Bullshit

American Wedding Confidential #3: It’s a Family Affair

Photo by Stephanie Lima: https://www.pexels.com/photo/women-having-fun-at-a-wedding-16026430/

Note: This essay originally appear in my zine The Inner Swine as part of a series composed during a period of my life when I was attending weddings as a Plus-One every other week.

THE hardest part about attending my cousin’s wedding was finding a suitable fake name for her so I could eventually write about the event. Being from your prototypical Irish-catholic family, I have several thousand cousins, not to mention hundreds other less-defined relations, plus the weird hangers-on who aren’t even related to me but who are always at these family functions. Finding a name that no other member of my clan was currently using, so as to avoid the usual libel threats my family throws at me on a daily basis, was the most difficult and research-intensive task I’ve had to perform recently. After months of deep thought and careful searching through the bars and taverns of the tri-state area (the best source of Irish-catholic wisdom in the country) I’ve come up with a winner: I’ll call my cousin Smilla. I do happen to have a three-month old second-cousin Smilla, but she’s too young to have been the subject of this essay, so it’s okay.

I asked my gorgeous friend Elizabeth to be my date at this event, which was partly due to the deep and abiding friendship we have developed over the years and partly due to the fact that Elizabeth can cause car wrecks when wearing certain dresses. Attending family weddings is like going to a high school reunion for me: it’s a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a while who are dying to dig into the steaming pile of gossip I represent. Naturally, you want to make a big impression in these situations, and Elizabeth also kept everyone’s eyes off me and my sadly neglected physique. Little did I know that the evening would be a slow, tortuous dance of humiliations.

Elizabeth drove us to the combination chapel and reception hall somewhere in the uncharted wilderness of New Jerseys strip mall hell, and we arrived in time to glad hand a few Aunts and Uncles (some of whom attempted to glad-hand Elizabeth, causing a few early shouting matches) and take our seats to watch the ceremony. Smilla was marrying a Jewish man who looked vaguely Italian and so the ceremony was a mix of catholic and Jewish. Having been to a few weddings, I can tell you now that both sides of that coin are equally boring. Elizabeth slipped a stiletto heel off of her graceful foot to jab me in the side with every time my snoring threatened to become an embarrassment.

When the wedding huddle broke up, we had some time to wander the halls during the cocktail hour while they readied the reception hall. We found ourselves trapped, along with my Mother and Brother, with the craziest of my Crazy Uncles, who relaxed in a plush chair with a scotch on the rocks telling us about Jesus, who apparently spoke to him on an almost constant basis. Every time my Crazy Uncles eyes fell on me, I was afraid he was going to denounce me as a witch. At the first break in my Crazy Uncles nearly-seamless soliloquy I grabbed Elizabeth and demanded that we go outside for a cigarette. My Brother, no fool, tagged along despite the fact that cigarettes make him turn green.

Humiliation #1: Freed from insane relatives, the three of us prowled the corridors curiously and were having such an enjoyable conversation that we were late getting to the reception hall. The Wedding Party was gathered at the doors, ready to make their big entrance, and Smilla spied the three of us waiting politely to sneak in after them. My cousin insisted we sneak in before the wedding party, and we burst into the room amidst cheers and music meant for the bride and groom. I stopped to grin and wave like a superstar, until Elizabeth manhandled me to a nearby table, which, I must admit, I kind of enjoyed.

Humiliation #2: The table we’d found ourselves sitting at wasn’t the table we were supposed to be sitting at, but rather one of the kids’ tables. It was Elizabeth, me, and several ten-year-olds who were rather belligerent towards us. Often I had to use violence to defend myself. The fact that several of my aunts and uncles no longer speak to me can be directly traced to my actions, words, and attitudes at this table.

Humiliation #3: After the pandemonium had settled down a little, I went to the bar for a much-needed stiff drink, whereupon I was promptly carded. At my own cousin’s wedding. I have always been cursed with a cherubic and innocent face, which is why I get away with copping free drinks and cheap feels from my friends on a constant basis, but this was too much. I took our drinks, grabbed Elizabeth, and once again demanded we go out for a cigarette.

When we returned from prowling the halls once again, my family in general had boozed itself into a frenzy, with fights, romances, and general silliness breaking out all around us in record numbers. The groom, well-oiled with liquor through the evening, was hoisted up on a chair along with his bride and a handkerchief for what appeared to be some sort of traditional religious nonsense, and promptly fell off the chair. They hoisted him up again, and he fell off again, killing several people. One of my uncles is a cop, though, so it was all made right in the end.

