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she fell asleep
with her face
nestled against my neck
her breath
warm against my ear
listening
to the vision that she saw
in the midnight of the fantasy
from the bight of dreaming
I could not wade into
I realize now that you do not want to be saved, how trite, you rather want to be worshiped at a distance, left alone to die, like an object in a store that costs more than what’s in my pocket
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It’s still not nearly done. But here’s a…
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What’s pain? What’s comfort? What do you consider soulful or arbitrary? Who’s the tertiary character here? What if I am all of it?
In my early twenties, I believed that maintaining a healthy death wish was all the creative stimulus I needed. Like Edgar Allen Poe’s “irreclaimable eater of opium”, I was always pale and divided, a morning away from not waking up. But yet, every morning I did and it kept me motivated to create for that one morning when I wouldn’t. Eventually it passed and I started drinking more, caring less, and the work suffered. Got longer. Then longer still. Until eventually I started forgetting to number the pages (I did it some time later across the span of several days, making sure that the lines ending each page matched up with the beginning lines of the next one). Now I was just desperate to get it done. The years have been weighing heavy on me and I’ve started to think that if I kept losing the want that I would eventually become a literary cataleptic. And I missed her, and the way she inspired me, but I found others and they were also uninspired and eventually I found my way to this party. Cruel. Lively, nearly. There were people and light from the windows, everything reflected and jumbled inside them. But I still didn’t see myself anywhere.
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Also, look out for the new Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album coming this month:
Push the Sky Away is available for pre-order, in the deluxe edition, here:
http://www.nickcave.com/music/nickcaveandthebadseeds/push-the-sky-away/
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As you have seen, I have been providing a lot of new material lately – but, unfortunately, this has been causing me to disregard my need to finish editing Part I of my novel, as well as write the necessary chapters still missing from Parts 2 – 4 which have created languishing narrative holes. Throughout all of next week I will be focusing on this task, though if something new pops up in my head, and I can’t push it back (which I usually cannot without at least a liter of bourbon) – you will of course see it here. One new piece a week guaranteed. For the time being, please note that I have updated the Official Material (Crack & Vinegar) section to make the rest of the work more accessible.
Cheers,
Jack
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If you know me well, then you know that I hate the holiday season. It’s cold, there are tourists everywhere and the right wing takes this time to remind us about the fervent war on Christmas. It’s more of a headache that I care to have. I fucks with eggnog, though.
But, to you and yours I wish you a happy holiday season. Hopefully you have as much as I do to be thankful for: a fifteen year old bottle of single malt scotch (William Grant & Sons need to make me their “celebrity” spokesman for Glenfiddich), a reunion with someone that I missed terribly for a terrifically long time and this video of DMX singing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”.
May your much-needed vacation time be spent in safety and love, and may you all get some rest, get some flavor and maybe even some temporary meaning underneath the mistletoe. Chill out, the next year is going to be better!
Love,
Jack
P.S. More work coming soon. Also, I will be updating the Official Material section coming into the new year.
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To be honest, I was in a horrible, mean mood all weekend. I missed someone’s company and she treated it casually (“we don’t deserve much, but we deserve each other”). Then I went to see an Icelandic troupe’s circus-like presentation of Faust with Tristan and then came back with him to the Rockaways to get some work done. After eating a toasted ham sandwich, my mood finally lightened and evened out a bit, so I started thinking like: if I get shot like Stack out here – at least it won’t be on the first floor. Capable of finding contentment even under the carpet of the mind.
Since I’m supposed to cease drinking and getting stoned after this Thursday’s poker night in order to finish the novel that I begun nearly five years ago, I looked over at some recent work that flickered across my computer screen, and I noticed that a lot of intended beginnings work by themselves but stubbornly won’t fit anywhere else. So, with no further ado, here are the Unuseables…
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The Unuseables
In this country you have to purchase your freedom, while in other countries – you’re free as long as you survive. That’s always been my problem: I know how to survive, but I’m clueless as to how to live.
This is a eulogy for the artist as a young man.
It used to be that the problem was that we were no longer able to forgive genius for its varied transgressions (Dostoevsky started off as an anti-Semite, while Salinger ended off drinking his own piss); the sad truth is that we are no longer capable of even recognizing it and thus my love for you is like snow falling on Virginia, absolutely meaningless. Writing for the penny is as sad as your old overcoat or Nabokov’s droll wit and there was that time that time stood still for the pen, your pen and the pages went and went and it didn’t matter that it would come to null eventually in revisions and procrastination and forgetfulness and that second job and the asshole next door that forgets to turn off his alarm set to the schedule of an rooster stimulated by amphetamines and bad sex in the henhouse.
The Suicide Diner in SoHo is open until 5 am. Fresh hashbrowns cooked with caramelized onions, free refills of coffee. Jack was having a conversation with Andrey:
“What the fuck do they know?! Neon Bible was better than A Confederacy of Dunces, The Virgin Suicides was better than Middlesex.”
“Yeah, just as the book I’m going to write is better than the book I’m writing now.”
If you happen to write a film where the protagonist is a writer – never, under any circumstances, use the following cliché to describe his creative process: ‘the words poured out of him…’ Words do not pour fucking out – it is a rough process, it is hard, it is marvelous and complex – it’s like loving someone who hates you and fucks you and treats you with the casualness of a homeless wretch begging for his meals. The words are a happy tomb, they are a fevered drink, but they do not pour out of anything unless it’s a knife to the belly.
