Your words are your income? You have to be so careful of that shit. There is nothing wrong with selling your words, I’ve done it from time to time, though most of my income is made by doing things like finding out some really well-meaning tradesman used a 3-inch flange on a 4-inch pipe, and that was what let to first $232,430 worth of damage in the first moment, and then led to one of the more profitable and serendipitous products that a major multinational has ever put into a home store. And it’s a product for which I might someday make enough buy a gumball out of a penny machine. My income is mostly built on having to clean up shit, sometimes figuratively, sometimes I have to clean up actual shit, like when that 3-inch flange forced me to remove the toilet while still full of sewage from half-a-dozen tradesmen who just got back from Firehouse Subs 45 minutes prior to coming face to face with this hellish monstrosity. That’s my income. And sometimes I get paid for a few words. But when people pay you for your words, they become forgettable, or sometimes they become the Mona Lisa, but usually they are forgettable.
So if you’re a writer, you can’t seek to make a living off of it. You need to have a side-job. Because being paid to write words means you have customers. And when you have customers you have to write for them. The only way words mean anything at all is when they are written for an audience of precisely one, the one who pukes them onto the page.
My son gave me “The New Coronavirus”
The rotten little punk, he juked me into showing him my push-up form. He even went so far as to deliberately arch his back so I that could show him the benefit of a straight back in a half-decent push-up. And when you do a half-decent push-up, it feels right, and you might not notice your punk son launching himself onto your perfectly straight back like doing a cannonball into the memory of the pre-COVID neighborhood swimming pool. (Just curious, are those backyard swimming pools hard to find these days, with most of the community pools closed? Speaking of which, I get that we need to close bars, because some lovely modern day Typhoid Mary might get drunk and kiss a hundred dudes. But why do we need to close down swimming pools? They’re these big fucking bowls of water that are calibrated to about 3 parts per million Chlorine in what is essentially an ocean of water, so that no viral, bacterial, or pathogenic load could possibly come close to even shocking the relative pH by more than an iota. And we shut these down? Why? It makes no sense. Here is a community resources that has been proven to save far, far more lives than it consumes, and we shut this down? Did these Covidians actually convince us as a society that we no longer need to pay attention to actual Public Health and Human Safety data? But then some asshole on the internet says roughly the same thing that I just did, and some greasy-chinned jackhole pops up and says “who the fuck do you think you are, I have a grandma that is as risk from dying from the coronavirus, why do you hate humanity?”)
And yeah, I heard something kind of pop somewhere inside my torso. But I’m still have at least a decade or two ahead of me where I can handle this kind of thing. So I get to going through my day, a few hours elapse, and holy shit, who do I see on the cement trail behind my house? “Ryan”, the world champion downhill skateboarder, he’s carving it out with a few turns. (Turns out he was back in Colorado because COVID shut down the world downhill tour that employs him, and he was supposed to be downhilling in The Philippines, but his Gen-Z future was thrown into the shitter by the plague of Boomers..) So, Gen-X guy that I am, I don’t pass up an opportunity to ride with a Gen-Z, especially not a pro. I grab my Dimension AS-1 streetboard, a couple minutes later, I’m bombing the hill with Ryan. He’s apparently happy to be riding with a neighbor, because now he can ride the next street over, with the silky new tarmac, and the not-too-bad hill, but wealthy Millennials tend to intimidate Gen-Z punks, it’s just the nature of the animals.
I’m grinding up that street, brewing my hatred for people who use ski lifts to gain altitude instead of just grinding against gravity, paying the price so that the downhill reward is that much sweeter. I’m grinding up that street against gravity, and “pop” I felt it again. But no paid, I keep riding. Then another Gen-Z rider (though an amateur, not a pro like “Ryan” starts pushing his way up the street, and a bunch of the neighborhood schoolkids are assembling to actually see how a genuine, certified, professional downhiller bombs a hill on a modified nickle board with some remarkably large Kryptonics and the a level of skill only obtainable of most of a young-adult’s lifetime spent playing every college scholarship sport his parents could throw at him, mastering every fucking one of them, and still coming back to his beloved downhill board at the end of the day. He’s that good.
