Random Thoughts on Life Itsownself

Dick Cheney spent a couple of hours in K Mart Friday afternoon. When I went down to pick my daughter up after school the bus stop was clogged by my least favorite minions. Rumor has it the Vice President was buying fire power, but I feel this rumor is based more on expectations than hard facts. The woman I heard spreading the gossip said, “Guns and ammo are the only products a real man has to pick out himself. He’d have sent an employee if he wanted Chap Stick.”

There may be truth in this. The Vice President of our country would not be in K Mart trying on clothes. If he was there for killing devices, someone should alert the area lawyers.

Here’s an actual story I found on Yahoo that is so bizarre, as a humor writer, I am humbled. Brittany Spears’ mother is writing a book on parenting. Imagine that. Nothing I can say could possibly make that sentence any funnier. There is a lesson to be learned here, by all you blog readers who are also novelists. Writing tip #1: Just because something is true does not make it believable. I could never get away with Britney Spears’ mother writing a book on parenting in fiction.

When my first editor said, “This is too far-fetched to put in a book. It’s not believable,” the one excuse she would not accept was, “But it’s true.” She didn’t even bother to say, “So what?

Non-fiction writers have a major advantage over fiction writers in this respect. They can get away with claiming true things are true, even though anyone who reads much nonfiction knows that’s bull. Take my personal favorite nonfiction works — Walden and Desert Solitaire. Both of those either leave out crucial data or make it up. Neither one is any closer to true than Have Spacesuit Will Travel.

Don’t get me started on the evils of nonfiction.

Many readers seem to have taken that last blog in a way I didn’t intend it to be taken. It wasn’t meant as a rant on the scumbags of Hollywood. Hollywood doesn’t contain a higher percentage of scumbags than, say, politics. Or drug dealing. I’d put it around forty percent. Nowhere near the ratio of bad to good you find at an insurance company.

I met some incredibly creative, cool people working in Hollywood. Some of my best friends, etc. The movie business works exactly like the Forest Service in that the lower to middle grade workers are high quality — professional and competent beyond normal belief — and they are convinced upper management is made up of fools and clowns. Maybe most industries are that way. I don’t know. I only know about Forest Service and movies.

I do know, in my personal history, the betrayal and heartbreak has been more extreme in publishing than movies.

My point, when I said everyone in L.A. lies, was that they speak in a code and until you learn that code, you’re a calf at the veal house. When a vice president of something or other (they’re all vice presidents of something or other. They pass out titles instead of raises) says he loves your work, and, after a couple of pertinent questions, you realize the guy hasn’t read your work — this doesn’t make him evil.

When you call an agent and her assistant says she’s stepped away from her desk and you can hear her in the background, the assistant isn’t lying, so much, as speaking in Hollywood babble. Your job is to learn Hollywood babble. If you can’t sail calmly, without crippling frustration, through a sea of duplicity, you’re in the wrong business.

All professions have a language of their own, and — Writer’s Lesson #2 — as a writer, if you can nail the language, you’ve nailed the profession. The readers will believe you and will go wherever you take them. It’s just that Hollywood babble isn’t so much technical terms — like in waitressing or hanging drywall — as it’s English words that don’t mean what the rest of us agree that they mean.

Bottom line in movies: The raw material every in the busines works with is the relationship. Your agent never says, “I know Joe Schmo at Universal.” She says, “I have a relationship with Joe Schmo at Universal.” Relationships are power and lifelines. If relationships are your career, there cannot, by definition, be an honest relationship.

I learned a lot of amazing skills in L.A., but here is the only one that I’ve been able to use east of San Bernadino. There’s deli in Beverly Hills called Nate ’N Al. The waitresses average sixty years old and are famous for treating both the high and low with equal disdain. I, personally, think it’s a bum rap. They treated me fine, but they treat stars the same as they treated me, which isn’t fine to the stars.

Anyway, if you take a baby or young toddler into Nate ’N Al as soon as you sit down they bring out a bagel cut in half diagonally and run a shoelace through the center hole and loop it around your kid’s highchair arm, so if the baby throws the bagel, it doesn’t get dirty. It hangs off the string a couple inches over the floor. Bagel on a rope.

