Damn, I'm like halfway out of the state.

The Tread-Desk Diaries, Day 9

Miles walked – 7.3

Speed – 2.2

Incline – 3%

Total miles – 43.8

OK, so I bumped my mileage goal up toe six a day this week, and I’ve been cracking seven the last couple of days. Here’s the thing. My daughter’s home, and she’s a delicate little princess who can’t stand the thermostat being down at 65, so she keeps turning it up to, I dunno, 80 or something. So I’m getting sweatier, which, aside from some additional laundry, would be no big deal.

Except for this. As the clothes absorb the sweat, they start to bunch up and such in some, eh, sensitive areas. And that leads to the “C” word – chafing. Once you get a good chafe going, you can kiss walkies goodbye.

A few ways to address this problem. First, avoid cotton – that whole “cotton is rotten” thing, ask any runner type, and they’ll wax poetic about it for a bit. Seems cotton absorbs sweat and just holds it there against your tender little dermis instead of wicking it away to join the atmosphere. Problem is, try finding some undies that ain’t cotton, without paying through the nose for them.

OK, you could always go commando, but usually I wear jeans, so still cotton, but now cotton that’s sort of abrasive to begin with, and that’s before I get a good ass-sweat going.

The solution? What I learned on the Twitters are called “lounge pants.” Near as I can tell, it’s just a fancy name for PJ bottoms. Nice fleecy things, soft enough that the boys can play in their unchaperoned, and they don’t get too wet and sticky. Problem is, I’m gonna have to either wash them every day or get a few more pairs, ’cause, round about 5pm, they do get a tad stinky.

TMI, I know. But hell. I’ve committed to blogging about this shit pretty much every day for a year solid. You signed up for TMI, so shut up.

In my period costume

Yesterday, I did the office tour, which brought up the treadmill desk thing again, which got me thinking. And not happy thoughts.

See, the treadmill desk, when I first set that up, I was walking my ass off. Literally. Dropped close to twenty pounds in the first few months.  And then?  Shit happened, life intervened, inertia set in. For whatever reason, I got out of the habit. I’d hop back on now and again, but what had been a daily exercise became a desultory charade. Most of that twenty pounds is right back where it started.

So I look like shit. Well, big deal. With my face? So what. But I’m 52 and I’m obese. I know, we don’t like the O word. We say big, we even say fat. But the fact is, if I don’t change my ways, I’m in for an early and probably unpleasant death. 

I’m going to try to blog my way out of this. On this very blog, the weight of public accountability and the threat of public shame got me through two online novels, so maybe I can use those same tools to save my own life. Sounds dramatic, I know, but that’s how I have to think about it. 

This isn’t about writing, though, and that’s what I’m reserving this blog for. No, this is about editing. It’s about cutting at least 20 percent off my person before that 20 percent cuts off a good chunk of my life. So I’m documenting this business on its own blog, GOING NOWHERE FAST. If you want to join in the fun, I could use your support – or, if I fail to keep pace, a good, swift kick in the ass.

Thanks.

The desk and The Writer Gym

Guess there’s some kind of web meme going ’round, all us writer types are supposed to show off our offices.  John Hornor Jacobs started it. Yes, THE John Hornor Jacobs – author of the acclaimed SOUTHERN GODS, the soon-to-be-acclaimed THIS DARK EARTH,  an upcoming YA trilogy. The man has more book deals than Carters has liver pills. Don’t know what that means, exactly, my mom used to say it, but I took it to mean a lot. 

So then Peter Farris jumped on board, and then Keith Rawson got in on the act, and since I sorta needed a blog post anyway and was fresh out of ideas, this seemed like a swell way to waste your time.

So, the tour.  Here’s the whole set-up, desk to the right, my revolutionary bookshelf-cum-treadmill desk dead ahead.  Gonna rename that The Writer Gym (soon to be TM) and work out some kind of endorsement deal with some hot-looking hard-body writer, make me a fortune.  Hmmm . . . that leaves out Jacobs and Rawson, I don’t really know what Farris looks like.  Wait, I’ve got it!  Joelle Charbonneau! Let me make a note here . . .

My Little Friends from the Old World

Back by the door, there’s an 18th century map of North America surrounded by my little friends. My late Aunt Mary Ellen and Uncle Bob were tireless collecters of Mexican folk art, and the masks are from their collection. Seem in pre-Columbian days, masks were a big deal in Aztec and other Toltec cultures, so when the missionaries showed up, they tried to piggy back on the trend by incorporating them into their passion plays and what not. The red guy on the right, that’s Old Scratch himself. Not sure what’s up with the rest of them.  The map was Bob’s – he loved maps. More fine people, also gone, but who, through their infectious enthusiam for, well, almost everything, were the coolest people a curious young lad could know.

