why

"If you don't mind me asking," said Siegfried, "why did you decide to stop smoking?"

I don't answer.  Earlier, eliptically, earlier, I did.  But now that I could expound upon it, I don't, choosing instead to recapitulate earlier points from the same list of reasons.  So I don't say the real, 100% #1 reason for quitting smoking.

Because I have to stop self-isolating.  Smoking is a self-isolating, self-segregating activity.  It separates you from others, and it is a choice to be separate.  This process of selection is actually useful, in a lot of ways, because [the majority of] people need to find reasons to be selective with their company.  Nobody needs to, or wants to, be around generalized, undifferentiated Everybody all the time.

There are far better, far smarter ways to do this.  Carrying a book or newspaper, some kind of reading material.  Keeping a journal or notebook, writing in it regularly.  These are pretty foolproof props for self-selecting what company you want to keep.  A book is a Big Signifier:  the company a reader wishes to keep is one that's not a font of ceaseless chatter.  It doesn't say you don't like words, or speech, but it gives the observer, the observant, a guide to what type, kind, or mode of communication you'd prefer-- which of course goes a long ways toward indicating the content you prefer to be immersed in, and is a politer way of doing so than blasting your favourite drill rap on the train.

I have been self-isolating, and self-segregating, for my entire life.  I did it in the south as a form of survival strategy.  But there is absolutely no need for it now.  Smokers are--  listen, what I'm about to say might sound mean, but I'm allowed to speak for everyone in my former clan, since I've been finding ways to relapse into that camp for twenty-something years, and they were always only too happy to have me  --smokers are miserable cunts.  Only a miserable cunt wants to be around other miserable cunts, because that's where they're happiest.  They like a fag, and being around other smokers, and not much else.  If they're the sort that calls themselves a smoker, that's the brand.  A smoker is always looking around for indicators as to whether they can smoke, where they can smoke, the distance between themselves and having the next smoke, etc.  It's all in relation to the habit.  The context for the smoker is the ability to smoke, or the ability to remark on the inconvenience of doing so.  It's a grim state of necessity, not dissimilar to that of other types of addiction except inasmuch as it's had some measure of Cool, Roguish, Counter-conformity attached ever since before James Dean got his shit soundly mortalized.

Also, it's fucking expensive.  Whether you're talking tobacco or toking.  Which makes the chronic smoker, the lifelong jones-er, evaluate the smokeability of every butt in a locale.  Which is a really disgusting detail, which SHOULD shame me, but I was sidewalk surfing for so long there's no point trying.  Sidewalk surfing is the lowest of the low.  It's homeless turf, addict turf.  It's demoralizing, ultimately.  And it eats up a fuck of a lot of time.

Because, if--  as stated earlier  --the point, the goal, is to separate (as opposed to distinguish) oneself from the greater mass of humanity, well.  The moral of smoking is that it's there to pass the time until your time passes.  A smoker smokes because they like smoking, and sometimes what they love most about it is that it's bad for you.  In terms of health, and in terms of society.  The smoker is the Perfect Capitalist labor unit.  They work so they can smoke so they can die on their own terms.  If they articulate it.  And the most insufferable of us do articulate it.  It's why smokers venerate deeply abrasive comedians like Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks and (shudder) Dennis Leary and Doug Stanhope as basically saints.  The saints of the death drive.

I started smoking because of / with my first boyfriend.  But I kept smoking because I wanted to die.  That's not an exaggeration.  I had been suicidal, was prone to persistent suicidal ideation, and dying was the ultimate loner move.  If the goal was isolation, then it doesn't get more sealed-off than choosing to give your lungs more pinholes than a voodoo doll.  So yeah.

That's probably enough Why to justify quitting, to anybody.  Let's see if it convinces me?

giving yourself permission

It's not the physical satisfaction, it's the physical habit.

