My Baltimore Rant. Part one.

Recently my city has been under attack by the president and the people who like to pile on and dump on the city that I have made home for the last 25 years. It has been an informative discussion of things I surely have never heard before. I was never aware of our many shootings, our corrupt police force or even our rat problem.

But…all sarcasm aside, A couple thoughts…

• Read an editorial by a suburban visitor that listed the cities many woes and offered distorted takes on how we as residents feel about it. What caught my eye was the free admission that this person is not a city resident.

To which my not at all sarcastic self responds with “Then shut up.”

• Elijah Cummings by the way, is not the only representative who represents Baltimore. As it happens, John Sarbanes is the rep on my side of town. John Sarbanes is white. Elijah Cummings is black and investigating Trump. This whole thing has nothing to do with Baltimore. Trump doesn’t give a fuck about Baltimore. He never did.

• I do not live in a hellhole. My neighborhood is nice. There are many such neighborhoods in Baltimore. There are also many shitty ones. A unique feature of this town is that often the good and the bad are right next to each other. They alternate. I call it “good block/bad block.”

• I understand privilege factors in. I can’t help that. I will never completely understand others’ lives or problems. But I make the attempt to empathize, (which is more than I can say for some people.) I just don’t lose my mind over it.

Look…we know this place is fucked up. Many of us accept the challenge of living here and trying to make it work.

The difference between me and the suburbanite casually tossing “shithole” bombs at us is that I don’t use those things as a reason to hate on this city.

Next: What I hate about living in the city.

Cliff C. Cookson, RIP (2007-2019)

(Reposing this here for my non-Facebook followers.)

Today we say goodbye to our little buddy, Cliff, the cat who didn’t like us and didn’t really like anything but still hung around when he wanted. Oh, he was a tricky one. One minute he was aloof and staying just out of reach, the next he was rolling over and asking for pets…then biting your hand when you gave them up.
He mellowed out over the years as he came to realize we were only doing our best to give him the best life.
He became diabetic in his later years, which meant a lot of personal sacrifices for my wife and me. We each had to learn how to give him insulin after first poking him in the ear to check his blood sugar. This was twice a day, every day. (Michele got up at 4 am for almost 2 years to do this for him.) At first we were scared that he wouldn’t tolerate such close contact, but in time he came to a grudging acceptance of the whole routine.
By far Cliff’s best moments came as a companion to our other cat, Stella, when she got sick (partly why he earned the nickname “Buddy”). He stayed with her on her final night and day, not leaving her side until she passed. After this, he softened a little, even consenting to voluntarily hang out with us on the couch, letting us rub his belly while we were watching TV.
Oh, he was a pain in the ass. But he was also a good cat. He was a true friend, who kept watch over us and never once tried to escape the house. He was a favorite at the vet’s office, a place where he unfortunately spent lots of time…all the ladies there always complimented him on being so handsome.
He was a weirdo, preferring hard floors to beds, and old wallets to regular cat toys. Sometimes we wanted him to just be a normal cat who enjoyed normal cat things, but that was Cliff in a nutshell.
As I write this I can’t help but be sad that I will never see him again. But I will never forget him. Our little Buddy.
Love you, Cliff. Rest in peace.
Cliff C. Cookson, 2007-2019.

A week of Light Rail, summed up in tweets June 14, June 17, June 20-22

Taking the much-derided (by me) Light Rail to work today for the 1st time ever for this job. Don’t let me down. Might be needing you awhile.

Just recently my car has been declared “borderline dangerous” by a mechanic who quoted a price that finally exceeded what I was willing to spend on my 19 year old 200 thousand mile Subaru Legacy. Circumstances have led my wife and me to adopt a car sharing/walking/public transportation stopgap solution to our now one-car household.

To that end…
I have been taking the light rail to my job, over 10 miles away at BWI Airport. The light rail, for those who may not know, is a half-hearted but well-meaning attempt at offering a mid-sized city a way for suburbanites to get downtown for the baseball game. At least, that’s what it feels like. But since I don’t have a car and the damn thing is a 7 minute walk from my house, I feel obligated to give it a try. And since sitting for 45 minutes to an hour lends itself to idle tweeting and observation, I present many of them here.

Back to the light rail. Today is a good job for transit: work then back downtown for the O's game. Ticket kiosk took 3 swipes to work. That is a real problem. I have allowed a whole 8 to 10 minutes for this, but God help anyone who doesn't carry multiple credit cards.

Yeah, this was my first problem on the first bright and sunny day I had to take the train to work at 557 am to make my 730 start time. But I persisted.

I think @mtamaryland needs to work on getting the payment method up to speed for people who aren't technologically savvy or who don't have multiple cards to try at defective machines. #mytwocents

I made it that first day and I felt pretty good. I learned that it was a long walk from the light rail stop at the airport to my work area, but that in what I call a “motivated walk,” can do it in 6 minutes.

More light rail thoughts...I think public transportation in general has gotten better for wheelchair users at least in that most buses "kneel" and let the little ramp down so the person can wheel right on. Used to be this awful lift that always broke down. @mtamaryland

The next week, this happened:

Welp. Train broke down in front of my train. Train stuck. I bailed out. Taking Lyft for maybe my 2nd time by myself. #LightRailFail

Yeah, so that happened. It was kind of shitty, but I had to get to work. I went through the progression of options. I chose to use Lyft.

This is basically the equivalent of the "oh shit I'm late have to park in the expensive garage." Back up plans have to be part of any transit plans here.

And…

Anyway, Lyft driver Loretta got me to work, no bs, I thanked her, said "You're awesome!" and gave her a good tip and top rating. But damn...can't do that every day.

I had to take the light rail the next day and became aware of a situation that would impact my Saturday commute. So...stations being closed thru the weekend....does that mean we have to get off the train and take a shuttle? I'm going up to Cold Spring. @mtamaryland

Riding home on the light rail on my last Saturday for a while. There is a service change where we need to get off at Patapsco and ride a shuttle, then reboard the train at Convention Center. If it is as easy as the operator says, no problem. It'll factor into my report.

First Spoiler: this did not go well.

All right, well...I'm at Convention Center and...This whole "step back on the train" thing is not going well...will @mtamaryland reimburse me for having to use Lyft twice in one week?

And….

