Ever hear “Love Is All Around” by Sloan?
You should. Please do. Right now.
The photo you see below my first day with Cookie. It’s our first 20 seconds together. Poor lil guy so frightened, you can tell, trying to pancake himself like that. Yes. Pancake himself.
Pancake can be a verb when you want it to be…that’s one of the perks of being a writer. There have to be perks, given how difficult it is to fucking write something decent, let alone good. But diction? Word choice? A new portmanteau like the guy who came up with smog? It’s fun! And it’s entirely up to you. It is YOUR divine choice as the writer.
If “meadow” can be used as a verb, as in “fields of pale purple meadowed to the sky,”1 then surely we can say that people are occasionally “pancaked?”
“Three young boys were apparently pancaked yesterday while playing on the railroad tracks west of Mill Street downtown Brampton. The train turned the corner too fast for the boys to get out of the way. One elderly witness who spoke to this reporter just kept babbling over and over, “They’d got themselves pancaked….train just…pancaked ‘em…” over & over. The senior woman was treated for shock symptoms at the scene.
Pancaked.
It’s gruesome but kinda humorous, eh? I submitted a short story years ago to the Toronto Star’s annual short story writing contest. I was certain I’d win for my creative use of the word pancake. Guess the editors felt otherwise.
The story was about a father and a son who drove around Northern Ontario stealing ATMs from rural gas stations. Of course, things go terribly wrong and one of them gets “pancaked,” a verb I thought terrifically original at the time. I wrote the story in 2010, before I’d seen the Breaking Bad episode where a husband and wife steal an ATM. As the man works underneath the machine, cursing ceaselessly at his wife, the woman, high on meth and sick of being scorned as a “skank” by her husband, deliberately pushes the ATM off the tirejack, which kinda pancakes her husband’s head. Nobody in the episode says the word “pancaked,” so I’m not even sure why I brought it up.
Except for this whole “I thought up a funny phrase” thing we writers do can get awfully petty. Even I fell for it, thinking I was the first to use pancake as a verb. Writers are forever findings strange and wondrous ways to verbalize nouns. It makes for funner reading. So I’m sure not just one but many writers have used the word pancaked instead of flattened. I’m positive it’s been done before. As Julian Barnes once asked, “Is the writer much more than a sophisticated parrot?”
In 1966 the novelist Romain Gary accused Thomas Pynchon in the New York Times of stealing one of his character’s names from Gary’s 1965 novel The Ski-Bum. The name in question was Genghis Cohen, who is a fairly unmemorable character in Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49. To be fair, almost all Pynchon’s characters are unmemorable. I don’t read Pynchon for characters. I read him for his fantastic skill and artistry, his gift for imbuing the innocuous with sinister hints of conspiracy. For his achingly gorgeous, sometimes paragraph-length sunblasts of prose-poetry. Save for the wonderful Mason & Dixon (1998), which has the titular two, the man’s oeuvre doesn’t have a single three-dimensional character.
I assumed he didn’t give a shit about his characters at all, actually, given the stupid fucking names he’s always bequeathing them or the random pointless deaths he’s forever marching them towards. But he took exception to Gary’s accusation, most likely because of the forum Gary chose, The New York Times, America’s Paper of Record. Pynchon likes to sack pretension, but he’s got some smugness in him. If Gary had sent the same letter to the Modesto Bee, I highly doubt Pynchon would have replied. He took offence to the accusation because it implied that Pynchon, a writer of gobsmacking imaginative power, was somehow too lazy to name one of his own characters. (His next novel, 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow would have over 100 characters, with names ranging from silly to idiotic and back again.) So Pynchon was pissed, which is why he rose to such a rare display of public pronouncement, replying to Gary via the Times. This is what he said:
In a recent letter to the editor, Romain Gary asserts that I took the name "Genghis Cohen" from a novel of his to use in a novel of mine, "The Crying of Lot 49." Mr. Gary is totally in error. I took the name Genghis Cohen from the name of Genghis Khan (1162-1227), the well-known Mongol warrior and statesman. If Mr. Gary really believes himself to be the only writer at present able to arrive at a play on words this trivial, that is another problem entirely, perhaps more psychiatric than literary, and I certainly hope he works it out.
