Is The Big Book Dead?

On vacation with the inlaws in Florida and stumble over Don DeLillos Underworld in the library of a gated community center where some white guy is singing Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World and the Greatest Generation is applauding like mad and there is DeLillos monster novel among all the John LeCarre/Grisham debris and my thought is well at least it is some literature with a capital L among the slickies and the mystery novels the Greatest Generation prefers along with their Phantom of the Opera (which is what the one man show is ending up with) and so I grab it and head out into the warm night.

I had read White Noise a while back and couldn't stay with it. It felt dated and sort of turgid like a heavy car trying to get up a hill. But I wanted to take a crack at Underworld because I was writing a Big Novel myself and this was a Big Novel and my thought was there should be something here for one Big Novel man to instruct another Big Novel man fifteen years later. So I read the first chapter and it was entertaining and sprawling and big and had everything but the kitchen sink and of course DeLillo is a good writer and this is a big swipe at American life...but it felt, ultimately, like a big old building that had seen better days and better times.

And part of this is I am not a fan of post modern fiction ala DeLillo. It is just too big. Too... look how much I can write and how well I can write. I don't find this with Franzen novels. They are big but they don't feel like they take up a city block. Don DeLillo is the appointed great writer so you can see him writing like a great writer and building these monstrous novels, but I guess my question is do we care about Big Novels anymore? I mean do we really want to invest all this time in this Titanic that lumbers across the sea when in fact we could probably get across in a smaller sleeker boat?

I like to think the Big Novel is still relevant and Franzen gives me heart because his novels don't feel like a big lumbering whale although they are long. But there is something very immediate and and that saves them from the DeLillo big novel fate. And maybe this is unfair because Don's novel  is fifteen years old and it does feel like one of those books you find in the attic and you stare at the wall of prose like...wow...people read this...all of this! Or maybe it is  just the Mailer big foot white male writer time has passed.

I dunno...but I think I'm going to put Don back in the Community Center because I am only here a week and that is not enough for a Big Novel. Maybe Louis will be playing again and maybe I can find something shorter among the literature of the Greatest Generation. Probably not.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Writing in summer

The Russian winter is gone  in Chicago and for writers this is a jolt. Happily ensconced in coffee houses you go about your business and assume the winter will drag on for at least another couple of months as we don't have spring in Chicago. We have wet soggy snow and dreary cold windy days that drag into June and then it gets hot. But now because of some kind of strange weather pattern we are in summer! And all those winter rhythms so conducive to writing the big Russian novels that require plodding and fires and lots and lots of coffee has been replaced by the airy days of summer. Bizarre.

And so you emerge bleary eyed after months of hacking away in your garret. Winter is enforced isolation as summer is enforced expulsion into the great outdoors of sunshine and air, peering strangely at the sky you have not seen except as a glaring cold ball of fire low on the horizon where night comes early and you pass the night in front of the television or the computer or with a book and rise to cold dark days that put you back in the coffee house and it is very good for the work. Summer...not so much.

You want to be outside man! Work. What work? Time to frolic. You are the school kid staring out the window and longing for the sunshine except you are now your own master and go on outside because the only taskmaster is yourself and he can be bribed very easily with promises of a bike ride or ice cream or just sitting on the porch with the laptop. The work moves into the background as all that Vitamin D pumps through your poor sun starved body and you find yourself waking up after a long hibernation. Could you really be that white and fat?YES!

So this lasts for the first week of the warm weather and that epic novel sits. Yeah you work on it but it is different. One foot in and one foot out the door at the Dairy Queen or throwing a football with the kids or wandering around the yard or garage and feeling like you should be doing something very active outside, but you have no idea what. Best to make some notes and tuck the novel while you lose your mind to the summer sun. At least until it rains.

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The Dream of Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris is  A Moveable Feast. Most of us who write or read seriously know about the Left Bank crowd of writers and painters who set the bar in the twenties for all to follow for the next hundred years. It was an amazing amalgam of creative talent centered in post WWI Paris and more centered in the bars and bistros where the writers and painters cross pollinated and created literature and art that is probably unparalleled since the Renaissance. Who hasn't become a writer or a painter and think about going to Paris to live the life less certain?