Having OCD & quitting smoking is...  I don't think I can tell you.  The physical habit is the thing.  Being a smoker causes a whole series of physical tics that the Art Brain becomes conditioned to; these manifest as tics and tendencies that are a bastard to get on top of.  They become determinants.  They determine the amount of time one spends doing anything.  They structure the day.  But no more.  It has to be me, not the habit, that does these things.  It was always me.  It must be my volition, not my addictive tendency, that organizes my day.  How else am I to admit joy into my life?  Where is the room for it to grow?  So.

Long story short I threw away my one-hitter this morning.  I've been using that thing over a decade.  Its case had been physically reshaped by the constant use; its base had been machine-level when purchased, but after ten years plus its posterior surface more resembled a well-tempered anvil than anything resembling flat.  A constant companion and witness to my degenerate addiction, that device.

Walked up to the end of Kathy Osterman pier and slung it as far as I could into lake Michigan:  my last act of pollution in this life.

With it I gave myself permission to let go of the behaviors I had taken on, in my adoption of the habit of smoking from my first boyfriend, Cameron, when I gave him money to buy a pack of cigarettes but then insisted on smoking half.  Just to be petty.  Made myself sick doing it, like a natural born idiot.  Smoking was a thing gay boys in the South did.  It became a socialization thing, a homosocial bond, especially at the time I adopted the habit, in the 90s.  It became part of being closeted, too.  And once the act of smoking became attached to my fondness for marijuana it became this ingrained, criminal, furtive behavior associated with a whole life that ended decades ago.  I am not a criminal, I am not a closeted scared kid, I am a well-adjusted angry old faggot who has to let the bad go along with the habit.  I'm holding onto a whole world that doesn't HAVE to exist, for me, in this life, any longer, by holding onto smoking and the little rituals of addiction and the self-segregation that smoking causes.  So today I gave myself permission to let it go.

And then did the little act of necessary defiance and sacrifice and consign a physical manifestation of a decade and change of my life to the sedimentary floor of a lake greater than any I have heretofore known.  That part of me can stay there, down deep where nobody will find it but me, when I think on all the little wasted seconds that went into that stuff.  Smoking is a motherfucker.  I won't miss it.

ocd vs plastics

today's ocd clean was a bit of improv.  walking the breaker wall between foster & monstrose beaches, spy a shelf filled with detritus, so out with the materials:  gloves, trashbag, patience.  the sorting is impossibly tiny, as foam of all types (styro, polystyrene, fill foam, insulation) is chunked up amidst the natural flotsam of driftwood, bark, feather, straw, dried seaweed, etc.  this is all leavened by shredded straws, kite string, balloon ribbon, plastic forks, chip bags, and of course, bottlecaps.  every type shape and make of cap for every bottle you can imagine, from the humble disposable water bottle to milk caps to pill bottles to wine corks-- every size conceivable, plus washers, pull tabs, and sundry seals for all the aforementioned

it is no exaggeration to say the scale of the task is barely conceivable.  it takes forty five minutes to clear a twelve-foot stretch of breaker shelf, going through all the middens of flotsam & jetsam.  there was one dead fish, a goodsized fucker.  surprisingly few glass bottles.  one tequila bottle, one agave, some broken basic beers.  a pair of sunworshippers thank me for taking the time & ask if i'm with a crew.  "no," i tell them, "this is just how i manage my ocd"

it's true.  at multiple points i found myself wondering why i was doing it.  and why i couldn't stop.  but it's what i do.  i just finished sweeping & vacuuming the house.  same syndrome.  i just get started and it's fuck you, entropy.  there's no real choice in it, for me, beyond picking a starting point

i can't remember who it was that first identified the issue.  probably christian wanakmaker & charlie bennett.  i was living with them at the house of slack, in atlanta.  the fuckers were confirmed bachelors and a total wreck when it came to basic upkeep.  they relied on my couchsurfing ass to keep them from rotting.  one day i found out my father was going to be passing through atlanta, and i thought i'd make an effort.  so i started cleaning.  did christian or charlie try to help?  no.  they just... watched me.  remarking on my obsessive-compulsive disorder, with amusement.  treating it like a novelty.  my father showed up and i wasn't done, and i couldn't stop myself, either, so i kept hacking at the kitchen, bathrooms, and floors.  christian & charlie were genial hosts, chatted with him for a bit.  i completed all my tasks at last and spent ten, fifteen minutes talking with the man i hadn't seen in six years, and then he headed on his way

