A few years ago I wanted to challenge myself a little with my zine project, so I decided that the next issue’s theme would be minutiae and then I decided that the issue would eschew formal articles and just be a stream-of-consciousness examination of the minutiae of my life. I think it kind of worked. So, here’s the entire issue of Volume 11, Issue 3 of The Inner Swine, which published in September, 2005. It’s about 25,000 words written by a guy I no longer am.
Minutiae. I am standing on the corner of 30th street and 7th avenue, desperate for coffee. I’m here just about every weekday, on my way to work, and I buy my coffee from a very pleasant Arabic man in a cart. I like his coffee, and he’s incredibly friendly. For the past ten years I have bought all my coffee from these sorts of carts in New York City, and the coffee is always good, the carts always owned by Arabic men, and these Arabic men are always very friendly. I’ve been in other cities that have no equivalent to the coffee cart on the street, places where you have to purchase your coffee from someplace horrible, like Starbucks, or Au Bon Pain or something. That’s not civilization. That’s corporate domination. What this country needs is more Arabic men selling cheap but delicious coffee out of metal carts.
I stand in line at the cart and let the city push past me for a while. I imagine it very likely that Mr. Coffee Cart, whose name I have never tried to learn (we call each other ‘sir’ and ‘my friend’), has more money and lives in better style than me. Generally, it is safe to assume this about anyone in the street, since I have a distinct lack of ambition when it comes to money—it’s just too exhausting to actually work for any—but with the coffee cart guys I think it’s painfully true: Here are people who have traveled far from their homeland and make their living hustling, working hard, and persevering. I barely wake up in the morning and generally spend my days at work scheming to leave early and putting more time and energy into avoiding work than I would put into just giving in and performing the duties of my job. But actually performing my duties would be a form of surrender, and that I can never countenance.
Every day—and I mean, every fucking day—some yahoo decides that the line at the coffee cart could not possibly apply to him, and he or she tries to cut to the front. They are always quickly punished by civilized society.
Coffee in hand, I walk the remaining block to my job. This area of Manhattan is unattractive and kind of depressing, filled with wholesale storefronts, grubby little groceries, and faux-hip restaurants. Too many people, and the closest decent bookstore (Skyline Books) is about 15 blocks away. Any place in this world that is fifteen Manhattan-blocks away from a bookstore of any value is not, in my opinion, civilization. So the one block from the train station to the job is kind of depressing—though not as depressing as the fifteen-block walk I endure most days, swimming upstream against the shitkickers to Skyline Books.
Ah, the shitkickers. Shitkickers are everywhere. I know that the term shitkicker originally meant a hayseed, but I don’t really use it that way. I use shitkicker as an overall term for the mass of dumb, badly dressed, and loudly ignorant people around me. I have immense faith in the intelligence of humanity, but sometimes you look around you, especially in New York, and it’s hard to believe that the people flowing by you have much going on by way of an inner life. Life is pretty much always an uphill battle against the downward flow of shitkickers. Of course, shitkicker is a mass term only; A huge roiling mass of humanity quickly degenerates into shitkickerism, but when you separate them all out they’re usually decent fellows and I probably wouldn’t dislike them. or at least not all of them.
I work in one of those aging office buildings, a rat’s warren of modular office space, designed to be completely emptied, ripped clean, every time a tenant leaves, and filled with new cube material and cheap furniture to begin the process anew. Everything about the building indicates it’s temporary nature, the whole place just reeks of anonymity and transience. Everything seems vaguely in disrepair, everything seems aged and pockmarked by hard use. The plumbing creaks, the carpets are thin and worn, the walls scuffed. No one wants to bother upgrading or repairing, not in any serious way, because we’re all gonna be out of here before too long, and eventually the Lords of Manhattan will tear this ugly building down and replace it with a brand-new modular office building, and begin the process anew.
If I’ve been especially organized and clear-minded, I’ve remembered to go to my PO Box in the morning and collect whatever treats my faceless zine-friends have for me, for morning reading. My memory is getting worse and worse—a consequence, I guess, of age and the millions of brain cells I have lost both to natural cell death and my occasionally life-threatening consumption of booze. I’m heading towards a cheerful, brightly lit future where I will be the crazy old man down the block who goes out to get the mail every morning in his underpants, because he has completely forgotten to wear pants. Or perhaps that will just be a sly ruse in order to live my dream of a pantsless life. Ha!
At any rate, I get to my desk, take the lid off my coffee, and go through my PO Box prizes:
Kris (& Lola!) sent me a nice postcard (which is fast becoming the medium of choice for TIS correspondence): ‘I have to tell you that “closer in my heart to thee” was amazing. I’m no literary critic or anything but nice work. Things are heating up over here and it has not rained in this town in 3 months. Ah yes, the smell of sour armpits and hot rubbish! Spanish summer is just around the corner!‘
This should be the template for all TIS correspondence: Praise for my genius, followed immediately with a discussion of sweaty armpits.
Holy shit, Vincent Voelz sent me a new Breakfast! (http://laplace.compbio.ucsf.edu/~voelzv/breakfast/index.html) and included this fine review of TIS: ‘If you’ve never heard of this zine before, sit up straight and take note. TIS is consistently entertaining and engaging, suffering no loss in quality one might expect for a zine published so frequently. I would go so far as to call his work ‘literary’, such a developed craft is his. Each time a new issue come in the mail, I quickly abscond to the bathroom, where I usually have a small stack of past issues sitting in the newspaper rack. (In Jeff’s honor, I save reading these stories for long and/or particularly painful bowel movements.) Why, let’s take a look, shall we? I have no less than 8 issues sitting there, and these are from only the past two years. Incredible! . . . It all adds up to a concoction more powerfully addictive than a crack-glazed Krispy Kreme.’
Rock on. I was never happier than when I opened my PO Box, cleared away the cobwebs, and found a new Breakfast. It’s one of those zines that comes out rarely enough I worry that it’s stopped publishing, and when a new one appears I am made happy.
From the someone-doesn’t-get-the-fucking-joke-dept: I was starting to worry that I was losing my edge after the last few reviews from maximumrocknroll were a little on the bland side, more or less settling for calling TIS mediocre, but my faith has been restored by this humorless little gem from #265 (MMR, $4/iss, $22/6 issue sub, $36/12 issue sub, PO Box 460760, San Francisco, CA 94146-0760; www.maximumrocknroll.com, mrr@maximumrocknroll.com): ‘At least Jeff admits he’s arrogant. That’s more than I can say. I would more likely classify this kind of writing as contrived arrogance, a showy version of insulting other people’s intelligence to seem smarter. The kind of writing that hits you in the place you just got hit last week, reintroduces the bruise you were nursing carefully and makes you hate life that much more. The most offensive writing this time is the essay called ‘The Inner Swine Guide to Living on the Street.’ . . .I don’t know about you guys, but whenever someone postulates about how easy life on the street is without ever mentioning what to do when you are being attacked by the police I want to kick them in the nads. The rest of the zine is what you might expect: Stories about being a privileged fuck followed by complaints about the free market economy (Julia Booz Ullrey).‘
THE PRIVILEGED FUCK SEZ: If you can defeat my Kung Fu and successfully kick me in the nads, I will give you five dollars.
Old friend and lifetime subscriber Dan Sills sent us this intriguing email: ‘Dear Editor: It recently occured to me that every single thing in the known Universe has, in composite, the same set of ingredients and outgredients. This is is a very large composite set. What scares me is the possibility that the FDA will mandate a description of outgredients on our personal-care products. Why? Because, on occasion, while showering, I like to count how many breaths it takes me to verbalize every word, number and alpha-numeric string on the shampoo bottle. If they list outgredients, I fear that I might faint or, worse yet, run out of hot water. Of course, it will likely never come to this since in order to keep the shampoo bottle tractable in size, manufacturers may need to resort to very small font, to wit: the font will be too small to read without the help of a magnifying lens, yet the lens will likely fog over or at least get too wet to see through, which means my days of reading every word on the bottle are over.’
You can easily see that Dan is much smarter than me, which is of course indicative of my readership as a whole. Trying to live up to Dan’s expectations, I responded:
‘I once took a shower, and did not enjoy it. Since then I have exclusively relied on Roman-style oil scraping for personal hygiene. As a result, I have no idea what you are describing here. It sounds terrible.‘
See? Corresponding with The Inner Swine is a deeply rewarding and educational experience. Now mail me some dollar bills.
Old friend Motel Todd (check out some of his work at www.anti-heroart.com) emailed us as well, bless him: ‘I just finished up the latest Swine on writing. You hit the nail on the head Jeff Sommers[sic]. Oh, the guy posing as you selling cheap gas at the freeway underpasses turned out to be some lobbiest working for a PAC. He’s under investigation and out on bail as far as I know. Anyway, my favorite part was the deep thoughts on poetry. I’ve made a total of $19 doing a poety reading sometime in the 90s. I had to stop going when I simply didn’t have the time or funds to join every political organization from PETA to STRR (Save the Rug Rats). What finally tore it for me was when some guy started reading Rush lyrics in lieu of actual poetry. I broke into a rage and was dragged off. The rest is rather hazy. Adios, mi amigo de Nuevo Jersey.‘
I politely asked Todd if he would loan me five of his nineteen dollars, but he refused. Which just seems selfish, you ask me.
Androo Robinson of Ped Xing fame (2000 NE 42nd Ave. #303, Portland, OR 97213; http://www.leekinginc.com/pedxing) sent me a nice postcard wherein he wrote: ‘‘wont’ means custom, usage, habit, whereas ‘want’ means lack, shortage, need. [see TIS Vol. 11, Issue 1, pg. 7, bottom third of the page.] I’d happily write this off as a typo were it not for the fact that it happened TWICE in one sentence! I point this out for two reasons: one, for the irresistable charm of being a snarky asshole, and two, to illustrate an addendum to one of your themes in this issue—there’s nothing a writer hates more than another writer…EXCEPT a friggin’ EDITOR. Another devilishly delightful read, you insufferable fuck. Thanks! PS: Oh, and just to guarantee publication, here’s your name FIVE TIMES! Jeff! Jeff! Jeff! Jeff! Jeff!‘
THE INSUFFERABLE FUCK SEZ: I swear on my childhood pet’s grave that I know the difference between want and wont and have no idea how that error got in there. Spellcheck has failed me again! No, really. I swear. The charm of being a snarky asshole is irresistible and its a costume I’ve often worn myself, no no hard feelings against Androo, who’s very talented.
Wred Fright of ULA and drinkdrankdrunk fame (www.wredfright.com) sent us $5 and this note: ‘Thanks for the new Swine! I thought your Rules of Polite Society was your best ever. It’s good to know that you can take suicide, self-loathing, and alcoholism to new levels thematically. Hey, how about an all-fiction issue of The Swine sometime, like The Atlantic or The New Yorker does? Anyway, here’s $5 in pity money. I’m sure there’s a bar somewhere in Hoboken where you can get more than one drink for that, and if you sell your pants to the bartender maybe you’ll get another couple after too.‘
Bastard! I don’t need your pity. But I will accept your money. Wred has actually overpaid us by about $50 over the years, but I ain’t giving any of it back. And, sadly, I don’t think anyone would pay me good money for my pants; they’re a little ripe. Finally, as for the suggestion of an all-fiction issue, I don’t know how well that would fly, but I suspect that the answer is like a lead zeppelin, and humbly point y’all to Fiction from The Inner Swine 1995—2002, available from me for $3, postage included.
