author.

Whoops.

In the old days – meaning, I'm sad to say, the time I grew up in – it was sufficient for an author simply to write. Everything else, including personal appearances, book signings, guest spots on television, etc. and so on, were handled for him by his publisher. But things have changed, and authors of all kinds are expected to spend enormities of time online, drumming up free publicity by posting their every thought on social media platforms...just like Twitter. It is because of Twitter that I know much Stephen King hates Donald Trump. It is because of Twitter that I know how cantankerous William Shatner really is. And it is because of Twitter that I realize how few people in positions of political power know how to spell at the level of a sixth grader. But this is not my beef with the platform. The tweets I've read from hockey players, actors, comedians, writers, politicians, pundits, and so on are not any more ungrammatical or poorly written on that platform than they are on Facebook or Instagram. No, what differentiates Twitter from the others, what makes me walk away from whatever following I manage to build and then come back, weeks or months later, to make a half-hearted attempt to rebuild it before I inevitably abandon it again, is a phenomenon directly related to the incident I recounted at the beginning of this blog. This phenomenon exists everywhere on the internet -- it is as ubiquitously found online as Old Bay is on the shelves of Maryland crab shacks -- but it seems to live on Twitter, just as the devil is reputed to live in hell.

When I was a kid, the expression “telephone tough guy” was what “keyboard warrior” is today. It described someone who talked tough from a distance, i.e. when there was no actual possibility of being held to account for his words. Examples of telephone tough-guy-ism in the 80s were not just limited to yelling abuse over a phone line: it included shouting invective at visiting teams at football games, shouting similar nonsense at pedestrians from the passenger seat of your best friend's car, spewing fighting words on a playground when you had five or six friends to make sure no fist every touched you in retaliation, or performing some aggressive act on a stronger person an instant before an authority figure like a teacher, parent or cop walked into view. Simply put, it was an act of calculated cowardice.

In 1985, I wanted to yell the ugliest insults I could think of that at the afformentioned bully. I knew I could get to my door faster than he could get to me, and I knew our paths would never cross during the summer, giving me a temporary victory over him. But I also knew that three months down the road, if he remembered the insults, he might finally exact vengeance, a vengeance which might be all the more terrible because he'd had to wait 90 long days to get it. So I kept my mouth shut and felt myself a coward. It was only much later that I realized how prudent, and in a certain sense, how principled, my decision had actually been.

Growing up in the 80s, I came from a time where those who talked the talk, but could not walk the walk, were an especially hated and despised group. They ranked far beneath mere cowards or weaklings in social status. It was considered much nobler to be the downtrodden victim of bullying than it was to be the sort who talked a lot of smoke around friends and classmates when it was safe to do so, and then quietly handed over his lunch money when the bully approached. A weakling, after all, was only a weakling: a weakling who pretended to strength was also a fake, which was infinitely worse. He was held in contempt by both bullies and by his fellow weaklings, who at least had the dignity of being who they were. I knew, standing at my bus stop in June of 1985, that I was unwilling to engage my bully in single combat. I knew my petty revenge could only be exacted if I did it from a distance and then ran and, in essence, let geography allow me to hide until the following September. In short, I knew I could only score off of the bully by becoming a telephone tough guy. I was unwilling to do this. As Xander Harris once said on Buffy: “I'm not doing this. I have my pride. Granted, I don't have a lot of my pride, but I have enough that I'm not doing this.”

What does this have to do with Twitter, you ask? Much. Very much indeed. You see, every time I dip a toe into the Twitterverse, what strikes me immediately is the change in standards which has occurred between 1985 and 2019. The telephone tough guy, a.k.a. the keyboard warrior, is no longer a despised, ridiculed minority, held in contempt even by the lower rungs of the social hierarchy. Oh no. On Twitter, the model of values is set upon its head, and those who talk the most shit are held in the highest esteem. Every day, these people, from both sexes and all races and every possible walk of life, send out tweets calculated to humiliate or to enrage people they have never met and have little to no prospect of meeting – and the more successful they are at it, the larger their following becomes. It scarcely matters whether the subject at hand is politics, sex, race, religion, movies, books, comedy, music – the idea seems to be to signal as many virtues as you can while simultaneously spewing as much vitriol as possible. This in itself might not be so bad if, say, Twitter were like the UFC. In the UFC, a fighter can boast about his or her abilities as much as they want, and at the same time insult and provoke every other fighter on the roster in the nastiest, most juvenile way possible: the critical difference is that a trash-talking fighter must sooner or later be locked into an eight-sided cage with the person they have insulted, giving said individual the chance to smash them in the face and choke them unconscious. It doesn't necessarily make communication between fighters more civilized, but it does force the fighters to be prepared to back up what they say online...which makes them, in my mind, nobler creatures than the trash-talking cowards you otherwise encounter on Twitter.

