The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

I was just walking down the street the other day when my school book learning got in my way. Actually, another day to a writer is always that day of years ago. A day equaling an entire period of angst and hell in the writer’s life, everything metabolized down into some symbolic form until you just can’t quite stand it anymore and you write about the relationship between a chicken and a squirrel and try to pass it off as art.
Now, it is art. This is the funny thing. It is art. But in order to be welcomed into the fold of humanity as the textbooks say that we need and want, we must do everything in our power to impress upon the hill people that it is art. This is an art in itself and is a higher art for it is what forms “artists” as we understand them: Bernard Shaw, Sarah McLaughlin, Rodney Dangerfield, Whoopi. What binds all of these people together is that they wanted to be famous. Being famous is the most important thing in the trek of the artist onward to sublimity. If we don’t become famous then we are nothing? Why is this? Because if we don’t become famous then we’re going to be scraping shit off things for others as their slaves. None of us want to be slaves. We don’t even believe in slavery and yet we are. Isn’t that funny how that happens?
So the main question becomes how we are to not be slaves in this world of slaves where everybody is a slave to somebody else unless you decide to completely back out and become a hermit. Now, hermiting has gotten a bad rap as of late with Ted Kazinski and all. In a family of “hard workers” it is even harder to break away from this desire to be alone or, god forbid, simply intellectual as opposed to industrial. People are brought up in this world to tackle the problem of somebody else. In the Bible they say that every part is equal in stature. You need the feet as much as you need the head. Well, the symbolic structure of “the feet” in our society consists of scrubbing toilets and making the beds of drunken, rich, drug-besotted 19-year-olds who have driven into town in their daddy’s BMW convertibles. Whichever way you slice it there can be no doubt that in this case being the head is undoubtedly better than being the feet, especially when you get a little of their cum on your finger as you change their sheets.
But strangers cannot affect you nearly as much as your own family can. God forbid that you have a father who makes his living scraping shit off of sewer walls because you will have learned that scraping shit off of sewer walls is the pinnacle of human existence, that there is no greater goal to strive for than to scrape shit off of sewer walls. This is just an example. Every human being believes that every other human beings should be doing what they are doing if only for the reason that if they don’t believe this then they will recognize that they have been wasting their lives, which we all, for the most part do every day.
And time passes. This is true. As you get older and your world does not materialize as you expected it would according to your dreams you see that all is in a state of slow deterioration. I imagine even the “successful” see this deterioration, if they don’t express it then maybe they feel it on the inside. They feel their weaknesses. I sometimes think that the only people who are happy are those who have forsaken the idea that you can improve your lot on earth by overcoming the material obstacles, by becoming the head instead of the feet. While it is better to be the head than the feet, it does not slow the process of deterioration. This is a truth. But also, this is not a truth. Every word is false if another word follows. A truth suggests that you can stop right there and bask in reality. Well, there is reality and then there is surreal reality and then there is blackest reality and then there is hopeful reality and then there is…
You get the picture. By the time you have the answer you’ve forgotten the question. We are all the mule trying to reach the carrot tied to our tails by the fool who laughs and laughs and laughs, who cannot stop laughing, who will never stop laughing, who has come upon a truth and, smarter than the non-fool, stops.
If you have love in your life then all of these ideas are ludicrous. They are all ludicrous anyway if you think of them in terms of how they will be understood. Isn’t to be understood to be loved if you are a good person? I rarely see instances of love between strangers. Loneliness isn’t the down side of being alone, it stems from seeing the world in love. Love is a singular connection. Once you stop being lovable then you are halfway released from any tether you may have had on earth. From here you enter the loveless realm of the workings of the mind. You can go to the moon or sit on a star from here, but you won’t be able to feel it. You will only be able to see it. When you look you glimpse the light from real human beings who have found the connection. Your book falls the nine miles it takes to get to hell. You wait, but you wait for nothing. For death. Same thing.
There is always the self help route. This too is faulty because we don’t want help. We want love. We can’t just change the pictures in our heads and somehow be alright. Even understanding is a failure because no matter how much we understand we are going to have to fight those closest to us to realize it in our lives and our society will always be about thirty years behind those of us who have taken the initiative and plotted out the possibilities of our human potential. We are still alone. Individuals are pushed backward, flushed out of the system. We walk the outer rim of earth, lonely puppets without puppeteers, alive due to some bizarre system we developed as children and perfected as adults much to our detriment. When we are not being blasted in the ear as to what we should do and how we should do it by our loved ones we are following paths of thought that take us only further away until, finally, we are at the outer rim, walking lonely and aimlessly within the realm of our highest aspiration which in it’s final form is spiritual when we thought it would include the physical, the mental, the emotional, the familial. Skin hanging upon bones. Man does not live on word alone.
They say that the hopeful people do better as human beings than the non-hopeful people. The numbers are pretty convincing although I don’t have them here. I’m not sure what they mean by “hopeful” but I imagine it consists of not having had many bad influences in your life. I think hopefulness comes from having had predominantly positive influences in your life. I personally get tired of trying to figure it all out. I guess this makes me less hopeful and therefore a failure according to the study which therefore makes the study useless to the hopeless and beneficial only to the hopeful since the hopeempty are easily beaten down and often gullible and believing, always attributing to themselves the worst and thereby becoming hopeempty.
At least us hope empty people have got some role models: Sartre, Camus, Beckett. The Hopeful look at these people and don’t understand them. The universities make sure that we worship. Then they come out with these studies which place the divides between the classes; between the educated and the ignorant. I believe that the ignorant are more hopeful. I am not hopeful because I know the futility in trying to make it in this world using my chosen method: the mind. There is nothing I can say to convince anybody of anything. When I do try I simply question my motives and find that I want others to read me and be changed and then if I go further I discover that if they are reading me then I am probably getting paid. I want my physical comforts so I can continue to dispense this “truth” which will set them free and keep me fed and housed. Truth is better left spontaneous. In actuality it cannot be given at all, but only expressed. Words are a cheap whore that I visit again and again, always believing that the next time I will get out of her what I dream.