Just Before the Cure.

But There is No Cure. No Shit.

a work in progress

I Don’t Have Sex With Boys.

Get over it.

I am not from your fucking planet.

I was sent here as a punishment. Death was considered too lenient.

Aren’t you the one who wrote…

I write what I see. I write what is there, might be there, could be there. I write about the emotional landscape that is around me like an old dirt road whose destination remains a mystery. I write about what it means to struggle to survive. I write. It’s what I do.

What it means is that the last page and the knife are always gripping several ropes.We are not writing to make books. It would bore us. We want video and art and photography to reinforce narrative. We want narrative to reinforce video, art, and photography.

This boys who constructed this have an average age of 14. Most are ADHD. Many are dyslexic. All have a history of complete and utter school failure, all of them come from turbulent families, or no families, or families that have punished and abused and fucked, literally, not symbolically, and they have damaged them, many are lucky to have survived, they have survived it has taken courage, balls, and ball, and balls. Big, defiant balls, and while defiance has helped them make it through the day in pose, it has, too, defeated them in many ways. They are here. Deal with it.

Dearest Readers, Mommie Morals, AIDS Orgs, it’s not about you. This work is not about any of the people who might read it. You are who you are, but then so are we.

It’s about the guyz who made this. Not you. I know, it’s sacrilege. The rules say it has to be about the reader. Fuck the reader. It’s about a world the reader does not know.

I live among you does not mean I am one of you. The inmates are running the asylum.

You will not get this VOOK. What is a VOOK. I have no idea. It seems to be a mixed media series of events. I don’t like the word VOOK much. It feels combersome, even presumptuous. What you won’t get is a central thematic issue of the WORK. Allow me to spell it out for you. Irony abounds, but so does ignorance.

This WORK will tell you that tribalism is not only dated, it’s dangerous. Then, it confronts the question of existence. What is identity. Its answer is more tribalism. It would be necessarily wrong even as it is incorrect. It is not ironic because we think in black and white. What we see as color belongs to us. Read any chapter. Read any chapter first. Read it out of order because there is no order. I am not interested in time and place. I am interested in time in place.

Here, that tribalism is constructed by adolescent boys who all have HIV. The suicidal virus that would kill its host which is what a virus does. It is not effecient. I am telling you that you cannot empathize until you can experience some of their suffering with your own metaphors representing suffering’s shared equations. Another tenant would be the tribe of a gay community touting the message that there is no suffering.

Be a man about it. Never cry. Remain strong and resolute. Beware of any version of masculinity your idealisms aspire to. Your want might just become your wish.

Such boys are mutants, too. They arrive from a variety of failed planets. The more this can become science fiction, the more it cannot be true. How could the idea of a planet possibly be true. The only ones you’ve ever seen are the ones on computer screens and in photographs.

You see, we are more like you than unlike you in how we socially function within the context of the tribe. It’s our job to pose the questions. It’s your job to live with them.

Suffering is a camouflage for what.

Tribes use suffering as a tool employed to maintain the sinews that connect the individual to something larger than himself. Using the constructs of literature, I want you to conclude that I am not as crazy as I might appear to be. Only the insane would create a portrait of stability versus instability that itself concludes that all tribes are inherently unstable because they are anchored to perceptions of the past that are molded to agree with the shared perceptions of the future such as the belief there will be one. One what.

It is in this instability that we find what is called “the action.” It is supposed to have an arc for it to be defined as cultural liturature. Thusly, it must be true. And balanced. Why would someone create something unbalanced. Because balancing on the head of a subatomic pin is what he does. Because we share an ability to see red flags as cautionary. The red of the Chinese flag symbolizes the attributes of communal evolution which is anything but a real evolution as much as it is a visualized response to blood. You see red, you are thinking blood whether or not you are conscious of an internal set of neurological mechanisms.

Yellow. Humans think the sun is yellow. The sun is fucking blue.

In truth, you belong to a species considered to be a bit primitive to other species throughout the known universe, and probably the unknown one as well. I would argue that tribalism precludes the nuance of a multiple, universal paradigm known as the Standard Model of physics. We are concluding and making educated guesses that only find meaning for us in a blueprint of historical reality shared by whatever tribe we belong to. What totem are you upon what was once a tree. I am the tree. This is our message and this is who we are. Most of our historical grip tape comes from an interpretation we agree is important, even if we share the belief that such gripping tape within the various Bibles all religions claim as truth, are, in fact, constructs of metaphor itself. I ask you, how can electron be in two places at the same time.

What is a coyote. A coyote is a trickster. He painted what you think is your sun, it does not belong to you, and yet you claim it in a universe of indifference and death. You are hard-wired to do it. The rest of it is magic tricks.

An electron can only be in two places at the same time as time and space are divided ideas in much the same way that the human brain (and all brains to varying degree) depend on more than one location. Humans call this healing. In fact, only human brains that could do this survived. A damaged brain, disease and war, both being tribal ideas registering identity, could conduct its dendrite firing mechanisms in a totally different part of the vast macine. It doesn’t make sense is why it makes sense. The laws (what are laws anyway if we keep breaking them as behaviors consistent with whatever order is and whatever chaos represents as the ability to change is also the ability to function) must concur. The laws of physics are not always the laws of the land.

Survival ensues. Not particularly intelligence as it’s intelligence that can assume there are laws of physics at the quantum level coexisting with cosmology. We are conflicted and your discoveries that we exist in a multiple perception of events allows for the disambiguation of the smaller as opposed to what we see as large. It cannot be both but it can be both and both and both. God does not play dice with the universe because there is no god. No dice. There is only a universe we know — or we suspect — to be incoherent as it is unstable.

You don’t get physics. The only tribe that is not really a tribe is the gravitas of a universe as big as a molecule. It too, can be split by zillions of stars illuminating thermal radiation curves as dictated by gravity and the finite speed of what is light where there is no beginning, and there is no end. Just like this VOOK. Who says the present is always going forward when there is no forward any more than there is a center; a center of what. The presence of nothing could have been around for eons of years when there were no years, and was nothing, split into something whose darkness grows darker and darker as we fling ourselves along the timeline.

No one will travel star to star. The stars are pulling far apart far apart. Instability exists as an inner assumption of process, and an outer perception that complexity and the complicit facilitate change to happen.

I wrote this as an ongoing event. An interview with the vampires of the mind. What we share is the suspicion that everything is real and nothing is real. We have yet to understand what nothing is. We have not yet comprehended what we think is large because we can’t think that big. Yet. Our mistake is that tribalism will get us there. There is no evidence of this as a basis for belief existent anywhere humanity might want to go as it stumbles around groping in the dark. I wrote this so you could see it being made. And unmade. The other members of the tribe throw together the languages of the visible and the auditory.

I fully intend to take some of the voices telling these stories and place them along what you think is the timeline that is only going forward yet is also going backwards as you enter any of the event horizons we call the videos and the photography that exists within the narrative and yet is also separate from the WORK.

What you read before I made this work and then unmade it, was one thing. A day in The Life. What it is right now is a cacophony of the voices or the madhouse.

One way cannot be the other and yet it is.

Humans who hear things are hearing things. We do not all accept this as we do not hear them. A VOOK, or any piece of what literature is all about, an attempt to use culture as a tool to both bond you and to make you change because in this particular unstable universe, you change or you do not survive. Physical evolution is not a new phenomenon. Stars have always done it as long as there were stars. There has always been stars. The are from nothing.

And probably everything.

You are everything to me. But I feel as if I do not in any way understand anything about you. As a species. As individuals fitting into disparate tribes.

I use the word — we — to stand for tribal affiliation. This is subterfuge. It is a lie. The very idea of what a tribe is, that it is us, is, too, a literary tourism to a country or spa that might or might not exist with veracity or deceit. This is why tourism is essentially dangerous to the tribe in whatever form it arrives in. Stability and instability visit each other’s status quo. As far as any virus goes, there is no there there because the thing is neither alive or dead. There cannot be a life, or lives living them, without the instability and stability of nonexistence.

One idea is that stability cannot exist without instability. I would argue that it will always be instability’s role to symbolize what is chaos even as it spreads outwardly according to the laws of physics. I tell tales of time and death and tribes that share subatomic bonding and expansions as any brain does as it attempts to know itself by flinging itself into the hot then cold vast unknown.

I am among you, but I am not you. I am you but I am not among you. I only exist because I am death. I am Vishnu with his six arms and princes. I am death upon all these worlds. A curse upon all your houses. I am the god of swords, vengeance, and suicide. I am the god of war.

All of these are only metaphors. I am no god. I am no human. The I of I does not exist. Only through these pages and computer screens do I form the serpeant’s tongue you slide down into my planet’s throat.

I am passive. The writer of the thing or the doer of the things. That is up to you. I would argue that a single imagination is more complex than a warehouse of atomic bombs. It’s not my tongue. I am the throat and not the snake. Women get it and a few boys addicted to science fiction. How can fiction be nonfiction, and nonfiction, fiction. Bladerunner had no blade. But it suspected it had a tribe.

Let us make a movie. We see an editor in his New York office pounding the walls. He can’t say these things and yet he did. Who is “he.” You decide.

Anton says I am unstable. I seriously doubt he will read this. If I send it to Esquire, they will put a contract out on my life. These would be the gods of literature and sacred is the temple we all pray in.

So Let’s Pretend

Let’s pretend there really is a cure for AIDS.

Question: If that cure was a pill that got you high — really high — so high that you had a completely new take on life, heroin is child’s play, let us call you a happy, happy, happy person, and the cure you just took completely eliminated depression in any form, and you liked being high, you liked it a lot, and this was a high that never disappeared, it just took over your life, and the world was a better place, would you be allowed to take it.

