Jet Elway's Blog

I am not a mental health professional, but given the track record of that profession it only undermines my authority on this subject about as much as saying that I am also not a Ouija board. If you want the perspective of the mental health industry I’ll give it to you: your problem is that you want to bonk your mom. No matter what it is: insomnia, nervous tics, the fear of paper clips — yep, you want to do your mom. Freud said so. OK, I might be oversimplifying a bit. There is more, it could also be your wounded Inner Child, I almost forgot about that one. You might need to repeat some affirmations. Here are some good affirmations: “I am worthy of more than hocus-pocus psychology” and “I am mature enough to handle the plain truth without therapist manipulations and psychobabble.”

Now that we’ve dispensed with modern psychology, let me, a true expert by virtue of intimate experience, elucidate for you just exactly how dysfunctional families work. First, you start with at least one, but most likely two, parents who are koo-koo. More precisely, their families are dysfunctional, and they have been indoctrinated into the family mythology.

Keep in mind that as a child, your family is your whole world, and you know nothing else. So when, oh let’s say, your mother’s side of the family pretends they are descended from royalty, a cut above, clearly better than their crass lower middle class neighbors who don’t even have the decency to cover their living room furniture in plastic year round … well, you buy into it. Or, when your father’s side of the family is proud country folk who have keenly penetrated the truth that education is just a way for lazy people to avoid honest work — that has a lasting impact. The dysfunctional family works ceaselessly to reinforce these types of ideas, and soon we will see why.

So as a kid, you enter crazy world. Your family is barely even middle class, but your mother walks around with her nose in the air like the Queen of England. She saves the boxes from Macy’s so that she can package her K-Mart bought gifts with a touch of class. You watch your own sister start putting on airs at a very young age, cherishing a doll that was made of real porcelain … well, at least the face was. It was a high class doll, not just some plastic piece of junk. You watch your father try to win the approval of his bumpkin family, who seem embarrassed that he is a teacher, which is a woman’s job after all. Why couldn’t he be more like his brother, who worked for the telephone company wiring up homes, or his other brother who was a brick layer? Why did he have to embarrass the family by refusing to do real work? Why couldn’t he be a real man?

OK, never mind these completely random examples that just happen to be an exact description of my family. Most of us grew up with some form of crazy. It was up to our naive yet powerful human brains to make sense of a lot of loopy and often contradictory information. The human brain simply MUST make sense of the world, it is imperative for survival. So it does. How does it make sense of crazy? That’s right, it makes YOU crazy. Putting cheaper gifts in Macy’s boxes becomes a normal, even a good thing to do. It isn’t insane or dishonest at all. You are just trying to make the world a better place and add a little class to what might otherwise appear to be a shoddy little life. If your well-educated father is obsessed with sports, physical fitness, and being a macho man, quietly and sometimes not so quietly expressing his disappointment with his nerdy, weakling son, who was pretty much EXACTLY LIKE HIM … well OK, says the human brain, we must be ashamed of our lack of physical prowess, we must overcome it! In this world, using brainpower is lazy and dishonest. Got it.

So, there it is. A kid from a lower middle class family must be high class while wearing poorly sewn homemade shirts made from orange and green bargain bin fabric. An intellectual, scrawny kid must avoid books and education as much as possible to pursue athletic glory. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Well I failed, and failed hard. This probably didn’t do my Inner Child any good at all. But maybe the bigger problem was how my family responded. After all, had I been dusted off, treated kindly, and perhaps advised to just be myself and maybe pursue a more fitting sport, like badminton, or had it been suggested that I was a smart kid and maybe I should look into taking advantage of that – well, then I wouldn’t have had a dysfunctional family.   Unfortunately, when you fail in a dysfunctional family it is because you are a failure. Yes, I embarrassed the family. I failed to be high class macho man. I wasn’t who I needed to be: Bond, James Bond.

