Attention: this book is "finished" but I didn't have the energy to do a final copy-edit/line-edit/edit-edit on it, which it Badly needs. So — right off the bat, y'all — if anyone wants to edit this I will Venmo you five bucks. I started this ages ago and then flamed out trying to finish it the last year or two...well, I "finished" it... finally. I wish I could say more. It's under 40,000 words so I guess it's still a novella. I really wanted to write a novel but I wrote a novella. It's fine. Everything is fine. I've posted Chapter 1 below. If you want to read it in its current "final form" you'll have to pay $9.99 @ BANDCAMP. ~ See Link Below The Excerpt ~
I'm glad that this book is over and done with because it was a real creative block for me! I'm really SELLING this book! huh? LOL
“This plastic ba—” My great aunt started to stutter then furiously cough. Stuck on a word but what word? She reminded me of a recent NFT of some glitch art I had recently purchased, a six-second video loop wherein a doomed sci-fi character (not an ape or a monkey) was attempting to say a word, relaying some important information to other characters off-screen. In my mind, this guy was trying to say “hatch” because his mouth sort of looked like that, as in “There! Go down the hatch! Escape, my friends!” but his enemies had poisoned him and there was no other context for this scene, if you can even call it a scene. As it turned out, it wasn't connected to any larger work. I gave it all the context. The poison. The hatch. The buddies we couldn’t see. It was called “choking soldier #22” and it quickly lost over 75% of its value after I bought it, and has only continued to steadily dip ever since. It's pretty close to worthless now. I didn’t check to see what was up with the other “choking soldiers” until after and it turns out they were all identical animations except the hue had been tweaked slightly for each. I thought I was buying part of a story, but in reality I was buying the entire story and it was rendered in a color that turned out to be a pretty unpopular one in a series which, on the whole, was the least successful thing this particular artist had ever made.
This was the creator’s first foray into non-ape jpegs (their hit collection of “laughing lemurs” were minted for, well, a “mint” — that's the jargon I used to explain it to Dad anyway, but it worked twofold). This guy (or lady) went by the handle “smemp” and while I obviously couldn’t afford the high six-figures the lemurs were going for, I noticed some entries in this new work were less than ten grand. Dad reluctantly fronted me $6,000 and it’s been seven months and I just keep saying that we have to wait and see. Fortune favors the bold, I told him, though I don’t know the origin of that quote (some movie?) or if the sentiment truly applies here. Needless to say, Dad isn’t too pleased with me these days.
Time heals all wounds, I tell him. That’s a straightforward one of them -isms and it felt good to say aloud. I tried to keep a notepad full of sayings so that I could research their origins later, but when my older brother Cal found it, he called me a fag and threw it in the toilet. I still have a fondness for sayings (all words really), but I mostly keep them to myself now and try not to worry about where they come from.
The funny thing about my Dad is I don’t think he’s all that concerned or mad about the money we’ve lost, or might lose (I still have hope). I think he also believes in the magic of it and, as much as I truly understand it, the investment could take awhile to pay off. Patience is a virtue. Dad still plays the lotto most every day. However, we did get into quite the row when he got fuming mad at a TV commercial and then became uncontrollably enraged due to my (failed) explanation of it.
It was an ad for Bopeepo+ that featured a three-headed dog sitting next to a fire. The dog was a massive, digital creation, enhanced not just with the extra heads (obviously) but with its comically large size in relation to his owner and the room they were in, which was a long, narrow, very fancy-like room, with high ceilings, ornate fixtures, the works. The room gave off the feeling that it existed some fifty yards out past the end of all visible shadows, but perhaps this was a digital effect as well. The dog’s master was the actor who played Jerry Seinfeld’s butler on Seinfeld, or so I thought. But his face had changed. It was off-putting. I couldn’t really focus on the point of the commercial because my mind was flooded with confusion about the state of this man’s face. What ravages of time or elective surgery or some other thing I didn’t even know about (bear or acid attack? some new drug?) could cause a man to change like this? So, the point is: I shouldn’t have offered my two cents in the first place. But there was something so annoying about Dad caring this much about a dumb advertisement to begin with. Why couldn’t he just quietly consider the butler’s face like a normal person?
“These fucking ads,” he muttered. “This should be illegal. The FCC should step in here. Makes no sense. No fucking sense.” His voice trailed off into a slur, if he kept talking at all, though — for the record — he was fifteen years sober. Maybe a vegan diet can make a man look like that, I wondered. “I mean we’re just trying to sit and watch a game and we’re subjected to fucking nonsense like that. Why?” I heard him say.
“Well,” I said. “It's funny.” I didn’t want to have this conversation but some part of me didn’t want my father to be so concerned with this stupid commercial even more. My agitation wasn’t so much rooted in frustration that my over-the-hill pops couldn’t fathom postmodern advertising, nor did it have much to do with my desire to be right — to outwit my elder, like some ancient passing of the torch situation — either. I think, deep down, my objection — which was totally unfounded, mind you, because I wasn’t paying attention — had more to do with the fact that Seinfeld's butler had morphed into a completely different person. Did my father not see this? He watched the show. He loved the show. Did he not notice the change? How could he not. Or was the change so drastic he didn’t recognize the actor? I had started second-guessing myself at this point and I would have looked it up right then if I hadn’t gotten into a fight with my Dad that almost came to blows.