I could not have said it better myself. Basically, if you’re a writer, don’t assume you are the first to think of something, like a novel passage, or a new word even.
If you are a writer, you are living in an era four to five thousand years after writing systems were developed. So the odds of one of us hitting on a truly original play on words are slim. You might write passages of great comedy or tragedy or beauty, but to think, in the 20th Century, that you are first person ever to come up with a character named Genghis Cohen, given that he is/was one of the most famous military statesmen the world has ever known is pretty stupid. And just silly anyway. Who the fuck cares who came up with making Genghis Kahn sound like a Jewish lawyer or something? I wouldn’t go so far to say that Khan is up there with Caesar or Xerxes or Alexander the Great, but still. C’mon Gary. Pynchon might have been right that the problem “is more psychiatric than literary” on Romain’s end.
I bet Stephen King’s thought of countless character names that have been used before (Mr. Mercedes is a particularly catchy one. It might be unGoogleable but not every single pulp magazine has been found, let alone digitized. I bet it’s out there. George Stark sounds compelling too. And Johnny Smith? Of The Dead Zone? I’d bet everything I own that of the 100 000 English language novels that have been published since the Paperback Wars of the 1970s, there are at least ten, if not two hundred, John Smith protagonists lurking in the clunky-ass prose of those pointedly violent, silly-ass, but also really fun books.
I wonder what kind of funny character names King & Koontz & the like have in their unpublished “novels-in-waiting.” For any number of reasons; burnout, characters feeling tiresome, or even that the book is done but the writer doesn’t think much of it, many popular novelists keep what are called “drawer novels.”
These “drawer novels” exist in case the writer gets sick…as in, sick enough to not be able to write. Or if they get writer’s block, they still have a novel they can turn in to their publisher that year.
Writers like Stephen King, James Patterson, Tana French, James Patterson, P.D. James, and Dead Koontz, all have up to four or five of these “emergency novels.”
You see it all the time. A LOT of people think The Garden of Eden is Hemingway's best, but it didn't come out til the 1980s. Islands in the Stream is my 3rd fav Hemingway book. And it was published posthumously too. There's gold in them thar drawers.
Hell, King even has a novel called Bag of Bones (1998) about a writer who, after the death of his wife, suddenly become vehemently ill any time he opens Microsoft Word to write, so he therefore must start handing in his drawer novels, hoping his weird phobia of writing goes away. This goes on for a few years. If it's autobiographical, we have a lot of posthumous King work to look forward to.
I LOVE the first half of Bag of Bones, by the way. It’s like a detective story by a guy who slowly realizes his wife was living a second, secret life. The second half of the book gets more and more ridiculous and silly, as Mike retreats to a cabin he’s named Sarah Laughs for some dumb reason, gets in tiffs with neighbours who don’t want him there because his fame could bring out all kinds of crazy fans. Then Noonan begins having sexual fantasies about the previous owner of the cabin, culminating in a scene where Mike Noonan, the author, copulates with the ghost of the cabin’s previous owner and his wife at the same time. And I don’t mean a threesome with ghosts. They’re going at it missionary style, and one moment its his dead wife Mike is fucking (though she’s not in a state of putrefaction, she’s as if she were alive), and then the next moment it’s the female previous owner of the cabin. It’s a batshit insane novel with an excellent first 250 pages. Too bad the book has 559 of them. A lot of King books go off the rails at the end. The Dark Half. It's like King can't remember why ravens are all over the place and has to find a reason. And he's literally finding the reason as he writes. It's that bad. But the first half is excellent. Needful Things ends badly too, but Bag of Bones takes the cake. See, King had switched publishers, and wanted the public to know he could write, so they marketed the shit out of the novel. The writing is no better or worse than any of King's other adjacent works. Needless to say, after the corpse copulation scene, things get even weirder. The TV adaptation is even worse.
