Bullshit

It’s been a while since I’ve treated this blog as a blog, just writing random stuff every now and then and expecting people to care. I’m a little out of practice. I remember when starting a blog felt like something important, like a record of your life and thoughts. Ah, sweet innocence. The rise of social media made blogs more or less optional, and I’ve used mine as an ersatz novel publishing platform for some time now. But it’s kind of refreshing to just yammer on about stuff.

I grew up in the Heights neighborhood of Jersey City, on cliffs overlooking Hoboken and with New York City visible across the Hudson River. As a largely free-range kid in the 1970s and 1980s I had a pretty fun time rambling around. Jersey City was (and is) a sprawling, multi-ethnic city of a few hundred thousand people, is firmly in the grip of the Democratic political machine, and offered me a very cliche old-school childhood experience filled with stickball, games of Manhunt, and the occasional mugging.

Oh yeah, the crimes. While most of my childhood was pretty calm and peaceful, our house did get robbed once, and I was personally mugged three times as a kid. Once two dudes simply knocked me off a brand-new Huffy dirtbike and zoomed off on it, which happened so fast I still believe magic may have been involved. But the most memorable mugging I ever experienced was also the nicest.

Do Crimes, Be Polite

My friend Mingus (not his real name) and I hopped on a bus one day, intending to head to the mall for an afternoon of hijinks, but we got on the bus going the wrong way, and soon found ourselves traveling into an area of Jersey City we weren’t familiar with, the sort of area that would have felt like we’d stepped into an episode of The Wire if that show weren’t 20 years in the future. We panicked a little bit and hopped off the bus before we got any further towards, well, we didn’t know where we were headed. Canada? It wasn’t impossible, so we hopped off and started walking back towards the familiar.

A group of older kids soon fell in with us, walking along. They were friendly. They offered us cigarettes and beer (this was a simpler time), they asked us where we were headed and offered to give us directions. And then they shoved us up against a convenient wall and began going through our pockets.

I remember the Velcro wallets we had. Those were, for some reason, all the rage back then, these fabric wallets that folded into thirds and closed with a Velcro strip. Mine was camouflage and quite badass. And I remember hearing both of our wallets being opened, and then there was some giggling.

The kids helped us up. One of them handed my wallet back, holding the single dollar bill it had contained and grinning. “Y’all got lucky,” he said. “One fucking dollar.”

They were amused. They literally dusted us off and pointed us in the general direction of civilization, and let us walk away without further trouble. I remember being in a daze, of sorts: On some level I knew I’d just experienced a semi-violent crime. On another level, I felt like I could be friends with those kids. I think if they’d kept us around for five more minutes Stockholm Syndrome would have set in and I would have been willing to murder someone to join their gang.

I’ve always been an easy recruit.

Instead, we shambled back to the Jersey City we knew and made a collect call and my mother came and got us. She wasn’t particularly concerned about the mugging, which she suspected was a ruse to cover some transgression we’d committed (in the grand scheme of things, she could be forgiven for assuming as much, as I got into a lot of shameful shenanigans and had certainly invented quite a number of ruses to cover them up in my time).

Mingus and I never spoke about the incident. I mourned the dollar for a while; in my 1980 Kids’ economy that was a lot of money, earmarked for baseball cards and video games. Then I forgot about it all, though I still have an alarming tendency to assume anyone holding me at knifepoint is probably a lot of fun to hang out with.

THE HOLIDAYS are terrible and exhausting, this is known. I truly believe no sane, rational person enjoys the holidays — whatever your creed or culture, whenever the holidays occur for you during the year, they translate to an exhausting gauntlet of forced socializing, travel-related misery, and maddening commercialized cheer.

To wit: Every year The Duchess and I make the pilgrimage back to her homeland to visit with her family. There is no similar pilgrimage on my side of things, because I have very sensibly faded myself from my extended family. At this point I doubt my cousins could identify me in a police lineup, and I am pretty certain that is precisely how it’s supposed to be.

When we fly to Texas we usually stay in a cool little hotel where they have a fridge in the room stocked with beer, liquor, and snacks. This is a glammed-up minibar, of course, but I like it — sometimes after a long day of eating barbecue and avoiding the topic of politics all you want to do is snag a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels and a bottle of Lone Star and sit on the bed watching Shark Tank reruns, so this fridge has an outsize impact on my life.

