How Frank Zappa Saved My Life

I didn’t get many visitors in the hospital after my first suicide attempt.  I was mostly too embarrassed to see my friends.
But two of the coolest guys I knew showed up, Andy and Mark, and they gave me precisely what I needed – to show up and shoot the shit with me.  I felt like a broken doll, but needed to be treated like a human being, and they kept the solicitous “…You okay?” questions to a minimum.
They were the first to make me laugh.
And I remember very clearly when they didn’t make me laugh.  Because Mark said there was a Zappa song that referenced me, and Andy put a hand on his arm and said, “Come on, man, don’t reference that, he’s not ready.” And I asked what song, and they demurred me, saying they’d tell me later.
A couple of weeks later that summer, when I got out of the hospital, I asked them to play whatever that song was for me.  And they bobbed their heads, embarrassed, and got out the tape and played the first Frank Zappa song I ever heard:
“Suicide Chump.”

You say there ain’t no use in livin’
It’s all a waste of time
‘N you wanna throw your life away, well
People that’s just fine
Go ahead on ‘n get it over with then
Find you a bridge ‘n take a jump
Just make sure you do it right the first time
‘Cause nothin’s worse than a Suicide Chump
They watched my face, horrified –
And I burst out in laughter.  Who the hell would say that?
“What else did he write?” I asked, thinking that Zappa was a guy like Tom Lehrer – all clever lyrics embossed over bog-standard tunes.  And they grinned and said, “Oh, you’re in for it,” because they knew what I didn’t – that song was among the most uninteresting tunes in the Zappa archive, a simple blues riff.  They knew that Zappa had complex polyrhythms that would get wedged in your brain for days but be impossible to play.
They unveiled You Are What You Is to me, and the top of my head blew off.
The thing about Zappa is that he was fearless in every direction – he’d make fun of anything.  (His first album notably pierced the hypocrisy of the hippie movement, in 1966.)  He hit conservatives and liberals with the same incisive glee, and nothing was sacred.
Yet he did so with a cold intellect.  He’d go dumb on purpose, sliding into dippiness because it amused him, but always Zappa would retreat to that high ground of thoughtfulness and he would not abandon it.
But he was also fearless musically, striding boldly into every territory to grab orchestral music from over here and doo-wop music from there and a snatch of heavy metal and then weld them all together with complexity that made his musicians have to do actual work.  He’d snag the most talented drummers and guitarists and keyboardists of his generation, and they would have to work ten-hour days to figure out how to play what he wrote.  Touring with Zappa became like graduating Juilliard – you couldn’t do it without a magnificent set of skills.
Yet for all that, his music never felt as studied as the prog rock movement, which often felt like they were doing crazily-hard stuff just to show that they could do it.  Zappa’s work, with rare exceptions such as The Black Page, felt organic – yes, the diabolical stuff was in there, but felt like it had a purpose.  It was singable.
And so Zappa saved my life.
Because Zappa showed me it was okay to be weird, so long as I kept observing.  He followed his dream so recklessly that he didn’t really give a crap about his fans, or the record companies, or even his musicians – he just wanted to explore whatever was interesting to him.
What interested Zappa was dissection.  He liked looking at things.  He liked tinkering with both ideas and notes.  I liked tinkering with ideas and words.  He liked changing styles, and I liked changing styles.  He hated pretentiousness for the sake of looking good for other people, treasuring honest exploration –
So that’s what I set out to be.
Zappa told me it was okay for me to be me, and maybe even Zappa wouldn’t approve of me, but that was okay.  The core message of Zappa was that he was living for his own amusement, and he didn’t give a fuck what you thought because he enjoyed what he did –
Which gave me permission to be weird.  And not the kind of performative weird I saw so much in high school, that Hey, look at how kooky I am guys, do I make you laugh? but the actual weird that comes from looking at things that nobody thinks should be cool and hugging them to your chest.
To this day, it’s hard to describe what I like musically.  I’m all over the map.  People hate my mix tapes.  Because I’ve got so many loves and they don’t have much in common except they called to me.  (It’s also why I have such a hard time whenever someone asks me what my literary influences are.)
And there were a couple of times I was tempted to commit suicide from then on, back when I was young and still working through what would eventually come to be known as my Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I thought of Zappa: Do you want to be a suicide chump?
I eventually came to realize that some significant portion of my suicides were, indeed, performative.  (The other portion was needing a vacation, which I came to realize suicide was not.)  And if Zappa wouldn’t feel sorry for me, then others wouldn’t, and if I was going to make a show out of my death then why would I do that for such an unappreciative audience?
Zappa’s one of the major reasons I’m here today.
And I think of David Bowie dying, and I see all the outpouring of love for him because for so many people, he was the first person who told them, “You can be yourself.”  They saw someone blazing their own path fearlessly, and they realized they could create their own life.  And to have that inspiration go away so suddenly, so unexpectedly, made them remember how much of their life was only possible because one person had been so unimaginably brave.
Their sorrow calls to mine.  Their grief is fresh; I lost my hero twenty-three years ago, in 1993.  I know this because I have a Frank Zappa print in my bathroom, right over the toilet – I’m pretty sure he’d have laughed at that – that marks his demise.  I think of him almost every day.
And in a sense, it’s good that Zappa’s gone.  He was already getting cranky, and I suspect he would have become insufferable in his later life – maybe he would have remained a hero, maybe his humor would have boiled away to leave him with nothing but arrogance and he would pucker into some Richard Dawkins-shaped asshole on Twitter.
But I don’t know. Zappa evolved a lot. It was exciting to see where he’d go.
And Bowie is gone, and Zappa is gone, and all our heroes must march into the sky eventually.  It’s a day of mourning for those beautiful freaks who found a different hero.
But we all marched down the same path, basically.  You and I, Bowie fans, we both had that moment where a man shook us by the shoulders and said, You don’t have to be this.  And pointed down a more limitless direction.
You.  Me.  Zappa.  Bowie.  We’re all part of the spectrum.
We all became our own heroes.  At least a little bit.
That bravery serves everybody, in time.
So be weird. Be bold. Be as big as your heroes, even if they’re gone. That’s what they would have wanted of you, and it’s the blessing I wish upon you, on a day that still feels a little colder and emptier than it should.

