The Tinkerbell Diet

A couple years ago Randolph Proust, his lovely wife Chelsey, and their children Lester and Brittania camped at Lava Creek Campground in Yellowstone National Park. One hot afternoon, after lunch, a young cinnamon-colored black bear wandered into the campground and commenced to pop open various bear-proof trash receptacles. Randolph decided he would get a cute photo by smearing Sioux Bear honey across Lester’s lips and chin.

“Think cuddly thoughts,” Lester’s mother said before sending the boy off to bond with nature’s wonder.

The next day, when interviewed by the Jackson Hole News and Guide at the Lake Hotel Hospital, Mr. Proust said, “I didn’t dream the Park Service would allow bears to roam freely if they weren’t tame. My kids were raised on Berenstein Bears, Brother Bear, Bear in the Big Blue House. We came to Yellowstone to watch Yogi and Boo Boo steal picnic baskets.”

Randolph’s daughter clutched a Teddy Bear to her chest and cooed, “Winnie the Pooh bit off Lester’s nose.”

I thought of this story the other day when I ran into Roger Ramsey at Hard Drive Café where we was skimming back and forth across the internet, searching for happy-go-lucky dairy products.

“I know I’ve heard of Mr. Cheddar Curd.” Roger’s teeth gnashed in determination. “I just can’t find him. Look at this. There’s a Japanese anime starring the Tofu Twins. I can use that.”

I ordered a half-caff, extra dry, soy vanilla cappuccino and came back to Roger and his computer. “Why are you Googling anthropomorphic cheese?” I asked.

“Because Maurey rented Finding Nemo for Scarlet and now she refuses to eat fish?”

“Maurey or Scarlet?”

“Scarlet. Maurey never would touch my trout.”

Maurey is Roger’s wife. Scarlet Gilia is their six-year-old daughter. Roger calls her Scarlet and Maurey calls her Gilia. Maurey is an ovo-lacto vegetarian and Roger is a hunting guide. It’s a marriage made on the second ring of hell.

“Maurey did it on purpose. All those cute little fish and crustaceans love their families and friends, and the evil humans want nothing more than to slaughter them. What does she think fish eat if not each other?”

“My theory is Disney characters live on fruit juice and Dove bars.”

“Maurey’s got Scarlet so she won’t eat any food that sings and dances. It began with the stupid pig in Charlotte’s Web. Then Benny the Bull from ‘Dora the Explorer.’ She hasn’t touched lamb since the damn thing followed to Mary to school one day, and don’t even get me started on Bambi.”

This was interesting. I sat beside Roger and watched him fly from cartoon site to site. There were hundreds of them. “So Scarlet won’t eat anything other than vegetables?”

“I nipped that in the bud. Went to the library and checked out a video called “Veggie-Tales.” It’s a bunch of Christian cucumbers and tomatoes and the like, teaching each other values. Scarlet sleeps with an artichoke heart now. She’s been cutting out little velvet skirts and blouses for her carrots.”

“How about apples and oranges?”

“I downloaded a Fruit of the Loom commercial. She’s got nowhere left to turn except macaroni and cheese, and as soon as I find Mr. Cheddar Curd, I can put a stop to that.”

I tried to see the logic in Roger’s logic, but it zipped right over my head. “Why are you trying to starve your daughter to death?”

“I’m not trying to starve Scarlet. I’m showing her those idiot kids’ shows have given everything a personality. I’ll drive her back to Happy Meal burgers, like a normal child. Look at this site.”

Roger stopped on the Boohbah Home Page. Boohbahs appear to be colorful amoebas with deep, creative emotions capable of expressing joy and sadness. “Better not show her that one,” Roger said. “Lord knows what she might swear off.”

He switched to Thomas the Tank Engine, which is a show about selfish, jealous, bitter trains who treat each other like human beings. “It’s not just animals,” Roger said. “There’s a new show on Disney about talking screwdrivers. It’s ripped off a PBS show where a front end loader cries when it doesn’t get its way.”

“Bob the Builder.”

“This baloney didn’t exist when I was a kid. You never saw the Three Stooges worrying about a cream pie’s self-esteem.”

“It’s been going on forever,” I said. “John Ruskin called it the Pathetic Fallacy.”

“Somebody got rich selling pet rocks. I wouldn’t call that pathetic.”

“Back then pathetic didn’t mean politics or sports or anything it’s used for now. It meant empathetic. Ruskin had a peeve against angry clouds or majestic mountains. He said no matter how much it rains, the clouds are never angry. A cloud is nothing but a cloud. The river is not an old man. Tumbleweeds don’t tumble because they are laid back.”

“What’s that got to do with forcing a rare rib eye down Scarlet’s throat. I won’t have a daughter so arrogant as to remove herself from the food chain.”

“Ruskin’s was a worthless complaint. Writers couldn’t write without the Pathetic Fallacy. Humans couldn’t be human. Ancient Greeks thought the sun, the moon, the oceans, even the earth itself were all gods who behaved like dysfunctional families. Even us modern types created God in man’s image.”

“Not the other way around?”

“Everything is personal to humans. That’s what sets us apart from the monkeys.”

Roger yelled, “Eureka!”

“You understand my philosophical treatise?”

“Chuck E. Cheese! She’ll never eat macaroni and cheese again.”

