Our yard, which moonlights as a pond come the deluges, got fixed. Three dry wells, a regrade. The HELOC hasn’t gone through and I just heard it’s not supposed to rain for the next four years. The good news is that I am in a legal battle with ESPN, ergo, Bob Iger. Am I really? Yes and no. Either way, even if yes, I’m not sure I have the horses to take down Disney. Oh, well. The worst of it, though, happened this morning. Blindsided. As we walked Jess to the train she would soon board toward New Amsterdam to work and bread-win (again: Legal Battle with Iger), employed by the Dad of the Man who castrated my once semi-promising career in movies-nobody-sees, she turned to me and said what I—what all of us--never wanted to hear: “I think we should start taking walks after dinner.” She may have asked, actually: “Do you think we should start taking walks after dinner?” What was worse was my response: “That found me, too,” as I shook my fist at the sky: “The algorithm!” My inbox, my feed- I don’t know where, but it was there, inside the AI rocket in my pocket.
We’re not fatsos. Not even big dinner guys. You understand what I’m saying. I’m a balding 41 y/o semi-employed VO guy / stay-at-home Dad with a Substack: if I don’t look decent naked, my taxes go up. Or my interest rates. But my wife, my friends and I, we are in the wellness cross-hairs, the demographic of the recently slowing metabolisms. We are being targeted, bullied and hurried into middle age. I stay young in other ways, though. I shout to my daughter “hey, dick knuckles, bring it to Dad!” when she’s pretending to drink (what I soon discover to be) a bottle of Kid’s Mucinex across the room as I attempt to rattle out another Substack. I don’t know where she got it, but it’s going in the trash and there will be talking-to’s tonight.
But the Grim Reaper’s PA’s, her interns—and you know goddamned well it’s a chick--they’re deployed to position the algorithm toward the end, point out that the grains of sand in my hourglass are actually just feed or field corn. Again. But, the obvious, the redundant: we’re gonna die. And the biblical rains of Westchester will come again but this time, hopefully my yard won’t get really wet. What a life.
The world is spinning faster than it did when I was young (Rickie Lee Jones, 1989), and as it does, one needs to cut weight, metabolize, burn the boats, come out the closet, so I have to say, in a public forum of a few hundred: I wrote a book.
I did. And this is old news to me. It’s been done for a while now. But I did write it in order to shut myself up (about writing it). And if I were not myself, were merely a tertiary friend of mine, and saw that he (I) wrote a book, I’d say: “Fuck. Good for him. Say what you will about him but he really ______s.” But I am Me and I am the one who wrote it and it did feel great, writing THE END on a three-hundred-and-some-odd page book. For a minute and months, it felt like this would be the thing to put me into a place of Adult pride and accomplishment. A book! A book that could be front and center, on display at the Crow bookstore at the top of Church St. in Burlington, Vermont, or the Strand, or that bookstore I used to go to on the Venice Boardwalk, or the Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle. Hudson News at JFK. Fuck you, Dad!
But the rejections slowly rolled in like blue-green algae on my beach of hope. Do not be mistaken: I am well-versed in rejection. I learned to laugh (drink) in the face of it. Scripts, pilots—I’ve refused so many bottles of water knowing I drove up to West Hollywood for nothing, my off-sets are drum tight. But this—the book--was a new medium, a new, fresh hope. I devolved back into a green-gilled starry-eyed dipshit who thought this uncharted world—this book world--was a creamery, a meritocracy. What an idiot! Writers are stereotyped as miserable because of books! It’s all the same, it’s nothing new. It’s subjective, arbitrary. It’s bullshit. Unless of course there is a representation offer waiting in my inbox, in which case the publishing world is wholly based on aptitude and talent, the table set for and only accommodating the virtuosic.
No such offer.
So here we are. Well, here I am. The time has come to get back in my own way. Jess has strongly voiced that I should remain patient, that the right person, the right agent, will read it. A published author asked me “have you queried EVERY agent?”
**“Querying” is the soul-draining process of tap dancing for agents via email, getting them to like you and your stupid book. It’s not my strength.
