Where The Rubber Meets The Road

I’m still writing, of course. You’d think one kind would naturally dovetail into the other, and if you were me, you would be wrong. I present this as the sort of waste of time I engage in: a fake song (that will most likely never be put to music) about a fake couple (who will mostly likely implode) for a fake band (that isn’t as good as I want them to be) in a story (that has a .01% chance of ever being published). I think I write almost twice as much material about the story as I do in the story.

The War

She puffs out her lip like a hitchhiker’s bruise.
He catches the heart on his sleeve on her dress.
They slip off their shoes for their ruse of a cruise.
The roadside they litter with such bitterness.

The wrong turns they take and the stops that they make
In the lots where the ghosts of their best shots lay dead.
She puts on her blacks as they stay for the wake;
They sigh while his blues clash with lips ruby red.

And this is the war
If not the heart’s wish.
It’s love at the core
That hates in the flesh.

In decency lost and complacency found,
The particulars are in need of redress;
They pick at the bones as they drive the world ’round,
And make their love with razor sharp tenderness.

And this is the war
If not the heart’s wish.
It’s love at the core
That hates in the flesh.

In the dark that falls in the hours made small,
When push comes to pull and the knife to it’s rest,
They’re twining their grip as they cling to their fall,
And lay themselves down by the sweat of their breast.

And this is the war.
Their war.
This is the war.
Their war.

Note: I’m pretty much making this an annual thing. If we’re going to assaulted with pinks and hearts and unicorns and wuggley-buggley-booszhy-booo! Sorry. Anyway, if St. Valentines Day keeps rolling around just as gaudy every year, I see no reason why I shouldn’t rebut just as repetitively. So, here it is, for those who find the whole thing tacky and banal; my sledge-fisted love letter to the incorporeal entity that inhabits many a person out there, filling their hate-bladder to bursting on this, February 14:

Ah, St. Valentine’s Day. Notice the “St.” part. That means there was once a person named Valentine who became a X-tian saint. How did he become a saint? Well, for one, he secretly married couples against the decree of the Roman Emperor, Claudius II. For this, he was beaten to death with clubs and had his head cut off, a fate that is symbolic of nearly everything that has ever happened to me on St. Valentine’s Day.

But I’m not here to bitch about me.
I’m here for you.
And by “you”, I mean those people for whom St. Valentine’s Day – or V.D., as my friend Lindsay calls it – is a shameful and bitter gauntlet of happy couples who inflict their saccharine brand of gropey-sweet, smoochy-smoothie ubercuteness on everyone. A day of reflection upon the ceaseless tide of sub-intellect and emotionally retarded jackholes who have made your love life the Hindenberg drama-o-rama that it is.
For you, I forge ahead. Only for you.

If it ever was a day intended for lovers, St. Valentine’s Day is no longer. It is now the providence of marketers; soulless, greedy, empty, walking ethical corpses who exist only in the realm of profits, and hew to them with the fixation and tenacity of undead zombies. It’s like Sweetest Day: a capitalist gang-bang, and the starting wide receiver is you, the lowly consumer.
You need look no further than the Larry The Cable Guy as Cupid Git-R-Done heart-shaped box of chocolates. (Yes, they really exist.) But if you must, there’s the cards, the flowers, the stuffed animal toys, and the not-so-subtle intimation that if you buy her a terrorist-financing diamond, for the rest of your life, she will drop down on you like your love-nub was made of French Perigold truffle and spurted the Elixir Of Life. Yeah. And Axe™ body spray makes fourth-tier actresses mosh-fuck you in the elevator.
And it’s worse for the women. All the tension and build-up leading to the big moment when your One True Love™ surprises you with heretofore unknown quantities of romantic panache, only to be let down at the last second. Again. Hmmm. Sounds like some… other… thing… ladies have to deal with. Oh well, I guess it’s not important.