Yes, my mother’s family was certain, in their fake furs and factory seconds of expensive clothing, that they had fooled the world, but I was just an embarrassment who would eat my entire dinner with a salad fork. For my father I played football and got broken bones. I boxed and got punched out. I ignored my school work and hung around with blue collar tough guys, who never accepted me because I was such a dork and a pansy. It was so bad that a few kind souls tried to pull me aside and talk to me, but I didn’t want their observations. Telling me that I was a trying to be something I wasn’t, and ignoring my actual strengths, was not going to help me become accepted in my own family. I knew what I had to do. I had to be the exact opposite of myself!

But why, oh why must dysfunctional families be this way? Well, what I noticed is that in dysfunctional families, there are always a few at the top who ARE acceptable. Why are they acceptable? Because they are controlling the family mythology! They decide that to be acceptable one must be high class, and by whatever delusion necessary, they meet this criterion, BUT YOU DON’T. Or they decide that to be acceptable one must be a good honest country boy, but by being too educated and wearing loafers instead of work boots YOU FAIL. The dynamics of the dysfunctional family aren’t designed to make sense, they are designed to boost the self-esteem of the controlling few at the expense of everyone else. Basically it is a clique of bullies dominating a group that nobody really chose to be in, just like in high school. One of the notions these bullies push the hardest is the importance of family, and family must always stick together, and you must always forgive your family and keep going to family gatherings no matter what.  Yes, family is like high school, only you must attend forever!

Did you notice how I have simply and accurately explained how dysfunctional families hijack impressionable young minds and make people crazy, all without claiming that anyone secretly desires to do the horizontal boogie with their parents? It wasn’t some sin or any kind of subliminal desire on your part that caused you harm, it was being indoctrinated in cult-like fashion into a system intentionally designed to destroy your self-esteem. You didn’t decide to reject yourself – the controllers of your dysfunctional family rejected you to make themselves feel elevated. They raised themselves up, and put you down. It would seem this game has been passed down through countless generations. Unlike healthy families, in dysfunctional families success is defined as something other than being what you are, and instead you must be something unobtainable, or even imaginary, particularly since those doing the judging have a vested interest in your failure.

In the cruel system of the dysfunctional family, some cope, like the women my mother’s family, by pretense and self-delusion. My aunt, the Queen Bee anointed as the judge of what was high class, was the only one who was never outside of the inner circle. The others had to strive to be like her and curry favor. In my father’s family, where his older siblings set the standard for being honest country folk, my father and his younger siblings coped by living out in the middle of nowhere in country style homes, waiting year after year for the family to all gather at their house – the prized seal of acceptance. This only happened once or twice, and nobody stayed very long, which was a sign of rejection.

As for how I cope, I’m going to go have a martini, shaken, not stirred, and thwart an international crime syndicate while seducing a few supermodels.

The women on my mother’s side of the family all have huge heads. They are rather petite otherwise, with porcelain skin and huge baby blue eyes roving around not-so-sanely in those parade balloon sized noggins. They are Nordic versions of the Area 51 aliens, but their appearance is actually the least creepy thing about them, as the kooky beliefs and delusional fantasy lands swirling darkly about in those cavernous skulls are vigorously projected out into the real world. One might think that reality would ultimately win out against the assault of mere imagination, and I suppose eventually, with death, it will — but until then, the iron-willed dominance of belief continues to beat reality like a circus monkey wherever these huge heads loom.

One particularly fervent notion projected out of these heads was that the head’s owner was a high class person. Very high class. Perhaps descended from royalty. Maybe even a god … I’m not sure where this belief ended. All I know is that they were way, way better than anyone else, as they drank wine and looked down their noses, speaking condescendingly about the weaker beings with their tiny inferior heads. OK, so they never actually mentioned head size, but I think it must have been implied somehow. There had to be some reason why my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts were so superior to everyone else. To look at them, they were perfectly average and middle class. Searching the family tree, there were no senators, generals, religious leaders, or divine beings. In fact, the family was relentlessly, generation after generation, nothing more than poor farmers from Kentucky.

In search of the source of all this grandiosity, I tracked down all the family stories: the opera singer, the famous actor, the Civil War general. In every case the story was false. The opera singer was a small town stage performer, only very distantly related. The actor was also far from famous, and in this case was related only by marriage, not a blood relation at all. The Civil War general was a captain of no particular distinction, related to my grandfather. The aura of family greatness was conjured out of thin air. I could never deduce when or by whom the story began, but I do remember my grandfather telling me that the first time he met my grandmother he asked her, “Why are you so snooty?” A question that has never been answered.