This one guy said he's been waiting "for a minute." He got on the southbound train which is supposed to turn back and be my northbound train...in another minute. MTA is turning out to be what I always thought it was. Where's that Denny Green gif? @mtamaryland

I'm not in a huge hurry...but my cat is gonna be a dick and I just want to get home.

Car just drove down the tracks like...for 3 blocks. People are so stupid.

And finally…

All right. Back on that train. On a normal day of this, woulda been home 10 minutes ago.

In summary:

It is nice to not have to deal with rush hour traffic. I like just sitting and listening to music and not having to do anything. I feel like I am being a responsible global citizen by doing public transportation like this. I mentioned the wheelchair accessibility. But… I have to give the whole experience at best a C minus. I had to use Lyft. The ticket machines are SOOOOOO shitty. The system is so small time that it only takes a small issue to mess up the whole route. If I had a working vehicle, I would not even think about taking light rail to work.

There is no way in Hell anyone in Baltimore should ever voluntarily give up a vehicle and trust the MTA. Stuff like what is happening now happens way too much for me just being a casual rider. And that is my week on light rail.

The Rise and Fall of the Parochialist. CONCLUSION!!!

2008 started.
Unfortunately, the plan to make Davey G and the Keyboard a household name hadn’t gone as well as I thought. But I see the posts from January 2008 and I just wonder how the hell I ever got this angry. It wasn’t all about the City Paper. I had other things. The Parochialist morphed into more of a general complaints and grievances space, while still providing links to all the usual things. Then I began work on the story that killed the Davezine…which was (no small coincidence) all about a fictionalized version of the City Paper…Davezine 13….

Davezine 13 was a zine that contained Low Level Bureaucrats 3: the Rise of the Collective, which combined two of my axes to grind into one book. I was making fun of a local group that was popular at the time and popular with the City Paper. While it might have been a well written story, I don’t know what the hell my marketing plan was. I didn’t have a release party or any huge push beyond what I posted to my blogs. It didn’t receive the wide release of some of my other things. I have no explanation for that. You might be able to find one in a store in the area. I certainly have plenty left over.

(file photo)
As it turned out, I never hit the high level I was aiming for. You could certainly suggest that I could have tried plying my trade in a better market. I could have gone to New York or LA or something and just gone for broke as a performer, far away from the parochial concerns of a lowly alternative weekly. But it’s not what I wanted, it was never what I wanted. In one of the last posts, I (ironically) tried to get people to vote for The Parochialist for best blog in the City Paper. This time I wasn’t serious. I knew there was no chance of this, and the readers obliged by not voting for me.

The last post of The Parochialist was on December 31, 2008. All in all, it had about 31 posts, a fairly meager output considering. Still, it gave me something to focus on from week to week, and provided a small outlet for at least a handful of dedicated readers. But I just didn’t have it in me anymore, and New Years’ Eve of 2008 seemed as good a time as any to say goodbye, which I did with this post:

Wednesday, December 31, 2008 2008... It's over. Thank God. Parochialist out...for now.

Aftermath.
The City Paper ended its run just this past year after a 40 year run. As much as I goofed on it and hated it at times, the fact that it is gone has made a huge hole in this city.
I was already on to the next thing after I finished with The Parochialist. I started up with the National Novel Writing Month, writing 50 thousand novels in a month. Writing like this for one month a year has made me more prolific than I had ever been before. Starting with The Best of Thunder Johnson and then most recently with Pain Center: the Novel, NaNoWriMo has stretched my writing muscles in a way that nothing else ever had, and given me raw material to work with for the rest of the year. To date, I have 10 of these novels in one form or another, plus a memoir and a novella.
And about a year and a half after The Parochialist folded, I quietly put down my keyboard and walked off the stage.

Check out my latest zine. Davezine Number Fourteen: the Bad Roommates Issue!

The Rise and Fall of the Parochialist (part two of three)

Looking back…I never had a shot at this. I know this now. But at the time, it was a huge labor that I spent quite a bit of time trying to make happen. I’m not above putting my energy behind a stupid or hopeless cause. After all, what is the point of living if you aren’t willing to do something pointless at a 100 miles an hour once in a while? I made flyers, I blogged about it, I posted to my Myspace page (because that was still a thing at the time), I told all my friends from the Pub where I worked, I shoved ballots in front of people to get them to vote for me…it was a push like I’d never pushed before. I tried so hard, in fact, that when I didn’t win so much as an honorable mention, I just said “to hell with it.” And while I can’t say it was the whole reason for project, it was at least a catalyst.

The First post included this explanation for what I was attempting to do:

"There are things in the CP that I do like to read, such as Savage Love, Political Animal, This Modern World, etc. Not to mention that CP is a free source for what’s going on in Baltimore on any given week. How can I still get this information without having to resort to picking up the paper that irritates me so much?

Well, here’s where my plucky resourcefulness comes in. I am making my own bastardized version of the City Paper, for my own personal use, (minus their snotty, annoying commentary) and you can too! Print it out for yourself, add your own columns!"

Since City Paper came out on Wednesdays, The Parochialist came out on Thursdays. The rage that led me to that first post kept up for several weeks, and by the end of the month I stumbled across a hook that kept the fans into it for several weeks. It was my top 5 reasons why I was boycotting the City Paper. For the record, here they were:

5. The Handling of a local club’s closing. I didn’t like the way they smeared someone in the way they did. 4. They reviewed a Weird Al show in a very snarky manner. Which REALLY upset me. 3. Their “Short Fiction Contest” after-comments…which were typically snotty. 2. Their Borat Movie review. Admittedly, I never saw that film. But this review was typical of their style at the time. Unhelpful to simply call a movie bad and offer no explanation. 1. They ignore me. Yeah…this one was the driving factor.

In retrospect…I think at least 4 of those reasons were valid. I’ll let you guess which 4. That might have been the highpoint of the blog’s run. Towards the end of that year, I had called off my boycott. It didn’t make sense for me to dedicate time to making fun of a paper that I wasn’t even reading. I played a CD release party, to relative success. My girlfriend and I flew to Vegas over Christmas to get married in secret…

The Rise and Fall of the Parochialist, Part one.

