David Dubrow

Author

Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice

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I’m pleased to announce that my newest book is available for download at Amazon!

Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice is an anthology of short stories written with authors Paul Hair and Ray Zacek, spanning several genres and points of view. It also features a foreword by R.M. Huffman, author of Leviathan and Fallen, books 1 and 2 of The Antediluvian Legacy, so you know it’s good. Here’s a peek at the back cover copy:

With political correctness gobbling up the culture like a fat kid on his sister’s quinceañera cake, where do you go for quality, old-school entertainment?

Appalling Stories focuses on themes and characters you’re just not supposed to read about anymore, using social issues as the setting, not the plot. Inside, you’ll read about a disturbing erotic resort that caters to an exclusive clientele, a violent Antifa group biting off much more than they can chew, a serial killer with a furious inch, and a lot more.

The authors find message fiction as tedious as you do, and traditional publishing seems intent on shoving favored narratives down readers’ throats. This anthology pushes back against PC moralizing, bringing you story above all else. Are you going to let Social Justice Warriors dictate what you can and can’t read?

Consider this your trigger warning.

Ben Wilhelm, Staff Writer for NOQReport and noted advocate for veterans and Second Amendment issues, said of it, “Ripped from the headlines, Appalling Stories is brilliant satire that illustrates the downfall of American society in the realms of culture, morality, religion, and even military policy. It is a must read for every patriotic American!”

Heck, even if you’re not a patriotic American, you’ll dig it.

Kristin Devine, a contributing author of GenderDreaming, the atomic feminist, and Ordinary Times, says of Appalling Stories, “While reading Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice you’ll find yourself in a rapidly deflating lifeboat afloat in a dark and dank sea of forbidden ideas. You won’t feel safe in these waters. Dive in anyway!”

All the stories within are terrific, but the best story in the book isn’t even mine! So what’re you waiting for? Get clicking and get reading!

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Photos of the Calliope Workshop

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Not long ago I wrote about my experience as a mentor for the 2017 Calliope Workshop, sponsored by Taliesin Nexus in Los Angeles, California. If you’ve got a passion for both liberty and writing, I urge you to check out the Taliesin Nexus website, particularly the section on the Calliope Workshop.

The terrific people at Taliesin Nexus were kind enough to photograph the event, and sent me some relevant pictures.

Here I am holding forth while David Angsten looks on, likely hoping I’ll shut up already.
Peter, one of my mentees (L); Yours Truly (C); David Angsten (R)
Yeah, I don’t know what I’m smiling at here, either.
If you look closely at the lower right you’ll see my zombie book on the same table as real books like Michael Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.

Thanks again to Taliesin Nexus for inviting me; it was an honor.

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Calliope, Irma, and Me

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David Dubrow, Robert Bidinotto, David Angsten

A couple of months ago I received an invitation to mentor some novelists at the Calliope Workshop for Fiction and Nonfiction Authors, hosted at the offices of Taliesin Nexus in Los Angeles, California. Deeply honored, I accepted.

As the weeks flew by and I received manuscripts from the writers I would mentor, the specter of Hurricane Irma rose in the Caribbean, heading straight for my home state of Florida. Every day I checked the projected paths, spaghetti models, and weather forecasts, all of which said the same thing: Irma was coming, and if I attended the workshop, I would be leaving my wife and son to face the storm alone. Despite this, Mrs Dubrow, who is easily the most capable person I know, insisted I go.

So, heart in my mouth, I went.

We had been preparing for such a storm for years: our house is situated in a non-evacuation zone, which means that it’s the sort of place you want to evacuate to if there’s any risk of flooding. We had landscaped in such a way as to minimize the danger of trees crashing through the roof (trees on our property, anyway), and we had acquired plenty of water and food if everything went to pot. And, best of all, we live close to a hurricane shelter in case the gale drives our neighbors’ tree limbs through our windows. While it’s impossible to prep for every contingency, we were ready.

And yet, I worried.

