Bullshit

A Morality Car Wash: A Trip to Las Vegas

Author: June 8, 2011 3 Comments

from Volume 13, Issue 3, of The Inner Swine, September 2007

Here is an actual conversation:

DUCHESS: For my birthday, I’d like to travel somewhere for a little vacation.
ME: <incoherent weeping>
DUCHESS: Man up, weepy boy—we’re going.

This happens more than would be tolerable in my life if not for liquor’s sweet, forgetful embrace, and it never gets easier. My wife likes to travel, and I do not. This means we travel on a regular basis. Now, if you were to ask The Duchess if we traveled a lot, she’d laugh sarcastically and possibly harm you in some minor physical way. If you ask me, we travel far too much. Objectively, I find myself on an airplane about twice a year, heading somewhere I do not want to go (which is everywhere, because travel sucks). One of these trips is usually the annual pilgrimage to Texas to visit with my wife’s family, which is non-negotiable, and the other is generally a brief vacation-type trip that The Duchess plans for us. I always greet the news with weeping, and she always sedates me before dragging me to the airport because of my childish behavior when a trip is in the offing.

I know my wife is physically stronger than me, you see, so I have learned to resort to childish tantrums in order to try and hold down the number of loathsome planes I have to get on in a year. I’ll never avoid traveling altogether, I know, but The Duchess is like a river breaking through a dam. If you don’t do something, you’re going to get washed away. At least if you plug up some holes and make a go of it you can reduce your damage.

So, when she announced that she had a bizarre desire to go to Las Vegas, I sighed wearily, did my weeping, and then resigned myself to the trip. We had enough frequent flyer miles or something to fly first-class for free, and The Duchess tried to sweeten my reaction to the trip by reminding me, constantly, that you get to drink cocktails for free in first class.

Someday we will examine the fact that everyone in my life tries to make me do stuff by offering me free booze, but let’s not go there yet.

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Bullshit, The Inner Swine

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled

Author: May 24, 2011 5 Comments

Marriage and the Creeping Incompetence
from volume 12, issue 2 of The Inner Swine, 2006

THERE is a certain smoothing mechanism to marriage, or at least there is when you enter into it as a lazy, somewhat grooming-challenged and disorganized person like me.

The phenomenon is difficult to explain but is undeniable — a lot of us go into marriage sweaty, disdainful of society’s norms, and somewhat unhygienic, only to emerge on the other side looking like a movie star. Or at least closer to looking like a movie star than you ever looked before by an order of magnitude. Gaining a spouse often means gaining other things as well, especially since opposites do tend, in general, to attract. So some people will gain an accountant, some will gain a butler or chambermaid, and some will gain a stylist.

Sure, sometimes this is disagreeable and amounts to being remade in your spouse’s image of who they’d meant to marry before you threw yourself bodily at them and conned them to the altar through a mixture of booze, charm, and Jedi Mind Tricks. More often, however, this is a beneficial situation, this smoothing, and usually involves a trade of skills. In my case, my wife provides to me a general smoothing — the skill set of a stylist, really. Not every day, or even on a regular basis — only when a public appearance is required.

In short, she makes sure that whenever we have an important event to attend I emerge from the house looking vaguely sane and prosperous, instead of the deranged hobo look I usually employ. After all, who can be bothered to actually find clean clothes every day, or shave on a regular basis, or not be drunk by 10 AM every day? not me, boyo — I’m not fancy-pants movie star. But because I have gained a wife, a few times a year I get to live like a movie star. Assuming movie stars are also menaced from room to room of their apartment by their stick-bearing wives who threaten all sorts of terrible things if they don’t clean up their acts right quick.

Thankfully, this only happens a few times a year and is probably good for me. But it does beg the question: Is this just a difference of opinion concerning my personal style (me: sublime; The Duchess: stunted, insofar as it is thought to actually exist), or am I being made incompetent?

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Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, The Inner Swine

Ask Me if I Have a God Complex

Author: May 6, 2011 6 Comments

“You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God.” – Alec Baldwin as Dr. Jed Hill, “Malice“.

