Welcome to the world that I know. Am I alone in the world or just alone now? When every thought must ring of some philosophy then that philosopher is living wrongly. Although pleasure should not be the end all of existence, a pleasureable moment should be expected, a breeze, he sounds of birds chirping, the passing over head of an airplane. Too often these sounds make us sad if we are all alone. Loneliness is the biggest problem. That and misunderstanding.
I have spent all of my words. A word has become a dollar to me and I have spent them. And yet I have received no compensation. I have let go of these dollars and allowed the words to remain. Surely words must have some value inside of themselves, maybe even more value than if they were paid for which I no longer for them to be. So now that I have back the useless, monetanetary free word what do I do with them? I suppose they can bring back memory. If I feel that by writing them I can go back into memory and revisit feelings from my past then maybe I will bring back some of that to my life. Those words are valuable because they can present emotions and feelings that money couldn’t have bought anyway. I guess letting go of the hold of the dollar upon my words could have a lot of positive effects. I’m sure, though, that the next time I start to write” seriously” that money will grasp the throat of my words once more and I will lose all joy. I am a failed writer because I cannot help but want to turn the words into cash. I am impure. I am desperate. I am inauthentic. Inauthentic words do not sell.
Maybe some day I will be lucky and have somebody read my words and, although they won’t give me money, they will read them and get something out of them. I am not talking about what I have written in the past. All of that is tainted by my desire for success. I am talking about my future words. Maybe somebody will read them and feel something. Maybe somebody will even pay me for the words, but I won’t have received the money because I was writing for them, but because it was an accidental repercussion of having written honest words. By saying this I presuppose that I am capable of writing honest words. I would like to think that I am. I admit that I am a writer but I have very little to say. I write mostly of moments. I write of where I am at the moment. In society nothing changes. I have no interest in writing about the moments of society. I have no interest in writing about the hysteria of modern man and throwing my two cents in and acting like it matters. It is all a flurry of activity like a bees hive. When the uproar has passed the bees settle down. I don’t need to be a bee. I would rather contemplate on the state of my existence. I first recognized this when I was a young writer, sixteen, when I noticed the way of things. I noticed the breezes, the temper of an afternoon, the sounds of distant dogs, the squealing of children and the silence. That was when it seemed that the spiritual had more sway over who I am than this car manic perplexity we call society ever gained victory over my soul’s needs and fears. I was purer then. I had not given up. I had not transferred my words into slashed s’s, I had hope that the words that I created mattered.
Then I saw the way society takes ( or doesn’t take) our words. I looked at who the stars were, the sixteen year old sex-pots. The wise eyes of seventeen year old heart-throbs who pretend to be saving the world when all of those over thirty have dropped off the face of the earth or at least lost their significance because they could not give the impression any longer of being Barbie’s dream date. Back then I never hoped that I woulde be one of them as I do now, sitting here, realizing that the bee swarm dictates whether or not I am a fruitful member of society or not. This is especially hard knowing that I have a desire to produce a family, to continue my trek in the manner it is meant to go. Having failed to sell my great American tale of love, daring and angst all to be played out in the hip mind of a young American male I sit here and what I think of can be thought of in terms of others, others much different from those who rule the world now, those who the world forgets as soon as they are forced to stop thinking about them: Thoreau, Gandhi, even Christ. In a world where man is not living on bread alone but on every word that comes out of the network’s mouth I feel a readiness to pull back from the electronic words and re-enter the soft spaces, the quiet spaces, the spaces where I used to feel. Where I didn’t ask so many questions of my worth according to mhy profitability prowess or lack thereof. Words, failures of transmissions, emptiness, these are pulling points for those of us who need to be extricated out of the morass of mass communication, those of us who bought into the hype of selling words for fame and money. Those of us who sold out I say forgive yourselves. I’m going to. Now, maybe I will be able to write, be published, maybe even be paid someday, but never again will I strive for those dollar signs if I have to gut the integrity of the words that originally were held so sacred by my naive yet wiser younger self.
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The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite 