Taking a Book-Writing Break; Plus: An Unexpected Clarification

9/4/2019

I need to get serious about finishing my book on pyramid legends, so I am going to be taking some time off this week to try to get some writing done. It seems like a good time to do it. Code of the Wild will devote its remaining episodes to hunting modern treasures, so it is of no concern to me. Andrew Collins has a new book out, but the publisher didn’t share it with me or other reviewers, so it might as well not exist. (The publisher offered some crap called The Wonder of Unicorns for review instead.) I’m sure I’ll eventually acquire a copy, but I’m not going to waste money on it. Tom DeLonge tried teasing more claims about testing “metamaterials,” but the photos showed what looks like the same types of material previously tested and determined to be industrial waste. So, until Ancient Aliens airs on Friday, it seems that I am safe to take a couple of days off.

But before I do, I feel like I need to issue a clarification and correction—but don’t get too excited; it’s not about any factual errors. Back when I analyzed the latest season of 13 Reasons Why, I complained that the Gothic accumulation of tragedies struck me as unrealistic. I should not, apparently, have said that.

This year, 2019, was my twenty-year high school reunion, and it marked, too, two decades since I graduated high school and went off to college. I described a bit of my experience in my review of 13 Reasons Why, and I was dismayed to discover that my memory cast entirely too rosy a glow over it. I wasn’t able to attend my reunion because it happened the weekend I moved to my new house, but in unpacking my things, I discovered my old high school and college journals, which I kept religiously during those years. They had mostly been packed away in a box of old papers and manuscripts for the past fifteen years or so, and I can’t remember the last time I looked at them. When I saw pictures of the sparsely attended reunion posted on Facebook, I thought I might want to go back and read about old times. I shouldn’t have.

It was horrifying, and not just because reading my own melodramatic teenage sturm und drang is cringeworthy. Instead, I could not quite believe how much I had forgotten from those years, or how many horrible things happened. I have always been an exceptionally careful chronicler, and even back then I collated my journal entries with newspaper clippings and other documentary evidence, so I know these things actually happened, even though I would not believe it if I had seen it on TV. My journal is an endless blotter of crimes committed by and on my friends and classmates (not by, or on, me I should stress), from the usual drinking and drugs to racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, steroids, corruption, child abuse, domestic abuse, pedophilia, statutory rape, date rape, sexual assault, assault, arson, domestic terrorism (bombings), and more. And yes, there were apparently a couple of deaths, though no murders. Even today, I wouldn’t describe everything publicly because, well, I’m sure some of it is still prosecutable felonies. And all of this is just from one and a half years’ worth of journal entries. I haven’t even read the rest yet. I know there is a section on the death threats I received senior year that is coming up eventually. That part I remember.

The fact that this horror story seemed normal back then—and probably is normal across America—shocks me today. I alluded in a past post to what I remembered of a rumored sexual assault committed by a friend of a friend on another friend of friend, but according to my journal, my memory has whitewashed the story more than even I would have suspected. I wrote in my journal that the day after the alleged rape, the principal took the distraught boy aside and told him that nothing would happen to him and that everything would be fine. The guidance counselor, a woman, took the girl aside and told her that what he did wasn’t so bad, that it wasn’t really a rape because it happened only the one time, and that she should let it go so as not to harm the boy’s future. To my credit, I didn’t think that was right back then, but I also didn’t really have any idea why their actions were so horrifically wrong. (As to why I was privy to these conversations—well, one happened in public, and the other was related to me by the participant.)

What is more astonishing still is that so many things that we would today consider outrageous violations occurred as a matter of course among the upper strata of the middle and upper-middle class students of a relatively safe and secure little town in the middle of a quiet area of upstate New York. I don’t want to give the impression that I lived through a Gothic horror story, but it was apparently a few shades darker than the sanitized excerpts that remain in my active memory.

So, long story short: Apparently, I lived through every goddamn thing that happened on 13 Reasons Why, and far from being an exaggerated and hyperbolic TV melodrama, it was scarily accurate. My apologies. Excuse me while I burn those journals and never think about any of this again.

