Maybe I’m just being cranky, but lately, something about Death has been bothering me. Is it just me? Is it just my self-absorbed myopia? Or is Death practically invisible in modern America?

How many Americans will die today?

Every year on average 40,000 Americans die ‘from’ cars. In fact, the cars are innocent, falsely accused of homicide. At most, a car can be charged with being an accessory to murder. It is the people driving the cars who do the killing. Some of the people drivers kill are walking or bicycling or standing at a bus stop scanning ads for menial low wage jobs on their iPhone when—WHAM!—someone drives a car into them.

And when we add in the many non-vehicular ways to die in this nation of 300 million-plus souls—from cancer to suicide-by-cop, from domestic violence to slipping in the bathtub—thousands more will join the 109 of us who will become road kill today.

So, where is all this dying being done?

Once in a while I see an ambulance with siren blaring working to pass drivers who are so intent on killing people with their cars that they do not pull over to allow the ambulance to pass. And I think about the person inside that ambulance. But I cannot know if that person is on the way to the morgue, or the maternity ward.

Some experts say the reason for Death being invisible in America is that we all moved from the farm, where Death was a daily event and the axis the cycle of life spun around—into the city, where we no longer raise and kill our own food, or witness Uncle Zeke fall into a mechanical thresher and get chopped into mincemeat.

Other experts say the reason for Death being invisible in America is that fewer Americans are dying. They’re not saying Death is now optional, they’re just saying that Americans who once routinely died from infections or influenza, from viruses or vitamin deficiencies, now, given the advances in medical knowledge and technology, recover and live.

While all the experts on Death are probably right to varying degree, I feel compelled to add my own more difficult to quantify, two-part explanation for Death being invisible in America.

Part One: Americans snub Death.

Most Americans go through Life without being near someone who is actively dying. (With the exception of the people they walk past, clustered outside of buildings and bars, smoking cigarettes.)

Rather than do their dying at home—the silent majority of Americans now do their dying in hospitals and nursing homes, often in rooms shared with strangers, behind curtains, with plastic tubes placed in their arms, mouths, and up their noses, and under the empty-eyed watch of security cameras, digital heart monitors, and a few people who don’t know them from Adam or Eve but earn their living working 12-hour shifts watching strangers die.

Americans snub Death using the same containment strategy they use to snub mental illness or disability or deviation from the norm: Put all the ‘afflicted’ in one place, out of the way, and make sure they stay there.

Why do we isolate the dying? Are we afraid that if the young and healthy and whole were to see—and worse—have relationships with—people who are in a state of fatal disintegration—this intimacy with Death might give them pause? Are we afraid that if young people are bedside as a parent, friend or loved one died, they would learn how the dying never exclaim, “I wish I had acquired more debt and spent more time in the office!” But rather, how heartbreakingly often the dying confess in a whisper, “I wish I had the courage to have lived my life true to myself, and not a life others expected of me.”

Might these hale and hearty young people then be inspired to decline to work 60-hour weeks, 50 out of 52 weeks for 40 years to pay off the $80,000 of debt they took on just to get a basic college education? Might they decline to borrow a year’s salary to buy a grossly uneconomical but luxurious SUV? Or, worse, would they decline to sign the ballooning mortgage that would rent the McMansion just long enough for their hard work to fill it with stuff they never had the time or energy to use?

I wonder, if more of us encountered Death more frequently, more naturalistically, would we choose to pay better attention to each day, and to spend more time with our children, friends and family, and less time with employers and money lenders? Might we purchase a used clarinet and start taking lessons?

Corralling of the dying into a few off-stage ghettos is Part One of the magic act of making Death invisible in America.

Here’s Part Two:

At the same time we Americans exert a staggering amount of psychic energy and money to repress and deny real Death—we also expend a staggering amount of psychic energy and money to revel in fake death.

Watch American movies or television; listen to American music; look at American art; read or listen to American storytelling, from Corporation Hollywood to the unproofread self-published Kindle books obsessively detailing the gruesome adventures of horny teenage vampires. Do that, and you will see that Americans are obsessed with Death as a violent, random, meaningless, grotesque, artificial and fictitious absurdity. Often Death is presented as a punishment or penalty, and almost never as the defining event of a Life.

