STRANGE DAYS
I've got three things to tell you about in ascending significance. A coin. A book. A death. And two postscripts on Washed Out and Radiohead.
1. My Street Grammy
My proudest moment as a busker came today. I won a Street Grammy. I was playing and singing ZZ Top's "Got Me Under Pressure," a longtime fav of mine, especially the part in the guitar solo when the E slams down to the D, when a coin came sailing at me from a pickup truck waiting at the light. The driver flashed the devil horns and drove off. It was a Toonie. He missed my guitar case but it was close enough.
Andre Royo, the actor who played Bubbles in The Wire was once hanging out, in character, on a street corner in Baltimore when a man came up to him and handed him a point of heroin. "Here. You need this more than I do." Royo calls this his “Street Emmy,” cuz if you've ever spent time around dope addicts, you know that someone handing you FREE heroin is a very very VERY unlikely event.
ANYWAY my situation isn't as impressive BUT it made me uncharacteristically happy cuz it's never happened before. It's always nice to make an impression. Then a few mins later while playing Treble Charger's "Friend of Mine" a woman handed me 20$. That happens maybe once every 2 months. Good energy today.
It is really gonna suck going back to "real life." Busking is SO MUCH better than working to make some asshole rich. Which brings me to my second piece of news.
DIGRESSION #!: I’d rather have a Street Emmy than Grammy
My novel will be out this year via LITTLE GHOST PUBLISHING CO.
The day has come and gone. May 1. I promised myself if I didn't find a publisher by this date, I'd publish my behemoth doorstopper myself. 900+ pages (BUT it's 3 short inter-connected novels in one. I'm not asking you to slog through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle).
This year I had “interest” from 3 publishing companies, out of the 32 I sent manuscripts to. But because these companies are corporate entities, they never deigned to explain what, if anything, "interest" means. It could mean a slush pile reader is going through it with awe and slack jaw, and has recommended it to her superior, except her superior was sacked a week ago because publishers are disappearing faster than [insert endangered fish species here].
"Interest" could mean "stack of papers that has been sitting beside the Xerox machine since May," gathering different coloured coffee mug stains. I'm not sure it why it took me this long to realize that publishing companies are made up of men in suits. As a general rule, men in suits are the reason this world is as fucked as it is. I'm actually ashamed of myself for seeking their approval but, unfortunately, in this world, a publisher confers legitimacy. Makes the book seem more "real."
One editor told me that he didn't think the novel had "commercial legs." When I replied that they'd said the same thing about Under the Volcano he looked confused. He didn't know the book. Now I understand a bookseller's job is to sell books, but in most industries a passing familiarity with one's wares is expected. And even a passing familiarity with 20th century literature should tell you who Malcolm Lowry is.
So FUCK ‘EM. I'm not "doing business" with these shitheads. Hell, my novel is not a very commercial prospect as is. I'll be quite lucky to sell 200 whether via a "known" publisher or not. At least if I do it myself I'll be out there, day after day, in the public's eye, feeling like I’m making progress. I'll just start busking in front of bookstores every third day or so.
If this year has taught us anything, it's that almost all societal institutions are set to "auto-crumble." Publishers aren't the all-powerful monolithic institutions we thought they were anyway. Hell, Walt freakin' Whitman self-published his masterpiece Leaves of Grass and sold it door-to-door.
I love Walt freakin’ Whitman, btw. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is one of my favourite poems ever. Check it out by clicking on this sentence. The poem is about the immortality of art. Whitman wants you, the reader, to know that he knows how you feel when you imagine and dream and love and enjoy.
It avails not, time nor place - distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt.
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried.
Hilarious Simpsons scene aside, if an artist that good, one of the best American soil ever produced, is cool with self-publishing, then it’s more than good enough for me. And it’s not like I’m a stranger to the process. I’ve been writing, recording, and self-releasing The Big City Nights’ stuff since we started, under the in-house imprint Little Ghost Recording Co. We have sixty-one releases to date, links to which can be found on the webpage behind this link. So I suppose All the Quiet Hours will be the first title for Little Ghost Publishing Co.
