A. A. Manzoni's Literary Blog

Everyone wants to have fun, everyone looks like they’re having fun, except the sick person.

“Hope ya get better then.”

That’s the problem. I don’t really get better. I go from “feeling terrible” to “feeling slightly less terrible.” As more and more days go by, I’m noticing my “good” days becoming almost non-existent. That doesn’t mean I’m taking any less medication. Far from it.

Too bad our country is in the middle of an epidemic! Yes! A prescription opiod epidemic, according to Macklemore and Barrack Obama. What can be done to stop it? They don’t know. All anyone thinks’ll do it is “make it harder to get pain medication.”

That’s...just...great. I mean, obviously some people are getting overprescribed. The thing is, under the new guidelines, I find myself wasting my time at the doctor to get over the counter medication. Now, as a man with a terrifyingly painful stomach condition, thyroid disease, arthritis and misc. I’ve been basically doing nothing but “be in pain” for the last...I don’t know....too long. But the fact of the matter is, I can’t have anything worthwhile to relieve my pain. And I’m sick all the time. I can’t enjoy life. I will do whatever I can to avoid wasting anymore time to get a 3 count bottle of Zofran that they won’t even refill. I no longer trust clinicians. All I do is write to take my mind off of this SHIT as my conditions worsen, write, smoke...and take huge fistfuls of these lame-o dud horse pills while I vomit until my throat bleeds.

Over the weekend I completed the rough draft manuscript for “The Spokane Story 2: American Dabbers.”

It only took since February. 171 pages. 87,000 words.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgySWnxcHQw)

Francis’ Guide to Being Bad

Here is another new Spokane Story video from the perspective of another character: Francis Lawrence.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTn1t5h_9lk)

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vtq2b54ai2E)

SPOKANE COMIC-CON

Yesterday I, as well as my very beautiful girlfriend and her best friend went to Lilac City Comic-con dressed as ourselves. I got to see the full extent of the contents of my childhood closet, in that, I had a lot of damn toys. It was interesting to see the new old Star Wars toys next to the old old ones. And of course there were the new new ones.

But I digress.

It seems that the comics scene out here is alive and well. I kind of expected a little bit more role playing shit. For example, why could I not find a wizard's hat or a reasonable facsimile thereof? These are questions I ask myself. Not because I want to look like a wizard.

It's because on Wednesdays, I am a wizard.

Yes.

“Oh, my!”

ON THE SUBJECT OF COOL

That was the perfect segue into the second part of the blog: the part whereupon I shall discuss coolness in general. Most of you reading this now, are biased against anything that follows, because I just intentionally shot myself in the foot for your entertainment. I want the concepts duking it out in your head like Rock em Sock em Robots. Yeah, bitch, that's right.

Coolness is relative. Go figure. What's cool for a schmecker probably ain't cool for the dude playing Bey Blade or the guy watching The Irresponsible Captain Tylor. What I'm trying to get at is that I can't do anything cool anymore without it being catered to hipsters, whom I find to be different beasts entirely: usually characterized as semi-affluent whites trying too hard or trying too hard not to seem like they're trying too hard.

On the other end of this dial we got the crustpunks and the tweaker gutter rats. And they got their own idea of cool. They are almost impossible to tell from actual homeless people. Usually the only way you can tell the difference is whether they're carrying house keys or not. What's depressing is how many of these are young kids, growing up on the street idolizing drug dealers and train-less hoboes. Hopefully at least some of those kids figure out what's cool and what's not before it's too late.

UNIFEST

Pictured: A. A. Manzoni & the Lovely Sophia at Unifest

Last night, after we went to Comiccon we headed on over to UniFest, which was quite obviously the coolest thing going on in town at that moment. It was over at the old cracker factory on W. Pacific Avenue in a very hoboey part of town near one of the main scenes of my book where Francis…oh, I don't want to spoil it for you. Anyway, this was a very cool event with cool vendors and purveyors of free trade & locally made sundries. I was at that very same building about a year ago for one of the Terrain events and that was huge. Three floors of the place was open for that event.

I was kind of disappointed this one was only held on the one. Whatever, though.

Pictured: Cool Dome

The first things I noticed were the cool dome and the girls dancing with flaming batons and hole hoops. I thought that was very cool. Cooler still since I had a great buzz going compliments of some top-shelf legal cannabis named Berry 1 we picked up at Cinder on the way over.

“Are we cool enough yet?”

We had very cool hot dogs at Nick's Shameless Sausage, a gourmet hot dog stand I'd only seen one time before at Artfest last year. If you ever see these guys, I'd definitely buy one. They're not cheap. But they're awesome. Otherwise, for gourmet dogs you're gonna have to goto Wild Dawgs which is over by the S.T.A. station on Wall.

