Taking It In The Content

Okay. Okay. I told you what I used to be, and said a hundred times I'm a retired film extra and ex-biker. Don't suppose you remember me telling you. Fuck it. Ex-wife is trying to have me killed, so what, we all got issues. But I believe the world at large has an obligation to know. To know me. Else it knows only the other side of this fat shit box called Earth. It's me against all of it. That's why I'm writing my autobiography.


So far, I got the title worked out, and I know what I want the cover to look like. Picture of me pretending to drive the broke down Winnebago I'm living in. I'll have this madd-man look on my face. Old Larry up the street is pretty good with a digital camera. Up top it's gonna say TAKING IT UP THE BACK (that's the title), and down near the bottom it'll say "by Orange Fitz." That's my name. Ma was a ceramist. It's gonna be a book.

There's this outfit that'll let you pump out your opus like pro, online, without you even having to fuck with agents and editors, and fuck 'em all, is what says. I'm glad about that shit cause soon as you try working with them creeps they want you to write some freaks and geeks into the story, like the same freaks and geeks as them. For some reason, you have to make 'em all seem likable. Can't do it.

And I wish fucked up people was my only problem. Something else, just now, is burning a hole in the seat of my Bermudas.

I'm not small man, nor a weakling. You seen some of the fight scenes I was doing back when I was an extra in some of the best biker films ever made. I was in 'C.C. and Company,' motherfuckers. Breathed the same desert air as Broadway Joe. Got to sit on his bike. So who the fuck would guess that a man like me would get stymied over the fucking table of contents.


All the cherry syup and whipped cream at Baskin Robins won't fix the trouble I'm having. Only one of my six old, rotting computers has a word program that will number the pages. The other five pooters won't even do that much for you. But, damn it, my book requires a table of contents, so y'all can mark your spot while reading my work of genius. That's what a table of contents is. It's like a dog pissing on a tree so other dogs know Rover was there first. Or else it's there so you can look shit up. Don't matter. I just don't want my life flowing down the shit pipe, same as everyone else. I'm different. I'm Orange.

So here's the deal. Soon as you upload your manuscript, the book making gizmo changes your format, and the page numbers ain't no differrent, they just is on another page other than the page it used to be on. Page 2 gets fucked onto page 4, and page 9 is where page 14 is supposed to be. The numbers is all going the right direction, from 1 to what the fuck ever, but the table of contents has the wrong page numbers on it, and your poor dumb reader will have a shit time finding his/her favorite passages. It's like felching Winston Fucking Churchill or making Edith Wharton blow a circus mule. It's no fucking good.



Now maybe it don't really matter what number is on which page, since it's your life on that paper. It's memories, and they don't come to me, each day, in any kind of logical order. They just pass through the gauze, willy nilly. Wife dumped me ten years ago, she been trying to hire a hit man to take me out for the last decade, and I haven't been called to work as an extra on biker films in more than a dozen years. Then there's the little things I need to tell, things most people do or did, but they need to hear that other people shit the same way as them, aside from me being more dynamic and fun than most people. I been in films.