18 or 19 THOUGHTS
on drugs, sports, TV, film, literature, and ummm...anything else that matters. (AS IF!)
Before we/me here at Better Days Are A Toenail Away™️ can begin, a quick note to readers of this blog.
I was CHUFFED, HONOURED, HUMBLED, & SHOCKED to see that over 498 unique readers perused a super depressing post I named after a not particularly popular Blue Rodeo album called The Days in Between.
I guess unpopular stuff can still find an audience. I never expected 100 readers for any post…esp considering my first post was…depressing to say the least. Here, lemme show you:
MY OWN PRIVATE EMERGENCY
Here’s a random cat I met last night walking the streets of suburban Scarborough in search of drugs. I’ve named her Emergency.
The opioid crisis is a public health emergency.
Opiate addiction is a private emergency.
And it really really REALLY fuckin sucks.
I miss my everything.
#Junkie#Scarborough#betterdaysareatoenailaway
1 YEAR AGO ON JULY 18, 2020 AT 07:35PM. 1 NOTE
As I’ve explained to my friend’s grandpa 8 times now, “1 NOTE” does not mean only one person read the fuckin’ thing. It means only one person felt sufficiently moved in order to press the little heart thing TUMBLR gives you in lieu of a blue thumbs up.
Which is even more depressing than that black cat. Tell ya what, tho. I knew the marriage was over 100% for certain @ that point.
Anyway I didn’t expect a readership higher than 100, let alone FOUR times that number. SO HOLY SHIT THANK ALL Y’ALL FOR READING. And an even bigger thank you to the 21 of you have chosen to financially support this blog.
I have a BIG surprise for you paying-for-it peeps. It’s been sent to your inbox. More on the way too.
The rest of you don’t get to see it (whatever “it” is) for now bcuz I am trying to incentivize monthly donations. $4.98 or $9.98 or whatever. I know that the idea of writers getting paid is wholly alien to people born after 1989 (as is paying for music), both developments that left my two potential life paths utterly fucked.
If I don’t make it as a musician, I used to tell myself back in, oh say…1999, maybe I could be a writer? I actually prefer writing. I didn’t then, but I do now.
I love music but its pleasures are simply vaguer. Music washes over you like a hot shower. But language, properly deployed, gets closer to the human condition, to the closed & locked drawers of the human heart. I’m older now. I’m not a 17-year old kid rockin’ out to Amusing the Amazing by Sloburn.
I’m interested in what keeps us alive and wanting to be. To what makes such different people kindred, and such similar people complete strangers in values, outlook, and manner.
I once dated a girl I thought might be the one until I saw the cold, rude manner with which she tossed a used napkin at a Sneaky Dee’s server. After that night I never saw her again.
Writing, I always thought, would be around forever.
There are just too many different facets of the human experience, and so many different ways of describing them, because novels are mainly about delay. You hold off on the payoff until you feel your reader, well past page 300 now, deserves the big set piece you always knew your book was founded on. Hell, without it, you wouldn’t have even started writing the fucker.
In high school, my Creative Writing teacher was a man…fuck I forgot his last name so I can’t check his credentials, who emigrated to Toronto in 1996 after a long career in the “People’s National Movement (PNM)” which is “the longest-serving and oldest active political party in Trinidad and Tobago.”
My teacher was a behind-the-scenes guy. He didn’t go to U.N. delegations and pound his shoe (though I do not think Nikita Khrushchev did this either. That story is total Western propaganda nonsense. Even Nikita Khrushchev’s American biographer admits it never happened, and that no photo exists of the Russian dictator brandishing a shoe.
But back to my Grade 11 and 12 Creative Writing teacher.
It was said - I’m using passive voice here to show how others, not just this teacher himself, propagated the rumour that he’d been the speechwriter for both George Chambers from 1981 to 1987, and then Patrick Manning from 1991 to 1995. Both these men were lifelong politicians who had risen to the top position in the republic of Trinidad and Tobago.
It is a testament to the inherent racism and lasting (and ostensible invisible) British colonial Imperialism if the best, most remunerative job the former speechwriter for the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago was teaching high school English.
Fuck, we suck. Canada. Canadians, This man spoke five languages, he wrote silken prose, he was a genius. And we stuck him in a portable in the suburbs to teach 12th grade Creative Writing?
Fuck. Maybe we are On-terrible in this province.
ANYWAY, my point is, I frequently sought him out for writing advice. My thesis assignment was a short story over 40 pages I worked on all year called “Revolutionary Debris” about a pair of heterosexual teenagers, a guy and a girl, who join an anti-government militia but are swiftly disillusioned by the group’s completely incoherent “policies.”
They stand around outside places like the Eaton Centre handing out illegible pamphlets on Marxism, Maoism, and other revolutionary debris such as how to make your own bomb. (I wrote this story as a response to my mixed feelings over Fight Club. Like many boys my age, I’d been fully and completely seduced my the movie’s Nietzschean Übermensch. It’s a great film in terms of how it’s acted and directed. But trying to live your life that way?
Fight Club, and the ensuing Project Mayhem, was a male-only cult.
Like others, I’d even written to Chuck Pahlaniuk. He never replied but during an interview with the Toronto Star for Lullaby he expressed his shock that people, none of whom he knew kept asking him how they should be living their lives. He couldn’t believe that people would put that much trust in him.
“[I]magine an idea that occupies your mind like a city,” wrote Pahlaniuk in Lullaby.
Well, no serious reader of Fight Club had to imagine very hard. Our minds had been hijacked by that book and the glorious release from civilization it promised but never delivered.
Well, fuck Chuck, I said. I’d outwrite him. I spent months on my short story. I remember the day I proudly handed it in, all stapled together like a fucking work of art.
Your writing has flashes of brilliance but tends to be wordy, wrote my Creative Writing teacher. I got a 75% for the story. Read widely and often and you’ll get there.
I wasn’t crushed like you’d think. I knew I wasn’t good enough. At least, not yet.
I disagreed with my teacher over one description…I’d described a busy highway as sounding like a rushing waterfall. I still stand behind that simile. My teacher hated it,
But I took the his advice seriously, especially the latter to read widely and often. I read male authors from Argentina, woman authors freshly escaped from North Korea. Fiction and non-fiction. I believe all writers should read a shitload. You need to know who and what (idea-wise) you are up against. And you need the inspiration.