Actor Pierce Brosnan (yes, the James Bond of the 90s…seemed then, seems now like a pretty big step backwards, career-wise) was tapped for the leading role of the A&E TV series, but he is hopelessly out of his depth here.
Like Richard Madden in Medici, what these actors think must be fierce glares coupled with smouldering good looks plus the shouldering of heavy burdens just comes off as two dudes who look hopelessly constipated. Both pictures just look like guys waiting to use the bathroom and pissed off about it.
What is this but a man who looks like he’s dying to take a shit?
I don’t know how these actors snagged these roles, and maybe I don’t wanna know.
But back to King for a moment.
King is the Wayne Gretzky of horror authors, thought Koontz is more prolific. Koontz is Jarri Kurri, blasting out at least one but usually two novels a year.
While King has slowed down a bit, what with all the Hollywood shit he’s got to deal with and foreign rights to negotiate (he also grants far more interviews that Koontz), and despite all this extraneous shit, despite being 73 years old (Koontz is 76), King can still write, edit, draft, polish, finish, and publish a novel in 12 months. That is amazing.
ANYWAY, I don’t have anything else to talk about today, so I’m gonna show you my kitty cats over the years.
l. Cookie
Here’s 20 seconds of a video of me lifting Cookie from a box of burrowing animals. Your eyes just go straight to him, eh? It’s beautiful. Luckily, the other girls I was with all wanted black cats so I got my white-eyed patched kitty without any argument.
Finally got Cookie home. He HATED the subway, mewling the whole time. My God, his old meow is sooooo high pitched compared to now.
More first-day footage:
Waking up Cookie on the second day:
Sritch-scratchin’ his chin.
I’ve been struggling with depression badly for about a year. Sent a “Happy Birthday” email to ___. Shouldn’t have, Should listened to family member advice on that one. But Cookie is always there for me.
Here he is “playing guitar” a few days ago:
Oh man The Goldfinch adaptation is sooooo bad. It's such an amazing novel. But there's too much plot. It needed a series. I was especially disappointed in the Vegas section, my favourite of the novel. The writing was so good you could smell the chlorine in Theo's hair and see the sunsets. I stayed up til 1030am reading it my first time through. The whole book is amazing, Hobie is a great character too (oddly asexual, like a lot of Tartt's characters. Doesn’t bother me. If you need books with sex in them, there's no shortage there. Anyway, Cookie hid the whole movie in my bag. Smart cat!
Cookie self-banishes himself to the corner or the bath when he feels he’s done wrong, like when he takes a swipe at my eyeball or tear a chunk of flesh off my penis. (He’s done both of these things but I can never stay mad at him, mainly for two reasons.
1. I’m not blind. Cookie doesn't extrude his claws when he slaps my face. It's so courteous of him.
2. I’m not currently sexually active so a cat scratch on my penis isn't really even in my top ten problems
More self-banishment. All that's missing is a dunce cap.
SUPER CLOSE UP ^
All-time fav cat yawn. ALL TIME.
When we first got here he was climbing UP the screen so I can't leave my window open cuz we're on floor 12. I am NOT losing this beautiful creature Eric Clapton style. No cat's life is worth that awful ballad. Or kid's life.
II. PATSY
My (& roommate Sam’s) cat Patsy. Got hit by car and died Dec 9 2017.
Sleeping Patsy #1:
Sleeping Patsy #2:
Patsy Sphinx-style.
When Patsy passed the apartment was so fucking quiet, we knew we needed a new cat. And within 3 weeks we had one.
III. Moon
She'd just come in from near Timmins. A northern soul. Originally named Loon. We fixed that the day we brought her home.
