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

MAGNUM & ME

If you were alive in the 80s and conscious of your surroundings, then the chances are you were well-familiar with MAGNUM, P.I. whether you wanted to be or not. In an age crowded with iconic prime-time television shows, MAGNUM stood at or near the top of the heap, both in terms of popularity, quality and longevity. The dimpled, mustachioe'd face of its star, Tom Selleck, was inescapable: if you didn't see him on TV, you'd surely see him in the supermarket, on the cover of PEOPLE or TV GUIDE or some other staple magazine of the era. It happens that this was not as annoying a phenomenon as it probably appears, because Selleck, in addition to being the sort of handsome that is not obnoxious to behold, was a very talented and likeable actor and MAGNUM a particularly good show. Indeed, there was a definite comfort in tuning in, year after year, and seeing him and his cohorts fighting crime to the tune of that beyond-iconic theme song. MAGNUM was, in many ways, the background of the 1980s. It was always there.

Recently I made the decision to rewatch all eight seasons – all 162 episodes – of this legendary television show which ran from 1980 – 1988. It was a deliberate trip down the nostalgia rabbit hole, but it was also made consciously out the memory of MAGNUM as first-rate entertainment. What I came away with following the experience, however, was far more than nostalgia or even a feeling of satisfaction (or regret) at having spent so much time in front of the boob tube. I actually learned quite a bit about myself – who I was in the 80s, and who I am now, in 2019. I picked up on themes which went over my head – or distinctly turned me off – when I was a teenager but resontate very strongly with me now.

For those who have forgotten or don't know, MAGNUM was the story of Thomas Sullivan Magnum (Selleck), a Vietnam vet and ex-Navy SEAL who hailed from an old Navy family and was early into a brilliant military career when he chucked it all away, and went to work in Hawaii as a private investigator. When asked why he did so, Magnum would invariably reply, “One day I turned 33 and realized I'd never been 23.” Although invariably broke, Magnum lived a life of luxury as a permanent guest of the mysterious, ultra-wealthy novelist Robin Masters, who kept a huge estate on Oahu and allowed Magnum to use his red Ferarri 308 GTS. On the other hand, he paid a steep price for his free room and board, in the form of Johnathan Quayle Higgins (Johnathan Hillerman), the pompous, tyrannical snob who managed the estate for the always-absent Robin and made Magnum's life a constant misery.

Magnum was (unwillingly) joined in his investigations by his Vietnam buddies Theodore “T.C.” Calvin (Roger E. Mosley) and Orville “Rick” Wright (Larry Manetti). The hulking T.C. ran a chopper service called Island Hoppers and often served as Magnum's aerial chauffeur, though he never did seem to get reimbursed for gas money or for the bullet holes invariably punched in his plexiglass; diminutive Rick managed the swanky King Kahmehameha Club and utilized his vast network of underworld contacts to facilitate Magnum's sleuthing.

I ought to note here that prime-time television during the 80s (or for that matter, the 50s, 60s and 70s) generally tended to use a formula known as “status quo ante.” Recurring characters were relatively infrequent, story arcs spanning multiple episodes were almost unheard of, and no matter how tragically an episode might conclude, or how badly battered the hero was at the end of a story, he appeared in the next as if nothing whatever had happened to him, physically or emotionally. This sort of storytelling had in mind the idea that a new viewer should be able to tune in and “get it” immediately, and not be repelled by arriving in the middle of some over-arching plot he knew nothing about. It also freed the writers from the cumulative tedium of worrying about continuity. The practical effect, however, was to prevent the characters of television shows from growing and changing over time. In life, human beings learn more by pain and defeat than they do pleasure or success, yet the formula of “status quo ante” meant that all life-lessons were sponged away at the end of an episode, leaving the characters as fresh, and as blank, as they were when it began.

MAGNUM departed from this formula in a number of ways: it featured a number of recurring characters, stories that played out in small pieces over time, and it did not always return Magnum to the status quo after a harrowing episode. (At the end of the two-part episode “Images,” for example, Magnum's mentally ill girlfriend-client [played by Sharon Stone] kills herself in front of him; in the following episode, “Mac's Back,” we find him in a drunken, bearded, guilt-ridden stupor, suffering from terrible flashbacks). Most importantly, MAGNUM did something no show I'd ever seen before (or since) ever did: it broke the fourth wall. He, and occasionally other characters, would sometimes look directly at the camera – usually to smirk, occasionally to raise an eyebrow or just plain roll their eyes. This information is not just trivia: it plays heavily into why MAGNUM had such an impact upon me then, but most especially why it affects me now.

When I began watching MAGNUM, at the age of 7 ½, what I most enjoyed about the character was his mix of toughness and humanity, knightly honor and juvenile irresponsibility. Magnum was a total badass, but he was just as often a chump, subject to all manner of ridicule and humiliation by Higgins, and to a lesser extent, his friends. He was a decorated Vietnam vet, capable of being moved to tears by a sunset or a memorial, but also a guy who loved eating chilli dogs while swilling beer and tossing around his lucky rubber chicken. He'd been through the wringer in Nam, but was determined to recapture his youth when not working on his cases – dating beautiful women, swimming in the ocean, entering surf-ski races and triathalons, roaring around Oahu in a luxury sportscar he didn't own, and coming back to a luxurious guest house that wasn't his. And indeed, the first four seasons of MAGNUM, which lasted until roughly my twelfth year, were very much in this vein. Thomas was, beneath all his .45 wielding, villain-punching, Ferarri-driving badassery, just a big, handsome kid. The oppression he dealt with at the hands of Higgins was the oppression I dealt with every day from my parents and my teachers. The scorn he often faced from his friends Rick and T.C. due to his indolent, sophomoric lifestyle was the scorn I endured for my inattention in class, my poor grades, my unwillingness to face up to adult responsibility. And yet, because of his badassery, and indeed, his irresponsibility, Magnum was also something I could aspire to.

