On the Oscars | Video Blog!

This is how I feel every time I read someone from my graduating class publishes something:



Also, it is a pretty uncanny impression of Bradley Cooper tonight.

On 'The Giving Tree'

What the grown-ups don't tell you is that the Giving Tree's stump was later torn up and mulched at a factory, where it was pulped, pressed, bleached and turned into binding to print copies of Melodie Beattie's self-help book "Codependent No More."


It was all a massive conspiracy to cyclically keep the publishing industry afloat. Truth is, man hasn't actually needed the written word since 1802. It's all a game being played out hundreds of moves in advance between the warring clans Simon and Schuster.

On Writing

I will tell you a truth about being a writer. No one else will tell you this, because they will say it is too simple, that it generalizes too much and diminishes the role of artists in our culture, but it is true.

There are only three writers.

Either you are talking about The Way Things Are, or Why Things Are What They Are, or you get mad and decide to talk about Something New Entirely.

That's it. That's the big secret.

The First Writer is important. He is a reporter, a chronicler of the Here and Now. She keeps our society from becoming to outwardly focused, keeps us returning to self-evaluation when we get too enthralled by the bread and circuses in our daily lives.

The Second Writer is a very fun person. She sees the relationships between disparate trends, understands the root causes and how A influences B. Second Writer points out what others fail to see and explain our lives in ways we hadn't considered, making us introspective with purpose, instilling the impetus to do good and provide betterment to our world.

And provides nothing.

Noticing connection and discussing philosophy is important, yet changes nothing. They are passive forms of thought. Important, useful, but ultimately not creative.

No, perhaps that is a poor, diminishing word. These modes of expression take effort. They are important, imperative. We must have them to be inventive. They are the long division of empirical thought. Philosophy is descriptive; ethics are an effort, a choice. We are given an understanding of the world, but choose how we will proceed.

When we have teased all the meaning we can out of life, when we can no longer abide comparing Miley Cyrus to Batman and we are tired, and we want truly to affect The Way Things Are, writers give up on description until they find something of their own to describe again.


I enjoyed being a First Writer. I had nothing to say, but a great desire to say much. So I was verbose. I learned a terrible number of adverbs and adopted the semicolon like an orphaned Cambodian child I could feed for pennies a day. I wrote scenes, all emotionally charged and all in which absolutely nothing happened, and what did happened happened without explanation. It was self-indulgent and subconscious, and it accomplished for me nothing.

Being a Second Writer is an incredible pain in my ass. I have so much to say still, but I recite it feeling like I'm retelling the same jokes to my friends. I was openly criticized last week for telling a story about a funny joke I made to someone else, because it wasn't funny as a story. I followed this by commenting on the dead air and implied a friend who had just left would shout from the back door like a prick at a flailing New York comedy club, "…You suck!" This got better laughs, and in telling it now I achieve nothing, because even that story isn't funny on-the-cuff. I have jokes, but no goal for them. I've been told that being a Writer means having to kill your favorite children. So as loath as I am to lose them, my progeny drown slowly in the bathtub.

I'm starting to build my own beliefs. I have ideas for reasons and I'd like to tell you about them, and I'm working to make you listen. I want to make it easy, but I don't want to spoon-feed you. I want to convince you by showing you what I've seen and making my case, so that we can go forward together.

There are things I want to say to you. I hope one of them will feel Entirely New.

A Sign of Things to Come

"Dear David,
My good friend Emily just went away. I need a new friend.
Will you be my friend? Let me know. Tell me something we can do.

*paw prints*
Your friend,
Little Bear


Dear Little Bear,

No. I do not like bears.

Your Friend,
David


This is what happens when you have a prodigy with a sense of humor and zero tolerance for neither busywork assignments nor ursine children's characters.

God that bear was stupid.

On Feminism

If I were Elaine Showalter, I'd have secretly written a bodice-ripping romance novel full of poor character development and trite symbolism by now, to be released only upon my death.

You know, just to mess with people.

Part of me says it would be to deconstruct my own deconstructions, to prove that no one viewpoint is ever the entire objective picture, but my gut says it's just to make people think.

Because people hate thinking. Especially people who plan on doing your for you.

Think Scary Thoughts

When I imagine jumping in front of a speeding city bus, and the notion seems an overreaction, then I know that I am not suicidal.

Today I considered becoming a functioning alcoholic. I may only have a few drinks a month, but having enjoyed quite a few more than that over my recent vacation, I find I went back to work only grudgingly, considering a shot of courage to ease the bitter medicine that is tech support.

