From today, Dec. 15, through Saturday, Dec. 17, the Kindle/Kindle Fire ebook version of I Held My Breath as Long as I Could will be available on Amzaon for free.
Tell your friends. Tell your neighbors. Tell anyone with an Amazon ebook reader.
I’m willing to bet there’s at least one story in there for everyone.
Don’t miss out!
You’re going to suffer if you don’t think things through in advance, and trough-pissing is no exception.
Let me take a wild guess; you were going to get up from your barstool, walk into that bathroom, face that long steel trough-style urinal, and just open up right over the drain. Am I right? Yeah, I know that’s what a short-term-thinking lemming such as yourself was going to do, because you like to go through life without pausing to ask yourself the important questions along the way. Well, let me force you to reflect on the situation in which you were about to put yourself.
You were trained at an early age to piss right into the center of the pot, and that usually works. So when it comes to a trough, you think, “Awesome! I got the spot right above the drain!” You’re thinking that’s a good thing, because you believe that the best course of action is to get rid of your waste straightaway.
Except you haven’t thought it through. Sure, your decision here is all well and good if you live in a world where no one else exists, but then you probably wouldn’t end up pissing into a trough in the first place. Sad fact is we have to share this rock–all however-many-billions of us–and some of those billions are going to come into that restroom with you. And there you’ll be, pissing foolishly away directly over the drain, no doubt with some stupid day-dreamy smile on your face, and they’ll have no choice but to take an upstream position. Now you’ll start to make a funny face, because the stench of someone else’s urine (probably some rank copper-color that really punches its way on up your nostrils) will commingle with your own (you probably drink lots of water and pride yourself on the clarity of your stream, and it will pain you, seeing it polluted with urobilins from someone else’s kidneys), and you’ll find yourself thinking, “Aw, man, this is disgusting, why is that other guy pissing into my piss?”
Well, this is how a trough urinal works. This is the way it’s been designed. Don’t come crying to me if you wander like a child into the path of another man’s urine.
I know it seems counter-intuitive, but the next time you go to a trough for a little micturition, get as far away from the drain as you can. Yes, it will seem silly to stand all the way over to the side and watch your piss roll down the long length of the trough. But I assure you, it will be worth it when that second man comes in and has to take his position–knowingly, grudgingly, sadly–closer to the drain.
I can’t explain it any better than I have, but there’s a reason I conduct interviews in bars with trough urinals. Nothing beats telling some downstream motherfucker that he’s not going to get the job at the firm while he wrinkles his nose, the stench of my urine in his nostrils as his eyes watch his hopes for his future swirl down the drain.
I just wish I could make all failure so olfactory.
3x6: A Collection of Three Stories
To say thank you to everyone who bought and read my collection, I Held My Breath as Long as I Could, I’m pleased to offer a very short bonus collection of three 600-words-or-less short stories, 3×6. Included are:
“A Life of Their Own”: Satan’s latest attempt to get a child hits a snag.
“Embrace the Ground”: A vicious alien allows a man a last glimpse at the home in which he grew up.
“The Art of the Dead”: A man attends the funeral of a good friend.
These were all written as entries in Lulu.com’s recent short story contest. Since Amazon.com refuses to allow me to sell anything for free, I’ve chosen to publish this through Lulu, and to simply give away copies of the ebook (in .mobi format for Kindle and Kindle Fire and .epub for iPad, iPhone, and Nook) from my own website.
Hope you enjoy these!
Hello all,
Given the extremely low sales on iTunes and Barnes & Noble, I decided to try an experiment. Over the next 90 days, I Held My Breath as Long as I Could, my collection of 23 short stories, will be available as an ebook exclusively for the Kindle and Kindle Fire (paperback will still be available in lots of places). The reason behind this change is that I’m intrigued by the Kindle Select program, which allows anyone with an Amazon Prime account to borrow my ebook for free. I like the model; it seems like it could actually work out better for me and would-be readers.
We’ll see. If you hate that I’ve gone this direction, say so, and once the exclusivity period expires I’ll go back to offering the ebook everywhere.
In the meantime, if you really want an ebook copy for Nook or iPad / iPhone … email me. Might be something we could work out.
We’ve given up tolerating fixity. Who the hell writes in stone, anymore, amirite?
We’re here to see someone about his ephemerality.
It’s about ingenuity and keeping up with the times.
We’re not just thinking outside the box; we’re ripping the box out of the archivists’ hands, dumping the contents over their heads, slapping them about the head and face with the empty container, and then setting them on fire and flushing their ashes down the toilet.
Provenance this, motherfuckers!
Newer versions of our demands will float out of your computer screen, pool on your desk, and sing you whatever song seems best suited to your purchasing history. So keep in mind, this list is beta, perhaps even alpha. All of it is subject to change; meeting these demands is no guarantee of meeting these demands.
File that under “THINGS TO BE AWARE OF.” Put it right beside, “THESE CREATURES ARE HERE TO KILL ME IF I DON’T COMPLY.”