But this year, when we stumbled into our room on Christmas Day (and let me tell you, anyone who thinks flying on December 25th should be easy because who in their right mind flies on Christmas Day has no idea how many insane people, like us, there are in the world — the airports are absolute madness) the hallowed fridge was empty. We just assumed the hotel had stopped their minibar policy and thought nothing of it, but as a result I was dispatched the next morning to a CVS in order to procure a few necessities for The Duchess and to grab a few drinks and snacks to have in the room.

A Football Field of Late Stage Capitalism

I fired up my trusty Big Brother Tracking Device and Google knew what I was looking for without me having to type anything in. The Maps app was already up and pointing me towards a CVS just 1 mile away. I briefly thought about walking there, because in New Jersey me walking 2 miles to do some light shopping is an everyday occurrence, but in cities in Texas if you want to walk places you have to be willing to cross some very busy highways and also commit some light trespassing on a regular basis, so I thought better of it.

When I arrived at my destination, I could see the CVS sign, but could not locate the actual CVS. This is because the CVS was not really a CVS but was instead a CVS counter inside a Target. That’s right: In Texas the stores are so large they subsume other stores, like a metastatic fungus. I settled myself and strode inside, and realized I was in the Largest Target I Have Ever or Will Ever Experience. It appeared to be the size of several football fields. The aisles were so wide you had to shout to be heard, the ceilings so high you could see birds or perhaps bats circling the sun-like lights.

This was the day after Christmas, too, so the place was a war zone. The shelves were empty — and I am not exaggerating. They were empty. Trash and debris littered the floors, employees sat on the floor hugging themselves and weeping. Targets are known to be total shitshows — I have never been in one that was not largely devoid of actual merchandise, or that did not appear to rely on the customers themselves to restock the shelves. But this was a whole new level of emptiness.

Slowly, I began to assemble the items on my modest list. I had to travel quite some distance. Many items were on random shelves in strange areas of the store, and it was only sheer luck that brought me near them. When I asked an employee about the presence of contact lens solution, she burst into a cackling laugh and then recited Marlon Brando’s speech from Apocalypse Now.

In the end, I got almost everything on the list, although I had to make a few creative substitutions. I returned to our room, and the rest of the trip was typical: 40% driving in the car on enormous, nearly-new highways, 30% family time, and 30% the aforementioned drinking while watching Shark Tank and reevaluating my life. We got on a place three days later and returned home, where our cats sniffed us doubtfully and then went back to sleep.

Then the hotel emailed us our final bill, which revealed that upon encountering an empty mini-bar fridge that was empty because they had never stocked it, they jumped to the rational conclusion that The Duchess and I had consumed $1,200 worth of beer, whiskey, and snacks and billed us accordingly. Everything is, indeed, bigger in Texas.

Happy New Year, y’all.

FRIENDS, I recently watched Triangle of Sadness, the film by Ruben Östlund in which fifteen minutes of screen time is devoted to rich people vomiting and shitting themselves (it is great, and I wrote an essay about it over at WRITING WITHOUT RULES: DEEP DIVES that you should read). It being the new year and all, all that vomit reminded me of one of my own New Year’s Eve debacles, an evening I’ve dubbed the Bubblegum Disaster.

You may not know this, but there was a moment in my life — brief and anomalous — when I suspected I might be fancy. I was quite young and the world seemed fresh and full of possibilities, and so I thought, why can’t I be the sort of guy who wears tailored suits and smokes European cigarettes and drinks cocktails as opposed to shooting whiskey like an animal.

I’m long disabused of this notion, but for a few short months in my mid-20s it took root. I would be a man of taste and discrimination. Naturally, the main avenue I pursued towards this kind of sophistication involved alcohol, because what better way to sooth the jangled nerves of an urban hillbilly attempting to live above his station? So I pursued cocktails, and threw a series of small-scale parties. The first was a disaster not of my own making: I invited people over for a martini party. I’d put together some simple recipes for various martinis, and we’d all stand around discussing fancy things as we sipped those disgusting, horrible things. But the day of the party I caught a stomach flu or food poisoning or something, and chose to soldier on, with the end result that I spent a great deal of time at my own party lying down in a dark room and praying for death.

