I just wanted to focus, not have to entertain anyone. He didn’t like the crowd. Before, I went to Teddy’s bar to take the edge off then bought a twelve pack at the liquor store and all the edges came off…became drunk…the people, a hundred or so, Goths, fags (not a derogatory term, just description), lesbians (same as the latter), too cool for school, such attention to what they wear and to pretentiousness, I never fit here…was shitfaced by the time Shilo called me up to the mic. The mic at the table was so close I kept hitting the bill of my cap on it…got some laughs, then good responses. All that balled-up hurt in the pit of my stomach, let loose with I-don’t-care, misunderstood drunk, a fuck you type of gesture.
I’ll get better next time, take it more seriously, this seems to be a quasi-career, the one thing that I do well, an identity…Brian (my friend) didn’t like the opening bands or the scene, felt like I had to baby-sit, which was the reason I didn’t want anyone to come, didn’t want to check if everyone was having a good time. Didn’t wait around, Andrea gave me a guilt trip, maybe one I deserved. I’d dissed Robbie and his band five times, maybe all this was karma, rode ten miles to the north side to hear him, (still no D.U.I.) make an appearance, get the karma leaning towards me again, stayed for twenty minutes, did purgatory, drove home, and crashed.
JANUARY 24, 2006
Called Shilo, asked him if I sold a CD…eight…what did I expect? No support for art in this city, can’t rely on it…apologized for leaving. When I hit a wall, I just leave, no goodbyes, like I’m on a mission, a bed…I thought he’d be pissed, but he wasn’t…told me I was slurring, but people got it…after I left, some professor said he knew a publisher that may be interested. I’ll call him, see what’s up, hopes high, but usually they crash.
Watch the television on mute, then pump up the volume when James Freys’ scared face is plastered on the screen…
I’ll defend Frey, so what if he lied? If a writer’s good, he has to lie…reality is a bore. Frey committed the unpardonable sin in this age…made Oprah look bad. Don’t fault him, he was trying to build a myth as a writer, which is noble, like Hemingway or London or Kerouac…can’t fault him for that. We don’t indict these three gods, though they benefited from the “tales” of how they lived…before we all get sanctimonious and stick up a self-righteous banner, we should stop and examine.
Kerouac’s “On the Road”, though fiction, still didn’t happen like that, so exciting in pool halls and what not…but he benefited as a rugged, American man, the myth. London didn’t drive dogs out into a snowy wilderness, he listened to bar stories of the men who did, though we paint him with a rough, sea-going adventurous brush, half true, half not… Hemingway, hell, he may have lived everything, seems to be the last author that had any balls. And Frey, he was just trying to build a myth, and you can’t fault him for the attempt, what was he supposed to do, be a janitor the rest of his life?…
JANUARY 29, 2006
Rent’s due tomorrow.
I get up early, 6:19 a.m., check the e-mails. Three drunk, really drunk days in a row, this last weekend the starting early trifecta trinity, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday…didn’t have it in me to see a societal face on Sunday, to work…Goddamn, I get so low, scraping my face on the asphalt…called in, made up a story, “Yeah, Andrea’s got car trouble in Anadarko, I’ll get there when I get there”…waited those tables like a zombie. I cried in her lap on the couch, “I’ll never be anything”. She strokes my hair with comfort and understanding. Wasted a semi- restful Sunday, hung over like a wino.
My friend wanted to build a steroid TV stand from scratch on Saturday. So the three of us, Travis, Chase, and I, christen it “Man’s Day”. Our girls went to get makeovers. Travis calls at 12:30, “Let’s do it! I’ll buy your CD.”, his becoming born again as a friend. Travis, quick wit, acid tongue…go to the bookstore…Shilo, burly, red face, hung over, red beard, red eyes, debauchery in little, I think last night. Get the CD, hung over like a bitch at Lowe’s for four hours, picking out wood to build the TV stand. I guess the three of us are bonding…
Chase can’t decide on the wood…Shit, I think, go to Target and just get one, make it easy… Spend the day building…hell, I don’t know anything about constructing, only the words in my head for stories, but the show becomes funny…Chase has his power tools…got them for Christmas…go through a case of beer like water…me, twelve…I stop counting… Chase holds the saw up like the texas chainsaw massacre…me 911 on my mind...the girls pop in, all the purple eye shadow like south-side hookers, like destiny child. They’ve been garage sale shopping too…Andrea picks up a book for me, can’t remember the title... obscure book by Bukowski.. she always thinks of me…the first one who has.
FEBRUARY 5, 2006
So I have this fight, this huge, ethical fight with an editor friend of mine. I’ve written this essay on Frey that’s getting good responses, ten reviews want it so far. I tell him I want a critique, which was a mistake. He’s a rehabber who considered Frey a priest and guru and put his faith in him. “He lied to me,” he says, like a girl, like he’s just been dropped on earth yesterday, doesn’t know how it works. So what if Frey lied, I tell him, the world is a lie in general, my nihilistic argument. He comes out of hiding, he’s becoming hand wringer, …
So he starts to list my sins, according to Saint Editor:
1. You simultaneously submit stories.
My argument: So I’m supposed to sit for six months on my ass, elbows deep in half-eaten slop, bussing tables for only an apathetic editor to finally get around to my fiction or non-fiction and then dismiss it out of hand. Submit to one place? Hell no, I want a lot of eyes to find me. He wants me to do this inhuman act to these lit journals and in the end never get paid. What are they doing for me? Put me on their home page for three weeks, and then bury me in the archives forever? Ambition won’t let me…
2. You wrote “Implosion of a Poet”. (His argument was plagiarism. I think he’s doing meth again, and I’m the receiver of his aftermath-cooked brain.)
