A guy is playing a distorted electric guitar through a wah-wah pedal– some groovy rock and roll guitar, as the freaks used to say.  I remember doing that, over a simple three chord vamp highly conducive to every possible bluesy invention.   4-14-06 it says next to the title of the song.  Eleven years ago yesterday! Jesus, tempus really do fugit.  

I am walking up a long, steep hill from the Hudson River to a graduation party.   My mother, now dead almost seven years, was alive and I was talking to her on the phone as I walked.  It was June, sunny and humid, and I didn’t notice how hot, until I arrived at the party soaked to the skin.  My host gave me an iced drink, a mojito, maybe.  It was cold and delicious and I was dehydrated, it went down in a couple of draughts.  I had another.  I just about emptied the sun-room, walking in glistening as if just doused with a fire hose pumping sweat.   Two remained, a mother and her son.  The woman asked how I was doing.  As I began the third cold mojito it all flooded out. Talk about fire hoses.  

My mother was toward the end of her long death, my daily calls to her in Florida the highlight of her days, my visits even more so.   I’d just spent a solid month with her, every waking hour, the second two weeks in New York.  Towards the end of that month I had to take care of several court cases and an imperious young judge solemnly read me the redundant letter of the law, although I’d already done everything in anyone’s power to protect an old man from eviction, had, in fact, indefinitely put off the eighty year-old’s inevitable eviction.  

The young judge was performing for two law students he had on the bench with him, to show them what a judge’s day is like, how he conducts business.  As the law students looked on the young judge read our agreement and agreed I’d done everything anyone could have done in this case, that the stipulation was not only reasonable and well-drawn, but the terms where generous, under the circumstances of the $13,000 in rent arrears.   He refused to sign off on it, though, which is what I needed him to do so I could dash off to the NYCHA part and get out of court before it closed for the lunch recess.

“Judge, with all respect, I don’t have any other arrows here in my quiver.   The only thing APS can do for him is get him an Article 81 Guardian.  The guardianship application will stay the Housing Court proceeding until someone can place him in alternative housing.  I wish there was another plan, but he has no income, is not a U.S. citizen, owes over $13,000 in arrears.   We can’t get a grant to pay the arrears, Article 81 is, sadly, the only option.”

“Yet,” said the judge seriously, “you didn’t bother to ever meet with the tenant to find out what his preferences might be?”  

“Judge, again, with respect, this tenant is not a U.S. citizen and he has no income.  Technically, APS should not even be taking his case, which I should not mention on the record, except that Josh is a good man and won’t make an issue of it.   I didn’t meet him because his preferences are not at issue here.  If he said, for example, that he wants to move to Hawaii and have APS get him airfare and several months rent in Hawaii, how would I be able to do anything but what I am doing to protect his interests?”

“So, you refuse to meet with the tenant you are representing, or bother to even find out what he might want,” said the judge, for the record.

“Judge, again, how does what he wants enter this discussion?   He hasn’t paid rent in over a year and has no money.  The only way to prevent his immediate homelessness is by having APS apply for an Article 81 guardianship.  I will undoubtedly write an Order to Show Cause, maybe two, before they complete the Article 81, but when the time comes, I will do that.”   Josh nodded, told the judge the same thing.

The judge began digging through a pile of papers on his desk there on the bench.  He dug for a while, as I looked at Josh, and tried to keep my face as composed as possible.  The court room clock now read 12:20, if I didn’t wrap things up here soon I’d have to come back to court at 2 pm to adjourn my last case.

My mother was waiting for me in Queens for lunch.  I had five cases on the calendar and was done with all of them, but this case and one in the NYCHA part that could be quickly adjourned with a stip I’d sign and have the NYCHA attorney submit for us both.  I had one foot out the door as Josh and I wrapped up the stip, it was about 11:20, I was in good shape for getting to my mother in Queens by 1:15 or so to take her for lunch.  Not after an almost hour wait to have this important judge allocute the stipulation between two attorneys.