Robert J. Zani wrote us another extremely lengthy letter we barely had the literacy to get through: ‘Another excellent work. . .I carefully read your call for a ‘complex and extensive disinformation campaign, that, sadly, begins with killing everyone on my mailing list. Unless someone has a better idea’. As a famous American said not so long ago, ‘Bring it on!’ I live in a concrete and steel mansion with 504 rooms, 504 ‘ baths (beat that!) and 850 employee guards, some sober, who have explicit orders to shoot to kill any trespassers. It has a double chain link fence topped with ribbon wire, alarms, and several guard towers. I have scores of slaves as groundskeepers. You are the biggest sissy in New Jersey if you don’t make good on your threat!. . .Thank you for not mentioning the Michael Jackson trial. . .Overall the issue was excellent and I liked the story. Sort of a Bernard Goetz thing about Rules. As I have said your writing shows talent and flow. I have trouble with your story endings, which may be just me.‘
No, not just you, Robert, by a long shot. Many people have complained about my endings, most recently my agent and every publisher she’s gotten a rejection from, but fuck it: The stories end like they end. There can be no other ending, because it doesn’t exist.
As for Robert’s mansion, I am intrigued, and would like to purchase it. I wonder if the Great State of Texas[1], which is paying Robert’s rent, would sell it to me.
I am sometimes conscious of starting to resemble Leon Trotsky as I get older; I’m not sure if I should be disturbed by this or not. On the one hand, Trotsky is famous and still remembered sixty years after his murder, which is good. On the other hand, he was murdered brutally by the NKVD, his skull crushed by an icepick. Which is bad. If anyone is paying attention to such requests, please note that I do not want to die by having my skull crushed by an icepick. Thank you.
Because of this creeping Trotskyism, the ravages of time have been on my mind of late. I’ve been working a ‘real’ job—a nine-to-five desk job—for over ten years now. I don’t feel very different, but sometimes when I see pictures of myself from college or before I can tell with just a glance that I have had several gallons of vital bodily fluids sucked out of me by life, leaving me a dessicated shadow of what I once was. Beyond the general decrepitude, there are a lot of strange physical transformations, most notably my hair, which has developed a strange, lopsided ‘fin’ that I cannot eliminate. No haircut is powerful enough to destroy the fin. It’s like my hair is now, suddenly, genetically programmed to just bunch up in a weird way and resist any attempt to tame it.
So this is how I show up for work everyday: Underdressed, severely overcaffeinated, and with crazyman hair. Somehow I have remained employed lo these many years.
Like a lot of writers or artists, I labored for a long time under the impression that my day job was a temporary thing, that as soon as I sold my novel to the highest bidder and then let my minions negotiate the film rights I would walk away, whistling a cheery tune, and spend the rest of my life oppressing the workers. And when I say a long time, I mean I labored under this impression until about four minutes ago. It’s easy, after all, to remain employed: As Woody Allen said, showing up is 90% of success. Literally. The people who get fired from low- and mid-level desk jobs in this country are morons. They don’t show up, sleep at their desks, and generally take absolutely no precautions to hide their unAmerican activities from their bosses. If you show up on time, stay the whole eight hours, and actually accomplish whatever tasks you’ve been given, well then: The chances of your being fired are close to zero, not counting corporate motherfuckery and downsizing, which probably doesn’t quite count as ‘getting fired’. So someone like me can probably remain employed at a low level for a very long time. And thank goodness, as I have almost no skills.
What it boils down to is back in 1994 my first employer offered me a laughably low salary to do a boring job, and I was probably the only person in America willing to work for such little money. Me and TIS Proofreader [redacted], that is, as she and I started out in the same job. And since then, I have remained, like a mold, resistant to any cleaning or direct sunlight, always sending out new tendrils into the darkened, paper supply-rich corners of corporate America. I have managed to remain employed for so long, of course, because details don’t matter to people. Details matter to machines, which is why you’ll get audited by the IRS someday. But people only really care about the big picture. We’re all too lazy for details.
I mean, details are boring. The deeper you focus down into the layers of stuff that make up our reality, the less coherent they are—the finer the grain the less sense it makes on a macro-scale, until eventually you’re in the quantum realm where nothing makes any fucking sense at all, where particles don’t behave like particles and no one can simultaneously know the speed and position of anything. Things always get better, more interesting, as you rise up and the details coalesce into a coherent pattern, something you can take in. The Big Picture. You break a novel down to letters and punctuation side by side, or a movie down to individual frames, but where’s the fun in that?
Of course, if you broke down The Inner Swine to letters and punctuation, you’d probably discover it’s all just complex anagrams of cursewords.
And if you do perform such a close examination, you quickly find that there is a point of diminishing returns with details. If you break a book down to several short parts, you might gain some wisdom about the book’s structure and ordering. If you further break it down and study individual scenes, there may be more insight there, and even looking at individual sentences and—possibly—phrases can be educational. But individual words? Unlikely. Letters? Impossible. You hit a point where the number of details, the amount of minutiae piling up, ceases to be helpful or enlightening and instead becomes obfuscating.
People have an instinctive distrust of details beyond this point. Small print causes our eyes to glaze over. We want to hear the big picture, cut to the chase, and not wallow in endless streams of largely-useless data. If you’re me, you’ve feigned seizures in order to avoid such things as reading tax form instructions, listening to 401(k) presentations at your job, or, for that matter, learning how to actually perform your job. You can predict pretty accurately how this will affect me as time goes on: There’s me, wearing nothing but a tattered bathrobe and clutching a half-empty bottle of schnapps to my breast when they come to evict me, because I’m penniless, and waiting patiently outside is an ambulance and two men with a huge butterfly net because at some point I was tricked into donating my living body to science via a clause buried in the small-print of my 401(k) forms.
Oh yes, I think we can all easily imagine that.
The fact that details lodged deeply in small-print are routinely used to trick people doesn’t demonstrate the value of details, it actually just proves that at a certain level, details are useless to us. Swamped in a deluge of details, the human brain just shuts off and stops paying any attention. Anyone who has found themselves transformed from a relatively alert child to a pool of warm spittle during a high-school history class knows what that feels like.
Of course, we live in a wondrous world where computers now allow us to deal with more details than ever before, making information overload a common affliction, and allowing the truly spectacular piling up of details all around us, like walls, because computers exist capable of picking through billions of bits in seconds, making the details manageable. . .to the computers. To us, sad, often intoxicated people treading water in this ocean of bullshit, it’s getting harder and harder to understand what’s going on. Most people don’t understand their tax forms, most people have little comprehension of the law codes or the way our government functions. It’s not because we’re stupid—well, certainly all of us—it’s because the level of detail has simply became so fine and so deep that you can only get down into the topsoil before you start to suffocate and need to pull yourself back out, gasping and white-faced.
Yes, this is what I think about when I’m supposed to be doing my job.
###
Aside from the fun of watching yourself melt like the goddamn Wicked Witch of the West, only in slow motion, over decades, there’s also the fun of not only having your memory turn into a wad of chewed gum, but being aware of it. I am slowly degenerating into a form of plant, a process that will, sadly, take about 50 more years to complete, during which time I will no doubt produce increasingly less coherent and less interesting issues of The Inner Swine (and I can hear you bastards who are already commenting that we’re already there—very fucking funny). Right now the memory loss results in some hilarity (—Uh, Jeff, are you late for work agai—GOOD GOD MAN, where are your trousers?’) and occasional suffering (‘Are you sure this is our anniversary? I could have sworn it was some time in December. Oh, wait, that’s Christmas I’m thinking of. The church attendance confused me.’) Nothing too damaging—yet. And still, I am often dismayed by the details that are being lost to the mists of time every day.
For example, right now I am reading The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, another in a long line of vain attempts to plug up the huge, gaping holes of ignorance I carry around with me. The book is a cascade of detail—statistics, names, dates—that I doubt I could have completely absorbed even in my heyday, when my brain was still lukewarm fresh from the oven and percolating efficiently. The fact that I can’t remember names and dates twenty pages after I read them makes me look around at the thousands of books I’ve read in my lifetime and wonder if I can remember anything significant about any of them. And the disturbing thing is, I probably can’t remember much about many of them.
For some of them, of course, this isn’t surprising or even undesirable, considering their general quality. When I was a young lad, I read an awful lot of fantasy books, inspired by early corruption by Tolkien and Narnia. At a certain point I was buying anything that had a sword on the cover, devouring books like junk food and getting about as much mental nutrition from them as I would from reading a candy wrapper. I pick up a dusty paperback of something like The Ring of Allaire and I have absolutely no memory of it, aside from some vague images. The question is, if a Leprechaun named McEgo were to appear on my shoulder and whisper alluringly ‘Eh, would ye be wanting a potion to restore yer memory, you scurvy English dog?’ would I be advised to turn him down rather than suffer a complete memory restoration of the plot and reading experience of The Ring of Allaire?
The answer, which I grunt out to McEgo every evening when he appears—always, for some reason, after I’ve had my fifth or sixth Bourbon Martini (my own invention!)—is lord yes. These are details that I do not want restored. These are details that have been flattened into the background noise of my experience for a reason, to preserve what’s left of my sanity. Which is precious little, considering the whole disturbing presence of McEgo in my life.
The price to be paid for this sweet oblivion, of course, is that lots of details I wish I could remember are washed away as well. For every Ring of Allaire that I’m just as happy to forget (the question of why I don’t get rid of books I can’t and don’t want to remember is one for the ages, and stronger minds than my own will have to tackle that one) there is a book I want to remember, but probably won’t. This is why I can never throw books away, because books I read just five years ago have melted into the goopy mass of my memories from five years ago—a vague melange of beer, baseball, and video games—and if I want to have any hope of ever resurrecting those memories, I need to hang onto the books themselves. There is no other choice. This even goes for the books I don’t much want to remember, because if I forget all about The Ring of Allaire, how can I use The Ring of Allaire ironically here in this issue of the zine? Think, dammit, think! Why do I have to do all the thinking around here!?
I’ve always been slightly obsessed—if you can be slightly obsessed about anything—with recording my own existence. This tendency has only gotten worse in recent years as it becomes increasingly clear to me that no one else is going to start recording my existence any time soon. Every now and then I notice someone following me around, observing me, and I get my hopes up that perhaps the Illuminati have finally noticed me and are working to preserve my brilliance for future generations:
VOICEOVER: In this covertly videotaped moment, we see the infamous zine publisher Somers in early 2005, six months before he published his groundbreaking samizdat “How to Make Potable Liquor from Fruit Juice and Saliva.” Note how the great intellectual appears to be nodding off at his desk. This is actually an exciting moment of rebellion, an example of a man who refused to be tied down by societies rules, in this case specifically the rule that all citizens must perform some useful function in society.
But it almost always turns out to be another undercover cop, or a collections agent, or, most often, a concerned citizen trying to covertly alert me to my state of pantslessness. So it’s left to me to make some sort of record of my existence: I keep a datebook where I write down the major events of each day (far too often, this amounts to WENT TO WORK CAME HOME), I publish this zine in the vain hope that one of you will collect them and preserve them and hand them to our future alien overlords as an example of human culture worthy of preservation, and I keep the books I read. It’s bizarre, I know, but in a way the books are proof that I was here, or at least proof that I have existed for a certain period of time and wasn’t invented yesterday by a superpowerful computer creating a virtual world for all us shaved house monkeys. Which is silly, since any supercomputer capable of inventing me lock stock and barrel is probably capable of inventing a huge literary history and a bunch of vague synopses, which might be why that’s all I can ever remember about books. ‘Uh, Crime and Punishment? Yeah, I read that. . .I think. . .some Russian guy gets punished, right? Oh man, I’m drunk.’
