A couple of months before I started trying to write this piece, I threatened harangued mortified The Reader made the comment that one of the reasons I changed the name of this place was to take the “film” specification out of the title so I could blather on piss about drive you crazy keep my brains active and do some writin’ about the books I read. We’ll see if this ever happens again seeing as how lazy and slow I am but sometimes it takes me a while to get a movie watched and I always have time to read because I take lunch breaks at work. You might think I was going to say shit break but I like to read hard copies and don’t go publicizing my business in public and I am not a public pooper unless the only other option is shitting my pants. And speaking of shitting pants that’s about how I feel about this book – I don’t know if I have a better memory of this one time when I was outside of one of the halls at college and trying to talk to this pretty girl and mildly farted and accidentally shit myself or if the memory of reading this book. The first one is kind of funny to think back on so I might go with that.

I read a lot of different things and I usually have a stack of these Hard Case Crime things ready to go and by design they’re usually about women and drugs. And even more granular – about women who corrupt men and drugs are involved. Usually the covers feature a half dressed lady in some sort of come hither pose or seemingly seductive like the figure at the top here who looks sexy and holds something maybe or maybe not symbolic in her left hand and has nothing whatsoever to do with the story inside. The copy I have, the cover looks like this:

and you can see someone skinny and alluring right up front (which conveniently does have something to do with the story). So these Hard Case Crime books are usually pretty light reading and I’ve gotten through about 20 or so of them and they’re all just usually ok but nothing super outstanding except for this one called Lowdown Road which was very 70s and fun. After that I read something called The Boatbuilder which was boring as all fuck and then I picked this thing.

In a movie post however long ago I mentioned how I used to read King a lot when I was a kid and grew out of it and got one of his Hard Case books called Joyland and then I bitched about it being the exact same story as what I read forty years ago blah blah blah blah bitch bitch bitch moan. So now I have this and I read the whole thing and I kind of hated it.

In the afterward here, King says he’s embracing the concept of “mystery” (or some shit) so he wrote a book about a couple of people that come across a dead body on a beach. They figure out that he came from Colorado but not why or even how or even why he’s dead but that’s the mystery, get it? This book is about two old men and a young woman talking about something that happened thirty (?) years ago. There’s no action of suspense or anything really just two old men drinking Coke and, for some reason, winking all the time and telling a story.

Maybe I just don’t like his writing style… this thing is filled with pieces like this made up sentence: “We never really found out, ayuh,” he said, his ninety year old, piercing blue eyes displaying a latent sadness as he ran his gnarled knuckles through his wispy, aged, white hair before taking out a plaid handkerchief and blotting the moisture accumulating on the profound bags under his spotted, lower eyelids, “ayuh” (reminding her again of the dialect she’d been learning since she stepped off the train in Moose-Lookitup, smelling, or better yet experiencing, the fresh air blending in off of the coast; so vastly and incredibly different from her life in central Illinois). That’s totally not exact because I put that book away but I didn’t just make that up and every chapter is filled with those things and i really thought it was pretty irritating to read through… probably much like my own writing cry cry cry

So for real, two old guys talk to a lady about something that happened once. Their dialogue is typed up in a way to convey some sort of Northern US island accent which totally irritated me the same way anyone on either coast thinks anyone in the South or Midwest calls everyone pardner says ain’t and y’all and spits tobacco. And probably shits in an outhouse. And rides a horse to school. And maybe that does happen, I don’t know anything but not really where I live I guess. However it works out there, I thought this book was totally lame with no payoff at all.

Anyway, in more fun news, or funnier news maybe – I don’t know what you think about ai – I’m not really for it or against it I guess – but the other day my friend showed me some software to use to make a picture. So I played with it here and there and then i had it make one of this made up singer from the 70s we have an inside joke about who we call ‘Steve Loggins’. I think the funniest thing about this is that the right eye is just kind of off and the left hand seems to have maybe six fingers, plus there’s just a random record on the wall corner. And a picture of himself I guess. I thought it was funny and better than this book. That’s probably a lot funnier to me than it is anybody else I guess.