Q: What was The Daily Bugle?
A: I named my web site after the newspaper Peter
Parker worked on in the comic book
This was before Eery Billy Haddock drew me with a spider tattoo on my shoulder.
Q: And compared you to Henry Darger.
A: And compared me to Henry Darger.
I was at the keen cutting edge of information development.
I was a senior information developer.
I was Cleanroom Jack.
You’ve heard of Eddie Cleanhead Vinson? I was Eddie Cleanroom Jack.
Q: You weren’t Edwin Drood. You were Eddie Cleanroom Snood.
A: Dan Simmons wrote Drood. Perhaps I am writing Snood.
Q: Eddie Cleanroom Snood was writing an eponymous novel called SNOOD.
On company time.
Using the company computer.
A: I didn’t write on company time.
I was a sharp tool for the company.
I wrote at home. On my home computer.
My Internet computer.
Q: At 784 pages, Drood: A Novel is longer than We, the Drowned. It was only 690 pages.
A: I don’t think Snood: A Novel will be that long.
Besides, it won’t be published.
You can just download it and print it out at home. On your home computer.
Q: People don’t have home computers. They have cell phones.
A: They work in cleanrooms like Louis Fyne in True Stories.
They wear paper booties over their shoes.
I wore booties.
Q: And two snoods, because you had a beard.
A: One snood upside down.
And prescription safety glasses.
Bifocals.
Q: Rubber gloves, I assume.
A: Yes. Vinyl.
Like a surgeon.
In electronics tech school they called me The Arc Welder. Because I was so clumsy.
I drew an arc with my soldering iron.
Zzzzzzt—wrong.
You have a shooooort.
Q: I miss Jim Varney.
A: He was funny.
Q: Bugle from buculus, the diminutive of Bos, the genus of cow.
A: The trumpet shall sound.
It shall creep.
It shall inch forward dialectically.
Except when it fulgurates.
Q: Is that a fulgurite or a corpolite? A vitrified lightning bolt or a fossilized turd?
A: Precisely. My full-face-mask tinfoil helmet is like a snood. A hardhat snood.
Deflect the cosmic rays.
Q: THE HARDHAT SNOOD. I like it.
A: Beneath the 12-Mile Reef. Filmed at Tarpon Springs.
I love Tarpon Springs.
Q: The giant squid, with its winking asshole.
A: Frightening. Frightening.
Q: Its beak. Its gnashing beak.
You know we’re killing off the squid to make cuttlebones for canaries.
A: The cuttlefish.
You’re right.
I’d rather have cuttlefish than canaries.
Q: Civilization and its discontents.
A: That’s what Roots Music is about.
The
developers. The Net Ban.
Putting commercial fishermen out of business to build McMansions.
I’d rather have Uncle Ed and the Friendship.
Q: Both your boys got to fish on the Friendship.
A: Yes, and Owen was a cook.
Q: Did you eat squid in
A: Dried squid. And boiled octopus.
Q: Was the octopus tough?
A: I prefer conch.
Q: Left-handed whelk.
A: Yes. Busycon perversum.
My famous scungilli marinara.
With Cuban bread and a green salad. Mojo criollo for a salad dressing. And marinade.
One time I was
walking along the beach at
And Balder and them sing a song Potter wrote, “Crooked Island Sweetie.”
Sittting on a piling.
The very piling I punch out, in a fit of frustrated anger at my life, my life so far.
Q: You must accept your life.
It could be worse.
A: That’s a hell of an epitaph. It could have been worse.
Q: HARDHAT DROOD: IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE.
A: I hit the brick stone wall of the world’s indifference with my head.
I hardened my own head.
The blood rushes to the penis and causes it to hard-en.