The stip Josh and I wrote could not have been improved by the most eloquent and exacting jurist.  The judge himself was not disputing that.  The agreement covered everything, the landlord was owed a tremendous and exact sum, and that, in light of the impossibility of the tenant ever paying (the only way to end a nonpayment eviction proceeding staying in the premises) a judgment of possession would issue to the landlord and a warrant of eviction would also issue forthwith, to be stayed thirty days, or maybe it was even 45 days, for APS to complete its application for the Article 81.   Everyone knew this sporting agreement meant my having to make at least one emergency application, two months from now, to stop the scheduled eviction.  

It was around 12:30 when the judge found what he was looking for, a memo from his boss.   The court officer took two copies from the judge and handed one to me and one to Josh.  The copies were so degraded it was hard to make out the words on them.   The judge struggled to read his own greyed out copy and finally found the language he read aloud.  The memo advised judges, in light of the vulnerability of tenants represented by Guardians ad Litem, particularly the crop of new GALs without legal expertise, to make sure their robe was extra long in the back.  

“To cover their asses,” I clarified to the college boy, when he raised his eyebrows quizzically.  His mother nodded, horrified but very interested in the jarring collision that was about to happen in Part A of the New York City Housing Court.

(to be continued, as tempus fucking fugit)

Here’s the thing about being one of the fifty million “content creators” out here, opining in the public space that is the internet: it feels like taking a stand.   I put my stories and arguments out here to give the several people who read them, friends and strangers, my honest thoughts and feelings, set out as clearly as I can set them out.  

The craft, writing clearly and, when called for, choosing the right words to move the reader, is the same for the blahgger as for the professional writer.  Standards vary, of course, but good writing is the same whether you read it in a book or here on the ‘internets’.  

The problem with reading things on the internet is that you are often in the hands of people who are, how to put this delicately, contemptible morons.   It may be easy or hard to click away, sometimes they suck you in by the sheer shock of their violence, like the tweets of our new troll-in-chief.

Writing “in public” serves another important purpose for me, someone who feels a rising urge to be paid for writing.  It holds me to a higher standard than writing emails, or keeping a notebook.   Before I hit “publish” I have to carefully consider every word I’ve set down.  I also have to comb through the words several times to make sure they are disentangled and say exactly what I mean them to.

Are they all in the right order?  Are there extra words that are not only unnecessary but distracting, or disruptive to the flow or mood? Typos?  Have I ended at exactly the right place?  Included all the detail to make the story understandable without burdening the reader with unneeded side-stories?   When I feel the piece is clean, and says clearly what I intended to say, I put it up for others to read.

The next question, and one entirely distinct from writing well and the considerations involved in doing that, is: how to build a wide enough internet audience so that I have a “platform”?   Publishers nowadays want an assurance that you are already popular enough to invest in before they publish your work.  

If your blog is read by 100,000 people a day, and you have that many “followers”, you have a robust platform and are well on your way. Having a million followers means, no matter how well or badly you may write, that you have the ability to get people to click on your words, which sounds exactly like “cah-ching!”  If your blahg is seen by a handful of people a week, a publishing corporation would be foolish to give you a large advance, no matter how intriguing or compelling your book might otherwise seem to be.

I am not writing this piece to whine about the obstacles in front of me as I try to reorganize, cut and prepare the next draft of the 750 page monster memoir of my idealistic monster dad.  There will be plenty of time for that whining when the time comes.   I am explaining some of the reasons I, and many others, write on the ‘internets’.  

There is love of writing, a good in itself.  There’s the satisfaction of having communicated something clearly, a nice feeling to have every day.  Then there is the pursuit of a livelihood from writing, also an excellent  thing– the livelihood more than the pursuit, of course.  These are three different things– love of writing, writing well and selling writing– none dependent on the others, and it is good to keep that in mind.

I heard two very clever English chaps, reading their own audiobook about how they sell a million words a year on the internet, between them, and make very good money following the principles that made them the tireless and successful self-promoters they are. Being a good writer, says this smooth-talker, is but one part of the equation; the other part, astute business sense and energetic and ingenious self-promotion, being the more crucial part for making money as a writer.  

These fellows had a solid, and perhaps indispensable, grounding in professional advertising, copy-writing, did it freelance for years, made enough money to keep them going until they cracked the lucrative fine art storytelling market they are wizards in now.  Writing ads and writing wildly popular fiction are different genres of writing of course, but the principles are the same. 