While we Americans fear real Death, and studiously keep it out of our mind and sight— we are fascinated by fake Death. So long as it’s done at a distance, done to someone else, and done with special effects. It is ‘normal’ for Americans to routinely consume thousands of fictitious stories of violent, meaningless Death. It is normal for Death to be delivered by vampires, zombies, racially profiled generic terrorists, and hysterical infectious diseases transported on jet planes in carry-on luggage and bringing doomsday down in 72 hours. Gee whiz, it’s enough to make the average hormonally in-flux college freshman reach for his mom’s AK-47, stuff a bomb in his backpack, and head off to his Psychology 101 class.

I wonder, does our preference for ignoring and fearing real Death, and glorifying outrageously phony Death, play some role in how easily we Americans make war— initiating the use of force to kill people we don’t know?

I wonder, has our denial of real Death and our delight in fake Death made it easy for us to make believe Death is nothing more than a grainy image captured by robotic cameras strapped to ‘smart’ bombs fired by drone aircraft? Death as video game?

And I wonder if this language of smart bombs and dumb bombs, drones and improvised explosive devices is a verbal expression of how we have substituted fake Death for the real thing. As if it is the ‘smart’ bombs and pilotless drones that select who gets killed, we don’t. Once upon a time, unintended murder was graphically named: manslaughter. The phrase now in vogue, collateral damage, could describe stubbing one’s toe, or default on a loan.

Since September 11, 2001 we have been telling ourselves that we live in a time of new, asymmetrical war and of unidentified threats from all directions. Already we have forgotten that living this way has been our choice.

I wonder what would happen on this planet if Americans were to unilaterally disarm themselves to Death. What would change in our world if we first recognized and then rejected, fictitious, fake, absurdist Death? Would nothing change? Or everything?

If we make peace with Death, would it then be easy and natural to make peace with ourselves and everyone else?

(Read Death to America! Part One)

Death is like the weather; we cannot change it or stop it. But we can choose how we respond to both; thermal underwear or sandals for the weather, black suits or New Orleans jazz bands for our funerals.

Sometimes when I chance to think about Death, the American philosopher George Burns’s observation comes to mind. “Dying? Meh. It’s been done.” And I blissfully return to my stumbling pursuit of happiness.

But long ago and far away, when I was 17, I would think long and hard about Death. Usually after smoking marijuana alone in the basement and staring into an ultraviolet black light while listening to The Doors song Roadhouse Blues with the volume all the way up. Looking back, what messages I heard in the song’s lyrics is a mystery to me:

Roll, roll, roll, roll
Thrill my soul
You gotta beep a gunk a chucha
Honk konk konk
You gotta each you puna
Each ya bop a luba
Each yall bump a kechonk
Ease sum konk
Ya, ride

Still, I was so moved that I adopted a rhyming couplet from the song as the anthem of my teenage nihilism:

Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer
The future’s uncertain, and the end is always near

Even at 17-years-old I had already lived longer than 99.567% of the life forms on this planet. And now, having passed the half-century mark, my few fellow travelers include a few sea turtles, elephants and redwoods. I do not require a statistician to tell me that I am much closer to my ending than to my beginning. Which, now that I think of it, since the Universe is expanding and carries Time with it in only one direction, we are always closer to our ending than to our beginning. Where was I? Ah. Having lived a very long time, I now see how at every significant age—5, 7, 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 25, 29, 32, 39—I was fooled by a trick of my mind into believing I had finally—finally—entered the prime of my Life. But now that I think of it, given that the moment of our Death is unknowable, isn’t whatever age we are the prime of our Life? (Whoa. Maybe I better Bogart this joint and try to concentrate.)

These days, as I trudge across the tundra of middle age, I contemplate Death without needing the props of mood-altering drugs, dramatic lighting, and a loud soundtrack. I now think of Death casually, while driving to the airport in the rain, while watching myself in the mirror as I brush my teeth, and even as I sip my beer and listen to a friend telling a funny story. No, Death is not my friend. But it is my shadow, my constant companion, and my relentless goad.