In an old version of my zine, I was going to put this out as a feature, but I've decided to let it rest here, on the blog. My new zine, Davezine Number Fourteen: the Bad Roommates Issue is available here. http://davecookson.tripod.com/DavezineNumber14.html

On October 11, 2007, partly based on a whim but partly based on some real grievances I had built up against the local Baltimore City Paper, I launched a little blog known as The Parochialist…a cheeky little poke at CP that billed itself as an alternative to the alternative, including links to many of the same syndicated columns as well as my own “bully pulpit” take on the many issues of the City Paper. The Parochialist got its name from the ideals on which it was founded…dedicated to the idea that possessing a narrow view, with blinders to all distractions was the way I would proceed with this project. I was single-minded, I was hungry, and I was FOCUSED. To understand the forces that led to my launching of such a ridiculous project (I mean, who is trying to take down a lousy Alternative Weekly all by himself? A Quixotic quest at best) I have to tell you a little about my mindset back then....

I had been doing a little musical project called Davey G and the Keyboard, which I billed as “Weird Al on a 3 dollar Budget.” In reality, it more closely resembled the late Wesley Willis, with me playing along with keyboard pre-sets and making up funny songs. I’d been doing this off and on since 2000, but I’d had a renewed interest in 2005 that led to a series of live performances. I’d had at least a small amount of success doing this, playing at small clubs in town and releasing a few CD’s. In 2007, I set about recording my masterwork: a polished and well produced album of new work.

I know it sounds stupid now, but in 2007 I really thought this would be my ticket to…whatever the hell it was I wanted. I had fans, I had shows, and I had momentum. People liked what I did, even if it wasn’t a large group of people. It had cult appeal. A well-produced and well-distributed album would go a long way to achieving that larger success I hoped for. So with the help of Reverend Alex and C. Camp, as well as the photography studio at Sears, I made the most polished Davey G album to date. That was “Chairman of the Keyboard.”



Long story short, this effort to push my musical “career” at the exclusion of all common sense led to my quixotic effort to try something I had never seriously tried before: I wanted to win City Paper’s Best Musical Artist....

Roseanne is a performer. Stop taking her so personally.

Allow me to broach the topic of something that I’m pretty sure most of my friends and generally liberal leaning people will probably hate and unfollow and unfriend me immediately because it’s 2018 and we are all very, very sensitive. (Just be aware of these three things: I am creative, I am basically a free thinking moderate/liberal, and like many of you, I also can’t stand the thought of Trump as our President.)

Roseanne.

I am not planning to watch her new revival series. It is not for political reasons. I never did watch her show when it was on in the past. My family never watched when I was growing up, I never bothered to watch and after all these years I can honestly say that I have never even seen one episode. I’m not especially crazy about her comedy, her voice…just her in general. But it’s not political. It never was.

Yeah, I know: she likes Trump. And as much as I also can’t stand Trump (see my above disclaimer), it so happens that I do in fact have a few random friends and family who do. Should I stop talking to them? Have we gotten to that point where someone supporting someone you don’t like is reason enough to not talk to them? Aren’t there other things to talk about? But I am hating something on her behalf, because frankly it wounds me as a writer, performer, and comedic minded person, namely, the inability to separate performance from performer.

Yes, real life Roseanne supports Trump. She’s allowed to. If that is your only reason for hating her, well, that’s your right. Yes, she has done some crass routines in the past (the “Baked Jew” cookies thing has popped up). And I’m not defending her lousy rendition of the National Anthem (though why Trump singles out black football players for kneeling yet says nothing about this speaks volumes. I even tweeted about this recently and got more “likes” than I have ever gotten, so color me hater). But holy fuck, you pick any comic who has been doing his or her thing for as long as she has and you are going to find something off color or crude or questionable. It’s called having a career. I have done songs and stories in the past that were questionable that I probably would not be doing today. I shudder to think if I somehow came out on the wrong side of any one of you and you brought these up in your attempt to ruin me. But I own every bad piece of writing and music I have ever done. Without them, I would not have learned how to do better.

I’m sorry if this sounds like a cop out, but it happens. You try stuff, you try to push the limits, push the boundaries, and sometimes you push too far, sometimes you piss off groups of people and if you really go too far, you apologize. I understand your view that supporting Trump is supporting racism, xenophobia, sexual assault, homophobia, and whole host of other terrible things. And as I always say whenever I post something like this, I hate him, too. But also realize that the people who voted for him are also Americans. And somewhere in there is someone you love.

Be a bigger person. It starts with thinking for yourself, and separating real life from the performance. I know it’s hard. But we have to. We already let Trump ruin football. Let’s not let Roseanne ruin everything else.

"What the Hell Do You Want?"

“What the Hell Do You Want?” In the early 90’s, When I was a teenager back in Massachusetts, me and couple of my friends were in the studio audience of a local cable access show called “What the Hell Do you Want?”—a novel show that featured a middle aged man who went by the name Bob Bitchum. He sat in a bathtub and took phone calls from people watching at home and would answer every call with his trademark greeting: “What the Hell do you want?” It was a classic in the old days of Pittsfield Cable Access Television. As a man befitting the name BOB BITCHUM, Bob was a total crank. Terrifically opinionated and not afraid to tell the truth as he saw it, his opinions carried a lot of weight with the blue collar working class of my hometown. To this day, I believe that his constant hammering on the Mayor, a woman he referred to as “Queen Anne” almost single-handedly brought her down.
One day, as a member of the audience, my friends and I were asked to sing the national Anthem for the audience at home. For whatever reason. It was just part of Bob’s free format, which featured bands, phone calls, diatribes, and this that and the other. He asked us to sing the Anthem. Which we did. Badly. Very, very badly. We were young and stupid and all of 14 or 15 years old. But even so, I never thought we were deliberately trying to disrespect the Anthem. We couldn’t help it if we had spiky hair, safety pinned jackets, (I think I was wearing a sleeveless raincoat indoors and my railroad hat...) and looked like grubby little freaks. We were grubby little freaks. It was just how we dressed back then. However we sang it, not long afterward, one of Bob’s callers called in. “What the hell do you want?” After which the caller took us all to task for our disrespect for the National Anthem in what he felt was a lackluster performance, where we did not do it justice…
Let me tell you one thing about Bob Bitchum: he was a bulldog. A warrior. You want him in your foxhole. Because HE WENT OFF on this guy.
“I WENT TO VIETNAM AND I GOT SHOT AT AND I SERVED MY COUNTRY AND I CAME BACK SO THAT THESE KIDS CAN SING THE ANTHEM ANY DAMN WAY THEY WANT TO!!!” I don’t know how long he went off on this person, but it came from somewhere deep inside that little man…
And at that moment, we erupted in cheers at the man who had defended us while tearing the caller a new asshole.
I’ve never forgotten it.
For on that stage of that odd little cable access show, Bob Bitchum in his own profane and rough way, defined what it means to be an American. Maybe we were stupid kids, punks who didn’t know any better, but Bob was not going to stand for his kids being attacked. Because this was America, and that meant something to him. Right or wrong, he felt that in America, kids had the right to be stupid and sing the Anthem badly. Just a thought.