My argument: I’ll explain “Implosion of a Poet” to the readers. A poet tells me my writing is shitty. Said poet shows me his writing, one of which is…”We enter through wombs and exit through tombs.”…That’s the whole poem. In the story, I go to the bathroom and flush his poem down the toilet, pry the window open and go home. His argument was that I used his poem in my story.
Yes, as an example of a shitty, artsy, pretentious, bohemian, wanting to be a Beat, but isn’t, poetry..
Hold on, let me get my Webster’s. Plagiarize- to steal and use the ideas or writings of another as one’s own.
I tell him I don’t claim his poems, don’t put my name on them, in fact attribute them to the shitty poet (all rights reserved) and then murder them in the piece. Then said editor starts to shit on me, his thoughts of me come out of hiding…asks me where my ethics are. He’s a Buddhist, stayed Buddhist. Me, I don’t care.
History, I think, is from where this envy comes…Said editor takes creative writing class, submits to a review in the college he attends, and can’t get in…Me, no classes, submits to the same review at the same college, and get in the anthology…Said editor gets in a bigger university’s review, mostly because both colleges are affiliated and they were mostly accepting students’ work…Me, submit to the same university, don’t get in, but later find out they lost my submission, me in web hell…Said editor sends e-mail, telling me he gets in with an attached, “can’t win ‘em all, ha, ha”…Me, in my mind I say, give him one…Said editor has been working on a novel for five years and is still not done…Me, decide to write an autobiography and churn out one hundred pages in four days…Said editor, published once…Me, twenty five…Advantage, me.
FEBRUARY 14, 2006
Valentine’s Day, went home yesterday, they overscheduled at work, forty-five bucks in my shrinking pockets…couldn’t afford to go home, thank God for income tax returns, three days away.
Prose night, missed it, the editor is running it now, the way he wanted it, me not caring…I didn’t show, got a mass e-mail from him about prose night, no call after the fight about Frey and ethics. What the hell does he have to be offended about? He’s the one who impaled my ethics, morality, everything…I made one comment to him in the heat of the moment about Thoreau not living up to the legend of himself, just to make my point. Thoreau, a god to him…as if I killed his mother…He said, “I’ve studied the Transcendentalists, don’t fuck with me…” I love Thoreau, read Walden through at least six times, the tattoo of his name on my arm…no one bleeds like me.
Every author, when he writes fiction or non-fiction, in some psychological way, a need really, to want to say, “Here I am, my views are brilliant, I’m the only one who can write and live in the earth.” Ballsy, ego-driven, narcissism…this is in the heart of the writer. No sin, it’s just nature.
Found a quote by a scholar, which I said in my essay, that he could not accept in laymans’ terms because english degrees don’t line my walls.. Joseph Wood Krutch, in “Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau”, said, “Though the very intensity of Thoreau’s own imagination made the retreat to Walden Pond a legend and a symbol, he was no Robinson Crusoe…” And then he had to go…don’t they all.
His review’s release party is February 18, no call, no nothing from him yet. Every time I get published, I credit this fucks’ review, got him listed on a big blog which is Kilimanjaro for lit journals, put my own money into t-shirts to advertise his review, came up with the idea for the documentary film he shot, everything…
He’s jealous I think, he wants his own private kingdom, the review, so he can say yay or nay, measuring his dick. He wants to workshop at prose night, what the hell, are we women? Write it, send it out, get on the scales, grow some balls, my anthem. If I go, I feel like I’ll be sucked into the vacuum of a writer’s society, which will be the end of me. I don’t want to be in any classified group, labeled, why would I go? These people can’t do anything for me other than to critique my writing with their take no chances lives and writing and make me lose hope and confidence. I don’t need someone else’s mind, I do well with my own thoughts, they’re a circus, a rocket…
I’d be lowering myself, which I feel I do every time I go to Galileo’s poetry night, the ranters, the anti-Bushers, the stereotypical wannabes, the look-at-me-I’ve-renamed-myself-with-one-word, like “Tapestry”, “the no one understands me” mentality, these are the fiascos. So this is my road, I’ve marked it, pissed on it, I’ll stay here alone, it’s always been like this. Do the things that are attributed to great writers (the loneliness).
Happy Valentine’s Day to me, love, P.L.
For Andrea, I’m making crème brule and paninis, two staples of our honeymoon in Paris, trying to recreate it. When’s the honeymoon over?… they say it should be here by now, it’s late. Just want to be romantic, she’s done so much for my insides, mostly, completely, the validation I’ve been seeking.
So I’ll wait my tables, get the ingredients that I need at Wal-Mart, have a quiet, intimate night with the one I love, get drowsy from the wine, and wait till I’m off on Friday, when I’ll have something to write.