so the eagle came over the San Marcos mountain like a horse and I sat under a busy and rolled a cigarette just like in the old days with Minnie and Mary and Jane in the cheap rooming houses, and it’s cigarettes like this and comic strips and radios that work badly and a clean pair of stockings and something to laugh at that keep a man going—even something like Joe Conrad or Tolstoy and they are pretty bad; even something like Faulkner and he’s horrible. an eagle over the San Marcos. a cup Hem drank coffee out of. a photograph of your father shooting golf in knickers. Herbert Hoover, alive, without wrinkles. victrolas you had to pump. Icemen with leather shoulders. God on the dole. Mickey Rooney in a tent getting whipped by Wallace Beery. so the eagle came over the San Marcos. the san marcos. and I read where India and Pakistan are fighting, something about a border. but it’s not something about a border. it’s something about us. we don’t make it. I don’t make it. I stink. I am ashamed of myself. I am not ashamed of you, I can never be ashamed of you. a cigarette. bad writing. more bad writing. Jane told me that I couldn’t write. when Burnett wrote back—“all your people seem to die in their own excrement,” dear Jane thought this was wonderful criticism. “That RIGHT, that’s RIGHT!” she screamed, “ALL YOUR PEOPLE DIE IN THEIR OWN SHIT!” I only told her, “For Christ’s sake, drink your wine and shut up!” I had always thought that all people died in their own shit; it wasn’t until Jane and Burnett told me that I thought there would be an alternative?? and the eagle came over the San Marcos and stopped to shit and was killed by a most agile wildcat, looked something like me.

as bad as I feel sometimes it comes pretty close to the end but I remember reading a Norwegian somewhere??? I was much younger. something called the suicide. The Suicide. This Icelander could write much better than I; married 3 or 4 times, born children, plowed the land, gone crazy, sucked up years of the sun, I think he finally died an old age, maybe in prison or embarrassment for being a political dupe—became so because he went to the underdog, what was his name? his name? no matter. the SUICIDE wanted to live so badly that given the final great and stereotyped chance, he wouldn’t buy it. but this isn’t any secret. many men who want to kill themselves only wish to do it because they are tired of being born in an age that will not let them live. I fall in love with my own limbs, my head ugly as it may be, my cock, my balls, my writes by merely being around them, by being with them, awake and asleep, my head, my breathing, my sense of the sun and walls; but when these things become too greatly violated by outside forces I will make the choice, and then finally the choice will not be now when but how?