I Can Only Go Up From Here

A New Hampshire Yankee in Los Angeles. Will Oggy find fame and Fortune? Will Oggy get his car to run? Will Oggy even find a job? Probably not, but won't it be funny to read about how close he gets?

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Monday, September 24, 2007

Oggy's notes to Memorabilia

As Oggy begins to accept his mortality, as Oggy's hair falls out and a mysterious bacteria-based infection renders him blind and as his hearing grows worse and worse, he needs to make some decisions. First, he must get his baseball cards out of storage. Second, he should look up that black family he called niggers in 1988 Methuen. That was just rude even though Bobby Hudson made him do it. And he needs to publish his book. The book. Memorabilia.
Editing 53 chapters, 1.3 millions words, will never happen. He can barely sit at the computer long enough to jerk off to some 8 second porn clips, let alone edit 1.3 million words.
But these words have been written and he feels they should be out there in the world so maybe an publishing Company in Bombay can steal them and publish them under the title "India Misses Oggy"
So Oggy is going to publish his book here despite the risks of copyright infringement, theft and humiliation. Memorabilia is the book that took him approximately a decade to write out long hand in two dozen journals all while huddled in a tent or trash bag shack in the forest. It then took 5 solid years to transcribe those elegible, sperm-stained journal entries into something that could be read by others. But when he was done the book was too big for anyone to read and Oggy had moved on to writing screenplays because they can not be more than 95 pages of dialogue. Simple. But this book is weighing on his mind. If he were to die tonight from heart failure (a growing, imminent concern) no one would ever be able to find this book, buried in millions of files and porn video clips. Those 15 years of work would be wasted. So in the interest of giving Oggy one less thing to think about he has decided to put it all up here and not edit it at all. He does not care if there is a subject verb agreement problem on page 1100. HE did not care five years ago when he finished transcribing it and he cares even less now. If you care then go ahead and edit it. But don't just edit that one page. Edit the entire book. Then you have done something worth while. And Oggy estimates that will take you about three years. Oggy would hire a professional editor to do it but estimates range from "$7,500 to read it." to "A million words? Good luck."
So Oggy has posted an alternate prologue (Prologue I), the original Prologue (Prologue II) and the first three chapters. He will post a few chapters at a time. He would like to say that your comments will inspire him, but that would be a lie. His heart flutters when he lays down. His left ear hums like a flock of locusts. His skin is pale and pasty. The other day he looked down at his feet and saw his big toe nail fall off. It just fell off. So "inspiration" isn't a word Oggy uses anymore. Oggy is that guy at the slot machine in Vegas or Reno. He has already spent all his money, his life savings, but he has a few more quarters in a plastic cup. He puts a quarter in and pulls the arm. A dollar or two tumbles out with that ugly plink and dink and light show. You walk up to him and say, "Wow. Looks like you won." Won? No. Oggy lost.

Now, Oggy will read comments and make some appropriately cynical responses, but he's going to post the entire book, all 54 chapters, no matter what anyone says. He just doesn't care. If you want to cut and paste the entire book into word and then print it out it will cost you about $54 in printing fees. You will need to bring it to a stationary store and have it comb bound. That will cost you $8 because it will need to be bound into two separate volumes. IF you go through the trouble of doing that then Oggy will gladly sign a cover page and mail it to you so you can staple it to the front of the volumes.
Oggy hopes this book will give readers a reason to laugh. It's a tribute to everything that's important to Oggy, or was important to Oggy fifteen years ago. He was happy with the way it turned out but he could not keep sending samples to agents and publishing houses. It cost too much money and he knew that it didn't matter. The book couldn't be published and no editor would look at it. But Oggy considered it beneath him to crawl to these agents. "Fuck them." he often yelled when he got a rejection letter. In order to stop getting rejection letters Oggy stopped sending the samples out. That's where the situation is right now. So Oggy is going to post it here and then he can sleep easy. When he dies there will be a record and no one will have to wade through hundreds of digital sub folders that make no sense to anyone by Oggy, unless they want to read the essay topics that Oggy didn't think were worth writing such as "God pulls plug on Human Experiment." or "God: Satan Wins! I give up!"

This is also a location where Oggy can comment on unpredictable situations like the one that just came up. He was only up to chapter 8 when he found a chapter that was titled "Youth Song Three" What the hell is that? Here is where this becomes like an archeology study. Oggy must actually try to remember what he was thinking 15 years ago when he started to put titles like that out of order and apparently without a youth song 1 or 2. Oggy vaguely remembers deciding to title sub chapters as Youth Songs. These sub chapters would be the actual recollections that the character Oggy (in the story) sings to appease the timewraith. But what happened to 1 and 2? Oggy doesn't know. The most likely scenario is that Oggy jumped in at Youth Song 3 forgetting 1 and 2. Or even more likely is that he had intended to insert 1 and 2 later but never got around to it. Then there is possibility that the youth song 1 and 2 are lost in a digital void.
Oggy is not going to try to correct this problem because that is the exact thing that broke his spirit five years ago when he couldn't keep all the numbers straight. In fact, in Oggy's opinion, this inconsistency is actually part of the book now. It's taken on a life of its own and to "edit" it would actually be destroying part of its original format. Maybe Oggy had subliminally invented some kind of great master plan that he was executing. In other words, maybe this omission of numbers and skipping of chapters IS PART OF THE BOOK. What is the deal with chapter VIII.5?? It's a chapter that happened when Oggy found two chapters VIII. CHapter IX already existed so you can't start bumping chapters up because that would mean renumbering 54 chapters. So why not split the difference. Really, Oggy can't comment on this anymore. He reads passages of this book and has no idea who wrote it. Some of it is very badly written. And then there will be passages that are so badly written that they almost seem right. Like they are a parody of this kind of fiction. And then you add in the skipped pages and other format problems and it's possible that's all intentional and will add to the reading.
Either way, the book isn't going to get edited and these "errors" have become part of the book that Oggy can't begin to figure out. It's a mystery.

Enjoy!