I busk 7 days a week right now. Pretty soon I’ll have a product to hawk.
A note for writers: Editing in a physical book is so much fucking easier. I suspect I’m not the only writer who has a VERY hard time editing on a computer screen, even in PDF format. I CAN'T RECOMMEND THIS METHOD ENOUGH. YOUR TIME READING THE INTERNET HAS TRAINED YOU TO SKIP/MISS ERRORS THAT WILL HAUNT YOU FOREVER ONCE YOUR BOOK GETS TO PRINT.
I used to convert my Word document to PDF, with headings saying the title and page number, in order to make it look like as much of a book as possible, and still I missed critical typos. Spellcheck does not always work because sometimes you SPELLED a word correctly, but it is the incorrect word to use in that context, and ruins your sentence/paragraph/book/life.
So I sent my manuscript out to get printed as a real book from a local print shop, and I'll be correcting the proofs over the course of this coming month. If I proof 30 pages a day, I’ll be done before June arrives.
I’ve also been spending 2-3 hours a day on a second book, which is called To The Glum Alumni. It’s a college campus novel in the tradition of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Don Delillo's White Noise, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Denis Johnson's The Name of The World, John Williams’ Stoner, and Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four.
As for my first novel, All the Quiet Hours, I was told by several publishers that they like the book but aren't really focusing on white male writers in 2021 - which is TOTALLY understandable given what has happened this year (and in previous years/decades/centuries). I'm all for giving voices to people who have been historically denied them. But I’m not going to give up my dream. I don’t wanna take someone else’s space; I just want to claim my own. There’s room for all of us in this world.
It’s not like I’m a runaway success anyway. Save for three articles and one short story, everything else I've sent in since 2008 has been rejected. (By the way, my very first submission was to Coke Machine Glow, a long-defunct music website named after the late Gord Downie’s debut solo record. My submission was rejected on the basis that they “weren’t looking for any more white male writers” at the time.) Again, I support diversity in publishing, but being a white male doesn’t mean doors just automatically fly open for me. I have to pound the pavement too. In terms of the trying-to-get-published struggle, I understand what it’s like, at least a bit.
I started my novel in January 2009, not yet in the throes of alcoholism but drinking three or four times a week. By 2012 I was drinking every single night, usually 12 tall cans of Pabst, sometimes 12 cans and a mickey of Alberta Premium whisky. I lived directly across from the Beer Store south of College on Bathurst at the time, and every night I’d try to wait til 9PM, when the store closed, without buying beer. But then, at 8:59, in full panic mode, I’d dash across the street to get a case of beer. Usually it would be waiting for me at the cash register, because the staff all knew me by name. It’s one of the signs of alcoholism. It might not sound sinister coming from that upbeat, sillyass Cheers theme song, but if “everybody knows your name” at your favourite bar (or your local liquor/beer store, for that matter) you have a drinking problem.
And I decidedly had one. I’d start drinking at 9PM and go til 6AM. I dropped out of University for a semester. But I kept writing. In 2014 I discovered opiates after a Percocet was recommended to me during a particularly harrowing hangover. By 2016 I was hooked on OxyContin. I stopped drinking in 2017, the last time I was drunk was in February 2017. I had a few more beers that year, so I don’t remember my quit date. But I hadn’t truly quit. I didn’t go through the shakes or delirium tremens. I didn’t have to face the paucity of a favourite substance. All I did was switch. I replaced alcohol with opiates. I could work on opiates. There was no hangover. (But dopesickness is even more paralyzing, but I figured I’d always be able to get some opiates. How naive and dumb I was.)
All through this I kept writing. When the supply of Oxy ran out in 2017, I had to switch to heroin, which I would later learn wasn’t actually heroin, but fentanyl. I tried Suboxone but it made me too depressed to do anything, let alone write. So I switched to methadone. And kept writing.
