Shit Gets Real

Okay, this is an official over-and-out for awhile.  New book’s gathering steam and the old one’s not at the moment, but there are plans afoot. By new book, I don’t mean the aforementioned The Meat Tree And The Beach.  The new one only has a working title.  Much more fun, mainly because it’s not a matter of me remembering in detail the goings on from my near-death to my divorce. Dunno why I thought making that–remembering all that shit–my primary leisure time activity would end well. Squandering several years of good, solid, devoted repression. So instead, titty jokes. Keep an eye out.

For now, I’m locking myself away and getting down to work. And by “for now,” I mean “for a couple days, then I’ll do a lot of fucking around, then I’ll feel like a real asshole for wasting so much time while still pissed that I’m not getting ahead at all, then the circle of life will continue.”

Interestingly enough, according the blog stats that WordPress keeps, most people wind up here because of searches related to redtube. After the jump, I’ve pasted in all the search terms that have ever resulted in someone landing here, of all places. And some people think I use too many tags.

Oh, and the book’s no longer available for preview here beyond the first two chapters.  Or, more properly speaking, the mustard juice and the first squirt of the real stuff.  All this and more will be explained in time. Take care.

Buddha was, and liked, a fatty

Give your apartment and yourself a wholly unwarranted sense of profundity! Get your Coffee Table Buddha today!

So, as I think I mentioned before, I was in Chicago with one Ladybeard over the recent holidays.  Went to the Institute of Art because it’s damn near my favorite thing in Chicago. There’s a story about that that I’m gonna put after the jump.

As an experiment, I’m going to put the point here, then all the nonsense after the jump.  It’s this: I was wondering why, when you walk through the Asia part of an art museum that has one (or the whole part of an Asian one), You see all kinds of Buddhas everywhere, but always in a reverent context.  What I mean is, there’s nothing like a Buddhist Piss Christ that you ever see. Or that I’ve ever seen.  I’m perfectly willing to assume that’s all this is.  In fact, the only fact I’m really working with here, the only thing I really know, is that you can (and lots of people, in fact, have) fill thousands of museums with wonderful art that I don’t know about. But I wondered: has Asian art gotten around to travestying its relevant religions, or are even the artists still too cowed, or is it something else?  Obviously, I’d consider that a major shortcoming of a culture, if it either hadn’t produced or couldn’t accommodate some good old-fashioned sacrilege.  Then again, maybe religion has atrophied enough in Asia that it doesn’t provoke something as ham-fisted as Piss Christ and its ilk.

By the way, I liked the juxtaposition of the statue, the doorway and the art there on the steps.  But I neglected to read what was spelled out by all them lights.  Now who’s superficial, bitches?

Now, if you weren’t rolling your eyes/pissed off by that nonsense about a “cultural shortcoming,” then you’re part of the problem.  If someone wants to regard things as inherently individual as art as referenda on a concept as broad and problematic as “culture,” they don’t have anything useful to say anyway.  Also–and here’s the big one–”Asia” should really never be referred to in the singular, except by lazy cartographers.

Okay.  But what the hell am I really talking about?  Watch me flail and fail around after the jump!

Update

So, as per usual, the blog languishes.  This time, it’s because, oddly enough, I’ve been doing something actually productive (ish.  very ish at the moment) and working on a new story.  I also happened to see (a week late) that Amazon had opened up the submisisons period for its breakthrough novel award.  My novel (Hey!  I wrote a novel!  you can sample it right over there —–>) has been languishing for some months, but I says to myself I says, “I should enter this thing.”  I shoulda last year, except that, as soon as I started looking over it prior to entering, to make sure it was just right, I realized there was plenty left to be done.  Well, went to put the finishing touches on my lightning-draft (#6 now) this morning, and review the submissions guidelines, when I see they’ve reached the limit and closed the contest.  In fact, it happened Wednesday.

Goddammit.

