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Mick Farren

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Posted Thursday, Dec. 9, 1999, at 9:00 PM ET

I had promised myself I'd write fiction today. Fiction is the one form of writing I never attempt to avoid. It's a relief. I can lose myself in worlds of my own creation. I can be valiantly heroic, ultimately cynical, perversely erotic, or horrendously evil, and no one gets hurt. I believe it's a throwback to my childhood, when I spent hours in fantasies of being Captain Midnight, Zorro, or Ming the Merciless, except now (touch wood) I actually get paid for it, rather than accused of idly daydreaming.

Unfortunately, I found myself thwarted by externals. First, I'd forgotten that today was leaf-blower day, when the garden maintenance crew comes to the adjacent apartment building. They wield long flexible tubes and carry small howling motorcycle engines strapped to their backs like Dan Akroyd in Ghostbusters, and they blast all the dead leaves off their property and onto ours, only to have the wind blow them all back again in a matter of an hour or less. The leaf-blower is not only man's most pointless invention, but also the rivals the jackhammer and low-flying helicopter in its distracting racket. Newton the rasta-cat hates three things with a feline venom--skateboards, over-revving Harley Davidsons, and leaf-blowers--all of which cause him to retreat from his balcony vantage point, where he normally takes the sun and acknowledges the kudos of admirers who point and exclaim, "Oh, look at the fabulous kitty!" (We do live in West Hollywood.)

The e-mail was also heavier than usual. I treasure all the cyber-friendships I've developed through this wonder of cybernetics, and I'm addicted to the ego strokes I get from fans and the massive exchange of information. I could hardly function without them all--Jake, Dan, Wendy, Mean Gene, and Phil in England, who has actually created a Web site called Funtopia devoted to my work. I love the way they all ghost in from cyberspace, and although I in no way begrudge the time, I am starting to find the communication is taking an hour or more a day. Also, one piece of mail was from Slate informing me that tech problems predicted for Friday would make this my last diary entry for the week. Horror! For a full 10 minutes I went into rejection funk. They don't like me. The material isn't good enough. I'm doomed! I'll never be allowed to work for Slate again! It didn't last, however. I'm now so used to rejection funk that I got over it fairly quickly. Rationality, of course, reasserted itself, and I ultimately took the message at face value, but I will never completely eliminate that kind of panic from my life. It's neurotic, but it's also a handy tool. Rejection funk and stage fright are the twin fears that keep artists honest.

With the e-mail done, I Zippo'd a Merit and readied myself to enter fantasy worlds. In my fiction of the moment, I have two choices. I can work on the third of my ongoing series of contemporary vampire novels in which my imagination can wear black and not have to die, or I can explore the more tentative and just commenced work in which I'm attempting a fusion of Babylonian demonology and MKULTRA-style mind control. The latter is proving one hell of a challenge and may necessitate cultivating a certain controlled madness. When writing fiction, I hate to stop, I forgo TV breaks, and hammer the keyboard like Jerry Lee Lewis pounding the piano. Non-writers have asked my why I don't get a direct voice program, and simply talk to the machine. On hearing that, I stare at them askance, eyes narrowed like Clint Eastwood at high noon. "That wouldn't be writing, punk, merely talking. Any damned idiot can do that."

Usually, after such a remark, I recall an argument at a New York party some years ago with the much missed Allen Ginsberg. I was singing the praises of the computer, and insisting he check one out, while he responded how he was more than happy to stick with pencil, notebook, and manual typewriter. Now I find myself falling into a similar conservatism. Oh dear. Am I finally getting old on some level?

By around 4 in the afternoon, I was finally poised to pound out prose, but my hands were halted by a furious shrieking from beyond the French windows. I have a strange neighbor named Joe--the current theory is that something very bad happened to him in Vietnam--who stands outside all day with his cockatoo Ginger on his shoulder. Fearing that something had happened to either Joe or his avian companion, I hurried from my study to discover that Ginger had decided loudly to berate the leaf-blowers. Even though she screamed in no known language except maybe basic Parrot, I absolutely concurred with her obvious sentiments.

Deeming the uproar a non-crisis, I settled again at the black computer, but then Susan, my girlfriend, returned with Phase 1 of the Christmas shopping, and after inspecting and approving the purchases, I made the mistake of checking out the TV, and found myself ensnared by an Independent Film Channel TV documentary on Donald Cammell, who after directing Performance, The Demon Seed, and the never-shown White of the Eye, shot himself. Although superficially depressing, the show encouraged me there would always be fresh demons to conquer. By the end of that distraction, the time had come to tackle this last diary entry, and no fiction had been created.

Ah well, tomorrow is another day, although, sadly, gentle readers, you won't be hearing about it, but, as the late, great Gilda Radner used to say as the Saturday Night Live character Emily Latella, "Never mind."

Coming next week: A Diary from McSweeney's editor David Eggers.

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Posted Thursday, Dec. 9, 1999, at 9:00 PM ET

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Mick Farren is a writer, musician, and author of the novel Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife, to be published next month (click here to buy the book and here to buy his band's CD).

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