We die alone. What of it.

We eat we fuck we joke we play we piss we hate we sing we dance we drink we smoke we tell stories we shit we run we race we love. We try to stay alive. We fail a lot.

Whelps. Kingdom of the whelps.

Every history is forfeit of itself. No history is sacred. History only is. Every history is forfeit of the dead.

We live alone. What of it.

Not being around other people has been my status quo for my entire life. Nothing new about it.

I am surrounded by the whelps I choose to be surrounded by. We stare deeply into the embers of the fire.

Other than that, I can’t know you by halves and halfway there, what historical ruins turn boys into men, and men left standing in the bitter wind of vacancy. What dawn holds his lips thick and erotic lush as his shit hole and his few little sweets as the circle of the shadows mingles with the hair matted as it collaborates with sweat.

To care is to close the curtains of good-bye. The end of leaps into the dark with complete strangers dug deep into the marrow of each other’s dust and ass in the anguish of a crowded toilet overflowing with savages as lucid as a fatal sun.

I have never even once in my entire life articulated the idea that I care what people think. Or what people know.

Or what people do not know.

Or what humans eat sticks. What do humans know.

About anything. All trees are mongrels.

I still get death threats. Death threats are stupid, and stupid people make them. Bring it on, bitch.

Death threats feel like remnants of decay, and loss, and such gurgling spit inside the choking of your throat.

I am not intimidated and all my dogs will die at the hands of cowards.

I opened my eyes. A small group of people in scrubs were looking down at me and they were uniformly grim.

What plague and roads of loneliness will this be. Pick one.

Obviously, this was a hospital.

Tubes. Beeps. Machines that wheezed.

I keep wondering if the HIV was from the rape.

Which one.

Or a tongue in my mouth like scars bitten there obviously by furies.

Rape is cyclical, but you don’t want to hear that. You want it to be a one time gig. A momentary mistake. Something you can rectify as if the rapist and the whore can be resolved by a wedding cake. That way you can say: get over it. Rape is so yesterday. I will never get over it. Rape me. Fuck me. Dig me out of ice. My cock as hard as a wind-ravaged scrub pine. Did I wanted it, yes. Did I want it, no. Did I want it, maybe. It vanished quickly as the wind sharpened knives against the grindstone.

Boys get raped all the time, but it’s not something nice people talk about. But I write. And I write. And I write. Around it. All the time. Repeatedly. A blinking neon trapping the light intermittently like the hush in a hotel.

Writing is all I have ever had. I just don’t call it writing. I call it: Mainly a Waste of Time Just Before You Wish You Could Be Dead.

I pray for it. You and I are playing cards. Walking through this worry in our endless grief.

It’s only writing if you get paid for it. I pray for it. I know. I know. Vast hordes of people who call themselves writers will send me death threats from Texas. But that is how I see it. It’s only writing if it makes money. And I don’t mean five bucks from Medium.

I mean money.

So, what would you be willing to do in order to survive. A plastic tube shoved into your lungs. Your mouth open and you’re sucking cock.

“You’re going to die.” This prognosis from an older man wearing a surgical mask. Apparently, I was dangerous. Get out of my face while the room is tinged with blue. Your hemlock and I’m burning up. Laden with calamity, I think this would be the appropriate time for LSD. Yes, LSD. My rushing forward into time. He raped both myself and my misbehavior what you fucking didn’t think I knew about my misbehavior you underestimate the calligraphy of pain.

I have always been dangerous.

“And we need to know how we are going to get paid.”

American health care is a piece of shit.

“I will give you ten percent of everything I make from what I write.”

They grew very still. Doctors and hospitals want to be paid. All plagues are your father’s song.

I knew I would be caught. It was not about being caught. I knew it was wrong. It was about how much time did I have. Before the literary vultures would descend. Book people are a very particular and vindictive tribe. They are immune from plagues. They commonly slit their wrists in the boathouse. Sailing toward the evil horizon deplores your life of epitaphs.

