Ballbag, A Book By Frank T. Bird

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Frank T Bird has just published a book. It’s called Ballbag.

I wonder if that’s an Aussie word. Aussies have the best slang. So do the Brits. I wouldn’t dare utter their words out loud, because that’s just obnoxious for an American, but I like to use them in print.

Actually I take that back. One word I will use occasionally is “lovely”. Tell an American woman she looks lovely and she’ll often be struck dumb by the novelty of it. Words like “beautiful” and “gorgeous” will bounce right off her, invite hostility even, but tell her she’s lovely and just watch as she twitches and convulses while her brain frantically searches its database for all the haughty things she’s been programmed to say to any man offering a spontaneous compliment. It’s quite a sight.

The word “lovely” short circuits that chip somehow, melts it, and as the smoke billows from her ears she may just remember a time not too long ago when a compliment was actually a good thing and a consent contract wasn’t required to legally offer one. Oh she’ll fight it mightily, but I’m telling you she’ll finally relent and thank you for the kind words, and maybe, just maybe, if all the stars are aligned properly, she’ll even blush and —

“Kid, get back to the book, would you? Yer fuckin’ killin’ me with this drivel.”

“Easy Frank, I’m getting there. Just warming up here…”

Right, so getting back to Ballbag. Here in America we call it “ballsack”, and —

“Mikey, no history required. Just get ta tha point ya cunt.”

Like I was saying, here in America we call it “ballsack”, and I think in this instance we got it right. (U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!). When you type Frank’s book title into the search bar on amazon, you’re actually offered a wide variety of mesh bags with draw strings, filled to the top with an assortment of balls — basketballs, soccer balls, footballs, and volleyballs — as if a group of schizophrenics had planned an active day at the park but couldn’t decide which sport they wanted to play. “I’m feeling like basketball, but Satan keeps telling me we should play football dammit!”

If I were to offer Frank just one bit of advice, it might be to switch the title to Ballsack. And speaking of ballsacks —

“Knittel you silly bastard, you were so close. Say some kind things about the book. Even if ya don’t mean it. Come on…”

Speaking of ballsacks, I once worked at a hospital as a “safety companion”, or “sitter” to some, and I never ceased to be amazed when exposed to the naked elderly men there. They don’t teach you this in school, but apparently what happens when a man hits 80 or so is his cock and balls both completely vanish, and the only thing that remains is an enormous flap of useless skin dangling between the legs, which resembles something like a parachute that hasn’t been deployed properly.

“No,” a coworker told me over dinner one evening, “it looks more like the webbing on the wings of those nasty creatures in the movie Beastmaster. Have you ever seen Beastmaster?”

And that’s why men get paid more, I imagine. That extra dollar an hour or whatever it is is designed to make up for this grave injustice. And I think it’s more than fair —

“Mikey ya prick, the — ”

The book. I know Birdman. I’m getting there…

Do any of you writers out there ever entertain the idea of publishing a book? To me it seems like an almost impossible goal. But occasionally I’ll saunter through the aisles at a Barnes N Noble and let myself dream a little. “The K’s need bolstering old boy,” I’ll tell myself. “Get on with it already. Ya ain’t gettin’ any younger. Before ya know it it’ll all be over for you, and you’ll be an old man in a hospital bed, mindlessly scratching that sagging parachute between your legs while wondering where it all went wrong…”

As writers we never feel we’re ready to publish. When I look back on writing I did just a year ago, it embarrasses me terribly. And a year ago I was just as embarrassed by the writing I did before that, and so on and so forth. So naturally, my great fear currently is that I’ll publish a book like Bird and look back a year from now and feel a crippling sense of embarrassment about it. “Nope, I didn’t write that shit,” I’ll say while vigorously shaking my head. “Musta been some other Mike Knittel!”

But — and this will sound very cliche but I don’t care — those patients that I cared for in hospital almost unfailingly said the same thing about their lives, and that was this: they didn’t regret the things that they tried and failed at, but they did regret the things they never tried at all. That’s not a cliche — it’s just a universal lament.

Cowardice is relentless. It will follow you everywhere, and even remorselessly haunt you on your deathbed.

FTB is going for it, and for that he has my utmost respect and admiration. I don’t have to say much about his stories, because they speak for themselves. They’re of the highest quality, and I would strongly encourage everyone to buy his ebook, Ballbag, which is currently available on amazon.

I leave you all with this Hubert Selby Jr. quote:

“Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one and the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.”