The Blog of Brian Hodges

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, ya know, anything.  Life.  Work.  More life.  The regular bloggy excuses.  But I’m thinking it’s maybe time to break my blog silence because I have a bit of news.  A bit of really freakin awesome news actually.

If you’ve read my ABOUT ME section, you know that I started this site as a way to eventually (hopefully) push my eventual (and hopeful) kids book, tentatively titled Sneaky Little Outlaws.  Well I’m proud and pleased as all freakin get out to announce that the first step in making that dream a reality (well, the first step after actually writing the stinkin thing) has finally happened.

I HAVE AN AGENT!

It’s all official with signed paperwork and everything.  As of this week, I am now a client of Amy Tipton at Signature Literary Agency.  You have no idea how utterly surreal it was walking to the mailbox to send out my contract with my son asking me, “Who are you mailing a letter to?” and me being able to respond, “To my agent.”  My agent. I have an agent.  Like that’s so… so… Hollywood.

The road to representation was a long, soul-sucking process.  For those of you who have not gone through the process, let me paint a little picture for you.  You have just spent months, possibly years, pouring your blood, sweat, tears, emotions and whatever free time you can eek out of the reality that is your “regular life” into a story that you sometimes love and just as often hate, until the night you finally type the words THE END.  After that you let trusted friends and family read it, hoping they’re just going to fall all over themselves telling you what an absolutely perfect story with perfect plot and perfect characters you’ve written and how they wouldn’t change a thing.  In reality, the reason you gave it to these people is for their honesty, which they give to you uncensored.  So after spending a good month being depressed and pissed off at said friends, you eventually come out of the fetal position and realize that their criticisms were probably right and get to work chopping up your masterpiece to make it better.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Lather, rinse, repeat. However many times it takes to get it as near-perfect as you (and your very patient readers) can possibly stomach.

After that, it’s time to begin the submission process whereby you have to whittle down a (in my case) 256-page novel into a single page query letter which you will then send out to every literary agent who seems like they might represent the type of drivel you’ve just spent the last four years channelling into Microsoft Word.  Then you wait.  Then you wait some more.  Most agents never respond.  Most of the ones who do offer little more than a copy-and-pasted “thanks but no thanks” rejection letter.  Here and there one will respond with interest and ask you to send them some sample pages, mayhap even the entire manuscript.  Holy crap!  Your heart leaps.  Your nerves are on fire.  You’re practically THERE, you just know it!  Then the real rejection starts rolling in.  The form rejections to your one-page query letter, while sucky, never really stung all that bad.  But when somebody reads your entire book and THEN says no thank you… Oh my.  Oh dear.  Oh crap.  That means it wasn’t just because their client load was full, or they weren’t looking for the type of book you wrote.  They actually liked your idea, but then rejected your book based on its actual merits… or lack thereof.  After five or so months of this, you start to doubt whether your book was really as great as you’d always imagined it… or if it’s even any good at all.  It doesn’t help when you pick up a book at the library that absolutely sucks and go, “Well geez, my book was better than THIS.”  By now, whenever an email shows up in your inbox with the RE: QUERY subject line, you’ve pretty much just resigned yourself to the idea that it’s going to be another rejection.  Which it usually is.

Until the day it isn’t.

I’ll be honest, when I sent Amy a follow-up e-mail about 4 months after she requested my full manuscript, it was really with the intention of tying up my loose ends and finally putting this book to rest so I could move on with my aforementioned “regular life.”  So when her response came back three days later with an offer of representation I just… I just… well shit, I effing FLIPPED OUT.  I had an agent!  I mean, I had an agent! Now lest you get the impression that Amy was my consolation prize after getting rejected out of hand by every other agent in town, let me assure you that even though she was the last agent to respond, she was actually one of the agents at the top of my “I’d really like to sign with them” list.  She’s an editorial agent which means she actually works with her writers to make their books as good as possible before submitting to publishers.  She’s young and full of energy but with solid credentials, a good track record of sales and a team of other experienced and well-respected agents backing her up.  And to top it all off, this is her agent photo.

