Hey folks, I’m so pleased to report that “The Forest Dark” is a finalist in this year’s Reader Views’ Literary Awards. Gay/Lesbian category.
I guess the honors go out next week (March 17, 2014)! Congratulations and good luck to all the finalists in our Gay/Lesbian genre, as well as all the book categories!
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What people really mean is “what is your job?” But so often we take it to mean “What are you?” In America, it’s how people define themselves. Particularly men, but also increasingly, women.
What they really want to ask, is “who are you?” And here in the U.S. especially, we equate our self-identity with our paid employment.
So what if you don’t have that anymore? Or what if you never did? Or what if it changed, significantly?
“I don’t do anything” is not an appropriate answer, as it could just as easily mean you live in a luxury apartment on a trust fund or live under the freeway bridge. Or certainly, a million other scenarios.
For those pursuing artistic endeavors, especially those that do not pay enough to make a living at (and very well never will), we still don’t want to be defined by our day jobs which have no relation to how we think of ourselves. Always a conundrum!
Say, if you work in the typing pool (or, excuse me, the word processing/admin pool) but you’re using your breaks to memorize the Shakespeare lines for Saturday’s showcase, the last thing you want to answer when someone asks that question is “I’m an administrative assistant.” (Not to denigrate the admins out there, but this person has other aspirations that need to be respected.)
There are those who would kill your dreams and insist that you are what you do for money. They may feel they’re realists, but I think they suffer from a lack of imagination and a soul sickness of advanced consumerism.
I’ve found this puzzle is exacerbated when one gets to, what, well, semi-retirement, or is it just classified as self-employment or part-time work as a result of long-term underemployment? Certainly, one doesn’t want to just blurt out: “Ever hear of the Great Recession, underemployment and age discrimination? Huh, buddy? Well lemme tell you a little story. . .”
Because, well, that would sound like you’ve become Debbie Downer, like you had a lot of self-pity (even if on the face of it it’s pretty darn accurate for millions of people in this country and around the world and god knows you must remain chipper at all times) but there’s also the stigma of the word “retirement.” Eeek.
That old definition just screams visions of ill-fitting shorts and golf, cocktail hours with Hawaiian shirts and leis, hours of television in the afternoon. None of which sounds like something to look forward to, at least not to me.
So we avoid that word right now and say instead: we’re moving on to a new chapter in life, which will likely include some work, some creativity, and some leisure. We don’t know exactly what it will look like yet, but it will be different from what came before, and probably endlessly changing.
So, I am a writer. There needs to be no qualifiers or caveats (i.e., “I used to have a long career in PR” or “But I have a part-time job in the design sector” or whatever). This stands on its own.
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Everyone on the road breaks the law – right, drivers, bicyclists, even pedestrians, right?
Why is the default “person with the rights” always the motorist? Why should it be that way?
The Blogger, with chariot at night.
I feel like an idiot not going through red lights when there’s nothing coming. If I were a pedestrian, I’d cross. Of course. But bicyclists are supposed to follow the rules of the road.
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So, I most often just stand there like a statue until the light changes. Exceptions: middle of the night when there’s no traffic. Rain (and we know how often that happens. . . ). Being chased by a crazy mofo’ type of whatever persuasion (usually does not happen to me at my age – silver hair and all that, but you never know).
If you asked me whether I thought bicyclists SHOULD BE allowed to go through red lights, I think I’d say no. Even though it would obviously benefit me on a bike in regards to trip timing, there’s a significant downside and it’s this: Riders need to be predictable to drivers. Since most of us in L.A. do both, from time to time (ride and drive) we know you can’t base any kind of driving philosophy on another moving object’s unpredictable behavior, I mean, that’s just nuts.
Drivers don’t like us already. Pedestrians, not much either (sometimes we must take to the sidewalks just to remain alive). So I’d say let’s not push it.
Instead, what I’d love to see is something like other cities have (well, like Berlin, anyway, cause I saw it there), which is dedicated and separated bicycle paths with their own signals, etc., built right into the infrastructure.
L.A. really does have so much potential there as a great biking town: mostly flat (that mountain range that bisects the city notwithstanding), great weather – warm and mostly dry, a well-developed road system.
Hopefully with more activism of the type describe in the linked article, we’ll get there sooner. Even if we have to wait for stoplights.
A little plug for friend Jason Jenn‘s one man show celebrating the poetry of James Broughton, “Ecstasy for Everyone,” playing at Spirit Studio in Silver Lake this February and March — with further dates and cities to be announced.
