MONOPOLE

It has been too long since I’ve written something without a purpose. I so often used to write just to write, for the joy of it, for the release it provides. I have been in need of a literary injunction.

You see, the incessant fear is that the words will some day (for better or worse) stop pouring from you, so while they do you feel obligated to get them down on paper—or at least to digitally document them, as the case may be. This is what happens when you wrap yourself in the pages of a book for more than seven years: you forget what life was like before the book, putting down a sentence simply because it popped into your head, seemingly conceived without purpose or prethought, conjuring just to conjure, with an uncontrollability that somehow brings you bliss.

            I guess that’s what I have been missing: losing myself in the act of writing as a means of pure catharsis, without any specific place toward which you’re directing the expulsion. This is what happens when you give your...

Monopole is a time-travel mystery novel about a world-famous physicist and engineer from the 1950s who, after creating what is arguably the most revolutionary technology history, wakes from a coma completely crippled and with severe amnesia. In short order, the hero regains his capacities and realizes that the future world in which he now finds himself is the result of that technology, which he invented 100 years ago, when he was the Elon Musk of his time.

It’s a classic fish-out-of-water story, but with sci-fi twists around every corner—and, at the center of it all, a deep regret over love lost, which becomes the hero’s focus once he remembers everything he left in the past. But in order to get back there, he must first embrace the future. Along the way, he explores a world irrevocably changed by his inventions, and encounters a former colleague, who is also somehow in the future and who is now running the hero’s massive technology empire. What he discovers in the end is the true nat...

New setting, new characters, new cover, new title, new story, and it’s nearly twice as long. I'm very enthusiastic about all the revisions and hope you will be too. Introducing MONOPOLE, a novel by yours truly.

I’m a much sillier person in person than I am on paper.

How does one exist in anything less than the forty-two minutes it takes until the laundry’s done? By one, of course, I mean myself and any of the useless thoughts I’m able to squeeze through the annals of my brain. It seems to me that the process of thought and expression is a little like consuming food and shitting it out: Somewhere in between something gets digested. What are these thoughts digesting in my brain? Are they the vitamins and minerals necessary to conjure a useful thought, just as they are the plaque and fat that clog the arteries and colon of my mind? One can only assume that consuming less mental food detrimental to thought—with all its creatures and creations—causes a great deal of less-disgusting shit to spew. Methinks I need to be more careful about what my brain consumes.

Teddy found something in himself it would have been impossible not to find. It is as though what he became, what he would become, was part of him all along. But it’s not like beating you over the head with it is going to make you any more keenly aware of the fact that I didn’t really write anything fiction here, for Teddy and his story. I’ve always been much too narcissistic for anything of that sort. I simply wrote myself into another character’s skin, as it withers and sags through the story of another dimension—one that ends as precisely as it began. The science of the novel is its predictability, the knowing that its story wouldn’t change from beginning to end. The fiction, I guess, is the one its characters create for themselves before and after they come into this existence—and the idea that simple conceptions have conceptions of their own. Such is man. Twisted up with his regret, Teddy inserts himself into his memory, so he can live a life that could have been: a life with Sylvi...

The days, as of late, have been filling up more—all the while these words beckoning to me, tugging at my arm, begging me to pursue. Teddy may be in Excelsis, but his existence remains mere fiction of mine, his life my satire. But what then is said of the satirist? How is he to come to terms with the limitations of his dimension? Of the many seasons forever unknowing—looking longingly at the stars, wondering if just to exist is knowing enough—the poet still only pours his heart out for things he knows will never be. How pointless it is to be sarcastic to oneself, Teddy thinks to himself, not knowing the terrible jab he’s just taken at the author, his creator. I am no different than Keats in the fruitlessness of my pursuit: He mused upon still moments in time depicted on a sylvan urn; I press buttons to create a character able to achieve the poet’s dream—but, alas, the dream is mine, as well. I am just as helpless, just as hopeless, as all those undying romantics who have long been left...

I can’t write anything fiction. I’m far too self-serving for that. So I simply parade my thoughts around in metaphors and other people’s clothes, telling myself that I’ve created something that has any application beyond my own introspection. I project myself onto the page as some other thing, some intellectual voice with a more interesting perspective. I beat reality with a stick until it looks like something more amusing or more meaningful. And when I’ve worn my hands to bone, and when the sweat from my brow has distorted my vision, and when I’m too exhausted to breathe, I’ll gaze upon this thing I’ve created out of sheer hard-headedness and I’ll chuckle a half-satisfied chuckle—having diluted myself into thinking I’m no longer looking back at my own reflection, having beaten myself into such a wonderful delusion. 

