BUS, BOOK, AND CANDLE
I'm self-publishing several books of my old writing, and I'm calling the collection "The Notebook Series 2000 - 2007".
I'm calling my self-published books "The Notebook Series: 2000 - 2007", because those were my most productive years of alcoholic self-loathing, and they will contain a ton of material from when I was logorrheic in my writing, blogging, and standup comedy. If I’d been able to focus any of that energy into a half-decent sitcom script I’d be pretty rich right now.
In any case, I released my first volume this week, Shadowdancing in Flame, and it contains nine of my serious poems from that time. I’m not saying I was a great poet, but despite my collection of rejection slips, I was actually surprised that my poems were pretty good, better than I remembered at least. It’s available on Kindle right now and in paperback soon.
Now I have to sort through all my humor writing and I’m trying to figure out how these bits and pieces of writing together will fit together and in how many volumes.
In the meantime here's a 100% true story I found from 2006 that I had completely forgotten happened to me:
I was on the crosstown bus one fine day, and if you take the bus in this town, it's because you either have a lot of time to kill or you have a medical condition that makes it impossible for you to walk that six blocks in under forty-five minutes.
So I was on the crosstown bus, and I was reading the newspaper, and the bus was a bit crowded, and there was a gentleman in his forties, black, balding, standing over me in a dress shirt tucked into some black slacks, smelling faintly of a manly cologne.
As we approached Lexington Avenue, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Can I borrow your paper?"
I inhaled slowly, paused for a beat, just long enough that I clearly was annoyed and did not want to say yes, and said, "Sure."
He then took the paper, folded it up and stuck it under his arm. The bus stopped and he walked off. Now, he did this with a deliberate slowness, to the point that I didn't stop him, thinking, "Wait is he...? No, he's not going to - oh my God, he is. That guy just walked off with my paper!" And left me there to half-laugh, half-stew at what had just happened.
Three days later, I'm at a random bar with some random friends, and I hear a familiar voice. I look over at the bar, and sitting there with some buddies - a black guy, balding, dress shirt tucked into black slacks.
I walked over, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, "Hey, can i have my paper back?"
He looked at me and, as I looked into his face, I realized it was the wrong guy.
I guarantee that to this day, those guys are still making fun of me.