So that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? The details are only useful up until a certain point, but the details are also what make up our lives, in the end. Moments. Seconds. They add up to days, and months, and periods in our lives, but it all comes down to each fragment of a second that you’re aware and taking in information, acting on it, analyzing results and consequences. Details make up who we are, who we were, and what happened in-between, but we’re so easily confused by too many details, and we’re so badly equipped to sort these details into a coherent picture.
###
At lunch I usually take a walk down to the bookstores I can find—a big Barnes & Nobel and my beloved Skylight Books—and pore over future acquisitions. I rarely buy anything from B&N, not out of any anti-corporate sentiment, but mainly because I am a cheap bastard. Why pay $21 for books when I can buy them for $1? The great thing about Skylight, too, is that the books that turn up there aren’t the bestsellers of the moment that the media is trying to convince you are ‘must-reads’, they’re simply remnants of the past. It’s really a crapshoot: Sometimes I find a whole bunch of interesting books for cheap, sometimes it seems like the only people selling used books to Skylight are romance lovers or cheap crime paperback people—the dirty bastards. But hey, when you’re cheap as hell, you pay the price.
And I am cheap. I always think of myself as middle-class, and I’m certainly not rich, but then again one thing that I’ve learned is that everything—everything—is relative. To someone else, maybe I am rich. I mean, I know I’m good-looking, and charming, but rich never crosses my mind, because, in my infantile concept of the world, rich people wear tuxedoes all the time and use hundred-dollar bills to light their cigars, and I only rarely do those things. I mean, rich people can’t possibly work a soul-chilling desk job for a five-digit salary while sorting through a pile of bills and saving, incrementally, for a house. Rich people have bums kidnapped off the street and flown to their private wildlife reserve so they can hunt the MOST DANGEROUS GAME.
But, of course, to someone working three minimum-wage jobs and still getting evicted, I guess I would seem rich. The very fact that I can blow extra cash on used books instead of using the library means, to some people, that I have more money than I should. It’s always the details of things that tell the story: There is no constant.
The thing is, even knowing all the details about someone and their situation doesn’t necessarily tell you anything, because those details have to be interpreted. They have to be filtered through your politics, worldview, and direct experience. Details by themselves, divorced from interpretation, are useless, lifeless, and hollow. I walk down Seventh Avenue at lunch and I can notice a hundred details about each and every person I pass, and know nothing more about them in the final analysis. I’d have a large pile of data, and big messes of data always look impressive—the same way being able to drink an entire bottle of Old Grandad without taking a breath, the only hint of intense physical effort being my hand pounded rhythmically on the bar as I imbibe, is impressive but really doesn’t mean or accomplish much.
The problem is, we’ve been convinced that under the heading knowledge is power the more data we have, the more details, the more minutiae, the better-informed we are. This really only works with Americans, of course, bred from birth to worship their own opinions as messages from Yahweh itself, the end result being that once we’ve been fed a statistic and have come to regard it as our own, it instantly takes on the hue and smell of Fact and becomes part of our unshakable personal worldview. At least until the next update on Fox News giving revised figures. Very often the more information you have, the less you understand a given subject while your impression of your knowledge increases. The end result? A lot of self-satisfied assholes such as myself who think because they know when the Battle of Hastings was fought we therefore understand British, Norman, and Anglo Saxon history.
As I walk during lunch, I can’t help but note a tsunami of details, an avalanche of minutiae. That the squat, mustard yellow building across the street from my office has the inscription The Manheim Building just under its roof. The Indian-looking beggar who is always stationed outside our office building, holding up a felt hat in supplication and muttering, gives the strong impression that he’s praying, but the pack of unfiltered cigarettes in his back pocket hints that he rides the subway home cursing under his breath. The fat, red-faced men who wear furs and try to direct people to the local fur stores wear different coats every day, because they can’t themselves afford a fur coat. I note that the security guards at Barnes and Nobel on 23rd street rotate the doors they cover every day, so you never say hello to the same one on consecutive days. There were, for months, two copies of my novel Lifers on the shelves in that B&N, for mysterious reasons, and then one day, there was only one; did someone buy one? Did the store make the bizarre decision to remove just one copy of a four-year-old novel by an obscure author? Either possibility is equally unlikely, I think.
What do these details gain me? Nothing. Without intelligent interpretation, they mean nothing.
And the hell of it is, sometimes you apply intelligent interpretation—well, interpretation, at least—and you actually end up further from the truth, because you’re either not as smart as you think you are or, in my case, you’re generally a lot more drunk than you suspect you are. For example: The other day The Duchess and I drove up to Jersey City to visit the Vitas, who are currently being held hostage by their 6-week old daughter Grace. TIS Staff Artist Jeof Vita at least is able to leave the apartment every day in order to attend work. Misty, having been transformed into an organic food machine, is trapped all the time. TIS Security Chief Ken West was sent in ahead of me, of course, to scope out the place for booby traps and gauge the mental state of my old friends, because I feared the Baby Madness. He came out after a few minutes shaking his head.
‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ he said. ‘The good news is, there’s Scotch. The bad news is, Jeof’s already gotten into it.’
‘Implement Emergency Escape Plan X!’ I shouted. For a moment, nothing happened. The Duchess reached out to rub my arm consolingly.
‘Honey,’ she said, guiding me towards the Vitas’ apartment, —How many times do I have to tell you that none of these ‘plans’ exist, and that you actually have no secret underground empire?’
I smiled and patted her hand. ‘Of course. Sorry.’ I leaned over to Ken. ‘Execute Emergency Liquidation of The Duchess plan Y!’ I whispered.
Ken nodded curtly. ‘It may take some time. She’s crafty.’
Such is my power.
Inside we found Misty not nearly as terrified as I thought appropriate, sitting calmly while her husband wandered around with their daughter, Grace. Grace had a perpetual look of anxiety on her little face, which I thought appropriate for a tiny person looking up from a good nap only to see Jeof Vita’s hideous countenance beaming down at her. Grace was obviously very wise, and I immediately named her my Special Advisor on International Politics.
Naturally the sudden arrival of a baby prompted a great deal of talk about age, aging, and the Good Old Days, generally defined as the Days When You Could Drink Things Just to Find Out If They Would Intoxicate You and If You Ended Up in the Hospital It Was All By Way of Learnin’. Now that we all had babies and mortgage payments and so such experimentation was frowned upon, and all that was left us were the ashes of our former selves to sift through on evenings such as this. A spirited discussion of past exploits sprang up, and I was quickly alarmed when all of my memories seemed to be completely wrong—I had a head filled with details, lots of minutiae concerning my past, but as I discussed it with people directly involved with said past—my fault for not following Comrade Stalin’s lead and having them all liquidated immediately—it became obvious that my interpretation of these details was woefully incorrect:
Jeof Vita: Remember that time we drank that really cheap bottle of vodka and I got so sick?[2]
Ken West: You kept begging us not to force you to drink any more. We refused, of course.
ME: Yeah! And then those ninjas came and I had to save you all with my superior Kung Fu!
Jeof: —-
Ken: —-
Jeof: So. . .anyway, that reminds me of the time we played Manhunt in the park and Ken got tired of hiding and just went home without telling anybody and we spent hours searching for him, terrified he’d been killed.
Ken: Hey! I’d been hiding for like an hour! What was I supposed to do—everyone was hiding.[3]
ME: I do remember that, but I always thought he’d been driven off by the Ninjas who were searching for me.
Jeof: —-
Ken: —-
ME: Make fun of me, you bastards? Ken, execute emergency liquidation plan Z!
Ken: Uh, that would include liquidating myself.
ME: Idiot! Liquidate yourself after everyone else!
Having details doesn’t really mean anything—details can be rearranged, arranged incorrectly, or simply misunderstood. Reality—especially past reality—is meaningless, it’s a point of view. It’s possible—though not guaranteed—to observe real-time, present existence and come to an agreement, at least in general, about what’s happening—about what’s real at that moment. But the past, which lives only in memory, is lost to us. You have a photograph. Of a lake. In black and white. And you show it to your friend and say, I was there, and it was a hot day. See, there I am in the background, waving. And your friend says, no, it was cold, freezing, I was there too. And you say, no, you’re not in the picture. And they say, yes, I’m in the lake, that was the year I drowned.
Ken West glanced nervously around the table. ‘Anyone got any booze we can give him? He’s got that wild look in his eyes again. Last time he looked like that, you guys had to have the whole bathroom replaced.’
Jeof shook his head. ‘No liquor; the baby keeps trying to drink it. Through Misty. Ask him to tell one of his long, boring stories. That usually puts him—and us—to sleep.’
‘Brilliant!’ Ken turned to me with a look of cherubic innocence. ‘Tell us a story.’
I assumed a solemn expression. ‘Very well. Settle back and hear the tale of
THE GOD OF EAST BAKER STREET
by Jeffrey Somers
He appeared out of the shadows, reigned for three weeks, and then vanished.
###
East Baker Street was a quiet row of old brownstones, three blocks off of Kennedy Avenue, terminating in a dead-end. The trees were tall and lush, the street was wide and rarely driven. In its three blocks there was a grocery store, a liquor store, a video store, and a butcher. The people who lived there were mostly young single professionals, with the exception of a few retired lifers holding onto rent-controlled apartments. It was quiet, neat, and, in the middle of summer, stiflingly hot.
A dozen or so of its residents were lounging on their front steps in the waning twilight of a Thursday evening. A few more were hanging off of their fire escapes like wilted plants, swooning. Occasionally pedestrians stomped by, sweating. The streetlights had come on, and the buzz of distant traffic on Kennedy had lessened, though it never really ceased. The Ice Cream Truck had set up permanent base camp on one corner, directly under the bright cone of a streetlight, a small, persistent crowd of people milled around near it.
Between 465 and 467 East Baker Street there was an indentation, not quite an alley but deeply shadowed. A six forty-five in the evening, he appeared, a tall humanoid in shining black armor. A darker hole, pitch black and rectangular, disappeared behind him just as he whirled around with a hum of hydraulics.
‘Une,’ he spat, his voice electronically filtered and resembling a dead dog speaking in tongues.
His armor was on continuous suit of black material, without any visible seams or joints. It gave like vinyl and glowed dully in the streetlight. He was seven foot tall and broad, and it covered him featurelessly from toe to head, which was on oval shape, smooth and seemingly without eye or breathing apertures. In fact, there seemed to be no orifices at all, not even any way to get into the armor. He appeared to be a featureless black shape.
‘Uk rallen ta ne perrinal?‘ he barked inquisitively at the stone before him, cocking his head like a large bird. ‘Mun akkath.‘
Minute electronics humming, he turned and stepped away from the shadows into the light of East Baker Street. For a moment he stood on the sidewalk looking around.
A young man dressed in torn-up denim shorts and a red T-shirt sporting deep sweat stains, stopped suddenly a few feet away. ‘Hey!’ he shouted reflexively, staring at the hulking humanoid shape. He raised his hand to point at it. ‘Holy ”
‘Mek nannith!‘ the black-armored figure snapped, whipping a closed fist up, aimed at the young man. There was a blurring, a rippling of air, and without another noise the young man sizzled away and crumbled to dust, fine and dry and immediately stirred by the hot wind of the evening.
