J. Walter Swartz

Drive East Until You Hit An Ocean

People keep asking me: "What is your book about?" And I am stumped...The thing is it is not "about" anything. It is an anthology of humorous writings. But then again humor is subjective so saying it is humor opens one to being seen as arrogant, "He thinks he's funny." Well, no, I'm not funny... what I wrote is funny to me. I amused myself and others have told me that they thought it was funny so I am glad to share. Drive East, covers over 20 years of random writings. There are poems from when I was on my high school magazine's editorial staff that I would submit to give a break from the poetry that, and forgive me for saying so, was repetitive and teen agsty. "A Trip To The Woods" was a parody of the sorts of poems we read through every day. Nothing teaches you what works and what doesn't faster than reading hundreds of submissions of vastly varied quality and then having to give critiques on them that are a bit more involved than "That's good." or "That sucks!" which was banned fairly early on.

There are also several comical sketches from high school, college, and an improv/sketch comedy group Rick and I founded in Arlington, VA. "Once and only once upon a time in an alley in LA" was a sketch written after a math class where a teacher wrote "LOGIC. This is a duck." on the chalk board and then left for 20 minutes. It has a very Monty Python feel to it.

In high school I was selected for a Kennedy Center acting program. And while I am considered a fairly descent actor I have a serious aversion to seeing myself on camera so when I went to film school and my classmates always wanted my friend Ian, or myself in a scenes they shot we eventually had to make a stand that we had come there to learn how to shoot films and not to act.

In 2005 I went to The New York Film Academy for the one year film making course. I'm listed multiple times on IMDB. One of my class mates, a TV writer and show creator for the BBC, after a stressful session translating a script he was sent about the old cliche of "a room divided by a chalk line" I gave him a copy of my list of cliches which he said he was going to add to the show bible as things to avoid in the future.

Some of the content of the book comes from a time when I had a job where I was supposed to sell cars in a mall from a computer. No one knew what the hell we were doing so no one came in. We were not allowed to look at the web, but we could send e-mails. I sent ridiculous numbers of e-mails to a large group of friends. My friend Nathan Hale and his wife Chantee compiled many of those into a book called "Emailings of the Mad" This book, largely exists because of them.

Evil Corporate Labs came from "Disposable Pets" which was originally one of those e-mails. Evil Corporate Labs is intended to be a comic book but Rick and I don't draw. (Rick did until he broke his hand at one point.) Rick would like us to do it as a film instead but that is currently well beyond our budget. Evil Corporate Labs is about the put upon Cary Gordon, who leaves his job at a department store complaints department to be hired by Evil Corporate Labs, a company that has technologies undreamt of, beuaracracy beyond belief, and also at some point took over Hell. As the boss likes to say "Hell is my pee-pee room." Teleportation? A great way to make money in the self storage industry by keeping goods on the moon.