My Amputated Techno-Limb

So, my computer crashed…damn Dell sons-of-bitches.  Actually, I take that back, she lived longer than most…five years.  I used my brother’s computer for a month, then he left for San Diego.  Since last Thursday, I’ve been without Internet access at my casa.  And I realized I might have a problem, because I am absolutely going NUTS!!!!!  I never realized how much I relied on the ability to get online whenever I need.  I mean, I actually, dug through the bottom cabinet next to my fridge and dusted off the Yellow Pages (oh God, no, not the YELLOW PAGES, anything but the YELLOW PAGES) to find a number of a neighbor.  I will admit.  I had difficulty with the alphabetical order.  I had to repeat the alphabet, Sesame Street style, over and over to find the name I needed.

What did we do without the Internet?

I, like many of you, was born before the Internet.  I have fond (I assume her’s are not) memories of my mother sitting at our kitchen table typing on a type writer and cursing (in her way–this is assinine!…bull-crumb!…Rick, you touch me again when I’m working on this, and I’ll kick your tuckus!) when she had to use the corrective paper to fix mistakes.  The hum of the electric, the smell of white out and ink…that’s old school, baby.

We have it easier now, I guess.  But technology is only good until the next power surge, motherboard circuit fry, blank screen, corrupted hard-drive, lost Zip drive.  There is something to be said for the reliability of the sturdy, while be it, dusty, Yellow Pages.  Only a fire can take it away…or a flood…or devil-demon paper eaters…

Less than one week ago, I had my techno-limb amputated, and I’ve come to realize how much I rely on it.  Like I third leg that I’ve subconciously leaned on more and more over the years, which is now gone, and I am unable to stand.  Now, I realize, that I am a writer, so I NEED (want) my computer in order to work, maybe I am more reliant than another.  But, what do I do to get directions to this new restuarant that I want to go to in Phoenix?  What do I do when, as I’m reading, I come across a word I don’t know?  What about a concept or a reference I don’t understand?  Where do I go to scratch those curious itches?  How do I breath without Google?  What if I want to talk to a buddy?  Do my vocal chords still work?  And what would I say, when I don’t have the security blanket of editing my emails?  OH, MY GOD.  I am FREAKING out!!!

Maybe, I am too reliant on the Internet.  Maybe, if I make it through this dark period without going COMPLETELY INSANE I’ll realize that yes, even I can live without the Internet.  Maybe, not.

I’d write more, but I have to go tear my basement apart to find my Encycopedia Brittanica.  God knows how long that will take.  And how to find what I am looking for in those twenty volumes, thousand pages…oh, please amputated techno-limb, come back to me!

An Ode to Pimp-Slapping Under-Performing Milk Cows

Fuck writing. My life is full of insubstantiality, something I thought I’d live with through my 20’s then discover stability enough to have what you have by 33. Something that I fear I might never have and wonder which will be a bigger disappointment, never to have had a wife and children, or never to have achieved my dreams, something I might never achieve regardless. Do you realize how many PEOPLE there are in this world? I was at the main train station in the city the other morning during rush hour, waiting to board my train. An inbound train arrived carrying people who live in the suburbs of Chicago and commute to the city. Literally, a thousand people funneled passed me like cattle herding from open-range into their fenced enclosure. I wondered, staring at the faces, “how many of these people have the same dreams as me?” “How many of these people had the same dreams as me?” “What does this person, that person want out of life?” “How many of these people will never even smell a whiff of their dreams?” “What makes me think I’m so goddamn special?”

Got to tell you. The magnitude of this scared the hell out of me. As writers, it’s easy to sit in our rooms and type away and think we are the smartest, wittiest, most revolutionary writers in the world and our books will sell and we’ll make a difference. Gets much harder if we allow ourselves to realize how many people there are in the world, how few will succeed and how many, many, many will fail.

