Fine Time.

 What can one say about a book one has written? That's something I'll have to think about over the next few months. Because I've written a book. Another one. So soon, John? Are you trying to saturate the market, like an incontinent caught short in Morrison's? 

I wrote this one, Fine, first, and it was written a long time ago. I performed chapters from this book, live, in Dublin, before the pandemic, which is, Christ, five years ago now. Bloody hell. Some of these chapters are even older than that. 

These were originally short stories of social embarrassment, enacted on a dull man who doesn't quite get what's going on. He's a modern Pooter, a sad-sack, every-man figure who will never win. It gave me a chance to explore a beery, blokeish demimonde, and the horror of male friendship. He'd have to have friends, and they'd be losers too, probably worse than he is. Did he have family? If he did, it would be as fractured and brittle as the rest of his life. Did he have aspirations? Was there a dream? Was there any hope left in him? 

By the time I was thinking of his dreams, I realised all these stories, probably half a dozen of them, all had the same voice. They featured, in fact, the same man. 

Once I realised I was thinking of giving him direction, that he wasn't just someone that bad stuff happened to, but someone who had goals, who thought about things and had opinions, and who attempted to interact with the world on its own terms, failed, but carried on trying, he started to feel like the protagonist in his own story. I just had to write the story. Also, I thought he was really funny and I could do lots of terrible things to him. 

I already had the name. In the early 90's I wrote a comic strip about a man who lived in a city, who had a band called The Flamingo Dancers, had a couple of surly flatmates and a girlfriend who looked like the singer from Madder Rose (because that's whose face I copied). His name was Paul Reverb and he was doing all the things that I - depressed and living in my parent's attic - wanted to be doing. Paul has a Sly Stone t-shirt! Why didn't I have a Sly Stone t-shirt? 

Mary Lorson of Madder Rose

I thought it would be fun to resurrect Paul. See how life had turned out for him. In the comic strips he would interact with Sweeney style 70's cops, or go on fantastic journeys with the ghost of Brian Eno and the Mael brothers. He doesn't do that stuff now. The magic of his magic realist past has sputtered out. He lives cocooned by his vinyl collection, barely bothering to pursue the phantom of romance. All that stuff just seems to happen to other people. He halfheartedly taps away at a novel he doesn't like and will never finish. He just wants to get through the day without embarrassment, but he is doomed to blushing misery, to full-body cringing. 

Until he isn't...

Until his prospects improve. If that's permissible. If I allow it. 

I am, after all, a jealous God.