Combatting Life’s Challenges Through Learned Helplnessness: A User’s Guide is the third zine I’ve put together for the Erochikan collection, and it’s now available in my webstore. This 18 page guide shows readers the many advantages to giving up on your aspirations and finding complacency with your current, mediocre life. It’s illustrated with a selection of superficially appealing stock photos to help you visualize the surface-level happiness that awaits you!
For those of you not in the know, the Erochikan Zine project is something I started a few years ago for the now on-hiatus Art Swaps. I had fun making them and people really liked them, so when I opened my webstore I printed some more copies and started selling them along with my Eikaiwa Bums chapbook, where they got even more positive responses. (BTW, thanks to everyone who bought copies, either online, or at my reading back in August—you’re all awesome.)
The name Erochikan comes from the ero in erotic and the Japanese word chikan, a pervert who gropes women on crowded subways. The fictitious company puts out a series of pamphlets that ostensibly aims at self-improvement but actually teaches readers annoying, self-centered, and destructive aspects of human behavior, like using passive-aggressive put-downs or writing the word “utilize” in emails.
If you like clever satire that makes you laugh, you might want to check out the full set of Erochikan zines because, well, they’re pretty funny. They’re also cool if you like hard-copy books and magazines that you can hold in your hands instead of just reading on screens all the time—something I’ve been gravitating towards more in recent years.
Plus, if you like my blog and want to support it in some way, buying a zine or two from my webstore is an easy and cool way to make that happen. Not only does the income help, but every sale provides me a BIG confidence boost when it comes to getting my writing out into the world—and that’s pretty awesome.
Yep, that’s the new zine. You can order a copy here.
Why Make a Bunch of Zines in the Digital Age, Anyway?
I’ve always loved satire, along with clever writing that makes fun of people who are pretentious or like to bully others. I’ve also spent a lot of time in offices where people communicated in ways that felt mechanically removed from the way real people actually talk, so I found this easy to make fun of too.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also become more aware that while we’re surrounded by information on how to be nice and treat others fairly, people learn how to be jerks by observing the world around them, or by figuring it out on their own. If there were books and step-by-step manuals on how to be a terrible person, we’d instantly reject them as bad because when these traits are spelled out directly, we can recognize them as bad, as opposed to when we see people sneakily carrying them out in the world around us.
I was also inspired years ago by Jonathan Swift’s essay A Modest Proposal from way back in 1729, a satirical piece where he describes the problem of Irish poverty and suggests that it can all be solved if people would start selling their babies to rich people as food. Now, obviously a smart guy like Jonathan Swift didn’t advocate baby-eating (even back then!), but he talks about it as if it were a sincere solution, which makes it funny.
We as readers can also see how ridiculous it would be to start eating babies as a way to curb poverty, so in a sense, when we read these kinds of ridiculous scenarios we see how ridiculous they are and tend to reach the opposite conclusion on our own. The process fires up our neurons and gets us thinking more critically about the problem, which is one of the things I love about smart satire.
That’s the whole concept behind the Erochikan project—to lay out ridiculous ways of thinking in a straightforward manner so readers can think more critically about them.
Hey, You Didn’t Answer My Question About Making Hard Copy Zines—You Just Went Off on a Literary Tangent About Some Old Writer!
True, but I’ll answer it now. I stand by my comment about hard copy media—I spend WAY too much time reading shit on my laptop screen, my phone screen, and even my e-reader screen (which monopolizes a lot of my reading time in Japan). Hard copy books and magazines help disconnect me from the ever-moving world of the internet and social media, and I’m less likely to feel scatterbrained when I’m focusing on a print copy away from a screen.
Despite their convenience and ease of access, digital copies of media, I’ve found, are all too often ephemeral—you read them (or listen to, or watch them), and then they’re gone, and you tend to forget about them. Sure, you could go back online and find that article or podcast you really liked again, or even save the file, but the information feels more removed from your thoughts and experiences when it’s buried in the digital realm.
Compare this to a book on your shelf: when I see an actual book in the real world, I’m more inclined to remember the experience I had reading it, even if that memory only lasts a split second. This makes me more inclined to reflect on a book’s ideas after I’ve read it, rather than reading it and blindly moving on. Having the book there also makes it that much easier to grab it, open it, and check out the part that made me laugh, think, or otherwise feel something.
These strong connections with ideas, I’ve found, are getting more and more important as the vastness of the digital realm, and all its background noise, takes over so many other aspects of our lives.
Cool Story Bro, But What’s the REAL Reason?
As I’ve stated many times on this blog, my goal is to move toward the point of making more money off of my writing and creative work so I’m less dependent on income from a Day Job. That’s big stuff.
While I’ve brought in some (very small) income from publishing Eikaiwa Bums with Blue Cubicle Press, webstore sales, and other writing-related endeavors, I haven’t yet been able to sell a whole novel with an actual publisher and I’m not at a point where I want to self-publish one or both of my finished novels yet. (The reasons for my not wanting to self-publish entire novels right now are numerous, so I’ll probably do a whole post on that later. Do know, however, I have nothing but respect for self-published authors who know their shit and produce good work.)
The Erochikan Zines seemed like a good middle ground project to tackle for now: it doesn’t involve a lot of investment, and it’s relatively easy for me to make and print a bunch of zines myself. Plus, they’re cheap to mail, even from Japan. I also like the feel of a cool indie zine that somebody put a lot of time and effort into—it feels more personal than a self-published book that someone just fired off and sent out for printing.
Putting out a small but cool project like the Erochikan zines seemed like a great opportunity for people to support this blog (and me) if they felt so inclined—simply put, if you like the work I do and want to throw me a few bucks, I’ll send you a funny zine or two that’ll make you laugh. I also hope you’ll be genuinely interested in them enough so that you’ll want to buy and read them on your own.
Finally, I like making these zines and think they’re good, which matters a lot. If creative people feel passionate about the projects they’re working on, it always shows, and people can sense it. Instead of feeling shy or awkward about the marketing/selling part of being an artist or writer, if you can make the process your own, it’ll feel more natural, and good things will follow.
Oh yeah, before you go…
But I Also Have a Day Job on Facebook
My Instagram where I post cool pics from Japan