“Isn’t Chuck E. a mouse?”

Roger leaned toward his computer and peered at Chuck. “Oh, yeah. Can’t let her find this one. She already goes hysterical at the sight of D-Con.”

“What if your plan doesn’t work?” I asked Roger. “What if you’re creating an anorexic? Girls today have enough neuroses without thinking their lunch is getting in touch with its inner pasta.”

“I see the light,” Roger said.

“You’ve discovered a way to use your brain?”

“I’ll write a diet book. It’ll make millions of dollars.”

“Are these the same millions you made off of self-cleaning barbecue sauce?”

“Nobody ever lost a dime selling weight loss schemes. I’ll call it the Yellowstone Diet. We’ll turn South Beach into a Trivial Pursuit answer.”

“Or Jeopardy question.”

“Every woman in America will clamor for my DVDs and CD ROMS.”

I finished my cappuccino and dug a finger into the bottom foam. “So, what are you selling exactly?”

“Tapes and movies of happy food groups. Living lunch. Whenever a woman puts anything whatsoever in her mouth, we’ll convince her she’s murdering Tinkerbell.”

“Or whoever.”

Roger grinned. “Whomever.”

P.S. Someone finally explained to me that 🙂 is code for openness to a sexual adventure. I’m going to have to rethink my relationship with a whole bunch of you readers out there.

The Punch Line

My daughter Leila turned seven last month and she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life. For a couple of years, she dreamed of managing a hotel in China, when she grows up. She researched hotel management and knew the track to get there. Then, she moved on to designing clothes. She’s got talent. Lately, she switched to jewelry design.

Sunday night, I mentioned this lack of focus to me wife, Carol. “By the time I was seven I knew writing novels was my calling. I had my entire career mapped out, and I knew what I had to do to get there.”

Carol said, “Yes, but you’re a freak.”

I’m thinking the true freak — me — is the one who doesn’t even know he’s a freak. Self-awareness blows the gig.

I was right around seven when I wrote my first joke. I wrote it for my cousin to tell in the family Christmas Eve talent show. Here it is: “Did you hear about the Cherokee Chief Red Cloud who drank three gallons of Lipton tea. He was found, drowned in his tipi.” I was seven for God’s sake. What do you expect?

At nine, I had my first publication — a poem in either Highlights for Children of Jack and Jill magazine. Sometimes I tell interviewers one and sometimes the other, but the truth is I don’t remember. The poem was entitled “Trees.” There were leaves in it.

Inspired by publication, I wrote basically every day until my second publication — Sex and Sunsets — when I was thirty-seven. S&S stayed in print twenty years, until last summer. There have been six screenplays based on it, but no movies.

The first joke I wrote for public performance came in junior high. My friend Ronny was running for vice-president of the student council and he wanted a laugh to open his speech.

I wrote him this: “If Chad attacks Libya from the rear, do you think Greece will help?”

The first novel I wrote was The Battle of Bitter Creek, and one of the blog readers wrote me to say he has a copy. Amazingly enough. I’m not sure I even have a copy of the manuscript. It’s set in 1888. The spoiled wife of the owner of the railroad tells the residents of Bitter Creek, Wyoming, they must put clothes on their horses, dogs, cats, and chickens, or the railroad will never stop there again. The hero is R.C. Nash, a name I used thirty years later in Honey Don’t, my political farce. There’s another guy named Overbite O’Brien. The book was fairly low end.

Now, fifty years after the tipi joke and thirty-five years after the bad Bitter Creek novel, I have my first cowboy novel coming out next week. For those of you who keep score, it’s my ninth published book. Rowdy in Paris is set in 2004, I think. Rowdy Talbot goes to Paris to retrieve his stolen belt buckle and finds himself ass deep in a plot to destroy both McDonalds and Starbucks.

Riverhead/Putnam is publishing the book and because the other eight weren’t best sellers, they aren’t investing any money in publicity or marketing. No author tour. No free books to Book Sense stores. No co-op.

(Quick lesson in co-op: My friend who writes thrillers told me Barnes and Noble ordered 12,000 of his newest book. I said, “How did you swing that?”
He said, “My publisher is paying three dollars per copy for B&N to stock the book. It’ll go on the New Arrivals shelf.” In radio, this is condemned as payola. In publishing, it’s co-op.)

The only prayer this book has of selling enough copies for me to find a publisher willing to put out the next GroVont book (I’m on page 320) is if something happens to stick Rowdy on Putnam’s radar. To oversimplify, if they think the book will be big, the book will be big.

This can’t happen without you mighty blog readers. You want me to keep writing blogs and books, give me some support. You don’t, that’s okay too. The world won’t be dramatically different without my writing.

But, if you are of a mind to pitch in, there are two possibilities. 1) If you or your college roommate, ex-lover, or the in-law you can’t abide works for big media, tell them you know about a cool book.

Okay, that’s not likely. Second, if Rowdy makes a good run on the Amazon Top Five Million chart, it might get my publisher’s attention. Amazon measures velocity, as opposed to overall numbers. A book that sold 200 in the last hour will rate above a book that sold 20,000 last month. Thusly, when the guy at the New York Times Book Review said Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty sucked because no on wants to read about sex between old people, the book jumped 30,000 slots the next morning. Which is two books, if you’re in six figure-ville, but Jimi was okay to start with. The dynamite review in USA Today gave it an even better kick.

