It’s a good word. By “good,” I mean a word that does the work it’s made for. If you believe in progress, you should conclude that f**k — the expletive — is the product of arduous field-testing and development. Centuries of testing. No other English word comes close to expressing abject outrage and frustration. I use it whenever my work around the house goes awry. I start with “Oh my f**king God!” then end with “Oh just f**k me!” This may go on for a while. It’s quite therapeutic.


If we didn’t have f**k, we’d have to invent it. Therein lies the irony of every objection to the word. Saying “snap!” or “fudgedragon!” just isn’t going to cut it. Any honest person will admit as much. For all their good intentions, those who prefer a substitute are playing a fool’s game: in saying “fudge,” the speaker derives satisfaction not from voicing the innocuous replacement but, rather, from thinking of the real word, f**k, and then reveling in the fact that he/she hasn’t said it aloud. Fudge is to f**k what methadone is to heroin. You’re still using an expletive; it’s just not a very good one.


All of this came to mind recently when Jill and I watched the first few episodes of the HBO series, “Boardwalk Empire.” The show features Steve Buschemi as an Atlantic City crime boss in the 1920s. It has a good cast, lavish sets, and producer Martin Scorcese. But, by the third episode, I tired of the show for two reasons: I didn’t really care about the characters (I need somebody to root for) and everybody was saying f**k a lot. I mean a lot. This struck me as wholly unrealistic.

Granted, gangster types nowadays say f**k in every sentence. But do you really think that 1920s-era gangsters did this? No doubt they enjoyed saying f**k, but society and its constraints were such that one f**k went a long way. When 1920s-era gangsters said f**k, they probably said it only when it really meant something. On “Boardwalk Empire,” they say it with every breath: “I don’t fucking know, but I think he’s fucking making a mistake. Right? Let’s fucking get out of here.”



I remember in the late 1980s and early 1990s when stand-up comedians started saying f**k a lot in their monologues. A typical opening would go something like this: “I was fucking sleeping, okay? And then I woke up and fucking thought, ‘What the fuck?’ I found myself in a fucking Dumpster, fucking reeking of puke and pee….” It got old fast because f**k became a kind of bad-ass place holder instead of a powerful expletive. And its overuse suggested that this new generation of comics lacked the confidence to sail solo. They needed to say f**k a lot to keep their audience off guard.


That’s the problem with “Boardwalk Empire”: the actors seem unsure of their dialogue and so, to make it stick, they keep saying f**k, as if this anachronistic over-usage would jar us into thinking we’re in the company of some really bad-ass 1920s-era gangsters. But, actually, f**k’s overuse only makes me feel that I’m in the company of writers who have little imagination.


I didn’t start saying f**k until I was eighteen. That’s how I was brought up. But, man, when I finally started using the word, I felt its power and used it accordingly. Which is to say: I used it when it really meant something. In short, I won’t overuse because I respect the word for the good work it does. There’s still a certain novelty to hearing a child say f**k, but it seems it won’t be novel for long because f**k is becoming as common among youngsters as crap was in my day. So, yes, I worry about the demise of this formidable word, even as I acknowledge that it is probably too late to wonder, Are we wearing out f**k?

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I’m on the road this week, promoting From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story in North Carolina, my home state. But the camper van is not ready. It’s so not ready that pots and pans are flying around in the back, cabinet doors are swinging open, latches are rattling loose, light shades are careening in their sconces, and tools are skating across the floor like hockey pucks. When I make a quick stop, the futon heaves off its bench seat and lands behind me with such force I feel a sudden breeze. The solar panels on my roof aren’t working and so I’m calling the solar supply people in New Mexico every other day. My inverter (converts power from the batteries) wasn’t working until this morning, when I finally figured it out. But its remote control panel still doesn’t work. And the last time I tried to plug into external power at an RV park, I got a shower of sparks from the outlet.

That’s when I realized that I had forgotten to connect the neutral lines to my AC panel. And right there is my problem — the electrical system. I didn’t have time to get my van ready for this trip because I spent all of my time, these last few weeks, trying to put together my electrical panel. It’s one of the most complicated how-to things I’ve ever done. RV electronics are identical to boat electronics. And boat electronics are significantly different than house electronics. To make sure I didn’t blow up the van, I consulted with Peter, a marine electrician in Annapolis.