I didn’t know that writing and music would become so devalued by 2010 that the idea of paying for either was quaint and, in some circles, verboten.
So let’s talk about Better Days Are A Toenail Away, for a min. In future I’ll try not to disappear for long stretches like I have in the past. Last weekend I was four feet away from the computer I write these posts on, I just couldn’t get outta bed. I say my doc tho who gave me THREE other anti-depressants to add to the one I am currently on. Counting my B12 and two vitamin Ds, that’s 6 pills every morning, just to get a fuckin dial tone. Better than the alternative though.
I was sad that I was never gonna see Moon again. And I couldn’t believe I was never gonna see ____ again. I still can’t.
But what’s done is done, okay?
Let’s talk about writing style: “Outta” for “out of.” “Min” for “minute.”
This is a casually written “blog,” FUCK I hate that word. Blog.
If I had ANY gumption or biz sense (that’s short for “business sense…wink wink”) I would do what Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics has done. He is currently the editor and publisher of The West End Phoenix, a weekly community newspaper in Toronto. He went door-to-door selling subscriptions until he had enough subscribers to put together some staff and a goddam newspaper.
Sounds like something Cabbagetown and St. James Town could use except local news, despite municipal developments affected us more than provincial or federal, can be extremely boring. I don’t wanna work for a boring weekly community newspaper just to satisfy my fucking ego. So I’ll keep writing min instead of minute, ____ instead of my ex-wife’s name, because our time was a private thing.
I liked her podcast a lot but it hurts too much to hear it nowadays. She seems to have left me alone in the 3 or 4 post-break up podcasts I was able to get through, so I’ll be doin the same, k? I was only able to listen to several before I got too sad, but she seems to be leaving me out of things, so I’ll be extending the same courtesy (especially considering all the shit I pulled. I could fill a whole episode of “horrible things Danny did.” Doesn’t seem to be one though. So let’s move the fuck on, k?
Yes, I wrote k. Stylistically these are time savers and I won’t be changing my style or getting more mannered.
I’m gonna keep writing “prolly,” a stylistic tic left over from writing the dialogue in my 1st novel. You’ll get used to it. I use it bcuz it’s faster but also because it is how people pronounce the word. I swear to God. Listen carefully the next time someone says “probably”. Unless they are a careful or unusually eloquent speaker, it will come out as “prolly.” Moreover, most people pronounce the word “pronounce” as “per-nounce.”
Again, listen carefully next time. If I had to use numbers, which I hate doing, I’d say over half native English speakers say “prolly,” “pernounce,” and “Febrary” instead of “probably,” “pronounce” and “Feh-Brew-Air-Eee.”
Anyway, so today’s post is called THIRTY THOUGHTS, as an homage to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman’s weekly “31 Thoughts.”
Friedman is on of the few broadcasters on the channel/website who has not played professional hockey. He is also, by at least four or five CFL-length football fields, the best journalist they have. He’s got more insiders than a clown has…whatever those HONNNK things are that clowns carry around.
So, without any further ado, here are my 16 or 17 THOUGHTS. This won’t be a weekly thing. There’s not enough news in my life for such consistent reportage.
I thought then, and think now, it incredibly brave of Sportsnet to put such a non-telegenic looking man on television. Here’s Elliotte, looking professional sans sideburns and in a suit and a tie. I was going to try to do 30 thoughts but only ended up with 18 or 19. Hope that’s okay.
Here he is, still allegedly looking professional, with a beard.
(This was during the 2014-2015 season, after Rogers had bought 12-years worth of NHL rights in an ill-advised attempt to appeal to millennials. They hired George Stroumboulopoulos, who did the best he could, but the boomers hated his tight pants, and he was gone by the following season.
Elliotte was just trying his best to look how he thought millennials expected him to look. I mean, was it really that bad?
LAWL. Yes. Yes it was. His reporting is always top notch because he has SO MANY INSIDERS, from guys in the front office for the Yotes, bartenders in New Jersey who hear about trades from players who have just been traded.
Thank God Friedmann just survived those 2015 firings that sent Strombo on a 6-month break from Damien Cox, who is not a natural on-creen spresencea James Mirtle predecessor in every sense of the term. Cox hated the Leafs, loathed Leafs fans for having the audacity to love our team, and even left a cushy Toronto Star job for the 2015 Rogers gig, a gig he used solely to ridicule the Leafs and their fans. Indeed, Damien Cox is a walking penis who has always taken just a little too much joy and relish in Leafs losses). After the 2015 season showed the numbers were way down, Rogers pulled some Marlo Stanfield shit and fired everyone. Strombo? Gone. Cox? May as well be gone. He moved to some obscure, who-gives-a-shit radio gig, where he remains today, with no one listening to him.
Incidentally, when that Rogers-NHL 12-year deal was reported, Mirtle sent off a now-deleted but incredibly poorly-timed Tweet sarcastically asking Bob McKenzie, (Canada’s other Elliotte Friedman, who’d worked his way up from reporter at the Hockey News to editor-in-chief to a broadcaster on TSN despite no playing career) how he was going to enjoy covering curling only from then on.
Bob’s reply?
No, but maybe I'll take job at The Globe in my spare time, in which c ase your services as resident smartass will no longer be req'd.
Woah. BURN.
Took Mirtle a while to put out that fire, the smarmy little prick. A man highly respected in his field loses his job and you…make fun of him? Fuck you. But at least he did not die, like the last great Dusty
Joseph Michael “Dusty” Hill of the immortal ZZ Top is dead @ 72. Hill actually was his last name elsewise I think Dusty Roads would’ve been a way more badass stage name.
If I may drop a Norm MacDonald joke here for a min & also spare you the endless fucking “when Dusty walked into a room…the room would just…LIGHT UP. Dusty didn’t have a flashlight or nothing but somehow…through sheer tyranny of will…could illuminate a whole room.”
Newscasters going on an on about how integral to the band Hill was. Well…yeah. They were a fucking trio.
Here is Mark Lanegan’s whose song “100 Days” will be track one at my funeral, covering “Precious & Grace.” “Josh,” he begins. “I thought I asked for no comments…”
Note to self: Maybe do not refer to a trio band who is now missing 33.3% of its members as “immortal.” I meant the music though!
In the documentary it is difficult to see accept just how much control their manager Bill Ham exerted over them, especially in the early days, especially on the first album:
“There will be no overdubs on this album,” he’s reported to have said.
