Category Archives: essays

The Great Unfinished

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As I get older, I abandon more books than I finish. I grow increasingly less interested as the pages pile up. I surrender to distraction. I grow bored. I feel guilty about this, but I still do it, with a willingness that’s beginning to flirt with the cavalier.

I need two ingredients to stay in love enough with a book to keep reading. I am mostly talking about novels. The first is that I need there to be enough plot to pull me through. I respect postmodern metafictional hijinks. I respect the modernist fracturing of linear narrative to better reflect the multifarious and diffuse nature of consciousness, our “reality,” etc. But still I need a little bit of that what-happens-next razzle-dazzle to keep me going. I feel cheap admitting it, but it’s true. 

The second ingredient, perhaps even more important than the first, is I must enjoy the sound of the writer’s voice. This is both hard to define or defend. In theory the greatest of novelists could also be the greatest of actors, channeling multiple characters’ voices within one work. Do I have to like all of them equally? No. I just have to like the general grain of the voice, the beat of it, the pulse, the groove. I am grasping toward musical analogies. Perhaps I should switch to radio. I have to pick up their frequency. The signal they’re putting out into the world has to be retrievable by my readerly antenna. I can get through a novel with a strong plot where I don’t like the prose, but it’s difficult.

While my need for plot makes me feel cheap, my need for a certain radio frequency in the prose makes me feel like a snob. Does it have to be “good writing,” beautiful sentences? Well, I mean, it helps, but that’s not it precisely. Good writing is hopelessly contextual. The writing has to have a singular voice that I can hear. I have a friend who won’t listen to certain artists because he doesn’t like their guitar tone, and I think: is it really that important? But to some people, the sound is as important as the substance, is inextricable from the substance, the overall gestalt. This makes me feel slightly better about being a prose snob, if that’s what I am.

I know it’s potentially good for me to finish novels, but if it feels like a chore while not actually being a chore, then I don’t care enough — even if everyone on Substack is talking about it. Perhaps what I am missing in my reading is sufficient peer group pressure to finish that big new novel. Maybe I really should join a book group. I try to give a book a sufficient amount of time to woo me. I try for 100 pages. That feels like enough to get the gist, the vibe, the overall type of radio station that we’re dealing with. But sometimes I just don’t dig it. I can recognize the contours of its ambition, and quite often respect that ambition, but it’s just not for me, not my thing, and there are only so many hours in the day, so many years left in this life. There are books that are a slog but their sloggyness feels worthwhile because of some combination of voice and plot and, on a much more tertiary level, literary importance. Yes, I am obliquely referring to the oeuvre of Uncle Hank. 

When I do find a novel where I love the voice and the plot is snapping, and I am fully immersed in the book, it forms a congruent and beneficial atmosphere above my life that nourishes me the handful of days it takes me to finish it. There is almost no better feeling. It’s like a heightened form of being alive, while still secluded within one’s ongoing active life, carrying one’s own private Narnia around town. 

Part of this is simply personal idiosyncrasy. I don’t enjoy certain flavors of ice cream. Who cares? And yet it feels reckless to express that level of personal taste with respect to literature. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler: annoying as hell. The Violent Bear it Away: I prefer her stories. Paul Auster’s City of Glass: interminable. Perhaps this is all just residual collegiate guilt. I never did get that Ph.D. I never did become that Full Professor, in part because I can’t stand reading stuff I don’t actually like. I realize that part of adult life is making oneself do activities that one doesn’t actually want to do but which one needs to do for some reason. Paradoxically, my early adult failure to succeed in the career I daydreamed about has saved me from having to read a) books I don’t actually want to read and b) student writing. I accidentally freed myself from those two curses. I am no doubt more ignorant because of that refusal/loss of opportunity, but I’ve also read almost strictly for pleasure in the meantime, however I delude myself about my literariness along the way. This means that I’ve read scads of not immediately relevant prose, in terms of the floating decal that we call the Canon, or books that are currently in the discourse, or that otherwise would make me look cool to someone somewhere. For example, I’ve read almost all of the essay collections of David Mamet. Mamet is of course appropriately celebrated for his plays. Does anyone on the planet care about his essays besides me? (This is pre-Right Wing Mamet, mind you. And the plays are great, sure, but give me an obscure collection of miscellany like The Cabin and I’m in pig city.) 

Sure there are books I try to read because I feel like I should read them or I am expected to have read them or they represent a blind spot in my education. Or simply books I would like to express an opinion about but feel obligated to read beforehand. I have a paperback copy of Ulysses that I visit every now and then. I do a little recreational paragraph-climbing. World enough and time I will finish it before retirement, but I’m not pushing myself. It delights me for a page, wears out its welcome by page two, bores me senseless by page three. As a sustained reading experience, it seems deliberately anti-pleasureable. 

I also don’t review books anymore either. I certainly have thoughts about books, but after a while one loses the patience for homework, much less the clamor of one’s  own opinions, much less fitting within the “conversation.” The intuitive reaction to a work of art can give way to the categorical impulse, which is much easier to feed than the creative impulse. All that ranking and filing. Strongly held aesthetic opinions, rigorously expressed, can become a kind of trap. One’s taste can become so refined no first draft can sift through it.

Forcing oneself to finish books that one is not really enjoying is a weird type of personal masochism. Reading becomes just another arena of shame, of wondering what the neighbors think, of — yes — even performative literacy. For the record I have never been approached by anyone as a consequence of my public reading. Just who am I performing for? I guess it’s the thesis committee that lives permanently in my head.  

Currently on the nightstand, half-finished, sits Great Expectations.  What kind of redneck jerkface won’t finish Great Expectations? Me, perhaps. I don’t know. It’s enjoyable enough. Pip’s relationship with Joe Gargery is terribly moving, though I’ve previously confessed I am a total wimp when it comes to that theme. But otherwise, I feel like I kind of get the outer perimeter of the experience. Do I have to sit through the whole concert? Do I have to eat this entire steak? 

Maybe I’m just a hick? Or maybe my capacity for sustained attention has been degraded so much by the internet and the stupid phones that I really can’t hack it anymore. I am the tired and fat soldier of literature, needing to be kicked out of the army by some beardless, tattooed groyper, sent to clean up the house of literature. See, I am too online to even adequately condemn myself for being too online. 

But then, what do I know? These thoughts too lie unfinished.

Old people shouldn’t text

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“Yes, but when do you become old?” My friend said this as soon as I uttered my headline above. Usually he just rolls his eyes at my proclamations. 

But here me out: I’ve told my kids there will come a day in the hopefully distant future when they will need to sit me down and say, “Dad, it’s really dangerous out there, and it’s time that we took some of your privileges away. This is for your own good and the well-being of perfect strangers.” Of course I am talking about my car keys. This prophylactic move is itself an outdated gesture, since everyone driving now has half an eye on the road and the rest of their eyes on their devices, so that even a legally blind but fully committed driver is probably safer, actuarially speaking. But now I might have to have the same conversation with them about my phone, specifically its ability to receive and send texts to large groups of people. 

