Absorbing Media

It’s the weekend, and I’ve gotta admit I have a hard time relaxing. Everybody tells me this: “David, you should relax.” It took me a while to figure out what this meant, which is “sit and do nothing for awhile.” I’m always sweeping or dusting or vacuuming or doing the dishes or working out in the yard. I can sit and play video games for a few hours. I can read for a few hours. Movies are tough for me, too much brain disengagement. I watch TV with my wife because that is her love language, but it’s an exercise in patience for me.

I love those success-win books that everybody hates. If I see a book in Barnes and Noble that’s called something like Unfuck Your Bullshit Life You Dumb Bitch, I will think to myself “ho ho ho…what have we here?” I get a kick out of watching dudes like Alex Hormozi or Tony Robbins, the kind of dude who will take ayahuasca in the jungle and come back fully energized to scale their SaaS business. I am what I am, and what I am at heart is a success-win bro.

You’d think with that mindset I’d be cranking books out left and right, but who’s got time to write that much when you’re busy self-improving? I’m kidding of course, but only kind of. The shadow side to all those life hacks and workflow optimization tricks is that…you actually do need to relax. Absorb. And believe it or not, I’ve managed to turn that into a system, as well. Forgive me.

After finishing a book, I make a list of 5-10 books that I want to read, and get to reading/listening. I play 2-3 video games to completion and several others kind of half-assed. While I’m doing this, I’m letting the ideas percolate. Thinking about them when they pop up, but not trying to do much with them.

Once I finished Berserker Club, I read Battle Royale, Daughter of Rot, The Earthen Dark, Crowbar, The Sorcerer’s Corpse, Manchukuo 1987, Christ the Eternal Tao, and listened to Killing Floor, Liturgies of the Wild, King of Dogs, and Musashi. I played Romeo is a Dead Man, Silent Hill f, I am Your Beast, Dread Delusion, Dungeons of Blood & Dream, Katana Zero, Hollowbody and Replaced. Again, I didn’t play all of those games all the way through, heh heh…😅 anyhow, I have nothing to say other than I liked all of them, some more than others. I’m beginning to think that criticism or even analysis of media kills my creativity. For others, maybe it gets them going, I know Eddy is like that, but for me I’ve gotta just ABSORB all of that.

My next goal is to marathon a bunch of Thomas Bernhard novels. I was thinking about his work last night as I was typing away on Ronin Trash. A lightbulb went on over my head and I thought to myself “oh, I’m just writing a gory/nasty Thomas Bernhard novel.” I first heard of him ten or twelve years ago from one of Blake Butler’s Vice articles, and back then I pretty much read whatever Butler recommended in those columns. Gargoyles and Wittgenstein’s Nephew were the only two I read. I enjoyed them, had a good discussion about them with Scott Adlerberg, and then forgot about them until now.

I have two major obsessions when it comes to my novels: doing things only books can do, and finding a way to optimize a book to be a page-turner no matter what (there’s that success-win again!). Bernhard falls squarely in that “something only books can do camp,” as his novels are mostly monologues, which allow for him as a writer to explore whatever he wants to in the context of the story. I’ve read other writers like this (Umberto Eco and Milan Kundera come to mind) and I think this specifically is a direction worth pursuing.

Anyhow, ARCs of Ronin Trash will likely be ready towards the end of June, so if you’d like to be on the early readers list drop me a line. I want to properly launch this book, have some reviews on the Amazon page, that kind of thing.

If there’s a takeaway (because I like for these to be helpful in some way), whether you hate optimization or structure or things that objectively make your life more fulfilling and easy, it’s to specifically schedule time to ABSORB media that gets you in the mood to create. Set aside a solid two or three months for this. The paths in the mind will extend out in front of you and backward through time, and the tentacles will pluck keys off the shelves and dust them off and zip them forward to unlock whatever is in your way. You too can Unfuck Your Bullshit.

Happy writing,

JDO

P.S. I forgot to mention manga, which I haven’t really read in six months or so. I’m picking up Crows and fixing that this weekend.