Um…wtf Ham? It ain’t your band. Your job is to get the word out there. Not to tell Billy Gibbons, one of the best guitarists on the planet, how to play guitar. Of the vanishingly small number of guitar players who have been complimented by Jimi Hendrix, Gibbons is one. The story of the two of them buying an assload of paint, a canvas large enough to walk on, turning off all the lights so that they were in total darkness, then dropping LSD, jamming, dipping the heads of their guitars in the paint cans as they played to toss paint everywhere is legendary. Unfortunately, that “painting” has never surfaced, either in the custody of fucking Bill Ham, who is himself a painter and would have known just how valuablwwm’’’’’’’r]refusing to le that Hendix-Gibbons canvas woulda been, ZZ Top fired in 1996 after the tour for the frostily received Rhythmeen LP, the Hendrix estate, or Billy Gibbons.
But the band had a plan. The chicken place was 35 miles away. While Bill Ham went and got chicken and took two or three hour to do it, Gibbons made the necessary guitar overdubs to make a decent sounding debut record, ZZ Top’s First Album (1971) into a cool sounding debut album.
Rio Grande Mud soon followed in 1972 but the band didn’t get really good til their third attempt: Tres Hombres.
“La Grange” was their first big-ass hit but I’ve mentioned on this blog before, they really owed John Lee Hooker some royalties. Click below to see what I mean. Listen to what Bill does @ 0:41 of the song.
Then listen to John Lee Hooker @ 0:20 of this song:
ZZ Top turned the blues into danceable party music and sold millions in the process. Everybody bought the album Eliminator. Everybody. And this was back in 1983, which means that a well-selling album could (and did) make its creators very very rich.
Even though nobody buys new ZZ Top albums (I don’t think they’ve been in the Billboard Top 200 since whatever fuckin album had “Burger Man” on it1), ZZ Top remain a very popular live act, and live performance is where the money is made these days. I hear you. I hear you. “But…but Dusty’s dead! They can’t tour without him!”
Think again.
If The Who can happily play a show less than 24 hours after John Entwistle, one of the greatest bass players of all-time died in his hotel room after playing with them the night before, ZZ Top can (and will) do the same thing. The again, Billy Gibbons is not Pete Townshend. The former is a decent person. The latter is not.
But ZZ Top will keep touring because it is the only way for big bands to make the kind of money they are used to. I’m not talking “sleeping on pizza boxes on basement floors while touring in vans” money. ($190 USD is the most I ever made on tour for a show Sleep for the Nightlife played in Ithaca, New York. That tour had strict rules: no fast food, on a tour with NO hotels, NO motels, we slept on Wal-Mart parking lots. The actual tarmac. And we STILL came back broke. Gasoline costs too much and there’s just too much distance between urban centres where you will a sympathetic audience for a small time. Anyway, if you wanna see the type of show we typically played, although this one was in Canada, click the video below. Love it when (drummer) Mitch stands up at 1:55. I think we made $30 for this show.
But the kind of facilities and treatment rock stars are used to means lavish hotels with thick towels, separate buses (Neil Young has traveled on a separate bus from his bandmates since the 1980s), a sobriety coach (Velvet Revolver hired one for Scott Weiland, which I thought was really nice of them, but it’s still all bloated rock star shit.
The separate bus thing confuses me most. It’s your band. Why would you want to be physically separated from them? Aside from the obvious, which would be to avoid the usual disgusting emissions of men living on only beer and pizza?
Apparently Crazy Horse’s Bill Talbot felt the same way while on a late 1980s tour to support Freedom, a tour where Frank “Poncho” Sampedro took it upon himself to become Neil’s personal cook.2
Talbot, already disgusted at ho poorly he thought the shows we’re going, got right in Neil’s face and let him know it.
“THIS IS TURNING INTO A CSN AND FUCKIN Y TOUR! SEPARATE BUSES! IF YOU STOP WORRYING ABOUT TRAINS AND PONCHO STOP WORRYIN’ ABOUT PORK CHOPS MAYBE WE CAN PLAY SOME FUCKIN MUSIC!”
It takes balls to speak to Neil Young that way.
Young has been surrounded by Yes Men since he was 24. It’s actually pretty sad. I’ve seen outtakes from Human Highway, Muddy Track, and even some footage of the Colorado sessions, and everyone walks on eggshells around him. So Neil gave his ex-wife Pegi his entire multi-million California ranch because it has their sons support systems and they didn’t wanna uproot either Zeke or Ben anymore than Young’s touring habit already had. According to Wikipedia, “Zeke Young and Ben Young both suffer from Cerebral Palsy, a permanent movement disorder that manifests in early childhood and often results in poor coordination, stiff muscles, and tremors, which makes it difficult for someone to even stand under their own power.” So a place with a lot of medical help that doesn’t feel like a hospital but a home sounds like a good idea.
So Neil, with Daryl Hannah, bought a smaller ranch in Colorado, and that’ll be their base of operations from now one of them dies, most likely Neil. I’m not being morbid but he’s been living rock star years.3
Colorado is the first Crazy Horse album sans Frank “Poncho” Sampedro since who has retired to Hawaii. His last recordings with the Horse can be heard on 2003’s Greendale, but his last great performance is on 2002’s Are You Passionate, a weird collection of Young trying to be a crooner backed by Booker T & the MGs, save for one big song in the middle, the centrepiece of the album called “Goin’ Home.”
Nobody is going to buy Colorado when it comes out, Neil. I’m sorry. I loved “Needle of Death,” an anti-heroin song by Bert Jansch recorded in Jack White’s studio in 2014, but I didn’t by A Letter Home either, Young’s album of all acoustic covers released that same year.
You can watch Neil Young track the Bert Jansch song live too (and doesn’t that whistle melody remind you of a different Neil Young song?) ! Anyway, here’s the GORGEOUS “Needle of Death” right here:
Anyway, ZZ Top’s “new” stuff is released more as an excuse to tour than anything else. AC/DC have been doing same since 1990’s The Razor Edge which boated two bonafide classics: “Thunderstruck” and “Money Talks.” If they haven’t already done so, ZZ Top owe a debt, both literal and financial, to the John Lee Hooker estate. That “La Grange” homage to “Boom Boom” is fantastic, but it’s also vocally and rhythmically identical.
