Book buyer thinks my 12.02 ounce book should gain weight

(744 words)

I sold three books earlier this week without having to rise from my bar stool — and that’s a strong disincentive to ever take such a drastic step again.

It was cool because a friend who’d already read the book had come to the Tin Lizzy to buy a gift copy and was so gushy about the need to do so it inspired nearby others.

It says on the back cover the book is $16.95.

I, still being of humble dispositions, round down and charge $15.

But I don’t object when generous buyers round up. So I was happy when my customers pulled out $20s and told me to keep the change.

One of the buyers works in construction and says he’s never read a single book in his life. I think he’s exaggerating, but he’s adamant.

He’s a very bright and friendly guy, very successful in his field.

He’s just not a reader.

That puts a lot of pressure on my book.

It’s like Martin McCrae, my book’s protagonist, is the carnal designate on a literary mission steal this burly man’s virginity.

Even though he’s a devoted heterosexual, McCrae, I think, would welcome the challenge.

But this novice reader said something thought-provoking when I handed him the book.

“Is this all there is?”

Yes, that’s it, I said. Was he disappointed?

“Well, I thought for $16.95 it would be thicker. Like maybe another half inch or so of pages.”

He was joking, but his declaration shows how a nuts-'n'-bolts man considers what is essentially a work of art.

Everything’s a commodity. 

It has me wondering if bargain-savvy readers would buy my book if it were more substantial. Let’s break it down:

“The Last Baby Boomer” is 252 pages (66,107 words) that weigh 12.02 ounces. The list price means it sells for about $20 a pound or about the same price as organic almonds.

The nutritionally dense nut is considered a superfood. They’re loaded with vitamins and nutrients and are an excellent source of the mono-saturated fats that promote healthy cholesterol.

But you can’t read an organic nut while you’re sitting on the crapper.

Would my book be more desirable if it weighed 2 or 3 pounds? 

It would a surprising turn of events because I spent years trying to reduce its size.

I believe great writing is a result of great deleting.

Adding to any book is a cinch.

Just shovel in the shit.

Like this blog!

After some thought, I believe I’ve come up with the perfect book for anyone who looks at a book as a purely bottom-line purchase. The book I have in mind has more than 1,000 pages.

It’s by author Jack Torrance — it’s his last book — and had a working title of, I guess, “The Story of Jack.”

It’s the most economical book of all time. It weighs probably a good 5 pounds and has maybe 150,000 words.

One catch: it uses just 10 words and they're all the same.

And they’re used in the same order over and over and over.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

As a study in repetition, it’s as chilling as anything Stephen King’s ever written.

You remember it, certainly, from the 1980 movie version of King’s book, “The Shining.”

Author/caretaker Torrance and his family hole up in the spooky Overlook Hotel. Shuttered for the winter, it offers perfect writerly solitude but for the ghostly gang of homicidal spirits.

The spookiest scene might be the one where Mrs. Torrance sereptitiously peeks at her cranky husband’s manuscript and sees it’s the same line over and over, sometimes in different patterns, but always the same sentence.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

She freaks out. She thinks, my God, my husband has lost his mind.

I see that and freak out for different reasons. I think, my God, some poor bastard had to type all that.

Because it’s not faked. They didn’t have a computer back in 1979 that could shoot out more than a thousand different patterns. 

It was all typed. Ten words. Same 10 words. Page after page.

My friend might think it’s a good book, but it’s not one I could ever write.

I’m going to rely on my belief that readers want fast-paced stories that don’t repeat words unless the author just can’t help himself unless the author just can’t help himself unless the author just can’t help himself.

Doing otherwise would drive me nuts.

Organically nuts.

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Our mansion vacation

We’d finished our meals at a place so sumptuous it makes Dick Cheney cheerful when Lucy became momentarily agreeable and said she wanted to return to our mansion.

There, a line that seems so strewn with lies and exaggerations, is 100 percent truth.

We did have a mansion, Lucy was momentarily agreeable and, yes, Virginia, there is a place where Cheney’s cheerful.

It’s St. Michaels, Maryland. We just spent the last three days there.

I don’t know which of the aforementioned truths is more surprising, so let’s get to the one that’s most monumental.

Let’s get right to the mansion.

It was Far Away Point (homes have addresses; mansions, like pets and people, all have names and personalities).

It just sold for $6.1 million and rents for the week for $6,500. 

Far Away Point has six bedrooms, six baths, library, pool, bath house, 81 acres, boat dock, guest house (sleeps 8), and a shoreline overlooking the same Chesapeake Bay eastern shore waters as recent retirees Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.

I was there to research a story about mansion rentals in a place that’s home to two men who think they’ve never been wrong and how with their selection of St. Michael’s as the perfect place to retire they got at least one thing right.

