Author Archive: jsomers

After weeks in this hotel room, forced to blog by my corporate masters, I think I am experiencing Helsinki Syndrome with the bathroom, which is all marble and expensive tile. Plus, it has a seat in the shower, which is my definition of luxury.

Word is trickling in from my vast network of vaguely-embarrassed supporters that Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) are being received across the land. People who actually know of me already are sending word. Lord knows how people who have no idea who I am will react–probably better. The people who know of me know me as a grubby, pantsless zine-publisher, frequently drunk and somewhat belligerent. Everyone else will simply be wowed by the amazing cover art and might even be fooled into reading the whole damn thing.

I got the following email from an old acquaintance who is going to try and review the book in one of the periodicals foolish enough to associate with him:

“What I was going to do, see, was go to bed early. I’m back on the “eating ight and exercising” bandwagon. . .So now I’m trying to be healthy and exercise and eat regularly and well, which is something that I can do and have done, and part of that is getting a decent night’s sleep and getting up early to do things when I’m freshly awake. So my plan last night was just that: go to bed early, and then get up and run for a while. . .

Then I got to the third or fourth chapter of The Electric Church. The one where the Monk decides he wants Nad and ends up chasing Avery. Next thing I know it’s 2 in the morning and. . .I was forced to sleep in.

All this to say that I’m *really* enjoying your book so far. Also, I’m glad you went with the blurry author photo.”

There you go, an unsolicited opinion by someone who is not merely me pretending to be someone else. Rock on.

It’s been, what, three weeks in this room? Blogging? My publisher promised me that if I generated some media attention for the book, they’d let me out of here. The way things have been going, I’ll be here forever.

I’m not cool. I’ve never been cool. Maybe, at one point in school I got so uncool I actually passed through the event horizon* of uncool, becoming so uncool I was actually cool. For a brief, ironic moment back in the early nineties when irony was hip. But in the traditional sense, no, I have never been cool.

Of course, in order to blog, you have to have a healthy appreciation for your own personal greatness, right? I mean, you are imagining that on some level total strangers want to know what you’re thinking, what you’re doing, maybe even what you’re eating, wearing, and muttering to yourself.

The answers for me: Scotch, an ancient pair of khaki shorts and nothing else besides a thin film of sweat, and goddamn you all to hell over and over again.

See? Not cool. And yet I must blog. For I have a book to sell.

That’s the sad truth of it–blogging is not natural for me. I didn’t see WordPress or Blogger and think, damn, this is what I should be doing with my time. I felt an overwhelming sense of boredom and woke up in Mexico without my pants. Again. But when you’re walking that thin line between being a total gacking sellout flogging your book like the unit-shifter it is, and maintaining some of the dark integrity you still gloat over under the covers with a flashlight, you pick your battles. A blog is a marketing tool these days, just like viral videos and Alternate Reality Games, but at least it’s a marketing tool where I get to be as uncool and lame as I always am.

I mean, I’ve been uncool for so long it’s comfortable. If I landed in some lame Disney movie about an uncool guy who finds a device that makes him cool, I’d run the other way, natch. I like being uncool. It’s part of my skin. When I was a little kid, I displayed zero athletic talent and yet insisted on playing Little League baseball to the mixed horror and amusement of my neighbors. When I was a little older I actually played Dungeons & Dragons. I got good grades. I wore glasses–ridiculously oversized plastic glasses, in fact. Look:

How I did not grow up to be a darkly muttering psycho, I have no idea. The liquor helps, I think.

And now, you lucky people will be exposed to my raw and unedited internal monologue! A RIVER OF UNCOOL WASHING OVER YOU LIKE AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE WAVE! Oh, it will be ever so much fun.

*Been reading Frederick Pohl and that’s my Phrase of the Week right now

Jeffs Ongoing Fugue of Pain

A History of My Life

By Jeff Somers

PART ONE: in which I eat dogs and become acquainted with Jesuit cruelty.

Where to start? I was born in Jersey City, New Jersey to an Irish-German family of thirteen: six brothers, five sisters, two parents. Only four survived the great bratwurst famine of 1974, two of them being my parents, who mourned the deaths of my siblings by dumping the surviving kids in private school and taking a cruise around the world. In private school my brother Yan and I learned to sing songs from The Sound of Music and tap dance, skills which have saved my life on more than one occasion. After the cruise, my parents went on an extended tour of Europe, from which they have yet to return.

As a result, Yan and I returned from the 1981 semester at school to find the house abandoned. A pack of wild, rabid dogs had broken through the screen door on the back porch and made it their home, and my poor brother Yan was mauled quite badly before I could Tap the dogs to death. I set about nursing Yan and scavenging our ancestral home for foodstuffs and potable water. It was, after all, a long summer. We survived it by eating carefully salted dog meat and drinking rainwater which had so much lead in it I went temporarily color blind in August. When Yan had regained enough of his strength, we set about repairing our ancestral home and plundering my father’s abandoned stocks of pornography. The summer passed quickly, then.

In the fall we matriculated into high school. Our parents maintained a long arm and enrolled us in St. Peter’s There But For the Grace of God Academy, which was a pseudo-religious-slash-military establishment stressing Latin and self-mutililation. We awoke one fine September day to find the ancestral home surrounded by Jesuit Commandos, who piled us into an armored truck along with several other frightened boys. Yan and I cheered our fellow kidnap victims by singing The Sound of Music (Yan’s voice indistinguishable from Julie Andrews’) and we plotted a brisk escape from the truck; but once the rear doors were thrown open Yan and I were inexplicably ratted out by our fellows. My brother and I entered St. Peter’s as prisoners, and spent our first weeks there being beaten on a daily basis by a burly priest named Father Hump, until we could speak perfect Latin, although we could no longer remember our own names.