“What?” he replied, incredulously, “you're kidding.” He started to laugh maniacally. “Explain it to me.” He was staring at me with dead eyes as if I had just betrayed his trust and wounded our deep familial bond beyond repair. Blood might be thicker than water but it can’t hold a candle to complaints about modern marketing. “Come on. Please. I'm not kidding. Explain it. Tell me why it’s funny.”
At this juncture, I was convinced that the actual point of the ad was to get folks talking about this actor and his face. In this way, the commercial becomes a conversation starter and lives on long after its airtime (I took a marketing class in pre-college). “Hey, can you believe how old and skinny Jerry Seinfeld’s butler looks now? Did you see that Bopeepo+ ad?” one friend might say to another.
But I didn’t want to say that because of my newfound lack of confidence in his true identity. I would come off like a complete fool if this was a different person altogether. I thought I could salvage it.
“It’s funny,” I began, “because, well, just on a simple level because the dog obviously is way too big, sitting there in a normal-sized room, and it’s one of those Latin dogs on top of it. One of those myth dogs. Not, like, Latino. Like, why is he—"
My Dad slammed the coffee table with an open palm and then it got out of hand pretty fast. A lot of explicits and flying spittle. No broken furniture, though. I stormed off to go for a run and make a little cash. I grabbed my Bopeepo Instant Billboard (B.I.B.) and also what I called my “wagon belt,” which is a wagon strung to a belt that I fill with food for sale. The hole where I looped the rope attached to the wagon would chafe my lower back so I first had to don my “pad belt,” which was just a regular belt with some fabric wrapped around the area that buffered the wagon belt’s rope loop on my lower toso. I filled the wagon with snacks from the $3.33 Store. Most of their snacks came in packs of five and I would resell them for a buck a piece, so if you factor in the tax I would make about a dollar-fifty profit on each pack of snacks. And ever since they made it legal to run on the highway on account of all the bad, slow-moving traffic and self-driving cars, you could bring in a nice chunk of change at the right time of day. I would only make slightly more from my wagon snacks than from the Instant Billboard revenue, but doubling your profits is doubling your profits. That’s Business 101. And I was basically in “Olympic marathon runner shape” at this point because of it. I decided to trek the almost twenty six miles from Hamilton to New Brunswick to visit my friend Louise at college, which I often did (this is how I knew I was in “Olympic marathon runner shape”). I could make close to fifty bucks total during the two and a half hours it took me to get there. Not bad.
I preferred to take Route 1, which was technically not a highway, at least not like the Turnpike or Garden State Parkway. Truth be told, the Bopeepo money was much better on those roads because there was a lot less for the drivers and passengers to look at, which meant more eyeballs on your projections. The way their Instant Billboards worked changed completely after they partnered up with the last vaccine. To entice people to get the jab they offered a 100% free nanochip in the injection. What a steal! These have never been offered commercially but most people think they would retail for a ton of money if they had. This technology was great because you could buy things on Bopeepo by just thinking them up now. Only real downside of the nanochip — in addition to the decrease in billboard money because you only made bucks now if A) the people had the implanted chips, and B) said people were focusing on the ads (the chip knows where your eyes are looking, and what you’re thinking about, I think, whereas before all this revenue was solely calculated by how far you traveled and if the thing was switched on or off) — was that you could only use their search engine to google things in your mind. I don’t know what it was about Tailsee but something didn’t seem right about it. I don’t think they gave you all the good results. And “tailsing” was a horrible verb that never caught on.
There was a light rain, more a mist really, but it was deemed safe to use the machine in precipitation (despite the multiple class action lawsuits, which were all brought on by losers who lost and who didn’t want to work for a living). It seemed to buzz a little more than usual when it got wet and it definitely gave me a headache, or more of a headache than on dry days, but beggars can’t be choosers, as they say. Not that I was begging in this scenario. The chooser part of that saying seems to fit the bill. My life, my choice, I thought, as the hum from the contraption strapped around my neck sent an undeniable electric pulse deep down inside me. Sometimes I wanted to look at the billboard images projected above my head but there was no real way to tilt my head to see. The way the B.I.B. functioned, it was only worth it if I kept my head upright and straight as the hologram was beamed vertically up from the base of my skull behind me. But sometimes I could catch it in the reflection off the glass off some passing building or car. I once thought I caught a glimpse of a strip club commercial with real (fake) dancing girls. I had read recently that Bopeepo was getting into the strip club business, which seemed incredibly odd. Ever since then I was much more fascinated by the content of the holograms. I'd thought it was all just ads for insurance companies and Bopeepo+.
I got pretty bored by the time I was passing through Princeton. I knew every storefront, every franchise, every logo on this stretch of New Jersey road. There was a decent amount of traffic and idle drivers who didn’t need to drive on account of their driverless cars, but the rain had picked up and I wasn’t getting flagged down to sell any snacks. People don’t typically want soggy snacks, even though I had a nice assortment: Brownie Bugles, Cinnabusters, Salt-fritters, Salmon Two-Packs, and more. So I decided to fire up Tailsee to look up the actor who played Jerry Seinfeld's butler on Seinfeld. I was apprehensive because I hate being wrong about stuff like that. I don’t know how complicated things work and I’m fine with that. Who does? But getting little factoids like this mixed up? That drives me insane. It’s the least I can do. It’s the least any of us can do. When we talk to people we have to be accurate with this type of information. The social fabric would completely dissolve without it. I thought, “Tailsee, who played the part of Jerry’s butler on the TV show, Seinfeld?”
No time later I heard, thought and felt the answer: No results.
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