Doesn’t quite make up for the whole Iraq War thingie, but let’s give the devils their due.

I remain amazed I was able to stay there without having committed any crimes.

We didn’t break in. We were invited.  I didn’t pretend I was someone else. I was legit. We weren’t supervised. We were so all alone the girls spent most of the time there skinny dipping.

As our host drove up the mile-long driveway, I had the uneasy sense I was about to become Jack Torrance from “The Shining.”

That disquiet was only heightened when after a full 25-minute tour, Lucy, 4 (5 next week!) looked with dead eyes at me and said, “We’ve been here before.”

Far Away Point is 93 years old.

That’s Lucy. She has just three speeds: Spooky, sweet or Satanic (nickname, Lucy-fer).

Then, as soon as the realtor departed, Josie got locked in Far Away Point’s elevator, or as we now call it, the “hellavator.”

It was one of those old, rickety, self-operated three-story numbers that are kid magnets. Both the outer and sliding doors need to be closed for it to run.

Josie, naturally, thought it would be the perfect toy. She took it from the second floor to the first.

Then the outer door wouldn’t budge. Then the light went out.

She started screaming. I yelled, “Don’t panic!” and immediately commenced to panic. I yanked with all my might, I twisted coat hangers, I looked around for a fire ax.

She was in there about 10 minutes. We called the caretaker and the realtor and got no answer. Val finally persuaded her to push the buttons again. The lift had been off the landing. It needed to descend two more inches for the doors to release.

We were off to a frightening start.

But it got better right away.

If there were malevolent spirits in the house intent on retrieving our souls for eternal damnation, I think we won them over. They saw we were friendly. They saw we had no ill-intentions. They saw Val naked.

The girls were naked nearly the whole time. Me, a veteran skinny dipper, was envious.

It soon became one of our best vacations ever. It was magical.

The mansion soon felt like home. It embraced us. We all relaxed and just reveled in the opportunity to have such freedom in something so regal.

In the end, the girls decided they preferred our own home for perfectly 21st century reasons.

For all its glories, it’s many books and lavish places to relax and read, Far Away Point has but one measly TV and it’s about the size of a chess board.

Our home may be tiny and under-furnished, but it has three glorious TVs, one of them a real whopper, and all three could kick the butt of the one in Far Away Point.

Who needs mansions when you have hi-def?

For me the best part was overcoming our initial fears and learning to love this big, old beautiful house on the shore. Our memories of it will never fade.

And to think I for even a fleeting moment believed that true evil lurked in the heart of the home, an evil so malignant that it could possess our very souls.

How wrong I was.

I must have been confusing Far Away Point with down the street at Cheney’s place.

All snowmen are abominable

Oh, the weather outside is frightful and I can’t keep the Christmas ditties from sleigh riding ‘round and ‘round inside my head.

At Christmas we all sang “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” How come “Make it Stop! Make it Stop! Make it Stop!” doesn’t work half as well?

We’ve already had our White Christmas, our White New Year’s, and our White Groundhog’s Day.

For heaven’s sake, we even had a White Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And how did Al Sharpton miss the chance to protest that racial switcherroo?

I’ve heard the Eskimos have 25 different words to describe snow. I have at least that many and all of mine start with a word that sounds like “firetruck.”

The man who said no two snowflakes look exactly alike never shoveled my driveway. Let me tell you, every single firetruckin’ snowflake looks exactly alike.

I’ve spent two to three hours each day for the past two weeks walking in a winter wonderland. We’re about to set a record for total snowfall in February and we still have 12 days left in the shortest month.

I asked a fellow sufferer how we’re supposed to celebrate breaking such a record. He looked at me with what combat veterans describe as the 1,000 mile stare and said, “You just keep shoveling.”


Really, there are times when I pause, lean on my shovel and pray my heart slows to a gallop. I look around through great gusts of frozen breath. Nearly three feet of snow is a marvelous sight to behold.

But so is about anything on my 52-inch hi-def TV. If I could choose, I’d take the TV.

We live half way up a mountain in what is familiar to local weather viewers as the Laurel Highlands. It’s about an hour east of Pittsburgh. It’s the place weatherman always say is “getting really hammered with twice that amount” after they say Pittsburgh’s getting a school-closing eight inches of snow.

I hear that and conclude weather school curriculum must be too severe to allow for decent parties.

Because I spend a lot of time thinking about getting really hammered and this ain’t it. I’d love to break the tedium of constant shoveling with one of those lost weekends I vaguely remember from my days at Ohio University where the weekends used to run from Thursdays to Mondays.

But that’s not going to happen. The forecast calls for more snows and sobriety.

