Ryan Werner's Blog, page 6

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 8: "It's Been Far Too Long Since You Woke Up In Someone Else's Shoes")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 


"Misunderstood" by Wilco was the inspiration behind the story "It's Been Far Too Long Since You Woke Up In Someone Else's Shoes"
Exclusive to SATCD. That first line—“Back in high school you had a girl and a band and you thought both of them would last forever”—is something I used to say about myself in college. It's possible that this one is more autobiographical than the others—a guy at a party playing with his old band for all of his old friends while trying to beat all of his old habits—but I can't even really tell. Once rock & roll gets mixed up in things, it all just sort of blurs together. I can't separate what I've experienced from what I've only heard about or seen.

I try to write in the second person sparingly. It almost always works, but the gimmick of it all too often usurps the story. I think I fell into a lot of the traps of second person writing, lapsing into a tone where it sounds like I'm giving stage directions and motivations. (“You do this and then that. You feel this way and then someone comes in. They say this. It makes no sense and you wonder whatever." Etc.) Second person is like Taco Bell in the sense that it's the same five ingredients turned into well-designed garbage that people feel the need to enjoy only in shameful privacy.

The story itself wasn't too much trouble. “Misunderstood” has always been, despite me usually feeling pretty well understood, one of my favorite songs. The narrative was essentially one of many variations on the “I used to be in a band” story. It's like a choose your own adventure book. “To bang your old girlfriend, go to page 32. To drink more and keeping talking about Aerosmith with those smelly dudes, turn to page 8.”

The ending is lovingly cribbed, as so many endings have been, from Raymond Carver.


Tomorrow: A story named "Monsters: A Series of Non-Chronological Vignettes" that is based on the song "Snow & Lights" by Explosions In the Sky.


SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I have a reason to leave my basement.  

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 7: "When There Is No Road")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 

"Rock N Roll" by Paleface, as suggested by musician Monica "Mo" Samalot, was the inspiration behind "When There Is No Road"
Originally OBCBYL #19. My friend Alice has to remind me periodically that old men are not heroes, but I think Hank in this story might be. He’s actually middle-aged, but he seems older. He keeps going to live-band karaoke and amateur fight nights. He’s spiritually willing but physically unable. He’s as big as he’s always been, which is why it was so fun to peel him back and show his weaknesses.

This is another boxing story, somewhat, though it was actually before the other, more traditional story. In fact, there’s even less fighting in this one than there is in “The King.” There’s nothing wrong with a dramatic play-by-play, but I like it when sports stories have all the action displaced, when something has already happened or is about to happen. There’s a different sort of emotional resonance in the moment as opposed to the anticipation of the moment.

I started to experiment with really short sections sometime around this time. The story’s about 700 words split up into five sections, the last of which makes up over a third of the story. This is why I want to say I was cribbing Amy Hempel, but something like Bass's novella “Where the Sea Used to Be” makes me think it was actually Bass. (Plus all the turns of phrase, especially at the end of the sections, are totally Bass.)

The song itself is good, but I found it hard to incorporate much aside from having the live karaoke represent rock & roll. Finally, with the last image, I think I nailed it. It took the whole story, but that's what endings are for. Why go on longer than 700 words if I don't have to?

Also, another thing that points to this being a Bass story is the name "Jim Mikinez" showing up in the text. I must have been reading one of Bass's books on wolves at the time, because "Mike Jimenez" is the name of the wolf expert Bass frequently consulted and went on excursions with. It's all making sense now and goddamn I love Rick Bass.


Tomorrow: A story named "It's Been Far Too Long Since You Woke Up In Someone Else's Shoes" that is based on the song "Misunderstood" by Wilco.


SATCD on Goodreads
 
Pre-order the book so I can maybe afford a fog machine someday.  

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 6: "Wide Right Game")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 

"Helps Both Ways" by Mogwai was the inspiration behind the story "Wide Right Game"
Exclusive to SATCD. For years there was just a HelpsBothWays.doc file on my computer with only one sentence in the body: “If you want a prostitute to lick your ass, it costs the same as a blowjob.” (Source: Some stupid show on HBO.) Thankfully, this idea morphed into something completely different in which a small-time crook sneaks into a man’s apartment and finds him dead. At that point, he’s faced with a choice of an easy looting or a complete turnaround.

The song itself has no words except the announcer of a football game, which immediately made me think of a dark apartment with just a TV on, flickering with a game. The prostitute thing makes absolutely no sense to me now, but the football game idea was always there.