Is this why Death is important? Without Death, wouldn’t we all just be here, forever, wandering around and complaining about the weather? Without Death, would our only motivation to do anything be to distract ourselves from an endless ennui? Without Death, would anyone care about Time enough to invent anything, from clocks to insurance policies to stop light cameras to iPods? Without Death, would there be no risk? Would the playing field be perfectly level, to infinity, and beyond?

Why is Death, the perfect vacuum, or absence, so powerful a presence? Death is Nature’s ultimate or else. In my long Life I have closely encountered Death only twice. First, when I was eleven and attended the tragicomic stage play of my Irish grandfather’s wake. Second, when I was 35 a wailing woman I did not know crossed a street and put a dead infant in my arms.

Somehow, with only those two experiences and a whole lot of tail-chasing thinking, somewhere along my journey I put aside childish things and I accepted in my heart and mind that the cosmos is benevolently indifferent to me, to my life, and to my demise.

I think I get the joke now. George Burns was channeling the cosmos when he delivered the punch line, Dying? Meh. It’s been done.

(Read Death to America! Part Two)

I could be wrong, but I believe that every human being, and indeed, every other life form on this planet as well, is an artist working with memory.

Some are Realists, some Dadaists, some Cubists and some Fauvists, but every person, porcupine, redwood or amoeba practices the art of memory in a way that is as unique as their single solitary once upon a time being.

When it comes to accuracy, my memory is reliably unreliable. My memories, when glanced at from afar, appear coherent, meaningful pieces of a larger, logical whole. Much like scenes from a novel or obituary. Yet, when studied up close, every memory I’ve painted begins to swirl and spin and gyrate, exploding apart into colorful, meaningless points of light, with expanding dark empty Space between.

I do, however, have viscerally vivid memories of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches. Of course, these sensual memories are impossible to verify, as they exist only in my world, no one else’s. I cannot convey the look, sound, scent, taste or touch of a memory I carry inside me no matter how hard I try.

So even though right now at this very moment the white canvas of my mind is painted with the first time ever I saw the Golden Gate Bridge—twenty-something years ago—this heart-pumping panorama of in-motion sky and light and sound and smell which I have zoomed down the road of history to visit again can be experienced only by single solitary me. For all its artful beauty (you’ll have to take my word for this), my memory is not real, but rather, a brilliant artistic rendering of what was, once upon a time, real.

Given my fractured mosaic of memory, it amuses me no end that what I am about to assert, I do firmly believe: Memory is the central mechanism of evolution—for an individual, a nation, a species. The Universe we live in wears a black beret, smokes clove cigarettes, and has streaks of ultramarine blue and cobalt violet all over its hands.

Consider B. F. Skinner’s rats. (How’s that for a quantum leap in expository prose?)

Skinner put some rats in cages and conditioned them to expect a pellet of food to be dropped into their cage every time they pressed on a lever. Ho-hum.

Then Skinner changed the world. At least he changed the world of those caged rats. Skinner wanted to see what happened if he made the pellet of food drop into the rat’s cage only every fifth time they pressed the lever. Whoa! Hysteria! Frantic pressing of the lever in desperation to regain the expected but somehow disappeared food pellets!

Yet, over time, the rats became re-conditioned. New memory asserted itself. They learned to expect the food to drop into their cage after the fifth pressing of the lever. Ho-hum.

Then Skinner played god again. He made the manna-like pellets of food drop into the cages without rhyme or reason or rhythm—unrelated to the number or frequency of lever pressings. The rats, unable to determine a pattern, pressed the lever continuously, obsessively, compulsively. Despite randomly receiving an occasional pellet of food, the rats were so consumed by the memory of the pellets of food that they should have been receiving but were not receiving—that they would not could not stop pressing the lever and trying trying trying to make the lost pellets come back.

With these experiments in intermittent reinforcement, Skinner discovered what the gambling industry had known since the dawn of history: If we win only rarely, without a detectable pattern leading to our winning, our not knowing when we will win again or if we will ever win again compels us to keep pressing or pulling the lever, sickened by the thought that those damn pellets of food that should be coming to us are secretly going to somebody else.

