Remember Cheech and Chong?
Mon, Sep 13, 3:11 AM (1 day ago)
I was having a discussion today about cultural appropriation and how Cheech (actually a canadian iranian) got away with acting like a mexican for so many years and what a great travesty that is. I have one of their old vinyl records, the one that famously came with a giant rolling paper. What could possibly be better than a giant rolling paper inside a record sleeve?
You know, I read this poet sometimes who has written more than a few lines about praise and adoration being what destroy a writer. With that in mind, I'd like to be an asshole and tell you once again how much I've thoroughly enjoyed reading your work lately, you still manage to stimulate thought in my thick skull and bring an evil smile to my joyless lips. Tell Bob I said hi.
Your friend,
Yeti Waters
My fellow writer—and i want to keep reminding you that you are a better natural writer than i am, possibly stemming from all that practice lying to the cops—I could use a little bit of writing praise just now. You see, I have a novel, Wonderfall, I want to finish that has been in the works since 2012 and its making me feel like a slug. I also outlined a novel that i was all keyed to write, titled Of Ichor and War, for which i had achieved subject matter saturation, and then backed out of, stepped away like it was eradiated, afraid that I can't pull it off.
Slogging through massive history books is work, but does not take much talent to write. I have tried to use history and journal writing to develop the skills to do higher level fiction and still wonder if i can, half-afraid to try and fail.
It's 45 degrees here in the Rockies on this chill morning as my ears ring so loudly I wonder if i can write. The fog has crowded out the narrative from last night. However, i did have a weird dream about saplings growing out of my head that had trunks so thick they resist not only the skull-shaving razor but the beard-trimming scissors... perhaps that will work for Beyond the Pale, adding a church bell, a novel i've been struggling with since 2013.
I have received some phone calls out of the Evil East from friends who are undergoing extreme, dehumanizing, soul-scraping gaslighting at work and with family. Some of these people who have been jaxxinated are coming down with strange late summer colds of flu-like severity and it makes me worried about my jabbed family...
These shadows crowd in on frayed story lines and make this writer wonder what he is doing. It occurs to me that we are living through a moral extinction event under a deeply corrosive sky—a sky that is in fact a tapestried tent ceiling woven of twisted fact and many-stranded lie.
The Brovid Jiveteen Jaxxination form you sent me is interesting, that the latest and greatest effort to reduce us to data is built on our strange desire to live forever as expressed in a clinical checklist to possibly be filled out by a retail food photo-clerk reassigned to medical duty. I am writing this post three months out and by the time it schedules i think I will have left the shelter of your hospitality for colder climes. But it is not known within this addled head. I get jittery and nervous when once i did not. Poor Megan called me asking me to return to the Harm City barrio to warm her worn-out hopes one last time for this winter.
As a writer, as a man, I feel like a hook that has been broken from its fishing line falling to the lake bottom—strange not to feel alive when writing. If it were not for the misery of travel the System might have eaten me. When running from it is the only time I feel alive, though progressively unwell of spirit. Doing this—this writing craft i've adopted as an end-of-life trade—i'm just a seated bell ringing a lonely little knell. I never feel human while writing, except for the last few chapters of a novel. Fighting and fight training is so much more like life.
If some of these novels can be finished and achieve some sense of our harried humanity among this edifice of lies, perhaps the effort will seem worthwhile. I only wrote yesterday's chapter because I pulled pigweed for hours. Today i go to 9,000 feet in search of the last mushrooms of the season for Bob's elk gravy. Perhaps that and the dream will provide some forage for the novelist still trying to escape the two greedy historians dueling over his fresh-dug grave.
Every novel written is a resurrection of the novelist I murdered at his desk to drag his bones back into the the graveyard of truth that is our accepted past. The man writing Beyond the Pale, who lurched through Chapter 5 last night, is barely animate, yawning like some chryo-head thawed for a debriefing about the century elapsed between his liquid nitrogen bath and his retrieving. By the time he achieves a strident life and feels that twinge of accomplishment at Chapter 15, it will be time to effect his murder and bury him somewhere in Plantation America among some millions of pauper souls...and he knows it.
