That Awkward Moment...

... when you haven't cleaned your room in so long, the toys have started lurking in dark corners looking disturbingly gangsta.

 

And how long's it been since you dusted?

Grumpy Review: The Successful Novelist by David Morrell

This book came highly recommended by the trusted strangers who review books on Amazon. But one CD* into the book I was like “Okay, yeah, that’s fine – but I don’t care that you wrote Rambo!” 

An inspiring literary figure.

Let me clarify. This guy, David Morrell, wrote the book First Blood which was later turned into the Rambo movie franchise. That qualifies him as a successful novelist, sure. But besides all the trite advice (Write things you like to write / Don’t be in this for the money / perseverance is key, you lazy bastard and such); the only image that stuck with me was from an anecdote meant to illustrate how HARD poor David Morrell had to work to get himself through college. He worked the night shift in some sort of death-and-torture factory that made car fenders and killed dreams.

He worked at this incredibly dangerous machine which was some sort of fender-presser – he’d have to put a metal sheet into the machine, then his hands (which were tied to a safety chain) would be yanked up away from the machine as the metal was pressed into shape. Imagine your job entailed being forced to do mini-Mexican Wave every 2 minutes. I’m guessing the novelty wears off pretty quick.

So David Morrell, being the sensitive literature-obsessed soul behind Rambo, was obviously friends with the equally sensitive and literature-loving factory manager, so they’d hang out and talk about Milton and Keats and shit like that. Eventually, (I assume to further his plan to make sweet love to David Morrell,) the factory manager called him up from the factory floor and announced that he’d be moved to a less dangerous job. I assume the factory manager brushed a stray hair from David Morrell’s face as he said this, but the account doesn’t specify.

Another worker (let’s call him Handless Hank – you’ll see why in a minute) was moved to Morrell’s job, and I assume Morrell himself took a less demanding position which involved him feeding grapes to the factory manager. A few hours later, the safety chain on the Mexican Wave of Death Machine failed, and Hank, Morrell’s replacement, lost both his hands.

David Morrell doesn’t even comment on this grim event, preferring it stand alone as a testament that God loves him and his beautiful prose-typing fingers more than Handless Hank. We swiftly move on to David Morrell writing his first novel in college and talking about his father issues, which – shockingly – appear in his work as male authority figures being blah blah blah WHAT ABOUT HANDLESS HANK?

I can’t stop thinking about it – here’s this probably young, inexperienced guy (if he had to be promoted to the Death Machine, what the hell was he doing before? Janitorial duty on the Vomit Projection Testing Grounds?) who’s at this new job for a couple of hours, making minimum wage, forced to do the Mexican Wave every two minutes, just hoping to get through the day so he can go home and watch some porn on VHS, when BAM. No hands. Shock. Blood. Crunchy bones and dirty fingernails pressed into the newest fender. Has to live the rest of his life on disability pension and can’t even jerk off anymore.

And the only testament to this horrific accident is a mention in David Morrell’s unhelpful book as a ‘hey, lucky me, right?’ anecdote.

I don’t know if Handless Hank is still around, or if he’s happy, or has found a lovely independently wealthy girl who’s very good at pleasuring him sexually. Maybe he’s okay, but come on – odds are he’s not, and hasn’t been since that day.

And maybe the most unfair part of the whole situation is that the horror and the injustice of this single moment in his life makes for a more compelling story than fucking Rambo.

*Loot sent me an audiobook version of this book, when I’d ordered a softcover. But because I’m a passive consumer and I figured, hey, I don’t mind audiobooks, I left it… Oh My GAWD the reader’s voice turned out to be so annoying. If this were twitter, I’d insert the hashtag #MurphysLaw, but it’s not, so I won’t.

#selfrestraint

The Magical Lunar Seahorse Angel

This one time, I was watching TV, (this is how most of my stories start) and there was this fantastically uninformative and mildly entertaining show about… ::shudders::… mysterious things. (What show was that? Boston Rob was in it!)

It was called… um… UFO Investigates? Sci-fi investigates? Mysterious Investigations..? Investigating Mysterious Things That Other People Have Investigated Before Us And Reached No Useful Conclusions And After Twenty Minutes of Cheesy Mysterious Music and Cute Editing We Reach No Useful Conclusions?

Something like that, anyway. It had this brilliant moment where a local in some hick town had a whole photo album of UFO sightings and such. One of the pictures was a Polaroid of the back of a guy’s head – but get this – there was no guy there when he’d taken the picture!

Dun dun DUUUUN.

He was just, like, you know, taking pictures of the lawn outside his house at night, and judging by how blurry the picture was I’m almost sure he was sober, so there can be no other reasonable explanation. The photograph was of an alien! An alien who only looked like a person, but a person invisible to the naked eye (an ingenious double-disguise, that sneaky alien bastard) but who showed up on the picture, because... well... the alien wasn’t expecting anybody to take pictures of a seemingly empty piece of lawn, okay?! So he didn’t take his photo-invisibility ray-gun with him on the trip. Ha!

And because I can’t find the actual show online (that’s how bad it was) here’s a watermarked image that’s sort of the same:

Eerie.

Funny story, because I was actually taking a picture of the empty sky the other night when I noticed a MAGICAL LUNAR SEAHORSE ANGEL!

No, seriously.

Have you met Lexi?

Darling reader, I could give you a long explanation of how my life is far too busy and orgasmically* wonderful for me to blog, but that would be a lie. I’ve been less busy and possibly less orgasmic than your average senior citizen, and this blog has once again come to the edge of death because I suck at life.

But! I have made a new resolution! Call it a Nearly End Of Winter resolution or a Post-Bronchitis resolution, but I’ve made one and here it is: just because I suck at life doesn’t mean I have to suck at blogging. Most people whose blogs I enjoy suck at life anyway (except for you, because if you do blog I’m sure you’re amazing and I marvel at your ability to keep your orgasmically busy life at bay long enough to document it.)

So what do the pro-active, successful bloggers of the world blog about? I don’t know, but I have a cat** so… here’s a picture of my cat! 

Her name is Lexi and she's adorable. And whenever I run out of ideas I’m going to post pictures of her*** so this blog will never almost-die again! Look at me, with my flawless plan. It’s almost as if I don’t suck at life.

What are you doing in that shoebox, Lexi? You’re not a shoe, you’re a cat!

Of course, I’ll talk about other stuff too. Because there’s thin YET INCREDIBLY DISTINCT line between me and this girl:



And that line is that she’s trolling, and my devotion to cats (at least, my cat) is disturbingly genuine.

*Spellcheck assures me that I mean ‘orgasmic ally’ here. I think I’ve just found the name of my superhero sidekick. Climax would be the main superhero of course. And aren’t sidekicks supposed to have more cumbersome and less impressive names which tie in thematically to the main hero? There you go.

**a common symptom of sucking at life

***because she’s fluffy