Author Archive: jsomers

They shut off the water to my room yesterday, leading me to suspect I may have actually misread the boilerplate in my contract, since I can’t blog for my corporate masters if I die of dehydration.

I’ve survived so far by drinking water from the toilet tank, which is a little rusty and. . .brakish, but that won’t last forever. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to decide if I’m being punished and, if so, for what. I have to admit the contract was lengthy and I was sleepy and didn’t read it very closely. I may be required to do all sorts of things.

I’ve been keeping myself busy by making copies of my zine, The Inner Swine. This is pretty involved. I have stacks of photocopies of the innards of each issue, and stacks of the covers. I also have a long-necked stapler, Put a cover on top of the 15 double-sided pages of each issue, staple twice in the middle, fold, and voila! One issue of my zine, ready to be stuffed into an envelope and mailed to the handful of people who cared enough to mail me some sweaty dollar bills in the mail. It’s a beautiful thing.

It’s also kind of labor-intensive. The Helper Monkeys used to help, once I’d trained them using my patented beer-no-beer system, but the Helper Monkeys long ago escaped, and even if I wasn’t trapped in this hotel room, forced to blog, the wife wouldn’t allow them in the house anyway.

It used to be worse. My zine used to be distributed by Tower Magazines within Tower Records stores, as well as an outfit called Desert Moon Periodicals, and I was at one time making thousands of copies. By hand. Using the fold-and-staple technique. With Helper Monkeys doing more crapping and flinging of crap than actual zine-making. This took forever, as you can imagine, but the upside was that my zine was showing up in stores all over the world and I actually got little checks in the mail that helped pay for everything.

Today, however, both Tower and Desert Moon have gone bye-bye as the world discovered recently that it is impossible to actually make money by selling zines, and I don’t have to make nearly as many copies each issue. Still, a few hundred is pretty tedious.

Why do it? Well, the zine will always be a place where I can be as dumb and ridiculous as I want, which is pretty damn dumb and ridiculous. It’s also a place where I can dump lazy, unrevised writing filled with terrible grammar and bad spelling, poorly researched opinions and bad, superbad poetry, and no one can complain. Or if they complain, I can then make mean fun of them in the next issue! Plus, if I didn’t, I’d just spend all that money on more liquor, which I think we all agree would not be good for Jeff. Insofar as you have any opinions on what’s good for Jeff in the first place.

After weeks in this hotel room, forced to blog by my corporate masters, I think I am experiencing Helsinki Syndrome with the bathroom, which is all marble and expensive tile. Plus, it has a seat in the shower, which is my definition of luxury.

Word is trickling in from my vast network of vaguely-embarrassed supporters that Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) are being received across the land. People who actually know of me already are sending word. Lord knows how people who have no idea who I am will react–probably better. The people who know of me know me as a grubby, pantsless zine-publisher, frequently drunk and somewhat belligerent. Everyone else will simply be wowed by the amazing cover art and might even be fooled into reading the whole damn thing.

I got the following email from an old acquaintance who is going to try and review the book in one of the periodicals foolish enough to associate with him:

“What I was going to do, see, was go to bed early. I’m back on the “eating ight and exercising” bandwagon. . .So now I’m trying to be healthy and exercise and eat regularly and well, which is something that I can do and have done, and part of that is getting a decent night’s sleep and getting up early to do things when I’m freshly awake. So my plan last night was just that: go to bed early, and then get up and run for a while. . .

Then I got to the third or fourth chapter of The Electric Church. The one where the Monk decides he wants Nad and ends up chasing Avery. Next thing I know it’s 2 in the morning and. . .I was forced to sleep in.

All this to say that I’m *really* enjoying your book so far. Also, I’m glad you went with the blurry author photo.”

There you go, an unsolicited opinion by someone who is not merely me pretending to be someone else. Rock on.

It’s been, what, three weeks in this room? Blogging? My publisher promised me that if I generated some media attention for the book, they’d let me out of here. The way things have been going, I’ll be here forever.

I’m not cool. I’ve never been cool. Maybe, at one point in school I got so uncool I actually passed through the event horizon* of uncool, becoming so uncool I was actually cool. For a brief, ironic moment back in the early nineties when irony was hip. But in the traditional sense, no, I have never been cool.

Of course, in order to blog, you have to have a healthy appreciation for your own personal greatness, right? I mean, you are imagining that on some level total strangers want to know what you’re thinking, what you’re doing, maybe even what you’re eating, wearing, and muttering to yourself.

The answers for me: Scotch, an ancient pair of khaki shorts and nothing else besides a thin film of sweat, and goddamn you all to hell over and over again.

See? Not cool. And yet I must blog. For I have a book to sell.

That’s the sad truth of it–blogging is not natural for me. I didn’t see WordPress or Blogger and think, damn, this is what I should be doing with my time. I felt an overwhelming sense of boredom and woke up in Mexico without my pants. Again. But when you’re walking that thin line between being a total gacking sellout flogging your book like the unit-shifter it is, and maintaining some of the dark integrity you still gloat over under the covers with a flashlight, you pick your battles. A blog is a marketing tool these days, just like viral videos and Alternate Reality Games, but at least it’s a marketing tool where I get to be as uncool and lame as I always am.