After I left Hollywood, Leila and I started going to Pearl Street Bagels here in Jackson every morning, five days a week, so her mother could get some rest. And every day, I gave Leila her bagel on a rope to play with while I drank coffee and read the newspaper.

In seven years of working the movie business, bagel on a rope is the one thing that has proved relevant in real life.

P.S. There was a coyote in the K Mart parking lot this afternoon. That’s kind of odd, even for Wyoming. To my knowledge, there is no connection between the two K Mart anecdotes in this blog.

Read Full Post »

Obsession for Writers

I’m off to the Wyoming Book Festival in Cheyenne next weekend. Come on down, if you’re in the area. There will be forty or fifty writers from Wyoming, Colorado, and South Dakota. Maybe a couple from Montana. They have a web page that gives the times and places. I have three events — a talk, a signing, and a panel.
It seems like every mid-to-big town in America has a book festival now days. I’m not sure why, but, God knows, I appreciate it. I suppose there are writers who hate them — there are writers who hate almost everything — but it’s fun for me to be around people who are interested in something I’m interested in. I lived and wrote, every day, in Jackson Hole for over twenty years before I got to know any readers, much less writers. Mostly everyone I knew was either a waitress, a drunk, a cowboy dancer, or a derelict. Or a combination of the above. Looking back, I think maybe there were people in town I might have had something in common with. I was just too busy doing whatever it was I did to meet them.
I made a conscious decision way back when that if I wanted to write I couldn’t downhill ski. This cut me off from 98 percent of the locals, in winter. I figured I had to conserve time and money. Self-evident truth #3. “You can’t obsess on two things at once.”
That’s why they call it obsession. And, for me, I must obsess on a book or it’s a waste of my time to write it and yours to read it. William Buckley can toss off novels between cocktail parties and yachting regattas. Not me.
Let’s give an example of what I mean by obsession on a book.
Because of cowboy dancing to let off tension after a day of writing, I found short-term serial monogamy during the shoulder seasons, between skiing and mountain climbing. By Thanksgiving and Memorial Day, those women were long gone, back to the jocks from whence they came.
The solitude reached its most clinical Christmas of 1984. I was writing Western Swing, which, for those of you who don’t have my work memorized, is told in the first person by Loren Paul and Lana Sue Goodwin/Potts/Roe/Paul. I’d recently finished the fifth draft of Sex and Sunsets, written in the first person by Kelly Palamino, who was secretly one of Loren’s pen names. Are you following this? I had two cats named Fitz and Zelda, and, like so many single artistic types, my cats were considerably more than pets. They were next of kin.
I also had a huge spider plant that took up at least half the front room of my apartment. I decorated the spider plant with Christmas lights and sparkly ornaments. It was quite nice. I didn’t use tinsel that Christmas because the year before Zelda had taken to eating the stuff and it came out looking like two-foot-long silver tape worms.
We had a bunch of presents under the spider plant, all wrapped in shiny paper and decorated with ribbons. The day before Christmas Eve, my friend from way back, Pam, came over to bring me Christmas fudge. She started poking around under the spider plant, looking at the gift cards on the presents.
“This one’s from you to Lana Sue,” Pam said.
“It’s a surprise,” I said. “I think she’ll like it.”
“And this one is from Kelly to Loren.” She looked up at me with a question in her eyes.
“I helped Kelly pick it out.”
“Tim,” Pam said. “You are Kelly.”
“Technically Loren is Kelly.”
“And you are Loren. And Lana Sue.”
That’s when I got a bit defensive. I said the pithiest comeback I could think of, on short notice. “So?”
“So, all these presents are to and from people who live inside your head.”
“That’s not true. Lana Sue bought treats for Fitz and Zelda.”
“Okay, all your presents are either for imaginary friends or cats.”
“What’s your point?”
Soon after that, Pam left.
On Christmas Day I made Grand Marnier spiked coffee and crepes for breakfast. Zelda and Fitz had Purina Special Diet. Then I turned on the radio to Christmas music and we all opened our gifts. Everyone except maybe Zelda was in the proper holiday spirit.
But that night, the Cowboy Bar wasn’t open on account of it being Christmas. There was no one to dance with. We didn’t have a TV and there’s only so much fun you can have with people who aren’t real.
I carried Zelda and Fitz into the bathroom for a family meeting.
“Look,” I said. “Guys. I’m afraid this is turning creepy.” Luckily, for my future, neither one of them said anything. “”We’ve got to take a break from the book. It’s time I got a job. Time I met people who aren’t me.”
Zelda clawed the door, wanting out.
And when Leila gets old enough for me to tell her the stories of my youth, I’m going to tell her this one and, at the end, I’ll say, “And that’s how I started cooking in the Lame Duck Chinese Restaurant, which is how I got interested in China, which is how I came to adopt you. It all began the Christmas me and my characters exchanged presents.”
I imagine Leila will then make me swear to never, ever, tell anyone that story again.