On the other hand, it turns out this thing wasn’t as ready, like I’d thought.  I’m pretty much completely sick fo the goddamned thing, but I still think it’s worth humping around a bit more.  My work situation being now settled for a few months, my taxes filed and my debt under control, it seems possible to think about it again.  So the submissions continue.  For the time being, you can read the new, improved version, right over there —–> (tip: there’s a new bit at the beginning of the third chapter that I think’s funny, but might not be there forever. )

And now I’m actually looking forward to launching a new project.  The one I’ve been working on in fits and starts for the last ten months or so, it’s going back on ice.  Just not feeling it.  So it goes. Upshot is, it’s exciting times.  New story done, new book starting Monday.  Should be only, oh, three to nine years, and I’ll have a new book to annoy my friends by talking about.

Holla.

I Gave Her My Heart; She Gave Me a Pen

The only difference between this and what goes on in the cluuuub is that these guys are wearing less Ed Hardy. Both are equidistant from anything good or healthy that can be meant by "a relationship." But this has more to do with love.

So it’s a new year, and I no longer even pretend to have optimism at this time.  Not that I have no optimism—I’m hands-down three of the most cheerful, friendly, optimistic people I know, but I can’t resist piss-taking and I play a deep game, so anybody who knows me is likely to roll their eyes at that statement.  Ah, so it goes in the life of the misunderstood sub-genius.

But 2010, among other things, brought me the Ladybeard, and that is a great good thing.  I think.  Mostly.  Well, what I think (the general rule of thumb) is uncertain and up in the air.  Skepticism, like sensible pants, is always warranted, and we all of us operate with incomplete information, at all times and nowhere so much as within that swamp carnival we carry around between this ear and that one.  High jinx and low farce, I’ve taken to saying.  I guess some people don’t operate that way; those people are boring as hell to me and of no interest here.

Which seems like a good place to insert the following disclaimer:

The ensuing comments of thisahere blog post, categorized as they can be under the heading of “romantic” relationships between men and women, apply to this particular man and a discrete and very specific set of women.  They are not intended as a diagnoses of Men And Women—that is, all of them, or all of us—and if they apply to anyone else, then that comes as a surprise to me, it having been established for lo these many years that I’m an odd duck.

So yeah, you read that right: I’m about to get romantic all up and down this bitch.  Or, more accurately, I’m going to tell you how love is.

The Beard of the Season for Laughing

I went to Wikimedia Commons looking for the pic of the day, just to have a picture. Thinking it would have nothing to do with anything here. This is what I got. The post explains why I think that’s . . . remarkable, at the very least.

So, palsomine, it has been awhile.  Things have been afoot.  Well, actually, no.  I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop.  And sweeping the Ladybeard off her feet.  And toeing the line, and . . .

Ahem.

First things first: I finally finished the “The Novel I’ve All Been Waiting For” revamp that I laid out for myself in the spring and promptly forgot about.  Not much going on with trying to sell that book.  The gatekeepers are otherwise occupied.  That’s not strictly true–I’ve gotten some interest but have been remiss in keeping the queries going out while I tried to figure out if I was about to go completely broke and have to consider moving out of NYC again.  Anyway, it’s done, it’s over to the right side, and that makes it remarkable that the picture here to the left is what Wikimedia Commons showed me.  That’s Lumpini Park, in the middle of Bangkok; this is part of a wide panorama shot taken from atop the Banyan Tree Hotel, which does show up in my book, and it doesn’t help the hankering I’ve had of late to go back to Thailand.  I left behind some friends there, and I like to see my friends.  Incidentally, I lived about 1.5 miles to the right; this picture makes everything look lovely.  Walk just out of frame and just behind the office buildings, in the daylight, and you’re in the shit.  I miss my old neighborhood sometimes.  I miss some parts of my old life, too.  Just not the lie that, as it turns out, it was founded on.

Shit gets complicated, brah.

So what have I been doing?

I had me some posts ready to go.  Man, I got on a tear.  I was gonna talk about Obama on The Daily Show and why I consider Stewart/Colbert basically Fox News with a better sense of humor (man, and I’d thought the indifference I expressed when the new Daily Show book was mentioned to me–incorrectly taken as anger or annoyance–brought on an awkward silence.  Dropping that comment at a dinner table in midtown . . . whoo, boy.).  I was gonna point out that Stewart actually had done a pretty goddamned good bit a few months back about how Obama’s basically continued all of Dubya’s policies (even though he spoiled it a bit at the end by somehow blaming Palin for all of it) and how I was gonna watch the interview with some interest.  I was gonna talk about the interview, about how Stewart mostly soft-pedalled it, letting Obama give all sorts of different spins to the question–which isn’t the right question, by the way–of “why isn’t everything all better now?”  I read a quote on a friends Twitterfeed the day after saying “I said change you could believe in.  Not change in 18 months,” which is funny and does a breathtakingly good job of changing the subject and avoiding the question.