Then another thought came to me. It’s out of our hands. Ninety percent of the people who want to be writers will have the same thought I had above, and this realization will stop them in their tracks. They’ll go to law school, med school, get their MBA’s; become accountants, file clerks, restaurant managers, bus drivers, bartenders, carpenters. They’ll spend the rest of their lives lying to themselves: “I didn’t have the talent”, “People don’t read anymore”, “I’m in love with my husband Ralph and my boys Jimmy and Sonny and being a wife and mother was my destiny”, “Being a writer wasn’t in the cards for me”, “No one makes it as a writer”, “Everyone must grow up someday”…

Out of the other ten percent, eight will half-heartedly make an effort. Write sometimes, not for weeks. Research contests, publishing houses, contacts, avenues of distribution every other Sunday. Sign up for a writing class at a community college one semester. Submit one or two stories a year for publication. Contemplate getting their MFA. Think about teaching.

The last two percent will fight for their dream like hyenas snapping after the last scrap of antelope meat (we all see ourselves as lions, don’t we, lions are lazy). Take the abuse from parents, friends, peers, potential mates: “Why don’t you get a real job?” “Grow up.” “At some point, you realize, you’re going to have to move out of my basement.” We’ll absorb the financial risks, the societal frownings, the blows to our self-esteem. We’ll eat Ramen by the Costco pallet. Sure, writers in the last two percent might not have the most talent, but they don’t care. They convince themselves that they do. They hold onto this delusion as though the last breath of air. They wall themselves up, protect egos against the world, then like my buddy who is convinced any girl that doesn’t want him is a lesbian, they take rejection and throw it back on the rejecter: “That magazine is a rag anyway”, “That agent wouldn’t know good literature if Milton unearthed his body and dropped ‘The Experience of Being Eating By Worms’ on his desk”, “That publisher is so corporate, I wouldn’t want my book published there anyway”, “What do people know about reading great books, they love Nicolas Sparks”, “Ah, the industry is set against writers, only about money”, “You don’t comprehend my short story/novel/screenplay/blog/newspaper article/opinion column/essay? Can’t recognize the genius, huh. Well, then you are a television loving philistine who opens beer bottles with his toes, breathes with his mouth open, reads out loud, is convinced Larry the Cable Guy is the King of Comedy, thinks foreplay is missionary position, and believes that reality TV is anything but the catalyst to thrust our culture into a contemporary dark-ages. Congratulations for being the first rate imbecile that you are. If you’d recognized my level of brilliance, I’d fear for the progression of Hominidae.”

The scary part of the macro writing equation, or depending on how you look at it, the enlightening part, is that luck is the variable. Ultimately, you can’t help that a writer in the Ten-Percent Group attended a writer’s conference in New York City, got snowed in on his return flight and happened to be tossing back whiskey sours at the airport Howard Johnson bar at four A.M. with the Vice President of Acquisitions at Random House. Or, this girl you used to bang sent out a mass email to all the guys she infected with Gonorrhea and Quentin Tarantino’s return address happens to be CC’d. That’s luck. Good news for the Two-Percenters is that luck as the variable in the macro writing equation is independent, but not completely out of the realm of manipulation. You control dependent variables that can improve your chance at luck. For example, if at that moment, your moment, you are presented with an opportunity, following three hammer-throws of Patron or a hasty email to recommend the best itch ointment, and the conversation thread leads to, “so, what do you do?” and you answer, sheepishly, “I’m a bartender but sometimes I write stuff”, then you didn’t raise your odds. But if you are savvy and confident (or a decent actor) in your work, then you can lasso luck to the ground. “I’m actually a screenwriter, Mr. Tarantino, I highly respect your work, especially an as yet non-produced early script of yours, ‘Motherfucker, Fuck You, Crack-Whore-Cow, Motherfucker’, which I read in film school. It was very intense, very raw, beautiful. I especially like when Cornrows Benny, the pimp/farmer, beats Snow, his milk-cow, with the milk bucket because she shorted him on her daily requirement of milk. I actually wrote a screenplay in a similar vein, and since you are the master, I was wondering if you might look at, you know, while both of us are soaking our STD’s in Epsom salts and not working for seven to ten days.”