I did and so did the Owen Wilson character who is struggling between art and commerce and a wife who wants the finer things. In his fantasy or Woody Allen's we meet Hemingway and Fitzgerald Dali Gertrude Stein Picasso Zelda Mcleish and are mindful of the lingering presence of Joyce and Faulkner and the many others who came to the heart of the world of art and writing to make history and live  the artist life in a world where art is preeminent.

This is the assumption and the dream and Fitzgerald is refined and Hemingway is coarse and hilarious and Gertrude Stein is the Grande Dam of writing and Picasso is conflicted and Zelda is brilliant and heading toward insanity. This is the world we dance through and of course Paris is the magical background that makes us want it all the more. And Owen Wilson wants it and when he finally throws over security for a life in Paris we say but of course.

And then the movie ends and leaves us with the dream of the Left Bank fantasy intact. And why not? Those people took a chance and went to Paris to be artists and live a life apart. Undoubtedly there was hardship and people starved and did not find literary fame. But Paris is not a dream, it is a real city, and as Owen Wilson says, just walking in the rain in Paris at night is enough. One can  only imagine.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic-- surviving as a writer

The Vapidity of Modern Fiction

Why is it I can go read a bad F. Scott Fitzgerald short story from the Saturday Evening Post, one of his uncollected stories, that he himself disparaged and critics overlooked at just mainstream tripe of his day, and that story has more heart, more soul, than the  modern novels of our day. I try and read all the big books out and like many I am excited to launch on a new journey into the literary fiction of our day but after all the spun gold of New Yorker prose, I find something lacking. In short...where's the beef?

The beef would be heart and that does not exist in our modern writers. At least the ones I read and I read a lot of bestsellers. Now I dont' read everyone but there is this qualitative difference between the old writers of fiction and the new ones. The new writers write stories that read like long magazine pieces that don't seem to lower themselves to the soul of pathos or bathos. They may even call it sentimentality. But there is a curious lack of warmth in a lot of these writers that the writers of old seemed to possess.

If you read  something like the Baby Party which is a story of Fitzgerald's about two men who get in a fist fight on a suburban lawn then you might think this is lightweight fare but in fact it is a dead on treatment of the absurdity of bourgeois life but also the devotion to children. It is so alive, so breathing with life that we know these people and feel their pain and sorrow. When I finish a novel of today it is a bit like skating on ice and just about as cold.

So I go back to where is the beef? Is it television and the Internet? Maybe so. But those old writers are softening we need to go back too after our revved up Kindle reading where the emotion flat lines in the long highway of over educated prose and we yearn for those humanist values stripped out of our smart fiction that can be shattered like so much over spun glass.

\My prose bitterly proves the point.  

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Books Most People Don't Read

I was going through my library and had to write down the books that influenced me as a writer. As I went through the books I realized I would never read them now. I simply don't have the time. It is a sad fact that if a writer doesn't read these books early on he or she will probably never read them. How many people would pick up Ulysses or The Sound and The Fury, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Light in August, or Finnegan's Wake and read it now? Most would not. Sanctuary, Under the Volcano, Dr Sax, On the Road. These are just a few of the books but the point is that if I had not read them when I was trying to learn how to write fiction, I probably wouldn't.

Work will knock out reading time. Kids, family, the Internet. I am amazed that I took the time to read a lot of these musty novels but it made me realize that if I had a different life where I would have had kids or a real job or taken a different road then I would have never read these books. But reading is the backbone of a writer and those books skipped are skipped for good. There is really a very short window to explore the old writers and that is really true today

Who knows how many writers are lost because they simply didn't have the time or read and develop their craft. It takes years of reading and experimenting before a style develops. Most people simply don't have the time and now of course I can barely keep up with reading current fiction. And I think about the books I didn't read and never will now. I can only take solace that at least, for a while, I took a stab at the the books most people don't read.

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NPR Interview in Hemingways Attic

Should a Writer Live in New York?

The conventional wisdom is that in the age of the Internet you can live anywhere. No longer do writers have to live in literary centers to be part of the world of publishing and agents and deals and other writers. It helps of course, but it really isn't necessary. Authors live all over the place and even the ones who live in New York have houses in other places. The successful ones that is.

