The Beard Years

The Beard Years were full of fear.

Boners had it on good authority (their own) that their erection would carry the day; they could have scarcely been more wrong.

On the polo yards were waiters who handed one another fat pelts of gravy boats -- the gay kind that kept moving. They were just so jolly. I mean animatronic gravy boats with real feelings and intention, meaning & attachment. There were whole plots about their love lives, how they felt to be living gravy boats, how they felt about Sebastian and his Vulcan death grip on status of "most loved living candelabra." It might not have been Sebastian, but I refuse to look it up.

In the movie "Wonder Boys" Katie Holmes' character said to Michael Douglas's character something like: "You told us writing was all about making choices. And it seems like you didn't make any choices [referring to his script of 2000-some pages that discussed, amongst other things, the dental history of character's horses]." It was true, of course. He was a smoked-out college professor who had to get real. The point being that writing on Abz sometimes glorifies in making no choices, or refusing to make the "ordinary" or "normal" kind of choices that typically bind "sane" writing. In some ways that's liberating -- and why, of course, throngs of millions of sexualized young co-eds read Absurdists Inc. each and every day.* But it's limiting in another way -- I fear it may not foster the development of a serious writer who, in order to produce anything even resembling something some entity would pay for, has to make almost limitless choices and be constantly conscious of the reader and the implied meaning(s). Yeah, I just put an "S" in parentheses. It almost seems like refusing to make those kind of choices is a fundamentally bad or wrong-headed thing, even as a lame hobby that doesn't amount to much -- to hone the obsessive and intelligent scent of a real writer, one has to do it all the time. (THIS IS ME SAYING ON THE OTHER HAND THAT THIS IS BULLSHIT AND I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT. I AM ERMINE.) I mean to be a really good one. Being a really good writer seems almost impossible. You have to deeply familiarize yourself with the details of everything you discuss -- several layers deeper than the depth at which you plumb the impossible. There I go again. I meant to end that sentence: "...several layers deeper than the depth at which you discuss it." This is a not-so-occasional rebellion against that kind of succinctness -- again, a word I'll initially puzzle over and spell wrong: not something I should ever be allowed to get away with.

I'm allowed to get away with anything.
I'm allowed
I allow myself.
I allow. Scrolls of half-dead meridians. Danger.

*This is in no way even remotely true.