How Many Brilliant GMs Have We Lost To This Writing Biz?

After months of playing evil vampires, I have agreed to step back up again and become DM for my gaming group.  They’ve been asking me to.  We stopped right in the middle of a very exciting plot twist in my Numenera campaign, and I know vaguely where it’s going…
I hope I won’t punk out on them this time.
But it’s hard to GM these days, because as it turns out my GM headspace lives right in the middle of my novel-writing headspace.  I plot my novel in my empty spaces: when I’m walking the dog, I’m marking out the beats for this epic soup-making action sequence I’ve got planned. When I’m driving long distances, I have conversations in-character, mapping out dialogue paths through the epic soup-making action sequence.  When I’m in the shower, I’m envisioning the tiny details of soup-making – what the bowl feels like in my hands, trying to master the little tidal shifts in a five-gallon pot.
All that primes the pump so when I eventually sit down to write that epic soup-making action sequence, it’s as good as I can make it.
(NOTE: You may think I’m kidding. I’m not. I am actually writing an epic soup-making action sequence.  Well, consomme, to be precise.)
Anyway, the issue is that most of the good bits of my novel are created when I’m not staring at a screen… and the same can be said for my GMing.  I plot out campaigns on my walks, on my drives, in the showers.
Switching modes doesn’t work. I can really only novel-plot or GM-plot.  Not both.
So my campaigns have suffered for some time now, ever since I’ve started writing (and selling) novels. I don’t have this problem with short stories; short stories don’t require me to keep an entire world juggled in my head the way that both games and novels do.  When I wrote short stories, I could switch modes easily, because short stories aren’t exactly easy but they are compact.
The thing is, I’ve gamed with Cat Valente, author of the Fairyland books, and I know that she’d make an awesome GM… but she also has the same issue of “novels vs. GMing, novels win.”  Mike Underwood, who writes the Genrenauts series, experiences the same problem.
In my ideal world, GMing would be its own financial career path, where the really good GMs were stars – maybe not Brad Pitt-level stars, but MC Lars-level stars where they have 20k followers and earn a nice living off of merch and video streams.  And in that world, novelists would have a lot of overlap of skills – no, you don’t get to control the characters precisely, but there’s a lot of related talents in worldbuilding and character tension and plotting and motivation that get hauled out when you’re a top-tier GM.
And I wonder how many novelists could run awesome long-term campaigns – not the one-shots you occasionally get at ConFusion, but those epic months-long games where you have character development and get hooked into the world because you’re both in it and changing it.
I dunno.  I know the world often loses me as a DM.  And I’m sad I never got to sit in a Cat Valente campaign.  And I’m sad that GMing isn’t more valued, because god damn there’s a lot of great sci-fi and fantasy writers I’d love to see behind the screen.
 
 

Read One Of My Favorite Stories, Over At Apex Magazine!

“Riding Atlas” is one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever written, in a career of writing weird fucking stories.  And I’ve had some people call this one “weirdly erotic,” which I didn’t exactly intend, but I guess you write about anything bodily-intimate and people respond.
Hey, I’m happy to be a springboard for all kinks.
Anyway, “Riding Atlas” is over at Apex now, and it starts like this:

They were naked, now, on a dirty mattress.
“Neither of you have eaten or drunk anything for twenty-four hours?” Ryan asked, hauling equipment into the room: sloshing plastic buckets, packs of hypodermic needles, coils of tubing, straps. “And no drugs in your system? This is a pure trip. Just two bloods commingling. Any impurities stop Atlas from getting inside you.”
Stewart didn’t answer. He was too distracted by all the naked couples. The attic’s flooring was covered with bodies, lying belly to swollen belly on bedbug-blackened box-springs. Their arms were thrust out above their heads, ears resting on their biceps; they clasped hands like lovers, their circulatory systems knitted into a single bloodstream.
Stewart felt his arms itch where the needles would be inserted, anticipation and fear churning into a sour mix in his gut. But Tina was ready, as she always was for things like this. She’d dragged him here, telling him they had to do this now, before they outlawed consanguination just like they’d outlawed LSD….