Of course there is a nagging little caveat to all of this. Take Chad Harbachs novel The Art of Fielding. I read the Vanity Fair piece written by his buddy who started the literary magazine N1. He basically describes the process in which Harbachs novel was discovered by Michael Pietch. There is the usual rejected by many component and Harbach slaved away for ten years and people were beginning to worry. But then his friend from the lit magazine who had a book published, put the manuscript in front of the right agent and then the right publisher. Harbach was discovered.

And if you go down the literary heavyweight list of Jonathan Franzen type big novels it does seem a lot of these authors live in New York. Lets face it networking is part of life and being where publishing is centered (at least for now) is probably a good thing. People do business with people they know and if you are bouncing around New York you might bump into agents and publishers and authors who could help you. To say nothing of the wealth of material living in a large city like New York generates.

I...like a lot of writers, thought about moving to the Big Apple. Living in Chicago did seem at times like a second city, but I doubted my ability to find time to write in NY. Chicago just seemed friendlier. And sometimes I think I should have gone. You never know what can happen just by moving to a bigger pond. Probably this question has no answer except that you go where you can survive and write.

Still, living in New York as a writer.....city of dreams, right?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Would One Narrator Have Worked for The Help?

Finished The Help. Good book. Very interesting and enjoyable take on the 1960's South as all hell is breaking lose. The verisimilitude of the novel is very good and I like the way the author wove in the events of the time, JFK assassination, Medgar Evers killing, the advent of air conditioning, television shows. Very good. And of course the maids views points gave the story it's hook and really it's reason for being. It's what it was all about right?

So here is my question. Why the multiple narrators? Why not stick with Abileen who opens the novel instead of cutting away to everyone else? Minny is a strong narrator but she is too prejudiced in her views. Skeeter, our alternate protagonist does not have the voice. It is a failure of the novel that the main white character, our character, whom we are in sympathy with is probably the weakest. Besides evolving into a writer and leaving the South for NY at the end, she just doesn't really catch fire.

But Abileen, she is a character and it is her book. It is fitting she should have the first chapter and the last chapter. She is the voice heart and soul of the book and it is curious that the author should use multiple narrators when all it did was distract us and take away from the power of the novel. Multiple narrators are used for great effect when other viewpoints are essential but this is not the case in The Help. I would argue the power is diluted by not seeing it though Abileens eyes.

We could experience all the bigotry and cruelty of the ladies of Mississippi through Abileen. She could give us every blow by blow and she would pull the loose ends together. Put her against the Skeeter story of her failed relationship with the Senators son and her dying mother and her struggles to become who she is. This could all still be achieved with Abileen by having Skeeter tell her about it when they get together. The author has power in Abilbeen and Minny, but the other characters are weak and a bit stereotypical.

But all in all a good novel from a viewpoint we don't ofter hear. I just wanted to hear more of it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Afternoon of an Author

You do it Stopping by a library for the Wifi connection you take a stroll in the stacks with your Kindle. Irony upon irony. You float along eyes scanning and the the H's begin and you see the first cover and then the next. It is your hometown library and they have multiple copies of all your books. And so you thumb that first one that you agonized over for seven years. It is well thumbed and someone has scribbled in pencil on the first page. Some of the pages are bent. The library pocket has your birthday stamped and followed by a dash How long until that final date?

The second book has been brutally abused. A good sign of anxious readers. The pages are even more worn, some turned back to mark a spot. Someone has dumped a glob of coffee that stained the cover page brown. You slip through the pages that took another seven years to produce. It is quiet in it's plastic cover that the small publisher had created but had now dimmed and turned to a yellowed plastic. The third novel looks like it just came off the shelf and has not seen the same action of the others. It was a quieter novel though more violent. The publisher had gone all  out and the author photo looks like that of a very prominent successful man of the literary world.

The fourth novel, your most recent has truly been abused. The cover is dog eared and coffee seems to have been dumped on several pages in wholesale quantities. Maybe jelly stains on a few other pages. There were more local references in this one so maybe people thumbed through quickly. The book already looks older than others but it is of a cheaper quality, more modern, less heft.

