My friend Jeff Bennington hosted my essay on unreasonable belief and spreading the word about your passion.
TOP TEN: Halloween’s almost here! Get slutty! Rob a bank! Show me them titties!
Things to consider for Halloween:
1. If you’re too old to go out begging for heart disease, convince your kids they might be allergic to nuts. There’s so much hysteria…excuse me…”awareness” at school that your precious children will gladly give up the Oh Henrys without a fight. You’re implicitly threatening them with asphyxiation and a horrible death, after all. The rest of the year, you have to be much less subtle in threatening your children with asphyxiation and horrible death.
2. You want diabetes. You’re using Halloween to speed your way to your sexy, blind amputee fetish. I understand. But if you’re too old to go out and beg for dependency on an insulin syringe, at least put a lot of effort into the costume if you want candy from me. Occasionally some older teens will show up at the door on Halloween and they don’t have a costume at all. “Sullen, entitled teen” is not a costume. Do that and I’m going to have to see your tits before I give up the candy. (“Show me them titties!” so weirded out that bunch of seventeen-year-old boys last year, they probably gave up on trick or treating altogether. You’re welcome.)
3. And goths? You dress like that every day. Not a costume. Show up all smiley and “Up with people!” and I’ll reconsider. Or “Show me them titties!”
4. Slutty costumes. I’m no prude. Hell, I wrote three books with “sex” in the title. Still, Halloween used to be about scaring small children. When did the costume store turn into competition for a Stag Shop? It’s not that I object to sexy nurses, sexy firefighters and sexy veterinarians experimenting with animal husbandry. (I’m especially in favour of sexy nurses. In fact, I think that should be the rule whenever anyone goes to the hospital. Give those leukaemia kids extra motivation to make it!) But slutty is all the costume shop offers! How am I to terrify small children and haunt their nightmares? (Come to think of it, if I squeeze my ass into the sexy veterinarian’s costume, that might do the job.)
5. I’m sorry, but I cannot accept any representation from the Twilight series as an acceptable costume. If you’re going to go vampire, it’s classic Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Buffy or nothing. Edward is more emo whiner than vampire. Show up as Spike and you get extra candy bars. In a more perfect world, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would never have ended. Ever. And Joss Whedon would rule the earth as a benevolent dictator and the economy would be based on comedy-horror-dramatic entertainment alone and the world’s hungry would be catered to at the craft services table. Sigh.
6. Homemade costumes score more points and therefore earn you more candy. Mr. Miyagi made Daniel a costume with a shower curtain for the Halloween dance so he could hide from the Cobra Kai gang and that rocked. Then Mr. Miyagi beat the shit out of Cobra Kais that same night, which rocked harder. When I beat up local teenagers, people say it’s “wrong.” What is that?
7. The ninja thing? It’s over. It died when Sho Kosugi killed it with the movie Pray for Death in 1985. Let. It. Go.
8. To you, does Halloween mean throwing eggs and toilet papering houses and soaping windows and petty acts of vandalism? I feel for you, little buddy. For me, Halloween means shooting vandals with a double-barrelled .12 gauge filled with rock salt and then burying you alive in the local cemetery à la The Bride in Kill Bill Volume II. We’re misunderstood is what we are.
9. It’s Halloween. Don’t give out an apple or toothbrushes or pencils. This is about Death. Honor the holiday properly. You see all those pretty fallen leaves? Death is everywhere and we laugh at mortality by walking around the neighbourhood dressed as the ghosts we will all be someday too soon! We stomp and crunch the pretty orange, red and yellow leaves and tell ourselves that drying up and blowing away and dying means nothing! Nothing, GODDAMNIT! Ahem…excuse me. I seem to have something in my eye…
10. And finally, this Halloween is a great time to rob a bank. The economy’s lousy and let’s face it, the bank robbed you first. This Halloween falls on a weekday, so grab a mask (I like the V for Vendetta mask and cape), roll on down to your local bank close to closing time, and do the logical thing to feed your family and buy a new iPhone. (It’s so worth the risk because you can talk to the new iPhone and it will talk back, thus severing any need for human contact, friendship and all that icky interaction your family insists upon.) Have another costume ready in the getaway car to switch into and to throw off the cops. This strategy works best if you’re a midget so you can blend in with the early evening toddler crowd dressed up as princesses and doggies and pumpkins.
You’re welcome.
Have you read the free book excerpt from Self-help for Stoners, Stuff to Read When You’re High yet? No?
Click here to read about Legs Gabrielle’s quest for respect.
Luck
No one seems to acknowledge luck in the making of their success. Every bonehead who wins Survivor calls themselves brilliant at the finale, but everyone knows the truth. Each winner could have been tossed off the island many times, forced to shamble along the Walk of Shame. As Douglas MacArthur said, “In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.” It’s true for everything else, too. We’re to all as brilliant as we’d like to think. (Corollary: Often we lose, but that doesn’t mean we suck as human beings, either, so cheer up.)
Daughter #1 saw an old newspaper story about me on the wall and asked if that was my proudest moment.
“Nah. You and your brother are my biggest accomplishments.” Yes, this is the obligatory answer, but it’s also true.
“What’s next?”
“Conning your mother into thinking I was the best she could do.”