Goodreads Giveaway, redux.

(THIS MIGHT BE A WORK IN PROGRESS. I'M NOT PROMOTING IT, I'M JUST PARKING IT HERE.)

Because I am a writer and all I ever really want is to be read, and because all I ever need is one person to care, I am writing this expanded blog post to accompany my blog post of the other day…in which I tried to tactfully explain my displeasure with the new GoodReads Giveaway program…all because one person asked….

First off, I have to say that I love Goodreads. I have been using it for 9 years, both as a reader and as a writer. It is a great place to find new books, connect with other readers, leave reviews, and (as an author) find new readers of my own work. Goodreads, however, is owned by Amazon, the company that is taking over the entire world in a very frightening manner. That means it is a business, and business does what business does: operates at a profit motive above all else.

And to that end, it has begun a revision to their Giveaway Program, one that I had been using to great success over the past year, as detailed in a previous post. https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/16253196-i-love-you-goodreads-giveaways-but

I read through their blog post announcing this, I read what the new features of it were, but what really popped out at me was the whopping 119 dollar charge for a standard giveaway, and 599 for a Premium Package. (!) Ok. It’s easy to simply say that this is a lot of money for a simple writer to give away his/her hard work. But I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of the program and why it irks me so much.

From their post: • (NEW) Everyone who enters your giveaway automatically adds the book to their Want-to-Read list, promoting your book via updates in their friends’ updates feeds, and building an audience for your title.

• (NEW) The author’s followers and anyone who has already added the book to their Want-to-Read list get a notification, letting them know there’s a giveaway starting. This helps generate even more entries, creating more stories in the Goodreads updates feed.

• About eight weeks after your Giveaway ends, winners receive an email from Goodreads to remind them to rate and review your book. This will help other readers discover and decide to read your book too.

Ok. These things are available and they are…nice…but let’s be honest: it’s only marginally different from what they had been offering all along FOR FREE. But somehow being able to add your book to a person’s TO READ LIST, notifying their followers, and then notifying the winners to read and review the book…does ANY of this make it worth 119 bucks?

And What about Premium?

• (NEW) Exclusive placements on the Giveaways homepage on Goodreads with tens of millions of visitors each month, giving your giveaway significantly more visibility and more entrants.

• (NEW) Everyone who enters your giveaway automatically adds the book to their Want-to-Read list, promoting your book via updates in their friends’ updates feeds, and building an audience for your title.

• (NEW) The author’s followers and anyone who has already added the book to their Want-to-Read list get a notification, letting them know there’s a giveaway starting. This helps generate even more entries, and creates more stories in the Goodreads updates feed.

• About eight weeks after your Giveaway ends, winners receive an email from Goodreads to remind them to rate and review your book. This will help other readers discover and decide to read your book too.

• Giveaways are shown in the Giveaways section of Goodreads and the book page,allowing readers to discover new books.

Honestly, it sounds like more of the same. And this costs a whopping 599 bucks.

Here’s the thing: Sending these books out already costs me. Before I’ve even put the Pain Center book in an envelope, I spent roughly 4 months with countless hours assembling the books myself. It all comes out of my own pocket. When I make a sale, I am ecstatic. But because I am still an unknown author, no one is lining up to buy my book. But with the giveaways, I was building an audience. I was gaining traction. Yet not one of these giveaways has actually led to any sales. Now they are making people PAY for this???

I understand they gotta make money. But couldn’t there be a compromise? Maybe a cheap option for the rest of us? There has to be some way that these things can be done without fleecing the authors!

Curiously, and apparently singularly, this blog post announcing this change has been closed to comments. Maybe I wasn’t the only one upset by paying so much for something that used to be free.

Giving Your Cat her Meds in liquid form

Any of my friends out there with cats, I just wanted to share this.

My wife and I have 2 older cats, both with medical difficulties: Cliff (age 10) is a diabetic and requires an insulin shot twice a day, along with checking his blood sugar which is done with a poke to the ear with a little needle. He has been like this for a year, but otherwise he has been fine.

Stella (age 12) is dying.

She has cancer, was given about 30 days to live about 90 days ago. We have made peace with this and are just trying to make her final days as comfortable as possible. And to that end, we have been giving her Prednisone, a steroid, as prescribed by our vet. It has done wonders for her, almost to the point where we forget that she is sick. It has improved her appetite and her energy, and while on this she has even gained weight. We believe it has helped extend her life and made her much happier than when we first got the diagnosis.

But the reason I am writing this is the share something that we learned. While Stella is a very sweet kitty, she is terrible about taking pills. We were stymied by having to do battle with her twice a day for something that was supposed to make her feel better. On top of our other diabetic kitty, Stella’s obstinance was creating a real source of stress, especially at 3:45 in the morning when I am trying to get out the door.

So we asked our vet for help. And she gave us a solution: getting the medicine in a liquid form so we can more easily shoot it in her mouth. We were referred to something called a compounding pharmacy, which we’d never heard of before.

Her meds are now easy to give to her in the morning, as all I have to do is pick her up while my wife shoots the dropped into her mouth. If one of us is not there, it is possible to do it alone. Either way, it is so much easier and Stella continues to do well under the circumstances.

We hope to have a few more months of a healthy Stella. But I just wanted to pass long that information for anyone out there having trouble. Here is a link to the Veterinary Pharmacies of America site, which can help you find a compounding pharmacy in your area.

Hope this helps someone!

http://www.vparx.com

Today's the Day! Pain Center: the Novel! is out!!!

