The Duane Swierczynki Top Seven

We should all be Duane Swierczynski. Seriously, everything would be done and the word “incomplete” would be a distant memory. "To-do lists" would spontaneously combust. I wouldn't be "Write Procrastinator" anymore, I'd just be "Write" for a change and the Missus would finally stop arguing with...never mind, bad wordplay.

Duane is my role model and when I told him so, he didn’t believe me for a second. I have a fairly easy blue collar union job that requires little or no thought, but I can’t write for more than five hours a day or my head literally melts like that particular R. Crumb poster. If two people talk in the same room that I am writing in and it interrupts my flow, I duct tape them to the ceiling.

Duane edits a paper http://www.citypaper.net/ and before you tell me the paper is a weekly as opposed to a daily, I will tell you that editing any paper is difficult because you are still dealing with scores of egos, personalities, unique problems, deadlines, etc... Plus you have to tune out all that noise that comes with a newsroom, too much damn noise for me.

He researches and writes novels, not the crap that best selling authors crank out in their sleep or have the maid ghostwrite because they’d rather be up at their condo in Aspen. I mean thought-provoking, well thought out, well written novels and non-fiction.

Books on beer...
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=NJ7WOTxBv6&isbn=1931686491&itm=1

Scams and scam artists...
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=NJ7WOTxBv6&isbn=0028644158&itm=3


Neo-noir...
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=NJ7WOTxBv6&isbn=0312343779&itm=2

Office espionage...
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=NJ7WOTxBv6&isbn=1931686602&itm=4

Hell, he wrote a book on bank robbery and it has been said that the would-be robber was arrested with a copy on his person.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=NJ7WOTxBv6&isbn=0028643445&itm=10

He hustles harder than all those who sell Amway, Mark Kay, Girl Scout Cookies, and four-packs of tube socks for five dollars, put together. By that, I mean book tours and signings everywhere and anywhere.

He’s a devoted parent and husband, and somehow he still finds time to paint the town red. As well as white and blue ‘cause we are talking Philadelphia. On tops of all this...he blogs, damn, HE blogs. http://secretdead.blogspot.com/

I need at least five and a half hours of sleep that I spread out over three shifts of slumber or I can’t write. Thomas Alva Edison needed only four to five hours a day with catnap here or there. Duane doesn’t sleep at all; it consumes too much valuable time that could be spent writing or researching future novels. I can’t compose a top thirty for Duane Swierczynski because only Duane is capable of such feats by himself, but I can do a top seven:

One time Duane fell asleep for a full fifteen minutes. As penance, he pulled a semi-truck using just a rope and his teeth, all the way to Manhattan. Where he then wrote and edited the Sunday edition of the New York Times entirely by himself while he did an impromptu book signing and sampled all the fine pilsners of Czechoslovakia that the city had to offer.

You cannot approach Duane with a cocktail in hand nor does he pump his own gas anymore or open his eyes at gas stations. Tired of his hands cramping through book signings after book signings, Duane had his eyes outfitted with lasers so that he could etch his salutations and signature onto most any surface.

In 2005: 1) Grade point averages went up throughout the entire of city of Philadelphia. 2) Everyone under eighteen passed English, including the most recently arrived immigrants. 3) Intelligent children walked the streets without fear of being beaten up and they had that much more time to devote to SAT preparation. 4) The high school graduation rate hit an all time high. 5) The acne and stress levels of all of the aforementioned had decreased by 80%. This was all because Duane was bored for an hour and did all their homework. If you can’t get into Temple or Rutgers, blame Duane.

The QWERTY typing system has wrongly been attributed to being invented as a way to keep typewriters from jamming from over-exuberant typists. It was actually created to keep Duane under 1,000 words-per-minute.

Gravity does not exist. This effect is merely the constant aftershock created by Duane’s typing and we should all pray that he never decides to stop, because everything will go flying into space.

Superman is weaker than Duane simply by virtue of the fact that kryptonite can affect Superman and Duane has NO weaknesses.

When Duane finishes his time machine and not if: 1) He will go back to the beginning of time and create the world in four days. 2) He will create beer and bars on the fifth day. 3) And he will (I imagine, respectfully) chastise God on the sixth day for taking six days the first time out. 4) Duane will create the printing press and book binding processes on the seventh because Duane just doesn’t take days off, even at the beginning of time.