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12:22am 29/06/2007
  I walked to the cooler and took down two tall silver cans. The cans felt like a loaded gun and if you squeezed at them in your fists, you felt how tight they were and how they yielded nothing; though, later when they were empty, you knew, they would yield everything.  
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To do the work   
12:29pm 20/04/2007
  Setting

I need to know there is not even the prospect of being bothered. The people need to be away; otherwise I can't even get the thought out or even approach the idea of beginning, which by itself, in privacy can be very hard.

Is ANYTHING worse than interruption? What could you possibly be needed for? There is nothing anyone could possibly want or need which is as important as the work going on inside, which you will then be taken away from.

I like this room, at the old dad's. Nowhere is easier. It's probably more of a habit and this is where the vast majority of it has been done and I need to be where I've done it before, so that I trust I can do it again.

I like to be near the window. That's important, I think. It's good to be connected to the slight noises and movements outside and to know that the sky is there and still blue and the Earth is turning and it's a very clear day today. But I think there must come a time when I won't reside here and this room will be gone from me. I'll have to do it somewhere else. Will I find a room and window so connected? Will the street be visible from the window? God, that's important. Anything can happen on the street; anybody can go there. There can be car accidents and road rage and violence and there can be one person at a time, bundled up in the winter, walking quickly on the trodden, snowy sidewalk, in imprints of footsteps of the people who have already gone by. It's a hell of an important thing to have a head-turn away.


Words

Words are what you've got and that's what you're doing, but it's easy to abuse words. There are many words which have been so badly abused that I can't see using them in most cases, i.e., cases which do not involve sarcasm or frivolousness; or maybe which are not presented in the dialogue of some person who would abuse the words. Because the words sometimes just don't sound like the people. I figure language has an applicable radius of about 100 years. For example, it's difficult for me to sit in 2007 and read Hawthorne (1804 - 1864), but I can look at A Farewell to Arms (1929) and it survives. But there is work from this time that sounds like it is not from this time or even any time that I know of. The words don't sound like the people; the words sound like some artificial stage production that yells, too loudly, "I and my art are holier than thou!" There is a great deal of work like that. To avoid that way, I try to imagine the words, told by one good friend to another at nighttime with a large red fire as the only light. I want to tell it like he does, because the way he tells it is the way it would be told.

The trouble too, with doing it now, maybe as opposed to a long time ago is the existence of "popular culture" and the convenience of a mass media, which can spread it quicker than AIDS in Africa. Popular culture tries to give everybody a lot of stuff - and does. Much of it, though, pretends to be art when it is only a distraction. I won't pretend to even know what art is. Really, the hell with art. And the hell with what it is. The people should just do what they do and what they like and the audience can enjoy it - but it should mean something. There should be a reason that's explicable and not just simple. The audience should want something that means something. Why wouldn't they? Clearly, though, there is an audience that is content with being distracted and let the distractions exist. But I don't judge it - or understand.

(Norman Mailer)
In their own time, the old and gone men, I'm sure, had a popular culture of their own that defined regular people. But this time, it has to be more intense.

But have you seen Norman Mailer? The guy's 84 and he's just too smart. Can anybody get that smart when they were born into the bulldozer of the last 20 or 30 years? But really, Norman Mailer is just too smart for me. He's too well-read and just too big. How can I or anyone in a marginal radius of my age read at the rate he must have? I wonder if maybe it's better for the writer to be of average intelligence, so that he is more marketable to the general public. Though, the average reader must be above average intelligence. But wouldn't it be nice if we could do something to bring that down? Norman Mailer can't go wrong as an orator, though. He delivers sentences in ways that go far beyond anything that can be put on paper with ink or letters or words or punctuation.

(John Fante)
There's Fante, too, and his rhythm was just too easy to get through. I think that's important. The stuff has got to be easy. The best is when you've sliced through a page and there was no effort involved. That's the trouble with a novel. Don't know if I would ever come to that. Maybe, but I think sometimes: does anybody really want to read a novel? Who wants to read something so long? Seems like it takes a great deal of filler to get into 100 pages. Does anybody really have 60,000-plus good words? Of course, people buy novels; not stories; not prose. Seems Ask the Dust was as close to an immortal short story (The Big Hunger) as there is before it was a great novel.

