Karl Klockars

I’ve been writing for a long time now.  I might have mentioned this somewhere else, but when I was about 11 years old, I wrote my first book of short stories.  Okay, so they were all about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and none of them exactly had what we’ll call “accurate punctuation” or “coherent plots” but damnation if it wasn’t a good 30 pages of single-spaced text printed out on a dot-matrix printer back in 1990.  (I did the artwork in PrintShop myself as well.)

"Sorry, Karl. They were really terrible stories. All about anchovy pizza and nunchucks. Definitely not radical, nor cowabunga."

This is just to say, that list of dates going back to ’06 over there on the right side of this page isn’t the extent of my entire writing career.  It goes back a ways, even to the early days of something called ModBlog (now apparently dead and forgotten, unperson-ed), pre-Google Blogger/blogspot accounts, and various radio-related blithering as mentioned on the above “ABOUT” section of this site.  That goes back to around ’05 so we’re going on a solid section of time spent exercising these fingers on this here keyboard.

And yet here I discover this morning, Monday the 14th of 2009, as we close out the year, that I’ve been going about this all wrong.  Those hours spent writing, researching, considering the human element, developing insights (sad as they may be) and building this ‘ere website from the ground up…all of this was for naught.  A complete waste.  A big nothing.  Zero.  Nada.

Why?

All I had to do was accept massive amounts of money to “service” a sitting governor, and a newspaper would happily give me space in their publication to tell people how to live their lives.  It was that simple all along.  Why didn’t I think of it?  From USAToday:

Ashley Dupre, the former Manhattan call girl who brought down New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, is now an advice columnist for The New York Post.

What kind of advice? “No-nonsense advice,” The Post says. About sex, love, relationships — Christmas gifts.

“Sure, she’s made some mistakes,” The Post declares right  up front about its new Sunday columnist, but says she’s now sharing what she’s learned.

Dupre’s column in the newspaper that was founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 features a photo of the one-time escort in casual office mode, wearing glasses, a light jacket and a generously unbuttoned blue blouse.

Okay, so I need to take some notes on my wardrobe as well (he writes as he sits at work in his $6 sportcoat purchased at Ragstock, a tie that cost a quarter from a St. Vincent de Paul outpost, and an old short-sleeved button up shirt).  Other than that…kudos to you, Ms. Dupre.

"I've been hired to do what? Suckers!"

I know people that are slaving away in their early 40′s still trying to live the dream of being a writer.  I know people that have their Masters in Journalism and are…interns.  And I know plenty of people who have thrown thousands of dollars at schools to teach them how to go out and write – and all any of us had to do was get paid thousands of dollars to perform sexual acts on an individual we barely knew.  Where’s the downside?

Sure, we might be educated and literate and well-spoken and know things like “history” and “politics” and “geography” and “how to earn money using things other than our sexual organs” and so on.  But…none of us who have been struggling throughout the past 16 months or so have even considered thinking of bedding a governor, have we?  No!  And we continue to believe we’re thinking outside the box!  (Oh, there’s a joke there, but I’ll let you write it.)

I have nothing against Ms. “Dupre.”  Or Youmans, or DiPietro, or whatever name she’s going by this week.  Or her chosen profession prior to becoming a “writer.”  What people choose as compensation between two consenting individuals as trade for inserting someone’s sexual organs inside someone else’s sexual organs (or, you know, whatever) is up to them.  And I wish her no ill will in terms of her musical career or whatever else she chooses to do with her life.

But please:  Don’t think that she’s changed her former job for this one – she’s still being used as a whore.

"This is how many months they'll employ me for!"

The paper is using her to make money.  They certainly aren’t trading on her mind (see: today’s View interview), so they must be utilizing her body – her body of notoriety.  Admittedly, all of us in the media are whores to some extent or another, but this?  This is still simple prostitution.

The only difference is that I’m sure Elliot Spitzer at least treated her to a drink or a “thank you” before he let her out of the hotel room.  After Ms. Whatsherface has had her notoriety run out at the paper for her “column” she will be kicked out into the streets like a common streetwalker.  She will have been used and then disposed of.  So be prepared, Ms. Whoever Nakedlady.  You may be used to getting paid well for your skills, but that’s not how it works in the newspaper world.

Now, it’s Pat Quinn’s birthday coming up.  I wonder if there’s a way we could work together to “benefit” both us…