Against my better judgement
Since my last substantial post, way back in October, many people have reached out to ask: “Dude, are you ok?” I am, thank you for asking!—possibly the best I’ve ever been in the whole of my existence! I was writing about some heavy themes last summer. The heavy themes being mostly, my life, the early years. It made things sound worse than they were/are. I’m a happy camper.
Cole and I are about to apply the finishing touches to our record, entitled Infinity’s Bottom, later today. Nine songs, a full album. It sounds so good, I can’t even believe it. I’ll have details soon on when and where the release will occur.
Implausibly, my AI Art career has, in the space of a month, garnered more followers than the videos for the band have managed to attract in two years. The world is strange. You can follow the art at @faux_chaufferette
But, since I already started to post excerpts about the book I wrote this summer, and since some of you may be interested, and since I’m supposed to be a writer, here is another short excerpt. Please keep in mind, I am fine! Better than ever! Fighting fit! But my life was no fun growing up, and this is my way of claiming back my past. Or something. Loosely edited. So forgive me on that account and on all the other ones too, if you’re so inclined.
Excerpt two from “Control S Me”
· I bet if I mashed all my rejected novels together, cut and paste, William S. Burroughs style the resulting monstrosity would be a cacophonous Guinness-worthy abomination that would nonetheless tell a reasonably accurate picture of my whole life. It would still not, of this I am sadly certain, be of any literary merit whatsoever. I have come the full way of thinking about William S., though. I fell under his influence early. Then we fell out of love. I stopped liking him as a person. I didn’t like cut and paste. Belatedly I saw its truth. Later still I forgave him his human folly. I’ve had to forgive so many people retroactively because the life I’ve led has just been a Benny Hill banana peel situation and it leaves me in no position to do anything but. I empathize with everyone now. Just, the price of empathy came so steep. I can guarantee you I overpaid.
· 1,500 pages? My best estimate. It would epically be the worst longest novel ever published. It would lose its publisher an obscene amount of money. It would have such a non-linear narrative even Cortázar would find it disjointed.
· This computer comes with Bing which is the only smart AI with which I’ve ever actually interacted. It wrote an epic poem about me that rhymed culture with vulture. I asked Bing to describe Colin Snowsell’s writing style and its review of me was the nicest thing anyone’s ever written. Long live AI, thank you for excessively kind praise. If Bing could write my cover letters, maybe I can get that 1,800 page, gottabe at least that, mindfuck of a novel, the monstermash of all novels published after all. I mean, I think Bing though is proof that that ship has sailed. Bing would be a far better dinner party guest than I ever was. Chat, conversation, not so much.
· You wanna know how obsolete I am? Instinctively without being able to help it I hit control S unconsciously every three minutes or so. The first couple times I did it the computer told me that hey you don’t have to save anymore. It’s auto-save all the way. I got the message, but I still can’t stop the behaviour. There is probably a moral in that one.
· I’m Gen-X old and can anyone honestly think of a single generation that has ever taken it so hard from both ends? Raised directly by Baby-boomers: no one suffered more under their reign. We got the pure and unadulterated baby-boomer when they were in charge. You have no idea. Then, the millennials. They are, if anything, more certain than baby-boomers that they are better and more righter than all before them. Including us, hapless Gen X. To insult us, they call us baby-boomers. It hurts so much. It’s like we’re the original baby-boomer victims, now you re-victimize us by reminding us of our original victimizers? It’s fucked up. All we ever do is suffer, Douglas Coupland you rich bastard you fucking explain it to me. I control ‘S’ed fucking hard after writing that one, count on it.
· It was like that a lot in the dorm. And in the school, to be clear for those of you who appreciate the distinction I’m semi trying to keep. The year ahead of us, nothing but soccer and basketball stars, athletes, studs all of them. The year behind us, they were better, so good that they eclipsed my year. We were a bad crop. We had a lot of delinquents. We had a lot of surplus intellectual activity. Had some high-grade Romeos. A lot of smokers. Quite a few holy rollers. We had very little athletic prowess. Whether pious or sinful, the boys of our year could not play. As athletic prowess was the currency of the school, we were generally, the boys of my year, regarded as duds and dudliers and who’s to stay they weren’t all right. I know everyone’s born equal and all that but the truth is that some people some years some crops seem to get born under a shitass moon. We were not well regarded.
· I guess I’m just trying to say that the era of the skinny white guy had not, in any way, shape or fey wristed form, made its way to Ecuador in the 1980s. In the hierarchy of masculinities I was low, low, low. I heard about it at school and in the dorm in two languages, from students, staff and faculty all the time. Somehow most of the peoples seemed to regard me as JUST on the wrong side of how a boy was supposed to be. So much unsolicited advice.