What it boils down to, really, is the age-old idea of being held accountable for what you say. Whenever I watch the old TV mini-series NORTH AND SOUTH, what strikes me is the way dueling culture influenced manners in antebellum America. The elaborate courtesy that strikes us all as so affected and ridiculous today, was simply a by-product of a society where it was common, even expected, for men who had been offended to demand satisfaction in the form of a duel to the death. The fear of being called out had softening effects on speech, on manners, even on the written word. Of course I am not quite old enough to remember the antebellum South, but some feeble, lingering echo of the old conceptions of honor did still resonate in the Maryland of my childhood. They manifested in a series of unwritten rules known to all children, foremost of which was: don't insult anyone you aren't prepared to fight.

Some people may ask: is it a good thing that people should go around in fear that a fast lip might become a fat one? For me, the answer is yes. The truth is that we live in a world where the idea that actions have consequences has been steadily eroding for decades. The extent to which it has crumbled is easy enough to prove by exploring any Twitter feed for just five minutes. On Twitter, everyone feels free to fire as many missiles as they wish in any direction they choose, secure in the knowledge there will be no actual consequence, and that they will never be physically confronted by the people they are attacking. This consequence-free environment has emboldened the cowardly, armed the feckless, and put ersatz strength into weaklings whose opinions would ordinarily and rightfully be disregarded. It has fostered an atmosphere where not the most intelligent, the most principled or the most reasonable voices are heard, but merely the loudest and most obnoxious. And it has acted as a subtle but persistent cut into the foundation stones of any healthy society: respect, toughness, and personal accountability. Freedom of speech is vital to any healthy human society, but freedom of speech has always been accompanied by the concomitant knowledge that words are dangerous things, and like any dangerous thing, have to be handled carefully and responsibly. This is precisely what has been destroyed during my own lifetime -- the idea that you might actually have to cash the check with your ass that you wrote with your mouth. The fact is that a lot more people need to be punched in the mouth for what they Tweet. The pain and humiliation would prove valuable lessons, one of which is: don't start what you can't finish.

It so happens that some years after the incident in question, I finally put the boots to the bully of this story. It happened in a hallway in high school, probably in 1988, and it was immensely satisfying. Passing me in the hallway, he made as if to hit me: when I flinched, he smirked and muttered, “Bitch!” It was the wrong day to make that remark, and I jumped him, right then and there. Yet what struck me about the fight, when it finally happened, is how one-sided it was. I hit him with two or three punches to the body and kicked him in the ass as hard as I could, and that was it – he did not even attempt to strike back once I began hitting him. The bully, it turned out, was a coward: I probably could have gotten him off my back much sooner, and spared myself much suffering, if I'd only acted sooner. But the lesson had to be learned. It was not I who was the telephone tough guy, it was him. But in that hot, sticky summer day three years earlier, I realized I was not yet prepared to fight my tormentor, so I kept my mouth shut. Any excursion on Twitter makes me wish millions of others would do the same.

