There is a song for everybody. I don’t care the beat. It just follows us along, accompanies our days like some metronome angel. Dylan’s song was of unpredictability, brokenness, like an asteroid going a million miles an hour and never really getting anywhere. He listened to others like he was a radio, but heard nothing, almost seeing the soundless radio waves instead, mocking him as though he could not know reality just because he perceived it differently, not wrongly. – From Dylan’s War by Albert Jones.
this is a short story of desperation
by
Albert Jones
a guy is born. Later he dies. It doesn’t matter to him because the way he feels he could care less. That’s the way of life. Death. Simple. Not that he wanted it, to die, no, he wanted to live, but it felt better to him to consider being alone in a warm grave for the rest of his life, or death, whatever it became. He couldn’t consider which was real. Life or death. The christians say that death is more like life than life is more like life. They call life death and call death new life. It’s odd. This is what all the presidents tell us and Billy Graham and the senate when they say a Christian prayer. Death is better than life, so don’t have too much fun I guess. I guess that’s what it means. Look forward to death after which you will have fun. What is fun then? I guess fun is being warm in a grave for the rest of your life or death, whichever it is like I said. So I guess I’m pretty straight on target, middle of the road for my views. I’ve never been much of a non conformist. Most christians would call me dour though. I guess I’m dour then. Isn’t that what they want us to be? Makes you think if maybe there isn’t money involved in this ludicrous argument. Fuck it. I believe in God, but I’m not going to freak out about it. The entire system of our Christian faith is wrong. We don’t worship Christ anymore but the devil. We watch television and go to church on Sunday. I’m not criticizing the television except its the most flagrant advertising scheme ever put out in front of the world and called by some “art.” it’s not art. It’s shit and an addictive behavior. The networks are enablers. Some will say that there are some good programs on television and its up to you to choose the ones you watch wisely. Well, they don’t live at my house where my dad sits around and drinks beer and farts his life away all the while watching Jerry Springer. We’ve become a potential case for the Jerry Springer show just by watching Jerry Springer what seems about four times a day. Is that possible? It sure seems like we see it four times a day. Fuck Jerry Springer and my dad. Fuck em all.
My mother’s cool though. She gave me four hundred dollars to get me by last month. She’s cool. Gotta buy weed and shit, but she don’t know about that and she thinks it all goes to my rent. I don’t say my mom is stupid, but she does give me a lot of money when I don’t really deserve it because I admit it that I’m a fuck up to some degree just like my old man is. I get stoned too much and I eat out a lot and I’m getting fat like my dad. I don’t work and that sucks, but I don’t give a shit. It’s what I want to do. When I get stoned it feels alright. I know, it’s an artificial high, but what else am I going to do? I got a dog that doesn’t stop barking. Barks at everything. It’s winter, got bronchitis. What the fuck else is new? Why not just get stoned and wait for better days to come in the mail. And they will. Sent out a rock musical and hope it will catch on. Created the tunes at home stoned of course. Everything stoned. Nothing held back and that’s my claim to literature like henry miller did, but, well, you can’t say better. Henry Miller wrote exactly what was on his mind. No messing around. Good writer. I try and look for ways to claim that the shit that I write is a short story or something so maybe I can sell it and get some money so I don’t die of starvation or consumption or stupidity or something or just die of being plain just stoned, scared and uncared for like most people do, I think.
