Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 8

Reviewed at The Small Press Book Review

The Small Press Book Review wrote about F 250 and me as this is what they said:

“Bud Smith reminds me of a young Bret Easton Ellis, if Ellis were slumming it in New Jersey.”

Read the whole review Here

F 250 Reviewed at This Blog Will Change Your Life

Ben Tanzer, author of New York Stories, and Lost In Space, just to name a few, wrote about my novel F 250 and the split book Tables Without Chairs for This Blog Will Change Your Life.

Check out the review here

E – A – D – G – B – E

I even slept with my prized guitar in my hands.

How much I loved it.

Ate breakfast while practicing pentatonic or mixolydian scales at the table, dipping down to my plate like I was at a pie eating contest.

But while I was in the shower Dan Riccard snuck in my room and took my guitar—so I pursued across town, thinking he’d be on his porch playing it, but he was not.

Roommate said, “Gone to Chicago.”

I wrote down the address and got on a bus but when I knocked on that Chicago door, a tall woman in a purple hat handed me a note.

Note said: ‘Tell all wimpy little punk pursuant parties I’m bye bye … shadow-style slipped into blooming dusk, everywhere and nowhere, me + this sweet six string.’

“To where?” I asked the tall woman.

She studied the note. “Hmmm, is Bye Bye a town in Tennessee?”

Turns out he’d joined the Army. Taken my guitar to the jungle!

I journeyed backwards to Louisville.

Where my girl the sweetest singer you ever heard said, “Forget the guitar. Get another guitar.”

Shook my head, “Need that one.”

“How we gonna make music?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but just shook my head.

She said to me as the screen door slapped shut, “Nothing belongs to nobody, and I’m slipping through your hands.”

That night I shaved my head and in the morning when the sun was popping over the corn, I went and joined the army too. Not to kill. Or to prove a point for God and country.

Just to find my guitar.

Day one at training:

“Anybody seen a big eyed Kentucky boy pass through here with a maple body acoustic …”

Day two at training: “He’s an ugly guy, big goofy strawberry for a nose, hateful eyes.”

Day thirty at training: “He couldn’t pick guitar for anything, you’d know who I’m looking for, bad picker, torture listening to him.”

Day Sixty on the boat over in crashing tempest of a storm: “He’s got a dent on his forehead from where we crashed when he was riding on my handlebars when we was kids.”

No luck. No one knew his whereabouts.

So I sunk deeper into death. And in just a week of horror bush kill life, I was all like: “LOOK AT ME BIG BADASS SOLDIER!” I screamed into tiger wet drip drop rain-all-the-time jungle.

And while on patrol, machine gun slung low, I thought about the C chord.

I thought about D minor, tossing grenades over the roof, no big deal. D minor, how the fingers went.

Burned a village down and visualized F#.

In all foxhole and caves I yelled for Dan Riccard.

At all the depots with money for leave I asked for Dan Riccard at whore houses and in the bars with rotted floors.

My stars and stripes superiors had never heard of him. Staff sergeant had not heard of him.

I drew Dan Riccard’s face at Da Nang, beach called My Khe, with a fossilized palm fronz. Waves pummeling the surface of my eroded earth.

I dreamt of the B major, hovering in a ping pong waterfall.

And one night being woken by someone strumming. I climbed up from my bed in the palm fronds and crawled through big thick mud, to peer out at our own enemy sitting in the middle of a downpour, playing a song.

I raised my rifle.

But could not fire.

The song was too sweet. Though I do not know its name.

It doesn’t matter it wasn’t my guitar anyway. I could see my guitar in my minds eye. My grandfather carved it himself from a tree that his grandfather had planted. It got struck by lightning every time it rained but did not fall.

The next morning there were explosions all around. And planes that dropped fire bombs on us wrongly. Our own damn planes.

I leapt into a river and the rapids took me away farther still from my life on the farm.

I too became a shadow on the edge of the villages. I hid. I did not travel in day light. I stowed away on a ship leaving the war, fleeing completely. Feeling no remorse.

I was in a Dutch motel having lost all trace of Dan Riccard except confirmation from a call to his momma that he too had ducked out of the war. And I had nowhere to go next when a note was slipped under the door.

“I’ve taken your guitar to the top of Mt. Everest, it’s always been a dream of mine.”

I ran out into the hallway, I ran out into the parking lot. There were no cars. There were no people. All I had was my emptiness.

The Sherpas tried to talk me out of the climb. They said I did not have the proper training. They said the air would be thin and that I needed $20,000 to pay them to help me get up. All air bottles would be abandoned. They said, “Get another guitar.”

