Help Wanted: My Short Vacation From Writing

One problem with being a one-man-band here at the Café de Mello is that if my rather surly and temperamental muse goes on strike, or I am abducted by aliens, or I go on a bender, or life intrudes—as it did last week (I will explain shortly)—everything comes to a halt. I am, therefore, looking for one or more of my readers who would like to supplement my efforts on a regular basis. Any reader who thinks he or she would like to post here regularly is welcome to e-mail me at giles@maildemello.com for more information. This will be a paid position, if the Café ever begins to turn a profit.

As the more alert of you will have gathered from the paragraph above, my absence last week was not due to my muse’s reticence, my going on a binge or my being abducted by aliens (either foreign or extra-terrestrial), mores the pity. Instead it was due to my dog requiring knee surgery and a friend needing support. The combination of these life’s events drew me out of my usual habits and away from the computer.

Since I have often compared my labors at the Café—where I strive to give my readers a sense of clarity, or additional information, or at least a humorous perspective regarding national politics, religion, and other select trivialities—as being as useful as “shoveling shit against the tide;” you might expect me to say that I spent last week doing things that really matter. Things with real consequences. In this I must disappoint you.

The political decisions that this country will make on Election Day this year will have consequences as real as the surgery on my dog’s knee or the outcome of my friend’s crisis. In fact, the impact of those political decisions will be much more profound than the outcomes of the surgery or the crisis, and the sound and fury out their in the world scares me.

I am trying to write two novels (which if either or both sell will have a major impact on my situation—I would love to hear from an agent, particularly Andrew Zak, by the way), and it is tempting to pretend I have moved to a cabin by Hat Creek where there is no internet.

But, when I read of the widespread anti-congress feeling at a time when only 26% of Americans know how many votes it takes to break a filibuster, I cannot be silent. It’s like American’s are frustrated because their cars are not running and they are blaming the auto manufactures, but only 26% know that cars need gas! Americans are howling, inchoate, drooling mad. They are like the snake being stung on its head by a wasp, madly rushing about looking for a wagon wheel to stick its head under (here is a more complete description of this fable), mindless of the self-destruction inherent in this solution.

I am reminded of the Kris Kristofferson song, “Beat the Devil.” To Kris the devil sings: “If you waste your time a talkin’ to the people who don’t listen to the things that you are sayin’ who do you thinks gonna hear. And if you should die explaining how the things that they complain about are things they could be changing who do you thinks gonna care? There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind, who were crucified for what they tried to show. And their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time ‘cause the truth remains that no one wants to know.”

In the song Kris rejects that argument, and like Kris I don’t believe that, “no one wants to know.” And for whatever good it does I will try to show the truth as I see it, because maybe I can reach you and you can reach someone else. Maybe the truth has to be spread by word of mouth. If not, at least I will have done what I can.

Send me an e-mail at giles@maildemello.com if you are ready to help shovel shit against the tide.