p.s. Those of you writing an English paper on this blog may score bonus points if you know how many times I used the word “which.”

Read Full Post »

Why I Left Hollywood: Part II

In a bizarre example of irony on parade, after I wrote that last blog full of George and Dick jokes, I went down to Valley Books here in Jackson and had run-ins with both the Secret Service and Dick Cheney. The Dick run-in wasn’t so much a run-in as a stand-next-to while Dick and Lynn bought books and I talked to Ashley the book sales girl about my run-in with the Secret Service outside. The Cheneys bought nonfiction, but I don’t know what. I should have looked, only I was distracted by Ashley, who was more interesting than the Vice President.
I did fight off the nearly irresistible urge to thrust one of my novels in his hands, but Dick just didn’t seem to type to read about Vice Presidents on coke or three-ways in nursing homes. The Honey Don’t tour (the Vice President on coke book) took me to Washington D.C. and one of the book buyers at Politics and Prose told me Republicans don’t read fiction.
“What do they read?” I asked.
“They watch television.”
The actual run-in part of the day happened earlier, outside with the Secret Service. I would wager there is some poor drudge of a bureaucrat whose job is to read all the blogs that mention Dick or George, searching for teenagers or Unabomber wannabes who post threats. If so, this is for him. Or her: Tell the Secret Service that if they identify themselves before pushing people around, they would save themselves and the people they push a lot of grief.
I thought this guy with the Mormon missionary haircut was saving a parking place for his wife who was driving the Winnebago around the block, and I told him to get his ass up on the curb so I could park.
“It’s unethical to save parking places,” I said.
In my mind, the man overreacted. He said, “Get out of here.”
The conversation deteriorated from there and I was ten seconds from digging into the glove compartment for bear spray when I noticed several other guys of similar build and hairstyle closing in.
I said, “Shit. You’re Secret Service.”
He sort of blinked a Yes. The turkey never did say it out loud.
I said, “I thought you were a tourist jerk.”
He said, “I don’t have time for this,” and I drove off. Had to park a block away, then when I finally make it to the bookstore — walking past the Secret Serviceman who didn’t seem to recognize me — there was Dick Cheney, browsing.
Which isn’t at all what this blog is about. I’ve written two political spiels lately, and that’s my quota for the month. There’s nothing worse that a highbrow blog evolving into an anti-government rant. Nobody wants to read that crapola.
This blog is about the screenplay I wrote for Jerry Bruckheimer. Jerry’s a famous person in Hollywood. He produced all kinds of movies from Top Gun to Armageddon to Pirates of the Caribbean, and why the nice folks at his company thought of me when it came time to write a script about a coal miner strike in Kentucky, I’ll never know. I am known for Rocky Mountain humor, not Appalachian angst. The project was based on a book by John Yount, who is one of my personal heroes. He wrote a book called Toots in Solitude that should be required reading for anyone before they are allowed to write a novel. This project wasn’t Toots, it was based on a book called Hardcastle, and I think the fact that I owned the book and had read it before they approached me was what sealed the pitch.
You probably think this is one of those bite the hand that fed you and allowed you to move indoors pieces, but it’s not. The Bruckheimer people were a pleasure to work with, especially his wife Linda. She is the finest example of quality folks in Hollywood. They flew me first class, put me up in a high-end hotel (I forget which one, some place they took for granted I had heard of before) and they never tried to hustle me for free drafts. All the other producers I wrote for hustled free drafts. Out there, you either get paid like you’ve never been paid before, or you work for nothing, and the labor is the same either way.
But Bruckhemer Films isn’t like the normal producer. They know the writer is the rock that keeps everyone else out of the water.
About four drafts in, someone finally showed Jerry himself a copy of the script. They flew me out from Wyoming and picked me up in a limo and drove me out to Santa Monica where I was given a fancy bottle of water and shown into this room straight out of your Hollywood fantasies.
A guy named Chad said, “Jerry wants you to kill a white guy by page twenty.”
I said, “I can do that.”
Chad said, “Great,” and they flew me home.