“Just one more press, one more! 78,543 has always been my lucky number!”

What all of that has to do with memory being the center-spring of evolution, I have no idea. I seem to have forgotten the point I was trying to make. Ho-hum. No great loss.

Oh, loss! That’s the point I wanted to make.

Why do we use our ability to travel through time by memory and or by history to obsessively revisit the people and places and things that we have lost? Why is the memory of what we have lost more powerful than the memory of what we possess?

I think there are only two different ways to remember what we once had but have lost.

One way to remember a loss is with anger.

This is called a grudge. A grudge, with five interconnected moving parts, is complex. First, you must remember something that you have lost. Second, you must be pissed off about the loss. Third, you must choose to remain pissed off about the loss. Fourth, you must blame someone for your loss. Fifth, you must try to make that someone suffer as much as you are suffering from holding your grudge.

Imagine holding onto anger over a loss for your entire life. Then imagine passing your grudge on to your children. Then imagine your children passing your grudge on to their children, and on and on, generation to generation. Or, just read the news. To see little grudges, read the local news. To see big grudges, read the national news. To see history-making grudges, read the international news.

Holding a grudge takes a lot of energy. One advantage of my being indolent both by nature and by nurture is that I am far too lazy to hold a grudge. Which brings me to the other way to remember a loss, which is simpler and easier.

Remember your loss in any way you care to so long as you do not remember it with anger.

Perhaps on Monday remember a loss with sorrow. On Tuesday remember that same loss or another one with blushing embarrassment. During the rest of the week remember your losses with regret, remorse, reason, ridicule, wisdom, humor, shame, denial, indifference or compassion. Practicing this method, I have come to savor my losses, each and every one. If remembering a particular loss begins to bore me, I switch to a fresh one.

Here’s something else about our memories: They may be the only truly private property, the only thing, we ever own. A memory is exclusively ours. We did not take it from the common weal; we created it ourselves. Unlike beachfront land or subterranean reservoirs of oil, which are taken from finite planetary resources someone claims as their own and erects legal barriers to exclude others from using—a memory is something we have and hold without depleting anyone else’s inventory.

Everyone has memories and owns the machinery to make more. Unlike sport utility vehicles and flat-screen televisions, a BIG memory requires no more raw materials or rare earth minerals than a tiny memory. The size and potency of our memories is completely up to us, and how we choose to practice the art.

Our private property memories cannot be stolen, cannot be plagiarized, cannot be counterfeited. At least, not yet. (Check back with me on this in another 54 years.)

As copyright owners of each infinitely malleable memory we possess, we can also expand, upgrade, remodel, super-size, revise, edit, face-lift, liposuction, restock, repress, distort, and rotate our memories in inventory without asking permission or applying for permits.

At every given moment, I am the sum of my memories. You are the sum of your memories. Universe is the sum of all memory.

You may steal my social security number, credit cards and passwords, but they are not my identity.

But would I be, would I exist, if I had no memory?

Without my memories, would only my body be here, and I be gone?

This makes me remember attending a lecture on a rainy evening many years ago at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. Elie Wiesel spoke about mankind needing to make a commitment to remembering. Practicing what he preached, Wiesel had committed himself to remembering a holocaust of loss. Listening to him, it became clear to me that he had also chosen to remember without anger. Elie Wiesel said practicing the art of memory was a person’s supreme defiance—an incorruptible assertion of their being and individuality.

In closing his speech, Elie Wiesel asked the audience a question. What was the most horrifying disease known to mankind? Was it cancer? AIDS? Hate?

Elie Wiesel said that, with its destruction of all memory, its erasure of the individual even while the body lived on, Alzheimer’s disease, or dementia, is the worst disease imaginable.

He’s right.

(Thanks for the Memory appears in the essay collection, You Must Be Present to Win, available on Amazon Kindle summer 2012)

Grasshopper: What is a memory?

Zen Master: A memory is a motorcycle.

(Two weeks and 161 hours of meditation later)

Grasshopper: What is history?

Zen Master: History is a road.

(Two weeks and 161 hours of meditation later)

Grasshopper: Master, is Time gasoline?