Pink Food is Always a Bad Idea

Undeterred, I saw New Year’s Eve as a second chance. Friends were hosting their own party, so I offered to mix up a menu of shots for everyone. The only shot I actually recall was a Bubblegum shot, and the fact that this horror was even on the menu is all you need to know about how things went that evening. Bubblegum shots are what they serve you in hell, and here I was mixing them up in bulk.

The evening ended, of course, in disaster, the sort of damp, colorful disaster that came with a pink tinge. And I learned many lessons: One, shots are stupid. Two, bubblegum shots are poison. And three, I am not fancy in any way.

I went back to imbibing my whiskey straight from the bottle like a frontiersman, and pursued a career exporting authentic urban hillbilly gibberish to the masses as I was always destined to do. I haven’t consumed a beverage that involves more than one ingredient since then, and I have been much happier for it.

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you have a great time — just refuse anything pink.

SO, another year is almost over. I’m generally not one to wallow in the past or engage in any sort of proftitable self-examination; if Past Jeff made mistakes in 2022, well, that’s Past Jeff’s problem. I am New and Improved Jeff, and New and Improved Jeff has whiskey to drink as he rides his own melt down to death and oblivion. All I can say about 2022 is that I did some writing I’m proud of, some writing I’m not proud of, and managed to pay all my bills by writing for my corporate masters. Huzzah!

I am all about looking forward to next year, though, because 2023 is currently an untrammeled field of pure snow and literally anything could happen. I am also a guy who likes to have a plan, so I’ve decided that 2023 will be the Jeff Somers Year of the Failed Novel¹.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to fail to write novels in 2023 (though, yes, that will happen, thanks for asking). It means that my many, many creative and promotional outlets will focus on the failed novels of my past. Specifically:

1. The Podcast. Over at THE NO PANTS COCKTAIL HOUR, where I discuss a work of fiction I wrote and possibly published and then read it for y’all, 2023 is going to be dedicated to the many failed novels I have in my trunk. This means novels that I started but couldn’t finish, novels that I finished but hate, novels I liked but couldn’t sell — any definition of the word “failed” will apply. So I’ll discuss the novel, why and how it failed, and then read a chapter from it. Sound like fun? Well, as always I’ll be sipping whiskey while I do all this, so I’ll be extra weepy and dramatic. Why can’t I sell a novel about a middle-aged white man who is average at everything? WHY?

2. This blog. Man, I am old enough to remember when everyone had a blog and it meant something. Now I have this blog and have no idea what to do with it. What I’ve been doing with it is posting free novels, so i guess I’ll do that again. And since by definition this will be a failed novel — because if I thought the novel had legs and could be published in some form I wouldn’t splash it on the Internet here — this will also fit into my Year of the Failed Novel inititiave².

So, in 2023, I’ll be posting my novel Collections here, one chapter a week until I run out. For extra fun, Collections will also be included in the failed novels discussed over on the podcast! Failure is fun. Here’s a quick logline for the book:

A legbreaking collections freelancer associated with gangster Frank McKenna buys the debt run up by civilian Elias Falken. It should be the easiest collection of his career — Falken is soft and spiraling, an easy touch. But when he tracks Falken down, the man vanishes into thin air — and he’s not the only one. Stuck with a debt that will see him killed if he can’t make good on it, the freelancer begins looking in every dark corner for clues — and discovers the world is not what it seems.

First chapter will drop on January 10th, and new chapters will show up weekly after that. Hopefully you enjoy it!

And that concludes this blog post about the future. See y’all there, and Happy Holidays!

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WHEN I was a very young kid, I enjoyed a brief period of normalcy — you might even have described me as cool. I’m not kidding! Prior to adolescence and the slow toboggan ride of humiliation it brought, from enormous plastic-rim glasses to unfortunate acne, a mullet to an inconvenient love of text adventure games, I was a fleet-footed moppet who dominated his neighborhood peers by winning foot races and being adorable.

