Tag: Writing

10 Years of Scrounging

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

Here we go again with some more self indulgence. I’ve recently had a short story accepted for an anthology. It’s a horror story that incorporates the 2020 quarantine. I just loved that idea, about a horror story where the fear is compounded by debilitating illness, queasiness, a kind of unsureness of what’s happening. I had fun with it. Try the e-book here, or buy a paperback there.

It’s been 10 years since I was first a reporter in the badlands of the Bakken in North Dakota. The oil boom days. Men flocking all across the country to live in the plains and work the oilfields – the money, that was the main reason for it. It’s always the money. These guys would go and live out there in “man camps” and burn themselves out working on the oilfields. They were so desperate to get me to their paper that they set me up with housing immediately – a trailer among rows and rows of them out in those plains. Business as a slapdash thing. They were just doing whatever at the time. Everything moved so fast they couldn’t see where they were going, and so there was a shitload of crime that came with it all. Just crazy chaos, people doing drugs, crashing cars into fences, stealing.

Then it got really serious. A woman around my mom’s age came into the newsroom in maybe May or June 2013. Sad and vulnerable, wanting everything we could give, no illusions. She was the mother of this kid who had gone missing in the area a while previously. This guy, James Henrikson, was arrested for hiring a hit on the guy, who he came up to the oilfields to work on, business partners, the two of them. I was barely there a month before this and they were organizing a whole day in June or so to look for this guy’s body. I wrote up a quick story and got drawn into it all. Obsessed! Henrikson was on the run then. He was involved with a lot of random business bullshit and other crimes. Criminals aren’t smart. Everyone knew he was behind it even back then. I drove around the desert and made phone calls. I remember actually being afraid of writing about this stuff in the paper – we were the biggest paper in that area. But fortunately nothing happened since, apparently, life isn’t 1:1 with a crime novel I’d be interested in.

One of the guys I worked with wasn’t sure why we were pursuing the case. But I couldn’t quit. This was the most interesting thing bar none. I got some information from the Feds which I put in an exhaustive article back then, and then it got used in this book Yellow Bird years and years later by a writer who put in much more work than I did. That’s a good enough legacy for me. That was a good book. I think you all should give it a read.

The rest of the time back then, in North Dakota, it was a lot of wandering. I’d travel just for the sake of getting out of town. Long stretches of flatlands and nothing. There were mostly a lot of bars and steakhouses in Williston. A ramshackle little town that was ballooned by force because they found gold in the ground. Story old as time. I remember there were murmurs of it being like the Wild West and it was the closest I ever got. My editor sent us out there to interview these oil workers, one a week. Guys whose stories were mostly all just “had to make money, left my family, came across the country to break my back and stain my hands in these fields.” I spent a lot of time doing increasingly dour, suffocating stories about the crime. Traveled a few times to Bismarck to do things – a four hour drive from me then. I think at some point, I’d done everything I could do living in that area. There are reasons people move to big cities.

To pass the time, I’d just hang out at bars, walk the town, hang in my own place and watch movies. Got used to the solitude. The transitory nature of that place made it hard to date or even make friends outside of the small circle who hung together at the paper. Everyone was a transient. From somewhere else and going somewhere else, still. It became a natural state for myself, too, to be always traveling or in motion somehow. I’m still doing it today.

I never really found a home in Williston. It was a dusty little place at the edge of the world and there was a lot of commotion there for a short time. I look back on it fondly, but I remember talking to guys who were leaving that dry old desert wasteland as quick as possible. I had some good times with a few friends back then, driving around, hitting up bars that might as well have been old West saloons. I read a lot, watched a lot of movies. The work days were full of conferences to cover, meetings with old men sitting at tables deliberating over the future, man-on-the-street interviews, lots of days in the courthouse covering random trials and things. That courthouse was something. A great construct of polished floors and quiet, regal courtrooms for the judges – you have to have good places for them to do their work.

I discovered standup comedy there. Imagine that. All the way out to the edge of North Dakota, two hours to the Canadian border, to learn I wanted to do comedy myself. It started in the basement of this trashy dive bar right down the road from me, the kind of place where the wood’s all stained with beer and the daylight made it all look just fucking sad. Nobody under 50 in there except for their dance party nights, and on those, the music blared over shitty cheap speakers. But it was what they had. Bars of that kind exist all over the country in the vast nothing and they’re always so interesting to me, those and the random seedy motels. Just fascinating.