Zen Master: Geesh. You can be such a dope.

(Two years and 8,372 hours of meditation later)

Grasshopper: Master, I have meditated long and deep on a memory being a motorcycle and a road being history. But, if it pleases you to tell, what then is Time?

Zen Master: I thought you’d never ask. Time is the speed limit.

Grasshopper: My head hurts.

Zen Master: No pain no gain.

Grasshopper: But Master, how can I reach enlightenment?

Zen Master: Try lifting this: Time keeps everything from happening at once.

Grasshopper: Whoa. Heavy.

Zen Master: It gets heavier. Memory keeps everything from happening only once.

Grasshopper: Does this mean that time travel is possible?

Zen Master: What did you have for lunch yesterday?

Grasshopper: Whirled peas.

Zen Master: How was it?

Grasshopper: Meh.

Zen Master: There you go.

Grasshopper: Huh? I mean, revered Master, I respectfully request clarification.

Zen Master: I’ll dumb it down for you. Yesterday’s lunch, at least since your last visit to the ashram’s outhouse, is over. Done. It exists in its original form only in the non-existent Past.

Grasshopper: Ow. Serious migraine.

Zen Master: Think of it this way. When asked what you had for lunch yesterday, you hopped on your motorcycle, zoomed down the road of history traveling at the speed of time, and stopped for lunch.

Grasshopper: Ah ha! Memory. History. Time travel. They are variations on the same theme. I feel the sudden presence of a cartoonish light bulb above my head!

Zen Master: Yeah, well, as a Zen Master I must suck. Because it’s only a 40-watt bulb.

Back Story

She said, “I’m talking about myself too much.”

I said, “No. You’re not.”

This was a white lie, something I had learned how and why to do when I was eleven. (More on that later.)

“I want to know about you,” she said. “All about you.”

My Life flashed before my eyes. I covered by gulping my wine and glancing aside to watch the people passing our table at the sidewalk bistro.

Then I looked at her and made what I hoped appeared to be a nonchalant smile. I said, “Ask me anything.”

On the surface, saying those three words cost no more than a two-part thump of my heart. Below the surface, inside the natural history museum where every exhibit documents an event in my Life, “ask me anything” caused the Greek chorus of my Inner Child, Inner Boy, Inner Adolescent, Inner Young Adult, and Inner Middle-Aged Man to all slap their foreheads in unison and sing out, “He’s gone mad! Somebody stop him! Call 911!”

I sternly and telepathically swore to them, “No matter what she asks me, I’m going to tell her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

My historical selves stared at each other in dumb shock. Then, confronted with the unpredictable consequences of my oath, they began running in circles, bumping into each other and flailing their arms while yelling, “51-50! 51-50!” ^(*)

Perhaps the beautiful woman sitting across from me sensed my inner distress, because she chose to look aside, studying the passersby. This was our tacitly agreed upon maneuver whenever looking into one another’s eyes risked revealing how our thoughts were running circles around our conversation.

While she studied passersby, I studied her. My sight slalomed down the waves of her dark hair pushed behind one ear, raced down her neck, banked up over the rounded angle of her shoulder and snowplowed down the alpine valley between her breasts swelling a black sequined blouse. By the end of the run, I was breathing heavily.

But I saw her frown, which snapped me to attention, and caused a rise of panic. What was she going to ask me? What secret humiliation from my long life was I about to reveal? Was she about to ask me, “Have you ever cheated on a lover? Do you have any sexually transmitted diseases? How much LSD did you take in high school? Do you listen to Hip Hop?”

Still frowning, she sipped her wine, then turned and looked straight at me, sat up tall, and decisively set her wine glass down between us.

Was she about to ask me, “Have you ever been arrested? Ever slept with another man? Are you wearing women’s panties under your jeans?”

No.

She began telling me about a trip to Ireland she had made in the company of her mother. She described driving a rented car along impossibly narrow, hedge-lined roads, and the abundance of lilting music spilling from even the remotest of pubs, and how the Irish doted on her white-haired mother, “Ah! You’re from America now are you?”

I said ask me anything; she asked me nothing.