Basically, it’s too fast. There is not enough friction, physical or monetary. It’s too easy to send out decontextualized language to your friends and family and internet friends and probable strangers. I’m not really talking about the unconsciously racist uncle post, though sure, that too. The whole problem with frictionless near-instant global communication is that people have terrible thoughts, expressed terribly, encountered at the worst possible time. It’s the future! 

What I mean is simpler: at some point, texting should be disabled on old people’s phones. For the sake of this idea, old people are defined as people much older than me. You know ’em when you see ’em. The technology is too powerful, like using a light saber to floss your teeth. It’s barely wielded safely by the youths out there. It’s no wonder those of us post-30 are endangered by these devices. 

This is most easily witnessed in the group chat, the noise rock of modern networked communication. The first problem with the group chat is that it’s bad qua communication. I don’t need seventeen thumbs-up emojis to clock everyone’s agreement. Text is faster than a phone call, but then it leaves all this shrapnel in its wake. And then someone wakes up and responds as if the chat is a one-to-one communication and the jokes go sideways fast. Or worst offense: the responder starts riffing unknowingly on another person in the chat. A group chat can be a wonderful thing. But negotiating the rhetorical demands of the chat can be like trying to pull an eyelash out of a drawer full of knives. When I am compelled to respond to large group chats, my answers are fully denuded of flair, a single Y or N to questions, as if I had actually fulfilled that promise to myself and gone back to flip phone land. It’s like throwing a party; if you didn’t write up the guest list, you don’t really know who’s there. Proceed accordingly.

A young person’s response to an older person sounding off unawares in the group chat tends to take two silent directions. First, there is the Michael Jackson-eating-popcorn-gif response. I wish I were this mature and/or callous. The second response, my response, is to emotionally absorb and project all the potential social ramifications of this faux pas, which when given the number of group chats that I am in — even as a non-popular person who is not young — generates a lot of psychic stress. Call it something catchy like “emotional labor.”

And honestly, maybe that’s the real problem. Maybe the old person who needs to have his texting taken away is me. I am mostly okay with the sending of the texts. But receiving them wears me out. It’s just so much language. And there is no hierarchy to it. Reminders from my dentist come at the same emotional volume as kid school notifications or cries for help from family members. There’s a riot in my pocket, and I’m terrible at prioritizing. 

Have you thought about turning off your notifications? Yes, thank you, I have. The only notifications I receive are calls or texts. The people who allow notifications from anything else strike me as bent, or just much stronger than I will ever be. I’ve even silenced my phone completely, so that texts only vibrate, which has lead to missing actually important communication, thus strengthening my already substantial paranoia about giving and receiving and missing all types of messages. All networked communication has the seasick whir of the slot machine: the next one could always be big money.  

Perhaps the problem is similar to my email problem: I can’t stand to see any number of unread messages. I have to clear them out. I remember in the third grade when we got mailboxes at school and the utter thrill of discovering I had notes to read. It’s the same feeling, now split across actual physical mail (always junk), personal email (almost always junk), work email (90% junk, 5% need-to-know, and 5% act-on-immediately), and texts (5% junk, 30% unnecessary responses, 54% memes, 10% logistical negotiations, and 1% emergencies). Phone calls are now almost exclusively the arena of situations that need immediate attention. My family has been conditioned by my personality, so that when they call me their first words are “Don’t panic. I’m alright.” They don’t even say hello. In their defense, neither do I. My first words are “What’s wrong?” 

There are doldrums during the week when I don’t get texts, and then I find myself lonely and bored, and I start texting people, just to gin up some conversation. Perhaps the problem is that I don’t get quite enough texts. If I got a little bit more, there would be too many for me to deal with, and my need to liquify that little red bubble would wear down out of exhaustion. I often have the same idea regarding travel. I travel just enough to see how terrible I am at travel. But if I travelled more, then I would streamline. Or I should stop travelling altogether and go in peace. 

Which is what I think of texting. Perhaps I am the old person. Perhaps I am on the cusp of talking trash about someone on a group chat accidentally and hurting people’s feelings. Perhaps my kids should knock my phone out of my hand. I know that I don’t need all this communication to function in the world, but once it’s available, once it becomes a habit of communication, it’s difficult to imagine life without it. It feels like missing out, because it is missing out. The constant parsing of overwhelming noise is the bounty of a full and active life. If it’s too loud, you’re too old.

On William Langewiesche

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I suppose hearing about your heroes dying is just a part of growing older, but I don’t like it one goddamned bit. 

This feeling is prompted by news of the recent death of William Langewiesche at 70 from prostate cancer. Langewiesche was known for his reportage in The Atlantic Monthly beginning in the 90s. As a former pilot he wrote frequently about airplane crashes, and more generally about disasters that were somehow the result of human ingenuity, technology, and hubris. I don’t know how to pronounce his name either. 

I first read Langewiesche in a graduate school creative nonfiction workshop. The book was Sahara Unveiled. The bit that got me was when Langewiesche is stranded in the Sahara, and slowly interweaves his predicament with a methodical explanation of how people die in the desert. At what point do they start drinking their own urine? Etc. The prose is in the Hemingway vein, focused on concrete and physical particulars, withheld emotion, friction and complexity created by juxtaposition. We aren’t ever directly informed of Langewiesche’s feelings, but we still have feelings reading him. He invokes them rather than performs them. 

Langewiesche became one of those writers whose essays I’d stalk in the newstands, and a summer or so later, when his long articles about the post-9/11 cleanup of the World Trade Center appeared, I would greedily consume each installment as soon as it became available. That was one of those fortuitous intersections of modern journalism and my tastes at the time. I didn’t know I wanted to read thousands of words about how to clean up the destruction from that event, but once Langewiesche’s first article came out, I couldn’t envision anyone better for the task.

I still have those Atlantic issues somewhere in my files. Those essays, which eventually became the book American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, were some of the key texts for me in those grad-school years after 9/11 — bits of nonfiction that were written almost immediately after the attacks and stuck with me. The others were “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” by David Foster Wallace, which appeared in Rolling Stone, and a paragraph from Susan Sontag, which appeared in a round robin of regular writers in the New Yorker immediately after the attacks. Sontag notoriously wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.” 

She was vilified for this paragraph, and this game of mutual provocation, the endless pickle ball tournament of statement and mock outrage counterstatement, was my introduction to the world of American discourse. It’s been downhill ever since for mutual understanding and my mental health. I’d read Against Interpretation the year before and felt like a gigantic redneck, but not an uninterested redneck. That is, I didn’t feel stupid, like I did whenever I tried to read, for instance, Foucault or Derrida; I just felt uncultured, like I was living way out in the sticks. The next book of hers I read was On Photography, which I adored, and from which I quoted sloppily for the rest of grad school. I did not get invited to many parties. 

I admired Wallace’s writing so much that I now regard his influence as a kind of persistent infection, latent but always ready to strike if I don’t watch my diet. I still have his issue of the Atlantic, too.