Grandpa Bart's Persuader

Over on the bookcase, we’ve got Grandpa Bart’s billy club, official Chicago PD issue, and he carried that puppy through the Capone days right up until the early years of the Daley era.  I like to think there’s a story behind each ding and dent, and I would have loved to have heard them, but he died when I was in fourth grade. I remember a gentle man with white hair and a soft smile, and sometimes you hear a line or two of Yeats out of him.  Lots of hats up on top of the bookcases, too. My dad had the largest head in the western world, but he loved his hats. The ones I can wear without them falling down around my ears, I do.

Dad, didn't you already have a cigar this week?

My African Writing God, Billy

There’s the Daja, guarding the humidor. And we have my African Writing God, Billy Shakes-His-Speare-at-You -and-Says-Write, Goddamnit.

Day job, night job, same office

My squirrel and my Ogden seducer

We got some awards I won for writing about taxes and such like. That’s the day job, and this is also my day-job office, so some of the book piles are a little, well, diverse.  There’s the stand-up lamp, where I keep my recording gear for whenever Sabrina Ogden needs an aural fix, and where you’ll also find a stuffed squirrel, a Christmas present from one of my smart-ass nephews to commemorate the day a squirrel tied to kill my by jumping into the front tire of my bike. 

A few things you’ll usually find in my office – a bottle of Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper, my big-ass Tweety-Bird tea-cup, and my Billy Williams bobble head doll,  Sweet Swingin’ Billy, the hottest stick on the team when I was a lad, back when the Cubbies broke my heart in 1969. Broke it for the first time, I should say. They’ve made a habit of it. And, of course, Dante the Hound, my faithful companion through most of the day.    

Caffeine and Cubby, a still life

Dante, my faithful hound

OK, I showed you mine . . .

Thing is, I know bullying. I started to leave this story over at Shotgun Honey as a comment, but it got a bit long, so I just linked it to here (that still counts as a comment, Pluck, so cough up.)

I was born six weeks premature and with congenital hip and leg defects that had me in leg braces and ortho shoes through third grade. I was also, as my family tended to be, the biggest kid in the class. Since I was pretty much immobile, there was a cadre of kids who thought it was some kind of badge of honor to count coup on my ass — they’d run up and shove me or hit me and then take off, knowing damn well I couldn’t catch them.  With all that shit on my legs, my balance wasn’t great, so I spent a lot of time on the ground listenting to kids laugh at me while I watched some little fuck run off. Had some bad days over that, but I have to credit my parents, especially my mom, for helping me keep perspective and for not letting me descend into self pity. She’d give me a little space to whine about it, but then would cut that shit off, telling me that these were the only legs I had and, god willing, they’d work better someday. She also signed me up for swim team early on so that, despite the fact that I couldn’t run and could only sort of walk, I was staying in good physical shape. In a pool, I was fast and graceful and whole – I was everything I couldn’t be on the ground 

I was fortunate that my dad was a doctor and was able to recruit some outstanding medical care – actually revolutionary-at-the-time medical care – care that almost completely healed my issues (my feet still point out a bit, and my left leg is still a tad shorter than my right, and they had to irradiate the growth plated on my right leg or I would have ended up 6’4″ on one side and 6′ on the other, but all and all, things worked out great. I actually went on to be a jock through my school days). 

So, the treatments worked and the first week of the summer between third and fourth grade, the braces and ortho shoes came off, the tennis shoes went on, and I was given the go ahead to test my legs. I played baseball for the first time. Basketball for the first time. Football for the first time. I ran my ass off all summer. I remember walking up really early one morning and feeling restless. I put on my new PF Flyers, went out in the back yard and just ran back and forth across the yard until I collapsed in the grass, exhausted. I guess I was crying, because my dad was watching me from the kitchen and came running out, thinking my legs had gone out on me again. I told him I was just so happy.

I went back to school in the fall with a shit list — not every kid who’d ever taken a shot – I mean even some of my friends had – but that core group, that asshole tribe of punks that had made me their regular bitch ever since Kindergarten. Because now, in my PF Flyers, I wasn’t just the biggest kid in the class, I was also probably the fastest. I caught up with three of them the first day, another one the second. On the third day, I was called in to see the principal — Sister Mary Roselle, with whom I’d always gotten on well.

“Danny,” she said, “what’s going on? We’ve never had this kind of trouble with you before.”

“I could never catch them before,” I told her.  She knew about my history.

She looked at me a moment and then held up a single finger. “Once each,” she said. “Any more than that, then you’re just a bully, too.”  Then she smiled a little. “Besides, I know those boys. it would do them all good to get taken down a peg.”

I nodded. That made sense. That was our deal. Once each. I’d caught up with everybody in the first couple weeks, everybody except this one Jeff kid – he was fast and he was careful. But that also meant he was living in a kind of exile. He couldn’t be on the playground, he couldn’t hang with anybody at lunch. Finally, about the middle of September, he turned himself in — just walked up to me and said “Get it over with.”

