The Radio and The Internet

We are not all desperate bottomfeeders to the last.  We count them in our number like any other class of people --  any other.  And we are not all poets, novelists, aspiring filmmakers:  Some of us wouldn't give you a straight answer what  year it is, let alone how that should be significant to the arts.  I, myself, have eaten from garbage cans -- dry things, wrapped in  plastic and not wrapped in plastic, drank flat soda, cold  coffee, the dregs of beer cans, drops left in the corner  of liquor bottles big & small. -- It's not just something  cool they say in movies: the street finds a way inside of you  and its gravity is not undone by accident.  The ones waiting for the accident, demanding it, even, you see them where their souls have become possessed in hysteria, their madmen apocalypse of Christian Martyrdom braced in, fenced in with ubiquitous methamphetamine addiction or vigilantly defending some 20 ft. by 20 ft. squ...

 If you asked people 20 yrs. ago  who overestimated their intelligence  how accurately they could predict the state  of things as they are now is I would put a reasonable, though  handsome wager  that their prediction  would be terrifyingly accurate.  Welcome to the brave new world.  Take your leisure weighing your fear.  **** 

 I don't  know  who broke your  goddamn heart.  I  just wanted  your  attention  for a minute  I wasn't planning  on feeding your hungry  fucking ghost of a soul  for the rest of time as  we know it. I love  you. I'll try. I'll try.  I'll try.  **** 

 So I got a phone. I spent a little more money than I meant to so I'll have to wait until you put  money in the bank again to activate it, get headphones, so on and so forth.  I think about writing. I think about different kinds of food or things that are intelligent for smoking... like I was listening to the girl at the weed store -- Hello, friend -- she says in this warm, I Accidentally Walked Out of Hubert Selby Jr novel, inter-edited by Walter Kirn. Lost in the Meritocracy and She Needed Me Walter Kirn.  Richard Lange's Angel Baby is probably if not definitely the best modern chase novel in the last 10 or 20 years. Or it's pretty close the Rovers. The Rovers is too many fucking pages of a badass for a single goddamn book. I mean, be reasonable.  Talk to you later.  Richard 

 He stepped off the street and into some discount liquor store in Northern Koreatown. The door came to an easy close behind him.  The place was empty except for the clerk. The light of the room went to his permanently startled eyes like a laser in his mudclay face, stone sober.  Charles Anthony had been gone from his apartment in Hawthorne for a shade over two weeks at that point, living out of his car, walking around in the street and the mostly-clean air. He was getting a taste for people.  He noticed how none of the clerks -- how really no one, ever said Hi to you, like they were too old for manners or niceties of any kind.  He went to a cooler at the back of the store and took a large bottle of Guinness out and brought it up to the counter.  Whether the clerk was filled with disbelief or incredulity, he couldn't say. Like so many of them everywhere, the man had the look of an angry stone that was equally afraid of its anger.  "Just this," said Char...

  My life has had no shortage of physical injuries. Not that I've ever been fatally wounded nor suffered any lasting/obvious injury in that time: I've never fallen off a skyscraper or been thrown from a bridge or had my shit splattered in the street by oncoming traffic I didn't notice. I've never been attacked by a shark nor raped by a dolphin.  The first big one I was 5 years old and I had to have the bloody, gooey mess of the back of my skull sewn back together like some violent Jackson Pollack painting or when me and Bobby were playing in the snow of his/our 300 ft. tall driveway in Upstate New York, and...Bobby was packing down snow with a shovel, and he told me not to walk behind him, which I did, or the time we rode the plastic sleighs down the driveway and I smashed my forehead underneath the truck that was there that couldn't make it up the hill for the snow. (I wonder if this sort of behavior isn't common in genetics, like some of us aren't actually...