Was I relieved?

Hell, yes.

And, Hell, no.

I mentally shrugged, even while my heart metaphorically sank. I hid my conflicted emotions from her by employing the most common form of white lie. That is, I smiled and said nothing.

Down beside the dust-covered artifacts, exhibits, and dioramas in the museum of my memory, my multiple selves slapped hands and shouted, “The big dope threw open the door—and she walked on by! Whoooo-hooooo!”

My Inner Kid did a happy dance step over to the door of the museum. He slapped the bolt back into place and, just before he flicked off the lights, stuck his tongue out at me.

Further Back Story

When I was a kid, I was shy.

Shy is a euphemism, which is a type of white lie. Truth is, when I was a kid I was terrified. People, whether grownups or kids of any age, including infants, scared the shit out of me. I was afraid of my neighbors, wary of my classmates, intimidated by teachers and janitors, scared-stiff by cops and priests and the burly men who dragged the black hose from the tanker truck across the white snow of our yard to fill our furnace with heating oil. Why, I don’t know. Unlike so many children, I did not suffer some terrible childhood trauma. The trauma I endured was subtle, low-level, but constant; like background radiation. I felt exposed, vulnerable, and dependent for survival on the kindness of strangers, starting with my own family. From the moment I awoke (reluctantly), wherever I went and whatever I did I was certain that if I made one single wrong move I would be…erased. Disappeared.

For me, and I suspect for many others, the joyful sun-drenched memories of childhood we haul around are a load of bullshit we back-filled into the landscape of our history. Similar to the uninterrupted and steadily advancing employment history we concoct for our résumés.

(Read the rest of Ask Me Anything in the essay collection, You Must Be Present to Win, available on Amazon Kindle summer 2012)

—————-
(*) Section 5150 (Involuntary psychiatric hold) of California’s Welfare and Institutions Code

Newton Reflecting

Long ago and far away, in a galaxy not unlike our own but which no longer exists, in a place without iPads and Kindles and where mobile phones were the size of toasters and traffic on the information highway was jammed with the cacophonous beep-buzz-honk-screech of dial-up modems, I came down with an incurable, life-altering fever.

I was living in Oregon and it was January. I had just completed a five-mile bicycle commute in a rainstorm and as I rolled my bike through the doors of the printing store where I worked, water cascaded from me, soaking the carpet.

My colleague, Patty, asked me, “When are you going to learn to take your clothes off be-fore you shower?”

“I am a wet dog,” I said. Then I played the part by shaking my whole body, sending a spray of water in all directions.

Patty’s nose wrinkled. “I hope you don’t smell like one.”

That’s when it hit me. “Patty! That’s a great name for a literary magazine!”

“I Hope You Don’t Smell Like One?”

“No! Well, yes, actually that is. But I meant, Wet Dog!”

For the rest of the day, Patty kept her distance, as if I had been infected with a virus.

I had.

II 

Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain. They had all contracted and suffered with the self-publishing virus. One of my favorite writers, Will Porter, had the fever bad. Real bad. In the 1890s he bought a used printing press and proceeded to write and publish Rolling Stone (no, not that Rolling Stone). Will Porter’s magazine was a humorous weekly reporting on local politics and other asinine behavior in his North Carolina hometown. Following a long tradition of self-publishing, Will Porter’s magazine lost money even faster than its reporter-publisher-printer could beg or borrow it from friends and relatives. But Will Porter had a day job. He was a teller in a bank. A bank clerk in the grip of the self-publishing fever is a risky proposition. So it came to pass that Will Porter was arrested, charged with embezzlement.

There are moments in every Life, and in every well-composed obituary or novel, for that matter, when Change with a capital C alters both our interior and exterior landscapes. Such a moment came for Will Porter during the train ride to his trial. He was alone. His pockets were filled with money his friends had given him for his legal expenses. What he was thinking and feeling we can only guess. But at a station en route, Will Porter got off the train, walked across the tracks, and boarded a train going in a new direction. He abandoned his past, which included an ailing wife and very young daughter. He took it on the lam, to Honduras, where he continued writing, and is credited with coining the term ‘banana republic.’