It’s been several days since a useful thought has come to me. More of the same old shit spewing from my brain. Sigh, fetter, waste. This is what happens when your best friend is a harmonica and your digital devices consume more of your time, energy, and love than actual people. I went to the Apple store twice today! Had to park in Santa Monica twice today! Had to feed my digital addiction—though I will say technology has eradicated most of my remaining excuses. There’s pretty much nothing I can do I can’t do with my phone, which leaves me infinitely more time, energy, and love to fiddle my literary self. See what I mean? This is shit. At this point, the best I should probably hope for is to go down in history as one of the truly great shovelers. 

With reason enough, I’ve been thinking over writing more and more…as of late. Beyond my current state of endeavors and affairs, I guess the best I can do to attempt to ascertain from whence these thoughts derive (as it were) is to attribute them, at least in part, to my recent encounters with Salinger’s Seymour an Introduction and Hemingway’s On Writing. I guess the best one can do is to wrap oneself in it as much as if it were the only thing preventing an endless fall into the incredible abyss of existence. With or without a great deal of pomp and circumstance, I’d like to point out here an obvious correlation—if only so apparent to its even-more-obviously self-serving identifier—between such a net of pursuit, as to be the only thing separating its occupier from an insufferable nothingness, and this lowly soul’s very existence. One questions into what such incredible abyss this nothingness resumes. One wonders, too, how it is that he or she (or they?) came to be dangling from this thi...

How many times is it going to take until you realize how good you’ve got it? No, don’t pick up the guitar and start playing music. You’re no musician. You’re a writer. So write! That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it? Who the fuck am I talking to? I swear, it’s like there’s a million different voices in my head having a conversation that I’m not whatsoever involved in. How can I be having a conversation with myself? How am I ever to know which of the voices to listen to? Don’t listen to any of them. Then what? Do I just sit here writing about the sound of a million different voices? Who would ever want to read about that? I don’t know, maybe people who know what a million different voices sounds like. But if they already know what it sounds like, why the fuck would they want to hear what you have to say about it, or even go so far as to read something you’ve written on the godforsaken subject? I don’t know, maybe they just want something to relate to. I mean, isn’t that all everybody is tryin...

insert something thoughtful here.

What does one say when one sits down to write? He could speak of the sound of somebody outside wheeling the big plastic garbage can to the curb, or cars going down the road, or planes across the sky, or of his incandescent thoughts dancing through his skull. He could speak of everything wrong or of everything right. He could speak his mind or pretend to speak somebody else’s. He could piss and moan—and he undoubtedly will—but of all the things one could say when one sits down to write, he’ll never reveal himself to you.

           He’ll only show you who he was or will be, or would be if he weren’t so preoccupied with showing you how he wants to be seen. He’ll show you how articulate he can be, without ever actually giving you anything worth giving your thoughts over to completely. He’ll beat himself over the head for you, just to show you how recklessly benign he is to the whole thing, and how much he’s willing to suffer just to show you what he wants you to see....

I wonder to myself now if it is possible to be both contented and fulfilled. What need to pursue fulfillment is there if one feels contentment? Can the poet pursue both those ends? Can the poet have both what he wants and what he needs? This poet can only hope. He hopes it is not merely a dream, and he wonders…

In the midst of pursuing his one pursuit, Teddy forgot to live. With all his persistence, his drive, his aspirations, Teddy failed to become a complete person. He existed only to chase a dream and now his life is but a dream he can scarcely remember. He dreams now what could have been, so that is what he chases.

Welcome to Plight of the Poet, the website devoted to my yet-unpublished novel Theodorus in Excelsis [now called Monopole]. Today, the 28th anniversary of my birth, seemed an appropriate day on which to launch this website and introduce my novel to the world. Please peruse these pages, which I designed myself, as they will surely whet your appetite for the novel itself—to appear in print and digital formats as soon as I find a publisher savvy enough to realize its kinetic (dare I say electromagnetic) potential. Please also be sure to “like” Plight of the Poet on Facebook and follow me on Twitter by clicking the icons at the bottom of this page. You can also follow my daily thoughts by keeping up with this blog, so you too can learn of the poet’s plight and of the inter-dimensional gallivanting its persistence inspires.