I’d like to sincerely thank the one person that actually paid for my book (Mom? Mink? – I’m guessing it was one of you) and on the sarcastic side, I’d like to ‘thank’ the three people that asked me if they could proofread it and then never bothered to respond to my detailed questions such as “How did you like it?” or “Hey, did you ever get a chance to read my book?” Also on the sarcastic side, I’d love to offer even more ‘thanks’ to Baen books who set up a complex submission process, asked that the book not be submitted anywhere for up to nine months and then never responded. Pretty lame.
So here is the link to download The SOB for free:
http://stores.lulu.com/amp.
On the subject of lameness. I thought it was pretty lame that Honolulu Magazine expressed interest in an article I was willing to write for them about Islam on Oahu and then didn’t respond for six months to my further queries about what format, etc, I should write in. Then, when they did respond, I mentioned that I was going to walk around Oahu and they again expressed interest. I asked them about the advisability of sending out press releases and doing PR and got no response until almost two weeks later when I sent out a Press Release and then got a response saying that my press release had ruined their sole submission requirement. Pretty lame, they might have let me know about that.
It all boils down to the fact that in this life, you can do lots of cool things or try to do cool things (like write sci fi novels that address social issues or walk around an entire island in the hope of showing that the worst parts aren’t as bad as some people claim they are…) and mostly, folks just don’t give a rats ass about it. A few folks do, some because they love you, some because they are on a similar trip in life, and some because they like you or what you are doing and it resonates with them. But mostly, nobody fucking cares whether you are working as a stock broker, making babies, taking a trip to the fucking moon, or discovering the meaning of reality.
As you guys know, I’ve been trying to get rid of my stuff. I’ve offered it for trade, offered it for sale, and asked for offers of what people think its worth. Nobody cares or wants any of it. A couple of years ago, I was able to sell books pretty easily online. The books haven’t changed and the prices have gotten cheaper, but no one is buying them anymore. Is it that people aren’t reading? WTF?
I’m certainly still buying books. I just finished reading Hardcore Zen, The Way of Zen, We the Living, Conceptual Blockbusting, and the Pillars of Hercules. I finished them all this weekend and this morning. I’m still reading The Job by William Burroughs, The Long Trip: A short History of Psychedelia, Nine Chains to the Moon by R. Buckminster Fuller, and a couple of other books that I pick up when I sit on the toilet.
Maybe it’s that I don’t have TV or the internet at home. Probably.
A friend of mine the other night told me that some people think I’m a druggie. I said to him that those people are right. I’ve smoked pot half a dozen times in the last year (once with him actually, he brought the drugs and offered them!), dropped acid once in the past ten years, and lately I’ve been playing around with some herbal substances that mostly haven’t had any noticeable effects. The exception of course were the Oh pills and the Salvia. The Oh pills are suitable for recreation, the salvia, certainly not for recreation.
I find that salvia is actually an aid to me in putting down my fragile ego and experiencing reality even though it has the effect of actually blurring what we call reality. I don’t want to be tripping on salvia for hours or every day or even for more than 15 minutes in a week or month. The stuff scares the hell out of me. It’s not like the enjoyment I get from drinking a beer or having the occasional cig. Every hit of salvia is terrifying. What I found from it though is that having the experience allowed me to conceptualize and understand the inconceptualizable and ununderstandable. Let’s just say it provides a suitable frame of reference for solving certain philosophical problems that I have been pondering for nearly my entire life. For instance, if you have never seen a cat it doesn’t matter how well you use your imagination, you still won’t be able to know what a cat looks like. Same thing with the true structure of reality or the lack thereof. Emptiness is the form and the form is emptiness.
Or as the old zen joke goes.
How many zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
The plum tree in the yard!
So yeah, download my book. Maybe even read the god damn thing! And if you think it might be as good or better than a lot of the books that are out there then maybe you can email your long lost cousin the publisher or agent and tell him or her about this insane writer that works as a tour guide in Hawaii (but who works for a company that can’t sell any of the tours and so isn’t real sure how he will pay his fucking rent) and who some people who use a lot of drugs think is a druggie, who walked around the entire island of Oahu and found out that no one cared (the Honolulu Advertiser put my press release on their blogs ‘user submitted’ page with a picture they had of me from 2004- thanks for asking for a new one assholes!) and who might actually have discovered the real secret of everything but who is loathe to tell anyone because his fragile ego is tired of realizing that nobody fucking cares and would hate to share something so profound only to have it end up being the #7 reason people come to his blog. The first six being all having to do with a George W. Bush buttplug that does really hot on search engines but that no one actually wanted to buy.
I won’t hold my breath.