I said, “I don’t care.”

I handed over my life savings. Which included the deed to my share of the farm and one Wednesday morning we began to climb.

Thursday I began felt ice vein and ice heart and chatter teeth.

Friday my hand crystallized. Saturday it froze some more. Sunday it was black. On Monday morning I woke up with my hand gone and a fever spread over me. A Sherpa passed me my hand. He’d cut it off to save my life.

Still we kept climbing.

Some of them turned back. I kept going. Most of them turned back I climbed higher. One-handed but still going.

When I got to the top of the mountain, wouldn’t you know, Dan Riccard had left me a drawing in the snow. Two circles.

One with a smile. One with a frown.

I guess I was supposed to choose.

I journeyed down the mountain. And then the harder journey … home.

The farm seemed quiet then. To my surprise no one came and took it away from me even though it didn’t belong to me any longer.

I cut down crop circles for thirteen years.

She came to visit me once and said, “Do you play anymore?”

I help up my stump.

“Nope.”

A black car came the next spring. The driver had a beard and a black hat and didn’t look like he was from around here. Who is anymore?

he stepped out of the car and asked my name and I said yessir and he said, “I’m sorry, boy. Dan Riccard has left the earth.”

“So he’s taken my guitar to Mars? That what you’re saying?”

“No. He’s passed away.”

“Now I feel bad. We were fighting. He was my best friend. We came up together.”

“Why were you fighting?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I understand.”

The driver opened up the trunk and there was my guitar.

I looked down at it in the trunk.

We were quiet for a while.

Contemplating life. And contemplating death. A song bird sang sorrowfully in a tree on the other side of the property. The driver sighed and said, “It’s such a pretty guitar.”

Well don’t you know, I picked it up.

I smashed the guitar against a tree.

The driver jumped. Looked at me. Got in his car and drove away.

But there was a photo inside it that fell down into the mud. A faded polaroid. The photo lay there in the splintered wood and the wet slop.

And I picked it up with my aching fingers. And brushed all the crud off it and looked hard.

Me and my friend.

I looked at my missing hand and could feel it make a G chord.

I could feel it moving on the demolished neck.

I could feel it switch to A7.

SOME TWEETS

Dressed like a ninja and not here for church, baby.

stay up to watch the sun rise and give it the finger

I’d like to hold 100,000 balloons and float up into the sky towards a cloud shaped like a shark with its mouth open.

I am going to start calling things ‘pretty fucking sledgehammer’

4 am is famous for being oblivion.

some people are just waking up to find out they have turned to stacks of hundreds of pebbles they found while dreaming.

other people are waking up with winged feet and opened windows above the sheer cool cliffs.

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I’m feeding fish food to the cat. Confusing the whole fucking ecosystem.

Somebody give a werewolf a jet pack. Let’s make some history.

If anybody needs me I’ll be looking out from the eye holes in painting walking around secret passages candle stick in hand

All your missing socks? They’re my house. You read that right. I built my house out of your socks.

Very anti-social. Very into heavy petting. Those two conflicting traits define my life.

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I was raised by a pack of wild cherry Pepsi.

Crash a dirtbike right into the swimming pool. Sink to the bottom. Await, badass mermaids.

There’s probably some Special Ops person somewhere who’s deadly enough to kill someone with a single blueberry pancake.

Just hijacked 15 glass jugs of apple juice from a medical lab. Tastes like urine.

My dream house has a pencil sharpener in every room.

Life’s a typo that everybody edits a different way.

Believe in yourself, unless you’re the Easter Bunny.

Don’t ever die. Drink this juice from this wolf paw footprint, let’s fucking party.

The survivors of the apocalypse gathered together and rebuilt society with Legos.

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Sometimes some people are so beautiful I can imagine them really being made of 100,000 blue birds that will scatter over the sea if ignored.

If you haven’t slow danced to the Mortal Kombat soundtrack, then you haven’t lived.

I should boil all my old VHS tapes and DVDs and CDs in a large pot. Make a nostalgic soup out of all that stuff. All I need is a bay leaf.

Shake a tree; a hundred beautiful girls spill out. Dodge them. Then, jump in like they’re a pile of leaves.

sometimes I look around at people at the supermarket and wonder how long they’d survive in a regular market.

You can’t steal second with your foot on first unless you use astral projection.

Hi kids, today I’m using a jackhammer to chip out concrete. Hi kids, stay in school.

Weaponized hashtag.