I did have to figure out which game I wanted to do, though. I don't know enough about sports to fabricate a game, and I'm pretty sure I just ended up Googling "famous football games." Eventually, I came across Superbowl XXV, the Wide Right Game. It had struggle, failure, and, most importantly, redemption, built into it already. Formatting around it was embarrassingly easy. Once I embodied the title of the song in there somehow—mainly around what the two characters have done for one another through their somewhat insalubrious actions—I was done.

I always think of my buddy Josh's dad when I think of "poor people who owned a few small things like CD players and deep fryers." My senior year of high school, he dropped way too much money on a three-foot wizard statue carved out of stone. The only purpose we could figure out for it to serve involved my buddy Ben getting drunk and trying to fight it.

The pretty Irish girl with bad eyes is a very real girl who is really named Jacqueline. I can't remember her last name and I didn't really know her that well. She was in one of my writing classes and I thought she was tiny and adorable, so of course I made a comment one day that would have been humorous if I had gotten sheepish at the last moment and just come off as a dickhead. I guess this is as close as she'll ever get to an apology.

Tomorrow: A story named "When There Is No Road" that is based on the song "Rock N Roll" by Paleface. Suggested by musician Monica "Mo" Samalot of Paleface.

SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I can get extra Taco Bell.  

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 6: "Helps Both Ways")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 

"Helps Both Ways" by Mogwai was the inspiration behind the story "Wide Right Game"
Exclusive to SATCD. For years there was just a HelpsBothWays.doc file on my computer with only one sentence in the body: “If you want a prostitute to lick your ass, it costs the same as a blowjob.” (Source: Some stupid show on HBO.) Thankfully, this idea morphed into something completely different in which a small-time crook sneaks into a man’s apartment and finds him dead. At that point, he’s faced with a choice of an easy looting or a complete turnaround.

The song itself has no words except the announcer of a football game, which immediately made me think of a dark apartment with just a TV on, flickering with a game. The prostitute thing makes absolutely no sense to me now, but the football game idea was always there.

I did have to figure out which game I wanted to do, though. I don't know enough about sports to fabricate a game, and I'm pretty sure I just ended up Googling "famous football games." Eventually, I came across Superbowl XXV, the Wide Right Game. It had struggle, failure, and, most importantly, redemption, built into it already. Formatting around it was embarrassingly easy. Once I embodied the title of the song in there somehow—mainly around what the two characters have done for one another through their somewhat insalubrious actions—I was done.

I always think of my buddy Josh's dad when I think of "poor people who owned a few small things like CD players and deep fryers." My senior year of high school, he dropped way too much money on a three-foot wizard statue carved out of stone. The only purpose we could figure out for it to serve involved my buddy Ben getting drunk and trying to fight it.

The pretty Irish girl with bad eyes is a very real girl who is really named Jacqueline. I can't remember her last name and I didn't really know her that well. She was in one of my writing classes and I thought she was tiny and adorable, so of course I made a comment one day that would have been humorous if I had gotten sheepish at the last moment and just come off as a dickhead. I guess this is as close as she'll ever get to an apology.

Tomorrow: A story named "When There Is No Road" that is based on the song "Rock N Roll" by Paleface. Suggested by musician Monica "Mo" Samalot of Paleface.

SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I can get extra Taco Bell.  

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 5: "Plots")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 

"Transatlantic Foe" by At the Drive-In, as suggested by writer/musician Philip Chavez, was the inspiration behind the story "Plots"
Originally OBCBYL #24. I don’t write about mother/son relationships because I don’t think I have anything interesting to say on the subject. Hamlet and Freud pretty much covered it. Besides, a man’s most interesting parental tension is usually with his father—Marc Maron calls it a “battle to the death”—and because I don’t have anything much to say about that, either, I don’t. My mother makes me lunch every Monday and my father’s feelings on me waver consistently between tolerable and favorable. What more is there?

That said, I think the mother in the story was a good choice for a foundation. I pulled a bunch of concrete imagery from the song: Pet Sounds, Mona Lisa, an aneurysm, Black Russians, black birds, and the title itself. I wish I could remember how chess became a sort of odd backbone for the story, but I'm drawing a total blank. It could have been the movie Angus, for all I remember. I'm assuming I looked up something about Pet Sounds and worked my way back from there to find a teenage narrator, stumbling upon the 1960s and not wanting to suck its dick in the usual ways.

