the book of problems + re-introducing this stack

sections 1-7

I started this Substack a few years ago, casually, posting irregularly but have in the past year or so tried to be slightly more regular and regimented in the output.

Before entering professional New York journalism and publishing, I did a zine. Many zines actually. I put them out when I felt like it, one or two a year—only when I felt the call.

What I liked about making a zine was having total creative control from start to finish, doing everything yourself—from the writing, to the self-editing, to the layout, spending long nights in the 24-hour copy shop building the copy art before breathlessly printing, collating, and stapling the finished product. Then I would mail stacks of them to the stores and distributors, media-mail rate—circulating them in a small community of other people who made and read zines. It felt like an ecosystem.

I find Substack to be a pretty close approximation to things I liked about doing a zine—that kind of go-for-it weirdo spirit—minus the insane effort of physically collating thousands of pieces of printed material like a medieval monk, which I got very tired of.

how i spent my misspent youth. live to the hilt!

There’s also a lot to be said for professional publishing and the separation of labor and editorial collaboration. These things have been a big part of my life too—I’m grateful for all my editors over the years and those who have provided me editorial feedback, and for the most part feel they have helped me get a grip and made the work better.

However, I do think you need to both work within the system and have a little bit of DIY mentality, because otherwise the hurry-up-to-wait of professional publishing and the social games will drive you crazy.

Request for Feedback

I want to grow this Substack. I realize we’re starting to enter a period of Substack fatigue and secular stagnation after a meteoric growth phase, but I want to grow it anyway. I think it’s good. I think it’s good for me.

So far, everything here has been free—my focus has been on growth rather than getting paid subscribers. My focus will continue to be on growth. If you’ve found the Substack valuable and want to help me grow it, please share it and also…

If you don’t have enough feedback surveys in your life, I’ve put together a Reader Feedback Survey! If you feel so compelled, I’m interested in helpful feedback. It is very important to express myself fully and unreservedly, but I would also like to give my readers what they want.

Lastly, I want to say: building community is important. At different times, I’ve said or felt it isn’t so important, the solitary individual is everything, but the truth is it is, it really is. I believe in small groups. I have seen in my life the power of small groups of people, the mysterious alchemy that comes when people who resonate meet and then do things together. Every good band I’ve ever seen embodies this alchemy, same with any good scene, same with any successful entrepreneurial endeavor. So that said: if you have an inkling we might connect or have come to the same place in life, get in touch. Let’s do cool shit. If you want a pair of second eyes on your manuscript, to take a walk, chat on phone, start a cake-bottom empire, get in touch and let’s see if we resonate.

Message me here or aaronlakesmith@gmail.com.

Preface to The Book of Problems:

A week or so ago, I stumbled upon a 66,000 word document—a book of sketches and fragments and short fictions—that I had completely forgotten putting together sometime in the late 2000s (2011 maybe?).

Aphorisms, short fictions, weird encounters, snippets and sketches. Basically all the orphans and strays that weren’t quite fiction and weren’t quite essay and didn’t seem to belong anywhere that I didn’t know what to do with—my best hope for them is that I could one-by-one cannibalize them as nice opening paragraphs for short stories and novels—but when I sat down to develop these little things into short stories and novels, I got bored with building all the artifice.

Reading through them again, I found them good on a prose level, better than I expected, and the ones I had completely forgotten about writing were the best ones—some seemed dated today, yes, but less dated than I was expecting given all the changes that have come.

I’ll be publishing a section of it a week. I have so far been resistant to paywalling things, but apparently Substack’s algorithm is shifted to favor paywalled content, so I will paywall future sections of this.

THE BOOK OF PROBLEMS

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ONE

Actors are bodies without minds, figures animated to life, made to dance and sing and feel, to be inhabited by spirits like in Pentecostal churches—they are bodies put to someone else’s purposes.

Writers are like minds without bodies, sitting mute and upright at desks for days, moving only to smoke or pace rooms or eat. Motion picture directors are Gods—writers who bring their visions to life, put them into action. Television show producers are minor deities. Editors are ghosts.

LEAVING WORK

I felt terrible when I left work. Attached to the screen by headphones like an IV, we went under and reanimated at 5:30, somewhat confused and stiff. After eight hours in the windowless cube I felt the muscles and tendons had ossified, atrophy had set in from the pumped in hiss of circulated air, which preserved us like in some kind of cryogenic jelly.

I left the black skyscraper and rounded the corner and strode confidently through the revolving door into a nice hotel, gliding over the carpets and lit up by the glow of chandeliers.

