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

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

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

transition on over here

I need help from all you Sandlinistas and free floating internet junkies out there on the web. My daughter’s kindergarten teacher has been using transition as a verb. “We will now transition to the playing field.” Transition is not a verb. I don’t want people talking like that around my precious child.
I would rather she say shit. Shit can be a verb. Ain’t is at least in the dictionary, even if it is an example of the wrong way to talk. Transition as a verb is not in the dictionary.
Leila loves her teachers and her school. Heck, I love her teachers and her school. It’s an amazing school full of amazing people and she’s happy as a tree squirrel in spring there. The last thing I want is for them to turn on my daughter because I’m a language prig. But how would you feel if someone said, “It’s time to transition into the lunch room,” in front of your impressionable child?
So, what should I do? How do I let the teacher know this is something that matters? No one likes to be corrected. It’s probably some teacher-talk thing she learned in grad school. For all I know, kindergarten teachers across America are all using transition as a verb and my daughter’s generation has gone down the tubes before they’ve turned six.
Any advice you can give would be appreciated.

Why I Left Hollywood: part 1

I wrote five novels about my problems and then I ran out of problems. The fact that I stripmined myself for five fairly good books shows just how deeply screwed up I was. I have always thought a novelist with nothing to say should shut up, so I did, waiting patiently for new problems to appear. In the meantime, I wrote screenplays because you don’t have to have anything to say to write a movie. You just have to be able to give good meeting.
In seven years I wrote 11 scripts for hire, which means they paid me to write them, and created hundreds of takes and treatments. Generally, you don’t get paid for those. Three of the last projects I worked on in good old L.A. were biopics. This means biographies loosely based on someone strange. My three assignments were Gorgeous George, Ron Popeil, and Brian Zembic.
Gorgeous George was the first true TV star. Or at least he tied with Milton Berle for first. George was a wrestler. The earliest hit TV shows were professional wrestling and it’s been going strong ever since. G.G. created the villain as star. He discovered that by pretending to cheat and preen and taunt, he was much more popular than the good guys. he faked the bully, cheating, homosexual, so people would hate him. This concept is foreign to me. While there are people the world over who don’t like me much, I’ve never gone out of my way to foster animosity.
Since then, many TV stars have found love through hatred. My favorite was J.R. Ewing back on “Dallas.” I guess they do it on that Survivor show all the time. And Bill O’Reilly has adopted all of Gorgeous George’s techniques for making people think he’s an arrogant ass. I’ve been told O’Reilly is a regular guy until the camera comes on. He says all those incredibly stupid things so people will believe the opposite. Without him, the Democrats wouldn’t control Congress.
Ron Popeil invented that stuff you spray on your head to make it look like you have hair. And the Pocket Fisherman and the In the Shell Egg Scrambler. He created hundreds of products no one knew they needed. Where would civilization be without the Veg-O-Matic? He also coined the phrase, “As Seen on TV,” as if being on TV makes an object or person legitimate. His dream is to sell people products they don’t need.
Brian Zembic is a flaming redneck who underwent a boob job to win a bet. I spent a week running around Vegas while he chased Chi Chi (I believe is how it is spelled), and hustled poker. He’ll bet on anything. He’s best at Ping Pong and backgammon, not bad at blackjack. He once made a bet taht he could watch continous porn for ten days straight without abusing himself. He won, but he told me porn has never been the same.
Brian has really big knockers. The other two guys were just treatments but I actually wrote an entire script for Brian. It’s called — get ready — “Stacked.” I made him considerably more charming in the screenplay than he is in real life. You can read it on timsandlin.com if you want. Anyone with two million bucks should send me a message. There’s some good actors attached. And a director.
The point of all this is I’m not like these guys. I would never try to make someone hate me. I would never sell anyone something they don’t want more than life itself. And I wouldn’t, as a rule, get large knockers to win a bet.
After these three projects —Voila! (how’s that spelled? This is harder than Chi Chi) — I had enough problems to go back to writing novels. I’ve been doing it ever since.

Proust and the hernia

I’ve always read the Fat Classics — the books people discuss at parties where they serve cold fish, the books most of the ones doing the talking haven’t actually read — on the toilet. I am one of the few college graduates who can boast of reading all 780 pages of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot with my pants down. Can you say that? Portrait of an Arist of a Young Man. Don Quixote. When the books were fast moving, so was I. When the books dragged . . . you get the point. I read 450 pages of Tristam Shandy before it dawned on me I wasn’t getting a thing from the book. This particular toilet experience was an outhouse in the Gros Ventre Mountains, so Tristam dropped down the hole.
I shall live and die without having read Ulysses, or Moby Dick. Sorry fans of literature. I’d rather read all 57 Bernie and Wooster novels by P.G. Wodehouse. It’s starting to look like I’ll pass on Harry Potter too, although with a six-year-old daughter, that may change.
The Fat Classic I’m reading these days is Remembrance of Things Past (Snobs call it In Search of Lost Time, but God knows I’m not a snob) by Marcel Proust. You probably want to know why.
Three years ago I developed a pain in the groin and side. Sharp pain, like my little sister shoving a Phillip’s head screwdriver into my gut. I thought the odds were good I was dying, but I didn’t have insurance at the time, so I had no way to find out the truth. An American without insurance is in big trouble, and, due to long stories of betrayal from New York and blatant ageism from Hollywood, I found myself on the wrong side of the statistical tracks. I’m covered now, with a mere five thousand dollar deductible. No need for you to worry about my welfare.
Anyway, I decided I’d read Remembrance of Things Past. It was one of those goals people make of things to do before going to the Great Whatever — such as learning ancient Greek or making love to Linda Ronstadt. Mine happens to be reading certain books. My other reason, which was even more important, is that I knew for certain I would never die in the middle of a book. Others may, but I’m not about to bite the big one until I read The End of whichever story I’m consuming at the moment.
Remembrance of Things Past comes in seven volumes and I figured, with time out for recreational reading, it would take a year to read each volume, so I had just given myself seven more years to live. Makes perfect sense to me.
I’m mid-way through volume three now, and, believe it or not, I’m enjoying the book. It’s kind of like a 1,200 hour riff by John Coltrane. I get moving on a sentence and three pages later I have no idea what the sentence is about or where it’s going. The words flow over and through me like jazz in the rain. Every 200 pages or so a phrase will jump out hit me like a maul to the deviated septum. Examples: “Happiness can never be achieved.” Or how about this one: “One lives rather uncomfortably when regret for the loss of another person is substituted for one’s entrails.’
(Have any of you English majors out there noticed Remembrance and Harry Potter are both seven volumes and each volume of Harry is almost exactly the same number of pages as the corresponding book in Remembrance? Can that be random?)
With most books, I finish a chapter before I set the book aside and drift off to sleep. With R of TP, at first I tried to find the end of a paragraph or at least stop at a period. I’ve long since given up that dream. Many nights I crawl to the nearest comma and call it quits.
The pain turned out to be a hernia, by the way. It was nothing ten thousand dollars and three days of pissing into a tube jammed up my pecker couldn’t fix good as new.

P.S. Speaking of urination, here’s something I discovered about a minute ago. When the air is quite choppy, it is difficult to pee in an airplane john. Not unlike pissing off the side of a canoe going through rapids. I guess it’s a guy thing.

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

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

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

Kurt Vonnegut
He signed it in blue ink.

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

Dead Animals and Literature

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