Obviously these three writers are quite different. I can only imagine their awkward dinner conversation, or the MFA thesis defense where they all sit stiffly on the same couch. They would never hang out together. They would smirk at the mention of the others’ names. And yet they each presented viable modes, worthy models. Langewiesche was exemplary of a certain tradition. He presented a way to be a masculine writer that wasn’t chauvinistic or corny or deliberately retrograde. It feels weird talking about this in hyper-enlightened 2025, but these feelings existed then. One could argue that the Hemingway mode, both the prose and the attitude it embodied, moved from American short fiction into nonfiction reportage — the male figure caught in extremis, a kind of staged adventure. The masculine tendency to get oneself into physical scrapes, often involving the wilderness or complex machinery, or if one’s lucky both, moved almost entirely into the journalism-adjacent slick magazine-financed world in the 1990s and 2000s. In the 80s you had your Raymond Carvers, your Richard Fords. Then came your Tom Bissells, your Wells Towers. Your Hampton Sides and your John Jeremiah Sullivans. All these dudes had great names. This manly short story to slick magazine reportage crossover enabled not just some financial stability, but also an escape hatch from the self-awareness constraints that plagued ambitious contemporary American fiction. That is, everyone knew fiction was artificial, a barker tent full of scams and devices and tricks. It was clearly emotionally and intellectually manipulative. But that conceptual baggage did not exist for narrative nonfiction, at least not back then. Postscript: these dudes now just write for TV. Man’s gotta eat. 

All of which is to say that Langewiesche represented a distinct path, clearly allied with a tradition while not trapped inside its castle. He discovered new places, and drug them back to us with his sentences. I will miss them. 

The days of wine and roses

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In general I find the “Days” that cycle through the calendar to be overwrought, commercialized, too much but not enough. Along with occasions for commerce and brunch, they seem to be occasions for disappointment. If you love someone, nothing you do on Valentine’s Day will ever be commensurate with that love. Likewise, if you appreciate your mother or your father, no amount of cards ever does them justice. Perhaps the notion of doing justice, that kind of rigorous accounting, is a foolish idea. I shouldn’t be so literal. It’s the gesture that’s important. It’s a synecdoche for all that gratitude, a gesture toward their storm of support and devotion, roiling constantly over the plains. 

For the record, I do still give and receive cards and flowers, etc. I am not that much of a bummer. I’m just working through some ideas. 

Parenthood is one of those totalizing experiences that’s hard to appreciate until you’ve entered it, and even then it’s mystifying. All my pre-parenthood thoughts on what it must be like seem inadequate for the actual lived experience, its mixture of obligation and emotion. The grip and slog of it, Raymond Carver called it. “Slog” is a little harsh and doesn’t apply universally, except for perhaps daily school lunch prep. I imagine that parenthood is like war; you don’t know what it’s like, and how you’ll handle it, until you’re actually in it. I say this as someone who has never served in war, would likely draft dodge as fast as humanly possible, and failing this, get shot within a half an hour of combat. Welcome home, kids!

There are two pertinent parenthood related statements that I think are useful to keep in mind. The first is from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms series, here rendered in project-appropriate all caps: 

FATHERS OFTEN USE TOO MUCH FORCE

I didn’t read this statement until I was already a father of several years, and I was chastened. It’s one of those statements I’ve thought of Sharpieing onto my forearm for daily reference. 

My internet friend Tom MacWright has created a site where you can download these Truisms to use as iPhone backgrounds. Plus, it’s a great resource to scroll through Holzer’s series of provocative statements. 

The second statement was something I overheard. I don’t remember the source. “What all parents want for their children is safety and happiness — in that order.”

I repeat this to my children often. I don’t mean to imply that all parent/child conflict springs from this chronology, but it’s surely the source of most of it. 

Finally, you’re a parent every day. It’s nice to have a day of rest and relaxation, of communal appreciation, but the condition is permanent. There are no days off. That’s what makes it so difficult, so different. What constitutes actual good parenting or bad parenting is too diffuse and complicated to think about here, and besides, everyone’s family is different. What strikes some people as charmingly eccentric might strike me as threateningly unstable. In between the peaks and valleys, the manias and doldrums, is the glue of the mundane, footsteps through the hall, how one comes into the house after work, the emotional temperature of the soccer commute, humming in the kitchen, the homework of domesticity. Like glue, it’s invisible when dry, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, holding everything together. I feel — at least today I feel — that this glue is what truly defines parenthood, in both directions, coming and going.

That’s the other bit about becoming a parent: you step into the river.

Are these statements a kind of advice? I’m afraid so. I am a father after all. If you talk with me long enough, even if you’re a grown-up stranger, I’ll nudge a plate of vegetables in your direction and check the reliability of your seatbelt. See, once you cross over, there’s no going back. 

How to use a microphone

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First, speak into the microphone. Don’t speak in the general neighborhood of the microphone. Get up on that thing. Eat the microphone. It is not a snake. Yes, true, there is a phenomenon called the “proximity effect” so that when you get closer to the microphone there is more bass to whatever is going into the microphone, but this is higher math and not our concern. Perhaps it’s because I sound like a tin can when I talk/sing, but I always enjoy the proximity effect. I need it. I relish it. But still, if this is something you’re worried about, then you’re a more advanced student. Proceed to the honors class and let us know how you did on that AP exam at the end of the year. 

The reason that you want to get up on that thing is because it’s a lot easier to amplify a strong signal. It’s a matter of how strong the signal is going in, how high the gain is set on the microphone, and how loud the volume is leaving the mains. I realize I am mixing some terms here so I will try to clarify. The signal here is your voice, duh. Gain is a concept I don’t fully understand, still at this late date, but the best way I know how to describe it is the hotness of the front end. How hot the mic is, basically. The trick is to use as much gain as you can stand before feedback, a term we will address momentarily. Volume is just volume, but the sound coming out the back end, or the true end, or the speakers pointed to the audience. These are your “mains” in your public address system. And that leads me to . . . 

Figure out where the sound is coming out. There is going to be at least one place where the sound of your voice comes out, the primary speaker or speakers that point at the audience, those mains mentioned above. It helps to know where the sound is coming out because you need to listen to your voice as it’s amplified, because it’s going to change. It’s going to sound different at the other end of the portal. One key lesson is that whenever you amplify an acoustic phenomenon, its attributes change. Sorry. It’s a pain but this is reality. An acoustic guitar is a good example. Amplify it how you will, a magnetic soundhole pickup, a piezo bridgeplate transducer, a Neumann KM84 at the neck joint, it’s not going to sound the same out front. It might sound better! But probably not. Sure, there are people on the internet who have the solution, which they will sell you or at least lecture you about in the comments. More power to them. I am going to grant their expertise, but they ain’t on my gig and are of little use to me when the sweat hits. 

The other place your voice could be coming out, depending on the circumstances, is through one or more of the monitors. These exist so that you can hear yourself better. A couple of my favs rather famously don’t use monitors (Leo Kottke, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings). You only need enough monitor to hear yourself. There is a whole internet cult out there of in-ear monitors — headphones, basically — but I treat these people like Scientologists. They are advanced and evangelical, and I am just a poor lapsed protestant from the south and thus sticking to the old-fashioned brimstone I understand. 

