New Story Published
7-3-08
Hey, check out my story The Spectacle now up at the excellent online literary journal
Identity Theory. You can read it
here. They've got lot's of other great stuff, including an interview with my man
Dagoberto Gilb, who writes the best construction worker stories this side of Bukowski.
So yesterday I'm getting my usual haircut at my usual place, which costs $12 a pop, and still seems like too much. The women who work there never seem to stay for very long, but they're always super friendly and don't speak a whole lot of English. Explaining how I want my hair cut usually just entails my pointing to the height setting on the clippers.
Anyway, the woman I had yesterday was Chinese, and she was chatting away about the weather and so forth in a vaguely understandable fashion, and I realized she had a KISS shirt under her smock, so I asked her if she was in KISS Army, which she didn't get, and so I asked her if she dug Detroit Rock City, which she didn't get, and so I asked her if she had any idea who KISS was, and she said no, she just liked the shirt. So I tried to explain who KISS was and what they sounded like, and I stuck my tongue way out like Gene and talked about spitting fire and wearing makeup. At which point she got highly offended. I don't know if she thought I was saying she should wear makeup, or that I did, or something even worse, but she whipped through the rest of the cut without saying another word, frowning at me in the mirror. I gave her a five dollar tip and slunk out like a criminal.
Telling Me Something From The Depths
6-3-08
So, I have more than 13,000 songs on my ipod. Pretty much my entire music collection. Five days a week, I listen to it on shuffle for anywhere from 5-8 hours at a time. I have noticed that, in a complete repudiation of basic mathematics, if not logic, the same bands come up over and over and over again in a way that defeats probability. This is, of course, assuming that the shuffle function is truly random. But of the hundreds of artists that might theoretically come up at any time, the same handful are played far more often than they should be. Like, to a disturbing degree. These artists seem to have no link in either name, music type, my personal preference, or alphebetical listing. They are: Neko Case, Moondog, Elliot Smith, The Mountain Goats, Bobby Conn and Charles Mingus. It seems like every other song, one of these five come up. So, it occurred to me that my Ipod was trying to tell me something. Perhaps there was a message in this grouping, or in the sequence of songs, or in the amalgam of their titles. And then I started to get scared. What could that impassive little rectangle want me to know? I was worried the titles would start to tell me I needed to shoot the president, or spend the rest of my life assembling the world's largest bowl of pudding in a small town in Idaho.
Anyone who can tell me what the connection is between these artists, or what my evil Jobsian box is trying to impart, will win an immediately Fed Ex'ed signed book.
Yes, it's official. You can stop clamoring. Fade To Blue is done. Finished. Sent off electronically. In copyediting. Advance copies should be ready by the end of the summer. Seriously, the clamor can stop now. No more picketing Little, Brown. No more threatening to start an internet "Fire Sale" and miraculously take over every government computer and hold all financial information hostage until the story of Sophie Blue is made available at your local chain booksellers.
