Sunset

Michael stopped. He stared at the group who were paused with eyes wide, an expression like they were waiting for him to break or fly. He shouldn’t have said anything – he knew this – but he didn’t, he couldn’t, stop:

“Am I tired of being famous? When I look at you people I get real tired of being famous.”

A flash of a camera and a FREEZE FRAME. Imagine a movie: Michael Sennet’s face caught in a demonic pause – I get real tired of being famous – hair that’s usually pressed and straight is sticking to his sweaty forehead, eyes wide and swirling with a kind of anxious anger, hand made into a fist but he can’t swing it because that would only make things worse, so the feeling of that fist flows through his blood and stays there.

sic(k)

I have found out that I’m a lot more sick than I had thought. I mentioned in a much earlier post that I’ve had problems with my kidneys. In my twenties, the problem was pretty much stable so I chose to ignore it. The results of my biopsy were inconclusive and it was easier to believe that the problem wasn’t so bad. Going to the doctor every six months to hear the same thing again was deflating, a reminder twice a day that I was sick. It was so disheartening to be 25 and have the constitution of an old man.

I went to the doctor last week and found out that my kidneys have deteriorated pretty significantly, 26% capacity. It could vacillate closer 30% but not much more. Doctor told me that most healthy people lose 1% of their kidney function every year in their forties, so I’m looking at a pretty big drop-off. Basically, I’m dying faster than most people my age.

Now that I’m a father, I’m much more eager to take care of myself. It’s also less insulting to me that I should live like an old man—avoiding salt, cholesterol, and healing slowly. I can live with it. I want to. I’ve also got a hell of a lot more to live for than when I was 25, lost, self-hating, and immature.

I really feel like I’ve made myself sick. In the past few years, I’ve been insanely caught up in all the world’s ills and how we’re heading to collapse and, in many ways, deserve it. I really think this mental toxic build-up is partly responsible for this. Too much toxic feeling has been entering my body, overloading it. Not that I’m going to drop my novel—about WW III—but I think I do have to change the way I think, along with what I eat, how I exercise, etc.

Meanwhile I’ve been watching the horror in Virginia and it ties into this. I’ve been immersing myself, like I don’t have a choice, like I might learn something. I had the same response after reading about that young guy who killed his neighbor, a ten-year-old girl, about a year ago. He had a blogspot blog and it was a horribly eerie thing to read, like something I might have written myself at a certain time. He wasn’t totally empty, a moron—on the sidebar were interesting links, he had interesting taste in music, showing that he was somewhat alive. Cho is the same way—his plays are deranged but he wasn’t illiterate. It takes some positive energy to create something, doesn’t it?

My first novel was about a celebrity stalker who begins by stalking a girl on a college campus. She doesn’t respond to his letters to her and so he gets angrier:

I would care for you like you've never been cared for before. I know the pains of the world so I know how to avoid them. I could have been your shelter. But you ignored me. If only you knew what you were ignoring. One day I'm going to be great and you'll regret you ever let me go. I'm the one. Do you have so much better to do? I've seen your friends. They're not very interesting, like most people here. They care only about themselves. And what do they care about? Frail, vile, boring people like themselves. Maybe like you…But remember, I've got the upper hand. I know who you are but you don't know me. I'm the one and you didn't realize it. You're too petty. Maybe the best way to get back is to get revenge.

Later he stalks and tries to kill Tim Griffith, movie star, a veiled version of Tom Cruise:

I will show the world what a false man you are. I will make you suffer like the rest of us. I am going to ruin you. Afterwards, you will be a broken man. That will be your real lesson. I will teach you like a ruler on the back of the hand. And then my job will be done.

None of this is so far off from Cho railing against the rich and the privileged who ignored him at Virginia Tech. I have felt this way before—felt that I was glorifying something that should be shunned. At the same time, it’s a book. And it’s a book about ideas—the idea that celebrity represents vanity, superficiality and shouldn’t be so adored, which it shouldn’t. The book’s not just about hate, but how love doesn’t exist as much as it should. I would never in my life make murder a reality. But I can't deny that the book came from a similar place, a lonely, less-attractive kid railing against the rich and comfortable. And if I wrote the book while I was in college—which I did, actually, just not for a class—they would have singled me out as a potential shooter.

