In his 2016 memoir Gone With the Mind, Mark Leyner asks what if a book were a third-person shooter game in which you the reader flew in a balcony with Mussolini into the cervix of Leyner’s mother, Muriel, and destroyed the embryonic matter that was his in utero self. In this same spirit, I wish to explore whether a book—specifically a memoir of my life during the years 2020 and 2021—can take the form of a cross-country journey on a coach bus in which you the reader plays card games with my in-laws while traversing the figurative landscape of a writer’s psyche—my psyche—only to arrive, after a perilous journey over lands fraught with fear, disease, and narrative manipulation, at one of two gatherings: either a cogent, reasoned academic lecture in a university auditorium or a heated political rally in bleacher-packed sports arena.
This question has been answered in what you hold in your hands: Omnibus.
Now let me tell you about the card game you’ll be playing during this illuminating and frightening trek. The game is called “Smooth,” and in it each player is dealt three cards in the first hand, and threes are wild the first hand. Then four cards are dealt, and fours are wild, and so on. You play discrete hands until kings are wild, and you’re holding 13 cards. Low score wins, so the objective, each hand, is to “go out,” or lay your cards on the table. When you go out, you get to say the game’s titular word to the score-keeper: “Smooth.”
The banality of this game is its massive dependency on luck, but the beauty of it is its unifying force. We are going to have a big crew on board, and it’s customary to use multiple decks. For shuffling we use an automatic shuffler. You take one deck, load it on one side, and a second deck and load it on the other side, and turn the crank. Then the gears start spinning, pulling the cards from the bottom of each deck and shuffling them together.
This is not an incidental detail; that, metaphorically speaking, is what this book is. One deck has the red design on its back. Such is one half of this book in your hands. The “red” half is a nonfiction memoir about two extended stays in the Midwestern United States, namely the states of Wisconsin and Minnesota. These stays happened during the Junes and Julys of 2020 and 2021. In this “red” book/deck I find myself embedded, a liberal spy inside the compound of this mostly conservative family of hetero-normative, traumatized and addicted (like myself) second- and third-generation European immigrants.
Shuffled into this is the other deck, the blue deck, consisting of a short stories authored during the same two-year period. These were mostly written when I was at home, in New York, during the other months of 2020 and 2021, which I’m sure you all remember as eventful, in a putrid, stagnant, terrifying, awful, yet transformative way. You could say fiction was a coping mechanism; but also these stories attempt to pay tribute to the people in my life whose influence, whose spirit, whose presence (or absence) got me through the pandemic and who are turned out to be the real enduring inspirations in my life.
Sounds like a nutty game, right? Everyone ready to play a practice hand?
Here’s the thing. We want a lot of players at this table. “The more the merrier” has always been my official motto as a person, and now is no exception. So in order to accommodate a diverse and robust audience, I mean, card game, we’re mixing in a third deck.
“What color is it?!”
I hear you asking what color it is, and the answer is purple. Why purple? Because of Prince, what else. No, no. This third, purple, deck consists of excerpts of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—colloquially, “The DSM.” Yes, that so-called bible of psychological reference material, that Alexandrian library of sacrosanct medical wisdom. But these excerpts are not just any old selections; they are draft entries authored by me, and submitted to American Psychiatric Press, Inc. of Washington, D.C., the body that governs the publication of the revered manual in question. They address a condition called Aspiring Writer Syndrome. In the bus journey motif, we can think of these entries as loose leaf papers flying around the cabin of the coach bus and interrupting the blue/red memoir/fiction card game that you the reader are playing with my in-laws on your way to the destination where the university auditorium and sports arena await. The have blown in on the buffeting breeze blasting through an open a window on the writer’s psyche. The condition itself, detailed in all its fascinating compulsions, is one that my in-laws politely don’t speak of, just as I don’t speak of their most glaring neuroses.
This is a lot to absorb. So let’s be sure we understand the journey to be undertaken. To be a blend of red and blue is to be a blend of compassionate care for the ill, troubled, and traumatized; and yet to have a kind of insistent, myopic, vehement, fervent, obnoxiously forceful regard for the “truth.” The memoir part of the story—its red deck—relies predictably on cozy dramatizations of my personal struggles, as you would expect, and in it, my liberal, art-loving, earnest self, a self revived from my own haunted past, succumbs to the myopia of my own defensively forceful traumas of my reality, as they are manifest in the undeniable present.
