Let's just bury Salinger, not praise him

During his life, Garbo-like author J.D. Salinger wished to be left alone and I was more than happy to oblige him. I tried to stop thinking about him in high school shortly after they made me read “Catcher in the Rye.”

The perennial favorite of homicidal malcontents and high school English teachers everywhere, the book did nothing for me.

I like books that feature protagonists with whom I feel like I could sit down and enjoy an afternoon of convivial drinking and perhaps a fragrant cigar or two. Guys like Capt. Augustus McCrae and Jake Spoon from “Lonesome Dove” or John Joseph Yossarian from “Catch-22.”

When I say I’ve spent many hours with guys like Holden Caulfield you might think I was once a licensed psychiatrist. Not true.

It’s just that, thanks to Salinger, disaffected Caulfields are everywhere.

Ian Fleming gave us a dynamic indelible character with a license to kill.

Salinger’s greatest contribution was an irritating character with a license to mope.

Certainly, there are many worthy reasons to go through life in a constant bitch. Living ain’t for sissies.

But there was no reason for Salinger to be like that and that’s my beef with the author who went through life as our national literary blister. His spent his post-Rye days shooing away interviewers, prospective publishers and hounding lawyers to sue anyone who dared reference his work.

You can write a book about a moody and depressing anti-hero, but when it succeeds beyond your wildest dreams you had better dare not become one.

One of my favorite interviews of all time was with hack crime writer Mickey Spillane, with whom I had the pleasure of engaging in a minor correspondence after I did a story about him that revealed a surprising side to the guy who created cold-blooded dick Mike Hammer.

And shame on you if you snickered at my usage of the word “dick.” In Spillane’s day it was a perfectly respectable reference to a man who practiced the detective trade. It wasn’t until later that it became a pejorative reference to the male sex organ and a subject for another day.

I found out that Spillane was a door-knocking Jehovah’s Witness. It’s true. From his home in lovely Pawley’s Island, S.C., the thrice-married brother would go door-to-door and preach the gospel of a religion that one of these days I just might give a try.

I loved the thought that this world famous author, a star from a series of hilarious Miller Lite beer commercials in the 1970s, would show up and politely ask strangers if they had a moment or two to discuss their eternal salvation.

Was it odd, I asked him, that he’d made a fortune selling more than 225 million books based on a ruthless character who killed without remorse while in private life he preached a loving and kind religion.

“Not at all,” Spillane told me. “Too many writers mistake a trade for an art. I tell stories. Sure, they are stories about sex, murder and deception, but there’s lots of stories like that in the Holy Bible, too.”

Like Hemingway, Twain and Steinbeck, our greatest American authors, Spillane engaged life with gusto. When he died in 2006, not a single story referred to him as “reclusive,” the adjective most used to describe Salinger.

Well, now his reclusiveness is complete.

I think our greatest writers inspire us to live. Not write. When I read Twain, I don’t feel like sitting all by myself and making up stories. I feel like going out and laughing with family and friends. I feel like enjoying the gift of life.

Salinger inspired lots of people, too. He inspired people to believe that giving into the grim burdens we all experience was a mantle to wear with petulant pride.

The papers are full of stories today about how Salinger soured and wrecked relationships throughout his life and will be buried in the next day or so in a grave that will long go unmoistened by tears of those that knew him best.

Many stories will mention that when John David Chapman killed John Lennon in 1981 he was asked, man, why did you do it?

“Catcher in the Rye,” was all he said.

So if he’s one of your literary heroes, I hope you enjoyed him for the artistry of his work and not because you relate to his miserable characters or because of the author’s misanthropic example.

You can enjoy the book, but the guy was just a cold-blooded dick.

And I mean that one in the most modern usage.

Twitticisms

I suppose I was destined to embrace Twitter because I’ve always spoken fortune cookie. Check it out:

“Pray for riches and you’ll get nothing. Pray for wisdom and you’ll need nothing.”

I came up with that line a few months ago and immediately recognized it as a dandy little couplet. But what the hell am I ever going to do with it?

I don’t even buy it. Only fools would prefer a lot of wisdom to a lot of money.

