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The Complete Down and Out in Seattle and Tacoma Series: Sleeping in the Daytime Novella One: Courting Mediocrity Novella Two: Squatting in the Shadow of an Ant Novella Three
I broke the books up in a way that left them easy to read, and enjoy, individually, out of order, or together and in order as they were intended. The original novel that I wrote in 2005, A Complete and Uncut Guide to Total Debauchery in the Modern World was rewritten to include a third-person narrator. The original version of the book was from Jack's first-person perspective. At some point between 2005 and 2020 I renamed it Down and Out in Seattle and Tacoma, an homage to George Orwell's brilliant memoir. In 2020 when I began rewriting the book, I started calling it Sleeping in the Daytime, and that title stuck as the sole title nearly until publication. Just prior to publication, the split happened, and I pulled the titles Courting Mediocrity and Squatting in the Shadow of an Ant out of thin air. They really have no deeper meaning other than they were words that popped into my head while I was wondering what to call these, up until then, unplanned second and third parts.
I did not make hardcover versions of the individual novellas. I wanted the first hardcover to be a special edition that included the complete series. I broke the books up, so I figured it was my prerogative to reunite them. If you're reading this, you are holding one of the original print on demand copies of the entire Down and Out in Seattle and Tacoma Series. This book may have wound up obscure or infamous. Whether history lauded my work or dismissed it, the copy you now hold was certainly produced in limited quantities. Enjoy.
I did not make hardcover versions of the individual novellas. I wanted the first hardcover to be a special edition that included the complete series. I broke the books up, so I figured it was my prerogative to reunite them. If you're reading this, you are holding one of the original print on demand copies of the entire Down and Out in Seattle and Tacoma Series. This book may have wound up obscure or infamous. Whether history lauded my work or dismissed it, the copy you now hold was certainly produced in limited quantities. Enjoy.
Paperback
Published June 1, 2025
4 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
About the author
Christopher J. Stockwell
12 books47 followers"Why do you write?" She asked me.
"Why do you fuckin' care," is what my bestie Jack would say. He's always inside me trying to push his way out. When people take a tone, or give me orders, Jack bristles. Chris has a wife, kids, and a mortgage, so most of the time, Chris is charged with keeping Jack in check. Jack is why I write. The world moved on without Jack. His music scene is nothing but burnt ash from the campfire the night before. Jack's city doesn't exist anymore. It might as well be called Seattle 2.0.
I'm a lawyer, a former prosecutor. When I put on a suit, you can't see me, or should I say you see my mask. Who am I? I'm the counterculture hiding in plain sight. Punk rock gave me a worldview, and I bring that worldview into society every time I speak in a courtroom or you flip the page of one of my books.
Why do I write, because after all these years, Jack and I are stilled pissed off at the world and everyone in it. And we've still got something to say about it.
"Why do you fuckin' care," is what my bestie Jack would say. He's always inside me trying to push his way out. When people take a tone, or give me orders, Jack bristles. Chris has a wife, kids, and a mortgage, so most of the time, Chris is charged with keeping Jack in check. Jack is why I write. The world moved on without Jack. His music scene is nothing but burnt ash from the campfire the night before. Jack's city doesn't exist anymore. It might as well be called Seattle 2.0.
I'm a lawyer, a former prosecutor. When I put on a suit, you can't see me, or should I say you see my mask. Who am I? I'm the counterculture hiding in plain sight. Punk rock gave me a worldview, and I bring that worldview into society every time I speak in a courtroom or you flip the page of one of my books.
Why do I write, because after all these years, Jack and I are stilled pissed off at the world and everyone in it. And we've still got something to say about it.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 19, 2025
"People made up happiness because they can't deal with sadness, and to people, lack of sadness was all. That's all there is to it."