I mean, I’ve been uncool for so long it’s comfortable. If I landed in some lame Disney movie about an uncool guy who finds a device that makes him cool, I’d run the other way, natch. I like being uncool. It’s part of my skin. When I was a little kid, I displayed zero athletic talent and yet insisted on playing Little League baseball to the mixed horror and amusement of my neighbors. When I was a little older I actually played Dungeons & Dragons. I got good grades. I wore glasses–ridiculously oversized plastic glasses, in fact. Look:

How I did not grow up to be a darkly muttering psycho, I have no idea. The liquor helps, I think.

And now, you lucky people will be exposed to my raw and unedited internal monologue! A RIVER OF UNCOOL WASHING OVER YOU LIKE AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE WAVE! Oh, it will be ever so much fun.

*Been reading Frederick Pohl and that’s my Phrase of the Week right now

Jeffs Ongoing Fugue of Pain

A History of My Life

By Jeff Somers

PART ONE: in which I eat dogs and become acquainted with Jesuit cruelty.

Where to start? I was born in Jersey City, New Jersey to an Irish-German family of thirteen: six brothers, five sisters, two parents. Only four survived the great bratwurst famine of 1974, two of them being my parents, who mourned the deaths of my siblings by dumping the surviving kids in private school and taking a cruise around the world. In private school my brother Yan and I learned to sing songs from The Sound of Music and tap dance, skills which have saved my life on more than one occasion. After the cruise, my parents went on an extended tour of Europe, from which they have yet to return.

As a result, Yan and I returned from the 1981 semester at school to find the house abandoned. A pack of wild, rabid dogs had broken through the screen door on the back porch and made it their home, and my poor brother Yan was mauled quite badly before I could Tap the dogs to death. I set about nursing Yan and scavenging our ancestral home for foodstuffs and potable water. It was, after all, a long summer. We survived it by eating carefully salted dog meat and drinking rainwater which had so much lead in it I went temporarily color blind in August. When Yan had regained enough of his strength, we set about repairing our ancestral home and plundering my father’s abandoned stocks of pornography. The summer passed quickly, then.

In the fall we matriculated into high school. Our parents maintained a long arm and enrolled us in St. Peter’s There But For the Grace of God Academy, which was a pseudo-religious-slash-military establishment stressing Latin and self-mutililation. We awoke one fine September day to find the ancestral home surrounded by Jesuit Commandos, who piled us into an armored truck along with several other frightened boys. Yan and I cheered our fellow kidnap victims by singing The Sound of Music (Yan’s voice indistinguishable from Julie Andrews’) and we plotted a brisk escape from the truck; but once the rear doors were thrown open Yan and I were inexplicably ratted out by our fellows. My brother and I entered St. Peter’s as prisoners, and spent our first weeks there being beaten on a daily basis by a burly priest named Father Hump, until we could speak perfect Latin, although we could no longer remember our own names.

(more…)

Quite frankly, I’m boring as hell.

People like me should not have blogs. I have few opinions. I let my life wash over me like an incomprehensible existential nightmare. I aspire to make shit up for a living. I’m a comfortable white guy living an easy life, and there is very little about me that is controversial or thought-provoking. Unless a fleshy mid-thirties guy drinking whiskey and reading a lot of books is your idea of thought-provoking, which it shouldn’t be, especially since I forget about 95% of what I read in those books. I’m like the guy from that movie Memento, except without the angst. And the dead wife.

Good blogs, blogs that I actually heave myself off of my digital ass to read, have one of two things going for them, I think: Either they have a central point, a subject to focus on in which the blogger is at least a self-styled expert, or they have an attitude–you know, blogs that exist just to stir shit up. Either way once you get some Technorati traction you start getting traffic, and then fights break out in your comments section, and all is good in the world. Then, one glorious day, one of your posts is greeted with a comment that reads, in full, “first!” and you know you have arrived.

Sadly, I am none of these things. I am an expert in nothing–I am your classic, classic Jack of All Trades and Master of None. My bizarre attention span has led me to become vaguely acquainted with any number of skills–baseball, French, chess, computer programming, guitar–before wandering off to do something else, usually involving whiskey. I can write authoritatively about nothing that does not personally involve me, so I don’t do it, for fear of being mocked. Your mockery wounds me.

I’m also not much of a shit-stirrer, largely for the same reason. When you recognize your vast ignorance and lack of life-mastery, it undermines the confidence, which makes it difficult to flatly call other people morons. It’s too bad; angering thousands of people would do wonders for my traffic.  If anyone out there wants to be my personal shit-stirrer, posting terrible things under my name in order to drum up attention, please contact me. The pay is terrible, but I’ll buy you beers.

*Name that reference and I will send you a cookie.**

**No cookies will actually be sent.