Many years from now, when people ask you, "Where were you on April 4, 2017, when Pain Center: the Novel! was released?" what will you tell them?
Pain.
Lost Love.
Betrayal.
And most importantly…
Coffee.
When Kyle's headaches drive him to seek the help of the Hartsburg Holistic Pain Center for Hartsburgers with Holistic Pain, he is reunited with a lost love from his youth. But what is the deal with his roommate with the stuffed animal that he uses to take notes after his midnight treks? Why do they make the patients do jumping jacks and pottery? And why do they force them to eat bean bowls and abstain from coffee? As he begins to question his situation, he soon finds that there is a deeper conspiracy that will rock the coffee loving town below...


PAIN CENTER: THE NOVEL!!!, By David G. Cookson!
Available through my web page:
http://davecookson.tripod.com/PainCentertheNovel.html,
atomic books in Baltimore,
Quimby's Bookstore (Chicago area only, for now)
or through the good, old fashioned US Postal Service, by sending 8 US dollars to :

David Cookson
PO Box 23568
Baltimore, MD
21203.

There, I hope you seek it out at one of these fine establishments, more to be added in the future. This is a good book, I hope you check it out!

Pain Center: the Novel! Available April 4th!!!

Pain. Lost love. Betrayal. And most importantly...Coffee. Pain Center, the Novel!, the new book from David G. Cookson, Available April 4th.

Last Call at a place where I think Bill knew my name....

A week ago I heard the news that Dougherty’s Pub was closing its doors, after 30 plus years in business. I worked there for ten years, years of my life that I count among the best. It’s not an exaggeration or some teary eyed thing to say just because it’s all now coming to an end. It’s because of what the Pub meant to me that my heart continues to hurt days after hearing the news and will no doubt hurt long after it is all finally gone and the doors close early Sunday morning.

I first came into the Pub about 20 years ago with a girlfriend. Before even ordering food, before even getting a drink, I said, “Let’s come here when we don’t know where else to go.” Which, in retrospect probably sums up my feeling toward the place that had become my second home. There was no place anywhere outside of my home that I felt more comfortable. The vibe, the simplicity, the good feelings that came from here; the Pub was a lot of things to a lot of people. When I got hired in 2000, it was kind of an off-handed transaction, the kind that would typify the next ten years there. No applications, no rigorous background checks: if you were a friend of someone who worked there, you were okay. When you came there, you were already family. If you knew somebody, you had a chance to be part of something, to work in a place that would keep you as long as you needed it, as long as you did your part and tried your best.

Bill and his family supported me in times of need. I can’t count the number of times when he came through for me in some way, as a boss or as a friend. It was the best feeling in the world to know that someone had my back. The Pub was truly a special place, where artists, musicians, black, white, Latino, Latina, construction workers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, soldiers, bureaucrats, students, and countless others could come together and eat and drink in peace. It was truly unique: a melting pot of Baltimore, once praised by The Baltimore City Paper as the Best Place where White and Black Baltimore Meet. I was always proud of that fact, that it was a place where everyone could go, where everyone could feel comfortable, no matter who they were. It was a neighborhood bar that was not really in a neighborhood, somewhere in that nether region between Mount Vernon, Martin Luther King Boulevard, and the Cultural District. This was the Pub that Never Changed. Even 4 days before it closes its doors and I enjoy it for one of the last times, it is still the same Pub that I remember.

I will always love this place. And now we say good bye. I already miss you.

A belated Review of Jonathan Ames' "The Extra Man."

The Extra Man by Jonathan Ames
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the hell out of this book, but I failed to review it before returning it to the library. Alas, this Jonathan Ames...all right, let's call it a classic...is by far one of the funniest books I've read all year. As my recent reading of My Less than Secret Life informs me, this book is not far from the embarrassing truth of Ames' reality. His character is a young man who fancies himself as a young Gentleman in the tradition of an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. He moves to New York City in the early 90's with a roommate who is easily 3 times his age, though his real age is kept a mystery to the young man. The old man spends his days dancing to old records and his nights being taken out by even older ladies. They use him as an "extra man," a man to escort them out to the theater and dinner and the like. It is via this route and some very clever workarounds that the man is able to experience the finer things in life without actually having any money to spend on them.
The young man learns his ways, while living his own somewhat shameful secret life, filled with illicit encounters with prostitutes and transsexuals. It is a life he keeps from the old man even while he grows to love him as a friend and a mentor. It's kind of sweet in a very ridiculous way. It is what one might now call a "Bromance."
As with everything I've read from Ames so far, I laughed my ass off the whole time. I believe Ames is in the category of "love him or hate him." I have already written before about admiring his honesty. The fact that he can get so detailed about the things that he writes about, even when they come off as embarrassing, humbles me as a writer. There are stories and things that I do not tell because I do not have it in me to bear my soul the way he does. I believe he is a stronger writer for doing so. The Extra Man is a great place for anyone to start to see if they agree.

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A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer. A review.

A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling True Story of the S-Bahn Murderer by Scott Andrew Selby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A relatively brief (262 pages) but fascinating true story of a not-very-well-known piece of Nazi history: the story of Paul Ogorzow, a railroad employee who derived pleasure from the killing of women during the late thirties/early forties in the heart of Berlin and the Nazi empire. His preferred M.O : bashing women over the head with a heavy object on the S-Bahn train, then throwing their bodies off in between stops. This all happened in darkness under the cover of the government enforced blackout (a way to make it hard for enemy planes to find their targets at night).
On his trail is Inspector Wilhelm Ludke. While nominally a Nazi party member, he actually feels a deep commitment to law and order, and is frustrated by the lack of help he gets from the upper reaches of the Party, who do not wish to appear weak due to the presence of a serial killer in their midst….
It is a fascinating story, against the backdrop of wartime Berlin during the Nazi regime. While the evil and “ethically challenged” leaders are busy trying to dominate the world, there were still normal everyday people who were trying to get back and forth to work, who live in fear due to the actions of one man wielding a blunt object, invisible in the darkness. While the Holocaust and Nazism represented a systemic evil, the personal level at which Ozgorow’s actions affect regular people are no less frightening and evil.
If the author ever gets bogged down in descriptions and details (why it is called the S-Bahn, the purpose of blackouts, etc.), it is only briefly. How Ozgorow is ultimately caught proves to be a breathtaking narrative, and a tribute to those who choose law and justice even when it was not the first priority of the Reich.