Christians, or Catholics in general—I’m not sure, I guess we could ask Dan Brown, just don’t ask the guy to place his response in a well-constructed, coherent, active, literary sentence—make use of the marketing pitch for non-believers to place travel bags loaded with guilt and pressure and fear at Jesus Christ’s feet. The selling point here is that it behooves a person to let go of all the factors which can’t be controlled in order to focus in on the one that can: faith. Writers should utilize a similar technique, though in a different vein, for if you want to be worth his or her salt, placing your faith in Jesus Christ proves to be a precarious bedfellow, like Ice-T appearing in a public service ad for the LAPD (ironic he plays a cop on TV?), for the strongest literature, most powerful stories generally rail against the establishment, Roman Catholic Church at the front of the line. A writer cannot control luck. A writer can only continually convince him or herself, and it will take daily, sometimes hourly internal preaching sessions, that he or she is a member of the microscopic percentage of the Two-Percent who will even publish a book.

But why wouldn’t you? I’ve lived as many things in my life. I’ve been a salesman, bowling alley porter, bus boy, television producer, baseball player, bartender, file clerk, secretary, teacher, stripper (once, for very little money…let’s not go there), minor league announcer, valet, manager, and for the last two and a half years basically a bum. What have I learned? To be successful in any field, you have to position yourself in the Ten-Percent Group. To be really successful, the Two-Percent Group is you. So, why, when you know what your dream is, what you would eat and drink if writing could be converted into palatable form, would you convince yourself that you can’t make it? Especially, when you’ll end up becoming some tire salesman, who hates everyday and whose heart isn’t in it, or go to law school and become some feckless lawyer? Like we need any more of those.

So, after pondering through all of this, I’ve realized that I am what I am. Sure, I sleep on my friend’s couches because I can’t afford hotel rooms when I visit Chicago; sure, I live in my parent’s summerhouse in Arizona; sure, I feed people drinks to feed myself; sure, I spend more time in a world of my head than a world with my family and friends; sure, ninety-eight percent of attractive girls wouldn’t spit on me if I were on fire; sure, I believe Wal-Mart food is too expensive; sure, I got my mother flowers for Mother’s Day by pillaging a neighbor’s flower bed; sure, most people would assume I have a membership card to Lazy M.F. Anonymous; sure, my parents are begging me to knock some poor girl up so they’ll have something to brag about to their friends (“How’s my son? Oh…he’s still…creative…but the Good Lord believes his genes merited a hand-me-down; you should see my grandson, he’s the cutest baby I’ve ever seen, destined to be a doctor or a lawyer or something quantitative and respectable”); sure, dad still has to pick-up the check at family dinners; sure, I hide behind the Green Defense to justify my elimination of a car as a necessary life expense; sure, if I get so much as the common cold I’ll have to seek medical treatment from la clinica publico/la burdel publico in Tijuana; sure, I ditched my ten year high school reunion, citing the flu as an excuse, when really the thought of facing Ted Emmons—JD Summa Cum Laude and fast-track associate at Rich Dick, Really Rich Dick, and Super Bloody Rich Dick in Chicago— drove me to embrace the porcelain God; sure, my San Diego accountant chuckles when I send my W-2’s, then spends ten minutes filling out my tax returns, hollers to his secretary that today looks to be a light day, and spends the rest of his afternoon surfing; sure, the reality of the matter is I may never, not once, publish one word of my writing before I die.

But knowing all this, realizing what my life has become (outlining it here in my blog, I believe I am going to pull a Tobias Funke and get in the shower and scrub myself raw with a loofah) I’ve worked at my craft, studied our bibles (not The Bible, now…if you are confused, see paragraph seven…if you’re still confused, see the very end of paragraph five), wrote every single day, researched new publishing opportunities, mined contacts, did favors (might help to explain the stripper thing), worked with/for established writers, made contacts, attended readings and open mics and speaking engagements and seminars and round-table discussions and, as soon as I win the lottery or marry a rich girl, writing conventions and workshops.