· I really wanted to meet Mario Vargas Llosa. Him and Pedro Camacho. In my head he seemed like the idea way a writer should be. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter kind of first showed me that if you wanted to write, you really, really, really needed to write. All the time. More than anything else. Norman Mailer got/gets skewed by the feminist because he said he thinks masturbation is wrong…for him. He was not, in my reading, saying the horribly misogynist things of which he’s accused. He said he didn’t like to masturbate when he was writing because for him it depleted energy that he needed to write. Like, he probably should have just kept that info. on the d/l., but I mean maybe Brett Easton Ellis and Kathy Acker masturbate MORE when they’re writing but I think Mailer just says the factual reality for many writers. When you’re writing, it’s better to just keep writing. It’s kind of like you’re trying to eliminate all distraction. Mortify the flesh. I barely eat or drink when I get on a roll. Coffee, always coffee, but I forget almost everything else. When I’m really writing in that Mario Vargas Llosa way I imagine the ideas are queued up one after the next. It can go on for ages, it’s like a tap attached to a tank. When writing, the flesh can be a distraction. Or so Mailer thought. It doesn’t seem in retrospect that Mailer was even taking a moral position. He was just kind of, like, an early adapter of no-nut November or no-not while writing fad. He got really defensive in interviews. Came off sounding like a dick a lot of the time.
· Yeah, I don’t know, Norman Mailer used to be the counter-culture now the poor fucker gets burned in effigy if he’s allowed to come out in public at all. I still don’t know why I’m thinking about him. I mean, I think about Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, one or more of them, every day. Just, sheer force of habit. Those terrible, terrible literary choices of mine still dominate me. I wish they didn’t a lot of the time. I really don’t think I write like any of the three of them at all. I mean, I’d take John Cheever over the three of them combined. How is this not a board game.
· I still think about Morrissey every day. Couldn’t stop it if I tried. Well, I have tried to stop it! Repeatedly. I can’t help it if I still care.
· I was also listening to Annie Lennox recently. I have a segment in my head from an interview she gave to Details magazine in which they talked about Norman Mailer and masturbation. No, I do not know why. You can’t predict or control the fragments that get stuck. Annie Lennox. Details Magazine. Masturbating Mailer. The 90s in six. Anyway, that’s the connection.
· The song “No More I Love Yous” appears in a pivotal scene in the Argentina TV drama “Barra Brava”. I saw it on Amazon. Legally! Fuck it, I like Amazon Prime.
· It was right up there for me when Miami Vice used Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight in their big finale or when Breaking Bad used April Wine’s Sign of the Gypsy Queen. Gives you the chills. I think I teared up. I’d forgotten the song and it came back with such force. What’s yours? No More I Love You being sung in Spanish by tough guys who don’t know the words but can’t resist the melody is my current number one. Probably wanna know why actually for real Morrissey and Annie Lennox are popular in Spanish? The way they sing the melodies is the meaning. The words are empty carriers for the most part. I think it’s the simplest answer, whatever that law is called. The music each sings resonates more when you don’t understand the words, which is an odd thing to say given that each is a renowned and excellent lyricist. But it’s still better somehow devoid of this original intent.
· I was about to write “originary”. That is one of the made-up communications studies words I am trying to purge from my vocabulary. I didn’t realize I’d announced a purge, but a purge is what I feel. No to originary, problematic and, yes, I’d hide too if I was the rest of you. Valorization. You’re done. Thought I didn’t see you.
· I did watch The Purge in case you were watching. It starred that guy who used to be on Oz, you know HBO’s first ever drama, which happened to be an ultra-violent prison show. I mean, I am not better off as a person for the experience. Communications scholars can say what they want. I think I wish I had not watched it.
· In the POW camps, my step-grandfather John Mayhead wrote me a long time ago, the latrines were called aborts. I always thought this was cheeky POW slang for pooping. I didn’t know abort was the German word for bathroom until I saw it in Amis or Levi can’t remember which. I mean, I could have found this information out three decades ago, but it never occurred to me at all. Der Abort. I just checked and apparently, this is no longer common usage. But in WWII Germany that’s how it was. It seems to mean “the away place.” I’ve never been to Germany.
· Marlon Brando plays a Nazi in Young Lions, based on Irwin Shaw’s book. I mention Brando because to me he is the anti-Mailer as far as his public persona goes. Every time I see or hear Brando interviewed I am struck by his grace, intelligence, insight and gentleness. He seems so softly impressive, a difficult series of traits to possess, one would imagine, in such an imposing, physical specimen. If you like Mailer, never hear his voice. If you like Brando, the more you see him, the more the legend grows. Young Lions, of course, co-stars Montgomery Clift. But they never did a scene together. I was so disappointed the first time I watched that film.
