At the beginning of this semester, I was extremely excited over the prospect of writing a novel. Not a novel that I wanted to write—everyone is always going to write a fucking novel—but instead a novel that I had to write as my undergrad thesis. One of the main reasons I went back to school was that it forced me to be creative when the allure of my couch and sizable television are often too enticing to pass up. What I failed to consider was that my final short-story workshop was also this semester, and that my late nights at a keyboard would be spent trying to cough up two more shorts. The two pieces, “Modern Romantic Fiction” and “How a Resurrection Really Feels” wound up being helpful in progressing this shit I do. One is an existential sex nightmare and the other is “fiction” in the sense that I changed some names, but otherwise it’s about my father’s funeral. The former was the first time I completely abandoned entertainment fiction for lit fiction, and the latter was Kraftwerk and a far cry from the droning, tangential creative non-fiction I started with in my first CW course.

So, the last of my mandatory short stories out of the way before I finish my BA, I now actually get to (have to) start the novel I threatened a few months back. I’ve cycled through a few concepts, but I haven’t yet landed on anything specific. At least two of them were science fiction and would have been a fucking disaster. I have narrowed it down to either a longer existential sex nightmare, a coming of age number, or a coming-to-terms-with-the-death-of-an-ambition story. These things are sort of in my wheelhouse. However, rather than try to force a plot, I’m starting with a list of rules. What I have so far are as follows:

Rule 1: Hybridize

I’m harboring no delusions that my silly undergrad thesis is going to get published. However my hope is to make something that falls between the bad books that sell and the good books that don’t. Up until this semester I wrote fairly smart-ish, big-hearted stories which were ultimately entertainment fiction. This semester I got my snob on and started clawing at the lofty, seemingly unattainable goal of literary fiction. With the entertainment fiction, I felt proud. With the lit fic, I felt smart. With this I’m shooting for a little of both, even though I’m sure the end result will be amateurish and something I laugh about in three years.

Rule 2: No Folksy Americana Bullshit

I love “Communist” by Richard Ford. Love it. I also have a phone with Star Trek technology on it. So while I did grow up in a rural midwestern town, I want to avoid anything with a decidedly rural, George Eliot feel to it where I use people’s simplicity to paint something larger on top. I’m not saying that doing this is somehow disingenuous. I just don’t like it.

Rule 3: Someone’s Gonna Die

If there’s been an ongoing theme in my small body of work, it’s death. Ruminations on possibly dying in a crisis. A suicide pact. Coping with death. …A better one about coping with death. “Exile on Riverton Avenue” had two dead parents and if it was a better story that would be been built in more. I’m fascinated by death, but not in a morbid or theological way. Specifically I’m fascinated by the ways a person can continue to affect the living after they’re out of moves on the ol’ chess board. I’ve never killed a protagonist, or killed someone for the sake of sentimental bullshit, but it’s a subject I like exploring.

Rule 4: I Will Write at Least One Sex Scene

This is sort of a joke with one of my closer writing friends. I’ve had a ton of implied sex scenes. Post-sex scenes. Failed-sex scenes. I’ve even had a story that was almost entirely ABOUT sex, but I’ve never actually choreographed the tremendously awkward and weird-smelling act of physical love. (This isn’t entire true, I have a few, but they’ve never made it into a finished product.) This time it has to happen.

That’s all I’ve got so far. That an a character name. I just don’t update this blog enough, so I figured I’d put it to work as a notepad. Cheers.

I received an e-mail today from the Michigan Democratic Party with the subject line “They Don’t Want You to Open This.” I was shocked, since it seemed odd that I’d be the lucky recipient of top secret political news on the same day that I also stood to make 250,000 dollars US from a Latvian diplomat who was in desperate need of my help. Not wanting THEM to get the best of me I opened it and, wouldn’t you know it? Those darn Republicans were up to no good again. It’s bad enough they spend their days plotting against the gays, blacks, mexicans, and poor, as well as trying to ensure that all corporations have free reign over our lives, but now it seems they’ve said something false in an e-mail they themselves sent out some days ago. I never received this e-mail, of course, since I’m not on the Michigan Republican Party’s mailing list, but I can only assume it was dictated by rape goblins and proofread by the devil himself.

