I am often asked why the hell I write the shit I write, or told that people don't know when to tell if I'm serious or just pulling their sexual stimulus packages. Occasionally I am asked if I have an alibi, and I usually don't. I've been an alcoholic and drug abuser since I was four or five years old, and most of my life is a total blank to me. I can't even remember how to tie my shoelaces, and I can't afford to hire any illegals to do it for, so I wear loafers for their convenience and ironic aptness in describing my soul, inspiration, and attitude.
I have no idea what reality is like. To me, all things are constructs of one kind or another: cultural, religious, poopadoodlist, sexual, necronomic, or idiotic. If it can be supported by rational and irrational arguments, I can annihilate it with my patented clowns of contempt.
After I got fired for reading my poems as a poet in the schools in South Carolina, I ended up working for the Department of Industrial Engineering at Clemson University, where I had earlier worked for the Department of Agricultural Engineering testing the viability of cotton seed run through various fan scroll housings that I built for a John Deere automated cotton picker and majored for awhile in electrical engineering before I got drafted, and ended up with a degree in Liberal and Fine Arts and moving to Arkansas for three years, although I'm no longer clear on the sequence of events and have never accepted the concept of cause and effect since reading the work of David Hume, whom I once named a turkey after.
When I ended up at Clemson again, I worked for the graphic arts lab writing slide/tape presentations and spiral bound lab books for the Printing Industries of the Carolinas Association (PICA). John Croft Norton and Randal Ashley, two of my former roommates and comrades in insanity, were graduate students at the time. One lives in North Carolina now, and the other is dead, and Reunion.com sends me weekly invites to meet the dead one face to face. Sometimes I'm tempted to accept the invite.
We conspired together, as all insane pranksters do, to use their projects and our access to the darkrooms, screen printers, typesetting equipment, and A. B. Dick and Heidleberg printing presses to produce a limited run edition of a miscellany we called De Humanities.
At the time, I was still under the influence of Missouri expatriate Michael Yates who had moved to Canada and started Sono Nis press. Yates was a visiting professor in the creative writing program at Arkansas the year after I hung turkeys at the Ralston Purina plant in Springdale, and he was the first professor who exposed me to contemporary world literature and philosophy, including the work of Yehuda Amichai, Octavio Paz, Claude Levi Strauss, and Jose Ortega y Gasset, who wrote The Dehumanization of Art.
Our magazine contained works by Charles Bukowski, who served as our legal advisor because Brad Stinson, who represented me when I was fired for reading poetry, was already our literary advisor.
This was about the time I began sending out every poetry and fiction submission under a different pseudonym, intending, at one point, to have published under more than 2,000 names by Y2K because of a rejection I received from Images magazine, whose editor I can't remember, that suggested my work was too sardonic and pointed me to the work of another more optimistic poet who also happened to be me.
I quit counting at 300-400, and I quit submitting altogether in 1991 with the publication of Disturbances. It was the first book Ahsahta Press published on acid free paper, a bit of trivia that Tom Trusky realized the beautiful irony of, bless his brotherly magnanimous soul. Don't worry, I was cruel to him too.
One of the first comments Anon, Nada, and Swine (initially publishers, but eventually imaginary lawyers and pataphysical terrorists) had about the first issue of De Humanities — which was a silk-screened boxed edition that contained postcards, two booklets, a tri-fold contributors sheet, and other odds and ends, all hand bound — were these questions: Who does your Latin? Shouldn't it be De Humanitas? I think this came from a liberal faculty member in the English Department.
So the point is there is no point. I am never serious. I was born to die and I haven't changed my plans. I have no goals, no motives, no dreams. I do what I do to see where it leads me in the hope that I will somehow be converted from mundane matter to eternal energy without having to consume myself in fire, holy, unholy, or wholly incomprehensible. Does this matter to you? Of course not. Unless you're insane.
I have been typing for more than 55 years, like a roomful of monkeys, with no intention of recreating Shakespeare or anyone else. I am just mobile meat attempting to stay that way until the Gospel Bird arrives.
If you're paranoid, don't be. Nobody's watching. It's all in your mind. If you need advice to make you feel better, here's all I have to give: Imagine your enemy and keep it guessing. That will put it into repetitive stereotypical behavior, and it will forget all about you.
Seriously. Ask Dr. Temple Grandin, who is not a pataphysician.