Have a soundcheck. If you’re giving a speech, you probably don’t have time for an actual sound check, so instead use a word or phrase. “Good evening” is a good one. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Don’t say, “Is this thing on?” Don’t be a goober. Don’t slap the mic. Don’t say “testing” if you aren’t literally doing a pre-show sound check test. Just say something innocuously introductory and if you can’t hear yourself or if people can’t hear you, it will become apparent. Adjust accordingly. See above re speaking into the mic. But the point is to listen to how you sound as an amplified voice. Taste that cake you’re baking. 

Stay behind the mains. General audio reinforcement ignorance and cheeseball preachers everywhere have convinced innocent everyday people that when speaking into a microphone they can walk anywhere they want with impunity. This is a mistake. That speaker is somewhere, and you need to know where it is. This is also brought about by the invention of the wireless and/or headset microphone. Like automatically dispensing paper towels in the airport, these seem like a good idea, but they don’t work. They just make a mess of everything. Stay behind the podium where you belong. Get your steps in some other way.

Understand feedback. It’s not something you get in your one-on-one. It’s not something you get from your therapist or your partner. I hate how “feedback” has gone from the audio sphere to the interpersonal relationship sphere because now no one knows what it actually is, so when the squealing starts everyone acts all surprised. Feedback is when the signal (your voice, that guitar chord, whatever) comes out of one of the speakers and gets back into the microphone. The portal forms a loop; the sound feeds back into the transducer. It’s when sound becomes postmodern, when it becomes recursive, when the mold starts growing on mold, and what it sounds like often is a high-pitched industrial keening and everyone in the audience immediately clutches their ears and assumes the tornado position. 

True, there are many different types of feedback and some can be musical, but I am not Hendrix and neither are you, and besides we’re talking about microphones, and feedback here is not your friend. When it feeds back it means you’re too loud. So the question is where are you too loud and what speaker is getting frisky with the microphones. This is why you only need your monitors loud enough so that you can hear yourself clearly, not so the grandparents three blocks away can hear you, and it’s why you need your mains to be in front of the microphones. 

Practice what you are going to say. My minimal but still valuable experience suggests that there is no such thing in life as improvisation; it’s all just accrued practice. If it’s difficult to speak extemporaneously to a small group of close friends, it’s even more so in a roomful of slightly inebriated strangers. Have a plan. Practice what you’re going to say. Remember that brevity is your friend. Everyone you’ve ever seen who talked into a microphone and sounded spontaneous and at ease practiced that speech beforehand. I realize it’s tedious, but it’s the only move that works. No amount of positive visualization will suffice. Actually say out loud what you plan to say later on the mic. Do it more than once. No one is born just knowing how to do a backflip. 

The other thing is that a microphone amplifies more than just the volume of your voice. Any hesitation, stutter, lisp, gargle, bungled word, mispronounced name, voice crack, vocal fry, tongue tie, sudden loss of vocabulary, spontaneous stormfront of uncertainty — any type of friction, like the smallest loose grains of spilt salt on a granite countertop, become magnified in that microphone. Plus your own voice sounds weird. Who is this hick overhead? It’s you, friend. 

People get weird on microphones. There is the kind of person, often drunk, who thinks they are god’s gift to microphones, and if they get on one during or after your gig, say a prayer and cut the power. These people often curse on the mic. It’s my conservative belief that unless you are a stand-up comedian doing a show where people have paid to hear you talk, don’t curse on the microphone. It’s not that I disagree with cursing, I enjoy a well-deployed profanity, it’s that it doesn’t work. It’s not usually effective as a means of emphasis. It’s like lighting a candle with a bazooka. But everyone attempts it now. Just last week I was playing a birthday party and some dude got on the mic to give a toast and out came the big ducks. Fellas, no one wants to hear you strain like that. 

And ladies, no one wants to hear you scream. Or, if you prefer, go wooo!

What is this thing called lunch?

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I am in an abusive relationship with a food truck. Okay, that’s not completely true. It’s not fully abusive. I don’t want to cheapen that word, but what is it when you are in a relationship, and you have a good thing going, and the food truck simply will not text you back? What is going on with the food truck? Doesn’t the food truck recognize that you have something special? 

I am of course referring to the El Peyo food truck that exists sometimes at the entrance of a decommissioned car wash behind the Valero gas station, approximately two klicks from my office. At some point in T’s relentless campaign of doom he warned that if Biden got elected we would have food trucks on every corner. I am still awaiting that horrible, wonderful prediction. 

First, some service journalism: if you’re driving through the Land of Progress and need the specific intersection of said food truck, hit me up. 

Moving on, the food is wonderful. Obviously? Twelve dollars and the best burrito in town since that place next to the Mazda dealership closed. What makes this burrito special is that they fry it just a little bit after wrapping everything up in its little portable poncho, so that the exterior gets wonderfully crisp. This is combined with their sinus-clearing orange salsa and a little side of sliced cucumbers. So innocent! So refreshing! 

But they’re not always there. After becoming slightly infatuated (I am not obsessed), I have finally learned that they aren’t there on Mondays. Fine. My doctor says I need a burrito break anyway. But sometimes they aren’t there on Tuesdays. And then, one day they weren’t there on a Friday, and then last Wednesday evening when I drove by on a lark because the kids were gone and I needed a quick bite, so why not treat myself? Not there. The unpredictability is what makes it so psychologically damaging. Sometimes they are there and open, and it’s wonderful, but randomly they are not, and I am left to U-turn in the parking lot and come up with a Plan B, which is another word for disappointment. I suppose I could just ask them when they’re open and when they’re not, if there is any kind of schedule, but that seems pushy, and when they are open, we have such a lovely time. I pay in cash and they call me “boss.” One lesson of middle age is that I love it when strangers, out of a sense of politeness or joie de vivre, call me “boss.” I had a lady call me “sugar” last week for no reason at all. I mean, I was about to buy a pizza, but “sir” or “mister” or “jackass” or whatever would have been fine. But sugar? Good lord. I would have changed that lady’s tires.

This reminds me of the classic “hon,” which is how the waitresses at the Elite often addressed customers. The Elite was itself a classic Land of Progress restaurant downtown, now closed and boarded up, another victim of the progress. Back in the glory days men would line up on the street in their shirt sleeves to get at those rolls. Sometimes a change is not an improvement. 

Plus I think part of the problem is that the food truck isn’t simply closed. Shut. Whatever. It’s that the black-paneled trailer is completely gone. But you have to pull into the Valero gas station and wheel around the dispensers to discover that it’s not there. There’s only the pitiful remnants of the car wash and the reticulated tracks that lead your car inside, Pied Piper-like, rusted from disuse. 

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day but lunch is the happiest. I live for lunch. I’ve already done a few hours of work. I have somewhat justified my existence. The kids are off at school. I am free briefly to pig out. And it comes without the theatrical complications of dinner. Dinner has to be made, or chosen, or you have to go to the restaurant and sit through the tiresome theater of it all. Dinner is work. Lunch is a holiday. Dinner is marriage. Lunch is a fling. I can have lunch with a friend, or I can go solo and try to catch up on all these goddamned Substacks. I can read my Henry James or listen to a podcast. Note: the burrito obsession does not comport well with Henry James. 