So, in order to make an Amazon run and hit my publisher in the noggin with a stick, you all not only need to buy Rowdy in Paris, you need to buy Rowdy in Paris at the same time.

Let’s say Thursday evening, January 24, at 6 p.m. Pacific time, which is 9 p.m. on the East Coast. You folks in Europe or wherever you are can figure it out. If you have any desire to read Rowdy or more blogs, buy the book between 6 and 7 PDT, the night of January 24. Buy several. They make outstanding gifts for loved ones.

Maybe, we’ll make a difference. Also, order books you have no intention of picking up from the chains. It’ll get me in their computers. Buy the backlist from your local independent bookstore, or go to my web site and buy first editions from Valley Books.

I would love to publish book #10 and it won’t happen without you guys.

p.s. The Chad-Libya-Greece joke is in Rowdy. Nothing is ever lost.

You, Too, Can Buy an Oscar Nomination

Did you ever wonder why certain mid-major to major studios seem to receive so many more Oscar nominations than others? The answer in some, if not a lot, of cases is that they pay for them. Not directly, of course. The people who run the Oscars are complete paranoids when it comes to bribing voters. No holiday gift baskets. No trips to Vegas at studio expense. Heck, for a while there they even vetoed the free DVD of the movie. Now, at least you get a free movie so long as you don’t copy it or loan it out or upload it onto any known electrical device. Screwing up is punishable by imprisonment and loss of Beverly Hills lunch privileges.

No, Oscar voters cannot be bribed. Golden Globe voters can. It is perfectly within the rules to fly a Golden Globe voter to Paris and ply him with Grand Marnier and wild French women. It’s done every year because Golden Glove winners don’t necessarily win Oscars, but they do, more often than not, win Oscar nominations.

The Golden Globe gatekeepers wield the same power in movies that Iowa and New Hampshire wield in Presidential politics. You have to win there to go on to the next level. And it’s so much cheaper to buy your way into a Golden Globe than an Oscar. The Golden Globe voters are made up of ninety foreign journalists — photographers, mostly, and we all know about entertainment industry photographer ethics — who have places to live in Southern California. Ninety voters. An Oscar campaign costs millions of dollars, while ninety journalists can be bought by ninety bottles of scotch.

How do I, a small-town former dishwasher, former screenwriter, presently happy-go-lucky novelist from Wyoming, know this information? For one thing, it’s not that hard to figure out. Take Pia Zadora, as an example. Yes, the same Pia Zadora whose most famous movie was “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.” Pia won her Golden Globe for a movie called “Butterfly.” Write me if you’ve seen it. I haven’t, but I’ve been told it doesn’t hold a candle to “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.” But then Pia’s husband flew all ninety Golden Globe voters to Vegas for a weekend of revelry.

Surprise! She won!

My theory was confirmed by an actor who won a Golden Globe himself, so his opinion is not likely to be sour grapes. For the blog’s sake, we’ll call him Paul Hogan. Paul played Shane in a movie I wrote, although, sad to say, the movie itself wasn’t called “Shane.” The movie, which should have been “Sorrow Floats” was entitled “Floating Away.” That’s because “Hope Floats” came out right before “Sorrow Floats” and Rosanna Arquette was in both of them, and the producer, Showtime, thought the public would get mixed up.

The public did get mixed up. I receive frequent compliments for writing “Hope Floats,” a movie I didn’t write. I rarely receive compliments for writing “Floating Away.”

As an interesting aside, the guy who did write “Hope Floats” was represented by the same agency that represented me. My belief is he saw the title on his agent’s bookshelf — they all had a copy back then — and he sublimated. I’m certain he didn’t steal, and I mean that without irony, even though I don’t know the guy.

You may wonder how the title “Floating Away” was chosen. The fine folks at Showtime set up a table on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, where they handed anyone who would take it a list of five possible titles. I wasn’t told the losers. But, the title of my movie — the movie I spent five years working on — was chosen by a committee of vagrant pedestrians with nothing else to do but fill out opinion polls. We were right next to the Pepsi versus Coke blind taste test booth.

Another tidbit you might find interesting: In lists of the most powerful people in Hollywood, you never hear about the psychics. Here’s some advice for you low budget filmmakers. Bribe a psychic. You want a big star in a cheap movie, find out which Hollywood Swami-type is calling his shots. A huge percentage of the creative talent uses psychics. The whole business of who is a star and who isn’t is such a mystery, and successful actors, directors, producers, and studio heads have no idea how they made it happen, so on top of being neurotic, they’re superstitious as hell. A lot of cash goes down the fortune-telling tubes in California in the name of career advice.

There’s big money in mysticism in Hollywood. The actresses refer each other to the psychics with the reputations, and, if you’re on the list, you’re in Fat City. Look at what happened with Tom Cruise and Scientology, or Madonna with her Kabbala. I’d like to set myself up as the Gnostic prophet. Any of you creative types want to know what to do next, send me your question accompanied by a small check. One thing I do know is what you should do next. I’m good at that.

How Many Guns Were in Your Church Christmas Eve?