I know this: they would work feverishly day and night to remove the part that got you high.

Pleasure and punishment are not unlike suicide and homicide. The difference between these things is tissue paper thin. When someone threatens suicide, they are at risk for committing murder.

Whenever I take Sustiva, it’s like being on LSD for at least the night.

If I told my doctor this, he would change the medication, and that means I would have failed another regimen.

Enough with the sarcasm. It is a defense. Get real. That I could even come here. That I could even participate in the construction of this. Whatever it is. That I could start writing this. Surrounded by the chaos of not just the past, but of the currently present upon this stage of AIDS, disease, destruction, suicide, graves, agony, medication schedules, medication failures, surgeries, runaways, police departments, ICE, and the US intelligence community (Google Analytics does not lie) hounding every word I write, they’re so unworried, analytics picks it up right away, they’re not worried about absolutely anything, they don’t care, that I could sit down with nothing more than an iPhone to plant these words inside this thing is indicative of one thing and only one thing. When I call myself a reservoir dog, that is exactly what I mean.

What is this. It’s a grape on the grapevine.

What is a grapevine.

Just how many kids out there at the edges are going to read this.

They will read this.

You have no idea who I am. You have no idea what I can accomplish or what I have accomplished. You have no fucking idea what the definition of the word — tough — really means. Tough does not mean stoic. The stoic are conflicted, too. That I could write no matter what, that I could do it every single day, now, that’s saying something, and it really doesn’t matter one solitary grain of sand what you think or feel about anything. I have transcended many things in this life. And that includes you. The idea of the audience. The idea of the publisher. And, often, the idea of the artist. In order to really teach art, you have to do it. I could tell you volumes about how at risk kids use the Internet, but it’s hardly important because we don’t really give a flying fuck about kids at risk.

Here, I transcend the idea of the safe house.

Build your own fucking safe house. I don’t care.

I have my own problems in the one I built or the several I have built and where is it written that I am responsible for connecting you to boys at risk because I’m simply not. Why should some kid with HIV and hard to reach and runs hard and is hardened, reveal in all vulnerability his presence, his hole, his confidentiality, his history and while I might write about them, or they might post their videos here, that is different from explanations that would trot them out onto a public stage to bend over so you might inspect them, chill, let the story of it be enough. Stigma is real and in some circumstances it kills people or facilitates them to kill themselves and you just don’t have a wide stigma net that you can cast to pull them in, when we are n-o-t accountable to you, the reader. It’s like a novel that you have to let unfold, it’s just a road trip I write road trips that is all I have ever written because road trips are what I know.

Making the thing, telling the story of it has a lot more gravitas than the audience who I have been taught, through experience, is a ghost-like hovering, it’s perhaps the suggestion of an ephemeral existence, but being a ghost, dear readers, does not, in fact, prove that you are really there.

I know you’re out there. But I don’t fucking care. I will write this anyway. Whether you have the tenacity or the balls to read it or not. I am not sure Anton knows what unstable means.

Who is Anton.

Anton is an editor. Do not ask me what it means. Esquire is a magazine. Do not ask me what that means either. I am not a part of publishing. I never was. I didn’t want it then and I do not want it now or I would be kissing some Manhattan piece of ass, and I’m not, and I am putting it here. Is that transparent enough for you. Does that reinforce my street creds with you. I am just another stupid fuck from off the planetary street and not unlike the kids who are my students.

Baby, I own that jacket, and, the color is all colors, being black, and coming off the back of an animal human beings invented. Human beings who do not see themselves as god. The boys I work with are all at risk. At risk for what. I forget. I was never very good at remembering who we were or what we were. Black is the only real color that the prism makes. The boys arrive as mutants.

If they live long enough to learn the ropes, they start inventing. Often, what they invent is yet another self. I don’t believe half of what Esquire had to say about who I really am. Here’s the gig. New York publishing — the Big Girls — is not about taking risks on anyone. But I am the bad guy who said: They only publish the already published. I said it then, and I am saying it now. They all scream it isn’t true. But it is true and they know it. They’re not really looking for fresh meat. They’re committed to their arcane rules. Publishing is your great, great, great-grandfather’s business. They’re a little behind.

People ask me where I am from. Stupid question. Like it means anything. I am from 729 Jones Street, San Francisco. This is where I was infected with HIV. Doing sex work. I worked the phones.

The top balcony was my balcony. Go out the front door. Turn left: Post Street. Turn right: Sutter. I had a thousand names. I was a whore. I am still a whore. I have always been a whore. The only way to get published is to be someone else. I didn’t love doing sex work — even if it did affirm the fact that men wanted you — I just loved the place. From that balcony, I could see the sun set over the Pacific Ocean. It was breathtaking.

Sex work can kill you. If you are a kid.

I got the fuck out. I went back to teaching art. The boys want art. I am a whore who gives my little tricks what they want. I teach the kids who scare the McJesus out of people. Art. It is Art that will create the brand new you. I was one of them once. Wilding boys. They just happen to have HIV. This is where I say: where is the evidence that I ever gave a flying fuck what you believe. If I ever said — I care — I was lying.

There is a lot to say about that. Young boys with HIV (the CDC calls them the hard to reach) doing sex work, transcending sex itself, and learning how to make what is known as art, transcending culture, transcending stigma; the situations these boys were mainly born in. Photography. Poetry. Video. Whatever appeals to the kid.

Most people have a real hard time imagining that young boys are sex trafficked at all.

The thinking goes: a boy will fight back but a girl will be a victim. Anal sex comes with Big Girl taboo. Stigma. Rape is not sex and sex is not rape. Both the male and the female of the species can be raped.

But boys fight back, right.

It’s simply not true. Both the girl and the boy being sex trafficked are victims.

Where are the parents.

How is it that people still wonder this in a paternalistic hierarchal society where children ARE expendable, and the street is where they live their lives. You don’t know them because you do not choose to see them.

The work is controversial. Imagine that.

An establishing shot — across the bow — can be more than something you do with a movie camera.

Or a manuscript.

We were dropping like flies. I was attending a minimum of two funerals a day. These were the days of graves, memory, appearances, and disappearances.

We see a pornographic video. Perhaps not you.

You would never do such a distasteful thing.

Without porn, without arousal, without desire, there would be no Internet. No music. No choreography. It’s not about the sex.

It’s about reproduction. Viral and otherwise. Or not. What sex. The sex. It’s about survival. No one has a corner on the marketplace of either sarcasm, sanctimony, or choice. You decide.

EXT: because we are always outside. Zoom in on a group of us mountain biking in the Blue Ridge. Skateboarding. Swimming and fishing in an Appalachian lake called Lake Lure. Camping in the Pisgah Forest. Sliding down crazy mountain falls. Talking. Talking. Talking.

As if no one had ever talked to them before. You cause them to read, not by lecturing at them, but by reading.

There is one subject that never fades. When will the next road trip be.

Who will go.

And to what sad planet oh to this one the one we are already on. Just to stay on harder.

Everyone will have their turn. We do not take ordinary road trips. The kind of road trips we take are the kind that define who and what you really are.

The boys want to know why. I want to know how.

Why is intellectualizing. It doesn’t mean anything because it does not imply any change in human behavior. Intellectualizing also lets institutions off the hook. The French philosophers who came after Satre did get it.

They nailed it, too.

I have lived all over the planet. In fact, I have sailed tall sailing ships, Windjammers, to many countries. Mainly, I live out of one bag. A Domke bag. But there’s one place I have never lived. And that is inside my head.

People who can intellectualize frequently live in their heads. The fact that they have bodies is of limited interest to them. They spend their lives ignoring their gut feelings. In fact, they do not know they have a gut. Or even anger. The real world is inside their brains where they want to know — why. Often, they already know why, but posing the question why, and then receiving an answer is simply another opportunity to pose the question why. Kids today do not know what the term — a broken record — means. What is writing. Writing is a fetish.

Why just doesn’t interest me. I see no light at the end of that tunnel. It’s too easy to get lost in the echolalia of whywhywhy. Then, you don’t have to move or change because you have not explored how.

Why just keeps people in their place.

The questions I pose are more like: how can we do this.

Not so much why are we doing this.

It has to do with being there. To watch someone’s back, someone who, too, is watching your back.

Reciprocity can be about sex. But not this time.

It has always been this way. Even when we started this thing in France. For me, France was kinda like an accident.

The term — Maison Sécurisée — in France is as much a political “act” as it is a way to limit one’s contact with the police. I was familiar with what a safe house was.

Having to leave the States was not exactly a choice. I was not on holiday. I could not walk down the street.

There seemed to be something of a Literary Scandal, and I seemed to be the star of that stupid movie. Major gotcha shit. I had underestimated One Big Thing. When you tread on another writer’s tribal territory, it is not uncommon for that writer to go after your ass with everything she’s got. There will be a small collection of lovelies who will go after me for this. This whatever it is. They won’t like it. I have not been punished enough. But this time around, being on the Internet is a different kind of venue.

Mary Scriver’s cats keep telling me publishing has changed.

I do not know that I believe it. Maybe. But the same tired people are bitching about the same issues they always bitch about. Danille Steel does not have enough money. Danielle, you already own the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Danielle, you have GOT to read your own blog.

The same New York editors still move around in the same chess game of look where I landed.

Publishing claims a cultural validity.

The argument is mute. The same upper two percent are laughing all the way to the same corporate banks.

Once you’ve worn Manolo Blahnik’s there’s no going back. They will sit in their caves in Mid-Town and plot. There are female editors who remember word for word stuff I said twenty years ago. Hoes, get a life.

