Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 26

Uno Kudo 3

Uno Kudo 3 just launched. Whoa. What a great issue this is. For those who don’t know, Uno Kudo is an art meets lit anthology that I edit with Aaron Dietz. The art director is Erin McParland, and the damn thing is awesome. Check it out here

I’ve been crazy over here, working a lot of hours, editing a book of short stories by chuck Howe called If I Had Wings These Windmills Would be Dead, for Unknown Press, and a book of poetry by Aurora Killpoet called Sugrtank for Kleft Jaw Press. Cool shit. Can’t wait to share it all with you.

Also: drop me a line, say hello.

Tollbooth reviewed at Screaming with Brevity

I mailed a paperback copy of my novel Tollbooth a few weeks ago. To do that, there’s customs forms and stuff, luckily my postman Derek is a cool guy and despite the long line behind me at the post office, he helped me figure out the form, and when I told him it was a novel, he asked, “Yours?”

“Yeah.”

“As in, you wrote it? Can I buy a copy.”

I paid for the book shipping to England and then walked out to my car. Yes, I have boxes of books in my trunk. I’m diseased like that now.

Anyway, today the review arrived for Tollbooth from Matthew J Hall. I thought is share it here

I’ll also let you know what the post master thinks when he’s done.

Word.

Interview about Tollbooth, NJ, etc.

Today, I got word that the interview I was part of with Gessy Alvarez went live on her site Digging Through the Fat. She is one of my favorite flash fiction writers and I was lucky enough to talk to her in length about my novel Tollbooth. You can read the interview here

Also, I hope you follow her blog, because her writing is great and she’ll keep you more than happily entertained.

Thanks for reading.

Drop me a line about the book below. I’ve got some copies on hand that I’m still mailing out to those who are interested. There is also a giveaway on Goodreads for Tollbooth. 5 copies available. Enter for that here

One last thing … Word Up! A great bookstore on 165th street in Manhatten now has copies of Tollbooth available,

as well as First Time, an anthology about how 48 writers lost their virginity. Drop in and say hi to them at Word Up! It’s a great store.

New Short Story Collection Coming by New Year’s

Alright!

Manuscript sent to editor, new short story collection by year’s end? Looks that way.

Thanks to everybody who keeps me wanting to write, you all do it in your own weird way, somehow. I’m lucky to have so many people who keep me creative. Cheers to you.

How To Find Porn on the Internet in 50 Steps

I know that some of you are struggling with finding pornographic images on the world wide web, so I thought I’d share some tips with you to make your attempts at finding lewd and lascivious images go from “major failure” to “sweet success”.

1. Get up early every day.

2. Or stay up super late, whatever.

3. Just set aside a block of time daily to reach your goal

a) that’s the only way anyone reaches their goals
b) you’ve got all this worthless free time
c) you’ve got a goal
d) so yeah, stay on target
e) Just remember your mantra, “must learn to find internet porn somehow. must learn to find internet porn somehow. must learn to find internet porn somehow.”

4. Get a job (trust me)

5. Or start your own business. Ughhhhh. I dunno.

6. The point is, you’ll need a computer

7. I know, I’ve heard, legend has it, porn is free

8. But you’ll need electricity and a room to watch it in

9. Get a newspaper

10. Go on a job interview anywhere but a cannery

a) for example catfood factory: horrible job
b) tuna fish factory: horrible job
c) aerosol spray can factory: horrible job.

11. Whatever job you get, make sure you enjoy it

12. OK, so now the money is starting to flood in

13. Go to an electronics store and say, “I would like to purchase a home desktop computer in order to casually cruise the world wide web and look for pornographic images and videos. I have zero experience with computers and zero experience with finding porn. Can you point me in the direction of a desktop system that will help me reach my goal? Also, it will need to be affordable because I work night shift at a cat food factory.”

14. Take the computer home

15. Put it in the corner.

16. DO NOT OPEN THE BOX

17. Remember what happened when you were a little kid when you jumped into the whole ‘learning to tie your shoelaces thing’ before you were ready? Remember?

18. Look down at your crushed, mangled amateur shoelace tying accident hands.

19. Make a promise to familiarize yourself with the ins and out of computers before jumping into computer use head first.

