Quit

I quit the tire job after two weeks.  A few days earlier I stood in the weak dawn light of my ex-wife's apartment, staring at my uniform, gunmetal gray.  Nametag.  I shook her shoulder and asked if she'd think less of me if I quit. She shook her head and fell back to sleep.  My dog watched me but didn't lift her head.  I went to work.  Kept this in my head: you have two days off.  Get through the day. 

No lunch breaks. 110 degrees.  Customers roll in.  Flat tires, alignments, rotations.  New tires.  I hated BMWs the worst, they had screws instead of lug nuts, forcing you to balance the tire, cradled just so between the knees, and screw it in, find the hole.  Most were relatively simple.  Thank god for Hondas.

Jeans will chafe your ass and hurt your balls.  First few days I wore some jeans to work.  THAT was dumb.  I took some pants from the rack upstairs, unworn uniforms belonging to employees who went the way I did, that is, out.

I worked with good people.  Most hadn't finished high school and had kids.  Didn't make it hurt any less when the salespeople, bonuses in mind, poked their head from their air conditioned office, yelling at them to hurry the fuck up.  But it made it easier for them not to do what I did.


Hard work has value.  I will never not tip a mover, for example.  I will understand the wait at a tire place.  But that is as far as it goes, once the lesson is learned, there is no reason to kill yourself at a place like that.  I don't presume to know where you folks work, or how important that is to you.  All I am saying is this: if you work at a place like that, for god's sake quit.

We have a very short time on this earth, and it makes not one lick of sense to spend more time than necessary doing things you loathe.  This advice, again, coming from a single guy with no children.

I write stories.  It's almost the only thing I'm good at, besides shuffleboard.  I consider myself a "bizarro writer", and that entails a few things, the most important of which is that I have a slightly skewed view on reality.  This is what separates bizarro from experimental literature: the latter twists language and structure in such a way to convey innovation.  They take a form, writing, and manipulate it to create something new, which inherently pays homage and calls attention to the original form.  Bizarro ignores this entirely, normally utilizing simple sentences, English at its most basic, to casually convey complete absurdity.  In doing so it makes no distinction between the original language and the hodge podge, cut and paste shenanigans of experimental: the weird and the "real" are one and the same, and should be treated as such.

That's my disclaimer: I will be the first to admit that I might not have a firm grasp on things like "responsibility" or "adulthood".  When I did quit, on the day I thought I had off, the ex shook her head and I was kicked out a few days later, back to making frantic calls, desperate not to sleep in my car.  The man's reality really exists, and it has real consequences.

If you have children, or a wife, or aspirations to financial stability, stick with the jobs and be responsible.  I really have no idea how to make your life better.  If you're single, childless, and know what it is that you have to do, then please do it.  Quit being so scared.  Lose your apartment, who cares?  You wrote a book!  Or built a car or photographed a sweet moose.  Quit wasting your time for no good reason.  That's what the internet is for.

floating

I am floating and I want it to stop. I'm not a wanderer or an adventurer. I'm someone who likes familiarity and my space. I have gone between Lawton and Norman several times in the past month, never settling down, hoping someone might change their mind. Lawton was for distance, but it is a shithole. El Paso is a possibility, I have friends there and the distance thing would come into effect again, but those friends aren't ready to strike out on their own and get their own place. I don't know what I'm doing. I guess I'm waiting for something to come into my life that says, "HEY MOTHERFUCKER." Until then I'll keep reading and writing. "Unbearable Lightness" helps. Kris Saknussemm helps. A job might help, just to give me something to do. But I'm not a big fan of regular jobs. I worked at Hibdon's for two goddamn weeks and decided that wasn't "for me", as though hauling tires in the heat is for somebody. Floop.

manuscript editing service

I spent the better part of last week busting my ass in a tire shop. My body got stronger, but my mind quickly folded. I have done enough hard labor. Time to put this English degree to good use. I am offering up my services, limited though they might be, to anyone who is interested. If you have a short story or manuscript that needs editing, I am your man. I have a novel and numerous short stories in print, and I have spent my four years in college. I have a solid grasp on the English language. I will do quality work in a timely manner. (Do you like that? It's what I put on resumes.) The pricing list is as follows:

Short Stories:
2000 words or less: $50
2000-3000 words: $70
3000-4000 words: $80
Anything over 4000 words will need to be discussed in order for me to draw up a customized cost summary.