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My Less Than Secret Life: A review

My Less Than Secret Life: A Diary, Fiction, Essays by Jonathan Ames
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ames’ best and worst quality is his honesty. His absolute, brutal, not-afraid-to-embarrass-himself honesty. He vocalizes thoughts that most of us keep private, which probably should be kept private. While some may look at his many adventures with transvestites/transsexuals and his stories about pooping and nose picking and masturbation as being somewhat vulgar and unnecessary, at least you can say that he is not full of shit. He is far too open to be considered shady or dishonest.
And for me, at least, this works.
My Less than Secret Life is a compilation of much of his late ‘90s/early 2000’s work. It’s a hodgepodge of essays, short stories, letters, what have you, that serve as a very complete (some might think overly complete) picture of the author as a middle aged man.
As with any such compilation, some of it works and some of it doesn’t. I believe the two strongest pieces are the one about how two chapters of his novel were stolen in an elaborate plot by a misguided friend, and the one about visiting a porno movie set with his father. Both stories are riveting, wickedly funny accounts of things that just don’t happen to most people.
In fact, these things and many other things he writes about, including his training for and participating in a boxing match with a stage performer, just don’t happen to anyone. Yet these things happen to Ames on a regular basis. And for the most part, he welcomes the adventure. Because as a true creative non-fiction writer, in the tradition of hunter Thompson and Hemingway, Ames throws himself into the story, to hilarious effect.
I loved most everything about this book: I can’t even count the number of times I laughed out loud at something I’d read. This is a great lead-in to Ames’ fiction (read The Extra Man!), which, as this book shows, isn’t very far from the truth.
#JonathanAmes





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I am a baseball fan of the game of baseball: a random personal history of how I got from being a young and confused New England kid to being a huge fan of a team in a town where I hadn’t grown up…

The Triangulation.

I grew up in Pittsfield Massachusetts, which in the eyes of most sports fans should place me as a Boston Red Sox fan. But Massachusetts is a bigger place than most people would assume. Often when people ask me “how far is Pittsfield from Boston?” I say “about 2 and a half hours or as far as you can get without actually leaving the state.” For while in fact the word “Massachusetts” would indicate that my loyalty should be to the home state, in actuality my region of the state was/is a triangulation of 3 separate TV markets, covering 3 separate teams: the aforementioned Boston Red Sox, the New York Yankees, and (if you really hate the Yankees but can’t stand rooting for the Sox) the New York Mets, the one New York team (in any sport) I couldn’t hate if I tried. Growing up in the 80’s, way before ESPN and MLB started dominating the baseball airwaves, I had The Boston Red Sox on WSBK out of Boston, the New York Yankees on WPIX out of New York, and The New York Mets out of WWOR, Secaucus, New Jersey. Realistically, I had a legitimate claim on any one of these teams as “home town” teams, since they were brought to my living room in equal measure. I mostly gravitated to the Sox and the Mets, since I didn’t care too much for the Yankees and they were terrible in the 80’s anyway.

Fair Weather Fan.

Growing up, I was a classic fair weather fan. My reasons for liking teams usually had to do with players I liked, or teams that were doing well.

The first year I started watching baseball was 1984, (the year after the Baltimore Orioles last won the World Series). I had a sticker book of 1983, which required me to buy sets of stickers that fit into that book into the appropriate slots. The packets of stickers were about 60 cents each and contained about 6 stickers with either a baseball player or a baseball scene from that year. Because that sticker book was my obsession that summer, I will always remember a few random things, like that Rick Dempsey was the 1983 World Series MVP, and that the Kansas City Royals finished at an 81-81 record.

But I had no one team I favored. I liked Dale Murphy, so I liked the Braves. I liked Carlton Fisk, who was playing for the White Sox. That year, I watched my first World Series, and I liked the Tigers, who beat the Padres in 5 games (it really was no contest, as that team was a powerhouse that year). The next year, Kansas City won it all, and I for whatever reason started wearing a Royals hat (that was ill-advised). I even rooted for the A’s the year they got beat by Kirk Gibson’s walk-off homerun in Game one of 1988…for a very limited time, at one point or another I had a different favorite team, possibly because I had yet to discover things like team loyalty and hometown pride or the nobility in suffering (like Cubs fans or the Red Sox fans of those days did). I was just a kid who didn’t know any better back then.

1986

But my one true year as a semi-devoted fan of any one particular team was 1986, when I fully backed my “native” Boston (“about 2 and a half hours or as far as you can get without actually leaving the state”) Red Sox…except when I was watching my equally native New York Mets, who were also quite good that year.

Boston had Dwight Evans, Rich Gedman, Roger Clemens, Calvin Shiraldi, Jim Rice, Bill Buckner, and a host of other people I can’t remember off the top of my head. The Mets had Wally Joyner, Len Dykstra, Ray Knight, Howard Johnson, Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, Gary Carter, Tim Teufel (of the “Tuefel Shuffle”) George Foster, Mookie Wilson, all managed by Davey Johnson, one of the best managers in baseball…come to think of it, it’s possible I remember more about the Mets than the Sox… (I’m trying to write this without googling: these are just the names I remember…) 1986 was a great year for my dual fandom of these teams, as I pulled for and followed them all year as they began their collision course with one another in that classic World Series. I had to pick a side: I chose the Sox…those of us who were alive and conscious during the 80’s know exactly how that one worked out…

I didn’t actually see the ball go through Buckner’s legs; it all happened past my bedtime (I was 10). My dad told me about it the next morning, in kind of a foggy and confused way that lots of Sox fans felt the next morning. I probably didn’t feel it as intensely as other new Englanders. But when I watched Game 7 and my favorite relief pitcher that year, Calvin Shiraldi, got hammered by the Mets (I don’t actually know what happened, this is just how I remember it), my heart sank as surely as if I’d actually seen that ball go through Buckner’s legs. (My adult self knows what an overhyped error this was. But it will unfairly go down in the annals of scapegoating, along with the Bartman play of 2003. Please, Chicago, forgive that man. Alou would’ve never caught that thing anyway!)