My natural state of being is just to point out the shit in the world. I’ve justified it in the past: at least it fuels writing, even if it’s not healthy. Like I watched a news report about VT in which the anchor sounded so excited to be talking to a guy who was trapped in a classroom watching his classmates die—you could hear the glee in her voice. The guy is bruised for life and she is happy about her scoop. Fuck her, I think.

The other morning I open up my Yahoo homepage and there’s a story that David Mamet is going to direct Ford commercials. Fuck him, I think. Does he really need the money? There are so many “fuck that” moments in my day to day. Ways that the world is crumbling. I just see the world as full of so much pollution, and, to get esoteric, bad thoughts are as bad for the atmosphere as a smoke stack. I believe that, just as I believe that all of my negativity hasn’t been so great on my body.

The new novel ends on a positive note, even if the road there is brutal, sort of how I see my life going. This news about my illness does have a positive flipside. There are things I appreciate more now. Much like when my daughter was born—it was a slap in the face telling me, this is what it is to be alive. I don’t want to waste any more time.

All in all, though, it’s been a fucked up week, meditating about death: my own, innocent student’s, and the world’s. I really need to start thinking differently. Like Travis Bickle says, “Too much abuse has gone on for too long.”

Podler

A nice review of North of Sunset by a new POD reviewer, PODler. Since my agent’s not sending the novel out anymore, I’m trying to promote it again. Took some time off from sending the book out. The new edition of the book is out to a bunch of reviewers.

I also reread the book for the first time in a year. I was scared of looking at it again. But I needed to see if it’s still something I want people to read, something that represents me. I was glad to like it. There’s some stuff I’d change, but nothing that makes me want to hurt myself. So, you know, buy it.

Anthology

Some things: I’m going to be in this anthology, a book put out by 3 Am Magazine about New York, Paris, and London. My story’s about New York, called “Thirteen Mississippi.” I asked the editor if my wife could submit a story and they accepted it. First time we’ll be in print together. First time she’ll be in print. More info later. I also asked my agent if he could take a look at her memoir and he agreed, which is fucking cool, so hard to send blind queries to agents.

Blogs I’ve been reading:

Urban Outlaw, editor of another anthology I’m going to be in this year
Philip K. Dick blog
Empty Drum, dedicated spammer
Strange Attractor, strange attractions

RIP, Vonnegut.

Earth

Thought while reading a book about alien abductions in which they often lament the destruction of the earth: Hating people for being ignorant or destructive is like hating the earth for being polluted.

Hollywood Apocalypse

Brush fire erupts in Hollywood Hills

Books

Last two books I read.



Awesome, as if James Joyce wrote the Da Vinci Code. To be honest, I like RAW more when he’s more DVC than JJ. Like in the Illuminatus Trilogy, I’ll be reading and thinking it’s the most entertaining novel ever written, then it will completely switch and go on a tangent which leaves me more lost. That’s because I’m a lightweight when it comes to experiment. Masks is more streamlined. I think RA Wilson’s going to be taken a lot more seriously as a writer at some point, maybe not as much as PK Dick, but along those lines.

Also:



I recommend this book to the skeptic in your family (like mine) who might be immediately turned off by the ravings of McKenna, Leary, or even Pinchbeck. Methodical, almost to a fault, about doing psychedelic research in a hospital/university setting. The cover speaks to the Alex Grey crowd, but the research is much more sober than that. Which makes it even more mind-blowing. Not quite as much as doing DMT (which I haven’t done. My wife has though: she saw many Buddhas.) But easier to come by than a hit of DMT.

These two books suggest I’ve turned into a deranged hippie. To further prove my nuttiness, this the is the pile of books I got from the library this week. I just cannot shed this stuff from my system, still fascinates me 5 years after I became interested in it.