So you slide the books back and wonder what testament there will be to a person reading now. With a kindle there is none. You read and download another Very convenient, fast, changing that physical interaction. None of these old battle hardened soldiers of the public library. You wonder how long they will last now that the digital age of books is here.

You walk on. Your afternoon is almost over and it is time to go back to work. Just a little less enthusiasm as you open your computer. You sigh as your Kindle warms up.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Selling Fiction

You start off just wanting to get published. No small feat. This can go on for years. For me it went on seven years. Ridiculous you think. Seven years trying to break into print, but then you finally do and that first goal of just getting into print is quickly supplanted with the second goal: you want to sell. Why this should be when you were so satisfied, so happy to just see your name on a book cover that you should suddenly up your goal to this much heavier weight to bear. But you do.

And now the writer is confronted with the marketplace. Strange amorphous beast who seems to not give a damn about you or your book. You have in your mind a great populace passing on your book with a whispered, read this, it's great. But you have no proof this is occurring just your own faith in what you have written. Shouldn't that be enough? A man who self published a book never misses a chance to ask me if I have seen the reviews on Amazon. I assure him I have. In his mind those reviews will push his book along unit the world has seen the reviews and read his book.

But of course the other million books are also crying our with their reviews. And those dismal Amazon rankings tell the writer of fiction he must do more. And so you do. You tweet, write, post, talk, push, review, you do what you have to do to get the word out. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it did it really fall? Probably not. And this comes to the writers basic fear: obscurity. That you will pass along and your books will not be read.

In nonfiction the hook is easier. You can tie it to what is happening right now. Fiction is trickier. The story has to be tied to something current and that is tough. Because the times are always changing, but your book is not. Your story is a constant. So you have to break it down to who will read your story. You hope everyone, but the truth is certain people will buy your books. Maybe women, maybe men, maybe kids. And you have to go find them.

Giant publishers confront this daunting task every day and only succeed with a few of their books. The rest of their titles are lottery tickets they hope will be a winner. But we know the odds on the lottery. So the best thing the writer of fiction can do at the end of the day is write a really great story. That you can control. Chasing the market is a futile gesture and bound to failure. But you can impact that basic law of selling fiction: books are still sold by word of mouth. To have someone say at the end, that was a great book! Is the ultimate marketing plan. 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man 

Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

From Scroll to Kodex to reading The New York Times in Wisconsin

Up in a cabin with nothing but my kindle I downloaded the NY Times and read Lev Grossmans piece on the limitations of the digital format versus what he called the the codex  (book) which evolved from the scroll. He says if anything we are not making enough of the change. He is right and he winds up his piece saying the constrictions of the digital format is it's undoing. He is right. You cannot go from the end to the beginning with the kind of ease of a book. You cannot find  a page you wanted and then shoot ahead and back again to the place you wanted to be. Ebooks are just harder to navigate and they do feel contained.

Saying that Grossman finishes up saying that he will stick with the book. It is everyones choice and I understand his frustration. Reading on the ereader is very different. You just don't have that physical book in your lap to tear to pieces and mark up and read and jump around in. It's almost like the story is caged and you can't quite get to it. But here is why the new medium trumps all. Convenience. Humans move to convenience like ships to water. I can think of no better example than sitting up in Wisconsin and reading Levs article and then the entire NY Times Sunday paper in a cabin in middle of the woods.

There was no way for me to do this at my in laws place before. The town five miles away had the Milwaukee Journal and if you drove further to a grocery store you could get the Chicago Tribune. But NY Times, no way. But I read Lev's piece and then Maureen Dowd and here was the big thing, I could drop it on the couch and then fall asleep and then pick up where I left off. I would have never read any of this without the ability to snatch the newspaper out of thin air.

And I have written about the limitation of reading the NY Times on the Kindle and I stand by preferring the paper over the digital. But there is no doubt that conveniencewill trump everything. We are only getting busier and more pressed for time. Going to a bookstore or to a grocery store will be a luxury we will pass on because it's just so much easier to sit in our cabin and start reading. The scroll gave way to the Codex for much the same reason. It was just so  much easier to read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Not Enough Pie to Go Around

You have to wonder if there is simply just not enough pie to go around. All our worldwide convolutions seem to have a common threat and it is that the promises made in the last century cannot be kept in this century. There is simply not enough resources, money, land, water to deliver on the promises made. Social Darwinism is rearing it's ugly head and without a war the general message seems to be that some of us will make it and a lot of us wont. Such is the world we  now live in.