Due to the severe isolation of the job, most literary writers, and a few of the genre guys, develop a co-dependency relationship with a specific bookstore. The store is usually a local, mid-sized independent where you can get to know the staff and the staff can get to know you and your idiosyncrasies. Authors become mascots, of a sort, like the store cat that customers see slinking through the stacks. We drop in at these bookstores four or five times a week, just to see the books on the shelves. We buy a few, of course, but most of the time we’re there to absorb vibrations off the printed page. We need to know books still exist. We need to renew faith that the book we’re writing now will one day be on those shelves, real and tangible.

My home store is Valley Books in Jackson, Wyoming. Steve Ashley owns Valley Books and he is the finest human I’ve known in my days on Earth. I have owed Steve money continuously for over thirty years. Back during the dishwashing decades, I would charge all my Christmas presents there, for the family back in Oklahoma, then spend the rest of the year paying off the bill.

After that, came the flush screenwriting years when I pretended Steve allowed me to hang out in his bookstore for a hundred dollar a month cover charge. In exchange, I pretended all the books were free. Most months it worked out well. Only in winter did I drop so far behind I had to write a massive check in the spring.

When I’m in the throes of writing a novel, I tend to get more than a little spooky. Steve’s employees have always been kind and patient with my abnormal behavior. More than once I came to after a bookseller touched me on the arm and asked after my welfare, when I was frozen up in front of a shelf.

Which brings us to Christmas Eve. Fifteen to twenty years ago, in appreciation of all Steve and his staff did for me, I would go in during Christmas week and clean the employee bathroom. I hoped to start a precedent ¬¬– a movement, if you will – whereby all authors clean their local bookstore employee bathrooms during Christmas week.

It never caught on. To this day, I think if Phillip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike had followed my lead, we would have created a new tradition, equal to Secret Santas and black-eyed peas on New Year’s. But then, Steve remodeled the store and did away with employee bathrooms. I would have probably stopped, eventually, anyway. There comes a time of life where it’s considered peculiar to clean other people’s bathrooms.

So, here is the current Christmas Eve tradition: First we – the family and I – go to the 4 p.m. Christmas carol service at the Episcopal Church here in town. My daughter, Leila, loves to sing, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” I like tradition and ritual.

(Last Monday night, Dick Cheney was at the service. By my modest count, seventeen members of the congregation were packing guns. We skipped the Peace. Made the Good Will to Men thing seem a bit warped.)

Then, after church, I take a bottle of Frangelica liqueur to Valley Books, and right before closing, the staff, the owner, family members, and late shoppers toast to Christmas and the wonderful folks who sell books. Actually, we share several toasts. I don’t drink much anymore, so it doesn’t take but a couple shots to zip me right into the holiday spirit. And I’ve found the staff is more appreciative of a Dixie cup full of cheer at closing time than they were of a clean bathroom.

If there’s any Frangelica left, I take it home and put in into the French toast Christmas morning. I heartily endorse baking with liqueurs.

On another note, I once tried to explain to Leila why teenagers hate poems and songs featuring their name. I used the example of “Georgie, Porgie, pudding and pie.” I never met a kid named George yet who doesn’t loathe that poem. And girls named Brandy – my advice is don’t break into “Brandy, you’re a fine girl,” when you meet them. They’ve heard it before. At seven, my Leila is not impressed by people who knock out a verse of “Layla” the moment they meet her. Besides, no one can remember the line after “You got me on my knees.”

For me, the most damaging Christmas icon is that little brat Tiny Tim. God, I hated that sanctimonious suck-up. I was small for my age – I grew seven inches after high school – so the whole tiny thing made me neurotic as a Democrat in Utah anyway. It didn’t help for other kids to taunt, “Where’s your crutch, Tiny Tim? When are you going to say your line?”

But then I grew up and I am no longer an insecure, short, isolated, frightened, resentful, nerdy, twerp.

I don’t think. To prove my point, I will now take a giant step forward in my development as a whole human being.

“Merry Christmas.” Here it comes: “God bless us every one.”

p.s. Mark it on your calendar. Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty comes out in paperback on January 4. If you’ve already read the book, buy a few for your loved ones. Grandparents love it even when they claim their friends won’t. And order three from chain stores. You don’t have to pick them up. Unclaimed books will eventually reach a shelf. I’m too old to wash dishes professionally.

The One Thing Worse Than Losing Your First True Love

This week, Leila latched onto a CD by Louis Jordan. I like her tastes in music. She’s at an age with definite likes and dislikes, but she doesn’t judge music based on genre, or whether the musician is young, old, or dead, or whether I like or dislike it. She judges music based on music. Her favorite cut from Louis Jordan is called “Beware.” In it, the lead singer lists various traits of women — “If she’s easy to kiss and never resists” — and the band behind him hits the chorus of “Beware, Brother, Beware.”

“They ain’t foolin’, and if you fool around with them you’re gonna get a schoolin’.” “Beware, Brother, Beware.”

It’s all what to watch out for if you want to avoid trouble. Which got me to thinking. I put in over twenty years in the serial monogamy game called dating. When I was in a relationship, I was monogamous as an Osmond, and when I wasn’t in a relationship, I was promiscuous as a wharf rat. The problems popped up when I didn’t think I was in a relationship and a woman thought I was. Or vice versa.