At some point within the fifth season, my relationship with the show began to change. It was a subtle change, and probably not one I understood at the time, but in retrospect it is fairly obvious. After four full years of playing in the surf with bikini babes when he wasn't taking criminals to the figurative woodshed, Magnum began to show the first signs of transitioning from what Patrick Swayze, in ROADHOUSE, called “a forty year-old adolescent,” into something else – a grownup. The show began -- very slowly -- to pull Magnum away somewhat from his habits of running miles along the beach every morning or his penchant for entering triathalons and surf-ski competitions – the habits of a young man – and allowed a certain self-doubt to creep into his mid-life career choice. In season three, for example, he sharply rebuffs T.C. for suggesting he might want to sidle back into the military via the reserves, but a year later, during narration, he ponders “when he will have to grow up,” suggesting his career as a P.I. is really just an elaborate dodge of the inevitable.

I do believe this line upset me when I heard it as a kid. It upset me more as a middle-aged man, for reasons I'll disclose in a moment. But I didn't really get upset with MAGNUM (as a teenager) until the sixth season, when I saw the episode “The Hotel Dick.” 'Dick,' for you perverts out there, is old-school slang for detective, and the story in question finds Magnum having left Robin's Nest and his P.I. gig to work as a hotel detective. He wears a suit (rather than his trademark Hawaiian shirt and Ocean Pacific short-shorts), uses glasses to read, and takes rafts of shit from his boss without fighting back. As a 13 year-old kid who equated Magnum's lifestyle not only with rebellion but successful rebellion, the idea that he would take such a job really bothered me. It constituted, in my mind, a progression toward “adulthood” that I did not want to see him take. It reminded me that “growing up” was not something that could be avoided forever – not even on television. The decision of MAGNUM's producers to let age and consequences slowly dissolve the status quo was difficult for me to swallow: it contained reminders of infirmity and mortality. Then, in season seven, came “Paper War.” In this episode, Magnum accuses Higgins of actually being the elusive, never-seen Robin Masters, and Higgins' evasions and denials were less than convincing. It seemed to me then that MAGNUM was taking “breaking the fourth wall” to new levels and actually inviting us, the audience, to question the very foundation the show – any show – actually rested upon: the identity of its characters. Could I believe in nothing?

The final season of MAGNUM disturbed me on several levels. The episode “Unfinished Business” offered Magnum a chance to kill the murderer of his wife, Michelle; Magnum declined to take it. He passed on vengeance to serve a greater good. What the fuck was up with that? In the climax of season three's notorious two-part episode “Did You See The Sunrise?” Magnum coldly executes a Soviet officer who tortured him as POW in Vietnam and later murdered his friend “Mac” Reynolds (Jeff Mackay) in Hawaii. Though shocking as hell for the time period -- it really was a scandal -- I heartily approved of him taking the law into his own hands. How could that same judgment-passing Magnum pass up on killing the cold-blooded murderer of his own wife? What had happened to my hero? Why was he forgoing personal satisfaction for the sake of others?

But it was the series finale that really did me in. In “Revelations, Part II,” Magnum makes the decision to hand over the keys to the Ferarri, leave Robin's Nest, and rejoin the Navy. After nearly a decade of woman-loving, bad-guy bashing and check bouncing, he cuts his hair, puts on the white uniform of a commander, USN, and decides to resume his military career – as a single dad, to boot! In essence, the show seemed to be saying, “It's been real, kids, and it's been fun – but it hasn't been real fun. Everyone has to grow up sometime, and for Thomas Sullivan Magnum, that time is now.”

For me, as a 16 year-old kid, this episode was a flat-out insult. We – the audience – had only come to know Thomas Magnum through his life as a private investigator, through Higgins, and through his long-suffering buddies Rick and T.C. Now we were being told that this whole period, this near-decade of adventure and do-gooding, was really just a kind of belch that occurred between courses in Magnum's life, an attempted escape from adulthood that had run its futile course. He was like a man who had run away from his wife and kids and drank it up and whored it up and then come home, hung over and contrite, to resume the life of a husband and father. It had all just been an idyll, a soujourn, a tryst, a fling, an affair. It signified nothing except a failed attempt to recapture a youth he had lost in the humid, insect-infested rice paddies of Vietnam.

All of this, I suppose, is why the first four seasons of MAGNUM are so clear and fresh and vital and immediate in my middle-aged mind: testaments to my own desire to stay forever 23...even when I was thirteen. At the same time, they are the same reason I can scarcely recall more than ten or twenty percent of the stories from the show's second half, its last eighty-plus episodes. As a teenager, I just didn't want to hear this shit. I didn't want to see Thomas Magnum in reading glasses, feeling a bit too long in the tooth for surf-ski competitions, experiencing existential angst about the course of his life. To see that meant acknowledging that some day I too would have to give up athletics, to wear knee braces and ice packs, and have to choose between life on the couch with a bag of cheetos resting on my gut or the ice-cold comforts offered by the alarm clock, the rat race, and the weekly paycheck. And folks, volk, wolves, dogs, homies, peeps, niggas, party comrades, friends, Romans and countrymen – I just didn't want to do that.

On the other hand, rewatching MAGNUM at my present age offered series of fresh epiphanies and fresh feelings. “The Hotel Dick” resonated with me so hard I felt like a goddamned tuning fork when the credits rolled. And why not? I could – I can – relate.

