Ryan Werner's Blog, page 2

Music For Little Kids That Isn't a Bunch of Bullshit

Fang Island playing to a bunch of stoked kids. Working at a Montessori preschool is great because I get to shape young minds and also be patient zero for a new kind of foot-and-mouth disease. I was listening to Lucinda Williams one day when one of the teachers told me that I needed to play kids' music, which isn't untrue but is kind of missing the part where she actually just kind of hates Lucinda WIlliams.

I had no intentions of listening to Raffi or limp-dick classical music or Kidz Bop. Because I love my job, I also had no intentions of putting on Return to Metalopolis  or Zombi and being like, "There's no swearing and it's virtuosic! What great music for kids!" just to be an asshole. After awhile, I ended coming back to these albums again and again. I can't guarantee that it's worthwhile or sinking in, but you could say the same thing about math. Jim O'Rourke - Bad Timing I probably prefer Leo Kottke if I’m going to listen to some guy sit down and noodle around on an acoustic guitar, but Kottke gets to be a bit too much with the 12-string battering sometimes, like he wants to shred but he can’t find his pick and oh shit I’m high on coke and is this an acoustic, man? I’d probably be better off with John Fahey, but at 7:15 in the morning I usually feel like I want to die enough already.

This album is pretty even sounding until some majestic, closing-movie-credits horn arrangement comes out of nowhere towards the back half. I always end up running into the kitchen to shut it off around then, because it’s around 7:45 in the morning at that point, and I don’t feel like hearing Jim O’Rourke’s interpretation of what a Clint Eastwood western would be like if he flew to the sun on the back of a dinosaur at the end.

I put this album on after hours at the bar I work at and my buddy Zach asked if it was Al Di Meola, which kind of sucks.
Chet Baker - Chet Baker Sings This is the Chet Baker I’d like to remember, where he looks like a detective diving cock first into an undercover job as a high school quarterback as opposed to the dude made of cigarette butts that we see in that documentary from the last year of his life. Flea is somehow more annoying than he’d be in the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Chet Baker glues his bones back together with heroin. Wonderful film.

Thankfully, the kids are still about fifteen years and several failed attempts at fucking a girl who looks like Death from the Sandman comics away from knowing anything about that documentary. For as much instrumental music as I play at the school, it’s nice to get something with vocals in. This isn’t nearly as desolate as Baker’s lispy cover of Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue” years later, and not as flip as some of the ballads albums he did for drug money. I think the kids would actually dig it if they weren’t busy yelling over it because they’re stoked I built a four foot tower out of some wood blocks. 
Marvin Gaye - Trouble Man I like Let’s Get It On better, but that’s practically like sex ed class and I don’t want to be the reason a bunch of future-dudes get maced because they keep telling the wrong girl at the bar that they know she sure loves to ball.

This one is mostly instrumental with random smatterings of jive soul nonsense thrown in because it’s Marvin Gaye, so who gives a shit. It’s like sexy meth head open mic rambling. Apparently it’s the soundtrack to a Blaxploitation movie about a detective named Mr. T who is also a pool shark attempting to clean up the ghetto. I haven’t seen it and I probably don’t need to because it uses a dice game as a major plot device and life is pretty short.

Whenever I put this on, one of the parents dropping of their kid will almost always do a little head nod and be like, “Yeah, we’re really jamming now!” Iowa is the whitest place on earth. Everyone owns the soundtrack to The Big Chill and has a favorite sandwich at Subway.
Toe - The Book About My Idle Plot On A Vague Anxiety I told a friend of mine online that I was starting an instrumental rock band. He sent me back a video of Toe playing live and then I thought I needed guitar lessons more than delay pedals.

For all the weaving and patchwork of the guitars, the drummer’s probably the best part. Usually I don’t want to listen to a band where the drummer’s the best part because they think they’re Led Zeppelin but they’ve actually just been playing the same blues riff for twenty minutes while some prick does fey wrist movements on his and-a hi-hat hits.

There’s a Toe album where some girl does weird techno-pop vocal punching—or at least that’s how I remember it—over top of the band and some more EPs that are all right, so this and Songs, Ideas We Forgot are the one I end up playing the most. This band and that heavy metal shred game show where Paul Gilbert and Marty Friedman cut heads and speak very campy Japanese are almost enough to make up for all the cartoon tentacle porn and vending machines that sell used panties.
Tristeza - Spine and Sensory In college I went kind of far down the post-rock rabbit hole while also, perhaps somewhat relatedly, secretly dating a girl who was hanging on to the last gasps of the religion she grew up with. So, there exists in me, as I'm guessing there does with many other guys my age, an odd correlation between sexual frustration and the discography of Mogwai.

It was actually the second Tristeza record, Dream Signals In Full Circles, I had back then. Like Air’s Moon Safari or Unwed Sailor’s The Faithful Anchor , we only listened to it once or twice for whatever reason. Years later I wanted to hear some emo stuff without the vocals, because I hadn’t gotten laid in a long time but was mostly at terms with it. Remembered Tristeza and checked out the wrong record, Spine and Sensory, which I like a lot more.

TL;DR: This is a good album and I don't want kids. The Score for David Lynch's The Straight Story Man, it took me forever to get into David Lynch. The first thing of his I saw was Mulholland Drive, which I didn’t know going into is like the length of a Wrestlemania and is either a Mobius strip experiment or just some weird fucking movie that could probably be like an hour and a half shorter. I didn’t know anything about David Lynch at the time except that he was cool enough to put tits in his movie.

I came back years later and tried Eraserhead, and thought it was like what happens when some kid gets too much money to make his entrance tape for film school. Blue Velvet had cool cars in it and I really loved Wild At Heart because it’s got Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern listening to thrash. Twin Peaks is great for awhile until that one chick turns into a knob on a cabinet or whatever. Audrey and Cooper never banging is horseshit.

I still haven’t seen The Straight Story, but I think I would really like it. Whenever I listen to the score I always mishear the kids and end up thinking they’re talking about manic depressive states and hyper-realistic alternate realities. Either Lynch really knows how to get the most out of sonic elements or I’m more deaf than I thought from years of practicing with a dumb stoner rock band without earplugs in a 9’x9’ room.
Eluvium - An Accidental Memory In the Case of Death I only passed my Piano Tech class in college because I insinuated to my professor that my parents beat me if I practiced at home and got a note wrong. Nothing I’m proud of, but I got a B and could barely chuff my way through a Bartok etude.

I watched a dude play entire Lizst compositions from memory before and I don’t think the Eluvium dude could hack that. Not that there isn’t a lot of middle ground, but this feels like classical music for dipshits. Which is fine, because if some kid is telling me a ten minute story about how they saw a bird at the park the other day, I don’t want a blanket of piano hitting me in the back of the head. It’s hard enough trying to guess what kind of bird they’re talking about based only on the description of “my grandpa threw his cigarette at the bird and then the bird ate it.”
Sigur Rós -Heim Depending on what part of the album is playing, parents dropping their kids off either comment on how pretty the music is or try to ignore that high-pitched, clearly-not-English nonsense that’s mixed way too high above everything else. I’ve had similar reactions to Agnostic Front tapes.

This is the last thing by these guys I really dig. The one after this sounded like Animal Collective and the one after that was pretty middle of the road. This one sounds like what I imagine Weird Al sounds like if you run his songs through one of those programs that slows stuff down by 400%.

I keep wanting this one girl at school to hear this because I think she'd get it. She randomly says stuff like “My name’s Debbie, and there’s a party in my body,” and “Oh, the concerts! My mother will kiss me!” apropos of nothing. One time she drew a bunch of random letters on a toy chalkboard and when I asked her if it says that we’re best friends she turned around and said, “Uhhh, these aren’t words.”
Gary Burton - Who Is Gary Burton? I have three little pieces of my life that have to do with mallet instruments.

1) The percussion/jazz professor during my two years as a music major was a dude named Joe Caploe. One time he told me about how he wanted to audition for Thin Lizzy and “really fuck them up, man.” He’s a monster behind a drumset but he absolutely kills it on the vibes. (The music ones, not the Teaches a Class On Sandal Tightenting At the Y and Doesn’t Tip When Ordering a Beer ones.) He told me that in the 70s he’d play four-mallet electric vibes with “like, forty ProCo Rat pedals hooked up to it,” which may be a bunch of bullshit, but is an awesome enough thing to think about that it doesn’t really matter.

2) Some drumline instructor I knew gave me a copy of Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians back when I was really into finding similar alternatives to doing drugs, like listening to Spine of God by Monster Magnet and falling asleep in public a lot. I don’t know if I’ve ever listened to the whole thing and I’ve been listening to it monthly for about a decade. I put it on and try to follow one of the pulses, but they all fade into each other so weird that my brain is like, “Hey, this is less like watching wrestling and more like doing math. I’m going to sleep.” Now I mostly listen to Reich’s Six Marimbas, which my girlfriend hates. She never did an album with Pat Methany, though, so I like her more than Reich by default.

3) I have no idea how I got this Gary Burton record, but I listen to it all the time, especially when the only other similar options at school are moozak versions of popular songs played from a Pandora station with ads off an iPad. Those nasty, soaring notes in “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as played on a marimba are only slightly more tolerable than listening to Axl sing them now. So, fuck it, put on Gary Burton.
Bill Evans Trio - Sunday at the Village Vanguard I want to make fun of this for paving the way for completely ignorable, low-key lounge jazz that serious musicians play because it’s an inoffensive, far-less-exciting variation on the sort of thing they want to be doing but doesn't pay anything. My first instinct in trying to talk myself out of doing that was to argue that we shouldn’t blame Faith No More for nu metal being so terrible, but that actually makes a lot of sense.

Here’s how I explained it to a four-year-old recently. Let’s say you’re playing Kid’s First Memory Game and you get really good at it. You practice all the time and develop that part of your brain that remembers stuff. Sometimes you accidentally knock the tiles off the table, but it’s an accident. One day, your friends watch you play and are amazed. The next day, they all want to play Kid’s First Memory Game, but they’re kind of dumb and the only thing they remember you doing it knocking the tiles off the table, which is how they think the game is played. Nobody has any fun and I need to take a two hour nap when I get home. Fast forward twenty years and everyone but you has a goatee and a three word band name with the word “Fire” in it.
Morton Feldman - Rothko Chapel/Why Patterns? I have a hard time explaining to parents that this isn’t one of those Spooky Halloween Sounds albums. It sounds more like an hour of film score during the Protagonist is Sneaking Around/Has The Mystery Of A Major Point Revealed To Them parts. Also, Morton Feldman looks like something Dan Clowes would draw.