I look forward to Friedman’s Monday morning “31 Thoughts” articles like a kid on Xmas Eve, trembling with excitement, looks forward to 3 or 4 hours later when he can “wake up” parents who prolly haven’t even gone to bed. I’m not as smart as Freidman, nor do I have scouts posted all over every single NHL market, keeping their ears piqued for gossip rumblings, confused ramblings, or confirmations of any kind. What blew my mind most was when he reported the story on December 16 2016 that Florida Panther coach Gerrard Gallant had been fired. That wasn’t Freidman’s story though. The story was that the Panthers had failed to arrange a car service to bring their former employee to the airport. Does Elliotte Friedman have inside men, women, etc posted at car rental place all across North America on his payroll just so he can get scoops like this? Or was it just a slow news day. Non-news, you might even say? For their part, the Panther insisted that they had indeed called a car service but Gallant, who made 2 million per season in both 2014-15 and whatever his gargantuan paycheques were in the 3 months before the Panthers fired him, opted to…gasp! rent his own taxi cab! Here is a picture of Gallant entering the cab like the poor prole he was forced to be on that sad night in Carolina.
Don’t worry. Were you worried? Gallant’s making $3.5 million per year coaching his new team, the New York Rangers, who we all know are the definition of mediocrity.Yes, the 1994 run was magical. In 2014 they barely stood a chance as L.A. destroyed New York 4 games to 1.
This whole “poor coach” thing reminds me of when the Leafs and Wings did their HBO 24/7 special and when the camera crew came into then-GM Dave Nonis’ office, one of tabs open on Nonis’ iPad was a website that sold artisanal wells. It was good to know, back then in 2014, that our GM had his hands firmly on the reins of our organization as he drove it into the ground yet again and the team missed the playoffs. Nonis would be relieved of his duties in April 2015, by Brendan Shanahan, a man brought in by Tim Leiweke. The hiring of Shanahan was thought to be a new starting point in the history of the team, which is exactly what the media said in November 2008 when MLSE hired Brian Burke and it took 5 years for the Leafs to make the playoffs, blow a 4-1 lead in Game 7 with under 10 mins to go (setting a record in the process) and become the laughingstock of the league ever since. Yes, the Leafs have been a good-to-great regular season team, pretty much since Lou Lamoriello got on board a year after Shanahan joined MLSE in 2016. Still…as a Leafs fan I am soooooo sick of cheering for…front office signings. I don’t want to imagine men in suits walking around doing nothing (I will say, Burke fleeced the Flyers when we got JVR for Schenn in 2013). And yes, we have Matthews now. And Tavares. And Marner (LOL…who…sucks so bad come playoff time I suspect he might be a double agent, like his “I forget how to play hockey in Game 7s” predecessor, James Gardiner).
# of playoff series reached under Burke: 1
# of playoff series won under Burke:
# of playoff series reached under Shanahan: 5
# of playoff series won under Shanahan: 0, including the Leafs blowing a 3-1 series lead in 2021. Sound familiar?
# of artisanal wells ordered by Dave Nonis while under contract with the Maple Leafs. Who knows? The man was overpaid and made the team MUCH WORSE with the Clarkson signing. The Bolland signing? Not his fault Bolland got the back of his leg sliced off. He was good until that happened. Here’s one exciting goal he scored. Remember?25. So now the team is too good to get any meaningful draft picks. Looks like we’re stuck with this core, which means the regular season will be entertaining (and sometimes even promising)…and then the playoffs will come, and a core consisting of a guy who insisted he was worth as much as Matthews and then IN THE PLAYOFFS AND under NO OPPOSING TEAM pressure, shot the puck into the stands to give Montreal a power play, will lace ‘em up and look completely unenthused until it’s far to late to win the series.
Listen to the announcer in that clip: “Marner, he’s not under any kind of pressure. He’s got all kinds of time!”Honestly, if you’re gonna hold out for Matthews money when you are NOT Auston Matthews, can you at least STOP PLAYING LIKE SHIT WHEN IT MATTERS?
It’s not happening. I don’t trust this core at all. Nylander was a revelation this series. Matthews, our “best player” was a ghost. Marner was even worse. He actively worked against the team. People keep saying “well, next year this and next year that…” YOu’re assuming the Leafs will MAKE the fucking playoffs next year. And, having watched the past half decade, only Game 4 v Columbus springs to mind when I think of a team who does what it takes to win in the fucking Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Did I mention I’m still furious with my fucking team? Man, I get MADE FUN OF AND LAUGHED AT FOR WALKING DOWN THE STREET IN MY OWN FUCKING CITY (HOME TO THE TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS ) FOR HAVING A TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS TATTOO. EVEN HERE THEY ARE A PUNCHLINE. JUST YEAR AFTER YEAR OF NEW WAYS TO HUMILIATE THE MOST LOYAL FANBASE IN THE WORLD. I MEAN…THEY LOST TO A FUCKING AMATEUR GOALIE ZAMBONI DRIVER IN 2019! AND THESE ARE THE GUYS WHO ARE GONNA WIN US A CHAMPIONSHIP? BRING US NOT JUST A LACK OF SHAME, BUT PRIDE? PFFF. I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I FUCKIN SEE IT.
I try not to think about it. It just makes me too angry. Sorry about the all CAPS rant. I wish I could not do my job, or even actively HELP THE OTHER TEAM a la Gardiner or Marner and still collect $10 million a year.
23. Took me til last month to learn that Washed Out, my fav current artist right now, has a new album out and it’s been out for a year! It’s called Purple Noon because of course it is.
That’s the front cover right there & because of course it is. Not sure if the figure standing there is Ernest Greene or a doppelganger. (Greene has an odd shy-guy tendency to use lookalikes. Ever see the video for “Amor Fati?”) Not Greene. Looks SO MUCH LIKE HIM THOUGH, that media reported that it was him for a week. Weird eh? Anyway, here’s a kid having one of “life changing” vacations.
22. Most people know what they are going to do before they do it. They might say “I dunno” or “prolly” but they know what they are gonna do. Remember Skyler’s coin flip in Breaking Bad? She takes Holly to the four corners where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona meet.
Skyler’s first toss lands in Colorado. Land of…whatever the fuck they claim to have up there. Tornados and a few remaining grizzlies (I did not know until reading Bill Bryson’s Appalachian Trail book) that grizzlies are dangerously underpopulated and found only out west. The ones in the East are black or brown bears. Less aggressive but they still might eat you. ANYWAY my point is, Skyler doesn’t wanna go to Colorado, even though it’s easily my favourite of the 18-20 States I have been do (I’ll do a more thorough count later…I’m running out of “thoughts’). She tosses again. And again gets Colorado. So then she drags the coin back over the line to New Mexico and goes home to Albuquerque, where fuckin’ Walt awaits, with his car wash and gigantic meth empire.
