Flying Blows

Big Heavy Sweater. You might think it was
really ossum to sit next to Hemingway on the plane...
that is until he got his itchy pretzel dust and
stinky rum sweat all over you.

Greg:

I've made a psychological breakthrough. I've managed to upgrade my irrational fear of flying to fully rational hatred of flying. As The Bard once quoth, How doth flying blow? Let me count the ways.

OK - so here's how this came about. I had to fly down to San Francisco for work a couple days ago. I was sitting in the waiting room at my gate - you know, the one with the screaming kids (what do they do, import choleric infants from 18th century England and stick them with pins or something?); crackling, unintelligible PA announcements; scoliosis-inducing seating, and That One Guy Who Stares At You The Whole Goddamn Time (is he on airline payroll, I wonder?). I was starting to get some anticipatory anxiety, something that I've learned to recognize as easily and detachedly (Hey, nice word! -Ed.) as you might recognize a stomach ache. I've been dealing with it and an entire spectrum of related and ancillary anxieties since you dropped me off at the nuthatch that one night back in 1984. Suffice it to say, I've also learned to deal with it for the most part. So yeah, I'm feeling the clench train pulling into the station and so I figure I'll listen to the fear of flying audio course that I always take with me to impart some rational wisdom to my irrationally-twitching brain. And then I just said to myself, "Y'know what? Fuck that. And not just fuck that. Capital FUCK capital THAT. I don't wanna be that "guy" who has that "thing" that he has to treat all the time. That's a lot of work and a bunch of BS." So I just quit. And I wasn't fearful anymore. And that was pretty much it. Done. Quit. Stop. No mas para yo. Goose egg. Empty set.

So now that I was no longer distracted by thoughts of falling out of the sky in a flaming, tangled mass, I was free to experience the splendor of traveling aboard a modern aircraft.

It sucks. It's not nice at all. Who in their right mind wants to be bombarded with cosmic rays while trapped inside an aluminum sausage? And it's loud, it's stuffy, and that 110% real faux leather they make the seats out of - why, if one were to break wind against it, it would most certainly make a mighty cracking sound like two razor strops colliding at supersonic speed. Papp!! Imagine the embarassment. (Speaking of which, ever since I wrote that bit about farts, the traffic on this clog has not abated even for a day. Google Analytics shows me that they're reading what will become known as The Dear Gregory FartBlog in Malaysia this evening.) I suppose I could go on to whine about the pretzels they gave us which were - and I crap you negative - the size of the nail on my pinky finger. But it all seems so pointless. Flying is what it is - a suffocating, claustrophobic hell peopled with people who get their people sweat all over you because you're crammed smack up against 'em in a 600 MPH autoclave of human misery. And neither you, nor I, nor all the magical pixie dust in Baby Jesus' coke bullet is going to change that. I've been working on this "happiness" thing, and it seems really counterproductive to dwell on that which induces agony, y'know?

But here's the ape in my ointment. I have two more round trip flights coming up in the next two months. I got tickets to go to two full days (two days!! ) of teachings from His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama (we call him The Big D) at the Graham Civic Center in San Francisco at the end of April, so I gotta fly down to that. But I figure either way, if I go down in a flaming ball or land safely but all schmutzig with people sweat, I was on a pilgrimage to see The Big D so I'm pretty much a shoo-in for nirvana.

Oh yeah, and then I'm going backpacking in Yellowstone at the end of May, so again, I'm going to have to fly not once but twice both ways for that. You can only fly from Seattle to Boise and then straddle an angry gnat to Jackson. They won't send you direct. I'm sure that the fine people of Wyoming put the kybosh on direct flights, citing the danger of their fair state filling up with steers, queers and hobos from Liberal Ol' Seattle if such a thing were allowed. (Hey - wait a minute... Actually... There was a movie about... Oh never mind. -Ed.) But again, whether it's a flaming ball or people sweat, I was on my way to Yellowstone so I'm pretty much a shoo-in for the Happy Hunting Grounds. (Think again, kimosabe. -Ed.)

But that's it, though. No more flying for me after that. I'd probably have to fly if I were going to Europe or something, but I'll probably never make it to Europe because I don't believe it exists. That's just some story they made up to scare us when we were kids. ("Little Thaddeus, did you know that in Europe they have a toilet that shoots water right up your hiney?" "Eeeeewww! I hate Europe!")