It’s between Morrissey and Motley Crue on my iPod that I still can’t work the wheel on correctly, so most of the time I end up accidentally playing the opening to Dr. Feelgood or Bona Drag. I’d never play either one of those for kids because they both usually make sure the point in their lives where they shrug off falling asleep while crying into a dude’s crotch come far too early and far too often.
Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music For Airports This kind of sounds like some asshole in a post-rock band hooking up all their pedals and making a “solo ambient project” YouTube video after practice got cancelled one day because one of their several band members who is a barista had to switch shifts last minute, but I still really like it. I put it on when I want the kids to go to sleep at naptime and also when I want them to realize that every molecule in the world will eventually expand to a point where everything they compose will become one all-encompassing, pulsing being.

Music For Little Kids That Isn't a Bunch of Bullshit

Fang Island playing to a bunch of stoked kids. Working at a Montessori preschool is great because I get to shape young minds and also be patient zero for a new kind of foot-and-mouth disease. I was listening to Lucinda Williams one day when one of the teachers told me that I needed to play kids' music, which isn't untrue but is kind of missing the part where she actually just kind of hates Lucinda WIlliams.

I had no intentions of listening to Raffi or limp-dick classical music or Kidz Bop. Because I love my job, I also had no intentions of putting on Return to Metalopolis  or Zombi and being like, "There's no swearing and it's virtuosic! What great music for kids!" just to be an asshole. After awhile, I ended coming back to these albums again and again. I can't guarantee that it's worthwhile or sinking in, but you could say the same thing about math. Jim O'Rourke - Bad Timing I probably prefer Leo Kottke if I’m going to listen to some guy sit down and noodle around on an acoustic guitar, but Kottke gets to be a bit too much with the 12-string battering sometimes, like he wants to shred but he can’t find his pick and oh shit I’m high on coke and is this an acoustic, man? I’d probably be better off with John Fahey, but at 7:15 in the morning I usually feel like I want to die enough already.

This album is pretty even sounding until some majestic, closing-movie-credits horn arrangement comes out of nowhere towards the back half. I always end up running into the kitchen to shut it off around then, because it’s around 7:45 in the morning at that point, and I don’t feel like hearing Jim O’Rourke’s interpretation of what a Clint Eastwood western would be like if he flew to the sun on the back of a dinosaur at the end.

I put this album on after hours at the bar I work at and my buddy Zach asked if it was Al Di Meola, which kind of sucks.
Chet Baker - Chet Baker Sings This is the Chet Baker I’d like to remember, where he looks like a detective diving cock first into an undercover job as a high school quarterback as opposed to the dude made of cigarette butts that we see in that documentary from the last year of his life. Flea is somehow more annoying than he’d be in the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Chet Baker glues his bones back together with heroin. Wonderful film.

Thankfully, the kids are still about fifteen years and several failed attempts at fucking a girl who looks like Death from the Sandman comics away from knowing anything about that documentary. For as much instrumental music as I play at the school, it’s nice to get something with vocals in. This isn’t nearly as desolate as Baker’s lispy cover of Elvis Costello’s “Almost Blue” years later, and not as flip as some of the ballads albums he did for drug money. I think the kids would actually dig it if they weren’t busy yelling over it because they’re stoked I built a four foot tower out of some wood blocks. 
Marvin Gaye - Trouble Man I like Let’s Get It On better, but that’s practically like sex ed class and I don’t want to be the reason a bunch of future-dudes get maced because they keep telling the wrong girl at the bar that they know she sure loves to ball.

This one is mostly instrumental with random smatterings of jive soul nonsense thrown in because it’s Marvin Gaye, so who gives a shit. It’s like sexy meth head open mic rambling. Apparently it’s the soundtrack to a Blaxploitation movie about a detective named Mr. T who is also a pool shark attempting to clean up the ghetto. I haven’t seen it and I probably don’t need to because it uses a dice game as a major plot device and life is pretty short.

Whenever I put this on, one of the parents dropping of their kid will almost always do a little head nod and be like, “Yeah, we’re really jamming now!” Iowa is the whitest place on earth. Everyone owns the soundtrack to The Big Chill and has a favorite sandwich at Subway.
Toe - The Book About My Idle Plot On A Vague Anxiety I told a friend of mine online that I was starting an instrumental rock band. He sent me back a video of Toe playing live and then I thought I needed guitar lessons more than delay pedals.

For all the weaving and patchwork of the guitars, the drummer’s probably the best part. Usually I don’t want to listen to a band where the drummer’s the best part because they think they’re Led Zeppelin but they’ve actually just been playing the same blues riff for twenty minutes while some prick does fey wrist movements on his and-a hi-hat hits.

There’s a Toe album where some girl does weird techno-pop vocal punching—or at least that’s how I remember it—over top of the band and some more EPs that are all right, so this and Songs, Ideas We Forgot are the one I end up playing the most. This band and that heavy metal shred game show where Paul Gilbert and Marty Friedman cut heads and speak very campy Japanese are almost enough to make up for all the cartoon tentacle porn and vending machines that sell used panties.
Tristeza - Spine and Sensory In college I went kind of far down the post-rock rabbit hole while also, perhaps somewhat relatedly, secretly dating a girl who was hanging on to the last gasps of the religion she grew up with. So, there exists in me, as I'm guessing there does with many other guys my age, an odd correlation between sexual frustration and the discography of Mogwai.

It was actually the second Tristeza record, Dream Signals In Full Circles, I had back then. Like Air’s Moon Safari or Unwed Sailor’s The Faithful Anchor , we only listened to it once or twice for whatever reason. Years later I wanted to hear some emo stuff without the vocals, because I hadn’t gotten laid in a long time but was mostly at terms with it. Remembered Tristeza and checked out the wrong record, Spine and Sensory, which I like a lot more.

TL;DR: This is a good album and I don't want kids. The Score for David Lynch's The Straight Story Man, it took me forever to get into David Lynch. The first thing of his I saw was Mulholland Drive, which I didn’t know going into is like the length of a Wrestlemania and is either a Mobius strip experiment or just some weird fucking movie that could probably be like an hour and a half shorter. I didn’t know anything about David Lynch at the time except that he was cool enough to put tits in his movie.

I came back years later and tried Eraserhead, and thought it was like what happens when some kid gets too much money to make his entrance tape for film school. Blue Velvet had cool cars in it and I really loved Wild At Heart because it’s got Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern listening to thrash. Twin Peaks is great for awhile until that one chick turns into a knob on a cabinet or whatever. Audrey and Cooper never banging is horseshit.

I still haven’t seen The Straight Story, but I think I would really like it. Whenever I listen to the score I always mishear the kids and end up thinking they’re talking about manic depressive states and hyper-realistic alternate realities. Either Lynch really knows how to get the most out of sonic elements or I’m more deaf than I thought from years of practicing with a dumb stoner rock band without earplugs in a 9’x9’ room.
Eluvium - An Accidental Memory In the Case of Death I only passed my Piano Tech class in college because I insinuated to my professor that my parents beat me if I practiced at home and got a note wrong. Nothing I’m proud of, but I got a B and could barely chuff my way through a Bartok etude.

I watched a dude play entire Lizst compositions from memory before and I don’t think the Eluvium dude could hack that. Not that there isn’t a lot of middle ground, but this feels like classical music for dipshits. Which is fine, because if some kid is telling me a ten minute story about how they saw a bird at the park the other day, I don’t want a blanket of piano hitting me in the back of the head. It’s hard enough trying to guess what kind of bird they’re talking about based only on the description of “my grandpa threw his cigarette at the bird and then the bird ate it.”
Sigur Rós -Heim Depending on what part of the album is playing, parents dropping their kids off either comment on how pretty the music is or try to ignore that high-pitched, clearly-not-English nonsense that’s mixed way too high above everything else. I’ve had similar reactions to Agnostic Front tapes.

This is the last thing by these guys I really dig. The one after this sounded like Animal Collective and the one after that was pretty middle of the road. This one sounds like what I imagine Weird Al sounds like if you run his songs through one of those programs that slows stuff down by 400%.

I keep wanting this one girl at school to hear this because I think she'd get it. She randomly says stuff like “My name’s Debbie, and there’s a party in my body,” and “Oh, the concerts! My mother will kiss me!” apropos of nothing. One time she drew a bunch of random letters on a toy chalkboard and when I asked her if it says that we’re best friends she turned around and said, “Uhhh, these aren’t words.”
Gary Burton - Who Is Gary Burton? I have three little pieces of my life that have to do with mallet instruments.

1) The percussion/jazz professor during my two years as a music major was a dude named Joe Caploe. One time he told me about how he wanted to audition for Thin Lizzy and “really fuck them up, man.” He’s a monster behind a drumset but he absolutely kills it on the vibes. (The music ones, not the Teaches a Class On Sandal Tightenting At the Y and Doesn’t Tip When Ordering a Beer ones.) He told me that in the 70s he’d play four-mallet electric vibes with “like, forty ProCo Rat pedals hooked up to it,” which may be a bunch of bullshit, but is an awesome enough thing to think about that it doesn’t really matter.

2) Some drumline instructor I knew gave me a copy of Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians back when I was really into finding similar alternatives to doing drugs, like listening to Spine of God by Monster Magnet and falling asleep in public a lot. I don’t know if I’ve ever listened to the whole thing and I’ve been listening to it monthly for about a decade. I put it on and try to follow one of the pulses, but they all fade into each other so weird that my brain is like, “Hey, this is less like watching wrestling and more like doing math. I’m going to sleep.” Now I mostly listen to Reich’s Six Marimbas, which my girlfriend hates. She never did an album with Pat Methany, though, so I like her more than Reich by default.

