Laird on Laird
Protected: To LS (Or Some Member Of ‘Our Side’ as They Like to Call It)
Fifty years is a long time. The exact length of time I have been fighting on Our Side. Why I’m going to set down some material I’ve never written about in this way in all that time. Don’t feel obliged to read it through. I’ve learned from five years at Facebook some of the new realities of American life, including Our Side.
Incuriosity. I recently resigned from my Facebook page. No one has commented on it, present company included. Some other things they haven’t done…
But first an anecdote of my FB days. People have birthdays. Facebook kindly informs you of them, so you can wish them a happy happy. Which people do. All very civilized, no? I like to wish people a happy happy too. But so many ‘friends’ (200+) have accumulated that I know nothing of. So I decided to take the opportunity of trying to find a greeting that was personal even though we didn’t know each other. I’d look up their page, where they were from, what age they seemed to be, what interests they professed or revealed through their photos, and I looked for a piece of appropriate music. A midwestern lady whose pictures showed a history and friends in African missionary music. I sent her a YouTube clip of an African Christian-Tribal choir called Missa Luba. Old guys from New Jersey, Sinatra. An opera buff from New York, Robert Merrill. And so on. They almost always thanked me individually.
Thank you’s are in short supply at Facebook. Whatever side you’re on. You make them laugh with a few hours of graphic work, and they tick off a Like. No comments, which are apparently too time-consuming for the very busy. Same with think pieces. Ideas that complement or expand on their own, in which they are actually mentioned, Like.
Likes are omnipresent at Facebook. Not so with condolences. These are rare as hen’s teeth unless you lose a mom or dad. Lose a dog or cat and mention it at either a dog or cat site and you will be inundated with heartfelt sharing of sorrow, often with related remembrances of their own. I’ve lost multiple pets, like any rescue veteran, recorded their passing and my sorrow, and my FB friends have kept the stiffest and most silent of upper lips. Who your friends are.
There’s a corollary that obtains when you comment on one of their posts, on their pages. They do not answer direct questions. They are not responsive when asked for elaboration, sources, or additional facts. They make a quip, they change the subject, they do not address you as if they have any reason to know anything about you. If you happen to disagree, all of the above still apply, with some additional features. They assume they are older, smarter, more experienced, and/or at least better informed. They are irritated at being challenged by some stranger off the street. They ignore you completely, because how could you possibly matter? And they are lightning fast at taking personal offense when errors or hazy assumptions are pointed out to them. They believe it’s name calling to criticize a fallacious opinion. Calling a stupid idea stupid, with supporting argument, is not ad hominem. It’s ad rem. A lost concept in the FB community. Even though many of them are attorneys. Go figure.
Correct me if none of these apply to yourself. But I’m under the distinct impression that in my five years of Facebook, almost no one on any ‘Side’ has ever visited my actual Page, read significant numbers of my posts in the context of my Page (where order often matters), taken more than the barest, cursory, Front Page look at my writing website, Laird Ink, or my half dozen linked online books and essay series. They know nothing about me, have never cared to, and are understandably indifferent about the death a year ago of my beautiful Deerhound Raebert. Fine. I can live with that. But if they don’t like me at all for five years of contributions, jokes, and thoughtful commentaries at Facebook, why have they Liked them over 20,000 times? (As Facebook was at pains to inform me, though not where I could where they had recorded the Likes or the Views of my posts over the years.)
No one has ever thought to ask in a comment, a reply, or a general inquiry, “Who the hell are you, Robert Laird? Why do you write better than we can, keep citing successful predictions of the past, and sneer at Harvard as much as you seem to be promoting it?” I look up people’s pages all the time. I want to know as much as I can about the people making comments I’m replying to. I’m also always looking for interesting people, those with bios, photographs, links, and posts that are intriguing, different, thought provoking. But then I’m the curious sort. As a population, Facebook people are most alike in their vast incuriosity about nearly everything but their topic of the moment.
These are members of the X and XY Generations, a Facebook sophisticate phenomenon. The XYs as a group are aware that to a great extent they are faking it, that there were people before them, even very recently before them, who learned stuff they will never know. Their monolithic incuriosity is a form of denial. They don’t want to know what they don’t know, and they don’t want to know the people who know what they don’t know. For this reason all Facebook Friends not known in person outside Facebook are suspect. They might be one of the dreaded Them, the ones who know things you don’t know.
