Less Tired, Less Depleted

Even if one is writing claptrap and drivel (my specialty) the thought that it may be read by someone, ANYone, within a matter or minutes or hours, is too, too tempting, so one taps away in this wonderful empty space with this very attractive font, all the while wondering what Proust or Beckett would do with a web log, real writers of course not engaging in web logging, though the screenwriter Kevin Smith has one. It's the immediate gratification factor that's so tempting, one's words flying out like spurts from an electronic water sprinkler, landing ALL OVER THE WORLD, it's too exciting, and the fact that one does not have to wait on line at the post office to do it is sheer ecstasy, God does the post office get me depressed. I should troll around and see if I can find any novelists who do web logging though there aren't that many contemporary novelists I'm familiar with, beyond Tsipi. "There is another world and it's this one," someone said that, some poet, I could look it up but who wants to get out of one's chair? It's a language-dominated universe, some poet said that, the main thing that's going on is the use of language, perhaps. A web log can be a kind of coffee shop where one can have a wonderful one-way conversation with . . . WHOMEVER . . . prattling along with the sense one is in the company of a FRIEND. I wonder if Gordon Lish has a blog, I doubt it but I'll check. Where was I? I know Tsipi has a blog that I like VERY MUCH, but for purely selfish reasons. Yes let me pour some more cream into my coffee and have a sip. Rather than starting a new screenplay my inclination is to perfect Cocked & Loaded (awful title, offensively and crassly commercial but if I'm going to be dealing with know-nothing producers (cause I probably won't, as an unknown, be able to get an agent) I might as well have a title that reeks of saleability) but I'm so weary of the story, having been through it six times or so, I need a break from it . . . so I don't know what to do . . . perhaps write verses for a time . . . it would be a massive mistake to sit here and web log and talk about trivia like what I did this afternoon, sitting on the retaining wall around the flower- and tree-bed on Barron Plaza where two people asked me the time and one guy said, "Can you spare sixty cents or a dollar?" One often hit upon for money if one sits down in Central Square; I should have bought that t-shirt I saw years ago that said in bold block letters, "DON'T ASK ME FOR SHIT!" Quite windy and warm this afternoon, overcast sky, a feeling of uneasiness in the air, usual heavy pedestrian traffic passing before one's eyes, Asians, blacks, some people speaking French, down-and-out whites, average people, not many people on the tree-bed wall, usually it's almost filled up, I guess people don't like windy weather, leaves swept about, Red Sox going into the World Series (ho-hum, z-z-z-zzzzz), I walked over to City Hall to point Percy at the porcelain, very pleasant smell of wood when one comes in the door of the lobby, then back to the tree-bed to sit some more, then a walk in the direction of MIT, getting as far as the Mariposa Bakery and then abruptly turning around and coming home because I felt an inclination to do some web logging. I usually call Betty at 5 PM to notify her, uselessly, that she is entitled to stop working, she's been putting in a lot of overtime lately because a conference is underway for healthcare officials from all over the world and she is responsible for EVERYTHING; at the last conference there were some Muslims and she had to find an empty room so they could do their five-times-a-day praying. "There is another world and it's this one," and by that the poet did not mean web logging, s/he was talking about taking the everyday world as some kind of utopia--but you knew that. I mean to post my letter to the NY Times on Iraq here at some point, the Times having ignored it. What I'm hoping for is the eventual dawning of a Golden Age for humanity developing out of the stupidity and agony of our first peace-time invasion of another country. I believe we're going to be in Iraq--in a non-combat mode--indefinitely, playing the role of peacekeeper like the NATO and UN troops did when Yugoslavia broke up (I keep meaning to Google, or iSeek, Yugoslavia to see if the peacekeepers are still there) or like the US troops STILL in Korea. The thought of democracy throughout the Middle East is so soothing to contemplate after all the agony one has felt about our invasion of Iraq. We should pull our troops back to a non-combat position and get that enormous embassy out of Baghdad as soon as possible. To pull out of the country means all those lives were lost for nothing and the thought of that really hurts. Maybe in ten or twenty years democracy can take hold in Iraq. But we've got to cut the casualty rate back to as close to zero as possible, and create a situation like Korea. We'll have our troops and embassy out in the desert and the Iraqis can come to us for help and we can launch military raids if necessary to help them out; we've got to stop using our troops as police in the middle of a civil war. Soldiers are meant to find the enemy, engage the enemy and destroy the enemy, NOT to be sitting, or traveling, ducks out on patrol in the middle of insane sectarian conflict. The thought that a GOLDEN AGE OF DEMOCRACY can eventually emerge from a stupid and criminal invasion appeals to one's sense of the paradoxical. Kierkegaard has written that a person who does not have a sense of irony can be said to be a person who has not yet begun to live. So we should pull our troops back, not out. (I should send a copy of this post to Ted Kennedy. I've never written to a Congress-donkey before.)

So that's enough for now.

Note to Tsipi: Your comment about "beggar writers" was too terribly true. Puts me in mind of a passage from Bernhard's On the Mountain:

"No worse rabble than writers, artists, all achievements glossed over, tremendous exertions dismissed with slander and silence, the status of the writer is even lower than that of shopkeepers, much lower than that of politicians, to get to the writers: get down into the dirt."

Time stamp: 6:09 PM.