Obviously, it couldn’t have lasted. There was clearly a weirdo trapped inside this pale, gelatinous body. Within a few months of my twelfth birthday I had slid into permanent residence in the “nerd” category, and as is my Way I embraced it rather than try to wriggle free from its damp embrace. As is the case with a lot of folks in similar circumstances, I found myself immersing myself in books, reading more or less constantly. In the days before Amazon and the Internet, living as I did in the relative book desert of Jersey City, New Jersey, I had no choice but to travel into New York City on a regular basis in order to purchase paperbacks with my allowance monies.

That’s right: Not drugs, or cool clothes, or music — books. Around the age of eleven or twelve, I started taking the 99S bus from Jersey City into New York in order to hit the Barnes and Noble stores there.

Free Range

I was what you might call a “free range” kid. My parents, god love ’em, weren’t terribly concerned about my whereabouts at every minute of the day, and seemed to regard my survival as something more or less in god’s largely disinterested hands. It’s possible they also thought that since they also had my brother, Yan, if I happened to vanish one day they had a backup of sorts. So I was able to crawl around New York City in the 1980s more or less unfettered. All I needed was bus fare and some determination.

This is one reason it is hilarious to me when folks talk about the cities, and specifically New York City, as hellholes of crime and violence. Man, I was there in 1985 before Disney took over Times Square. I wandered around the city unsupervised as a child during a pretty bleak period in the city’s history and had pretty much zero problems or sketchy encounters. And I’ve been in New York — some kind of sketchy areas of New York, too — in recent months. If you’re telling me New York is somehow worse than it was in 1985, you are on crack.

This anti-city sentiment from people who have never actually spent time in a city isn’t new, of course. And it isn’t even the point of this essay. As a real, professional writer I have spent several hundred words meandering about before finally zeroing on my point, which is the time I thought a book was haunted.

Here’s what happened: My trips to New York City to blow all my allowance monies on paperback sci-fi and fantasy novels meant that I very quickly worked my way through most of the available titles that appealed to me, so I was forced to dip my toe into second-tier SFF novels and eventually books that were a little more complex in terms of genre. And this led me to a book that really wasn’t a good fit for me, but I bought it in a moment of desperation because I lacked fresh books to read.

And I quickly got a weird vibe from the book. It was told in a jumpy, timey-wimey way, with chort chapters describing various characters in variously weird situations, and I simply started to feel weird reading it. I can’t explain it, but 13-year-old Jeff just got squicked out by the book, like it was hitting me with this very strange energy, so I decided to do something I, a verified book hoarder, had never done: Return a book.

So I took my allowance monies and got on the bus and hoofed it back to the book store, and there was no obvious place to return a book, and I was also kind of embarrassed that my reason for returning the book was “it may be haunted,” so I eventually wimped out and simply slipped the book back onto the shelves and walked away, forfeiting my $3.95 plus tax. It only occurred to me later that if the book were haunted this was probably how it propagated its evil spell, by compelling soft idiots like myself to just keep leaving it on bookshelves to be bought over and over again.

Was that the most ridiculous moment in my life? No, but it was ridiculous. I think of that book often. I have never found any evidence that it actually existed. Which is worrying.

FRIENDOS, as many of you know I am a man of many cats. The sheer number of cats living in my house are due to two basic reasons: One, I refused to get a dog with my wife, The Duchess, one of the few moments in my life when I have defied her, and thus she has punished me for my temerity. And two, because cats are adorable, I thought that was obvious. And so here I am enslaved to these furry demons. I swear if I startle awake tomorrow and find that my cat Harry is nestled in close to my ear and whispering subliminal instructions (I imagine he’d have the voice of James Spader, for some reason), I would not be surprised.

Cats are a pain in the ass, however. Not only do they absorb almost all of the money and other resources in any given home like a gang of furry, plump parasites, they’re also very dumb creatures who need constant supervision. I mean, cats make poor decisions every day of their lives, which is why they’ve evolved to resemble furry babies and to parasitically attach themselves to us. Left to their own devices they would perish in increasingly ridiculous ways.

To illustrate this, stare in awe at the story of the time my cat Guenther went on a suicidal jaunt and forced me to trespass on my neighbor’s property.

I Believe I Can Fly

One day way back in some previous era — I think I was carrying around a rotary phone and the only way to take photos of things was via Etch-a-Sketch — a loud noise sent our cats scurrying to their safe places. Apparently for our one gray cat, Guenther (RIP, buddy) the term “safe space” referred to our next door neighbor’s roof.