It’s only the first 90 years that are tough, says the 91 year old lady about to jump out of an airplane with a parachute with her face on it

If you feel lost, eat a map.

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moonlit pools. starlit pools. neon sign lit pools. bug zapper lit pools.

People everywhere are swimming in night lit pools.

some people are stepping through doorways into super bright light and getting knocked over for their efforts. I’m fine here.

I guess it never gets old finding great stuff laying in the dirt.

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If all else fails sit very quietly and change the entire world.

Hi I just listened to your voicemail, I love you too and you make my life worth living too. I’m on my way home carrying chests of treasure.

the bartender doesn’t seem ready to negotiate with me on a molecular level.

Other times we write our memoirs on barf bags.

Hi, I’m drinking everclear in Indiana.

This is Dante’s Inferno for Kids Who Don’t Give a Shit.

Just wanted you to know I’m in economy parking area B row 12, approx 42 cars down the row to the east of bus shuttle stop 6. In case I ask.

Hold your breath and swim through the electric coral maze to open up the treasure chest full of extra lives, ruby fins, infinite breath.

Weave in an out of asteroids and laser blast metallic dragons leaping up from the space lava.

even more people are waking up with music pouring out of their hummingbird lives.

X-rays for the ordinary instances of your life.

Wonder who pissed off the moon last night.

I’m curating me sleeping in this bed like I’m in a medically induced coma.

Trees think turtles are fast as fuck.

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Don’t let a door welded shut stop you.

I only take my wedding ring off when I’m around a machine that can rip the finger off or if I’m feeding a camel a handful of captain crunch.

just chilling in the work parking lot ten feet from the turnstiles pretending I’m dead, again.

I specialize in things that do not matter.

Shout out to the guy laying on his horn behind me in traffic. We weren’t moving but the horn made me open the sunroof extend a friendly wave

If you get lucky you learn to like yourself.

I’m working night shift at an oil refinery. Any body have any theories on this universe?

You don’t always have to be happy. Sometimes you can be ecstatically miserable.

This whole city is covered in a thin layer of coconut suntan lotion.

Sometimes when people talk to me I just stare at them until they give up and go to the movies or a water park or whatever they do.

If you want to have more vivid dreams, change the light bulbs in your house to Roman candles.

If you want to be a better artist, go fall off a few cliffs.

some other winners have lost 18 pounds in 2 months by drinking just 800 less beers a week.

other people are making oatmeal in a waffle iron.

Life should inspire drool

Dying is the worst thing on TV but it keeps getting picked up for a nee season.

Self destruction seems easier than grocery shopping.

I come from a small town with 1000 people and 2500 asshole cops.

I can’t figure out what anything means, so I’m making up my own everything.

A river of coffee in which we wash away our our sins, dunking new babies and stuff. Celebrating the Donut Lord.

Take some heavy excavation equipment out into the street, start digging. Go down about 100 feet, get bored, put up some road cones. Leave

I feel more comfortable with ugly bank tellers.

Life: be more serious

Me: no

Life: comb your cat

Me: I don’t have a cat

Life: get a serious cat to comb

Me: you’re irrational

Life: a calico

I wanna lay down in a blueberry waffle and die for awhile.

My coworkers specialize in racist humor and not getting fucked by their wives.

Rumor has it that 83% of humanity is pandering towards whoever/whatever will have them.

“I’m sorry, I don’t date clients.”

–girl at the fried chicken place

I just commissioned a bird outside my window to be my eyes and ears over the kingdom.

Some avocados are better pets than cats.

Take great pride in your resistance to spontaneous human combustion.

Any of these doors magic?

Keep your sex and time travel separate.

Going on another shaman vision quest at work today, rather than working. Upper management has been warned.

Quick question: why didn’t Teen Wolf just kill EVERYONE?

In my dreams I have Pepto Bismol for blood and I’m super chill.Right now: dissolve through the floor, swim through lakes of magma until you find the magnetic core of this sphere, becoming lightning.

For my next trick I’ll make all of this laundry a home for raccoons.

Be not very awesome at the drums very loudly.

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Destruction Is inevitable, I said to the girl at the deli counter.

one dream I had was of a man who collected 200 refrigerators, cut the walls out of some, welded them together, lived inside the structure

Made a pizza with my telekinesis. Tasted very much like a dust bunny. Found the pizza under the bed with telekinesis. Science has no answers

Enjoys: all 26 letters, some numbers, liquid nitrogen, hens, rabbits, colors that draw birds/not bees, waterfalls with caves and swords, etc.

it’s pretty cool when someone is like “Hey! What are you working on?”

and you’re like “HEY! NOTHING!”

my review of this glass of ice water: 1 STAR: TASTELESS, TOO FUCKING COLD!