But here’s the problem if you’re one of the ones on ‘Our Side.’ You are in desperate need of an Our Side Story to counter the lefty narrative of evil old white men despoiling one and all while accomplishing nothing in a universe meaningless except for the existence of victims of white conspiracy. But you don’t have that story. Because if you’re Not Millennial, you’re X or XY, and none of you has lived a life of real adventure and bold creativity. You got your degrees, got your job titles, did what was expected and a bit more, and there’s not a sexy scintilla about any of it. You’re as boring as the flamethrowing lefties claim you are,
Has it ever occurred to you that X-Gen incuriosity is your worst enemy, the biggest obstacle to an adventure of your own?
Now this is for you, LS, specifically. What do you know about me? Nothing is my guess. You proposed a meeting, but you have never offered me a compliment other than that. If you have some interest in who I am or what I have to say apart from some topic of the moment, I couldn’t cite it even with a gun at my head. You kind of act as if I should be pleased by the fact you answer a Facebook message from me. You’ve never once said even one of my jokes was funny.
Bored already, aren’t you? Here’s my wake up call to you, the one I’ve never articulated in stark terms to anyone before. I am the Story your so-called ‘Our Side’ needs.
Writers are the best measure, not the only measure, but the best measure of their times in ways history and the culture at large can benefit from. They can be transformative in multiple ways: 1) They live a life that exemplifies a time (more about this later); 2) They can be honest witnesses to both the local and universal happenings of their times, free of the necessary lies of political memoirs and academic (re)interpretations of those happenings; 3) They can provide a discoverable point of view for their reports and observations, unconcealed by resumés and titles; 4) They can approach happenings from both sensory and philosophical perspectives, via fiction, drama, poetry, essays, reviews, analysis, and transparently biased reportage; and 5) In response to the happenings in their times, they can revolutionize and revivify the forms in which they render them to the extent that they change the culture that produced them, even if this change occurs long after their deaths.
In all these respects, I am the most important American writer from 1950 to 2020. I know. You’d never heard of me. But bear in mind that whatever I say here, you can prove to yourself by doing the work; i.e, by following the references and reading/viewing/hearing the material I’ve produced. If I’m right, you have a Big Story. If I’m wrong, you will still have had a hell of a ride. I’m immensely colorful, even if I’m not as great as you’re sure so far I’m not.
Number 1. Your real story, except for maybe Number 5. More, I guess, about what I am, that is, made of, than what I have accomplished as an act of will or perseverance or talent. Just me. Never wrote about this as a series of boasts. Get ready for a list. I have been the kid who read the whole year’s reading books on Night One to his parents and then skipped 2nd grade at the age of barely seven, a childhood maniac with coaster brakes, a TV Secret Agent who typed and filed reports in coat and tie, an elementary school fan of Enesco and friend of holocaust-survivor son Julian, 10-yo boy kissed by Piaf lookalike on the French Riviera, survivor of the near sinking of the ocean liner Leonardo da Vinci, first in his class at St. John’s Day School every year, offered sophomore standing at Mercersburg Academy, first in his class for three years at Mercersburg, Editor-in-Chief of the school’s literary magazine and the Mercersburg News, sole editor of the first ever MN Special Edition at the age of 15 (about the 1969 emerging counterculture Chapel Walkout), first candidate accepted for Class of ‘74 at Harvard (as confirmed in summons from Dean Chase Peterson), Sophomore Standing and Honorary Scholarship, President of The Harvard Final Club Phoenix SK at age 17, 2nd Storey Man in seven unofficial Final Club ‘tours,’ (including that bad moment on Easter Sunday on the fifth floor of the Porcellian fire escape), graduate cum laude at age 19.
Teacher’s Favorite Smart Guy of the Cornell Business School’s most august Stat professor, coordinator and newswriter of the 1978 Re-enactment of the 1778 Skirmish at Quinton’s Bridge in Lower Alloways Creek, NJ, fired from first editor job at Philadelphia Construction News, proofreader for nuclear engineering firm in the aftermath of TMI, writer and editor for Datapro Research Corporation (wrote company’s first review of Apple McIntosh), [abundant timeouts herein for howling sounds in NJ and PA with overbuilt Chrysler V-8s, hookers and headers and Holley carbs], competitive analyst and a slew of titles in the Office Systems Division of NCR (last project as lead consultant reporting to Senior VPs on the top floor) in Dayton OH, contract writer then consultant and factory floor trainer and executive speechwriter for GMC Inland and Inland Fisher Guide Divisions, only external consultant member of the UAW/GM Quality Network, author of The Boomer Bible(sandwiched into my corporate career), consultant to newly global Whirlpool Corporation, developer and deliverer of multi-year internal communications training programs in U.S. and Europe, creator and editor/writer of The Whirlpool Management Journal, which won the PRSA Award for Best Internal Corporate Publication Of the Year.
