Not notable

Easy to say, difficult to digest. I'm not notable. The term has specific meaning at Wikipedia. There is no Wikipedia article about Wolf DeVoon, and I very much doubt that my death will be noticed, except by the nice old lady who runs the general store. I owe a hefty balance.

My latest opus was issued in the size and shape of a child's coloring book, that's how little it mattered. Self-published books are invisible. I've written 23 of them. Web content doesn't count in terms of notability. I can't guess how many forum posts and blog posts I authored. Published magazine articles, radio interviews, and videos don't count, either. Wolf DeVoon won't be notable until SOMEONE ELSE decides to say something about me in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, GQ or Advertising Age. Colin Kapernik was celebrated by all of them, and he made the cover of Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Time, despite being one of the worst quarterbacks in NFL history, eleven losses before he got fired for being incredibly stupid and vain.

Doesn't seem fair. I'm just as stupid, equally vain.

Politicians get noticed. Mass murderers and evangelists get noticed. It's a coin toss whether a scientist might be notable, unless she's a guru of climate change and gender fluidity. Now that I think about it, it might be felony sexual harrassment to review a straight male novelist, universally shunned by agents and publishers. Chicks and queers rule the book trade.

I hit a million words recently, decades of effort, much of it writing full-time, because I have to have solitude, months at a stretch to conceive and execute and polish something as huge as a novel. I laugh about it some times. Facebook decided that I was a "public figure" with zero Likes and no Talking Abouts.

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner this week is discount balogna, slivers of onion, and mustard. I have one pack of cigarettes left, one pack of Ol' Roy soft food for my dog. He can't eat cheap kibble or defend himself because he lost half of his teeth to a lunatic vet. I lost half of mine over the years, so we're symmetrical, old and unable to do much except to gum soft balogna and dream of boiled eggs, sharp cheddar, fried chicken, Dewar's on the rocks, hot rib eye.

Gracefully surrender the things of youth?

Okay, I suppose that my creative work was juvenile. I stood up for masculinity and gorgeous women, outlandish love stories in outer space and on the hot filthy streets of Los Angeles. I had them chase each other in Central Java and Oud Loosdrecht and Columbus Circle, places that were familiar to me, the plumes of another life, all six continents when I was young and handsome and daring. All that's left is daring to claim that what I wrote was important.

Not notable, just important. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of justice.

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