People think I was Nasdijj for weeks. I was Nasdijj for ten years, and I was tired of his goodness because it ground me down in the wisdom of a stereotype. You only believed him then. Stereotypes take and they take and they take all the lives you dare to give. Including the one you live in. It wears your skin. You do not wear it.

You would never do what I did. I know that. The reality is that most people have no idea what they would be willing to do if it was a matter of life and death.

Oh, sure. You would never break the rules, and wounds do not bleed.

Jesus fucking christ. I would break the rules and break them and burn them to the ground. To live. I have done all of this and more.

Lockdown. Seclusion. Barns in February. Sex in snow. He sobs, bent upon his knees, barren fingers, coat hangers in your suitcase.

To live. But for what. But for what. Who among us is more than a previously existing condition. AIDS will fuck you in the mouth. AIDS will fuck you in the Ass. AIDS will continue to fuck you long after you are dead. A virus is an empty highway. Your lungs will fill with inconsolable seas swarming in a billion shrouds.

CoVid will smother you like Desdemona.

I never called myself a Native American although the media screamed I did.

I did not. You will find no claim to that in any of my books. Because I never said that.

When Is Cultural Appropriation Survival. When the last man standing is smart enough to realize he’s being used. He’s a pawn in the ethnic chess game. Anyone can make a case for the minority terrorizing the majority. It’s bullshit. The majority terrorizes the minority no matter how you dress these people up, no matter who they worship, no matter where they went to school, no matter where they were born, when they were born, or what tokens they have in their pockets. What is it minorities actually win. In concrete terms. What do you win.

I would argue that obfuscation comes into play when the majority gets to decide who wins, who loses, who gets to walk upon the stage. The majority with its guilt. The majority indicted. The majority that rules the minority even when they have created smoke screens to suggest otherwise. When you map the cosmic microwave background in detail, you find it’s not completely smooth. There are spots where physics suggests the universe will last forever. There are other spots where physics makes no common sense. The quantum map has no code that delineates reality.

I called myself a mongrel. I am a mongrel.

Fucking shrugs. All poets are in exile.

Back then, mongrels did not get health insurance because the health insurance companies considered mongrelism to be an aforementioned previously existing condition. It’s terminal. In publishing, it’s just not done. Publishing closes for the summer. Always. Publishing needs cocktails in the Hamptons. Do you know of any other industry that closes for the summer. No. Because there aren’t any.

This breaking of the rules was all back in the dinosaur days. This was before insurance companies were compelled to cover people with previous conditions.

This was all before the Trump Virus.

I had nothing. I was a writer. But I did not want to die. I wanted to fight for my life if I had to.

I did it so I could buy health insurance, venetian blinds, naked women, foreplay, wings, cages, this hospital bed I am writing from behind the drapes, the drapes, the cum inside my hole is burning me, deliver reality from this.

I am not sure I would make the same decision today. Another virus comes along — imagine that — and you are confronted with the question — survive for what. It has been asked in other times, in other places, in other voices, in other desolate countries, in other dying towns, and among the eating of your flesh for lunch.

There has to be something, a canibalism, something to survive for.

There’s a group of gay men who are becoming elderly who have survived HIV. They still have it. But they keep it at bay with antiretrovirals.

And that is fine. It’s all authority has to offer other than the power to decide where the dead go. It’s always a limited membership knocking bandaids out one by one. But it doesn’t ask the junkyard question: survive for what.

We need to articulate FOR WHAT. To sit in a quiet field with the wind and remember the dead.

No. Just no.

The cost of HIV meds are beyond your wildest fantasy. The swelling of the brain will cost you literally everything you could possibly make — every dollar, every penny — until the day you die. CoronaTime just as I expected. Personally, I went formally and steadfastly bankrupt. I went to Federal Court where I explained I cannot pay for this because it simply is not there.

Going bankrupt only helped a little bit. After bankruptcy, Big Pharma was still there. Since then, health care costs have soared. Drug prices have make billionaires of fourteen people. And yet, they want more. More and more. And they will lie, cheat, steal, take everything you have, and shit in your mouth to get what they want which is more and more.

