here is a new strategy. Each time you feel yourself starting to write poetry, close the file and begin a new one. This will help steer us back to unrefined, pure, useless, perfect spillage. Of course perfection is impossible, but if ever a woman could come close captain circ said. OF THEHF shoic haoishd hanbd no is if the it eht sic the it g iso fioa cohgi focogho cogot cogotor cofuet scojr sconet othe ceitra ncins fio i cant wrtite ic nai nci i nam i am not really good at anything. I write sometimes a little bit but nothing really deep or serious. I drum sometimes but never with a band, just when there’s drum circles of other non-musicians. I sell books but i hate my job and therefore am uninspired at it. It doesn’t particularly invite inspiration, but that is no excuse. I do karate, but only a couple of days a week. I have friends but am patchy about keeping in touch. I go to school and do only the work I have to do to get good grades, and I even got an A- last semester. I am looking for things to whine about. I become a vegetarian but I’m not sure why and I don’t know how far to take it. I play the flute but only enough to pick it up and annoy the dog every now and then; I repeat I am not a musician. I know I should stretch more often than I do in order to feel better. I watch movies or read books that make me disturbed and then I think of what I could do to follow my bliss or my vision and then gradually let it fade from my mind until the next disturbing book. I say I’m going to write a story a day and then I don’t. I am thinking of changing that policy back to just writing anything once a day and you know where THAT leads--into feeling guilty for just bullshitting instead of feeling guilty for writing bad stories or nothing at all. Which is worse you tell me. I am all moral and upright but I’m still a common theif. I have a girlfriend whom I profess to love and feel “right” with but I’m still not sure I don’t want to just go around and fuck whomever and have an exciting single life which I feel I somehow have never fully engaged in. Although I have had opportunities; I have squandered them. I do like to quote fragments: I have squandered—I have squandered (that’s simon and garfunkel in case you didn’t know) to be fair, I do love the things I love, and I mean I really do love them when I love them. Certain songs at certain times. Certain smells at night when there are leaves and water breathing each other’s scents in and out. Certain configurations of sun, moon, stars, and comet on an evening out walking the dog. Things I can’t explain that fill me full of wonder. Bright colors. Strange compositions of fence, railway, gravel, sidewalk, house. The way all these things fit together like a snapshot when I walk by and a dog growls and barks behind a tall wood fence. Back to complaining. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a publisher because I don’t know if I have the drive, self-confidence, self-initiative. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a writer because every time I start to write something I like I immediately start doubting that it will ever be good enough or universal enough or refined enough and I doubt that I have the strength to focus anything into a real finished product except occasionally by luck. It seems so arbitrary when things work out, and then half the time when I look at them later I doubt that they are so great after all, it’s like a spell wears off. I am so weary because I have so much to say and do not feel authorized to say it. I lack credibility. Who the fuck am I? What do I know and who cares? I’m just another “creative flower,” a boring bisexual with molluscum contagiosum, a soft new-agey kind of guy who knows nothing about standing up for himself, nothing about Vietnam or World War Two or the Sixties or the Twenties or beans around a campfire as a way of life or travelling around under his own volition without any money from his parents. What do I know about any universal truths or recognizable pithy social observations or satire or anything—look at the scornful way I am posing these questions. Do you see what I am doing? I do: I am structuring these questions in a way that builds toward a cathartic, self-affirming, humble generalization about how I don’t really need all those worldly things and can be perfect and wise and essential to my brethren without them. And do you know what? I try so hard to do this because I don’t believe it. I am no philosopher. It is all bullshit. Do you hear me? Until I really believe it without trying to convince myself or you, it is all bullshit. But I can’t seem to keep from doing it. It’s become like breathing. Who taught me to do this? Who taught me to use this technique of subtle irony to constantly justify my existence and maintain the illusion of a graspable and admirable identity? My parents. Anne. I blame the usual suspects. Society. That’s a good one, I like that one. Nebulous and huge enough to escape the burden of proof, yes that is a catchall scapegoat: SOCIETY. Again, it is bullshit, but when did that ever stop indivuals with no spine or even Society itself? I don’t know. I’m asking because I really don’t know. A break for some more things I do like: Pine needles. The wind off the Rockies when you’re standing on a tall one near Boulder. The soreness of muscles a day and a half or so after a really surprising workout. Pine needles. Laughing so hard I cry. I haven’t ever really done that. I mean I’ve laughed really hard before, I have laughed long and hard and nearly uncontrollably. I’ve entered that realm where you have laughed so long your belly is tight and hot and your face is flushed and the world is spinning and you are wracked with glorious spasms and you are at your leisure to laugh even more. So you prod it a little. You give yourself a little mental push by picturing again the absurdity that started it off in the first place, and by that you start laughing all over again. You continue this push-and-relax, each time producing a slightly less consuming bout of laughs, until it finally tapers off and you’re merely conjuring up nice smiles or snickers out of context that you really can’t explain and usually no one asks you to. Or maybe they say “What?” and you say, “Oh nothing, it wouldn’t make sense out of context” or some such waiver and they say “Okay” if they are either cool or just didn’t really want to know in the first place but i can’t remember ever actually laughing so hard i began to cry, really cry, not the fake squishing out of tears that I sometimes do when I want to cry, when it seems really appropriate and identity-validating to cry, but I cannot. uave never fully engaged in. Although I have had opportunities; I have squandered them. I do like to quote fragments: I have squandered—I have squandered (that’s simon and garfunkel in case you didn’t know) to be fair, I do love the things I love, and I mean
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