Circles of Life

The end is just the beginning (except when it’s not)

Did you miss me? I took a week off from Message from the Underworld to try and wrap up my book. The good news is it worked. I followed the advice of a loyal reader (Hi Terese!) and sprinted to the finish. I now have a draft of Corporate Rock Sucks. It’s not finished but it’s a book. 

Those of you who have endeavored to write a book know there are many moments when the prospect of ever finishing feels not only unlikely but utterly impossible. No one knows everything they need to know to finish the book when they start. It requires a huge leap of faith just to get the project off the ground. There are plenty of highs and lows along the way, and the writing teaches you what you need to know. Blah, blah, blah. 

But for me, the closer I get to the end of the book, the further away the prospect of finishing seems. Maybe it’s another symptom of self-sabotage, but that’s when I start waking up at four in the morning a couple of times a week, wondering what will happen to my book if I get in a car accident or keel over at my desk. It’s the mortifying thought of someone else trying to piece together my tragically messy manuscript that gets me out of bed and back to work. 

You know that stereotype about mothers preoccupied with their kids having clean underwear? It’s like the writer’s version of that. It’s completely absurd, but that doesn’t make the anxiety feel any less real. 

Then there’s the whole writing under a deadline thing. I like deadlines. I’m a huge fan of tracking my writing and making daily, weekly, and monthly goals. Here’s what my final entry in the massive ten-page chart I created during the writing of Corporate Rock Sucks looked like on the day I finished:

364M 5/10/21 128,150 129,575 1,425 462 +6 💥FINISH💥

It’s one thing to miss a day of writing; quite another to miss the publisher’s deadline. I don’t like being late for things. It goes against my Navy training. There’s no such thing as being late in the Navy. Either you’re UA (unauthorized absence) or AWOL (absent without leave). If you’re “late” you won’t have the opportunity to be late again after the master-at-arms deprives you of your liberty. Long story short, I like to be on time. Except for church weddings. You really only need to be there for the last fifteen minutes. 

So the manuscript is now complete. It has a beginning, middle, and end. If I drop dead tomorrow I will feel sorry for the sucker who has to track down all the attributions for the end notes, but for the most part it’s all there. 

Now it’s time to turn it over to my readers who will point out all of the book’s flaws, big and small, and help me make it better. Just like they did on My Damage and Do What You Want, they will push me to reconsider things. They will challenge my thinking. They will tell me if I’m flat out wrong. They will tell me to get the fuck out of here with that weak cheese (if, indeed, the cheese be weak.)

I will also let you in on a little secret. In addition to my crack team of punk rock readers, I always hire a proofreader to go over my manuscript before I turn it in. I’ve been working with the same proofreader for many, many years, and she’s indispensable to the process. In fact, calling her a proofreader understates all the ways she makes my work better. Yes, publishers have copy editors, very good copy editors, but submitting a ms. without my proofreader’s input would feel like painting a house without putting down a coat of primer. 

This review process is time consuming and I’ll use it to comb through my notes, double check quotes, review interviews, and possibly conduct a few more. I’m also negotiating with photographers and getting the images cleared for inclusion in the book. There are a million things I want to spend a little extra time on to make sure I get it right, ensure that it contributes to the overall story, and so on. This process will continue up until I submit final proofs for approval, i.e. when they pry the book out of my hands. 

I’m still listening to records and pouring over old press releases and digging up some gems that—to be perfectly honest—I’m enjoying more now that the pressure to finish is off. I thought I might want a break from SST, but no, I’m reaching a new phase of my obsession. That’s good news if you like the PssSST feature, because it will be back next week. 

Circle of Life, Part I

A reader of Message from the Underworld told me a few weeks ago (oh look it’s Terese again!) that finishing a book is like sending a kid off to college. Well, I’m doing that too. 

Now I should clarify that I’m one of many people in my daughter’s life. There’s Annie’s mom, her stepmom, her grandparents… you get the drill and I’m going to shut up now because I’m burying the lede: I’m thrilled to share the news that Annie will be attending University of California Davis as a political science major in the fall! 

I’m so incredibly proud of Annie.  Do I think she’s ready for everything that life will throw her way? Hell no. Nobody graduates from high school “ready” but I do know this: she’s smarter, more capable, and infinitely more confident than I was at her age. 

I talk about my Navy days a lot in this newsletter but the fact of the matter is the reason I enlisted in the Navy is because I was a terrible student with lousy grades, a worse attitude, and abysmal test scores. I did not set academia on fire. If anything, I was a strong candidate for actually setting the school on fire and if the building burned down you better believe they would have wanted to know my whereabouts the night of the inferno.

