Don't Come In Here

This Thing has fallen way by the wayside. Though I'm not sure anyone noticed. For the time being, until life affords more time to talk about itself on this forum, here's a Christmas story I wrote for The Coast.

I'm Sorry and Thank You

Swing by the Joyland site, why not. I currently have a story up on the Montreal-Atlantic section, I'm Sorry and Thank You. The way things currently look, this will be the final story in the forthcoming The Cloaca.

A man on base is a man on base

This was my third year of university. All I can remember about this story and this time was being completely past the whole scene. Over them. Guh: undergraduate literary journals and their launch parties. There’s a line of Bruce McCulloch’s that I’d like on my Tombstone one day, and it certainly describes my headspace then. Cynicism was my whiskey, the line goes, and I’d had a few. The thing was that whiskey was also my whiskey, and beer my beer. At the launch of this Headlight, I went up for my allotted reading time, cynicism and whiskey and beer up to my eyes, and I decided that I was better than all of it. Everyone with their stupid little stories in this stupid little book. I decided to tell a story from off the top of my head and have it be better than anything in that book. The result was a slurred story about this kid I had played baseball with, this kid Peter. His mother was a dwarf and his father was a giant who owned a vacuum store in town, The Vacman. The only way for Peter get on base ever was to get hit by a pitch, and pretty soon that became his gimmick. Whenever he was up to bat, I swear he let his body list just enough over the plate. "Way to take one for the team, Peter!" the coached called. A man on base is a man on base, after all.

I won't go into my revised attitude about undergraduate literary anthologies. Or I'll just say they're good and important and let that be that. But I can't keep talking about my juvenile writings without talking about the juvenile attitudes and postures that came along with them. Stay tuned for a post on zines and what prompted me to opine, during a spoken word poetry performance, "That's the same sound I make when I come into my own mouth."

The empty sack of traits

The discerning reader should pick up on the fact that the kitten featured in this story about a sad robot is named Epimy. This is an obvious reference to Epimetheus, titan twin of Prometheus--the latter meaning foresight, the former hindsight. Duh. The twins were given the task of handing out qualities to all the animals of the mythological world. Epimetheus, lacking foresight, emptied his sack of traits before he got around to man. Getting his brother out of this tight spot, Prometheus stole some goddamn fire from the gods the way we learned in high school. What this has to do with a robot who is sad because he can't cry, I leave up to you (you being you) to decide.

The two other inspirations for this story were the answering machine message I had at the time and a series of songs by Grandaddy about a robot who commits suicide. The story, for me, is a comment on humanity's sad drive to build robots who resemble us. Why it's important for a robot to smile or dance is so, so far beyond me. I understand making machines for specific tasks, but striving to make humanoids seems just frivolous and an obvious path to a Terminator future. This trend which I had hit on in 2004 has since gone unabated. Obviously the Movers and Shakers did not get their copy of Soliloquies 7.

I'm just like the freelance fence-painter

There was a good spate there--a lot of 2004--where I was working on a sequence of stories about the doings of a freelance fence-painter operating in the Muskokas. I had read Italo Calvino and holy hell did my hair ever get blown back, did my dress ever get gusted up over my head. The freelance fence-painter was my stab at Calvino's Marcovaldo and Palomar stories, the stories full of the titular character looking at banal things and realizing profound trtuhs about himself and the universe and the universe in himself. The project was a fantastic, thrilling failure. I even spent a weekend in the summer of '04 in Bracebridge and Huntsville getting drunk in Travelodges' under the guise of working on the Book (a scene that has been repeated the past few summers in Arizona, while I work on what might one day be my first novel).

Let me tell you: the only thing better than actually writing a book is sitting around dreaming about writing a book. We can talk about Shelley and the ember of inspiration, but my second year Romantic notes are in a box at my parents house, so we won't. I will flimsily summarize, though, and say that the way you (you being me) build a book in your head is an astounding exercise, astounding because you don't actually have to do any of the work; the prose has already taken move-like life before actually being written. The comeuppance comes when you (you being me) have to sit down and turn all those lovely, sitcom-flashback-misty scenes into real writing. It turns out writing's hard. What's easy is killing an entire weekend in a hotel in Ontario's lake country, not leaving your room, getting drunk the way twenty-year-olds get drunk, watching TV in your swim trunks, and calling it writing.

The stories that I did manage to finish (roughly seven of the planned (seriously) 100) appeared in Soliloquies 7 and a newsprint magazine called The Void. (A funny story: Colm Toibin visited Concordia that fall with his book The Master. In a fleeting conversation it came up that I had just had a story published. "Oh? Published where?" he wanted to know, imaging, maybe, that I had placed a story in the god damned New Yorker or something. "In The Void," I told him. And Mr. Toibin laughed at me in that way only a large, craggy-faced Irishman can.)

The character of the freelance fence-painter (marvel, please, at my choice not to Capitalize the main character) hails from this Smog song, Song. You (you being you) can be sure there was a story where the FFP eyes the backside of a woman who has brought him iced tea.

Juvenilia

This is my first kick at this can. With not a fancy hell-of-a-lot to report about my comings and goings and doings and thinkings--and with not a heap of interest in any of all that anyway--I thought I'd nudge this thing into motion with some ready made content.

What'll follow is the juvenilia that I had the wet-earned temerity to foist on people my own age in positions to bind or staple their coevals crap (some of which was pretty good--pretty readable and pretty performable) to sell to their friends and, in some cases, the parents of their friends. These are not good writings, and I'm way pleased that they're not good. Reading over the pieces that I'll make available to you (whoever you are), I can remember the writing of them. I can remember how certain I was about everything that spilled out of my cup whenever I deigned to tip it over. I'm not being falsely modest when I say that I don't know if I've improved as a writer from this first story (the one just around the bend, a story written nearly ten years ago) to the ones I'm right now trying to foist on a whole slew more binding people. What's changed is the certainty. I've got so much less of that animating confidence that drove me to write these (probably shitty) early stories. I'm the first one to admit that I'm no technician when it comes to prose, and I've got very little to say about the goddamn art of the whole business. What I am is self-conscious as all get out. And this insecurity slows me down, cools my heels, and maybe let's me temper and suss out the technique or art from whatever stupid thing I'm at. To think that these stories I'm offering up here happened without that creeping self-hate is a little befuddling. And maybe that's what makes these Muppet Babies so interesting to me. I can't say whether they'll be of any interest to you (whoever you are).

Brother's Sad Because His Skull's Become Too Tight is the first story that I ever had "published." It appeared in Soliloquies 6, released Spring 2003--Soliloquies being one of the two (maybe more now) vehicles for the creative writing students at Concordia. I would have been newly twenty when I wrote this. I realize now, reading the fucker over somewhat quickly tonight, that I brought this bucket up from the same well that I hoisted the first story in my collection, Pardon Our Monsters. The practice described in the story is called trepanation, by the way, and I think I probably heard of it first in the movie Ghost Busters.