I had a lovely essay completed and somehow it was lost. I used to get bent out of shape about that but I know that an asteroid is hurtling through space at our planet and with that as comfort I will redo the essay. I have a potpourri of things to say, associations and mental quiltwork to express. What has gotten my writing interest of late is The Optimist’s Rag, a parody of a self-help book that I am personally having fun with. I want it to be so dry and savage that one might mistakenly take it for the real thing, whatever that is. I leaven it with puns and dry humor and wild ideation interspersed among the serious and savage things I have to relate. If you will see the Ten Canons and the talk I gave to the Stony Brook Psychology society in 1990 under Pages you will see a very serious effort at getting at self-awareness. Well, I take after myself. I comment on each of the essential parts and parody it. That was interesting to do. The essential theme of the book is that emptiness, empty people and acutely empty people are the happiest people around. I savage self-awareness as unnecessary angst. You get the idea. Often Iget confused and I come out on the side of emptiness which just delights me. Now I will press “save” and see if wordpress does that. I love Bill Gates who breast-fed on a lactating intel chip.
So what does the title allude to. It is how I write. I excavate interiorly, I dig, I scratch and I spade. I crack open geodes and break down shale to get at some “truth” of the matter. Oh, I know when I am there; it is this writer’s “G” spot. (Isn’t writing when it’s going well orgasmic?) Of late I cannot seem to open that door as I struggle with myself to write about emptiness in as much a serious vein as I write about awareness. The writing comes and goes fitfully. I am with it. I have that boa’s fucking head in my grasp and I will not let go of the beast until its caged. As you may well know, reader, writer, interested party, we are only sacks of shit and skin ruled by eruptive and often volcanic emotional sources. I realize that well and I count on that seething cauldron to produce the best writing I can do. I am only a utensil to modulate and moderate its strength. I am the spigot. I just associated to Star Trek. I found it enjoyable when I realized that Kirk was the ego, Doc the id, and Spock the superego. Once you have that in mind watch Shatner work the other two, using reason always to get out of predicaments, much as our own ego does for us. Remember, though, the action comes from the id.
I am about 50 pages into the pamphlet or book, some 13,000 words and I have still not nailed the head of the boa to the plank with a tenpenny nail (that’s three inches). However, I am patient and now and then the unconscious oozes out a few paragraphs. At my age I can only think of the corollary with regard to my own sexuality. Moving on, hmmm!, I started off with a kind of writer’s despair that the work had no merit. It does. I sent a PDF file to my son (Big shot, he thinks he’s a hacker) and he told me to continue. I found that encouraging. If we heard that as a child, continue, go on, reach for platinum, not gold, the world is not the Olympics, your inner self is the medal to obtain, what larks, Pip what larks!
As a tangential note so that you can understand my son’s wild yet dry sense of humor. He works as a high end technician at Morningstar in Chicago. He is an artist and that is how he eats, but it is not his metier. Anyhow he relates how a woman from another department came to him with a problem. Her mouse was not working. Jordan tells me she was a nice person and she did not ask him to come down several floors to handle the situation. What she did to prove the mouse was dead was to shake it vigorously in front of my son as a display of how dead it was and queried him as how he would help her. His response was along these lines, “You only shake people like that.” I now call him the levity that came from my loins.
So the son saves the father, this is not Christianity folks, not from me.
i know no fear as I end this blog. It will be saved or it will not be saved, all this religious terminology. Jews are not into being saved. We tire of that. We tired of that centuries ago. Now we are more into saving one another. I bid you adieu, having run out of steam and feeling a need to get back to The Optimist’s Rag.
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