The three books included within this volume provide a scalding look at what it's really like to be an alcoholic and a drug addict. Homelessness is only one of the side effects. Mental illness may also be abundant. This is the story of a man's life and troubles. Some parts are graphically brutal, while others detail the lives of the disturbed. It's a maze that keeps changing as life deteriorates. But I still felt good when I read the last page. That's all there is to it.
The three books included within this volume provide a scalding look at what it's really like to be an alcoholic and a drug addict. Homelessness is only one of the side effects. Mental illness may also be abundant. This is the story of a man's life and troubles. Some parts are graphically brutal, while others detail the lives of the disturbed. It's a maze that keeps changing as life deteriorates. But I still felt good when I read the last page. That's all there is to it.
April 27, 2025
Christopher J. Stockwell is the Hubert Selby Jr. of the Pacific Northwest. The character navigates mental illness, transient relationships, temporary places to live and various means of survival. The whole book was great but my favorites were Parts II & III. It’s an extraordinary book about what people go through just to survive, and will do to quiet negative voices and thoughts booming inside their head.
June 6, 2024
It's a hard story about a hard-luck guy. The first page effectively tells you how the story will end for Jack, and then the next three-hundred pages tells you how. Even so, somewhere along the way, you forget that Jack is doomed and start rooting for him to succeed. Some books make you feel inspired when you've finished them. Other books, make you hurt a little on the inside. This is the latter. The inspiring books are great, but easily forgotten. This book sticks around long after you've put it down.
January 17, 2025
I got a little confused by all the back and forth in time but I enjoyed reading about Jack’s sad journey through mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness.
January 2, 2025
Thanks to Reedsy/Discovery for an ARC of this book. To call it three books in one isn’t quite right, so I’m glad they were combined into one. It’s more of a three-part saga. I was hooked from the start, and I kid you not when I say I was laughing out loud too many times to count, even making my husband laugh when I read portions out loud to him. It’s genuinely funny. It’s also tragic. Jack, drinking and using drugs since he was a teenager, is on a road to destruction. The first time he’s committed to a mental institution, he meets Beth, a recurring character and the love of his life. In fact, at times I wondered what could possibly be wrong with Beth to keep putting up with his shenanigans and his inability to be responsible or an adult in any way that mattered. To be fair, even Jack spent a lot of time being disgusted with himself. I love the descriptions of Jack's life and I do have some sympathy for him, but I would not be one to fall prey to his “charm.” Except, I feel compelled to admit, as a teenager.
We follow Jack from his late teens to his early thirties, and by the end, even he doesn’t think his antics were cute anymore. He’d gone from a teenage to early-twenties bad boy, to an indigent alcoholic and drug addict. And he’s so mentally ill (PTSD, OCD, depression, anxiety, borderline schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder), it’s clear that nothing will get better if he doesn’t take his meds. And he doesn’t.
At first, the narrative is similar to what you might expect from an intelligent drug addict who knows how to keep track of all the various tangents and come back to the point when necessary. But then, I started to realize that this was the narrator’s voice and Jack occasionally commented. Still, at the beginning, Jack is coherent and can tell a great story. He’s not doing this so much anymore by the end, and it’s a tragedy because he started out with opportunities and what I think was a high intellect. Untreated mental illness was just too strong for him to fight it, and this was compounded by his lifestyle.
The early part of the book includes some outright funny, and even endearing excerpts about Jack. “It was an inconvenient time for an acid flashback, but nonetheless it had snuck up on him, so Jack managed a thank you and quickly made his way to an empty table…he was so stoned that the best he could do was to not say anything, and the worst he could do was seem like a stoned moron. In years past, Jack could have made stoned moron cute, but he was in his late twenties, and that sh*t had long since worn thin. It didn’t stop him from being a stoned moron. It’s just that nobody thought it was cute anymore.” Except, apparently, the barista he had a crush on, Dolores. She asks him a question, and he’s silent. When she asks if he heard her question, he responds, “Sometimes I have to remind myself to speak out loud, but only when I’m really f@ckin’ stoned. I’m Jack. Did I speak that time?”