3) I have no idea how I got this Gary Burton record, but I listen to it all the time, especially when the only other similar options at school are moozak versions of popular songs played from a Pandora station with ads off an iPad. Those nasty, soaring notes in “Sweet Child O’ Mine” as played on a marimba are only slightly more tolerable than listening to Axl sing them now. So, fuck it, put on Gary Burton.
Bill Evans Trio - Sunday at the Village Vanguard I want to make fun of this for paving the way for completely ignorable, low-key lounge jazz that serious musicians play because it’s an inoffensive, far-less-exciting variation on the sort of thing they want to be doing but doesn't pay anything. My first instinct in trying to talk myself out of doing that was to argue that we shouldn’t blame Faith No More for nu metal being so terrible, but that actually makes a lot of sense.

Here’s how I explained it to a four-year-old recently. Let’s say you’re playing Kid’s First Memory Game and you get really good at it. You practice all the time and develop that part of your brain that remembers stuff. Sometimes you accidentally knock the tiles off the table, but it’s an accident. One day, your friends watch you play and are amazed. The next day, they all want to play Kid’s First Memory Game, but they’re kind of dumb and the only thing they remember you doing it knocking the tiles off the table, which is how they think the game is played. Nobody has any fun and I need to take a two hour nap when I get home. Fast forward twenty years and everyone but you has a goatee and a three word band name with the word “Fire” in it.
Morton Feldman - Rothko Chapel/Why Patterns? I have a hard time explaining to parents that this isn’t one of those Spooky Halloween Sounds albums. It sounds more like an hour of film score during the Protagonist is Sneaking Around/Has The Mystery Of A Major Point Revealed To Them parts. Also, Morton Feldman looks like something Dan Clowes would draw.

It’s between Morrissey and Motley Crue on my iPod that I still can’t work the wheel on correctly, so most of the time I end up accidentally playing the opening to Dr. Feelgood or Bona Drag. I’d never play either one of those for kids because they both usually make sure the point in their lives where they shrug off falling asleep while crying into a dude’s crotch come far too early and far too often.
Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music For Airports This kind of sounds like some asshole in a post-rock band hooking up all their pedals and making a “solo ambient project” YouTube video after practice got cancelled one day because one of their several band members who is a barista had to switch shifts last minute, but I still really like it. I put it on when I want the kids to go to sleep at naptime and also when I want them to realize that every molecule in the world will eventually expand to a point where everything they compose will become one all-encompassing, pulsing being.

Things that can happen, happen to you . . .

"Unreal Is Here" by Chavez, with a great Bon Jovi video/Mentos commercial Another several months of terribly sporadic internet promotion. Here are some things.

1) I met some wrestlers (and Randy Couture) in Waterloo, Iowa, at a little Wrestling Hall of Fame between a strip club and a gas station with a Burger King built in. Diamond Dallas Page was a super awesome dude. The Steiner Brothers were kind of standoffish and weird. Jim Ross once again made it a point to prove that he didn't really want to be there.

1b) Wrestling fans are the best. Of the two dudes I was stuck between in line, one of them reads stuff on the internet but doesn't process it into actual thought ("Brock Lesnar's going to win at Summerslam. I read it online," followed by twenty similar comments) and a guy who thought wrestling was real and posed the question of whether or not Undertaker is in the Illuminati, which is also real.

1c) DDP is obviously in the Illuminati, as his hand symbol makes a triangle.

1d) In complaining about this guy to my friend Jim, he said that most people believe in angels and nobody's ever seen one, so if someone wants to believe in wrestling, at least everyone's fucking seen Stone Cold Steve Austin.

2) I'm mostly reading graphic novels and nothing else. Writing has been slow because all I want to do is sit down with Punisher MAX and play guitar because I'm fifteen.

3) I got a library card, finally. (So I can read comics for free.) I immediately cashed in on any goodwill I may have rallied up in the ten minutes I was a member by shitting in the women's restroom, something even the homeless dudes who mostly bathe there frown upon.

4) I thought I wasn't too old and frail to be front row at a hardcore show, but I was fucking wrong. Two songs in--this equals about 45 seconds--and someone landed on my head, sending my glasses directly underneath the feet of like 150 malnourished kids in black t-shirts.

4b) I got new glasses, which I will now use to watch hardcore bands from a comfy position off to the side of the stage along with the rest of the 30-year-olds who still want to be cool.

5) My girlfriend was in Reefer Madness. I watched most of it but my buddy Scotty showed up and started playing me videos of him doing trick basketball shots like halfway through.

6) I've gotten really into eating lots of chili dogs lately.

6b) "lately"

7) If the crowd who frequent the bar I work at is any indication, lots of people either don't really read books or there's a new thing people do where they explain to strangers how books work using James Patterson and Chuck Palahniuk as examples.

8) Got another email from an agent, which is awesome except for the fact that he essentially said, "If you have a novel, great! If you have a short story collection, write a novel."

9) I'm trying to downsize things and having a hard time, which means I packed up two giant boxes of books and still have five and a half bookshelves worth of stuff that I "can't possibly part with" even though I'm never going to read my copy of Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon books that I've read the first twenty pages of take up about a foot and a half of shelf space. Also, working with kids is awesome. No publications since the last time that I can think of, though I just remembered that I need to send Austin Hayden of 90's Meg Ryan the audio file of me reading a story about karaoke.

I did do an interview with Jon Konrath over at Paragraph Line. Here's an excerpt:

PL: Who are your favorite three members of Krokus other than Chris Von Rohr, Fernando Von Arb, Marc Storace, Mark Kohler, and Mandy Meyer?

RW: They’re all drummers, actually. Freddy Steady, because he kind of sucked but really loved being in Krokus, which is admirable. (Sort of.) Steve Pace, because he played drums and his last name was Pace. Stefan Schwarzmann, because he’s like the foreign metal version of some asshole like Matt Sorum, who just plays in every band after their prime. He was on one of the Krokus albums in the mid-2000s, which he left Helloween to play on.

As you can tell, it's very insightful. Here's the whole thing.

Other than that I've been the least busy I've been in years. I mentioned in a previous blog post that my writing is slowing down and that I feel all right about it. I tried working my novella a bit this summer, the aforementioned Soft that is told in hundreds of shattered pieces and, so far, has had some mixed reactions from the people who have read what's done of it. I wrote an essay about a Drive-By Truckers song and never revised it. I wrote that story for Austin Hayden. I started some more stories about a guy named Marty and haven't finished them. And, like I said, I'm all right with that.

I've been playing guitar, writing songs for the three or four bands I've been ignoring while I do all this book/tour stuff. Finally getting back into comics has been great, too, especially since I've got some monthlies that have grabbed me, Saga and East of West. I've even been playing some shitty tower defense computer games just because I realized that I can.

I don't remember the last time I took a break from things--writing, working on publishing, booking a tour, doing stuff for Passenger Side, feeding my ulcer cream soda--for more than a week or two. I go back to my day job at the school in a few weeks, but until then, I've finally figured out how to relax. Talk all you want about the satisfaction of writing, but it's easy to forget that satisfaction and not the writing is the endgame. And I've been saving lots of pictures of wrestlers wearing fanny packs to my computer. Interests are weird. I'll be doing a couple more readings this summer before packing it in and doing weekend warrior shit during the school year. Here are the last two dates:

8/6 - Champaign, IL - Institute 4 Creativity (w/Bob Bucko Jr & heavy metal belly dancers!)
8/7 - Rock Island, IL - Rozz-Tox QC (w/Bob Bucko Jr, Mystic Dolphin, KAB)

As for the readings I did this summer, they were all pretty awesome. Plenty of shit to talk, plenty of kind strangers. I made enough money to cover gas and a shitload of pinball, I never went hungry, and I had a place to crash every night. Everything else is a cherry on top. Let's do it again soon.

I'm going to rewatch all of The Larry Sanders Show now. Party time.

RW

Out of the woods and into the light . . .

The Rutabega, Live at Borelli's in Chicago last year. Goddamn.
I've been busy, as always. Here's a point-by-point rundown of the last two months.

1) I keep getting emails from eBay asking me if I'm still interested in buying action figures and full size wrestling rings and Scorpions shirts, reminding me that not only is everythingI search for on the internet connected and interactive in a really creepy way, but someone at the NSA thinks I'm a fifteen year old kid who's traveled back from my parents' basement in 1986.

2) I tried to make deviled eggs for a weekend of events at the local arts collective but got impatient and ended up making squishy eggs I couldn't peel with yolks that look like melted Werther's Original trapped in their own skin.

3) America's River Festival hit Dubuque, Iowa, featuring the all-star line-up of Gin Blossoms, Kevin Costner's band, and Joan Jett. The night before, a bunch of middle-aged assholes watched another bunch of middle-aged assholes dance to "Night Moves" by Bob Seger and other great covers from the history of underwhelming popular music.

4) I saw The Menzingers, a pop-punk band I really like, in the Quad Cities and even though they're a bunch of dudes in nice shirts just being solidly in their 30s and playing pop-punk for adults, there were still a handful of people stage diving. If it's Tuesday and you're with 25 other people listening to guys with mortgages sing about girls and muscle cars, maybe cool it on shoving your Black Flag shirt and the gut it contains into the base of my neck.

5) I almost bought a guitar at the pawnshop with a monkey grip and no headstock but I bought The Lost Boys on DVD for $2 instead.

6) I found this new recipe for popcorn balls where I make a bunch of popcorn and then roll a spoonful of ice cream around in it while watching Royal Rumble 1992.

7) One of my co-workers got me a Pop Tarts hat that says "Crazy Good" on the front, because I'm infinitely easy to figure out.

8) I had my first annual review at the preschool. Told them to start paying me in weed or get the fuck out of my face.

9) The short documentary my friend Kylie made about me finally screened. I can't post the link to it yet because she has it out at film festivals and things like that, but I think it turned out pretty good. Like any other documentary, I don't know think it's all the way accurate--it turned out to be sadder and less funny than my life is--but I understand that you have to go into a project like that knowing you only have ten minutes, and to have an agenda or idea of what you want to get from the footage available is what's going to decide the direction of things.

9b) Next time, more underwear dance scenes.

10) I realized that Kurt Cobain never had MySpace.

Kurt Cobain also never had that guitar from the pawn shop, or herpes. I'd like to point out the possibility of correlation.
My newest book came out and I'm going on tour. The book is called If There's Any Truth In a Northbound Train. Here are some nice things people said about it.

