No one has to read me. Millions of books in libraries, no joke, no
exaggeration. My wife and daughter have at least three hundred at home, and we abandoned
a couple hundred more in Costa Rica. I can't guess how many they've read over
the years. Perhaps a thousand or two. I visited big public libraries in Milwaukee,
New York, Philadelphia, and London. Every day of the week, NPR and Fox monotonously
plug more Jewish and black authors. There could be 100,000 self published goyim
on Amazon, a million preachers, dreamers, and woo-woo mystics in America. I
can't estimate how many keystrokes and cat videos were posted on Facebook.
Lawyers and legislators dump trillions of words on paper. Every year, there's a
library book sale in upscale Jefferson County, Colorado, tens of thousands of old
encyclopedias, novels, children's books, mysteries, and dusty nonfiction
retired from a dozen suburban county branch libraries to make room on their
shelves for new socially correct rubbish. In 1980, I was offered a job at
Lucasfilm to write Star Wars paperbacks. God knows how many westerns and
romance novels were sold in the past, certainly thousands of titles. Every TV show
has writers, every movie, every newscast, every commercial. In 1965, I tore bulletins
from a teletype to be broadcast on a 250-watt AM radio station to retirees and
housewives. We read a weekly newspaper full of gossip, school lunch menus, high
school sports, death notices, and smiling VFW fish fry eaters. People
subscribed to Time, Good Housekeeping, National Geographic, Reader's Digest,
and Sports Illustrated.
The world does not need me. It may be illegal nowadays to read or discuss
my signature style of straight white obscenities and preposterous adventures.
I've invested more decades than I can remember, to be completely ignored. I
deeply appreciate the half dozen friends who encouraged me to continue. Without
them I would have quit long ago. Maybe I improved over the years. Perhaps
Escape! is my finest work to date. I don't know. Certainly my most stridently
idiosyncratic, full of frankly adult content. That's how I understand the truth
of life past, present, and future. Boy meets girls.
My friend Tom has been posting splendid videos on early American history.
In the space of a mere 70 years, colonial population increased tenfold, about a
third of which resulted from additional migration from Europe. Where did the
other 2/3 of colonists come from? They fucked a lot. That's also why there are 200
million Nigerians, all Bible thumping, bandits, and crime notwithstanding, fucking
day and night. The same thing happened in China and India. Three billion people
didn't suddenly appear by magic. Communists and Hindus fucked all day and night,
young and old, rich and poor. It's sort of a lost art in woke America, but it
persists in our country music, classic rock, and motels from coast to coast.
I estimate that I successfully wooed 75 babes. Your mileage may vary.
Of course, there's more to life than sexuality. Literature, science,
medicine, politics, crime, corrections, salesmanship, mining, manufacturing,
farming, food service, cartoons, and clog dancing. I would include banking and
finance, but they don't exist anymore except as camp followers of government,
pushing paper assets to paper over unpayable public debt. Ask yourself how much
fun would it be to date a black female Morgan Stanley manager or a mentally
challenged public servant like AOC? I had several interesting experiences with
black girls, but you couldn't pay me enough to bed an angry diversity hire or horse
faced Occasional Cortex, unless it involved handcuffs and a horsewhip. Call me
picky.
I admit to reading other people's books, everything written by Rand,
Kipling, C.S. Forester, Ray Chandler, James Madison, Winston Churchill, Mark
Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, RLS, Aristotle, and Machiavelli. I've read more
Gene Rhodes than most people have and all five of Hammett's novels. I regret
reading some authors, particularly Hemingway and Chesterton. Sort of ambivalent
about Victor Hugo. Too many bad guys and helpless victims. Salinger was
contemptible, Vonnegut, Heller, and Adams idiotic. I was amused by Gurdjieff
and O. Henry, bored by Jules Verne, and infuriated by Wall Street Journal
editorials. Joyce, Kafka, and Lawrence are unreadable trash. I much admire and
respect Erik's short stories.
The other day at the country store, there were a dozen strangers on the
front porch, sitting and standing in an array of paraplegic gear, severely
disabled Iraq War vets. I went outside to chat with them, always glad to meet
brave men. They have courageous tales to tell, plenty of grisly war stories in
hardcover.
No reason to read my novels. "Old fashioned," Cass remarked.
I'll be honest with you. The final chapter of Escape! is so daunting that I
doubt any other living author could wrangle it with penetrating truths,
sizzling tension, and suspension of disbelief. Victor Hugo achieved it in Notre
Dame de Paris, a very thick medieval French tragedy. I'm 1/4 French. I don't care
about ancestry or a melodrama of fake marriage in the Court of Miracles to save
a nitwit. I'm not Victor Hugo, nor a cog in his shadow. I'm individual,
marginalized, and about to be canceled by a horde of savages who despise white
men. That doesn't matter. I have to fashion an alchemy no one else would
attempt — challenging Hugo with dueling pixels point blank, one of us to be slain
and forgotten.
This post never seems finished. I'm dragging my feet, letting hours and
days escape, no pun intended. Don't want to write anything written before by
anyone on earth. The outline is set. Outlines are not writing. The crisis is
simple. Literature is not simple. I would rather lose this laptop to barn rot,
rather than draft and mess around with the climax. People talk about editing and
emending. I've done it with See Spot Run situations and dialogue typed too rapidly.
Not now. The ending is not negotiable.
One last thing to append. You should definitely boycott my books, all of
them. I'm not to be trusted. In the past, I've lost my temper hundreds of
times, destroyed a heavy Selectric typewriter by upending a table, physically
ripped a 25-pair office telephone from the wall in anger (not easy to do) and
tore up several marriages by firing wives who make life difficult. What the
fuck did they expect from a writer? I've walked off numerous jobs, snorted at
coworkers, and been fired more times than I can count. I am not a reasonable
person. My life was a lost struggle for recognition.
Older now, isolated and impoverished, I yell at the dog to get out of my
line of sight when I write. The work I do is impossibly difficult. I fight with
wasps, ticks, broiling summer heat and icy winter. None of that stops me.
Either I'll write the final chapter of Escape! or choke to death in the war of
words. My future is canceled. Escape! will be self-published and die, like Partners
did, another masterpiece of war and death. I'm too worn and ugly for a new girlfriend,
however much I crave feminine caress.
Somehow, it was all worth it, every blunder, every crime, every cigarette,
every obscenity, every folly, temper tantrum, and broken promise. I blew
through millions of dollars belonging to others. I suffered the most pitiful
disasters, always my own fault. And worse — I wrote about it, as if my misery
was worth discussing in detail, a completely foolish enterprise in the name of
transparency. Salinger was far more clever. He never made a public statement,
kept quiet, became mysterious. Familiarity breeds contempt and ridicule. I
should change my middle name to Chump. Nothing but ridicule, coast to coast and
in five foreign countries, humiliated by judges and juries in every profession
I assaulted.
Hell is worth it, if I can pen the last chapter and climax of Escape!
If I had to go to prison again to achieve it, I'd pay that price.
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