"These essays are poignant, funny and intellectually charged."
-- Traci Foust, Nowhere Near Normal
I COULD BE WRONG BUT... This new trade paperback book features many of the essays from 4 popular Kindle ebooks by David Boyne. Available now on Amazon
Happy Accidents
Inside My 3-Pound Universe
Resistance Is Futile!
X Marks the Spot
"Beautifully crafted, poignant, and humorous. Essays by David Boyne capture the magic in daily life, if we stop and pay attention. He reminds us that happiness, indeed, is not an accident." -- Paula Margulies, Coyote Heart
"Like Dave Barry and David Sedaris, David Boyne analyzes life's minor truths and comes up with the uncomfortable questions that may not topple governments, but do make life richer." --Ken Callaway, Screenwriter
"These stories take you on a sardonic ride as curvy as it is bodacious. Sardonic, curvy, bodacious. Yeah, that's what I said." --Julie Ann Weinstein, Flashes From the Other World
"These essays brim with profound insight. They are tales of ordinary life, extraordinarily observed. And they're funny. So funny you hardly know he's making you think 'til you catch yourself doing it." --Patty Kadel, Cartoonist (PattyKadel.com)
David Boyne has failed at everything he has tried.
He once considered becoming a better person. But when told identity theft was illegal, he abandoned the idea. When not boldly staring into Space, being distracted, or scheming for Total World Domination, he exposes himself in public at DavidBoyne.com and ICouldBeWrongBut.com
Recently, I had a conversation with another writer. This conversation took place exactly where the cliché would have literary conversations take place, over stale cheese and cheap red wine.
For several minutes I held up my end of the conversation by listening. The other writer, a dark haired woman who was an admirably talented and prolific fiction writer, told me in great detail of the many long hours she had been spending of late not on writing her new novel but on marketing her already published work. It seemed that her days and nights were being spent doing interviews, meeting with her agent and publicist, overseeing the sending of press releases, and struggling to come up with something immensely important which I had never heard of, a Branding Statement.
It was then that I made two mistakes, the same two mistakes I have been making since kindergarten. First, I spoke. Second, I said aloud the thoughts that were at that very moment romping across the daisy fields of my mind.
“Gee. You should write more and market less. I bet you’d be happier.”
The other writer went silent. She smoothed a wave of dark hair behind an ear. She took a sip of wine. She walked away.
The next morning, after showering and vigorously brushing and flossing and gargling away the taste and odor of stale cheese and cheap red wine lingering on my breath, I sat at my desk and I promptly procrastinated. That is, instead of writing an essay, I read email.
There was a letter from the dark haired writer. My first thought was, “Ah! Could it be that she considered my opinion, acted on it, and is happier? Perchance she is writing to express her gratitude?”
These thoughts wilted when I read the title of her letter. (Consummately professional writers such as the dark haired woman will title their emails, knowing that a title is one technique a pro uses to spin their message.) The title of the dark haired writer’s email was, “You said some things that weren't so nice.”
I tilted my head. I said, “Wha-huh?” I double-checked the From line, thinking I had mistakenly opened an email from a past girlfriend. But no.
Forewarned by the title, rather than read the full letter, I scanned it. The dark haired writer, being admirably prolific, had written 310 words, and, being admirably talented, she had made her meaning unmistakable. Even when scanned in a thousand-foot fly-over.
Admonishing myself never to reply to an email before having ingested at minimum 20 ounces of hot black coffee, preferably shade-grown fair-trade organically grown coffee, I went to the kitchen to prepare a pot.
Watching the coffee brew, I asked myself, “David, why are people so intolerant of other people’s opinions?”
I answered myself, “Beats me.”
Pressing the issue, I asked me, “Really, what is so threatening about an opinion? After all, isn’t it no more than the controlled release of hot (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit) air?”
I did not have a clever answer to my questions, so I covered by thoughtfully thinking, “Hmm.”
My overbearing self took the opportunity to monopolize the conversation, beginning to lecture me. “Opinions,” I thought at myself, “Are not just spoken. Opinions are also expressed in writing—in essays, rants, sermons, and lectures. And what about facial expressions? Does any word convey an opinion as eloquently as a smirk or frown?”
“You’re right,” I thought, impressed by myself.
“Of course I’m right,” I told myself, and continued, “Now think of it: What is a painting, a symphony, a political campaign, how a person walks or parents or dances, if not an expression of their opinion?”
I took my advice and thought about it. My head started hurting. I told myself, “Please. Shush. Quiet. No more bipolar dialogue. I’m having a caffeine deprivation headache.”
The coffee finally brewed, I drank it. Almost immediately I felt a surging courageous intensely alive energy coursing through my bloodstream. Yeah, baby!
This was more like it.
My thoughts ran wild. I chased after them. They quickly led me to the realization that the 310-word email the dark haired writer had sent me was no more than… her opinion.
That thought led me down a spiraling rabbit hole of more thoughts. Eventually, thinking I had struck bottom, I thought to myself, “Hold on! Is everything I write nothing but my opinion?”
Suddenly I was smacked down hard upon this bedrock thought: “My entire Life—not just my writing—really is nothing more or less than the continual expression of my opinion!”
My thoughts then veered sharply to current events in the Mideast. I struggled to catch up, thinking how people in Tunisia and Egypt were peacefully overthrowing dictators. And in Libya, people were violently overthrowing mass-murdering madmen. And it dawned upon me that all the surging courageous intensely alive energy coursing through these amazing people was for one central ambition: To express their opinion.
Without being arrested, jailed, tortured, murdered.