And if I go to Bhutan, I'll just take the train.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Uncle To The 26th Power

Pull my finger: Something tells me that at least one of these guys is somebody's

batshit-crazy uncle. So this is what I have to look forward to.

Greg:

I'm going to tell you something that may surprise you. These letters that I write to you are not private. In fact, they are "posted" on a "blog" called "Dear Gregory" where literally "hundreds" of "people" "read" them.

Now let me tell you something that will surprise you even less. Our niece Morgan gave birth yesterday at 5:10PM to our newest grand-niece, a linebacker of an infant girl (8 lbs. 10 oz., 21") named Mina. That brings our nephew/niece total to 26. We are now uncles to the 26th power.

Just stick with me. All of this seemingly disparate information does have a singular point.

Back to the "blog" issue. Last month, I installed sophisticated tracking code on this blog which enables me to see exactly how many people are reading it and exactly wherefrom. It also tells me which installments get the most "hits". (Ask me to slow down if all this heady technical jargon is too "much" for you.) What I have discovered from reading the data produced by my new analytics tool is that people everywhere simply love farts. As a matter of fact, people love farts five times more than they love philanthropy. Here's my proof. Of all the letters I've written to you, the one about farts scored five times as many page hits as the lowest scoring page (which was essentially about philanthropy). And the "fart" entry set an all-time record for number of hits from any entry point - and - and - it was read worldwide. Wimbledon, Valencia, Madrid, Paris, Budapest, Beijing - all God's chilluns love they farts. Yes they does.

However, people read about farts much more quickly than they read about philanthropy. People spend about 3 minutes ripping through an installment on farts, whereas they spend a dawdling 16 minutes on installments about philanthropy.

OK, so - how does this figure in with the astounding number of nieces and nephews we have in common? Lord knows I can't even remember most of their names. Who are they again? Let's see if I can keep a running total - John's kids: Gabe, who has four kids, so that's five; Camiya plus her three kids - so that's nine - Brendon has two...or three? - I'll spot him one, so that's thirteen total now for that one sibling. You've got none, so that's easy. Sgt. Rock's kids: Phaedra - fourteen - Alowan - fifteen - Morgan plus one - sixteen, seventeen. And our sister - she has ten. Whoah, that's twenty seven! But that takes into account Brendon's extra mystery kid that I may have just made up (let's call him Shmendrick), so it may just be 26 after all. Well, anyway you slice it, that's a buttload of kids. It's like somebody got out the baby hose and sprayed it in every direction.

So with that many nieces and nephews of ours crawling the planet, it's a pretty good bet that some of them read this blog. And if they read this blog, then according to my fancy new analytics tool, they love farts.

Here's a tip, kids, if you're reading this: don't tell anyone we're related. You know why? I'll tell you. One day you're going to be somewhere, maybe somewhere far away, maybe some place where they read this blog, like China. And you're going to be in a Starbucks in Beijing and some guy is gonna come up to you and he's gonna say (in Chinese), "Hey, do you read 'Dear Gregory'?" And you're gonna say, "Read it?! I'm freakin' related to that guy!" And then all of a sudden the guy's gonna point at you and scream "You love farts!" And then pretty soon everybody in the place is going to be screaming "you love farts!" in Chinese. And you're gonna feel pretty crunchy. And then they're going to put you in a labor camp where you'll be forced to build the Victory Over The Fart-Loving Roundeye Memorial Dam. And that'll pretty much be it for you. Done deal. Game over.

Look, all of this may sound like lunatic ravings to you and there's a very simple reason why it does: because it is. But every little kid out there needs to have a crazy uncle who spews rambling, nonsensical yarns to the point of glossolalia, don't you think? A friend of mine had an Uncle Carl who used to raid buffets at the funerals of complete strangers while wearing a Santa hat. Nobody said shit to Uncle Carl and he was always well fed. Never had a grocery bill in his life. People gave him a wide berth and a bottle of suds and let him be. I learned from Carl's example that pretty much anything you want is attainable, provided you're willing to compromise a big, thick slice of your dignity to get it. I always wanted an uncle who was about that nuts. Then one day I looked around at a crowd of my nieces and nephews who were laughing their fool heads off because I had my suit on backwards and was talking gibberish, and you know what I realized? I realized that crazy old Uncle Carl was me. (Only thing missing is the Santa hat. -Ed.) So yeah, with 26 (27?) nieces and nephews, I figure I have to be able muster up enough crazy to go all the way around.

