Please thank Nathan for the drawings. he’s got a good touch.

yes I’ll submit something for your book series if I don’t go mad or crazy or dull, but yes, first N.O, and beer with Webb, and walking the mighty wooden nightstreets full of hammerheaded whores and newsboys and rats and grifters; 5 will get you 30 that I will carry around a basket of torturous legless writhing hangovers with black rotting hearts of apples in their mouths, but this is the game we play, in this we rape little girls in the upper branches of palm trees while reading the life of Richard Wagner. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

February 16, 1965

[* * *] yours was a fine letter, baby. we don’t think exactly alike but I never have any trouble understanding you, which is more than I can say for Shakespeare. you, if something doesn’t get you first, are going to be a pretty good writer, maybe a great one. well, hell, this doesn’t flush the turds away or keep you out of the factory, does it? I don’t know: we get slammed and slammed and slammed so much that it almost feels good. I have run through quite a few women but there was never a child to hold it still. But the women are essentially the same. they look into your soul long enough and it’s not changing to fit their fingers so they began the chant, the protest bit:

“Why to you always laugh at yourself? Why do you always make fun of yourself?”

(no answer.)

“I can’t stand a man who doesn’t like himself.”

(no answer.)

“Why don’t you quit that god damned job, then?”

(no answer.)

“You think I don’t feel trapped too?”

(no answer.)

“You’re jealous. There are many people I like better than I like you and you can’t understand this.”

(no answer.)