There are no drinks at lunch, no appetizers to decision tree, no dessert foolishness. If it’s quick, fine. Sometimes I have to get back to work. Sometimes my lunch buddy has other stuff to do. Sometimes it goes long, it’s a Friday, we’re playing hooky, we can lounge on the patio and make fun of the pick-up trucks. Dinner is getting everyone fed, but lunch is civilization. For a while whenever I proposed going to lunch with a friend I did it with the name of some jazz standard, but I would substitute the word “lunch” for “love.” So a friend would get texts such as: 

A lunch supreme? 
I can give you anything but lunch? 
There is no greater lunch? 
I fall in lunch too easily? 

This began as a way to be a smart ass over text. For some reason it pains me to communicate straight. But as time went on and I ran out of standards I realized I did find lunch to be a form of love, comradeship, communion, the mutual breaking of bread, pick your Platonic euphemism. But of course, we don’t acknowledge that. If we did, it would break the spell. It’s nothing special. It’s just lunch. The important exchanges are like turtles, startled into the creek if confronted head on. We must lunch with our gaze averted. 

Now I’m hungry. But it’s a Monday, and I know my lover isn’t there.

Art contests are a scam

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All of them. Everything from the Booker prize on down to the Scholastic awards for high schoolers. They purport to measure and reward excellence and they do no such thing. They can’t do any such thing, because artistic excellence is not measurable, can only be measured by approximation, by appreciation. It cannot be ranked. The judges are compromised, the evaluation metrics are compromised, and the purported value of the awards are compromised, and I don’t mean compromised in some kind of “foetry,” Jorie Graham, nepotism-baby, back-scratching way; I mean intellectually compromised, as in they’re lying to themselves, and they’re lying to you, the audience.

Today’s gripe is brought to you by a promotional email I received from a local concert venue. A bluegrassy, Nashville group is coming to town, and they seemed interesting. It’s basically your standard bluegrass quintet, but with tattoos. Lots of beards and denim and the no-longer-ironic trucker hats. In their bio it noted that their fiddler has won several state championship fiddle contests. I immediately opened a tab to write this rant. I don’t know why one would enter a fiddling contest, but why would you remark upon it, and your winning of it, for any length of time past the day of the contest? Who cares who won a fiddle contest?

Prizes are fine, I guess. A group of people wants to get together and award a prize. Good for them. All judgments are essentially autobiographical. They are always more about the judger than the judged. But contests are where it gets icky. You have to apply for the contest. You have to pay for the contest. You have to submit to the contest.

The problem with contests is that they purport to adjudicate who or what is best, when that designation is artificial, ambiguous, constantly on the move. It’s the roadrunner of adjectives. In a soccer game, you know who scored the most goals. In a 100-meter race, you know who ran the fastest. These are determinable facts. But art is not an athletic event. It might make sense if we had contests for the year’s longest novel. It would be much easier, like judging the year’s largest pumpkin. But best?

To continue with my previous gripe, it costs about $3 to submit to a literary magazine via Submittable. I will save the ethical thumb wrestling about submission fees for another day. (For earlier thoughts on this, see here.) But contests are where the costs increase. Typical contest is $25 to submit with the prospect of getting a $1,500 prize, publication, perpetual acknowledgement that you were the winner, etc. Have I submitted to contests in the past? You betcha. Will I do so in the future? Look, I’m only human.

These have been around seemingly forever, and they quite clearly are a way for literary magazines to make enough money to fund themselves. That is, they can’t sell enough issues of the magazine to fund the magazine, so they sell the chance of being in the magazine, “winning” a prize, in order to fund the magazine. I know that there are lots of ways that literary magazines can fund themselves, such as support from the affiliated institution of higher learning, etc., though in these strange times who knows the future prospects of that funding. I am not saying that lit mags are evil or wrong to do this. They are behaving as rational actors. That ship sailed way back.

The problem for the writer is that these expenses quickly add up, and it creates a tiered system for the table of contents within a magazine. You have the “regular submissions,” those contributors who paid the nominal electronic submission fee, or maybe even just paid for old-fashioned postage. And then you have the contest winners, who paid more for better placement, who paid to get a better seat at the show, paid for premium parking, paid for the Fast Pass. It corrupts the editorial vision of the magazine with a gimmick to gin up money and attention. (I am not against gimmicks. I am just against this gimmick.) But the difference for the writer is that when you pay for the Fast Pass, it’s clear what the exchange is. You are paying more money to skip the line. Simple, straightforward. But for the contests, you are paying more money for the ever-dim prospect of winning and having that dubious distinction put upon you. You are paying for the chance to have your name in slightly larger type. And also the prize money, large enough to be nice, not large enough to change your life. The problem is that you’re trading a collaborative editorial endeavor for a chance to sit at the Craps table. At least when you gamble, they bring you free drinks.

It’s a weird admission for a journal or a book publisher because it says, in essence, Hey, we don’t know how to sell enough copies of this print artifact that we’re making, so we need you to fund it. That would seem to be the very reason one would go to a publisher or a lit magazine. They know where the readers are and how to find them, how to marshal them for a party, how to find a space and rent a keg. I don’t know how to do these things. If I strong-armed all my friends into reading my latest story I’d have, what, four readers? The whole predominant reason to submit to a magazine is — I apologize for using this loaded phrase — its network effects, which as far as I can tell actually means “ability to get people to the party.” You can see this with the teens. Some of them have strong network effects. They will often throw parties. Some can throw parties but no one is driving way the hell out there. Some of them don’t even try. (This was me.) Some of them throw parties and can get people to the parties. And we may not like them as individuals, but we know a good party when we see one, and we want our short story to be at that party.

All that’s bad enough, but then the audience is told, “this is a contest winner!” as if I care one bit about who won a fiddle contest. Great, I guess? I don’t know what goes into winning a fiddle contest. Speed? Ability to boot-scoot while fiddling? What I want to know: will the show next week be any good? Is it worth the ticket and the logistical hurdles I will have to lurch myself over? Will I dig the music? Will I go home and save the album to my Spotify library, text it to my friends, contemplate a vinyl? The annual fiddle awards won’t tell me this. The prize-winning poetry collection won’t tell me this. It’s embarrassing for you to have to put this in your bio. I am embarrassed on your behalf. This is not T-ball, and we are no longer children.

We need to grow culture and stop making lists. I propose that other people are like me and don’t actually care about the false fire of contest-winners. The story, the poem, the Americana fiddle performance needs to enchant on its own without the artificial scaffolding. We need culture that can get people to show up to the party, get people excited to party. Culture happens at the party, not at the casino.

Full disclosure: I have never won a contest, except for the watermelon seed-spitting contest I won when I was eight. I killed it! And remember: all judgement is autobiographical.