I walked past the front desk and nodded like a guest and headed to the fancy, private hotel bathroom like I had so many times before, the blush of aromas, the freshly picked daisies in a bowl on the marble countertop by the sinks. The mirror had a flat screen embedded in it which played gender-appropriate sports coverage—mystified, I circled my fingers around it trying to intuit the nature of its sorcery. Sensing no bevel, no edge, no protrusion—no, it wasn’t a television mounted, it was inside the cut glass. I left the bathroom and went back into the hotel’s cave-like lobby. A couple of Spanish tourists sat using the hotel computers and I went towards the coffee machine. The hotel had replaced the urn, that unbelievably classy stainless steel urn that I had grown to love with that pure love of a guest, of a tourist—the love of one that can just enjoy and doesn’t have to possess—with the new little aluminum packet-system for espresso.

BARS ALONE

I walk down to my neighborhood bar to look for some friends. That’s the story I tell myself.

The streets are eerie, ghostly plastic bags jump out at me with the wind, looking like rats. It’s two AM on a Sunday night, so it’s looking pretty sparse.

My friends aren’t at the bar. Why would they be at this bar? I don’t know anybody who hangs out at this bar. I just wanted to get out of the house and get the feeling of night life and not being shut in the velvet coffin of the night.

Maybe have a conversation with a stranger. That would be nice. Maybe.

I pace around the bar a little bit checking it out, and realize how conspicuous I look, how extremely sketchy. Order a beer or leave.

I’ve calcified a little since last year—I used to think nothing of taking the train into Manhattan late at night, just to pace around and poke my head into late night bars and restaurants. Now, it’s a stretch to even go down the street. Getting too comfortable—next thing I know, I won’t leave the house, I will only commune with the dead through whatever creative efforts they’ve left behind for us to consume. In the wind, I walk back home. I walk home and hole back up in my room.

ROUTINE

Every morning is the same. Wake up. Look out the window at the overcast sky. Check the telephone. Respond to messages and e-mails. Turn on the portable heater and start the coffee. Once the coffee is done and drank and has begun to do its work on the bowels sit on the toilet. Wipe. Look down to see what the consistency of things are—try to read the message in their shape and color. Flush. Shower. Repeat.

NOTES FROM THE CRISIS

I woke up at dawn and I saw: a tree rustling violently in the wind, signaling that something has changed. A headline that Lehman Brothers has crashed and there are great fears of a worldwide stock sell-off. A subtle reminder in the breeze that Manhattan and Brooklyn were built on islands. A leaky faucet in front of a little apartment tenement. The small library across the street from my house looking inviting with its gas lamps lit. A city that could have been frequented by pirates. A scaly, mean-looking old lady at the bus stop. The bagel shop open, dimly lit like a tavern or a brothel. A dream behind my eyelids of my brother getting trapped in a car. I woke up and knew that I wasn’t going to get any work done today.

My days are passing like crows, dark and rich, filled with a secret. All I retain from the dream I had last night was that I had found a place where things were still possible. There were long docks that I walked down and cold, blue mountains across icy lakes. I woke up early from the dream and looked out my window to see a black and white and purple moon risen across the brown apartment buildings across the street, Martian-looking and haunted. I fell back asleep and then woke up when the sky was cobalt blue and the two skeletal trees outside my window were swaying, the strange Christmas-ornament-like balls hanging from them swaying in the wind, black and big as chestnuts. I woke up and wanted to have breakfast with someone, so I picked up my cell phone and texted down a list of friends and acquaintances. Nobody wrote back. A line from a letter from another friend which I had read the night before as I was falling asleep drunk came back to me: I’ve been brooding over how little my phone rings lately even though I dislike talking on it when it does. I felt the tinge of Judas-like shame realizing that comes when someone’s embarrassing confession is your secret untold condition; like how all the men cheating on their wives must have felt as John Edwards was condemned before the 2008 election. I thought about how we were the same, both stubborn and hardheaded and against the world, like sober people communing bitterly in a corner at a really fun party. I like to be alone. I count myself lucky that the shower works and the apartment is heated, and I am free to wander the city anonymously (the thing that in an incredible 60 Minutes interview that Mr. Obama said he would miss the most).

GUERRILLA MARKETING

I was sitting alone when a woman approached me at my chair in the Barnes and Noble.

“I work with a business interest. We’re actually looking for more people if you’re interested.”

“What kind of business?” I said.

“It has to do with social networking…we’ve been a business for fifty years. We pay a competitive salary.”

“OK, that sounds pretty good,” I leaned forward in the armchair. “Tell me more.”

“The information is available on the web site,” she nodded toward my laptop.

“It’s an old laptop,” I said sheepishly, “It doesn’t have the Internet.”

She smiled. “Just check the website on your phone, silly!”

I pulled my flip phone out of my bag and held it up to her and she laughed and grinned at me, wider than before.

“We can watch it together on mine.”

She sat on the arm of my armchair and cued up a video on her pad.

We watched the YouTube ads awkwardly, and I was relieved when it came up.