Anyway, after that year I kind of lost interest in the Sox. I just wasn’t as committed as I thought I was. Other than my year I followed the Athletics in ’88, I moved on to other things, namely music and playing the drums in little band called Lampstand. I didn’t watch sports at all for almost 6 years…

Baltimore.

And the next thing you know, I grew up and moved to Baltimore. Where, as it turned out, my love of baseball was restored…

It didn’t happen right away. I moved during the ’94 strike year. I was 18. But sometime during the 1995 season, when some guy named Ripken was making his run toward history, playing in a record 2131 consecutive games, I worked at a deli that was about a half block away from the celebratory parade route for Mr. Ripken, which we were allowed to skip out of work to attend. The next years the team went on two exciting playoff runs that united the city behind them. Suddenly they were the most important thing going. It was during that period right before the Ravens came to town and took primary ownership of the sports attention in Baltimore. In ’97, when the O’s went wire to wire, I remember being in a math class at my Community College, in another Game 6…people running out every other few minutes to check on the score (if this were today, I could have just followed along on my phone). And…the O’s losing to Cleveland in a heartbreaker…

Unlike those games of ten years earlier, this was in my city, my beautiful adopted home city, one I was proud to call home. I moved for my own reasons, but one of which was to be my own person, to assert my independence in a new place where things were fresh and exciting to me. I’ve always seen Baltimore with outsider’s eyes, and I’ve always felt like this was a gift. I love the people, the neighborhoods, the great many things to do, the fact that even now after 20 years I still discover new parks and parts of town I never knew existed, and even more, I love my teams. And while I have learned to love my Ravens (2 Super Bowls makes it easy), I love my Orioles just a little bit more…

The Dark Years.

Yeah, any O’s fan remembers the years between 1998 and 2011. We sucked. Gotta own it: if I refer to an Orioles win by saying “We Won!” I also have to be able to say “We lost.” after a loss. We sucked. Really, really, really, fucking sucked.

This team certainly spent a lot of time punishing me for turning my back on what should have been my childhood team. Watching the Red Sox win 3 World Championships may seem like punishment for not sticking with them. But at the same time, I am not that person anymore. I could no more call myself a Red Sox fan than I could stop breathing or singing in the shower or yelling “moo!” at cows on the side of the road, or yelling “puppy!” whenever I see a puppy. It’s just not me.

Even the Dark Years had their moments. I actually attended my first big league game in 1998. It was the O’s vs the Chicago White Sox, Mark Buehrle was pitching and I think Jose Canseco was still playing. I know that we lost. But I had so much fun going, I kind of didn’t care. My buddy’s dad took a group of us, bought us beers, and as we sat out on beautiful night of mediocre baseball, he seriously questioned why we’d all never done this before?

I really didn’t have an answer for that. But if it had taken me 23 years to finally make it to a big league game, I certainly have made up for that in the years since…

But these were the Dark years of multiple managers and ownership interference and stupid decisions and Albert Belle and losing Mike Mussina and a cover article in a national sports magazine detailing how bad and poorly mismanaged my team was. Things were so bad that a grass roots fan protest was organized: there was a mass walkout during a game, to protest the poor team play and the poor management that had led us into this horrible stretch. I wasn’t a part of that, but I wanted to be.

2012. Buck, and Why I continue to love baseball and the O’s.

Then Buck happened.

Buck Showalter taking over this team at the end of 2010 was the beginning of a sea change in Baltimore. After many years of many different managers, it finally looked like the ownership was getting serious when they hired Buck. The newspaper began printing the O’s record under Buck. And even though it was way late in the season and we were way out of the pennant race, Buck gave us reason to talk about the O’s.

My wife and I love Buck. We watch his press conferences, laugh at his gentle humor; bask in the glow of his simple wisdom. Buck gives us our little moment of Zen, every day. Nothing makes us feel better after a loss than listening to his long-view take on everything. And nothing grounds me more as a fan after a win then understanding his long-view. Baseball is a long season, 162 games a year. One win or win loss isn’t then end of the world, nor is it a reason to think too much of yourself. No matter what, Buck is in charge, and any success the team achieves is surely the result of his leadership, something we had lacked for so many years. One day there will be a statue of him out there past left/centerfield. I just know it.

Then the curse of the Andino happened.

Another major event involving the Boston Red Sox that I didn’t actually see. This was still during what can be considered the Dark Years. I only actually read about it on Facebook, and in spite of my lagging interest in my adopted home team, I at last was able to express pride in them for knocking out the Red Sox on the last day of the 2011 season. The Red Sox, a team whose fans had been invading our stadium for years and possibly edging out traveling New Yorkers for the title of Most Obnoxious Visiting Fans.

(SIDEBAR SOAPBOX: I have nothing against visiting fans. I have been one myself. I have made friends with visiting fans, most notably a very nice group of Detroiters, as well as we have made fans in other cities—San Diegans and Houstonians were all very nice. But when I visit another stadium, I am respectful of my place as a visitor. When I am in another city to see a game, I never refer to it as an “Orioles game”: If we are at an Orioles game played in San Francisco, it is a Giants game; if in Houston, it is an Astros game. To refer to another’s stadium as simply being the site of an “Orioles game” is disrespectful. You are a guest in that city: be polite. While I will cheer loudly for my team when they do something good, I do not smack talk the home team. I also do not lead cheers. In short, I am not an asshole. END OF SIDEBAR SOAPBOX.)

Then 2012 happened.

A magical run that turned my casual but steady fandom of this team into a full on obsession. Just before that season, my wife, who had possibly looked at my devotion to this team with loving but benign detachment, got on board. This was completely her idea and was not done with any coaxing from me and I love her for it. Suddenly she amassed a wealth of knowledge about all the Orioles personal stories, following them on Twitter and keeping up with up and coming stars. Whereas at one time I was driving the bus of the hopeless Oriole trip, now I have a partner in crime who rides with me and knows more about it than I do.

We followed that run all the way to the end. We had tickets and we endured the rain of the first two playoff games at home, yelled our heads off when we won Game 2; then we watched into the wee hours on TV, and even after finally losing to the Yankees in 5 games, I couldn’t help but be proud of my team, and their turnaround.

