harold redux

I wish I knew who drew this - as usual, I can't find the provenance of it. Thank you, whoever you are, this gives me joy.

Harold walking along the beach at the estate of William Randolph Hearst.

A curiosity, in which a makeup artist transforms himself (supposedly) into various celebrities, including Harold who does some fancy moves.

Harold had superb balance,coordination and reflexes. And it's a good thing. The drop wasn't as extreme as it looks, but he still could have fallen six feet and hurt himself.

Facebook: "I have so many friends, I'm SWAMPED!"

Actual Facebook post from an actual Facebook friend, actually read by me this morning.

"What is going on with FACEBOOK? I'm getting inundated with "friend" requests. If you have referred someone to my page and I've declined, I apologize BUT I only have just over 200 "slots" left. Please invite your friends to follow my FB page, "like" my Watchdogz page, and check out for my website which is coming out late next month. They can also view my book trailer (please repost the link). Thanks to the many authors who have connected with me and lent me some good advice, shown me some phenomenal reading material, and have been "friends." I hope you will continue on this journey with me."

For reasons that have to do with self-preservation only, I will withhold the name of the person who wrote this Facebook post. But I think it's a brilliant example of casual, tossed-off narcissism expressed as irritation: oh, those pesky fans of mine! Why must they overwhelm me with their petty requests to be my friend? As if they think they are close enough to my lofty status to "friend" me. I'm almost at the 3000 upper limit, for God's sake. Have they no manners? Don't they realize that the last 200 friend "slots" must be filled by people I love, cherish and see face-to-face every day (just like the other 2800), not to mention people who are good for my career? I have forgotten how to refuse friend requests, by the way, which gives me a very good excuse to complain about it here.

But then comes the topper. This whiny  post which is so disdainful and even contemptuous of her fans then switches to blatant advertising for her new web site and her books. Then her tone seems to miraculously settle down, maybe because this message has been sent out in one form or another about 50,000 times. Having prepared the ground by letting everyone know what a literary superstar she is, she then moves in for the kill.

I see this sort of thing all the time on FB: sometimes phony irritation about those pesky people who debase themselves with abject adulation, sometimes phony humility ("I don't know how this ever happened - it seems impossible - I know I probably don't deserve it - but GUESS WHAT, guys! I just won the Giller Prize. Yippee!"). One strange one I saw went sort of like, "I hate having to do this - it just tortures me every day, but I HAVE to do it, it's part of a writer's burden. My publisher insists that I promote myself, so it's not my fault. They insist I talk about the, no, I won't say it,that I announce to everyone, not that I want to, my nomination for the Gasbag Award for 2015."

There are twists of double, triple and quadruple meaning here, all of them veiling a narcissism that causes a level of nausea in me equivalent to spraying an entire can of Reddi-Whip in my mouth at once. Nobody's straight about it. The petty foot-stomping over all those presumptuous fans is the worst, but I've also seen things like, "I apologize to all my friends in advance. I'll be taking some time off Facebook for some much-need R & R. Be back in an hour." One went, "My email is down and is going to be down for the next half-hour. Please message me on FB - not all at once, please, I can't possibly get through them all! - or email my overflow email, or my overflow-overflow email, or just sit there and miss me for half an hour. Or better yet, go on my fan page or buy my book on Amazon and give me five stars. OK?"

The published authors are snooty, the "famous" published authors who actually have an income are astonishingly, headshakingly vain and narcissistic. I don't know how many times I've seen links to artlcles such as, "Why it's so heartbreaking to fail as a writer," which consists of a few paragraphs about what it's like to be hopeless loser who never gets anywhere because they don't know what the hell they are doing. Then comes the REAL article: how I beat the curse of being a hopeless loser and got a $250,000.00 advance on my next novel that isn't even written yet. So what the hell is going on here? "Yes, OK, I know how it must feel to be a total failure, happens to the best of us, and it might even have happened to ME, except, you see, I know what the hell I'm doing. And you don't."

Say what you mean, people. If you're a failure, poop it out. If you're successful, march around with a banner. Just don't be so goddamn devious, please - you are making me sick.