I did this as a way of getting ready. I've got two underway. And look at what now: I'm not even about to continue those - not immediately; I'm about to begin a third - before it's too late for it. I didn't want to do it too soon. I couldn't, I felt. Today, I've felt, I have to. Have to do it now. Have to have to do it before it gets further away from me.		  
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04:03pm 21/03/2007
  It's good when you know there's story you will pick up on later. What I don't know is what new thing there will be after this, but I do have a feeling of what I will do in six months or so. It is a story that, to write know, would be morally impossible. I'm not sure what the wait will do to the story. My memory may fade, but the time may glorify it.

I would say this six-months-away story will be a great story, but that will be only immediately after it is finished, which is the small section of time when all stories are great - when the Moonlight Sonata booms in the room, arms are thrown way out, with open hands, up to the ceiling, wallowing at the sheer gravity of the creative act that has just been performed. In that moment, exclusively, if Hemingway himself were to have read the work, he would have crumbled, wept and gotten a job as a dishwasher.		  
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10:46pm 18/03/2007
  Outside, the people I know are the same, with the same banal activities, cheap amusements and false conversation. And, oh, the millions who agree with the preceeding sentence. But they are disappointed when they find I am not loud, long or dyed. Everyone is fooled. Me, too.

I see and pull the good out of everybody because nobody this side of fiction is that impressive. I can't find it in me to hate you because this world is so ultimately similar, and if I were to hate one, I would have to hate everybody out of fairness.

But there are times when I am completely wrong, when I am accompanied and happy. That time is so easy, and then I look out and see a single person, in a heavy coat, with the hood up, trying just to get past my window.		  
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Norman   
05:41pm 04/03/2007
  This is a story about Norman. All the corners of his fingernails were painful. Besides that, Norman is a moderately happy man, moderately successful and moderately content in his profession. Though he is neither very young nor very old, his hairline has retreated to a half-circle around the back of his head. Like most of his fellow countrymen, the doctor says he could afford to lose a few pounds. There is just one car in the driveway. Norman has never married.

Given the parts of Norman's life I have selected to point out to you just now may make him seem like an unfortunate man, but I do not mean to give that impression, because I do not believe he feels like an unfortunate man.

Despite any of the above, he gets along well, letting little get to him, living through the days in his home in relative comfort.
( Read more... )		  
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03:01am 04/03/2007
  Go, young man.
Go because you won't go.
Go because you are near.
Go because time neither lives nor dies.
Go because men sit out on the sidewalk against cement walls on poor streets at dusk.
Go because there are heavily made-up old women at work at the shopping mall, named Joanne, who give instructions to the young women, young man.		  
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I realized the best went by while I never realized it   
01:32am 23/02/2007
  I realized the best went by while I never realized it. The best years were when there was something to do and we did it all the time. Later, all the people would dry out of my life. They never left in a moment or on a day; they were just less and less while no one was looking. They were still there, and they thought of you, but they weren't around. They stopped loving the things you loved. The long times when I had to make the best out of only myself were many. Then, it was easiest because myself knew the things he didn't know, which was better than believing to know many things, but it was hardest because those many times moved by slowly, which allowed the asking of many large questions. But if not for that time without, I would not think that the times when I was most brave were when I was most afraid. And, I thought, there was probably no way to know it as it happened.  
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10:26pm 18/02/2007
  Today is empty, which would be fine, but yesterday was empty too. Even that would be okay, because I know how to do it, but I know tomorrow is a holiday and will be as empty. How does one convince himself to stand up when he's set to go down again? How does he do it when living is comfortable and there's electricity and bulbs that switch on or off and electronics with small red lights and machines that wash the clothes and the dishes for you and doors that stay shut for you and an oven and a furnace that builds the fire for you and smoke alarms that keep you from the fiery death and radio alarms that scream when it's time to go? And walls - walls that keep the weather and the people out. How does one then convince himself that anybody needs anybody?

Nobody leaves the house. The doors are locked up and life ages away, watching boxes of other people pretending to live. Grown men and women sit in separate apartments at empty dinner tables with a vase of roses somebody bought for themselves. The TVs keep the rooms from being silent. And the sidewalks are deserted. The sheets of snow make an unwritten page on the street. Everyone is inside.		  
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Hawthorne   
10:19pm 18/02/2007
  A strange repulsion - as well as a strong attraction - exists among human beings.  
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Certain things just cannot be written about   
09:29pm 06/02/2007
  Certain things just cannot be written about. One waits and waits for the story to "arrive", though it comes and cannot be told. It cannot possibly be told because there is no good way to tell it.