I am trouble. I am murder. I am revolution. I am mistake. I am the senselessness of futile attempts. I am the withering and the drug addiction of unrequited love. I am the empty bank account. I am the grammatical error pointed out by a pupil. I am the second bottle of wine. I am the new movement. I am the unrecognized brilliance. I am the full subway car in the dead of night and the bad lines in a soap opera and all of it, for nothing.
This is a much shorter play than I expected.
This was a much shorter play than the one I paid for.
Love, apparently, only works in the introduction.
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No!
Stop, folks! I’ve met you guys before – you used to be so eloquent… the world won’t be ending on December 21st (for further inquiry please visit the ubiquitously available “calm the fuck down” N.A.S.A. sites that report that all of you are worried for nothing and trying to make a joke out of an event that should be pitied within the framework of pop-culture as though it was a prophecy that came out of Alabama). Worry about your bills, your kids, and the fact that your paranoia is misdirected. We’ll be gone soon enough, don’t fret (as a species, within the comparison between the amount of time it would take us to excuse ourselves, use a toilette to wipe the grease off our face and then walk out the door as warmly and unembarrassed as possible and the time it took us to get to this conscious state of illogicality). We’ve got “global warming” and China and Republican rhetoric to worry about. So, for now, let us mellow a bit… or at least, can we all stop mentioning this bullshit apocalyptic theory to me while I’m simply trying to have an overpriced drink at the bar and ignore the frenzied pace of small-talk around me.
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Although I will never apologize for offending anyone with anything I’ve ever written – because I don’t care much for the sensitive types that can’t take the time to read through into the intended meaning of something I’ve ever published here and will instead only get themselves foolishly riled up by a few four letter words I might have chosen to sprinkle in here and there like paprika to spice up a crowded text – I will say this instead:
Though certain things written here are composite sketches of people that I know; exaggerated, abstracted and lovingly manipulated so as to seem amusing or tempting or entertainingly subversive, they are never exact replications of their biographical realities. But if I ever write about a hypothetical person and call them “humorless” or “only of mediocre creative capacity” or “a good fuck but barely memorable outside of your imaginative use of hot sauce” or “full of a self-assuredness that can only be a later hindrance” and you see yourself in these lines – you should probably take a look inward, rather than at me. Most likely, that wasn’t about you, you arrogant child. I do not think about you when I write, because someone who takes themselves so seriously can only be a target of easy mockery and I am not in the easy mockery business. I create what I see as Art. I write because I am a writer and because I am capable of capturing the world for myself and for others in a surrealist, lyrical, acute perspective that seems to make more sense than the senseless reality we’re sifting through on our way to the next inevitably meaningless plateau. Enjoy it and learn to take a fucking joke – you should see how funny Freud found that one about the pedophile and Catholic priest at the petting zoo after he shot an eight-ball. Dennis Leary once said in his stand up set (likely stolen from the far superior comic writer Bill Hicks) that life is composed of little pleasures: “it’s a cigarette butte, or a chocolate chip cookie or a five second orgasm. You cum, you smoke the butte, you eat the cookie, you go to sleep, wake up and go back to fucking work the next morning – that’s it, end of fucking list!” All relatively meaningless in the mesmerizing quandary that is the universe and our shared existence within it, especially if we consider the span of this meandering sea that we call time. So, trust me, you are feckless too in this futile schism of the revoltingly revolving unimportant – meaningless to me and to the apathetic world. The people who still nest inside my head are all mere ghosts now, trust me – and ghosts aren’t real. Go get laid and forget about it.
“Boo!”
But just in case, for the ones who are slow and unnecessarily delicate – I have provided a notice in bar to the right of you regarding the fictitious nature of all work published on this site. You’re welcome, you touchy cunts!
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Working on a Nickelodeon show for a week: already shooting coke in the office bathroom at 8am while everyone is circling the kitchen coffee pot brewing slowly like the CIA around a Mexican cartel that believes in the preservation of free market capitalism, already known as the raging alcoholic of the kids-animation scribes’ facility on the 7th floor with bags under his eyes and blood along the whites like hostilities in snow – at least, now Spongebob isn’t the only drug addict in the building.
But with steady money coming in, I’m getting the anniversary sex like Obama every night, that’s why I’m looking distracted and a little nodded like it was four years ago.
And speaking of heroin – the Yankee postseason is coming up tomorrow as the constant TBS commercials prophesize – so, fuck Baltimore! Lets do it in three games, get it up and get it on like you were Gaye or Heavy D.
Now it’s time for a glass of milk and a splash of vodka down my gullet. I think there’s some Canadian hash coming in this week and Robbie and I will be sleeping outside on his balcony again like we were tech-junkies waiting for an Apple product.
Sleep is not required, but October is getting cold.
Where will we be in a month?
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Closing down Barnes & Noble once they hear that Tumult is starting to read there…
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So, ladies and gents – as you can see, the site has had a bit of a premature facelift. The Elegant Grunge theme I was using previously, developed by Michael Tyson, is no longer congruent with the site – so I have moved onto the Black Board theme by Frank Schrijvers. I know, I know – there’s a lot to have your eyes running wild now, but deal with it. Seek out the good work, it’s more available now… Also, I will be updating the Official Material section, which will make the new pieces instantly available in the right column of the page. Don’t forget my quick reading coming up in Barnes & Noble (Oct. 5th at 7:30) – small crowds, minor expectations breed surprise. I will be trying out some pieces that I have never read live.
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Until then, some advice:
Never piss in the soup of your parole officer when he’s about to drug test you and then do your impression of the soup nazi. Seinfeld is syndicated on every possible channel, and you’ll probably have enough to haunt you inside without being reminded of your own spunky idiocy every time they show a rerun of the show on the communal television.
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Morose Pontifications and Other Poetic Ramblings
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