Bitchin.  How could an aspiring author NOT want to sign with this chick?  In talking with her other clients I know I’m in good hands and I’m seriously stoked to see where this partnership takes us.

There’s still plenty of work to be done.  Amy has already put me to work revising a major section of the book before she sends it out.  As it turns out, it’s the part of the book that has always been my favorite part.  Those of you who are also writers know that dreaded mantra, “Kill your babies” or “Kill your darlings.”  The notion that the thing you love most about whatever you’ve created is going to be the one thing you’ve most likely lost all perspective on and the one thing somebody who knows better is going to tell you to nix.  You fight it.  You try and make them see it your way.  But in the end, you know that they’re probably right.  Fortunately for me and Amy and our brandy spanking new writer/agent relationship, it only took a week or so of me going, “but but but” before I realized that yes, she’s right.  She has said from the beginning that she loves my book.  Loves my story.  And only wants to make it as good as it can possibly be.  I believe her.  I trust her.  Time to put those babies on the chopping block.

And so now the work begins anew, after which the road to publication is still fraught with more, oh so many more, opportunities for soul-sucking rejection before (hopefully) eventually ending with a publisher who says, “We love this, let’s do it.”

Thus begins a new category in my life as a writer, and a new category in this very blog.  By clicking on the “being a writer” label, you can follow the progress of my book (and me I suppose) as it goes through the long and arduous process of turning from a double-spaced word processing document on my laptop, to an actual physical book that you can actually buy at bookstores nationwide.  Wish me luck.  I have an agent!

Y’ever been on Facebook (duh, of course you have) and done an honest-to-god double-take because one of your staunchly Liberal friends posted a link for a Tea Party rally, or your born again Christian brother made his status: “Strippers and Jager seemed like a good idea at the time”?  Only after looking closer do you realize that one of two things happened:

1) With all that information crammed together on one news feed, you accidentally transposed said link or status with the friend appearing immediately above or below.

or

2) A combination of similar first names and vague profile pictures caused you to apply the statement to the wrong “Jennifer”.

What’s even more disconcerting than the immediate double-take is when you come back to the post a few minutes later (after, say, other people have posted comments and you realize, “Wait, Mom isn’t friends with Hamstring Timmy from work!”) and wonder why you didn’t question the clearly out-of-character statement in the first place only to realize that, just as the naysayers have been naysaying, you really aren’t friends with any of your Facebook friends.  Then you feel lonely and drink.

We really need an Urban Dictionary term for such moments.

Am I ridiculously shallow or something?  Whenever I read a book that depicts what is meant to be an ironically utopian future, one where everyone is happy, I fail to grasp the irony.  Books like “Brave New World” and my most recent read “Uglies” or even a more familiar piece of art to most of you, “The Matrix” trilogy, simply fail to make me believe the overriding morality that the author seems to be making, which is that even if there are no discernable drawbacks, it’s bad to use artificial means to ensure the happiness of the masses.

In “Brave New World”, briefly, everyone is bred into classes.  Reproduction is accomplished in labs and chemicals are introduced that will determine if you’re an Alpha (the highest most beautiful class with the most privileges, who are encouraged to have fun, buy lots of toys and have insane amounts of sex with as many people as possible) on down through the Epsilons (who are the squat ugly “worker bees” of the future).  At the outset that sounds sick.  Great for the Alphas, but what a horrible existence for the Epsilons.  But here’s the thing: EVERYONE is happy.  Their brains are designed to automatically accept and ENJOY their station in life.  And whenever somebody does manage to get depressed in a life that is biologically designed to feel perfect, there’s always “soma” a relatively harmless drug that puts you into a blissful little coma until you’re ready to be happy again.

In “Uglies” when you turn sixteen you undergo an operation that makes you the absolute pinnacle of physical perfection.  It makes you “Pretty.”  But not just pretty.  (SPOILER ALERT.  SKIP THE NEXT SENTENCE IF YOU DON’T WANT A MINOR PLOT POINT REVEALED)  The operation also puts a lesion on your brain designed to stop all jealousy and anger and capacity to rebel against authority.  You are sublimely happy, spending your days and nights partying and having fun with other Pretties.  There’s no war.  No unhappiness.  Why should there be?  Everyone has plenty to eat and every day is as fun as the one before.

