Misanthropy

So I’m back, if anyone’s still reading. Been feeling like shit. Money. I also was feeling like this blog is a fabrication, a way to make me seem more suave and refined. Even using the words suave and refined is kind of bullshit because I’m basically a mess. Writing is a way to embellish my life rather than tell the perfect truth. But maybe there’s nothing wrong with that.

So I’ve been going through a rut where every fucking thing bothers me. Corrupted by the feeling that many people are expendably dumb. Many people could vanish and it wouldn’t matter, so long as the death is painless and there’s no one to mourn them. Being that I believe in life after death, I don’t think eradicating whole hoards of people is that big a deal. Of course, I could be wrong.

Guy in Blockbuster video, with his two small kids. Nothing bothers me like a son looking exactly like his father--you can tell that the son is probably going to end up leading an identical life. On the screen comes an ad for some new race car video game. Guy says, "Ooh, I can’t wait for that," like a small child, can’t look away from the TV. Not for the benefit of his kid, he was doing it on his own. His 10-year-old kid had the very same expression. We are a species of children and we are getting younger, not older.

Condescending, no? I hated that man as I stood in line waiting to rent "The Hulk." Sometimes I torture myself by watching the worst television imaginable. A way to punish my brain and my fate by saying to it, "Fuck you for not making my life any easier." The worse the TV, the better.

"The Hulk" wasn’t so bad as it could have been. Then again it was really, stupidly bad. A big green ape smashing things. The interesting thing was the extra features with footage of the filming, which solidified my feeling that a film set is a very depressing environment. No one looked like they were having any fun. Seems to be populated by self-important depressives.

Sounds familiar. The only difference is they’re getting paid millions of dollars and they’re still miserable. All I want is a little extra money so I can write my book and take care of my family. This is not for lack of trying. Now you’re seeing why I wasn’t blogging. Self-pity isn’t all that entertaining. At least I got it down so there's a record of it.

Burroughs

I really have to work today. There can be no extended blog entries. Here’s a nice site about William Burroughs that I wish I could’ve written.

Gout

I lied about my ailments. I have more! When I was in Paris, I got gout. I was drinking copious amounts of wine and eating rich food. Wine is incredibly cheap in Paris. Expensive wine here might go for six dollars over there. So I was drinking more wine than I ever had, all at once. They say gout is one of the worst pains there is--all the pains of a body concentrated in one joint--for me it’s the big toe. I’ve had it once a year or so since then. I am a young old man.

I managed to write a screenplay while I was holed up. Sometimes pain is a good catalyst. I used to think it was the only catalyst, but not anymore. That was the only time in my life that I thought of a scene in a dream. In the early morning I dreamt the first scene of the screenplay, woke up and wrote it down and didn’t stop writing until the screenplay was done. I’ve been waiting ever since for that to happen again--some great premise to magically hit me. Come to think of it, it was probably the French gout medication.

I wrote the screenplay while my roommate was at the summer home of Francois Truffeau’s daughter, Eva. Sounds like the stereotype of what you’d do in France, but it’s true. I also met a good friend at the birthday party for semi-legendary jazz musician Steve Lacy. I mention this because my life is nothing like this now. It’s like a strange, old dream, an interruption of my normal life.

You might have noticed that I don’t talk much about what’s going on in my life in the present tense. I use this blog as a kind of memoir, rather than reporting on my daily life, for the most part. I don’t like writing autobiographical fiction, and I wouldn’t have the gall to write an actual memoir. And my life is generally dull. Trips to the park. My second home at the Beverly Hills library where I wrote my last story and I bring home CD’s and books, most of which I don’t read. We watch movies. My life is uneventful.

On my wife’s birthday, we went to a Brazilian restaurant, just the two of us. Normally, we can’t afford to do this. It was the first time since we moved to L.A. that my wife and I went out to dinner alone--this is insane, a year and a half. It was a profoundly eye-opening experience. We walked past the bars in West Hollywood--the sounds of sexual tension, the smell of smoke and liquor. Such a familiar smell, I felt 25 again. For all anyone knew, my wife and I were out on our first date. I wasn’t defined as a guy with a kid. Sounds like I could be complaining about fatherhood, but that’s not true. She’s the only thing on earth that should have happened. It makes me intensely proud and comforted to walk around with her. But it also cuts into my time to be an individual. I got a small taste of the good life and I want some more.

As the Zombies’ song says, "This will be our year, took a long time to come." I say this to myself every year, and I always believe it.

Vanity Fair

Just found out that I’m in "Vanity Fair" this month. I mentioned a while back that a writer for "Vanity Fair" contacted me for an article about my high school, Crossroads. I made the cut and I’m quoted in the article. I haven’t read it yet so I don’t know if it’s completely embarrassing or not. Whenever I’ve been in the newspaper, there’s been something wrong with it--like being called Harry Brown in "Variety" when my novel was optioned. It makes me think that there’s something wrong with every article. If you want to see me embarrassed get the new issue.

Divine Comedy

The site’s still getting sorted out. Explorer is crashing--which sounds lyrical. The designer is on the case. While I'm waiting, here’s this. I haven’t done many of these, but I like this one. I’m lustful, who would’ve thought? I’m only one level away from limbo.


The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	High
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Moderate
Level 7 (Violent)	Very High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	High

Take the Dante's Inferno Test

Behold!