· […]
· We went to see Cortazar’s grave last time we were in Paris. Took pictures. I didn’t mean to be ghoulish. I genuinely went to pay my respects. Hopscotch was a profoundly influential novel on me. I’ve only read it in translation. An Argentine. In Paris. Jazz. Read it in any order you want. Just, really changed not just my literary tastes but helped me think a new way. I’ve read a few novels in Spanish, but, yeah, it feels too much like work. I speak Spanish better than I read it. There’s a story for that if I remember I’ll try and get to it. Even still, I’m done with the graveyards. Feel like if I’d thought it through more carefully earlier…no, I’d still have gone to see Cortazar’s final resting place. I don’t think I should have gone to see Oscar Wilde. Different cemetery, obviously. I did that because of Morrissey and I just, like, don’t think that I personally have read enough Wilde to have sightseed his tomb. I was also happy to pay respects to Charles Baudelaire. There was a time when his kind of darkness felt like the only thing that could soothe me. But even still, I think I’m now more in the fuck graveyard tourism kind of category. Let the famous dead RIP.
· Unless I decide to pay my respect to dead French composers. Although I think I may just stick to inspecting their organs. If you know what I mean. Church innuendo, up the steeple choirboy ahoy you are welcome. That was too far. Faure was an organist. Saint-Saens, too. I think I’d like to see a few more Parisian churches, there are worse ways to spend your days.
· I don’t think I really had a Baudelaire phase. I think that would have been too emo for me. I do own two rather nice copies of Fleur de Mal, although it’s possible I’ve sold one and kept the other. I suppose I possess roughly half of the books with which I arrived in Vancouver. I’ve always sold and I’ve always bought, but intentionally we shrunk the collection in half, at least in half, when we moved into this, our new apartment. It is very possible this will be my final apartment. I kind of hope it is. That is not a wish for death. It is a wish not to have to move again. I bet Cole feels the same way. Cole has moved me more than I have moved me for the past thirteen years. I love that guy like a brother and a friend and if I had wish it would be that somehow we can continue to make music together, and that through music our friendship might grow. We had a lot of deadweight. Not me and Cole. Our bookcase. It was as fun cutting it down as it was building it up. The bookcase. Not Cole and I’s friendship. We are solid. Actually, the bookcase is too. It’s a formidable piece of furniture in an apartment as small as ours.
· Since you asked, yes I did get rid of all my Norman Mailer. Except Naked and the Dead. I also have to confess I keep forgetting to read Executioner’s Song. Probably, once I’m done with that, sayonara Norman. I’m still going to say both those books probably still get read, generation to generation, those are two that so far seem to have made it. Are they still in print? Someone ask Bing.
· I read an interview where William Faulkner admonishes would-be writers to read it all –the junk, the bad, the cheap, the famous, the not, all of it. My book collection largely reflects this ethos. It is a lot of hardboiled detective fiction from the 1950s. I don’t care if the subject matter hasn’t aged well—well, I do care, but it doesn’t offend me that in the 1950s popular stories contained sex and violence, just like none of it has ever been remotely as offensive on all levels as every episode of CSI. I am very glad that I did not have to be a woman in the 1950s. Or 60s. Or 70s. But I still admire and enjoy the crime fiction of the era. So many vintage crime writers just knew how to swing language around so, you know, coolly. Including Dorothy B. Hughes. I’m bumping into territory I’ve covered before so I’m moving on, I hope to something actually new.
· I was tasked to take five vintage films to the cabin for latenight movies and/or matinees. For once, we decided to hit the classics hard, films we’ve watched before but want to watch again, this time with Doobz, who, of course, is Jamie’s mom. Ride the Pink Horse, from the Hughes’ novel made the list.
· See, I said I’d get back to the cabin and now I’ve done it. It’s on Lake Shuswap. Or the Shuswap Lake. Shuswap. Dear family friends of the Friesens have given us use of their cabin for a full week and that, to remind you, is where I expect to turn 53.
· I’m still not there yet, mind you. Hi, me again on a Day 4 marathon, or day Day 4 of the marathon. At the cabin, I mean. Tomorrow is the day we drive. I think it’s four hours. I am taking my prized new computer with me—it’s got the five movies on it, African Queen is another one: it’s not me favourite Huston, Bogart or Katherine Hepburn, but it’s got an undeniable distinctiveness about it.