I recalled how just the day before while listening on my car radio to a variety of opinions about the incipient civil war in Libya, a BBC reporter told of interviewing a Libyan man who had until three days earlier been a taxi driver but who was now hurriedly learning how to use an AK-47. The Libyan man had said, “I cannot believe this! I am making fun of Qaddafi! I have never been so happy in my life!”
There, in my comfortable little house with the huge mortgage, drinking my hot black shade-grown fair-trade organically grown coffee, with a high-speed and uncensored connection to the World Wide Web, and with friends to share stale cheese and cheap red wine with while talking about whatever crossed our minds, I heard in my memory the words of the Libyan man ready to use an AK-47 rifle to try and keep from being made dead for what I am accidentally blessed to take for granted: expressing opinions.
My Irish-Catholic upbringing had taught me a prayer to express profound amazement with God’s creation. I whispered it now, “Holy fucking shit.”
No amount of coffee could make me as brave as that man.
Which made me wonder what should we do, how should we respond, when we encounter an opinion?
I could be wrong, but I think there are three perfectly good choices for responding to an opinion, any opinion. First, whenever an opinion crosses the mote and scales the wall into our sovereign dominion, that is, our Life, we can simply Dismiss it.
The second perfectly good choice is to Consider the intruding opinion. Then Dismiss it.
The third perfectly good choice is to Consider the opinion. Then Make it our Own. (Which, in China, is what they do with copyright and trademark laws, clearly considering these nothing but opinions.)
Heap scorn upon people who express opinions not your own? Please, go right ahead. After all, you’re just expressing your opinion.
But arresting, jailing, torturing, or murdering someone for expressing their opinion?
Fuck you.
Revved up with these streaming, over-caffeinated thoughts, I returned to my desk ready to dash off a reply to the dark haired prolifically marketing writer.
But.
What would be the point? Whatever reply I might make would only contain more of my opinions, the very things that had created problems for her. Still, a tiny red devil perched on my left shoulder urged me to reply by quoting Picasso: “The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.” Yet, a tiny white angel hovering on my right shoulder cooed into my ear, "Oh, please. Picasso was such a mean bastard. And in my opinion, David, you are a much nicer bastard."
But there was no getting around it. The only thing that would reunite me with my temporarily misplaced happy buzz was to express my opinion. After all, I am alive. I think, therefore, I opine.
Having Considered the dark haired writer’s 310-word opinion I now Dismissed it, by pressing the delete key.
Then I began to express my opinion. By writing this essay.
Sometime during the creative process, my brain went Wham! Bam! I had an idea. I would steal the dark haired writer’s opinion about marketing versus writing and without so much as a Thank you ma’am!—make it my own.
I uploaded my uncensored opinion to the World Wide Web, confident that while I might receive an angry email or two, no one would arrest, jail, torture or murder me.
A closing word, to my friend the taxi driver in Libya: I think of you and hope you are happy and still laughing at Qadaffi. And alive.
It’s obvious that San Diego writer David Boyne has been in some kind of accident, clonked over the head with a dose of hard reality and is now living in the streets of Astoria—or maybe a semi-nice walk-up in Queens—as the muse of Russell David Harper and Chip Kidd. To be clear: Boyne has hit the mark with Happy Accidents. In this first of a four book collection covering objective—sometimes delicate—subjects as step-parenting and America’s obsession with consumerism (see what I mean about the Russ Harper part?) Boyne takes the reader to that scary, gorgeous, hopeful/less place called What The Hell Were You Thinking? It’s where he lives. From the sincere writing and down-to-earth tone it’s clear he’s been a resident for some time and knows his way around without a map, thank you. (Actually, Google shows this area to be somewhere in the vicinity of Flushing and Sinji’s Yoga Studio in West Hollywood.)
In a similar narrative voice as Bob Powers who waved goodbye to American manners in Happy Cruelty Day and the harmonious blend of Tom Robbins in Wild Ducks Flying Backward, Boyne takes the reader through his no holds barred style of nothing is obvious—but everything is there. In the essay Hurry Up and Wait, Boyne opens by asking a set of seemingly unrelated questions : Why we suffer, why we tell stories, why we wait— then lays bare all the examples of what the reader will experience should they choose to come along for this imaginative ride (as if we have a choice after such titles like Black Teeth and Bubonic Plague.)
…
I confess I also liked watching the voluptuous dyed-blonde barista because the tight black tank top she wore was all used up in covering the wave of her breasts, with no material left to keep from public display, the wide expanse of her rounded belly and the ski-slope curve of the small of her back and the top of the swell of her ample hips—and how all the taut, tan skin in view was adorned with a colorful, dense, complex tapestry of tattoos.
This goes further than just the irony of the complex being the simple. See Also: If it walks like a duck… These essays are poignant, funny and intellectually charged. Threaded with the susceptible civic tightrope of where we are walking today, it’s clear Mr. Boyne needs to take a trip to Washington and begin a set of new documents for the likes of those who would thrive in a Lorne Michaelesque democracy—written for the smart people, by the smart people.
If you’re looking for an In Persuasion Nation complexity of authentic humor, look no further—a pretty little calendar narrative with Dave Matthews up-thumbing each carefully plotted ending?
This isn’t that.
This is real writing, really good writing, often showing Boyne at his best when he steps back just enough from the make-nice platform giving his reader room to tie themselves to their own tracks, yet all the while you get this feeling he is standing right behind you, his lyrical prose threatening a nudge, maybe even a push ..not with both hands lest a complete fall shove you into the obvious, maybe just a finger or two, just enough to make sure you’ve been moved.
