The Daily Hernia

Thinking about writing a novel. No, it is funny. I've been "working on a novel" since I was about 15 years old. Back then, I sat in my bedroom with the door shut so my insane mother wouldn't see me and shriek at me for, literally, existing. In so shutting myself off, I also shut out the heat from the kerosene heaters in the house. So the room was about 40 degrees, and colder some nights.

In this room, I had an electric typewriter circa 1986, with a funky "word processor" in the tiny unreadable digital screen. At least this was an upgrade to the 1970s typewriter with the cloth ribbon. I had this typewriter set on an open drawer of my dresser, and I'd scoot a chair up to it, wearing my coat and a blanket across my legs. And I wrote unbelievably shitty short stories in that condition.

I've been a writer, and I've stood naked against the world. But nobody looks.

As an aside, the drawer was filled with discarded manuscripts, pieces of stories I'd cannibalize. In the drawer, among the papers, tiny little mice had made their home. In the dead of winter, I didn't have the heart to toss them outside. I didn't have a car, or a driver's license, so I couldn't take them to a shelter even if I knew of the existence of one. And I certainly couldn't kill the cute little bastards.

While I'd write, I'd see a mouse running along the floor molding, stopping to observe me for long periods. Since my head did not fly from my shoulders and swoop down on it like a preying bird, as I'm sure the mouse expected, it would move on. Eventually I'd hear it scuttling up the back of the open drawer and plop into the shredded manuscripts. I once probed into the drawer and found four very young mice, huddled together under the paper for warmth. Four grey balls of fur, precisely the same.

The memory of what I'd endure, for the sake of writing, is like a hernia to me now. I'm hesitant to think hard on it, as if in moving I will cause the hernia to shift, and blaze searingly through a hole in my abdomen until I can force it back inside. Where it belongs. My grandfather, an old car mechanic, had a hernia the size of his fist. When it would pop out, he'd have to lie down on his back and push the thing back into his body.

I imagined, in that artic room, among my scribbles and virginity, I was going to become a "successful novelist." Hemingway, Stephen King, someone like that. Adventure and women. The Florida Keys or Maine. Chad Carter and his expanding universe of hardboiled novels, sex-dappled lovers, and acclaim. My uncomfortable youth would strip Vegas style, revealing ever more amazing reams of happiness and satisfaction. Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury would say I was a great writer, carrying on a great legacy.

Hernia.

The hernia aches, a piledriver waiting to fall. I talked about being a writer more in my adult life than anything else, more than girls, more than jobs, more than anyone who ever meant anything to me. I believed, in the final report, I'd be forgiven if I didn't quite know how to love, or how to communicate, or how to be happy. All of those things come with success. And what is success for a writer really? Money? Movie adaptions? Smug satisfaction?

I don't know. I remember when I was a boy, I'd climb a shed behind my grandfather's garage and sit on the roof, looking out over a corn field. It was where I went when I was hiding, when I was sure I was alone. Beyond the field was a high school and mysteriously fluffed and laughing girls much older than me drove in and out. Sometimes they stopped for gas at the garage, and I'd pop wheelies on my bike to show off for them. I once hit the brake pedal by mistake and flew over the handlebars. I didn't let go, so I ended up sitting on the ground in front of my bike. I scrambled up, too shaken to even get back on. One of the pretty teenagers I was showing off for came jogging over, her friends giving those "aww" noises and half-laughs, and the girl laughed too. I didn't look at her, just shoved my bike fast into the bushes and took off running. It was like I would never ride a bike again. I swore vengenance on bikes and teenaged girls in jeans.

In a way, my writing has become very much a failed popped wheelie. I shove writing around, kind of humilated, cheeks burning, dreams skinned. Showing off had gotten me nowhere but embarrassed. The only difference is, everyone expected the little boy to get back on the bike and show off for the girls again some day, and probably sooner than later. But now?

Now they just say things like, "Well, what are you going to do? You need a hobby. You should think about taking classes. It's over. It's finished. The bike's broke, and lucky for you to still have your balls after that crack-up!"

Yes, lucky.

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.