But this guy had a comedy night where he brought in road-dog headliners to do some time, occasionally with some local people. It was fascinating because it was new to me. I’d seen comedies, but didn’t like all of them as well as some. And I’d watched some Robin Williams, some George Carlin, loved Louis CK in college. Watching standup in that dingy bar basement every week, often drunk as shit because there was so little else I had to do. It was just a 10 minute drive home. Don’t drive drunk, though. I started comedy in 2015 when my life was at a much less stable place. That was the genesis, though – a little bar in North Dakota.

I left in 2014 in April. The second to last day there was the most snow I ever saw there. Early April and a blanket of white. I’d set off for a long drive across the country and have some interesting times. Back then, it was always interesting at least. Life with no definition yet. I think your early 20s can be something cool and I tried to make mine that way. And maybe my 30s will be interesting too. I guess all you can do is try.

Art/Money

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about art and how the pay works. There was some talk about pirating works recently on Twitter. And then that spiraled into another discussion about how streaming and whatnot affects artists. I’m not in a band, but I do travel for comedy. I am at what you’d call a somewhat lower level – no one is demanding that I headline or anything, and I’m just one guy sending out avails to bookers like everybody else. Both bands and comedy involve a lot of slumming it. Lots of nights driving to and from places. The money isn’t great, as you’d expect from bar shows doing it out of passion – dingy Irish pubs, cheap beers, cool out of the way spaces like book shows and art galleries. That’s the stuff; it’s not corporate gigs and it shouldn’t be. I once said I made enough money doing comedy to survive in the specific lifestyle portrayed in the 50s book MIDNIGHT COWBOY, where most of the characters are homeless drifters. I stand by that and it hasn’t changed.

It’s funny how it works – I’d really like to be able to go travel and do comedy way more. I’m at least good enough to get booked consistently now. But the gas prices don’t care about that. It might be going down a little now. $4.49 for gas seeming like a bargain – what a world. It’s still just not worth it to go and drive more than a few hours. Even driving two hours, while doable, I’m losing money. It’s more out of passion and playing a long game – if I travel enough and get seen enough, I can build momentum. Or that’s what I tell myself. But with the insane gas prices and everything else being so fucking expensive, I just had to start really calculating things. I’m pretty awful at math, but it seems like I just have to be way more choosy about where I go. It’s a cost benefit thing. Then again, since I started this piece, gas prices are mildly down at like $4 a gallon now. We live in the lap of luxury.

And this isn’t a new thing I just invented or thought of. Any artists or bands will tell you it’s a fucking criminal thing, the pay and all of that. We’re out there making a go of it and if we don’t have rich parents to help us live in LA or NY and get the right connections, we’re all pretty indie for the most part. For comedy you can do the cruise ships or the corporate gigs, but really, not everybody’s cut out for that. Not everybody really wants to do the board room lunchtime gigs where everyone’s eating gas station tuna sandwiches and apples and drinking Cokes in the middle of the day. A buddy of mine said you do those shows to do the comedy you really want to do later. I can respect that.

Read a NYT piece recently about Janeane Garofalo, whose work I’m not familiar with. It basically went into her strident devotion to being “alt.” Back in the 90s that was all the rage. It spilled over into the early ’00s when I was finally becoming culturally conscious in small and weird ways – I remember loving all the weird movies I could find, getting into heavy metal, all this stuff; I was really into that sense of finding something “other.” It’s a very pure instinct.

The Garofalo article makes mention of how she would never even repeat bits that did too well – “anything that was successful, she didn’t want to do.” I love that. There’s something in it, a spunk, that really speaks to me, because it’s sort of the essence of comedy to me. The going-out-on-a-limb. The adventurousness. I do repeat bits that work, as do a lot of comics, but that Garofalo anecdote really spoke to me about what the most exciting part of it is, which is the failing. When you come up with a good bit and throw it out in the void of a crowd at a mic, not knowing whether there’ll be any return. Especially for more long-winded or complicated bits. That’s what I like about doing this. I think it should be valid just to like doing something to do it. The Mike Birbiglia movie DON’T THINK TWICE was about that.

But everyone needs art in their lives. And as a whole it does have an industry. Just taking a cursory glance at the statistics for Florida’s arts and culture economy:

“The industry generated $166.3 billion of economic activity and $63.8 billion by the nation’s nonprofit arts and culture organizations. This economic activity supports 4.6 million full-time jobs and generates $49.4 billion in resident household income. The arts and culture industry also generates $27.5 billion in revenue to local, state, and federal governments—a yield well beyond their collective $5 billion in arts allocations.”

Quite a hefty thing. The report ends up saying the arts have a ripple sort of effect on everything else. You go out to the arts and then you pay for parking, dinner, a bunch of stuff. But there’s also a wide gulf there because there’s so many artists out there, and the big respectable money isn’t funneled in every direction equally. Then they cut the arts funding for schools and kids. Spotify will cut peoples’ comedy albums off their service and hoard all their money for a bodybuilding anti-vaxxer. There’s not a lot of equity going around. Never has been.