The guys at the BMW dealerships don’t give Beamers for brains. It takes bucks.

That’s all the wisdom I need.

So until Twitter reared its dainty little feathered head, I didn’t have a place to use the gem that made any sense. So now I’m jumping into twitter with all eight fingers and one thumb.

Most recent Twitter post: “During all my typing commotion, my left thumb never even hits the space bar. When it comes to typing, my left thumb never lifts a finger.”

See, there you go. It’s a good line, but could I build an entire blog post around it? I don’t think so. So now I can use it and perhaps it’ll brain barnacle on someone who checks it out.

I don’t know whether 8days2Amish will become a farm team for www.EightDaysToAmish.com or vice versa. I think more than likely it’ll become a sort of greatest hits version of the blog.

It’ll be a place where I can take some of my best little nuggets and put them all in one big basket. I hope you’ll check it and encourage friends to do the same.

To save you the trouble of that, here’s the first 28 Tweets I’ve posted in the first week I’ve spent engaged in an endeavor I once ridiculed as being the province of vapid simpletons too weak-minded to engage in extended coherent thought.

Really, I may have been too harsh.

After all, if I limited my conversations to only intelligent people, I’d have to quit talking to even myself.

Hmmm . . . I think I’ll post that one!



-- A sleeping child in your arms is better than any drug. Problem is kids wake up. That's why there are real drugs.


-- Teenage girls who starve themselves to appear more like Hollywood anorexics ought to be called “slimitators.”


-- A single splash of water killed the Wicked Witch of the West. Logical conclusion: Not only was she evil, she also reeked.

-- We're all doomed to die, but if just one of us gets to live forever, I hope it's Keith Richards.

-- Dog's been dead 3 years. Sometimes I swear I can still smell his farts. It's either Casey's ghost or those were some powerful farts.

-- Someday I'm going to challenge the intellects of the airport security guys by trying to get through metal detectors wearing a suit of armor.

-- I ask more pointed and concerned questions of computer tech people than I did of our baby docs. Why? One earns money, the other spends it.

-- Being a writer is like being in a rubber raft way out at sea. Having tech problems is like being in that raft and hearing an urgent hiss.

-- If chickens ever start laying Cadbury eggs I'm becoming a chicken farmer.

-- Karma? Did two nice deeds for strangers today and came home to an IRS penalty letter. Then my computer jammed. Karma's crap.

-- People who refuse straws do not suck.

-- It's a cruel irony that things that could most benefit from alcoholic diversion -church, work, parenting - require at least some sobriety.

-- I have about the same interest in learning speed reading as I do in learning speed sex.

-- I hope heaven for Haitians is better for them than it is for guys like me. They sure deserve it.

-- I used to say bloggin was the writing equal of running a lemonade stand. Then I realized kids had the good sense to charge a quarter for lemonade.

-- The same people who say global warming is a hoax are the ones marveling at the snow & saying we haven't had a winter like this in 30 years.

-- Why are there locks on the lobster tank where I shop? If I'm a shoplifter, a live lobster is the last thing I'm stuffing down my pants.

-- Does anyone ever keep gloves in their glove box? I wonder if the dashboards on the space shuttles have glove boxes.

-- I love my family, but sometimes I need bar time with the boys the way worms need dirt. Happy Hour, here I come!

-- My 9-year-old daughter treats me like Moe treats Curly.

-- For the good of the show, American Idol should replace Simon Cowell with Dick Cheney. He'd be hilarious.

-- An hour spent listening to good country music is like an hour spent reading the
Bible while someone nearby plays a really good fiddle

-- Stephen King is the literary equivalent of an earth-devouring monster. Right now he’s killing my time. Yep, I'm reading "Under the Dome."

-- How do people from Wyoming, our most geographically square state, ever manage to think outside the box?

-- Times are tough, but I’ll burn the furniture for fuel before I give up my XM satellite radio.

-- Mick Jagger lecturing Ron Wood on polite behavior would be like me lecturing people on the need to be more industrious.

Tech problems inflict Biblical torments

I always tell prospective authors that being a freelance writer is like being adrift in a rubber raft far out at sea. And that being a freelance writer with technical problems is like being in that rubber raft and hearing an urgent hiss.