She looks chill but I once saw Moon chase a mouse across the living room, catch it, and completely tear its head off. This cat knows how to cat. Seriously.
IV: Harbinger is this cat's name.
Met him or her on July 15 2020, just hours my marriage collapsed. I was a mess. His/her futile expression seemed then, seems now, to sum up things perfectly.
“You fucked up, Danny. You fucked up BIG. And I hate you.”
V. My friend Ben’s cats. (forgot their names, will update when I remember them)
VI: Random summer patio cat. Named it Quebec. Seemed/seems close to Church's age. Similar agility and cautious gait. Same “seen it all, kid, you're gonna have to work harder to make ME swoon and snuggle” gaze you see in cats over 10.
VII: Melancholy store cat @ Home Hardware on Danforth near Main & Dawes. I named it Dusty.
VIII: More Moon! (Goodbye pictures, as it has turned out).
Plus other Moon pics from happier Moontimes to lighten the mood.
My last time visiting Moon, July 20 2021.
XI: Nameless
Me & ____ keeping a cat we didn’t know but who kept following us dry. ___ went to Pet Valu and got him/her food, which he/she devoured. Summer 2019.
X: Me meeting Summer, the alley cat sometime in May. Note her tail drop the instant I let go of it. (I don't tug cat's tails. I used to start petting from the head and stop at the butt. _____ keeps going. To my surprise, they like it! Just be soft and gentle.
XI: This is Church. Named after the cat in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary:
This is from the 2019 remake.
The original front cover for the Hardcover:
Day #1 of having Church sometime in April 2018. She was a lil shy @ first.
This is my favourite photo I took of Church.
If I’m being straight up, I didn’t want to name her Church. I wanted to name her California. Church had been a street cat and for a lot of homeless people, California is the ultimate destination, cuz you won't freeze to death on the streets at night.
I'm serious. Everyone wants to go to California.
Remember the opening shot of the film The Wizard?2
Anyway, “we” named her Church. Or maybe I'll do passive voice instead. The cat was named, or rather re-named, Church. Her foster Mom had called her Rosie.
Church does NOT have a rosy personality. This can be ascertained in less than ten mins.
ANYWAY ____ got her way. That happened a lot, felt like.
I'm not saying I was treated badly, just that she called the shots for pretty much everything.
She has/had every right to be pissed off that she married a fucking junkie but I TOLD HER WITHIN THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF OUR FIRST DATE ABOUT MY ADDICTION, ABOUT HOW BAD IT WAS, & THE STEPS I WAS TAKING TO ALLEVIATE IT (I WAS ON SUBOXONE AY THE TIME).
She has every right to complain that I took money from her to buy heroin. Typically I would slip her bank card out of her purse while she slept, then ran to the Kensington TD to withdraw $40, just hoping she wouldn’t her balance that day. Then I’d buy enough to allow me to work a 12pm noon shift to 230am shift. When I got home, I’d have my tips transferred to cash. And once again, as she slept, I’d slowly and stealthily crawl across the floor of our bedroom to her purse, take her bank card, run to the Kensington ATM, and replace to $40. Usually those 14 hour shifts would get me enough $ to buy heroin to get through to the next paycheque. And on and on it went. The stealing $40 thing happened usually about 3 or 4 times per month. Sometimes she’s wake up early and i’d have ten minutes to run to the ATM. Sometimes That ATM would be out of service so I’d have to fun further down Spadina to where the Dark Horse Coffee is. Sometimes I’d make it back before she was out of the shower, sometimes I wouldn’t, so I’d slip the bank card back into her purse while she was doing her makeup for work. (She always looked fucking INCREDIBLE in the mornings, btw. Like the most beautiful woman who ever walked the earth. Of course, I started taking more and more money. Totally out of control.
Still, only very recently has it occurred to me that when it came to our life together she called ALL the shots. She’d pick what dinner was gonna be, she’s pick what movie we were gonna watch, what we did on weekends, where we went grocery shopping, and bought clothes or makeup @ Sephora, a place I learned about from her.