With him just standing there looking humiliated, his head only coming up to the middle of my chest, and with everybody watching with that same atavistic Lord of the Flies expectation I used to see on their faces when those punks used to surround me, suddenly I felt like a bully. I should have just let him go. I should have made some kind of speech about how this was all bullshit – I mean I could feel that inside me, but I was 9 and i caved in to the expectations. I hit him once, hard, in the stomach, and he went down in a fetal heap on the ground and lots of the kids laughed at him, mostly his friends, the ones that used to help him torment me. 

Looking at him on the ground and listening to his goading friends, I felt something I never had before – at least not in association with anything like this. I felt ashamed. Jeff and I got to be pretty good friends eventually.

That was it. That was the end of my list. But for the rest of my years in school, if you were some big kid who got your rocks off by picking on some little kid and if word got back to me, your ass was mine.

Not that it matters once you have a knife through your frontal lobe. Dead is dead.

In the early 1950s, a portrait of what is now believed to be Marlowe was discovered at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where Marlowe was a student. I was taken by the motto – Quod me nutrit me destruit (That which nourishes me destroys me). Taken against the frantic and chaotic backdrop of Marlowe’s life, one imagines meanings as varied as Marlowe’s tastes. He indulged his intellectual appetites. He was a free-thinker, quite probably an atheist, and not shy with his opinions. Even today, when the only risk of such thoughts is to reputation (a 2010 poll found that more Americans would vote for a homosexual or a Muslim or a convicted felon for public office than would vote for an admitted atheist), I think that many people hold such beliefs in private but are loathe to admit to them in public. Marlowe embraced these thoughts in an age where such ideas could get you burned at the stake. He indulged his sexual appetites. Marlowe caused a bit of a contretemps at Cambridge, choosing to translate Ovid’s Amores, which are unabashedly erotic, as part of his studies – putting an even more erotic spin on the material. Marlowe was also likely homosexual, or at least bisexual at a time when the consequences of that orientation were as dire as those associated with his theological beliefs. Marlowe was a drinker and a brawler, proving his appetites were not confined to only finer thoughts or biological imperatives. He was a spy, a leading dramatist and, in his fashion, a scholar – all by the age of 29, all by a man of common birth, a cobbler’s son, at a time when birth was destiny. He should have spent a long, dull life making shoes. Instead he spent a short, bright one making history.

Shakespeare, too, was born a commoner and, in his way, overcame even more. Marlowe went to Cambridge at a young age on scholarship, the BA and MA he earned holding a weight that PhDs from even the most august institutions today do not hold. The annual matriculation at Cambridge in Marlowe’s time was a couple dozen in a good year, so just holding those degrees made him a full-fledged member of the Elizabethan intelligentsia and lent a weight to his authorship that Shakespeare, who held no academic credentials, could never claim. Yet Shakespeare went on to become the cornerstone of the English literary canon. Marlowe was a brilliant comet across the same Elizabethan sky. How long he might have shinned we can only guess.

Quod me nutrit me destruit. Perhaps Marlowe meant that in reference to the joys and consequences of his the voracious appetites he indulged in pursuit his own vision of a full life – indulged in the face of a moral climate that then, even more than today, would preach curbing those desires in the service of probity, of chastity, of God. But there is a longer thought, one that Shakespeare echoes in Sonnet 73, and one that holds a lesson for us all, particularly on the cusp of this new year.

          In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire

          That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

          As the death-bed whereon it must expire

          Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by

Time is both the fuel of that fire and the flame that devours it. Time feeds us. It is the essential stuff of life, the thread of mortality with which we each weave in such days as we are allotted. But it consumes us, too. Each day is another bite out of a finite meal at the end of which awaits either death or dessert. Many of us pretend it will be the later, but I think we all know in our hearts it will be the former.

Marlowe chose to make that meal a feast – to gorge on every morsel life offered him, even knowing that every indulged appetite held out the promise of both sustenance and destruction, but knowing too that, however carefully we may choose to pick at life’s meal, the same grave awaits us each on that day we scrape our plates clean.

I’m closer to the end of that meal than to the beginning and have spent too much time already picking at my food either out of fear of insulting imagined gods or in pretended service to a society that I thought somehow better served by my restraint than by my action, or, in a harder and sadder truth, in plain sloth, in too many days and weeks and years where the simple effort of reaching for another joint of mutton seemed too much work when balanced against the myriad banal distractions that also litter life’s table. A promise to change is easy, but it is my intent to be more greedy of those morsels I desire, to recognize that my joyful gluttony has more to offer the world than my dour restraint, that the table is laid rich and full and that I cannot possibly hope to exhaust its bounty. To gorge at this table costs no other man a single crumb. To sit at it empty-mouthed, thinned with guilt or shame or sloth, that costs us each everything. The waiters are standing in the corner waiting to take your plate away.

Eat hearty and damn the consequences. Dead is dead.

You’ve heard the basic arguments, I suppose.