I'm rambling now, but like I said, that's exactly what crazy old uncles are supposed to do. They're supposed to ramble and tell fart jokes. So far I'm doing pretty damn good, dontcha think?

Pull my finger,

-Thaddeus

Why Must I Fart So Much?

Hubert Korneliszoon Poot: Dutch Enlightenment-era writer
and namesake/author of the first fart joke.

Greg:

I don't know if you've ever farted before. I didn't really keep track while we were growing up. Maybe you did and you just blamed it on your tuba and no one was the wiser. After all, the tuba is the most flatulent of all the brass instruments. Just in case you haven't, don't take it up as a hobby. It's really not worth the alienation and/or social stigma. To wit:

I had two going-away parties to attend last night, one for my friend and (now) former co-worker Francesca (hired away by the Starbucks creative team) and another for my friend and (now) former co-worker Tyler (leaving on a round-the-world voyage)...

Wait, first I simply must digress onto the topic of Naughty Limericks. Francesca is one tough old bird, and though that tough old bird is a songbird who trills like a meadowlark, (Drop that goddamn bird metaphor now before I shoot you with a bb gun. -Ed.) she occasionally peppers her discourse with Naval-grade profanity. So I figured hey, what's a better send-off for a pottymouth like Francie than writing and performing a trio of Naughty Limericks in her honor at the event? So yeah, I did. And for your edification, here they are - with reactions from the present company included parenthetically after each:

There once was a hooker named Francie
Who found her vocation too chancey
She found some employment
Much more to her enjoyment
And safer than dropping her pantsies

(Francesca hoots with joy; one token giggle by the rest of the company; many anxious brows furrowed.)

Francesca has gone to Starbucks
We wish her "so many good lucks"
All we ask, Francie dear
In your heart, keep us near
And come visit us miserable fucks

(Francesca blushes with joy and cackles; much nervous clinking of cutlery on the part of the rest assembled.)

Francesca the horny wordmonger
Needed fresh meat to lessen her hunger
She felt wrongly pent
By the age of consent
"Eighteen? Hell, I'll go ten years younger!"

(Francesca shrieks with glee I LOVE IT!; cold granite silence and frozen, contorted grimaces of abject terror from the rest. Apparently pedophilia, even in Limerick form, doesn't play well in Seattle.)

Yeah, so as you can see, I was a smash hit. And soon after that I continued to ingratiate myself to the present company by furtively playing an oboe cantata with my butt. As you know, I'm a vegetarian. That means when I go out, if I'm not going to a strictly vegetarian restaurant, I have to make do with whatever legume, twig, or compost heap that's on the menu. And usually the selection is pretty much anything you see pictured on the label of the Beano bottle. I don't know what it was about the entree I ordered, but it could've been called The South Wind Special. Blazing sciroccos of acrid stench were emanating from my backside. Since I had the handy "out" of Tyler's party, I clenched my hiney as best I could and said my goodbyes.

Needless to say, I never made it. On the way there, I stopped off at home to pick up Teresa, but by then such a fugue was going on - with grumblings, claps, and staccato horn-bursts (with the occasional bold firmata and scintillating arpeggio) - I couldn't possibly subject another group of air-breathing humans to its terrible majesty. I mean c'mon, my ass was practically respirating. Someone would've called the police. Or the Guinness Book statisticians. So instead I sat at home and did my best to inflate the couch.

It's perplexing. Why do I gotta toot so much? And how do I explain to Tyler that I couldn't make his party because my ass was practically shouting and I was afraid of asphyxiating the guests? I've combed Emily Post's rules of etiquette, and I got zero hits on any combination of the terms "fart", "party", "wind", and "stanky". Any advice you may have short of using a cork would be most welcome.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

I Heart Satan

Waiter! Two glasses of Chardonnay, please - with
ample space between them!

Greg:

What the hell happened to all the decent Satan worshippers in the world? Seems to me that when we were young, there were scads of them. Remember in 1970 or so, right around the release of The Exorcist, how Satan-worshippers were piled up to the eaves of every house in suburbia? Or was that just in our neighborhood? Or was that just the formerly dry-as-emery-toast Episcopalians trying to drum up business during the charismatic movement?