20. Get yourself a book to familiarize yourself with your new home computer. I reccomend

“DATA STRUCTURES AND ALGORITHMS IN C++”

21. I also recommend “The Advanced HTML Companion, Second Edition”

22. Step one after reading those books, Take your computer out of the box.

23. Don’t eat any packing peanuts. They are not circus peanuts.

24. Set the computer up on your desk.

25. Wait … you don’t have a desk? You were gonna set it up on the floor? I’ve never heard of that. That sounds like some serial killer shit right there.

26. Go to anywhere that sells a desk

27. Explain in graphic detail everything  you hope to get out of the desk. If they will let you sit at the desk and try it out for your purposes, by all means, give it a test run.

28. Ughhhh, build the desk at home. Follow the instructions.

29. Dispose of all the extra weird screws and bolts and stuff the desk people gave you

30. Moment of truth. Set  the computer up on the desk.

31. Don’t be scared. Just push the power button. It’ll be somewhere on the computer depending on your model, who knows where.

32. What do you mean it’s not working?

33. Is the power chord plugged into the electric socket?

34. Ok, it’s plugged in. Is the monitor plugged into the CPU tower?

35. Ok, nothing is getting power …

36. Are you sitting in the dark right now?

37. Call the power company, tell them that you need the electricity turned on in your house. How did you not know that? All the light switches didn’t work? You thought that you just needed new light switches.

38. I’m sick.

39. OK. You have light! Place looks brighter now, huh?

40. I know, you’re at  the cat food factory when the sun goes down … You just never noticed. Sure. TURN THE COMPUTER ON.

41. Working? Looks good?

42. Nice, glad to hear it. Set up your personal preferences on your desktop.

43. Oh. Yeah, I forgot to mention. Plug the fucking mouse in and the keyboard.

44. It’s not a real mouse, they just call it that.

45. Stop right there … please go take a class at our community college to familiarize yourself with basic home computer use. Try: Advanced Soldering and Circuit Board Engineering.

46. Good! You got it now! Excellent!

47. Click on the button that says “Internet”

48. Internet is another way to say world wide web

49. In the upper right hand corner there’s a magnifying glass near a search bar. Magnifying glass like Sherlock Holmes, not actual magnifying. That’s how you find stuff.

50. Type porn in that search bar. Click enter. ENJOY!

50 Steps To Writing a Poem

1. Get born

2. Breath some air

3. Once they give you a crayon, start drawing on everything

4. When they take your crayons away, make shapes with your peas and carrots or whatever

5. Laugh at everything

6. Stare at the sun

7. go underwater with your eyes open

8. listen to the dog’s heart for hours

9. listen to the cat’s heart for a split

second before it runs away

10. learn some of the alphabet

11. notice that things don’t always float

12. ride a BMX or something through weird trails.

13. learn a few numbers

14. when they mention the moon, remember that it is a) made of cheese, b) somewhere we never went

15. don’t get a haircut

16. get in a fist fight on the school bus with whoever will have you

17. fall out of a tree and break something.

18. kiss other humans

19. learn the rest of the alphabet

20. drink some water

21. go to a funeral in a Hawaiian shirt if they’ll let you.

22. try to levitate. just try. you never know.

23. lose some teeth

24. get some new teeth

25. play music everywhere all the time underneath everything

26. dream about neon death without pain

27. eat fire for lunch

28. graduate grammar school

29. carve things into dead wood

30. spell out S.O.S. in chicken bones

31. rhyme everything with orange

32. watch Goonies again

33. read books about anything but books

34. spit off a watertower onto the high tension powerlines.

35. do a backflip off a tire swing into a silver lake

36. go to the prom with a cardboard cut out of yourself

37. don’t go to college yet

38. drive around aimlessly through America

39. yell into caves

40. find a nice graveyard and make sure your tombstone isn’t there

41. go to college

42. Look for drugs

43. If you can’t find any, start selling drugs there

44. Invest your drug money in a nice suit

45. Also get a notebook

46. And a pen

47. write a poem

48. do you like it?

49. ok, you made it, you made a poem.

50. You’re done. You win.

Book Giveaway for Tollbooth

I set up a book giveaway for my novel Tollbooth, out from Piscataway House. The giveaway will last 30 days, enter to win with the click of a god dang button. We’re giving away 5 signed paperback copies. I hope that you win one.

Check out the contest here

If you’re not sure what’s up with Tollbooth, read here

Other comments, question? Hit me up down below. Also: wanna know more about having your own contests? Leave a comment.