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Moved my bed under the motherfucking window. If it floats up and out and away out the window, I’ll feel in on it. Away we go.

If I start to levitate, throw my beer up to me.the death squad seemed friendly at first.

Wanna run over a mythical creature with my car.

Washed my pants in the bath tub like this is Ireland 1887.

Don’t get out of bed they’ll shoot you with a flame thrower.

Be nice to everybody they might be the Angel of Death, or have an in ground swimming pool.

Update: seagull just shit on me.

Hi everyone I won my local election I’m now a congressman in the district of my own apartment. I oppose suicide, because it’s just me.

bought them a chainsaw for their wedding gift.

the universe is random but errs in our favor, if you don’t believe me, get high and look at your hand.

I get high and specifically do not solve crimes.

My hopes lie with the adventurers.

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I don’t respect gravity: don’t use it, don’t depend on it, don’t–oh shit here I go floating away.

If I die in the middle of the night, wake me up gentle saying, “hey babe you died again, come back to life, on the way get us bread & milk”

lift the hood, check oil, inspect the fan belts, change the spark plugs, drink the windshield washer fluid, drink the ant-freeze: LET’S RIDE

after a thousand years, I cleaned the dryer lint trap.

Got some new clothes. Now I look like Vanilla Ice.

Just caught a mouse with a drinking glass and flushed him down the toilet after writing a poem about compassion.

tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be 5 in dog years minus 1 cat year.

eat light bulbs. make light in your belly for those trapped there, painting pretty pictures.

tonight the bartender explained in detail how to make my favorite drink, and now I am my own bartender and the bartender no longer exists.

It’s hard to get through. We don’t live on the same earth.

every time a bat swoops into the moonlight to eat a mosquito, we take a yager shot.

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Interviewed at About.com

Hi there,

About Dot Com interviewed me about writing fiction, being creative in an industrial slum, daily grind becoming art — as they say “finding inspiration in the mundane”

read it here if you’re in the mood

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On the home front, I just got home from Asbury Park, NJ, where me and my wife went for the weekend to swim in the ocean. We hung out a lot with the poet Mark Brunetti and went to see the band Dentist play at the Asbury Park Yacht Club. Also saw some punk band play at Asbury Park Lanes. We also heard a guy jamming out AC/DC’s Thunderstruck on a park bench at 2 am with a huge amp. And people making art suspended from ropes and flailing around on the boardwalk … I don’t know what I am saying, but I guess it all adds up to: you should come with us to the beach in New Jersey. All the time. Make that happen, please.

Also, I just hooked up a Roku 2.

We have TV now.

Whoa. We are watching Seinfeld on hulu plus.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got …

BRAND NEW SPLIT BOOK / REVIEW COPIES FOR YOU.

  

So, it hasn’t been too long since the release of my novel F 250 (a guy in a noise band gets in a three way relationship with two girls, June Doom and K Neon) which is now found as a paperback and on Kindle 

But I love adventurous/weird projects and Tables Without Chairs is definitely that … Part brain-melting art damaged drawings, part episode of Seinfeld if you were Robotrippin’, part pot shot laugh a second skewering of MFA culture, this book is a gloriously arranged mess of love. 

Today I have ARCs of the split book with Brian Alan Ellis (author of King Shit, 33 Fragments of Sick Sad Living, and Something Good, Something Bad, Something Dirty, among others) coming out from House of Vlad and today I want to send you an advanced release PDF. 

If you think you’d like to write up something about the book, send me a message for a digital ARC. Better yet, if you have a specific magazine or website in mind, message me at budsmithwrites.com and I will send you a paperback, along with a copy of my chapbook Dust Bunny City (32 pages: a day-drinking narrative poem cycle ranging from 75th street to 173rd street, with lots of surprises along the way.) 

About TABLES WITHOUT CHAIRS, the book: 

It owes less to norm core literature than it does to an acid trip one might do at a punk show at the local bowling alley. 

There’s wild monster drawings by Waylon Thornton

a novella called Spook House by Brian, along with a large chuck of anti-writing advice tweets that are the funniest things I’ve ever read. 

And then to finish off the book, I’ve got collection of short stories called CALM FACE about where I live in NYC and the whacked out stuff I see, experience, don’t sleep through. 

Here’s a story at JUKED from my section, called No Reason.