Speaking of Satan, I was deeply saddened when my television informed me that the Masons - contrary to popular myth - are not cat-buggering Satan worshippers. (However, it seems that certain members of The Royal Navy are.) I had so hoped that they were. According to The History Channel, which in my household is also called The Unimpeachable Voice of Truth, the Masons are nothing of the sort. They were originally a sort of labor union, and then they morphed into a secret society of free-thinkers trying to avoid the ire of the church and the monarchy. Now they're a bunch of well-meaning, bespectacled old farts who couldn't even stab a tuna sandwich in fit of rage.

That's too bad. It would be weirdly comforting to me to know that events such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq were the handiwork of an evil, multinational cabal and not the result of the nexus of blind zeal and staggering incompetence. It would be so much nicer to believe that the NeoCons were genuinely pernicious and not just a bunch of dumbasses with really big guns.

I know what you're going to say. You're going to say that it's a thin-to-nonexistent line between ignorant and evil. Agreed - but! I say that if you're gonna be evil, don't do it by the default of your own ignorance. If you're gonna be evil in my dream world, I want you inverting pentagrams and slamming ham on the altar of St. Mark's Cathedral during a first communion celebration for deaf children. I want you to derive your wickedness from a pure source. I want you to drill down 'til you hit Beelzebub himself. Don't just get put into "office" in an "election" or be "appointed" by the "president". That's the "pussy way out". (FACT: quotation marks are actually a typeset representation of the Hex Against The Evil Eye, but NOT the International Mullet-Wearer's Salute, which is shockingly similar. So for instance, when you say pussy way out or any other quotationally-ensconced phrase, you must, by Washington State Law, make with The Sign already. FURTHER NOTE: making The Sign with one hand is perfectly legal and acceptable if one of your limbs has been lopped off and replaced with a hook or a chainsaw or a garage-door opener or something.)

I don't have much else to say on the subject of evil, so I'll leave you for now with this exhibit of journalistic evil. These two blurbs appeared exactly in this order on the front page of the online edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I crap you negative. You cannot make this stuff up.

Study: Millions have 'rage' disorder
CHICAGO -- To you, that angry, horn-blasting tailgater is suffering from road rage. But doctors have another name for it -- intermittent explosive disorder -- and a new study suggests it is far more common than they realized. Update · 2:00 p.m.

Man attempts to blow up house
A man apparently attempted to blow up his South Seattle home with natural gas after a standoff with police Sunday. Update · 12:02 p.m.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

-Thaddeus

My Sole Literary Ambition

Let's make some noise! Avant garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen
(pictured here, preparing to kill everyone) gets paid to
make music out of train wrecks and ostrich farts. Why can't I make a
living with my obsession?

Greg:

Got your message. Heard you were going to be out until Monday. What do you have to do that's so all-fired important that it's going to keep you away from the telephone for that long? Are you camping out for tickets to an Imax film about the history of the slide rule? Or is the Nevada Whores Orphan's Symphony mounting a retrospective of the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen? Whatever it is, I hope it brings you joy, and that you return to the telephone with your voice intact. I know how you like to shout yourself hoarse at Stockhausen concerts.

Which brings me to my next point which is things that bring me joy. Correction: "the" thing that brings me joy. It's just that yesterday while I was revising my profile to say "My sole literary ambition is to write these letters to my brother Greg", I realized that my sole literary ambition is to write these letters to my brother Greg. So it's the joy of self-actualization, one that you are keenly aware of being a musician and all. It seems that those who are aware of exactly what their self-actualizing gig is - the one thing that they do with their own hands that gives their life purpose, meaning and direction - are understandably the ones who feel the constant frustration of not being able to do just that one thing all the time.

Some folks might say that's just the way life is, that you don't just get to entertain your obsessions, artistic, scientific or otherwise. I say that's a load of hooey - you don't get to entertain your obsessions if you can't make money doing it. But this is America, dammit! There's a way to make money doing just about anything!

So what predicated my assertion of letter-writing as my sole literary ambition was a recent compliment I received from one of my co-workers. Patrick Kevin, a marketing - wizard? junkie? stylist? seargent? - anyway, he came into my office, apropos of nothing, and asked me in (what I took to be) abejct flabbergastration, "What are you doing here?!" At first I thought he was implying that I blew off a deadline by sitting on my hands or playing Frogger or something.