Paperbacks, cheaper, mailed to you. Tollbooth continues … Chapters 19-22

I just got a new shipment of my novel Tollbooth from the publisher, Piscataway House. If anyone would like to snag one from me, I sign them and mail them out with some zines and poems and stuff. Thank you for reading.

$10.00

follow the paypal link below.

Shipping to USA only

and as always on Tuesdays, here is the continued serialization of Tollbooth. We’re almost a 1/4 into the book. We’ll hit that this Thursday.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

*** continuing the serialization of Tollbooth***

click here to start at the beginning

19

Sarah had vivid nightmares about car crashes. She would often wake me—hysterical. A reoccurring object of her night terrors was my old car, a diesel Volkswagen Rabbit, that I’d named Diesel Cottontail as a teenager.

Usually in Sarah’s nightmares, Diesel Cottontail would strike into her while she was walking or riding her sea green bicycle. She would lose a limb, pinned between other cars, telephone poles, brick walls.

For the most part, it was Sarah’s leg that was lost. It’d vanish in a swarm of black bees.

Waking, she would grip onto her leg underneath the sheets as she thrashed in terror. I’d stroke the sweaty hair from her brow and comfort her the best I could, as she wept, saying, “that car . . . that car . . . that car.”

When she was calmer, I’d bring her a glass of ice cold water, she’d fish a tablet out of her top drawer beside the bed, take it down with a gulp.

“Everything’s alright now,” I used to say. “That was a long time. That car is gone, and is never coming back.”

20

Dolly, Sarah’s mom, was dead. She visited me from time to time, just to make me squirm. That’s when I knew I was doing bad. She’d come dressed in the clothes she’d wore on the day she died and harassed me venomously.

“You’re a real piece of work,” she said, materializing in the booth at my shoulder. “Utter scum,” she hocked ectoplasm at my feet.

Dolly grew up in Long Island, lived through hardships there, moved to New Jersey with Sarah in her womb. She’d raised my Sarah alone while working as an ER nurse. Dolly had done the best she could. It was my fault she was dead.

The first time she appeared to me from beyond the grave, it was in an Atlantic City bathroom mirror on the night of my bachelor party. I was washing my hands in the sink, they smelled like the insides of a stripper.

She’d materialized in the bathroom mirror, flips of jet black hair and her horn rimmed glasses, “Look at you! Pathetic!” Dolly snarled, “Pathetic!”

Then she vanished. Just a brief little insult, then gone.

Behind me in the tollbooth, Dolly whispered, “Jim, I’m not gonna make this easy for you.”

I turned to look at her, all that was there was on the silver wall was my certificate with more dicks drawn on it.

21

Sarah killed her mother and she did it with my car. Diesel Cottontail. I was out of town, on a school trip. Dolly, who wasn’t much of a driver herself, was teaching Sarah how to drive. I’d been real cool with the idea. Excited even. Sarah the driver! I remember sitting on the yellow bus as we pushed west, hoping she’d get a real badass car with a big back seat, so we could screw with more comfort.

Their driver’s lesson, hadn’t gone so well. I still have the article from the paper. She was trying to learn how to parallel park, her mom was behind the car giving her signals. she ran her over, inadvertently crushing her underneath the Volks.

I could understand why Sarah hated cars, it was just a shame that she had to hate the one car that I ever loved.

22

Dolly’s coffin was lowered slowly into the wet earth, each pallbearer gripping onto a satin sash while one of the nameless cousins played Danny Boy on the fiddle with wobbly uneven strokes.

I wasn’t there, funerals weren’t my thing. My father in his copper urn on the mantel was all the ceremonial death I ever needed from this life. It was a shame though that the contents of that urn hadn’t been able to teach me what was right and wrong.

I had no concept of what giving respect was, either. Blame the ashes. My mother didn’t have the capacity to explain anything. She’d shut down after my dad’s death.

When Sarah’s mother died, she’d done the opposite, becoming vivid and dislodged. Frantic.

Sarah was seventeen at the cemetery, crying into her teenage hands, avoiding eye contact with her mother’s casket. Black dress. Trembling knees. I was in the opposite of a suit, at home parked outside the garage, spray painting my Volkswagen. The wind kept whistling, the blue paint catching the breeze and blowing back at me. Ted skidding up on his BMX, said, “You look like a smurf.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You still have that car?” he asked, surprised, “it was used in a murder . . . don’t the cops confiscate it for evidence?”