These ingenious chaps put together a solid “platform” based on catering to the demographics of their target audience– fans of a certain type of fiction.  They then built a thirsty, twelve-mouthed “funnel” to draw others into their network and soon were creating daily interest for over a million people.  Now they had something publishers were drooling for a piece of.  But not so fast!   They were able to keep virtually all the profits by monetizing their platform themselves, as well as half of their dozen voracious funnels.  $0.005 a hit on one their funnels comes out to $1,500 a day, money that comes in handy for cross-platform promotion.

You see, old boy, this is how we do it, and with a bit of verve and elan, you can do the same, no matter how well you might think you write.  We cater to the buyers in a professionally engaging way, we build the infrastructure to produce and distribute our virtual wares, we have professional designers create beautiful covers for our virtual works– and don’t skimp on this part, readers DO judge books by their covers, at least at the cash register, and we publish what we want them to devour, leave the story at a dramatic cliff-hanging spot at the end of each book to create a frenzy for the sequel, and we keep all the profits.  This is how you do it.  

Or, you can sit alone tapping out the most beautiful prose your talent allows.  You might be an amazing writer with fantastically rich stories to tell, even valuable stories, who can say?  If this is the case, and you are not devoting as much time to monetizing your talent as you are to writing every day, you are like the batter who can consistently hit a 95 mph fastball 500 feet– in a batting cage somewhere in suburbia, with nobody to jump up and cheer or offer you the million dollar bonus your rare, work-honed skill and god-given ability would otherwise command in the marketplace of sluggers.

I wrote Note on How Far You Should Go in telling a story mainly to reiterate my belief that the reader should be given all the info necessary to put everything together to get the full impact of the story.  The writer should include every useful specific detail so the reader can understand and digest exactly what they are reading.

I feel the same way about conversation, particularly with the people we’re closest to.  Would you rather have the pertinent background to a story, if told concisely, or be left wondering how you might feel about details left out or glossed over?  

Information, it seems to me, is the key to grappling with anything tricky.  Can you fully trust an information source that is guarded in deciding what information you will need for your understanding of the complex thing on the table between you? 

That is the essence of my beef with writing that provides a simple happy ending to an emotionally complicated situation.   I think of one I read, by an otherwise excellent writer, where he reports being deeply, desperately depressed for the first time in his life, after the end of his long marriage.  I’m interested immediately.

Then, instead of describing his particular depression, which might have been fascinating to have his unique take on, he sketched out a generic depression in a few lines to stand in for how unbearably painful it was.  Then he quickly and sure-footedly moved on to the abrupt end of his depression, thankfully a merciful 48 hours later (though if felt like a year), when he met the new love of his life and the world was bright and fresh again.  

My thought was “give me a fucking break” when it could have as easily been “beautifully rendered”, because this writer was capable of rendering it beautifully, if he hadn’t been writing a light piece to be sold for a Reader’s Digest-type publication.

I have the same beef with parents who keep essential truths from their children, perhaps thinking they’re sparing them the worst while leaving them with no clue into the seething rage around them at the dinner table.  Daddy won’t admit it, but he was caught fucking the former baby sitter, mommy saw it on the nanny cam; dad sticks to his imbecilic story that it was simply malicious trick photography by a hacker intent on sowing discord. 

Mom is enraged, the kids have no clue that she has good reason to be mad– as much about the childishly implausible denial as the infidelity with young woman a few years older than their daughter. Everyone keeps awkwardly mum as mom smolders and seethes, pounding the pots on the stove, slamming the oven door shut.  

To me, the teenaged kids don’t deserve to be kept in the dark as to why mom is not unreasonable to be hurt and angry.  Mom doesn’t deserve to be seen as irrationally enraged, neither does dad deserve to shrug at the kids and smile ironically whenever mom turns away like he’s the victim too, but it’s a sadly typical case.

