Dave Dumanis's Blog

To celebrate both my birthday and the release of my latest book Drinking from the Firehose, most of my books will be free on Amazon from January 26th through January 30th.

Free titles will include: Drinking from the Firehose, Mona Liebowitz, A Plague of Boils, Lucid Screaming, American Beehive, 51, and my best-known title, Nine Lives by Paul Varjak by Dave Dumanis, a realization of the famous fictional short story collection featured in the classic film Breakfast at Tiffany's. 

Go get 'em, folks!

Only Kindle Editions will be free. Sorry, no free paperbacks. 

Please join me in cracking open the bubbly (California rouge, please) for my new book, Drinking from the Firehose: Berning Social Media Posts from the 2015-2016 Election. 

During the past year and a half, politics took over my life as I became involved with Bernie Sanders campaign. I'd never been involved with politics before except as a voter. Suddenly I was researching news stories and doing my best to publicize them, as well as to debunk smear propaganda from well-funded corporate Democrats as well as from Republicans. 

I felt like I was trying to put out a fire that was happening on both sides of the political aisle, with the firehose itself always threatening to wrest away from my control at any moment. Fortunately I held a day job that required very little of my time, so I could spend the rest of it commenting on the news of the day, using my Facebook account to spread the word among like-minded resisters who wanted the United States to join civilized countries around the world in providing guaranteed healthcare, free college, and publicly funded elections, while making the rich and corporations pay their fair share. These didn't seem like particularly radical ideas to me. 

Eventually this hose spray became such a torrent that, on a friend's suggestion, I compiled all the posts, as well as a few memes I created, into a book. By turns angry, funny, nasty, passionate and frantic, a cry against the oligarchy that Bernie Sanders named on national TV even though every Democrat, Republican and big news media outlet tried to stop him, it's now available for your reading pleasure. I invite your interest. 

I’ll bet you wish you were me, because I’m paid to daydream.  

Not only that, but my daydreaming is largely responsible for my taking a trip around the world with the beautiful woman who became my wife!

    Please let me explain. And please don’t hate me.

As a professional creative person, my job is daydreaming,  more or less. I’ve engineered my life that way, quite deliberately, even though it’s sometimes more pressure or stress than it otherwise would be and even though it took me a long time to break in. I get to write and use my imagination, and think of nifty words and images, and original, slightly amusing ways to say things, and I get paid for it. There’s a kind of natural surrealism or magical realism tendency to the way I think, so it works for me. I’m fortunate enough to have a job many people would kill for.

    That doesn’t mean everything’s a hundred percent rosy all the time, though. If I finish all my work and am not busy, which happens frequently, I still have to appear busy; otherwise, the powers that be may get suspicious. They may not be able to understand that something that a headline that would take them six hours to come up with takes me a mere six minutes—or that, conversely, I may have stayed up all night racking my brains and losing sleep to write the same headline, even though they only witness the six minutes of actual transcription that happened during daylight hours.

    So I camouflage my lack of busy-ness, by spending time on news and social websites of various kinds, or by reading books online, or by writing books as well as blogs like this one. But sometimes, in spite of all this, the boredom becomes apparent. It was during one recent stretch of such months-long boredom that I wrote my book of short bite-size pieces, LUCID SCREAMING: A DAYDREAM DIARY.

    But things weren’t always this way. Back in 1995, I hadn’t yet learn how to camouflage my daydreaming. And with the Internet yet to be adopted by most businesses, the agency that employed me had not outfitted their computers with a web browser, leaving me to fill my spare time the old-fashioned way, by leafing through books and magazines.

Some of those books were the vaunted award annuals that creatives often leafed through looking to pilfer old work and make it their own with slight tweaks, so they didn’t have to take any chances on something new. But many of them were just books that I personally wanted to read. And I either didn’t have an office door to shut, or didn’t want to appear snobbish beyond my tenure by deigning to shut it—I can’t remember which.

    Eventually, one Monday in 1995, exactly two weeks after my wife had been laid off from her job selling braille signage to banks and offices, I was called into my boss’s office and told that I, too, had been laid off from my job. The reason was that I had been spotted too many times reading non-professional materials or just plain goofing off. I was therefore thought by upper management to be redundant, even though my partner and I I produced far more, better, and faster campaign concepts than most of the other talent and were much less precious about the way we presented them.

(Far too often, I found, a mediocre ad concept was given a huge build-up and thrown a fancy party as though it were pure genius. And almost as often, the audience to whom it was presented bought it as pure genius too, just because it was presented that way—like wrapping a turd in gold wrapping paper to the great delight of the recipient.)