· April Wine, which I’ve been listening to lately (I own three of their records on vinyl, you can guess which if it’s important for you), gets described as the Marcel Dionne of Canadian Rock. That is to say, April Wine, like the hockey player Marcel Dionne were undeniably first-rate talents who never had a bad season or put out a bad album yet they get completely forgotten all the same, especially when it comes to awards and best of lists. Each was destined to ply their respective trade in a golden age. April Wine is a footnote to Rush, globally. They disappeared in the shadow of the reputation, and even though Rush’s stature is not exaggerated or unearned it still causes April Wine to suffer from an oblivion that they simply don’t deserve. Personally, just to fuck with people, whenever I’m asked who the greatest Canadian drummer of all time is I always answer Jerry Mercer. I’m hockey-shy these days. Hate being a Canadian talking about hockey. Who was Marcel Dion overshadowed by? I don’t know, like Guy Lafleur, maybe? Was Gilbert Perreault around then? Point is, he was a great who got crowded out of the greats list in an era and an occupation too flush with greats. Like, if you could take peak 70s Marcel Dion and drop him into the 1994 NHL season, he’d be MVP no contest.
· Oh no, it’s time for hockey talk. I grew up on hockey. My dad iced our backyard in Calgary and taught us to skate. He loved the Habs because he hated Toronto. That is to say, Doug Snowsell didn’t just hate The Toronto Maple Leafs he hated Toronto the city and all it represented. Western Canada has thousands upon thousands of legacy Montreal Canadians fans for the exact same reason. Kids today in B.C. do not hate Toronto. In Vancouver, Toronto has a good reputation. I think we tend now to view them with admiration and respect.
· I use the word we loosely in the sentence above. I lived in Toronto for four months and it was meh so I was left. I lived in Montreal for five years and I came back to life and remembered who I was and saw anew all the possibilities. So, I’m on team Montreal, it’s no contest. I was always team Montreal, though. I followed my Dad’s sports preferences. Whenever we played hockey in the backyard on skates or in the front driveway on sneakers I was always Guy Lafleur #10. Been dreaming of Montreal since I could remember. Alright, now it’s going to get dark again. It’s the only way I can square up to this face-off circle.
· Just before I do I want to express again regret at my decision to delete two years of writing without a back-up I can find. Depression makes me try to fuck up my own life to teach myself a lesson and I have proven quite good at it, stealth ninja when it comes to self-sabotage. I checked again, in a meaningful way, and it’s gone. I don’t know why this should bother me since it is better to write anew, surely, than to borrow from myself in the past. But what if myself in the past wrote better than myself right now? That’s kind of what I surmise. Also, it feels wasteful even though if I thinking about these things again it seems like there’s a new churn that wants to come out and I shouldn’t fight. Don’t fight the feeling. Alright, Clarence, if you say so:
· I was five, bro was six, neighbourhood kid named Lance also six. Pick-up game of hockey in our front driveway. Sunday evening. Today, just so you can feel it, is also a Sunday. It feels to me no different than any other day. I hate summer and I hide in my dark bedroom. I mean, I’m going to love summer at the lake. But in the city, a lot of the time, this is how I deal with it. Ok. I was Guy Lafleur. That we know. The catch? Our mom and dad had gone to evening service at church. My dad had specifically instructed us not to leave the house. We were not allowed to leave the house. Did we understand?
· I did whatever my brother did so when his classmate Lance came over and invited us to play hockey, I followed his lead. It was a sloped driveway. Lance had a net. One on one ‘gainst a goalie. It must have been fun because we lost track of time. Maybe it was a short evening service. Maybe they hadn’t gone to evening service, I don’t know I wasn’t there. But the car pulled into the driveway—well it couldn’t, because it had to wait for three hockey players to clear out—and Lance slinked off with his net.
· Now, a lot of people might argue that my Dad and my Mom had been grossly irresponsible parents to leave a five and a six year old alone unsupervised. Even for the 70s. It should also be pointed out that Lance lived a few doors down, his parents were home and knew exactly where he was. However, disobedience. I mean, we clearly had disobeyed a specific command and we expected to be punished for it.
· But it came in such a flurry of anger. My dad whipped out of the car yelled at us to get in the house and when it was my turn, the belt was off and he just whipped me and whipped me and whipped me with it and you could feel his fury like he wasn’t even really trying to pretend this was about child-rearing, helping me learn responsibility or trying to teach me a valuable lesson about street safety, it was a beating, like the kind you’d dish out in a schoolyard. I started to sour on hockey then. I also started to sour on church—since beat shit out of your kids was the lesson they’d gone to evening church service to bring back to us? I never really trusted my Dad after this.
· I know my dad’s dead and there’s a saying that says you’re not supposed to speak ill of them. Another saying tells you that if you can’t say anything nice not to say anything at all. I weigh both carefully. I do have nice memories of my dad. But the reality is that they are few. That spanking is one of earliest and most vivid memories of my father. It’s one of my earliest ones from after he had become a Christian.
· If my Dad hadn’t been a missionary who took tithes and offerings from Christians to travel the world teaching about God’s love, I would give him a pass on just about all of this. But the contradiction between his personal self and his public persona are so great that it presents itself to me as an obligation to introduce the other side, simply to paint in a fuller picture.