A tall Irish man with a sunburnt face, Peter looked at my work with skepticism. He kept pulling at loose wires and asking, “What’s this?” He sold me a lot of stuff I didn’t know I needed. Like fuse boxes to keep my van from blowing up. “You need a fuse here,” he’d say, “and here.” So many fuses! Then there was the differences between ground wires and neutral wires. They seem to do the same thing but they don’t. Never mind that both get anchored the same way. I wanted to have this job done two weeks ago and really thought I was close when I went to Peter’s shop for his inspection. But then he pointed out all the things I had done wrong. So I worked feverishly outside of Peter’s shop, thinking I’d have it done by the end of the day.

But then, at the day’s end, I was far, far from finished. And I had so many questions! I asked Peter if he’d be around the next day because I really wanted to be done the next day. Peter grimaced, then looked at me kind of sadly and said, “You’ve got to take this more seriously, Ron. What you’ve done looks terrible — really a mess. If you don’t do it right, it’ll fuck up for sure.” I nodded in agreement, feeling a bit like I had whenever my father used to tell me, Ron, you do it once and you do it right, then you won’t have to do it over again.

So Peter sold me the kinds of cables the pros use. And more fuses. And then I went home and tore out everything I had done and started over. It took for-frigging-ever. But, man, it’s looking nice now. And when I returned to Peter, he was much happier and no longer felt compelled to send me a disclaimer that would have said, “I have informed you of …. and you are hereby warned about …. I am not liable for ….. ”

But there are, of course, glitches in any new system. With the exception of the spark shower I created because of those missing neutral lines, I believe I’ve got the wiring down. It’s the equipment I’m not sure of. Control boxes and such. And now that I’m on the road, I am getting a real-world view of the many little things I have to do to make the van hold together. Latches for cabinet doors would help, for example.

As for the tour itself, it was a little overwhelming at first — because the van seemed to be falling apart and the weather was frigid (snow in Asheville) — but now I’m getting more accustomed to the routine. Last night in Charlotte, where I know no one, I thought I’d be alone at my table at the back of the book store but then eight folks from Historic Charlotte showed up. Thank God. I’m not doing a reading, exactly, I’m doing a presentation/talk: I’ve got a slide show! If I get at least 5 people to the reading and then sell 5 books, I consider it a success. The added bonus is if the book store asks me to sign 10 copies, which means the store is committed to selling them.



I’ve done a couple of TV morning talk shows. TV at that level is anything but glamorous. Nobody’s going to give you make-up, for instance, though the anchors are wearing plenty. The anchors have notes about your book given to them by the producer, which they glance over in the sixty seconds before the cameras go on. You get 3-6 minutes for the interview and good luck keeping your focus. Try not to think of all the viewers who have taken this opportunity to go to the bathroom. Then it’s over, the anchor nods a polite see-ya!, the tech pulls off your mic, and the next thing you know, you’re in the parking lot, squinting at the sky and wondering what’s for lunch.


I’m in Greensboro tonight, then Chapel Hill on Saturday. The big book tour — in the company of Cleo, our bassett hound — doesn’t start until May. That’s plenty of time to get the van ready, isn’t it?

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In writing the story of how Jill and I bought a wrecked frat house and tried to bring it back to its original Victorian splendor and keep our then-early love alive at the same, I had a hell of a hard time. That book, From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story, is out today from Academy Chicago Publishers.


Why was it so hard to write this book? Because life is messy, messy, messy. In any snippet taken from my life or yours, there is never only one story. There are many strands of many stories running through everything we do — the story of your working life, the story of your dreaming life, the story of your love life, the story of your domestic life, and so on. The story of my work on the condemened property that had, for ten years, been Baltimore’s most notorious fraternity was just one of many strands I had to keep straight. As it happened, Jill and I had been dating for only a few months when I bought the house, hoping that Jill would move in with me and that we’d fix up the house in no time and then live happily ever after. Here’s the video trailer that gives you an overview of that situation: From Animal House to Our house video trailer


I am much more comfortable writing fiction than nonfiction. In fiction, if I don’t like the way things are going, I simply change it and try out another possibility. That’s what makes writing fiction fun: anything can happen. In nonfiction, however, only one thing can happen: the story as it unfolded in your life. Nonfiction is inconvenient in ways fiction will never be. You can’t change time or place or chronology. You can’t combine two or three people into one character in order to make the telling more convenient. If you think you can, then you should be writing fiction.