my "friends" and roomies kept making little remarks about my ocd afterward.  at no point thanking me.  i've gotten the same treatment from coworkers and exes, over the intervening decades.  it used to rankle me, peeps calling me obsessive-compulsive.  "does this happen often?" a co-worker may ask, seeing me losing my mind.  but they generally don't offer to help.  they just watch.  it is what it is

i did get a formal diagnosis for o.c.d. sometime around 2013, or so.  for what that's fuckin' worth.  but it was my so-called best friends who named it.  bugged the shit out of me, at the time.  i didn't like the label.  now it's just something i do

re-reading / up a tree

a good sign, when re-reading & you no longer see things to fix.  all the gaping wounds & obtrusive scar tissue have been elided and there is now a flow whereas before it was ALL roadwork, to my weary eyes

edits are coming to an end

i have of late been doing a lot of my editing in a tree.  this isn't gonna be one of those posts.  it feels good to climb a tree and sit and think.  i feel like i've re-discovered something.  i've always done a bit of climbing & perching, but it's been years time since i've felt confident enough to really Climb.  apparently i have the upper body strength for it, whereas in my youth-as-a-squirrel my arms were flabby & tremulous

also i have no fear.  which i keep noticing and wondering at--  it should bother me, or there should be some leeriness, some anxiety over imbalance, but i just look down with unarticulated certainty that i'm secure.  you'd think i haven't been afraid of climbing stairs or taking a tumble...  which i have, rather significantly, since cracking my skull.  i've had a veritble case of the Mortals ever since the skullcrack.  a stair without a banister spooks me.  and since my right knee started giving me grief i've been rather reliant on banisters.  but this tree climbing thing is instinctual, apparently, and does not strain the joints, somehow

maybe tree climbing reverses aging.  what's the harm in believing that?  don't answer

anyroad.  a photographer noticed me the other day and asked "why" and i didn't have an answer since it was an impulse.  but...  it's nice to be in a public place and people simply either take you for granted because you're not at eye level, ergo you're out of mind's reach, or when they do notice you, it's with a pleasurable envy.  that look that says "fuck, i wish i'd thought to climb up there".  it's a nice perch.  good shade.  great spot to think & read.  reading in a tree is the fuckin' best

my favourite tree at the moment, to be completely honest:  my editing suite

scrying the shelves / oracular consultation

These days-- these post-drug, post-drink, post-derangement days --reading is a straightforward affair.  Like consulting an oracle, or the "books" of the tarot.  You go to a book because you know you need something from it:  the need is yours, and the reading is For You.  One goes for divination as much as inspiration or straight-up knowledge.

It wasn't always so unmysterious.  There was a time, away & over my shoulder, in the rearview, that derangement & literacy were glove over hand.  The first time I did acid was seventeen.  With wages earned at Ace Electronics I bought a couple tabs from Layne Milwood, that band kid everyone wanted to befriend, and early one September night holed up in my claustrophobically cramped bed with my headphones on, the 'Fixed' remix by Coil on repeat as I read Al Columbia's 'Tar Frogs' and whatever else was in that issue of Deadline Magazine that perv at the CD shop, Carl, sold me.  Those were not good tabs.  It was lowgrade acid, if it even was acid.  I recall at some point that the norwegian wood paneling of my room began to flow & pulse like tides of pollen in mud puddles, but there wasn't much-if-any action beyond that.  Jitteriness.  Anxiety.  A sense of being too tightly sewn into my own skin.

To be honest, I got better results from sleep deprivation.  Which was my go-to for derangement, as it was cheap and also my natural state.  Sleep deprivation, it adds a paranoid cast to people's faces, makes how they perceive you more interesting: livens up conversations by letting folks talk loudly without moving their lips.  Sleep deprivation makes you feel like you're telepathic, and in low light conditions, really kicks out the jams.  I remember my first real dance with the stuff had me full-on hallucinating; sneaking out to the woods to study the shadows of animals gliding and pouncing through the dark...  Good times.

