Home

When I was a kid, my family moved a lot. Not far, just a lot. By the time I was 11 I had lived in seven different houses and a mobile home. One in Ohio, where I was born, one in Champaign Illinois, five bouncing around the suburbs northwest of Detroit before moving to Plano, Texas.

I changed schools a lot, too and as a result, for those formative years of my life, I was "the new kid" every couple of years. When I go back to visit family in the Detroit area, I sometimes visit some of the places we used to live, but none of them feel like "THE" home.

As an adult with children, I've lived in the same house for 11 years now and both of my children have lived their entire 11 and  7 year old lives here. This is where they learned to walk and use a toilet and play video games and invent games on the hill. This is their childhood home.  If I give them nothing else, they will always have a childhood home. This is one thing I really consider a major accomplishment.

Some, okay, many nights I stand in the backyard facing West. Just looking around and loving this home. We're situated in a canyon with hills rising on either side of us, and from here I can see the lights of the homes on those hills glittering in the darkness. Occassionally a freight train will chug and whistle through what used to be Taylor Yards a couple miles away and I'll be able to hear it just faintly and it will trick me into thinking our neighborhood, a mere four miles from downtown Los Angeles is actually somewhere rural.  It's quiet, it's beautiful. It's perfect.

I love this place. I would happily retire here.

If I can't, for some reason, if we have to go, well - at least we got to spend this much time here. There's a lot to be said for that. I hope it doesn't come to that, but if it does, I can safely say that I have appreciated every moment we've been here.

Daily Dingo

The daily dingo is an idea I had for a joke a few years ago and I drew a bunch of them up and then forgot about it. I have like 80 of these just sitting on my hard drive. I try a lot of different things. They work to varying degrees. The point is to always try new stuff. 

The Zap - my novella

If you could go to a doctor and have all your personality imperfections ironed out forever - would you? A disorganized, lazy person could be turned into a type-A super-doer. A wallflower could be instantly transformed into a confident and outgoing life of the party type. A pessimist could be reborn an optimist. Or all of the above. Forever and ever. All from a simple, painless and affordable procedure with EZ financing available. 

Would you do it? 

THE ZAP is a 22K word novella I wrote a couple years ago about a world where all your personality faults can be 'fixed' with a simple outpatient procedure, told from the point of view of a grumpy guy who refuses to take the easy way out. He consideres it "plastic surgery for your personality." But when he meets the girl of his dreams and she hints that she would be a lot happier if he would just get "the zap" he's faced with a dilemma of identity and integrity.


Obviously this is a story inspired by the idea of "quick fix self-help" and how desperate some of us are to change ourselves at the most elemental level. From medication to psychotherapy we all are obsessed with attaining happiness somehow. But what is happiness anyway? Is it a byproduct of human self-actualization or is it just a chemical reaction in our heads?

I had fun writing this. If you get a chance to read it, I'd love to know what you think.

Here are the first couple chapters and the PDF and epubs are available for download on this link...


The Zap - A Novella

First two chapters below...

The Zap

by

Mike Samonek

1.

Everyone called it The Zap, but the scientists who invented it had named it Neuro-Electro Synaptic Modification. It was a simple outpatient procedure. They hooked some electrodes up to your head, pushed some buttons on a computer, and in a half hour you could be a whole new person. And if not a new person, certainly a 'better' one. 

A disorganized, lazy person could be zapped to become a type-A super-doer. A wallflower could be instantly transformed into a confident and outgoing life of the party type. A pessimist could be reborn an optimist. Or all of the above. Forever and ever. For about the cost of a subcompact car. Financing was of course available. 

According to the commercials which ran in what seemed like a continuous loop, the process rearranged basic elemental communications structures in the brain to help certain sections communicate better with each other. Or not communicate with certain areas at all. Like the places where self-doubt lived. Or insecurity. Or addiction. Or cynicism. Bitterness. Envy. Pettiness. Or any number of other of the wonderful things that make us human. 

I was not, you'll soon see, a fan of The Zap. To me it was cheating. A shortcut to self-improvement. It didn't count. I'll always have respect for the fat guy who worked his ass off to get down to a pair of 32's. The guy who goes in for the lipo? Not so much. And who doesn't love a set of nice natural boobs over a pair of bolt-ons? 

The Zap was ostensibly plastic surgery for your personality. 

I mean look. We're all messed up in our own little ways, right? That's what makes us who we are.  Going to a shrink to work through your shit? I get that. I respect that. Maybe you get a little pharmacological help along the way. Who am I to judge? God knows I enjoy self-medicating as much as the next person. Okay more so. All right, by most definitions I'm a functioning alcoholic. So what? I'm a good natured drunk, I pay my rent, and I don't have a whole lot of regrets, so what's the harm?