It’s those grey areas that will get you condemned. Anyway, I averaged roughly two three-month relationships a year, and after twenty years, that means forty starts and stops. So, I learned some basic truths and I will now give you the benefit of my experience. Just what you want. These apply to men as well as women. If you are a heterosexual female, or a homosexual male, simply flip the pronouns.

Tim’s Tips for the Interpersonal Relationship — learned the hard way

1. If a woman wears camouflage on the first date, avoid a second.
2. Never get involved with a person who insists your relationship should be a secret. This will end badly.
3. Do not date a woman whose mother is named after food — Brownie, Sugar, Honey, Cupcake — or whose father is named Bubba, Butch, Dutch, or Killer.
4. Powder and paint makes them what they ain’t. Padding and stuffing, don’t add nothing.
5. There will come a moment, usually after the third time you sleep together, when a woman will be honest for roughly twelve hours. If she says she is trouble and you would be better off staying away — believe her. If she says all her relationships end in bitterness and tears — believe her. Believe whatever she says during this gap. It won’t happen again.
6. Don’t date a woman who keeps score. This includes women who flaunt photos of all the old beaus, or women who have stars stuck on the headboard of their bed and add another one the morning after your first night.
7. If a woman is 45 and has never been married, there is probably a reason.
8. Beware of women in wigs.
9. Stay clear of women who don’t eat.
10. Women who tell you they are sterile are almost always lying. Ask for a doctor’s note. (This one is especially true when you flip the pronoun.)

Red flags: These are not necessarily deal killers, but they should raise questions.

There are crystals under her bed.
When ordering coffee, she uses five or more adjectives.
She says, “I have a bad history with credit cards.”
She sleeps in shoes, curlers, or a car.
She wails, “I’m soooo drunk when she is looking for an excuse to misbehave.
She is your roommate.
She has more prescriptions than you.

Other helpful tips for the young:

Sleeping with someone, one last time, after you’ve broken up, “for old time’s sake,” almost always leads to pregnancy.

Do not move in together because you need the money. (I’ve been burned on this one, many a time.)

Separated is not the same as divorced.

Beware of women who lie to their parents, bosses, or teachers. They will not stop at you.

You lose them the way you get them. That means if it took two slow years to start, it’ll take two agonizingly slow years to end. If it started with lightning, it will end with lightning. Most importantly, if she cheated to be with you, she’ll cheat on you. Write this one down: You will not change your mate.

The one thing worse than losing your first true love is not losing your first true love.

All these pithy pieces of advice are just another way of saying the 11th Commandment that God gave Moses, but because it wasn’t a round number, Moses didn’t write it down. Thou shalt not sleep with anyone who has more problems than you have.

If any of you regular (can’t say faithful here) readers have dating tips you don’t get in Cosmo or Men’s Journal, I’d like to hear them.

Addendum for the real fans. The paperback of Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty comes out Jan. 4, and Rowdy in Paris will be released Jan. 24. Because I am not exactly a superstar or even a likely bestseller, the fine folks at Riverhead/Putnam have budgeted around twelve dollars for marketing and publicity.

I’m on my own for selling these things. I have an interesting idea for a guerilla marketing campaign that you guys might find fun. However, a blog isn’t the place to sell stuff, and part of my plan involves possibly illegal activities. Lord knows, no one on writing a blog would try to sell stuff or encourage illegal activities.

Which means — if you like my books or blogs, and you want me to make a living at it so I can continue to write them, you should go to the Yahoo Group where a clandestine bunch calling themselves Sandlinistas meets to cause trouble. That’s http://groups.yahoo.com/group/timsandlin/ Look under the message entitled: Guerilla Marketing Scheme.

You too can help a starving writer’s daughter celebrate Christmas.

The Greatest Story Ever Told — Shane

When she was thirteen years old, Tanya Tucker had a big crossover country/pop hit called “Delta Dawn.” Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, she found herself famous, the Miley Cyrus of her day. Tanya went into a wild spell marked by extremes, outrageous behavior, and public delamination of the celebrity sort. Now, she’s grown into a respected icon of country music, which, goes to show you — survival is the most important element in becoming an icon. You, too, can become a venerated elder of your tribe, no matter what you did as a teenager. It’s a matter of not stopping till you get there.

Anyway, Tanya Tucker put together an anthology called “100 Ways to Beat the Blues.” In the book, 100 more or less well-known people talk about their personal remedies for fighting depression. Mostly, she chose country singer and movie stars, along with a smattering of politicians and sports guys. And me. Lord knows how I made the cut. I’ve never met Tanya, although I have enjoyed her music and she seems to have come through the too-young fame syndrome with some level of sanity.

There are a few writers in the 100— Wally Lamb, Kinky Friedman, Cathie Pelletier. Not many live west of Austin. George And Barbara Bush had to share a chapter. Willie Nelson’s advice is short — “If you don’t like the blues, play from the whites.” I’m thinking it’s a golf joke. Garth Brooks chapter is serious, sincere, and personal. Among other things, Garth says you should watch the news on TV every night. Whatever makes you happy, I guess. Roseanne said it’s uplifting to beat the tar out of your ex-husband’s motorcycle with a baseball bat.