Our house has a second-floor deck in the back, and when we first moved in we had zero cat-retention methods. For years our cats were yeeting themselves over the low wall of our deck and scampering about on the neighbors’ roofs, having adventures, and then returning home for meals and cuddles as if nothing had happened. The Guenther Incident was our first clue this was happening, I think. Once things had calmed down in the house, I went counting snouts to make sure we had all the critters, and came up one snout short. Upon investigation, I located Guenther … on the roof diagonally across from our deck.

It wasn’t far. So I got a step ladder and climbed up to peer over our railing, and Guenther recognized me and got excited. He padded over to the edge of the roof, meowed at me, and before I could tell him it was a terrible idea, he launched himself at me … and fell one foot short, dropping like a bag of rocks into our neighbor’s yard.

I stood there for a moment planning a cat funeral. Also, my explanatory speech when I knocked on my neighbor’s door and asked politely to retrieve my dead cat. I figured by this point of my tenancy in the neighborhood I was well known as “the drunk White Man who also sometimes writes books” so that would work … well, ‘in my favor’ doesn’t seem like the right phrase, but something like that.

Incredibly, though, Guenther bounced once, looked up at me with what appeared to be resentment, and scurried under the neighbor’s ground-level deck. Fucking cats. They can swallow uranium, get hit by cars, and drop two stories into gravel-filled yards and just shrug.

It started to snow, and had gotten very cold. The Duchess became extremely concerned that our not terribly bright but very gentle gray boy would freeze to death and/or become the property of our neighbors, but our neighbors weren’t home.

I went back to the deck and peered down to the cold, snowy yard below. I looked at The Duchess. “I think I could climb down there,” I said.

“Do it,” she responded. “I can always marry someone else.”

Parkour!

I am not a graceful or particularly athletic person. When I played Little League baseball as a tyke, I played a rarefied position known to insiders as Left Out, which means I stood in Left Fied and the Center Fielder, a kid named Jon, ran over to catch every fly ball hit towards me. I have never forgiven him.

But! Despite my lack of physical skill, I am largely impervious to humiliation, and that is a huge asset when it comes to physical exertion. So I looked at the yard down below, and quickly figured I could make my way down there as long as I didn’t think too hard about it. I climbed up over out deck railing, jumped over to the roof where Guenther had been hanging out, then climbed gingerly down to a stockade fence and from there leaped into our neighbor’s yard, officially trespassing.

The house next door was, at the time, a rental occupied by several college students. They were nice enough guys — a bit loud now and then, but generally cromulent neighbors. So I figured that if someone were to walk out into the yard while I was creeping around back there, all would be well. Besides, all I had to do was coax my little moron out from under the deck and we’d be golden. The Duchess grabbed a long extension cord and lowered a cat carrier down to me, so the plan was simple: I would use some cat treats to lure Guenther out, stuff him into the carrier, and then figure out how to climb out of the yard.

It is always the Somers Way to leave details like an exfiltration plan to the end. That’s why so many of us are in jail.

Of course, Guenther refused to come out. He huddled under the deck like it was his new home. Of course, the kids came home and were startled to discover me in their back yard. I explained the situation, and they were nice enough about it. Still, Guenther would not come. The Duchess arrived and suggested we had no choice but to cut open the decking and retrieve Guenther that way, but the kids balked at that — they were renting, after all, and had security deposits to worry about. The Duchess turned on the Power of The Duchess’s Angry Tears (which, dear reader, are in fact the most powerful force in the universe) and they eventually relented.

When we moved their grill off the deck in preparation for some demolition, however, we discovered an access panel built into the deck. We lifted up a 4×4 section of the deck and Guenther’s head popped out. He looked at us in some confusion, I grabbed him, and all was well.

Epilogue

The ripple effect of my invasion of private property should have been obvious: The kids, having been informed that it was possible to climb down from my deck into their yard, began using this newfound ability as a defense against losing or forgetting their keys, which they did often. Since I had once locked myself out of my apartment while in college and been forced to break in via a window in an alleyway, I sympathized, but the rest of the year saw a parade of twenty-somethings leaping from our deck to the roof next door.