21. In honour of Albuquerque, here’s one of the few country songs I know that mention ham, and also one of Young most lonely songs (save for the 1978 San Francisco Boarding House rendition of “Shots” which I post here…3 or 4 times a year and the classic “Interstate” which I post here…pretty much every single time I write a post. And anyway I made a comment about Young earlier, how he travels in separate buses from his bandmates, so why not? Jesus listen to Ben Keith on that Dobro (slide guitar that sits in your lap). As somebody in Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey said it: It’s like Ben Keith goes to Cairo. An incredible performance from Keith, who is now sadly dead. Young, having actual ethics, unlike the Who playing a show before John Entwistle is even cold in the ground, he no longer performs songs that featured Keith’s slide predominantly
Ocean City is a cool name for a town. “Ocean City Girl” is a song by a band I love called Ivy. This song is from a 2005 album called In The Clear. If you’re a fan of a band like Still Corners, I’d say they owe a debt to Ivy.
Ivy aren’t a “band” band in the sense that they don’t need to sell albums or tour in order to continue making records. (Then again, this is 2021. If that were the criteria for a band, there would be very few bands left. And my band, established July 1 2005, would not be a band either.) I keep forgetting I’m not 14, leafing through the liner notes of physical albums. Anyway, all the members of Ivy are audio engineers, so when they’re not recording say…a new Mogwai album or say…a Todd the Wet Sprocket reunion-before-cash-grab-tour EP. Recording whatever for whatever kind of band can afford a studio these days, they make records as Ivy. And you can hear the experience, I think. For example, the decision to use real strings (!) and not just a synth or “violin” synth setting, was brilliant. Honestly, budget-wise, they probably were only able to hire on violin player and and have them double or even triple their part. This is my favourite Ivy song. I can still listen to it because I heard it YEARS before my ex and I met, so the “you” is just the general you. The Denis Johnson you: “With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.”
Denis Johnson, a writer I fucking love, just as much as my other #1, Donna Tartt, died recently. By recently I mean like…18 months ago. But like I said, in recovery (or while using) you’re life is on pause.4 I just want to show you a few of his sentences so you can see why and how much I loved him. In his short story “Working,” the heroin addicted narrator and his alcoholic friend break into an empty house to steal the copper wire. “I made a decision in my mind,” the alcoholic tells the H addict. “To make some money.”
I find dialogue like this funny. Like…so unnecessary as to be hilarious. So you made a decision. In your mind? Where the fuck else would have made it?
So the two men leave the bar to go on their sordid caper and you, the law-abiding reader, fully expect them to get arrested. But they don’t! They rip the copper right out the wall, go to some lowlife fence5and go back to the very same bar with about $120 between them. This is in the 1980s. Johnson’s narrator (who is given no name except for “fuckhead” throughout all of Jesus’ Son thinks the following:
All the best times happened when ____ (I forget the friend’s name). We felt good. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked.
Now, your sympathy towards these men is likely directly tied to your life experience, but the line “there was something wrong with us, and we didn’t know what it was” hits me in the gut like a steel bar.
17. The story continues. They are still at this bar because this particular bartender pours singles like doubles and doubles like fuckin triples. Like home runs. Full glasses of pure unmixed liquor. Johnson doesn’t specify but I’m guessing…Pacific Northwest…it’s whiskey.
Anyway everyone at the bar nicknames her “nurse.”
If you get the joke, you get it. I’m not gonna explain. Here is how the story ends and it always make me cry:
“Nurse,” I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. " You have a lovely pitching arm." You had to go down on them like a hummingbird over a blossom. I saw her much later, not too many years ago, and when I smiled she seemed to believe I was making advances. But it was only that I remembered. I'll never forgot you. Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.”
Fuck I love that line “But it was only that I remembered. I'll never forgot you.” And the bleakness that follows is almost too harsh to imagine, but…that’s life too.
16.
One more thought, tangentially related to Denis Johnson. Now, if you’ve spent any more than an hour or two with Americans people from the United States, you will begin to notice that they have a very close relationship with not just their own state, but all the states that brought them to where they are know. To them, each state is a link in the chain of their life. I think it’s cool. The only reason we Canadian don’t do it is bcuz our provinces are way too fuckin huge for provincial pride.
But someone born and raised in the United States will always give you each link in the chain. I don’t even find Americans particularly talkative. It just seems to matter to them somehow, like there’s a karmic element, like it’s bad luck if they don’t tell you what state they were born in, then tell you which one they went to kindergarten in. “I was born in Oregon,” some guy you just met is explaining. “But I grew up a Hoosier and now I’m here, in big fat fuckin’ Chicago.”
I love how Americans speak.
I don’t know if they expect you to clap or what, but we just don’t have that kind of provincial pride in Canada. When I hear people denigrate my province (the insult is “on-terrible”) I bristle a little, but that’s it. Just a little. Newfies have a lot of provincial pride, but they have to. They’re the butt of all other Canadian’s Newfie jokes.
You’ll rarely see a barfight where a Manitoban is hitting a guy from Saskatchewan just because he is from Saskatchewan and the other is from Manitoba. But you’ll see fights like that all the fucking time as the provincial border approaches, might see a Manitoba man fight an Ontario man, cuz people hate Ontario. That’s Manitoba behind us.
From left to right: Andrew, James, Carey, and me.But people don’t truly hate people from Ontario. They just hate that Ontario is the seat of political power in Canada. They also hate the fact that driving eastbound on the Trans-Canada Highway, as soon as you cross into Ontario, you have to slow down to 90kmh instead of the 100kmh you’ve been rockin’ since…Golden, B.C. prolly.
It’s Ontario’s shutty and mean way of saying “we run the show now, okay?” WE have the Federal capital: Ottawa. We even had the old Federal capital: Kingston. This is Ontario and you must do what our stupid signs tell you to do.The only way I think Ontario pride would swell up in my guts would be if I were airlifted out of Ontario while asleep and dropped off in Manitoba or Quebec and told I can NEVER EVER return to Ontario or I’d be hunted down and thrown right back out again.
