A close friend recently texted me: Write what you know. It’s good advice, like Keep It Simple Stupid or Seize the Day. Then again, what if I stay in bed too long? Make it slightly complicated? And I just don’t know?
Army personnel at The Javits Center during the outbreak of Covid-19, New York, 2020
I’m writing a speculative trilogy about going to another planet, which is something that I know nothing about. But I do know about promise and failure. I know I think of my flaws as attributes. I know that there is a fine line between when to choose the sensible thing and the brave. I know that I am as self centered and mean spirited as the rest. And I know that I will be alone in the end.
Abandoned sign near Wall Street, New York, September 2020
And so it becomes jumbled. Yes, I know what I know. But I think I know too much of that. It might come clear in my dreams, but who wants to hear about that? I’ll tell you about my mother. Actually I think I already did.
So here’s the story: Guy writes a blog for eight years and then writes that one true thing that gets shared to every corner of the galaxy and becomes the soothsayer for all. Share that!
I spend a lot of time digging into my memories. I look at pictures of me as a boy – fishing on the dock, beside the Christmas Tree, with our dog Celeste – trying to access that momentous time. I have also tried to searched out childhood things like Checkerboard Ice Cream and Pantry cookies, both of which I cherished in those days and both of which have vanished.
Modern-Day Checkerboard Ice Cream but not my brand (Not the Gluten-free notation!)
It seems somehow possible that if I could just taste them again, I would rediscover a key note to my uncluttered mind, like the magic of holding the tin or the feeling of my bare legs against the kitchen linoleum. But I have not been able to find either.
Toronto Maple Leafs page of Loblaws NHL Action Players
I collected these stickers from the Loblaws grocery store, furiously opening strip after strip to fill the booklet, trading for missing stamps, finding out who had found the un-find-able ones. There were dozens of Larry Carriere and Walt McKechnie and so few of Guy Lambert and Don Awry. It was impossible to find those.
NHL Action Players available for purchase on Ebay.
And then Doug Crosby, a rich and somewhat simple boy in my class, bought the completed book from Edward Etchells for $50. The class bully Andy McAlpine mocked him. “You idiot! That’s not how it’s done!”
Class bully Andy McAlpine today.
I realize that the whole thing was about the experience of collecting things, but why not do it Doug Crosby’s way? Why go through all of the hassle of bartering for the rare stickers when you could just buy the whole thing in one shot? As much as Doug seemed to have missed the point, Andy totally misses it. It’s not about scamming the system but learning from the experiences of the thing, be that finding Don Awry or eating Checkerboard Ice Cream.
My family had many Christmas traditions. Presents were not put under the tree until Christmas Eve. The living room door was kept closed until after we had a proper breakfast. Christmas cards were used as decorations around the house. And after receiving our gifts, we had to write thank-you notes to everyone. It was an onerous, yet vital task.
Thank-you notes are a thing of the past; now children just call aunts and grandparents, or worse, send texts and posts. A quick word with an emoji or two, and they can go back to their games and chats. The same goes for notes and letters. Indeed when was the last time you received a postcard?
Postcards from camp to my parents in 1973
It’s not as if I’m pining for the days of writing thank-you notes but that, as these artifacts go, so do our memories. The Young Chronicles series detailing my 1983 Cross-Canada hitchhiking trip would not exist if not for my hand-written notes.
Original notes for Young Chronicles
While these sophomoric scribblings are not vital to living my life, they are key to reminding me of where I’ve been.
I wrote a piece twenty years ago on the poor state of sports journalism. I interviewed many sports people including Allen Iverson, Mark Messier, Cito Gaston and the sports editor for The New York Times. It was a solid bit of writing which The Globe and Mail considered publishing but ultimately rejected as being too controversial because I named names – including Stephen Brunt and Gary Mason, godawful writers still working today. The story is gone, lost because it and all of the notes were on a floppy disk that vanished in the years of transition. And so I only have this picture from Gary’s Instagram.
I rarely write on paper anymore. I text myself my notes. I do this so much that my Gmail account has flagged me (the same Gmail account) as junk, junk unto itself. Yes, even my computer is sending the message for me to get back to paper, maybe even print out these posts so that I can reflect and share on whatever platform is to come.
The general premise of the book is obvious: living through the pandemic and watching the routines of everyday life dissolve away. Our main character, Davis, considers the lack of achievement in his life and then approaching death.