It would seem the optimism that started with the Wright Brothers in Kitty Hawk and dampened by the sinking of the Titanic then buoyed with our triumph over evil in two World Wars then reinforced with the American Centuries Gottermerung of Capitalism, has ended not with a bang but a whimper. We promised the world during those high flying years and the world cannot understand why we wont deliver. From the Arabs to those protectected by our vast Social Safety Nets, we cannot pay on the checks our higher nature is writing.

We have always believed that everyone could have a shot at the American Dream. But of course we never talked about all the people who didn't get it. They mostly died or starved or just went silently into the American night. But now we are really faced with the reality that most people will not find this mythical Leave it To Beaver land of milk, two cars, and a home. We simply don't have the cash and it seems nobody else does either.

Nothing new under the sun. We staved off the laws of survival of the fittest for maybe fifty or sixty years while we ruled the world, but the sun has set and we now no longer have the dineros to help those who cannot help themselves. Like those poor souls who drowned in the icy Atlantic with lifeboats nearby, it is truly every man, woman, and child for himself. At least with the Titanic, woman and children were spared. First class that is.

Rocket Man Kindle Downlaod

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo’s Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." - Chicago Sun Time




Writer in Residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation William Hazelgrove's third novel is "a charming tale of fatherhood, family, and the American Dream." (Midwest Book Review).

On Finishing a Novel

Finishing a book is a bit like losing your job. You have been consumed with your singular task for years and have lived your life half in this world and half in the fictional world of your novel. And then one day you realize it is really finished. For good or bad. You no longer have the privilege of working on your book. And so you get up and instead of working on that scene, that paragraph, that chapter, than ending, that beginning...you pay your bills, feed the cat, take out the trash.

There is no ticker tape parade. There is no ribbon cutting ceremony. Just an alteration of your daily routine and of course all those things you have put off for years come crashing in. So you immerse yourself in the practical world of living and realize what a mess everything became while you were off in that other world. You work like hell and get nowhere but the piles of things to do does go down slightly. The exhaustion at the end of the day is different. There is no dreaminess of the job well done, there is the edgy feeling that you cannot get it all done.

A book is a luxury. One task. One goal. Finish the book. If you say it once you say it a thousand times. People ask you for years what you have been doing. Working on the book. They are as tired of hearing it as you are of saying it. So you quit saying it after a while and just answer airily you are working on this and that. And so when you finish there is no real news either. Finished the book means nothing to most people. You finished goofing off, you finished whatever you do up there. Like most writing it is a quiet celebration with an audience of one.

So you have finished your novel and you swear you will not start another for a good while. Let everything cool down. Take a break. It is a crazy existence after all. Still, there is that one idea you have been kicking around. Maybe you'll just google it. Do a little research...you never know.

Rocket Man Kindle Download

"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." - James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

"The Catcher in the Rye for the fortysomethings. Not quite boomers, five years old during Woodstock, missed the sixties revolution and ended up being mellow in the seventies, partied in the eighties, floated in the nineties, then lost it all in the Great Recession."

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Pensions are DOA

The world has changed. Look at Greece and London and America. The old days of doing a stint of thirty years and then retiring are gone. Pensions are DOA. The problem is that you now have millions of people with absolutely no safety net and that is sucking down the people with a pension. The people who have nothing because of our prolonged recession do not want to pay for anybody. They have nothing and have nothing to lose. The bottom line is there is simply not enough pie to go around anymore.

One group has taken more than their fair share and this has left millions holding the bag. You have to question the worker states set up under capitalism where people are plugged into jobs with the promise of gold at the end. This scenario worked for a long time as along as people were making money and there was still enough pie to divvy up. This is not the case any longer. One group is taking a good healthy twenty seven percent of the wealth pie and capitalism has simply run out of gas. With so many people displaced, the old promised gold is now under attack.

