Zoomer

Louis Shalako

I was heading to the smoke shack to get a couple of packs of smokes.

There was a familiar figure coming up the street on his crappy old bicycle, most likely stolen or given to him to pay off some small drug debt, (from a bigger loser than him?)

Let’s call him Zoomer.

We’re the same age. We grew up on the same street. We went to the same school. 

We played street hockey together. As we got older we drank together, smoked pot together, chased girls together, and indulged in a little bit of petty crime together.

Zoomer was clearly well on his way to alcoholism even back then. He was the only guy I know who could carry a two-four of beer on a ten-speed bike. This guy rolled joints the size of your thumb, but then he never worried about where the next bag was coming from. He would just go out and steal some more money when he ran out. This was quite shocking to staid, working class guys like me.

See, I always had to work, to earn my money.

Later, when I was going to college and had a real nice girlfriend, Zoomer was making the papers, the Provincial Court section, several times a year. He has a rap sheet as long as your arm.

He’s the one that stole a Datsun 240-Z, (someone left the key in it). He was drunk as a skunk, high on acid, and doing laps around the Central High School track, which at the time was packed clay and gravel. (Sounds kind of fun, eh.)

He looks pretty wild these days. His hair is all over the place, but I doubt if he’s cut it in years.

His face looks like it could hold a three-day rain. His eyes dart back and forth. He’s absolutely nuts. He cruises around on that bike, looking for stuff to steal. When a mitre-saw disappeared from my garage a few years ago, he was the first one I thought of. It might not have been him. It could have been somebody else. There are plenty of them, after all.

I guess I forgot to lock the garage.

His girlfriend left him and hooked up with a big coke-head. For a while there, back in the eighties, I would drive her to London so that she could visit him when he was in jail. She looked pretty good then, and I have to admit, my attraction to her felt kind of disloyal. 

There’s no doubt she would have been better off with me…such was my thinking.

After seeing her in recent years, I’m kind of glad that didn’t happen.

She dumped him when her mother died and there was some chance of inheritance…I guess she could see, even then, which way the wind was blowing. It wouldn’t have lasted very long, would it? A half a million bucks would have kept Zoomer and her going for about two, two and a half years…

There were times when I envied that guy—envied him. Shit, he had girlfriends, some of them not too bad looking, and at some point in my life, I was always alone. It was only when you went to their house, sat there and listened to them talk, when you figured it out.

Who else would have him?

No one in their right mind.

The women were as bad as he was.

No one was more impressed than I was, when Zoomer got a job. Predictably, it was the sort of job where no one really cared if you showed up hung over, called in sick, or stepped outside to smoke a quick doobie or two on your lunch hour. When the bosses went home at four-thirty, that’s when the beer magically appeared. Guys down there love their overtime, eh?

It was a shitty place to work—all kinds of resin, fibreglass, and fumes in there, and so I never applied there.

My buddy taught me how to boost a car stereo, open a car door with a coat hangar, how to shoplift, how to make rock cocaine from powder, all sorts of things really.

He’s still out there. He’s on the street, although I’ve seen him and one or two others coming and going from the homeless shelter. One wonders where he would find a landlord dumb enough to rent to him. The welfare claim is pretty much automatic, although the looking for work, and the job searches can’t be all that credible. I’ve never seen him wearing the orange vest and picking up cigarette butts downtown. It’s beneath his dignity, one would think. Why work when you can steal?

He doesn’t seem to have any teeth left.

Poor old Zoomer looks like sheer hell when you see him.

I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want him to know where I live. I don’t want him asking about my family.

I don’t want to come home one day and find that he’s cleaned me out, or if not him, then it would be somebody else.

At his age, one would think that he is beyond hope, beyond cure, beyond caring any longer what happens to him.

It’s probably true, too.

Was he ever a good man?

Not that I can really recall.

With that guy, it all started when he was about fourteen years old.

And I’m guilty too. Twenty years went by when I was just killing time, trying to stay drunk, or stoned, or just not bothering to try. I was trying to avoid responsibility for my life. Even then, I thought of writing books—I was a crashing bore on the subject, but it just seemed so unlikely.

It was just too hard, ladies and gentlemen.

I don’t care if you pity or condemn Zoomer, who eventually found the meth. It’s cheap, it gets you high, and it kills a lot of pain—that’s what I’m thinking.