Seven years in Dayton and Detroit, then back home to NJ, where I got divorced by a wife seduced from me by AT&T’s acquisition of NCR, lost the Wire Haired, the House, and the Porsche, and started drinking a lot. Never wanted the Porsche (read my posts), but the Wire Haired I grieved for (read Sighthounds & Other Strangers).
So, being a writer, and living as a writer, I drank a lot. Wrote first draft of The Naked Woman, one of my most brilliant ever exercises in pure thought. The Naked Woman manuscript got me blackballed from mainstream publishing. Forever. Concurrently, I fell in love with a stripper. I wrote things I can no longer find about her. They were good writing. When I lost my driver’s license, another woman rescued me. I have always been good looking. She was good looking too. Seven years passed. I was a house-husband with no license, marriage or driver’s, but we were still not happy. She had a daughter. I was permitted no say in her upbringing or education. I taught her how to drive though. The me in she awakened. She wiped out a neighbor’s lawn on the first day of her first car, losing a 4-wheel drift. Made all those hours practicing gear changes in the parking lot worth it. I helped out with her college when no one else in the divorce would. She is a banker now. But she still gets speeding tickets.
Pretty tame so far, Lisa? No one you know can match the next part. Working my way down from up. I mean all the way down, and not with alcohol or drugs. (Biggest hole in my writer bio: No hard drugs. Ever.) I got my driver’s license back. Time for Harvard to meet the masses. As important, educational, and rewarding as my time with the Fortune 100companies. No shit.
I worked for Borders. One of the two companies whose buyers had killed The Naked Woman. I watched them not file The Boomer Bible on shelves, which was still on the list for sale, but the girls with nose rings had their orders. Several acres of concrete with outdoor carpet on top. My knees are crippled now. But I learned about Jazz from old black guys in cool hats and they didn’t regard me as a lost cause. My first experience of working with uncloseted gays. They couldn’t stop talking about that, which does more to explain their unpopularity than does their sexual bent.
I worked for a business telemarketing firm. I was the best one. The women, black and white, protected me. I had my kryptonite. Without this one particular earpiece, I couldn’t hear. They guarded it for me, threatened bodily harm to young bitches who didn’t care whose earpiece it was. They wanted me to try their potato salad first. Their best days were half my sales. They didn’t care. I was theirs. One day I just walked out. Quite suddenly, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I told myself it was boredom, burnout, embarrassment. Harder to admit I didn’t want them to see me fail. But guess what. I liked those women. All of us playing the hand we’d been dealt. They lied a lot. About their names in particular. Nobody’s name was really her name. Collector phone calls never got through. They lied about the situation with boys/husbands. One of them who was sweet on me had a business owner husband who heard her praise and offered a job to the ‘cool white dude.’ Once I went up to headquarters and took their test to write the crap they were selling. An IQ test. Jeez. Last one of those I saw gave me a 155. They wanted to lowball me. So I walked on the whole shebang.
Then I got to watch my mother die. And my sister play the family card. Her right, me wrong. So be it.
Now, something you’re going to be hearing about later, called serendicity. The real woman arrived. She said, “Let’s blow this joint,” and we did.
Patricia Hurley Laird. My Boudicca. I’m alive, she’s alive, and we are hard to kill. More than a dozen books. That’s Pat’s Amazon and Kindle count to date.
But as for me. Here’s the deal. You’ll see later that I am always somehow at the focal point of what is emblematically important where I am. When there’s a big deal on, look around. Who’s winning arguments and changing the rules (or trying to) with new ideas? R. F. Laird. Revolutions I have played some interesting role in as change agent/supporting player/eyewitness: the Microprocessor Revolution that put your smartphone in your hand, the Just in Time Manufacturing and Statistical Process Control Revolution in major American corporations, the Continuous Improvement Process Revolution in globalizing corporate organizations, and in the grassroots Obama Resistance that led to the Tea Party and the unlikely elevation and election of Donald Trump. I’ve been working throughout, needless to say, on the overdue Literary/Cultural Revolution we need to undo the immense damage caused by the Baby Boom.