Exile is the only way I would truly appreciate my province. Which brings me back to Denis Johnson one last time. His 3 rules for writing were this:
a. Write naked. That means to write what you would never say.
b. Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it.
c. Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.
That’s pretty beautiful stuff, eh?
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Stormy Nights, and Awards for Bad Writing
So Ed Bulwer-Lytton was a very popular writer in his time. His most similar contemporary would be James Patterson, he of Kiss The Girls ans 5648 other books. Controversially, Patterson has been working with co-writer since the mid 2000s, enabling him to release 4 (four!) hardcovers a year. The price of HC6 is insane, and Patterson just keeps churning ‘em out, the epitome of assembly line writing. I mentioned Kiss the Girls not because it’s good or stands out but cuz I think it might be Patterson’s only profitable foray into Hollywood. He’s had better luck than Dean Koontz, that’s for fuckin’ sure.
Anyway, Edward Bulwer-Lytton name is a bit of a joke these days. In 1982 an annual contest was inaugurated in his honour to award the writer with the worst first sentence in a novel.
Bulwer-Lytton’s ostensibly terrible sentence? “It was a dark and stormy night.”
I’m not used to giving honorific titles to dead or living guys (I spoke about this in an earlier post, prolly the one about how I hated my life at the time. That was April. The Right Honourable Stephen Harper. He gets that for the rest of his non-Ontario dwelling life! I think he’s in Calgary, but some MacLean’s writer followed him around for a while and all the guy does is seem to work. Which I guess is right and honourable:
14.
Sort of an apology
Reading over these thoughts so far, I realize I come off kinda angry and mean. My justification for “prolly” and “per-nounced” made it sounds like I enjoy literary slumming.I am a slum dweller. I love mixing high and low culture. I’m not a misery tourist. I live in a rough neighbuorhood and I’ve been fighting an opiate addiction since 2015.
I was not making fun of people who sometimes pronounce words wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’ve done it many times. I find readers more likely to make the error because we read so much, we see the word, but no is there to pronounce it for us. What I don’t get it, why am I always being corrected by someone who reads far less but just somehow knows how to pernounce certain little-used words?I’ve read over 800 books in my life. I get little testy when some prick who hasn’t read anything since To Kill A Mockingbird in high school laughs at how I pronounce “zenith.” I thought it was Zen as in the sonf “Everything Zen” by Bush (or Bush X if yr in Canada or if you care), But apparently it’s ZEE-nith. Okay then, tell me how I should pernounce nadir than, asshoke? I’ve been pronouncing it like Nadia. Nah. Deer. But I’ve never heard someone actually SAY nadir, even though it’s the opposite of zenith.
I get defensive because words are all I have left going for me. I can put words together better than most, but not so much better as to make money from it. I’m a good writer, but not goo enough to get paid to do it unless I am writing a lazy undergraduates essay. So when my pronunciation is corrected I try to take it as a teachable moment. Lemme give you another embarrassing moment from my life.
Back in the day, MySpace for bands used to have a little spot under the band photo in the top left corner where you could write something and it would show up in quotes beneath your photo.
DEFTONES quote was “in accordance with the dictates of reason.” I guess Chino likes Spinoza.
PANT CITY, a band I love from Orangeville, wrote “No one writes a Pant City song like Pant City!” N one could argue with that.
CONSTANTINES wrote “Young Lions.” A fan fav track from their second (and far superior) album Shine a Light.
THE JUNCTION, an incredibly overrated and dull band who played sorta dance-y Dave Matthew Band-type shit back in 1999 when it was cool, deftly switched to an indie rock trio just at the right time, and were signed by Universal Music Canada. One problem though: Everyone else at Universal Music Canada loathed The Junction, and not without reason. Here’s their “hit” the one that sounded like Hootie & the Blowfish:
Nevermind the nonsense lyrics, “A condescending century caused a flaw in my feet that was caused cuz the cause…aloof I will.” “Components of Four” was by far the band’s biggest song. Especially live. The Junction’s suburban shows in 2002-2004 were packed affairs with dancing people everywhere. The one guy at Universal who liked the band convinced the label to give The Junction a shot. It was hard because the label “brass” would only attend Toronto shows and The Junction could just never get their energy across on a Toronto stage.
All their Toronto shows sucked.
Here’s another problem too. The band had already released their best song on their debut 3 song EP in 2002, a record they (some might say arrogantly) titled “3 singles.”
The band ignored this and re-recorded the song for their 2004 Maple Music debut, an EP boringly/stupidly titled “And With This Comes Tomorrow.”
The differences are obvious between this version and the one above. But The Junctions 16-18 year old fanbase were moving off to colleges and starting careers. The band that could once be relied on for 200 people per show (outside of Toronto, so Brampton, Mississauga, Bolton) could no longer be relied for even a 40 person turnout. They were just like every other band from the 905/416/519 areas.
Then a guy named Ryan Masters stepped forward and claimed that he had written parts of “Components of Four” during a jam the band had back in 2002. So now the band had legal issues to fight, their lone champion at Universal quit, but the label did give them a sizeable budget to re-record an almost identical version of “Components of Four” and release it to radio. 102.1 The Edge picked up on it, but the song never really caught on. I went hitchhiking for a while an lost track of the Junction.
I mention the Junction only because of the MySpace option they gve you to write something creative like…”the greatest rock band in On-terrible!” but The Junction were so ceatively and imaginatively bankrupt, they wrote “The Junction.”
So You’d go to their MySpace and it would sat THE JUNCTION with a photo of them below. And below the photo, just in case you missed the first time, “The Junction.”
Other bands would put boring uncreative shit like “On tour!” Or “Buy our new album here!” (Remember when people bought albums? Fuck…remember when bands went on tours?)
My own band THE BIG CITY NIGHTS quote was “making lo-fi racket in basements & bars since ought-five!”
See? Me? A DOUBLE ENGLISH MAJOR didn’t know whether it was “aught” not “ought” when you are trying to say zero. It’s not as bad, I feel, as mixing up “dawned” and “donned,” it’s the same. Everybody has these little dead zones.
In Stephen King’s 1979 The Dead Zone, thriller in which his political candidate named Greg Stillson who wears hard hats while giving speeches in blue collar regions is first introduced to the reader while kicking a dog to death. The movie is more placid, but jesus. I think it may have been Martin Sheen’s last before he got help for his substance probs.
Anyway, the protagonist Johnny gets in a car accident early on in the book. While in physio, he is subjected to a buncha mental tests when he wakes up.