I graduated from college in 1997. From then until 2004 I worked in the criminal justice system with great success – as a parole officer, investigator for the district attorney, and correctional specialist. At the height of my career, however, I chucked it all away to go back to school and write creatively. I did this because I felt I had been outraging my true nature by pursuing a conventional career when my creative talents were going used. I got myself a luxurious apartment, a wide circle of friends and lovers, and for about four years, lived essentially lived on the early Magnum level, sans responsibility. At the end of 2007 I came out to Hollywood to double down on my dream of living off my talent rather than a set of abilities I had learned but did not feel passionately about. And to make the parallel complete, I even worked periodically as a private investigator myself, right down to the occasional high-speed chase (unfortunately without music). I published novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories. I was paid – poorly and disingenuously, but still paid – to write a screenplay. I racked up an shelf-load of literary awards, and unlike some, I got them on my own merits (I don't ride coat-tails, and I don't take credit for things I didn't do). Yet after about ten years, part of me – what Magnum would call his Little Voice – started whispering, “Is this adulthood? Is this what grown-ups do? Where is your 401K? Where are your health benefits? Where is your house, your wife, your kids? Where is your actual contribution to the society in which you live? What have you sacrificed to live the life of a forty year-old adolescent?”

What, indeed?

Thomas Magnum came to a conclusion that, after eight years of snuggling hot guest stars like Morgan Fairchild, Sharon Stone, Marta DuBois and Erin Gray, eight years of ripping 'round Hawaii in a knife-prowed Ferarri, eight years of eating chilli dogs on the couch in the guest house of Robin's Nest while watching VHS tapes of his favorite movies or delayed-broadcast Army – Navy games, eight years of going .45 to .38 with his enemies, well, the time had come to take off his Hawaiian shirt, get a haircut, and slip back into that horrible thing we call adulthood. He'd had enough of being 23.

I can relate to that, too.

I've lived in Los Angeles for 12 years, having experiences I never dreamed possible when I was working as an underpaid parole officer in a small town. I've been paid tens of thousands of dollars to play video games (yes, you read that right), I've befriended (or at least partied with) TV stars whose work I long admired, I've had meetings with bombastic cigar-chewing movie producers who were so cartoonishly crass and egotistical that I left feeling as if I myself was playing a small part in a cruel comedy about Hollywood. I have, in short, lived out the vast majority of shallow fantasies I once harbored as a hard-working but unfulfilled member of what we refer to as The System. I don't regret a moment of it, any more than I regret the four years previous to that, spent studying, drinking oceans of beer, chasing women and doing whatever the hell I wanted to do whenever the hell I wanted to do it. It was all enormously fun and strangely productive. But sitting here, now, tonight, a little bagged, a lot tired, a little wrung-out, well, it all seems a little frivolous to me. A little silly. A little meaningless. I came here as a guy in his middle thirties with stars in his eyes, but I'm not in my middle thirties anymore, and those stars, I think, became rather salty droplets of ice-cold water a few years back, with a tendency to sting. Magnum, in “The Hotel Dick,” is trying to prove something to himself – essentially, that he still knows how to adult – and I guess I am, too.

Interesting fact: a man gets older. He starts having to wear reading glasses and to double up on the aspirin after a really tough workout – and even then, he doesn't recover like he used to. He walks down the street, and the cute redhead with the fine ass, who was precisely the type who used to stare him up and down like a side of beef and drop him a wink, now struts past him as if he isn't there, doesn't exist, has never existed. He goes on a bender after a tough week, and it takes him damn near a week to recover. His bills and debts have caught up to him, so he can't afford a flashy car anymore – Christ, he can't even pay his fucking rent anymore, because $3,700/month is no mo'fuckin' joke. He opens his social media accounts to see charlatans, frauds, fakes, thieves, cowards and clowns are accelerating past him on the career curve, dropping the hammer on their puny short-dicked four-cylinder engines, when sometimes he can't even get his massive V12 to even roll over, much less hit 200 MPH. So he discovers that he has a choice. He can continue wearing the Hawaiian shirt, which is no longer such a good fit, and continue to guzzle his Old Dusseldorf, which doesn't taste quite so sweet anymore, or he can say to himself, “It has been real, Thomas, and it has been fun, and it has been real fun, too; but that fun – that particular type of fun – is over, and it's time to do something else. It's time to find the fun somewhere else.”

In the end, I guess what I discovered – or re-discovered – watching MAGNUM again as a middle-aged man, was one of the hardest, coldest, and most unavoidable truths of all. We can escape everything in life except our destiny, and that destiny is not determined by others. It is not determined by the stars, or by genetics, or by fate: it's determined by ourselves. By where our own hearts take us. There is a time for discipline and asceticism, and there is a time for Hawaiian shirts and rubber chickens, and only we can determine which has come, and which has gone.

And which may come again.

BALLAD FOR DEAD FRIENDS

Perhaps all bereavement is a mourning for dreams. What has really happened can never be undone. The dead never leave us. What torments is the loss of things that never were – the years of life unlived, the things not said or done, what wasn't, what couldn't be.
– Carly Rheilan


There's an old saying that when you hit your forties, you don't celebrate birthdays, you mourn them. This is just a macabre joke, but it has elements of truth to it. After a certain point, just what the hell is it that you're supposed to be celebrating when a birthday comes around? Another year off what you have left? The fact that age and gravity are one step closer to stripping you of your power to enjoy life? A little less hair and a few more wrinkles? The increased probability of the death of older loved ones?

Still, I try to remain positive about it. A birthday is, after all, an accomplishment. It's one more year you didn't die, which means it's also one more year in which you accumulated experiences and, one hopes, a fair share of joy, pleasure, and knowledge. It triggers reflection, which is a good thing, and can also initiate long-overdue changes and inspire goals.

There are times, however, when it feeling positive about this era of life is very difficult. Now is one of those times. Actually, it has little to do with me and any kind of bullshit mid-life crisis or existential dread. It's just been a week of bad news about old friends.

In this blog I generally avoid getting too specific about certain things. It's not my privacy that concerns me, but the privacy of others. I could a tale unfold about many great adventures and hi-jinks and songs of inspiration I know you'd enjoy, but they would involve betraying confidences or embarrassing people I care about. In some cases it would involve breaking pledges of secrecy to individuals or organizations to which I belong or have served. So I am damned careful what I talk about here, and often change names, descriptions and circumstances so that real events, even harmless ones, are not traceable to their sources. Tonight, however, I am partially suspending that rule. I'm not sure it's a good idea because it may cause pain to certain people, but sometimes you've gotta speak from the heart, and you can't speak from the heart if you're writing beneath a smoke screen.