But what are these paths in the mind that take us places we don’t really want to go. I know that everybody must think exactly like me in the solitude of their own minds. I just happen to sometimes put it down on paper. What are they going to do to me after I’m dead for writing these pages, admitting I was stoned and lonely and a loser and lost? Everybody will just relate. It’s as simple as that and I’ll be called a great writer because it will be as if I gave my very existence for their sakes since they never had the balls to write down what they felt which was just as fucked up as what I’m writing and often write. And I hope to sell this shit because I think it might make me a few bucks because people don’t know what short stories are and sometimes pick up a magazine and see something that looks like a story, but reads like a true to life narrative, but it ain’t it’s a short story, like this one, but you don’t know your role in it. After all, if this isn’t true then there’s no need for you to read further, but if it is true and yet false, I mean, made up, then you can read on because it won’t hurt you, it won’t relate to you in a preachy way. So I propose that this is a short story about what you would write if you could write short stories and had become a writer like you probably a couple of times wished that you could become, but didn’t. I write for you. Write the shit in my mind, because you thought that you would want to get out of your mind more than you did when you were alive, but you didn’t. You died silent. But don’t worry, Christians say that is the only way to die, silent and solemn. Then you dream well. Do you believe them? I don’t. I don’t think I do anymore. My father eats and shits and watches Springer. I get stoned and write short stories that I think maybe if i’m lucky might come to me in the form of an actual short story and not pure shit of my mind and it always comes out a little bit of both and all I can do is hope that the future will look at my work as valuable so that maybe while i’m alive I can actually get a little money so I can buy some shit for my bronchitis so I don’t hack to death, so I can sell my motorcycle and get a little car so I can go out on a date and chicks won’t think i’m a total loser and maybe my life won’t be a total waste. In the meantime, it is. And I write. I write a short story for you because I think that maybe you would want it that way. You would want a short story about the process of not really knowing how to harness all of your energy to write a short story and yet having the short story called a short story anyway. Then you get the money and you can get out of your shit situation like I can get out of mine, you can turn your heat up in the winter. You can work less. You can ache less. You can deal with stupid people less and just be by yourself more and maybe get stoned in a relaxing way or sit there with a drink because you not only gave yourself a mental enema, but you got paid for it and you knew the whole thing was shit and yet you didn’t care because they all bought it. They bought that all the mental puking you did on the page was somehow worthwhile and that you showed them a little bit about the imagination, free association, the nature of literature itself and you know it’s impossible that it really is shit and only by a stroke of luck, luck such as comes only once in a lifetime, some idiot reviewer might see your piece you got lucky to place in a stupid student literary review and say that you have a style and that you’re trying to say something but he is not sure what it is although he’s willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that somehow it is meaningful. But you know that if it isn’t meaningful in a way that has meaning, or at least words to describe some aspect of the feeling which poses as meaningfulness then it is all bullshit. It’s all a scenar. It’s all a fade out. None of it matters and you’re left sitting there knowing that your game is almost up and you will be homeless soon and all the talk about how you’re a writer will be out the window to the rest of the world as soon as they see you pulling out of its garbage cans. Such is the love of the world for artists and truthtellers.
So. Points of reference become important. Some are very close to you like the scratchiness in your throat which has turned into a fever because you fell asleep on a bed and your insistence that you still get stoned and try to write because you’re so confused about what the hell you’re going to do with the rest of your life that you don’t even want to think about it anymore. Forget about larger questions, those concerning the possibility that a big hand might come out of the sky and pluck you with it’s fingernail through your chest into another dimension which you won’t ever actually see because you will already be dead by the giant fingernail through your heart just like the movie Starship Troopers. Why not admit in our movies that we are all doomed to laugh and cry and die according to the straightness of our chins and noses? The young are praised and the lucky ones, like I’m not, make a lot of money early on chins and noses. The rest of us die unseemly deaths after many years of losing faith gradually by watching ours and our loved ones bodies fall apart. We see the girls who we thought pure die slowly through alcohol or drugs or just a bad marriage. We consider how many days we actually have after we have lost the best days of our lives to time. And sometimes we smell the roses, look at the mountains and try to remember that we still must have some good days left even though we can’t pay the bills on the table and we live in Santa Barbara where the millionaires live and don’t really give a shit about the poor folk and that’s almost a fact, I can’t say a complete fact, but they sure don’t open their doors wide around here for people without a lot of money. Let’s just say the Okies wouldn’t have been warmly received in Santa Barbara. They’ll arrest you for sitting down on State Street in Quackersville. Can’t even sit on a planter waiting for a bus. Fuck them. But that is the way it is.
Fuck Clacknersberg. And I’m trying to consider this a requiem for a fantasy. As I slowly sputter out I cry out like a leper without love ever and ask for somebody to notice me as I fall slowly down, spiral down, like a boy drowning in a whirlpool or falling over the falls of Niagara unnoticed, calm one moment and down and drowned the next in a violence unheard or unconceived until as yet that point that only the boy could have ever really known until he woke up or woke up dead. I think I’m dead. No, I can’t think anymore. I think I’m dead. Where is the short story in this statement? Where’s the monetary benefits? Where the benefits for a dead man? So I’m trying to be a good Christian and pretend that I’m dead when I’m really not because the Christians say that if you’re dead you are happy and if you are alive then you are sad. They don’t need to tell me that because I already know. I just can’t get myself to kill myself and I guess I never won’t.
The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite 