It’s another manic Monday and I’m doing whatever I can to avoid smoking. Cigarettes. MySpace is, thankfully, down for the moment, preventing me from wasting any more time in its digital cul-de-sacs. All things begin equal, I prefer blogging, both in general and as a fad, to this current wave the Talking Heads have labeled “social networking websites.”
Harlan Ellison must love MySpace…if he even knows of its existence. The impersonal, unfeeling, machine-as-spectator-to-and-cause-of-human-suffering is one of his best reoccurring villains. Dr. Charles Forbin’s Colossus and Arthur C. Clark’s HAL have nothing on the monstrous, sociopathic world-computer of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Were Philip Dick alive today he would no-doubt stare into the vacuous abyss of the internet and scream with equal-parts revulsion, fascination, and bitter disappointment. The World Computer, long dreamt of in story and nightmare, has seized us all. It had no need to control our nuclear missiles or our orbiting death rays. It’s captured us with flashing lights and the ability to upload our vacation photos.
MySpace is crack for the internet. It is Pure Democracy with no cause and no idea of its inherent powers. Only the bands, who popularized MySpace to begin with, have glimpsed even a fraction of the site’s potential. Even they only utilize it as a free promotional tool…more power to them, I say. Getting people to pay attention to you’re art is one hell of a thing. Believe me, I know. I am, after all, a writer.
To make matters even better, I live with a musician. And while we’ve formed several bands over the years of our acquaintance, none of them have progressed beyond the “Hey, wanna play music for a couple of hours while we drink?” stage.
I could blame this on my laziness or my roommate’s new girlfriend…either way I’d be making an excuse. I’m not that lazy, all things considered (three hundred-something movie reviews in four years ain’t no chump change), and the new girlfriend is a firecracker of athletic, honey-blonde hot. I cannot fault my roommate for selecting her, or disappearing into her apartment for days on end. Hell, were our positions reversed I’d do the same damn thing and not spare my roommate a second thought.
(In fact I did just that in the summer/fall of 2002. Now, when I go three, four or even five days without seeing my best friend I think back to that summer/fall and shrug. Serves me right, I think. Bros before hoes…not to cast disparagement.)
The more I think about it, the more I believe that musicians have it easy. Theirs is a performance medium with its own social expectations. Taste may vary with audience but, roughly speaking, the closer a musician comes to rocking his/her audience’s proverbial fucking socks off, the supposedly “better” they are. Personal (if not financial) success is measured in the amount of applause you receive from your (hopefully not too drunken) audience members. And, to top it all off, you get the instant gratification of knowing, right there, right then, that someone else has gotten a buzz off of your personal artistic habit.
We writers cannot perform in public…apart from the occasional maverick among us. Again I think of Harlan Ellison, who takes request from the audiences at his book signings, banging out the resulting short story on a manual typewriter with his index fingers. And even then how fascinating is the writer at work anyway? You can do a lot of things with prose, but I have always held (and will continue to hold) that you cannot make it fun to watch. If you could, the Japanese would’ve already ran with the idea straight into Game Show land. Its title would literally translate into Super Writer Challenge of the Gods…or something like that. Makes about as much sense as that damn game, Katamari.
To write is to make a conscious choice. I will spend a substantial chunk of my waking hours in forced immobility. I will consciously force my ass to press an outline of itself in this chair. I will ignore the pleas of friends and relatives and shun the attentions of hot girls. I will ignore the raucous floating through my window from the bar across the street. And I most definitely will not rise out of this chair to cross the street to join it. No matter how tempting a pint might sound.
Two days ago I submitted a short story to The New Yorker. This was, for all intents and purposes, my first submission. (The two or three from high school don’t really count…back then I thought “SASE” was some uppity New York way of saying “sassy.”) I suppose I could’ve taken a week (or, knowing my work habits, three) to pound out some pointless, neo-Hemingway-ish tale wherein a protagonist without a past goes to a war, beds a nurse, and gets drunk while wistfully remembering her…but I didn’t.
Instead I submitted a story about a politically disenchanted youth from the Midwest who, in a fit of passion, convinces his drug dealer to run for Congress. Do I need to tell my non-existent readership that it is a work of pure, undiluted fiction? And that any resemblance to any person, place, or Congressional district, living or dead, is purely coincidental?
I didn’t think so.
In any case, I don’t expect much to come of it. At most I figure I’ll make some bored assistant editor in some drab, windowless New York office chuckle. For a second. Maybe. Hopefully. In all seriousness, I did it just to get That First One out of the way. It was threatening me, building up inside my mind like the freakish quantum singularities you always see on Star Trek. Better to just get it over with, I figured, and move on to the next one.
So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction to read over…in lieu of doing my homework. Hell with mid-terms. That’s why god gave us caffeine and exotic, Canadian pep pills.