So as far as I’m concerned my theory of superiority by virtue of having humongous heads is still the front runner. I must admit, my own head is rather large, but it is important to note that the family greatness somehow does not extend to the males of the family. My grandfather was portrayed as an irresponsible drunkard who could never hold a job, forcing my heroic grandmother to single-handedly rescue the family by working 18 hours a day in a coal mine – no wait, that’s right, it was a normal receptionist job at the local telephone company. Imagine my astonishment when one day my father casually contradicted this firmly established family legend, telling me that while my grandfather was a salesman and a bit of a rascal, he always had a job and never drank more than a beer or two. Instead of being the heroic rock of the family, my grandmother was actually a huge drama queen, constantly swooning into the arms of the nearest man when her delicate sensibilities were shocked — until one day when no one caught her and she hit the floor with a thud. After that she managed to stay erect.

Although they were perfectly middle class, my grandmother ceaselessly drummed it into her daughters’ identically huge heads that they were in grave danger of starving and being put on the street. The villain in these endless tales was my happy-go-lucky grandfather, who dismissed my grandmother, and his daughters, with a wave of his hand. He apparently never even responded to the campaign waged against him. From what I could tell, he just didn’t care what my grandmother said or what his daughters believed. When my grandmother would have a meltdown, or unload on him with a steam of invective, he reacted with mild amusement, answering only with “silly” and “nonsense” without ever defending himself. If my grandmother kept it up he would just leave, not the slightest bit perturbed.

I am not sure if they all hated my grandfather because of the stories my grandmother told, or because he refused to take them seriously. He never went along with the “high class” family meme. He liked to tell stories about his father using honey to pick up peas with his knife, then sucking them off with a smack, or pouring his coffee into the saucer to cool it off before slurping it up. He talked about picking cotton as a young man for a dollar a day. Oh the horror, the embarrassment! How ruinous to the imaginary family name! He was down to earth, good humored, and had Teflon self-esteem. He was a snob’s nightmare, perfectly happy with himself, his crossword puzzles, watching baseball on TV, and tending to his prize tomatoes.

I was the only grandson, and I suppose it was rather sexist of him to favor me, but I was just a kid and obliviously happy to have the positive attention. I had no idea, and I’m sure my grandfather had no idea, that his favoritism would make me a target. He bragged on how hard I worked in his yard, how handsome of a lad I was, how I didn’t break a sweat in the summer heat. He remarked on how smart I was and gave me a lot of his treasured old books. He took me to the barber shop. He took me fishing. We would eat lunch together at his favorite cafeteria.

It is hard to know if I was targeted because of this favoritism, or just caught up in the general hatred of all pretty much all men as my mother and her sisters all divorced their husbands almost simultaneously. It might be worth mentioning that my grandmother, in her need for drama, had divorced and remarried my grandfather four times. Anyway, after ridding the men from their lives, things gradually started to change. It started off as “teasing” at family gatherings. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the Teflon self-esteem of my grandfather, and instead of ignoring, dismissing, or chiding them back I was hurt and humiliated. I suppose after decades of frustration with my grandfather, to find weakness in his favorite filled their pumpkin-sized heads with unimaginable glee. The thin veil of teasing was dispensed with and a subtle yet more aggressive mocking and humiliation steamed ahead, as my mother and her sisters laughed together at my expense … all in jest, of course. To my grandmother’s credit, she never joined in the revelry. Like my grandfather, she seemed not to notice. Then again, the more cruel barbs came after my grandparents had gone home, when the wine drinking switched over to Scotch and the laughter became more uncontrolled and words unguarded.

As my grandfather grew old and senile, and my grandmother was increasingly ill, the new crop of Jack-O-Lanterns took over, lit up by alcohol, their jaggedly carved smiles and flashing eyes not bothering to mask their need to feel superior at any cost, and their thirst for revenge. It wasn’t too many years before the large raucous family gatherings were reduced to small petty affairs, as friends and family vanished to safer havens, and I disappeared as the party piñata. Or maybe I am just too sensitive. My mother assures me that it was all just good natured teasing.