(more…)

Quite frankly, I’m boring as hell.

People like me should not have blogs. I have few opinions. I let my life wash over me like an incomprehensible existential nightmare. I aspire to make shit up for a living. I’m a comfortable white guy living an easy life, and there is very little about me that is controversial or thought-provoking. Unless a fleshy mid-thirties guy drinking whiskey and reading a lot of books is your idea of thought-provoking, which it shouldn’t be, especially since I forget about 95% of what I read in those books. I’m like the guy from that movie Memento, except without the angst. And the dead wife.

Good blogs, blogs that I actually heave myself off of my digital ass to read, have one of two things going for them, I think: Either they have a central point, a subject to focus on in which the blogger is at least a self-styled expert, or they have an attitude–you know, blogs that exist just to stir shit up. Either way once you get some Technorati traction you start getting traffic, and then fights break out in your comments section, and all is good in the world. Then, one glorious day, one of your posts is greeted with a comment that reads, in full, “first!” and you know you have arrived.

Sadly, I am none of these things. I am an expert in nothing–I am your classic, classic Jack of All Trades and Master of None. My bizarre attention span has led me to become vaguely acquainted with any number of skills–baseball, French, chess, computer programming, guitar–before wandering off to do something else, usually involving whiskey. I can write authoritatively about nothing that does not personally involve me, so I don’t do it, for fear of being mocked. Your mockery wounds me.

I’m also not much of a shit-stirrer, largely for the same reason. When you recognize your vast ignorance and lack of life-mastery, it undermines the confidence, which makes it difficult to flatly call other people morons. It’s too bad; angering thousands of people would do wonders for my traffic.  If anyone out there wants to be my personal shit-stirrer, posting terrible things under my name in order to drum up attention, please contact me. The pay is terrible, but I’ll buy you beers.

*Name that reference and I will send you a cookie.**

**No cookies will actually be sent.

I suspect the hotel may be on fire. At any rate, room service doesn’t respond and I’ve been reduced to collecting rainwater outside the one window I can pry open–the gap is too narrow for me to make an escape through, though.

My whole life revolves around beverages. I’m not sure how this happened, or if this is a writer thing, since writers have been stereotyped as hopeless alcoholics whose talents run proportional to their liquor intake. All I know is that my days are loose chunks of time defined by what I’m drinking at the moment. The fact that many of these beverages are alcoholic in nature is just coincidence, don’t you think? Right? Hello?

In the morning, it’s Our God Coffee. I’d like to be one of those mysterious, intellectual writer types who drinks obscure Moroccan drinks whilst sitting on their veranda, thinking deeply, but the fact is I have the palate of a junkyard dog. Just about everything in the food and beverage world pleases me, and the subtle differences of quality people talk about elude me. I’ve never met a bottle of wine I didn’t like, and the while I can’t quite say the same thing about coffee–there is bad coffee in the world, Virginia, and I’ve had it–I am still pretty easy about coffee. The only real rule is, no Starbucks. I have nothing particularly against Starbucks as an evil corporation sucking the life out of the world, they can oppress the workers and rip off the consumer all they want. No, it’s their terrible, over-roasted coffee that offends me. That shit could be used to remove paint.

So where do I get my coffee? I live near and work in Manhattan, fans, which means one thing: Coffee Carts run by Arab Men. Used to be $1 a cup for a large, now the evil of inflation has raised it to $1.25. It’s the best damn coffee in the universe, bar none.

The cart has been run by a series of Arabic men for years. They tend to work there for a few years and then disappear, without explanation. I assume there is a steady stream of family and friends coming into this country, getting jobs in the coffee cart empire, and then moving on when they’re established, but maybe it’s just the sort of job you can only take for so long before you go mad.

After coffee, nothing much happens for a very long time, and then there’s lunch. At lunch, I start working on a huge bottle of water. Now, I feel like a chump buying bottled water, I do. Water is water–at home I drink it from the tap, without any filters, and generally speaking I’m easy about the water. But any time I’ve tried to avoid buying the bottles, I’ve been frustrated, most probably by my weak brain and spineless tendencies. The water out of the tap at my office is deadly–when I did drink it for a week or so, I got sick every single day. Not sick enough to go home and call for lawyers in order to make my will, but nauseous nonetheless, and nothing makes a shitty day spent at work worse than nausea. Unless it’s suddenly realizing all that snickering talk around the water cooler is about you. So I’ve been stuck with bottled water, like a sucker.

After work, there is a beer when I get home–nothing heals like an ice cold beer, my beautiful babies. Whenever there is no beer in the icebox because of my incompetence, there are tears and recriminations, breast-beating and despair. Because I am an American, I’ve been drinking Yuengling. I completely agree with Homer Simpson, who once said of beer (well, he was actually talking about women, but he was using beer as a metaphor) “They smell good, they look good, you’d step over your own mother just to get one! But you can’t stop at one.”

Ahem. I must stop here before my wife or agent has me forcibly committed to a 12-step program.

After dinner, there’s more water. Hoboken water! Best water in the world. Of course, I’ve never been anywhere, so Hoboken water might suck for all I know. I mean, no one is pumping water out of Hoboken and bottling it, are they? Then again, from what I hear about bottled water, maybe they are.

Later, before bed, it’s a glass of good whiskey. I’d like to say that I sit and think deeply on the world’s problems while sipping some good 40-year old Scotch, but there’s only one thing true about that statement: I am sitting. The Scotch is  usually a little younger, and my thoughts generally focus on baseball scores and whatever is itching me that evening. Now you know, and you are no better for it. Maybe I should maintain a little more mystery on this site.

I don’t remember what my point was going to be. So I will simply stop typing, before making things worse. Bon soir, people!