All My Books Are Road Trips, My Whole Fucking Life Are Road Trips after Road Trips: The Road Trip Is A Shape Shifter
I remember staring into the blackness of What Comes Next.
1952 Flight to Los Angeles. I'm standing up on the seat next to a window wearing knickers which I abhor. I had been jumping up and down on the airplane seat (it was red) and my Buster Browns were brown. The plane was on fire. People screamed. One of the engines outside our windows looked as if might explode. Sit down and shut up. Those women were authority. They didn't look like authority. I thought, that was what authority did. Authority means shut the fuck up. Sit down. Be quiet. Get on the floor. It's just another brick wall to me. My experience in publishing is one of strange, inordinate tunnels and labyrinthine snakes curvature like a particle accelerator on steroids.
Plane crashes were common in 1952. We landed in the middle of the Texas desert. One old store that only sold old bread. I wanted to see a snake. I had seen pictures of snakes. But I got lugged along. We could sit on the asphalt parking lot. I crawled away. It grinds the skin off your knees. I knew there had to be big old rattlesnakes somewhere. I was right. When people ask me Why Are You Here, I tell them the truth: I am here to have adventures. I have been making books, and giving them away. If you give me a ridiculous amount of money, I will hand-make a book just for you. I get paid in full whether you like the book or not. I might beat it with a hammer, too. No returns.
I do not want to meet you.
I will send you the book when the check clears. Now, go home. My work is never over.
Bring in the next one. -- Tim Barrus
I am a communist. How many times do we have to listen to republican apparatchiks explain how death can't be all that bad. What happens when the deviant is the last homo sapiens standing. Maybe he can walk around the rubble. I don't care anymore what happens to America. Let the sea eat it. Let the oceans rise and the deviant can be essentially alone on the roof of Trump tower. A very vulnerable position. I am burned out saying he wants to kill everyone. Classical rape psychology but the media refuses to go there. Lay low, democrats. The world has already left you behind. You are irrelevant. Yet they cling to dreams of power, too. The media has plugged its own butt hole. The deviant must now be referred to appropriately. The media is lost. Even as you clutch your pearls and faint, the deviant is off and killing someone else. What are Americans going to do when he opens the health camps and we are ordered to move in. No stuff. Trains. Steel coming down that track. Pack’em in like cows.
“You are now citizens of Health Camp Executions.
These camps are already there. Citizens who build their own prisons. Asshole contamination everywhere. You are not informed. Your little police departments are watching. Happy face. These are the people who come to your house in the night to kill you.
And you do not believe it. The deviant will take your life and eat you alive. It’s hungry for red meat.
I received an enraged letter from the homo sapiens who runs NYT comments. She was livid. She defends etiquette because her idea of etiquette is obviously a forced rather simple ideology. She doesn't understand why I would challenge her unique (it’s all been done before) ideas are all clampdowns. Her ideas about containment are fried into her pea brain. I will not be contained. Why. Because I cannot be contained. She will probably run a health camp. Child corpses to eviscerate. Cut up. Experiment with. Can children become good citizens if we cut off their heads. No. Missy Moderation lists my NYT crimes. I wear those medals proudly. When you start editing me, what usually happens is their hair catches fire. Never talk with a reporter, or department head, or an editor. She makes the rules up as she walks around her staff of fourteen. Dear Missy: I will talk to reporters. I will talk with editors. And, Missy Moderator can kiss my literate asshole. All comments I make go right into my book. Including your stupid letter. My book is about Comment Moderation. It is called We Will Tape Your Mouth Shut.
It come with a broad view. I am a dinosaur. Many people are biding their time. What I want to know is, why even have a government. Because someone or a group of someones have to agree on where to put the dead. This obviously lends itself to Greek Theatre. “Why Are You Here.”
Artists sometimes (not often enough) see things differently. Comment Moderation keeps the riff raff out. It is effective and mean-spirited. I would argue that comment moderation keeps particular voices out. I have a Southern accent, now. You would not know that. But if I revert to inner censorship, I would drop the accent, and I would revert to the monotone. The New York Times doesn’t even know what monotone means. And all the experts who only talk to homo sapiens from the bubble, all statues are risen like a black monolith rises with no sound because the sound of the sun itself would make your head explode. Comment moderation is the silence. What has happened, is that the species itself is eating itself, and who in their right mind would want us as neighbors. Absolutely, no one.
I do not have neighbors. I know survivors, and we know this: You get away ignoring us yet you want our money. On subscriptions. What do we get out of the dark ages deal of the wheel.
The word Serf is beginning to look like the word Serf. I might be a communist, but have you met my brother of the books. He still throws books at me. Sally Mann moved me. I am in awe of talent. But it always gets messy. I sell more art than I sell writing.
Why can’t the New York Times be questioned about annoying things like why have you banished us from speaking how we speak. I adopted it because I have lived most of my life saturated with the music of the beast. I am Stand By Your Man. I am also pissed off that I had to mask to look that one in the face. I speak of it because it’s easier. The stranger comes to town.
I am the autistic spectrum. We all mask so we might function in such ways the Normals approve of as it absorbs most code, and then disappears in ways not intended by Sally Man as she draws all the shadows in with images that follow all the moral motif an eye for an eye, and eye for the photograph is all the eye you will ever read.
“I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort. From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be — what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing — I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.” — Socrates
My moderator with her sword decides what civil is. Socrates got it. Civil is to admit with your very life that power structures endure stones that fall from the sky. She does not understand that she just keeps giving me material I most definitely use. She is making her problem far worse. I get it.
I think her real name is Melanie Wilkes. Satire and comedy are protected speech. Opinions are also protected speech. The New York Times cringes with legal bills as the current standard of What The Fuck. You either arrive with worth or go home. Perhaps she wants me to mention her. I only use symbolisms of her as an icon of linguistic terrorism she employs with that sword the size of France. She plays a good game of poker, but in the end, she’s in way over her pretty head. I told you, I am a dinosaur. I am the President of the Dinosaurs. No one told her the stakes were not spare change. She truly believes that a bad word can cause a war to break out in the penguin community of Antarctica.
We are growing in numbers. We are the people who would like to see comment moderation burned to the motherfucker ground. I am offended that I am presumed to be so stupid I can’t figure out bad actors. I need help from a comment moderator to show me how to feel. Why is free speech inside your head is even an argument. The American Hardware Stores of Cucamonga has comment moderators to defend and cut off any criticisms of a wrench made by the penguin community in the Tasmanian iceflow as it melts. There are a lot of people who find comment moderation to be the leaden hand of a righteous, wrathful god. I find it to be another finger up my ass. “We don’t censor anyone, but we will edit you to death, because we have a style of etiquette that solves all problems in the world. Such as who makes what. Changed to Who Makes How Much of what.
You all, should be afraid. This is not the time for timidity. Melanie, sit down. People are staring.
He’s coming for you, too. The last time this bullshit came up was what Elizabeth wanted from William, were plays with some spin to the gothic tale. Now, she becomes by decree, a publisher. What to do. William knew what she wanted. It’s what everyone wants.
To have a voice.
And he pushed it to the very edge. She had to stand in line to buy her ticket, but by her butt, she bought the ticket.