The new design. I love doing stuff like this. Still tweaking it. I got the template from this designer. It was incredibly easy to set up.

Update: It wasn’t so easy as when I started. I’ve fixed some things. Over and over again. Please let me know if you’re having trouble loading the site.

Submission

So I finished a story and sent it out to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and Open City. I also submitted 30 pages of "North of Sunset" to a few small literary presses. I thought I’d start with some longshots for the story because it could potentially launch my career. It would be like winning the lottery. Sending out work makes me feel better: at least I’m trying, there’s always hope.

The NYer doesn’t allow simultaneous submissions which seems unfair. The likelihood of them publishing anything by me is remote, so I’ve got to wait around six months for a rejection letter while the story remains stagnant. Don’t tell anyone, but I submitted it to other places as well.

I haven’t written too many stories in my life. This one may be my favorite. I’ve always been more interested in writing novels. If I invent characters, I want to stay with them for a while. I become attached. I’m more interested in the scope of the novel. A good story can have the scope of the novel, but still a novel is less confined. I also think I might not be a good enough writer to write good short stories. It’s seemed strange to me that student writers are always taught to start with stories. To me, it’s harder to be that concise--I’d rather lay it all out, go in different directions. I’ve thought that I’d write stories later in life, which is backwards.

The advice I give to anyone who asks me about writing: keep going and don’t read it. You can only learn to write by writing. People have told me that they’ve stopped halfway because they were unhappy with it. If it’s not genius right away, they give up. It can make you feel like shit to read what you’ve written. I’ve read interviews with a lot of writers who say that their first drafts are horrible--unless you’re Jack Kerouac who was against revision. Spontaneous bop prosody and all. Bob Dylan also didn’t like rerecording anything. But Raymond Carver did forty revisions or more on a story. Not revising is insane to me. But I don’t revise until the thing’s basically done. If not, I’d rewrite the same page over and over again. I can be a perfectionist--which is tedious, like reading the same novel 100 times in a row, and doesn’t lead to perfection. Someone said somewhere, "Art is not finished, it’s abandoned."

I also don’t read a lot of short fiction. So I have a limited knowledge of the thousands of small lit magazines. If any of you know of good places to send the story, I’d be grateful for the help: Small magazines that I’d have a chance with and publish darker fiction--not brutally dark, just not calm.

Daily Detox

If I’m ever going to do a commercial for something, it would be for Daily Detox: For Today’s Toxic Environment. This will probably read like a commercial. It has all of the best herbs that are good for cleaning out the body.

When I lived in NYC, I used to hit a tennis ball against a wall at some handball courts. I started up a game with a Puerto Rican guy and we’d play a game of handball using tennis rackets and a tennis ball. Sometimes I’d even win. Once I played the same game against a guy using just his hand and he kicked my ass, which was fairly humiliating.

An incredibly fun game, but also incredibly unhealthy. The handball courts were beneath the Williamsburg Bridge--soot and exhaust descended on those courts. Sometimes I couldn’t take in a full breath afterwards because I could feel the pollution in my lungs. The same thing happened to me as a kid living in L.A. After a day of playing, I couldn’t take a deep breath. It’s seems to be a lot better in L.A. now. Must be the smog checks on cars.

So I went to a health food store, bought some Daily Detox, and it cleared my lungs out right away. I also have bad kidneys so it’s good for me to get some extra help with cleansing my system. My kidneys work only 2/3 what they should. Doctors don’t know how it happened. My guess is that it happened during a horrible fever when I lived in Minneapolis--shivering uncontrollably, crazy hornlike glands swelling up on the back of my head. It might be when my kidneys got scarred. A bad fever can do that. I need to stay away from meat and keep my blood pressure down.

So I always feel a little bit toxic, unhealthy. It contributes to me feeling psychologically toxic as well--about all the dumb, bad, violent stuff in the world. Daily Detox has herbs that help the liver and the kidneys--Milk Thistle, Dandelion, Burdock, etc. Some supplements like Juniper or Licorice actually make the kidneys work harder so I stay away from them. I’ve done my homework.

What else is wrong with me? I’m 3/4 deaf in my right ear. When I was seven I got a concussion after a kid dared me to make a jump on the jungle gym from one bar to another and I hit my head. I ended up lying unconscious in the sand, blood pouring out of my right ear. Must have been hideously bad for my brother to see me lying there. Really, I think it’s years of playing drums and live music which have broken down my ear drum. Again, doctors don’t know what caused it. All they can tell me is that, yes, I have hearing loss.

Everyone’s got some maladies: these are mine.

Super Size Me

Saw "Super Size Me" which I really liked--as if someone I might know made a Michael Moore documentary. If you don’t know the story: a guy eats only McDonald’s for thirty days and finds that he nearly destroys his liver, as if he had been on a heavy drinking binge. On the DVD there were extra features, including an interview with the writer of Fast Food Nation. He divulged that every McDonald’s hamburger is not comprised of one dead cow, but possibly thousands of dead cows at once--as a result of factory processing. I never eat at McDonald’s so this won’t be too difficult, but this one fact makes me never want to eat at McDonald’s again, or any fast food. I don’t eat too much meat for health reasons as much as the moral issue, but it cannot be very good for the human spirit to eat a thousand dead animals in one sitting.

UPDATE: Here's some more McDonald's amusement.

Birthday

It's my wife's birthday. Happy Birthday, Samantha!!!