Close reading my rejections

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Not too long ago, Ross Barkan posted a terrifying essay on his Substack, which I have read more than once through slitted fingers. It’s called “Pity the Short Story Writer.” The gist is that submitting short stories to literary magazines in the Year of our Lord 2025 is a loser’s game, both in that you will lose by being rejected and you will lose by throwing your work out into the void while you wait for months for a form rejection, if you are lucky. “The void, when you play the short story game, is what you get.” His point is that it’s no way to develop a career, to spend a life.1

Who on earth is submitting their short fiction to lit journals now? Well, I am. Though my diligence has certainly waxed and waned over the years, I have been semi-regularly sending out short fiction to journals, both print and online, for over twenty years. (My genius in the form is currently unrecognized.) I have no idea if this is a wise strategy, a foolish practice, a waste of my time and theirs (whoever they are), or really what I am even doing. I finished undergrad in 2000, my MFA in 2004, and though I started reading blogs right away, the winds of change that altered the aerodynamics of short form publishing in the past twenty-five years have been slow to ruffle my hair, if by “hair” we mean how I think about my work, and if by “think about” we really mean commit to one plan of action in an inspired burst on a Sunday only to completely recant into paralysis by Tuesday. Don’t even talk to me on Thursday. Although AI might indeed be able to replicate my prose style, I doubt it will ever be able to sufficiently duplicate my capacity for corrosive self-doubt.2

Anyway, I don’t read my rejection letters that closely anymore. The best rejection to my mind would be, “Thanks, but no thanks.” There are forms of rejections, forms within the forms. There is the slightly encouraging reject. The best one of these I ever got said, essentially, “Hey, I like this, but we don’t have room.” And it was on actual letterhead! More often they say, “we’d like to see something from you again.” One can dine out for months, nay years, on such oblique encouragement. 

But the one I got today was a real winner, a real punch in old dunlap. It read in part, “We’d like to thank you, sincerely, for giving us the opportunity to read your work. Though it doesn’t meet our needs at this time, we’re so thankful for it; now more than ever, the arts feel as necessary as they are fragile, and it’s up to each of us to keep them going.” 

Let’s take this one sentence at a time. “We’d like to thank you, sincerely, for giving us the opportunity to read your work.” I think it’s the “sincerely,” fenced off by commas, that grates so. “Like to thank” is linguistic phlegm. “I’d like to thank the Academy.” They’d “like to thank” me. Well I’d like to be 6’3” and drive a G Wagon, thanks. I’d like you to accept my novella.3 I’d like to quit paying three dollars to Submittable every time I want to send a story out. The world is full of actions I would like to do. The most direct way to say thank you is just to say it: “thank you, name, for doing X.” “I’d like to thank” is a performative thanks, a thanks with a smirk and a blink, eyeing for extra credit. Just because people say it in their award show acceptance speeches doesn’t mean you should say it, too. In fact, that’s the reason you shouldn’t say it.4

Now, were their previous expressions of gratitude for reading my work insincere? Do they really mean it now, since they’re saying “sincerely”? I hate cloying language. Do me the honor of directly telling me you don’t like me. Dump me to my face. 

The second half of the next sentence reads: “Now more than ever, the arts feel as necessary as they are fragile, and it’s up to each of us to keep them going.”

Really it’s this portion after the semi-colon that bothers me. Some people don’t like semi-colons; I myself don’t mind them. I do realize they are pretentious. As I’ve already confessed, I was technically an adult when 9/11 occurred so the phrase “now more than ever” has been filed in my memory as a reflex — a kind of moral gravitas mantra, uttered unto meaninglessness. Could “now more than ever” signify anything at this point aside from a Warholian series of Dick Cheney snarls? Do they really think that me writing stories is important now more than ever? Really? I mean, I think I’m moderately decent, but even this strains the elastic of my ego. Is this second sentence about He Who Will Go Unnamed? Look, I don’t like him either, but this makes me feel like we’re glass blowing or something. I don’t think literature is fragile. I just think it’s unread and unappreciated, because reading is harder than 99% of the other activities we could be doing. The period of mass literacy that lead to a mass literary culture seems to be a temporary accident of education and technology. 

“Necessary” here, like in other literary contexts, strikes me as one of those trendy gesture words or phrases, like “he understood the assignment,” or “so-and-so is doing the work.” They evoke adolescent-level in-group signaling. Are poems and short stories “necessary”? I mean, they’re great, but food and shelter they are not. Remember: poetry makes nothing happen, and thank God for it. We should quit pushing stories and poems through some kind of utilization review. Just let them be free to delight and instruct.

Also, I am not writing short stories to keep the arts going. I am doing it because it’s fun, and I’m good at it. It’s pleasurable on a deep intellectual level that’s somehow not entirely intellectual. I don’t want to get all woo woo on you, but it provides the pleasure of artistic craft, an iterative practice of exploratory variation, with the pleasure of discovery of meaning, the feeling of stumbling over what you yourself are going on about. Writing is an act of thinking, of a kind, that is then presented after the fact as a form of thought, like lava cooling. 

Should I just throw these stories up on Substack and pester my few subscribers? I think about it a lot, which means I change my mind about eight times a week. It’s exhausting. I have been trying to figure out my hesitancy in posting my stories online the same way I occasionally post these little grumbles. Part of it is that I want to be accepted. You submit. They accept. They reject. You re-submit. BDSM echoes, etc. I want to be chosen. I think I am good, but my belief in myself is flimsy, worth nothing, a currency in a failed country. I need those crisp dollars of approval from somewhere better, some new world. Look, all I want is an unending string of praise from strangers. Surely that will make me feel whole. 

Part of it is the context. Max Read wrote something interesting in his Substack when he talked about what makes successful writing on that platform different. He writes: “. . . while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist. (The one exception being: Weekly op-ed columnist.) What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing — or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept — and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of ‘thinking through,’ to which subscribers are invited.”

This makes sense to me, as I listen to my favorite podcasts more for the voices of the hosts than any guests or topics. But what are short pieces of fiction if not discrete textual artifacts? They are by definition not me, not perpetuations of a single authorial persona.5 It’s difficult enough getting people to separate the fiction from the author without that fiction being surrounded by other bits of more directly personal essayish grumbling. We’re not Within the Context of No Context but rather in the Context of Too Much Context. Emily Gould had the right idea way back when she named her own website/blog “Emily Magazine.” Each site is a Marvel Cinematic Universe of one.

The final problem is one of audience. Outside of school, reading short stories is a minority pursuit. It ain’t where the fish are. I could probably post TikTok dances and get more viewers/readers than I could publishing short stories, and I’ve got a body built for radio. Why do I keep working in this form where there is so little audience and I have had so little success?6 Is it delusion? Compulsion? An inherent lack of creativity? Is my notion of “good writing” hopelessly narrow and stuck in 1994? Do I just not know what to do with myself otherwise? Am I lying to myself in that I haven’t actually been that diligent in my submitting and really what do I expect from such meager effort? These are questions both rhetorical and real. 

Maybe these blog posts are just failed short stories. 

1. Of course the word “career” has layers upon layers of implied scare-quotes around it. Perhaps a better way to say it is that it’s not a wise method, under current conditions, to publish a body of work. 