Today I was informed a friend of mine from graduate school, Angie F., died at the age of 46 – the same age I was until a few weeks ago. She was a warm, kind, gentle person who nevertheless had some steel beneath the velvet: she had no difficulty holding unpopular political opinions and once, when she overheard a classmate talking trash about me, confronted the guilty party and took up a lance on my behalf (I was 2,000 miles away at the time or I'd have done it myself). We had fallen out of touch in the last few years because she was averse to the social media platforms I use to communicate with most of my far-away friends, but she was rarely far from my mind because she had a special energy about her that was very genuine. Her death leaves me feeling cheated and small – cheated because I didn't talk to her more often, small because the effort involved would have cost me nothing and yielded much, but I didn't make it, and now it's too late. And aren't those two of the shittiest words in the English language, folks?

At times like this I always think of the Dashboard Prophets:

How are you feeling
Do you feel ok?
'Cause I don't
It keeps me reelin'
Will I ever be the same?
No I won't

A week ago I learned of another passing. My fraternity brother Alphonse G. Alphonse was a younger cat who pledged well beneath me, probably in 1996 or 1997. I was about to very belatedly graduate and not enormously interested in getting to know him, and I treated him indifferently and shabbily. The last time I saw him was about five years after graduation: he was on a ladder, painting a house on Philadelphia Street in York, and I thought, “I ought to stop and say hello.” But I didn't. I kept loose tabs on him over the years, meaning to ring him up, meaning to apologize, but again, I never did it. Good intentions and all that. Then, a few weeks ago, I had a very powerful urge to get in touch with him. I decided, this time, to listen to my little voice, but no sooner did I experience this impulse than I heard the news of his passing. I wondered if the sudden desire for contact wasn't perhaps some kind of intimation of that passing – the universe trying to tell me to mend fences while I could. If that was the case, I wasn't fast enough on the draw. Another regret, carefully tucked away in my personal vault of regrets, gathering interest that only I can collect.

Its a cold day in a cruel world
I really wished I could have saved you
Then who would save me from myself?
Right now, well, I could use a stiff drink
To kill the pain that's deep inside my bones

I'm an August baby, and August precedes September, and September is when the Towers fell down, 18 years ago. A friend of mine fell with them. His name was Frank. In college we called him F.T. We were in different fraternities, came from different backgrounds, had nothing in common. I liked him very much in spite of this, or perhaps because of it. By the time I came to know him, I had become a bit of a G. in my fraternity, but F.T. was an O.G. in his. He was one of those people who owned who he was and owed it absolutely with no apologies to anyone. Three days before he died I drove past his place of work in Manhattan, not dreaming that enormity of glass and steel and concrete would come tumbling down 72 hours later. I watched it happen on television, not realizing I was watching him die, and every year since I think of him, and have dreamed of him too – dreams that frighten me with their almost supernatural intensity. F.T.'s name is chiseled into the 9/11 memorial. It's also chiseled into my brain.

Have you been dreaming?
I don't dream at all
I have nightmares
Memories careenin'
Have you come to kill what's left
Of my smile
Theres no vacancy in paradise

Once you start thinking along these lines it's hard to stop – like the lines were cut going downhill and you're following them down, into your own personal history. Erik S. died five years ago. I was here in Los Angeles when I got the call. I'd known Erik since 1992, when I was a 19 year-old kid pledging my fraternity. Erik was a crazy musician motherfucker who did crazy musician motherfucker things: he once showed up at my apartment with a machine gun. He liked to drink, he liked to sing and play keyboard and guitar, and he built the bar in my apartment at 821 South Pershing Street in York, Pennsylvania, a bar that was signed by many, many people I knew and which may very will still exist somewhere, soaking up Rolling Rock and Yuengling Lager. The bar may remain, but Erik is gone.

So is Bill E. Bill was a teacher at my school, and also our fraternity advisor. He loved the damned Dallas Cowboys and wouldn't stop talking about them -- or taking action on them. When I was 19 I got mildly drunk with him and Erik on school grounds a few days before the end of the school year. Much later, after I had graduated, we had a stupid quarrel over nothing very important and stopped speaking. In 2016, long after I'd moved away from Pennsylvania, he passed away. When my fraternity brothers (from several generations) were expressing their grief, all I could think of was the fact we used to pass each other in hallways and not look at each other and how goddamned silly that was.

People come and people go, but organizations remain, and in that sense fraternities are funny things. You join them in a literal sense, become part of a stream of history that was flowing along merrily before you got there and continues to flow long after you pack your shit and blow. I remember Jason B. very well. He was one of those fundamentally decent guys who liked to goof off and play the fool. Once I was at a party and he got the idea to streak bare-ass naked from the third floor down to the basement and back, only while he was streaking, some wiseguy got hold of his clothes and hid them. Jason ended up having to borrow a very loose Eagles jersey and a pair of horribly tight football pants to avoid being arrested. I have no memories of him after that. Some years later I got the news he'd been killed in a car accident, leaving behind a wife and children. It was a bitter pill. There's a long list of people I'd have seen in the ground before him.

I really wished I could have saved you
But then who would have saved me from myself?
Right now, well, I could use a stiff drink
To kill the pain that's deep inside my bones
I really wish I could have saved you

Life is full of bitter pills, though, and perhaps none is more bitter than the story of Matt F. “Baby Huey” was a guy I got to know quite well, both through my fraternity and through the bar where we worked together for half a year. When he graduated, I thought I'd seen the last of him, but our paths crossed again a few years later. He had joined the army, and a routine physical found bone cancer. Discharged from the military, he came back to school – thin, hollow-cheeked, on crutches, but full of beans and untouched by self-pity. Unfortunately his positive attitude wasn't enough to save him. It made me enormously angry. I lost my father to the same filthy disease, a disease nobody wanted to talk about or even speak aloud because they were all afraid, somehow, that acknowledging it would bring the same doom upon themselves. People are often afraid to speak of the prematurely dead. They want to think they are exempt from the same fate. It doesn't work that way. And that brings me to Geneva D.