I know those women. The tenacity alone is manic. They go from institution to institution, higher education, corporate, agenting, marketing the glories of the average MFA, and the below average workshops, and they are simply fabulous at what they do, but they are not above contempt, and they are not cultural icons, and they are like all the rest of the vicious cats that have clawed their way up the ladders of publishing until they reach the glass ceilings they have so lovingly maintained.

They’re out there. This time, we do this ourselves.

We make shit because that’s what we do. The kids I teach are constantly showing me new ways to see it all through a unique camera’s lens, and I love them for it. They expand my world. Like a lot of landscape that exists on the Internet, we are a walled little garden of our own universe. We are learning to make art, and sometimes, not always, but sometimes, the paints we select to paint with come from what experiences we draw from, to paint a world we see as carnivorous.

I am here like a magnet to a refrigerator door.

These are boys who have already used the tools of technology to sell themselves as whores because sex work is survival, too. I don’t care about any of that. It’s entirely irrelevant. The suits have legislation and morality and religion on their side. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a culture war out there. We are not always in agreement amongst our literary selves.

I use bad words to get your attention. It’s all I have.

I do this because I have to. Or I will be one of those guys who rave at god in the middle of the street.

I already walk naked through the dead. I own one bag. I do not want to hear one more time (we hear you) the litany of the one and only hurting, whining little writer in the univese of hurt’s hatred who is so intent on taking the title of the last man standing wins because I am not intrigued and I am not interested in eating another asshole in your asshole and any of your bowel movement anywhere near my mouth. You win. Your writing has so moved the world, you are now the blazing star we revolve around. Tastefully accept your Nobel Prize, give us your best balls of fire, and then piss off.

Hey, the best writer in the universe, I have never read anything by you, and I never will, because life is too short to feed on all the hate that squeezes out of your asshole, bitch. Hurt is everywhere. You are not that unique. Your dead and my dead are different dead. My dead are not your dead. You have enough dead to walk through.

The cunt who went after my ass has chewed on a lot of them. Oh, let’s go get some writer ass today. I did it because AIDS will break you in a thousand ways. I had zero T-cells. I could not walk. My tongue had swollen so I could not speak, and there were tumors in my mouth. I was breathing via an oxygen generating machine. If the electric went out, I went with it. The cost alone was a million dollars. I had been in ICU in a coma for a month.

Esquire magazine was the least of it. Poor them. Esquire magazine is flourishing. It should be flourishing. It is what suits do. They flourish. They own the flourishes. Technology has brought a lot of its own flourishes, its own contempt, its own networks to the table, but it is the same table parked in the same Manhattan we all know and love. Woody Allen is the fantacist, not me. Romanticism is like a foreign language to us. Woody makes movies and pop culture giggles to itself. I tell kids to go make their own movies and while they’re struggling with those precepts, I don’t care what tools are employed because these are kids who have never, ever, ever had a break, and for the most part they’ve given up. I do this for them. I do this with them. I do this because I was at one time taking the same elevator down into the basement and the boiler room where all us misfits went to class in a classroom where no one knew, and no one knows, we exist.

My goal is to get the kids I am invested with OFF THE STREET.

Period.

What you think of it is germane to what. “But you should care.”

Why. What are you to me. Why should I care about you. I don’t even know you.

No one is forcing you to read this. No one, no writer is that powerful. How is that it that the option of — TURNING IT OFF — has been removed from your sovereign accountability to youself.

The only reason I was able to do book tours — and all the bullshit speaking gigs as him — was because antiretrovirals work. They also do fun things like nerve damage. I was in such pain, I was put on IV fentynal and became more addicted than you can possibly imagine. I had aspergelosis and Pneumocystis pneumonia at the same fucking time. Massive amount of Prednisone had allowed me to breath, but at enormous cost to bone. My bones started to disintegrate. Avascular necrosis. My bones were dying inside of me. The pain could rob you of your breath. Yet I did the tours. I did the talks. I walked out on those stages with forearm crutches. I wept in bookstores reading about the dead because I knew the dead, I had loved those people in those books, and reading those stories to you was like reliving the whole nightmare over and over and over.

Go roll with the Los Angeles Times, you fucking bitch. You don’t mean shit to me. I live with lowlives. I can smell one a mile away. People whose spirits have wrapped themselves around needles and packing lunches in an AIDS kitchen, and you really owe it to your own internalized acid bitterness to go visit the one in Minneapolis. I spoke there about the phenomenon of shunning, and it is a cruelty used by various cultures, not just one. It’s village mentality and fear and stigma and that is where those sack lunches go, out there into a community saturated with anger, just like your anger, enough anger to melt the sun like wax. No one killed your babies, bitch, and they are not your babies you have enough babies of your own. I don’t care what you fucking think. Eat me. Get on your soap box and read the dead their constitutional rights. I am already among them and every morning, we get our crusted bones up, like everybody else, and we put our panty hose on one leg at a time.

I am still here. I’m not going anywhere. Not without a fight, and my fight is not with you because you are insignificant compared to the fights I fight today. My real fights are with a virus.

Compared to that, your tiny take on history is irrelevant.

I know this: I still love the people I work and live with. We struggle just like everyone else and we try to simply make it through the day. We have one another’s backs. No one is going to do it for us. They hate us out there. I will never go back into the hospital again. Because I am sick and tired of the hatred that is burning in all the eyes of all the people who look at me just like you look at me through all the hatred and all the years of feeding on it, you marginalize yourself, and I am sorry for you, I pity you, life and history suck. But that does not mean I am going to stop living my life while I have any breath left inside of me because you are so ripped off. I didn’t even know who you were. You are not that famous. Go fuck yourself. It seems like the system has done pretty well for you. You are a rich man. You ARE the top one percent. Get the fuck off my little block. You’re slumming. There are enough whining cunts I have to deal with every day. You are eaten alive by a hatred I am all too familiar with. You don’t know me, and you don’t know about any of the challenges I have faced because you are part and parcel of the system you have invested yourself in. I am light years outside of that. You are the fucking status quo. Your status isn’t spit to me.

You are a suit. It doesn’t matter if you are wearing a Walmart hoodie. I will tell you what my kids tell me on a daily basis.

I don’t frigging care.

It is not simply a statement. It is an identity. Identity has a cultural gravitas.

I don’t frigging care does not signify indifference. It signifies vulnerability because it’s saying: there is so much here that I find overwhelming that I can only afford to care to varying degrees. In fact, I am the shit hole of memory and dementia. That is what being human means. The rest of it is pretense.

We have given up on the dream that it’s a land of dreams, and you are not the only person who has ever hurt, and the entire world is not pitted against you anymore than life is because life is unfair and life is unfair and life is unfair and you make me vomit.

You may call her she. You may call her her. I don’t really care what you call her. I call her…

It.

Never mind what I call that bitch. I hate her fucking guts. I hate her more than she hates me. I forbid her name to be spoken in my presence. I had not read her. I will never read her. She’s dead to me.

She accuses me of murdering children.

Where are her books about the children she so zealously defends.

I forgot. She never wrote one. Or she wrote twenty. No one knows because no one wants to get close to a shit throwing temper tantrum.

Time magazine loves this crap. Let’s watch them fight. Time magazine can go fuck itself.

“So,” my voices ask. “Why are you putting this on the Internet.”

For free. Someone has to feed them. I can barely spell.

Because when you say things like Time magazine can go fuck itself every New York book editor will run screaming for the hills. This is not exactly a courageous group. I make the Big Girls sweat.

Running for the hills in your Jimmy Chu high heels is hard, but the book editors manage to do it with a dexterity one can only call sublime.

If the book editors has been in charge a few hundred years ago, we would all be speaking English.

For them, it’s embarrassing. Literary scandals embarrass them. They weren’t the ones who had to cut down the family cat that had been left hanging on my porch with piano wire. Mainly, they don’t think of their outrage as having any real consequences. People were pissed off, but no one was physically hurt.

Tell it to my cat.

And I had committed one grievous sin. It seems I had contacted a book critic. And I had. I did not understand the meaning of the term sui generis. Via the New York Times Book Review. I had no idea what sui generis meant. I was simply asking what the definition of the term means. Google search did not exist. If it had, I would have used it. The book critic did not respond. I had NO idea I had broken a cardinal rule of publishing which is never contact a book critic. It would be some time before someone explained to me that tiny, little rule. Publishing is a place of manners, mannerisms, tradition, and rules no one has ever written down (because they’re stupid) in all the godzillion and one things called How To Get Published By Women in Jimmy Chu’s.

Someone needs to write down the real rules. Using a pen name is identity theft. Piffle.

Most of these rules are for the Little People. The Little People who can’t get read let alone published. These are not the rules for the Big People who can get published. They have no rules.

The hatred on the phone, much of it inspired from the State of Texas which was bizarre, was unfathomable. It was off the wall. It was crazy.

“I’m going to get you,” was a common theme.

I had to have the phone number changed so many times, the phone company was sick of me. We do have the Texas phone numbers so many of those calls were made from.

Many Americans believed I had killed those children.

My cat was innocent.

The hypocrisy of it was enough to urinate on.

I had to leave. There was one place on the planet where they did not care about American literary scandals, or Americans for that matter, and that place is called France.

The day I landed, the students were rioting. I had never seen a riot quite like it. We were being told to stay in our hotels.

I knew I would never be allowed to write another thing. If there’s an editorial group firmly committed to seeing to it that free expression, and free speech are complete jokes, it’s the Jimmy Chu Society of Manhattan High Heels. They really hate me, and so do other writers.

Why.