Go read the rest. If you can.
 

Trust Your Gut Instinct.

If you’re out on a date, and get that flutter of “STRANGER DANGER” jolting its way through your nerves, then you need to pay attention to that and cut this date off right away. Because your natural instincts know better than you do, and it’s time to start acting on those hunches.
You know when you’re in trouble. You just don’t know you know.
And if you’re out on a date and feel unloved, and your instincts tell you the best way to solve this is to have a crazy breakdown in public so her protective instincts will kick in and you’ll know how much she adores you, then it’s time to huddle up against a wall and tell her you can’t do this! Follow those impulses! You –
Wait. That’s bad advice?
Okay, I’m gonna level with you: About half of you need to pay attention to your instincts, because you folks do have good instincts, and you’re not listening when the alarm systems start blaring “ABUSER.” Chances are good you had such good instincts that an abuser in your distant past muffled them to make you more compliant, and it’s time to start listening.
But the other half have terrible instincts that make them feel all warm and fuzzy when someone subtly mistreats them with a feisty round of negging, or have instincts that tell them to do horrible selfish things when they feel bad, or even have instincts that make them homing missiles for the worst and most self-destructive relationships.
So you know what? As usual, universal advice fucks over a lot of people.
Here’s the truth: if you’re not sure yet, pay attention to your instincts. Write ’em down, if you need to. Then go along with ’em and see what happens.
You might be the sort of person whose instincts get them out of jams, in which case, hell yeah, follow those instincts! Pay more attention! Activate those instinct-sensors! Lift instinct-weights until you have the confidence to speak the fuck up when something triggers the DANGER WILL ROBINSON part of your brain!
Or you might be the kind of person who, like me, has Darwin-destruction instincts that lead them to walk into blazing bonfires of drama – in which case you need to put a ball-gag on those instincts, and work overtime to develop artificial habits that compensate for this anti-consigliere in your brain who consistently advises you into ruin.
And after you’ve done that for a while, you might find that you have really good instincts for some things and really terrible instincts for others, at which point, shit, you gotta break it down and determine which category you’re in before following or running away from those subliminal impulses.
The point is that all advice is two-sided, and can wreck you if you listen to the wrong advice. “Speak up!” you say to a shy person, but the local friendless Donald Trump fan just heard you and he’s gonna talk louder now because clearly nobody’s listening. “Learn to trust people!” you say to someone who shoves everyone away, but the person who falls in love with the checkout clerk has heard you and they’re now justifying quitting their job to move in with someone on the second date. “Be yourself!” you say to the person who spends all his time quashing himself down to fit in, but Mister “I don’t bathe because that’s robbing me of my germ resistance” is giving you a thumbs-up from his reeking seat on the subway.
It’s not about getting advice. It’s about getting the right advice.
Learn to listen properly, man. And that’s literally the best advice I can give you.

A Brief Discussion Of Star Wars Costumes.

So I was thinking about the lack of imagination in the prequels versus the Force Awakens.  And some of that’s evident in the costumes.
Because I just saw a picture of Obi-Wan… and he’s wearing basically the same outfit in the prequels that he wears in A New Hope.  Which implies that Obi-Wan basically has dressed the same for, well, his entire fucking life.  He retreated to Tatooine as part of a secret mission, wearing what are clearly fucking Jedi robes in retrospect, and Lucas didn’t care because, well, the characters weren’t what he cared about.
How ridiculous is it that someone would wear the same outfit for seventy years if he wasn’t some sort of bizarre cartoon character or performer?  Especially if he went into hiding?
Whereas Han Solo is wearing his smuggler’s outfit in The Force Awakens – except on each rewatch, it seems a little more ridiculous.  He’s supposed to be a little sad for going back to his old smuggler days – and I think of a fashion show I watched that said, “People wear what they wore when they felt the most sexy.” And a lot of that show, which was devoted to helping people dress better, was about making them realize that it was a little sad to wear that outfit that no longer suited you.
He looks a little itchy in that outfit.  And it’s the exact same outfit, down to the belt buckle. Which makes us happy as Star Wars fans, but the script itself seems to indicate that being a smuggler really doesn’t suit Han any more – he just doesn’t know what to do with himself, and is trying to recreate his old magic by dressing up in a costume and hoping that hey, the good feelings will return.
Leia, you may note, is wearing a different outfit.  That’s because Leia’s a little wiser.
As is, I think, this movie.