Davis sits on his fire escape every night and listens to the sounds of the city. One specific sound emerges: the communal humming of the buildings. He realizes that his mind has been cluttered and starts to dig into the more essential question of the meaning of this sound. He listens to it intently.
The sound is constant, but Davis realizes that he is not, that the sound swells and fades as does his interest. His mind drifts to other things. He tries to devote himself to the sound. He begins to understand that the sound asks that we do nothing but listen to it. The only thing needed is to listen to the note. His confidence in his understanding of this grows and grows until he realizes that he is now thinking about that – his confidence – and not the sound.
He then understands that he doesn’t understand. He cannot understand. He understands that to listen to that sound, to understand that sound is an impossibility.
Anyway, that’s the general premise. The book needs more of an arc and a whole bunch of interesting characters. And the real trick is to keep the tale sharp and witty! Lots of existential jokes and sex bits too.
In Until the End of Time, Brian Greene states that our only possibility of eternal life is through The creative mind, able to roam freely through imagined worlds, exploring the immortal, meandering through eternity, and meditating on why we might seek or disdain or fear endless time. (380)
God knows that I have striven for immortality in my writing. (I might even settle on one published work!) I have rummaged through my head and flailed away with anything I could find. My family’s distant interest in me has been a source of bitter inspiration. My father’s certitude of always doing the right thing has been a touchstone and albatross. I have pissed off many a person with my righteous thoughts. My terror of the darkness and deep waters has held me back as has my reticence and distrust of people.
I have channeled much of this into Dee Sinclair, a 30-something former sex worker who owns an exotic pet and who appears in four of my books, including My Bad Side and The Cx Trilogy.
Her mother was dead. Her sister was dead. Nani was dead. Everyone was gone. And she was alone. That was how she was used to it being. Alone. She just wanted this corner, Apollo with her, just Apollo, a place she could pull her knees into her chest and be quiet. That’s all she wanted. (Anori)
I deeply admire Dee for her courage and singular focus, for her intense devotion and fury, for her willingness to carry on, knowing that life is only there to disappoint. I desperately need to get her out into the world, to have her thoughts published, so that an audience might understand and care. She must be heard. She is my one and true child.
When I look back on the jobs I’ve done, performance sex was the hardest. I don’t mean how I was judged, and even judged myself, because none of that means anything, or even the unpleasantness at times. Some people really do stink. It was more about making it real. It was rare when I could lose that control, not just have that half open mouth, and give what I knew was expected.
It was when I broke from that, that I got frantic, balancing at the tip, and felt like I might slide sideways, barely hanging on. I would push hard and then stop, do that again and again, all taut and stupid, clinging to this good side of the moment, and keep it like that.
And then I would right into like a mania, straight ahead, nothing else but plowing straight for that full-on orgasm, so much that it was almost I’m made me get mad and crazy, like I was a kid and wanted what I wanted, and would not let go, and skip ahead, my feet barely touching the ground, until I was in it and nothing else. It was really hard work, but there were those moments.
I was 14 when I saved a copy of Marvel Two-in-One #34 with my scathing “I hate this comic” letter in my desk drawer and looked at it every once in a while.
I lost of track of it some time later, through high school, college and work, vaguely sure that it was somewhere in my mess of drafts, articles and rejection letters.
The memory of it came to me years later, but the search was always detoured by distraction and ultimately, the lack of the required energy of such a futile quest. After all it was just an eight-word letter that didn’t even approximate my original message.
It is a funny tale and works for this site and so I blogged on it five years back, working solely from memory and thus erroneously cited the comic in question as Marvel Team #31 (featuring Spiderman and Iron Fist).
It was only recently, in these pandemic days, that I decided to find the damn thing. I knew that it was from one of three comic series (Team-Up, Two-in-One or Iron Fist) and scoured through various blogs and archives for it.
I knew the issue focused on saving kids from a burning orphanage and so keyed on images of orphans and fires. I thought I had found it in an issue of Marvel Team-Up which had a collapsing building and an orphan-looking kid.
I ordered the issue on-line and several others following to ensure that I got the one with my letter too. I knew it was wrong before I even opened the issue. It looked wrong and was. I returned to my on-line search and finally noticed the burning hospital (not orphanage) in the background of Marvel Two-in-One #34 that I knew that I had found it. It was then that I realized my letter was in Issue #40 by looking at the cover.