I broke the rules. But did the rules break me. The question of what is identity goes as far back as ancient Greece, and further. It’s almost impossible for any culture to acknowledge that there are multiple universalisms. Humans can be rooted in the particular selves of their own design, and they can choose different universal frameworks with which to construct those selves. In other words: everyone is different but no one ‘fits in’, largely because there is very little to ‘fit in’ to. Culture is rigid because nuamce implies hyphenated loyalty. Who or what is a writer loyal to. Critics have called me a pioneer of sadomasochism. These would be writers who have spent most of their lives following the rules of writing. When that doesn’t work, they become editors. They get seriously enraged when someone breaks the rules, and it wasn’t them. Their jobs are to maintain the status quo.

One of the mistakes they make is in assuming that the name I was writing under hadn’t published anything, and he had. The first thing he published was a sex piece in Advocate Men. This is conveniently ignored because they were the ones ripped off. Gay publishing doesn’t count.

Writing one more thing was out of the question. It left a bitter taste in my mouth like road kill. But I had my camera. It is an extraordinary camera (a Nikon), and if you think I might wade out into the riot with it, you’d be right.

Journalists are using cameras that take both photographs and video. That camera takes great video, and that night I got a lot of footage of French cops beating the shit out of French students. I had never seen anything quite like it.

I posted that footage on a Tumblr blog I call Le-Too. The name was not my idea. The name came from Sergey Brin.

No one reads it, and there’s the thing. There is far, far more freedom in creating stuff no one reads versus most of the garbage Americans are addicted to.

I have always just written the books I want to read. I have scores of unpublished book manuscriprs in a big antique chest. These would be the ones I haven’t burned.

I filmed one cop beating a student up with a metal pipe. He did not like being filmed. When cops with metal pipes come after you, you run.

Film the cops became my mantra long before America adopted it.

I first met the boys at a Parisian demonstration protesting homelessness. Homelessness is not so hard to imagine in a place like Paris, where people live under bridges, because Paris is without a doubt one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, city in the world.

You don’t believe me. Actually, it’s all on YouTube. You would see us setting up red tents because we were going to sleep in them for one night to express the outrage of being homeless in Western Europe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWUzvnwKHgc

The boys, all of them hustlers, were living at the Hotel du Nord, and they were smart enough to know that many of the people protesting would be upper-middle-class, and would know nothing about what it means to be homeless or to sleep in the cold. So the boys thought that they could provide some warmth for men with money who would pay them to keep the tent warm.

Never miss an opportunity to do sex work.

It was one hell of a night. We had little campfires next to a canal, and when people have campfires, they tend to sit around them and tell the stories of their lives.

My story of surviving an American literary scandal received a lot of laughter. Nous photographier au du Nord.

And so I did.

INT: The next day. We see a group of young boys shooting heroin at the Hotel du Nord where they shared a room.

When sex, drugs, and rock and roll left the States, it moved to France.

Fade to black:

My leather jacket has lots of fringe.

Ext: The landscape is surveyed in a long slow pan.

We see two males walking along a French beach that looks grey and rather cold.

Push in. Split screen. My old eyes. And Rayce’s big brown ones.

“I’m going with you. You need me.”

“You’re not going.”

“I speak Spanish.”

“How well do you speak Spanish.”

“Well enough.”

Montage. A hot day, and the beach is crowded with surfboards and wind surfing. Superimpose a colder day, and images of a suggested rain either coming or going. Wet grass at a house set behind some dunes.

Cap Breton was cold and damp. Kilian and Eavan had retreated to the house behind the dunes to stay warm and toasty. Rayce and I liked to walk the beach. Cold or no cold. Fog or no fog. My dog, Navajo, bounding through the sand and barking at waves that chased her. Tristan in drug rehab. No one thought Tristan could make it through the program like there was some illumination at the end of tunnels that are only dark. Appalachia has a lot of those particular tunnels. Appalachia is a long way from France.

I do not subscribe to the theory that the adolescent brain is any different from any other adult brain. When culture wants to infantilize a group or subgroup, it says their brains are not as good as our brains.

As usual, culture with its extended sucking sound. A big dick in its mouth.

The brains are essentially the same brain. Adolescents threaten the adult status quo. Many of these boys are actually leaders. Leaders with no one to lead, and not that much to believe in.

I was them. Once.

My voices pose the question all the time. Why are you doing this.

Because I was them. I had been alone.

I am told that IT JUST GETS BETTER. Another slogan. The truth they’re not going to tell you about is the one where it can gets lots worse, and is under no obligation to get better.

No one was there for me. No one dared. I was always pushing back.

“One bag.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Rayce had long hair back them. And stuff. Most of the boys I lived with had stuff. Following my sane example of Spartan living, was usually laughed at like, please get real. I am told that the only reason to be alive is to get more stuff. It all just weighs me down. I can never quite see myself as standing by some luggage carousel waiting for my stuff to come around the block. Rayce has become a glass blower so now he wears the hair short or kinda short.

He’s afraid that someday his hair might catch on fire.

I have news for Rayce. The fire comes from inside the belly up.

“Do I appear to be an unserious person to you,” I asked.

“I’m not you.”

“One bag or you’re not going.”

“Okay, one bag.”

Rayce knows Paris like the back of his hand. Bilingual and trilingual European kids are not all that unusual. All the dark and secret places where the revolutions are planned. And planned. Cap Breton was where we could get away. Paris will dazzle you with chaos. The beach was a refuge then.

“I won’t have sex with you,” Rayce.

“This trip is not about sex.”

“All trips are about sex. That is what a road trip imposes upon its citizens.”

“We’ll just have to learn how to control ourselves.”

This presupposes that we have not yet mastered control to our usual astounding levels take or shake two or three of the levels.

“I am the epitome of the term. A gentleman.”

Rayce’s lips. Freeze frame.

“Hmm.” Rayce rolling his eyes.

I was going to Mexico. There were a few people there still buying art from me. Then. My turn at video was not exactly a hit. Most people eventually leave. Mary Scriver insists that I leave them. It simply isn’t true. Michael threw me out. Money issues I had none. Adolfo threw me out. Money issues I had none. Mary Vicious threw me out. I had neglected to tell her she would be appearing in a certain book. I try to be good and not write about things because people cannot grasp my life. Sometimes images of things sneak through like a toilet overflows, oh fuck.

“They don’t really want to buy your art, do they,” Rayce asked on the flight to Cancun.

“Why do you say that.”

“Because I am willing to bet, these people are drug dealers, and they want to fuck you in the ass.”

“I have HIV.”

“And…”

“And when you live with other insane and radical and cynical bitches, all whores with HIV, it gets expensive. A chronic disease isn’t cheap. You take the antiretrovirals or you die. And then, you die anyway.”

We all had each other’s backs. That is how it works. The landscape of naked backs in one slow scan.

I got the idea for it from Dark I. Chester. Screaming on his back that he had hurt it.

The one thing back then that I wanted to avoid the most was where everyone you knew would be gathered in some room where they had locked you in the room and you could not get out.

I think they call it intervention.

They gang up on you because they’ve had enough of your shit.

Dark had participated in an intervention where he ended up with the printer’s car.

I can’t even begin to describe the panic of being locked up in a room with twelve bitches who want to put you into a program.

Fuck me.

I did not know the printer. Programs don’t work for me. I am not from your fucking planet.

Being surrounded by people who have your back, and you have their back, faults, dramatic projects, singing and dancing with the Rocketts, whatever, whatever your trip is, works for me.

But I will not go into a room if you are going to lock me in it.

The claustrophobia alone.

I returned Dark’s keys. Or Kenny did. I had come unglued. The next Australian cowboy who walks into my life can keep on walking. My answer to most struggle is to meet the struggle with determination and drugs.

Works for me. Until it doesn’t.

We had reached until it doesn’t.

The Federal government asked me to get the fuck out of South of Market, and so I did. I had a book coming out called Genocide. They weren’t going to like it. My dramas made the boys I would end up living with seem like so many truffles. Having left the States due to some other identity I had assumed, which I really didn’t get, all that outrage, I just don’t get it, mainly because all of the people I knew in The Life had other names. Even “The Man Man” was another name. Just don’t get caught.

“Why are you The Man Man.”

“I’m a Jew from Wisconsin.”

I had no idea.

Do not call her her. Do not call her she. Call her The Man Man. The man at the Post Office was intransigent. You can’t write a check for two stamps.

Fire now emanated from her eyes. She was a photographer. I think she still is.

Just whip me with a rubber hose.

Artists. OMFG.

EXT: Aerial Shot.

We see Paris. Junkie riffraff. Tristan had a pimp. The pimp was violent. There was a part of Tristan that liked getting knocked around. Black racoon eyes of density and closure. There was something about Tristran that wanted to die.

The boys and I had left the du Nord. The heroin was so pure, it would kill you. We had moved into a loft. We were going to lose our loft in Paris, I had no business even being in Paris, and the kind of photographs I was taking of junkies having sex and nodding out were not exactly too popular. The French were not too worked up over some two-bit literary scandal where the author did not disclose who he really was. The French would shrug. They didn’t care. If you’ve seen one junkie photograph, you’ve seen them all. I did a lot of that, too, in San Francisco, and the cops would raid my shows there, and they would rip my work off the walls and destroy it. I lost six cameras to the cops.

What rent.

The rent I was going to Mexico to try and raise.

Drug dealers have all the money so why not travel to Mexico and ask them. For money. Groveling is such a bore. I would gift them art. The days of fucking me and paying my rent were over. I do far less drugs than I was doing back then. Even Rayce has cut his hair.

We are all going to catch on fire like the really bad vampires become totally and utterly out of control. Step into the light.

Aerial shot. A desert crowded with crows.

Karlos Kastaneda was a crow who flew away. She lives in the Canary Islands, and has a number of new identities. Next door to Elvis. Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

Drugs, sex work, rock and roll and HIV. Not necessarily in that order.