I met Geneva in 2005. I'd come back to college to get a second degree and felt awkward – a newly-minted 33 year-old man among (mostly) teenagers. Geneva was in one of my writing classes, and she was an absolute doll: a gorgeous blonde with a brilliant smile and a vivacious personality that could and did light up a room. Despite her tender age – was she even 20? – she was a writer, too, and I remember hours spent in computer labs and lounges and a coffee house on Market Street where we discussed the craft and the art while people read poetry and played guitar before a feedback-prone microphone. Oh yes, I crushed on Geneva, without apologies. She was youth and beauty and eagerness for life. But she died. Dehydration brought on by influenza, or somesuch shit nobody is supposed to die from in the 21st century. It hit me like a hammer to the head. Here one minute, gone the next. No answers, no meaning.

In the Old Testament, Job dared to ask God why his family had been killed and why he himself, a pious believer, had been ruined and destroyed when he had committed no sin. God answered thusly:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
    Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
    Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
    or who laid its cornerstone—
 while the morning stars sang together
    and all the angels shouted for joy?
“Who shut up the sea behind doors
    when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
    and wrapped it in thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it
    and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
    here is where your proud waves halt’?
“Have you ever given orders to the morning,
    or shown the dawn its place,
that it might take the earth by the edges
    and shake the wicked out of it?
The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.
“Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this!”

I for one don't know. I'm just a 47 year old man who writes things and drinks beer and smokes the very occasional cigar when I'm not watching re-runs of television shows canceled before you were probably born. I was happy once. I'll be happy again, I suppose, but right now I'm just angry, because people I'm fond of keep dying and the world keeps turning, indifferent as fuck, and I don't have the power to give orders to the morning or show the dawn its place. I don't have the power to go back in time and say "I'm sorry" or "Hey, how are you?" at the moments those words would have been significant. I've got no power at all. But if God doesn't speak to me, even to taunt me with rhetorical questions, Sherlock Holmes does. Witness what he said to my fictional ancestor in “The Mystery of the Cardboard Box”:

“What is the meaning of it, Watson? What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”

Put another way:

I'll never forget you
I really wish I could have saved you

Unbroken

Somebody told me today, "The whole idea of 'breaking' is vastly oversold in sports."

I replied that the whole I idea of 'breaking' is vastly oversold, period.

Too many people use that word to describe how they feel after ordinary life setbacks, defeats and embarrassments. Nine times out of ten they are not actually broken. They are maybe a little scuffed, a little shaken, a little dismayed, a little bruised. They don't know the difference between discomfort and pain, disappointment and devastation, getting dented and getting shattered, because they were over protected, coddled and pampered too much growing up. They were handed one too many participation trophies, told they were special one too many times, assured that they had an inalienable right not to be offended. If you've never been hurt, physically or emotionally, a paper cut probably feels like a compound fracture of the tibia.

Pain and upset, like everything else, exist on a sliding scale. The more we experience, the more context we have, and the more understanding we gain of how to deal with them. There is the hunger you feel when you are forced to skip lunch, and the hunger a concentration camp inmate feels doing hard labor on 500 calories of sawdust soup once a day. There is the pain of losing a pet and the pain of losing a parent. I will never forget reading Guy Sajer's THE FORGOTTEN SOLDIER -- the passage he writes about the difference between "exhaustion" as a civilian understands it, and the "exhaustion" a fighting man experiences during a terrible war.

When someone describes themself as "broken" after a disappointment, a betrayal, a defeat or an injury, I'm always tempted to answer, "In relation to what?"

When I was in high school, my father once did me the very great favor of explaining to me, after a crushing disappointment, that life was full of goddamned disappointments and a man was measured not by how many of them he endured but how he responded to them afterward. Life will give you endless reasons to quit, he said, and not many reasons to continue. On the other hand, quitting is a choice, and it is usually driven by a false sense of reality.

"When you are a toddler," he told me. "You fall down a lot. And when you fall, you cry -- not because of the pain, but because you think crying is what you're supposed to do when you fall. But sooner or later you realize falling is not the end of the world. In fact, it's no big deal. It's actually part of the process of learning to walk. Falling is supposed to teach us that each goal comes with a cost. The goal is going through life on your feet rather than on your knees, and the cost is the pain you feel when you land on your ass. It's the same when you learn to ride a bike, when you crush on girls, when you try out for a team or go on a job interview or apply to a school. You're bound to be rejected and disappointed sometimes, and when you are, you have a choice -- crawl and cry or get up and dust off and keep walking. The small setbacks prep us for the big ones, and if you avoid the small ones, the big ones, when they come, will seem like the end of the world."

The good news in this equation is that 9/10ths of the people who think they are broken, aren't. They just don't have any context for the pain and upset they are feeling. But as the Dead once sang, every silver lining has a touch of gray, and the trouble here is that very few people in our society are providing them any context. Instead, they get affirmation for their own diagnosis. Slightly damaged, they are told that, yes indeed, they are broken and isn't it a pity and don't they deserve sympathy and special treatment?

The fact is, I get scared as hell when I look at Twitter and see the number of people working themselves into a hysterical state because someone disagreed with or slightly displeased them. I get scared when people try to form Internet lynch mobs because they felt insulted by a Tweet or a Facebook post or some remark somebody made 15 years ago.
I get scared because one day there will be another Great Depression or World War or Influenza Pandemic and we will need everybody to roll up their sleeves and come together and pitch in to win the day... and nobody will show up because they're sobbing in a corner somewhere because they overhead someone use the wrong gender pronoun.

As Sherlock Holmes once said, “How can you build a foundation on such quicksand?”

The question is rhetorical, but I think I can provide an answer.