Before this, my knowledge of chess extended to pretty much knowing that I wasn't very good at it and that there was that Bobby Fischer movie in the 90s. (That movie didn't actually have anything to do with Bobby Fischer, I think I later found out and stopped giving a shit about immediately.) Something about Russian names really appealed to me, too—in small doses only, as my multiple failed attempts to tackle Chekhov will prove—so just having Boris Spassky be mentioned a couple times at least gave me a faux-sophistication I could rest my hat on long enough to finish the story.

I go back and forth about the girl in the story, whether or not she’s a tool or a worthwhile character. I’d like to someday rewrite the story from her perspective and find out. Also, like when I worked at a gas station and a meat processing plant, my narrators have been getting custodial jobs ever since I got one. Punch me in the face if I ever start writing about writers.

Tomorrow: A story named "Wide Right Game" that is based on the song "Helps Both Ways" by Mogwai. 

SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book if you either love cake or have diabetes. 

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 6: "Wide Right Game")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 

"Helps Both Ways" by Mogwai was the inspiration behind the story "Wide Right Game"
(Read "Wide Right Game" in Issue #32 of Jersey Devil Press)

Exclusive to SATCD. For years there was just a HelpsBothWays.doc file on my computer with only one sentence in the body: “If you want a prostitute to lick your ass, it costs the same as a blowjob.” (Source: Some stupid show on HBO.) Thankfully, this idea morphed into something completely different in which a small-time crook sneaks into a man’s apartment and finds him dead. At that point, he’s faced with a choice of an easy looting or a complete turnaround. My writing isn't very emotionally risky, but it's not without feeling, so I’m sure I was going somewhere at least halfway decent with the originally ass-licking idea. 

The song itself has no words except the announcer of a football game, which immediately made me think of a dark apartment with just a TV on, flickering with a game. All I had to figure out was which game I wanted to do. I don't know enough about sports to fabricate a game, and I'm pretty sure I just ended up Googling "famous football games." Eventually, I came across Superbowl XXV, the Wide Right Game. It had struggle, failure, and, most importantly, redemption, built into it already. Formatting around it was embarrassingly easy. Once I embodied the title of the song in there somehow—mainly around what the two characters have done for one another through their somewhat insalubrious actions—I was done.

I always think of my buddy Josh's dad when I think of "poor people who owned a few small things like CD players and deep fryers." My senior year of high school, he dropped way too much money on a three-foot wizard statue carved out of stone. The only purpose we could figure out for it to serve involved my buddy Ben getting drunk and trying to fight it.

The pretty Irish girl with bad eyes is a very real girl who is really named Jacqueline. I can't remember her last name and I didn't really know her that well. She was in one of my writing classes and I thought she was tiny and adorable, so of course I made a comment one day that would have been humorous if I had gotten sheepish at the last moment and just come off as a dickhead. I guess this is as close as she'll ever get to an apology.


Tomorrow: A story named "When There Is No Road" that is based on the song "Rock N Roll" by Paleface. Suggested by musician Monica "Mo" Samalot.


SATCD on Goodreads
 
Pre-order the book so I can get extra Taco Bell.  

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 4: "The King")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 


"Do Anything You Want To" by Thin Lizzy was the inspiration behind the story "The King"
(Check out "The King" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.)

Exclusive to SATCD. Aside from a few archaic, illogical outliers—Rollie Fingers in baseball, Jay Novacek in football, Manute Bol in basketball—I’m wholly uninterested in sports. My sense of competition is the sort that leads to either rage-induced yelling or obnoxious gloating. I am, occasionally, the worst person ever.

Laterally, I’m a wrestling fan, too. Boxing appeals to me because it’s one-on-one and people get hit in the face. I don’t remember how “The King” came to be boxing story. I probably just figured it was about time to do one. Hemingway always wrote some great boxing stories and Rick Bass, too, has a killer story called "The Legend of Pig-eye" that I went back and reread a couple times. Plus, it gave me a chance to crack open that book on the history of Jewish boxers that I bought for a dollar.

I think I ended up with a Mexican coach because I just wanted a chance to call someone an asshole in Spanish. I remembering being stuck at one point and turning the "puppet on a string" line of the song into a section where the narrator is literally a puppet on a string, with Montoya pulling his arms all over the place as he boxed. (Whenever I got stuck on a story when writing from a song, I took the figurative literally and the literal figuratively and it almost always worked.)

