Hi youse,
little clique of mutual friendlies (lot of terms there, but I mean it, I’ll be your “mutual” if you “Substack.”) I’ll follow you. Tell me, and I’ll do it. I just want to say thank you for letting me hammer your inbox from week to week with these video read alouds of my novel, Tales Told Out of School.
If you signed up because of kind social media boosts from Frank McCormick, Jodi Shaw or others, you make up the brunt of my audience. Probably didn’t know you were going to watch Hotspvrre turn into a fiction read aloud by an old guy who’s obviously not camera-ready. You might be here because of my debut essay, “It Doesn’t Fit the Narrative” about the demolition of my career over 2016-2019, and now you see me reading some stories or something.
How are you doing, following this? I just want to look up a second and say thanks. I started reading my kid stories aloud after a string of disappointments after bites and nibbles from major outlets last spring, some of them bonafide big-shot media people, none of which was aired. And nobody wanted the “Narrative.” So I just said, All right, I’ll do it. When I began writing kid sketches in 2014 as antidote to repetitive stress over threats of firing by Iron Equity™ knobs in my school district, I just wanted to record various paycheck jobs I’ve had in my life. Having read Down and Out in Paris and London, I wrote my first sketch about a happy-go-lucky sociopath waiter in a restaurant. His lack of remorse for stealing other waitresses’ tables, and his greasy way with females amazed the storyteller in me. I’ve worked a lot of jobs prior to teaching, from bicycle courie-ing in Ireland to detox and psych staff, rock songwriter, reporter and editor, truck driver, I swept up teeth in an oral surgery hospital, I did warehouse and telemarketing, gave financial advice at American Express, I assembled kids’ bikes for a week and sold oriental rugs for one day, and I parked a lot of cars. How many times in interviews did I answer “Why do you want this job?” with “I have a passion for” peeling garlic, for balancing the Ph in a motel swimming pool, or a passion for drunk car owners behind Minneapolis’s Moby Dicks bar, “Home of the Whale Of A Drink”?
But after writing about the sociopathic waiter, I turned to my then-current job, teaching kids, and rattled off a cache of sketches about two teachers trying to meet their needs. I sandwiched them among 514 blog entries about many topics, including Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One character, Henry Hotspur Percy, the antihero of my favorite play. I liked that this ill-tempered, hothead-knight heeded no warnings about rebelling against his own oblivious king without sufficient back-up, without his father’s defense, and he got killed in battle, skewered through the facemask, drawn, quartered, and paraded around London, in 1403. Who doesn’t love that? He’s my spirit jerk when people try to shut me up. Read his speech reacting to someone boring him. The Brits like him! A football club and many other brands are named after him. I have thought of many monikers, but Hotspvrre tops them.
When Black Lives Matter went rabid and distributed my blog at a school board meeting, that’s when I knew my pieces were good. Shitty pieces too would have garnered me tar and feathers, but these defied some reporters’ hot takes, and I resolved to quietly hoard the bits, then slowly retool and weave their flax into gold.
I don’t spend my life taunting dragons and abusing authority. I have simple wishes, to entertain and inform. I grew up liberal with liberal parents, and I still consider myself left and unmoved, but that the Party pontoon has drifted off its anchor in the stream. I support women’s access to abortion, universal health care, I see all kids’ skin color, I held my brothers’ gay marriage in my livingroom the midnight it became legal, I protect kids in a hospital enduring suicidal ideation, one of whose symptoms is to identify as transgender, and I believe in a hippie facsimile of public schools that welcome all with high expectations of behavior and academics, and where licensed adults call the shots, accountable to parents. Like before.
I’m just writing this little credo to clear the air, maybe acquaint people better with my takes on thing. My wife said I should (and I have fought her): but tell people I’m NOT a racist, NOT a TERF, NOT a Trumper, NOT Pro-Life, NOT homophobic, NOT misogynistic or xenophobic. I haaate virtue signalers, but once I have said all these baloney, at least I might refer to it later that on such and such, September 21, 2022, I did say it, and I marked myself safe from morons.
Teddy McHotspvrre
Back in my rock band days, my smiling, radiant days.