Cocktail Hour
Wormtown: The Fate of Man
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We seem to be on a mortality theme here at Bill and Dave’s, what with Bill going under the knife (as they say.) I’m also thinking that way, since I’m coming up on the twentieth anniversary of my 30th birthday. I’m planning a three day pagan party in my backyard–bonfires, pig-roasts, loin cloths, the works—and my daughter Hadley is scheming about getting all the kids to wear wolf costumes and howl at the moon.
No matter how successful, or wild, the party is, it’s unlikely to match my 30th for sheer wildness and joyous fucking life celebration. That’s because a week before that birthday I was operated on for testicular cancer and spent the next days waiting to find out what flavor of cancer I had. As I remember it, I was feeling pretty pessimistic, and had settled into a deep gloom, by the time my doctor arrived in my room, late in the week of my hospital stay, to give me the news. I remember him walking over to my bedside and fixing his eyes on mine, very professionally, and then for the final touch, placing his hand on my shoulder. Then, the key moment: his thin lips curled slightly upward in what was unquestionably a smile. It was then that I understood that he had come to tell me just what I most wanted to hear. Continue reading →
More from the Short Story Unit
categories: Cocktail Hour
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My nurse
Penny was my nurse. She wrote her name on a dry-erase board along with the name of her assistant, also my location: the short stay unit. I thought in my haze that it said short-story unit. And I thought that was really very sweet that they had put me in a writer’s ward of some kind, or named the unit in my honor, even if temporarily. I’d gone into the operating room at about 7:00 a.m., and now it was suddenly one. I remembered the x-ray, but that was all, six hours lost. Someone named Nutrition brought in a tray of food and this was amusing, like I was going to eat. Drew sat in a stiff armchair in the corner and told me he’d called my dad and various friends. (Later, I’d see my dad’s email to the family–he thought he’d spoken to my surgeon, delightful in that Drew is a scientist and speaks with Continue reading →
Occupational Hazards
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 13 comments
Phew. I’m still here. I’m sore and at times very uncomfortable, but not really in pain ten days out. I won’t paragraph this because that’s the way the pain meds affect my thinking, just big, strong blocks of prose and then a nap. My sense is this all starts when I’m much younger. Maybe the car accident at sixteen–telephone pole at probably 40 miles an hour, no seat belt, the impression of the steering wheel across my chest as a bruise for weeks, no medical or other treatment, my mother mad at me for calling my girlfriend first rather than her. And I played piano and other instruments in bands, often violently, always bent to the task. And I worked various Continue reading →
The Making Of…(A Happy Story)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Things are getting kind of exciting down here in sleepy old Wilmington. Lookout Books, sister press of Ecotone and the brainchild of my colleagues Emily Smith and Ben George, just released its very first book, Binocular Vision, a short story collection by Edith Pearlman. That would be exciting enough but the reception of the book has been kind of, well, crazy. If you don’t believe me consider yesterday, when the book got a rave on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and in the L.A. Times. (Not to mention this great piece in Publishers Weekly.) In one week the entire first printing has been distributed to bookstores, and today Lookout will go back for a second printing. To say that anyone down here expected this kind of response would be a big, fat lie. We weren’t quite ready for Edith Pearlmania.
One thing that seems to have caught everyone’s imagination, along with Edith’s stories, is Edith’s story. Both the L.A. and N.Y. Times reviews start with the same question: Why haven’t we heard of her? And as Roxana Robinson answers in the NYTBR: “Maybe from now on everyone will know of Edith Pearlman.”
GET WELL SOON, BILL
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 24 comments
Bill has been in the hospital for a couple of days for spinal fusion neck surgery so I send this note along for all of us (sort of):
Dear Bill,
Get well soon. We miss you down here at Bill and Dave’s Blogging Factory. Just yesterday, our secretary, Miss. Cashdime, made some dated, sexist comment about missing seeing your sexy behind around the shop. (I chastised her and docked her pay.) But I’m getting off my point here…..
My point is love, love, love. We are all sending it out to you. You were always the handsome and talented member of the B & D team (I never admitted until now that you ghost wrote all my posts.) We are lost without you (as the quality of this particular post attests.) Continue reading →
On the Road–Again
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Jack and friends
The Churchill Wit
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Well, now that Bill has taken the IQ level of the blog down a a few notches, I feel it is up to me to really drive us into the cellar.
For Christmas I gave my brother Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great by Rick Meyerowitz.
The book is great, brilliant, and full of the high culture–crude joke variety of humor that I like to think of as the Socrates-steps-in dog-shit-school. But one thing is missing, and that’s Michael O’Donoghue’s The Churchill Wit. So after scrounging around on line for a while I found it and here it is. I’ve changed the order slightly, putting my two favorites first.
And, um, to you sensitive folk I’m sorry for the language. I hope we don’t lose subscribers….do we have subscribers? Continue reading →
100 Ways to Celebrate Amateur’s Night
categories: Cocktail Hour
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vocabulary quiz
Happy New Year from Bill and Dave’s! And now, without further ado, this year’s 100 top words for being drunk, in no particular order. Remember: Don’t drink and drive, but if you do, drive fast! This way you limit your time on the road. Example: If you drive 100 miles per hour you get there four times faster than the person who drives only 25, thus limiting the danger you pose to others! At 200 mph you are only on the road eight minutes for a 25-mile trip! That slowpoke takes a whole hour, a lot more exposure to danger! The police love this kind of logic–try it when you’re pulled over! And tell ’em you saw it on Bill and Dave’s. But say Dave told you. Continue reading →
Junger Envy: A Perfect, Rank Place
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Happy holidays!
I have had a one-sided rivalry with Sebastian Junger for about fifteen years now. I say it is “one-sided” because he likely doesn’t know it exists. The roots of this (imaginary) feud grow out of the fact that our first books came out at the same time and we did a couple of readings together. This was early in my writing career, back when I still fantasized that the publication of books could lead to earth-shaking fame and everlasting glory, and for one of us it would.
My book was called “A Wild, Rank Place.” His, you likely already know, was “The Perfect Storm.” I’m bringing them up again today, not out of sour grapes or indolence (re-hashing an old essay for today’s blog) but out of a building and grudging respect. Not for the book itself, which, honestly, I never read, but for the staying power of the book’s title. Over the last decade and a half it has wormed its way into the culture in a manner not rivaled since “Catch-22” and “1984.” And there’s a good reason for this. It’s great! How did we ever live, let alone talk to each other, in the centuries before we had a phrase that meant the exact confluence of many events to create the ultimate in any situation. What did we say before we said, “This election was a perfect storm of republican cynicism, economic circumstances, and voter discontent.”? The phrase is wonderful, really, to the extent that I sometimes hear myself using it when I lecture. Continue reading →
Southern Drivers
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 14 comments
My daughter learned the word “douchebag” recently. Since she is in first grade this is not a particularly good thing. Of course she learned it from me. And, of course, since I rarely use the word in normal conversations, she learned it from hearing me yell it at other cars and drivers while I was behind the wheel. “Douchebag,” if you really think about it, is a strange word to use in reference to other motorists, but it’s also one of my favorites. When I drive I am often surrounded by douchebags, and though it feels good to yell it out loud, I’m always left feeling a little bad afterward. My hope is that the word doesn’t take hold in Hadley’s mind, and that she won’t start using it when we visit my Mom’s for Christmas.