Update: I read another block of entries and got to the suicide and the murder. I have no idea how I lived through this. It is completely horrifying, more so that I blocked out so much of it. I truly do not remember a classmate getting shot in the head by her boyfriend who had accused her of cheating on him. I am afraid to read the rest.

39 Comments

Jim Davis

9/4/2019 09:13:22 am

<i> I wrote in my journal that the day after the alleged rape, the principal took the distraught boy aside and told him that nothing would happen to him and that everything would be fine. The guidance counselor, a woman, took the girl aside and told her that what he did wasn’t so bad, that it wasn’t really a rape because it happened only the one time, and that she should let it go so as not to harm the boy’s future.</i>

I'm curious; how do you happen to know what the principal and guidance counselor said and did?

justabill

9/4/2019 10:42:38 am

as stated in below the passage you quoted one took place in public and one was related to him by the participant

Jim

9/4/2019 09:37:29 am

“Everything is relative”

Just don't tell us your journals say anything about being abducted by Nephilim space monkeys,

Kent’s c*nt

9/4/2019 01:23:15 pm

Oh no, how will I feed my addiction to posting idiotic comments if you’re not providing new material?

I know — I’ll go back and re-proofread your old articles and publish the various mistakes that I find, while simultaneously declaring that anyone who corrects my errors is “small.”

I have a wonderful life!

P.G. Grenadine

9/4/2019 01:38:32 pm

Look Asshole,

That sounds like something a shit for brains would say.

Kent’s cxnt

9/4/2019 02:19:24 pm

I apologize, I’ve been vaping some of the tarry substance found in Egyptian mummies and as a result, I’m not able to sustain my usual superior standard of absolute genius today.

James Tilly Matthews

9/4/2019 10:09:39 pm

"I’ve been vaping some of the tarry substance found in Egyptian mummies"

Mmmm. Egyptian snuff.

I'd be careful with that, mate, know what I mean? Wink, wink. Nudge nudge.

Paul

9/4/2019 01:45:28 pm

Just when you thought it was safe to stay out of the water, Diana Muir releases her Henry Sinclair Journals, vol. 2. Should be plenty of fodder there.

9/4/2019 02:07:40 pm

Wolter Is Coming. Alert the Night Watch.

https://www.amazon.com/Cryptic-Code-Templars-America-Origins/dp/1682011011

9/4/2019 02:49:21 pm

And for all the Jovan Hutton Pulitzer fans, Diana Muir delivers.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/diana-j-muir/kings-queens-tyrants-and-rebels/paperback/product-24189127.html

Kings, Queens, Tyrants, and Rebels

"A collection of ancestral portraits for the family of Jeffry Jovany Philyaw, including coat of arms for the noble lines of his genealogy."

Pity she misspelled his name, oh well, it's only a little over a hundred bucks and Christmas is coming.

An Anonymous Nerd

9/5/2019 07:00:32 am

You have two choices.

Burn them, as you suggested initially, or at minimum put them away until you finish both of your upcoming books.

Note that reading the rest, at least in the immediate future, is not a listed option.

-An Anonymous Nerd

P. Smith

9/6/2019 12:47:44 pm

My hope is that you will not destroy your journals. And eventually come to a place where you feel comfortable calling them "diaries."

It was my father's strange conceit to write me a letter, the writing of which extended over a period of more than thirty years, and which, ultimately, reached ten thousand pages in length, a total of over two and a half million words. The length of the "letter" was only one of its oddities. Much of it was devoted to an account of his sexual adventures, related in very explicit detail. It contained, to be sure, a great deal of additional information dealing with his ill-fated business ventures and his lifelong fascination with politics, but anyone plunging into the nonstop narrative at almost any point could not avoid the predominantly sexual character of it.