Please pass this post along to people you know in the lit scene who love free stuff and love to review books. Tweet it. Facebook it. Text it. Email it. If you do, drop me a line, let me know, I’ll send you something cool. 

Love, 

Bud

F 250 Now on KINDLE

  

Hello hello hello 

I’m happy to say that my novel F 250 is up on Kindle for $5.99. 

Recently the Otherppl Podcast said this about it, “Refreshing. Bud is a good one.”

“Bud Smith is Nick Hornby if you strapped him to a Tesla coil and launched him into a Sun made of Poetry.” –Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day 

“The working-class romanticism in F 250 is hard to miss, with drug addiction, home eviction and random violence, the abyss the music is supposed to hold off for at least the length of a song.”  –The Rumpus 

Check it out Here

Thanks! 

(Also, if you review for any sites/magazines, please contact me at budsmithwrites@gmail.com, I’d be happy to send out a book for you.)

Interviewed on Otherppl Podcast

Hey! So, this was a big deal to me. I had a chance when I was in Los Angeles, to go to Brad Listi’s garage and talk about my writing and my day job and family and some normal but weird things that have happened to me. Otherppl is a wonderful podcast and I’m humbled to be able to go on it. Right now I’m at the oil refinery on night shift but the sun is coming up, and you better believe I’m watching it rise over New Jersey.

Listen to the interview here

Interviewed at The Rumpus

A couple of things have happened in the last few weeks that I’m psyched to tell you about. 

I was interviewed in The Rumpus about my novel F250, working in heavy construction vs attending an MFA program, and getting in a bunch of car crashes. 

I went to California on vacation and managed to do two readings, one on July 7th at Stories bookstore in Los Angeles with Ben Loory, xTx, Brad Listi and Mira Gonzales. I read from F250 … That was a good time. Met Roxanne Gay for the first time, and that was very nice. On July 8th I did another reading in Long Beach with Jim Ruland, Ashley Perez, Erin Parker and Janice Lee. I didn’t read from F250 at this one. Instead I read a new story called Tiger Blood and read a bunch of quick capsule reviews on my comer bodega here in NYC. 

Also on July 8th, I was interviewed for Brad Listi’s Otherppl podcast which he records in West Hollywood. Look for that next week, I believe. Or the week after. I’ll share the link here when it’s live. 

And I had a story that ran at JUKED not too long ago called No Reason. It’s a story that will be in a forthcoming book I have coming out called Calm Face, which is in a split book with Brian Alan Ellis … The book is called Table Without Chairs, look for that at the end of August. 

I’m going to the post office today to mail books out. So thank you to everyone who is reading this, sharing it, retweeting it, reviewing the book and coming out to see readings … I feel pretty lucky these days. 

When I Have Nothing to Write About

When I have nothing to write about I get in my car and drive around. I go to Chipotle and get a carnitas burrito salad and then I go over to the surf and skate store and I buy jeans off the clearance rack because it’s 86 degrees and when it’s 86 degrees you can get $70 jeans for $28. 

When I have nothing to write about I’m able to drink a lot more unsweetened ice tea than usual and I squeeze about six lemons in it. 

I do my non writing in the car parked behind the Chipotle and type on my iPhone with my thumbs. It may seem crazy to type something very long out with your thumbs but before we had iPhones we had to sit at a computer and that was lame and before that we had to use a manual typewriter and oh god that sounds like utter hell, especially if you make a mistake and before that it was papyrus and ink blot on a feather and damn damn before that it was carving what you had to say into the side of a hunk of stone with a chisel. So, typing on an iPhone doesn’t sound that crazy now. 

I don’t have an idea for a short story or a poem today and I’m not working on a novel. Instead I’m down here by the beach and I’m waiting for my wife and her sister to get done registering for a baby shower for the sister. 

If I had an opinion on anything, this would be an opinion piece. I don’t have any opinions. Maybe my only opinion is that I think it’s better when kids like me just shut the hell up for a while. Let anybody else yell about current events or world politics. 

I just went into a Chipotle and took a selfie in there because I thought the white tile looked cool, it reminded me of Dungeon 5 in the original Legend of Zelda game. So that’s what I’m up to in my life on this beautiful Saturday. Updating my facebook AVI, drinking unsweetened ice t, dressing like I’m a 16 year old skater punk and sitting in the air conditioning of my car which is finally paid off and now I feel like a millionaire because I don’t have to send $400 a month to Delaware. The $400 I can now spend on blue tinted crappy sunglasses, deodorant that smells like a tropical island and of course, fancy beer.