Now when I go to the home games and see the little Orioles highlight package of the last 60 years, culminating with the footage of the team celebrating on the field after the Wild Card win against Texas and the announcer saying “And the magical run of the Baltimore Orioles continues...” sometimes I have to stop myself from shedding a tear…

And Now…

I have met Orioles, gotten autographs, been interviewed by the TV news, travelled to other stadiums to follow the team, watched the standings, become the go-to guy at work for the answer to questions like "did we win last night?" and "who are we playing today?"…it is important to me in a way that is hard to explain to a non fan. Non fans can say “It’s just a game.” They are free to say that. But if it’s just a game, then it is a game that fills me with joy and exhilaration and dread and heartache and happiness and hope and pride and love. In short: all the things that make up life. The world is a fucked up place full of horrible things and assholes and unpleasantness and problems too big for me to make one damn bit of difference about. But baseball is solid, concrete, and in my view, one of the best diversions ever known to man. If I choose to care about this diversion, I at least keep my sanity and do not give in to the despair of the world.

Pride in a city, pride in a team, and an unwavering faith that one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) a team that I love will make it to the Promised Land have taken me full circle in my life as a baseball fan. While I have always followed the game, it has meant different things to me at different points in my life, and this is what it means now: a little pride, a little faith and a lot of love.

I have been a baseball fan all my life, an Orioles fan for 20 years. Rain or shine, good year or bad: that is what I am. I hope it all makes sense to you but I understand if it doesn’t.

Thank you for reading my words today.

July, 2014.



NOTES:
Things the non-hardcore baseball fan might need to know to understand some of my references:
1. The ball going through Buckner’s legs refers to a play in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. In extra innings, with a runner on second and the game tied, Mookie Wilson hit a weak ground ball down the first base side, which should have been an easy play for first baseman Bill Buckner, only it went just under his glove and into shallow right field, bringing home Ray Knight, the winning run from third base.


2. “The Bartman play” refers to a foul ball hit with one out in the 8th inning of Game 6 of the National League Championship, Chicago Cubs against the Florida Marlins in 2003. While several fans went for the ball, the unlucky young Steve Bartman was the one whose hand actually tipped the ball preventing any possibility of a catch by the left fielder. Failure to make this out led the Marlins to a huge rally to overcome the Cubs, win the game, force a Game 7, resulting in the Marlins going to the World Series, which they won. There is a GREAT movie about this called “Catching Hell,” which you can probably find on Netflix. Here is a clip of the play.

How to Become a Famous Writer...a review

How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights by Ariel Gore

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But Dave…you are a writer! Yeah…but I’m not a famous writer. I have to admit, the sheer brazen nature of this book appealed to me. The act of self-promotion requires an incredible amount of confidence--or at least the great ability to fake it. In this book, author Ariel Gore advocates all manner of self-promotion and creativity in the attempt to make a name for yourself. In many ways, this could serve as a companion piece to my other favorite book about writing, No Plot, No Problem, by the founder of National Novel Writing Month, Chris Baty, which also advocates plowing ahead beyond self-doubt to do the wonderfully ridiculous act of writing a 50 thousand word novel in 30 days. The best advice any writer can ever get is simply to write. Write every day. Write even when you don’t feel like it.

Ariel Gore starts the book with a powerful hook: a letter from a friend, who wants her help in the quest to become a famous writer. Gore says she will help her, that they should meet and have coffee and talk about how she can help her become a literary superstar. But of course, life gets in the way, and before they can ever get together to talk, her friend has a seizure and dies, at age 23. All the advice in this book is what she would have said to her if they had ever had that meeting.

The book itself is a rollicking run through the craft of writing and self-promoting, and is an inspirational tribute to her friend, the writer. It is less of a step by step/how to manual and more of a motivational piece--though, to be sure, there is a lot of solid advice here, and many things I might have never thought of--such as why a large advance is not necessarily a good thing or why you shouldn’t change your name or why you should be nice to interns.

I recommend this to any writer who needs a kick in the butt, or anyone who just needs to be reminded that all art is worth the struggle.


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My Gentle Plug for Others to Join Me on Next Month’s Quest.

I always introduce myself as a writer and sort-of musician, and now I add to that, a ramp agent. And as a writer, sort of musician, and ramp agent who writes about being a ramp agent, I am going to use my little forum to invite anyone interested to do something that I have been doing for the last 2 years.

The National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is an event that is now in its 12th year. It is a fun exercise in what founder Chris Baty calls “exuberant imperfection,” or in other words, writing a 50 thousand word novel in only 30 days--during the month of November. More info here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/whatisnano

It’s hard, it’s messy, it seems impossible. But it is possible, and what’s more, it is so much fun that I can’t possibly imagine ever going a year without doing it.

November is already my favorite month of the year, with my birthday (the 19th!), football season, the leaves changing, Thanksgiving (along with the Fourth of July, my favorite holiday), and add to that the 30 day sprint to 50 thousand words. And I’m especially excited for this year, because my new job has introduced me to so many people and so many new situations (as my lovely wife said it would when she encouraged me to take this job!) that I think I have a whole new well of inspiration to draw from.

The first year I did it, I came up with the book I called The Best of Thunder Johnson, a story about a cable access employee who accidentally broadcasts a porno movie over the air and then becomes the focus of a disturbed mental patient’s rage. It was fun, it was inspired, and overall I am happy with the final result. It is a story that would never have been possible had I not put forth the effort to write so much in so little time, even if the original product was a complete mess.

I encourage anyone out there to try this with me. You say you don’t have time, that no one can possibly do a good job on a novel in such a short time? That’s half the point! It’s actually more fun to do things like this when you have less time. Because that way, the time you spend writing becomes sacred, and more meaningful, and dare I say, more meditative. It creates a break from the busy world you inhabit. And besides, sleep is overrated.
So do this with me: write a novel. Be my writing buddy! Writing starts November 1!

Update: request for new trial to fight unfairly high parking fine!

Still trying to fight the $102 parking fine, on the basis that it is unfairly high. They gave me a trial date that I couldn't make. I requested a new date. This is their letter in response:

They usually make it so that it is too difficult to even bother fighting. They assume that most people have day jobs and that they won't bother losing pay to fight the ticket. Not me: I plan to be a big pain in the ass to Baltimore City, who makes her residents put up with a lot of shit in this area. Is the penalty for parking ever worth $102 dollars? Does the punishment fit the crime?
I don't think so.