2. Just to be clear, I am not whining about being rejected. I expect to be rejected. I welcome being rejected. I just want to be rejected more swiftly and thoroughly and unambiguously. The whole endeavor of short story publication has a slight BDSM whiff about it. 

3. I know, I know, what did I expect? If there is any form more hopeless than a short story, it’s the novella. I will spare you any attempts to define the novella. Yes, I have always had a soft, hairy spot for the novella. I refer to it as my Jim Harrison Spot. I think poetry actually has a larger audience, because poetry still lives in mutant form, both high and low. You’ve got Hallmark cards, still. And what were Tweets but poems of rage? For a while there, the Tweet was the perfect poem because it was birthed from an actual technological constraint. And then once that fence was lifted, people kept the 140 character limit. The formal properties persisted! People actually like formal poetry. They just don’t like school.

4. Whoever writes those speeches for the celebrities should be banned from the profession for life. It’s like watching someone pat themselves on the back while giving themselves a hand job. 

5. Read also writes insightfully about self-publishing on the internet as a vector for shame. 

6. I acknowledge that this isn’t the best word here. Is it a form? A mode? A genre? What is a short story? Just a prose narrative subject to an artificial length constraint.

Indentation Blues

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I tend to read a lot of writing on the internet. Perhaps you’re like me. Perhaps, like me, you have noticed that reading words on the internet is different in certain respects than reading words on a printed page. Perhaps you have enumerated these differences to yourself and discovered the key difference, the pothole in this transition from page to screen, the absence that makes the heart grow fonder. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about indentation. 

Remember when paragraphs each had uniformly sized indentations? Finish reading one paragraph and there is another blank little gap in the bricks of prose, letting you catch your breath. But put those paragraphs on a screen and they lose their wonderful indentations. They now have a blank line in between them, each rectangle floating out on its own. Why is this?

I think it’s because the indentation was difficult to achieve in early HTML. Something about creating that type of blank space, how to define its width. Like if you’re laying out a book or just typing on a page, the indentation width is somewhat proportional to the margins of the physical page itself. If you had a standard 8.5×11″ American-type page but with a  4″ indentation for each paragraph, that would appear odd, off, a mistake, unless you are being intentionally House of Leaves-ian. But on the internet, via the HTML code rendered legible via a browser, text on the screen is malleable. The margins are never really fixed. This is both the glory and the irritation of the hypertexted text. Frictionless delivery through time and space, no more waiting for the ice to melt in the harbor to get those pallets of paperbacks out to the stores, you can just upload that sucker. But then, everyone’s not going to read your upload on the same worn out Dell. Suzy has a sleek little laptop. Sammy’s got an iPad. Sterling’s got a gaming tower with enough juice to mine a meme-coin. And grandma can’t figure out how to make it all look bigger on her phone.

Actually I put on my child’s new VR headset and was briefly immersed in the panoramic view and thought: I could get some good work done in here. However, moving stuff around with my hands feels odd. I am old enough to really like a keyboard and a mouse. I like to click. And when the clicker doesn’t work, I like to rap that sucker three good times on the dining room table, turn it over and blow on it hard, and then proceed with my work. I’m just an analog kid, still.

But my point is that with ever-changing margins, the paragraph indentation becomes vestigial. You can technically add traditional indentation to your blog posts, but it’s going to look weird, and everyone is going to think you’re no fun. It’s easier and quicker to have each paragraph separated by a line break, and we all like easier and quicker. 

And this is not fundamentally evil, but I still miss the indentations. I can feel them itching in their absence. Back in the olden times, when we mostly read stories and essays and blog posts in books, the line space, as opposed to the paragraph indentation, was meant to indicate some kind of change, like a scene change, or chronology change, or some kind of throat-clearing pivot that the reader had learned to intuit. A line break was a different degree of break from an indentation, just the way a chapter break was an even greater break with the continuity of the prose experience. (The chapter break is out of scope of this essay1.) It means that I have to subtly readjust when reading online. Those are just regular paragraph divisions, I tell myself, not some greater gap in coherence. 

In grad school, we called those free floating paragraphs crottes, using the french word for spot of excrement. We got this from a professor who had gotten it from his professor. At the time it didn’t seem pejorative to refer to unindented paragraphs as droppings of excrement that fell down the page, it was just part of the grad seminar argot, but now I wonder if there wasn’t some generational judgment there. But now crottes are everywhere. One scrolls endlessly through the crottes. You never know where to take a break because all of the sectional divisions are uniform. The only graphical punctuation now are ads or the pleading subscription buttons or the skimmable subheads. 

Perhaps this isn’t a sign of encroaching illiteracy but just a sign of changing literacy. Words were once not even separated by spaces, sentences by periods. Those bits of punctuation had to be invented. Paragraphs used to be indicated by the pilcrow, that westward-facing P-shape. At some point, those marks were lost, but the unit of thought that the paragraph had come to represent jumped the line and grew the indentation. And now it’s jumped the line again and floats on slightly freer from the text that comes before or after. Our text becomes slowly more aerated through the changing technology. Call it the breeze of progress. 

1. Post? Blog? Substack? Rant? Article? I am going to pretentiously continue to use the term essay. It captures the gist, the tradition, while still being elastic enough to contain whatever it is I’m up to. Becca Rothfeld recently tried to distinguish between “posting” on Substack and “writing” for the Washington Post, to much general confusion and ire. But it’s all text, it’s all writing, with subjects and verbs. (And hopefully proofreading! Substackers: get better at proofreading!) The number of editorial intermediaries is different. And there are potentially different contextual expectations of formality, but it’s still all writing. But modern cyber publishing is convenient enough, machine-enabled enough, that it almost feels like talking, though it still hits like writing, at least to the reader. Also, everyone is worried about how artificial intelligence might affect writing, but I would say we are already using artificial intelligence to write. E.g., I can’t code this page myself. 

How to gig inside

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It’s fairly straightforward, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have commentary. As my kids tell me, I am nothing if not overly explanatory. 

Create a stage. You’re probably not going to have a raised platform or any kind of physical distinction between the “stage,” the place you’re supposed to set up and play, and the rest of the restaurant, bar, whatever. I mean, there might be. But prepare for there not to be. Prepare to show up and for everything to go wrong; this is not bad advice for life in general, if I may be a little coldly clear-eyed this new January. I’ve found it helps if I try to establish a general perimeter, a defensible space, between the band and the audience. Usually this is done with the monitors and the mic stands. I also use a power cord as a kind of invisible fence. Unfortunately, this doesn’t actually shock any perpetrators, but hope springs eternal. This is all mostly theater, albeit theater of a practical sort. But it’s still a show, and anything that even gestures toward a proscenium interruption in the fern bar is an advantage. Perhaps I’m being too whimsical here. Plus the monitor wedges act like a small guardrail against falling drunks. 

Don’t drink. But do eat. Not too much. Mostly salads. Try to stay under your comped limit. You think you can just eat after, but everyone will be a lot less annoying along the way if you have half a meal beforehand. Please, learn from my mistakes. 

