Biggest idiots I’ve ever seen: or, why do we write?

So late at night

I don’t have to listen to the thumping and tumbling of my soul

Why do we we write?

Where was I born? I remember a front porch, and not

Much else. Always there were books around

A whole room of them, a den lined with books,

Most of them in German, seemingly,

Goethe Werke, Schiller Werke

Whatever the fuck that meant

So I tried to make my way
 

 

One day in the buriedness of deeply sucking at

An author I raptly chose

As my favourite of the moment or the day,

I had this thought: you can MAKE these.

Somebody makes them, somebody DOES them.

They don’t come out of nowhere, someone

Sits down and does them.

I began to write. In shaky block capitals at first,

Always in pencil like they told me to in school,

In case I made an error and had to take a pink pearl eraser

And rub it out, leaving disgusting grey crumbs like dead insects

And when I had finished the story

Which was probably about horses

I thought it was good

And I began to write out copies.

 

 

Does this mean I was published? If publishing

Means distributing written material

To a number of different readers, then yeah,

Just don’t count the numbers

As later on,

Having written novel manuscripts, poetry manuscripts, thousands of

Book reviews and gazillions of newspaper pieces,

I did not wish to count the numbers,

As I did have an income

From writing, a steady one,

Just very small,

So I hoped no one would count it up

And see that a paper boy would make more,

Or a counter person at McDonald’s.

 

Oh but you’re in the arts, someone would say,

So why do you even think about making money?

Why do you sully yourself, what’s wrong with you,

Don’t you think you’re lowering yourself by writing for newspapers?

Especially when they line birdcages the next day.

Or start fires, I mean in the fireplace. Good for that.

I didn’t want to tell them about Dickens and guys like that, I don’t want to

Look them up, lots of guys and maybe girls too, who plied their trade

Whatever way they could.

If it's out there at all,

it becomes Game,

Public property that prompts some people

(who always wanted to write but never

had the guts to even get started)

to send you Criticisms

which are For Your Own Good,

and aren't all writers 

interested in "feedback" from readers,

isn't it always a good thing

an educational thing

a thing that will doubtless hugely improve them

if they're "real" writers?

So then I'm a fake writer,

and you can have your fucking gratuitous, sneakily sadistic criticism back

open your mouth and I will return it to you

(or some other orifice, I don't care)

because you don't know what the hell you are

talking about

anyway.
 

But there are bigger problems than this 

I hope I don't live to see it

Grammar is slowly eroding, not the schoolmarm type, not parsing sentences, I mean the matrix below and beneath vocabularly

That helps the whole mess make sense.

 

I wonder how it will be in 100 years, if I came back,

Which I will not,

Even if I could,

Or 300 or 500, if the planet hasn’t blown up by then or is

Taken over by cockroaches, who could probably

Spell better

Than the lamebrain mutants on Twitter.

I wonder if I’d know what they were saying at all,

With the speed with which they were saying it,

The fractured syntax,

Verb never matching subject EVER,

With no one noticing or caring, not even really educated people

Or will there BE such a thing

As everyone spews Orwellian Duckspeak.

 

Maybe just bouncing brain waves off each other.

I would not mind dispensing with words, I mean for-bloody-ever,

Because I honestly wonder

What good they have done me

Except to light in myself

A feverish desire to be “read”

Which has never come about,

Not even in this-here blog

Which probably has an offputting title

That I sincerely thought might ignite some sales.

 

At the same time,

I am unable to wag my ass

Or kneel down

The way I suppose I am meant to

To “get ahead”, to play the game.

There is a randomness about it

So that squealing ambitious pretenders

Say, look, look, there’s 100 Shades of Swill or what-you-call-it

Look, SHE made it work by writing three atrocious books

Full of appalling sadism against women

And these were ebooks

Did you know that

She didn’t even have to send a stamped self-addressed envelope

Or print out 900 pages and parcel them up and mail them

Or put them all on floppy disks.

 

But this is the business part

I suppose I must keep it purely away

From the mad addiction that keeps me sitting in front of this machine

I know I would write anyway because I am an idiot

I am STILL involved with this abusive person, this sadist

Who throws me a crumb once in a while

And kicks me in the face the rest of the time
 

 

And who needs Fifty Shades of Grey

When you serve a Master

Who is so completely

And utterly

Sociopathic

Celebrity Wife Swap: it can't be true!

