Second chances

 

I’m not going to mention my barber’s fee, which is a special fee just for me, or so she says. She also tells me she is not a barber, she is a hair stylist; I tell her I am a man, and real men do not go to hair stylists; she tells me I must be older than I look, or I wouldn’t say that. Whatever. Suffice it to say that, for the price of one visit here, I could drink enough beer to kill 1 million brain cells. Of course there are more efficient ways to dispose of a bunch of neurons.

Here I am, in Bangkok traffic, sitting on the back of a motorcycle taxi, telling myself, yet again, that I should remember never to find myself sitting on motorcycle taxis in Bangok traffic. My driver’s spare brainbucket hangs from the side of our vehicle, it being too small for my head. Anyway, the strap’s broken, not to mention the helmet is shocking pink. Whatever. Right away, I can see my driver has little or no depth perception. Given the way he leans the wrong way into corners—maybe a series of stylish attempts to lay the bike flat on the road—he might suffer an inner-ear infection as well. From the outset he keeps seeing holes among the contending currents of traffic, holes that no one else—especially me, what with my eyes closed in terror—can see. Never mind his apparent death wish, I can only conclude he’s either the unluckiest attemptive suicide in the world, or else he knows something the rest of us do not. Perhaps it’s due to some understanding on his part of extra-dimensional physics that we don’t have a head-on collision with any of these cars, trucks, buses, tuk-tuks or other motorcycles.

Big surprise—we actually get to the printer. But it’s closed. So what do I do? I suggest he takes me back to a noodleshop on my soi, my sub-street, thereby indicating serious brain damage on my own part even if we have avoided leaving my brains smeared across the road.

Never mind. The media flavor of the month is neural “plasticity" (more). Back when, in the Stone Age of behavioral psychology, we were told with confidence that, after the age of 15, our neurons started popping off at the rate of about one a second. I was never really able to relax and enjoy life after watching one prominent scientist standing there at the podium telling us this while she snapped her fingers, counting off the death of our brain cells. That was about the same time I discovered booze and the fact that sufficient quantities of this substance could erase the fear of steady neural attrition at the same time, sufficiently applied, it could erase millions and millions more cells, hopefully the ones in charge of keeping you anxious about such matters.

But good news! Current wisdom says this steady and inevitable brain death is not a fact of life, and that freelance writers and other confirmed piss-artists get another shot at sentience. That’s right. Brain cells regenerate, in some uncertain way and at some uncertain rate. I’m actually hoping that they regenerate faster than Dr. Donald Hebb, the behavioral psychologist, claimed they died by natural attrition, or else, by my own calculations, I’ll have to live 2,700,000 years to regenerate what I lose in a year, at a very conservative estimate of 1 million cells per booze-up at the rate of 2 per week, or around 700 per year, given that there are nearly 2 trillion seconds in a year, and that’s only if I stop boozing now.

I’ve just read over that last paragraph, and it confuses me, which is no more than one should expect given the fact that I’ve been drinking too much twice a week all my adult life. … Wait a minute—if there are really nearly 2 trillion seconds in a year, and my neurons had been dying at the rate of 1 per second, I should have run out of brain cells long ago. … What’s that you say? … Ha, ha. Anyway, I’m a writer, not a mathematician.

I could really use a beer.

Secret of success: Round tuits.

My brand-new blog has already drawn comment. Someone wants to know who I am. Here’s the short version:

I’m 32 years old and I’ve got no wife, no kids, no car, no DVD player, no TV, no hot water, no insurance policy, no pension plan, not enough sense not to be a freelance writer, and lots more besides. Some people call me Jack the Hack, and so can you, if you want.

I’m doing okay as a freelance writer, although of course I speak in relative terms, and doing okay at this game does not entail security for the future, much less fast cars and fast women. Sitting here at my tripewriter.

How did this happen? One day I’m sitting there with a beer, a callow youth, wondering what I’ll do when I grow up. The next thing I know, I’m sitting here going prematurely gray and stupid and still wondering what I’ll do when I grow up. I’m busy as can be churning out millions of words written on the wind, and some would say that’s a waste of wind, watching the prance of brochure copy across the page, serving up florid blandishments for commercial hucksters with a fine contempt for the meaning of words.

It’s hard to tell, just looking at me, that I’m secretly the author of a pile of deathless prose that only awaits my getting a round tuit. I only hope I don’t spend the rest of my life singing this same song, and that I actually somehow find the formula that allows me to churn out a bunch of fiction at the same time I’m having a good time and eating and not dying poor and everything. The real secret is acquiring a round tuit. With one of these items, there’s no limit to what I might not accomplish.

I am a foreign correspondent and a columnist. I’m a writer and I’m a freelance journalist. I have seven pen-names, and in fact I’m a hack, a two-bit panderer to any passing proposition. I am a full-fledged author, my life-long ambition, never mind I never have time to write anything. Not only that, but I’m practically a celebrity. Probably a dozen people have heard of me already, and one of them was a cute girl who looked at me kind of funny. Maybe she was a groupie.

Retirement plans.

The other day I was talking to Collin Piprell, who was buying up web domain names, the latest plan to keep a roof over his head in his old age. He says it started with him shopping for a few websites to promote his new books. It turns out that there are a lot of people way ahead of him on the keeping-a-roof-over-your-head front, and most of his best candidates were unavailable.

It’s amazing, he says. Www.psychedeli.com--“psychedeli” is something he coins in his sci-fi novel The Proteant Enigmass--was already in the hands of some entrepreneur. As were www.cognitech.com, www.inneradventures.com (article written years ago for Action Asia), and www.worlds-unlimited.com (used in MOM). But he tells me he has bought www.proteant.com, magifactory, themagifactory, agodisborn, a-god-is-born, and Worlds-UnLtd. Though he didn’t say exactly why. Www.collinpiprell.com/ was available, though that didn’t surprise him, and he snapped it right up.

“How is this different from what these other people are doing?” I ask.

“It isn’t the same at all,” he says. “I need these names for my books.”

I still don’t know what he’s talking about.

“The gone goodies,” he tells me, “include worlding, worlders, worldsgate, biologic, and magic-circle. The bastids.” He laughs, sort of, and he says, “Not the last one—that’s no domain name; it’s only rhetoric.” He’s got his laptop right there in the beer and cigarette ash on the table in front of him at the Rising Son, and the next thing I hear is: “Whoa! Guess what? www.bastids.com is available. I’m going to buy that one and www.friggingreedybastids.com too.”

Look ahead a few years: what are writers going to use for language? What Collin figures, and he could be right, is that soon these magpies are going to have registered every word and phrase that exists, as well as all those that ever could exist, as domain names. And how is a writer supposed to coin shiny new turns of phrase, if everything there is or could be has already been hoarded away with a price tag attached? Writing a book is going to cost big bucks, if the writer has to buy all his bon mots from domain moguls. And what about new IT or bioengineering companies? They’ll have to spend much of their start-up capital on web-domain and product names.

Collin pokes around some more on a site he calls godaddy.com and he says this: “Guess what. ‘Bastards’ and ‘greedybastards’ are already gone. Can you believe it? There’s a story in this somewhere. Hey, but ‘greedysonsofbitches’ is available, and if I were you I’d buy it immediately.”

Ha, ha. First I’ve got to buy lunch. Tomorrow too, I hope.

“By the way,” he tells me, “ ‘jackthehack.com’ is gone as well.” Like I care. “Freelunch” is gone as well, he says. Free Lunch is the name of the novel I’m writing, or not writing, as the case may be.) So I propose www.jacksjunkets.com.

Alliteration is always good, he answers me.