Independent booksellers are the guardians of our reading culture – local businesspeople who care deeply about the titles they stock, staffed with book lovers that will hand-sell deserving authors. They provide the local chapels where those of the literary faith can congregate.  Try scheduling a reading/signing gig on Amazon and see who shows up.  You can commune in the flesh with both the books you love and your fellow readers – snuggle up in a comfy chair with a cup of Joe and sample pages to your heart’s content.

Amazon breaks down the brick-and-mortar walls separating authors from audience. With no space constraints, they can carry virtually every title and in every format – trying buying an e-book down at Mom and Pop’s House of Books. They democratize the review process, letting all readers weigh in, not just Kirkus or the New York Times. And their business model means you’re paying less, sometimes a lot less, than you do at your local independent.

Both arguments have merit, but there is one disingenuous element that needs to be addressed. On the price front? Part of Amazon’s advantage stems from their joyful exploitation of an outdated tax loophole.  When you shop at Amazon, you don’t pay sales tax. What that means in dollars and cents depends on where you live, but the average sales tax rate in the US is 9.64 percent.  That’s a record high, by the way.  That means, on average, almost 10 percent of the price advantage that Amazon attributes to its superior business model actually comes from starving state and local governments of their tax revenue.

By the way, those sales taxes you don’t pay when you shop on line?  You still owe them, you know.  They are actually called sales and use taxes. In cases where they aren’t collected as sales taxes by the vendor and transmitted to the appropriate taxing jurisdictions (such as in interstate internet transactions) they are still owed as use taxes by the buyer.  That’s right. You are supposed to keep track of your non-taxed purchases and remit the appropriate taxes to your state and local taxing authorities. 

You aren’t, of course. Nobody is.  And there is no practical way for state and local governments to make you. That’s part of Amazon’s argument – that they aren’t cheating anybody out of tax revenues, it’s you, their scofflaw customers that are doing that.

Sales and use tax laws were written and adjudicated decades ago, when something like the internet wasn’t even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye.  The key to sales taxes was and largely remains nexus – a seller has to have a physical presence in the state or local taxing jurisdiction where a purchase is made before it can be required to collect taxes on that purchase. The fact that sales taxes aren’t collected on mail order purchases has always been an irritant to brick-and-mortar businesses, but mail order never approached the level of commerce that the Internet now sees. 

So what, you say. So I save a little scratch and the swollen Leviathan of government hasn’t figured a way to get it out of me. What’s the problem?  I suppose I could make a civic duty argument, that, as a citizen who freely partakes of the goods, services and infrastructure that these taxes pay for, you have a moral obligation to pay your fair share, but civic duty isn’t much in fashion these days. So I’ll make a practical argument instead.

Remember how I said that 9.64 percent average is a record high? Part of the reason is the shrinking base of sales on which those taxes are collected.  As more and more business avoid collecting sales taxes via the Internet, and as more and more consumers take advantage of that situation by not stepping up and paying those taxes themselves, the sales tax base shrinks. When tax bases shrink, tax rates tend to go up.  It’s not like you can avoid sales taxes everywhere, not unless you’ve found some way to buy your gasoline and groceries on-line from out of state vendors.  So you save on sales taxes by buying your books from Amazon, and you end up paying higher sales taxes when you buy your milk at your local grocer. If sales tax revenues drop further and stop providing the funds state and local governments need, then they will turn to income taxes or property taxes. One way or another, you’re gonna pay.

I understand that a lot of people have a bug up their butts about taxes. I get it. I think of the trillions of dollars flushed down the Iraq toilet and I wanna puke. But sales taxes don’t go to boondoggles like that. Sales taxes tend to go to things like fixing potholes and paying teachers and mowing parks and having libraries – they go to the nuts-and-bolts local stuff where the citizen rubber meets the government road. That’s a road we all have to help pay for or we won’t have one to drive on. If you’re one of these off-the-gridders who doesn’t think you should pay any taxes anywhere, well, you probably don’t read anyway, so I guess you don’t much care about local bookstores. Oh, and by the way? Fuck you. 

States have been trying a variety of tax law solutions to get the Amazon’s of the world to play fair on the sales tax front, which attempts have met with varying success. Fortunately, a few cases are wending their way up toward the Supreme Court where, hopefully, the judges will rule in such a way that outdated nexus standards are replaced with something more befitting our increasing virtual economy.

On the business model front? Hey, we can all make our choices and we can all live with the results. But the sales tax issue unfairly tilts the table in Amazon’s direction.  Consumers who think they are benefitting from this tax dodge are kidding themselves, because they will end up paying in the end. They only ones benefitting are Amazon and its fellow on-line retailers. 

That makes them bad corporate citizens and it makes us dupes for putting up with it.    