‘Ekka elin ta,’ the black-armored man said, and a note of disgust managed to slip through the filtering. ‘Elin ta.‘
A quiet held East Baker Street in thrall; up and down the block people stared in mixed awe, fear, and fascination. In this window of silence, the Man in Black planted his hands on his hips and looked around. As his blank gaze passed over people they animated. A few ran inside; most, however, seemed to ignore the fact that a man had become residue on their sidewalk and approached that end of the block slowly.
“Was that John Samal?’ an old man asked, his voice tremulous and unsteady.
“Sure was,’ someone replied. —What is that?’
The Man in Black turned slowly, seeming to examine them all as they circled around him. His posture was easy and fluid.
‘Panna nu piken alla menah urot?‘ he barked. ‘Menah urot?‘ He waited and then held out both hands. ‘Men-ah-ur-rot?‘
‘What’s he saying? Sounds like gibberish,’ the old man demanded, looking around.
‘That’s what it is, all right,’ someone replied.
‘Elin ta,‘ the Man in Black said, putting a jet-black hand up to his head, appearing to be scratching his head. ‘Ne durril elin ta.‘
A young woman in cutoff shorts and a halter top knelt down and picked up a handful of John Samal, sifting it through her fingers.
“Oh, man, that’s gross.’
The Man in Black glanced down and gave a start. ‘Mekka da nakel, elin ta posu!‘ his filtered voice screeched, and he whipped a hand towards her. She did not dissolve, however; she stiffened, and as the Man in Black raised his arm she rose into the air. ‘Elin ta posu,‘ He repeated.
‘Holy mother o’ god,’ a young man in an unbuttoned flannel shirt breathed into the silence. He looked up at the Man in Black. ‘Hey, man, what are you?’
‘Someone better call the cops, someone better tell them there’s been a murder,’ the old man said.
The man in the flannel shirt glanced at the fine dust of John Samal. ‘Hey, you want to antagonize this motherfucker?’
The Man in Black tilted his head, as if listening carefully. ‘Min alla nikka? Min tu mella? Aagh!‘
The last noise was a harsh sound, spoken just as the Man in Black threw up his hands in what appeared to be disgust, turned, and stalked away. A few feet beyond the knot of people, he paused and stood alone, arms crossed. The woman in the halter top remained suspended, stiffly, in the air. The others looked from the pile of dust to the woman and back again in strange, unexpected synchronicity, and then looked at the Man in Black, lost in thought. Slowly, they edged away from John Samal’s mortal remains and moved toward the Man in Black, trying to see what he was doing.
He noticed them, whirled with a snarl, and with a wave of his hand an invisible barrier erected itself between him and the residents. They pressed up against it, palms flat and faces pale. They traced it in a complete circle around him, felt along its bottom, and could find no gaps or faults. This information was passed around in whispers.
Within it, he sat down gracefully, watched them for a bit, and seemed to mutter to himself. The gawkers gawked, grew tired and left, and were replaced by new gawkers. By seven-thirty, lawn chairs had been pulled out and theories were put forth.
‘He’s an alien, is all.’
‘Is all? Man, that’s dumb. Look at him. He’s human.’
‘Just cause he got two arms and legs? Could be claws, or flippers. He could have scales, be a robot, under that suit.’
‘Suit? I thought it was his skin.’
‘Ain’t no alien.’
Everyone turned to face the old man in the plaid shorts and black socks. He was potbellied and wrinkled, unshaven and yellowed from use. His nose was bright red and he smelled exclusively of wine, the cheap stuff you got change of a dollar for.
‘Well, what is he, then?’
The old man eyed them carefully, sizing up his first captive audience in years. ‘He’s a demon, he is. Black like night, with the power of a devil in him. A demon.’
Everyone immediately lost their enthusiasm for the old man, and they turned away in disgust.
They did not notice the invisible wall fade away, and they did not notice the Man in Black stalking towards them until he began to shout at them. He had an arm extended, finger pointing outwards. The whir and buzz of his suit was loud and clear.
‘Bude ela neg rikk uk stan!‘ he shouted, pointing. ‘Piccel un arat eh uk stan!‘
Seeing him, the small crowd scattered, running in different directions. Most hid behind parked cars. The Man in Black watched them, and then shook his head. He reached up to his neck and with a click the portion covering his head disconnected, and he pulled it off, revealing a normal-looking human head, hair shaved close and pale skin glistening with sweat in the streetlights. ‘Moch ut nimmal crim,’ he spat in a weak, normal voice. ‘Picca elin ta.‘
They peered at him over hoods and trunks. They exchanged glances and slowly stood.
‘What d’ya suppose he’s saying?’
‘Maybe he’s hungry.’
###
They fed him, bringing out trays of leftovers and cans of beer. He ate seated on the front steps of 465 East Baker street, eying the crowd around him, grunting now and then but saying nothing. More people had come out, they formed a respectful semi-circle before him, occasionally glancing back at the floating woman, still stiffly suspended in the air.
‘Maybe we should ask him to let her down?’
‘Go ahead. I’ll bet you end up joining her.’
‘Naw, it ain’t like that. He’s human. He just don’t know what we’re about.’
Finally, a middle-aged man still wearing the shiny gray suit he’d worn to work that morning stepped forward, wringing his hands. The Man in Black glanced up in mid swallow, grunting a question and raising an eyebrow.
‘Uh, sir, please, could you, maybe, um, ah.’ He paused and gestured feebly at the suspended woman, and the Man in Black’s eyes tracked his gesture until he was staring at her.
‘Mintalin unno ka,‘ he said with a shrug, and she animated, hitting the ground with a thump.
‘Gross—oh,’ she said, and immediately began moaning.
‘Thank you,’ the man in the suit said, bowing his head and backing away.
‘Bune dal,‘ The Man in Black said, nodding once.
‘I think he even knew what you were saying, man.’
‘Shit, thank you ain’t so hard to figure out, kid.’
‘Like you know shit. I’ll bet he knows every god-damned word we say. I’ll bet he’s just laughing at us, talking to him like he was slow or something.’
‘Just keep him happy, I say. I don’t want to know what’ll happen if he’s pissed off at us. Might level a few fucking houses, might turn a few more of us into dust. And who the hell knows what else he’s got under that second skin.’
‘Got a point there. Doesn’t matter what he knows or not. Keep him happy.’
‘Aw, hell, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing this due oatmeal.’
‘Screw you. If my house gets blown up because he got hungry, I’m looking right at you.’
‘We should call the cops, man. Get the National Guard.’
‘You really think he’d have any problems with them?’
There was a moment of silence. The Man in Black glanced up at them.
‘Well, we could take turns feeding him.’
###
With some difficulty regarding the communication factor, the Black Man moved into the house at 453 East Baker Street. The owners, Mike and Ellen Carmichael, moved in with their next door neighbors. Tempers flared and some hard words were exchanged, but things were smoothed over out of fear that noise and disturbance might upset the Man in Black.
A schedule was set up for bringing him food, and many fevered late night meetings were held to discuss the stranger amongst them. Without realizing it, East Baker Street split into three factions concerning the Man in Black:
One considered him to be the best thing that had ever happened to them, and schemed to use the Man in Black for their own ends. These ends ranged from an eighty-four-year-old woman’s desire for a crime-free neighborhood to at least three plots for world domination.
The second, and much larger, group regarded the Man in Black as some sort of sign, and quietly welcomed him as a savior. A few of the more religious ones considered him an angel, some an alien, all expected him to lead them to better things. They had patience and fervor; they had been biding their time all their lives, in silence, and now they would finally see themselves vindicated.
Finally, a few of the residents also considered the Man in Black a sign, but of a decidedly unwelcome nature. Led by an old man named Leo Racken, this group was not shy about the word evil and were distressed that their neighbors housed and fed a demon. They met in Leo Racken’s dingy, uncleaned apartment, drank coffee and spoke in low tones. It was the most company Leo had had in years, and he was delighted.
As for the Man in Black, he entered the house at 453 East Baker Street and stayed in the living room. He spoke little, ate what was given him, and seemed to barely notice the people who came to him. One more person was disintegrated, a young boy named Timmy who had snuck in to see the Man in Black up close. He’d had the bad luck of waking him, and in surprise the Man in Black shot first and cursed unintelligibly later.
Timmy was not missed until the next day, and immediately Leo Racken and his cronies turned up on the front lawn, speaking out against the Man in Black for killing a child. The Man in Black did not appear, but a second crowd of people arrived to jeer and shout at Leo’s group, and a spirited shoving match ensued. Leo Racken was hit in the mouth and bloodied.
Standing across the street, two young men watched the brawl, leaning against a wall.
‘Which side do you root against,’ one asked laconically, ‘when both have god on their sides?’
‘I dunno,’ the other replied.
###
The Man in Black slipped into a hermitage, moving into a back room and not appearing when anyone was inside. His meals were left in the living room.
Outside, life ground to a halt. A dozen people quit their jobs, convinced one way or another that the Man in Black had ended their lives, in one sense, forever. They hung around waiting outside 453 East Baker Street, talking, watching. These were not members, really, of any faction. If anything could be said about them, it was that they were greatly amused by it all and didn’t much care how it ended, as long as they had an excuse to skip work.
Leo Racken and his fellow believers met daily with a clutch of avid angel-watchers to shout at each other outside 453. The shouting had begun as a spirited bout of bible-quoting mixed with the rare case of secret UFO report-quoting. When neither side could claim victory through interpretation and logic, this quickly degenerated into insults and name-calling, and just as quickly into threats. Occasionally Leo would threaten to kill the Man in Black, the ‘demon amongst us’ as he called him, and the other would jeer and dare him to try it.
‘He must be cast out, you can see that?’ Leo would shout, waving his thin and woeful arms about. ‘We’ve got to drive the devil from us with fire!’
‘Fire?’ his opponents replied. ‘You’d need a bunch of tanks and then we’d give you bad odds.’
For a week this went on, and through it all three meals a day were brought to the Man in Black’s living room, and the Man in Black did not emerge until there was no one about to see him. The only evidence that he emerged at all were the emptied trays left behind. Mostly the meals were taken care of by members of the Angelic faction, but a few of the cynics who didn’t care what he was took part because they wished to avoid any and all wholesale slaughter his inconvenience or discomfort might cause.
###
About a week and a half after the Man in Black’s appearance, several things happened all at once.
First, the Man in Black stopped taking meals. First one, then two and three trays collected in the living room, untouched. The door to the bedroom remained shut, and no one had enough courage to wait for him. As night fell speculation had reached a peak and warranted a special meeting of Leo Racken’s bible bunch, which in turn drew out their opposite numbers, to make fun and argue. Aside from being at night, this pair of gatherings didn’t seem to differ from those previous until blows landed and a fistfight erupted on the lawn of 453 East Baker Street.
While this remarkable battle went on, a few feet away someone broke into 453 East Baker Street and attempted to break the Man in Black out, in preparation for one of the plans for World Domination that had been hastily drawn up upon his arrival. They forced open a living room window and made their way in silently, creeping past stale food and flat beer. When they thrust the bedroom door open (ducking down to avoid any startled fire from the Man in Black) they found the room empty, quiet and dark. The Man in Black had left.