We are all of us in possession of our own internal landscape. Part of the landscape is born with us, part of it shaped by experience. It contains pristine lakes and beautiful mountains, and it also contains fetid swamps and canyons full of gila monsters. When we go exploring within ourselves, we can find beauty or ugliness, pleasure or pain. The proportions of each differ from person to person: some have a great deal of prime real estate and others, more desert or tundra or active volcanoes. Where we choose to stay -- where we build our foundation within ourselves -- is however up to us. If your landscape is mostly quicksand, that doesn't mean that's where you have to put your house. If you're a middle-aged person who feels inadequate to the slings and arrows of daily misfortune -- thin-skinned, oversensitive, weak, take your pick -- that doesn't mean you can't find a better vantage point within yourself. In short, if you feel broken, it doesn't mean you have to stay broken. And the very process of putting yourself back together may show you that you weren't broken in the first place. Just scuffed a bit. Dinged. Dented.

Ah, you say, that's all well and good. But what if I really am broken? What if my diagnosis was correct, and I as a human being am actually laying in pieces on the ground like the remains of a cheap vase dropped on a marble floor?

My answer to this is simple. Being broken, like falling down as a toddler, like getting chicken pox, like enduring the pain of a skinned knee or a burned finger for the first time, actually has a purpose when it occurs for real. We break because there were places within us unable to stand a particular strain. But this condition is not necessarily permanent. Hemingway famously remarked, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." He grasped that the very act of breaking, which were are taught to think of as shameful, can in fact be the first step to becoming a stronger person. One cannot fix a problem, after all, until one has admitted there is a problem, located it, and sketched a strategy for repair. But even this is impossible if one declares oneself broken after every setback, defeat or disappointment, if one's primary response to stressors is quitting or looking for pity. The difference between thinking one is broken and actually being broken is enormous, but not always readily visible, and understanding that difference is often the key to finding one's true inner strength.

Why You're So Angry

It's one of the characteristics of modern life: people having noisy and sometimes violent meltdowns on planes, trains, and buses; in coffee shops and supermarkets; at government offices and Little League baseball games. Indeed, the Internet so bulges with videos of public tantrums, rants and rage-sparked outbursts of vandalism that it's difficult to remember that not all that long ago – well within my own lifetime, and I'm not old – such antics were exceedingly rare, and confined almost entirely to poor or working-class people, who had more to be angry about. Now, however, sudden and explosive anger seems to be universal, cutting across class lines. With my own eyes I have witnessed seemingly trivial incidents provoke the most volcanic eruptions of fury from men driving Lambos, from women in thousand-dollar shoes, and from middle-class kids who only moments before were saying “please” and “thank you” and exhibiting all the other verbal stigmata of the middle class. Spontaneous rage: it's not just for poor folks anymore.

God knows we live in troubled times – unusually troubled, I mean. Extremes of weather are now the norm everywhere. Political discourse has devolved to the intellectual and moral level of a junior high school shoving match. Oil, the edifice upon which all human civilization is built and which cannot be replaced by any other form of energy nor combination of energies, is now “past peak” and what's left is burning up with terrifying speed. Democracy, which only 20 years ago was on the march all over the planet, is now in shameful retreat everywhere. People are frightened, and if I may presume to paraphrase Yoda, fear leads to anger, and anger can lead to otherwise intelligent, civilized human beings into behaving very badly indeed. Still, I'm convinced it's not the shaky and ill-balanced state of the planet that has most people throwing fits. Nor do I entirely subscribe – partially, yes, but not entirely – to the idea that people have become less mature, less disciplined, less orderly than they used to be. Rather, I blame our collective behavior on a feeling of mounting frustration over the impersonal, incompetent, and indifferent way in which we are treated in our daily lives – not only by the government agencies with which we interact, but with the businesses we patronize and even the ones we work for.

When I was growing up, “customer service” was a term that had real meaning. Businesses, whether public or private, operated from a philosophy that “the customer is always right.” They strove at all times for that quality known as “the human touch.” Whether at a hotel or a hardware store, at an airport or a government office, a barber shop or a switchboard, you could be assured that you would be treated with either formal respect or friendly intimacy, depending on the circumstances. What's more, there was a certain level of accountability. If a service were poor, if a product was defective, if an employee had been rude or disrespectful or dishonest, satisfaction was obtainable, often very swiftly. Businesses did not, of course, do this out of the kindness of their hearts, but because they feared loss of revenue: the dreaded exclamation, “I'll take my business elsewhere!” was probably the focus of recurring nightmares to men and women in the complaint departments of various corporations and networks, because losing a customer meant that you might lose your job.

“The customer is always right,” as a philosophy, provided an important benefit to people in society. It gave them a feeling – probably a semi-illusion, but nevertheless an important and comforting semi-illusion – that they had power in their everyday lives. They might work low-paying dead-end jobs themselves, spend their lives dog-paddling in debt, and be hapless pawns to forces far greater than themselves, but damn it, they could get a fast refund when the toy they bought for their brat nephew broke coming out of the box. They could get a free night in a hotel if the concierge was rude, or a free meal if the service was slow. If the airline lost their luggage or the mail-order service lost the package or the postman kicked the dog, they could get satisfaction, or at least a simulacrum thereof. All it took was a phone call or a letter or a request to speak to the manager. This knowledge went a long way to keeping people's tempers in check, and to swiftly mollifying feelings of anger before they became outbursts of rage.