"'You have to want something all the time,' I tell him. 'It's just human.'—Werner’s book is full of characters wanting something all the time. It makes me want. It makes me want to read this book over and over. Hilarious, witty, ghostly: people and body parts go missing and sometimes reappear. But the Truth, dammit, is elusive and pervasive at the same time. How does he do it? It makes me squirm." -Amy Temple Harper, author of Cramped Uptown

"There is an apocalyptic fervor to these tales of missing friends, missing limbs and tightly held truths ripped violently away. Werner is a master of articulating the particularly Middle American malaise of his beloved miscreants and misanthropic castaways—his grocery store clerks and meat packers living an inch from oblivion. With predictably electric prose and a freewheeling vernacular that rings deadly true, Werner takes us on a heavy metal hell-ride through lives lived without a net—banzai skydivers staring down the end of days and taking another bite of their goddamned candied apple." - Aaron Teel, author of Shampoo Horns

You can order it here. This is what it looks like. Check for it in garbages in coffee shops near you.
As for the tour, here's where you can catch me when I'm not at an arcade in one of these fine towns.

Monday, June 23 @ The Beanhive in Galesburg, IL
Tuesday, June 24 @ Mike 'N' Molly's in Champaign/Urbana, IL
Wednesday, June 25 @ Rachael's in Bloomington, IN
Thursday, June 26 @ Chase Public in Cincinnati, OH
Friday, June 27 @ Java Brewing Co. in Louisville, KY
Saturday, June 28 @ Foam in St. Louis, MO
Sunday, June 29 @ NOWHERE BECAUSE BOOKERS ARE OFTEN CUNTS in St. Louis, MO
Monday, June 30 @ Cafe Berlin in Columbia, MO
Tuesday, July 1 @ Lawrence Percolator in Lawrence, KS
Wednesday, July 2 @  The Orange Gentleman in Ames, IA
Thursday, July 3 @ Sidecar Coffee in Cedar Falls, IA

All of these dates will be with my buddy Michael Lambert, whose first book, Circumnavigation, just came out through Red Bird Chapbooks. We'll also be joined at different points of the tour by awesome writers like Kyle Mustain, Katie Schmid, Austin Hayden, Sara Tucker, David James Keaton, Edward Herring, Keija Parsinnen, Geetha Iyer, and many others.

See you in the back row, hoodlum.

RW

My Writing Process

I don't know exactly what a virtual blog tour is except maybe a fancy chain letter that makes it sound like other people care more than they do about other people. I was tagged by Sam Snoek-Brown and Jon Konrath to do this. I'm not tagging anyone.

(Matthew Burnside recently told me I'm the most negative person online.)

(I recently told Matthew Burnside to fuck off.)

(And didn't mean it, because he's wonderful.)

Anyways, here are the questions I'm supposed to answer about my writing process, and below each one is some stuff I'm not going to think about too much because this is a blog, which is like the older sister who wins on scratch off tickets all the time of a MySpace bulletin.

* * * * * * * * * *

WHAT AM I WORKING ON?

I'm not going to answer this because it just reminds me that I haven't finished my shattered-novella, Soft, about the difference between girls and bands and lives you want to be in and girls and bands and lives you settle for, what you owe to who and if it was worth it. At this point, I'm wondering if writing a big Mary Robison rip-off novella--a long short story, if I can cut the shit--is worth it. Also, I had a band pretty much break up on stage once. Don't get me started about girls.

I'm almost done with a new chapbook, tentatively titled If There's Any Truth In a Northbound Train, but it's so close to being done that it's hardly worth mentioning. I started a wrestling-themed short story collection like a year-and-a-half ago and haven't done much because I've been too busy watching wrestling. In my head, I've been "working on" a couple essays about Drive-By Truckers songs and albums my buddies made and how they made me quit my job or realize why I'm getting old, but without a word down on paper, digital or otherwise, I can't really count it.

Mostly, I'm working on making a deep, labored-over scrawl of the word "BLOODLETTING" in the corner of the monthly check to my student loan empire, which is about as satisfactory as it comes in terms of writing.

* * * * * * * * * *

HOW DOES MY WORK DIFFER FROM OTHERS OF ITS GENRE?

I write literary fiction, which is like saying "I play rock & roll." Instead of convincing you that I'm different than other writers in that broad, very general label--because, other than more unnecessarily missing limbs and none of that weak, boring grad student shit aimed at the big journals, it's pretty similar to other stuff--let me make a short list of writers who are more successful than me and and a brief, jealousy-fueled reason as to why you should hate them and love me.

Amy Hempel: Has really white hair now and writes about dogs too much. (My hair is brown with natural blonde highlights and I think dogs are stupid even if labradors are really cuddly when they're puppies.)

Barry Hannah: Wrote a 400 page story collection and owned a lot of guns. (I won't waste your time . . . or you!)

Raymond Carver: Married Tess Gallagher and then died. (Possibly related incidents. Either way, I'm still alive.)

Rick Bass: Really likes going outside and has a last name that confuses some people as to how it's pronounced. (Inside has never given anyone a sunburn and my name is impossible mispronounce unless you speak some dialect of German and even then it's only one letter off and it sounds pretty much the same.)

Tom Franklin: Drinks Bud Light. (That stuff smells like piss.)

Justin Lawrence Daugherty: So sexy that he causes car accidents and stuff. (I am of reasonable looks and incapable of distracting a person to a point of harm.)

Gary Lutz: Doesn't have Facebook and writes in an absurd font size. (I have an awesome Facebook and I write in Times New Roman, 12 pt. font.)

Kevin Wilson: Named his kid after Ann Patchett. (She's great and adorable, but come on.)

Mary Miller: Won't marry me on top of a mountain. (I would marry me on top of a mountain.)

W.P. Kinsella: Wrote some shit that sounds like Garrison Keillor. (I had like a compilation disc of Guy Noir stuff in college, but that was a confusing time and I'd never write like the dude, for fuck's sake.)

Matt Bell: Loves his wife too much. (I never mention the fulfillment my significant other gives me, even to her, which she finds really disheartening.)

Lorrie Moore: Left Wisconsin. (I moved like three minutes into Iowa and my mail still goes to a house in Wisconsin, so, LEGALLY, I haven't left.)

Grace Paley: Excessively Jewish. (I am a very moderate, easily tolerable level of Jewish.)

Heiko Julien: Is a cunt. (I am not a cunt.) (We are also in different genres, but he's still a cunt.)

* * * * * * * * * *

WHY DO I WRITE WHAT I DO?

I try not to write about things in a way that other people would write about them. The other day I was working on a story and I knew I needed one of the characters to say something about the first date this kid was going on. I had the father say, "She comes first," and then I deleted it. Same thing with "Respect is the most important thing" and "Be safe, always" and other such garbage. I had the uncle say some borderline greasy stuff I won't put in here. It went around like that, just trying to break up the narrative and pop us back in the scene. But I couldn't figure out what to say. Finally, I had the little brother ask, "Is she pretty and would you rescue her from a burning building?" It reminded me of when I was in fifth grade and my friend Pat and I would stay up way too late proposing scenarios in which we would save girls we liked from danger. This probably says more about me than it does my writing, but it still seemed like the thing that only I could say.

I try not to write boring sentences, is what it is. Unless I have to just to get on with the fucking point. If I need someone to get downtown, I say, "Micky got in her Ford Festiva and took the downhill route to Sears." Or wherever she's going. Regardless, not a thrilling sentence, but I make sure the next one or two are.

Basically, I just write whatever's left after I get done not writing all the shit that I think sucks. Sometimes I still write shit that sucks, but I just delete that stuff. Occasionally, I don't delete that stuff. I'm no genius.

* * * * * * * * * *

HOW DOES MY WRITING PROCESS WORK?

Who said "I just sit down and bleed on the page" or something like that? That person is an asshole.

(Googled it. It was Hemingway. Standing by my asshole judgment.)

There's some anecdote about Chekhov getting asked this same question, picking up an ashtray, and then saying, "Tomorrow, I'm going to write a story called 'The Ashtray.'" I do the same thing except I sit down at my computer with what I think is like three pages of an idea in my head about how I just noticed a scar on my face I've never noticed before and have no idea how I got it or how a guy who runs a repair shop wants two wives because he has two of everything else and by the time I get out a first paragraph I'm happy with it's four days later and I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing and the original idea is almost completely revised out in favor of what I actually end up writing.

I think it's important to note that I edit as I write. So if my first draft seems good or even complete, just know that I write between 100 and 200 words a day and spend the majority of my time the next day deleting most of it. After a couple weeks of this I usually have enough of a story to start rearranging the sections. My stuff isn't exactly non-linear, but it's vignette-based and it doesn't really matter which point of the picture you look at first because you're going to see the whole thing eventually. Also, there's no real narrative at this point yet and I usually hate myself.

It was pointed out to me accidentally that I write jokes and when I do it right they add up to a story. Each section is pretty short (as are my stories) and usually starts with a dropped-in introduction--it doesn't matter why the priest and the rabbi are walking together into a bar, it just matters that they are--and then moves on to whatever set-up I need to get to the punchline, usually whatever clever line I'm going to have a character say, something that flips around a common phrase or idea. It's like writing Dio lyrics, I guess. When I'm not doing that, I'm just using the same bag of tricks everyone uses: pull tension from between the good and the bad, walk the middle path between two virtues of a vice, remember that words have lots of different meanings and there is no such thing as reality if you don't want there to be, etc.

Once I've got all my jokes down and in an order I feel comfortable with, I go back and personalize the story. This involves making sentences pop or simply more interesting by adding stronger language, maybe fucking with the syntax, or deciding what to put in narration and what to put in dialogue. I always add a Gary Lutz sentence, too, where he has some big weird abstract statement revolving around the phrase "my life." I don't go overboard with details because who gives a shit. One time after a reading I did with Justin Daugherty, someone in the audience pointed out that Justin is very specific when it comes to naming and counting important things and I just sort of give a roundabout estimate. Justin's hyperfocus leads him to the clouds. Mine leads me to the blue between them. One's not better than the other, but I think we both know how and why that plays to our strengths.

When I'm done, I start a new story a week or so later and completely forget how to do everything.

I've been wondering what to do about you, I've been wondering what to do about me . . .

A great live version of "You Work Days I Work Nights" by Water Liars
It's been about little bit. Here's what we're working with.

