My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

title page of a book of poetry I started in ’01. I got six pages in and gave up.

It’s so hard to throw shit away. I have boxes of old journals that I thought should be donated to the appropriate institute after my death, most likely the Smithsonian. But a few years of reality have passed since high school and the stuff is not so much embarrassing, but simply crude. As in carved with blunt instruments. There were quite a few stories from English classes about committing suicide or sitting alone in a room unloved lighting candles. Lots of candles in those stories. I think I was longing for an Amish revolt.

I have thrown these stories out. If I ever get a novel written, I don’t want anyone to know how hard it was for me. How far I’ve come. Better to appear a natural. The fact I didn’t chop off my hands after reading my “early years” has me baffled. How could I let myself ever write again after that six year warm up excercise? It must be that same overinflated sense of self worth that allowed me, in a sophomore English class essay, to ask emotionally stunted questions about why God forced me to be born, and how America could claim I was free. At one point I came across my hand written lyrics to The Cure’s “Lullaby”. I can’t cut these hands off now, they have so many apologies to write. So much damage to undo.

There are stacks of paper – the old computer printer type that had perferations along the vertical edges, a series of little holes that the printer wheel gripped and spun the paper around by. These could be detached later. The whole ream was itself ostensibly one large sheet with another line of minuscule horizontal perforations every 11 inches down. These early ignorant ramblings of mine are thus able to be pulled open like an accordion’s bellows. That is the single entertainment value they provide me so many years later. “Battlestar Nostalgica”.

Writing well surely isn’t about sharing your feelings. Just the opposite. You need to keep your feelings out of it, because most likely you are an emotional juvenile delinquent. You are still carving your name in hearts that don’t belong to you. Writing well involves becoming, for a moment, a person you want to be. That’s the trick – ignoring yourself. First you have to think you are great – then you can pick up a pen. Then you have to admit you aren’t – then you can create a great character. Hopefully people confuse the character with you, so your ego doesn’t get too bruised.

Here is the one poem out of six “Jacuzzi Enthusiast” poems I thought was somewhat interesting. I’ll print it here, but I’ve thrown the rest out.

The moon does weird things. You have to watch it to understand.
One night it will rise up in the sky like a little mushroom cloud missing
it’s stalk. The next, I see it sink below the hills with a crescent wink.
What does it do when it is out of sight? Consider this:
I once had a cat who thought when no one was looking it should drag
things over to the dog’s water dish and put them in. So, you think the
moon could be working on something to drop on us? Perhaps the moon
has a workshop. That is where so many inventions come from. Things
like spiral galaxies. The moon made them. Your thoughts on creationism.
The moon gave them to you. And right now the moon is hard at work
on the big one.