I will not write about the night I drank and stumbled through the department store while you tried to keep up with me at both. I will not write about how you looked with the red feather boa around you after you yanked it from the shelf. Nor will I tell about the fake plastic flowers we handed back and forth. I won't write about how we collapsed in the booths outside, by the overhead lights, near where they sell sandwiches made with fancy breads. I cannot write about those things in a way that works. Far before that, I would write about the old men who now sit in those booths, wearing navy blue caps with the bright red brim; colors for the world champion minor league team. I would write about how these men don't sit at the booths as often, but at the round yellow linoleum tables in the middle, in tall chairs, under umbrellas. These men sit alone, with no purpose and with no effort directed at hiding it. Books have already been written for you, Reader. Who writes books for these men?

Or some things aren't written about because they never happen. Most things don't. Neither do you. Reader, you finally are everyone else. Unalike. Impossible. Here. And I am gone. The end.		  
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08:24pm 06/02/2007
  We pass by their lives
very quietly, and then
they are gone. Eons
will go by until this
time is such a small
fraction, it becomes
nonexistant.		  
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Proverbs 1:22   
05:39am 21/01/2007
  How long will you simple ones love your simple ways?
How long will mockers delight in mockery
and fools hate knowledge?		  
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This was the night   
07:45am 20/01/2007
  This was the night. You knew it would come. Sure of it. Sure because you'd lived it before, unlike all those other things you're still not sure will come because you haven't lived them. Because tonight they put a drink in your hand, and for the first time ever, that was hard. That'd been anything but hard. But you were sure it would come. What you weren't sure of is how you would handle it.

I handled it well. Not like an alcoholic, but like I handled it before I was an alcoholic. It was a party, a night and I arrived. And everyone argued over who was drunk and who was not. And it took a long time for the host to put a drink in my hand. Even then, it took a long time. I looked down at it and said to our host, "It's been a long time." But I was looking down at the drink and I was really talking to it; him; that old, reliable, absolute friend.

I drank very lightly, lighter than the rest of them, and spoke of the usual alcoholism and futility. And they all pretended they could relate, singing it along with me.

And my other two friends were there. You met them at least a couple times: my two friends who always fight over not fighting. They were two older men, grizzly, grey, unshaven, nearly identical. Are they brothers? I've never asked. One reeks of liquor; the other claims not to. And they go on and on. They never fight. They never give me anything to write about.

But after that, it was great again. Maybe better. It's always better as the night wears on, even as I stop drinking, even as everyone stops drinking. I talked up big my high tolerance for alcohol, how I'd put down six before going anywhere and how those were the days, but those days were gone and these were the new ones, and how everything was a memory and some things not even that. I drank through things, I said, and there are many people like that. They're just hidden in their homes, cars and jobs. That's all that separates us from the bums.

This one young kid there said my outlook was bleak. He made much use of the word "bleak". "Your outlook is bleak," he said, "but I agree."

He said he drank too. He said he found love once, but it, of course, ran away on him. I told him there was no love, only lovers and lovees. He knew it. And he said he wished he would stop drinking and chasing women so he'd just go and do the things he really wanted to do, like writing and getting an education.

I wanted to tell him to drink and write, but no, I didn't say that. I wanted to tell him an education is only necessary for those not talented enough to bypass it, but that that included most of us. But I didn't say that. I wanted to tell him, "Stop drinking and hoping and trying and wishing and praying. Just go home and write. Write until it's out of you and gone. Then start drinking and praying again when you need new material." But goddamn me, I didn't say any of that.		  
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The trouble is being used to better   
05:11pm 15/01/2007
  The trouble is being used to better. Do you remember when you used to kill them down, one by one, which wasn't fast enough? "One down," and you'd stomp it into the floor, hoping the people living below didn't mind, but not minding yourself because of how much it minimized the empties. And do you remember how far you'd continue? how your stomach convulsed and quivered because you were putting in too much, too fast? But you continued anyway, going flush to the edge of preemptive regurgitation. And have you forgotten that it didn't stop there? You'd walk out to the car, carrying an empty coffee cup, knowing there was another case resting behind the passenger's seat. And the toothpaste in the center console was always ready for your arrival. Oh, and do you remember that one time you evaded arrest by making casual and fictional conversation about being nervously on your way to the hospital to see your wife, who was pregnant, and, well, actually, you weren't married? And remember how he looked over your car and told you to get married again and again until you said "Yes, sir, I will," and got him to let you leave, because you had the sobriety of 100 men?

