you may listen to this chapter on YouTube: tapering ecstacy
Vanity knows no limits with artists and writers. We imagine greatness will be the product of our toil. Maybe not international recognition, I’m not insane, but perhaps the $15 per month I receive from my book sales could be improved. It seems my own thoughts and mental engineering on this topic are quite fertile.
So far, so good.
I began by saying something about working on my literature books. Like I was redirecting my craft to a higher level, attuning to a more poetic prose or some shit like that. For all I know, memoirs are going to be huge again. What do I care if I’m writing a novel or a memoir? Catcher is clearly autobiographical. Poisoned us all, the American coming of age novel. Vonnegut did the rest.
What is literature? And what is to spit in the face of literature? Does Henry Miller achieve the status I aspire to? Certainly Kerouac, at least for a book or two. How do I know which modern writers are lit and which are pulp? Finding inspiring new writers is not hard. Enouraging them enough during their lives to keep writing, keep poet-ing, keep painting, singing, burping and farting, whatever they do well. We need to encourage the young people to keep drawing throughout their lives. What a laugh. For what? Most of them (69% to be exact) won’t ever open a book once they graduate from high school. If they go to college, I’m not sure the odds are better or worse for becoming a known writer. A successful writer.
What does that mean? D. H. Lawrence almost starved to death as he was writing the deepest and most earthy secrets of sex and love and lust and loss. Where does he fit in the canon? Whitman seems to have had a go of it with some joy and robust fun. He self-published Leaves of Grass over and over. Added a letter from Emerson as a preface to the next edition. Always promoting his next edition, he funded the printing and collecting of his singlular poetic achievement of mankind. You may say Homer, I say Whitman.
Their voices are never emptied from our heads. The critics. The teachers. The father who just did not understand how an English degree was going to help his son make a fortune. It wasn’t like he hadn’t already made one big enough for all of us. The stories I would bring to the weekly dinner at dad’s were confusing for him. I’m pretty sure he never read anything but AMA journals and publications. How would words inspire or enlighten the load of the working man? Or the wealthy physician now approaching terminal velocity down the cups?
His voice is in here, whispering cautions. “Keep looking for the job. This creative stuff hasn’t paid yet. You need to keep working a real job.” Of course, he died when I was 23, and I’m 61. Them ghosts die hard. Or perhaps it’s not a ghost, perhaps my dead father, mother, brother, and favorite sister are up there directing me with coded hand signals and signs here in my life. Like the red cardinal appearing to remind me of their presence. My mom, I’m sure, is pleased. Not that she understands much of what I write. “It’s too personal and private.” But the writing, of all things, she gave to me at an early age. Her love of art, writing, and music, while depricated to my sister’s hippie-love, was more the driving force behind what I can only explain as an obsession with words.
If I can assemble any pattern of letters and spaces that becomes pleasing to more than my family and five readers, I will be somewhat fulfilled. Well, that’s not really true. I will be disappointed if I die undiscovered. Enough of that gloom and doom ruminations, let’s get back to the well-worn path up the mountain.
We all climb our own mountain. If I look at my current health and life expectancy I should consider taking my retirement at the earliest possible age, four or five months away. I’m afraid, of course, that my identity as some sort of digital savant vaporizes into “retired.” That sounds scary. Let’s see. Maybe we can park our career in a CMO role created for me by me to give myself the illusion that I’m still working.
I am writing.
That’s all I’m doing. That and trying to keep in shape by playing three or more times a week. It’s not enough, I know. If I eat all the crap I want, there is no amount of tennis or vigorous love making that’s going to keep me at a healthier weight. But I try. I’ve seen the opposite. Watched Mom’s health essentially collapse and choak on over-indulgence in the kitchen. As she liked to say, “Never trust a skinny cook.” She did us proud in that department. I’ve been relearning how to eat healthier over the last twenty years. I still reach for Haagen Das with every setback. Today, I buy the mini-pints, single servings, or one of those low-cal version.
Ice cream is my weakness.
Also watching professional tennis players, mostly women, on DVR. I get riled up. I am inspired. Aroused even. All this up energy must be charged into the service of creative productivity. Write. Paint. Do. Sing. Play. Go. Wake. The. Fuck. Up.
Letters and funny patterns make more interesting reading, don’t you think?
AI today is going to write the next great American novel, that’s obvious. In fact, I’m helping train this new LLM we’re massaging. It’s called PoetLaureate.ai. I am the chief architect. And today, with the advances in Quantum Computing, we’re expecting the first “award-winning poem” to arrive in two years. The novel will be more difficult, due to the need for longer constructs, throughlines, and character development. How do you train an AI about the word “loss?” It’s not math. It’s not Beaudelair. It’s not even loss = melancholy or the color black or blue. What’s the flavor of happiness? How does a privileged son make choices against, in defiance even, his own success? Here I am. Dad has been hanging around during this resurrection. My son, on the other hand, doing the exact same move on me.
“You need to figure out what your plan is.”
“I don’t know. Guns. I want my guns back.”
“You see how absurd that is, right? That your guns are going to bring you happiness. That you will be comforted by them.”
“I won’t be shot.”
“Who’s after you? Why would anyone shoot you?
“I’ve seen a lot, man. You wouldn’t understand.”
And off he goes after a brief lunch, back to his mom’s house and self-described “hell.” I can offer little assistance. I feel my father’s pain. We don’t understand each other. I wish there was some way to pull my son up and out of his malaise. My dad comforted himself with the idea that I could always go to law school after getting an English degree. His undergrad had been in Zoology. [I just learned this today, at 61, by unearthing his obituary. I had to revise his death age to 54, too. I always thought he was 53 when he died.]
