How Did You Get Like This: The Bill Bitner Newsletter Volume Five 2007

It started out as a way to keep in touch with concerned friends as I’d moved out to Land’s End where there definitely be dragons with strict instructions I be left alone to lick my wounds and became, well, what it became. As time went on and it refused to go away the Newsletter subscriber list expanded to three figures and was forwarded in chains of astounding length. The vast majority of correspondence I received regarding the newsletter during those eleven years came from folks I’d never heard of in my life, some hailing from such exotic locales (at least exotic to someone sitting in a trailer out Harmon’s Creek) as Tokyo and Norwich, England. The Newsletter was a rambling dissertation on what (and sometimes who) Bill was doing as well as what Bill was reading, watching, drinking, eating, dreaming etc. There were hundreds of book, music and movie reviews, food and drink reviews and recipes as well, irregular (pretty much everything about the Newsletter was irregular) features like Comics Corner and Tough Guy Corner and much, much more. It was a heady and sometimes toxic stew. Far and away the most popular feature during his lifetime was the Bill and his Dad stories and I was at first going to compile a couple volumes containing those stories exclusively before being convinced by some former Newsletter subscribers to include more of the features so as to give the books a taste of what receiving the Newsletter was like when it was current. A taste somewhere between tangy and bitter I would imagine. I was drinking quite heavily during those years and was often seriously intoxicated while composing the Newsletter which contributed to the stream of consciousness aspect of the thing as well as many lapses in judgment about what is appropriate content.