The Gift of Burbank, or; Things I Learned From My Orange Tree

Six years ago I moved from Los Angeles to Burbank. As the car drives, that is a distance of about 10.5 miles. In practical terms, it is roughly the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Los Angeles, especially the area in which I previously resided, known as Mid-City West, is densely populated, noisy, traffic-congested and more or less urban in feel. The neighborhoods around you -- Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Hollywood proper, the Miracle Mile and so forth -- are all along the most famous and the most heavily visited in the city. Real estate is at a premium and getting more expensive by the minute (when I moved into Park La Brea in 2010, I paid $1,420 for a one-bedroom apartment: as of today the same apartment goes for about $2,000). Just about every aspiring actor, comedian, musician, model, writer, director and producer who comes to the city settles in this vicinity, at least for awhile, reasoning that it is best to be at the epicenter of the entertainment industry than somewhere on its fringe. The young trust-fund jockeys and bunnies of the West Side also come here to "rough it," and on the other end of the scale, so does seemingly every homeless person, schizophrenic, and drug addict not presently residing on Skid Row. Sherlock Holmes' buddy and my possible relation, Dr. John Watson, once observed that London was "that great cesspool to which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained." Well, Los Angeles can claim similar honors. If it's noisy, dirty, snobbish or entitled, it's here.

The net effect of all of this gravitation is that long-time residents, like myself, become somewhat inured to it all -- the press and police helicopters blasting overhead at treetop altitude for hours at a time; the expensive cars whose speaker-systems rattle windows for blocks in every direction at 3 AM; the winos screaming delirious nonsense outside your window; the buses jammed with tourists who stare at you like a beast in a cage as they trundle past. You don't like it -- you don't like the stench of ozone, human piss and rotting garbage, either -- but you get used to it. The endless shriek of sirens, the enormous traffic jams, the road construction that never seems to build or repair anything, the fact that your gym or favorite restaurant is closed two days out of every seven so someone can shoot a movie there, it's all just so much white noise.

It is only when you move to a sleepy studio community like Burbank that you begin to understand how traumatized you were by all those years amid the cacophony. This awareness strikes you almost the moment the moving truck drives away in a cloud of dust, because even the dust in Burbank is different: it is actual, organic dirt particle of the sort God allegedly made, and not pulverized concrete and asphalt. In Burbank, which is climatically a semi-desert, you nevertheless realize you are closer to nature than you can ever be in L.A. -- there are trees and shrubs and grasses everywhere -- and this, along with the lesser congestion and population density, give the air a different, more natural, cleaner taste.

When the truck is gone you stand on what is now your street, and experience a sense of confusion whose cause takes a moment to determine. You eventually realize the source: silence. In Los Angeles silence is an incredibly precious and rare commodity. There is no time of day or night at any time of the year where you are likely to encounter it. Summer is noisier than what passes for winter, but both are quite cacaphonous. Here in Burbank, at seven o'clock on a summer weekday, the only sound you hear are insects, and even they are keeping it down.

That night you require a certain amount of white noise to ease you to sleep: you're used to sirens and choppers and speakers and arguments resonating through your windows and walls, after all: silence is eerie. But you soon get used to it, and the sense of relaxation you discover within your muscles as you rise in the morning and go about your business makes you realize, with a start, that you have been carrying yourself in a state of coiled-spring tension for longer than you can remember. In L.A., just walking down the street to buy a cup of coffee carries with it the element of risk: you could be hit by a car (I have been, and nearly struck on two other occasions) or you could be accosted by a lunatic demanding money who won't take no for an answer. Because of this, you find yourself perpetually tense, perpetually at-the-ready for some kind of minor confrontation. But there is no need for this in Burbank: as you soon discover, confrontation of any kind here is rare, and even when I came eye-to-eye with a coyote in the middle of the street one night, he politely padded away without causing any mischief.

Burbank being a semi-desert climate, the summers are long (about 6 months in duration), and in the words of Michael Caine, "insanely hot," with triple-digit temperatures practically the norm. For someone like me, of pure North European ancestry, that poses a lot of problems; but there are benefits. The climate here is perfect for flowering and fruit-bearing plants, and this fact is how I became acquainted with my orange tree.

Like my rosebushes, it came with the house, and sits in the extreme left-hand corner of my enormous yard (enormous yards for tiny homes are the norm in the San Fernando Valley: why I have no idea, with the possible exception of the fact that this town has an enormous number of dogs). Possessing an orange tree in Burbank is no big deal. This climate excels at producing citrus plants of all kinds, as well as roses -- as I said before, in Burbank you feel closer to nature than you ever will in L.A. In my immediate neighborhood, in addition to orange trees, there also grow pomegranates, lemons, grapefruit, clementines, and limes, all in great profusion. But in my own yard, I have an orange tree.