There were some pithy commentaries about Jack: “Jack was terrified of his mind and the real people it dressed itself up as. Jack was terrified of most things, but his mind was the scariest place on Earth.” “Jack was a fifty-one-card deck. He was hard to throw out, because he was so close to functional. You always thought that other card would just turn up in a junk drawer or a couch cushion, so you kept that incomplete deck in a cabinet.”
Jack was like one of those “...kids whose parents had let them walk to school in kindergarten.” His childhood with his older brother Laurence sounds truly horrific because his brother was such a bully, and so much bigger than him. They end up in the ER countless times.
Jack's memory is going, partly because he's a blackout drink. He tries to remember something from his pre-teens, the first time he smoked a joint: “By twenty-eight, the visceral feeling of that experience had disintegrated into a worn out Betamax tape version of itself. Sure, you could still watch the Stand by Me tape you'd watched a thousand times, but all the sharpness was gone. Not only that, but there were entire portions of the tape that were just snow on the screen, eaten, crumpled tape. The experience was nothing that was really real to Jack at the age of twenty-eight. It might as well have been someone else's memory, or for that matter, an actual movie on a worn out Betamax tape.”
While Jack is preparing for the first date in his life, with Dolores, he asks for advice from his circle of acquaintances, which isn't great. He comes to the conclusion that there are certain subjects that shouldn't be brought up in the course of conversation. These include: “molestation, politics, animal rights, abortion, (and) prostitution as a sensible employment option for academically challenged men and women.” The narrator then goes on to describe Jack's philosophy of dating, and the fact that when you go out with a more sophisticated woman than he's accustomed to, you need to avoid the subject of sex if you hope to have it. And if you've been to more than one place during your date, you can offer a kiss. Jack pipes in to say, “At that point, you will know if you're bein' prompted for something' more simply by how her body moves in your arms. If she melts in your arms all smooth like black tar heroin over a flame, you're in. If she's brittle, like putting' a razor through a choppy rock of angel dust, your night is over, my friend." I couldn't stop laughing at this description.
Jack really wants this woman, Dolores, to like him, and the narrator says, "Jack's aim was more sinister than using somebody for sex. It was his intention to use this girl for her emotional and mental stability." This is because “Jack was just a germ with feelings, and germs destroyed things.” Later, it becomes apparent, "Jack had latched onto her because of what he perceived as her stability, but she really only looked stable to Jack because Jack was so unstable that anyone that was not currently committed to an institution looked stable to him.”
The thing is, Jack has some great insights when he's thinking clearly. And this one really struck me. Observing the changes that had occurred in his city, he realized that his hometown "didn't wait on his permission to do anything just because he had been born there. The city changed, and yes, people from other places moved in, built things, got married, drove Subarus, and made lives for themselves right there. Jack had no ownership or veto power over who could live there, or what they might build or drive when they came." Time marches on, with or without your permission.
Another great observation from Jack was this one. “God seemed to antagonize humans in much the same way that Jack had used to antagonize his GI Joe figures as a kid. Jack had mutilated his toys instead of cleaning his room. To Jack, God appeared to have a similar agenda for humans and planet Earth."
“Jack's mind was wired to go bad right away, but his body was wired to keep living for a long time. The end result was always the same: everyday, Jack kept waking up. His mind wouldn't give him a moment's peace, no matter how hard he beat it with substances, and his body wouldn't stop living, no matter how hard he beat it with substances. He was stuck, alive, and alone." “...the older he got, the more he realized that he was a fly trying to escape from a closed window.”
There's also a scene in an AM/PM that cracked me up, the narrator describing the person working behind the counter. “Somehow, his creator had crammed all the worst things about being an adolescent and young man into this one sad creature. He had terrible acne and a patchy beard. Instead of shaving, he had just let the whiskers grow over the pimples. He was too skinny and too short. Usually, people were one or the other. His glasses were too small, but his lenses were way too thick. Was he human? Was he a facsimile of a human? Jack didn't want to stick around to find out.”