Then something occurred to me. The sinister “they” probably didn’t care if I opened that e-mail. I’m on the MDP’s mailing list, so it’s a safe assumption I’m already in the tank. I’m one of those brainwashed Obamaites who want to steal your money and give it to alcoholic welfare cheats (that is, when I’m not trying to perform coat-hanger abortions in my apartment and applauding terrorism.) The MDP also probably understands that The MRP doesn’t care if I open said e-mail, which means they’re lying to me. But that’s impossible, right? We’re the good guys. We don’t lie.

The problem with strongly held ideology is that there are armies of people who are paid a hefty salary to try and exploit them. They frame the other side as being so impossibly, viciously against what you believe in (which is inherently good since none of us are dicks) that the country would surely implode if they won an election. They prey on our hopes for the future and excrete freedom-sodomizing bogeymen.

You want our troops home? Republicans masturbate to war documentaries.
You want limited government? Democrats want 1984.
Tighter Wall Street regulations? THEY are going to light poor people on fire.
Moral values? THEY want to show gay porn to your children in school.

If you genuinely believe that half the country (whichever half isn’t your half) are rabid, genital-mauling wildebeests, then your beliefs are being exploited. Which is too bad because I’ve seen some very smart people re-post some very dumb stuff on Facebook in protest of the nightmarish hogshit they get spoon-fed by their team (and my team is not exempt from that criticism.) This isn’t even MSNBC or Fox News-style slanting of actual news, but just pure internet-forged ‘tardsmanship.

Pictured: Anyone you even slightly disagree with about anything

“Neat rant, dipshit. But honestly? Who the fuck cares? People like to spout off. That’s why Facebook has an unsubscribe button.”

This is true, but I saw something sad today which inspired this soapboxing. It was a chain-post of the infamous Obama not holding his hand over his heart during the national anthem photo, which apparently has resurfaced and gives the reader the impression that it’s recent. For those unfamiliar with what this is, it’s a photo from the 2008 Democratic primaries and the song being played was “America the Beautiful” which one does not traditionally treat as our national anthem since it’s a poem by an English professor written in 1893. (For my right wing friends, it should be noted that there have been attempts by pussies to push for this as our national anthem since it doesn’t involve war, but these attempts have thankfully failed.) You don’t place your hand on your heart to “America the Beautiful” for the same reason you don’t during “Don’t Stop Believing.’” Now, the post itself doesn’t bother me and my liberal friends post equally dumb shit just as (if not more) frequently. But there was a commenter who was outraged over this photo. His brother was fighting overseas, and how could the President be so disrespectful to his brother who’s risking his life every day to protect the country he cares so deeply for? To clarify, I’m not making fun of his comment. I genuinely believe this is a well-meaning person taken in by an internet hoax. But hoax or not, it wasn’t the opposing team who set him up to feel like the President doesn’t care about the military and, by extension, his brother. So for at least ten minutes, that guy was really pissed off today because someone on his team told him a lie.

Now, there are plenty of reasons to not like Obama’s policies and by using this as an example I wasn’t trying to suggest that right-leaning people are responsible for this wordy outburst. This just happened to be the particular instance that caught my attention earlier today. Politics, especially during election season, make otherwise rational people go complete fucking insane. This is perfectly acceptable behavior for conspiracy theory lunatics or 4chan users, but not for the rest of us.

But he loved Lady in the Water. Weird.

So the next time you’re on the internet and you see “evidence” or a “poll” or “statistics” or anything with “studies have shown,” but a mysterious lack of peer-reviewed sources, please consider who wrote it and what they intended by you seeing it before you slap it up on your news feed.

Or better yet, forget everything I just said and remember this:

Michigan-based writer AJ Draper is a warlock from planet Tarzan, and if you don’t re-post a link to his website every day for the next ten days, you’ll be afflicted with terminal butthole cancer and all of your children will look like George Stephanopoulos, smell like Pete Yorn, and have the voice of Rachael Ray.

It’s on the internet. It must be true.

Lest We Remember
A.J. Draper

It’s funny. You can be lying face down in a shower with near-boiling water pouring over your shame-and-stripper-slime covered body and somehow still be dehydrated. I can at least. When I first staggered in to the bathroom, Emily was passed out on the tile floor wearing the same black cocktail dress as last night. I have a split lip, a small laceration on my forehead, and zero recollection about the second half of the previous evening’s events. As any good drunk knows, though, even when you can’t properly remember, there’s that feeling in the lower part of your chest that tells you something probably went dreadfully wrong between shots 6 and 10-15. I notice there’s a small fragment of something hard and sharp in my hair, right at the hairline and near the cut.