Manuscript services (Line Edits with manuscript critique):
50000 words - $250
60000-70000 words - $300
70000 - 85000 words $350
85000 and above - please email.

Manuscript Services (proofread/summary edit):
50000 words - $150
60000-70000 words - $200
70000 - 85000 words $300
85000 and above - please email.

Query Letters:
Creation - $50
Rewrite - $40

NOTE:
*Academic and Non-Fiction prices vary and are not including in the pricing above*
*While I feel that an author should write their own queries, I'm happy to offer critiques of query letters free of charge.*

For all projects, please include the following:
* Story genre
* What type of editorial service you're looking for (line edit, proofread, manuscript critique[pacing/plot], query letter review and/or creation)
* A short summary/synopsis (1 page or less)
* The word count/projected word count
* The first ten pages of your manuscript/story

You get some quality edits, I get to eat. Fair trade?

(thanks to Tee Tate for writing these prices
and guidelines out and Adrienne Crezo for sharing)

end of school

School is over for good. I feel relieved. I will miss the campus. I am wearing a shirt today that I wore on Friday, when I nearly died. Vomit, convulsions, hallucinations. The "do-not-disturb" sign on the hotel room door blinked in and out of existence. Everybody else, too, writhing and trying not to die. Our group made noise everywhere we went. The lights at Nocturnal were amazing. The bass, too. The half-naked everyone.

I was thinking that maybe I would go somewhere but instead I think I'm going to work on tires for a bit. Save some money, drink some beer. Then maybe I'll go. As of right now, how would I?

review of BTTWL up at the Velvet

Chris Deal wrote a fantastic review of BY THE TIME WE LEAVE HERE, WE'LL BE FRIENDS over at The Velvet. Easily one of the best online resources for finding new and exciting (usually dark) fiction, the Velvet is a community of writers and readers who have a shared love for the works of Will Christopher Baer, Craig Clevenger, and Stephen Graham Jones. It is an honor to have BTTWL featured on their home page with such high praise.

The Velvet

tunnels

There's a feeling like a picture being taken off the wall in another room on the other side of the house any time I reach the end of a tunnel. I think humans feel this strange, not sadness, but maybe microscopic anxiety, because the two major tunnels in our lives, the uterus and the One-With-The-Bright-Light, have at their end the embodiment of unknowing, except we know how one ends, and are living it, and that certainly doesn't ease our fears about the second.

drunken belligerence

Earthquake is a "high gravity lager" in the vein of Steel Reserve. It is 24 oz of 12% alcohol. In Oklahoma our grocery store/gas station beer is 3%, meaning one can of Earthquake is like drinking eight beers. I drank mine in a little under a half-an-hour, shooting it once a minute. Vile stuff. By the end of it my stomach was in knots and I was screaming through my teeth.

I ended up going to a party, where I subsequently went about attracting the ire of everyone there. I think it started when I went into the kitchen and flipped everyone off. I didn't mean it in a bad way. Then a girl became convinced that I'd called her a bitch, which I am 90% sure I did not do.

A tiny girl with a pixie haircut kept coming out to scream at me for various reasons.

I was confronted by a large, slightly chubby male who had puffed himself up to me a few times over the course of the night. He was flanked by two other men, one of them a timid guy in glasses and the other a less-timid guy in glasses. He proceeded to regale me with my laundry list of misdeeds. I listened, and when he was done, I said, "Okay. First of all, your pea coat is gay." Then I laughed. He screamed "MY PEA COAT IS GAY?!?!?! THAT'S ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY TO ME?" And I continued to laugh. The pixie girl kept coming out and yelling at me, which was funny.

I am not saying that I blame the Earthquake, but I don't think I've ever attracted that much negative attention in my life. Maybe I'll stick to my 3% gas station beer.