    I ran across the street to get an enormous peanut butter and chocolate smoothie, then walked to a phone booth (they still had those then) and called my wife. We had a quick chat on the way home: we could either stay home and scramble for jobs, we said. Or, we could pool our savings and spend six months in Europe.

    And that’s exactly what we did. We spend half a year traveling in Turkey, Greece, England, Ireland, Scotland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Spain, and France. We camped, and picnicked, and hiked to dozens of historic spots, and had a blast.

And in fact, we decided to get married shortly thereafter—if we could stand each other for five months and even have a good time, we thought, we can do it for life.

And it’s all thanks to my deep and unconquerable need to daydream—job or no job.

    LUCID SCREAMING: A DAYDREAM DIARY is available for Kindle at Amazon.

My special Kindle promotion ends today, October 12th.

You can download Kindle editions for any or all of these books for free, if you do it today: Obsessed, Lucid Screaming, 51, Mona Liebowitz, Nine Lives, A Plague of Boils.

If you download one and enjoy it, please leave a short review. Thank you!

Six of my titles are free for Kindle until Monday the 12th:

- Lucid Screaming (new!)

- 51

- Nine Lives

- Mona Liebowitz

- A Plague of Boils

- Obsessed

Get your copies while they last! 

Thanks for following my posts with excerpts from LUCID SCREAMING: A DAYDREAM DIARY.

The whole thing is now available for Kindle. $1.99 on Amazon.

This is a book of microstories, daydreams if you will. Some are magical realism, others are nightmares, and yet others are based in reality yet ever so slightly disturbing.

Just two bucks gets you the whole bucket of literary popcorn. 

Thanks for supporting literature that stretches the imagination—and the boundaries of storytelling itself. 

I am a child at a party. A clown is twisting balloons into animal shapes. Poodles, giraffes, elephants. Standard stuff. The party drags on and on. It’s a party for kind of a boring, nondescript kid, and sure enough it’s exactly the kind of boring, nondescript party everyone thought he would have.

Eventually it begins to strike me that the party has gone on for eight hours straight and the clown has been twisting up balloons for at least that long. He is manic and indefatigable and shows no sign of stopping. The balloons are now waist-high, and are starting dominate the room with their bright colors and shiny surfaces.

The clown is relentless, and in spite of mothers and kids grimacing and pointedly looking at their watches, the party is just not winding down. I am terrified that a wall of balloons is going to envelop and surround us and no one will be able to escape it, and sure enough that seems to be exactly what is happening.

There is only one solution to this mess and I have it. Reaching deep down inside my front trouser pocket I produce a safety pin. I’m not sure exactly why it was there—probably for safety. Safety first. I squeeze the pin to release its point from the little round casing that holds it, then begin brandishing it about and, gritting my teeth and holding my breath, pop the balloons one by one. First I do it gingerly, then faster and faster.

The noise is deafening, pop after pop after pop as the hippos and tigers turn into play little pieces of torn colored rubber like used condoms after an orgy. And when the pops stop, I am left there alone in the room. The partiers and clown have cleared out. It’s just me, the boy with the safety pin, just doing what I do, popping everyone else’s balloon. No one ever wants to stick around for that.  

Determinedly I begin cleaning up the multicolored mess.

*

           I am driving a getaway car. I’m zooming along at what feels like a thousand miles an hour in the immortal words of Jonathan Richman. All the windows are open and the air is hitting my face in an unstoppable stream, bugs and all. What am I getting away from, exactly? The answer is that I don’t know. I have no way of knowing, in fact, and there’s no one to ask. Yet I’m driving the car, which is extremely disconcerting. I look from side to side, using my peripheral vision. The 500 psi winds sting my eyes and I have to squint to keep from losing vision completely.

           Amazingly, we haven’t crashed yet. That is, it’s amazing considering that I can’t see anything out of the windshield or any of the windows.  Everything is a blue blur. I’m somehow driving by pure feel, even at this ridiculous speed. And who is joining me? Who are my partners in crime and fellow getaway artists? I look around at the other seats but I can’t really tell their gender, age, race, anything at all. They do all seem to be wearing black, and I believe they’re all wearing rubber Halloween masks. I wasn’t even aware that anyone made rubber Halloween masks anymore, so that’s remarkable right there.