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I’m not completely sold on the idea that human activities are causing catastrophic global warming that will extinct all life on the planet if I don’t start wearing hemp clothing and eating nothing but elderberries.  I really doubt that the crash of the housing market was caused by Barney Frank forcing banks to make bad loans to black people.  I don’t believe that technology companies need unlimited indentured servants through H-1B  visas because there is a shortage of smart, talented Americans.  I also don’t believe that the Patriot Act was very patriotic, but that it was more like an unconstitutional act of treason.  For all these reasons I am not only a blind, bamboozled Kool-Aid drinking sheep, but I am also apparently an Anti-Science, Socialist, Communist, Protectionist, Nazi, and traitor.

My opinions could be right or wrong.  They are based on my experience and observations.  For instance, it is my experience that I can’t get an accurate weather forecast for more than a few days in advance (if I’m lucky).  If the supercomputer-powered state of the art weather forecasting can’t accurately predict a sunny weekend, why would I believe that the same technology can accurately predict catastrophic global warming?  Also, I have noticed that every change in weather, hot or cold, is more “proof” of global warming, which they are now trying to rebrand as “climate change” – so basically they are staking out the bold position that the weather will change.  Call me Anti-Science, but what exactly would be the proof that they are wrong?

OK, to some of you I am obviously crazy.  I probably believe in Bigfoot and UFOs.  After all, if you believe in global warming and I don’t — I must be stupid.  Let’s not let the fact that neither one of us know jack about climate science nor have any real knowledge beyond what we hear from our various news sources stop us from mindless name calling.   Speaking of various news sources, another observation of mine is that most of the name calling seems to come from those who restrict their news sources to only the most extreme of the political right or left.  Not to name call or label, but just for the sake of expediency, let’s call them the Wingnuts and Moonbats, with the right wing conservatives being Wingnuts, and the left wing liberals being Moonbats.

Much attention has been drawn to the 1% of the population that controls all the wealth in this country, but I would like to propose that there is also a 2% problem: the 1% of the population who are extreme Wingnuts plus the 1% of the population who are extreme Moonbats.  Just like the 1% controls the wealth to the detriment of the rest of us, the 2% control the political debate in this country, reducing every discussion to childish labeling, wild delusional conspiracy theories, and name calling.

Again, I will give an example.  Let’s say you want to discuss abortion rights, and you take the moderate position that a woman should have the right to terminate a pregnancy until the fetus is developed enough to live outside the womb.  Sorry, but that makes you a murderer and a rapist.  To the Wingnut, you are a murderer.  You want to kill babies.  Life begins at conception.  To the Moonbat you are a rapist.  You want to control women and force them to have babies against their will.  Fueled by their self-righteous fervor and certainty that they alone have realized the Absolute Truth, they drown out all other voices, squawking and shrieking until all of the adults have finally left the room.

If you don’t believe me, browse the news on the internet and look at the comments.  How many comments can you read before someone is accused of being a sheep, Nazi, Socialist, Communist, or drinking the Kool-Aid?   Not many, right?  Now watch how the discussion deteriorates from there, as the frothing Wingnuts and Moonbats snarl and snap incoherently, repeating whatever snappy sound bites they have been fed by their slanted news sources.

Another fascinating thing that I have noticed is that Wingnuts and Moonbats both refuse to acknowledge that they are mindlessly repeating something they heard someone else say.  No sir, they came to their brilliant conclusions by way of keen observation and a thorough examination of the evidence!  This is particularly true of Rush Limbaugh fans.  I don’t know why, but I must admit that occasionally I listen to his show.  He is kind of entertaining, in a crazy uncle kind of way.  His Wingnut fans are among the loudest and most obnoxious on the internet, and time and again I have seen them post exact quotes from his show as their own thoughts — and then absolutely refuse to admit it.  Many of them go so far as to claim that they don’t even listen to his show at all.  Hell, a lot of them don’t even admit to being Republicans.  They are Independents!

