I’ve been here before. I built a career on bad reviews. On rejection. Me and Bukowski. Or somebody. They can’t kill me. I hope. But they have set me adrift one more time. What’s the alternative? Figure out what “they want” and write the same shit over and over, move those units, make those bucks for the Man? If I was smart I’d do that, right? Stick to the tried and true, the formula. That’s what all the successful artists do. And in my case, that would be what? What is my formula for success? I knocked ’em dead with a collection of short stories twenty-five years ago. What was I writing about that was so appealing then? Anger? Ambition? Drugs? Sex with my movie star girlfriend Elizabeth? Maybe I was dumber then, more outspoken and thus easier to read. Doesn’t matter, that voice is no longer my voice. I’m not that guy anymore. Can’t do it.

I write my novels because I have to. That’s all. And Leon publishes them. And now the new one is out there languishing. That’s the way the artistic cookie crumbles. Not that anyone gives a shit. Just my own thing. Absurd, isn’t it? Writing for my own benefit. What’s that? If no one’s interested in what I have to say, then my writing is nothing more than the inner monologue of a lunatic, right? Might as well be pacing the streets of Manhattan in an old overcoat, flinging my arms about, ranting. What’s the diff? Yes, I’m a petty, self-involved egotist. But I’ve dedicated myself to this thing. What does Ian McEwan call it? This “writing project.” It is important. It has to be important or I could never stick with it. What difference does it make what they think? My conviction is what makes the art. (Spoken like a true mediocre artist.)

I want to get drunk. I want Sarah to come up here and kill me with her mouth.

January 15, 2006

Back in the crawlspace, I broke into the boxes, my life, entombed in crumbling cardboard. What could I have been thinking? No one gives a shit about this stuff. Storing the detritus of my personal history, as if I’m a Hemingway and everything I’ve ever touched will someday be prized by scholars. Old report cards, essays, newspaper clippings. Photos of classmates: Mike, Rich, Larry. Susan. Where are they, right now? A flat, dried prom carnation, a rusty lapel pin piercing its faded stem. An arrangement of DNA and memory. But forgotten.

Volumes upon volumes of journals, one to a year. I know I wrote them, but I don’t recall so many. They begin in high school, continue sporadically through college and continue to when I first moved to New York in the seventies. For the most part spiral-bound notebooks, the sort you’d need for a “101” college course. All carefully inscribed in black ink. I remember now, I had that fountain pen I would lovingly refill. I thought the flowing ink gave my words greater weight. Where is that pen now?