The Inner Swine

I Take the Haircuts I’m Given

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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Eight Albums for Just a Penny

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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The Inner Swine on Kindle

The Inner Swine Volume 16, Winter 2010I’ve been putting out my zine The Inner Swine for 15-17 years, depending on whether you count its inception from the date my original collaborators and I got together to discuss putting out a magazine or the actual release of issue one, by which time I’d taken over the magazine all by myself. I’m closing in on issue 60.

Over the years I’ve released plenty of Inner Swine material electronically, mostly for free. PDFs of just about every issue are up on the zine’s web site for free download, and plain-text files of some issues are also there. I still do a print run of each issue for a mailing list of subscribers and traders. Recently, however, I’ve been thinking that a formal digital edition of the zine might be a good idea. So I finally sobered up for a day and created a Kindle Edition of the latest issue (Volume 16, Issue 3/4, Winter 2010) and put it up for sale on Amazon for $0.99. NINETY-NINE CENTS! Yowza.

The Kindle edition doesn’t have any images in it, because a) images on the Kindle are a pain in the ass and b) some of the images that make it into the zine are not, shall we say, vetted by my copyright lawyers. It’s a zine, after all. The copyright lawyers for my zine are a tiny leprechaun who sits on my shoulder and sings sea shanties into my ear all day and my cat Spartacus, who uses a thick book of copyright law as a scratching post. The Kindle Edition also has no advertisements in it. It’s just the text, baby. Other than that, it’s exactly the same: Every word that’s in the print edition is in the Kindle edition. It’s ~45,000 words, which is novella-sized.

Right now it’s set up as a standalone publication, not a series or periodical. There’s no DRM and it’s set to allow lending. I’m learning this as I go, so if you do grab a copy, all feedback is gratefully accepted. Let me know if I can improve the formatting or do anything else to make it a better product.

Thanks! Remember, I’ll make $0.35 cents on every issue. THIRTY-FIVE CENTS! Every five issues sold buys me a bottle of Thunderbird with change back!

His Sins Were Scarlet, but His Books Were Read

This is an essay from the forthcoming Summer 2011 Issue of my zine, The Inner Swine.

The Don Camillo Books

Don CamilloWould it shock anyone to learn that I was something of a nerd as a teenager? It would not. As a matter of fact, I am pretty sure that when each issue of The Inner Swine arrives in your mailbox, you shout “NERD!” and then throw it in the garbage. You bastards.

However, being a nerd in high school wasn’t exactly terrible. I didn’t have a negative high school experience. If you watch TV or movies, having any sort of personality or brains when you were fifteen is depicted as The Worst Possible Thing Ever because apparently the world is filled with people who were lonely, bullied, sad people in high school because they had acne or didn’t play football, or read books or something. That wasn’t my experience. Oh, I was a nerd, all right. I wasn’t exactly cool in my high school. And we had football players and such, and a definite caste system. It was just that it was a private Jesuit-run prep school and everyone there was an academic nerd to some degree, so it wasn’t so bad. I had some good times in high school.

As a child, my father had done a lot to interest my brother and me in books and reading. He read to us, and there were always books around, and Dad liked to be well-read, which rubbed off on his sons. When I was really young he brought home a tattered paperback book titled Don Camillo Takes the Devil by the Tail, left it in the bathroom, and I started reading it.

It was the least likely book ever to make an impression on a kid in the early 1980s. It was written by an Italian author in the 1950s and translated into English. It involved stories about a priest in a tiny Italian village and his antics against the Communist mayor. It involved a lot of sincere religious feeling, including direct dialogs with Jesus. It was outdated, completely foreign, and almost aggressively Catholic and sentimental.

Naturally, I loved it.

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Like Immortality: I Suck at Correspondence

“A Letter always seemed to me like Immortality, for is it not the Mind alone, without corporeal friend?” — Emily Dickinson
The aging process is an adventure! Who knows where it will lead you...

The aging process is an adventure! Who knows where it will lead you...

The aging process takes us in unexpected directions, doesn’t it? It’s always disturbing. You’d like to think you’re an eternal creature, a permanent existence, when not only is it a fact that someday—relatively soon, friend—you won’t be here any more, but you’re not even unchanging. You wake up every day a little more eroded, a little more educated—changed. Unfortunately, our self-image does not always change accordingly, resulting in people like me who still see themselves as they were when eighteen—svelte, optimistic, able to handle their liquor—instead of how we are—bloated, ruined, and suffering permanent yellowed skin from debilitating liver damage.

Time is indeed a harsh mistress.

There are plenty of examples of time’s softly scrubbing fingers I could offer: My taste in booze, my aching back, the fact that I’d rather shove pins under my fingernails than go out to a movie these days. These all seem subtle to me, however, and easily ignored. One aspect of my changing existence that always strikes me these days is the fact that I now suck, totally suck, at correspondence. This is not simply bragging about my misanthropic tendencies, my friends—when the phone rings, I glance at it in annoyance and let the machine pick up, and then fail to respond. When an email arrives, it sits in my inbox for weeks, ignored and threatening. I haven’t written a letter in years. People often write me through my zine or this blog, and even if they send me emotional, interesting letters or gifts, the most anyone ever gets back is a curt note thanking them for their interest. If I am drinking while stuffing envelopes, they get incoherent threats that if they don’t stop assaulting my bunnies, I will fertilize their lawn. Or something.

In short, I completely suck at correspondence.