I figure he’s protected by the neighborhood kids now against a possible jealous Boomer glare. So I head home, but then … what the fuck, why do I suddenly feel a dull ache in my side? I ignore it. I get home, crack a Natural Ice. So cold, after riding a Natty Ice is the tendril of faith. I didn’t grow up in a time when a skateboarder could drink a Natty after riding. We drank Moosehead. Moosehead was a somewhat expensive beer that seemed to universally taste like fermented dung to every teenager on the planet. But back then, if we were willing to spring an extra few bucks for the better quality beer, we usually circumvent the liquor store’s alcohol restrictions. IT took us a few years to understand why, all we knew is that if we tried to buy 3.2 at the supermarket, we would be carded. If we tried to buy alcohol at the liquor store we would be carded. If we tried to buy Pabst or any other cheapish 3.2-style beer at the liquor store we would be carded. But when we bought Moosehead, there was a good chance that we wouldn’t be carded. So there was no Natty for us back in the day, we choked down Moosehead, and told ourselves that it must be delicious if we paid so much for it. The after-ride beers were never truly happy, the skunkiness took away some of the pleasure. But now, I can drink a tasty, inexpensive brew and wonder why in the fuck that dull ache is now spreading over my entire torso. Shit, I forgot to check the mail when I was down there, I’ll ride the board down, oh fuck, I better walk down there. Neighbors generally ignoring the social distance, people are happy, children are happy, it’s a good day. Every breath, a jabbing pain. This isn’t from riding, this feels like pneumonia. This feels like … this feels like Coronavirus!
By the time I was back up to the house, each deep breath was agony. If I could keep the pain to a dull ache if I just moved very slowly and kept my breathing as shallow as possible. It got worse. A migraine kicked in, and I’m looking at stars and phonemes, my brain pulsed in my skull, I had to lay down. I remember some time moving past me, I kept shoving tequila down my throat to manage the pain, but the pain kept me sober unfortunately. I gave my kids my goodbyes, all three of them were home. Daddy’s going to die of Coronavirus now, goodbye. I remember moving through another couple of hours, it felt like a fat opera singer had used a shrinking ray to sneak inside of my body and then used her enlarging ray to reobtain her full size inside of me. And this blessed performer was now Screeching some kind of Weasel in some foreign tongue preferred by opera singers. It reminded me of the time I accidentally burned my hand with a quart of boiling water from an electric kettle in a boarding house in Glasgow. Only this time the alternation between dull ache and sharp agony wasn’t restricted to the back of my hand, but rather it filled me up. Back in Glasgow, I figured that if I drank enough, I would eventually pass out and wake up to a better world, one where my hand no longer attacked me with such pleasure. But this time, I figured that if I drank enough, I would eventually pass out and wake up to a better world where Mother Nature herself had dispatched me to a merciful heaven with the only reward being that there is no Coronavirus to force a gentleman to drink himself to a Coronavirus-free heaven. (The rest of the heaven would be nothing more than an empty office building, on an empty street, or essentially exactly like Hell, except that in Hell a gentleman is forced to drink himself to a Coranavirus-free heaven.)
The alcohol wasn’t working, the infection had obviously altered my molecular make-up to the point that it was able to neutralize the effects of Mexican Silver Tequila. Either that, or I kept passing out, and I didn’t realize that hours had passed in this oblivion.
I called my sister. She’s a doctor, the kind with actual training, not the kind like me that for some reason receives his designation through knowing how to compute the necessary time between energy transfer in a field of below-ground state transitions. I give her my goodbyes from this world, I hint that it’s all her fault, because that’s what little brothers do. She looks for ways to cure my Coronavirus over the phone. And then she waits for me to calm the fuck down, and she asks me, “have you done anything today with any kind of twisting motion?” Uh … I grinded up a hill with a world-champion downhiller.
“Do you have a heating pad there, it sounds like you might have pulled something.”
I’ve been riding my whole life, far harder, far higher, far faster than today. It feels like Coronavirus. But I find a heating pad, set it on high, lay on top. Heating pad then did for me what no relationship had ever down for me. She brought me peace, relief, love, delivered me from that agony. Suddenly I felt well enough that I could drag myself to the WC and piss out an ocean of tequila and half a can of Natty Ice. I painfully pulled my way back into the bed, on top of The Most Blessed and Sacred Heating Pad. She had a timer, and she would automatically shut off after 90 minutes. I would would be jolted out of my sleep about four minutes after that with my body suddenly reobtaining the memory of a pain like no other. Then I hit the blessed nuclear switch, the one that re-powered the heating pad, put her on high, drift off to another 94 minutes of respite.
This continued for about 20 hours.Or maybe 44 hours, I’m not sure which. There was definitely another piss trip to the WC in there. And then I was healed. It still hurt, but I could move through life. It was apparently some bizarre muscular spasm that coincidentally occurred in the heart of my downtown nervous system central,.
I walk into my son’s room. He’s playing Fortnite. “Daddy’s still alive.” He turns to look at me, this little fellow for whom I’ve structured a third of my life, and suddenly that face of a tiny football player looks at me, I get an instant flashback of what it must have looked like to see him land on my back while doing that pushup. Cannonball + Riding like I’m a Z instead of an X = whatever the hell that was.
I explained the whole thing to him. “You got the new Coronavirus, dad.” Yeah, and that little punk gave it to me.