To further illustrate the mental instability of the 2%, these are the very people who are the first to scream in ALL CAPS that anyone posting a different opinion is a MINDLESS LEMMING being led by the nose!  Yes, the people who have their thoughts supplied to them by daily indoctrinations from the most utterly biased news sources, the extreme Wingnuts and Moonbats, the 2%, they are the ones who most fervently believe themselves to be independent thinkers!  Even more delightful is that even the idea that they are independent thinkers and their opponents are mindless lemmings is fed to them daily by their chosen sources of propaganda!  Apparently this is Propaganda 101.  It would be a source of endless amusement if only they weren’t allowed to spam to death every attempt at an adult conversation on the internet.

So what do we, the 98%, do about the 2% problem?  Do we camp out in public parks and smoke weed?  Do we start up a militia and stash canned food and weapons in underground bunkers?  I know, some of you are thinking that we maintain our adult composure and speak to them calmly and respectfully, explaining to them that their views are somewhat irrational.  Go ahead and give that a try.  For those who already know that reasoning with the 2% is futile, join me in the only effective way of dealing with them – mercilessly taunting them.  Go ahead, push their buttons and watch their robotic arms swing about madly as their heads spin in circles spewing out the latest thing they heard their programmers say on Fox News.  Try calling them blind, bamboozled, Kool-Aid drinking sheep first, thus stealing their thunder and causing them to tic and twitch uncontrollably.  Go ahead, have fun, TYPE OUT INCOHERENT QUIPS IN ALL CAPS.  OBAMA WANTS TO FORCE US ALL TO EAT CANNED PIZZA!

Trust me, they won’t see the humor in this.  How dare you make light of the serious problems that lie exclusively with other political party!  Can’t you see that they are independent free thinkers?  If they have any control over the internet forum you are posting on, you will have the honor of being banned.  After all, you weren’t being very mature.  Count this as a victory for the 98%!

So, you are asking yourself, how does behaving as idiotically as Wingnuts and Moonbats behave and preemptively destroying any possibility of civil discourse help the situation?  Well, if you are like me, which for the ultimate fate of humanity I kind of hope you aren’t, you will be amused.  Where there was once frustration and disappointment, there is now levity and a creative outlet.  Every political discussion becomes a blank canvas for your art.  Disillusionment is replaced by snickering for the 98%, and the self-satisfaction of the 2% is replaced by rage.  You will be creating a more just and perfect world.  Most importantly: it’s fun.

Can you write books for a dollar a day?  If you are a Kindle Direct Publishing author like me, you’ll have to!  For the endless minutes I toiled to produce my three “books”, I am being handsomely compensated to the tune of about one dollar a day in royalties.  I know, it sounds like a lot.  Why, I could buy a candy bar or use a pay toilet every single day with that kind of money.

Sure, maybe we should consider the quality of my work — but wait, my books all have multiple five star reviews, many of which were not written by me.  Obviously, my writing is top notch!  That leaves us with only one logical line of attack in our quest to wring pennies out of the reading public: crank out more books!

Simple arithmetic tells us that by writing ten times as many books, I would make $10 a day.  OK, that might pay for the gas it takes me to get back and forth to my real job, but what if I wrote a hundred times as many books!  Yes, by cranking out THREE HUNDRED books I would finally be making $100 a day.  That’s not bad, but unfortunately my day job pays a lot more than that.  By my quick estimation I would need to write 789 books to equal my current salary.  But wait, that doesn’t include benefits like medical and dental insurance, holidays, and vacation time.  What the hell, let’s just pick a nice round number like 1000.

All I need to do to retire from my current backbreaking job of sitting around all day on a computer is write ONE THOUSAND books!  That means I only need to write 997 more books – I’m stoked!  If I write a book a day, I’ll be retired in less than three years.  Oh yeah, I have to PUBLISH a book a day, not just write one.  Most of my books take longer to format and publish than they take to write.  Then there is all the spamming that I have to do on Facebook and Twitter, which eats up a lot more time.  Realistically, I need to be able to write these books in about an hour, maybe two.

You know, this is starting to sound like a very stressful endeavor.  When would I have time to post to my blog?  What if I want to play World of Warcraft free for ten days?  Let’s reframe this differently so I don’t seem to be weaseling out it just because I’m lazy: the official reason that I will not crank out 997 more books real quick is because it wouldn’t be fair to my readers.  Yeah, that’s it – the quality might suffer!