Yet, only a year later, when word reached Will in Honduras that his wife was gravely ill, he chose to go back to the States and turn himself in. He went to his wife’s bedside, and to her funeral, and to his trial, and to jail.

For some people, like bodybuilders, career criminals, and writers, a jail sentence can be the equivalent of graduate school. After three years, when released from jail, Will Porter was forty-years-old, a disgraced and penniless convict, and a self-publisher in recovery. But he was also a professional writer who, working from his jail cell, had sold several short stories to New York publishers. These publishers said if he wrote more stories they might buy them. Motivated by that shallow promise, and the deep yearning to keep the disgrace of his past a secret, Will moved to Manhattan, a place where his shame would be puny and anonymous among four million others. Over the next nine years, he would drink two or more bottles of liquor everyday, carouse the city every night, and write nearly three hundred stories under a pen name. He stayed out of jail by wisely leaving the publishing of his work to others. When he was physically, emotionally, and creatively spent, William Sydney Porter, alias O. Henry, said, “Turn up the lights—I don’t want to go home in the dark.” And died.

III 

The self-publishing fever I contracted was far less virulent than O. Henry’s. It never turned me into an embezzler. But then, I did not work in a bank. I worked in a printing store. Which, for a self-publisher back in that other far away galaxy, was heaven. After a day of wage slavery, I would happily overwork myself late into the night, writing and printing and publishing Wet Dog. My illness drove me to explore and master such things as kerning, creep, and gripper, and it caused me to spend every spare dollar of my puny income on paper and postage, instead of on craft-brewed beer.

Some late nights, alone in the shop, surrounded by a fantastic wealth of computers loaded with expensive graphics programs, color laser printers, high-speed black and white copiers, printing presses, saddle-stitchers, binders, laminators— all at my semi-competent command— I felt myself a bona fide Superman of Self-Publishing. Wet Dog was my Daily Planet. But should this month’s issue need a photograph, I did not have a Jimmy Olsen to holler out the door. I had to go shoot the photograph. Nor did I have a Lois Lane or Clark Kent clamoring for story assignments. Like O. Henry before me, all the stories in my magazine, despite the many bylines such as Finneran James and Newton Golden, had a common author. Me.

Each month I also had to come up with the design, do the typesetting and layout, buy the paper, run the copies, fold, stitch, stuff and seal and mail. My weekends were devoted to local distribution. I would pedal my bike around Portland in the rain, the panniers stuffed with plastic-covered bundles of Wet Dog. I would deliver issues to Powell’s bookstore and to the many cafés that sprouted like mushrooms in the Oregon rain.

I soon had scores—scores!—of subscribers. Which both amazed and disturbed me. (Who were these 43 people? I sure wouldn’t mail $16 to some nut who promised to send me a magazine filled with his wacky short stories and goofy photographs of his drenched golden retriever.) And I soon had fans. Sort of. There was the woman who e-mailed to me her blushingly revealing poem, Drunk In My Jammies. And there was the letter in my post office box from the person who was so impressed with my short story about what might have happened to Einstein’s eyes after he died, that she or he scrawled a four-word letter: “Brilliant! Send me more!” But failed to provide their name and address, or to enclose a check.

The crest of the wave of my fame was a phone interview with the Assistant Literary Editor of Portland’s daily newspaper, The Oregonian.  The brief article he wrote for the Friday arts section was headlined, Wet Dog Marks Its Literary Territory.

I came home from work that night certain my answering machine would be filled with messages from hungry agents eager to represent me, the Northwest’s latest literary phenom, right up there with Chuck Palahniuk and David Guterson, and to sell my work to New York publishers who had way more money than brains.

There was one phone message. But it was from my landlady. She told me to stop complaining about the constantly running toilet in my bathroom—why should I care, she asked—I wasn’t paying for it and there was plenty of water in Oregon.

IV

Flash forward to this galaxy, to this millennium, to this world where iPads and tablets and Kindles and Nooks proliferate, and driving on the information highway is a speeder’s delight, with buck-a-song music, and pirated movies, and a cornucopia of free pornography all downloading in the background whilst we Twitter away our life on Facebook.