Read Full Post »

George and Dick Parables

“Coming next, drug addicted pregnant women no longer have anything to fear from the authorities thanks to the Supreme Court. Both sides on this in a moment.”–Bill O’Reilly (O’Reilly Factor, 3/23/01)

I love the part about both sides.

The following are parables, which means they are Truth as opposed to true. Ever since the New York Times started faking stories you’ve got to include a disclaimer with this spiritual stuff. God knows, if Jesus was preaching today Fox News would come out with an expose that he invented the Good Samaritan. I can see Tony Snow shouting at the camera: “Jesus lies! He’s worse than the KKK!”
So, parables, got that?
Parable #1. George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condeleezza Rice were wandering across the desert in Iraq because coming out of the Kuwait City Marriott Hotel George told everyone he would lead and God wanted them to turn right. The truth is Karl Rove was taking downs the names of people turning left and George didn’t want to be on Karl’s crap list.
George, Dick, and Condeleezza wandered lost for six days without water or hair gel and on the seventh they rested. Mere hours before they would all surely have died from thirst, Condeleezza found a half-full bottle of Dasani water, or half-empty, depending on your attitude.
She quickly unscrewed the top and without even wiping Arab cooties off the lip of the bottle, the put the Dasani to her lips.
That’s when George cleared his throat. He said, “Condeleezza, aren’t you forgetting, you serve at the pleasure of the President.”
Condeleezza said, “So what?”
George said, “It is my pleasure to have firsties on that bottle of Dasani.”
(I just Googled Dasani and did you know Coca-Cola bottles that stuff directly from the city tap — no filters, no additives, nothing. They sell water for $1.25 that costs them under .001 cents a bottle. No wonder we live in the greatest country on Earth.)
So, Condeleezza gave George her bottle of Dasani. George rubbed the top of the bottle on his tie because his ick factor with Arab bugs is higher than Miss Rice’s, then he brought the bottle to his mouth. That’s when Dick Cheney said, “George.”
President Bush said, “Yes, sir?”
Dick said, “Sit.”
George sat.
Dick said, “Give the bottle to me.”
George gave him the half-full or half empty bottle. Dick Cheney unscrewed the top. Then he turned to face Mecca — although he was really turning away from Condeleeza and didn’t know anymore where Mecca was than Texas — and Dick Cheney peed in the bottle.

See how a parable works. While the exact details have been fudged, the truth is still there.

Parable #2.
Dick and George went hunting in Wyoming, over by the Big Horns. The Secret Service figured it was safe because they didn’t take any lawyers along. As the Executive Branch walked down a trail, Dick was telling George how tough you have to be to stay President while everyone in the world thinks you’re the village idiot. “If every single person in America disagrees with us, we’ve got to spit in their eye,” Dick said, when suddenly a wolverine leapt from the forest and bit Dick Cheney on the ass.
The wolverine clamped on like vice grips on a wing nut. Without a word, Dick stomped back to the truck, dragging the wolverine all the way. Dick reached into the bed of the truck and got himself a tire tool and twisted around to WHACK that wolverine between the eyes. The wolverine fell over dead.
Dick glared at George and said, “Do you think you’re tough enough to do that?”
George looked from the deal wolverine, then back up the trail to the spot where the bite took place, then back at Dick again.
“I think I could,” George said, “But you’ve got to promise not to hit me with the tire iron.”

Those are my Sandlinista parables of the day. You readers can go back to whatever you were doing.

