Bullshit

Old Man Bars

Kids, here’s an essay that originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of The Inner Swine

OLD MAN BARS
Are My Eventual Destination
A World Ignorant of Booze
by Jeff Somers

PIGS, here’s a horrifying scenario: I meet some friends at a local restaurant for drinks. Not a place of my choosing, because despite my best efforts I have not yet been able to bend people to my will simply by focusing my thoughts on them, though research continues. The waitress comes for drink orders and the following exchange occurs:

WAITRESS: What’ll it be, folks?
ME: What whiskeys do you have back there?
WAITRESS: Uh. . .some. . .uh. . .we have. . .er, bottles.
ME: <sighing> Johnny Walker Black, neat.

I’ve come to recognize the sort of fear and blank-minded panic on the faces of waiters, waitresses, and bartenders when I inquire about their booze selections that indicates they either have no idea what’s back there or that there’s not much back there to begin with. Whenever I spot this sort of panic, I immediately give up my quest for single-malt goodness because it will only end in tears, and fall back on either Johnny Walker or Jack Daniels, because there isn’t a bar in the fucking world that doesn’t have those.

Now, there’s nothing really wrong with Johnny Walker. As blended whiskeys go, it’s a fine dram and I can always get by on it. But it has come to represent defeat to me, because I know there are bars, at least in New York City, where you can stroll in and order just about any decent whiskey you can think of and it will be brought to you, posthaste. Having been in such heavenly places, it is always a difficult transition to regular bars, where most people drink wine or beer or mixed drinks, and if they do go for an unadulterated spirit it’s blended Scotch or American Bourbon.

Again, nothing wrong with good old American Bourbon. I like quite a bit of it. But I feel handcuffed in such situations, because, goddammit, I want what I want.

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I Take the Haircuts I’m Given

From The Inner Swine Volume 13, Issue 2, June 2007

I knew a kid in high school who had as a personal philosophy of life something he called MEMO: Minimum Effort, Maximum Output. I doubt this was original to him; few kids in Jesuit schools have original ideas. Originality is beaten out of us like sin. What this philosophy boils down to is to put the least amount of work into anything while simultaneously exploiting the situation to its fullest. I don’t know what that kid’s up to these days—probably dead, like just about everyone else I went to school with, most of whom perished in hellish flames while demons cavorted around them, just as the priests predicted they would.

Me, my time is coming. And I have absolutely no doubt that no matter how long it takes for said time to come, when it does there will be several priests from my school days present, no matter how many decades they themselves may be dead by then. As a matter of fact, I may spend the rest of my life trying desperately to adopt enough orphans and endow enough schools for the blind to avoid eternal damnation, just so I won’t have to hear Father Browning tell me that I was evil, and that was why he had to fail me in Religion class back in 1987. And then he’d tear off my pants with some sort of trick magician’s move and paddle my ass for the lord.

Not that anything like that happened in my Jesuit high school. Mostly, there was emotional abuse. And some light attempted cult brainwashing.

Anyway, over the years I’ve adopted MEMO and adjusted it for my own personality, mainly by lopping off the last two letters, leaving me with a simple guide for the rest of my life: Minimum effort. It’s short and easy to remember, and it really is the easiest way to the simple life, because it immediately lops off entire categories of action and effort. If you’re seeking a simple and uncomplicated existence, after all, you can’t necessarily put much effort into things, because effort spawns complexity—you have to seek out resources, marshal those resources, organize things, and then put the work in—any one of those stages can produce unwanted complexity in your life. The devil, after all, is in the details.

As an example, let us examine the disastrous nature of my haircuts.

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Eight Albums for Just a Penny

This is an essay from the Winter 2010 Issue of my zine, The Inner Swine, for no particular reason.

From the Columbia Record & Tape Club to Amazon MP3s: My Musical Consumption History

PIGS, my first brush with what I’ll term Pop Music Snobbery Humiliation came in grade school. I was never a particularly hip cat, peeps; when I was very young I was wiry and quick and dreamed of athletic prowess, but something went wrong with me genetically as I got older and by the time I was ten or eleven years old or so I was a pudgy glasses-wearing nerd, and I drifted myopically through my days without too many worries. Generally, I was a happy kid living in my own little world. I had a few friends and I did well in school, and had few complaints.

There were, of course, a few bullies. There always are. I didn’t have a terrible time of it, but there were a few incidents. I don’t lay awake at night tortured by my experiences or anything, but there was one kid who was in my grade who occasionally liked to torment me, but usually there were juicier targets for him and I sort of coasted by in the usually rhythms of being almost-cool to being almost-outcast depending on the prevailing winds of grammar school. By the time I graduated to High School I was almost nostalgic for my grammar school, so obviously I didn’t have a Carrie-esque experience, but that one kid still irritates me in my memories to this day. It’s not like he beat me up or ever did anything particularly terrible, it was just that he sensed I was kind of not paying attention to the things that made you cool and liked to knock me around with my own lameness once in a while.

One of these moments was when everyone was suddenly discovering pop music and choosing their sides; I can remember one girl had a birthday party in class (we used to do that—every kid got a birthday in class; after three o’clock or something we’d move the desks out of the way, they’d bring in cake and soda, and we’d spend the last hour or two of the day having fun) and brought in some records to play. I’d never heard any of it, obscure things like “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John or “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats—you know, minor hits I couldn’t be expected to be familiar with.