There's another scene in which Jack describes blood on the sheets of Beth's bed thusly: “Beth’s sheets had blue and white zigzag stripes, and Jack had thought the pools of red blood actually gave the sheets a bit of a patriotic appeal. With the backdrop of Beth's antique ironframe bed, the scene had been a nice little slice of Americana. Jack imagined that a painting of the two of them staring at the bloody bed would have made a handsome addition to some art gallery or museum. It could be titled something like Patriotism and Valor at Home.” I was howling when I read this one.
Discussing nostalgia and why it's so appealing to people, Jack chimes in with this gem: “...nostalgia for the alright times happens because people can(‘t) take the alright times that had happened in the past away from you. You don't have to worry about when pain is going to start because it already happened. You already know when the pain started. You never have to relive the pain and misery when you're rememberin’ the alright times. You just live in the alright times, and never go to the pain and misery times. That's why. Duh!”
I’ll be honest, when I wasn’t laughing, I wanted to cry for poor Jack. Although I wouldn’t want someone so damaged in my life, I empathized with his plight, and some of his realizations were heartbreaking. Here are a few of the saddest observations about him and his life:
“Jack's life was about failure, and hardship. Jack had been forced to hurt and fail to thrive, and by thrive he meant slow down his inevitable decline.”
“Jack probably knew things weren't ever going to get better for him. Actually, he always figured they'd get worse, or stay equally sh*tty. Making it on time to his next metaphorical beating was his purpose.”
“The world was essentially just waiting for him to die so that, in so doing, he would solve the problem that his existence created for the people in it.”
This is an outstanding cautionary story about someone with opportunities and intelligence who never quite learned the lessons life tried to teach him. He chose wrong, over and over again. With a more than healthy dose of humor, the author paints a depressing picture of what life could be.
We follow Jack from his late teens to his early thirties, and by the end, even he doesn’t think his antics were cute anymore. He’d gone from a teenage to early-twenties bad boy, to an indigent alcoholic and drug addict. And he’s so mentally ill (PTSD, OCD, depression, anxiety, borderline schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder), it’s clear that nothing will get better if he doesn’t take his meds. And he doesn’t.
At first, the narrative is similar to what you might expect from an intelligent drug addict who knows how to keep track of all the various tangents and come back to the point when necessary. But then, I started to realize that this was the narrator’s voice and Jack occasionally commented. Still, at the beginning, Jack is coherent and can tell a great story. He’s not doing this so much anymore by the end, and it’s a tragedy because he started out with opportunities and what I think was a high intellect. Untreated mental illness was just too strong for him to fight it, and this was compounded by his lifestyle.
The early part of the book includes some outright funny, and even endearing excerpts about Jack. “It was an inconvenient time for an acid flashback, but nonetheless it had snuck up on him, so Jack managed a thank you and quickly made his way to an empty table…he was so stoned that the best he could do was to not say anything, and the worst he could do was seem like a stoned moron. In years past, Jack could have made stoned moron cute, but he was in his late twenties, and that sh*t had long since worn thin. It didn’t stop him from being a stoned moron. It’s just that nobody thought it was cute anymore.” Except, apparently, the barista he had a crush on, Dolores. She asks him a question, and he’s silent. When she asks if he heard her question, he responds, “Sometimes I have to remind myself to speak out loud, but only when I’m really f@ckin’ stoned. I’m Jack. Did I speak that time?”
There were some pithy commentaries about Jack: “Jack was terrified of his mind and the real people it dressed itself up as. Jack was terrified of most things, but his mind was the scariest place on Earth.” “Jack was a fifty-one-card deck. He was hard to throw out, because he was so close to functional. You always thought that other card would just turn up in a junk drawer or a couch cushion, so you kept that incomplete deck in a cabinet.”