I know that I could go down to the doctor's office and get a Zap and never crave another beer again. Or shot of whiskey. Or joint. Or Xanax. I could be free of all these pesky addictions. I could become a model citizen. I could be the person my mother thinks I am. I could be just like everyone else.

Two problems with that. 1, I like my addictions and 2, I hate everyone else. 

≤≥

2.

When I was 22 and just out of J-school, I was asked by one of our professors emeritus to write an opinion piece on where I thought America was going as we hurtled breathlessly into the 1990's. I did it mostly because I was young and full of confidence strictly because I'd never known what failure felt like. Yet. The professor flipped over the article I wrote titled, “Is It Now Yet?” He had some insane connections and before I knew what was happening or how, my piece ran in Playboy, back when the magazine still had a purpose. 

It was extremely well received. That one article got me a book deal and a staff job at Rolling Stone. Cable was really taking off and all of a sudden there were a lot of talk shows that needed guests, so my agent would book me on anything that would ask. I don't think any show I went on had a million viewers at any given time. But I was on a lot of them and people seemed to like my self-effacing manner, so I became a regular on the basic cable circuit. Meanwhile, I published a string of articles that people cared less and less about until eventually – for whatever reason – they didn't care at all. 

Both of my books met a similar apathetic fate. The first, “New Improved Context,” was  383 well-researched and caustically presented pages on why I believed the then decade-old CNN was bad for our national psyche and how the 24 hour news cycle would eventually be our ruination.  America, I suggested, does best when you're not looking at it.  Non-stop news, I argued, was the equivalent of being stuck on a endless car trip with he entire country. It would lead to a spiral of self-loathing and rage. And god forbid I wrote - quite presciently, I might add - a second, competing 24 news source were to appear as the battle to maintain ratings would lead to, well, the mess we have now.

But despite being right, no one cared about it.  It was too academic for the people who liked my cheeky, self-referential Playboy article and too cheeky and self-referential for people who actually read books about The Media.

But it was, I think, the last good thing I wrote. 

That was seven months after “Is it Now Yet?” 

I was 23. 

The second book I wrote, “Marginalized Man” was a mess of ill-conceived essays about the pain of being a white middle class American in a post-cold war globalist world. It was supposed to be a self-mocking joke, taking the piss out of my literary “peers” who's writings seemed to imply that working in a cubicle for more money than most human beings will see in a decade is some form of spiritual failure and psychological torture. I don't think anyone got the joke. Also there's the fact that by then I had veered rather decisively into substance abuse and wrote the entire thing while heavily intoxicated or hungover. Reading it sober later I realized it was terrible. The publishers agreed and refused to publish it and quickly printed a collection of my articles up to that point just to fulfill my contract. No one bought it and that was the last I heard from The Book People. 

Before my literary star faded from view completely, I camera tested to host an “alt” variety show on MTV and somehow got the job. It was called “Nice Show, Buddy!” and ran late sunday nights. No one watched, but we were inexpensive filler so they let us keep doing it for a couple years. Then we didn't do it anymore. I was 26, and a burgeoning alcoholic. I moved to LA and the rest is the disaster I now call life every single day. 

I was still miraculously considered culturally relevant enough to get paid a pittance to write three articles a week for a pop culture and politics website called The Stickler. My blog was called  “And Now a Word From The Aging Gen-X'er.” It was as awful as it sounds. I was ostensibly the butt of an joke. I regularly made it clear that I was in on it and “okay” with it, but part of being in on the joke was the tacit awareness that I was being made fun of by people younger and much cooler than me. Or something. Irony has gotten very complicated over the years. 

The kids I worked for were vicious, awful, snarky people who trafficked in sex tapes and Schadenfreude.  The head one, who I'd only ever spoken to over video chat, was a Texas trust fundrepeneur who lived in Florianopolis, Brazil at age 24 . He was constantly starting up business concerns with money given to him by his parents. That is when he wasn't DJ'ing, sleeping with Brazilian models and doing an unlimited supply of pure cocaine, of course. The fact that he owned the blog I worked for put me at odds. I wanted anything and everything that pertained to this entitled douchebag's life to fail. That meant the blog had to fail for me to be happy and to win. But if the blog failed, I'd  be out of work again. 

I decided to root for the blog's continued existence and success, but in exchange I had to wish him erectile dysfunction and chlamydia. Just to balance it out. 