I ran into a problem when I found out that Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott—the real hero of the intelligent working class—is a bit more vague than someone like, say, Bruce Springsteen. (Sorry, Jersey Devil Press. The guy can go fuck himself.) Even though that's probably why I like Springsteen less, who always seems to be trying too hard and whose coolness often comes across as manufactured, it didn't make writing a story based on Thin Lizzy lyrics any easier.

I didn't have a title in mind until I wrote the end. In the song, Phil has a little spoken word outro that fades with the song. "Elvis is dead. The king of rock & roll is dead." It didn't occur to me until writing this that song may have been about Elvis trying to break free from his songwriters and management, so I just wound the story down with a random non-sequitur flashback and hope that it tied everything together. If nothing else, at least I got to call someone an asshole in Spanish.

Sports stories, in general, appeal to me because there's a winner and a loser, the exact reason competing in sports doesn't appeal to me. I had considered making the fight at the climax—if it happened, mind you—a scene instead of just something mentioned, but decided against it. We don't know who wins or loses, and it doesn't matter, because life, as the narrator finds out, is about more than boxing. Life, however, is exactly like boxing: you are singular, you are the fist and the mind and the world.

Tomorrow: A story named "Plots" that is based on the song "Transatlantic Foe" by At the Drive-In. Suggested by writer/musician Philip Chavez.

SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so they don't just sit in my car once they're printed. 

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 3: "Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.


"Life Passed Me By" by Super Stereo, as suggested by writer Monica Rodriguez, was the inspiration behind the story "Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All"
(Check out "Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.)

Originally OBCBYL #27. I've really got no business writing about war or recovering from war or any sort of war-related incident aside from, possibly, a critical look at the Black Flag album My War. I was considering enlisting in the Marines my senior year of high school—to be in the band—but I quickly realized that I was not very good at saxophone and quite the wuss.
The thing about fiction, and the thing about that old "write what you know" saying, is that you can just make shit up if you're self-aware enough about exactly how clever and shallow you are. Anything worth writing about shares the same dozen or so approximations of natural feelings: confusion, joy, triumph, isolation, etc. The experience of going to war doesn't compare to the experience of just kind of being bummed out that you're home by yourself on a summer night in suburbia, obviously. Just put on The Cure or something and invent something good.
That said, this was one of those stories whose first draft ended up being some sort of shitty, told-by-a-bystander alternate universe prologues that I had to delete. Nothing was helped by the fact that I hated the song, a vapid piece of dance pop whose lyrics are the equivalent of a shirt with #YOLO on it.

Sometimes when I read other people's stories I tell them to delete everything except the last sentence and then write forward from there. Nobody wants to hear shit like that—especially when it's internal dialogue. The original draft ended with one character being compared to the hands of a clock and the other character being the pin that holds them. I shitcanned the rest of the story—a guy watching his grandfather interact with a woman who he only sees every ten years—and had pretty much just that one sentence left for a few days. I tried to convince myself I was a big enough dickhead to call that one sentence a story and leave it as is, but no dice.

I spent a lot of time walking around at my job trying to think about what the hell I was going to do. The guy's grandfather was supposed to enlist in the Navy with the woman, but he didn't make it and she did. By chance, one of my friends at work, Keith—a Navy vet—ended up randomly telling me about the USS Indianapolis, whose sinking at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Navy led to the greatest single loss of life at sea in the history of the U.S. Navy.

Call it good, simple fortune. I went home, looked up some more details on the USS Indianapolis, and quickly wrote a draft that closely resembles the one in the book. A couple of the cities mentioned are off-hand references to other things: Ybor City is repeatedly name-checked in a few Hold Steady songs and Philipsburg is a nod to the poet Richard Hugo, whose poem "Degrees of Gray In Philipsburg" fucking rules.

This story got picked up by amphibi.us, too, when I was madly in need of validation and searching for journals that took previously published material. What good is writing if people won't figuratively blow me over it?

Tomorrow: A story named "The King" that is based on the song "Do Anything You Want To" by Thin Lizzy. 

SATCD on Goodreads
 
Pre-order the book so nothing will ever hurt again. 

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 2: "Sergei Avdeyev")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Traveller In Time" by Uriah Heep, as suggested my musician Mike Conte of the band Early Man, was the inspiration behind the story "Sergei Avdeyev" 
(Read "Sergei Avdeyev" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.)  

Originally OBCBYL #28. Writing about isolation means writing through isolation to evoke empathy. A story that makes a reader feel alone goes against the one morality we can almost all agree that storytelling is supposed to achieve. What good is a cathedral without people in it? 

