Bullshit

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.

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.

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.

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 Novel²¹.

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 inititiave²².

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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