Nothing to do with self-publishing, but hey, it's the holidays

I’ll be clear up front. I’ve got nothing against self-publishing per se. I’ve seen examples of kick-ass writers who couldn’t break through the traditional gatekeepers, but who built huge audiences online and either then have continued down that route to a new kind of publishing fame and fortune, or who then have signed blockbuster deals with the very houses that could have had them cheap early on. So maybe self-publishing is now a legitimate new entre for those with the skill to pull it off.

I’ve also seen an explosive proliferation of absolute crap, a nauseating cesspool of poor storytelling, badly written and rife with spelling, grammatical and formatting errors, usually offered so cheap as to be practically free. So maybe self-publishing is an exercise in unbridled narcissism through which marginally literate hacks are furthering the reputation of self-publishing as the last refuge of the talentless while simultaneously creating unrealistic pricing expectations, thus twice-poisoning the well for real writers with actual talent.

There’s the good and the bad. Pretty much like anything else. But I won’t be playing.

I’ve got three novels with my agent now, one that’s been shopped a good bit, one just getting shopped now, and one that will be heading out to the usual suspects shortly.  Even if my novels don’t sell, though, I won’t be self-publishing, not now and probably not ever.  Here’s why.

Read Chuck Wendig’s post today on all the moving parts you’ve got to consider if you want to get serious about the self-publishing business. You’ve got to learn the ins and outs of the various platforms and their comparative benefits. You’ve got to decide whether your soul is worth more than Amazon is offering to pay for it. You’ve got to figure out how you’re going to sell your work – and then invest a lot of effort pimping it. You’ve got to track results and tweak your approach to capitalize on what works in a constantly evolving marketplace. You’ve got to up your technical game so that the material you put out has the fit and finish to distinguish it as a professional product in what is often a pretty amateurish crowd. 

In other words, you’ve gotta do a lot of fucking work. And that all takes time.

If you’re a full-time penmonkey like Chuck, and you’ve got his energy and enthusiasm for the ins and outs of the business, it makes a lot of sense. It’s another revenue stream to divert into your wallet.

But I’m not one of those. I’ve got a job – a job that eats up fifty hours of my time on a good week. And I don’t have Chuck’s passion for the business side of this. I’ve got time to do three things: My day job; the sundry accumulation of housework, TV watching, drinking and marital goodwill maintenance that comprises most of the rest of my life; and writing.

 If having any kind of career as a writer, other than the one the day-job people pay me for, is going to require mastering the vagaries of self-publishing, then I’m not going to have that career. That’s just how it goes.

And it’s too bad, in a way.  Because if that’s how it ends up going; if, as an increasing chorus of people claim, traditional publishing is hearing the sound of self-publishing’s winged chariot drawing near and is soon to be crushed beneath its wheels, I fear many good writers will be lost. Because, to succeed, you’ll have to be as much a self-publishing entrepreneur as you are a writer, and the former skill set may end up being more important than the later.

Whine all you want about agents, editors and the rest of the traditional publishing establishment castigated as gatekeepers – and they certainly weren’t and aren’t infallible – but they did keep most of the crap out of the system. Now, anybody with an internet connection and an ego can flood the virtual book market with a shitstorm of, well, shit.

It isn’t just making it more complicated to be a writer; it is making it more complicated to be a reader. Sometimes the universe of choices in the marketplace when I fire up my Kindle drives me to despair. Truth be told, I often default to what’s offered by the traditional publishers anyway – it saves time, and it’s a little like having that UL tag on my Christmas lights. I may not end up loving the book, but I’m pretty sure it won’t burn my house down.

So, self-publishing? I don’t have the time and, truth be told, even if I did, I don’t have the temperament. So I’ll plug along through the traditional channels and I’ll make it or I won’t. The self-publishing craze will just have to carry on without me.

Back around Thanksgiving, Gerald So put out the call for holiday crime poems. Huh, I thought. Never did a crime poem. So I wrote a Thanksgivings Day crime poem.  Gerald, in his gracious rejection, said he had some Christmas ones that were a better fit for his next issue, which is coming out on December 26, (that was probably code for “stick with prose you tin-eared troglodyte and leave poetry to the professionals, like Steve Weddle.”)

But that means I’ve got spare buffalo parts lying around and a blog entry to fill. So here you go, my Thanksgiving crime poem.

A word due gods

Thanksgiving like love is

a word due gods eroded to

lazy poverty by common

tongues making gratitude

too freely for the

banal the material the transitory in

thoughtless ritual at  

countless tables

I thank God for . . .

and then the trivial litany

 . . . my family

. . .  my job

. . . this meal

in a rote prelude to

thankless gluttony as they imagine the

biological accident of their

existence is a blessing

a cardiganed father

standing priest at the lardered

altar of their table the

knife communing with the

insufficient offered flesh the

first slice along the breastbone the

way the YouTube video said to do it

The first slice along the breastbone

at my altar too but my blade is

not corrupted by holiday feasting

is instead blessed with the

sweat of the effort to

cut through the

joints of costal cartilage

separating the ribs from the

sternum and then

spreading that injury open

I was going to say like a flower the

surrender of a bud to the

sun’s seduction the prisoned

petals straining to their destined

glory but this is the

harder work of mammal birth

life’s insistence forcing wide this pelvis

of ribs the heart crowning in

the mouth of this womb crowning

in the mouth of

my holy appetite

and to the favor of Gods well

pleased that I am

thankful for this

thankful for this

thankful for this

You know what we need? Writing pants.