###
News spread slowly, what with the brawl going on and the intruder’s reluctance to admit why he’d been in 453 to begin with. As it spread, quiet crept up on the block again, except for the brawling factions outside 453, only made angrier by this.
The next day things had returned to normal. The Carmicheals moved back into their home nervously, and Leo Racken spent the whole day sitting in his quiet, dusty apartment, listening to the familiar silence and the endless looping monologue in his head.
The most disappointed of the residents, of course, were the disaffected and no longer amused cynics who now despaired of ever know what the Man in Black had been. They had ended their lives to wait and see, and now sat in sullen groups on the steps of their buildings, complaining.
‘Well,’ one said, brightening. ‘I suppose we ought to finally call the cops about that fellow Samal.’
THE END
I looked around at my audience. They were all soundly asleep. I stole two bottles of Rum and escaped out the bathroom window, cackling at my good fortune. It wasn’t until days—or perhaps weeks, my memory is not good here—that I was recaptured and forced back into work on this issue, with nothing but watery grog to keep the shakes away. I threatened to redact everyone out of my autobiography and personal history, but no one seemed to care. This is probably because most people have already asked to be redacted from anything TIS-related.
It’s true. Somehow, over the years, being associated with The Inner Swine has gone from surefire hipster cred to surefire terminated from your job and reviled by decent folk, because there’s been an explosion of people demanding that their names be removed from the web site of this crummy little zine. So far no one has asked that their name be removed from the print version, which would, of course, be impossible, but I suspect that’s coming.
Everyone seems to have the same reason for this request: Professional reputation. Apparently being associated with TIS is a smudge on anyone’s reputation, and people seeking employment live in constant fear that their potential employer will Google them and discover they were referred to in an article written in 1997 about Internet pornography, in which I depicted them as wearing Superman Underoos and drinking potato moonshine. When, exactly, TIS became something that threatened your reputation I’m not sure—it’s been a pretty weak-kneed zine since its inception. We don’t have CIA bugs tracking our revolutionary progress, we don’t have armies of kids ready to deface property in our name, and we don’t even have a subculture. I mean, The Inner Swine is literally the zine you find in someone’s guest toilet, flip through for ten minutes while you sweat and grunt, put back neatly in its pile, and never think of again.
What I’m saying is, the idea that someone is out there, Googling your name, and gets upset or worried because you’re associated with this zine is patently ridiculous. First of all, you’re assuming that people are Googling you, you arrogant fucko. Second of all, you’re assuming that your name being in the same zine as my stories of pathetic pantslessness and vague, apolitical dissatisfaction is somehow dangerous to your worldwide reputation, and finally, you think you have a worldwide reputation, you arrogant fucko.
Let’s examine this sad group of people, referred to from now on by the ominous name The Redacted.
THE REDACTED
Name: We’ll call him Petruchio.
Level of Involvement in TIS: Minimal.
Reason for Wanting Name Redacted from TIS: Was afraid it would harm his political aspirations. No, seriously.
Petruchio was the first person to ever request that their name be removed from TIS-connected materials, and I was a bit insulted, at first. I acquiesced to his request with ill humor, which may have had something to do with his reason, which was that he’d only contributed to TIS because he didn’t think anyone actually read it, and when he’d found his name on the Internet in the midst of all this crap he became alarmed.
Name: The Duchess.
Level of Involvement in TIS: She’s my wife.
Reason for Wanting Name Redacted from TIS: Fear of being Googled by coworkers and other professional contacts.
Okay, that’s not a bad reason to want your name taken off the damn masthead, I suppose. Just because I refuse to admit that TIS is a sordid and adolescent way to waste money and bore people doesn’t mean the stuffed shirts who crowd the nation’s watercoolers will understand. Especially when your name is right next to an article entitled ‘GERM ENCRUSTED AND PROUD’.
I thought that when she agreed to marry me she knew that vague disappointment and embarrassment was part of the deal, but I guess not.
Name: Our Publisher.
Level of Involvement in TIS: Moderate.
Reason for Wanting Name Redacted from TIS: Fear of professional humiliation.
Those of you who’ve been around with TIS for a while can dig in your back issue to discover who our publisher is; for the whippersnappers out there it must remain a mystery.
Name: Let’s call him The Interloper.
Level of Involvement in TIS: None.
Reason for Wanting Name Redacted from TIS: He didn’t actually request his name be redacted, just altered from the way it appeared on the web site. I think it’s because law enforcement might have been searching for him. While I think the FBI or whatever has better techniques than Google to find the dangerous criminals in the world, I could be wrong. After all, the CIA used Google to track me down and implant their tracking devices in my head.
I considered making the price of redaction expulsion from The Inner Swine Inner Circle (TISIC), but I reconsidered: It’s not that big a deal, I suppose, and someday when I am rich and famous and all the cool kids have TIS stickers on their bookbags, the Redacted will beg to put their names back and I will refuse. I do find it interesting; one, that these people are Googling themselves, and two, that anyone is paying close enough attention to these sorts of details to even notice—and that’s all it is, details. Meaningless on their own; you have to read the actual text of the zine to find out what it’s all about, and who’s doing that?
From my sales, I assume: No one.
###
After my lunchtime browsing I walk back to work and for some reason I tend to notice the people around me a lot more than usual. It might be the after lunch effect, where all the blood in my body rushes to my stomach and attempts to process all that bourbon, leaving me a little woozy, or maybe it’s just the one time during the day I am outside in the sunlight and able to observe my fellow humans. Some of whom are fucking weird, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.
Let’s start with the Fat Men Without Shirts. Almost exclusively Latino in appearance, these Men with Man Breasts whip off the shirt the moment the temperature approaches hot. They invariably have their shorts pulled up to just under their armpits, and their gold chains always gleam dully from the forest of chest hair that proudly covers their torso. Where do these men come from, and why in the fucking world do they imagine anyone wants to see their naked bodies? I’d like to think I’m not a prude, but I’m all for clothes in public, because most of you are so hideous I want to stab my eyes out if I even catch a glimpse. God made us ashamed of our bodies for a reason, damn you!
There are far more of these mysterious gentlemen than you’d imagine. Next time you’re somewhere near 23rd Street and 7th Avenue, look around, my jollies, and you will be amazed. You take the constant onrushing traffic of human bodies as a whole, and they are vaguely odiferous and mildly alarming. But focus in on a detail—a single person—and then focus even further onto something even smaller, and bam! You’re staring at the sweaty navel of a portly Hispanic man.
Or take the fat, sweaty man who is always sitting on a stoop on 22nd street, always muttering to himself, always swathed in layers of inappropriately winter-oriented clothing. How can an obviously homeless, obviously deranged man be so plump? Is he one of the many CIA plants that keep an eye on me in case I ever decide to stir up rebellion against the United States? I certainly could, if I ever wanted to. A few speeches from me, standing on a box in the middle of Times Square, and Manhattan will be burning that evening. But this guy doesn’t look like a CIA agent; he’s fat, bearded, sweating profusely, and always looks like he’s been sitting on that stoop for about six hours, a small pool of lukewarm sweat under him.
Or the tall, ungainly black fellow who is always standing outside Gray’s Papaya on 23rd street, eating a hot dog with the works, his face suffused with an expression of such angelic joy it makes me want a hot dog so damn bad, I want to cry.
###
Back at work, the afternoons are a struggle against incompetence and sleep. I am not a detail-oriented person, friends; I prefer big-picture things like how much beer is left in the cooler and is it time for a nap yet. Which is why is simultaneously unfortunate and amusing that I have chosen as a profession something which generally requires and expects attention to detail. My afternoons are a constant battle against incompetence, the shaking desire to go downstairs and have a few drinks, and my vague desire to not be fired any time soon.
When I was a young pup and just a few months into my new, exciting career of low salaries and zero respect—otherwise known as Low Level Publishing Drone—I made the worst mistake of my career, perhaps the Worst Mistake of Any Career. Part of my job was taking typewritten material and getting it into electronic format, and I had a primitive scanner with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities to aid me, but the scanner never OCR’d anything cleanly, there was always tons of garbage. So a sentence like ‘The Quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ would turn out like ‘3he 6vixj bwon fox …’ One day I came into work and my phone was ringing, and I answered it, and it was the author of that particular article, screaming that I was an idiot and ought to be examined for mental retardation. Despite the fact that I was quite used to being considered a simp, this was the single worst phone call of my life, and inspired a firm policy of never answering my phone, at work or home, ever. Since that day of being ambushed at 9AM by an angry author, I have never answered my phone without letting the voicemail pick up first to screen. That guy tore me a new one, and no wonder, because somehow I had managed to publish his scanned-in article without any cleanup at all. Garbage, straight from the scanner to the printer.
How did this happen? How is it possible that so many people’s incompetence coincided simultaneously to allow that article to slip through? We will never know. All that it proves is that I lack so much attention to detail that I let an entire article of gibberish be published. Granted, this was ten years ago, and you might expect that in that decade I’ve managed to gain some experience and some wisdom, at least where my profession is concerned. But you have to add in the alcohol. The basic equation is:
(intelligence + experience) – (3[alcohol consumption]) = wisdom
How I wasn’t fired remains a mystery to this day. I haven’t had a boner of that magnitude since, but I think it still demonstrates how unsuited for the profession I am. Details rule my life, but I am frustrated and annoyed by details. Details always seem like unimportant bullshit I have to pretend to care about in order to get to where I’m going, which is usually the liquor store, with the detail in question being whether I am wearing pants or not, though the good city of Hoboken has assigned a permanent police officer to stand outside my apartment and check my pants situation every time I leave the apartment. You’ve not lived until you’ve been pantsed by a half dozen cops, my friends. Trust me.
I’ve gotten better at my job, I suppose. In theory, it’s easy enough: Just pay attention and make sure things don’t get fucked up. In practice, however, I have probably the worst attention to detail ever, in the history of man. It may be a generic mutation of sorts—I may represent a potential new race of humans, flitting about without any sense of detail whatsoever. My wife, The Duchess agrees with this analysis wholeheartedly:
THE DUCHESS SEZ: Yikes! Where do I begin?! You can’t begin to imagine the pains a good wife like me must go through to keep a brilliant, but, hmmmn, I’ll be kind—let’s say forgetful husband clothed and functioning in society on a daily basis. The real problem occurs when Jeff’s lack of attention to detail coincides with, shall we say, his ‘soft memory’. Let me share some examples of my ‘daily burdens’:
When I can convince his highness to actually wear pants, they must be an exact shade of olive green, and of course only he knows what this mysterious hue looks like. And of course he refuses to actually shop in search of these finely colored trousers. So I am forced to bring one pair after another home, only to have each disdainfully rejected. When he finally finds a pair to be acceptable, he inevitably wears them with the most atrocious shade of lime green shirts. So while my lord is particular, in his attention to detail regarding assembling color coordinated outfit is somewhat lacking.
This will shock you, constant reader, but the Master Swine is a cleaner. He can’t stand for things to be out of place in the home. He spends nights and weekends scurrying about the house putting every item in its place and all the while insisting that my shoes should be hidden away as opposed to on display throughout the house. Despite his cleanliness, Somers routinely leaves a trail of cleaning supplies all over the house. The Windex can be found near the kitchen sink, the paper towels left on the couch and the box of Swiffers on the table. In his mind, the house sparkles. Meanwhile, the Duchess is forced to tiptoe behind him cleaning up after his cleanliness.