           I start to slow down and pull over now. I don’t know how I knew to do that. No one told me to, and I didn’t see any road signs. It just seemed like the right place to do it. As I slow, I can see what looks like an abandoned roadside burger shack. The sign is boarded up, making it impossible to make out the name, and so are the windows.

           When I park the car and yank up the parking brake, which makes a nasty skittery clicking noise like an insect carapace, I can finally take a look around at my fellow passengers. What I thought were Halloween masks are really just their faces. One is an old man, one is an old lady, and one is a kind of vampire but with a single, giant cycloptic eye on its forehead. These sorry bastards, I think. These horrible faces will never come off. They’re stuck with them forever.

           Then I realize that if they have these faces, whatever face I’ve been stuck with is probably equally horrible. I check the rear view mirror. I have no face. Zero face. I can’t see anything where my head is. I’m invisible, at least from the neck up. This is horrifying and at the same time relieving. I don’t have to worry about anyone recognizing me, whether I have combed my hair that day, whether I have a zit.  A whole host of lifelong worries are gone for good.

           “I am the man with no face,” I say pretentiously, trying out the phrase like Vincent Price at a table read. I get no reaction from the passengers. They’re used to looking a little odd.

           Then I realize that I’ve given the cops a chance to catch up. What will they do if they catch me? I really don’t know, since I have no inkling of what I did. The safe assumption is that I, we, robbed a bank—whenever you see getaway cars in movies, that’s generally why. Yet, suspiciously, there are no bags of money tied at the top with string and marked with giant dollar signs.  In fact, there’s no sign of any cash anywhere. Certainly there’s none in my pockets.

           “Where’s the money?” I ask. But no one responds, or seems to know what I’m talking about. They may not even speak English.

           Now all that’s left is to wait for the police to come. I look behind me nervously, through the back windshield.  I hear no sirens, just the whistle of cars going by. And then, growing louder and louder, an ominous series of beeps and buzzes, repeated over and over. Whatever it is, it is so large that it is now blocking out the back windshield and all I can see is black. The beeps and buzzes penetrate our eardrums and turn our brains to yogurt.

Nothing to see here, folks. Show’s over. Move along.

I just signed with an agency in New York, and they want me to be active on social media. That means posting reviews—readers attract more readers. So I could use your help. It won't take but a few moments. 

If you've read my books, and you like them, please post a review on the appropriate Amazon page(s). Here's my general Author Page to get you started:

http://www.amazon.com/Dave-Dumanis/e/...

Your review doesn't have to be long. Just "Read it, it's great" or something like that will do just peachy. 

I thank you.

I am a fish riding on the waves, not a care or worry in the world except eating, eating, eating. Swim to eat, eat to swim. I am a swimming and eating machine. I eat smaller fish, their eggs, bugs and flies, whatever comes my way. Now, some may have noticed that I don’t really seem to have any real overall goals. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that my little brain is incapable of such concepts. I think in small bites and chunks, and I’m happy to do so. I find that time passes more quickly, and life is generally more enjoyable.

    Today, I pass something that looks a little like a bug, but just not quite. It’s dangly, and shiny, and spinny, and very eye-catching and hypnotic. It has four extremely pointy legs. I’ve never seen a bug quite like it.  Should I eat this? I wonder. I am so hungry. I’m always hungry, after all. But I also don’t want to poison myself.

Eat it? Don’t eat it? Eat it? Don’t eat it? Eat it? Don’t eat it?

    Finally I break down and eat it. I’m only ichthyoid, after all. If I’m hungry and there’s a tempting morsel nearby, I’m going to go for it. Hm… does not taste at all like I anticipated. It’s hard, not soft… Pointy, not crunchy and yielding… Metallic, not delectable, nutty and shrimplike.

    Okay, now I’m tasting something. Mmm, that’s delicious. So rich and filled with nutrients. Yes, that’s delightful.

    Oh, wait. That’s my own blood.

Fuck. That’s the taste of my own blood in my mouth.

Fuck fuck fuck.

    I’m swallowing my own blood. I’m actually eating my own blood. This cannot be good.

    Okay, now I’m swallowing but there’s more blood coming, and more and more. The more I drink the more appears. This really cannot be good.

    OK, I’ve made up my mind that this is not food. It may actually be poison. I feel that my mouth has been poisoned, since it’s in great pain. I’ve never been in this situation before and am not quite sure how to react, but I am sure that I’m hungry. So hungry! In fact I’m going to try to bite this again, because after all it’s only a special kind of bug and it can’t really hurt me.