I recognize the social frowning upon of drinking before work. Very unprofessional. And yet the thought came slowly, from the ground up as it congealed into a real possibility. If I were nervous and unhappy, why not take a relaxant? What harm is that but for the possibility of growing dependent? Truly, would drinking a beer at lunch be any worse than the Red Bull I guzzle every few days to stay awake?

And the thought frightens me, because short of seeing it as an emotional crutch, I find no qualms with this line of behavior. Mad Men may be horrifyingly excessive, but a grown adult can certainly enjoy a single beer at lunch without being called a drunkard on-the-clock. Honestly, it frightens me more that I would require such a crutch.

So I choose to neither be a drunkard, nor a caffeine addict. I choose to soldier on sober and with a bit of malice in my heart because it is a part of me not to be drowned or overlooked. If I am frightened or unhappy to do what must be done, I will acknowledge that and perform my duties regardless, because to simply complete those duties to the best of my ability without slack or chemical aid pushes my natural limits. Frightening thoughts only prove that I am still considering every possible universe in front of me, even those I and others find unattractive. It's a comfort, to meet my own rigorous standards and to find I have something more left to give.

My friends tell me there's a point in drinking beyond regular drunk, where you become more awake and manageable, where to stop drinking is to fall asleep. You go beyond drunk. It's the Super Saiyan of drinking. Frankly, after my BAC tops about 0.01 I want to take a nap. As much as it might help my image as a crotchety old lush/writer, I think I'm going to steer clear of the Hemmingway school of thought.

Unless I really need a nap, then I'm hitting up happy hour.

I Hope I Become Famous | Boston | We Might All Me Murdered

Today was very much A DAY. Lots of things, all EXTREME, possibly with extra X's, none of it terribly consequential.

The takeaways:


1. I have a featured column up at Good Men Project!

Right on the front page, "above the scroll," AND IN THE SLIDESHOW!
Direct link here: Transformers as an Allegory for Transsexualism in America.
(It originally appeared on here and will likely make it into my book one day, if Michael Bay doesn't sue me or make a gritty reboot of my book.)


2. I'm Headed up to Boston for a long weekend celebrating a friend's birthday. We will be touring the Sam Adams brewery and then attending a Red Sox game. It is entirely expected for us to be molested, ejected, and hopefully respected for returning home alive. Also, we may not all return from this alive. We knew what we signed up for though.

That said, blogs are going to be sparse the next few days, but I should be posting some interesting photos, quotes, or anecdotes as they unfold. Also, I may ask for bail.

On an Unnecessary Number of Shades of Grey

Erika Leonard, I begrudge you nothing but the millions of dollars you'll make
exploiting the market's overall lack of taste in fiction.You're no worse than the Disney Channel.

I'll admit, I'm completely a hypocritical elitist when it comes to books. I know what good literature is and I know what good writing is, in the non-fictitious realm, and I know that just because something is popular doesn't make it automatically bad writing.

I mean usually, but not always. ("Hunger Games" proved its worth to me.) Likewise, just because genre nerds love something doesn't make it good either, nor is a book well written just because I like it. Frankly, the bulk of my shelves are still Star Wars novels. They're not even particularly solid, anymore, just genre tropes, but I'm 40 years into a continually expanding universe. I'm plot committed. (Glad somebody else uses that term, apparently.)

Still, "Fifty Shades of Grey" is a piece of garbage I wouldn't tough if it were recycled into the only toilet paper in a five block radius.

Yes, yes, I bitched out "Harry Potter" and "Twilight" before it, but those at the very least had the distinction of gearing towards children and teens. This book began as "Twilight" erotic fan fiction and is selling like a new iPhone. It is not good, it is not even fun. It has all the undercurrent popularity of mild pornography smuggled into tree houses from brothers' backpacks.

And honestly, I'm fine with it.

Worst-case scenario, nothing happens aside from another terrible movie adaptation trilogy, currently rumored to star Alex Skarsgard. That could at least be a lot of sexy times in 4 hours of television men will get dragged to. Way more than Bridget Jones' Diary.

Best case? A whole generation of women latch onto light-to-moderate BDSM play as a weekend fetish on par with the Sexy Pirate swashbuckler novels and $8 naughty nurse VHS tapes.


Still, I'm thinking about exercising that "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason" clause if any more 14 year-olds ask for it.

We put age ratings on the manga and even shrink wrap the more violent ones or anything that draws the nipple. We shrink wrap "The Big Butts Book" in Photography for the same reason: while technically listed as it, the artistic merits of the nudity are questionable, especially in light of commercial and obscenity laws.

"Fifty Shades" is listed as 'Erotica' right on the back cover, and I'm selling it to grandmothers, mothers, and girls who were dropped off here on their way to the movies which, if rated R, would require their chaperone. Some local girls are even trying to read it for their high school's Free Choice quarterly book project.

