The Stupidity Diaries

Over the last two years or so I have come to the suspicion--vague at first but recurring until I could no longer ignore it--that I am getting progressively stupider.

Nobody like to think they're actually losing intelligence as they get older, but of course it is as much a part of the natural order as the tide or changing seasons. Science tells us we ought to expect the gradual softening of intellectual faculties, the onset of absent mindedness, dementia and worse. Though I'm still middle-aged, I often find myself unable to answer my son when he asks me to define words like "absquatulate," and simple Latin translations or queries about famous historic battles such as that time Superman fought Mohammed Ali--events whose smallest details I was once able to recount without a moment's hesitation--now send me scurrying off to my vast library of classical erotica.

What has changed? True, a recent MRI of my brain revealed one or two localized areas of white matter demyelination, but a radiologist friend assured me that these lesions are nothing to worry about, typical of any male who has sustained repeated blows to the head. Yet I still find my reaction time is slowing, and when I asked a question I can almost feel myself flipping through some mental file-cabinet, frantically searching for the answer while at the same time trying to look down the blouse of the secretary flipping through the file cabinet next to mine, mentally peeling off her blouse to cup one creamy smooth and freckled breast in my palm.

Ultimately I decided to make some "lifestyle changes" to see if I could halt my steadily deteriorating mental state. I would keep a journal, a diary, if you will, to incorporate whatever the results might show. Perhaps someday, a thousand years from now, others would look upon my account and find some succor in its pages. Meanwhile, I decided to make three specific changes in my life and stick to them for a year to see what would happen.

First, I have decided to stop drinking turpentine. Hard as it is to admit, my consumption various solvents and stains has been increasingly slowly but steadily over the past decade. What was once a recreating diversion has become a nightly ritual of relaxation and although have no definitive reason to believe this dependency has any effect on my cognative powers, it does occasionally result in blackouts, rages and blindness, so perhaps I'm not entirely wrong to make this change. If, after a year, my ability to process information remains unchanged, why, the turpentine will still be there.

Secondly, I will completely stop using the internet excent in emergency cases where I need to check my email or confirm movies showtimes, book a flight or download a coupon. These days there is more and more data confirming what's being called "internet apnea," wherein we actually breathe more shallowly while online, thus delivering less precious oxygen to the brain. How true this is! How many times have I sat looking at certain web-sites with a noose looped around my throat or a plastic bag over my head, and felt so short of breath that I could practically feel my brain cells winking out in their thousands, like lights going out across some vast cityscape in one of those movies where they have blackouts across the city because of something that happens.

Not that I'm one of those Luddites who believe the internet is evil. Like many things, like a loaf of bread or a vial of crack cocaine or a child with an automatic weapon, there is a time and a place for it under certain circumstances whereas, under other circumstances, not so much. It's like it says in the Bible, too much of anything isn't good, except for God's rain of fire and blood upon the guilty.

A final lifestyle change in my attempt to derail the onrushing freight train of stupidity is the most obvious -- and it starts at my bookshelf. I was always a voracious reader, devouring whole books in a sitting and later vomiting up the damp crumpled pages and trying to flatten them out and read them. Later I moved onto the classics, large, dusty leather-bound tomes whose spines crackled as a gouged a screwdriver through them with a mallet, or flipped idly through their stiff pages searching for money. Most recently I have to admit that the authors I tend to read--Collins, Steele, Bertinelli--weren't helping me stave off the stupidity curdling in the pit of my brain.

No, from now on, I will read only the classics from a carefully composed reading list. In the year to come I shall read (or listen to) one book per day, starting with the obvious Don Quixote, the father of all Western literature, followed in short order by Moby Dick, Frankenstein, Moby Dick Vs Frankenstein, Dracula, Blackula, The Cadbury Tales, Aqualung, Romeo Must Die and so many, many more.

Ambitious? Certainly. But only by embedding my nose in the deep warm firm fragrant breasts of Mother Literature can I slide my tongue gently over the stiffening nipples of Language as I lower my hand slowly down to the soft moist cleft of Knowledge, rubbing my thumb in gentle teasing circles across the blood-flushed nubbin of True Culture until I finally feel my intelligence exploding forward in a great geysering spray of Smartness.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get started.

Don't quit your day job

Every so often the question arises, as it did this past week:

"How much longer until you can quit your job and write full time?"

It's an excellent question. Certainly there are writers out there who can pull it off -- you don't have to be Stephen King to make it work. Some of my closest writer friends are fortunate enough to be able to stay home and write full-time. Even from my informed vantage point, the line between published writer with a dayjob to published full-time novelist is a beguiling shadow-zone, like the landmine-strewn borderland between two historically unstable countries.

Back in the late '90s, I was a stay-at-home writer. My wife was working full-time, and I spent my days at the computer. Back then I visualized my career as a kind of early Wright Brothers aircraft struggling into flight. It might dip or even plunge wildly, but as long as I could somehow keep the damn thing in the air -- even a few feet off the ground -- I considered myself a success. True, I wasn't working exclusively on my own stuff and in fact, all the money I was making was coming from freelance editing, consulting and ghostwriting fees. But the money was coming in regularly enough that I didn't worry. I didn't have health insurance, but that was all right too, since I was young, fairly healthy and didn't have kids.