There, now it’s time to go to the snack machine and spend today’s royalties.

It figures that just as soon as it become possible to easily publish a book the world stops reading them.  Ah, technology, wonderful and cruel.  Like so many pre-internet activities, reading was one of those things done out of boredom more than anything else.  Your options used to be working, watching the grass grow, or reading.  That made reading an attractive option.  Today, there is no need to put in all the heavy labor of actually reading a book.  If a book is any good, someone will make it into a motion picture.  Of course most people don’t go to the movies anymore either.  Why bother?  Wait a few months and it will be on DVD.  Then again who watches DVDs anymore when you can just stay at home and have it streamed directly to your television.

Through deductive reasoning the main driving forces behind human behavior is alleviating boredom and avoiding any effort whatsoever.  Books used to be really popular, but now turning all of those pages and having to imagine things is just too much work.  Today it is much better to sit in front of a screen and wait for entertaining and imaginative worlds to be steamed before your eyes.  If there is any instinct left to work, play an online game where for the minimal effort of moving your fingers a little you can mine exotic ores and forge fantastic swords and armor, and then join up with other players to defeat dragons, monsters, or opposing armies — all while burning no more than a single potato chip’s worth of calories.

I think the only readers left in the world are those with exceptionally good imaginations.  These rare individuals can actually produce an inner world that Hollywood just can’t match.  My sister is like this.  She is always disappointed in the movie versions of the books she loves, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Sure, I read the trilogy too, long ago, but I didn’t really notice all the story lines that were cut out to cram those books into three long motion pictures, or the details that were altered in some way — but my sister did, and she found the movies offensive.  Despite the tremendous effort put into the movies, they couldn’t match her imagination or even come close.  Some people were similarly disappointed by the Harry Potter movies.

Anyway, I would guess that I have an OK imagination, but I just can’t remember anything for very long.  I like the book, and then I like the movie too.  If I wait a few years, I can watch the movie again and it might as well be a new release because I will remember very little from the previous viewing.

Then again, watching a whole hours-long movie is becoming such a commitment.  I think we might also be approaching the post-movie era.  Soon most of us will just wait for the multiplayer online version of the movie to come out, so we can actually participate in the story by moving our fingers a little.  No imagination will be necessary.

Oh well, at least now it is simple to get my stories published.

As you all know by now, the first step to getting rich quick is to buy something, like my e-book:

How to Make a Million Billion Dollars Selling e-Books!

(The Seven Secrets and Three Easy Steps!)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AR2CELO

Of course I’m not going to divulge the full 99 cents worth of valuable information all right here, that would not be making money off my e-book, which would make me look like some kind of idiot.  You see, the first step to showing you how to make money is to take your money from you.  I’m showing you how it is done.

I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking that nobody can make a million billion dollars selling e-books.  You are already caught in what I call the “negativity trap” which is typified by excessive rational thought and a fierce clinging to reality that will get you absolutely nowhere when it comes to procuring unimaginable wealth by writing for a living.  You have to unshackle your mind from negativity first — no wait, first you have to buy my e-book, and then you have to unshackle your mind second – if you want to succeed in what might appear to be a wildly delusional undertaking.

Sure, there are plenty of other books out there promising to show you the way to make big money off e-books, but I will let you in on a secret: those books are all bullshit!  None of them tell you the seven secrets and three easy steps.  None of them promise to make you anywhere near even one billion dollars.  The authors of those books are just a bunch of cynical flim-flam artists hoping to fool you into giving them money.  Yes, they are no better than carny barkers looking to entice the unwary rubes into games that fleece them and leave them wishing they had bought a corny dog instead.  This e-book is the corny dog, my friends – and it is only 99 cents!

OK, back to exactly what is in my e-book.  I’m not telling.  You see, that is one of the secrets … not necessarily one of the seven secrets in my book, but still, a secret.  What was I saying?  Oh yes, I was just NOT saying what is in my book and keeping it secret so that you have to buy it to find out.  Aren’t you curious?  You know, there is a high correlation between curiosity and intelligence.  You look like an intelligent person to me.  Step right up and plunk your money down!  Get your copy before they are all gone!