I am surprised and a little disturbed when I hear memoir writers say that they have altered some chronology and combined some people in their nonfiction in order to make the story more manageable. They defend these choices by insisting that they have been “true” to the story and have left untouched all the important details. This rationalization changes the essence of the “non” in “nonfiction,” doesn’t it? Granted, it’s understood that writers of nonfiction reconstruct dialogue to the best of their recollection and describe events as well as they can remember. The memoir is, at bottom, a form of testimony, as if to say, “This is what I heard, saw, and felt as best as I can recount it.” But this is not a license to make things up. Life is messy enough without the writer fudging the details and hiding the fact that, say, “Uncle Tim” is actually a conmbination of Uncle Timothy, Uncle Simon, and Aunt Clara.

Had I written FROM ANIMAL HOUSE TO OUR HOUSE as fiction, I would have

1) made the roof cave in (only three ceilings were falling in),
2) made the contractors more bizarre than they were (the beer-drinking roofers, one of whom nearly died, were the worst we had to deal with)
3) made my family’s first, too-early Christmas visit even more disastrous than it was (I would have made someone fall through the floor, for instance, and added even more extended family to make it more chaotic),
4) created at least one thoroughly eccentric neighbor, to add some local color
5) brought back some frat boys (only one returned and I nearly attacked him when he did),
6) and made the fights between Jill and me even more volatile (we had plenty of arguments but we never separated).

As it happened, just as Jill and I began working on that old, wrecked frat house, my life at work was imploding. In the original draft of From Animal House to Our House, I tried to connect my travails at work with my travails at home. But, really, there was little or no connection to be made. And, honestly, the story of my working life wasn’t that interesting, even though it was complicated and often ugly. The result was that the story I had to tell — about Jill and me in a wrecked frat house — got muddled. That’s why, in the first round of submissions, no publisher would take the book. They didn’t want to deal with that mess.

So I had a choice: change the story or leave some of it out. Since I was writing non-fiction, I chose to do the latter and simply left out the story of my working life. All writers understand the need to be selective: you can’t tell everything. Now, when you read From Animal House to Our House (as I hope you will), you’ll find a fast read that focuses on a newly romanced couple taking on an impossible task: why they survive it? If so, how?

I left out other things too, like the details of my second marriage, some of which were so disturbing they would have distracted the reader. That’s the challenge of writing non-fiction: you have to keep the reader focused. Just because it happened in your life doesn’t mean you are obliged to tell about it. When in doubt, leave it out.


Although I think I’m getting more comfortable writing nonfiction, it continues to bedevil me because nothing is messier than real life. Sorting through that mess to make sense of one or two things will always be a daunting task, it seems. But then I remind myself, Who would want a life that’s so simple, there’s nothing to sort through?

For more before/after pics of the house, click here.

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The last time I had a problem with my web host, my blog had disappeared. Completely disappeared. That’s 160+ entires that cover my weekly blogging for the last four years. Was I freaking out? Yes, I was freaking out. When I called tech support, I found myself talking to somebody in Eastern Europe. Sarajevo, I imagined. Eastern European tech support is more or less competent. I mean, they get the job done most of the time if the problem isn’t a big one. But this was a big problem and I didn’t have much confidence in this too long-distance help, especially when the tech I was talking to asked me three times for the name of my domain: he couldn’t quite spell it. As I was in no mood to fool around, I said: “I’ll give you one more chance to get it right.” Then he got it.


By law, you are allowed to speak to American tech help on American soil if you request to do so. Just say, “I want to speak to somebody in America,” and they will have to transfer you. No kidding.


But let me say this: I could never learn Croatian or Polish or Russian as well as Eastern European tech support have learned English. No way. Still, when I’m freaking out about my vanished website, I’m not happy about having to talk to somebody who isn’t a native speaker of English. I fear that something really important is NOT going to get through the translation. By the way, this was the third time that my website had disappeared. I was convinced that my web host had fallen on hard times and had resorted to cheap off-shore labor. Such is the diminished quality of life we Americans must suffer etc. etc.


I raised hell with my Eastern European tech help, blaming my web host for incompetence and reminding them that I have seven websites on the web host’s servers. Seven. And, no, I would not buy the file back-up service they tried to sell me because my files are missing. “Don’t you DARE,” I said. “Just find my files!”


They did find my files and, as a courtesy, restored them for free. And I got my blog back. I felt vindicated. I felt like one tough cookie. We Americans know how to get what we want, don’t we? I sent a long email to tech support (that is, the Americans who run the company), asking my web host to take my concerns seriously. I said I didn’t want to talk to Eastern European tech team any more.


