‘Monstrous’ Being Talked About by People Other Than Me

Here is a bit of what I’ve been up to today, a link to a discussion of my book that I supplied to BookTalk.org just before I got here.

Monstrous Discussion Group

I also contributed 2 to 5 cents at GoodReads, and am feeling particularly excited about flooding the site with quotes from Monstrous so that my book might gain some traction on its own merits. Surely a reader who is actually there for reading can stop to take in a few lines, ajudge with an almighty ‘like’, and catapult worthy snippets straight to the top no matter how humble their beginnings.

What, Me Worry?

From the My Brother the Serial Killer documentary, I remember Glen Rogers being quoted by his brother as saying that he wasn’t worried about any demons entering him because he figured it would be taken care of by the demon that was already there. I could relate to that. It took me back to the Bad Old Days and the feeling of security I had, believing I was the only developing psycho in my jurisdiction. The universe had room for only so many, I was a magnet drawing on the power of the universe within a certain radius, and any other psycho-energy magnets would need to stay the heck away and find their own salesman territory if they wanted to maximize power for themselves.

BookTalk.Org

Haven’t missed a day since getting back in the swing and I can’t start now. Today I joined BookTalk and told their community of the existence of my non-fiction book.

Monstrous: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer but for the Grace of God

Next I foresee myself participating in the book discussion forum, and also I must rally myself to sit through the GoodReads tutorials to get a leg up there as well. I found a site that lists 42 places where a fellow can promote their books, and my intention is to knock ’em down one by one. Projecting myself to the end of this project, I will have done more publicity-wise ten years after the fact that I ever did when Monstrous was brand new. This time I am seriously going to try to make this work economically. I imagine myself to be readier for whatever this time around, and I have recently come to acknowledge that there is no conventional means of support available in this world that represents who I am half as well as my beautiful book.

More Than Meets The Eye

I swore a long time ago that if the Martians ever came down and chose me for their guide to lead them to intelligent life that I would turn them away saying there wasn’t any here. If ever we had any candidates you would think they’d have come from the field of science, as in rocket science, but I keep thinking how whenever a new discovery is made, it’s treated as the final word until the next discovery makes the previous one obsolete. At no time do the scientists catch on to this phenomenon and say well this is what we think at the moment but I’m sure we’re full of crap. Most embarrassing have been the attempts to define human uniqueness, such as the old claim that we’re the only species with language or the only one that fill-in-the-blank.

I’m put in mind of this after watching a documentary on Richard Trenton Chase. Nothing out of the ordinary was discovered about his treatment in life, or nothing that couldn’t be downplayed, prior to his first bizarre acts, and the various so-called experts were all-too-easily swayed to the conclusion that there was nothing there. Like they didn’t believe a person could experience life and be influenced by it when no distant neighbors were looking.

I don’t have a refutation at the ready, though the bogus claims as to Chase’s “erectile dysfunction” (he had no problem getting it up when the object was dead) suggests an issue that can scarcely arise from anything other than a contextual life. What I do know is that a comp of his, Herb Mullin (earthquake prevention is a sideshow) is also a comp of mine, existentially speaking, and I have lived a life that makes sense.

Probably none of this would be bemoaned tonight were it not for the starkly different takes I came across recently on Glen Rogers’ life. The Wikipedia entry says that the serial killer’s childhood was unremarkable, yet a documentary has just come out from his own brother’s perspective that paints his childhood as a fertile ground for some seriously wicked potential. Oh, so maybe his childhood was remarkable after all. Will they ever learn? No, they won’t.

I Didn’t Really Say That, Did I?

Offhand I don’t know if any other artist accounts for more than one song.

The Who

Tommy, Can You Hear Me
See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me
The Best I Ever Had
Pinball Wizard

Playing off the Sesame Street theme from the previous post, here are some children’s songs that get mentioned:

Free To Be You And Me
Who Am I?

Not to be confused with “Who Are You?”, which is *not* in my book.

Rain– Of Course– How Could I Forget

Nine Beatles songs mentioned in Monstrous, and could we still be counting?? Walking in the rain to the store and this ninth one came back to me:

Laughing maniacally and singing the Beatles’ “Rain” at the top of my lungs. [page 321]

1. Revolution Number Nine
2. All You Need Is Love
3. Strawberry Fields
4. Rocky Raccoon
5. When I’m Sixty-four
6. Honey Pie
7. A Day In The Life
8. I’m A Loser
9. Rain

Offhand I don’t know if any other artist accounts for more than one song.