Alright, I might steal that eight page sex contract/questionnaire, though. That might be useful at some point.

On Copyediting

Two years as a section editor and I never learned a better reaction to seeing these instances than contacting the publisher and begging for a job.

Of Literary Insomnia

I remember I once wrote what I would say in the event I become famous and am then asked how I write such words. I have no idea what exactly it was I said, and the reason is this:

The way I actually write is by scribbling down odd ideas throughout the day, if I can remember them long enough to get to a pad and pen. Some days I have material for weeks, other days are dry as gin. On these days, most of the days, really, I open a new document around eleven at night. About one-thirty I give up and start typing anything I have, spitefully at the empty white screen which reminds me that even I loath most of the notions for subject matter I've had so far that night.

By 1:58 I've usually penned something adequate and pleasantly humorous. By 2:02 I have completely forgotten what it is I wrote.

So when you tell me that you read this, and I have no idea what you're talking about, and I say things like, "What are you talking about?" and "Well, that sounds like something I'd write, yeah. But what did I say?" you'll forgive me for my self-induced and entirely unavoidable literary insomnia.

How Blues Traveler Writes a Song | John Popper is a pretty cool guy

On the brilliant advice of a friend I posted this past week my old college paper likening Blues Traveler's "The Hook" to a Shakespearean sonnet (#55, for reference). I also tweeted it @Blues Traveler since John Popper had expressed an interest in it. My friend thought he might retweet it and get me some page views. It was a smart move.

Well, John actually got back to me with some fascinating thoughts strung out over the course of ten consecutive tweets, which I've decided to dump for you here so everyone else can get a little insight into how a BT song comes together.

[Note: I've adjusted for tweet separation and spelling errors, but not grammar or style. That's all Popper, baby.]

Wow... I did not know a lot of that!... Intuition led a lot of my feel for respecting & rejecting traditional form intermittently but my desecration of Pachebel was my first aim.

Actually the song was built on the premise of my older brother mentioning that I use too many words in a verse... So my aim was to do the first two verses "normal" & cram way too many into the "3rd" verse (which became the break down).

But the subdivision of rhyme scan into rhyme within a "rhyme" while not perhaps Shakespear's brand of gin, is a practice as old as the hills... Especially with lymrics or iembic scans...actually rap does it alot... But I'd wager most devises have been effected by the Bard... & certainly his ability to take what had come before & innovate is a trademark of every innovater I aspire to...Bob Marley didn't do alot of the "reggae" things we now associate with a genre we give him credit for inventing. Likewise Hendrix broke many of his own rules of the new guitar style he himself was establishing... I expect no less from arguably the greatest master of the english language ever.. But I was really impressed with that report & must now track down sonnet #55... Thanx for that... ;)

For the record, that is two winky faces John Popper has tweeted me.

Your move, Everyone Else Trying to Feel Cool.

3am Thoughts

They say midnight is the witching hour, but every artist I know seems to say 3 a.m. is the inspiration hour.

Here's a thought for you: I can only stay up this late because I get to sleep in on my one day off from selling books and trying to sell computers.

So I will end up spending the day reading my new book I haven't had time for and perusing and adding to the internet.

Now go to the dictionary and look up "irony."

(The real irony being you'd most likely have to find and ask your parents for a dictionary.)

On Lacking Direction: A Project Update

So today I get to sleep in a little bit, then book it to Connecticut for an interview with Apple. That'd be a second part-time job alongside Barnes & Noble, both of which would fund my plot to move somewhere more conducive to a writing career in the near future.

All this while maintaining this blog, submitting my book proposal to more agents, and interviewing webcartoonists from Oregon, Texas, Belgium and hopefully Massachusetts for said book.

Oh, and I'm starting a secret project to create a meme/internet resource site, but shush.

Basically, I have no idea what I'm doing, but it should be very entertaining for the rest of you, especially with a 1000th blog post coming in about a month. (Oh shit oh shit oh shit….) Bear with me while my head explodes, and sell the elegant blood splatter pattern afterward.

On Timing

Sometimes this blog is really fun. Last week I came up with an idea while I was actually staring at my computer with nothing to do and nowhere to be. I churned out a whole entry, copied into my book's Office file and reedited the thing into a whole new, five-page in-between chapter. It was great. And all this happened ten hours before the blog would even post, so I had the entire night to myself to see friends and relax when normally I'd be mining conversations for material to slap together between 12 and 3 in the morning (like–er–now, I guess).

And other times, yeah, it's like pulling teeth, but I kind of love those hateful nights the way you love your weird uncle or a really whorish sister.