Sleep dep was a drag on my C to D average, though, and took too long to trigger.  I'm pretty sure the idea came from the paperback edition of 'Dale Cooper:  My Life, My Tapes'.  Insomnia wasn't my natural state, at the outset.  After a while fucking with my brain chemistry in this fashion, however, being nocturnal became a habit.  I don't think it did me any favours when it came to reading comprehension or retension, though.  Pretty sure it did the opposite.  Trying to retain information with a sleep deprived brain is a little like trying to make a tape recording with scotch tape over the recording head on a reel-to-reel: the encoding is faint as fuck if not partly absent.  So while I read anything I could get my hands on--

(and there was a lot to read, growing up, from sci-fi to horror to "adult comix" to architecture to occultism to engineering to my parents' separate, discrete Secret Libraries of hardcore smut & hippy-dippy witchlore.  My parents were the kind of people who built their own bookshelves.  Every house we lived in had ever-expanding sets of shelves, in distinct contrast to the amount of living space available.  But back to the previous paragraph)

--keeping that data available in my mind was a struggle.  It would take my developing some OCD and a tendency, in my twenties, to read every book twice in a row, to make it possible to Know What I Was Talking About.  If my memory failed me, usually, I'd bluff.  Which is why my test scores were abysmal.  Probably.  There was the PTSD nobody recognized somewhere in the mix, too.  At any rate, all the components for a half-bright artfag's development were in place:  a bibliophile with brain problems & a recreational interest in neurochemistry.

At that stage of my life pot wasn't really a thing.  I'd tried my parents' stash, once, and didn't dig it.  It wasn't until after running away, in my mid-twenties, that I got into that nasty shit, and even then, not habitually.  Nope, mostly it was books & being On The Natch crazy.  I developed an oracular faith in books; they became my muse & my offboard memory, part of my daily creative process.  Somewhere between that first taste of acid and the time I ran away it became common practice to read two to three books at a time.  Not that my reading tastes were particularly elevated.  I gravitated towards trash, until some sort of personal snobbery developed.

Anyhow.  Some two years after bailing from the nest, and plummeting into the depressingly workaday world of being a kitchen drudge, I tried acid again.  The tabs were free, this time, a gift from my room-mate & co-worker, Chris Beck.  By this time I was into my Burroughs worship, so after hours at our coffeeshop we all dropped.  While my idiot friends did their "Whoaaaaa" thing listening to Skinny Puppy by the blue neon of the Galleria's signage, I read The Ticket That Exploded.  At some point Chris looked over, incredulous.  "Are you reading!?  You're on LSD, and you're... reading?"  So maybe it was ever-so-slightly his fault when the typesetting spilled off the paper and into the oily fractal patterning that slid over and through every surface, from my sallow skin to the denim of my JNCOs to the checkered tile floor.  Maybe I wouldn't have developed that particular hallucinatory default, where I see words materially inveigled everydamnwhere.  'Environments speak to you,' as Ol' Uncle Bill sez.

It's happened since.  Without the influence of mindmelting technologies.  But putting that aside...

Reading is the practice.  Without chemicals for casual inspiration, the shelves are where I gravitate.  Mine, or anywhere in the world.  If there's a book I go for it.  And when I can't get myself to focus on the book I'm in the middle of--  I'm halfway through 'The House of Impossible Beauties' by Joseph Cassara  --my brain will drift onto other authors.  Usually those I've found most inspirational.  Over decades, my shelves have become a repository not simply for fiction but lived experience.  Particularly lived experiences of writers whose lives are most unlike my own.  Because I don't read just to get out of my own head:  I do it to enter others' minds & times.  It's the finest escapism I know.