Finally I finished writing sometime in 2018. Then I spent three years chiseling and honing and editing, all while quitting opiates and then relapsing, over and over. I went to rehab for the first time in late 2019-early 2020 and things were going pretty well when I got out but when the pandemic hit my meetings got canceled and my therapist got COVID, so I lost my support systems and swiftly went back to doing drugs.
By the time July rolled around, everything had blown up in my face. I lost my marriage to my beloved partner, my two beloved cats, my beloved apartment, and a job I merely tolerated but badly needed. (I deserved to lose these things, btw. I was hellbent on drugs. Nothing else was on my radar.)
I found a place on the east end, where I am now. Then I got served an eviction notice last month. That’s two evictions in ten months. Neither were for not paying rent, but because yet another landlord was cashing in to go sit on a beach, leaving the rest of us to spit and struggle, blood under our fingernails, fighting each other for the almighty dollar.
Through it all I kept writing. And I’m just gonna keep writing. It’s cathartic and therapeutic. Plus, whenever I feel like procrastinating on the second novel, I work on a cat-and-mouse commercial thriller I’ve been fucking with in which an FBI agent (Agent Davenport…a homage to both the Toronto street name and the cop in The Secret History) is chasing a serial kidnapper across America. I’m 85 pages deep already. It's called Burning Redd (that’s not a typo...that's the serial kidnapper's last name...and she has excellent reasons for abducting the people she abducts.) And her name could make for a badass trilogy: Running Redd, Dying Redd, etc. This book is unabashedly commercial. I will most likely finish it well before To the Glum Alumni. It is so much easier to write “genre” than “literary,” even if I don’t actually subscribe to those categories.
But I have far lower artistic ambitions for Burning Redd than AtQH. I am writing it so I can sell it to a publisher and move to Olon in Ecuador and write full-time for the rest of my life. A crazy (crack)pipe dream I know. But dreams are what sustain us. I have mine, you have yours.
Seriously though: I am more proud of All the Quiet Hours than anything else I have ever done. I don't give a fuck if it sells ONE copy and makes me the Robert Musil of the 2020s, having written my own The Man Without Qualities. Musil spent his whole life in poverty, writing his magnum opus and it STILL wasn't finished when he died. At least I finished mine.
From Musil’s Wikipedia: Although he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he felt that he did not receive the recognition he deserved. He sometimes expressed annoyance at the success of better known colleagues such as Thomas Mann or Hermann Broch, who admired his work deeply and tried to shield him from economic difficulties and encouraged his writing.
He occasionally released various sections of The Man Without Qualities in serialized form, won a Nobel Prize, but still wasn’t happy because nobody bought his book, poor fella. It is now considered a major work of literature, a classic, so I guess Musil had the last laugh. He still shoulda tried to finish the fucking thing though.
Anyway, all this rhapsodizing over how happy I am with my book isn't meant to diminish any of the other creative shit I’ve done, neither my music stuff with The Big City Nights or the mockumentary me and my friend Russell made back in 2012 called Sudbury ‘96. Here’s a fake Behind the Music-style video from our movie:
And here is the trailer:
I love all that stuff, but my book means more to me. Making it was a lonely, isolating, excruciating experience. Like pushing a boulder up Mt. Everest. I put in countless sixteen hour, two-cigarette-pack days. I developed RSI in both hands and I still cannot use my pointer finger when I type. It hurts too much. I’ve tried speech-to-text but the technology is in its infancy still. I write my first drafts longhand, so by the time it’s typed, it’s already a second draft. But I couldn’t get speech-to-text to write a coherent sentence, let alone major portions of a novel. So I gave up on that shitty technology and I’m still writing the old way, even though my hands hurt all the time when I do it.
I write sober now. But I’ve written drunk, high, dopesick, normal sick, tired, awake, etc. When I was in full-on work mode, I rarely wrote less than three hours a day. I often wrote 12+ hour days.