Long story short: I went for a walk a long time ago at the University of Ottawa. Had I turned right or left at just the wrong time, The Saint/Hottie/She Who Must Be Obeyed and I would never have gotten together. I didn’t know it then, but I had one shot that fateful night. What if I’d gone east instead of west? What if I’d waited another hour or not gone out at all? I often think how easily things could have gone another way. I’m sure I would have ended up in Toronto anyhow, but I’d probably still be there now in an awful job paying alimony to a couple of angry ex-wives.
“What’s your next biggest accomplishment?” Daughter #1 persisted.
At this point, I started to panic that she was looking for a list of ten or something insurmountable like that. “Uh…early in my career, back when I was a healer, I got a woman out of a wheelchair.”
“Why aren’t you still doing that since you were so good at it?”
Kids. They sure make you sweat. “I think…” I said, having no idea what I’d say next, “that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it forever.” Also, being a healer is outlawed by my alternative health profession. I found that I was constrained by my profession as a massage therapist to a more technical approach since my return to Ontario. I peaked early and did my very best work in the first four years of practice when I wasn’t under The Man’s thumb. It chafes, that gap between the ineffable and the bureaucratic. That work was right at the right time, but that suit doesn’t fit anymore. I’ve changed and so has the profession of massage therapy in 20 years. I haven’t liked where it’s been going and needed to break out.
I need to assert my indie-pendance. And here I am starting Ex Parte Press and writing books and putting them out there and being the real me.
But that suggests I planned something. I didn’t plan anything. I fell into things. I succumbed. More decisions were forced upon me than I made proactively. In short, I lucked out.
I have been following my heart and writing for free or writing for very little for some time. Thank Zeus I didn’t send out any of my novels and get accepted somewhere. I might have gotten locked in prematurely to a bad deal with a publisher. Now is a great time to be a writer and get on the self-publishing train. I wasn’t waiting in any conscious way. My career path is not strategic. I just kept writing books without submitting them, preparing for forming this company and publishing my stuff on my own. I didn’t know I was preparing for the future. I was just answering my heart’s call.
That’s how I fell into being a healer, too. Now I’m falling into this soft place where I hide in my basement bunker and write or type (and sometimes I don’t know which of those things I’m doing.) I hope the luck will be the good kind again.
Obi-Wan didn’t believe in luck. But he was a suicidal Jedi who couldn’t manage to kill a guy he chopped up and left to die by a lake of fire. Who cares what that loser thinks? If you’re going to kill Darth Vader, you better have the guts to finish the job!
What We Can’t Do is Wait
I used to be entranced, like a deer in Time’s headlights, with the idea of “paying dues.”
People in positions of power, older people, and a lot of losers used that phrase a lot. In case you’re wondering, I fell into the category of loser because I believed it. A lot of people denigrate the “kids” in the Occupy Wall Street protests. We’re told twenty-year-olds don’t have fully developed brains and when we’re young we don’t know the ways of the world. Well, fuck that. A bunch of twenty to twenty-five-year-olds were largely responsible for getting Apollo rockets into space. The young may not know the ways of the world, but they have adult responsibilities. Very young people are killing for their nations, going to jail, getting executed and being kept down by the established order. No wonder they’re pissed. (Thankfully, after the young led the charge, many much older people are recognizing they, too, are the 99% and have joined in the cause and lent their experience from the sixties civil rights struggle.)
If you’re young, don’t wait for someone else’s approval to follow your heart’s desire. Take action. If you’re old, please don’t dampen their enthusiasm with caution. (You probably didn’t. A bunch of you went to war.) Being young is risky and it’s the perfect time to risk more, not less. When I was in my twenties, I did a lot of low-level grunt work in newspapers and magazines and books. I once went to a job interview where the publisher told me I wouldn’t get to have an opinion for seven years. He figured it would take that long before I would be worthy to even utter a single opinion. Really. I told him I guessed I’d just go to med school. At least there they let you start saving lives much earlier in the learning process.
I believe in learning. But I believe in learning by doing. For instance, I went to journalism school for four years, but two weeks on the job at a daily newspaper pretty much equalled those four expensive years. University, for me, was not ultimately about getting a marketable skill. It was to enjoy myself for four years while delaying entry into the workforce. And no wonder. Look what awaited me. Grunt jobs where some self-regarding asshole tells you that you don’t get to have an opinion until you’re thirty-three.
Life is short. We don’t have time for delays. We think of Einstein as a much-lauded old man, but he came up with the theory of relativity when he was young and surprisingly sexed up. The brilliant people I know now in their forties were just as bright and ready to contribute in their twenties. Young people change the world while older people often try to keep things the same. (Not all old people, but there’s an easily recognized pattern there.) Instead of being active mentors, many mid-level managers try to dampen youthful energy in the name of systems and organization. Meanwhile, the CEO started the company out of his parents’ garage when he was seventeen and packed full of that same creative enthusiasm for innovation.
Sadly, in my twenties, I wasn’t one of the strong ones. I believed the lies that respected established power and past accomplishment more than new, personal and future accomplishment. I was told to wait and I did. I kept apprenticing while a young Kevin Smith went out and took risks and made movies and a young Neil Gaiman wrote comics.
I’m writing full-time now. I wish I’d started younger. I wish I had a time machine. (I’d also stop myself from buying parachute pants. That was also a terrible mistake.)
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.
The next best time? Today.