Rayce and I leased a Porsche in Cancun. Mexico is a really big place. Two bags in that car was it. I refuse to apologize for the Porsche. It was fast.

Traveling through the deserts of Mexico is the bias of the world on recreant limbs for shame in sweat and hang the hazards of new fortunes there. Motels. The kind where you are as anonymous as any fixed star is nourishment for the malcontents. Motels and in bed with Rayce. Whose cares are now all ended. We stopped in a church in Mazatlan. Rayce had to sit down or he would fall twirling and staring at all the colored windows, the colors of a matron’s bones who calls upon the many oblivions such as this or any boy’s soul within the sweetness of the glass or any house adorned with it.

He will make his own fire in glass and call it original, and I would be there to tell him that it was.

Montage of motel bedrooms.

The art I sold was in the form of journals.

Freeze frame.

A still and quiet consciousness and wars and ruins. Not unlike some final exhalation in the evening desert. Don Juan’s books giving discord to the earth in so fair a desert such as this. I would taste his fingers in my mouth and dream that Mexico might still be free. Solitude with Rayce in a motel’s bed of desert torment. A constant opposition to the sand against the window. And who would dare in such blind faith as this to kiss such a brown boy’s tit in the running laughter of betrayal.

Smashing Streets

I WILL BE DEAD BEFORE THE CURE ARRIVES

I am not afraid of death. But the voices I hear are. I have heard the voices all my life.

“You’re just cynical,” the voices say. My eyes to the sky. I do not respond.

I do respond, but I try not to move my lips. The cure for HIV/AIDS is just around the corner.

Probably not.

The movers and the shakers in the world of HIV/AIDS who know, know. They would rather you did not know. When hope dries up, funding dries up with it. So they’ve formed a cheerleading squad of hopefuls. Who also know when they take the time to internalize the reality of it. There is no cure anywhere in sight.

How many scientists have been trotted out onto the media stage to announce that there is hope for the future (you stupid fucks in the present get to suck yourselves) only to disappear into deep pockets’ mist. There will be no cure for HIV/AIDS. The AIDS pandemic makes the history of smallpox seem trivial.

An AIDS-Free generation is a romantic fiction. It’s a slogan dreamed up by a New York publicist whose job is to keep the money flowing.

How many foundation fundraisers and gay galas will there be when it gets around that your money has been spent on a big piece of pie in the sky.

But don’t mind me. This, too, is a romantic fiction. What you are reading now. Because it has to be. None of it could possibly be true. I had yet to survive the ligature of literary scandal, and if you think I am going to tell you as much as the year any of this took place, you’re insane or wrong or both. There are enough people out there who want a piece of my ass. The US government for one.

Word on the street is that the US Federal Commission on Obscenity has had me under a microscope for some time. They are more interested in what I have to say than specifically with me. I am a thing, not a person. I am saying all the wrong things. What do you think telling truth to power is. I am able to see who reads me on the Internet. Google Analytics can tell you a lot.

729 Jones was a safe house. Only a handful of people knew about it.

Life with your average pimp lacks for imagination. They beat you up a lot. Last window on the left.

Top floor. Down a long hall. In the back. It was a big apartment, but from the hall it looked like several much smaller apartments because that is what it was before it became a place for adolescent boys who did sex work and had HIV.

Right there. The law is being broken. In about a thousand places.

We may as well have all moved our ass into a cemetery. We were in one or another all the time anyway.

This is the Tenderloin. The smashing streets.

This is not glittering, affluent, San Francisco. This is the labyrinthine shadows with its wino poverty, violence, and abuse, ten people packed into one small apartment, and the homeless in every alley, and sleeping anywhere they can.

This is my San Francisco.

Junkies. Drug dealers (the real kind). Whores. Very tired bars. Porn shops, drop a quarter, sex in the back booths. And Polk Street was young boys.

Even then, the skateboard was a prop. Runaways working every corner. The cable car is over on California Street, the fog rolling in like a calvary with sails, and all the horses and the thunder pissing vodka.

My San Francisco does not exist. It is simply a figment of a twisted and infantile dream world I made up. I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m telling you this is fiction.

There were as many stories as there were whores.

729 Jones was a sanctuary of sorts. Young boys doing sex work at a time when disease has shoved its tongue so deep inside your bowels, you could taste inside the whoredom of your mouth.

The idea was simple enough. Get the kid off the street, and keep him off the street, and assist him to not be consumed by what we call The Life.

Why. Because they were painful to look at. It was that simple.

Why painful to look at.

We had been them once, too. We might still be living in the Tenderloin where a one room SRO was all you could do to not be homeless yourself. But we were not them. We were the adults. Someone had to be.

I wrote my entire book, Genocide, between tricks.

What’s a trick. Tricks are the men who pay you to fuck with. Usually, these are married men. It’s called turning tricks. Sex work 101.

Working the phones was a big step up from working the street. I advertised in the Bay Area Reporter and Drummer. The BAR was a cheaper gig. You could charge by the half hour. It never took much longer than that. Drummer was different. Tricks from Drummer flew in. They were from all around the planet and they could pay. Really pay. For some reason, the whores figured out how to rob them better than Drummer did. They wanted very specific experiences. Drummer was usually the night, or it might be the weekend. You had made it a focus to get off the street. That you even had a phone said a lot.

The boys just moved in and out. There was no executive director. No nonprofit board. Nothing traceable. The boys themselves were mainly from Polk Street. Hustlers. Runaways. Junkies. The people who paid for 729 were leather queens from South of Market, a few drag queens, one rich artist from Pacific Heights, and a chocolate shop in the Haight. Go figure. Most of us had survived the street, and we were intensely cognizant of what that meant. It meant luck, hard work, and a little determination. The American dream dreaming Miss Sugarnut.

The street will kill you. It kills people every day. It will kill you. It would kill me. It will not necessarily be slow about it. I knew boys who had been diagosed, and were dead within the week. It will kill us all. The boys came and went. A few disappeared and ended up in shallow graves of leaves in the woods off Interstate 5 just north of Salem, Oregon, before you got to Portland. Skulls and bones. Old leather shoes and your hands are tied behind your back. Whores are a dime a dozen.

There were no rules, no schedule, and no established leader. You took the trash out or you didn’t.

Our biggest problem was not the cops. We could pay the cops off. Our biggest problem were the pimps who ran the Tenderloin. Pimps are never too excited about the whores who can and do walk away. Once, you’re in The Life, you’re supposed to stay there.

Pimps like to think of themselves as people in the shadows who know the secrets. But they did not know 729 Jones was a safe house. All they knew was that it was there.

“You just want to have sex with them,” Mary complained. Mary is my Other Writer’s Voice. She can spell. I ignore her mainly. I do not know how Prairie Mary got inside my head. Orpheous had descended.

“I asked my friends about you.”

These would be her Maltese Falcon Friends. All detectives.

“My friends say boys are dangerous.”

Boys are always dangerous. Sex with one would be a bit anticlimactic. For one thing, I’m completely impotent, and for another thing, I do not do boys.

Some things are too much. I do not have sex with boys. One by one, they’ve managed to fade from memory. Everyone was dying.

Nothing to be done for it. Nothing could be done. The only thing right around the corner were the winos, the pimps, and the inevitable laundromat where you lost your clothes to the motherfucking thieves of the Tenderloin. Where young boys were tricking for a few bucks they knew they needed just to make it through the night.

We are still dying. We do it all the time. Today, it only takes longer, and the dead are not apt to argue. But back then, when everything, and I mean everything, was more than a little grim, you couldn’t shut them up.

TRISTAN’S BUTTHOLE-STAINED UNDERPANTS

AVIGNON was the shit hole of Europe. But there was an amazing hotel under the Saint Bénézet bridge. An Oasis.

From authority. Specifically, the authority of the Pope as the entire Papal retinue had settled there.

In fact, the Holy Sea bought the place. They owned it. Everyone else just paid rent. The irony to the Hotel du Nord was that it was a brothel that the Catholic Church kept in coin since so many Cardinals abused the boys there. Often, the Cardinals wanted a threesome, and they were very fond of watching. Which meant the boys were put in the position of having to fuck their friends. These were women who otherwise mothered them.

The entire Papal retinue had settled there. It was a time of Great Contradiction.

The bridge in Arles had collapsed. Pilgrimage was over the one and only bridge in a circumference of 200 miles. Business was almost overwhelming.

Ironically, Avignon had been settled by the Celts, and you will still find French blond hair.

Mary loves this stuff because it reaffirms that little has fundamentally changed. Therefore it can be boxed and understood. Raises hand in class, but the teacher does not call on her because that hand is always popping up.

“Yes, Mary,” Teacher sighs.

Mary will know because her reading level exceeds the status quo. What does this get her. While her friends were busy learning how to play house: Chicago.

The Maltese Falcon would have to wait.

The problem that the paradigm of it has all been done before is that it completely leaves out the possibility of originality at work. I copy everyone, but I am original.

History repeats itself. Mary is far more cynical than moi. What I believe is that history does not have to repeat itself.

But I am a fool. A court jester. Mary is right. Yet we are not her teachers and we are not compelled to recognize the popping arm. Anal sex is an enema used as punishment. The Reverend Mother bears a whip. The supplicant will bleed.

“How is it that you are able to go back and forth in history and in time,” Mary asked.

“How is it that you have rented yourself out as another voice. I have so many.”

No response.

Mary does not like this stuff. S/M imagery can be intellectualized. We are different. What I object to are dramatic games where the playhouse leaks like piss sludged into the pig dirt of the walled city where everyone whips everyone. Careful where you step. The royal chamber pot was emptied in the street with all the rest of the chamber pots. I say: keep S/M in the playroom which is no place for children trafficked there. But writers never listen. Go ahead, write books until the pigs come home. They never, ever listen, either. The writing is for nothing. The saving of history is for nothing. S/M history is nothing. Humanity will fuck itself in the ass because that is what Homo sapiens do. Islam or no Islam. As species go, Homo sapiens are highly overrated.