Finally, Elizabeth’s friendship had been strained enough and we made our way through the EMS workers, police, and wounded to say good night to the bride and groom. The bride eyed us with the traditional catholic-matron marriage eye and thanked me for coming, the groom thought my name was Steve and seemed to be still standing only because he was too drunk to fall down.

In the car, with the wind screaming past us and Elizabeth’s perfume in the car, I pondered the horror of the family wedding and decided that it was definitely better to be a rent-a-date than the relation. As a rent-a-date I can get really drunk and make a pig of myself at both the buffet and the bridesmaids receiving line, and my mother never has to hear about it.

American Wedding Confidential #2: Going Stag In the Age of Couplehood

Photo by RDNE Stock project: https://www.pexels.com/photo/whiskey-glass-held-by-a-vip-passenger-5778514/

Note: This essay originally appear in my zine The Inner Swine as part of a series composed during a period of my life when I was attending weddings as a Plus-One every other week.

All I can say is, never attend a wedding as a freewheeling bachelor. Never never never. Families abhor bachelors, and the rutting-fevered atmosphere of the pagan marriage ceremony brings this sentiment out in spades. It gets ugly.

My friend Madge was getting married and had scheduled her wedding very inconveniently for my rent-a-date purposes; every woman who owed me a favor or who might conceivably enjoy dressing up and drinking watery drinks with me for several hours was otherwise engaged, usually with a sudden vacation to some exotic port. If I’d been a less secure individual it might have seemed like all my friends were avoiding my wedding invite, but of course, that couldn’t be. So, in a moment of whimsical affection for my friend Madge I doomed myself by deciding that what the hell, I’ll go alone.

I don’t know what, exactly, I imagined the wedding reception would be like. I guess I had some disco-fueled sex fantasy involving available and drunkenly wanton bridesmaids (forgetting in my fever that Madge had no friends who could accurately be described as drunkenly wanton) and me ending up the evening like Sammy Davis Jr. with the band, tie undone, microphone and cocktail in hand, calling everybody “baby” and singing Barbara Streisand’s People Who Need People while the bride and groom slow danced. This was never, ever going to happen, not even for a second. If you believe in alternate universes, there was never even an alternate universe where that was a slight possibility. Frankly, I didn’t take a lot of different things into consideration: a) the awesome instinct to match-make in the modern Catholic female, b) the sheer horror uncoupled bachelors inspire in the hearts of Catholic matrons, c) how uncomfortable suits make me (so binding).

Still, for whatever reason I somehow convinced myself that attending Madge’s union ceremony as Solamente Jeff was a good idea. I even went out and bought a new suit for the occasion, because I was feeling lucky. Under the fascist-shopping guidance of the infamous and gorgeous Elizabeth [REDACTED], I picked out a dignified dark-green number that artfully accentuated my beer gut and brought out the somber color of the bags under my eyes. In a shopping mood, I also went in search of an odd and unique wedding gift. I didn’t want to give in to conformist tradition and buy Madge something she actually wanted; I’m an artist, after all, and had to find something symbolic and beautiful but patently useless.

I won’t tell you what I bought, though I will say that I succeeded. While Madge will protest her undying affection for my gift because it came from me (and thus will likely be worth money some day), I doubt it has ever seen light of her living room. I should also mention that my choice of gift was ungainly and large, and I packed into an even larger box, wrapped it garishly, and brought it with me to the wedding, I suppose so I could set it on the seat next to me and not feel so lonely.

.o0o.

The wedding itself was normal: the groom had the glassy-eyed stare of muscle relaxants, Madge was a vision in white and guarded by security professionals so no one would have opportunity to smudge her makeup. In the middle of the ceremony, she put the ring on the wrong finger, couldn’t get it off to fix the mistake, and dissolved into giggles while the groom, completely numb from sedatives, stared at her in mute horror. Or something like that; my memory gets a little fuzzy these days. I lurked in the background trying not to absorb any of the holiness going on around me. The two families could sense that I was a wolf among the flock and they steered clear, leaving empty seats around me for a two pew radius.

At the reception, I lugged my absolutely huge present around with me like the Ancient Mariner with his pet albatross until a very Italian woman took pity on me and told me where I could put it down safely. She then had me sit with her family, introducing me to her beautiful daughters with a degree of pity that instantly made me bitter and resentful. I spent a great deal of the cocktail hour smoking cigarettes, muttering to myself.