Yet I am the literary criminal. How convenient.

The literary reservation is this place where writers are allowed a voice. As long as they use that voice to sing hymns to the appointed choir. He won awards on buses. His sons were strangers who made no claims as he had nothing more to give.

I would use the word GREED for Big Pharma, but I will get death threats.

If I am the cultural criminal, WHAT THE FUCK IS BIG PHARMA. In America, it’s okay to extort everything a person has — including their lives — in order to create immeasurable wealth for a handful of old white men.

Always, always. It’s the same old men who make birds of plagues.

Who is the criminal. They are the criminals. They will squeeze the life from you with absolute impunity while they insist you need them. Who else do you really have. No one. America cannot take its culture back because it isn’t smart enough to do it, and America is one big dog whistle for a moral punishment that defines everything. The hierarchal patriarchy of America will kill you and wash its moral hands of even your memory.

Dementia is not a cultural instition until it is.

Sit back and let the minorities and the marginal fight it out. That seems to be the game plan. Down to the last idiot standing. Okay, you win. The rest of us are inferior. Yawn. What the fuck.

Each minority group feels it is the most aggrieved. Each minority group IS the most aggrieved. No one is left unaffected. The Corona Clouds move mountains on a song. When did it become a contest. When it evolved into a fight to the death over available resources. The most obvious example would be social programs and public policy. Less obvious are institutions such as publishing that has no jobs.

There are only so many people who can get published. It’s a very jam packed and crowded place to build a time machine.

Who’s building a time machine. We all are. Out of Africa means there was a beginning, and there will be an end. The cosmic microwave background has turned what we used to know into mythology.

As long as we are willing to play LET’S YOU AND HIM FIGHT take a wild guess around who wins. The white rich win. How many times does it need to be spelled out. The white rich win. Time after time after time. Like any other institution, the white media loves to play this scenario to the motherfucking hilt.

You need us, we are the media, and you need us to play judge, jury, and executioner. You need us to make sense for you in the topsy turvy world because you are the marginal, and you don’t have enough goddamn sense in your little heads to arrive at the correct conclusions.

Sit back and let the fights begin. Does this mean him. Yes. This means him.

Today, I am tired, and I no longer give a fuck. I am no longer a writer. Valhalla is a recreation.

Publishing will kill you, too. Be careful about what you wish for.

I didn’t know who these people were. Looking down at me in the hospital bed. I didn’t know where this hospital was. I had no memory of being admitted here. What ambulance. I had been in a medically induced coma for months.

It was another year.

I could not speak. I could barely breathe. My throat was my bleeding cunt. I could not close my mouth because my tongue had swollen to three times its normal size.

I knew this: I wasn’t going to need hugs. I wasn’t going to need emotional support. I wasn’t going to need a cheerleading team. I wanted to live. I was going to need money. An erection in my mouth.

Antiretrovirals are a king’s ransom. The plague is irrelevant.

The words writer and money are not analogous.

Anyone who is in the writing biz understands what that means. It means hand-to-mouth. It means maybe, maybe, maybe enough money to buy food this week. It means no health insurance. I wrote most of my books on picnic tables in places like national parks where I was living in my truck.

Other Writers who call themselves journalists contend I was raised in a middle-class home. They are wrong. We were poor. I had a full-time job at twelve because my parents made it very clear they could not pay for things. Like clothes. Food was bare bones to gnaw on.

I was going to have to write something that would save my life. If I couldn’t prove some kind of income, I would be thrown into the street. That was quite evident.

I wrote until my balls fell off.

It was not a stretch Being Him. Being Him meant I could buy that medication.

Sustiva was a nightmare or a series of them.

In time, I could show them — the great and powerful them the them of them the hospital bill collector police them — a letter from Esquire Magazine that indicated I was going to get paid for the writing I had so recently done.

