I Could Be Wrong, But…

is a finalist in this year’s San Diego Book & Writing Awards contest.

Are you among the 1%?

I was excited by the Occupy movement when it began. For the same reasons others ridiculed it: They had no political agenda other than to plant themselves in the public square and say, “Let’s talk about what’s going on.”

But a big problem for me was when Occupy created their version of “the other.” Namely, The 1%.  The moment we begin to think or see through a filter, in this case, Us versus Them, we go wrong. Just as in the moment we get angry, we go wrong.

Yes, please, please, let’s talk about how 1% of Americans can possess so much wealth when so many others posses so little. But how about we expand the context to include everyone alive on Earth, not just Americans?

When we do that, many in Occupy would find themselves among The 1%. (Which proves what those two great theoretical physicists, Einstein and Buddha, discovered: Everything is relative to where you are.)

So first, find out where you are.

Are you among the 1%?

I am.

http://www.globalrichlist.com/

What are you doing with all that wealth of yours?

The muse of WET DOG

“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.

(Read the rest of the essay, Wet Dog Fever, on AuthorMagazine.org)

Interview with John Byk of WritersAlive.com

David Boyne interview with John Byk on Writers Alive.

http://2012writersalive.blogspot.com/2012/04/david-boyne-and-x-marks-spot.html

This.

I consider myself to be an affable, not too bright, insignificant man. Which may explain why I like the affable, not too bright, insignificant movie, City Slickers.

I like Mitch, the main character in the film who is on the hero’s journey. Mitch lives in an apartment on Roosevelt Island in the middle of the East River alongside Manhattan. Once upon a time, I also lived in an apartment on Roosevelt Island. Like Mitch, I would ride the aerial tram from Roosevelt Island to my job in the gleaming Oz of Manhattan. But unlike Mitch, whose face while commuting in the tram could have illustrated the dictionary entry for “glum”, my face could have illustrated the dictionary entry for “giddy with an ineffable thrill of world-embracing hope.” Of course, there is no such dictionary entry. I’ve looked.

The other reason I enjoy City Slickers is that while telling the story of Mitch’s vacation on a dude ranch in New Mexico, the screenwriters, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, slipped in the secret of Life. For a couple of Hollywood writers without a single PhD in poststructuralist philosophy between them, this is a neat little trick.

The secret of Life is revealed in a brief dialog between the hard-bitten cowboy, Curly, and the wisecracking Manhattan adman, Mitch. Here, in its entirety, is that pas de quatre. (Quatre, because  I count the horses Mitch and Curly are riding as supporting cast.):

Curly: Do you know what the secret of Life is?
[holds up one finger]

Curly: This.

Mitch: Your finger?

Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.

Mitch: But, what is the “one thing?”

Curly: [smiles] That’s what you have to find out.

Long before I first watched City Slickers, I had been looking for my own ‘just one thing’. Which is probably why that brief exchange of dialogue resonated with me then and continues to echo in my memory now. Of course, the years of searching for my Just One Thing has brought me right back to where I started. This is called an odyssey. Having made an odyssey puts me in good company. It’s like being Facebook friends with Odysseus, and Dorothy and Toto. Curiously, everyone who completes an odyssey learns the same lesson. To wit, “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard; because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” (Even though the lesson we come home to is always the same, the journey we make to get there is unique. Dorothy received the lesson while lying in a bed in Kansas with a cool towel pressed on her forehead and surrounded by people who loved her. Odysseus received the same lesson while standing ankle deep in the blood and gore of the men he slaughtered after coming home to find them competing to possess his wife and make love to his money.)

I received the lesson of my odyssey last Friday on or about 7:35pm when in the tasting room of the Lost Abbey brewery in San Marcos, California and watching an empty pint glass become half full and then, miracle of miracles, become undeniably full. At which point the full to overflowing pint of Mongo India Pale Ale was set on the wood bar before me. At that sacred moment, I received my lesson, my Just One Thing.

I shall share it with you now, as you cannot take it from me, its magic would not work for you or anyone else unless, until, you complete your own odyssey.

For me, Just One Thing is — drum roll crescendo ending in cymbal splash —

Whatever is happening wherever I am.

Have a good Life! See you around! End of message.

How a Conversation with Ray Bradbury Changed My Life

I was driving on College Boulevard late in the afternoon of a warm summer day, careful to stay under the speed limit of 50 miles per hour as I accelerated up the long hill near Mesa Avenue.