And of course you know “The Matrix”.  While it’s not a utopian world by any stretch, the world you “wake up” to when Morpheus gives you the red pill is worse than any drug trip gone bad.  You live in a dark, cold cave, constantly at war with sentient machines, the mere sight of which would drive any normal person insane.  Yet it’s considered a victory whenever they can pull somebody out of their comparatively blissful digitally created dream state.

WHY?

What is supposed to be so bad about any of these circumstances?  Now, mind you, “Fahrenheit 451” explored a similar theme where the entire world is kept in line by a neverending series of toys, TV shows and mindless entertainment.  But in THAT utopia, all that happiness was merely used to distract the public from an impending nuclear war.  So in THAT reality, yes, the happiness was all a farce designed to keep the public in line to their ultimate destruction.  But in “Brave New World”, “Uglies” and “The Matrix” there was zero downside to all this happiness.  Sure it was artificial, but so what?  If you’re happy (ignorantly but sincerely happy) and this happiness doesn’t actually pose a danger to you or cause the suffering of others… why are we supposed to think that’s a bad thing?  Frankly the more I read stories like these, the more I wish we had those capabilities in this world.  Yet each of these stories seems to indicate that happiness is actually a prison and that every person should have “the freedom to be miserable.”  Nobody wants to say it, but the real hero of the Matrix films was Joe Pantaliano who, after making a deal to be plugged back into the system, say, “Ignorance is bliss.”

I suppose this whole mentality goes hand-in-hand with other aspects of the way my brain works.  You all know I lost my faith in God about two years ago now.  It wasn’t a willful decision, or even REALLY a decision.  It was simply a matter of not being able to believe what I now understand to be a happy and comforting but wholly artificial fairy tale.  And yet I’d be lying if I said this “freedom” of thinking has actually made me a happier person.  In fact for a solid year after my initial realization it made me a downright miserable sonofabitch.  I honestly went through those five famous stages of grief with a very long and punctuated ANGER phase.  Man was I angry.  Angry at God, which was pointless because He wasn’t even there to be angry at.  So that meant I was angry at anyone who came from that same faith I’d just left.  It was irrational, I know.  But goddamn it I was angry and the one person I wanted to yell at wasn’t even real.

I still go to church.  For my wife.  For the kids.  And as I look at the people around me, people singing with their hands flung in the air, lost in the rapture of devotion and worship, you’d think my knee-jerk reaction would be to scoff at and make fun of them.  But I don’t.  Well sometimes I do.  But mostly I envy them.  I KNOW they are wrong.**  I KNOW there’s nobody really listening to their praises and supplications.  I KNOW they are trusting their faith and future to the metaphysical equivalent of Santa Claus and unicorns.  And yet I wish I were like them.  I wish I could take such deep comfort in something so clearly artificial.  I wish I could find that pure “Brave New World” happiness.  So what if it’s not real?  It’s real to them.  Like genuinely real.  As far as their senses are concerned it’s as real as the heat of the sun is to me.  And if it truly makes them happy, and isn’t actually hurting them or anyone else, who on earth wouldn’t want that? (Yes, I know there is a whole discussion involving Prop 8 and denial of other people’s rights and happiness brought on by religion that we could get into, but lets leave that for another time)

Is artificial happiness (whatever that means) really a prison? Is the freedom to be miserable really such a noble virtue?  As far as I’m concerned this life is all we have, so why spend it whiling away in misery just because it’s more “free” and “natural”?  If faith in an imaginary friend makes someone happy, great.  If some future society develops an alternate reality machine that allows you to spend all your days in perfect bliss, yet somehow still allows productivity and the human race to go on and endure, how awesome would that be?  And if you can safely become drop dead gorgeous and enjoy every shallow pleasure in sublime happiness without ever needing to think deeply, and this didn’t lead to yours or somebody else’s harm, holy crap, sign me the hell up!

Anyone else with me?

