Russian Corpse Dolls

It is really hard to keep up with the awesomeness that is Joe these days.  In the month of November alone, we've seen four short stories published, three poems published, another short story, what very well may be my best, the cannibal-driven The Meat, taken at Drunken Boat, three more pieces (essay, flash, poem) accepted for translation into Romanian, and for whose magazine, egophobia, I've been invited to be a regular columnist, and yesterday I received an email asking for permission to turn another short story ("In Cases Such As These") into a drama for KMVR in Sacramento.

And my payment for these things?  A big fat fucking not a dime.

Like when I ran into Jon Dempsey working at the old Country Farms in Berlin, CT, after I returned home from California following a few years of losing jobs and girlfriends and fucking up my dreams.

"Yeah," Jon said, slapping down an extra piece of juicy roast beef, "but you're living in San Francisco."

The idea sounds a lot more impressive than it is.

An up-and-coming writer versus a fat guy sitting at his computer.

(To which you say, "Who you kidding, Joe?  You're not fat!"  Damn straight.  16% body fat.  Which is good.  Of course, that's not George [5%] good.  But it'll have to do.  Until I get better.)

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OK.  So we've got to upgrade this fucking thing.

This blog began as a joke, really.  I kept hearing (over and over and over) that I should start one, how I'd have so much to say, how it would be good for my career and (yawn).  I didn't know how to start a blog.  It took me, like, seven years after everyone else to even get a goddamn e-mail account (and I am one of like seven people left on the planet who still uses hotmail).  So just to shut everyone up, I did it.  Actually my wife did it.  Kind of like when my former poetry professor had to send out my submissions for me because I was so apprehensive and gun-shy.  After she set it up, I tinkered with the design to get this craptastic gem you see before you today.

But I look around at everyone else's blog, and feel like that goofy family of kids who lived on the Turnpike and wore the ill-fitting hand-me-downs and drank their tap from the poisoned mercury well.

I went trolling around the Internet last night, since I was having a bitch of a time writing, because I was feeling so down about my blog having all the visual appeal of a vegan Thanksgiving.

Found a few interesting distractions.  One was this awesome article by Chuck Wendig http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2011/11/03/writers-are-the-99/, which explores the 99% vs. 1% phenomena that has taken root, this idea of the writer as marginalized (along with everyone trying to carve out a living in the creative arts), which ties in nicely with the opening paragraph of today's entry.  I like being able to tie all these random thoughts together, more like an exercise, really, since all good writing is all about motif and parallelism (for a stellar example of this, see the other day's banking conceit http://tinyurl.com/6lt43u3).

Wendig, as usual, makes terrific points, doing what I try to do, only a fucklot better. But the sentiment is the same.  

Mostly, I walked away from his blog feeling envious.  Because his blog looks like a grown-up's, whereas mine looks like it designed by one of Harry Potter's lesser, ineffectual classmates.  (Speaking of Harry Potter, since when did he start dating my Amanda?

)

So I guess if we're looking for a theme today, it's coveting what we can't have. Amanda (http://tinyurl.com/89l4fmh).  A blog that makes me look like a professional.  To get paid for my work while achieving international fame and hot, awkward-looking Romanian chicks.

Of course, all my coveting can't quite touch this guy (and this guy definitely seems like a guy you wouldn't want to touch.)

Russian Man Stole 29 Corpses And Dressed Them Up As Dolls





In case you missed it, the dude's name is Anatoly Moskvin.  He is like a cemetery expert over in Nizhny Novgorod, a town in Russia.  And he really does look like the kind of guy who would dress up dead people for elaborate tea parties.  Here's an arbitrary link http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,796477,00.html, but it's pretty much all over the Internet.  Along with the pictures.

Usually he dressed the corpses as women, which I thought was interesting.  With blonde wigs.  I mean, if you are dressing up corpses, there are so many ways to go. You could have drinking buddies.  A sports' team.  A giant teddy bear.

OK.  Well, he did go the teddy bear route with one of the corpses.  But can you blame him?  In the corpse-dressing game, it's like the rock band "serious" shot.

But dressing them up like women says so much, doesn't it?  There are no reports he had sex with them (not that I've read).  Anatoly just want to be surrounded by girls dressed up pretty in a giant, never-ending tea party where he was the permanent guest of honor http://tinyurl.com/7czfgm6.  Is there a law against that?  OK. Probably several.