The answer is: No. No, but I’ve queried enough. I’ve found myself waiting for someone in this small pool of literary agents--most of them Brown graduates, all of them wanting to discover the next bold voice from an underrepresented community—I’ve been waiting for one of them to like me, digitally, enough to actually read the fucking manuscript. I think three agents have read it. Maybe two. I’ve probably queried two hundred? “Colin Thompson” doesn’t exactly leave much to be discovered behind the curtain, ethnically.
I am certainly not complaining about that: We have had all of all time, it’s just the one bad time.
I have been asked by a friend of mine to write a bio/blurb for her forthcoming record. I do consider her a friend, although we’ve never met in person. Her name is Domino Kirke-Badgley. She is a Mom, a doula, and long before either of those things happened, a songwriter and musician. We have laughed, via text, about Mark Wahlburg’s weird religion and she taught me the term “nap-trapped”. I was flattered albeit nervous when she asked me to write this for her. Upon listening to the songs and (thank GOD) really enjoying them, my first thought and what I said to her was: “Alright. NOT just a Doula!”
I bring up Domino because the thing that is giving me the confidence/juice as well as an angle on which to write this for her is that we are tethered in a way, in the sloppy cosmos of being a stay-at-home parent. **she is a renowned doula and I am the voice of Peter Millar, ahem, so, I mean, it’s not all ants-on-a-log here. As the parent of a little dictator, you find yourself in an empty tunnel-slide, hiding from another offensive algorithm targeting, screaming into a diaper bag, mouthful of another something you didn’t want to eat: “This is not all that I am! SURE, I’m great at it! But there’s other things, too! For real!”
She has these songs. I have this book. Nobody buys records, nobody reads books. But fuck nobody. My book is not for this slow-growing list of queried agents. It’s not for nobody. It’s for everyone. Wait. It’s definitely not for everyone. But it’s for everyone to love, to like. To stop reading if it’s not for them. To hate-read it if they’re into that type of experience; say something like “I cannot have that those __ hours back” when finished. To recommend to a friend.
So this is my manifesto. I will say it out loud, in here, and thus be forced to hold myself accountable. I have not detailed the “self-published” roll-out but I have started recording the manuscript for an audiobook. It will be available as an ebook. I probably won’t get to smell its spine, but fuck spine. I will perhaps put out the first few chapters on here, who knows. What I do know is that if I hold out and hold on to hope, the book and the person who wrote it will grow further away, becoming unrecognizable and off-putting. I’m going to get older, uncooler, and uncooler. I owe it to the book to not just sit on my hands, waiting on rejection, developing liverspots. It’s embarrassing, looking down the road of “self-publish”, skin chafed and burned from this Idiot (head)wind. But I wrote and directed a movie about fifteen-year-olds on mushrooms…and I played all the parts! In my later 30’s! Embarrassed, embarrassing!? I might as well have written the bible: Embarrassed Adult 4 Dummies. Embarrassing. Please. It’s where I peddle and meddle. I have spent a lifetime hastily shooting myself in the foot so why stop now? At some point, the bullet has to bounce off or at least stick. No, I know: it’s time to kick the bullet.
Fuck it (again).
Now I speak for Domino and legions of 40-something y/o stay-at-home parents when I say: I haven’t been sick in over a year because in this semi-trancelike state I’m in, I consume filthy microbe’d food from the playground floors of New Rochelle to New Paltz when, again: I wasn’t even hungry. But I will push the swing and I will kick the bullet and I will not wait on an uptight literary agent to take a shine to my words, the voice. There’s corn in that sand. I will set it free, this book I busted my fucking ass on, put it out into the world…and hope and pray that some Gen Z or Alpha twit loves it, fake cries to it on their TikTok with a billion views so then, then I will get a traditional publishing deal for the next one.
Unless, of course, awaiting me in my inbox…shit. Still, either way, win or lose, hard cover or Audible: Fuck you, Dad!
“F*ck spine.” Says it all. Listening to yr spiel (love the blatant Oedipal struggle), I had to wonder at the fact that I, too, no joke, was, on the basis of our very fine radio interview years ago and my fan-ship of the films, trying to get up the courage/chutzpah to ask you for a blurb for my new album, “The Quiver,” debuting my late life foray into songwriting. Maybe the universe wants you to be an indie rock promoter.