How to Make a Million Billion Dollars Selling e-Books!

(The Seven Secrets and Three Easy Steps!)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AR2CELO

Sure, you are thinking that I will give it away for free in the near future, and you will just save your 99 cents and wait.  Well let me tell you this: you don’t know when I’m going to give it away.  I might keep that a secret as well.  In the meantime you will be losing millions of dollars a day according to my e-book, which you could buy right now for 99 cents.  Use your brain!

I write satire.  At least I think I do.  My characters are moochers and incompetent boobs, or delusional narcissists.  They are meant to make fun of our society (such as how real life careers compare to the televised ideals) or segments of our society (such as self-proclaimed gurus and their followers).  I did not set out to write a detective novel or a story about spirituality.  I was really kind of mocking those things.  I’m not quite sure how this isn’t apparent to my readers, but hey, if they all see it one way and only I see it another … well?

Even more amazing, is that while completely missing the intended point of my stories, my readers seem to genuinely enjoy them and I have several five star reviews.  Unfortunately those reviews reveal that the works were not understood as I intended them, despite what I felt were quite deranged portrayals of detectives or spiritual gurus.  I’m not sure how to take this.  I’m glad people enjoyed the books.

Nobody has mentioned the humor in my stories, which was actually the main thrust of both books.  This makes me wonder if my stories are inside jokes that only I am getting.  I once heard that Stephen King found his horror stories to be very amusing.  Everyone else finds them to be scary, while he is snickering.  He did write a story about a Pet Cemetery – how could that not be a joke, right?  Am I just like Stephen King, minus the countless published books, movie deals, money and fame?  See, that last sentence was supposed to be amusing, but I bet everyone thinks that I compare myself to Stephen King.  How arrogant!

I really do write my stories just to amuse myself.  They make me laugh.  I have never laid down a single serious line in any of my books.  Sure, I am not writing obvious jokes.  There isn’t a lot of slapstick humor: it is more subtle.  Maybe it’s too subtle.  Maybe it only exists in my mind!

Yes, that whooshing might not be the sound of my satire going over the heads of my readers – it might be the sound of me completely missing what I am actually communicating.  The true satire might be the satirist giggling at his own subtle wit that is completely non-existent to the rest of the world.  I must admit that I am somewhat concerned.

What the hell, I’ll just go with it.  I am amusing myself and my readers are happy.  Nobody ever said we have to be on the same page.

#1 Have fun, because you aren’t going to make any money!

Look, some guys spend $20,000 on a boat, fishing gear, licenses and then fill up with about a hundred dollars worth of gas and maybe, if they have a good day … catch a fish.  So if you spend your time writing, and then pay an editor, a book cover designer, and someone to format your book so that it looks nice, and end up with a book, what’s the difference?  The thing about the guy and his boat is that he is having fun.  Fishing is fun.  It involves some challenge and requires skill.  There are good days and bad.  If you feel the same way about writing, then it can be fun as well.

What if the fisherman decided he needed to make a profit for the investment of time and money he put into his boat, gear, and studying the wily ways of animals with brains the size of a pea?  Crunching the numbers, he would probably need to catch tens of thousands of fish every year.  He would need to fish all day, every day.  He would need to stick to the sure thing, and fish the same few spots day after day after day.  It would be grueling, he would be miserable, and in the end he would fail anyway.

 Keeping with this analogy, if you want to make a living off of writing creative fiction, you need to “catch” tens of thousands of readers every year, just to squeak by.  If you grimly go about writing with all of your might day and night, only cranking out vampire romance novels, and sticking with the tried and true formulas that draw in the same rather dopey readers, you will be miserable, and you will also almost certainly fail in the end anyway.

Have I hammered this point home yet?  Have fun.

#2 Let it all hang out, because nobody cares!

Write the book you would want to read.  Forget the rules, the formulas.  If the book you really want to write is Harry Potter, then by all means enjoy yourself.  Heck, just write fan fiction and steal the characters outright.  Sure, the copyright police might insist that you stop, but by then you could have already ordered thousands of copies of your book for the same price as a nice fishing boat.  You can give them away and slip them into public libraries, if that is your idea of fun.  Of course if what you really want is to BE that famous author, sorry, I can’t help you there.