I golf a bit. Not as much as a few years back, but it’s still a good time when I get out.  Golf courses are pretty places – flora, fauna, quiet usually.  And you walk around or ride around and tell dirty jokes, drink a little beer, hit the occasional good shot.  Four hours or so of camaraderie in funny pants.  It’s relaxing.

Or it is for me. 

But I know some guys.  They agonize over every stroke. They’re pissed when a twenty-foot putt comes up three inches short. They get upset about stuff like “short-siding” themselves on their approach, whatever the hell that means. They are crushed when they leave their tee shot on the wrong side of the fairway.  I’m pretty happy when I can find mine.

Of course, I’m lucky to break 100 these days, and even back when I was playing regularly and I was a little younger and a little stronger and a lot more flexible, breaking 90 was the best I could hope for. And who cares, really? I’m just out for a good time.

These other guys? These are your 70s shooters, your scratch-golfer types. They aren’t out there for fun. They are out there to win, to perfect their arcane art, to reign victorious in a battle with an unseen inner vision of perfection that’s always just beyond their grasp.

That’s swell, Dan, you say. But who gives a fuck about your golf game? (You fat-ass, one-percenting Republican bastard a few of you mutter under your breath to punctuate the sentiment.)

But this isn’t about that. It’s about this.

The last few weeks, I’ve read a few blog posts about how tortured we writers are. The hours and days and weeks and months of research and drafting and re-drafting and re-re-drafting that go into each work. All the unseen travails our benighted souls endure in lonely silence so that you lucky readers might one day bask in the light of our genius.

And it’s all true, I guess.  This writing shit, once you decide you don’t just want to break 100 anymore, it can wear on you.    

But then I think of some of my golfer friends, the ones who can’t smile on the links, who can’t relax a little and just have fun. The ones that, when you tell them “Nice shot” after they’ve split the fairway with a 350-yard drive that leaves mere mortals gaping in awed wonder, say “Yeah, well it’s about time” and stomp angrily and without celebration to the recalcitrant white sphere that had, until that swing, defied the perfect vision of their will.  I always think hey, nobody’s got a gun to your head here.  If you aren’t having fun, go home and screw your wife. Or your mistress. Go do a line of coke of the dashboard of your Beemer. Life’s too short.

And I guess I feel the same way about us tortured writers – and I’ve fallen into that trap myself.  Unless you’re under contract (and if you are, good for you – that’s a problem the rest of us would kill for) nobody’s got a gun (or a lawyer) to your head either.  Enjoy it a little, willya?  That chunk of copy you just wrote, the one that flowed through you as if you were a divine conduit for the verbal music of the spheres?  Take a second, give yourself a pat on the back, print it out and hand it to somebody and say “Look what I did!”  When you hit a nice shot, celebrate a little. 

Because life’s too short.  Not just metaphorically – really.  If you aren’t having any fun, what’s the point? 

In fourth grade, the nuns assigned our class our first real paper.  Sister Margaret Mary wrote the names of a mess of countries on slips of scrap and dropped them in a box.  You owed her five hundred words on whatever country you pulled.  I got the Congo.  This paper, it was a big deal, maybe half of our Social Studies grade for the quarter, several class periods spent going over formatting, what a footnote was, how many sources we had to use, how to do a bibliography – the basic blocking and tackling of an academic treatise.  Good training I guess, and kudos to Sister Margaret Mary and the other hard-ass nuns that ran Holy Angels School back in the day that they made us do it at that young age.

Thing is, I didn’t think of myself as a writer yet. I was going to be the world’s first shortstop astronaut quarterback.  Don Kessinger was doing that leaping pirouette throw-from-the-hole thing for the Cubbies; the moon missions were just getting going, astronauts had a kind of rock star vibe at the time; and I was a budding Green Bay Packers fan, so Bart Starr – Bart the Cool – he was Zeus in my personal pantheon.  This paper?  It was just homework. And the nuns, in their tender mercies, they sprang this on us in mid-May. My mind was already on vacation, and my body, in those hours it wasn’t imprisoned behind a desk in room 4B, was playing ball.

