By PHM
Mon. 14 Feb. 2011 / 3:21 AM CST Fort Hood, TX
When reading, it is hard to resist the urge to write. To break the impractical act of reading and delve into more practical, sensible activities like mindlessly browsing the internet, scouring it for diamonds and what not. They call it surfing. There’s no rip tide. It’s drifting. I’m reading Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann. Finally actually reading it. Bought it last year. E-book version. Never got around to it during my nervous breakdown.
I thought of taking a break to write a bloggery journal thing but decided against it. That’s not where the roots of my writing process lie. They lie at the very depths of the nature of the thing, something like that — back when I used to spend days on end reading, caffeinated, unsure of anything besides the gravity of the pages in my hands. I remember the manuscript to Make it One-Fifty sat on my dresser forever. My friend Codis the Barbarian would comment on it, critique it randomly. We didn’t call him a barbarian for nothing. The kid was a born fighter, boxed for real, was damn good at it. He may be the last man in America to discover Facebook. Probably he’s imprisoned. Perhaps he’s dead. Things happen. Never found an obit. Surely he’s still in Fall River, but maybe not.
There’s a song that keeps playing in my head these past few days. Probably by writing about it, it will vanish, which won’t be a bad thing. “A Leaving Song” by the Broken Records. Sing to me, my only love. And so forth. Back to reading, then. This took five minutes to write. Feel good about that. Managing my time well, maybe.
Sat. 20 Feb. 2011 / 9:47PM PST Los Angeles, CA
She was Colombian. She hardly spoke English. She was beautiful. She complained at my whiskey dick: “it’s low, baby, it’s low.” I don’t know why she was giving me the time. I don’t know what I said to her. She said her name was Cynthia. We went to the Traveler’s Inn in Hawthorne, near to where my friend lives. He’d been working all day. I told him she had been a prostitute. I didn’t want him to know that I spent the day in the bar, mostly, and hooked up with this aging Colombia near-hooker. Because the night before I somewhat ruined his poorly planned birthday celebration by being blasted on Blue Moon’s via Venice Beach’s The Brig ($6 a pop for a fucking can!)
I mean, I did give her some money. She said she didn’t have any. I don’t know how she was paying for her drinks. Now I’m outside the Inn. I paid for another night for her, I gave her a couple bucks. I feel good about the whole experience. I could go back in there and spend the night with her. I did take a nap, sobered me up good. I’m going to find a place to go now and wait for him. Just cruise. Get something to eat. Wait for him to call, then tell him where to come find me, because I’m sure as fuck I’ll get lost again. Wish I had gotten more writing and reading done today, but I’m not sweating anything. I don’t think I like LA so much. Now, what was that name of that bar?
Fri. 25 Feb. 2011 / 3:26AM CST Fort Hood, TX
They say it takes the soul a few days to catch up with the body and what not. I spent yesterday, well, Wednesday anyway, sleeping and recovering and generally not doing the things I should have been doing. I spent Thursday, real yesterday, working up a sweat doing all the things I should have been doing Wednesday, barely rescuing customer relations and what have you, and now I can safely say I’m almost fully caught up. Took two hours off to read the news; it turned into four hours, as often enough happens.
Submitted to a big, high-paying magazine. Will find it ironic if they accept it and pay me a bunch of cash while these non-paying magazines mostly wouldn’t give me the time of day with it. Then again, that’s unlikely, but never you mind, never you mind.
30 hours on the bus is a long time. I read three novels and one novella. My favorite novel that I read on the bus was Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett. Truly amazing, despite the fact that I highly and probably rightly suspect this fella to be a literary insider — he thanks “Jon Franzen” on that gratitude page they give you. So yeah, probably an insider, like Franzen and the deceased Foster Wallace.