My rickety little raft began to hiss on Wednesday and I’ve been sinking ever since.

It occurred to me while on one of the numerous multi-hour tech talks to Apple that I ask more concerned and pointed questions about how these self-proclaimed “geniuses” were going fix my computer than I did to the docs who were going to deliver our children.

It makes sense, really. One earns money. The other spends it.

Of course, it hasn’t been earning me much lately. But I still look at my $1,700 MacBook Pro like it is a magic genie. If I rub it just the right way it’ll make my fondest dreams come true.

Inside its cool chrome exterior are four non-fiction book proposals, a completed novel and the stark rejections from -- who knows? – maybe 1,000 agents and publishers who think I suck.

It’s no stretch to say that my relationship to my computer is like my marriage. I love it wholeheartedly and try and nurture it. If it’s sick, I fret about its well-being and have trouble sleeping.

I wonder what will happen to me if we part ways and I have to start all over.

This is being written on my wife’s shiny and pretty Toshiba and it feels like I’m committing an infidelity. I’m doing the same things with it that I do with my own computer, but it feels different to my fingers. It gives me strange warnings and nags me in ways I’m not used to being nagged. I touch some things expecting one reaction and I get another unsettling one.

My own computer has already suffered the technological equivalent of castration. I with a stroke of my own hand wiped out its hard drive. This, I was told, would fix the problems and allow me to re-install with a backup hard drive that I faithfully apply.

I’d only lose about two days of work and, I swear, I’ve convinced myself that during those two days I’d composed some of the greatest thoughts ever conjured. Those words are now gone.

So is my faith in backups. One genius darkly hinted that the problem could actually stem from the backup.

Now I’m contemplating getting an entire harem of illicit backups. My trust’s been shattered.

I’m ashamed to admit this, but as all the fixes were failing me I thought of turning to the omnipotent deity to whom we all look to for hope and fulfillment.

And I’m not talking about Steve Jobs.

Nope, I’m talking about the guy who Biblically bystands when another of his faithful sons, Job v.1.0 (no relation) endures a torment that had nothing to do with corrupt hard drives and invalid node structures.

In the book of Job, the Lord’s most faithful servant is bedeviled by Satan -- and bedevilment doesn’t get any more pure than that.

And the Lord lets it all happen as Job wonders wounded why.

During a dark time yesterday, I felt a kinship with Job. I wondered if prayer might help.

Then I thought that there was, for sure, some dying father trapped in the rubble down in Haiti saying prayers that needed hearing more than mine. I’d feel small if my prayer took priority.

So I’ll soldier on through my moral mess on my own. Today I’ll endure another marathon of ear-squashing tech advice, dashed hopes and, perhaps, a resolution that’ll allow me to come home to my computer.

And when it’s over, I’ll return to my little rubber raft and the currents will sweep me far, far out to sea.

Maybe someday my tech torments will end and I'll board a ship with a smart crew that'll free me from concerns that have nothing to do with the act of writing.

But that won’t happen until I can look myself in the mirror and make a career sea change.

I'll have to quit freelancing. I'll have to take this Job and shove it.

Heaven for Haitians

I hope for the sake of fairness heaven is better for Haitians than it is for guys like me. And by “guys like me” I mean those of us who happen by chance to reside in places free of strife, famine, poverty or redundant natural disaster.

Poor, godforsaken Haiti’s batting 1,000 with that diabolical quartet.

Why some parts of the world are so cursed with enduring misery while others are so blessed with healthy abundance is a confounding mystery.

When guys like me have a bad day, it usually involves one our favorite professional sports teams losing a game and in which we had nothing but contrived emotional stakes.

Guys like me have a bad day when work’s not going well, traffic is a mess, and the forecast -- brrrr! -- calls for unseasonably cold temperatures.

A good day for guys like me usually involves a frolic with the family and maybe a round of free golf with friends at a club so posh that showing up to work there would probably strike many Haitians as heavenly.

Guaranteed, many Haitians would sell his or her soul to trade their $10 a week jobs for one day toting golf bags for $50 tips at one of our posh country clubs.

