34 years old next week. Still no flying car, but far fewer axe wielding teddy bears.
I’m turning 34 next week. One minute I’m debating with a roomful of stoned philosophy grad students if having a Delta Kappa Dookie puke on your Samba’s right after making out precludes her spending the night in your dorm…next thing I know the Shakir-a-like behind the counter is asking me if going bald hurts and calling me “Sir” as she passes over my $5.00 espresso.
I guess Mr. Bright Side would point out that I’m lucky enough to be alive and (mostly) healthy in the 21st century. Which is pretty damn hype. It’s the future, man! The new age of enlightenment! Complete digital omniscience! The power to find out anything, anytime about from anyone anywhere! (Although I am still wondering where’s my flying car, dammit.)
So, in an effort to take inventory of my past and evaluate my future I’ve been doing what all introspective modern men do at that crossroads somewhere between a hundred summer nights of Little League & breaking your hip getting out of your biodiesel SUV the wrong way: I’ve been searching for the Internet flotsom I’ve created over the years, still bobbing around the web, cached evidence of my past accolades and cockups alike.
Turns out that sometime in 1999, I discovered writing for the web as a pretty neat pursuit. I started keeping daily sites on tech news and writing up stuff going on in the parts of dotcom world I was working in. But I was already a bit late to the game at age 26 and only a few months out from the first NASDAQ crash…and unfortunately, pretty damn drunk most of that summer. So I got a bit distracted for the next, oh, 7 years or so, which resulting in my missing the boat on the current trend of raking in $100K/month keeping a blog of press releases expert evaluations of Web 2.0 companies.
I did, however, have marginal success putting my creative writing degree to work getting a couple of short fiction and poetry pieces picked up. I got down with a brother/sister team by the name of Hauck who lived in Los Angeles, liked my writing and ran a then popular online zine called Painkiller, which still exists today.
My nom de dumb was Amis North, and is this first thing of mine they published:
Somewhere on Main Street there is a man sitting outside a coffee shop watching young girls walk by in clingy knee highs and gleaming buckled shoes and pressed plaid skirts. Something trendy plays over the outdoor speakers and the hunter green wrought iron table is wobbly. The jewels on the man’s watch catch a ray of light and spin a kalidescope onto the sidewalk. He steadies his latte or mocha or espresso or italian soda and grins. The missus is in Boca for the week and the boys are down the shore with the nanny. The babysitter stayed late last night, but the overtime was well worth it.
Life is good.
Until Rayray screams down Main in his Lexus and hops the curb, taking out the wobbly table, one Catholic school girl and the kalidescope watch in one shot. Rayray loses his lunch when the airbag hits and the squirm of anchovies against his mug make him puke a second time.The smell reminds him of dinner with his wife last night and her stupid story about the faces on Mars and some men’s club called the Illuminati. He’s too drunk to fight the big white bean bag, so he just flails a little and slowly chokes to death on his caesar salad. His last thoughts before he walks into oblivion are of singing lollipops and screaming worms.
It was also the *last* thing of mine that they published. I can’t recall the details of the other stuff I submitted, but I know they rejected it all.
I also dug up the bio I wrote for their Authors section:
Reading it now begs within me the question: was this the sort of sandpaper smooth science I was trying to drop on the ladies?! “Screaming Worms”? How in the name of Crispin Glover was I getting dates back then? Voodoo dolls, hypnosis and roofies? Goddamn.
Still no flying car. But, hey, at least age has made me far, far less creepy.