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Stapler porn

For those of you who make print zines, this might appeal. After switching to a double biannual issue, I found that my trusty old Stanley long reach stapler couldn’t hack it any more. Sadly, I had to replace it with . . . this:

MONSTER STAPLER

Monster Stapler can destroy worlds with its awesome power. And possibly staple my hand to my thigh if I try to make zines drunk.

Haircuts and Me

And now, for no good reason at all, an article scheduled to appear in The Inner Swine Volume 15, Issue 3/4 (Winter 2009):

HITMEN WEARING MUZZLES

HESITATE YOU DIE

Haircuts and Me


Darlin’ don’t you go and cut your hair
Do you think it’s gonna make him change?
“I’m just a boy with a new haircut”
And that’s a pretty nice haircut
Charge in like a puzzle
Hitmen wearing muzzles
Hesitate you die
Look around, around
The second drummer drowned
His telephone is found[1]

–Possible lyrics, “Cut Your Hair”, Pavement

PIGS, let’s talk haircuts.

Why? Well, I could come up with some justification, I suppose. I could link haircuts with marriage, or I could come up with some theory about how haircuts reflect the world we live in. I could do that. Or I could say that I needed to fill a few pages in this zine and I just got a haircut and thought I could milk the subject for a while. Which are you more likely to believe? Don’t answer. I know what a bunch of bastards like you will say. You don’t deserve better. That’s why you get articles about my haircuts.

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The Futility of Writing

Ah, another week, another video. I’m having far too much fun with these. This week, we’re discussing the futility of your artistic and financial literary dreams:

As always, tell the world and let me know if you have any comments as feedback is always appreciated!

Pop Culture

Friends, I’ve spent far too much time this week a) reading TvTropes.org and b) watching the MTV VMAs. As Tv Tropes put me in the frame of mind to overanalyze everything, what struck me about the VMAs was how drastically the pop culture world has shifted in my lifetime, and, hell, within the last few years. I mean, most of the people who attended the 1999 VMAs weren’t at this year’s, weren’t even mentioned, and are possibly entirely unknown to kids starting High School this year. I mean, here’s a short list of performers/presenters:

Kid Rock, Aerosmith, Run-DMC, Lauryn Hill, Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin, Nine Inch Nails, TLC, Fatboy Slim, Amil & Jay-Z, *NSYNC, Britney Spears, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Korn, Garbage, Marilyn Manson, Lil’ Kim

Now, some of those folks still have hot careers, some are dead, and some are still plodding along, but very few of them are still part of the bubbling pop culture conversation. It’s amazing, really, to think what a difference 10 years makes.

So I was going to write a post about how pop culture references affect and date writing, but then I realized I wrote that eassay five thousand years ago in my zine The Inner Swine. So I’ll just reprint it here, slightly revised (very slightly):

How Many Simpsons References Can I String Together in One Essay, Anyway?

Pop Culture in Fiction

by Jeff Somers

FANS, I don’t claim to know much of anything at all. I know a few things: I know that Warren Spahn is the winningnest lefthanded pitcher in Major League Baseball history. I know that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a given object to arbitrary precision. I know that irony is a form of speech in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the words used. I know how to tie a Square Knot. I can write a Hello World program in BASIC. I know what a Fnord is. See, I know a few things, but nothing, really, of any importance, and nothing, really, that would convince you that I am qualified in any way to write intelligently about Serious Writing Topics. The fact that I’ve published a few literary gems doesn’t mean much, if you consider some of the crap that gets published these days—not just published, but the crap that wins awards. I don’t have any advanced degrees and I’ve rarely won an argument, usually descending to physical threats after about five minutes of stuttering impotence; I haven’t published any scholarly papers on the subject of writing and I’m not making millions through my art. So, there’s really no reason to pay any attention to me, is there? On this subject, I mean. If you need an essay on why a six-pack is good breakfast fare, I’m your man.

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From The Inner Swine

From the June Issue of The Inner Swine

Pig In Shit #55: WOULD NOT JOIN ANY CLUB That Would Have Someone Like Me for a Member

AH, to be young again. Not really. I’d saw my own leg off before I went back in time to relive some of my younger years. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great childhood, a fun adolescence, and a fun and educational college experience. My first job was filled with drunken, Melrose Place-style drama, and my mid-to-late 20s were a blast. I enjoyed my youth, friends, and as a result I am pop-eyed horrified at any thought of traveling back to a time when I still thought a mullet was a good idea[1].

No, I’ve always been pretty happy with whatever my age is at the moment. When I was ten, I liked being ten—I thought the lack of responsibility and the ability to run at full-on supersonic speeds for hours at a time was pretty cool. I used to win all the races in my neighborhood and even though I couldn’t hit worth shit because of still-undiscovered farsightedness, I ran fast and so always got picked in wiffle ball just to be a designated runner. I loved being ten. When I was sixteen, I’d gotten fat and dopey, sure, and I was wearing a pair of glasses so large and thick they occasionally set my hair on fire when I wasn’t paying attention out in the sun, but I still liked being sixteen. I could drive, for one, had recently discovered alcohol, which would of course turn into the second most important love affair of my life, and I had a group of friends who made me laugh constantly. When I was twenty, I was rocking college, and even though I’d temporarily given up booze and didn’t get laid nearly as much as I’d expected (movies, in short, had lied to me), I still had a great time. When I was twenty-five, I’d come into my own, spending most nights in a bar getting drunk with friends, and finally able to afford things because of my tiny publishing industry salary[2].

A few years later I got married, bought a house, and sold a novel.

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