While I Was A-Wayne

It’s been a relatively quiet week at VeepsBlog, This will be a slow return, because I’m both slightly inebriated and lacking sleep right now.

I was a little concerned with Wayne’s return to the fold, because of his commitment to not drinking, and my commitment to continue drinking. Of course I knew I’d have to come over from my dark side and meet him. I missed my friend, and with the book coming out in August, we both know we’ve got the Lord’s work to do.

It was a learning experience from my standpoint. As someone who’s been unfamiliar with a completely sober lifestyle since the early days of the first Reagan Administration, most of my days are measured on the HUB Metric, or “Hours Until Beers.” I have the air of indestructibility of someone who spent his life imbibing like Charles Bukowski and have proudly never missed a day of work due to my avocation. Granted, it may seem odd to the occasional workplace observer that I perspire an inordinate amount for the relative paucity of exertion expended at pecking at a keyboard, but I have always gotten up in the morning and made the donuts. Also, like Charles Bukowski, I’ve been fond of referring to recovering alcoholics as “quitters.”

I’ve put all the boozer hubris behind me now, though I’ll keep a few arrows in my quiver for Christians and Republicans who embrace sobriety to curry favor after a criminal investigation or a prominent sexual indiscretion.

I have a different appreciation for the sober life now seeing Wayne approach it with the same focus and determination he used to apply towards screwing me out of Dan Quayle gym bags and autographed Hubert Humphrey speech albums in online auctions. He attended meetings every day that he was here, and out of support and curiosity, I promised to attend future meetings with him, if for no other reason than for the free coffee. I’m keeping an open mind and open ears and thinking I can learn something from him if I ever want to introduce sobriety into my life.

It’s just that that time isn’t now.

We had a wonderfully productive week while he was here and you’ll see big changes soon on the Veeps site (soon to be “www.veeps.us”) and the blog (moving soon to “veepsblog.com”). The book has not only gone from gorgeous to hypnotically dazzling, but is 127% more informative as well. We’ve both felt for too long that the canon of Executive Branch tomes is missing an expansive volume on this country’s Vice Presidents that is both informative and entertaining, and by the sheer beauty of its design is capable of producing erections in bibliophiles and others who experience visceral arousal at such things. We feel that we’ve accomplished all three.

In the meantime, there are questions to be answered, lists to be addressed, and shoe leather to be burned. Our first order of business is to get the galleys to America’s influential political personalities and reviewers to see if we can induce them into lending their imprimatur to this very important work; testimonials that we can present on the back of the book where they say, in their own distinguished voices and the parlance of their industry, “Damn, this fucker’s pretty good!”

Some naysayers may use the loaded term “mercenary,” but we are entirely inclusive and non-partisan in soliciting those who would graciously deign to lend their influential voices to this book. If Sean Hannity is particulary captivated by the flamboyant elegance of William Rufus DeVane King and Bill Moyers gets a chuckle out of the part where Aaron Burr severs a man’s arm, then we would have no compunction about posting their comments side by side. Much like VeepsBlog, the back cover of Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance will be a big tent.

We’re aiming for the fences here. If anyone out there knows how we can get the PDF of the book on George Will’s Blackberry, there’s a $25 gift card at Bed, Bath, and Beyond in it for you, compliments of Top Shelf Productions.

In any event, Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance is going to be the toast of the summer publishing season. Come August and September, this will be the hot read of the Indian summer set and will be seen in beach bags on sandy shores from Maine to Maui. And you can tell all your friends that you were then, before Bill and Wayne took the political and literary world by storm and introduced Vice Presidential anecdotes as a legitimate topic of social discourse in much the same way and with the same seismic result as Richard Knerr and Spud Melin achieved when they introduced the Hula Hoop.