My first consulting partner once tried to explain me to a a University of Dayton professor who was hemming and hawing about joining our firm, which eventually grew to ten partners. Mark was an MIT guy, a smart, hard, devout Roman Catholic Irishman whom I’d first seen tending bar in Central Square years before our paths finally crossed. He taught me the world of Big Eight consulting and was responsible for the first BIG paycheck we got from General Motors. The professor wasn’t used to being around people who made him feel like an undergraduate again.
Mark told him, “When you meet Laird, you realize he’s smart. Then you realize he’s smarter than you are. Eventually it dawns on you, he’s way smarter than the smartest person you’ve ever met. It’s scary, but if you can hang in there then, you start learning things. I’ve been through the Arthur Andersen boot camp, I’ve been in the Big Eight consulting world ever since. And this I can tell you — Robert Laird is the best consultant I’ve ever worked with, bar none.”
The professor became a partner. We became great friends. He joined the silence I have become used to. I have always been the elephant in the room. The postulate that cannot be mentioned. I do not receive praise from my friends and intimates, except by implication. ‘YOU fix it’ they used to say to me in the consulting days when I found fault or pointed out that a task hadn’t been completed. “This is as good as I can do.”
The bridge was first erected in the 19th Century. I may as well have been born in Victorian Times. I grew up with the children’s literature my father and aunt grew up with. I was taught, rather strictly, the code of being a gentleman from first family dinners on. I grew into the counterculture of the Sixties, for which nothing had prepared me, and for which those who encountered me were equally unprepared. I have been at war against the death of consciousness, meaning, and civilization ever since. That is a story no one else in my generation can lay claim to. Because I am winning in my mission to write it all down for those who want to know what happened and why.
Number 2. Honest witnesses. The diarists are important chiefly because they are there as bystanders, or if involved to some degree in actual events, not as the stars but well positioned observers sharing “close encounters of the most convenient kind,” as critics used to say about historical miniseries. Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, Philip Vickers Fithian, Anne Frank, and William Shirer, to name a few, took us places most people hadn’t been to and wrote it down, day by day, as they experienced the everyday happenings of their lives. It’s not an accident that the first novel published as such was Samuel Richardson’s fictional diary Pamela (almost immediately parodied as Shamela ).
There is no continuous diary of the five turbulent decades from 1969 to 2019. Mine is as close as it’s possible to get, with a couple of unexpected bonuses. Three of my 15+ books are expressly in diary form. Writing America Down covers the grim summer that began with the trial of Timothy McVeigh and ended with the death of Princess Diana. It’s local, personal, and honest to a fault, containing accounts of the loss of my family and a family home we’d owned for 70+ years. Indictment: An Obama Diary, recounting the political years 2007-2013, was inspired as a book project by Shirer’s Berlin Diary, although the content was drawn from a far more sweeping and ambitious diary project called InstaPunk.com, which covered the years, almost day by day, from 2004 to 2014 (probably 2,500 posts all told and c. 2.5 million words.) All by itself, InstaPunk.com is a monumental work, a relentless recording of serious, satirical, polemic, inspirational, and ultimately personal responses to the aftermath of 9/11 and everything thereafter to the predawn of the Trump era. Which I predicted in 2014 at another diary blog called InstaPunk Rules that ran from 2013 to 2017 (c.600 posts over 5 years). There was/is also a blog diary called Deerhound Diary (500+ posts from 2013-Present), which covered many of the same topics plus dogs and cats and personal matters less stridently than the Instapunks.
Facebook is a story unto itself. I did it as a watered down version of the Instapunks, as politically correct as the site demanded, though I was suspended three times, of which two were were for female nudity, and I managed to insert quite a number of satirical graphics and serious essays which are at present being collected for inclusion in the Archive Pages of InstaPunk Returns. It adds up to a lot. As does my FB graphical material. The last solicitation for a Facebook Photo Album (I bought one a couple years back. Very cool.) was 298 pages. They insisted they liked it, though it contained photos they had suspended me for.