Post-blog blob. Just thought of something that happened quite a few years ago at a writer's workshop. A novelist, best-selling by Canadian standards - i. e. a few thousand copies - was telling us all about the perils of fame, and what a nuisance her fans can be. She told us a story to illustrate this. After doing a reading from her latest best-selling novel featuring a dysfunctional Canadian family living on a broken-down prairie wheat farm in the 1800s, with the mother giving birth to a stillborn baby in the barn, etc. etc., a fan came up to her and said, "I just wanted to tell you that your reading brought back all sorts of vivid memories for me. Your character Mac McMackintosh reminded me so much of my great-grandfather and his stories of the Great Grasshopper Plague of 1892." 

The author looked at us in horror with a sort of shrinking-back, dread-mixed-with-disgust body posture and said in a whiny voice, "I don't want to get involved with these people and their traumatic memories! I have nothing to do with their dysfunctional families! I don't want to hear about how my work triggered whatever-the-hell in them. That's none of my affair and they should know that." (Eye-roll, shrug)"Honestly." Composing herself, rearranging her poofy

hair and straightening her I-don't-really-need-these glasses: "Besides, it was crickets."

BLOG BADDA-BOOM! A follow-up to the follow-up to the quote from my anonymous friend's Facebook page. I am sure she has no idea of the staggering level of narcissism and entitlement expressed in her post. But it would be no fun without it!:

"Wow, this has been an eventful 24 hours. First of all, I have had to decline so many friend requests the past week as I have been swamped. Unfortunately, some people are not happy about this. I invite everyone to follow my FB page, "like" my Watchdogz page, and keep an eye out for my website which is coming out late next month. Facebook places a 5,000 person limit on "friends" and of course, we know this can be difficult. As of writing this message, I have 188 spots left and have been trying to carefully select people who I feel will genuinely be supportive to me as an author and will continue on this journey of my mystery/thriller adventures."

"Over the last couple of days, I have sadly lost a longtime "personal" friend who has accused me of "poaching" from his friend list to develop my own friends and demanded that I cancel them from my account. I value all of my FB friends and I have contacted each and everyone of the formerly (I have blocked him from my page) 60 mutual "friends," that we shared and advised them of the situation, inviting them to "unfriend" ME if THEY so desire. This individual is attempting to get me "banned" from Facebook and has launched a very vicious attack on my integrity. I would like to say, I value all of my friends, am responsive to their thoughts and comments and do not wish to intrude on people who think otherwise. Please feel free to "unfriend" me if you so choose (although, I hope you won't) as I am also feeling strained by people requesting to join my page that I have had to regrettably decline.

Phew! I thought, that I would enjoy my retirement and hopefully entertain some people with the stories (that my personal friends all know) I love to tell.

Blessings to all,

Narcisse A. Nonnee-Mousse

P.S. This is my book trailer: 

(removed by blogger)

You know, I have all those same problems, but I have decided to raise my maximum number of friends to 7 billion, thus taking in all those poor Third World souls who need my enlightenment. Sorry this is so long, I just had to include that last, noisome entry. The author, having been unfriended by me, now must scramble frantically for a replacement to top up her list. Such a hemorrhage! Oh well, she told me I could do it.

P. S. to the P. S.: This doesn't deserve a post on its own, but it's yet another example of "oh God, poor me, I'm in such pain because I just have SO many people reading my stuff!" It's backhanded narcissism, but what dismays me is how many likes and "oh, poor baby" comments she got on Facebook. Sharyn Wolf wrote some sort of memoir about being a shrink (!?) whose marriage broke up, and oh God, more than 250 (NOT 249, NOT 251, though it's likely up to 2500 by now) people sniped at her for writing such a shallow useless thing. ONE person said she liked it, but it was Cher, so it kind of negated all the criticisms. If you believe in love. . .

Sharyn Wolf Oh, sadly, this is true. I had more than 250 comments--a surprising fight between a bunch of people who thought I should be drawn and quartered against one kind soul who claimed that English teachers don't have to publish a novel to teach writing. I read an interview with Cher about a million years ago, where she said that with 50 great reviews, she only recollects the few horrid ones. I learned recently that we cling to those because our brain is velcro with the bad stuff and teflon to the good.

"You had me at hello"

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

What a good cat, what a smart cat, what a pretty cat

Real live girl. (Whistle) Real live girl. (Whistle)

 

(From a musical called Little Me, unknown.)