The kid who picked on me sometimes positioned himself as a heavy metal guy, naturally, and declared that Van Halen and Led Zeppelin were the greatest bands in the universe. I’d never heard of either. How is this possible in the early 1980s? You have to have a powerfully foggy brain, like mine. You have no idea how easily I can ignore things. No idea. Anyway, one day he demanded to know what my favorite band was. It was one of those grammar-school moments when you sensed that history had paused to make note of your response, and it would follow you—probably on your permanent record—forever. I didn’t actually have a favorite band, and I didn’t own any albums of my own (my parents had few rock and roll records aside from The Beatles, who I loved, but even I knew better than to name a band that had broken up 15 years prior), so I simply picked a band from the air and said Led Zeppelin, hoping this was sufficiently cool. My nemesis, no fool, demanded to know what my favorite album by Zeppelin was, and I couldn’t answer, and my humiliation was complete.

I vowed to never be so uncool again.

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Friday is Guitar Day

Epiphone Les Paul CustomLike a sad monkey that thinks he’s people, I keep playing guitar. Like a sad monkey that thinks he’s people and has Internet access, I keep posting them here. I CANNOT BE STOPPED. Someday alien archeologists will examine the ruins of our civilization and ask why you all did not rise up to stop me from posting the music that destroys everything. They will not understand that I cannot be stopped.

Herewith:

Song347
Song352
Song354
Song362
Song363
Song365
Song368
Song370

The usual disclaimer: 1. I admit these are not great music; 2. I claim copyright anyway, so there; 3. No, I cannot do anything about the general quality of the mix, as I am incompetent.

The Middle of F-ing Nowhere, PA

Dan Krokos*, who you’ll all be hearing about soon enough, and who must be greeted with a gutteral war cry of “KROKOS!“, sent me this photo, and titled it “Middle of fucking nowhere, PA”:

Middle of F-ing Nowhere, PA

Rock on.

*I’d link to something, but Dan’s web site just makes me sad with all its emptiness.

SitCom Writin’ at Its Finest

I love a good Situation Comedy, I admit it. And NBC’s Community has been my drug of choice recently. Here’s a context-free speech made by one of the characters that I’m still laughing about (see it here if you’re interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-viB1GwqTYk):

Jeff Winger: I’m going to say some names to you. Jeffrey Dahmer. Ted Bundy. Rich. What do they have in common? We don’t know them very well. What do we know about Ben Chang? We know he’s nuts.

Ben Chang: Let him finish!

JW: We know he’s dangerous. Unpredictable. Selfish. We know he uses his name to make bad puns.

BC: Guilty as Changed.

JW: When he talks, he over- and under-emphasizes words, seemingly at random! When he eats, he holds his fork like a murderer’s knife, gnawing at its skewered payload like a deranged woodland rodent!

BC: Bring it home!

JW: We know he smells like band-aids. We know he dresses like a Cuban cab driver. We know he exhibits–nay! Flaunts proudly obvious symptoms of over half a dozen disorders you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy’s pets!

BC: Feel the *heat*!

JW: We know these things about Ben Chang. And so much more than we ever wanted to know about him. And why? Because its there. It’s on the surface. What you see may be what you don’t want, but it’s also what you get!

I think it was the “he smells like band-aids” that got me.

The World of Fail

The only sport I pay much attention to is baseball. Baseball, I think, attracts nerds like me because a) a lot of baseball players (more so when I was a kid than today) look like they don’t work out much, and it creates this illusion that anyone can play baseball, and b) the stats. Other sports are much more physical, much more fast-paced, and you can blame a lot on the sheer magical physical capability of the athletes. In baseball you can crunch the numbers. If you think about it, baseball stats are basically Failure Stats. The best hitters in the game fail to get on base 60% of the time. The best pitchers in the game lose one-third of their games.

Baseball is beautiful. But it is a game of suffering.

So is writing fiction, babies. As a matter of fact, I sometimes think my own personal batting average for successful stories is worse than a batting average. The sheer number of failed novels in my desk drawers and on my hard drives is kind of amazing, and are so numerous they can actually be categorized:

  1. The Rejected: Novels I wrote, polished, submitted to someone, and was told, gently, to bury as deeply as possible. Sometimes to deny having written in the first place.
  2. The Single Drafted: Novels I wrote and immediately regretted, like a burrito ordered and consumed after you spent the day drinking bourbon in a dive bar with Sean Ferrell.
  3. The Juvenilia: There are several novels written in my formative years when I actually thought my shocking and ballsy attitudes and opinions would scandalize the world! In other words, I was an asshole, and these are novels written by an asshole.

Hell, if you did the simple math and divided every novel I wrote by every novel I would actually show to you, my success rate is pretty abysmal. This is nothing new, of course. I maybe have more completed novels in my files than some, but possibly fewer than others. Writing a novel ain’t easy to begin with. Writing one people can read without shooting themselves in the head is a whole other level of difficult. And writing one that people would pay to read, well, that’s nearly impossible.

And then it hits you: Writing is a goddamn World of Fail.

Even successful stories go through a hell of revision and feedback where people point out everything you did wrong, or didn’t do well enough.  I have a feeling that if I ever wrote a book that sailed through all beta readings and the entire publishing process without any Fail, I’d have something like The Entertainment from Infinite Jest, or Monty Python’s Funniest Joke in the World. Which would be great. Because I would totally leverage that into world domination. I imagine some outfit like Halliburton would be at my door the next day with an 18-wheeler filled with diamonds and a 500-page contract for exclusive use of the novel in warfare.

Of course, when you’re living in a World of Fail, such fantasies are all you have.

The worst part is the Dan Browning: Even if you’re a successful writer who sells scads of books, you still get to Fail, and often, through the fact that all the hipster doofuses start complaining about your lack of lietrary merit or your tendency to lose control over POV throughout the story. Or that your story makes no sense even after you’ve huffed an entire tube of airplane glue in an old Taco Bell bag. You might think that doesn’t hurt our feelings, but it does. In other words, even when a writer Wins, they Fail.

And you wonder why we drink.