Read Full Post »

Styrofoam: It’s only cold when you fall in it

Fiction writers write a series of lies that add up to Truth. Capital T. Nonfiction writers write a series of facts that add up to a point of view, if you are kind, and a lie, if you are tacky. I write novels, which means my lies are Truth. President Bush’s lies are lies. Your sanity depends on your ability to tell the difference.
And, besides being a professional daydreamer and storyteller, I live in a tourist trap, which makes me a double liar. The whole world over, locals lie to tourists. Remember the Fountain of Youth. That was a lie locals told tourists in something like 1526. It’s been a tradition ever since, culminating in the official Wyoming state animal — the jackalope.
At times, my tall tales get me in the soup. I like to think my stories are so tall, nobody would be gullible enough to buy them. But, there are those who are beyond gullible. Especially in Oklahoma. Consider the following Letter to the Editor that was actually published in the Jackson Hole News. My neighbors blamed me, of course.

To the Editor,
My family and I visited your beautiful valley this past summer and we had a wonderful time, but I must register a complaint. While my husband and I were waiting in the line to dump the Mini Winnie’s tanks in the RV sewage disposal at Signal Mountain campground, a nice young man walked over and we got up a conversation.
He said he lived year-round in the Teton area and I said he was lucky and he said, “Yes, ma’am,” polite as could be. Then I asked him what was the white stuff on the mountains. We’d been arguing about it all week — Bert and me. Bert said he thought it was snow, but this was August and I was born and reared in Oklahoma. I never heard of snow in August.
The nice young man told us the white stuff was Styrofoam so the mountain climbers wouldn’t get hurt when they fell off the cliffs. Made sense to me, and who would dream a native person would spread misinformation, so I said, “Told you,” to Bert and he grumbled some and that was that.
Back here in Oklahoma, last month, I told my beautician Wanda Jo Henderson that the park people spread Styrofoam all through the mountains so climbers won’t get hurt when they fall. She said I was nuts and one thing led to another until I bet her twelve dollars (which is the price of a wash and set) that I was right. I mean a local native told me.
You know the rest. I’m out twelve dollars, my hair looked like a Brillo pad for a week because Wanda Jo was laughing so hard that she botched the job, and now all the girls, and Bert, are telling the whole state what a fool I am.
So I think that young man owes me twelve dollars and an apology. If anyone there knows who I’m talking about, I’d appreciate you slapping his face and getting my money. The young man was taller than me and had a beard. You’re bound to recognize him because he had on sunglasses with a silly strap around the back of his head. He wore jeans and a T-shirt that said Skipped Parts. He had on sandals. Get him for me.
Kathy McLish
Norman, Oklahoma

Read Full Post »

Jackson Hole: Where Bush Hides His Dick

I live in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and so, theoretically, does Vice President Dick Cheney. I say theoretically because he really doesn’t. There is this rule in the Constitution that says the President and Vice President can’t be from the same state, and Dick was living in Dallas at the time he was nominated, so he quickly came to Jackson and registered to vote here. I’ve seen the voting registration lists and he’s the only one in the valley with General Delivery for his address. They won’t allow the other transients to register General Delivery, on the theory that people should live somewhere before they vote.
Dick was raised in Wyoming, but way over on the other side of the state. We don’t exactly claim him. His granddaughter played with my daughter one afternoon at the library. She seemed like a normal little girl — no sign of Devil spawn — except for two large goons with really bad haircuts and yellow dangly coils coming out of their ears who sat over by the cardboard cut-out of Angelina Ballerina, the dancing mouse.
Whenever the news folks say the Vice President is in an undisclosed location, he is here, fishing. He’s supposed to be in hiding, only two ambulances follow him around wherever he goes, so locals tend to keep track of the man without help from CNN. If you miss the ambulances, a sure sign of Vice Presidential occupancy is quick, little jets darting through the valley, or oversized helicopters hovering over the Snake River.
Those helicopters were a bone of local contention the week after Katrina wiped out New Orleans. Besides the obvious literary comparison of Nero fiddling while Rome burned and Cheney flyfishing while New Orleans drowned, there were those who thought the helicopters could have been used for rescue work instead of tracking a #14 dry humpy lost in the willows.
I think Cheney got a bad rap on that one. He was on vacation for Chrissake. We shouldn’t expect him to care what happened to New Orleans. Black people don’t vote Republican. I think he did just what he should have done. He fished.
Here is what I meant to write about before I got sidetracked. I find this interesting:
Teton County, Wyoming, has three registered Republicans for each registered Democrat. This is the Vice President’s hometown, and yet (I’ve written nine novels and this is the first time I’ve ever typed “and yet”). And yet, Teton County was the only county in Wyoming that voted for Kerry in the last election. How can that be? My only theory is that people who actually live near the Dick and know him, won’t vote for him.
Maybe there is another reason. If anyone has any ideas why the man’s Republican neighbors won’t vote for him, I’d like to hear them.

