Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Jeff, I think you know why we’ve called this meeting: You absolutely must start wearing pants to the office.

AS AN author, I hear about Impostor Syndrome a lot. This syndrome, if you have somehow lived this long without encountering it, is when perfectly capable, competent people believe their own success (or lack of failure) is the result of sheer luck and circumstance—that they are, in fact, frauds.

Writers are easy marks for this kind of corrosive self-doubt; no matter how successful you are as a writer, of course, there will be a group of people who consider your work to be terrible, and most writers wind up in that Twilight Zone of mid-level success: A few publishing credits to your name, but no significant sales breakthrough, meaning you make a few pennies and get some recognition, but you’re still working a day job and still hustling every minute of the day instead of lounging by the pool of chocolate pudding in your tropical estate. Or something; your fantasy of being rich and wildly successful may vary.

So when you sell a story or a novel, it’s easy to think you just got lucky, and many of us do just that. I often have that urge to mutter joke’s on you, suckers! as I sign a book contract, so I’m no stranger to Impostor Syndrome. The thing is, while I’m not an impostor as a writer, I certainly have been an impostor throughout much of my adult life, because I am a firm disciple of the Fake It Til You Make It religion of sleeping in and not doing the research.

The Miracle 18

Up until a few years ago, I had a Day Job. In a sense, I still do; I’m not a full-time novelist, I’m a full time writer, which means a lot of what I write I do in order to earn a living. But writing as a Day Job is a perfect fit for me, because I’m good with the words. What I did for 18 years of my life in a professional capacity was not a good fit, because it required three things I do not possess: Attention to detail, organization, and the ability to wake up in the morning.

So, if I was terrible at my job, how did I keep it for nearly two decades? Here’s a timeline of events that hold some clues:

1. When I got my first job in the industry, I was a chubby, tow-headed kid of 23 who wore enormous glasses and whose clothes were always 2 sizes too large (that is not a joke) and so I firmly believe my bosses during the first 3 years or so simply took pity on me.
2. Over the first 5 years or so, the company I worked at went through several mergers and re-organizations, and I had about 6 bosses over that time, so no one ever had the chance to appreciate my incompetence and apathy.
3. At some point my bosses realized I was the only person in the office who could write a Visual Basic script, and I had a shadow career creating toolbars and widgets . At one point, despite this having nothing to do with my actual job description, I probably spent 75% of my time doing this.
4. By the time I was forced to actually focus on the core work my job demanded, I’d had a decade to more or less memorize the basic shortcuts, which meant that as long as the other people I worked with were competent, I could fake it.

Eventually, of course, the whole house of cards collapsed. Looking back, I’m impressed that I was able to fake it for as long as I did, and I have to say that making a living doing something I’m actually good at is an incredible feeling. Some people have been feeling this their whole lives! That seems incredible, but it’s true.

What’s the moral of this story? Sometimes that creeping feeling that you’re not very good at something isn’t Impostor Syndrome, it’s reality knocking on your door. Of course, I was lucky that my incompetence applies to something I didn’t want to do in the first place, and that sheer luck or the power of my charm (which is potent) kept me employed.

Or possibly the moral of the story is that if you work hard enough you can in fact earn a living without wearing pants.

FRIENDS, I have never claimed to be cool. I was a portly kid with thick glasses, and so I was doomed to be the mascot of every class (spiced with occasional good old-fashioned bullying) until I hit college, when somehow my combination of sarcasm, bad hair, and even thicker glasses alchemically made me, if not cool, at least not uncool. Still, despite my chronic uncoolness at every stop along my journey through life I’ve managed to do two things: Have a lot of fun and toss all the rulebooks out the window.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that I’m some sort of brilliant iconoclast or rebel. Far from it; I’m the sort of guy who gets mildly upset if I don’t get my coffee at the same exact time every day, because what this world needs is MORE ORDER; in other words, I love following rules in general. But I am that classic jackass who looks at a book of rules and thinks, jeez, that’s a lot to read and so I don’t read them and I just sort of wing it and make shit up as I go. This is why all my Ikea furniture looks like torture devices from Isengard, and why I spent six years lost in Canada, refusing to read a map. Yes, I’m that jackass.