The letter was never delivered to me during my father's lifetime but he made references to it on those rare occasions when I saw him and read brief portions during visits to Greenwich, New York, where he and his third wife had a weekend and vacation home. So I knew something of its general character long before it passed into my hands upon his death in 1968. His estate was a modest one: some hats, of which he was a diligent collector, a gold watch that had belonged to his father, a lengthy genealogy, the compilation of which took up much of the time not absorbed in writing the letter to me, a considerable number of autographed portraits of prominent politicians and theatrical figures, the letter, and a small trunk full of what might be called supporting documents.

These were delivered in several boxes and two small trunks. The "letter" was, from the moment of its arrival, something of a white elephant or, perhaps more aptly, an albatross. I poked into it more or less at random, reading the erotic, pornographic portions and feeling, while doing so, somewhat like a small boy reading a dirty book. It was a puzzle to me-as it had been from the time I first got a notion of the nature of the letter-that a father would wish to have his son read such accounts. Innumerable fathers have been womanizers. Most have attempted to conceal their philandering from their families, certainly from their children. Some have, I am sure, been the deliberate debauchers (or teachers in sexual matters) of their children, more particularly their male children. Very few, I suspect, have left such detailed and explicit accounts of their sexual liaisons. So, I asked myself repeatedly, without, I fear, producing any satisfactory answers, Why? Why the letter? Why the extraordinary emphasis on sexual encounters? And then, equally baffling, what was to be done with this white albatross? I confess my first impulse was to burn it. I have very different views on sexual matters from my father's. I am what Arthur Hoppe has called a "closet monogamist." Like Konrad Lorentz' greylag geese, I believe in "bonding," in "finding the right little woman" and cleaving to her until death us do part. I am appalled at the notion of a series of wives and mistresses, partly on aesthetic grounds-it seems so messy-and largely on emotional grounds: I could not bear all that meaningless excitation, violation of the spirit, misery, and recrimination. I believe in fidelity; in mastering one's passions rather than succumbing to them. I even adhere to the moral argument. Indeed, I am bound to because I believe that all matters are, in essence, moral, that is to say they have to do with diminishing or enhancing our humanness and thus they have to do with right and wrong. Morality, to me, is simply a kind of convenient code which prescribes most behavior so that we do not have to approach every problem de novo, as though it was entirely new and had to be figured out ad hominem, so to speak, a course which I believe to be exhausting and unnecessarily time-consuming. Virtually everything that my father did, especially though not exclusively in the realm of sex, seemed to me both wrong and personally and socially destructive, evil if you will.

People against Plagiarism

9/6/2019 01:45:26 pm

Funny that you were able to post this here after Page Smith died in 1995.

SUPPORTER OF PEOPLE AGAINST PLAGIARISM

9/6/2019 02:01:16 pm

Nice catch! I suspect A. Frank will be posting personal diary excerpts soon as well.

People Against Assism Smith

9/6/2019 02:32:04 pm

Uh, "P. Smith" is a credit but does not violate Jason's rules against impersonating someone else. If this is the hill you want to die on go for it.

Champion of Plagiarism

9/6/2019 04:50:26 pm

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a
crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are
all alone here and we are dead.

Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had
to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not
stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like
this? But no matter. We might never have known each
other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the
lice.

Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He
is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he
says. There will be more calamities, more death, more
despair. Not the slightest indication of a change
anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our
heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.
The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must
get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death.
There is no escape. The weather will not change.

FROGHEMOTH

9/6/2019 05:01:31 pm

The weather won't effect He Who Lurks Beneath the Lillypads!

People against plagiarism

9/6/2019 05:20:59 pm

The first sentence of the comment addressed Jason directly regarding his old journals and there is nothing indicating that the remainder of the material is lifted from another source other than an ambiguous name that does not constitute giving credit. In fact, given that the plagiarized parts were originally written in the first person, there was a clear attempt by the plagiarizer to fool the reader into thinking that the entire comment was the plagiarizer’s original work.

One of many unanswered questions I have is what type of benefit does the plagiarizer glean from stealing the work of others?

D. Chappelle

9/6/2019 05:52:26 pm

Get over yourself you enormous faggot. And watch my special!

