Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy

In the footsteps of Hotblack Desiato, I’ve been taking a month off dead, for tax reasons. Well, OK, not really for tax reasons. The Korean government treats me relatively well when it comes to hoovering up the monetary crumbs in my fiscal wake, and I have long been out of the purview of the long arm of Revenue Canada.
But I certainly have been dead, at least from the neck up. Occasionally during the course of the last month or two, as the caffeine rush has hit me, I’ve had a Brilliant Idea flash up on the Times Square text-crawl on the inside of my forehead, then just as quickly disappear, before I actually worked up the energy to write it down.
I’m not entirely sure why this might be, other than the damp lassitude that comes with the ‘monsoon’ season here in Korea, when the rains come and the whole country starts to smell and feel like the inside of a fat man’s underpants. Not that I’ve spent a lot of time rummaging around such places, mind you, but I got me an active imagination.
And I do have some theories.
The most plausible is performance anxiety. Since it became as certain as these things ever are that some of my offhand screeds were going to be included in the upcoming ‘Best of Web Writing‘ book (which should be finalized and ready to get magically transformed from bits to atoms in the next 8 weeks, according to a recent email from the publisher), I’ve felt a little weird about writing. Back when I was posting something every day — being a realio trulio weblogger, half self-promotion, half self-regard and half community-cheerleader (I know that’s three halves. I am large, I contain multitudes) — and I was pushing the thousand uniques a day envelope, with a couple of times the number of daily readers I have now, oddly, I didn’t think much about it. Just had a coffee or a beer or something, and whacked out some brainfart that was temporarily stinking up the room, to clear the air a bit. I imagine that many of those people who once visited the site now read it through the newsfeeds, and I may well have more readers than I did back then, but they are invisible to me, basically, and off my Pay Attention To Me Waaaah! radar.
I’m not sure if that reticence to dance in the spotlight for fear that it’ll just suck is a good thing or bad. Probably bad, because if you don’t write, you’re not a f–king writer, right?
Right?
The other thing that made my weiner shrink in the glare, authorially speaking, was this Flickr testimonial from my blogfather, Rageboy.

I even sent the bastard an email that could be summarized with “Dude? WTF?” to inquire if he was just yankin my crank. He replied in the negative. Proud — astonished, is more like it — am I that someone I’ve respected and sucked up to for so long thinks so well of my stuff, but I think it pushed me over the brink into the ‘crikey how can I live up to that?!’ swamp.
Not to say that I’ve spent more time revising or rewriting any of the infrequent posts I’ve made in the last month or two, of course. Hell no! But I did cringe when I hit the post button, which has to count for something.
And not to say that I don’t bask in the praise like a puppy with its ear being scratched. I do. Don’t stop now!
My other theory about why it is that I’ve if not gone dry, at least had a dam built upstream somewhere, is that I’m healthy, by god. Rude, animal health. All bulgy muscles and efficient oxygen exchange. Meaty, beaty, big and bouncy.
I started working out, you see, for the first time in my life, about 7 months back. About 4 1/2 hours a week, weights and treadmill and stationary bike. My 39th birthday came and went a couple of weeks back, and I’m in better shape than I have been in my life. It pleases me, especially considering that given the lifestyle I enjoyed during my 20s and early 30s, I’d figured I’d be dead by now.
But I’m kinda thinking that the life of the mind might suffer in some way when the meat is singing. Has there ever been a Real Writer who worked out at the gym? I’m not talking foofoo yuppie reactionaries like Brett Easton Ellis or someone like that, here. I mean mad bastards, one of whom I have always considered myself to be. Hell, I don’t know. But the persona, writerly and otherwise, that I’ve invested so much time grooming over the past few decades just doesn’t marry up with sleekness and throbbing muscley health.
It’s not that I feel that much dumber, per se, it’s just that, for the first time in a lifetime of flesh-hating, I’m feeling pretty comfortable inside my skin, and at the same time, the locus of Me has shifted downwards a couple of feet.
Balance is good, they say. Maybe it’s just that while the changes underway in the ways my mind and body work together are consolidated, I’m off balance, and it’ll all settle into a new pattern eventually. Hell, I dunno (redux).
But like I said, maybe it’s only the weather.
Either way, I apologize for not writing more to those who like to read the meandering mental travelogues of the wonderchicken. For now though, let it be known that I haven’t been on a half-assed hiatus because I’m unhappy. Just the opposite.

