Integrity

I won’t make myself clear enough to them, and that’s why they say their dripping and thipping won’t stop. They’ll never be satisfied as long as they harbor passive disgust for their own creative sterility, flaccidity.

They keep it so cruelly hot in here, in this effective oven, that they won’t come in, the sanctimonious pussies, the aimless who sling shit from afar and, in their hearts of hearts, on petty, irrelevant grounds.

I won’t say what they want me to say in the way they want me to say it, I won’t say what I want to say in the way they want me to say it, and I won’t say what they think I should want to say in the way they want me to say it—in the way they’re conditioned to hear it.

They’ve given me plenty of chances, goaded me relentlessly to abandon integrity, and I won’t; I’ve had plenty of chances to give up what makes me a man, what makes my aesthetic mine, and I will not.

The compassionate writer knows when to say “with all due respect, I don’t respect your opinion, and I suggest you fuck off before you begin to consciously see yourself as an addled fool.”

With love,
JC

A Principled Writer

A principled writer knows when to say “with all due respect, I don’t respect your opinion.”

A Writer’s “Birth”

Is that how it happens? Are we born this way–hypersensitive, hypervigilant, hyperverbal, hypercerebral? Are we all that way? No, that’s not how it goes.

So when and how is a writer cobirthed out of the vajeens of his/her brain and body? Pay attention to that pair: brain and body. Learn the language of your eyes, their eyes, your ears, their ears, your neurons, and their neurons. The writer remembers and adds perspective, unity. The writer takes fragments, tacks them to other fragments, and makes new lives. Life is manifold; the writer knows this and shows as many folds as he/she wants, thank you.

When and how does the writer assert itself? I had to take charge somehow, and I took to the pen and then the keyboard without doubt. Without doubt is the only way to write, and skeptically is the only way to edit.

Once you get past fear, what’s in your way? If you’ve browsed here, you can at least dictate to a machine, and you at least have the software that allows you to do that.

I may suck, but I write because it’s right for me, and because sometimes my life just isn’t enough.