I was gonna give Greg Easterbrook (my favorite NFL columnist; he’s actually known for writing center-left political commentary, especially about the environment, but I know him as an NFL columnist, which tells you how good I am at being right) an earful for calling on Congress to regulate the NFL because sometimes people get hurt there (then being dishonest about how he’d been using that cudgel) and for his seeming belief that regulation is magic.

I was gonna talk about David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I still might (you should read it.  I think he comes closer to having actual substance in that book than any he’s done before, which are all mostly so breathtakingly well-styled that I honestly don’t know if it matters that he doesn’t seem to have anything all that interesting or enlightening to say about the world and our endlessly entertaining passage through it).

But . . . nah.

What I’ve done is gain about 75 lbs (though most of that is beardweight, which resides in another dimension), move into and out of Westchester County, join Costco and make numerous false starts on continuing with the book I’m working on right now, called The Meat Tree and the Beach.  I was making headway there, but some life-related nuttiness got in the way.  Which was nice, because I was having trouble drawing out the parts of the book that come before the parts that are going to be hard to write, which I’ve been whining about a lot.  They were blog posts written with the expectation that they’d be edited mulitple times later–which is to say, they were even messier than this right here usually is.  If you can believe that.

Anyway, that’s all–just wanted to stop in and say hello.  Fiction Friday didn’t really pan out.  There are a couple stories I’ve been holding back for no good reason, so I believe I will begin posting those soon.  But I’ve got me some productive momentum (promentum, if you will, and you shouldn’t) going, a lot of work reading to get done and some me writing that it’s about damn time I stopped talking about and just did, already.

So . . . hello, there.  Hope all’s been going well for you.  Let’s keep in touch.  That is to say, touch me.

Shrinkless August

The guest columnist for July. He will enlighten you two times before you're aware.

I’d like to thank my guest columnist, 汗まみれの-san, for filling in for me over the last month.  As I’m sure none of you found out, 汗まみれの-san hails from an ancient family of ninjas renowned for a sense of literary style and humor so subtle as to require no words whatsoever.  You have had insights aplenty but, 汗まみれの-san being such a master, you didn’t know.

Big changes are afoot.  There is now an official ladyparts associate of Authorbeard, who is to be named later (I guess I should check with her first), and I’ve been here and there–in Vegas, I think I was both at the same time.  It’s easy to get lost there.  But at least the air conditioning and indoor smoking means you can do it in a nice suit, so I got no beef with Vegas.

Short post today. [authorbeard's note: bwaaaaahahahahahahahahha] I came across this the other day while killing time after exhausting my usual preferred procrastination providers: http://tinyurl.com/36j299q

It took me awhile to get through this, mainly because I’ve been unable to sit still and concentrate on much of anything of any substance for a good long while now.  But I read it with high hopes that I might come across some interesting insights into therapy and such, since I continue to mull over giving it a shot without actually giving it a shot.  Every time I get to the verge of it, I figure there’s something better to do with my time.  Usually, I resume writing and exercising and, sure enough, have no more need for it.  Or at least I don’t feel like I do.  As an aside, I’m beginning to think that I was on the right track back in the day when i thought people were generally too quick to regard bad moods and nasty thoughts as akin to melanomas needing to be excised.  Doubtless, they sometimes are, and if depression is anything, it’s a malignant melanoma, reproducting and hijacking systems left and right.  I’m not quite as gung-ho as I used to be in my embrace of a (mostly) physical explanation of the faulty mechanism causing it to grow out of control, but then I’m more convinced than ever that when I got to the point where I said, “well, fuck it, if the meds make me feel better, or at least draw a line under how bad I’m going to feel without good reason, then I’m all for them,” that I was right.  Then again, this idea that there are–or can be–good reasons to feel bad isn’t all that commonly-held, in my experience. But, as with the meds, the writing, the exercising, or even things like looking for a new job or moving to a different country, the bad feelings have their uses: I dropped Lexapro when I realized it was too good at keeping the panic at bay.  Without the occasional bout of fear and trembling over my own mortality, I never do a damned thing more than going to the usual daily routine.  And not even I’m so hooked on Madden that I think my franchises are any substitute for doing, you know, stuff with my life and stuff.