1) I sold a big chunk of my t-shirt collection, because I'm not the sort of person anymore who needs four Tool shirts.

1b) I made the mistake of getting a Tool tattoo on my 18th birthday, so I'll have that forever just in case I ever feel like I'm not advertising very well for a band I haven't really liked in about eight or nine years.

1c) People will pay $20 for a Rage Against the Machine shirt while my Fucking Champs shirt sells for a meager $3, because the world is full of people who wish they had Tool tattoos.

2) At the Goodwill in Dubuque, IA I found a record haul worth a couple hundred bucks that I got for about $14.50. Stuff by Swans, Mission of Burma, Jesus and Mary Chain, Brian Eno, Billy Bragg, and a bunch more in that vein. RIP, Dude Who Died and His Parents Took His records to the Goodwill in Goddamn Dubuque

2b) I'm still debating about whether or not to sell them. One time I found the first three Desert Sessions CDs for $6 each and sold them to pay my rent. I'm not hurting for money, but I'm probably not going to put on Red Roses For Me by The Pogues very often. Will trade for chili dogs.

3) My girlfriend got me invested in Veronica Mars. I'm not admitting it anywhere except here and I'm mostly attributing it to a brief-yet-warranted obsession with Kristen Bell I had when I watched Party Down a couple years ago.

4) I contemplated spending a substantial sum of money ($1000) on a pair of tights that Rick Rude wore in the ring at one point.

4b) They weren't the Cheryl Roberts ones, so I passed.

4c) And I don't have $1000 to spend on dirty wrestling tights.

5) I got to have snow days for the first time in about a decade. I probably just ate pizza earlier than I normally would have otherwise.

6) I tried listening to Dream Theater again because I knew I liked them at one point in my life. They're actually pretty fucking stupid.

6b) I almost got a Dream Theater tattoo once.

7) At a classic car/rockabilly show recently, I bought a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles poster about how you shouldn't do drugs and also stepped into a pile of piss so big it could have been measured in fathoms.

8) I gave wrestling valentines from 1999 to all the kids I make lunch for and they were super stoked. I asked one little girl born in the year 2010 what she knows about 1999 and she said, "Nothing," which makes total sense but still bummed me the fuck out because I've had aches in my body older than her.

8b) I ran into my mom at a gas station randomly and she told me that I have degenerative arthritis in my knees, a family trait that had gone previously unmentioned and, because I don't have insurance, undocumented. Last year she told me I'm Jewish. Next year I'm going to find out I was born on Mars.

8c) But not Veronica Mars, unfortunately.

9) Some drunk girl came into the bar where I work and was talking loudly about how she's going to be Cinderella at Disney World this summer and then I found out her and her friends had signed their names on the toilet in the bathroom and then I called her a cunt and she left. No reason to mention this except I hate her.

10) I went to my first live wrestling show in almost 15 years, RING OF HONOR: RAISING THE BAR PART I in Milwaukee. A couple bitter wrestling fans not buying merch because there weren't t-shirts for a certain tag team's gimmick they only use in Japan, but otherwise a wholly awesome night.

10b) Seriously, if you say shit like "I don't like moves, I like matches" and then argue with me about whether or not it's okay for Marty Jannetty to use a top rope powerbomb as a transitional move in '96, you need to settle down.

What a woman.
I haven't written much lately, or at least I don't feel like I have. I keep trying to build up a cache of stories and then send them out in a lump to all sorts of different places, like I did in the Our Band Could Be Your Lit days, but what little I write ends up either getting picked up right away or I get solicited and end up back at zero. I know it sounds like I'm bragging--not humbly or gracefully, either--but it does bother me a bit, to have the only struggle be the actual writing process.

Isn't that the dream, though, to have to only worry about feeling better? If I'm not concerned about getting published--especially on nice little runs of getting picked up like I've been on for awhile--and I'm not obligated to write by academia or outside pressure, I can really only justify writing by how much I like it and how satisfied I feel when I do it.

I always tell people that the reason I don't drink or do drugs or anything like that is because I like myself just fine the way I am. This is to say the opposite, that I like the world just fine and I'm the one who needs some tweaking.

What I think I'm taking the long way of trying to say is this: If I don't feel the need to write, if I don't feel as if I'm compelled to do so, and I only write because it's the thing that gets me to the place where I can become my possibilities, what do I do when I feel like I'm already there?

So I haven't been writing a lot lately. It's been pretty good.

I tried to save this picture as "party.jpg" but I'm so party that there was ALREADY A PARTY.JPG SAVED TO THAT FOLDER.
Of what I have written lately, here's what's been picked up where.

My story "Banzai Skydiving" went up at Connotation Press a bit ago. It's about how sometimes you can know everything and it doesn't matter. Thanks to Meg Tuite and her hard work and enthusiasm for all things literature.

It was my last day at work and Pippi wouldn’t let me do anything except watch her look into a bathroom mirror and tell me about everything and the whole damn world. She was seventeen and didn’t get into the college she wanted to get into and probably wouldn’t get into any of the other ones either, so she started reading lists of facts and coffee table books and then, when she found out I was quitting and essentially leaving her alone in a Wisconsin grocery store to wonder if tomorrow would be a little bit different, knew every reason I should stay.

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My story "Lifeguard" went up at Jersey Devil Press. It's about New Coke and desire and devotion and doubt. Thanks to Mike Sweeney for asking me to be a part of this special issue to help JDP founder Eirik Gumeny get two new lungs. He has cystic fibrosis and needs your help. Any small amount will do. I've donated my money and I've donated my time and I've donated my words. The rest is up to you. Eirik's a damn good guy and I owe a lot to him and Mike both. Donate here.

I didn’t marry a girl named Florence and then she won the lottery. That’s not the way I tell it, but it sure is the way she tells it, like they’re related, like there couldn’t be one without the other.

“I’m building a pool the size of your apartment building,” she tells me. “Come on back and I’ll fill it with whatever you want.”

“Fill it with New Coke,” I say. “They haven’t made it since we were learning long division. Get the last drop to the brim and I’ll pack up everything I own.”

---------------

So, cocaine.
Speaking of donating, there was a recent problem of abuse in the writing community. Lots of people had lots of things to say, but the only thing that matters is sympathy and understanding for all involved. And also putting your money where your mouth is. An article on xoJane isn't going to do shit. Buy a blanket for a woman in need.

Safe Haven Rescue and Resource Center

Women Against Abuse: Advocacy In Action

AVDA: Aid to Victims of Domestic Abuse

Or go local, even better. Just shut the fuck up and help. Opinions won't buy deodorant for a woman who had to leave her house.

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On a more positive note, I'll be on tour for a few days coming up this week. I did Rock Island and St. Louis last week with some incredible writers and I'll be doing Grand Rapids, Chicago, and Madison this week. Here's the full info:

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Thursday, March 20th at The House of Pancakes in Grand Rapids, MI

An evening in the living room featuring Ryan Werner (Passenger Side Books - WI), The Bandit Zine! (Reading from their issue on feminism), and poetry from Matty Feedlord Weaver, Keean Mansour and Luke P Fortier.

Suggested donations of $3-5

6pm - please be punctual!

No jerks and no drugs.
if you bring alcohol, you must donate
& please only bring a few

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Friday, March 21st at Church of Templehead in Chicago, IL

This is a tangential little part of the UNCOMMON COPIES series of events!

Reading will start at 7:00 sharp! No punk rock time!

This is a free event, but the donation bucket will be out and about! 

Ryan Werner, Matt Rowan (UNTOWARD MAGAZINE), and Peter Jurmu (ARTIFICE BOOKS).

The event will have xeroxed stories and broadsheets for sale in addition to other DIY books and merch. Following the readings will be a panel discussion about DOING IT YOUR OWN DAMN SELF!

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Saturday, March 22nd at Dragonfly Lounge in Madison, WI

Soundless Album Release with Tyranny is Tyranny, Young Indian, Ryan Werner, Tegan Swanson. LET'S PARTY. Post-everything. Very loud. Very heavy. Very humble.

10:00 PM! 

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Here's to future radness, folks. Let's do this. To the pit.

RW

Eight Moralities for Successful Writing

I recently started moderating a new writing workshop for high school and college students. (There are a few a non-traditional students, too.) I wrote this up for them because it's what I try to keep in mind when I'm writing my own bullshit.

Eight Moralities for Successful Writing

1) Write as if you don’t need a metaphor about writing to help you write, because you don’t.

While I hope this list and the other methods of motivation help, they’re reminders, not keys to the company car. You’re either putting words to paper or you’re not, and once you do, you’re in the club. Simple as that, if you’ve ever said anything about always wanting to be a writer. So write something, come on in, and have a seat next to Hemingway. Don’t let him touch you.

2) Write from Olympus, edit from the Dairy Queen.

Letters to words, words to sentences/lines, sentences/lines to paragraphs/stanzas. At the end of it all, you want it to look like one piece made in a single swipe on your first try. So after you figure out how to make the world, figure out how to make some fries.

3) Figure out what words look like when they’re a part of written work.

Read a lot. Voraciously, if that’s your thing. I’m not saying you should rip other writers off, just that you should know what the options are. People didn’t know that you could make a guitar sound like an elephant until Adrian Belew did it, and despite any potential lack of practicality, it added another inch to the workbench.

4) Mostly, people don’t want you crashing on their couch.

Nobody minds a 400 page book that should be 400 pages. Everyone minds a 400 page book that should be 300 pages. If you can say it in twenty words instead of thirty, do it. Don’t choke your meaning off or cut yourself short, but, unless you’re writing about Austrian Economics, maybe skip the parts about Austrian Economics.

5) You have something to write about even though you haven’t been married, lost a loved one, been to France, or done acid.

Life is going to have a lot of major, important experiences that will change you, but instead of waiting for them to show up or, in what could take even longer, waiting to realize they’re here, you need to start writing now, if for no other reason so that you can be technically prepared. Also, if you can’t write about the bird in your backyard, you can’t write about the bird at a hostel in Tuscany.

6) Instead of being boring, don’t be boring.

Sometimes a door just needs to be opened—“I opened the door” is a perfectly wonderful sentence—so this isn’t a plea for complexity as much as it is telling you that there better not be two pages of expository feelings behind the newly opened door. Some people need a lot of dry information to get their point across, and most of them write instruction manuals.