That would, I imagine, be heaven to them. Honest, if they ever have time to dream in Haiti, a safe menial job at lush places like Oakmont Country Club would seem like heaven.

We’re all seeing what a bad day for guys in Haiti is like.

It’s hell.

That’s why I hope, out of fairness, that Haiti heaven is better than the heaven for guys like me. They were so historically screwed just by being born that they’re due a real eternal break.

Many of us have been moved to tears by the poignant stories of people who left places like this to help people in places like that.

Just yesterday, altruistic angels named Jamie and Al McMutrie, sisters from Pittsburgh who’d been running a Haitian orphanage, made national news by shepherding 54 young Haitians to our hometown. Once settled here many of them will now grow up and some of them will become guys like me.

They’ll become Steeler fans. They’ll enjoy riding our scenic little inclines with loved ones they haven’t even met yet. They’ll make friends and duck out of work early to giggle at the Happy Hour.

I’m confident this will happen because, really, there are guys like me all over the place. We’re not out to rule the world. We just don’t want to get run over by it. We like to laugh and joke, sit in the shade when it’s hot and near the fire when it’s cold.

I marvel at the faith that inspires people to leave comfortable lives here and go to Haiti to devote their lives to caring for people for whom life is a daily struggle.

And God bless the people who are lining up to take these sad orphans into their homes and give them a chance to grow up to be guys like me.

I’d offer to do it but guys like me figure we already do our share. I gave $50 to UNICEF last week and went to bed convinced that I’d done my part and that there was nothing more I could do to help anyone.

When you think about it, it’s a wonder guys like me have the audacity to even speculate if a heaven he may never deserve to see will be superior to anyone else’s.

This blog a Pittsburgh 'best of.' No kidding.

Pittsburgh Magazine's new website flatters www.EightDaysToAmish.com by naming it one of the five best blogs of The ‘Burgh (*).

As honors go, I’m ranking it just behind the “World’s Greatest Dad” beer mug proclamation my daughters bestowed last Father’s Day.

See, both were given by demanding authorities.

In the same year that I got the best dad beer mug from my girls, 9 and 3, they’d also called me at various times, the “World’s Meanest Dad,” “World’s Dorkiest Dad” and “World’s Stinkiest Dad” (and that last one really hurt).

Either they couldn’t find beer mugs heralding those designations or I truly am the “World’s Greatest Dad.” Why would a $5 beer mug lie?

As for being one of the best blogs in The ‘Burgh, well, I couldn’t be more pleased. It’s a significant promotion for an aimless blog with no evident mission, no budget and certainly no income. Even more remarkable is that it’s produced by a man so devoid of ambition he’s held only three salaried jobs in his entire adult life and one of them was at the Pizza Hut.

To be named best of anything in Pittsburgh is, to me, a significant achievement. I think it’s the best city in the world and can cite survey after esteemed survey to back the boast.

What’s even more surprising is that my blog has absolutely nothing to do with Pittsburgh.

This is key and why I justify saying it’s one of the five (*) best blogs when the magazine lists 14 others.

Here’s the list from www.pittsburghmagazine.com:

Pittsburgh Bloggers - News of the area's blogging community, including a directory of blogs.
Bike Pittsburgh
Burgh Baby
Burghilicious
Carbolic Smoke Ball
Carnegie Library
Chris Rodell
I Heart Pittsburgh
Mondesi's House - Pittsburgh Sports
Only in Pittsburgh
Pennsylvania Haunts & History
Pittsblog
Pittsburgh Arts: Digging Pitt
Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy
That's Church

My breakdown immediately dismisses any blog that includes some variation of Pittsburgh in its title. It strikes me as just a tad too butt-kissy. Like if I capriciously changed the name of mine to “Eight Days To Pittsburgh” (a bit south of Guadalajara) just to score hometown points.

So removing blogs with “Pittsburgh” named derivatives bumps me clear up to number three. The listing appears alphabetical, but that could be coincidence.

But insinuating mine is among the top three seems more pretentious by two notches than saying I’m number five and I don’t want to appear greedy.