Emily comes to, the steam and noise shaking her out of a vodka and tonic induced coma. She walks out into the hallway without a word. Only a groan. I stay balled up letting the hard water wash away whatever remnants of sin I may have spewed forth into the universe ten hours ago. The bottom of the tub starts to fill a little and I feel my breath bounce off the ensuing pool. Gin. Strong enough to raise the dead. Emily comes back in wearing her pajamas and carrying a bottle of Gatorade. She throws open the shower curtain, glares at me for a moment, and closes it again.

“How’s your head?” I ask in hopes of gauging the temperature of her response. Nothing. I suppose that’s all the gauge I need. I start to sit up. I’m dizzy still. A few minutes pass and I hear her sigh and tap her engagement ring on the sink a few times. Then she starts to brush her teeth. She’s processing. Maybe still trying to remember as well. Any good drunk also knows you can sometimes be mad at someone, but foggy on the details as to why. The steam starts to clear out my tar-filled lungs.

“The hallway mirror is broken,” she says with a mouthful of toothpaste foam. Then she spits, rinses, and goes back to bed. I turn off the water and stand up in defiance of my rotating center of gravity. I grab a beige towel and start to dry off. This isn’t going to be a very good day.

With another apocalypse looming in just over a year’s time, I figure it’s probably a good idea to get a couple more releases out, as I’ve been relatively quiet since my 2010 solo album—which is still available for free download, I might add. They are as follows:

Sponsors (An Important Lesson About the Value of Sex on Airplanes)

Audio books have come a long way since the time I was rockin’ a ten-speed around my home town. These days they’re frequently read by the author or, in some special instances, a voice cast with all the benefits of production and music. I was sort of a sucker for radio dramas when I was a kid, so I really love that format for storytelling. Yet it occurred to me that these new audio books are always pretty limited to stories that are already published. Stuff people already want to read, but maybe don’t have the time to. So, just to see how it goes over, I’m going to release my newest short story in a free, downloadable, audio-book format. It’s a heartwarming comedy about suicide.

Vaguely Electropop Untitled EP.

There was a brief period I had between deciding I didn’t want to be in a garage rock band and deciding I didn’t want to be an electropop act when I got some song demos going. They were far more synth-heavy than my previous stuff but certainly not what you’d consider “dance music.” After getting out of the habit and letting the SSA project stagnate, I hadn’t really worked much on music in the last six months short of one acoustic show. I hadn’t “quit” or anything, I’d just gotten busy with school and writing. A few weeks ago I listened to those demos again finally and thought “these are pretty good. I should probably finish them.” You know, rather than than toss them one the pile of the 60-or-so unfinished demo songs I’ve worked on in the past ten years. So, as a secondary project to the audio-short-story, I’m also going to be working on releasing a three-or-four song EP in early 2012.

There are many rights of passage we experience in life. The first time we ride a bike or kiss a girl. Our graduation or first beer. Then, of course, we have our slightly less romantic milestones like our first cable bill or the first time we think seriously about the shape of a mole. Today I hit a one that, while slightly bittersweet, left me feeling like I had accomplished something:

I threw out my old hipster clothes.

Being in my early twenties, and especially having been in a rock band, I amassed a truly impressive collection of “ironic” t-shirts, campy track jackets, and vintage suits that wouldn’t have even looked sharp on a young(er) Bob Barker. I loved all this terrible crap dearly and it served me well through the drunken nights of debauchery and mayhem that usher one into manhood. Preening like a peacock in my turquoise suede jacket feat. band pins as I floated from gig, to party-hook-up, to wherever the hell I’d wind up.

Eventually, though, your early-twenties become your mid-twenties. You’re not in a rock band anymore. There simply aren’t as many reason to draw attention to yourself in a crowded room. Plus you get a little fatter. As this all happened to me, my dear hipsters clothes were pulled out, deemed inappropriate or ill-fitting, and tossed onto a pile. A pile that I carried around with me over five years and three apartments, forever holding the promise that someday, in the right circumstances and once I was down to 156 lbs again, they’d make a grand return.