Anyway, for those of you who find yourself alone on this day for lovers (of cheap, gimmicky, bullshit products that buying will do nothing but prove you’re a gullible asshole), take heart. Reread the above paragraphs, and remember: misery loves company. Find one of those obnoxiously high-on-life, pixie-dust-sprinkled couples with unicorn horns warming their spotless bungholes, and let them know what a shallow, tacky, pathetic display they’re putting on. Tell them that if they weren’t this in love yesterday, then they’re nothing more than sad little tools of consumer culture, witlessly following the bouncing dollar sign, lemming-like, down a primrose path devoid of any depth or meaning. Ask them if they shouldn’t reexamine their relationship if it takes some marketing ploy to get them to be nice to each other for a day. Exult as – even while they scoff at your bitterness – the doubt settles in, and their day loses it’s faux color and becomes the flavorless wad of cud that it truly is.

Then go home, watch When Harry Met Sally, and wish with every fiber of your being that you could be exactly like that couple: lame and happy. You bring the tissues, I’ll provide the ice cream.
Be strong, my little bitterbots. We shall all sell out some day. I did.
I love St. Valentine’s Day.

It’s quarter to four in the morning, and my body has tipped over the insomnia waterfall, ready to plunge into the weird, waking world of the sleep deprived.

Noelle took the brunt of the day shift, so it was left to me to see Gabe off to sleep. After the meningitis scare, we are extra twitchy about his every ache and sniffle. We try not to let it show. But when I ran out to collect Gabe from school Wednesday afternoon, his stomach was painful and sour, and his head ached. This is how it began last time, I thought.

The vomiting started later. I took as much of the puke patrol as I could; I have the stronger stomach. A low-grade fever rose by the hour. It was a lot like last time. It was also a lot different. There was much to be optimistic about.

Nevertheless, I stood my post, unable and unwilling to relax until something – good or bad – happened. Around two AM, Gabe woke to have some water. His temperature was 99.1. Two degrees lower with no medication. I put him back in bed and dragged my sorry ass back to the adult’s bedroom.

Noelle is turning from time to time, making the kinds of noises you make when you’re in dreamland. I sit beside her, writing this.

I wait for the sandman to come and claim me.
I am ready, Morpheus.

Got another form rejection letter today.

It’s a good thing I’m a comic; rejection is like my oldest friend. In comedy, rejection is visceral and immediate. It come in the form of silence, or uncomfortable huh-huh-ing, or a gasp (usually when your over-the-top joke gets taken a little too seriously – one of the pitfalls of being so good at the deadpan). Sometimes, you’ll get that sweet, stinging slap of a boo. That always makes me smile. Not to sound too full of myself, but the ‘boo’ doesn’t happen to me very often. When I get one, it’s almost like a rare kind of applause break; I know I’ve really earned the audience’s reaction.

In writing, rejection is the distant and uninformative judgment of people you’ll never meet. Not that they are to be counted cold for the form rejection; at least they replied. The wall-of-silence rejection is the one that gets under your skin. Even then, I don’t blame the agents. They don’t mean it personally; they’re not even saying your work isn’t any good. It’s just not right for that particular agent.

However, the unfortunate truth is that the wall-of-silence and form rejections lack one thing the visceral, immediate reaction of a comedy crowd does not: Something to learn from. The worst part is, there’s no way around it. Literary Agents are deluged with submissions on a daily basis. They’d starve trying to explain why they rejected everyone’s work. So, they don’t. And the writer is forced to shrug and move on.

Mind you, if you’ve gone through a hundred queries and never received so much as a nibble, perhaps you might want to reconsider what you’re doing. Of course, there’s no way – easy or otherwise – to pinpoint the specific problem. Oh, you can pore through a slew of blogs and a near-infinite number of essays on the topic(s) of manuscript submission/querying, but once you eliminate the ten to twenty common sense, glaring errors, it’s a complete guessing game.

I haven’t reached the oh-crap-I-must-be-doing-something-seriously-wrong point. I haven’t submitted enough. For now, I’m in shrug-and-move-on mode. Which, at this point, is defined as “burying myself in a new project until I get picked up, or until everyone on my current list rejects me, whereupon I go to my next-in-line crop of agencies, and repeat the process”.
Meanwhile, NoMeansNo’s Tired Of Waiting is on infinite loop in the iPod™ of my mind.

Looking forward to the next, fleeting glimmer of hope known as the unopened query response letter/email.

Failure is indeed an option. In fact, it’s a pretty popular one.