Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—Scrib finished a book he was writing. SCRIB. He started another book. CRITICAL FUDGE. The next day, or the same day.
He knew what form
it was going to be in. 750-word
columns. And he knew when it would
end.
He started
writing The Daily Bugle on
How many books had he written in ten years, or 120 months? 216. Counting CRITICAL FUDGE. Although some of them were short, and some of them were not posted online. One six-book series was called Held-in-Abeyance (HIA). He didn’t post Held-in-Abeyance (HIA) online.
SCRIB and CRITICAL FUDGE combined to form a pair of books, or book in two parts, called Scrib Online.
On the description of Scrib Online Scrib wrote, to send agents, he wrote,
How long is CRITICAL FUDGE? Depends on how many 750-word columns I write, per day. Why write more than one? Why write any? To still the voices. Because it’s what I do. I have found my métier.
This was Scrib’s justification, or rationale, for writing. It was what he did. It was who he was.
Why would that make me want to read it? I want to be informed. I want to be entertained. I want to be titillated and amused.
I want to be sold a bill of goods. I want to be hoodwinked and bamboozled. I want to be fed a raft of political propaganda and commercial advertisements, like I am on television, in the slick magazines, and in mass-circulation newspapers like USA Today.
Scantily-clad women. Pretty women. Sexy women.
Thin women. Thin women with expensive tastes. Glamorous women.
Who wanted to read about a trailer park. About jobs you get laid-off from. Suddenly, out of the blue.
At-risk jobs.
Scrib wrote a book called SWIMMING IN THE AT-RISK POOL.
They not only let you go, for any reason or none, they keep you on tenterhooks, with the possibility that they might lay your buddy off, but retain you.
This makes you willing to rat your buddy out to keep your own job.
Who wants to read about that? It’s too much like life.
It’s funny. It’s Dilbert with an edge. I’ll see you in the funny papers.
What happened to Scrib can happen to you. It probably will happen to you. Scrib didn’t bring what happened to him down on himself.
Never sick a day in my life…and then—pow: senile psychosis.
Scrib wasn’t senile yet, but he had PSD, or pre-senile dementia. Like President Bush.
You might have it, too. How would you know?
The writer Terry Pratchett, who was diagnosed in 2007 with early-onset Alzheimer’s, writes this.
The last few years have been quite bad in all kinds of ways—mostly family and personal, but nothing unique. You have parents, and stuff happens. What actually cheered me up on one hand and frightened me on the other is the writing doesn’t stop. It’s like being shackled to some kind of huge, stainless steel tractor that just keeps on chugging.
Scrib would keep on writing as long as he could.
Sometimes he wondered if the book was writing him.
Not just writing itself, but, by using him to write it, writing him.
He felt ill-used by his métier. Used-up. Seduced and abandoned.
Used-up and discarded. Thrown away, like a disposable item.
Scrib was the outlaw in their stock. He didn’t have a place where he fit. They didn’t know what to do with him.
Who is they?
I don’t know.
Them. Dem. You.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
You’re murdering me, here.