To what lengths will some people go to resurrect their careers?

I mean, careers shattered by their own stupidity, selfishness and horrifically bad judgement?

Here's how far.

(from an entertainment site)

Reality TV will have another proud moment Tuesday night when disgraced pastor Ted Haggard and unstable one-time Oscar nominee Gary Busey trade spouses for ABC's "Celebrity Wife Swap." To promote their appearance on the show, Busey and Haggard appeared via satellite earlier in the day on Fox's "Good Day LA."

"Steve, do you remember the last time we talked?" Busey started the interview, then recalling for host Steve Edwards the interview they had after Busey's Oscar nomination in 1979. "You were very much a gentleman and very nice to me, and I've never forgotten that moment. You inspired me."


It's unlikely Busey will have such warm memories of this interview.

What followed was an awkward nine minutes of live TV that featured Haggard engaging in a contentious discussion of gay marriage with Jillian Reynolds, a virtually ignored Busey seemingly amusing himself in the monitor off camera, and a series of pauses caused by some kind of audio lag that seemed to affect only Busey.

Haggard seemed put off by the intro, in which Edwards described Haggard's scandal involving a male prostitute who claimed to have had sex with Haggard (which Haggard denied) and doing drugs with him (which Haggard admitted to). The scandal led to Haggard resigning as pastor at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs and as head of the National Assn. of Evangelicals. Amazingly, he's remained married for the past five years and he's willing to let his wife spend a week with Gary Busey.


Shortly after the introduction, Haggard turned to Busey and commented, "That was a jumbled group of facts they had."

The rest of the interview is worth watching for Busey's facial expressions and occasional asides and for his reaction to Edwards' concluding suggestion that he say, "Amen!"


Chances are that ABC's "Celebrity Wife Swap" episode will be slicker and probably less entertaining than Tuesday morning's chat.


As for the wives who actually did the swapping? Barely discussed.

I don't even know where to start here. With his drippingly oily manner and rectangular smile, Ted Haggard seemed like the natural successor to Jimmy Swaggart, whimpering and slobbering with insincere apology after being exposed (though he denies it) having sex with a male prostitute.

They didn't have sex, Haggard insists. They just did drugs together. Is all.

I watched a rather pathetic documentary about how the disgraced pastor was trying to resurrect his church in what looked like a tool shed in the back yard. A ramshackle group of people showed up, probably spying the camera crew and yearning for a moment of reality TV fame.

Gary Busey, well. . . do we even need to get into it? Where did they dredge him up, and why? I know most reality shows seem to recycle '80s whatever-happened-to's and revolving-door rehab dropouts. But this pairing is particularly bizarre. Why is a so-called Christian evangelist engaging in wife-swapping (even the sanitized version we see on TV), especially with this loser? Why is he callously exploiting the wife who stood by him while he "didn't" have sex with a male hooker, though he admitted to lusting for him in his heart?

If you're truly heterosexual, it doesn't occur to you to hang around using recreational drugs with a gay prostitute. It just doesn't come up. So OK, we've exposed this Haggard guy, but he must be pretty desperate for the spotlight if he's willing to do this.

Maybe he's trying to start a new church: a congregation of evangelical swingers. When they pass around the collection plate, will they throw their keys into the basket?

Or maybe it's just another desperate attempt to convince the world that he's NOT homosexual. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

This weird press conference is enough of a taste of the impending carnage to keep me away, so I probably won't be able to watch.  I was most repelled by the fact that these men's wives weren't even mentioned in the interview. That's because they are nothing but pawns in this disgusting game of opportunistic narcissism.

It's "wife swap", not "couples swap" or "husband swap". That tells us all we need to know about the balance of power here.

Besides, the wives aren't "celebrities", so who who gives a shit about them? Instead, we're supposed to care about a morally bankrupt hypocrite and a mediocre actor with a horrific reputation, so washed-up I had pretty much forgotten who he was.

What was it Saint Paul said in the gospels? "Wives, submit to your husbands." But does this still apply if your husband is a revolting crackpot masquerading as a man of God?

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