Did I mention bonuses? When the left started flapping about evil old white men, I published a book called White Privilege, focused on my childhood and youth as an ‘Old Money Family But No Trust Fund’ third of a trio of Robert Fisher Lairds and the rich, poor, and important people in our lives. It winds up covering a period from about 1959 to 1984. That’s one.
Two is the Mercersburg News, of which my year of issues as editor-in-chief (and satirical columnist in partnership with my friend Howard Levin) is still sitting in the Morgue and on microfiche at Mercersburg Academy. This link will show you the Special Edition of the Mercersburg News I produced when I was 15, as well as a link about the experience of doing that. And this link will show you how important that odd prep school rebellion remains to this day, a recent correspondence with a nearly 70 year old man who still can’t let that event go — or the other events which ensued.
Three is a website called Shuteye Nation, a satirical microscope focused on the years 2000 and 2001, including 9/11. Impeachment was still a subject then too, amply covered in the newspapers of SN.
Four is a book called 100 Years On, which consists of excerpts from the front line diary of my maternal grandfather, who was a Captain of infantry in the fabled Rainbow Division of World War I. Which I always knew was the single backbreaking event of western civilization in the 20th Century.
Put aside all my other works. These records of our times have no equal in their level of detail, variety, and scope.
Number 3. A Discoverable Point of View. Who is writing this and what are his sources beyond the end of the bar? You have to leave a trail of bread crumbs for readers of the future. Even James Joyce knew that. He didn’t want Finnegan’s Wake to subside into impenetrable oblivion or become a mere curiosity, the Voynich Manuscript of the 21st Century. Rather lamely, he left this map behind for the Ph.D. Candidates who would have to decode him in subsequent generations.
It makes no sense, of course. None of these terms or categorizations is ever defined in any traceable way. What Joyce was after was driving home his insistence that the most unread work of great literature since Pilgrim’s Progress was not simply a stream of Lewis Carroll-esque portmanteau words you’d need a Ph.D. in the Dublin bar habits of James Joyce to decipher. He was talking about The Whole Thing all along. Which had, unfortunately, gone a’glimmering in the centuries since Dante created a true structural, numeric and spiritual whole in his Divine Comedy.
I always had the Divine Comedy in mind when I was writing The Boomer Bible. I had read a beautiful introduction to a contemporary translation by a man, John Ciardi, who was intent on driving home the meticulous organization of the work, the imitation of divine wholeness by a man of faith who believed devoutly in divine wholeness, including the use of divine numbers as proof of wholeness. So I set about making the the Boomer Bible a whole in multiple, completely different systems of organization, including the King James Bible (and indispensable supporting works like The Book of Common Prayer and the Hymnal), The Tarot deck, Numerology, the five acts of an Aristotelian play (the basis of Punk fiction), and even quantum mechanics and Chaos Theory, which mandated simultaneous time and self-similarity across scales, resulting in the book’s obsessive use of fours and fives as organizational subsets all the way down to the varieties of Intercolumn References. It didn’t matter that people, readers or critics, wouldn’t be looking for such organizational schemes. What mattered was my determination to use wholenesses to force me to cover everything, to fill in the holes the wholes made stick out like sore thumbs.
But. I also wanted to leave a trail of breadcrumbs better than Joyce had. I wanted people to be able to find the wholes if they decided they wanted to go looking for them. I have done that. You think the Numerology angle is an empty claim? Go here. Other organizational approaches are also abundantly documented outside the book itself. (Here’s a reading list that offers assistance to the curious.) I used to tell people to image all the interconnections as a sphere they could light up. Now I can tell them there’s something more substantial in their terms they can use as proof. The polyhedrons Of Archimedes. The Boomer Bible is the biggest one of those. Why I laugh at Joyce.
But I have always shown how I got to where a work is. What reading the website Laird Ink (now defunct) was indispensable for. I am the only writer in the full-time business of wholes. That makes a Story, even if nothing else does. All the diary materials constitute proof of my determination to track down meaning wherever it may hide.