To be perfectly honest, it is really more a large bush than a tree. I don't suppose the trunk is nearly as thick as my thigh, and its general shape is cubic rather than the T-shape of your average tree. To look at it in the offseason is to look past it: it is simply a big green mass in the corner of the yard, under which my cat occasionally likes to shade himself. But twice a year -- every 6 - 7 months like clockwork -- the tree begins to bud with emerald-green fruits the size of acorns. The baby oranges stay in this modest and unappealing shape and color for what seem like weeks: then, almost overnight, they burst into much larger fruits of the traditional color, and before long can be picked and eaten with abandon. Based on my six years of tending the plant, I would estimate that each "harvest" yields an average of about 70 oranges, but the crop varies depending on a number of factors, like the amount of rainfall or the temperature at the time the fruits blossom. But what is remarkable is not the size of the crop relative to the tree, but the flavor of the fruit.

Oranges have always been among my favorite fruits, but until I picked a ripe one off the vine, peeled it and ate it while the fragrant smell of the blossoms was still on the skin, I had never really experienced what it was like to taste one of the blessed things. My father, who had grown up in Missouri and Illinois, had often insisted when I was growing up that we only eat corn bought directly from local Maryland farmers, because "only fresh corn has any taste to it." Well, he might have added that this also applies to oranges. Biting into one of these is an explosion of flavor that makes your taste buds cramp: it is as far from the tepid suggestion of flavor produced by a store-bought, refrigerated, imported orange as a Guinness is from a Miller Lite. Eating them was a wake-up call that triggered in me a very protective attitude toward the tree.

Now, I grew up in two places -- Wilmette, Illinois and Bethesda, Maryland -- which had boisenberry trees, and believe me when I tell you I spent every summer both cramming the ripe red-and-blue-black berries down my gullet and getting yelled at for tracking the ink-like juices into the house, where they (permanently) stained all and sundry. But as a kid, I never looked at those trees as anything but a kind of benny of summer, manna which fell not from heaven, but from the backyard. I didn't give the trees themselves a second thought, and I had no qualms about hacking away inconvenient branches. As a grown man, my relationship with growing things in my own yard has changed.

In both Pagan, Eastern and Native American and Aboriginal philosophy, there is a great deal of emphasis on the relationship and interconnection between man and nature. In Japan, the samurai were expected to draw conclusions from what they saw in nature; in China, many styles of kung fu were developed by observing the movements of animals and insects. Among First Nations tribes in the Americas, and among Aborigines and European Pagans, there is a commonality in the way the tribes looked at the cycles of the seasons, the behaviors of the animals, the land itself, and even the weather: as parts of a unified whole. From their surroundings, they drew inspiration from their folklore and spiritual beliefs, and to some extent even their way of hunting and fighting. Now, I'm not claiming I sit beneath the orange tree in white robes as the sun rises, murmuring snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom: but I am saying that the twice-yearly ritual of harvesting the tree has proven surprisingly educational. Some of the things which tending the tree have taught me:

Patience. I am not a patient man. Never have been. Probably never will be. When I was studying tae kwon do, my main focus was on the next belt test -- and the next and the next, until I could finally tie the black one around my waist. I was in such a rush for that moment that when it arrived I realized I had failed to savor the process which had allowed it to become possible. It was the same way with the oranges -- months of impatient waiting, then a sudden orgy of orange-eating, a kind of debauchery of citrus. However, as the years have gone on, my sense of impatience has been lessened, in part because I have come to understand that the long intervals between me eating the last of the fruit (which I did yesterday) and me eating the first orange of the following harvest (probably August or September of this year) are actually important parts of the ritual. When you're a kid, you wish every day could be Christmas: it's not until you're older that you realize that it's precisely the fact that Christmas comes but once a year which makes it special. As Major Charles Emerson Winchester III once said on an episode of M*A*S*H, "Anticipation is in itself a sensory delight." To my surprise, it really is.