Experts say a successful blog ought to identify its target readership in the title. My www.EightDaysToAmish.com defies that convention as it seems to court the percentage of Amish men and women who access the internet to find stories about things like getting high in hammocks.

My chosen blog title is so confounding the Pittsburgh Magazine editors decided against even using it. They list only my actual name. I like it. Seems to add panache among the other worthy honorees.

Point of etiquette: I sent congratulatory e-mails to most of the others listed and proposed a link swap but didn’t hear back from a single one of them.

See, Pittsburghers can be a tough crowd.

Maybe they collectively feared I’d engage them in windy sermons about why they, too, should be eight days to Amish.

I ought to try that one day. I can be pretty persuasive and the world might be better off with a few more e-Amish.

Who knows? Maybe with a snappier name, I might be “best of” in western Pennsylvania places like Uniontown, Cranberry and -- who knows? -- maybe even Altoona.

So to the editors of Pittsburgh Magazine, I say thank you. Thank you for including my blog on your “best of” blog roll and for listing things in a way that allows me to shamelessly declare mine is a top five.

And, by the way, thanks to my parents for not naming me something like Zeke.

Just one question: When can I expect to get my beer mug?

Dick Cheney should replace Simon Cowell

The only thing that can save the declining “American Idol” franchise is replacing the departing Simon Cowell with the only man more reliably mean and nasty than the bellicose Brit.

That, of course, would be Dick Cheney.

Cowell leaving is a death blow to a show that began circling the drain last season when it detonated its nifty chemistry by adding the bizarre and dippy Kara DioGuardi.

The result was the reality TV-equivalent of New Coke. Something we all enjoyed was replaced by something nobody liked nor sought.

And it’s been all down hill from there. Paula Abdul split, thus depriving America of her balloon-headed commentary. Her eventual replacement is Ellen DeGeneres, but her seat’s been filled by the grim and lizard-like Victoria “Posh” Beckham and Mary K. Blige who looked so uncomfortable I suspect she must have lost a bet.

Worst of all Cowell, without the foil of Abdul’s gushy babble, seems adrift. He seems restrained. He seems like he’s pulling his punches. Gadzooks, he seems well-mannered.

And if he’s bored, I’m bored. His breathtaking honesty makes him among the most compelling figures on television. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks about what he says or, certainly, how he dresses. I know guys who gut deer in shirts fancier than ones he wears on prime time.

He’s planning on moving to a new show that won’t restrict the ages of its amateur contestants so now our exposure to the pool of appalling talent in America will be deepened exponentially.

That should make for good TV, too, so I’ll probably check it out.

Really, I think he’s missing his calling judging creaky voiced warblers with bad teeth and delusions of grandeur.

I think Cowell should be on the U.S. Supreme Court. Imagine prim Ken Starr coming before the Cowell court to argue against some lurid aspect of gay marriage or legal marijuana.

The resulting pay per view proceeds could overnight wipe out the national dept.

But Cowell seems unlikely to leave Hollywood for D.C.

The opposite is true for the Cheney. The former recluse is popping up in front of the cameras so much you wonder when he's going to go union and apply for his SAG card.

He’s predicted so much imminent doom in the past 12 months I’m surprised people still even bother to peruse the seed catalogues.

It’s as shameless as it is shrewd because the odds certainly favor lone wolf terrorists bent on bloodying our national nose. Jack Bauer always wins in the end but not without a grim body count that escalates sometime after about the eighth hour of “24.”

So Cheney is a natural to step in for Cowell. Who wouldn’t tune in to hear him tell some “Freebird”-mangling hillbilly, “You can’t sing. You’re ugly and the viewers at home can’t tell, but you smell like Detroit during a summer garbage strike.

“I’d advise you to go back to welding bent tailpipes, but I’ll be happy to shove you out the window if you’re just going to stand there and pout. It’s up to you friend. I don’t care one way or the other.”

It may seem like a long shot, but who ever would have thought the dour puritan Tom Delay would one day don Chippendale tights to cha-cha-cha on “Dancing With The Stars?” And I’d self-lobotomize with jumper cables and my car battery if I was certain it would erase the Twilight Zone of that surreal memory from my frontal lobe.