But sometimes I encounter a really annoying, really fun problem. Sometimes I'm just too awesome. I can come up with an idea so wonderful I can't pull it off to my own satisfaction. Those get locked up in the brain vault or, like, a notepad until one of my friends tries to make another internet video. Other times I think of a joke so perfect it doesn't even have words, just a series of flashed images and ethereal concepts.

And then sometimes I just have a really good idea for something and I can't fucking show you. Yeah, sometimes I repurpose ideas which were originally used in other projects. So sue me; I've done this every night for two years now. If I've got good material somewhere you haven't seen it I'm reusing it so you can see it.

…

I'm getting off track. Look, just check back in in a week and I promise you something pretty awesome if you're a huge nerd.

But I mean check back every day in between too, because there could also totally be awesome crap in the interim, I just haven't made it yet.

On Cabin Fever

I got through this whole post without making one
Rider Strong joke. I should win a date with Topanga.
…Damn it.

I haven't gotten into work for a week now. No, I've not been barricaded in behind steel doors fending off dreaded ice zombies of the snowpocalypse. It just keeps snowing the night before all the days I'm scheduled to work. Store's not open, I can't go in.

I've filled my time fairly well. I worked on my book, I took notes whenever a new episode of Jersey Shore was on, I even got out to the grocery store a couple times and saw friends before the weather got too rough. But I went into this most recent snow storm basically being done. I finished everything. Now I've got very little that needs doing and precious little that I'd be interested in doing after spending the last week indoors.

Of course, most of my friends are stuck driving into work anyway at the crack of dawn and sitting around doing nothing all day, so I suppose sleeping in and only being bothered by too much free time isn't all that bad. In fact, it kind of makes me the asshole of the group. Awesome.

On Art

This is a story my father told me, one I only now recollect hearing firsthand.

Years ago, much as this past week, there had been a terrible snow storm. My mother, still getting her master's, rushed out of the house one day to take a test. Driving towards a frighteningly tough contemporary art history essay exam, she happened to drive past a Mercedes, haplessly adrift in a, well, a snow drift.

Suddenly, inspiration struck her. What was once a looming dissertation of unknown topic became an obvious solution. Art is, after all, that which has no intrinsic use to society. Having lost all functionality intended for a mid-sized German coupe, the Mercedes had stopped being a car and become a work of art.

On Procrastination and Class

I really should have been working on my book today.

It's already evident that I'm not going to have a finished third draft by the end of the year. I may have stood a chance if I really buckled down, but instead I decided to, yeah, work a little bit and earn some money for Christmas.

Fine. Whatever.

But now I'm tired from working and I'm full of pizza and I'm not exercising and I find myself procrastinating. Case in point:

Somewhere along the line I was linked a DropBox link which opens a YouTube video in each of three object windows, looping them indefinitely. They are a video of a fireplace and the audio of smooth jazz and a quiet rainstorm.

I forget what it was originally called, but I just have it saved to my desktop as "Pure Class." This is like the most relaxing thing I've ever found, and I'm including relaxing erotic hypnosis. (I don't have to but, hell, I'll do it for the children.)

Unfortunately, this link won't work on an iPhone, since part of it's Flash based and despite my best warranty-voiding shenanigans I can't play it.

Well, I was looking for a way to procrastinate and not work on my book.

So two hours later I've ripped each of the original videos from YouTube, converted the fireplace to .mov and the other two to .mp3, combined them in Garageband and published back to YouTube in a single video. If you want some class in your life, here's the dropbox link.

And if you're on a mobile device and want just as much class in your life, like I often am, here you go:

On Dumb Teenagers

"If only I'd had my iPhone!"

You know, the more I watch older movies and T.V. shows, the more I'm confronted by the notion that technology is both ruining and evolving horror plots.

On the one hand, teenagers used to be pretty easy to kill. They'd run into the woods, get lost, and then it's just a matter of tracking them over land you're much more familiar with. Then they die.

But now? Kids have GPS all up and down their iPads and cellular mobile modular banana phones. One 12 year old girl even scared off a would-be kidnapper by pretending her iPod was an iPhone and saying she'd dialed 911.

Do you know what I saw in a T.V. show from only 6 years ago? Naked girl slaughters an industrial facility full of armed guards with telekinesis, gets shot, loses her memory and washes up on a beach somewhere. Two college kids find her and what do they do? They put a shirt on her and take her back to their place. Do they call the police? No. Do they take what looks to be an obvious rape/trauma victim to the goddam hospital? Nope. Take her home and feed her rice balls.