But anyway, I wanna keep this short. [authorbeard's note: I also want a helicopter]  Join me as I give the self-pitying, tiresome autobiographist linked to above a couple good one-twos after the jump:

Coming Attractions

Marvel at my grasp of alred-well-established communications technology!

So, if you read the post immediately before this one, you’ll see that one Speedyhat has decided to enter the octagon.  I’m pleased as punch to have him aboard; he’s a good fighter.  That will be the last compliment I pay him without any subtext, because the point of any argument is to win, and I fight dirty.

Aha, the point: check over at the “Everybody’s Wrong” tab up there near the top for our ongoing donnybrooks and shenanigans and even the occasional Loch Lomond, since I’ve got some Scottish in me anyway.

As for me, I’m in Las Vegas of all places and, much as I believe it glorifies all that’s questionable or downright despicable about the rock n roll industry, I got nothing but nice things to say about the Hard Rock Hotel, at least as far as my room goes.  Still and all, Vegas: balls.  I was wondering to my friend the Vuvuzelette what it says about me and America that Vegas no longer seems scandalously, darkly crass, nothing but cheap glitz and barely-ignored underbelly, and I haven’t decided yet.  This ain’t Fear and Loathing, but I think that might be a good thing, or at least have some good bits: making peace with the underbelly.  Or that

See me jump to conclusions, and to the end of the sentence, all this and more after the jump–

SpeedyHat Makes An Entrance

The Beard has invited me to participate in this blog. I’m not really a writer. And I don’t really read. But hell, why not. I figure the only requirements for blogging are that you (1) have an inflated sense of your own self-worth and (2) don’t mind looking stupid on a fairly regular basis.

So here I am. Hopefully, I’ll prove a good foil for Mr. Authorbeard.  If nothing else, my blog posts will be much shorter and more frequent, though they might lack a certain flare characteristic of the Beard. (yes that was a dig)

Welcome me.

[I just noticed that there are way too many categories in this blog. I'm using porn ... well because I like porn. My apologies to future browsers. ]

Well, Never Mind

Even more useless than Facebook for generating worthwhile political speech.

So I said that I wasn’t gonna blog politics and thisahere thing promptly went dead again.  To my seven-and-one-half readers, I apologize.  It’s just that the stuff I was thinking about, that I should be on about, isn’t for the blog, really.  The good news is that I got cookin’ on a couple of other things, and the second book is humming along decently—along with a repurposing of the old ending to my first book, which, by the way, you can sample over there to your right.——>

Why the politiblogging, then?  Well, I need—er, no, that’s not true; I want an outlet for it, and doing it on Facebook is annoying as all hell.  Ask anyone who’s gotten sideswiped from me (though the Cheshire Infantryman and Emperador Niceguy haven’t followed through on their initial enthusiasm for taking our spats over here rather than littering people’s walls; they might have surmised—correctly, I assure you—that I’d open both barrels and get ad hominem.  The problem is that they seem to object to that—and what fun’s political talk amongst friends if it isn’t nasty and personal?).  Hell, it annoys even me.  I’ll return to this in a second.

But what else am I supposed to talk about on my blog?  The state of the publishing industry?  Sports (well, I’ll get to that, especially once real sport—the NFL, that is—returns to action, granting my life an organizing principle once again)?  Some sort of hyperspecific fetishization of the little pleasures of everyday life, ginned up to appear as an old-timey Protestant-hymn celebration of the magnificence of existence?  If you want that, read this, or read someone’s Facebook stream about, I dunno, goddamned cupcakes.  Should I write about what I did today?  No—you don’t want to know, boyo.  Trust me on that one.

New cupcake recipes after the jump!!! Yay!!! !!! (god, shoot me)

Fuck This Blog

I am deeply and sincerely indifferent to the part of this person who is not the character this person has created and flogged in public.