Read Full Post »

What Kurt Vonnegut Told Me to Do but I Didn’t

Back in my early twenties I used to squat illegally on National Forest land in a Cheyenne tipi my then-wife and I put together with canvas and lodgepole pines. I would work an entry leveljob in a restaurant I knew was closing after summer tourist season to make enough money to move inside for the winter. When the restaurant closed, I went on unemployment and wrote a novel as hard as I could until spring when I moved outside again.
In four winters, I wrote four novels. As soon as one was finished, I dashed off 120 to 150 query letters to agents and editors across America, asking them if they wanted to read my book. No one did. I could have been writing damn classics and no one would have known. Luckily for literary history’s sake, I wasn’t.
In a fit of pique, I wrote a letter to Kurt Vonnegut. As I recall, mostly I whined about the state of publishing. At the end, I asked him to read some of my stuff. Now, after bringing out eight or nine books of my own, I realize what a pushy son-of-a-bitch I was. but, amazingly enough, he wrote back.
This is what Kurt Vonnegut said.
The letter is typed on bond paper using a fairly old ribbon. It is dated November 25, 1981.

Dear Tim Sandlin,
I can’t begin to read all the stuff people expect me to read. I am smothered by manuscripts. Also: I have never acted as an agent, have never gotten anybody published.
Writing is a business like any other. You are going to have to hustle some. It would probably be smart for you, if you really believe in your work, to come to New York to persuade an agent to take you on. As to the indifference of publishers to queries by mail from unknowns: They simply can’t afford to read and evaluate the tons of stuff which is written in this enormous country of ours year after year. They don’t have that kind of money. So they leave it to the agents to conduct the talent searches. Agents themselves can’t afford to consider everything, either. They have to be wooed, which is why I suggest your coming to New York.
Sorry about that, and good luck.
Yours truly,

Kurt Vonnegut
He signed it in blue ink.

It’s odd that a man who had a phobia about semi-colons would use two colons in one page. And that “tons of stuff which is written” line isn’t quite right. I daresay he didn’t expect the letter to end up on a blog.
Sometimes I imagine what would have happened if I took his advice. I mean, at the time, I wasn’t living on pavement. Moving to New York was as bizarre an idea as moving to Mars. Or Tralfamador. Since then, I have published books, without moving, but I wonder if I did go woo, would I have bigger advances or print runs? Would I know people who go to cocktail parties and eat brie? Who can tell. We all make choices.
But, I think it was enormously kind of Mr. Vonnegut to write me a letter that wasn’t a copy/paste get-away-from-me-kid. I will always think well of him and cherish his books.

Read Full Post »