All we need to perfect the slapstick chemistry is another bubble-headed foil for Cheney to criticize.

Let’s see. It has to be someone he can order around like Moe does Curly, someone he can ridicule whenever the perspective judge says or does something so stupid we’re all dumbfounded this person is in a position of authority as supreme as “American Idol.”

I wonder if W. is busy.

The King-sized Monster in Maine

We vacationed there as kids and it was where my wife and I enjoyed our last child-free frolic.

But I’ll never return to Maine. A three-headed monster lives there and his realm is populated by drug addicts, adulterers, cutthroats and a host of garden variety geeks and idiots.

And those are the good guys.

I already feel like I’ve met every single person who resides in Maine -- and I’m only on page 519.

Yes, God help me, I’m reading Stephen King’s “Under the Dome.”

King, 62, has sold more than 350 million copies of books under his own name and those issued under the crafty pseudonyms Richard Bachman and John Swithen.

He is the literary equivalent of an earth-devouring monster. Right now he’s killing my time.

I’d been looking forward to reading the 1,074 page book. I hadn’t read a King offering since “Needful Things” (1993) and thought this epic would be a nice break from the history and biography that so enriches my life.

Like most of the world, King’s left an indelible mark on me. For me it started with Pet Sematary, as horrific as anything ever conceived by Poe, Hitchcock or Sterling, the Holy Trinity of creative American horror. I remember relishing “Salem’s Lot” the night after my last college final was completed and I was free to read whatever I wanted.

I remember swapping “The Dead Zone,” “The Shining,” and “Misery” with my old man and sharing our exuberance of stories well told. My wife and I raced each other to book stores to get the monthly installments of the wonderful chap book series, “The Green Mile.” And we both loved his Bachman book, “Thinner.”

I guess I stopped reading King when he started writing books faster than I could read them. Some sources put his total at 73.

I can think of maybe five things in my life I’ve done more than 73 times. In fact, other than golf, reading good books, fun time with the kids, attending sporting events and lovey-dovey stuff with the missus, I have trouble thinking of things I want to do 73 times.

Lots of stuff -- voting, commuting to work -- just gets boring after 25 times.

And that’s what had happened with me and King.

He started losing me with “It,” an otherwise compelling tale that craps out when the villain is revealed to be -- spoiler alert -- a great big scary spider. Oooh! My 3-year-old on a sugar high could have come up with something more plausibly frightening.

Heck, my 3-year-old on a sugar high is more plausibly frightening.

So now I feel marooned halfway through a book that’s more dense than three stacked Bibles.

I need to find out if the people of Chester’s Mill ever emerge from the big dome, how it got there, who’s to blame and who’ll be slain without mercy or taste.

At this point, I hope they all do. King has made the entire population of Maine part of the cast.

And there’s something objectionable about every one of them. His books make the whole state seem like it’s filled with a bunch of reactionary jerks who, ayuh, confront each supernatural challenge with either dull-witted immobility or vigorous criminal mayhem.

I’ve lost count of the rapes, the murders, the assaults and criminal lawlessness taking place in the town -- and that’s just by the police officers.

The narrative is so plodding I’ve become distracted by casting which B-list actor should play the leads in the eventual miniseries (I say Ashton Kutcher as Col. Barbie and Dick Cheney as Big Jim Rennie).

I don’t think the dome book would have been published in its existing form by anyone but King. But no publisher or editor at this point can tell him he’s off track.

So he should take it from me. He needs a decade-long horror sabbatical so he can return with another series of timeless novellas like the four included in “Different Seasons,” his most satisfying read.

That 1982 collection yielded two of the best human interest movies any of us has ever seen: “Stand By Me” and the magnificent “Shawshank Redemption.”

Many people are often surprised but the outstanding 1994 Tim Robbins/Morgan Freeman prison flick is faithfully based on a Stephen King book.

He needs to get back to telling stories about people and daily struggles that make the supernatural seem so contrived.

Besides, what could be any scarier or more supernatural than what’s just taken place?

I just devoted about an hour to giving career advice to Stephen King.