“Picture a picnic table in a park for me,” a doctor would say.
“Done,” said Johnny.
“Picture the ocean, but coloured red.”
“Done.”
“Picture a canoe lying beneath a stop sign.”
“I…” Johnny is confused. “I can’t.” For whatever reason, Johnny can’t do it. He can’t picture a canoe below a stop sign even though he knows what a stop sign is. And what a canoe is.
“Relax,” the doctor immediately reassures him.
“You’ve hit a dead zone, that’s all. There will be more.”
We all have such dead zones.
I know geniuses who pronounce epitome the way it looks, not the bizarre way only the well-read say it.But still. Man, was my face red when I found out it was “aught-five” instead of “ought-five.” I was sooo embarrassed. That quote had been up on our MySpace for nearly 4 years. Ouch. No one had said a thing to me, meaning they didn’t catch the error or, far worse, they were being tactful.
I know many people who have read as much as I have, if not more, who have written as much as I have, if not more, who write things like “and then it donned on me” instead of “dawned on me.” I correct them, but not rudely, and they are still embarrassed.
I’ve know a woman who recently Tweeted “Fuckin eh!” instead of “Fuckin A!”
Some pretty little prick took a writer I know personally to task for mixing up “grizzly” and “grisly.” They sound identical. That’s an easy mistake to make.
And then in the fall of 2013 I went to grad school, where I learned that even professors with PhDs don’t know how to pronounce certain words, even when these very words are pertinent/relevant to the grad school course they are teaching!
I took a class on mesmerism where I had to read an 800+ page novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. At one point in the novel, he uses the word daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes were an early, more primitive form of photography.
I had to read a passage aloud to our small class of 11, 12 people, but stopped before the big long word and looked to my prof for help, he offered no help but blinked back expectantly, grinning. He was constantly grinning, that prof. Not ironically or sarcastically either. I think he was just happy to be a teacher. He’d graduated last in his grad school cohort at University of Toronto and ended up teaching English Lit and Basic Comp @ the University of Northern British Columbia…the only college in Canada that would take him.
But he’d been teaching Bulwer-Lytton since the early 1980s. Surely the man knew how to say “daguerreotype.”
I looked at him, waiting for assistance. None came.
So he was going to make me ask him. Of course he was. Profs are dicks. Making six figures a year must make you feel somehow special, somehow divided, from “the great unwashed.” (A phrase coined by none other than Bulwer-Lytton, by the by.)
“How do I pronounce this word?” I asked. “Is it DUH-GWARE-OH-TYPE?”
“Don’t know!” he grinned hugely.
“Really?” I wasn’t the least bit satisfied with his reply. This was grad school. “Well, how do you say it?”
“I’ve never had any reason to.”
“But you’re teaching a course on early American mesmerism, where daguerreotypes of all diff kinds are used. And you have never once read the world aloud?”
His grin was shrinking, but still very much there.
Still smiling without a word, I was beginning to lose my patience with this man. Why was the onus on me to pronounce a word my own fucking professor had assigned me in an 800+ page novel he expected me to read in three days?”
“How do you read it in your head?” I asked my prof. “Like, how does your inner voice say daguerreotype?”
He shook his head and refused to answer my question, preferring instead to regale us with tales of how he would get A’s on his grad student essays, “and in those days getting an A was difficult,” he’d remind us.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet “doctor” Bruce Wyse, PhD. Teaches at both the University of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University.
Areas of expertise: 19th-century British literature. Gothic fiction. Mesmerism in literature.Areas of ignorance: How to pronounce a word as common in 19th-century British literature, Gothic fiction, and Mesmerism in literature than the word “investigation” is found in detective fiction.
He was almost proud of the fact that he couldn’t pronounce daguerreotype. Whatever. Let’s just say I made damn sure he didn’t dock me the 2 marks he had the audacity to try and dock me for not properly pronouncing a word he himself could not, and probably still cannot pronounce.
That same semester, a different professor of mine named Ken Hirschkop, a man whose academic renown is as inexplicable as it is global, assigned my small class a truly wonderful novel by a writer named China Miéville called The City & the City. Before I even started my oral presentation, I asked Professor Hirschkop that correct way to pronounce the author’s last name.
Like his colleague Professor Wyse, he smiled too. “Don’t know!”
“Okay,” I sighed. I didn’t need another confrontation with yet another man who thought he knew everything, except the pronunciation of authors on his syllabi and certain words found inside their pages.
“I’m gonna go with MY-VILLE,” I decided. “As in, ‘my village.’ Is that okay?”
“I guess,” Hirschkop shrugged, seeming disappointed somehow. As if I should have been more sure. Or perhaps more adventurous. MY-EEE-VILLY? ME-YAY-VIE?
“Man, fuck this Hirschkop guy,” I thought to myself as I prepped my notes.
Mr. Ken Hirschkop (I will NOT call him doctor, or even professor) is nothing more than a case of right place, right time. The perestroika that transformed the USSR from a heavily guarded and controlled state to a free-for-all open archive in 1989 allowed all kinds of scholars and academics, and just general interest hobbyists (these latter tend to be the best writers in my opinion, provided they have no pre-conceived agenda like Mr. Hirschkop or other Western chauvinist “the Soviets will return!” nutjobs!), to have access to all kinds of important documents.
Ken Hirschkop found a veritable trove of work by Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher whose work was well known in the 1920s until Stalin’s Purges put everything and anything even remotely dangerous in the basements of libraries, where they waited, gathering dust, until the late 1980s when Mikhail Bakhtin became as “cool” as a philosopher can become. And who was there, right place, right time, to go through all of Bakhtin’s work? That’s right. Ken Hirschkop. Under no other circumstances would this man have ever earned a PhD. He was an even worse teacher than Buce Wyse, if you can believe it.
Bakhtin’s stuff was rediscovered by Soviet scholars in the 1960s. When Ken Hirschkop finally made his way to the Bakhtin files, there were many disputed texts (as in…did Bakhtin actually write this or is it bogus?). Instead of trying to ascertain which was real and which was imitation, Hirschkop merely (and quite lazily, I’ll add) treated every document he found as genuine. Now this is the fucking USSR we are talking about. The KGB were the best in the world at disinformation and forgery. It is not anti-Soviet sentiment to say so. They were master forgers, just as the Persians were master poisoners. Give credit where credit is due.