A heavily made-up woman stood beside some giant computer generated words that said “Social Networking.”

“The old workforce has changed,” the host said, with a toothy smile.

“Social networking is the way of the future and has toppled all the old paradigms of what it means to make money. Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and smaller disruptors are changing the way people interact and do business with each other. Now three out of four online adults use social networking, up from only 56% of Internet users in 2007. You can too! You can work on a team!”

An image of young hipsters in business suits chatting in the plush leather chairs of a windowed conference room popped up. “There’s three steps to our business plan. Time leveraging! It only takes a couple hours a week. Don’t work hard. Work smart!”

The video ended. “So what did you think?” she asked.

“I don’t know…” I looked down, “What is it exactly? What is the job or opportunity or thing?”

“I can’t tell you that—to learn more, you would have to come to the information session!” she said, still smiling.

“It seems very mysterious,” I said.

“It’s not. I just don’t want to say the wrong thing and then you get there and it’s confusing. So did you see anything there that you’d be interested in?” she batted her eyelashes.

“I guess? Maybe?” I said.

“Well, you’re in luck. There’s an information session tomorrow. And I’ll be there. I’m Patty. So you’ll know me at least.”

Patty wrote out the address in cursive on a little pink piece of paper that had the word ROMANTIC printed in purple at the bottom of it. DRESS: BUSINESS CASUAL. TIME: 7:45-9:15.

“It’s out by the airport. Exit 284.”

“So what do you do when you’re not social networking?”

“I’m a therapist.” Patty said blankly, “I help people with disabilities.”

“That is important work,” I said, “My brother is disabled and I’ve been around people with disabilities my whole life. So you do this other gig on the side?”

She didn’t respond but pulled out two brightly-colored aluminum packets out of her backpack, with Starbucks logos on them.

“I was just in a VIA contest over at Starbucks this weekend. They had me take home these VIA packets and test it against a regular cup of coffee. It’s pretty good, and you can go into any Starbucks and just ask for a VIA cup…”

“Is part of your job doing guerilla marketing for VIA?”

She continued without missing a beat.

“It’s actually stronger than regular coffee. Stronger and darker. You can’t see the bottom…”

“I’ll just stick with regular coffee I think.” I said.

I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my shoulder, “God, I’ve got this horrible knot in my back, it’s so painful…”

“Don’t rub it! That just makes it worse. It’s probably either from lifting or… maybe stress,”

“Stress I think,” I said.

“You probably need a good night’s sleep. I know I do.”

“I don’t sleep too much,” I said.

“Our bodies need sleep to regenerate themselves.”

“I didn’t sleep well last night,” I said, “I slept too long and dreamt that our lost cat was found. When I woke up, he had been found in real life.”

She seemed to relate to this. She licked her lips and looked at me like she was a certain breed of cat. I imagined her naked in a hot tub.

“I love cats!”

“So you don’t sleep?” she said.

“I sleep, but maybe not so well that often, rarely the whole night.”

My lust began to loosen up and my eye kept being drawn to the nervous stroking of her hand on my armchair.

“It’s a good thing we have the Internet at this Barnes and Noble to keep everyone from reading all these books.” I said, to break the tension.

“I read a lot,” she said, “My bag is full of books.”

“Which books?” I asked.

“Think and Grow Rich. Life in the Rich Lane. The Purpose-driven Life. Personality Plus. Ooh, that one’s embarrassing.”

“Why is it embarrassing?” I asked.

“It’s kind of a survey. At the beginning you take this personality test and it tells you what type of personality you are. There are four types.”

“Which are you?” I said.

“I’m ‘laid back’ and ‘social’. I think that describes me pretty well.”

“Maybe I should take it,” I said.

“Maybe you should,” she said. “Maybe we can take it at the information session together.”

FRIEND UP AND LEFT TOWN

I hate goodbyes too. But it can be taken that you don’t care about their friendship, you left them alone in Chicago, wah wah, and caused some weird permanent “trust” issues. Good luck with that. I guess there comes a time in everyone’s life when it’s time to cash in their chips—just disconcerting to realize you’re leaving the casino drunker, more haggard, and with less panache than what you came in with.

History is wrought with so many decisions that at the time look like tragedies and world-class freakouts that turned out to be brilliant. Without a girl, or any defensible status symbol tying you to Chicago, it seems like as good a time as ever to bow out.

You’ve picked a funny time to come home—the weather is unnervingly mild, the people are unnervingly mild. Everything is about 70 degrees and breezy, which is pretty eerie. Coming home really freaked me out, man—all the college students, all the same old people still hanging around doing the same old thing, new people that think that this is their town, their moment. But after a while you kind of settle back into North Carolina’s woodwork (it’s taken me about a month)--and you start to remember what it was you liked about the lumber yards and Biscuitvilles and empty highways.