Number 4. Sensory and Philosophical Perspectives. Meaning diversity of form. Most writers keep writing the same book. They’re not materially different from John Updike and his Rabbit Warren. (I preferred Watership Down myself.) What did I list? “Fiction, drama, poetry, essays, reviews, analysis, and transparently biased reportage. Done. I might add some new forms in our era: comic books, video games, and graphic novels. I’ve done them all, even if only for spoof or satirical purposes. I believe my Scandinavian plays in The Naked Woman are superior to Ibsen’s, but that’s the coffee talking. The facts do show the basic truth of what I’m saying here though. Punk City is fiction, unencumbered by picture (truthfully, my last word on fiction, done and dusted as the Brit’s say). Shuteye Town is, to be computational about it, 3,000 pages of graphics with a book’s worth of dialogue in speech bubbles along the way through 40 different subway stations. In the InstaPunk blogs and Facebook, I have produced a larger quantity of original graphics than most political cartoonists, arguably to better, subtler effect. I have written in the voices of innumerable authors, including Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Sue Grafton, P.D. James, Patricia Cornwell, Shakespeare, William Blake, Ambrose Bierce, John Cheever, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Algernon Swinburne, and many more in addition to my own. I have written one great poem. I have done my own versions of graphic novels, video games (within my own games, yes ma’am, including a couple shooter games), plays, mysteries, romance novels, and essays out the wazoo, both serious and satirical. I have my own cable news network (And spinoff book). I have my own city, my own country, my own Internet, my own universe. And more characters than most writers can dream of. At one point I even had my own news feed
And, yes, also dozens of videos (the password is Super) and voice recordings. Short, amateurish, but funny enough to attract a small subscriber base at Youtube.
No writer ever has done what I have done. Four Bibles. One book compiling the works of a completely fictional literary movement. One book of nothing but essays. One book of imaginary science. One book of movie reviews. One book of poetry, including sonnets, Haiku, blank verse, and prose poems. One enormous video game/puzzle/labyrinth available for free on the Internet. One nonfiction historical chronicle about the single most pivotal event of the 20th century, World War I. I got to try on the moldy gas mask in my grandfather’s Army steamer trunk. I knew I’d have to figure some way to honor him someday.
The medium changes the message. Unless it doesn’t. Where else can people turn to evaluate that observation?
Number 5. Revolutionize the Forms. I have done nothing but. More than every other writer in the last hundred years put together. They were my material, part of my inspiration. Along with the writings of Cynewulf, William Tyndall, stained glass windows, graduate business school case studies, mathematics, Egyptian mythology, BASIC programming and computer technology generally, the defunct Episcopal faith, The Rolling Stones, and, er, The Rolling Stones.
I’ve shown you what my tombstone could look like. Haven’t said what my service would be like, attended by my wife and the one journalist needed to say “the poor son of a bitch.” I wouldn’t mind the poor attendance. If I hadn’t lived and written in (mostly) obscurity, I’d be long dead already of drink and despair. My books would have been mostly the same book. Where the Stones come in. I always laugh at the dimwits who rank the Beatles ahead of the Stones. Such people are irrational and not to be trusted in any matter requiring judgment. The Beatles were a spent force in 1971. Nineteen-seventy-one. What have the Stones done since 1971? Everything. Every damn thing. (I’ve written a book’s worth about this too inside the InstaPunk blogs, along with book equivalents about Global Warming, Atheism, Evolution, Movies, TV, the Olympics, pro and college sports, Dogs & Cats, Feminism, Technology, Automobiles, and Musicians & Writers.)
Since McCartney defected to Wings and started a four decade career writing and performing “silly love songs,” the Stones have done the impossible. Disco, Reggae, Techno, Soul, philosophical Heavy Metal, Rap, more falsettos than SNL and SCTV combined, and the only constant, vital vein of brilliant satire accessible to the mass public audience. While the Beatles were being taken in by the Sixties and exemplifying the ailment, the Stones were making fun, derisive fun, of the Sixties. They have never stopped. Never ever stopped.
I would be delighted if my eulogist in the empty Episcopal Church would say,
“Robert Laird was The Rolling Stones of American Literature for more than half a century. The Music World wanted Rolling Stones. The Literary World didn’t. The New York Times vowed never to review the book that contained strikeover text, hymns about cocaine, more original chapter-and-verse poetry written in English than any other book, and a corporate slide presentation, plus the first ever use of hyperlink concepts in a serious work of fiction, finished before the technology that made it accessible had even been invented. The brazen young writer who created this monumental piece of work wrote the first page, including Intercolumn Reference Links, on an Underwood Standard Manual typewriter. He was, therefore, and will always remain, beneath the notice and the contempt of New York Times literati who have never written “a single true sentence.” (At least they’ll get the Hemingway reference.)