I did get the first bit done. At least four sources, that was the rule, and only one of them could be an encyclopedia. So I took the bus downtown to the library after school one day, me and Paul Novak, I think, and I grabbed the first four books on the Congo that I saw. Then we went over to Barefoot Charlie’s, which was this weird recycled train-car diner just up Stolp that we weren’t supposed to go to because it was, I dunno, disreputable or something, always these guys hanging out in there that were our dads’ age, but that didn’t look anything like our dads.  Our dads looked like Ward Cleaver. These guys, they were from someplace that Ward Cleaver couldn’t point to on a map.  So we went to Barefoot Charlie’s, and we sat at the counter ordered a couple Cherry Cokes, this being back when Cherry Coke was the kid equivalent of a cocktail, something the counter guy had to mix up for you, not the pre-packaged crap the Coke people are peddling now, and these alien guys, who had all shut up the second we came in, they were staring holes in our backs. So we sucked our Cherry Cokes down in about ten seconds flat, our fourth-grade rectums puckered up tight, hauled ass out of the place and rode the bus back to white-bread land feeling like a couple of tough guy rebels. 

I got home, I put the Congo books on the desk in my room and I went out to shoot baskets in the driveway.  (I was also going to be Jerry West, too, maybe, if I could squeeze it in.)

And all of a sudden, it was next Sunday night, Bonanza was over, the paper was due in the morning, and I hadn’t done shit besides check out the books. I can’t say I’d forgotten about it exactly, this was more like denial, but the sudden immediacy of the looming deadline and the probable consequences of failure froze my bowels in a panicked rictus. My parents were pretty strict on the school thing. They knew about the paper. They’d asked about the paper. They’d nodded affectionately at my assurances concerning my steady progress. Now it was due in twelve hours and the school year was ending three days later. I’d be bringing home my report card and a couple of pages of hastily scrawled gibberish with Sister Margaret Mary’s emphatic F- slapped on the cover page on the very eve of that first, sweet full day of freedom. And, on that day, Paul Novak and my other friends would mount their bikes, their baseball gloves hanging from the handlebars , and pedal off to pursue those glorious ad hoc adventures that comprised a boy’s summer glory in those halcyon days before video game controllers and pixels turned the flower of manly youth into couch-bound zombies. 

They would ride off to those adventures, and I would not.  I was figuring a week, anyway. A week I would spend cleaning the garage and washing the cars and weeding the garden and then cleaning the garage again in a punitive crush of purgatorial labors that would fell Hercules. A week. That week. The first week of summer. It would be like missing the honeymoon. By the time I was paroled, new alliances would have formed, pecking orders would be established, the arbitrary concrete of the informal customs that would govern that summer would have set hard. Somebody else would be playing shortstop. I was destined to three months of right field.

I grabbed the green-and-white spine of the C volume from the set of World Books in the library and trudged up the stairs to my room, hoping I might somehow salvage a C, which was the minimum threshold to escape my pathetic exercise in academic sloth with only a tongue lashing and maybe an extra dollop of yard work. 

I was already a reader. It was inevitable in our household. The place was lousy with books and my dad modeled their enjoyment with such infectious enthusiasm that the habit was inevitable.  But my reading, aside from the requirements of school, which, to date, had been confined to text books, had mostly been of the fiction variety. Fiction or sports stuff.  I used to flip through the encyclopedia all the time, stopping at this picture or that with prurient boyish enthusiasm when I’d hit on a topic like EXECUTIONS, which had this cool old etching of some English guy about to get the ax, or THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, which had that iconic Capra photo of some poor Republican bastard having the top of his head peeled back by a bullet from one of Franco’s goons. But I hadn’t really read much of it.

Until that night. 

The entry on the Congo? It was all right there – geography, history, economy.  Hell, here was exactly what the Sister Margaret Mary was looking for, except too much of it. It turned out the Congo paper wasn’t just my introduction to academic writing, it was my introduction to word counts.  The Congo entry in the World Book? It ran something like eight thousand words.

But I noticed this thing about how it was put together.  In sections.  And at the beginning of each section, there’d be a sentence or two that sort of summed everything up.  If a guy took those sentences and strung them together, that guy’d have a pretty good 500-word paper on the Congo.

That guy’d also be a thief. 

I knew that. I knew that instinctively even before Sister Margaret Mary spent the better part of an afternoon preaching about the evils of plagiarism. About how someone who would steal a man’s ideas was lower than someone who would steal a man’s money because money was just a commodity where  ideas where the very life blood of mankind’s rise from the apes, our reason being the shining gift that God had given us to separate us from all other creatures. How anyone who would steal ideas was rejecting their own humanity and was lower than a worm. 

She was pretty worked up about it, God bless her.

But still, I had to balance being lower than a worm against the possibility of spending the first week of summer cleaning out the garage.  It was no contest, really. I rejected my humanity.  I rejected the hell out of it.             

I cobbled those sentences together, doing a little fourth-grade editing to try to knock off the rough edges.  And I wasn’t an idiot.  Any word I didn’t know, I looked up and then replaced with equivalent words I did know.  I still remember reading the phrase “anti-colonialist fervor” and knowing that would never fly, whatever the hell it was.  So I looked up its component parts and stuck in something about the natives being mad at the Belgians – and then I misspelled Belgians on purpose for a little verisimilitude.