9/6/2019 02:50:45 pm

Somebody's dying on a hill? Sounds like a war flick; those aren't my taste. Except maybe Kelly's Heroes; I love Clint Eastwood.

I'm not impersonating someone who supports those against plagiarism; I am one. I abhor plagiarism and support those who are well read enough to call it out. It is, after all, unethical and a crime to boot. It's a personal choice, not a formal statement of identity. Do you see MR.or MRS. in front of that?

If there is going to be any "dying on hills", better to do it calling potential criminality even if it violates a blogger's personal rules. Jason has chastised people before over potential plagiarism in these forums. In this particular case, it's just someone being a smartass. But he might view it differently. Who's to say except Jason?

Besides, didn't you just do the same thing? Not a very well thought out position in the end.

Stumbled on this site

9/6/2019 02:56:04 pm

It's not clear what your point is. Where does Mr. and Mrs. fit in? Are you pro- or anti- plagiarism? Are you accusing the OP of plagiarism? These are just a few questions your post leaves unanswered.

Sniggler S. Sniggleton

9/6/2019 07:34:58 pm

"actually a crime to boot"

No, plagiarism actually isn't a crime. So in the words of the immortal Tom Gavin, fucky the you.

9/6/2019 07:39:31 pm

I didn't say "actually".

SNIGGLER S. SNIGGLETON

9/6/2019 08:14:36 pm

I know. I didn't want to plagiarize.

9/7/2019 05:46:58 pm

Actually, plagiarism IS a crime if it infringes on an author's intellectual property rights. So, to use your own words, "fucky the you."

9/7/2019 11:26:42 pm

No, it's not a crime, it's a civil matter. Fucky the you.

9/9/2019 09:51:41 am

Yes, it is a crime. Fucky the you. And no,that wasn't plagiarism.

Wiki Forever

9/9/2019 10:20:04 am

"Plagiarism is not in itself a crime,"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

9/9/2019 12:50:58 pm

Again, it iS if you infringe on somebody's property rights. That's the whole point of copyright laws.

Wiki is not a good source for reliable info, because any dipshit can post whatever he wants.

Kent's law degree

9/9/2019 02:11:31 pm

Walking is a capitol crime if you shoot someone while doing it.

9/9/2019 02:41:17 pm

FROGHEMOTH
9/9/2019 12:50:58 pm
Again, it iS if you infringe on somebody's property rights. That's the whole point of copyright laws.

Wiki is not a good source for reliable info, because any dipshit can post whatever he wants.

Like you here?

KENT'S LAW DEGREE
9/9/2019 02:11:31 pm
Walking is a capitol crime if you shoot someone while doing it.

Even if you wrote it correctly it wouldn't be true and there is no such thing as a "capitol crime". And if I shoot myself while walking and kill myself, that's not a crime. Suicide is not a crime. Attempted suicide is a crime. There's a hidden message here.

William Harris

9/6/2019 08:01:29 pm

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The plagiarism police

9/6/2019 08:20:18 pm

I’m happy to report that your comment does not constitute plagiarism.

Kent

9/6/2019 08:20:48 pm

Maybe the scammers were the same zealots who took Anthony Warren's Yahoo account away from him.

9/6/2019 11:20:01 pm

"i receive the sum of 100 thousand USD in to my bank account instantly after my initiation"

Oh my God,,,,,, what did they do to you ?

Spicy Grandma

9/7/2019 02:47:10 pm

It's like Skull & Bones meets Chinatown. The anal is like the cheese and crackers at a wine tasting, cleanses the palate. Then there's the Suit of Centipedes...

Mike

9/9/2019 02:01:13 am

Jason,
Would you please say you "graduated from high school" and not you "graduated high school"? You didn't do anything to high school.

Hot Underage Girl

9/9/2019 12:56:02 pm

Are you a compulsive closet matriculator?

Seed Of Bismuth

9/19/2019 04:55:25 pm

You found evidence that your rose-tinted view of things was wrong, and your first thought is to burn said evidence. Wow, never thought I'd call you a hypocrite.

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