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  Ryan Werner (Writes Stuff)
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Criminal, there ought to be a whole lot more . . .

2/6/2013

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"If You Want Blood" by Mark Kozelek, because who the fuck knew there'd be so much pathos hidden right there in an AC/DC song?

It's been about a month. Here are some things that have happened since then.

1) I watched Summerslam 2005 and didn't cry when the giant electronic American flag unfurled behind Hulk Hogan during his entrance. This is a semi-major life-improvement.

2) I applied for a job stocking ice and beer at a casino. I didn't get it. Two weeks later they called me and asked if I want to work part-time checking coats.

2b) I told them to fuck off.

2c) What I actually did was just not call them back after they left a voicemail.

3) I searched for "Iowa" and "Wisconsin" on PornHub. There were a bunch of videos for Iowa and all the chicks looked pretty hot. There were like seven videos for Wisconsin and all the chicks looked like they were made of stale biscuits.

4) Several dumb old photos of me were uploaded to Facebook by other people, such as this one where I'm wearing an XL Pantera shirt and standing next to a cardboard cutout of Shaquille O'Neal and this one where I'm wearing a winged battle-suit I made out of Construx.

5) I locked my keys in my car twice, once behind the coffee shop and once a week later in front of the coffee shop. The same guy from Master Key came to my assistance both time. The first time he was wearing a pink mesh shirt underneath a button-up tank top and when he went into his trunk to get the tools he needed to get into my car, he had to first take out two huge chainsaws and set them on the ground.

6) I got ordained. I'm going to marry so many drunk people at the bar.


7) I met Mick Foley.

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I MET MICK FOLEY, DUDE.

I had some stuff get published recently. It seems like I used to be stoked for weeks after something got published and now I've had three things go up this past month and I'm already back to feeling like I haven't done anything. Writing is better than meth, but only because it doesn't ruin your teeth.

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In a rare showing, I was able to write and publish an essay. It's about Neko Case, and though everything I do is, on some level, about Neko Case, this is blatantly about Neko Case and how her album Middle Cyclone made me learn things about living in and around solitude, the extent to which I should love myself, and respecting fear as it arrives in all humans. It's up over at The Rumpus, and I'd love for you to read it.

"The year 2008 tumbled out of itself and took with it the things that consumed my days. Within a month I had lost my job to the upholding of liquor laws, my college education to an unavoidable graduation, and my girlfriend to youth and general apathy.


I spent a lot of time in bed, not depressed, but reading depressing things—Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems 1966-1987, William Matthews’s Search Party, Rick Bass’s In the Loyal Mountains—often out loud. I read Heaney in an impassioned Irish accent, Bass with a gruff-yet-kind tone of wonderment. I read Matthews sitting up, as if at a podium, addressing a faceless sum of the discontinued millions.

There were certain lengths I was willing to go to in order to not be myself."

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I also had a story called "Trace" that I've talked about here before on the subject of "revising old stuff I wrote and wondering if it's all just a big waste of my fucking time." This one turned out decent for being around so long and going through so many drafts. It's up over at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, and it'd be really great of you to read it.

"My grandmother spent her last several thousand mornings highlighting the obituaries."

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Lastly, the fourth story in my chapbook/cycle Murmuration is out there in the world now. I'm happy with how this one turned out and, like most of my stuff, it ties in with another story: The Honeybreakers are the band that had dissolved and reassembled in my story "Sometimes We Were Young." Here we find them merely dissolving, as seen through the eyes of our faithful narrator. Please read it over at Bartleby Snopes.

"Revising my dreams into the necessary shapes involved going out to the van every night and playing guitar in the street. I waited until after the show, after everyone had locked into the distractions that would take them through to morning. I would strap on whichever guitar I grabbed first and commence to shredding first against the van and then eventually to the center of the street. This was a small reassurance that my life would eventually resolve itself if attacked from compromising angles."

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The chance of me or my buddy Josh actually learning German: 0%

I've spent so much time playing music that I haven't really had time to sit down and write anything. This isn't really a very good excuse. "Write every day" is kind of the only semi-infallible writing advice out there, and I'm totally blowing it. If this new country-rock project gets off the ground, I'll be in a total four bands in addition to working 40+ hours between two jobs. My options in life turned out to be "one band that does a lot" or "four bands that don't do much." Regardless, none of these bands are getting me laid, so it doesn't really matter.