When we were all seated for the ridiculously intricate introduction and bridal Awards Ceremony, I spent a few quality moments trying to figure out the demographics of my table. Wedding veterans will tell you: every table tells a story, baby. There’s always the Single Friends table, the Obligatory Co-Workers table, the Never-Talked-To Childhood Friends table. I was none of those, and I slowly came to realize, to my horror, that I was seated at that nightmare scenario known as the Dateless table.

Without warning, I’d been bitten by the despised monster and been transformed into one of The Dateless.

I had also been carefully placed next to Madge’s colorful cousin who had a sunny personality, a bountiful bosom, and a complete lack of attraction either to or for yours truly. I’m not saying that Madge was trying to match us up, but I am saying that she figured she’d seat us together and see what happens, because, as I was learning, nature abhors a bachelor and the wise women of our tribes will always try and find you the sort of happiness they have found, the sort of happiness which results in a 113% divorce rate in this country. The sunny and bountiful cousin, however, also had something akin to a attention deficit disorder, resulting in her dashing around the reception like a lemur spooked from the brush, which was doing nothing to attract me.

Defeated, I left the reception at the appropriate time. The bride and groom were liquored up and weary and had no energy to pity me as I exited alone, determined to never attend another wedding dateless. Or to wear that suit ever again.

American Wedding Confidential #1: My Weekend with Carla

Photo by Rene Asmussen: https://www.pexels.com/photo/groom-being-held-by-his-best-men-12919222/

Note: This essay originally appear in my zine The Inner Swine as part of a series composed during a period of my life when I was attending weddings as a Plus-One every other week.

I showed up at Carla’s around 2:30pm, shaved, showered, and pressed into uncomfortable shoes, which I do not wear for just anybody. I also smelled good, which anyone who knows me well will attest is not such a common occurrence. I was buffed, shined, and ready to boogie. As I stepped into Carla’s apartment it became obvious that she was not: the place was littered with underwear, recently purchased shoes, and trash. Carla was in the throes of typical chick-like lateness, rushing about applying last-minute makeup, brushing her lustrous hair, and vacuuming herself into rubber underwear, all, I presumed, for my benefit (hubba hubba).

I tried to make myself at home, but any time I tried to leave the living room I encountered a pile of underwear and Carla, screeching that I couldn’t go in there. Eventually I found that I was only welcome to sit in an uncomfortable chair in the shadowed area of the living room, and there I stayed.

Carla finally emerged ready to go, and I witnessed the first of many transformations for My Wedding Date, this one from Crazy Girl to Normal Girl. In her nice dress and with her hair combed, she appeared almost normal. We got into her chariot and off we were to pick up her friend Dorothy in Englewood. Here I grew worried as Carla seemed to have little idea where her friend lived, and seemed content to just drive around in circles and hum to herself. Adding to my desperation was the fact that Carla kept one finger mashed on the “lock” button all this time, so I could not give in to my urge to leap from the moving vehicle. We were saved by the sight of Dorothy waving at us from her front porch.

We got out and Dorothy told us to beware of snipers; apparently some local outpatient had been shooting at her trees just moments before. Carla seemed interested in this story, and I began to think her friend would have a calming effect on her, when Carla suddenly noticed that the dress Dorothy was wearing was strikingly similar to her own, and a cat-fight broke out on the front lawn. I was able to save Dorothy only by pointing out to Carla that since the offending dress was now stained green and red with grass and blood it no longer resembled her own. I carried the unconscious Dorothy gently to the car and we were off.

At the wedding, Carla developed an unseemly fascination with the bald head of the man seated in front of us, which was actually a good thing, as it kept her relatively quiet throughout the ceremony, except when she loudly informed me that I would be blasted by lightning for my sins and the several times she asked me if I was interested in any of her girlfriends, all of whom, she asserted, had “big bazooms”. With the aid of several burly ushers I was able to rush her from the church before being identified.

We arrived triumphantly at the hotel for the reception, and Carla lost little time digging into the rum supply, double-fisting it for most of the evening. Her transformation from Normal Girl to Drunk Girl was seamless, as was her almost unnoticed transformation from Drunk Girl to DANCING QUEEN. I’d had no idea I was the official nonthreatening male guest of the DANCING QUEEN, but my education was quick and brutal. She danced the Twist, which is to say she danced the Twist to every song that the band played, often by herself on the dance floor with the hot spotlight following, once with a dozen tuxedoed men clapping time and hooting.