7) There are so many people who shouldn’t be flying spaceships.

I once told a friend of mine that I like the music of Bob Seger because he tries hard. My friend responded by telling me that he could go down to NASA and try really hard, too, and see how that works out. Some stories are there right away, others never will be, and I can’t tell you when it’s okay to call it a wash, I can tell you it’s okay to call it a wash.

8) If it’s not in you, you can’t write it.

Best I can tell, being a janitor and not a neuroscientist, writing is based around pathology. A lot of empathy and sympathy goes into figuring out what is wrong—trouble is necessary for writing—and why something is wrong—questions are necessary for writing. People say write what you know and write what you love and the opposites of both, but if you can make the most human parts of you relate to the most human parts of others, the size of your writing world becomes almost as big as the world itself, as if you get a square foot for each person understood.

In conclusion: I never bought into the whole mysticism of writers feeling compelled to write unless they mean that they feel better when they write. If compelled means that dealing with the not-so-fun parts that get me to a point of temporary satisfaction I can only get from writing and it’s better than most television and all radio, then sure, I guess I’m compelled to write. It just takes time. If you don’t have time, you’ll be fine with just the first three items on this list. Also, if you don’t have time, you might just be better off enjoying the possible personal and financial rewards of hanging drywall.

I'm not stoppin' til all my teeth are rotten . . .

"Coca Cola" by Pity Sex, from their debut EP Dark World. I'm working on a story about this song for WhiskeyPaper.
Has it really been four months already? Here's some shit.

1) The job I spoke about previously as being a possibility, barring background checks and whathaveyou, totally happened. Now I spend five days a week telling four-year-olds about wrestling and Ozzy.

1b) I acted like I only tolerated it at first, but it's really awesome. I wore an Anthrax shirt in my school pictures, because time won't change for me and vice-versa.

1c) My phone is a veritable cesspool of adorable pictures of kids helping me cook lunch. I'm worse than a grandmother.

2) I got the NUMBER ONE HIGH SCORE on the South Park pinball machine at the bar. Suck it, automated high scores that come pre-loaded onto the machine.

3) I've been watching a lot of wrestling. I realized there's a lot of stuff from right before the Attitude Era that I haven't seen all the way through. Here's to Survivor Series '96 and The Rock looking like a Ribbon Dancer tried to fuck a pineapple.

4) I started a band and joined another one, bringing the count to an unnecessary, over-committed FIVE BANDS.

4b) This is much less impressive when you consider that, much like other prolific songwriters--not that I'm really one of them--of previous and current times, I really only write three or four different kinds of songs. I just sort of change the nuances a bit to fit what I'm doing, because I'm a liar, essentially.

5) My friend Kylie and her friend Matt (who is kind of my friend, too, though I barely know him) made a documentary about me. It's just called Werner and it's about twelve minutes long, which is all it takes to sum up my life, including gag reel.

5b) It's actually a really well-made documentary, and Kylie and Matt did a great job. I was worried I'd look like I was too serious or too much of a joke, but she blended it well. Better than I do in my life, at least.

5c) It'll be available to watch online sometime in the near future once all the paperwork and red-tape of whatever goes along with these sorts of projects is cleared. They're film students and this was for a class, so I'm not sure exactly what needs to all happen. Other than CGI enhancements of my abs.

6) I saw Charles Bradley play a show in Madison and it was pretty incredible. I still need to see the documentary about him.

6b) I missed Lee Fields the month before, though. Only so much soul I can handle, apparently.

7) I downloaded Snapchat and don't understand it. Why wouldn't you just text someone? On the bright side, I wish all selfies had a built-in disappearing point.

8) My computer died. Just flat-out fucking ate shit. Luckily, I have most of my important stuff--music, wrestling, writing, porn--on an external hard drive. The stuff I deserve to get bummed about losing is some writing and pictures. Everything else was pirated. Even I'm not delusional enough to think I had a right to that.

8b) David Atkinson is a beautiful man with a heart of gold, and he hooked me up with a replacement right quick. Buy him cigarettes and coffee and build a statue of his out of a meat of your choice. Then feed it to a homeless person, because the world needs more people paying it forward.

9) I got a hat that says BOOB POLICE on it for Christmas. Happy birthday, Jesus.

10) I became an uncle. My brother and his girlfriend had a kid and named it Maddux, which is a cool name spelled in a fucking dickhead way.

10b) My brother spells his name "Nikolas" with no "c" in it, so whatever. Hereditary, I guess. I'm just glad I'm not "Ryen" or some shit.

That's bad, right?
Writing-wise, I'm doing better than I was when I last checked in. I've written six stories since then and five of them have been picked up. The sixth one is a really bad retelling of a Kenny Loggins song about Winnie the Pooh that Matt Burnside suggested I write about for Cloud Rodeo, and I never submitted it because in addition to being mind-numbingly shitty, I lost it in the computer crash. If I need to find it, I'm sure it's in an e-mail or Facebook message, but I might just call this one a loss. (Sort of.)

Some of the stuff I wrote is already up. The surge in writing came from the Cease, Cows contest for Halloween. They had a 1000-word cap and a theme of "hallow/hallowed" that stories needed to fit into. One submission for $5, three submissions for $10. I wrote three stories and got an honorable mention with one. (And a Pushcart nomination!)

The winner of this batch according to Cease, Cows was the story "Atavism." I started writing this under the theme of "hollow" instead of "hallow" because I'm a goddamn idiot. I gave the woman empty bones and then, when I realized I was writing about the wrong word, just decided to keep that idea and work around it. So, a haunted house, some hollow bones, and the things people do when they're afraid.

Melanie thought that humans descended from birds. Back in the middle of her snap, she paid an old man strung out on heroin fifty bucks to read her past lives, to do a palm reading on the place where her hand was supposed to be but wasn’t. So he ran his finger down the scar that sealed the end of her arm up and then he told her that God created sparrows and some evolved into humans.

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The other new thing that went up already is the story "My Friend Wallace Eating a Candy Apple at the End of the World." I wrote this last for the contest, in a quick burst. It's the shortest thing I've written in a long while, maybe the shortest thing I've ever had published. As is the way with DOGZPLOT, it's under 200 words, so I'm not going to excerpt it. You've got time to click a link.

"My Friend Wallace Eating a Candy Apple at the End of the World"

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The non-story I got published recently is a review of my bro Dena Rash Guzman's debut poetry collection Life Cycle. It's a damn fine book made by a rough-neck that might also possibly be a red-neck. Part ghost and part glitter, part sweet and part bitter. (Not everyone gets the Macho Man Randy Savage-style intro, DRG.) Check it.

Guzman’s vision is true to itself, right down to the faults. This is proof that the book has been nurtured and then shot out, more creation than craft and goddamn all the better for it.

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I almost forgot that I had a story get published right after that last blog went up, the aforementioned "There Is No Joy between the Last Thing and the Next Thing" up at Jersey Devil Press. It's about friendship and trust and moving forward, always.

When they called on me to testify, I told them I didn’t know Eugene to have a history of violence. What I meant was that spent knuckles and a dozen years of broken glass don’t add up to bank statements or toe tags, but, there they are.

You see, I used to have a bunch of rad photos saved to my computer and I'd just pop one in a spot like this as a little space break, something semi-related I could make a joke about. Thanks for nothing except leaving me with pictures of me being a fat fuck, computer crash.
The rest of the stories will be up in the months to come. "If There's Any Truth In a Northbound Train" was the second story written for the Cease, Cows contest and it'll be up at SmokeLong Quarterly in the spring. It's about twins and fate and what it means to be an older brother, if it means anything.

I also got solicited for a couple stories by Meg Tuite, one for the Sante Fe Literary Review and one for Connotation Press. SFLR will be publishing my story "Mexico," about sleep and reality and what happens when the amounts of each get thrown off together. Connotation nabbed up my story "Banzai Skydiving" about the difference between a lack of opportunity and a lack of skill. Both of these will be up fairly soon, if I understand it right.

The Indiana Review with my story "Shoot Out the Bright Lights" arrived in the mail the other day and it looks awesome. I've never been in a big journal like this, something with history and very slick production values.

Also, I'm the first person to mention Krokus in the Indiana Review, as confirmed by the IR staff.
I can't really do a year-end book round-up because I didn't read shit this year. Or, to be more specific, I read a bunch of shit this year, but not a lot of it in book form. I spent a fair amount of time reading manuscripts for Passenger Side and reading stuff online trying to find stuff I loved to solicit for manuscripts, but as far as books go, I didn't have a lot of luck or time.

The two books I put out on PSB that weren't my book are my favorites. They had to be and have to be and are. Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise is brilliant, the biggest heart of the hardest warrior. Matthew Burnside's Infinity's Jukebox is really that: the tunes of a lifetime, every lifetime. (ORDER HERE!)

Aaron Teel's Shampoo Horns is my favorite book I had nothing to do with other than sitting down and reading it cover-to-cover. It's dirty and tender and says a lot about what it means to grow up with nothing more than yourself and the people around you.

I read Brian Allen Carr's Vampire Conditions, too, and really dug it. Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas did nothing for me. I didn't even finish it.

I don't know why I didn't read, other than time. I know my old job killed a lot of my creativity and ability to focus on creative endeavors. Maybe next year will be better. It kind of has to be, right?

I always forget that reading and writing go hand in hand, and in a year when I played a bunch of shows with a bunch of different bands and wrote a lot of music, some strange and some in the box, for several groups, I can name a list of a dozen killer records I spun over and over again. One feeds into the other, which doesn't make it less of a struggle to think of something to pull from the air, but it does make the air a bit thicker.

There's a stack of books I bought this year from a lot of great writers. Amber Sparks, Matt Bell, Jon Konrath, David Atkinson, Sam Snoek-Brown and on and on. I know they're all talented and enjoyable. This one's on me.

Hopefully I'll tune in sooner than every four months to this thing, but incase I don't, here are my new tour dates, reading in a city near you. (Maybe.) March 2014! NO COAST SPRING BREAK!