All the book needs now is a front cover. I can't afford to publish a photograph so all I want are some train tracks, scrawled by hand, running to the horizon with my name above and the title below. The front cover needs to be completely white otherwise, and my name needs to be written by my own hand. Same goes for the title of the book.
If any artists or people good at drawing are reading this: If you feel like sketching some train tracks, email me @ essayelf at Google mail dot come. I will pay you for your work. Let me know if you are interested and I'll sign and scan the title and my name in my handwriting and send it to you.
On the back cover I’ve already written a buncha fake blurbs from newspapers that don't exist, quotes excoriating the novel. I think it would be funny and I've always wanted to to it and nobody is standing in my way, so I'm doing it. Example:
"This is the worst book I have ever read." - Brenda Backington, The New Smyrna Daily Bugle, etc etc.
If the foregoing is tl;dr, I’ll keep this brief:
MY DEBUT NOVEL WILL BE OUT THIS YEAR. I'LL DO WHATEVER I CAN TO KEEP COSTS DOWN, SELLING THEM FOR JUST A LITTLE OVER WHAT IT COST TO MAKE.
Please consider buying a copy when one is available. If you are in Toronto I can deliver it to you myself. Speaking of Toronto…
A Death on the Danforth
I like to switch up my busking spots. My favourite and most remunerative spot is in front of the Tim Horton’s just east of Main on the south side. As a busker, you always wanna position yourself where people have just handled change (or if you’re lucky…cash). So Tim’s is my #1 spot. That’s where I was today, where I made $34. That’s 14 over my daily average. But Mondays usually suck, so it’ll average back out to $20. That’s why they call ‘em averages. To quote an ancient Big City Nights song recorded on Canada Day, July1 2005, the first song we ever recorded, “baby, I’ll be your law of averages.” You can here the song by clicking this very sentence.
My third spot is just north of Main Station on a grate, but I only play there four or five hours a week. My second spot is on the corner of Main & Danforth, right underneath the Main Square sign.
See the man to the right of the bicylist? See the alcove just to the left of that man? That’s where I stand and busk, usually for 3-4 hours on weekend afternoons, when Tim’s doesn’t draw big enough crowds to justify my being there (weekend mornings are a different story). The day in question was a Tuesday. I don’t know why, but I chose Main Square instead of Tim’s. Just after 3PM an elderly woman in a wheelchair was crossing the street from the southeast corner (pictured above) to the northeast corner, so she was moving left across the above cityscape, when a dump truck, whose driver must not have seen her, ran over her and killed her.
As I said, I was less than ten feet away and saw the whole thing. Her head popped like a balloon under the weight of the truck, and her wheelchair was mangled and stuck, so the truck couldn’t move. The poor woman’s final moments were spent in agony beneath a five ton truck. I don’t think she was conscious, but she wasn’t yet dead. She was still moving a little.
Within seconds of the accident, forty or fifty people materialized out of nowhere to stare slack jawed at the woman’s final moments. A few people were calling 911, but the rest were just there for the show. Just to watch a human being die. It made me fucking sick.
I yelled at one guy, who looked a little too fascinated. “Why are you just standing there staring?”
“I’m helping!” he retorted.
“You’re not helping! You are staring at her!”
It was like arguing with a brick wall. Gawkers gonna gawk. I wasn’t gonna change anybody’s mind. What should I have done? Stood on my guitar case and bellowed “FOR SHAME!”
Or perhaps “A PLAGUE ON YOUR HOUSES!”
The woman was pinned under the truck. There was nothing I could do. If this were ten months ago I would have had some heroin to help ease the pain, but I doubt I would have been able to get her to snort it. She’d probably never snorted heroin before. Why start at age 82?
I simply got the fuck out of there. A dying person should not be gawked at like they are a fucking zoo exhibit.