As the hour grew late, I was pulled aside by Wedding Officials and asked to remove her from the dance floor so that the older couples could safely dance without fear of being smacked or trampled by the rampaging DANCING QUEEN. I donned my fatigues (I was “going commando” at the wedding anyway) and hustled her off to the bar, where she loudly berated the bartender for trying to give her her drinks in plastic cups instead of glasses. As he hustled off to take care of this, she leaned over and breathed into my ear.

“My rubber underwear has cut off my circulation,” she said, “I think my feet are numb.”

Around one in the morning we all admitted weariness and retired to the room we had rented for the evening. Here Carla instructed me to strip and lay down in the tub, but I refused, knowing better, and wrapped myself up in a bolt of fabric in order to protect myself from Carla and from the corrosive cold of the air conditioner, which the other denizens of the room had insisted on activating. We implored Carla to change out of her dress and remove her rubber underwear, fearing permanent brain damage from the lack of circulation, but Carla became irrational at this point and seemed to feel threatened by this piece of good advice, curling up defensively on the couch and growling at anyone who came near her, accusing several of her friends of attempted sodomy. In a bizarre moment, her friends made up a taunting song which included the words “finger” and “crack”, and sang it over and over again until poor Carla wept. At this point I fell asleep, and so cannot detail Carla’s undoubtedly agonizing transformation from Drunk Girl to Hungover Girl.

In the morning Carla announced several times that she felt like a “whore” but still refused to change clothes, planning instead to hang around the lobby of the hotel in the hopes of getting into another wedding reception, and at yet another rum supply. I enlisted several of her big-bosomed friends to help me force her into the car, wherein she grew grim and drove me home in silence, complaining that her underwear was up around her neck.

The Ballad of the House Crew

Photo by Ann Zzz: https://www.pexels.com/photo/yellow-folding-metal-chairs-on-the-ground-11078857/

When I went to college, I had a job at the Student Center. My first year there, this involved me sitting, hungover, at a central desk where they sold candy and I was expected to dispense information that I absolutely did not possess. The Student Center staff was divided into a few separate units: There was the Workbench, which was a crafty sort of spot where people came to do screen printing or bake their sculptures, the office staff, the central desk area, and the House Crew.

The House Crew were tasked with setting up for events, lugging chairs and stages and sound equipment around, partitioning meeting rooms, and general cleanup. It was a lot of hard work, and I had nothing to do with them initially. I worked at that front desk and sometimes in the Workbench, which involved just sitting around and making sure people didn’t steal anything or set themselves on fire while using the equipment.

At some point, I decided I wanted to grow up a bit, make a bit more money, and, I don’t know, challenge myself? That can’t be right. But whatever 20-year-old Jeff’s reasons were, I decided to throw my name in for a management position. Each area of the Student Center had a manager who handled scheduling, payroll, and other issues, and despite a lifelong commitment to MEMO (minimum effort, maximum output), I decided to go for it. I was pretty confident I’d get manager of Workbench, but when the day came no one called me to let me know either way. There was a little party for all the new managers, so I toddled down there and forced the Director of the Student Center to inform me that I had not gotten the position in front of everyone, which was kind of humiliating.

Apparently living the MEMO life didn’t translate to success. Who knew1?

Our First Second Choice

My time came a few weeks later, however; two people had been installed as co-managers of the House crew for some reason, and they got into a dispute with the Director over the hourly pay rate for some of their folks. As a protest, they purposefully filled out payroll at a higher hourly rate for those workers, and were promptly fired. So I got the call to replace them, because, I assume, the field of potential managers was pretty thin.

I’d never managed anything before. I’d also never worked House Crew, because of my delicate writer’s constitution and ladylike hands. But I dived into that job with gusto. My main innovation was writing up minutes of our weekly staff meetings and distributing them to everyone, which I of course turned into a creative exercise. My Minutes were mini-stories, detailing fictional brawls, field trips, and supernatural happenings that occurred at each meeting. I wrote a few as epic poems, some as stage plays. In a lot of ways, those staff meeting minutes were prepping me for The Inner Swine, the zine I started publishing after I graduated college, which was similarly filled with ridiculous experimental stuff like that.

Was I good manager of the House Crew? Probably not. I’m not good at managing anything, so I was likely deeply mediocre. But I like to think that I brought a little fun into the job. Like a lot of the ephemera of my pre-Internet life, I wish I’d saved some of those meeting minutes; they’re all gone now, trashed shortly after they were handed out and forgotten by their recipients. And honestly they were probably only mildly amusing to the folks who were literally there. But I still kind of wish I had a few copies, just to see if I was really as clever as I thought I was2.

