“2”

The metalogue

When I’m not getting laid, I like to think of myself as asexual, as capable of breathing life into a pile of pages and sending it gangling about the world to reach more people than I might. But this is not true. This is that same old patriarchal mythology, that my word is the seed, and the page is merely a garden where I plant it; as if the miracle of life were something easily isolated, a spattering of ink that grows and becomes something more. We hope that one day someone might read this shit and make sense of it, like my unborn child, not yet a twinkle in my pants, might pick up a piece of my writing fifty years from now, and get to know me better. But a piece of writing is an offspring unto itself, a sentient child, drifting about a desk, a shoebox, an attic, awaiting life. Writing is such an intimate art. You cannot stand before a book as one stands before a painting, with a friend, saying things like: he shows an excellent sense of negative capability in this work. No, you can only read the book, alone, and think to yourself: what the actual fuck? You must be with me for the entirety of this book and keep asking yourself What the fuck is he trying to say anyway? Good. We totally agree on something.

I suppose that I chose writing as a career because it seemed a decent excuse to get into all sorts of trouble. If I write it, there’s no guarantee that anyone is going to read it, and if this is the case, then the whole idea of immortality through writing becomes a bit of a ruse. In an estate sale, the sundry personal items are the first to be thrown away, a trunk emptied of its contents for an antique roadshow. It’s easy to burn journals, manuscripts and such. As such, the act of writing then becomes less like an act of conception, but rather a fearsome, life-consuming masturbatory session which leaves me exhausted, raw, and entirely spent. Not an act of creation for the rest of the world, but an act of personal obliviation.

Honestly, without me, you wouldn’t be here to witness any of this.

But you know me. If you are reading this book you might even hear my voice in your head as you read these words. You might have been with me on any given night as I embarked on some misadventure. You might remember it differently. You are probably thinking: That’s not right. That’s not what happened at all. You are thinking I already read this book, years ago. It was by some Italian guy or something. The Italian guy did it much better. You’re right, of course, because the Italian guy wrote books for readers. I write books for the guy sitting next to me at the bar.

He, of course, is functionally illiterate. Most dudes are these days.