Just last night, my blog disappeared again. But this time, the disappearance gave me pause because I had been working on my site — I had been the last one to touch the thing and I saw that the last file I transferred was there but everything else was gone. Then it dawned on me that, oh my god, the file transfer program I had been using was the culprit. Yes, my Filezilla FTP program has a way of erasing my entire site. Maybe yours too. I’m not sure what goes wrong but I think the program stalls and then, if you click some more to get it to respond, it misunderstands the commands and then a request comes up: “Delete current file?” Which the program may read as “Delete current files?” And then because I always move too fast and never read the fine print, I click YES. And then, boom!, everything is gone, even though the program (because it’s slow and buggy) doesn’t show that everything is gone.



So it’s not my web host, it’s me. I’m the problem. I’ve been the problem all along because the problem started just after I started using this file transfer program. So I’ve been sending angry emails to my web host, perhaps causing some tech manager grief, and demanding satisfaction from the Eastern European tech team and all along they weren’t to blame! I feel badly about this. Incidents like this make me realize that sometimes the incompetence we fear is, at bottom, our own.


When I called tech support this time, an American answered. I guess my web host had indeed listened to my emails after all! This made me feel worse because, really, i was expecting the Eastern European tech team again and I was planning on being very nice to them. I was very nice to Phillip, my American tech support. I explained that my blog had “disappeared” and that this wasn’t the first time it had happened. Notice that I didn’t blame them this time . . . but I didn’t blame myself either. You must pay — $75 — to have your mistakenly erased files restored. In fact, Phillip told me this.


I said, “Phillip, can you find my files?”
He said, “You have to pay for that.”
I said, “Just humor me and see if you can find them.”
It took a while but he found them.
Then he said, “You can sign up for the $12.95 per year back-up plan and restore the files yourself.”
I said, “Let’s do it.”


He signed me up. I restored my files. And that’s why you’re reading this blog right now from a much humbler man — with apologies to my web host and its ever-patient Eastern European tech team.

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I received another speeding ticket yesterday — my third this month. These are tickets issued by the city’s new robo speed-trap cameras, strategically placed along roads you’d never think would have speed traps. The offending speeds are 38 MPH in a 20 MPH zone or 41 in a 30 MPH zone. Miniscule speeds on roads you’d swear were 35 MPH zones at least.

If I have pulled in 3 tickets in a month — and I’m no drag-racer — you can bet that just about every driver in the city is getting a ticket once a month, if not every week. You’d think everybody would be up in arms but the city is smart about it: the speeding violations cost a flat $40 and don’t go on your record (i.e., you don’t get “points”). As a result, most speeders won’t protest the violation. They’ll pay the fine and shrug it off as a nusiance.


I’m happy the city’s getting rich suddenly, though I’m not convinced any of the money will be put to good use because it seems city governments are doomed by their own bureaucracy and scattered incompetence. Certainly, this doesn’t help relations between citizens and their government. Buying a bunch of robo-radar traps is like buying into slot machines. It’s a dirty business that generates little good will. There are plenty of reported abuses, like the case of the guy who was fined at random because the photo in the ticket was too dark to read so, apparently, somebody took a wild guess about the identity of the speeder. It took the alleged speeder 7 months to get the violation cleared (if you don’t pay your fine, you can’t renew your license). After that ordeal, he said he would register his car in another state.

Incerasingly, our world is monitored by cameras but it’s not because of the new fear of terrorism. The proliferation of automated cameras is the product, mostly, of budget cut-backs. The age-old fear of the robot has come to pass in the most mundane way: state and local governments simply don’t have the money to hire and train people to do the jobs that have been given over to robotic cameras. For example, there are some toll roads you can’t drive without a prepaid toll-pass that automatically feeds your fee to the camera toll-reader. The end result of this automation is that we get fees, fines, and tickets at every turn but there’s no way to get a refund if there’s a mistake. It’s just too much of a hassle. And good luck trying to get anybody on the phone.

Sad to say, this is about the diminishing quality of life in America. As our nation becomes a poorer one, our governments are getting less generous and less tolerant. And, because we don’t have the resources to come up with better solutions, we are resorting to short-cuts and easy answers that sloppily address the questions of the day. How can your township make more money? Up its surveillance of daily traffic! This might make more money for local government but now, when you or I drive a quiet city street, we may do so ill at ease and a little irritated, wary of being watched and worried that tomorrow or the next day we’ll get an unwelcome notice in the mail.

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