At some point about twenty or more years ago, however, all of this began to change. As more and more privately owned businesses were bought out (or wiped out) by corporations, the corporations began to discover that “customer service,” as it had previously been understood, was simply a drag on profits, and with it the long-standing philosophy of “customer rightness.” Changes in technology allowed them to begin the process of building firewalls between themselves and irate or unsatisfied consumers, the first of which was the replacement of telephone switchboards (where you could speak with a human who could direct you to another human) with automated switchboards (where you could speak with a robot who could direct you to another robot). Understaffing complaint departments, which leads to endless hours on hold, was another weapon in this new war waged against the patron. As time marched on and “globalization,” became what we refer to now unpoetically as “a thing,” corporations also discovered it was possible to hire foreign companies – in India, say – to handle customer service, thus placing a second firewall behind the first and further isolating the customer from the people who had wronged him. But the devolution did not stop there. It spread to all aspects of government, who began shunting complaints and even ordinary communication through automated websites as well as contractors and subcontractors. In each and every instance, the idea is the same: to prevent the customer from obtaining relief for their complaint, or, failing that, to make the process so tedious and unrewarding that he either drops the matter or, having seen it through to the end against all odds, decides never to complain again, because it's just not worth the time and misery involved.

One of the many victims of this very deliberate attack on the old philosophy was the idea of personal or company-wide accountability. A rude, disrespectful, lazy or incompetent employee had little to fear from an angry customer when protected by multiple lines of defense designed both to protect him and to keep him anonymous. And indeed, one of the many aspects of modern interaction with government and business is anonymity. It is possible for a government worker or a corporate drone to get away with all manner of infuriating mischief or stupidity when policy keeps their identity from being known to the customer. This in turn leads to a perception, which is in fact quite accurate, that the ordinary consumer has no recourse when insulted or wronged by an agent of a business or a governmental department. He must not only put up with the broken toy, the lost luggage, the fudged hotel reservation, the leaky washing machine or the cold soup, he is powerless to vent any of his quite reasonable ire on anyone responsible for the situation.

In our society, anger is frowned upon, considered unhealthy, and discouraged from being displayed openly. In fact, anger is a necessary and often positive human emotion – many of the great works of literature, the most important pieces of muckraking journalism, most of the advancements in human rights, innumerable works of art, and even some of the more beneficial wars were the product of righteous anger which demanded, and got, release. Injustice produces anger, and anger can produce satisfaction: it is only unhealthy when it is unreasonable or uncontrolled. We now live in a world, however, where anger has no point of healthy release, no way to escape harmlessly before it builds to the danger point. To raise one's voice when rudely treated in an airport or on an aeroplane can lead to a felony arrest. To express indignation over the way one has been treated by a government agency can mark one for retaliation. To raise hell with an insurance or credit card company over an error can lead to ugly shouting matches in which one not only fails to gain satisfaction, but leaves the situation angrier than before. Businesses and government have taken a hard line, to wit: “the customer is always wrong,” and they stick by that line like the Confederates stuck to their earthworks at Cold Harbor. Even in the rare case of an admission of fault, it's expected that the admission will be grudging and issued with ill grace. A fine example of this would be in a ticket I received by the Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority for parking at a trail without a permit. In point of fact I had the permit, and had proof that I had purchased it, yet when they dismissed the ticket in my favor, they scribbled in the margin of the flimsy that the dismissal was a “one-time curtesy” (their spelling). The rightness of my counterclaim was therefore never acknowledged. They were doing me a favor, you see, by not forcing to pay $70 because of their mistake.

My private journals are littered with this sort of incident, documenting numerous incidents with various types of businesses and agencies over a period of many years. To give you some random examples from random years, I begin with a conversation which occurred in 2007, when trying to book a hotel room in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I rang up the Courtyard Marriott, but was shunted to a booking service in India. The woman to whom I spoke had no knowledge of American geography or ZIP codes or anything else. We had a 30 minute conversation, of which I transcribed this part:

“I need to reserve a room.”
“When?”
“June 19 – 24.”
“What day?”
“The 19th. Through the 24th.”
“And your zip code?”
“17401.”
“York, Pennsylvania?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s the 19th?”
“Through the 24th.”
“And your zip code again? One-seven….?”
“Four-zero-one.”
“Four-zero….?”
“Four-zero-one.”
“One-seven….?”
“Four-zero-one.”
“And that’s the 19th….”
“Through the 24th.”
“And your street address?”
“Eleven North Beaver Street, Apartment –”
“Hold on, hold on. Eleven North….Beaver?”
“Like the creature.”
“Beaver Street….”
“Apartment 205.”
“Apartment?”
“Two zero five.”
“Two zero five?”
“Yes.”
“Eleven North Beaver Street Apartment Two Zero Five?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s one-seven….”
“One seven four zero one.”
“One seven four zero one?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s York, PA?”

Needless to say I became increasingly angry as this nonsense continued. By the time we had finished I had to call the hotel back again and ask the desk clerk why the fuck she couldn't have handled the reservation herself instead of shunting me to India. She coldly explained it was “policy” and hung up on me. Doubtless she resented my anger at her – she did not, after all, create policy – but the incident is noteworthy because a simple task, fundamental to the existence of a hotel – booking rooms! – became an unendurable torment which left everyone involved furious.

Government agencies are no better. When working as an investigator in the mid-2000s, I used to have to obtain Offense Tracking Numbers as part of my job. The following type of conversation was a daily, sometimes an hourly, occurrence:

ME TO CLERK OF COURTS: I need the disposition on this case.
CLERK-DRONE: What is the OTN number?
ME: I don’t have one.
CLERK-DRONE: I need an OTN.
ME: Where can I get it?
CLERK-DRONE: Try the website.
ME: The website requires an OTN.
CLERK-DRONE: Try the DA.

(calls DA)

ME TO DA: I need the disposition on this case.
DA-DRONE: What is the OTN number?
ME: I don’t have one.
DA-DRONE: I need an OTN. Try the Clerk.
ME: The Clerk said to try you.
DA-DRONE: We can’t give out that information.
ME: But it’s public record.
DA-DRONE: We can’t give out that information.
ME: Where can I get it then?
DA-DRONE: Try the website.

