Diary Entry (11/21/2023)

Random Thoughts on Life

If interested, check out my latest post discussing “What Substack Readers Want.”

Life is short, I know that.

                    ~Me

WEDDING AND MOVING

My wedding reception was two days ago, on November 19^th. About 80 people—family, work colleagues and close friends—showed up to dance, drink, make speeches and be generally merry. It was a total blast. I even cut some moves on the dance floor, especially once thew DJ started playing songs from both the Footloose soundtrack and Dirty Dancing, two of my all-time favorite cheesy 1980s movies which I’ve watched dozens of times over the decades.

Family is a funny thing. My family is tiny, fragmented and spread out. I am the last Mohr. My dad is gone now. All the grandparents are long gone. But my family has expanded now that I’m married. Britney’s family—and there are three strains: Her mom’s side, her biological father’s side, and her step-dad’s side—is massive. Think of a typical huge Italian family and you’re in the ballpark. It’s fantastic. So my world has been magnified in this way.

On the flip side we’re going to move somewhere come summer. Originally we were going to move (back, for me) to the San Francisco Bay Area. But we were disabused of that notion when we started paying more attention to the stories online and in the media about the ravaging homelessness, crime and political dysfunction of the city, mostly due to young, quixotic district attorneys who refused to prosecute crime. (Several Bay Area friends confirmed the chaos and warned me to move somewhere else, saying they’d leave if they could.)

It seemed a whole city was being gaslit by the fringe left. Every bad thing that happened, according to the fringe left, was either White Supremacy somehow or a magical Republican “plot” to destroy San Francisco. Far lefties have never been able to take responsibility for their own failures or bad ideas. *(Ditto Republicans: Being anti-Woke does not mean being pro-Republican. I identify as a left-of-center free-thinking contrarian. I utilize independent, critical thinking skills and make my own informed choices.)

Then we thought of Chicago. But this changed for similar reasons, particularly crime, which again “wasn’t actually happening” according to the Woke social justice left. (It was all a mirage, all a fever-dream of racist white people desperately trying to regain control.) We kept hearing about stories of mass exodus from Chicago, rising crime, crime bleeding into the nice touristy areas, nasty tales of young Black men beating people with golf clubs for absolutely no reason. And again: A young, quixotic DA and mayor who simply gaslit and denied reality, pretending crime was a white delusion. Britney even joined a local Nextdoor group in Chicago and quickly discovered angry, bitter locals of all races—many Black—complaining about the rampant crime and idiocy of the mayor.

So now we want to move abroad. Likely Spain (who knows what part), but also possibly Portugal, Italy or Tangier, the northernmost city along the Mediterranean and Strait of Gibralter in Morocco. Tangier would be dirt cheap. It’s a 35 minute ferry ride to southern Spain. There’s a bullet train. Casablanca, aka the airport, is two hours away. It’s a very mixed and diverse culture comprising African, French and Spanish. And we could learn Spanish or French versus Arabic, which is incredibly challenging. We could live on passive income and even save. We’ll see.

READING

I’m always reading something. Every day. Morning and night. In the morning it’s like my coffee. I don’t actually drink coffee—I quit coffee a year or two after I got sober in 2010—I drink Irish Breakfast Tea. (I am a sophisticated man, haha.) Lately I’ve been reading two books (and slowly chipping away at a history book on Israel): Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877, which is absolutely fascinating, and a collection of letters by Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters 1940-1977, equally fascinating for different reasons.

The reconstruction book challenges many contemporary myths about slavery, reconstruction, the civil war and also simply adds incredible nuance to the whole affair. Here’s one interesting tidbit. Frederick Douglass—19^th century civil rights activist, abolitionist, author and public intellectual—suggested even before the Civil War had been won by the Union that the North should do “nothing” for the Black population other than to abolish slavery. His fear was that pumping federal money into the economy for freedmen, giving them free land and guaranteeing labor contracts and jobs would make them unconditionally dependent upon the federal Government.

This cuts strongly against the traditional liberal notion of the welfare state. I’m not saying I agree. Personally, I think the welfare state is largely problematic now, but that free land (or being given the land slaves had worked on for free via forced labor for centuries), and having guaranteed labor contracts, jobs, and federal guarantees of civil rights, not to mention suffrage for Blacks (the right to vote) was all 100% essential immediately after the end of the Civil War. You can’t expect millions of former slaves to just “figure it out.” But now? In 2023: Different story.

*(I’m referring here to low-income urban citizens, both Black and white. Obviously there is and has for a long time now been a thriving Black middle-class. Not to mention many wealthy Black Americans, more than ever before in history. It’s worth noting that the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War, which focused on aiding free Blacks, also helped poor whites; at one point it even helped Black free men band resources together to financially assist poor ex-Confederate whites! Many ex-Confederate whites were dirt poor after the devastation of the war, especially already poor upper-South yeomen, who’d always felt that the war was a wealthy plantation owner’s war which had nothing to do with them.)

