(An Entry without a number or even a letter in the series, Wanderings of a writer in the digital age)
On Summer Music Gatherings…
So it’s a nice summer night. Sitting in lawn chair after what just happened last hour and I’m happy. So my hometown really knows how to set the mood. So they’re having this thing called the ‘Unity Christian Music Festival’ down by the lakeshore. I hear a P.A and a voice: “We’d like to thank Budweiser” and then they start playing a song. I’d also like to thank the great god of Budweiser, to who around ten I’ll begin confessing my sins. I joke. I think. My goodness. The song they’re playing is terrible. It’s by death leopard or something. I don’t care but anyway, it’s Complete Savagery. They again I’m happy it happened, because in the end it’s all just funny.
Oh Society…
Weaving through traffic with a cart full of cans at the superstore, a place made out of nightmares for men like me, where people push around carts looking at Chef Boyardee like it’s the goddamn dewey decimal system, I thought the worse was over. The fall is silent, but it’s constant, and it never stops. Every single bottle return was beeping, it sounded like one million snow globes chirping Christmas music. “I like my natty. Can’t you tell” a guy said. “Takes them for-fucking-ever to change the bins”. “Cool” I said. “My dog got attacked by a turkey.” “What?” “Yeah. Fifty seven stitches. The bird cut the bitch right open.” “Damn. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of that happening before. They are some big birds…” “I got dear back there too.” “Cool” I said. “Hey, you need any help changing those things” I said to this guy who was seriously looking like he was just going to have a sit down on a crate to cry, and so for twenty minutes I emptied all the bottle machines and even showed him how the tape went in. I don’t get it. But that’s the price you pay not to have to talk about turkeys and dogs and natty cans. Sometimes you have to walk away before it gets weird. You know what I mean? I’m not mad. I got no axe to grind anymore. I’m just intrigued.
On Summer Book Reading…
“Competing with the much deeper pockets of its corporate-owned competitors, FSG needed wiles to survive, and Straus had those in spades. He was reluctant to compromise in a deal, and afterward always reinvented history to paint himself the victor. Beneath the flash and ego, though, Kachka shows Straus to be genuine in his love for the company, the books it produced and especially the authors it published.” Printed in Book-page, concerning a book called HotHouse.
On The Job Market…
Ben Franklin had thirty-five jobs in his life. His last job was creating The United States of America.
On Map Makers and…
WHAT THE FUCK? SERIOUSLY?
On how I’m going to get over there soon…
So it’s like a people bank tube thing or whatever. Who knows, I guess this beats dragging my feet all over the world: “By 12 August, Tesla founder Elon Musk will have announced plans for a new form of transportation which will take passengers 300 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles in half an hour. Such a claim would usually be swatted away as impossible, but Musk has a habit of proving critics wrong, having revolutionised internet banking with Paypal, made the electric car a success with Tesla and proved that reusable rockets are a solution to keep the space race alive with SpaceX. This is also a man who wants to retire with a one-way ticket to Mars. Musk is setting out to prove the US government is wrong with its proposal to construct a high speed railway on the same San Francisco-to-Los Angeles route at a cost of more than $60 billion (£40bn); Musk reckons he can build a faster, safer and more efficient system for a tenth of that amount.”
On The Plight…
AM I? My email is a comedy. So sometimes people think I can hire them. I try and explain them the fact of the matter. Sometimes they don’t listen. I tell them more about the plight. They say they have great recommendations and an accredited degree from so and so. They send me samples. Sometimes they have real good stuff. They ask me about jobs. I tell them nothing. I usually don’t respond. Sometimes people ask me this:
On Mark Wahlberg. The great lover of Detroit…
Full statement if you don’t wanna click: “People think of Detroit like it’s a battle man, but I’m here to put an end to the haters, because Life’s a battle, and this town knows THE TRUTH: Detroiters symbolize the two most important letters in the word HOPE, H and E, and like the auto industry, it starts and ends in the motor city capital of the milky-way. Hello, my name’s Mark Wahlberg, and I know about movies. I act and speak behind a camera. For almost twenty-five years I think I’ve been mumbling other words I didn’t write. I read a total of thirty pages overall in high school so I’m no Chomsky, but I’m pals with him, and he told me that every day in Detroit is a happy one. Remember, I’m Mark Wahlberg, from the movies, and sometimes I do my own stunts. but let’s get REAL: Everyone does their own stunts in Detroit, and the BIG D, posers not welcome, and it’s not what people think it is. I saw many familiar things like humans and telephone wires. It’s not Russia ok, it’s on USA soil. Like every family they got some tiffs, but there’s white people and black people and Asian looking people and some polish too. There are all sorts of people with white and blacker skin tones and textures. THINK! We all came from monkeys people. Evolution. WHAT YOU SMOKING? KNOCK KNOCK…HELLO, I’m Mark Wahlberg, and I know all about Detroit. It’s a place on earth, and some People have hair and most people have teeth. I saw a garbage can too. It’s real life you sheltered rich kids, and no, this isn’t always what the news media depicts, Detroit: They get along with kittens and the cops are actually very cordial to famous white movie stars, and stop with the rumor-mill, because nobody stole my gas pump when I was doing the gas filling up myself on my hybrid monster truck imported from France. Hear me out: It’s what inside that counts, that’s what a young women in Detroit told me, and she’s right. The whole ‘Detroit Abroad In-broad Program’ really opened my eyes: People live there and do stuff like help out with yard work and many people even die of old age and not of murder folks. It’s not like Somalia. What you smoking? It’s in America. There are stores and people talk English and sometimes they speak other languages, because it’s in Michigan. REPRESENT. THE MITTEN OF America. USA SOIL. They have real things that you can sense and it’s not just about murder. I Like Detroit! I don’t live there but I like it. Grow up.” NOTE: MARK WALLBERG NEVER SAID ANY OF THESE ABOVE WORDS.
On Too Much Summer Fun…
And so I couldn’t work on my novel today. Way too hung over and muggy out. Been sweating and snoozing in lawn chair hoping for rain. Needed the day off, not really, and it’s not that bad doing nothing, I just wish it wouldn’t have been because of a self-induced sickness. I did go out to lunch and ate a good Reuben sandwich, and it’s killing me right now. But hey, that’s life, a really slow death by Reuben sandwich. Anyway, note to self, I have to remember to.. no…never mind. I’ll do it again.
A BOOK
Click on picture for full text:
And as always, End with a song…
Adventures In American Writing 