The origins of Aspiring Writer Syndrome will help you prepare for the trip. In 2018, I realized I had a condition. I’d had it all my life. My friend Nick has it (you’ll meet him in the piece within titled “Highway 61 Revisited”); he describes it as a “restlessness between moments.” The subject (or patient) bounces between a strong inclination to write and—perhaps surprisingly, perhaps counterintuitively—an aversion to writing. Sounds simple, sounds like the same age-old artistic hand-writing that so depressed everyone in the film about P.B. Shelley. But it’s not merely that angsty pretentiousness. It’s more. Much more. There’s guilt, self-judgement, a whole roller coaster of endorphins and dopamine. There is a deep pathology centered around identity.
In authoring a reference manual entry on the condition, I am questing to make known and to inventory the diverse range of mental, emotional, and behavioral outcomes that a writer may experience. As a creative writing teacher for 13 years, I’ve seen many individuals suffer from their possession of a strong creative drive, while living in a world that values productivity, labor, adherence to rules, and other non-creative traits. But furthermore, apart from this altruistic motive—this wish to establish a clinical framework within the medical community—the “I” of the memoir also wishes for something much more personal: to be seen, loved and understood and valued for his own creative output.
Personally, I thought my cogent written definition, my pervasive insights, and extensive notes would have convinced the editorial staff at American Psychiatric Press, Inc. to include the condition AWS. After all, it bears a strong resemblance to many known addictions, not least of which are addictions to: alcohol, sexual behavior and gambling. Plus “AWS” rolls off the tongue like ALS. But alas, I was met with disappointment, frustration, and obstacles[1].
In late 2020, a prominent media organization came on in support of the movement to have AWS recognized, and that was Medium.com. Medium came on as a financial supporter at a time when it was much needed, and I, as the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AWS.com, was very grateful for and heartened by their recognition. Several red-deck and blue-deck chapters that you’ll find within this volume, such as “The Killing Place,” “Cosmic Banking,” and “Small Shot” were pieces published at Medium.com/aspiringwritersyndrome.
And then there’s the pandemic. A deadly viral pathogen coursing through the human population on a global scale has a tendency to yield a certain level of reflective contemplation. I speak for myself in saying that I know I shit my pants daily throughout the arrival of COVID and tried to keep it all together as economies crumbled and cities rioted. And yet, in June 2020 my wife and I took the first of our driven sojourns from New York to Wisconsin/Minnesota. This drive, which forms the foundational motif of Omnibus, was our first excursion after six months of lockdown. Whether hunkered down in my New York house, or hunkered in the Wisconsin basement of my in-laws, this was a time of really probing—encouraged by the prospect of random, unpredictable life-threatening illness—what I was trying to accomplish with all the writing business that I’d engaged in my entire adult life. The terror of the pandemic was like a cleanser in this case, pushing me to change my attitudes and beliefs about publishing and being a writer.
A final note on the contents. Given the current standing of veracity in our nation—given its extreme precariousness as a cultural value and the abounding uncertainty of its future, which is not unlike that of the dodo bird circa 1910; given its sublimation by “alternative facts”—the kindly and handsome editors of this volume have advised that Omnibus seek to be as rigorously fact-based as possible. I, in my bibliophilic zeal, have attempted to make the red-deck material tirelessly so through the addition of a reference section. Some readers may find it helpful to peruse this before venturing on the journey through the body of the book, just as one would peruse a map of terrain they were about to cross. This way you’ll know what resources are available to you, to inform your trip. This reference section has proven to be surprisingly easy to populate, given that data is in some sense a currency today. One’s personal computer, smart phone, email, and other device history bear witness to our every deed these days—as well as our geographic travels. Why? So that it can be quantified and made saleable as a consumer metric. This is handy bit of reality for the nonfiction writer and for the publisher who wishes to avoid embarrassing inaccuracies.
In this reference section you’ll find addenda galore such as timelines, file creation dates, google map records, tax documents, correspondences, and a even a letter from my father. These materials, I believe, illuminate a future that is presently upon us, in which nonfiction must function as a desperately abject effort to sustain the credibility of the individual who lives in a media landscape where perfidy and obfuscation (goodnight and goodbye, mere “spin”) are the dominant features.
Benjamin Obler
Oct 2021 / Feb 2022
[1] Mark Leyner presciently reminds us in Gone With the Mind: “That’s what nonfiction is, people. Shitty feelings and encounters with death”; and in this regard and others Omnibus strives to be irrepressibly nonfictional.