Barack Obama leaves a bad taste for a similar reason.  He is a smooth obfuscater who speaks eloquently of the necessity, in a democracy, of free and open information for citizens, while he withholds information the People have a right to know, denies more Freedom of Information requests than even Cheney, threatens journalists and other citizens who report things he doesn’t want public.  For maximum chilling effect, he brandishes the rarely-used 1917 Espionage Act which was designed, in a mania of patriotic wartime fervor, to imprison and even execute wartime traitors during the War to End All Wars.  

I watch the president do a great comedic turn at his final National Press Club’s White House Correspondents’ dinner and then turn serious to thank his partners in transparency, the millionaire stars of the mass media, the ones who help him keep all Americans exquisitely informed with all the details we citizens of a democracy need to make intelligent choices.  

I get that candidate Obama had a great selling point in his election fight against the non-transparent heirs to Cheney’s unprecedented reign of secrecy.  I get that politics is complicated and that all candidates lie.  I don’t get why he keeps counter-factually insisting that he’s run a transparent administration.  The facts say he has not.  

As he goes on congratulating his partners in the corporate media and speaking of this era of unprecedented government transparency they are partners in, I immediately picture the New-Speak talking Martians in Mars Attacks, saying “we come in peace” and reducing the person they’ve greeted to a charred skeleton.  My smile turns to a sneer and I say to the screen “OK, man, you need to just shut the fuck up now.”

I believe that a writer in a free society should be as true to his or her thoughts and feelings, and what she/he knows, as possible.  It may not be the best way to sell a book, necessarily, but, for me, it makes for the most interesting and rewarding reading.

I suppose that conviction comes from a childhood where the whole story was never told, where you had almost no chance to put together the larger puzzle from the few perplexing pieces given.

That childhood, and my experience as an adult in our simplified blue hat/red hat advertising-driven democracy, have given me a lifelong distaste for half-truth, untruth, self-justifying rationale, saying what you think you should say, or what you think needs to be said, lies of omission, withholding of needed facts, the disconnect between feeling and expression, between knowledge and responsibility. 

That was my main point in that piece on what a writer should write and how far they should go to properly tell a story, though I don’t know that I expressed it very clearly or succinctly in that previous post.  

Two women whose literary opinions I esteem told me to get Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years.  I eventually did.  I now recommend it to you, delightful short essays, each two or three pages long, each one a gem.  I found myself laughing out loud.   It felt strange to recall I once had a sense of humor, was not always this ball of aggravated nerve endings who sits clenched before you today.

Upstairs, or across the air shaft, the Human Theremin just began practicing her shaky soprano trill.  That high strung register is my least favorite range of the human voice, and her repetitive exercise is, I’m pretty sure, the most hideous use for that shrill tone.   She sounds like a Victorian hysteric swooning, over and over and over.   But I digress.  

The other day I was on the phone with my cellphone provider, T-Mobile.   They had problems with their service, and with their customer service, and sent me texts nobody could explain, and then abruptly cut off my internet service and data.   I spent hours on the phone with their representatives who were busy helping other customers but apparently there was no help for my situation.  

In the car one evening, I was finally talking to someone intelligent and proactive over at T-Mobile.   She was very nice, very smart, had looked at the mishmash of my recent customer service calls, apologized for the series of apparent screw-ups and network failures and told me she’d solved all the problems, zeroed out the balance, restored the improperly disabled data and internet services, was very sorry for my agggg….

“Hello?” I said “Sharayah?”  

Seconds later I had a free T-Mobile Msg:  

We apologize, your call with Sharayah (23530) from T-Mobile just dropped.  You will receive a call back shortly. Thanks for your patience.    

I read it out loud to Sekhnet, who’d heard the end of my delightful call with Sharayah.  

“Assholes,” she said, and I pointed out that they were a German company and, therefore, most likely, Nazi assholes.  

She’d had similar problems with her provider, Verizon, and we concluded once more that the corporate personality leaves a lot to be desired whether that corporation is Nazi, American or transnational.

An hour or two later the patience that T-Mobile politeness bots had thanked me for was gone.  I texted back “Hello?”  

T-Mobile was once again lightning fast with a response:

Sorry, this service is temporarily unavailable.  Please try again later.  

This too I read aloud to Sekhnet, with predicable results.  I probably used the word “motherfuckers” in some connection to these automated Nazi dickheads.   Thinking back, a lot of what happened later was simply my fault– I’d wound her up.    