It's all about controlling our environment, no?  The work, the scenery, the people you want accompanying your life.  Some people are just more conventional than others.

I can understand Anatoly's point.  And not just because I've asked Justine to have me stuffed and set up permanently in the living room when I die.  The outside world, there are so many variables required to deem success.  Bosses.  Publishers. Women who say "yes" when you ask them to marry you.  Life is about circumvention.  Wall Street.  Publishing.  Love.  Anatoly simply did what Kirk did with the Kobayashi Maru: cheated at a game he was never meant to win.


Best I can do to tie all that shit in is leave you with a little Khan ear worm (which features, yes, a Russian).

I'll leave you to make the connection.

Crime Fiction

Maybe because I was born in 1970 and it was the first great mystery of my life, but the D.B. Cooper case has always fascinated me.  I guess I'm not alone.  It's been all over the news of late, after a woman claiming to be his niece came forward implicating her uncle.  Although when I said to Justine the other day that they may've found out who D.B. Cooper was, she was like, "Who's that?"  Justine was born in the 1980s, and by then there wasn't much news about the man who hijacked a passenger plan somewhere over Seattle and parachuted with 200K into the dark Pacific Northwest night in the middle of a raging storm.  Many maintained D.B. Cooper died in the fall, especially when money matching the serial numbers of the ransom was found decaying on a riverbank by some kids years later.  D.B. Cooper wasn't even the actual name the man gave when claiming he had a bomb but the name of a suspect, later cleared, that just stuck.  I'm not going to recount the whole goddamn thing. You can Google "D.B. Cooper" if you want to know more about the guy.

We love it when criminals get away with it.  OK, maybe not everyone.  And certainly not all criminals.  But I do.  Not the real creepers, the murderers and those who do unspeakable violence.  I'm talking mostly your classic bank robber types from the movies, like Heat or even Oceans Eleven (but not the two crappy sequels), where the violence isn't real, and the peril innocent people are put in isn't real; through the illusion of film, the only part that resonates is that of the common man trying to come up in life, pitted against nameless, faceless corporations and authoritative institutions.  I mean, who wasn't rooting for Hannibal Lector?  (In Silence of the Lambs, of course, not the the crappy sequels.)  And the man was a goddamn cannibal.

Like I said, not everyone wishes to be the bad guy.  I knew dickish kids who, when they played cops and robbers, wanted to be the cops.  And you know what?  They grew up to be...cops.  They also grew up to be dicks, and I'm not saying those two things are necessarily connected.  Most guys are dickish.  I've known far more criminals than I have cops, and most of them scared the shit out of me.  Still, when I was kid, I wanted to be...Captain Kirk.  Because I never played cops and robbers.  I usually played Star Trek.  Not sure how that correlates, or what it says about me. That I'm a reckless egomaniac with a messiah complex and strict adherence to his own brand of morality and honor.  But that doesn't sound like me at all.

I'm probably thinking about this now because after reading the delightful hijinks of D.B. Cooper sticking it to the man, I read the article about the mentally ill guy in SoCal who was beaten to death by the cops.  If you didn't see it, here it is: http://tinyurl.com/4xgfrh6.  And there's nothing funny or romantic here.

Now the easy thing would be to pile on against the cops who did this.  Which would be pointless.  It's indefensible.  And it's obvious.  Besides the fact that I can't believe cops still do this shit knowing everyone has a cell phone camera, it hits me because I spent some time living outside, and I knew some people with schizophrenia, and I had friends who were beaten by cops; we saw some really bad things.  But we were also doing bad things, and there is such a climate of hatred and mistrust and danger out there, police confronting violence and possible death on a daily basis, that it's not inconceivable how this happens.  Indefensible?  Yes.  But not inconceivable. And these days, if somebody steals my shit, yeah, I'm calling the police, which at one time was inconceivable.

It's nice to have a point to these things, to be able to tie it all together.  It's what the reader expects.  So if I have to do it, I guess it's this: I'd rather live in the world of D.B. Cooper.  Which is romanticized by the soft haze of nostalgia, where there were no victims, and a masked man gets away with the bank's money. I don't want to live in this world, where mentally ill homeless men are beaten to death by the cops and it's videotaped and then everyone wrings their hands and acts horrified that this could happen, but it will only happen again.  Because one world is fiction.  The other is all too real.  Fiction I can manipulate.  The real world and its violence and hatred?  I can't do shit about that.