    Ow again! OK, that was really horribly painful. Let me wiggle to get myself free. It’s much more difficult this time. OK, there, I did it! Finally! A few currents of warm water roll by, too warm for my taste. I wait until they pass. There, they’re gone. Now—ack, there’s that taste of blood again!—now I can get back to the agenda at hand, which is taking a nice big bite out of this delicious-looking silver bug in front of me! Yum!

    Um. Okay. I have to never, never, ever do that again. That was horrible and self-destructive and just completely wrong. I am literally destroying the inside of my mouth with pain and suffering and blood. And for what? Why would I do such a thing? Simply to taste an extra-large and delicious, shiny, meaty bug that I have never tasted before and will probably never taste again? Is that really good enough reason?

    Chomp.

    Okay. I have now officially shredded my mouth to pieces and am bleeding profusely out of what used to be my mouth and is now nothing more than a giant hole in the front of my head out of which a roiling cloud of red is flowing out and rising up in front of my eyes. I can taste my guts, as they, too, come pouring out of that hole. This is horrible. Dead, dead, dead, in a few moments I will be fucking dead. I am losing consciousness. Vision is becoming blurry and fuzzy, and I am alternately cognizant/not cognizant of other fish and plants around me, as I blink in and out of the void.

    But you know what I have enough consciousness left to do? Just barely? Take an enormous, delicious bite of this incredibly sumptuous feast of a BRAND NEW BIG SILVER BUG that fortune has deemed fit to lay out before me in all its bounty.

    Praise the Lord and pass the sauce!

Typing pool. 1950’s. I am a paper waitress. I roll a sheet of paper into my IBM Selectric, put ink marks on it at 100 words per minute, and roll it out again, often with three or four carbon copies. I do this all day long, my fingers smudged black with carbon and white with correction fluid. If I showed you my fingertips, you would see black and white. And that is how I view the world: In black and white.

    I smoke, almost constantly. Philip Morris, a brand at the height of its popularity thanks to being advertised on the new interracial marriage comedy show I Love Lucy. Oh, how I love that wacky Cuban. All the secretaries have a secret crush on him. And I drink. Pink Ladies and White Russians and Blue Hawaiis. If it has a color in its name, I drink it. My life may be black and white, but my drinks are in technicolor.

    This particular day, I’ve come into the office to see all the other secretaries staring at a bug. It’s a particularly large cockroach. I’ve never even seen any cockroaches in the office, much less a big one, yet here one is. It’s the size of an Oldsmobile. It’s not even really doing anything. Its size is a handicap; it seems too large to get around comfortably, or maybe it’s sick. Anyway any evidence of motility is lacking. It might as well be one of those rubber joke cockroaches that kids use to startle people.

    “What are we gonna do with it?”

    “We’re gonna kill it.”

    “Smash it.”

    “No, yuck, that’s disgusting. Get a dustpan and throw it out the window.”

    “What if it flies?”

    “Call the janitor!”

    As always, Wanda from accounting saves the day. She opens her enormous purse, at least twice the size of her head, and whips out an enormous can of Flit, which she angles at the bug and sprays—not a little mist, not half of it, but all of it, every last drop of poison.  We all gag, coughing and choking, gasping for air as the sickly-sweet cloud fills up the room. We’ve all seen this done on the TV commercials, all she’s done was to follow their model, and yet somehow or other we instinctively know this is very, very wrong.

    First to go is Velma. She sinks to the floor, lank limp blond hair falling into a little puddle behind her pale skinny face and neck. She never was very hardy, and she smokes like a chimney which is not good for the wind. So, this one isn’t surprising. But then down go Rosalie, and Florence, and Patience, and Yvette and Yvonne. Even old Mrs. Terwilliger is getting into the act, placing the back of her hand against her forehead in an “I feel faint” gesture before crumbling, slow-motion, to the floor.

    Poor Mrs. Terwilliger. The only one in the typing pool to earn the title “Mrs.” Everyone else is known simply by her first name.

    Meanwhile the cockroach is still alive, twiddling its antennae feistily. It flaunts its life in Mrs. Terwilliger’s face. The insect race will survive, it seems to say, but you will be the cause of your own demise.

    In the end the entire secretarial pool lies dead on the floor, head in, feet out. Typewriters are filled with letters and reports that will never be finished, humming incessantly without hope of operators coming to save them. In the end, it’s just me and the roach, facing each other down. It looks bigger than ever now, bigger than a shoe. But my shoe is exactly what I take off to battle it. My weapon of choice, a green pump with a little bow at the toe.

    Victory is sweet. Victory will be mine.