It’s not clear with my son if the malfunction is wiring, chemical, or simply some form of defiance disorder.
“Here’s a new tool that could help you look for a job. I’m using it now for my own job search.”
“Thanks.”
“That means, “fuck you,” right?”
“Pretty much.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
+++
I need that question again, for me.
What’s the plan?
Let’s see, each time the rug gets pulled out from under me, I have to get up, reboot myself, and get started up the seven story mountain again. I’m not the Jesus kind of spiritual, but God is on my radar. My sponsor, a very Jesus-y dude, would say if I embrace even one part of the trinitiy it is enough. So, I think I’m good there. Besides, my girlfriend teaches at a Catholic private school here in Texas, where the wealthy send their autistic and maladabpted kids so they are not corrected and redirected by the public school system. Problem is, they need the corrective guidance of healthy and intelligent parents. And those parents are focused on mostly other things. They pay young girls to pick up their kids from school and get them to the sporting event. Often the young babysitters become the only real person in the kid’s life. It is a mess.
Rug. Well-paying job. Pull. Manager became afraid after several projects outside of his circle of influence garnered me some individual attention. Boom. Fired. But the kicker is this. They did every single thing wrong in trying to get rid of me. And they are a major multinational corporation. There’s a good and a bad side to that part. Anyway, the real issue is cash flow. I enjoyed the steady influx of cash from the “data center leader.” I enjoyed the team, even the manager before he went coocoo. I could get my job done easily each day, using AI and another writer I’d brought on to take care of the tedious task of writing 300 data center descriptions. Well, ChatGPT (you know what that is, right?) launched just as my friend joined the team. All of us were amazed. Todd and I went to work getting ChatGPT to do our jobs. So we could rest, or write, or play music, or make love to our wives. Well, he’s married anyway.
Life was solid and good. I was writing and publishing with the abandon and fury of a man with no money worries. And CRASH FUCK BOOM. Fired. And law firms, and waiting, and petitions to the court, and waiting, and a first mediation meeting may happen in the next four months. I’ve been jobless for over 180 days (the last day to file) and a couple months. So, there’s no there there for now. Maybe a little birthday cake within the next year. But they are big. They will delay delay delay in hopes that I die. I don’t want any of them to die. Well, I’d like my manager’s Ford Bronco to always be in disrepair, always be a thorn in his side. He’s not even thinking about me anymore, and I think of him every time I pass one of those bastardized Jeeps. Ug ug ugly. Fitting, I suppose for him.
And there’s nothing more to that. The poison from even writing about it, gets me hopped up. Anger? Frustration? Fear? Something happens, and it’s not all good. But it can be useful information. Like my therapist said the last time we spoke a few years ago, “The anxiety dreams may not be prophetic, but they are messages from your subconsious about dangers and concerns.” She was spot on. So, no more dreams about Bronco’s bursting into flames before flying off a bridge in Big Sur.
The opposite of inspiration is …
I find that revving my engines in any form can be beneficial. Let me explain.
Anger. Turned inward it’s toxic. Becomes depression or overeating. Turned outward, as my writer-friend said one day before I was fired, “I can do a lot of work out of spite. Spite drives me.” So, there’s that. Use the anger to get even, to get better, to write the damn book about it.
Sadness and Regret
Loneliness
Joy
Ecstasy
I certainly don’t need to go into each of these, like bullet points of my philosophical perspective. I think you get the idea. I mean, this is adult literature, right? I mean, I hope so. That’s my plan.
It’s also a trap. Did Tom Robbins imagine he was writing literature? What about Frederick Barthleme, the younger brother of the great writer Donald Barthelme? Did he imagine his novels and short stories would achieve some gravitas and staying power? Heck, even Donald is just a footnote of a writer. Shit. Holy shit. And then there’s Laurence Durrell and his masterpiesce The Alexandria Quartet, what about him and that? You know his BROTHER is the more famous writer and personality? The zoo guy. Gerald Durrell takes first place in the writer/celebrity competition.
So where does that leave us, me, modern writers and poets?
Is there any reason for me to continue this exercise? Am I going to become “known?” And what about music, why oh why am I still devoting so much time each week to creating music only five people will hear?
I’m going to give you the answer. It’s not original. It’s from Rilke’s masterpiece, now in the public domain.
“I write because I can’t not write. It’s what I do.”
Rilke never said such a thing. First, he wrote in German. Second, it’s not a very good paraphrase. Finally, it’s my mantra. The first time I read that book, “Letters to a Young Poet” I knew, I just knew, Rilke was right. Don’t ask me if your poetry is any good. In fact, don’t ask anybody. It’s best sometimes, most times, always, if you don’t share your work until it is completely finished. See, you let out some of the steam. The propellant. The reason we write is to complete a work, to complete ourselves, to organize a thought into an architecture of ideas for someone else to wander around in. If my writing gets you lost and you stay with it, I promise I will bring it all back around like some famous book written on the skeleton of another famous book, that you wouldn’t understand unless you too the class in college.
This architecture I aspire to, ultimately, should be as deep as Proust, as rebald as Henry Miller, as intoxicating as Hunter S. Thompson, and as transparently broken as Jack Kerouac. Then put a little Song of Myself bow around the entire enterprise and you have an idea of my ambition.
But don’t let the fear tamp down your ambition. Burn this entire life to the ground if that’s what it takes to capture the smell and trauma of the death of a great writer. I don’t know much about Whitman’s funeral and death celebrations. I need to look into that. It might inform me and my aspirational thrust. What was accomplished? What has been left behind? What becomes art, lasting, and important? What is swept under the waves of time as frivolous and popular?
Don’t care. Don’t know. Get with the program.
Just write.
And don’t let the fuckers get you down.
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