And off to the right standing on the sidewalk I saw a naked woman.

Passing her at 73-feet per second, my eyes blinked once, like the shutter of a camera taking a photograph.

She looked to be in her middle forties, with blonde hair that was professionally colored and cut to stop a few inches above her round shoulders. Her breasts were large, heavy, wide apart, and almost reached down to where her round stomach fell in a big fold above her wide hips and thighs. She was staring at the flow of passing cars, her expression was a content, dreamy, distracted smile.

There was someone else in the tableau vivant. A uniformed police officer was approaching the woman and holding out a silver foil emergency blanket—even while keeping his eyes averted and leaning backward—clearly hoping that the woman would awake from her reverie, take the offered blanket, and save him from having to wrap it around her.

Then I was past.

And I wondered.

Had the woman been harmed in some terrible way? No, I reassured myself. Not with that beatific smile.

Maybe she was drunk or drugged. But she had stood so casually still, neither swaying nor wobbling, and with a calm composure that was in stark contrast to the nervous cop wrestling with the silver blanket and his sense of propriety.

Even as I drove I looked at the mental picture I had taken and what began to intrigue me even more than her public nakedness was her smile. That smile was satisfied yet selfless, faint yet unmistakable. It was an expression of concentrated interest, without a trace of hesitation, anxiety, or judgment. I had seen such a smile on others, although not often. I remembered watching carpenters hammering nails while framing a house, and the Dalai Lama in a television interview listening to a question.

Maybe the woman lived nearby, in one of the big houses in the gated community atop the wooded hills overlooking the road. Maybe she had been putting on her makeup early that morning she stopped, seeing in her mind and feeling in her gut the emptiness of driving 30 miles to spend 10 hours in an office sitting at a desk with her eyes and mind continuously jumping from one to another of three computer screens while the click click click of the mouse under her hand counted out the passing moments of her life. And she had grabbed her phone from her purse and had called her office, and in s shaken voice claimed to have a “stomach flu or something.”

When she had snapped closed the phone she felt an immense wave of soundless relief, and both her mind and her body had gone slack.

For a long time she sat in her bathrobe on the leather sofa staring at the big flat-screen television on the wall across from her, without having turned it on.  Instead, she watched the images filling the screen of her mind. At first, the dense quiet filling the 4,000 square foot house had agitated her, like a single mosquito near her ears. She told herself to get up and get dressed, but she stayed on the sofa in her robe staring through the French doors, across the patio she never used, to watch the birds flitting among the leafy trees. Even when the three gardeners appeared, she sat and watched through the French doors as they worked the yard with leaf blowers and edgers and mowers. After the gardeners were done she stared at the sections of sky she could see through the door and windows, watching how the white clouds flowed and combined and pulled apart, like the blobs floating inside a lava lamp

Then she realized she was standing in front of the full-length mirror in the hallway near the front door. Each morning before leaving for work she would stop and look into this mirror, making a fast survey of herself. But this day she stood in front of the mirror for a long time. She had shrugged off the bathrobe, both smiling at and ignoring her urge to pick it up from the hardwood floor and at least drape it over a chair. She had stared at her body in the mirror as her thoughts had flowed past. Her boyfriend liked to have sex every time he was with her but he never made an effort to bring her to orgasm. He had gone to Cabo last month rather than accompany her to the wedding of her niece and meet her family. But he danced well and he made her laugh. When he had a few drinks in him. And her boss at work, a woman much younger than her, who seemed to always be working through a well-planned and invisible strategy, and how it made her feel as if she were a disposable this other woman’s chess board.

And when she had glanced through the narrow windows beside the big wood front door and saw the three plastic wrapped newspapers in the driveway, she had wondered who had dropped them there. She got her news online and did not subscribe to a newspaper. When she unlocked and pulled open the heavy wood front door it had made a soft whoosh, like air entering a vacuum-sealed jar.

Standing in the driveway, she liked how the sun-warmed asphalt wet from the automated lawn sprinklers felt on the bottoms of her feet. She almost gasped with the swift memory of herself as a young barefoot girl on some long unremembered summer day. The angle of the late afternoon sun entranced her. She had started walking, going very slowly down the long hill and stopping often to look into the bay windows of the empty houses of her anonymous neighbors. The heavy wet scent of the blooming hedges swelling out to block half the sidewalk she walked along was intoxicating. She was delighted with how she could somehow still detect, swirled up into the warm perfume of the hedges so close to her, the very slight tang of the ocean seven miles away.

