The shits are small and hard and easy to pick up. I often pick them up with my bare hands. I fling them into the toilet, as though they were mini-basketballs. And then I wash my hands. Don't worry. I'm not that much of an idiot.
So I started talking my dog into the backyard and pissing to show her how it's done. I try to aim for the poison ivy or poison sumac. I don't think human piss kiss plants that make you itch, but it can't hurt to try.
Of course, at times I wonder what my neighbors would think if they looked out and saw my pale white ass stomping around. I have that strange sense of modern paranoia where I always think the police are going to show up and arrest me for one crime or another and it would be something like this: me out, innocently pissing next to the chihuahua, the next day in the Concord pen, writing Thoreau-like letters about how prison isn't so bad, since the real prison is the human mind.
I would be in the pen, but still have poison ivy around the toes from stomping around the backyard naked.
*
I should note that my trick worked, and the dog now stands next to me and we piss together.
*
An ex-student of mine, Frank, started writing a blog entry here that we had planned out as a half-prank, but I found out that Osama bin Laden had been killed and it not only would have spoiled the joke, but well, as I said, I have that strange sense of modern paranoia . . . .
*
But what are you here for? You see, I once told Frank that you can't write as though as a Protestant minister was standing over your shoulder. And I tried to put it this way to writing students: that very thing that pains you to write, that thought that flickers across your brain until you stop it with a no way there's no way I can write that no one will ever date me and I'll get fired -- that thing? That thing is what people want to read. And it's exactly why in the age of flame wars and 14 year olds dissing on Herman Melville and Lady Gaga alike we aren't an inch closer to anything like the truth. Because even those 14 year old kids - especially those 14 year old kids, are scared as hell to write what they actually think. Moreover, to do so with the necessary discipline, the aesthetic form to make it into something less random and more art? Fuck that. This echoes across the net as much as information does. Fuck that. No way. No no no no.
*
Because, of course, there's truth in it. Life involves filters and concealment. So be it. And if I told you the true comic adventures of what my daily life was like yes I would get fired but, I suspect, would probably get laid more. And it's not that I would get fired because I'm some arch bastard. Because I, like you, am pretty normal. My confessions have nothing to do with the big stuff and a lot more to do with the petty. But even that . . . .
*
So how's it going? How ya been?
I'm still on the Internet a lot. I mean, a hell of a lot. Hours a day. I study bjj videos on youtube. I "wiki" D.H. Lawrence. But I was fairly honest in keeping it all to essentials, or at least to things that don't need an apology. I am using the tool.
And from that perspective, the few times I've gotten on facebook, I have that feeling that I get when I occasionally look on my old myspace page. Which is mostly what the hell was the big deal?
When I get home at night, no light shines straight into my eyes. And I sleep well. I don't think I'll ever go back to being on the Internet frequently. I think I'll keep pushing in the direction of less. I've let my Nook gather dust.
I bought a Dashiell Hammett book. The book smells feminine, almost perfumed. Maybe a little soapy.
The book has a receipt for itself inside it. Someone paid full price, nine dollars, for it, back in 1999 and it was purchased at a Barnes and Noble in Riverdale, Alabama. How it made it's way to Nashua? Who read it? Who stained its bottom slightly with such a strange and delicate scent? So to think about as you read tales of the lost New York, with its drunks and dames.
*
But I still get on to send important messages and to make sure I have the time of events correct. Important matters.
*
I've started going to a park in the afternoon with a notebook. I first started doing this as a self-consciously creative-person act. But then I found that not only did it make me feel happy, but I was always writing a lot about stuff that I didn't expect. I also started drawing. Why? Well, because there were big blank white pages. Once you have a stick and a canvas and a little spare time, of course you'll start drawing bison, and from then on to naked women and trains and space monsters and, finally, leaves. Of course, leaves.
*
It's been hard to give up music and I gave in last night and listened to a Sinatra cd, Only the Lonely, and that was because I was feeling a little lonely. I hurt my knee this week, so I couldn't train. I had gone through a number of novels this week. And I just wanted to hang out. I didn't want my sociality mediatized. I wanted to hang with people. And no people were around. So, in my head, I thought of the America from before when I was born, and I thought of drinking Old Fashioneds in hotel bars and listening to Gerry Mulligan and I let my head roll and roll onto into that crazy fog of mantelpieces and Chinese food and black and white.
*
So I've written a lot, in this time, in a notebook, that only I can read. I wrote a few letters that I haven't sent. I read quite a few books. I injured my knee. So bad it's hard for me to walk. And I kept thinking that ideas, like anything in the universe, have power and energy.
At night, the dog has stopped sleeping on her heating pad and now insists on sleeping next to me again. I worry about rolling over on her, but I also wake up, every time, thinking, where is the dog? I need to find my little friend. And I reach my hand down my side, and there she is, nestly by my underpants. And her tail starts to thump against the blanket and she is happy, either because it's a new day or because I'm touching her or because a bond lost in sleep has been reformed.
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