We’re all just waiting for the Ben Affleck directed period piece (1990…so post-Berlin wall fall, pre USSR collapse) featuring Western academics who go out there and show the whole world what the KGB was really like. Also they are coke-sniffing rock star types; now that’s a Hollywood movie.
You can read about the disputes over the legitimacy of Bakhtin’s stuff on his and on Hirschkop’s Wikipedia page.
I mention it only because Ken Hirschkop’s presence in USSR libraries in 1989 and 1990, reading and taking notes and photocopying originals must have got him a reputation as a “serious thinker,” cuz the man I met was anything but.
13. Give credit where credit is due however. While in the USSR Hirschkop produced a 24-page…I dunno…essay? Treatise? Most serious scholars write more than 24 pages on a topic they care about but maybe Ken was in a hurry to watch the USSR crumble. He also has published book-length study on the man, published by Oxford in 1999. These two works on their own got the man a job teaching at fucking Oxford, and then the University of Waterloo.
I’m thinking Oxford realized pretty quickly they had an imposter on their hands because NOBODY leaves the University of Oxford to go work at the University of Waterloo. Nobody. Imagine Ken having that convo with friends. “I just don’t feel challenged enough at the #2 academic institution in the world. I think the institute ranked #210 is much more my speed.”
And it seemed to be. His syllabus was okay, aside from that amazing novel he assigned us by China “My Village” Miéville. The City & the City is an unadulterated masterpiece.
Now, most tenured profs are expected to speak at at least one conference a year, a gathering of similar professionals. Mr Hirschkop has never gone to one of these. Tenured profs are also expected to produce on or two articles a year on their recent research. Ken has declined to do any of this either. His entire list of publications could be written on one page in 20 point font:
Hirschkop, Ken. "Bakhtin in the sober light of day." Bakhtin and Cultural Theory. Eds. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001. 1-25.
Hirschkop, Ken. Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
That is it. That’s it. This is what I mean by “right place, right time.”
Hirschkop’s Bakhtin work, his timely transition into the field of Semiotics (which in the 1980s was cooler than going to a Pearl Jam concert during their fight v Ticketmaster in the 1990s).
These two publications are all that Hirschkop’s reputation rests on. The class I took with him? I had no idea what he was trying to teach us. When you are an undergrad, your profs are a lot more explicit about what they expect from you. They don’t tell you what to think. They are trying to teach you how to think for yourself.
In grad school, your prof’s have a much lighter touch, gently nudging you toward whatever topic they think you should be mulling over. Hirschkop had a had time direction us toward anything. Whatever it was Hirschkop wanted us, his students, to think about, I don’t think we were thinking about. The entire semester we were either thinking one of two things:
1. “What the fuck is this man trying to teach us?” and
2. “Huh?”At least Wyse let us know what he wanted us to get from each assignment. Hirschkop gave us one memorable book to read. My mother bought it for me (thanks Mum!) Oh God was it ever good. I devoured the novel. You know how the current United States seems so split? What if was so split, that you could not speak to, interact with, or even acknowledge the presence of certain other citizens, under penalty of arrest by a frightening police force called Breach. The city is not divided geographically either. Think about that. You could be walking down Queen St West but if you glance up at the wrong time and look at the wrong person, you suddenly find yourself surrounded by an Orwellian police force who can only say one thing:
“Breach.”
“But I…I was just…”
“Breach.”
And off you are dragged, to the novel’s version of Room 101.
That’s Ken Hirschkop right there. I’d be grinning too if I were TERRIBLE at my job and still made (in 2019, according to the Sunshine List website, a site an American like Hirschkop I’m sure find an unfair invasion of privacy), the sum total of 192,784.72.
I would argue that if you read a book someone has laboured over for years, you know them better than people you’ve known for years but only superficially.
I had me a vision
I was a fireman in a time of fires
And I was paralyzed…
1990’s Recycler
See Shakey by Jimmy McDonough
What is UP with Neil Youngh’s obsession with extremely plain woman who just happen to be blonde? Carrie Snodgress, I can absolutely see the attraction. Pegi Young though? Nope. I don’t care what desert highway she’s driving a Harley Davidson down, that woman is not (in my opinion) attractive. Neither’s Hannah. Oh well. Better than Young trying to get with Gwen Stefani. At least with Hannah the age difference is just 15 years. Some of Young’s peers have partners/wives/whatever you call em
I love the story Ministry’s Al Jourgenson tells about going to meet William Burroughs sometime in 1992. They do heroin together (“I don’t know how an 80-year old man finds a vein, but he seemed to know what he was doing,” said Jourgenson). Wandering Bill Burrough’s house high, Al spotted some mail from the White House. It was an invitation to speak or “say” some poetry. I don’t know the right verb, nor care to. I read poetry. I think slam poetry takes the absolute worst people from the sports world, and inserts them into what should be a reflective, pastoral, calm setting in which poetry is read and understood. Poetry, when it is great, reads like something you’ve read before. It’s a recognizance. I don’t need some shithead in a backward Yankee cap “Slamming” his fucking rhymes at me. Just because it rhymes doesn’t make it poetry. Unless you are smiling and nodding in recognition at the worlds on the page or you feel like something icy is dripping on top of your head, it ain’t poetry. ANYWAY Jourgenson brings a very high William Burroughs the invite. Bill is dismissive.
“It’s just junk mail. Toss it.”
”Bill. This is from the White House. They want you to speak there.”
After a long pause. “Who’s the President?”
“He didn’t even know who the President was,” Jourgenson delights in telling interviewers, even now, years later. Gotta admit, that’s funny. As a heroin addict I feel credentialed enough to defend Burroughs by saying “well, it was an election year.”
In the criminal world, a fence is not just a thing you climb and hop over to evade your pursuers. It is a slang term for a person who buys and sells stolen goods.
HC means hardcover and the price of hardcovers in 2021 is fuckin’ criminal (between $45-65 USD). Patterson’s biblioghraphy is getting bigger and bigger because he is “co-writing” books with desperate starving artist types writers. It’s a form of assembly line book writing and it’s sad. As of July 2021 he is publishing 2 or 3 works “co-written” with other writer a year. No information is given as to the division of labor. The “co-writer” may be writing 90%. Then again, Patterson is nothing if not a calm and pleasant Christian man living in a bucolic area of Florida. LOts of trees to deaden the sound of cars and *shudder* truck. He might insist on his own 50% to keep his voice consistent.