But here’s the catch: I was always sort of awkwardly thin at 156 anyway, and was only trying to keep my weight that low to pull off the whole androgynous sex-bomb image. I’m 5’11″. I have fairly broad shoulders and athletic legs. Even if I shed my mild-at-best beer belly, I’d still probably be around 185. And worse still, I wasn’t even in my mid-twenties anymore with a reasonable excuse while I was holding out hope. My mid-twenties had became my late-twenties and I barely even noticed. Yet here I was, new life, new direction, new city. Same pile.

Having gotten over my head with the start of school and still kicking out of my traditional summer funk, I realized yesterday morning that I’d really let my office go to hell. It had become a sea of recording equipment, Jimmy John’s bags, soda cans, books, and my trusty pile of clothes. I made the commitment then and there to clean up my office as a weekend project. (My weekend starting on Thursday, as it does, gave me a good head start.) Once I had the things obstructing the pile out of the way, I started to push it back into a more compact mass in the back of my closet beneath the hanging clothes that I actually wear. It was then that I noticed a shirt. It was a tan, diagonal striped mod-esque shirt I’d worn twice when I was 22 and 156. After the second time I wore it, a button came off and it retired into the pile. Every time I’ve seen it since then, I vowed I’d someday put that button back on and wear the hideous thing when I’d returned to my once unnaturally slender build. “Maybe I should throw that out,” I thought. So I picked it up, tossed it into a trash bag of discarded workshop stories, and with that, finally, the levees broke. Each piece of super-tight nostalgia was easier and easier to let go of and before I knew it, the pile was gone.

This doesn’t mean I’m transitioning to gentleman’s active wear at twenty-eight. I guess I just finally realized I was never going have use for those clothes again, and the weird thing is, not having them looming behind me and reminding me that I’m “not what I used to be” made me feel better. Sure I’ll probably never fit into my second-hand 1980′s Whitesnake World Series of Rock shirt feat. original barf stain, but I got a lot of mileage out of that shirt. I get drunk with my friends in new shirts now. I don’t need to sit around pretending some day I’ll get drunk with my friends in old shirts.

Everyone’s life is a endless sequence of miscues and false starts. Mine, of course, is no exception.

When I started this summer, I had big plans musically. …Or to better phrase that, I had big theories but no real semblance of a plan other than I was going to work on an electropop album. This came off the heels of four or five months of being deeply uninspired about my new garage rock revival band. The idea was, since I was bored with doing something I did six years ago, best to try the complete opposite. Now, this is neither a knock on the guys nor the genre itself, but as an artist it’s hard enough to find the hours in a day to work, let alone work on something you’re not jumping out of your skull about every aspect of. So the electropop album struck me as something fun and new. The process of it, however, was a pain in the ass, as could have been predicted by anyone who knows my hot and cold attitude toward making music. It would have been like someone who spent ten years as a right fielder spontaneously deciding he was going to try shortstop, and that he was going to be as good at it instantly. The results were hits and misses, but enough misses for me notice that I was again not enjoying myself, so my summer of musical experimentation quickly became a summer of me watching The Simpsons and playing the new World of Warcraft expansion (hey, drug habits are difficult to kick, though I did abandon my priest and re-rolled a Blood Elf Mage).

Anyhow, I was offered a tentative slot on a Halloween show playing as Noel Gallagher. The Force of Nature did a night as Oasis once and it was one of the most fun shows I’d ever played, so I was excited about the opportunity. More importantly I was excited about the idea of doing something fun musically again, so I started dusting off my Noel covers on an acoustic guitar. Then I started playing my songs. Then I actually remembered that I like my songs. You can probably see where this is going by this point. I’ve spent ten years of trying to do something “else,” be it garage rock, electropop, even a very short-lived attempt at a musical. Yet the happiest I’ve ever been with a release was the one I did when I wasn’t trying to do anything “else.” You see, I’ve got this strange grudge against singer/songwriters or any bright-eyed kid with flawless hair singing songs about his feelings on an acoustic guitar. It’s a deep and irrational hatred anyone would have developed when you’ve played as many open mic nights as I have. But as I sat in my office, strumming, my voice becoming steadily less shaky after months of hibernation, I came to realize that I’ve spent way too much time avoiding the thing I enjoy and am actually good at, which is being AJ Draper: the dude who sings songs on an acoustic guitar.

