[P.S.] my god, it’s all so terrible: all our self-importance; we’ll all soon be dust, and that’s not news, not news. less even than the smell of shit.

[To William Want-ling]

September 11, 1965

as ya can see, I’ve burned myself out writing a letter to your wife (enclosed) when I should be out building little bird-houses for the approaching winter and those little bastards too lazy to leave this Goldwater territory.

where the riots have just about said quits and the committees are in dividing govt. poverty program funds among contractors, engineers, bullshitters and companies to train janitors—or as they now are called Floor Engineers. I was a janitor for a while but I can never imagine a man calling himself a Floor Engineer when he has to walk into the woman’s crapper and clean up what they leave behind. I couldn’t get a hard-on for a year after working in that place. what they leave behind. and on the floor. and in that little compartment behind the seat. or alongside of it. or wherever it was.

knives, guns? you’re one deep beyond me. I can understand drilling wood with a bit, tho. that’s fetching. your problem, of course, is not that you’re insane but that you are entirely too sane. through war, jail, dope, woman you’re still twitching to find something to hang your hat onto and you probably don’t wear one until it snows. I guess, if I can guess, that what hurts is that no matter what men go through, little changes them. they may change an inch for a moment, then snap back, then snap to. the centuries and the training are too jesus much for them. you want victory now, not in your grave where it doesn’t count. I’m too tired for victory. I fight a slow withdrawal. I can’t make it. if your wife only realized that while you are drilling into that ladder that what is left of your soul is falling back into place. I can see you out there now in the middle of the night, a small light bulb like a crazy sun hanging near your ear and you are smelling the wood and the burning oil from the bit, jesus, what sweetness, nobody around, not even people you love, and if the people you loved would leave you alone you’d come to them with eyes shining in your head so beautiful they’d cry cry cry, but the average woman and no matter how good she is, is only more or less average and the Art they help create is the child and that is enough and too much for me; the average woman wants a constant reminder of love and fuck, and from their angle, I can’t blame them—they figure we’ve been off to a big ball game in hell, tough, yeah, but how about that long cock now, daddy? you haven’t told me you loved me since I burned my hand making strawberry jam in 1961. yet, love is confining if you hold it too close to your own belly. I read somewhere a week or so ago that the food America throws into its garbage cans could feed two-thirds of a world and that two-thirds of the world is starving. think how many lovers have thrown their garbage to the pits. love is, in a sense, only a form of selfishness, a form of recognition, usually between 2 people. I do suppose when you are drilling that wood in the middle of the night that all this has occurred to you, but just to let you know that I have thought of it too, and that you are not insane, and that the faces you’d think of machine-gunning on the boulevards are only dead and you only want to bury them bury them, not kill them, for it can’t be done, even tho y’d be charged with murder. Your problem, our problem, of course, has been faced before most strongly in the 3 novels (I hesitate to use the world great, they are more than that, for they are beyond the Bible, man’s saving little stamping ground) Crime and Punishment via Dos, and Camus’ The Stranger, and, I think, the strongest of them all: Celine’s—Journey to the End of the Night. where the hell was I?