Jack was like one of those “...kids whose parents had let them walk to school in kindergarten.” His childhood with his older brother Laurence sounds truly horrific because his brother was such a bully, and so much bigger than him. They end up in the ER countless times.
Jack's memory is going, partly because he's a blackout drink. He tries to remember something from his pre-teens, the first time he smoked a joint: “By twenty-eight, the visceral feeling of that experience had disintegrated into a worn out Betamax tape version of itself. Sure, you could still watch the Stand by Me tape you'd watched a thousand times, but all the sharpness was gone. Not only that, but there were entire portions of the tape that were just snow on the screen, eaten, crumpled tape. The experience was nothing that was really real to Jack at the age of twenty-eight. It might as well have been someone else's memory, or for that matter, an actual movie on a worn out Betamax tape.”
While Jack is preparing for the first date in his life, with Dolores, he asks for advice from his circle of acquaintances, which isn't great. He comes to the conclusion that there are certain subjects that shouldn't be brought up in the course of conversation. These include: “molestation, politics, animal rights, abortion, (and) prostitution as a sensible employment option for academically challenged men and women.” The narrator then goes on to describe Jack's philosophy of dating, and the fact that when you go out with a more sophisticated woman than he's accustomed to, you need to avoid the subject of sex if you hope to have it. And if you've been to more than one place during your date, you can offer a kiss. Jack pipes in to say, “At that point, you will know if you're bein' prompted for something' more simply by how her body moves in your arms. If she melts in your arms all smooth like black tar heroin over a flame, you're in. If she's brittle, like putting' a razor through a choppy rock of angel dust, your night is over, my friend." I couldn't stop laughing at this description.
Jack really wants this woman, Dolores, to like him, and the narrator says, "Jack's aim was more sinister than using somebody for sex. It was his intention to use this girl for her emotional and mental stability." This is because “Jack was just a germ with feelings, and germs destroyed things.” Later, it becomes apparent, "Jack had latched onto her because of what he perceived as her stability, but she really only looked stable to Jack because Jack was so unstable that anyone that was not currently committed to an institution looked stable to him.”
The thing is, Jack has some great insights when he's thinking clearly. And this one really struck me. Observing the changes that had occurred in his city, he realized that his hometown "didn't wait on his permission to do anything just because he had been born there. The city changed, and yes, people from other places moved in, built things, got married, drove Subarus, and made lives for themselves right there. Jack had no ownership or veto power over who could live there, or what they might build or drive when they came." Time marches on, with or without your permission.
Another great observation from Jack was this one. “God seemed to antagonize humans in much the same way that Jack had used to antagonize his GI Joe figures as a kid. Jack had mutilated his toys instead of cleaning his room. To Jack, God appeared to have a similar agenda for humans and planet Earth."
“Jack's mind was wired to go bad right away, but his body was wired to keep living for a long time. The end result was always the same: everyday, Jack kept waking up. His mind wouldn't give him a moment's peace, no matter how hard he beat it with substances, and his body wouldn't stop living, no matter how hard he beat it with substances. He was stuck, alive, and alone." “...the older he got, the more he realized that he was a fly trying to escape from a closed window.”
There's also a scene in an AM/PM that cracked me up, the narrator describing the person working behind the counter. “Somehow, his creator had crammed all the worst things about being an adolescent and young man into this one sad creature. He had terrible acne and a patchy beard. Instead of shaving, he had just let the whiskers grow over the pimples. He was too skinny and too short. Usually, people were one or the other. His glasses were too small, but his lenses were way too thick. Was he human? Was he a facsimile of a human? Jack didn't want to stick around to find out.”