Anyway, we saw a rock band called Adventure that reminded me of Huey Lewis and the News and I had some craft beer. We stayed until the parking meter began to run out. And it occurred to me that it felt like the 80s in there: up hairstyles, rock music mixed with dance and electronic with a hint of disco, white people wearing sunglasses at night on cocaine.

Before we left we went down to the dance pit outside and danced until the DJ's playlist violently cut out three times in a row. That was it. We went back to my apartment, lit up and the ladies made models for our Pathfinder game while I played electric guitar. That's right, we're going to make molds of 'em and cast em in resin.

That sounds pretty cool to me.

ON WRITING...

There has been a recent drop-off in my blog posts. This has been due to concentrating on more important writing regarding American Dabbers. Today I reached page 123, a number that I myself have always found lucky and a sort of milestone much like page 50 or 100. 

As for word count, it is over 63,000, making it about as long as a lot of them books they made you read in American schools. I can tell you without flinching that The Spokane Story Series is way more outrageous. That is, unless your school had you reading Naked Lunch or something, which to me seems unlikely. When I say outrageous I do not refer to the word in its most literal sense. For The Spokane Story and American Dabbers are based heavily on reality. When I'm out and about and see an especially odd character I tend to come up with an imaginary backstory reflecting their manner of appearance and body language. In essence, creating an overall storyline and universe felt like the natural extension of that.

Coming up with the idea of a soundtrack for a book was something else entirely.

ON MUSIC...

It came to me in 2007, about five years before I started writing my unpublished first novel, From NJ to Hell. When I was training in sound engineering with Mike Tarsia (formerly of Sigma Sound Studios) in Philly I was tooling around with the idea of a symphony telling the story of a man named  from birth to death, a man known only as Bill who was cursed by the gods with the greatest hair in the universe that made him a genius. But as soon as his great golden locks grew in they began to fall out, and with each hair that fell he grew stupider and crazier until he lost his mind, became addicted to cocaine and heroin and overdosed in the bathroom at his job: washing dishes at TacoHut. 

It was not a great story. It grew more complex still in that there were no words to any of this. I decided on doing scenes out of From NJ to Hell and that worked out nicely, I mean, aside from the book never getting published and all.

I wish to continue this once again with The Spokane Story and American Dabbers. It kind of works out, in that I have background music to put behind the videos I've been making.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I hope that everybody has a good week, that nobody dies and we all come into unexpected windfalls of cash.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6cR3mMGJx0)

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMRhBfOAJMQ) I am jamming out, right, and I realize that if I record myself playing I’ll be able to go back and remember what I did. I want to make a soundtrack to The Spokane Story and American Dabbers, like I did with (the unpublished novela) From NJ to Hell. I sold my recording gear and ProTools equipment a long time ago so this should be especially interesting.

At the moment I only have the guitar. But I plan to add to the diversity of my instrument base after I move out of this little apartment. I can play guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo, alto and tenor saxophone.

I know all about sequencers and recording with synthesizers, I’m just not any good at playing them live.

There was a thick string attached to his belt loop that ran down into the front of his drawers whereupon there was located a black canvas pouch containing a stereotypical glass tweaker pipe as well as Gurn’s own headstash, a mélange of different intoxicants that would’ve caused the late American journalist Hunter S. Thompson to swivel his head around bug eyed, going, “Hmmmm…what’s that y’got there? Sayyyy…can I have a hit of whatever the fuck that is? It looks good. Don’t mind if I do! Reminds me of the ’72 U. S. Democratic primaries.”

           Gurn blinked, but said nothing as a psychotic hallucination of Johnny Depp playing Thompson appeared in the backseat next to Double-$.

           Friggin’ meth does the weirdest shit, turns you into a schizophrenic.

           And then, of course Dr. Gonzo have had to go into a wild tirade…

           “Humphrey and Muskie,” the Doctor began, “they were both hooting like wild apes and snorting pure crystal methadrine off one another’s bulging erections right there on live T.V. in front of the whole goddamn country.”

           “I said to myself, ‘What is the meaning of this? Are these men not running for president of this great nation? And why isn’t anyone stopping them? My God. George McGovern simply stood there at the podium slack-jawed and masturbating like a teenage werewolf maniac. And it only got worse from there.”

           “I can only imagine how bad this circus’ll be about fifty years from now. The election will probably be decided by packs of roving Mongolians on acid while the candidates throw flaming feces at cameramen on live television. I can only imagine…”

           Though Gurn would sooner die than share one crumb of anything, especially with Double-$ or that guy from “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.”

Some character drawings:

Francis “Francisco” Lawrence from American Dabbers– “I got caught wiping a little bit of shit on the walls.”

Nester Lester Howard “Ness the Mess” from American Dabbers– “S’them dabs, girl!” “Don’t mind my boy. He’s more stoned than he’s usedta bein’!”

The novel is up to 59,300 words, 114 pages. I’m thinking of doing another video this week, because, why not? If I didn’t have this I would likely be bored all of the time.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dwS501gyiw)