The Seat of the Soul, Gary Zukov
From Elsewhere: the subculture of those who claim to be of non-earthly origins, Scott Mandelker (terrible, too credulous, the book Channeling by John Klimo is good)
Conspiracies and Secret Societies: The Complete Dossier, Brad Steiger and Sherry Steiger
The Illuminati Papers, Robert Anton Wilson
The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book, Jane Roberts (not gonna read it, saw her Oversoul 7 books, channeled novels, looks more interesting)
Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Civilization, Dan Burton and David Grandy
Lectures on Ancient Philosophy, Manly P. Hall
H.P. Blavatsky and the Secret Doctrine, Edited by Virginia Hanson
Belonging to the Universe, Fritjof Capra and David Steindl-Rast
Gurdjieff, Edited by Jacob Needleman and George Baker

I think it’s very cool that Oprah picked Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for her book club. Especially since I’ve got my own apocalyptic novel that I’m about to send out.

Dream's End

Watch me go toe to toe with some conspiracy theorists at Dream’s End.

Largehearted Boy

Check out my book notes for North of Sunset on Largehearted Boy—songs behind the novel. The story behind that: Susan Tomaselli on 3 AM linked to Nick Antosca’s Book Notes. I got jealous, as I usually do, and wrote up my own. Thankfully he also liked the book. To anyone coming from there, please check out the mp3s on the sidebar.

Self Help

We’ve been doing a lot of self-help around here lately. My wife had a huge hang-up about our couch, thought it was the epicenter of sloth in our house. Turns out she was right because we got a new couch and our apartment doesn’t seem so dead. Rearranged some other stuff to, got rid of some clutter, which really does do a lot for the head.

I also read the first self-help book I’ve ever read in my life, 100 pages of it at least. It was actually helpful:



The most basic thing he hammers over and over is the problem with overgeneralization. Making absolute statements. Like the other week I was walking to pick up my daughter at preschool, as I do every day. As I crossed the crosswalk a schmuck in a convertible Porsche took a left turn right behind me so I could feel the wind, then revved his engine, speeding away, basically saying to me, “Fuck you for walking.” My first instinct is to think, Man people are materialistic, soul-raping pricks, no wonder the earth is dying. But no, not everyone is materialistic, and that guy’s probably not all bad, might be nice to his mother, might be having a bad day, there’s layers of meaning to everything and my interpretation is only based on half the story. Even if, as a writer, I need to believe my fictions to be true—still wrong, an overgeneralization.

Sounds incredibly simplistic, but overgeneralization is something I fall into. It’s not just psychobabble, it’s an actual useful bit of psychiatry. My main problem is crazed criticism of other people, a projection of self-hatred—none of which is accurate. So the book did some good.

More self-help. A couple of weeks ago there was an author night for graduates of my high school. People in the last 25 years who’ve published a book. I haven’t seen a lot of them in 15 years. Never been to a class reunion. Click that link to see where I’m coming from. I was worried that everyone, and I, would regress to high school years. Stupid of me, people are adults. The reading went over very well. People liked it—a section of NoS in which a paparazzi photographer talks about how much he hated high school:

Hollywood was like high school all over again. A place where the pretty and comfortable persevered, and the ugly watched. There was a certain youthful pride that existed in Hollywood, a center-of-the-world, sun-drenched, almost chosen, pride. Just like teenagers who thought nothing could hurt them. The main difference between Hollywood and high school was that in Hollywood they didn’t just think they were in the center of the world, they were in the center of the world.

High school’s defined me in a number of ways, and a number of ways it shouldn’t anymore. It was like 10 years of therapy in a night.

Then today I received a letter that my agent is not sending out my novel anymore. Believe it or not, I’m sort of relieved. It’s no longer a crutch, a reason to think “Life will be better when…” I can be more active, writing and otherwise. I could also be a lot more active if I got a $500,000 book deal. Life is complicated.