Clarification and amelioration: I do, at times, sit on my hands and/or play Frogger. I do not, however, blow deadlines. Why? Not because I have a good work ethic. Because I'm as neurotic as a hamster on meth, and believe that I'll be stricken with boils if I'm dilatory. This digression has been brought to you by GlaxoSmithKline, makers of both Dexedrine and Paxil.

So I says to him I says, "uhhhhhwwWWwhhhhuhhhh?" And he surprises me by telling me that he's been reading my blog and why am I not making big cash dollars writing screenplays or something instead of writing junk - excuse me, opt-in email when all the writing he sees out in the world can't touch mine with a three-meter pole and so on. I know that Patrick knows his way around good writing from our conversations. And I could see he was really serious about what he was saying by the way he was stirring the air in my office with his right arm and then his left, as though he were making peanut brittle and trying to make good and goddamn sure it didn't scorch before it reached the hard-ball stage. (That's a little confectionary insider joke.)

I have to tell you honestly, it was the best compliment I've received on my writing since PEN/Faulkner and National Book Award Winner T. Coraghessan Boyle called me "a fine and pithy writer who won't miss any more classes." (Emphasis: his.)

So anyway, yeah, that about made me stammer and blush. But it also made me think about why I'm not making big cash dollars writing screenplays. Then I remembered how I've already written six or so screenplays, ranging in quality from "sucky" to "unbelievably sucky" to "unforgivable", and that I really didn't like the whole film culture (oxymoron?) or writing screenplays. It also occurred to me that I might write a novel or something, but coming home mentally knackered after a hard day at the email factory left me precious little motivation to even press the start button on the TiVo, let alone coordinate the mammoth task of creating an ampersand by way of pressing the shift key.

Then I realized that the one thing that taps into a boundless well of desire to write is the simple thought of writing to you. There's nothing I'd rather do than gab to my brother Greg on paper every gol-durn day. Honestly, I can only - and do often - converse unceasingly with you on subjects as diverse as game theory, The Funkadelics, my cat's ass (aka The Brownstar), and the hubristic hegemony of the right wing. Watch, I'll prove it. I can say, "Fast and bulbous, The Mascara Snake!" And you'll automatically say, "Also a tin teardrop!" And I bet you even said it before you read that sentence. Why? Because you get it, and by extension, you get me. And there's nothing more affirming and comforting in this often confounding and heartbreaking life than being understood. It's the one time you're sure that you're alive.

Thanks for being my brother, and thanks for giving me a reason to write.

And if you enjoyed this, please send $75,000 and full medical coverage to my home address.

-Thaddeus

My Brain Has Turned To Creamed Fucking Corn

Henry Rollins demonstrates the benefits of Neck Farming.

Greg:

I don't know what you do all day other than sit around and think up novel ways to not respond to my letters. Oh wait - that's right. You invent stuff. Each day you chisel a larger niche for yourself in the abbey of history. Whereas I sit around all day and try to think up novel ways of getting people to buy stuff they could probably do without. Barring that, I at least try to write mass marketing emails that get read before they get deleted. So therein lies the difference between us: you have lofty goals, whereas I would be happy if my goals reached as high as the crown molding in a dormouse's terlit room.

Which brings me to my next point which is that I don't have one. The wife? Fine. Kid? Awesome. Work? Same as always. And I've had some pretty fun holiday gatherings so far. So why do I feel like I'm up to my neck in cement?

So speaking of neck, there is something I have been doing, which is to do some neck-farming down at the Intramural Athletic center at the University of Washington. I have spousal privileges there since Teresa is an employee of the UW. So I've been down there hitting the plates a few times a week and am becoming rather a fetching and well-muscled (albeit hairless) beeve. (That's an archaic term for beef cattle, in case you do something other than sit around and read the dictionary whilst avoiding work.) The IMA is just about the nicest health club I've ever been to. It has plenty of space, plenty of high-tech machines, and surprisingly little cock-ogling going on in the sauna. Yeah, I know that sounds crass, but what is it about guys that makes them want to stare at another guy's Ben Johnson just because? And it's always the old farts, the tenured faculty who are staring at your nether parts wistfully as though the were remembering that they had one once. I swear to Buffo Guatto, the next Professor EuroGeeze who stares at my bits is going to be asked in no uncertain terms to buy me flowers first. But still, it's nothing like the downtown YMCA, where tonsil jousting carried on day and night with complete impunity.