In the end, that’s the best I can do. In the end that’s the best any of us can do. If I could speak to the Ninety-Percenters, I’d say good riddance. You are right. I support your decision. If I were to speak to the Ten-Percenters, I’d say some more need to succumb to joining up with the Ninety-Percenters. If I were to speak to the Two-Percenters, I’d say that you better be on your games because I am coming for you. This isn’t, let’s all hold hands and chant “Kum Ba Yah” and make it together, this is I will scratch your eyes out to get what I want. That doesn’t make me a bad person, just not naïve, because I know you’ll disembowel me for a publishing contract, but if I’m wearing my Kevlar Vest and beat you to it. And I will because I am delusional, for Hemmingway’s sake, I’m a writer!

Time

Everyday, I fight an internal struggle before I actually work. Everyday, I fight an internal struggle where my Negative Brain tries to convince the rest of me that there are plenty of other things I could do, have to do, should be doing than writing. Some excuses are rational, others are not (“you’ll never make it, why waste your time”, “you’re completely untalented, too stupid, you posses no amount of material anyone would want to read”, “Richard Russo…ha!…when it’s all over you won’t even be categorized with the likes of Richard Bachman!”, “there’s beer in the fridge”, “your broke and starving, shouldn’t you be trying to earn money”, “your parents are disappointed in you, lets can this writing fantasy, and go to law school so they can be proud of you again”, “you don’t have enough time, you have to do this and that today…”)

Time, time, time. Really? There is plenty of time in a day to write. Realistically, I spend more of it battling with myself to write and procrastinating than I do actually sitting my butt in the damn seat. Why do I do this? Because I’m afraid. Everyday I battle the fear to fail. That the words I’ll create today will be worse than the words I created yesterday. That I’ll never improve, never get better, never make it. Strange thing, though. Everyday I DO improve, every time I sit in my chair I am improving. So, it’s funny how the mind works. Once I’m in the seat, I’m fine. It’s like riding a roller coaster. While waiting in line, I’m freaking out, but once I’m strapped into the chair, I have a blast, though that doesn’t help me to not freak out the next time I’m in line.

I don’t have children. I don’t have a girlfriend. I have no major financial obligations anymore, so I’m probably not speaking for most (any) people when I say, if you want it bad enough you’ll do it. All I want to do is have a successful writing career. I have pared my life down to that sole ideal. I neglect family, neglect friends, neglect relationships, neglect the possibility of having children, of being financially viable, of getting married, of being remembered when I’m dead as anything but a lazy derelict that squandered every gift he’d been given and wasted every second of life he’d be blessed with. Now, I used to have a “real job”, used to have credit card debt, rent, nice car, used to go out to fancy clubs and party like a maniac, but I’ve eliminated everything from my life that does not fall into line with my mission. So, to me, time is irrelevant, because you’re not fighting for time, you’re fighting yourself, trying to decide how badly you want to do this. Time can always be made.

When I think about writing, I hearken back to my baseball career. One of the biggest lessons I learned from my failure to make it to the Major Leagues is something a coach once told me, that at the time I didn’t take to heart because I was a stupid teenager. “Green, he said, when you are at home playing video games, someone in the world is practicing, when you are goofing off with your buds on Friday night, someone is the world is practicing, when you are trying to feel up some cheerleader in the back seat of your dad’s Chevy, someone in the world is practicing, when you are sleeping, eating, showering, going to the bathroom, someone in the world is practicing. They are getting better while your wasting your time, and they’re going to make it and you’re not.”

Turns out Coach was correct.

So, every time I’m procrastinating by watching TV or surfing the Internet or reminiscing about days when I was young enough to date a cheerleader or rambling away on a Blog, Coach’s voice is in my head: someone in the world is writing, and they’re going to make it and you’re not.

Writing, real writing, professional writing, is a competitive sport, an internal and international blood-fest, and anyone who thinks it’s not will not make it. Do you know how many writers there are in the world? My friend interned at one of the bigger New York agencies last summer and her job was to go through thousands of manuscripts…thousands…they received a flood of people’s “masterpieces” everyday…this is the field, this is the competitors. How many will sacrifice everything to get published? How many will scratch and kick and fight until death to achieve their dreams? How many will neglect every extraneous facet of their life? How many of these “writers” are sitting butt in seat right now as you read this?

Time is nothing. Desire…raw desire is everything.

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