Tuesday's Burly Rant or I Love You Harlan Ellison

I'm thinking of trying to maintain a purely misanthropic theme by forcing myself to raise hell over something.

It's hard to be angry and not be petty. But I'm angry most of the time. I have no real reason to be angry, other than that I haven't acheived my career goals. And people suck, along with the culture of f*cking stupidity they have wrought.

Is this the best time, or the worst time, to be alive? Well, it smells infinitely better than it did a thousand years ago, I'm sure. At least when you had a bunch of people together who didn't have the benefit of being slathered in fine oils because they were born into royalty. Human beings are foul because we're walking germ infestations. I won't touch anything in a public restroom. Yet I'll eat the ass out of a woman with no compunction whatsoever. That's called "Getting Your Groove On." Does the music sound as sweet on a dusty record? Well, once you've blown it off, it does. I can't verify the smell thing, by the way. Considering the stench of carbon monoxide and Axe cologne, it might be a close race with a thousand years ago.

I was trying to think of why I've had such a hard time finishing projects in recent times. I mean, a real apathy like when you know you have to wipe out the bathtub. I was trying to figure out why I'm writing. Writing anything. These days, any coffee-cake hair mom can sit at a computer and knock out an article or novel. It's not like back when people had to scribble on paper with blocky lead pencils then transcribe their own f*cked up handwriting, or sit at a manual typewriter in a crappy room full of cigarette smoke ramming those keys down. God forbid you have to break out the carbon paper. Jack Kerouac used paper rolls he fed into the typewriter which allowed him to keep typing non-stop with the manuscript coiling up on the floor like a snake. F*ck hitting SAVE before you lose a day's work. His work was a real thing at his feet.

So to figure out writing, and you're not a poet with his index finger up his ass, you have to figure you're writing for an audience. The audience can be like one in a movie theatre. Or it can be your wife. Or your College Preparatory English teacher in high school. Or the faceless masses you imagine lining up with your novel or book in hand, who hand it to you facing themselves but upside-down for you, so you have to turn the book around to sign it, and this is the 40,000th time you've had to do that, and you've become annoyed that you have to small talk with a reader who can't even hand you a book turned around right, to make your life easier.

This faceless reader asks, "Where do you get your ideas?"

And all I can think is, "I fundamentally hate that question you just asked. Because you know where I get my ideas. I steal them from more brilliant people, dumb them down so I can understand them, put a title to it and get some limited thinker like yourself to wonder how I came up with it. I must be a genius! And I don't like your face."

Everyone should admit they steal. It's the most sincere form of love. The originality stems from how to display that love of those ideas--not your own ideas, because everything is played out sorry to tell you--so that everyone who reads your book understands your love. The only true love story is between a writer and his inspirations. That's a fact.

Coming back to Audience, I realized that I really started writing because I was influenced by Stephen King, first, and then writers like Harlan Ellison. I wanted their approval, their respect, just as King had earned from Ellison. The brotherhood of the writer is Freemasonry. You want to be entertained from within, and keep the riffraff out. King may be the most down-to-earth writer who ever lived, a family man with a sharp sense of humor and natural story-telling ability. Ellison, in contrast, is the fiery lone wolf in the forest banging models in Hollywood in the 1960s. One man was beloved by millions of readers. The other received death threats on a regular basis while working for the Los Angeles Free Press. Nobody wanted to kill Stephen King because they hated him, like they hated Ellison. No, the schizoids wanted to kill Stephen King because they loved him too much.

I think people in general are a harsh disease. Too much of them is doom. I'd sign books under duress, but I wouldn't belittle people for loving the work. As long as they can distinguish between the work and my humanity. Because I'm not looking for friends. Readers, yes.

But I mostly have to admit I just want to read or hear somewhere, even in a blurb, that Harlan Ellison said my novels were like getting mauled by a half-bear, half-orca that smelled like Raquel Welch after a good workout. He's saying he loves my work, and I loved his work, and by god that's good recycling right there.