I’ve been wasting my time and yours with this political bullshit.  I’m talking, of course, to the 3.5 Juniorbeards out there who check in on thisahere thing.  Lefty, DelRay, Hut: much obliged.  But anyway, as I was saying, this political bullshit can come right on over and do shocking things with intimate parts of my body.  There’s no point to it, for several reasons–and, for a change, I’m not going to run them down in exhaustive detail.  Suffice it to say, it’s not my thing that I do, so I’m going to stop doing it.

Right now, somewhere between the usual boredom alchemy and shoplifting thrill of hiding out in the open all weekend, reading to myself and doing precisely none of the things one is allegedly supposed to do to take advantage of this great metropolis what plays host to the Land of the Morning Amnesia, I’m starting to get pissed off enough to get down to actual business.  That almost certainly sounds entirely unlike what I mean.  But so here’s something else untoward about me: I have to get pissed off to get down to work.  Take my sorry, flabby corpus, for example: all it takes is the right picture, and I remember that, really, loving food or not, I learned to like all the pains of getting fit.  So I need to be going after those.  Hedonist though I am, that’s just sort of to skim off the scum from my true passion, which is the pursuit of invisible and entirely avoidable pains, because they might could turn out to be good for me in some respect or another.

I’m telling you, sport, if I ever have any success, it’s going to send me for one godawful mess of a loop.

Also, I stumbled across a new biography of Tom Waits yesterday, out looking for something else like I always am when I find something worth finding (“Well, what are you looking for?” people ask, entirely understandably, when I talk about looking for a new job.  The foregoing is not an appopriate answer.  Neither is, “a golden helicopter made of hot tubs,” but I’ll take it anyway.)  Like the last one I read, which I remember as a kind of spliced-together collection of interviews with a little light interpretation kind of strung between them, it’s a reminder of what I really should be up to.  And I’ll tell you, there’s nothing in Williamsburg that’s that.  ‘Swhy the Bill is such a good place for me to be.  Maybe the Dominicans in my neighborhood, maybe they got places I can go and just sort of be there, and lurk, and maybe talk to people who got no set of expectations for me, except that I’m white and so only tangentially comprehensible and probably not that interesting.  Lotta dives around here.  They’re almost all faux dives, but what the hell: I gave up giving a shit about authenticity a good long while ago.  It’s one of the themes of the first book, in fact.  Holla.

But this guy, Barney Hoskins, the one who wrote the biography I’m reading now, he’s already earned himself a couple solid thwacks on the ears for his music-critic nonsense (it’s bad enough that they take music so seriously.  Then they gotta do it to musicians?  What I mean is, they pretty much all got the wrong kind of serious, is what I mean.  It’s like they figure since they can’t be rockstars themselves, they’ll be acadmics, where they can sit in safety and churn out careers in sausage-making from the riskiness, pretense and general illiteracy of people inolved in pop mus).  For one thing, this insufferable foreword he wrote, ostensibly agonizing over whether he has the “right” to dig into Tom Waits’ personal life in light of Tom’s clear and very strong preference that he not do that.  As an exercise in missing the point, it’s exquisite: he gets to the point, before too long, where he picks up on the obvious, which is that “Tom Waits” is an act that also includes music.  But in the intro he betrays all sorts of nonsense about wanting, apparently, to get to the man hisself, which makes me wonder why on earth anybody’d want to do that.  See cheap Psych 101 pseudo-insight blather about identifying with the singer, music, the spiritual importance of musicians, and so on in the intro.  Then, after you’d brushed out the throwup smell offa your teeth and had a couple cups of water, keep reading, because it’s actually, so far, fantastically well done, for all my kvetches.  Or at least it’s fantastic that it was done; me, I’m reading it as a sort of how-to manual.  I’m also scanning for good, old-timey, offensive and groan-inducing jokes like the one about the gay guy who joined the church because he heard Jesus was hung like this.

So yeah, fuck this blog.  Now I’m free to write about other stuff that I’m in no position to write about.  I like the challenge.  Maybe something pretty good will come out of it.

Don’t hold your breath, JimBuck.