** This isn’t intended to ignite an argument over whether God does or does not exist.  For anyone who has religious faith, just understand that I “know” God is fake in the same way that you “know” He is real.  In my head, my certainty is equally as certain as your certainty is in yours.  I mean and insinuate nothing more or less than that.

As I pulled into the Philadelphia International Airport the other day, I had the radio cranked to the local awesome rock station WMMR, who happened to be in the middle of a block of Pink Floyd.  And as I drove slowly down the Departing Flights avenue, chock full of people getting out of cabs and checking luggage, the song “One Slip” came on.  It’s a rather obscure Floyd song, though I of course knew it, having gone through a lengthy (yet somehow completely drug free) Floydian phase in college.  The song, like a lot of Floyd creations, begins with a series of sound effects which I guess are supposed to evoke the image of a factory switchboard or mission control or something.  Basically you hear a series of beeps and boops like the sound of  a computer monitoring something.   Then, without warning the machines just go  absolutely apeshit and alarms start sounding before a heavy drum cuts them off and the song begins.

Well I just so happened to be driving past a big crowd of people when said machines shit said apes and as you can imagine, the sound of any kind of alarm in or near an airport situation is enough to make people turn and look and wondering just what the heck is going on.  I was just thankful that no cops were around or I might have gotten pulled over for some terror suspect questioning and missed my flight.

Actually, the radio wasn’t even all that loud and nobody so much as turned their head in my direction when it happened.  But it would have been pretty funny if they had.

An impromptu song made up by Allison at the conclusion of dinnertime:

(Sung in triplets)

If you don’t eat your dinner

You won’t get dessert

And you’ll get eaten by

the Tri-ceeer-a-tops

…one in which cash and calories mattered not, I would be perpetually almost out of pie.

On a recent Saturday night, Lauren was at work and I let Allison stay up late with me on the couch.  As we watched the Graham Norton Show on BBC America, Allison took note of their English accents and wondered why they “sounded funny.”

I told her that the people on this show were from England so even though they speak the same language as us, they speak it with an English accent.  “That’s why they talked different than us in Mary Poppins too, because they were from England.”

“Right,” Allison said, processing it all. “They must sound that way because they’re from the future.”

Love that kid.

Can we talk penises for a minute?

Part of being the husband of a midwife means you’re pretty much piped in to every conceivable controversial issue that is in any way related to pregnancy, childbirth and parenting.  C-sections, homebirth, vaccines, co-sleeping, breast-feeding, best hemp strollers for hippies and of course, the pros and cons (mostly cons) of circumcision.  In the past seven years, beginning when we got pregnant with our first child who, at the time, might have been a boy, I swear I have talked more about foreskin than all the other years of my life combined.  So I feel fully qualified to get a few things off my chest right now.

For starters, can we just lay this on the table right off the bat: FORESKINS ARE WEIRD!!!

I say this, mind you, as the circumcised father of two uncircumcised sons.  That’s right we didn’t do it because, as I said, I married a midwife, and we’re about love and peace, not mutilation and being horrible wicked parents… at least that’s what the mommy blogs say.  And I fully accept that my narrow-minded appraisal of that floppy stuff on the tip of my sons’ winkies has everything to do with the fact that for the first twenty-eight years of my life, my only model for what a penis was“supposed to” look like was my own.  Sure sure, here and there, in the locker room for example, you couldn’t help but catch sight of other “examples.”  But either I was hanging out in predominantly Jewish gyms or else I just never looked closely enough to know for sure whether somebody, ya know, was or wasn’t.

I knew there was such a thing as circumcision, I wasn’t completely sheltered, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around what an extra bit of skin would even look like.  In later years I guess I could have Googled the answer but, honestly, I didn’t care enough to risk someone walking up behind me while a penis was in close-up on my desktop.  My very first glimpse of an uncircumcised penis came the day my first son was born… and even then, you couldn’t really tell that anything was different because everything on an infant is always so wrinkled and out of proportion anyway.  It was only about a year later when the thing started retracting that I sat up and yelped, “Whoa, crap, is it SUPPOSED to do that?”

That’s right, I said it: my three-year-old’s penis creeps me the crap right out!