Almost ten years later, I work full-time at a hospital as an MRI technologist and I write when I get the chance. Ironically, I made and will be making more money over the next year with my writing than I ever did when I was writing full-time, but circumstances have changed radically. I have a family to support, and responsibilities unimaginable to a 20-something version of myself. The prospect of of dipping and swooping nuttily over the dunes of my own private financial Kittyhawk, barely keeping my ass in the air, have become about as exhilarating as a an unexpected jolt at 35,000 feet.

Norman Partridge, one of my favorite horror writers and a fellow who also happens to balance a day job along with writing, told me that he feels like he's bursting people bubbles when they find out he's not writing full-time. Like me, Norm did that gig once...and he discovered that the worries of no health insurance and an irregular paycheck -- or taking writing jobs that he didn't have the heart for, just to pay the bills -- were even harder work than actually working. And I realized that I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Do I ever hope to write full-time again? Sure. Someday. Will I be Elmore Leonard's age when I finally pull it off? Possibly. Who knows? All I know is that it's not what I'm striving for right now. As a writer, as a person, you always need to prioritize, and right now my priorities are taking care of my family and writing as well and honestly as I can. I've been very fortunate to see my work in print and, unlike the plane I was fighting to keep in the air, the quality of my work is something I can control.

All the rest is weather.

Movies that don't suck: Into the Wild

What do you do at night in South Carolina when it's too cold to go skinnydipping on the beach? If your hotel room is equipped with a DVD player, you go across Route 17 to the Piggly-Wiggly where you rent Into the Wild and stay up till midnight getting your eyes knocked out by Sean Penn's mind-boggling imagistic adaptation of the life and death of Christopher McCandless.

I read John Krackauer's Into the Wild a few years ago and it stuck with me like a kiss from a stranger. I spent the first year of my life in a small fishing village in Alaska and have been back several times with my father on camping trips, being flown into remote lakes and islands by bush pilots who would come back a week later to pick us up. There were no cell phones back then, and if there were, it's doubtful they would have worked -- the sense of isolation was thrilling, especially to a twelve year old, the excitement always with an undercurrent of potential danger. One of my strongest memories is salmon fishing with my dad in a river, getting my line snagged and yanking it loose. The hook flew back and caught my father in the face, an inch below his eye. I remember him telling me afterward that if it had caught him in the eye, no one would have been able to come and get us to a hospital for days. We were at the mercy of a vast and beautiful wilderness whose punishing indifference to us was absolute.

Into the Wild comes at your eyes with that same elemental energy and sense of peril. The movie does a phenomenal job capturing that sense of gorgeous emptiness and the way it can turn without warning and sink its teeth into the throat of youthful naivete. Penn structures the journey of 22-year-old McCandless so that his final months aboard an abandoned bus in the middle of the wilderness are intercut with vivid encouters along the road, with people who look at him and see what's been missing from their own lives. As played by Emile Hirsch, McCandless is the charming young kid that everybody wants to have stick around, but is always just making a few weeks' pay to fund his "great Alaskan adventure," while back east, his dysfunctional family and sympathetic but increasingly distressed sister hire P.I.'s to track him down.

Meanwhile McCandless heads westward with a backpack full of Jack London paperbacks and espouses his own home-cooked ideal of a splendid isolation, his response to a corrupt and shameful society. Because he's so determined, he achieves exactly what he sets out to do by going beyond previous frame of reference and forging a new identity for himself north of everything. Ultimately, his story becomes tragic in the classic sense of the word because by the time he realizes the flaw in his own logic, he's already signed his own death warrant.

The difference between Into the Wild and a documentary like Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man is that, by dramatizing the story, Sean Penn actually makes what happens to Chris McCandless seem more real and sympathetic than reality. Grizzly Man's Timothy Treadwell lived and died among deadly predators because his mindset was a lethal combination of ignorance and daft-headed arrogance: up to the very end, he thought of himself as one with nature, in a place where he had no earthly business. When the bear finally ate him, you felt nothing but the nearly audible click of the universe putting itself back in order. Chris McCandless, on the other hand--or at least Sean Penn's version of him--never seems to lose the fear and awe of the wilderness that surrounds him and in the end, he does grasp his true place in the world of people. Except that it's too late.

Into the Wild was a great book that could have been easily messed up at the hands of a bad director. Sean Penn does everything right here, and he's made the best film of his career. The cast is terrific, the scenery is stunning and Eddie Vedder's music fits in perfectly with the fear and awe of a young man falling sway to a urge that, on some level, he understands must ultimately destroy him. In every way that matters, Into the Wild does not suck.

Going to Carolina

Who doesn't love Maximum Overdrive? This Reagan-era clot of cocaine-driven shit squirted out by Stephen King himself, from his terrible adaptation of an awesome original short story, was a big favorite of mine back in the '80s. I loved every bit of it, from the AC/DC soundtrack to the slow motion shot of watermelons tumbling over an extension bridge, to the dead dog with the remote control car jammed in its mouth, just made sense to the kid I was back then. I even bought a copy on Beta.