I remember when I first noticed the effect The Zap was having on how my work was received. I was in my kitchen, hungover natch, reading the comments under my latest article on my ancient laptop. I was expecting the usual healthy mix of “lol!” “So true,” and “You rock” from my fans and the “lusr” “#oldmanfail” and “EABOD” from the haters. The haters really bugged me at first. I couldn't get what I had done to garner so much hostility. But then I realized that these people didn't just hate me, they hated everything in their path. No matter how innocuous or inoffensive something or someone was, they instinctively hated it. I almost respected their ability to focus so much rage and antipathy on so many targets. I only really had enough malice in my heart to hate one thing at a time. Quietly, to myself.  

I noticed that there were almost no replies from haters. And the fan posts were more and more positive and upbeat. It was the Zap. Everyday it was claiming more and more Former Humans and turning them into  pod people. To be honest, I prefered the trolls. I thrive on conflict, even from anonymous assholes I've never met. 

Internet flaming wasn't the only thing taking a hit. Bars were closing at a shocking pace as people no longer had any reason to drink. Science had made them happy, well-adjusted people who unlike me didn't need alcohol to socialize, or relax, or leave the house. Fortunately, my local dive-pub was weathering the storm. 

I had liked to think that my neighborhood would be largely unchanged by the Zap. I lived in a fairly bohemian area on the artsy East Side. At first, it seemed as if the craze would elude us completely. Folks who had gone in for the proceedure were mockingly called "betters" for the smarmy, superior attitude they came out with and people in my area held “NO BETTERS” parties and trendy restaurants had signs indicating that Betters would be seated in a special section formerly reserved for society's previous outcasts, smokers. Betters were considered phonies, bogus, frauds. We all agreed.

At least we all agreed at first. 

The change was slow but perceptible and after about nine months, I started noticing more and more people I thought had more integrity going in for their “tune up.” Soon the signs came down in the restaurants and the party invitations came without condition. 

One particularly painful transformation was Kelly at the coffee shop. Kelly was a cute rock-a-billy chick with Betty Page bangs and some kick ass ink. She was probably the most cynical person I had ever met. She trusted no one, believed in nothing. She approached every moment in life as if it were an antagonist. And I loved her for it. I had been mustering up the courage to ask her out. She could spiritually destroy me, which made her even sexier to me. I finally decided I had waited long enough. Next time I ordered coffee I was going to ask her to catch a show at Echo with me. By the time I finally got the nerve, she had done it. She was smiling. She never smiled. That's how I knew it was over. That she was gone. 

I told her I was disappointed in her and she just smiled and told me that that was normal and that the doctors at the clinic had told her to expect that sort of reaction from insecure people. But, she insisted, the procedure was the greatest thing she'd ever done. She planned on going back to school, as education wasn't a lie after all. She told me that she really, really thought the zap would do me a world of good. “It'll just get you on track to being happier,” she said. She just wouldn't stop smiling. I was bummed out for like two months. 

"So Bad It's Good!"

My generation (dubbed "X" all those years ago) is supposedly big on appreciating popular culture ironically. I've never been a big fan of the concept of anything being "so bad it's good." I don't buy that. Life is short. Are you really going to spend your precisious lesiure time mocking something that's bad? Why? There's enough good stuff in the world to keep your days and nights full of rewarding and interesting content.

I remember seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show described as "so bad it's good" which is a crazy statement. Rocky Horror is a GOOD movie, possibly a great one. It's incredibly entertaining and original and memorable - it's just weird. Weird sometimes freaks people out and they have a hard time processing that something that doesn't look or feel like what they expect things to look like or feel like. Now less than it did back then, but still.

Anyway, there's a movie called The Room that people like to go out of their way to watch just to make fun of.  I can't speak as an expert on the subject because I haven't seen it so when I call it a bad movie, I'm going on what I've heard. Now, I hate to sound like a prig, but I can't think of anything less fun to do for 100 minutes than sit through a bad movie just to make fun of it. (I was never a MST3K fan, but I give them a pass because it was obvious they had a genuine affection for schlocky 50's flicks).

Again, I haven't seen The Room, I'm just going on what I've heard. And I don't begrudge people having a good time -  but going out of your way to watch a bad movie just to make fun of it is just not a good time I understand.  If someone reads this (Ha) and can explain the phenomenon please feel free. I'm willing to have my mind changed.

Damn, this came across a lot more scoldy than it sounded in my head.

Looking back at old work

My first attempt to write an MG novel was a couple years ago. I hardly showed it to anyone, and the one agent who did read it had helpful feedback and offered to read the rewrite. All very promising. At the time I got legitimately sidelined by a bunch of stuff good and bad (good = a new writing gig, bad = my father's ongoing health issues) and it has sat on the hard drive ever since. Yes, that's a series of excuses, I know that. We always find time to do the things that are most important to us. But I think the couple years away from it really clarified my opinions of the work and I'm actually much more proud of it now than I was back then. So if I am fortunate enough to have a literary agent I have a second book ready to show as well. I'm not a big fan of the expression "Everything happens for a reason," but in this case I'll allow it.