Also spent a few hours listening to Wallace read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which I had bought from Audible a couple years ago. Hearing him read his work is much different than attempting to read it. You can almost keep up with the brambles of his mind, but not quite. He’s my modern Shakespeare, I guess. Shakespeare another one that everyone loves whom I have little to no respect for, speaking strictly in literary terms, that is. I’m not one to advocate loaded words like “literary merit” unless I feel they’re necessary, but I think that some people just get too much praise, and in my generation we just call it “over-rated.”
Then again, had I read something of David Foster Wallace’s in 1995, I might have felt differently. Perhaps he was a pioneer of certain things. I did like the movie to Brief Interviews, anyway.
Union Atlantic would make a great fucking movie.
There are a lot of things from the bus that I would talk about if I had the time. I got a handjob from this really weird, crazy chick. That was on the way out there. It was like 2:30 in the morning. I don’t know. And these are my exploits as a reverted fat kid. I don’t intend to stay in the shape I’m in, mind you. It’s just been a thing I’ve been up to, getting fat. I weigh like 220 right now. I should weigh around 190 to be right. So yeah, I’m overweight. Desperately. But I still get laid. Women should stop fucking me if they want me to really shape up.
I wish people liked me more. Occasionally I get depressed enough to pretend I understand why they don’t. But really they’re just terrible people who go around giving advice like “kiss everybody’s ass.” That’s no advice at all. That’s a terrible way to live. That’s for terrible people. So they’re terrible people.
I think I’m going to draft a list of the phrases which Tao Lin’s prose has deadened for the literate, sentient public. That’d be a good thing to do.
By PHM
5:04AM – Fort Hood, TX
Weather report: Texas doesn’t give a fuck about human civilization. This place never gets it right.
I’ve got some submissions out. One of them is to a place I formerly ranted about. Over the past couple years, they have managed to maintain a high standard of quality. If they accept me, there’ll be an audio with it. I have this trove of writing I haven’t bothered to submit. I get on little tears with the submission thing. I’ll submit four or five times one month, then none for the next few months. I was recently published in more than one magazine under a pseudonym. These same magazines had rejected me for years. Funny how that works.
The top two superpowers that human beings desire are the ability to go back in time and the ability to read the minds of others. We are essentially a race of inter-connected half-tards who make spend less time making mistakes than we do wishing we could correct them before they happened.
I’m going to California next week. Six days from now. First time there. Once upon a time, I went to Eugene, Oregon, and spent a couple weeks bumbling around the outlaw culture there. Shortly thereafter, I joined the army. Everything is mythological from that era.
H. apparently blocked me from the Facebook, as did her sister. It was very random. I can’t imagine why. It says a lot that I’m still thinking about it. That I think about her at least two or three times a day. And none of it matters; I can’t bring myself to care.
I spent the last week not doing anything, really. Minimal amounts of work, keeping the customers as handily satisfied as possible. I’m almost all caught up. I made like $800 in sales yesterday. Psycho busy. Truth is, and I do this little chortle to myself as I think this, I’m really just stoked about the $40 that means for disproductions. That’s my true love. That’s the empire I’ve laid the ground work for these many years. Some come along and displace us. In a matter of months they become supernovas. And such things always burn out. We have this sort of slowly amassing momentum that’s eventually unstoppable.
A week at HTMLGIANT looks like this: someone posts something about experimental fiction and the merits thereof or not thereof; someone (Roxane Gay) posts something about gender or race disparities in publishing; someone posts something about classic literature; someone posts an obituary; Blake Butler asks a divisive question to get everybody pissed off; and then someone comes to the rescue with a book review or link to a new book for sale, for a fresh injection of positivity. This formula has managed to get the place about half a million hits per month, with a growing audience of wide-eyed college kids who will eventually realize exactly what I just told you but will not move on, will become part of the process. And after all this time, after all the abuse I’ve suffered at the hands of these people, all I can do is casually just sigh and say: well, good for them. And especially good for Blake Butler, you know? I don’t mind him so much anymore. I’ve realized that he’s just another living breathing human being like I am. Perhaps, yes, he is asleep to the world around him. Yes, perhaps it takes a flood or natural disaster to shake him outside of his armchair snooze box. But what of it? At least he’s writing, Paul, fuck, and at least he’s doing well with it! Or something along those lines.