Those times were easy. You remember them fondly.

It's harder now to sit down, not able to remember how you handled sobriety before. Or maybe you didn't handle it before. Maybe it had always been this way, and you've been spoiled by the glory of being free of it. And it's harder to sit and know how easy it is to be free of it again.		  
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Ecclesiastes 4:2-3   
09:06pm 14/01/2007
  And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.

But better than both
is he who has not yet been,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun.		  
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Now, Bukowski is dead   
09:47pm 12/01/2007
  (We hadn't been read to since we were little people told to sit Indian-style over on the carpet, when the teacher would come over and hold the book open with the fingers of one hand, so we could see it as she read.

That's the only reason Bukowski was tolerable in that form. Anybody else reading made me want to vomit. He read softly and gently, like our grandfather would have read us Little Red Riding Hood. Only because we were bigger people, the subject matter was harsher.

When I was there, it was a college hall that was dimly-lit, and that helped too. I couldn't imagine where these other people came from or if they knew what they had attended. It was dark enough, anyway, that I wouldn't have known if I could recognize any of them, before or after. Who ever they were, they all clapped as he came out, as if he had already done something.)

Now, Bukowski is dead. He was always dead. Now, he lies in the ground under "Don't Try". He was always dead. Hemingway, Cummings, Wolfe have always been dead.

Bly is still alive. Of course he is. He was always alive. Read him and you'll know. As long as there have been and are trees and winds and ponds and rocks and trails and men in black coats who turn, he is alive. Dully, but alive. His tree will be there for a thousand years--and longer.

But we are not Robert Bly. You are mortal. I am mortal. Knowing it; not forgetting it, but really knowing it is the greatest motivator I know. That is real; most real; easiest to forget.

Time is an invention of man, created to explain his memory.

Now is the only time that ever was or ever will. The people will pass by your life, whether through death or geography or forgetfulness or choice. They will pass by like a pulse. Now is all there is.

All is fiction. All which cannot be understood, at the least, must not be of concern. I only know there is just one innate feeling in me that aches for growth. It throbs, asking, desperately, for me to burden the world and more human bodies with new existence of mine.

World is fiction. There is no time or past or future. What came before? What comes after? Neither. There is only now and it is fiction. If it is anything, you or I couldn't understand. If we could, what its own meaning means would ultimately mean nothing. There is no everything; no anything. It was always gone. There is no loss then. So stop our useless fear. Whatever will be, can't; it already is.		  
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On days like these, Mr. Dobbs...   
08:20pm 09/01/2007
  On days like these, Mr. Dobbs, I am a greater red menace than the People's Republic of China. Today, I was worse than a hundred-thousand dollars cash, stuffed under a mattress. On these days, it's hard to even go into thought, because I haven't earned it. Friends say they need occasional days like these. I tell them, I've had enough of these days.

Outside, there is a nice thin layer of white on everything that was once grey. The white is so bright and new, it makes it harder for the night to get its job done. A friend used to say winter was the best for writing. This is maybe my first shot at it this season. Now, I put all the lights off in the room, because it makes it better for seeing the window. When I was younger, I did it in a silent room with a pen. Tonight, I do it sober, in the dark, the most sober I've been in half a year. I used to go with the light on brightly, the blinds down, drinking, sometimes heavily, putting down everything I knew for that moment. It brought things out of me I believed I couldn't get out otherwise. Everything just fell and fell and fell out. It was partly out of control and disorganized. I would become sober later and fix everything up. I went on through a book's worth that way. Then it just ran out. There was nothing more I could get out of drinking. In life, as always, the same. It took me as far it could take me. So far to where I'm back where sobriety is worth trying again.