Thursday, March 13: Rock Island, IL
Friday, March 14: St. Louis, MO
Saturday, March 15: Carbondale, IL
Sunday, March 16: Nashville, TN
Monday, March 17: Louisville, KY
Tuesday, March 18: Cincinnati, OH
Wednesday, March 19: Fort Wayne, IN
Thursday, March 20: Grand Rapids, MI
Friday, March 21: Chicago, IL
Saturday, March 22: Madison, WI

More info as it comes. Booking a DIY book tour without doing Universities and trying to avoid book stores and the (somewhat justified) 40% cut they take from sales is hard. I knew that going in, having booked the tour this previous summer, but I forgot how often writers don't leave their house and how many places don't have reading series. I've talked to a lot of cool, helpful people in booking this, but I've also hit a lot of odd, dead ends.

Regardless, I'll be in the car on March 13th and I'll be in these cities, doing my thing. Join me if you can.

Until then, party like you want it.

RW

What you did to me on those long nights with short skirts . . .

"Jamie" by The Bismarck, from their new album "Wild Prairie Rose"
I guess it's been about three months. Lots of things have happened.

1) I quit my job as a janitor at Wal-Mart. It was really bumming me out because, in addition to the inherent shittiness of a title like "Wal-Mart Janitor," my boss was a dick, I was forced to do things that were blatantly not my job, and I didn't have time or patience to write or read anymore.

1b) To be fair, I spent the majority of my four years there sneaking off to a non-monitored office or the family restroom (which locks) and reading books. I still did some work occasionally, at least as much as they deserved for the shit pay and shit treatment, but that majority is barely a majority. Most of the fuck-around time took place in the first two-and-a-half years. After that it was Buttfuck City.

2) I went on a cross-country tour of the US with Justin Lawrence Daugherty. We did readings in ten different states over the course of two weeks, putting almost 4000 miles on his Toyota Corolla, also known as the Toyota Rock 'n' Rolla. A full recap of this will be up on the Sundog Lit blog soon.

3) I moved out of my parents' place.

3b) Again.

3c) It's not that I didn't like living at the farm, something I hadn't done in about eight or nine years, but the driving was killing me. And I hate my mom's cats and choice of television shows that she must blare on televisions in two separate rooms simultaneously. But yeah, I fell asleep at the wheel a couple times from the half hour drive back and forth on long, boring country roads and was spending so much money in gas each month that I could actually afford to rent an apartment in the city I was driving to and come out ahead on cash.

4) I went on a week-long tour of the Midwest filling in on guitar with the Oakland-based band Victory and Associates. I also did some sitting in with our tour-mates, Louisville-based riffers Trophy Wives. Playing a lot was rad, but even better than that, I met a bunch of cool, old school punk rock dudes who proved my theory that punk rock and having your shit together are not mutually exclusive.

4b) We played with a band in Minneapolis called Gay Witch Abortion.

4c) We also played the surprise 50th birthday party for Jeff Moody, one of the coolest dudes in music. He's the sort of guy who only wants to talk passionately and positively about the things he loves, and is worth listening to for those and several other reasons.

4d) Kentucky seems like an odd place.

5) I got a rollerdog grill. It's like the ones in the gas station but it has a bunch of gaudy plastic shit all over it to make it look old-timey.

6) My girlfriend moved in with me. We're currently arguing about who is more poorly dressed in an attempt to get out of answering the door, which has been being knocked on for a minute or two now.

7) Summerslam was great, I just wish Randy Orton wasn't the guy they're going with for this "Daniel Bryan is a B+" thing. He's fucking boring. I think the "R" in "RKO" stands for "resthold." And he looks like the wall of a tattoo shop threw up on his arms. He's six or seven years past his two or three year prime. The angle is good and it broke my heart in all the right ways, but Orton's a clowndick.

7b) If any of this results in the Evolution theme being used again, all is forgiven.

8) I got the number 4 score on the South Park pinball machine at the bar I work at. That means I'm fucking awesome.

9) Barring a background check and fingerprints and all the paperwork that needs to happen when you're going to work with kids, I might have an additional job as a cook at a Montessori school, because life is weird.

9b) I was going to just work at the bar and tighten up spending-wise and then just tour as much as I can, but this kind of seems like an opportunity I can't pass up. It's only thirty hours a week and I'll be done at 1:00 every day. That means I can still work at the bar and have time for band practice. Plus, with seasonal breaks and all the other times kids get off for essentially no reason, I'll be able to tour about as much as I would anyways. My only real sacrifice is having to hang out with kids all the time and make up lies out stuff that they will no doubt believe, because they are dumb.

10) Gwen Beatty got published. This is cool because she's a great writer and that aforementioned girlfriend and there's no better return on the good karma she's created by having to see me naked on a regular basis than by having her talents be recognized. You should read her story "I Thought About How the Sea" and then send her stories to read for her new gig at the journal Cease, Cows.

Do you even be gross, bro?
In this time, I've done very little writing. Or reading. I've read manuscripts for PSB and done edits on other people's stuff, but I haven't done much of anything for my own work. This is called an "excuse" because I'm "lazy" and "currently mostly playing computer games."

The whole "write every day" thing is an idea I try to live by it. It seems to be the one piece of advice that almost everyone agrees upon. There a part in the Comedians of Comedy documentary where Patton Oswalt talks about being obsessed with doing stand-up, to the point where it was all he did for two or three years. Open mics, crafting jokes, listening to other people do it. He says that every serious artist probably goes through this at some point, just drowning themselves in their craft.

I did that already. I did that when I was 20 and 21 and 22 and 23. I stayed home on weekends and revise stuff. I spent my entire Spring Break when I was twenty writing for six or seven hours day. I wrote before work and after work and couldn't think of anything but narrative and character whenever I watched television or a movie.

This was to no immediate benefit to the outside world. I was working on a novel that I knew wouldn't get published, something uneven and very blatantly the first thing I'd ever written. The last page is infinitely better than the first page, because I learned everything I know about writing just by working on that one giant thing.

Then I fell into an easy sort of routine--Mark Doty said he only write 400 words a day, so that's what I did. I've even shortened it in the past year or so: 100 words a day and one perfect sentence. I usually end up doing more than that, but sometimes I don't, which is fine. The one rule of writing is "feel good." I figured out how to write--or at least how I write--and I do that and it's very satisfying, the ways I still manage to surprise myself, running with the same themes and motifs and building up a series of personal archetypes the way Bob Dylan or Jason Molina or Raymond Carver did.

That I do the same thing they did, on a smaller, less successful level, is still incredible to me.

But recently, I haven't done shit. I've been preoccupied with other endeavors, some creative and some not: bands and a micropress and Twin Peaks and making dinner and pinball and all that stuff. Even now that I've been working a mere twenty hours a week I've only been writing four or five days of it.

Back when I was neck deep in my writing, I couldn't go two days with getting panicky about not writing. I just went a few months without doing much of anything, and I feel all right.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything other than I don't know if I'm becoming less self-obsessed or if I actually might not write forever. I don't like to think that I can be perfectly happy not doing something I spent so much time grinding my life around.

"There's too much fucking perspective now."
Still, I managed to write a few things during a brief explosion of productivity. One of the stories will be for a special issue of Jersey Devil Press. I get my old Our Band Could Be Your Lit project up and running again for ONE NIGHT ONLY, thanks to a suggestion of "write about a Lita Ford song if you can't think of anything" by Mike Sweeney. From that has come the story "There Is No Joy Between the Last Thing and the Next Thing." It's based on "Shot of Poison" from Lita's pretty-awesome album Dangerous Curves. It's about friendship and emptiness and the big, scary future. Look for it soon.

(Unfortunately, I missed Lita Ford when she came to the casino in town. I made a promise to my pubescent self that I would have sex with her, but bailed at the last minute because I didn't want to take off work and Lita kind of looks like old dinner rolls now.)

Another thing I wrote and managed to get published right away in a kind of silly "the internet is a wild place" sort of way is an essay called "How to make -$1377 the Hard Way" about starting a micropress, booking my own cross-country book tour, DIY attitudes in indie lit, jealousy, success, satisfaction, and other things I secretly and not-so-secretly obsess about when it comes to writing. The ever-badass Jennifer A. Howard picked it up immediately and pushed it through to publication right away for the Passages North WRITERS ON WRITING column. I'm very happy to be a part of it.

Punk rock means that not only do all the eggs go in the basket, but you decide what the eggs and the basket are. Anyone who understands this probably doesn't need the reminder and anyone who doesn't understand it probably isn't going to have a revelation concerning it, so I’ll stop being indignant before I get wet under the arms about it.

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Some other things I wrote awhile back that were published during my period of soul searching/watching Agent Dale Cooper eat pie include this story about brothers and pro wrestling and what the truth really is and what it's good for. It's called "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way to do Everything" and it's up a Necessary Fiction.

I watch my dead brother’s wrestling matches and try to count the number of times he gets hurt for real. In one, a wispy tattooed man hits him with a monitor from the commentary desk. In the rematch, he hits him with the commentary desk.

I’ve got one of his boots on either side of the television. Maybe there’s a heart attack resting in my chest, too.

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And this review of Ken Nash's The Brain Harvest, also up at Necessary Fiction.

What this really taught me was the same thing that The Brain Harvest by Ken Nash taught me: precision and compression and crazy hope, how if we zoom in far enough in anyone’s life, the absurdities reveal a depth of honesty and wonder. There’s something amazing in everyone’s life, something historic in everyone’s town.

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And, lastly, this review of Adam Marek's wonderful short story collection The Stone Thrower, up now at Heavy Feather Review.

Before even reading Adam Marek’s short story collection The Stone Thrower­—a book that openly states its themes of parental protection and vulnerability right on the back cover—I began to worry that I would be slogging through a dozen or so stories written by someone who has been made soft and sentimental by the idea of what they do to nurture their offspring or, perhaps even worse, stories written by someone who has been made hard, writing for the aforementioned softies.

Thankfully, The Stone Thrower is none of that.

Most of any tour is a variation on this picture of an unclean Justin Lawrence Daugherty devouring a burrito with gravy in it at a truck stop somewhere in northern Idaho at 8:00 AM shortly before describing some guy's balls as smelling like nuclear fallout.
A very nice review of my chapbook, Murmuration, went up at Heavy Feather Review. Austin Hayden was too kind.

Ryan works life’s incongruities. The Midwest he puts on the page is at once vast and closed-off. Even (at times, especially) alongside his friends, or girlfriends, or family members, his speaker is alone out there. His POV character is calloused but endearing. Both sarcastic and earnest. The yin and yang of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld meshed into one voice.