Do bring a water bottle. Borrow one from your wife or teen. You know they have them, with the overly complex lid-top-straw situation. To me the metal water bottle trend is less a trend and more an example of mass hysteria, or maybe I just resent how my house has turned into a junk drawer for hydration. But nevertheless, you can turn this vicious foolishness into some easy mid-gig refreshment. Bonus: it has a close-able lid, which is handy if you, like me, are a person who spills every drink he ever touches, every drink he thinks of touching. I am particularly adept at spilling drinks on everyone’s amplification equipment. You’re welcome.

75 minutes on the front, 45 on the back. You need to give yourself enough time set up, but not too much time. It all depends on what you are responsible for. I admit to struggling with the time question. In one band, where I only assist with unloading the PA, they want me to get there 90 minutes early, even 120 minutes early. When I acquiesce, we all sit around staring at each other for the last half hour before downbeat. Yes, I enjoy the hang. But the hang here is clouded by time wasted. For a different band, the one where I bring, set up, and run the PA, I tried to stick to 60 minutes before the gig max, in which I’d set up the PA, the guitar rig, the mics, etc. This turned out to be too tight. It’s like leaving for the airport with just enough time; you can make it if you catch all the lights, etc. I am trying to change this habit and now I’m shooting for 75 minutes before showtime. This allows me to hit some traffic during set up and prevents me from lapsing into a panic. Also, I am able to have friendly side conversations with bandmates while setting up rather than the tight-lipped, avoidant sprint I was doing. I still dream of the 60 minute set up though, something about the evenness of that hour. 

Afterward, I try to bag it up in 45 minutes. Here you really suffer the consequences of all the stuff you brought. At the beginning of the gig, you set up your stuff. At the end of the gig, you tear down your shit. 45 is the goal. Yes, sometimes I want to hang afterward. But sometimes I want to go home. And the staff in the restaurant want you to go home, so they can go home. But that can’t happen until they clear the tables and mop the floor where you’re standing, so get moving. 

To do this it’s important to invoke the Spaceballs rule: take only what you need to survive. Of course, survival here becomes highly variable. And really the rule is more like: take whatever you are willing to carry. If you have help, then everything changes. But I have no help, and I am increasingly willing to carry less and less. Sometimes, to frighten myself, I go on keyboard forums (don’t go on forums) and look at everyone’s keyboard rigs. With the caveat that forums are typically made up of self-selecting nerds dorking out for clout, these rigs are terrifying, like the engine room on the Death Star. Remember: every cord is a failure waiting to happen.1

Other arbitrary but useful limitations: drummers should have only two cymbals max in addition to their hi-hats and at most a four-piece kit. But to be honest, they can get by with one tom and one cymbal. Guitar players should play through a Blues Junior and no pedals for a year straight. Practice skill acquisition through device deprivation. Keyboard players don’t need 88 keys on their board and rarely need more than one board, and they should leave the laptop at home. It’s a job but it’s not an office. Singers should show up on time and be responsible for the PA or at least get really good at rolling cords. What usually creates stage volume problems are electric guitar, crash cymbals, and the snare drum. You don’t need to solve this problem by using in-ear monitors. You solve it by turning down. Bass players: no one wants to hear your slapping or your popping. If you sound like Seinfeld, you don’t get called again. Second guitar players: do not exist in this band. Horn players: no pay until all the gear’s away. 

Of course the problem with horn players is that they know they’re precious unicorns and can gallop away at my Grumpelstiltskin suggestions. 

Don’t go IMAX. Last night the gig was an acoustic duo in a restaurant, two guitars, two singers. In the back room, there was a corporate holiday party with a DJ. We could feel the thump through the closed doors. Let me see that tootsie roll! We couldn’t compete. We just played our Neil Young tunes to our 12 patrons and had a nice little time. There wasn’t any use getting offended by the juxtaposition. This is just the way of the world. But you can see how some bands want to go IMAX, want to surround the world. This is a false god. You’re never going to sound like the record. It’s more fun for you to sound like human beings playing instruments with their hands and feet. I think the primary charm of the NPR Tiny Desk Concert is that it’s the anti-Sphere. There’s no light show, no choreo, no subwoofers. It’s extremely limited. It’s not “authentic” (the other false god). All performances are acts. It’s just a less cliched performance. We’ve all seen the version with the dancing girls already. Over the holiday I saw a live clip of Shania Twain. She was surrounded by young men dancing shirtless in tuxedo tails. Whatever twinkcake allure this might have provided seemed undercut by the sheer predictability of it all. (Dancing: almost always overrated.) When in doubt, underdo it. It’s easier. It’s more interesting. And if you’re quieter, people have to pay attention. 

On break, find somewhere to go. It gives you a break. It gives the audience a break. It structures the show. In one band I play in, the leader likes to go all out the entire time, just one relentless marathon of music. This challenges the human bladder and human patience. There should be peaks and valleys. Always leave them wanting more. Also, if you’re going to eat on break, do it off stage and out of sight. You’re part of the help. 

Minimize patter, murder dead air. Every time I have tried to be amusing with my in-between song chatter, I come across like an idiot, like someone walking down the street without pants, selling blowtorches. The patrons are not expecting my feeble, impromptu attempts at humor. I’m just making them self-conscious and uncomfortable. It’s better to stick to “this song is by . . .” or “on bass tonight we have . . .” type of commentary. Remember, they are primarily drinking, not listening. Don’t mess up the flow of energy. 

To help, either have a song list or know the available tunes well enough so that you can keep things moving when you’re not on break. It’s annoying to watch a group of musicians sit around playing the what do you wanna play game in between each song. And it’s enervating to be on the bandstand with same, at least for those of us who are uptight and care too much. It’s a show. Get on with it. 

1. Lately guitar players have been imitating keyboard players, turning their instruments into synths with all those knobs on the floor. I know it’s fun to make your guitar sound like a vacuum cleaner, but that’s too much to carry. It’s too much to set up. Plus, you don’t need that many sounds. I think aside from vanity one of the reasons people bring all this stuff is the idea of getting their most pristine sound and also the (contradictory) idea of getting the various “sounds” you need to cover the material. I can understand wanting to get a pristine sound in an environment like the recording studio or your home, where you can reasonably control all the variables. But you can’t do that on a gig. Playing music live is like trying to self-checkout your groceries while someone shoots tennis balls at your face. It’s highly contingent on innumerable unknowns. 

And as far as getting the appropriate sounds, I don’t think you can do it and I don’t think you should try. A guitar player needs 2-3 sounds a night tops, a regular sound, a lead sound for solos, maybe an overdriven sound. And really, these are all just different gain levels of the same sound. We don’t ask trumpet players to have different sounds other than what they can produce on the instrument with their technique. Plus the guitar pedals start to work on a player like prescription drugs on the body. You always need to add another one to mitigate the side effects of a previous one. Obviously if you’re playing something like metal, I have no idea what to tell you. That music frightens me and I avoid it. I’m talking about normal music, music that people want to hear in public, while they try to politely signal to their fellow patrons that they’re down-to-clown after closing.