I’d made an indie movie in 2011 and I was proud if it. I kept waiting & waiting for her to say something like… “hey, let’s check out that indie mockumentary you made.”
I wasn’t gonna ask. I was waiting. And I'm still waiting. She disliked a lot of the movies that I picked for us, even though the ratio was something like 1 to 15, or 1 to 20. For every 20 movies she picked, I’d pick one. Seriously.
I remember showing her one of my not just favourite Canadian movies, but movies ever, directed by Don McKellar. It’s called Last Night (1998).
It’s about the last day on Earth. No explanation is given but the world is ending at midnight & the sun isn’t going down, so the sun is probably exploding or something. Canadian film fans would recognize some of the stars of the film, which include McKellar himself, Sandra Oh, David Cronenberg and Callum Keith Rennie.
That movie meant and means a lot to me. It wasn’t the first movie I’d ever shown ____ but I’m like…crying during the scene where the classical piano recital takes places and the camera pans across all the finger paintings from Don Mckellar’s fridge: Get Well Soon. It's the part where you, the viewer, are hit with the revelation that his wife is dead. Which explains his eccentric behaviour throughout the film and his desire to die alone on the last day of his life.
But then he meets Sandra Oh and his plans change.
With Oh in tow, he pays a visit to Callum Keith Rennie, his friend to say goodbye.
“See you later.”
“No you won't.”
UGH. BREAKS MY HEART.
After leaving Rennie's, things start getting much more frantic. And poignant.
So I show ___ the movie and she says….nothing. No response. Barely a shrug.
Then she tells me that Don McKellar was a dick to her once at TIFF, demanding VIP treatment because he was in one of the movies. It sucks to hear stuff like that about actors or artists you like. But it sounded like she had good cause to dislike McKellar. But to hate his movie too?
Like, if you knew going into the movie that it was one of my favourites ever, but your dislike of McKellar doesn't have to make you hate his movie. Why not just tell me the McKellar thing? Why make me make a fool out of myself gushing and crying while you sit there seething and hating the guy?
Funnily enough, McKellar met Cronenberg at an early version of TIFF. The latter was chewing out the former for the poor quality of reels being shown. “This is a disgrace to Canadian cinema!” he is reported to have said.
They got on the wrong foot. But as Cronenberg saw how serious the young Don McKellar about getting better, newer, cleaner prints, and the two ended up becoming close. Close enough that Cronenberg act in a small role in McKekllar’s directorial debut.
If she was not going to like the movie, why watch? So she didn’t like the movie. Easily in my top ten. Not top ten Canadian. My top ten ever.
But that's okay. Fine. I married a movie expert.
Co-hosting a popular podcast about horror films, and having authored two books (one on the New French Extremity and another on the 1990s Teen Horror Cycle), plus innumerable articles, essays, etc, does give you a certain expertise. But I’m not a fucking idiot. It doesn’t mean that movies I like are automatically shittier than ones she likes.
I’d been waiting months for El Camino to come out and finish the Breaking Bad story. She said she would watch it with me. 10 or 15 mins in she wordlessly gets up and goes into the bedroom. And stays there. And that was that. We’d been having some marriage-related problems, but…dude, I watch what you wanna watch almost every night, you can’t give me one 90 min Netflix film?
I was like, really?
And you wonder why I enjoy drugs so much? I felt like a fucking mannequin half the time. Unless we do exactly what you wanted to do, you would turn into a sulking brooding pile of sadness.
Maybe I fell for the person you were pretending to be, not the person you are. That night we hooked back up in September 2017 and you stayed up til 3 AM with me? You never, ever did that again. Ever.
Were you acting or sorta misrepresenting yourself in the beginning? Or did I turn you bitter? I hope not. You should be happy. I remember towards the end, thinking “I haven't heard ____ laugh in months.” I loved your laugh.