Since my heady days as Lord of House Crew I have carefully avoided any kind of managerial responsibility, and I think the world has been a better place as a result. You are welcome.

PANTS

Photo by Spencer Cooper: https://www.pexels.com/photo/portrait-of-a-man-in-a-leather-jacket-17750853/

All joking aside — and I do joke about pants a lot, perhaps too much, no, never, forget I said anything — my experiences with pants have always been fraught. I’ve come to suspect that I have suffered from a mild form of subtle body dysmorphia for most of my life, because the first time I bought a pair of pants that actually fit me somewhat accurately was about a year ago.

I remember when I got my first real, benefits-and-office kind of adult job working for a small medical publisher in New York City, and I bought some new clothes so I would look like a real adult instead of a deranged child (spoilers: I failed at this goal). I strutted into work feeling like a superstar (a superstar who was earning (checks notes) $17,000 a year (about $36k in modern monies) and who wore glasses the size of satellite dishes on his face, but still.

I have a photo from around that time, me and some co-workers standing around smiling. And my pants are frickin’ enormous. They look like two of me could have fit into them, and I honestly have no reason to believe that wasn’t possible. I stare at this photo and think, what the hell is wrong with me that I thought those pants fit properly? What was wrong with everyone else for treating me like a normal human being and not some kind of deranged monster?

Sad Trombone

Of course, fresh-outta-college Jeff was a different person. Dumber, certainly. Drunker, possibly. He resembled 10-year-old Jeff except fatter and with an even more dubious haircut, which is difficult to imagine, so it’s tempting to write off his enormous, ill-fitting pants as a trick of time dilation.

Except I still regular wear pants that threaten to fall down at inopportune times (are there opportune times for your pants to fall down? Research continues). I was out walking around town a few months ago, carrying heavy bags, and I had seriously worries that my pants were going to just shimmy down around my ankles at any moment.

Part of this is the 1930s Depression-Era cheapness my parents instilled in me. My whole immediate family were hoarders of different stripes, I’ve come to realize. Buttons, old clothes, books–they kept everything. My brother has never once thrown a single item away in his entire life. He has every computer he’s ever owned sitting in the basement, most likely infested with spiders, and even though most of them wouldn’t even boot up any more any suggestion of getting rid of them elicits nothing more than a puzzled frown.

All of this is to say that if I accidentally purchase a pair of pants made for a much larger person, I am too lazy to return them, as a rule (these whiskies ain’t gonna drink themselves) but also compelled to wear them, because I can’t throw them away.

Solutions? I could double my caloric intake in an attempt to fit into the pants, or learn to sew from Youtube videos and savage my pants into submission. But as I am very lazy I will choose C, just keep wearing those pants and enjoy the thrill of never knowing whether they’re going to slide down with a sad trombone noise next time I’m leaving the grocery store laden with bags, leaving me to shuffle pathetically across the street, tears streaming down my face, pants around my ankles, the youths of the neighborhood snapping photos on their phones and making me famous.

The (Competence) Struggle is Real

Photo by Sarazh Izmailov: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-shoveling-snow-off-a-roof-11236043/

FRIENDOS, I was raised to be both cheap and self-sufficient, in the sense that I abhor spending money on things I can do half-assedly myself. This includes most home maintenance, which I approach with insane enthusiasm for a man so poorly prepared to do actual work.

I like to joke that I’m the second-worst carpenter in New Jersey because I was trained by my father, the worst carpenter in New Jersey history. This isn’t far from the truth; Dad had just enough construction and carpentry knowledge to be dangerous, and he passed on about half of what he knew to me in a vague, non-specific fashion. If I didn’t have YouTube this house I am sitting in right now would have burned down long ago, because I insist on doing many repairs and renovations around here I am absolutely not qualified to do. And when I do give in and hire someone, I find myself following them around and nodding, muttering any bits of knowledge I might have about plumbing or electrical work in order to convince them that I am a competent, adult man.

This combination of factors leaves me open to frequent humiliations, of course. A few years ago, for example, we had a lot of snow around these parts. A lot of snow. I became a little concerned that our roof might not be up to the load, so I decided to climb out there and do some judicious shoveling. The Duchess informed me that if I slipped and fell off the roof to my death she would be so angry at me she would leave my body to be eaten by squirrels, and I took this as a challenge and accepted it.

