it’s raining and I think I’ll walk up through the rain, drop this in box and buy one of those horrible newspapers. I enjoy the comic strips by inverting/ reversing the meaning. and really, all you’ve got to do with almost any man’s speech, thought, action, is reverse it entirely and you get some kind of truth. it comes out very clean. [* * *]

[To Carl Weissner]

May 13, 1967

[* * *] some collectors over last night thumbing through my bookshelf, took some of my early books which I am pretty much down on, plus a few other items, broadsides so forth, a painting I didn’t want, and when the guy asked me what I thought—he had quite a bundle, 15 or so objects, I suggested $50 and he wrote me out a check for $100—INTERNATIONAL BOOKFINDERS—and if the check doesn’t bounce, it should finance my trip to Tucson, Arizona where Jon and Lou Webb are working on a record of mine—not poems—but talk mostly, drunk stories of my past. I’ll try to mail you a record if it ever gets out. also handed the guy with the book collector a chapter from my novel, I am going slowly, chapter 7, I really don’t want to write the thing but he keeps pressing me, and the novel may be good because I don’t want to write it. it’s like trying to run through cement, and I often wonder how people can think of themselves as writers? it is pretty near impossible to imagine oneself as a “writer.” I can more easily think of myself as a rapist, a pisser of piss, a killer of spiders.