NO ALTERNATIVE: “The Clarity of Regret”

NoAlternative-TitleI just completed my book tour.  It was a great success, and also a heck of a lot of fun.  I’m grateful to those bloggers who hosted my book and to Kriss and Kai of The Finishing Fairies for organizing the endeavor.

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On the tour, I released an exclusive clip from a reading I did at Stories Books and Cafe in Echo Park.  Here it is:

The promotional campaign for this book has been grassroots.  Perhaps in line with the spirit of the characters in the novel, the concept behind writing this book, and consequently marketing it, is the “DIY” mindset.  If there is a core ingredient to punk rock, if there is an ideal to aspire to in said art form, it is the collective embrace of the do-it-yourself spirit, culture and lifestyle.  Just like the indie bands of the early 90’s, before there were social networks and paid advertisements on facebook and twitter, it was all about word-of-mouth.  So, if you’ve heard of “No Alternative,” and you dig what it’s about, please spread the word.

Here is the excerpt from the novel that I read in the above clip:

This break-up was the bittersweet kind, as if there is any other kind, but a kind nonetheless, and this kind fell into a specific subset of the bittersweet break-up, one that is typical among teenagers who have professed their love for one another, exchanged sterling silver rings, broken heart pendants, leather jackets, punk rock mix tapes. It’s falling head-over-Converses in love at an age when we’re still growing, physically, mentally, and emotionally, but more than just growing, expanding at breakneck speed, finding ourselves at a pace that is downright alarming and which will never be duplicated for the rest of our lives. It’s guaranteed that no love will last, but this teenaged love feels like heroin in the brutal rush of its power, its ability to commandeer the body and the mind and its ability to make you feel like a steaming pile of shit when it comes to its crashing end. It’s not that teenaged love is more powerful than any of the other types of love we experience throughout our lives, it’s just that we will never feel that way again, never feel that rush of addiction, the certainty that we have found our proper place in the universe and we feel that way precisely because we haven’t completed our physical and mental maturation. That’s what makes it unique. That’s what makes it addicting. That’s what makes it so enervating when it starts and so heartbreaking when it ends. And it always ends. And when it does, what was once there, what was once perfect, becomes irretrievable –

It’s lost forever.

Jeremy and Leslie were on the beach, kissing tenderly and gently, the way a couple that is not brand new starts to do at some point before they stop kissing altogether, kissing for what was soon to be the last time. It was the fact that they knew it was going to be the last time that made the kissing even more tender, as though there were memories tied up in it, as though there were regrets, not of times gone by but of times that would never be. He could feel her face, their cheeks grazing against each other’s, their tears mixing together, and he remembered how he licked them off his lips, tasting them. He tasted the salt; it was like he dipped his tongue into the expanse of the Pacific Ocean. As Jeremy sat in his dank little holding cell in Bronxville, it was like the break-up was happening to him all over again, like he was replaying the events in his mind with Technicolor clarity, not the cheap rewinding and replaying of a VHS tape, but the hyper-clarity of a laserdisc, right down to the depiction of the blood dripping into the sand after she left. It was as High Definition as hi-def could get back then. Before there was Blu-ray and plasma televisions, there was the clarity of regret.

Thanks for reading.

You can find the book on Amazon, in Paperback and in Kindle: www.amazon.com/noalternative

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