The story itself came about pretty quickly once I stumbled upon Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdayev, which took for fucking ever to stumble upon. Sergei holds the record for time dilation experienced by a human being. What this basically means is that he was in space for so long at such a rapid speed--a cumulative 747 days at an average speed of about 27,360 km/h--that he actually aged roughly 0.02 seconds less than an Earthbound person would have. He is, and this is how simple my brain works, a traveler in time.

In my head, the narrator was stranded in Moscow for a similar reason Ethan Hawke's character in Before Sunrise was stranded in Europe before meeting up with Julie Delpy's character: translatlantic travel that resulted in a break-up upon arrival. When I wrote this, I was finally becoming sick of writing bad relationship stories--both stories that were about bad relationships and bad stories about relationships. I left the "lovesick and stranded" part out of it entirely.

Really, though, I don't think it matters why the narrator's in Moscow. He's just there. Sometimes people end up places by themselves, which the narrator subtly notes right away in the first sentence. This goes back to the idea of isolation in writing: if there's nothing that can be done, then you have to do nothing.

I was worried about the interaction with Sergei because I didn't want to have to keep saying shit like "Sergei spoke elegantly in Russian and gestured toward WHATEVER." I can't remember if I was too lazy to actually find out if Sergei knew English or if I searched around for about five minutes and didn't find anything to confirm that. Regardless, it worked out in my favor. Sergei is silently stoic and all their interaction is physical, which really helps the scenes play out. The narrator and Sergei playing darts is one of my favorite things I've written.

I submitted this story to Cartographer and they got back to me--on my birthday, no less--saying they'd agree to publish "Sergei Avdeyev" upon deletion of the last sentence. I offered them an alternate last sentence that was a nice compromise between what I had--a punchline--and what they wanted--less of a punchline. I never heard back from them.

And that's why I don't celebrate my birthday.

Tomorrow: A story named "Look At How Fast I Can Go Nowhere At All" that is based on the song "Life Passed Me By" by Super Stereo. Suggested by writer Monica Rodriguez.


SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I have a reason to leave my basement. 

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 1: "Back and to the Left")

The content of my upcoming book of short short stories, Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Brain of J" by Pearl Jam, as suggested by writer Stephen Schwegler, was the inspiration behind the story "Back and to the Left."
(Read "Back and to the Left" in JDP's gracious preview of Shake Away These Constant Days.)

Originally OBCBYL #21. This was the first story I wrote after coming back from a long hiatus. I think around the time I wrote this story I also wrote a song called "Sex In Your City," if that gives you any indication as to where my mind was.

"Brain of J" is, I'm pretty sure, about JFK. The only thing I was more positive about than the world not needing another spin on the JFK assasination was a strong affirmation of my own laziness. So, a JFK assination story it became.

I like to think this is one of the better ones--it kicks off the book, too, so Mike Sweeney at Jersey Devil Press must have thought the same thing. I figured I could get away with a story like this if I took the aspect of saving JFK's brain and sort of manifested it in a living JFK, one who didn't die but is now, for real this time, dead as fuck.

Plus, I think a small part of me just wanted to see JFK die twice.

The reason there's a small part in the story about anagrams and Scrabble is because, in addition to spending a lot of time writing songs about cunilingus and stuff, I spent a lot of time thinking I could be a really great Scrabble player. I read a book called Word Freak and watched a documentary called Word Wars, both about Scrabble. The Scrabble/anagram related part in this story is about all I really got out of it.

It's got a nice flow to the end, a really solid rising cadence. The last line is lovingly cribbed from The Maltese Falcon. In it, Sam Spade says the closing simile as a tossed-off description of suddenness. Mine's a commentary on a county finding satisfaction through grief, which, in itself will always remind me of the William Matthews poem "Why We Are Truly a Nation" and is, therefore, a mini-crib of its own. (A post-modern, collage-based mindset is a wonderful thing when it comes to justification.)

The title is taken from one of the many creepy scenes in Oliver Stone's JFK that dissect the Zapruder footage. Unfortuntely, I was unable to fit any odd references in about my Jr High history teacher who was obsessed with JFK. I think he eventually got fired for getting busted with a Playboy in school, but don't quote me on that.

Tomorrow: A story named "Sergei Avdeyev" that is based on the song "Traveller in Time" by Uriah Heep. Suggested by musician Mike Conte of Early Man.


SATCD on Goodreads

Pre-order the book so I can love myself again.