Things are different here. Not necessarily better, but definitely vaster, and faster. Gil Scot Heron was right; the revolution is not being televised. It’s on the internet. Once upon a time in that other galaxy, I was the only person I knew infected with the self-publishing fever. Here in this world, my eBooks are but a handful of the millions of digital books only 30 seconds away from a reader. And most of these books are the ungainly spawn of feverish self-publishers possessing almost no money and even less brains.

Like me.

Just as in the bygone California and Yukon gold rushes, the rare but phrenetically publicized stories of self-publishers who have become millionaires, one 99-cent sale at a time, have created a tsunami of miners. To mangle a metaphor. Everybody is self-publishing their slightest thought. And these slight thoughts are often buried under gnarly grammar and faulty formatting. If the work is edited or proofread at all, someone with Tourette syndrome did it.

To all of which I say, “So what?” Every fever, every revolution, has a terrible beauty. Why would the digital self-publishing revolution be any different?

Fundamentally, nothing has changed. There is still a publisher standing between writer and reader. But Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, Apple, and their ilk, unlike the paper publishers of the recent past, don’t pretend they care about the quality of what they publish. They are honest corporations, which, like cancers, survive and thrive on growth, on quantity, not quality.

Over time, my self-publishing fever has become an illness I manage, rather than try to cure. Like malaria. Comparing now to back then, the differences are only in detail. I no longer have to pedal my bike in the rain to distribute copies of my work and hope some café rat will read them. Now, with my books available in the giant cyber-air mall of Amazon, even while I am on a hike in the mountains or watching a green flash sunset at the beach people all over the world can buy and instantly download my books, rain or shine, day or night. Once in a while, they actually do. And sometimes I manage to somehow write something that moves a reader to backtalk me. It delights and amazes me to read their smart reviews of my work—positive or negative—on Amazon.

Perhaps it is only my nostalgia for Wet Dog, but sadly, my self-published eBooks have yet to inspire a response that rivals Drunk In My Jammies.

Borrowed…then purchased!
by
L Hartman Amazon Verified Purchase

David Boyne showed up as a “suggestion” by my Kindle, I assume, because of my collection of books authored by humorous, witty, and intelligent writers. Taking advantage of my Prime membership, I borrowed Happy Accidents and rolled the dice. Not only did I relate to many of Boyne’s experiences and observations, but I also found myself laughing out loud and highlighting passages. Give this book back at the end of the borrowing period? No way. This book needed to be owned. So I purchased it…along with Three Pound Universe and X Marks the Spot. I suspect this is only the beginning. I thank my Kindle for suggesting David Boyne to me. One could say it was a happy accident.

I Could Be Wrong, But... Essays by David Boyne

January 9, 2012 Land of the Lotus Eaters, CA

I Could Be Wrong, But… Offbeat Essays Exploring the Irony in the Ordinary, by David Boyne

David Boyne has unleashed on an unsuspecting public a collection of quietly hilarious and deceptively meaningful (read: quirky as hell) essays. I Could Be Wrong, But… is the first book in the Amazon Kindle series, I Could Be Wrong, But… David Boyne’s I Could Be Wrong, But… is selling like hotcakes in a logging camp and has earned rave reviews. How can this be? Has the world gone mad? Is there no one who can stop this madness?

I Could Be Wrong, But… reviews

“Like, Dave Barry and David Sedaris, David Boyne analyzes life’s minor truths and comes up with the uncomfortable questions that may not topple governments, but do make life richer.”
–Ken Callaway, Screenwriter

“Beautifully crafted, poignant, and humorous. Essays by David Boyne capture the magic in daily life, if we stop and pay attention. He reminds us that happiness, indeed, is not an accident.”
– Paula Margulies, author of Coyote Heart

“I Could Be Wrong, But… is poignant, funny and intellectually charged.”
—Traci Foust, author of Nowhere Near Normal

I Could Be Wrong, But… now available in trade paperback on Amazon

Amazon Kindle books by David Boyne include Happy Accidents, X Marks the Spot, Resistance Is Futile!, and Inside My 3-Pound Universe.