Okay, so there's that. And then there's football...oh wait, did I just put you to sleep? FOOTBALL! I recently got to meet Jerramy Stevens, a Hawks tight end, and a little slip of a fellow at 6'7" and 265 (about 14 and 3/4ths stone if you're Scottish). Both he and several other of his Gridiron Brethren came back this year with full-on Amish style beards. Perhaps it is the God-fearing, clean-living ways of the Amish that enables these mastodons to perform at the height of their game (4AM! Time for milking!). Speaking of which, you'll be overjoyed to hear that the Seahawks are doing quite well, have won their division, and have the #1 win-loss record in the NFC right now at 11-2. They've scored 83 points in their last 2 games, shutting out the Eagles on Monday Night Football 42-0, and cracking the 'nards of the 49ers six days later at 41-3. So yeah, it's a good time to be a Seahawks fan, and I'm happy to have made it to 2 of the last 3 games. Still, we get NO FREAKING LOVE WHATSOEVER from the press, one MegaDullard even going so far as to say "we don't know much about them way up there in the Pacific Northwest", neverminding the fact that there are such newfangled things nowadays as the Televisory Unit, the Home Telephonic Transceiver and the InterWeb whereby people can converse 'round the globe as though they were in the very same room!

I would say "I digress", but then that begs the question from what.

So with that said, I'm glad we had this chat.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

-Thaddeus

Watts Pt. 2: He's Zen-tastic, Yet Alco-rrific!

Check it out! It's Tenzin Mo-Dope!

Dear Fart-Stain:

It is becoming ever-so-obvious that not only can you not reply to an actual posted letter, you can't even get your grubby dick-skinners to peck at the keyboard long enough to reply to a freakin' blog! And this whole "InterWeb" thing was supposed to make communication easy. Besides causing rampant infomania, compulsive shopping and increased access to porn, what good has it done? It can't get you to reply to a letter, so what's it worth? I swear to horse-tits, they'll be turning lead to platinum before I ever see a letter from you. Knowledge of that sad fact, however, will not stop me from ranting here and now.

So to get back to Alan Watts, Wikipedia (the open-source online encyclopedia that any autodidactic wankster like myself can edit) tells me that he was something of a sot and put away quantiferous amounts of booze that no doubt foreshortened his life. He died at age 58. You probably already knew all this, but it was a surprise to me. Oh yeah, there was that and all that acid he ate. And all that stuff he smoked. So. Yeah. Short life.

Which brings me to the point of why it should be so surprising that someone who wrote and spoke with such lucidity should also be a world-class boozehound-slash-fried-hat. Somehow I was under the delusion that someone who was so educated and practiced in Zen - viz., mental purity - would be trying to maintain physical purity as well. Maybe that's a bad assumption on my part. Perhaps the point is that one has nothing to do with the other. Or that some people are good at handling substances, and some are not (like me). Or that alcohol and narcotics are what they are, and work on the nervous system in a definable way, and all of that has nothing to do with the mythology and superstitions that have grown up around them. I've heard that certain yogis can munch down hundreds of mics of acid and remain completely lucid (Ram Dass has a story about that one), yet these same yogis do not choose chemically-augmented consciousness as their path to realization. Maybe they're hip to the fact that the consciousness does not lie within the substance.

So perhaps the point is that spiritual and mental acuity are over here and substance use is over there and although they share a sliver of a Venn diagram, neither one is utterly related to the other.

And with that in mind, I'm going to polish off my usual tankard of morning coffee. And boot some smack. And smoke the dog.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Suckled At The Teats Of Woolly Nuns, High In The Windblown Sierra Nevada

Italo Calvino > Me

Dear Greg:

I've concluded that there aren't enough hours in the day to write letters. I've been limiting myself to one per day, and I've limited the length to four pages. Still this doesn't seem to be enough. It's as though all the letters that I didn't write over the years are suddenly coming to the surface like some sort of suppressed memory.[1]

I got another issue of The Paris Review yesterday. Teresa has had to put up with my mewling and wretchedness over having an almost three–week literature drought. When she saw the package in the mailbox, she threw her hands heavenward and shouted "At last! A reason to live!"