Was there liability there if one of those kids fell and killed themselves? Sure, but I planned to just drag them under the deck if that happened and pretend to have no knowledge.

Friends, I used to think I was a People Person. This stemmed largely from my early childhood experience; I was, for a hauntingly short time, adorable. Photos of me from before the age of 12 or so show a dimpled, blonde kid with a mischievous smirk and a series of truly garish sweaters I somehow pulled off with a wink and a cocky strut. My early experiences with my fellow human beings largely involved having old ladies pinch my cheeks and offer me chocolates. Frankly, I’m surprised I wasn’t lured into a van and disappeared, because aside from being adorable I was also vaguely stupid.

Then, of course, adolescence hit me like a truck. My eyes clouded, I gained glasses, my hair coarsened, and I got fat. The thing about being alive is that it’s a horror movie: Your fleshy prison keeps changing without warning or permission, developing new maladies and losing old skills seemingly at random. This experience embittered me, naturally enough, but for a while I still thought of myself as quite the Charmer.

These days? Not so much. Twenty years ago when The Duchess and I moved into our house, I stupidly thought I could do all the moving by myself with a handtruck and the right attitude. When I quickly realized how stupid I was, I made a few humiliating calls and some friends turned up to help move heavy furniture with me. When we couldn’t fit the bed up the narrow stairs in this place, they even began sketching complex pulley systems that could be created to haul it up via the roof.

These days, I can’t think of anyone I would make that call to, and even if I could no one would answer it. In part this is because they would simply tell me to spend some money and hire movers, but in part this is because I have, like many middle-aged cranks, drifted from most of my friends. And in general I am okay with this. People are a lot of trouble, and as I’ve aged and gained wisdom I’ve realized that I’m not a charmer. I’m a socially awkward misanthrope who is much better off talking to cats like they can understand him, which is what I do. My social circle are a bunch of cats who communicate via urination and scratches, and that is my best case scenario.

It works well. Until I try to do projects around the house.

Renovation Follies

Trying to renovate or repair anything in your house when you are a) a cheap bastard and b) a friendless misanthrope is difficult. Making it even worse is the fact that I c) way, way, way overestimate my own physical abilities. The same hubris that led Slightly Younger Jeff to imagine he could load a heavy wardrobe onto a handtruck and pull it up two flights of stairs single-handedly has evolved into a Slightly Decrepit Jeff who … pretty much still thinks he can do anything he puts his mind to¹.

This has led to several near-death experiences. In fact, I may be dead and living some kind of Owl Creek Bridge moment. I have lifted things I should not have lifted. I have constructed scaffolds that I should not have climbed up on. I have breathed fumes and dust clouds I should not have breathed. I have dangled over the edges of roofs in ways that should have resulted in me being mentioned on the nightly news. Something like LOCAL IDIOT GOES SPLAT or WEEPING CRYBABY RESCUED FROM TELEPHONE WIRE ENTANGLEMENT.

The thing is, when I decide I’m going to, say, renovate my bathroom, I don’t want other people involved. I don’t want contractors in my house, and I don’t want neighbors or friends coming over and making conversation. When I first moved into this neighborhood I put a storm door on the house, and a neighbor came by and asked if I’d help him with his since he thought I did a nice job. And it was terrible, because it was several hours of awkward conversation and an increasing sense that he was angry at me for not being as knowledgeable as he’d assumed, because his storm door installation did not go well.

Who needs that? Not me. I much prefer to wake up on the floor covered in dust and rubble as my cats sniff curiously at me and wonder if the time has come, finally, to consume me. I much prefer to hastily hobble to the emergency room for a quick suture before The Duchess comes home to wonder about all the blood. I much prefer to discover, in real time, how much of my youthful grace and fine motor skills I retain after decades of whiskey and indolence (answer: simultaneously a shocking amount and depressingly little; adrenaline is a superpower).

Nope, I’ll continue to move incredibly heavy things by wrapping them in sheets and sliding them down stairs while I learn the limits of physical strength and the power of gravity, thank you very much. And when you hear that I’ve died in a bizarre home accident, you will know that I likely died surrounded by floor tiles and five very hungry cats.