I once had a professor who said that being an artist is tantamount to being criminal. The concept is simple but helpful when you find yourself living in a nation of miserable fucks (NOMF™).
Dylan said pretty much the same thing in Tombstone Blues and Absolutely Sweet Marie, where he actually kind of sings: "To live outside the law, you must be honest." Honesty is not the best policy in a country based on the rule of law written and run by the lawless, elected by idiots, and controlled by the brutal whims of nature, if anything.
My best writing, whether poetry, prose, scripts, letters, or blogging, has more in common with constructing elaborate hoaxes than creating literature, which — let's face it — is boring, as John Berryman wrote: especially great literature. My old buddy Hank Bukowski was seldom boring, and he understood what boring meant: Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
I'm writing this because of the response I got to a comment I made on Dear Kip which apparently is worth saving in my collection of things that worked. Most stuff doesn't work, like government, religion, community, supply-side economics, market-driven capitalism, family values, spreading the wealth, rechargeable electric toothbrushes, psychology, the health care system, and the flakes you hire to fix stuff, who should be working — but aren't — on stuff that should be working — but isn't.
Which brings me to Entrecard, which is broken again. I'd been waiting for it to admit it was broken for an hour or so when nothing was being updated anywhere, and it finally fell to its knees and prayed to whatever supreme benevolent fiction that Internet SaaS entities pray to, fessing up about 20 minutes ago, making it difficult to track down some of the stuff I wanted to link to.
Well, it looks like things at Entrecard are getting even weirder, if the latest error message is any indication. I can only surmise that the flakes they initially hired to tix things are calling in other flakes to help them break it some more.
But to get back to the point of this post by an imaginary poster who does not believe in anything, trusts no one, enjoys life, suggests frequently that pointlessness is the natural order of the universe, and published extensively as Osama bin Laden prior to September 11, 2001, a day that has apparently not changed very much beyond the order of doodledy squat, my favorite writers have always annoyed people: Hamsun, Pound, Jarry, Milton, Garcia Lorca, Chaucer, Vonnegut, Paz, Neitzsche, Camus, Sartre, and Ellen Degeneres, who I hope one day will sit on my face so I can suck on her pussy until her head caves in.
I would attribute that last phrase to its originator if I could remember who it was. I heard it in a bar with a bunch of really drunk Vietnam vets who were on R&R in Fayetteville, Arkansas for some reason in the early seventies, getting ready to ship their hopeless doomed asses back into the shitstorm long before I heard another version voiced by William Forsyth in Walter Hill's Extreme Prejudice (Honey! As long as I've got a face, you'll always have a place to sit).
See, I'm not all bad. I care for my sources, even if they are probably tucked away in a VA hospital orthopedics ward somewhere. The VA always had a twisted sense of humor. Ain't nobody on them orthopedic wards got any arms or legs. Trust me on that one. Johnny ain't even got no gun in them places.
I've given up on Entrecard coming back any time soon, and I have real world chores to do. Sorry for the interruption.
Nothing you read here is true. It is all based on other things that you probably haven't read and things I have previously written or thought about writing. There is a Robert Scheckley novel called Mindswap or something like it that presents a simple conundrum that perfectly encapsulates the kinds of paradoxes that most believers are incapable of confronting.
You are handed a card which says:
The statement on the other side of this card is true.
You turn it over and see this:
The statement on the other side of this card is false.
That is reality. I want no part of it. It is boring. Boring. Boring.
Carry on.