There's another scene in which Jack describes blood on the sheets of Beth's bed thusly: “Beth’s sheets had blue and white zigzag stripes, and Jack had thought the pools of red blood actually gave the sheets a bit of a patriotic appeal. With the backdrop of Beth's antique ironframe bed, the scene had been a nice little slice of Americana. Jack imagined that a painting of the two of them staring at the bloody bed would have made a handsome addition to some art gallery or museum. It could be titled something like Patriotism and Valor at Home.” I was howling when I read this one.
Discussing nostalgia and why it's so appealing to people, Jack chimes in with this gem: “...nostalgia for the alright times happens because people can(‘t) take the alright times that had happened in the past away from you. You don't have to worry about when pain is going to start because it already happened. You already know when the pain started. You never have to relive the pain and misery when you're rememberin’ the alright times. You just live in the alright times, and never go to the pain and misery times. That's why. Duh!”
I’ll be honest, when I wasn’t laughing, I wanted to cry for poor Jack. Although I wouldn’t want someone so damaged in my life, I empathized with his plight, and some of his realizations were heartbreaking. Here are a few of the saddest observations about him and his life:
“Jack's life was about failure, and hardship. Jack had been forced to hurt and fail to thrive, and by thrive he meant slow down his inevitable decline.”
“Jack probably knew things weren't ever going to get better for him. Actually, he always figured they'd get worse, or stay equally sh*tty. Making it on time to his next metaphorical beating was his purpose.”
“The world was essentially just waiting for him to die so that, in so doing, he would solve the problem that his existence created for the people in it.”
This is an outstanding cautionary story about someone with opportunities and intelligence who never quite learned the lessons life tried to teach him. He chose wrong, over and over again. With a more than healthy dose of humor, the author paints a depressing picture of what life could be.
August 1, 2025
This book was actually gifted to me by a friend who knows I have a soft spot for raw, gritty writing, and wow, it hit hard in the best way. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into at first, but once I started reading, I couldn’t look away. The story has this haunting honesty that stays with you, especially the way Jack is portrayed. He’s flawed, frustrating, but so real, and that made him impossible not to care about.
What I really appreciated was how the writing didn’t try to clean things up or offer easy answers. It just let the chaos, loneliness, and dark humor unfold in this strange, almost poetic rhythm. There were moments that made me laugh, and others that made me sit in silence for a while. It’s not a comforting book, but it’s an unforgettable one. It shows you what it’s like to fall through the cracks and still somehow have a story worth telling.
What I really appreciated was how the writing didn’t try to clean things up or offer easy answers. It just let the chaos, loneliness, and dark humor unfold in this strange, almost poetic rhythm. There were moments that made me laugh, and others that made me sit in silence for a while. It’s not a comforting book, but it’s an unforgettable one. It shows you what it’s like to fall through the cracks and still somehow have a story worth telling.
June 17, 2025
The narrator shifts absurdly and satirically in and out of the narrative, sometimes telling the story, and other times breaking the fourth wall to speak directly for himself. That’s something I’ve never encountered in a book before. To me, that’s what makes a good book, one that forces me to think or see things in a different way.
The story itself follows Jack, a Gen X addict interned in Fairfax Psychiatric. He sees life through a grungy lens. He has no place to go, nowhere to sleep, keeps falling back into drugs, can’t hold a job for more than a couple of weeks, and ends up in wildly imaginative episodes, like inventing a life story for Dolores, the waitress at a restaurant, after an acid flashback. All of it is told with an absurd, comical tone.
It’s a tough read, but one that delves deeply into what it means to be lost, alone, and still, somehow magnetic.
The story itself follows Jack, a Gen X addict interned in Fairfax Psychiatric. He sees life through a grungy lens. He has no place to go, nowhere to sleep, keeps falling back into drugs, can’t hold a job for more than a couple of weeks, and ends up in wildly imaginative episodes, like inventing a life story for Dolores, the waitress at a restaurant, after an acid flashback. All of it is told with an absurd, comical tone.
It’s a tough read, but one that delves deeply into what it means to be lost, alone, and still, somehow magnetic.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews