Sorry it’s been a while since the last post, my bloggies. I’ve been busy– probably only as busy as a normal busy person is on a regular basis, but to me it felt frantic, and exhausting.

Flew to Vancouver and back. Travel is horrible, I hate it. On the plane, no legroom, so I asked the stewardess if I could sit up in one of the bulkhead seats. Sure, she said. So I went up and pointed to a seat this jackass dude had his briefcase on, and said: “Mind if I sit there?”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why do you want to sit here?”

“Well, I’m 6′5″ and my seat’s really cramped, do you mind?”

“I would, actually.”

My turn to say: “Why?”

“I’d have to move my stuff, and we’d have someone sitting between us.”

I was about to pursue it, but then thought: nah. This guy was being such an ass that I didn’t want to sit next to him anyway.

So he got his wish. Then a lonely hotel room, numerous radio and TV appearances, then back on a plane.

Of course the same douche is on the plane.

“Don’t even look at me,” I said to the douche.

He kept looking at me.

“I’m telling you,” I said. “You’re making a mistake even looking at me.”

He kept doing it, with a defiant look on his face. I would have done him right there, grabbed him by the throat and squeezed until his face turned purple and there was genuine fear in his eyes, but didn’t want to get tossed off the plane. Oooh, I can’t wait to see him around town. I’ll never forget his stupid, jackass face, and balding dome. Please, God, let me run into this guy.

Then the launch party, at the United Steelworkers of America building. Nerve-wracking. Many, many details, right down to “which type of wire does the DJ need to hook his gear up to the venue’s speakers.” We got it wrong, the DJ had to run off to get a different type of wire at the last minute. Plastic glasses, snacks, did we buy enough booze? Would enough people show?

It came off in the end, though, and was fun.

Then this weekend hockey, hockey, hockey, then preparations for Adam’s 8th birthday and la la la. Running around frantically all weekend. Radio interview at 7:30 a.m. yesterday, program called “Fresh Air.” Another one this morning on “Roger, Darren, and Marilyn,” at 8:10.

Life has had a certain never-stop quality of late. It’s good, I’m not complaining, but I didn’t get much writing done. 

It’s nice to be back in my red flower-patterned chair, typing. 

This is where I belong. This is what I like. Sitting and typing and making myself little snacks. This is when I’m most productive, ironically, and unlike most of the rest of the population.

When I’m not busy.

Rudyard Kipling

Friend of mine emailed: “Great review in the Globe today.”

I phoned him back. “So it was a good review?”

He was aghast. “Yeah, it was in the paper you write for? Are you telling me you haven’t read it?”

“I haven’t read a review of my work since 1996.”

“Oh.”

I went on to explain why. I mean– it’s just human nature. But even the most positive, glowing reviews– at least with my work, I don’t know, maybe I push people’s buttons– are interlarded (at last! I get to use my favourite word in my blog) with all kinds of hidden barbs, zingers, passive-aggressive cracks, “insultiments” (insult + compliment = insultiment), and all kinds of other material which will cause me to toss and turn for the rest of my life.

I’m serious. I remember lines, from back when I used to read reviews, that will only be erased from my memory banks when Papa Death comes to take me.

My books are like: my soul on a plate. Offered up quivering and hopeful, like foie gras, to a cynical and mocking world. When people make little cracks about them, it makes me want to climb through the critic’s window with a balaclava over my head.

Believe it or not, I never even read the New York Times review of my callow, jejeune (but funny) first novel, Chump Change.  Supposedly it was a good review. People said “Hey, congratulations, you got a good review in the New York Times.”

“Great! Fine! I don’t want to hear anymore! Thank you!”

And all but clapped my hands over my ears and started going “La la la la…”

Because once you hear it’sa good review, it’s all downhill from there. Chump Change is kind of a coming-of-age story about a drug-addled man-about-town in his twenties, trying to kick day jobs and avoid student-loan creditors and become a writer– a little bit in the mould of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. But not really. And set in Toronto.

When I was in Seattle on tour with the book, a dude came running up, waving a copy of the New York Times. “Hey, check it out! You got a good review in the New York Times!”

“O.K.! Thank you! Don’t show me!”

He kept on coming, as if in a nightmare, brandishing the paper. “No, check it out, dude! What’s the problem?”

“I’m serious! Take it away! I don’t want to see it!”

With a puzzled look he took it away. But not before I caught a glimpse of the headline:

DIM LIGHTS, MEDIUM-SIZED CITY

Even friggin’ headline-writers are zinger-meisters.

So to Jason Anderson, apparently the author of the review: thank you for your kind words, whatever they may be.

And sorry: I know you probably worked hard on your review. But I will never read it. I can’t read negative reviews, and therefore I don’t want to read positive ones either.

It’s all part of my program to achieve a Zen mental where, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, I can “meet with triumph and disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same.”

Well, I went to the Press Pass party, and I’m sorry, my bloggies, I’m getting old. Time passes, even I am not immune. People shoving, pushing past, shouting, you couldn’t hear what anyone was saying.

Still, it was fun. I wound up outside, having a smoke, with several nefarious characters, including a certain Micah Toub:

Yes, he’s cute, isn’t he, ladies? And as he cheerfully informed me at the event, “absolutely, 100 percent single.” I can get you his contact info if you’re interested (you see, it’s not only my  book I pimp).

Anyway, like me he’s a) a Globe columnist  b) pimping a book– in his case Growing Up Jung, about, uh, how his father was a shrink or something…anyway, the point is, he’s on the hustle, on the bubble. His book doesn’t come out until the fall, but already he’s working all the angles, flying down to New York, buttering up his publicist, and so on and so forth.

We were comparing notes, I asked him if he was going on tour, he muttered something about how the publisher asked him if he would “happen to be in certain cities anyway,” they could set something up– like I say, it’s a DIY world these days, ladies, you have to be both Publicity Pimp and Media Whore for your own book…to an extent (I don’t want anyone to get me wrong, in my case I’ve got a guy, at the publishers, Josh Glover, at M&S, who’s doing a brilliant job).

Anyway, he was like blah blah blah. And I was like: “Dude, do you know The Four Phases of Fame?”

And he was like: “No.”

So I told him.

1. “Who’s Micah Toub?”

2. “Get me Micah Toub.”

3. “Get me the next Micah Toub.”

4. “Who’s Micah Toub?”

Anyway he laughed at that, and then along with my man Ian Daffern we started riffing on it, how in the modern era there should be several more layer added, e.g.:

2b. “And do you think he’ll blog for free?”

2. c. “I’m sorry Micah we have to cancel your blog, we just can’t even afford to do it anymore.”

“But I do it for free!”

“I know: that’s what makes this so painful.”

Anyway, maybe you had to be there. It was funny to me– and just kinda nice to talk to a couple of dudes (younger, always younger) who know what I’m on about.

You gotta hustle. Hustle or die, babies. And you don’t even know if it’s paying off. Who knows? Why do people buy books? It’s a mystery.

But “at the end of the day” (everyone hates that term but I like it) you want to be able to say you did all you could.

In fact, let that be the inscription upon my gravestone. Dave Eddie RIP: “I did all I could.”

Whew, am I ever freakin’ tired. Your humble narrator appeared on City-TV’s  ”Breakfast Television” this morning, cold-pimpin’ the book, and did an interview with one of the hosts, the semi-divine Dina Pugliese:

She was everything: smart, funny, cool, friendly, warm– and, obviously, so gorgeous I could hardly stare directly into her beauty-rays. In Manhattan (I think) Woody Allen says to Diane Keaton (one of my favourite lines of his), while they’re riding in a taxi: “You’re so beautiful I can hardly keep my eyes on the meter.” I wanted to say to DP: “You’re so beautiful I can hardly keep my mind on pimping my book– that’s Damage Control, by the way, people, available at finer boosktores near you.”

But I managed the trick somehow. Everyone at BT was great: fun, friendly, and welcoming. TV usually gives me the willies, but they made it easy. Around there they’ve declared it ”Whopper Wednesdays” around there, so everyone was scarfing down Whoppers at 7:30 a.m., which is, like lunch for them. Gross, greasy fun!

Then it was off to CIUT for “Take 5.” I have to tell you, I’m impressed by how much of the book everyone’s read on this go-round, and how intelligent and astute the questions.

Then it was home for a nap– because I woke up at freakin’  5 a.m. this morning. And you know when you do these early-morning things you toss and turn and sleep badly.

I just zonked out, complete with freaky dreams and everything. Woke up crabby, got in trouble with Pam (my wife and true goddess, as anyone who knows me, the world’s most faithful husband, knows: if, late one night, while Pam was off on a trip with the kids to, say, her mother’s house, Dina Pugliese were to appear nude as a silhouette in my doorway, I would pull the covers up around my neck and say: “Dina! This is terribly inappropriate! you’re a lovely woman and fantastic TV presenter, but I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong idea from what was after all a purely professional encounter! I’m going to have to call you a cab and you’re going to have to exit my domicile immediately!”), who’s taking the week off for “March break madness” with the kids.

Tonight it’s off to “Press Pass” for St. Patrick’s Day, where the featured drink on the menu is “Irish car bombs,” a shot of (Irish) whiskey dropped in a pint of Guinness.

Lord have mercy on the soul of a poor sinner like me! If this book-promoting stuff doesn’t kill me, I just hope it somehow makes me stronger.

OK testing, let’s get this blog going again on my sexy new website (thank you Sarka and Digital Fin). Going in to the CBC to talk to Jian Ghomeshi, live, shortly, on his excellent show Q– the one Billy Bob Thornton freaked out on. 

Classic example of “Damage Control,” actually: Jian handled himself so well it kind of made his career. Exactly the point I’m trying to get across with the book: sometimes, though it may not seem so at the time, the worst kind of messed-up situations can in fact be opportunities. It’s not the damage, it’s how you handle it, babies.