“Go away, man,” I said. “I’m not in the mood to joke around.”

“I wasn’t joking . . .”

There were tears forming in my eyes. One welled up and rolled down my cheek. Ted watched the tear roll and shake on my jawline as the breeze blew. When the tear fell, it screamed down to the earth and made a sound like a bomb going off when it struck the blue tarp I’d covered the driveway with.

I recall him flinching, jumping almost.

“It’s gonna be alright,” he said.

I went into the house. Sat on the couch. Staining the cushions blue.

I talked to Sarah on the telephone the night that she tried to kill herself. She was in the guest room at her aunt’s house. Two days had passed since the funeral. I tried my hardest to make her laugh. It wasn’t easy. We talked about going to see a movie. There was a dog barking outside her door. She said she hated the dog more than anything in the world. She said that she missed me. She wanted to hold me. I suggested we go see Weekend At Bernie’s II. She was deathly silent. “Really, Weekend At Bernie’s II?” she asked in disgust.

“Yeah.”

“Sure, sure, whatever. Anything. I just want to see you.”

“The feeling is more than mutual.”

She said goodbye. Then, she went into the bathroom, turned on the sink. She turned on the shower. She ate every single pill in her aunt’s medicine cabinet, laid down in the bathtub with the shower raining down her. She contemplated drinking Drano, like Kurt Vonnegut’s mother had done. She’d just read Slaughter House Five because it was on the banned books list. She closed her eyes.

One of the nameless cousins found her.

She was doing time in the Mayweather Home. I went to visit her there: seventh floor. At first she was in a ward where you weren’t allowed to sit. She laid in the bed staring up at the florescent lights. As visiting hours allowed, I stood next to the bed. They’d let me come for two and a half hours. I’d stand the whole time, leaning against the wall next to her bed, she would say nothing. Not even when I said, “Supposedly, there are secret passages underneath this place. Al Capone used them to get away from the G men. Did you know that?”

That went on for three days.

The fourth day, she said, “go away.”

So I went away.

I fell in love with her when she was there in that home. She was brought down to my level. I don’t think it’s possible to love someone who is high above you or far below you. You might be drawn to them, you might feel affection or admiration of some kind, but not real love.

When I came to see Sarah again, she’d been moved into her own room. I wasn’t allowed to be anywhere near it except during visiting hours, it was OK for me to sit with her. We sat in the communal area and played checkers. We watched a VHS of Romeo and Juliet because “I have a book report and I don’t think I can bring myself to read anything,” she said.

She didn’t know that Juliet drank poison at the end. I said, “I’m bored, can we shut this off?” somewhere around the middle.

“I wanna see what happens . . .”

“They get away.”

“Oh, alright,” she said.

The next time I came, we went down to the basketball court. We didn’t play. We sat Indian style on the green grass and watched some of the other patients dribble around the court awkwardly, tossing the ball up at the rim, ricocheting off wildly into the pine trees.

She looked at me, “I want to stay with you. I don’t wanna go back to my aunt’s house. She doesn’t want me there anyway.”

“Of course,” I said, holding her hand on the cool grass. “You can move in,” I said.

It was my mother’s house, but she didn’t care. We were gonna graduate high school in two months.

Across the lawn was my blue car. The murder car—Diesel Cottontail.

“Is that your car?”

“Yeah,” I said.

She was very quiet.

“I painted it,” I said.

“I see that.”

“It’s not orange anymore.”

Sarah let go of my hand.

 

I’m interviewed by Mik Everett

Here is a link to an interview that I was lucky enough to be on the receiving end of. It explains some of the projects that I have going on. Thank you or checking it out.

Click here

Short Story “The Frog” published at Bartleby Snopes

Today, I go word that my story “The Frog” is running at the website Bartleby Snopes. I’m a fan of the site, and am pleased to see the story find a home there. You can read it here

A quick set up, The Frog is a bit of magical realism taking place in a strip mall town, and centers on Adam, a displeased young man, who takes his rage and boredom out on the frogs he catches in the drainage ditch behind Fried Paradise.

I’m expecting this short story to be a part of my new print collection, Lightning Box, that is in the hands of my publisher right now, being mulled over.

I appreciate the read, and wouldn’t mind if you dropped a line down there at the bottom, who’s out there? What are you up to?

Also: I’m looking for reviewers or my novel Tollbooth. Want a free book, let me know.