The protected groups are no longer protected and this world is ending quickly. There is simply too much economic devastation globally to fund the people who cut the deal way back when. The metaphor of people drowning and swamping those in the life boats is too easy too resist. But it is no less true. The pension lifeboats are being swamped by those with nothing. Conversely the governments have nothing to pay and they are letting everyone know now: you have been the victim of the biggest bait and switch in history.

There is no gold at the end.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in July

Watching Foreigner Warm Up

Old rock and roll bands don't fade away they end up playing small venues in small towns that no one has ever heard of. I was in a coffee shop below a movie theatre converted from a real theatre when I heard a familiar song from yesteryear. I packed up my backpack and trudged into the hallway of the theatre to see PBS technicians and lights and cameras and more hubbub than this old theatre has seen for probably eighty years. The music continued and I followed the sound up some stairs and down a hall and through an open door into a darkened balcony overlooking the now brightly lit stage bathed in a video glow the size of a billboard.

  The old neo classical theatre that smelled like wet upholstery had been covert ed into a rock venue with men in skinny black jeans and tennis shoes standing center and gesturing to their ears while someone thumped on the drums and another man sat in a chair with his guitar. The stage seemed bare with just keyboards and drums and three men with guitars. They milled around around and asked people if they had their ears on because the quarter notes just didn't sound right and that final guitar squeal was a little off.  And so it was I realized I was watching the old resuscitation of a WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FOREIGNER segment that would land on the lower end of cable land in the fuzzy sanctum of boomer rock.

I sat down and just watched. As fascinating as the old roadie who still had his faded Foreigner sweatshirt and a sixty year old face under the long hair of another generation. How many places like this had he seen? Rock and roll seemed much like work about now. The musicians were fuming about the sound and trying to get their levels and without the songs being amped they sounded curiously like boys trying to be rock stars. But of course they were old men who had been rock stars and that was evident in the chair that the one original rocker made sure he was never far from.

And then they finished and put on their coats and left. I walked out of the balcony and out the side door to my car. Cold in Chicago land area and blustery. I put the car in gear and see some old guys clustered outside in thin coats grabbing a smoke.  Just some old rockers behind a theatre in the middle of nowhere. 

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man due to blast off April 26th

Our Taunting Media

Our media taunts us all the time. They love stories about people who are ten or twelve or twenty and who just started a company and made a million dollars while donating shoes to an impoverished county without shoes. They love someone who looks like they are nine who started a website and became a billionaire. They love someone who is twelve who starred in a movie and sold a million downloads of a song or who just happened to be fifteen when they came up with the cure for cancer in their spare time while donating time to homeless people in rough neighborhoods of Chicago or New York.

Publishing is even worse. They love the story of the girl who self published a novel and got a million downloads. Or the girl who sold a first novel at twenty five to an agent who was thirty to an editor who was ten. For a million dollars. That one really makes writers feel like crap. Writers especially feel that kind of taunting because most writers make nothing. Zero. Nada. Or like me they worked years and years and chased down publishers like timber wolves and finally shot them or got them to publish their book. The discovered moment came after years of toil. And that is still the exception.

I suppose working people get very tired of hearing of the guy who quit his job and then took five hundred dollars and started a web based company and sold it for five hundred million. Or the billionaires You get really tired of the billionaires. Even the name is obnoxious. Billionaire. Not merely rich. Billionaire. Like something from another planet. And maybe they are. I certainly don't know any billionaires. I know of them and I know what they look like and I did see The Social Network. That billionaire looked like a boy. I don't even know many millionaires. A few. But they only have a few million. Not very impressive.

In fact I know mostly people who don't have squat. I know people who look liked drugged coal miners from stress. They have been stressed for years now with unemployment, foreclosure, taxes, college tuition. It seems like everyone I know is barely making it. They are happy to have enough money to have a night out. A drink after work. And these people have college degrees. Lots of them. They are hardly the working class, but maybe they are.

So I guess the taunting will go on. It is designed to make us feel worse. It is designed to make us want what those people have. Sure. Who doesn't want a million dollars. Or a billion. Who doesn't want to be famous. But most people are just middle class. You sure don't read about them in the paper. Except when they lose their ass. Then it makes a good story.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th