I was chatting with another author about a work-in-progress the other night. This is unusual in that I a) dislike people and b) dislike other authors almost on sight, as a rule. Well, dislike is the wrong word; there are actually quite a number of other writers I like just fine, and a few I even enjoy. Don’t tell them, or they’ll start expecting me to pick up bar tabs.

Anyways, this writer – we’ll call him Mr. Bean – was asking me my opinion of the ending of his work-in-progress, which amounted to what I like to call a Titanic Ending: You’re tired of writing the damn story, so you just steer for an iceberg and let it sink. I told him so, and after an awkward pause he confessed he had another idea for the ending. He told it to me, and it was so much better I physically assaulted him. After we convinced the waitresses at Stinky Sullivan’s in Hoboken to release us and promised to pay for the broken table, I bought Mr. Bean another whiskey and asked why he was not going with the clearly superior ending, which had actually been his original intention.

He said it was a simple matter of mechanics: Earlier events in the story had precluded the ending, made it impossible.

So, I hit him again. Don’t writers realize they are gods in their own universes?

You can do anything in your story. Halfway through a historical novel set in Edwardian England you can have aliens show up and start melting brains. If you’re writing a locked room mystery, you can go back to chapter 1 and insert the innocuous clue that makes everything fall into place. Jebus, within the confines of your story you can make anything work. It’s like the Reverse Chekov’s Gun Principle: If suddenly realize you need a gun to go off by the end of your story, go back to chapter 1 and put in a damn gun.

It is surprising how many writers don’t seem to realize this. You are writing fiction. You are, in scientific terms, making shit up. If a detail you invented earlier doesn’t work, go back and change it.

Unless you are, as I notably am, lazy. My biggest dread when routing a new novel is the terrible Logic Revision, wherein someone notes either a major flaw in logic (e.g., “How come the hero didn’t just use his magic flying shoes to escape the prison?”) or introduces a brilliant suggestion that makes my storytelling seem like the work of drunken moron. Er, more like the work of a drunken moron. Shut up. These sorts of suggestions require major surgery, months and months of chaotic, confusing revision that sees me trying to salvage as much of my previous work as possible, papering over problems with paragraphs of new text, and sleepless nights until I finally realize I’ve made a mess of it, burn the manuscript in a drunken revel, and then burst into tears when I remember that this is 2011 and burning the manuscript doesn’t do anything except set off the fire alarm and summon my wife The Duchess, who then hides all my whiskey bottles.

However, when I wake up hungover and bleary the next day, I always realize that I am, after all, god in this little written world. I go back and start over. And I can always make it work, because I can change the fundamental truths about my world. I can make things appear and disappear. I can change the history of a character. I can introduce new people who never existed before and delete others from the world so thoroughly they are burned out of the pattern, so to speak. The dreaded Logic Revision hurts, but it isn’t anything that can’t be accomplished with some concentration and hard work. Any writer who retreats from a good Logic Revision deserves to have their novel sit in a metaphorical drawer, never to be read.

The ancillary rule to this is simple: The less you want to do the revision, the better the revision probably is. When I get feedback and my reaction to suggested revisions is a shrug and a vague determination to, sure, why not, do it someday, then that revision is probably just polishing the silver. If my reaction is to drop to my knees and scream out a good old fashioned do not want to the universe, chances are the suggested change is going to make me famous when I win some sort of book award. If I wrote the sort of books that won book awards, instead of just jealous emails from other writers at 3AM. You’re all jealous. I can feel it.

Someday, when I am rich and powerful I will force the publishing overlords to publish my novels straight from my zero-draft file. All logic gaps and misspelled words will be “poetic license”. Even if I’ve combined two completely unrelated stories via the simple technique of pasting one file onto the end of the other, they will print it! Oh, the day will come, my friends. Until then, I revise, and I am god.

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

Old Man Bars

Author: April 29, 2011 8 Comments

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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Bullshit, The Inner Swine

I Take the Haircuts I’m Given

Author: March 31, 2011 9 Comments

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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Bullshit, The Inner Swine

Eight Albums for Just a Penny

Author: March 22, 2011 5 Comments

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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Bullshit, The Inner Swine