Escapism, and research.  Because it's a resource!  And a necessary part of having that resource handy is making sure there will always be surprises.  If I hit a dead end with a project, I don't want to go to the fucking internet to figure out a solution.  I'd rather consult the oracle(s).  Like last night.  In the Ds, under Duras, there's a translated collection of Marguerite's journalism & essays, titled 'Outside'.  Clearly I've never sat down to read it end-to-end, because if I had the presence of an interview with Francis Bacon wouldn't have surprised me.

Most useful, libraries.

I'll post excerpts from the interview, later.  But it was revealing.  Because there's a writer who's never done art, asking the most incisive questions of a notoriously self-taught & curiously chaotically disciplined artist.  It's almost as though they were holding a miniature seminar for me.

Stating all this in light of my recent decision to go 100% sober again.  It's not the easiest road to be on, in this life.  But it's necessary for body & mind.  Because, fuck, have you SEEN Francis Bacon's studio?

red light by night

This morning, in the early hours, doing my yoga & watching a bat belly sail directly overhead, picked up the faintest red thumbnail paring of the new moon.  I say "picked up" when fact is my eyes could not directly perceive it.  If I looked at where the moon was supposed to be, every star & satellite in its vicinity was brighter than the narrow band of spectra the moon threw.  Something red-- something around, above, below red --radiated when-ever my eyes were on other targets.  An eclipse from any other angle is a new moon, I guess.  But I like to think I saw something special.  Inasmuch as it was visible.  Which it was!  Just not in any way that I could actually draw or render, coherently, in print.  Abstractions of light are especially appealing to me but I know nobody sees what I see in such things...  Anselm Kiefer could do a motherfucking massive barn door painting of it and get the feeling of it exactly right.  But his trick is scale.  My medium being comix, it's hard to evoke that sense of scale where everything in the world is larger than your equipment is equipped to take in.  Nighttime and lakeside are Big Feelings, and I fret, frequently, that my approach to composition and pagination are too micro- to encode the macro-cosmic correctly.

And, shit, anyway, how do you push the concept of "red" in strict b&w, or even b&w + graytone?  Been grappling w/ ink & print for 32 years years & that riddle is still too zen for my blood...

philosophy, or what passes for it: three quarters here & three raccoons in a trenchcoat

I'm only about three quarters here.  In relation to the rest of "normative" humanity, or what a Standard Model Human is meant to be.  I mean, I'm present.  I am In The World.  But I'm about a quarter-step back from what "most people" perceive as Reality.  Not in the sense that I hallucinate, or am subject to invasive thoughts--  those things have happened, and are easily recognizable as such  --simply that, I'm not engaged with this bullshit the way everybody else is.

I am pretty sure part of that is due to having experienced survival panic & the threat of death, and having a (very Jungian) crisis of mortality at an extremely formative age that spiraled out into delusion & mental illness & PTSD and finally metastasized as my obsessive-compulsive disorder, which I manifest as in the practice of my art.  I relate to my body, my mind, and my world differently than other people.  And I don't take medication for it.  * Unless one counts the weed, which one truly must.  But putting aside that bad habit, the window I have on consensual reality is pretty One Step Back from everyone around me.

I don't grapple with status or class or race or gender or sexuality the way everyone around me seems to.  I know who I am and I know what that's worth in this world and I've got some pretty nihilistic views about all of it, fundamentally speaking.  I'm pretty materialist.  I've had my three brushes with death and my feelings about death are that it is Full Stop for me.  It's left me with a little permanent fuckedness and I just can't, with nationalism and racism and sexism and all the motherfucking Othering all the time, and how important Othering is to being an American in the 21st century.  Bitch, please.

None of this means a goddamned thing.  None of it could be more important--  to everyone but me.  Because I'm three quarters here.  I do care.  I care about human beings.  And I care about the environment, and life, and all that.  Rah rah.  I love life.  It's incredible and ineffable and every moment is incredible, even the dullest grimiest most gray shit is precious--  yet when it's done it's done and I'm not very worried about the state of my soul.  I know I've done my best the whole time.  I'm not going to peace out with Sins on my conscience.  I don't have the judeo-catholic wiring for any of it, ultimately, because I wasn't raised that way.  I was a gay white kid in the south with reactionary hippy parents reacting to their lace curtain irish world in a shitty not-"segregated"-but-not-integrated southern town.