Schools have been closed for seven of the past nine days. The kids are sick of me and the ways I try and cheat to win at things like Jenga.

I look in the mirror and staring back I see Jack Torrance from “The Shining.” He’s been sober since the snows began to fall. His cabin fever is acute. He keeps writing the same disturbing drivel over and over and over.

The literary parallels alone are frightening.

If Scatman Carothers shows up at my door, he’d better watch out.

I told the 55-pound daughter that she could jump up and down on my aching back. She began to do so with glee and continued right up until Mommy told her that she wasn’t inflicting pain, she was relieving it.

That’s the instant she stopped.

My instinct was to drag myself off the floor and drive straight to the bar for sudsy camaraderie. But it seemed foolish to risk winding up in a ditch just to break the monotony with some beers and buddies.

So I just stayed in and challenged the girls to beat me at Jenga.

Besides, baby, it’s cold outside.

My good deed & karmic consequences

Okay, first let me tell you about my good, altruistic deed and then I’ll tell you the reasons why you shouldn’t follow suit.

And usage of “suit” is apt.

That’s what I was there at the dry cleaners to pick up. It was a seasonal sort of summer suit, so I’d been leisurely about picking it up at the local dry cleaners. To clarify: the suit isn't leisure; I am.

Had I picked the suit up a month previous when it was ready, the instigating transaction may never have occurred. But it did.

Here’s what happened:

I walked into the local dry cleaner ready for friendly service. The ladies there are sweet as Delta tea and just as sunny.

But the friendly service wasn’t what caught my eye. What did was something I prefer to avoid during my daily routine.

It was the black and gray uniform of the Pennsylvania State Police. It was hanging there in prominence smack dab in front of the five rows of -- who knows? -- perhaps a thousand items of bagged and dry-cleaned cloths.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but my first instinct when seeing that vacant suit was, “Run!”

Can’t help it. It’s in-bred. I have friends who are state policemen and enjoy golfing with them. But the uniform itself usually means a day-ruining event.

That’s why I was surprised by the impulse I felt seizing me.

“How much is the bill for that officer’s uniform?”

The old lady looked perplexed. She turned and looked through bi-focals at the pink receipt. It was $14.73.

“Let me have that one, too,” I said. “I’d like to pay for it.”

Like the rest of America, I’m deep into tough times. Income’s near zero. If I donate right now, it’s going to go to the Salvation Army, not the guy who’s going to bust me with a $97 citation for going 42 in a 35 mph zone.

But here in western Pennsylvania there’d been a heartbreaking rash of officer shootings. Four were killed in past six months. Two of them never had a chance.

So I paid for the officer’s dry cleaning and the sweet dry cleaning lady was overwhelmed. “Well, how kind of you!” she gushed. “What’s your name and phone number? I want to pass this along. I’m sure the officer will want to thank you.”

I declined. “Just tell him thanks for all he does for us."

And I practically danced out of the shop. I felt great. I’d done an impulsive good deed for a worthy stranger and didn’t taint it by seeking credit.

So why am I tainting it now? As a warning because of what’s been happening to me ever since.

See, I walked out of that dry cleaning shop not only feeling good, but also, yes, convinced something good was now likely to happen to me.

We all like to believe in karma. We who consider ourselves good like to believe that our good deeds will eventually resonate and be rewarded. Sooner the better.

I felt so good that I thought I’d try generate some web campaign to get dry cleaning customers to anonymously pay for bills for uniformed police and armed forces. Certainly, among the hundreds of clothes being dry cleaned at any given moment, there are some uniforms worn by brave citizens who put their lives on the line for us.

It’s such a simple gesture and is a great way to say thanks.

Now, here’s what happened in the hour after my good, anonymous deed:

• Got an IRS bill for $437 in penalties for a tax dispute that was resolved in the tax bureau’s favor.

• My six-month old computer malfunctioned. I drove 90 minutes to Pittsburgh three times in the following seven days to get warranty service. Lost about two days of data and felt rash-inducing anxieties all week.

• Heard little sawing noises in the attic above the bed. Went up to investigate and found puddles of water on the plastic insulation. The snow-covered roof’s leaking and needs replacing. Our baffled bug and critter guy couldn’t discern what’s making the noises. The disconcerting sawing noises continue unabated and I lay there sleepless each night awaiting a nest of mice to break through the ceiling and fall on my face.

• The snows that have since topped a total of 52-inches began to fall and continue to do so. I’m beginning to feel like Jack Torrance in “The Shining.”

• Learned the kid needs braces.

So given how cockeyed karma’s reacted to my good deed, will I ever voluntarily pay for another officer’s dry cleaning?

Absolutely.