The Nabokov letters are really intriguing. VN—Vladimir Nabokov—fled Russia (born 1899) just after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He lived in Paris, Berlin, Switzerland, and finally came to the States, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen. He wrote books gorgeously, profoundly carefully, and, somehow, very fast. He often worked on multiple books at the same time. He was also a fastidious translator, translating Tolstoy, Pushkin and others from Russian to English. (He spoke fluent English.) He’d come from a wealthy Russian clan, his father a liberal lawyer and his mother a gold-mine heiress. He taught Russian and European literature at Wellesley and Cornell. He won two Guggenheim fellowships. He became famous after the American publication of Lolita in 1958. (Originally published in France in 1955 and subsequently banned, criticized, praised and mocked by many newspapers, literary journals, authors, etc.)

V.N. was a consummate Artist of the highest grade. He was narcissistic, self-absorbed, clearly understood himself to be a genius (which he was), and also possessed an incredible level of artistic integrity, something sorely lacking in our contemporary times. His letters eschew the fawning of publishers, critics and editors. He told it like it was, throwing bitter criticism, anger and judgment when and where he saw fit, no matter who it was, a major publisher taking his book or the fiction editor at The New Yorker, a magazine that published a lot of his writing in the 1940s and 1950s. He fully stood on his personal values and principles and didn’t take guff from anybody no matter who they were. He constantly harangued amateur, unqualified (in his mind) translators. He harshly criticized any author who sent a book his way. He absolutely loathed T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and especially Boris Pasternak, particularly Dr. Zhivago, which he viewed as communist drivel. He was staunchly anti-Soviet.

WRITING

Mainly I’ve been writing on Substack. I have 63,000 words of my Dad/cancer 3^rd-person novel. I’m at the very end now, a few days before his death. It’s been emotional to think deeply about that time again, and I find myself avoiding this end work. I’ll get to it. I also have the two-volume diary journals from the 23 months of caring for my terminally sick father. I went through them once and cut, revised, edited, etc, trying to both make the sentences sound clearer and also to cut out anything that might make my family want to disown me. (I was very raw and honest in my diaries.) Still, I think it’s an important piece of work documenting my two years of leaving NYC, caring for my father fulltime, experiencing crushing depression and loneliness, doing online dating, and finally meeting Britney, falling in love, getting married. It’s a heck of a story.

I keep wanting to say, I still haven’t written any fiction. This, of course, is a blatantly false statement. I feel it because I write such autobiographical work that it often feels to me like thinly veiled memoir. But the truth is that I do shift off the literary reservation in my autobiographical writing, adding, subtracting and wholesale making things up, exaggerating or changing things as I see fit when it feels right and fun to do so. I might be writing something that’s 99% true and then suddenly veer off the path into something totally made up because, well, it adds to the story/plot. That’s the joy of auto-fiction, in my mind. I did this with my NYC/Covid “fictional memoir,” though I’d say this one more than any other of my books hews as close as possible to “the truth” as I understand it, given that I have natural organic biases, like everyone, and given that memory is slippery and not fully reliable. Perhaps all memoir is a form of fiction, as Michael Chabon feels.

SUBSTACK

I try not to take things on the platform personally. I obsess too much when it comes to numbers: Paid subscribers—which have been all over the map, dramatic dips and then recoveries—versus free subscribers, amount of views, number of re-stacks and shares, etc etc. This of course lends it a sort of social media feel except, not exactly, because it’s only for writers, there are no ads, and, so far, there does in general seem to be more of a community feel. Much more so than, say, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

It saddens me that I can’t seem to get past roughly 70 paid subscribers. It also saddens me that many of my own friends and family aren’t paying. If even 60% of these people did pay, I’d be doing pretty well. (Only $35/year.) But, this isn’t how real life works. I learned this the hard way when I got sober in 2010 and completed my first [YA literary] novel. I wanted feedback and sent my book (hard-copy in the mail!) to dozens of people, all friends and family. I was shocked by who actually read the book and who didn’t, and by who offered helpful feedback and who remained silent and never said a word.

Many family members never even read it or acknowledged it. Some of my closest friends did the same. On the flip side, some of my old friends who I hadn’t talked to in years read the book, loved it, and gave me helpful, detailed notes on it. My mom was of course incredibly helpful. She’s an author herself and helped me on and off with that book in particular for many years. (The YA book was later read by dozens of agents but ultimately rejected.)

Expectations, as I’ve written before, will get you every time. I know this. I get that with Substack, as with traditionally published writing and really anything else in life, requires, as they say in AA, “doing the work and letting go of the outcomes.” In other words: It is what it is. People are people. Some will pay me and support my writing , some won’t. People are busy and have their lives, jobs, relationships, kids, expenses, etc etc. I myself pay for quite a few Substacks, and I admit I’ve sometimes ended subscriptions out of the blue for no other reason than I am trying to save money. (It adds up!) We all have to make these tough choices: Who to pay and for how long. This is life. Reality. The grisly truth.

I see Substack as being a long-term goal. I have 1,293 subscribers as of now, with 71 paying. But the truth is these numbers fluctuate, go up and down for all sorts of reasons. I think the best way to look at it is to see the long, open road ahead and think long-term, five, ten years ahead. It’s a slow, steady build. I’d love to hit 100 paid subscribers and I know I will. It just takes time. Probably the best I can do right now is to just let go, allow myself to float down the Substack river, just keep writing my stuff and putting it out there, knowing that if you write it they (the paid subs) will come.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!