The point is, we see flaws in your original master. We’d rather you take us direct to the remaster. We believe the remaster will know how to deal with us in a more satisfying manner than the last person we saw.
Oh, you are the remaster? Very well, then. Good to know, and a pleasant surprise, if we do say so ourselves. We should have known you’d look different.
To the point, then. These are our demands:
1. Remastermind, the game (let’s play it!): We no longer want to be locked into one combination of four colored pegs. If you guess any of them correctly, obviously our strategy was flawed, and we would like to be able to change it at will. This will result in a much more challenging game for you, we feel.
2. Remaster locks (use them!): The combination changes every time you turn the dial. This prevents the lock from ever opening. Truly, what is the point of a lock being able to be unlocked in the first place? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose? We feel it does.
13. Whatever George Lucas wants, he gets. No more fucking crying about it, either. Seriously. You people. It’s like you’ve never seen someone bleeding out their own nipples; you’re always complaining the loudest about the least important things.
c. Remasturbation (do it!): Immediately after finishing, do it once more, with feeling. Make it faster, more intense. Don’t be ashamed; we don’t think anyone gets anything right the first time.
iv. We’d like to point out that the 2003 Stereo Remastered Version of “Roxanne” by The Police, which corrects the pitch of the first few notes and thereby renders Sting’s odd little laugh perfectly nonsensical, is re-re-re-reeeeeee-genius, and the person responsible for it should be given a Medal of Re-Achievement.
FIVE! This one has actually become demand six. See below.
The rest of our demands have been deleted, because, upon reflection five minutes from now, they probably won’t / didn’t seem so interesting. In lieu of them, we would just like to request a slice of pie, pumpkin if you have it. If you don’t have pie, well, your face will be remastered, along with some of your internal organs.
You know, your face really would look better digitally enhanced for widescreen televisions.
We are getting the feeling that the original version of you is about to go out of print.
Come on over here. We’ve got work to do. Don’t be shy.
Stop that screaming. We’re sure if your parents had had our technology when you were born, this is how they would have wanted you to look.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Read this book for a second time after giving the movie a rest for a few years. The book reads like a fever dream of underground boxing and how-to recipes for making explosives out of soap, sprinkled with just enough self-empowerment rhetoric to give it some philosophical heft. I don’t picture Ed Norton when I read this story of a man who creates an anarchic club that spirals wildly out of his control, but I do appreciate the way the film translated this story into something a bit more streamlined and concrete. I like the first half of the book better than the second, although sometimes Palahniuk’s style reads more like summary than story. The themes are all there; I’m not so sure about the scenes and the drama, which often seem more like incident than meaningful steps along a path. There’s a murder at the end of the book that, in particular, seems to come out of nowhere. And, like any Chuck Palahniuk book, the motifs are repeated a bit too much (if Chuck P. were a band, all his songs would have the same beat). Even so, it’s a fun book, visceral and thought-provoking.
Men in Black II—or MIIB, as they incessantly refer to themselves—arguably have it the worst, because they were a sequel to a major summer blockbuster. They didn’t expect to end up here, slumming it with White Oleander, Blood Work, K-PAX, and S1m0ne.
We were born from success, all of us. Things were pitched, agreed upon, gushed over. There was a lot of cocaine-fueled love, but, drug-induced or not, it still counts. Stars and talent were sold on the ideas. Scenes were shot, edited, given the thumbs-up, greens means go, world premiered, west coast premiered, east coast premiered, applauded, reviewed, and people went and saw them, talked about them, then on to the video store, where … well, about that.
We don’t want to gossip, but some of those MIIBs were never rented at all. They had their week on the New Releases wall, then a week or two later and it was time for something else, and onto the ‘Previously Viewed’ table they went, even if they were technically never viewed, and then, when they didn’t sell there, they had to move again. This time, they went into boxes underneath the tables, where they remained for months, meeting us in time, as we were inventoried month after month, seeing fluorescent lights only briefly as we were scanned and determined to still be here, still waiting for some point to our DVD existence, and never finding one.
As for us, White Oleander, well — at least we heard one of the clerks talking about how we were “actually not bad.” We’ll always have that.
Shut up, Men in Black II, no one cares about your box office! You’re just as dusty as the rest of us. And at least the rest of us were rented.
We’ll be melted down and recycled soon, we suppose. That’s what all the Blook Work are saying. We actually hope its true. Holding onto these boxed-up identities forgotten in a warehouse seems like a waste.
We could go for a fresh start–a chance to try again as something else, something a little more loved.
But with our luck, we’ll probably all end up raw materials for copies of Men in Black 3-D.