I also remember one day in summer 2019.
2018 had been the most romantic, love-filled, wonderful year. We'd cooled down a bit, but things were still going good for us. I think.
We we leaving the house that morning to run some errand and I recall saying “jeez, you’re such an optimist…” to something she had said. I didn't say it in a mean way. I was being playful.
She spun and looked at me with a strange, almost suspicious look. Like I was an idiot who just was not seeing the bigger picture.
“How so?” she wanted to know.
She could be pretty corrosive and acerbic when it came to insults, which I liked actually, and found funny. Even the times she'd toss a barb at me, I enjoyed it. She was and is funny. But the expression on her face was one of pardon me? Did you just call me an optimist?
Guess she wasn’t used to hearing her name and “optimist” in the same sentence.
She'd lately been looking at me like that. A lot. Like I was crazy. Not looks of confusion, but ones of hostility & suspicion. Like we were playing the same game but with each of us having different objectives and conflicting sets of rules. Which I can see now, we totally were. Still, idiot that I am, instead of shutting the fuck up, I tried to explain myself better.
“Well,” I began. “You gave things a shot with me even though I told you, from the very first date, how bad my opiate thing was.“
She glared at me. I was surprised at her anger. “You told me you were working a program. That you were on Suboxone and not using anymore. If I'd known that…”
She didn’t finish her sentence.
She kinda didn’t need to.
That ellipsis hung in the air all fuckin’ summer like a goddamn guillotine blade.
That ellipsis said many things, first and foremost being “if I’d known how fucked up you were, I never would have gotten involved with you.”
But hang on second now.
We’d gone a few dates in Feb 2017. Then I ghosted. Why? Cuz I found her kinda boring.
Like I said, when we hooked back up in September, she was completely different. Was she trying to be the kind of girl that I would like? Spontaneous (without necessarily needing drugs or booze…that’s a myth). She came to me that September, not the other way around.
But now she was essentially making it known that if she'd had a full deck of cards, that is...ALL the available information regarding me and my addiction, she would NOT have gotten involved with me.
Anyway, back to the movie thing.
The first movie I picked to show her was the 9th or 10th we'd watched together. I picked Primer (2004), which is my favorite time travel film ever. It’s about a Dallas-based company that makes computer chips or some shit. I’m not sure cuz the first 15 minutes of the movie the employees use strictly engineering language, incomprehensible to the average viewer. Somehow though, it works! And surprisingly well too.
One day the top two guys at the firm realize they’ve accidentally built a time machine, so they fire everybody except themselves. The two main guys are director/writer Shane Carruth & actor David Sullivan (he was in that terrible Netflix show Flaked.)
At first, their goal is strictly financial. They travel to yesterday, look at the stock market, return to today, and make any and all relevant purchases that make them a lot of money.
But of course, at some point, one of the men use the machine for the wrong reason, and after that strange things begin to occur. One night they come home and their their neighbour is incoherent and babbling and bleeding. One of the guys starts wearing earbuds that play him what anybody in vicinity is going to say in ten seconds. It gets worse from there, as they realize they can’t trust the other alone with the machine. I mean, shit gets crazy. I’ve seen the movie ten times and I still don’t know what happens, plot-wise. There are entire sub-reddit threads devoted to figuring out the chronology.
Eventually the two men agree to cease activities, having made more money than they’ll ever need. But neither agrees to throw away, burn, or destroy the blueprint for the time machine.
The final shots are disquieting, as one of the men seems to be in the midst of building a gigantic, factory-sized version of the original Dallas time machine, and he is wearing a hard hat and making decisive hand gestures, which implies he is training MORE people how to use it. The other guy’s intentions are more ambiguous but you get the sense he will not be able to resist the temptation to time travel either.
Within 20 min of Primer ___ was already actively & vocally telling me why she disliked it.
