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 Out of Control?

Showed my friend a first draft, which he criticized as self-indulgent and lazy.

My first thought: “I believe you to be a jealous, oblivious-to-intent bitch who’s taking his abject cuckoldry by nature out on the nearest alpha.”

My second thought: “it is self indulgent, and was meant to be. Thanks for your feedback, my friend.”

 

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.

Ricky’s Dead, Time for a Shop

I came home one night, hard day in wake, expecting to have salad with my steak. I got to the kitchen—having clitted and clatted up the stony steps—and all I saw was an expired spring mix; no steak, no chicken, no salmon! I opened up the spring mix to make sure there was no hope for it, bent down to a suitable distance for testing, sniffed…

So the lettuce smelled like when Ricky took that jizzy fart in his unwashed mouth and plugged it up along with his nose. The stench escaped through his eyes, must have been! Ricky would buttress me there if only to herald his lung space but now he’s dead. Died that same time. Needed to be uncouthest. Couldn’t be anything-elsest, Ricky? I wondered if the gases were noxious or if Ricky wasn’t the athlete he said he was—if his known muff diving failed to live up to his alleged deep-sea diving.

“Lettuce for dinner? Is there nothing else? No peas, beans, oats?” I led.

“Check the ice box and the pantry,” she said.

She read my face, my slanted mouth and furrowed brows, and knew she—cause of the present association, her native herring and bean-induced flatulence co-enablers of Ricky’s last oral stench—should say something. She, after all, likely finished the oats, the beans, and the peas. The oats, the peas, the beans if you like allusions. Played that one in band—really tested my nine-and-ten-year-old lungs. Repugnant Ricky had the same breathing tests I did, plus one yes that jizzy one too many. Hope it at least occurred to him at the end that a hard jaunt would have been better.