There’s a skylight out on that roof, which made navigating around on the slippery surface a challenge, and so naturally about five minutes into my roof-shoveling adventure I slipped and fell backwards directly onto the skylight, cracking it all to hell. I remember looking up and finding The Duchess staring at me from the bedroom window, just shaking her head at the jackassery she had just witnessed.

This was a problem, of course, because a cracked skylight meant snow and rain pouring into the house. I thought I could probably figure out a solution, but The Duchess insisted we call a contractor who had recently done work for us, and beg him for some help. What did I know about skylights, after all? There was probably a super secret solution or trick an experienced person would know.

I grit my teeth and made the call. I’m not exactly an old-school man when it comes to gender roles, but I feel the icy teeth of shame when I have to ask another man for help in my own house, so I dreaded this experience. Our contractor agreed to drop by and see what could be done. I told myself that at least there might be something to learn here. All I could think to do was drape a tarp over the skylight and secure it with elastic cords. The contractor might show me something I could then pretend to have known all along, and temporarily forgotten.

The contractor came, took a look at the cracked skylight, a look at my damp pants, and chose to make no comment. He then proceeded to … drape a tarp over the skylight and secure it with elastic cords.

My humiliation complete, I went inside to calculate the cost of a new skylight. The Duchess made me some hot cocoa, and I wondered when, exactly, I would start to feel like a grown up. Hint: It’s been several years since then and it still hasn’t happened.

The Friendliest Mugging of All Time

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-an-empty-wallet-8515596/

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 World’s Most Hidden CMOS Battery Ever

So! We’ve finished up posting Collections, the novel no one wanted to publish, and my strange brain won’t allow me to start a new weekly novel post here until 2024. Which leaves us with some weeks to fill here at the wee blog. But, luckily, life decided to screw me over this week and I suffered a computer crash for the ages, which I can now write about in hilarious detail.

Friendos, I am the Platonic Ideal of Intellectual Shallowness. I have a real skill: I am 100% that asshole who skims a Wikipedia article an hour before meeting you for drinks and then spends the evening confidently lecturing you on the subject. Maybe I’m the Platonic Ideal of Unearned Confidence? Nah, that’s just me being a white middle-aged cis man.

Anyways, I have a long history of fucking around and finding out when it comes to computers. My first PC was a Commodore 64, gifted to me by my parents when I was a wee lad and still filled with promise. Back then no one laughed when I told them I wanted to be a brain surgeon, and so my parents could be forgiven for thinking that the $200 in 1982 money was an investment in making me a billionaire computer genius. I mostly used the C64 to play video games, of course, amassing an enormous empire of pirated games utilizing a wide range of illegal programs that broke DRM. I also spent a lot of time typing programs directly into the RAM from computer magazines3. Naturally, none of these programs–which took days to keyboard–ever worked properly, and so I knew the bitter taste of computer failure very early on.

I bought my first real computer years later, and that’s when I started getting into trouble, because I got curious. Early attempts to dual-boot Windows and Unix resulted in many, many boot failures, and the thing was these all happened in 1998 or so. Imagine for a moment turning on your computer and getting a blinking cursor and nothing else, and you have zero other computers or access to online information. I had the Internet in some form, but with my PC blown to pieces by my tinkering I couldn’t get there. I had no smartphone or tablet, so I had to wait until the next day when I went to work, spend hours furiously Googling solutions, print out instructions, and go home to try everything until finally something actually worked4.

Twenty-five years later, things are very, very different.

This FileSystem Does Not Exist

My computer blew up on Monday evening. These things always happen at night, for some reason. Your computer never turns into a malformed paperweight when you’re up early and feeling clearheaded; it always discovers entropy when you’re tired and slightly drunk and trying to figure out if the tiny leprechaun named McSwiggins who keeps shouting that you have to BURN EVERYTHING, BOYO is real or not.

An old man screams into the void. Not shown: McSwiggins, but he’s there all right.

One moment I was editing the thumbnail images for the new episode of the podcast, the next I was staring at a reboot screen. Fine, I thought. Something got screwed up and I’d lose a few minutes of my time.

The computer made it to the desktop, then crashed again. This time I didn’t even get a POST. No BIOS. No nothing. It was very much as if my computer had simply ceased to exist. For a moment I worried that when I opened the case to peek inside, I’d find nothing but a note from some alternate timeline explaining that my Alternate Self had to steal my computer in order to save the future or something, and then I would be swallowed by a violent temporal anomaly and that would be that.

