My first book, When the Messenger is Hot, came out twenty years ago this month, on January 8th.
Fucking time! It’s just endlessly happening. You can spend more half your life, literally, in fact in 2003 I’d spent fully three-quarters of my life, writing and hoping that someone in the world would someday want to publish some of that writing, and then they did, and then twenty years passed. That’s it, twenty years pass, not one thing happens inbetween, you just get your dream come true, have a big book party because that’s what they still did in 2003, and then it’s 2023.
Arguably, it’s all about time and the death march, and why belabor those points, until it’s you, and then it’s like well maybe whatever I have to say about it is not going to reveal anything new about it, but what if it did? What if I were to reveal here the secret to everlasting life? I’m not, but what if I did? Would you want it? I can’t say for sure that I would, or that there would be some circumstances under which I’d want to. I’d like to have more time to catch up on reading, but that would really only work if time actually stopped, so that I could catch up on the books I already have before any new ones started coming out and piling up around my house as they do. I’d like to have love again, but I don’t need to live forever for that, and I might not be prepared for that long of a long-term relationship anyway.
Probably this piece could have been about who I was when I wrote that book, or about the book itself, if I were to reread it, which I don’t know that I really want to do anytime soon (refer back here to ‘more time to catch up on reading’ not to mention what if it doesn’t hold up, or is cringey in different ways; if you feel like reading or rereading you can let me know) or something along those lines, that would at least have celebrated the existence of the book, and what it led to, which, fine, was not a twenty year period where time stopped, it was a twenty year period in which many more books were written (by me and others) much more life happened, friends were made, marriages and divorces happened, jobs came and went, people died and were born and grew up and moved around and did all the things people do. This weird little book of stories is one component of things that absolutely changed the course my life, for the better, but was also the result of a number of other things that changed my life enough so that I could both write a decent book and also do the work necessary to help it get out into the world. (This makes sense in my head, but is basically me saying, without going into the hows of it, that I had to get my shit somewhat together before this book even came to be, or could come to be. I am endlessly in awe of people in their twenties who make any kind of brilliant art/books/music, I want to ask all my brilliant friends how they knew so much back then (or now, because some of them, my newer brilliant friends, are still young!). I was not that person, and I knew it. I was this person: I know I can write but I also know I don’t really know shit at this point, hopefully someday I’ll know just enough? And that seems to have been what transpired, what continues to transpire. I always try to know more, but it seems like I usually know at least enough to get by and probably to think up one more book. I guess we’ll soon see. I’ll check back with you twenty years after that book comes out.