TISIC likes to meet in secret (read: go to the movies) on a regular basis. Jeff”s idea of calling the generals to arms usually involves, if we’re lucky, an email saying ‘hey, let’s meet up’, forgoing the usual details as to where, when, and what time. Upon my insistence for a real plan, Somers’ typical response is that TISIC communicates ‘telepathically’ and doesn’t need to waste time with such details. What a grand concept! If only it didn’t leave me standing alone in Times Square, telepathically browbeating the Grand Poobah for yet another failed scheme.
AND THEN there’s my favorite moment: Being left standing in the rain for 30 MINUTES, waiting for his highness who ‘lost track of time’ while playing with our CAT. Hmmmmn…shows you where I stand in the food chain.
No, my fellow swines, it’s not easy living with a man who can’t remember to put pants on (and when he does, they don’t match his shirt) and who puts the cat before his wife. But there are worse things than living with a pantsless house cleaner!
JEFF SEZ: Sometimes, when I clean the house, I am not merely pantsless, I am completely nude.
###
Naturally, when faced with a job that requires mental abilities I simply do not possess—I feel like the President!—I do what any sane person would do: I sneak out, buy a pint of bourbon, and go to the movies. There’s no better way to pass a boring afternoon filled with alarming, confusing details than watching crapulent Hollywood movies. Of course, the fatal flaw in that plan is that movies are all about details, and you have to pay attention to them. Strangely, when details come wrapped in manilla folders with Excel spreadsheets attached to them, my eyes glaze over and it seems like everyone around me is speaking like the teacher on Charlie Brown. When the details come wrapped in a gooey movie coating, I don’t find it difficult to notice them. Must be the same phenomena that allowed me to memorize Iron Maiden lyrics[4] and still fail Pre-Calc in High School.
It’s funny what close viewing of movies will reveal to you. Films that seemed perfectly complex and involving the first time ’round can seem simplistic and insulting on second viewing, and vice versa. I used to be unable to watch a film without noticing, instantly and forcefully, the racial makeup of its cast, which was usually strangely and inexplicably monochrome—usually all white unless the movie was about prison, or sports. Nowadays I can easily ignore the monochromatic nature of movie casting, but I’ve been noticing the ridiculous redundancy of dialog. It’s a plague in just about every movie. As an example, let’s take The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, a movie that some people, at least, considered somewhat complex and subtle. Or, if not subtle, at least not assinine.
Yet, the movie is filled with endless dialog redundancy designed to lead the audience by the nose. There’s a scene in the movie where the two Hobbits, Pippin and Merry, have been captured by Treebeard the Ent, who isn’t sure if he’s captured Orcs or friendly creatures, so he says he’s going to take them to see ‘The White Wizard’.
Now, people who have been watching the movie thus far immediately know that in the context of the story at this point in time, The White Wizard refers to the character of Saruman. This is obvious to anyone of moderate intelligence who has been paying attention to the story. On screen, the hobbits look at each other in consternation—which is fine, because Saruman is an evil character and being told that you’re being taken to him would upset any right-minded person. But then one of the hobbits says, in a strangled whisper, ‘Saruman!’
The question is, why include this line of dialog? It serves no purpose. We know they’re being taken to Saruman. The characters know it, too. The fact that we turn out to be wrong due to an as-yet-unseen plot twist doesn’t change the fact that the audience gets the point that is actually being made. The reason for this dialog redundancy—for any dialog redundancy—is because the filmmakers think you and I are complete morons, and they’re worried we’re not going to understand this incredibly subtle plot point. Or, in all fairness, the filmmakers realize that in order to have a big general audience hit and make hundreds of millions of dollars, you have to assume that some percentage of your audience will be complete morons, and you have to make allowances for the mouth-breathers or you’ll have an idiot backlash.
Have no doubt, every time a film character repeats something ominously, says obvious things for no reason, or simply repeats information in a simpler fashion, it is because the filmmakers think we’re all drooling idiots. They think we need this kind of guidance. They think that if they don’t have the hobbit look worried and say ‘Saruman!’ we’ll all be sitting there in the theater scratching our heads and squinting in perplexity.
Once I noticed this, I see it everywhere, constantly. Hollywood thinks we’re idiots. Even otherwise interesting films employ this idiot-redundancy. Trust me, once you notice details like this, there’s no going back: A door is opened, and you have no choice but to step through and shut it behind you. You start noticing all the annoying details about movies, from the cigarette burns that appear in the upper corner to signal a change of reel, to the fact that every important detail or character in a film will be given a lingering close-up within the first twenty minutes, just so you can have that shock of recognition later when it comes into play. Movies, like any narrative, are basically carefully collected details, arranged in a certain way and presented to you, and if you start looking for certain ones, you’re going to find them, over and over, maddeningly, in each movie you see.
This doesn’t just go for movies, either, though it’s a little different in, say, books. Despite my award-winning lack of attention to detail, working in publishing has indeed given me a few skills, and they plague me on a regular basis by forcing me to notice the worst details of all: Typographical errors. They’re everywhere. It’s as if grammar school is just a waste of time with the entire human race, as we all seem to emerge from schooling with a complete inability to create written things without mistakes. I am sure that TIS Proofreader [REDACTED] will gladly tell you many amusing tales of my own incompetence in this regard, especially my early penchant for spelling the word monkeys as monkies.
It’s obvious, eh? We’re all morons. Except, of course, [REDACTED], and possibly a few obscure Oxford deans.
[REDACTED] likes to be creative when proofing The Inner Swine—when she deigns to actually proof us, these days. Her enthusiasm for the thankless and often painful role of TIS Proofreader Extraordinaire has waned in recent years, and I’m lucky to get a few pages initialed in her rage-filled scrawl before the rest is tossed back to me contemptuously, usually with the word IDIOT written on it in big, bold letters. [REDACTED]’s proofreading strategy seems to be to scan the issue for her name, and base the amount of care and work she intends to put into correcting my idiotic mistakes on how often she is mentioned and how complimentary the light is.
You would think that spelling words correctly, typing them correctly, and constructing sentences that parse correctly isn’t that difficult, and it isn’t, when you’re talking about a handful of them. When you start talking about thousands, tens of thousands of them, well, it gets more difficult to make sure everything’s correct. And if you’re writing drunk, as I often do, it’s well-nigh impossible. Of course, there are still words I have no idea how to spell properly despite using them in casual conversation for almost twenty years now, so I suppose some of the blame is mine. The rest of the blame, of course, must be shouldered by all you Haters who keep pointing out my mistakes to me. The Inner Swine, you see, is like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan; you have to believe we’re perfect, or mistakes will creep in. From what I can tell, you bastards don’t believe nearly hard enough.
And there are always mistakes: Why, just last issue we printed the fucking cover of the zine with the wrong issue number on it. Now you Haters might suggest that I sent the incorrect information to TIS cover artist Jeof Vita, and you’d be right, if by ‘sent’ you mean ‘drunk-dialed the Vita household and murmured incoherently into their answering machine while the Vita family stood around in disturbed and awkward silence, feeling nothing but pity for me’.
So you’d think, then, that I’d have some huge wellspring of sympathy for typos I notice in other people’s work, since I am intimately familiar with the process of creating a disastrous typo. Naturally, the opposite is true: I silently crow in triumph when I notice someone else’s mistake, and show it to everyone I meet during my day so they will know that I am not the only alcoholic bastard who slept through English class. It’s especially gratifying if the typo appears in some classy and important publication, but I’ll take anything I can get, bubba.
Part of the problem is automation and computers: The word processor handles so much for you, a lot of little things get lost. When you had to carefully kern every letter and adjust the leading of every line manually, painstakingly making your page perfect, you got to stare at every single detail of your work so closely you could not fail to note any imperfection. But things have gotten to the point where I can write this issue of TIS while I typeset it, and the program will spell-check and justify everything automatically for me. Of course, it will allow me to use homonyms, and whatever grammar-checking service it offers is bullshit, at best, so it actually creates errors. Hot damn! What a time to be alive. I know from working in publishing that in the last ten years or so a lot of the detailed work of publishing has gone out the window; we have macros written to handle most of that stuff, Quark extensions and Adobe plugins that take care of things for us. The end result, of course, is a lot more typos, because we no longer have dedicated human beings running their eyes over every single line of text.
The other part of the problem is an extension of this: This technology allows anyone, including mildly educated drunks like myself, to pretend they are publishers. Without skills, training, or experience, we can push out a PDF file to a printer and get back something resembling a book or periodical, albeit one riddled with errors and poor design decisions. Did I just describe The Inner Swine? You bet your sweet fanny I did. Bastards.
The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul. The afternoons at my job are soul-suckingly dull. You can’t expect any wage-slavery to be exciting; if you wanted excitement, you’d have done better to leave home at a tender age and take up Adventuring as a profession. If you settle for a desk-based job, you’re staring down some pretty grim afternoons, afternoons filled with all sorts of desperate attempts to stave off boredom and suicidal emptiness—hidden bottles of liquor, surreptitious Googling for pornography, complex, years-long plots against the lives of your coworkers. The usual. But the boredom always wins. There’s only so much pornography in the world, and no matter how fast you are with the ALT-TAB buttons on your keyboard, you’re going to get caught at some point with a site like www.womenlikebourbon.com on your screen and be forced to spend several afternoons in ‘sensitivity training’ or some such. After a while, you give up on the usual time-killers and have little other choice but to start thinking, applying your mind to the questions and problems of modern life.
It’s during these lengthy, sleep-inducing afternoons, with lunch settling and quitting time so far away, that you realize, if only briefly, how unimportant most of the details of our lives really are. After all, unless you attain lasting fame, no one will care what car you drive or how you dress, or how you voted, or what kind of music you like. Yet people always act as if these details are of paramount importance. I mean, chances are, when I die (leaving behind nothing but debts and cheerful, well-tipped bartenders across the globe) no one will catalog the details of my life: The Converse Chucks, the old Remington manual typewriter stolen shamelessly from my Mother, the baseball card collection, the typos, this zine. Chances are there will be some sort of headstone to be weathered away over the centuries (Get the fuck off my grave would be, I think, a proper and fitting inscription for the stone) and that’ll be about it, aside from the buried records of my slim publishing exploits in the Library of Congress, at least until the gathered mob finally shirk off restraint and burn the place to the ground.
Ah, but if you’re famous, it’s completely different, isn’t it? If you die famous, chances are someday someone will write a book about you cataloging all the minor details and minutiae of your life. Someone else will make it into a movie that will fetishize a few of the more obvious details, and someone else will write a catchy pop song about you like Rock Me Amadeous and you will be subsumed into pop culture, and idiots who know nothing about anything will drop mention of your details into casual conversation in order to appear erudite or cool.
The circle of life.
The tiniest details of famous people’s lives are ground so fine by the peering lenses of history you’ve got to come to grips with the fact that if you do, indeed, become famous in life there is nothing waiting for your corpse after you’ve shuffled off but humiliation and horror, with every decision you ever made during your life exposed for consideration, interpretation, and judgement. You can spend your whole life carefully constructing a persona—say, of a hard-drinking, pantlsless fop with dreams of an evil world organization—and five minutes after you’re dead everything is exploded, analyzed, and ground down into a fine powder, and everyone knows that you spent most of your life napping and drinking tea and collecting Precious Moments figurines.