Now. How dare I? Honestly didn’t think you would read this far. You have important things to do. You’re doing me a favor by glancing at anything I send you. That’s one thing. Thank you if you’re still with me. Here’s a second thing. I am in the odd position I thought I’d never reach, of looking back at a whole lifetime of decisions, coincidence, happenstance, and luck, good and bad. Would I change anything? No. Because it all, in retrospect, seems so arranged, meticulously so. I have had exactly the right experiences in exactly the right order, to make me who I am right now and my accomplishments as they are. A term I coined, ‘serendicity,’ combines serendipity with synchronicity to describe the phenomenon and its extraordinary effects. No one has ever stopped me from saying, writing, or drawing exactly what I wanted to. Famous writers can’t say that. If I’d made millions, my work would have been less varied, less daring, less prolific, just less period, and I’d probably be dead years back. And lo and behold, I don’t care about money. I worked hand-in-glove with three Fortune 100 companies. They paid me well. I left them, not the other way around. I didn’t start writing The Boomer Bible because my consulting firm was in trouble. My consulting firm got into trouble when I went full time after The Boomer Bible.
Finishing The Boomer Bible after it was sold was a mystical experience. Where the quantum physics comes into it. Consciousness creates reality. I had a lot still to do after I accepted an advance check and a deadline. I was a professional corporate writer. Deadlines are real to me. I divvied up the work yet to be done, X number of unfinished books (including the all-important Book of Damn Yankees), Y number Of Punk Testament stanzas to write, Z number of hymns, and then when those were finished, the complete Inter-Column Reference, the whole reason I’d written the book in the first place.
Was I nervous? Surprisingly, no. I just sat down in an Ohio State sweatshirt and sweatpants and went to work by the clock. Nothing came hard. It all flowed, as if the book were (was?) writing me, not the other way around. I felt like I was just channeling something already complete at that point. My own deadline for text completion was met slightly ahead of schedule. Then came the Inter-Column Reference.
The text was a mystical experience. The ICR felt more like a divine experience. Bear in mind, I wrote the whole book to get to this point. To me, the ICR was the book. I’d sold it, taken money, agreed to a deadline, and had about six weeks to create the one indisputable element of genius in it. And as Mike Hammer once said about killing a killer blonde, “It was easy.”
The whole book, all 2,001(?, yes) chapters, all 25,000+ verses were in my head simultaneously. I could see each link in the forefront of my vision. There was no break, no letdown. When I broke off to go to sleep at night, I dreamed continuously of the ICR, all night long, and awoke with focused energy to remember the link patterns I’d been given. Yes, I said ‘given.’ This was the time when I realized that the whole endeavor had been a gift given me, from outside, because I had gone there and asked for it, demanded it. In the writing, all those weird disjunctions. I went to work each day with a plan to work on ‘A’ and went immediately to work on ‘Q’ instead. Not just now and then. Every day. I never caught on. Plan to work here, work there instead. It knew what the order of the completion of everything had to be. I was just the typist. Did I succeed? Here’s what the ICR looks like in mind-space. Now look at the reviewers who stared right at it and never saw a thing. Because they’re the gatekeepers, protecting all of you from “empty-headed” frauds like me.
This kind of dictation experience has happened to me two other times. First with the initial draft of The Naked Woman, second with the whole of Shuteye Train 1999. There was no reason to think I could single-handedly draw 3,000 graphic screens of a made up place. Immaterial. I sat down and did it, with never a day off. Worked on the day of my father’s death. Worked on the day I slashed my drawing hand (right hand) on a broken window; I continued without a moment’s pause, drawing with the mouse left handed. And it changed the content dramatically, meaningfully. Where the Mirror/Cartoon/Wonderland World entered the story (Click on the mirror, then click where you can for pages).
Why I can say the kinds of things I say about my writing. The interventions occur all the time, on short pieces as well as long. You just look up after some time has passed and something new is staring back at you.
Why, also, I can contemplate my own demise without fear or desperation. Everything has gone the way it was apparently supposed to go, with me firmly in charge, making all the decisions, or so I thought at the time.
Like the decision to write this, even though no one is likely to read it until long after the pic up top is a reality.
I’ll give the last word to the Punk Writers of South Street, from the book of They in the Punk Testament Of TBB, which sorely needs to be re-published in a new edition.
And so to bed.
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