Now, in 1998 I had no way to access the vast troves of information out there on the Internet, but this is 2023, baby, and I have a phone, two old laptops, two old tablets, and my wife’s laptop. I had access to the information. I’m not afraid to assault my motherboard with a screwdriver and my sticky, whiskey-stained hands.

Nothing worked. The computer was dead. I pulled the hard drive out of it and hooked it up to an old laptop and confirmed I hadn’t experienced any data loss, which was calming, and then I decided to do a few basic triage steps to try to revive the computer: I resat the graphics card and the RAM, I checked all the plugs and connections. And then I thought I’d bleed the CMOS battery and clear that as well, which sometimes revives a confused motherboard.

Except, I couldn’t find the CMOS battery.

Now, if you don’t know anything about computer hardware that means nothing to you, but as a guy who has stared into the abyss of many non-functioning computers in his time, not being able to see the CMOS battery was disturbing. It’s normally a pretty simple process to unplug the CMOS and/or clear it with the jumpers, but here I couldn’t even see that fucker. I wondered, for a moment, if computer technology had progressed so far that they no longer used CMOS batteries, and I missed it because I am old and feeble.

I broke out the motherboard’s documentation, and discovered that the manufacturer had hidden the CMOS battery the way a Super Villain would have. The battery is a thin, disc-shaped thing, and they glued it to the back of another component, which was in turn obscured by another component. Salt in the wound: The plug was also buried behind something, and the only way to try to unplug it was to get in there with a pair of needles or something and use them like chopsticks. Which I did. I think I lost several pounds of body weight through sweat and anxiety.

You Have Failed

So, did I win? Well, a new computer has been ordered, so the answer is: No. That motherboard is fried and not coming back from the dead any time soon. Maybe it was the incendiary nature of my writing, my ideas too hot for the hard drive. Or maybe I just got unlucky. But the contrast with past computer problems was astonishing: Instead of losing everything on my hard drive and staying awake for six days straight as I tried to cobble together information to fix things, I … just used the Internet to learn everything I needed to know and retrieve any files I’d lost. What used to be a paralyzing moment of terror is now just a pain in the ass.

Except for that CMOS battery. That’s gonna haunt me to the end of my days.

The Grim Joys of Novels Written by Multitudes

Writers keep trying to crowdsource the novel, and it has never worked.

Writing can be a distressingly isolated and lonely process5. This is especially true of fiction—while screenwriting and theater writing often involve a certain element of collaboration and community, writing a story or novel is typically a solo endeavor. That translates to a lot of pressure—you have to come up with the plot, bring the characters to life, do the research, and punch up the dialog all on your own6.

While many writers (including yours truly) consider this to be a feature of the writing life, not a bug, there are a suspicious number of crowdsourced novels in literary history, suggesting that authors have occasionally sought to turn writing a book into something more of a community effort. And this almost always fails, for one very obvious reason: Writers spend their careers cultivating a unique and distinct Voice and style, making chapters written by different people sound very, erm, different.

Out of Many, Boredom

There are plenty of novels out there written by two or three authors without incident, and that makes sense. If you’re the sort of writer who can tolerate the idea of collaboration, teaming up with someone who shares your style and sensibility makes sense7.

Less common—and much less successful as a strategy designed to create readable fiction—is the “tag team” approach involving several writers. This isn’t a new or particularly modern idea—Harriet Beecher Stowe teamed up with five other writers for “Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other” in 1872, for example8—and the mechanisms used to produce one haven’t changed much. Sometimes it involves one author writing an initial chapter or treatment and then “tagging in” the next writer, who continues the story and then passes it on to the next (and so on). Sometimes it’s a bit messier and more collaborative. Whatever the approach, the end result is usually pretty unimpressive9.

One early example is “The Floating Admiral,” written by thirteen writers including Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. The fact that this story—an old-school murder mystery—works at all is a testament to the talent involved, but it exposes one great flaw in the multiple writers scheme: The quality of the work sinks down to the lowest level, and the result is a book that is tepidly entertaining at best10. When the most positive thing you can say about a mystery is that the solution isn’t completely insane despite the efforts of earlier writers to make it so, that’s not exactly compelling.

Which may be why a later example of collaborative novel, “No Rest for the Dead” (by no fewer than 26 authors, including Jeffery Deaver and R.L. Stine) actually fails in the other direction: So much effort is put into making everything consistent it would be hard to tell who wrote what if you removed the names from the TOC. It’s a competent book but also a forgettable one.

