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    Living The Zine Life
    Living The Zine Life
    Living The Zine Life
    Ebook129 pages1 hour

    Living The Zine Life

    By Mel C. Thompson

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Good luck meets an otherwise-doomed poet who was all but certain to perish on the streets of San Francisco. By sheer luck, he falls in with a group of poets whose psychological and physical illnesses almost mirror his own. For the first time in his life, he feels his entire person is understood. He begins to tell his life story and the stories of others he has known in short prose works which also double as poems. His works slowly begin to get published in tiny homemade, underground zines. One thing leads to another, and before long, he finds more acceptance and publicity than he had ever dreamed possible. The prose-poems he writes and performs are dark, but underneath the darkness is the victory of survival and living to fight life's battles another day.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMel C. Thompson
    Release dateJul 16, 2018
    ISBN9780463266816
    Living The Zine Life
    Author

    Mel C. Thompson

    Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...

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      Book preview

      Living The Zine Life - Mel C. Thompson

      Living The Zine Life

      Mel C. Thompson

      Copyright © 2010, 2018, Mel C. Thompson

      Mel C. Thompson Publishing

      3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

      Lafayette, California 94549

      melcthompson@yahoo.com

      This book is dedicated to the late Denver Harold. May the poets always remember what he did for us.

      Cover Photograph: Joie Cook.

      Text Notes:

      The following prose works are reformatted and edited forms of the original poems published in hard-copy zines. Because the school of poetry I was involved in pushed the boundaries of prose and poetry to a place where they were barely distinguishable, it is fairly easy to present these works as short prose pieces in order to take advantage of the natural text flow of ebooks. The original versions were with line breaks, most of which were removed for this particular product. Copy editing and rewriting was done to make the pieces hold together better in ordinary prose paragraphs, and other changes were made to deal with issues caused by rapidly changing language and culture. In attempting to import works written in the stone age of primitive desktop publishing into the modern area of multi-device compatibility, compromises were made to make this book readable on everything from large desktop computers to small handheld tablets and smartphones. However, I have still credited the publications that published the original versions of these pieces, especially since many of these works still have about ninety percent of the original wording in spite in spite of the many changes that were made to present the work in this medium.

      Table of Contents

      Poems 1-10

      1. Greener Pastures

      2. The Ambulance

      3. Suburban Families: Their Eating Disorders And Their Sexual Dysfunctions

      4. Asking To Be Teased

      5. The Sadness

      6. The Dead

      7. Would It?

      8. Café Du Loser

      9. The Final Assault On Burundi

      10. Pyro

      Poems 11-20:

      11. Upon The First Meeting of My Two Tormentors

      12. Robert

      13. Urban Lullaby

      14. What Andrea Told Me

      15. Other Empires That Fell

      16. Truth Or Dare

      17. For P.W. Stevens In Honor of His Death

      18. All Things In Excess

      19. The Flames of Hell

      20. Men

      Poems 21-30

      21. At The John Wayne Airport

      22. Dance of The Bower Birds

      23. Notes From Freelance Gardener And Landscaper

      24. Trying To Date Sister Dharmastream

      25. Sensei's Koans

      26. One Great Path

      27. The Fundamental Virtue

      28. Visualization

      29. An Unhappily-Married Woman

      30. Facts About English Garden Robins

      Poems 31-40

      31. The Ghost Is The Machine

      32. Elizabeth 2002

      33. Moss Beach, El Granada, Miramar

      34. Klipschutz At Rockaway Beach & Linda Mar

      35. Selected Ancient Fragments From The Scrolls of To Fu

      36. To A Woman Named Eli

      37. Notes On Astronomy And You

      38. The Physics of Despair — Part I

      39. An Irresistible Sale

      40. A Day At Cerebral Care Center, A.D. 2100

      Poems 41-50

      41. Sun Ships

      42. Anthropology 100

      43. South of Everywhere

      44. Werner Erhard

      45. Hegel — Abbreviated In Seven Stages (19th Century German Idealism Made Simpler)

      46. Mass Transit Bedouin

      47. The Libido of Power

      48. Without Him, Your Whole Theory Collapses

      49. Higher Consciousness Through Coffee

      50. House of Lost Men

      Poems 51-60

      51. Virtually Reality

      52. On My Preference For Humans

      53. My Girlfriend's Butt

      54. Former Academic Now Encased In Newspapers

      55. On Intimacy And Future Shock

      56. Nightmare Poetry Boyfriend

      57. A Most Unusual Pink Slip

      58. The Handjob That Saved The World

      59. Soul For Sale

      60. After The Sentencing

      Poems 61-70

      61. How I've Come To Know You

      62. Consort Without A Nervous System

      63. A Meeting of Suns

      64. How We Made Our Fortune

      65. A Language We Shared

      66. Concept #2

      67. The Wretched Ones

      68. Carrying The Torch

      69. Your Real Name Is Janis

      70. The Human Paper Blizzard

      Poems 71-72

      71. Three Generation Xers Collide

      72. L.A. Chinatown # 1

      Notes On Zines And The Zine Life

      A. My Introduction To Zines

      B. How Zines Saved My Artistic Life And My Sanity

      C. The Criteria For Choosing Zines And Poems

      D.  Short Notes On A Few of The Zine-Makers

      Poems 1-10

      Greener Pastures

      Return To Table of Contents

      When you’re a poet, you watch your friends drift away. And after a while it doesn’t even make you sad anymore. You are only left marveling at the reasons they give.

      Sandra got into Religious Science, and she told me she didn't like the universe I’d created for myself. That was before she called me from a South American jail. She was screaming and crying incoherently about latex and spandex and rubber. I couldn’t fully understand what she was saying about foreign obscenity laws and the porn flick she was trying to make. But she wanted me to come to Havana and bail her out. I told her I couldn’t help her until she created a better universe for herself.

      Billy said he couldn’t hang around with me anymore: I expect a certain level of growth and functioning from my friends. And honestly, I’m disappointed with how little you’ve done with your life.

      He changed his mind three months later after his fourth wife left him and he became an alcoholic again. I told him he could send me some of his poetry in the mail. If your writing is good enough, I said to him, maybe we can be friends.

      Poets can see the interpersonal politics for what they are. And after a while it doesn’t even insult you anymore. You are only left amused at how easily people sell you out.

      Jerry and me were real close till he got into positive thinking. I can’t accept your fatalism and negativity, he proclaimed. Me and my wife are trying to build a life together. We’re planning to start a business and have some kids and buy a home. We want positive reinforcement of our values. We want our children to be around inspiring role models.

      The police came by my house five years later to ask me some questions. They wanted to know what could have motivated Jerry to blockade himself inside his house with a gun and scream to the authorities, The ham and rye sandwich! I won’t come out till you bring me the ham and rye sandwich! Why, Jerry? Why?

      Now it was hard to take when Renee left me. But I’ll be damned if I’ll let her get to me. She was always on my back about my self-image.

      I need a man with more self-confidence than you, she’d complain. That was after she confessed to me about the psychotherapy practice she was running and how she used to take Valium every day just to be able to face her patients in the morning, patients whom she was supposedly helping to learn to face life without using drugs.

      Did I tell you she sent me a letter last week? I miss the little spankings you used to give me, she wrote. Do you still have those black leather straps around?

      I just decided to put the letter in my file box. And I thought to myself, Well, well, isn’t life just a tender little thing?

      Bullhorn, Volume 3, Number 11, November, 1990

      The Ambulance

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