Crawling through the dirty aisles of corporate bookstores like Barnes and Nobel‘s, you see the logical conclusion of this trend: What I like to call Instant History and Insane Magnification History. In short, the former is a book purporting to examine a recent historical event or trend well before any sort of historical perspective can possibly exist around it, and the latter takes a tiny, absurdly magnified detail and purports to examine it throughout time. For an example of the former, look for anything with the word Iraq in its title published within the last few months. For an example of the latter, pick out one of those books with monoword titles like Salt or Blood or pick out the subtitled qualifications like Throughout History or … that Changed the World or the hoary old chestnut The Story of—sometimes even a brutal combination of all these titles.
Instant History, of course, is the complete dismissal of details. If there’s one thing you can learn from history, it’s that there is no way to know the full story of any historical person, event, or time period until sufficient time has gone by for the details to be shaken out—the rumors discarded, the theories tested, the results and trajectories known. Any book that claims to be a study of something as recent as the Bush presidency, or the war in Iraq, is quite simply guessing: There is no way to come to any rational conclusion about something that recent. Books that claim to do so undoubtedly have motivations behind them other than historical consideration, usually propaganda.
Insane Magnification History takes the opposite route; it seeks to tackle one impossibly focused topic and examine it in such vanishing detail that an entire book is produced almost without effort. These books now plague the corporate bookstores (which means they’ll soon plague the used bookstores once the idiots who bought them at Barnes & Nobel pawn them off to make room for the next glut of fashinable coffee-table turds) in truly breathtaking numbers. I mean, the Instant Histories are pretty much useless, but there could concievably be some value to them, some kernel of information, or a well-argued point, that might illuminate your worldview. The Insane Magnification Histories, on the other hand, stretch a point far too thin. There may be some interesting stuff involved in the history of salt, brother, but is it 300 pages of interesting? The answer is complex, but boils down to: No.
Who’s buying these books? Who’s buying these books in sufficient quantities to make it worthwhile to the publishers? Obviously, not people who are seriously interested in, say, salt or cod. If you’re seriously interested in salt you do not do your research by wandering a bookstore for years until someone decides to publish a general-interest book on your cherished subject, natch. You would actually do research—you know, go to the library. Read some primary sources. Gain some real knowledge instead of a trivial, loose-fitting background.
There is, I suppose, some value in taking a wide view of the social and historical connections centered around one thing, place, or person. But the fact remains that the people who purchase Insane Magnification History books are just trolling for trivia, looking for easy connections and cokctail-hour chat. Mostly harmless, certainly, but also squeezing out better, more interesting books. Being a pedantic, trivia-obsessed bastard, you might think I’d applaud these sorts of books, books which give me plenty of trivial ammunition with very little complex understanding of the background or themes. After all, I am the man who once leapt to his feet during a game of Trivial Pursuit and shouted ‘William Tecumseh Sherman, you stupid, stupid motherfuckers!'[5]
But you’d be wrong. Despite the fact that my specialty in life is appearing slightly—oh, ever so slightly—more smarter than I actually am through the judicious use of trivial details, I hate these books. What I love about trivial knowledge—aside from its ability to make me appear smart—is the serendipitous nature of it. I love reading about something and learning something completely unrelated just in the course of things, or suddenly making a connection between two events or people that had eluded me for years. That kind of eureka! moment is great fun, at least to nerds like me. And if I use that moment of joyous discovery in order to cynically pretend to be smart, well, who’s to say that’s wrong? And don’t say you. We all know that’s a lie.
The problem with trivial genius is that it’s so easy to cow people with a little knowledge. Americans are, I think, trained from birth to be suspicious and intimidated by intelligence, which is why we hate the smart kids in class and yet will always pick them for our spelling bee team because you’re afraid he’ll grow up, build a horrible death ray, and aim it at your house. People are pretty much programmed to simultaneously disparage intelligence and assume that everyone is smarter than they are. So if you inject some incredible factoid into general conversation, and deliver it with authority and firmness, it’s like a smartbomb going off in everyone’s face and they immediately back away in fear from whatever type of super-genius knows, for example, who in hell William Tecumseh Sherman is. Because apparently no normal people know this. It goes like this:
Person: Uh, you can’t pay for those porno magazines with rocks and pieces of lint. You need money.
ME: You know, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System wasn’t completed until 1991. It cost $114 billion dollars.
Person: Huh, I guess you can use lint as money. Who knew? Well, obviously, you did, master. Command me!
ME: Tell me what time it is.
As the long dark tea-time of the soul stretches on, my inability to internalize time makes for some extremely hallucinagenic hours. It’s not that my internal clock is broken in some way—I don’t think I even have an internal clock. If I don’t have a clock to look at, I have no idea what time it is, ever. Time is one of those details that I just don’t have a mastery over—which is weird, because I am obsessed with time on a macro level, in terms of years and decades and centuries. My own mortality? I am in constant touch with my state of health and where I think I am on the mortalilty timeline. But ask me what time it is, and unless there’s a clock situated over your shoulder I just can’t tell you, unless you give me a plus or minus twelve hours margin of error.
I try to avoid knowing what time it is, because if I can see a clock, I check it every two minutes, and my day becomes a strobe-like series of two-minute increments, and by the end of my day I’m stunned and glassy-eyed. Well, the glassy eyes might have something to do with the liquor, but we’ll let that slide for now. What it really means is that I have no concept of time whatsoever: I can’t tell you how long it’s been since something happened. I can’t reliably estimate how long it will take to do something. I think it takes me fifteen minutes to walk anywhere, despite obvious proof otherwise. Time is a mystery to me.
It doesn’t help that I refuse to wear a watch. I hate wearing shit—I hate carrying shit, too. I already have my wallet, my keys, some spare change, my bag with my notebooks in it—the last fucking thing I need is more shit to lug around with me. I look at people around me on the bus or train and I am sometimes amazed at all the shit they are carrying around. Music players, cell phones, jewelry, watches—I’d go insane. And I’ve never once missed having a watch. I mean, when I’m inside somewhere, if I have an appointment to keep, there is almost always a clock to glance at, and once on the move to my destination why do I need to know what time it is? Knowing that I am ten minutes late will not make me travel any faster. I suspect that people’s fondness for timepieces and knowing the time stems from a secret belief in their power over the universe and ability to alter reality to suit them. I think most of you arrogant bastards secretly believe this—I know I sure do. You probably think that knowing you’re ten minutes late will make the trip go faster, simply because you will it.
Cheeky bastards. I know better. It’s easier to just not know, and let the incomprehensible wave of this meaningless existential hell push me along at whatever speed the cosmos feels is right for me.
This makes it pretty difficult to function in a world where time is, indeed, the number-one most important detail of our daily lives. Everything is based on a uniform understanding of time, after all, the whole of society is synchronized on the same idea of time. The fact that we all observe the same definition of a second, and the various collections of multiple seconds (minutes, hours) is what keeps society humming along. For example, at my job we all pretty much agree that I’m supposed to be here at nine o’clock in the morning, and that nine o’clock in the morning is defined as a certain moment during the course of the day. It’s all artificial, of course; we could choose another time of day and declare it to be nine o’clock in the morning and it would be just as official. And it’s a burden on me because the details of time escape me on an alarmingly regular basis, so I’ve put some effort into arguing that time is an illusion, as that the moment in time that I define as 9AM is just as legitimate as the moment in time my employers’ define as 9AM.
This argument generally doesn’t have much traction with my employers, of course. The counter-argument seems to be that I define nine o’clock in the morning as something roughly similar to what they’d define as six-o’clock at night, they had no doubt I would never actually show up for work, and simply drink and sleep and cash my paychecks. So my dream of doing nothing but drinking and sleeping and cashing paychecks has to remain on the back-burner for the time being.
This leads inevitably—well, it’s inevitable when you’re sitting at your desk at four in the afternoon wondering if your face is melting off, and then you get up and start wandering the office hoping someone will look at you and then you’ll know if your face is actually melting off your skull by their reaction to your hideous (or non-hideous) countenance, but then no one looks up at you as you wander and then you stop worrying about your face melting off and start wondering if you’ve turned invisible—in other words, it’s inevitable when you’re going insane during the endless afternoon at work—to the realization that anything that would build its foundations on the shifting sands of time has to be inherently broken. Time is an unreliable detail to pin important things to—it is a concept, not a verifiable fact, and its measurement—precise as it sometimes is—is still the measurement of an arbitrary and mutable perception. And even in its measurement there is a lot of guesswork and half-assery. Ask five people for the time and you will likely receive five distinct answers. They may all be within acceptable ranges of deviation, but the fact remains, time is a crappy detail to base important things like the fine sifting of civilization on.
###
No matter how my day is going, the final hour always takes a very long time to play out. Whether I’m having a bad day or a great day, it doesn’t matter. That last hour arrives, stops on a dime, and then crawls to the end. Being a resourceful man, conscious of his own mortality and the quickly approaching end of the line, I try to use this final hour of subsidized existence—that curious moment when I am being paid, to some extent, to work on my own projects—for a burst of creative energy that will justify my day. This usually comes after eight hours spent reading slashdot.org, Googling my name, and checking out how cheap used copies of Lifers are on Amazon.com ($1.58). I figure if I can just use this last hour in a coherent, energetic way, write a few pages of good stuff, it will justify the entire day and I can go home and drink an entire bottle of something in celebration, just like Faulkner used to.
I usually end up spending that final, golden hour staring at my desk.
I have a theory about desks at work. Wanna hear it? Of course you do—we’re 2/3s of the way through this zine, and you’re still here. You love me. There is no other possible explanation, so sit down shut up and take what I give you, because if I haven’t bored you out of the room yet, it ain’t gonna happen, and I can thus dismiss you from my concerns.
My theory of desks at work is simply that you can tell a lot about a person based on the way they handle their desk at their job. You can tell whether they’ve drunk the Kool Aid put out by your employers or if they’re still dubious about the joys of selling off chunks of their lives in return for cash. My desk, for example, is almost completely bare of decoration and knick-knacks—there are no photos of friends and family, no cartoons, no plants, nothing that would make it a more comfortable environment to sit at for eight hours a day. I strongly believe that the last thing you should ever do is try and make your work environment inviting or comfortable. You must never forget that you are engaged in selling pieces of your life, you must never be lulled into spending any more time at the office than absolutely necessary. The more comfortable your cube or office is, the more apt you are to just let the gravity of your job hold you close.
Better, I think, to keep your area as drab and lifeless as possible. When quitting time rolls around, friends, I can’t wait to get the hell out of here. And that is the way it ought to be.
Other people experience something similar to Stockholm Syndrome, I think; they start to identify with their employer. They start to think they’re actually a part of an organization, that they owe their employer something more. These are the people, I suspect, who nest at their jobs. They bring in potted plants, pictures, posters, and little kooky knick-knacks, and make their desk at work resemble their home as much as possible. Making your job just like your home is, I think, depressing as all hell. It blurs the dividing line, and when that line is blurred it’s easy to donate some time to your employer, who already treat you pretty badly.
Personally, I sit at a drab, empty desk I can’t wait to get away from. I think this works better, as I waste no time sitting in the office—and it is wasted time.
Some might argue that making the environment you spend eight hours a day in a pleasant one is just good sense. And, of course, there’s merit to that idea—why spend eight hours a day in a dull, boring environment when you can spruce it up a bit and be comfortable? There’s common sense there, sure. My theory, though, is that the more comfortable you are at work the harder it is to remember that work is not where you want to be. If your career is what you’ve always wanted to do, and you’re getting paid to do what you love, then that’s fantastic—good for you. But if you’re like me and you’re working to survive and your skills led you into a job you never imagined you’d be doing—in fact, if you can’t imagine any job that you’d actually enjoy—then working for a living is like a frog being boiled. Turn up the heat slowly enough, and it’ll never noticed, and will sit in that pot until boiled alive.