Bear spray and mosquito spray are not the same thing

I would like to be remembered as the man who invented the word gazillion. Not that I did, but most people given credit for creating things didn’t. I would encourage you to tell your friends that Tim Sandlin coined the gazillion.
Which isn’t what this blog is about. This blog is about evolution.
On our way to Yellowstone the other day we came upon a major bear jam up around Pacific Creek. A couple hundred cars were pulled over and the display of photo equipment was truly impressive. There were lenses the size of bazookas aimed at this mother grizzly and three cubs that appeared to be grazing out in the field. I know, you are thinking grizzlies don’t graze, but it sure looked like they were eating grass. Maybe it was for the same reason my dog eats grass — so they could crap indoors.
Anyway, the token idiot from Utah wandered out in the field for a close-up. Suddenly, the interesting nature lesson became one of those Darwin Award deals. All the hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment left the bears and moved to the idiot. I blame YouTube. And those TV shows of Stupid Human Tricks, or Nature Gone Wild. Any tech weenie with a cell phone can get rich selling tragedy to network news now, so nature itself takes a backseat to the chance to make a buck.
People were saying, “God, I hope she just rips his arms off instead of killing him outright. It’ll make for much better footage.”
I told my daughter the man was committing suicide and we might be able to watch. All these comments about his brainless, stupid, Utah-like behavior were made within hearing distance of the man’s wife and kids. After a bit, the woman herded her children back into one of those pickup trucks so big it takes six tires instead of two to keep them on the road. And the cab is big as a limo. They idle loud as an airplane. The boy was playing some kind of handheld game where he got to kill people, which is modern life for you. Kids are more interested in wasting electronic humans than watching their dad buy it from a grizzly bear.
The bear stood on her hind legs and looked at the guy, but she never charged. The crowd was disappointed.
She did pick off a jogger a week later. Bit him in the ear and shoulder. People who live in grizzly country don’t call it jogging. We call it trolling.
A photographer in Yellowstone was mauled the same day as our near but not quite adventure with the idiot. The guy in Yellowstone was two miles from a trail and three from a road. The bear ripped out his eye, and the guy walked three miles with his eyeball hanging off the side of his face. I think. The news story said the bear ripped out his eye, and another story said doctors spent so-many hours putting his eye back in, which means he either carried his eyeball in his hand for three miles or it was hanging by mucus or whatever off his cheek there. Both make an interesting image.
I wonder if he could see out of it. I read that Frenchmen who were guillotined were able to see for around three minutes after their head popped off their body. I don’t know how the scientist who figured this out figured it out, but I suppose it’s possible. The eye and the brain are both there together. You could see until oxygen became a problem. It would be fun to write a poem under those conditions.
Back to the title of this little piece: Last year a woman from Texas sprayed her kids with mosquito repellant then did the same with bear repellant. Results were about what you would expect.

Read Full Post »

Why I Write Books

There are four things I keep nearby at all times, generally in my pocket. 1) A photo of my now 6-year-old daughter taken when she was one and in a Chinese orphanage. She’s sitting in front of a wall in front of a block building. 2) My Food Stamp card from 1973. It keeps my humble. 3) A card Julie Sheppard from Wichita, Kansas, gave me after a reading. It says “I Am a Professional Woman — Don’t Fuck With Me. And 4) this letter.

Mr. Sandlin,
Last Saturday nite my fiancée flipped her motorcycle into a parked car. I held her as she died.
I’ve spent this week sitting in our big, quiet house listening to the tapes we made together and I happened to pick up a book you wrote.
It’s important that I tell you how much Social Blunders has meant to me.
People dealing with death, and sex, and love in a way that really makes sense. You make me feel less alone and I wanted to say thanks.
A
p.s. Her name was Cyndi. She was 29. She really liked your books too.

I still can’t read the letter without weeping.

Read Full Post »

Dead animals and literature

I did whatever it is I do at the Wyoming Writers Conference in beautiful Thermopolis, Wyoming, last week. Mostly, I told people who live in small towns in a state with no known connections to the rest of the country how to break into the movie business. It’s been done, but winning the Food Network pie competition is more likely.
Anyway, they had me stay at the Holiday Inn in Thermopolis, home of a thousand dead animals. Hundreds anyway. Every inch of wall space and every nook of floor space is covered by something dead — hundreds of elk, deer, antelope, fish of every sort. Pythons, rattlesnakes, and vipers. Several gorillas, a rhinoserus, lions, tigers, and bears, oh my. Maybe twenty jackalopes.
Taxidermists are known for their sense of humor. Besides the jackalope, you’ve got pikealope, bassalope, fur bearing trout, and rattlesnakes with feet. My favorite is the Wyoming werewolf. You take a set of coyote teeth and jam them into asshole of a deer. The tail is the nose, and glass eyes are implanted in the butt cheeks. It works best with a white-tailed deer. Looks like a muff with rabies.
The literature on the place says the animals were “harvested” by the owner and his family. When harvested means killed, language has gone to hell. We harvest corn. Green peppers. I could even let them slide on pigs and sheep, but a wild animal? You kill a wild animal, you don’t harvest it.
The government, of course, is the best at coming up with nice ways to say kill. After extensive contact with the Forest Service, I came up with this list: crop, take, thin, harvest, suppress, put down, subdue, repress, extinguish, censor, localize, secure, bridle, limit, check, clear, pacify, reduce, cull, trim, adjust, manage, regulate, lose, and maintain population objectives. Then there’s the good old collateral damage, which means killing innocent bystanders. They use that one for people.

Read Full Post »