In the Mood To Write

I just don't know what. I won't let that stop me, though--that's the point of this whole thing, right, to be able to write no matter when we're in the mood, and no matter if we have anything to say. It's the opposite of a blank piece of paper, which is so difficult to add ink to, just like that. You could say that this environment is so easy, too easy. When anything is worthy of writing about, do words die?

Time to end this, for self preservation. Just like that.

Ear Slime

This is why I'm hot, this is why I'm hot, this is why, this is why, this is why I'm hot.

This is why I'm hot, this is why I'm hot, this is why, this is why, this is why I'm hot.

I'm hot because I'm fly, you ain't because you not, this is—CEASE AND DESIST. Enough.

This song, which I'm sure is called "This Is Why I'm Hot," is such a complete pile of shit that I hesitate to use so familiar a term, lest you consider it in the same vein as any other pile of shit you might hear. My Humps is a pile of shit, but you might catch yourself dancing to it for a few seconds. "I went down, down to the disco--damn, can't believe I just shook my ass to that." But you did. But This Is Why I'm Hot? Like gonhorrea and our appendices, I wonder why it exists.

I cannot get that line out of my head: I'm hot because I'm fly, you ain't because you not." It's a wood-burrowing insect mistaking my brain for oak. It's an enormous wad of Big League Chew caught in a boot. I'd give up at least three toes to be fluent in any language, or to remember long sections of obscure plays, or even someone's birthday without help from Microsoft Outlook, but this stank line--probably with me for life.

Incunabulum

What can you say about a person who prefers the lives of poets to the poems themselves? The poems now refer to their past so much that almost nothing is original. How can it be? To paraphrase someone I can't remember once said, Elizabethan England had 20 poets. There's now 20 poets in one neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio. It's all been said!

Give me the lives of the authors instead: Genet's impossible life, Anais Nin's non-self-published secrets, and Rimbaud's back-alley adventures! Their words are surely the same as something somebody did, but their lives, their creative quest, usual sexual and exciting, is always original.

I want to find the Ur-book, the one that makes no reference to others because there's nothing else to reference. This takes imagination, though. How can we imagine The Iliad as original when its progeny are everywhere? How can we understand a world of no Hamlet when we exist with him, when he is a part of our upbringing, like a home from childhood

Even Os Lusiadas, the greatest story no one reads. Even this gorgeous tale begins by ripping off Virgil, and ends I don't know how, because who can finish 10 cantos during commercials? No, better to read about Luis Vaz de Camoes, who lost an eye in battle defending his country in an unnecessary war, who fought the wrong guy in the streets and was jailed for it, who served in an Orient that knew no Occident: human suffering and perseverance that any dummy can get, even if they don't like that heavy stuff. Can't you see him, tossed into the water from a shipwreck, his masterwork in one hand above the waves as he struggles to reach land? Can't you feel that desperation? We need his words to need to know him. His words are for our souls, when we're ready. His struggle is for our lives, ready or not.

He died as his country ceased to be. Vice versa, probably. Either way, it's been done.