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And, actually, now that I think about it, a killer review of Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise went up at HFR a bit before mine, thanks to the wonderful Kate Kimball.

There is a bridge that dogs jump to their deaths from that symbolizes the broken heart of a man. A man swearing there is a bomb on the lawn, which later, the character who believes him tries to pry the metal from the earth. A teenager works on competitive eating to impress a father who is a Marlboro Man in Japan. Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise introduces unexpected situations, but is able to create a strong affect in those situations. Daugherty’s characters are believable, endearing, and refreshing. His use of ironic humor, believable dialects, and uncanny conflicts work to symbolize the innate human quest for rediscovering nature.

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And while I'm on the subject of all thing Passenger Side Books, Matthew Burnside's Infinity's Jukebox has a birthday and artwork! September 9th, people. Here's one of the covers we'll be using in addition to seven other killer color schemes. Order all of this stuff right here at the cheaply-made PASSENGER SIDE BOOKS website.
After that Passages North essay went up, I got a lot of traffic to this site, and most of the information on it was from months ago. I'm going to try to not make it that long between updates. If you're new here now, take a look around. I'm doing things, occasionally. I hope you are, too.

With love,

RW

August is over, so when are you coming back . . .

"Younger Days" by Mount Moriah, off their new record Miracle Temple.
Another month gone that I'll never get back, because that's how time works until you're dead and it doesn't matter anymore. Here's what I've been doing.

1) I went and talked to a temp agency about getting me work in an office because I hate my job at Wal-Mart, mainly because I can't fuck around as much anymore.

1b) I realize this makes me sound incredibly lazy and part of a much larger problem concerning the new adults of America, but it's a matter of right more than anything. I signed up for a shitty job that pays under $10 an hour and has no responsibilities. Being a fuck up is built into it. It's a job for retired people who want to push a broom all day or kids in high school who are waiting for their lives to start. I'm using it as a way to have a job I can leave there when I walk out the door, which it hasn't been, thanks to a clause in my "Wal-Mart contract" that says I agreed to help out where needed, meaning that if this fucking dildo assistant manager I hate tells me to eat shit and bark at the moon, I have to eat shit and bark at the moon.

1c) That dude's a dick.

2) I saw Bret Michaels of Poison at the casino in town. It was one of the worst shows I've ever seen. He opened up with two Posion songs, so fine, I wasn't pissed. Then he went off stage to change his shirt and came on to play "Sweet Home Alabama." Then he dedicated "Something To Believe In" to the troops and the people of Boston. His twelve-string acoustic sounded like Steve Albini's Shellac tone, which was kind of awesome but entirely inappropriate. Then he changed his shirt again, came back out, and played "What I Got" by Sublime after giving a shout-out to Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray. He played for under an hour, which is kind of an odd thing to complain about--"This food is terrible, and such small portions!"--but he didn't play "Ride the Wind" so I'm pissed.

3) Some dude came into the bar I work at and stole my screen-printed, hand-numbered Melvins poster from the wall in the little room I do door in. We took a screenshot of the security footage and did a public shaming of him online. I happened to run into him the next day on the street, where I called him a fucker, asked him where my poster was, and then opened up the back door of his car to grab it while he made excuses. He's a white dude with dreads, so fuck him.

3b) I put the poster back up and it disappeared that same night. I asked the owners to check the footage the next day and they never did, so I assumed they just didn't care. A week later, I saw the poster hanging back up in the room. The middle of it was completely burned through and then entire thing was ruined. I was immediately bummed. Ten minutes later one of the owners comes through the door holding the real Melvins poster, then explains to me that he saw it on the ground that night and took it home. He went to CopyWorks, made a cheap black and white copy, stained it with coffee, colored it with colored pencils, and then burned out the middle. He and the other owner were watching the security footage to see my reaction and he ran down to the bar as soon as he saw I was about to kill myself. A total dick, but what a wonderful prank.

4) I've been eating people's ice cream out of the freezer at work because I'm a rotten human.

5) I started writing fake horoscopes under the name Dr. McCracken for a local entertainment magazine.

5b) Here are three of them:

Aries: You will argue for forty-five minutes with an IKEA representative about the best way to design a pit. Enjoy naps in lieu of the sun, which will eventually burn out anyways. Someone in your professional life will dream of lighting your shoes on fire. Life is debatable.

Taurus: A new love interest will appear and replace all of the light switch covers in your house with photocopies of your baby pictures. Do not be shaken by the unknown. Cry in your bathtub at every opportunity.

Gemini: More than ever before it is important to remember that the human body's age limitations are ultimately usurped by the fact that cancer is unavoidable in all life forms past the age of 150. You will drown your motivation with ice cream.

6) My buddy Zach made me a custom leather guitar strap that has my name written in the scoops of an ice cream cone.

7) I started watching this video series on YouTube where some Irish guys talk about old wrestling PPVs for like an hour and a half over-top the footage they're talking about. I'm halfway through the Wrestlemania I episode and yes, they make an interesting point with the placement of Lord Alfred. Very odd. And yes, my life is disappearing.

8) I found out that I'm Jewish. My mother was explaining something about my grandmother being an old Jew, which made me realize--thanks to David Cross--that if her mother was a Jew, then that means she's a Jew. That means I'm a Jew. A loophole Jew, but still a Jew.

8b) Nobody was surprised.

Seriously.
After what felt like a million years but was actually only like two months of minor complaining about not being published for two months, I got e-mails telling me that my story "Go Says No," about pinball and the doldrums, will be going up at BULL: Men's Fiction and my story "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything," about a dead wrestler and his brother dealing with it, will be going up at Necessary Fiction, both in the near future.

Part of why I went so long--"so long," I guess, since it really wasn't a very long time--without getting anything accepted for publication was because I didn't have a lot floating around out there, and what I did have floating around was at the big-time journals that take at least three months to respond. Nothing was helped by the responses I actually was getting, which were all rejections, one of which addressed only to "Dear [name]." I am a human, I swear.

But anyways, those should be out soon, and I'm sure I won't shut the fuck up about them once they get here. "A Comprehensive List" is the first story (that I have written, maybe not the first story in the collection) in a pro wrestling based chapbook I'm working on called The Road Becomes What You Leave, a title I pinched from a Magnolia Electric Co. song lyric, one that was actually already pinched several years ago for a short documentary about the band. (Magnolia Electric Co. singer/guitarist Jason Molina recently died after a long battle with alcoholism, and though I've been planning on using the title for years and years and Molina probably wasn't a huge wrestling fan, I'm still very dedicated to the idea of using it.)

"Go Says No" isn't a part of any collection, at least not yet, and that's somewhat exciting, because it means that in a few years, if I can keep writing, I'll hopefully have a handful of stories to pull from to make a new collection. It'll be interesting to see what themes emerge from the group of stories. I plan out what I'm writing about, at least in terms of what I want to get across emotionally or thematically, as much as I can ahead of time, so the idea that a book that doesn't exist yet is going to come together from a bunch of stories that also don't exist yet kind of blows my mind.

How inexplicable shitty this Tom Keifer of Cinderella solo album is also kind of blows my mind. For some reason.
The Passenger Side Books website is finally up and running, and the first two titles are available as fuck. Justin Lawrence Daugherty's Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise and my Murmuration are$5 shipped each or $9 shipped as a bundle. People said nice things about each of them, like this from Amber Sparks about Justin's book:

"Justin Lawrence Daugherty has not just a voice, but a hulking, goose-pimpling presence on the page -  like something buried in the earth too long and about to burn its way out. He is an acute and devastatingly honest observer of the current human condition, and his characters limp and bayonet their way through Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise like soldiers of some wounded new century."

Or this from Mary Miller about my book:

"The five stories in Ryan Werner's Murmuration, which are dedicated to the Midwest, bring me into the heart of a world where boys drive cars off cliffs and have least favorite strippers, where dreams must be revised into "necessary shapes" by playing guitar in the street at night. Ryan writes with authority, skill, and passion, not only about the Midwest, but about youth and what it means to be young."

Get them both right here at the Passenger Side Books site.

Also, Murmuration is on Goodreads.

And so is Whatever Don't Drown Will Always Rise.


AND ALL THIS SHIT IS ON TWITTER NOW.

Here's our logo. Isn't it rad? Order now and get a free sticker or two with this on it.
I had a couple things go online recently, despite my endless whining about not being published. The first one, my story "Back and to the Left" up at Jersey Devil Press, I totally forgot about because they're the ones who published my first book, where this story originally appeared. We worked out a loose arrangement and now it's here and I'm stoked. It's like finding twenty bucks in an old pair of pants. Anyways, this story is based on the song "Brain of J" by Pearl Jam, and it has to do with the idea that JFK didn't really die--until now--and wasn't really up to anything anyways. OR as I like to call it, REALITY, DUDE.

Aside from his relations with Marilyn Monroe and being the most powerful man in the United States for a little bit, JFK wasn’t the luckiest guy around. He was accident prone, more than anything. Still, he kept his humor. He’d call me a few times a year and say something like, “I just slammed my hand in a car door. First I get shot in the head and now this.”

The other thing I had go up is a review of Roy Kesey's Any Deadly Thing up at Heavy Feather Review. I didn't really like the book, but here's me being diplomatic.

In these large, faraway places are usually two people experimenting with the space they’re forced to cohabitate. In the portion of their lives we’re presented with, the good stuff often seems ready to arrive despite the stories all beginning and ending in odd spots, the story going on, always.

If you liked Roy's book and you're upset that I didn't, keep in mind that this is just one of many pictures of CC DeVille I have saved to my computer.
I didn't talk much about what I'm working on because I'm not working on shit. I've been busy finalizing the PSB stuff and working and playing in four or five bands. And I hate reading more than one book at once, so I've been stuck on Ken Nash's The Brain Harvest, trying to read it at the slow points in my work day, which isn't exactly ideal or productive. However, I just finished the review for The Brain Harvest (and a review for The Stone Thrower by Adam Marek, which was wonderful), so I'm going to reread The Watch by Rick Bass and some new shit by Gary Lutz and I'm going to generally get back into the swing of writing again. Because I like writing. I think.

All right. Let's get incredible.

With love,

RW