I have fun writing original stories.  I know that nobody really cares what I write or whether I follow the rules for writing a short story, novella, or a sonnet.  I amuse myself, and if I amuse others, that is a win-win.  If I amuse myself, and others are not amused, that is still a win for me.  If others point out that I did not follow the rules for such and such, that is still a win for me, because I really don’t care and I had fun writing it.

#3 Don’t both with agents or publishers, because they are idiots!

This is a little known secret: almost every great author was resoundingly rejected by an endless stream of agents and publishers.  Why?  Because they are idiots.  OK, that isn’t fair, they aren’t idiots.  It is simply that they want the sure thing, and the sure thing is what is already selling, so all they really want is another J.K. Rowling, and even then, they only really want another Harry Potter installment, not something new and different. 

Simply don’t waste your time chasing agents and publishers.  Publish whatever you want directly on Amazon.  The other little known secret is that most authors that do actually land that agent and book deal with a “real” publisher don’t end up making any money.  The books are printed up, the publishing house does a tiny amount of marketing, and the books languish on the shelves until they are returned.  With the tiny royalty paid per book, you would need to sell a hundred thousand copies just to make a living for one year.

So relax and have fun.  Don’t follow the rules and publish you own books.  You’ll thank me some day for this great advice.

Some of us are never going to be normal.  Sure, most people are not normal in some ways, but they still have many friends, close families, and fit into to society — my “not normal” is that even my dog ignores me, pretending to be asleep unless he hears me running the electric can opener.  My extended family ignores me, sending me generic cards on Christmas and maybe on my birthday.  Sometimes they don’t even bother to change the card and just use up a ten-pack of identical cards over a decade.  My immediate family  (wife, sons in college, daughter in high school) pretty much ignore me too.  We all live on the internet, only stopping for brief, awkward pauses to eat.

Today, society for me is the internet.  It isn’t that different from regular society.  It is a society where I am hated for sucking at online games instead of real games.  It is a society where I am banned from message boards for being a “troll” instead of being just being called an idiot and shunned.  I start off really trying to fit in, to be normal.  I actually try to make friends and play games to the best of my ability.  I try to have thoughtful discussions.  Over time, over the decades, the message has finally become clear – I am crazy.

Other people play games and get better at them.  I don’t.  I get too bored hiding or defending a position in some online game, so I run out throwing hand grenades and get shot to death.  My team hates me for that.  I made them lose.  I get bored spending hours collecting a dozen wolf pelts to make a robe or a hundred chunks of gold ore to smelt and make into a belt, so my avatar never looks cool.  Instead, my avatar looks just like me in high school wearing my Sears blue jeans and generic sneakers — uncool.  Shunned again.

My last hope was the message boards.  Some sounded interesting, like the ones where people think they are witches and warlocks.  I was intrigued, so I started asking them questions about magic, such as, had they actually ever done anything magical.  Why sure, of course they had!  So then all I asked for was a little proof, you know, like turn me into a newt or something.  Suddenly, I’m a troll.  Banned.  Over and over, board after board.  Weirdo doesn’t get it — banned.

So why do I write what I write?  I write books because so far no one has found a way to stop me.  I’m sure some people would like to.  My detective novel certainly isn’t going to make readers of that genre very happy.  My novel about a spiritual guy will not get me any New Age followers.  I write what I write because I can’t write anything normal, apparently.

For the background of my stories I only have my own dysfunctional upbringing to draw upon.  That is why my stories are full of strange, disconnected, and deluded characters.  It’s what I know.  I can’t write normal characters or interactions.  I couldn’t correctly portray normal, connected, mentally healthy human beings if I tried.

Why do I attempt to be humorous?  Because it is the best I have to offer.  I have always been funny to some people, who took my general cluelessness, wild imaginings, and hare-brained ideas as jokes.  At least temporarily, there could be a kind of connection.  My protagonists, emotionally distant but seeking connection and meaning, those clueless characters are me, bumbling along cluelessly or charging around recklessly, they are me.