FRED

Pardon me, miss, but I've never done this
With a real live girl.

Straight off the farm with an actual arm

Full of real live girl.

Pardon me if your affectionate squeeze

Fogs up my glasses and buckles my knees,

I'm simply drowned in the sight and the sound

And the scent and the feel

Of a real live girl.

SOLDIERS

Nothing can beat getting swept off your feet

By a real live girl.

Dreams in your bunk don't compare with a hunk

Of a real live girl.

Speaking of miracles, this must be it;

Just when I started to learn how to knit.

I'm all in stitches from finding what riches

A waltz can reveal

With a real live girl.

[Whistle]

Real live girl.

[Whistle]

Real live girl.

I've seen photographs and facsimiles

That have set my head off in a whirl,

But no work of art gets you right in the heart

Like a real live girl.

Take your statues of Juno,

And the Venus de My-lo.

(Me-lo.)

When a fellow wants you-know,

(We know.)

Who wants substitutes? I'll o-

Verlook everyone in the book

For a real

Sexy Sally or Suzabel.

Take your Venetian or Roman or Grecian

Ideal,

I'll take something more "uzabel."

Girls were like fellas was once my belief;

What a reversal, and what a relief.

I'll take the flowering hat and the towering heel

And the squeal

Of a real live girl.

[Dance]

Real live girl.

[Dance]

Real live girl.

Go be a holdout for Helen of Troy,

I am a healthy American boy.

I'd rather gape at the dear little shape

Of the stern and the keel

Of a full-time vocational,

Full-operational

Girl.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Who let the goats out?

Sky Ladder: Wowsy-wow-WOW!

Oh deer: it's PORNOGRAPHY!

 

Yes, we're going bananas

Meow meow meow meow

 

Just a little diversion

Just a sweet little something to wash out your mouth after my bitter diatribe. Fuck 'em, I'm going to go walk in the woods.

The care and feeding of an Amazon author

Long ago, and oh so far away, I was a book reviewer. Books came out every season, and my editor

for whatever publication I was writing for (Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, etc.) would phone me and run some titles by me, or even send a few and let me pick. I did this for a shocking, disgraceful and deeply embarrassing 25 or 30 years, which I've been told I must take off my resume so it won't look "dated". But I loved the work and I suppose would have kept on with it.

I wonder what happened to it all.

Now it's slam, click, like, buy, gulp, consume, poop it out the other side, with normalized ADD as a laxative. More than ever, it's "product" like Dairy Queen soft-serve, only brown.

I got out of it, I had to, the last book nearly killed me because I didn't understand the language of barter: you give me five stars for MY book, I'll give you five stars for YOUR book, and neither one of us will have read the book because we're too busy turning out more slop and swill.

(The worst example of this was a published author who "friended" me, then immediately messaged me and said she had looked at my Amazon author page and noticed I "didn't have too many reviews". She said my work looked "great" and would love to rate it with five stars if I'd take a look at HER page, which "didn't have too many reviews" either, so maybe we could help each other. She said she'd try to take a closer look at my stuff - meaning, read it - if she had time. Her page had a sci-fi dragon/maiden-with-flaxen-hair/his-manhood-stood-erect series (oh, these endless SERIES - big sellers, I'm told) with approximately 200 reviews. OK then. The "unfriend" button is a Godsend sometimes.)

You can't say I didn't try, in fact I tried everything I could think of, but somehow the "everything" was always desperate, embarrassing and "wrong".  I just don't know the secret handshake, and as far as my self-esteem is concerned, I'm still being shunned on the playground because I just don't know how to do this. And PLEASE, don't anybody send me instructions, because that is not what I am talking about. 

Did I stop writing? I write for myself now, every single day, and it is intensely enjoyable, but I don't mean to show it to anyone. Ever. This is the only way I can maintain the purity of the experience and keep my sanity intact.

(A P. S. to the sci-fi dragon-lady story: she mentioned the name of a Hollywood producer who might be interested in looking at The Glass Character, deliberate catnip. I did a little research on this guy, and while he pretends to be a producer, he is a convicted felon who has never "produced" anything but a criminal record. If you're a serious writer, if there are any of you left out there, watch your back.)