It’s not his fault, it’s just that, not ever having had access to the covered version myself, I have no idea how to advise him on such issues as, oh say, the relative strength and elasticity of his extra half-inch.  So when he starts yanking it back and forth in the bathtub, as little boys (and let’s face it, fully-grown men) are wont to do, I can only cringe because it sure as hell looks like he is less than a millimeter away from injuring himself in a way that I am frankly not drunk enough to deal with without freaking out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all the benefits of leaving your boy’s integrity in tact.  It makes intimate passion in later years something like a thousand times better.  Cutting it off supposedly impedes the early bonding process, which, hooked into the attachment parenting vibe is like totally unacceptable, man.  So whatever, I get it.  I’d never go back and change the decision we made. Go Team Foreskin!  Though when we were in the early days of the first pregnancy, I did ask an unabashedly loose friend, who had seen her fair share of junk over the years, whether she preferred one kind over the other.  I blame that damn Seinfeld episode where Elaine says the uncut have “no face, no personality.”  Not to worry though, my worldly friend assured me, she herself had been enjoying both flavors equally.  For years.  And if you can’t rely on the opinion of the promiscuous in situations like this, what can you rely on?

As he grows older, my son is not going to be able to rely much on me I’m afraid.  I can barely help him with his business now while everything is still normal and healthy looking, and where the worst problem I ever have to deal with is gritting my teeth as I help him remove a piece off fuzz that has somehow become, ya know, adhered.  But the minute he starts coming to me with smegma issues I swear to God and Ina May Gaskin I will slice him off with a c-section knife that was sterilized in Similac.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that, in addition to being the World’s Greatest Dad (and I’ve got the mug to prove it), I also qualify for the role of World’s Funnest Uncle**.  But as one comedian put it, there is a very thin line between “fun uncle” and “creepy uncle”… or words to that effect.  And few things define that line quite like a little game I played last night called, “Flapdoodle.”

Flapdoodle, according to its Amazon production description, is “a totally silly game for kids and families. Use your creativity and imagination to answer crazy questions and do silly stunts.” For each of these questions and stunts, you get to move forward a certain number of spaces.  List three things from the ocean that you would NEVER want on your sandwich (seaweed, algae and, let’s face it, oil) and you move ahead one space.  Use the back of a chair like a steering wheel and pretend you’re a motorcycle for 60 seconds, and congratulations, you just bumped up three spaces.

Now I’d say 95% of these questions and stunts would place any adult male safely into the category of “fun uncle.”  For instance, “In a rockstar voice, repeat the words WET RAIN and DRY LEAVES until the timer runs out.”  Perfect opportunity to elicit some giggles from my ten- and six-year-old nieces with my AC/DC and Metallica impressions.  Or how about pretending your two big toes are named Gus and Earl and you need to make them have a conversation about potato chips.  Fun Uncle GOLD.  But wait, then we get this card: “Close your eyes and have all the players line up in front of you.  Identify each player using only your sense of smell.”

(AGH! AGH! AGH!)

(WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!)

I’m sorry, but if my female niece, who stands perched precisely on the threshold of puberty and adolescence, goes home and tells her mom that “Uncle Brian was smelling me,” I’m guessing there won’t be any more sleepovers at the Hodges house.

Still, barring a couple cards that, while most definitely cute and harmless when played exclusively amongst 6- to 12-year-old girls, but which are borderline we-may-have-to-send-Dateline-to-check-out-this-guy’s-computer-history once you get a 30-year-old involved, it really is a fun game.

Especially for kids with the world’s funnest uncle.

**Excluding, of course, any and all uncles under the age of thirty who drive a convertible and are still in the amusing early stages of full blown alcoholism.

Jesse clearly has trouble with his hearing since, ya know, we have to tell him like ten times to go put on his pajamas and yet thirty minutes later he’s still just finally getting around to taking his socks off.  Yet somehow that boy’s ears can hone in on the precise frequency of a Mellow Yellow bottle opening on the other side of the house and it sets him off running: “Daddy, c’I haf some SO-DA???”  Wonder if that’s some kind of selective X-Man superpower?