And I’ll bet he’s got a lot of pain to kill. He’s got a whole, wasted lifetime of guilt and pain which he will never acknowledge outside of a rehab group therapy session, and probably not even then. He’s never been honest with himself, unless it was part of a ploy to gain sympathy—a ploy to beg, borrow or steal some more money.

Some of these guys are real good with the sob stories. Their dads are always there to bail them out of jail, too.

That must be an interesting conversation.

Eh?

A lot of that money must have come from his own parents.

There but for something—call it luck, call it determination, call it the grace of God if you must, go I—and I know that very well.

It is all too easy to let go and not give a fuck about anything anymore. Or anyone—and I can assure you that he did have a mother, a father, a sister and a brother.

When people don’t respect themselves, you can hardly expect them to respect anyone or anything else. That includes other people's property. It’s all the same to a meth-head.

He had a nice girlfriend, and he had some pretty good friends there for a while.

This is his fate—and that’s okay with me as long as it’s okay with him.

And if you don’t want to hear about my books and stories, that’s okay too.

I don’t need him any more than I need you.

Maybe that’s the difference.

Maybe the poor guy never got pissed off at himself.

Maybe the poor guy never asked the question.

Maybe he never looked inside of himself and found something there that was worthwhile.

Maybe that guy never found any guts.

But I did. I did, ladies and gentlemen. In that sense, even an atheist can be truly blessed.

And I can tell you that there is something better than this.

I will keep going until I find it.

As for you guys, you can do what you want.

It’s not like I give a fucking shit. I got my shit together, it took a while, but it did happen.

No one is going to take that away from me.

END

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addictive_personality

The Right to Die.

Louis Shalako

On behalf of Ontario’s 740,000 + disabled persons, I hereby serve notice that I will be lobbying for the right to death.

After twenty years on an Ontario Disability Support Program pension, which as we all know is really only two-thirds of a pension, I no longer have any confidence in this government, this province or country, this people, to do the right thing for the disabled.

We have seen billions of dollars thrown at the richest and most fortunate Canadians, individuals, corporations, and industries of the most anti-social nature.

To go on like this is to compound cruelty with torment, to temper ignorance with abuse.

We have no one to turn to, no one who listens, no one who cares. Simply incarcerating us really doesn’t provide a solution, (i.e. death.)

The billions of dollars this government pissed away on Ehealth and paying for gas-fired electrical generating plants not to be built might have been better spent on gas chambers and factories producing the finest in gourmet Soylent Green for the gustatory delectation of bourgeois gourmands, who are already eating their young anyways.

http://www.dyingwithdignity.ca/?gclid=CJ2l5ZbIyMQCFQqoaQodDEYAPw

https://www.dreamessays.com/customessays/Euthanasia/3674.htm

 

Viral Catalysts, Passive Discoverability, Nothing But a Crock of Shit.

"I don't like that guy, Davey. He's not telling us what we want to hear."

Louis Shalako

When Smashwords founder Mark Coker stands up in front of yet another convention packed with wannabes and speaks about viral catalysts, what is he really talking about?

What does he want?

What is he telling you to do?

What he wants is for you to spend $500.00 on a book cover. What he wants is for you to spend $2000.00 on a ‘professional’ editor. What he wants is for you to spend $425.00 on a Kirkus five-star review. What he wants is for you to do the million-blog tour.

He wants to see enthusiasm. The more mindless that enthusiasm, the better.

Enthusiasm is the opposite of critical thinking.

He wants you to put everything you got into it. The odds of you becoming a bestseller are miniscule. 

Your costs are not his costs—but he gets a dime for every book you sell through his platform.

He cheerfully admits that Smashwords and other digital, do-it-yourself vanity publishing platforms have enabled millions of ‘horrible’ books to enter the marketplace. And that’s okay with him.

I don’t even really care either. Your books aren’t going anywhere. You’re the only one that doesn’t see it.

While ninety-nine percent of book buyers might go away satisfied with their purchase, it’s pretty obvious ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of Smashwords authors will eventually go away disappointed too, and I reckon they’ll be walking a bit funny when they do.

It’s a very exploitive business model, and it’s not too hard to predict that at some point in the future, there will be a reaction. There’s going to be some pushback.

This is just the thin end of the wedge.

All the optimism, all the talk of ‘control’ in digital publishing is a crock of shit.

In a previous blog post, I noted that all of my titles appeared on txtr, while there were quite a few missing on OverDrive. I contacted SW staff. Marcus V reshipped all of those titles and they appeared back on the OverDrive website. A mere matter of weeks later, I could not help but note that two-thirds of my titles were unaccountably missing from txtr.