I'm currently reading the correspondences by Italo Calvino (The Castle of Crossed Destinies, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler), letters that he wrote home while he was a Ford Foundation Grant Recipient and living in New York City in 1959. He has fascinating observations about American culture in the late 50's, some of which make me think that our current political situation is simply our natural mode of state which is occasionally interrupted by such humanists as Roosevelt and Kennedy. Calvino talks about the climate of McCarthyism, but with a noticeable lack of criticism or surprise. Remember, this guy had just come over from Franco's fascist Spain. However, his remarks about American capitalism are priceless; he uses terms like "propaganda" without any pejorative overtone, and recommends that anyone who was going to have their children schooled in America should first send them to Merrill Lynch to study for two years, and then on to college to study the arts and letters. (Merrill Lynch, by the way, does have a student program, or at least did in 1959.) He marvels at the size of American automobiles, which at the time were sporting impossibly–sized fins (even the cabs, he says), and entertains the idea of hiring [renting] one just so he can feel more American. What really made me laugh was his description of the beatniks, whom he continually refers to as "filthy". He gives especially palpable descriptions of Allen Ginsberg's beard and mode of dress. There's one passage about how one of his Ford colleagues, a twenty–six year old writer from France who was wretchedly poor and sported a frightened little beard that clung to his chin for mercy (my description, not Calvino's) got taken back to Ginsberg's apartment. Ginsberg and his "wife" of course attempted to seduce this poor little guy, who later reported to Calvino that Ginsberg lived in a great deal of modern style, kept a tidy apartment, and only got dirty and dressed in mismatched thrift garb when he went out to the coffee houses. The more I hear stories like that, the more I believe that Kerouac and Ginsberg and the rest either inspired a generation that was nothing like themselves, or they manipulated a generation into a style of living that they did not share at all. Either way, they knew the beats, knew their tastes, and knew how to capitalize on them, that's for sure. They were champions of a culture that fancied itself disenfranchised, a culture that they also concurrently participated in outwardly and despised privately, as the evidence indicates.

I was going through all the writing samples that I have scattered here and there all over my computer, looking for a few pieces that might be representative of my body of work. After a while it became apparent that I have no body of work, that most of what I have completed sucks, and the mass of which is unfinished. I don't mean to sound like I'm getting down on myself, because there's nothing that I can really do to undo all the crap I've already committed to paper, other than to write more material that's better, and thus redeem myself. I think that it's an evolutionary necessity, this aversion to one's own work. Konrad Lorenz talks about intra–specific aversion which causes members on the same species to spread themselves around the available habitat if only to stay out of each other's way and avoid wearing out the ecosystem in one spot. I can see parallels in the life of writing. Not only is writing a solitary pursuit, but writers have a sort of bifurcated drive that keeps them away from other writers (through the application of stinging and unsolicited criticisms and whatnot), and away from their own works through endogenous loathing. And of course there's the other corollary: a writer, dropping a manuscript and moving away from it is akin to say, bears crapping around the perimeter of their domain. Or beatniks bathing in their own filth. I digress.

So I've come to the conclusion that all my previous works simultaneously sucks and blows, which is a party trick I thought was reserved for brass players who were short on money. ("Five bucks says I can keep bubbles coming out of this straw for fifteen minutes!") My only recourse, or penance if you prefer, is to create a lot more work that is markedly superior. Since I haven't enjoyed any sort of success or fame with my fiction to this point, then I can safely avoid association with anything that I've written previously, or at least burn it all, and have no one be the wiser. Moreover, I can look like I sprang into literary history fully formed, like a sort of Venus on the Half–Shell, albeit with a sagging belly, an appendectomy scar, and a frightened little beard. Once I'm famous, I can tell everyone that I never put a word to paper until I was forty one. I'll tell them that previous to that, I was a feral man–child who communicated through a complicated series of gestures, grunts and farts. Then one day, as my story shall continue, I was beaten with a copy of The Paris Review by a disgruntled coffee house owner who found me rooting in the garbage. The rest is history. I think this is a brilliant plan, and it obviously requires your complete cooperation and sworn oath of silence. Better yet, you should play the part of my only–slightly–more–developed feral brother, and limit your responses to single syllables if approached by the press. Tell them we were raised by Episcopalians in the wild, and suckled at the teats of wooly nuns high in the windblown Sierra Nevadas.

Drat and blast! Now I'm out of time. I have to go do something stupid and meaningless, like work. The sooner I get out of this having to work business and get on with doing what I want to do, the better. Like Confucius said, the man who finds a job that he loves never has to work a day in his life.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie,
[1] Suppressed memory, such as the term is used by pop psychologists and defense lawyers, is something that I do not believe in. Just wanted to be clear on that.