Complaints never availed me anything, and usually caused bridges to be burned – employees remember people who try to hold them accountable for indifference service. Thus I was forced to keep a lid on my temper, which only made me angrier still. It is one thing, however, to be indifferent and apathetic to a customer or member of the tax-paying public: it is quite another to be hostile almost to the point of provoking violence, and doing so deliberately. On two occasions, one in 2000, one in 2017, I was treated so badly at airports that still cannot believe the incidents actually occurred. In the former, my mother and I were racing to a small jet taking us to my brother's wedding, and needed information about the gate since it had been changed without our knowledge. The man behind the desk was on the phone, and barked, “I'm busy.” When I tried to explain we needed the information now or we'd miss a wedding, he looked at me and said, “Did you not hear what I said? Are you deaf? I'm busy.” Only the knowledge that smashing in his face would certainly cause me to miss my only brother's nuptials saved that man from permanent damage. In the latter incident, the following conversation occurred, at what was laughably referred to as United's “Help Desk.”

WOMAN: You can't have two carry-on items. You have to check that laptop.
ME: The laptop was in my checked luggage. They made me remove it back there. That's why I have it now.
WOMAN: Well, they shouldn't have done that but you can't take it on the plane. It has to be checked.
ME: Well, I can't go back, can I?
WOMAN: Not my problem.
ME: I guess it is since I can't go back.
WOMAN: (laughs) Then I guess we just won't let you on the plane.
ME: (staring)
WOMAN: (laughs again) We won't let you on the plane, understand?
ME: What am I supposed to do? Leave it here?
WOMAN: You can check it with us but that'll be $25.
ME: What! It WAS checked. They made me take it out. Why should I pay for your mistake?
WOMAN: Not my problem.

It's impossible to communicate in sober prose the deliberate, nasty smugness of the woman in question, or the furious anger I experienced while staring into her pudgy, oily, smarmily-smiling face. It was the type of anger that is only a hair's-breadth from exploding into either a screaming fit or fisticuffs...and it is the type of anger that occurs only when one feels one has been punished for someone else's mistake and then deliberately insulted in the bargain. One final example, from 2003, is telling because it occurred not when dealing with a faceless bureaucracy or a heartless corporation, but at a restaurant down the street from my apartment. I ate breakfast – total $9 – and when the waitress came handed her the only money I had, a $20. Many minutes passed and she never reappeared with my change. At last I flagged down the manager.

ME: Can you get the waitress?
HIM: She went home.
ME: What do you mean, she went home?
HIM: She left.
ME: But she has my money.
HIM: She must have thought it was her tip.
ME: Her tip? Eleven dollars? My bill was $9! Why would she assume I was tipping her 120%?
HIM: (walking away) Next time you see her tell her you want it back.

Individually, none of these incidents or the dozens or hundreds of others I could recount may seem like big or even mid-sized potatoes, but together they have a cumulative weight. In each and every instance the underlying message is that we, the individual consumers/taxpayers, have neither a right nor an expectation to be treated decently; nor do we have any reasonable avenue, recourse or means by which we might complain or obtain a redress of your grievance. And if we dare express anger or frustration, the furthest implication is that you will be punished further for doing so. Had I “made a scene” at the restaurant, I've no doubt the manager would simply have called the police, in which case I'd have been out not only my money, but possibly my freedom as well.

I chose the words “redress of grievance” specifically, because it was acknowledged by our forefathers that such redress was a fundamental right of all free people. To deny the petition is not merely to deny freedom, but in a greater sense to deny a person's humanity. And this in fact is a fundamental condition of being unfree, i.e. a slave – to feel powerless, impotent, robbed of dignity, and to have no outlet for one's legitimate complaints. And this is the world in which we presently live. Whether dealing with the IRS or the Unemployment Office, the local police or some petty city official, a corporation or a small business, the result is generally the same: knuckle under, and lose one's dignity, or fight back, and bring down further inconvenience and humiliation upon oneself.

There is no longer any question that freedom is under attack everywhere in the world, and perhaps nowhere more ferociously than in the West, where most modern democratic ideals originated. But the means by which our freedom is taken away from us vary enormously and do not always present in the obvious ways -- troops in the streets, thugs at polling stations, imprisonment and execution of dissidents, attacks on journalists and journalism. There are far more subtle weapons, and one of them is to first blunt and ultimately smash the idea that it is possible for the ordinary Joe -- or Jane -- to complain about unjust treatment with some expectation of receiving a fair hearing and a measure of compensation. To lower our expectations, rob us of our sense of power, demoralize us so that we accept the stick rather than demand the carrot. To make us feel as if our God-given inalienable rights are actually just privileges which may be revoked or curtailed at the whim of our masters. In short, to keep us in a perpetual state of impotent anger, and never mind the psychological results.

During the First World War, British army psychologists discovered that one of the principal causes of "shell shock" was not war itself -- not the fear, discomfort, and pain -- but rather the one-way nature of military discipline itself. Men at the front were led by officers who in many cases were either criminally negligent, grossly incompetent or psychopathically callous, yet the iron discipline of the British army prevented them from expressing their anger. They simply had to take it -- week after week, month after month, year after bloody year, without letting on that they thought their superiors were bloody fools. It was this, more than the shells, machine gun fire and poison gas that caused so many men to crack. Fury, especially righteous fury, is not an emotion that can be bottled up long without consequences.

It follows that there are many paths to anger. Frustration is probably among the shortest, and frustration is generally caused by unmet expectations. Some frustration – my inability to go back in time and have sex with the 1969 version of Kim Novak, for example – is not legitimate, but most of the frustration I see around me today, and which I experience myself, is caused by a sort of ancestral memory of times when it was possible to be treated poorly or inadequately by a business or an agency, to express one's dissatisfaction about it, and to obtain either redress or a rough approximation of same, without being subjected to abuse or ridicule or a process so deliberately tiresome as to discourage future complaint. It is chic today to say “dissent is patriotic,” but the fact of the matter is that dissent in the face of injustice, even so petty an injustice as rude treatment at a coffee shop, is also patriotism, not to one's country only, but to one's entire race...the human race.

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.)