Surfacing

*pokes head above the oily surface of the waves, all Sheen-y from Apocalypse Now*
I’ve been keeping my head down of late, snarfing up Warren Ellis‘s astonishingly cool Transmetropolitan during the afternoon, reading The Collected Philip K Dick at night before the sandman whacks me one in the medulla oblongata, filling in the spare moments with more bittorrented Takashi Miike movies and old episodes of Space Ghost and The Kids in The Hall. The things I gotta do to hotwire my brain now that I’m drug-free. It’s a damn shame.
Anyway, some strange and marvellous textual creature is soon to be born out of all this non-bloggerly activity (if not Athena-like parthenogenetically spoinged from my forehead, then perhaps appearing on the scene in a more, er… cloacally ichor-dripping kinda way (and then presumably slouching towards Bethlehem or something), which should be big fun for everyone involved), I hope, but then again, that might just be indigestion.
Stay tuned. Or not. I never know where the hell I’m going with this stuff.
*plays tape backwards, hoping that it’ll look like he’s re-submerging and that nobody’ll notice the ripples are going in the wrong direction*

Thanks

My heartfelt and humble thanks to the folks that have kicked a few bucks (or a lot of bucks, in some surprising but very welcome cases!) into the hosting kitty over the past few days, by the way. I’ll leave the button up over on the left, I guess, should anyone else get the urge to help out.
As it stands, though, I have enough for a year or so of hosting now, I think. You people rock!
I promise to try to write more in future. Although given the post just to the south, there, for example, that may not actually be a Good Thing. Your call.

I Wish It Weren't So

I’ve put off doing this for a long time. It makes me feel weird and a little ashamed. But when the going gets weird…ah well, you know the rest.
My good friend and kind host, who’s been providing a home for this site gratis for the last few years, isn’t going to be able to do so much longer. This wouldn’t be a problem if I could reasonably spare the bucks to pay for my hosting, but the sh-tty thing is: I can’t.

So I’ve finally taken the plunge and set up a paypal account tip jar, and if you’ve gotten any pleasure out of my ranting and babbling over the years, and you’d like to do the equivalent of buying me a couple of beers, as thanks or as fuel for more of the same, well, I’d be in your debt. I’ll use any dollars or euros or yen or shekels thrown my way to keep this site online, and if folks do kick in, I promise to try and write more frequently as a token of my appreciation.
I’m putting a button over in the left column as well. You have my heartfelt thanks if you decide to shoot me some coin, friends.
Edit: Nuh-uh. Long since deleted. If you want to help me out and get some hosting for yourself, go here.
In happier wonderchicken news, the contract for the upcoming book has arrived, and all systems look to be go, so if I end up rich and sexy and famous out of the deal†, the beers’ll be on me. It’s a promise.
[Update : †Yeah, like that's gonna happen.
Also, I just realized I probably put up my little 'help me, I's monetarily disadvantaged!' plea here at the worst possible time, as blogger wallets snap shut all over the web thanks to the MT 3.0 brouhaha (man, I love that word), making a sound like distant automatic weapons fire. So go give Rageboy some money, if you can only afford to help out one weblogger with a tip jar and a bad attitude this year. It sounds like he might need the help more than I do. And he'll kick my ass if he doesn't get his meds.]