And it just goes into another thing I just read yesterday – this Carmen Maria Machado piece about why it’s OK for artists to not rush into the business side of things. It talks a lot about how sometimes really good art takes a while to marinate. But the rush is understandable because, again, we all need the money and we want to try and climb that ladder and open doors. I always thought this too. Why rush? Why promote a product that isn’t really as good as it could be yet? Of course, now we have to contend with the burning Earth. How much time do we really have left? Who knows?

But it’d be nice if we could all just have the time and license to do whatever we want more often.

Nothing I’m saying here is going to change anything. It probably comes off as a lot of bitching. But I think about this stuff a lot.

Time Allotment

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

I’m very bad at keeping up this thing, which was supposed to be a way to keep some interest in my site. But I haven’t had anything published in a while. And when I tried to upload a comedy video it was annoying and I ended up forgetting to follow through. So this all just seems like a pointless internet vanity project right now.

I can’t help it – I just have more fun actually tinkering with creative shit than doing stuff to build up marketing or whatever. I don’t think I’m alone in that.

It’s been a decent life as of late though. I did a few comedy shows – I drove two hours each way for shows two nights in a row, in different cities. It was like it used to be. There’s something fun for me in the long drives, the playing music, the stopping at random gas stations or hotels. It’s an adventure. I would probably get tired of it if I did it for a living month after month.

The world seems to be a bigger place out here (North Carolina, where I live now). In Florida it was literally narrow – you could drive up and down that state, but it was time consuming to go further. I used to work a desk job as a reporter, and I didn’t have time for it then. I could drive up and down Florida, that thin tube of a state, but the rest of the country seemed a big mystery a lot of the time. It’d been a while since I left.

Now I have the range to drive in different directions and potentially enter two or three other states. I visited Colorado last year and am going to Texas this year. It all seems broader now and I think you need that.

I have been reading a bunch of shit all at the same time – Marx’s Capital and a Keith Richards biography are two of them. It’s not so bad. The Marx is really something – he sure has a lot of ideas. I feel like I’m giving myself the forbidden education that was never in the curriculum when I was in school. I got the old fashioned American dogma so I’m going in another direction now. Here’s hoping a bunch of Republican senators don’t find out. The Keith Richards is good too. He’s a strong writer; funny and to the point. Rock stars can occasionally really pull this shit off.

Politics is the same as ever – endless culture wars dominate while the rich get richer. Seems like the status quo. They are talking about a war with Russia now. I’m sure that’s going to be an entirely noble thing, born solely of good will for the underserved people of the Earth. I’m also very glad our military budget is in the hundreds of billions while nobody can afford rent or health care. Great system.

I’ve been thinking more about anger lately. We all have to live in the world, and the last two years if nothing else have spotlighted just how bad a lot of service workers have it. The animosity directed at them. They get the brunt of the anger from short-fused, small-minded idiots and it sucks, because they are just trying to survive. Now, I would occasionally get drunk and send off some kind of angry email to a politician chastising them for being full of shit. But they aren’t reading those emails. The ones who got the brunt of my own wrath were hapless interns or something, also just trying to make a buck. So the anger becomes impotent. If you’re really deserving of that rage, you’re insulated from it. Money can be a buffer in that way and you can go on and do the same horrible shit you were before.

I think there might be a joke in that. This is how I write jokes. I just sort of type out a bunch of stuff and hope a punchline can be gleaned from it like a nugget of gold. It’s a work in progress.

Anyway, this has all been a hodge podge of random thoughts. Here’s some stuff I’ve been enjoying lately:

MOVIES: TITANE was good. Interesting and artsy and vague in the best ways. Art’s supposed to make you feel things and challenge you. This did that.

MUSIC: Right now I am playing the first Jimi Hendrix Experience album. There’s something to the brevity of it all. The simple, direct musicality. He had something to say and he said it. Also been playing some Voivod. Their Post-Society EP is so good. A true free-thinking band.

The Grind

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been slacking on trying to promote my existing writing because I have been undertaking National Novel Writing Month and doing new stuff instead. That’s the persistent temptation – I just love the feeling of chasing a new story.

It’s a 1920s historical fiction tale about a made-up blues guitarist back then. I am woefully unprepared for this kind of thing. I’ve never been a history buff and I’m also writing extensively about a Black man and racial issues of the time. All of it could go so wrong this thing may never even try to see the light of day. But I think there is a part of me that just really wants to go after it and try it. What is art if not trying things that could fail? Can’t ever be too safe.