There was no time to slack off. I was sick as a dog. I could barely see. But I pounded the fuck out of my Sears manual typewriter inside the camper shell of the truck I was living in. It was quiet even when the wind screamed in. I did not care. I was writing. I was mean to save myself. My dog, Navajo, was my companion. She never left my side. The wind was cold and I was hanging fire.

The dog I wrote about was the dog I lived with. The piece I had sent Esquire had to become a book. If I could not do that, I was going to die. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t stand on my own two feet. I had lost half my weight.

All I had left was a writing in the wings. It had to prove itself worthy. It had to make money so I could get my hands on some of that medication. There were no charitable programs for fuck ups like me who lived in trucks.

This was going to have to work. No one could know who I was. No one could know what disease I was struggling with.

People who were suspected of having HIV were being murdered. You don’t remember that because you were not fucking there.

You could appropriate my culture, but I don’t have one. Stigma is very, very real. Your masks will not protect you from stigma. I started doing sex work in the seventh grade. It’s not about morality. It’s about poverty. Stigma means you can’t get a fucking job.

You can’t find a place to live. You can’t make a living. Anyone who says that times have changed has not walked in my shoes. Athlete’s foot powder will keep away the itching.

The only people who were going to help me were the loosely-knit family I was surrounded by. Junkies, poets, artists, photographers, drug dealers, whores, dancers, actors, playwrights, and marginalized mad people who knew all about disease and death.

And money. None of us had any. Not a goddamn dime. The writing, too, would have to wear a mask. My world has always been filled with people who wore masks. It was no big thing. It only was. I have written other books no one knows I wrote. I would kinda like to keep it that way.

“You have to write,” I was told. “This time like your life depends on it.”

Because it did.

I had lived among the dead and dying now for so long, I knew exactly what the future had in store. It’s not about disease. It’s about identity.

We die alone. What of it.

We eat we fuck we joke we play we piss we hate we sing we dance we drink we smoke we tell stories we shit we run we race we love. We try to stay alive. We fail a lot.

Whelps. Kingdom of the whelps.

Every history is forfeit of itself. No history is sacred. History only is. Every history is forfeit of the dead.

We live alone. What of it.

The plague is over but are any plagues ever really over. Or are pockets of them like bone marrow hosts latent viral pools of figures in the distance. HIV and CoronaVirus have nothing in common. They hell they don’t. What rises from the dirt of loneliness, desire, and resurrection.

Another plague and another plague and another plague has risen to take its place of pauper’s graves and corpses wrapped in the bloodied sheets of potter’s fields. Dead whelps.

Another generation is now at-risk. These young people do not know what we know. Our shoes will fit, and they will walk in them. It is up to us to teach them how. This is not about publishing. It’s not really about me, either. I am simply attempting to draw you in.

Into a world you absolutely do not know. What you know are stereotypes. You live them, too. Nasdijj was not alone. His bed was crowded with a moving through itself.

The kid at-risk is a big stereotype. I know him and all my second selves know him. We know his sweat. We know his swinging dick. We know his sweet skid marks ingrained in his underwear. This kid will test you even as all other men like him are hanged. Here comes a set of very strange and yellow eyes for which in all tongues would be called fools except for him. He’s living the life. That is not a testament for Instagram. It is a testament for survival.

I still get death threats. Death threats are stupid, and stupid people make them. Bring it on, bitch.

I threw my guns away. But I have a new one now.

I was him once, and too much of me is inside his disgusting guts.

I will show you who he really is. It is not unlike rape. Nice people don’t talk about at-risk kids because stigma still has us by the testicles. It isn’t done.

We die alone. What of it.

We eat we fuck we joke we play we piss we hate we sing we dance we drink we smoke we tell stories we shit we run we race we love. We peer deeply into the embers of the fire. We try to stay alive. We fail a lot.

We eat and we eat and we eat sticks.

Whelps. Kingdom of the whelps.

Every history is forfeit of itself. No history is sacred. History only is. Every history is forfeit of the dead.

We live alone. What of it.

I closed my eyes and became someone else.

https://timbarrus.tumblr.com