I'm also going on a micro-tour with the Oakland-based rock & roll band Victory and Associates as a hired gun to replace their real lead guitarist who can't make it because he has a real job, unlike us. My band Legal Fingers played with them back in October and we hit it off and I've been on their podcast not once, but twice, and now we're going to christen our union by piling into a van and making it smell bad for about a week. I've spent the last month learning how to play a dozen or so of their songs and in less than a week I've got to prove that I won't fuck it up. For those not in the know, this is what volume was invented for.

Well, and this.

But still, I haven't had time to write anything because when I'm not at a band practice I'm making a flier for a show or I'm being a fucking dickhead on Twitter or I'm watching The Family Feud at the coffee shop. Murmuration has been done for months now, which means I've been slacking on finishing the wrestling-themed chapbook. One story called "A Comprehensive List of the Least Worst Way To Do Everything" is done and making the rejection rounds, but "Waiting for Andre"--the story about a rich man with a bone disease who learns about and becomes obsessed with the anecdote of Samuel Beckett giving Andre the Giant rides to school--is stuck in revision hell. I've just finally got a decent grip on it after weeks of picking at it here and there, but it's still not close. The title story, "The Road Becomes What You Leave," exists only in the form of an aborted story from years ago. If I finish this book before the end of the year, I'd be surprised.

And I'm working on a novella, but the truth is that I'm not working on it nearly as hard as I'm working on my tweets, which is fucked up.

I hope I have something to show the next time I check in, but I'll probably just have more stories about how drunk girls in bars yell at me and then later on get my phone number and pretend to be Stoya. Mario Kolaric is doing the artwork for my chapbook and Matt Kish is doing the artwork for Justin Lawrence Daugherty's chapbook that I'm putting out through Passenger Side Books. So there's that. But still, I can't take credit for that. All I did was send some e-mails. I did that to Christina Hendricks and NOTHING.

That's it for now. Be wonderful.

RW
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Come on, come on, come on little rabbit, show me where you got it 'cuz I know you got a habit . . .

11/28/2012

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The Afghan Whigs performing "66" on Conan O'Brien's show back in 1999. Dulli breaks a string!

I dressed up as the Wal-Mart Santa this past weekend and scared the fuck out of some kids. Dr. Pepper/7-Up bought the rights to Santa (in Wal-Mart), so on either side of the bench I sit on is a stack of about 50-70 two-liters of 7-Up. In addition to mini candy canes, I also gave the kids cans of soda. It was all really fucked.

Of course, this happened, too.

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Look at how shitty I look as Santa and then think about the fact that the person who was dressing up as Santa before me is female, stands (literally) around four feet tall, has the mental development of an 8-10 year old child, and kept pulling off her beard to take drinks of water, which would have been fine, except she "was too hot" and "about to pass out" with the beard on, so she just left it hanging from her one ear, including during pictures with the kids.

She also decided it was necessary to wear no pants underneath the Santa pants that are designed to go over the pants you're already wearing. Then she informed me that she "got really sweaty" in the suit. I realize that this has an effect on nobody except me, but come on. Goddamn.

Her intentions were top notch, but none of her physical or mental attributes really helped in the way of keeping the spirit of Christmas. You'd think that with all the fat dudes we have working and frequenting our store that we'd be able to rope someone into doing it, but that was apparently impossible. They all claimed to be bad with kids.

How to Be Santa

1) Don't molest the kid. This is a good rule even when not dressed up as Santa.

2) Ask the kid if they've been good this year and believe whatever they say because who gives a shit.

3) If the kid has a brother or sister with them, ask them who's been the baddest. If they don't have a brother or sister with them, ask their parents. If the mom is kind of hot and the dad isn't around, ask if she's been naughty, because Santa does that on stupid sitcoms and everyone's seen Bad Santa and she'll think it's funny. See if you can ask for a "snowjob" without the kid hearing.