I don’t want to sit in a comfortable cube until I’m sixty-five, sucked dry and ruined. Maybe I won’t escape before then, but goddamn, I want to feel every excruciating moment in full, to be constantly reminded of how terrible it is, so when an opportunity, no matter how slim, comes along to escape, I’ll know to jump for it. And if that opportunity never comes, I’ll know to shed a few tears about it.
###
WE ACCEPT YOU, WE ACCEPT YOU, ONE OF US. And then, the sweet relief of five-o’clock. I don’t want to be one of those typical lame nine-to-fiver’s who just bitch and bitch about the indignity of having to work for a living—wait, I think I already am one of those lame bastards. Sigh. I guess I have to accept the simple fact that I am simply not important enough in the grand scheme of things to have been granted riches and leisure. It’s even possible that I am not talented, cool, or strong enough to deserve riches and leisure, but I’m still considering arguments along that line. I mean, I must deserve something, right? Although perhaps it’s just a brisk kick in the nads.
On the train ride home, everyone—everyone—seems to be reading the new Harry Potter book.
I’ll come clean and admit that not only have I never read any of the Harry Potter books, I’ve also never seen the movies. I can’t explain it. I don’t have any hipster-sneering attitude towards the books; I’m sure they’re wonderful stories (although I did read the first few pages of the first one, once, and came away less than impressed). There’s just something uninteresting about them.
Part of it might be a simple aversion to hype; I have enough hipsterism in me to instinctively avoid trends, and nothing is trendier than Harry Potter. The simple fact that everyone on the train is reading Harry Potter books makes me want to not read them, which is a natural if slightly antiproductive reaction. Part of it might also be that I am not a pre-teenager or teenager, the target audience of the books. There’s nothing wrong with adults enjoying books aimed at kids—in fact, I think the best children’s books written are ones which do appeal to adults—but I do think being the target age of the book helps in getting you into the story. I read The Chronicles of Narnia when I was nine, and I continue to love those books. If I’d waited until I was thirty to read those, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. Sad, really, how you grow out of things.
There are two remarkable things about adult Harry Potter fans, in my limited experience: One, their defensive attitude about the books, and two, their willingness to carry those tomes around.
I mean, those books are fucking huge. The hardcovers are the sort of things you want to leave sitting somewhere and never have to lug around with you, yet people are dragging these books around with them wherever they go. I see them on the train, pulling out encyclopedia-sized books—these things have to be causing back problems across the world. Personally, I have a firm division of books in my life: Big assed hardcovers are for the house, and cheap, lightweight paperbacks are for carrying around in my bag, for travel reading.
For many people, I suspect, the Harry Potter books are fetishized books—they want them to be big and beautiful. A scabby old paperback wouldn’t do it for them. They want the dustcover and the hardback and the beautiful, creamy paper, because its an event for them, and also because of my other point: The defensive attitude. I’ve always found that admitting to people that I haven’t read any of the HP books always gets an aggressive reaction: They demand to know why I haven’t read them, and appear ready to attack anything critical I might say about them. I suspect this is because they are, after all, books for children. As I’ve stated, there’s nothing wrong with adults reading and enjoying books aimed at children—but I think there is an element of self-consciousness for people my age who are standing in line at midnight to buy the latest HP adventure, and I think they’re primed for an attack whenever they encounter someone who seems to disdain the books. Here’s a transcript of a recent exchange I had with a real living person:
HER: Have you started reading The Half-Blood Prince?
ME: I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books.
HER: Why not!?
ME: Well, I—
HER: (sullen) You can’t say they’re bad.
I can’t say anything, since I haven’t read them, but this kind of half-ashamed, half-pissed attitude is pretty common, in my experience. Of course, part of that might simply be the strain of lugging those fucking books around—it’s insanity, how big those books are.
Someday, I suppose, I’ll pick up the first book at a used bookstore and give it a whirl, see what it’s like, and hopefully I’ll be able to put aside the hype and my instinctive hipster-doofus reaction to it, and just read the books and have an honest reaction to them. Shedding the hipster-doofus shell isn’t easy, though, let me tell you.
When my train pulls into the station, everyone gets up about thirty seconds before the doors open in order to jostle for position and try to be the first ones out onto the platform—it’s really amusing when the doors, which almost always open on one side, suddenly open on another, as if the conductor was just fucking with everyone, which very naturally amuses the hell out of me. Observing this behavior day after day leaves you cynical and contemptuous, but I don’t say or do anything about it because I’m afraid that people will raise up their huge, heavy Harry Potter books and beat me with them, probably killing me.
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Finally home and ensconced in my Spider Man pajamas, a glass of Scotch warming in my hand, I am able to relax and contemplate The Inner Swine and my other writing exploits. This is a lot harder than you might think, mainly due to the restrictive requirement that it all make at least a marginal amount of sense. My readership tends to be pretty fault-tolerant—heck, they wouldn’t be my readership if they weren’t—and I can usually slip some gibberish by them with a few lame references to drunkenness, pantslessness, or drunken pantslessness. But some sense is demanded. I can’t have an entire issue created from random gibberish words. The words must at least be intelligible on some level—although I have considered generating an entire issue using the Postmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/) which generates completely meaningless essays that look, at first glance, like they mean something:
‘If one examines subdialectic theory, one is faced with a choice: either accept capitalist discourse or conclude that narrativity is used to reinforce capitalism. Thus, Lyotard’s critique of the deconstructivist paradigm of discourse implies that truth is capable of significance. The characteristic theme of the works of Tarantino is the role of the participant as poet. Any number of discourses concerning capitalist discourse exist. But the primary theme of d’Erlette’s[1] model of Batailleist `powerful communication’ is the bridge between culture and sexual identity.’
Those sentences were generated by the Postmodernism Generator and mean absolutely nothing if examined carefully. While it’s impressive that computers can generate essays hundreds of words in length that appear to be meaningful ideas, I doubt anyone would read an entire issue of The Inner Swine that read like the above. I mean, I’d have to at least include a few references to drunkenness, pantslessness, and boobies in order to make it worth people’s while—although I suspect that if I just put those three words into every third sentence, people would probably accept the issue as legitimate. I might not get much praise, but people’d probably glance through the issue, as always, smirk at the word pantsless when they see it, and then file the issue wherever people file issues of The Inner Swine—probably their wastepaper basket. I’d get the same unamused review from maximumrocknroll, the same delirious letters, and the world would move on. After four or five issues, I’d be able to automate the entire process, using a combination of web-based text generators (probably three or four in order to have verbal variety), computer scripts, and scheduled Internet events to produce a complete issue every three months without ever writing a word myself, and no one would notice. Except for proofreader [REDACTED], of course, who would leave plenty of hurtful insults all over every issue.
Of course, that’s silly: someone would notice, you bastards. Every time Jeff thinks of a way to get more drinking time and less working time, you bastards are always there to ruin it. Don’t you understand that coming up with new ideas for each issue—and the 20,000 to 30,000 words it takes to flesh those ideas out each issue—is a lot of work? Have pity on a poor soul. A poor lazy soul. Over the years, of course, I have developed a system of getting these issues put together. Using a combination of the following techniques, I can usually whip one of these babies together with just a minimum amount of attention and effort, leaving me more time for booze, video games, and feigning illness in order to escape labors. Since this is an issue dedicated to the study of detail and minutiae, I figure it makes sense to study my creative process in detail, right? Well, if I’m wrong, I don’t want to be right.
SUPER HAPPY INNER SWINE ISSUE COMPLETION TECHNIQUES
1. Booze. The first step to battling any swine-related writer’s block is to lubricate the brain a little. But not too much, or you end up writing six pages listing everyone you will have your revenge on when you perfect that water engine and have enough money to have people killed—probably playing THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, as mentioned earlier. You want to drink enough to stir things up a little, not so much that McEgo, the invisible leprechaun, shows up and starts taunting you. I hate when that happens.
2. Rummage around in the unused articles folder. I have a folder of rejected articles, some complete, some just fragments (usually degenerating into screeds against the ‘cocksuckers’), and a few mysterious ones that are just titles with no text or explanation at all. All of these were rejected for a very good reason: They suck. Still, hope springs eternal, and I always wonder if maybe something akin to The Sound and the Fury might have gotten shuffled in there by accident.
3. Demand that others provide material. This is an old but still useful trick. When I’m pinched for material and am on the verge of kernel and leading shenanigans to plump the issue up enough, I go begging to friends and family for material, flattering everyone and pretending that it was my plan all along to ask them to be a part of the new issue.
THE DUCHESS SEZ: Yea! I got a lot of smoke blown up my ass earlier about contributing a little something to this issue, believe me. But it’s okay, because he used my cute little head next to the text. Ain’t my cute little head adorable? I think readership would go up 1000% if he used my cute little head more.
4. If things look grim, run more poetry!
Beer & Merriment
I would never regret a single cent
spent on beer and merriment
but I spend my days in sad review
over that night I never called you
and to beer and merriment now I’m numb
and deep in my cups I’m stricken dumb
hidden by dark, I stand by the juke
and sing those sad songs of rebuke
and in those songs my heart is pent
despite endless beer
and
merriment.
5. When in doubt, re-run an article and feign ignorance, like I did with the story Time’s Thumb in 2000 and 2002. Now that’s attention to detail.
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[1] Name the song: —When I was arrested, I didn’t have a dime / The sheriff says, “Son, you’re ridin’ free this time / Where you’re goin’ you won’t need a cent / ’cause the great state of Texas gonna pay your rent.‘
[2] True story: Jeof lay on our bathroom floor for the rest of the night, and whenever he was disturbed he groaned and begged us not to force him to drink anywmore. I think he was there for about three weeks, at which time he leaped up, brushed his teeth, and immediately drank a bottle of Ouzo, and passed out again. Or, perhaps, battled Ninjas.
[3] Another true story: About ten of us went to the park at night to play a drunken game of ManHunt. We scattered and hid and over the course of about forty minutes all of us were found. . .except Ken, who had gotten bored and left. We wandered the park for almost an hour, shouting ‘Manhunt is over!’ in the hope of catching Ken’s attention. When he returned to the park to see where in hell we were, we almost murdered him, right there. It was at that point I swore to myself that I would never worry about Ken’s life again.
[4] I can still repeat the lyrics to ‘Two Minutes to Midnight’ without hesitation, an example of modern poetry I carved into more desks and scrawled on more binders than you might think possible: ‘Kill for gain or shoot to maim / But we don’t need a reason / The Golden Goose is on the loose / And never out of season / Some blackened pride still burns inside / This shell of bloody treason / Here’s my gun for a barrel of fun / For the love of living death’ Huzzah! Who says my education was wasted?
[5] True story. The question was undoubtedly something about ‘which Civil War General famously burned Georgia’ or something like that, and the other team not only did not know the answer, they acted like this was the most obscure and mysterious knowledge in the universe, which just enraged me, a man who thinks basic knowledge of a major conflict that split your own country asunder a mere 150 years before should be pretty universal. Doubtless, if salt or cod had played a bigger role in Sherman’s March to the Sea, they would have read about it and won the game. I do find it difficult to find people who will play Trivial Pursuit with me. Or do anything with me, actually. Fuck you.