FWIW

Ars Punketica

I am unknown. I am also the future of writing. Which has been dead for a long long time. For a few decades I was The Rolling Stones of writing, the Bowie, the Lennon, the Hendrix, the Clash, but no more. Left them all behind I did.

Because I am also the Tom Waits, the Warren Zevon, the dying Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison alive and dead. And even the Miles Davis of a dead generation trying to leave its wisdom behind for you. All of them simultaneously. Smeared across the sunrise and sunset.

No writer has ever done what I have done.  I am both a poet and a quantitative analyst with years of management consulting experience backed by math. You won’t get this, but it doesn’t matter. Since the age of 16, I haven’t been writing for you. I’ve been writing for the sad heirs of your grandchildren. Even my wife hates my obsession with not talking to you. Just your grandchildren. I have a granddaughter. I’m not even talking to her. She will fall, as all of you have fallen for the new evangelical thing called STEM.

What am I doing? Rescuing literary writing from the abyss. I am in the process of creating a gigantic work of fiction that spans nearly 50 Internet websites to earn even a chance at understanding. What’s different about this Quixotic project from the usual meaninglessness? Meaning.

I did something similar, simpler, before, called The Boomer Bible. But this is bigger. I am in the process of creating an Alternate Reality, excuse me—Realities, things you insist to yourself have never existed.

My wife is mad at me. I have a major publishing book offer underway. I shouldn’t be wasting my time building a series of channels through nearly 50 websites. Right?

Yeah, I should. It’s not a trick. It’s an invitation to consciousness, a state of which I am confident most of you are unaware. Which is, when all Is said and done, what even the mean old drunk from Oxford, Mississippi, was trying in his one-noted way to bring about.

I have way more than one note.

The ultimate white nightmare, not one note but at the least a concerto. I have been rich, poor, coddled by WASPs, raised by black, brown, and purple-nailed babysitters. Went to prep school and Harvard? Yeah. Also created a list almost none of you could match in right proportions: Things I’ve driven, ridden in, laid my hands on, a list I am absolutely certain distinguishes you from me.

My wife yelled at me in my dream. She said I had eaten her heart out and left a nine-inch hole. I told her this, and she was comforting kind of. She didn’t say that was not what she felt.

The job? Tell the truth. Even to the dumb ones. Wish it could never be the necessary so.

Just saying.