Song: Pepper
Artist: The Butthole Surfers
November 2014. My family and I had recently moved to live in Taichung City, Taiwan, for me to take up a teaching position at a private elementary school. I was coming off the back of completing my first novel (And The Birds Do Sing), had nearly no money, and spent what free time I had contemplating the variables of my fate.
Around the same time, I discovered the joys of YouTube. Now don’t go laughing at me; I’d been living in a forest nearly two years beforehand and wasn’t nearly as competent per the platform as pretty much the rest of the world.
Before moving to Taichung, a work colleague had answered my question of what it’d be like to live with psychologists as parents by directing me to the TV show, Six Feet Under. Produced at the turn of the century, I first jumped into it via YouTube, and upon discovering that I couldn’t continue watching it that way, I raided a good old-fashioned video store to fill that existential void.
Come its conclusion and still feeling curious, I hopped on to YouTube one evening while my wife dealt with my young son’s breastmilk needs and randomly discovered the Butthole Surfers’ Pepper. I knew the band by name but not by material, and thirty seconds into Pepper, a weird artistic wave started sloshing around inside me.
By the end of the song, I had accrued enough literary will to start my second novel, The New Mainstream. For those who’ve never written a full-length novel, I’ll put it euphemistically: this was hardly a frivolous thing. I subsequently played Pepper over and over again, and in the hours that followed, I put down the first five pages of my new literary mistress.
Writing The New Mainstream was a real trip. It took two years from beginning to end, and compared to the ego-wrecking odyssey my debut novel And The Birds Do Sing presented, it was a genuine pleasure to complete. What came to the fore while writing The New Mainstream was that I felt I’d grown beyond my myriad personal literary misgivings and could now put my writing before myself, this a conflicting state many authors never grow out of.
As with writing all my books, their narratives become more real to me than the life beyond their pages. The mystery/thriller that is The New Mainstream took me down some delightful rabbit holes, and I offer my gratitude to the unseen forces that placed Pepper in my path to catalyze things.