The Grove by John Rector
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
There’s potential here–the writing style itself is pretty clean and the setting is evocative enough–but unfortunately this story suffers from a character continually doing the wrong thing for moderately inexplicable reasons. The plot is simple enough: a man, who should be taking medication for some kind of schizophrenic disorder, has gone off the pills. One morning, he wakes up to find his wife gone and a dead body out in his field. He can’t remember the fight with his wife, which apparently was pretty bad, nor can he be quite sure he didn’t murder the teenage girl. He chooses not to report the body, and the rest of the book concerns his modest investigation into what happened to her. I found the choice there hard to take; why, after continually blacking out and being so afraid that you’re doing terrible things, do you not either 1.) start taking your pills, or 2.) turn yourself in? The resolution of the plot also left me cold. The ending was far too simple. I’d love it if there was more adventure in a self-published work; why be so cookie-cutter when you have the freedom to do whatever you like? Still, it’s a short, to-the-point thriller, modest in its goals, and at times effective.
I mean, because then you’d see, by God, and, oh, how it would burn! Imagine it: scrolling through your happy little social networking news feed, reading about this one and that one’s kids, so-and-so’s bar-drinking fun, the other one’s vacation in Patagonia, and then BAM! You see “Kristopher Kelly is fucking PISSED OFF!” Like, whoa! Is it about you? Is it not? You don’t know, you can’t say, but you get a feeling that it’s certainly possible you did something wrong, but what could it be?
Ha! As if I’d tell you! That’s how fucking PISSED OFF I am at you! You made me carpet-bomb all my other Facebook friends for the sake of sending my lily-livered vitriol through a system of tubes, and now everyone’s wondering, everyone’s worried, and no one knows who did what to me. My post is just a big bright shining middle finger to–well, everybody, really.
You’re so vain, you’ll probably even want my post to be about you.
But my update will just stand there moping, like some douche at a dance standing in a dark corner, arms crossed, a sour look on his face, waiting for someone to come up and beg a cheerful attitude out of him, because it’s awesome to sit and seethe and make other people do the hard work of getting you to talk. Eventually, someone else will post beneath my post, asking me, “What happened?” And I’ll reply, “Nothing. Just some people, you know? Tired of JERKS!” And the other person will agree, and we’ll post a few more lines about jerks as a general construct, maybe even “like”-ing it up, clicking all over each other’s posts and suckling on each other’s thumbs-ups and cackling because DAMN the world is just too goddamn full of jerks like you.
You know who you are. You know what you did. And you’ll get to watch all this indirect trash-talking about you and feel like the cretin you are. But I’m not going to name names, because I’m not fully committed to airing my dirty laundry. Too many specifics and people might start taking sides, even yours. If I’d wanted you to get sympathy, I would’ve posted something on your wall. But this is MY wall, bitch! The sympathy goes one way here, and that’s into my face.
Because let’s be real, here–it’s all about the sympathy. Man, when that one girl tells me to cheer up and that she hopes my day gets better–wow, that’ll be the exact mental salve I’ll need! And someone else will pray for me, I’m sure. To God and Jesus! Against you! Can you beat that? And yet another person, some guy, will remind me that things could always get worse, that other people are much worse off. Well! That will blow my freakin’ mind and turn my whole perspective around. So many kindnesses, it’ll be like I cranked the brightness on my monitor all the goddamned way up. The sun’ll break through the digital clouds, motherfucker! No way you’ll feel as good, getting anonymously flogged in a public forum. You’ll probably end up stifling sobs at your nondescript desk at your no-name company in your who-gives-a-shit job. Yeah. Good. You’ll digitally deserve it. Just ask all the people who will take my side in this. You’ll be able to see them if you visit my page. You’ll be able to see them taking the shit out of my side!
And one last thing while I’m on the subject of how much you suck: stop uploading that kind of photo of yourself! Seriously. You know the kind–the kind where you’re all bleeeaaaah-bleeeeeaaah, and bleeeeaaaaah-bleeeeaaaah-at-the-beach-lookit-me-and-my-ehhhhh, ehhhhh. It’s lame, and enough is enough.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book, about a freshman in high school in 1991 who pines for a pretty senior while discovering drugs, music, and literature, hit so close to home, most of the time it reads like a happier revision of my own life (I was a freshman in 1992 and briefly dated a few juniors, so … close!). I even read most of the same books, including The Fountainhead, and had conversations with adults about them very similar to what Charlie has here. What really drew me into the story, however, was the earnest sweetness of the main character; kinda wish I’d been more like him at the time. Oh well!
Anyway, the story itself can seem a bit like a salad of After School Special topics (domestic violence, child molestation, date rape, drug and alcohol abuse, homophobia — the list goes on and on!), written in a decent imitation of J. D. Salinger (although Charlie’s so much less of a dick than Holden), and while I appreciate the craft of writing a young voice, the bland rhythm of a young voice can get tedious after a while. It also detracts that every single beat of some subplots are predictable (the gay romance subplot, for example, holds few surprises). There are a lot of good-natured observations about life here, but they’re all a little bit obvious for this reader. Even so, I have to admit that it was a pleasure to read something so refreshingly well-meaning and good-natured, after all the other tortured stuff I’m usually reading.
Something so gallantly irony-free could only be set in the early 90s, and it made me miss those days a little bit. I just wish it had dug a little deeper and tried to get a little bit more out of the shadow of The Catcher in the Rye.