Not much of a blog post but at least I'm not prattling on about my mid-life crisis for a change!

My 10 favorite "non traditional" Christmas songs

Although some of these have been kicking around for so long they're traditional at this point. I'm limiting this list to original songs rather than modern covers of Christams standards - that list would be too long.


Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses - I love everything about this song. The sick bass line, the clever lyrics, the sax breaks, and Patty Donahue's voice. I get that some people don't like it, but that's because they're wrong.

Christmas is a Time To Say I Love You by Billy Squire - when Don't Say No came out I pretty much played the groove off the vinyl so I am at least a passing fan of Mr. Squire, but this is his best song. Such simple songwriting. It never wears out its welcome.

Thanks For Christmas - XTC. XTC is one of my favorite bands and any time I hear them played by someone else it makes me happy. My favorite part of the song is the bridge "You've been saving your love up/ Let it out, 'cause christmas time is here." 

Father Christmas - the Kinks.  When I was a kid this felt so subversive and "punk." But it's still a really good song. Because it's by the Kinks so of course it's really good.

All I want For Christmas is You - Mariah Carey and others. This is probably pretty much a traditional Christmas song at this point. Certainly mainstream. Probably as standard as Bing Crosby at this point, but I love it. It's exuberant, joyous, well written and performed. I'm not a fan of her in general though.

At the Closing of the Year - Wendy and Lisa. This dream pop gem opens the movie TOYS. It's not a very good movie but it's so wacky and ambitious that I appreciate the attempt. This song is too complex to become a carol, but no Christmas mix is complete without it.

I Saw My Baby Wearing Santa's Beard - They Might Be Giants - I've always loved TMBG and Lincoln is my favorite album by them. This song has a less sincere sentiment than most of the others on this list, but it's a hell of a lot funnier than "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer."

Beatles Christmas records 1964-1967 - Not technically songs, but I don't go a Christmas season without listening to them and even the little musical doodles they toss off effortlessly sound like they could be classics if they were fully realized and arranged. The first two Christmas records were too canned and the last two were too sad. These middle ones are endlessly entertaining.

Fairy Tale of New York - the Pogues. I used to spend a lot of time, money and brain cells in a pub where this was played year round. The song not only reminds me of Christmas but of the days when I could while away my evenings with pals in a bar without a care in the world.

and finally...

Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time - Paul McCartney. Look I get it. People hate this song. It's trite. It's overplayed every year. It's underwritten.Those tacky synth hits sound tacky and cheap. I don't care. This song is the musical equivalent of egg nog. Sticky sweet, makes you a little sick to your stomach, but it's not Christmas without it.

The Running Man

I run.

It's what I do for exercise.

People are supposed to get a certain amount of physical activity. I choose to run. Why? I can't get my ass to a gym and as far as I'm concerned only lunatics ride bikes on Los Angeles streets. You take your life in your own hands in a car as it is, I'm not about to risk becoming the hood ornament of some stoned manchld who's flipping through Spotify on his iphone while he drives into the setting sun on his way to the weekly visit to the medical marijuana dispensary. I'd like to go out with a touch more dignity than that.

So I run. More precisely, I alternate running and walking each day. We live in one of the most beautiful places in Los Angeles and my walks take me through canyons and over hills and trails and windy mystery streets where there are no architectural rules. I can disappear for three hours at a time on these walks depending on my work load.

But every other day I run. I have a .6 mile track nearby that's pretty nice. Compact dirt, far enough away from cars that the exhaust doesn't seem to be an immediate issue. The weather, of course, is usually nice and I rarely have to deal with the crowds (and never the attitude) of the Silver Lake resevoir, which is a prettier, more satisfying run, but frought with frustrations. Let me just throw this out there - I think it's great you're walking your dog(s). I how how much pets mean to people, but is the 30 foot leash really necessary? Could we maybe share the path? No? Sorry, didn't mean to bother you there.

I digress.

I don't like running. At all. I like the way it makes me feel when I'm done and I like the fact that I am noticably better off for sticking with it for the last four years. I feel better, I look better.

But my god, I don't like running.

It is sheer tedium. In the four years I've been running 6 miles every othe day, how many times have I been around that damn track? I could do the math, but I really don't want to know. I thought by now I'd like it, but at best I just accept that it's what I do and to man up and power through it without complaint. It amazes me that people enjoy it but I'm sure people are amazed (if not horrified) by some of the things I enjoy doing.

I thought i would enjoy it by now. People in Nike commercials always seem so happy. Either I don't have the athlete gene or Nike commercials are lies.

Probably both.