Overdrive, of course, was set in the Dixie Boy Truckstop, built somewhere outside of Wilmington, North Carolina, for movie. After it was partially torn down, some locals fixed it up and turned it into a real working truckstop, and even though it went bankrupt in a few years, there are supposedly still some road signs for the Dixie Boy along the local interstate.

We're headed down that way tonight for a vacation. To South Carolina, actually, but I'll be the one doing the driving through the middle of the night, and who knows, I might just get turned around enough to find my way down Highway 74/76 in search of the old Dixie Boy -- and whatever's lurking there.

What's going on in Germany?

Everybody knows you're not supposed to look at your Amazon ranking because it doesn't really reflect the sales of your books. Also, everybody knows that it's impossible not to check your Amazon ranking, at least once in a while.

I've come up with a solution. For some reason the German edition of Chasing the Dead is selling respectably, months after publication. Today it was #87 in the horror division, and it's gone as low as five hundred something on the general list. Now of course all of this is just as grossly meaningless to me as the US Amazon listing, and my royalties schedule is different for foreign rights...but it feels good to see those low numbers. And on these bleak late-winter afternoons, isn't that why we check Amazon in the first place?

Bonus -- I can't read the reviews.

Tomorrow: new free fiction.

Oh my goodness

I got some very, very exciting news yesterday.

And it's killing me that I can't say anything more about it right now.

Davy and Joe-liath

My friend Mike, who works on The Simpsons, emailed me to let me know about his friend Davy Lauterbach, a former Simpsons animator who now makes what sounds like a good living painting uber-disturbing portraits of creepy looking kids. Celebrities are buying his art and Mike said no matter how much he's tried to buy the painting featured above, Davy won't sell.

In this online profile, Davy describes his kids thusly: "One baby that is the clone of a clone of a clone of what I think I would be if I were inbred with myself over and over and over. That baby would be repulsive. Way too smiley. Clownish. Definitely a chronic masturbator."

Cooooool. But if you're looking for really scary baby art, why not take a peek at these pictures of me taken circa 1969-1970?


I use these photos of myself to terrify my wife. This morning I brought them downstairs and she screamed and refused to look back until I promised I'd put them away.

Top that, Davy.

Drink Puke Sleep

Drink, Puke, Sleep
One Man’s Search for Everything across Wal-Mart, Wii and Wendy’s

“(Eat, Pray, Love) has inspired women readers to follow in Gilbert’s footsteps as they make pilgrimages abroad looking for good food, new boyfriends and personal gurus to make everything right again after divorce.”

--USA TODAY,
2/7/08

Drink, Puke, Sleep is my inspiring story. It begins with the heartbreaking decampment of my girlfriend, leaving me in a state of emotional fragility so extreme that all I could do is drink and cry and play Guitar Hero. After sixteen straight hours of gaming, a case of Keystone Light and a pint of Captain Morgan I ultimately passed out in tears on the couch, only to find myself in the exact same place five hours later, in a pool of my own urine, my sinuses clogged and head throbbing as if trapped between the very ass cheeks of Satan himself.

Out the window, through the falling snow, enlightenment beckoned from the glowing fast food signs across the street, and I found myself staggering through Wendy’s, crying as I walked up to the Drive-through window. This, at the urging of Rodney “Ramrod” Hobart, whose motor home had been parked in the Wendy’s lot since the Patriots lost the Superbowl. Unable to return home due to outstanding gambling debts, Ramrod was a prophet without honor but that didn’t keep him from sharing his wisdom with me, and it was at his behest that I tearfully ordered one of everything on the menu. But the chili proved too much for my delicate state of existential angst and, weeping, I purged the contents of my stomach copiously in Ramrod’s shower/bath, wherein he threw a Hooters ashtray at my head.

I awoke with tears and blood in my eyes. Ramrod’s wisdom had been transcendental, but his RV was gone, leaving me alone again and in tears. Wal-Mart, however, was just across the street, and it was there that I was able to find twenty-four hour solace in the arms of low prices and a clean shirt. The cheerful, gnome-like employees welcomed me into their quaint and charming culture as if I were one of their own, and I will never forget the moment that one of them faced me with the sort of candor one can only find in the eyes of a kindred spirit and asked, “Can I help you?”

Then, out of the changing room, came Tiffany. Like all the others she was wearing a red vest and a button asking how she could help me. But this was different. I knew right away that the question was not rhetorical, just as I knew that my quest for meaning had, at last, come to an end. I realized then that all of my searching had not been in vain, that in fact the person I had been looking for all along was this very woman. My mind was saying no but my heart was saying that with her employee discount I could soon be playing video games as yet unimagined. Not to mention, she was significantly hotter than my ex-girlfriend, so just getting to second base with her was a triumph, which I was about to until she got up to take her contacts out. I felt much better when I woke up on her waterbed the next morning, even though I was still fully clothed and her father was threatening me with jail time. Downstairs her little brother was playing Guitar Hero.

“Hey, little man,” I said. “Mind if I give it a try?”

With tears in my eyes, I smoked his ass on “Freebird.”

Truly, I had come full circle.