The world told me what it didn't want me to be:  a pervert or a monster or a murderer, and also not gay, not leftist, not humanist, not interested in women's rights or, shit, i dunno, saving the world?  Like, there's a lot of self-hate involved in just getting through the contradictions we have to eat just to get up in the morning.  I don't have any scales over my eyes about any of it.  I do what I can.  I walk up and down and to and fro in it and when I die, none of it's gonna stick to me, because--

There's this joke I have, with my co-workers.  It's my three raccoons in a trenchcoat.  The top raccoon, that's Mind, me, the dolt steering the entire clumsy enterprise.  There's the second racoon, my Central Nervous System, the one stuck in the middle, completely covered by the coat, the interlocutor between the idiot on top and the poor indentured raccoon on bottom, Body, the feet on the ground and the guts to get around in all this tsimmis.

Mind, brain, and being:  those are the three raccoons in my trenchcoat.  

Sometimes one to two of the raccoons show up to work.  The best days, all three are in attendance.

Those guys are why I'm only three-quarters here.  Because I think about them, individually and in pairs and collectively, about as often as I'm contemplating the futility of caring about any of the shit-shit-shittiness happening because it took me fifty years to remember all the names of all the alpha morons responsible--  

when all I want to do, in this life or any other, is create art & love my husband.

Anyway.  No big existential taffy-pull.  I just realized earlier the best way to phrase all this, as I was walking, and I stopped to move a freshly-emerged cicada to a nearby tree.  He seemed quite content to accept the help and climbed his happy way to tonight's metamorphosis.  Yeah, little fella, you do it.  

So.  I'm only three-quarters here.  I'm a step removed.  I think I've been this way since coming to in the hospital, watching myself be sewn up.  It doesn't bother me.  It just is.  I don't think my top raccoon was in good shape before the crack to the skull; maybe he was four-fifths or five-sixths of a percent Present to begin with.  Now he's Bueller--?  Bueller--? over the hills and far away, on the best of days.

Today could be the best of days, though.  That cicada was pretty cute.  And yoga on the beach was good.  I think I'm healing from the fall at work, and the shit in my lungs is being coughed out a bit at a time, and I feel fundamentally more embodied & sexier than probably ever in my whole life in the South, so that's basically two raccoons out of three to start the day with.  If we get three raccoons in this trenchcoat then hey, Senor Droolcup got his shit together enough to crack a smile and pass the middle raccoon a brush to dip in the ol' inkwell.  What day is better than that, I ask you?

Time to drink this tea and crawl back into bed with my husband.

"one day a man will read... and then it will all start again"

out of a variety of nowheres

That's where the writing gets done, largely.  The writing and the thinking.

Your Warren Ellises of the world will talk up their gear and their precious rituals for genius and the albums they were given as gifts and the live shows they saw and the meals they ate and the booze they saturated them with and the gardening they struggle over.  They will blog.  They have blogged.  They are blog.

Yet I am blog, and you can too.  Because you do not need the frills & the fripperies of a content hound to triangulate the origins of inspiration.  You can pick up those signals... anywhere, everywhere, and in my case, most readily, in a wide variety of nowheres.

Of late I refer to them as Woods Offices.  I have two Woods Offices--  the first so designated is nice in spring but utterly inaccessible by summer.  It consists of a log thrown across some other fallen logs, by a fence, right next to the Evanston channel trail.  Woods Office number two is technically a River Office, as it's beneath an overpass, but the woods are also right there.  These are places I habitually hang out in the hour(s) before my actual job begins.  I'm a compulsive tidier, so when I head out it's with plastic bags & vinyl gloves at hand, the better to clean the world with.  Usually I average one to two commercial grade trashbags.  This past couple weeks I've pulled gallon cans of paint outta the woods, found a cop's lost maglite, cleaned a burnt-down homeless encampment, et cetera.