Was so happy to go and hear these words as spoken and sung by Jason — I did not know much about Broughton before and certainly still don’t know a lot, but I got a great introduction. From Jason’s program: “The sacred and the profane, united and whole, with love. What spoke to me so profoundly about James’ work was its unabashed sense of spiritual and sexual liberation. It may have taken most of his life to come to the full extent of that expression, but the themes are played with throughout his life’s work: that spirituality and sexuality can co-exist harmoniously as well as our masculine and feminine energies within — and that they must or we merely perpetuate the terrible war of duality. So here we are this evening, tucked away in a dark corner of the searchlight skies and marquee-light boulevards of Los Angeles, inside an intimate spiritual community center to celebrate both aspects of our human nature, the divine heights and the earthly delights.”
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Go! (to find out about more/future performances, check out HiveWorld.org)
The latest in my series of publishing biography information for my fictional characters in The Forest Dark. Louis Ronald Reagan von Eiff White was probably the hardest persona for me as the writer to inhabit — a 24 year old, in 2009. He’s a mixed-race, heterosexual man-boy. Harder for me to write than a fifty-something woman (Eden von Eiff, his mother)? I think it was. At times anyway, though not always.
It’s funny, since those of us older than our 20s have lived through all that and much more, we think, “oh sure, I remember what it was like.” But the truth is we really don’t think the way we used to when we were younger, and it’s difficult to conjure up. There are those who seem to have an affinity for certain life periods (thinking of someone like the late filmmaker John Hughes, who had that knack to immediately dredge back high school, to fantastic effect).
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No really what does he look like? Well, I knew he came from a similar situation as this guy:
The Most Powerful Man in the World
But he was much younger and has a certain accoutrement (you’ll have to read the book) – but then I saw this commercial (which I thought was great, btw) and I realized that this is not far from what my intention was with Louie White – though Dante de Blasio is still a teenager:
So what do you need to know about Louis White? Well —
he’s proficient at surfing.
he has a best friend named Zeke
he has a girlfriend, Stephanie, who he met in high school
he has a slight inferiority complex – resulting from the rejection of his mother
he is the best kind of cool because he’s totally unaware of it
he’s actually talented in the same way that his mother is
he tweets, and has quite a following
he writes an award-winning blog at 24
never knew his father, but touts his Cuban heritage anyway
he has a ‘fro (not at all unlike Dante)
I think he’s somewhat passive/aggressive
he’s also charismatic and knows how to work it
he has no good adult role models but craves them; his closest relationship is with a crazy middle-aged white gay man
A pretty interesting and fun character for me to write. Certain folks have said I should base a series of books on him. Not sure about that but it’s intriguing. New review of Forest Dark here.
Herewith: an introvert’s experiences with the teamplayeritis that infects Corporate America.
I’m not aware of any research that suggests teams are the optimal way to organize work or businesses – please enlighten me if you have them, send them my way, and I will link and then apologize, for perhaps not being a team player or just being lazy. (Which, no doubt, is probably a big sin in teamplayer land.)
Why was I thinking of this? I was probably ruminating on the benefits of the current part-time job I have, which is for a small business, as in really small, one owner and several part-time consultants — and how different that is than places I’ve worked in the past.
WTF is it with the sports metaphors, anyway? Management types must know in their dark hearts how even the thought that our work is going to be organized like a high school sports team will only elicit nausea in a not insignificant portion of the evolving “team.”
And they will hate your sorry ass for it. Never ever forgiving you.
And the language they use to pepper the day with: “touch base;” “Mary hit one out of the park;” “That’s a slam dunk;” “do a hole in one with this project, guys” and my uber-hated favorite of all time: “at the end of the day” — which always seemed to me to be default language that makes a conclusion sound “true,” whether it is or not.
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Please. These are jobs, not teams. The only reason the vast majority of your people work there is that’s what they must do to pay for food and a roof over their head. Nobody with a life outside of work really gives a flying fuck about your team.
Teamplayeritis deleterious effects:
Staying late. Nobody wants to be the first to leave for the day! Whether you have to make it home to feed the kids (or the dog), go to sports practice, a movie or just a few blessed minutes to take a short nap, the first to leave is invariably thought of as NOT a TEAM PLAYER. Cause they wouldn’t leave if they were.
Meetings, meetings, meetings! I think people at corporations hold regular meetings where nothing gets done because they want to create the illusion that what they’re spending their day doing is important, or that it serves some purpose. Usually, I found meetings useless. Then again, it’s a way to fill time if you have to stay at the job all day long. You probably could get the work done in one or two hours, but you had to stay all day. Why, again?
Agreeing. People agree with you (in corporations) for all sorts of reasons. They may want a raise (if you’re the boss) or a promotion. They may want to be your friend or hope to have sex with you. They may just want you to shut up and it’s the path of least resistance. Actually agreeing with your position on an issue may not be a part of it at all.
Here we have dedicated and engaged team players about to come to a consensus in their beautiful hotel ballroom meeting area.