I’ve determined that I am going to write a book review of xTx’s Normally Special when I get my hands on my copy, for Girls with Insurance. I will not neglect to preface the review with the whole story of how I wasn’t supposed to get that copy. That’ll be a good preface, intriguing.
I signed the document. I’m actually 60% disabled according to the Veterans Administration. I’m a quarter of the way through to having my certification as a transcriptionist. As if I need it. I don’t have anything to prove to anyone. My customers are happy, I am happy. I may be dumb but I’m not stupid.
So stoked about this California trip. I’m taking the bus on purpose. It’s $209 for me, round trip. It’s over 30 hours each way. That’s a lot of reading I can do and catch up on.
I don’t want to regret these words later.
The thing is that on the breeze I smell the bitter end. These aren’t just words. These are feelings. On the breeze I smell the bittermost end. And will it be wrong if I am one who says, good riddance? And is there anyone here among us who can say that we’ll really miss the whole shit storm? In any case, no regrets. Systems fail, people get wise, and birth takes place through the flames. Or anything such as that.
Marginalization is a state of mind. They’ve ignored me since I was born. They will keep ignoring me. In truth, I’m that much the better for it. I’ve never relied on other people to validate or build me up. I’ve always just kept doing what I was doing. The internet was much more fun before Facebook, I feel.
I can’t wait to get out and smoke some weed and fuck some girls. I don’t want to think of myself as some sort of Hank Chinaski degenerate, but I have that within me. I work much harder than that motherfucker, though.
By PHM
10:26PM CST, Fort Hood, TX
The date of my separation from the military nears at a quickening pace. I have to sign a document that says I agree that I am 50% disabled. I haven’t signed it yet. I’m reluctant. I’m reluctant about the future. I’m reluctant about leaving the army.
I’ve been eating junk food like there’s no tomorrow. I’ve been force feeding water and coffee. I’ve been smoking two packs a day. I’ve been oscillating between thoughts of death and realizations of solitude. I keep finding myself thinking about women and how much they value their bodies and how it doesn’t matter, how when it comes down to it you can just buy sex and be miserable. I always let the good things leave from my life and replace them with things that make me miserable. On the tip of my tongue there is the taste of whiskey, a memory not so very far away.
I’ve been listening to Placebo for hours. I have no idea why. That’s not true. Some song came on the Grooveshark. It was an interview with the singer. She or he said something. I was quite annoyed at her voice. The hipster intonation. But I realized that I loved this band a lot. I don’t find myself so enthused anymore.
Life is short, that’s true, but it can be too long. I just want to wake up in a better place. I just want to fast-forward through all the bullshit. The truth is that you can work your entire life for one thing and still never get it. Success is not the application of steps that work repeated over and over. That’s something that lucky people tell unlucky people to make them feel better.
I don’t mean to be so cantankerous. I wasn’t born this way.
I want to write a story about the hollowness that a hipster girl feels when she realizes that hipster men don’t care about her anymore than jocks and other types of assholes. I want to write such a story but I don’t care enough to write it more likely I just can’t get the story down because I’ve never been that girl. I wish I wasn’t such an addict. I don’t wish any such thing. I just wish I could get into a relationship I gave a fuck about again and really latch onto it.
We went as a big group and visited Gene Simmons last night. There was an army girl there. I was very interested in the looks of her. I kept restraining myself from talking to her and she kept getting near to me, waiting for me to say something. I said nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I know exactly how it goes. I know the trajectory of any relationship before I initiate it. I know exactly the point at which you will hate me, dear, that’s why I couldn’t bring myself to say hello. I’m sorry. You were really cute, though, but you wouldn’t have gotten anything out of me. You wouldn’t have been any happier afterward. And years from now, on the foggy mornings when I rose to your memory, it’d be like: he was such an asshole sometimes. And I just can’t add that to the flurry right now.
It is snowing outside.