In any case, Annie is not me. She is her own person who is passionate and forthright and talented in so many ways. I’m astonished at all the things she can do that I cannot, which is not a new feeling. She started circling laps around me when she was still a pre-teen. This semester, she’s already wrapped up her advanced calculus test and she’s getting an A. Nuvia and I don’t think grades are important but this was important to her so we’re celebrating it. Me? Most days I can’t even correctly subtract my birth year from 2021 to figure out how old I am. 

This pandemic has been really hard on a lot of people. We’ve all had our own unique challenges but I don’t think there’s any doubt that—barring those who have contracted the coronavirus—the people who’ve had it the hardest are 1) mothers of young children and 2) teenagers who have had to move their entire existence online and have missed out on so much. I’m grateful for the extra time the pandemic has given us to spend together, but it’s Annie’s time now. Her whole life awaits and I’m incredibly happy for her. 

Circle of Life, Part II

It’s been ten days since I learned that my friend, Shanna Mahin, took her own life earlier this month, and I still haven’t wrapped my head around the fact that she’s gone. 

Shanna was a no bullshit kind of person. Everyone needs a no bullshit kind of person in their life and for pretty much all of my sobriety Shanna was that for me. 

Shanna was the kind of person who told her friends she loved them. She loved her friends fiercely and devotedly. They weren’t just words to her. Or they were, but the words weren’t tokens of affection or endearment. She meant them. So when she said them you felt them, and when she let you in on her view of things, especially if there was something she thought was fucked up, something unworthy of her love and devotion, you listened. 

The last trip I took out of the country before the pandemic was to San Miguel de Allende in February of 2020. Shanna had been living there for a little less than a year (I think). I was participating in a Literary Death Match and Shanna came to the reading. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Shanna was in a great deal of pain. She had arthritic knees and was going to have them both replaced. She refused to let it get in the way of her life, but she could barely walk and then only slowly, but still she came to my reading. That’s what she did. Shanna fucking showed up. 

We had lunch afterward and then the following day we went to an art show at a painter’s gallery. We arrived fairly early and we were there maybe ten minutes when she bought two of the paintings. They were two of the smaller pieces, but she snapped them up, no hesitation. That’s how she was with people, too. She was drawn to people she felt were amazing. That sounds facile. Aren’t we all drawn to people who do amazing things? The difference was Shanna would walk up to someone and say, “Your work is fabulous. You’re fabulous. I want to know you.” Most of us aren’t like that, but maybe we should be. 

It worked the other way, too. Shanna signed up for a class I was teaching at San Diego Writers, Ink. Shanna and I were both kind of new to San Diego. I was definitely newly sober. Shanna wasn’t, but she’d been through some things, and I felt like she understood what it was like to be an adult who was still trying to figure their shit out. 

How do I say this? Shanna was not nice to people in that class. She didn’t like the readings I assigned. She claimed she didn’t understand them. She was even less charitable about the work others shared. In retrospect, it’s pretty hilarious, but at the time it was a little nerve-wracking. I was afraid the students would turn on each other and the nice ladies that sign up for memoir writing classes wouldn’t have stood a chance against Shanna. No fucking way. 

What’s so gutting about Shanna’s death is that it feels like I just saw her since it was right before the beginning of the pandemic. Because our life experiences have been circumscribed by the pandemic, my time with her feels very recent, even though it wasn’t.

Some of you may recall when I got a parking ticket in San Miguel de Allende and the cops took the license plate of my rental car. Shanna was the first person I reached out to. “How screwed am I?” I had visions of being extorted for hundreds of dollars, if not more. Shanna talked me down. She said it wasn’t much and walked me through the process. And she was right. The ticket was less than forty bucks. I found out later she didn’t know this at the time, but she’d called up several friends to find out what I should do and then she got back to me. That’s the kind of person she was. She’d drop everything if a friend was in trouble, even if it was something as dumb and banal as a parking ticket. 

I kept in touch with Shanna after that trip because I was worried about her knees. How does an American citizen get their knees replaced in Mexico during a pandemic? It turns out one doesn’t. Shanna returned to Houston, Texas, where she’d been living with her husband before she split for Mexico. She was going to stay with him, get the surgery in Houston, and recover there, which she did, but it took a lot longer than she thought it would.

In October I got an email from her, a reply to this newsletter in fact. It read. “I love you. That’s all.” I told her I loved her too. And that was our last correspondence. I had no idea that she’d contracted COVID-19 and she’d been sick with it for a long time and that she’d become depressed. I don’t want to say more because I don’t know the details. Frankly, it’s not my story to tell because I was AWOL, which I feel a tremendous amount of guilt about. When she needed a friend, I wasn’t there. Full stop. 

But I think there’s at least one thing Shanna got wrong. When she said, “I love you. That’s all.” She had no idea what it meant to get that message from her, to feel that love. That’s no small thing. 

That’s everything.