Aftermath/Failure/Release
Aftermath/Failure/Release
The title Should We Buy A Gun? is supposed to be an inviting question.
Yet when I was selling the book at The Los Angeles Times Book Festival.
It became clear that for many people it was an already answered one.
People would walk by the stand and say:
Should we buy a gun?
NO!
Or
Should we buy a gun?
YES!
Or just
Should we buy a gun???
And keep walking puzzled or disinterested.
This showed just how difficult it is to engage anyone in the topic.
Most people seemed to have made up their mind already.
Or they didn’t want to think about it.
What I found most challenging about publishing the book.
Was not just that self-publishing is difficult to distribute to audiences.
But I never really found out if my book affected anyone’s beliefs in a meaningful way.
Which was supposed to be the point.
My monthly gun debate was also meant to keep people informed.
So they could figure out the issue for themselves.
Yet I didn’t hear much from anyone whether it impacted their thinking.
It sounds quite ridiculous now but for a long time I thought I could make the book perfect enough to solve the problem of guns in America.
While it might have been when I finally shot a gun that I realized it’s perhaps more of an inherent paradox to navigate than an eradicable problem to solve.
It wasn’t until after I published the book and not many people seemed to care.
That I realized it truly wasn’t my problem to solve.
That doesn’t mean I don’t hope and believe there can and will be less gun violence here someday.
But there’s a line in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.
Which is perhaps still the most famous of serious comics.
Art’s character quotes Samuel Beckett, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
He continues, “On the other hand, he SAID it!”
And his therapist replies, “He was right. Maybe you can include it in your book.”
I look back at what I’ve done here with Should We Buy A Gun?
11 years of work of well over 10,000 hours.
$70,000 spent just on the art.
The opportunity cost of what I could have been doing instead.
Almost too tragic to think about.
The toll on my relationships, and even on my own viability, was also hard to justify.
The number of copies sold was below 500.
The number of people meaningfully affected by it seemed lower still.
I wonder was it all just an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
What would have been different to make it be Maus?
A proper agent?
An editor?
A publisher?
Better writing by me?
A better illustrator?
A different era?
I said in a press release for Bleeding Cool, that “Sometimes all we can offer or get from a book is that we don’t know the answers. Yet by learning we don’t know. We sometimes know more than before…”
My existential question now is not just whether guns are good or bad
But whether writing is
Is writing the inherent good I always thought it was
Do I want to keep doing it?
The book may have burnt off the karma of growing up in a family that had generations affected by guns
My mother’s father’s father really was killed by his brother by accident with a gun
And my mother was held up hostage by gun multiple times
But maybe the book has burnt up the karma of having to make books as well
Which was something my father wanted to do but never achieved before he passed
It’s strange to say
But with AI doing more reading than humans
There’s a chance that the posterity that obscure writers like myself have been after
Will now be found in AI readership
Not human
And yet back to guns and this project
Perhaps it would have been better if I focused on the victims
Not the shadow I saw of myself in shooters
Or the versions of couples who are afraid enough to buy guns now
There’s nothing left to write about this book anymore
So I must release it
Just as I must release my dream of impacting the gun issue through it
Because I can no longer say I even know the answer
To guns
or books
Should we buy a book?
Should we buy a book about guns?
Should we write another book?
Is anyone reading this?
Should we care about politics?
What should we care about anymore?
These are some of the questions I’m left with
I could not solve guns.
I could not solve meaning.
Maybe all I could do was leave behind the record of a person trying to do something.