The second movie I tried to show her is 2013’s Coherence, which I admit has tons of similarities with The Invitation, which came out 2 years later. She didn't like it but she was dead right that The Invitation was, and still is, way way better.
Anyway, she didn’t like that one either. The only movie I showed that I remember her liking, and even liking enough to see twice, the second at TIFF, was My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant’s 1991 masterpiece with River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves.
So that was cool. I don't know what I would have done if she'd disliked that movie. That one's top three.
Anyway she disliked most of the stuff I tried to get her to watch with me, which was a drag.
But y’know what really hurt the most?
She never ONCE asked “hey, let’s watch that movie you made.”
I made an independently written/shot.acted and edited movie in 2011 called Sudbury ‘96. The title was a homage to Buffalo ‘66, which I apologize for now. At the time I didn’t know what a terrible person Vincent Gallo was.
Here’s the trailer:
It’s a mockumentary and a 90s nostalgia piece about 3 Sudbury bands who are friendly but also antagonistically competing for an opening slot at a show by The Vandelles.
In our movie, The Vandelles are a legendary all-girl punk band who, through various shady record company dealings, found themselves destitute sometime during the Regan era. Dejected and disillusioned with the music industry, they split. But they're back and on tour!
Here is their Behind the Music style documentary. I wrote the music for it and asked my best friend Ryan’s then-gf, now wife, Reena, who sings beautifully, to sing the song. Which she did. IN ONE TAKE.
Putting the show on is a sleazy Toronto promoter named Ron Borg. Whichever band draws the most fans or plays best, depends on how Borg is feeling that night, gets to open for LEGENDARY Vandelles. Here’s a quickie bio on Ron, in the same Behind the Music format:
ANYWAY. I was with a partner who loved movies, reviewed and watched films as both a passion and a lucrative side gig. We were together from Sept 9 2017 (I remember cuz it was 2 days after her birthday to July 15 2020) and not ONCE did she ask to see the movie. Not one fucking time.
So yes. I was a terrible bf and husband and I stole money to buy drugs. But I was always really supportive of and excited about her creative endeavours. I never got any of that back from her. I remember her mention ONCE in late 2017 that she’d listened to the Stumblr record I made with David Contin from The Flying Museum Band, and that she’d liked the first song and how we sorta “scream/sang the chorus.”
But I’ve been in a band called The Big City Nights since June 1 2005. We have 21 full-length albums, plus an original Christmas song. To make things easier on people, at the ten year anniversary of the band, we put together TWO best-of compilation records, one representing the first five years, July 1 2005-July 1 2010, and the second disc representing the second five years. From 2015-2021, we have released nothing on account of James punishing work schedule, Ryan’s growing family, and my debilitating heroin/fentanyl addiction. I’m NOT placing blame on James or Ryan. It’s ALL on me. I pawned guitars, I stole money, I robbed drug dealers, I robbed drug users. Our band's recent lack of output is on me (but we have a HUGE album coming up entitled You’ve Come A Long Way, Maybe.)
The first best-of, Minor Carpentry can be heard if you click this sentence.
The second, I Had A Dream I Mattered, can be heard if click THIS sentence.
The entire time I was with Alex, she did not mention listening to, much less liking, a single Big City Nights song, despite knowing it’s the major creative project of my life. Even just ONE song. “Hey Danny, I listened to ___ today and I really liked it.”
Now, she DID say she read my novel. And that’s not nothing. If she read it, then I thank her for that because it means a lot to me.
I’ll continue to listen to her podcast tho I prefer reading her books. When I read her books, I hear them in whatever voice my head uses when it reads for me. Not her voice. On the podcast, there’s no escaping it. And it still hurts to hear her voice.
But y’know what?
I actually feel really good to be alive today.
Yeah I’m alone. But maybe not forever.
Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon
Jenny Lewis, of Rilo Kiley fame, was also in the movie. It’s a cult classic of the ilk that tend to get sung about in classic Ataris songs.