Saturday 10/22/22
* Anniversary of my sister's death yesterday. Called my mom but she wasn't there. Texted her that I'd been thinking of her all week and that I loved her. Heard back later in the day. She was going to have dinner alone with my other sister, which was good.
* Not a lot enrages me more than being condescended to. Being discriminated against like I am by these bigots of publishing trumps it, though I don't have the luxury of acting on that anger. I can channel it. When I channel it, I change it. The anger becomes fuel. The fuel becomes my energy. It becomes my drive. It becomes my productivity. It becomes my courage. But someone condescending to me is definitely up there. It's always someone simple and stupid, too. With their platitudinous inanities. Because I don't want to further complicate my life at this point, with everything I already have to deal with, I simply remove myself from these situations by saying the bare minimum. I have enough crazy people who follow me around and stalk me. People have no idea of the digital footprint they leave. Or, more likely, they just can't help themselves. Sometimes I crush someone. That's always there whenever I want it. My words, though, are always words that I'd have no problem with twenty million people seeing. That's policy here. Could twenty million people see it and would I just carry on? Well, I'd just carry on regardless. But that's my little rhetorical metric. The truth is, nothing is worse than the truth to people. Not name calling or anything like that. Say the truth and that will do it. Of course, you have to see the truth first. It takes me ten seconds to know someone better than they know themselves and what they're all about.
* People grill me about what I do, which for everything that has come before, and all that has been made, I look at as having barely started. Wait until this changes. Then we start. They become pushy and invasive. Eventually, I give some semblance of an answer. They think I'm exaggerating. I could scarcely be underselling more. They find out who I am, and they realize this. Then, because most people are 1. Unbalanced and 2. Insecure and 3. Toxic and 4. Envious, a number of things may happen. Their unbalanced nature will become all the more evident. They essentially topple over. I've done nothing. I've simply been what I am, before I met them. People start by measuring how much like them that you are. The more so, the more comfortable they are. They immediately realize that it is impossible for anyone to be less like them than I am. They are threatened and overwhelmed by this. They take it personally. What they ought to realize--and they do on some level, because it's that obvious--is that I'm equally unlike anyone else as I am unlike them. They internalize it as about them, or what they lack. They lack plenty. They almost always lack everything. We really have no business talking to each other at all, save that I try, because what is one supposed to do? Talk to no one? Wait and wait and wait for that person who is the smartest person out of millions of people, to turn up? But it's no more a commentary on them than anyone else. I'm equally removed from all in this manner. Many manners. I mean, what? There it is. Here it is. In everything I do and the full range of it. That is not my fault.
* The person I am going to be with--I am certain of this--is going to be someone who knows much about me already, has read every word I've written that they could get their hands on. That is the ground we will meet upon. That will all already be done and in place. I think they will be someone who reaches out to me. They may very well expect I will ignore them. I think anything would have to start like that. Someone would have to know ahead of time. Now, if everyone out there in the world knows--one knows what I mean; if millions know--then that becomes more logistically tenable. Easier. But I would also have some doubts, I'm sure, as to intention. That will always be there. Frankly, I know too much about people, have experienced too much, to ever trust anyone fully again. Do you know what I trust fully? My work. Do you know who I trust fully? My characters. They are not just more real than anyone I've ever known. They are more real than anyone has ever been. I'm not saying they're too real. Hyperreal. I'm saying they have a fullness of identity that people you meet do not. People think they do. They'd have to, right? But they don't.
* I know what the find of finds is on this upcoming Revolver box set. The "key" nugget. I should write something about it. I hope they give Rubber Soul the big box set treatment. I worry about that record becoming the "forgotten" classic. Pepper, Revolver, The White Album and Abbey Road get more play and ink. Rubber Soul may be better than any of them.
* I am listening to a lot of the Grateful Dead in Columbus, Ohio on Halloween in 1971 as a five-piece. They are the best band this country has ever produced. They're unreal. They are also America's greatest dance band, in the pop and rock category. The Ellington band rules the jazz section.
* No Mercy When We Get There: Stories to Wreck You, is really beginning to take shape. I am very pleased with the title. I'll write an intro for the book.
* Pitch: There's a piece dying to be written about how the John Lennon-sung "Yellow Submarine" is the find of find of the Revolver box. This cut was never even rumored to exist. But more than that, it could fit on Plastic Ono Band. Total surprise. Even for me. Wasn't prepared for what this track is. I could do it quick, if you were amenable. I'll probably be writing it this weekend anyway, for someone, and then scramble and try and get it sorted somewhere next week if I have to.
* That happened in real time. I do a lot at once.
* "Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad" is so damn joyous.
* Advanced copy of Bob Dylan's The Philosophy of Modern Song arrived. Will go through it this weekend.
* Rewatched this 1960 interview of Orson Welles talking about Kane. Texted it to a bunch of people. That's the kind of text one routinely gets if one is my friend. Welles is Welles. The gold standard at the time. I thought, right, be better than that. Sometimes you look at what someone else did. Sometimes you don't. With writing, I didn't. There was no reason to. But looking doesn't also mean there's a reason. It means you were aware. Note the quality of the questions that Welles gets, too.
* I saw in an M.R. James Facebook group where a guy put together a book of public domain Christmas stories. Some real rarities in there, too. Looks like he did a great job and it's a volume worth having. I'll have to check it out.
* I lay in bed and work on stories. "Up the Sea." Others. I close my eyes and create. There are thousands of narratives in my mind, created and living there, becoming what they will become, as others come into existence to join them, and they all make their journey to the page.
* Someone should translate the works of Konstantin Vaginov and put them in an affordable English edition. I would also really like to find a translation of Vvedensky's Christmas at the Ivanovs' but I'm having no luck.
* Armies and armies of broken people out there. I see these people on Twitter who are boring, empty, hateful, bland. They post the same kind of shit over and over and over again. But they'll have 400,000 followers. Exact same shit every day. "Tell me you're a fascist without telling me you're a fascist." (And hardly anyone who uses the word fascist has a clue what the word means.) The same language. The same cliches. Never anything individual to them. They possess no individuality. Then, 500 people comment. Sometimes I'll click on one of those profiles, because I honestly wonder what on earth they could be getting from following this person and I want to know what this follower person is like. And that profile I click on is always the profile of a crazy, broken person. With their cats. They'll have 4000 followers themselves. Just for being crazy. And broken. And stupid. And bland. They just want the echo. The echo is their God. Think about that: God in this world--and I'm using the word God to represent the most significant thing, not any religious deity--is an echo. People bow down before an echo above all else. What this is, amazingly, is a community. A community of the dead. And this is virtually all there is now in this world. Armies and armies of broken people. This is a much bigger thing I need to overcome than even this industry in which so many in it are working in concert to hold me back. What I am is squarely at odds with everything in this world now.
* To me, these lines from John Clare's "I Am" are the most affecting in all of poetry: "Even the dearest that I loved the best/Are strange--nay, stranger than the rest." And to think: this was a man who once wrote poems about birds nests and badgers. And he gets to this other point.
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