Category Archives: writing

At the DMV

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I had all of my documents, passport, old driver’s license, social insurance, proof of residence, everything. I just needed to pop in for my picture and a signature.

“Do you have your appointment?” The security guatrd offered a friendly smile.

“Appointment?”

I waved me over to the window. “Scan the QR code.”

“Oh.” The website listed every DMV in the state, a litany of addresses and zip codes. I was fucked. I would have to come back. I scrolled down and found a slot in just 20 minutes. What miracle was this? I showed the security guard my screen.

“Check in over there.”

“Thank you.” I filled out the form and sat with my ticket, U0091.

Now serving U0091 at counter 11.

This was insane. I had slipped into some other dimension where the DMV was an easy, almost plesant experience. I gave the woman my ticket and signed the document.

“Please look at the camera. You can smile if you like.”

I was aghast. “You are so efficient!”

She gave me my ticket back. “Sit and they will call you.”

“What do you mean?”

“They will call you.”

Now serving U0062 at counter 19.

“Oh, okay.” I sat and looked at my ticket again. U0091. It was beginning to make sense. I looked around at the many others all waiting quietly, staring up at the screens.

Now serving U0063 at counter 4….Now serving WF0045 at counter 21

What was I thinking? Of course I would have to wait. I scrolled through the news, my mind glazing over at more Trump insanity, assembling the generals, telling them that the cities were training grounds. This fucking guy.

Now serving WL001 at counter 12…Now serving LR045 at counter 7…Now serving EN008 at counter 17…Now serving LE018 at counter 14…Now serving U0064 at counter 10.

This was going to to take a some time. I wouldn’t back to work on time.

Now serving EM009 at counter 21. Now serving U0071 at counter 12.

Very late. I texted. Sorry about that. The DMV, you know.

Now serving LR0047 at counter 11. Now serving U0072 at counter 4.

What did matter? I was in the queue. It would happen sometime. I scrolled and liked and posted retorts to the brazenly false images and data on the White House Instagram account and wondered when they would come after me. Crazy world. Interesting world. Whatever.

Now serving U0090 at counter 15.

I looked up. My time was almost up. I checked my papers. Did I have everything? Odds were low.

Now serving LE022 at counter 6. Now serving EN012 at counter 4. Now serving LE023 at counter 7.

Crazy fucking world. Why couldn’t we just make sensible decisions and get along? I had a friend in college that always said that. “Why can’t we all just get along?” He was a first-class moron.

Now serving U0091 at counter 14.

I stood sharply, stepped the wrong way, turned, and realized that that was the wrong way, that I had gone the right way the first time, and approached counter 14 and handed in my paperwork.

“Your slip.” She looked bored. At least she wasn’t angry.

“I’m sorry?”

“I need your slip.” A little irritable perhaps.

I gave her my U0091 slip.

“Okay.” She waved for my paperwork.

“Sorry about that.”

She highlighted my problems in green. “Your full name.”

“The signature too?”

“Just write out your full name.”

I returned the form.

She highlighted more. “And check the box.”

“Which one?”

“Just check yes.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

There were more highlights and fixes, and suddenly it seemed I was almost there.

“Follow the prompts on the panel.”

“Okay.” It was the voter registration stuff. I registered as a Democrat, even if I was only marginally so. I mean, it was obvious what had to be done. Get this guy out of there. But the boxes wouldn’t click. “Uh…”

“Tap. Don’t press.”

The screen worked half of the time, less than that. I kept at it, tapping not pressing, and eventually made it through. She gave me my old license back.

“I keep that?”

“Oh no.” She took it back.

I offered a smile. “At least I got that one right.”

“How are you paying? Credit?”

“Yes.”

“Follow the prompts.”

She gave me a slip of paper, my temporary license, and I was away. I had done something big. I had a renewal for eight years, the enahnced one. I was enhanced. And no one was chasing me down. I took a peak back around as I thought that. At least not yet.

My Fever Dream About Fever Dreams

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My fever dream about fever dreams begins with a man rising out of the East River and approaching the shore like MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. He strides with certainty onto the island and into a hotel. He proceeds to rise up through the ceiling and crushes everything around until the space metamorphises into a ballroom.

The music blossoms – for this appears to be a music video fever dream – into a kind of Indian techno. The room is filled with spectacular light and joyous people. It pulls back to the dreamer – me – trying to embrace and share that vision with others, waking, wandering out into the night, telling others, old friends, strangers, students, even casting them, promising roles, searching out the exact location for each scene. Everyone is inspired and encouraging. This really could be something.

He – I – cannot use my phone and then pee into the front engine of a car, sure signs that this is still a dream, not as fevered, but soldier on, trying to remember all of the details of the genesis and come up through the layers, less feverish now, and awake, holding on to the key moments. This is the thing that will reach others, to you. You will understand me now. And so I write all of it down.

The Best Times Are When I am Alone

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And yet, I think of who to talk to all of the time.

On the dock at Ahmic Lake

The Art of Procrastination

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I meant to post this blog a long time ago…

I was going to do it first thing in the morning. That was the plan. I’m good at procrastinating, and I was going to write about that, all the things I do instead of the things I’m supposed to do, but I needed to get something to eat. And the apartment needed tiddying, the plants watering. The windows were dirty too. And I had the laundry and the shopping. And so…yeah. I would have to get to it tomorrow.

I wrote notes the next day – or maybe it was the day after that – about tiddying and dirty windows. And then I opened my emails and deleted and answered, one an announcement about a Stereolab concert and bought tickets to that, and fiddled with my playlist. My CDs were a mess, completely disorganized; I had to reorder those.