A Level 35 Demigod

12-year Old Jeff Said HOLY CRAP ITS GOT A DRAGON ON IT, DUNNIT!

Back in my grammar school days I played a bit of Dungeons & Dragons, although I’ll admit I only glanced at the rules. I probably read the Basic Module, or mostly read it, but as we got deeper and deeper in I could never be bothered to read the more advanced rules. D&D had a pretty neat system there, starting off simple and then adding in layers of complexity, but this seemed an awful lot like work, so my friends and I just sort of absorbed the basic concept and then set about just making up whatever we wanted.

Since we were nearing full-on puberty, there were a number of pornographic adventures involving lots of lusty barmaids, witches, and female monsters. Things got … weird. After things got weird, we went full-on acquisitive; the rules for D&D were painfully slow. You started off with nothing, a Level One Thief or Elf or what have you, and you were supposed to slowly make your way through adventures where you would slowly gain experience and level up and slowly discover magic items that would augment your abilities and slowly, slowly, slowly.

One advantage to not reading any rules was the ease with which you could simply decide fuck that, let’s become demigods. So we did.

Acting as Dungeon Masters, we created adventures specifically designed to level up our characters as quickly as possible. We awarded experience points like candy, we littered the adventure with spectacular items gleamed from the Dungeon Master’s Handbook from the Advanced version of the game, and by the end of it we had characters who could basically do anything.

Look on My Works, Ye Mighty

Of course, the game was ruined. Once you have a demigod for a character all you can do is pit them against each other, rolling the dice to see whose obscure and ultra-powerful spell would shatter whose ancient magical shield. That didn’t matter, for me it was a teachable moment, because I realized something very important about myself: I love stats.

Statistics were why I got interested in D&D in the first place (that and the aforementioned pornographic possibilities of role-playing games), just like stats lured me into baseball fandom. The neat rows of numbers, all meaning something, all representing abilities and achievements—I loved them like children. I could calculate an ERA in my head and I instinctively knew the odds of my fireball spell working, and more than anything else I loved the back of a baseball card where a player’s stats were listed and I loved my D&D character sheets where their stats were all laid out.

The same kids who I played D&D with also played in a computer baseball league with me on our Commodore 64s. Microleague Baseball was a marvel; it ran on stats. It came with pre-compiled teams, but you could enter your own and then manage the team in real time. We played entire seasons, made trades, had playoffs and championships. And it was half numbers, half strategy, and not so different from D&D in some ways, although we didn’t cheat much in Microleague. We cheated a little, of course, but not much.

To this day, I don’t read the manual or work too hard to understand the rules. This is why many video games enrage me and also why the washing machine turns on when I play the radio—who has time to pay attention to electrical codes or wiring diagrams?

Yup.

I go out drinking with my brother, Yan*, all the time. During these boozy afternoons we often repeat arguments, circling around the same old disagreements like brothers do. Also, lifelong enemies. One of the arguments we have stems from my brother’s conviction that nothing in the arts has been worth watching since 1995, and even the period between 1985 and 1995 is kind of sketchy. Yan believes that with rare exceptions, the best movies, TV shows, and music was created before that era, and he turns a yellow and suspicious eye on anything that bears a copyright later than that.

He also, it goes without saying, dismisses any sort of reboot or update, believing firmly that Hollywood is out of ideas and should get back to making new stories, instead of raiding the past for easy dollars.

I haven’t had the chance to ask him yet, but I am confident my brother would despise whatever comes of the Matrix Trilogy reboot being planned.

To be fair, he likely isn’t a fan of the original, either. My brother is quite the curmudgeon.

Still, the general wails of dismay concerning the reboot of the Matrix kind of perplexed me. Because I think anything can be rebooted. And maybe should be.

Shakespeare

It’s funny the things we decide cannot possibly be remade or rebooted; they tend to be things we experienced directly in our own lifetimes, as if we have some sort of ownership of them. Some movie made long before our time, which we’ve maybe never seen? Sure, go ahead and remake it. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Hilarious! Go for it. The Matrix? Are you mad? That was just 18 years ago.