Compassion. Like most people, I rarely think of plant life as being worthy of, or even a candidate for, compassion. Plants are alive, of course, but because they are a form of life utterly alien to us -- no brain, no nervous system, no bones or blood -- we tend to look upon them as simple phenomena and not living beings which allow us to exist. A few years ago California was in the grip of a severe drought which parched the soil to the consistency of dryer dust: a lot of lawns died, along with most of the non-indigenous flora, and even the palms and yucca plants were drooping. Although I was extremely punctilious in obeying water restrictions in every other area of life -- dishes, laundry, showers, cooking, all of it -- I braved the furnace-like noonday sun and triple digit temps to make sure the orange tree got its share of H2O via my garden hose. I am of 100% Nordic-Gaelic-Anglo-Saxon descent, so the Burbank sun is my mortal enemy, but damned if I didn't roast myself a redder shade of lobster making sure that thirsty sumbitch got all the water she needed. Was self-interest at play here? Yes -- initially. I wanted my damned oranges and no sorry-ass drought was gonna stop me from getting them. But watering the orange tree led me to notice the withered condition of the roses, the yucca plants, the various cacti and so on, who were also silently pleading for relief. Before long I could be seen furtively watering all of them, usually with buckets filled by the otherwise annoyingly leaky bathroom faucet. I did not like the idea of them dying of thirst: I began to see them as living creatures in need of assistance, not scenery.

Generosity. Everyone has a besetting sin. Mine -- one of mine, I should say -- is greed. I'm not sure where this impulse came from, but I have it in abundance. When I first tasted the oranges, I couldn't get over how good they were, and this led me to pick them in large numbers. I clucked over my hoard of fruit like a dragon over his treasure, and only very grudgingly gave away individual samples to friends and relatives. Because I can only eat so many oranges, however, eventually I noticed that some of the fruits were going bad before I could get to them -- rotting and going to waste because I didn't have the heart to share them. This was embarrassing, so I gradually forced myself to become less parsimonious and to give them away in much larger numbers, even mailing them across the country to friends and family. Of the last crop, I'd estimate at least 30 went to other people, which is quite an increase from my original figure of zero. Of course, about a half a dozen still went bad, so I have room for improvement...but at least I recognize this, which is progress.

Respect. I used to consider the orange tree simply another thing which grew on my lawn, like the roses. Then I began to see it as a gift which provides me, on a yearly basis, with between 100 - 150 delicious pieces of fruit. Now I see it for what it is: a generous friend. I have eaten the oranges off the tree, I have crushed them into juice, I have used them to flavor water, I have made them into a crude form of jam, I have curried favor with them and bartered them for other locally-grown fruits.
I have done all of this without spending a single penny. Except during times of drought, orange tree asks nothing of me and wants nothing from me. Anything that can provide so much and ask for next to zero ought to be treated reverently, and I do try do just exactly that.

Humility. First Nations/Aboriginal tribes tend to maintain that they do not own land; they belong to it. Whenever I feel greed in relation to the coming harvest ("Mine! All mine! Bwahahaha!") I remember that the time will come -- perhaps even this year -- when I will no longer live here and the orange tree will no longer be "mine." Someone else, or perhaps several someones, or perhaps no one at all (you'd be surprised how many nitwits simply let their fruit rot on their front lawn) will reap the benefits. Every time I pick one of the oranges, I keep in mind that having access to the tree at all was either an accident or a gift, and like everything else in life, including life itself, it is temporary. This tree is probably very young -- as I said, it's more of a bush than a tree, and not very large -- and according to my research may live for a century or more, which is probably far longer than I will last. Will it remember me 80 years from now? Was it ever aware of me at all? I don't know. I never will. And in spite of my human ego, which wants desperately to be remembered and revered, I have learned to take comfort in this.

You see, humans tend to think of life as a play -- with a beginning, middle, and end. We seldom see ourselves as part of a larger community, cells in a body, so to speak, whose individual life-cycles simply transpire within the much larger organism of life itself, which on this planet is billions of years old. But each of us is in a sense only one link in an enormous DNA chain stretching back through the ages to some unimaginably ancient past: even this orange tree, which will probably outlive me by many years, has a progenitor, and with every fruit it grows, tries to seed the ground with future offspring. Individually, we die. Collectively, we go on.

I told you before I don't sit beneath the tree mumbling yogic mantras beneath the rising sun, and right now I probably sound as if I do. But among its other properties, the orange tree in my yard is a teacher, and one of the things it taught me is to share.