The Condensed Version

In lieu of presenting for you a half-regurgitated opinion about something vaguely news-cycle related, I've decided tonight to treat you all to something more thought through, more considered, something fully regurgitated. I try not to talk too much about the longer-term projects I have going on behind the scenes, for a couple of reasons: a) I'm a bit superstitious, I admit it. I feel like talking about it too soon is bad luck. Bad luck specifically in the form of people then expecting me to finish something, and b) I've never actually worked on a longer-term project. I've started loads of them, but it turns out that writing more than this deal where I do 700 words for immediate publication once a week is super hard.

Well, I guess none of that is entirely true because, inspired by the courage and talent of a couple of people I know who have actually gotten things published in the last couple of years, I've decided to turn away from half-assed attempts at writing fiction to a half-assed attempt at writing a memoir.

The only trouble is that the people inspiring me have both a compelling life story that would merit recording on paper for a wide audience who might find inspiration, solace, entertainment or just basic human connection in the details of their struggles and triumphs and the ability to tell those stories in a coherent, balanced way that serves both the narrative of their truth and the needs of a readership they only could have speculated about as they wrote. As nothing of particular note has ever really happened to me and I've thus far only been able to fully access my social imagination when thinking up details for my Ashley Madison account, this is not a natural fit for me. But once I got going, I realized that there was no more interesting subject for me than me. Hopefully you'll agree. If you don't, I... honestly, I'm not even sure I'm capable of imagining that as an outcome. Weird.

Anyroad, please enjoy a chunk for my forthcoming memoir Walk Like the Eagle: Current Remembrances of a Living Spirit. The first four chapters about my (recovered) memories of conception, incubation in the womb and birth I'll skip past. You'd need years of intensive therapy, an animal guide and not a small dose of psilocybin to crack your commodified brain open wide enough to fully accept it. I'll let you off somewhere safer, don't worry. I'm always thinking of you.

And now...


Walk Like the Eagle
Current Remembrances of a Living Spirit

Chapter 17
No Quarter Asked Nor Given-the Sixth Grade Spelling Bee, Rounds 4 through 8

[NOTE: THIS IS A TRUE STORY. Some names have been changed to protect the anonymity of the people whose lives would be changed when this book becomes a huge fucking deal. Or because their names weren't that interesting. Seriously I know like four guys named "Matt Smith." Events have been condensed, reordered or invented for the sake of clarity, narrative pace, attention-span failure or because I couldn't find anywhere else to include passages from my as-yet unproduced 1995 techno-action-thriller screenplay about sexy hacker-pirates entitled Giga-Bastards.]

"Whew," I thought to myself, "that third round of the spelling bee that we just finished sure wasn't easy. One R in 'gorilla' though, glad I remembered that." There was no relaxing. There as no not-sweating. I gripped the sides of the molded plastic chair holding me up on the multipurpose room stage. I imagined it warping under the heat and force of my intense grip. I don't remember looking to check if that actually happened, but that only means I can't 100% rule out that it didn't.

I watched as another competitor, Kelly LeBrock, crossed the stage in front of those of us who were left, shuffling, head down, toward the steps to exit the stage after flailing and failing at her word. And her word? "Misspell." You had to feel it, right in your guts.

There were only seven of us left: me, Garth Brooks, Dana Delaney, Merritt Butrick, Susan St. James, Kobe Bryant and Charo. I sized them up as I counted them off, trying to identify my stiffest competition. It was Charo. No doubt, Charo. She was in my class, always sitting behind me, always just a second ahead or behind one another in turning in our assignments, always within a point or two on a test. And she was always sneaking off to use the lone classroom computer whenever a free-use period allowed it. I knew they wouldn't let you play games on it, so what could she be doing on a computer that was so blessed important?

Now was not the time for speculation, though. It was time for focus. Kobe Bryant was up next. A pudgy red-headed kid from Mrs. Havesham's fifth-grade class. He was a good student, if a bit cagey and aloof. Rumor around school was that he'd murdered and eaten a distant relative at some point over the previous summer. You know how playground rumors go, though. His word was "androphagy."

He got the word right in the end, but not without the maximum amount of manufactured drama and artifice obscuring and complicating the obvious natural talents underneath. Typical Kobe Bryant. A prodigy, sure, but so hard to like.

Now it was my turn. Again. I strode up to the single microphone, vaguely aware of what must have been dozens of people somewhere in the blackness outside of the ring of damp illumination from the tepid, lone spotlight trained on me from the back of the room, exactly at eye level. I closed my eyes and the world fell away. Except for the bright red globule of an afterimage of the stage-light that remained burned on my unseeing corneas. That didn't go away. Still, I was totally focused on what was coming.

"Your word," the moderator's voice said, tinny over the tannoy, the last sound of the last word echoing to a ringing, to an almost inaudible squeal, like the song of a dial-up modem in connection mode, and I stood, all stillness, open, waiting. "Your word," he said again, and again with all of the other effects like I just said before, "is 'opportunity'."

All I could do was smile. And laugh. For like a minute straight. Really loudly too. Like a movie villain, except so hard that at one point I threw up a little. "Opportunity." I understood. Sometimes the universe was an opaque, inscrutable thing of pure chaos and silence. Other times it was the guy next to you at the diner counter, nursing his coffee, who wants to tell you about his kids and also YOUR TRUE COSMIC DESTINY.

Opportunity. Yes. I didn't have to ask them to use it in a sentence.

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And that's basically it. If you want more, you're going to have to pay for it. Right after I finish it. And it's published. All pending dates. All pending. I'll mark you all down as "tentative pre-order commits."