word from Nash who also sent a flask Hemingway took a slug from, and now it’s mine, a nice gift, and it will see use, good use, and Nash also says that he is going to bring out Cold Dogs by the end of this month—which to me, means in a couple of months. This is in response to a ten page drunken letter I printed out via hand to him. at least it did appear to rattle buried bones, finally. Crucifix now (see Webb and Lyle-Stuart) is being collated and it won’t be long at all, and someday too I will get Confessions, and hang it up there on the top row of ye old bookcase with the rest. I don’t feel so much like a writer as I do like somebody who has slipped one past, and I guess my detractors would agree with this. I feel like Warren Spahn squeezing out just one more for the lousy Mets, or like the dice are hot but it’s gotta end. of course it will. I’ll peel and die like old paint, hurrah, but anyhow I have been gifted with not ever having had any first-class fame, and this has allowed me to go on writing the way I please to write. I’ve been lucky, no one can have been any luckier. look, I’ll be 45 in August, think of it. no guns have killed me and I have not been suckered into any beliefs. uh, just think of standing in a kitchen and pulling up a shade with 45 years on you and letting in the sunlight, thinking of the stockpile crashed behind you, thinking, I might even some day be 65, peering from slits of eyes like a grey tank and pulling at a tiny bottle of whiskey and lighting a WINSTON and watching the blue smoke curl curl climb the air, and still feeling bad, and taking it, wearing an old green sweater with moth holes and knowing death is very close as the young girls sing in the streets and literary and political giants have risen and exploded and disappeared.

the Vietnam thing is in the papers every night and the govt. keeps sending over more planes, bombs, troops, battleships, and, of course, I don’t understand it, I haven’t understood any of the wars, I only know that I am always told the enemy is a big bad guy and unless we show him constant muscle and boldness I am told, he’ll someday be in the doorway finger-fucking our wives, but all that I do know is that after the clearing of one war we immed. pump up another, and after you see the same picture book again and again you know that it’s only a nightmare train always getting ready to run off the tracks, and you neither fight it, accept it or forget it; you ride along hoping the thing holds to the rails a little longer, hoping for one more beer in a peeling kitchen while listening to Haydn, hoping the enemy has sense and forbearance instead of what we’re told he has, and the newsboys hawk the crazy news as our wives burn the toast, think of other things like changing diapers and nose drops, of going to a Sunday’s church or wanting a drive down the coast to inhale the turd-filled ocean. but the car’s too old and the spirit’s tired: forget it, baby, I want to sit in here and just drink tonight. what again? again. Blazek’s wife brings him beer. why don’t you bring me beer? no, I don’t want a boiled egg. listen, what do you think of this Vietnam thing?