4) Ask the kid what they want for Christmas and tell them you'll get it for them for sure. You are not their parents and this is not your responsibility.

4b) If someone asks for a kidney for medical purposes, just be really nice and tell them you'll try. If they ask for a kidney for weirdo shit, just tell them to fuck off.

5) Ask the kid if they like to play in the snow. Some kids will be a bit gunshy, but, ultimately, kids are fucking dumb, so you can really ask them anything and they'll just answer with whatever the fuck they feel like. Ask them about quantum physics or something. I bet they'll answer with a story about a time they saw a really big dog.

All in all, I'm a really awesome Santa. And you can too.

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Tis the season to suck it.

Right as I was complaining that I haven't had any work accepted in a long-ass time, I look like a dickhead by getting three acceptances in about a week.

My story "Reruns" (the second story in my cycle/chapbook Murmuration) went up at Monkeybicycle. This is a big deal because Monkeybicycle is excellent, and them having faith in my story kind of gives me a little faith in my story. This one is secretly dedicated to my friend Jon Eagle, who loves television shows more than anyone I've ever met.

"I listened to my family name off local dead people and soon enough began to wish i was one of them."

The other stories that got accepted aren't up yet. One of them is "Pyramid Scheme" (the fourth story in Murmuration). I'm stoked about this going up (at Bartleby Snopes!) for the same reason as "Reruns." That one's about a band called the Honeybreakers, reprising the role they played in my story "Sometimes We Were Young." (My friend Sam Snoek-Brown and I do this stupid thing where every story we write is connected to at least one other story we've written. It's pointless and nobody wins, but if they did, I'd be winning.) I'm working with the crew on some edits right now and even the butting-heads that we're doing on a couple spots have gone way too smoothly. The changes they suggested that I ended up taking helped the story immensely, and, as I had thought, the parts I've always been uneasy with have disappeared.

That leaves only one story for the collection unpublished, the stripper story "Cool Tits, Moxie." I've got that out at a few places now, and if none of them pick it up, I'm fine with it going unpublished. Leaves a bit of incentive for buying the book, I guess. I'll probably end up putting it out myself because I'm too lazy to send it off to publishers, but that's fine.

The other story is called "Trace," going up at 10,000 Tons of Black Ink. I've talked about that stupid asshole story on here before as being a revising nightmare. I actually even revised it after sending it off, because that's what nightmares are for. I'm wondering if I can actually broach the subject of having 10KTOBI publish the revised version without pissing them off. I'm totally going to try.

I've also gotta remember to make a stupid 10,000 Maniacs joke in my next e-mail to them.

I added some friends to the (Has Friends) page. Justin Lawrence Daugherty is a fucking incredible writer who I can guarantee you will hear more from/about very soon. He takes myths and turns them into realistic stories of the absurd. Matthew Burnside is another wizard working with myth and sorrow, one who I didn't even realize until today that I've known for years and years from a guitar forum we both frequent. (Or used to frequent, in my case, as I was perma-banned years ago for several different things, one of which included posting under the name CC DeVilled Eggs and ruining every thread with pictures of Poison's CC DeVille.) Mary Miller wrote two of my favorite books in recent memory, the full-length Big World and the chapbook Less Shiny and I'm kind of in love with her. Check these wonderful people out.

While you're checking things out, go to the website for the micro-press I've started for Passenger Side Books and consider sending me a manuscript. I've got some good work so far and look forward to reading more of it. Let's make books, people.

My (Is Published) page and my (Has Friends) page have both been retooled to be more readable. So read them.

Also, I appeared on a podcast being hosted by my tight bros in the band Victory & Associates. It's called You Can't Stop the Signal and is a must-listen for anyone who's into podcasts or has been in a band or likes talking about ASCII-styled dicks or thinks I'd be a good guy to talk to on the phone for a half hour. They play a bunch of killer angular indie rock and roll, too, so do everyone a favor and listen.

Oh yeah. And this:

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Seasons beatings, y'all.

RW
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    Ryan Werner
    (About Stuff)
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    Writer, rocker, janitor. Lover of pro wrestling, porno, and ice cream. Hater of fingerless gloves, pictures of cats, and goodbyes. 

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