Thing is, I had a passing acquaintance with the woman, from busking in front of Tim Horton’s. Sometimes she would pull into the little alcove where I play and just hang there for a half hour and sip coffee. She never said anything about my playing and.or singing one way or the other, which didn’t bother me in the slightest. The very fact that she wasn’t rolling away from me as fast as possible, hands clamped over her ears, was more than enough for me. We said hello a few times but never engaged in conversation, as English wasn’t her first language. I think she was either Greek or Portuguese. I often heard her speaking in her mother tongue with other seniors out front of the Tim’s.
The news reported that she was 82 years old. That’s a lot of years. Think about it. Hitler’s Nazi regime invaded Poland and triggered WWII the year that woman was born. Colour TV was fourteen years away. The first manned space-flight was twenty-two years in the future. Not knowing the woman’s exact birthdate, she was either twenty-nine or thirty the day the first humans landed, walked on the surface moon, and safely returned home.
Think of all the things the woman who died last Tuesday said and did and saw in those 82 years. Walls crumbling. Buildings shooting up into the sky. Nations starving. Genocides starting. Hands Across America. Starvation and homeless and wars on drugs but, yeah, hope and health and happiness too.
A few other things happened this week, but they’re not for public consumption. It’s not like they were NC-17 or anything. I’m still in pandemic hibernation mode with Cookie.
There’s a beautiful alley cat who hangs out in…get this, the alley near my place. Usually he runs from me but this week he posed long enough for me to snap this photo. Look at that tail! He is GORGEOUS.
Focus on the good, Danny. The alley is a disgusting shithole, but this beautiful, half-wild creature lives there. A diamond in the rough. There’s beauty everywhere, you just hafta look for it.
It has been a very difficult year, but brighter days are ahead.
Washed Out’s Purple Noon
A few last notes, music-wise. Firstly, I was delighted to learn that one of my favourite artists of all-time, the brilliant Washed Out, has a new album out called Purple Noon. I was flabbergasted to learn that this album has been out since last August and I just found out about it this week. Granted, I was pretty fucked up last summer, but how the hell am I nine months late to the party? The vocal harmonies on the first song are just…goosebump inducing. I’m talking major galvanic responses here. I am not ashamed to say that this man has given me chills more than most women.
Is it too late to fall in love tonight?
'Cause I'm falling out
Another woozy gauzy downbeat Balearic classic from Ernest Greene. May he ride the waves of chill forever. Perfect front cover too, eh?
5. True Love Waits
A few days I came across this video of Thom York performing the Radiohead classic “True Love Waits.” I was nodding my head pleasantly and happily to it when I suddenly noticed the date on the video. It’s from December 5 1995. Most fans know the song from the celebrated live album I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings, released in 2001. That album presented the Kid A and Amnesiac songs in a live context. Before its release, fans were skeptical. Those two Radiohead albums are such obviously studio creations. How the hell would Radiohead pull them off live?
I don’t know, but they did. The album is captivating and sublime and proved beyond a doubt that Radiohead were a force to be reckoned with. Not merely prone to studio wizardry, they were seriously accomplished musicians. But the live album, for all its skrinks and skronks and delay pedal white noise, was perplexingly capped off with a bare acoustic track called “True Love Waits”. It was as gorgeous and powerful as it was unexpected. A truly incredible piece of music. On message boards and blogs (remember those?), fans traded theories as to why a song so great hadn’t been put on Kid A or Amnesiac - or even OK Computer for that matter, if the song had been around since 1995. Now, I have always loved the song, and I’ve only ever heard the version on I Might Be Wrong, but even on first listen I knew that the 1995 rendition was superior. Singing has always been about finding the perfect balance between technical skill and emotional vulnerability. York delivers here. Bigtime. Dig that haunting “don’t leave” line…such desperation and emotion. And that keyboard loop in the background! How could they have left that off the 2001 rendition?
Ladies and gentlemen and those who identify otherwise, this is the definitive “True Love Waits.” Have a listen. I envy you your first time hearing it, an experience I can never have again.
I’ll drown my beliefs
To have your babies
I’ll dress like your niece
And wash your swollen feet
True love waits in haunted attics
True love lives on lollipops and crisps