An alarming number of the musicians recommend getting drunk. Personally, I found myself drunk a lot, back in the old days, and I don’t remember it ever making me perky, punctual , and positive.

A bunch of the your more artistic types say depression is not necessarily bad for you.

Here is my chapter:

Kurt Vonnegut says a person must be depressed to write a novel, which is probably true. However, when I am depressed I have a tendency to sit on the couch and stare at that four-inch gap between my feet for several days, until the spiritual catatonia grows boring and I get up.

Boredom is the cure for long-term depression, and anything that alleviates boredom short-term — alcohol, sex with people you don’t like, rage — only puts off the cure. So, after a few days of sitting there like an African violet in need of sunlight, I get up and fix a pot of Kenya AA coffee. Then I pop Shane into the VCR. It’s a scientific fact that a person cannot remain in the dumps throughout a full viewing of Shane.

Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur. Jack Palance.

“Shane! Come back! Mother wants you!”

The movie will renew your faith in the inevitability of good’s victory over evil, the dignity of beauty, and the inspiration brought on by a nice view.

After Shane, and a couple of cups of strong Kenya AA, I can return to my work, refreshed and ready to produce.

That riff is the closest I’ve come to a bestseller.

I once saw Tanya Tucker at the Cowboy Bar. She was with Glen Campbell, at the height of her public flame-out. Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears are flashes in the pan compared to a country singer gone off the steep side of the roller coaster. Tonya had taken some sort of strange pills and got herself stuck up against a wall in the Cowboy Bar ladies room. Folks went in and out of there for a couple hours, trying to peel her loose.

Then, suddenly, Tanya bounced on stage, grabbed the microphone, and belted out one of the most kick-ass sets I’ve ever seen or heard. She was a true professional, and a hot singer. I later used that scene in “Western Swing.” Nothing is wasted.

So far as I can make out, nine readers of the last blog submitted titles containing three different punctuation marks. My favorite was Hooper Humperdink . . . ? Not Him!, submitted by Jill, because it used the most punctuation in the least words, which was the point of the Go, Dog. Go! exercise. I should have outlawed quotation marks, apostrophes, and nonfiction, but I didn’t so you readers have all earned your copies of “The Pyms: Unauthorized Tales of Jackson Hole.” If you will send me an address, through Messages — not Comments or Blog Comments or anything public — I will, eventually, when I get time between now and Christmas, mail you an autographed copy of this near-but-not-quite classic.

The rest of you can actually purchase this wonder at timsandlin.com. It’s the perfect Secret Santa gift, suitable for toilet reading, as each chapter takes the exact amount of time to read as a healthy #2. They are ten dollars each, plus three dollars shipping no matter how many you buy. Handling is free. In my value system, it is immoral to charge for handling. Who came up with that scam anyway?

Today’s assignment: In thirty-two words or less, tell me how you beat the blues.

Go, God. Go!

My daughter, Leila, who is six and was named after a J.P. Donleavy novel and not an Eric Clapton song, has been pulling out the old books I read to her when she was two. Now, Leila reads them to me. How many of you are familiar with the plot of “Go, Dog. Go!” One dog insults another dog’s hat and they all end up at a big party in a tree. I learned a valuable lesson about containing conflict from “Go, Dog. Go!”

What makes the book interesting to me are the three different punctuation marks in the title. You hardly ever see punctuation in a title, except for that silly colon in nonfiction. “I Did It My Way: The True Story of Transgender in NASCAR.” Does anyone else out there know of a book with three different punctuation marks in the title? Am I the only one who cares deeply about this?

Here’s the deal. I will send a free copy of “The Pyms: (note the colon) Unauthorized Tales of Jackson Hole,” (available only on Timsandlin.com) to anyone who can find me a title with three different punctuation marks. I don’t count titles using punctuation to disguise dirty words — C;:ks?!ker!

Leila asked me to tell her a bedtime story last night and because this is Thanksgiving week, I told her the old Isuzu legend about the true meaning of Easter. The Isuzus were a splinter group of Arapaho that lived in Yellowstone after the Battle of Greasy Grass. Other Indians considered them the bastard spawn of Custer, and it is true many of the Isuzus had blue eyes and a tendency to self-promote. Their tragic flaw was the fact they were high-centered and prone to rollovers.

A missionary named Sister Leslie Gore converted the entire tribe to Christianity in 1888 by teaching them the alternate words to “Jingle Bell Rock.” But some of their Christian traditions intermingled with the Happy Hunting Grounds faith system, such as the belief Mary was impregnated by a geyser.

Leila didn’t believe me. Clutching her little Piglet stuffed pig, she said, “You’re making this up as you go along, Dad.” I said if she didn’t go to sleep the Sandman would rub dirt in her eyes.

Anyway, the true meaning of Easter in northwest Wyoming, according to Isuzu legend as told by me to my daughter:

Two thousand and whatever years ago, the established church and an occupation government conspired with the media to have Jesus put to death on a cross between a couple of telephone solicitors. Jesus’s last words, were, “Forgive me Father. I do not want to change my calling plan.”

Later, he was cut down and body was hauled off to a cave. While the Bible says he would be dead for three days, any first grader knows Friday sunset to Sunday sunrise is only a day and a half, but you have to suspend some disbelief here, to be a true Fox News Fundamentalist.