I write this, and put the videos of it on the Internet because I can.

I also have this great fantasy where art will set you free. Art will save you.

Okay, it’s a stupid fantasy, but there it is.

The writing down the bones is the ancient echo of the chanting of the monks in their robes shuffling off to the whipping room. Where the monks whip themselves into a frenzy. S/M is everywhere you look. Mary eschews the Marquis. But he was right. We are all de Sade.

There are no good people. There are only people.

I am told that knowledge is power. Knowledge and power are both used as a means of social control. The development of archaeological and genealogical methods which emphasized the role power plays in the evolution of discourse in society. The Scotch are thrifty. So is everyone else. We both understand that being fucked in the ass by a nozzle, and whipped until the supplicant bleeds makes a messy floor. The games that are the rituals of the Church inside where the whipping is, too, the sadomasochism of the chalice and the drinking of buckets of blood. We make Mohammed look positively flaccid. Mohammed had a very little dick. He is essentially impotent and so he turns to rituals and words. Foucault to suck his cock on Foucault’s knees, while offering us sacrificial wafers of solid flesh we might eat even as (or especially as) witches and gargoyles guard the temple’s door. All the failed priests of Gaza become their Christ. Stigmata is a magazine. The Hotel du Nord, a Mosque. As Tristan fucked me, I would suck the cross hanging from his neck that otherwise swung back and forth like time. Mary was born a preacher, and studied for it. Celibacy is just another game that in Avignon was a way of life. To only heighten the act of sex itself. I dropped out because I am a delinquent on a bike with broken hips who sees education — as having souped at the fountains of it — as just another sadomasochism imposed upon the supplicants. The writers are mad. All of them. They might wage war, a war of ideas and words, but they will never be King, and certainly not the King of France. Foucault gives that part to Tristan.

Tristan only fucked Charles when the soldiers came for Tristan at the Hotel du Nord. Outcalls were extra. There was one thing Tristan did better than anyone, and that was to make an entrance nude. Eat me. The Last Supper had nothing on him, and men in red hats paid him to eat his shit.

Academic books of historical importance never tell the real story of Avignon. Tristan Avignon. History is now a tourist tour of a decrepit bridge. The bell tolls for no one.

The Church has always shit down our throats.

To her credit, Mary gets how history can be erased, or the spinning of it, and how this benefits a hierarchal, paternalistic power structure. Wikipedia is more like an erasing machine than an encyclopedia. The restaurant was on the second floor of the Ambush. Tristan on my lap. I fed him steak and Scotch. The steak was rare and ran with it. My tongue inside his mouth. Much like Wikipedia wipes out the inconvenient, and the shadows of what is grey. Black and white being easily recognizable to the masses living in the pig mud of plagues and disease. Charles was from the House of Valois, and he was mad enough (thinking he was made from glass which he was) for his family to take power for themselves, and there were wars. One hundred years of them. What happened in the Ambush stayed in the Ambush. Jack was not taking notes for any future book. He was living it, and Robert really did, and should have, changed out of all the designer leather. Robert was a whore. Charles particularly liked games where his blond whores pretended to break him into shards. Mussolini much the same. I saw Mussolini’s name on the subscription list which I did not allow Gershman to get her hands on even though she wanted it. The court jester’s role was to watch, humiliate the King, and jack him off. Gershman was a bottle blonde.

Sex was simply sex. People had babies because people got old. A writer’s words will live forever. Nothing lives forever. The relationship between the temple of the magazine and the writing of it will be to get the bitches talking that no one ever does it right. At Drummer, I was besieged by leather queens who did nothing but whine and complain about how the furniture moved around. But it was always the same fucking furniture. Slay me in a sling. Stick a knife up my asshole and gut me clean. It’s true. I fucked myself with a gun in a performance piece. Pull the trigger. Nothing happens. She says my sex is therapy. Well, she’s wrong. There is an aristocracy South of Market that made Rome look like a pretense of ancient Greece. Alexander was a blond as well. Gershman really did fuck Doctorow who thought Genocide not obscene enough. Drummer was Ragtime for the harlots and most of us are dead. Jack will wring the bell of it in robes but those are boots, not sandals. I am only looking down and covering my ears even as I swing bell to bell. There was one place in town that no one ever seemed to age, and it was located under the one and only bridge.

Avignon was everyone’s Castro and I do not mean the one in Cuba. The tanneries of Avignon invented the kind of leather that anyone could wear because this new leather was easily sewn. Drag is whenever and wherever you find it. All of us who worked at Drummer were volunteers. A soup kitchen would have been more fun. You would not believe the number of people — all of them could afford to live South of Market — who would plot to do you in. Everyone of those men who worked there hated my guts that they would have ripped out if they could have. I still do not know why. My fiction has always been nonfiction, and my nonfiction, fiction. Publishing will fight that war of Roses for another hundred years. I just don’t give a fuck. It will land you in a heap of trouble turning the sacred supper upside down, but fiction that is nonfiction, and nonfiction presented as fiction is exactly what you would find among the prostitutes at the du Nord. No one is who they say they are and everyone is exactly who they say they are. It is not unique. Tristan as the little boy who fucked everyone. The bottom does more than control the scene. The bottom is the scene.

I do not wear underpants. But Tristan did.

Tristan. Fluid in his many bodies of discontent. We were in bed smoking dope. I am told it’s naughty. Antiretrovirals at the time gave young boys the runs. Everything has changed and nothing has changed.

This is fiction. It never happened. It happened. I hate it that he’s dead. I am the Hindu wife and the bonfire, too. I miss him not being inside of me he is always inside of me.

It’s poetry as well because I say so. License is a matter of degree. In the 1300's, poetry about Tristan was wildly popular. It was a great period of prose romance. One poetic version of his life is no less than thirteen volumes. Not quite lost to history. Only kind of. Tristan was not a character in the Holy Grail. He was and is the Holy Grail. The Book of Sir Tristam de Lyones is a quintessential part of Le Morte D’Arthur.

“I like my cock up your ass,” he said.

Vanilla was the law. The Round Table is a legend grade B movies kept alive.

To break that law, he would cut my wrists. To eat his shit was to consume him. The naked boy is turning over the tables of the money lenders in the temple. He is excited and erect. Who you eat is important. Who you do not eat is more important.

Morphine calmed him down. Rubber was not just a single pair of boots. It was a tube around his arm as well. I am always gentle. The vein was never hard to find. When I was with him, consciousness itself was altered. Had he lived, I would have no need of drugs. Tristan made a fortune at the Hotel du Nord. Anyone who was with him, really with him, would be changed forever. People didn’t just fight over Tristan. Troy was nothing and so was its gift, the horse. Tristan did not simply facilitate conflict. He was a war. I had to get him out of the du Nord if it was the last thing I ever did.

No one knows who invented the Hotel du Nord. All we have left is the movie of it. The heterosexual version of that film I have seen a thousand times. It is the one and only film I have ever learned anything from. Produced just before the Nazis arrived in Paris, and all they speak is French. During the occupation, the world grew quite grim. Tristan would have killed a lot of Germans had he lived during that time. Being underground was where the boy was born. I have this feeling that the Hotel du Nord was invented in a cave in France. There are erotic drawings of it on the walls. Whips, slings, boots, and horses. The fisting wing is closed to the public by a purple rope. The French are like that. Sex is just a part of life, but they become provincial in Provence. Tristan in Marseilles provoked the sailors on the docks. Genet was a court jester who got around.

To watch, humiliate the King, and jack him off. The shattering of glass is a secondary fetish. The Romans wore their fetish on a cross. Depending on the cross and how far the thing could swing. My tongue against it was the Book of Revelation.

The playrooms of the du Nord were down the hall. If you hold him in your arms, he will shake until it’s over. Epilepsy on the rocks, and Scotch. The Viking hordes landed in this place and in time, they would go all the way to Paris. It doesn’t really matter what the color of his hair was.

He was blond. But I hadn’t noticed.

To you, Tristan is dead. To me, Tristan is my Christ, my holy Eucharist, my lover, the breast I could cry upon, my whore, my Maha — vira, and my sword. I keep a pair of his unwashed underpants with its stains and skid marks and butt smells in the one Domke bag my whole life revolves around.

And from time to time, I breathe him deeply in, and back to life inside the memory of my faggot lungs.

StraightBoy in Our Midst — or — I am Dancing at the Airport

I didn’t think it was such a good idea.

But I am such a fucking whore.

The father of the boy is a criminal. I know nothing. I know this: criminality Is. Is I have no idea what criminality is. American corporations get away with tax breaks, loan forgiveness, outright bribery, hedge funds, kickbacks, keeping all windfall profits, putting the inferior junk they make — especially in foods — out into the marketplace and it is an addiction to eating, just like any other addiction the brain of homo Sapiens that wants to dance around the room with another big baboon. American culture eats its way to the moon in much the same exact way, the Brits took to opium. Kinda killed them kinda didn’t.

It never fucking changes — Mary says publishing has changed — so don’t go all morality on me because it’s sanctimonious, most likely wrong, grounded in humbug voodoo all about god, gods, and gods, suffering, and all about how suffering is god punishing you in the painted-black, leather smelling, sling of someone’s arm up my hole to the hilt. Morality is often a culture’s public way of responding to mass confusion, when the whole fucking planet is mass confusion, and makes no more sense than a donkey for a best friend.