It was the best of wonderchicken, it was the worst of wonderchicken

So my big news this week is that I’ve been asked for permission to allow some of my writing here to be published in a book that is intended to gather ‘the best of writing on the web,’ to be released this summer by a publishing house in New York.
Back in 2001, I started writing this weblog for a few different reasons, and over the years, those reasons haven’t really changed, although I have discovered some new ones that keep me going. My life was going through one of its periodic upheavals, the transplantations I seem to need periodically to help me thrive, when I uproot and fling myself (and this time my wife) and my meager collection of possessions halfway around the planet again, and I thought it would be fun to write about it in a journal that I wouldn’t end up losing in the shuffle, like I have so many others.
My memory is spotty at the best of times, and (I’m not sure if it was Cory Doctorow or someone else who coined the phrase, but to them I offer thanks) I really liked the idea of having an outboard brain, a kind of inverse memory hole that I could dip into to help me recall who I was and what I was thinking in bygone days, when I looked back from some far-future vantage point.
I also love to write, plain and simple, and though I’ve never studied writing in any other way than the tattered-and-wine-spattered-paperback-in-a-hovel romantic way of youth, people kept telling me that I was some kinda kick-ass…. word putting down guy. Me write pretty someday. So I thought that if I wrote in public (although my ‘public’ was pretty thin on the ground for the first while), it might be a way to keep me honest, keep me writing every day, and through sheer practice, that I might become better at it. I think I am a better writer after almost 3 years of this stuff, when I make an effort, so mission accomplished there. Although one of my great failings as a writer and a man is that I don’t often make much of an effort. Ah well.
As many who read my stuff regularly know, I’ve been travelling around the planet for about 15 years now, and writing about it, when the mood struck me. My semi-secret dream has always always been to make a living from doing so — travelling, writing, meeting people and drinking their odd, skull-cracking native beverages, writing about that, and moving on, weaving a bit — but, as has been my habit since I was a kid, I never really did much about the dream, hoping that somehow I’d just be discovered. Bad habit, and one I’ve tried to break many times. Comes down to ‘an external locus of control as a result of childhood bereavement,’ the literature told me, back 20 years ago when I was trying to figure out why I was such a lunatic, but that’s neither here nor there, perhaps.
It seems now that I have been discovered, and in a way that might, if I’m both lucky and determined, help me to realize the dreams I’ve always had about writing — not fame, or much fortune, or even the cocaine and hookers so much, but just a dream of being free to wander and write about that, to read and think and drink and write about that, and to make enough money from it to live, and continue. Or it might not. Either way, I’m thrilled.
Others have ‘discovered’ me too, over the past few years, and helped me and encouraged me, or pointed to me and praised my work (or called me an idiot in a comment thread and roused me to rages as eloquent as I could muster), and I don’t think this book offer would have come about if it hadn’t been for those people. You know who you are, and there are many of you, and I thank you all. You are one of those ‘other reasons’ that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, reasons that I love this and will keep doing it.
So the book will be published in a couple of months, and I hope that everyone will buy at least five copies for themselves, and a few more besides for their grannies and orthodontists and paperboys and so on. It will, I think, be a book well worth the buying and the reading, and should occupy a place of pride on the toilet tank of the best homes in America. I say this not because I’m going to have some stuff in it, but because of the superb work of the terrifyingly talented other writers alongside which my paltry scribblings will stand. The list is impressive, and I will share, when it is finalized. It stands now at 26 writers, I believe.
Have I finally become an A-lister? Hell, I don’t know. Not even sure what that means anymore. Am I starry-eyed, dazzled by the glare of the spotlight from Old Media that has swung my way? Sure as sh-t, I am. Am I overly enthused because I’m actually going to be included in a book that includes the word ‘Best’ in the title? Yeah, probably. But I am aware that many of the people I consider my virtual friends in the weblogging community have several (or many!) books already out there, without sharing author credit with 25 other writers.
Still, this is a big moment for me. I’m having a Sally Field moment, and I am still uncynical enough to hope that it might be one of those Big Moments in my life, like the one almost 3 years ago that started me doing this in the first place.
This is where you come in, friends and neighbours. Although an editorial board (including the publisher himself, an editor from the New York Times, a Yale professor and New Yorker contributing editor, a Time Magazine columnist and a best-selling fiction author) have already read and thumbs-upped a few pieces from each of the authors selected for the book, and a group of three readers will apparently be going through my archives (and those of the others who will be contributing) mining for gold, I’ve been asked to submit a list of 5 or 10 pieces that I consider to be my best. A number of pieces out of the union of the resultant lists will then be selected for inclusion in the book.
I hoiked out some of my faves a while back, and whacked them into a new ‘Uncrappy‘ archive list, which includes some of my personal favorites, but I find that what I think of as my ‘best’ is frequently different from what you folks think. I thought that Typepad bit a couple of days ago was Comedy Gold, for example, but it garnered little more than a collective ‘huh’ from you, the Readers. Go figure.
So, I ask you a favour, friends. If you have a favorite or favorites amongst the bits I’ve written over the past couple of years, then I’d be forever in your debt if you’d consider whacking a link (or just a description, if you can’t be bothered searching) in the comments thread attached to this post. Whether from my ‘Uncrappy’ best-of list, or not, could you tell me what your favorite bits of wonderchickensian blather are?
Then, when you give a copy of the book to your garbageman, you can point to one of my pieces and say with pride (or shame, your call) “I picked that one!”
Many thanks.
Update : Here’s the lineup for the book. In fine company, am I. Hoping I don’t look like a rube by comparison, am I. Stop talking like Yoda, must I.

Uncrappy

I’ve got a new EB gadget for you that I’ve been compelled to whip up after literally thousands hundreds dozens not a single solitary request. Still, it’s something I’ve been planning to do for a while, even though I wanted to keep this design free of the crud-accretion that plagued the last one.
Way down the left-handside there, under the stack of coasters, is a box of past posts which I consider to be relatively Uncrappy. Highlights. You know. There’re some missing, but I’ve managed to hit a few high points going back as far as the end of 2001, so far. If you Daypopped in with the crowds or are otherwise new to my stuff, you may find some dusty relics in there somewhere that you like. The whole list can be found here, if you’ve got a few hours.
Can you feel the excitement? The electricity in the air? The whole axle-snapping, gear-grinding power of it? Can you hear the crowd going wild?

No? Me neither.
Ah well.
A warning in advance though, to be fair : the content to be found yonder in the archive includes a short description of Dick Cheney’s penis. But if that’s not a highlight, I dunno what is.