Lessons From Jack, a Kinde single by David Boyne

Lessons From Jack
A Handful of Scenes, Light and Dark, from a Young Boy’s Life
by David Boyne
(cover photo © Max Kunowski, MaxKunowski.com)

BOOK DESCRIPTION
Jack is all grown up now. Yes, it happens. That’s a photograph of him on the cover of this book. His friend Max took it when they were both in high school.

Life is filled with promises and not one of them, other than death, is guaranteed. Yet I cannot help but think that some day Life will arrange for Jack to be a parent. He’ll be a great dad. A small part of me wants him to feel the vague but ever-present stomach-churning nausea of being guardian to a kid he loves. Just like he made me feel. But a bigger and better part of me wants Jack to have the chance to meet the kid he once upon a time was. Just like the chance he gave me.

Praise for I COULD BE WRONG, BUT… COLLECTED ESSAYS OF DAVID BOYNE

“These essays are poignant, funny and intellectually charged.”
– Traci Foust, author of Nowhere Near Normal

“Read David Boyne at your own peril, and be prepared to duck.”
– Thornton H. Sully, A Word With You Press

“These essays brim with profound insight. They are tales of ordinary life, extraordinarily observed. And they’re funny. So funny you hardly know he’s making you think ’til you catch yourself doing it.”
–Patty Kadel, Cartoonist

“The stories in this way off-the-beaten-path travelogue take you through a beautiful, spongy, delightful mass of gray matter. They are wry, tender, and carry just a hint of the acerbic. They intoxicate.”
–Ann S. Bancroft, WriTeRsMOnthlY.com

“Like those other two Davids, 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/Composer

“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

Not Writing? Get off your Ass go Outside and Fail at Something!

People sometimes ask me, “Why do you write?”

I always sigh, look them straight in the eyes, and lie through my teeth.  “Beats the hell out of me.”

Truth is, I know why I write. I write because I have proven myself to be astonishingly incompetent at everything else that I have used my abundant energy and freedom to try my hand at.

I have failed at being gainfully employed. I have failed at being gainfully self-employed. I have failed to spend less than I earn, to buy low and sell high. I have failed at love, at marriage, at parenting, and at CPR training. I have failed at getting my act together and taking it on the road, including failing at riding a bicycle across North America

Sometimes I have succeeded in failing in ingenious combinations, as when I was eleven-years-old and precociously failed to resist the temptations of alcohol—while simultaneously failing as an altar boy. (I was fired for drinking the blessed wine.)

You name it, and chances are good that I’ve failed at it. But I’m okay with my résumé of failure—because I’m a writer now. It’s impossible to fail at writing.

Sure, I can fail at making money from my writing, and fail to win friends and influence people with my writing—but who’s going to fire me? Being a writer is the ultimate work-at-home scheme: No bosses, and no customers! In my mind and heart, the profound joy of being a writer in America is this: no one is trying to keep me from writing.

Because no one cares about writers in America.

Isn’t that the very definition of freedom: Being left alone to do what you most want? Which, if you think about it (I strongly recommend you do no such thing), is scary. Because the essential part of that freedom is being left alone to fail at doing what you most want.

American writers who complain about being unread, unloved and unsold need to reconnect with the long and honorable tradition of American writers exercising their freedom to fail. So many wonderful American writers have been failures at so many diverse pursuits of happiness before becoming writers that I feel deeply honored to count myself in their company. I urge my kvetching brother and sister writers to first, shut up. And second, to acknowledge that they stand on the shoulders of heroic—often spectacular!—failures.

A very short list: Mark Twain failed at printing and publishing, at manufacturing and inventing. Thomas Paine (an honorary American, if anyone is) was a total screw-up in three countries and on two continents, yet he became a key player in two world revolutions by inventing the essay form we now call the rant. Jack Kerouac really became a writer when he failed at being Neal Cassady. David Sedaris became a writer by failing at being a maid in Manhattan and failing at being a Santa’s elf in Macy’s.

This is why, when I meet folks who complain that no one pays attention to writers in America, I tell them that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s also why, when people ask me, “How do I become a writer?” I always sigh, look them straight in the eyes, and tell them the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“First, spend all your abundant energy and freedom in failing at everything you can imagine.”

They always lean forward eagerly. “Yeah? And?”

“Then write about it.”