Below this window, as teenagers shoot the deli man in broad daylight for the $50 in the register, while they still don't know what happened to the old lady after her home burned to the ground, and as a man waits in the dark bushes to get the next woman on the bike path, the police are blitzing the parking meters. Not that near anarchy wouldn't ensue downtown if we believed we could park where ever we wanted, as long as we wanted, especially in the daytime hours, but you'd think with all the crimes and emergencies and on-going investigations that occur on any given day, you'd be able to get away with a 15 minutes here or a half-an-hour there at the meter.

You can see from here with the naked eye, cars with tickets pinned under their wipers by meters that blink "EXPIRED". It's a $30 fine; $45 if you're late. When they put a stop to me, I had three quarters in my pocket, dropped all three into the meter and walked into the library. What I figured was about 45 minutes later, I heard sirens outside. I thought, there are greater emergencies at this moment. I will be safe. I'm no good judge of time, but when I did walk out, I found the ticket with a time of "1:33 p.m." printed on it. I looked at my watch. It was 1:44 p.m. Eleven minutes and 25 cents would have saved me.

To avoid gas prices, I don't drive the car anymore. I have it, but keep it parked in a rotation of department store and supermarket parking lots in the meantime. Every few days, I move it to another store in case anyone begins to notice the same car in the same spot for days on end and gets the temptation to have it towed away.

There is no subway of any real use in Buffalo. Where would it take you anyway? From an empty waterfront to an empty Main Street? Or from an out of business restaurant to one too expensive to eat at anyway? There's only the bus. Reader, you should see some of the people who wait for the bus. They're the ones who have it rough.

I think I told the above to get to the point that to get out and try to become or join or beat out anything isn't made any easier.

On guilt-ridden days that I've lived enough of, it's harder to think, so easiest to think of the most approved thoughts. When the voices on NPR talk about "no chance" for reinstitution of the military draft, I understand, but am disappointed. And you know, even when I saw the recruiter, he bragged about the many specialized jobs, one of which would fit me. No matter what my skills, there was a position waiting for me in the United States Army. I looked at his long list. I couldn't find "Soldier" on it.		  
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Around the crowded room...   
02:41pm 08/01/2007
  Around the crowded room, I look for death. It's on all of them, but they hide it well or are much closer to it; closer, the way two old friends are close. I look in me and see great death. There is time for nothing else. Seeing it gives me an immediacy like only chemicals have. But this natural kind of immediacy fleets much more easily, with the passing of the thought. Only if I can harness it, it makes me brave enough to take rejection out of my head and into my hand.

I sat in an employment office, staring at my birth certificate. I could think of no prediction more certain than the idea that I would never see my death certificate. The office sent me home with nothing.

At home, they play one-hour biographies for worthy people. After advertisements, forty-eight minutes (or maybe the full 60, if they put you on public programming) is what the good lives come down to. What will they make for us when we are gone? A building? A monument? An airport? A museum? A TV special? If there are still TVs. If there is electricity. If there is an Earth and a people who walk on it.		  
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First   
11:43am 07/01/2007
  I am John. I don't know that much. Let's try not to make this too personal, okay? Let's try not to get too fancy either. I hate that. This is a litmus test.

I'm a frequently recovering alcoholic. I work as a typist. I live in downtown Buffalo in a brick building several stories high. I have one window. Out it are cars and sidewalks and other buildings. Inside, I eat mostly potatoes because I can afford them. I cook them in a microwave, cut them open and coat on cooking spray. Potatoes are dense. It takes 10 minutes to do two.

Most mornings, on the walk to work, I stop to get coffee at the gas station. In the center of the little store, there's a tall stainless aluminum pillar with a spout, which you put a styrofoam cup under and let the coffee drop out into. I want to start in drinking the coffee immediately, but they make it very hot. It is always several minutes before it's drinkable. Knowing this, every 30 seconds or so, I still test to see if it's cooled off. This is easier on colder days. I start in drinking it as soon as it's just below scalding. My tastebuds are nearly scarred. I make coffee at home, and when I do, I don't make it so hot.

Most of what you write is bad because you try too hard. You make it hurt to read. When reading, I don't want to know it. If it's not an accident, at least make it look like one. You write more like newspapers than people. And you tell me too much. You leave nothing left.

Hemingway was good, wasn't he? Too bad he ended early. But really, it was what? '61 when he did it? Selfishly, he'd be about 107 by now anyway, right? He probably wouldn't be alive anymore anyway. Even if he was, they ruined him with the ECT. That's why he went.		  
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johnnine
 
 

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