But you know, there's something to be said for losing this technology now that we have it. When a kid loses his cell phone in a horror movie now, he's really boned. He might know four useful phone numbers off the top of his head. He won't know where he's driving. He can't easily snap pictures of the hulking, machete-wielding lunatic that's been killing his friends and evading police custody due to lack of living witnesses.

It's real easy to make an audience feel like the protagonist has been stripped of his societal power and must survive on his own. Just take away his damned cell phone.

On Writing A Book

Ostensibly, this blog is something to get me writing each day as a warm-up to writing the bulk of my book.

Instead, I've taken to updating immediately before I go to bed in the wee a.m. of the day for that date, thereby eliminating the possibility of getting work done after. Additionally, after the first eight months or so I completely ran out of jokes.

I mean all of them. I told all my jokes. I had to start making new jokes on a daily basis. It was hard. Especially when I stopped doing things each day. Some days, just nothing funny happens. That's life. (That's also when you end up seeing a reaction to BBC news stories or a list that's maybe 3 or 4 points long. I do try to keep to longer entries for you. It's always for youuuuuu….)

Anyway, when I actually manage to get some work done on the book I feel good. Then I leave it alone for a few weeks until I feel so guilty I have to start again because I've literally cleaned everything I can around my work area without actually working.

However, this ast week I found something while cleaning. I was reorganizing the office supply nooks on the hutch on my desk in the corner where I keep the desktop I haven't used in over a year and only rarely sit. And inside that tiny cubby I found a tiny notepad with some folded fliers wedged inside, and I said, "I can throw this away, right?"

No. I looked at what it was and it was the notepad I haven't used since I went to the concert which I did not write up for a local newspaper and jumpstart a rock music critic career. Instead, it became a college essay a year later, a second essay a year after that, and then the first, titular chapter of the book I'm writing.

And it validates a joke everyone complains about.

I talk about how tiny the venue was, and how lame it was, and then I say that Slayer was performing soon. No one believes Slayer played this place. Really? It's Slayer. What the shit else are they doing? Still, no one believes Slayer would play in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

WELL SUCK IT BITCHES I FOUND THE FLIER.


Yeah, okay, it was a MONTH later instead of next week, and it was actually at a much larger, nearby location, but it was totally booked by the company that owned the tinier venues, run by the same people and listed on the handout explaining who was playing at that venue in the ensuing weeks.

You just got Hoardered.

That joke is legit, yo. And I got the records to prove it. This book goes gold or platinum or Pulitzer or whatever color it is books about hipster dickweeds go, I got evidence to prove to the Comedy IRS that I'm not just making shit up.

I mean I make shit up constantly, but that stuff's reserved for dickweeds like you guys.

On Trigonometry

I was having dinner at my father's last night and ended up helping my little brother with his homework. He's 17. Not that little. Also, I'm pretty sure it was AP (state approved college credit) level physics.

He was tasked with figuring out the resultant direction and magnitude of force when two distinct farces are applied to the same object at an angle to each other. Think to oxen side-by-side pulling the same cart. Like "Oregon Trail." (Even if you don't get physics or weird analogies, everybody gets Oregon Trail.)

It's comforting to know that I'm still capable of this level trigonometry after six years out of the math game. I was always good at math. The irony of my school career was enjoying being good at everything short of gym class. I could have done anything. Teachers always wanted me to go into their field. I liked trig.

Then we hit pre-calc and there were curves. Fucking curves, man. What the shit are curves doing? All curvy? Let me say this about calculus: Trigonometry has existed for 3500 years. Calculus has existed for 350. Judging by how hard it was for unmitigated geniuses to get calculus up and working, I'm going to go ahead and say that it is at least TEN TIMES harder than trigonometry.

Anyway, I aced pre-calc, but that's not the point.

The point is, I dare say, that high school physics homework and calculus are perhaps the greatest offenders of a phenomenon that plagues every branch of the sciences: "scientists can't write words for shit."

Seriously, I think it's gotten worse since I was in school. The word problems are completely incomprehensible, utilize situational models that no rational human being would ever encounter, and are generally tasks that never require a numeric answer.

"How much energy would a single rope require to move the car out of the ditch and in what direction relative to the bisection of the two-rope example?" The answer is "However fucking much it takes to get my car out of this goddam hole."

Worse still, something has caused people to demand the use of directions formed as "North of West." Apparently "Northwest" is wrong. I assume because Northwest is a legitimate direction while many answers would be "generally Northwest-ish." Stupid.

Once again I'm convinced that my high school career was marred by my own terrible ability to test well. Apparently, no one ever expects you to read English, decipher dumb-speak and actually figure out what you're supposed to be doing.

I take it back. Nothing about high school has changed whatsoever.