As for the workshop, it was a transformative experience. There’s nothing like teaching others the fundamentals to keep you yourself learning, and in between mentoring sessions, a number of brilliant and successful writers gave panel discussions, like Adam Bellow, Robert Bidinotto, Ann Bridges, Nick Cole, Andrew Klavan, and Ken Lizzi. David Bernstein of Liberty Island led a discussion on marketing and sales. Michael Walsh was the keynote speaker.  Best of all, I met my friend David Angsten face to face at long last; David, another panelist, recommended me for this gig, and he’s one of those rare people you like more and more the better you know him. I was also privileged to meet Andrew Malcolm of Hot Air, as well as some other columnists whose material I had read and enjoyed over the years.

Irma hung over everything. In the layover between connecting flights to California, the airline canceled my flight home, days in advance. The hurricane was scheduled to hit the west coast of Florida late Sunday night, and all models projected it to rampage over my very neighborhood in its path along the state. I was helpless to do anything but worry and pray, like most Floridians, but I was the one who fled and left his family behind (a silly thought, but it’s one of the things that occupies one’s mind in anxious moments). Because I didn’t know when I might be able to get home again, I arranged to fly to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, figuring I’d stay with my older brother and his family until I could catch the next flight to Tampa. I spent Sunday night in an agony of worry until I heard from my wife, who told me that the electricity had gone out but everyone was fine.

Imagine my relief.

Once the storm drifted north, the airport opened again. The earliest flight I could get would take me halfway across the country to Dallas, Texas. Then, after a four-hour layover, from Dallas to Tampa. Not fun, but compared to what people in the Florida Keys and the Caribbean were going through, it was nothing. First-world problems. During that time, my wife and son checked into a hotel near the airport, because it’s next to impossible to live without air conditioning in Florida. My Dallas to Tampa flight was delayed four more hours, and I wasn’t reunited with my family until four o’clock in the morning that Friday.

Three days later (eight days after the storm blew out our power), electricity was restored to my house. We were among the last in the county to get power back. For us, the disaster was over.

As the things I learned, saw, and did in L.A. sort themselves into the various corners of my mind, I find myself overwhelmed by gratitude.

Thanks to God for sparing my family. Others weren’t so fortunate.

Thanks to the Calliope Workshop for putting such faith in me.

Thanks to David Angsten for recommending me for the job.

Thanks to my brother and his family, who took me in.

And last but definitely not least, thanks to Mrs Dubrow, who could’ve asked me to stay behind, but didn’t.

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Coming Home: Two Stories

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When we moved to Florida, my wife and son went first so I could pack up the house, take care of all the moving arrangements, oversee home repairs, deal with landscaping improvements, etc. They stayed with her parents while I remained in Colorado for a week and a half. My son was about 14 months old at the time, so he was still in his babyhood, moving to toddlerhood (which isn’t really a word). This is one of the reasons why parents refer to their young children’s ages in months: you expect different things from an 8-month-old than an 18-month-old. It makes more sense when it’s personally relevant, like so much else in parenting.

Boxes filled, movers tipped, and all other arrangements made, I drove our SUV to Florida from Colorado, which was rather a long, solitary trip. This took place during Tropical Storm Debbie, which lashed the southeast with torrential rain and wind. After the grueling drive, with an aching back and no sleep and the yearning for family that you experience when you’ve been away for too long, I got to my in-laws’ house very early in the morning. My wife had already left for work, so I went to the guest room where my son lay in his Pack-and-Play (his crib was still in a moving truck somewhere), and I was so happy to see him that I couldn’t speak.

My son, at the time, couldn’t have cared less. He wanted his toys, his breakfast, to be not picked up and cuddled by his father. He cried until I put him down. God, it hurt. I kind of expected it, because he was too young to be aware of the passage of time, but it hurt all the same. I missed him and he didn’t miss me. Some homecoming.