So, there’s that then. I’m writing material for the next solo album, as well as booking gigs and ordering merch, which I’ll hopefully have some designs up for soon, as well as maybe a single. I also might finally pop out one or two of those covers EPs I’ve been threatening to release for years.

Cheers.

This week I am largely obsessed with being left alone.

I don’t feel well.

Also Google+ and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, I guess.

Cheers.

Where the hell did my week go? Well, there was the holiday weekend, I guess. Then I sank a day into finishing a new demo for Such Social Animals / AJ Draper / whatever the next release is. Then some work. I suppose the rest was…

1: Noel Gallagher

The moment I heard “Little James” off Oasis’ Standing on the Solder of Giants, I knew things were heading in a bad direction. Sure enough, every album that came after was filled with a greater ratio of songs by guys who wouldn’t be able to get an indie label contract if they pissed hundred dollar bills (sans maybe Gem Archer.) It’s no secret that my three favorite albums in the world are the first three Oasis albums, which, as it happens, were the albums entirely written by (and mostly performed by) Noel Gallagher. Now, I could write a very very long nostalgia-ridden fanboy post on the subject, but I won’t. Instead I’ll simply leave it at that Noel Gallagher is my favorite band and after ten years of hoping it’d happen, yesterday Noel announced the details of his first (forth) solo record. I watched the whole press conference. I’m that guy. I owe all of my desire in music and a fair chunk of my style to that surly mank twat. This is a demo from several years ago that’s going to be on Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds…

Yeah, it’s kinda minimal. Wanna fight about it?

2: Dragonette

I owe a lot of my current bandwidth throttling to the fact that I don’t like being told what I’m allowed to watch or listen to. I did, however, use Pandora for one day. In that time it spit out a lot of crap I didn’t like despite putting in some of very specific seed material. The one thing it managed to get right, and that I’d never heard of before, was a Canadian Electropop band that’s better than most of my favorite Electropop bands.

3: The Simpsons (still)

I stalled a bit on my Simpsons project. Seasons 12-14 will do that to you. I did, however, watch season 22 in the mean time, which was HILARIOUS. People are right in their assessment that the show got stale, but I think their timeline is off. It’s as good right now as it has been since 1999. Also, ask me in 50 years, if I’m alive (I won’t be) which stood the test of time better between The Simpsons and Family Guy. My decapitated ghost will very logically explain to you that it was clearly The Simpsons. Unless, god willing, it was American Dad (which is better than anything on the Fox Sunday lineup. It just had zero cultural impact and probably won’t go another 15+ years.)

American Network Sitcoms of My Lifetime*…
1/2: The Simpsons / American Dad
the author would like to acknowledge that he understands no one on earth agrees with the latter
3: Seinfeld
4: Futurama
5: Cheers (yes, Cheers, I’m probably older than you.)

*this is NOT a list of best shows or even sitcoms. Just American network sitcoms. So don’t bust up my shit.

4: Alex Turner

I was slow on this one. I read some unflattering (but favorable) reviews all focused on how romantic it was. I generally hate romance, so I wasn’t interested. Turns out the aforementioned reviews were the work of the retarded. These are just some really great minimalistic songs.

5: Their Teeth Will Be of Lions

Okay, I only actually spent 47 minutes of my week on this, but the broad singer is a buddy of mine, and her band as a whole is a balls-ton better than they used to be. Both their new tunes are pretty stellar (you’ll want to listen to the “demo” release), and they’re one of the bigger deals in Kalamazoo, so you should invest the ten minutes of your time. Close your eyes and imagine it with some solid loud-chorus production and you’ll probably ruin a pair of pants. Lions are… wait, okay, me, then Jake, yeah, Lions are the third best band in Michigan. The White Stripes broke up, right? Third or forth. Anyway, amidst a vast sea of boring-as-fuck indie shlock from around the state, Lions actually have some hooks as well as some solid (and creative) melody crafting. Most importantly, they don’t reek of “local favorite.”

THE LINK TO THEIR BANDCAMP ACCOUNT Go to it or I’ll hit you in the eye.

Hmm, I really wanted to end with a video, though. Drake? Yeah, probably Drake.