I went for a hike on the weekend, certain my mind would get moving on the trail, and came up with a script idea about a woman, more of a spirit or witch, something like that, who wanders about and subtly moves different people in the right direction to keep the world in some kind of order. I’d finish the blog when I got home and start the outline.

I didn’t do either. It was a long week, calling and emailing, convincing, buying and answering, following up, calculating, choosing alternate dates, transferring, confirming, calling again, reminding, booking, dealing and answering again, listing and crossing off, adding again, feeling like I was getting somewhere when I wasn’t.

And then things got weird. I was a trapezoid person running along a shoreline. I was trying to out-distance death. The more I ran, the more I turned on myself and tried on different meat puppet skins, some electric, others baggy and old fashioned. I checked my head again and again to find out what wasn’t working, what was working too fast, and realized my lungs were outside myself. I was racing along the shoreline again.

Goya sketch

It was a trap, my little trap, being conscious of one day never being conscious again, as if that meant anything, but I could blog about that, Yes, the procrastinating blog, and even while thinking about why bothering with anything, especially that, I began.

I can’t believe I got this done. I doesn’t feel like it.

Knowledge Messes Up My Self

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I had something in me that was real. I remember it. I don’t just remember it. I was wholly in that, everything raw and wild. That was when I was a kid, and I didn’t think about it like that. I was a kid and the world was open to anything I could imagine. I want to get back to that.

My head is old now. Experiences have eroded my wiring, bashed it about with learning to kowtow, inebriation and pretending to know. The desire is the thing, on tippy toes, to keep getting up like that. And I cannot.

It reminds me of a realization of love, that thing as it was at the outset, pure, the excitement, that anticipation, all of that wonder in the eyes, then realizing it was not magic, but a drug we’re self-prescribed. And now I can’t think of it as anything else.

The light from a childhood window, the smells from the hall, sounds of people downstairs, someone approaching, a mother, maybe not, knowing that space, looking back, realizing you are there, no one to answer to, just for the moment, in that world as long as you can make it, without closing your eyes, for as long possible.

You Want Me to Care? Is That It?

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If I die, then I die. The loss to this world won’t be great. I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: Why have I lived? For what purpose was I born? There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling because I feel a boundless strength in my soul. But I didn’t divine this calling I was carried away with the bits of passion, empty and unrewarding.

My love never brought anyone happiness. I loved for myself, for my personal pleasure. And maybe I will die tomorrow. And not one being on this earth will have understood me totally. Some thought of me as worse, some as better, than I actually am. Some will say “he was a good fellow”, others will say I was a swine. Both one and the other will be wrong. (From Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time)

The Less You Know, The More You Aren’t

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I’ve never understood how people know exactly who they are – not only the presentation of themselves but lying in bed with that awareness. I realize it is mostly a farce created to help us through birth to death, but I remain dumbfounded by their remarkable certainity in all of it.

My heads remains much the same as it was at Mia Frumhartz’s birthday party – I think it was her eighth – at the bowling alley where I decided to help her off with her coat. I didn’t know why I did that, aside from the fact that I like to be in the good graces of the fairer sex. I thought I would begin to know more about who I was as life went on. I was wrong.

My only consistent behavior has been to seek solitutude. The results are pending as is the impetus. In other words, I’m still just a kid trying to get away with stuff. My immediate desire when I have free time is to do things I’m not supposed to – smoke, drink, read trashy books – and get away with that as long as possible.

I do other things too, read stuff like Sartre, re-watch Tarkovsky films and have fine thoughts about important things. And I write too, my latest book focuses on an identity crisis, a person who revels in not only not knowing who he is but condemns those who pretend otherwise. And he blogs about that.

Form of Rejection

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I have been sending out queries and writing samples to literary agents for many years and received the same form responses in a variety of phrasings: It’s not quite what I’m looking for at this time… I have to be particularly selective about which projects I represent…I can only responsibly take on a few new clients each year…I’m not the best fit for this project at this time… I’m not the best match…I’m not the right agent… I’m going to have to step aside…will be stepping back from consideration… I’ll be regretfully stepping aside.

Best wishes in your search for representation. Wishing you the very best of luck in your publishing endeavors. Please accept my very best wishes for your writing success. Best of luck with your future queries. I wish you the best of luck. I wish you all the best in your search for representation and in your writing career. We’re rooting for you! Until then, you have my…Very best.

Along with these snippets of clearly intended prose, the replies are sent from a “Do-Not-Reply-To-This-Email Address”. After 35 years, you’d think I’d get the message.

Advance Reviews for “The Vanishing Pill”

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Contrasting the dim of the city against the icy wilds of Greenland, The Vanishing Pill exposes the violent inner conflicts of our nature. As McPhedran’s liner notes state: “Dreams aren’t simple things; they’re the only fucking thing.”

The advanced reviews are unanimous…

Atlantic Tri-Monthly: “I ate it up like a rabid monkey. McPhedran stews his prose with a burning hot sauce that leaves you screaming for more.” 

USA Tomorrow: “You have not lived until you have read this intoxicating yarn of lust and joy.”

NY1 Off-line: “New Yorker McPhedran’s latest explosion of prose lights up the city with a tower of anguish and delight.”

Foxy News on-line: “It’s a good book, even with all the big words.”

Some Dictator Someplace

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We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States. Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.

Or even worse, imagine if producers and distributors and others (colleges perhaps?) start engaging in self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended. So that’s not who we are. That’s not what America is about.

President Obama on Kim Jong Un’s attempt to prevent the release of Seth Rogen and Even Goldberg’s 2014 film The Interview