How in the hell did that happen, Mister Coker? When SW staff asked me to provide links to the missing titles I asked them how often I could reasonably be expected to do that. The lady refused to answer the question. I’ll be damned if I can go back once a week to every stinking distribution channel, check to see what books have mysteriously gone missing, and spend a half hour for each pen-name, each platform, and provide SW with those links on the off chance that the titles won’t just disappear again within a week.

What that means is that we are now on our own.

What is professional editing?

Professional editing is when you pay someone two bucks a page and they go through your book, mark it up with red ink and send it back to you. The most substantive editing is content editing. This is also the most expensive editing.

I’m not denying that most writers need and use editors.

Unfortunately my skills are such that finding an editor that is actually better than me is virtually impossible. After twenty years on an Ontario Disability Support Program pension, there is just no way that I can afford thirty-five bucks, or fifty bucks, or a hundred bucks for a book cover. I have a hundred and fourteen titles and five pen names.

I don't have any money.

Mr. Coker is essentially telling me that I write too fast. He’s telling me to slow down. He’s saying he’s not going to make any money off me if I don’t sink more money, a lot more money, into the product displayed in his store.

At fifty bucks a cover, that would be $5,700.00 in covers alone.

It took five years to make my first thousand dollars from this industry. With a bit of luck, the way things are going, I will be very fortunate to make $1,000.00 this year. It is true the bulk of that will come from Smashwords, as passive discoverability, (remember all those viral catalysts?) absolutely does not work on certain other platforms. This is especially true of Amazon, who play all kinds of dirty little tricks to get exclusivity, who are constantly price-matching, and quite frankly Amazon is the biggest crock of shit in this entire marketplace.

At least they have the grace to keep their mouth shut.

There are an estimated thirty million books listed on Amazon, the vast bulk of them either unremarkable or downright horrible. No matter how good (or bad) a book might be, it’s not going to be passively discovered there and everybody knows it.

Everybody knows it and that’s why they sign up for Kindle Select, that’s why they blog and spam, that’s why they pay for reviews and that’s why they’re always clubbing together and giving each other as many five-star reviews as they can generate. That’s why they load up the front of their books with crock of shit blurbs, written by crock of shit folks who haven’t even read the crock of shit book…fifty five star reviews written by their friends and relatives before the book ever comes out. 

They make a science of lying to and misleading prospective readers.

There is nothing fair or even reasonable about this industry. Bad books end up on the New York Times list all the time. I’ve read many of them.

The editing for content is shit in some of those books. I’m talking authors like Robert Ludlum, Jack Higgins and Clive Cussler. Some of that editing for content is shockingly bad, and in the case of Cussler, the dialogue stinks much of the time. If Dirk Pitt ties a rope on his ass and plunges into one more God-damned underground river while Al Giordino stands there with a thumb up his ass telling all who will listen that Dirk is the bravest and luckiest and smartest and sexiest man alive, I think I am going to puke.

My books meet or exceed all industry standards in terms of editing and proofreading. One of the reasons for that is because this industry is a cash cow that has never been seriously challenged in the past. It’s also not very good sometimes.

The other thing is that I have the skill, a skill acquired over thirty-one years, and I take the time. This is no guarantee of success, in fact the opposite seems to be true.

I am quite frankly shocked by the number of people who can’t spell, can’t write, or simply can’t be bothered to turn on grammar check. They spend four or five grand on some shit book that is supposed to make them some money. They set the price at $0.99 on Amazon, where it is going to take a hell of a long time, at a royalty of $0.35 per copy, to cover your costs. They still think they have a right to succeed as authors. Why, just look at all the money those bourgeois crocks of shit have spent on their books. For every thousand you spend on your book, you will have to sell two thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven copies just to make the costs back. How many people on Amazon or any other platform do you think sell anywhere near three thousand books? How long do you think it takes for them to do that?

They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t have certain expectations—expectations that they feel are reasonable. If that isn’t a sense of entitlement, I would sure like to know what is. The fact that you spent money on it doesn’t make it a good book, and it doesn’t make you a good writer. It is pure vanity much of the time.

The sooner you get out of the business, the better it will be for you, and quite frankly, the better it will be for readers, and the rest of us who genuinely must be writers, which, under some circumstances, is a fate worse than death.

Trust me on that one.

I'm in a position to know, which is more than can be said for the professional cheerleaders.

END