Look, I complained too when they decided that Batman needed to be rebooted just eight fucking years after the disastrous and terrible Batman and Robin. But I’ve changed my mind: Why not reboot things? Reboot them often, reboot them hard. Because all that matters–or all that should matter–is whether that reboot is good. They reboot Shakespeare on a regular basis, and no one in their right mind complains.

Of course, Shakespeare is theater–transient and of the moment. No one is going to complain that they did it better in 1601, after all, since no record of that performance exists, and even modern performances fade away like tears in the rain, memorialized only in our memories. Songs, too, get remade all the time, re-interpreted, slaughtered on reality-TV shows, remixed, sampled–you name it. No one cares.

But movies and TV shows? The outrage whenever we decide to reboot, remix, or simply remake a movie–unless it’s old and not part of our living experience–is always met with cries about how Hollywood is “out of ideas” and must pillage our cherished memories for more tickets sales. This of course ignores a few points:

1. The movies we’re complaining about being remade are often themselves remixes, reboots, or a tasty melange of borrowed tropes, as all art builds on what has come before, and
2. For a younger generation, the newer version will likely be theirs in the same way the older or original version is yours. Let them have it.

I just can’t get upset about a reboot any more. Look, The Matrix films were great–or, the first one was, and the two sequels, while containing some great sequences, were a slog–but our worst case scenario is that the new version will be a pale imitation of the original, which we’ve already seen and survived with The Force Awakens, so what’s the big deal?

*Not his real name. My brother is very important and cannot risk being embarrassed by connection with me.

Sorry, I’d tip but I only carry $100,000 bills, because I’m a writer.

Friends, we may be moving into a post-cash society. I say this with a degree of confidence because I am normally at least two decades behind in any trend; I’m that guy who walks into a room and says something like “Wow, that Kanye West fellow sure can rap!” in 2017 and then wonders why everyone is smirking at him. So the fact that I never carry any cash on me means that a cashless society can only be moments away, if I’m already on board.

I was once worried about going cashless, because I didn’t want the Illuminati to be able to track all of my movements and purchases. But I don’t worry about that any more, because 1) smartphones take care of that for them and 2) I’m old and tired and dealing with cash is just too much fucking work, so if the Illuminati want to know all about my liquor and cheese purchases (and, as a direct result of the first two, my Beano purchases), I say let them have all the big data they want.

Going cashless is wonderful. I no longer worry about having money in my wallet, I no longer have pounds of coins weighing me down at the end of the day. I have a record of every purchase which does wonders for budgeting. The only problem? Tipping.

To Insure Proper Service

I like to tip. This is because I am a drinker, and drinkers live in bars and the bar ecosystem is predicated on tips. I also have a certain amount of empathy for every fellow human I meet, and when I meet fellow humans doing a hard job I like to reward them and make their day a little brighter. It also makes me feel like Jeff Somers, Millionaire About Town, I won’t lie.

But, now that I never have any cash on me, I am frequently in the position of being Jeff Somers, Entitled Asshat Who Never Tips.

For example, I was at a fairly swanky event recently. Open bar, finger foods, coat check, all that nice stuff. And all night I felt like an asshat because I couldn’t tip the bartenders, the coat check girl, or anyone. Do you know that time dilates and it takes about 6 hours to get a drink from a bartender when you know you don’t have a dollar bill to put in their little bowl? It’s science. I have performed the experiment to confirm the phenomenon.

Yes, I could—and should!—plan ahead and just get some cash to keep on my person at all times just for tipping. This would require competence, which I do not possess. Believe me, it’s on my list of things to do.

I suppose someday there will be easy digital tipping options, which would be a little ominous as it’s easy to imagine someone setting up a card skimmer to accept tips and the next day you’re cleaned out just because the bartender had a heavy hand pouring your shots of Wild Turkey. But I’d probably take the chance, because I love to tip, and the chances that I’ll remember to bring cash ever are disturbingly low. Just like my chances of wearing pants, which is another reason I never have cash; no pockets. Don’t ask where I keep the credit card. Don’t. Ask.