Welly well well. What the fuck is up meng. Rather than recount the many twists and turns that have kept me from posting on here, and instead of having a go at the big news I’ve wanted to share with you for so long, I’ll just take a little stab at it, here, on the roof (where else?) on a warm July afternoon with a pack of triple nickels and a cup of drugstore coffee. Still feeding the beast of nictoine. But I’m giving myself a little slack, if not only because I haven’t had a drink in over 4 months but because my therapist posed the question-what if I don’t quit smoking for the next 2 months? S’alright with me, counselor. Nevermind that cigarettes are the filthiest of habits barring heroin and writing creative non-fiction. But quitting drinking is what I’m concentrating on now, which means lots of seltzer, lots of Topo Chico (see “bullet for the mourning dove” ) and lots of cigarettes. The other thing I’d like to mention, in passing, and in this tracer round of a post, is I hit a snag in the order of things ie. my Art. If you’ve been keeping up with this blog you know that I thought I had it made. The medium of blogging had helped me “become a writer” (albeit perverse and grand that most of my writing was about writing). As a reader of Going For The Throat you understood that the story had been cast, the protagonist was me, caught up in the thrust and sway of the plot, which was me becoming a writer. And all the crazy shit that happened along the way. It was all there and it was simply me, in a chair, posting missives to you (or trying to, and writing about that). I won’t get too bogged down with it just now but I will say that a few letters from an editor gave me considerable pause. Her comments on length or how overly personalized my writing is dashed my hopes of being a professional writer and had even gone as far as queering me to the beast of creative non-fiction I had been feeding for the last 4 years writing for Going For The Throat. I felt outdated and old. The world had moved on without me. Which shouldn’t have come as any surprise considering I dropped out of the world at the age of 20, sleeping in the cemetery across the street from my old high school with a Fakebook and an abcessed molar. But I thought I had found a way in, after all these years on the outside. She liked my voice, she liked the anger and the irreverance. But in the end it came down to a generational divide and a rediscovering of what my art means to me.
Understandably, I turned to poetry. But even there the arena had changed. I turned 40. I quit drinking. I redevoted myself to the practice of Yoga. And the blues-I buried that bitch and didn’t look back. I came back from the Big Easy with nothing on my mind and no great tragedy with which to pull the good and strong verse. “Fuck the world” was my answer to my thwarted hopes of being a columnist. And I started writing poetry again. That is, until now.
Going for the Throat 