I loved Mary Scriver, I did not ask her to write about my junk, and writing as work or a viable pastime, at least to me, is just junk, and junk that has zillions of rules, and quite frankly, sort of stepping outside The Life, I had no real idea of what the rules were. I did not know that rule number one was never email a book critic, why the fuck not. So demure, publishing.

Let us be real. Most of the people in publishing, and I am speaking very generally, here, attempting to paint a photograph, must demure myself to the same bunches of let us call them very taciturn women in Manolo Blahniks to ever conquer an entire glass ceiling set up by other women in Jimmy Chu.

I never got it. I just write. I loathe it. I much prefer photography, and what you get off on is your business.

If you say the word — publishing — to anyone here in the Blue Ridge of Appalachia, they’d shrug. Mainly a Yankee speaking White People Yankee. One of them that moved here. But we are very quiet, and I keep up, barely, with my in-town life, and my up the mountain one.

I need my jeep. I could not do this without it. It’s not in my name.

I own one bag.

I was standing naked in the laundromat on Post Street around the corner from Jones.

No one cared. I didn’t.

Straight men would whistle.

Straight men are strange.

The boy was straight.

I knew him. It would be hard for any kid to live with us who for whatever reason couold not get into art. We live to make art, and we make art to live. It’s smashed and mashed and crashed and flashed. It’s what we do to keep from falling apart. It’s not like we don’t have to do it because we do.

Pull focus to include boys’ smiley faces working together pleasantly in groups.

Pure drivel.

They argue, cajole, trade, make deals they cannot keep, attempt to persuade, and sometimes they beat on someone’s chest who seems intransigent.

To get their version of what they see as relevant for the video they are constructing. It falls apart. A lot.

I don’t see anyone who can’t get into it as fitting in.

The father and I sat in the jeep of the parking lot at a small airport that the father had flown to in order to convince me to take his son. Who he would fly out as soon as he returned to the Southern state he was from and ran meth through whatever meth is. Southern cocaine.

The father was a tweaker.

Tweaking in a parking lot. That is what junkies do. We tweak in parking lots. My drug dealer used to be a cop.

“It’s hard to be a cop,” Mary said.

“What are you doing in my voices.”

“I don’t get much of a comment in my comments — I am trying to be supportive — so I thought I would move in with my cats.

“I don’t need another voice.”

“I was almost a cop.”

“I don’t trust cops.”

“They have guns.”

“They have guns.”

“In the West, we think you Eastern People are Pussies.”

“I am a pussy.”

“Probably not. But your act has been done before. You could be a pussy. I am not sure.”

“I can handle a power saw.”

“But not always your big mouth. Your mother was Dutch.”

And…

“And the Dutch are thrifty.”

Like the time when I was twelve and said they would no longer buy my clothes and if I wanted clothes, I could go get a job, and so I did.

This is not thrifty. This is abuse. All of my bones have been broken. I am held together with a lot of wire.

Barbed wire like in the West. Sometimes I wear my Tony Lama cowboy boots just for the hell of it.

Drew was from Australia. A cowboy. He drove a van. Parked it on Jones.

I think I scared the hell out of Drew. We were usually flying high as buzzards by 7am. And then I had to go to work and assemble pornography all day. A Little Yes Boy. The degree to which an entire subculture wanted the way things should be should be done to their satisfaction the should be the way to do should be things like rules of war and sobriety. Should be I may as well have gone to work for Family Circle, it was not a fun job. Sex was a political act. So was making it transparent, and sometimes artful. There were publishing wars. Book reviews where no one knew the rules, who said what to who, how much money one was losing, and why it’s so hard to pay writers in a timely way.

Make sure the check will cash, and if it won’t, wing it.

“We winged it in animal control. You never knew what might happen next.”

I do give Mary this. I do. I’m the one who is a shit. I don’t have what it takes. Sometimes, it can be very, very grim all day, medical dramas mainly, and then be confronted with one using up one’s account at the New York Times as a bad, annoying day — I flipped. WTF.

“But you don’t tell me things.”

“Get in line.”

“But I don’t want to get in line.”

“It’s a long line. I love you madly, but I need to sail away to Bora Bora for a few years to think.”

Thing is, I have done Bora Bora numerous times. I really, really, truly, truly do not like hurricanes. Or typhoons. Or Tsunamis. Or earthquakes. Or cops.

The Fantome going down really stunned me.

I felt alive sailing that boat in ways I had never felt before.

TR drank all my scotch. Drew went back to Australia. Adolfo took me to Fifes. On the Russian River. I saw Billy Bowers in the Tenderloin. We laughed and waved. Dark I left me a message that said: I never knew you. Okay. Mario wanted me to fuck him because he was straight and he wondered what it might be like.

A pity fuck.

But I don’t fuck straight men.

Well, one time. In an emergency.

I didn’t want Mario, I wanted Drew.

I could barely make it to Folsom Street in a cab.

That bitch knew me all too well.

The media goes to Billy Bowers for dish. Esquire sends a writer for dish. Gary was dead. Sometimes, I wonder if Brian is alive. What a stupid thing to wonder about. People just disappeared under shallow graves of leaves dug by snakes off the Interstate on the way to Portland.

“I’m from Portland.”

Mary is from Portland. It is so HARD for me to know other writers.

I cannot always be on the grid. Dark I Chester would call my neighbors. Mary just looks them up on the Internet. There is no such thing as off the grid to other writers.

“My son is straight. But he’s too hard to handle.” Really, sitting in a car in an empty parking lot is so cliche.

”Yes, but does he get fucked.”

“I don’t think so.”

“This might be a bad idea,” I said. “I want trade. I need a new hot water heater. I need lots more camping equipment. I need a new engine for the jeep. I need to try some of that dry alcohol kids carry around it’s a powder you add water and you have a double Jack Daniels. I need a new jeep. I need a new wok because mine is just dead. I need another house. I need a dishwasher. I need another Mac. I need to know how to build one of those tiny homes. I need an airplane. I need a better drug store. I want trade. This is Appalachia. Land of the junkyard and the kids ripping off the junkyard because they build spaceships to outer space, and they need free parts, and then they run. Mary’s right. Shit only repeats itself.”

“Who’s Mary.”

“Montana on the Prairie Mary. You know what.”

“What.”

“I’m feral, too”

“I can’t do anything with him, and he’s in lots of trouble all of the time.”

“You’re leaving out the HIV.”

“I can’t even say it.”

“Watch my lips: AIDS.

“It sounds so futile.”

“It is. Futile is nothing. This goes up and down in different grades of futility. There’s the gold standard futility, and the drink the Kool Aid futility.”

“Do you need a truck.”

“I could carry bikes in the truck. Getting to the bike trails would be easier because I could put bikes in the back.”

“You feel guilty because you did it to yourself.”

“Mary, now is not the time.”

“When is the time.”

“I just don’t know. There are many, many things I do not know. I am not curious. I’m just not. My plate is full.”

“So, who’s curious.”

Never mind. I definitely did not say the words — never mind — out loud. Sometimes I move my lips but I don’t mean it.

“It’s hard to never mind when you’re curious.”

“We’re taking in a straight kid.”

Maybe voices from the past are voices you need to listen to because pioneers are tough.

“So are single mothers who live in public housing.”

Yes, even if you think it.

“People in the East are almost always pussies. It gets cold in Montana.”

I love the West. I love it. But I cannot afford to live there.

I can barely afford Appalachia.

Esquire is still pissed off with you.”

“I know. It’s silly, really. All those emails.”

“I would caution restraint.”

“Did you know we can’t contact critics.”

“No. I did not know that. I would email a critic.”

“It isn’t done.”

“Fiddledeedee. The pussies make up all the rules, and I used up my New York Times quota. Fuck.”

“We’re getting a straight boy student. Fresh from jail.”

What kind of jail.”

“A Texas drug jail where they make chemical stimulants in washing machines.”

“Feral.”

“They can be.”

“I wonder how long it takes for some kid like that to begin to feel as if anyone has their back.”

“That could be a lifetime. They will want to fuck him.”

“Probably. They fall in and out of love with themselves. A lot.I have to drive to Pikes Peak.”

“I must be delusional.”

“You are delusional. You think this might work. This boy is going to be overwhelmed.”

“I don’t like it when other guys touch me,” he said.

We were waiting in BAGGAGE for the carousel to drop off his five big bags.

“I’m not into that.”

“You might get shit all over your cock, right.”

“Yeah.”

“It will never happen unless you want it to happen. They will jump your bones on the couch. They love hugs.”

“I don’t give hugs.”

“I give hugs,” Mary says.

“Well, anyway, I won’t give hugs because then the guy will think you are making a move. I want them to respect me.”

“They will try selling drugs to you,” I said. “Respect is another thing.”

“I love mountain biking.”

“Good because that’s what we do.”

“I’ve seen the videos. You can’t fuck me. No one can fuck me.”

“Okay.”

“People might think I’m a faggot. I don’t get fucked.”

“Me either.”

We were pushing a big cart laden down with stuff toward the elevator to the parking garage. “I only dance with girls who do snapchat.”

Code for pussy.

“Me, too. Wanna go to a club in Asheville.”

“Before I meet the other guys.”

“Why not. I need to go dancing. In fact, I think I will go dancing right here in this airport.”

“I don’t dance in airports. I only dance with girls. They rim me.”

“I like to watch,” I confessed.

Mary started to speak again. I try ignoring some stuff. I fail a lot. What do you want from an old whore such as myself.

“Are the boys really whores,” he asked.

“Yes.”

“All of them.”

“All of them. Will you dance with me at the club,” I asked. “I have some very serious moves.”

This boy thinks he knows his way around. Let’s see what he can dance to.

I dance in lots and lots of airports. Ask Tristan.

“Sure.” Straight boy tries to smile.