So, after three days, Jesus rolls away the rock covering the cave and rises from the dead. He steps out of the cave, and if he sees his shadow he runs back in and we get six more weeks of winter.

Leila sat up in bed. “Is that true?”

I said, “It’s Gospel.”

“What about the Easter bunny?”

“The Isuzus didn’t believe in a rabbit who hid eggs around the house and then forgot where he hid them until they started to stink in mid-summer. They bought into the rising dead guy theory, but they just couldn’t swallow a holiday hare.”

Leila hit me with her Piglet.

Reflections on Skinning a Bear

Throughout the 1970s and into the early 80s, I spent my summers and falls living outdoors, illegally, on National Forest land. The first few years, I lived in a tent, then later a homemade Cheyenne tipi. Nowadays, what we did is called homelessness. Back then, it was living in the woods. Millions of tourists paid big money to sleep outside like me. The only difference I could see was they had an indoor bed (and bathroom) to go back to.

The plan was to make enough money to move to town for the winter. Come September and October I found a job with a guaranteed lay-off so I could claim unemployment for six months and write a book. I wrote four unpublished and unpublishable novels this way, until the breakthrough in 1987. I turned 35 living alone in a backpacking tent up on Crystal Creek, reading Saul Bellow by flashlight light.

There were two years — ’77 and ’78, as I recall — where the only work I could find in the fall in Wyoming was in big game processing. I became an elk skinner. I had to wear a hairnet and a hard hat. The hairnet was because I hadn’t cut my hair in a dozen years and the boss was a redneck. The hard hat was because the elk hang on meat hooks that could cold cock your ass if you didn’t watch where you were going.

I wore a chain link belt with two knife sheaves and a slot for my sharpening steel. Big Mickey Mouse boots. We had a large barrel where all the bones and scraps and cigarette butts and the occasional Coke can went for the animal byproducts man to pick up every Friday. To this day, I can’t eat anything that lists byproducts as an ingredient. Can’t even feed the stuff to my dog. People speak admiringly of Indians who used every bit of a buffalo when they killed it, but those Indians were wastrels compared to the modern meat industry. Indians didn’t use the glop found inside the lower intestines.

Deer and antelope are easy to skin. They peel like a banana. Elk and moose are harder because the muscles are attached to the hide, which is why they can do that skin flicking maneuver to shake off flies. I don’t recall skinning a buffalo. There weren’t that many around back then. I did sleep under a buffalo robe for a few winters. They aren’t like blankets. As your body heat warms the hide, it forms a soft shell around your body, like a leather glove. Or a warm tortilla. Quite comfortable, especially if you can ignore the tiny bugs in the hair.

I only skinned one bear. Most hunters kill bears for the hide and head instead of the meat. They think a nice bearskin rug in front of a crackling fire will make them irresistible to women. Here’s advice to those of you who would like to get laid on a bearskin. Make sure you’re the one on top. Hollow bear hairs up your butt are not conducive to romance.

Skinned bears give me and lots of other people the heebie-jeebies. A skinned bear looks remarkably like a child, say, ten years old, dipped in candle wax. A child with a slightly humped back and no head. It’s the fingers, I think, that make them so disturbing. A skinned bear’s hands and feet could pass for human, except the feet are on backwards. The big toe is on the outside. Personally, I could live the rest of my life in peace without ever skinning another bear.

I say I took the job out of a lack of any other work in Wyoming in the off-season, but the truth is I became an elk skinner because I thought it would look cool on a book jacket. Ten years before my first publication, I was already aware of marketing. It’s the same reason I worked trail inventory for the Forest Service, buffed belt buckles, and sold Popsicles out of a truck that played insane music from loud speakers mounted on the roof, but not the same reason I became a Chinese cook. I went into egg rolls from desperation as opposed to publicity.

Skinning elk affected my attitude toward hunters in general and hunters from Pennsylvania and Texas in particular. As a rule, the animals I skinned and boned were much more beautiful, noble, and deserving of love than the foul-smelling drunks in DayGlo orange vests and camo pants hovering in the background, bragging about the rite of passage into manhood they’d passed through by killing. Elk are smarter than other animals, including many people, and they mourn for their dead loved ones. I have seen an elk hang out around the body of a family member for days.

The definition of sport is a game where both sides can win or lose. Hunting lions with a spear might be a sport. Hunting elk with a gun is slaughtering meat.

Although, the whole ethical question isn’t as black or white — good versus evil — as the two sides of the argument would have you believe. The truth is, vegetarians don’t have the power or motivation to save a species like a person out to kill the individual members of that species. If not for duck hunters, there would be very few ducks. Rich, white guys protect duck habitat purely so they will be able to blow their little brains out. To a lesser extent, the same goes for elk and trout.

After several years of being conflicted on the whole killing thing, I discovered my bottom line when I was driving the Antelope Flats Road and I cam upon two men, one kneeling and the other using his pickup truck bed as a base, blazing away at three panicked elk who were running for the tree line. And, at that instant, I hated those men on a level I’ve never hated anyone or anything before. It was so unfair and such a waste of beauty. The intensity of the hatred shook me. So, I came to know where I stand on hunting.