On the opposite end of the style/editing spectrum you’ve got “Caverns,” authored by Ken Kesey and his 13 writing students at the University of Oregon in 1989. Most likely due to Kesey’s stature, the book actually got published, but it is, to put it mildly, a bit of a mess—it reads like a book written by 14 people, with varying Voices throughout and a plot that definitely feels like a committee put it together.

In On the Joke

The difficulty in making a collaborative novel read like a real book instead of a joke may be why the most successful examples are, in fact, jokes—or at least pranks. In 1969 journalist Mike McGrady assembled a team of 24 to pen “Naked Came the Stranger,” a deliberately terrible novel designed to prove, somehow, that all the reading public cared about was sex and titillation. The fact that anyone had any doubts about this is the real story here—but “Naked Came the Stranger” remains an example of a collaborative book that achieved its (sordid) literary goals and, more importantly, read like a book authored by a single writer. A very sexy, somewhat unstable author11.

Similarly, later efforts like “Naked Came the Manatee” (satirizing 1990s-era thrillers) and “Atlanta Nights” (a novel written by a group of authors intending to prove that online publisher Publish America was a scam by writing a novel so terrible no sane person [or legitimate publisher] would accept it12) succeed in part because they intend to be terrible, and all the flaws of the collaborative writing process actually work in their favor.[/efn_note], but the point stands.

Of course, all of this effort and skulduggery is mystifying: I have always been able to write truly awful, disjointed, and confusing novels all on my own. I must conclude that the folks who need help are just amateurs.

How the MEMO Method Ruined My Life and Turned Me into a Writer and Book Lover

I was supposed to be entering the Baseball Hall of Fame this year, dammit.

I had a normal childhood, at first: My brother, Yan,13 and I would cover the living room with plastic army men and engage in complex war games that always ended with Godzilla decimating entire battlefields14. I played a series of complex games with the other urchins of my neighborhood, each with fluid rules, some of which have not, technically, ended yet. And I dreamed of being a professional baseball player. Or a magician, if that didn’t work out; it seemed likely that the skills were pretty transferable.

A few years later, everything had changed. Suddenly, I was a pudgy kid in enormous glasses who had the dexterity of a rock. Was it hormones? Dark magicks? The sudden, late-night realization of my mortality? Well, yes to that last one, but also, no, it was something else entirely: I was forced to read a book.

Minimum Effort

During that brief, happy period of my life when I was a skinny idiot who won every footrace he was challenged to on my block (and that’s a lot of footraces15), things came relatively easy to me. I independently developed the philosophy known as MEMO: Minimum Effort, Maximum Output. I approached every assignment and problem with the absolute minimum effort required to accomplish it. To this day I do not understand why people do more than the absolute minimum in any situation.

So when my teacher forced the entire class to walk six blocks to the local library and select a book we would then have to read and write a report about, I immediately knew what I would choose: A book of magic tricks. My reasoning was unassailable:

  1. Probably very few words.
  2. Probably a lot of pictures.
  3. It would simultaneously be training for my backup career16.

And then the plan went to hell and my life changed, because several months earlier I had watched The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe on television.

Maybe I should back up.

The Memory Hole

I am an old, old man17 and the world has changed a lot since my carefree youth. When I was a kid, television was terrible, but to compensate for this terribleness the universe had made it also very transient. There would be a truly terrible program—maybe an episode of The Love Boat, literally any episode—and it would make the world a worse, dumber place while it was airing18. But then it would be over, and it would be gone, because back then there was no recording. No VCRs, no DVRs, no cloud storage, no Internet. You watched a show, it ended, and that was it. Some shows were re-broadcast, but not everything, and not reliably.

There was an animated adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe on TV and I was transfixed. And then it was over and I returned to my regular schedule of eating crayons to see if my poop turned colors19. And then I was herded into a library to select a book to read, and there was The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Being something of an idiot, it had never occurred to me that TV shows might be based on something like a book. I was stunned, and for the first time in my young life, I wanted to read a book.

I took all seven Narnia books out, read them all, and then read them again. I repeated this process over and over again, staying up late under the covers to read by flashlight, my hair turning white, my eyes failing, my desire to learn how to throw a curveball fading. Instead of learning how to find quarters behind people’s ears—a skill that would have set me up for life—I started writing my own stories. A skill which has not set me up for life20.

Now here I am, a Gollum-like creature who hisses at the sun and spends his days in the glow of a screen, writing stories and novels and self-serving essays that make me—and likely no one else—giggle in a very unattractive manner. And it’s all because I was forced to read a book. I may sue.