—

I think it was a year or so later when my wife and I went on a long vacation to some resort or other. (A long vacation by my definition is anything more than three days. Vacations always discomfit me, just a little. I know it’s weird.) We left our son with her parents and did the typical laze-around things one does at an all-inclusive resort: swam in the pool, ate a lot, drank a lot, hung out on the beach, read books, etc. When we got back to my in-laws’, it was around time to wake up our son from his afternoon nap. This is something I remember as clear as I can recall what I had for breakfast today: I went into the darkened bedroom, and there he was in the Pack-and-Play bed. Roused from sleep by the sound of the door opening, my son stood up, with his blond hair all tangled and his striped romper creased, and he saw me, and he smiled, and he said, simply, “Daddy.”

And the wound that he had unknowingly opened in me a year before was healed.

Parenthood is full of these injuries. Some of them heal, some just scab over. It may be that God intended for us to be younger when we’re parents, because it teaches us to be better children while our parents are still alive. I wish I had been a better son, and I try every day to be a good father.

—

A prior engagement, the details of which I will relate in a future post, kept me away from home when Hurricane Irma struck, and has stranded me for much longer than anyone would like. Pleasantly, my family and house are both in good shape, which is all I can ask for and more than I deserve. I’ll be home soon.

I can’t wait.

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Forgiving Yourself: A Meditation

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I want to discuss the idea of separating you from what happened to you. There’s the you, the you reading this, and there are your experiences, and they’re not the same thing. One of my favorite expressions is, “It’s bad that it happened, but it’s worse if you don’t learn anything from it.” We look to the past for lessons, but we don’t live in the past. Being victimized doesn’t make you a victim. Staying where trauma happened makes you a victim.  As someone who has experienced trauma, only you can decide that you’re a victim. Someone who experienced the same thing may call himself a survivor, or may not call himself anything at all. Self-identifying as a victim ties you to your experiences. The mantle of victimhood can only be worn voluntarily. And, in today’s society, there are great benefits to being a victim, to display one’s traumas as badges of honor. In large part, human beings love attention. With the rise of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, stardom may be one trauma away. Victims get money, sympathy, and fame: who doesn’t want that?

This is not to say that people who have experienced genuine trauma should just get over it. Truly horrible things like rape, the loss of a child, a brutal assault: they require love and time to heal from, or at least endure. As human beings our worth is at least partly measured in how we care for those in need. Part of the freedom of being an adult is determining what qualifies as a trauma versus an unfortunate occurrence.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably doing okay, at least in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You don’t lack for potable water. Perhaps you live in the West, or a Western-style country that upholds enough inalienable human rights to keep jackbooted thugs from knocking down your door and throwing you in prison over something minor. Compared to the vast majority of humanity for the vast majority of human history, you’re wealthy. So what do you have to complain about?

Not a lot. But it doesn’t mean that you haven’t had terrible experiences. And it definitely doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn from those experiences. Just retain that sense of perspective, that learned skill of sorting difficulties from the major (being shot at) to the nonexistent (a social media spat). Prioritizing is a learned skill. To a small child, everything’s important: a lost toy means as much as a house fire, at least in the moment. Because we’re so attached to our phones, our lifeline to social media, that perspective tends to get lost. Who Bill O’Reilly sexually harassed or what conspiracy theory Rachel Maddow is promulgating: do you really give a damn? Why does that have to take up space in your mental attic? Say you’re not political. Okay, who cares that your old high school friend didn’t Like that selfie of you and your kids at the Mets game? I know you count Likes and Favorites and Shares and Retweets: we all do. But you know they’re utterly empty, right? I mean, you know that deep down. You also know what is important: your family (if you have one), your faith (if you have one), your principles (if you have any).

So both developing that sense of perspective and maintaining it in a culture that prizes minutiae are vital to the separation of you from what happened to you. If it were easy we wouldn’t have to talk about it: we’d just do it like turning off a television.