P.S. I took my wife and daughter to Romeo and Juliet Sunday. I don’t guess I’d ever seen the whole play, although of course I knew the story. That Romeo was a total creep. First, he’s so sick in love with Rosaline he’s ready to die, then he switches to Juliet, who is only thirteen and doesn’t know men will say anything to get to a girl her age. Her father is terrible, her cousin is jerk, Romeo’s friends are like frat boys in heat. The friar is stupid as a fence post. All the men are bad and the women are various levels of wonderful — just like in my books. I’m starting to think me and Shakespeare have more in common than a tendency to write sonnets.

Jesus Invents the Limerick

Let’s say you’re hanging out in the campus Starbucks with a bunch of MFA students. You know the kind. The girls order their coffee decaf triple venti three Splenda extra hot stirred no-foam with double whipped cream and extra caramel. The guys call a movie a film. Some twit will jump down your throat if you use “party” as a verb. And these intellectuals (you can’t say pseudo-intellectual without being one) break out in a limerick reciting contest.

What you can do, after you’ve read this blog, is show them up by reciting the original limerick. Not only the first but also the most famous, it has nothing to do with Nantucket or Terlingua.

Here is God’s Own limerick.

Our Father who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.

Some dork will call you on the rhyme of the second line, but limericks are defined more by rhythm than rhyme scheme. Tell them when Jesus first created the poem in whatever form of Hebrew they spoke back then, that “name” and “heaven” rhymed. Not many can prove you wrong there.

Whoever actually did translate the prayer for the King James version must have done it limerick form on purpose. You don’t just fall into that 8-6-4-4-8 beat thing by accident. Maybe the old monk or whoever it was had been drinking with Irishmen who started conversations with, “There once was a girl from Regina.”

I heard a guy at Pearl Street Bagels tell this nice looking girl that Jesus spoke Yiddish. She said that wasn’t true, that her Jesus was a Southern Baptist and none of them talked in Yiddish at all.

I seem to be on strike. I went down to the Cowboy Bar looking for someone to picket, but they weren’t shooting any movies, so I left. People say this Hollywood drama is like pro football players striking— millionaires trying to cut other millionaires out of the cut — but I disagree. Writers of TV and movies are being shafted by the non-creative types at the top, who have been somewhat Draconian in this deal. As the saying out there goes for writers: “You can make a killing, but you can’t make a living.”

There’s also an old Polish/blonde/North Dakota/fill-in-the-blank joke about the woman who went to a movie set and she wanted to get ahead so she slept with the writer.

I’m on page 300 of the fourth book of the GroVont trilogy. For those of you who haven’t read the story so far, the first three books take place in 1963, 1973, and 1983. At the end of the 1983 book, Sam Callahan’s mother, Lydia, went into hiding after the Secret Service discovered she’d Fed Exxed a poison chew toy to President Reagan’s dog.

Now, in 1993, Lydia has been let out of prison. Her community service requirement entails taping an oral history of a 100-year-old codger named Oly Pedersen, who appeared in a paragraph or two of each of the other three books.

Did you follow that?

I’ve been searching for a title for a couple of years. At first it was “Oly and Lydia,” but that then Garrison Keillor started telling Oly and Lena jokes on his show and I gave it up. Then it was GroVont IV. I hate movie sequels that use numbers because no one involved was creative enough to come up with a name, so I threw that out. Then I read about this experiment where they hooked people up to a lie detector machine and read them lists of words, and the two words that caused the greatest emotional response were “Mother” and “Blood.” So, naturally, I named the book “Mother’s Blood.” My editor didn’t like it. He said a book with that title would not announce itself as a comedy. He said, “Mother’s Blood is dark.” Even though that was a straight line for the ages, I had to walk away.

So — drum roll. The new title of the new novel: “A Clean Catch.”

I can hear you now. “I don’t get it.” For some, the reference may not be obvious. “Clean catch” is a term used by people who are explaining the proper way to give a urine sample. Basically, you whiz two seconds, stop, position the cup, start again, and stop before overflow. This procedure can either be medical or legal. Everywhere you go these days, someone wants your pee.

Anyway, I told my good friend and internet guru (drop him a line if you need a web page designed) Curt the new title and here’s what he wrote back.

“To me the stream is a person. You start off full blast with a big hole to shoot for, but as time goes by, you come to a point where you suddenly have to stop and aim for the cup (society), without dripping, missing, or overflowing. Or the huge hole becomes a tiny cup whether you want it to or not. My dad’s simplification was ‘Piss on it.’ ”

Both of these explanations are brilliant. It’s like when a high school kid writes a paper on your novel and finds all kinds of symbols, metaphors, and motifs you never dreamed of. After you read the paper, you say, “Yeah. That’s what I meant. I just didn’t know it at the time.”

So, all you Blog Commenters — and you know who you are — this is a challenge. I’d like to hear your interpretation of the metaphor behind a novel entitled “A Clean Catch.” Go wild (although keep it short. The rest of us have to read these things).

Years from now, after the strike ends, when I’m interviewed on “The View” and one of those vibrant women says, “Tell us the meaning of the title,” I may go into your very own rap, and you can e-mail your friends and loved ones and say, “Tim stole that metaphor from me.”

How about this: If the title stays till publication, I’ll put the best one you guys come up with in the Acknowledgments. It can’t get more exciting than that.

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.