A couple of hours later I called T-Mobile again, again from the car.  This time Sekhnet was driving.  After a very short wait, no more than five minutes (recent hold times had been up to an hour, due to the super popular iPhone’s recent emergence on the T-Mobile Nazi network),  I had another lovely, very sympathetic T-Mobile representative on the line.  

She was the second coming of Sharayah and she was able to read me all of Sharayah’s notes.   I should not be experiencing this problem, she told me reassuringly, it was a stupid error… someone had simply not inputted the proper order.  She began to apologize as she typed more notes on my account.  Suddenly Sekhnet, hearing my silence, had had enough.  

“T-Mobile sucks!” she barked, almost as loud as that inconsolable Tourretic German Shepherd next door.  “Tell them their service is complete shit!  What a bunch of fucking useless assholes… their fucking network is a piece of shit!   Fuck them!  Fuck T-Mobile!”  

It was hard to hear the kind young woman on the line apologizing to me over this outpouring of righteous passion.  

I asked the girl at T-Mobile for a second.  I told Sekhnet, with carefully modulated snappishness, that I was on the phone with T-Mobile.  Then I added, in a stage whisper straight into the phone, that a very nice, intelligent woman at T-Mobile was straightening everything out for me, the long tech nightmare was, hopefully, almost over.  

Then suddenly it all got to me, the restraint I’d been showing in recent days when two long-time acquaintances had revealed themselves as rabid by tag teaming me with snarling emails about what a wimp I was to complain about some innocent and completely inadvertent repetitive ass-dicking.   “As if any of us had never been, figuratively, fucked up the ass!” their terse emails strongly implied.

Suddenly I wanted to be compensated for this long ordeal with fucking T-Mobile.   Reparations was all I could think about.  I told this woman I wanted money refunded to me.  I suggested a month’s fees would be about right, as a sign of good faith from T-Mobile.  

She wasn’t authorized to do it, but said I was right to feel that way, she’d feel the same way — and she thought T-Mobile did owe me some money.  I appreciated her saying that, they so rarely do.  She told me she’d have to get a supervisor, someone who could give me some money.  She promised she’d stay on the line until one picked up, but then forgot to put me on silent hold as she had thoughtfully done, at my request, when she’d put me on a brief hold moments earlier to find Sharayah’s notes.  

A few blaring bars composed by the humorless Josef Mengele, MD, played over and over.  Then Josh was on the line.  Josh was a supervisor, very grateful that I’d been a loyal T-Mobile customer for twelve years.  He was eager, he told me, to make me completely happy.  

I told him my story in some detail and then spoke the only language these Nazis understand: money.  I wanted monetary compensation for my recent run around, in light of my twelve years of, heretofore, thankless loyalty to T-Mobile.  He said he understood.  He then offered me ten dollars off my next bill.

“Josh, if we were friends, and I’d done something very aggravating to you that had cost you many hours of your life to fix, and I offered you ten dollars, would you consider that fair, or an adequate show of friendship?”  I asked the supervisor.  

“Yes, I would,” he said cheerfully.  

“Well, you’re a much nicer person that I am, Josh,” I said with ill-disguised bitterness, with malice actually. “To me ten dollars from a multi-national corporation feels like someone peeing on me.”  

Josh then affably pointed out that the internet and data services I received from T-Mobile, and had not been able to use for only the last few days, were provided free, as a courtesy by T-Mobile.  

I countered that the generous 500 MB of data per month were part of the plan I paid T-Mobile $50 a month for, therefore it was hard for me to see the service as free.  We discussed this pointlessly for a moment or two.  Then I cut him off.  

“OK, I understand you’re not authorized to offer a customer more than $10 on behalf of the corporation.  I’ll take it.  Talk to you later, Josh,” I said, and rung off.  

“You were very mean to him,” Sekhnet said.  You’d hardly know, from her reasonable, parental tone, that she’d been barking like Obi, the long-eared Tourretic next door, only moments earlier.  

“And you’re no Etgar Keret,” she will point out when I read this to her.  

“Steek,” I will say, suavely extending a paw,  “James Steek, Keret veh Steek.”