The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

Even my stove doesn’t fuckin work. The mind is a terrible thing to attempt to use. I was going to say waste. No need to say waste. The mind is a waste of time anyway. You don’t need to press it for it to be a stupid fucking waste of time. All us writers are writing for money now. There is no such thing as literature anymore except for those who have been lucky enough to make money writing. They can write literature. The rest of us have to turn on our fucking stoves to get heat in our houses because the heat doesn’t work. Many of us want to die. Myself included. I’ve reconciled to the fact that nothing I ever say on paper will matter to anybody, ever. My childish belief in immortality through the written word is dead. I failed to do everything in life that would make me a success because I thought I had a higher ideal. I didn’t.
So it’s as though I’ve got nothing left to lose. The stove finally kicked on and it’s cooking my left ear. My right ear is about frozen off. I look at a magazine called Poets and Writers for yuppies who want to make a lot of money from their writing. I’m looking at the face of a poet named Ai. Everybody has such names in this magazine. They all try to be literary when they’re getting literarily screwed too. The greatest of them get their faces placed inside because they won a contest or something. Then there are interviews inside too with the Ai’s of the world. These Ai’s supposedly have some sort of ability to tap into the world’s unconscious psyche and reveal it to the rest of us piglets.  Ai’s making money. I respect her.
In college they tell you all about these great writers. They never tell you about the shit writers, the ones who failed. The many who killed themselves AND never wrote a word the rest of the shitheads considered valuable. They’re brushed aside as the crazies. The winners don’t know that they know how to play the system which includes having the ability to lick stamp after fucking stamp against all odds. The rest of us see it as a waste of immortality. Time’s little joke on us we figure is to make us give up our supposed art for the sake of office supplies. The Buddhists wouldn’t complain about this. But I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a writer who doesn’t write most of the time, who gave up, who was looking for something in the written word that he couldn’t find in the reality of this world where words don’t mean shit, who didn’t know that he was just hiding by writing, hoping by writing, praying by writing and ultimately dying by writing. His soul is dead now because he thought he could make a living out of writing. Now that he’s realized this impossibility he’s awoken to the fact that he has no way to make a living. No woman wants to be by his side because of his insanity and commitment to the higher arts which had no commitment to him, only loathing that he would attempt to aspire there. And all of the other brothers and sisters say hallelujah the foolish boy has gone home. He’s not trying to knock on the door of heaven anymore. Everybody knows he’s not pretty enough. As they step up to the door, head held high, finger outstretched poised to press a doorbell a million miles up hanging there like the Man hanging on the moon. Good luck.

So to quit is to begin. This is the lesson. To let it all go is to allow it all to come again, but in a different form. Ai sits there knowing something that I never will. She looks at me as if my thoughts of the end can be combated no matter how hard I try against that look in her eye. She says to me that I may be wise in some regards, but her poetry can handle even my wisdom and if she has her way then I’m not going to die, but rise, but rise, but rise.
And the writer in me says keep writing to find out the answer to this predicament which has no name and only begs more exposition simply so the lights don’t go out completely. Ai’s eyes will die someday and what will then keep me alive? I don’t know. I think it’s the next word, but nobody reads my words anyway and everybody says i’m not supposed to just write for the hell of it.
Just thought that maybe I’d call this a diary. Who cares what this is called? It doesn’t matter. I thought if I called it a diary then maybe I could hone it later and sell it.