Bullshit

Years ago in my halcyon childhood, my suffering parents bought my brother Yan and I a set of the Columbia Encyclopedia, which I guess is what people who can’t afford the Britannica buy their kids. It was pretty impressive – a rich, dark blue faux-leather binding, gilt-edged paper, all that. My suffering parents were obviously still hoping their childrens’ ability with trivia and video games would somehow translate into well-paying careers, and thought the encyclopedia would help.

I immediately looked myself up, and was amazed – and dismayed – to discover that I wasn’t in there. And me, a famous Defender Prodigy with the high score in no fewer than three New Jersey arcades.

A few years ago, when Wikipedia (motto: almost!) was the hot new Internet toy, I created my own page there. Ah, those were the days. I played it straight; no claims of royalty, nothing about me inventing the automobile, very little megalomania in general. It was fun while it lasted; a few years ago I was deemed not important enough and my page was deleted. And so far none of you bastards have been moved to re-create it, and I hate you for the lapse, believe me.

I wouldn’t bother re-creating it myself, for a variety of reasons. Number one, I have no desire to get into a humiliating battle with Unseen Millions about whether or not I am a “notable” author (hint: I am probably not). Number two, let’s face it: a Wikipedia page is not exactly an honor. Wikipedia is about as reliable and useful for real data-gathering as interviewing drunks down by the pier. Sure, you might get some decent info, and it’ll certainly be entertaining, but you can’t list any of them as references.

This may sound like sour grapes. Would I burn Wikipedia down if it were a structure, in revenge for my de-listing? Sure. I also flatly refuse to play first-base for the New York Mets, the picky bastards. Since it is an amorphous web-page and not a structure, or a person whose kneecaps I can break and then run away, I must choose to suffer the humiliation and carry on.

Of course, Wikipedia is damned entertaining; I spend hours every week just paging through it, reading fascinating entries and wondering if any of it is actually true.

If anyone is nuts enough to actually want to create a new Wikipedia page for me, I encourage you to be creative. I wouldn’t mind being a former President of Nauru, or a former Bounty Hunter. Give me some magical powers, too, if you don’t mind, and for god’s sake use some free stock photography for my photo – some good-looking, strong-jawed fellow, but with a rakish quality. I mean, go all out.

The Man will likely delete my new entry, so it might be best if you organized a bit and formed a team who would be prepared to post replacement pages as quickly as they come down, using slight alternate spellings to evade automated checks. Naturally I’m not actually endorsing any of this, but in case you’re determined no matter what I say, I’d like my middle name to be Rex.

The Duchess is running a half marathon in Jersey City today, so I am sitting in a Starbucks fine-tuning a manuscript and waiting for her to finish up so I can cheer her at the Finish and go home. And man, Starbucks is a horrible, horrible place. It’s been a long while since I’ve been in one, drinking their bitter, over-roasted coffee and listening to their bland, corporate soft-rock music. And I actually had to use the word venti <shiver> (which, thank goodness, WordPress’ spellcheck flags). I’ll need a shower when I get home. Just wanted to share that.

MySpace is haunting me.

Like a lot of clueless morons, I signed up for a MySpace page a while ago because some random person told me it was a necessary marketing tool. Every now and then I wake up on a strange park bench wearing a white linen suit that isn’t mine, and I think, damn, it’s time I started acting like a real live professional writer. On the long walk home I ponder what exactly real live professional writer means. I imagine wearing a dinner jacket all the time, smoking a pipe, and being able to quote poetry and Greek tragedies on demand. And then I notice I am walking by a windowless place named Teddy’s Bar and I forget all about it.

Sometimes, though, I make these spastic efforts at being all adult and professional, and lame attempts at branding or marketing result. Like, for example, setting up a MySpace page.

The great part about the MySpace page is that I don’t remember much about it. I think I set it up and then forgot about it, imagining it would yield all sorts of markety goodness all automatically and shit, without my intervention. Which is how I like to run things whenever possible. Hell, I would write my books without my direct conscious involvement if I could.

Instead, all I’ve gotten out of MySpace are endless friend invitations. And this is just underscoring and exacerbating my general misanthropy. I’m socially awkward, and this apparently extends to the Internets as well. As a matter of fact, it’s worse. In real life when total strangers try to flag me down for a conversation, or invite me to functions, I can generally do something to signal to them that I would rather make a total ass out of myself in public and be hated for all eternity than speak with them – you know, feign a seizure, feign not speaking English, all the usual tricks. On the Intarwebs, this is not possible. I get these friend requests and they just sit in my Junk email like radioactive nuggets until I turn off the PC and they get flushed away. Meanwhile, someone somewhere places me in their asshole folder for never responding.

I know it’s possible to delete your MySpace account and stop giving out the impression that I want to be people’s friends, but this would involve some actual effort, unlike the act of setting up the account in the first place, which basically involved me thinking casually that I ought to do it and then somehow, in a process probably involving black magic and elves, my account had been created.  Aside from crippling misanthropic tendencies, I am also: incredibly lazy. I’m the whole package!

How can a man be this socially awkward and yet achieve some modest success as a writer? Science has no answers.

My agent is a funny chick sometimes. She certainly knows her clients, especially those of us who view pants as the tools of societal oppression that they are.

Yep. After years of successful duplicity, I’ve been outed by Waterstones in the UK:

You always suspected, huh?

That’s right. I’m really Nicholas Sparks, author of The Notebook. You know what I realized The Notebook needed? More cyborgs. And thus Jeff Somers, evil alias, was born.