During today’s reading of my favorite book, I came across mention of “Ragtime Doll”, which as far as I know (about as far as I can throw myself) belongs to the Warner Brothers cartoon character J. Michigan Frog. And it occurs to me that he’s not the only frog singer I know. Kermit had a big hit with “It’s Not Easy Being Green”, and many years later with “The Rainbow Connection”. Both are definitely songs of my life, and as such could conceivably have made it into my autobiography. There is almost a mention of Sesame Street in my book

And Sesame Street, boy howdy, talk about kid tested and mother approved

but that little snippet was left behind on the cutting room floor.

Not Mine, But Bears Repeating

“Boy meets girl; girl gets boy into pickle; boy gets pickle into girl.”
— Jack Woodward

These five are mine, however:

A simple case of falling in love, of boy meets doll.

…two little kids playing, a girl and a boy, and the girl was chasing the boy, threatening to kiss him.

Like a lady had handed me a pickle jar that I simply couldn’t open and I wasn’t a man anymore.

Got myself into a pickle which was a page right out of the Stephen King novella “The Body”

Supercharged, and we were on our way.

Cortisol, My Ass

Lots of carts before horses when it comes to scientific explanations for aberrant mindsets and behavior. Take a normal person with a few unusual gifts, drop-kick him into an extremely instructive, interesting family environment, watch him acquire a take on the world that is 51-49 as opposed to the 50-50 of his peers, then watch as he becomes a lightning rod for all the 50-50s when their aggressions against him fail to bend him back to 50 and he instead goes 52-48. This purely hypothetical person has Truth on his side, so we can do this all day. He is no less normal at 52-48 than he was at 51-49, since he’s reacting as any normal person would under the same circumstances. And he will be no less normal at 99-1, even though he experiences the suckitude of life, to the extent that it must involve people, more acutely than the other 99.

At some point when the spread gets really striking, at like say a thousand to one, cause may be found to pry his head open and go rummaging around, and chances are excellent that you’re going to find that his cortisol levels are low. The levels will come to match with this person’s unusual acquired ability to see that all roads lead to death, coupled with his inability to distract himself in the meantime. He looks around one day and says “There is almost nothing here for me” and he doesn’t mean cortisol.

Brudos Before Chase

The sooner I get this done the sooner I can watch the Richard Trenton Chase documentary. That ought to wake me up. I’ve read a bit on him as a chapter in larger books.

The one I just finished was on Glen Rogers, called My Brother the Serial Killer. In theory, its most electrifying claim was that Rogers was responsible for the O.J. murders, but when I heard it my interest waned. Later, it perked up again and I heard the claim out. Who the hell knows, I guess.

Occurs to me that for all the ink I spilled, I never actually watched the Jerry Brudos doc– better rectify that.

Living Room Floor

…the living room floor is one of the most important elements of working on a manuscript.

Totally agree, and I remember mine well. The link is to a liker from yesterday who kinda looks like a real human being, and I just want to add that this is true not just for poets, though I myself have been a poet on the side and in fact have included some poetry within my book. There’s a poem and a partial from the heart of the bad old days that double as song lyrics, if only you could hear the music…

Four Angles of the Empty Set [partial, page 278]
In My Garden [whole, pages 290-91]

…and a series of mostly untitled poetic personal ads, both published and scrapped, from during my emotional comeback, a couple of which could stand on their own as straight poems:

Gingerbread Man [pages 410-11]
Nightmare [pages 440-441]

Bless their souls, Amazon blocked me against quickly finding the page numbers associated with “In My Garden” via their Search Inside feature, possibly because I had worn out my welcome and there’s copyright issues– I mustn’t be permitted to rip myself off. You might have better luck, or not, if you make it the first thing you search and not the fourth like I did. I see that my page has a new look to it, which is nice irrespective of the lack of actually new content.

In the interest of completion, a high priority of Monstrous and an ongoing concern, I also re-print (twice) a four-line poem, “If in Heaven” that I suspect is public domain, and in any case consider my property in that it was gifted, written to me. Perhaps compulsive silliness is leading me to mention “Driving Down the Road in My Car” and its five-line song refrain, because as poetry it’s pretty awful but at least it rhymes.