Where this ties into children of substance abusers is that we often mature into adults with a pervasive feeling that there’s something wrong with us, whether we take up substance abuse ourselves or we don’t. That somehow our parents’ sins are written upon us in ways that others can read at a glance. That’s a function of confusing a negative experience with a negative trait. There’s nothing wrong with you, particularly the you as a child, but there was something wrong with your experience. It’s difficult to peel your self from your experiences after so long, particularly when these traumas were inflicted upon you as a child, when everything sticks and the scars run deepest. I don’t subscribe to the notion that children have special wisdom that mature adults lack, but they do feel things more strongly than adults do. And, in many respects, the subconscious is a time machine: when things happen to us today that are similar to what happened to us long ago, we often have the same emotional reactions to them that we did as youngsters. It’s difficult to escape the child’s logic: mommy drank, so there’s something wrong with me. It stays with us, even into adulthood.

That child’s logic often extends further, into self-blame: if there’s something wrong with me, it’s because of something I did. Or something I am. It doesn’t make sense to an adult, but children are adept at accepting responsibility for disparate things: step on a crack, break your mother’s back. You’re not eating your peas? What about the starving children in China? Etc. This illogic is baked into childhood. If you are something bad, owing to being the child of a substance abuser, then you need to be punished. And if the world isn’t punishing you enough, then you’ll just have to do it yourself. (Children love justice, particularly rough justice. Adults do, too.)

Once you recognize that there’s nothing wrong with you, but that there was something wrong with your experience, you can move on to the difficult step of forgiving yourself instead of punishing yourself. Call it your inner child or the Time Machine Subconscious, but you’ve got to tell that raw, injured kid that he’s okay. He didn’t do anything wrong. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s worthy of love.

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Odds and Ends 7/11/2017

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Few people seem to talk about the Amazon show Fortitude in the horror circles I dip into. Is it horror? An exquisitely slow-burn thriller? I’m seven episodes in at the time of this writing and the show is hard to categorize. This can be a bad or a good thing, depending. There are horror elements to it, in addition to police procedural and mystery. I have difficulty understanding about 15% of the dialogue, what with all the accents. Stanley Tucci steals every scene he’s in, which is amazing considering the strength of all the other performances. Once I’m done the first season I may do a proper write-up, but despite its somewhat frustrating slowness it’s a show I look forward to watching each evening.

***

Here’s a fragment of conversation I had with my son as we took a walk around the neighborhood not too long ago:

Sonny Boy: I can’t wait to go to gramma and grandpa’s.

Me: I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun there.

Sonny Boy: Yeah. I’ll miss you and Mommy.

Me: You’ll be too busy having fun to miss us. But if you do, it’s okay. We’ll miss you, too.

Sonny Boy: I know your parents are dead. Do you miss yours mommy?

Me: *thinking* Yes.

He didn’t notice the long pause before my answer, or if he did, I’m certain he didn’t know how to interpret it. How could I tell him that I miss the person my mother was supposed to be instead of who she was? My wife, Sonny Boy’s mother, is a great example of who a mother is supposed to be; I thank God every day that Sonny Boy has her as his mom and doesn’t have a different experience. It’s taken me decades to learn, understand, and internalize the truth that people are not their experiences. There may be something wrong with your experience of something, but it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. Many children of substance abusers don’t accept this, but grasping it is vital to achieving that one thing so many find impossible to do: forgive yourself.

Amazing how a simple question from a little boy can get the gears going.

***

Netflix recommended that I see the movie Bokeh, because it’s got an end-of-the-world flavor to it and I’m kind of partial to that. In it, two lovers vacationing in Iceland wake up one morning to find that they’re the last people on the planet. Where the movie succeeds is in the cinematography, where beautiful scenery is captured in rich hues. Where the movie fails is in everything else. In narrative, ideas, core, and tension, it’s as empty as the world the two lovers find themselves in. The protagonists embody every nightmarish thought Generation X and Boomers have about the millennial generation, down to the bearded hipster with his retro camera and the impossible-to-please girl who hints at a religious upbringing without having taken anything away from it. Watching it with the sound on or off makes no difference. No questions are answered, and few are asked. Despite all that, you might like it. If you watch it, drop me a line and let me know where I went wrong.

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