“Don’t say it, Mary.” I have to be stern.

“I will watch from here.”

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading JUST BEFORE THE CURE.

Please do not recommend this. Or recommend anything on my Medium blog. The recommend button OFFENDS ME because I have a mind of MY OWN. It is also disingenuous. I see no worth to Miss Popularity. Remember urban LEGENDS. I get how it works. I deal with at-risk adolescent boys every day. And I can tell you about something called motivation reinforcement. The recommend button is designed to give you permission to follow the herd. It must be good if everyone loves it.

Give me a fucking break. It’s about the value of traffic, and in that context, it is manipulative. It gives the same old tired crowd of writers you’ve been reading for — years, decades, a gravitas they do not fucking deserve. You know you feel good when you get a recommend you know you do, right. It keeps alive the idea of Mid-Town publishing as an editorial set of marketing tricks in a bag (which do not always make money for publishers but publishers are stupid, and they have a great contempt for both writers and the reader). It’s an entire paradigm. It herds the traffic like the reader is a sheep. But I have no expectation that an addiction, which is essentially what a scheduled dose of serotonin injection rush is as it becomes dependent on neurological functioning , and we junkies really, really find impossible to change. I don’t care what cold turkey group you go to. NYC publishing is about pretending to be important. Mainly, we’re busy surviving, you and I. We become unaware of being manipulated. I am rarely not aware of it.

LIKE. FRIEND. REBLOG. RECOMMENDED. FAVORITE. This has no inherent meaning by Itself. I am not talking about a few people on a list of folks you like as writer. These get filtered into the equation. But it is a little self-important to reiterate what we already know. It is what you make of it.

Easy.

Not quite. Context is also anecdotal.

I will put my money where my mouth is. This is not anecdotal for me. It’s personal. Just Before the Cure is free.

What I see out there when I sort through the numbers from Twitter Stats, Medium stats, Google Analytics, there are more, but this list will do for now because they are all saying the same thing.

It’s a molecular breakdown of who my readers are and the subsequent demographics.

Millie the Reader is female. She’s a progressive. She reads a lot. She’s educated. She’s 30–45 or she’s 64. To a point. Fucking with her basic premise that she functions in a moral world, really shakes Millie’s world view a bit, you give her headaches.

Because she’s stupid.

No patience for it.

Get off the planet and you don’t give anything back. For Millie, it’s all about Millie. She says she believes in a god but her involvement with organized religion is a sometimes gig, not significantly, it sorta waves through her brain material.

I pissed her off in 2006.

Explanation is a fool’s errand. Have we left 2006 yet. No. Well, wake me up when the boredom’s over.

Go ahead, It’s not worth it. Millie can only comprehend so much at one time.

Millie doesn’t like you. You are on her shit list but sometimes she takes a peek at what I am doing at the moment.

Thing is, she will never know. I am quite over people getting anywhere near that close.

You are not meaningful. To me.

I can respect your place. Your geography to the hierarchies we aspire to. I can respect you in that you are here.

But. You show little evidence as anything other than learning disabled.

Mainly. I. Walk. Away. I’m done. I don’t have time. I have always worked with kids. Blind ones. Deaf ones. The neurologically impaired. The child with autism. Head Start. Home Start. I worked the ICU of a university psychiatric hospital. Tribal residential facilities. Migrant Head Start. Residential facilities for the developmentally disabled. Sexuality workshops from one end of the country to another and back again. I have worked with the Children’s Rights Group, President, the Board of Directors of the Office for Young Children. the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, Real Stories Gallery Foundation, and I am the founder of Cinematheque Films (art by boys at risk), and Show Me Your Life (art by children at risk).

And then, I wrote.

I’m still not sure why I should care about Millie Reader.

She can buy the gig, or go home. Go home, honey. It’s okay.

Millie’s cute, but she’s uninformed. Life is a continual grey area. That is how it is. But she’s an advocate.

No. She’s not. She’s taking up space, and too often, she takes up all the oxygen in the room as well.

Millie and her cohorts are the people who are reading Just Before the Cure. How can people read and snarl at the same time.

It’s all the same people.

These are the people who are breathtakingly focused like laser beams — everything is about them — and they cannot be otherwise moved. They’re everywhere, but mainly they are suburban to distinctly urban. Half are gay men. Many of them are connected to publishing.

It’s not going to change because these people see life as a one way, herd perspective. You break the rules, you’re out. Tribal culture is historically embedded in this concrete mix that usually hardens in the form of institutions.

It’s not about you. Sorry.

It’s about the kid.

If that confuses you, so what. It’s still about the kid.

Today: The Next Web:

“The work world of tech is the tip of the disparity iceberg. As the rich one percent continue to amass more and more of the wealth of the planet, the future, that would be code for children, confronts a disparity that is widening even as I type this. Simply put, every study that has focused on kids and tech is saying that access to tech for poor children is becoming increasingly and incrementally less and less while the access for well-off children has become more and more. The gap isn’t limited to the workplace. The gap is even more pronounced in the economic divide. The future of the marketplace is n-o-t as rosy as tech insists it is because people in the undeveloped world are using phones. They may have a phone, but they also have a demographic that most of them never leave a 25 mile radious of where they were born. If access to tech is based in any way on location and mobility, tech’s in big trouble.

It’s not unlike the friend button or the like button of the reblog button or the recommend button. This has not come home to you yet, but it’s about to be forced upon you especially as diaspora evolves to become entire governments. Popularity is not a measurement of worth. You guys just can’t see that. Your vision does not focus that far ahead. You insist that the paradigms are not set in stone. Yet many of them are because you won’t move them and your definition of what innovation is remains limited.

A world of poor kids with no tech and rich kids with essentially all the tech is not a world you would recognize.

But it’s coming. It’s coming.

This is why the Medium will fail. Americans want it spoon fed. They’re fat to obese. Most writers are fat, but they’re relevant. So, you have a very popular bullhorn. But no one is listening. To Millie Reader with a bullhorn. Guaranteed migraine. The Medium will fail because it will become the Millie Medium. The terms of service are good because they give you permission to pass the work around. But whose work is being passed around or read at all.

Do you see these people over there who are all jumping over that cliff. More hits. More recommends. More traffic. The techies watch these numbers very, very closely. Entire careers depend on these measuring instruments. It can go financial in a New York minute.

They know what they are doing. And it is Vegas by any other name.

It doesn’t mean you are compelled to drink the Kool Aid. I just don’t get how people marginalize themselves. I might be too marginal myself to see the forest for the trees but I see them fucking trees and it’s a forest of them.

Don’t recommend my work.

To wit: I recommended a PR piece about the Medium written by one of their lawyers. I think I left comments about how the recommend button leaves too many really excellent examples of work as stuff that gets read 20 times, then it’s dead.

How can it be an outrage when that has been the status quo for literally centuries. Reading and writing were what the affluent did. They supported the arts. They supported reading and writing. Because if they didn’t, it became dangerous for them to leave the house, and it didn’t matter that much how much of the pie they owned which was a lot. They recommended what they believed to be true which was astoundingly disconnected. If it was popular, they could sit with the Big Girls table.

But not always. Value is not necessarily what is popular. Value is partially esoteric.

Hierarchy hardens. Not exactly close to six figures which is what a member of the Medium Club can get. Get rid of it. Writers, real writers, people who struggle, and think hard, languish in the the publishing suck known as the Houghton Mifflin hole. Did the lawyer for the Medium pass that on in response. No. It’s called patronizing. Certainly, she has that ability — to pass on something from the riff raff — who is kidding who.

The ranch. She didn’t.

There is only one way to get people to pay attention within the corporate structure. Render them irrelevant.

Ignore them and marginalize THEM is representing a DISSENT, a refusal to be herded on a chess board like sheep because that is what the New York publishing paradigm works which is code for works for who.

We need new blood. There are too many writers here who pop into it, and then, they leave. They are not Millie but they are aware of her and the heard I mean herd she descends from. I notice that they are usually professionals and as such — the ranch — they’re very busy and are constantly involved in how their time is spent because time is money. Reading is the escape. I would guess they are here about a month seems like average.

There are things no one is willing to change because they are benchmarks everyone has one.

Bingo.

The Medium attorney hit recommend on that piece regarding getting rid of it. There are no coincidences. We will do this our way is the message. She did what I asked her not to do. It was a test.

Do your best and refuse to recommend.

Underline.

That puts value on the existence of thought and twenty ways to make you a better writer is just plain any old rip off can do. It is so tired.

Highlight is different. You highlight, and then Tweet it.

But that recommend button keeps you in your fucking place.

I suspect, agents are involved.

Once this happens, they pare the marginal off with a scalpel. You are less than a tumor to them.

I don’t want to write about any kind of business relationship that exists between publishers and agents. Publishers recognize the supposed worth of a manuscript within the context of cost analysis and marketing.

Often, they totally miss the mark.

Recommends are put into the mix of why you have to buy this.

It’s a culture war. Not a dialogue.

You already HAVE a brain. Use it. The recommend button is used to assign a totally false value to whatever you want to click recommend.

It’s a lazy-ass piece of shit. You value your own work or you don’t. If all you are reading is what other people read, you seriously need to go get a life.

PLEASE. PLEASE. PLEASE. Do not hit. Recommend.

The Hard 2 Reach R Not So Hard 2 Reach

Continued: Part Two:

This is a work of fiction. Images and video via Show Me Your Life(Real Stories Gallery Foundation Non-Profit Initiative), Smash Street Art Program for boys at risk with HIV. Research Project: How Children at Risk Use the Internet. Non-profit Classroom Teaching Application: Fair Use: Multi-media Artistic Materials in an Instructional Setting. International Digital Millennium Act.