The memory of walking through the pinewood hallway to my bedroom at the cottage came to me at that moment – the cool, dark air, a distant screen door closing, the feeling of emptiness of seeing my letter in print, edited to nothing – and then the feeling of comics not being what they once had been – a place of wonder – it all came into me like that.
It’s funny how that feeling returned again now, when I had finally found the issue again, at the end of this farcical quest. I had found it last and so what indeed? What’s next?
I complain a lot about never being published, but that actually isn’t true. My words were first put into print when I was a wee gaffer in June 1978.
I was an avid comic reader in those days and followed three comic books with regularity: Iron Fist and Power Man, Marvel Team-Up featuring The Amazing Spiderman and Marvel Two-in-One with The Thing. I especially enjoyed Marvel Two-in-One because I had followed the series since its inception in 1974 and it featured a wiseass superhero who essentially was a giant pile of rocks. (Interestingly enough, I went on to collect rocks for much of my life.) I connected to The Thing because he offered witty rejoinders (“How cum nobody wants me around for my good looks?”), an excellent catchphrase (“It’s clobberin’ time!”), chomped on cigars and spoke often of his isolation from humanity. Spiderman, Iron Fist and Power Man were great too, but they weren’t as much the black sheep. Anyway the point is that I really liked Marvel Two-in-One.
And then along came Issue #34 in which The Thing and Nighthawk battle a monster from outer space. Or so it seemed.
I was mortified by everything in this issue. The monster wasn’t a monster. There was no battle. Nighthawk and The Thing didn’t do much of anything. In fact, the monster never battles The Thing nor Nighthawk because it isn’t a monster at all, but a highly empathetic creature from the great beyond which focuses its energy on saving children trapped in burning hospitals.
How the fire got started was the worst thing of all.
No attempt is made to explain why Margaret pulls the plug from the wall nor is there any justification for the fire being started as a result of her doing it. (She, of course, is the last one saved from the blaze by our monster from outer space.)
Nighthawk completes this painful issue by beating both the reader and the assholes who shot the misunderstood creature over the head with the moral of the story.
I was incensed. The writers had done a hack job and needed to hear about it. I penned a four- paragraph letter detailing much of the above, along with comments about the weak drawing and sent it off to Marvel Comics Group on Madison Avenue in New York City.
Four months later, my letter finally appeared in Marvel Two-in-One #40 featuring The Thing and The Black Panther.
Regrettably my first experience in publishing was also my first experience with an editor, who decided to reduce my passionately erudite salvo to the following:
Author’s note: Don Gibson is my birth name
Yes, Stan Lee and his bitter cohorts had edited my full-page letter to ten lousy words. They didn’t even cite the issue in question, making it sound like I hated everything about the comic, including The Thing himself! As stupid as it sounds, it was upsetting. I thought about writing another letter but realized that they would just edit that too. And so I have waited until now, 42 years later, to set the record straight.
Marvel Two-In-One #34 needs a severe dousing! The Thing would clobber anyone responsible for this whatchamacallit. Fires aren’t caused by little girls pulling electrical cords out of the wall; they’re started by readers burning stuff like this. Who’s the real monster, Stan! Who?! Yers truly and all, Phed
The supreme editor decided to get in on the critical action: Master McPhedran; I’m writing to you because I know there’s a lot to handle with this radioactive material, but I hope you haven’t continued to think of it as being guided by a passion for a different style of writing. Andy spends a lot of time teaching in the letter, giving examples from other works to showcase a point, or explaining literary construction to the author. He does this very well (I’ve seen it go sideways before!) in that he comes off as very experienced, well-read and knowledgeable but never veers into talking down to the author. I know this is not particularly helpful to you. I was sorry to hear that the phone call wasn’t as fruitful as expected.
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I replied with vague decorum: Thank you for the email, Bridget. I understand and appreciate your references to radioactive material and your efforts to connect Andy’s edit to what it could mean to my work. I don’t agree, however, with the idea of it being a lot to handle or offering effective teaching. (I cringed at that, as I did at the image of Andy being thankful at my listening to ‘some’ of his guidance.) You have an enterprise to run, and the first order is to support the staff. The point is that Andy’s notes do not benefit my process. It isn’t personal. It is about the words. And sadly, in the end, the feedback is worth the same as I might get from a bartender – not to denigrate her.Â