Consensus. Like a group “agreeing.” Not valid, know why? Because it’s fraught with attrition. Teamplayers are practically frothing at the mouth to get out of whatever seminar/meeting requires the consensus, so they’ll nod to just about anything. Even if they don’t concur.
The loudest person wins. Now I know there’s science behind this one, I actually remember it from Sociology 101 back in undergrad. If you don’t believe me here, listen to talk radio or watch Fox Hate News. The loudest idiot on the team — not the smartest necessarily or the one with most insights/experience — most often wins. For those to whom teamplayeritis comes naturally, developing a hog-calling voice may be the best advice.
Favors extroverts. See loudest, above. American business values people who have extroverted personalities, and those who are quieter or introverts are pushed aside and often mistrusted. “What is wrong with her? Why is she so quiet? Is he a psycho?” etc. This is simply not fair or good business – introverted personalities are often those who come up with brilliant solutions to problems. On. Their. Own.
False values in hiring. HR departments, and hiring managers themselves, almost always ask the question about giving examples of when you were a great team player and how you worked so well with others. Truthful or hesitant answers to these questions will screen out those lone wolves who may make a great leap forward for your organization – and all because you subscribe to the idea that it’s always a good idea to work in teams.
Back to my novel The Forest Dark, and the bios of main characters.
The story is about the long-term friendship of a gay man with a straight woman – the woman, Eden von Eiff, we talked about here.
The man, fictional Noah Baldock, had several influences. I based him mostly on an idea of a beloved old boyfriend of mine who’s been dead for over 20 years. I posed the question: what would Mr. X be like, if instead of dying in his 30s, he’d survived and grew into middle age?
Same personality I remembered, but older. How age changes people: some traits get worse, some better. Some softer, other emotions more pronounced. So, really, it’s not based on a real person, rather what my imagining someone would be like who’s no longer with us.
I suspect there’s a bit of Noah in me, too, but I do feel I’m not as angry as he is.
Here’s some things you should know about Noah Baldock:
He grew up in Middleton, which is a suburb of Madison, Wisconsin.
He’s a ginger – actually, he’s a redhead, they didn’t call them gingers back then. In the second part of the book, he’s got reddish gray hair.
Noah’s got some serious anger issues.
Also he’s got some honesty issues, can you say “unreliable narrator?”
He thinks of himself as Louie’s father, even though he’s not related.
He’s a crackerjack shot.
He was gay bashed, and that forever changed him.
He likes to go to comedy clubs, loves watching standup, though he may not do it in the pages of the book.
He likes to listen to Frank Sinatra, unusual for someone of his generation.
He loves cats, but won’t admit it.
He’s got a major, Big Secret. Want to find out what that is? You will have to read the book!
More Forest Dark bios to come.
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It’s very much a ‘hood thing, as in, you walk around where you live. If it indeed is something more recent, it harkens back to what the Los Angeles area originally was: a bunch of small towns that grew together forming one huge megalopolis.
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And since the megalopolis isn’t possible to walk through (well, not without a tent and provisions, anyway) people find that they walk and live in their walkable neighborhood, whether it be Los Feliz, DTLA, Koreatown, or Palms (which, oddly, has a very respectable Walkscore for L.A. – who’d think that a westside neighborhood would?).
And so it is totally possible. In my 30+ years of living in Los Angeles (mostly, there was a several year detour to SF and also time spent in Palm Springs) I have noticed there are more people walking. One reason could be that the city itself has grown by nearly a million people in the last 30 years (the county has grown by 2.5 million) so there’s just more people, period, whether driving or walking or on the bus or train or what have you.
And the city has made itself more amenable to walking. In those last 30 years, there’s been an explosion of outdoor seating at restaurants, something that oddly wasn’t the case before that. Other neighborhoods have taken Westwood’s lead and encouraged small business district walking. I think the Metro has a lot to do with it – not only the location of subway and train stops, but also the alignment and total system coordination of local and rapid buses with Metrorail and regional trains is something that’s relatively new.
So we’re truly Back to the Future — a lot of the new rail lines are being built where long before there were Pacific Railway routes — and we discovered the most important thing was that they had it right to begin with. It’s great that you can have a human scale to the place you actually find yourself living.
I think that the L.A. “lifestyle” as presented to me as a newcomer in 1981 and the subject of cliche — the surf in the morning, ski in the afternoon, have dinner by the beach, etc. which absolutely depended on fast automobile transportation is just a thing of the past – it’s just not possible anymore without a helicopter. That’s not a bad thing. Come to think of it, we’ve got to work on getting all the helicopters out of the sky as well.
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I’m not aware of any research that suggests teams are the optimal way to organize work or businesses – please enlighten me if you have them, send them my way, and I will link and then apologize, for perhaps not being a team player or just being lazy. (Which, no doubt, is probably a big sin in teamplayer land.)
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