Aside from the specifics of the story, I’ve just been thinking about writing in general. I feel like you’re not a good writer if you can look back at your stuff and be like yeah, all of it was good. My old stuff was good for the time. I can read it now and be like ‘well, there’s a lot I’d do differently today.’ I’ve been trying to shift my writing to a sort of show don’t tell mentality where I just describe things in a basic manner, have some dialogue, and let people figure out the rest in their heads – no need for a lot of inner monologuing from characters if I can help it. I feel like the best writing just transports you and makes you forget you’re even reading at all, skipping along like a rock on water, pure imagination. Too much wordiness or introspection from a character can, in the wrong hands, spoil that.

But on the other hand, the more I write and read, the clearer it is that there are no real rules for anything. Anybody who tells you there are is either an English teacher just trying to get you to pass a class or lying to you. There are infinite ways to tell a story. The fun part is getting it to the point where it can reach people. Maybe I’ll be able to do that some more sometime soon.

Starving Artist

~ lawrencegriffin5 ~ Leave a comment

I saw this Tweet thread this morning, reacting to the news of the Squid Game creator, who apparently struggled for years, had to sell his laptop, got rejected, et cetera before finally breaking big with his show recently. His show is about the monstrous ills and woes of capitalism, how it eats people alive, which makes a lot of the stuff he went through seem pretty personal. Almost meta.

But then, as the Tweets say, you get this narrative where it’s inspiring. People will say “never give up.” They’ll say “follow your dreams.” It’s a good general way to go about life in that we all need stuff to keep us happy and fulfilled. And maybe once in a while you do get published. I was glad to get the stories I’ve published out in the world. It is possible.

However, there was always the slight voice in the back of my mind telling me this was a bit annoying, the whole follow your dreams narrative.

It’s just in the kind of empty-calorie optimism in that statement. “If you just keep working hard, you’ll be on Netflix or published by Penguin Random House or have your own TV show or your dream job just like that!” I don’t know. There are ways to be fulfilled and there are ways to live a fine life. But the entertainment industry, and breaking big in any way – that’s a tough thing to do. Most of us won’t, in writing or comedy or film or any of it. I’ll see comedians make Facebook pages for themselves a year or so into comedy. That just seems bizarre to me. You don’t even know what you’re selling yet. Some comics do it for 10, 20, 30 years before they really get any success. It seems like deluding yourself.

And the world is full of these stories of artists not making it for decades or something. The entertainment system’s gatekeepers pick what they want at the time and other things inevitably get left behind. Loads of the things I like, movies or bands for example, I can go on their Wikipedia pages and see the same thing like clockwork, like the refrain of a song: “initially the work was panned and critics hated it, but years later it was reassessed as a masterpiece.” It makes you wonder if maybe nothing is ever objective. And it makes you wonder who else we’re sleeping on.

As I write this I’m playing a John Lee Hooker album. This is a guy who made music for literally like 40 or 50 years before finally getting a charting album in his 70s. That’s crazy to me. Inspiring, but wow, I don’t think he was planning on it taking so long.

The industry and art are like yin and yang – we need the industry to amplify the art, but the artistic instinct is very different from a business mindset. The industry, responding to the insatiable need for entertainment, has become a gigantic money-driven machine. This isn’t to make this all some kind of ‘fuck the system’ point – I can do that any old time. I’m just saying that maybe it’s all relative who gets success and we shouldn’t base our worths off that.

Maybe social media has played a role in it, giving us all a platform to feel like we have bullhorns to say whatever. Or maybe it’s just part of human nature to want to be recognized for something, in some way. I dunno. The comedian Sara Schaefer had this podcast where she outlined the details of how TV shows get made, with all the various steps, rewrites, meetings, consultants, people it has to go through – and that sometimes, even after all that, the show still doesn’t make it to the air.

I can go on writing forums and social media threads and there are hundreds of comments all talking about their books and projects. About how far along they are and their ideas. All of them miniature universes living in minds and laptops and cell phones. It’s inspiring. I hope all of them get finished to satisfaction. And beyond that there are the mountains and mountains of published works that are not touted as masterpieces or remembered by the ages, but they’re still there, still definitively in the world. And maybe humanity is a vast and wide thing and a great mountain of experiences and the creation and expression of art is its own virtue, and it’s fine just to be happy with whatever you do have, the sheer electric experience of creating and the validation whenever you actually do accomplish something.

But yeah, it’s just Hollywood and NYC that decide everything for us – if you’re not in those cities you’re not making it, apparently. What a small thing that kind of world seems like to me.