I may often be found at the beach, picking up.  You would wrinkle your nose at the things I've picked up.  Just rest assured I do so with a great many precautions & barriers between myself and worldly filth.  The upshot of this compulsive behavior, while distracting, is that it calms me and leads me to Notice all kinds of oddments.  The cleaning has rewards built in, as well.  My new Leatherman multi-tool, for instance, came from a beach clean, as did my new collection of novelty cocaine spoons.

The point I am making here, painfully slowly, is that one may find inspiration in the world, in a wide variety of nowheres.  The cocaine spoons are useless to me, practically & personally, but it's a lovely character note to append somewhere within A HERO OF THE FEVER.  Because...  the sort of personality that would collect coke spoons?  That's something I couldn't have brainstormed.

It takes being in the world.

Warren Ellis might have been able to conjure the cokespoon collector.  Because himself is a poseur and a degenerate who quite enjoyed cocaine.  I also imagine that, though he was once as scrawny and gutter-oriented as myself, he only hung out in curious out-of-the-way overlaps of urbanism & opportunistic nature as a hipster flex in his twenties.  Carousing, like.  Doing his weekend warrior bit with the lads, getting into shit, desperate to pull some bird.  

Whereas I've always been the guy who needs to avoid humans.  And if you need to avoid humans, you explore.  Now I know how to access the Metra rail corridor.  Like, there's a great deal of mapmaking that gets done, just walking around.  Because people take walking for granted.  North American urbanoids rely on their cars for virtually every sojourn and consequently never get to grips with how their city is constructed.  It's very, very useful to know every square inch of the places you live & work.

Anyway, recon:  It's how creation gets done, as much as any of the Art or Craft shit I usually drone on about.  I've written four going on five books by being absolutely nowhere, writing at fucking dumb hours, in conditions of relative-to-absolute dark, cold, and rain-- by being persistent, prepared, and pathological.

Try it.

Tracing Gould - o17

"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."

The dialogue first emits from the mouth of a child, in Wild Palms, installment 3; and concludes the chapter as a button from the hapless protagonist and father of the same kid.

"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."

The child is running a fever when he says it.  The father is having a panic attack as his life collapses into weirdness.

Bruce Wagner is The Weirdest.  He's been an influence on my life longer than David Lynch, possibly, if one discounts Dune.  I first encountered Wild Palms in the back of Details magazine, reading it in the hair salon my aunt Edwina (remember her?) used to attend every Saturday.  I fell in love with the art immediately-- not least for its "adult" content.  There was a perverse thrill to reading about sex around all these adults spending most of their time pretending sex doesn't exist.  That Wild Palms had an absurdist, grotesque fascination with violence didn't hurt, either.

And then Twin Peaks happened, and Details didn't serialize Wild Palms with regularity, so I never got to finish it.  I remember there being a trade paperback on the shelves in bookstores at the mall, and I'd leaf through it, scrying for the slightest suggestion of fucking-- but I didn't read it.  I honestly knew more about the plot of Wild Palms from its teevee incarnation, than its origin as a comic book serial.

My teen PTSD was such that cause & effect kind of didn't exist in relation to one another.  Unless directly addressed, I couldn't make certain connections on my own.  I didn't recognize that the Wild Palms teevee miniseries 'Movie Event' was an adaptation.  I remember being excited that Ernie Hudson was in it, because the black Ghostbuster was my favourite.  I knew Jim Belushi from the movie 'Real Men'.  But as a comix-cultural moment, Wild Palms didn't register.  The cast was too insanely large and the plot was half-there as something a casual viewer could isolate & identify.  There was something about teevee tech, Cronenbergian vibes, and there were occult themes (an occult brotherhood, abductions, enigmatic tattoos) but as to what was HAPPENING, it was all over the place.

Which is why I couldn't really trace the comix incarnation in Details, honestly.  Because it ran in two-page instalments, and anyone who's ever been in a hairdresser's salon knows there aren't three consecutive months of *any* magazine in the house.  But that art, that art, that art...

"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."