There was the footnote thing – we had to have three, and they had to be from three different sources.  That led to another cool discovery.  These books from the library?  They had these things called indexes in the back.  You could look up something like anti-colonialism in the index, even if you weren’t quite sure what it meant, and BAM!  The index would tell you the exact pages where the author wrote about it.  So you flip to those pages, you find a sentence somewhere that seems to fit in with what you’re writing about (or at least with what the World Book people wrote about), and you get to copy that sentence right into your paper, just as long as you put the little number after it.

Bingo bango bongo, I had a paper about the Congo. 

The only question left?  Would I get away with it. I’d already decided to reject my humanity to escape the draconian consequences of my own failings, so this wasn’t a moral question anymore. It was a practical one.  If I got caught at this, forget a week at hard labor.  I could kiss summer goodbye.  I’d be spending a good chunk of it in summer school, and I’d probably spend the rest cleaning out toilets. With my tongue.  You might even be able to look me up in the World Book someday – under EXECUTIONS. I was at the big-boy table now. I was playing for real stakes.

So I thought about it. 

They didn’t have World Books in the school library.  They had Britannicas.  So Sister Margaret Mary couldn’t check the same entry on the Congo, right?  With the same sentences?  That would be plagiarism.  What kind of pond-scum of a human being would do that?  I mean grown-up human being.  Kids would do it.  Kids had summer to protect.  Grownups didn’t get summer off, so they didn’t have any reason left to risk their humanity.  But could the nuns have another set of encyclopedias?  A secret stash of World Books over at the convent that they used to sandbag idea-thieving devils who were playing the Britannica card?  I decided I was willing to bet no, but, the next day, when Sister Margret Mary prowled the aisles with her hand out to collect our papers, my hand shook a little as I shoved my chips into the pot.  I was four years in to Catholic school. Five, counting kindergarten. I’d learned not to underestimate the sisters’ guile or the elaborate but unseen web of sources by which they could ferret out our every evil no matter how distant from their sight we were during its commission.

I have no words for the gnawing terror of the next few days. I weighed Sister Margaret Mary’s every look and word and intonation for signs of disfavor, but she was a human disfavor factory. I had no way of knowing whether her latest scowl was antecedent to my ruin or just the constant register of her judgment on this heathen assemblage it was her unfortunate duty to shepherd through our daily lessons.

 The appointed hour arrived.  The last day.  She choose to return our papers during those frenzied minutes in which we were charged to empty our desk of everything save those books and supplies that belonged to the school.  I was suddenly thankful for my own sloth, for the accumulation of personal and academic detritus that nearly flooded from the confines of my desk, for I was able to keep my head inside it, its hinged lid propped up on my noggin, while I pulled out paper after paper, dropping them one at a time into the bag at my side.  If I had been one of those neat souls who completed the task in mere seconds, I would have no option but to sit in my seat, watching Sister Margaret Mary’s approach, ever more convinced of my own doom. I would have broken.  When she was a desk or two away, I would have dropped to my knees and confessed my sins, hoping that my pre-emptive confession might somehow blunt the justly earned wrath that was my due. 

Instead, I emptied my papers, one at a time, trying not to breathe, not to move, not to exist. Sister Margaret Mary rapped on the lid of my desk. I lowered it. She handed me my paper and walked on. 

An A.  I not only had gotten away with it, I had pulled off the crime of the century.

But that business about rejecting my humanity?  That stuck with me.  Ruined that first week of summer some.  Well, ruined is a little strong.  Colored a few minutes of it here and there with regret, anyway.

In the coming years, the sisters kept after us with the papers, though.  And here’s what else I learned.  It took me four hours of hard work to plagiarize 500 words, and then cost me three days of gut-ripping anxiety as I awaited my unmasking.  In those same four hours, maybe a shade more, I could write my own 500 words.  And they’d be mine.  I wouldn’t have to be afraid of them. 

A few years on, I found out I could even be proud of them. 

So here’s what really confuses me about these latest plagiarism imbroglios, the ones with this Quentin Rowan and his Fraken-novel and this other chic whose name escapes me who appears to have lifted a fair bit of stuff from some out of print book that covers a lot of the same ground as her latest offering. Go to any of the various blogs or websites that have cataloged their thievery and take a look at the passages they stole.  I didn’t see a single “anti-colonialist fervor” in the lot, not a single passage I would put beyond the skills of any marginally talented writer, much less the sort of transcendent copy that hits you like the first discovery of grace and makes you think “Jesus, I would sell my soul to have written that.” 

But they did sell their souls. Both of them. And they sold them cheap, for stuff they could easily have written themselves.

I don’t get it.  But if Sister Margaret Mary is somewhere reading this belated confession, I pray she feels me worthy of my humanity